[ { "file": "hamzayusuf/Hamza Yusuf_ Miracles of the Prophet ﷺ__1743307254.opus", "text": [ "One of the greatest miracles of the Prophet is the Sahaba. Because if you just study the lives of the Sahabah, how do you get all those people at the same time in one place? Men and women, some of the most extraordinary people that ever lived. I mean Omar ibn al-Khattab, in the hundred most influential people in human history,", "Omar ibn al-Khattab is in there according to the prophet, according to historian Michael Hart was number one. And he's Jewish historian I think he was being very fair but he puts Omar in there also as one of the most influential. How is that possible? Omar is a product of prophetic molding so the transformation you know the alchemical transformation of lead to gold that occurs amongst the companions of the Prophet", "from a tribe of really brigands and just becomes so upright that he can't even live with people anymore. I mean, it's just amazing or somebody like Aisha. Aisha had the Prophet , I mean we can't imagine it but you know had the prophet never come who is Aisha? Aisha nobody would ever know about.", "ever know a name like Aisha bint Abi Bakr and yet she's one of the most important women in human history. And she has influenced countless people, men and women so she is amazing. So I mean the greatest miracle according to our tradition is the Quran itself but to understand that miracle takes a considerable amount", "and get a glimpse of it. It takes a long time, but the more you study, the more miraculous it becomes. That's undeniable." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Hamza Yusuf interrupted at Islamic convention_ZC2QYSSG4Yo&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743307209.opus", "text": [ "We have to recognize that it's not reasonable to think that the unjust, being unjust will lend an ear to our pleas for justice. So if the principle is sound, the question becomes one of means. Sometimes it's actually absolutely necessary to suffer in silence.", "That's the means of survival. But it doesn't mean it's final. The crisis has been immense, it's been incredibly difficult for all of us and so people are very passionate about things. Just one correction though I'm not a normalizer. I don't have any...I've never normalized anything. Something that concerns this ability for us to be unified in hearts", "but not always unified in positions and opinions. And I think that's really important because sometimes we often forget that there are different ways of viewing circumstances and conditions. The..." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/HAMZA YUSUF_S CANDID ADMISSION ON QURAN ERRORS _ T_K6TqOdmEDVA&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748533318.opus", "text": [ "i want you guys to take it easy okay hold on man hey man why don't you take it so easy", "Is Rumble great? I don't know, man. You tell me. I don' t know what it is, man Hold on Te quere se Te queren e se They call it puppy love, man How's rumble doing? Hold on. I'll be on camera one minute, man Oh sorry, is that Cath...Cathel Ryan? I dunno what Cathel Ryan mean, right? What song in the beginning?", "tropical sunshine at the sun shining very silver green you know what i mean that's right my son is your way hold on me i'll be all right i'll", "about me, right? Pray for me to be 100% recovered by tomorrow. You know this cat ring he bothering me man I don't know what this cow on me on that second all right sorry let's start down for me you're right so good so good shoot get off me talk to me talk", "don't you see oh say can you see what's on him", "What's up, Tony? Why is my lip so red, dude? I don't put on lipstick. What is going on here? Don't shoot, man. I want to see if the cat wants to go out. Pray I'm fully recovered. I don' t know if the Cat wants to get off. You're going away? All second. Hoping by next week, I'll be around 200 pounds, man Come on, come on! Go out, kid! Go, Ring! That's right, Ring. Go out.", "go out and finally went out all right you know have you ever heard like tony montana version singing right oh say can you see okay another turn you weren't never turning", "pray for me guys stay tight by the grace of lord jesus christ i gotta get back all right so how about if we did how about", "did a tony montana bruce lee version you know just say hey you don't you know enter jack in what he's teaching the guy to kick your foot okay why are you so apprehensive man okay go ahead kick me man kick me darling get what the hell is that way what else exhibition come on use real emotion right you're really emotional", "ring i said it worship me not angry man what's up man shoot yeah i know that would be the tony montana version buddy i know your mother wants to debate with the shiite because you're a bastard and you're", "Hold on, man. We got to get rid of some people already. Let me see. They're already starting. Let's see what we should get out of here. We haven't even gone. Yes. All right. Let us see if I'm going to block already.", "We know that Jeremy he's faked like his mother is because mothers are she a prostitute Man you should see the demons manifest filthy wicked demons manifests when I post anything about The ancient church is teaching about the Holy Mother. Oh my facebook shoot and on YouTube and then Because they're dumb bastards some of them trying to pretend to be", "humble and morally righteous say well weren't you also at one time anti-catholic yeah and i would deserve the same insults that i unleash on you guys just because i too at one hated these doctrines doesn't mean that those who believe these doctrins to be true were not justified", "deserve to be insulted whether I liked it or not. What are you going to do? That's stupid, man. Stupid. They can't. They have to chime in. They don't know how to do something. I got ADHD. I gotta clean this up, man, hold on. All right. Yeah, they have to", "They prove to the night. What I did was, I posted a series of articles to equip you. Yeah, yeah. I mean, they said, well, didn't you at one time also post these doctrines? Okay, but would that mean that the Catholics and Orthodox would not have been justified to put me in my place and rebuke me and insult me?", "even if my ego didn't like it. What does that mean? Just because I was one of you, right? Yeah, Alex, I got a new haircut, brother. It was very nice hair, brother.\" Yeah, yeah, Alex. That's what you get for saying you're my cousin and we're not cousins but so okay, Alex I still love you. Okay don't take it personally. I'm an equal opportunist hater. You pretend to be related to me hey, as your cousin cause you have the same last name, you know, and you start joking as if you and me go way back and then my mother and your mother", "your mother they're both mothers and therefore they're related so it's okay alex i hope you enjoy the plot you know just you can watch but see alex because you know hey we're cousins because we have the same last thing don't even know who the guy is right and then he tells me jokes with me because he thinks because my mother and his mother were both mothers that means we're related right so sorry okay well i hope", "so anyway my husband is seriously against me all right glory to the boss of spirit well all right you like that now all right just uh equip you guys what's up jw laura hold on one second how's rumbling rumble your care what's", "I'm not qualified about the filioque. I mean, the papacy. What's up? All right. Anyway, one thing about Rumble, it's high def cameras. So it magnifies how much I look like if a camera added 10 pounds, that means I'd have like 20 cameras on me. And on top of that, you know what I'm saying? Less censorship. All right, anyway. You all right, everyone? All Right. What' s up Kirilei Soon? How are you? When I was growing up they used to call me fat man.", "fat man i'm fat man all right glory to the father so speak we ready ready begin make sure you go to my youtube community section and i share this on my facebook so let's do this brutus hold on man what's up", "Yeah, pray I'm fully recovered man. So Rumble. I don't know if any community sections on Rumble that's why I don' t but I can tell you that right here oh man we got Muslims going at it again. Asharis are upon the way of the Salaf. Sheikh Haroon Kanj. I guess he is refuting Muslim Maritimble. Muslim Maritable right here.", "here okay so is this it all right interesting but anyway you go to my community section right here all right i'm on the largest screen in a minute yeah these people these questions man so i'm seven day am i in the right direction", "Why don't you travel and look for some food? All right, anyway. If you go to my community section right here, I'm going to show you all the articles we posted to help you demonstrate from Scripture and early church tradition the doctrines held in common by Catholics and Orthodox regarding the Blessed Mother are biblically based. They are correct inferences", "inferences from scripture and they were held by those closest to the holy apostles so don't let them deceive you all the bible's impeach that you more off if you weren't stupid and demonized you would know that you wouldn't even know what the bible is if it wasn't that church that god used to preserve the scriptures and interpret", "You know, that's why you get rebuked. And I understand. I was like you too. Deceived by Satan but the Lord have mercy on my pathetic soul. May he have mercy your pathetic soul as well. But anyway right here if you go right here check it out right here. Check it out. Check It Out! And then you should see there. Well Mary wasn't white she was black. Jesus wasn't White.", "he was black stupid man so you go right here and i'll open it up and show you what the articles are go to my community section all right and you'll find the articles there let me enlarge a little more because i know it doesn't look large enough for all you guys so let me see if you can see it now mary wasn't black man well i mean what's wrong with your family she would", "Jesus wasn't albino, Sam. My whole family. Jesus wasn' Albino, I don't know what you're talking about man. Sam, I dunno what you think. You know what I'm saying? Jesus was an albion. Oh man here we go. We got that demon who's over like the molestum. Mouths him, you know? Mouth him like the Shia mouth his mother because he's a bastard. You're little bastard whore like your mama. Live with it. Little bastard white beater like your dog Muhammad who's in hell. Anyway", "let's go through the post right here since some of the ray bead anti-catholic orthodox protestant demons i said son because not all of them are rabid right rather are foaming at the mouth again due to the early church's belief that there is an orgy saved his blessed mother from being contaminated by sin now why did i say save because the same mary thank god it's my savior she needed a favor", "You wicked, vile, anti-Catholic, anti Orthodox. You're stupid. I have to say you're stupid, your idiots. You don't know the argument and the position you're refuting. To quote Mary saying God is my savior proves exactly what? Who denies that Jesus saved Mary because they're stupid dude right? Hold on a second. Let me not shut down a computer on myself. Right And you wonder why I can't be nice guys", "guys you know you don't you appreciate that I'm the Tony Montana of apologetics you need someone like me because we got enough nice guys like Trent horn Jimmy can you need sometimes a jerk but pray God have mercy on me and constrain me I don't shame the Lord Jesus Christ as long Jesus is happy with me cuz I want to lose supporters I'm gonna lose subscribers", "how pathetic of an argument luke 1 47 right look on for god my savior say she needed a favor salmon if she would feel it she wouldn't need to be saved stupid man you guys are idiots you really are even james white is not that stupid he's more sophisticated to use that art because he understands that the teaching of the early church which is", "preserved by the catholic orthodox traditions is that god saved her from being contaminated by sin otherwise she would have been contaminated like all of us but you're idiots because you don't want to understand what the position is so you make yourself look stupid and then you make", "All have them. And fallen short of glory to God, family. All of them. There are no exceptions there. Yeah, I know because the early Christians never read Romans 3 23 because they didn't know what the Bible was. They didn't even know that there was a Paul who wrote letters to churches. Even though one of", "centers of Christianity was Rome, but they wouldn't know that because they didn't have a Bible. You're the first one out of five. You know what I'm saying? They didn't even have a book. They didn' t have a bible. Especially then after King James. So they were lost. They needed to wait until 1611 all their way to heaven and they had no leaven. The leaven of the Pharisees. See if there are", "they're at 16 11 they'd be on their way to heaven family right romans 3 23 because i'm no one has ever read romans 323 until you protestants mentioned i mean i understand when i didn't know look in the 90s when i first came into the faith and i was more ignorant back then than i am now i didn' t know i used the same verses but guess what", "responses oh they have a response to this hmm oh they already know about Luke 147 God my Savior oh they're anywhere for some 52 5G they're prepared yeah Pastor billabob you're right but you guys are stupid man here since some of the rabies anti-catholic Orthodox Protestant demons", "that there is a lord jesus saved his blessed mother from being condemned by sin i decided to post the links of the series articles rebuttals presenting the biblical basis for this belief you'll be able to shame and expose these bible butchers for misinterpreting texts such as romans 3 23 in first timothy 2 5. and this all started because i shared jimmy aiken's response on my facebook and boss she ain't killing family", "I can't believe that you're a Bible scholar and you fell for it, man. See? That even tells you scholars can be deceived. Number one, I never said I'm a scholar. And number two, if I'm deceived, I'm in good company because that means the universal church of the first 300 years, they're all deceived. Well, I don't know. I'm not saying I'm going to do this. I mean, I've been in good", "Therefore, study the info. Use it in your witness and share it with others. Till there is in Christ be everlasting glory as we seek to honor him by defending his only mother against these dogs. Right? And so here are the names of the articles. Notes for discussions on the Marian doctrines. The womb of the virgin, God's most holy place. This one you got to read. Protestant scholarship on Luke 1 26. Right. And Mary as God's ark.", "as god's ark mary as queen mother mary israel personified mary's purity and solace in the church fathers the father's unmarried being full of grace some of these articles were sent to me by william albrecht the lord bless him and his family and preserve them reformers on mary s perpetual virginity luther's praise of mary notes for", "1 Timothy 2.5, one meteor and one God are just seeing the misuse of 1 Timothy 3.5 parts 1 and 2. No, we never heard these arguments, Sam. Because you're stupid, Sam! You're stupid! You know what I'm saying? Because you don't have... You don't hae- The anointing, Sam... You DON'T HAVE THE ANOINTING, SAMMY! Because you'RE STUPID! You get what I'M SAYIN'? Sam, damn, Sammy... Damn, Sammy! Stupid!", "Stupid. All right, anyway. Let me show you just one of these articles. This one you will love if you study it. All Right? Now in each article I will link to other articles. Right? That will go in depth. The material is yours. You don't need to ask me. You can print them out, distribute them, upload them, translate them, even my clips.", "even my clips don't charge i don't judge you enough they want to give a gift to your ministry amen and pray for my ministry support continue to do this man i gotta clean this computer right and learn to present the facts accurately share them accurately but you got to teach you got", "your priests if he's willing to supervise a session where you go through material like your churches, like Vascon does. Right? Do it! Yeah. Are you stupid? What this article shows is something very important and I'm not going to go into it. I did a session I'll probably do it again for Christmas but remember brethren, Lord willing tomorrow with your prayers my daughters will be with me for three weeks not enough time but better than nothing pray God we'll reconnect", "reconnect that bond and make it unbreakable. And the spirit will start doing a miracle where he will work and have them every day, pray God destroy that wicked adulterous marriage to chasten rebuke so they learn the fear of God, Martin, that adulteress man and Michelle to fear the Lord because they're adultery and I'm not going to lie about it. God protect my children and I raise them up in the love of the Lord. So I will try", "but it may be infrequent and you guys know you guys understand pray we have a great time and i don't hurt them by reminding what their mom does does may god heal my heart because i don'm going to see them i'll be heartbroken because i'llbe thinking about what she did to put us in the situation but i need god to heal me so i can love them they see jesus in me so pray for me", "protestants really believe the bible and they really believe that jesus christ is thy priest and they're really believed his physical body is the temple of god because the tabernacle temple on earth are a shadow of the heavenly temple", "body and making his physical body the living immortal temple of god as the bible says then they're faced with a dilemma okay their face with a dilima what's the dilemma according to leviticus 16. the high priest on earth can only enter the most holy place right because in the temple he had the holy place where the priests would serve", "and then you had the most holy place where the high priest could only enter once a year on yom kippurim, the day of atonements. And he would have to enter with sacrifices acceptable to God. If not, he'd be struck dead. And if God accepted, he's going to have to go back out. So he would", "you Protestants believe that and You believe that Christ took on? Flesh from the Virgin's flesh blood from the blood of the virgin bone from the bones of the Virgin Chromosome DNA entirely from her no man That means for those nine months", "fullness of god the full glory of god dwelt in her holy body her holy womb fully completely as he was developing inner womb being nourished in that water of the womb from her order to take a physical body to make it the tabernacle", "if you believe the bible right let's see if you leave the bible that's why i say it right here it's all in this one if you believed the bible i'm just using scripture so i'm going to ask you protestants a question if the high priest on earth could only enter the most holy place once a year at his own risk and could not remain and leave", "but an earthly replica made by sinful hands are you going to suggest that at least for the time that mary conceived the human nature physical body of christ and christ dwelt in her knowledge fullness that she would be able to sin at any moment during the entire course of her possessing the fullness of god and the fullness", "is that what you want to believe what dwelt in her wasn't a replica or a shadow if you protestants actually think about your doctrines if you really understood what you're saying she had god almighty and all his fullness", "At what moment could she sin? At what point at what moment Could she have said, you understand now or no doesn't that it sink in or not the implication and inference drawn by the early Christians from their deep prayerful spirit", "spirit illuminated meditation of the bible led them to the conclusion god must have in his mercy kept her pure from sin because of this privilege and honor do you understand now or no yes then why the early christians came to that conclusion", "you understand now the implication or no so you guys who think you know the bible even satan quotes the bible he does he quoted against jesus and you quote a verse universe there that shows again that you're stupid you know i'm gonna have to quote sheikh asim al-hakim to remind you you're", "scriptures defended the Scriptures died for the presentation scriptures who didn't need to study Greek many of them read spoke wrote and dreamt in Greek they all didn't get it but you got it yeah I know you understand no what sends you to hell is because you're stupid you're a stupid bastard that's why you're gonna go to hell", "that's why you go to hell because you're a stupid bastard just like sheikh assam says so you know stop your fake piety you're not doing jesus a favor you're insulting the lord by disrespecting his mother thinking you're doing him a favor because you", "You know how you explain that she sinned after? She gave birth to him. You do this. You join them and you go to Mike Winger. Say, Mike Wenger is waiting for you. Right? So there you go. Now that guy's a special kind of stupid. So the Lord protects her from sinning during that period. And then her cells are imprinted on Him and His cells are printed on her. He leaves an imprint on her", "her and yet god is going to say all right now that i used you now that I use you to become flesh now I'm gonna hand you over to sin yeah I know that that's that shows the lord's graciousness and gratitude towards his mother yeah yeah Mike Winger will help you out all right so now I didn't want to preach on this anyway yeah but she need a favor Sam you didn't see your stupid fam if she didn't finish she wouldn't need a savior", "She wouldn't need a favor, Sam. Sam. All right. So let me play my dude. You ready? Let's go here. And then we're going to go into it. So you guys are just like pathetic, dude. Like we haven't heard it. No. Sam, she was a thimber, Sam", "She needed a favor. She needed favor. Why would she need favor, Sam? You tell me! What? Boy, she failed! There. How does he say that? Is it here? Let's see. Okay, there you go. They come and say, I don't know what's happening.", "what's happening okay that's not it okay i want to see if i can find a shorter version i guess this is the one all right hold on all right remember youtube copyright law says i can use clips for educational purposes", "can allah create something bigger than him are you stupid that's right one more time are you", "are you stupid hey big arson how's your whole mother because i know she loves to write like you do okay hey son of a whore how you doing little queer bait be brave behind your screen yeah your mother is more brave than you she goes out in the public as a prostitute", "as a prostitute anyway you guys ready i hope you're happy no this is they're better than you okay we got that out of the way you guys happy you got your fix today yeah you got you're fixed today are you happy now or are you stupid but i don't think gina can do something", "thing i've noticed man i'm not the only one who attracts trolls that just don't get it i'm Not the only One poor Jimmy Akin dude I mean he probably made a mistake going criticizing a young guy for questioning him and jimmy Aiken's not perfect we know that no one's perfect i'm the closest thing to perfection but i'm NOT even perfect i'M definitely more perfect than Lepanto but that'S another story but all right", "It's not just me. I get trolls everyone gets trolls because we got losers and low lives Narcissists who need attention? Because no one gives them attention And they want to get attention other people's channels because they think they're important enough to be heard and they will just bombard your comment section Look, my poor guy was going through the comments like man are these guys serious? Watch here But you know what one thing about him though One thing I liked about him, though it's because if", "If you be hitting and subscribing and liking, he'll always be praying for you. All right? Even this guy got him, I guess, slandering, criticizing, calumniating. But lacking, counting, subscribing. Okay? Here, look at... All right. Look, see? And sufferable intro. Lol.", "I don't care how long you've been a Catholic, Jimmy. Better, I don' t care how much longer you've bee a Catholic. You disagree? I'm not saying you're wrong but this appeal is to see poor guy man. I don know how he lets these guys just comment. I guess it's for algorithm. I'd rather lose numbers that allow people to bark and act like keyboard warriors right? Right here", "Even, see? Look. Look at this idiot. Even Mary doesn't believe she was sinless and my spirit rejoiced in God my Savior. Say that? Oh, poor guy. No one was sinness by Jesus. How the hell do you tolerate this man? You were getting trolled too, right? By Christina Princess's fangirls because the dog is", "because the dog is foaming and barking like a rabid dog, because no one gives him attention apart from his cult followers. Slandering me, but God will rebuke him and crush his mouth. You'll see. See? Here you go. Now watch some of the people what they say about him. And he wasn't making fun of his autism. He said that... He said", "because he mentioned that jimmy aiken said maybe that's the reason all right look look at this guy look it they can't see they can t be honest dude so you became a catholic apologist with kathleen after only being catholic for one year your shame and christian wagner for being an apology see is that what he said is that", "That's why I don't like to go to comment section. Like, I'll go to Christ Overalls channel or the archive and I see the dogs barking. And these guys just tolerate it because they can. I can't. And I start cussing them out, remind them of their origins that they are children of the Lord Babylon. Right? And I don' think all my comments go through but anyway... Look at this! Jimmy you're a revisionist modernist fraud. You've misquoted manuals and double down on this garbage opinion. You have only exposed yourself.", "Man. You lost, Jimmy! I'm older and it's more smarter. Believe me, not him. You see? How do people handle this? I don't know. Right? You know what I'm saying? Let me enlarge it because I don' t think he is large enough. I don''t know how they do this. You're lost, Jimi! I am older! Guys, did you know that he has only been cat 3 years?", "only been cat three years yep only three years i've been catherine much longer see look at this guy making fun right say that anyway that's what i'm like dude man how do you tolerate it man out here look now look at his genius look at genus we've never read luke 2 21 to 23. see after jesus was born mary had to offer a sacrifice for him said", "sacrifice for him so that tells you he's a dumb bastard because in Luke Leviticus 12 1-8 it wasn't a sacrifice for sin it was a purification ritual because when women give birth to children because of the flow of blood right they would have to come and offer sacrifice for Ritual Purification but again what do you do with that", "yeah anyway i mean i don't know how he does it so let's begin i'm like man dude and it's not just i've seen in every channel right maybe uh we need to play sheikh awesome again are you stupid are you all ready all right let's start in prayer for the glory of the father son spirit because we're going to go into a lot of meat that's right son we're gonna go a lot more", "You ready? You ready. Are you ready? I think that's all I need to cover before we begin. So Lord bless our numbers, increase for your glory not from my praise but quality over quantity and constrain us that will never prostitute ourselves to be politically correct and never sin in our anger and hatred as long as you are glorified the name of the Father and of the Son of the Holy Spirit. I believe in God the Father Almighty creator", "earth and in jesus christ his only begotten son our lord was conceived by the holy spirit born of the virgin mary suffered under pontius pilate was crucified died and was buried he descended to hell on the third day he rose again he ascended to heaven and sits at the right hand of god the father almighty from thence he shall come to judge living and dead i believe in the holy", "the holy spirit the holy catholic church the communion of saints the forgiveness of sins the resurrection of body and life everlasting amen our father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven give us this day our daily bread forgive us our trespasses", "but the lips from evil for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory but now forever unto ages of ages in the name of the father and of the son of the holy spirit we plead the precious blood of lord jesus christ to cleanse purify wash us our loved ones my daughter sorely and we ask the father to purge us my daughters are loved ones", "to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ and serve you, the church. We ask the Father to perfect my recall of every jot through poor scripture, perfect exegesis, perfect recall of facts, and destroy all error in me, all sin in us. And I ask the", "Destroy double-mindedness, not to live double lives. Destroy the beams in our eyes and control and constrain our mouths and tongues and do that. Father, we ask in the name of Lord Jesus Christ for my daughters, our loved ones, to never betray or deny or shame or disown or blaspheme in the love of your beloved Son, our God and Savior, Lord Jesus", "Plunge the depth of Scripture. Feast on the meat of Scripture and by the power of the Spirit to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ by destroying blasphemies and silencing blasphemous dogs and teach them the fear of the Lord, Jesus. Help me to expose to them the use of this charlatan who's misleading many. Chasten him and protect the innocent from him. If he does not repent, teach him the fear", "And again, I ask that the Spirit will be the teacher and I'll be his mouthpiece. Destroy every form of idolatry and blasphemy in our lives from us, from our daughters, our sons, our children, our loved ones. That we have no other God besides you, your Son, the Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.", "the throne upon the hearts of my daughters, our loved ones and our hearts to truly love Lord Jesus Christ and not disqualify ourselves. Do not let us prostitute ourselves for more numbers or status position for fame, for money and destroy our fear of not having enough. What matters is that you are pleased father. And when no one's watching but you I pray that when noone's watching me but you're watching that I am faithful and I'm worshiping", "jesus christ loving the holy spirit teach us how to pray more how to fast more how do sing your praises more study that scripture and live it out get to church get to the sacraments and silence these dogs and teach them your fear the fear of the lord jesus Christ the fear the only spirit that we will be bold lions and lionesses warriors never backing down even if they threaten us with death but face death and laugh at", "and he is reality and he lives give us the faith to move mountains strengthen my throat my heart my lungs my chest with the health i need and strict discipline lord to get healthy and use it to serve your church bless my neighbors that i'm not a nuisance to them they see the lord jesus shine in and through all of us blessed internet connection out of visual qualities bless my daughters make this reunion inseparable unbreakable and bring them to me", "jesus christ we thank you father we thank your beloved your heart the virgin born son the virgin-born lamb the eternal love of the spirit that we thank", "the bible if the spirit is pleased to work through me so i just want to ask are you stupid are you still up how do you stupid we were saving along yeah neutral system has my number lord did jesus christ now thank the lord jesus because certain systems work for sin individuals nutrition works for me as you can see it's been only what i'm on to the third week and you can", "it you know by the way I want to show you how amazing Allah is I always like to throw these snippets out to show how amazing allah is there's a saying attributed to Rasul Shaytan right Momo says when you take one steps towards Allah he'll take two steps towards you and see that sounds pious", "hold on let me see damn look look i'm looking lean again see are you stupid see that look side here oh are you still open anyway let me show you how that works in real time this is all off watch her", "now watch the genius of allah if i take one steps towards allah and he takes two steps towards me look what happens okay ready one two allah passes me by where'd you go why oh i'm here oh okay i'm sorry see that's what happened when you want to sound pious", "are you stupid are you still fit okay watch it again see here watch your church the genius of all over and why so stupid man we're like this look there you go when you take one step towards a law he'll take two steps towards you all right let's do it", "Where do you go, man? Why like this, man. Oh, I'm so sorry, Tommy. Give me a hug. Okay, I love you, man So nice. No kiss, man Damn it, man That's the beauty of Islam, man See, that's Islam He pass you by, man Alright The articles for this session We're going to play some clips Will be found in the description box Why are you stupid, man Sam, you're racist, man You're a racist pig", "pig yeah why you make fun of nationalities because i can do that all right live with it so when you go here in the comments section all right you go right here you'll find the articles right here it's right here but i like rumble make rumble great again because not only is high def less censorship but they actually show", "Get ready to rumble. Go right here. All right, you'll see right here, see? The farce of Quranic abrogation. The farc that is Shira Ali the case of abrogations. Right? Muhammad in the Bible. Muhammad fraud Aliyatai exposed. Shirosh.", "revisit it and so on and so forth right so we're gonna now go to the clips now i have to get first two let me go here i gotta go right are you stupid how are you man see there goes my adhd so let's get the clips so we go right her right here mister right here what's up g20 says i haven't seen you in a while right here right here", "mentally challenged. They'd be right though. Are you stupid? Let me see. Right here, right now. Let me just do this. Let's find which clip I'm going to play first. It should be... Okay, this is it right here. We go to... Okay. I may have to make the screen a little shorter. Hold on. Are You Stupid? Why are you so stupid man? Tommy!", "all right let me do this okay candid emissions from hamza yusuf canada admissions from hamzah yusif let me see what time stamp though candid admissions from humsay use of are you stupid man see that i really do think i have autism myself and maybe ocd a dhd because i do stuff yeah", "All right, so let's go right here. Are you stupid? Why don't you shut your mouth? 18 minute 39 second mark. What do you think I should say to this guy? Any scholarly articles on Christianity that you would recommend? What do I say to", "Anyway, let me ignore it. 18 minute 39 second mark. Look what he admits. What is the Islamic stance on swearing on the Bible as in a president being sworn? I mean, a Muslim should not swear on the bible because that's a dominant opinion. There's there's two opinions. One opinion is that the meanings have been changed. The other opinion is at the actual words and the Hebrew Bible had been changed here. He admitted and acknowledged", "there are two opinions among the Muslim scholars one view is they've changed the meaning not the text this comes from Hamza Yusuf's lecture living in non-Muslim country Sheikh Hamza Yousaf Rahma of Islam do you hear it? two views one says they change the meaning of the text, not the", "you hear it i want to admit this please listen so when they tell you no the crowd teaches the bible's text has been changed you don't have the original bible that's not true the crown doesn't teach it teaches the opposite and it's not through all muslims teach that the bible has been corrupted in respect to its textual transmission that was even something that dr khalil and danny", "Let him finish his point. So that's a khilaf, al-mabani or ma'ani. The dominant opinion is that the actual words have been changed also. Imam Al-Ghazali, there's a book attributed to him which argues that the gospel even in the four gospels as they exist today can be interpreted esoterically to be in conformity with the Islamic position. Now he loves Imam Al Ghazali.", "Al Ghazali wrote it. So he's saying that even Al Ghazzani took the position that the four Gospels can be interpreted to agree with Islam. In other words, Muslims have no honor, no shame, no integrity. They will butcher everything whether metaphorically or physically. They'll either butcher you by beheading you which they're doing right now in Syria. You guys may not know this. Right now in", "You don't see the footage, but this is Islam. They will go around. They'll start beheading men again as they've been doing. Folks do not take for granted your blessings because when you live in comfort right? You become complacent and lazy and then you fall away from the Lord and what God does He sends trials tribulations to beat you into repentance", "By the way, this has been a fact historically. A fact historically and it's even proven right now. The church is at its greatest and the church explodes in numbers when it's persecuted. Are you with me there? Focus, Connor. This is why in Iran, the church is exploding under persecution duress", "of iranians coming to christ in china god has a different way of doing things and he has a sense of humor when the church is persecuted that's when it grows when the churches complacent that's what it withers and capitulates to the world so fact i'm not lying", "confess Christianity and not be imprisoned or killed. Those days will be taken from us. Point being, point being as we speak right now in Nigeria there are Christian pastors priests, Christian teenage girls being taken as sex slaves and Christian pastors, priests being beheaded and churches", "being burned down right now as we speak in nigeria which you don't hear about in egypt you have cop the girls being kidnapped and syria when they entered syria you know they beheaded men there are beheading people that is part of islam they have to behead", "It's straight out of the pages of Revelation. Revelation 20 verses 1 to 4, I'm sorry, Revelation 20 verse 46, John talks about those who had been beheaded. Beheaded he even says. So Muslims will butcher you physically and they will butcher sources metaphorically. So notice what he's saying. Al-Ghazali says, yeah,", "can be interpreted to agree with Islam. In other words, butcher the plain reading of the Gospels to make them fit the Islamic worldview and yet they will cry foul and play victims when you do that to their sources because they have no respect. Allah is the greatest of all deceivers because Allah the Quran is Satan. And this clown became a Muslim and is considered one of their scholars. This clown,", "the first Muslim college in Berkeley, California, Zaytun Institute who comes from a Greek Orthodox Roman Catholic heritage. Who led his parents to hell by having them confess Islam. This demon that looks so nice and professional. So that book is probably apocryphal but if it's not it's still stretching and that's a type of genius that people are able to do that and he was certainly a great genius.", "So it's certainly one way of doing dawah to Christians by saying, you know, we don't have a problem with your Bible but listen to our interpretation. Okay so why don't we do evangelism to you? Muhammadan pagan stone kissing wife beating pedophiliacs and say hey we have no problem using Quran but here are our interpretations right? Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you right? Right?", "measure you use will be used against you right why don't we do that to your sources but then you play victim and cry foul like narcissist because muhammad was the classical narcissist of what you think that means so uh yeah muslims shouldn't swear on a bible though they should um you can make an oath", "swore. And it was a very politically astute move, which was to use the Thomas Jefferson Bible that was in his library that George Sale translated from... He made a mistake. He meant to say and if you guys don't know, in America Keith Ellison was a Muslim but when he swore into office he swor on Thomas Jefferson's Quran. Thomas Jefferson was studying the Quran because he wanted to understand", "to understand the muslim jihadi mindset right because there were muslim pirates who are attacking ships and robbing them so thomas jefferson wanted to get an idea what inspires these muslim thugs to rob right and to loot and to kill so he started reading", "That part, they don't tell you why Thomas Jefferson was studying the Quran. By the way, these Muslim pirates are mentioned in the song Tripoli. Have you heard that song? Right? You know what I'm talking about? Well, part of that was that Muslim pirates were attacking ships and robbing and looting them. Yeah.", "you know i'm talking about that song you guys know what i'm telling about the beat go on google type in that song the background behind it is muslim pirate ships were attacking ships and robbing and looting them", "the attention of folks like Thomas Jefferson. And so they wanted to know what was inciting these Muslims to rob and loot. And they found out it's because of Muhammad who is in hell, Tripoli. And by the way, hope... No, this is not the same. It's not the Same-Up right there. We got more than one hope. You remember our brother Brad? Who became Muslim, became a Christian", "It was two years today that we had a discussion. He reminded me the Lord Jesus brought him back to the faith. He married a godly Catholic woman, and he has a beautiful young daughter, right? And he's found a stable job, and they have a stable house. If you haven't seen it because he's busy working raising up his little daughter. Look at this guy.", "look at this guy you're a special kind of slow huh when the saints come marching in when the sayings come marching yep this is it from the halls of montezuma to the shores of tripoli yeah because hope we have two hopes there he goes right there congratulations brother the shores are tripli tripoli's one the muslim pirates were attacking see that", "We fight our country's battles in the air on land and sea. From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. Go Google Tripoli! Muslim pirate ships were attacking unsuspecting ships. Right? Are you there? There he goes, yeah.", "there he goes yeah because we have two people named hope i think the one hoping crisis where i get the two confused right you get it so do you guys check it tripoli muslim pirate ships america google it real quick may the lord destroy all air in me and then recall the facts correctly but anyway thomas jefferson wanted to understand the muslim mindset", "right want to understand the muslim mindset fact check me guys again i don't want to be mistaken may the lord correct all my ears on the spot not leathernecks right okay so let me know guys because again too much information even though more infallible than hope i still have hope that i don t make mistakes sorry so get that mindset so thomas jefferson won't understand the Muslim mindset so he read their Quran", "So he read their Quran. Anyway, so he made a mistake. He said Keith Ellison's Warren Jefferson Bible. No, it was the Quran. So they correct him from what's that? What did I say? Well, Bible in Greek means book. So I meant I meant Alkitab. Yeah, Biblios. The book. Yeah. The Quran. Thank you. All right. So sub police and that's a slip of the tongue. OK, so anyway, one of the problems with all these books are excellent.", "do let me make a comment about thomas jefferson's bible a lot of people don't know now guys did you fact check me i just want to be clear i'm going to go sit down a lot o f people don t know okay libya sam okay be cool you know i m gonna send you to mike winger if you bark again down girl keep repeating tripoli libyan how does it change the fact muslim pirates were attacking ships", "do you want to bark again be cool because you're being stupid and sheikh awesome is going to cuss you out in your shia origin so say something again pretend you're not a dumb ass so we don't treat you like an who keeps you know manifesting say it again say one more time be cool okay more off", "all right so the guy keeps repeating libya said no i thought it was in honolulu hawaii where i'm going to send you first class all right lucia well i don't know who lucy is we see hold on let me go here muslim pirates tripoli all right", "all right let me see let me find it all right here goes see i told you guys to fact check but i have to do everything for you guys one second stock for a law jefferson versus the muslim pirates so why couldn't you guys", "you guys do sheikh google okay the greatest scholar that the ulama have ever known america's first confrontation with islamic world helped forge a new nation's character okay you now got it the shores of tripoli victory in tripoli all right", "all right do you get it now we got it now let's see what jefferson did all right the viewers would perhaps have been eager to squawking i want to see about the quran and he wanted to read about them all right see how easy was shech google", "but i want to talk about the jefferson quran anyway let's now do jefferson crown was that okay was that good sorry so be cool say hi to mike winger for me okay as you start foaming like a dog again no okay thomas jeffer and the tripoli pirates they forgot more", "that change american history see here's a no there's a book on it see that all right you see we got it now okay now let's see quran thomas jefferson quran crystals you got that why thomas", "why did he own a quran so easy what's when i said just do sheikh google but i gotta do it hope once you say three times brother said already twice all right let's see why there goes it is all right see i got to do everything and make my sessions longer", "1734 edition of the quran is perhaps the most surprising why all right okay here you go not long before jefferson's quran rolled north with what rest of his library in 1850 another american attempt to write his own islamic sacred text all right slave chater traders captured omar bin sayyid and what is now senegal and brought him to charleston south carolina iraq", "All right. Poor guy. Yeah, I feel bad. I want to know why did Thomas Jefferson... Yep, anyway. Do I have to read through all this? I can't read all this, dude! Shoot! I don't got time. Time... Why you punish me? Let's see. He actually was a bibliophile from the beginning. Ordered the Koran 11 years before he wrote the Declaration of Independence.", "time and he had the book shipped from england to williamsburg so i want to correct myself right all right anyway we know he's a bibliophile dude but why did he get the quran or anyway let me go here you know you know if it's baptist you know they speak the truth and never lie no just kidding what was the point of having", "historians have attributed the third president ownership muslim only book to curiosity of a variety of religions but that obscures a crucial fact too many living jefferson's young nation this book mentioned much more all right do we have to then get the book to find out that's it shoot all right read full story okay where are we going to read it sorry guys this is what happens when you don't go and do the homework for me", "me okay anyway it is what it is i made the connection with tripoli but again just wanted to confirm all right anyway guys that's that is what", "of muslim pirates attacking ships that also got thomas jefferson curious that i did hear in a lecture but again an election doesn't mean it's factually sound this is why we need to always fact check especially if you live in a politically correct age they may not come out and tell you that's what got thompson jefferson curious to study the quran understand the muslim mindset because you don't want to paint islam in a bad picture", "bad picture she's saying because the terrorists don't represent islam you understand with that said what that said i also want to make clear thomas jefferson was a deist d-e-i-s-t who did not believe in the trinity and was amazing this is why you have the jefferson bible", "see there you go thank you but that part moab they'll leave out they don't want you to know that because of muslim pirates and their attacking ships and robbing ships and thomas jefferson wanting to understand what is the motivation behind these muslims", "Is there something in the Islamic system that encourages terrorism? That part, in today's 21st century political correctness, they don't want to tell you. See that guys? There you go right there. So what I heard was correct. Let me tell you another thing about him. Okay, hopefully I'll send you there.", "you there see that right there okay now i want you to listen to this part thomas jefferson being a deist was a mason believed jesus was just a man did not believe in the trinity he then took the four gospels he omitted the virgin birth narratives", "with Jesus's death and burial because he didn't believe in Jesus's resurrection and Thomas Jefferson was also known to be an immoral should I say misogynist who got his black servant maids pregnant you guys know this about him these are all facts about Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson sired many children and he had children", "children right that were black and so thomas jefferson wasn't this great christian leader or moral example so moab share the link dude share the so you're quoting snippets but not giving the link moeb you're a special kind of slow", "do you know that thomas jefferson so jefferson actually had children from one of his black maidservants oh so you found it okay thank you brother there he goes right here so it's right there so i was correct right my friend i was cracked i'm going to share the link with everyone else", "so i try to recall the facts remember i'm human i'm better looking than moab and smarter than g26 call the facts well remember i mean and not as slow as hope that's why it has a lot of hope sure it is so i wasn't making it up dude see so we learned something interesting so i kept telling you guys google it google it the only one who googled it was my", "was moeb right there you see so that's the part that today's 21st century political crisis does not want you to know that thomas jefferson wanted to study the quran to see why these muslim pirates were attacking and robbing ships and he realized it's because of their profit", "But do you think they're going to mention that part? Oh, he was a bibliophile. Bibliophile. He loved books. He just loved to read books, Sam. You know. He did not love to read. He didn't love to write books, Sammy. You're just an Islamophobe, Sammy! You're an Islamophobes!", "But now with that said, now that thank Jesus our Lord. Thank you Holy Spirit for giving me the recall of the facts and destroy all error in us and sin in us. Right? All right. Another thing about him is he was an anti-Trinitarian deist. D-E-I-S-T Different from theist. T-H-E I-S T Deists believe there's a God", "he created the universe put laws in motion and doesn't intervene and interrupt override those laws and as such he will not intervene and override the loss to do miracles and jesus was just a man not born of a virgin who died and remained dead so that thomas jefferson bible", "christ and his resurrection so he ends with that jesus was naturally born who just taught and then died and was buried the topic is why jay dissel is this dumb little spiritual bastard needs to go to mike winger okay that's thomas jefferson", "So how many of you did not know? Yep, exactly. Because he was a racist bastard. So he will father slave children from his female slave and do nothing to set them free because he's a bastard. See? Filthy, racist, misogynist bastard. I mean, I wanted to call him that but", "that but now we got it documented right so you'll knock her up get children with her keep her a slave and keep your children's slave all right yeah he was he was no hero now many of you are shocked to hear that about him yeah he", "me shock you with another fact of history that I learned from Unitarians. Okay, that I", "and wrote a book attacking the trinity he wrote a books attacking first john 5 7 saying that it is an interpolation where it says there are three that bear record in heaven the father word and holy ghost these three are one and he also attacked the king james rendering of first timothy 3 16. where it", "that sir isaac newton that people say hey he was a great christian see he was the scientist and he was you know a christian and we got netonian physics but he's an anti-trinitarian he wrote books he wrote attacks on the trinity no he wasn't he was no catholic dude yeah", "yeah so i just wanted to learn in his passing as i told you there will be a lot of topics we'll cover by the grace of god's spirit here and i learned that from the unitarians the unitarian mentioned him and claim him as one of their own here sir isaac newton trinity sir isaiah trinity right anti-trinitarian he was an aryan", "Right? Which means he held views similar to those of the anti-Trinity movement. He was not a Trinitarian. He wrote books attacking the Trinity. Right there. Even here, Answers in Genesis has something about it. Both naturalists and Bible-believing Christians claim Newton as their hero. Whose side is he really on?", "Whose side is he really on? All right, everyone's hero. But let's see what he says. Noon was a complex figure. Okay. All right. Let's see if they say anything. Yep. So led him to question basic doctrines. Okay", "set up to clean this up and in the end he rejected the trinity here answers in genesis they're trinitarian young earth creationists see good see homeschoolers actually end up doing better", "are going sent to public schools yep you see that guys margaret do you see it up sir eisenhower was no Trinitarian yes we're getting into this Aziza god bless you Aziza I hope you enjoy your time in purgatory right so there you go", "there you go anyway there you goes so anyway now getting back to the issue now we got his his candid admission out of the way he admitted what did i want to play that clip for okay what do i wanted to play you heard you heard hamza use of admit you heard humsayus of admit two opinions", "there's a view among muslims that the bible is not corrupt it's only wrongly interpreted keep that in mind now let's go to the other one this one's going to be a doozy so let's get the other clip ready but i got to find the time mark yep hamza abdul malik will admit the hadiths have contradictions and the quran's outward meaning contain contradictions", "That's why not everyone should translate the Quran. You need scholars. He's going to admit this, so let's go to the other clip. Are you ready? Let's go here. Right here. Let's get started. And then we're going to go into his claim. Muhammad is in the Bible and we're gonna have a field day with that one.", "okay so right here at the three minute 23 second mark and from the horse's mouth guys he's going to admit the quran the outward meaning of the crown has a lot of contradictions and the hadiths have a lot", "Listen. I think it's a convincing argument for people that have not thought deeply about the issue, and a lot of arguments are convincing when they're not fully thought out. But if you think... First of all, there's over 54,000 hadiths. Many of them are clearly contradictory. Okay. Now this is as good as the sound gets. There are over 54 thousand hadith. Many", "this go viral so we can make him famous like yasir kadi there are holes in the narrative this should go viral let me get you the link if you want to just play it directly from", "The three minute, 23 second mark. So let's go back a little more and listen to them. About the issue, and a lot of arguments are convincing when they're not fully thought out. But if you think it... First of all, there's over 54,000 hadiths. Many of them are clearly contradictory. Many have been contradicted. You guys heard it? What about the Quran though?", "So how do you navigate those hadiths? There are ayahs that the outward are clearly contradictory. There are Ayahs, Quranic verses, that the outwards are clearly Contradictory. Hear it? That's him!", "So how do you navigate those verses? And the enemies of Islam, there's many websites pointing out all these contradictions. He admitted it. The enemies of islam, many websites point out that those contradictions, Jared this guy's gold. Guy's gold man.", "in very sophisticated way but they dealt with them with usul al fiqh. In other words, do the very thing Christians do when they find discrepancies seek to harmonize them which the Muslims laugh at us and scoff at us for doing. Same as you're used, the Lord Jesus is going to use it against you and shove it down your throat to silence you and humiliate you for attacking His true word. I'm going to give you an example of a doctrine", "that the Quran conveniently came up with to handle these contradictions. And so without usul, it's very dangerous especially for... Very dangerous! You need usul. In other words you need Islamic brainwashing, Islamic propaganda.", "to be a blind zombie cult follower and this man left the greek orthodox roman catholic heritage that he was raised in he talks about going to the greeks orthodox church and his great grandfather it talks about go into roman catholics vacation school gave that up at the age of 17 to become a muslim watch here again from this demon's mouth", "So how do you navigate those verses? Navigate those hadiths. There are ayahs that the outward are clearly contradictory. So how", "in very sophisticated way, but they dealt with them with usul al fiqh. And so without usul it's very dangerous especially for lay people I mean first of all to master Arabic For lay people Now I'm going to give you an example how the Quran came up with a convenient convenient doctrine to explain away the contradictions", "called the doctrine of abrogation nasik woman are you ready so you heard from the horse's mouth there are verse in the quran clearly contradictory they're over 54 000 adibs many of them clearly are contradictory then he says the enemies of islam know about it but", "Okay, now let's go into Nasik woman sook. Now remember where the articles are found This one we're gonna have fun. We're gonna do at least two parts if you don't mind Right, so we go here I go to food. I'll go to the rumble one Let's get ready to rumble Yeah, I don't know I'm doing that all right the farce of Quranic abrogation", "okay let me show you right here hi hi you ready i don't know what's wrong with me man i don' t know why it manifests you're ready la sharika la who you ready all right", "Yeah, I just saw a post of a guy I knew who had passed away a couple years ago and his daughter saying happy heavenly birthday to my dad. Damn. I hate to see these kind of posts, man. Until the Lord comes this is going to be the story of all of us. Anyway. Alright, let's get into it. God have mercy on us. Heal our hearts, Lord. Ready? Hi-ho!", "i got mental issues dudes i swear i do i'm not normal man i pray glorify jesus christ and honor him and love him and worship him unto death and be with him forever and leave a legacy for my daughters all right so let's go here one second let's begin all right let's", "on my daughters get her get in tomorrow lord willing i may do an early show or i might have to do one that night because i'll be focused on them g26 i miss my beautiful head too you ready okay the farce of chronic abrogation there is a doctor in the crown called nasa woman can you say that five times fast", "five times fast get it good you thought i said can you say nasa woman five times first no pay attention nasa women so can you that five times faster that five time fast all right this is the doctrine of abrogating and abrogated", "abrogating and abrogated to this day the muslim scholars cannot tell you how many verses of the quran have been abrogate it and how many are the abrogation versus follow me guys let me enlarge it because we're going to go into it number one", "verse that's been cancelled muslim scholars are not agreed how many verses have been canceled and what are those verses and which verses cancel them nazif means versus that abrogate mansook means", "the muslims do not agree okay how many verses have been abrogated and what are those verses and which are the verses that abrogate them that's the first problem okay you want to go deep pay attention learn these facts secondly", "that were abrogated, that are still in the crown. But then verses that were aggregated, That have been removed from the crop. Now you asked them why were some of the versus that were obligated remove and others kept in? And how many abrogate adverse is we're removed from The Cron Are you listening guys? Let's go deep as a spirit gives me recall of the facts because the real miracle", "religion is a miracle it's a joke so again you ask the Muslims are there verses that have been abrogated still the crowd they'll go yeah are their verses that were abrogate it that were removed from the Quran yeah so why were some kept in why were others removed okay but then", "There are verses in the Quran, they'll tell you that abrogated previous commands. But the commands that are abrogate it or not in the crowd. I want you to Are you listening? All right. There are versus in the cron that air canceling out previous commands but the commands That have been canceled out are not in The Croc", "okay then it gets even more confusing there are verses in the prong that have been abrogated but the command that abrogates them are not in the quran you want me there did you guys get that or no before i move on did you get it", "i don't know if you're getting this okay so you have a verse that's canceling out a command but the command that it cancels out is not in the quran and you only know that this verse", "then there are verses in the quran that i read but have been cancelled out but what's cancelling them out it's not in the Quran it's an adeep literature god bless you Michael I know you're tired brother", "she started doing muta because that was now made halal for her return to your vomit you dumb bastard because you don't know the difference between consummation abrogation okay down girl okay you want me there i'll give you an example of a verse that cancels out a previous command yes fisher there are muslim scholars who say", "say there are statements in the hadith that are sound, that actually cancel out commands in the Quran. Okay? Let me give you an example. Let me see if it's in my article. No, it's not here. Go watch here. Right here. Let's see here. You ready?", "okay you ready here we go this verse cancelled out the previous direction of prayer what's called a qibla a qiblah a prayer direction", "brackets to make sense out of the crown because without these explanatory notes the Crown is incoherent okay now we're going to get there Igor now watch here what's up samowi verily we have seen The Turning Of Your Face Mohammed saw him in half isn't ironic they put the word s-a-w which means Saul because he's being sought and half in hell towards the heaven", "towards the heaven surely we shall turn you to a Qibla prayer direction that shall please you so turn your face in the direction of al-Masjid Al haram now without the explanatory notes you will have no clue where Masjid al-haram is supposedly Mecca okay now follow me as we unpack this follow me Connor let's unpack this before you guys get too excited", "okay let me enlarge a little more because without recourse to exochronic sources you're not going to be able to understand what is this talking about wheresoever you people are turn your faces in prayer in that direction certainly the people were given the scriptures i.e jews and christians know well that you turning towards direction of the combat mecca and prayers as a truth from their lord alone is not aware of what they do now", "they do now if you do not have course to muslim commentaries or hadiths you're not going to understand what the heck this is about because a literal translation reads this way we have seen thee turning thy face about in heaven now we will surely turn thee to a direction that shall satisfy thee now if i didn't have hades or commentaries would i have any idea what the hell this is", "okay now watch here turn thy face towards the holy mosque holy ma square wherever you are turn your face towards it those who've been given the book know it is the truth from the lord no what is the", "a verse that cancels out abrogates a previous practice command injunction but if all you had was the crown you'll you cannot make heads or tails out of this what is this talking about so if i go outside of the crowd this is what i learned are you ready ready for me to explain", "are you ready for me to explain all right according to muslim tradition starting in the year 610 a.d muhammad would face jerusalem when praying he and his followers would face direction of jerusalem", "okay this continued all the way up until he migrated to medina so he did this in mecca whereas the pagans would face the kaaba he and his followers would face jerusalem this continued", "face Jerusalem now for that period of time he tried to convince the Jews that he was a prophet but the Jews being stubborn didn't believe he's a prophet didn't accept his prophethood so then finally he told his followers change your prayer direction stop facing", "when it was still filled with 360 idols this is what the verse is talking about so it says we have seen thee turning thy face about in heaven other words supposedly muhammad kept looking to allah in heaven like i don't want to pray this way anymore so then allah being muhammads servant did what now we will surely turn thee", "about making muhammad happy all right muhammed stop facing jerusalem start facing the kaba to spite the jews so then you ask the muslims why did muhammad face jerusalem for nearly 14 years of his prophethood and then all of a sudden after he gets to", "he gets to right over 14 years approximately medina and the jewish tribes reject him he then changes direction starts facing the kaaba when it's littered with 360 idols how does that make sense did everyone get it or did i put you guys asleep how does", "sense right now this is an abrogating verse it's canceling out a previous practice but the practice that it cancels out is not mentioned in the crime it's not mentioned to the car you with me there the cron doesn't tell us", "tell us that allah instructed muhammad's followers to face jerusalem when they prayed only to change that direction so you see so the quran will have verses that have been abrogated but there's still in the qura but the commands that abrogate them are not thought of the crown or versus", "are not mentioned in the quran and this is islam this is the beauty of islam so you see it this is a religion that wants to compete with the bible and christianity but now let's go into this topic this is how the qur'an deals with contradictions and missing verses", "you get it all right well he's forgiven brother may god forgive us all thank goodness all right now let's focus you ready", "one of the ways that Kron deals with contradictions. Oh, no, no. It's not a contradiction. It was canceled out. Okay. What does that mean? You had to cancel out because it was a contradiction? Okay. Watch here. Now watch how stupid it gets. I'm going to have to do two parts on this because I got a lot to cover. Probably three parts. The way it's going is probably going to be three parts All right. Watch Here are the verses. Let's see if the screen is large and can you see it", "can you see it yeah let me enlarge a little more too much to talk about two times keep praying god will strengthen me and confirm to me he wants me to do this because sometimes rather remember i'm human and i'm weak and we are being perfected and healed made whole pray the lord will show me if he wants", "Maybe the Lord wants me to do something else. This will be done. It gets tiring, but we're human. Anyway, pray the Lord will show me that. Here, chapter 2106. Here it is. And for whatever verse we abrogate... Now literally, I'm going to show you what a literal translation says, but I want you to see the genius of Islam. Exactly, brother. Alhamdulillah Jesus. Whatever verse we Abrogate or cast into ability. Notice", "Notice, whatever verse we, whoever that we are, cancel, we bring a better or the like of it. Knowest thou not that God is powerful over everything? See, God can do everything He wants. Okay now let me ask you a question. Don't Muslims tell us the Quran is the speech of Allah? Don't", "lmao alexandre we don't use laughing muhammad's ass off we use laughing mohammed's butt off all right understand the verses of the quran are allah speech notice what allah is saying whenever we cancel a part of our speech or toss a part", "allah's speech is not equal there are certain times where allah speaks better than other times see how stupid this religion is if the entire quran is allah speech and the entire koran is uncreated and divine because speech of allah allah", "than another part of Allah's speech can you explain that to me does that mean Allah's speaking improves over time and Allah starts speaking better over time the more he speaks, the better he gets at it", "you see how easy it is to destroy this wicked satanic religion which is why they always want to focus on the bible which is Why They Always Want To Attack The Bible Because They Can't Defend This Trash", "you get it now yeah just uh you can ask something when you get to mike winger send me your question focus melchion you see it i want it to sink in before i move on", "cast aside or cancel out a part of our speech and replace it with a better part of your speech or something similar well number one if it's similar why did you replace it and number two how can what part of you speech be better than another part of", "he's allah he can do what he wants why you complaining why are you guys complaining he can't do what it was dude right so that's number one now watch here god allah blots out and he establishes whatsoever", "In reality, it says with him is the mother of the book. Umm al-Kitab. You hear me there? You think the Muslims are going to teach you all this stuff? No. Until you're brainwashed and deceived and stupid to follow Muhammad. Now let me show you what the actual word is. Focus guys. Learn these facts.", "facts don't distract yourself too many comments i want you to learn these arguments so you can use them in your debates and witnessing let me show you what the actual word is for essence essence of the book all right let me share it to you let's go right here it's actually omul kitab literally means the mother of the bock that brings up another issue but anyway let me", "Yeah, rumor has it that after Jay and I debated fresh and fit Allah left Mecca and went to Mount Athos because he's considering becoming a Christian. So he's living in a monastery for now. And then they say when I debated Khalil and Dhani after the debate Allah contacted the local priest", "the local priests and asked whether he should be chrismated or she look into the catholic church so he's now on a journey right i don't know if you know that i don' t know if okay now watch here what's the word for essence of the book", "okay watch here let's look at it god does plot out or confirm what he pleaseth with him is the mother of the book and here halali khan tells you what the mother book is hello al-mahfuz the heavenly tablet in which allah commanded the pen to write everything in it", "and what's the word mother of the book um mother who means mother of The Book so the book has a mommy did you know that that the book", "butch who's your daddy can i watch here now this is hilarious 16101 and i'll show you why this was sent down okay and watch the contradiction we're gonna do two parts at least", "look them up right now for you and when we exchange a verse in the place of another verse and god knows very well what he's sending down they say muhammad's enemies thou art a mere forger no but most of them have no knowledge you know what they're saying dude the guy is a fake he's a quack why", "tells him to do Y. And the day after he tells them to do X. Dude, this guy's a fake. He's a quack man. And what is Allah's response? Hey, don't you know I have a right to do that? Okay? You understand? This is Allah' s response. So he's saying dude, you're a quac. You know? You're telling your followers do A. Then tomorrow you say", "hey guys are you doing y and then the day after you're going to come and say how come you forgot to do x because yesterday he told us to do y and the day before you told us dude see the guy's a fake he's a quack man he's making it up and guess what what is all his response hey we can do what we want", "us we know what we're doing that's the answer you see the answer god knows very well what he's sending now well that's argument do you really know what you're doing if you know what your doing then why don't you do it and get it right the first time", "Muhammad embarrasses himself and then you run to the rescue with the corrective. Right? Why is it always looking like Muhammad is saving himself after he's been embarrassed, after he has been exposed? What's going on here? See it? And I'm gonna show you the commentators what they say about that. Now watch here.", "87 for six to seven now this is hilarious we shall make thee recite we're gonna make you recite muhammad to forget not so you don't forget except if all i want you to forget okay i'm going to have to read that again hold on wait a lot you're promising muhammed hey muhammoud don't worry about it whatever your site you won't forget unless you want you", "excuse because that means Muhammad is going to recite certain verses today the next day he forgot what he recited the day before so now he's got a change in recitation and go hey Mohammed what happened dude how come you forgot what you said yesterday that's not what you", "What a beautiful religion, man. Do you understand what's going on here? You guys caught this or are you not catching it? Do you know what's happening? Do I understand what is going on Here? I'm not lying. The Hadith say Oh! I thank so and so because he reminded me of verse that I forgot.", "i forgot it's in the hadiths do you know that so notice the excuse we will make you recite so you don't forget except if allah wants you to forget so what happened was according to sources muhammad would", "or muhammad would forget the recitation he gave previously and then he'd come up with something new what happened oh allah made me forget so now i'm saying it this way everyone got it or no now let me see if i give the commentaries because these are my articles that i've not read in ages so i don't know", "all right uh all right let me go to the commentary so i'll show you that i'm not making it up okay let's go to eltafseer l tips here you ready you don't mind if i do at least another part on this in the series right see what they say about 16101", "right okay we understand when we exchange a verse in place of a difference by abrogating it and revealing another for the welfare god servants god knows best what he reels", "that is this believer stated prophets you are just a fabricator a liar making it up yourself were they wrong were they raw nay most of them do not know the true nature of the crown and the benefit to God's servants of abrogation see no Allah's this is a benefit trust Allah how about", "gabriel with an abrogating verse and place another revelation in place of another abrogated verse allah knows that's what he revealed allah know is the property of that with which he commands his servants did this believers makkah say thou are but inventing from yourself o muhammad most of them know not that allah commands us with that which is good for them right let's see what al-wahdi says", "Watch here. This verse was revealed when idolaters said, look, Muhammad is mocking his companions. One day he commands them to do something and the next day he prevents them from doing it or brings instead something which is easier. See, he's making them look stupid. He's playing games with them. He stringing them along. That's what they're saying. He has nothing but a calumniator. Calumniater who says things of his own invention. And so Allah exalted us. He revealed this verse.", "he revealed this verse in the verse after it see what they're saying dude man is muhammad is a jokester he's making fun of these clowns because their brain dead zombies following this cult leader to their death to his to their deaths because he'll tell them do this today right but then the next day you'll tell him don't do it anymore or have them do something else", "so let's see what they say about 86 six oh sorry it's 87. see because they're too similar", "so don't just you know bismillah we shall make thee read muhammad we shall teach obama the quran it is also said this means gabriel shall read to you the qur'an so that thou shalt not forget well what about the next verse all right save that which allah willeth and allah willed that you do not forget and the prophet never forgot a bit of", "And the words that are said in the open. And that which is still hidden of secrets, which you have thought about yourself. Now this is not true. It says Muhammad did forget. But still notice it implies that prior to this he was forgetting. Let's go to Tafsir al-Jalalin. We're going to see what Ibn Kathir says. Shut up man. We will have you recite the Quran so that you will not forget what you recite. Alright.", "accept what god may will that you forget by abrogating its recitation and it's ruling you see except if allah wants you to forget and in that case he's going to have you cancel out the recitation the prophet used to recite aloud while gabriel was cited fearing to forget", "up by reciting it aloud and surely he exalted be he knows what is overt of words and deeds and what is in both of these all right so you see now watch the contradiction okay watch the contradictions all right let's go what do i mean let's", "words with other words that are similar if not better will blot out words and change them with other statements right but wait we're told here in the same quran watch here we're taught in the sam caron chapter 6 verse 34 rejected were the apostles before thee with patience and constancy they bore their rejection of wrongdoings", "wrongdoings until our aid didn't reach them there is none that can alter the words and decrees of god wait if no one can change allah's decrees in words then how does the quran say that allahs words and degrees will be changed and have been changed see the contradiction", "chapter 6 verse 115 the word of thy lord doth find its fulfillment in truth and justice none can change his words for he is the one who heareth and knoweth all none last time i checked not includes allah allah won't do it either but the quran says there are words that have been changed and replaced right", "you with me capish caprice mate all right how about 1064. for them are glad tidings and the life of the president hereafter no change can there be in the words of god yes there can be right here we're told and forever verse we obligate our class into bolivian", "it into bolivian so we're going to change it with something better or similar so what's going on is there a change or there no change we exchange others in the place of another verse but it says none can change his words how about 1827 and recite and teach what has been revealed to thee of", "can change his words none will thou find as a refuge other than him 1827 how about 48 23 the sunnah and the quran is supposed to be the sunna of allah 48 23 that had been the son of allahu which definitely continued persistent since before and you'll never find a change for the sunnab practice of allot yes you will many of the practices", "Does this make sense? And then there are Muslims who reject that the Quran abrogates itself because of these verses. Let me show you. And then part two, I'm going to give you examples how humiliating and embarrassing right? Humiliating and Embarrassing These statements are let me show ya", "there'll be a lot more of this in part two so i'm going to probably do two or three parts but i want to show you something all right here the late muhammad assad a jewish convert slam because of those verses no one can change allah's words and yet he would read these verses any message which we annul", "thou not know that god is a power to anything look what he's going to say okay look at his admission right this is muhammad assad footnote 87 pages 22 23 now the urls they've been changed but you can still find an adam.org look he rejected that the quran abrogates itself why look look what it says the principle laid down in this passage chapter 206", "relating to the supersession of biblical dispensation. So he's saying what the Quran is claiming is that the Quran in the Bible, that's not what it says. He's lying but he has to come up with an excuse. This verse he admits gave rise to an erroneous interpretation by many Muslim theologians. So", "right canceling itself out not the bible and he says they're wrong so recent jewish convert to islam saying these scholars were all because he's embarrassed why then stay muslim hamza yusuf why stay muslin if you have to keep making up excuses and explaining me the quran", "up this trash and this fake prophet and follow jesus but now watch the principle laid down in this passage leading to the supersession of the biblical dispensation by that of the quran has given rise to an iranian sensation by many muslim theologians the word ayah which in the qur'an can mean sign revelation", "occurring in this context is also used to denote a verse of the cross he admits it because every one of these verses contains a message taking this restricted meaning of the term ayah some scholars conclude from the above passage that certain verses of the quran have been abrogated by god's command before the revelation of the crown was completed now watch what he admits look what he admits okay", "okay watch the admission folks look apart from the fancy fancifulness of this assertion and i'm going to show you that this assertio is based on events in muhammad's life so he's gonna have to then say these stories were made up so the muslims are liars making things", "admit that the quran cancels out itself in many places he admits the following look look at his admission apart from the fancifulness of this assertion which calls to mind the image", "deleting one passage and replacing with another did you catch it this is why he rejects it because if you accept this doctrine then what you're saying is allah's like a human author who corrects himself on second thought and improves his manuscript there does not exist a single reliable tradition to the effect that the prophet ever declared", "are many reliable traditions so he's lying but thank you for that admission to say that allah will cancel out parts of his speech with something better or similar shows that all is human he's like a human author who has to correct himself after he thinks about the matter realizing that he could do a better job", "You got it? Well, now let's continue though. At the root of the so-called doctrine of emigration, look at his admission. May lie the inability of some early commentators to reconcile one chronic passage with another. He is admitting it. Isn't that what Hamza Yusuf admitted?", "there are many ayat of the quran that outwardly clearly contradict themselves and he's admitting that when muslim scholars found verses that contradict and they were not able to reconcile them they came up with the doctrine of abrogation capisce guys", "a difficulty which was overcome by declaring that one of the verses in question had been abrogated all right but it's going to get worse i'm going to quote dr yasser kadi admitting that abrogations appeal to when you have verses that are contradictory and cannot be reconciled this arbitrary procedure explains also why there is no unanimity", "unanimity whatsoever among the upholders of the doctrine of their application as to which and how many proverbs they can't even agree verses have been affected by it and furthermore as whether this alleged abrogation implies a total elimination of the verse from the consecrated that means you got to remove it from the crown or you can keep it in the cron only cancellation", "in short the doctrine of abrogation has no basis in historical fact and he's lying to you impart i'm going to show you there are plenty of narrations that show it has a basis in historic effect and must be rejected now watch right an ahmadiyya muslim scholar acknowledged", "is because of contradictory verses right right here mohamed ali in his quran translation commentary acknowledge that the sunnis came up with this because they did not find a satisfactory way", "the principle on which the theory of abrogation is based is unacceptable being contrary to the clear teachings of cron a verse is considered to be aggregated when the two cannot be reconciled with each other in other words when they appear to contradict each other see that but the crowd destroys his foundation when it declares that no part of it is at variance with another he just", "He just compounded the problem. He just admitted there's another contradiction. If the Quran says, The Quran does not have many contradictions, but there are verses that are contradictory, that can't be reconciled. He only compounded it. Compounded the problem, he didn't resolve it. Does any quote a verse that says, You'll find many contradicting in the Quran? Meaning you won't if it's from Allah. But we do.", "therefore the quran is a lie will they will they not then meditate on the qura and if we're from any other than allah they would have found in it many a discrepancy exactly it was due to lack of meditation now look at the arrogance of this guy he comes in right 20th century 1900s saying well these muslim scholars many of them were arabs", "didn't seriously meditate on the quran which is why they couldn't reconcile the contradictions so this guy whose founder was from india right this dude thinks he was able to do the job in the 20th century it was due to lack of meditation that one verse was thought", "were abrogation notice almost can't even say all was upheld by one person there has been another who being able to reconcile the two as reputed a large aggregation ah but wait yasser kadi there are holes in the narrative right he admits that the scholars of usul and", "When you have verses that are contradictory and cannot be harmonized, he admits it. That's why they appeal to abrogation here. Abu Amr Yasser Akadi Introduction Science of the Quran Chapter 13 Abrogation of the Qur'an Nasikh wa Mansukh Pages 236-237 He admits that scholars will appeal to aggregation when there are verses in the Qurʾān that cannot be reconciled. Gee how convenient!", "here it is we're going to end this part and lord willing i may be back later tonight for part two the most important condition for nasa to have occurred is that the two rulings in question must directly contradict each other such that both rulings cannot be applied at the same time and there exists no way to reconcile them", "this is because as just mentioned nasa nasek is only called as a last resort when there exists no other way to explain the two rulings in other words it's ad hoc post talk right it's not because allah said this verse cancels that out", "not be reconciled so we're going to resort to abrogation therefore if one of the rulings can apply to a specific case and the other ruling to a different case this cannot be considered an example of nasa right there you go in part two lord willing which i may do tonight", "then quote you the narrations where muhammad acknowledges one verse cancel out the other and how this proved to be a huge embarrassment for muhammed so guys pray for me you prayer warriors pray the lord grant my daughters and i perfect safety security health and protection pray the Lord will just confirm", "Pray that I see my daughters grow up to be godly women and he brings them to me to have them every day. And I die in their arms of the Lord Terry's, and I glorify Jesus and finish race. Pray God bless this young woman and her family to preserve her and fill her with the joy of the Spirit. And if I can't be a blessing to her, the Lord have her see it, then she can do much better. Pray we finish the race. May the Lord destroy any error I may", "and destroy all sin in us. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and the Holy Spirit, in Jesus' name, and pray for strict discipline, get healthier and holier. May the Lord Jesus return our lifetime. May he bless us. We thank you, Father. We think your Jesus, thank you Holy Spirit increase in us and shine in us in Jesus name we pray. Modern author crisis risen was it indeed" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Hamza Yusuf on Jonathan Brown_s Work on Sahih Bukh__xnuSK1Gprc&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748693950.opus", "text": [ "One of the proofs for me that the hadith are true is that why didn't the Ahl al-Sunnah put down, if they made up all these hadith, why didn t they put down hadith to defend positions like Khalq Al Qur'an? When the big fitna came, why did nt they just invent hadith about the Qur'aan. And so these arguments that somehow people made, Abi Bakr makes up the hadit about Aisha and the dogs barking at Hawlaab just making it up. It's rubbish. Sahaba didn't make up hadith.", "Does that mean every hadith in al-Bukhari is absolutely 100% true? No. There are many probabilistic hadiths in al Bukhara, there according to even some of the ulama there are hadith that shouldn't be in there. Jonathan Brown wrote a very serious study", "criticisms of Bukhari early on but later it becomes almost sacrosanct impossible to and al-Bukhary undeniably had divine guidance and I mean we believe that, I believe that about him. He he had dreams, he saw the Prophet in dreams his memory was beyond belief really beyond belief and and the only reason", "still have people that have these type of memories because I met people, and I met uh people. I met a man in Mauritania that memorized the entire Qamis al-Muhyid of Feroz Abadi by rote he could quote any word tell you what page it was on and give you a complete just start it and like give me the whole thing and that's like thousands of pages is rote memorization so people had much better memories than they do now" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/_HAMZA YUSUF_ DONALD TRUMP AND THE BLACK CONTRADIC_J6riS0BoeOY&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748532734.opus", "text": [ "Hi everyone, welcome to the Muslim Street. This is your host Hina Lotus We have an exciting episode", "exciting episode in line for everyone today. We are joined again by Dr. White, he is becoming a regular on our show and we're super humbled to always have him and you know go over all the knowledge and pearls of wisdom that he has for us. Today we're actually going to be interviewing Hakeem Muhammad, he's a prestigious attorney from Chicago if you can please introduce yourself to our audience we'd love to kind of get to know you before we get into the interview. Sure so I'm an attorney", "human rights of black people i do police brutality litigation i do wrongful conviction cases i'm very passionate about defending black people here in the united states and all over the globe and i'm also very active in the muslim community i believe islam holds the solutions to the social problems that the black community face and so anytime someone presents a distorted image", "what it stands for, especi black people. I want to be on this program today. We and we're excited to do t white you obviously need n any newcomers to our show yourself kind of go over experience and anything el with the audience? Thank", "as well as a social thinker. I've taught at major universities with tenure, University of Cincinnati, University Illinois, University Central Florida and I just completed my sixth book and that is Blacklisted The Price for Speaking Truth. I look forward to talking to Brother Hakeem Muhammad of Chicago", "It's a joy and a privilege to share the platform with you. Thank you.", "backbone of the Muslim street. And then, of course, you know, needs no introduction. My co-host Malik, he's definitely producing and in the background today. But we also want to give him a quick shout out for creating this platform for allowing Muslims to have journalism for Muslims by Muslims and to be able to speak freely without having to worry about state sponsored media or anything of that nature. Today, we're actually going to be discussing Hamza Yousaf", "around that. Dr. White, is there anything you'd like to share before we get into the interview and your thoughts? Well I think it's very interesting that Hanse Yousaf who many claim to be one of the most influential Muslims not only in the United States but throughout the world. What's interesting", "against groups like Black Lives Matter, his stance against black liberation theology. His stance in favor of the Abraham Accords that favors a pacifist Muslim perspective towards the state of Israel and his whole element of blaming the Palestinians for the uprising that they had to take in reference to Gaza and in reference", "His appointment by Donald Trump on the Religious Advisory Board is very interesting, very suspect. And I look forward to hearing Hakeem Muhammad talk about it. Hakeim, you just put out a new book, I mean, a new article titled Why Hamza Yousaf's Voice Doesn't Speak for the Balayans, right? So that's actually... I'm not the author.", "I'm not the author of that particular piece. I did read it, however. I see. And now what is your perspective on Hansa and his appointment to the advisory board? First, you know, I just want to clarify things. So African Americans here in the United States we have a tradition, a tradition that is rooted", "speaking truth to power. That is a legacy of people such as Malcolm X, Malik al-Hajj, Al Shabazz and also brother Muhammad Ali who took a courageous stance against white supremacy in the United States. We have a history of this. This is our legacy. This", "Hamza Youssef now for almost a decade now has been in contrary to this tradition. A tradition that all of these immigrant Muslims, these white Muslims they stand on top while we are the people who paved the way I wrote an article, the article is almost 10 years old now. The article was published in 2017 why Hamza", "And that article was in regards to him making very tired, redundant arguments against Black people in our fight against police brutality. Saying things such as what about all of this black on black crime? Not all Black people, not all police officers are racist when the data is very clear that police use excessive force disproportionately against Black", "black people throughout the United States by police departments. And so he took a stance against black people fighting out against police brutality almost back, almost a decade ago in year by year by years, he's represented at the same tire stances. So him and Donald Trump, I mean their natural allies, Donald Trump also makes the same. He's no friend to black people.", "Elon Musk sending racist white South Africans here to the United States as though they're a victim. So Hamza Yousaf is a natural ally to Donald Trump, it's not surprising given his history and his trajectory. It comes as no surprise at all. But this position where people look at him as some sort of legitimate Islamic leader, some sort", "How did that come about? Because you're right. He argues that of the 15,000 to 18,000 homicides that are taking place in the United States annually he maintains that African Americans make up 50 or 66 percent of them which I disagree with but how is it? How did he become this so-called leader within the Muslim circle especially when we had people such as at the time", "Mohammed, Louis Farrakhan and so many great African American leaders. How did this happen? Well I think it's due to an inferiority complex that many Muslims have they see a white person converted. So I even heard people refer to Hamza Yousaf as the Elvis Presley among American Muslims and you know public enemy said it best you know Elvis here", "but to black people it was just a straight up racist cracker. So, it's a part of this celebrity what people are attracted to a white person converting to Islam, it reinforces their iman they have such an inferiority complex that islam which stands for truth which is the religion of truth anytime a white", "So do you see him as an apologist for Israel?", "And he is in bed with Donald Trump and right-wing politicians. They're natural allies to one another, and we shouldn't let Hamza Youssef converting to Islam fool us on this matter. He is someone who has made his position clear in regards to Black people and our fight against police brutality.", "flight against police brut who has made his position Palestinians and their sh settler colony, the so So he's no friend to oppr sincerely apologize. I ac a question because i'm co you know as a Pakistani m of the black community do that he poses a threat ju", "or in the black community? Or do you think it's collectively all oppressed groups, whether they're Muslim or not, or regardless of ethnicity? Yes. Well I think when it comes to the religion of Islam as I mentioned earlier in this program our legacy as Black Muslims has always historically been standing up for the oppressed speaking truth to power and so when we have people with these so-called Islamic credentials who put a mask", "mask as though they're some Islamic scholar when what they really are white supremacists and religious war, it poses a threat to our tradition of liberation in who we are. And so this is how I don't care how much he jazza's Hamza Yousaf has. I don t care how m uch he can wax poetically about this school of Islamic theology,", "all of the his institution of higher learning, the Zaytuna Institute. All of it is taking the Muslim community backwards because of his positions and what this man is standing for and with this man as propagating. How would you say that has taken a backward? Because many, many Muslims will say, wow, this is something he had to say. The first accredited Islamic college in the United States. Some would say that while", "he's on the advisory board, which is giving the Muslim community a place, a standing in the White House. So how would you counter that? Sure. I mean, what Hamza Youssef is problemating is the Zaytunah Institute, are they going to produce revolutionary minds that are transforming their communities with Islam? No,", "and who are going to be bootlicking the United States government, its politicians, and who aren't going to advancing the struggle of oppressed people against white supremacy and the injustices that the Black community has faced ever since we were kidnapped from Africa and brought to this country against our will. Can you be a little bit more clear-cut in your examination in reference to maybe his ideas and policies in Gaza or his ideas dealing with Syria?", "or his ideas even dealing with the generic Palestinian-Israeli conflict? You know, I've seen some of Hamza Yusuf, some of his commentaries on Palestine. But to be straightforward, you know, following this guy years ago, even the article Why Hamza", "in 2017 and it's recirculated because he has, he's continuing to go down this, he is continuing to double down on positions that he's taken almost a decade ago. So as I said, you know, I'm not too familiar with some of his recent comments especially not on Syria but I know very well what this individual has said about black people,", "of defending police officers who are committing massacres on the black community. You know, not all police officers are racist. It's an assumption that police officers or racists also want to... There is a book I wrote called The Muslim Guide for Understanding Structural Racism and its Impact on Black America. If you read that book we go through all the data,", "that police departments disproportionately use excessive force against the black community. And the data is clear, the evidence is clear and this is something that black people have historically struggled with in the United States, the first police officers being slave catchers. So this is why Malcolm X became so prominent in the black", "against one of his Muslim brothers. And when he was organizing the FOI to demand justice for that brother, one of the people commented no man should have that much power. So our leaders who have emerged from our black community, Muslim leaders who emerge from our Black community they are in line with our struggle, they are aligned with our tradition what our people are facing and you know this Hamza Youssef individual makes a mockery", "of that tradition and that legacy. So if we want to talk specifically about his statements on Palestine, his statements in Syria and other things he said I'm happy to discuss it if you all want to introduce the quotes but for me his statements and reports to black people and police is sufficient that this individual is someone who is... these individuals", "the so-called Sufi Imams, they like to talk about adab. They like to talked about manners. What manners are you showing the people who paved the way for Islam in this country? Who fought with their blood, sweat and tears to defend the rights of Muslims and establish the first Islamic institutions in America when you mock their struggle, when you defend their oppressors. So this individual has made his position clear", "position clear and it's t community takes heed that of individuals who we shou Yes. Uh two statements tha is that one he blamed um,", "dynamics and what has been taking place there. And also, what's interesting is that he stated that the United States is one of the least racist countries in the world. I found that very disturbing. I don't know what planet he is living on or where he has come from. Can you speak to those issues? Certainly. Now we know,", "the Palestinians are not too extreme. They're not too violent, they're real perpetrators of the violence, they are real perpetrator's of extremism is a so-called state of Israel and its Zionist ideology that is predicated upon massacring Palestinians displacing them from their land committing a genocide so they can usurp their territory and expand their settler colonial", "state. That is their real intentions and now why would a Muslim take the side of a Zionist, against their own Muslim brothers characterizing their own Muslims who are fighting to defend their land, people, heritage or being actively just completely wiped out of their own territory? He's coming to the defense", "to the defense of the oppressor. And this is why it should not surprise us that he would join as an advisor of the Trump administration. They have the same policies, the same ideology. Also when he talks about America being one of the least racist countries in the world I'm familiar with that statement and he's making an assumption", "Automatically, there was no more racism. All the racism just went away when in reality it just transformed itself black people continue to be discriminated against in every area of American society when it comes to employment Opportunities they've done studies black people send out a job resume that they have a quote-unquote Black sounding names what they have superior qualifications They send out other resumes with least qualified credentials", "credentials, but more traditionally white sounding names. These jobs prefer the white applicant. They prefer the White applicant when they've done studies on police usage of force. White police officers are more likely to misidentify these psychological studies that are more like to mis-identify a wallet or other objects in a Black person's hand as being a weapon and then more likely", "instances. I mean, the racism in American society is ubiquitous when it comes to wealth, when it still disproportionately more wealthier, the more financially stable than Black families. And all the studies on this indicate that this is not a result of hard work. It's not the workup. This disparity between Blacks and whites", "of hard work. It's not the result of any labor issues. It is a direct product of inheritance. White people who have accumulated wealth unjustifiably through slavery, passing on from generation to generation the exclusion of Black people from wealth-building opportunities and home ownership programs that were branded to whites. This", "and whites it is a direct product of racism so absolutely not america's not you know the guy's delusional and you know i we should not this is an individual who has shown himself as we say in that black community to be an op he is an opt to oppress people this is not someone who um you know he does not hold dignified respectable uh positions at all", "some black people working under him, working at his university, being his defense attorney when he comes out and makes these disrespectful statements against a black community. So this is what I have to say in regards to Hamza Yusuf's statement. America is one of the least racist societies in the world, completely unfounded. Him blaming Palestinians for quote-unquote", "extreme. No, the Palestinians are not being extreme. You know, his people, you know, Hamza Yusuf's people, they are the people he's a descendant of people who came to this country. They exterminated the Native Americans. He is sitting here on stolen land talking about another group of people, the", "I'm sorry. I find it very interesting that this guy is from Walla Walla, Washington, 99.9% white community. But now he's in a position as a Muslim to speak on behalf of a community that is overwhelmingly people who are brown, black and yellow. You know, less than one percent that are Muslims in this community,", "Do you think it's possible that he and perhaps other individuals, especially white reverts or otherwise use Islam as a vehicle to essentially do the exact opposite? Like for example they use the Muslim platform as a because it's clearly not ideological within the context of our faith. Absolutely and another guy who joined that Trump advisory board is a guy named Ismail Rohr. This", "this individual ismael roark he's attacked me several times on on twitter when his uh on his social media mainly for for me you know speaking out very strongly against him to use it but here's a guy who he converted uh to islam uh you know he was accused of you know of terrorism and this is a guy", "And that's the only reason this individual is not doing a life sentence, a life for a life sentenced in ADX Florence because he decided to testify against his co-defendant. But now you know he's rebranded himself as some sort of Muslim white Muslim conservative forming all these alliances with evangelical Christians. Let me ask you all the question what a Somali Muslim brother who was a former member of Al Shamaa", "member of Al-Shabaab be allowed to rebrand themselves as some sort of figure, and now all of a sudden he's getting these high positions in government? Absolutely not. So this is really his whole story is made possible by white privilege. Like you see this guy Ismail Roura, he'll be attacking African American legal thought, critical race theory, African American political thought back to back to", "back to back with completely weak arguments, with completely week argument saying that African American legal fault in Islam are incompatible. Yet he's joining a administration that is perpetrating a genocide and Palestinians that is racist anti black. He doesn't see any incompatibility with that in Islam. So the answer to your question sister is absolutely yes. Islam stands for justice.", "been connected with freedom for black people, standing out speaking up against tyranny and oppression. And these individuals, Hamza Youssef Ismail Rour, they're doing the exact opposite because they want to co-opt and disrupt that legacy. I really wouldn't be surprised if these individuals were coined because the government recognizes the power of Islam and they want", "world yeah oh go on dr y i apologize i find it interesting that like uh hansa uh warrior was also a catholic he's brought up in st louis very interesting and his and he believes that he can speak on behalf of the muslim to the global south because of three things", "movies do the right thing and he liked Public Enemy. You see? And it is just sad. It's funny, it's a funny, sad thing whereby we have these individuals who have as the attorney stated, have no connection to the struggle of the African American or to just generally the struggle", "again, they're nothing more than paternalistic. And I also find it very interesting that if I'm telling me if a wrong attorney but they are the only so-called Muslims on the advisory committee. Am I right? I would have to double check that. But what I will say is you know the whole irony about this is now", "still attacking uh hamza yusuf and attacking ismail war because they're muslims because they have this past it just goes so that they will never you know accept they would never accept you all no matter how much they're trying to placate you know the right and and join up with these conservative movements you know they're bringing up you know him to use if you know he allegedly did some uh you know some fundraiser years ago or", "connect him with Imam Jamil Al-Amin because they may have attended some conference years ago together, which I mean there's no real connection between the two. But they're attacking Hamza Youssef, attacking Ismail Rawr. It just goes to show that no matter how much we placate or how much Muslims placate, bootleg the Donald Trump administration white conservative, they're not going to be accepting of Islam or Muslims. Yeah. Go on Dr. White.", "on dr white no you go ahead i'm talking enough go ahead I sincerely apologize I just had a quick question so with you know Hamza Yusuf's uh Hamza use of being appointed per se do you think that Trump is potentially using him as a proxy when it comes to maybe spying on Muslims who may be like radical or militant or organizing against empire do you", "Yes, I definitely believe that these individuals Hamza Yusuf Ismail Rour and they're like they're being utilized to placate the Muslims. To move Muslims away from that revolutionary tradition of Malcolm X, to move Muslims Away from that Revolutionary Tradition of Imam Jamil Al-Amin in the beautiful wonderful history", "all the way up to the beautiful Black Liberation Army. How many Muslims were involved in the Black Liberations Army, the Black Panther Party? So it is a way to move Muslims away from a tradition that they have always been connected to and that is the struggle of black people against white supremacy and Islam has historically", "the J Edgar Hoover, he recognized this when you read his cointelpro documents. He recognized the power of Islam in awakening the oppressed. This government has always been fearful of Islam, fearful of Muslims and the revolutionary potential it poses. And so when we see individuals like Hamza Youssef, Ismael Rohr they're being put in these top positions", "is part of a strategy to placate the Muslims and to disconnect the Muslim community from this beautiful struggle of Black people against white supremacy. But wasn't Yusuf also supportive of the Biden administration in reference to their activities in Gaza? You're indicating, was Hamza Yusif supportive of of the Biding Administration? Yes.", "yes so i'm not um fully aware of uh mr hamza yusuf's position and worse to the joe biden administration but if that is the case you know both for the whether it's the trump administration whether it're the uh joe Biden you know administration both of these you know individuals are two sides of the same zionist coin in regards to what's been perpetrated", "these individuals have the use if they're seeking positions in the government, that they're they're seeing positions with a white supremacist of government. You know I'm no fan of Donald Trump. I'm not fan of Joe Biden all of these individuals when it comes to black people are no friends of black people. Yeah my next question for you was actually so clearly we", "a threat to our community on a multitude of different levels, not just for black Muslim Americans. How are we able to address individuals like him and create a form of resistance? Because under Trump's administration, not to undermine anything that happened under Biden's, it seems like there are a lot of people within the OMA especially watching what's going on in Palestine and Syria and other regions. I think they are kind of becoming more self-aware", "to unite as an Oman kind of resist and fight back. These organizing efforts will obviously be thwarted by individuals like Hamza Youssef, so how can we maintain organizing? How can we create that resistance and how can sort of unite? I guess what I'm looking for is solutions when it comes to individuals like him. Sure, I think the first solution... We as a... I wanna first speak on behalf", "need to be doing. We need to return to the political and spiritual legacy of Malcolm X. Malcolm X spoke about building Islamic institutions within the black community, to address the social problems that the black communities faces. We have to do this on a local level. We must establish black Muslim institutions connected", "Malcolm X that are teaching the religion of Islam propagating other religion of islam producing our own leaders and in producing our platforms platforms like this that they give voices to black Muslim blackness of which isn't creating our own you know alternative you know institutions and this you know we this is a reconnecting to Malcolm X's legacy of doubt what I think", "I think this is a very important priority. So, this is something that we must prioritize. Secondly as a UMA, we need to be at the forefront of fighting against racism, speaking out against racism hating racism in our heart, speaking it with our tongue working to change this racist society and the impact that racism is having on black communities", "communities with our hands. And we need to reproduce a scholarship, we need be actively speaking out against racism so wherever racism rears its ugly head this is also a very important priority and you know third when it comes to individuals such as Hamza Youssef his like people who defend them", "defend them we need to start uh the muslim community why the musl as a muslims community we should not be supporting uh zaytuna institute this is not an institution that should be supported that should platform there as i mentioned earlier they are not going to be producing revolutionary minds that are transforming their communities with this law", "for this system. So we need to create our own Islamic educational institutes that are speaking the truth about racism, teaching the truth of black people and the entire Muslim community needs to be supporting it, supporting these institutions intellectually, supporting", "There are several Black Muslim organizations, such as the Black Muslim Leadership Council, the Black Muslims Leadership Council Fund, the Muslim Women's Organization and several others. I haven't heard anyone of these groups or leaders of these", "Ismael Royer. Why is this or have you heard any of them speaking out against his appointment recently? I'm not too familiar with those organizations to know much details about their politics and their stances. Maybe they don't see Hamza Youssef anymore as being relevant. Me, myself, Hamza", "was making these types of statements, you know, seven to eight years ago. He was making statements that were very mocking of Black people, the Black struggle and I spoke about it, you now, very strongly then and there but, you kno,w I think our energies need to be focused more so on establishing Black Muslim institutions", "speak the truth about racism. We should speak out against these individuals, no doubt we should definitely speak out um against them and there are some I think that there's a greater duty and a greater responsibility for people for black people uh to speak out agains him that you said four close to him this this individual has black people working you know in his educational institutions how can you be a dignified self-respecting black man", "And you're working at a school whose founder is mocking the struggle of your people against racism. Have no self-respect? Have you no dignity to be so close to such an individual and you don't check this guy?", "against police brutality right then and there you know this individual if you're a black person you're close to him that you said he should have been checked but now you know it's uh seven eight years later is continuing down the same uh political trajectory and yet you still have black people like even you have some black muslims who are being his defense attorney uh defending camp when he comes out in any speaks uh against black people our struggle", "our struggle when he joins up with this racist Trump administration. So we do need to be speaking out against him, and I'm glad that we have this platform so we collectively can address this individual and his mocking of Black people in our struggle against white supremacy. Organizations like CARE as well as Engage have sponsored him on several occasions", "events and they have drawn large crowds. Do you think that Hamza's views are indicative of many other views or the feelings of many non African American and non black Muslims in the United States? Yeah, what are you doing here? This is a message to the Council of American Islamic Relations. You all need to be speaking out against him", "against Hamza Yousaf. But when you look at this organization, CAIR, the Council of American Islamic Relations, I mean it's all about public...you can tell by the very name of the organization that what it is about is monitoring Muslims' public relations, how Muslims are publicly perceived vis-à-vis mainstream American society. So many years ago", "many years ago CARE came out and they gave condolences to John McCain. They called John McCain a hero, someone who supported apartheid regime of South Africa. They said that they were crying tears for John McCain, why CARE? So I know several individuals who work for CARE personally but we have", "acceptable conduct care. You all should stop platforming Hamza Yusuf. You will need to care more about public relations vis-a-vis how Muslims are perceived by the mainstream American society, and you all need to support the struggle of Black people against white supremacy. So do you think that perhaps the appointment of Royer and Hamza Tutu's advisory", "this advisory board is more of a case of identity politics at play well you know i believe that what it is about is about placating uh the powerful tradition of islam in advancing the liberation of oppressed people and so they want to elevate these individuals to positions of leadership", "what Islam is. They want to move Islam away and disconnect Islam entirely from what Islam has always been about in the United States, which is it has always be connected to the struggle of black people against white supremacy. That is why Malcolm X is the most prolific, the most influential Muslim leader of the past century, that the same goes in regards", "regards to Muhammad Ali. And on a side note, I've heard Hamza Youssef give lectures about Malcolm X, about Muhammad Ali, like you really can't take these individuals seriously when Ismail Roura is talking about oh, you know, I converted to Islam after I read the autobiography of Malcolm X. What? Like clearly you didn't understand what Malcolm X stood for, what Malcolm", "Malcolm X, the principles that Malcolm X embodied. So I mean you clearly lack either reading comprehension skills or being deceptive or lying. If you want to tell me you read the autobiography of Malcolm X and it touched you yet joined forces with the Trump administration? You delegitimized a struggle against Black people", "in the police. So, you know, these individuals are not to be taken seriously. They are destructive. The Hamza Youssef, Ismail Rohr, these are destructive individuals. They actively destroying the legacy of Black Muslims in the United States when they placate the message of Islam and join the bed of our oppressors such as", "And as I stated previously, I don't care. You know, Hamza Yusuf, he can wax so poetically about the Isharite school of Islamic theology, Greek philosophy and Al-Ghazali and this Islamic thinker Al- Ghazali and all of this and Ibn Sina but you are an active white supremacist. So I don t care how many ijazahs he's had or how much ayes of the quran", "The Koran that Hamza Yusuf has memorized. How many years he's spent in Mauritania allegedly studying the Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence. You don't know what Islam is if you are making these statements to mock the struggle of the Palestinians against a so-called state of Israel. We do not know what it is long is, if you're walking the struggle black people against the police. No, I agree with that.", "I agree with that. And I did have a question for you, and it's actually been brought up in the comments as well. So we want to thank our audience for being very interactive today. But, you know, that being said, it seems like Hamza Youssef actually has a history in which he also played a big role in the Bush administration. Do either of you know what kind of role he played and how that may have, like, I guess come into the Trump administration as well? He was an advisor.", "He was an unofficial advisor with the Bush administration, and he was on a commission. I was on the commission. But the Bush Administration utilized him as their eyes to oversee and give them analysis of what's taking place in the Middle East.", "and CIA forms giving his position and his thinking on what is taking place in the Middle East. And constantly, there was quite conservative and quite reactionary. I know I was there. So that's what he is. What's interesting is that Hansa as well as Royer, they could have said something that would've given", "week last week you had um james uh no randy fine who is a congressperson out of florida not far from me who stated that the united states should know israel any united states shouldn't nuke gaza do you remember that statement last week and both of these fellas could have said something condemning", "but he didn't say anything and i find that very interesting that is very interesting and i want the audience to understand something when we have token individuals that come from oppressed backgrounds whether it's south asians middle eastern people black individuals muslim individuals who serve as advisors are you know in high profile positions within the government", "sentiments that are expressed by, you know, government officials. It's almost a way that the government is legitimizing what they're saying by saying, look, we have Muslim advisors. We have, you black individuals in our cabinets and so on and so forth. If they're not speaking out against it, then what we're saying must be true, which is why this serves to be so damaging. And, you I actually wanted to ask another question. Did he play some sort of, I don't want to say pivotal role, but did he play any sort of influential role when", "the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, because that was going on during the Bush administration as well. Well, I would say that he never gave any pushback to the trend. Remember people like Hansa and others who get on these commissions and advisory boards, they have a choice. They can even speak for the interest of their community. And that is the pushback against policies", "with the administration to enhance their political influence and their economic wealth. And most of them align, they have no interest. Now remember when I say identity politics it really means that they're there to support the status quo all right? And their face is utilized as if to say look we have one on your own. Not a sad thing about it", "black people we as palestinians we as arabs we as indians many of us are so backward until we say oh wow we got one of our own people there isn't the world great isn't america changed because so happy when we hear uh the president saying oh thomas jefferson had a karam we're", "like the attorney stated, he is nothing but a steward for the administration to be utilized to keep the global south, the black, the Palestinians, the Arabs, the Muslims in place. All right? So that we will not do anything that is outlined, that is outside the reach of the government. And I think you're also", "as a mechanism to work with the fbi and to work for law enforcement to encourage spying on our own people in fact last year i went to a meeting with fbi police chiefs in the state of florida and that's exactly what they were pushing they were", "And I'm the only one who said that was ludicrous. Because we are a peaceful community for the most part. We don't go around doing things. That's why we need Attorney Muhammad down here to help us.", "terms of this issue or any others. And then Dr. White, as well as Brother Hakeem, if you also want to kind of go over where people can reach you, if your working on books platforms, I know Dr. white, you do have a campaign going on. I'd love to go over that as well because at the Muslim Street we also even though we do bring on guest speakers, we also wanna give both of you as well", "or organizing your efforts and give away for people you have they, you know, a even want to work with y Attorney. Sure. So let's thoughts in regards to uh has shown his character o he is for almost over a d", "political trajectory of defending white supremacy. This is who he is, he is not someone who supports oppressed people. Him joining the Trump administration, I mean let's be real this individual is not going to be actively speaking out against the United States in the so-called state of Israel's genocide against Palestinians that he is", "against the Muslim world? I mean, what advising are they going to be doing? Muslims are an oppressed people in the United States and across the world. The United States is actively oppressing Muslims with its military. What advising is he going to", "Hamza Youssef, Ismael Rohrer. They are going to be supporting the status quo. So that is who they are. But what we as a Black Muslim community need to be doing is we need to focus on Dawa in our own community. We need to reviving the Islamic tradition of Malcolm X. I run an organization, Black Dawa Network. We organize Islamic outreach events throughout", "to quote unquote gang infested neighborhoods. We reach out to gang members with the message of Islam, we go into the communities that have been most impacted by racism, by white supremacy and we teach people about Islam. And that is what we need to be focused on. We need to focus on reviving the legacy of Malcolm X in our communities. Insha'Allah the people can reach me I'm very available on Twitter it's brother", "brother, brother underscore Hakeem. I have several books on Amazon that are available for purchase. One is the Muslim Guide for Understanding Structural Racism and its Impact on Black America. I've another book it's called In Defense of Black America where we go through the most common arguments that are used to delegitimize the struggle of black people against racism. Arguments that you hear Hamza Yousaf making what about black-on-black crime when", "when it comes to fighting police brutality. Oh, you know, Black people sold their own people into slavery. You know, slavery was so long ago. I address the most common arguments that people use to delegitimize the struggle of Black people against racism. I debunk it and I defend African-American political dissent. That book is available for purchase on amazon.com.", "And you may have said it, but just so the audience is clear. I know you said you're on Twitter. What is your Twitter handle? Instagram email? Just in case people want to reach out to you in that regard. Yeah. So I can be reached out on Twitter's brother. Brother spelled the last word of brother is a and then it's an underscore Hakeem H-A-K-E-E. Perfect. Thank you so much. And Dr. White, I know", "not mistaken and i mean you have a multitude of accolades i don't even want to take the mic on that if you can kind of go over your information and how people can reach you well first of all as you know i'm running for congress in the 10th district which is uh orange county orlando florida and if you want to get involved with our campaign our handle is pretty long but", "5373-321-3205373. And someone will get back with you very immediately. Do you live in Orlando? I live in Atlanta, Winter Park. Got it. Perfect. Secondly, we heard the attorney and you want to get the book Black Holistic The Price of Speaking Truth.", "I know he's speaking truth and I know He's getting hit. Anytime you speak truth, you're attacked one way or another. So this is like a guide for us as to what is happening, what has happened, and what will happen to you if you take the time and you have the guts to speak truth to power consistently.", "to you all reading it. I look forward to hearing from you and most of all, I look for having another dialogue with attorney Akin Muhammad. The next time you must send us a bean pie and since some fish from Lawrence's Fish House on Canal Street. Thank you all for having me. Thank You. This is Hina Lotus the host of the Muslim street we are on social media as well please follow", "as well. Please follow us we are on Instagram, we are", "And, you know, let us know if there's any episodes you'd like to see. If there's anything that we can do for you guys. If you have any issues that you'd want us to address. Huge shout out again to Lance Curve as well as Malik Aziz. You know, they've definitely helped build this platform and make it what it is today. And inshallah, we will continue to grow. But thank you so much for joining us. We do go live every Sunday at 730 Eastern Standard Time. And so we'll be here same time, same place. Thank you so" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Sheikh Hamza Yusuf _ Oral vs Written Tradition__1748539946.opus", "text": [ "And then you have the written tradition. We have the same concept, right? The text traditionally is the written Tradition but the oral tradition is the commentary and it's very important in certain things" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _Everyone has gifts_ _ Bradford__1748525155.opus", "text": [ "Everybody has gifts. There's nobody that doesn't have gifts. Everybody has gift. This is one of my favorite hadiths, Allah has decreed ihsan in everything. So if you don't do with ihsan it's better not to do it and Ibn Wahab said Don't look at doing a lot of things but look at things well. And so whatever you do just do it well as best you can" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Shaykh Hamza Yusuf expalains Nafs _ Aqal _shaykhha__1743062699.opus", "text": [ "In Arabic, the aqal is an immaterial that moves towards intelligibles. So it's an immateria quality of the human being that moves toward intelligible. If I'm studying mathematics my intellect is moving towards these abstract entities we call numbers that are intelligibles and then we have the Quran has what's called ru'ah which is ruwakh in Hebrew", "Yeah. So, this is the spirit when it's directed towards the ultimate reality which is God and not to the intelligibles. And then the nafs is the next one. Nefesh in Hebrew also is the idea of the soul but it's the soul when it is directed towards worldly things, the more lower things generally." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_on Khalifa _islam _stewardship __1742882307.opus", "text": [ "And then finally stewardship. The idea of being caretakers of what we've been given, this is called the Khalifa and the Khalifah is one who stands in place and the Quran tells us that God said I'm placing in the earth a steward and a stewards is one acts on behalf of another and so this is divine stewardship and then David were told in the Jewish tradition that David", "over the land, judge fairly between people. Do not follow your desires.\" There's a really important point about this because stewardship is corrupted by following desires and lest they divert you from this divine plan. And so the question is how are we doing as stewards of the earth if this is really one of the reasons why we're here?" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Shaykh Hamza Yusuf on Palestine _hamzayusuf _islam__1748540407.opus", "text": [ "All of the horrors that we've been witnessing in Palestine being done to these poor people, they have no army. They have no air force. They are being bombed relentlessly. Humanitarian aid is being withheld. These fanatics going and even destroying food and things that were supposed to go to these people. It's beyond belief to see this.", "And I know it's so painful for people." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Shaykh Hamza Yusuf on Palestine_ Syria and Iraq _h__1742892906.opus", "text": [ "have Palestine which has been this just this constant wound in the body of our species you know it's just it's been unbelievable so Yemen Syria I mean what the Syrians went through Iraq I mean all these things that we've seen and so this is life on earth and the prophet told us that these latter days that people would see", "would see all these things. He said, The punishment of my ummah is in this world it's not in the next world and he said that it was fitan and qatal and zelazal earthquakes and civil strife" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Sheikh Hamza Yusuf _ Exploring the Tragic Genius B__1742998403.opus", "text": [ "Another very tortured person, but somebody who had a richness of vision that people are still entranced by his paintings." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Sheikh Hamza Yusuf _ Finding Hope in Darkness _ Th__1742888390.opus", "text": [ "So, the dark night has those lights. They have those... You can see that it's not all dark. It's not doom and gloom. If it was people would commit suicide in large numbers but people always had that hope. حتى يغشاه أبو السرج until the sun comes out The Sun is called Abu Suraj. It is the possessor of all the lights because when the sun come out all other lights disappear", "the calamity is there, but the calamitiy will come to an end." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Sheikh Hamza Yusuf _ Finding Spiritual Guidance _ __1748519339.opus", "text": [ "So, may the best da'wah win. You know they say al-hakim yurfa alkhilaf The ruler removes difference of opinion We don't have somebody that does that anymore so we're like orphans we are just left on our own we have to find a spiritual father or a spiritual mother that can nurture our souls and we feel comfortable with that learning" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Sheikh Hamza Yusuf _ Humanity Beyond Wealth _ Who __1742890679.opus", "text": [ "That is open to the poorest of the poor and the richest of the rich, and that's what separates people. So that street sweeper, that janitor might have more humanity ounce per ounce than that PhD professor at Yale University." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Sheikh Hamza Yusuf _ Mastering Life_s Wheel _ Find__1742890359.opus", "text": [ "I was on this plane talking to this Moroccan and we were just talking about what's happening in the world. And she said, young Moroccan, she said the dunya is a wheel. And I said you hit the bullseye because that's exactly what it is. It's the wheel of fortune. One day you're up and the next day you are down", "down. And the secret is to get into that center and that's where the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam was. He was in the hub of the wheel. He did not get affected by the vicissitudes of time, what they call Suruf al-Dahar. He wasn't in that hub. So when tribulations come you have to see them for what they are" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Sheikh Hamza Yusuf _ Maximize Your Life _ Meeting __1748526079.opus", "text": [ "If we use our time wisely, obviously we can derive great benefit from the time that Allah has allotted each one of us because all of us have a certain amount of time and none of us know. It's one of the mysteries of life is that none of knows when that time is. Each one of there's a door we're going to go through into an infinite world, from a finite world to an infinite", "We don't even know which place it will be on the earth. Allah can bring you to a place, you never thought that you would be there and that is the place where the angel of death was waiting for you" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Sheikh Hamza Yusuf on Extremism _islam _causeandef__1748534877.opus", "text": [ "What true religion teaches is it teaches us to be within our limits. Now what happens when you get extremism or breaking out of those limits, within religion, it's because people aren't well and there are circumstances that make people unwell. The word in Arabic for extremism is ghaluu and the Prophet Muhammad said, Beware of extremism in the religion. He actually despised extremism he did not like it", "it. He was a very balanced person, he smiled often and but this word that he used if you look at the root word in Arabic it means to boil over. Boiling over is not a cause it's an effect and we often fail to look at" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Sheikh Hamza Yusuf on Limits _islam _spirituality __1748526756.opus", "text": [ "And one of the things about our religious traditions is that they're actually an attempt at teaching people balance. If you notice, in the animal kingdom a tree does not have to learn how to be a tree unless humans plant it and then we have to put a stick next to it to make sure that it grows straight but if you actually go out into the forest they don't need sticks. It's only when man gets his grubby hands on nature", "that nature begins to have a hard time. A cat does not learn to be a cat, a cat knows how to be cat, and a dog knows how do be a dog. Eagles know at which level they can fly and then they stop. The sparrow doesn't fly at the height of the eagle because the sparrow is not the eagle and they have different limits. Everything in creation has limits" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Sheikh Hamza Yusuf _ Rejecting the False Dichotomy__1742888159.opus", "text": [ "So the whole dichotomization, this desire to kind of split the world into good people and evil people, to me is a false dialectic that I think as Muslims we should reject. We should reject it. There are wretched demonic people amongst the poor and there are decent angelic people amongst wealthy. And the Prophet had poor people with him and he had wealthy people" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Sheikh Hamza Yusuf _ The Danger of Ungratefulness __1742886502.opus", "text": [ "And Iblis, what does he say? He says you'll find most of them aren't grateful. So Ibliss knows that the way to get people away from God is to make them ingrates and what does Kufr really mean it means ingratitude and so when you're always complaining then you're just in a state of ingratitute and Iblisse is happy", "is happy and your Lord is not honored because everything that he's giving you is a gift." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Sheikh Hamza Yusuf _ The Futility of Debating With__1743303661.opus", "text": [ "It says, What benefit is it to debate somebody that hasn't reached a level of ijtihad? Now listen to this. And this is the reality of all people of our time. Nobody is a mujtahid mutlaq. So all these people debating they really don't know what they're talking about" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Sheikh Hamza Yusuf _ The Power of Meaningful Posse__1742888816.opus", "text": [ "What I realized about that in my estimation, is that he was honoring goods that enhance our lives. He had a name for his comb, he had a named for his turban. He only had a handful of things in his life. If you actually took all the possessions that he had they would fit into a very small box but he named them because", "because they were meaningful things to him. We live in a society that gives stuff no meaning," ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Sheikh Hamza Yusuf _ The Power of Meaningful Posse__1743063329.opus", "text": [ "What I realized about that in my estimation, is that he was honoring goods that enhance our lives. He had a name for his comb, he had a named for his turban. He only had a handful of things in his life. If you actually took all the possessions that he had they would fit into a very small box but he named them because", "because they were meaningful things to him. We live in a society that gives stuff no meaning," ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Sheikh Hamza Yusuf _ Understanding Love Poetry _ W__1743298825.opus", "text": [ "But if it's a woman that you haven't married and you're writing her love poetry, it's haram. But they say that it's permissible to write love poetry if it is not a specific woman. So good luck with that!" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Sheikh Hamza Yusuf _ Understanding Tabarruj _ Orna__1742884964.opus", "text": [ "So that's what's prohibited doing that. And then the sounds of the which are the bangles that she wears. Also it's prohibited and from the sins of the tongue is to write love poetry to a specific woman who you're not married to. You can write love poetry to your wife, it's good thing to do." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Sheikh Hamza Yusuf _ Unlocking the Meaning of Orwe__1742886920.opus", "text": [ "But people haven't read Orwell, so how do they know? If you don't know Orwell you're not going to know how to use the adjective Orwellian. And if somebody uses it you don' t know what they are talking about. Orwellians is that like Orson Welles? You know if they know Orson well because even good films they don't anymore like Citizen Kane. People don't now that now they know about Dumb and Dumber" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Sheikh Hamza Yusuf _ Wealth Inequality _ 1_230 Peo__1742880322.opus", "text": [ "They have half of the wealth of 3 billion people on the planet. Half. 8 trillion people, $8 trillion, half of that goes to 1,230 people and the other half goes to three billion people. You think about that." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Shaykh Hamza Yusuf about Malcom X_P-rZNK9ZPas&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742880383.opus", "text": [ "After his pilgrimage to Mecca, Malcolm said that many of the white people he'd met on his journey displayed a spirit of brotherhood that gave him a new positive insight into race relations.", "on themselves as human beings, as part of the human family and therefore they looked upon all other segments of the Human Family as part that same family. Now uh... They had a different look or a different air or a difference attitude than which is reflected in the attitudes of the man in America who called himself white. So I said that if Islam had done this for them perhaps the white men in America would study Islam", "perhaps they could do the same thing for him.", "it's uh news media to propagandize and make out makes the whole american public love the love of the germans in the japanese rather love the russians and the chinese and hate the germains than the japanese and then after the war they changed it and made the american public loved the uh the germens and loved the japanese hate the russian and hate that which shows that they can make the american", "and show white people how to love black people, and show black people how do something to stand on our own feet and solve our own problems.", "that you just read and if you understood them, just read down what people have to say. And you'll realize how illiterate our culture is. He said that he read history, he read Will Durant's story of civilization a multi-volume history of the world. He read H.G. Wells' outline of history. He heard Herodotus. He had Arnold Toynbee. And there was a brilliant library that he said would've been the envy of colleges", "to the prison, you can see the divine hand in the education of this man. He said he read philosophy. If you go to Alcatraz and visit Alcatrazz they have a little prison library in there it's not...the books aren't there anymore but on the wall it says the inmates were particularly interested in philosophy and would check out Kant and other philosophers.", "struck by Spinoza and one of the things that he said, that he felt that Western civilization had ended up in a cool day sack. And I don't think it could be summed up any better than that, the crisis of Western civilization. But he was once asked... He also got into African American history. He read W.E.B Du Bois or Dubois. And he read about the soul of black folks", "history he read a three-volume book on race and sex and race. He also said that he read Mendel's book on genetics several times, particularly passages from it. And he said the book made clear to him that you could not get a black man from a white man but you could get a white men from a black men which substantiated his belief that the first human beings were dark which according to our tradition Adam is Tawny", "them is Taani, it means dark and Hawa means black so it wouldn't be at all inconsistent with our understanding of the first people. And we now know that they were probably from South Africa. So we're all Africans right? Tell that to the crackers! You're a mutation!", "Melaton deficiency. Some people say that's part of the problem with the behavior, it's just a deficiency. I would argue he had a far superior education to many of the PhDs and college graduates. He definitely knew rhetoric, he knew logic you can clearly see his knowledge of logic is displayed constantly in his argumentation", "his pointing out fallacies, logical fallacies. Somebody accused him of being a communist he said why would you conclude that? And he said you spoke at the socialist... You know, at some venue of communists in New York He said I spoke at Dr King's church does that make me a follower of Dr King? Said I spoke last week at the Methodist Church Does that make my a Methodist? Right? This is logic", "He said, every time I catch a plane, I have with me a book I want to read. And that's a lot of books these days. If I weren't out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading just satisfying my curiosity because you can hardly mention anything I'm not curious about. I don't think anyone got more out of prison than I did. In fact, prison enabled me", "more intensely than I ever would have if my life had gone differently and I had attended some college. I imagine that one of the biggest troubles, listen up Zaytuna students, one of", "I spoke at the Oxford Union when I walked in they give you a standing ovation just for getting there You know, you don't even have to give a talk after that. You just wave or something Because just because you're at the union they consider it so prestigious and is this typical Anglo-saxon pride They consider it's so prestigious that you've been invited there that you get a standing Ovation just from walking in Right. So he was there December 3rd 1963", "a beautiful speech that he gave on extremism. He went toe-to-toe with professors from Oxford, the ovations in that speech were immense his diction was impeccable, his elocution is beautiful, he did not speak slang if he spoke slang it was for rhetorical effect which is actually a trope in rhetoric is to use we was robbed", "So Malcolm knew rhetoric and he used it to great effectiveness. He was an extraordinary orator, but he was an educated mind. And this is what has to be understood. This is not something that came down from heaven like manna. This man struggled with great difficulty to educate himself. And he spent years...he read, he would read till 3 in the morning in prison.", "of the hall. And every 58 minutes he would go because the guard would come by and they weren't allowed to be up at that time, and he would pretend to be asleep. The guard would leave and he'd go back and start reading again. This was Malcolm! So when you see this man, you have to understand that this is not something that just came down. All these gifted people their great gift is discipline, their great GIFT is the ability to struggle against themselves and overcome laziness, overcome the temptations to go the easy way", "easy way. This is what Malcolm was, he was a highly disciplined individual. He was disciplined morally, he with discipline intellectually and he was disciplined spiritually when his brother Reginald was thrown out he spent the entire night in prayer so he was man of prayer and these are important things to remember and finally in conclusion it would be difficult to...", "Malik El Shabazz, only I only used it in the Muslim world. Hajj is a title that is given to any Muslim who makes the pilgrimage to Mecca during the official hajj season. Well are you... will you now use Shabaz and drop X? I'll probably continue to use Malcolm X because... And I'll probaby use it as long as the situation that produced it exists. You don't feel...", "against the injustices that our people are involved in, in this country. Are you prepared to go into the United Nations at this point and ask that charges be brought against the United States for its treatment of American Negroes? Oh yes. The audience will have to be quiet. Yes, as I pointed out when I was doing my traveling, that nations look, African nations and Asian nations", "look very hypocritical when they stand up in the United Nations condemning the racist practices of South Africa and that which is practiced by Portugal and Angola, and saying nothing in the UN about the racist practises that are manifest every day against Negroes in this society. Even in South Africa those Africans aren't faced with bayonets and aren't", "If I was in a position to bring it in front of the United Nations and didn't do so, I wouldn't be a man. Malcolm, do you intend to lead the charge in the United nations? Well, I find that to say you're going to lead something creates a lot of hostility division jealousy and envy. I hope to work with any group of leaders or any group organizations to do whatever is necessary to see this problem is brought before the United Nation. Have you had any commitment from any nations in Africa to support your move?", "I would rather not say at this time, but one thing I found in my travels all of them look upon us as their long-lost brother. You realize the implication is that you have had such commitments when you say... This is your interpretation of what I said. One thing that I found and all of my travels was that All of the Africans, not only Africans But the Asians and the Muslims look upon Us as their Long Lost Brothers and America had actually tricked many of them", "into a hands-off policy by giving them the impression that she was honestly trying to do something to solve the problem. My argument over there was designed to prove that it is impossible for the United States government to solve their race problems, it's impossible. Malcolm on your trip abroad you said you sensed a feeling of great brotherhood and that conceivably would be working toward integration in this country now. At least this is what your reporter could have said, any comment on it? I don't think that I ever", "I don't think that I ever mentioned anything about working toward integration. They haven't even got integration right here in New York City. You have worse integration problems in the North than they have in the South, so if it doesn't work and you can't bring about integration in New york city as international cosmopolitan up-to-date is its supposed to be you'll never get integration anywhere else in the country. Are you prepared to work with some of leaders of the other civil rights organizations? Certainly certainly we will work", "or leaders in any way, as long as it's genuinely designed to get results. Does your new beard have any religious significance? No, not particularly but I do think that you'll find black people in America as they strive to throw off the shackles of mental colonialism will also probably reflect an effort to show up...to throw off", "own with standards of their own uh malcolm the more controversial remarks was a call for black people to get rifles and form rifle clubs sometime back do you still favor that or self-defense i don't see why that should be controversial i think that if white people found themselves the victim of the same kind of brutality that black people in this country face and they saw that the government was either unwilling or unable to protect them", "protect them that the intelligence on the part of the whites would make them get some rifles and shotguns and protect themselves. Now, Negroes are developing some kind of intellectual maturity too, and they can see that having waited upon the government to protect them has been a weight that has been in vain so any of them who live in areas where the government is not able to do its job then we do have to get together and do a job of protecting ourselves." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Shaykh Hamza_s greatest lesson on Hardships_EPmQNYwQRPs&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW3SBwkJsAkBhyohjO8%3D_1748521163.opus", "text": [ "One of the most extraordinary aspects of the Prophet's life is that he never allowed tribulations to disquiet him. In other words, he never", "Turbulence and the word in Arabic for Somebody who has forbearance is called Haleem And the word Haleen Is a word that the Prophet was described as he had more Forbearance than anybody else. That's a description now the word for intellect is Hilm That's one of the words for intellect his Hilm One of the things they accused the prophet", "is a lightness, there's no stability because what intellect should do is it should stabilize you and that's why the Haleem is somebody who does not get disquieted he doesn't get perturbed in life now what's interesting about disquitude is that the word for dreamer is Halim", "is حالم Now why do you think the word for somebody who does not get perturbed is حليم and the word of a dreamer is حالم أحلام is intellect but it's also dreams أضغاث الأحلام in Surah Yusuf The dreams were called empty dreams Why do you there's a connection between حلم", "And dream and intellect. Yeah, it's hard to dream when somebody is agitating you. Dreams need a state of quietude in order for you to sleep. Now the word for nipple is halama. And a child, when they're at the nipple, what happens to their state? What does the mother do when the child is in a perturbed state?", "in a perturbed state, the infant. She gives it the breast which is called halama and what happens to the child? It goes into a state of complete quietude and relaxation. Now isn't it interesting that milk and knowledge are from the same source and that's why when Sayyidina Omar in The Sound Hadith saw a dream", "Omar was drinking it and the Prophet said, It's knowledge. So isn't it interesting that which means to go astray means the inability to digest milk in Arabic you can look these up in Arabic dictionary which is to go a stray the root of it means the", "Because our first stage is to get through the two years. And in Western developmental psychology, they call it that first crisis is trust versus mistrust. That's what the child needs to realize is that they are in a safe environment and if they're not given milk,", "by their mother, if they're mistreated, they don't get through that first developmental stage and then every stage after that is a disaster. According to Erickson, I mean this is a theory in developmental psychology but my point of bringing that up is that trust versus mistrust is related to whether or not the mother removes the disquietude of the child or not because that's", "cry of the baby there's a reason babies cry and if you grew up in this country in the 60s, there was a character named Dr. Spock and they're always giving new theories about how to raise children but one of the theories in the 50s was mothers should ignore the cry of child and regulate the milk according to fixed times which is complete insanity but that's what they did and now look at the society", "society out there. So the haleem, the person who's haleeam is a person who in the face of tribulation whether it's a person or whether it'a circumstance they do not lose their cool They do not become perturbed and this is the hallmark of the Prophet ﷺ", "and with circumstances. Is that, for instance, he is described whenever people would speak ill to him, he would return with اِدْفَعْ بِالَّتِي هِيَ أَحْسَنُ The Qur'an says give a bad turn repay it with a good turn. The Prophet ﷺ on the when he was migrating from Mecca to Medina", "When they were in the cave, and Abu Bakr was very nervous because right outside were the Quraysh. Literally outside of the cave. And the Prophet ﷺ was in a complete unperturbed state. In battles, they said that the Prophet ﷻ used to hide behind him some of the people when it got very difficult, what they call مَعْمَعَةً مَأْرَكًا", "Prophet ﷺ and purposely upset him in order to elicit a response. And it was Umar who got very angry, and the prophet was completely unperturbed even though he was insulted by this man. And the man said that he had seen all of the characters of prophecy except for one, Hilm . And he needed to test that. And so he purposely evoked a negative response", "negative response but didn't get it from the Prophet ﷺ. So he knew that he had Hilm or forbearance so one of the things about people that are disconnected from Allah is that they get completely disquieted whenever things get difficult and it's a sign of weak Iman People whose iman is weak when they lose the slightest thing you see them", "One of the things that we are increasingly becoming incapable of is listening to each other. Just talk, human beings without getting disquieted. So people can't have civil arguments. They can't had discussions because once we start talking I get heated you elicit a response from me like there was a physician in India who used to treat people with Ruqya", "with Ruqya and one of these modern physicians thought he was completely insane. And when you start arguing with him about this, and he said how do you think words can affect anything? You need to give people antibiotics and you need to them things that will change their state. And so the other physician who believed in Ruqyat called him a donkey.", "a pig and he was about to kill him. And he said, two words I said to you and look at how they've changed your state. You're red and ready to kill me because of two words. So words have a power to elicit responses from us. And so what hirm is, is the ability to not allow your buttons to be pushed. And it really is one of the gifts of Islam if people take it seriously,", "It's hard to do, and we're all working on it at some degree. People get better at it than others, but it takes a great deal of effort, and it doesn't stop. It gets finer and finer. But removing resentment from the heart is a really difficult thing. Hasad, all these diseases of the heart. So this book he wrote as a way of helping people to understand what tribulations really are", "we get disquieted about difficulties is, we don't understand what the wisdom of the difficulty is from Allah . That's one of the real problems. So when Allah gives you a difficult situation if you believe in Allah ,the difference between you and somebody who does not believe in allah is that you will derive benefit from that condition. Now one of beauties of the creation and for me one of greatest proofs of the existence of God", "in God, you will live in a world that is godless. And I really think that that is a proof for the existence of God because if you believe in God you will be living in a life filled with God but if you disbelieve in God then you will constantly be reaffirmed in your disbelief and that's why atheists can't understand people who believe in", "atheists, because both of them are seeing a proof for their belief. They really are and that's one of the meanings I think of the hadith, أنا عند الظن عبد بي فليظن بيا ما شاء I am in the opinion of my servant so if my servant thinks I'm nothing, that's what he finds. Allah is in the understanding of the believer So if you believe Allah is with you, Allah is", "If you don't believe he's with you, he's not with you. And that's why despair is haram in every Abrahamic tradition. It's haram. And in Catholicism it's the unforgivable unpardonable sin to despair from the mercy of God. Is actually the one thing they say is not forgiven. And thats Iblis Ablesa. That's his disease. He despaired and so he wants everybody else to despair.", "the game that's being played in the world is to make everybody think that it's all horrible. And whenever you talk to people who don't believe in God, or people of this age in particular, what do they say to you? Look around you! How can you believe in god? Well, that's my whole point. I'm looking around how can I not believe in GOD? So where's the problem? The problem is in what they call evil.", "of God rests upon. It rests upon what they call the problem of evil, and that is why if somebody tells you they don't believe in God, what you should ask them to do is explain to me what your definition of God is because we might not believe in that same thing. In other words, I might agree with you that I don't", "entities. Whereas we believe good and evil are both creations of Allah. See, the Christians can't explain evil because they say God is all-good and God is All-Powerful. Well if God's all-Good and all-powerful how do we explain evil in the world? Because if He's all good he wouldn't create evil and if He is all powerful He would remove it from the world. This is what they call the problem of evil in philosophy. That's the argument.", "the argument. So that is ultimately what atheists have a problem with. One of the benefits of this, is that we had scholars who looked at tribulations and said never think something is evil because you don't know! Now on one hand we have a sharia'ah that says killing is evil right? So if somebody kills another person unjustly", "punished or forgiven or whatever is done but it's a wrong that needs to be redressed so sharia is something that we have to live with the law that Allah has given us just like here in this society we have laws many of them are congruous with our system of law and that's what Raghubir Isbahani calls al-adala muttaqa which is shared by Muslims and non-Muslims and then you have what's called al-adaal muqayyida", "that a specific prophet has brought and that adala can actually change. It can actually changed but adal mutaqaa it's wrong to take somebody else's property everybody agrees on that, and that is the basis of entering into transactions with non-Muslims and that why Muslims can transact with non Muslims because if we didn't have a shared understanding of justice there's...we couldn't communicate", "will agree with us on many basic points. And this is how it's capable for Muslims and non-Muslims to live together based on these shared things. There are other things where we disagree, and then the sharia has ways of dealing with that. In a Muslim society even, non-muslims are allowed to do things that muslims aren't allowed to. So he begins his book Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Raheem in the name Allah the Merciful the Compassionate Every Muslim traditionally began their book", "with either Bismillah or Alhamdulillah. And that was because the Prophet ﷺ said, anything that begins without Bismillah is cut off from Barakah. So it's a way of maintaining barakah.", "that the Shaykh, and Shaykh in Arabic has several meanings. One of them is simply just an old man, he gets gray hairs. And Shaykh also means the head of a tribe, it can be somebody who has wealth, it could mean a dignified person but here its used to signify somebody who as wisdom because usually wisdom comes with old age so a Shaykh", "Imam is a paragon, somebody that embodies something. أَمَّ يَأُمَّ means to intend something or to move towards something. An ummah is a group of people that are moving towards the same object. That's what an ummah it is. It's a people that bound together by the same goal and that's why the Ummah of the Prophet has the same go to get to paradise. And then the mother is obviously", "She is the Umm, which is related to the same root word. Hujjat al-Islam, hujja is a proof and that was a level, a degree that certain scholars reach where they actually become like Imam Al Ghazali who is the famous Hujjal al-Issalam becomes a proof for the existence or for the truth of Islam. That person has become... The fact that they exist is a prove that Islam is true.", "the one that all of the creatures depend upon. And Anam generally means the things that sleep, but it also means the insan , and imam al-Tabari says about the... ...that he placed the earth for the Anaam, that it means all the living creatures, things that sleeps. And also the ulama are a benefit to the creatures because they defend their rights. Creatures have rights, trees have rights", "all these... and this is a modern argument in the West whether creation has legal standing or not. This is an argument that environmentalist lawyers have brought up whereas the Muslims dealt with these things, they are to be protected so.. And then his name is Abu Muhammad Abdul Aziz Ibn Abdus Salam", "the Maraki Madhhab. And then he says, نَفْعَ اللَّهُ بِهِ الْمُسْلِمِينَ May Allah benefit the Muslims by him. And see even today 800 years after he wrote this book we're here in California benefiting by his words and so the dua was answered. May we benefit by this Imam. وَلَهُ وَ لِجَمِيعَ الْ مُؤْمِنِينِ And all the believers.", "May Allah forgive us and him and all the believers. Kalamities, tests, tribulations and disasters have different benefits based upon the different ranks of people. Now this is an important idea. Rutba is a rank it's used in modern Arabic in military rank", "military rank. The ruta are the ranks that people are in, in relation to Allah. So just as you have in the military because nobody knows the armies of your Lord except Allah.", "generals, you have colonels and then even within that you have ranks. And then you have majors and captains and lieutenants and sergeants and corporals. People are ranked. Now the people of the Wahir actually wear uniforms to let them know what their ranks are. In Islam those ranks are hidden. You don't", "the stations of people with Allah. It's something Allah has hidden. One of the ulama said that Allah hid three things, أَخْفَ ثَرَاثَ فِي ثَلَاظٍ He hid three thing in three things. He hid his رضا في طاعته . He hid His contentment in His obedience. So in other words you never know what Allah will accept from you. Allah might not accept a great thing you did", "was an act of obedience, but he might accept a small thing. Like the prostitute who was forgiven for giving a dog water. That's the reason that she was forgiven, forgiving a dog, water. So Allah has hidden His contentment in his obedience.", "So the woman who locked up the cat and went to hell for locking up a cat, that was the thing. She obviously, that's an indication of her state. She was obviously a cruel woman because if you don't have compassion with animals it's a sign of cruelty. And in our society we know that children that are abusive to animals and torture animals when they're young often end up becoming very abusive", "There's a relationship between kindness towards animals and kindness towards humans. And that is one of the reasons why every prophet was a shepherd, because they learned to be gentle to animals, because that is a transitional phase into being gentle to... Because if you're kind to animals you should certainly seem that you would be kind to humans which are at where the highest on that chain hierarchy of beings so", "I mean, people say you wouldn't treat a dog like that. You know, like why are you treating me like that? Well because dogs are faithful and you were unfaithful. So he says benefits are based on the differences of the ranks of people. So for some people a tribulation removes wrongs.", "Ghazali said that there are wrongs in this world that are only removed by depression That you know if you're wondering why people get depressed from dhunub I mean they and also the soul. You see, I don't care what anybody says about Alternative lifestyles and all these people out there doing People I guarantee you people have trouble in their soul.", "You can preoccupy yourself, you can entertain yourself. You can do all these things to not deal with the soul's anguish but you cannot remove the anguish of the soul. It is not possible which is why Marx said religion is the opiate of the masses and Abdu'l-Hakim Winter said", "the religion of the masses. That's the idol, is escape from reality. That what they're worshipping because they'll do anything for that idol and all they are trying to do is numb the pain of existence but the existence is painful because you are not fulfilling your function", "There's always trouble. And anytime anything in the body is not fulfilling its function, what is the first sign to let you know that you should go to a doctor? Pain! There's some type of disquietude in the Body to let You know it's not fulfilling Its functions. So suddenly You've got this pain in Your liver and You go and He says, You've Got hepatitis.", "That pain was to let you know the function has been disrupted. The same is true for the soul. If you're not fulfilling your function, which is to worship Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, testify to His unity and to behave accordingly, then you will be in pain and suffering until you come into accordance. And that's a gift from Allah in the same way that pain signs and symptoms are gifts", "they can go to a physician and get well. If there weren't signs and symptoms, that's why hypertension is such a dangerous disease because people can walk around and not feel any discomfort from hypertension and they can die from it. So pain in the soul is there but people will do things and that's what people do. See what kufr is essentially is covering up. Now if you get a headache and you go and take Tylenol, you're not getting rid of the headache", "You're suppressing the symptom. So if you are sick in your soul from your kufr, and you go and you do things in order to remove the pain of the kufar, you're just covering up more. And that's why it's dhulumat fulqa dhulumat. It's darknesses over, covering darknesses.", "Covering up more and more and until that person is so diseased That it's all it's a hopeless case unless Allah intervenes but that's what happens to people and so The ranks of people differ now the prophets upon them all be peace the prophets have tribulation not to remove their wrongs But to elevate them in rank", "rank. It's not to remove their wrongs and that's the case of some of the sariheen as well, it actually becomes irtifa' , rafa'darajat . They're moving up in degrees. And ashadu nasib tiratan The people of the greatest tribulation are the prophets and then those closest to them and then close closest to him and those closest", "and you see tribulations like there's non-muslims, and you wonder about that. Well according to Ibn Abbas , he said that there is no tribulation that doesn't have a tribulation which could be worse than it. And so its difficult to assess what really is happening when you look at people but this is one of the problems", "The problems in religion is suffering in the world and the different degrees of tribulation out there. And this is the way that we view tribulation for the believer. For people outside of Islam, there's a whole other set of rules working because when you know things, you have an accountability that is not included when you do not know things.", "Islam is that when they entered into Islam and they would do something wrong, they would see an immediate effect of that. Whereas they never saw it in the Jahiliyyah. And that was because of their maqam with Allah. So there was a once... The Prophet ﷺ was walking and there was young man who saw a woman and he was looking at the woman and ran into the wall. And the Prophet ﷺ said that that was his removal of the wrong", "That it happened immediately. And so that actually was a blessing, to have that wrong removed. Now there's another hadith where the Prophet went to a man who was completely devastated. He was dying, he was in his bed, flesh and bone, and completely wasted. And he said, what did you ask Allah? He said, I asked Him to purify me of all my sins.", "that because you can't take it. But ask him for afiyah, for well-being. Don't ask him to purify your sins in this world. You want him to remove your sins by forgiveness. That's what we want and that's why a sincere tawbah is what we need. We need a sincere", "toba to Allah. We don't want to have to do all these things and then get these things happening to us because of the wrongs that we're doing. But that's what happens. And don't think that it gets any easier, but what happens with the people, the saliheen is that they get to a point where they're content with what's happening. It's no longer painful because they're in such", "Then one of the Sadihaats was walking and she stumbled, and hurt her leg. And she began to laugh! And somebody thought that she was crazy, and said, you know are you Majnuna? And she said no but I fell and then when the pain came, I remembered the hadith in which the Prophet said that a believer doesn't get a shouk,", "It removes wrongs. And the sweetness of my wrongs being removed overwhelmed my pain. But she was actually, Alhamdulillah. That's Iman. Those are spiritual endorphins kicking in. There are spiritual Endorphins. All those things are mythal. They're just what you see in the world is just a metaphor for the unseen world. They have opium.", "opium. There's spiritual opium and there are things that can put out your pain when one of the Sahaba had an arrow they said wait till he goes into prayer to remove it this you think these are stories? You think these like things people made up and like fairy tales and things like that seriously these were not made-up stories, these are things people witness with their own eyes", "eyes and they removed the arrow during his prayer because he couldn't feel it. And don't think, I mean there's...I broke this arm severely. I had a Colley's fracture. It's one of the worst kinds you can get on your wrist. And they gave me something called fentanyl. They could have broken my leg! I wouldn't have cared because", "drug. The half-life is very quick and it's used, it's a morphine derivative but once they gave me the fentanyl he could have done anything! He took it and pulled it down and reset it I didn't feel anything I was in complete bliss from a drug and that's just a chemical reaction happening in the brain", "Those things are real. People go into those states with Allah where they do not feel pain, They actually feel delight And that's not something you should ask Allah for You know let me delight in my calamities You should ask allah for aafiya But you should recognize when the calamity come They come for deep wisdom", "So he says, أَحَدُهَا مَعْرِفَةُ عِذَ الرَّبُوبِيَّةِ وَقَهْرها The first benefit is that you realize the power of lordship over you. You realize that Allah is Rabb and you are marbub. And the nature of lordhip is that lordship lords over you .", "إِنَّ لِلّٰهِ وَإِنِّى إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعُونَ They should remind you, there's things you can control. In my environment here, there are things I can control, I'm thirsty, I have a cup Allah has given me will. Bismillah! I can drink, I can quench my thirst, Allah has give me that but He can take it away.", "can not only remove the power of motion, Guillain-Barré. Has anybody ever seen a person with Guillain Barré? The virus where they have to be on ventilators, they can't move. Healthy young people in their 20s get afflicted with this disease and then one of the miracles of that is sometimes they actually recover and get back there their emotion so it's like this period where Allah removes it all from them and then gives it back", "it back. But then there's other times they don't get it back and that's when they see what the reality, because this is the illusion. The illusion is I'm free, I'm independent, I can do whatever I want. I mean we've got six billion people walking around on this planet under that delusion but", "And that's why Lee Atwater, if anybody... Does anybody remember that name? Lee At water. He was the Republican head of the election committee. He basically destroyed Dukakis when Dukakis ran for Democratic president. Lee At Water wrote an extraordinary and it's worth reading. It's a confessional that he wrote right before he died because at the age of 39", "And this was a man who by dunya standards in this society had it all. That's what they said about him. He was young, handsome, wealthy, powerful. He had it al. He he was a Machiavellian politician that basically destroyed people's lives. He said that he based his life on Machiavelli's book The Prince.", "And then at the age of 39, he got a tumor in the brain. And all he wanted to do was ask forgiveness of all the people that he had destroyed. And he wrote it. It's really worth reading what he wrote because he said suddenly he realized. And that's what it takes for some people. That's what is takes to learn that lesson. So learning that Allah is Lord and He is", "That he overpowers his servants. The second benefit is that you realize your abject servanthood and your complete state of resignation and brokenness before the will and power of Allah.", "And to this, the words of God indicate when He said, Those who when an affliction strikes them, they say, surely to God we belong and to Him we return.", "مُلْكَهُ وَعَبِيدُهُ They finally admit that they are in the dominion. They admit, when calamity comes, we are the Dominion of God. إِنَّ لِلَّيْهِ We belong to God. In other words if I take something, if I owned it and I took it and threw it out And you say you can't do that. Why can't I do that? This is mine. I own it. I can do whatever I want with it That's the nature of property", "The property is that the one who owns it has the right to do what he wills with it. That's the nature of property. If you don't have that quality of possession, then it's not really your property. Now because the dunya is not our property we can't do whatever we want with it, can we? But we understand the concept of property! This world is the dominion of God and therefore God can do whatever He wants with it", "Now, the nature of... You see if I have a book and I burn it. And you say to me, you can't do that. Yes I can, it's my book and i want to burn it! You shouldn't burn books. Maybe I shouldn't but I can and you can stop me by law. So then if the person asks you why did you burn the book? Because there are mistakes in it. Oh, I didn't realize.", "In that story of Al-Kahf, which is the story of the problem of evil. That story solves the problem Of evil because Musa's looking with the eye of the outward and everything he sees is wrong But when it's explained to him by a servant who was given knowledge of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala suddenly the servant The Musa is saying I didn't realize Now I have an explanation what happens on Yawmul Qiyamah? Allah tells us in the Quran He explains it all to us", "And then everybody's gonna say, now it makes sense. The difference between the believer and the catheter is in this world we're saying we know it makes sens and we're willing to wait until the day of judgment to have it explained because we trust Allah. They are saying no! It's wrong! How do you know? You don't have all the information.", "Unless you completely understand that thing. To judge a thing is only one aspect of conceptualizing the entirety of that thing, it's a principle in logic and that's why a judge has to know all the facts if you pre-judge it's called prejudice And it's considered to be a moral vice", "vice, to be prejudiced. So we cannot pre-judge God! We don't have that right to do that. We cannot pre judge Allah because Allah is the one who knows all things. And as for you, you have only been given a small amount of knowledge.", "I was talking with a physician in the car and one of the things that he said was, he was talking to a nephrologist or one of his anatomy professors said we don't even know how we urinate. We don't really understand it. We can explain to you what we know but why is happening? How this whole thing is working? How the kidneys are doing all these? We don' t really understand them. Well, and I responded him by saying Imam Al Ghazali was once asked", "By a man, where is God? Ain't Allah. And Imam al-Ghazali wrote a poem back to him and in the poem he said you don't even know how you drink water and then how you urinate it. What's happening in between? You don't know your coordinates in the universe. How can you ask where God is? I mean I love these maps in astronomy books where they show our galaxy and they say you are here. They put this little...", "In astronomy books, they have the Milky Way. And then they say you are here. Give me those coordinates. Seriously. You know what coordinates are based on? Coordinate system. XYZ, yeah right. You have to have a system. Like here we have what are called cardinal points which don't even exist in reality because cardinal point are experiential. It's all flat earth. Cardinal points are all based", "Copernican theories about the universe, but that's all we've got. So if you ask for my coordinates here in California it's based on arbitrary points of reference like Greenwich. Who chose Greenwich? The English happened to be the most powerful people at the time so it was Greenwich! It could have been Istanbul.", "You don't know where you are in the universe. How do you know where God is? But this is the ignorance of man, because man is in a delusional state and the problem with delusions... This is the most troubling thing for me as a person that understands this intellectually. The problem with", "The problem of delusion is you do not understand that you're deluded. Arrogant people are often completely oblivious to their arrogance. They don't realize that they're being arrogant, but they see themselves as better than you and that's where the arrogance comes from. And to see themselves is better than You is a delusional state because in reality they do not know whether or not they're better than", "don't know. See you didn't ask me what were the other things that he there was one thing I left out of the three things haha that just reminded me of that. أخفى اولياءه في عباده He's hidden his awliya amongst his servants and and the frightening", "That's the amazing thing about it. Because Imam Al-Qurtubi said that Sayyidina Omar was beloved to God when he was in Mecca prostrating to idols. So you don't even know, you could meet a person and he could be better than you. And that's why Habib Omar told one of the students that was in Yemen, when you go to America, he said if you want to call Americans to Islam, never call anybody talk to them about Islam", "assume that He's better than you. Not that He is lower than you, but that He actually is better than your. And that methodology is what spread Islam all over the world because what he said was that you now know the truth and so any disobedience you do, you have no excuse for it. Whereas as long as he is in a state of ignorance, it might be an excuse with his Lord until the message comes to him. Because we believe", "haven't been given a message are forgiven. So then he says that they admit that they are his dominion and his servants, وَأَنَّهُمْ رَاجِعُونَ إِلَى حُكْمِهِ وَتَدْبِيرِهُ And ultimately they must return to His judgment and decree, to His planning and management in them, وقضائه and to His fate وتقديره and", "place of refuge from him. And no way out. The third benefit of calamities is, إِذْ لَا مَرْجَعَ فِي دَفْعِ الشَّدَائِدِ إِلَّا إِليْهِ", "except to him. So it makes you sincere because the mukhlis is the one that calls on God without any shirk. So if you realize you have no other place, لَا مَلْ جَأَ مِنْهُ إِلَّا إِليَّ They realized that they had no place of refuge from Him except to Him. That that state is a great gift from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala because it puts you in a state of ikhlas. And one of the ulemas said that a moment's of ikhhlas in this world is enough to save a person.", "to save a person. Just to be in that state of ikhlas with Allah . So, that is a great gift. وَلَا مُعْتَمَدْ فِيهِ كَشْفِهَ إِلاَّ عَلٰى And there's no source to depend upon in removal of that calamity except upon Allah . Allah says, وَإِن يَمْسِسْكَ اللّٰهُ بِضُرٍّ فَلًا كَاشِفَ لَهُ إِلَّا هُوٌۚ If Allah afflicts you with some harm", "that harm except Allah . Except Him. وَإِذَا رَكِبُوا فِي الْفُرْقِ دَعُوا اللَّهَ مُخْلِصِينَ لَهُ الدِّينَ When they get on a boat and then there's turbulence, waves suddenly they're calling Allah sincerely. These are people that are not... They're in bad state but Allah saying in that state they're مُحْلٰسون Because when the calamities come so that is benefit of calamity is that they make it And how many times Wallahi you ask yourselves", "Every one of you right now, you ask yourself how many times has a calamity afflicted you and it led to that state? Where where you really felt You're the only one that can help me in this That's how I became Muslim. Wallahi! I mean I remember very clearly when I was 17 years old I had an incredible tribulation And I remember the night", "I know that I called on Allah with absolute sincerity. I remember it very clearly and that prayer got answered And that's the beauty because that's Ism Al-A'lam if you call on Allah, That is this Ism al-Alaam The greatest name is the name that has no partnership with it The fourth benefit", "that he returns to Allah and suddenly is fervent in his desire of His Lord. So, that's a benefit. Allah says when a harm afflicts the human He calls on His Lord returning back to Him, to His Lord The fifth one", "that it leads to humble, a humbled state before God and prayers. That you're calling on Allah . When the harm afflicts a person he calls on us. So one of the things that Allah loves... And there's a hadith that Allah afflicts people He loves just to hear them call on Him. Subhanallah! It's only for a short time", "for a short time. I mean, that's the thing. If you just keep it in perspective, it's just like the dentist. He said this is only going to hurt for a second but he's doing it for your benefit and that's why you let him do it. It's true or not true? You know somebody when they're pulling out the sliver, you know, this is just gonna hurt for second. Just okay go ahead. Oh! It's over. That's what you say when they...you know, you do something", "And then they're crying and crying. It's over, it's over. And then you hug them and everything is all right. And that's the thing about dunya. We're getting the tooth pulled out at 70 years 80 maximum. But if you relate it to infinity, to infinity... It's cancelled out! So stop complaining. Really just sit back and relax. You know what it's like? I really...", "I've seen this with my own child. And you could do this, take the child... Don't do this! Take the child, I don't want to be responsible. It's America they sue you if stuff like that happens. If you take a child and you throw the child up there is a point where you see this They go into this state of complete panic. And then when they come back to your arms they are laughing. That is dunya", "I guarantee you, that moment, that is your life. You came from God and you're going back to God. And there's just a moment where you're in a complete state of panic. But just relax, you're good hands. You're in good hands! So just relax. The Moroccans say", "Relax the mind and learn to swim. Seriously, relax the mind... Do you remember when you first learned to swim? I remember. I'll never forget it. I got placed on my back and the person told me, relax completely. I was scared to death. Relax completely! What are you talking about? I'm gonna drown. No, you're not. You're gonna float.", "Relax. And it was frightening in the beginning, but once you learn to relax suddenly you are floating and everything is fine. And that's dunya. You just have to relax. We're in the ocean of dunya and we need to just float, just keep afloat. Don't drown. They're all drowning out there because... The person who drowns they come up and they're in a state of panic. If they would just relax", "But the panic is causing them to drown. And that's what's happening with all these people out there, it's the panic. إِنَّ الْإِنسَانَ خُلِقَ هَلُوعًا Human beings are created in a state of anxiety. إذا مسه شر جزوع When any harm afflicts them they panic. وَإِذَا مَسّهُ الخَيْرُ مَنُوع And when good comes to them they withhold, they don't want to share it with anybody. إلا المصلين", "except the people of prayer. They're in a different state and that's the people we want to be from, from the mustathnayon, the people that are exempted from that other state because that trust in Allah is what saves you So that's fifth is tatharrah Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala also says", "Rather to him may your call be, and Allah... He will remove what you're calling Him for to remove the calamity if he desires. So that's one of the benefits. Say who will save you from the darknesses of the land and the sea when you call on Him abased and humble?", "humble in fear and concealment the six benefit al-himu amman sadrat anhu musiba the sixth one is that your forbearing toward the one who has afflicted you al-hilmu amman saadrat anho al-musiba Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says", "Ibrahim was somebody who had compassion for other people. يَتَأَوَّهُ He felt compassion. Some of the ulum say that's the awwah. And then haleem is the gentleness. So, فَبَشَّرْنَاهُ بِغُلَامٍ حَلِيمٍ We gave them good tidings of a ghulam haleen, Ismail alayhi salam. The young boy, a forebearing boy.", "in their enormities and in their severity, whether they're great or small. So a forbearance shown when there's great calamities is much greater than any other type of forbearances. So that's one of the great blessings is the ability to show forbearants because it's a gift from Allah . The seventh one, السَّابِعَةُ الْعَفُو عَنْ دَانِيهَا That you can actually forgive them so it's not just having", "but you actually forgive them and you get one of the greatest rewards is forgiving people that have actually done you a wrong. Allah says, وَالْعَافِينَ عَنِ النَّاسِ Those who forgive people. Allah loves those people. وَمَنْ عَفَهَا وَأَصْلَحَ فَأْجُرْهُ عَلَى اللَّهِ That the one who pardons and who rectifies his reward is with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala.", "And when you forgive people for great calamities, it's better than any other forgiveness. See if you have family members that cause you problems, You have to forgive them for the sake of Allah. Don't do it for them. Do it for Allah . See one of things people do, If you get angry and you leave, you run out of the room, and then you don't talk to that person, The more you delay that time,", "that it festers. It's like a boil. If you immediately, because that's a jaraha. If You immediately go seriously I got upset with somebody. I literally went took a shower and then just went and asked their forgiveness and I was not the wrongdoer. The thing can be healed if you don't do that it becomes more and more difficult as time goes on. Becomes more and", "It's not your fault, you didn't do it. He should be the one asking forgiveness of you. Who does he think he is? Don't worry about who he thinks he is. Worry about who you think you are. That's the problem. The problem with the world is who we think we are. So asking forgiveness... ...of people is a great blessing from Allah .", "The eighth one is to be patient during the tribulation. Because Allah is with patient ones. So when you show patience, it's a great blessing. And intidhar al-faraj is one of the greatest acts of ibadah. It's actually just wait for an opening from Allah. And there's Muslims, if you tell them, Muslims need to be", "to be patient. There's this kind of thing like, it's like we've been patient that is not patience. You cannot call a donkey patient in Arabic you don't say al-himar sabir It doesn't work because patience is based on understanding. You can bear things tahtamal shay' That's what it is tahtamar al darb They just bare it but patience", "Patience has what's called Ihtisab, which is where you actually reckon with your Lord a reward. You're believing there's a reward coming from being patient. This brings on the mahabba of Allah, the love of Allah and also the abundant reward from Allah .", "يُحِبَّ الصابرين Allah loves the patient ones. So by being patient, you're actually incurring the love of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Engendering the love Allah subhana wa ta-ala. إِنَّمَا يُوَفَّى الصَّابِرُونَ أَجْرَهُمْ بِغَيْرِ حِسَابٍ The sabirun are given their rewards without any reckoning. Some rewards you get it's reckoned already whereas patience is without reckoning", "reckoning. No one was given a blessing better and more vast than patience. The ninth one is to actually be happy, glad about what's happening because of those benefits.", "The Prophet said in a hadith that Imam Ahmad relates about the peoples who went before. They used to be as happy during calamities and tribulations as you are during times of abundance. How wondrous those two distasteful things.", "death and poverty. Because in the akhirah, poverty in this world is a blessing because your hisab is much less if you're poor. And that's what Imam Ali said about wealth he said, What's halal from it is a reckoning and what's prohibited from it as punishment. And thats why the zuhad are called The most intelligent people are the people of zuhd", "people of zuhud because they give up things, because they don't want problems that go with things. وَإِنَّمَا فَرِحُوا بِهَٰ إِذْلَى لِشِّدَّتِهٰ وَمَرَارَةِهۡ بِنِسْبَةٍ يَوَثَمْرَةً وَفَائِدَتِيهٖ That they were happy with it not because they happened but rather because of the rewards and the fruits that came from those tribulations كَمَّا يَفْرحُ مَنْ عَظُمَتْ أَدْوَاءَهُ بِشَرْبِ الْأَدُوِيَةَ الْحَاسِمَةُ لَهَا", "So just as somebody who is happy, who has great diseases when he drinks that bitter cure that will remove the disease. He's drinking it and he's happy about it because he's thinking not about the bitterness and the difficulty of the remedy but he's thinkin g about the benefits that will come from taking the bitter remedy. And so this is the way people are", "of Allah with the tribulations. And the tenth, that Aashiratu ashukru alayha to be grateful for it. Lima tadammanatuhu min fawaidihah kama yaskur an maridu tabiba alqati' li atrafihi an mani alahu min shahawatihi lima yatawakau fidharika manal bur'i washifa Just like because of what are contained in there of the benefits as a sick person would be grateful to the doctor who is severing one of his limbs", "of his limbs or preventing him from his desires because he believes in that is a cure for him. You go to the surgeon, what's... The surgeon cut your hand off because there's gangrene? What do they say to the Surgeon afterwards? Thank you so much doctor! You know I really can't tell you how much I'm... He just cut your hands off! Why are you thanking him? Because you realize", "he harmed you. And so in the same way, those people who have tribulation from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala know that Allah only does these things to benefit them, to make them grow and so they actually say Alhamdulillah wa shukurillah al-hadiyat ashara The 11th one, tamheesuha li dhunubi wal khataya The purification that these calamities have towards their wrongs and their sins", "Allah says, وَمَا أَصَابُكُم مِّنْ مُّصِيبَةٍ فَبِمَٓا كَسَبَتْ أَيْدِيكُٰمْ وَيَعْفُ عَنْ كَثِيرٍ That anything that afflicts you is from what your own hands have wrought. And He pardons much of what you've done. In other words, what you're being afflicted with is actually much less than what you deserve. And in that one of the things that Imam An-Nasafi radiAllahu anhu says in his tafsir of this...", "One of the things he says in that, he said if you reflect on the meaning of that You will show gratitude for your calamities because you will realize That it's a blessing that they're much less than they are. That that's the secret of that ayah. وَيَعْفُ عَن كَثِيرٍ That's why Allah followed that up that you're afflicted with your wrong actions You can feel bad about that but then when you realize that He's pardon so much", "overlook so much of your shortcomings. وَلَا يُصِيبُ الْمُؤْمِنَىٰ وَاصَبٌ وَلا نَصَبُ حَتَّى الْهَمَّ يُحِمّهُ وَالشَّوكَ يُشَاكُهَ إِلَّا كَفَّرَ بِهِ عَن سَيِّئَاتِهُ That the believer is not afflicted with any difficulty, any exhaustion, fatigue, anxiety that concerns him or even a thorn that punctures him except that Allah removes", "with it that he steps on, a thorn that he step on except that Allah removes with it his wrong actions. So those are all blessings. So no disease, no exhaustion fatigue anything like that it all comes as removal of wrong actions SubhanAllah. The twelfth blessing is the compassion", "to people that are in tribulation and to help them because whoever relieves a one of the calamities of this world for a believer allah will relieve a calamity for him on the yoma qiyamah so people in tribulations become an opportunity one of things that imam muhammad hassan hafidhu allah one of", "One is where you have the aafiyah, you have well-being in yourself and your family but you get problems of other people. And the others that you have those problems. And he said that if you don't help people that have problems then Allah will give you those problems That's the nature of the world This it! لِيَبْلُوَكُمْ It's to test you So you're either tested in yourself or with others", "you have to respond appropriately. So avoiding those things is a danger, and that's why the tribulations of others are actually a blessing. If they come to you for help or something, it's an opportunity to earn some closeness to Allah . And... In the Muwata'a of Imam Marek , Isa was reported to have said people are of two types,", "people of tribulation so have compassion for the people of Tribulation and show gratitude for well-being that's why if you're in good shape don't complain tell somebody to punch you every time you complain or something because you don't want if you complain and you don' t have anything to complain about Allah will give you things to complain abou.t And then you'll think about how good things were remember we used to complain", "There's people that say that. When real calamities hit them, they think, what was I complaining about before? Well, the truth is, stop complaining now because it could get worse. That's the whole point. It could get worst. And one of the poets said, وَإِنَّمَا يَرْحَمُ الْعُشَاقَ مِّنْ عَشِقًا The only people that really feel sorry for the people in passionate love are people who have been in passionate", "The fourth ten, the fourteenth one.", "So when tribulations come, you really appreciate what well-being is. So it's better to appreciate it when you've got it. وَالشُّكْرُ عَلَيْهَا فِإِنَّ النِّعْمَ لَا يُعْرَفُ مِقْدَارُهَٰ إِلَّا بَعْدًا فَقْتِهَى The nature of blessings is that nobody realizes the extent of them until they've lost them. That's human being. ظَلُومٌ كَفَّارٌ He's just oppressive to himself and constantly denies", "constantly denying the blessings of Allah . The 14th, What Allah has prepared from the blessings and reward of the Akhirah based on these varying ranks. So this is also a blessing that Allah has prepare rewards for calamities that you bear patiently or with contentment", "or with contentment, based on the different ranks. There are people that are content they'll have a higher station in paradise than people that were simply patient and patience is the lowest maqam In the maqamat of the... The tawbah is actually the first one. What is hidden inside the folds of these calamities of blessings", "That's another benefit. فَعَسَىٰ أَن تَكْرَهُ شَيْئًا وَيِجْعَلَ اللَّهُ فِيهِ خَيَرًا كَثِيرًا Maybe you just like a thing and Allah will put in it much good. See, you don't know there are things hidden in blessings. So I'll give an example. I missed a flight once. And alhamdulillah, I've never been upset about missing a flight. I guarantee because I always think if the plane goes down, I'm gonna feel like such a fool for having run to catch the plane or something like that.", "or something like that. So I just relax. Never want to be on a plane that you ran to catch and then it goes down. What was I running for? So if you miss it, you miss It but I missed the plane everybody said oh they ended up giving me like $500 back because they had to reroute the ticket and things like that and The difference was nothing in time and things Like that there's always benefits That are hidden in what you think is a trouble and the thing about the world", "In every delay, there's God's choice in it.", "that tribulations prevent you from arrogance and from evil, and from pride, and form tyranny. And doing all these things like Nimrod. He says had Nimrod been a poor sickly person deaf and dumb he would have never done all those horrible things that he did. The same with the tyrants of the world.", "and this and that. But it's those things that make them arrogant. And then the 17th one is contentment. Because tribulations afflict the good and the evil. And so whoever doesn't like it, then it's just on him. And he's lost the dunya and the akhira.", "he knows that paradise is better than anything in this world and if those tribulations are what it takes to get him into paradise then he's content with it so these are the blessings, some of the blessings I mean there's many blessings but these are ones that Sultanul Ulama Ibn Abbas enumerated and they're good to remember in these times but I will end by saying read history. These are not bad times", "Muslims shouldn't be so negative. There's been much worse times, I mean there are aspects that are bad about this time and certainly one of the greatest calamities of the time is that we don't have a lot of people of knowledge anymore and we don' t have levels of deen and things like this but just in terms of outward dunya calamity this period is nothing if you read history it's nothing! The real calamities at this age are spiritual calamities", "They're not worldly calamities. So what we should be, if we're going to weep over the calamities of the age, we should weeping about the loss of Iman, about the lack of religion, about a lack of spirituality. We shouldn't be weeping all this stuff we see out there because it's just not that bad! I'm sorry and if you think it is, you haven't read history. Things have been much worse.", "and how many people died, and plagues that afflicted people and wiped out. A third of Europe was wiped out by the Black Plague. There's too many blessings we've got. The blessings we have is just overwhelming. That's why inshaAllah we'll all ask Allah to put us in a state of gratitude with Allah and make us from the shaykh-e-reen. You know really, make us form the shah-ke-reen and not complain.", "Complain even the thing about complainers, even complainers don't like complainers Really? They want to complain but they don't want to listen anybody complain So insha'Allah we'll all stop whining. It's the maqam of the tifl is to whine That's what I always tell my boys Nobody likes a whiner or even a whinier and they laugh because they know it's true So whining is a maqaam. It''s the maquam of tifal", "That's what a whiner is. And the Rijal, and the Rijaal is a... In Haqiqah it doesn't mean a male. The Rajl is male and female. It's the one who has reached the Maqam of the adult. It' s the mature one. That's What it means. It is the mature One. Rujoola is maturity. So InshaAllah Allah make us all mature JazakumAllahu khairan Very nice to see everybody", "see everybody and we have great blessing as you know the people here Sheikh Muhammad Ali Aqoubi, Sheikh Salik it's a real blessing I mean the level of knowledge is immense and inshaAllah may Allah make us worthy containers for what's being poured into us" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/What really Hamza Yusuf spoke about Syria - Reveal_jPk-EF713YU&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748541556.opus", "text": [ "Maliki position, which Imam al-Qarafi mentions. But anyway, you have different systems of justice. So when you have a judge, the judge is ta'yeen. So yu'ayyan. So once the hukum has come and then he says he's guilty, he's not guilty, now comes tamkeen. This is the role of the hakim. It's not the role", "And they're the ones you make them in 10 feet of hook'em. So, they will do the actual implementation of the ruling. Now John Marshall who knows who John Marshall was? Australians are exempt from this. Yeah he was one of the great first great Chief Justice of America is a brilliant jurist when", "When the Cherokee brought their case before, it went to the Supreme Court. And John Marshall judged for the Cherokees nation that they had rights to defend their lands against whites because they killed some settlers that had come into their land and so he actually judged for them. Andrew Jackson... So that's Ta'yeen. That's Tabyeen and Ta'yene.", "Keene, he was the president at the time. What did he say? John Marshall has declared his verdict now let's see him implement it so he just ignored it and that happens sometimes they just ignore what the judge says and that's what he did Andrew Jackson did that that's American history but that's not for John Marshall to go out and say I'm going to implement it no it's not", "to the ruler, it's not for you if he doesn't implement it to overthrow him. It's not fo ryou to do that because each person has his role and Allah has made this world a world in which everybody has their place. مَا مِنَّ إِلَّا لَهُمْ مَقَامٌ مَعْلُومٌ Everybody has their Place and you have to know your place", "Nobody knows their place anymore. And so it's just anarchy now. It's not going to make you happy. It is why metaphysics is so important because if you want to change the world, you have to change yourself and nobody wants to do the real work. They want to", "It will never be. There are 13 years in Mecca that prepare them for Medina. 13 years of preparation. They didn't go straight to the city-state, they had to prepare themselves and what does Allah say after? أَلَّذِينُهُمْ عَنَ اللَّغْوِ هُم مُعْرِضُونَ They leave what doesn't concern them.", "That's a Meccan verse. Abu Muslim says, the zakat there is not paying your zakat. It's purifying yourself. Right? Because zakat, right? خَيْرًا مِّنهُ زَكَاتًا More pure than him. Zakat in Arabic means tahara and nazaha. So what are they doing? They're purifying themselves. قَدَ افْلِحَ مَنْ زَکَّاهَ", "Allah will not change the conditions of a people until they change what's in themselves. What does that mean? That means that if you're preoccupied with God's job, you're not doing your job. You're preoccupified with what doesn't concern you and so God leaves you to yourself because you're taking God's", "But if you're not doing your job, don't expect God to do what He promised. If you do what he told you to do. If You're not Doing it, Don't Expect Him To Do the other without you doing because he said in allaha that's to akid That's to let you know Verily Surely Without a doubt", "Allah will not change what's with a people, the conditions of a people. Nobody wants to do that work. Nobody want to build from the bottom up. What did Martin Luther King say in the Birmingham jail? He said if you wanna change, you have to do certain things before you can demand from the tyrant and one of them he said", "and if you have any of those qualities that you want to get rid of in the tyrant, you have to do self-purification because you have no moral capital. Big hadith. Big Hadith. But nobody wants to hear this for some reason", "hear this for some reason. So they can go out and keep doing the same old thing. How's that revolution looking for you? You know what the slogan of the Syrian revolution was? Who knows what the", "The Syrian people will not be humiliated. That was their slogan. They're all shouting it in the streets. Now, all these poor innocent people are begging non-Muslims to let them into their countries. They are fleeing across the ocean in boats. Allah can humiliate whomever he pleases.", "If you humiliate a ruler, God will humiliate you. That's a hadith in Tarmidhi. If you humiliate a", "He attacks a ruler and he's not capable of doing it. In other words, they have power. You don't have power if you attack them, you humiliate yourself. You can blame the ruler all you want. Guy is a bad guy. I'm no fan of that man. I was no fan there. Saddam, I was not a fan of Saddam but now we see the wisdom why these people were in those places", "were in those places. Because the Iraqis now, Muhammad al-Mahdi who tore down that statue was saying he wants to put the statue back up. Right? Zainab al-Kanzi a Kurdish Iraqi said, Now I see the wisdom that God had in having that horrible man as our ruler because you take him away and you look what... Because we're not ready! We don't have civil society. We can't even wait in line for buses", "And this is not because Muslims are inferior to non-Muslims. It's just circumstances. We've been moribund for a long time. We have lost a lot of wisdom that we had. We had terrible treatment of our women, we don't raise our children properly, we have horrible school systems, we had widespread corruption. These are all the realities of the Muslim world", "What did the Prophet say? Your fluff! That's how he described us. So, how do we change that situation? It's all there but no this is just quietism This is what the Sufis say Just worry about yourself don't worry about anybody else", "What does Allah say? يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمْنُوا قُوْ أَنفُسُكُمْ وَأَهْلِكُ مِن نَارًا Save yourself. Because you can't save anybody else if you haven't saved yourself. And then your family should be your first priority. Let me give an example of that ayah. This is a true story. My son, is he here? I won't point him out.", "was in the garage playing with a candle because it was a birthday. He was playing with the candles and then we called him in, it's time for the cake. Comes in and suddenly like I'm smelling smoke", "And then my mother was there. My wife was there and... Do you smell something? It's like smoke, so I go and I open the garage door and there is a raging fire. True story! What did I think of? Wallahi as Allah is my witness, I have an 800 year old Quran in that house.", "hundred years old. I have a piece of the Kaaba, I have an alms bowl from the Kaabah that hung on the door of the kaabah for one year. All those things not one of them occurred to my mind all I thought was get my family out of this house. That's all I though. I'd have to get my", "When you're confronted with a fire, all you think about is the ones you love most. That's it. And that's the reality. It's as simple as that. The next day, and Allah is my witness, my son was there. Isaac, weren't you there? The next", "I read a hadith and from Riyadh al-Sadiheen, Allah is my witness. The very next day the hadith that I read was be sure to put out the candles in your house because it protects you from a fire. That was literally the hadit that was the next day", "Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Raheem, wa salallahu ala Sayyidina Muhammad, walhamdulilah. Assalamu Alaikum, peace be upon all of you. I'm addressing an issue that arose a few days ago on the day of Ashura. Somebody uploaded a clip", "of a part of a longer discussion from a Rehla in 2016, in Turkey. Which was during the period of the attempted coup in Turkey and unfortunately I went into an area that I think really regret which was speaking about the terrible tragedy in Syria", "What troubled me the most was that the clip actually had the title that I was mocking victims of a horrific, just one of the most unjust things we've seen in our lifetime. So anybody who would suggest that, it was so odious to me. I don't know anybody in my family who are not Muslims", "And so I certainly, being from that family, would never do something like that. I would really ask forgiveness for anybody that misconstrued that or took offense from that because that would never be my intention. And I also want to say that there is in no way that I can determine why things happen. Only God knows. I don't know the mind of God and I would never assume that it's absolutely wrong. We do have a tradition", "I take full responsibility. The Prophet said,", "All of you are sinners and good sinners.", "ask forgiveness. I asked forgiveness at least a hundred times every day for my sins and i also hope that people will overlook any mistakes that i make because that's what i try to do with other people the religion that i embraced, i understood it to be a religion of sitar, availing people's faults. I understood to be in a religion having good opinion of people. I understand to be", "people and I have immense love and sympathy for the Syrian people who have been egregiously wronged And oppressed. For a long time, many of my teachers were Syrians Sheikh Hisham al-Burhani was one of my primary teachers in the United Arab Emirates when I was studying there as a young man Sheikh Khalid al-Ubaissi, Sheikh Nadir al-Shammi One of my first teacher in Aqeedah was", "Sheikh Anas Abu Murad, who was a wonderful Syrian scholar. So I had many Syrian teachers. Many of them were actually refugees in the UAE from the Hama massacre and I was there during that time so I remember very much hearing the stories of what happened. And certainly Sheikh Mohammed Ali Aqoubi is—I consider him one of my most important teachers", "and revivers of the Isnad tradition. Another thing I just want to say about Zaytuna College, which is a college that I founded with Imam Zaid who studied in Syria, that in many ways this is actually an extension of Syrian knowledge because every single one of our teachers that teach us here Islam or anything to do with Sira, Hadith, Quran including our Turkish scholar are scholars that studied", "of one that studied with Syrian scholars and are largely indebted to a Syrian scholarship for what they teach in their knowledge. So, in many ways this is an extension of the Syrian Islamic tradition which to me is one of most important ones and one that the Prophet salallahu alayhi wa sallam praised. The prophet said, لاتصبوا أهد شام Never curse the people of Sham which was greater Syria", "This morning I called a very close friend who's Syrian, who I've known for a really long time and he's just an extraordinary human being. And I felt the pain in his voice and it really troubled me and he said, I have two pains. He said,", "What if they get angry? They forgive.", "in Kashmir, and so many places in our community. And in conclusion I want to say this idea somehow that I would support a tyrant or something like that again is so odious to me when a lot of these troubles broke out I actually translated a poem called that I entitled The Prayer Of The Oppressed it's by Imam Muhammad bin Nasir Al-Dara'i", "to Chris Hedges and all those who have, despite its political incorrectness stood by the Palestinian people in their just cause. To the people of Darfur, to the six million victims of the 21st century Holocaust of the Congo, to Kashmiris, Iraqis, Afghans, Chechnyans and every other victim of the many tragic oppressions I have witnessed in my lifetime. To victims of oppression everywhere whose only weapon is the power of prayer this work", "That's where my sentiments lie. It lies with the oppressed, not with the oppressor and anybody that would suggest otherwise I'll meet them on the Qantara. I have nothing other to say about that. Again, I with really sincere contrition in my heart for any pain that I caused a very dignified and noble people that are going through immense pain along with many others of our Muslim community including the Yemenis", "the Yemenis again who were many of my teachers, we're from Yemen. So I hope that we can spread unity in our community, that we overcome these tribulations. There's a lot of young people that are leaving Islam just because of the confusion. I really think this vindictiveness and this bitterness", "that is really deeply rooted in a loss of a strong connection with our Lord. And I would hope that people would just see how dangerous this is, especially for our young people. This institution that...I'm going to be leaving this world soon enough. I am at the age that the Prophet was when he left the world. I'm 63 lunar years old and this institution is not me", "It's not Imam Zaid, it's not Dr. Hatim We helped establish it but we're hoping that it will survive and thrive for our community in this country What people are learning and studying here is amazing We have amazing teachers So I would just hope that people recognize that I think there are forces out there that would really like to see harm", "There's people that are just looking for any mistake that I make. And I will make mistakes, I have made mistakes which is why we make tawbah every day and I think that's it. I hope people again could find it in their hearts to just forgive", "That's what I feel we need more than anything. I'm putting up the essay that I wrote on oppression in this book, The Prayer of the Oppressed and I really hope you read it because it will give you some insights into my perspective which I think comes out of a deep intellectual and spiritual tradition of our scholastic community. And so my real hope is people actually take the time to read it", "and just ponder it, think about it. And try to see the wisdom in tribulation. إِذَا أَحَبَّ اللّٰهُ قَوْمًا ابْتَدَاهُمْ If Allah loves a people He will try them. So... As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuhu First of all", "Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, God Almighty whether you're Christian, whether you are Jew, whether a Muslim. Most of you here are Muslims. We have a belief in Islam that the Prophet sallallaahu alayhi wasalam said", "The people of Syria, as you know have been living under tyranny for a long time. Many of my teachers were from Syria. Sheikh Hisham Al-Burhani was one of my teacher in the Emirates who fled. Sheikh Bashir Shukfa who fled from the tyranny in the 1980s.", "The massacre of the people of Hama.", "his mercy to those who show mercy and these are people who have proven themselves beyond the pale of mercy they have shown no mercy and so no mercy will be shown to them allah subhanahu wa ta'ala will reveal himself to these people who", "It's come to where they can torture children. Torture children. People like Hamza al-Khatib, he will have his day. The people that did what they did to him and all the children of Dara'ah and all", "Allah is the just Lord and His justice will be established against those who abuse their power.", "The leadership of the Shia in Lebanon and Iran have revealed themselves to be the political Machiavellian people that they are. They have revealed themself to side with the tyrants against those who were oppressed, but the Shias people many of these people had nothing to do with that so it's important that Muslims not fall into the trap of lumping all the people together because", "because of what some other people do. We cannot take people to account for what the leaders do.", "only evil people doing evil things but some of these people have been chained into the tanks, chained in to the tanks and sent into these villages. They have their families with guns to their head if they don't do what they are told that there will be repercussions this is the type of sickness and tyranny we're dealing with so it's important that Muslims when the victory comes and it will come that the Muslims display the mercy of their prophet", "towards all of these people. This has to be essential. Amir Abd al-Qadr Al-Jaza'i, one of the great mujahideen of the 19th century who fought the French. He fought the french and the french stole his land betrayed him in his treaties when he surrendered arrested him instead of giving him free passage to the Ottoman Empire which was promised to him they took him to Lyon", "Istanbul and then to Syria. And during his time in Syria, there were riots. The Druze Riots, these are well known. They were threatening the Christian minority in Syria. Amir Abd al-Qadr Al Jazaeri went out with his soldiers and he defended the Christians against any attacks. Amongst them", "had stole his land and he gave them safe passage and protected them the french were so overwhelmed by this and we have all of this in recorded but he told the people if anybody touches these these christians then then they will taste the wrath of my sword because this is the sword of the prophet who defends the people that are under", "had to adhere to these principles and finally allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said is that the other be on a man that my wrath is fierce upon those who have no helpers other than me and right now the entire world community has shown that the syrians have no other help except allah this is our soul help", "Take care in prayer and patience. Be people of prayer. Get up in the night and ask Allah. Our Lord is not deaf. Our lord is present. Our lords hears the prayers, and he will hear the prayers of those people. So just know that justice will prevail. We believe this it will prevail but we have to be people of justice and people of mercy for those who show no mercy. We give them justice and don't transgress the bounds", "Don't allow the hatred of a people to prevent you from being just. Do not transgress the bounds of justice even against the worst people but for the people of mercy then we should be people of Mercy and forgiveness Jazakum Allah Khairan Pray to Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala don't forget your Lord" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Frauds - Sheikh Hamza Yusuf _quran__1748539142.opus", "text": [ "The Quran tells us not to consume what I talk about on what a nasty but all pity Don't consume the wealth of people falsely unjustly vainly Bottle is everything that's empty It's it's what's not good so it's the opposite of Huck which is is truthfulness sincerity Reality, what is real? So it says don't consume. The wealth of", "of people unjustly. إِلَّا تَكُونَ ٱتِجٰرَةً عَنْ تَرَاضٍ مِّنْكُمْ Let your trade only be trade that is mutually content.\" In other words, each side is content with the actual event of trade and commerce. This is an incredibly important... All of the Quran is important but this verse", "to what's happening right now globally and why we're seeing so much turmoil in what are called the markets, these global markets where wealth is consumed unjustly. People's wealth is stolen, misappropriated, given to people without the right accountability" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Atheism by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayusuf _islam ___1743305391.opus", "text": [ "Do you think that we created you in vain and that you will not be returned to God? In other words, this is just a free lunch. There's not going to be any reckoning. There is no Hesab. Do you thing this is all... And this is what a lot of modern people think. They think that this is purely just meaningless. I mean they'll create existential meaning like somebody like Camille Paglia or something will say she talks about how important meaning is", "But she's an atheist. So that meaning has to be generated like the spider who generates his own abode from his body. The spider creates his web from his own... And this is why Allah says that those who disbelieve, الَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا اتَّخْلُوا بَيْتًا كَبَيطًا عَنْ كَهُبُوتٍ Their house is like the Spiderweb's house. So they build this web of meaning but it's all from themselves. وَإِنَّ أَوْهَنَتْ بِيُوتًا لَأَبْيَةٍ عَمْكَبُودٍ This is the weakest of houses" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Atheism by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayusuf _islam ___1743306270.opus", "text": [ "We're called موحدون, those who make one. That's what the Muslims are. They are those who makes one. They make God one in their understanding because there are others that give God multiplicity or deny God and then make the universe a god because there is no such thing as an atheist. If somebody says I don't believe in God they have to believe in the universe, they have", "other than God. And that's the essence of shirk in our tradition, which is the worst sin, which has to associate with God what cannot be associated with God." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Desires by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayusuf _islam ___1743309355.opus", "text": [ "And the Prophet ﷺ for that reason said, none of you truly believes until the Hawa, the desire of the person is in accordance with what I have brought. So initially you have to struggle with that but once the Sunnah becomes your habit it's your want, you've habituated yourself to following the Prophet's guidance then you have the Malika of virtue and so your Hawa now is in", "in accordance with what he desired." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/The Heart by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayusuf _islam__1743304409.opus", "text": [ "So that's the benefits that the heart gets from perceiving reality." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Waking up by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayusuf _islam__1743308194.opus", "text": [ "The most important thing in our tradition is this idea of waking up. There's an idea that we're actually asleep, so Imam Ali said all of humanity is asleep and when they die they wake up and then he says die before you die. So there's this idea that were actually not conscious, that we are actually asleep or dreaming and so there's the idea of awakening to reality" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Khadija R_A - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf__1748536862.opus", "text": [ "Khadija never had anybody that transacted with her money like the Messenger of Allah and should we be surprised? And when she sent Maisarah out with him, all the people around him have beautiful names. Like Maisarah and Umm Baraka, Umm Ayman, Halima, Saadiya they all have beautiful name. All the people who raised him and nurtured him. So he's with Maisarah, the place of ease, the one who makes things easy.", "until the Prophet completes her Khadija Al-Kubra was a merchant and she used her wealth for the sake of Allah . Abu Bakr was a Merchant he used his wealth for The Sake Of Allah Omar all of these people look at them the people around the prophet were the great merchants of the Arabian Peninsula but he went to the people of agriculture because", "Because these are the two forces in the world, agriculture and commerce." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Empty talk by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayusuf _isla__1743058181.opus", "text": [ "Actually took looked at what human beings talk on a daily basis. The vast majority of it is just chitchat Backbiting empty how much are those onions? You know, that's what people talk actually high Talk is not that common to actually be in environments where and that's why when you're with some people That's all they talk about They won't go down to that simple level like if you spend time with Shadola been there He he just doesn't have shit more up the house had no chit chat mother but the Hodge told me that he stopped drinking tea because of", "of the chit-chat involved in drinking tea. Like he just wasn't interested. So these, it doesn't mean I mean we're human so this is but you have to see that there are people that are selected out amongst human beings and these are the guides and that's why they just have qualities and that one of their qualities is that they tend to be introverted, they tend more... They just have a hard time" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/God is One by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayusuf _isla__1742998799.opus", "text": [ "The fundamental verse that tells us about God is the 112th chapter, which is a stunning summation of the reality of God. So it says قل هو الله أحد Say God is one and one is not a number in the Arabic tradition. Numbers begin with two. So say God is unique. God is One. قل الله صمد God cannot be... There's no hollowness to God." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/The Qur_an by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf rh _hamzayusuf _i__1743309061.opus", "text": [ "The Qur'an, when the Qur'aan was revealed and we see it as Muslims, we see that as the last testament. It comes as a final testament from Allah, the last dispensation for humanity and in our understanding and tradition it abrogates the previous ones. It doesn't negate the truths that are in them but it says this is the final testament for humanity. And then it calls everybody to it allowing them the option to stay outside of it." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Jingle bells - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf__1748526475.opus", "text": [ "These are the things that make the world go round. They're what enable us to survive and they're in our original story is all of the human condition Everything is there in that original extraordinary story of the messenger of Allah sallallaahu alaihi wa sallam The Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam taught principles of commerce One of the principles that he taught Sallallaah waslam was that a tangible I mean? The truthful merchant is with martyrs on the day of judgment", "the day of judgment. The ulama say it's because of the rarity of a real merchant Imam al-Azai once was in Beirut and he passed by an onion seller, and the onion seller was saying, onions sweeter than honey and Imam al Azai said to him do you think", "That's called advertising. Don't think advertising is some new thing Arabs were marketing a long time ago they used to market with poetry now we have jingles plop-plop fizz-fizz Oh, what a relief it is the Arabs had jingled as well Right? I wish I could get that part of my brain back that that got lodged into but they're very good these jingle makers Jingle bells" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Don_t be Sad _ Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_AIvri0fHWRk&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743313090.opus", "text": [ "السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته", "I wanted to inshallah go over a booklet that was written by a man known as Sultan al-Ulama, the sultan of the scholars.", "and he was known also to have mastered the two madhhabs which is rare in the history of Islam. In fact, I think he's the only person that really has that maqam but... He wrote this book and he called it The Book of Calamities, Tribulations, Hardships", "and disasters or the benefits of tribulation and tests. And he wrote it actually to point out all the tests, the benefits that come from having tribulation in your life. And one of the aspects of the Prophet ﷺ, one of most extraordinary aspects of The Prophet's ﷺ life is that he never", "never allowed tribulations to disquiet him. In other words, he never allowed any difficulties that he faced or hardships to perturb him, to put him in a state of turbulence. And the word in Arabic for somebody who has forbearance is called حليم.", "The word that the Prophet was described as He had more forbearance than anybody else. That's a description Now, the word for intellect is That's one of the words for intellect One of the things they accused the Prophet of was He causes us to lose our intellects or to make us look like fools", "Because Safiyyah is opposite of Haleem. So the man of intellect, Is somebody who has Hilm And the man without intellect is somebody who Saffahaa and Saffaaha is they say they call it Khifat al-Aqal It's Saffaha is a lightness There's no stability because what intellect should do is it should stabilize you and that's why the Haleeem is", "does not get disquieted, he doesn't get perturbed in life. Now what's interesting about disquiatude is that the word for dreamer is halim. The word for a person who's dreaming is halam right? Now why do you think the word", "Ahlam is intellect but it's also dreams. In Surah Yusuf, the dreams were called empty dreams. Why do you think there's a connection between Hilm and dream and intellect? Yeah, that it's hard to dream when somebody's agitating you.", "of quietude in order for you to sleep now the word for nipple is halama and a child when they're at the nipple what happens to their state what does the mother do when the child's in a perturbed state the infant she gives it the breast which is called Halema", "It's knowledge, it's knowledge.", "noticing that which means to go astray, means the inability to digest milk. In Arabic you can look these up in an Arabic dictionary. Which is to go a stray, the root of it means the ability to digest Milk because our first stage is to get through the two years and in Western developmental psychology they call it", "that first crisis is trust versus mistrust. That's what the child needs to realize, is that they are in a safe environment and if they're not given milk, they're neglected by their mother, if they are mistreated, they don't get through that first developmental stage and then every stage after that is a disaster. According to Erickson, I mean this is a theory in developmental psychology but my point of bringing", "bringing that up, is that trust versus mistrust is related to whether or not the mother removes the disquietude of the child. Or not. Because that's the key thing that the mother has to do, is recognize that the cry of the baby there's a reason babies cry and if you grew up in this country in the 60s there was a character named Dr. Spock and they're always giving new theories about how", "in the 50s was mothers should ignore the cry of the child and regulate the milk according to fixed times which is complete insanity, but that's what they did. Now look at the society out there. So the person who's Halim is a person who in the face of tribulation whether it's a person", "whether it's a person or whether it is a circumstance, they do not lose their cool. They do not become perturbed and this is the hallmark of the Prophet ﷺ in terms of his behavior with people and circumstances. Is that for instance he has described whenever people would speak ill to him", "The Qur'an says, give a bad turn, repay it with a good turn.", "Even though Suraqa ibn Malik was right behind them And Abu Bakr was worried not about himself He was worried about the Messenger of Allah So he was in an act of Ibadah But the Prophet ﷺ was in a state of tranquility And he was reciting the Qur'an Unperturbed When they were in the cave And Abu Baker was very nervous Because right outside were the Quraish Literally outside of the cave", "in a complete unperturbed state. In battles, they said that the Prophet ﷺ used to hide behind him some of the people when it got very difficult what they call مَعْمَعةً و مَاعَكةً So, the famous story of the Jew that came to the Prophet and purposely upset him in order to elicit a response and it was Omar who got very angry", "he was insulted by this man and the man said that he had seen all of the characters of prophecy except for one him and he needed to test that and so he purposely evoked a negative response but didn't get it from the prophet salallahu alaihi wasalam so he knew that he or forbearance so one of the things about people", "is that they get completely disquieted whenever things get difficult. And it's a sign of weak Iman. People whose Iman is weak, when they lose the slightest thing you see them disquited, perturbed. One of the things that we are increasingly becoming incapable of is listening to each other just talk human beings without getting disquitted", "So people can't have civil arguments. They can't had discussions because once we start talking I get heated you elicit a response from me like the there was a physician in India who used to treat people with Ruqya and one of these modern physicians thought he was completely insane and when he started arguing with him about this", "Words can affect anything. You need to give people antibiotics and you need to them things that will change their state.\" And so the other physician who believed in Ruqya called him a donkey, and he got really angry. Then he called him pig and was about to kill him. He said two words I said to you and look at how they've changed your state.", "So words have a power to elicit responses from us. And so what hīlm is, is the ability to not allow your buttons to be pushed. And it really is one of the gifts of Islam if people take it seriously. It's hard to do and we're all working on it at some degree. People get better at it than others but it takes a great deal of effort and it doesn't stop.", "But removing resentment from the heart is a really difficult thing. Hasad, all these diseases of the heart. So this book he wrote as a way of helping people to understand what tribulations really are because one of the reasons we get disquieted about difficulties is we don't understand what the wisdom of the difficulty is from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. That's one of", "a difficult situation, if you believe in Allah the difference between you and somebody who does not believe in allah is that you will derive benefit from that condition. Now one of the beauties of the creation and for me one of greatest proofs of the existence of God is that if you do not believe In God you will live in a world that is godless And I really think that that is a proof for the existence Of God because if you", "a world filled with God. But if you disbelieve in God, you will constantly be reaffirmed in your disbelief. And that's why atheists can't understand people that believe in God and people that belief in God can't understant atheists because both of them are seeing a proof for their belief. They really are! And that is one of the meanings I think of the hadith", "فَلْيَظُنَّ بِيَ مَا شَاءُ I am in the opinion of my servant. So if my servant thinks I'm nothing, that's what he finds. Allah is in the understanding of the believer. So, if you believe Allah is with you, Allah is WITH YOU! If you don't believe He's with you He's not with you and that's why despair is haram in every Abrahamic tradition. It's haram and in Catholicism it's the unforgiven", "unforgiven, unpardonable sin in Catholicism. To despair from the mercy of God is actually the one thing they say is not forgiven. And that's iblis ablesa. You know, that's his disease. He despaired. And so he wants everybody else to despair. So part of the game that's being played in the world is to make everybody think that it's all horrible. And whenever you talk to people that don't believe in God or people", "you how can you believe in God well that's my whole point I'm looking around how can i not believe in god so where is the problem the problem is in what they call evil and this is ultimately what every argument against his existence of God rests upon it rests upon what they called a problem with evil and that is why if somebody tells you they don't believe in", "not believe in that same thing. In other words, I might agree with you that I don't believe in the same thing because one of the things they've done is trapped in a Christian Manichean worldview which is where good and evil are separate entities whereas we believe good and evill are both creations of Allah. See the Christians can't explain evil because they say God is all-good", "powerful? Well, if God's all good and all powerful, how do we explain evil in the world? Because if he's all-good, He wouldn't create evil. And if He's all powerful He would remove it from the world. This is what they call the problem of evil in philosophy. That's the argument. So that is ultimately what atheists have a problem with. One of the benefits of this is that we had scholars who looked at tribulations and said", "Never think something is evil because you don't know. Now on the one hand, we have a sharia that says killing is evil, right? So if somebody kills another person unjustly, that's evil and you have to... The person should be punished or forgiven or whatever is done but it's a wrong that needs to be redressed. So sharia is something that we have to live with.", "society we have laws many of them are congruous with our system of law and that's what Raghubir Isbahani calls al-Adala Al Muttaqa which is shared by Muslims and non-Muslims. And then you have what's called an Adal Muqayyida, which relates to the Sharia or the sacred law that a specific prophet has brought and that Adalah can actually change it can actually changed but Adala muttaka it's wrong to take somebody else's property everybody agrees on", "basis of entering into transactions with non-Muslims, and that's why Muslims can transact with non Muslims. Because if we didn't have a shared understanding of justice, there's... We couldn't communicate! But every non Muslim who has got any brains at all will agree with us on many basic points. And this is how it's capable for Muslims and non Muslims to live together based on these shared things. There are other things where we disagree.", "has ways of dealing with that. In a Muslim society even, non-Muslims are allowed to do things that Muslims aren't allowed to so he begins this book Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Raheem in the name of Allah the merciful and compassionate every Muslim traditionally began their book with either Bismillah or Alhamdulilah and that was because the Prophet said that anything that begins without Bismillah is cut off from Barakah and so it's a way of maintaining Barakah", "The Shaykh, and Shaykh in Arabic has several meanings. One of them is simply just an old man. He gets gray hairs. And Shaykh also means", "It also means the head of a tribe. It can be somebody who has wealth, it could mean a dignified person but here it's used to signify somebody who as wisdom and because usually wisdom comes with old age so a sheikh. And then al-imam is a paragon, somebody that embodies something. Amma ya ummah means to intend something or to move towards something", "of people that are moving towards the same object. That's what an Ummah is, it's a people that bound together by the same goal and that's why the Ummah of the Prophet has the same go to get to paradise. And then the mother is obviously she is the Umm which is related to the same root word. Hujjat al-Islam, hujja is a proof and that was a level", "actually become like Imam al-Ghazali who is the famous Hajjaj, becomes a proof for the existence of...for the truth of Islam. That that person has become...the fact they exist is a proof that Islam is true. Mu'tamad al-Anam, the one that all of the creatures depend upon and Anam generally means the things that sleep but it also means the insan , the jinn. And Imam Al-Tabari says about", "about the... that he placed the earth for the anam, that it means all the living creatures. Things that sleep and also the ulama are a benefit to the creatures because they defend their rights. Creatures have rights, trees have rights. All these... And this is a modern argument in the West whether creation has legal standing or not. I mean, this is an argument that environmentalist lawyers", "benefiting by his words. And so the dua was answered. May we benefit by this imam. وَلَهُ وَالِجَمِيعَ الْمُؤْمِنِينَ And all the believers. غَفَرَ لَنَا وَلاهُو وَإِي جَمِّعٍ مُؤمِينٍ May Allah forgive us and him and all the", "Calamities and tests, tribulations and disasters have different benefits based upon the different ranks of people. Now this is an important idea. Rutba is a rank. It's used in modern Arabic in military rank. The rutab are the ranks that people are in relation to Allah. So just as you have in the military because", "وَمَا يَعْرَمُ جُنُودُ إِلَّا هُوَةًۭ جُند ربك إلا هو Nobody knows the armies of your Lord except Allah. So Allah has Junud. Now, people have different ranks. You have generals, you have colonels and then even within that you have ranks. And then you have majors and captains and lieutenants", "People are ranks. Now in the people of the Zahir actually wear uniforms to let them know what their ranks are In Islam those ranks are hidden You don't know the stations of people with Allah It's something Allah has hidden one of the ulama said that Allah hid three things He hid three and three things", "He hid his rida fi ta'atihi. He hid His contentment in His obedience. So, in other words you never know what Allah will accept from you. Allah might not accept a great thing you did that was an act of obedience but he might accept the small things like the prostitute who was forgiven for giving a dog water. That's the reason that she was forgiven", "For giving a dog water. So Allah has hidden his contentment in his obedience. وَأَخْفَى سَخَطَهُ فِي مَعْصِيَتِهِ And he hid his wrath in disobedience. So the woman who locked up the cat and went to hell for locking up a cat, that was the thing. She obviously, that's an indication of her state.", "cruel woman, because if you don't have compassion with animals it's a sign of cruelty. And in our society we know that children that are abusive to animals and torture animals when they're young often end up becoming very abusive when they are old so there is a relationship between kindness towards animals and kindness towards humans. And that is why one of the reasons why every prophet was a shepherd", "they learn to be gentle to animals because that is a transitional phase into being gentle. Because if you're kind to animals, you should certainly seem that you would be kind to humans which are at the highest on that chain hierarchy of beings. I mean people say, you wouldn't treat a dog like that. You know, why are you treating me like that? Well, because dogs are faithful and you were unfaithful.", "So he says benefits are based on the differences of the ranks of people. So for some people, a tribulation removes wrongs. Imam al-Ghazali said that there are wrongs in this world that are only removed by depression. That if you're wondering why people get depressed,", "depressed from the noob. I mean they and also the soul you see, I don't care what anybody says about alternative lifestyles and all these people out there doing... People, I guarantee you, people have trouble in their soul. You can numb it, you can preoccupy yourself, you", "You cannot remove the anguish of the soul. It's not possible, which is why Marx said religion is the opiate of the masses and Abdel Hakim Winter said but opium is the religion of the mass. That's the idol, escape from reality.", "that idol. And all they're trying to do is numb the pain of existence, but the existence is painful because you are not fulfilling your function and when you don't fulfill your function there's always trouble. And anytime anything in the body is not fulfilling its function what is the first sign to let", "Pain. There's some type of disquietude in the body to let you know it's not fulfilling its function. So suddenly, you've got this pain in your liver and you go and he says, You've got hepatitis. That pain was to let yo know the function has been disrupted. The same is true for the soul. If you're not fulfilling your function which is to worship Allah ,", "testify to his unity and to behave accordingly, then you will be in pain and suffering until you come into accordance. And that's a gift from Allah in the same way that pain signs and symptoms are gifts for people so that they can go to a physician and get well. If there weren't signs and systems, that's why hypertension is such a dangerous disease because people can walk around", "from hypertension and they can die from it. So pain in the soul is there, but people will do things. And that's what people do. See what kufr is essentially is covering up. Now if you get a headache and you go and take Tylenol, you're not getting rid of the headache. You're suppressing the symptom. So if you are sick in your soul", "remove the pain of the kufr. You're just covering up more and that's why it's dhulumat fawqa dhulumat, its darkness is over covering darknesses. And you just keep covering up, more and more and until that person is so diseased That it's a hopeless case unless Allah intervened", "But that's what happens to people. And so the ranks of people differ. Now, the prophets, upon them all be peace, the Prophets have tribulation not to remove their wrongs but to elevate them in rank. It's not to move their wrong and that's the case of some of the Sadiheen as well it actually becomes", "up in degrees. And Ashadu nasib tiratun, the people of the greatest tribulation are the prophets and then those closest to them and then close closest to him and those closest them it's like that now obviously you can see people in the world and you look at them and you see tribulations like there is non-muslims and you", "that he said that there's no tribulation, that doesn't have a tribulation that could be worse than it. And so it's difficult to assess what really is happening when you look at people. But this is one of the problems in religion, is suffering in the world and the different degrees of tribulation out there. And this is the way that we view tribulation for the believer. For people outside of Islam,", "There's a whole other set of rules working. Because when you know things, you have an accountability that is not included when you do not know things. And one of the things that Sayyidina Umar said that he noticed about Islam is that when they entered into Islam and they would do something wrong, they would see an immediate effect of that. Whereas they never saw it in the Jahiliyyah.", "That was because of their maqam with Allah. So there was a once, the Prophet ﷺ was walking and there was young man who saw a woman and he was looking at the woman and ran into the wall. And the Prophet said that that was his removal of the wrong. That it happened immediately. And so that actually was a blessing to have that wrong removed. Now there's another hadith where the Prophet went to a man who was completely devastated.", "He was dying, he was in his bed, flesh and bone, and completely wasted. And he said, what did you ask Allah? He said, I asked Him to purify me of all my sins. And He said don't ask Allah for that because you can't take it. But ask Him for afiyah, for well-being. Don't ask Him", "to purify your sins in this world. You want him to remove your sins by forgiveness. That's what we want and that's why a sincere tawbah is what we need. We need a sincere Tawbah to Allah, we don't want to have to do all these things and then get the these things happening to us because of the wrongs that", "And don't think that it gets any easier, but what happens with the people, the saliheen, is that they get to a point where they're content with what's happening. It's no longer painful because they're in such a state... A woman, one of the salihats was walking and she stumbled and hurt her leg and she began to laugh and somebody thought she was crazy", "and said you know are you Majnunah? And she said no but I fell and then when the pain came, I remembered the hadith in which the Prophet said that a believer doesn't get us a choke, a thorn in his foot except it removes wrongs. And the sweetness of my wrongs being removed overwhelm my pain. That's actually Alhamdulillah!", "Those are spiritual endorphins kicking in. There are spiritual Endorphin's all those things are myth of they're just what you see in the world is just a metaphor for the unseen world They have opium their spiritual opium And there's things that can put out your pain when one of the Sahaba had an arrow They said wait till he goes into prayer to remove it", "to remove it. You think these are stories? You think, these are like things people made up and like fairy tales and things like that? Seriously! These were...these are not made-up stories. These are things people witnessed with their own eyes. And they removed the arrow during his prayer because he couldn't feel it.", "I had a Collies fracture. It's one of the worst kinds you can get on your wrist and they gave me something called fentanyl They could have broken my leg. I wouldn't have cared Because of that drug and it only lasts for it's a very short lasting drug The half-life is very quick, and it's used it's it's morphine derivative But once they gave the fentanyls he could have done anything He took it pulled it down reset it", "I didn't feel anything. I was in complete bliss from a drug and that's just a chemical reaction happening in the brain. It's all it is. So don't think that those are stories. Those things are real. People go into those states with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala where they do not feel pain. They actually feel delight", "something that you should ask Allah for, let me delight in my calamities. You should ask allah for aafiyya but you should recognize that when the calamities come they come for deep wisdom so he says The first benefit is that you realize the power of lordship over you", "You realize that Allah is Rabb and you are marbub. And the nature of lordship, is that lordship lords over you. And this is why when tribulations come to you, They should remind you there's things you can control in my environment here. There's thing I can control.", "I'm thirsty. I have a cup, Allah has given me will. Bismillah, I can drink, I could quench my thirst. Allah has give me that but He can take it away. Allah can not only remove the power of motion, Giambarae... Has anybody ever seen a person with giambara? The virus where they have to be on ventilator", "to be on ventilators, they can't move. Healthy young people in their 20s get afflicted with this disease and then one of the miracles of that is sometimes they actually recover and get back there their motion so it's like this period where Allah removes it all from them and then gives it back but then there's other times they don't get it back and that's when they see what the reality because", "I can do whatever I want. I mean, we've got six billion people walking around on this planet under that delusion. But when the calamity comes, suddenly that delution is taken away. And that's why Lee Atwater, if anybody... Does anybody remember that name? Lee At water he was the Republican head of the election committee. He basically destroyed", "destroyed Dukakis's when Dukakis ran for Democratic president. Lee Atwater wrote an extraordinary and it's worth reading, it's a confessional that he wrote right before he died because at the age of 39 and this was a man who by dunya standards in this society had it all. That's what they said about him. He was young handsome wealthy", "powerful. He had it all. He was a Machiavellian politician that basically destroyed people's lives. He said that he based his life on Machiavelli's book, The Prince. That was his Bible. And then at the age of 39, he got a tumor in the brain and all he wanted to do was ask forgiveness", "worth reading what he wrote because he said suddenly he realized and that's what it takes for some people. That's what It takes to learn that lesson so learning that Allah is Lord and He is قاهر فوق عباده, that He overpowers His servants the second benefit is معرفة ذلة العبودية وكسرها", "Realize your abject servanthood and your complete state of resignation and brokenness before the will and power of Allah. وَإِلَيْهِ الْإِشَارَةُ بِقَوْدِهِ تَعَالَى And to this, the words of God indicate when He said, أَن لَّذِينَ إِذَا أَصَابَتْهُم مُّصِيبَةٌ قَالُوا إِنَّ لِلَّهِ وَئِنِّ إِلٰهِ رَاجِعُونَ", "إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعُونَ Those who when an affliction strikes them, they say, surely to God we belong and to Him we return. اعترفوا بأنهم مُلكه وعبيده They finally admit that they are in the dominion. When the calamity comes, they admit we are the dominions of God. إِنَّ لِلَّهِ We belong to God. In other words,", "In other words, if I take something, if i take this, if owned it and I took it and threw it out. And you say, You can't do that! Why can't I do that? This is mine. I own it. I can do whatever I want with it. That's the nature of property. Property is... The property is that the one who owns it has the right to do what he wills with it as the nature property. If you don't have that quality of possession then it's not really your property.", "Now, because the dunya is not our property we can't do whatever we want with it. Can we? But we understand the concept of property! This world is the dominion of God and therefore God can do whatever He wants with it now the nature of... you see if I have a book and I burn it and you say to me You can't that yes I can it's my book and i wanna burn it", "I shouldn't, but I can and you can't stop me by law. So then if the person asks you why did you burn the book? Because there's mistakes in it. Oh, I didn't realize. Now I've explained myself and now it makes sense to you. This is Musa and Al-Khadr, right? In that story of Alkaf which is the story of the problem of evil. That story solves the problem", "outward and everything he sees is wrong. But when it's explained to him by a servant who was given knowledge of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, suddenly the servant, the Musa is saying I didn't realize now I have an explanation. Well what happens on Yawmul Qiyamah? Allah tells us in the Quran He explains it all to us. And then everybody says Now it makes sense! The difference between the believer and the kafir is in this world we're saying", "until the day of judgment to have it explained. Because we trust Allah, they're saying no! It's wrong! How do you know you don't have all the information? You cannot make a judgement about a thing unless you completely understand that thing. الحكم على شيء فرع عن تصوره To judge a thing is only one aspect of conceptualizing", "It's a principle in logic. And that's why a judge has to know all the facts. If you prejudge, it's called prejudice. And it's considered to be a moral vice, to be prejudiced. So we cannot prejudge God. We don't have that right to do that.", "pre-judge Allah because Allah is the one who knows all things. And as for you, you have only been given a small amount of knowledge. So how can you judge it? On the way here we were I was talking with a physician in the car and one of the things that he said was he was talking", "We don't really understand it. We can explain to you what we know, but why it's happening, how this whole thing is working, how the kidneys are doing all this, we don't even know. We don' t really understand It. Well and I responded to him by saying Imam Al Ghazali was once asked by a man where is God? Ain Allah? And Imam Al-Ghazali wrote a poem back to him and in the poem he said You don't", "What's happening in between? You don't know your coordinates in the universe. How can you ask where God is? I mean, I love these maps in astronomy books where they show our galaxy and they say, you are here. They put this little... I'm serious. They do it in astronomy. In astronomy books, they have the Milky Way and then they say you are there. Give me those coordinates! Seriously, you know what coordinates are based on?", "Coordinate system. XYZ, yeah, right, you have to have a system. You have to like here we have what are called cardinal points which don't even exist in reality because cardinal point are experiential it's all flat earth. Cardinal points are based on pre-Copernican theories about the universe but that's all we've got. So if you ask for my coordinates here in California", "arbitrary points of reference, like Greenwich. Who chose Greenwich? The English happened to be the most powerful people at the time so it was Greenwich! It could have been Istanbul. It's arbitrary. You don't know where you are in the universe. How do you know where God is? But this is the ignorance of man because man is in a delusional state", "And the problem with delusion, this is the most troubling thing for me as a person that understands this intellectually. The problem with illusion is nobody who is deluded sees their delusion. That is the problem of delusion is you do not understand that your deluded arrogant people are often completely oblivious to their arrogance They don't realize that they're being arrogant", "they're being arrogant. But they see themselves as better than you, and that's where the arrogance comes from. And to see themselves is better than You is a delusional state because in reality they do not know whether or not they are better than YOU. They might be but they don't know. See, you didn't ask me what were the other things that He... there was one thing I left out of the three things.", "That just reminded me of that. أَخْفَىٰ أَوْلِيَأُهُ فِي عِبَادِهِ He's hidden his awliya amongst his servants. And the frightening thing about this is, it might even be a non-Muslim. That's the amazing thing about it. Because Imam Al-Qurtubi said that Sayyidina Omar was beloved to God when he was in Mecca prostrating to idols.", "So you don't even know, you could meet a person and he could be better than you. And that's why Habib Omar told one of the students that was in Yemen when you go to America, he said if you want to call Americans to Islam never call anybody talk to them about Islam except that you assume that he is better than You. Not that He is lower than you, that He actually better than YOU. And THAT methodology is what spread Islam all over the world", "Because what he said was, is that you now know the truth and so any disobedience you do, you have no excuse for. Whereas as long as he's in a state of ignorance, it might be an excuse with his Lord until the message comes to him. Because we believe that people that haven't been given a message are forgiven. So then he says that they admit that they are His dominion and His servants", "and ultimately they must return to his judgment and decree, to his planning and management in them. وَقَضَائِهِ And to his fate. وُتَقْدِيرِهُ And to His measuring out. لَا مَفَرَّ لَهُمْ مِّنْهُ They have no place of refuge from Him. وِلَا نَحِيدَ رَهٌ عَنْ هُوْ And no way out. The third benefit of calamities is", "is, The third is sincerity to Allah because one has no place of return in putting off or defending against the calamities except to Him. So it makes you sincere because the mukhlis is the one that calls on God without any shirk.", "They realized that they had no place of refuge from him except to him. That state is a great gift from Allah because it puts you in the state of ikhlas and one of the ulama said that a moments of Ikhlas in this world is enough to save a person just To be in that state of Ikhlal with Allah So that is a Great Gift", "And there's no source to depend upon in removal of that calamity except upon Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Allah says, وَإِن يَمْسِسْكَ اللَّهُ بِضُرٍ فَلَا كَاشِفَ لَهُ إِلَّا هُوْ If Allah afflicts you with some harm, there's not remover of that harm except Allah subhana wa ta'da, except Him. وَئِذَا رَكِبُوا فِي الْفُلْكِ دَعُوا اللَّـهَ مُخْرِصِينَ لَّهِ الدِّينِ When they get on a boat and then there is turbulence and waves", "turbulence and waves suddenly they're calling Allah sincerely these are people that are not there in a bad state but allah saying in that state their mohli soon because when the calamities come so that is a benefit of Calamity's is that they make it and how many times will lie you ask yourselves Every one of you right now. You asked yourself How many times has a calamity afflicted you and it led to that state? Where were you really felt? You're the only one that can help me in this", "that can help me in this. That's how I became Muslim, Wallahi. I mean, I remember very clearly when I was 17 years old, I had an incredible tribulation and I remember the night. I remember that night, I was in a car, I'll never forget that night where I know that I called on Allah with absolute sincerity. I remembered it very clearly and that prayer got answered. And that's the beauty because that is Ism al-A'lam", "If you call on Allah, that is the Ism Al-A'zam. The greatest name is the name that has no partnership with it. The fourth benefit, الْإِنَابَةُ إِلَى اللَّهِ تَعَالَى وَالْإقْبَالُ عَلَيْهِ وَإِذَا مَسَّدْ إِنسَانًا ضُرٌّ دَعًا رَبَّهُمْ مُنِيبًا إِليهِ That he returns to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and suddenly is fervent in his desire of His Lord.", "So that's a benefit. Allah says when a harm afflicts the human, he calls on his Lord returning back to him, to his Lord. The fifth one, الخامسة أتضرع الدعاء That it leads to humble, a humbled state before God and prayers that you're calling on Allah سبحانه وتعالى فإذا مسد إنسان ضر دعانا", "the harm afflicts a person, he calls on us. دعانا So one of the things that Allah loves... And there's a hadith that Allah afflicts people He loves just to hear them call on Him. Subhanallah! It's only for a short time. I mean, that's the thing. If you just keep it in perspective, it's just like the dentist. He said this is only gonna hurt for a second but he's doing it for your benefit and that's why you let him do it.", "It's true or not true. You know, somebody when they're pulling out the sliver, you know, this is just going to hurt for a second. Just... Okay, go ahead. Oh! It's over. That's what you say when they, you do something to the child, get a sliver out. It's just for a moment. And then they're crying and crying. It' s over. It''s over. And that's the thing about dunya. We are getting the tooth pulled out at 70 years 80 maximum.", "maximum, but if you relate it to infinity, to infinity. It's cancelled out! So stop complaining. Really just sit back and relax. You know what it's like? I really...I've seen this with my own child And you could do this take the child don't do this. Take the child. I don't want to be responsible. This is America they sue you.", "and you throw the child up, there's a point where you see this. They go into this state of complete panic. And then when they come back to your arms, they're laughing. That is dunya. I guarantee you that moment, that is your life. You came from God", "where you're in a complete state of panic. But just relax, you're good hands. You're in good hands! So just relax... The Moroccans say, Relax the mind and learn to swim. Seriously, relax the mind... Do you remember when you first learned to swim? I remember, I'll never forget it.", "I got placed on my back and the person told me, relax completely. I was scared to death. Relax completely? What are you talking about? I'm going to drown. No, you're not. You're going to float. Relax. And it was frightening in the beginning but once you learn to relax suddenly you were floating and everything was fine. And that's dunya. You just have to relax", "We're in the ocean of dunya, and we need to just float. Just keep afloat. Don't drown.\" They are all drowning out there because it's... You know, the person who drowns they come up and they're in a state of panic. If they would just relax, they wouldn't drown but the panic is causing them to drown. And that's what happening with all these people out there. It's the panic.", "When any harm afflicts them, they panic. And when good comes to them, They withhold, they don't want to share it with anybody. Except the people of prayer. They're in a different state. And that's the people we wanna be from, From the mustathanaion, The people that are exempted from that other state. Because they're not going to be able to do anything else.", "Because that trust in Allah is what saves you. So, that's the fifth is تَضَرَّعْ Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala also says بَلْ إِيَّهُ تَدْعُونَ فَيَكْشِفُ مَا تَتْعَوْنَ إِلَيْهِ إِن شَاءً They call to Him, rather to Him may your call be and Allah فَیَك्شِحُ مَّا تِدْ عُونًا إِلاِّهِ وَإِنْ شَائً He will remove what you're calling Him for to remove the calamity if He desires.", "desires. So that's one of the benefits. Say, who will save you from the darknesses of the land and the sea when you call on him abased and humble in fear and in concealment? The sixth benefit,", "toward the one who has afflicted you. الحلم عمن صدرت عنه المصيبة Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says in the Quran, إِنَّ إِبْرَاهِيمَ لَأَوَّاهٌ حَلِيمٌ Ibrahim was somebody who had compassion for other people. يَتَأُوَّة He felt compassion. Some of the ulama say that's the awwah.", "And then is the gentleness. So, we gave them good tidings of a , Ismail . The young boy or forbearing boy and then the Prophet said, You have two qualities that Allah loves, forbearance and deliberation.", "وَتَخْتَرِفُ مَرَاتِبُ الْحِلْمِ بِاخْتِلافِ المَّصَائِبِ فِي صِغْرِهَا وَكِبْرِّهَٰ فَالْحَلْما عَنْدَ أَعْظَمِ الْمَصَاءِبٍ أَفْضَرُ مِن كُلِّ حِلٌّ And there is a difference in the rankings of forbearance based upon the differences of the calamities in their enormities and in their severity, whether they're great or small. So a forbearant shown when there's great calamities is much greater than any other type of forbears.", "So that's one of the great blessings, is the ability to show forbearance. Because it's a gift from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. The seventh one, as-sabi'atu al-'afu an dianiha. That you can actually forgive them. So it's not just having forbearans, but you actually forgive and you get one of greatest rewards is forgiving people that have actually done you wrong. Allah subh'anaHu wa ta-ta'ala says, wal-'afina ani n-nas.", "Yes, those who forgive people. Allah loves those people. وَمِنْ عَافَهَا وَأَصْلَحَ فَأَّجُرْهُ عَلَى اللَّهِ That the one who pardons and who rectifies his reward is with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. وِالْعَافُ عًا أَعَظَمِّهَٰ أَفْضَرُ مِن كُلِّ عَفُو And when you forgive people for great calamities it's better than any other forgiveness. See if you have family members that cause you problems", "Don't do it for them. Do it for Allah . See, one of the things people do if you get angry and you leave, you run out of the room and then you don't talk to that person, the more you delay that time, the deeper that... It festers. It's like a boil. If you immediately... Because that's a jaraha. If You Immediately go... Seriously I got upset with somebody.", "and then just went and asked their forgiveness. And I was not the wrongdoer. The thing can be healed. If you don't do that, it becomes more and more difficult as time goes on. It becomes more", "you think you are. That's the problem, the problem with the world is who we think we are. So asking forgiveness of people is a great blessing from Allah . The eighth one is to be patient during the tribulation because in Allah , Allah is with patient ones.", "The waiting for the Fajr prayer", "It doesn't work because patience is based on understanding You can bear things Tahtamal shayt, you know, that's what it is. Tahtamar al darb They just bear it but patience is different. Patience has what's called Ihtisab which is where you actually reckon with your Lord a reward. You're believing there's a reward coming from being patient", "وَهُوَ مُوجِبٌ مَحَبَّةَ اللَّهِ تَعَالَىٰ وَكَثَرَتَ ثَوَابِهِ This brings on the mahabba of Allah, the love of Allah and also the abundant reward from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. وَاللَّهُ يُحِبَّ الصَّابِرِينَ Allah loves the patient ones. So by being patient you're actually incurring the love", "The sabirun are given their rewards without any reckoning. Some rewards you get, it's reckoned already. Whereas patience, it is without reckoning No one was given a blessing better and more vast than patience", "The ninth one, is to actually be happy, glad about what's happening because of those benefits. The Prophet ﷺ said in a hadith that Imam Ahmed relates about the peoples that went before, they used to be as happy during calamities", "calamities and tribulations as you are during times of abundance. How wondrous those two distasteful things, death and poverty. Because in the Akhirah, poverty in this world is a blessing because your hisab is much less if you're poor. And that's what Imam Ali said about", "said about wealth, he said حَلَالُهُ حِسَابٌ وَحَرَامُه عِقَابٍ What's halal from it is a reckoning and what's prohibited from it Is a punishment. And that's why the Zuhad are called أَعْقَلُ النَّاسِ The most intelligent people Are the people of Zuhd Because they give up things Because they don't want The problems that go with things وَإِنَّمَا فِرِحُوا بِهَا إِذْ لَى شِدِّتِهٰ وَمَرارَتِيهٖ", "That they were happy with it, not because they happened. But rather because of the rewards and the fruits that came from those tribulations. So just as somebody who is happy, who has great diseases when he drinks that bitter cure", "cure that will remove the disease. He's drinking it and he's happy about it because he's thinking not about the bitterness, and the difficulty of the remedy but he's thinkin g about the benefits that will come from taking the bitter remedy. And so this is the way people are of Allah with the tribulations and the tent that Ashirat ashukru alayha to be grateful for it.", "Just like because of what are contained in there, of the benefits. As a sick person would be grateful to the doctor who is severing one of his limbs or preventing him from his desires because he believes in that as a cure for him. You go to the surgeon, the surgeon cut your hand off because there's gangrene.", "What do they say to the surgeon afterwards? Thank you so much doctor. You know, I really...I can't tell you how much I'm... He just cut your hand off! Why are you thanking him? Because you realize that he was doing you a benefit even though outwardly he harmed you and so in the same way those people who have tribulation from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala know that Allah only does these things to benefit them", "So they actually say, الحمد لله وشكر لله الحادية عشر The 11th one. تمحيصها للذنوب والخطايا The purification that these calamities have towards their wrongs and their sins. Allah سبحانه وتعالى says, وَمَا أَصَابُكُم مِّن مُّصِيبَةٍ فَبِمَٰ كِسَبَتْ أَيْدِيكُםْ وَيَعْفُو عَنْ كَثِيرٍ That anything that afflicts you is from what your own hands have wrought", "And he pardons much of what you have done. In other words, what you're being afflicted with is actually much less than what you deserve. And in that, one of the things that Imam An-Nasafi r.a says in his tafsir of this, and his tafseer is a beautiful tafsiir, but one of things he says in that he said if you reflect on the meaning of that, you will show gratitude for your calamities because you will realize that it's a blessing that they are much less then they are. That that's the secret of that", "That's the secret of that ayah. وَيَعْفُو عَن كَثِيرٍ That's why Allah followed it up, that you're afflicted with your wrong actions, you can feel bad about that but then when you realize that He has pardon so much, It actually makes you feel grateful that Allah has overlooked so much of your shortcomings.", "the believer is not afflicted with any difficulty, any exhaustion, fatigue, anxiety that concerns him or even a thorn that punctures him except that Allah removes with it that he steps on, a thorns that he stepes on except that allah removes with his wrong actions. So those are all blessings.", "exhaustion, fatigue anything like that it all comes as removal of wrong actions Subhanallah The twelfth blessing is the compassion that Allah enables you to show to people that are in tribulation and to help them because whoever relieves a one of the calamities of this world for a believer", "for him on the Yawm al Qiyamah. So people in tribulation become an opportunity and one of things that Imam Muhammad Al-Hassan, hafidhu Allah, one of the things he says in his commentary on the Mathara, he said there's two conditions that people have. One is where you have the afiya, you have well being in yourself, in your family but you get problems of other people and the other", "If you don't help people that have problems, then Allah will give you those problems. That's the nature of the world This is it. liya'bluwakum is to test you so you're either tested in yourself or with others But you have to respond appropriately So avoiding those things is a danger and that's why the tribulations of others are actually a blessing if they come to you for help or something", "some closeness to Allah . And, In the Muwattab Imam Marek, Isa was reported to have said people are of two types. People of well-being and people of tribulation. So have compassion for the people of Tribulation and show gratitude for well being. That's why if you're in good shape don't complain. Tell somebody", "or something because you don't want if you complain and you don' have anything to complain about Allah will give you things to complain abou And then you'll think about how good things were. Remember we used to complain that? What were we thinking? There's people that say that when real calamities hit them they think what was I complaining about before well the truth is stop complaining now because it could get worse", "That's the whole point. It could get worse. And one of the poets said, وَإِنَّمَا يَرْحَمُ الْعُشَاقَ مِنْ عَشِقًا The only people that really feel sorry for the people in passionate love are people who have been in passionate Love. So when you see people of tribulation, you should remember I've been there, I remember what that was like and show compassion to them. الرَّبِعَةَ عَشرَةً The 14th one", "14th one, the thariyatha ta'ashara. Ma'rifatu qadri ni'mata al-afiya. Tribulations give you the blessing of having true knowledge of the extent of the blessing", "The nature of blessings is that nobody realizes the extent of them until they've lost them. That's human being. He's just oppressive to himself and constantly denying the blessings of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala.", "Allah has prepared from the blessings of the reward of the Akhirah based on these varying ranks. So this is also a blessing that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has prepared rewards for the calamities that you bear patiently or with contentment, based on the different ranks. There are people that are content they'll have a higher station in paradise than people that were simply patient and patience is the lowest maqam", "The maqamat of the tawbah is actually the first one. الخامسة عشرة ما في طيها من الفوائد الخفية What is hidden inside the folds of these calamities of blessings? That's another benefit. فعاسى أن تكره شيئا ويجعل الله فيه خيرا كثيرا Maybe you dislike a thing and Allah will put in it much good. See, you don't know.", "You don't know. There's things hidden in blessings. So I'll give you an example. I missed a flight once and alhamdulillah, I've never been upset about missing a flight. I guarantee because I always think if the plane goes down, I'm going to feel like such a fool for having run to catch the plane or something like that. So i just relax. Never want to be on a plane that you ran to catch and then it goes down. What was I running for?", "But I missed a plane. Everybody said, oh... They ended up giving me like $500 back because they had to reroute the ticket and things like that. And the difference was nothing in time and things Like that there's always benefits that are hidden in what you think is a trouble and the thing about the world Is that if you enter into a state with your experience of the world in which whenever these things happen You just accept them", "always, Allah will show you. You'll know there's a benefit. In every delay, there's God's choice in it that Allah and that's part of what the mu'min does he submits to it and the 16th one is that tribulations prevent you from arrogance and from evil and from pride and from tyranny and doing all these things like Nimrud", "He says, had Nimrod been a poor sickly person. Deaf and dumb he would have never done all those horrible things that he did. The same with the tyrants of the world. Had they been born impoverished and this and that but it's those things that make them arrogant. And then the 17th one is contentment.", "Because tribulations afflict the good and the evil. And so whoever doesn't like it, then it's just on him. And he's lost the dunya and the akhira. And whoever is pleased with it, he's pleased because he knows that paradise is better than anything in this world. And if those tribulations are what it takes to get him into paradise, then he's content with it. So these are some of the blessings.", "I mean there's many blessings but these are the ones that Sultan al-Ulema, Ibn Abbas Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam enumerated and they're good to remember in these times. But I will end this by saying read history. These are not bad times. Muslims shouldn't be so negative. There's been much worse times. I mean, there's aspects that are bad about this time and certainly one of the greatest calamities of the time is that we don't have a lot of people of knowledge anymore", "and we don't have levels of din, but just in terms of outward dunya calamities this period is nothing if you read history. It's nothing! The real calamities of this age are spiritual calamities. They're not worldly calamities So what we should be... If we're going to weep over the calamities over the age, we should weeping about the loss of iman,", "We shouldn't be weeping about all this stuff we see out there because it's just not that bad. I'm sorry. And if you think it is, you haven't read history. Things have been much worse. Read about earlier wars and how many people died and plagues that afflicted people and wiped out... A third of Europe was wiped out by the Black Plague. There's too many blessings. The blessing we have", "have is just it's this overwhelming that's why inshallah will just all ask a lot of put us in a state of gratitude with Allah and make us from the sheikh Eileen you know really make us room to check it in then just not complain complaint even the thing about complainers even complainers don't like complainers really they want to", "Inshallah, we'll all stop whining. It's the maqam of the tifl is to whine. That's what I always tell my boys. Nobody likes a whiner, even a whinier. And they laugh because they know it's true. So whining is a maqom. It' s the maqum of the Tifl that's what a whinner is and the Rijal and the rijaal is a... in haqiqah doesn't mean a male The Rajal is male and female", "and female. It's the one who has reached the maqam of the adult, it's the mature one that's what it means. The mature one. Rujula is maturity so inshallah Allah make us all mature Jazakumullah khairan very nice to see everybody and we have great blessing as you know the people here Sheikh Muhammad Ali Aqoubi, Sheikh Salik it's a real blessing I mean", "Insha'Allah, may Allah make us worthy containers for what's being poured into us. InshaAllah. Jazakumullah khair." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Islam on War -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayusuf _is__1748538503.opus", "text": [ "People don't like to go to war. Our species is not a species that actually, there's only I think four or five species that kill within the species. If you look at rams, rams lock horns they don't gouge another ram. They don't gouging other ram. If your watch cats fight, they don' use their claws when they fight each other. You know they're very careful about that.", "So you can see that animals don't, they won't kill other animals within their species. Humans will suffer greatly from killing other people. A lot of trauma goes with killing people. If it's justified, it's a little different obviously but it's still the Prophet ﷺ said لَا يُزْهَلُ أَحْدِكُمْ فِي فُصْحَةً مِّن رَبِّهِ مَّا لَمْ يَسْفِقَ الدَّمِ You will have for want of a better translation wiggle room", "with your Lord. You will have some negotiating room with your lord as long as you haven't shed blood" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Dr_Umar Faruq x Shaykh Hamza Yusuf - How to be a h_wDVZGJedLq4&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748537050.opus", "text": [ "talk, bismillah. The book that you wrote which I have in Arabic about fitrah iman and fitra. Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayya actually read that book and was very impressed with it the hadith that you quoted", "the hadith indicates that people are enculturated into customs and beliefs and traditions but then he says just as the animal is created complete or whole in its nature do you notice any mutilations", "animals like cutting their ears and things like that. So it indicates that the fitrah is, it's a wholeness in nature that's there but the hadith also indicates that there's a whole set of other possibilities to that inherent or principial nature. And one of the things I think that's very confusing for people, in the 20th century we've seen human nature as denied", "this idea that we have human nature is denied and that all peoples, the anthropologists and sociologists and social scientists have shown there's so much diversity in the world that it's impossible for us to have some type of human nature that unites us all as this hadith would indicate. And there's a very interesting herodotus", "Herodotus in the histories has a very interesting section where Darius, the king brings the Greeks and they honor their fathers by burning them. And he asked them how much money would it cost to get them to honor them by eating them? And they said that you could give them all the money in the world. They wouldn't eat. They were horrified by that. And then he brings the Indians who ate their fathers to honor", "And he says how much money to burn your father's and they were horrified by that and Herodotus makes this comment about how Customs are so different even though. They were both honoring their Their ancestors, so just in terms of how do you? see this incredible diversity of human expression and and the relationship that it has to this idea of a", "of a universal nature. When we talk about the Fitra, you know then some of the most important verses about it are like Surah Al-Shams and Surat al-Din, by the fig and olive and so forth, by", "verse, these are chapters in the Quran which establish that human beings are perfectly created and that there's nothing wrong about them at all but commentators say that one of the reasons why they're preceded by the oaths is because the oath in Arabic means this is the literal truth it's emphatic, it's not metaphorical, it absolutely so. But it needs that emphasis because no one would believe this", "you look at what people do, especially the evil they do this also takes on so many forms it's impossible to comprehend and it is very clear in the other hadith we just tonight as you know just looked at a very small part even the hadith I mentioned uh i left out two-thirds of the hadis just for time sake. You know but um it's very clear", "more than anything else that alters the human beings. And they do it a thousand different ways, times a thousand of different ways. If we look for proofs of the Fitra then I think one of the greatest proofs in the 20th century is the great Austrian anthropologist Wilhelm Schmidt and he wrote a book in German Der Ursprung", "Ursprung des Gottesidee, The Origin of the Idea of God. Never translated into English and it's 12 volumes. And you know this book is really amazing because he spent his life documenting all the so-called primitive religions. Primitive religions being what we call micro religions they're kinship groups that don't have political structures everything", "by kinship. And these little groups that we call primitive, they're always very isolated otherwise they wouldn't be that way and there are many of them especially in the 20th century there still were many that are not there today. And he showed that all of them have the idea of the one God, no exceptions whatsoever. None of them are polytheistic", "also to refute Lubbock and Tyler who were evolutionist anthropologists, who didn't do research by the way. They didn't good research and they claimed that religion begins with animism so he showed that's absolutely not true and he himself who was a Catholic believed that this was a proof of ancient prophecy", "people are so isolated and yet they have these amazing similarities that pertain not just to the belief in the one God whom they call by beautiful names, you know but also they believe in morality. They believe that marriage is given to them by God. They believed in heaven and hell some of them even believe in the Sirat right? The path that takes you to the garden and so we would", "No one has a greater spectrum of potentials, good and bad than us. Right. Nesta Webster who was regarded before she went into conspiracy theories as a historian in one of her books she makes that argument that Unitarianism was the Aboriginal faith", "was secondary and not primary. So I'm wondering if she was influenced by that German... Well, Arnold Toynbee was. That's one of the main influences on Arnold Toyinbee. And Arnold Toyingbee who is really a remarkable thinker and you know historians sometimes are equivocal about whether they want to accept him or not because he does what historians are not supposed to do which is to tell you what it all means", "But, you know, Toynbee was very deeply influenced by Schmidt and by others. And one of the interesting things about Toynbe is that he believed that the most advanced human beings who ever lived were those of the Paleolithic, of the old Stone Age. And again, he doesn't say that just off the top of his head. They didn't build cities like we built cities but they were spiritually", "very far advanced and he bases that on a lot of things but schmidt's one of them well um you brought up toynbee and i think you were the first one that exposed me to arnold toynbee that's kind of become uh a very interesting reference that i go back to at different times i think some of the students have actually read at least the abridged version of 20 study in history", "the outset of the study he argues for the differences like these differences in civilizations and he wants to understand where civilization originated from and what produces it. And he basically rejects race, this idea that there's racial superiority in some peoples as opposed to others. He categorically rejects that but he does make an argument", "of civilization and one of the things that again as human expressions there's such an incredible diversity on the planet of Human behavior and expression so would you do you see civilization? as Something that unifies human beings in from a fitrah sense that humans by nature begin to create civilization", "You know language is so important, so when we use the word civilization one of the problems is that it comes from... Defining the term. It comes from the word city So it's those great societies that build big cities like Rome and so forth And this is where in our tradition we use word Omran and Omran to me is a much better word Because of the fact that it has nothing to do with cities", "It means bringing things to life. You know, it could be referred to Bedouins just as although we have al-Hadar and al-Bedu but you know I think that with Toynbee and his concept of civilization this focusing on these civilizations that are big states and so forth", "If we had a broader perspective it would be good. Of course when he talks about human beings in the Paleolithic then he's taking that broader perspective, but Toynbee also believes very much in what he calls the creative minority and one of the most important ideas in Toynbe is that history is always the work of minorities", "have solidarity, they will lead and they will have great effects. And he believes that civilizations like those of Egypt and those of Mesopotamia and those in ancient China, the Yellow River Valley civilization, the yellow emperor... That these begin by creative minorities. And creative minorities are always inclusive and they're not oppressive and they are a", "And in fact, maybe Toynbee hints at this but we could easily say that they're prophetic. And he emphasizes the fact that to do civilizations like those of Egypt or Mesopotamia or the Yellow Valley and China is such an immense human undertaking that essentially it can't be done without a prophet. It's got to be done with something that can give us divisions in labor", "a new way of living. But then the civilizations usually become civilizations of domineering or dominant minorities and then they oppress, and they become the property of the elites and then create what Toynbee calls the proletariats using that Marxist term but you have an internal proletariat which are the oppressed people in this society", "and you have an external proletariat, which are usually better when peoples who are also oppressed by that civilization he would regard the pre-Islamic Arabs to be the external prole terriot of the Byzantine and Persian empires. Okay so they have to keep their distance but they also learn from them how to use weapons and usually they can often conquer them as well", "I sort of forgot the question. Well, you know Okay, it's fine Let me let me Look at something else here that you brought up the idea of moving Because you spoke very beautifully about the Adamic Nature and that human beings are these incredibly honored creatures But there's also in the Quran", "you know the human being was created in angst and anxiety he's called ajul in the quran he's hasty um he's oppressive you know yeah your oppression is against your own self that's talking to all humanity we didn't oppress them but they were pressing themselves so there's also this other side of", "And obviously the Christian tradition deals with that, with the idea of the fallen human being. How would you address that aspect of the human being? So this is also part of the fitrah, that it has the negative capacity and it is forgetful. And it has to be forgetful because then it can't use what its fitrah was for which is to rediscover it.", "until the age of maturity or sometime after that, they're saints. You know because of the fact that they have this fitrah and they are also not morally responsible, they are not moral agents yet. But then as the passions develop in us, then these passions you know, the idol of the pig,", "they will necessarily veil us from who we are. So you have this seeming contradiction between . With . So, we have this but again our commentators make it very clear that this is a particular type of human being. You know he's the human being whose not true to his or her fitrah and what was the other part?", "What was the other part of that question? Just, you know, that idea of looking at the human being and all these negative qualities. So then human nature if we say there is a human nature that's universal I mean our tradition would argue that. We would insist upon it. Yeah, insist upon but for us the nature and from that hadith that began the talk the nature", "of capacities. And so the actualization, and we have the concept of it , you know this idea of the perfectible human being that can move towards a kind of wholeness or completeness which is a restoration of that first being. Is that how? We have that and you know of course I'm a convert, this beloved brother is a convert many of", "converts and I remember when I became a Muslim which was early January the 3rd 1970, and then as I went through that first year there were certain dilemmas I had in my heart from before like an emptiness even though I had been religious. And that was filled and then you know believe it or not", "Ramadan like can I do this? Can I fast this? I've never done that in my life and then you just see yourself changing. And so it's, this is manifest I think to most people who come into the faith. And I remember when we were in Spain, Sheikh Hamza was also part of that, that we had a particular person come to us from the mountains he was from Madrid,", "that he could sleep in, it would keep him warm. He did his own Buddhism and then all of his buddies joined us and we later called him Osman you probably met him and when he came to us he was frightening His eyes were like about to pop out of his head and we had a madrasa with Sheikh Hamza I met him there It was an Andalusian type of school", "And you know we had a little door that you open for the window, it's like a window to the door to know who is knocking. When he knocked at the door, the brother who went to open it shut it just like that and then he says oh my God what if he becomes a Muslim? We've got enough crazies in the community already. He kept knocking and finally we let him in", "He took the Shahada. We thought oh my God, what are we going to do and? I know my wife Samira remembers him really well and Like within three weeks you could not recognize him And he was also a professional acrobat and I would watch him from my office looking over the garden and he couldn't take two steps without doing us a Big skip and the way that acrobats skip is not the way you skip", "the way you skip. And he became, he became the most beautiful person in our community and he became a person that, you know anything you wanted done even cleaning your house, even doing your laundry, you knew sacrificing a chicken, he would be the one to do it so again one of the most important things is you can come back to the fitrah and that's why we say the fitra", "else. My wife and I, when we were at Michigan where I began to teach in 1978 you know we were in student housing because I was an assistant professor who's always poor and she was also completing her education so we were the graduate housing and there was a woman there who was a feminist she was divorced with a child she was a law student and I don't", "us we liked her and we always argued. And she's always talking, you can't get in a word edgewise. And then one spring day... She was talking about how horrible religion has been to women. We say that women are religions best friends but religion is not necessarily their best friend. So on one springday she was out, we were out in an open area and her son was there he's", "and he was having a big time, and then he got over to where the cars were parked. You know on a street both sides of the street And there's a car coming down the street really fast and He's going out between the cars and Then she notices him Just at the last moment. What did you say? Oh my God? so she said oh my god and", "plumbed on its brakes and it screeched, and there was crying and yelling. And he escaped by an inch of his life. You see? And then this is what the Qur'an says that anyone who calls upon God in dire need He will answer their prayer. That was istighatha which she did, which is coming out of what her fitrah But when the fitrah is veiled over it only shows itself to be what it is In times of great fear. And this was a time of great Fear I can't lose my son", "lose my son and also times of great joy. And they say there's no disbeliever in the foxhole, but the ability of the fitrah to come back this is very hopeful for us isn't it? This is one important thing about studying the fitra because people can get so far away from it and we can take a thousand different paths but you can come back to it actually very easily. Right. Subhanallah.", "the you know about women I like that they're the best friends of religion but religion is not always their best friend and that's something for centuries women were seen that their nature was inferior to male nature Aristotle asserts that and that was certainly you'll find that creeping up in both Christian and Muslim texts", "There's a very interesting verse, I think it's in Zuhruf about... It says And it's articulated in the masculine and yet most of them Most of them say it's talking about women. And it uses the", "that they are enculturated into ornaments, ornamentation. That they're put up as ornaments women and then they have an inability to articulate... It indicates essentially that it is inculturation, that there's a nurturing element and if you remove that because if we say the woman's nature is inferior like it has been asserted by many people in the past", "it's irremediable. You can't alter that fact, but if it's understood as a nurture thing which we clearly see especially in the 20th century where women have been given equal opportunity to... In fact, in many ways they're exceeding the men now at a lot of universities. I think you saw that when you were teaching in the Middle East and the women were far superior. Women are the best students. They were the best student. In fact my whole academic career women are the", "phenomenon which I think that ayah in the Quran indicates and I think thats why it's put into the masculine, that the same would happen to a man who was raised in that environment where he is not allowed to have his intellect nurtured because he is more an ornament for the male. Of course when we look at the prophetic history there was this clear cultural difference between", "Mecca, the Quraysh and the women of Medina where the Prophet went in his migration. And the women at Medina were extremely articulate and they were warriors on the battlefield. And of course there are women who live in an agrarian culture because Medina was a huge oasis. And usually when women and men are doing the same thing then they're extremely compatible", "compatible and that's certainly the way it was with the Medinese women. We had a zawiya not long ago, just a few weeks ago in Egypt and we had our sister Maryam Shaybani I hope people hope she didn't mind me mentioning her name but she actually took Hadith about women and studied them very carefully and showed how they're often misinterpreted", "But the women of Medina were extremely strong and very outspoken. And this is a Meccan surah that you're referring to, so you would think what will come in my mind is it is talking to the Meccans in terms of their own culture. And the women from Mecca they were very different because also the city lives by international trade and it lives also by the pilgrimage", "And the men are the ones who really do it. So their women tend to be much more subdued They could also go on the battlefield by the way But they weren't the kind of warriors that the Medenese women could be But we do believe that men and women have these perfect natures The women are not debilitated in any way by their nature And in Islamic law, you know, it is a societal obligation", "that women get knowledge, every type of knowledge, religious knowledge just like men. Well I think even Arab would argue that they have spiritual advantages over men. That's what they say. Even in one part of the Futuhat Makiyah he talked about a saint, a man-saint who spoke to God with a feminine voice and", "that with a Moroccan scholar and explained to me that this is very common in that tradition. That you know, if you don't have that feminine voice, you can't really attain the highest spiritual level. One of the good books by the way for people interested in that is The Tao of Islam. Right, Sachiko Murata. Right by Murata it is the first thing she wrote. She was a Japanese convert", "and it's a very good book. The translations are really good in Arabic and in Persian, but later on she would discover Chinese Islam and then she becomes one of the authorities in Chinese Islam if she had only had that knowledge of Chinese Islam the book would have been even more beneficial than is but the Tao of Islam is a very very amazing book to read", "And it's about the male principle and the female principle you have in In the pre-modern world I think as far as I can tell most civilizations agreed that there was a human nature certainly the Islamic did Even the the Indic and the Buddhist traditions would have understood that as well And the Buddha nature was a potential That could be realized in any human being", "You also have, certainly in the Christian tradition, the idea of human nature. They might differ on certain aspects of its potentialities but essentially the idea about unified nature. Since the Enlightenment period people like Hume who reject human nature and then in the 20th century you get like Merleau-Ponty says something like", "share no nature or you get somebody like Ortega y Gasset who also denies human nature and I think modern there's in fact Pinker who's at Harvard Steven Pinker wrote a book called The Blank Slate arguing that there is a human nature", "of a fluid nature that human beings can... They might be born into the wrong body, for instance. So I have a female trapped in a man's body and instead of seeing that maybe as dysmorphia or some type of mental illness that needs to be treated it's now being embraced even", "In fact, I think in Sweden they're doing non-gender child rearing where the children wear the same clothes. The traditional pink and blue for instance that people would if it was a girl they would give at the wedding shower. They would give all these nice girly type things. And this is the argument that this is simply enculturation. That this is natural not natural.", "Crowley, Aleister Crowley in the book of The Law chapter 2 argues over a hundred years ago that the time is coming soon when we will be free of this binary and we will able to choose our own genders. So this is something that we're really seeing happening all over now and young people are really encouraged I actually saw an East Asian man if you can believe this I saw Pakistani men with a nose ring", "because I think in that culture, maybe in some of the Hindu castes or something. But in that cultural a man would not wear a nose ring as far as I know but this is kind of the throwing off of cultural decorum and this idea how would you address that just from this denial of human nature that we're seeing in the 20th century and 21st century?", "level of the horizontal, which is you know if you live in a world where you only explain things by reference to other things like them that's like a horizontal universe then there is no meaning there and there are no immutables. And there's no truth either.", "you put in the vertical connection, which is to look up to heaven and to look to first principles. The law of non-contradiction, the excluded middle, the law of identity, causality, possibility, necessity, impossibility then you've got a tent. And then you have a structure and then you also meaning. So a lot of things that we see in our time is because of this Cartesian world view that", "what's out there, we don't even know that it is out there. We can't relate to it and you have all these social experiments. And most of the social experiments around gender they go back also... It's very important to study the genealogy of ideas so that is a complex issue. Descartes is one who gives us the concept of mind in its modern sense", "we'd say is a fundamental mistake. But, and that's also important genderless but you have Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich R-E-I-C-H the sexual revolutions from him and he means revolution. He means revolution and you only win that revolution when incest is best. Okay it's got to go there", "He was a big deal here in Berkeley in the 1960s. Heroes and civilization, and so forth. And then you have Judith Butler. And of course what you're talking about as you know... Judith's right next door. She is? She is next door yeah. I didn't know that. I thought she was in Israel. No no, she teaches here at UC Berkeley. Okay, I didn' t know that but it's very important to know who gave you this idea and where did they get it from", "of modern thought doesn't even have first principles. And therefore for us, we want to get our orientation correct and we want know why do we believe what we believe? Where do we begin? How does the intellect work? Most people don't even know today what intellect is. Intellect doesn't need anything outside of itself. And of course you've heard about that in the debunking", "things like that, but that's not true. In any universal statement like existence and non-existence the syllogism works perfectly because you have excluded middle, you distribute the middle term. And so for us...and I think this is one of the great things about Zaytuna is that we learn our tradition where we get our ideas and how we know them and", "Right. And that these ideas don't drop out of the sky. There are certain people who are behind them and I feel that one of the most eloquent ways to address these issues, and most objective ways is look at where the ideas come from. The idea of first principles again, that's getting to something that is deeply rooted", "deeply rooted in the essential nature of the human being. The law of non-contradiction. That's fitrah also for us. It's a fitrah, yeah. You know that you know the law of nontradiction, you know, the law excluded middle, you now the law identity, you knew this is Shaykh Hamza Yusuf and this is shaykh Abdullah they're not the same. It' s not like you are now him he's now you. When I taught logic,", "the law of identity was Popeye's Law. I am what I am. I'm what I'm and that's all that I am, you know? But these are very important and if you look at most modern thought, if you looked at Stephen Hawking, you now, you knew the theory of everything is because everything is a model. Right. And Stephen Hawkin says this chair is not a chair. It's probably a molecular structure,", "a three-dimensional brown chair. So this is Cartesian dualism and therefore... And it's also, it's the Kantian, this idea that there's no correspondence because I think Muslims were very much committed to correspondence truth. And that's exactly what the Fitra is. That's why the Fitrra also... It enables you to know the world because you've got it in you. You know we say critiques of modern science they say", "science they say that physics doesn't believe in red apples okay because it just believes there's molecular structures that you make into an apple and it tastes sweet and it nourishes you but it's all about probabilities. And this leads to a type of Gnosticism, I think we're very much in a gnostic world in many ways even despite the materialism", "There's an occult element that is very strong, this idea that none of this is real. That we can't know reality. This might be just simply a solipsistic world view in my head. We've got young people now going in and shooting up people in schools. It's a complete divorce of reality. They're not really inflicting pain on other people.", "like they're in a matrix and they perceive it as a kind of game that they are doing. And that's a very demonic reality, I think, that being a lot of people are experiencing. It is very interesting that it is related to film and these games that people are playing where the Decalogue, the second prohibition in The Decalog which...and", "this book in Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman. That's a really good book. Yeah the second chapter where he talks about why would there be a prohibition on making graven images? You know this whole idea because we've entered into a completely image based civilization", "that once you lose, when you enter into that image-based culture, you lose the ability for abstraction. For real abstraction. The ability to understand essences like the chair. To understand what makes a chair and why despite the fact that you can have chairs that are... You take a dog, the idea that you could have a Chihuahua and a Great Dane and see the dogginess that they share", "that they share is amazing. Like, the human beings can do that and seeing also human nature despite the fact we can look at somebody in the Amazon or somebody in an aboriginal culture that are completely different from us in their expression of their humanity and yet we can still abstract that essential human nature", "lost in people. It's, you know the image-based culture where people are divorced and enter into this I mean I see it as with no offense to people afflicted with this but a kind of autism that you know, the Arabs translated it as tawahud, you now this idea of going into the individual self and losing a sense of other.", "You know, we get our humanity I think from looking people in the eyes and having their companionship from our mothers or great-grandmothers or grandmothers, our aunts. From the men and so forth of our families. And what happens to people who are raised on video games and iPhones and things like that? Who get there... Or Facebook or whatever.", "who's the daughter of one of our brothers, and really amazing girl but it's as if she couldn't even socialize with the other teens that were there. It's always her phone. It is like if you want to talk to her send her a text. And one of out brothers in Chicago whose a neurologist he told me about this syndrome they have, you probably know the name of it I forgot.", "and they have to go see him. It's like I have memory loss, and he said that they call this some kind of a psychological disorder. Like Munchausen syndrome? Sorry? Munchhausen syndrome. I don't know. But you know again, I'm not a neurologist so I can't really say anything about what's what. He is the one who deals with these. Well we grow up in a very different world. Yeah but my belief, this is just an intuition, is that they are actually having memory loss. Right.", "Because it's like they're extremely weak. They're extremely vulnerable because you know whatever strength we have in my opinion is because You know, we were with human beings and these human beings gave us our humanity And they gave us ability to meet with trials and tribulations and so this is you know one of the things of course that we are conscious of We need to be very conscious of his what does this technology?", "What does this technology do to our primordial self? Because that primordia, m-mortial self needs to be nurtured by other human beings who have that nature. And uh you know so this is very important in our time and you know to learn to use our technology very very intelligently and very wisely of course it gives us tremendous benefits. You know I'm able to be here because of technology.", "it, you know. So I don't believe that we...I think we should be thankful for it, but at the same time we have to know how to use it and this is one of the things which one of great books on technology is Jacques Ellul. This was one of our classics back in the old days and Jacques Elluls warns about how technology sets its own rules. It goes its own direction.", "We don't want to make people so pessimistic, you know that they can't deal with the world They live in but you know we have to end this one things a Lou says is that The massification of society is required for technology to have its March So you have to break down significant religious and social groups who could apply principle right? And this is why also for us as People that should be principled. We want to be principled then", "then we have to also learn about these things. How do they affect us? How are we going to use them and to live in a way that's beneficial? How many of our people are destroyed on social media, right? Dr. Jackson who many of you know he said that social media is not going to leave us a single leader, a see a single value, a single principle. Well the...also", "One of the problems is this idea of neutrality of technology. I think that's something, one of the most important influences for me on that because you know I've talked a lot about how...I've been talking for years about the problem of image-based media and long before what it has come to now because this was pre-internet.", "that Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote called Between Two Ages, which he wrote in 1969. And he talks about the introduction of technology because they were very aware of the internet and all these things. The US military has technologies that we don't even know about. They were using the internet in the universities I think in 1969 or 70 was when", "when it begins. The actual first, the first transmission was from UCLA I think to Stanford and they were gonna put like log L-O-G and it crashed after L-0 so it was like low and behold. And one of the things I saw Werner Herzog's", "Herzog's amazing documentary on the internet and the first half is all the positive aspects of it how amazing it is which it is right I mean, it's just like my dictionary app. I Just I use it all the time and so cool It's just amazing to have it and then and then to have like all these Arabic dictionaries Literally in the palm of your hand", "It's unreal but the second half was on the dangers of The Internet and one of the things that there something really floored me it was this lady And I felt like you know Ghazali when the thief Tells him He laughs at him when he says you can't steal all my knowledge. I just spent two years right writing it all down and the thief laughed Adam and said what kind of knowledge is it that a thief can steal it from you and", "God made him say that and he vowed never to, he would always memorize after that everything that he learned. But there's a woman in there it's a family and it's one of the most depressing parts of this documentary but they're all, they look very depressed and the woman, they lost a daughter in a horrific car accident and she had her head severed", "drove by took pictures of it and then they posted it on the internet. And then over time people kept sending them to her, to the family. And here's what she said and it really floored me when she said it because I felt like . She said that I think that the internet...I think the spirit of the antichrist has descended into the internet", "And it's just so interesting how vile people are. I mean, just cruel. There is so much cruelty. You know one of the things I have been asking somebody from Silicon Valley maybe an engineer here. I want a computer program that automatically erases anything done on the internet that is grammatically incorrect because it would eliminate 99.9% of the trolls", "of the trolls, because they always write in bad grammar. But be that as it may there's something I think it's in Thessalonians, I'm not sure...I think it is in 2nd Thessalonic where Paul talks about the mystery of iniquity and the man of lawlessness, the person towards the end of time you know? And this is obviously a reference to the Antichrist but he says the mystery", "already active in the world. And we have a tradition, in our own tradition where the Prophet said that there's no fitna that has occurred since the beginning of time except that it's preparing for the greatest fitna this anti-christic period where people completely divert from their nature and the fitra is really so perverted that people lose it and so what's happening now with so many people turning away", "turning away from faith and godlessness being celebrated, and profanity being celebrated. The idea of mocking religion which would have been so unacceptable not that long ago in most cultures in the world now it's something... It is just the bread-and-butter of comedians. It's the Hollywood...", "Everything is just really, just making religion seem like such a dark thing. And there's so many young people now, you know they say I'm spiritual but not religious or they don't want to have anything to do with organized religions. I always tell them to join Islam because we're the most unorganized religion there is. But anyway what do you say about that? Because the prophet said one of the signs", "of the proceeds, the Antichrist is people stop talking about the Antchrist. That's right. And it seems like we're in a very antichristic world where... So you know the word that we use of course for the Anticrisis is ad-dajjal and belief in him is obligatory", "means to lie, to confuse, to turn things upside down. Some of our scholars say that what the Dajjal does is he overturns the very principles of knowledge so you no longer know that what is true is true and what is false is false. And this is the age we live in because even if we look at Descartes I think therefore", "Okay, well that changes the whole history of human thought because in traditional medieval thought existence comes first. And in our tradition also existence comes for us and then epistemology so now for him Epistemology comes for it's and we don't really know if we exist or not. So we should say I am therefore I should think Yeah Some people say I'm there for God exists but you know", "you know, overturning the what we call immutables. Immutables are first principles. Immutable is also for us are the basic principles of prophetic law, the dispensation and the basic Principles of theological truth necessary being possible existence a change indicates temporality and then the basic Thawabit of sulukh of the moral path", "of the moral path, self-perfection. These don't change but the Dajjal makes them change and then you have the immutables made mutable and this gives you disasters which are the ugly signs at the end of time as the Prophet said, you know, the slave girl will give birth to her mistress or her master", "vying for each other, sometimes the camel shepherds vying with each other in the building of tall buildings. So you see that but then when we look at it we say many people probably most they say that you know the mother will give birth to a daughter who would treat her like a slave and of course we see that today and you know and then you can see the buildings you can go look at them yourself one of the signs", "is when you see Mecca gutted with tunnels and you see tall buildings over the tops of the mountain, then know that the hour has cast its shadow over you. You can go and see the hour doing that right now, the big tower. They call that Burj Asad, the Tower of the Hour. That's frightening, isn't it? I went to Mecca for the first time in 1973. There wasn't a single tunnel", "single tunnel anywhere. It's like where they come from, but you see then what happens is why does the girl treat her mother as a slave or the boy treat his mother as slave? Or as a slaves that mistreated because the Thawabit are gone That they don't have sound belief They don't know first principles They don' t have the morality Okay so all this and when that's done Then she will do whatever she wants to do And the same thing", "thing you look at the shepherds vying with each other in tall buildings so it means certain Thoabit have been overthrown and among these are a sound political order which should put people in power who are capable of leading and who lead us for our benefit and not their own. And then you have also overthrowing a sound economic system", "all this wealth concentrated in the hands of shepherds. Many of those shepards, as Sheikh Hamza knows are very good people you know but they're not the cloth that you make leaders from in a time like this. They can't deal with that so the Dajjal, this is what he does. He takes the Thawabit, the immutables and makes them mutable and changes them in a thousand different ways. Right, Christ said to the", "I once said to the woman accused of adultery, you know, where are your accusers? Because they all left. And then he said go and sin no more. And this is an age where it's go there isn't do what thou wilt for there is no more sin. You know, this is the idea that the concept of sin is being removed from the world.", "agent that nobody can tell me what to, as long as I don't you know the harm principle. As long as i don't hurt anybody then I can do what I want. I'm...I want to because we're the times coming to a close but I want to the Quran in the verses that you quoted from Surah Ar-Rom it says that this is the fitrah of", "the fitrah of God, the principial nature that God has created the human being on. And then it's , you actually wrote about that in your book about that name which is a very interesting name of God and I think it was Ibn Abbas didn't know what it meant", "the Bedouin saying, I dug the well before you. So I was the first one. So is to make it first or the original and I mean, it's interesting we call aboriginals from the origin of man they have that but then it says . And you alluded to the difference of opinion", "They preferred the opinion that it was, the negation there was for prohibition and not impossibility. You know like . It wasn't , it was do not change, it's a warning to change, do not cha... And what we're seeing now is an incredible in the West and increasingly affecting people", "of virtuous character in order to experience the divine. If you look at the hadith that are on the fitrah, and I have those in my book, one of the things we see in them is that there's nothing easier for us than to live according to our natures, you know? And it's very easy for us to do that. There are a thousand ways back to your nature. The traditional Islamic city was a garden city", "And to be a valid city in Islam according to law you have to have land, You have to water on that land or above it. You have produce all the food you need for your city in your city. You can't depend on the outside. Okay? But we were garden cities and we had animals. And lots of animals. We have a whole law about green zones and things like that that enable us to support those animals", "And we believe in our tradition, I believe according to my teachers and our tradition that without animals you can't be human. Chickens are amazing! And if you do permaculture you know how amazing they are. You know? And chickens will teach you a lot. All animals would do that so I think getting back into the natural world... We're going to have this program on permacultures with our brother Ramiz Kent", "May the 21st till June the 2nd, I think. And we had one in Spain last summer and we made soil. You can make soil on 18 days. You need three parts of carbon which can be sticks. You two parts of nitrogen which can green grass. And you need then something else that catalyzes it like manure. Okay? One part. And then again 3-2-1-3...and you water it properly so it's not too wet.", "It's not too dry. And it's steaming in one day, it's full of life. In order to have healthy food you have to have living soil, not just nutrients. This is one thing they learned from the organic movement and they learned it from Muslim India by the way. The organic movement comes out of Muslim India. Making soil... You should be a producer, not", "A lot of beautiful things to consume. But if you're a producer, that's a revolutionary act. You can do it in your apartment. And I think of all the things we did in that Zawiya, making the soil captivated people more than anything else. And, you know, I know an example of a young man in Australia. He's Lebanese. He came into Australia because of the Lebanese Civil War.", "Lebanese civil war. There are a lot of Lebanese like that in Australia, most of them from the north, from Tripoli and other areas. He felt he was treated like you know by a race...in a very racist way at least he felt that way and he didn't think he owed anything to Australia and he actually said I hate this country even though it took you in as a refugee and he was taken out you know to learn about the soil", "soil, do some permaculture plant trees and in the act of planting a tree you know he put his hand in the ground and he said that when I put my hand in The Ground everything changed. And he said I began to love this country and I began feel that I'm part of it so contact with the soil, contact with animals, contact", "human beings talking, visiting. These are very important. These bring us back to our nature. There are a lot of things I would also say martial arts and there all kinds of martial arts as I'm sure everybody here knows but martial arts do something for you one of the big problems with males in particular is that we don't have initiations. You know whereas traditional societies", "to being a man. Women often don't need that because their biological changes are so powerful, that they serve as initiations but you know getting back to nature You should learn the language of nature. The Aborigines who were incredible people Incredible culture. They teach children to listen and if a child asks a question they say go ask your mother. What do they mean?", "What do they mean? Go listen to nature. Listen to what nature says about this. And you can do that here, you have this incredibly beautiful environment. You can find yourself a sitting spot in the forest. People even tell you the best ways to do that. Learn the language of the forest, learn the language with the birds. The birds will come to look at you. Other animals would come to check you out. So these things are very good for us. Getting in your body", "You know getting out of in dream time for aborigines is being in the center brain It's not just about dreaming. It's about being out of this analytical brain that's always worrying and always analyzing and Concerned about stuff, you know get into the center Brain so I just think it's very easy to come back to the footer. I gave you an example of our brother us man in Spain and", "us have seen this in our own lives. Look at Malcolm X, how this man changed so incredibly after the pilgrimage his voice was even different. So we believe in that fitrah. This is a belief it's obligatory for us and again this affects the way we look at the world. That there's no one out there who is foreign to us. There's no", "we benefit you know in learning our tradition again one of the great dangers of this time and this is you know one of things we have to be very conscious about in secular institutions is epistemic warfare you know which is warfare against your epistemology and that's what they did the aborigines like you're not even human beings you're", "you're like plants. You can cut down the plant, you can take away its sibling...you can take it with a little plants that's what they did. Epistemic warfare means your tradition cannot generate knowledge. I spent hours with the Aborigines in Australia and with ones who are like basically spirit doctors everything they say is knowledge. For example they don't have a word for health", "have to heal yourself every day you have to get that negativity out of you you know this in you and it's just incredible but also you know when we defend our tradition it's not because shouldn't be because we're romantic not because we lament a lost past no it's because I know and this man knows and you know that our tradition generates knowledge okay so", "know our tradition to say it doesn't. You belong in a museum, we'll give you a nice place in the museum. You did produce beautiful things and epistemic warfare is imperialism and a lot of our institutions are that way. They say they're liberal but they're not liberal to anything that doesn't agree with the episteme tradition that they have and you're very blessed", "of the best libraries and mines in the world, and I really hope that this institution succeeds. And I believe it will. I'm amazed because the last time I was here... I don't know how many years ago it was, maybe five or seven but I remember coming into this place and it wasn't even used yet. But I mean you know this is a great gift that's been given to you and you have great teachers", "And may we continue to do this. And I believe myself that we are here to save humanity. You know, khuntum khaira ummatin ukhrijat lin nas. You're the best community brought forth for human beings. Imam al-Bukhari says, khayrun nasi lin nas, you must be the best of all people to all people and people today they really... How long will this last?", "that you know like we have schools in Naperville right now, that one class has in it three suicides. And that was unthinkable in the old days. Suicide was virtually unthinkably. You have one school they had 30 suicides! This is not right! These are vital signs that are being lost and you know we have to bring ourselves to life but", "that we'll find there are a lot of good people in this society, Christians and Jews and others you know who were on the same page that we're on in that. And inshallah we work together in this it's very important and you know when we do the right things like permaculture to me it's win-win you know and not only is it win-wins but you then find that some of the best people in the world you know you get to know them and that benefits us a lot.", "single day by memory the whole thing and his dua was making dua for the ummah like that's what he did he was i think in his 80s at the time and he told me I've never wished for anything to be different than the way it was but today i wish i was a young man so i could go with you tomorrow to study", "That's really good advice just about being in nature. And we know the Prophet , he was very deeply connected to the natural world and that natural world spoke to him, and he spoke back with . Walk barefoot in the grass. It's incredible!", "It's not too cold when she'll have to do one shoe who fat and say no Omar said that Remind yourself be like Matt even Adnan and walk barefoot sometimes right yeah, I said no Omar. Said they Even you know I mean Even when you wear your shoes You can imagine that you're walking barefoot you're feeling the earth underneath you these things are all very very valuable to us They're also very good for our health in getting rooted and", "Learning to be human beings again, right? That's one of the things we have to do but I just emphasize it's easy to do that. Hmm It's not difficult even though it might seem to you impossible But this is one of easiest things to do there's also God's mercy. It's so easy to come back and It's very difficult to astray to go astray because at the point where we're at right now There was a lot of work put into that over a lot generations", "a lot of generations. It didn't just happen overnight, you know? And there's a lot money invested in that as well and it's very easy to come back and to be yourself and to natural. And our religion is the religion of service and love. And service and", "and the importance of beauty. The Prophet, when a man asked him about was wearing nice clothes and a good sandal, was that from arrogance? And he said no it's Allah loves beauty. One of the things I find really notable about pre-modern people is they adorned things. They didn't have a lot of things generally but what they did had they always made beautiful", "And when I was in Mauritania, they started using Bic pens. Their traditional pen was a bamboo pen but they started bick pens But the women would adorn them with leather and make them very beautiful so they would actually take the plastic and they would just do a design on it and then put little frills at the end of it and The students would write with these pens and when I asked one of the women why they did that she said", "She said it's so ugly You know the big pen, you know And and what is I what is that thing in humans? That why not just have a functional carpet. Why put the tree of life on the carpet? Why not just Have functional walls why put wainscoting with designs on the on the I mean What is that and how do we restore that because Muslims they dressed beautifully even peasants? Dressed beauty, you", "embroidery and the Sadria that the Egyptian Falaah wears with the striped. People really have become, you don't see the caliphate of God in that human being anymore. And how is that restored? You know traditional societies, tell me any traditional society that was not beautiful. Look at the first nations of this land.", "I mean look at the Inuit, you know, Eskimos who are really a civilization. The Amran that's a good example of Amran but doesn't have cities But everything they did was beautiful Look at the Aborigines You can't believe how beautiful everything they make is and we were like that too We were highly skilled society", "And everything we made was beautiful. And that's because God is beautiful and he loves beauty. Beauty is the splendor of truth, you know? And that means God doesn't love ugliness. And ugleness is the mark of falsehood. Ugliness means you've gone astray. So getting this back again I believe it's going to be easy. And again if we look at Zaytuna and then we look", "are dear to us, look at the beauty they create. You know so God is beautiful if you love God you become beautiful, you become internally beautiful that's the universal routing and then what you produce is graceful and beautiful even the way you walk, even the word you talk, even words you use because you want to use beautiful words, you want", "And that makes us human. You know, that El Maturidi who is one of our great theologians he talks about how God holds us back from evil by putting us in a natural setting. We still do evil but the natural setting is telling us this is wrong, this is wronk, this wrong. What happens however when you put people in an ugly setting of broken windows", "broken glass, graffiti, rats and so forth. You can't believe there's such a thing as truth anymore. You cant' believe that there is any such a things as goodness anymore. And that's what beautification is something we have to do to ourselves. In Islamic art I believe the highest form of art is architecture.", "many other forms of incredible art. You know, but our art according to some it begins with clothing. Some would say it begins the mihrab, the recitation of the Qur'an, the writing of the Quran, but clothing is one of the first things and we believed in beautiful clothing and who didn't? All traditional people were like that you know and it showed their identity, it showed honor, and it show what they believe in, who they are,", "clothing that also we could pray in and not be embarrassed. You look at the Eid prayers, you know, in Nigeria, and you can put it National Geographic, you look at us praying Eid prayer is like please don't take a picture until we're sitting up or standing up again, right? Except for the sisters, they are the ones who come off okay. But we wanted to go with some clothing that would look good, clothing also that we can do ablution with easily. And we made beautiful things", "And you know in Pakistan those of you who have been to Pakistan, or if you're from Pakistan they have in Rawalpindi this incredible museum called Lok Varsa. And Lok Varsha in Punjabi means the tradition of the people and I went to that museum The woman who took me she was one of the curators She said and I was this is a question in my mind", "He said, this is a museum designed to preserve the cultures of this land. Not to destroy them. Because many people say that being put in a museum is like Salatul Janazah. It's the end of your culture. So he said we don't want to do that. And then if you go there and look at all these cultures in Pakistan. Punjabi, Pashtuns, Sindhis...", "They're all these different cultures. And they are all beautiful and everyone is distinctive. Everyone is distinctive, and they're so beautiful it's like beyond words. Look at what the Indonesians do, what the Malays do but this is the way we were traditionally. You go to Rosales, this beautiful retreat we have in Spain and you have a tile which is to me one of the most beautiful tiles in the world.", "but it's called the breath of the most merciful and the colors are soft you know, and then you have what is called in a contracting square which looks like a cross with points and you have expanding square which look like I guess an octagon okay inside that's the breath as the most", "And especially I do i'tikaf there in the last 10 days of Ramadan if I can. And you know, I just like to focus on those tiles because to me they're spiritually therapeutic. Right? So this is who we were and this is how we are and this as who we must be. And beauty is our means right? Beauty, making beauty.", "beauty and you know this again, you know one of our teachers who studied metaphysics we talked tonight about my booty and Kona we and others these are the greatest metaphysicians they are spectacular You know, but this man spent his life studying great metaphysician And that's not something that everybody can do. Not everybody can rocket science You know but this he was visiting a particular place in Pakistan I think body", "Bari Imam or Bulle Shah, I don't know which one it was and he's overstayed his time so he came out It was late at night And he had to be taken to his hotel and this hotel was a long ways away and There's nobody there and then out of the darkness Came this cart A cart driver and those of you who know Urdu. You know what they call that cart? I always forget and You know the cart driver He said if you looked at him his clothes", "his clothes, you could buy all of them for one dollar in the market. He was a poor man and so he spoke to him. He didn't know Urdu, he knew Persian. He spoke to me in Persian and said, Could you take me to the hotel? The man answered in Urdu. He could understand it because the languages are close. He got on the front seat of the car with this poor man, and the man who was he, this world is filled with amazing things began to recite to him from Hafiz and Rumi", "and Rumi, in perfect Persian. And he said in those 45 minutes I learned more about metaphysics than I learned in 30 years. So beauty is the language of truth also. And that's why you know even some of the things we talked about tonight because it put in an intellectual vocabulary not everybody can understand that but when", "When you put that into art and beauty, then everybody gets it. And beauty attracts you to those meanings. This is why also our societies are so beautiful. You know a lot about that. I remember going to one of the great...I think it's the Selimiyya One of the Great Mosques of Sinan in Edirne, I think it is. It's basically red.", "It's like this is the story of the whole universe. You see it say he's telling in colors, he's tellling in symbols He's telling us shapes but like what have you done here? You see so this pulls our souls to the truth and ugliness does the opposite And that's why we want to replace the uglness with beauty Thank you on that note I want to thank you Dr.. Omar on behalf of the community here for coming this way", "coming this way also haja samira for coming and supporting you may you have a blessed trip here the muris mauritanians say that rabas inshallah may you not see any evil um i want to thank everybody for coming out tonight uh may allah subhanahu wa ta'ala bless dr omar abdullah farooq", "him may we benefit from what we've heard tonight and uh may you all return to your homes safe and sound and have a blessed sleep with some dream time inshallah may you say may you see beautiful things in your dreams tonight's one of the signs at the end of time is many beautiful dreams that are true", "that you live in a world where so many people don't believe. So He sent you these incredible dreams. So may you have beautiful dreams, sweet dreams. Insha'Allah. Allah yubarak fiikum. Assalamu alaikum." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/THE INSPIRING STORY OF HAMZA _RA__ THE LION OF ALL_zwkESPnTnjQ&pp=ygUTb21hciBzdWxlaW1hbiBpc2xhbdIHCQm9AIO1pN6f1A%3D%3D_1742866278.opus", "text": [ "If you go to Medina, you visit Shuhada Uhud the martyrs of Uhud and instantly you connect to Hamza Every time you go there and the guide tells you about the way that the events of Uhad unfolded when you are there You will connect to hamza. However many times we underestimate who he was and the role that he played because of how early he died", "how early he died in Islam. And I'm just going to start off with this, this is a man that some of the ulama said had he lived he would have likely been one of the khulafa. He would have like been one khulafah al-rashideen. He will have likely be one of caliphs so that tells you enough that he was considered from the best of the best the sahaba of the prophet sallallaho alaihe wa salam and his love for Allah and his", "in his sincerity, in his wisdom, in guidance and leadership skills. This man could have been one of Khulafa Ar-Rashideen had he lived long enough because that was the rank that the Sahaba understood that he had amongst them. So this is Hamza ibn Abdul Muttalib, the uncle of the Prophet , Asadullah wa Rasoolihi, the Lion of Allah and His Messenger and Sayyid al-Shuhada, the Master of the Shuhada.", "This tells you enough, by the way, when we talk about how people will be ranked on the Day of Judgment and we know we have the Anbiya, the Prophets and the Siddiqoon, the People of Truth. And we have The Shuhadaa and we have Martyrs. Imagine all of the virtues that you read about The Shohadaa, all of The Virtues that you Read About The Martyr's and the Prophet said their master, their leader on the day of judgment is this man Hamza standing representing the rank of The Shouhadaa , the rank Of The Martyrs", "of the martyrs coming forth before Allah to receive his mighty reward. Hamza as we talk about him, his nickname Asadullah of course, the lion of Allah and Sayyid al-Shuhada, the master of the martyrs, the leader of the", "we have spoken about her when we talked about Ja'far radiyaAllahu ta'ala anhu. So if you go back in the series and you listen to the lecture about Jaafar radiyaAllah ta'laanhu, then you will see the story of his daughter, his one descendant that survived him Umama radiya Allah ta'alaa anha. Now, one of the things that we talk about often as we're going through this series is the meaning of the names. When you name your children, have a reason for the way that you are naming them, right? We live in an era where people just", "where people just find something that sounds cute and modern, whatever that means. Throw it on your child and say this is the name of my child. And if you remember we talked about Abu Talib and Subhanallah the way he named his children. So Banu Hashim in particular, it seems even in the days of ignorance when they named their children they had special names, special reasons and intentions for the way that you name your children.", "And Hamza, radiallahu ta'ala anhu, both of their names mean lion. Actually mean asad. Abbas, the Arabs say is when the lion is roaring before it attacks its prey. And so what is the lion superior at or what is The Lion doing? and I know that some of the kids are going to love this especially Abdullah my son because he loves animals right but they talk about the Lions ability", "and the way that the lion even paces its roars, and the noise that it makes. Superior wisdom, it knows how to stake out its prey, and so that speaks to the calculated way that a lion paces itself before jumps on its prey. Al-Abbas means that. The Asad, the Lion, when the lion is roaring, when he's about to attack, when his lion is scoping out its preys. Hamza refers to the lion", "Whenever the lion has attacked its prey and it is starting to tear into the prey, The time when it's eating and feasting on its prey that means Hamza. And by the way Usama refers to post, a post prey So all of these names actually in the Arabic language refer to the lion so Hamza refers to the strength Right? The lion when it showing its superior strengths Subhanallah how it matches Hamza", "Hamza radiyaAllahu ta'ala anhu. So he was named Hamza which also means a lion as it is feasting on its prey so it speaks to his build, it speaks To his strength and of course what was he known for? Before Islam very strong tall, strong handsome popular loved a warrior a hunter an archer one of courage all of the youth looked up to him everyone wanted", "Everyone wanted to be him, so every time he came into the town people would come around him. They made legends about his strength and his particular hunting skills. Hamza liked to hunt the animals that no one else could hunt. Amongst them by the way, lions. So Hamza knew how to tame and hunt lions himself. So everything about him represents a lion and he is the Lion of Allah .", "a skilled archer, a skilled hunter and he had they described him. They said he walked with pride There was a pride in the way that he walked and this was something that Was especially known to the Arabs before Islam right there was an arrogance to their walk Especially the royals amongst them so Hamza radiyaAllahu ta'ala Anhu had a very proud walk Okay This is the physical description of Hamza radhiallahu ta-ala Anhuh And this is who he would be in his society and it matches of course everything that is known about Hamza", "In our memory, in the Muslim memory. From a family perspective of course he's from Banu Hashim He is the paternal uncle of the Prophet Two of the pateral uncles of the prophet embraced Islam two of them did not embrace Islam Who are the two paternal uncles of The Prophet that embraced Islam? It's nice to have a live audience again Abbas and Hamza who were the two that did not Embrace Islam Abu Lahab and", "and Abu Talib, right? Even though they were very different in the role that they played in the seerah. So Hamza radiyaAllahu ta'ala anhu is one of the two paternal uncles to embrace Islam. And he's the only one to embrace this Islam amongst the first because we know that Al-Abbas radiyaAllah ta'la anhu would be much later on in al-Islam. So, Hamza radiyallahu anhu was the only who embraces Islam that early. And if you remember there was an aunt of the Prophet sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam that was extremely close to Hamza. She loved him so much", "him so much and she embraced Islam when he embraced Islam. And we did an episode about her. Does anyone remember her name? Safiyyah bint Abdul Muttalib, the mother of who? Come on someone make me happy. Who? Al-Zubair radiyaAllahu ta'ala Anhu. Safiyah, the Mother of Al- Zubair may Allah be pleased with them. Safiya was the maternal aunt of the Prophet very close to Hamza . When Hamza embraced Islam, She embraced Islam too.", "So this is Hamza radiallahu ta'ala anhu in that regard. Now his closeness and age to the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم makes him unique in another way. He really was not like an uncle to the prophet صلى اللہ عليه وسلام as much as he was like a brother to the Prophets صلى اله عليه وسلاً. And one narration says that Amina and Abdullah, the parents of the Prophetصلى الله عليهم وسلم got married in the same gathering as Abdul Muttalib and Hala bint Wahayb, the mother of Hamza.", "of Hamza. So I'm gonna say that again Abdullah married Amina, the parents of the Prophet got married in the same gathering as Abdul Muttalib married the mother of Hamzah . And so that's why some of the scholars say that they were the same age and if not the same aged extremely close in age the Prophet and Hamzat", "from the same what nurse? And her name was Thuwaiba radiallahu ta'ala anha. So Thuwayba fed both Hamza and the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam therefore they were brothers in Lilaa, they were brother through that nursing so he is his uncle, he is brother Hala bint Wuhaib the mother of Hamza is actually the cousin of Amina the mother", "close in this regard and if you go back to the episode we had about Umm Habiba radiyaAllahu ta'ala anha, you'll remember that when Hamza radiyaAllah ta'la anhu passed away there was a discussion about who would take care of his daughter. And one of the suggestions was that the Prophet Sallallaahu Alaihi Wasallam would marry his daughter and the Prophet said that he is my brother her father is my", "Tidbit that comes from the seerah and there's no way to authenticate this as a hadith But it comes in the books of Seerah is that Hamza radiallahu ta'ala anhu was a witness to the marriage of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and Khadija radiallau ta'la Anha He was one of the witnesses from the prophet Sallallaahu Alaihim side So he was there at the wedding of the prophet sallallu alaihi wa sallam. He fed with the prophets I saw him He was around the prophet throughout his entire life extremely close and", "to the Prophet ﷺ. So, the question is why didn't Hamza just embrace Islam right away? Right? You know you're reading about the family of the Prophet as he called them to Islam first. Why so late? Why did Hamzah not embrace Islam? Right away, the ulama mention a few things. The scholars say first and foremost Hamzat was rarely in Mecca. He was always out in the desert hunting something doing something exploring something", "Exploring something he was the man of adventure Okay, so he was not really in the city while other people would do tijara and they would buy and sell and trade it Hamza radiallahu anhu who was kind of disconnected from City life in Mecca and what other people were doing the tribal affairs of Banu Hashim He was just a guy that would go out. He would learn all of these different things You know think about a person who is so into their craft into their sports It's as if nothing in the world counts nothing else in the World Matters", "with his archery, with his hunting. He was never really in Mecca and you know surely when you actually look through the incidents of the Prophet calling Banu Hashim Hamza is nowhere to be found he's never really been in those gatherings, his name never even comes up so that's one thing The other thing is the ulama say Hamza was just not a person who really cared much about religion as a whole right? He's busy with his", "used to drink a lot of alcohol because before the prohibition of khamr there are incidents of his drinking in fact even after the battle of Badr an incident of him drinking alcohol because the prohibion of alcohol came after Badr so he really was not into deen like I love the Prophet salallahu alayhi wa sallam, I love my nephew I love brother but this religion stuff i'm not interested. I'm going to keep on hunting, I'm gonna keep working on my archery didn't really care much about dunya and akhira", "and akhirah or those concepts none of that really clicked with him right so the point is is that what's very clear is he was distant from it all both physically and mentally not really into the entire discussion of religion now enter the incident of his Islam how did he become Muslim then Abu Jahl taunted the prophet sallallaahu alaihi wa sallam", "persecution of the Muslims as he saw that he wasn't able to root out Islam by the torture of his followers. So when you look at Abu Jahl, Abu Jahal goes one-by-one and he's a tyrant and he is a coward but he goes one by one right with the classes so he starts off with who? The weakest followers of the Prophet . And of course the first murder victim of Abu Jhul was who? Sumayya", "and of course Yasser , the first shuhada, then the torture of Abdullah ibn Mas'ud, the torture those types of people. Then he brings it closer and closer until finally Abu Jahl moves from verbal abuse of the Prophet to starting to get physical with the Prophet as well. So this is a point where Abu Jahal is increasing in his Tughiyam. He's increasing in the way that he is starting to oppress the Prophet and the early Muslims", "early Muslims, he's getting more aggressive with them. And in fact before this incident Abu Jahl grabbed a stone and he went to the Kaaba and the Prophet was praying in front of the Kaabah and he was walking with a stone imagine you know what he said he wanted to do? He said I'm gonna crush his head while he's in sujood You know when a person is a madman like that and he doesn't think properly because of how he's deceived by his own strength", "going to kill him. Today I just woke up and decided, you know what? I'm sick of him, I'm going to go kill him.\" And he goes to the Kaaba and as he's going to the kaabah to crush the Prophet suddenly he drops the stone, he looks his eyes get wide and then he screams and he runs. People are looking around like, what just happened? So Abu Jahl says that when I went to kill the Prophet or to step on him,", "finished his salah, he said, if he would have done so, Jibreel would have killed him on the spot. Jibaree was ready to kill Abu Jahal on the spots if he had tried to harm the Prophet . And Abu Jahil said that I saw a trench of fire in front of me right as I was about to kill the Prophet and this is what some of them mentioned the ayat", "call out to his associates, we will call Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says, we'll summon the guardians of hellfire. The angels who guard hellfire so Abu Jahl saw the angels in front of him and he saw a trench of fire and it caused him to panic and he ran away did that make him repent? No! He went right back to oppressing the Prophet because he convinced himself but even though he had heard the Quran and this is important by the way when you see that Allah really established", "a proof against these people. He heard the Quran, he admitted that it was miraculous in private. He admitted that the Prophet's character was superior in private, he admit all of this things about the Messenger in private but at the same time Abu Jahl was willing to die for his tribe. This is about Banu Mahzum versus Banu Hashim My tribe vs His I cannot acknowledge he is the messenger of Allah because then his tribe gains the upper hand over my tribe", "my tribe. So he continues to harass the Prophet . So one day, he goes to the Prophet in the Ka'ba and starts to push him around. And Abu Jahl throws a nasty insult at him in front of the people. Very nasty insult. Now realize that you know the Arabs had these red lines of sorts when it came to like cursing a person's family.", "that had some asabiya in it, some sort of insult to his family that was embedded in the insult to the Prophet ﷺ. And none of the tribesmen of the Prophet were around to defend him. What used to happen is that Banu Hashim, Banu Muttalib, the tribesman of the prophet even those that were not Muslim they would stand up for him if someone tried to harass him because", "they were dutiful to Muhammad as a person of their tribe. So this time Abu Jahl really looked cowardly, he looked bad in front of the people because he noticed the Prophet had no one around him from his tribe so he used that as an opportunity to particularly insult him using his family. So he did so and some of the", "coming back into town. So think about yourself sitting around the Kaaba, here's what Hamza was known to do. Hamza would hunt all these exotic animals he would come back, the people, the youth in particular would rush him right? If they could get his autograph they would everyone would rush Hamza and he would...he was a very social person. He'd go to the Kaabah and he'd sit in the various circles around the kaabah, people hanging out at that time", "the tribesmen, they would invite Hamza to sit with them. He would sit with him for some time he would distribute some of the meat that he had slaughtered and hunted on the outskirts of Mecca catch up with people and things of that sort. So Hamzah comes back from a hunting trip which is very like Hamzat . And as he's coming back he goes straight to the Kaaba to do his thing,", "And this woman comes out to him and she is from the family of Abdullah ibn Jid'an. She's a female servant from the truck, from the Family of Abdullah Ibn Jad'aan and she lives around Safa and she witnessed the incident of Abu Jahal humiliating the Prophet . So she goes to Hamza radiyaAllahu taala anhu and in a way starts to say to him like you know how are you okay with this? You're coming here and you're demonstrating", "and you're demonstrating your bravery, you're showing how proud you are. But at the same time, you know, your nephew was treated this way and you did nothing about it.\" Hamza said, what do you mean? And she relayed to Hamzah , the entire incident. Hamzat said, awa qad fa'al? Did he really do that? She said yes. Hamza , did the Prophet , did Muhammad my nephew respond", "was dignified. He never responded to the insults of people and Hamza became even more enraged he said, not a single person had the decency to stand up for my nephew and respond to Abu Jahl? And she said no. So Hamzah goes marching towards the gatherings around the Kaaba The way that he's described is that the anger was in his face and he was sweating out of anger I mean you saw the redness in his", "raging, he was fuming. He's walking past everyone and they knew something was wrong. He wasn't greeting anybody. He is walking straight to Abu Jahl. People are getting in the way and they're trying to say what's going on Hamza? What happened? Hamzah goes straight to Al-Jahl right amongst his clansmen, amongst his tribesman, amongst the Banu al-Makhzoom so he has no fear I don't care if your whole tribe is around you.", "takes his kous which is his bow and he punches him with his bow on his hand right in the middle of his head okay now when Hamza punches you that's a knockout punch every time okay if Abu Jahl is a man who is the size of Umar bin Khattab so you read about the size", "punched him that could have killed him. Right? But because it's Abu Jahl, he survived but his head split open right away and the blood started to flow from his head. Hamza doesn't care about the scene that he is making. He stands on top of him and he says, starts to call him names. You dare insult Muhammad salallahu alayhi wa sallam. And then in the midst of him talking down Abu Jahr, he is literally standing on top", "You dare curse him? When I am on his religion, I say what he says. Right? He doesn't even know what he does. He doesn' t know anything about Islam. He don't know what to call it right? But I'm on his religious and I say that he says just because he knows that would make Abu Jahl mad. And that's part of his war cry at the moment. Now when he does that Banu Makhzum gets up and they're about to attack Hamza", "Abu Jahl was a smart man, right? He's foolish in his rejection of Islam. But what was his nickname before Islam? Abu al-Hakam, the father of wisdom. He's manipulative. He is controlling. I mean there's a reason why he rose to that position in society. It wasn't all his strength, right. He knew how to play people. He know how to these tribal lines. Abu Jahal sees what is about to happen here and he knows that if Hamza turns against us", "turns against us, we're in trouble. Because up until this point there is no powerful person that embraced Islam. No warrior, no one who held the status of a person like Hamza radiyaAllahu anhu had embraced Islam which is why Abu Jahl could pick on the Muslims the way that he would. You had some wealthy people, some people that were considered you know somewhat noble by their standards but he knows that if I let this go,", "So Abu Jahl, right away, even though he just got popped by Hamza radiyaAllahu ta'ala anhu while the blood is still coming from his head. He stands up and he says no, no,no. He says everyone stop calm down. He's right I went too far with his nephew. And he says دعوه فإني سببت ابن عميه سبا قبيحة He said you know leave him alone because I really did insult his nephew with an insult I should not have insulted him with. Right so Abu Jahal is trying to play now", "you know, a person who's apologetic. I'm sorry, let's calm things down since when does Abu Jahl want to deescalate? Right? That should tell you everything about how much he feared the Islam of the likes of Hamza radiyaAllahu ta'ala anhu So he knows that Hamza probably just said what he said and he was right in the moment of anger. He wasn't really a Muslim come on, he didn't care about religion And he wants to stop this before it gets out of hand so Abu Jahal de-escalates Hamza", "He leaves in that state. He doesn't say a word after that, he doesn't punch him again, he doesnt fight Banu Makhzum, he goes back home. Hamza said I got home and he actually related that night, he said and I was so upset with myself confused conflicted I didn't know what to do because he said Shaytan came them and tried to talk him out of it like oh you're playing", "and what about your forefathers? So he started to give him, he heard the whispers of the rhetoric of Shaytan. What about your four fathers and Abdul Muttalib and you've shamed your forefather's in their family. He said at the same time did I really just accept the religion of my nephew or not? So, he said he did not sleep that night now Hamza radiyaAllahu ta'ala anhu said he believed in Allah, he believed a God because he had that fitrah so he knew the idols were there", "But he believed in Allah. So, he said, I asked Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, I ask Allah to put guidance in my heart, to guide me to what was right, to allow something to happen, to settle it. If this is what I'm supposed to be doing then oh Allah! Right? And again, to him the idols are gods but there's one supreme God so oh Allah just let it settle in my hear.", "way in Qadr, a great lesson and divine decree. You know think about this situation how Allah used Abu Jahl who feared Islam growing right to bring about the religion to bring Islam in the heart of Hamza . Right? Think about that Divine Decree you know Abu Jahil thought he was getting a leg up on the Prophet when he insulted the Prophet but what ended up happening was", "would embrace Islam. So Allah allowed him to insult the Prophet as a means of guidance for Hamza to become the most powerful aid of the Prophet . And by the way, there was an unique ʿasabiyya to this, a tribalism to this. Who insulted the Prophet before Abu Jahl? Who was it? Who is the first person? I'll give you a hint his name is in the Quran.", "But Abu Lahab is Hamza's brother. It's different, right? You know, his own uncle insulted him that way, a much nastier insult than whatever Abu Jahl said to him in a very consequential time. But that's different because he's his uncle, he's our family. But you, Abu Jğl from Bar Makhzum, don't you dare. Stay back and don't hurt. Even if you believe in some other way,", "or whatever it is, but ask God alone. Say, oh God if this is the truth guide me to it and watch what happens to your heart as a result of that right? So the Prophet told Hamza radiyaAllahu ta'ala anhu to do just that and Hamza prayed on it he thought about it and he said to the prophet I testify that you are telling the truth and he", "Go ahead and proclaim your religion open. دينك يا ابن أخي, go ahead and show your religion to the people. Oh my nephew, I will support you. Subhanallah, it's really amazing. And then he says to the Prophet ﷺ, I wouldn't want the whole world if it meant that I would return to my first deen, meaning the religion of Paul. So now Islam is precious to me. I know you're telling the truth. I believe in your religion. Iman settled in my heart. Faith and guidance has settled in", "heart so he says to the prophet go out and proclaim your religion i will protect you now now i have your back can you imagine how dumb abu jahl felt when he heard this and this is when the scholars of sira actually mentioned there was a turning point that before hamza accepted islam", "accepted Islam, now there was the talk of negotiating with the Prophet trying to compromise with him because they knew if a battle were to break out between the Muslims and them, Hamza would surely cause a bloodbath. They didn't want anything to do with this man in battle and in war so things did indeed change. This is also when the scholars mentioned", "Reminding the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam The verses, right? That the best person who is better in speech than the one Who works righteous deeds and who believes in Allah And says that I am from the Muslims Fast forward all the way to where Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala Says", "I mean persist on your ways of good, respond to evil with that which is better and you will find that even your enemies will become your protective allies. The ulama mentioned that this verse came down after the Islam of Hamza and as a glad tidings of the Islam Of Umar ibn al-Khattab radiyaAllahu ta'ala anhu That if you think this is big someone even greater than this is about to come to you soon Right? So this is the first of that class of powerful men", "that are embracing Islam, someone else is around the corner and that is Umar ibn al-Khattab . So in Mecca we don't know much about his life. It seems he continued his ways for the most part. He continued to hunt, he continued to be who he was but at the same time he became from the regulars of Dar Al Arqam Okay so he became a student of the Prophet , a student", "study with the early Muslims when anyone would come he was the de facto guard of Dar al-Arqam so if there was a knock on the door or some noise outside Hamza stood up, he pulled out his bow, he pulled out his sword and that was their protection. It was the expectation that Hamzah was going to be the guardian of the Muslims in these early days now what we do know is that you find Hamzahl playing this role", "particularly once they make the hijrah and they go to medina and when the actual battles start when the actually narrated that before the hijra hamza radiallahu ta'ala wanted one final go at the people of mecca so he actually went out to the kaaba and he announced he said if anyone wants to fight i'm here anyone want to go for one more duel", "trying to escape the persecution, Hamza was going out and calling out to see if anyone wanted one final battle, one final fight in Mecca before he goes up. Nobody accepted the call of Hamzah to fight him. They didn't even try to crowd him at the time. They just said, you know what? Let them go. They make the Hijrah. Hamzal was paired off with or he stayed in the house of Kulthum ibn al-Hadm who we will", "will one day talk about insha'Allah taala, but one of the nobles of the Ansar. And the Prophet ﷺ paired him off with or made him the brother of someone specific and that is Zayd ibn al-Harithah radiyaAllahu ta'ala anhu. Now Zayd of course is from Mecca like him. But they would live together and they were like brothers because remember Zayd was at that time you know the adopted son of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam,", "And so Hamza and Zayd rode together. And in fact, we'll find that a few things come out of this one. Remember the battle of Badr? They didn't have horses. They weren't prepared for a full-out battle. So Hamza, and Zaid were actually sharing the same she camel on the day of Badir. We also see that Hamzah entrusted Zaid with his wasaya, with his will and with his inheritance.", "would tell Zayd radiallahu ta'ala anhu what he wanted to happen after he passed away. And he was always prepared for that moment when Allah subhanahu wa ta'la would take his life. The Prophet salallahu alayhi wa sallam, however, did not just count him in that regard, right? This is his brother. This is uncle. This the first of the powerful to embrace Islam. He is certainly a warrior. The prophet also considered him", "14 advisors amongst whom was Hamza in the early period in Al-Madinah. Now, what was the first battle of Hamza ? Badr? Close! But prior to Badr there were two expeditions or potential skirmishes that would take place and if you were to list the firsts in regards to Hamzah ,", "SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam entrusted Hamza radiyaAllah ta'ala Anhu as the first general of Islam, the first flag bearer of Islam in both expeditions prior to the Battle of Badr. What is this referring to? Of course once they were in Medina, the people of Mecca stole all of their belongings raided whatever they left behind and their families and they stole their belongings so the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihissalam allowed for attacks on some of the caravans", "what was stolen from them in Mecca. Right? So the first one of those, the Prophet sent Hamza to lead a group of the Sahaba on the first raid against Quraysh and so it was 30 of them and they intercepted one of the caravans as it was heading to Al-Sham, as it is heading to greater Syria. And Hamza had 30 men with him Abu Jahl happened to be in that particular caravan going to Al Sham and they have 300.", "didn't care. He said, we're going to fight all 300 of them. Okay? Now what ends up happening is that as Hamza radiyaAllahu ta'ala anhu comes forth the first general of Islam, the first one to lead a raid commissioned by the Prophet sallallaahu alaihi wa sallam and Abu Jahl prepares his man to fight back there was a man who was there by the name of Majd ibn Amr Al-Juhani who intervened between them and this was in his area it was in the Juhaina territory", "and he was someone that was considered an ally to both sides. From a tribal perspective, he had a good relationship with Banu Hashim, he has a good relation with Ban u Makhzum He was in good standing with the Prophet , good standing Makkah, good standing Madinah So he basically separated between them And made peace between them and set them both on their way. So Abu Jahl and caravan continued to Al-Sham Hamza out of respect for this man", "He turned around with those 30 men and they came back to Al-Madinah. A second time was Al-Abwaa, and this time in Al-Abwaa the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam himself went out by the way in this expedition which is significant because the first one the Prophet went out in but guess who the general was and holding the flag? Hamza . So his position is very clear as the lead in all of these situations right? So Hamza leads however there was no actual battle", "no actual battle that would take place in Al-Abwaa. However, the expedition went out to Al-Abwaa Now comes the Battle of Badr So what did it look like to see Hamza radiyaAllahu ta'ala anhu in war? Hamza , you can imagine he wanted to fight the Meccans way before this He was ready and Hamza had this feather from an ostrich You know, he hunted these exotic animals right so, you know people that keep their", "souvenirs, right? The different animals. I'm not saying there was a deer head in the home of Hamza radiallahu anhu or something like that. I know in Texas this is very appealing to some of you, okay? But Hamza radiyallahu had this exotic feather of an ostrich and he put it on his chest. He pin it sometimes to his helmet, sometimes to", "You're wearing pretty much the same thing. You're trying to kind of hide yourself amongst the ranks. Hamza radiyaAllahu ta'ala anhu, to him it was, come at me. Right? I want to fight and I'm not hiding from you. And this was a sign they said of his shujaa, of his courage that he would wear something so distinctive and hold himself out before battle. Hamzah radiyaAllah ta'la anhu was also one of those who could fight with two swords. Now if you carry the swords of those people", "You know for us these days it's like to carry one of them takes two hands and you fall. Hamza could wield both swords in battle, And this was one of his skills that he could fight with two swords in one battle, and he had control with both of his arms So they go out to the Battle of Badr Hamzah , the first general of Islam Carrying the flag clearly the Prophet is organizing the army in a way", "a way that Hamza radiyaAllahu ta'ala anhu is the lead. And before the battle started, there was a name by the name of Al-Aswad ibn Abdul Asad and he was from the tribe of Abu Jahl. He's from the other side, Al-Aswad ibbn Abdul Asaad. And he swore that he was going to walk right through the Muslims and he would drink from the well of Badr. Arrogant man from the", "of taunting the Muslims because the Muslims had occupied the wells of Badr. Now realize, the Muslims were not expecting the large army that was coming in Badr, Badr was not looking good for them they didn't have the animals of war, they didn'y have their proper weapons, they really were not ready but they knew this huge army was coming to get them with all of their animals and all of there weapons so they occupied the well of Badir strategically right? Al-Aswad Ibn Abdul Asad said", "said, I'm going to go and drink from the well of the Muslims or I'll destroy it or I will die for it. So I am gonna plow right through them and I am going to drink from their well to taunt them because no one is going to fight me. He was wrong. Hamza immediately when he came out in front of him, he sliced his legs and killed him. This is actually the first man to die in the battle of Badr and Hamzah was not scared", "was not scared of him at all, right? Threw him back like whatever. You know, we are not intimidated. We're not afraid of you. So Hamza radiallahu anhu was the first to strike on the day of Al-Badr. At that point, Ritba bin Rabi'ah he comes out and he has his brother Shaybah, of course and they call out and they say send us three that are going to fight us. Okay, send us your three best men. Three of the Ansar came out", "came out to fight them, to duel before the battle. And he said, you know of course referring to himself, Uthba, Shaybah and Tu'ima Ibn Adi He said, You know what? These three men are not equivalent to us send us some more noble people. Hamza comes out Ali and Ubaydah Ibn Al-Harith and Uthaba says, he calls on he says who are you? This was Hamza himself who responded", "of the Prophet , Asadullah wa Rasulihi. I am the Lion of Allah and His Messenger. You know in battle these things are permissible, right? People show their strength in battle before their duels this is permissible so Hamza says I am The Lion Of Allah And The Lion of his messenger and Ritba he says a noble and worthy opponent you", "At least they didn't send three other people. So they're sending their best from the very beginning which shows that they're serious about this battle Of course Hamza kills him, Ali kills Shayba, Rubaidah Ibn Al-Harith kills Tuaima But at the same time Rubaidh was wounded and he would die later on as a result of that battle I'm sorry Alwaleed ibn Utbah. I was trying to think about who the third person was so it's Alwalaeed ibn Uthbah who is fighting", "So anyway, the Battle of Badr then ensues. We know that Hamza was extremely brave and the Battle Of Badr was of course a decisive victory for the Muslims And of course they derived a confidence after seeing these three men fight and duel with the other three prior to the battle even starting However this made Hamzah a key person", "was going to come after Badr when the people got back to Mecca and they had lost some of their elders Abu Jahl, Rutbah right? Umayyah these huge names amongst the Mushrikeen amongst the disbelievers died in the battle of Badr. The poetry that would come out of Mecca the environment of Meccathe widows", "to get revenge from the Muslims for their casualties in the battle of Badr. And if you think about this, subhanAllah, these people they didn't have Akhirah, they didn'y have any notion of the hereafter, they don't have any notions of Shahadah or martyrdom or anything like that right? So this was all that they had was their pride and this was a huge blow to their ego everything we persecuted the Muslims were for all 13 years and then we lost our leaders,", "especially with Hind bint Uthbah, who was killed by Hamza . Hind bnt Uthbah was fantasizing about what she would do to Hamzah , the way she would mutilate his body all of the harm that he would commit. She was talking about it, she was authoring lines of poetry to the point that it became an obsession for her", "had done to her father, Utbah. And you have to know that with the Battle of Uhud they didn't just come out with their larger army and their more prepared cavalry and what they were brewing inside of them of hatred and the desire for vengeance and revenge. They also came with the women folk, with the woman folk of Mecca. And so the wives, the widows, the daughters came forth. So Hind comes out, the wife of Ikram ibn Abi Jahal", "bin Abi Jahal, Fatima bint Walid the daughter of Mas'ud al-Thakafi, the wife of Amr ibn Al-'As, the mother of Musab ibn Umayn. All these enemies right? The women folk came out too and they had these lines of poetry. They were singing all of these verses about vengeance, right? And they even had extra animals with the wine because they wanted to celebrate over the corpses of the Muslims. So they're coming back to Medina actually for Uhud with a vengeance", "They wanted to really mutilate the Muslims. They didn't just want to defeat them, they wanted to mutilate them after the defeat. So the battle of Uhud starts to take place. In the beginning of the battle I know that some of you might... We all know the death of Hamza on the Battle of Uhd right? But what you probably don't know is that before he died, He actually killed many of the enemy.", "Okay, so when the battle first started One of the people that he killed was a man by the name of Suba' bint Abdul Uzza. Who is considered one of the strongest of Quraysh. Hamza killed him with two blows and The narrations Mentioned that up to 2 thirds of the casualties on the other side on the day of Uhud were from the hands of Hamzah What a way to go out right? Up to 30 or 31", "or 31 people Hamza radiallahu ta'ala anhu would kill before he was killed by the spear of Wahshi. So Hamza radhiallahu wa ta'la anhu comes out and Hamza does what Hamza did, and of course we know that in Uhud the Muslims had the upper hand they had the victory so how did he die? Wahshi bin Harab of course was a slave of Jubair ibn Mutarn", "Al-Khair freed him on the condition that he would kill Hamza radiyaAllahu ta'ala anhu and Hind offered him a specific compensation for the murder of Hamza to kill him and to cut out his liver so that Hind could chew it and spit it out. They wanted to make an example out of Hamzah radiyaAllah ta'laanhu Wahshi described the moment, and the Abyssinians particularly were known for their spear play", "SubhanAllah, even when you look at the narrations about Eid. When A'ish and the Prophet would watch the Abyssinian Muslims they had the spears that they would practice with. And so Wahshi was a specialist with his spear and he had a particular spear that he was known to really use very well. Wahshi described the moment He said that I went out on the day of Uhud and I hid behind this boulder", "the rest of the battle I literally just kept my eyes on Hamza and I waited for something to be exposed with him, I waited before the first moments where I could kill him. And SubhanAllah he says that you know I saw him roaring like a lion through the battle and demolishing the enemy. He said until after he killed Ibn Abdul Uzza we talked about, he said that his armor was raised just a little bit to wear some of his lower abdomen", "So I said, there's my opportunity. So Wahshi said, I looked at him and then I pinpointed him and threw my spear at him And it went right through his body, through his lower abdomen. So it actually went through him. And he says Hamza was so strong that he got up and still pursued me even as the spear was through his", "even with the spear through his body until eventually he succumbed to the wound and he passed away, رضي الله تعالى عنه, the master of the shuhada, Sayyid al-Shuhada. Now, of course this is a difficult, difficult thing for the Prophet ﷺ as it is. To lose someone like Hamza is not easy. He's definitely at the chief of the casualties that would die on the day of Uhud", "About 72 or 73 people that died in Uhud from the Muslims amongst them Hamza and of course Abdullah ibn Jahsh And Mus'ab Ibn Umair and some of the most well-known Sahaba that passed away in the day of Uhud. Hamzah is the chief of those martyrs, and he's the chief Of all martyrs of all time. All of the shuhada will line up behind him on the Day of Judgment It's hard enough to lose Hamza", "But of course beyond that, after the battle was over and because of what had taken place where the archers left their position. And the Prophet went up into the mountain of Uhud so the battlefield itself was relinquished to them. To celebrate, to claim the battlefield at that point where the Muslims had fled or they'd gone up into The Mountain. They then started to make an example, they started to mutilate the bodies of the shahada", "the shuhada it wasn't just hamza by the way but it was all of them that they started to cut off their ears they start to cut their noses they started do things to their bodies nasty things to thier bodies celebrating with their wine chanting their poetry you know these horrific things that they were doing to them right as their moment of gloating this is all they have in dunya sick in the heart at this point disease people and hind", "asks for the liver of Hamza to be cut out where she would chew it and she would spit it out. So SubhanAllah, after they had finished doing what they did to the bodies then the Muslims come back to the battlefields And the Prophet goes to of course the body of Hamzah . And the prophet looks at Hamzat and he sees the mutilation of the body", "cut off his limbs, you know did things to him that really were a disgusting sight. Rasulullah looks at Hamza and they said that the cry of the Prophet on that day was unlike the cry from the Prophet any other day. The way he wept over the body of Hamza was different from any other weeping like that's his uncle, that's is brother, that is someone so near and dear to his heart but Subhanallah even then the Prophet immediately what", "immediately what does he say? He tells the Zubayr, do not let Safiyyah see this sight. Go stop your mother from coming to see this site. SubhanAllah Rasulullah SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam knows if I can't bear this sight right if this sight is hurting me so much then Safiyya what's his sister going to do? What's my aunt going to", "Safiyyah is marching forward to Uhud, she's yelling at the Sahaba that fled. Calling them names, she saying did you leave the Prophet ? Did you leave Hamza? What happened? Why did you lead them and as she is marching and marching and Zubair is trying to stop his mom And she's going straight forward and she's looking for Hamza. And Zubayr doesn't know what to do and finally Zubaihr says, Ya Ummah, oh my mother this was an order from the Prophet . So then she stops right", "And that's when she says what happened to Hamza and Zubair tells Safiyyah radiyaAllahu ta'ala anha, that Hamzah has been killed. Safiya radiyaAllah ta'la anha has these two clots right? She anticipated something was wrong so she sends these two cloths back with the Zubayr to shroud Hamzat radiya Allah ta'alaa anhu So Zubaiir makes his way back to the Prophet salallahu alayhi wa sallam with these two clothes to shroud", "and Rasulullah is crying over the body of Hamza . And he says , May Allah have mercy on you, O my uncle. And the Prophet starts to praise him. And first thing he says, You were always one who enjoined the ties of kinship. You brought us together. You loved your family. You brough us together", "Always. You know, when you say fa'al, fa'ul, like he's always doing khayr. You were always doing good. Always at the forefront of good. And Rasulullah SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam says, had it not been for the grief of Safiyyah, like if I wasn't worried about Safiyah seeing your body, the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihissalam said, I would have preferred to leave you so that the birds would consume you instead and then Allah brings you back on the day of judgment. Meaning like this sight,", "dignity of the birds taking your flesh but Allah will gather you certainly on the day of judgment. But I don't want to leave you out for too long because I don' t want Safiyyah to see what I'm seeing.\" SubhanAllah, so Rasulullah was truly worried about the sister seeing Hamza as much as he cried for him. By that time Zubair came holding the two shrouds for Hamzah and when people were", "was about to shroud him, there was an Ansari man next to Hamza who didn't have anything to cover his body. So the Prophet took one shroud and he shrouded Hamza and he could not shroud the entire body of Hamza like Mus'ab when we'll talk about him. And he shrouding Hamza with one covered the bottom half and he covered the", "of course started to lead the janazah and there's all types of different narrations about the jana'is of Hamza and the shuhada of Uhud. How would have a janazat taken place? Did it take place? How many takbirat, how many you know, Janazzas did he pray? And one thing about Hamzah radiyaAllahu taala anhu that narrates is that the Prophet when he prayed upon Hamza He did multiple Takbiraat beyond what is usually done in the janaza", "authentically about Abu Salama by the way. Prophet did nine takbirat in the jinnahs of Abu Salamah, what did he say between them? We don't know but it was unusual and they say when the prophet prayed upon Hamza we did up to 70 takbeers. SubhanAllah you imagine that Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar as he was praying on Hamza some of the narration suggests that the prophets like some prayed 10x10 with", "and Hamza was in each one of the janazas. Like he left his body up there, salallahu alayhi wa sallam, and they kept bringing in the bodies, and the Prophet salallu alaihi wa salam prayed on the bodies of ten by ten. And then the Prophet sallalahu alaihe wa sallaam proceeded to bury them. And we know that Hamza radiyaAllahu ta'ala anhu and Abdullah were buried separately in a grave, and then the rest of them, Musab radiyaAllah ta'aleh anhu, and", "memorized, the Prophet buried them in that order, in that fashion by their Hif of the Quran. May Allah make us from the people of the Qur'an. Allahumma Ameen Now there are a few things to be mentioned here as well The first is that when the Prophet saw what was done to Hamza radiyaAllahu ta'ala anhum the mutilation and when the Sahaba saw the way that Quraysh was so shameless", "they mutilated the bodies of the Muslims in Uhud. Think about their mindset and where they were at the time. We let your captives go in Badr, right? The Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam let them go in badr. Not only did he not kill them or mutilate them, he freed them Sallallahu Alaihissalam some of them for just the ransom of being able to teach Muslims how to read. Like we showed you so much ihsan, so much excellence in badir", "us, you mutilate our deceased. So it was a sign of the ethical disparity between the Muslims and their opponents in this regard. And so some of the Ansar at that moment started to swear that they will mutilate the bodies of the people of Mecca. That not only will we get revenge but we will make an example of them as they made an example", "Prophet said in that moment of hurt and pain as he was crying over the body of Hamza radiyaAllahu ta'ala anhu, that I will make an example of 70 of them. The way they made an example 70 of us, I will be making an example for 70 of then. Allah sends Jibreel to the prophet in those difficult moments. Surah An-Nahl verse 1 26", "وَمِنْ عَاقِبُوا بِمِثْلِ مَا عُعِقِفْتُمْ بِهِ وَلَئِن صَبَرْتٌ لَهُوَ خَيْرٌ لَّكُمُ وَاصْبِرْ وَما صَدْرُكَ إِلَّا بِاللهِ Subhanallah. Jibreel Ayeslam comes to the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam with these verses, if you retaliate then let your retaliation only be equivalent to what you have suffered but if you patiently endure, if show sabr then that is certainly best for those who show sabar. وَصْبَراً وَ ما صَبرُكُ إِلاَّ بِ اللَّهِ Allah telling the Prophet", "be patient and where are you going to derive that patience from? Allah, You'll derive it from Allah . Ya Rasulullah don't do to them what they did to yours. SubhanAllah maintain the moral high ground, maintain the ethical high ground over these people and the Prophet responded he said I will be patient Insha'Allah. SubhahnaHu Alaihi Wasallam that's why in Fath Makkah The same people who mutilated their own in Uhud there at the mercy of the prophet in Mecca Subhanallah What could He have done to them", "what could he have done to them, right? And justifiably, remember when you mutilated us in our city in Medina? Well, we're back now. And you're at the mercy of the Prophet ﷺ. And so now it can be done to you in the same way you did it to our loved ones. Think about the emotions, right?\" The Prophet said, no I'm gonna be patient. So that's the first thing this incident at the death of Hamza . The other things SubhanAllah about the death", "when what it did to the city of Medina at the time, when they all went back to Medina after Uhud. Everybody in Medina had a deceased person from Uhud, right? Everyone had a relative that was killed in Uhud in some way. So everyone in Medinah was crying and there was a particular thing called An-Niyaha which was the wailing ceremonies, the mourning that the women would do in particular", "Prophet was walking the streets of Medina and he sees the crying and the wailing of the women in Medinah. And the men as well, and their niyaha ,and their grief over what has happened. And The Prophet ,he puts his head down and he says, You cry over your dead ones. He said,", "There's no one to cry over him. Like subhanAllah, his sadness, sallAllahu alayhi wa sallam. All these families in Medina are gathered and they're all crying over their deceased ones. He said but my uncle Hamza who the Prophet SallAllah Alaihi Wasallam cried more for than anyone that they'd ever seen right? The way he cried over Hamza was the deep cry. They said the weeping of the Prophet when Hamzah radiyaAllahu ta'ala Anhu was massacred when he was murdered that way. So he said Hamza has no one", "So what did they do in Medina? They went all around the Prophet's house and they started to loudly wail out of their love for the Prophet . SubhanAllah. Like think about their love from the Messenger , like we ignored him while we were crying over our own, we forgot that he lost his uncle in this battle and he doesn't have his family with him , you know it's different", "And so they all went in front of the house Of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam And they started to cry and mourn and weep And this is when the hukum The ruling of al-niyaha, the prohibition of mourning Wailing out loud came down Only after the death of Hamza radiyaAllahu ta'ala anhu Wailing is to shout, to cry loudly At the death or a person So Hamza was the last person that this would be allowed for After that the prohibiton came down", "that there is no niyaha, there's no wailing at the time of death over a person. And the Prophet said, Sayyid al-Shuhada ya'ind Allahi yawmul qiyamah hamza min abdul muttareb As we said it is an authentic hadith about him . And Rasullullah would visit the shuhadah of Uhud and by the way he would pray janazah on the shohadah multiple times. There's a ruling in this that if I missed the janazha", "to attend the janazah and I go there later, can I pray janazha? Yes you can. Days after yes, weeks after yes. The Prophet was still praying janazh on the shuhada of Uhud years later he went out and prayed janazhan on them again . So how many jana' did the prophet perform on Hamza and the shohadah of Uhd And the Prophet would point to them and say, I am a witness upon these people. I am their witness on the day of judgment. SubhanaAllah, these amazing human beings", "human beings and when the Prophet was about to die, he went out to visit Hamza radiyaAllahu ta'ala anhu and the shuhada one last time. And he prayed upon them one last Time and then he went to the Baqi next to him where the Sahaba were buried and then the prophet went to his home where the sickness would become severe and he would pass away . And so this is Hamza , and the place that he has in Islam", "that he was. Now subhanAllah, I know I'm going for a very long time but I want to mention a few things here in conclusion. Number one, one of the amazing things about this is that Wahshi, the one who threw the spear to kill Hamza radiallahu ta'ala anhu and Hind, the", "And their Islam was described as being outstanding. So they didn't just become Muslim, They actually became pious people Think about that. Hind the Prophet forgave her right away when he went back to Mecca and she was afraid How am I going to approach the Prophet when I caused him that much pain? How am i gonna seek his forgiveness? She sought the forgiveness from the Prophet and Rasulallah forgave", "went on and she became a pious Muslim woman. Wahshi, and in fact there was narration about Hinds coming to the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam and complaining that Abu Sufyan was cheap with her. And the Prophet said to take from his wealth but do not exceed what you need right when you take from His wealth so the Prophet even showing her lenience and the Prophet speaking to her with Ihsan, with excellence and helping her in her situation she became", "And there is a narration about Wahshi, which is very interesting because sometimes the way the stories were told, subhanAllah in and of itself Is a lesson for us. It's an authentic narration it's a long narration from Ja'far ibn Amr Ibn Umayya who said I went out with Abdullah ibn Adi and we reached a town of Al-Hims Wahshi radiAllahu Anhu settled in Al-hims in Syria may Allah Subhana Ta'ala free it became a great Mujahideen", "became a great Mujahid in Islam, a great warrior in Islam. And he said we went out to Al-Hims and we were asking about the Sahaba their tabi'een so we asked where is Wahshi? So they pointed to where Wahshi lives and they said we want to go ask him about the killing of Hamza . I mean he is marked forever in Islam as that person right? So They went to Wahshi and they went up to him and they", "full water skin, like he was staying in his shade. He was really away from the people but he was residing in his own element and his own system right? This was a man that had moved on from taking the life of someone very precious to the Prophet and the Muslims So they said we went up to him and we were short distance from him And Ubaidullah was wearing a turban and Wahshi could not see except for his eyes and then Ubaiddullah he said to me", "And Wahshi, he looked at him and he said no but I know that Adi married a woman named Umm Qital the daughter of Abul As and she delivered a boy from him in Mecca. And he started to go through it but the point is that your feet resemble... SubhanAllah he said I know, it's actually fascinating, I know Adi maried a woman called Umm Qitaal the daughter Abul as and she deliverd a boy for him in Makkah and I was the one who look for a nurse for that boy in Makka", "like his feet that's how sharp Wahshi was I remember the feet of a baby that i carried in Mecca long time ago and your feet looked like that baby's feet so he uncovered his face and he said that's me so he said can you tell me the story of how Hamza radiallahu anhu was killed and Wahshi starts to recount", "particularly how the Prophet had asked him to describe how Hamza died and the Prophet was so hurt that the Prophet could not even look at the face of Wahshi. He forgave him, he accepted his Islam but he couldn't even look in his face. So Wahshi says I lived with that pain. I lived knowing that I caused that hurt to the Prophet . SubhanAllah imagine like how am I going to recover from this? I caused him so much pain. The Prophet couldn't look at my face because he remembered", "He remembered the murder of Hamza radiallahu anhu when he looked at me. He forgave me, but it was hard for the Prophet ﷺ to look at me So he said until the Khilafah Abu Bakr He said I went out in Hurub al-Ridda I took that same spear that I killed Hamzah with and I marked Musaylim Al-Kadhab The false prophet the man who killed so many Huffadh of the Quran this wicked man And he said I win't in the battle and I", "I killed it. I threw Hamza and it went right through Musaylimah Al-Kadhab, And I said one for one, I killed the best of people and then I killed worst of people Subhanallah some of the Sahaba some of their ulama they said We thought about that verse say oh my servants who have transgressed against themselves don't despair from mercy of Allah when you saw Wahshi You thought about the verse how do you recover from murdering Hamzah", "murdering Hamza radiyaAllahu ta'ala anhu, look what Wahshi did. He took it as motivation to kill the man who was an enemy to the Muslims that caused so much harm to the Muslim's the false prophet Musaylimah al-Kadhaa and this hadith where the Prophet Sallallaahu Alaihi Wasallam I mentioned this hadit some time ago that Allah laughs at two people who meet in Jannah one of them killed the other SubhanAllah you imagine a person meets his murderer in Janna", "Allah Ta'ala in Jannah, Sayyid Al-Shuhada seeing Wahshi and Hind in Janna. How did this happen? SubhanAllah how did this happened but that shows you the redemption of Islam that Allah gave him the mercy of the Prophet to these people the mercy Allah showed them through the Prophet . So if you're thinking will Allah ever forgive me? Did you commit that deed? SubhaanAllah who do you think has a harder sin", "99 and then 100 people from Bani Israel are the one who took one Hamza. And somehow he redeemed himself. And guess who led the janazah of both Hind and Wahshi? Umar ibn Khattab radiallahu anhu. Subhanallah, both of them passed away and Umar radiallahi anhu led their janazas. So subhanallah I mean an incredible story of Hamza radiallaha anhu but there's something about this that Hamza died so that Islam could live.", "cared about Islam. He cared about Islm living after him and going forward. Hamza was not in this for the arrogance of it, the pride of it. No, it was because Iman had settled firmly in his heart. Look what Allah gave to Hamza . And look at the mercy of Allah that there is redemption even for Hind bint Uthbah and Wahshi ibn Harb. The last thing I'll say by the way is that there's a narration even though there's some weakness", "that Jabir ibn Abdullah radiallahu ta'ala anhu mentions, that a person came in the presence of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam and he had a son. And he asked the Prophet what he should name his son? And the Prophet said you should name him Hamza So all the Hamzas in here be proud Alhamdulillah your parents did you right and for those of you that are expecting may Allah give you a Hamza That also resembles Hamza and may Allah allow us to love these Sahaba and to be joined with these", "joined with the Sahaba, the Shuhadaa, these Sabiqoon, these Awaloon. SubhanAllah He is a first, a companion, the leader of the martyrs, the master of the Martyrs. May Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la join us with our beloved Messenger SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam and these beloved people. Allahumma Ameen JazakumAllahu Khairan" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/DEATH in ISLAM _ Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _shorts _allah__1743301428.opus", "text": [ "I had a near-death experience, so death was very real and I decided to go through all the world scriptures from the perspective of death. And it was the Quran that really struck me as the one that dealt so much with death. There was just so much in there about death.", "said to do much remembrance of the destroyer of pleasure, meaning death. And not in a morbid way but just in a way that makes us aware of the fragility of life so we get more out of life" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Hijab in syria - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _shaykhhamzayu__1748538431.opus", "text": [ "Now, for instance in Syria you have a hijab like it's a raincoat. There is nothing traditional about that. It's a European coat however that came in. I mean there must've been some first woman who started that but that is not a traditional dress. If you want to see a traditional Shammi dress you have to go to Palestinian villages or Syrian villages where they wear those traditional... They used to have their own little...", "it would tell you knew what village they were from based on the patterns on the hijab. So, you would know where they were" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Lower Desires by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayusuf _i__1743306305.opus", "text": [ "The intelligence has to fight the passion because the passion is one of the enemies of God. And the proof of that is the Prophet said nothing is worshipped on earth more odious to God than passion, Hawa all the desires, right? The low desires and then Allah says have they not seen the One who took as a god his desires? Come out in a minute", "When shaytan takes control of a human being, he makes that human being forget the remembrance of God. Allah says, Shaytaan took over and they forgot the remembrance Of God. That's why there is so much demonic influence in our culture now because God is not remembered." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/_ The Strangest Thing _ Hamza Yusuf _ Inspiring Is__1743306893.opus", "text": [ "I am your God. There's nothing worthy of worship except me alone. So worship me and establish the prayer for my remembrance. Allah says about these people that they're", "Wa ita'i zakah, that they are not preoccupied from their commerce, from remembering Allah . One of the Andrusian travelers went to Mecca and when he came back people used to ask the question what's the strangest thing you saw? He said I saw an old man clinging to the Kaaba asking for dunya. And then I went into the sukh and I saw a young man in the midst of his trading remembering Allah" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/How not to lie - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_UjPCegMbJh8&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748543108.opus", "text": [ "Best Position from various positions in the famous hadith in al-halal abiyyuna wainna al haram abiyyun wa baynuhumma umur mushtabihat la ya'lmuhunna kathiru minan nas Between the halal and the haram are these gray areas that not many people know Imam no way, and others say that Not many people. No it or the muhakkikoon amongst the ulama they're the ones that know These gray areas", "gray areas. Ibn Abbas is an example of that so Ahmed Zarroq and others have said means one of the many words the Arabs have for kid it for a lie is Muharram, it's prohibited to bring some benefit unless there", "the truth is made manifest. And one could also take from this, the idea of using fiction as moral teachings. For instance many of the great fiction writers create stories that are essentially lies they're fables, they're made up from their imagination but they use them in order to teach us something about the human condition", "condition and So what he's saying is that normally lying is prohibited? But if there's a way in which the truth can manifest in that and then he gives the example of the tisano Tesson with Tessa una, which comes from the sod in the chapter in the Quran Which is the 38th chapter when Dawood alayhi salam the Prophet Dawood had attack and never will cost me It so world my heart did", "Did the news of the two that were arguing when they came into his palace and when he saw them, When Dawood alayhis salam saw them he was shocked to see them. And then they just said don't be afraid.", "two khasman. They had a disagreement about something, some of us have oppressed others and then they ask him to be an arbiter, to judge between them. These according to Ibn Juzay all the mufassirun say these were two angels that came in. Now obviously angels aren't going", "So, the two angels decide to tell him that one of them has 99 yus and the other only has 1.", "and he wants me to give his mind to add to his, to make it a hundred. And so he's saying is this fair or not? Now there's a khilaf about what that story is referring to but there's an agreement that it relates to something that happened to Dawud alayhi salam. Now there is a story in the Israeli tradition, the Jewish tradition I mean not Israeli like a political but Israeliyat", "Which is totally unacceptable from a Muslim perspective because many of these stories in the Old Testament about the prophets, the Muslims don't agree with that happened to Nuh or to Lot or to David or Solomon. So the stories that are told that in any way diminish the stature and the honor of the prophets are completely rejected and unacceptable.", "But some of the ulama do talk about that story. Others say that the Prophet ﷺ, Dawud, whatever happened Allah did not go into detail about it but just gave this example and some say it was over a jariyah which was permissible for him but it was something that Allah ﷻ wanted to show him that it was what's called khilaf al-awla that it would have been better not to have done it.", "So he uses this example, and then when they tell him that, Dawood says that your brother has wronged you in asking you for this na'jah. And then he says, and it's very common that people when they're khulata,", "common for one of them to oppress the other. So he gives this wisdom that very often when people are working together, some will oppress the others and then Dawud realizes that Allah was showing him this tip for him to see from himself so he asks forgiveness in the ayahs, it's one of the sujood that he goes into sajdah for that. So", "through this story, and this is obviously the basis for a lot of teaching traditions. You have stories that teachers will use that might not necessarily have happened or not but it's not important whether they happen or not. And this is the foundation of a lot mythology based on that. The story, whether it happened or no,t is not the point. It's the wisdoms that come out of the story. So from that perspective he's saying that it was permissible", "An example of that is when Ibrahim alayhis salam was asked about the idol because he went and smashed the idols. And then he left the big one, and he put the axe around the neck of the big ones. So when his people went and saw that they remembered Ibrahim had been speaking about the idols, they went and got Ibrahim aleyhis salama.", "The big one did it. There's a khilaf about this, but on Yawm al-Qiyamah, Ibrahim does not take the shafa'a when people will go to Ibrahim A.S. to intercede. They go to Adam and he says, I can't do it. They get to Ibraheem, he says he can't doing because of these three... And they're called kithibat. But they are not lies. What they are is ma'arid", "in Arabic because the Prophet said, In double entendres, in prevarications, what's called tauriya in Arabic rhetoric. There is a way to get out of lying. So the Prophet for instance when the man wanted to kill him he asked him who are you from and he meant which tribe? The Prophet said I'm from water", "Before their prophecy and after their prophecy. But generally what they do is khilaf al-awla. Which is, khilof al-lawla is a third category. Because you have the kabira. And then you have this saghira. Then you have something that's called khiluf al awla. It could be makroo or khilauf al awlah. Khilafal awlah is where you do a thing and you should be doing something else instead of it. So it's preferable thing to do in that situation.", "in that situation. And that's an example of when Allah said to the Prophet, you frowned and turned away. It wasn't that he was doing something wrong but Allah was telling him here is a better thing that you could be doing because He was in da'wah to a person but the person wasn't really that interested so the Prophet was told no you should be doing this instead.", "of what the prophets can do. So Ibrahim could not have been telling a lie, and so when he said that some say it was sarcastic, like if somebody says to you for instance they come in and you wrote something very beautiful and they can't write and they say oh did you do that? And then you say no you did it. You're not lying, you're just being sarcastic.", "He's like saying no dummies the big one did it you know in other words who else did it or What he was saying was the big, one did is that? Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala is this destroyer of idols and That if they can't see what he was trying to teach them was if that big idol Doesn't want the little idols around because he's the biggest idol", "he's the biggest idol in town and He doesn't want the little idols around. And you can't see that it's logical, that the big one would want to knock the other ones down so that He is the only One they worship. So He was teaching them that Allah is a jealous God, that He doesn' t want to be worshipped with others. And that would be logical to them if they could understand that.", "He looked into the stars and he said I'm sick. They used to use the stars for astrological predictive purposes So he looked up in into the Stars when they asked him to come to the party, and he Said I'm Sick but he wasn't He wasn't using the stars as the way to indicate that he was sick He was merely doing a Tauria to them like that so these are examples and all of the prophets use of adeus Adam when he says", "that he accuses them of stealing, that they stole him from his father. So they did commit theft. They stole their brother and took him away from the father. The prophets don't lie but he's saying you can say something that is not true if it's in order to manifest the truth. Now this gets into another obviously", "in our ethical tradition, you have different forms of ethics. The dominant form of ethics in the Islamic tradition is what's called virtue ethics and you'll find this comes out of the Quran and the Hadith as very clearly substantiating a virtue ethic tradition and then obviously the influence of Aristotle's book on the Muslims, Imam al-Ghazali, Raghav Risfahani, Ibn Miskawi, Ibb al-Hazzam all the great moral ethicists of the Islamic", "Islamic tradition used the template that Aristotle put in the book of ethics but they really created their own based on the Quran and the hadith. But there are other types, situational ethics is another type of ethics, deontological ethics, command theory. If you look at the Islamic tradition, there are elements in all of these so there are situational", "permissible to tell a lie. If you're going to save an army or something, if somebody asks you where the army is and you say oh they're over there right? And the Prophet said so that's what he's basically explaining that those are... There are situations where it is permissible but generally it's not. So go ahead next one.", "But if you tell somebody, I called you at least ten times and you only called them three times then that's a lie because ten times is possible. But if said, Yahi, I call you a thousand times and he knows you called him several times because it's hyperbole. There are people who take things literally so be careful with that. Really? A thousand times? You must be exhausted.", "So that's basically what he is saying That it is permissible if It's understood to be something Mustahil adatan In normal circumstances they would know That it's just not possible", "Right. So basically, if a child for instance is begging you for something the ulama say that it's permissible to say I'll get it to you later even if you're not intending that. Imam Madaq was asked about that and he said", "like a spring chicken. And you don't really believe that, that that's also permissible to say that. Or do you think I'm beautiful? If you don' t want to get a divorce then you better answer that correctly and it is not a multiple choice question. There is only one answer. So that's basically what he is saying to do.", "لكنك لا تستطيع أن تخلص أحداً منه وأن تفتحهم بأجزاء خاطئة لكي تحصل على شيء. هذا هو السيدات المرأية. إذا كنت تريد شيء من الشخص، فبالفعل تبدأ بتعليقه عن ممثلته ومعنى ما يشبهه. وأيضاً هل يمكنني أن أسرع سيارتك أو شيء آخر؟ والناس يفعلون ذلك أيضا.", "And then this basically, again, is about warding off harm. In situational ethics it is permitted to do certain things that would not normally be permitted because of the situation and generally we're not a situational-ethics tradition but there are times, and this is the reasonableness of Islam, there are", "deontological ethics or Kantian ethics, you have what's called the categorical imperative which is the idea that you should never do anything that you would not want to be universalized. So the idea if you're...you should never tell a lie because imagine if everybody told lies there'd be never any virtue in the world and that's basically the idea but if somebody's gonna steal your money and you say I don't", "to do that in a situation like that. What he says here, وَالْخُلْفُ إِن يُرْشَبِهِ صَرَاحٌ لِلْبَيْنِ The Prophet ﷺ in a hadith in the Jam'a Saghir, the Prophet ﷺ said, لَيسَد كَذَّابًا الَّذِى يُصْلِحُ بَيِّنَ النَّاسِ He's not a liar and kathab is really somebody who lies a lot but he wouldn't be put down as a liar because the idea,", "that lying leads to fujour and fujor leads to the fire, sithqa leads to birr and birr leads to paradise, truthfulness leads to righteousness, righteousness leads to Paradise. So what he's saying there is there's a khilaf about that. Some of the ulama say it's not a lie if you say something to rectify between people", "or based in truthfulness to do that. So, that's a Khilaf issue." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/_ Go Buy from His Shop _ Hamza Yusuf _ Inspiring I__1742997457.opus", "text": [ "I went to buy bulgha in the souq and all of the people that sell these sandals are in the same place, in Fes. And I went and I asked a man for a size, I think I was 42, I can't remember my European size. And he said, see that man there? I said yeah. He said go buy it from him. I said don't you have it? He said no, I haven't but go buy", "I saw that with my own eyes. That's Islam, that's not competition. That is تعاون على البر والتقوى Work with one another! There's no greed, there's no طمع . Islam gets rid of these things in people's hearts. Amazing." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Good Character -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayusuf ___1748538392.opus", "text": [ "We're going to leave the world. We will be judged and we will be judge about what we did, about what said, about how we acted, about our behavior And the single most important thing according to the prophet, the thing that saves people more than anything else is good character, is treating people decently He said, إِنَّمَا بُعْتُ لِيُؤْتَمِّمَ مَكَرٌّ الْأَخْلَقِ And have trust in Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala Be people of Tawakkul They say that Tawakkal", "is to know what that means, to believe it with your heart. And then to take on the qualities of the Prophet ﷺ," ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Islam is not a culture - Hamza Yusuf_1SIG_TIQvQ0&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748536351.opus", "text": [ "This is Surah Qaf, which obviously is the name of the surah and it begins with the letter. These are the Muqatta'at letters. Every book Abu Bakr and Omar said every book has a secret and the secret of this book is in these letters. And Allah swears an oath by the glorious Quran, the majestic Quran,", "And then tells us that these people are bewildered that a warner came to them. And the kafiroon say this is a strange thing, that we're dead and we're brought back to life. And they call it rajum ba'id. This is a very unlikely scenario.", "what the earth diminishes from them. And Allah says that He has a book which contains everything in it. And then Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says that they deny the truth when it came to them and they're confused about it. So, they have this confusion. And Allāh subhanu wa taʿla then says haven't they considered the heavens over them?", "over them we have built it and adorned it ornamented it and you will see no there's no gaps in it uh imam said this is a proof that the heavens surround the earth so he saw it as a proof for the that the earth was round and it was surrounded by heavens because he said if there's", "completely self-contained. And then Allah says, and then go to the earth. So you look at the heaven, then go into the earth and look at how we spread it out and we put in these mountains that are anchors for it", "it and they do stabilize the earth. The dominant theory is that the mountains emerge out of when these tectonic plates came together, and then they ended up...that's where it stops, the shaking stops because these mountains come up and then the plates don't shake anymore. And then Allah says this is", "This is a tabseerah. It's something that will illuminate you, enable you to see clearly when you reflect on these things and also a dhikra, a constant reminder. So some of them said it was the heaven that enabled you to be able to see clear, the order of the heavens. And then the earth is this constant reminder because it's always changing. The heavens stay the same but the Earth is constantly changing", "it's this reminder of change that the heavens have a permanence but the earth has an imp, it has a effinessing nature like the nature of the earth is that it's constantly changing and this is a reminder to us that we are heavenly by our souls but we're earthly by our bodies. And so our bodies", "but our bodies are earthly. So the soul does not, it doesn't corrupt in its permanence, but it can be stunted and corrupted by the behavior of the body and by the thoughts that go in. One of the very interesting scholars of Morocco he said that the food of the", "of the uh of the body comes from the earth but the food of the soul comes from heaven so if you eat the food", "with the words of men and the falsehoods of man, it's like junk food for the body. You're getting sick so your soul will get sick whereas if you feed yourself with the spiritual nourishment of revelation, the soul will well. He has success, he grows the soul purifies it but it also means to grow that's why", "That's why the great souls are souls that kept growing. And then there's a beautiful word that comes from Latin, pusillanimous. So you have magnanimous which means animus is soul, magnet is great so a magnanimious person has a great soul. The pusillanimous person has", "We have words in different cultures to articulate these meanings. A petty person, in India Gandhi was called Mahatma the great soul so all these cultures had this understanding that there are great souls and then there are puny souls but Allah says that we have given us the ability", "But if you feed it with the wrong food, you stunt it. If you feed with the right food, it grows. And that's why they say Imam Ghazali at the end of his life, his maqam was so exalted that he could not read books that men had written. He could only read Quran and Hadith. That was his maquam. And he was reading Hadith all... Because he was not a... I mean, if he was alive today, probably be the greatest Muhadith alive.", "But at that time, he was not considered a muhadith. His area of expertise was the usul al-fiqh in particular and then obviously tazkiyah. And that's why he's been criticized by some for having these hadiths in the Ihya. But most of them are hadith that are related to tazkiyah. And the ulama were much more easy on those type of hadith.", "So, and then he goes... I mean this book is just so extraordinary because it goes heaven earth and now the meeting of the heaven in the earth the water. So the water comes down to the earth and brings the earth to life.", "that it's the nourishment just as the heavens bring the water that brings forth the nourish of the earth, it's what they call in ancient times called fons vitae. The water of life. So again all these cultures have these words that have these meanings because these are ancient truths that were brought by the prophetic traditions.", "And it's blessed water. So we brought forth all of these gardens and then hab al-hasid, all these grains that are harvested. And then the nakheel is such an amazing tree,", "And the fact that the dates are so central to the Arabian Peninsula, this was life and death for them. The date yields. And the amazing thing, dates will last for a very long time. You can eat them for a long time and then there's all these different things they can be eaten at every stage. So this is a reminder because the Khitab is first and foremost to the Arabs. It's important to know that.", "was revealed in their language and then they had to convey it to other people. And this is why, although Islam is not an Arabian religion, and one of the tragedies of modern Islam is this kind of Arabization of a lot of cultures that's not... In fact, a lot the Arabization is not even Arabic. So for instance, the robe is not a Arab dress. The robe is a Persian dress.", "The Prophet wore, probably the closest thing to his dress is the way Bengalis and Indians dress with the izar, what they call lungi. And then he wore a kameez. And the Libyan dress also or the way they dressed in Pakistan because he wore sirwal and had a kamaez over it but the robe was a Persian dress. You can look at all of the pictures of ancient Persians, they are all wearing robes. So when the Arabs conquered Persia", "conquered Persia, they took on the dress of the aristocrats of Persia. That's where the robe comes from but it's not native to the Arabs themselves. It would have been alien to them but now it's become associated with the Arabs when it's actually Persian and also the Ghutra was not something any Sahabi wore. Ibn Omar said that the Ghotra was doubt in the night", "something inappropriate for a man in the day because in the night it would make him look like a woman. They wouldn't know if it was... But they didn't wear the ghotra. This was something adopted later. They wore a turban, the Arabs. And then also the other thing which is really important about the dress of the Prophet, he dressed from different cultures. So he had a Roman Byzantine shirt.", "He had an Ethiopian shirt. He had very few clothes, but they were not of one culture. It was very interesting because had they been people might have said that's the sunnah is to dress like that and then he wore a Yemeni jubba. He got a juba from Yemen made in Sana'a. They're very nice. There was a red and striped juba so he wore different clothes,", "in his amazing book on adab dunya dine or adab din he says that clothes should follow the place that you're in they should not be alien muslims should not have alien closed because wherever muslim went they wanted to let people know we are not aliens this religion is not an alien religion", "religion and also they indigenized their architecture you'll never see muslims in Andrusia building like Hindu architecture whereas in India they built like Hindu architect in China that they look like Buddhist pagodas the mosques if you go to Turkey they look", "So you have your culture. Islam is not a culture. It's a sieve for culture, it purifies culture. And doesn't impose upon you an alien culture. Its religion and teaching and has rights and rituals and its sacred language is Arabic but it doesn't have any culture so the Arabs they" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Food of the soul - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf__1748524922.opus", "text": [ "Tabsirah, it's something that will illuminate you enable you to see clearly when you reflect on these things and also a dhikra, a constant reminder. So some of them said it was the heaven that enabled you to be able to see clear the order of the heavens And then the earth is this constant reminder because it's always changing The heavens stay the same but the Earth is constantly changing And so it's this reminder of change That the heavens have a permanence", "but the earth has an effinessing nature, like the nature of the earth is that it's constantly changing. And this is a reminder to us that we are heavenly by our souls, but we're earthly by our bodies. And so our bodies are sidereal, are celestial. Our souls are celestial, but our bodies", "It doesn't corrupt in its permanence, but it can be stunted and corrupted by the behavior of the body. And by the thoughts that go in one of the city island Jamal, one of very interesting scholars of Morocco. He said that the food of the of the, of the", "but the food of the soul comes from the heaven." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Meaning of Taqwa - Sheikh Hamza Yusuf__1743071401.opus", "text": [ "The Taqwa is really about disciplining the soul, about aligning oneself. It's a vertical alignment with your Lord. Most people are living on this horizontal plane and forgetting that there is actually another plane. There's a plane that penetrates this plane and that is the vertical plane of reality. And so trying to get to the point where we have the sun of reality directly over our head,", "That's at the essence of what Taqwa is." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/People of Kerala - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf__1743300076.opus", "text": [ "Kerala's the sweetest people in India. Really! They speak Malayalam, the Arabs say Malayulam. Keralan nice people, Wallahi some... I lived in the Emirates all the Kerali people that were there a lot of people from Keralat they were the sweet as people. I was amazed at the Kela people they're just really humble people" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Surah Al Fatiha by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf rh _hamzayus__1743307985.opus", "text": [ "is what you do something with. And so in the Arabic language, for instance, if you say khatam, khatm is a seal. It's what you seal with. So it's the instrument of sealing. So alam is the instrument" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Test and trials by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _rh_ _hamzay__1743309800.opus", "text": [ "Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala throughout the Qur'an tells us that He's going to try us and in fact it's one of the reasons for our existence. Raghub al-Isbahani gives these different reasons that Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la created us based on a Quranic understanding, and one of them is Ibtila which in Arabic means test trial tribulation but its fundamental meaning Bala is a trial or a tribulation so we're tested and this is obviously a test" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Trust Allah ﷻ -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayusuf _i__1742877921.opus", "text": [ "People that really trust in Allah and really have that strong Yaqeen and Iman about it, Allah will provide for them. He will provide from where you're not expecting it. And I've seen that with people. That it's...I really have seen that." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Trust Allah ﷻ -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayusuf _i__1742890527.opus", "text": [ "Nothing will afflict you except what Allah has decreed for you. Nothing, that's tawathq and then tamalluq is to be in a state of humility before Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. If you trust in Allah, He's enough for you Finally the Prophet sallallaahu alaihi wasalam he said a mu'min should never humiliate him or herself The Sahaba were these were Arabs they were people of Izzah in their very nature They said how could someone", "somebody humiliate himself that wasn't even in their understanding and the prophet said him said to expose yourself to tribulations that you're unable to bear to expose yourselves to tribulation that you are unable to bare there are tribulations will be sent to you from a lot there are people in here probably who've been diagnosed with terminal illnesses this is the dunya that's a tribulation you didn't choose" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Prayer in Islam -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_WAGmFsZrVSY&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742889013.opus", "text": [ "Prayer. It's interesting that in the Qur'an, and this is brought out here, is that the thing that is commanded more than any other human activity in the Quran is prayer. Salah. Prayer. And also the Prophet ﷺ said that as-salatu wa imadu al-deen, that the prayer is the imad of this religion. It is the central pole or pillar that holds the tent up.", "had four pegs on each side, and then they had a central peg. So the idea here is that the four other pillars, the shahada, zakat, fasting, and hajj are these other pillars. But the prayer is really what's giving this tent its real reality. So prayer is at the essence. And the Prophet ﷺ said, which is another word for prayer,", "a supplication, prayer is the bone marrow of worship. And it's really interesting from a physiological point of view to describe it as the bone marrow because what the bone narrow is one, it's the core and that's what it means. The Arabs say , the core of something but the bone", "generates blood. It also generates the defense system or the immune system and the Prophet in another hadith said, prayer is the weapon of the believer. So the idea that prayer is like the immune systems of the body and that's why the Qur'an says that God does not punish a people that pray, that are calling on God.", "The Salatullah, Allah prays. That He prays on you. So Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and His prayer is mercy. His mercy is called Salah. It's the same word that's used but it has a different meaning. But still it's considered Salah And then there is everything that's in the heaven and earth is praying so there's this prayer of creation.", "Everything is in this state of glorification. The thing that says in verse 24-41, Have you not seen that everyone in the heavens and the earth glorifies God? The birds spreading their wings. Each one knows its prayer and its glorification So each one of the things in creation has a prayer, a salah, and it has a tasbih. When we pray what do we do immediately after the prayer?", "might not look the same and that's why different religions have different outward forms of praying because just like different animals have different forms in which they do their worship, different communities have been given different forms. And Allah says we gave every ummah its own form, shara'a wa minhaja, it's own sharaa',", "So each one, now obviously things are similar which is one of the reasons why in most traditions there's some form of praying with the hands and these type things. You'll see similarities but they don't have to be the same to be a prayer. And then finally there's the specific prayer which is the ritual that Muslims do and it's the second pillar of Islam. So those are the different types of prayer. Now that prayer is done five times a day", "To go into numerology, it's not that I don't think numbers have a reality. But numerology is kind of a path to insanity. And that's traditionally the way Muslims have looked at it. So numbers do have reality. Don't think they're not significant. They're very significant. But generally we don't like to go in there. But I'll make a few remarks about five. There are five pillars in Islam. There", "There are five rulings in every action. So, every action falls under one of five categories. Five is a very interesting number. It is the first number that occurs as a sum of an even and an odd. So you have after 1 which is the divine number and it belongs to Allah alone. Allah's number is 1. And that's why Wahid is the", "It's the first number, but ahad is not. Ahad is an adat. One is God's number. But if you look at two and three, it's the even and the odd. وَالشَّفْعِي وَ الْوَتْرِي By the even in the odd So Allah swears by the even on the odd And the even of the odd is also representing the male and female. It's represented a lot so they're coming together these two numbers produces five.", "an interesting number, and we do pray five times a day. The quintessence is the fifth nature which is the spirit, the ruach because you have the four elements that we are composed of which is earth water fire and air and then you have to quintessent so the quintaesencia which was the fifth essence which is spiritual essence that permeates the world. So we pray five", "when the sun is not visible, and two of them are when the Sun is visible. So they're divided by night and by day. And wa shifa'i war witri. They're divided in that way. They also done according to the movements of the Sun which again is harmonizing with the world. So the idea of watching the Sun... See if you get up before dawn Muslims should do that. I mean you should have been up this morning if you pray", "should have been up before the sun went up. Just to see that every morning is something spectacular, just to go out and look at that phenomenon of the breaking of dawn and what that means. Then watching that sun move across and becoming aware of this movement that's occurring every day because one of the things about modern human beings is they're so out of sync with reality, just with nature. I mean people are completely isolated. Food comes in packages.", "People don't just experience the Earth anymore. I mean, people live in cities that are just all cement and skyscrapers block out the sky. And there's a lot of people who don't even know that the sun traverses the sky every day. They're not even aware of that fact. And these astronomical centers get calls all the time where people are horrified that they saw the moon during the daytime and they want to know why the moon's out in the daytime.", "where people just see the moon for the first time in the daytime, and what's it doing up there in the sky? That's only supposed to come out at night. And so this is a type of detachment that people have. I remember being in New Mexico with a group of inner-city youth who'd never been outside of New York or New Jersey, and that night when the stars came out they were in shock. They were literally in shock!", "If the stars only came out once every thousand years, how would we even know how to adore God? And that's part of what the stars are about. And that is why Ibrahim who was the father of the NBL, what was the first thing he does because he was kept according to one tradition in a sirdab for 12 years. He never saw the light of day and when he was 12 he came out and it was his first experience of the world and he saw the stars and said this is my Lord", "my lord and then he saw the moon he said no this is and they kept setting and then you saw the Sun this must be it and then it's that he said I don't know but I mean I don' love things that set in other words he knew that God was the one that didn't set and so the only must say that it's using the stars to prove the existence of God that the order of the heavens is one of the ways of understanding that God is real and that's something i guarantee", "that you have a standing position and then a bowing position, and then an prostrating position,and then the sitting position. And he said also it's in Adam's name which is the standing,the bending, and the sitting, and than the sajda . So the letters... The human being has been designed to pray", "You can notice when you do wudu, is that you're designed... The wudhu works perfectly. I mean just if you watch, just when you dwudhu, you'll realize all your limbs are made to do this thing. Each one of these positions of prayer and that's why you don't go way down. You stop right where it's natural to stop because as you go further it begins to hurt.", "to do ruku'ah. Because when you get to that, most people can get to the point it doesn't hurt. If you try to go any further, you'll feel the pain of that. And then the sajda, the going down on all seven limbs. I mean this is very interesting as well, of putting everything goes down and then sitting as well. This sitting position so each one of these positions", "The prayer conforms with the body perfectly. And these are natural positions to do. And part of the reason why in Islam you pray is because your body should be sharing in the worship of God. So, the body itself is participating. You don't just sit and meditate. It's not in your head that your body is actually worshipping with you.", "removes this kind of dualistic mind-body separation. It's a very profound, and really if you're on a strong path, you will spend your life perfecting it and mastering it. You will never reach the ultimate prayer. And that's why the prayer is something that must be done every day five times a day until you die because one of the things about", "they have to do them every day is not just to keep remembering them, but to perfect them. Mastery in a martial art is a lifetime experience and every martial art I don't care if he has reached that he will admit to you, I'm not as good as my teacher, I still haven't perfected this. They're always working on that perfection and that's the thing about the prayer is that it is a", "So that's why if you're doing it the same way every day, you're missing the point. That you've fallen into a perfunctory routine. You've gone to sleep. That the prayer should be a commitment. It is a lifelong commitment to the mastery of the art of communicating with God. Now obviously you have to in Islam,", "yourself before you do it and that's preparation for entering into this state like the ihram before hajj. You're going into a sacred space, so you want to prepare for that space. So wudu is a way and wadua comes from brightness because the face will be luminous on the day of judgment and the arms and limbs are from wuduu. Wadua means to be luminus or bright", "Prophet said on the day of judgment, they asked him how will you know your followers? He said there'll be a whole had done They will be like the piebald horse. You know have these horses have the white their brown But then they have the White on the face on them and then they front in the hind are all white that's how he described his followers and he said from the other men uttered will go from the effects of we'll do so again", "So again, what you're doing is preparing yourself for something that occurs in the next world which is the luminosity of practice. And this is why if you've ever met anybody that's mastered anything it has affected their being. It can't... I don't care if they are a master pianist, a master ballerina whatever it is", "find in ordinary human beings. I guarantee you, it doesn't matter what the mastery is, you will find that a committed practice to something in which a person has done it religiously every day, it has an effect on their character and that is why the highest thing", "experience of the world as a theater of divine manifestation. So that is what prayer is about and water is a purifying element, it's an outward element but it's the purest thing that we know of in the world. We talk about it in our language, in our metaphors. It was crystal clear,", "problematic because you're so focused on the rules, you can't really focus on the spirit of the prayer. But that's a necessary stage of prayer. So learning the rules really well until they really become second nature and then you begin to work on your spiritual presence in the prayer and part of that has to do with the amount of dhikr that you do during the day and that's why the more dhiker you do, the better your prayer and also wudhu is very important. Sir Ahmad Zarroq said", "wudu determines your presence in the prayer. And one of the things that people do is they do wudhu very hastily and very ritualistically so that their wudnu is no longer an act of worship. And, one of best things that I ever was exposed to was watching Marabt al-Hajj do wudo because it really hit home the first time I saw it. It is a deep act of Worship, wuddu. And we tend to forget that.", "Qura'ah with the Lord of people, the King of people and the Lord God of people", "have these calls like the Shafar, which is how the Jews call with the ram's horn and the Christians have the bell. How did the Prophet ﷺ through a dream... different people saw it. Bilal was one of them. They sought to call with human voice people to prayer. So not to use anything artificial but to use the voice itself to call people to the prayer", "I bear witness that there's no God but Allah. I bear witnesses that Muhammad is the messenger of God and then hurry to prayer, hasten to prayer. Hasten to falah. Falah is harvest. That's what falah is. So what you're coming to is a harvest.That's what prayer is. You are reaping the benefit of the day because the day was made for prayer", "You've missed the point of the day. It's just like somebody who's planted seeds all spring, and then when summer comes and it's time to harvest, they don't go and they don' t harvest what they planted. So what was the point? The same in being in the world. The point of being in this world is this practice. And that's why never belittle the reality of the prayer.", "do in your life as a constant practice. And you should be committed to perfecting your prayer, and it's a struggle. It's a strugle to be commited to wakefulness, to be committed doing your wudu correctly all these things. Some people can see this tedious but the beauty of practice is that the proof is in the pudding like the English say. The better", "come and that's why the prophet said give our souls repose by calling us to prayer oh bilal and he said his repose was in his prayer and he", "Hot tears are painful tears. The cool tear is a joyful tear. So what he was saying is that the joy of my life is in my prayer. Prayer was not something that was dreadful to him. And Adi ibn al-Hathim said, from the time I became Muslim, I never heard the adhan except I was yearning for the time. And that was his experience of the prayer. From the time he became Muslim he never heard", "It's anybody who does prayer seriously, you thank God for that. Just that stopping. So the prayer is a gift and people that really practice it, you can't even imagine. I mean, even though I went 18 years without doing the Muslim prayer since I became Muslim as far as I know, I've never missed a prayer. I couldn't imagine not praying. I could not imagine it. I just, I could", "imagine being deprived of prayer would be like being deprived breathing and the Prophet in his beautiful description points out the prayers effect. The Prophet said tell me if one of you had a river at his door and he washed in it five times a day, would any of his filthiness remain? And they said nothing of his filthyness would remain. He said that is the likeness", "So that's part of the going back to the prayer. So that is prayer and استعين بالصبر والصلاة There are a lot of verses in the Qur'an to use the prayer as a way of taking sikur and help from Allah.", "And Abu Bakr said to his people, I saw thousands upon thousands innumerable numbers that were vigilant about doing the prayer but I can only count five.", "but I can only really count about five who were mindful in the prayer. وَإِنَّهُ لَكَرَاتِكْ And he said, indeed it is like that." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/The Secret of the Heart _ Hamza Yusuf on Self-Know_CsbMyNq63AE&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742883506.opus", "text": [ "You will know those hidden enemies in your soul. So the soul has all these things, your default settings, your egotistical nature, your narcissism, your pettiness, your sharah, your appetites, your tama', your covetousness, your desires, your hawaa' ,your passions, all of these things that are your enemies. I mean the four dominant enemies are nafs, shaitan, hawaa and dunya'. Those are the four", "Nafs, Hawa, Shaitan and Dunya. So Shaitaan gets locked up in Ramadan but Nafshawa and Duny are still around so they wreak most of the havoc all Shaiton can do is suggest he can't really do his damages in his waswasa but Hawa Nafas those are very damaging especially these massive egos really dangerous people that", "And the worst type of people are the people that seek power, the people who want to be in charge. There's a very interesting book called Corruptible which is looking at the fact that corruptibility, that the people most susceptible to corruption are actually the people seeking power and so the worst types of people you want to elect are those who want", "in vast hikmah, the wisest human being that ever lived. He said we do not give political authority to people that seek it. Or covet it once they get it. One of the signs of a sincere person is you can remove them from a position of authority and they're not bothered by it. In fact, that's one of the tests in the traditional samurai code was to test people like that.", "The generals would test there to see. Omar ibn al-Khattab, he took Khalid who was head of the army and he made him a foot soldier. Did Khalid object? How dare you? I'm the great general. All these victories are mine. He just did sama'an wa ta'ta. If that's where you want me, that's what I'll be. That's very different perspective. So knowledge,", "And that's why the Prophet said, أَعْدَىٰ عَدُوَّك نَفْسُكَ الَّتِي بَيْنَ جَمْبَيكَ The worst enemy that you have is your own soul between your two sides. Imam al-Bayhaq relates that. فَيَسْتَعِذُ بِاللَّهِ مِنْهَا وَمِن شَرِّهَةٍ So he seeks refuge in God or she seeks refuge from God from the evil of their own souls. كما قال النبي صلى الله عليه وسلم اللهم ألهمني رشدي", "Allahumma alhimni rushdi wa a'idhni min sharri nafsihi. Oh Allah, inspire me with my guidance, my prudence that I act prudently and give me refuge from the evil of my own soul. This is dua. And then Allahumme la takinni ira nafsi tarfat a'een. Don't leave me to myself. You know, don't leave", "even for the blink of an eye. In other words, be my nasir. Don't leave me to my soul because my soul will take me to destruction. وَمَنْ عَرَفَ أَعْدَاءُهُ الْكَامِنَةَ وَ مَكَانٍ مِنْهَا Whoever knows those hidden enemies and their machinations all the hidden things in them all the subtleties and the ways that they do these things وَكَّيْفِيَتِ إِنبِعَاتِهَ", "and the nature of what incites the nafs, what provokes it. The provocations of the self. Knowing the nature or the provocation of the Self. That one will be capable of guarding against his or her soul. And to struggle against the soul in order", "to warrant, to be worthy of what God has promised that person who is amongst the people who struggle against his soul in the way of God. In Surah Al-Ankabut Allah says, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says about the...", "That was in Mecca, that was before any type of outward defense or jihad was mentioned. So this is a Meccan verse and it's about the struggle against the soul. Al-Mujahidu man Jahada Hawaah Right? So he says that if you do Mujahida in your soul Allah will guide you to His ways not the Sabil , the Subal", "of God because God has many ways in the world that he's working, that Allah is working. And then He says", "So if he doesn't know his soul and knows these hidden enemies, then it's easy for his enemy to appear to him. Which is his own passion in the form of intelligence. It'll come in the shape of reason and will make falsehood appear to be truth. It will make", "appear to be truth. And that's why the Prophet said, is whatever diverts you from Allah. That's is to make you distant from God, to take you away. Kafka said it's a beautiful definition evil is whatever distracts. It's what distracts you from reality. It takes you away from reality and so that's", "from your true self, from your own essence. I mean this is what Dr. Clear used to talk about the host and the guest that don't be fooled by the uninvited guest who takes over your house, your spiritual house,", "Because if you didn't want to, and yet you did, what's that conflict in the soul? Those are the things that you're struggling against. Those are internal enemies that he is talking about. The uninvited guests that come in and completely wreak havoc on the host. And one of the biggest problems for humans is they begin to associate the uninviting guest with themselves.", "they think it's them. They don't know. If man but knew, if the human being but knew our reality and who we are. And so then he says Nothing has been worshipped no god, no idol or deity", "has been worshipped in the earth more odious to Allah than al-Hawa. So Hawa is one of those comprehensive words in Arabic, it's got the idea of passion, it' s got the ideas of appetite, it has got that idea of desire, it interestingly the word that was used for heresy so Ahwa if you read in the books of Kalam usually they mean ahlul Ahwa are the heretics because", "followed their own you know the word heresia in greek means to choose for yourself so heresy is when you depart from the revelation or from the jamaa and you just follow yourself it's interesting that hawa which is passion buggery which is an anglo-saxon word for", "So even in the Western tradition, they had an understanding of the relationship between... Because sinfulness that's done openly, sinfulness you're in rebellion. Complete rebellion to God because sinfulness is hidden. The Prophet said My Ummah will remain in a good state as long as they don't openly do enormities. As long as", "major sins. Once they do it openly, then you know that the azab is coming. It's just the nature of it. Because hypocrisy as a wise Frenchman said is the homage that vice pays to virtue. Hypocrisy when somebody being hypocritical what they're saying is I should be good but once", "they just come out with their foulness, it means that they don't even care about being good or pretending to be good. And that's why one of the worst things about this culture is this idea like I don't want to be a hypocrite. Just let it all hang out. Just do whatever and who cares what other people think? Who cares what", "the children think? Who cares all these things that are happening now because decency and the respect for common decency is what holds a society together. Once you lose that, it begins to fragment and then it dissipates until you don't have a society anymore. You just have a community of animals. And that's what he's saying. They're not even in sand. They've got nests. There's something else.", "something else. Like Shakespeare, you know, has the man proud man but man proud men dressed in a little brief authority most ignorant of what he's most assured of his glassy essence like an angry ape that plays such high trick that plays fantastic tricks before high heaven as make the angels weep right? I mean that", "angry ape. You know, somebody who's not achieved his humanity. And this is what our religion's calling us to, what Nietzsche said, Islam presupposes men. I mean, our Lord actually has a high opinion of us and Iblis wants to prove God wrong. That's His whole effort. I'm going to show you you made a mistake", "And that's his whole effort, is just to humiliate, denigrate, degrade the human being. And then just say, look at that. But Allah said, إِنِّي عَلُمُ مَا لَا تَعْلُّمُونَ I saw him in Rabt al-Hajj. Nobody can take that away from me. A man who lived for 112 years in complete open society.", "doors on his house there's a tent you could see him 24 7 no shadow self i saw that i lived with them i've traveled and and and lived with uh sheikh abdullah bin beya i've seen the people of righteousness and how they behave and ha and how", "These Salihun. And many of them are hidden. I mean these are people that now Marab Tarhaz was hidden for a long time but these are many people know, there're many people hidden. They're simple people they're not even scholars. They don't...they're not always scholars. Really simple people that live upright beautiful lives to take care of people that do hidden things for the sake of Allah . Those are the people Allah is looking at.", "Those are the people, virtuous lives. Those are those are those of the lives that Allah elevates not vicious lives. Oppression is not some kind of ontological status if you're oppressed. If you're pressed and virtuous, you have a place with God but oppression just to be oppressed? The Quran says that they're in hell. There are people", "This is a conversation they have in hell. The oppressed with their oppressors. If it wasn't for you, we would have been believers. And Allah says that the oppressor say to them, What? We stopped you from guidance after it came to you? No, you were criminals just like us. You're just little criminals.", "Right? I mean, the taxi driver that's cheating you and then he says he's oppressed. You know, there's people who don't make moral equivalencies between people that grow up in the same circumstances, same conditions, and they don't choose the ways of crime. They don't chose the ways viciousness. They choose the way of virtue. You can't make more equivalence between them. Allah can give people Tauba. That's a good thing.", "Tawbah is the best thing. But Allah is calling us to virtue. And then he says, The sixth thing.", "You know, one thing. So the sixth is if you know yourself, you will become good at governing the self. You will be good at covering the self and whoever's good at governin' the self then would be good", "And you will become among the khulafa of God, the vice-gerents. I'm putting in the earth a vice-garent to take care of the earth. But if you don't take care for yourself and that's why the dhari'ah which is his other book The dhiri'ah in Makaram al-Sharia is the means by taking on these noble qualities to become a caliph. The khalifa. This is the maqam that Allah is calling us to", "And so he's saying that if you know yourself, you will be able to govern yourself. And if you govern yourself, You can govern the world. If you govern the World, you're amongst the Khulafa. يستخدفكم في الأرض He will put you in the earth That can mean يستغرفكم, he replaces you from the people that are before you So we like the Khalifa Abu Bakr was Khalifat-ur Rasoolillah So he was the one who was in place. He stood in place", "for the Prophet ﷺ. So that's one of the meanings. But it also means, so khalafah means to leave behind. Khalfiya is your background. Khilaf is your difference of opinion. So different backgrounds are going to end up in khilaf if you don't know how to govern yourself. In fact, I was reading a book the other day about Robert's Rules of Order. It was very interesting because the man who wrote that book, Herbert Robert,", "Herbert Robert, he was an engineer. But he was a deacon at a Baptist church and he was heading a meeting that got totally out of control and everybody started yelling and he didn't have any way of controlling it. So he spent the next like 15 years thinking deeply about meetings and how to govern meetings. And so he created Robert's Rules", "actually talk with one another. So that's a knowledge, like if you're committed to following that, Allah says, تَحْسِبُهُمْ جَمِيعًا وَقُرُوبٌ شَتَّى ذَٰرِكَ بِأَنَّهُ مُقَوْمٌ لَيَعْقِلُونَ You think they're all together but they're not, they're separate, their hearts are separate. Why? Because they have no intellect. They don't have intellect. If you had intellect, you'd be united at least in sitting down to discuss things intelligently. People can't even talk anymore. Look out there,", "We can't even discuss, like is it wise to cut the organs and healthy organs off adolescent children? Is that a wise thing to do? We can' t even discuss that. We can not even talk about it. It's just oh you're transphobic. No I'm actually just trying to think about the welfare of the child because apparently most of these people are resolved by the time they get to 18 or 19 years old so shouldn't we wait a little", "time? Doesn't that make sense, just to wait? We can't talk about it. You're not allowed to talk about It. We can even talk anymore. That's how bad it is and so that's what you know if you want to be a caliph you have to work on yourself. You have to do the work and and that's why he begins this with ma'rifat of the soul, if you know that. And then He says that not only will you be khulafah, He says", "And this one when Moses was told to tell his people, remember Allah made all these prophets from you because the Prophet said that every time a prophet would die God would give them another prophet and they would govern them. They were governed by prophets", "And that's why, وَجَعْرِكُم مُلُوكًا Because Ibn Abbas said that Bani Israel said that anybody who had a spouse and a house. And a servant was a king. That was a Malik. Like if you had those three things, you were Malik So Allah is saying, I gave you these blessings. I made you kings. I gave your houses. I give you spouses.", "I gave you servants. Where's the gratitude? There's a man from the Muhajirin who came to Abdullah ibn Amr ibn al-'As and he said, Aren't we from amongst the poor people of the Muhadjirine? He said, Do you have a house you live in? He", "He said, You're from the rich people. You're not from the poor people. And then he said, I have a servant. He said you're a king. This is an ingratitude of human beings. There's you know poor people in America. I swear to God they're rich in many countries. The poor people In this country. They're rich In many countries If you go to Mauritania I can show you real poverty and those People in Mauritiania", "Because I live with some of the poorest people on the planet. They're much richer than some of them. Much richer spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, psycho-emotional states of their minds. But you meet poor people and one of the beautiful aspects of Islam is that Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam chose to be poor", "He was given the choice to be like Sulaiman or to be, and he chose to be Nabiun Abd. Like a slave servant. A slave prophet not a king prophet because Allah has both so he chose And he did this desiring for his ummah to see well if this is the best of creation when Aisha brought all the possessions of the Prophet out it was two garments", "that he used to wash with. That was his possession, that's what he left behind. He didn't leave anything behind, it's amazing and he could have been the richest man in the world physically material well but he chose to be poor but one of the beauties of poverty in the Muslim world and I'm talking about traditional, I'm not talking about modern Muslim world because I've seen traditional Muslim places", "I saw Gero before there was electricity. It's not some kind of romantic version of what I saw. Those people have dignity with their poverty. They have dignity, and that's the difference. Our poverty does not allow people to be dignified, and it doesn't allow people", "The Marxists tried to eliminate it and they had to kill millions of people, and they still couldn't do it. All these people talking about oh we're gonna do this, we're going to that don't believe any of it. They are all liars. Just liars!", "This is an amazing statement here. So he says the seventh reason why you should know yourself, is that you won't find faults in others because you will see those faults are in you", "own essence either manifest or hidden like fire in flint. In other words, if you were in the same condition because you can look at people and you can think you wouldn't do that if you weren't that simple but you don't know. You don't how you would behave. You see somebody who's addicted to drugs out on the street and if you had the same life journey of that person, you don' t know. One would hope", "hope but you don't know people say you know they look at these tyrants in the Muslim world the vast majority Muslims if they got into the same power they would probably be worse but they think no I wouldn't do that I'd be upright and just and do all this justice that's what they think because they're deluded they've never been tempted like that it's like these celebrities people", "temptations that they have. They don't know because they've never been tempted like that. So when you see people, there's a kind of shafaqah and that's why Ibn Atayla one of the things that he says is that if Allah reveals to you the faults of people without rahmah in your heart it's a fitna for you. The Prophet had shafa'a for people of ibtira and that is why Imam Malik radiallahu anhu in Kitab al-Jami'ah he mentions Isa . He said", "Don't mention the, you know, the fault of others as if you're lords. But remember your own faults as you are servants. And then he said, People are two. They're either in tribulation or they're in well-being.", "Or they're in well-being. And so he said, فَرْحَمُ أَهْلَ الْبَلَاءِ وَاحْمَدُ اللَّهُ عَلٰى الْعَافِيَةِ So have mercy on those who are in tribulation and praise God for well-beeing. So that's really important. So he says, He would not be حَمَّازًا لَمَزًا وَإِلُّ لِكُلِّ هُمَذَةٍ لُمَّزًى So the حَماس is عياب. It's somebody طَعَان في عرض النَّاس The people find faults in other people. They're always talking about other people's faults.", "other people's faults. They never mention their own faults, they always mention their other people false. The lammas is more like you know naginag wink-wink rolling the eyes. You know people do that like somebody's talking to person behind them and they roll their eyes like at that part that's lamms so how you know hamaz lammas ayyab fault finder", "وَجِدُهُ فِي نَفْسِهِ Whatever fault he sees it. وَمِن رَاعِبَ نَفسِهُ يَكُم مِّن دَعَ لَهُ النَّبِيِّ Whoever finds his own faults, then he will be among those. It's appropriate that he should be amongst those who the Prophet prayed for when he said may Allah have mercy on a man or a person who preoccupied with his or her own faults did not see the faults of others like", "of others. So, his own fault preoccupied him from the faults of others It's difficult to know the faults in yourself it's difficult why? Because people love themselves human being loves themselves when that love becomes excessive its narcissism but human beings love themselves and Allah made us", "made us to love ourselves allah loves his self allah made us save your own selves first and then your families like when you're when you are on the plane they always give that message when oxygen comes down first put it on yourself like before you can help somebody else you have to help yourself", "So then he says, because your love of yourself will blind you from yourself's faults. And that's why one of the great blessings of sahaba, real sahaba. You know like true companionship and this was the original purpose of what they call the fuqara, the qawm people that came it was actually to show that they could show one another their faults", "Now people get angry if you try to help somebody. They get angry. But that's one of the great blessings. The Prophet said, Al-mu'minu mir'atu akhihi. The mu'min is the mirror of his or her brother or sister. What does that mean? What do you use a mirror for? Well, if you're a narcissist, you use it to admire yourself. You know, just... But if you are an intelligent person,", "you're going to look, you know, to clean up your mess. The egg on your face from breakfast, right? It's actually to fix your hair or do something to actually correct the defects. The Prophet looked at the mirror and he took very good care of his hair. There's actually a chapter of taking care of your hair in the books of Shemaiah. He said whoever has been given hair let him honor the hair", "It's a blessing to have hair. I mean, the three men, one of them was bald. And the three man that the angel comes. Do you know that hadith? That's my favorite hadith. I actually thought we wanted to do a children's story with that hadif because it's such a good hadif. You know, Allah sent an angel to these three different men. And so the first one, there was a bald man, a blind man and a man who had skin disease. So he went to the skin disease", "disease and he came in the uh the angel came and asked him what he wanted and he said uh he wanted his skin to be good and so he said we'll look at that again and he cured him and then he yeah he said what kind of livestock do you like he told me i like sheep no i think it was like camels or cattle and and then and then", "He said, oh, I want hair. And so he, and then what kind of animals? You know, it's cattle. So he gives him that. Then he goes to the blind man. He says, I wanna see. So she comes back in the form for the first man in the shape of somebody with skin disease. And he asks them for charity. And they say won't you give me one of your animals? He said no, no, I don't have time for that.", "time for that he's shoes him away he said weren't you like me and god bless you with this he didn't know i was always like this he said well if that's not if you're lying may god return you to your original state so all his animals died and he got the skin disease again same with the man which goes he went as a bald man to the man without hair he said were you bald like me he said no i've always had this hair my dad's had this", "He saw himself. He said, take whatever you want because you remind me of the way I was before Allah blessed me. But what's interesting in the hadith, the blind man wanted to see people. That's why he asked for his sight. He says, so I can see people The other ones were worried about how people saw them. So it's right there. When that's your concern.", "Like your love of a thing will blind you to that thing and make you deaf to hearing any criticisms of it.", "He said there's no harm worse for a human being than to be enamored of himself, to be impressed with himself. Because some of the wise men said the liar is in great distance from the truth and the ostentatious one, the show-off, the morai is more doing eye service.", "in a worse condition than the liar because the liar is lying with his words but the murai lies with his", "but the one impressed with himself, there's no benefit will come from him in any way. Because the first two you can exhort them and that exhortation might be salutary it might have a beneficial effect on them because of their knowledge of their own souls so the liar knows he is a liar", "And the Mura'i knows he's a Mura'. But the one Mu'ajib binafsihi, he won't... He's not talking about me. He couldn't be talking about you. He wasn't talking about Me. I mean, I went to... I gave a khutbah once. This is a true story. I gave an khutbah. This man came up to me afterwards. Why did you... Why were you talking about My in that khutba? He got so angry. I knew the person. You know? I think I said something about these people", "that drive around in big cars and i don't know younger days but he just thought i was talking about him and i wasn't talking about Him, but He was convinced that I was talking to Him. But that was actually a good sign right? That's the way a khutbah should be you should think in the waw that the Khatib is talking about you but other people say ah he's not talking about me", "Yeah, Abdullah does that all the time. Can't be me. Right? Because he's totally ignorant of his own soul. He doesn't think that you're giving any exhortation to him. It couldn't mean him. The eighth.", "This is amazing. So he says the eighth reason, is that whoever knows his soul knows his Lord, knows Allah. Because it's been related there's no book that has ever been revealed from God except in it was something akin to know yourself oh human being you will know your Lord.", "So he's saying that that's the verse in the Quran that has that meaning. Know yourself and you will know your Lord, right? So there's a famous hadith which says, Imam Naui said, there's no confirmation of it. Ibn Taymiyyah and other scholars have said it's a fabricated hadith.", "Some of them say that it's from like in book on hadith, he says that it is from Yahya ibn Mu'adh al-Razi who was a great kind of mystic. That Imam al-Dhahabi says that he was . He was from the great Imams of his time", "of his time and he was famous for his exhortations. So some say it's from him, Ibn Arabi said that he considered absolutely sound in terms of its meaning. And Imam Masyuti wrote a... In his Al Hawila Al Fatawi, he has a little epistle, risalah", "called al-qawlu ashbah fi hadithi man arafa nasufu fa qad arafarabbah. You know, the kind of the most appropriate statement about the Hadith and he says that it's not a Hadith but he gives different interpretations of the meaning so the point he is making here is that the meaning is sound", "So he gives three ta'wilat. Asyuti actually gives several also, but he gives 3 ta'walat. The first is that knowledge of your soul will enable you to reach to knowledge of God in the same way that we say something like know Arabic and", "you'll be able to know jurisprudence. In other words, So through knowledge of Arabic it's a means in which it will enable you to learn or jurisprudent even though between them are intermediaries like you can't go directly to that. The second meaning", "So if knowledge of the self is achieved, then through its knowledge, knowledge of God is achieved without any falsehood. There's no... In the same meaning as when the sun comes up,", "the light comes out. In other words, the light is coupled with the rise of the sun. It's not delayed. So he's saying that through knowledge of yourself you will have knowledge of your Lord and for instance if you know yourself, if you're , then you'll know Allah is . If you know that you're fani, you'll understand that Allah is baqi. That's one level.", "The other is what in Christian scholasticism, what they call the imago dei. Which is the image of God that man was created in the image Of God and there's a hadith it says, There's a lot of khilaf about this but the point Is it's not the image God in...there's no form. God has no form God is infinite with no form, God cannot be in place or time Because you can't if you put God in place then you", "God in place, then you all studied this in Aqidah. But the point is that Allah has He has given us the means by which we understand something about our Lord. So he has given up these seven attributes so we have existence. So Allah has existence. We have wujud and then we have reason.", "intelligibility, that Allah has ilm. Right? We have sight. Allah has given us sight so we know Allah has basar. Allah is basir. He's given us ear hearing. We know Allah is samia. He has given life so we allah has life. Right?! So though that is the meaning that through knowing ourselves we can know something about our Lord even though all of it's cancelled out in reality", "compared to God's hearing is zero. You can't compare the finite to the infinite, but it's a , it's an approximation to give us some knowledge of our Lord. So if you know yourself and you understand your attributes, you will know your Lord.", "So if you know yourself in reality, then you will know the world. If you know the word, you'll know that it was created and you will now there has to be a creator. That cannot resemble the creative thing. Be watching in any way shape or form. So that's the extent of your knowledge", "That the intellect was given us to establish our servanthood to God, not to realize the reality of our Lord.", "So the howness of yourself, you know Imam Al-Ghazali wrote a famous poem about this but he says like you're asking how Allah , you don't even know how the water you drank ends up urine. You don't know how bread you ate ends up", "energy in your body. Like you don't know what's between your own two sides, so how can you know anything about Allah? So that aspect of it is, you know, you don' t know. How could you know the Jabar in his eternity, in God's eternity? Allah is the one who began everything. He initiated everything.", "the one who is a created soul, the nasima. How could that one understand God? And then also . Our inability to know God is knowledge of God. And any attempt to penetrate the mystery of the essence will end up in shirk", "in associating with God. وَفِي سَرَائِرِهِمْ مَّاتِرْ وَرٰى هِمَمٌ عَنذَا الَّذِي عَجَزَتْ جِنُّ وَأَمْلَكُ And the hidden aspirations of creation are aspirations, you know, the concerns of the creation are our aspirations. عَدَى الَّدِي يَعَجِزَةْ جَنٌّ وْأَبْلِكُ About what the jinn and the angels were incapable of comprehending.", "So he will guide them to him. From him, to him is guidance and he will achieve it. And the wali of Allah is midrak. The wali", "So they forgot God and so God caused them to forget themselves. Again reminding us that if they knew themselves, they would know God but when they were ignorant of them it indicated their ignorance of God. Their ignorance.", "forgetting ourselves. Kierkegaard, the Danish Christian philosopher said something very interesting. He said a human being, the most dangerous thing in the world is to lose oneself. It was very interesting because the Quran talks in many verses, several verses about khasiro anfusahum. They lost themselves. Khasiro anfusahim. And so he said the most", "And then he said, a man can lose five kroner and he would be aware of it. Like $5. He'd be aware if it. A man could lose his arm, he'd certainly be aware it. Could even lose a finger you'll be aware that. You can even lose fingernail you'll aware of that. If you lose a spouse, you'll to be aware. But he said but a man could loose himself and not even be aware about it. I mean that is amazing. So", "This is what he's calling us to. The next chapter is So, he mentions the different types of created things and the position of the human being from them in relation to them.", "وَلَا تُسَلَّطْ عَلِيْنَا بِذُنُوبِنَاهُمْ مَنْ لَا يَخَفُقُ وَلا يَحْرَمُنَ فِيهِ" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/People of Morocco - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _morocco__1742882000.opus", "text": [ "Look at this culture. One of the most beautiful cultures, and I fell in love with it 40 years ago because the first Muslim village, Muslim country I went to was Morocco. And I really, I fell In love with the culture. I fell with the people. I spent one month with Amazigh people up in the Atlas Mountains, Sidi Saleh." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Abdul sattar edhi n shaykh hamza Yusuf _usa_ motiv__1742890988.opus", "text": [ "Abdul Sattar Eidi, Pakistan. Although not a traditional Sufi, his life and work were deeply influenced by Sufi principles of selfless service and compassion. He founded the Eidi Foundation, one of the largest social welfare organizations in the world, providing health care orphanages and emergency services. Sheikh Hamza Yousuf, USA. A contemporary Islamic scholar and Sufi teacher, Hamza Yusuf emphasizes social justice education and spiritual renewal in the modern world." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Believing in God by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayusuf__1743073879.opus", "text": [ "When you accept God, God will continually show you reasons to continue to believe in God. And when you reject Him there's a verse in the Quran that says that we will remove our signs from people that show arrogance in the earth and they can see every sign and they will not believe. So the most important thing is... The Catholics have this tradition of the skeptics prayer which I actually really like. This idea of just saying, God, I don't know if You're there but if You are there", "but if you're there, help me find you. And I think if somebody really genuinely prayed that prayer, I think God would show up. And so I just believe God is real and I believe that God does present that reality to people that are willing to just humble themselves and say, I believe." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/BEWARE THE TONGUE _ Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _shorts _al__1743298918.opus", "text": [ "And that's why the tongue, you know every morning all the whole body says to the tongue You know Like don't fear God with us. If you're straight we're straight. Like and if you go astray we go astrays so that the body is afraid of the tongue and the tongue as Ralph Nader said his mother told him to eat the vegetables", "vegetables. And he said, I don't like that when he was a boy. I heard him tell the story. So when I was a He said, who is I? And he" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Privacy in Islam -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayusuf__1748541185.opus", "text": [ "If you go into a house, you're not actually supposed to look around at people's possessions and things like that or look at their books. You know, people just go right to the bookshelf and start looking at the books. I mean, that's like getting into the heart of somebody. Like for me personally, you look at my books, you are looking into my soul. So it is a personal thing. People have a right to those privacies. One of the good" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Qur_an is Unique by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayusuf__1743308047.opus", "text": [ "I think partly a testimony to the truth of the Qur'an that it is not like any other book because it is uniquely amongst the revealed books. It is the one that is directly from God, so even Jews and Christians understand that the Bible and the New Testament are inspired works, so they're inspired by God. So there's a wahi but it's human beings that it's transmitted through them. That's why they find discrepancies", "and other things in them that don't really bother them from that perspective because they understand that the scribes can make mistakes, and things like that. So they don't have the same understanding that we have whereas the Quran itself comes directly from God to the Prophet , and the prophet is merely a conduit for this revelation so it's coming through him to us" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Turkey is amazing - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _islam _tur__1742884986.opus", "text": [ "In Korea, when they captured the Americans, they captured Turks with them. So they were actually imprisoned together and when they studied, the Americans all fell apart and they actually started doing recordings for the Koreans like communist propaganda and they're very worried about this because they felt they were brainwashed. It was all from the interrogation but the Turks didn't. They didn't succumb to the interrogations and they wanted to understand why", "why and what they found out was two things that the Turks did one. They laughed a lot because they saw the ridiculousness of what they were trying to do in the brainwashing So they just would watch these people telling them these things and they thought it was funny And I know that that's from a type of iman where you kind of recognize The hilarity of this dunya and the stupidity of human beings, and I know it had to do with their upbringing", "to do with their upbringing as Muslims. The other thing that they did, because they would take away the officers and the morale would break down with the Americans, the Turks always appointed an amir . So even if it was a private, they would appoint somebody over them and he would keep them all together. These are really important things to remember." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/_ We Wouldn_t Even Exist _ Hamza Yusuf _ Inspiring__1743056852.opus", "text": [ "People don't think about what Allah has done for them. They're in heedlessness. There are people now that haven't remembered God for years. They don't even think about Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And yet every instant is completely and utterly dependent on Allah subhana wa ta'da. Your breath, your lungs, your kidneys, your digestion, everything is dependent on", "the universe. He is the Qayyum, he's the one who has set it up. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is doing everything for us and then he asked for us to do some things for him. To remember him at least five times a day that's minimal. He's remembering us in every instant because if he didn't remember us we wouldn't even exist" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Allah ﷻ is One by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf rh __ _hamzay__1743305665.opus", "text": [ "Allah is simple. In theology, I use that term simple which simply means that Allah is not compound You know there's no parts So God doesn't have any parts He's not... And that's what you know he's قُرْهُ وَاللَّهُ أَحَدٌ He is absolutely unique and one in his acts attributes in his essence His attributes and his acts He's one in all three right", "Right? And so he's not three in one. He's one with those three dimensions and this is why Trinity is, you know it's a really interesting thing in the world that's why trigonometry is such a fascinating study because it's hard to get out of triads they're everywhere and so you can see how Christian theologians fell into that mistake which is what Allah warns them against" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Healing your soul - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_KjXUx42n7fY&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743059083.opus", "text": [ "People might be familiar with Aristotle's theory of stasis and the reason why revolutions happen, and we're living in revolutionary times places like The Middle East Crimea other places The the reason revolutions happened according to Aristotle is that philia breaks down love breaks down in a society and people lose the compassion for the other and This is one of the reasons why", "Philadelphia, which was the original capital of the United States is the city of philia It's the city brotherly love and so to reintroduce that into politics. I think this is really important. It's not spoken enough The I want a little caveat this if anybody's on Prozac They might feel better leaving I don't want to depress anybody", "anybody but I want to both before you can really talk about healing you have to look at the diagnostics to understand what's going on a very influential author for me is Arnold Toynbee and he wrote a book over 50 years ago called change and habit the challenge of our time", "listening to because in 1947 he wrote an essay about a civilization when it's up against the wall, against another civilization has certain strategies and one of them is zealotry and fanaticism. And he warns about the Muslim world and actually identifies three places where he felt in 1947 that he felt serious problems would emerge in the future. Afghanistan, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia.", "Saudi Arabia. And that was in 1947. One of the gifts that historians bring is that they look at the future with hindsight because they know the past so well, they can see and prognosticate about what's going to happen. But he wrote this book, Change in Habit, arguing that as humans we have certain habits that are very dangerous. And they're not instinctual. They're literally habitual. And the worst, he felt, was the habit of going to war.", "that this is, it's a choice. That there are other alternatives and peoples have done other things. War is not the only solution. It's actually always a failure. It' s the last refuge of the incompetence violence so but he also felt There were other aspects one of them was tribalism or nationalism and this idea of not seeing us as a human family", "a human family, as seeing us as us and them. And this is a very dangerous habit of the mind. If we're not trained to change these habits, and this is why virtue theory is based on altering habits, it's adopting new habits. The human being can change. It's not nature versus nurture. The two work together. This idea of nature versus", "is something also that's problematic. So I just want to say that, I'm gonna talk about... Is it? Okay. Another one of my favorite people is Søren Kierkegaard who was another visionary, somebody who really saw the future. If you haven't read Kierkegaard he's incredibly humorous writer, wonderful wit", "he says that, he said things to make people laugh while he was crying inwardly. But one of the things that he said was that one solitary person cannot help or save an age. He can only make it clear that it is on its way to a downfall. And this is the Cassandra problem because if people know Greek mythology, Cassandra warned not in the Iliad", "but in a play, warned the Trojans not to bring in the horse. But she had the gift of prophecy, but she was cursed with it. Nobody would believe her. So in terms of... This isn't switching here. Maybe we're meant to contemplate this a little longer.", "Yeah, technology is such a... Okay. Now we're okay. Thanks. So the purpose of human existence. I'm going to speak from my tradition. This is the festival of faiths. So I want to speak", "they believe in the divine or not that they are fulfilling a divine purpose and this is often lost on religious peoples that are working from a provincial tradition and not recognizing that everybody is here for a reason. The second is, the purpose is actually to worship, to adore the Creator and this obviously from the Abrahamic traditions", "And then finally, stewardship. The idea of being caretakers of what we've been given. This is called the khalifa and the khaleefah is one who stands in place. And the Quran tells us that God said I'm placing in the earth a steward and a ste ward is one acts on behalf of another. So this is divine stewardship. And David, we're told in the Jewish tradition that David,", "over the land, judge fairly between people. Do not follow your desires.\" There's a really important point about this because stewardship is corrupted by following desires and lest they divert you from this divine plan. And so the question is how are we doing as stewards of the earth if this is really one of the reasons why we're here? So just to look maybe at some of the signs", "I trained in the medical profession and we always take vital signs. And we also assess orientation, so you ask somebody what...I was working at a time when we didn't have a president there was that little interregnum period where we didn t know who was president, was it Bush or Kerry? So we couldn't really ask them whose president but you asked a patient whose president,", "Who are you? So, you orient them to time and place so they... You can see. Do they know? One of the verses in the Quran says that corruption, and the word is fasad, has appeared on land and on sea because of what people have earned by their acts to make them taste some of what they have done that they might turn back. So, the idea of when we do things in the world", "we get this repercussion and the reason for that repercussion it's actually a mercy because it's letting you know that you need to turn back, that you're doing something wrong. And so you cannot go out and sow corruption without having the corruption come back at you in what in economic terms is these externalities", "of economic production. So if you have a factory, the factory doesn't intend to pollute the river because it just wants to produce whatever it's producing but that's a negative externality. You also have positive externalities. So one of the signs of these latter times when it's gotten too much, the Quran says that men will cry out and say what is happening to the earth? On that day", "On that day, it will tell you all because your Lord inspired it to do so. So the word in Arabic that's used in the Quran which is fasad is rottenness, spoiledness, corruption, decayed decomposition, putrefaction, depravity, wickedness. It has...it's used for like when food goes bad, the Arabs say faseda, it's gone bad but they also use it for a person", "has gone wrong. And pollution is the undesirable state of the natural environment being contaminated with harmful substances as a consequence of human activities, so the state of being polluted. It's also defilement and this is also traditionally a religious term that was used. Now the traditional interpretation which is from the seventh century of one of the great Quran interpreters Abdallah ibn Abbas about this he said", "of corruption, a facade on land are fires soil degradation the lowering of the water tables and among the signs of corruption in the sea is the diminution of the fish so the fish begin to disappear. So this is seventh century and you will actually find in Chinese manuscripts from over 2,000 years ago the problems of pollution these aren't new", "effects on the lands that they were in. But, in my own... I'm coming from the West Coast one of things that we've seen is a lot of fires and and I don't know if people know about the fires that are happening all over the planet Spain Europe has a tremendous problem with with fires but we see a lot fires and you can see the increase that's happened over time here just from 1980 to 1989 to 2000 2010", "firefighters, people go in. One of the reasons is because of the climate change that's happening so it's increasing this risk and then wildfires are projected to burn more land as temperatures continue to rise so you can see the projected increase here on the west coast of...on the west side of our country. Another aspect is the air pollution and it's extraordinary how many people suffer around", "city has a huge problem with asthma. We have actually high mortality rates in major cities because of the pollution we're actually finding also a lot of contamination our bodies so this is a major problem. This is China where a lot people are forced to wear masks because the pollution gets so bad and then another aspect here", "degradation which a lot of people are unaware of this I think people here, I mean I'm obviously speaking to a lot that are aware of these things but a lot people are not aware of the real crisis we're seeing in soil degradation. Soil is a very thin layer it takes millennia to produce topsoil and it can be lost very easily and I mean obviously we have hydroponics we have other ways of growing plants. Plants actually don't need", "and hydroponics, they began studying hydroponic in the 17th century. But it would be an immense loss to our species because we have incredible problems with water as well. And this is another aspect of the desertification which I saw firsthand in the Sahara. I lived in the Saha Desert and I saw first hand literally at the encroachment of the Saharan deserts pretty overwhelming", "whole cities engulfed in sand so overall this is what we're seeing and this is our scientists are telling us. We don't need apocalyptic prophets now to talk about these things, we have our scientists telling these and it's an important reminder that the earth is not just for human beings one of the verses in the Quran is that its God who spread out the Earth for all living creatures it literally says lil-anam", "So it's all sleeping creatures. It's a place where you should feel safe and secure. It is a place of repose, you can't sleep unless you feel safe or secure. And many of the animals are suffering and I've mentioned this before but one of the intriguing things to me about endangered species is that it's not the cockroaches that are going extinct. It' s not the rats or mice they're actually thriving. But what's going extinct", "are these animals that historically in many traditional cultures, they use them as names for their children. They're the animals that embody noble spirits, the eagles, the lions, the tigers, the wolves. One of the real tragic aspects, I don't know if people might know about the doctrine of signatures but there's a traditional belief in medicine", "In the Arab tradition, cashews are very good for memory according to the Arabs. If you look at a cashew it looks almost like a hypocalamus which is where memories located in the brain so if something looks like that if you cut a carrot you can see an eye in the carrots so carrots are considered good fries well there's a Asian belief that the rhinoceros I think you can use your imagination is good for people that would otherwise use Viagra and", "And so unfortunately, the rhinoceros extraordinary animal is literally being wiped out because of this desire for people to use this aphrodisiac. Virginia Gray Henry published a wonderful book which was written in the 10th century about the animals having a lawsuit against humanity. So they actually come to court and demand that the human be taken to task", "to task for wreaking so much havoc in the natural world. It's worth reading, but then we move from the land to the sea and I could talk... There are a lot of other things happening and many of you are aware that you know about the mountain tops in Kentucky and many, many other things, but I don't want to...I just want to give an overview here. But the oceans also amazing what we're seeing in the oceans. The Gulf of Mexico, the repercussions of that are just overwhelming", "I mean, the people that are suffering to this day. There's a lot of immune diseases that have occurred, a lot people really suffering and the BP cleanup is far from over. The effects of that are massive on the planet so oil is another major problem. And then obviously again, the animals just really suffer when it comes to this. So burning off a lot", "which is also another real source of pollution. It's interesting that right now, sorry, this literally is May 13th, a glacial region's melt is past the point of no return according to NASA. So these things are happening right now and our scientists are confirming these things", "It's very difficult to process these things. When I first read that 90% of the fish were gone, I thought it just seemed so crazy. And I sat next to a man on an airplane who happened to be a marine biologist and we started talking. I asked him about this. I said listen, I've read this in The Guardian is this true? He said well, it's between 85 and 95%. So we kind of took a middle number in there. I say what do you think about that? He says keeps me up at night.", "One of the things, and this is really important about the acidification. So I want you to just see... Whoops! Is this going to work for me? Okay so I'm not getting the actual video because this had video. I guess they didn't hook up the video for it. Anyway, the ocean acidification which is a result of the pollution we have acid rain. We have our oceans are becoming more and", "Which is very interesting and I'm going to get to that why.", "struggling to survive. But that's just touching the surface. By the end of the century, acidification could leave some types of plankton unable to form their shells. And plankton is at the foundation of nearly all marine ecosystems. If key species of these tiny organisms are lost, everything else that depends on them for food", "The ocean threatens to change life in our oceans out of all recognition within the span of a single human lifetime.", "coast including parts of washington state all along the coast down to california our report tonight from nbc is miguel almaguer in the waters off monterey bay an urgent expedition is underway this is the hunt for a killer it's happened so rapidly that some species are just missing marine biologist pete ramondi", "to an epidemic named starfish wasting disease infecting waters from Alaska the Southern California causing millions of starfish like this one to fall apart and melt away our group is looking to try to map that timing of the onset of the disease and locations of the diseases up and down a coastal it will help us point two causes the die-off has decimated", "You know is this the canary in the coal mine? He said it very well could be I want to we'll get back to the jellyfish which are very interesting But here's just some numbers of people don't know but a blue fish tuna when it's fully formed is worth literally tens of thousands of dollars on the sushi market and so these these fishermen go out looking for they don't find them anymore these giant ones because the overfishing is so", "immense that they're not allowing the fish to actually reach their full maturity. So what's happening, what's interesting is that it's creating an ideal environment for jellyfish. They are the only ones that are thriving right now in the ocean. The big fish stocks fall 90% since 1950 according to National Geographic so you know", "You know, the jellyfish are thriving which is really fascinating. I just read this book Stung and it was a really devastating book written by she's the foremost expert on jellyfish. And jellyfish you're fascinating that they're toxic what I find interesting as the ocean in traditional cosmology is consciousness which is why Robert Frost has wonderful poem about why we look out at the ocean to land varies more but we still want to look out of the ocean", "And we can't look out far and we can' t look in deep, but that doesn't prevent us from looking at the ocean. The ocean is, in cosmology it's consciousness. And the fact that all these great fish are dying off, the whales and the dolphins, but the jellyfish this spineless brainless predator, all it does is consume. It's just a spineless, brainless consumer.", "And that to me is just such an amazing statement about human consciousness. Are the jellyfish taking over our minds, our consciousness? Are we becoming human jellyfish? And believe it or not all over they're having jellyfish warnings because they are really thriving and the woman who wrote that book Stung says its way past this was a wake up call long time ago", "literally have shut down aircraft carriers because there's so many jellyfish pods out there. So now what are the roots of this crisis? At at the heart of it is the modern doctrine of the consumer. Now, what's interesting to me is that the consumer in Old English meant", "he consumed the souls of people. And consumption was a name for the wasting disease in the 19th century. It's what killed people slowly. And so this whole idea of, you know, I shop therefore I am, shop until you drop, the one with the most toys at the end wins. This idea of just shopping, this comes, this was actually done to us. And I would recommend people reading William Leach, The Land of Desire.", "land of desire because he takes a period about from the 1890s till the 1930s and shows how our society was turned into a consumer society. It was conscious, it was done because they could produce a large number of goods and they wanted people to buy those goods so we have to understand that this was something that was done to us, that people were not always consumers,", "they recycle everything because it's just simply, that's what they do. When I lived with the Bedouin, they use everything, literally. They don't throw away anything and now they're starting to get these throwaway items and so you're seeing garbage everywhere now in the Sahara, just plastics. In fact, Mauritania, and I'm proud", "Consul of Mauritania, but Mauritian outlawed plastic bags. It's a one-year prison sentence to use plastic bags and the reason that they did that is because so many of the goats, the livestock that they depend on were dying and they didn't know why until they found out they were eating the plastic bags out in the desert and they were getting these intestinal diseases and dying from intestinal obstruction. And so the government", "And again, this is where a government makes a choice and does something. So in the 1530s consumer was one who squanders or wastes so it had a negative connotation. The Quran says that people boast I have squandered great wealth and this is conspicuous consumption. I'll get back to this but another major problem", "where we, especially in the United States, where we talk about budgets and making cuts and welfare mothers. And nobody wants to talk seriously about this obscene armaments. We were warned by Eisenhower as he was departing after spending his life serving the military and working with the military industry. He warned us about this new phenomenon, the military industrial complex.", "And we have to recognize that the type of budgets that this country has for military spending are obscene. They are obscane, and it's money that could be going to much, much better things. This is the result of the aerial bombing that happened in Germany, and this is why we have end war as a species. We have to", "war strategist from Europe said that war was just the extension of politics by other means. So, war is a political act because in politics you try to get things done when things aren't getting done through the traditional means of politics then use violence to get them done it doesn't work anymore if it ever worked its arguable but it does not work this is a scene from Syria so it's going on now", "still happening. And these are the budgets, if you look at education compared to military spending it's insane. I mean Pakistan spends so much on the military some of the Gulf states have budget Saudi Arabia has a budget that's it's the seventh largest military budget after India. A country of 19 million people why because they're subsidizing Western industry it's as simple", "don't use it. When the Gulf War came, they didn't, they, the Americans came and other people. So why are these obscene budgets being used? And then we also, we don't want to deal with this but this can't go on either. Our prophet actually predicted that the time would come he said when", "he said that it would be like pillars of gold and silver. And the one who kills on the day of judgment, he will come and say this is the reason I killed for? And then the one being killed will say this was the reason why I was killed? And the wars if you read Daniel Juergens book The Prize, the 20th century was wars over oil. And oil is the blood of our technological society", "technological society. It is the blood, and it's more precious than human blood for a lot of people. We cannot... If we now, if the average earthling lives like the average American, we will need three Earths to supply that consumption. It's impossible. It can't go on. Now just moving", "moving to the self. What are some of the signs? Autism in 1970, and people can argue that this is from diagnostics and things like that but we know from 2012-2013 no, something's happening here. We had 1 in 10 thousand diagnosed. I mean the first diagnosis of autism was in the 1950s but now it's one in 50 in the United States.", "Now if you look at the definition of autism, a pervasive developmental disorder characterized by severe deficits in social interaction and communication. By an extremely limited range of activities and interests and often by the presence of repetitive stereotype behavior. This about defines everybody under 30.", "I mean, we have to really think about what's happening to our young people that are growing up with this technology. Repetitive stereotypical practices, losing the ability to interact socially. Another major problem that we have is obesity. The Quran and this is in all our traditions because gluttony is one of the deadly sins but it reminds", "Eat and drink, but not to excess. God loves not the extravagant wasters. And one of the signs of the latter days, according to our tradition, is yad harofihim as-simen, that obesity would become manifest. These are the average BMIs around the globe. You can see Africa and a lot of Asia. The Asians don't eat a lot", "a serious industrial nation, but they still eat cosmologically. If you look at Chinese food one of the things about Chinese medicine which I studied and my sister's an acupuncturist and one of things that I always thought that they lacked diet. They never talk about diet if you go to a Chinese doctor they don't focus on diet. At a certain point I realized it because in their culture they didn't need to people just simply ate well by the very nature of the food they consumed", "These are the world's fattest countries. We're number two, so Americans are proud of being number one. But Kuwait takes that, so there's McDonalds in Arabic, the Golden Arches. As you come into Mecca, the first thing you see is the Golden Archers. It was a very troubling sight for me.", "scarcity and on the other hand we have this overconsumption it's just so imbalanced. And there is a tradition that we have from our prophet that a believer will not go to bed satiated knowing his neighbor is hungry, and that's any neighbor of any faith. Diabetes is a really important", "a really important problem now that's globally. This is extraordinary what's happening, but I want to point out in traditional cosmology what happens inside of us happens outside of us. If you want to know why the oceans are acidic it's because we're becoming acidic. Literally. We are becoming acidic The world manifests our states and that's why knowing our states is so important because how we are, how we behave", "we behave, what we do. All of this is going to be reflected in the world. The macrocosm can only reflect the microcosm and so the acidosis of the oceans is related to the acidic levels that are happening people are moving away from the natural state which is an alkaline state and moving towards an acidic state and this this is what happens when by 2050 one-third of Americans will have diabetes", "will have diabetes at current rates. And if you look, there's a relationship between carbohydrates and hydrocarbons. There's a relation chemically. So what we're using oil is like sugar. We are giving the earth diabetes. It's becoming acidic. Our soil is becoming acidic and our oceans are becoming acidic because we are using cheap energy. Sugar is a very quick energy for our bodies. Oil is a", "a very quick easily digested energy for our machines and for heating our homes. And so this results in this acidic state, and this is what diabetic acidosis is related as far as I... This is my belief that it's related to the the acidic state of the planet. Another major problem we... The UN estimates there are more slaves today than any other time", "of it, 80% is sexual slavery. And this is another really serious problem, the problem of lust that we're really not dealing with in our society. I really think we're in a deep denial about the serious problem of lost in this culture and one of the most important thermometers for it is pornography. The size of the industry now is 57 billion worldwide. It's a massive industry. These are", "These are sound numbers, people. These are not exaggerated numbers. This is taken from one of our top universities. $12 billion in the U.S. Porn revenue is larger than all combined revenues of all professional football, baseball and basketball franchises. U. S porn revenue exceeds the combined revenues ABC, CBS and NBC. If you look at the websites 4.2 million 12% of total websites now daily internet", "Daily internet searches, 68 million. 25% of total searches. Monthly porn downloads, 1.5 billion. Websites offering illegal child pornography, over 100,000 websites. And for those of you who don't know, there's a deep web where there's just the darkness that goes on on the deep web. And then 8 to 16-year-olds who have viewed porn online in our country, 90%. Gluttony over consumption.", "consumption. Those who squander are like siblings or the brethren of the demons.\" One of the things that we don't think about is the relationship to what we do and this darkness. People that are watching pornography are supporting human trafficking because many of the women in these films, here in the United States and outside the United", "girls that appear on CNN getting their degree at Duke and saying how much they love being a porn star. Those represent a very, very, tiny percentage of the actual women engaged in the porn industry which degrades both men and women. Another thing is planned obsolescence. I would recommend...I'm not going to go through this it's a very interesting thing but there's the story of stuff with Annie Leonard many of you have probably seen it.", "It's definitely worth watching. Well, two of their most effective strategies are planned obsolescence and perceived obsolesence. Planned obsolesce is another word for designed for the dump. It means they actually make stuff to be useless as quickly as possible so we'll chuck it and buy a new one. It's obvious with things like plastic bags and coffee cups but now it's even big stuff. Mops, DVDs, cameras, barbecues, even everything. Even computers. Have you noticed that when you buy a computer now", "facet in just a couple of years. It's actually an impediment to communication. I was curious about this, so I opened up a big desktop computer to see what was inside and I found out that the piece that changes each year is just a tiny little piece in the corner. But you can't just change that one piece because each new version is a different shape. So you've got to chuck the whole thing and buy a new one. So I was reading industrial design journals from the 1950s when planned obsolescence was really catching on. See, this is the point. This was done consciously", "can tell that you haven't contributed to this arrow recently. And since the way we demonstrate our value is contributing to this Arrow, it can be embarrassing. Like I've had the same fat white computer monitor on my desk for five years. My coworker just got a new computer. She has a flat shiny sleek monitor. It matches her computer, it matches her phone even her pen stand. She looks like she's driving in Spaceship Central and I look like I'm at a washing machine on my", "prime example of this. Have you ever wondered why women's shoe heels go from fat one year to skinny the next, to fat to skinny? It's not because there is some debate about which heel structure is the most healthy for woman's feet. It's because wearing fat heels in a skinny-heeled year shows everybody that you haven't contributed to that era as recently so you're not as valuable as that person in skinny heels next to you or more likely on some ad. It is to keep us buying new shoes. Advertisements and media in general plays a big role in this. Each", "Each of us in the U.S. is targeted with over 3,000 advertisements a day. We see more advertisements in one year than people 50 years ago saw in a lifetime. And if you think about it, what's the point of an ad except to make us unhappy with what we have? So 3, 000 times a day we're told our hair is wrong or skin is wrong, our clothes are wrong, furniture is wrong cars wrong, we are wrong but it can all be made right if we just go shopping. Media also helps by hiding all this and all of this so the only part of the materials economy", "is the shopping. The extraction, production and disposal all happens outside of our field of vision.\" It's important to bring backgrounds into the foreground so people understand because when we look this one of things that painters do so effectively Van Gogh when you look at the shoes you know if you he painted several different but if you look", "because he was taking something that's in the background and bringing it to the foreground. And it's very important for religious leaders, for artists, for others to do that, to let people know what's in their background, those things we're not seeing, the things that are hidden. One of the things our Prophet told us is there would be people towards the end of time like locusts in their consumption.", "Every year we have martyrs to consumption. There are people that die on these buying sprees every year this happens in this country, people literally died because they're trampled to death and because of these things but another aspect that we don't think about is just garbage production and the fact one of the professors that was at my university he taught environmental studies", "He had zero garbage production in his home, and he used to take his students to his home to show what he did. In other words, people can actually live reducing their garbage to a great extent, but everything is packaged, totally unnecessary packaging. And this leads to these landfills. It's beyond belief what's happening. And again, who suffers? The animals. They eat this stuff.", "When you, you know everybody lets off those helium balloons. Those helium balloons go to the ocean they eventually Go down and turtles swallow them They get the the obstruction so these simple things that people are doing without thinking And now we have the great Pacific garbage patch which is bigger than the size of Texas It's a huge massive swell of garbage in the middle of the Pacific Ocean That because of the tides and currents it all tends to go to this one area", "Now, there's a verse in the Quran that angels ask God. And obviously this shouldn't be taken like a literal type conversation. But the angels asked God when God created man in our church and the human being how can you put someone therein who will cause damage and bloodshed when we celebrate your praise and proclaim your holiness? So the angels were asking this question.", "give I'm not going to go into that and you can certainly see the incredible amount we over almost 200 million people were killed at the hands of other people in the last century, the 20th century. And we came into the 21st century with a lot of hope but it begins with 9-11 and then these terrible wars that have affected us. But the response that God made was, إِنِّي أَعْلُمُ الْمَا لَا تَعلمُونَ I know what you don't know about the human being.", "This is what we have to keep in mind. I put these pictures up because these are my personal teachers. These are people that I studied with. And there's... There's a verse in the Quran that says", "in the earth or to be elevated. And this is what we have to remember as a species that, we have people in this world that remind us of who we really are. We're not jellyfish.", "spineless consumers. We have human hearts, we have the ability to know infinity. We can conceptualize it. No other species can do that. We are something amazing and we have to remind our young people of that. Lost in this world of false idols,", "images of women that are so degrading. They are so degrading and I don't need to name names because you know them, you see them on the television, you seen them on covers of magazines. This is not who we want our young girls to grow up emulating. We don't want our men to grow emulating the lowest forms of life on this earth. The cockroaches, the rats, the jellyfish.", "We want them to soar with the eagles. And that's what we're here to do and to remind people, and that's why as far as I'm concerned, as religious people, the religious leadership, we have failed so dramatically. We have failed our young people. We are the halo effect, and then we have the clay feet syndrome. They don't see people walking", "people walking their talk. They don't see people living it. They do not see the gift of sanctity in their beings, in their presence and that is what we need to remind ourselves that we have to become these people. We have to be these people that have graced this earth reminding us this is not what it's about. We are here for a short temporal time", "is in discovering ourselves and in serving others. This is the work, we're not here to consume. We're not hear to indulge ourselves. We are here for something much greater and we constantly need to be reminded because we are a forgetful species. When the elephants came to honor the man who had looked after them and some of you may have seen this but they walked for over a day even before he died", "vigil in front of his house. These are signs for people that reflect. The animals pray for us, according to our tradition the fish in the ocean pray for the righteous. Our Prophet said, المسترح والمستريح منه The one who has repose and the one others have repose from them. They said, Who are they O Messenger of God? And he said, Those who live righteously when they die they have reposed. And those who live corrupting", "corrupting, when they die people, trees, rivers and animals have repose from them. That's the choice. And I really want to drive this point home because I think this is one of the most important verses for me in the New Testament. I'm in a great Christian city of Louisville traditionally. You see churches everywhere you know there was a love of Christianity which", "Christianity which is a great faith and there's incredible amount of beauty and truth Despite the history we tend to forget that the history of religions is the history their ego not of their soul But for we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities against powers against the rulers of the darkness of this world against spiritual wickedness in high places People that that created planned obsolescence", "obsolescence. This is from spiritual wickedness in high places, and we have to recognize that we cannot support these people, that there are people out there that are actively engaged in harming this world. They're doing it because they're complete slaves of their own desires, and you cannot be a steward if you're filled with your own egoistic desires. You can't. And", "The Catholics divided the sins into the hot sins and the cold sins. And we tend to forget, you know, the hot things are easy to recognize gluttony wrath and lust. Dorothy Sayers reminded us that when a society loses its spiritual center sex is always the spiritual outlet So this obsession with sex which is also related to the rape of the earth To the way we treat Mother Earth because of our degradation of our objectification of women", "of women. And this is much more a male problem than a female problem. Pornography is largely a male program, but not entirely. But we have to remember there are hot sins and cold sins, but the cold sins are often praised in our society. The sins of avarice, right? The sins", "not laziness. Acedia, in the traditional understanding, sloth was spiritual laziness a CEO could be out there working 120 hour work week and he's still slothful because he's forgotten his soul or she's forgotten her soul. And this is what we have to remember Robert Frost said some say the world will end in fire some say in ice from what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire but if it had to perish twice I think I know enough", "hate to say that for destruction ice is also great and would suffice it's the hot sins of the cold sins that are going to kill us and we have to really take this seriously and it's our spiritual traditions that address this root problem it's not complicated the problem is not complicated thank you very much", "That was really remarkable. Thank you. It opened a lot of eyes, both educationally and particularly your ending in our recognition of the spiritual that lies beneath that. Just to remind everyone as we come out", "the highness of that encounter. The plan from here is we have about an hour to spend together and I was asked to do just a very brief kind of response myself which is basically really just wending some time for you to be thinking about questions that you'd like to ask because what we would like to do with most of this time is just have an open dialogue with Hamsa on some of the things he's presented today and maybe some questions that", "or things that you wanted to share. So I'll do about three or four minutes here, my own kind of response to these challenges from a specifically Jewish perspective and I have questions I could ask, I was scribbling notes but we'd really rather listen to yours so be thinking about the questions you might post okay? All right", "There's an illusion. It's a grand illusion that has been perpetrated upon us, and we have perpetrated it upon ourselves. It is an illusion that we are somehow separate from the earth, that we're somehow separate form ourselves. We are all Adam, one human family. And we are all part of Adama, or all part", "earth. What makes us think that there's a barrier somewhere between my feet and the wooden floor upon which they sit, between the floor and the foundation upon which it sits, between The Earth and the stone which holds it all and us firmly here in place? Where does a tree end and the roots begin? Where do the roots merely become tendrils and the tendrils become one with", "which nourishes and sustains us. What makes us think that there's a difference between the air we breathe, and the one who breathes it? Breathe in. Breathe out. The air enters us. It fills our lungs, it enriches our blood, and it gives us life. We breathe it forth and return to its source as trees and plants breathe in our breath", "in our breath enriched and sustained by our souls which have been added to this breath of life what makes us think that there's a difference between sheikh hamza yusuf and myself and yourself a difference", "We are one, all of us here in this room. We are all the children of one creator who has placed us here to help build a world that is one as God is one. And there's an illusion that stands side by side with the first. That in order to be one we must all be the same. That to be different from one another makes us somehow other.", "for so long that we've come to accept it, and to feel that those who are like ourselves are like. And we've become to fear those who upon the surface of their likeness seem unlike us. It's as if we see in the mirror only a reflection of ourselves in order to be comfortable. And that is an illusion. What we must seek instead is a sameness not in reflection but in the soul.", "This is an illusion which we who have gathered here today can often fall prey to. Ourselves. We gather as a people of faith, in common cause and common action, with common hopes and dreams through which we seek to find common elements and common paths. This is a well-meaning illusion that we are all the same beneath the surface,", "beneath the skin and we worship the same God in essentially the same ways. And since there is much that we share in common, this is a particularly useful illusion and one which we become very adept at maintaining. In Hebrew were commanded to seek shalom. In Arabic it's called salam. In English you strive for peace. As Jews we seek to heal the brokenness of our world through acts of tzedakah.", "In Arabic it's called zakah. In English we call it charity, from the Latin word caritas which means caring. In our prayers as Jews we seek rachamim. In Arabic rahim. in English we strive for compassion and because we share many of these essential traits which make us human it's easy for us to imagine that we are all the same and a dream of a world of peace", "We will all sing with one voice in a single chorus instead of inspiring the harmony of our many voices, or a symphony of the many instruments creating together a song of oneness that we can all share. In the Mishnah, a collection of ethical writings now some 1800 years old, we are taught that humanity was created with a single Adam, the descendant of one human being to demonstrate God's greatness.", "When a human being mints a coin in the press, each coin is identical. But when the ruler of all, the Holy One, blessed be, creates humanity in the form of Adam, not one is similar to the other. The lesson of this Mishnah comes to teach us that diversity is intended and an intended part of the divine plan. And this is the wondrous part. Our many faces, our many languages,", "part of God's plan for us here on earth. We are children of one human family, we cannot be other from our brother. We need not be the same to feel a kinship with our sisters. We're all the children of One Creator of us all. The path towards a compassionate society requires of us the courage I think to tear the veil of these twin illusions from before our eyes,", "as together we might be. We are one human family, many minds, many voices, and many hands to heal the world. And we can work together as one and build a compassionate community in a world of peace.\" I'm not sure how much that balanced but it said a lot of things. Thank you for the one person who was clapping but we're not clapping now.", "would come of that though was a recognition of a lot that we share and a lot of the wisdom that we've learned, but frankly we would not have learned if it were not for an Islamic scholar sharing us the wonder of his particular traditions view. And I hope that you like I were listening and saying you know there's wisdom there. And sometimes the wisdom is wisdom that I don't find in my own sacred scripture and", "to believe that we didn't have the same hands writing them. But that the key here is that there's a wisdom beneath all of this, and that when we listen to each other and learn from one another, we can see perspectives we would not have seen otherwise, and sometimes learn lessons that were waiting to be taught to us. Now I have a nice list of questions. I'm going to ask one, and then you're on. Okay? So you're thinking, and Mustafa has some people who are gonna be around with microphones who will give you the opportunity. There's someone waving back there", "back there for an opportunity for you to get in line for. The place I thought I'd start just give them a chance to consider is with a wisdom of the Jewish tradition, a Midrash, a legend it's from Gohelle Rava. It says that God created Adam as the last of all the creations and then toured Adam throughout all creation so", "of the gift that was being given us. And then God said, this is given to you as a gift. Care for it. For if you do not there will be no other to be received. And there's a sense there I think that we've lost perhaps of the religious and spiritual obligation to the earth. I feel like we get caught up in the scientific conversation of global warming or climate change", "and forth about how fast, human deliverance. It just occurs to me that polluting the earth is a bad thing. If we would just recognize... It's not complicated. Right. Beneath it there's a spiritual thing. That's what I really got mostly from... For me one of the things that every time you go into these places where they give you these throwaways and then you throw them away, this kind of Kantian thing where think if everybody did", "which is what they call themselves in Arabic, means the first people. And this is why some Christians call them the First Nations, the First Peoples. There's great things that come. I mean, I'm glad Shakespeare's in the world. I'm", "Lady Gaga, you know. I mean there's whole slews of people that just get something out of the artist, but all of the things we love about civilization... The question we have to ask ourselves now is it all worth it in terms of what civilization is doing to us as a species? And that is...I think", "that's a real question because we have to somehow learn what aboriginal peoples have known how to live sustainably on the planet and they have great things to teach us but they're messed up too so it's not, cause I know in first hand just living they have their problems, they're grappling they, a lot of aboriginal people do not have", "Modernity when it's introduced and an example of that for people that know the work of gerrymander not the political word, but the writer He he wrote a book called the four arguments for the elimination of television And in that book one of the studies they did in Canada. They had the good fortune of being able to watch a Inuit Native American village as electricity was introduced", "I think one of the reasons why we've lost our spirituality is because of artificial light. And it's interesting, we call it artificial light, because if you look up at the sky in the Sahara Desert and I have been reduced to tears on many nights just that the heavens declare your glory. I've been in the Sinai. It's breathtaking. It is breathtaking. And there's a reason why those guys fled to the desert. You know? Because if you want to be close to the heavens, that's as close as you're going to get. We don't see the stars anymore.", "Plato said God put the stars there to show us the order of the heavens that we would desire to bring the order down into ourselves. So what happens when we don't see the heavens anymore? And I would really like to see a city, you might think of this, Mayor Fisher might think just having an hour once a month where all the lights in the city are turned off on a clear night so that people can actually go out and see the heaven. Just see the Heavens. It's amazing!", "amazing stars are amazing i'm the chair of the planetarium which if you think about it for a second is a sad reality which is that in cities we've built places where you can see the stars because we project them but at least then they do it geocentrically nobody points that out that when you're in a planetarium they don't have you revolving around the heavens they have the heavens evolving around so they have to do a ptolemaic planet please visit us at the planetarium", "the spiritual effect of consuming artificial foods like high fructose corn syrup and you know all these sort of processed things that are added to foods and Packaged, you know what's the spiritual affect of eating? Artificial food and how you know can you sort of comment on the idea well just to use another tradition in tradition in some traditional Buddhism The chef in the monastery had to be enlightened", "Like they didn't let just anybody into the kitchen. And in the Islamic tradition, there's a whole tradition about food preparation and the intention of the cook. My teachers, the people that cooked always made the intention that the food was a healing. One of the things that is really interesting in our culture... They don't teach grammar anymore so people use transitive verbs as intransitive verbs", "But when you go to a restaurant, they say enjoy. Enjoy is... I guess you could make it intransitive but usually enjoy something. But here it means the food so... But they just say enjoy In traditional cultures, they never would say something like that They would say like salood with health In Arabic culture, they said b'sahw al-afiyah", "which reminds us of the purpose of the food. It's not to enjoy. Enjoyment is part of it. I mean, it's wonderful that food is so enjoyable but that's not the reason why you're actually eating it. That's why the glutton eats. But somebody who's serious about maintaining their health they eat for health and we're literally digging our graves with our teeth. I", "In our culture, we are literally killing ourselves with the food we eat. And so I would say that all traditional peoples ate with just a knowledge of what food was about and this is why the Kishrat tradition you know the halal tradition that you have to there's a whole Native Americans took permission in many of their traditions they took permission from the animal", "There is actual, you have to do it in a way. In our tradition, you're not allowed to kill an animal in front of another animal. And if you look, I mean, it's arguable that it's unethical to eat meat today unless you're on a farm where you're... There was an interesting article about a man who decided for one year, I didn't see the film but he did a documentary where he only ate what he killed for one", "And when he would buy the sheep, one of the sheep farmers told him, you know, he said, I think I'm going to call that, you now, Zeke. And he said no don't name them because you'll get attached to them. But he chose to name them. What he said was the thing that struck him most was the gratitude he felt to the animal when he ate it.", "It wants to be energy for good deeds. Because by becoming part of a righteous person, it's elevated in its state from an animal that doesn't have free will, that only behaves according to its nature, to part of being with free will. And the animal hates to be used for foulness or for misdeeds. And so that whole cosmology, which might sound romantic,", "which might sound romantic, but it was real. And I met people that still live like this and my wife does this. She cooks with that intention. If I cook, I cook with that intension. When I serve food, I cooked with that intention. I'll just tell you one quick story. I have a friend of mine who's a connoisseur of tea and he will only drink certain teas. In England PG Tips is the worst tea. He went to a friend", "and the English take this very seriously. And so he only had PG tips in the house, and so he said God he's gonna know this is horrible tea. So he goes in and he told me that he made a prayer over the tea. He said oh god make this delightful for my friend. And he went in and poured the tea and he", "And you know, there's a reality to these things. We don't realize just the power of intention. You know niya in Arabic which means intention also means seed. It's the seed of the thing why you do something and so many of us do things without intention There is no intentionality and intention I know in your tradition In our tradition intention is everything Why are you doing something? And constantly asking yourself why am I doing this? To check on intentions", "I just disavow that we're not going to clap thing. That applause was also for the question. It was a good question. Because, at least...I don't want to deflect too much but from a Jewish tradition this is something we struggle with a great deal because the laws of Kashrut were written you know a thousand years ago and more and they were designed to be more humane", "And the world in which we live has advanced to the point that one needs a variance from the USDA because it's not as advanced. And we lost something in that. There was this speaker who came just a couple years ago, his name is Rabbi Arthur Waska and he sort of on the front of something we call the Echo Kashrut Movement. And Arthur's perspective is if you're saying a blessing over wine", "wine that was made with grapes, that was sprayed with pesticides, that made the people who made them ill. It's not holy. And if you take organic wine that's been made in the purest way and pour it into a styrofoam cup, it's not kosher. And what he means by that is that the word used to mean something. It meant fit. And the purpose of the sharing", "the enjoyment wasn't in the consumption and how much can we pump into it with corn syrup, but rather the meal. And the story of your friend praying over his tea. That's what that was intended to be. Okay our next question over that way. Where are we? Here okay. Yes Sheikh Hamza when you spoke", "purposes of human existence. I realized, I've kind of mushed together two of those three meaning the cultivation of the earth and stewardship. And I wonder if you could distinguish for us a little bit develop that idea of what are the ways in which we cultivate the earth? And how do we steward it? Well, the stewardship would be more about sustainability whereas the cultivation is more about how we're using it", "our needs. So the stewardship is more about making sure that what we're doing in our cultivation is not harmful. Question over here? I think there's a lady up here. Okay, but we need a microphone next to that person. Right here. Hi. What you guys are talking about is beautiful stuff, but it's not very realistic.", "not very realistic. Like I can't see myself finding a person to buy a goat from so that I could harvest the goat and show gratitude for the goat after I kill it, eat it and all of that. I don't know who to buy the goat from. And I don' t know where to buy affordable organic food from because I went to the Whole Food Store", "$30 on nothing. And finding it throughout the community is a real challenge. I think you're bringing up a really excellent point. This is an excellent point, it's the incredible discrepancy we have between much of like the fair trade movement which I feel that a lot of it is upper middle class luxury", "to assuage our own personal guilt and things like that. But, I... That's not why I would promote it because I think it's important to take positions about these things. In terms of disenfranchised communities, underprivileged communities, you know, the disparity which I was highlighting in that picture of starving kids with these completely overweight kids. I mean one of the problems we have in this country is that processed food is incredibly cheap to buy. And the reason", "and the reason that see all processed food came out of war. The Americans in World War II, I mean margarine came from Napoleon they needed butter for these troops so we tend to forget that processed food is actually a direct result of war because they need to feed these armies as they were moving and so in World war 2 they learned how to do this stuff to a degree scientifically that they'd never achieved before", "could keep long life, shelf life. And they realize because this military industrial complex the same people that are supplying that during wartime are the people that selling the food during peacetime. They realized that this is a great way... We don't have to worry about perishables because it's... Nothing will perish. They lose a lot of money except for us. Because when you take... It's amazing how many... The reason it's so expensive at Whole Foods is cause they lose a", "And this is the problem, and farmers know this. So one of the really important movements is urban homesteading where people are beginning to put gardens on their rooftops. African-American communities in Detroit are beginning do this. And it's a really interesting movement where they're bringing fresh food to disenfranchised communities and having some of the schools doing it. This is really important so I think Louisville would be really useful to bring some of these people in to show them how to do it.", "show them how to do it. We can grow our own food and actually is realistic people can have gardens in World War II they had what were called victory gardens where unlike these recent wars where they encourage you to go out and spend, they used to encourage you actually to save and recycle. World War 2 was a great era of recycling. People were recycling everything and if you go to third world countries people wear sandals made out of used tires because", "a soul for the shoe. And so these are the things where we need to get creative in our communities and not, you know, so many of our communities in the inner cities they can go and get... It's easier to get liquor than it is to get food. And it's much easier to... You can't get vegetables in a lot of these inner city stores. It's all processed food. They get corn out of the can. And that movement I think is a really important movement that's starting to take place", "starting to take place. This ad brought you by the Center for Interfaith Relations, which has a program for building box gardens or urban gardens throughout Louisville and we need to expand that. And children love to do it they love to plant you can get the kids involved in they get connected to the earth you mentioned earlier were called Benu Adam you know in in the Jewish and Muslim tradition and Adam is Adama you know Udma in Arabic is is the topsoil", "And in our tradition, the reason he was called Adam... and really it's the first Adam had the male-female and then it splits into the two of Adam and Eve. So the first creation was the human being. But the reason is called topsoil because we're told that Prophet Muhammad said that God took white soil", "We have the same story, we probably borrowed from you.", "an innovator from the message. You're bringing the same message, so much of it is in Jewish tradition. We know that and the Jewish tradition is part of our tradition. And there are many I mean all my Tafsirs are filled with Midrash and you know the Gomorrah story. It's all in the Islamic Judaism. They never shied away from that. We had rabbis that became Muslim. There was interaction between rabbis and Muslim scholars and so these are all this is wisdom. It' just hikmah", "Hikmah, you know, Chokmah. So this belongs to everybody. Thank you again for putting this a very practical thing and if anyone's interested, a great organization called Youth Build Louisville will help you build that garden. Yes, build that Garden. And it's amazing how much food you can get out of a very small... I want to thank you for what you said about human trafficking as", "a 21st century outrage. An estimated 20 million, billion people are affected by it. I want to say the good news about it just as a little bit of commercial there's an organization called SOAP S-O-A-P Save Our Adolescents from Prostitution headquartered in Columbus Ohio", "and we go before large sporting events like the Super Bowl, NCAA, Kentucky Derby, World Equestrians. And we meet in hotels all over the place to provide literature, photos, and soap with an 800 number to go in every hotel room in Louisville, in Columbus, in New York, in LA, wherever. We did it. I participated twice.", "participated twice in Louisville. We did it before the truck show in Louisvile and 90% of the hotels accepted the material. The good news is that it's working in lots of places. During the Super Bowl in New Jersey, 16 teenage girls were rescued because of soap and 400 volunteers covered New York and New Jersey. In Indianapolis Super Bowl two teenage girls", "multiply that over in Detroit the auto show girls rescued in Columbus Ohio the Arnold Schwarzenegger bodybuilding yeah girls were rescued is it's there are groups working we need more people involved well there's a worldwide war against girls and women around the world and also the reason why these are all events", "They literally bring them in, in cars. And these are the places. And this is something that the Romans, for people who are familiar with the Colosseum, the prostitutes were always brought at the Coliseums and people would get very excited and go down and abuse them. But I think we're doing such a poor job at educating our young men into honoring women. And it's something... I have five boys", "I constantly bring that home to them. Never dishonor a woman, that women, they're gentle beings, they are easily seduced and men know this about women because women are trusting and when a man tells her certain things he has the keys to her heart very often and too many wolves out there really prey on that knowledge. There's books out there", "out there of how to seduce women that are now bestsellers thank you very much it's a little hard for me to see but over here so I see these slides and I hear these facts and they're very disturbing of course and they should be", "I do. I do things with my deeds, you know? I own a farm and I am trying to help that part of the world but in my daily practice that you would suggest that could help because I do believe in intentions being able to actually help these problems but I'm up for suggestions. Well first of all we have to honor our small farmers", "because you know I'm fortunate to be in Northern California where the slow movement of slow food moment started that we have local farmers markets that we can go to on a regular basis so we get all our food from local growers. I would much rather support them than support, even though Whole Foods has some pretty enlightened leadership there but i would still rather support", "one. I think that's something really important so, you know, and people you were talking earlier downstairs just about this loopy feeling about being connected to the land but the truth is farmers suffer immensely. The highest suicide rates in India are from the small farmers. They get them into these usurious debts and we had people remember the 80s crises. The biggest rates of suicide were among small farmers We're losing our small farmers and agribusiness is taking over and this is what I'm talking about", "talking about, you know these rulers of darkness in this world. You know a lot of these people and there's good people in that I'm not in any way Manichean. There are good CEOs, decent people working but these are soul destroying institutions we've set up. And so I am not in anyway revolutionary in that i don't believe if we just kill the evil ruler suddenly everything is going to be fine", "you know, be fine. It's not like that and there are good people in Washington DC There is really amazing police And then there are people who abuse these powers You know? And some of them...you know...there are really dark demonic people that we have termed psychopaths and about 1 out 22 Americans is considered to be psychopathic and they're functional psychopathic people often in CEO positions", "And this is social science in our culture. I would recommend, there's several books on this. One of them is The Sociopath Next Door. A lot of people think sociopaths are the serial killer. No, there are sociopathics that are surgeons. There are sociopaths that are CEOs and they really don't... They don't think like other people. They just don't feel remorse about harming others or harming the earth or whatever. So in terms of a practice, I can't... I wouldn't even want to advise you on that", "you on that. I think people, we're living in an age that enables us to experiment with religions. This is in some ways unprecedented. In other ways, we've always had eclecticism and interaction of traditions. Muslims and Jews lived together for centuries in places like Morocco and Sarajevo. And so there's always been these... And we know that different traditions adopted methods. St. Francis was influenced by the", "to take a serious tradition and to practice it. And for me personally, there's certain things that I have to do every day. I think the only thing that I really incorporate outside of my own tradition is I've been practicing qigong for some time now and derived a lot of benefit from it just physically because I was having a lot energy problems but I think we need to have time with ourselves alone", "where we can just disengage and turn off all these things. I have a friend of mine, he's an imam in Washington DC who has a box in the front of his house and when everybody comes in they have to put the cell phones in the box and they're not allowed to use any cell phones inside the house. And he's a Sudanese man and I thought that was really an excellent practice.", "from the madness of these constantly being, you know texting and getting called. We don't have to answer the phone every time it rings. You really don't. Now you're really sounding revolutionary. That's true. Okay before you do that though I was going to do this as an ad anyway. My best suggestion would be to come tonight at 7 o'clock because from seven to nine Wendell Berry is gonna", "Gary Snyder and Jack Schumacher.", "is that we've begun to look at food, he'll say this better tonight I hope. But in a sentence, we come to look as food as a commodity and we lose the nature of the relationship. You're feeding people okay? That is gift okay? And when you receive the food from the people who grew it, you create something different than going to a market and buying it. You are recognizing that the people whom you feed and we're recognizing who feeds us.", "And I think what you're doing is that intention, honestly. But come tonight it'll be wonderful. Okay now a question. Where are we? Here. Thank you. I have a question regarding...I think as a challenge that we face in the US and it's very pervasive in that we are...we have a sense of entitlement that is much stronger than a lot of places you find in the world.", "that I really don't have to do anything to change because I have earned what I've earned and I worked hard for that. Yeah, well... That was one of mine too. You know when you go to other places like I was just in West Africa, I was in Senegal and in Mauritania", "to get our kids over to places, to do work in other communities and places to see the reality. I'll give you an example. A friend of mine...I teach a course at a junior college nearby with a friend and she was having trouble controlling this class because they were just their college kids behaving like high school kids so I suggested that she bring", "who was a leading member of one of the dominant African American gangs in LA, went to prison for murder. Spent several years in prison and he converted, transformed his life in prison. He came out, he's actually a teacher now so I suggested that she bring him into the class and she did and she just said the transformation in these students was amazing with him telling his story", "And, you know, I just tell them this junior college if you were in Kabul and Afghanistan this would be the Harvard of Afghanistan. You know? We have people in a lot of countries that literally commit suicide because their scores are too low to get into the colleges. So we just it's amazing the opportunities. If you look at when people come here from places like African countries", "enroll in junior colleges. It's just so amazing for them to be able to get an education that doesn't cost very much, and so I think part of it is really trying to inculcate this early on. Narcissism was, you know, it was designated in the 1970s in that famous book The Culture of Narcicism. He saw something that nobody was seeing at the time how narcissistic our culture was coming.", "Selfie is just such an indicative aspect of our civilization. This idea of just taking your own picture, you know I've never carried a camera, I don't have any pictures of myself in...I've been all over the world, I'm at the Pope and had a picture with the Pope, and I've just never had that urge to have these pictures", "My wife said, because some people send us things and she wants to put them up. I said, I don't want them on the wall. You know, I do not want to do that. And I don´t get that thing about pictures. For me this is where I take my pictures. And try to be present with people and remember them as best I can. And learn this from the Bedouin because what really struck me about the Bedoun", "were so present and I would meet a Bedouin that I'd met ten years before he would remember what we talked about the conversation we had. And they don't take pictures because they know, and so this whole obsession with images... The New York Times recently reported that the average American sees more images in one day than a 19th century English person saw in his entire lifetime.", "our hearts, we're losing that space. You know the imageless space. One of things when Trajan went into the holiest of Holies, the thing that really disturbed him was there was nothing in there. And he wanted the Jews to explain like where's your idols? Where are your images? It's an empty place and so that emptiness, we have to have that emptiness", "to be able to contemplate. And I would recommend reading Neil Postman's incredible book, Amusing Ourselves to Death and that second chapter about why the Decalogue would have prohibited images because he argues that if you want people to understand abstractions you have to watch out for the images that you give them", "image-based culture is so abstract. This is why image- based cultures become debased very quickly. I really think the images are harming us immensely. The pornographic images that are going into the minds of these young kids, it's really terrifying because they can't get these things out. They won't be able to get those images out of their mind. I have people who converted to Islam or have these problems and", "And they've told me, just when they open their prayer images start flooding and they want to get rid of them. So it's really difficult spiritually it can be done with a lot of work but you have to be careful what you put into your heart. I was once with a Bedouin we'd gone from the desert to Nouakchott and there was a TV in the room and it was on and he was looking the other way. He was a man in his 30s", "in his 30s and he was a student of knowledge. And he was looking the other way, and I was with a Libyan, Abdurrazaq Muhtar, he's the ambassador in Turkey now for Libya but he asked him have you ever seen television? He said no. He said don't you want to look at it? And he said I heard that it has foul things on it and I don't want to let it into my heart. And you know that level of being is just where are those people?", "Just very briefly, in the Jewish community I would echo this part about how important travel can be and meeting people from other cultures and places. We have a commitment it's called Birthright to send all of our children to the land of Israel and we really press this and make it literally affordable to the point of practically free to get every one of our kids to go to Israel. They meet Israeli kids who also have cell phones and text they text in Hebrew there and think that's really cool", "But what they also find out is that these kids go into the army after high school, all of them. And they serve their country. These kids have an expectation that they probably aren't going to be able to college necessarily because not everybody gets to go to college because there's just not enough slots so you really have to work hard if you want to do that and they'll grow up in a world where they're not even going to afford a home and they'd be very lucky but probably not to have a car", "of commitment to their country is something that's very different. And when these kids come and visit ours, there's this recognition of you're not entitled. You earn things every day. The things that you choose to earn are the things that really matter. Maybe they are not those material things. Maybe there are things like respect. Maybe a future in a family. I would like to continue with questions but we need to stop now because", "other things to finish, the first of which is the poetry. Do you have that? Yeah I do. Okay and you can perhaps explain. This was... there were several poems and then they narrowed them down to eight and then I was given the unfortunate task of determining which one should be given. Let me read the introduction", "This is a poetry of the sacred contest that the Center put forward as part of this year's festival. The Poetry of the Sacred Context is run annually through the Center for Interfaith Relations Institute for contemplative practice. Poetry can be thought as the language of the soul, and this contest encourages poets to awaken their reader to the meaningfulness and beauty of life. People entered this contest from 34 different states in four different countries. From these entries, a winning poem and three honorable mentions were chosen.", "were chosen and received both monetary prizes and will soon be published in Parabola magazine in the winter issue of 2014. The poems were then judged by Hamsa, which he hated having to do, and we've selected one which you will now read. So just to preface this, they were all very interesting poems. This one was the one that hit me the most just in terms of my talk and what I think the Festival of Faith is about.", "too. They were more depressing, but this one I thought really captured something for me. What Worship Is by Red Hawk from Arizona. At dusk cousin John is driving home when a rabbit darts in front of his car and is thrown tumbling and spinning into the tall grass beyond", "brutish humans, and assumes a form we barely know. He stops the car, pulls off to sea. What harm he has done! I don't know anyone else who would have stopped. He finds the rabbit broken and thrashing, not yet dead in the tall grass. Goes to his trunk for a hammer, returns, and finishes what chance started. Then with the claw part", "he digs a shallow hole and puts the body in, returns, drives home. Heavy with sorrow, feeling remorse, having performed his humble sacrament to make right what has gone wrong in us, we have forgotten who we are and what we must do.\" Thanks a lot. So just a few", "So just a few other sort of follow-up things. We'll be concluding now, but Hamsa Youssef will be in the foyer. We had a long conversation about the pronunciation of that word. There'll be a book signing there as well as a reception with light food and drink. And we want to invite all of you to join us there. Again, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, and Jack Shoemaker this evening at 7 and 9 is really", "really a program I'm not going to miss and you really shouldn't. It's gonna be fantastic, and we will conclude as we are in all of these sessions with a moment of silence, and I encourage you in the silence to try to take in some of what Hamsa has shared with us and think in the ways that many of your questions did about how we can take these ideas and make them into spirit in ourselves and practice in our lives." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/It_s all your Ego - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_tZR4apqCA9c&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW3SBwkJvQCDtaTen9Q%3D_1743060644.opus", "text": [ "But if you actually look at the meaning of it, the literal meaning of It is a pure statement of the Qawm and I don't have any doubt that's where it came in because is emptying. It's the kenosis. It' what...it's the empting of the self Empty your mind from your ego", "That's how you watch out. If you want to watch out, if you want protect yourself the way you protect yourself is to empty yourself of your self because it's your self that's getting you in all the trouble. Empty your mind of your ego and you will be fine.", "Relax your mind and learn how to swim. The first thing you learn in swimming is, You have to learn to float right? That's what any good swimming instructor the first thing they do and what did they tell the child relax? Relax because if you're worried you sink but once you actually just completely relax you just start floating that's life on earth Just you have to", "to trust in Allah because we're in the ocean of dunya and if you don't want to drown in it, you have to learn how to empty your mind of yourself. And the tongue is the thing that will do more damage in your life than any other thing in your live. The tongue is a source of all the wars they begin with words", "That's what the Arabs say. Wars begin with words. We're drawing a line in the sand. You have an ultimatum. Do what we say or else. Read Thucydides at Milos when the Athenians, the arrogance of the Athenas.", "They said, we don't want to be in this war. They said no you're either with us or you're against us Right It's all words it's all and this is why in some traditions they just stopped talking like trappist monks right You know about the monk that He became a monk and he Said", "He said, the abbot told him, he said, listen, you're only allowed two words every two years. So are you ready to do this? He said absolutely. He said okay so we start today. Two years later he comes to the abbott and says, you know you got two words go ahead. He", "In two years, get two more words. See you later.\" Goes. Two years later he comes and says, Brother's bad. So then two years elapse, he comes back He said, I quit. So the abbot says, You know that doesn't surprise me. You've been complaining since you got here.", "But we can't do that. That's not our path. Our path is to learn to control, right? I mean the prophet said his path is high. The other paths are easier. People say oh it's so hard to be a monk or a priest. That is the easiest thing. To go off up into some cave. The hermit. The sheikhs. They're out there in the cave. Nobody to bother them. Right?", "right we're gonna go visit away Salar knee his the cloak that he was given inshallah today and he was basically a hermit he didn't want to have anything do with anybody he just took care of his mother but he used to throw rocks at people when they came and that was that was he that was an intelligent thing to do if you're trying to guard yourself because", "They want to pull you down. The people that, they just want to put you down into their own level and they don't like to see people getting up like the lobsters. You know lobstres when they have the cage and there's a hole on the top if a lobster tries to crawl out they all pull them down. That's what humans are. They don't", "No, they want you to stay down. The drug addict wants you... If somebody... if they see them getting off the drugs, they wanna pull them back in because it's reflecting on them. And this happens in marriages too because one of the spouses will move spiritually and the other one won't. And that's how marriages can fall apart if they're not developing because the marriage contract is that you are both on a path of salvation or sanctification", "that you should be working together to spiritually evolve and to help each other on that path. So if one's doing the work and the other's not, it's a disaster. And you will meet people that you see 20 years you haven't seen them and they're exactly the same. Nothing's changed. No spiritual evolution. They're talking about the same things. They are trapped in the same", "them. Some people, they never grow. So Uwais al-Qarni was from the Tabiin. He was a great man. The Prophet salallahu alayhi wa sallam praised him because his mother, he wanted to go and be with the Prophet salAllahu alaihi wa saallam but his mother was elderly and that's what kept him. So it was Birr al-Walida that prevented him from being a companion. It was the filial piety towards his mother.", "towards his mother. And the Prophet said that he was the best of the tabi'een. So, he was co-temporous with the Prophet living at the same time but he did not meet the Prophet. The Prophet told Omar to seek him out and he had a cloak for him which was the cloak that the Prophet wore on the Israa in the Mi'raj. He gave the cloak. Sayyidina Omar met him on the Hajj", "He asked the people from Yemen if there was a man amongst them called Uwais al Qarni and they said yes. He doesn't talk to anybody, he avoided people. And he ended up though during the fitna that he went in he fought with Imam Ali. He died a Shaheed also so but amazing man and his cloak stayed in the family for many many centuries and then Sultan Abd Al Hamid built", "a beautiful masjid that we're going to visit today, to house the cloak. It's a burda that the Prophet wore on the Israa and I was told that they had experts in cloth from Istanbul examine the cloth and they said it wasn't any cloth that they thought was made here on earth", "He said it was just a completely unique cloth. And if you zoom in, we're not going to take pictures of them. There have been pictures taken but I don't want any cameras out because they are opening this up for us as a... They don't do this except in Ramadan. They open at one time a year so they're doing this as special thing for this group and so you go in there and be just present", "present, you know. Take the picture in the heart but look at it definitely. It's worth looking at but there is a presence in the room that's very strong if you're open to it and it's quite something so anyway and be quiet in the", "magnification for the relics that the Prophet left behind. Khalid ibn Walid in a sound tradition almost died trying to get his helmet back which had hairs of the Prophet . One of the Sahaba who's buried in Tunisia was a person used to cut the hair of the prophet and he's buried with the hairs of The Prophet. We know Umm Salama, others in Sahir Bukhari she used to put the hair Of the Prophet in water and then they would use it to treat people. That's in Sahar Bukhar these are all sound Hadiths", "Hadith, the Tabarruk bi-Athara Rasul salallahu alayhi wa sallam is established and people that deny it they're denying it min bab sadda dharaya. They know those hadiths are there but they're doing it because unfortunately there are common people that go to excesses in these things and lose control and do these things so some of the ulama went to that other extreme but it's really not correct if you", "things should be preserved and that's why the amanat were preserved. When we go to the Topkapi also, you're going to see the staff of Moses is there. People say, is it really the staff? It's really the stuff. These things were carried in the tabut. The Jews had them and then they went to the Christians. They are sacred trusts. The Tass of Ibrahim is there which is possibly the one that the hearts of the prophets", "The prophets were washed in. These were all in the, which is in the Quran. It says that this is the remnants from the Al Musa, that were from the family of Moses that were kept in the tabut and there's sakinah with them. It said that there's a tranquility. The garment of Fatima is there and there definitely presence with that garment. Also if you're open to it again", "you're open to it again, there's a very strong perfume that is not something you can buy in the souk that is there. So just be open to these things. We don't worship these things, hasha. There's no worship of these things they are things that were possessed by some of the greatest human beings and in the case of the Prophet, the greatest", "people leave their traces on things. People, I mean, if you, you know, people who are married for a long time, if the spouse leaves, sometimes the spouse will take just the cloth and there's people whose spouses die and they keep, they have clothes that they wore and they'll just go in to smell it. And we know that Jacob when he lost Yusuf, what did he do with", "he put it up and his eyesight came back. I mean, that's Jacob. Why is he doing that? It's just a shirt because it was the shirt that his beloved son Yusuf had worn. And so there are many examples of this in our tradition. And to deny these things is just to deny something that's clearly embedded in the tradition. So that's what he says about that.", "So, Walid al-Khadim says, If you want a sound religion, if you want", "Avoid, according to Imam al-Junaid, people. And get the benefit of isti'nas, of being intimate in being alone. One of the things Pascal, the philosopher said was that the greatest tribulation of human beings is that they're unable to sit in a room alone. They just can't sit alone and be in a", "Boredom is a good thing. There needs to be times where you don't have anything to do because that's where creative energy comes from. Creativity comes from those times where it's very important to be able just to sit there and this whole thing of, oh, grabbing the iPhone, did I get any emails? Grabbing the iPad,", "iPad check this you know having to listen to something all the time You know I'd have to have music on have to this these are diseases of the heart You know just being able to be you know, just sit with a book or do thicker or just benefit from your time This you know Can't be under emphasized would you please clarify the meaning of the word? Yeah mean Oh Amin", "Hmm, Amun. I mean it might be related to Amon You know, that doesn't wouldn't surprise me But I mean most of the ulama say it means Allahumma istijib. Oh Allah answer the prayer So and It's something that we say at the end of a prayer. I Mean the Christians say Amen. It's obviously the same thing but The ancient Egyptian God Amun is", "Amon is, you know, it might be related to that word amon but it wouldn't have anything to do with the god. And you have to know that there are things even in for instance the Egyptian tradition which was not known at the time of the prophesies and because that was all discovered later they have the weighing of the soul we had that the Christians and Jews don't know about that we know about so the ancient Egyptian religion had that does that mean oh we got it from the Egyptians? No! It means that the Egyptians have some remnant", "of the truth. And the same with the Zoroastrian religion. The Zoroasterian religion has, their descriptions of paradise are very similar to the descriptions we have in the Quran of paradise which are not the descriptions in the Bible of paradise. Does that mean oh, that the Prophet got those things from Zoroastern religion? No! Those are materialistic people that have to see connections between everything like you know there was a when I was a kid Thor or Hyderol", "or whatever his name was. He was a northern European explorer and he was convinced that the pyramids in Egypt had to be related to the pyramides in South America, Central America and so he created these boats made out of ancient boats that they used to make. And he wanted", "to that site in these boats and he did these expeditions for National Geographic. And it was all to prove there had to be this connection between the pyramids here, and the pyramides over there. As if human beings aren't just pyramid making creatures. Like a bird that makes a nest in Africa had to somehow fly over to South America to teach those birds how to make a nest.", "that it's just birds make nests. That's what they do. So human beings make buildings and the pyramid is a very powerful structure, obviously" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Aqal_Ruh and nafs by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayusu__1743058520.opus", "text": [ "In Arabic, the aqal is an immaterial that moves towards intelligibles. So it's an immateria quality of the human being that moves toward intelligible. If I'm studying mathematics my intellect is moving towards these abstract entities we call numbers that are intelligibles and then we have the Quran has what's called ru'ah which is ruwakh in Hebrew", "Yeah. So this is the spirit when it's directed towards the ultimate reality, which is God and not to the intelligibles. And then the nafs is the next one. Nefesh in Hebrew also is the idea of the soul but it's the soul when it is directed towards worldly things, the more lower things generally." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/God Consciousness by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf rh _hamzay__1743307313.opus", "text": [ "Really good example. Okay, most of us not all of us but most of speed on the highway But if we see a policeman Suddenly we like going to speed limit you always see the red lights go on Right every he's like cruising down the hive and suddenly all these red lights Go on and then oh you see the black-and-white That's because he has police consciousness So suddenly he's obeying that he becomes consciously aware of the police", "least, and then he becomes dutiful. He fulfills his duty to drive at the speed limit. Well that in essence is what God consciousness is, that you're always aware of God and so you're going to follow the rules which" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/How Shaytan works by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf rh _hamzay__1743310677.opus", "text": [ "Don't follow the progress of Shaytan. If you want to understand Iblis, Ibliss is a progressive. Iblisse is not a conservative. Iblees is always changing the posts. He's always moving them a little bit further. So now he's telling you that marriage", "hear, oh what's wrong with intimacy outside of marriage? If it is two people that love each other they agree on it and then move it to the next stage. Move it to another stage. What's coming next are things like in Germany incest making permitted incest this is what Shaitan does he takes people progressively" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Seed in the Heart -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayusu__1742886523.opus", "text": [ "The Prophet said there's a seed in the heart that's for darkness and as you do sinfulness, that seed grows until the whole heart can become black. So we all of us have a propensity to based on this fallen nature that Allah has given us, we have a prepensity to make mistakes, to error but also to sin. And that's why the Prophet said the Sahaba complained about their sinfulness", "He said, if you didn't sin, you'd be shaking hands with the angels on the streets. SubhanAllah. But he said but... All of you are sinners. But the best of the sinners are those who repent from their sins and that's all Allah is asking people to do really is just acknowledge their sinfulness and then get straight with Allah and struggle against their own natural dispensations" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Tricks of Shaytan -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayusu__1742892509.opus", "text": [ "One of the signs of following Hawa, of following your own desires is that you prefer Nawafil over Fara'il. So there will be people who stay up all night and then they'll sleep through Fajr. Right? Really! There's people that do that. They'll like do Dhikr late into the night, go to a Mawlat or something and then sleep through fajr. These are people... That's Talbisu Iblis.", "That's the way Iblis fools people and tricks people." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Worse than Shirk --- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayusu__1743064401.opus", "text": [ "To say about God what you don't know, that is the worst thing that you can do. It's worse than shirk So people should have fear of Allah and that's what he's saying" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Knowing Allah ﷻ by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayusuf __1743309008.opus", "text": [ "The great theologian Imam al-Ghazali, God have mercy on his soul. He said that if somebody really wants to know God they should study anatomy and physiology. And people do have that experience some people the opposite they'll say oh the eye is not really designed that well I had a physiology professor that said that you know but there's also divinely engineered obsolescence i mean there's just falling into old age i mean this is part of god's plan for us um", "And then mystical experience is very powerful. I've had those experiences, not everybody has them but people do have them. People have dreams, people have profound experience of oneness" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Love of Allah ﷻ -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayusuf __1743056280.opus", "text": [ "Allah loves patient ones. So this is a great gift from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, that you get his mahabba. Now one of the things and I think it's an important point there are a lot of Muslims who don't understand the nature of divine love. And some Christians have always argued that Islam is not a religion of love. That to me is completely false argument", "argument at the source of Islam is our Prophet who's called Habibullah, the beloved of God. They love God and God loves them. So Mahabba is at the root of the Islamic tradition. And in fact there are many different types of love in the Arabic tradition. The Quran uses terms like", "that Allah puts between the servants of the merciful wood. Wood is a type of affectionate love and it's an unconditional type of love so Al-Wadud is a loving spouse one of the names of God is Al-wadood, the loving god, the god who loves his creation" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Love of Allah ﷻ -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayusuf __1748527081.opus", "text": [ "If you claim to love Allah, the proof is in following the Prophet ﷺ. That's the proof of your love and the Sahaba had complete tamahih they were completely annihilated in the love of the Prophet to such a degree that Bilal after many years being in Syria came back to visit Medina and some of the Madanis convinced him to give the adhan it was very difficult for him but he decided", "He decided to. And when he gave the Adhan, people heard the Adhaan for the first time from Bilal since the time of the Prophet and they came out their homes just weeping. They were just crying. That's how present the Prophet was in their lives." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/How To Control Your Desires Hamza Yusuf_i8CRs0LhdYs&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743303303.opus", "text": [ "Like who are you talking to me? Well, who's talking you It's a very strange thing. So we have this internal dialogue that's going on and And they're like waves for many people it's in fact some people will drive them crazy They you see them sometimes talking to themselves On the streets I mean now you can't tell because people have these things in their ears", "and there but that if people came from any previous generation and took a walk around Berkeley or any City now in the world they would think everybody's gone mad Because they're all talking to themselves on their phones But they literally just walking down the street And now you know I used to take because I walk every day, and I would see people and I'd always do it Just good afternoon. They don't hear you anymore It's really amazing", "really amazing they said now like I think almost half the country is eating alone or something it's like 35% just eating alone even families now don't eat together and people now young people in the cafeterias they eat and just scroll their phones they don't sit with other people these are all really bad signs so we're told you know that here", "So it's a voice that you can't really hear but here it means the internal voice. Because people will get into you, like if you listen to the wrong people their words will get in to you and you'll hear them.", "the last verses in the Quran is to seek refuge from waswasa and the Prophet it's actually in fiqh, the mouswis and it's used in the active voice even though it's their mouswas but its mouswhs. The one who is mousws in our tradition has a separate set of fiqhh in sujood as-sehu", "Because the way that you increase the waswasa is by giving it some kind of reality. Like if you begin to obsess about it and one of the ways that Dr. Cleary translated the demons was the obsessors, you know they...that's how they work. They make people obsessive about things.", "Jahlun bi sunnah or khalalun fi al-aql", "Shaytan, what they say about the waswasa and this is very important for people that have because there might be some people either watching or in this room that have this problem. What's really important to remember is they say a lus, the thief, la yasaraqu min baytin kharib he doesn't sneak into an empty house, a derelict house. He goes into a house that's full.", "the people that have piety and so it's very important to know that, that oh am I in wudu? Making these doubts. Malik is I think of the four he's if you have doubt about wudus usually doubt you know right but in wudo malik has a... You have to redo your wudou if you doubt", "I mean there's aahkam to that but in any case generally shak is ignored right unless you have some certainty that it happened so just ignoring Shaytan, I mentioned that last time that Sayyidi Ahmad Zarouq says that That what you hear in your heart that the heart rejects that's iman and the prophet said", "The Prophet said, that it's true Iman. So not obsessing with this is very important and then... And the other thing there's a bab in Al-Bukhari which is actually called So it's what Shaytan will tell you to make you doubt your faith so in that Bab one of the hadiths which i think is another miracle of the prophet", "Prophet , I mean there's countless miracles but he said that Shaitan would say to the human being, He said Who created Allah? Right and there are other rewisage People will continue to ask one another you know who created this", "Allah, Allah, and then they say who created Allah? And he said if you hear that just don't listen to it. Many years ago I was in Morocco and there was somebody... He's actually working at the gas station but he was a student at the university and he told me he was taking philosophy and the philosophy teacher had asked that question because this is something you hear in the philosophy department. Okay well so who created God?", "So who created God? And he asked me that. He said, what's the answer? And I told him that hadith and he just... He had such relief to hear that. And that's why the Prophet sallallaahu alaihi wa sallam you know, he didn't... He never wavered in that. Whatever he saw that was dangerous for this ummah he warned us about it. And one of things he warned is they're going to ask that question because that was not a question of the ancients. It's a question on the moderns.", "Ancients wouldn't have asked that question. So waswasa is just something, it's very important to not get lost in it. Don't argue with him because it just gives him more force.", "So this is a qaeda that Imam Zarruq put forward. Like do not fight with the waswas, just ignore him. And one of the salaf was actually asked how you treat waswasa. He said if you ever have it, just be happy. Feel happy because shaitan does it to make you miserable. So when you get happy, it really bothers them.", "just be happy feel joy and so that's a proof about the derelict house like you should be happy that he's bothering you because it means that there's something there that he worried about", "Vertraue und glaube, es hilft, es heilt die göttliche Kraft!" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Patience in Islam -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_1X6n2EXFUmk&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742892020.opus", "text": [ "This is from Imam al-Kushayri. In his Baaab as Sabr he says, It is that the heart is completely submitted to the judgment of Allah . He said, It's to stop at the tribulation and to remain in a state of purity despite the tribulations. It's too stop complaining when the tribualtion comes", "comes. It's to swallow the tribulation without any claims. It is to recognize the mihna, you keep it inside and you show the blessing so on your tongue you're in a state of gratitude then but the real definition of sabr is", "It is to be patient with obedience to Allah and to avoid any disobedience. And finally, Allah when He said, And that's why the aqiba is for the people of taqwa.", "People of Dunya have their time. But there is a day of judgment. We are all going to die. We didn't exist. You didn't resist. And now we exist, and then we will no longer be in this world. We'll go to another dimension. All of us. Our prophet said I'm at the decade that the prophet said the majority of my people died in that decade. We're going to leave the world.", "we did about what we said about how we acted about how he behaved and the single most important thing according to the prophet the thing that saves people more than anything else is good character is treating people decently he said in a mobile italy you tell me my macarum al-akhlaq and and to have trust in allah subhanahu wa ta'ala be people of tawakkul they say", "what to what look what a man look that's the essence of Tawakkal to hop up is to really realize the Kalima of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala la ilaha illallah Muhammad Rasulullah to know what that means to believe it with your heart and then to look to take on the qualities of the Prophet sallallaahu alaihi wasalam the o'clock of the Sunnah of our prophet salatul islam and then toe what took to have fit but in there", "That nothing will... لَنْ يُصِيبَكَ إِلَّا مَا كَتَبَ اللَّهِ Nothing will afflict you except what Allah has decreed for you. Nothing, that's tawathq and then tamalluq is to be in a state of humility before Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. So وَمَن يَتوَكَّلْ عَلَى اللَّـهِ فَهُوَ حَسْبُهُ If you trust in Allah, He's enough for you Finally the Prophet ﷺ he said لا يَنبغِلِ الْمُؤْمَٰنَ أَن نُذِلّ نَفْسَه", "A mu'min should never humiliate him or herself. The Sahaba, these were Arabs. They were people of Izzah in their very nature. They said, كيف يذل نفسه؟ How could somebody humiliate himself? That wasn't even in their understanding and the Prophet ﷺ said, يَتَعَرَّدُ مِنَ الْبَلَاءِ لِمَا لَا يُطِيقُ To expose yourself to tribulations", "that you're unable to bear. To expose yourselves to tribulations that you are unable to bare. There are tribulations, that will be sent to you from Allah. There people in here probably who've been diagnosed with terminal illnesses. This is the dunya. That's a tribulation you didn't choose. There were people also that have depression. Depression one of the words in Arabic, one of meanings of bala if you look at any good dictionary", "Al-balaa, alhammu wal ghamm. Depression is a bala from Allah for some people. To be depressed. If you're depressed today, this is exogenous. It's perfectly natural to be grieving. But also recognize that joy is what Allah intended. We did not reveal this Quran for you to be miserable.", "We revealed it for you to be people of happiness.", "he buried his daughter. He buried all of his children except for Fatima and told her that she would follow him after six months. Our Prophet ﷺ buried all his children. How many of us have had that tribulation? Nobody had the tribulation of the Prophets. We know the tribulations, the Prophet described Isa when they were beating him and blood was coming from his body. And he said, اللهم اغفر قومي فإنهم لا يعلمون The Prophet described that", "He said, forgive my people. They don't even know what they're doing. There's people that don't ever know why they're doig what they are doing. They're a tribulation for other people. Don't be a tribulations for other peopl. You will have trials and tribulations even from your own family. Yusuf , his own brothers plotted to throw him into a well. One of them suggested killing him. These were the children of a prophet", "prophet. Who has had that suffering? Who has hat that? Seriously, who has had tha? We can't even imagine that so don't think the prophets didn't have their difficulty they had graver difficulties than we could imagine one of the things that my teacher one of his sons because every day they have people coming and trials and tribulation every single day and one day his son said to him sheikh can we have one day without problems", "And he looked at me said Azila to put him in public take that arrogance out of your heart Do you think our prophet ever had a day without trouble? This is the Sunnah of the world that we're in it's Daru Hamman waham and what Bella and with its an according to imam al-junay this Is the dunya now here's the thing. We ask Allah for Afia, and many of us have Alhamdulillah good conditions good situations, and we asked for blessing for the people wherever they are that are in trouble", "they are that are in trials and tribulations. This is the dunya. There's people that are up, there's people", "succeed. So the Prophet ﷺ, he said that on the day of judgment, Imam Tarmidhi relates that the Prophet's ﷺ said,", "of the people who suffered. They will wish they could go back to the dunya and have their skin flayed with scissors when they see what the people of Bala get. The one who had the most tribulation in the dunyā, Allah says to the one who has the most joy in this dunyá, أَنْعَمُ النَّاسِ وَهُوَ فِي النَّارِ Allah says him, did you ever know any pleasure? And he says, لا والله I never knew any pleasure.", "pleasure then he says to the one who had the worst time in the dunya from the people of belief did you ever know any suffering he said lowell I never knew any suffering whatever memory of pain and Aristotle says one of the miracles of the human body is you can't remember pain you remember that you had it but you can remember pain this is the afterlife", "This little six-year-old boy who was massacred by some insane person because they were Palestinians in the United States. This little boy, Wadi' I mean his father named him miraculously Wadi'. It's subhanAllah. He was stabbed. His last words to his mother who was stabbed but survived he said, I'm alright.", "It's like he was in that liminal state, and there must have been angels there to give that solace for a mother to see her child. And we cannot imagine what people are experiencing when they see their children dead. But they have to know that our prophet buried all of his children except for one. Nobody knew that pain like our prophet said that.", "So this is something to remember. That this dunya, this is the abode. One of the poets in the mustataraf said, إِذَا مَا أَتَاكَ الدَّهْرُ يَوْمًا بِنَقْبَةٍ And he used a word for the Palestinian, نَقَبَ This is centuries ago. إِذا مَा أَطَاکَ الدِّهْ رُوا يَومًا بنَق்بَتٍ فَفْرِغْ لَهَا صَبْرًا وَوَسِّعْ لِهَى صَدْرَ", "Then exhaust for it your patience and expand your breath. Imam Ibn A'tayla said, In order to soften and mitigate the pain of your trial is your knowledge that the one testing you", "you is your Lord. The one testing you as your Lord this should remove that when people come on the day of judgment and this is a real day it is a day that we will all see it's a day", "this is the day where even the dog will have his day. The animal that was harmed unjustly, the horse that was beaten unjustly all of them will have their day. That is the Day of Yom HaQiyamah. This abode is Daru Hamman Wa Ghaman wa Ibtila In conclusion i want to say something one of my teachers Hishamar Borhani he was a great Syrian Shaykh some people might even know about him", "he had been in different approaches. He told me almost 40 years ago, and I was not ready for this. He said to me, I looked at all of the manahaj of the islah of this ummah, and the soundest one I found was the minhaj of the jama'at, ad-dawa wa tabligh.", "That's what he told me. I wasn't ready 40 years ago to hear that, I thought What's he talking about? Because I had gone out with the tabligh. I don't know if Imam Zaid went out early on but I went out Dr. Abduhakim Winter also we went out We did our three days forty days I didn't do the four months But I learned my first ten surahs with the jama'a I learned the adab of eating with them", "group that we call Jumaat Tabligh. He was talking about a minhaj, that great ulama in India put down. These were great ulma Imam Dahlwi some of the great ulm... Yusuf Dahlw is one of the greatest ulma of his time They had six principles and this is what I'm gonna leave you with The first principle was know the kalima Know the weight of La ilaha illallah and the weight on the person that says la ilahaillallah Muhammad Rasulullah This outweighs everything in the dunya", "the dunya and then the idea of prayer as the central and most fundamental pillar of our religion we have to create communities where we can pray together the prayer is so important the prophet when he was given the prayer he was giving 50 prayers and musa said your community can't do that", "his sunnah on a daily basis was to pray 50 rakats as shukr. The 17 fard and then he did the sunnah that equaled 50 rakat every day. That was the sunna of the Prophet. This is the most fundamental and important, and then al-ilm wa dhikr not just dhiker, al- ilm wa Dhikr.The prophet in one hadith came into a masjid there were people learning", "with the people doing knowledge and he said in them a boy to moalema they're both valid places people who are devotional need some illam people who focus on him needs some devotion it's a matter of where your priorities are there both valid paths to Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala", "Those who believe their hearts have with dhikr. Too many people are in a state of disturbance, of mental disruption. Dhikr will calm people down. And then the idea of ikram al-Muslim, the maqam of a Muslim. The Prophet ﷺ said, لِيَنْ تُهْدَمَ الْكَعْبَ حَجَرًا حَزَرٌ أَهْوَنُوا عَلَى اللَّهِ مِن قَتْرٍ مُؤْمِنٍ وَاحِدٍ That to destroy the Ka'bah stone by stone is easier with Allah", "to kill one believer. The ikram of a Muslim, to know what it means to be a Muslim not to backbite, not to speak ill about brothers and sisters, to have good opinion. There's two things that are higher than everything in the dunya,", "servants of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Have a good opinion of Allah. أَنَا عِندَ ظَنِّي عَبْدِ بِيَّ اللَّهُ says, And then the ikhlas. To have ikhlaas in your actions. And finally da'wah wa tabliq. They knocked out the da'weh and now it's just tabliqu. Da'wah is to tell other people about this religion. You don't give da'wha to Muslims", "dawah to Muslims. Muslims already accepted the call you give tabligh to Muslims, balighu anni walaw ayaa Da'wa is for non-muslims so we need to invite people but we have to prepare the banquet We have to make this religion beautiful to people as it was once majestic and beautiful It's the most beautiful of religions", "It really... So, and then he says, فَإِنَّ التَّصَارِفَ الزَّمَانِ عَجِيبَتُونَ فَيَوْمًا تَرَى يُسْرًا وَيُوْ مَنْ تَرا عُسرًٰ This is the nature of the dunya. It's a day of yusr and usr. One day for you, one day against you. This is", "InshaAllah, may we die on La ilaha illallah. May we be people who remember Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Maybe inshaAllah people of dawah that invite other people to Islam with our hal before our maqal, with our state. And then I hope everyone and this is my nasiha for myself and all of you have a word of Quran every single day. Do not... The Prophet was asked what is the best?", "what is the best action? He said, الحال المرتحل The one who descends or alights upon a place and then sets out on a journey again. And they said, ما هو الحال المرتحل Who is the حال المرتحλ? He says, the one who finishes the Qur'an and starts it again. Start your day every day like today, it's the 11th. This is the 11 th day of the lunar month because in Morocco", "Because in Morocco, they start the day of the first Jews on the first day of lunar month. You always know what day you're at. It's either 11th or 12th. So that's a great blessing. Start the Jews... People read newspapers or read their... for hours. A Jew will take you half an hour once you get used to reciting with Hadar. You can do it in 20 minutes. Some people can do even faster. But it's a half-hour a day", "It's a half hour a day, 15 minutes in the morning, 15 Minutes. Do Khatm every month we need more Khatam Morocco does 250,000 Khatma in their Masajid every single month When all these trials and tribulations happen look at Morocco how much stability they have They have lots of problems in Morocco but look how much stable their community is than other communities", "they do in the morning and the evening. This is the book that the Prophet said to Imam Ali, in the end of time when everything was dark he said how do we get out of it? He said Kitab Allah, the Book of Allah may Allah give you the Book", "وإحسان يزج بنا في حضرات الغيوب ونتطهر به من أنواع الغفلات وسائل العيوب", "ومن طاعتك ما تبلغ به جنتك ومن اليقين ما تهون به علينا مصائب الدنيا ومتعنا بأسمعنا وأبصارنا وقوتنا أبدًا ما حييتنا وجعل ثأرنا على من ظلمنا إخواننا في غزة وفي غير غزاء اللهم أنصورهم يا رحم الراحمين أنت أرحم الروح", "اللهم اجعل اليقين في قلوبهم، اللهم جعل التسريع في قلبهم، واللهما اجعال الإيمان في قولبهم، اللهما ثبتهم يا الله ولا تخذلهم ياالله أنت أرحم الراحمن، أركم هذه الأمة، أروم إخواننا وأحبابنا في كل مكان، كل من علمنا حرفاً، الله وفق لما تحب وترضى، اللوم برك في أمتنا يا الله، اللام اغفر لنا لتقصيرنا، اللاهما لا تواخذنا إن نسينا أو أخطأنا", "اللهم ذكرنا من القرآن ما نسينا اللهم اجعلنا من أهل القران وخاصتك يا أرحم الراحمين اللهم يا الله اللهم إغفر لنا وتب علينا اللوم اجعال آخر ما نقول في هذه الدار لا إله إلا الله محمد رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم اللهم جعله يا أحمر راحمين مقبلا علينا حينما يرانا مبتسما يا الله آخذ بأيدنا", "اللهم بيهدي الأكواس يا أرحم الراحمين اللهم اجعل هذا الحوض يا الله ما نثمأ بعده أبداً اللهم لا تجعلنا من الذين يقولون لهم ابعد عني اللهم", "May Allah fill your hearts with joy despite all of the pain that we have. May Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala bless you. Jazakumullah khairan wassalamu alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Situation in Yemen - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_0qD_BWhZidw&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748525072.opus", "text": [ "Yeah, Yemen is a great tragedy of our time amongst many others. These are incredibly complicated situations involving civil wars between... Yemen's still a clan culture so you have tribes, you have cultures, you different... They're actually quite distinct cultures in Yemen like Hadhrami culture is different from Al Mukalla or Aden", "the northern portion of Yemen. It was once actually two countries and they unified, and now they're back to the civil war. And then obviously the neighboring countries got involved. You had ISIS or ISIS-like people took over quite a large portion. So it's just...it's the fog", "It's not easy to discern. It's very easy to point fingers at this, that or the other but in the end these are fitn between Muslims and we should just pray to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to remove these fitn from these people. The Yemeni people, the Prophet salallahu alayhi wasalam loved them. They were people who became Muslim without having to... Just by inviting them to Islam they came. He said,", "But there's also unfortunately in the whole Muslim world and here everywhere, you know Muslims have really departed from the Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ From his Minhaj. And a lot of these things if you read the Quran it's very clear that The prophet says, SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam said", "has it's a ummah of God's mercy and then he said the punishment of my Ummah is in this dunya so we also have to recognize that when people divert and go far astray from the sunnah of the Prophet and from the guidance that was given to us and then the sinfulness becomes widespread", "that tribulations will afflict us. And in some ways, the places where these tribulations are the worst are the places were those people are closer to Allah . In other words, When Allah loves a people He gives them tribulation to elevate them or to remove their sins and so we should pray for our brothers and sisters do what we can there's good organizations that try to help", "to pray for our Ummah. We should do our best to pray, we should counsel the people that have the power to do what they can. I think the kind of belligerent attitude and what's happening even for people that you know... And I have my own criticisms of things in that region but I would honestly say you know we should be praying for these people.", "praying for these people. We should not, this type of hatred that people have for these governments and things like that we should be praying for them. You know it's what comes without government is actually much worse than whatever tribulations governments bring when you remove these governments, when you have anarchy. This is the result of anarchy we should", "He didn't disrupt social systems. When he came into Mecca, إِنَّ الْمُرُوكَ إِذَا دَخَلُوا قَرْيَةً أَفْسَدُوهَا وَجَعَلْوَ عَزَتَ أَهْدِهَٰ ذِلّٰى The kings, tyrants and when they come into places, they create these horrible situations but the مصريحون , the people of Allah , the prophets, they don't do that.", "He said, whoever enters the house of Abu Sufyan will be safe. He took the Sayyid of Quraish who had fought him for 20 years and he maintained his dignity and honor because he wanted to win his enemies over. He wanted to", "submit and find peace when he spoke, if you want to see the best lesson in dealing with government just look at how Ja'far spoke with al-Najashi it's a stunning testimony to the hikmah of these people despite the fact that the Najashis they were monophysites", "believed in the divinity of Christ, but when Amir bin al-As tried to get them into a difficult situation, the ayahs he quoted, he just left it in a way where he didn't compromise his beliefs. But at the same time, he didn' t offend the beliefs of the ruler that they were guests of. And so just getting back to this wisdom and trying to... Everybody is going", "is going to be judged by God. We're all gonna be judged, these rulers are going to judge by God and I don't envy any of them. Most of them don't sleep well the type of burdens that they have people think that Adafi changed palaces every night never had a good night's sleep many of them have to take drugs just to go to sleep so it's not something you should envy or we should really pray for them", "day we're all going to see who's who on that day. We'll see who is who, it's better I think to wait. Wait and I'll wait too with you and we will see" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Why Islam is True -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_9XxpJ_GXnts&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743060797.opus", "text": [ "So if you say, I believe in Islam. Somebody... It's very... They have every right to say why do you believe in islam? It's a revelation. How do you know? Because the Quran says so. Well how do you that the Quran is true? Because it's from God. Well, how do", "Because God said so. Where did he say that? In the Quran. You know, that drives atheists crazy. That's called circular reasoning. Now if you say the Quran is a miracle and if you'd give me 20 years to study and master Arabic I can prove it. And you could. Really. But you'd have to take my word. Now you're in taqlid.", "You know, Al-Baqalani proved it. It's called Ijaz al-Quran. He proved that the Quran is a miracle in terms of its language. He showed how every single jahili poet has lousy lines. Even the best of them. They just have bad lines. But he showed how rhetorically by the standards of rhetoric", "on making a statement in the Quran. There's nothing he said that you could rhetorically tweak. You know, editing, if you've ever done editing, you can always make something better but at a certain point, you cannot say it better than the way they have been set. To be or not to be? You're not going to improve on that!", "on that. To be or not to be, that is the question. You're not going to improve on that like should I exist or shouldn't I exist? Should I commit suicide or shouldn'y I commit sui-cide? Right? There's other ways to say what he was saying but as far as the English language goes you're not gonna improve on it. Love is not love that alters when alteration finds or bends with a remover to remove.", "to remove. You're not going to improve on that. I don't think, if you sat there love is not love that alters when it alteration finds. It doesn't sound better to say it's not really love if it changes when the one you love changes. Same meaning it's just, it's", "How do we prove to somebody why we should believe? Well, it depends on who you're talking to. If they're an atheist then you really have to take that argument first and foremost without revelation you have to talk about whether it's rational to believe there is not a intelligent force behind creation. The idea that this just popped into existence from nothing.", "then you would have to argue what the Bible says like the Old Testament because they believe in the Bible so there's a starting point. The Bible says that in the Old Testaments it says, the difference between a true prophet and false prophet if what the true prophet says...if what the Prophet says comes true then he is a true Prophet. If what he says does not then he's a false prophet. So we have plenty of evidence to show that our prophets prophesized things", "to know in the seventh century and have come true. Many things." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Get Ready for World War 3 - Hamza Yusuf_km_Y3p9ba4A&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW3SBwkJvQCDtaTen9Q%3D_1743307766.opus", "text": [ "But one of the most important things that the Quran does for a believer is that the Qur'an essentially gives us an entire understanding of not only ourselves but of the world around us. And so within the Book of Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala, there's really an explanation of why we're here where we came from what we should do while we are here and then where we're going", "where we're going. One of the most important realities that the Qur'an explains to us is that the nature of the abode that we're in, is an abode of tribulation. This is an Abode of trials and tribulations. And this is...the Qur'aan is rife with verses that remind us of this fact.", "He is the one who created life and death, and he created life in order to test you. And then he says that just to see which one of you is the best in actions. Which of you are the best? In actions. And also another text that was in Surah Al-Murk", "Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala tells us that Sulaiman who was given an immense dominion actually says about what he was given, That do I ashkuru am akfuru? Am I grateful or am I ingrate? Do I have ingratitude? And here kufr means to be ungrateful because that's the fundamental meaning of the word.", "And whoever is grateful, is really for the benefit of his own soul. And then he says, and whoever is ungrateful, then verily my Lord is independent and kareem which one of these words in Arabic that has many different meanings but generous and noble exalted so", "My Lord is ghaniyun, is rich without need. And kareem, generous with his riches. So this is what Suleiman says. What's important here is that what Sulaiman is essentially telling us is that tribulation is not just a negative aspect of life, which a lot of people think, oh, I'm going through a lot", "blessing, that blessings are tribulations. So depending on whether you're grateful or not, because a lot of people are pure ingrates with their blessings. And one of the remarkable things about our time is that people are just filled with ingratitude, even though there's so many blessings like people use. There are places where people are definitely suffering considerably, but for many, many", "other people listening that are in places like Malaysia or Europe, or many places where there's just immense blessings. So the two fundamental blessings that if you have them Allah expects you to worship Him. If you're lacking one or both of these two blessings, you might have some excuses but when you have these two", "with Allah and those are security and freedom from hunger. This is a fundamental thing in Surah Quraish when Allah says, فَلْيَعْبُدُوا رَبَّ هَذَا الْبَيْتِ Let them worship the Lord of this house. Why? Because He has secured you أَمَنَهُ مِّن خَوْفٍ", "so you're in a state of security. He has given you food, so he's giving you satiety from your hunger and he has given your security from any fear. So those are the two blessings that Allah is saying warrant the worship of Allah . And that, in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the fundamental ones are physiological needs,", "he calls them but actually the prophet I think has a better hierarchy of needs than Maslow and of course he does. I mean, it's...I don't think, I know because the Prophet actually put what the first khutbah that he gave when he went into Medina was he said that like spread peace in other words create security", "societies and in Sahih al-Bukhari one of the three hallmarks of faith is, the third one is spreading global peace. Spreading peace around the world so that the Muslims are we are supposed to be spreaders of peace. Global peace. So that peace is what the Prophet told us to spread and then he said", "and feed the hungry. So there you have security at the very bottom of the pyramid, and then the next are the physiological needs because if you're about to have your lunch and a bear or a lion shows up, you're going to forget your lunch. Security is the fundamental need before the physiological need. You need security. And then he says, وَصِلُ الْأَرْحَامِ And then maintain kinship bonds because family is the foundation of a society.", "of a society. So you're moving up in this hierarchy and then he said, And then pray it in the night when people are asleep so now you have to work on yourself because everything the hierarchy is there your securities are taken care of your foods taking care of you have family now work on Yourself and get close to Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala and then He says", "with peace. Then he said you will enter paradise in peace and Salman al-Farisi the Prophet told him that no one will enter Paradise without a passport, and he literally used the word jawaz in the hadith. In other words like just laissez faire let", "a fair let him pass so here in dunya you have all these boundaries there in the akhira as well jannah has a border patrol so you're not going to get into paradise without a passport with a visa from Allah but that visa is a it's permanent they call like permanent residence visa you'll have iqama daima right and you become a citizen", "That's in the Hadith, so it's really quite extraordinary. But one of the things... So you've got that side of the dunya which this is the half of the world that we're in where people I feel are just total like so many people. I hear people whining all the time about how horrible things are. They don't know how horri- I mean, I'm somewhat of a historian. I've read a lot of history. You know my...I have a degree in history but", "My reading of history, like don't complain because you have no idea what has happened in the past in history. It's terrifying what's happened, like what people have gone through, the hunger they've suffered. I mean our Prophet ﷺ suffered immensely but yet he never complained. Show me anywhere where he complains. The only complaint the Prophets give is to Allah. They don't", "nowhere where he complains, SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam. Because they understood everything. So now why didn't they complain? That's the important thing and this is what the Quran teaches us why they didn't complain. And here's the reason. In the Hikmah of Ibn Ataylah, he says and this in the 104th Hikam and it's one of the most important books that was written in our tradition in the science of Ihsan", "of Ihsan, recognized by all of our scholars. It's commented on by so many people. One of the great Maliki scholars, Ahmed Zarruq has over 25 commentaries on it some say up to 32 and he would finish commenting on it. He was start a new commentary because he was getting new insights into these things and Faqi al-Bannani said if it was permitted", "it would have been permitted with the hikm of Ibn Atayla. I mean, that's hyperbole obviously but the point he was making was this is such a stunning book with insight. So one of the things that he says Qara radiallahu anhu Ibn Ataila mafqara of the Egyptian people that he was born and raised in Egypt. In fact some say because the famous hadith there's a hadith and may Allah give sukkah to our brothers", "brothers and sisters, sons and daughters in Yemen who are just going through immense trials and tribulations. But Ibn Atayla was originally from Azd which is a Yemeni clan so when the Prophet said that some of the scholars said he was referring to Abul Hassan who was from the Bani Ashar who were a Yemen tribe", "and jurisprudence is Yemeni. He was referring to Imam Marek who was from the Asbah, which is another Yemeni tribe. And then when he said, well, Hikmatu Yamaniya and wisdom is Yemeny as well. They say he was referring Ibn Atayla because he was also Yemeni from the Azd. And there's Azdal Kabir and Azdal Saghir different people from that but it's one of the great tribes of the Arabs or clans. So anyway, Ibn Ataila", "In order to diminish the pain of your tribulation, he has given you knowledge. Glory be to him that he is the one trying you. So once you know that,", "of the tribulation and this is what our Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam knew and this why at the lowest point of his life which is Taif he does that remarkable dua at Taif as long as you're not upset with me I'm fine with what's come to me, as long you're no upset with. And this is from the book of Allah when the prophet was commanded", "فَإِنَّكَ بِأَعْيُونِنَا In Surah At-Tur. Be patient with the hukm of your Lord, with this decree of your God because you are in our providential care. Like بِآئْيونِنا You're in our care here. The ulema say it's عِنٰيَة Which is related in the etymology, the greater etymology to عِين", "So then he says, فَالَّذِي وَاجْهَتْكَ مِنْهُ الْأَقْدَارُ هُوَ الَّذِّي عَوَّدْك حُسْنَ الْإِخْتِيَارِ So the one who sends these trials and tribulations that you hate, He is also the One Who has accustomed you to things that you love. And so he says بِمَا تُحِبُّهُ فَاشْكُرْه على ما أولَك", "This is Ahmad Zarruq. So be grateful with the things you love from Allah and be patient with those things that Allah have sent you that are difficult. And this is why... This Quran are signs for people that are constantly patient and constantly grateful. You have to be one or the other in any given circumstance. If it's a trial,", "If it's a trial, be patient. If it is a blessing which is also a trial then the response is gratitude. Those are the responses. Ibn al-Tayla said he had an immense weight on his shoulder and he was just really troubled and he went to his Shaykh Abu'l Abbas Al Mursi in Egypt He was from Alexandria And he went into him and told him every human being is in one of four conditions", "of those conditions has an appropriate response you're either in blessing and the response is gratitude, you're in tribulation and the responses patient your in obedience and the respond is to witness God's tawfiq that he's given you this success shuhud al minna to see the blessing of obedience from God or you're disobedience and the responds repentance. And that's it and Ibn Atayla said when he heard that he felt like this incredible", "incredible weight was taken from his shoulders. That's it, that is a Boolean algebraic formula for how to live in this world. You're in one of those four states and so just be blessed. Now one of the things he goes on I mean this is something amazing Imam Al-Junaid who was one of greats and again Ibn Taymiyyah all of the scholars recognized Imam Al Junaid", "All of them. Nobody said, you know, this Imam al-Junaid. All of the but he, Imam al Junaid in the Risala of Imam al Qushayri, they mention a story that Imam al Junaid said That was his uncle, Sari al Saqati. He had a junkyard and so he sold from a junk yard. That was halal job", "Halal job. It's amazing, right? I mean the best food is from jobs that are halal and every job that's halal is dignified. We don't... He was actually a smith so he was doing something that was labor. And one of the things about our culture is it denigrates labor which is really sad because labor like carpenters", "type of, these are some of the most halal jobs now in the world. And you know nobody should ever denigrate these types of jobs because they're actually very valuable for society but anyway he woke him up, he was sleeping and he woke up and said He's telling them his vision that he saw it says if I was standing before God", "of that tenth fled because I created paradise. And so now he only 1% is left. And then, I sent upon them an atom's weight of tribulation and nine-tenths of that one-tenth", "you're literally down at just point one. You don't want dunya? And you don't flee from the fire? And your not fleeing from tribulation? What do you want? You know what we want.", "I am going to subject you to tribulation with the number of your breasts. And even the high mountains could not stand it. Will you show patience? If you're the one sending the trial, then do what you want. Those are my true servants. I mean this is a dream.", "I mean, this is a dream that one of the Saliheen saw but it's a remarkable dream. And so here it is that the Prophet was told us when he was asked who are the people that have the greatest tribulation? Which people have the great tribulation in the world? The Prophet said", "ثُمَّ الْأَمْثَلُ فَالْأِمْتَلِ First the Prophets and then those closest to the Prohpets, and then the closest to them. يُبْتلَ النَّاسَ عَرَ قَدْرِ دِينِهِم People will have tribulations based upon the degree of their faith, their religion, their deen. فَمَنْ ثَخُونَ دِيْنُهُ وَاشْتِدَّ بَلَاؤُهِ The ones whose deen is very strong, their religions are strong they will have اشْتدّ بلاؤ They will have great difficulties. وَمًا ضعفَ دینُه ضعوفَ بلاءُه", "have weak religion, they will have weak tribulations. There will be people who have so much trial that they will be walking on the earth without any sin. This is a Sahih Hadith. So this is it. Now even more extraordinary is that the Prophet told us that on the day of judgment", "judgment, there will be the people of Afia who had well-being in this world. When they see the rewards, this is in the Musnad of Imam Ahmed. When They See The Rewards Of The People Of Tribulation In This Dunya Who Had Great Suffering And Difficulty, They Will Wish That They Were Flayed Alive In The Dunya Their Skin Toqradu Juluduhum Bil Majariyat The Prophet Said That Their Skin Was Flayed", "from them. That's what they would hope in the dunya and this is people don't realize this, this is a difficult thing now do we want suffering? No! The Prophet said Asala Allah al-afiyah and he went by some people in great tribulation and suffering and he said didn't they ask for that for well being and this", "Du'as that we say every day, every morning and every evening. Why? Because these are the du'as of asking Allah for well-being. So it's not like we want suffering but when suffering comes see who the one who sent the suffering. Why did he do it? The Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam said that there are people that سَبَقَتْ لَهُمْ مِنْ عِندِ اللَّهِ مَنزِلًا That there are", "a station with Allah. But that person did not reach the station with their actions. In other words, what Allah wanted from them they did not give to Allah. So then He tries them. Until he achieves the station that Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala because", "because he shows patience. Imam al-Ghazali said that there are people who their sins will only be removed by depression, like literally Allah will give them sadness and grief, and this is the removal of their sin. This is an abode of huzan! Look at the description of the Prophet. He was constantly in a state of huzaan", "But he was also in a state of joy with Allah. So these are not paradoxes, these are understanding the nature of the abode when you see the world. You can't go now on the internet without seeing things about Yemen. How could you not cry? Or Palestine or Syria or Iraq. I mean how many tears have been shed by our community over just looking at the tribulation around the world but what you need to understand is maybe those people aren't fulfilling", "from them as people of the prophet Muhammad's Ummah. And maybe he is removing all their sins in this world. I mean, I saw three women on CNN that were from Syria and they were literally crossing into Turkey fleeing the crises and it just completely floored me. You know, the person, the reporter just said to this person", "What do you think? What do You think about this situation?\" And she just looked at him and said, Allah is present. Allah exists! That's a believer's response. So on the Day of Judgment what position does that person have? Because that's patience. I mean all these Muslims have gone through all these things. We've been through this before. I hear people saying, oh, you know people I'm losing my faith.", "There's people in America, Muslims that are losing their faith because of what's happening in Yemen. Like, what does that mean? Look at the people of Yemen. They're calling on Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala. And this is the difference. It's amazing. Don't lose your akhirah because somebody else is losing their dunya. I mean we're people of akhirah, not people of dunya This abode is what it is and its a zero sum game", "some game. It's always has been, you know, some areas get better, other areas get worse, but it stays dunya and we've had a long run. Those of us who are over here, we've got a long", "My goodness. I don't know, people should be grateful. That's my feeling. My advice to myself and everybody else is just be grateful Alhamdulillah wa shukurillah Stop complaining all the time. Everybody's just it's just amazing The complaints so this is it in order for him To mitigate the pain of your tribulation he gave you knowledge", "gave you knowledge that he was the one trying you. So may Allah make us people of patience and gratitude even better is to be grateful all of the time because the people that know Allah are grateful even in their tribulations because Ibn Abbas said in every tribulation know that there are three blessings hidden that you have to see", "a child you could have lost all your children. You lost a hand, you could've lost both hands. So and then know that it's in your dunya like its in your worldly things and not in your religious matters so if you lose money like stock market collapse and you lost all of your money just alhamdulillah it's just dunya. And the last one is in this world and not the next world", "So on the Yom Kiyamah, maybe you're going to say I wish I had more tribulation like those people that see the people in tribulation getting all their rewards saying I wish i had more tribulation. Don't wish for more tribulations just ask Allah for athia and well-being but know that if tribulation comes to you it's probably because you are closer to Allah than other people" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/This is a Red flag - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_gQpt3HdDEoc&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW3SBwkJvQCDtaTen9Q%3D_1743306195.opus", "text": [ "But one of the things that people do is they love to put this all up on the internet. Local problems should be, they should be local problems. The Muslim community make...they take a local problem some Imam does something scandalous thing in some you know town and whatever someplace and suddenly it's all over the Internet like these are fitna people. They're spreading fitna. Let the local community deal with that if", "Prominent person there might be some need but generally these are local problems. They should the idea of just spreading all this fitna is It's really not good and it also it makes people scandal is is You know when when scandal happens? It just has a horrible impact on the community And a lot of these problems are problems of just not following Sharia You know, they're just not falling Sharia", "following Sharia. I mean the Prophet told us don't be alone with somebody who's not a mahram so any woman should never if some you know quote-unquote spiritual teacher is saying oh you know I'll give you private lessons red flag, the Dajjal because it's just not in our religion and that's what protects people both people because if you're alone", "if you're alone, you're with Iblis. He's the third and then people also even just seeing people like the Prophet he was with Maimunah and it was night time and he was walking in and they saw the Prophet said he told them it's my wife and they said would we ever suspect you? And he said Shaitan flows in the veins", "So even the best people can get that doubt." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/The walking miracle- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _ Quran st_w4zlV_OA-no&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW3SBwkJvQCDtaTen9Q%3D_1743300658.opus", "text": [ "First, the idea of the Quran as the miracle of Islam. Islam is fascinating in that we have before us the miracle", "unlike the miracles that we read about in the Quran, that are taken based on faith. Such as the miracle of Musa , when he thrust down his staff and it became a hayah . And the miracle Isa who brought the living to the dead or dead to the living. Or the bird that he fashioned from clay and then... It was given life by the power of Allah. These are miracles that people experienced at that time", "And some people would contend that they have a type of what's called tawatur, because there is such a vast chain of transmission of these miracles that they can be accepted on that value. But we would believe in them because they are mentioned in the Quran. But the Quran itself is the miracle of the Prophet. This is the triumphant miracle that the Prophet ﷺ was given. One of the poets put it best when he said, أَخُوكَ عِيسَ دَعَمَيْتًا", "Your brother Isa, he called the dead and they answered him. And they stood up. But you have brought generations back to life. The Prophet's miracle is that his book is with us to this day.", "I have left two things with you. As long as you adhere to them, cling to them hold to them You will never go astray the book of Allah and my Sunnah And the Sunnah is in reality an explanation of the Book of Allah It is an explanation Of the Book Of Allah The Prophet's life is a commentary on the Book", "how was the character of the Prophet , she said, His character was the Quran. You are on a vast character, a vast ethos. The Quran can be really summed up in one statement that Ibn Juzay says in his Tafsir al-Tasheer. He says it is the call of creation,", "the worship of Al Haqq, The Truth which is Allah . Now this invitation is exactly that. It is an invitation. Da'wah in the Islamic tradition is an invitation. We invite people. We have never historically have never outside of the Arabian Peninsula have never forced anyone to become Muslim. This is historically documented. Nowhere has a Muslim held a sword over somebody's head outside of", "Ad'u ila sabili rabbika bil hikmah wa al muwaidatil hasanah", "and in the best exhortation. This is the message that Islam has gone out and spread to people. So if we look at the Quran as an invitation, it is a da'wah. We can see there's a beautiful hadith that articulates this and gives a different nuance to this idea. The Quran is the ma'duba of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala in the creation, in this earth. Ma'duba in the Arabic language", "in the Arabic language means a place, there's two riwayah, two transmissions. One is ma'duba and one is ma'daba. The ma'dubah is a banquet in which a king sets forth and invites those worthy of the invitation to his banquet. And they must have the proper and requisite adab in order to enter into the tent of the king. And this, the Quran, is the banquet of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala", "The other riwayah which is also sound calls it ma'daba. If you look at the word ma'dab, it is what they call in the Arabic language. It's the place where one acquires adab and adab is that which makes us human. The Prophet said the best of what a parent gives to his child or her child is adab hasan, is good adab.", "And this is what the Quran is. It is a place where we learn the requisite courtesies in order to be fully human.", "or the human transactions, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has given guidance in both of these. When we look in the idea of ibadah, ibadat has two aspects. The first is aqeedah and the second is ahkam. The aqeadah can be broken off again into two branches. One of the sicknesses of the age is an obsession with aqeedah which in using western terminology", "would go under the category of what they call kerygma or rules, of which you learn. The aqeedah is not complicated, it's something that can be learned very fast. The Aqeeda of Imam Al-Tahawee is a beautiful aqeda of which the ummah has agreed upon, it can be learnt very quickly. But the aqida must be seen as three essential aspects. Al-Qaww, What we say. We say Allah is One. We Say Allah Has No Likeness.", "not give birth, does not give. These are aspects of the Aqeedah which we articulate and then there is an I'tiqaad a belief in the heart that Aqeeda must penetrate the heart it cannot simply remain at the level of ratiocination at the", "and not vice versa, and this is very clearly understood in modern social sciences. And I would recommend studying the concept of cognitive dissonance which is a beautiful insight which the Qur'an gave us centuries before. I haven't found really any insights in my own personal studies of modern sciences except that I've found already either explicitly articulated", "in the Qur'an and the Sunnah or implicitly understood by the scholars of Islam who came later. If you look then at what the Qur-an is, the Qur-'an is formulated on this idea of aqeedah. The other aspect of the Qur-, which is from the ahkam, is how then do we get human beings? How does the human being get from a stage where he is bereft", "And the benefits of following the deen of Allah and what will happen with us if we follow the neem of allah The next aspect is called tarheel which is out of awe to inspire awe Rahba, the prophet in the hadith beautiful dua that he made when he went to sleep I have surrendered myself to you.", "I have placed my whole back in your security and safety. رَغْبَةً وَرَهْبَّةً إِلَيْكُ Out of desire for you, and out of awe of you. And these are the dual... These are the two sandals that a human being must have in his life. He has to have the sandal of raja, and he has to be the sandel of khawf . And so he moves forward or she moves forward in her life with the tarheeb and the tarheeb.", "The mu'min is the one who the targhid and la-tarhid yastawi. They become equal with him. Abu Hamad al-Ghazali, radhiallahu anhu, preferred the raja because he said the raga engendered love and fear engender despair. If we then look at the aspects of the Quran, there are seven identified by Ibn Jauzai, radhaiallahu anh, in his tasheel.", "There are seven knowledges that the Quran encompasses. The first one is ilm al-rububiyya, which is the knowledge of lordship. Who is our Lord? Who is Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala? Who Is Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la? Allah tells us and declares it in the Quran. Know that there's no God but Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala. Now part of the miracle of the Quran and an essential aspect of it is the Arabic language.", "is to transcend being. In other words, there's no conceptual limitations of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala when we speak about Allah subhana wa ta-ala in the Arabic language which exists in the English language and that is why it is impossible to say La ilaha illallah in any other language than the Arabic langauge The Quran is an Arabic revelation before it is anything It is revealed", "will literally give the human being a much deeper and broader understanding. Your actual understanding of existence increases with your increase in the knowledge of Arabic language. Why? Because it is a true language. It is a TRUE language. In other words, the language is not simply a symbolic language in which people have agreed on certain phrases to use like in the English language we used the word cat in Arabic to describe cat or self to describe self.", "the actual evolution of the language, these are arbitrary distinctions. In the Arabic language there is no arbitrariness there. We believe that the Arabic Language is part of revelation. It is a Taqifiyya language that was revealed it is not a language which human beings agreed upon and this is why as you begin to move into the Arabic Langauge and the meanings of the Arabic words you will see conventional understandings of words that exist when an Arab says Nafs he understands self", "The Arabic word for nafs has two, possibly more, but two words in the first form. There are six what they call baab, six forms in the Arabic first form or what they called thulathi verb. The two are nafisa yamfasu which is on the baab kasru fathan and the nafusa yamfu su which is damu dhamman.", "Already Allah is indicating two types of self. The Prophet ﷺ said in a beautiful hadith about one of the munafiqeen, when he was asked who's your sayyid? And they said, Sayyiduna so and so, إِلَّا نَسْتَبْخِلُهُ Except we consider him miserly. The prophet said, وَهَلْ هُنَكَ دَاءٌ أَدْوَى مِنَ الْبُخْلِ Is there a disease more sick than miserliness? Because the kafir is a miser in reality.", "Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala out of... Thanks is easy to give. You know, it's like this London taxi cab driver that I got and he was complaining about all these Muslims that had come to London and I won't say from which countries but they come during the summer and they take over a place called Edgeware Road. And he was going on and on and he told me the thing that really bothered him was they never say thank you, right? And I said well it does exist in their language which means", "one aspect of humanity. The other aspect is preciousness, nafs. The nafs itself its primary nature is precious that is why whoever kills a nafs it's as if he killed all of humankind this is the Quranic world view the nafs is precious now if you go into the second form you have nafasa which means to help other people to alleviate somebody suffering which is the kareem ,the generous, the precious nafs will do this but then", "then let them compete with one another for akhira, but not for this world. And what is very interesting that the dominant philosophy now is what they call competitive capitalism which is literally destroying people as the Prophet ﷺ said it would destroy people when they tanāfasuḥa, when they begin to vie over the dunya, فَتُهْلِكُهُمْ كَمَا أَهْرَكَتْهُмْ and it destroys them like it destroyed the people before them. So this is again a disease of the self. So from this semantic feel that comes out of the Arabic language", "Arabic language you can see the richness of the word nafs which in its conventional meaning simply means self but once you begin to open it up and explore it, you get this extraordinary... It's where symbol meets reality. This is the power, the symbolic power of the Arabic language is that it is literally meeting reality and haqiqah in Arabic comes from Haqq.", "is a derivative from the word al-haq. Now if you look in English, the word for reality which is reality comes from a word res which means thing. So already in the language it's indicating what they believe reality to be which is things, material things. This is the substance of their reality this is not the substance our reality. We believe that the earth and everything on it is contingently real", "else. Everything is in a state of annihilation. Everything will be destroyed. This existence is not permanently real, it is only contingently real based on the Qayyumiya of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala that He allows it to exist. This is all the world view of the Quran that Allah is giving us. Knowing Lordship and we must again", "that you had to go into the Arabic language. We do not think of Allah as the supreme being in a hierarchy of being. This is something that already even the Christian philosophers are recognizing, the invalidity at this point. We don't see Allah as a supreme being and a hierarchy or being. Allah in an extraordinary articulation by Abu Bakr al-Baqallani one of the great intellects of this ummah when they said", "Allah is not the supreme being with all these inferior beings. And this is the depth of the Muslim understanding. The Muslims had the deepest and most profound understanding based on their knowledge of the Quran, and on their knowlege of the Arabic language.", "The next is the علم النبوة which is knowledge of the prophets themselves. The Quran gives us knowledge of what is nabooa, once we identify that there's no god but Allah, that Allah is actually giving us a message then who is the messenger? The messengers are clearly identified as men that come from the purest of human beings and they articulate the truth for creation in different times and places.", "Where are we going? Where then are you going? This is the great Quranic question that every single individual must come to terms with. If people don't want to think about where they came from, which most people don' t and people like Steven Jay Gold aren't really thinking about where he came from because these people all they look at is how, they never look at why. You see evolution looks at how this happened it never looked at why, why has this come about whether we believe in evolution or not", "in terms of the question itself. Why did this stuff come about? Where did it come from? Who brought it into existence? And so knowledge of المعاد that we are going to meet Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, that we will be in the presence of Allah subhana wa ta'ta'ala in a way that only Allah subhahana wa ta-ta'ala knows and we will asked and taken to account for. This is the علم المعااد . The next emphasis of the Qur'an is أحكام", "Lord you accept that there's messengers, you accept the final reckoning how then do you live in earth? How do you with human beings? How to you live and worship Allah and this is the realm of ahkam in Quran. There are only 500 verses in Quran that deal with ahkam either explicitly or implicitly it's not a great deal out of 6236 I believe verses of Quran. I don't know where they get six six six I see that in books", "Whoever's writing that, quit writing that. That scares the Christians. There are 6666 verses in the Quran. I think a Christian wrote a book first of all and then Muslim just been reading that book and getting information because that's not how many eyes of the Qur'an. But it scares them because it is the number of the Antichrist in their eschatology. So after understanding the Ahkam and applying them in our lives Allah gives us again", "which is in the Quran, what we're promised if we follow the Book of Allah and we follow this Sunnah of the Messenger. You have in the messenger the best example for those who are yearning for the next life, who desire Allah's pleasure and desire to meet Allah in the next", "And so the wa'id is there and the wa-eed which is again the tarheeb that Allah promised us if we deviate from the Quran what will happen to us. And we are witnessing that everywhere. This is one of the beauties of the Quran, is it empowers the human being and allows us to know why we are where we are and how we can get out of the situation we're in. If you look all over the Muslim world, wallahi I after deep deliberation about these things", "that all of this is in reality a rahmah from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and nothing else. This is a rahma from Allah to this ummah, ju'ida azabu ummatin fi dunyaha the punishment of my ummah was placed in the dunya and this is a Rahmah form Allah In order that we might return to Allah subh'anaHu wa ta-A'la Allah has frightening and devastating ways of bringing his people back to the deen of Allah subhaanahu wa Ta-Aa'la We are warned about this in the Quran so we should see these things", "Perhaps you detest a thing, but in it is much good for you. And Allah knows. You do not know. We do not understand existence fully. And then the last aspect out of these seven is the idea of قصص which is the Quran contains stories of those who went before us. Now the stories of", "there to teach us that we are part of an unbroken chain of struggle. The deen by its nature is mujahadah, it is struggle. We are part on an unbroken chain of struggles that will continue until the end of time. It is the struggle of truth and falsehood. They fight one another and this is the nature. And that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala will give victory to those who are patient amongst us.", "who went before us was the deep patience that they had. The deep, deep patience in taking this message out and suffering for it. Command to good, forbid evil and be patient about what afflicts you from doing that. They enjoin right and they enjoin patience by the nature of enjoying right, you will suffer afflictions.", "that even Juzay Al-Kalbi identifies in the Quran. Now, what I would like to do is just talk a little bit about how then all of us agree that the Quran is the way out? I don't think...I've heard this so many times, What is the Way Out? And I said it myself, The Quran. How is it then do we get from understanding this at the rational level and the intellect", "experiencing it and living it in our lives. I believe that the Quran itself gives us the methodology for doing that. The first thing I want to say is that although there's a lot of work been done on the scientific miracles of the Quran, Abdul Majeed Zindani has done extraordinary work and really many people have been influenced and impacted by it.", "in relation to the purpose of the Qur'an because I do not believe that the purpose is to be a book of science. There are miracles of science no doubt in the Qur-an, in embryology extraordinary things and in geography and geology and other sciences. They're there and it's good work for people to identify those things because it's part of what they call or the incapacitating nature of the science in the Quran but the primary ijaz of the Quran", "And what I would like to do is look at a statement made by a man, Jeremy Campbell who wrote a book about information theory. He says in here evidently nature can no longer be seen as matter and energy alone which is the 19th century view of reality matter and Energy alone nor can all her secrets be unlocked with the keys of chemistry and physics Which is what human beings have been attempting to do to understand reality at the biochemical level at the", "at the atomic level to this is materialism, at its sickest. Brilliantly successful as these two branches of science have been in our century a third component is needed for any explanation of the world that claims to be complete The powerful theories of chemistry and physics must be added a late arrival A theory of information Nature must be interpreted", "and information. Nature must be interpreted as matter, energy and information that is the Quranic worldview. The Quranic world view tells us that what we see and witness outside of ourselves are signs from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and what we", "A witness of knowledge, sight and vision.", "gained by witnessing, مشاهدة بصرا with our own eyes وبصيرة and with our hearts. And this is why the human being according to the founder I mean the Quran itself but the founder of information theory Claude Shannon who's the founder", "And the Quran itself is the... It is the code, it is the translation for the human being. It is a manual by which the human beings can break the code of existence. Not from a scientific aspect and I don't doubt that there are things in there that deal with that but from what how existence works in terms of sunan of Allah .", "How existence works. This to me is the greatest miracle of the Quran, that if we learn and deeply deliberate the Quran... Don't they deeply deliberate and reflect on the Quran or are their organs of cognition, their hearts covered with locks, unable to access the book of Allah?", "If it was from other than Allah, they would have found much differences in it. Like the 50 thousand errors that they've found in other religious books. They would have find much difference in it but there are not differences in the Book of Allah because the Book Of Allah is from Allah . This can only be grasped in a deep and sincere way with yaqeen and certainty by deep reflection on the Book On Allah And this is the job of ulil albab", "the shell of superficial thought, to transcend the shell and enter in to the meanings that Allah has immersed the human being both in his experience of the world and in the greatest and divine articulation of who the creator of the word is what the world is and what our place and all the various types of people and creation that exist in existence itself. And this is an act of discovery", "an act of discovery. To enter into this is an act or discovery which in itself, is to enter into the experience of ecstasy. The word in Arabic to find or discover is the same root word that we use for existence itself. Wujud is existence. Wajada means to find but it also means to be ecstatic because discovery is a state of ecstaty. When they asked Abu Hanifa ,", "did you gain knowledge? He said, by hamd and shukr. And the meaning of that is that he said, Every time I increased in my knowledge and understanding, I thanked Allah and I gave him hamd, praise, and he increased me in my knowlege and understanding. And you thank Allah by blessings, things that make you felicitous, things", "The Quran is a book of sa'ada. It is for the mu'mineen. وَنُنَزِرُوا مِّنَ الْقُرْآنِ مَهُوَ فْشِفَاءٌ رحمة للمؤمنين We have revealed from this Quran what is a healing and a mercy for the Mu'mineens. وَّلَا يُزِيدَ الظَّالِمِينَ إِلَّا خَسَارًا It will only increase those transgressing in loss. Why? Because they're gaining by transgression, and the Quran stops transgression. أَنصُرَ أَخَاكُمْ ظَالِماً أَوْ مَظْلُومًا Give victory to your brother, the oppressor and the oppressed.", "and the oppressed. كَيْفَ نَمْصُرُ أَخَانَ الظَّلِمَ How do we give victory to our brother, the oppressor? By stopping him from his oppressing. And this is what the Qur'an does. It will only increase the ظالم in loss because it stops him from His oppression. And This Is What The Muslims Who Adhere To The Book Of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala Have Done. The Way The Methodology In Deriving Benefit From The Qur'aan", "is in the Quran itself. The first thing that the Quran, when it announces itself, that it is a wahi from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And then it tells us that these are signs. Now a sign in linguistic theory is something that must be decoded. You have to decode a sign", "of the existence and unity of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, but the Qur'an itself is a sign of an explanation of the existance of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la and of the Creator. And so the first thing is to recognize that the Qurán is a book literally of ayats. Now in order to decode those signs we must learn the language of the Qurân. The language of Qurān is Arabic. Imam Al Shafi'i in his Risalah said", "Every Muslim should learn Arabic, whatever his effort will be.", "The language is a human language, it's a sign of Allah. Allah says in your tongues and in your colors are signs. It's a Sign of Allah but for the Muslims to me it is a sign our humiliation and our subjugation. That English has become the language of our conferences and our intellectual and scholastic pursuits is an indication of our humilation because it's the language that conquered many Muslim lands. And they have given us this language and this is what we're left with", "to the level anywhere near what those who went before us do. Part of regaining our heritage is regaining the Arabic language and also unlike almost all the other languages in existence, the complexification of languages increases despite the fact that it changes. In other words Latin moved into Italian, Spanish, French these are like slangs or dialects of Latin but by the nature of language because they left Latin", "There was a complexification that took place that enabled them to articulate difficult thought Unfortunately this has not occurred in the Arabic language and the reason for that I say unfortunately really not unfortunately But it has unfortunate consequences the Arabic Language by its nature has been preserved intact Unchangeable with the revelation of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala the Arab grammarians and the Arab Lexicographers were the first people the first dictionary in the English language is 16th century", "century. They don't even know really what Chaucer's language meant, they can only guess at a lot of words the meanings of words. The Hebrew language, the Hebrews caught on to dictionaries from the Muslims and this is why in modern biblical studies in Tel Aviv and the universities where they study they go to Arabic roots to understand the Bible. This is a fact that I'm not making this up they go too Arabic roots", "Arabic language that has maintained a lexical purity that other languages have not maintained because of the preservation of our scholars. And by the tawfiq of Allah, because when Allah said, إِنَّا نَحْنُ نَزَلْنَا الذِّكَرُ وَإِنّ ذَهُ لَحَافِظُونَ That includes the preservation or the Arabic language because it's an essential aspect. The Arabic language has been preserved and it's there for whoever wants it. If you want dunya then learn English but if you want akhira, learn Arabic", "that literally opens up a whole world of meaning, that is inaccessible in the English language. And I'm saying that as somebody who is bilingual, who reads the Qur'an in Arabic and reads English. The Arabic...the Qur'aan is not the Qur-an in English. It cannot be called the Qurr'anin English. And this is not kind of you know boasting of the scholars of the past. No! Part of the ijaz of the Qurraan is the Arabic language itself.", "So we must learn the language of the book itself. And this includes Arabs who go through 12 years of high school and they can't... You know, one of the ulema, I think it was Muhammad ibn Hussein said, خصت هذه الأمة بثلاثة الانساب والإسناد والإعراض This ummah has been given three special things. Knowledge of the ansab genealogy", "the knowledge of the isnad. لَوْلَا السَّنِدُ لَقَالَ مَنْ شَاءَ مَّا شَائَةً As Ibn al-Mubarak said, if it wasn't for the sunnah of this ummah that he would have said whatever he wanted to say whoever wanted to see it. So we have the Sunnah which is the unbroken chain of transmission which the Quran exists to this day in an unbroken chains of transmission to the messenger of Allah to Jibril , to Allah . There are Muslims who memorize the Quran with a sunnah unbroken change to Allah", "Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala. And this exists to our day, it's a miracle of the Qur'an that we have an absolute center of unbroken chain of transmitters of the Quran both by articulation and by writing, it is unbroken. All of these has been preserved. So learning the Arabic language. Now the next aspect is...", "Read the meanings of the Quran. I'm not suggesting that, but I'm saying it's a crutch and lame people use crutches But the beauty of it is you can throw away your crutches because the Arabic language is learnable I mean Maurice Boucaille was 50 years old when he learned the Arabic Language A French scientist who just wanted to read the Quran in its original language 52 years old We have Muslims that speak English better than the Queen They speak English Better Than The Queen Why?", "Allah has given us the formula. When the Quran is recited, listen to it. Now the word in Arabic here, استمعو, is from an 8th form verb, استماع, which is called باب المطاوع, which means it's a reflexive. It goes back into the self. In other words, it's not simply a hearing. It is an internalization of the hearing.", "It means we hear, like سمعت. In Mauritanian they always say سمع, سماء, سماع. They always ask me, did you hear that? Like here they used to say, I heard that. But that's not what استمع it means. That is what سميع means. استمعة means to internalize it. So you not only hear the word, you internalize", "misunderstood and comprehended. And then once it enters into the heart, there has to be silence and stillness. There has to silence and sillness. If you do not steal the heart from the chatter of the world, then you cannot understand and penetrate the meanings of the Book of Allah. They only touch at the purified ones. The purified one which is a passive form they're purified by their . Allah purifies them.", "The Qur'an is the only source of peace for those who are purified.", "The Quran now is played like background music. You will hear it, you will hear Quran now in the suks of all the Muslim countries. You'll hear the Quran even in the suk and if you hear it here then tell people to stop playing it because the Suk is not a place for Quran In fact its makruh to recite the Quran in the Suk except for talib ilm who's doing murajah And you can look at the books of fiqh I'm not making that up and I was once trying to do a transaction and somebody had a CD of quran", "If you hear the Quran, listen to it and be silent. And I can't make a business transaction if you've got Quran playing. And he said, is it wajib? See this is...I mean this is a sickness. This is a sicknes. It means there's a deep loss of adab. And this is what happened in our ummah. We have lost adab to the book of Allah. I'm gonna close it up now.", "We've lost adab to the Book of Allah . Now from the adab of the Book Of Allah is that you listen to it when it's recited and your silence. Now in the Quran, It says, Don't raise your voices over the voice of the Prophet. The ulamas many of them said it includes one hadith is being recited now There's a principle on tafsir mahumad awla which is even more stronger like when Allah says don't say to your parents", "Allah says about them, they are blind deaf and dumb and they do not see. They're deaf, they can't hear. And there's...they can't speak, they cannot articulate", "articulate and they can't see. And the Muslim is somebody who is listening attentively to the signs of Allah, seeing the signs up Allah because the signs are both things that we see with the eyes We see with our eyes, we hear with the ears and we understand in our hearts. The Muslims are people of intellect They're not people of stupidity and idiocy", "a book that demands deep thought. It is not a book for simplistic, just a book... No! It absolutely demands from us that we think Allah says, بَلْ نَقْفِ فَالْحَقِّ عَلَى الْبَاطِلِ فَّيَدْمُغْهُ فَإِذَا هُوَ زَاهِقٌ We thrust this Quran against falsehood and all forms of truth against false hood and it is overcome.", "a modern translation that says, and it smashes out their brains. Which, that's a gross mistranslation of Quran because damagha although in its one of the meanings is to hit strike the brain. That striking does not mean smashing it physically out which is a lot of a way that a lot Muslim modern Muslims would like to finish arguments by smashing out their opponents' brains. No we are people of Burhan and the proof", "that verse you will see that they all asking about do you think there's more than one God in creation haven't you looked at the heavens and earth it's using intellectual proofs to show these people in other words yet Mahalo means that it overwhelms their intellect until they have to admit that it is the truth from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala Muslims have never been afraid of open debate an open discourse the Muslims have", "Allah is the greatest, He is the most gracious.", "The Prophet when saying Ali, he said fitanun ka qata'a laylan mudhlim. There are afflictions like a dark black night and then Ali karmallahu wajah radiAllahu anhu said maal khalasu yawma idhin ya Rasulullah what is the way out on that day? He said kitab Allah, the book of Allah. Fihi naba'u ma qabrikum wa khabru ma ba'dikum wa hukmu ma baynikum It has the information of those who went before news about those who will come after", "آپ کے دوسرے میں جو بات ہے ، اللہ تعالیٰ نے کہا کہ", "would stand up and is there a microphone in the", "They would just say, what was that? أكتب بألمي That means in Arabic I write with pain. So they really wouldn't understand, I don't think. I mean they heard Suhaib Rumi once saying, يا ناس يا نس And Umar ibn al-Khattab said, ما بار سوهاب ينادي الناس What's wrong with Suhaab he is calling the people. And he said no no he has a boy named Yahnas But Suhaob had Ujma in his tongue", "in his tongue so he didn't pronounce the ha very strongly I would say that the way we go back to the Quran is taking the minhaj of the Salaf people The minhaj of the salaf was to read the Quran in 30 days This was the minhag of the salah The Quran was divided into 30 juz 60 hizb, 30 juzz", "Fajr and Maghrib. It takes about 15 to 20 minutes to read, and most people spend more time in the bathroom doing their toiletries than that takes really I mean just put our priorities straight Abu Hanifa who is often times the most generous in terms of his leniency said that the least amount we can recite the Quran is twice a year", "The Prophet said in a hadith that has weakness that Al-Razi mentions,", "us in our knowledge. whoever acts according to what he knows Allah will increase him in his knowledge so there's increased by acting according to What we know the Arabic language, the Quranic Arabic although there are deep intricacies and subtleties in the Quran Arabic by and large the Quran arabic is not a complicated Arabic it is moving", "So the Qur'anic Arabic, there's a beautiful vocabulary that is not extensive, that can be learned very quickly. I have a class that has been working with me two hours a week for about three and half... almost four years. And all of them were Ajam when they came in, and now they're reading the Qurán with a considerable amount of understanding. They can understand it with a dictionary using relying on a dictionary for some words.", "shows you just that a small amount of time, a massive amount can be gained. Now Arabs already have a considerable jump on everybody else because there's a great deal of the Quranic Arabic that they still can understand even for a person on the street. My friend Abdullah Omar in Jeddah told me he was in Egypt once and he speaks Fusha Arabic and he got in a taxi and he said", "and the man said, So now Egyptian taxi drivers are notorious for being like what they call khafifat dam. So I don't know if he was just not understanding it was Quran or he was making fun of my friend. But we'll give him the benefit of the doubt.", "resources and the other thing I didn't, I want to talk about this but again i'm just not...I need to be more structured. But I wanted to talk our children and giving our children the book of Allah . The Prophet said on the Day of Resurrection that the parents who give the Quran to their children will be given crowns that radiate like suns.", "I don't understand how we can give our children chemistry and biology and physics. And, I mean it's just that they're not going to be tested about that stuff on Yom Kiyamah which is not to diminish the importance of those sciences. I'm not but we need to get our priorities right. And our priority above and beyond everything should be the Book of Allah .", "who were the most brilliant scientists and scholars that... ...the world has ever known. I mean way beyond the people now, who don't even know how to take care of themselves. I'm mean scientists are uninspiring individuals by in large. It's not all of them but a lot of them. Look at these western scientist they don't know how send it to me on email. They don't want to talk to people anymore. Send it to my on email But these ulema", "All of them what they share in common is that they memorize the book of Allah and they learn the language of the Arabs. And I believe personally that that ayah in the Quran is absolutely literal in its meaning, لَعَلَّكُمْ تَعْقِرُونَ In order that you use your intellects, that you learn to use your intellectuals when Allah tells us the reason why we're all scattered and separated He says ذَٰرِكَ لِيَنَّهُم طَوْمٌ لَا يَعقِلُون Because there are people that don't use their intellects", "use their intellects. تَحْسِبُهُمْ دِمْعًا وَقُرُوبُهِم شَتَّى ذَٰرِكَ بِأَنْهُмْ قَوْمٌ لَيَعَقِدُونَ You think that they're united, their hearts are separate because they don't use their intellectuals. We need to begin using our intellectuals raise up to the level of this deen and Arabic is a means it's a tool. That's all it is. It's a powerful tool that empowers the intellect certain types of understandings that are not available to people through other linguistic mediums. Jazakum Allah Khairan Wa Salamu Alaikum" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Tunisians and Islam - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _tunisia__1742886211.opus", "text": [ "Tunisian scholar in that I knew and was one of my teachers and actually he gave me years ago ijazah with the Hamziya but I think kesh from him or something that I would translate it because he gave his commentary on it So so he told me that the tunisians haven't been practicing Islam for 800 years That's what he said. He was the dean of the Zaytuna college", "actually Hanafi because a lot of the court system was using still Hanafi." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Death is a blessing - Sheikh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayus__1742892531.opus", "text": [ "Kufr essentially means ingratitude. Here it means how can you deny God? But you're denying, فَبِأَيِّ آلَاءِ رَبِّكُمْ أَتُكَذِّبًا Which of the bounties of your Lord are you denying? So this is a denial of the gifts that God's given us. So what are those gifts? He brought you to life. Then he causes you to die. Then we return to him. So death is among the gifts", "then God will cause you to die and then return. Hence, God made death a blessing just as life was made a blessing simply given as one cannot achieve the bliss of the afterlife without passing through the door of death. Death becomes a blessing as the means to a blessing is also a blessing." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Earth belong to god - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayus__1743294949.opus", "text": [ "We're reminded that the earth is God's but then, that He gives it to whom he pleases. يُورِثُهَا مَنْ يَشَٰى مِنْ عِبَادِهِ Again, من عِ بَادَهِ But they are still His servants It doesn't matter who they are They are still in the servitude of Allah سبحانه وتعالى But والعقبة للمتقين Despite all of that The aqiba, the end affair is for the people of taqwa" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/If you fall in love - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayus__1748542530.opus", "text": [ "If you fall in love, you get married. People say love is irrational. It's definitely got some irrational components but there's a reason why you get marry. There's a reasons why... Most people love for reasons. They fell in love with their beauty, their goodness. In fact they say about the Prophet that the reason why he learned the Shama'il is because attraction to beautiful qualities of a person is one of the reasons that love is cultivated. So just reading about him", "about him. He was very beautiful, he was a physically very beautiful person. He is the most beautiful of men and everything was balanced with the Prophet. He had beautiful hair, he had very wavy black hair. It wasn't curly it wasn't straight because everything about him is balance so even his hair was balanced. Wasn't straight and it wasn' t curly. The extremes, those are two extremes of hair. You have curly hair you have straight hair. His", "His was right in the middle of those two extremes. He had wavy hair, parted it in the midddle. It went sometimes to the bottom of the earlobe, sometimes to his shoulders. He has a very beautiful complexion. They said it was like the moon" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Leave People Alone -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayus__1743300601.opus", "text": [ "You can clarify what your position is, but don't attack people who take another position when it's a valid position. Do we celebrate the Maulid or not? These are khilaf issues and you can present your position that's fine say look the Salaf didn't practice it here's why we shouldn't practice It but we recognize there's a khilaff here and other you know and show the two arguments Right and then leave people alone But to go and try to stop", "and try to stop people from practicing things that are disagreed on. That leads to sectarianism, it leads to division, it leaves the hatred and it splits an ummah. Allah says in Arabic I'm your Lord don't forget who's your lord you know Shakespeare said tis idolatry to make the service greater than the God sometimes people Islam becomes what they're worshipping all these rules" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/_ Who Will Truly Miss You_ _ Hamza Yusuf _ Inspiri__1742997328.opus", "text": [ "One of the things about life is that when you die, most people are just going to... Oh, if they knew you, they might say, oh, mashallah, inna lillahi wa inna illa hi raji'un. If they were close, they would send condolences to the family and think, but the people who are really gonna miss you are your direct loved ones. Those are the people that are gonna miss. Other people won't really miss you. The world goes on. And we've lost greats. When Ibn Manjur died, he was one of the greatest scholars of Morocco", "of Morocco, the man who buried him, who was his student wept and just said I knew this world was insignificant. A man that had this tongue because he taught his whole life and he was just a master of all sciences one of the truly great faqis of Moroccan history and he said I just knew if worms could eat this tongue that this earth had such insignificance in my eyes. And this is the nature of dunya, we're passing through it" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/People of Allah ﷻ _ Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayusuf__1743063197.opus", "text": [ "The people, the mu'minun are these are real people. Be with the truthful ones. Be what the people of sitq These are the people whose hearts are sincere with Allah and Allah tells us to be with them Seek them out Wherever they are seek them out and be and sit with them and be with him and benefit with them And be humbled before them You know, these are the", "I went to the middle of Sahara, really, to Sahara desert to meet one of these people when I heard about him and I was a young man but I wanted to see this person because I only heard about them. You know the Arabs say sometimes the ear has ishq before the eye you hear about somebody and you get ishk. Do you know what ishqu is?" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Do it until you die - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_F31K7FmCCm4&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743304881.opus", "text": [ "You know, really. And I'll tell you why. If you take on a practice, you should do it until you die. The difference between them and us is one thing one of my teachers told me which is a really useful piece of advice. If read a hadith that says to do something at least do it once if you're not even taking on as a practice just do it for the blessing of doing it but if you take", "If you learn archery and then you give it up, then you disobeyed Abu al-Qasim. Al-Bukhari one of his companions he used to do archery every morning Imam al-Buhari every morning 20 years one of His companions with him He said in 20 years I never saw miss the target once And that's how he was with the Hadith sahih He always hit the target so if you're able to", "If you're able to just take, if all you do is Yasin and Waqia. If what you do, if what you are doing is Yasina waqia, Allahu Akbar. Mulk also the prophet said 30 ayahs I wish was in the heart of every believer. The Munjiyat are really also Sajda, Yasin, Dukhan, Waqa, Bayna, there's seven the Munjiya Suras", "Khayru al-A'mal, adwamah wa inqal", "Ramadan should be a time where you assess your practice and try to add something on for the coming year. Just commit to one or two things, and then do them. You know inshaAllah may Allah give you all tawfiq, may Allah bless you increase you elevate you I really hope that those watching we need help to build we're trying to build an institution it's a difficult time where we it's very unfortunately we've seen you know things happening it's just it's", "where everything's going but shaytan swore an oath so shaitan sworn oath I'm gonna sit and wait for them on this straight path of yours. I will sit in wait, and he said I will come to them", "in front of them and behind them, on their aiman, on the right side or left side. And you will find most of them are ingrates.\" He swore that oath. He didn't say I'll come over them or under them because if you're aligned with Allah, shaytan has no access to you. So just be aligned with allah subhanahu wa ta'ala have vertical alignment with allahu subhanhu wa ta-ala and shaitan has no acess to you stand in prayer and in sajdah he can't get you", "get you yeah he actually flees when the prayer comes you know" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Science of Tasawwuf _ Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _ Session_iWBSKBPPb5k&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743074027.opus", "text": [ "Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Raheem Allahumma salli wa salla mubarak ala Sayyidina Muhammad wa a'la ali wa sahbihi wa salam tasneema wa la hawla wa la quwwata illa billahil aliyyi al-'azim Alhamdulillah I mentioned yesterday about the science of Tasawwuf has two aspects. One is conformity, it's really fiqh al-ba'tan just like you have fiqhh al-dhaher, like you", "between wudu, then you have fiqh al-batn which relates to the niyyah. The ikhlās, khushū' in prayer that you're actually present in the prayer so it relates to those elements of the religion that are not external because you have Islam which is the external and then you Iman which is vertical component of the external because iman and Islam go together", "about vertical and horizontal traditions. So the horizontal is the Islam, it's how you relate to other people and what you do outwardly. Islam is an outward phenomenon although Islam covers Iman and Ihsan, it has that general meaning but it's also an outward phenomena so like in the Quran when it says قَالَتْ الْعَرَابُ آمَنَّا You know the Arab desert Arabs they say we believe and Allah says don't say we", "Don't say we believe but say, We are in a state of Islam. So we're Muslims. Don't Say we're mu'minun And there's a khilaf about making that claim and the Ash'ari's and the Maturidi's have a khilaaf about that because The Ash'aris say you say ana mu'man jazman and the maturidis say no you say Ana Mu'minoon insha Allah", "And the difference is, is that Ash'ari's believe that Shaqawah and Sa'da are permanent states. Whereas the Maturidi believe they're not. They're actual individual states. So you can be a Mu'min at one time and become a Kafir at another time. And that's a difference. And thats why according to the one Madhhab You can't make Takfir of anybody in that way because you don't know what their state is with God", "with God. So if you see a person who's not a Muslim, he might be a mu'min and Allah so you shouldn't make the false assumption that it's a kafir And that's why if you look at the Sahaba when they talked... They don't call people kafir. They say ya adu wa Allah O enemy of God or ya aduw wa nafsika They would say things like that. They wouldn't say ya kafir because Allahu anhum they might become Muslims", "when he was fighting the Prophet, in reality he was a Mu'min. He didn't know it yet but Allah knew it. So that's a type of difference of opinion about people states. The akhlaq or trying to conform outwardly and then you have the inward Iman which is the vertical. That's what connects you to Allah so Islam becomes meaningful", "dimension. Because a munafiq can practice Islam, so outwardly you can see all the things of a munafiq and you think they're Muslim but there's no vertical connection it's a horizontal phenomenon. And that iman introduces the vertical connection and then ihsan is the depth of it. It brings in the third dimension of depth. So it brings depth to", "And so the increase in Iman is not really an increase in the phenomenon of belief It's just an increase what you believe in So, the more you believe In The more you have Iman in Like once somebody teaches you to believe that the Prophet is the best of creation So you believe that If you didn't know that before You've increased your dimension of Iman But the reality of IMAN is the same That's Abu Hanifa's position", "The other position, which is the dominant position, is that Iman increases. وَرُجِّحَتْ زِيادةُ الإيمان بما تزيد طاعت الإنسان That the preferred opinion is the increase of Iman based upon increase in obedience So the more obedience, the bigger the Iman If you put the Imaan of Abu Bakr in one Kufa like the Prophet said and the Imaan of rest of Ummah with exception of his Imaan Abu Bakar's Imaan would outweigh the entire Ummah", "So the Iman of a person differs. So increasing iman, that's what Ihsan is about. Increasing the dimension of iman. The iman is the vertical connection but now you're increasing the actual space of ima. It's becoming bigger. It' taking on more depth and that's really what this science is about it's about increasing...", "Then you have, and that's what they call akhlaq. That's akhloq. So really to solve part of it is the science of ethics. It's what in the West they call ethics. How to be a virtuous human being. And then you have another aspect which is called adwaaq, which is the actual tasting of spiritual states. For instance we know many examples of the sahaba where for instance", "while he was standing in prayer and didn't feel it. We have many confirmed reports like that, I'll just give you an example there's been studies with Tibetan lamas and actually read one study and I met a man who is actually one of the monks that did this study the Dalai Lama students but in physiology of what's called a startle factor", "you get a reaction, central nervous system. And you can't stop that reaction. So people do that. You can't... If you get startled... I mean, people have different degrees. Some people really get scared. Other people it's just... But they always notice certain things. Well what they would do with these monks when they would go into their deep meditation, they fired guns near them. They didn't notice there was only a slight startle factor.", "would ask them, did you hear anything? And they would say I heard a very faint sound from a distance. So these types of aspects are not limited to Islam. You can have in Hinduism, you have yogis that do certain practices and get into certain states. These are not limit to the Muslims so there's actually scientific evidence for", "interesting about this, and this is why I mentioned this last night. The reason it's considered a science is because there are states and stations that are replicable. If you repeat the processes, you will get the same results with sincerity, with Nia. So in that way if there's an element to which is experimental science but obviously you know there has to be belief in it so this book deals with a little bit of both", "وجاهد في إله حق الجهاد وبذل جهده في الحرص على النجاة العباد وعلم ونصح وبين وأوضح حتى قامت الحجة ولاحت المحجة وتبين الرشد من الغي وظهرت طريق الحقي والصواب وانقشعت ظلمات الشيطان والارتياب ذلك سيدنا مونانم ونبينا وشفيعنا محمد", "Now these introductions in this tradition are called Dibaja. And Dibajah is like when you ornament something,", "something and so the books traditionally begin with this dibaja. And usually most of the ulama make them very difficult to understand, they use a very high rarified literary language now the reason that they do that is to keep uneducated people out of the books and the reason for that is their belief was", "access to knowledge and don't understand it. And that's why they made the books difficult, with the exception to a certain degree of the Shafi'i Madhhab. The Shafii Madhhabs tended to write books...they made them easy. Of all the madhhabs, the Shaffi'in Madhhaba is probably the easiest to learn but the Hanafis and Malikis were adamant about making their", "because they wanted to ensure that people did not get to that knowledge without going through the key. And the key was the Shaykh who studied with somebody, who studied was somebody and so most of these books are actually quite difficult particularly in the beginning and some of them get very easy like if you read the Shifa Qad'i Yad The first four or five pages you can't understand a thing from it It's just so difficult to understand and you need a dictionary But once you get past that he put that there to stop", "that there to stop people from reading his book unless they knew what they were reading. And there's a story, one of the Yemeni sheikhs, a student of him asked permission to read one of philosopher sheikh and he said no I don't want you to read it. He said wallahi sheikh I'll only take what I understand and leave what I don' t understand. And the sheikh said to him I'm worried about", "I'd prefer you don't read the books. I'll give an example, I've read this thing about Ibn Abbas , Now outwardly that means that he didn't like silence and that's what it means but it wasn't, the word was a type of cloth that mixed silk and cotton. You know there is a famous story", "They make that joke, but it's very true. The believer is a box of cotton. It actually is But if you change slightly the diacritical marks and things, it can be a box Of cotton. And you have many examples of that. I'll give you one example. There was a man, and he actually claimed to be an azhari. He was giving fatwa.", "went with a friend of mine, Tarif al-Urabi. So he's actually a witness to this and we were talking about the measuring the shadow and the fact that the prayer times, Dhuhr in particular is off in some parts of the United States because they're based on the NASA computer program and there are basically standard time zones", "So you can be off by 10 minutes in some areas. We measured over a period of time and found that Dhahur was off by a few minutes where we were. He wanted to debate me about that, I just asked him have you ever actually measured the way the Prophet measured? And he said yes! And I said how did you do it?", "Tarif al-Urabi was there with me, so I'm not making this story up. You know you read about these things in books like Hamqa wal Mughafaleen the books of fools and idiots. You read about this stuff but when you actually see it, it's always amazing. So I said you took Anza? He said yeah which means a goat. And I said he took anza and you measured the dhul? And he said yeah like the hadith says. And i said what about when it moved? He say la thibbetna. We held it down.", "Now the word in the hadith is anaza, with a fatha, which means a stick. I'm not making this up. I mean, I'm telling you a story I didn't read about. This happened to me. And Tarif al-Urabi who from Syria people who know him he's my witness and at that point I just said Jazakallah khairan yun we left and I said did you hear that? He said wallahi I heard it.", "He said, SubhanAllah. The difference of the word is a fatha. And he read a book obviously and then he lied too which bothered me. But he read it and he thought it said anza and it didn't. It said anaza. كان يأخذ عنزة He used to take a stick and measure the shadow with a stick but the book didn't have a fathah so he thought", "It's just ridiculous. And that's why you get these fatwas now, about milking the lady if you're working in an office, just drink her breast milk and she's a mahram for you. It's unbelievable. Yeah front page New York Times. I mean it makes our religion look like it's an idiot's religion. La ilaha illallah So that's they do this. They start this dibaja to kind of", "out of the book that shouldn't be reading the book. So he says, you know, praise be to Allah, al-Aziz, al Wahab, two attributes. Malik al-Muluk, the king of kings is probably Malik Al Muluk. Wa Rabbal Arbab and the Lord of Lords. The one who revealed on his servant the Book. And this is called Sajjah. The Arabs like to have rhymes... They have...", "There are three genres in their literature. They have the prose, nathar which is prose and then they have poetry, shi'r and then the third is called sajah which is a rhymed prose it's similar to what in the west now they call rap It doesn't have a meter but it has a rhyme and they like that they like the effect that it has In English you have alliteration and rhymes", "The Qur'an is a source of knowledge and knowledge is the source of understanding.", "and all of these signs, and this wise reminder. And then struggled in the way of God in truth. So he struggled as one should struggle. And expended all of his energies due to his covetousness for the salvation of humanity. So his energy was expended because he wanted people to be saved.", "He was sincere in his advice, and he clarified. And he elucidated until the matter was clear, the proof was well established, the road was laid before us. And guidance was in clear contradistinction to deviation.", "darkness of shaitan was dispelled and of doubt, and that is our master. And the Mawla is the one who really possesses you. So our Master and our Possessor, our Prophet and our Intercessor Muhammad, The Unlettered Prophet, the Quraishi, the Hashimi,", "of the lineages and the noblest of characters. The one who Allah has given ta'yid, help with miracles manifest, with overcoming armies and with the strength of weapons. Allah made him the leader of the ghur al-muhajjaleen And those are the piebald... You have a horse that's called Ghur Muhajjal", "the forehead and then the muhajjal is down on the legs it has the white. And it's something that horses, some horses have that. The Prophet said when he was asked how will you know your ummah on the day of judgment? He said because they'll be like these piebald horses I'll see the light of wudu in their faces and on their hands and feet so he'll know his ummah will be distinguished from other ummah", "And these illuminated faces. He is the first of those who are allowed to intercede on the day of reckoning and the first who will enter paradise and the", "A prayer and may Allah give him benedictions, and upon his noble companions the best of families, the noblest of companions. A purified prayer that's whose scope cannot be limited by number or reckoning, and nor can its description ever be reached", "of the great writers and orators. أَمَّا بَعْدْ أيُّهَا الْمُحِبَّ الصَّادِقُ بِمَحَبَّتِهِ And as for what comes after, O you truthful lover! المُحِّبَّ صَادِيقُ وَمَ حَبّةٍهِ The one whose love is sincere. He's assuming that if you're reading this book which is called تصفية القلوب", "So he's assuming if you're reading a book entitled, تَصْفِيَةُ الْقُرُوبِ فِى الْوَصُورِ إِلَى حَضَرَةِ عَلَّمَ الْغُيُوبَ The purification of the hearts in their journey of arrival to the presence of the one who knows the unseen. If you're this then you're it because you want help on your journey. So he is assuming and this is called حُسن الظَّن It's having a good opinion of people And it's one of the hallmarks of تَ صَوّف", "Tasawwuf. And so he's beginning his book by already teaching you something about tasawwaf. He is saying, Oh you who are sincere in your love! That's his assumption about the reader of his book. So he's already letting you know that this... I'm practicing what I am preaching because this science is based on", "The good opinion of Allah and the good opinion Of the servants of Allah That's something that And that's something we've lost Our community We often assume the worst about people If somebody is late, the assumption Is they could care less about the appointment What the Prophet said One of the hallmarks of believers They look for excuses For people", "find faults in people. So it's something central to belief is that people who believe have a good opinion of other people. Now one of the things that, in social sciences, is that when you have expectations of people they often will respond to your expectation and I'll give an example of that. There was a study done,", "and they put them in a class, and they told the teacher that these were the best students that they had last year. This was actually done in the US. And the teacher thought that they were all like gate students, gifted children. That class ended up all becoming A students because the teachers expectation", "And what often happens is when teachers look at students, how they behaved previously, they make the assumption this is a C student. There's a kind of bell curve assumption about classes. Almost every teacher now because the bell curve is such an idol in our culture. So there's an assumption that you're going to have a certain amount of A's, a certain", "every year the tests and everything predict that now when I took statistics at the university, I asked the professor have they ever done a bell curve on the teachers to see if there were more A's in excellent teachers you know like is the bell curve just confirming that C teachers have a majority of C students so", "And he said, yeah that's a really good idea. Because people don't think of things from other dimensions. But generally what's found is excellent teachers often inspire students in classes so they become better students because there's more motivation and that's why having a good opinion of people", "I think, this is something that I've known intuitively and also from the Sunnah. And I really believe in it and it's the way I tried to raise my children. But the book is called A Case Against Adolescence by Robert Epstein. He's a psychiatrist and what he did was studied the phenomenon of adolescent rebellion. In looking at the social sciences", "found is in countries where there really isn't an adolescence, when people reach puberty they begin to be treated like adults. They don't have the phenomenon of teenage rebellion and so he's come up with a theory that Robert Ellis who is a well-known I'm not particularly like his school of psychology but he's very well respected in emotive behavioral therapy", "psychiatrist, but he said it was the most revolutionary book he'd ever read. And what this man is arguing is that the reason young people are rebelling is because they're still being treated like children. John Taylor Gatto told me about a group of students who were in Harlem and these were the worst students in this school.", "had no respect for the teacher. And so what this teacher did is he made a deal with the principal of the school that he would teach his class at the junior college, and so these high school students would go to junior college. And he told them I'm putting you guys in college. John Taylor Gowder told me that their behavior,", "It was like an overnight, suddenly they wanted to behave like adults. They were in college. They didn't want to behave punk anymore because they wanted it to behave the other college students and so much of what's going on is just that assumption if you expect these people to rebel and behave like children and you treat them with those assumptions", "of a 15-year old, you'll be surprised. So there's so much in what we assume about other people and that's why he is beginning this book like that. He is making the assumption that you are sincere in your love of God. It's beautiful.", "Tasawwuf is something that God thrusts into the hearts of those people of purity. And it's something that must be tasted at the hands of its people. So what he's saying, and this is Imam al-Ghazali who precedes him and is really one of the great formulators of this science.", "which is tasting. And the reason they use that metaphor for this science, is because there are certain things that you cannot explain to other people. They have to be tasted and Imam al-Ghazali uses honey as his metaphor He said if somebody asks you what honey tastes like The best way to help him understand is to give him a spoonful of honey", "You can say it's sweet, but it's not like sugar. It's not fruit. It is a distinct thing and even though honeys are very different there's something that all honey share in common that we place them into the gins or the genus of honey. There's different types of honey, but there's one genus. And so that's what he's saying that this is something about tasting", "The best way to taste this is to be in the company of its people because you will experience it from them. It's not something that you can really get from a book, a book can help you, it's like a map but in the end you have to take the journey, the maps are waste of time. Borges, the Argentinian writer has a story about a Chinese emperor that wants an exact map of China", "And so every map they bring him, it's completely inadequate. So finally he decides to lay paper across all of China. So it's an exaggeration about the nature of maps. They're limited. They are always limited. You have to take the journey. That is the only way you can understand the terrain. You can read about desert but you have to experience it.", "Once you see a maha, you'll understand why the Arabs... You know, I mean, you read maha. It's a woman's name. Why would they name a woman after a wild oryx? Oryx is a type of gazelle. Yeah. Yeah, oryX is a specific type. That's okay. But why they would name after the animal, you have to see it. And once you see it, oh, now I understand. Makes perfect sense.", "That's the difference of experience and a kind of book knowledge. The Arabs say everything has a portion of its name. Like whatever you give a child, that's why the Prophet said choose good names for your children because they'll get a portion", "negative names. So then he says, وَأَصْرُهُ نِعْمَ الصَّفَاء والوَفَىٰ وَالْمحَبَّةَ الصادقَ مَحَلَّ الْقُرْبِ بِالْ مُسْطَفًا Its foundation is the blessing of purity and loyalty, of fulfilling your oath and promise. And true love that is...and its place is in nearness to the Prophet ﷺ.", "those things that he described. As for tasawwuf, it has a connection with the Quran. In other words this is a Quranic science and that's why what's interesting about this book and why I really like it is he took it entirely from the Quran because there are people who claim tasawwwuf is something outside of Islam they borrowed it from the Hindus, they borrowed from the Buddhists, they borrow... And there's some truth to those elements. There's definitely within", "within some of the turuq of the Sufiya, they borrowed things from other traditions. That's just fact. But the science is a Qur'anic science and that's why he wrote this book to really show that.", "Because we see that in the Qur'an many divine knowledges have come and also the disciplining of the souls, the illumination of the hearts, the purification of the heart by acquiring virtuous character and by avoiding vice. So this...", "spoke and interpreted the Qur'an themselves. So they spoke about Tafsir al-Qur'an.", "So some of them made their own tafsir, and some of the sunk deeply into this and arrived at realities of the Qur'an, their desired realities. And among them are those who got tawaghala is to really get stuck in esoteric meanings", "basically attempted to explain the Quran in ways that the Arabic language does not allow. So they went beyond the boundaries and he says, which is a plural because in Tafsir there are many ways to interpret a word and the Mufassir will look at the different ways and one of the Qawa'id of Tafseer, the principles in Taffseer", "way of looking at that verse and that's why you have primary meaning, secondary, tertiary meanings. So that's an important aspect of the science. And Abu Abdur Rahman al-Sulami he is one of the great scholars. He was born in 325. He wrote in hadiths and tafsir. He is very well known but he wrote a book and gathered all of the different opinions of the Sufis up to his time", "the realities. And some of the ulama said, no it's really the falsities. Now look what he says, but if we're fair, it has realities and it has falsities so and this is", "The thing about lesser ulama is that if they don't like something, they reject the whole thing. And every book has mistakes. I was once in the United Emirates years ago and there was a mufassir from Mauritania, Sheikh Tareb al-Khiar. His name was Sheikh. He was born as a sheikh. In Mauritaniyat they don' t use the word sheikh, like I have a son named Sheikh. I named him after one of my teachers.", "have high infant mortality rate. Shaykh means old man, it's a hope that they grow old. So his name, his mother named him Shaykh Tareb Khyar and when the Mauritanians moved to the east they get the title Shaykh like Shaykh Abdullah in Mauritania he wouldn't be called Shaykh Abdallah he'd be called Murabit Abdallah because they use the word murabit instead of shaykh so he used to say the Mauritanians he said you know you didn't become Shiukh until you move to the East he said I was born a Shaykh", "But one day we were in a gathering and somebody asked him, if you were on a desert island and you could only have one tafsir which would you take? And he said al-jalalayn. It was very simple I mean not simple but it's very short tafsira He said ajalalayn? He said naam. And then he said but there are some mistakes in that isn't there?", "Allah will never allow a book to be written other than his book without mistakes in it. Every book that humans have written has mistakes in simple as that. So he says, if we were fair, we would say it has realities and falsities. And I mentioned earlier what could to see how the kitab may is to send him an issue.", "In this book, I am going to mention only those things that are appropriate. That are good indications from the Sufis. This is called Ishaara and that's why in Tafsir you have Ishaarah. Tafseer bil-Ishara is to take meanings out of the... I'll give an example of Tafsiir al-Ishaari", "Omar was in a gathering and Ibn Abbas was there. And we just visited Ibn-Abbas, radiAllahu anhu so bil munasabah. Omar said to the Sahaba what do you say about this verse? And the Sahabah said well it's Fath Mecca when Fath mecca came and all the people came into Islam then", "the Prophet should ask forgiveness and praise God. Each one of them said, most of them they all had that meaning. Then he looked at Ibn Abbas and he said what do you say it means? He said it is Allah telling the Prophet that his death is nearing. إِذَا جَاء نَصْرُ اللَّهِ وَالْفَتْحَةِ When your ajl comes, that's the real nasr of God to die a believer. And that is the great opening because everything", "then at that time ask forgiveness and glorify Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala so when he said that, that's an ishara when he says that, Umar said that's what I understand from it also So an isharah is something that the outward is not apparent It's something that's indicated but it needs to be derived from it And you need to dig deeper", "would say to Ibn Abbas, he would ask him a question about Quran or fiqh and he used to say, ghus ghowas. Dive deep you diver! You know ghouas is the one that goes in to get the pearls in the ocean. In the Arabian Peninsula they had the ghouass is the ones that dives to get", "And these are, you will find no opposition or objection to what I'm going to mention. In other words this is Quranic Tasawwuf that's what he's saying He's saying I'm not gonna bring things that people can find objections so I'm gonna give you something that every Muslim should agree on because it's taken directly from the Qur'an", "So the Shaykh, the Faqih, the Alam, the scholar, the Allama, exaggerated form of Alam. Somebody who is not just a Alam but he has gone to the extreme of knowledge.", "somebody who's is he knows many, many different things. It was like a Renaissance scholar and the one who explains the Quran, , the scholar of his age, the leader of his aged, The is that around which everything revolves so he's the scholar at this time around which knowledge revolved. And this is a", "presence and states. And Imam al-Bukhari, if you read al- Bukhārī, you'll see that lakab in some of the rijal. So this is... it was an early laqab that people got. It's not like an innovation even though some people are very posted. The muḥaqiq is the one who really examines and goes into great detail, the scholar of detail. Sayyid Abu Abdillāh, that's his kunya, the father of Abdullah. Muhammad,", "of Muhammad ibn Juzayn, so from a tribe of the Arabs. Al-Kalbi is his tribe, Bani Kalb which is a tribe here in the Arabian Peninsula and al-Andrusi, so he was from Andrus. Al Granati from Granada which is famous city in Andrusia it was a city known for scholars and craftsmen and it was the last citadel of Islam", "the Nasrid dynasty lost it to Ferdinand and Isabella after two years of actually being surrounded. So they held out for two years a city, a walled city. He said in his Tafsir which is called at-tasheel, the facilitation and the knowledges of revelation I spoke in my Tafseer about 12 stations", "from the stations of tasawwuf. في مواضعها من القرآن In the appropriate places from the Qur'an فتكلمنا على الشكر في أم القران I spoke about gratitude in the Fatiha when I did tafsir of the Fataha لما بين الحمد وشكر من الاشتراك Because of the relationship between gratitude and praise because Allah begins الحمدي لله رب العالمين الرحمن الرحيم ملك يوم الدين So الحمود لله", "حَمْدُ لِلَّهِ حَامْد and شُكْر are related. So he's saying that I mentioned this مقام of شكر in the فاتحة. And then, وَتَكَلَمنَ عَلٰى التَّقْوَى فِي قَوْلِهِ تَعَالَىٰ فِی الْبَقْرَ هُدًى لِّلْمُتَّقِينَ And then I spoke about taqwa in Baqarah when I mentioned it's a guidance for the people of Taqwa. وَعلى الذِّكْري فِى قَولِه فيها فَذْكُرُونِ أَذكُركُمْ And then", "And on patience in Allah's word when he said give good tidings to the people of patience. And I spoke about Tawheed in Allahs word in the Quran when He said your God is one God.", "in the divine word when he said, and those who believe in God have greater love of God than even the idolaters have for their idols. And I spoke about trust and dependence on God in the verse in Ali Imran. And once you have firmly decided a matter then trust in God.", "and awareness of God, and God's presence in his divine word mentioned in An-Nisaa. Inna allaha kana alaykum raqeeba That God is constantly aware and watching you. Wa'ala khawfi wa rajaa fi qawlihi fir aaraaf And I spoke about fear and hope in the divine word mention in Araf, The Heights. Wadaoohoo khawfan wa tamaAAah And call on him out of fear and out of hope.", "and I spoke about Tawbah in his mention in the chapter of light, and turn all together to Allah. And I spoke sincerity in Surah Al-Bayyinah in The Divine Word and they were only commanded to worship God with absolute sincerity.", "أحد ما ورد في القرآن من إثبات الأقائد وإقامة البراهين عليها والرد على أصناف الكفار والأحزاب والطوائف المختلفة من المسلمين تعلق بالقر�אן وكل طائفة منهم تحتج لمذهبها في القרآن وتردوا على من خالفها وتزعموا أنه خارف القرأن ولا شك أن منهم المحقة والمبدرة", "So that's the introduction. He says, as for creed, usool al-deen, the basis of our religion which is the creed what we believe, the aqeedah. He said this is also related to the Qur'an based on two...for two reasons or in two ways. The first of them is because of what has been mentioned", "in affirmation of our beliefs and establishing the proofs of what we believe. And then, in refutation of the various types of kuffar and the types of sects that you have in the world and the different groups from amongst the muslimin. Every single group has held to the Qur'an. See all the groups that are people of deviation, heresy,", "holds to the Quran. Every one of them proves his school based on the Quran and he refutes those who disagree with him based on The Quran, and he claims that they're the ones that are going against the Quran And there's no doubt that amongst them are people that have truth with them and others that are false So knowing the tafsir of Quran, the interpretation of Quran", "of Quran is what will enable you to realize what is sound and accurate. And Allah gives tawfiq, successes with God. He is enough for me and he's the best of protectors. So to go back to Ibn Abbas radhi allahu anhu, Ibn Abbass was once asked by Sayyidina Omar. The Prophet told us that this Ummah would fall into sex because he said", "The Jews split into 71 sects, the Christians into 72 sects and my ummah will split into 70 or 70 sects. 71-72 and my Ummah will will split", "two sects and he said all of them are in the fire except for one. And there's another riwayah which is hasan, all of then are in paradise except for on. And they're both correct because one of things that Imam al Ghazali says is in many hadiths and this is something many groups have gone astray with. In many hadits where it says people are in", "but it doesn't mean they're going to the fire because the Prophet intercedes for people. And so that's very important to understand. So Imam al-Ghazali said that all of the Muslims will be in paradise eventually with the exception of one group and their, the heretics, people that have just gone out of the pale of Islam. But people will have to go through purification. Some it'll be on Yawmul Qiyamah, others it'll", "the Sirat and others will spend time according to the sound hadith. So what he's saying here, Ibn Abbas said, Sayyidina Umar asked him why is it that if we have the Quran and we read the Quran, and we see it before us how can we go astray? And Ibn", "Don't you see how every verse that was revealed, we were there when it was revealed. We knew the conditions in which it was reveal. We understood its meanings and its context. There will be people who come after us that won't know those things. And they'll read the Quran and assume things about what's being said and misunderstand it. Each one will follow his own opinion and that will lead to dissension and the dissention will lead", "And that is why there are knowledges you have to have before you can interpret the Qur'an. One of them is Asbab al-Nazool, so that's what he's talking about. Every group deviates with the Qurán. There's a group that said people have absolute free will. So they took لَهَا مَا كَسِبَتْ وَعَلَيْهَمَا اكْتَسبَتُ and they left وَمَّا رَمٰيتْ إِذْ رَمایْتْ ۚ وَرَكَنَّ اللّٰهَ رَامًا You didn't throw when you threw but God threw.", "He created you and your actions. You don't will anything except Allah wills it. There's another group that said, we're completely determined. We have no free will. They took those verses and they ignored It has what it earned and it has against it. So every group goes astray by taking some of the Quran without a holistic understanding of the", "In this science in particular, it's important to adhere to the Qur'an because people can really go astray in this science. Because so much of it is experiential and people have experiences and they like I mentioned yesterday you get psychotic episodes, you get people that think that they're above the Sharia There are people who said the Quran says worship Allah until you get certainty And I have Yaqeen now So I don't have to pray", "There's people that said that. Imam al-Junaid was asked about a group of people that claimed to be people who arrived and they said we don't have to pray anymore. And he said, indeed they did arrive. They arrived to hell. So Jazakum Allah khairan It's been a long day.", "responsible for us and taking care of us. InshaAllah bless Aisha Subhani, her family, and Fraidun, Asaad, all the helpers and people, our teachers. May Allah bless Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah for being with us. He hasn't been feeling very well but Mashallah he's a Haris! It makes him really happy to see all of you so may Allah bless him and Sheikh Abdullah Al Qadi, Sheikh Walid, Sidi Yahya and all the teachers.", "We'll take Imam Zaid's coming and Sheikh Jamal and others. Jazakumullah Khairan Subhanah Rabbika Rabbal Izzati Amma Yusufoon Wassalamualaikum Warahmatullahi Wabarakatuh" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Science of Tasawwuf _ Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _ Session_tFtXnHO56l8&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743071641.opus", "text": [ "In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.", "chapter, which was an introduction. I talked about the Dibaja and the fact that these scholars tended to make the initial part of a book very difficult to keep people out that weren't really...that would probably be more harmed by the book than benefited because of their inability to understand the subtleties of language. And that's one", "but the education is not, it doesn't teach people certain basic sciences that are absolutely necessary for an educated population. The most important are what in the West they used to call the trivium which is grammar logic and rhetoric you need grammar because language is very complicated early peoples had grammar", "complicated by their very nature. And so the Arabs at the time of the prophesized did not need the rules of grammar because the language was an inflected language which meant you had to understand the rules to speak it but they weren't understood in terms of any formal systemization of those rules, they were understood intuitively because that's how your mother spoke she spoke grammatically correct Arabic and you took", "mother tongue from her. And so the Arabs, what they called a lahan which is grammatically incorrect language was something that did not occur and it used to shock the early Muslims when they heard because as converts would come into Islam and the Persians came into Islam, the Persian's", "and it used to trouble the Arabs because they were afraid that this would become a norm, and people would lose access to the Quranic Arabic. And it was the Persians and the genius of the Persian's that recognized the need for the structure of the language, so they developed grammar. So the great Persian contribution to the Islamic tradition is grammar,", "Because the Arabs did not need grammar at that time. It was the Ajam, and Ajam first and foremost means Persian before it means anything else. So the Ajami is the non-Arab, the non Arab speaking person. And they also develop Sarf which is morphology and some of the great Persian grammarians Ibn Jinnah, Ibn Faris,", "that the Arabs were unaware of. So they actually began to recognize not only the genius of the language, but also the fact that the language is a miraculous language. The language is not like other languages. You have two types of languages. Sacred languages and then you have sacerdotal languages.", "a religious tradition. So you have, for instance, Koine Greek which is the language of the New Testament it's not really... The revelations came in Hebrew but that became the religious language of Eastern Church and then Latin becomes the religious languages of Western Church so Latin and Greek are not languages of primary revelation I mean they may have been at some time like Attic Greek, the ancient Greek of Plato might've been", "is probably revelation. If you look at Sanskrit, Sanskrit is one of the ancient languages and probably a language of revelation. if you look in the Vedas for instance there's very strong indications that those are Unitarian teachings and probably from prophets. And the same is true for Chinese, ancient Chinese probably was a language", "later languages, they're very different from these ancient languages. Now of all the ancient languages, the most preserved language is the Arabic language. I mean this is something that linguists who study a lot of different languages recognize. Now the other thing that is absolutely unique about the preservation of the Arabic Language is the Arabs and again particularly the Persians but the Arabs also were involved in this. The Arabs", "the meanings of their language. So, you...the earliest dictionaries that are scientific, you have ancient Chinese dictionaries but if you read them they do not have the quality of a really sound dictionary. If you read the Arabic dictionaries from the 8th-9th century what strikes anyone who goes into them is how modern they are. They're incredibly modern dictionaries.", "They're very scientific, they're very worked out and they are different from the earlier dictionaries. If you look in English Johnson's dictionary which is a late dictionary we don't have dictionaries from the Elizabethan period so there's a lot of words even in Shakespeare that were not totally certain what they mean or there's debates about what they", "Already in English dictionaries are very late. I mean we have 18th century is where you start getting, and even his dictionary is not very... it's not scientific in any way shape or form nothing compared to the early Arabic dictionaries. And they precede him by a thousand years almost so I mean you have to recognize the stunning achievement of these people. Now even the Jews did", "oral in the Midrash and so they would teach the Torah and its interpretation without these tools of study that the Arabs developed very early on. Phonetics is a 19th century science in English, so even phonetic Tajweed is incredible! The preservation of Arabic... So people have to realize this is one of", "preservation of the Arabic language and that's why it's central to the teaching of Islam. And because these books are difficult, and language is difficult they made it a prerequisite before you could really go into these you had to study grammar. That's why many of them will embed grammar in their books as a way of keeping people out. I know", "that when you speak, people misunderstand. People don't know what conditional sentences are. So they hear you say something and they think you said something else. And this is a major problem. In the past common people had no pretense to knowledge. And so they would just be silent. But when people have a little bit of education there's an assumption", "They're educated, and so they assume they understand what is being said. So you have a major problem. This is where we get a lot of problems in the world today. It's from the inability for people to... In fact, my brother who's a lawyer, and he's trained quite well in both logic and rhetoric and had about six years of Latin, so he's very adept. He spent about three years just analyzing.", "cases and see what the argument was. So he's very trained, and he told me he was reading an article about Islam, about the six universals of Islam, preservation of life, the preservation of religion, the presentation of intellect, dignity, property, and when I read this I could not understand how these modern Muslims can be doing what they're", "they really need to learn logic because it's so illogical in relation to the religion itself. So recently I did an article called How Holocaust Denial Undermines Islam, and the article was about Mutawatir and Ahad reports, but part of the point of the article is that one of the things that Islam is being attacked on is that it's irrational. Muslims are irrational, Islam is irrational", "rational and it's very sad for somebody who knows the tradition and knows the depth of these minds that really gave us this tradition to see how terribly represented the tradition is today by a lot of idiots. I mean real sufaha, what the Quran calls sufaha fools. And the safiya according to the dictionaries", "easily put into a reactionary state. يستخفه أبسط شيء He loses his... And this is why Hasan al-Basri said, I'm amazed at anyone who can hear Allah's word وَتَمَّتْ كَرِمَةُ رَبِّكَ الْحُسْنَ لِبَنِي إِسْرَائِيلِ بِمَّا صَبَرُوا We completed the beautiful words for Bani Israel", "for Bani Israel because of their patience. We completed this teaching for them because they went through a lot of tribulation. So he said, once you hear that, that patience is the way that Allah completes his bounty to you and Omar ibn Abd al-Aziz said that Allah will never deprive a servant of something", "resignation and patience, Allah will give him better than what he deprived him of. That that's a guarantee from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And so the importance of language can't be underestimated. People have to learn language. It's good to learn one language well, your own. You know people say America is monolingual you know we only speak one language but that's debatable in and of itself because a lot of people", "people can really cannot read an argument and understand. And that's true all over the world, people can't read anymore and understand and then also people write things that are completely illogical there is no logical basis for it so this was a major problem so this is all introduction to what he's going to talk about now.", "And Basmala is a way the Arabs say, like Hawqala is to say La hawla wa la quwata illa. Basmela is to Say Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-rahim Alhamdalah is to Alhamdulilah hi Rabbil alameen So he says", "So he says the ba in Bismillah is actually connected to a substantive, a noun that has been omitted according to the Basrans.", "Basrans and this is one school of grammar It's the minority school, the dominant schools, the kufans. And he says that taqdeer The omitted which is understood is ابتدائي كاين بسم الله My beginning is with the Bismillah So when you say bismillah what you're saying is ابطداعي my beginning is in the name of God", "beginning in the name of God but you're omitting that I'm beginning. That's understood when you say that so this is called مَحْذُوه مُقَدَّر in grammar and then he says or according to the Kufiyun, and this is the other school of Zamakhshari تَتَعَلّقوا بِفِعْلاً تَقْدِيرُهُ أَبْدأوا بسم الله أو أَطْروا باسم الله It is connected to a omitted verb and this", "The Basrans believed that the noun was the basis of existence and the Kufans believe that the verb was the bases of existence. So this is actually a philosophical debate because in the Basran school they thought that the now was that around which things revolved.", "For the Kufans, it's the verbal noun. So this is a debate and this is about whether you have being, a state of being, and then you have action. Like our state of Being as a human being we're simply here like I'm being here but there's no action involved in being When you bring a verb into what you're doing is you're bringing the time element into it", "past, present or future. Nouns aren't past, president or future a tree is a tree but once a tree begins to blow in the wind there's a time did it blow in The Past? Is it blowing in the present or will it blow when the wind comes so the trees swaying is an action of the essence of the tree which is simply being and so this is really", "Is the root of existence movement and action or is it being? And this is also about God's relationship to the world because Allah has action but His action is created. His actual essence is passive, there's no action in his essence when we talk about Allah . It is His fi'l because Allah is essence attribute", "and essence and attribute are states of being. Action is a substantive that moves into time, and that's why the understanding in theology is that Allah is beyond time and space. So His action is something that is actually created. He brings things into the world through fi'l but that fi'il is muhdath anyway. That's really what he's talking about", "And then he says that if it's a noun, then it has... It's in the nominative case. It has rafa' Ibtidai Bismillah If it's verb, then its in the accusative The bismillah, the ba in the bismilah is in the accusative Even though it's harf jar , it's an accusative So he's going into grammar here وَيَنْبَغِيَ نُقَدِّر مُتَأَخِرًا لِوَتَينَ It should be understood that this is delayed for two reasons", "So when you have something, the first is ifadat al-hasri wal-ikhtisas. When you say bismillah what you're saying in the name of God only. So that's what he's saying. The fact that it's delayed. The verb or the noun whichever one you choose is being placed first. He said this is to indicate that it' s only. It's specifically for Allah .", "أقدم بسم الله اختناء كما قدر And then the other is that you put Bismillah first to indicate that it's enough. Just simply to say Bismillah is enough like when Allah said, بِسْمِ اللَّهَ مُجْرَاهَا In other words He didn't say مُّجْراها بِسمِ اللّٰهِ We depart in the name of God. He said in the Name of God we depart so the reason you put it first is", "And the reason that it would be delayed is the specificity. And then he says, وَأَيَضًا الْإِسْمُ مُشْتَقٌ مِنَ السَّمُ عَنْدِ الرِّبَصِرِيينَ There's a debate between the Basrans about the name itself, Ism. And this is very important because عَلَّمَ آدَمَ الْأَسْما What Adam was taught were names. What the name Ismun, what is the origin of that in the Arabic language? So according to the Basrons, لَامَهُوا مَحْذُوفَةٌ", "The grammarians put every triliteral verb, they called a fa-ain lam. So the first letter is called fa, the middle letters ain and the last letter is lam. He's saying that the lam letter is actually waw so it's from samu something that's high like sama is in the sky. So Basran said a noun is taken from heaven.", "which is an alama or a sign. So it's taken from a signifier, so it means a signifyer. So the noun is something that signifies something else. So when I say tree in English you see something that has a trunk branches, has leaves... That's what comes to your mind. Or if it's a palmate, it has a trunc and then it has palm fibers not like...", "Then it's got the little spikes instead of leaves. But tree, because there are three types of trees. So the fir trees, the palmates and then these with the leaves. So when we say shajara in Arabic what is between shajarah and tree? We could argue that they're completely arbitrary and this is a dominant opinion amongst most linguists. That names have no connection to the thing named other than that they are signs that humans agreed upon", "agreed upon so I said I'm gonna call this a Zujajah in Arabic and in English I'm going to say glass all right there's actually would call this Qas because as you judge it is empty a Qas has something in it so the arrows were actually called this Qa'as. So we would say well what's the relationship to Shadjarah and", "there is a relationship. When you have sheen, it's called harf tafeshi. Sheen is always something that spreads out. So in Arabic when you use the letter sheen it spreads out like shams has radiation. Sha'ar, hair, has radiation You know your hair spreads out Shajara, it has radiation and then the jeem, harf shiddah It's a strong letter, it used in strong things because the basis of a tree", "strong, it's the trunk. And then the ra is harf tikrar, trees are constantly regenerating themselves. So they would say there's a deep relationship between the letters and the thing that's named itself. These are philosophical debates about the nature of language. The Arabs would definitely say that things...there is a secret in names. In the Arabic language", "Actually, there's a reason why a shajara is called a shijarah with those sounds. And that's why there's an effect. Arabic has a different effect on human consciousness from other languages. And so then he says, So the fa letter is actually a wow because wasama is the root. Surely in that is a sign for,", "that is a sign for those who can see signs. So wasama is a sine and that's what the root of a noun is, it's a sine. And he says dhalil al basriyin atasghir wa taksir wa anna allamah harfu illa The proof of the basrans is the diminutive when you put the ism in the diminuitive its clearly derived from samu", "So that's their proof. But as for the lamb, it's a weak letter also. Even though that's a strong argument he is saying the Kufans have also a stronger argument in his estimation because he says the substantive is a sign. It's something you put onto something to signify it.", "And then he says, The substantive, the noun is a sign that indicates the signified. So it's a signifier that indicates to signify and that's why he says the Kufan argument is strong but there's a very strong argument for the other one because Allah talks about in Surah Ar-Rom He says surely in the variance of your tongues and your complexions", "and in the heavens and earth are signs for people who think. So Allah relates the tongues, this is called tibaq in Arabic which is a type of antithesis where you use opposites. He talks about tongues and colors like our skin color and our tongue. And then he talks about heavens and Earth so there's a relationship between tongues and heaven and colors and earth. The reason that tongues come from heaven because", "because Allah taught human beings, imprinted in them language. That's literally what it means. means to imprint in a human being. This is what Chomsky calls the universal grammar that humans all share, that we all have the ability to learn language and then the complexions come from the earth because Allah said that Adam was created from all the topsoil of the Earth", "the yellow, the red. So you get all these variances in human complexions because Adam was created from Udma in Arabic means topsoil. So Adam means the one created from topsoils. So all humans have these different complexions that are found in... You've seen white soil, pure white and then you see red soil,", "So, complexions are related to earth and language is related to heaven. Language is meaning, complexion is sensory. So there's a relationship between meaning and sensory that are joined in the human being. What is significant and what is palpable. What we understand and what we see touch and feel. So the sensory and the meaning are gathered in these two phenomena. The phenomenon of language and body.", "The essence of the human being is language. And that's why the definition, you see, definition in logic always gets to the essence of something. When you define a term, you're getting to the Essence of a term. When You describe something it has to do with attributes. So when you talk about essence what is the essence? What's the essence ? Existence. That's the Essense that God IS.", "is. And then you have attributes, he's merciful. Those describe God but the essence is being. There's no description for being we can't describe being. Well were contingent beings. You see we have being also and it's not our essence because we're contingent so what is that essence of man? If you know the logical definition of", "What is the essence of man? What defines the human being? Well, animals forget too. Other animals. There's something specific to the human beings which is unique. Rational. That's why in logic we're called the rational animal but what did they call that in Arabic?", "The speaking animal. حيوانا ناطق Do you see? Because the essence of language is what? Rationality. Language is meaningful. So, the essence or the human being is language and that's why when you judge a person by their color it's so wrong because you're judging them by something that incidental to their nature whereas when you judged them by what they believe", "by how they speak, by what they say, whether they're truthful, whether their virtuous. Whether they stand for the truth that's how human beings should be judged. That's why Dr King talked about being judged by the content of character. How do you know the content and character? By the essence of the person. What is the essence? Their belief because that's what's going to manifest from them. And so that's", "That's what that verse means to me anyway. That's why I meant it. When we say Bismillah, Allah is Ismun Jamidun It's a fixed substantive. It doesn't change. It does not have a plural like Allah doesn't have a Plural. It's fixed. It is not derived from anything. The in it are essential to it.", "you can't take them away. So, alif and lam in Arabic are used as an article of definition. definitive article we call it in English grammar so when you say there means Allah is a fixed name it's not derived from according to the dominant opinion", "Some say it is derived from which means It relates to worship. And some says it's derived from and that means confused or bewildered So the essence of the name is Because intellects become completely bewilder when they begin to think about God", "God is so beyond, because the intellect is finite and the fact that it has, it can understand something about infinity is one of the extraordinary aspects of the intellect. The fact that he can see something beyond what is in the world and also what its own nature is. We can contemplate theoretical infinity like an infinite set of numbers. An infinite set up numbers. My five-year old years ago, he's eight now but my five year old asked me what was the highest number?", "number. And I said, there is no highest number because you could always add one to it until infinity. And the next morning he said to me, you're wrong. I said about what? He said about the numbers. And i said why? He says because there must be a highest number but only God knows it. What struck me about that is that even though he was only five at the time", "debate about theoretical infinity and infinity, you know. Is there a theoretical infinity or not? I mean that's actually a debate in philosophy. So the Alif and the Lam is something that is related to it and he says that it comes from this word to bewilder the intellects. And then قِيلَ أَصْرُهُ مِن غِيْرِي أَلَفٍ وَلاً And some say that the origin is without the Alief-Lam. In other words, the Alieflamer added to it ثم حُذِفَتَ الْحَمزةُ مِّن أَوَّرِهِ عَرَىٰ غِيرِ", "and then it was removed not in any logical way according to the rules of morphology but some things that Arabs do that don't have any analogical example to it. Some say it's from Al-ilah, and then the Lam and the Alif so THE God and then", "So to say Al-ilah is cumbersome for them, so they just said Allah. So you get the Al-illah is Allah. It means The God. It's a way of saying The God And then he says", "So the two lambs were united, and then assimilated. One in the other. And then we say Allah. You don't say Allah There's what's called Tarqiq and Tafkhim right? In Tajweed so when you say Allah you don't Say Allah You say Allah because the Tafkhim is a way that Arabs exalt something like Khalid", "Khalid. You don't say Khalid, like modern Arabs they say Khaled, where is Khalid? But ancient Arab, I know Khalid you have to do the Tafheem because it's something, Khalid is a big letter so the Arabs do that and if you look at words that have Khal in it there are always big things not little things like Khalid eternal Khiyana treachery, they're big things", "they're big things. So, Khalifa, right? The Khalifa. So he's saying that for Ta'zeem. إِلَّا إِذَا كَانَ قَبْرُهُ كَسْراً Unless you have a Kasra before it the little haraka underneath so when you say... You don't say Bismillah. You say Bismilllah because the Kasrah moves it to Tarqeeq. Alright? And then he says فَفْحَمْ إِن كُنتَ مِّن أَهْلِيَةٍ So understand this if you are from its people. In other words I just gave you all these grammar", "grammar. If you don't know what I'm talking about, tough luck. But understand it if you're from the people of this science. If studied this, understand it.\" So and then he goes on and I'm just... You know, I went into that and I know some of people it's like, What's going on here? The point of this is really... This is the level that these people were working on. They were working", "level of scholarship for our community so that these sciences were in the hands of the right people. Because if you don't know these sciences, you have no business going into this stuff trying to explain it to other people or trying to tell others because you're gonna go astray and you're going to lead other people astray. And one of the signs at the end of time, the Prophet ﷺ said he's in Sahih al-Bukhari", "Allah doesn't just seize knowledge from people. It's not just taken away from them, like everybody wakes up the next morning they're all ignorant but he says But he takes it by taking the scholars, the people of the knowledge away so they die off and there's nobody to replace them. And then he says until there won't be a scholar left on the earth", "رؤوسا جهالة people will take ignorant leaders فسئلوا and they'll be asked فأفتو بغير علم they give fatwas, they give responses without true knowledge فضلوا وأضلُّوا so they go astray and they lead others astray. So that's how we lose the religion by the lack of preservation of this knowledge And then he says وَإِذًا الرَّحْمٰنَ الرَّاحِيمَ عَرَ مَارُويَ عُنْ رَسُولِ إِلَٰهِ صلى الله عليه وسلم صِيفَتانِ مِنَ الْرَحْما", "As for Ar-Rahman Ar- Raheem, because he's teaching us about Bismillah Ar-rahman ar- raheem. According to what was narrated from the Prophet , these are attributes of mercy so they're from mercy and their meaning is Ihsan, the good and the giving of good to others And in that case it is an attribute of action Because Iza Ahsani ilayka, its an action", "I'm doing an action. Do you see? So he's saying from that point of view, it's an attribute of action. وَقِيلَ إِرَادَةُ الْإِحْسَانِ And some say no. It means desiring goodness for others or mercy for others. And then he says فَهِيَ صِفَتُ ذَاتٍ In that case, it is an attribute to the essence because irada is from our will. It's the will of a human being. It is not an action so if you are Rahman", "whether you're showing Rahmah or not, it's essential to your nature. So this is a difference. Some say it's an attribute of the action itself so when Allah shows that action he's Rahman and then others say no it's in attribute of his irada, the will of God is to show mercy. It's part of His essence to show Mercy. Whether He shows the mercy or not", "philosophical debate. And then its meaning according to what the Prophet said is that Rahman is in this world and in the Akhirah but Rahim is only in the akhira So, Rahman as an attribute of this world, and the next world, And Rahim as an attributte of the next word, and then he says, and it's said Ar-Rahman is a general meaning for both believers and disbelievers", "So everybody gets the Rahmah of God whether you believe in God or not. Everybody eats food, everybody has a state of well-being, everybody have blessings, people have families irrespective of whether you believed in God don't believe in god you're enjoying the bounty of God and so the mercy of the Rahman is to everybody but the mercy", "and has a wider dispersion, more people get it. But the is specific And then he says it's specific to the believers because Allah said He was with the believers . And that's why he gives also the prophet is generally merciful, he has , and then specifically merciful So it's the same idea", "The Prophet has a general mercy to everybody but his specific mercy is to his ummah and the people that believe in him. And this is human nature. A merciful person is going to be more merciful with his own family. He's gonna take care of his family before he takes care of somebody else. That's the nature of people.", "So he says, and Rahim is also more... It has more impact because it follows the Rahman.", "is more specific, it gets to the essence of something. So he's saying that fact that it comes after the Ar-Rahman is meaningful because it's ARA TARIQ AL IRTIQA'I ILAL AAALAH It's moving to a higher meaning so you go from low to high. Ar-rahman, ar-raheem. So He's saying That's one way of looking at it. WA AYDHAN INNA MA QUDDIMA AR-RAHMAN LI WACHHAIN But we can also look at it that the Ar Rahman was put before the Ar raheem for two reasons", "reasons. It is unique to God so people can be Rahim but no human can be a Rahman. Rahman is a unique attribute of Allah and that's why you can't call a person Rahman, you can call a Person Raheem, you say Abdullah Raheam but you can say Abdullah rahman it's specific to Allah so that's one reason why it precedes Raheeme in the Bismillah", "and also because it is one of the names of God that's not an attribute of God. In other words, it is specific to his essence. So it's talking about the essential nature of God is mercy. And so these are the two reasons why. فَفْحَمْ So understand this وَبِاللَّهِ تَوْفِيقٌ And you'll understand if you get توفيق from God and Allah is my hasbi he's enough for me in what I'm saying. In another words, I'm a scholar and I'm", "with trust that Allah is enough for me. I'm not worried about what you think. حَسْبِ اللَّهُ فِي مَا أَقُولُ I have a right to say this because I've earned this right through the knowledge that God's given me and Allah will be my accounting. You can't take me to account. Allah will do it. Allah Will Be My Account And then he goes, Surah Umm Al-Quran Makiyya The chapter Umm Al Quran is a Meccan chapter. عَدَدُ آيِّها سَبْعُ آیات The number of ayats is seven.", "is seven. The number of words in it is 25. The numbers of letters is 141 letters. What you say Surat Al Hamd, it's also called the praise chapter. Fatiha al Kitab, the opening of the book or the opener", "that opens the book, not so much the opening. And then it's called Umm al-Quran, The Matrix of the Quran because from it all the meanings of the Qur'an spring. It's also called Al Waqia, The Protector Ash Shafi'ah, The Healer Was Saba'a Al Mathani, The Seven Off Repeated Ones or that are doubled and repeated. Wafeeha Aishroon Faida There are 20 benefits of this", "There are untold benefits, but the discernible benefits are 20. And then he says, وَخْتُرِفَ فِيهَا And there is a difference of opinion about it. قِدَ مَدَنِيَّة Some say it was revealed مَكِّيَّ He prefers the Meccan which is why he began it that way. وَلَا خِرَافَ أَنَّ الْفَاتِحَةَ سَبْعُ آيَاتٍ There's no debate about Fatiha being seven verses. There's", "Except that Shafi'i counts the Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Raheem a verse from the Fatiha. But Imam Malik says no, the Bismillahi Ar-Rahmani Ar- Rahim is not from the Fatihah It's Anamta alayhim ayah. It's actually an amtah alayhim That's the other ayah some put that together so they put those two together as one Ayah and", "and Imam Malik separates them. So he doesn't consider the Bismillah actually from the Quran. That's Malik's position, except in Surah An-Naml. إِنَّهُمْ مِن سُرِ ايمَانٍ وَإِنْهُ بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرِّحِيمِ That's only Bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim. Now I believe that Imam Maliki is correct not because of Imam Malaki but because the Quran is غير مختلف فيه There's no debate about what's Quran And the fact that they're debating whether this is from the Qur'an or not it can't be from the quran", "So I actually think Malik's position is higher than Imam Shafi'i's. With all respect to the two Imams. Maybe it is because I'm a Maliki. تفسيرها And then he says its meaning الحمد معناه قيل الحمض أعم من الشكر The meaning is الحمدا praise, its meaning is more general than thanks.", "thanks. When you praise something, a sense of gratitude is included. Because gratitude is only given as a reward, as a response to a blessing. You're grateful because of a blessing But praise is a response like", "foremost, it's a way of elevating or exalting something. When you praise something, you're honoring it in that way, irrespective of whether it's done anything for you. And then he says, كما أن شكر قد يكون أعمى من الحمد and also, shukr is more general than thanks, than praise لأن الحمدة باللسان because praise is with the tongue والشكرو باللصان والقلب والجوارح", "But thanks is with the tongue, the heart and the limbs. So when you praise something it's on your tongue but when you have gratitude that gratitude is shown on your Tongue by expressing gratitude in your Heart by feeling gratitude and then your Limbs by returning the gratitude so it's more general", "So if you understand this, then you will know that praise... You will understand that when you say الحَمْدُ Like الحَامْد لله That necessitates praise on the one you're praising because he deserves that praise Irrespective of what he's done Because he deserves our praise because of his majesty His magnificence", "uniqueness, his exaltedness, his bounty, his knowledge, his power, his wisdom and all the other things that come from his attributes. وَيَتَضَمَّنُ مَعْنَ أَسْمَائِهِ الْحُسْنىٰ ٩٩ وَإِلْكُمْ ٩۠٩ And it includes all the meanings of His beautiful names, all 99. وِيَقْطَدِ شُكْرُهُ أَثْناء عَلَيْهِ بِكُلِّ نَعَمَةٍ آَطَىٖ And it necessitates also this gratitude and this thanks for God", "وَرَحْمَةً أَوْلَىٰ And every mercy that He has granted عَلَ جَمِيعِ خَرْقِهِ فِي الْآخِرَةِ وَالْأُولَى On all of His creation In this world and in the next فَيَا لَهَا مِن كَرِمَاتٍ جَماعَتْ مَا تَضِيقُ عَنْهُ الْمُجَلَّدَاتِ Oh, how exalted is this word The volumes of books Are constrained by their ability to express What this means When you say الحمد لله For God", "for God because God is so exalted beyond anything we can imagine. وَتَّقِفُوا دُونَ عَدِّهِ أُعْقُولِ الْخَلَائِقِ And the intellects of His creation are there befuddled before this. ويكفيك أن الله جعلها أور كتابه It's enough, suffice it that God made at the beginning of his book and the last dua'a of the people of paradise in Jannah لِقَوْرِهِ تَعَالَى سُبْحَانِكَ اللَّهُمَّ", "وَتَحْيَةُهُمْ فِيهَا السَّلَامُ وَآخِرُ دَعْوَاهُم أَنِ الْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ رَبِّ الْعَالَمِينَ Glory to you, O Allah. All the greeting. تَحِيَتُهْمْفِيها Their greeting amongst each other is peace and the last prayer that they say is الحَم्دُ للهِ الرَّبِّ العَالِمِونَ وَعَلَمَ أَيُّهَ الْمُحِبَّ الصَّادِقُ فِى حُبِّهِ And know, O You sincere in Your love for God.", "Oh sincere lover of God in this love.", "A praise on the tongue because of the blessings of the Mun'im, the one who grants blessings. And it's speaking about these blessings. The Prophet ﷺ said to speak about the blessings that God has given you is gratitude. وَأَمَّا بِنَعْمَةِ رَبِّكَ فَحَدِّثُ As for the blessing of your Lord, speak about it. Speak about it, talk about it because when you talk about blessing you remind people.", "to ta'am, the blessing of food. The blessing of warmth, the blessings of comfort, the blessign of health. When you begin to enumerate the blessing from God, you'll never come to the end. There was a study done I think it was at Davis about...was it at Davis? Yeah they did a study on depressed people and what they had is that group that control group and then the other group and they had these people every day", "their blessings and the other people didn't, and they had same level of depression. What they found...they have every morning they had to write down blessings that they thought think of things that you feel grateful about so they would start the day you know I'm glad I'm alive and I'm gonna have food I'm going to have a house whatever just start and they would enumerate them as an exercise what they found is those", "So the study showed that the fact that they began to reflect on the blessings of God, it actually changed their perception. And that's why remembering the blessing of God is so essential to our faith and tradition. And then he says that shukr with your limbs is acting in obedience to God and leaving disobedience, and then gratitude with the heart is knowing the scope of the blessing.", "the scope of the blessing and knowledge that it's from God alone, and that it is from His bounty. It's nothing you warranted. There's a beautiful poem that accentuates this by Robert Frost called The Fear Of God. He says if you should rise from nowhere to somewhere, from being nobody to being somebody be sure", "whose mercy to you rather than to others won't bear too much examination. Stay unassuming.\" So he's saying that when you're given things, wealth, health whatever, you become a doctor, people were nothing and then they become something. They were nowhere and then end up somewhere. So he is saying be sure to keep reminding yourself you owe it to an arbitrary God. That the reason He's giving you this", "He gives it to whom he pleases. Don't think it's something I deserve. I'm better than these people. You have to see that it is just bounty from Allah and that keeps you from getting arrogant. Stay unassuming. If for lack of license, to wear the uniform of who you are, you should be tempted to make up for it in a subordinating look, word or glance. So if you don't really feel worthy of it", "by looking at others as less than you. People that have contempt for others, it's really about their own self-worth is diminished. That's why they have to have contempt of others because they don't feel worthy so they try to create their own worth by having contempt for other. So then he says, وَعْنَمْ أَيُّهَا الْمُحِبِّ And no! Oh you lover! He keeps repeating this right?", "He's inculcating this in the reader. That's why you're reading this book, to increase your love for God. So he's reminding you because... And this is labeling theory. If you keep calling somebody something they end up being that thing. You call somebody a criminal, you idiot, they end becoming that thing! People are what they're called. That' s why parents it so important how they speak to their children. Because they're literally creating the character of that child.", "they are, that's going to be the perception that they have about themselves. If they're always told how bright they are , if they're reminded of that, they'll have that self-confidence. So that's what he is doing. He is inculcating this in us as he is teaching us.", "So there's three types of blessings that you have to be grateful for. The first is worldly blessings like health, wealth and children. Health, wealth, and children And the second is religious blessings like knowledge, taqwa , piety and action", "and action. And the third are otherworldly blessings that he rewards us with great rewards despite how insignificant our actions are, and how short our life is. So he gives you infinity for worshipping him for 30 40 50 years or even one moment because if somebody dies in faith that's enough so that is the otherworldy", "شُكْرِ عَلَى مَقَامِينَ People, when it comes to gratitude there's two stations. مِنْهُمَّن يَشْكُرُوا عَلى النِّعْمِ الوَاصِرَةِ إِلَيْهِ خَاصًا وَمِنهم من يَسْكَرُ اللّٰهَ عَلا جَميعِ خرقِهِ عالَ النِّعمِ الْوَصِرِةِ اِلٰى جَبِيعِهُ There are two types of people with gratitude. The first are those who are only grateful for their own blessings. They're only grateful", "blessings that he's bestowed on his creation. So they feel this gratitude for Allah because of all these blessings that He is giving to all them. There are three degrees of gratitude. The degree of common people, which is just being grateful for blessings. The Degree of the elect, people that have a deeper knowledge of Allah .", "They're grateful for blessings, for tribulations, for difficulties. They just feel gratitude to God. And they don't complain. But the degree of the elect of the elected...", "They see the bestower of blessing. They don't see the blessing. Imam Ali r.a said, مَا رَأِتُوا شَيْئًا إِلَّا رأَيَتُ اللَّهَ قَبْلَهُ وَفِيهِ وَبَعْدَهِ I never saw anything but I saw Allah before it, in it and after it. So they don't say the water. They see The Creator of the Water, the grantor of the water, the bestowal of the blessing of the", "And that's the highest. And then he said, The great Afghan saint. They saw one man said to Ibrahim ibn Adham. He was a prince, right? Yeah. And when he was hunting the deer and he lost it. He realized he was", "Ibrahim ibn Adham, a man said to him once, إِنَّ الْفُقَرَاءِ إِذَا أَعْطُوا شَكَرُوا وَإِذًا مُنْعُوا صَبَرٌوا The fuqara, you know people of God. Like the fuqra, the qawm. They're people that when they're given gifts, they're grateful. And when they are deprived, they are patient. So the people of god, when they've been given gifts they are grateful but when they were deprived their patient.", "This is the character of dogs. If you give a dog something, it wags its tail. You know, it's all happy. And then if you don't get... It just sits there waiting. So he's saying that's the way dogs are. That's not a very high maqam.", "But the real people are those when Allah deprives them, they're grateful. Because they see the depriver. They see al-māna' not the mina'. Because that's a name of God. So Allah يتجل لك بمنعه He is revealing Himself as the deprivor and because he's God whether he's giving or withholding", "You're happy with Allah . You are grateful. And then he said, and when they're given, they prefer others. So there a conduit for the blessings of God. He gives them in one hand and they give with the other hand. That's the way you know the Rumi. One hand up giving, the other hands there spinning around.", "And one of the great virtues of gratitude is that it is both an attribute of God, the real, Subhanahu Exalted Is He. And it's also among the attributes of humanity. So it's a divine attribute that human beings manifest in the world.", "You see the divine manifesting in you as a way to recognize the real. So gratitude is a quality of God that you are taking in yourself and that's why there's a hadith that says take on the virtues of God those things that God does, he's generous be generous He's grateful be grateful. He's saboor, he is patient with his creation be patient. He is haleem, he forbearing with his creations be forebearing", "be forbearing. Now look at, إِنَّ اللّٰهَ وَمَلَائِكَةُ يُصَلُّونَ عَدَ النَّبِيِّ يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا صَلْوَ عِلَيْهِ وَسَلِّمُوا تَسْلِيمًا God and His angels bestow benedictions upon the Prophet ﷺ. O you who believe! Do what God and his angels are doing. Bestow benédictions on the Prophet's ﷺ So Allah began with Himself and then told us to do what He Himself is doing which is", "They're different. God's salah ala nabi is not human salah, it's elevating him in his rank and stature constantly. The Prophet is always being elevated he's just moving, always. Our statement, Allah's statement praise be to Allah Lord of all the worlds", "really understand then la ilaha illallah it's better alhamdulillahirrabbaranimeen is better than for two reasons, it's more virtuous according to Imam An-Nasa'i who relates a hadith from the messenger of God that whoever says la ilahe illallah", "But whoever says, 30 good deeds is written for him. That's the first reason. And the second reason is that Tawheed, the unity of God,", "implied when it's implied in la ilaha illallah It's also Implied in Rabbal Alameen. So when you say a rabbal alameen, it means La Ilaha Illallah He is the Lord of all the worlds. There's only one Lord of All The Worlds so that's understood was added to be holy cup But there's more to it when you said hamdurillah, so you're not only getting tawhid but you're also getting your praise of Allah subhanahu wa'ta'ala", "So for that second reason also, and it has many meanings that we already mentioned. وَإِنَّ مَا قَوْلُهُ صلى الله عليه وسلم أَفْضَرَ مَقُدْتُهِ أَنَا وَالنَّبِيؤُونَ مِنْ قَبْلِي The best thing that I said and the prophets before me said is لا إله إلا الله That's the best thing. فَإنَّ ذَارِكَ لِلتَّوحيدَ الَّذِي تَقْطَدِيهِ The reason for that is because Tawheed, that's the highest thing that the prophets bring", "and وَقَدْ شَارَكَتْهَا الْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ رَبِّ الْعَالَمِينَ فِي ذَٰرِكَةٍ And الحمد لله رب العالمين contains that in it. So, it's not specifically لا إله إلا الله It's the meaning of توحيد The best thing that Prophet said is that God is one. And that's understood in رَضِّ العالمین That's what he's saying. And then he says وَزَادَتَ عَلَيْهًا وَهَذَا المُؤمن يَقُولُهَى لِطَّرَبَ الثَّوَابِ So, the believer says this because he's desiring a reward وَأَمَّا مَن دَخَرَ فَالإِسْلَامِ فَيَت'َعِينُوا عَدَيهِ قَوْلُوا لَا إِلَهِ إِلاَّ اللَّهُ", "But whoever comes into Islam, he has to say by obligation. The morphological frame or paradigm is So it's actually The middle letter has a The two baas were assimilated", "So it became, so the actual word is but the Arabs don't like to do that. When they have two words come together, it's cumbersome and so they have assimilation. So is, that's the meaning of it. And then he says, The meanings of are four. Al-ilah, the God. As-sayyid, the one you flee to when you need help. Almalik, the One who possesses something", "the one who has wealth, something like that. And the one is nurturing and rectifying So the is the one whose nurturing like the plant Allah's the one He's the One that takes a plant from a seed and then splits it and then nurtures it as it grows until it fulfills its destiny to be a tree That is", "That's one of the four meanings. And then he says, وَكُلُّهَا تَصَحُوا فِي رَبَّ الْعَالَمِينَ All of them are sound when we say the Lord of the worlds. إِلَّا أَنَّ الَأَرْجَح But the most preferred meaning is إِلاً It's the God. لِيَخْتِصَاسِهِ بِالدَّةِ Because that's the only one you can say for God alone. Whereas the other ones you can Say about people like the Prophet is سَيِّد The Prophet is مَالِك The Prophet Is مُسْلِح But The Prophet", "He's saying they're all sound but the most preferred meaning is Ilaah, the God of all the worlds. That's why it has Tauhid in it. He's the god of all world. كما أن الأرجح في العالمين أن يراد به كل موجود سوى الله تعالى فيعمم جميع المخلوقات And the most prefered meaning of worlds عالمين is that they mean everything that is existent other than God", "created things that's the preferred. Ibn Abbas said that it meant the Ins and the Jinn because Alameen is called Jam'u Aqil, it's a plural that is used for sapiential creatures that have intellect if you want to say worlds you would say Awalim but when you say Alamein it really means the ins and the jinn that's Ibn abbas but he's saying no", "Worlds. All the worlds. The ones we know, the ones we don't know. Because there's worlds right alongside us. There's jinn. There are whole unseen creatures that live on the planet. And people didn't know about microbes for centuries. Millennia! Humans didn't knew that there were microbes living in your stomach. Animals, they're creatures. They have DNA material. They've functions. Asexual reproduction. They eat. They defecate.", "Centuries, people didn't know that. And then they discovered, oh there's these little unseen things that you can only see on a microscope. So when we're told that there's unseen creatures living inside of us, there's whole worlds inside you right now. Inside you, there are whole worlds going on. They're not you! They're actually separate lives that live on you just like we live on the earth and we need the Earth. We're like parasites on the Earth", "unfortunately true because some parasites kill. But we need the earth, we can't live without the earth. Those parasites that live in you all these then most of them are mutual they're beneficial when you get negative ones that come in like bacteria that come into harm you those are negatives and then the body sends the army right? The phagocytes, the white blood cells go start eating it up sometimes they overwhelm depends a battle this whole battles going on inside your", "inside your body, like worlds. You know, the Odysseus or the Achilles of the Phagocytes chopping away at all... It's happening right now inside your bodies. It's going on. There's a whole world and then people say, oh, gin, what is that? I don't believe in gin. Well, good luck! You know seriously, the prophet why would he make up these things? And you know what the Christians say? Why isn't the gin in the Bible? You see they say this is just", "This is just Arabian fairy tales. What are all those spirits Jesus is chasing out of people, putting them into pigs? Right? Seriously, what are those? I read a book by this Christian attacking Islam. He's like, where's gin in the Bible? It's all over the Bible. There's probably one in you. People deny things that are right in front of them. Seriously.", "Seriously. Humans are very ignorant of ourselves and we're so arrogant. We really were incredibly arrogant because, مَا أُوتِيتُمْ مِنَ الْعِلْمِ إِلاَّ قَلِيلًا We only give you a little bit of knowledge but that little bit makes us so... We think we're gods. وَظَنَّ أَهْلُهَا اَنّهُم قَادِرٌ عَلَيَّةً The people of the earth think they have all dominion over the Earth. One little hurricane comes wipes out a whole city New Orleans 300 years", "most inhabited city in America. Wiped out, hurricane. Really? Tornado comes in a city in Kansas took the whole city just gone and those are small phenomenon. A serious volcanic eruption could wipeout I mean it's a concern all you need is a meteorite to come knock the earth knock it out of its orbit it could have there huge massive bodies out in space that we know about", "it. I'm not worried about it, but they're worried about. There are scientists that are really worried about a meteorite. They want to build defense systems to blow up meteorites and things like that. Seriously! Because they look out there and like there's giant rocks hurling around the space and they think my god...they don't think my God because if they thought my God they'd know that he is the one that stops them from hitting us. Seriously we're protected. Allah said", "protected the earth. We have Van Allen's belts, the Earth spins generates these incredible electromagnetic fields that stop solar radiation from killing us if you took those fields away it wipe out the whole earth really and they're amazing if you've ever seen computer simulation of the Van Allen belt this is God's blessings on people but they don't recognize and that's all he said just recognize my blessings on you be grateful I'm the Lord", "I'm the lord of the meteorites. I'm Lord of Sirius. I am the lord that star don't think that stars causing your Nile River to you know the Egyptians thought they used to worship Sirius because they thought that's what whenever Shira showed up the Nile would flood in August cuz that's the month that Sirius, the dog star that's", "they call it dog days, you know dog days? Those are August days because they're very muggy and hot. So the Egyptians thought oh every time we see Sirius on the horizon the Nile rises! It must be Sirius making the... See it's the inability to see beyond the means. They make a connection between two things and they assume there's a relationship like conspiracy theories.", "two things happen at the same time, oh they must be related. They don't necessarily have to be related, they could be related but they don't have to relate so that's where humans go completely wrong and they don understand the nature of existence and that's what the blessing of this book is it's teaching people in a nature of existance So then he says", "Because it's best to try to avoid sexist language if you can with God. Because God is beyond male or female. And even though Malik is a masculine form, Allah has no gender. It's very important to do this. So sovereign of the day of judgment. قَرَأْهُ الْجَمِيعُ مِنْ غَيْرِ أَلِفٍ All of the reciters of Quran recited it without the alif. They didn't say Maliki Yawm-i Deen. من الملك وقرأه عاصم", "But Aasim, and that's Hafs. Most of you read Hafs on Aasm. Aas was a Kufan reciter. He was the teacher of Abu Hanifa . So Abu Hanifah's madhhab took it. And because Abu Haniffa's madhhab was the madhhb of the Khilafah most of the Qurans that were sponsored were the Hafs Quran. And that's why it went everywhere. And also Al-Kasa'i in Arif. It's the king that comes on the day of judgment", "or the Malik, the possessor. Malik means possessor with an alif. Malek means sovereign. So the sovereign that comes to judge on the day of judgment and Malik is the one who possesses the affair of that day, the momentous affair. It's the Malek. It' s the one nobody can argue with because he owns that day. It''s a possessor He's the owner of that", "and the preferred reading is what the group is. He prefers Malik Yom Idin for three reasons, the first because anybody can be called a malik like I have a watch", "If you own anything, you're a Malik. Even your Maliku Hayatika You are the possessor of your life But when you're Malik it's only Allah that is Malik I mean it's a king Only a King has that He is Sayyidunnas And Allah is the highest of all the kings On that day is the dominion His dominion alone on that day that the trumpet blast comes", "And then he says the third reason is because there's no omission necessary. Whereas when you say Malik, there's an omission necessarily. Because it's what you're really saying is Malik al-Amri, the one who possesses the affair of that day.", "or the one, the possession that's coming on that day. Whereas when you say, you don't need to assume anything else. Whereas Malik, you assume something else. So he's saying, the حَذْف is always... It can't be the origin of the meaning. It's something added. It' an addendum to the meaning", "I think there's missing an adik. So he says, as for the way that the jama'ah, the majority read it, by adding madik to the yawm al-deen, it is as a way of expanding this meaning and also using a conditional like you would use an object in grammar.", "يكون كما لو أنه موجود في شيء فإن المعنى على الظرفية إذا استخدمت لأن تطبيقها هو الملك في يوم الدين في اليوم القيامة", "Both of them are correct readings from the Prophet ﷺ. And as for his word, الرَّحْمَٰن and الرَّاحِيم and مَرِك, their attributes, it could be said how is the attribute of مَلِك and مارِك", "How can it be an attribute, a definitive attribute when you annex something? When you have a genitive construct. This is grammar again. I'm sorry. He does this a lot. When you do a genative construct the It's not unique in and of itself like it needs the the genitive Construct so he's saying how isn't an attribute when it's got an annexation", "annexation and if it was a true attribute, it would stand alone. That's what he is saying. And then he is say, فَالْجَوٰبُ The answer to that, أَنَّهَا تَكُونُ غِيْرٌ مَحْضًا إِذَا كَانَ بِمَعْنَ الْحَارِ وَلِاسْتِقْبَادِ وآمَّا هَذَ فَهُوَ مُسْتَمِرٌ دائمٌ بِإِضافتهِ مَاحْضَةً This is very nice statement. So as for the answer, أُنَّها تَکُونَ It's not a pure attribute if it means now or in the future.", "it's not a pure attribute but if it has the mustamir and a perpetual meaning in other words he is always the Lord, the possessor of the day of judgment that is equality of God then he is saying in that case the i'dafa is complete attribute so anyway it's little tough but fathamin kuntum min ahliha like he says understand if you are one of his people qawlu ta'ala yu'm ad-deen wa huwa yu're qiyama", "the day of judgment means the day that we stand before him. And also you can understand from this meaning, it's correct to assume the meaning of debt, of reckoning, of reward and also of this overpowering from God. On that day your free will is gone. Like here you can disobey, you can be in rebellion,", "to either obey him or disobey him. You get the choice, but on that day it's the Day of Qahar. So there is no choice on that Day. And then he says", "So when he says, Like when you say, The Arabs, if you say It could have been You could have said that in Arabic. But when you Say We worship you And also", "and we worship other things. But when you say, which is where the مَفْعُول بِهِ, the object of the verb نَعْبُدُ The object of a verb is put before the verb itself then it's يُفِيدَ الْحَصَر It means only You So that's why when they translated in the book You alone We worship That alone is assumed in putting the object before the Verb Does everybody get that?", "You alone we worship, not we worship you. You alone We worship and you alone we seek help now Really listen to this because this is so profound Fatiha is it's an amazing thing the fatiha what God gives its unique to this Ummah Fatihah as a prayer", "When we say, you alone seek help. It means we're seeking your support, your help from you in our worship and in all of our other affairs. You alone were seeking help the help comes from you and in this is a proof", "against those who say man has no free will and against those that say man have absolute free will so the truth resides between the two and Imam Ali was once asked about the qadr is man free or determined? and Imam told the man lift your right leg", "down, lift your left leg. And the man said I can't do that. He said هو بين ذارك. He says it's between those two. There are some things you have free will and there are other things you're عاجز , you're incapable. So it is between the two. That what إياك نعبده وإياك استعين is indicating. We worship You with our free will when استعینه but we need Your help to do that so it's that balance", "and between free will. وَقَوْلُهُ تَعَالَ إِهْدِنَا دُعَاءٌ بِالْهُدَى And when we say, اِهدِينا It's a dua for guidance. فَإِن قِيدَ كَيْفَ يَطُبَ الْمُؤْمِنُونَ الَّهُدا وَهُوَ حَاصِلٌ لَهٌ So when we Say, اهدنا You're seeking Guidance from God. So it could be said Why should the believers seek guidance When they are already guided? If you're on guidance You're a believer, you're praying So why say اهدينا Guide us", "Guide us, you have guidance. فَالْجَوَابُ أَنَّ ذَٰرِكَ طَرَبٌ لِلثَّبَاتِ عَلَيْهِ إِلَى الْمَمَاتٍ أَوَّ الزِّيَادَةِ مِنْهُ فَإِنَّ الْارْتِقَاءَ فِي الْماقَامَاتَ لَا نِحَيَةَ رَهُ أيضًا So he says the answer to that is that you're seeking this firm ثبات that you are completely firmly established in this guidance until you die", "So you might be guided right now, but you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow or the next day. So you're saying, اهدنا, keep guiding us, keep guideing us. Or it could be give us more guidance because there is always more to learn, there is also more to understand, there are more to know and he says being elevated in these stations towards God they're infinite, there's no end to them, the elevation towards God because God is infinite so elevation towards him must also have no limit.", "قَوْنُهُ تَعَالَىٰ أَلْحَمْدُ لِلَّا قُضِّمَ الْحُمْضُ وَالثَّنَاءُ عَلَى الدُّعَاءِ لِأَنَّ تِرْكَهِي السُّنَّةِ فِي الدُواۡاءِ The reason he says الحمد لله before he says اهدينا صراط المستقيم is because like today Shaykh Jamal at Fajr when he made the dua, he didn't say اللهم اهدينَا اللهم غفر لنا اللهم توب علينا He began it by saying سبحانك", "أَثْنَاءَ عَلَيْكَ كَمَا أَنتَ أَتْنِيتَ عُلَى النَّفْسِكَ He began by this dua of hamd. You praise God before you ask God for things. And this is the sunnah also in the world. Like, before you go to your spouse, the Prophet ﷺ said, send a messenger. You have to kiss, say nice things. You need to prepare that path. You can't just go... He said don't go like a camel goes to the camel. Be gentle.", "Be gentle because that will facilitate. And then there's love and it makes ease. That's the same when you go to people if you need something, you don't go and say give me this. You say I really need some help and you're the one person that I thought of because you've helped me before and you do it in a way that... You know, you tell them that's the way that you talk to people. You don't just command them. So asking Allah in that way first praising Him and then asking Him", "the Hamd before the Dua and then he says, وَشَأْنُ الطَّرَبَ نِيَأتِ بَعْدَ الْمَدْحِ Because when you seek something you should always first preface it by praising. Even the king, you go to the King, يَا صَاحِبَ الجلالَ، يَاعَظِيمَ القَدَرِ، يامن أقامه الله في هذا المقام العظيم I need some help. You know like here they say يَاطَى العمركَ May God give you long life", "I'm having a problem getting my driver's license. Can you? And then he says, وَذَٰرِكَ أَقْرُبُوا لِلْإِجَابَةِ Because that will facilitate the response. وَكَذٰئِرِ كَقُدِّمَ الرَّحْمَنَا الرَّاحِيمَ عَلَى مَرِيكِ يَوْمِ الدِّينِ لِأَنَّ رَحْMَتَ اللَّهِ سَبَقَتْ غَضَبُهُ And also we say, الرَّحمَنُ الرَّ حِيمُ Before we say مَدِكِي يَومِ الدّينِ Because His mercy precedes His wrath. And the Day of Judgment, there is going to be wrath. But we begin الرَّخْمًا الرَحِيم", "promised us that his mercy precedes his wrath. So we begin, and then, just to affirm that mercy even after the wrath is mentioned. You see it's so beautiful. So two mercies one wrath. This is it. And then he says", "And we say, you alone we worship before we ask for help. Because the means to God precedes the request for help, do you see? In other words, you're saying I'm worshipping you as a way of drawing near to you but I need help to do that so help me. You don't say help me and then and you alone I worship. No, what you're", "And then, now listen to this. This is so beautiful. وَأَيْذًا ذِكُرُوا اللَّهِ فِي أَوِّرَ السُّورَةِ عَلَى الطَّرِيقِ الْغَيبَ ثُمَّ عَلى الخِطَابِ إِيَّاكَ وَمَن بَعْدُهُ وَذَارَك يُسَمَّ الْإِلْتِفَاتِ وَفِيهِ إشَارةٌ إِلَٰئَ النَّعَابْدَ إِذَا ذَكَرَ اللَّـهَ تَقَرَّبَ مِنْهُ فَصَارًا مِνْ أَهْلِ الحُضُورِ فَنَجَاهُ I mean, this is so Beautiful. He's saying look how he begins at the beginning of this surah using the third person. So in Arabic you have", "When you speak, you have first person second person third person. So in first person you say I did this I did that Second person You need to do this you need to Do that Third person He did this he did that One of the paths of the Quran in balaqah is called iltifat and it's to change the person so it goes That's why a lot of Western people when they read the Quran they say First God says me then he says we then he", "It's all over the place. That's actually a technique to draw you in, to grab your attention, to create multiple perspectives so that the consciousness is expanded because Allah contains everything. So when Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is speaking to us He speaks third person, first person, second person, all of these Allah subhana wa ta-ala contains all of this", "All of these. But people's consciousness differs. There are those that speak to God as if He is absent. هُوَ الَّذِي أَنْعَمْ عَلَيَّةً There are Those who speak to god as if he is before them. أنتَ الّذِى أَناْعْمْتَ عَلايَّهُ And then there are those who are completely in a state of witnessing where they don't see themselves anymore so it becomes like first person It's not that they're god but they actually lose sight of themselves and they only see god", "only see God. And those are all in the Qur'an and this is one of the things, inshaAllah if Allah gives me life I want to write an article called how the Qur-an means you know there's people say what does the Qurrn mean but how the Quran means the way in which the Qurra means they're the Quran has meanings by the very nature of the language that it's used so", "these methods embody meaning that transcends the actual meanings of the words. That's why the Qur'an cannot be understood outside of the Arabic language, there is no way! These are specific to the Arabic Language So then he says وَفِيهِ إِشَارَةٌ إِلَىٰ أَنَّ الْعَبْدُ And this is an indication that the servant when he mentions Allah He begins to draw near to Him فَصَارًا مِنْ أَهْلَ الْحُضُورِ until he becomes present", "becomes present. So in the beginning Allah says, بِسْمِ اللَّهَ الرَّحْمٰنُ الرَّاحِيمُ Speaking He, in the name of God the Merciful, مَدِكِ يَوْمٍ الدِّينِ The Possessor of the Day of Judgment. It's like he is not there but then اِيَا كَنَ عَبُدُ To you now it's...he is there so this what he saying is this indicates that as you enter into your مناجع with Allah You enter into presence with God", "to remember God. Allahu Akbar! And then you begin the remembrance, Alhamdulillahi Rabbil alameen Ar-Rahman Ar- Raheem, Madikiyawmiti Iyaka! Now you're in the presence. To you. That's called Kaf and Mukhataba You are speaking directly to God. And that is why the presence of the Prophet in the Tahiya when you say Assalamu Alaika Ayyuha Nabi You don't say Assalmu Aleihi You are actually speaking to him directly", "Because the Prophet said, whoever says salam to me I reply to him. And there's people that hear that reply.", "And then it was used metaphorically, is a metaphor. It was used as a metaphor for the path that the human being is on from good or evil. We guided him to these two paths, these roads. The Najd is a... These clear paths, the path of good, the", "And it's clear. So if you're on the path of a liar, if you are always telling people lies, it is clearly the evil path that you are on. If you are in the path sithq then you are at the path truthfulness and that's a clear path of good. So these two paths are distinct from each other. Allah has made this sirat al-mustaqeem The straight path is qawluhul mustaqeema al-kweeme alladhi la'i wa jafeen It's the path there is no crookedness in it", "It's a straight path. فِيهِ فَالسِّرَاطُ الْمُسْتَقِيمُ الاسلام That straight path is Islam وَقيلَ الْقُرَانُ And it also means the Quran وَالْمَعْنَيَانَ مُتَغَارِبًا And they both have similar meanings because the Quran is the statute laws of Islam, it's the constitution of Islam it's that path that the Prophet ﷺ embodied so it also has that meaning لِأَنَّ الْكُرٰنَ تَضَمَّنَ شَرَائِعَ الاسلم The Quran contains all of the laws of", "the laws of Islam and both have the same meaning from the Prophet . So in the Qira'at you say there's a Qira', with a scene, and then there's which is between the Saad and the Zay. So those all are Qira'. And they're different recitations, they mean the same thing", "Ibn Abbas said it's the prophets and then the Siddiqoon are the people in the next Daraja to the Prophets. These are the Awliya, Khawas al-Khwas they're the elect of the elect like Abu Bakr is their Imam he's the first one of the Siddiquin Maryam in the Quran is called Sidiqa she was a Siddique Yusuf is also called a Sidiqi because every prophet is a Siddiq Every Prophet is a Shaheed every prophet Is a Salih They contain everything", "So the Siddiq is a maqam that's the closest a human can get to Nabuwah. It's the highest maqom after Nabuwha and then the shuhada are the next maqams down, the martyrs, the people who sacrificed their life for the sake of Allah and there're many types of martyrs. Qadid ibn Walid died in his bed but he has the maqama of Shaheed and the reason the ulama said he died in", "of God and God would never allow his sword to fall on the battlefield even though the thing most beloved to Khalid was shahada Allah didn't give it to him on the battle field but he has the maqam of shaheed because actions are by intentions so people get what they intend so if you want to be a martyr Allah will give you that even if you die in your bed inshallah I should probably go into", "go into a whole thing because it's being recorded about martyrs and things. Because I mean, every... You know, just for the recording. In America, the highest honor that they give is called the Congressional Medal of Honor. The majority of those were given to people that died in battle. It's the highest", "for others. That's what a shaheed is, only they're doing it for the preservation of religion and the sanctity of humans including Christians and Jews. Amir Abd al-Qadr Al Jazaeri one of the great people of Islam and really I mean to me he's like the last Muslim you know that the last samurai. Amin Abd al Qadr he's the last muslim because he embodied all the meanings of Islam", "Jahid, he was the ruler of a country. He was a merchant. Just everything. He really embodied the Sunnah in so many ways. But when he was exiled to Turkey first, France, he went to Turkey. In France all the French guards that guarded him in Marseille they all became Muslims. They're buried there's a Muslim graveyard for these French people in Marcelle where he was imprisoned and then Napoleon II", "the second realized what a wrong was done to him and so he had them brought to Paris, given medals even though they took his country away from him because he was such a noble person but he went to Turkey and then moved to Damascus. But when he was in Damascus in the 1860s there were these pogroms against the Christians in Damasca riots and they were attacking the Christian and he had a hash of a lot of Algerians they were men that fought with him", "weapons and they went out and they defended the Christians against the Muslims. And he said a speech that was recorded where he said, you're dishonoring the prophet of God. These people have done nothing and they are to be protected. Now amongst those people was the French consul. The people that had taken his country from him and he fought them from 1832 until the 1850s, he fought", "even though he knew he was French. And he was so overwhelmed that he wrote this article in a French newspaper, it got translated into... and people knew him, he was well-known. Thackeray wrote a poem about him, He's mentioned in the European Parliament. And then the Americans heard about it. There are three cities in America named after him. Three cities named after", "that he sent a horse and his two pistols to him as a gift. But Amir Abd al-Qadr al-Jazairi, he told his followers protecting these Christians is no less a jihad than what we were doing in Algeria when we were fighting the Christians to protect our country. That is Islam! That's why I'm a Muslim", "It's not for all this madness out there. It's because of people like that. Because that's the embodiment of the Prophet Sunnah. If you want to follow the Sunnah, it's not big beards and short robes. It is that magnanimity of character. The ability to not want vengeance. Not have that resentment. Because he saw God. Somebody asked him in the Muwaqif, why are the Christians taking over? He said, because we abandon our religion.", "religion and God is putting these people over us because we've humiliated his religion and now we humiliate ourselves that's what he said and he said that God manifests as the Nasir in tons for a lot young circle if you give victory to God God will get victory to you and he", "بصيفة الخاذل that God will manifest himself to you as خاذل the one that forsakes you and so his understanding because he was seeing the منعم I mean, that's the difference So anyway, that was just martyrs Just so people don't think we're talking about these crazy people And then he says", "prophets the Siddiqoon, the martyrs, the righteous and generally believers. And some say it's the sahaba give us the path that you of those you bless meaning the Sahabah because they had the company of the Prophet they gave him victory all these things. And it said there are the Jews that followed Moses that's an opinion about that verse. And It said about the Christians that it's", "من قوم موسى وقوم عيسى from people of Moses and Jesus قبل أن يغيروا before they change their religion. And the first is the preferred opinion لعمومه because it's better to take a general meaning before you go to a specific in the rules of Tafsir. ولقوله تعلم مع الذين أنعم الله عليهم من النبيين والصديقين والشهداء والصادحين and also because Allah said in the verse, make us from those who you have blessed", "The prophets, the truthful ones, the Siddiqeen, the martyrs and the righteous ones. So that he said is the preferred position because the Quran... You fassir al-Quran. The best tafsir is al-quran you fassar al-Quaran to look what the Quran says in other verses about the same thing.", "earned your wrath or the ones who've gone astray are Jews and Christians who have changed their religion. Right? Not all of them, the ones that have changed it. Ibn Abbas said this, wa ibn Mas'ud wa ghayruhumaa and others. And there's a weak narration also from the Prophet ﷺ.", "because Allah differentiated between those who are angry that have incurred wrath and those who astray. There's a difference between the two. And also, because the wrath is attributed to the Jews in the Quran in certain verses like when he said they acquired the wrath of God", "is an attribute attributed to the Christians because of their divergent statements about Jesus. Some said he was God, some said he part God, part man, some say he was man, and some said that he was human in this world. So all those went astray in those different statements.", "And Allah said they went astray before and they led astray many, and they went to stray from the straight path. So that's mentioned about them. And that's obviously I mean this is always understood with iqamat al-hujjah That most people, most Christians are devout people. The people who are practicing Christianity and many Jews or devout Jews This is about people that know the truth and reject the truth. It's very important to", "people of Moses and Jesus before us. And that's one of the interpretations of that. And then he said, but don't let us go astray like some of them went astray because some of changed their religion. And also the people that changed it are not the people to come after. And thats very important for people to understand is that most Jews and Christians do not understand that there were things changed in their religion and that's why its very dangerous to assume all Jews are", "hates all Jews. That's not true. Why would God speak to the Jews in the Quran? Why does God say, وَمِنْ أَهْلَ الْكِتَابِ مَنْ هُو بِقِنطَارًا يُؤَدِّيهِ إِلَيْكَ Amongst the people of the book are trustworthy righteous people. لَيسوا سَوَاءً مِنَ أَحْلِ الْکِتَّابِ They're not all the same. The people of Bible. So these verses... The Quran it has to be taken holistically. When you take verses out of context when you take verse... It says for instance", "the Jews and the Christians will never be until you follow them. But then in other verses it says some of them, Some of the people of Ahl al-Kitab want you to go astray. In rhetoric it says that there's It's one of the rhetorical devices in the Quran when you generalize but you're actually talking about specific groups. You don't mean all of them. So most of those verses really should have", "should have some of the Jews, some of Christians. It's very dangerous to make generalizations because we know we live amongst them. Some of these people they're very sincere people and they're not trying to convert you. They actually respect your religion. They want to learn about your religion some of them convert and actually become Muslim I'm one of them and there are some people in here that converted so it is very important for people to get out of that Manichean worldview of black-and-white all kufar evil", "evil and all Muslims are good. No, there's a lot of good people that aren't Muslim and there's alot of bad people that are Muslim so it's like the Chinese have that yin yang symbol the black in the white but in the black they put the white dot and in the way they put to black dot just to remind you don't go into black-and-white worldviews because they're very dangerous", "فَكَأَنَّهَا نُسْخَةٌ مُخْتَصَرَةُ فَتَأمَّلْهَٰ بَعْدِ تَحْصِيرِ مَا فَاسَّرْنَا لَكِ وَبِالدَّاهِ توفِيقٌ And know that this chapter contains all the meanings of the Qur'an. As if it is an abridged version of the entire book. So reflect deeply once you've understood what I've explained to you here. Really reflect, because we say this 17 times a day at least every day.", "the meanings of this surah and not just going to... You know, the people that just go into this routine mode. And you don't even remember what you said. Or you listen to imam, you don'y even know what surah he recited from or what he said. For the Arab speakers but everybody can understand the Fatiha. For other thing it's good just to hear the Quran. But you should still concentrate. You know there was one of the Habib al-Ajmi was Persian. But every time we heard the Quran used to like weep profusely", "profusely and somebody said to him, why are you always weeping? You hear the Arabic. You're Ajami. He said, My tongue is Ajami but my heart is Arab. In other words I'm getting the meanings. It's like my wife, I was doing a Wird and she was doing what she knew from it. And then I looked at her and she'd stop and she said, I'm doing it in my heart. And Allah gives you Tawfiq.", "Allah gives you tawfiq. So, al-awwal fal'uluhiya The first is divinities. The Quran came He says, maqsada alquran da'wata alkhalqi ilal haqqi wa ddukhuli fi dinihi That the entire purpose of the Quran is an invitation to creation To enter into the worship of the one true God And then to enter in to this transaction with Him", "He bought for you your lives and your wealth in order that against it is this paradise. So, this is the transaction. So that's the entire purpose of the Qur'an. And then he says so the first thing is you have to have...and then he said that This يقتضي أمرين The first is what is this عبادة? That you're being called to فَبيانُوا الْعِبَادَةِ اللَّتِى دُعْيَ إِلَيْهَا", "It's what is this ibadah you're being called to? And then the second is, What are those things that compel you to do that worship? So the ibadat is of two types. It's how we believe about God and then it's how act in accordance with that belief. And so that's aqidah and fiqh That's what the ibaadah is. The ibaada is aqida and fi'k.", "is that it's the stick and the carrot. It's the two motivating factors of human beings, desire for a gain and a fear of some harm to come to you. So this is why the Qur'an is based on this. It is speaking to majority people not all people are at that level. The highest levels to transcend Tarheeb and Tarheeb That's the highest level like Suhaib al-Romi", "even if he knew he was going to the fire, he still wouldn't disobey Allah. So the first is أُلوهيَّة and it is حَاصِرَةٌ فِي قَوْلِيَ الْحَمْدُ لِلّٰهِ رَبِّ الْعَالَمِينَ الرَّحْمَنَا الرَّاحِيمَ So all of divinities is contained in الحَمد لله رب العالمين الرَّحمان الرَّخِيم If you understand that, you understand God. وَالدَّارُ الآخرةَ فِى قَولِهِ مَلِك يوم الدِّينِ", "that there's an afterlife, that's another important point about the Qur'an is in Merak-i Yomideen. Lord or possessor sovereign of the day of judgment. وَالْعِبَادَاتُ كُلُّهَا مِنِ الْاعِتِّقَاداتِ وَ الْأَحْكَامِ الَّتِي تَقْطَضِيهَٰ رَوَامَرٌ وَ النَّوَاهِ فِى قَوْرٍ إِيَّاكَ نَعْبُدُوا۟ All of the Ahkam both what you understand and what you practice is in إِياكَنَ عَبُودُوا. إِیَّاکَ نعْ بُدْو فِي اعتِقَاضِنَا وَإِيَاكًا عَابُدَو ف۪ي أَعَمَالِنٰا", "our belief about you and then in our worship of you, in our actions. And those actions the Ahkam have three. The rules related to your body. Wudhu, ghusl prayer hajj Those are all physical things that you have to do. And then the ahkam of maal", "دفاعاً, believers يعني انفاق, spending in the way of God for the sake of God. And then القلب, أحكام القلبية, the rules of the heart. إخلاص، خوف، خشوع, having sincerity, having presence, حضور مع الله, being present with God in your prayer. That's the whole مدار. And I'm almost done here. I know it's been long but I want to get through this before we... You guys are really good.", "are really good. Some people weeded out. And then he says, وَالشَّرِيعَةُ كُلُّهَا فِي قَوْلِهِ الصِّرَاطَ الْمُسْتَقِيمِ All of the sharia is in the straight path. وَلْأَنبِيَّاءَ عَلَيْهِمْ صَرَطُوا وَسِلَامٌ غِيرُهُمْ فِى قَولِهَ الَّذِينَ أَنْعَمْتُ عَLَيهِםْ All the salihin are in that. So the qasas of the Quran because there's seven meanings of the", "the nabooat, the ahkam, the waad, waaid, ma'aad, qasas. So they're all here so Qasas al-anbiya is here and anta anim like those who you blessed before Wathikru tawaif kufar and all the people that go astray The two types that you go astraight the people who go astrait with knowledge and the people to go astright without knowledge So those who go straight with knowledge They know they're wrong Those are they incur God's wrath those who goes straight without knowledge their dhalin. They're just a stray you need to help them", "when you get into a higher level of Arabic. But first, you have to learn basic Arabic. It's interesting. It is called علم الحروف . It's very interesting. Like غ always relates to things that are hidden like غيب , غفر to hide your sins غابة to disappear غفلة to be heedless, you're not aware of something So the غين letter is related to that. ر is always things that continue on", "to drag, again and again. Things like that. To flee because once you flee it stays with you. You know cowards it just yeah never goes away so anyway there's a lot of things I mean my favorite one is if you look at usually has", "to cut something, to sever it. Right? It's a qalb, nihayat al-insan, you know the end purpose of man. So qalbi will find in those. So if you look at ghariqa, to drown, The first is ghain which is the letter that indicates hidden things so the beginning of drowning ghabaa an sathh al bahar You disappear from the surface of the ocean and then raaaaaaaa You hit the bottom", "dead that's true I'm not making that up yeah many words like that in Arabic you know is a heavy if you look at hafifah, hafeef is light the way it's pronounced faqeel is heavy qaf is a heavie Quranis is heavy so Qaf is weighty letter letters have weights some of them actually measure", "gave gram quantities to the letters. So this one weighs this much, this one ways this much based on the 28 letters and then 28 you have moon letters and Sun letters what's a month? 28 days right yeah that's how long it takes the moon to go around the earth so and", "like, الطريق and the moon letters, ال it's pronounced definitive because the sun obliterates whereas the moon the light is not overwhelming you could look at the moon but you can't look at sun so that the letter disappears in the Sun letter this cosmology Arabic is amazing anyway that just fun those are fun things", "Jeeam, haa, daal. The jeem letter is shiddah the daal letter is Shiddah but the haa letter is a soft letter So jihad the outward of jihad is harsh But the inward of jihad is mercy so it's in the word embedded in the Word What are the types of blessings you mentioned worldly? the dunyaweeya the deenia and then the ukhraweeah this world", "children, those are all wives, husbands. Those are all blessings of the world and then the diniyah knowledge taqwa ibadah generosity those type things and then ukhrawiya is The blessing that Allah rewards you with immense reward for very little action So though he said those are the three that we should be aware of and then it sounds That make a word have certain effects do they have the same effects in a name if so Then what best sounds used for naming a child?", "Jews for naming a child. No, that's a good point. The best name is Abdullah and Abdurrahman by the hadith. And also the Humida names. Mahmoud, Hamid, Muhammad, Hameed, all those type names. And then the names of the Sahaba are all good. The names of prophets are all", "as long as they're good meanings. Like you should look at the meaning if it's good and then you can use the pronunciations of the people that you live amongst, like David, you know how to say Dawood? Most of the Ajam cultures didn't pronounce the names the way they are pronounced in Arabic Right? And the Turks say Mehmet They don't say Muhammad because they didn't Sayyidina Umar did not like Muhammad people to name their children Muhammad Because he never wanted to hear it cursed or spoken ill of", "ill of. Like, what's wrong with you Muhammad? يَمُجُّوا فِي الْأُذْنِ You know it really bothered him so he preferred... So the Turks out of adab to the name Muhammad they said Mehmet They wouldn't say Muhammad So that's why the Turks call it Mehmet just adab, to the Prophet ﷺ So those names are fine The names of the ajam the way they pronounce them Yahya, John I don't have a problem with that I mean I wouldn't", "you know, most converts I believe now they should keep their name. I don't think converts should change their name if they have a good name. If they have bad name and they can take a name like Dr. Lings he had a name Sirajuddin which was between his close friends and then he kept the name Martin Lings for general so publicly he published under Martin Lins but in private his close friend called him Sirajuddin or Sidi Abu Bakr So you can do that, that's fine", "having to change your name. Like, I was given my name when I became Muslim. I just thought that's what you had to do. But it's actually wrong because your father has the haq of the father to name the son and for you to change the name your father gave you is just not right. If he's happy with it, that's fine but my father was really difficult. It was really", "And it was very difficult for him. I forced him to call me Hamza. You know, I just would not tolerate my Christian name. But that was just ignorance. I was just very zealous. Converts are usually like that. Mahatma Gandhi said about Marmaduke Pickthall he was that rare convert that was able to change his religion without becoming a fanatic.", "that is Abdu'l-Hakim Winter. I've known him for 30 years, he's the only person I know that didn't go crazy after he became Muslim. I need a break because Shaykh is gonna come and so Jazakum Allah khairah. I'll answer these though next time" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Science of Tasawwuf _ Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _ Session_TdfODhOjoh4&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW3SBwkJvQCDtaTen9Q%3D_1742998205.opus", "text": [ "The Prophet , he liked very simple, no protocol. His gatherings were very simple gatherings. They couldn't tell who he was between his Sahaba . Like that he would not have had this type environment because if you come in like if somebody came and now they would know immediately who's who was teaching, who was... But in his Majlis, he sat at the same level they sat at and he spoke in the circle", "didn't know him, they couldn't recognize him from amongst the other Sahaba which is an amazing testimony to his humility. He said, I was commanded to be humble so that no one would show contempt for anyone else. Nobody would feel better than anybody else because if he was commanded", "else. So he said, I was commanded to be humble and means to put something down like . I put it like if I say the word also means to give birth because the child falls in fact they call it because in most pre-modern societies women did not give birth on their backs", "the child came, the head hit the earth. And so literally the Arabs call where you were born that place your head hit. Because that's how...and they still do that in some cultures. The women actually squat. They don't go on the back because it's easier to do the pushing than it is when you're on your back with an epiderm and all", "The Prophet said, that's what he said. He was commanded to be humble and then one of the things Imam Al-Ghazali says about humility, he says that, أول التواضع التكلف The beginning of humility is to force yourself because people were very egocentric humans our lives revolve around ourselves it's a major problem in fact it's probably the single most significant", "planet is egocentricity. You know, the nafs, nafsi-nafsi. And one of the things that this religion teaches people is ithar to actually begin to prefer other people and the reason for that is because yom qiyamah its all nafsy-navsy and the only people that are saved are the people who had the ithar in this world Allah gives them the ithr in the next world.", "Just that you are the sun and everything else in the world is revolving around you. That's the child's reality, which is why children when they don't get something they scream because to them that's the only thing that matters at that moment is their nafs. And really this is very related to the talk because in our tradition", "The place of the science, of tasawwuf is really rooted in overcoming the self. That's the root of the Science and it's a Quranic science because the Quran clearly delineates the different types of nafs", "These are Quranic terms. Nafs al-ammara is the egocentric, commanding self. It's the soul that it commands and impels one to things that are not good for it. Which is why people constantly do things that bad for them. They smoke even though they know smoking is bad. They don't exercise even though exercise is good because the nafs is lazy.", "toward. So if they're given a choice for dessert between the cheesecake and the fruit, they choose the cheesecake because that's what the nafs inclines towards it's the nature of the naf is it likes things that are maladdat you know the things have ladda the things that there's some type of delight in it but what's interesting is the things", "He said, حُفَّةَ الجنّةُ بِالْمَكارِحِ Paradise was surrounded by distasteful things. وَحُفِّتَ النَّارِ بِ الشَّهوٰاتِ And hell was surrounded By delightful things Things that we incline towards And this is one of the paradoxes of the world It's a paradox And one of other interesting aspects of the World Is those things that are very difficult for you in the world", "you get the greatest satisfaction when you do them. The real challenges in life, it's not going the easy route, it is going the harder route where you get that personal satisfaction that you've accomplished something. And we were talking yesterday I was with somebody in Jeddah or the day before and they did a program he's a producer for...he does a religious program and they", "he was talking about what makes people happy and he asked me about that concept, sa'ada. And I told him you know that in the Islamic tradition happiness is not a state it's not something you can be in like you can't be happy you can feel happy but", "Happiness is the sum total of your life. It's the result of your live, whether you lived a happy life or whether you've lived a miserable life and that's based on what you did in your life according to the Greeks it was about virtue living what they called Erete which was a life of excellence. Actually the word they use for means the same as Ihsan.", "is, and Imam al-Ghazali is heavily influenced by Raghub so it's probably better to say Raghb Rasbahani. Raghab Rasbahany who was a great ethicist he was a mufassir I mean he was many things he was one of these great ulama of Islam but he said that the whole purpose of life is happiness there's no other purpose the purpose of", "Happiness, unlike anything else in life is an end not a means. Everything else is a means if you ask people what they want You know average people that haven't thought about things deeply If you just say what do you want out of life? Well I wanna have a family I wanna be successful I wanna get a degree I want to make lots of money Whatever I mean they give you lots of different reasons But if you asked people and then you begin to probe that Why do you wnat money", "Well, it enables me to be free. I can do things that you can't do without money. Why do you want to be able to do things? And if you keep probing, the end result is always happiness because they want to happy. They want to in a state of contentment. So that is the essence of what humans are out for but most people don't know it and then they don't understand the difference between real and apparent goods.", "You know, like people think that fame is a good in itself. So there's all these people that want to be famous. They want to known or they think stature is a thing that it's good to have. Or they think money. I want money because money gives me power. Money gives me... And so they'll sacrifice real goods for what they deem to be the ultimate goods in life", "goods in life. And that's why people sacrifice their families. You know, families break up over inheritance because money to them is more important than the family. But the real good is the family because you can have all the money you want but if you don't have family, you're deprived of one of the most essential", "gave humans. I mean, family is at the root of what life is about and many other examples of that. So this is one of the real problems with humans is that they don't know what they want and what they think they want if you probe them they want it for the same reason that other people want other things. It's really amazing if you think about it. People want different", "things, but if you really probe them it's because they want the same thing. Which is sa'ada. And then what revelation does is it turns it on its head that there's no sa'adah in the dunya. You can't get it because no matter what you have you can lose it and that state of just knowing", "if you're in good health right now, you can drop dead. You know we were just on a 10-hour flight. You can get a DVT, right? You know you get venous stasis. You're sitting in this ridiculous tube with this noise level that's unbelievable. I mean I'm still hearing it. It's just...I'm like on a permanent 30,000 feet above state because", "I've been flying so much lately. So you just hear that kind of shh in the background, but you have that deep vein thrombosis. People die like Olympic athlete died on an airplane, just in perfect condition of health. But he got this problem if you don't drink enough, you don' walk during the flight. But even if you do that, you can still get the problem. You take the precautions.", "And this is called Marfoo' even though it has Hukum al-Rafa in the Hadith science. Whenever there's an end of time statement, even if the Sahaba doesn't mention the Prophet you have to assume that it's from the Prophet because they don't have revelation and they would only say something they heard the Prophet say so sometimes Sahaba will just make a statement and it's actually from the prophet. Imam Ali said one of the signs of the end of", "and sudden death. Now if you look at hemorrhoids and sudden deaths, the thing they have in common is sitting. It's that lifestyle of not moving which is how heart disease I mean that's how people get heart disease from sedentary lifestyle so really what he was saying was one of the signs of the end-of-time his sedentery lifestyle but he was looking at the effects of sedentarily life because that's more important", "important. Had he said one of the signs at the end of time is people are going to sit around all the time and they won't move anymore, okay what's wrong with that? But what he said was they're gonna get hemorrhoids which is one of worst conditions to have just as a condition because it's so uncomfortable people can't even sit down and most comfortable thing after lying down is sitting down you know when people stand they say let's go", "more comfortable, right? They want to be comfort. But if you have hemorrhoids, you'd rather be standing. So that's a sign of the end of time and then sudden death like DVTs, heart attacks, all these type things. People start... so you can be one of the things that's very strange about our modern life is it's really the descriptions", "Quran, it's very much like the way people live in the modern world. Like you walk into a room and all the lights turn on because now they have these sensors. And I was in California and I was with a Mauritanian, Sheikh Abdullah Wad Ahmadna, and we came and the light turned on. And he said who turned the light on? I said it senses our movement and it turns on so you can see the path. He said subhanAllah.", "They're making Jannah here. And then you go and the cornucopia, the Quran says you have whatever you want. You go to the store and there's 500 different types of coffee. I mean it used to be when I was growing up there was just coffee. That's what you said. I'm not making this up. Some people are too young to remember these days but people used to just say can I have a cup", "Because there was just Maxwell House. There was another one, Urban something. I can't even remember. But Maxwell House, good to the last drop. That's what people drank. You know, Maxwell House and there was like three brands. And it was the same coffee. If you did a test and put blindfolded people they couldn't tell the difference. Now you have", "have mocha, cappuccino supreme, ginger super x factor. Seriously there's a whole list when you wait in line it takes an hour to get a coffee now because everybody comes up and they say I'd like no foam extra hot and 2% milk right? So", "So everybody is out there, like everything's becoming so specific to the nafs. Like every nafs has his own... It's not just coffee anymore where we all just go and have a cup of coffee. Every nafs ha s to get exactly what they want. It's really interesting time! One of the signs at the end of time, the Prophet said تخترف الأهواء People's interests will become diversified", "diversified. You know what they like to do? You go to the magazine rack, look at all those... There's people that read those things. There's stuff just on Harley Davidson motorcycles because there's people, that's their life. They're Harley Davidson and they have clothes with Harley Davidson", "all the nuffs are turning into these individualized desire machines. So, all the desires become individualized. How can people survive that? You know when I was a kid you had four types of ice cream vanilla strawberry chocolate and then tutti-frutti That was it! When you went to the ice cream what did you want? And if", "really extravagant, you'd have like all three on a cone. You know? Like I'll have vanilla chocolate and strawberry together and a dash of tutti frutti. I mean that was like whoa! And that was somebody... But now you go in and there's like 400 types of all kinds of... Now they", "Like everything's there and so the people, their nafs are just completely being bombarded. Do you know with I mean seriously in Afghanistan how many they're just certain amount of dishes you didn't this is a way traditional cultures were and one of the things the Sahaba were shocked at was when they went to Syria there were a lot of plates with different types of food it was like a big shock", "them to see that. And they considered it like just extravagance, that food was fuel. You know, food is basically fuel. It's good, it tastes good and Allah put blessings in food but essentially food if you really ask a physician what is food for? It's really, it's just fuel.", "So this obsession with food and all the different types of foods, that's all indications of the nafs taking charge. And that is where people are at. We represent about 1% of the earths population, the way we're living.", "lived 200 years ago. Really, kings did not live the way we live. The type houses we live in... I mean I was telling him this villa that were in, I told Sheikh Abdullah, I said SubhanAllah, this would have been a palace 100 years ago in Saudi Arabia like a king's palace for you know and the Hujjaj would look at it and just be an awe because they were coming from huts", "Not only in India there are palaces too, but you know a lot of the places where Muslims come from they're simple poor places. So they would see this and it would... I mean the Indians would say pfft! You know because they had the Taj Mahal and you know I mean they have real dunya. But that's really where things are going. It's just a diversification of nafs. The nafs is just diversifying", "and more and more ways of fulfilling its individual desire. It used to be humans had pretty common collective desires, but now it's exactly like the Prophet described at the end of time is that every nafs would be in its own specific types of desires. You know music if you look at music traditionally", "a couple of types of music. There were just a couple types of Music you'd have high music like in India, you had a high classical music with the sitars and they would do it based on the Vedas and all these very sophisticated... And then you had popular music of the common people same in Europe classical music and folk music now it's just people even in one genre of music there's all these bifurcations", "and things that people get into, and have words and terms. And there's a whole internal vocabulary that only that group speaks. So if you're into grunge, there's an entire group of people who speak. There's a full vocabulary that goes with that. There is a dress code that goes it. There are ways of being that go with it. And that's one group. It didn't used to be like that. People were essentially...", "a deity in culture that enabled us to be together as humans. So if you went to Rawalpindi or if you want to Kabul, or Harat, or these places there was pretty much unified culture it had class, there was class because socio-economic class determines things but every class was pretty harmonized and they were similar, they dressed the same,", "And so there was a homogeneity that enabled them to feel a spree decor, a type of what Ibn Khaldun called the asabiya, the thing that holds things together.", "So you have the iPod culture, which is very interesting. I mean people walking around in a completely different reality than your end literally because they're hearing songs or whatever they are hearing. People listen to different things. They might be...I saw guy he was walking, I was walking and he was saying", "know, on his iPod. So some people do useful things but a lot of people they're just bopping along right? And the iPod commercial to me is really amazing because it's a shadow with these iPod earplugs. It's like the person's not even there anymore. It' s just a shadow of a person you know whoever thought of that ad was just I think", "what that signifies. What you're doing is, you are allowing somebody to put everything into you. Your thoughts are being dictated by somebody else because what you're thinking about is what's being plugged in to you whether it's the song or whatever it is and then there's no silence people are losing the ability just to be silent", "just to sit in silence. This is the human condition, in the West particularly but this is now being it's a hegemonic culture somebody said to me do the Muslims really want to take over the world? I said no they're reacting to our taking over the World right and that's what's going on it's like this monolithic Western culture everywhere its going", "changing cultures radically and people are reacting to it. It's so disruptive, and then we kind of look at it like you know, we're not taking over the world. McDonalds? Just because we're in Mecca now? Just cause everybody is eating McDonalds wearing jeans listening to the same type of music, we are not taking", "That's what it is. It's a cultural crusade because it's overwhelming all these cultures everywhere. Traditional crafts people can't compete, the shoes they used to make by hand you can make in a day a million of them in some factory in Japan or somewhere. How do you compete with that? I mean the Saudis used to have these,", "They don't wear them anymore, only the real Bedouin type people wear them because now they wear Birkenstock versions of them that are a lot more comfortable. They are! I have a pair. I used to wear the Nejdiya and then when Birkenstocke came out with the same style and it's all fit to your foot well after awhile its ergonomically designed", "be perfect for your nuffs. It used to be just feet were feet, you put it in the shoe but now it fits your foot. It's really amazing and how do people survive that without becoming just monsters? Infant monsters because we get what we want", "getting patient when we don't get what we want. I mean that's the current human condition, that's why everybody is out there in this state of stress and anxiety and they're so used to getting what they want now you know the computer is not fast enough people come to Saudi Arabia and it's...I'm used to a DSL line I'm sitting there waiting and things going like that. In California you push", "When we first started using the computer, they were slower than they are here. And it wasn't a problem then because we didn't have that expectation. So once you get the expectation of speed, it's hard to deal with the slowness. And that's what happens to the nafs. The more and more... Sayyidina Omar said, إِخْشَوْشِنُوا فَإِنَّ النِّعْمَةَ لَا تَدُومُ Be tough on yourselves because blessings don't last. إِحْشَّوْ شِنْوْا فَئِنِّ النِّيْمْتَ لَّا تَّدُونُ It's an amazing statement by Sayyida Omar.", "In other words, if you're always accustoming yourself to being in comfort and when you find yourself outside of that comfort zone suddenly you can't take it. And it becomes very difficult. So basically the human condition is in crises I mean there's no doubt it's always been in crisis to some degree because just being human is a crisis", "human is a crisis. Just the fact that we're here and living in the world, there's an aspect of it that has that crises component but...and people who work in ERs know that better than most people. There's always something about to happen or something happening or something just happened, always. I mean that's the nature of life on earth. When the Prophet came with this dean one", "components of the religion was to try to humanize people, to make the already difficult circumstances of the world more tolerable. And one of the central ways of doing that was to help people get outside of their egocentricity because not only is there a benefit for yourself when you're less egocentric but it's", "but it's making life a lot easier for other people. And so when the more people that do that, the better life becomes. That's what's so ironic about egocentricity. Egocentric makes life miserable for everybody and when you begin to get out of yourself and actually start thinking about other people if you get a critical mass of people doing that then you really begin to create paradise on earth.", "double shot, triple cappuccino. You know it's like tafadda Can I get you something? Can I help? That is what makes life much more enjoyable as an experience It's not the satisfaction of the self that is the apparent...that's the illusion of happiness Is that if i can just satisfy myself I'm going to be happy. That's the elusion of happiness The real happiness is actually in serving others", "others. That's where the real happiness, in fact, in philosophy they actually call it the hedonistic principle because it's a paradox why people feel good about... I mean they just did a study on brain about people giving charity and all the pleasure zones in the brain were fired off when people were giving charity because people feel", "to prevent that. The enemies of the human are there to prevent it, and that's why the beauty of the prophetic way is that the Prophet said I did not see any evil but I warned you about it, I did no see any good but guided you to it. That he has already given you all of the guidance, then it becomes a matter", "practice these things. And they're amazing principles and one of the examples that I've used many times, and Shaykh Abdullah Al Qadir you can ask him about this because he was there and witnessed it. The Prophet said that none of you will enter paradise until you believe and none of your will believe until you love one another. Then he said, Can I tell you something? That if you do it, love will begin to grow amongst you. They said yes indeed Ya Rasulullah", "And he said, spread peace amongst you. Now the primary meaning of that is actually give the greeting of peace. But it also obviously has just what it means. Spread peace amongst You. We were in Medina and we used to go every morning at the same door and there was a man there, very grumpy man. One of these guards at the door.", "I said, Salam alaikum to him. And he just looked at me and was like, Wa alaykum salam. And then the next morning we came, same man. I was with Sheikh Abdullah. And I smiled and said, salam alaykum. And He was like wa alaykam salam you know. And Then the next day I came, Same man. This is a true story. And i said, salaam alakom. And", "The next day I came and I said, Salaam Alaikum. And I swear to God, Sheikh Abdullah Qadhi was there. He came up and he hugged me. You know just it takes work. We don't want to do that work", "you know, human icicles. And people have reasons why they are the way they are and a lot of it is just that they didn't get enough hugs when they were kids or whatever I don't know there's a lot if reasons for it why people are in this state the lack of trust that they have for other people uh... there's alot of reasons but that aspect of our dean is so ignored", "The respect of just adab and treating people with respect, you know, with human dignity. It's so ignored. And then the Muslim ummah wonders why nobody treats us with respect? We don't treat each other with respect. Why should anybody respect us? Why should God grant us that gift of being respected if we don't respect each other? You know, if we", "You know, tafaddal. And I'll just give you one more example of this. When I was in Medina, I was with a man driving and somebody cut him off and he started honking his horn. And...and I just said to him, you know...I said that is such a horrible thing to hear in the city all the honking that goes on. Mecca's the worst for that,", "that for honking. And it's just people, and the amazing thing is they honk when it's meaningless. Like honking, you know, there's a reason to honk. Honking, I mean, there' s a reason why you have a horn in your car because it's like to stop something really dangerous from happening or if somebody really does something, you honk and let them know that wasn't appropriate. I want a bumper sticker, don't shoot, I admit I'm a lousy driver", "driver, you know. But people do things that cut you off sometimes by mistake and people whenever they get cut off they never remember the times they've cut off people by accident there's always the assumption what an idiot so this man I just told him I said you know the maqam of driving is", "others to themselves. That's the maqam of driving because when people have that type of adab on the road, driving is much more safe and it's actually a much more... It's already a difficult thing to drive. You know, it's an intense thing to do. You're traveling at high speeds and it very dangerous. It's all really a difficult think but when people", "So I just told him that. He said, no you don't understand here everybody it's nafsi-nafsi and I said well don't be one of those people you know you need to change. I came back a year later and the same person he's actually the son of a sheikh in Medina really sweet man and a year", "you know, I had an amazing experience this year based on something you said last year. And I said, what? And he said, do you remember when the, I told got angry with that person cut me off and you said, you know you should really prefer people driving. He said, well, I decided to do that, to practice that. And he", "So he experienced that, just of doing that. But you need to create critical masses. I mean, that's what the Prophet , what's so amazing is that he was able... Because he was such a powerful transformative agent himself, I mean THE most powerful, nobody has ever, no human has ever accomplished what he did in the time that he", "effects. Genghis Khan was short-lasted, what he did was quite stunning but it was short lived, it wasn't like the Muslim phenomenon. The Christians, it took them hundreds of years to achieve what they did. The Muslims achieved in a hundred years what is still considered largely the Muslim world. It's still the Muslim", "So the Prophet came with these incredible principles to help people, help themselves and to help navigate the world in a way that makes it much easier to bear. Because it's already difficult. The world is difficult. It's an Ibtila liyabluwakum . We created you to test you, to try you and it's", "these things is really what the deen, it's at the essence of our deen. It's at that essence of religion and it's something that needs to be re-centralized in our religion. Sayyid Naqeeb al-'Ataas said that the crisis of this Ummah is adab. That's what he said and I really believe that. He said that adab is a loss of prioritization because when you put yourself", "When you put yourself first, everything else is chaos. When you are your major concern, everything is chaos.\" That is not to negate, aleikum anfusukum , but taking care of the souls in reality is taking care", "you begin to get out of that egocentricity and move into a world that actually is taking other people into consideration, that that is nurturing your own soul. That's how you work on yourself. And that's why patience, all these... So inshallah what I'm hoping to do is go through this book. It's not a long book but it's a book", "which is why I really like it. And it was written by Ibn Juzay Al-Kalbi, who was a scholar from Granada. He was one of the great ulama of Andalusia. What he's most known for is a book called Taseer li Uluma Tanzeel, facilitating the sciences of the Quran. It's four volume tafsir that he wrote.", "In the Maliki school, he's one of three that they say was given the gift of ikhtisar. He just got to the root of things and gave you the zubda, just the cream of whatever he was writing about.", "at a time that was quite difficult. He actually died a shaheed, he was in a battle defending the Muslim lands from Christian incursion. He's one of the great geniuses of Islam but he was also what you feel from reading his text because I've spent a lot of time reading him and his tafsir is probably the one that I've looked in more than any other. It's not long but it always amazes me", "He has things in there that you don't find in the longer tafsir. You always sense this kind of spiritual rootedness in his thought, and his ihsan is really the center of his view of the sciences. So he wrote this book. He says that there's 12 essential stations", "that tasawwuf was one of the sciences that was necessary before you could actually interpret the Qur'an, that you had to have some mastery of it. And I want to say that from my own reading anybody that rejects that science is just... all they're doing is displaying their ignorance of the religion because I've never seen any scholar whether it was ibn Tamiyyah even ibn Abd al-Wahhab who's", "of the movement in Nejd that spread over the Arabian Peninsula. Even Ibn Abd al-Wahhab has letters saying that he never denied Tasawwuf, you know, that it's a science of Islam. Nobody has ever. Ibn Tamiyyah has an entire volume in his fatawa on Tasawwwuf and where they differ is what's acceptable within the science. That's where", "And this is like medicine. You have medicine, you can't deny that Chinese medicine is a type of medicine. It's a type medicine. Some Western doctors don't accept certain practices within Chinese medicine and Chinese doctors likewise don't except certain things in Western medicine but they're still there it's medicine and it has a system and much of it is empirical so where the science comes from", "comes from, there's two central aspects of the science. The first one is akhlaq and it's getting your character aligned with the character of the Prophet . That's at the center of this teaching. It's trying to align your character with the Prophet so that you actually follow his sunnah. And one of the things a lot of people do they follow the sunnah", "the beard, the siwak, the robe. They take all these outward sunan but then they don't follow the sunna of smiling like they'll never smile Now the beard is an important sunnah there's no doubt about that But anybody can grow a beard Do you know it's an effortless practice You just don't shave", "don't shave. Seriously, it's effortless. But smiling when you don't feel like smiling, you know that it takes effort to do that and that's why it's one of his amazing sunnahs is that he was constantly smiling. Al-Dahak, that's one", "mile. So that's one aspect, now the other aspect of the science is when you begin to inculcate prophetic qualities and practices especially when you do the devotional ones because the Prophet used to mention Allah like Aisha says in Sahih al-Bukhari he remembered Allah in all his states so he did constant dhikr of Allah", "If you begin to do those types of practices, certain things begin to happen. And that is what they call the ahwal, states. And states are real. People go into states. Now there are different types of states. There are psychotic states. They're people who go in to spiritual psychosis where they do a lot of dhikr and they literally lose it. I've seen this personally. I know that it's real.", "It's real. And you find it in other religions as well, where people... and I've seen people, I knew somebody who did dhikr all the time, and it wasn't healthy. They ended up thinking that they were a prophet. That happens to people. You know, it's a type of spiritual psychosis so you have to have balance. It is very important to have balanced. And that's part of the Prophet's teaching, is teaching people balance, how to maintain balance in your life like he said", "He said that one of his Sahaba, he was doing dhikr all the time and fasting. He never spent any time with his wife. His wife went and complained to the Prophet. And the Prophet told him, he said no your wife has rights over you. He said I spend time with my family. That's also sunnah to be with your family. There is a sunnah for sitting and enjoying yourself with your", "recorded in our tradition inside the house. They were throwing food at each other and Prabhupada was watching it, he was laughing. That's a frivolous thing but we know that recreation and frivolity is actually necessary for a healthy person. If you don't do those things, you get sick. It's not frivolus in that there is a purpose for it even", "Even frivolity has a purpose. What is problematic when that becomes your life, you know, when that's all your life is, is a search for fun and frivolities and things like that. Now it's a science in that its replicable. I mean the definition of true science is falsifiability according to Karl Popper. And falsifiably means that if you can't falsify something then it's not science", "It's philosophy or metaphysics or something else. Falsifiability enables you to, if you say that the sound barrier is broken at a certain speed and every time you get to that speed, you hear the sound barriere broken, you can falsify that theory. You can test it. So if it doesn't happen the same way every time then it's obviously not...the theory is not sound.", "or freezing ice at zero Celsius. You know, water freezes at zero celsius. If you keep testing that with calibrated instruments that are effective and every single time it freezes, at zero, you've falsified something, you tested it and shown that indeed you get the same replication of the...you can replicate that experiment. And the same is true for these inner sciences", "is that people, when they do certain things, get the same experiences. And that's why these books are very interesting because there're books written in Sri Lanka, in Herat, in Turkey, in Morocco by different scholars and they're describing the same things because the same thing happened to people at different times and places. In that way it's replicable. So the Ahwaal, that's a separate science", "That's a separate science. And that's really not, this is more about akhlaq and about behavior. So those are the two branches of this science, is the science of the states and stations, of the things that happen to people in those, and then trying to inculcate these qualities in oneself which is what this book is about.", "is about. So he's going to talk from the Qur'an about the maqamah shukr, the station of gratitude and praise, as shukur walhamd. The maqamaf taqwa, the stations of taqwah, and then there are degrees in that of taquwah and shukran. Maqamat dhikr, a station of dhiker. Ma qamas sabar, a station of patience. Ma Qamat tawheed, maqaman mahabbah,", "Maqam al-Tawakkul, the station of trust. Maqama al-Muraaqaba which is the station vigilance of awareness of the divine presence. Maquama al Khauf, the Station of Fear, state of awe. Maquaam ar-Raja, State of Hope. Maqualma at Tauba and then Maquamat Ikhlas which is really that's at the root.", "2,000 definitions of tasawwuf. But he said all of them revolve around siddqa tawajjah, sincerity. That's really at the root of this. I want to really thank the people that have been helping and I just want to say all of you, the ladies only for this one, just give Aisha Subhani a really big hug and a kiss on her forehead", "on her forehead because she lost sleep trying to make sure that everybody was here and going through this really with two kids, a husband. And she's also an emergency room doctor. And She really just volunteered to do this. And may Allah reward her really because it's just incredible.", "seen also just been doing an incredible amount. They've been trying to get these visas for the people that didn't come. I hope all of you made dua for them to get their visas, but it's also one of the things that the Muslims unfortunately they blame the qadr for their own ineptitudes which has always really bothered me. Whenever people are inept, they say qadar Allah mashaa Allah decreed it.", "Allah is the Greatest, the Most Gracious, the All-Compassionate.", "like in Libya they say Allah is the most powerful which is true but it's what Sayyidina Ali said when the Khawarij said لا حكم إلا لله he said كلمة حق أريد بها الباطل It's true, but it being used for falsehood. So it's a real problem", "there's some good people, may Allah increase them and give them tawfiq. I mean I didn't arrange this but when I delayed my flight hoping that the women would travel with me but they didn't. But when I got on the plane, I was the last one on the plan and then one person came after him and it was the ambassador so the Saudi ambassador to the US we ended up on", "And, you know, I told him how I felt about the whole thing, the way things went. And he was very conciliatory and, you now, I think from his end because there's two ambassadors in the U.S., which I did not know. He is ambassador in New York and then there's an ambassador in Washington.", "some of the greatest scholars in the ummah as being at a level that is just very rare in our ummah. He would hold his own with scholars of the past, he's somebody who could sit in the circles of the scholars really and if you read his books you'll know that because he engages the previous usuli scholars", "which is very unusual. Most ulama today, they have naqal. They transmit what... Whereas he has naql and then he has aqil. He has tasarruf so he has his own opinion but he's really rare. You know, he's a philosopher also. His thoughts are quite rarefied but it's just a real blessing to have him. And then Sheikh Abdullah al-Qadi for people that don't know him, what a blessing, a treat. I mean, he is such a gift to have with us", "with us and if you knew what he did behind the scenes to make sure that you really have a wonderful experience. And I mean today, I was just watching him getting permission to visit these places that most people can't visit without difficulty in things which is it was an art form because he's got the deha of", "the kind of savvy of his ancestor, Aqeel ibn Abi Talib because he's a direct descendant of the Prophet's cousin. And Aqil was known for just his ability, just to... Just his savvy and his diplomacy and intelligence. So, and then Walid also, Ustad Walid and Ustad Yahya and the people that are here. Unfortunately Imam Zaid", "Unfortunately, Imam Zaid may Allah also make easy his journey and Sheikh Jamal also. We really wanted them to be here. Imam Zayd he's the indefatigable. He's the one that kind of holds it all together because he you know he mashallah. May Allah reward him but he unfortunately as some of you know had lost", "we're waiting for him, inshallah, to come. But hopefully it'll be a very enriching, rewarding experience for all of us and you know the most important thing that I would say is just please have that adab especially with people who are over you not over you in any other way than just the order to maintain orders so please have", "People here that are, you know, they're very... They have positions of leadership in their own communities and things like that. And so it's just good to try to be with the group and maintain that, you now, the order of this group and respect especially Aisha and Asaad and anybody else who is... See I forget Fereydoun because it's like me.", "You know, like Fredon he's just like me. So you always forget yourself. I did this thing one night we had at this Night of Gratitude and I forgot the two closest people to me and I told them later they were totally devastated. Like I said it's just it's like me, it didn't even occur to me because so but see Fredon and it's really important", "And they have to respect you also, so that's a two-way street. But understand, they're under a lot of stress and pressure. So if somebody does snap or something like that, just have a good opinion of people because they do. There's a lot pressure and it's an immense amount of responsibility. Did people go to the Masjid of Ibn Abbas yet?", "Oh, Mashallah. Yeah, Ibn Abbas, radhi Allah no. He's the only person because he was born during the drought, during the time when they had the sanctions on the Prophet ﷺ so that they didn't have any dates. They were eating leaves of trees at the time. So when he was", "They brought him to the Prophet and he didn't have anything to give the tahneek. So, he gave them... You know, the taheek is when you take dates and put it in the mouth of the child. You mix it with the spittle, put it into the mouth. He did it with his own spittle. And Mujahid who was his student said that he's the only person I know of whose taheik was solely with the", "the Prophet . And he made that prophet very happy because it was a difficult time for the Prophet so when he was born, because it his uncle and his aunt's child Al-Abbas and Umfadl Lubaba. And best position is that they were Muslims even though Abbas hid his Islam for strategic reasons but Ibn Abbas", "When the Prophet died, he was probably 13. There's a Rewa that he was 10. But he soon in his teens became central to Sayyidina Omar's Majlis and a lot of the older people from Badr initially bothered them because he was very young. He is like 16 years old and he is in the Majlisi of Sayyida Omar", "And Sayyidina Omar used to test them and ask them questions, and they couldn't answer. Then he would ask Ibn Abbas, and he would give the right answer, and that's why he is here. So he is an amazing person. He fought at Constantinople. He was there with Yazeed's army when they went with Ibn Omar and others because the Prophet said that", "The army that first goes to Constantinople will be forgiven for their sins. And so he wanted to be in that. And he also fought in Tunisia. I mean, he's amazing. So he wasn't just a scholar. He was out there. You know, he was in Egypt. He", "man, really stunning. And he was also very successful in the world. He became very wealthy. He dressed in very fine clothes. They said his majlis was a majlisi that had poetry and fiqh and Arabic and tafsir, everything. Even though all the poets were there, he was the one that knew the most", "In Tafseer, he's the basis of Tafsir really. Ibn Abbas, the Prophet called him Tarjuman al-Quran. He was called Tarjumana al-quran, the interpreter of the Quran and it came from a dua that the Prophet said, faqahu fi deen wa'alimhu taweel Give him knowledge of this religion and teach him how to interpret So that's a dua the prophet gave for him and it was answered", "eyesight at the end of his life. He got cataracts, and they used to have a treatment for cataract where they would actually scrape the...and then they didn't allow them to...they couldn't go into sajda for about two weeks probably just for pressure or something. He didn't want to do that because he said he couldn't without making sajja for two weeks. It's just too difficult. Really stunning person but this is", "But this is where he died, and he's buried here. And very beloved to the Prophet ﷺ. Also his aunt is Maimunah, who the Prophet married outside of Mecca when he came to make the Umrah. Because Maimuna was the sister of Lubaba, who's his mother. And so he used to be able to go in and out of the Prophet's house, and He would spend time with his aunt. And So he lived with the Prophet intimately", "intimately. And when the other kids used to play, they would tell him come and play with us. And he was saying no I want just get as much knowledge from these men because they're gonna die and then people will look to us. They said no there's plenty of scholars and that kid said that they realized later that Ibn Abbas, because everybody began to go to him for knowledge even the older ones so Allah gave him something from early on", "early on and he's a really amazing man and beloved of the Prophet ﷺ.", "وترفعنا بها عندك أعلى درجات وتبلغنا بأقصى الغايات من جميع الخيرات في الحياة وبعد الممات وعلى آله وصحبه وسلم تسليما سبحان ربك رب العزة عما يوصفون والسلام على المسلمين والحمد لله ربا العالمين" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Moses never did this - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf__1748541790.opus", "text": [ "Now just a few things about our prophet. First of all, there is no prophet that did what our prophet did. None of them. They're all great and the Prophet said not for us not to even though he's Mufaddal but he told us don't go to the Jews our prophets better than your prophet Moses was a great prophet one of the greatest the five major prophets but none of them Moses never" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/They neglected Quran - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf__1748539102.opus", "text": [ "Surah Qaf, which obviously is the name of the surah and it begins with the letter. These are the Muqatta'at letters. Every book Abu Bakr and Umar said every book has a secret and the secret of this book is in these letters. And Allah swears an oath by the glorious Quran, the majestic Quran, The Noble Quran and then tells us that", "diminishes from them and Allah says that he has a book which contains everything in it. And then Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says that they deny the truth when it came to them, and they're confused about it so that they have this confusion. And Allah subhana wa ta-ta'ala then says haven't they considered the heavens?" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Death in the Qur_an by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayu__1743057191.opus", "text": [ "I had a near-death experience, so death was very real and I decided to go through all the world scriptures from the perspective of death. And it was the Quran that really struck me as the one that dealt so much with death. There was just so much in there about death. Um...there are two chapters that devout Muslims recite every day Yaseen and Waqia and they're both basically death meditations. The Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him said", "said to do much remembrance of the destroyer of pleasure, meaning death. And not in a morbid way but just in a way that makes us aware of the fragility of life so that we get more out of life" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Gratitude in Prayer by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayu__1743060704.opus", "text": [ "It's the nature of God to be abundant and so giving us participation in being this extraordinary experience. And so prayer is actually a form of gratitude, and it's a form reorienting because the world you know the vanity fair idea that the world is a place of heedlessness. It's a place where we can easily fall into heedlessness and forget ourselves. In fact the Quran uses", "to forget the self several times. They forgot themselves, and so God forgot them. And remember me and I will remember you." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Secret of the Heart -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayu__1748543504.opus", "text": [ "لو أن الإنسان فقط عرفت قيمة قلوبه ، سوف يستغرق كل ما كان لها بدون أي تجاوز.", "the light of its own secret, the sirr of the human being in the human heart. Then every breath that exits us would be accompanied with a tear, a tear of joy" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/The Day of Judgment -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayu__1742891353.opus", "text": [ "So Allah says that the dunya involves trials and this is important to remember, bala' is not just hardships. We made the whole earth an ornament to test them. To see who's the best in action again. So the zina of the world is a test for people. And then Allah says", "The final test is on Yawm al-Qiyamah. Allah says, يوم تبل السرائر The day when Tubla Qatada said, يختبر The secrets are all revealed and people the real test happens" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/This too shall Pass -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayu__1743308363.opus", "text": [ "Muslims had no problem taking wisdom. Wherever it was, they took it. It's one of the wisdoms from a pre-Islamic Persian king who asked a wise man of Persia, I want you to give me a word that when I'm at the heights of the dunya, it will remind me and when I am at the bottom, I'll want the same thing. So he went and spent time and then he came back with a ring", "in these big Zara this too shall pass so when you're at the height just remember this to show past when you are at the bottom this to shop ass this is doing a doodling keyed in your head it's two days it's just two days one day you're up the next day or down it's a half an inch water and you think you're gonna drown as John" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/You had a Beginning -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayu__1748523696.opus", "text": [ "There was a beginning to all this. There were first parents, Adam and Eve. So it's a reminder that you had a beginning, your species had a begining. Although you came from your parents, your parents had parents who had parents all the way back. There is no infinite regress and there is no circular reasoning. You have to arrive at a first cause. Allah is reminding us that once you determine, once you understand that you have a Lord, you have to worship that Lord.", "worship that Lord. And the purpose of that worship is to achieve what the Quran calls, لَعْلُكُمْ تَتَّقُونَ That perhaps you might gain this piety" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Love of Prophet ﷺ -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayusu__1743071358.opus", "text": [ "Many people hate the Prophet because they don't know, they heard lies about him. They heard lies, really terrible lies too. And so once they got to know him that they would love him. Sophia, she was the wife of one of the notables when Khyber happened. She was taken captive. The Prophet sat with her for two hours explaining why he fought her family and she said", "And she said, he was the most hated person to me. And after those two hours there was nobody in this world more beloved to me.\" And one day she came to him complaining about how the women called her a Yehudia. He said go back tell them my father's Aaron, my uncle's Moses and my husband's Muhammad." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Look Deeply at The Creation - Hamza Yusuf_WKiJi61ggnI&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748523343.opus", "text": [ "And so when you look at the stars, you see them moving but they're actually stationary. When you look in the mountains, you'll see them stationary but they are actually moving. So it's complete opposite and this is one of the amazing miracles. In the Quran, Allah says, أَوْ وَنَمْ تَرَىٰ إِلَى رَبِّكَ كَيْفَ مَدَّ الظِّلُّ Haven't you seen your Lord how He made the shadow move?", "And had Allah wanted, He would have made the shadow still. وَجْعَلْنَا الشَّمْسَ عَلَيْهِ دَلِيلًا And we made the sun a dahlil for the movement of the shadow which indicates that the sun is stationary. He didn't say the sun causing... The movement of sun is causing the shadow to move. It's the turning of earth that causes the shadow", "that you're seeing the movement of the shadow. So here, you've got these opposites. You have stars that are moving that ornament the sky but they're not moving in reality for us and then you've mountains that are with the turning of the earth but they appear to a stable. They're the zina of the Earth as the stars are the zinna of the sky", "The nabat is based on breaking through. It's all shukooq. So Allah is telling us, look deeply into creation and reflect on these things and see how Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is doing all these things because you're going to conclude from this that there's a mudabbir behind this. You're gonna conclude that Allah subhana wa ta-ala that there has to be an intelligence behind this,", "An alim behind this, a qadir behind this A mureed behind this All of these will lead you to that And that's why after showing that they deny this Allah is saying You haven't thought about this deeply You need to think deeper You need look at the creation And then Allah says This is a tabseerah", "Some of them say it's a mastar like basr hu Allah that Allah is making you see it or it's ahal, or it maf'ulun bihi. I mean there are different ways you can view it grammatically but it's basically Allah doing this as tabseerah He's doing this to show us to give us basirah so we can actually see because they have luhum uyun They have eyes but they don't see with their eyes This is part of the blindness of the human being", "being. They don't see and so Allah is telling us to look, think and see. This is from the Inaba, the servant who turns back to Allah .", "And we sent down from the heaven blessed rain. And we brought forth with it gardens, jannat, wa habbal hasid. And the habbal hasnid is the zara that's mahsood. So it's the actual seed that we grow. So Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala brings forth the burr and the shaeer and the qamah. All these blessings that come from this water.", "Don't you see every year here in just our Bay Area, every year all the green now that's everywhere. All these hills are covered. Those were dead hills a few months ago. They were dead. If you go up there, all of that was dead but then the water comes and it is brought back to life. Every morning when you wake up, the Prophet said", "هذا هو الشيء الأول الذي قاله عندما وقع في الوقت لأن الله يجعلنا ننوم كل ربعة وهو مثل الموت لا يوجد شيئ يمكننا فعله كذلك كالشخص الذي ترى الروح تصل إلى الحلقون لا يمكنك فعل أي شيء لا يستطيع أن تحمله والأمر نفسه مع النوم، النوم يساعدك", "Sleep conquers you. Milton called it the gentle tyrant because it conquers You and so every morning Your eyes open up if You're lucky, and there You are again back to life brought back to light and You actually come up just as they will come in the grave when They're called again", "Who woke us up from our sleep. This is what, and yet we're reminded every single day of our life, of this reality. Every single day. And that's why the Prophet said, وإليك النشور And to you is the resurrection. That's how he viewed waking up from sleep. It reminded him another day. I have another day to get close to my Lord", "ونحن نتقل إلى الله لإستعداد على هذه المؤكدة وهي موتنا", "shows to highlight out of all the things that grow from the earth because there's actually a rewire that says the date palm was created from the leftover clay of Adam . There's a rewired that say it's our paternal uncle, Amatuna.", "in the Arab tradition, the honor of the date palm. And one of the things about the date poem if you look at it first of all is the first stage of the flowering and its . It's also I think there's another , there's a another verse that uses another word", "The date palm is a miraculous tree because every single part of the date palm was used. There's nothing that's not used by the Arabs traditionally, they built with it, the Prophet's Masjid, the first Masjids was built with trunks and then the palm fibers,", "they would put the aliaf inside the bed. They used it to clean their teeth, so that actual mokhalil was used from the palm froths, the fibers. And then there are over 450 varieties of dates. Like somebody just sent me, Shaykh Abdullah Qadi sent me from Al-Ahsa Ruzayz which they call it Barney because that's the Muntakhab for the Eastern Arabs during Ramadan", "Ramadan they all eat the Ruzays. The Prophet loved Ajwa and the Hadith Sahih in Al-Bukhari praising the Ajwa that whoever eats Sabaa, if you ate eight in the morning then no Sihra or Sum can get you. So the Prophet lived on dates we know Aisha didn't see any smoke coming out of his", "coming out of his house for two months, and they asked Aisha what were you eating? Because there was no smoke. She said, We used to just live on the two black things. So those... The Arabs often do that because dates tend to be black, especially the ajwa are very black. But they're dark. And then the water when you drink it from the bowls that they traditionally drank with, it takes on the color of the bowl so it would look dark as well.", "well. So it's water and dates. The Prophet said in the Sahih Hadith, whoever has dates in their house will never go hungry. Dates can last a very long time. They enabled the Arabs to travel long distances and that was the food they took and it didn't spoil. It's one of the blessings. Basikat is another beautiful word because one of", "So the Basiqat, they're pregnant because dates need to be fertilized. So you have to pollinate the male date palm. The tala from the male day palm is pollinated onto the fruit of the female date palm and that's what the Arabs do so they actually do it themselves. They pollinate", "And so from that, the female brings the fruit. So it's a very interesting tree that again Allah is telling them to look and think about these things. They're high also, high palm trees.", "for all the people, and that's for everybody. And then we bring with this water a dead land back to life. So this is all taking people to an understanding of the Ba'ath. The resurrection is real. These verses are to help people understand if they think deeply about this", "they will come to the conclusion" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Timesless interview of Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_2-E2i6Rb6Mo&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743310746.opus", "text": [ "So let's talk about Islamic philosophy. What are the core building blocks that Islamic philosophy is built upon? The core building block... Well, I think first of all, Islamic philosophy has two roads. One of them is the philosophers themselves people like Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Avicenna and they pursue a very specific", "specific philosophical tract but because they were believers, they obviously bring in Islam to some degree. The other track though is really a philosophical track that's profoundly rooted in the Islamic tradition itself and so you see the flourishing of it with people like al-Ghazali and then ultimately moving into the great scholastics", "of the people like Sa'duddin Tabtizani, Abdulddin al-Iji, Fakhruddin al Razi. And they're using the philosophers but they're really integrating them into the Islamic tradition so it's a very rich tradition but it's rooted in the Quran and I think it's it's", "creation of God so they're very interested in proving or giving rational beliefs for that. So the Kalam Cosmological Argument comes out of this idea to prove the world had a beginning, something obviously at the time the philosophers who were the scientists of that time did not believe and so it's very interesting that the prophets asserted something that would have been anti-scientific and yet today scientists are asserting what the prophets had asserted you know", "also the end of the world that the world comes to an end so i think there's uh there's a very rich islamic philosophical tradition it eventually moves in almost entirely into a religious metaphysical tradition and it's kept alive today largely by the shia community so the the shias have a great", "still pockets but overall it's more become a formal tradition where, more dogmatic, where they learn dogmatically the text as opposed to really delving deep into the philosophical issues. But there is a resurgence of kalam and philosophy amongst young Muslims so it's interesting. Let's go back to the origin as you said in the two foundations one is", "embedded in the religious tradition. What are some examples of each and how do they articulate? Well, I think what happens with the Arabs...I mean obviously the Arabs before Islam are relegated to a pretty provincial isolated area, the Arabian Peninsula. You did have some Arabs in the Levant, in places like Syria", "which is Israel, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon. In that area you did have Christian Arabs and so they would've been exposed to some degree to the Byzantine tradition, the philosophical tradition of the Byzantium Christians but the Muslims discover the Greeks", "new trajectory because prior to that they were definitely rooted in their tradition but suddenly they discover the Greeks, they also discover Christian theology so the Christian theology suddenly kind of excites them. I mean i'll give you an example there's a verse in the Quran that says that Christ is the kalima which could mean logos I mean it means word but obviously it could mean", "if Christ is the Kelima, the Logos, is God's Logos eternal? And therefore, is Christ eternal?\" So you can see the syllogism being set up there. And so that was a first kind of shock to them and that develops what's called the Kalam tradition of having to deal with questions that are being posited to them because I mean, I think any faith becomes challenged when it steps outside", "positions, other views. And I think it makes faith stronger especially when it's challenged by even within itself by heretical ideas and this is where you get the dialectic between heresy and orthodoxy and then very often there's synthesis and so i think that's what's happening in that early period with these philosophers they're thinking deeply about issues they're also beginning to organize in a way because the Quran", "comes with very, it's a non-linear book. And so it's speaking in first person, second person. It's something in Arabic called iltifat which is very unusual. So God's changing constantly we, you, I, he and so that creates a kind of vertigious experience when reading the Quran for people who are not accustomed to that. The Bible is much more linear", "linear. So when they meet the Greeks, they kind of are confronted with a much more structured way of viewing things and so that begins to emerge a kind of structured philosophy and it becomes highly developed and I think a lot of the most educated Europeans and Westerners generally know the incredible debt that western civilization has on the Islamic tradition including", "Imam al-Ghazali's famous Maqasid al-Philafifa, which is the aims of the philosophers was translated into Hebrew and became it was really kind of like a dummy philosophy for dummies. But it became a major work. And in fact, Professor Chertoff who was at Columbia University did his PhD on the influence of Ghazali on the rabbinical tradition. What are some of the fundamental ontological aspects of Islamic philosophy?", "Obviously, God is the preeminent element. But one question that comes up in various traditions is the world that God created real or is it just sort of the emanation of God in some almost virtual sense? Right. And I think the Muslims generally our tradition adheres to a kind of correspondence theory. There is an idea that God has created", "mind, that it's not a trick. It's not an Akarsian Cartesian demon who is fooling us in some way. We're not in the matrix. That my experience of you, that you are objectively real to me and that my mind experiences you and that I can assume that you indeed do exist. And we can exchange ideas because our minds are designed to be able to collaborate in", "There are many verses in the Quran that say that God created the heavens and earth with truth, bil haq. And so there's an idea that truth is here and that this... The beautiful word in Arabic for world is alam which means the instrument of knowledge. And So the idea is that the particulars of the world are meant to take us to an aggregate", "the world and so it's designed, and our minds are designed to move towards a knowledge of God. There is a beautiful book that was written called Hayy ibn Yaqdan, it's a famous book The Awake Son of the Awake but it's philosophical musing by an Andrusian philosopher that actually had influence in the West and his idea as kind of Robinson Crusoe character who comes he's on a desert island", "to just reflect. And his reflection ultimately takes him to God. And so the Quran definitely has this idea about if you reflect deeply, there are many verses in the Quran telling us, reflect deeply. Think about these signs. And the fact that the Quran calls... There are two signs. The signs that are actually the verses of the Quran are called signs. So they need to be decoded. But then there's also the idea that the greater world is... It's a natural theology approach.", "natural theology. And I think one of the beauties of the Quran is it's constantly telling... Some people think religion is telling us to stop thinking and just simply become dogmatic, and just be fideistic. The Quran is saying, think. Haven't you looked at the camel how it was created? Haven't we looked at winds, how they work in such magnificent order? So there's this idea that there's order in creation,", "I mean, one of the reasons that the Quran gives for understanding God is that there's a kind of providential care that God has given us. And there are many verses that tell us about the blessings. Like haven't you seen how everything is... We made the earth... There's a beautiful verse that says we made the Earth a bed for you and in the commentaries they say it's neither too hard", "hard like rock so you couldn't build on it nor is it too soft like sand so you could live on it but he made it in that middle area like a bed no you don't want to bet too hard or too soft and so those are the kind of blessings that and then food the diversity of food all these things the idea is to reflect on these and to kind of come to conclusions that there's there's a creator behind this there", "and it's a source that speaks to us through these individuals, the great Jewish prophets. We believe that Christ obviously is one of the prophets not son of God but a prophet and then the Prophet Muhammad so there is... And that's not limited to the Jewish prophets There's a belief in the Quran tells us that every peoples have been given prophets So the Asian people had their prophets", "you know, the native peoples here in America had their profits. Everybody has been given some kind of access to this supra rational world because our intellects science has a ceiling and there's an unknowable aspect of what's beyond that. And so that's where metaphysics comes in.", "I really like to understand the Islamic God. I am more familiar in terms of conversations with the God as portrayed in Christian philosophy, to a lesser degree Jewish philosophy and I know there are great similarities but let's drill down to the Islamic god. I've heard of the 99 names. I understand the apophatic tradition that we can only know God", "which I thought, little I've read of Islamic philosophy, seeing God as beyond being not a category that even can be conceptualized was very enlightening, very exciting to me. So I want to understand the depth of the nature of God or Allah. Right. So bismillah, the nature", "that there's something beyond us, there's a creator. The idea of recognizing our own createdness, that we weren't here and now we're here, and we know that soon we will not be here, other people will be here. And so the Jewish understanding of God which comes into the world obviously with the great Jewish tradition basically morphs into Christianity", "which has a very different view of God. And then about 600 years later, the prophet comes and really is addressing both the Jewish and the Christian understandings, acknowledging the Jewish God but criticizing the Christian God. So there's this idea of restoring a kind of radical monotheism to God. I think that's at the heart of Islam is to restore a radical monothelism to", "without any partners, without any personas, the persons of God, the triune God. And so for Muslims, we learn about God first and foremost from the Quran. But outside of that, there is also an understanding in our tradition that you should not be... Your belief in God should not a type of imitation of just simply something that drives atheists crazy. Why do", "well, how do you know the Qur'an's from God? Because God says so. Where does he say it in the Qur-an? So there's this idea of trying to get out of that circular reasoning by really coming to a natural philosophy and a natural understanding of God. So you have those two tracks. If we look at what the Qurr-an says about God, the most fundamental thing it says about god is la ilaha illallah. There is no god. There", "There's a different opinion about it, but one of the opinions is that it comes from walaha which means to bewilder or to perplex. Elohai in the Jewish tradition they have elohim, ilah in Arabic these are related there are others Muslim scholars say Allah is just uniquely a name that has no derivation that it's the personal name of God It's like John or Mark as the person name of a human being", "being. And so Muslims try to understand God through the Quran first and foremost, and the most fundamental verse that tells us about God is the 112th chapter which is a stunning summation of the reality of God. So it says قل هو الله أحد say god is one and one is not a number in the Arabic tradition numbers begin with two", "one. God is cannot be, there's no hollowness to God. God has no needs and then God was not begotten nor did he beget. And then finally there's nothing like unto God. So any idea that comes", "a student of theology was anything that occurs to your mind, God is other than that. So we cannot conceptualize God. God has no gender. Unfortunately in Arabic you can speak without the problem of masculine feminine like you can in Persian. In English we have he and she and it. And so generally the Quran has been translated with the masculine but there's no masculinity associated with God.", "a possessor of majestic attributes and a possesser of beautiful attributes. But that verse, according to our theologians, looks at these eight aspects. The first God is one. It means that God is neither composite. He's simple. He is neither composites nor are there partners. There aren't gods beside him so it negates those two aspects. Allah-u-Samad he neither has need", "in need of God. So he has no needs, he's free of needs and defects. And then , He is neither caused nor does he cause anything in an Aristotelian first mover sense that's connected with the cause. So He neither causes a cause-and-effects sense, nor is He caused Himself.", "no peer and he has no opposite. So that really sums up, it's an extraordinary chapter because even a Bedouin can learn that. And I was once in the United Arab Emirates and I was with some Bedouins and they asked me what my religion was before Islam and I said it was Orthodox Christian. And they said, What did they believe? And I said well they believed Jesus is Son of God. And then one of the young Bedouine...and they had their sticks you know that", "because he didn't have a father, so God must've been his Father. And the other Bedouin took his stick and hit him on his knee and said, , He neither begot nor was he begotten. And it really struck me these were illiterate people but this verse, you know, this short chapter made him a kind of theologian. How do you contrast the two ideas that God is being", "God is beyond categories which you described very eloquently in the so-called apophatic tradition that you can only know God as opposed to asserting. And yet on the other hand, you have the 99 names of God, which are all positive affirmations. Sure. Great question. So first of all, the Aristotelian category begins with substance and then it's got", "is not a substance. There's no genus, God is outside of the idea of genus and species so we can't define him in a traditional way that logicians would have used in pre-modern logic but at the same time... And this is where you get in our tradition what's called tenzih and teshbiha which tenzihi has like transcendence that God is transcended utterly transcendent", "us to know is through attributes and but those attributes have to be understood in a kind of mathematical sense of any number over infinity is zero so the idea that it's approximations. So we, the 99 names tell us that God is merciful and compassionate. Those are the first two attributes in the Quran. So how do we know mercy and compassion? Well the Quran says look into yourselves you", "so that we can know this imago Dei, that we could know God through reflecting on ourselves. And that's why the great polymath, Persian Polymath Raghavir Spahani says that every book that has ever been revealed has said in it, Know yourself and you will know God in some way or another. And so self-knowledge is what will take us to a kind of knowledge of God. And thats natural theology too. That's a natural theology absolutely.", "names. There are 99 names. So there's actually 121 names in the Quran, but there are 99 that the prophet said whoever memorizes them and knows them will enter paradise if they know them. Yeah. And so like the Jewish tradition has 72 names of God in some of the iterations. So the idea that God has multiple names... In fact, in our tradition, there are names that we don't know. God has withheld names from us.", "have taught to a prophet or taught to someone, or you have kept in your own knowledge so that God has infinite names because he's infinite. Hamza, in Islam what is the nature of the person? And normally we ask is there a non-physical component that makes us who we are? Is it some kind of spirit? Is there an immortal soul in the platonic sense? What makes us mentally human beings?", "human beings. Right, so the Quran gives five different words that compose the human being it gives a word which means It's a difficult word now because we intellect means something very different to modern people than it did to pre-modern people because Intellect is from Latin this idea of being able to judge between things", "is an immaterial that moves towards intelligibles. So it's an immateriel quality of the human being that moves toward intelligible. If I'm studying mathematics, my intellect is moving towards these abstract entities we call numbers that are intelligibles and then we have the Quran has what's called Ruach which is ruakh in Hebrew.", "this is the spirit when it's directed towards the ultimate reality, which is God and not to the intelligibles. And then the nafs is the next one. Nefesh in Hebrew also is the idea of the soul but it's the soul when it is directed toward worldly things, the more lower things generally.", "we have this body and then it talks about the heart. So these are the... The heart represents emotion? The heart, represents intellect also. The Quran says they have hearts but they don't reason with them. And so there's this connection between the qalb and aql. So the Qalb in Arabic, the heart comes from a word which means to oscillate between two opposites. So it literally can mean to be turned upside down.", "move towards good, but then sometimes they can move towards the opposite. And that's the human condition. You know our lives have a mingled... So there is a moral component to that? There's a moral components exactly so the heart is related and then there are other words like Fuad is another word it very rich words so that's benefits of the heart gets from perceiving reality. Okay so if we take all five or six together as a composite what does that imply about the nature of the person?", "That we're very complex. Okay, we're are complex. We're very Complex and that we have a natural movement towards the good so this is understood that the soul wants to know God, the soul was created to know god and that's a natural Movement towards good when Aristotle says in book one of the metaphysics that all humans want to know that is very consonant with a Muslim understanding", "And this is what in our tradition is called the intellectual potential, what the scholastics call the apprehensive appetite. Apprehensive meaning quick to understand, the desire to know. And so the human being is a composite of heaven and earth. And this why we have an angelic nature and then we have a bestial nature.", "this kind of antagonistic relationship. So God put the head on the top, he put the thumos, the chest in the middle and then he put stomach and genitals down below and that's the order for an upright person to be following. So reason should govern irascibility, emotions and appetite. When it gets turned upside-down, that's . It literally means to be turned upside down so when", "the human being now is completely discombobulated. He's completely... Now, these are attributes in the sense of the expressions of what a person is, but what is kind of the mechanism that's causing that? Because you can—I mean from my old science and neuroscience I can make an argument how all", "and that's all you need to do that uh on the other hand some people talk about there you have to have an immortal soul that that that creates that so those attributes are they each have a different kind of character the body is that can obviously be physical emotions or one thing and intellect is another uh nephesh and ruach pardon my knowledge of hebrew not arabic but", "And so those are slightly different categories. Right. And so how were they generated? What is the mechanism? Well, there's an immaterial soul in our tradition. I mean we believe that God breathes into the human being the nefesh, you know, the ruach, the soul and that's what animates us. And that's why if you see a dead person... You know, I've washed many bodies.", "intensive care unit and saw many people die. There is such an extraordinary difference between an animated living human being and a corpse. I mean, we can just see that something profoundly missing there with the loss of that breath, you know? Which in Arabic, the word for soul is related both ru'ah and nafash are related to breath. And so this idea", "idea of this spirit. The Native Americans used to use the pipe to show the breath so that they could see that it was a human and not an inanimate type of spirit. So I think the soul is, the Quran, the definitive verse about the Quran is they ask you about the soul, say the soul", "the knowledge. We believe in the soul, and in fact Raghav says, the great Persian polymath, he says that the ancients considered crazy anybody that denied the existence of the soul because it was so self-evident. And so I think the reductionist model to neuroscience...I mean we don't know consciousness. We don't really still know what it is. We can understand the hardware but where's the software? Where's the cloud? You know what", "the pre-moderns had the idea of the agent intellect which is kind of like the cloud and then and then the intellect itself which is the soft you know the hardware but consciousness what is that what is the light big debate in the philosophical community all whom may be atheists but they have very different views on the nature of consciousness and the requirement of something not physical in our sense of physical today that's necessary right um", "have an immortal soul as part of the tradition. It's less clear, some would say it's not in the Hebrew Bible and the Hebrew bible talks about resurrection as opposed to an immortal Soul but those are different kinds of debates. If you look at the brain itself, the triune nature of the brain I mean we have this R-stem, this reptilian brain which is you know it's this ancient survival brain and then we have", "And again, it's top to bottom. There's an ordering there. And so the challenge I think for Muslims we are challenged to use our reason to really take hold of ourselves, to discipline our souls. The Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him he said that the intelligent one is the one who disciplines his soul or her soul and works for what is coming both in this world", "but particularly in the next. And he said, The fool is the one that lets the soul do as it pleases. You know, do what thou wilt. The Thalema, you know, the Abbey of Thalma, Rabelais. Is there a distinction between the person and the self? You know I think person is more in the Christian tradition. It's a very important concept because of the persons of God and obviously the human person. But even in Arabic, I've kind of looked for a corresponding word", "and they're really i don't think there is you know the same idea but the idea that each one of us is an individual and that each One of Us is created by God and should have the dignity of The One Created By God That's very important assuming There Is Some Kind Of Immortal Soul And That Comes From God How Does That Happen Or When Does That happen and I'm Not Asking About An Abortion Issue What Happens That's Irrelevant To", "to what I'm interested in. What is relevant is, is it a specific act of God that picks an immortal soul for you and picked one for me? Right. And pick one for everyone. Everyone has their special nature that God picked an immortal so or is it something that sort of part of the process of the natural creation that a soul sort of comes with the package because", "that God created. So is it a sort of, not mechanical thing but the way God created things souls come into bodies or does God have to take an individual effort for each one on a particular basis? Yeah so I would say that the soul... The Quran says we were created from one soul. Okay yeah and then there's a particularization", "the loins of that first soul and God brought them all forth as souls so we have been in another world um and all the souls came out and and and god says to all the Souls am I not your lord and all The Souls answered in affirmative and then we come into this world okay and what we need is recollection there's an idea that we have to remember so the quran is constantly telling us", "Wow. And so that's why when the child comes into the world, the very first thing that's done is the person should whisper the adhan, the call to prayer in the ear of the child and then give it a date on the tongue. And if you remember the covenant, you will have the sweetness of God's blessing. That's a nice metaphor. Yeah. How does that tie into an Eastern reincarnation? There's a little bit of a resonance there.", "There's some resonance, but we don't believe in reincarnation in that way. What we do believe, the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him, and this is very interesting from genetics, he said that every soul that comes into the world was prepared by every previous ancestor that had all the way back to its first ancestors so they all participated into the coming-in of existence of that soul. And there's a very interesting verses about how God has", "rakab, which is literally to bring together in this combinatorial fashion each individual unique human being. So our genetic composition is completely unique for each human being and that is somehow related because we believe in the body. This is a non-physical genetics as well as a physical. Exactly, I think it's both. And so in terms of coming in, the soul coming into", "The vast majority of scholars say 120 days. There is a smaller minority, and I'm amongst them that says it's around 40 days after conception. And I think the embryology shows that now based on certain criteria. I would be skeptical of that but you would expect me to be skeptical Yeah, of course. Of numbers and specificity like that. But what was interesting to me if God created all this universe of souls or", "that everything is part of. Is there therefore a finite number of those, and once you've apportioned that one soul into all its pieces, you got nothing left? Or does God have to recreate something more? Well we believe that God's recreating in every instant. So but so this is one big soul that God created originally... It says we were created from one soul,", "But there was some substance, non-physical substance. It's non- physical. We wouldn't call it a substance yet. It is an immaterial spirit. Is it immaterial? Substance can be immaterial. Yeah that's true in the Catholic tradition. So it's an immaterial spirit and then it can be cut into infinite number of pieces or... I mean I don't know. That's God's knowledge. Don't you do everything? I don' t know very little. I feel embarrassed.", "imposter syndrome yeah what do we know really i mean we're all here trying to learn yeah i'm saying looking at the world's religions uh one um nodal point is the nature of ultimate reality in the abrahamic religions of course it is god in various different ways of perceiving god and", "and in some Eastern tradition, Buddhism in particular but aspects of Hinduism perhaps some Chinese philosophy the dominant essence is a kind of consciousness. A cosmic consciousness an all-pervading consciousness in which our consciousness is a part of or some sort of a segmental process How do you... now obviously consciousness is", "the philosophy of mind we have we really don't understand what it is to have this in felt inner experience whether neuroscience alone can explain it many people would be in doubt of that i'd be among them at least even though i was a neuroscientist by training but from an islamic point of view as you look at consciousness", "or cosmic consciousness. What's your reaction to that? And how do you articulate the Islamic beliefs with that? Right, so, Smeena, the idea of the word itself I think is relatively new it's really something a 20th century obsession about consciousness. I think the pre-moderns would have had a very different view of things. In our tradition knowledge God has absolute knowledge", "knowledge, knowledge of all things, knowledge God's self. And that knowledge we have been given a portion of knowledge but it's very limited, but it enables us to know God and there is this idea I think the mind itself, we actually believe in what are called degrees of existence so one of the degrees of", "a mental existence, that things have mental existence. So we can think of things like I can think about unicorn and that has a mental existance it doesn't have an extra-mental existance as far as we know. I mean a narwhal is an interesting unicorn in the sea but the idea that God has given us imagination that we can", "all these contingent possibilities. And that gives us an indication that God has infinite possibilities, that God can actualize an infinite number of possibilities. Because our minds represent God in some way. It's an indication. It is an approximation. If we can imagine things that don't exist then God can imagine them. Exactly. God has given us something of an understanding", "of hearing, of seeing, of sight, of consciousness, of intellect, of imagination. These are all things that enable us to somehow get some approximation. But the most important thing in our tradition is this idea of waking up. There's an idea that we're actually asleep. So Imam Ali said all of humanity is asleep and when they die they wake up. And then he says die before you die.", "actually asleep we're dreaming and so there's this idea of awakening to reality awakening and that something that can occur in life or has to wait till after it preferably occurs here if it doesn't occur here it will occur with the great awakening which is death yeah so so there s this idea before death the idea of we have a word in our tradition called fana", "It means to be blown out. And so it's the idea of having the self blown out, so that it can perceive reality and... Is that in core Islam or is that in the...? That's in core Islamic, that's in traditional... That's not mysticism, Sufism? Well, think about when they talk about Sufisim and mysticism all of the Muslims had some commitment to mysticism. All of them.", "Ibn Taymiyyah uses the word fana. Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, scholars that are traditionally associated with a kind of anti-mystical doctrine, they use these doctrines. They were first formulated by a great Baghdadi scholar, Imam al-JUNayd. And they're accepted by the Muslims. So I believe it's core Islam and I'm not saying that as some kind of heterodoxic view. This is orthodoxy. It really", "really is traditional Islam. So yeah, there is an understanding that we can wake up to reality in life and that's called... We could call that the path of sanctification. So the other path is the path salvation which a vast majority of humans take and that just getting by. There's a bare minimum, a baseline of practice that if you do that your promise salvation but there are those in the world that it's not enough for them. They want to know God here", "God. And they set out on that pursuit, and it's a dangerous pursuit because there are a lot of thorns on that path. What kind of thorn? Well, self-delusion is a big one. You know to think that you've actually had some kind of arrival. There's a great Zen story about the enlightened monk who came to talk to all the Zen,", "enlightenment is an illusion. And so everybody left except one, and he said, what are you doing? He said, well I've been sitting here thinking I'm enlightened, I realize it's just early senility. So I mean there is delusional states, and people fall into these states, that's why humility is so important in our Islamic tradition. The Prophet said, I was commanded to be humble despite being a prophet,", "That's why a true sage in the Islamic tradition sees everybody as better than them, even the ignorant ones. Because they might have an excuse with God because of their ignorance whereas somebody who knows has no excuse. And is there something like a cosmic consciousness that pervades reality that's independent of God or not? You know I just...I'm a little hesitant to use words that are outside of our tradition.", "has absolute knowledge and his knowledge is everywhere, that God's knowledge he is with us wherever we are. His knowledge is with as He knows. God knows everything. God know what's happening and so in that way God is mindful of His creation and in fact the Quran says there's an amazing verse", "self and in the horizon until it becomes clear to you that this is truth. And then it says, does it not suffice you that God is witnessing all things? So this idea that things could not exist without the witnessing of God, kind of the idea that...and as you know in physics, this idea if the observer's not there, does", "consciousness itself, our awareness. That requires some sort of an implantation of a soul from God? Absolutely. It's a light. We believe that consciousness is a light that God has placed into the human being and that... This is not metaphor. This is no metaphor. It' s a light... It's something that's a non-physical something. I'd say it's a spiritual light. And it's resonant in each person as their own", "their own thing. And the mirror of the soul has to be polished because the light cannot shine through unless there's a polishing and the polishing of that is mindfulness, is remembrance of God. That's how one polishes the soul. And if that polishing occurs then reality begins to present itself as it is reality. Most people when they think of the Islamic tradition", "and a lot of experiences, people praying five times a day, facing Mecca, various kinds of mysticism, ascetic practices. Each religious tradition has its own set of practices. So what I want to understand is in the Islamic tradition,", "traditional behaviors, but more importantly why do those behaviors facilitate the ultimate goal? So, Bismillah. The prayer itself is really the central pillar that holds the tent so to speak up and obviously the very first pillar of our tradition is there's no God but God", "peace be upon him, is the messenger of God then he tells us what God wants from us. And one of the most important things is prayer itself that it's actually good for us we believe that God has no need of his creation that there's an abundance that God and the creation comes out of that abundance but it does not come", "to be abundant. And so giving us participation in being this extraordinary experience. And prayer is actually a form of gratitude and it's a form reorienting because the world, you know, the vanity fair idea that the world is a place of heedlessness. It's a place that we can easily fall into heedlessness and forget ourselves. In fact, the Quran uses that term to forget", "several times. They forgot themselves, and so God forgot them. And remember me, and I will remember you.\" And one of the things Kierkegaard said is something that fascinated me. He said that one of most dangerous things in the world is to lose yourself. That it's...he said it's the easiest thing in the word to do. He says you can lose your wife or your spouse,", "and recognize it. But he said, but people lose themselves all the time and they're completely unaware of it. That is why the prayer brings us back. It reorients us. I mean, reorient to go back to the east, you know, to go where the sun is rising, to where that light is coming forth. You know, that's the essence of the prayer. And that's why it's the fundamental practice", "is also a Quranic recitation, this idea in the Hindu tradition they have the smriti which is this idea of remembering the scripture because the scripture brings us back. The scripture has all these reminders that there's the fragrance of death on every page of the Quran it's reminding us that we are temporal beings, that life is very fragile, that we can lose our lives at any time as Hammett said the readiness is all you know", "for meeting god the prayer itself um what are the essence uh what's the essence of it how long is it it's not long there are five prayers the first one is at dawn so when the first light comes each one is different yeah so yeah each one istifferent so we wake upwe're encouraged to wake up before dawn and do night prayers so that's called night vigilso that's that's very important", "So the idea is we get up at dawn as a baseline. You can do other practices, and then you do a ritual washing which in the Jewish tradition they have the mikvah. You know, you have certain ritual washings. Well, we have a rusul, which is akin to the mikveh, and them we have wudu, which... A beautiful translation of that is lustrations because it's something that brightens you. And so before we pray,", "wash our face, our hands up to the elbows and then our feet. And then we wipe our heads. And that's just to prepare ourselves to enter into the divine presence. And you come to the prayer and it's... You say God Allahu Akbar and you make that motion of just... It's like putting everything behind you, like the whole world behind you. And your coming in to the presence of God. And every prayer has to have the Fatiha which is the first chapter of the Quran", "And it begins in the third person, but then it goes to the first person. So it's the idea we come into this kind of absence of God, we enter into the presence and then it's Iyakanabudu, to you alone we worship. And so that is to reorient every day. And then when the sun goes to zenith and moves one degree, that's the second prayer.", "when the shadow reaches its length after the zenith, then again we do the afternoon prayer. And they have different circuits like it's about five minutes. I mean you could do it pretty fast. It's better to do it properly but some people do it quite fast and then you have the sunset prayer and then the prayer when the light of the sun is gone, the last prayer. So we pray five times a day bare minimum. There are 17 different circuits of the prayers", "of the prayer so what does that mean in other words that standing bowing prostrating sitting that's one circuit okay and each each each prayer has like the first prayer has two of those oh okay yeah and they actually make the human form and they", "and there are 17 positions? No, there's 17 circuits. So standing, bowing, standing again, prostrating, sitting, prostrated, prostrate, prostratting, standing. That's one circuit. The human body. And there are 16 others like that? Yeah, you'll do all together 17 during one day. Okay. So two in the morning, four at the Dohor, four", "the sunset prayer and four at the night. And each one is a different sequence? The same. Oh, so each of the 17 are exactly the same. Exactly the same but the ones that night or out loud and the ones in the day are silent because there's a cosmology of very akin to yin yang you know the idea of the day is it's a time of the outward and so the prayer is inward and at night it's time of", "a lot of that cosmology is there any numerology significance to the five times a day or the 17. yeah there are sacred numbers in the Islamic tradition so obviously one is the most sacred and like I said it wasn't considered a number and then um five has obviously a cosmological reality and traditional world views had", "many things. And then seven is another number, it's a perfect number between the four and three addition. So Muslims tend to shy away from too much numerology. There's a recognition that it's real and that it does have significance. 70 is a sacred number, 99 is a secret number, 33 is a sacret number. How about 17 for the different circuits? Yeah I don't know the significance of that but these are", "super rational, like God has kept things of why he does things. But we know for instance, I mean cortisol levels are highest at that point in the morning and definitely we also know grounding now, the importance of grounding, the important of actually just grounding our bodies to the earth. And that's why it's actually a want of the Prophet to actually pray directly on something that comes from the Earth. Is there any intercessionary objective", "objective of prayer, of this kind of prayer? Absolutely. So are you able to ask Allah to do things and... I mean we tend to, we ask God to choose for us like we have a prayer called the istikhara. You know they say more tears have been shed over answered prayers than unanswered prayers. I think there's a lot of truth to that. We tend to ask God if this is good for us then make it happen. If it's not then divert it from us so but", "and ask for good health, well-being. We pray for people, other people. We ask God to give them good health or make it easy their sickness, things like that. And is there an increased likelihood of those things happening? You know, there's a difference of opinion. There's verses in the Quran that say had it not been for your prayers of intercession then God would not give you that attention but there's also an idea", "and our need of God. That the idea of, God knows best what's for us so whether it's answered or not we don't really put a lot of... It'd be nice when prayers are answered right? But but it's not something that oh he didn't answer my prayers you know he's angry at me no it's he didn' t answer my prayer as it must be better for me that they weren't answered.", "have the problem of evil which Christian philosophy and to a lesser degree Jewish philosophy have wrestled with? Bismillah. Well, first of all I think the fact you said to a", "or the devil having some kind of independent power. But evil is understood in the Islamic tradition, we have six core beliefs that every Muslim has to believe in and one of them is called the qadr which is often translated as fate I think a better translation for it is the measuring out and that's of good and evil that God has measured out In other words, God allows these things to happen", "purpose. We can distinguish, obviously you're well aware of the distinguishing between moral and natural evil. So as moral agents we have free will, so human beings can perpetuate great evils on other people. And there are reasons for that, one of the fundamental reasons is it enables certain things to happen like for instance if", "There could not be the patience of the oppressed. There could be the display of the virtue of the oppress. There cannot be forgiveness. These are all very important, God forgives and so judge not lest he be judged as you're the standard by which you judge. So too shall you be judged. So the idea is that we want to forgive. We want to overcome certain qualities of the soul.", "is not equivalent, although if you go back into Old English perhaps you'll find some equivalence. In Old English evil I think it comes one of the word meanings of it as defect and also mean illness. And so I think that's closer to Islamic understanding that evil is a want or a lack of and that's one of", "poverty is an evil. Not because it's morally wrong, but because it' a privation. So anything that's a priva or defect is a type of evil in terms of natural... And so there's no distinction between them in terms o term of a priva versus an affirmative evl somebody perpetuates? A crime? Well, and that would be lack of goodness. I mean, ther", "in the perpetration of the crime. In that sense, it's a similar thing. It's an absence of goodness or an absence or adequate standard of living is poverty and those are equivalent. Right but it's also there's another... Many people argue that they're really not equivalent. I know and i think there's an argument for that but i think one of the things if you look for instance in Hebrew the word for sin is khata in Arabic it's khatia", "They're all archery terms to miss the mark. And so, the idea is that everybody wants good. Everybody. Even the evildoer wants good but the problem is that the light of the intellect has not been polished and so they're looking through this opaque lens and it's muddled for them. So, they see an apparent good as a real good. They think pleasure, for instance, you know raping the woman. They're going to get that good which is the pleasure they want from that", "from that, but that's what they're seeking. But it's a sin. They've missed the mark. The proper way would have been to court the person and for things to be consensual. So that's our understanding that there's a kind of ignorance. If you look at the soul when we get...the idea of the rational soul being reason and then the irascibility,", "of the rational soul is ignorance. The sin of the emotional soul is malice, right? It's malice—the will. And then the sin of appetite is inordinate passion. So ordering this is really fundamental to our tradition and we are challenged to do that. If we do that, we will not fall into the type of evil. But you can't have a kind of evil at each level. Absolutely.", "that Christian philosophy wrestles with enormously is, did God create the evil? And Christian philosophers in large part go to extreme perhaps tortuous logic to explain how God did not create the Evil. The moral evil? Any kind of evil. Yes see I mean God...the earthquake that happened in Turkey recently", "obviously, and it's devastating. But from our perspective, God one brings good out of evil which is very important to one of the things that human beings because of our heedlessness we're so accustomed to the goodness of God that we forget him in fact there's a verse in the Quran what has deluded you from your generous Lord? And in the commentaries they say he put", "we're so used to, like right now everything's fine. If suddenly it started shaking, we would become aware of the blessing of the stillness but we're not, we're heedless of it. So when these things happen in fact Chrysippus actually argued that these are actually proofs for the existence of God, things like hurricanes and floods and things because the order that we're accustomed to from God is disrupted and you know the Arabs say by opposites", "So it's by that chaos and disorder that comes into the world, that we know the blessing of the order. So I think Muslims don't have...I've always been marveled at the fact they don't really have a kind of stoic view of life. That's very interesting. Does the distinction between God allowing the evil for good purposes", "good purposes and God creating the evil. Is that a distinction without a real difference? I mean, I think in some ways, yeah. I think the fact that God is a creator of all things. Right. Yeah. And so evil is part of the creation, and it serves a function. It serves a purpose. It", "One of the most important ones is that good people actually combat evil because spiritual warfare is part of life on earth. And so it's very important, the great Persian poet Rumi said, sometimes we take up the sword to take swords out of the hands of madmen. You know, there has to be an opposition. And and so in terms of the purpose of the world, evil serves a very important purpose. And without it, there would not be many goods that God clearly wants to realize in the world.", "in the world. So you'd have no problem saying that God created the world and evil... With evil in it. We believe that, we have to. Yeah. We have to believe it. I think that's more logically coherent than trying to parse the difference between God... To get it out because then it limits God's omniscience, omnipotence. Right, didn't God know that there would be evil? And then this idea, I mean, I think it's a problematic syllogism that the atheists use, this idea that is God all good?", "God all good, if he permits evil and all powerful and he permits the evil then it's either not all-powerful or not all good. But if his permitting it is for a greater good then I think that...I mean a surgeon will cut off an arm to save a body so we can't you know there's a beautiful Persian proverb what does the ant know of", "Yeah, we're just so limited in our knowledge. But I mean look like in Turkey one of the things that really struck me was all the goodness that came... All these people that were in cold they could have stayed in their apartments. They left from all over. People from Ukraine and Russia both came. People that are fighting each other in Ukraine. They both sent people to help save lives. So they're killing lives in Ukraine? I mean there's an irony there but there's also something really powerful about tragedies", "tragedies and about natural evil that it brings out the best in most people. The problem that comes up is that, in general, your argument works. But there are lots of specific people, you know, rational, sentient human beings whom it doesn't work because they were the ones who died or the child who got brain cancer or a million other examples.", "examples. And so is it fair for God to create a world where I can benefit because I've helped the poor person, but that poor person has died or something? In other words, I got the benefit because was so beneficent and so I benefited, but then that person suffered in order for me to benefit. Well this is Ivan's argument in Brothers Karamazov. It's a powerful argument.", "right, the suffering of children. It's a powerful argument but in the end I think we have to choose and there are those of us who choose to believe in the goodness of God and that these are for a purpose and I think one it's definitely a healthier perspective because the other perspective", "And I think there's a reason for that. I think God has created us in that way. You have emphasized, in your writing, the concept of suffering a great deal which has resonance with much in Buddhism, for example, in terms of the importance of suffering and the world. I recognize suffering. Of course everybody does but I don't do it in my worldview anywhere near as much as you do. So enlighten me", "importance of appreciating suffering as this vehicle to understand reality, understand God? Well I mean I've seen people...I was a registered nurse and worked in a hospital. And I've see people in immense suffering and I've seem people handle it in ways with faith that people without faith were incapable of handling it.", "that suffering is something that it's just, it's the first noble truth. It's part of the world and we have to hopefully avoid it as much as possible. I mean who wants to suffer unless you're a masochist? But I think we also have to embrace it when it comes to us and try to see the wisdom in it. I saw an amazing interview with Christopher Reeves where he said that he chose", "purpose and that this event that happened to him had a purpose, that he chose that as opposed to just wallowing in his anger and resentment at God or no god. At the pure arbitrariness of the universe. I mean these are all choices that we make and I think the most intelligent choices, the most hopeful choices, and the most necessary ones for our well-being are the ones that recognize", "And I think we've all suffered. I mean, this is something at different degrees, obviously. I know there's different degrees of suffering but we have all suffered and it's something that we share as a human species. And I thing if you're empathic, it enables you because of your own suffering to recognize the need to help others. And these are the benefits of tribulation. That's one of the great benefits of Tribulation.", "experience of that once. But I'll save it for another time. Why don't you? Okay, well this woman was listening to a talk that I gave. She was in England driving on the highway and it was called The 17 Benefits of Tribulation. And one of the benefits was that it enables other people to help you.", "this wonderful man came and changed the tire. And there was that exchange, and I think that's something very human. So what is Islamic philosophy's approach to death? Life after death? The sequence of events? What happens? I think bismillah... This is something that I actually came into Islam because of that so I had a near-death experience", "to go through all the world scriptures from the perspective of death and it was the quran that really struck me as the one that dealt so much with death there was just so much in there about death um there are two chapters that devout muslims recite every day yasin and waqia and they're both basically death meditations uh", "destroyer of pleasure meaning death and not in a morbid way but just in a way that makes us aware of the fragility of life so that we get more out of life. The Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him said wake up in the morning not expecting to see the evening and go to sleep at night not expecting", "ended up actually writing for the study of quran many many years later the article on death in the quran it was kind of a it was an amazing uh just i think event for me dr nassar asked me to do it and i've had to read the qur'an from that perspective and i was just struck how it's it's the fragrance of death is on every page", "from the body and um and the uh the body becomes there's a kind of hyper consciousness that occurs in the soul it suddenly wakes up and then there's immense amount of remorse for most people because they realize that things that they did were not appropriate for what they are right", "atheists in hell, you must feel really stupid today. It's kind of that idea like, yeah, that it was real. And there's a verse in the Quran that says when they're awakened from their graves, they say glory be to God who has awakened us from our sleep. So there's an idea that death is an awakening from the sleep of this world. Now that is immediately after death or? Yeah, no, it's immediately after", "So it's a bodily resurrection which will combine with the soul, but the soul has an independent existence. A very hyper real existence after you die. And it's the immaterial soul so its consciousness as well. Yeah, so you have consciousness is it's first person consciousness? First person consciousness and then... You have all your memories from the past? Yes, and when you're put into your grave there's a sleep. You go into a sleep", "the soul. The body and the soul are not in a living sense, like if you open the grave that you're not going to see life but there is a reuniting. If the soul was scattered...if the body was scattered like in cremation and then people thought we're told that God and it's mentioned in our tradition that God will reassemble from all of the parts of that. And so that's the resurrection? There's a", "you're put into a sleep. There's an initial questioning in the grave, who is your God? Who is your Lord? That's the first question. What is your religion and who is prophet? And there are two angels that come in and they're very intense and they ask these questions to the soul. This was before the resurrection? This was after the resurrection. Then after that, it's either like a very unpleasant place or it's a very pleasant place", "place, depending on how you lived your life. And then what happens is there's a sleep that goes and then that sleep will be awakened with the blowing of the trumpet. So the Muslims believe like the Jews and the Christians that there is a blowing of trumpet at the end of time when all the souls are brought forward. I just want to get the sequence again. So when you die, the soul separates, has a hyper-awareness and a consciousness, first person awareness. The body is a corpse", "is a corpse and is in the grave. There's a... Let's leave that, let's go to the end and then come back. So then the soul after a time that we don't know there'll be a resurrection, the soul is reunited with the body it's kind of... The body is a permanent body though it's not... It's not the same. Yeah it's different. Whenever God gathers together it doesn't have to be the same molecules has to be", "so it can't be every molecule but a physical form, it's reunited. It's kind of questioned or like a PhD exam? No then they're all brought to a plane and the plane is described as white and they're naked and the Prophet's wife said won't people", "said it's much more ominous. Like you're not going to be thinking about that. And then they move, then they go to each prophet and they ask them for intercession. And so the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam finally they go into the prophet and ask him for intercessions. And he is the one who says I am for it. Analah which is one of the meanings of Shiloh. So we believe that Shilah, the scepter is given to Shilow.", "one of the meanings is, the One who it is for. So He says I am for it and He intercedes for humanity in our traditions, peace be upon Him. And then the judgment comes because people...it's like you want to... But it's individual judgment? It will be but it's like people want diagnoses, they just want what's wrong with me doctor? There's a relief in the diagnosis so that's the kind of idea people want to know", "of they're given their each person is given the book of deeds of everything they did it's all recorded the Quran says we have recorded everything and it says it's in a digital book it literally says digital book yeah that we have", "So if you repented for sins, they can be removed from that book of deeds. Kind of a blackout like a top secret document. Right, exactly, like a redaction. And so then you're given the book and then your deeds are weighed in scales, like in the ancient Egyptian tradition. The soul is weighed. So they're weighed and depending on the balance, it depends on... Is it a bimodal decision? Either you go to paradise or heaven or hell?", "or hell? Yeah, it is. Well, there's also a kind of purgatory. There's something called al-A'raf which is neither in hell nor in heaven and there are people obviously that can get out of hell also. So hell is not permanent. It is permanent for some people but many people will get out through intercession, through purification spending some time Is it possible for everyone to", "everyone to get out or some people? There are opinions amongst some of the, there are certain scholars that had those opinions but that's not the normative tradition. But there are scholars that did hold that opinion. Is there any tradition of universal salvation in Islam? Yeah and there is a book written by Muhammad Rustam that has that on universal salvation, Islamic tradition. Like I said it's not an orthodox position. There was a position from one of the Andrusian scholars", "that eventually hell becomes, they become nariyun the people. So it's like an accustomed, they've become accustomed to it but the Quran is pretty clear that its eternal punishment and there are many verses although there is an interesting position in our tradition so if God makes a promise he has to fulfill it because that's his nature but if he makes a threat it's actually considered acceptable for him", "a threat because even in our tradition, if I say to you, if you come to my house, I'm going to really... You'll see what I'll do to you. And then you show up and I'm saying, yeah, come on in. That would be seen as a good thing, like I've forgiven you. So that idea about God is that he can forego a threat but not a promise. How do you distinguish between a threat and a promise? Well, the threats are the threats of punishment. Those are threats. But there", "of punishment so he will, yeah you have to be careful and that's the idea. And then there is this idea of a sirat which is a bridge between paradise and underneath it is hell and every human being has to cross that and then the prophet described these massive scanners", "it will clamp on to weak souls and pull them, and the soul will pull with...to keep them on the path so that they could get across. And the ones who don't make it are literally thrown into hell. This process occurs after the judgment? After the judgment, yeah, that goes across, yeah. And then the people that get a cross, every prophet will be praying for their community. So Moses will be", "community every prophet or messenger i mean there are people that believe that buddha was a one of the messengers it's not in the quran but there are muslims now right after death the immortal soul is has this hyper aware state um but it's like going to heaven or hell what does it do during the interim period before the resurrection yeah there's a lot of debate about that about what", "but they're not in heaven. And so there are some that argue that it's to prepare them, like the seven-story mountain. Well, who's in heaven? Because I thought nobody gets to heaven before the resurrection. Yeah, no. Well the martyrs are in heaven, so we believe that martyrs go straight to heaven. But normal people don't go straight down. No, they have to go through the judgment. Everybody has to go", "martyrs yeah okay so but so then the souls after they leave the body before the judgment and the resurrection that they can see the martyrs in heaven right but some it's a pretty sparse place compared to the great majority we also believe children if you're if you die before um puberty oh i said", "Even aborted children. Even aborded children? Even abored children. So there must be a... The spontaneous abortions that happen, and they all intercede for their parents because they lost the child. And there must have been a time frame before...? We're out of time now. Oh, yeah. No I mean a timeframe for the abortion. It wouldn't happen one second after conception. Yeah exactly.", "So there'd be a kind of cutoff point where you make it. Yeah. Okay, well I mean all these systems are fascinating that what the human mind can construct and put together some logical ways. I'd be shocked if any of this were true to the last word but... Well here's something to think about. There is a verse in the... There's a tradition in the Hadith which says", "No ear has heard and has never occurred to the human mind. And so these are, again, all approximations. Like what is going to happen? These are approximations for us to understand it. But we do believe in these resurrections, and there are many Muslims that take these very literally. Hamza, the historical knowledge is that the relationship between Islam and science during the flourishing of Islamic civilization, Middle Ages,", "and Middle Ages was the richest in the world at that time, that Islamic civilization was the font from which much of science began to develop from. And yet, in today's world, much of the Islamic world has that same view of science. How can you characterize the relationship between Islam and science, particularly questions", "is obviously sensitive in parts of the Christian tradition. How does the relationships relate? Well, I think, bismillah, in the early period, the Muslims were encouraged by the Quran to seek knowledge. The Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him, in many traditions said to seek knowlege. There's a tradition, seek knowledge even unto China that every believer has to seek", "Muslims were syncretists wherever they went. I mean, they went to Jundishapur. They learned the medicine from the Persians. They went to India. We have wonderful early books where they were quoting Hindu sages. They translated all the Greek materials into Arabic. So they were just filled with an incredible appetite for knowledge and did that all over", "geometry, the sacred science. They really understood geometry as a discipline that really can hone the intellect into perceiving order and also the idea of demonstrative proofs that have a type of certainty in them. So they really developed mathematics. And I think they were fascinated by everything about the world and wanted to know it and understand", "Interesting thing, David Berlinski in his book on the self, he has a book where he talks about if you took modern American academics and put them into scholastic Europe like 13th century. He said they would acclimatize very quickly with the dogmatism because we're so dogmatic here. The book's on human nature. And then he has, he said but if they were put in 10th century Baghdad", "century Baghdad at the height of the Muslim, he said they would be bewildered by the variety of opinion and the differences and the robustness of the dialectical exchanges between scholars. So I think there's a lot of truth to that. The Muslims were real seekers. And over time, there's curvilinear reality to all civilizations.", "So he did describe that, although he said towards the latter days there would be a resurgence. But they fell into a kind of decline in the sciences. And today what is the orthodoxy in terms of approach to science whether it's cosmology or whether its evolution? I think Muslims are very open to science.", "scientists today are actually Muslim. There are many people at Harvard, MIT, you know there's Turkish scientists, Arab scientists, Persian, Indian I mean there's great physicists that there's a Muslim that won the Nobel Prize for physics so I think they have a respect for science in terms of evolution I mean obviously evolution is nobody can deny certain aspects", "empirical evidence that I think is very strong. But the idea of randomness, the idea that God is playing dice with the universe as Einstein said, I don't think any Muslim could accept that. We also do believe in the original creation of Adam. Maurice Boucaille made an argument that things evolved but the human being did not, that he was put here in the process", "idea for most Orthodox Muslims. But there's also evolution, there's Stephen Myers doing some really interesting work. There's a book called Theistic Evolution which is I think edited by him but challenging a lot of the assumptions and I think that he's convincing a lot people that the model that evolution presented this idea of simplicity down as foundational", "you know, we have to see science can become very dogmatic and not allow for alternate perspectives. And I mean Thomas Kuhn, scientific revolutions, these are realities that theories break down so we don't know. And think for me personally, I tend to... I mean, I think anybody denies design obviously Dawkins would say", "you know, but I just feel like it's so evident. I mean the opposable thumb, the eye, the ears, you know? I mean there's a falcon, you now the design of the nose of the falcon because they dive at 200 miles per hour and the design prevents their lungs from exploding. So there are so many things even Darwin said that damned eye, you kno, because how did the eye evolve with the incredible complexity", "We think colors themselves, I mean the world might not have any colors. Colors might be purely a subjective experience but what a God to give us colors. Yeah so there are different positions that one could take on evolution. You can have a broadly deistic evolution where God put everything in place from the beginning but then it naturally developed without any intervention", "intervention. You could have a theistic evolution where God set it in motion but needed to intervene at places to create step function differences of different people, however many times you think God may have done that. And then, of course, you could have no god and just the evolutionary process. I think", "of why things look like they're designed because in a sense, evolution would say they are designed but through the long process of evolution, the person that has the better eye will likely escape the predator versus the one that had the poorer eye and so that process develops. But how did it start? I mean, the cell, the first cell... Look, origin of life is", "is still I mean thank God for the design of the nose we both have problems holding up our glasses so that's good but you know if we had a different nose we could invent some other thing to do that um but in in in the orthodox Islamic tradition today which obviously it's not not random is there a theistic evolution or you know i've perceived", "Sure. I think the majority of Muslims don't. There are people writing now on theistic evolution. There's recent books on the idea, so I think it's being debated but the idea of randomness is absolutely unacceptable. What I would say and I have said this before if evolution were true hypothetically, if evolution we're true and God used the mechanism of random- randomness like obviously", "from God's knowledge. But if he used that, like God made us to learn through hit and miss. I mean, that's how we learn as humans. So if he created a whole creation like that, I think that's perfectly possible and compatible with God, if that was true. But from God perspective, if we can even use that word, I mean language breaks down when we talk about God.", "But from that reality, there's no randomness. The Quran says there's nothing, there is not an atom that God is not aware of. So everything is in its place, everything is fulfilling it's function, everything was doing what it was intended to do and we believe that about God so I think these are debates that can continue and they're interesting. Hamza, what are the deep fundamental metaphysics?", "Adam and Adam was shown everything. And he named everything. Now, Fakhreddin al-Razi one of our great metaphysicians said that what he was able to do is to see the universal in the particular. And abstraction is the ability of the human mind to see one out of many universes, one", "to see the one out of many, because ultimately it is to see The One God out of the many variants of God's creation. And so that abstraction is the great gift of the human mind that we can abstract, in Arabic means literally to make naked, to denude and to get to the essence of a thing. And this is why a human being can categorize things. If I say to somebody could you get me a glass?", "they go to the kitchen. I don't have to say which glass, you know, in some kind of nominalistic idea that every single glass is unique. No, he has the universal concept of glass, which enables us to talk. So we're constantly talking with abstraction. There's no way we could speak or communicate without abstraction. So those abstractions are a gift from God and it was designed for", "multiplicity which is one and that's why we're called those who make one. That's what the Muslims are they are those who Make One, They Make God One in their understanding because there are others that make God give God multiplicity or deny God and then make the universe a god because there's no such thing as an atheist every if somebody says I don't believe in God", "So what they're doing is they're giving the attributes of God to other than God. And that's the essence of shirk in our tradition, which is the worst sin, which has to associate with God what cannot be associated with God. Okay. So that would seem to indicate a nominalism where the human mind abstracts the ideas of the universal from the particulars but there's no self-existing universal. Yeah you get into big debates about", "big debates. And these are metaphysical problems, and obviously Hume and his ilk completely dismiss them as just a waste of time. But there is an idea of what are called source forms or archetypes that everything is coming out of these source forms, and that's how we recognize them in this world. It's a very different way to conceptualize it. Yeah, so there is this idea. Muslims tend", "of that word, not the modern sense of it. So we're not idealists like Berkeley's idea of the world where it's just a perception. In the mind of God, no, it's real. Yeah, yeah, no. There are real things but then there are also things that have an extra mental existence. Okay, well that's different than if we have the ability to abstract something, that's something we're creating as opposed to something... Like numbers.", "Do numbers exist? Yeah, exactly. Right, so numbers are pure abstractions. I mean there's no number in the world. It's the mind that gives the world number. Avicenna has a whole section about that. But is that something that we're inferring by language and therefore it's kind of a fictionalism to have a universal or is this some fundamental universal perhaps that God created or some relationship with God that we were then able to perceive?", "yeah and i think these are the debates that the metaphysicians have and i don't it's not a dogmatic view in the islamic tradition so there's no there's fixed dogmatism on that how about the relationship between god and time which to me is one of the deep probes of both time and god um and the question is uh is god clearly god has", "One is that time is real and God is in time, but God never had a beginning and never had an end. And then we'll never have an end so it's an everlasting situation. Or is God not in time? Time is something that God created and therefore is not in-time and has some sort of a changeless time out of...not in existence and is eternal", "no participation in time. There's no difference in terms of God always being there, but a very deep difference in the nature of God and how we relate to God. Sure. So I think that in the Islamic tradition, God is creator of time. I think Muslims would adhere", "no motion. There's no space that God moves in. God is infinite, and the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him said do not reflect on the infinity of God but rather reflect on God's attributes because like Cantor who worked on actual infinities you can go mad thinking about infinity so he actually prohibited us from doing that but we believe that God is Infinite which means there couldn't be any time for an infinite being I mean", "the concept of infinity is quite stunning, that God's given us the capacity to understand something that has no limit. But we don't accept actual infinity like some of the modern mathematicians which would create logical inconsistencies like the part being greater than the whole. So we believe that God", "He cannot be contained by time. So, time-space is a pure creation and we're in it. And then there is an idea that we move out of time. The last day is called the Last Day because there's no more reckoning of time... And after that we moved into God sort of sphere or dimension world? There's an understanding in our tradition and the Latin scholastics have it and I don't know if they got", "if they got it from the Muslims. I have a suspicion that they did, but I might be wrong.\" And in the Latin tradition, they call it the nunc stans, the idea of the eternal now. In our tradition, it's called ad-da'im, al anad da'im which means exactly the same thing, the eternal Now. So God said do not curse time because I am time. In my hand is the night and", "as the eternal now. God is not time in our concept of time. Okay, the eternal Now's a very powerful concept right? Right. Now in other Christian scholasticism and some modern believers say if you just say that God is Not In Time there are other attributes of God that has to come along with that and that God can't change, that God Is Impassable, that nothing can have an impact on God which seems to undermine intercessionary prayer I mean they even do", "complexities of God is out of time. Right. Well, yeah we believe that, that God is—we're not process theologians. Yeah. God is...God is God and in the end of the day we…that's why we put our head on the ground. There's a kind of submission at a certain point of the intellect just to say that this is beyond my…it's beyond my pay grade but it's not beyond my pray grade.", "Okay, that's a nice phrase. But then intercessionary prayer? Can God listen in time? Ibn Al-Tayla, one of the great Egyptians said that prayer was solely for a display of utter submission before God but the Quran and the Hadith indicate that God does answer prayers so that's the normative position", "prayers. But obviously, the knowledge of God is absolute. It's not... There's this idea of aforeknowledge of God as already presupposing time. So if God is just eternal and God's knowledge is absolute, there's no past or present, there is just pure knowledge. And so God can answer the prayers. Yeah, it's not a problem for me.", "for me so what's the islamic view of the world to come what will happen to the world itself and obviously our ourselves as individuals in it so the the world this world is called dunya in the quran and dunya means the lowest", "The dunya is also a kind of illusory world. So it's more the world of King Lear's kind of, the court comings and goings, you know? So it' s the life of this world. And then there's the alam which is the world that is the epiphany of God's attributes where God's revealing Him, God's...attributes to the world.", "to this world. There's also a corresponding negative and positive to the next world. And how does that work? So there's heaven and hell. Okay. Yeah, and so heaven is an abode of complete peace, and hell is an Abode of distance from God. And that's the real essence of hell is to be distant from God, and these are the choices that humans make according to the Quran. People in our tradition", "faith is from volition. Faith is actually an act of the will. The Quran says, oh you who believe, believe. So it's an imperative and the source of the execution of an imperative verb is the human will. So we will ourselves to believe, the will to believe that we have to believe in God and that becomes a choice", "then the afterlife is in a blessed abode. Paradise is a place that is seen, it's a place under which rivers flow. There are rivers of milk and honey but again these are all approximations. Ibn Abbas, the great commentator on the Quran who was a companion of the Prophet peace be upon him, Ibn A'bass may God have mercy on his soul he said that all of the Qurani descriptions", "There are just ways of us to get some glimpse of what the afterlife is. But we know that when a person enters into paradise, they repeat over and over peace. It's called the abode of peace. And so this is what everybody's seeking in the world. And that's a permanent... It's permanent. That goes into eternity? Ave eternal. So the human soul is considered ave eternal. It has a beginning but no end. Okay, but is it still in time?", "in time because he's no god is not in time so the soul then enters into the same sphere that god is in outside of time after the judgment it's it's pure presence it's true it's a total experience in the present now yeah and the highest is presence of God so the highest", "So the Muslim approach is similar to the Catholic approach. Well, there's gradations of paradise and there's graduations of hell just like there's grudations in this world The Quran says the gradations are greater than the ones of this world There more so give me an order of magnitude 7-8 or 10 trillion? No no I think it's more like ten trillion Okay well that's good You're closer than I am", "I think so. That's good to know the order of magnitude. And can you make transitions after that? No, no. You can make transitions and that's why praying for the dead is so important here because praying for", "purgatorio the if you remember the people on each of the terraces they say tell them to remember us when they go back right you know they're begging him to have them pray because it will help them in their afterlife so we do intercede for the dead we pray for the day and that's why we say peace be upon him God have mercy on his soul we don't mention dead people without praying for them Muslims devout Muslims who always will always say like if I mentioned Imam Ghazali", "really say may god have mercy on his soul so any it doesn't have to be an exalted dead person no like any any dead muslim and any dead Muslim yeah would you say that for a non-muslim if they die i mean we know we wouldn't it's like the Catholics the traditional Catholicism we pray for our dead but we can ask that God give them the best of what he gives", "this time when the soul is into this atemporal space with God or in hell and all these gradations, does the earth still exist? Does the physical world still exist or that's all born away? The earth has recreated. It's recreated? It's re-created and it testifies against anyone who polluted it or oppressed it. And what's on it? God actually gives it the ability to speak. The earth will speak? Yes, the earth will", "our tongues will speak the eyes will speak. The eye will say he made me look at this, the ear will say He made me listen to this, and the tongue will say, He made Me say this, right? The hands will say. He made. Me do this because they don't want to go there blaming their blaming the soul because they Don't want To Go to hell like what did they do to deserve that so so there yeah, so so the earth is raised up animals are raised of any animal that was wronged will have every dog has its day I mean in Islam that's actually true how deep does", "How deep does that go? Does it go to flies and mosquitoes? No, I don't think so. I think it's the sentient beings. And so at some point there's a cutoff. There must be. I can't say for certain because there's nothing definitive in our tradition but I would think logically. So a pet that I had as a child... If you abuse the pet, it will have its day. Yeah. And testify against me. Okay. But at that time will there still be recreation of people?", "recreation of people on earth or will the earth be barren no the earth will have it won't okay so once it's done it's not it doesn't recreate no there's no other worlds and others he said that the afterlife to this world is like a va this world", "So this is called the mulk, which is God's dominion. But then there's above this, there's a dimension called the malakut and then the jabarut, divine presence. So there's different dimensions. And when you say this world, you don't mean just this earth, you mean this whole cosmos? Everything that the empirical world, the whole universe. Yeah, this is all called a mulk. So like this heaven is called The Heaven of the Dunya. There are other heavens above it. Above it metaphorically. Of course, of course.", "Of course, of course. What about the current activities on this world in terms of an end time for this world that's very prevalent in Jewish and Christian philosophy? Yeah, no, we have a very strong eschatological... So what are, are there events that will occur that will lead to the ultimate? Well, one of the things, I mean, the Hindus, it's actually similar to the Kali Yuga,", "the last age, the prophet predicted that children would be in utter rebellion against their parents. That fornication would become prevalent. That swearing would become pregnant. He said that foul language would become consistent. He's said the Arabs would buy in building tall buildings. He says the goat herders would build skyscrapers. He is said that the buildings in Mecca would reach the tops of the mountains.", "Who said this? The Prophet Muhammad. It was all recorded. Yeah, he said that people would sell their souls for a paltry price of the dunya and this has always been the case but in the end it's exacerbated by the numbers of people that do these things. He said religion would be on the wane and atheism would be", "allah allah god god on the earth so in this world the atheists will eventually be the dominant yeah group uh and what are some other signs like the mati he said that that's time would be speeded up he said a year would be like a month a month would be Like A Week, A week would be a day and a day would be an hour. He said blessing would be taken out of people's lives um he said obesity would become prevalent", "become prevalent obesity he said that he said uh that uh he said also that hemorrhoids would become present prevalent yeah okay he said people wouldn't move um he said the people would bring their spouse close and distance their parents", "and they would immediately reach the ends of the earth. It's actual hadith. Yeah, he said they would say rumors and it would be... And he said that people would believe liars more than they would believe truthful people. He said trustworthy people would be deemed treacherous. Treacherous people would being deemed trustworthy. And then he called a group the Rawabida in Arabic. He says, and the Rawabi would manifest.", "word. And he said insignificant people that would talk about global events. Like just, and then he said people would make money from talking. Does anybody set dates? Is there any tradition? You know it's well known in religious tradition that it's always unwise to set a date. Right but some people still do it. They do it yeah the famous one back in the 18th century which was called The Great Disappointment. Yeah right", "Yeah. So, basically the Prophet said that the signs will come near so he said that there were lesser signs and then there would be great signs. So the great signs will be... He talked about sinkholes, that there would many sinkholes in the world. He said earthquakes would become prevalent. He's said that eventually there would", "become like a torture, like an adab. And he said that the Antichrist would come. So the Muslims believe in an antichristic phenomenon called the Masih Ad-Dajjal which literally means the imposter Christ and he's somebody who is a world leader who comes at the end. The Prophet said that he will travel like a wind that leaves behind a cloud trail.", "in 40 days. It's quite stunning, and he said that he would have mountains of wheat. He could command the rain clouds to form and rain to fall so he can just command this guy. So we'd have all these powers, and that's why the Muslims are told not to give any consideration towards the latter days", "in the latter days that traditional peoples would be seen, would see as miracles. That just become common experience for like talking to somebody on it. He also said that people would talk to they would leave their families and on there on their sides would be things that would enable them to talk to their families. The Hadith I am not making this up. Yeah. And that's very similar to the Christian tradition of the Book of Revelation and", "The book of Revelations is a very, his hadiths are very specific. The book revelations has, is open to a lot of interpretation. Yeah but I mean yeah the Saint John of Damascus was sorry not St. John of the book of revelations definitely had some extraordinary vision and saw things but there's a lot interpretations in Christianity of what that means. But you're saying the specificity in the Muslim tradition is much greater?", "And I've had an interest in the signs of the end of time. I've never seen a tradition that has the remarkable number and the incredible detail that is given in the science of the other time. So if you were to tell me a secret that I promise not to tell anybody, do you have your own sense of when that might occur or what generation? Well, in our tradition there's three last days. The first one is your own personal death. Yeah, that's easy.", "but they're gone. They won't be able to come out and tell us their first-hand experience. And then you have the end of time, which there's massive earth disruption. The Prophet, peace be upon him, the way it's described in the Quran is going to be like one of these terrible apocalyptic films where everybody's running to and fro. Also, the Prophet said that people would run", "that the pen would become prevalent, which is very unusual for an illiterate society because there were Arabs who were literate. But he said everybody would have pens. And so do Muslim scholars or speculators think that it could be our age or the next hundred years or a thousand years or million years? Ibn Khaldun, the great historian, said that one of the faults of the Sufis is they always predict the end of time.", "the end of time it's never a good thing but what we know is it's 1400 years closer than it was when the prophet told us it was near one of the things we hear about all the time in the common vernacular is get to know god how do you know god but from a philosophical point of view uh so-called what's called theological anthropology", "to answer that question in a philosophical manner, how can we know God? Right. So bismillah, the Islamic tradition recognizes four main vehicles to knowledge of God. One is pure reason. The other is the data of the senses that aid reason and then experience, especially mystical experience", "experience and finally revelation itself so these are the fundamental means by which a human being can come to know god so the idea pure reason would be the a priori uh knowledge that we we begin to explore for instance we ask the question why is there something rather than i've heard of that question yeah nothing", "itself the concept of time movement change all of these things also in metaphysics that the really big questions of the one and the many you know the idea of these being itself because being is something that we live in like the fish that might not be aware of the water you know so many of us don't really contemplate", "of being itself, not particularized being but the very phenomenon of being it self. And then is there something beyond being? So I think that... There are different ways obviously. I mean, there's the famous five ways of Aquinas which obviously come largely from Aristotle but also from the influence of Avicenna on Aquinas. The Muslims really focused on the Kalam cosmological argument", "asserting that there could not be an infinite regress, then an actual infinity was impossible. That there must be a beginning and if there was a beginning who tipped the scales? If you have the scales of nothing and nothing and now there's something, who tipped that scale? And so the preponderance of that scale is left to God. So the first category in essence you don't need sense data for I mean you just need to", "To be in the world to think privately. Yeah, and then sense data is that we are surrounded by things. There's clearly design in the word. I mean evolution has an explanation for that which challenges many believers but essentially we can see there is design. There is a wonderful poem by Robert Frost Accidentally on Purpose which looks at that idea of just", "towards design and we can clearly see that our bodies have functions in purpose. And so looking at that, reflecting the great theologian Imam al-Ghazali, God have mercy on his soul, he said that if somebody really wants to know God they should study anatomy and physiology. And people do have that experience. Some people, the opposite, they'll say oh the eye is not really designed that well I had a physiology professor", "divinely engineered obsolescence. I mean, there's just falling into old age. I think this is part of God's plan for us. And then mystical experience is very powerful. I've had those experiences. Not everybody has them but people do have them. People have dreams. People", "wonderful philosopher, Edith Stein who was an atheist. She she was raised in a Jewish family but she became an atheist and she had a mystical experience in a cathedral in Cologne and then she read Saint Teresa de Avila's biography and she said by the...she read it all night and by the morning she was a believer so what is that? And", "And I feel like I've had that experience. Saintly people are very powerful, you can feel the spiritual presence. And finally revelation and revelation comes with its own proofs in essence. I think one of the great proofs of the Old Testament is the Jewish story itself. Like how God chose this small group from... They were in the Sinai desert they could have just disappeared", "And yet today they're here. And there are also people of great intellect and people of good study, I mean all the Nobel Prize winners. For me, I think the Jewish community is a proof of God because of just the fact that they're designated in this book as having this kind of special ontological status amongst humanity. And we see the extraordinary influence.", "each of these categories can be subject to critique and absolutely and have different interpretation my own sense uh to speak personally just as between you and i know you know nobody else is watching yeah um i would be most suspicious if in my case with number three uh if i had an experience or i had a dream which", "meant anything and i can honestly say that not a single dream in my life has ever meant anything in reality um one time i thought it might and it didn't so but if it did you know if i did have an experience i maybe it's my problem i wouldn't trust it because i would like to believe i would", "those who don't believe would like to be believers. Well, not everybody. Yeah, but a lot. But I'll put myself in that category. I would like you to be a believer. I think...I think that you just haven't realized that you are a believer because I think your obsession with this... Obsession is good word. Yeah. With the search for the truth. Yes. But moving closer to the truth, I think… Closer to truth, not the… To truth. Okay. Good point. No definite article.", "but I think that search, one of the things that Imam al-Ghazali says, that if a man is sincerely seeking the truth and doesn't achieve it before his death, that God... That that is actually a serious consideration. Oh good! Yeah yeah. So I have a chance? I think so. Okay well, if not you'll help me. No I hope so. You know, I mean I think we can't... There's so many human experiences that cannot be taken", "only God can really assess them. I mean, people that if I was born into a family with a mother who's addicted to crack cocaine and I'm abused as a child my whole life, am I gonna have a good opinion of the world or of God? These are tough things to understand, the mystery of iniquity. And it's a great mystery. Yeah so anyway, as I said,", "own feelings but you know we'll see and uh and there's a lot of delusional people yeah sure yeah Imam Ghazali says some of the most delusinal people are the mystics like so he actually says that yeah that's good it's good so you know all four reasons are good the caution is good and the extra caution about you know self-delusion and maybe I'm super sensitive to that right because of my desire well I think fallibilism", "it's absolutely essential that we have a phallibist perspective, that I think I'm right but I could be wrong. Hamza in the early days of Closer to Truth, I had the privilege to spend really two days with Alvin Plantinger and one of his questions that he had posed which I saw in his work was does God have a nature like a human nature or not? Does God have its own nature? And", "And I was just startled by that idea, that God could have a nature where it's something we should explore. And I enjoyed talking to Al and a few others but I'd love to get an Islamic perspective on that question. Sure. I mean the word in English comes obviously from a Latin term natura and the idea has something to do with birthing", "coming into being or being born. So using it in that way, obviously we would reject that but the idea of nature and I think it is used in Christian theology as indicating the essence, it's also one of the meanings of the word in English so from that point of view definitely we would believe that God has an essential nature. The essence of God for the Muslims", "But we understand God as having an essence, but also acts and attributes. So the acts are both eternal and uncreated, and then created acts also. And then we believe that God has these attributes. And many of them obviously are mentioned in the Quran, and some are withheld from us. I think the Old Testament and the New Testament also have attributes of God. The essential attribute is mercy.", "is mercy, according to our tradition. That is the essential attribute of God and in fact there's a famous hadith of the Prophet peace be upon him that he's speaking on behalf of God not from the Quran and he says that God says I have derived the womb which in Arabic and Hebrew also rahm, in Arabic it's rahim", "from my name the merciful which is Rahman and so anyone who severs the womb is severed from my mercy in other words kinship bonds and maintaining them and having compassion for people. And the fundamental kinships bond that holds us all together is that we are all children of Adam and Eve, and so you're my brother, you're a distant brother but you're", "said that everyone is either a brother in religion or a peer in this created fraternity. So, that's really important. So God wants us to express His attributes in the world and so like showing mercy but there's also the attribute of vengeance that God does take vengeance for wrongs", "And so that's part of God's nature also is that God takes revenge. And so he's a majestic, God is a majestic creator but He's also a beautiful creator and these aren't mutually contradictory. The primary word you use is merciful as the primary essence I think in Christian philosophy would probably be love. Love yeah. How do those articulate? Obviously they do articulate together", "together, but to privilege mercy over love. What does that connote? Well I think yeah, mercy is...I mean one of the meanings if you look in Latin is the idea of grace has the same root meaning and so it's really about grace. And mercy", "I think it emanates out of, it has to emanate out of a kind of love. God has a love for his creation which is universal and then there's a specific love the love of the righteous so there are many verses in the Quran that God does not love the wrongdoers that's in the specific love of God but creation itself is obviously God loved his creation", "And there are arguments that some philosophers said that God had no choice but to create. It wasn't like God had to make a decision, but God was sort of... I don't know if forced is the right word, but it was the only way it could be, is that God created. Yeah, we wouldn't accept that because there's nothing that compels God outside of himself. But the effulgence, this idea of what's called fadlun,", "that it's part of God's nature to express that bounty. The reason when I first heard Plantinga's idea about God having a nature, it just seemed to lower God and the idea of God being beyond being and you can't even use any characterization of God and nature seemed to undercut that in some way. But I guess I got used to it.", "used to it. I mean, well also, I mean language is when we talk about God where we're ultimately stuck with human language for instance just gendering like Muslims do not believe God has a gender and yet in the English language were tend to force to use one of two genders yeah and it makes it would just be an impersonal yeah and", "it would be unacceptable and appropriate yeah what i try to do is try to use the word god double god so if i had to say if if god wanted to do something then god rather than that's what i tried to do i'm trying to get out of gendered language but it's not easy no and it's it's slightly awkward english yeah it is awkward english and uh dr thomas clearly translated the quran without any gender with god and he i think", "can ask about god and one of the most profound to me is is god necessary now we're using the word necessary in its philosophical sense not in it's sure it's in its uh common connotation because commonly we say sure god's necessary there wouldn't be a world you know we need god that's not what", "states of affairs, of all reality. Is there a possibility God could not exist? And certainly from the Judeo-Christian tradition, the classical one that God is necessary but what do we mean by necessary because I can conceive of the universe coming into being or being existing without", "logically necessary the way a married bachelor is impossible. So it is necessary that a married Bachelor does not exist, that's necessary because there's direct contradiction in terms of definition but I can conceive of a world where God is not needed so God does not seem to be logically necessary. What's the Islamic tradition on the necessity of God?", "necessity of God well yeah this mean I think that first of all the idea of the of the necessity of god comes from a Muslim philosopher which was avicenna and his argument was the argument from contingency this idea that that if you have a contingent world meaning a possible world because we could have many many possible worlds we could", "lived in glass bottles and were always existent. We can conceive of amazing things. Or everything in the entire history of the world is exactly the same, except that when I put my finger here versus I put it my finger there, that's two different worlds. Right? Everything else is exactly right thing. And so there's literally infinity of infinities of kinds of contingent worlds. Exactly. So that's for sure. And", "principle there then of sufficient reason asks for an explanation that makes some kind of sense to a contingent world. Avicenna's solution to that was, there must be then a necessary being that has aseity, this idea that there is no explanation for that reality's existence. Aseity meaning the entity in itself has all the requirements for existing... Self-sustaining, does not need anything, is incomplete.", "complete one of our definitions of god is the one that is independent of all things and yet all things are dependent upon that god and the essence is existence it can't exactly because then it would come out the accidents or the attributes then would come", "traditional view, but conceivability is one of the phenomena of the human mind. I mean, the fact that we can conceive of all these things. Now, the question is again, it begs a question, your question, of the definition because we can talk about God. Einstein had a vision of God, but it certainly isn't the God of the theologians. Spinoza, you know, many, many people have had... So if we're talking", "about the god of abraham that is a personal god that's a god that actively engaged with the creation and so that i think a lot of people will debate about but I think most people our belief is that there is a kind of principial nature in the quran it's called fitra that that people let me give an example Fakhreddin al-Razi the great theologian persian", "is a fundamental aspect of the mind. And he said, you can take an infant and you can hide and throw something in front of the infant. The infant will not assume it popped into existence. It will literally walk around to find the source. And He says causation is a Fundamental Desire of the human being. And so that is essentially what metaphysics is. It's trying to get to the first cause like where did this all begin?", "did this all begin so aristotle has you know his argument from motion but that is that's a philosophical god that's not the god of revelation that's Not the God of creation ex nihilo. That's the God that is the first mover who's connected with creation as a cause and effect connection that can't be parted, And so the universe exists forever alongside God. So Avicenna, there's debates about in the Muslim tradition,", "Imam al-Ghazali completely rejected that idea. And so Muslims believe in creation ex nihilos, so the ground of being where does that come from? Where and what's sustaining this there's a verse in the Quran that says God is witnessing all things. So that witnessing is sustaining existence and there's verse in Quran with the most famous verse which called The Throne Verse that says,", "the sustainer, and then it says neither sleep nor slumber takes God. And in the commentaries they say if that was true, the whole existence would disappear. I mean one of the most fundamental things about the world is that we assume its continuity like we get up in the morning, I planned to come here to talk to you last night. But really if we believe", "conceive that it could just pop out of existence. The alternative is that it always was Bertrand Russell in his famous debate with Copleston. Coplestone eloquently put forth the arguments you and I probably agree with. In a much better way than I could ever do. Brilliant, brilliant man. And Russell got up and said the universe just is and that's all and sat down. That's a glib to me that's a very glib answer", "glib answer you know first of all that was probably during the time fred hoyle's steady state theory was still very much active that's no longer true i mean and then you have okay so we had the big bang and then it's the big crunch and then starts again but then you haven't actual infinity i mean in the end i really believe we're just making choices and and i choose to me", "Yeah, and we're not debating that at this point. What we're debating is the source behind that which given this conversation I'll give you as God what is the necessity of that god? Is it this absolute logical necessity there's every possible world that we can conceive of there's no way we can concede of a world without God which would make it logically impossible and I could conceive of a", "ability to conceive all possible things, in your...all contingent things. But I would say that this creation is always gonna compel us to ask that question. Okay. And it's... And I believe that the prophets...I mean one of the most interesting things about the prophets is they don't contradict one another. They really do say the same...especially", "God. He's going to judge you, and you better behave.\" And I mean every PhD disagrees with his the previous guy, his mentor. Aristotle disagrees of Plato. Philosophers are always disagreeing with their mentors but these prophets are very consistent and they told us the universe had a beginning. Nobody believed that at the time. They just thought it was always here. Now we actually do believe", "end. I mean, I think that's a very compelling argument. But one of the things about God is He has left it. He has not given us a criminal type of evidence. It's not beyond a reasonable doubt. He made it clear and compelling evidence. And I think for the principle of sufficient reason, the most clear and", "in God's own self can be at the most extreme logically forced, and there's no other logical aspect. It can be some kind of metaphysical which is not quite at the level of logic or it could be just factual, which is a nice way of saying brute fact. You know, we...it just is. Not that we don't know. It's not an epistemological question. Yeah. It is an ontological fact that God just is,", "It's just a brute fact. It's the ultimate brute fact.\" I mean, those are three possibilities. Most philosophers who were believers that I've met—again in the Christian tradition—desperately want it to be a higher level of necessity so they want it be logical and don't like it to a brute-fact factual necessity even though it's still a necessity even thought it's God. And you know, I'm...I don't know because I want it", "want it to be right i don't want it just be making god more than god really is yeah that's a very interesting point because um ultimately god is more than anything that we can conceive of god being i think that's the answer we have to accept yeah again we muslims put our head on the ground there's just a submission", "me and it's something that's very personal. And one of the ways that I get at that question is not to go through all the proofs or disproofs, I mean that gets pretty boring after a time you go over again but rather to assume God exists and then ask what are the kinds of traits that God would have? And then look at those traits and are they coherent do they make sense is that possible", "classical traits of God that you read about, that is accepted today to some degree but was highlighted during the high flourishing in the Middle Ages, is that God is simple. And simple means that God has no parts and that every one of God's characteristics are not the way they sound,", "knowledge, omniscience are actually the same thing and we just have to separate them because does that make coherent sense? That God is simple. That everything about God is really the same things that we have to disaggregate in our mind because we can't understand it but in ultimate reality they are the same. Right so Ms. Smita I think one of the most difficult", "talking about the attributes of God and the essence of God. So in the Monteserite tradition, they were the same, and the Catholics actually took that, this idea that the essence and the attributes, there's no distinction. The mainstream Orthodox Muslims did make a distinction between the essence", "They actually call it dakiq al-kalaam, which means the very subtle theology that becomes difficult to articulate well because of the dangers of misunderstanding in it. So when we say simple, obviously God cannot be a composite because one, that would end up with an actual infinity, parts being greater than the wholes if it's infinite. Where do the parts come from? Right, where do the", "is contained in some kind of space. So what's interesting is that the Christians also believe that God is simple, a lot of people don't know that because they think of the personas right? The persons, the three persons of God, the Father, God, and Son, and the Holy Ghost or the Holy Spirit but Aquinas is very clear on the simplicity of God that God does not have any composite and so it's interesting he chose", "the plastic tradition which means mask you know it's something so Meister Eckhart argues that the Godhead is absolute simple Infinity so um I think the word simple is a problematic word too because of what it evokes in yeah yeah it has a connotation to it yeah so but yeah we say he's a little more that there's no parts nor are there different persons uh the hypostasis", "and the Islamic tradition, the idea of a trinity. And the Jewish tradition. And they Jewish tradition yeah I mean that the Jewish theologians and the Muslim theologian really were in concert on a lot of things and in fact George Kohler the Jewish Theologian who ran the Boston Seminary said that the Christians were only half proselytize of the Noahidic tradition whereas the Muslims", "world for the coming of the Messiah and that was the classical Jewish position yeah that's right uh in the Christian tradition today I would say the majority of serious Christian philosophers reject the idea that God was simple as a scholastic tradition there are a few traditionalists who who maintain that um and and I think they they get to that similarly to what you describe", "but that does not imply that there are parts, which is hard to deal with. Exactly, and that's why the Martiziarites said that the Asheri and the Maturidi were actually making more than one god by doing that. Oh, that's interesting. So they did see that problem, but I think semantically if you can get your head around it,", "in the essence, but yet it has a distinction as an attribute. But it doesn't negate the simplicity of God. To take it back where I started from now that we've sort of agreed with that and if I'm going to believe in God that the explanation you've given would be the way I'd say yeah, if I have to make a choice I'll probably go follow your trail. Oh great! You're a convert.", "You're a convert. But now that I reflect back on it, does that make sense? Does it make sense to say that something that has no parts whatsoever can do anything that's differentiable? Because how do you get something that's differential out of something that is not having parts and yet we can have different ideas in our consciousness?", "has some non-physical component, the parts are coming through the parts of the brain. And that I know really well. Yeah, that's hardware. But if we assume that consciousness is immaterial... There's something, I would give you something about consciousness that may be immaterial, but the specificity of what we see, like the ability to know", "but the fact that I see a red rather than a green, all of that is physiological. Well also even in modern physics if the veils were lifted we would see the field and in some ways it was a type of simplicity and yet there's all these differentiations within the field. So this is again whether God is simple and how that works is a deep probe of what you understand God to be", "such a being really exists. So I think, again we the fundamental truth of our God is that God is absolutely one which is tohid and that one is pure unity so there's no composition, there's persons, there are no other gods beside that one true living God and that is unique. To discern the relationship between God", "of God and of time. And I want to begin by telling you an observation that I had which really made a profound impact on me as I began to understand this question. There were two individuals, both of whom have passed subsequently who I greatly admired, both in the UK, both distinguished PhDs in physics, both strong believers", "tradition, you couldn't pick out two people who on their surface were more similar in their background, their commitment to their faith and their deep intellectual desire to know God. That's the background premise. On the question of God and time they were diametrically opposite. One believed that God was", "not in time was timeless and so it existed totally outside of time. And the other believed that that was impossible, and that God was in time but God was everlasting without beginning and without end, but God is in time.\" And on that point they were intellectual enemies whereas everything else they were exactly the same. Amazing. And that struck me. So in the Islamic tradition", "tradition. Has that been a point of dispute, of how God relates to time? Not really. I think that the most... Obviously, time is an extraordinary experience. We're all experiencing it. We are in it and its movement and it's the measure of movement and creation is constantly changing", "we central park is central park it goes through its seasons we walk through it that statue's there and yet time those statues well are getting older and things begin to fade and buildings need renovation so change uh is happening all around us god does not", "by the very nature of God, because God is the creator of time and space. God is not in time or space. And I think that's probably one of the most difficult things for us to get our heads around because we exist in time. Okay why did God create the world 14 billion years ago? Why didn't he do it 20 billion years", "God has done, and so we have to experience time. Now there is a very interesting tradition from our prophet peace be upon him where he said that God says do not curse time, and there are many words for time by the way in Arabic but he said do not cursed time and use the word dahar. Dahar according to Imam al-Jorjani means all of time", "we would call, he says it's eternity as an instance. Eternal presence. It's eternal presence. And so the traditional commentary though is that because the Hadith says in my hand is the night and the day, the metaphorical hand of God. In my hand", "eternally present and infinite. And that nukestans, that eternal now... The Old Testament verse that articulates with that is that to God a thousand years is as a day and a day is as it's thousand years. The Quran quotes that and also 50,000 years to indicate that it's relative. Yeah, yeah, the thousand years you could have picked any number you like for that. Exactly, yeah. So with God", "It's all yeah. No, I mean that has a coherence to it and absolutely coherent And we now believe that time there's a relative created and time is related to the beginning of the universe You can't ask what was before that? It's like asking what was be for them right? What is the north of the North Pole? It just a illogical question when time you can't as well would be for its well We also have a very interesting concept. Sorry, you were you know, it's just", "that we go along those lines, but it's not sufficient. So I can understand and I respect greatly those philosophers, scientists who are believers who believe that God is in time. To pick names, John Polkinghorne was one of the physicists I was referring to or Richard Swinburne. And part of the reason for that", "is to maintain God as a personal god in a real sense, as opposed to kind of a tortuous philosophical sense that God from all eternity and this enormous presence. This single instant of knowing at all time in one enormous present that God sort of knew from all", "pray for on right on uh march 10th to 2023 and he knew that from all eternity he knew That and He Knew How He Would Answer Your Prayer at that point I mean it gets torturous well that was Nietzsche's i think Nietzche had the eternal reoccurrence was kind of if if that was true realizing that there was this kind of eternal re-occurrance of life because all of your moments in life would always be present", "be present. Yeah, very interesting. So I think people tend to overthink things and I just feel like I'll shut down at that point because our prophet said don't reflect on eternity because the intellect can't take it. And there are mysteries in religion that are impenetrable and that's where submission comes into it, this idea of just submission. Like I feel", "I feel that my life has shown me enough evidence, especially providential evidence of a caring loving God. That's been my... And it's not that I haven't had really difficult times and I haven' suffered and I have'n't had childhood trauma and things that have happened to me that are very disturbing and disrupting but overall I just feel there is a providence in the world working", "And I think also that time, one of the things that time expands and contracts for us. Like I know we have this concept of barakah, blessing in time so that lives can have much more time than other lives. We both know that one of strongest, the strongest proof that atheists use against God is the problem of evil", "And it's just so obvious. If you pose a God that is all-powerful and all good, how can you account for evil? And if you have evil, to flip the argument around, God cannot be both all-good and all- powerful. So take your choice. God is less powerful than you think. That would be coherent. Or he's less good than you", "all powerful and all good is incoherent. Yeah, I don't agree with that for a number of reasons. One, the assumption that there's evil in the world is one of the moral arguments for the existence of God because where do we even get the concept of evil? If it's all just pure randomness, I mean animals kill other animals all the time. Is that evil? Is it evil that the lion preys on the deer? Is that", "I had a coyote recently kill my cat. That coyote was evil as far as I'm concerned because I really like the cat, but God is the creator of everything. It's all his...God's dominion and therefore whatever God does with His dominion if I take this coat and you see me burn the coat you can say...and this is the brutal answer to this question. Yeah so if I burned", "coat, what are you doing? Well I could know that the coat was actually infected with some kind of thing. You don't know why I'm burning a coat but the point is you don't have any business telling me what to do with my property so if the whole world is God's dominion we have no business questioning God. One of the verses in the Quran is God will not be asked about what God does but you will be asked without what you do now it's quite brutal but on the other hand... It's not an equal relationship. It's", "valence on God. Hey, that's evil what you did. You allowed Hitler to rise and kill millions of people. That's evil. What you did, you allowed Putin to invade Ukraine. We can say that but at the same time we have moral agency and God has given us moral agency. And so I think just as we can say where is God? God can ask us where were you like? Where were you because", "as Burke said, for evil to flourish. It just takes good men to do nothing. And so there's a lot of truth to that. I mean we have people all over the world that just don't seem to be bothered. I walk around yesterday and went just to get a blanket for a homeless person because it's really hard for me just to walk by somebody I see shivering and not do something about it. But what happens when we live in a cynical world where people just assume these things are normal? Because they're", "because they're not. Something's deeply wrong, and so I think religion...I don't think people realize the good that religion does. And then the other thing about evil if you look at Dostoevsky, I mean Dostoyevsky gives us the best argument for the problem of evil in Ivan about children what did they do to deserve the horrors? Because we know there are children being trafficked right now. We know", "Scotland Yard, they can't even last in those units very long because it's so traumatic. The people in Philippines doing the PTSD, they get PTSD from taking things down from YouTube because there's so much traumatic material. So there's a lot of really creepy stuff and evil stuff on the planet but at the same time we have to understand that we have moral responsibility as human beings", "And so I feel that this idea of evil, what Ivan ends up committing suicide, you know, just going kind of mad. Right? Or rather going mad and then Alyosha and Father Zosima are his representatives of the tradition of believing in God and acting accordingly. And in the end it's, you", "So he had great concern about the problem of evil. Another example is Henri de Lubac, who uses Nietzsche and Dostoevsky as the two quote-unquote prophets of the modern age, and he shows how one gives us an example of coming to terms with the evil in the world by believing in God and working to reduce that, mitigate it, and the other is Nietzche,", "I appreciate that, but let's look at it from God's perspective. The Muslim tradition, and I assume you believe, that God created the universe and had conscious knowledge of and knows everything what the universe will be. So I think therefore in a simple syllogism you believe that when God created he universe God knew the extent of evil that would exist. Right. That's absolutely true yeah.", "True, yeah. And therefore God was happy, quote-unquote, to create a world that had all that evil? Well, I think to fulfill the purpose because Helen Keller once said the world is filled with sorrows and travails but don't forget it's filled with the overcoming of sorrows", "with that cry in the night. You know, every man that goes out and risks his life to save people, the fireman who goes into the building. I mean all these things are happening all over the world, and I think it has to be 51-49. There has to more good than evil. I don't think God would sustain a world that had more evil than good. So actually I'm just on the side of good, and that's where I want to reside.", "legitimate but the question is why is there The 49 I mean could you create a world could God have created a world um God had a choice and God did create a World Without Evil it's called Paradise yeah but didn't put us in there not yet not yet right yeah but that that's the patience here and and and the gratitude and the virtue of participation in being and and couldn't put", "right away well it wouldn't avoid the then we wouldn't have known we would just be there we wouldn' t have known what i mean one of the things about human beings is the incredible ingratitude that human beings display and one of things in the quran the devil swears an oath i will lead them all astray except your sincere servants and you will see that the majority of them are not grateful", "grateful. I genuinely feel grateful, and I always wonder about atheists. If you had the sunrise or the sunset once a year, every human being would go out there to watch it every year. It would be this amazing display. One of the reasons I personally... But people see it every day, and it's no big deal. One", "When I lived in the Sahara, many nights I was in tears just looking at the stars. And the Bible reminds us that the heavens declare your glory. You see those stars and Plato said that God put the order of the stars in the heaven so that we might see them reflect on them and desire to bring that order down as above so below. So I just feel like people if they would wake up", "To reality to if they would wake up to reality. I mean, I don't think we do enough as even with all the evil in the world Yeah It's horrible and and I could I think I could make a great argument for why religions horrible? I think i could make it great argument that I can help you with yeah So but I could an argument that without religion. It's a lot more horrible I'm so of all the Christian philosophers that I have spoken to", "to all but one, to my recollection would vehemently fight with me when I would say is God all-powerful? Is God all knowledgeable? Is there evil in the world? Yes yes yes you believe in God then God created evil. I mean I'm trying to be a very simple approach to it and I'd get fights back and never make any progress. There was", "that there's no way to get out of it God created evil and went through the process I really don't know the Islamic view of whether God created me this mean so Muslims believe that there is something called the qadr which is traditionally translated as fate destiny but it the root meaning of it is the idea of measuring something else so", "given us enough rope to save us or hang us. And so moral evil is a result of the sinfulness of human beings, so what comes from that? And there's also an understanding that a lot of natural evils are either one of two things, that God is... There's a punishment that could be involved. It's not for us to decide, but it could be a punishment", "them. For instance, our prophet said that anybody that dies from a house collapsing on him is a martyr. It's a martyr's death. So they go straight to heaven. So all the people that died in the earthquake by their houses collapsing on them, they're considered martyrs. And also dying of sudden death is a", "like a stomach cancer or something like that is a martyr's death. So there are many deaths, the prophet said, that are martyrs' deaths because of the intensity of the death and also the lack of time sometimes that people have to make amends and do these things. So I think we believe that God created everything but we don't attribute evil to God as a kind of just appropriateness.", "we have a formula that the prophet gave us it said all of good is in your presence and evil is not attributed to you but we believe that evil is part of god's creation god obviously created um the evil in in the world by allowing it to happen if it's moral evil and and then by uh the the events of natural", "certainly allows it because if you believe in God and it's happening, then it's obvious that God allows it if you still want to believe in god. But yet you roll it back to say when God created the universe did God know that evil would occur? Absolutely. I mean so-called open theology in the Christian tradition modern today not mainstream but", "but not insignificant, would say that the future is open and God is omniscient in that God knows everything. That can be known, but the future cannot be known because it hasn't occurred yet. So we're not undercutting God's omniscience because we're saying that like, can God lift a rock that's too heavy to... Logical inconsistency. Yeah, logical inconsistence. There's no undermining of God with a logical inconsistencies.", "So they say the future is a logical inconsistency to know. So that's a coherent explanation. It may not be satisfying to you or to anyone, but it's a logical consideration. There's a famous saint in Turkey who had his students and he wanted to appoint somebody to follow him. So he asked all his students to reflect that night on what they would remove from the world if they could. And so the next day he comes", "because it's the worst thing. And next one says, I'd get rid of alcohol because it is the source of so much evil. I'd be rid of adultery. They all giving their things they take out of the world and it got to the saint Marques Ofendi and he said, I would not take anything out of a world that God created for its purposes. And so that's just, I think, a very Muslim view of things", "why. I mean, there's a theodicy of the grand scheme of things that we just don't know, but God does bring good out of evil and then evil serves its purposes in that people rise up and oppose it, that people bear the burdens of oppression and still maintain faith in God. There's a wonderful... It's not", "says anybody who reaches 80 years of age still believing in God is forgiven. I got a couple to go, so I'm almost there. But I think the idea if you live long enough, you're going to see a lot of very troubling things. That's a great one. I like that. Even if it's not true, even if it isn't a real one but I'll quote you. Yeah, no, that's very good.", "is that either God knew or didn't know the amount of evil in the world, but God created the universe. And once you reach that nodal point, you have to make a choice. Yeah, and one of the things that I find really interesting, like I've been in a lot of places in the people I've seen that suffer the most often have the most profound belief in God. And the people that sit around with their kind of wine, cheese, and crackers discussing evil", "evil you know and why i don't believe in god they actually very often have wonderful lives there's kind of an irony in that yeah that is true that that is uh but you know it um i'm not i'm sure that that gives an answer to the question yeah it's kind", "a coherent approach to God. I mean, if I'm going to believe in God then we need to have a coherent approaching and to shirk from the idea that God is omnipotent and omniscient and yet distinguish... And yet the evil is something that God has allowed in order for us to have free will with the free will defense, the theodicy of free will. A classic defense in terms of we needed that. And that only deals with moral evil. It doesn't deal with natural evil. Exactly.", "natural exactly yeah exactly and it doesn't deal that effectively with moral evil uh yeah because now we have sociologists I mean that's one thing Dostoevsky points out is that the that the time is coming when they'll tell us there is no crime because the sociologists are going to say well the reason they did this is so there's kind of a hard determinism that says oh that criminal couldn't have done anything else given the life that he was given so there are those arguments and again I think", "i think i personally believe there's compelling arguments on both sides and you have to make your choice uh i've chosen the side of god and other people chose the side up either nothingness randomness or the side o f the devil well i hope i'm not in the latter category it doesn't seem like that but yeah seemed like a mensch", "them certainly believe that God intervenes in human affairs, both in our personal lives and in the flow of history and nations in one form or another. The question I always have is how? How does God do that? And there are radically different ways that sophisticated philosophers in the traditions who are believers explain", "which God has done that. What is the Islamic view? Well, the Islamic View, Bismillah, the Islamic view is that God is actively engaged in every instant with creation sustaining it and without that active engagement that their existence would not be here. The other thing is the providential care, the protection... I mean one of the things we see in the world", "is that generally things are like where things are peaceful and in the vast majority of places people feel a kind of security in their person and property those are these those are great blessings they can be disrupted but that in some ways is a proof of our natural inclination to kind of uh experiencing order um and and one of", "The idea like of an earthquake is there's all this order and then suddenly all this chaos comes in, but then there's a restoration of order. And that's to remind us that order is the norm, that experiencing order is...and that's one of the great blessings from God. So God, in essence, throws these wrenches in our works in order for us to grow. I've met several people who have been imprisoned unjustly.", "Tubbs, who spent 28 years in prison, African-American beautiful man. And he said, okay, is this what God wants from me? And he spent his time helping other people in prison. He's helped thousands of inmates who were there for crimes. So a man who was there without crime could help all these people. He chose to do that. That was a choice. And almost every person I've ever met", "unjustly in when i was in west africa uh in jail that was horrible experience but when i saw the notes i was only 19 years old but when I saw the note um that my friend who was with me had written he sent them to me a couple of years ago and I and I was telling him oh this is a great blessing this only happens to people close to God like prophets and things like Joseph he was in prison", "the tribulation was actually from god one of our great mystics uh ibn attalila said that one of the things that will mitigate the pain of his tribulation is to know that god is the one trying you and and so these are things that we grow from like i said i've met several people who've been in prison and they've all said to me the same thing it was the best thing ever happened to me and i wouldn't want", "there are people that do get great benefit from actually being forced to confront themselves in a way that they'd never had before. And I think tribulation does that for people. So when God intervenes in the world, I mean, there are several different mechanisms by which God can do that. God is sustaining the world so at any given nexus", "any point in the world of god sustaining uh that's one way it's sort of an active proactive in time kind of reaction to move things and the other way he says that somehow from all creation god sort of knew what things were happening so that god could create a world in which he did not have", "beforehand like a deistic type a dst but it's it's there's a philosophy called middle knowledge where god had an infinite number of choices of worlds that you could have and part of this is to is to harmonize human freedom because if god is continually manipulating things maybe we don't have as much freedom and to be sure that god's providence is secured so that the app the outcomes", "freedom and God's absolute providence seem like they're philosophically contradictory at first. And so how do you deal with that? So, do you privilege one over the other human freedom versus a God's providence? I mean there is a kind of soft determinism. There is an idea that things are fated and we accept that but at the same time we believe that we do have free will.", "balance and that's why whenever anything in the past has happened we just say mashallah god has uh willed that and and that according to quran is to free your heart from the stress of oh god if only this had i've only done that if i'd only done it that eliminates that problem that's good yeah it works it does true or not irrelevant it works yeah it", "about the past, but they're not fatalists about the future. They believe that we have choices. And so there's a trope that says all Muslims are fatalist, but it's not actually true. We do believe that God has given us the ability to choose and even if we have neuroscience that tells us oh before you make the choice, there's already things- There's a lot of problems happening in your brain and things like that. But that would be God's aforeknowledge preparing you for the choice that you were gonna freely make.", "for believers. I mean, that's why in essence religion is kind of in the Paparian sense it's non-falsifiable because we really can come up with some kind of solution to the problem and it drives people that are not believers a little crazy but you know, I just feel again that we're going to search for the best answers and maybe there's answers that we haven't found yet that will find... Maybe these great beasts", "of computers are going to end up telling us things that we... I doubt that. Yeah, I do too. That's my own personal bias. But who knows? So look, we have free will, we God's providence and it seems to me if I heard you right, that you have to be a little soft on both in order to harmonize them because some people say that's not true. Some people can keep them both hard", "But I don't see that. I like softening both of them because then they work. Yeah, we're in agreement on this. Imam Ali was once asked do we have free will or is there just choice? And he said lift your leg right leg and he lifted his leg and now without putting it down lift the other one. He said I can't. He says it's between those two. So you know I mean we didn't choose our parents despite what new age people say. You know we didn' t choose", "you know, the type of health we would have. Well, there is some level of choice in health but generally if you had bad genes, you didn't choose that. Hamza, all of the Abrahamic religions in their essence believe in divine providence but there's a distinction between what it means as I've discerned it between those who believe that providence means that God will know the total outcome of the world maybe individual nations", "nations and that the end result is certain, and things will be positive. The devil will be put in prison or whatever it is. And others who believe not only that but God knows every single event, every single movement of every single molecule in every single part of the universe, and that's what providence means. In the Islamic tradition which are the two? Something in between?", "How do you deal with divine providence? They're both from a Muslim perspective. They're absolutely true so on the one hand the The creation is moving towards a destiny and that destiny will be fulfilled in another world And there's a providential care and assuring that happens, then on the other hand we believe that God is directly engaged in every instance", "in every instant with the creation, sustaining it. And according to the dominant understanding actually recreating it in every instance so there's a kind of occasionalist belief that many Muslims hold. So that means that God is providentially taking care for instance we actually believe if we took your temperature or my temperature right now", "measurement with Fahrenheit that's God, that's doing that. And if it goes up, that is God. If it goes down, that s God. You take sugar and the insulin is released, that�s God. So that's providence for us. God is in every instant taking care of us. And then when it goes wrong, it's also God that is... Does that lead to a fatalism on one hand or diminishment", "into free will on the other? Well, that's a good question. I think there's... On the one hand it does give us a kind of acceptance of things but on the another hand we do believe that we have free will in that limited area of our agency that God has given us will, volition, that we are volitional creatures and we have moral agencies so... And in fact like Kierkegaard you know", "Every instant, in essence is a... It's an ethical choice that's being made. Even stronger position than God knowing everything is, in essense, God causing everything and the occasionalistic view which comes out I think of the Islamic tradition not all Muslims believe that of course but it is", "It is a way to intensify strongly God's involvement in the world. And basically that says that in the causal process of anything going on, that God has an active role as opposed to just setting the stage and the actors, meaning the molecules doing their thing, that at every stage God is in those...in the causal chain.", "causal change. Which is why the mystic who experiences God directly sees that reality. There's a great Egyptian scholar and mystic, Ibrahima Tayla, who said when was God absent that God needed to be proved to exist? That for the mystics, God is never absent. And there's a tradition where the prophet Muhammad said as people draw closer to God,", "which he sees, the ear with which he hears, the tongue with which speaks, the hand with which grasp, the leg with which walk. So in other words there's an experience of that divine reality. What is the extent of the belief in occasionalism where God is involved in the causal chain of everything that happens? Is that mainstream or not? It's mainstream I think that would be", "belief. There are people that believe in secondary causation, but the vast majority of Muslims would hold at least the scholars I mean a lot of common Muslims might not know But that is review of Imam al Ghazali of many of the great scholastics of Islam and it became the dominant creed It's... The way I put it is there's the quantum and the Newtonian so at the Newton we believe in", "causation that if I harm somebody, I'm responsible for the harm. God didn't cause it. I caused it. But at that quantum level we would say that everything is created by God. It sounds like a contradiction though because the quantum level sits below the Newtonian in a sense and that's the real stuff that's going on. Well, I mean, I think they're both real. We're living...I'm not gonna walk through", "I'm not going to jump off this building. We're living in a Newtonian world of Newtonian physics, of cause and effect but there is a world underneath it that they are challenging even the whole concept of cause-and-effect now at places like CERN that is their really cause and fact? It's a longer conversation. The concept of Occasionalism though some have said had undermined", "process of science because if God's involved in all the causation then science takes a lower position. Yes, yeah I don't... that argument does not convince me at all because first of all the Muslims when they were at the height of their certainly their prowess civilizationally they were the forefront of sciences and many of them were actually occasionalists so it didn't stop", "with the world that God has given them. I mean, the foundational text that we believe by Imam Nasafi says that the reality of things is fixed. It's haqqi qadashiyat thabita. It' s fixed and the knowledge of those things is realized so... And then it talks about how the way that we know those is through facts and through the five senses. So empiricism is real for the Muslims.", "for the Muslims. I mean, we believe in empirical science. At the same time you believe in occasionalism? Yeah and I think there's a type of challenge for people to hold contradictory thoughts in their mind. Einstein said it was a sign of genius so I think the Muslims maybe had a type or genius that people haven't really appreciated. So each of the Abrahamic religions believes in an end-time in the sense that they will be", "have known it for at least in written history, four or five, 6,000 years. And that God will be having some kind of intervention. In Judaism they're looking for the Messiah and Christianity there'll be this return of the Messiah. And Islam is a prophet who will come. I'd like to understand", "I'd like to understand from the Islamic point of view what the end time means, what are the signs that you would look for and then maybe how it articulates with the Jewish and the Christian view. Sure. So the end times is first of all very much part of Islam in one of the most famous traditions of the Prophet peace be upon him he talked about... He was asked by Gabriel", "Islam and he gave him the five pillars, and he asked him what is Iman faith and he give him the six articles of Faith belief in God belief in angels belief in the messenger belief in books believe in the last day and belief in The idea of the other this kind of fate or the measuring out And then he asked about signs at the end of time and he said that one asking does not know more than the one", "than the one, the one being asked does not know more than the asking. And so then he said, then tell me its signs. So he gave us signs and in our tradition there's the lesser signs and then there's greater signs. The lesser signs are many in our traditions. I mean there is really a lot of very specific signs of the latter days where the Prophet said that there would be widespread knowledge. He said inanimate things would talk.", "that you would find men being satisfied with men and women being satisfied, with women would be much very widespread. He said that people would walk they would spend their time with musical instruments on their heads which nobody understood at the time he said that People would have on their sides They would have things it would tell them what their family was doing at home He's he said That people would travel", "between the cloud and back to the earth. Many, many signs that he said that metal would speak not the hadid I was very interesting science. He said that the skyscrapers would that there would appear buildings that would reach the mountain tops. He's said that destitute Arabs would compete in vying to build bigger and bigger buildings", "He literally said desu goat herders amongst the Arabs would compete to building higher buildings. He also said that there would be wars like the Christian tradition, wars and rumors of wars.", "about but then there's these great signs certainly all the smaller ones one could say as you've described them they're already here today yeah they're always here and yeah and i think many muslims have felt that these a lot of muslim I ve heard they ask me are these the latter days you know that they kind of feel that they think you know they think i don't know but yeah but they do feel like uh you know at least the latter", "legitimate question. In the end, the Muslims believe... So these major signs we believe in this anti-Christic world leader that comes called the Messiah Dajjal. We also believe in the second coming of Jesus who is, we believe as the messiah that the Jewish community missed and that he will come at the end of time.", "is a sign of the end times or that is the end? That's, we're almost at the very end. Yeah, once Jesus returns but there will be a period. So how does that differentiate from the Christian view? Well, the Christians see Jesus as part of the Godhead. Right, sure. I mean, there is a sophisticated Catholic and Orthodox tradition of the dual nature. There are some Christians that believe in the monophysite nature.", "believe that Jesus is God um but uh yeah so they believe that he's coming back as as God you know okay and the Muslim tradition but Jesus is coming back he's a prophet it's part of this process any other prophets coming back no but some say that Elijah is I mean there is a belief in in Elijah as an immortal another Jewish guy in there Elijah is very interesting yeah", "How about what I read about the, you know, kind of, I forgot the name, Mahdi? The Mahdi. So there is a belief in the Mahdi That's a dominant belief but there are scholars who believe that there's no Mahdi except for Jesus, that Jesus is the Mahadi, but the dominant belief is that there is person who comes back and revives Islam and unites the Muslim community when the world's filled with a lot", "with a lot of injustice. And I mean, the Prophet said he predicted... He said that Islam would last 30 years as a political phenomenon. Only 30 years. And when his grandson Hassan, that was literally at the 30-year point. And then he said it would become monarchies. And they would be horrible.", "And then he said, then it would go back to the prophetic model which Muslims understood to be the Mahdi. It's very strong in the Shia tradition. I think some of the Shias saw Barak Hussain Obama as kind of a sign because Hussein is held very high in both Sunni and Shia but particularly in the Shiite tradition. So we disappointed them in the end?", "end i think so with the if the in the mahdi comes back unifies the islam is that a sign of the end or is that the end itself it's not the end no so the end eventually there's a there's an understanding that it will go back to the loss of that prophetic tradition and then there will be uh you know", "a terrible war that happens, a kind of Armageddon-type scenario. And then basically the worst people will be left and then the end comes. And what happens? How do we make it better? Does God intervene in some way or...? Just the afterlife. There's a closing of the earth. Oh wow! Yeah so the human species comes to an end.", "it starts bad gets worse and then is destroyed so at the end is very different than the christian and the jewish tradition which has god come coming back when jesus comes back then he takes over the earth and reforms the earth that makes peace to go out from jerusalem well there is a period like that but it's followed oh because in", "that is the end and therefore that's a new beginning. And that's the permanent, the new heaven and the new earth here. Yeah, we don't believe that. No, we move to another dimension. So you would have that as kind of a false hope if that happens. Other people think it's the ultimate. Well I think there's a lot of certain iteration of Christianity that is looking forward to the end time. We're not.", "Sure. We're not. Like Muslims don't, like in the Jewish tradition you actually should avoid bringing nearer the end times. The Muslims have the same idea. You don't want to be a sign of the end of time. Right. Yeah, you want to become a zadek. We call it siddik. Same word. So that's our goal is to forestall because we want to keep the theater of enlightenment. Christians like to see", "to see some christians i don't think all of them yeah sure yeah a lot of the fundamentalists would see the end time because after that then jesus would come and the world could be peaceful forever right but you're saying the end times is going to be totally removed and we're going to move to another dimension and then that's that's yeah that's when that's where the end comes and there's a tradition it's almost similar to the rapture the idea that people are", "the people are removed, the believers. And then there's only left the disbelievers and then it's... All right well I hope I'll go with you. Yeah yeah well uh it's very easy la ilaha illallah wa mahumd rasulullah and then your well take your hand. So what may seem like a very trivially an obvious question why believe in God? I'd like to ask different people because", "The general answer I know, I mean, I think everybody sort of knows why some people think we should believe in God. But I like to hear the nuances, the way people describe it. Articulate it. So from an Islamic point of view, from your own personal view, what is the benefit for believing in God? Can I ask you a question? Yeah, that's fair. So what's the best answer you've ever heard for that? Have you thought about it?", "I'm not sure I can tell you that there's a best answer. The answer is generally operative in terms of the person, how it'll benefit you and what's the benefit for you. And I guess what I'm looking for is answers that are not as obvious as that. Sure. Well, for me, I don't feel like I have a choice.", "I don't really, I could give you a lot of whys. But for me God is so self-evident that to deny him would like being denying my own existence personally. I really feel that. I just, I really feels it's impossible for me to not believe in God because everything to me confirms God", "god and and i've seen that in my own life and and I feel you know I have there's a wonderful poem by Robert Frost about looking at the ocean you ever seen that poem you know the people along the sand they all look one way they turn their backs on the land they look at the sea all day well and then he says the land may vary more but wherever the truth may be the the people turn their bags and they and look at", "more? What's the fascination with looking at the ocean? And I feel like a believer is the ones that he's looking at, and the disbeliever is looking at land. And then when the believer sees the whale, look at this, turn around, did you see? And then it's gone. And I, and I feel when you accept God, God will continually show you reasons to continue to believe in God.", "we will remove our signs from people that show arrogance in the earth and they can see every sign and they will not believe. And so, the most important thing is you know the Catholics have this tradition of the skeptics prayer which I actually really like. This idea of just saying God I don't know if You're there but if You are there help me find You. And I think if somebody really genuinely prayed", "believe God is real, and I believe that God does present that reality to people that are willing to just humble themselves and say, I believe. Yeah, I easily can see myself in that position because I really do want to. It's just that I worry about fooling myself. I'm not worried about others fooling me. I mean, egotistical enough to know", "can't fool me, but I can fool myself. So that's what scares me. Well the devil might be able to fool you too. Maybe I should worry about that. They say Tillyard famously said his greatest trick was convincing people he didn't exist. Again, I think I'm very much in control of what I believe and how I believe, and how articulate to myself. But I really do feel fooling myself because I really", "to believe yeah and it's very easy for hope to swamp reason uh and yet i understand that reason in its rigorous sense may be an inhibition to see god because many people have told me that many people criticize what we do the part of closer to truth that deals with meaning and search for god by saying", "to do it experientially. And my comeback to that is not that they're wrong, right? They may be right but I cannot discern the difference between the wheat and the chaff if there's any weed at all. I can intellectually but I can't experientially and does that put me in an impossible situation where I'm rejecting the only real evidence?", "Another why for me is that it seems to be the most obvious explanation for being here and being as coherent as we are, the fact that our minds are so beautifully correspondent with creation itself. I mean how could we know something like the universal law of gravity? How can our minds be so matched to the universe to know that?", "out things like fine-tuning and the anthropic principle. How could we determine Van Allen's belts, and these things? I mean it's quite stunning what the human mind has been capable of doing. And that mind is constantly generating thought. And where does that thought come from? Jalal al-Jameer Rumi says silence, ask God, and the answers will come.", "primary points in disproving God is the severe contradictions in religious teaching, certainly among the major religions of the world. That there are points of obvious contradiction and so the fact that these contradictions", "we have a choice. We recognize the contradictions, sure there are some similarities they all seem to believe in something beyond the physical I mean when you devolve down to the commonalities among religions which some have tried to do philosophically John Hick famously as looks to the real and but when you look at the lowest common denominator you don't wind up with very much so how do you respond to that? Well I mean I would say", "say that one i personally love religions like i've studied religions uh both academically and and also just out of personal interest um so i do love religions i think there is immense amount of truth in all the religions that i've studies especially the world's great religions the ones that have large numbers of people but they obviously there's difference there's a lot of", "of things that we agree upon, but there are differences. So in the Islamic tradition, we're a supersessionist religion so we do believe that Islam came and abrogates the previous dispensations, but it acknowledges the previous dispositions. If there's differences, it's because they've been changed or altered. That's how the Muslims view it. But Christians as well. They just had one less to deal with.", "But the Abrahamic tend to, the Jewish and the... I mean, the Jews tradition believes in the Noahides. Right. But their mandate is to teach the Noahide for the rest. So the 613 is for them but the seven is for everybody else. It's a lot easier. But the Muslims actually believe that all peoples had prophets. All peoples. The Quran is very clear that there has been no people except they have messengers sent to them.", "and traces of prophetic tradition all over the world, which is why you have a lot of these themes and a lot more morality. I mean there's differences but there are a lot similarities so we believe that...we acknowledge the previous dispensations and also the Muslims have traditionally allowed them to coexist with them in Muslim states so the Muslims always protected the Christians. I", "Yeah, by law they had to. But I mean there's bad rulers like we had a ruler in the 11th century in Jerusalem that burnt down the church of the sepulcher but the ruler right after him rebuilt it because it was just an act of madness. And the Christians historically have lived with the Muslims. There's 12 million Christians at least eight I think but closer to 12 in Egypt. The Coptic Christian Church was protected even though they were persecuted by the Byzantines.", "So the Muslims have recognized that. The Jewish community, Bernard Lewis wrote a book about how much better Jews fared in Muslim lands than they did in Europe. Yes, for sure. It wasn't perfect. That was a low hurdle. Yeah, good point. And it certainly wasn't perfectly but there are periods of great collaboration between the scholastics amongst the Jewish and Muslims. And then also in India, there's some bad periods", "also periods where with people like Darushaku. Darushakuh the great mogul prince of Shah Jahan who built the Taj Mahal he actually translated the Upanishads into Persian and the Upani Shad's are really consistent with Islamic teaching Muslims any Muslim that read the Upanshads would feel like they were reading Muslim commentary and he actually felt the Upanishads were mentioned in the Quran Darusha", "translation of the Upanishads into European language in English was done from Persian, from a Muslim translation of a Hindu text. So I think Muslims have been taught to respect religions but we do believe that Islam superseded the previous dispensation. Let's follow that. The dispensation we were talking about it was obviously the Hebrew Bible and then", "in their perspective and then the Islamic tradition did that but how then did the Islamic Tradition deal with other non Abrahamic religion because there was nothing to supersede in a sense you're dealing with with Hinduism or Buddhism right and a lot of Muslims considered Hinduism we can't assert it because it's not mentioned in the Quran the Quran does mention lesser lights distant", "The Muslims, many of the Muslims felt like Al-Baruni did a whole study of Hinduism. And in fact one of the great Esfariyini in his book on heresiology actually has a whole chapter on Buddha which I wrote about. I have an article called Buddha in the Quran and he makes an argument that if what the Buddhists say is true then he's al-khidr which is the green man who's mentioned in the Qur'an and Buddha is often portrayed in green jade.", "green jade. In any case, I have no problem believing that these were revelations and dispensationalism. The vast majority of Hindus believe in one God. A lot of Muslims think they're idolaters but a true understanding of Hinduism is actually they believe in this ultimate. They have the trimurti, you know, the idea of Brahma and Vishnu and Shiva", "Shiva. Yeah, but if the Muslim tradition says that each people have their own prophets, the assumption is those prophets are saying some things that are not accurate or not true? Well they spoke for their time so sometimes it's cultural. Their laws would differ but the ultimate truth of one God,", "you know avatars or however you want to call it and then the idea of a judgment that these would be considered fundamental. And is that good enough to make it like the Noahide laws from the Jewish point of view would give non-Jewish people if they fulfill that really kind of the same thing? Yeah, and it's an easy ticket seven not 613.", "train bound for glory. Yeah. So, but in the Islamic tradition, how do you then view the other traditions who didn't become Muslim but maintained either the old dispensation? The Quran says in the fifth chapter that we have given every people a shir'ah, a sacred law and a minhaj and a way of methodology to follow", "one. So vie with one another in virtue, and so there's a kind of withholding like we do believe that we have superseded the previous religions but we recognize it there's wisdom in that God has left these religions in the world and they're...and we are not allowed to force them to become Muslim. They've become Muslim with their own choice and God will judge them on the day of judgment. We cannot say I cannot say if I say you're going to hell", "that to no individual i can say that to know individual as a muslim but yet as a Muslim you do believe that the only certain way you'd be 100 sure they'd be in paradise is being a true muslim yeah not the you know the true Scottish fallacy I don't like that fallacy you don't know that one the true Scotsman fallacy", "newspaper that somebody got raped you know he's a Scotsman would never do that and the next day finds out it was a Scottsman he said well a true Scotsmen would have never done that yeah that was one of those good I'm sorry I think we could say with some confidence that the Abrahamic religions worshiped the same God now the Islamic view may be that it uh it's um", "a former Christian and Jewish. The Christian would say they have superseded the Jewish. They're the real truth. So, all right, we'll accept that. But I don't think any of them would fight with the idea that you're worshiping the same God, although the Trinity throws a little bit of a wrench into that wheel, at least from the Jewish point of view, and I think from the Muslim point of", "question is uh do the major religions worship the same god and there are two things two questions i have for you to to tackle number one is because christianity has a trinity uh is that the same God that is uh worshipped by the name of Allah or the tetragrammaton the four you know the name", "the same as the trinity let's deal with that is one question and the other question is go further afield hinduism and buddhism which really doesn't have a god but has sort of a cosmic consciousness quasi-god right and hinduim has uh god which is a god that is this is my words not theirs derivative from a brahman", "um evolve uh devolves a god or god emerges from the cosmic consciousness but is definitely secondary to this fundamental consciousness so you know handle it well i think there yeah between that i think that one of the things is there's all these different perspectives that people are looking from uh there's that famous story of the elephant", "feeling the trunk, feeling this stump, feeling the ears. And everybody's right. But at the same time they're all wrong. So I think God is so beyond anything that we can comprehend and so all of these languages are attempts to articulate something that ultimately isn't ineffable. The Tao which can be named is not the eternal Tao. One of my favorite verses. It's a beautiful verse yeah", "For Muslims, Allah, God and Allah does really mean God. The Christians use Allah in Arabic so they actually call Jesus the son of Allah and people forget that and Aramaic also I did not see it but apparently in the Passion of Christ when the figure is on the cross he says", "is yeah it's hebrew aramaic elohim yeah this is so ilah in arabic is god like we have muslims named abdulila the son of the god so elohim um so so i think jews and christians worship uh the same god conceptually also christians", "perspective and from the Jewish perspective, it's not a correct perception because they have made these personas, the hypostases. They've given God three in one. And so for Muslims that's problematic. So we don't believe in God, the Father, God, The Son, and then the Holy Ghost. And then there's a lot of Christian differences about does the Holy Spirit emanate from the Father and", "code eternal and yeah we can spend the rest of eternity right so for Muslims we believe that if we're talking about the creator of the heavens and the earth however we conceptualize that we're", "and i think first of all they need to study more christian history because the i have to say i find it incredibly ironic that the catholic doctrine since 1832 is from saint thomas aquinas and st thomas Aquinas quotes muslim theologians and philosophers constantly after augustine some of the most quoted are uh ibn rushd averroes and and even sina avicenna so", "So Aquinas benefited greatly from Muslim theologians and scholastics, and some of his arguments are from them. Yeah, no doubt. And I think that educated Catholics, people like my friend Dr. Robbie George at Princeton, these Catholics that are educated they know that the Muslim God is the same god but they believe in the Trinity. That's why Muslims can marry Christians and Jews. They cannot marry pagans", "cannot marry pagans but they can marry christians and jews pagan is this is defined as anybody outside of the uh the abrahamic faith yeah okay so hindus and zoroastrians were traditionally treated as people of the book like they they so the dominant opinion of the muslims is that all peoples are to be respected even", "that only Abrahamic peoples can live under Muslims. But it's never been practiced. And so what about the Hindus and then the Buddhists who don't even have a God? They have something fundamental, maybe something like God, but certainly it's impersonal. They have some thing of ultimate concern and they do have a sense of reality. Yes. I think the Pew polls show that almost 70% of Buddhists in India believe in God", "a lot of Buddhists do believe in God. I mean, I know American Buddhists that believe in god. Yeah but that's sort of an individual decision and kind of a syncretic approach to... Sure it's not part of the doctrine. I think Dr Thomas Cleary was probably the foremost Buddhist scholar in the United States and greatest translator of Buddhist texts into English. He really saw Buddhism as a technique that all religions could benefit from. A lot do. A lotta people think there is no incoherence in being a Buddhist and a Jew at the same time.", "Right. But if you look at the doctrines, that's not... Yeah well there are a lot of different doctrines in Buddhism. I mean if we read Dr. Cleary saw the Prophet Muhammad prophesized in the Dhammapada. I think everybody sees everything and I get letters every week who people find", "or in the numerology and the Bible. I think there is some proof to the Upanishads maybe, yeah. Yeah, well you know but there's a lot more speculation than hope and I think reality... Well I think what you- And it shouldn't be dependent upon that should not be if you're looking to try to prove the revelation of these scriptures by scientific prescience I think you're in trouble. Although I do think", "I do think, like the Quran to me, if people are willing to put in the time, there are very powerful arguments in the Quran that a lot of people aren't aware of. You know, I mean, there is syllogism, syllogistic arguments that are there for people to ponder and the Quran does call us to reflect. So one way that atheists make fun of religious people", "God created the universe and God created a world, and all gods are good. This should be the best of all possible worlds.\" And philosophers, again mainly in the Christian tradition go through various complex arguments to show that creating...that's not an effective atheistic argument because creating THE best possible world is a logical impossibility because whatever you can imagine as the best possible", "comes goes to heaven or whatever and that's a better one than that you have he said that's the bed then I can add another one and it goes on in so it becomes logically impossible right is that a legitimate question to ask uh you know if God had a choice some say that God didn't have a choice but most Abrahamic um deep thinkers believe that God had no choice God did not have to create the world that God created the world out of love", "to share his godness with other sentient creatures i think that's a dominant theme in all the abrahamic religions um and if that's so you know why didn't god create you'd have to assume got created the best one or god created an infinite number of ones that would just happen to be one of them right well uh there's a very interesting voltaire's candide you know making fun of professor pangloss going", "possible worlds. I mean, he was making fun of German philosophy. But he ends up in Turkey and they find the Sufi, you know? And then they go to the Sufis and ask him is this the best of all possible worlds? And he gives them quite a harsh remark. And then there they see the Turkish man eating the sherbet at total peace. And Kandide says what's the secret of life? He said tend your own garden.", "and so they end up doing that every once while, they have their debates. But I think there's a lot of truth to that tending our own gardens here in this world. In terms of being the best of all possible worlds, there is a famous statement that is attributed to Imam al-Ghazali which means something like, there's not in this contingent world a more wondrous world. And his books were burnt", "were burnt in andrewsia for saying that so the muslims of spain actually uh burned his books and rejected that statement but i think because they thought that it was a kind of heretical uh statement to suggest that god could not make a more perfect world um because that seemed to limit the power of god yeah", "Imam al-Ghazali was saying, that for serving the purpose this is the best of all possible worlds. For serving God's purpose in creating the world, that this is best of possible worlds it serves that purpose but paradise is infinitely better than this world we are in now. But its the best world we have for now and so we have to take care of it", "Mark Van Doren once said that he loved, he didn't like didactic literature. He loved literature that just presented the world as it was and he said Shakespeare loved the world. He love the world with all of the characters, with Iago's and you know, all the good characters and the bad characters. You know, he loved it all and I think he said in a way that God must love his world that he's created with everything in it because it is perfect in that way", "way and there's a verse in the quran that if you if you look to the world you will not see any flaw in it and then it says return your glance and look again and you will NOT see any fault. In other words, if you're seeing a fault the fault is in YOU. And so that's an argument that this IS the best possible way? Yeah exactly! And so there's there's A wonderful tradition where the prophet Muhammad said", "then praise god but if you find other than good then blame only yourself because you're not seeing the good you know god looked upon the world and saw that it was good and so it's all there to serve a purpose especially for the believer because we're accepting whatever god presents to us with a submission so may god give", "As a believer, I would hope. I don't know how I would react, but I would that I would act appropriately which is to accept the tribulation God's given me and it doesn't mean I can't work to treat it if I could, but should still accept it with submission. And so I think from that point of view everything in the world is good for the believer. Are we forced in our theological commitments", "is the best possible world that god uh could have made for the purposes that god has even if we can't understand it are we forced to that conclusion i don't think so yeah i don' t i don''t think so what's the alternative what would be the alternative then i mean i think we could conceive of many things in our minds we could", "would be that instead of being 5'6\", I was, you know, six feet tall. You know, if that would give me better skill maybe I would have been a better basketball player. You and I share that exactly yeah. Yeah so that's a better world but is it you know...but that's not-I wouldn't criticize God for having sub optimized the world because I'm not 6 feet tall Right, exactly. I mean", "you know that we should be pleased with what God's given us and just be grateful for what we have. I think the prophets peace be upon him he said always look on people that are less fortunate than you and never people that more fortunate than because it will give you gratitude in your heart. The question of what is God's relationship to abstract objects sounds like it's a very", "really looks deeply into the aseity, God's independence and God's total control of all reality which is a fundamental characteristic belief of certainly the Abrahamic religions. And the problem goes like this if you believe that abstract objects like numbers logic propositions universals generalities are somehow", "existed like you cannot imagine that 2 plus 2 is not equal to 4 and even if there was no world That would still be a true statement. And even if nothing ever existed if The statement would be if something existed and if there were two in two things would always before I don't think anybody disputes that the question is is What what is the grounding for such abstract objects because if they exist", "exist necessarily meaning there's no way they could not have existed it means that that was not created so many philosophers believe that it's impossible for god to have created two plus two equal four because uh there's", "with a blizzard, a snowstorm blizzard with all these abstract objects floating around that God somehow has to deal with. Now, that doesn't make sense either. So you have two sets of circumstances that seem to be universally exhaustive, neither one of which makes sense. Right. So how do you deal with that question? Well, I think... Yeah, for us, the abstract ideas", "a mental existence, and then there's the extra-mental existence of the created world. The mental existence...the ability to abstract is a fundamental quality of the human mind. And it's to take the universal out of the particular. But I can nowhere in the world point to the Universal Man. I can't. But the Universal man exists in my mind. If he didn't exist in my", "And so abstraction is one of the great gifts of God. And it's essentially the ability to see the one in the many, which is a fundamental metaphysical pursuit of understanding the relationship of the one and the many. So in Arabic, the word abstraction means to denude, to literally strip of any clothing.", "the Mahia of the thing. I mean, quiddity, quid est actually comes from the Arabic. They translated it from the Arab mahiya what is it? And that understanding that the human mind is capable of, that ability to perceive with extraordinary clarity what a thing is, is a gift from God. Now are there these platonic archetypal universal somewhere in a perfect world", "Is there the perfect circle? Is there a perfect horse? All of these things are in the knowledge of God, and I have no doubt about that. I mean, God has knowledge of all things, and then He has given us some infinitesimal portion of knowledge to let us understand knowledge, to give us a glimpse into that God is the knower.", "infinitesimal ability to hear, to let us understand when God said he hears and sees all things. So these are all approximations but in reality they're cancelled out in the knowledge of God so anything that we understand or know I mean numbers are fascinating because numbers are abstractions a lot of people think that numbers have some kind of extra mental existence but they don't. We're the ones putting these two chairs together", "know two chairs. There's this entity and there's this Entity it's your mind that's playing a trick on you by pulling those together so that abstraction though of knowing what a chair is I mean there's a kind of fuzzy logic obviously but where you get into is is it this or is it that anymore then when's the table not a table? You know, but if the abstract object is as a conscious imposition", "imposition of our ability to make sense of reality. And therefore, that generalization doesn't exist as like a nominalist or a fictionalist approach. I mean, that's one explanation. Other people say that you're denying the reality of something that you can't get rid of. You", "if there was no humans who could conceptualize this. You know, before 10 billion years ago the universe was still there. There were no... Would they exist? But the statement was just as true then with no conscious beings around to conceptualize it than it is today. With God. Yeah, except God, if God exists. So therefore some people say that these abstractions are ideas in the mind of God because you can't get", "to you can't get rid of their existence but you'd rather and again i don't want to differentiate from the islamic or muslim tradition but what are the muslim traditions about dealing with these abstract objects are they uh creations of god are they fictions that there really don't exist it's just our imposition right so so that there's definitely", "like God has knowledge of them. And in that way, they have what would be akin to our mental existence. I mean, if I have the concept of fire in my head, it's a mental existence of the fire. It's not an extra-mental existence or my head would burn. Yeah, for sure. So God has knowlege of all the abstractions but He has given us the ability to abstract because He wants us", "to see the one behind the multiplicity of this world. I mean, one of the reasons why the Muslims were so obsessed with tessellations is because they go on for infinity. So it's this kind of replication and so all our mosques are filled with these tessellaions. A Russian scientist mathematician worked out there were only 17 possible infinite tessellätions 14 or in the Alhambra Palace. So that's the one", "geometrically to people, you know, to see that. And so but again it's seeing the one universes, seeing the One out of the diversity is the ability of... That's why we're Muwahidun, we are makers of One. The only way we can communicate is through abstraction. The Only way we say these words is because we have abstracted their meanings and all of the particularizations", "through abstraction we couldn't talk about you know i need a cup of coffee right now if somebody didn't have the universal concept of a cup o coffee so it's quite stunning i mean abstraction is fascinating and important and what gives us our minds Hamza, the Islamic tradition is very rich in its geometric architecture", "especially the great mosques are just marvels of architecture. What is it about that architecture that creates a sacred space? I think that sacred space is a very interesting concept, sacred space and there's also sacred time so for instance every religion has times", "for the religion than other times. In our tradition, the Prophet said that the whole world has been made a place of devotion for me. The whole earth he said masjid, he called it a masjida place, a mosque so the whole Earth is a mosque and this is why Muslims like Christians worship in the church I mean they can pray in other places but their worship", "Jews in the synagogue so the Muslims can pray anywhere on the earth as because it's the whole Earth is a mosque. So, in that way, the whole earth is sacred space for Muslims and then there's sacred time like Ramadan is a sacred time. So what makes it sacred? I mean the first thing and the most important thing is that in our belief God has designated these places", "the Prophet Muhammad said that, the last third of the night before dawn is the night when somebody's closest to God. And I once saw an amazing man who does Zen bows, the archery bow. He was a Japanese man and he said the only time he could make it was the hour before dawn because he said it was at the time when his ego was absent. And he said that the degree with which his ego", "the bow and I just thought that was so interesting because that would resonate with a Muslim because that time is anybody that spends time before dawn like that hour before dawn will know the special time and most people are deprived of that time. Just a very beautiful time, dawn is a beautiful time seeing the dawn emerge as a wonderful thing also. So these are really important in terms of mosques. Mosque can be very simple they're not meant to", "meant to be have any graven images we're very important that's why geometry became as kind of sacred art of the Muslims and calligraphy so you will find in mosques both calligraphic which is celebrating the word because it's abstraction Neil Postman wrote a wonderful book about the danger of images and amusing ourselves to death and in the second chapter he talks", "images because he said if god wanted a community to abstract and to abstract the greatest abstraction which is an understanding of reality then he would not want them to be distracted by images and so you know plato also understood that this idea of having these you know that we're already divorced once from reality so if we add images to it now we're twice divorced and and they're very distracting", "Kafka who said, evil is whatever distracts. And one of the things about pre-modern peoples, the word in English distracted means insane. Bethlehem was the hospital for the incurably distracted. And so the modern world is a distraction. So sacred space is meant to remove distractions. And that's why it's very important for that space to be a kind of empty space. One of the", "One of the Roman emperors, when he went into the holiest of holies in the Jewish temple, he couldn't believe there were no idols in it. It was an empty space and he couldn' understand it. He's like what's going on here? What are you worshiping? Yeah, no thing. And even when we talk about God, even though it's permitted to use thing for God to avoid nothing, the word in Arabic for thing means that which literally means that", "into existence so a thing is already a created phenomenon so god is beyond thinness in that way how about the art itself in um in mosques specifically the great mosques with incredible tessellation uh that is are these geometric patterns that cover it and just give you a feeling of great space", "great movement into beyond that which you can see. Well, geometry was generally an obsession with the Muslim civilization early. Euclid was translated 34 times into Arabic more than any other language 28 times in Latin but 34 times in Arabic it was a fundamental text that was taught in all the colleges and madrasas of the Muslim world for centuries and the reason for that is well one of the fundamental reasons is", "gives you these demonstrative proofs. So it has a type of rationality that shows you in abstraction, there are things that are real and can be proved to be true, QED, that's been demonstrated. And so they love to put this sacred geometry in their mosques to remind people of this other dimension of reality.", "with fractals and as we go deeper, we're seeing all these geometrical patterns. I mean snowflakes themselves it's just stunning. The pilgrimage itself when we go on Hajj there's a circle around a square, a cube you make a circle, around the cube then you go on a straight line back and forth and then it ends with the point on the day of Arafat so all", "the circle represents that which has no beginning and that which had no end. So it's often been a symbol for God, for God. So you see all of these different images. How did the tessellation begin as a process? Was that an innovation? Well I think there was some tessellaion from previous civilizations, no doubt but the Muslims developed in a way that...I mean people that study", "tessellation study Islamic art. Of course. Yeah. Is there a theological meaning to it? Well, it's this idea of the infinite, you know, the one becoming infinite in diversity, in many. So it has the one and the many contained in the display. And it's quite vertiginous when you see it really,", "a certain commonality, even when you go into to a great cathedral or a pagoda or Hindu temple. There's always a sense of that this space is different from other spaces and I think it's the intentions of the builders and also the intentions those who go into them to worship so devotion, devotion is a beautiful thing." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/A book you must read - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_FiEliSH7588&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW3SBwkJvQCDtaTen9Q%3D_1743308638.opus", "text": [ "So then he says, هذه رسالة في تصوير النشأتين وتحصير السعدتين. This is an epistle. It's not really a book. I mean it's called a kitab but it's not that long. It could be easily written in maybe 50 pages in short in tighter script. So he says about the نشأتين وَأَمَّا نَشْأَتَانِ فَإِحْدَاهُ مَن مَذْكُورَةُ فِي قَوْرِهِ تَعَنَىٰ وَلَقَدْ عَلِمْتُمُ الْنَشَةِ الْوُولَى", "So you were aware of the first creation, the first nash'ah. Would that you would remember. So that's the first one in Surat al-Waqia. And then Allah creates the second nash', so this is the one in the afterlife. The second nasha' is in the", "And then he's capable of all things. So don't think that this is going to be difficult for God to recreate us and that's why that follows. Don't think it's gonna be difficult. So, then he goes into As for the two felicities", "So, O Bani Israel, he's saying that he removed the Bani Isra'il. But in any case, remember my blessing. So this was the blessing given to Bani Esra'el. They had many blessings but the most important of which was they had a constant sequence of prophets.", "أَتَىٰ نَبِيُونَ آخَرًا So the Prophet ﷺ said that بَنِي يَسْرَكَّانَ يَصُّصُهُمْ مَلْأَنْبِياَةً They were ruled by prophets, unlike other people. So that was one of the great blessings. So the سَعَادَة that he's referring to and why he says اُذْكُنُوا النَّعْمَةِ الَّتِيَا نَعْماً تُعَدِيكُم Is guidance. So this is the felicity of this world. It's not happiness that people think.", "big house, having all these wonderful things in the dunya. It's guidance from Allah. So he is saying remember the guidance I gave you. Remember I saved you from Firaun with Moses and the miracles He was given. Remember the manna and salwa. All these things. And then the second sa'ada. And as for those who su'idu", "in nafi'ah, in others. I think this is in Su'idu is in Hafsan, Kisa'i and Hamza but in the other recensions it's actually Sa'idoo which is important because one of the things about the difference of Qira'a is they nuance meanings. And so one of", "The Mas'udun They're not So this is a passive Right If it was Sa'du Then it's an active Even though it's intransitive It's still, it's the person that is Sa'd He's the one Sa'd So it's both Su'd and Sa'd", "God and because of that they were felicitous. And this is what you see, It's both. So these qira'at are very important in that way, it's that they nuance these means.", "مَا دَامَتُ السَّمَوَاتُ وَالْأَرْضِ As long as the heavens and the earth. So there's different opinion of why Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says مَادَامة السَّماوَةُ وِالْ أَردِ And this is where you get these weak opinions about الجنة تفنى والنار تفناه But Al-Bahak who was one of the great commentators, he said that the سَمَواة or سَماوات الجنہ", "The earth is the earth of Jannah and Naam. So, كل ما يعلوك فهو سماء عند العرب Everything that's over you is called Samaa. And so Jannah has a Sama. Earth is كل ما تستقر عليها قدمك ف هو أرض Everything that your foot finds stability on is called earth, ground.", "and the adat al-Arab. Like, the Arabs will say, meaning like, I'll never visit you. Right? So it's an expression of ta'beed. So then he says, And this is the wazir al-Dabbi. So his name was Abu Abbas Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Dadbi. He died in 390", "398. And he was a very pious man, so he wrote it for him. لَمَّ رَأَيْتُهُ مَعْنِيًّا بِاكْتِسَابِ الْإِنسَانِيَّةِ الـمُوصِلَةِ إِلَّىٰ سَعَدَتَيٍّ When I saw him concerned about acquiring humanity, his humanity, الإنسانية is a very interesting use because you don't see this used that often in older Arabic. It's a much more modern term. إنسانیّة, his", "attempting to acquire humanity that will and مُصِرَةِ إِلَى سَعَدَتَيْنِ that will enable you to arrive at the two felicities أَعانَهُ اللَّهُ عَلَا اسْتِفَادَتِهَا may Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala help him to benefit from them حَتَّى يَصِيرَ حَاوِيًا لِنُوعِيهَة until he acquires both of them, the both types the saad al-ula wal akhirah وَمُحَامِيَنْ عَلى مَعْنَاهَا and guarding the meanings وَمرَاعٍ لِخَصَائِسِهٰ", "And careful, like the yura'i. Careful on the particularities of them. It's almost as if this word of ours, insan, is merely an utterance.", "It's an utterance about something that doesn't exist. A meaning that doesn' t exist. وَإِسْمًا لِي حَيُوَانٍ غَيْرِ مَعْهُودٍ And a name for an animal that is not known. Nobody has غير معهود. It's not known كَعَنْقَاءِ مُغْرَبٍ Like or مغرب كَاعَنكَاء مُّغْرابٍ The Arabs and this goes back to the Greeks as well", "The ancient mythology, the Egyptians believed this too. There was a bird in the desert of Arabia called the Anqa and every 500 years it would reemerge and fly. And they say if a feather dropped, a sage would emerge. So it's a mythological character. So the point of the phoenix is called Phoenix in our tradition. And some call it the Western Phoenix.", "No, but the proper is مغرب. Which is the wondrous or strange bird. So he's saying it's... The human being is like the عنقى مغرب. We heard about it. But we've never actually seen it. وَنَحْمَ ذَٰرِكَ مِّنَ الْأَسْمٰى اللَّتِي لَا مَعْنِيَ لَهَا Or like those names that really have no meaning. كَمَا قَالَ التَّعَارُّ فِي صِفِةَ الَأَصْنَامِ الْمُسَمَّاهِ آلِهَةً Like what Allah said about these attributes of the idols that are called gods.", "These are only names that you have named them with. You and your fathers before you, Allah gave you no authority to name them. وَقَالَ جَلَّا جَرَالُ مَا تَعْبُدُونَ مِن دُونِهِ إِلَّىٰ أَسْمَاءً سَمَّيْتُمُوهَا You don't worship anything beside God except names that You have called. They're just names. There's no reality to it.", "It's a name without anything that it's naming. Like you make up something, you have a name like a unicorn. It's, it's a but there's no unicorn only in the imagination. So those of you who've done your logic he's giving descriptions right?", "These are descriptions, but they're not definitions. He says I don't mean by the insan and insan is really it's a non-gendered word in Arabic. It applies to male and female equally. There is an opinion of insana some of them mention that, but insan is human being. It's male and femal, it's human being And so he's saying when I say human being", "I'm not talking about this animal that stands upright. He's got broad fingernails. He has very smooth skin. أَمْلَسَ الْبَشَرَةِ بحك الوجه He's risible, right? Like he can laugh. مِنْ مَنْ يَنطِقُونَ وَلَكَنَ عَنِ الْهَوَىٰ Those who speak but speak from their passion. وَيَتَعْلُّمَّنَ وُلَاكَ النَّارِ لَا يَضُرُّهُمْ وَلا يَفْعُهُ", "They learn but they learn what harms them and does not benefit them. وَيَعْنَمُونَ وَلَكَنْ ظَاهِرًا مِّنَ الْحَيَّةِ الدُّنْيَا وَهُمْ عَنَى الْآخِرَةِ هُمُ غَافِرُون They know, but they know the life of the outward of this world And about the next world, they're heedless. يَكْتُبُونِ الْكِتَابَ بِأَيْدِهِمْ They write the book with their hands. ولكن يقولون هذا من عند الله ليشتروا به ثمن قليلا But they say this is from God", "paltry part of the world. يُجَادِرُونَ وَلَكَنْ بِالْبَاطِرِ لِيُضْحِظُوا بِهِ الْحَقِّ They argue but with vanity, with falsehoods in order to undermine the truth. وَيُؤْمِنُونُ وَلاكَمْ بَالْجِبْتِ وَالطَّاغُوتِ They believe but in jibt and taghut. Jibt, I mean there's a lot of different views of it but generally in Lisan al-Arab he says, الجِبت ما أُبد من دون الله جِب ت is whatever is worshipped other than Allah.", "is anything that's excessive. Like a tyrannical ruler is called Taghut. And some say that the... يُؤْمِنُونَ بِجِبْتِ وَالطَّغُوتِ Taghuth was Ka'b ibn al-Ashraf, who was one of the tyrants in Medina. So Taghuts is from tagha, excessive. And then... يَعْبُدُونُوا وَلَكِم مِّن دُونِ اللَّهِ مَا لَا يَضُرُّهُمْ وَلا يَنفَعُهُmْ They worship but other than Allah", "harms them nor benefits them. They spend their nights but with what is displeasing from words, it's not beneficial. They come to the prayer but lazy only showing off for people they mention only a little", "They pray, but in their prayers they're heedless. They remember, but when they're told to remember, they don't remember. They pray but not to God. They play with another god beside God.", "with just repugnant. They're not happy about it, they're upset about it. وَيَحْكُمُونَ وَلَكِن حُكْمًا جَهَدِيَّةٍ يَبْغُونُ They make judgments but the judgment of the age of ignorance is what they desire. وِيَخْلُقُونِ وَوَلٰكِين يَخلُّقُوا إفْكَى And they create but they create lies. So and that's why in Arabic خَلق can only be used for God to mean create. With humans it means to lie. اختلق It means you lied because", "you lied because we can't create, we can only make from existing pre-existing thing. So these even if they're in the sentient form of human beings In the intelligible form a surah al maqoola They are neither people nor nasnas nor resemble people", "Some say it's the apes that look like humans, like orangutans, things like that. Some say that was actually like a golem and like a creature that was like a human but wasn't so. But the Arabs say, The people are gone and nothing remains but resemblances of people.", "يَا أَشْبَهَ الرِّجَالُ وَلَا رِجَالمُ O you who resemble man but are not man. بَرَهُم مِّن الْإِنسِ الْمَذْكُورَةِ فِي قَوْلِ اللَّهِ تَعَالَىٰ وَكَذَارَك جَعًّا لِكُلِّ نَبِيٍ عَدُوٌّ شَيْطِينٌ الْئِنْسِ وَالْجِنِّ يُحِي بَعْضُهُما إِلَى بَעْضٍ زُخَرِفَ الْقَوۡرِ غُرُورًا And like that we have made for every prophet an enemy of the shayateen, al-ins,", "with ornamented words, delusional. He's one of the poets Al-Buhtari was an early...one of the early poets of the Early Islamic era So he says And I don't consider Al-Buhtari if we consider human beings from their character", "character, rather from their createdness, from their form. I don't think that he's far-fetched when he said, There's nothing remains from humanity except these remnants that you see the forms but it's just like a... It's imaginary. It's not real. And then he says,", "The majority of people, if you really think about it. They're like donkeys, dogs and wolves. It's a very negative view. But there's a reason why. Which you will get to if you go through this book. Why he's really trying to wake people up. Because when you look out there and see what people are doing. It is quite shocking.", "egocentric worlds concerned about themselves and not about others. And then they end up when the time comes, they're willing to go to war and kill other people. They're willing do horrible things. It's amazing so . Don't think that these lines of poetry are just poetical statements or figurative expressions articulations", "فَإِنَّ اللَّهَ تَعَالَكَ ذَٰرِكَ يَقُولُ It's God Himself that says أَمْ تَحْسِبُوا أَنَّ أَكْثَرَهُمْ يَسْمَعُونَا أَوْ يْعْقِلُونِ إِنْ هُمُوا إِلَّا كَالْأَنْعَامِ بَلْ هَمُّوا أضَنُّ سَبِيلًا Do not think that the majority of them hear or use their intellects. Rather, they're like livestock. They're even more astray. The reason they say more astrays Allah says more astRAY is because", "one of the hallmarks of an animal is it's, if it's first of all, it's always vigilant. If you think about animals, they're always vigilant, even the cows when they're just eating. If somebody comes, they get up immediately and if they think there's any danger, they run. You'll see them run away. If they see a fire, they go the opposite direction. If", "Cameras out. And they chase them in their car. I mean this is human nature. Is that the majority of people. They don't even look after. Their own welfare. So that's what he's saying. Do you think these people actually hear and think? They're just going through the motions. I have told. In this epistle.", "in this epistle about the summation of existent things, and the place of the human being in the midst of these created things. Where they began, how they were formed, and how they end.", "the two joys, the two states of happiness. In both abodes by acquiring one's humanity that that's how you get the sa'ada and then I show you how to do it. How do you move in degrees towards this thing? So that's what this book is going to do. He's going to show you first of all what you are so this is an explanation", "an explanation of what the human being is, but then he's going to show you what you should be, what Allah expects you to be and then how to get that. وَابْتِدَأْتُ بِالتَّنبِيهِ عَلَىٰ وَجُوبِ مَعْرِفَةٍ إِنسَانِ ذَاتَهُ And I begin by reminding of the obligation of a human being to know him or herself فَمَنْ عَالِمَ أَنَّ شَيْئًا وَهوَ مِمَّا يَجِبُوا أَν يُعْلَمُ إِذْنَهَوَ إِلَّمْ يَعلمُهُمْ فَقَدْ حَصَلْ لَهِ بِذَارِكَ عِلْمٌ", "To know that you should know something and yet you don't know it is a type of knowledge. Because amongst the knowledge is knowing that you don'T KNOW. And this is why Imam Malik said,", "said, to say I don't know is half of knowledge. And that's why when the great Zuhri was in the masjid of the Prophet ﷺ and he saw a man do Taslimatain it's in the Aarizat al-Ahwadi He did Taslimatan because Aisha said, that he would do his salam like in the janazah prayer", "Assalamu alaikum, just one. This is a khilaf. The madhabs differ on this. In any case, the point being when Zuhri saw this man doing two which was not the actions of the people of Medina he said where did you get that? The second taslimah and he said an fulana an fula'an ibn Mas'ud anna rasullallah canna yusallimu taslimatain He said I don't know that hadith and the man said to him he's from Iraq he said ahatta bi hadithi rasoolillahi kullihi", "Rasulullah kulihi? You know all the hadiths of the Prophet? He said no. He said thulithay, two-thirds? He says no. Nusr? Naam. Half? Yes. Hattu fin nusri li dhrataqra. Put it in the half you don't know. Dahiq al zuhri. He showed he had a good sense of humor. He laughed at that. The point being is to say I don't", "The modern muhaqiqoon, they always say la asla lahu. They should say I couldn't find it or ma warad or you know the earlier ones they usually say something like that if you look at their tahqiq they don't use that absolute thing unless it's clearly fabricated then it is but there's a lot of hadith that were lost. Then he says", "He said, whoever does not find some sense of the deficiency of his ignorance in his intellect and the humiliation of his disobedience in his heart", "loses its ability to be precise. But this type of person will never be able to free himself from low things and he won't rise above his incapacitated state, nor will he be concerned about discerning between clarity and confusion, between proofs and obfuscations. It's very interesting.", "So khala is need. So for people studying Arabic here, khulla, this is one of the muthallathat. So the mithallathah, there's a famous text by Imam Qutrab which is the mothallathet and it's really important because you can really make mistakes in Arabic. So khalla is need, kholla is friendship", "when you do takhleel. There's other meanings as well, but those are the dominant ones. وَبِقَدْرِ مَعْرِّفَةِ مَّنْ فَعَتَ شَيْءٍ يَحْرُصُ الْإِنسَانُ عَلَىٰ طَرَبهِ To the degree with which somebody knows the benefit of a thing, he will be covetous in seeking it. وِيَصْبِرُ عَّلَا تَحَمَّلًا مَشَقَّةِ فِي تَخْصِيرِهِ And he will patient about bearing the hardships in its acquisition. وُلِذَٰلِكَ قَالَ اللَّهُ تَعٰلا فِی يُصِيفَةٍ مَنْ جَاهِلًۭا نَفْرًا", "So this is Musa and Khidr. So when Musa, somebody asked him a question about was there anybody more learned? And he didn't know that there was because he was the prophet of the time. And so Allah directed him to this man who was given ilm ladunni, a type of knowledge that is... There's a khilaf about it.", "what type of knowledge it is. But in any case, it just says immediate knowledge. It's a type of direct knowledge from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And so when he asked, he said to Al-Khadar, هَدَىٰ اتِّبِعُكَ عَلَى أَن تُعْلِمَّنِ مِمّا أُولِمْتَ رُشْطًا You know, will you allow me to follow you to learn something of what you have been taught? Of knowledge and", "Ahl al-Tafsir point out that he asked with great adab by saying, and use the passive verb. What you have been given of knowledge. Not what you know. What we have been told. What has been given. Of knowledge. And so he says to him, to ask that, You won't be able to be patient with me. So then they go through their journey", "and he keeps asking questions, and he finally tells him in the end, this isn't working out. And then he gives him the ta'weel of everything. And what's interesting when he gives them the taawil, he tells him, thatika ta'wiru ma lam tashti' and he doesn't say tashtati' So in the first one he says lan tashtatiyah", "not be able to bear with me so as you know ziyadat al-mabna taddulu a'ra ziyatat al ma'ana you have more letters in the word there's some more complexity in that in the meaning so once he learns he gives him the tasdia he removes the ta and gives them the tasdi because now he understands musa", "be talking to the wazir but he's also talking to us and this is something that the ulama do they when they write their books they often call you by your virtue because they're calling to something high in you trying to awaken that in you so know the fadilat al-insaniya, the virtue of being human of achieving humanity know the virtue", "prepared of success from the one who has purified himself or herself. He has succeeded, the one Who has caused the soul to grow. So is to purify but it's also to make something grow so you're growing in your humanity and then he says", "This is from a long qasidah that he actually quotes here. But it's basically, these are the makarimu. Qa'b is what you put the laban in or qaab. They still use that word in Mauritania when you milk. So what they used to do is water the milk to make more so they feed more people.", "He gives you the full milk. He doesn't water it down. And that's why he says that these virtues are not like the two qi'ban of milk, shiba bima'in, that have been mixed with water, faAAda ba'du abwala, and then they just, you just urinate it out. Right? Like this is, this is the real thing. wa la ya kaadannaka bu'adan mashakati You know, don't be worried or confused from", "Don't be worried or confused about the distance. And don't also be deluded by the actions of the one whose taq and riwaq impress you. So, the taq is the garment, the taylasan. So he's saying, don't be deluted by nice garments and nice houses. Riwaq", "It's what we call an antechamber. So, if you go to a palace, they always have these large antechambres where people wait. If you go into houses of wealthy people, they often have a pretty big antechambre where there are usually places you sit and put on your shoes or something. So that is what he is saying. Don't be impressed by those things. There is a proverb", "proverb, meaning after abadan there's nothing. Like in Morocco they say, after faz and maknas there's no people. So it's the same idea. So he's saying once you get past the close, you'll see there's", "vehicle, like a car or something. I mean, dh'ina is the rahila but now he would say car. Like people that... I mean these people that collect like you know, these wealthy people. How many cars do you need? It's amazing. They'll have all these cars. How much money to get to where? You can only be in one place at one time. You can't be in 1 room at 1 time. If you have a palace with 50 rooms, you can only", "It's like the billionaire who celebrated her birthday with two, the daughter of the billionaire, who celebrated his birthday with 2 birthday cakes. I mean how much can you eat? So that's what he is saying and that's why he quotes the Prophet . The Prophet , he censured this one", "هذا هو يقول تعيسى عبد الدرهم تعيش", "You know, the dinar is the way of hell. And the dirham is just an abode of stress. So he says here, perish and fall back, get sick again. And this is like a dua. May the tweezers fail.", "tweezers fail. You know, like the thorns? If he gets a thorn, may he fail to get it out. The minqash is what they use to pull the thorn out. So, فَإِذَا شِيكَ فَلَنْ تَقَشُ وَعْنَمَنَّهُ لَيْسَ يَحْسُنُ بِذِي هِمَّةٍ قَدْ أَحسَنَ اللَّهِ إِلَٰهِ فِي خَلْقِهِ وَخُلُقِہِ وقَيِّضَ رَهُ مِنْ رَبَّاهُ فَأَحसَنِ تَرْبِيَتُهُ وْأَزَاحَ فِى مُعَوَنًاتِه بعدَ بُلوغِه", "He says, in the text. I think that might be. No. That it's not appropriate for anybody who has real aspiration", "so much for them in their creation and in their character, and has given them those who raised them, and did a good job at raising them, removed from them by his providential care. Once they achieve their adulthood any weakness also is things that the toys . So it's like once you reach , you're not playing, you're no child anymore. When we were children we did the things of children now that we are adults let us do the things that adults do.", "وَأَن يَرْضَى بِأَν يُكُونَ حَيْوًا Or that he would be content, that he should be content that he's an animal. And Allah has given him the ability to become a human. Or that He's a human and Allah has been giving Him the ability To become an angel or an angel. And allah has given Him the Ability to be a king. Like how could you be content if You have the potential? If Allah has Given you the God-given potential to achieve higher and Higher heights while you have this time on earth. What are you doing?", "What are you doing with your lives? Why are you wasting your life not achieving your human potential? And that's why في مقعد صدق عند مريك مقتدر Sitting in this true station With the all-powerful king", "Or the angels are at your service because they pray for you. And they say, dunya, serve the one who serves Allah and tire out the one Who serves you. So the angels when they enter in upon them from every door They say peace be upon you because of your patience", "of your patience, what a blessed final abode you have. SubhanAllah. So may Allah give us tawfiq to be like that and may He not make us among the lazy ones,", "If it was near Ghanima, this was said about the Munafiqun when they were told to go out in Tabuk and they chose not to go They made excuses. Oh we have to farm We have to do this that but had it been easy pickings Was suffering Qasi then or a close nearby journey let tabaouk they would have followed you what I can buy with that idea much But they saw Shuka is shaka is suffer by Eid", "Right? That's why when you go on a journey, it's a long journey. So he's saying the most amazing thing about this book to me is how he uses the Quran. I haven't seen any other scholar use the Quran with the facility,", "to substantiate every single thing he says. So, he's saying this is a hard journey. It's a tough journey. This is difficult but don't be like those people who think oh it's just if it was an easy thing. If it's not hard it's worth anything and that's why people are honored who master things even stupid things.", "You know, people can shoot three pointers one after another and they're just held up. Why? Because they went out every day for eight hours a day and they wasted their entire youth mastering how to put a ball into a hoop. And because they did that, because they went through that difficulty and that discipline, people acknowledge it. That's the dunya. People will acknowledge excellence but they will not acknowledge batala.", "They won't acknowledge the hobo or the bomb. You can have all your sentimentality about these things, we're all equal. We're not all equal" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Sad reality of Dunya - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_iuFE9KYMMKU&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW3SBwkJvQCDtaTen9Q%3D_1742889939.opus", "text": [ "We're all going to die. There's we were all not here. I mean, I don't know how the oldest person in this room is. I might be that person but really we weren't here that long ago. We weren't hear that longer and there were all these other people having all the same problems and fighting and arguing and family tribulations and the liars and the cheaters and the righteous and the upright the people taking care of the orphans the people neglecting the orphan", "The people causing the orphans. This is dunya and we are going to be gone. The Prophet said that in 100 years nobody will be alive on earth. That's called degeneration, that's the Qarn. 100 years, nobody will live on it. He told his Sahaba that in a hundred years no one will be Alive today. In Siraj al-Muluk he said that the Indians...", "And one of the interesting things about the early Muslims is they quoted from India a lot. They had no problem with the Indians, they actually considered the Indians to have a lot of wisdom and so they actually quote these great Hindu sages because they saw them as wise and they had things to tell us. They have no problem quoting them but they said that there was a city in India where", "EVERY HUNDRED YEARS WHERE EVERYBODY WOULD COME OUT AND THE KING WOULD HAVE THEM ANNOUNCE, IS ANYBODE HERE WHO SAW THE PREVIOUS CELEBRATION? AND ONLY ONE OR TWO OLD PEOPLE WOULD COMES UP. MAYBE LIKE 110, 120 AND THEY WOULD COME UP AND THEN THEY WULT TELL THE PEOPL WHAT THEY REMEMBERED, WHO WAS KING AND WHAT THE PEPPOL WERE DOING AND HOW THEY...AND IT WAS TO REMIND THEM OF THIS EFFEMERAL NATURE OF THE WORLD THAT WE WILL BE IN", "that we will be out of the world soon enough." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Marrying right person - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf__1742888366.opus", "text": [ "Somebody might be wealthy today, they had all their money in stock market and then the next day they don't have anything. So is your love still there? Because if you married them for that reason and they lose that thing, then the reason that you were attracted to that person is no longer there. Finally beauty, I mean beauty one, initial attractions, if you're seeing a person every day, you start losing that, you know, the first attraction.", "and it becomes a very unhealthy cycle. So the idea of marrying not just for deen but khuluq, of wanting to have somebody who has good deen, but also good khulu q.", "you're going to have. And as you get older and the novelties wear off, and those things... The spiritual aspect of your life together in the journey that you are on becomes more and more important." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Afghans were Buddists - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _shaykh__1742881952.opus", "text": [ "And Afghanistan was one of the major Buddhist centers in the pre-modern world. And they became Muslim very quickly. In fact, the great shrine keepers who are known as the Barmakids... Barmak was not a family it was actually a clan that kept the Buddhist Shrine in Afghanistan. So the Baramika were actually Buddhists that converted to Islam and then they", "helped bring all of their administrative knowledge into the Abbasid Empire." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/_ Backbiting on the Internet _ Hamza Yusuf _ Inspi__1743308453.opus", "text": [ "The Prophet ﷺ talked about the dangers of ghibah, because much of what goes on now on the internet is really ghiba. Somebody puts something up on the Internet and then all these people have to say these terrible things about them whether they deserve them or not. They just feel compelled... And it's all done with anonymity because they're cowards. People won't come and say to your face,", "but the angels know who they are. You can be Killer23 on the internet, but the Angels know that you're Abdullah, the son of Abdullah and they'll write that down so you can't get away with it there's no anonymity in the unseen world" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Believe the Prophets -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzay__1742883720.opus", "text": [ "If you look, the ancients thought that heavens and earth were eternal. They thought they were always here. That was the view of Aristotle, that was the views of philosophers. The prophets came along and said this is ex nihilo, it came out of nothing. So the scientists of their time denied. Now the scientists our time say oh, it had a beginning. This is what they say now. So they confirm what the prophets say. So in ancient times the philosophers", "they denied the resurrection but the Prophet said no you're going to be resurrected you'll be recreated and then the modern people they say oh there's no resurrection nothing after this so we believe the prophets in the first one it turns out they were true and that's why we should believe the profits they why would they lie to us why would tell these stories they're not like the royal lie of Socrates there's there's a reason for them to tell these things that they're all inspired with the same truth" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/He is a good person who _shaykhhamzayusuf _islam ___1748543922.opus", "text": [ "Look, if you really want to guard your tongue, فَاعْتِزِلْ Just avoid hanging out with people. Right? Because... You spend your time with people... Imam Al-Jazuli said there's four types of speech. Harmful speech, حرام Speech that has benefit and harm, حراً Speech that neither benefit nor harm مكروه To speak a lot of it", "Speak a lot of it. And then speech that's beneficial. So, three-fourths of all speech is really either no benefit or harmful. Three-fourth. So what we're speaking on average, three fourths of it is total waste of time and for a lot people nine tenths and for some people 100%. Imam Maddix said he's a good man except" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/__ Manusia Papan Iklan _ Syekh Hamza Yusuf _ Muhas__1743303492.opus", "text": [ "Perhatikan bagaimana Muslim berpakaian selama berabad-abad. Bahkan Muslim termiskin pun berpikaian pantas. Pergilah ke Said, Mesir atau ke Lembah Suat atau ke kampung-kampung di Malaysia. Lihatlah bagaimanakah Muslim memakai pakaian tradisional dengan harga diri seorang manusia. Mereka tidak pernah memakainya papan iklan di tubuhnya. Menjual produk-produk orang lain yang bahkan tidak dibayar untuk itu. Orang-orang memakail papan Iklan. Memasang semua merek ini ditubuh mereka seperti Nike, Tommy Hilfiger siapapun namanya saya tanya mereka anda dibayaran?", "Anda dibayar, anda punya kontrak, anda itu manusia papan iklan. Mereka itu membayar untuk memasang nama mereka di papan-iklan, di kardus kotak-kotak diluar sana. Merekaitu membayara untuk membasang naman mereka digambar-gambar terbuat dari pixel di internet. Namun anda melakukan itu secara gratis. Meletakan nama mreka ditubuh anda yang telah diciptakan Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala. Anda bahkan tidak memikirkannya. Manusia paban iklan" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/People of the Qur_an -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzay__1742997804.opus", "text": [ "One of the things that our scholars say about Qur'an and Majeed is, That if you actually apply the Qur'aan, you will become majid. Like it will transform you into a sharif and a kareem person, noble and generous. And that's why the Prophet , he was amjad al-bashar . He was the most glorious", "glorious of human beings because he was the one who followed the Quran." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Persians and Iranians - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _iran ___1748526043.opus", "text": [ "Mawlana Rumi, Saadi, Hafidh, Shabistari. You just go on and on and On amazing people He knew that he said they'll have one but Qadisiyah And then he said and then there's no he didn't mean there's No more purge he meant There's no more fear of them It's a great civilization that gave the world so much" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Quran about europeans - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _europe__1742891335.opus", "text": [ "But he said, the Europeans. And it is the Europeans my friends. When you see in any hadith and in that chapter of the Quran this is not the Byzantines, it's not the Greeks, It's the Europeans! And their sacred history all goes back to Rome. Read the venerable The sacred history goes back", "Every time you see one of them, their generation destroyed. Another one rises up. That's what the Prophet said. How did he know that in the 7th century? How did He know that?" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/When things gets hard - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _shaykh__1742891701.opus", "text": [ "Because fleeing from what one is unable to bear, is from the sunan of the messengers. It's from the way of the Prophets and the Messengers. In other words, the Prophet , he made hijrah because it was becoming impossible for them to live in Mecca because of the tribulations that were there. The Prophet left... I mean he was told by Allah to make hijra to Medina but this is a teaching for us", "for us. وَرَقَدْ كَانَ لَكُمْ فِي رَسُولِ اللَّهِ إِصْوَةٌ حَسَنًا You have in the messenger of Allah, the best example." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Why atheists are dumb - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _atheis__1742887985.opus", "text": [ "This kind of modern quantum view that things just popped into existence, it's a little hard to swallow for people that just think even superficially about what like where because we know that this wasn't here forever. We know this even our material sciences had indicated that but and even the most primitive peoples have always understood that and not because they were primitive but because they", "were human, right? So no matter how intellectual you get, no matter intelligent you get it's that's not the reason that you know, you're denying Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la. You're denying a loss of Hannah with Donna because your fitra has been so distorted by civilization and by a kind of abstraction in your mind" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/_ You Win When You Surrender _ Hamza Yusuf _ Inspi__1742996963.opus", "text": [ "What kind of faith do you have that, like, you lost your job and suddenly you don't believe in God? Or your child got sick. Who gave you the child in the first place? Like where did it come from? How do you know what's good for you and what's bad? How to you know if that child is better they leave the world now than stay in the world? You don't know! Who are you to decide these things? We're people of submission. We don't challenge God. We're not people who wrestle with God.", "It's sweet surrender. It's not bitter surrender, it's not like I lose. You win by surrendering! This is the opposite of surrendering in dunya. In dunya you lose when you surrender. In our religion, you win when you surrendered." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Before you judge them - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_8Nme50hDTwY&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743299038.opus", "text": [ "That's where the prohibition lies. And then he says, the great Shaykh Abd al-Ghani Al-Nabrisi He was a famous Shaykh and he tended to incline towards the permissibility of Sama' So this is very different because Imam Ghazali argues for this and Abd al Ghani An-Nablisi and others. In his letter after the speech, he said all musical instruments are like that", "So he's saying all of these instruments, if they are used just to completely divert people from what they should be doing or something like that, then of course they fall into that category of prohibition. But it depends on what they're being used for. And then he says...", "لأن أصوات الطيور والشحرير المطربة ليست حراما إزمعا بل حرمتها لاقتران اللهوي بها ولكونها ملاهي. So he says, it's well known that all of these instruments, all these different types, their prohibition is not from the essence of these things or their forms, whatever specific form they take, but it has to be what they're used for because if you argued that then you would have to say all of the musical sounds that you hear are prohibited.", "Like the sounds of birds and this is also Imam al Ghazali's argument He said you'd have to when the bird start chirping up music because they have maqams You can actually if a musician could take a bird song and put it into musical notation Because they're actually singing musical notes And so he's saying if that's the case then you'd Have to say that all of that is haram, and he said that nobody says that", "And Abdur Ghani al-Nabrisi also mentions that Ibn Hajar radiallahu anhu, when he was talking about the prohibition of instruments in a letter he wrote about that. He starts talking about Sama' and the Mazamir wa Sa'irin Malahi.", "So even Ibn Hajar is saying we don't think that all of Sama'ah is negative. No, some of it is not a waste of time. So it's important to see that and I think another thing... And one of the things that the ulama mentioned is a lot of this like I said is Saddadh Dharaya but part of the problem with the Saddaddh Dhraya", "when you say something's haram to cut off the pretext of it, the danger of that is to fall under the category of وَلَا تَقُولُوا تَصِفُوا أَلْسِنَتُكُمْ الْكِذِبَ هَذَا حَلٰالٌ وَهَذ΄ حَرَامٌ لِّي تَفْتَرُوا عَلَّ اللَّهِ الْکِذِّبَ إِنَّ الَّذِينِ يَفتُرُونَ عَلاً الْ كِذٍبَ لَهُمَ عِذَابٌ عَالِيمٌ You know that don't say with your tongues", "In a lying state this is halal and this is haram right because Only Allah can make halal, and only Allah can Make Haram through his prophet sallallaahu alaihi wasalam so if something is not Clearly haram in the quran or in the hadith then you have to be very careful And the later ulama took that road of declaring things halal", "from Sadda Dharaya and that was their Ishtihad but if they want when Imam Malik was asked about music he said the people that do that are Fusaq, they're not pious people because it's a waste of time you see but he didn't say Haram or something like that he just said because they didn't", "by Ibn Qaym al-Jawziya in A'lam Al Muqeeeen has a section on the prohibition of calling a fatwa, the Hukam of Allah. And this comes from a Hadith in Al Bukhari where Bureyda asked the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam if we come to a city should we and he said", "Because it's easy. That don't say that you'll take their surrender based on the judgment of Allah, but say it's your own judgment. You see because the ishtihad is your own judgement and you don't know whether you got Allah's ruling or not. And this is why the fatwas are attempts at getting the ruling of Allah. And that's clarified in usul and things like this. But a lot of people don't", "ومن ثم تفضل سيدي مواقع عندما يتحدث المختصر عن غناء", "So he said that Imam al-Ma'ziri said, when the prohibition of khamr came down, of drugs and alcohol intoxicants. The listening to the otar was related, listening to these things was related to those things. And also blowing in the pipes and flutes and things", "flutes and things. All of that was related to alcohol and drinking, and it encouraged people to drink. And so the hukam of tahreem went with that. And this is why, this is what Ibn Hazm argues that if you look at the hadiths, they all have alcohol in them. And he says, بِخِلَافِ مَا لَا يُطْرَبُ بِهِ وَلَا یَدْعُوا إِلَّى الشُّربِ So this means", "under those things that don't call to the haram and don't called to drinking or cause that so that's basically anyway you know I just want to cover that so it just we have to understand it's a nuanced problem the dominant position of the four medhebs is", "is that singing is permissible, the duft drum is permissable. Some of them permit the flute also. Generally stringed instruments... The khilaf is weak on that so generally the stringed instrument have been prohibited and it relates to the effect at the string instruments because the string instrument are actually far more powerful in terms of their affect", "Piano, for instance is really a percussion instrument but the stringed instruments like the oud and sitar and guitar all these different instruments they can be very dangerous. And people are very profoundly affected by them so that's generally where the ulama went in terms of those prohibitions.", "You know that like the tunes of the Ud every once in a while will remove depression and get rid of. So he says, But consider them not permissible and don't follow Ibn Hazm.", "when Mizmaru because he permitted all these musical instruments. The Andrusians, like I said, tended to permit that and my personal belief is that in European and Western Islam generally that Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyas said do not bring an Islam with that prohibition as introducing people to Islam. That people come into Islam", "instruments and all these things, and then wean people off diversion and wasting their time because Islam is a religion where time is very precious. And those types of things are really diversionary things. So anyway I spent a little more time than but I wanted to just cover that so go ahead next one", "As for debates and dialectics, they fall under the five rulings and are prohibited if silencing one's opponent is what is intended. The reason for this is that it engenders destructive matters", "Okay, so basically what he's saying is jidal which is argumentation. The Prophet said That people never go astray after they had guidance except it's replaced with argumentation", "with argumentation, that's actually a quality of people who are astray. They start arguing about everything and they can't agree on anything. And that's why if you know certain , like one of them is . If there's disagreement about something, you shouldn't get into arguments about it. The is what we all agree on. So when you have differences of opinion,", "Practice nushabban or not you can clarify what your position is But don't attack people who take another position when it's a valid position do we celebrate the mawled or not? These are khilaf issues, and you can present your position. That's fine say look the Salif didn't practice it Here's why we shouldn't practice It but we recognize there's a khilaff here and other you know and show the two arguments Right and then leave people alone", "Allah is the greatest, and your Ummah is one. And I am your Lord, so be righteous.", "what they're worshipping, all these rules. I mean the Prophet was very generous with people about even when they broke the rules he was very Generous. The man who slept with his wife during Ramadan just look at that hadith how he dealt with him. The people that were new in Islam He just told them eat the meat and say Bismillah and eat the Meat Aisha said why are you telling them that? Right because but the what you put your mouth is so important", "Muslims, just leave them alone. This is hikmah, this is wisdom but people want... somebody becomes Muslim they want them to be like Sahaba the next day even though they're not like Sahabas right? But that's what they expect. No let them come in with all their faults and blemishes so what he saying is that.. And then Imam Marek radiallahu anhu said", "The limitation has nothing to do with our religion. A man came to Imam Marek once and he said, I want to argue with you. And Imam Marduk said, okay so you beat me what? He said, you follow me. He said and I beat you. He says, I follow you. What if a third person comes and beats both of us? Then we follow him. He say, you're going to be on a new religion every day. See you later. Right?", "People discovering, you know, oh I found this new hadith. This stuff's all been worked out. You're not going to discover anything new. Right? You might find something out but the Maliki school knew about it. The Hanafi school knew abut it. They've all been debating this stuff for centuries. Why are you reinventing the wheel? So that's very dangerous", "all of this argumentation and but they go under the five rulings right it can be wajib sometimes you have to argue and the Nuh there are people complain that he was always arguing with them he was trying to save them so jidal can be to manifest the truth, it can", "but they have to know the rules of debating because it sharpens their mind so that they can make arguments Imam Shafi'i said that he never got into a debate except he didn't care who won He said I could care less whether I won the debate or the one I was debating with won the", "follow the intention of your companion", "obstinacy and they want to just be fanatic about their position. وَخَاسَمَ فِي الْحَقِّ بَعْدَ ظُهُورِهِ And they're still arguing against the truth after it's manifested, or be batinin' or something false. أَوْ غَلَبَ عَلٰى الظَّنِّهِ أَنَّ خَصْمُه لا يَنفَعُ الجِدَالَ مَعَهُ أَا كَانَ ف۪ي مَا لَيْسَ تَحْتُهِ عَمْرٌ فَمِمْنُوعٌ It's prohibited in all those things if you're just arguing for the sake of argumentation.", "said, meaning Al-Madinah, the great ulama of Madinah. They didn't like any types of debates. Unless it was a fiqh issue that they were trying to resolve. If it was about aqidah, they didn't", "you get into debates about it, you'll end up saying something about God. Right? To say about God what you don't know. That is the worst thing that you can do.", "it's worse than shirk. Ibn Qayyim says that he began by talking about itham, because that's the least of things. Right? And then baghi, and then shirk, and he ended with saying about God what you don't know. That's the worst thing you can do. So people should have fear of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, and that's what He's saying. That if there's action or something like that, then it's a good thing.", "And then he says, when you read manfa'atan fahuwa ala... This isn't in your text. So if you want benefit, if he wants benefit, then it's permissible but you have to look at what way cost-benefit analysis. But it's makruh if there's no benefit or harm. It's just makruah to do it because of the problems that it leads to.", "of you know inner sight basira is to the intellect what the eye is to vision is to eye so basira enables you to see things clearly intellectually and so the ulama say that argumentation if you do it a lot its considered as saghirah", "they like to argue. And أَبْغَضُ الرِّجَالِ عَنْدَ اللَّهِ الَّذَّا الخَصَمُ In the Sahih, the Prophet ﷺ said that people most odious to God are people that love to argue مُولًى Right? And they argue just for the sake of argumentation. Allah hates those people. They're odious", "So if you're choleric by nature, you'll tend to incline towards argumentation. Sanguine and phlegmatic don't really like to argue generally but the cholerics is argumentative and the ulama tend to be cholerate by nature so it's something they students of knowledge have to be very careful about that because it is part of the nature and It can become like a real sickness of the heart next one", "Also prohibited is one's enabling a woman to hear his voice if he knows that she desires to hear it. Scholars have also reckoned the elevation of a woman's voice", "So this, women tend to be more affected by sound. Men are more affected vision. So a woman will be more...she'll actually be aroused by sound whereas the man is", "Whereas the man is aroused by division. And so what he's saying is, if you know that there's a alaqa, this first degree of love is called ala'qa with the Arabs. If that's there then it becomes haram because you can have an effect on them and it's not good for them, it's no good for you. And then he's also raising the voice of a woman who", "People you know it's people will derive pleasure again the this You know these things. I mean we're in very mixed cultures in the West so but in in traditional Muslim countries, you know There was much more separation and these rules You know if if you try to apply these rules in?", "or in Canada, or somewhere where you're from. It's just not really going to fly but it is prohibited to take pleasure if you know you are getting pleasure then it's haram and that's very clear In terms of voice a woman is not supposed to speak in seductive voice In America that usually resolved because women don't they speak like men now so it's not really a problem", "In traditional societies, you tend to find women had very soft voices. You'll still find this if you go to certain Arab countries and you hear the women talk. It sounds so different from... If you go for instance Mauritania, the way they speak is very feminine. There's a lot of femininity in their words. They know in social studies that women who enter into management will tend to lower the tone of their voice because they get more respect", "because they get more respect with a less high voice. So you'll find in many Muslim countries women actually speak with high-pitched voices, whereas if you'll notice in the West, the tone of the woman's voices are actually lower in terms of... Because they know that they will get more respects from the men if they speak in those lower tones. So generally it is not permitted to speak in a seductive way and you know a lot of these robotic voices that they use", "The Prophet actually cursed the", "and the masculine women. Now, the scholars...the khuntha in Arabic is a hermaphrodite. The mukhanath is an effeminate person so you have the khunthah has a special hukam. In fact, in Iran the ulama permitted sex operations to change the sex depending on the hormones", "Traditionally, the Muslims were very enlightened about these things. They didn't have the types of approaches that you saw in the West. The Muslims recognized that there are biological differences. Generally, you have a male and a female but then you get people who have mixed male and female hormones. This is just part of life on Earth.", "So it's that category has fiqh rulings for them and even subhanAllah Abd al-Ra'uf Al Munawi who was a great scholar of hadith in his commentary on that hadith he says if the person is effeminate by their nature then they're not blamed for that. In other words, if its part of their nature but he said", "then it's where the curse goes. But if it's part of their nature, he says, يَتَّكَلُّفُوا إِزَالَةًهُ He should try his hardest to get rid of it. So the point is, if you see somebody like that and generally you can distinguish when it's affected and when it not in my own personal experience I grew up in California so...and in the Bay Area", "naturally effeminate or when it's there's tokellof and What they used to call loose-wristed. I don't know what they called them anymore. It's probably not politically correct anymore, but You know basically people like that And you shouldn't make judgments about people either you know if somebody because you can I've seen heterosexual men that are effeminent even in the Muslim community you will find their heterosexual man that are a feminine by nature and", "And so those people just you know leave them alone. Don't make fun of them don't make a stanza this is You know it's just compassion for people sometimes they have more estrogen more Hormones the oxytocin hormone and things like that So, and then you have women that have high testosterone levels so they tend to be more masculine and you have you know the Baba Hassan from", "in Saudi Arabia, what do they say for the tomboy? Baba Hassan or Hassan Baba or something. Somebody from Jeddah told me that because I asked him, do you have tomboy he said yeah, told me what it was. In Syria what did they say? Do you have Tomboy? Huh? Yeah, Baba Hasson. Yes so tomboy is a phenomenon there are girls that tend to", "They can show these masculine qualities. The Prophet is cursing people that do this on purpose. So there's also women that have that, they'll tend to be more masculine and it could be a natural thing so you just have to be careful. These aren't blanket rules about people and you have to", "judging people because a lot of this is hormonal. It's not something that people can control. Go ahead, next one. Yeah, go ahead.", "So if you're studying because very often teachers were men and so the women to learn their", "the women to learn their fardain, they study with male teachers. Basically it's prohibited for the women too be flirtatious and that's pretty much what it saying don't be flirtacious sometimes women and men will develop you know amorous feelings towards teachers and things that happens and that where", "with somebody if they're going to have problems like that. But certainly, they shouldn't be flirtatious with them unless they're mahram, not flirtatius but then they can laugh with them or something like that and then he says tazagrit is where they move the tongue very rapidly back and forth. They usually cover their tongues, the women, and they do it in festivals and parties and at weddings and things like that He's saying that", "Al-Hattab, one of the great scholars of the Maliki tradition, his family from Libya originally. There's three of them, the grandfather, father and then the son. One of them is from Libya and the other two went to Mecca. But Al- Hattab is one of foundational later Malikis. His books are used so he didn't consider it permissible. That's a Khilaf issue some of the ulama permitted", "permitted it because they said it's not a, it just doesn't turn men on or something like that. I mean, that's basically what they said. So it's", "And so that's what's prohibited doing that. And then the sounds of the which are the bangles that she wears. Also, it's prohibited and from the sins of the tongue is to write love poetry to a specific woman who you're not married to. You can write love", "But if it's a woman that you haven't married and you're writing her love poetry, it's haram. But they say that it's permissible to write love poetry if it is not a specific woman. So good luck with that. I just want to get through this one section. Go ahead.", "So the reason for that is you don't know somebody's end and so you should not say If they're a Muslim, it's you should never do that. But even for the non-muslims, you don' t know their end. For people that", "Their end is known Abu Jahal, Abu Lahab Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala cursed them in the Quran So but People you don't know their end. You shouldn't do a curse of them They say, you know, you can make dua against an oppressor who's oppressing you? But again You know this is a difference of opinion I wrote a whole", "about this problem and the ulama differed on that but Imam al-Ghazali tend to not saying things like may God not give him good health or something like that at the same time asking for the good health of an oppressor is prohibited but generally they permit that you can make dua against an oppresser if they're oppressing you so like", "For Palestinians, they can certainly make dua against an oppressor that's oppressing them or whoever it is. It's permissible to do that. It always better to ask for people's guidance and that's the gist of that argument but anyway. Claiming to be from other than your father is haram and the hadith says basically you don't go to paradise so", "So, just to say that you're something else. Or to claim sharaf. People are believed about their ansab unless they claim to be from the Prophet's family. That needs to thabbut. People shouldn't make that claim because there is rights that go with the family of the Prophet.", "And so that's a little different. And then he says, تبرو الإنسان من قرابتي كالإبني والآخي ومولى النعمة You cannot relinquish your relationship with relatives and say, yeah, he's not my son, he is not my daughter or brother. And the مولى also which we don't...that doesn't apply anymore because there aren't people who go under that category but that was a category", "So also there's a difference of opinion about not using euphemisms. Some of the ulama say anything that is language that is inappropriate for what you would call genteel company, that you should not use. So the Prophet never used language that was... Like for instance,", "You know in I mean in this culture not not here Turkey But I don't know what they do here, but in the West people say really crude things you know like when they're going to the bathroom They say you know some it's just a crude language And you should never use that language. You don't go on you know I'm going to urinate they use other words for those things you Know but to say that you know need to go urinate or something like that It's just inappropriate language so you just say I need to use the restroom", "The Prophet said that a mu'min is not someone who uses foul language or language that is devoid of decorum.", "not swearing, I mean because swearing generally is prohibited. Although we know that Abu Bakr did once use a swear word when he was... He got very angry at one of the Quraysh and he said something really it's quite shocking when you read it for some areas I couldn't believe it but that happens even the best of people can use a foul word if they get angry and so that does happen", "it is not a habit of believers to use foul language. And so if you're using foul language habitually, check your iman because something's wrong. So that's what he's basically arguing. The prophet once used a very direct term about relations between a man and woman", "using euphemisms because the man was admitting to adultery and then he asked him first in euphemism, but then he said something really just as stark and candid as you can get in Arabic. And the ulama say that if you need to ascertain then you have to use literal language and so that is permissible to get that ruling. But other than that you should not use", "words that directly indicate a thing that is inappropriate in company. And the Prophet, peace be upon him, in their company they never talked about sexual things any of these things, never. The Prophet, , they had a lot of comportment decorum it was very important in that community and the Prophet , that's his way.", "that talk to other people about things that go on behind closed doors with their own... he cursed that so that's also completely private between people.", "stop there, I guess. I'm not getting how we're doing. Inshallah, get through it. I hope so. You know, the music one was important. So I just want to make clear, it wasn't a blanket either or. I was just trying to clarify the nuances in that issue and... So is there a problem with the child learning to play musical instruments? Yeah,", "Yeah, I mean again that's in the West they're going to be exposed to music and it just depends on certain situations and cultures that people are from. It's much better for them to be expose to classical and appreciate those things than a lot of the common music that is out there so", "I mean, I would leave that to the families and the type of families they're from. For Western people certainly that was traditionally part of education especially if they were from a cultured family you know, that was just part of being in a culture family in the West In the Muslim world it's tend to be generally frowned upon to learn musical instruments for children Children are very musical by nature", "In Moroccan culture, the dhuf drum... Even in Syrian culture, a lot of people can play dhuff drum. If you're from Syria it's something that a lot kids learn early on. And even some of the ulama can play the dhuf. I know a few ulama who can play this dhouf.", "were notable musicians as well. And in the early period of Islam there were some ulama that were notable musician, so these are khilaf issues I would leave it to the families if you're obviously from a Diobandi background or from certain backgrounds where these things they take most of the diobandi positions", "In the law they will show, and in the law it is forbidden. And between them are different things.", "But to say it's clearly haram or halal, it doesn't fly. Both positions, neither of them fly. But it's definitely mushtabihat, undeniably. So the Prophet said if you want to protect your religion, it's better to avoid the mushtabihaat. But certainly sama'a and ghina like what we heard now this is permitted", "permitted and for people to say that it's haram, you know, hatu burhanakum in kuntum sadaqeen. You know bring your proofs because it's a very hard thing So how would you help fellow Muslims move away from music and intoxicants? Well if they're in intoxicant Imam Sidi al-Mawwaq says that you should teach them a musical instrument to get them out of intoxicance Because he said that", "He said that intoxicants are very similar, they have a similar effect that musical instruments have because the dopamine is released. People get high playing musical instruments. I mean musicians know this. Anybody who's played an instrument at any serious level knows that it can be very intoxicating to play a musical instrument. So that's what Sidi Mouak... Because he said you're getting them out of something that's agreed upon in its prohibition and moving them into", "there's a difference of opinion and it will give them the same type of experience isn't a woman's voice aura yeah there's about that but you know the position of muhammad hassan is that", "that it's not the aura is far more convincing than the position that it is aura. Allah says, لا تخضعنا بالقول don't I mean just the fact that they were told not to be seductive in their voices meant that it was permissible for them to talk but the idea that a woman can't speak in public I mean the hadith of Omar which is after the Prophet where the woman got up and told him why are you saying that to not give us our dowries when Allah", "Allah allows a qimtar, which is a very large amount of money. And Omar, when she said that, he said, You know, the woman's right and Omar's wrong and all of you are more knowledgeable than Omar. So he didn't say, He didn't Say that. She could have sent something up, a piece of paper or something, right? But I think", "I think in certain environments, and this also goes under orf. Really, I respect orf a lot. Orf is our word for culture. Europeans didn't have a word for cultural until the late 18th century or early 19th so they didn't even know about culture. Muslims knew about culture, araf is part of Islam.", "the norms of a people have legal rulings. And so culture is respected and peoples' cultures should be respected. Different peoples do different things. If I go to the Eastern Province, I have friends there in Arabia, I've never seen their wives. And they're close friends but I've not seen their wife because that's their culture. The women are in complete seclusion", "from black, from head to toe. I respect that. That's their culture. If you go to Yemeni culture, that's also generally the way it is. If your go to any tribal cultures where marriage is a very tricky thing they tend not because they don't want clans mixing and doing things like that so they tend to have those seclusions. And Europe was certainly like that to a certain degree. So in other cultures", "you know in other cultures is not like that if you go to other cultures there's a more relaxed atmosphere about that and Syria you'll see different types some families are very conservative and they it's very separate and then other families or less so so that also can be a different family is because and that's generally more religious than cultural because they're taking religious positions", "the religious position which might be overriding the Urf. Or it's an earlier, because Araf change, cultures change and we're certainly seeing a liberalization of Islam. I mean you know may these blessed souls all you know be happy that were using their extraordinary techie that they've developed but in their time", "floor next to the men. It just wouldn't happen. She'd be up there with that little masharabiyah looking through one of the holes, right? And that's the way it was, right ? And that certainly is the way still in certain places. We were somewhere last night where the women were up and they were looking through the masharabiya . I mean, I know because my wife was up there and she told me, you know, because I said did you...she said we had to look through a little hole.", "or unmarried with married people. This is how you get a complete disintegration of the culture like you have in the West where they've broken down marriages, everything's broken down so there are definite things that we should guard modesty and dress modesty in speech comportment I mean people now address it's amazing these people dressed was even peasants in the Muslim world dressed with great dignity", "They would never go out in t-shirts because t-shirt were underwear. In my culture, when I was a kid that's when it all started changing. Marlon Brando wore a t- shirt on the film and then everybody started wearing t- shirts. Before that if you went out with a t shirt people would have been shocked because of his underwear. What is he doing with his underwear? But now t-shirts has become national dress", "in America, you know have a nice day. Or billboards like wearing billboards free advertising for corporations. You're just a product placement. In weddings we have music played even separated ones what is the replacement to it? Music is permissible at weddings again stringed", "Again, stringed instruments, bands, that's where you're going to get the khidafat. But the idea of entertainment at a wedding, that is in sound hadith and Prophet permitted it. So I'm just saying there are differences of opinion about these things and you should follow... If you want the dominant opinion ask the mufti that you trust and if he gives you the dominant", "And some would argue that it's wajib. That is certainly where the later fuqaha came to, following the dominant opinion. The dominant opinion tends to be very conservative on the issue of music. Subhanakallah wa bihamdika ashadu an la ilaha illa anta astaghfirullah" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Everything is recorded- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_xCbGpMFnU4g&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743063581.opus", "text": [ "So nothing is uttered out of your mouth except there is a raqeeb, in other words somebody who's monitoring it and ready to write it down. So anything that you say... And it's really important for people to think about this because we're in an age of talking. I mean I don't think humans have ever talked more than they talk today", "And and just something to think about when you write something on the internet You can't get that back Some of them you can delete people delete tweets and things but they're not deleted with the angels Especially when it's about other people because then is the hub of somebody else and There's the pantera for Muslims like the panthera is is going to be a problem", "be a problem because the qantra you can't get into paradise until you settle things with other muslims so you make it across the sirat there's another stage which is the qanthara for anybody you wronged they have a right at that point to demand from you so but people just don't think about this they just", "that it's not being recorded. And now we know all these recordings, all our phone calls are recorded. I mean... We're going to show them our signs. Look at all the recording that's going on. Hidden conversations. There's people now that get people in these gotcha situations and they record them and then they put it up on the internet. The Prophet said... Like private conversations are sacred trust.", "our sacred trust. The Prophet said if a man ever before he says something, he looks around it's amanah. But they also say don't blame somebody for... If you tell somebody the secret, a secret, don't claim them for telling somebody else because they say the same thing that pulled it out of your chest pulled it", "that the breasts of free people are the graveyards of secrets. Because it's people that spread other people's secrets and tell... I mean, everything is going to be revealed on the Yom Kiyamah but sitar is also very important. Our religion... And this is a very fine line. I recognize this especially today because there are certain things. But one of the things that people do is they love to put this all up on the internet", "the internet. Local problems should be, they should be local problems. The Muslim community may take a local problem. Some imam does something scandalous thing in some town in whatever someplace and suddenly it's all over the internet like these are fitna people. They're spreading fitna. Let the local community deal with that if the person is a prominent person there might be some need but generally these are local problems", "local problems. The idea of just spreading all this fitna is really not good, and it also makes people... Scandal is when scandal happens, it just has a horrible impact on the community. And a lot of these problems are problems of just not following Sharia. They're just not", "Prophet told us don't be alone with somebody who's not a mahram. So any woman should never, if some quote unquote spiritual teacher is saying oh I'll give you private lessons, red flag the Dajjal because it's just not in our religion and that's what protects people both people because if you're alone you're with Iblis he's the third", "And then people also even just seeing people like the Prophet he was with Maimunah and it was night time, and he was walking in and they saw the Prophet said He told them it's my wife. And they said would we ever suspect you? And he said Shaitan flows in the veins", "like, so even the best people can get that doubt. So but you know this there's just a lot of...the internet has created such a horrible environment for people. It is really unhealthy and then all these people that just attack other people like recently because I was talking with Sheikh Abdullah in", "something and then all these other scholars jump in if this is the scholars talking like that then what how do you what about the poor people just who aren't if they see the quote-unquote ulama attacking one another don't call one another names the prophet said what's up with a people that do this so ghiba is very dangerous um", "is to mention your brother with something that they would be disturbed and then one of the sahaba said you know and like even if it's true because this is human right people like to talk about other people a very common thing", "how so-and-so because some people ask that cuz they want to hear dirt right that's why they asked well how so and so hmm amazing nothing changes humans so", "online and what's going to happen then you make Toba and what do you do? And then again so just about Ghibah, there are seven things that the ulama said that don't go under that category. So for the benefit of that", "It's one of the worst sins is ghiba. So avoid ghiba except certain reasons to do it that some of the great ulama have mentioned.", "Those are the seven things. So tazalim is if there's a zhalim and you want to, you know, tell me you need help in getting rid of this zhalm. It's not ghiba to do that. Another one is istighith like for istighatha, like calling for help.", "Like you know this person is doing this or that and then it's tifta One of the women asked the prophet she'd been given two proposals about one was from Muawiyah and Abu al-Jaham, he said He's poor And he says In the other", "But he said, so he was warning her against somebody who had a propensity to domestic violence. So that's not ghibah. You're warning the person. So if somebody is asking you about a potential spouse and you know something about them then you should let them know that's nasiha, that's", "And then also, you know had there to warn people about like somebody in business dealings things like that. You warned them and Then tariff RF like if you say, you the The blind the person he's blind like you're just doing tattie if you're letting somebody know or the one with the limp", "aren't it's not if you're doing it to describe somebody so that they know who you're talking about and then uh you know like warning people about which is a problem now because every group thinks that every other groups are mopedic and so they think they're free just to and that's why you should do what's what's you know when there's difference of opinion just leave people alone", "valid opinion to do the mawlid. It's a valid opinion that considers it an innovation. They're both there. The minority opinion is the second, but just leave people alone. If somebody is at their opinion, it's a perfectly valid opinion for them to take, but don't attack other people that the ulama said that they can do that, right? So that's important because it's only the mujma'alay that is yunkar", "If it's agreed upon, then you make inkar of it. If it is not agreed upon just leave people alone. I mean they said about al-Maziri that and Shaykh Abdullah was like that because his knowledge is so vast that he'll say maybe he's on the opinion of so and so. And that's part of why this religion was able to be a world religion is because it had a tolerance that other religions didn't have", "didn't have. We didn't these religious wars if you look at the intolerance of and that they've lost their religion in a lot of ways from their intolerant, and now you have all these Muslims that are becoming intolerant and the Prophet said you'll follow the previous religions down the lizard's hole and that's one of their hallmarks is the intolerence of these previous dispensations so it's really important just to recognize", "and everybody is an alim today all these amazing ulama like they're just, everybody's a scholar you know and everybody has an opinion and everybody ah you're wrong he's wrong mashallah it's amazing and you know I mean there's a temptation just to yinzui for people because it's just you don't even want to bring that on other people", "because you become a source of fitna yourself. That's why a lot of people, when things get bad they just go in, they just for that reason" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/A beautiful speech delivered by Hamza Yusuf _ IMAA__1748542997.opus", "text": [ "Islam is here brother. It's in the heart. No, Iman is in the Heart. Islam is outward thing, Sharia. It doing outward thing. Anybody can be a Munafiq can be Muslim but he can't be a Mu'min because Mu'mins are an interior reality that reflects on the exterior and then Ihsan is the depth dimension. It what gives you...Iman give you the height. Islam gives you the breadth", "Ihsan gives you the depth and that's why what you witness here is Ihsan because these were people of Ihsan. These were great people of Ihsan" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/World War III is Near - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_smib3vr5sBg&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742998819.opus", "text": [ "One of the most important things that the Qur'an does for a believer is that the Quran essentially gives us an entire understanding not only ourselves but of the world around us and so within the Book of Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala is really an explanation of why we're here, where we came from what we should do while we are here and then where we're going", "One of the most important realities that the Qur'an explains to us is that the nature of the abode that we're in is an abode of tribulation. This is an Abode of trials and tribulations, and this is the Qur-an is rife with verses that remind us of this fact And so one of these verses in which Allah says that he", "is the one who created life and death, and he created life in order to test you. And then He says that just to see which one of you is the best in actions. Which of you are the best? In actions. And also another text that was in Surah Al-Mulk", "Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala tells us that Sulaiman who was given an immense dominion actually says about what he was given, That do I ashkuru am akfuru? Am I grateful or am I ingrate? Do I have ingratitude? And here kufr means to be ungrateful because that's the fundamental meaning of the word.", "يَشْكُرُ لِنَفْسِهِ And whoever is grateful, is grateful really for the benefit of his own soul. وَمَنْ كَفَرَ فَإِنَّ رَبِّي غَنِيمٌ كَرِيمٍ And then he says, and whoever is ungrateful, then verily my Lord is independent and kareem. Which one of these words in Arabic that has many different meanings but generous and noble, exalted.", "is ghaniyun, rich without need and kareem generous with his riches. So this is what Suleiman says. What's important here is that what Sulaiman is essentially telling us is that tribulation is not just a negative aspect of life which a lot of people think oh I'm going through a lot", "The blessings are tribulations. So depending on whether you're grateful or not, because a lot of people are pure ingrates with their blessings. And one of the remarkable things about our time is that people are just filled with ingratitude, even though there's so many blessings like people use. There are places where people are definitely suffering considerably. But for many, many people, especially here in the US and I know there's other people listening to this.", "listening that are in places like Malaysia or Europe, or many places where there's just immense blessings. So the two fundamental blessings that if you have them Allah expects you to worship Him. If you're lacking one or both of these two blessings, you might have some excuses but when you have these two", "with Allah and those are security and freedom from hunger. This is a fundamental thing in Surah Quraysh when Allah says, لِإِلَٰهِ قُرْيشٌ إِلٰى فِي مِّرَحْنَةَ الشِّتَاءِ وَالصَّيْفِ فَلْيَعْبُدُوا رَبَّ هَذَا الْبَيْتَ Let them worship the Lord of this house. Why? Because He has secured you أَمَنَهُمْ مِنْ خَوْفٍ", "So you're in a state of security. أَطْعَمُهُ مِن جُوعٍ وَآمِرَهُم مِّن خَوْفٍ He has given you food, so he's giving you satiety from your hunger and he has given your security from any fear. So those are the two blessings that Allah is saying warrant the worship of Allah . And that, in Maslow's hierarchy of needs,", "Actually, the Prophet , I think has a better hierarchy of needs than Maslow. And of course he does. I mean, it's...I don't think, I know because the Prophet actually put what the first khutbah that he gave when he went into Medina was he said that,", "And in Sahih al-Bukhari, one of the three hallmarks of faith is spreading global peace. Spreading peace around the world. So the Muslims are... we are supposed to be spreaders of peace. Global peace. So that peace is what the Prophet told us to spread and then he said", "and feed the hungry. So there you have security at the very bottom of the pyramid, and then the next are the physiological needs because if you're about to have your lunch and a bear or a lion shows up, you're gonna forget your lunch. Security is the fundamental need before the physiological need, so you need security. And then he says , and then maintain kinship bonds", "So you're moving up in this hierarchy. And then he said, and then pray it in the night when people are asleep. So now you have to work on yourself because everything, the hierarchy is there. Your securities are taken care of your food's taken care off. You have family. Now we'll work on your self and get close to Allah . And then He says, so it begins with peace and it ends with peace. Then he said", "Then he said, you will enter paradise in peace. And Salman al-Farisi, the Prophet ﷺ told him that no one will enter Paradise without a passport and he literally used the word jawaz in the hadith. In other words, like just laissez faire, let him pass", "pass so here in dunya you have all these boundaries there in the akhira as well jannah has a border patrol so you're not going to get into paradise without a passport with a visa from Allah but that visa is a it's a permanent they call like permanent residence visa you'll have iqamah daima right and", "the hadith so it's really quite extraordinary but one of the things so you've got that side of the dunya which this is the half of the world that we're in where people i feel are just total like so many people i hear people whining all the time about how horrible things are they don't know how i mean i i'm i'm somewhat of a historian i've read a lot", "reading of history, like don't complain because you have no idea what has happened in the past in history. It's terrifying what's happened, like what people have gone through, the hunger they've suffered. I mean our Prophet ﷺ suffered immensely but yet he never complained. Show me anywhere where he complains. The only complaint the Prophets give us to Allah, they don't", "he complains because they understood everything so now why didn't they complain that's the important thing and this is what the quran teaches us why they didn't complain and here's the reason in the hikm of ibn atayla, he says and this one of the most important books that was written", "recognized by all of our scholars. It's commented on by so many people. One of the great Maliki scholars, Ahmed Zarouq has over 25 commentaries on it some say up to 32 and he would finish commenting on it. He was start a new commentary because he was getting new insights into these things and Faqi al-Bannani said if it was permitted to read other than the Quran in prayer", "permitted with the Hikmah of Ibn Atayla. I mean that's hyperbole obviously, but the point he was making was this is such a stunning book with insight so one of the things that he says Qara radiAllahu anhu ibn Ataya lai mafqarah of the Egyptian people that he was born and raised in Egypt In fact some say because the famous hadith there's a hadith and may Allah give succor to our brothers and sisters", "sisters and sons and daughters in Yemen who are just going through immense trials and tribulations. But Ibn Atayla was originally from Azd, which is a Yemeni clan. And so when the Prophet said that Al-Imanu Yamani some of the scholars said he was referring to Abul Hassan who was from the Bani Ashar who were a Yemen tribe.", "jurisprudence is Yemeni, he was referring to Imam Marek who was from the Asbah which is another Yemeni tribe and then when he said well Hikmah to Yemenia and wisdom is is Yemeny as well they say he was a referring to Ibn Atayla because he was also Yemeni from the Azd. And there's Azdal Kabir and Azdal Saghir different people from that but it's one of the great tribes of the Arabs or clans so anyway Ibn Ataila", "In order to diminish the pain of your tribulation, he has given you knowledge. Glory be to him that he is the one trying you. So once you know that,", "tribulation and this is what our prophet knew, and this why at the lowest point of his life which is Ta'if he does that remarkable dua at Ta'iif as long you're not upset with me I'm fine with what's come to me. As long as you're no upset with my. And this is from the book of Allah when the Prophet was commanded", "In Surah At-Tur. Be patient with the hukm of your Lord, with this decree of your lord because you are in our providential care. You're in our care here. The ulama say it's which is related in the etymology, the greater etymolgy to right? So", "So then he says, فَالَّذِي وَاجَهَتْكَ مِنْهُ الْأَقْدَارِ هُوَ الَّذِّي عَوَّدْك حُسْنَ الْإِخْتِيَارُ So the one who sends these trials and tribulations that you hate, He is also the one Who has accustomed you to things that you love. And so he says بِمَا تُحِبُّهُ فَاشْكُرْهَ عَلَىٰ مَا أَوْلاَكَ", "This is Ahmad Zarruq. So be grateful with the things you love from Allah and be patient with those things that Allah has sent you that are difficult. And this is why, This Quran are signs for people that are constantly patient and constantly grateful. You have to be one or the other in any given circumstance. If it's a trial, be patient.", "patient if it's a blessing which is also a trial then the response is gratitude those are the responses Ibn al-Tayla said he had an immense weight on his shoulder and he was just really troubled and he went to his Shaykh Abu Al Abbas Al Mursi in Egypt, he was from Alexandria and he", "has an appropriate response. You're either in blessing and the response is gratitude, you're in tribulation and the responses patient, your in obedience and the responds is to witness God's tawfiq that he's given you this success shuhud al minna to see the blessing of obedience from God or you're disobedience and the respond is repentance and that's it. And Ibn Al-Tayla said when he heard that", "weight was taken from his shoulders. That's it! That is a Boolean algebraic formula for how to live in this world You're in one of those four states and so just be blessed now one of the things He goes on I mean, this is something amazing Imam al-Junaid who? Was one of The Greats and again ibn Taymiyyah", "All of them. Nobody said, you know, this Imam al-Junaid. All of the but he, Imam al Junaid in the Risalah of Imam al Qushayri they mention a story that Imam al Junaid said, That was his uncle, Sari al Saqati He had a junkyard and so he sold from a junk yard. That's was his job.", "It's amazing, right? I mean the best food is from jobs that are halal and every job that's halal is dignified. We don't... He was actually a smith so he was doing something that was labor. And one of the things about our culture is it denigrates labor you know which is really sad because labor like carpenters", "are some of the most halal jobs now in the world. Nobody should ever denigrate these type of jobs because they're actually very, very valuable for society but anyway he woke him up, he was sleeping and he woke up and said He's telling them his vision that he saw it says if I was standing before God he had a dream and he said", "God said to me, I created creation and all of them claim to love me. And then I created the world and nine tenths of them fled. And only one tenth remained. And", "fled because I created paradise. And so now he only 1% is left. And then, I sent upon them an atom's weight of tribulation and 9 tenths of that one tenth of that", "I am going to subject you to tribulation with the number of your breasts and even the high mountains could not stand it. Will you show patience? If you're the one sending the trial, then do what you want. Those are my true servants.", "dream that one of the Saliheen saw, but it's a remarkable dream. And so here it is that the Prophet was told us when he was asked who are the people that have the greatest tribulation? Which people have the great tribulation in the world? The Prophet said", "First the Prophets and then those closest to the Prohpets, and then the closest to them. People will have tribulations based upon the degree of their faith, their religion, their deen. The ones whose deen is very strong, their religions are strong they will have great difficulties.", "they will have weak tribulations. There will be people who have so much trial that they will be walking on the earth without any sin. This is a Sahih Hadith, so this is it now even more extraordinary is that the Prophet told us", "There will be the people of Afia who had well-being in this world. When they see the rewards, this is in the Musnad of Imam Ahmed. When They see the reward of the people tribulation in this dunya who had great suffering and difficulty, they will wish that they were flayed alive in the dunya their skin. The Prophet said that their skin was flayed a life cut from them", "That's what they would hope in the dunya. And people don't realize this. This is a difficult thing. Now, do we want suffering? No. The Prophet ﷺ said, أَسْلُ اللَّهِ لَعَافِيَةً And he went by some people in great tribulation and suffering, and he said, وَلَمْ يَسَرُوا اللَّا لَأَفِيًّا Didn't they ask for well-being?", "every day, every morning and every evening. Why? Because these are the duas of asking Allah for well-being. So it's not like we want suffering but when suffering comes see who the one who sent the suffering. Why did he do it? The Prophet said that there are people that سَبَقَتْ لَهُمْ مِنْ عِندِ اللَّهِ مَنزِلًا That they were there are", "But that person did not reach the station with their actions. In other words, what Allah wanted from them they did not give to Allah. So then He tries them. Until he achieves the station that Allah because He shows patience", "shows patience. Imam al-Ghazali said that there are people who their sins will only be removed by depression, like literally Allah will give them sadness and grief and this is the removal of their sin. This is an abode of huzan! Look at the description of the Prophet", "Allah is also in a state of joy with Allah. So these are not paradoxes, these are understanding the nature of the abode when you see the world. You can't go now on the internet without seeing things about Yemen. How could you not cry? Or Palestine or Syria or Iraq. I mean how many tears have been shed by our community over just looking at the tribulation around the world but what you need to understand is maybe those people aren't fulfilling", "as people of the Prophet Muhammad's Ummah and maybe he is removing all their sins in this world. I mean, I saw three women on CNN from Syria and they were literally crossing into Turkey fleeing the crises and it just completely floored me. You know, the person that... The reporter just said to this person", "What do you think? What do You think about this situation?\" And she just looked at him and said, Allah is present. Allah exists! That's a believer's response. So on the Day of Judgment what maqam does that person have? Because that's patience. I mean all these Muslims have gone through all these things. We've been through this before. I hear people saying, oh, you know people I'm losing my faith. There are people in America", "Muslims that are losing their faith because of what's happening in Yemen. Like, what does that mean? Look at the people of Yemen. They're calling on Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And this is the difference. It's amazing. Don't lose your akhirah because somebody else is losing their dunya. I mean we're people of akhirah, not people of dunya This abode is what it is and it's a zero sum game. It always has been", "It always has been. You know, some areas get better. Other areas get worse. But it stays dunya. And we've had a long run, those of us who are over here. We've had the dark clouds on the horizon. I'm not a negative person but I see dark clouds and people should be doing spiritual exercises to get ready for what's coming because you don't want to lose your faith just because everything falls apart and things fall apart. World War II, my goodness,", "goodness. I don't know, people should be grateful that's my feeling like my advice to myself and everybody else is just be grateful alhamdulillah wa shukurillah stop complaining all the time everybody's just it's just amazing the complaints so this is it in order for him", "that he was the one trying you. So may Allah make us people of patience and gratitude even better is to be grateful all of the time because the aarifeen, the people who know Allah are grateful even in their tribulations Because Ibn Abbas said in every tribulation know that there are three blessings hidden that you have to see The first is it could've been worse You lost a child, you could've lost all your children", "have lost all your children you lost a hand you could have lost both hands so and then know that it's in your dunya like it's it's, in your worldly things and not in your religious matters. So if you lose money like he's stock market collapse and you lost all of your money just alhamdulillah it's just dunya and then the last one is in this world and not the next world", "So, on the Yom Kiyamah maybe you're going to say I wish I had more tribulation like those people that see the people in tribulation getting all their rewards saying I wish i had more tribulatio- don't wish for more tribulations just ask Allah for aafi and well being but know if tribulation comes to you it's probably because your closer to Allah than other people." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Bani Israil vs Muslim -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamza__1743057793.opus", "text": [ "Allah gave them continual prophets. What He gave us was continual ulama . See, our ulama are like the Prophets of Bani Israel and those of us who've studied with them, the real ulama not the likes of you know we're like Tufayliyun ala Ma'ida The real Ulama if you study with Marab Tarhaj anybody who met him You sit with these people and you know that", "people they have miraculous lives the amount of ibadah they can do the fact that they never speak ill of people just that if you meet anybody that never speaks ill of other people assume their a wali of Allah because it's a hard thing to do it's just easy to do" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Creation of Adam _as_ -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamza__1742889839.opus", "text": [ "This hadith is a very interesting hadith which Abu Dawud and Tirmidhi relates from Abu Musa al-Ash'ari. He says that when Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala desired to create the Adam, he commanded that there be a qabda, which is a handful of...from all over the earth. So the children of Adam come based on", "the places where that earth was gathered. So he said, and from that you see red people, white people, black people, easy people, difficult people based on the type of terrain, good people, tayyib and khabith, people that are very fecund in their productivity and other people that aren't because there's earth that doesn't produce much." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Free will and choices by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamza__1743063364.opus", "text": [ "Imam Ali was once asked, do we have free will or is there just choice? And he said lift your leg. Right leg and he lifted his leg and now without putting it down, lift the other one. He said I can't. He says it's between those two. So you know...I mean we didn't choose our parents despite what new age people say. You know we didn t choose the type of health we would have. Well there is some level of choice in health but generally if you had bad genes you didn t chose that." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/If you loose a Million - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamza__1748542854.opus", "text": [ "If you lose a million dollars and all you had was $800,000 so now your two hundred thousand dollars in debt. You still have your health. And there are people who have a million that are sick that would give you that million dollars if they could purchase your health and so there's always something to be grateful of and to recognize that worldly things are not we can lose worldly things but if we haven't lost our Dean it's a blessing" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/__ Just Put on Muslim Tattoos _ Hamza Yusuf _ Insp__1743315097.opus", "text": [ "People have tattoos, they have tattoos of demons on their shoulders. I mean, I was behind somebody who had a tattoo of a 1966 Mustang on their back because the license plate said 1966. No, this is tragic for people. This is tragic that this has happened to our society, our civilization. Really? And we're getting Muslims putting on tattoos. We've got young Muslims now putting on tattoo. It's true. Listen, we have tattoos in Islam. All right? Seriously.", "But they're temporary. It's called henna If you want to put a tattoo on just put a temporary one on there if you're 17 or 18 years old I want a tattoo Just put a temperate one on their it'll wear off by the time your intellect comes back to you All right, so don't mind" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Miracle of the Qur_an by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamza__1743314756.opus", "text": [ "The Qur'an, when it does use the same stories very often you will see either it's embedded in a very different sequence for a purpose and then you will just see changes in the words that are very subtle because of the sequence that it is in. And this is why traditionally our scholars understood that the miracle of the Qur'aan is not a scientific miracle. There are some interesting scientific facts in the Qur-aan, that's fine", "But it is not the miracle of the Qur'an. The miracle of Quran is rhetorical, It is a miracle of language and we're in a civilization that privileges science over And by that I mean the material sciences over other aspects but the single most interesting thing about our species is not science its language We are creatures of language" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Most ungrateful thing by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf rh _ ___1743303200.opus", "text": [ "You know, and the most ungrateful thing you can do is not acknowledge your creator. It doesn't get much more ungrateful than that. We give standing ovations to great talent, you know? And yet we see a sunset and we don't have a sense of praise like praising the one that made that. I mean if you had a sunset once a month everybody'd go out to watch it. If you had", "whole planet would be out to see that amazing event. But every day, and this is why ما غرّك بربك الكريم You know what has deluded you about your generous Lord? Imam As-Sawi says أعد جوابه في سؤاله He put the answer in the question. It's your generosity because he's so generous." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Secret of Tribulation -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamza__1742889352.opus", "text": [ "The Quran highlights privilege as one of the manifestations of trials. Some people are set over other peoples, as a trial for both of them. That he has put some of you over others in degrees to test you. Ibn Qayyimah Josiah says that", "are a test for the rich, the ignorant are a tests for the learned. The learned are a chest for the ignorant that this is part of it Allah says we made some of you a trial for others will you show patience and this is the secret of tribulation is patience" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Selling quality things - Shaykh Hamza yusuf _marke__1748521006.opus", "text": [ "fruit to make sure the good fruit was not on the top and the bad fruit on the bottom if you go into a store now you'll get your strawberries they have all the big ones on the Top and then the tiny ones on The Bottom that's not by mistake but it's a type of fish because you buy the big one and then when you open the package you get all the little ones on", "having quality assurance in the marketplace. This is part of the Islamic tradition and we forget this," ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/You made yourself Sick - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _shayk__1742888611.opus", "text": [ "You made yourself ill. So if you were exercising, if you're eating well, if your getting good sleep, if doing all the right things and then you get sick that's Ibtillah from Allah but if you aren't doing any of those things and than you get sik you have no one to blame but yourself" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Prophet ﷺ is Unique -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzayu__1742999262.opus", "text": [ "Now just a few things about our prophet. First of all, there is no prophet that did what our prophet did. None of them. Moses was a great prophet, one of the greatest. The five major prophets. But none of them... Moses never led a state. People see the Prophet in Mecca and they say... Mahmuduq Pickelhau says, the sentimentalist. You know somebody who's sentimental shallow feelings he says oh", "He says, oh he was like Jesus in Mecca. But then in Medina he changes his personality change. He didn't change nothing changed about him. He's the same prophet. He is the same caring gentle human being but now he's the head of a state It's a different set of circumstances. He has different considerations" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Evil people and sufism - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_wSX00NEurVw&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748540494.opus", "text": [ "So in the famous book Al-Adkar, Imam An-Nawawi spoke about the Sufis. So he said that they were the Sada of this Ummah. You know, they're the highest group. These majestic masters.", "from the best of this Ummah. They're the people that help people on the path to God by getting better, and they discipline the souls of others with their insight. Now this has to be understood in the context because this is a contested term. Sufism is not what you see", "you see in many countries in the Muslim world today. In fact, the Sufis would be the first people to reject them. Imam al-Ghazali in his book, a Tabyeen, he wrote a small treatise called a Tabyaeen elucidating the fact that the vast majority of creation is completely diluted and when", "And he said, and how great is their delusion? He said they're deluded in their dress. They're delluded in the way they talk. They are deluded thinking that they are the elite of God and the elect. So remember that many of the people who were part of this tradition, they were great critics", "Some of them say that the Sufiya and the Mutasawifa are different. Some use these terms technically. The Mutasowifa are the people that pretend to be Sufis, and in fact they have a term in the tradition called the Mutamawat. The mutamawat is somebody who's like a... He's acting like a spiritual person because he thinks this is how a spiritual persons should be, and so he's pretending to be dead. In other words his ego is dead", "And he has certain qualities. He's very hushed, he's very you know I'm very humble I am. Like Uriah Heep in David Copperfield. I'm humble, I know me place in society but he is meanwhile like tricking and doing all these things to... So one of the Mauritanians said", "That, You know the Qawm. These are the Qaum, the Sufiya. They were called the Qaaum. They're the people because when the angels found a circle of dhikr they said there was one person he wasn't from them but he was sitting with them. He said and Allah says to the angels", "They're the people that even if you sit with them, you're in a good state. So he says that these are people that But it became a means of getting livelihood after that. It became a mean of selling talismans and doing these things like... And the peer sob who gets the poor people", "the poor people and convinces them, you know, that support me and all your ailments will go away. And I'm going to get gin out of you. Ah, I can see there's a ginny in you. Just give me five minutes and I'll do some mumbo jumbo and it'll all go away.\" There is a lot of this in our ummah, right? Seriously! So we can't be naive about these things.", "came to our area, and he made all these claims. That's the first thing. If they make claims, big red flag. That is the first. Somebody came to me and said I've got this person in our city who doesn't pray Jummah at the masjid. He came from...I won't name the country. And he says he prays Jummuh with the Prophet's alayhissalam at his house. A lot of people were really taking this man seriously", "taking this man seriously. And I said, I just said you know he's a cadab, just a liar don't believe him. The Prophet said first of all I don't think he'd be praying in England Juma because most of the fuqa has say Jumaa doesn't even apply in foreign countries without an Imam because that's one of the conditions to establish Jum'ah. I mean Shaykh Saeed Ramadan used to pray Jumma and then pray Dhuhr afterwards", "Zuhur afterwards because they didn't consider the Jumu'ah valid in Syria. People don't know that because there was no legitimate government by Sharia, right? So I just anyway and I don't have a problem telling people that. I don''t believe that you know I had somebody come to me you know we do this Dhikr on Thursdays and this one guy he's every day he said the Prophet is in the circle and he comes to him in his dreams and he tells them what Dhikrs they should do", "should do. You know, for me that's just red flags all over the place. I don't want anything to do with those people. I'm telling you the truth. These are people that, you know, the real...the people that I knew never talked about any of those things. Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah somebody asked him he actually once said, you", "Like who am I to see the Prophet ﷺ? You know, that's the people I knew. These people were people of no claims. No claims. So people that do that, they tell you, oh, I saw the Prophet and I saw this and that. Now people can genuinely see the", "and there can be a bushra in that. But if you do see the Prophet, keep that to yourself. That's my advice. It's a very special thing, and you should just keep it to yourself if you want to share it with somebody very special that has to do with them or you want tell somebody that might know something about dream interpretation. That is another thing but I would not put that on Facebook. And if you hear a Shaykh saying, I saw the Prophet and he said support Sisi", "that and then, no I'm sorry. You know? I mean these are things that destroy our religion you know and make people really dislike the religion and turn away from their religion is charlatans religious charlatan and i'm not saying they're all charlatanes but", "One of the books that I read when I was starting out, I mean, I wasn't starting out. I was already pretty adept at reading Arabic but I read Bedi' al-Zaman Al Hamadani. I went through a period where I read the Maqamat. I really liked them. Zamakhshari's were beautiful because they were all spiritual maqamahs. But Bedi', it was a man... Really, I was conflicted reading it initially and it took me awhile to understand what he was doing because he wrote about a religious charlatan", "He was very eloquent and he knew the book and the sunnah. And he used to go to villages, and he would trick people. And tell them things like I saw the Prophet in a dream, and told me to go this village, and said I'm supposed to pray the rain prayer because you need rain but he told me I have to do an extremely long sajdah or it won't get answered. So they're all like Allah hu akbar. And is very eloquence. He's got this brilliant eloquance. They're all Allah hu alaqbaar.", "They pray, and he goes into Sajda. And then he gets up. They're all in Sajja. He gets up and robs all the houses. And I thought, why is he doing this? This was 800 years ago. He's talking about characters. He is warning people about religious charlatanry. That there are Montebanks. There are these people that are Dajadjila.", "you know, to use Imam Malik's term because he was asked about him and he said, He's an imposter. He was a scholarly imposter who was pretending to be something he wasn't. And this has happened many times in our history that people have been fooled by these people. And so this is why it's very important to learn the religion for yourself so that you don't become victim to these people", "that have been victims. And then what happens? They get scandalized when they find out the truth, the person ended up having sexual improprieties with people or something. This happens in our community and then they have their loss of faith or they get confused or then they don't want to have anything to do with religion because this charlatan has given religion such a bad name and this happens and they suffer from it. People are abused by religion", "I would rather have a mafiosa leader and deal with him than deal with a religious charlatan. I really would, I would have that because he's just doing bad and everybody can see it's bad but when you do bad in the name of good, you are a truly evil person." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Imam Ghazzali_s advice - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_4Z4IC4v-rF0&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743304924.opus", "text": [ "So it's really important for us to, uh, to really reignite reconnect to the book of Allah , which is the foundation of our faith. And then following that obviously the sunnah of our prophet and then not just his verbal or oral sunna but actually this sunnah practice what Imam Malik called the Amal . And so the reason I wanted to do the Jawahara al-Qur'an, I mentioned this last year because we looked at", "Ibn Juzay Al-Kalbi. And I love Ibn Juza' Al- Kalbi, it's one of my favorite tafsirs, the Tafsir li Ulm al-Tanzil. It's a brilliant tafseer, it is short, concise but it's on of those oceans where every time you dip into it you realize that how could he have done that? How did he get so much into so few pages? Well Imam Al Ghazali is THE ocean. His own teacher Imam Al Joaini said", "was bahroon mughraq, that he was an ocean that would drown you. That once you go into him, he is an ocean and it's really important to emphasize when we talk about Imam al-Ghazali radiallahu anhum is that he has been much maligned of late by our community and unfortunately it's one", "that the people towards the end of the Ummah would curse or speak ill of the people at the outset of the ummah. So this has to be fulfilled, I suppose but I feel sorry for those people that are the ones fulfilling that hadith. So Imam al-Ghazali as you can see, I'm using the term the oceanic imam and sheikh, the proof of Islam, the wonder of his age", "great muhadith and historian who was famously a student of Ibn Taymiyyah, the faqih. He was a polymath, Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Tamiyyah. But Ibn Temi and Imam Al Ghazali have a very interesting relationship. Obviously Ibn Timi is after him but in many ways Ibn Tamiyya's responding to Imam Al Ghazali so it's one", "conversations in our Ummah. So Imam al-Dhahbi calls him Al-Imam al-Bahr and Bahar in Arabic can mean different things but here it clearly means ocean. In the Quran that actually means amongst the bedouin and in the cities so the Bahar there means the Qur'an and the Mudun because often cities are built by rivers or by oceans", "oceans because of the trade, the importance of trade coming to them. So the bahar can mean different things but it's used for the meaning of ocean and interesting is related to the word hibr in the great derivation so the Jews are called ahbar because the hibir is also the bahars he's the bahara of ink and the Prophet who is the Great Ocean that we all", "on the shore or others have dived into his sunnah and are drowning in the glories of his sunna. The Prophet interacted with the ahbar, and went used to debate them so they the hibar is the person who spends a lot of ink in in his occupation. So Imam al-Dahabi calls him Al-Imam al-Bahar", "Imam al-Bahar, Al-Sheikh, Hujjatul Islam wa Ujubatul Zaman. He is the huja of Islam, the proof of Islam and the wonder of the age. And this is important because of who Imam al Dhahabi is. He's clearly one of the great scholars of Islam. And so when a great scholar of Islam acknowledges another scholar and gives him titles like that you have to take it very serious. Another great scholar", "great scholar who is the polymath and the Hafidh, Ibn al-Najjar. He actually says about the Imam, كان إماماً بالاتفاق. He said, إمَام الفُقْهاء على الإطّاق And then he said that he was also رباني الأمة بالاتّفاقة", "That's what he calls him. So Ibn al-Najjar who was in Baghdad and he lives after Imam Ghazali, not that long after Imam al-Ghazali but he is one of the great Imams of Baghdad. And he said that he was an imam in fiqh, ilm al-fiqh ala itlaq. He had mastered it so he said he's the imam al-fuqaha which means", "they're the master, faqih. And I'm going to go into that more but so as we move in I want to just begin by before we get into Jawahar al-Qur'an I'm gonna take you through two doors The first door which I'm looking at inshaAllah today is the door of the Imam himself and looking at the Imam and why he's so important and why has to be restored to his position because some people have tried to knock him off his pedestal and this is not the first time it happened It's happened in the past", "He is the most important jurist after the first generation in the history of Islam. And he's also one of the most theologians and he is certainly probably the most mystic of Islamic tradition. So, in that way, he is...after that first generation,", "for the Sunni tradition. The Shia traditionally have had a difficult time with him because he did spend, the little time that he spent in refutation was in refuting the Shia. So unfortunately, because he's Iranian one would think he would be one of the great treasures of Iran. He is not as appreciated I think as he should be although the Shias do benefit from him and Nasiruddin al-Tusi who's a great Shia scholar did so.", "in Tuz which is an area that was really called Khorasan. So today you can have Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and Northern Iran all of that was called Kharasan so the Afghanis are really Khorasani's the Turkmestanis are Khorassanis and the people of Northern Iran are Khrasan because it's a Persian word", "The sun is son. Is that right? Khorasan. It's, yeah, son. So khora is where it rises. Is That correct? Yeah. So he was born in this place in Tuz in northern Iran and his father was a simple... Some say he was a ghazal like a person who was a wool carter and that's why there's a debate about", "or is it ghazali with a soft zay? But his father was a very simple man who loved the ulama and he used to serve them, and he would honor them, treat them and do whatever he could for them. And he made sincere dua to Allah that he had two sons, Ahmed and Muhammad.", "but his son Abu Hamid really becomes a Hujjat al-Islam. And I think it's from the sincerity of his father, but he was raised an orphan because his father dies in his early years He left him to be taken care of by somebody when the money ran out He put them in a madrasa Because he couldn't afford to keep them and so they grew up in this Madrasah in Tuz Which is where he learns the beginnings of his knowledge", "studied with an Imam there, Radkali is his name and he's very interesting. And then he moves to Georgian that should say Georgian which is Gurgan, which is near what they call it Bahar al-Akhdar. And he studies their many great Imams from this place. Imam Al-Georgiani was from there both Georgians because there's two of them but really truly extraordinary", "and he studies with Abu Nasr al-Isma'ili, some say it's Abu Qasim al-Ismaili. This is around 465, he was born in 450 and so he's about 15 years of age. So he's literally on his journey now. And he spends... He stays there with this Shaykh who was a formidable Shaykh in fiqh. And basically he memorizes Quran,", "he studies with him Shafi' fiqh and he basically writes what's called the Taaliqah which is essentially all of his notes of the lectures because this is a time when scholars did what is called Amaliy they just Yumli so for instance Sheikh Abdullah Mubayyah has a book called Amalia Dalalaat which is a very formal book in usul al-fiqh. All of it was from lecture,", "his students recorded it and then it was transcribed, and then he edited it. But those were his amali . Very few scholars can do that today. I know one Mauritanian scholar who told me that he could write in this moment, He told me I could dictate to you 40 books in 40 sciences. And he said since I mastered those sciences, I've only been asked about three out of the 37", "37 he was never even asked about so he basically writes on his after four years a little close to five after studying with this man He's on his way back and he tells this story where these brigands come And they and they basically robbed the caravan This is quite common in those days, and they robbed the Caravan and so Imam al Ghazali I mean you can imagine. He's 19 years old and he's just studied and he mastered all of this", "knowledge that he's learned, but he hasn't memorized it. So he understands it, but has not memorized it.\" The thief takes his bag of books and the Imam runs after him and begs him, please don't take my knowledge from me. At that point the thief laughs at him and says to him what kind of knowledge is it that a wretch like me could steal it from you?", "Can you really call that knowledge? And Abu Hamid says, I knew then that Allah made him say that for me to know that that is not knowledge. If it can be stolen from you by a thief, it's not knowledge and so he goes back to Tuz and spends the next three years memorizing everything he had learned by rote so that nobody could ever take it from him again", "for what's called nisabur or nishapur. And this was another great center of learning in northern Iran, today it's called Northern Iran and he studies with the great Imam al-Juwaini, he is also called Imam al Haramein. He was probably the most brilliant scholar of his age in fiqh. He", "So the philosophy of law. And what's more important is he's really, even though arguably Imam Shafi'i, Malik, Imam Malik and Imam Abu Hanifa all are working in a Maqasidi approach. That's undeniable if you look at their methodologies. But it hadn't really been articulated. The beginnings begin with Imam Shafa'i when he writes his famous Risalah but then it's Imam al-Juwaini that really develops the Maqsidi school.", "So he comes up with the five universals that these are the maqasid of our religion, like protecting the religion itself, protecting life, protecting intelligence, reason itself, and then protecting family and then property. And sometimes they add a sixth which is dignity but most of them include that in family because honor and that all goes under", "that all goes under your name because you carry your family name. So anybody that disparages it is disparaging your honor. So they put حفظ العرض in حفض النسل. So Imam al-Ghazali, now you can imagine the tawfiq that Imam al Juhayni must have felt by having a student like Imam al Ghazali because he actually has him teach in his madrasah very early. So he studies with him there for five years. He goes there when he's 23.", "Imam Al-Juaini dies. But what's really important, this was a time when there was a lot of fitan. Imam Al Juaini r.a. was actually... There were assassination attempts on his life because of the Bataniya. He actually had to flee at a certain point. He goes to... He's called the Imam al-Haramayn because he goes to Mecca and Medina. He taught in Mecca", "And it's just extraordinary that Allah brought those two together. And that's very important to remember, they say if you see a turtle on a fence the one thing that you can deduce from that is that he didn't get there by himself. There's a lot of truth to the fact that wherever you are in the world you did not get there on your own. If you study, it's your teachers who will make or break you. It's the reality. Teachers will either turn you off of knowledge", "of knowledge and unfortunately many do that to young people or they will ignite a fire in you. The kindling is there, it's all ready but it's a great teacher who will ignite the fire in the student. Imam al-Ghazali already had that fire but when he goes to Imam al Jua'ini amazing things happen. One of the first thing that he does is he masters his book Al Burhan in Usul Fiqh", "bridges it. So he abridges his teacher's book and then brings it to him, and shows him the book so he is very impressed with it. Then he goes after Imam al-Ju'aini dies when the imam is 28th, he actually goes to the court of Nithan Malmulk. And you have to understand that Imam al Ghazali will be the first to admit that he was an incredibly ambitious person.", "people of, you know the spiritual masters of the religion say is that the last thing to leave the heart of sincere people is hubr-riyasa. It's love of leadership because it's love a leadership that often gets them there without that they won't have that drive to outstrip everybody else because they have that thoroughbred nature and so he goes to Nizam al Mulq now Nizama al Mulk who was a Seljuk minister", "Nizam al-Mulk was actually a righteous minister. The government arguably was not a great government like all governments, it had its problems and there were a lot of dissent but Ibn Taymiyyah one of the things that he points out is that the idea that you cannot work with governments unless they're perfectly angelic is... He said it's insane because it will lead to", "falling into disarray because governments are the ones that establish the mosques in Muslim countries. They're the ones who have the mahaakam al-shara'iya, the courts. They have the dar ul iftaa, the fatwa places. So if all the ulema in their righteousness say I'm not going to have anything to do with the government then who runs the government? And I'll give you one example of this. There was a man named Muhammad Sharif who was Libyan and he worked", "government under Gaddafi and I actually visited him in 1978 in Libya with one of my teachers. And he hosted us, he was a beautiful man. He helped so many people. He help Africans, he helped all... But then he stayed in the government for years never said anything. He was doing everything in spite", "Qadhafi. He hated the government, but he was a hidden man. He was like the mu'min amongst Ali Firaun, the believer within Ali Firoan and they actually wanted to try him after the rebellion and the death of Qaddafi, but thankfully because of the intercession of some good people particularly Jordanians,", "of Imam al-Ghazali's works. He is one of the few people that did critical editions of his work, so that's an example of somebody at the time there were probably people who saw him as a scholar sultan, he was just working with the government. Imam Al Ghazali went and said I learned knowledge for other than Allah but knowledge refused to be other than for Allah. And so even though he might have had his niyyah", "always the best. His path, because he was a sincere seeker his path was his purification and so he went through great tribulations. So he gets into the court, he completely floors Nizam al-Mulk who was an Alim himself and was surrounded by ulama and he sees him as somebody this man is going to be very useful", "a project. At the time they were cursing the Ash'aris on the minbars, literally cursing them, the Ashari Mutakallimun, the theologians. There was a lot of fitna in the community. The Ismailis, the Bataniyya were very strong, the occultists and I'll talk about that later. So there's all these problems and he... it's just amazing what he does because he comes", "argument. He is just so formidable and so irrefutable that the ulama, they can't handle him. And so a lot of envy, a lot jealousy but Nizam-ul Mulk sends him... he becomes a full professor in Baghdad at the Nizamiya. Now you have to understand at the young age I mean he's in his early 30s and he's a full", "be in their 60s and 70s, right? So it's quite stunning. But then he has a crisis. The crisis comes about the age of 38. He goes into what we would call an existential crises. In the West they'd probably called a midlife crises where he really begins to...he goes through a period of radical skepticism and doubt and just is wondering", "and because he penetrates so deeply into things. But he really begins to question everything, and because of that, he actually loses the ability to talk. He can't teach anymore. And this is a man who the ulama came to listen to. Ibn Aqeel, the great grammarian and scholar used to come and sit... This is a men who the great ulama of Baghdad would come to sit in his lectures. That's how formidable he was.", "talk and the doctors basically say you need a psychologist, we're physicians. We can't do this. You need somebody to know your soul because it's not a physiological problem, this is psychological problem. And so he basically decides to just really examine everything and he looks... He identifies four sources of knowledge.", "the mutakallimun, and then the falasifa, the rationalists. And then the bataniya, the occultists like people that seek knowledge through the occults, through hidden arcane knowledge, esoteric knowledge. And finally the mystics who at that time were called Sufiyah which should not be confused with what a lot of people associate with so-called Sufiya because there's... Imam al Ghazali was one of the great critics", "And he was actually, if you look at him, he's far more critical of Sufism than not in the Ihya. He is constantly condemning a lot of practices but he recognized intuition that the knowledge that the people of Tasawwuf are talking about is intuitive knowledge it's kishp knowledge and he realizes that this is essentially real knowledge because", "There's a Berkeley professor, Paul Fierioban who wrote a book called Against Method in which he argued. It's a very radical book and I'm not recommending people read it but I did read it many years ago. And one of the arguments he made was just very interesting in the book is that he said that scientific method has never helped any major discoveries in science. All major discoveries were intuitive. Scientific method is what helps the dummies understand it", "but the actual breakthroughs came from great moments of insight. And you will find this, many of the Nobel Prize winners. I mean Linus Pauling who won the Nobel prize in chemistry he saw the whole thing in a fever like in his mind. Now one could argue all their study helps produce those moments and that's very possible. But the point is intuition is an underrated understanding", "heads because all of knowledge is founded on the concept and the concept is mystical in its essence just the fact that we have consciousness, the fact we can see things and perceive them and then take the one out of the many and abstract and all these things are coming out of an intuitive source but we don't understand some would call it the agent intellect there's a lot of debates about where that knowledge comes from", "a mystical type of knowledge that is the foundation of all knowledge. And so he realized that was the real true knowledge, but it's not easily acquired and so he goes into seclusion this is very early I think this is the first picture of Damascus if you see the minaret on the right apparently that is where he actually resided for over a year some say 18 months there are debates about", "There's debates about this. Even in his own book, there are some debates. I mean, some people have accused him of prevarication in the book which I don't think is fair because first of all, when he was in the state that he was one wonders just what was going on in his mind because he was", "But he does spend time there and this is where he begins to write the Ihya Ulum al-Din. This is part of his project, but not all of his projects. And then he actually goes to Jerusalem and he writes his Risalah Al Qudsiyah there, what's called Qawa'id Al Aqaid which is really a fundamental book in Kalam which I'll get to. Some say he visits Egypt. There's debate about this.", "He was planning on visiting Yusuf Tashafin. Yusof Tashfin is the great Murabit leader who actually conquers Andalusia. It was Imam al-Ghazali who wrote him a letter arguing to him that he must go and save Andalusi because if he doesn't it will fall to the Christians, and so some say that it's actually Imam al Ghazali that led to the Murabitan going into in the famous battle in Zalaqa where they defeat", "And then he restores the unity of Andurusia after it had fallen into what are called Maluk al-Tawai, very similar to what's happened today in the Muslim world. So and then he goes on, he makes his pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. And during this time, I mean there's wonderful stories about him but during this he was literally sweeping the mosque in the Umayyad Mosque. This was a man who'd been a dean at the greatest university", "University in Iraq. And he just wants to be left alone, and he's just... He wants to work on himself. And then he goes back to Baghdad and spends a short time there. At this time, he is about 49 years old. So some say...and there are debates about this, and I'm going to take the Imam at his own word. There are debates", "The letters indicate that he actually was gone less than that. He was probably gone about two years, but for whatever time he was in seclusion this was a time the great jurist Qadi Abu Bakr ibn al-Arabi visits him and Qadi Abubakar who is really one of the masters of the Islamic tradition, he was a brilliant exegete of the Quran. He's a great Maliki faqih.", "in Iraq that Imam al Ghazali took and he read with them the Ihya. He takes back Imam al-Ghazali's teachings to Morocco, and then it becomes...it begins to spread. Initially the Marabatun rejected his book because of some of the Kalam problems that they found in it. They were much more Salafi in their orientation, and by Salafis I mean not Mujassima Salafiy but the traditional Salafy,", "but the people that were dogmatic, following like imam tahawi type texts. Very simple. They didn't like any elaborate dialectical theology. So he then basically goes to Nisapur and he teaches in the nizamiyat. This time he's teaching usul and other things, but he's about 50 years of age. Then he goes back to Tuz. He opens up a zawiyah", "a zawiya, what they would call a... I think they called it chanaka. Yeah, chanaca. So he opens up a type of place where he's really doing character development and spiritual work and teaching. Most of the time was spent in recitation of Quran at this stage in his life. He was reciting the Quran at least once a week and with great deliberation. In 40 years", "Some will argue because the books are... like, Ihya has 40 books so you could look at it as 40 as opposed to just one. So some say it's actually 400 books if you look at them but I think around... It's around 70-72 books. Somebody worked out given the amount of paper somebody worked out he would have had to write four Karrasah every day in his entire adult life from the time he was about 18 until the end of his life", "40 pages a day he would have had to write. So incredible output. Now I want to talk, and this is really at the heart of what I wanted to talk about today. I want you to talk abut what his project is because Imam al-Ghazali has a project. It's the Mashrua' al-ghazali. It is the Ghazalian Project. What is that project? First of all, and I use the term liberal arts. Traditionally this", "I like it because it's understood in the West, but it really is the same concept as the term that was used in the Muslim world as . These are the instrumental arts. They're the arts that are studied to train the mind so that the mind can actually begin to understand reality and so this is part of his project", "focus is on reviving the sciences of Iman, Islam and Ihsan. And then that involved Kalam in Iman , Legal Theory in Islam and then The Inner Path in Ihsan . As a side project he has the refutation fundamentally of two groups that had huge impact. One of them was the Peripatetic philosophers and the other were the occultists.", "And it's important to remember, when they say that he destroyed philosophy, he was focusing on one school of philosophy which is the peripatetic school. He identifies 20 problems three of which he considered to be really kufr and then 17 of which to lesser or greater degrees but the methodology of the philosophers he recognized as", "he was not opposed to philosophy but he was opposed to the results of certain schools of philosophy. This is really important to understand. Ibn Khaldun who wrote considerably against philosophy in the Muqaddimah says, despite the errors of the philosophers their methodology is the best methodology so even if Ibn Khaldoon admitted this Imam al-Ghazali is the one that introduces", "into kalam, into usool and arguably into ihsan. So for that reason Ibn Taymiyyah in many ways really motivated from a very pure intention but I don't think he recognized what the Imam was trying to do", "The Imam saw the fragmentation of the Ummah. He saw what was happening and he recognized that there were tools out there that we would need to protect this religion from the onslaught from outside. And it's not to say that the religion itself wasn't enough, it is enough but the Prophet said", "that wisdom is the lost property of the believer, like a lost riding beast of the Believer. Wherever he finds it, wherever he finds, he is more worthy of it because he will use it for the right reasons. So he really saw that there was great benefit in these tools in the same way that Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari recognized the same thing in his Kalam project. Ibn Sina who is much maligned", "much maligned in our community, unfortunately, was an absolute genius that we should be incredibly proud that Allah made him from this ummah because he is one of the greatest thinkers in human history. And Peter Adamson actually argues that he's probably the single most influential philosopher in European history, not just in... and he's an expert obviously on Ibn Sina but Avicenna his right now", "Right now, the quarantine, this is even though the Prophet ﷺ first articulated the quarantine. Ibn Sina was the one that said it should be for 40 days. He said people should wash their hands with vinegar because these diseases are spread by what he called like harmful bodies. Viruses aren't even living things according to most scientists. There is a debate but most of them say they're not living things, the viruses.", "the viruses. They behave as if they were, but they're actually not. They're just genetic material that have codes in them that corrupt our cells. So so the project is a formal one. In the liberal arts he has two fundamental books that are really important. The first one is called Ma'iyar al-Ilm and this is his theoretical book. He wrote it", "And he wrote it because he felt that the human mind was so fallible, that it needed to be trained. So this book is literally the grammar of thought. Now most people when they learn a language correctly and I know there's debates about this but actually believe in prescriptive language somebody use the word correctly there is incorrect usage of language and correct usage by grammatical terms", "grammatical terms. A lot of people don't like these terms anymore, but so be it. The grammar of thought is to learn how the mind should work properly when it reasons. That's what the grammar of thoughts is. So this is called manthiq. Ibn Taymiyyah wrote a book called Arad al-Manthaqeen even though he was a logician. He wrote a", "He said, logic does not benefit stupid people and it's superfluous for highly intelligent people. That is absolutely true. The problem is most of us fall in the bell curve, in that middle. And this is why the Sahaba didn't need mantiq because the ones that were fuqaha and reasoning were reasoning with their brilliance.", "generally don't need mantiq. They still will benefit from this training, but they don't it. So manti q is to teach people of lesser capacity how to avoid pitfalls like hasty generalization. It's a logical fallacy in what's called material logic because we do that naturally. I had three South Asian taxi drivers in New York. They all cheated me so every South Asians a cheat. That's obviously a fallacy. But that's how the mind works", "mind works. So that's his first book and it's a brilliant book we're actually alhamdulillah, it's been translated and is being edited now and so this going to be part of the Zaytuna curriculum series so alhamduliilah that book should be out hopefully within the year. The second book he wrote which I think one of most extraordinary books in ethics", "which is so the myaar al-ilm is the standard of knowledge. Mizan al amal is the scales of action, so that you could weigh every action and determine whether the action was worthwhile or whether it wasn't. So it's a book of virtue ethics. It's a brilliant book. It heavily influenced by the great polymath and Persian scholastic Raghubr Isfahani who wrote one of my favorite books,", "So now just in Iman, he wrote his two most important books. One is the abridged version. The other's more extensive are Qawa'id al-Aqaid and Al-Iqtisad ful-Itiqa'd. So economy in belief. And the other one is the principles of the axioms of creed.", "using logic in scholastic theology. Now it's important to remember, the last book that he wrote probably is called Iljam al-Awam an ilm al-Karam not allowing common people to study theology so he was not somebody that really encouraged but he recognized a certain group of scholars must learn this because it will enable them to refute", "and the attacks of the religion by people from outside. So for instance, right now we have all these philosophers, we have deconstructionists, structuralist, postmodernist, we also have postcolonialist, critical race theorist, then we have also the analytic school,", "school not just philosophers theologians like Alvin Plantinga who I was fortunate enough to be part of the award ceremony a brilliant scholar working within a certain School of Philosophy to defend faith so he understood that you're always going to have these people out there who use their intellects and sophistry to confuse people and if you don't have people trained", "You're going to get into trouble. And what will happen is you'll be left to the argument of blood. When you can't defend your religion with intelligence, the people that are zealots, that don't have the intelligence or the training to defend it, will end up defending it through violence. And that's not a defense of religion. Blood is no argument. So that's really important thing to remember. Now in Islam he took the abridgements", "The abridgment of Imam al-Juwaini. Imam al Juvaini wrote a famous book called Nihayat Al Matab Fi Dira'at Al Madhab in the Shafii Thirq, it's very important book but he takes it and writes a long abridgement of it, middle abridgement and short abridgement. Al Wasit and Al Wajiz. In fact one of the Abu Hafs Omar ibn Abd al Aziz Al Tarablisi early on only 10 years after", "after the Imam died, he said, So these are the four books in Furu' that Imam al-Ghazali writes. The people who are Shafi'i know this. Imam al Ghazali is the most important, after Imam Juwaini, I mean obviously the Imam himself, Imam Shafii, but all of the later books", "are all dependent on the books of Imam al-Ghazali. So these are foundational books in the madhab. This is in faroo' not in usool, so this is in the branches of jurisprudence and not in the legal philosophy. Now in Ihsan he writes a beautiful short book called Bidait Al Hidayah which is really to prepare a person for the spiritual path, to get you to be doing practices on a daily basis but then he writes his magisterial Ihyaa Ulama Deen", "which is reviving the sciences of the religion, and I'm going to get into that. He then abridges it in Persian in a book called Kimya Sa'ada, The Alchemy of Happiness. And this is the book inshallah I am going to be talking about in a few days. He writes a book call Jawahar al-Quran. He's referencing all his other books in it. This book is his theory of the Quran", "book, is his entire tradition revolves around the Qur'an. Everything that Imam was doing is really revolving around the Quran primarily and then the Sunnah of the Prophet secondarily. So he is a jurist of the first order and he brings his juristic worldview into the Quraniq world", "you can use this as a separate book. Because he wrote that, it was later published as a seperate book but its actually part of the Jauhar al-Quran so he shows you what the Quran is calling us to and that is why his entire opus is basically a commentary on the Quran and the prophetic life as we know", "the Quran. So it all goes back to the Book of Allah. The Prophet ﷺ's sunnah is an explanation of the Quran, everything is from the Quran It's all from the Qur'an I'm not a Qurani, I 100% believe in the Kitab wa Sunnah but the Sunnah is and explanation of Quran And we should understand that You need the Sunna you can't understand the Quran without the Sunnah", "a dialectical relationship between Imam al-Ghazali and Ibn Taymiyyah. Could you expand on the nature of that relationship, and their respective ideologies? Ibn Temiyyah is an undeniable polymath. He was a brilliant scholar. He", "books on the Old Testament and New Testament. He has a six-volume book that's very important, I mean it's an extremely important book. He also wrote a book on Ta'arad al-Naql wal-'Aqil, a book about the problems of Naqal and reason. Naql being what is transmitted so revelation and reason... I think at the root of the difference is Ibn Taymiyyah really wanted to", "just keep it at the book and the sunnah. Like he really want, he did not want the type of edifice that was emerging out of the tradition of Islam. And in some ways you have to appreciate that because there's something very profound about the simplicity of teachings. And", "very cumbersome. And I think Kierkegaard has a very similar attitude towards what happens within Christianity. So, I appreciate Ibn Taymiyyah, I really do, I appriciate what he's trying to do but I really feel like you cannot deny the human creativity that comes out of that initial inspiration", "initial inspiration. And you can't deny the fact that the Prophet was a syncretist in that he said, seek knowledge. The Qur'an says, seek knowlege. It says go out explore the world. Go look how creation began. That's a recommendation to go study geology. The Quran has history. It say, look at the people who went before you. The", "So all of those are there and so the elaborations that come out of that initial inspiration, what you want to do is mitigate the influences that are dangerous. And they're going to slip in but you want prevent them and I think that was his project. I have to say this and I'm not the first person who said this", "It's just so vast. And I think Imam al-Subki, Sir Ahmad Zarruq and others said that Ibn Taymiyyah was more reliable in his naqal than in the way that he looked at the naql. So I think that's fundamentally at the heart of the differences.", "was trying to do but I really think in the end he's his project was a critical product like he is criticizing a lot like a lot of his books are criticizing Imam al-Ghazali's project is a project he's building like he's really trying to build a normative Islam that will withstand", "materialism, of philosophy, of atheism. That's what he's trying to do. He wants to build a fortress around the book and the sunnah. Imam Ibn Taymiyyah, he feels like the book in the sunna doesn't need a fortress. Imam al-Ghazali says no it needs a fortress and I'm going to build it. And I think that's fundamentally the difference.", "and a lot of but we respect both of them and and the traditionally there were far more critics have been taking it in our own mother than they were even though they both have critics farm or are critical event any is project than they are above imam al-hazadi's but people are going to differ on this and there's people that are gonna I'm stay with even tanya", "But I think you have to recognize that one of them defines the tradition and That you do need to recognize and arguably for a thousand years The Ummah considered it was Hajj at Islam, and it's interesting. He's called the proof of Islam What do you use a proof or use a prove against? people that are questioning you Whereas even Timmy is called Sheikh al-Islam", "Islam. He's one of many, but that is a laqab he was given. So why was Imam al-Ghazali initially vilified by the scholars of Andrus and Al Maghrib? Well I think I said that they were... this is something that a Mauritanian friend of mine says that the Murabi'atun were like the Taliban which I don't think is totally fair. But they were very in kalam", "The scholars of Islam are not like that.", "condemns him, but he does recognize that they did play a role in defending Islam. So he's not entirely antagonistic. These are debates amongst the ulama. His books were burnt at one point in Morocco although the men who burned them had a dream where the Prophet came and had him flogged by Imam al Ghazali so he actually repented publicly for burning them. He burnt", "and he had that dream, so he repented. That's a well-known story. Are there English translations of Imam Ghazali's works or other resources? Fortunately, he has been fortunate to have some good translators. There was a translation done, it is an abridgment of the Ihya that was done by Mawlana... He was a South Asian scholar, Mawlane Fadhala.", "Karim, I think. And that was reprinted by the Malaysians and they edited a lot of it because he originally did not want... He was actually a very formidable scholar. He did a commentary on the Mishkat al-Masabiha translated into Bengali, I believe. So that is good. Fonz Vidae has done some... I actually wrote the introduction to a couple of those books including The Book of Knowledge", "the Book of Knowledge, and then also the Islamic Text Society has done a good job. I mean Dr. Winter, Abduhakim Winter is I think really excellent, beautiful stylist in English language and Imam Ghazali deserves a good translator because he is so eloquent in Arabic", "I was recently reading a translation of one, I won't say who did it because he's actually a good scholar. But it was so bad! The English was soo bad and I just...I felt sad for anybody who read that book and thought that in any way reflected the style of Imam al-Ghazali So, and I know he is a great Persian stylist. I'm not able to read him in Persian but I know from people that do know Persian that he is beautiful stylist in Persian. He was very gifted orator, gifted writer", "Did Imam Ghazali reject the relationship between cause and effect?", "the world. It's the sunnah of God in the world to deny it is to deny reality and so we do not deny cause and effect but we have I think a very profound understanding of the divine nature of what's happening in the", "So I would look at it, you have Newtonian physics and you have quantum physics. Sharia is Newtonian. Haqiqah is quantum. This is an analogy. I'm not saying, don't say, oh he said that kalam is quantum physics I am saying in the same way that the quantum laws do not work in the Newtonian world That's the same that's happening so It's two different ways we have something called maratib al wujud", "You know, we live in a multiplex universe. In fact, it's not a universe. It's a multiverse. And he's the Lord of all the worlds. So there are many worlds. Universe is this world. It' one world but there are man universes and so what we know if you look at a Persian carpet that aunt knows nothing about the pattern of the Persian carpet. That is our intellect", "our intellect before the glory of Allah's creation. And the Prophet indicated that in a hadith about, that the mulk in relation to the malakut was like a ring in the midst of a desert, a small ring. So this whole idea, oh people lost their faith because they realized the universe is vast? Our prophet knew how vast things were he didn't... it increased his faith! You know this is something material say,", "are there so many galaxies well you can do the same thing if you go inward like if you magnify yourself inwardly you'll see the same number of miraculous whether you go out or in in fact there's a Nobel Prize winner Alexis Carroll who showed basically that the largest things in the universe if you take the largest", "and divide them by two you get the basic human proportion he won the Nobel Prize so we are the microcosm like the cosmos is out there but it's also in here everything's in here and in fact it couldn't be out there if it wasn't in here that's how we can see it and understand it so anyway we'll get into that inshallah hmm and then did Imam al-Ghazali only acknowledge virtue ethics", "affirmative ethical theories such as consequentialism, deontological ethics. I mean these are terms that come later Islam does have a kind of deontology approach. We do believe in duty bound ethics and we also have consequentialist ethics because there's situations where like Kant said you couldn't lie in any situation right? And that's his deontologic approach but we know that lying is permitted to save somebody from", "somebody from a tyrant for instance so that's a kind of looking at the consequences. So I think the point of virtue ethics is the foundation of all ethics and it has to be studied to understand cultivation of virtues and why its important, so I think traditionally our virtue", "tradition. Can you please recommend an introductory book on the Quran that one can share with non-Muslims? The Quran, I found it's very interesting Quran. I would not recommend a non-muslim reading the Quran because it's such a difficult book in translation first of all it is a nonlinear book but second of all there's a lot of lacunae", "I actually had a young Singaporean, really wonderful Muslim lady that worked with us in the Rehla group when we were in Singapore. And she was very troubled. She'd taken a course in university and the course made an argument that the Quran needed commentary.", "And initially I didn't really have an answer for her. I didn'y give her an answer, I just thought about it but I actually realized It's a reminder for you and your people Imam Malik said that is saying so-and-so on so-on-so That Allah has made His Book impossible to reach without the intercession", "of scholars, of the warathat al-anbiya. So you cannot understand the Qur'an without the Prophet salallahu alayhi wa sallam and you cannot understant the Prophet's salallu alayhim without the scholars so you always need commentary and that is because the meanings of the Qurr'an are locked in the hearts of human beings", "who unlocked many of the mysteries." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Muslims HATING on Dogs - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_ENGgULGe_-s&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748522763.opus", "text": [ "There were cats in the house. There were also dogs in the early period. Aisha had a puppy dog. Jibril complained about it and Prophet did not keep any dogs in his house after that, but there were dogs in Medina. The type of attitude Muslims have towards dogs is completely unacceptable. The three Imams considered dogs to be nejis", "be najis, that they're unclean animals. Imam Marek was not of that opinion. His proof to me is a stronger proof. The hadith, إذا ولغ كلب في إناء فاغسروه سبعا If a dog licks in a bowl, clean the bowl seven times. Imam Madik said, had it been for najasa he would not have mentioned a number because", "But the fact that he mentioned sab'an, he said it means it's ta'bud. That the wisdom is not known to us why we're told to do that. But Marrakees have never had a problem with the dogs and seeing-eye dogs. I mean, I know Muslims. There's Muslims in our community who have seeing-eyed dogs. And when they come, it's like suddenly everybody becomes...", "for somebody who has a seeing eye dog. It's just not really a very nice thing to do to somebody because dogs are very beneficial, they're also animals that are guard dogs. Ibn Abi Zayl al-Qairawani the great Maliki scholar had a guard dog in his house and some people kind of complained about it he said if Malik was alive today he'd have a lion in his yard. In other words things aren't as safe as they used to be", "they used to be. So if you know a Muslim that has one of my teachers had a guard dog and I saw with my own eyes because I used to eat with him, and with my eyes I saw this he would take the couscous put it in his left hand and feed the dog while he was eating dinner. I saw it with my", "anybody that has the wara' , the scrupulousness of that man. So, you know dogs just be nice to dogs. That's my message there. You know don't... The kelb al-akur which the Prophet said to kill is like a rabid dog, a voracious dog but just the dogs that you see in the West, you", "They all have dogs. They're dog people and they need to become Muslim, they can become Malikis you know..." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Not like in the Movies - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_9LzFLbr1XxI&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742889538.opus", "text": [ "When Salah ad-Din al Ayyubi, this is where he was working from. Salah Ad-Dina al Ayyyubi was working at the center He didn't spend his youth throwing stones at crusaders Who can tell me what he did as a young man?", "of the madrasa of Imam Abu Hamid. He was a Shafi'i scholar, he memorized the Quran that's what he was doing in his youth even though the Crusaders were occupying Palestine he knew we don't have any power to do it we can't get rid of these people now so what should I use my time for? To learn the things that will help me not just free", "Al-Quds But free the people Who are oppressing The people in al-quds From their oppression Unsooru akhakum Wari manaw mazluma Give help to your brother Even your Jewish brother Your Christian brother Help them stop oppressing That's how you The prophet said We know how to help Victims How do you help The oppressor He said by stopping him From his oppression At least remind him At least tell him You're oppressing", "oppressing you shouldn't do this right because they kill the people that remind them Allah says that in the Quran right Martin Luther King Malcolm X all Malcolm was doing he the tongue was all he had he didn't have any army and he started from hatred", "That's where he was, and that's why if you listen to his early talks, they're just filled with hate. But listen to the... His last talk... Nobody wants to hear Malcolm after Mecca. They all want that harsh Malcolm. Yeah! They don't wanna hear the Malcolm that suddenly realizes people are human beings. White people are humans. A lot of them would almost convince you otherwise. I understand that. But they're human beings, right?", "Turkish people are white. A lot of them. They don't behave like that sickness, which some attribute to a lack of melatonin. You need more sun. The sun makes you happy, doesn't it? When the sun comes up. If you live in Europe, there's never any sun. You're miserable. Get a bad attitude. But that's Malcolm. Malcolm got there. In the end of his life, that's where he was.", "What's Martin Luther King said right before he dies? I've been to the mountain. Everybody wants longevity. I've Been to the mountaintop. He was moving that's where he but he started he understood this trust me. He knew this model very well You know one thing Martin Luther king said was if I wasn't against violence on moral terms for moral reasons I'd still be against it for pragmatic reasons That's what Muslims haven't learned that", "I'm against modern violence on moral grounds. I really am. I am against modern warfare. I don't believe in modern warfare, I don' t believe Muslims should be engaged in modern warfair. I'd rather be killed than kill people with nuclear weapons. I would rather die then drop a bomb. I d rather die than blow up children. I much rather be kill than kill some innocent person. And the prophet said towards the end of time he said be the best of two sons of Adam", "Be like the best of who? It's Habil, right? Not Qabil. It's Abel, not Cain. You know in the Tafsir of Imam al-Baghwi what he says? He says that Ibn Abbas said Cain was actually weaker than Abel. Abel could have defeated him but he said their Sharia was that they weren't even allowed self-defense and", "And that means, if that is true, that means that the foundation of our tradition is non-violence. And I would argue that the Prophet would exhaust every non-violent means before he would go to violent means. He would exhaust all non-vile means. And that's why at Hudaybiyah, he had every right to fight those people but he didn't. It was a non-violent solution to a problem. The Muslims didn't like it. Why? Because Al Yasser was being tortured. They were in chains. They're calling on them help us!", "The Prophet said, There's a proof that the prophet is seeing a Muslim tortured and he's not doing anything about it. Outwardly He saw a Muslim being tortured And he didn't do anything about outwardly Because he was a profound strategic thinker Completely different approach to the problems of the world" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Your inner peace first _ Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_0pAbpkU3pG4&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743306655.opus", "text": [ "Peace be upon all of you. Alhamdulillah, we're here again for another sacred text message. The verse that I'd like to look at today is in Surah Al-Baqarah. It's the 216th verse.", "216th verse which says كُتِبَ عَدَيْكُمَ الْقِتَالِ that struggle, fighting obviously in our tradition related to defending. Defending the faith is prescribed upon you it's incumbent upon you but then it says وَهُوَ كُرْهٌ لَّكُنْ But it's distasteful to you", "and perhaps you dislike a thing, and in it is much good for you. And perhaps you love a thing and in It is much harm for your evil for you or it's not good for You and Allah knows God knows and you don't know so This is very interesting verse in relation to something that", "something that in traditional psychology was identified and something I learned from a really brilliant sinologist and scholar, Dr. Cleary. But in traditional Psychology there was real recognition of the relationship between thinking and feeling. These are two capacities that are constantly interplayed in human beings both", "environment but also internally so we're affected a word that people use today is triggered that that people are affected by other people by what they say there's a great story of a Pakistani Hakeem who used to treat with Rukia and so this physician had", "And then the patient got well and the physician said, I'm so happy that the medicine worked. And she said, no, no. That medicine didn't help me. And he said, well what helped you? She said, the hakeem did a ruqya for me. That's what cured me. The doctor was like, what do you mean? He said after I came here I went to my hakeemsab and he actually gave me a du'aan, did a", "So this physician, he was a materialist. He was very upset about that. He wanted to meet the hakeem and explain to him that you're really misleading people. And so he went and visited him. And then the hakeeem said when he met him, the doctor said to him, all this mumbo jumbo that you are doing, misleading people telling them that you can say magical words and they affect them and change their body.", "we have science now, we don't need these things anymore. And then the hakim said you're a donkey and he got really angry and started turning red and puffing up and what do you mean? How dare you call me I'm a physician, I studied at King Edward Medical College and I am well regarded and he said no, no, you are worse than a donkey, I think you are something else.", "and he was about to explode, and the Hakim just said to him, he said, look at how these few words I've said to you have just completely changed your internal state. And they're only words. I didn't give you anything physical. How is it that those words could have such an effect on your internal states? This is really about triggering and thinking and feeling.", "thinking and feeling is that people can use them for really nefarious means. Like, because we're so susceptible to the changing of our inward states based on what's being presented to us, that people who have bad intentions can't really do this. So one of the things traditionally that was understood when you look at thinking and", "between the emotions and logic. And so when we have this kind of lack of knowledge of what's being done to us from others who might have real nefarious intentions in manipulating our internal states,", "they can arrest our attention and take hold of us. It's a type of possession, really, if you think about it. So people can become easily possessed. Groups can become possessed. Whole entire nations can become under the spell of people that know how to manipulate them when they have a type unconscious vulnerability to these things. And so one of the things this is what this great teacher taught was that there are two classic models", "emotional reprocessing, which illustrate how these differences in individual intellectual development are related to differences in emotional development. So one of the traditional ways of doing this was to rethink our likes and dislikes. And this is exactly what the verse is reminding us that maybe you dislike a thing and it is good for you.", "So this is actually telling us to reprocess the way we're thinking about things. And so if you look at what could be termed as emotional logic, so for instance somebody does something to you and you feel sorrow about it, you feel sadness from it, and then that in turn leads to self-pity. So you feel like", "leads to anger. So you start becoming angry and then that leads to blame, so you're going to find a source of your anger. You blame that person and then it leads to rationalization why you are doing it. Well I'm justified in doing it.\" That is the type of emotional logic where your feelings have really taken over and they've taken over your internal state and you actually have no control now over them. And you become basically", "talks about in a book called Manipulated Mind. It's a very interesting book and it's worth reading because this is done constantly, and rulers and governments use these techniques to manipulate the masses. There's a Chinese manual for the emperor of how to control whole nations, and one of the chapters is translated as The Art of Letting All Hell Break Loose.", "So there are times when governments will actually let what they call a purge. They'll let a society purge itself because they know there's so much pent-up frustration that it's kind of bloodletting, so it's like when you lance a boil so that you can diffuse the poison. So these are all techniques but there is another model which could be termed logical emotion", "you're really reprocessing your thoughts and it's a type of, it's way of thinking that you can detach yourself. So something has happened, somebody has done something to you so you feel this sorrow but then you detach yourself so you step away from it and really what is going on inside me? Why do I feel quote unquote triggered like what's happening inside of me", "inside of me that this person has taken control of my inner state. So you detach yourself, pull yourself away from it and then you reflect. And that actually can lead to compassion where you begin to actually have a different response. That's a free person's response. The first is the default setting. So all of us have default settings when you get... When you buy new technology they're always on default", "manual, the operating manual. And then you can actually set them to suit what you need that thing for. Well we also come into this world with default settings. One of them is me, me, Me. That's a default setting. That why children scream when they don't get what they want. But you have to reset and if you have good teachers they'll help you because you're like that new technology that they are going to reset the default setting", "But the book, the operating manual for the human being is called the Quran. That is the operating Manual so you can actually learn how to understand yourself and then you can reprogram yourself because Allah tells you all these things like وَإِذَا مَغْضِّبُوا هُمْ يَغفِرُونَ When they get angry they forgive", "Forgive. Oh, so I don't have to blame and attack? It's like somebody who's been watching television, and they think there's only one channel. And their whole life, they've just been watching this one channel, and then somebody comes in the room and says, what are you watching? And you say, I'm watching the TV. No, no, no. What channel are you on? What do you mean channel? What's a channel?", "a channel. That looks like a really stupid thing to be watching, but it's what's it called jackass? You know so you're watching people do stupid things? No there's other channels here look here's the nature channel. Oh look here is a documentary about Mecca.", "can turn on to. But if you don't know they exist, then you're just trapped in these empty mindless states. So really getting out of the default setting is life's challenge. That's what we're here to do because if your constantly in a state of anger and blame which is based on self-pity it makes you susceptible", "People can manipulate you because you're angry. And there's all these people that a lot of their social work is actually personal pathology, so they're out there shouting and screaming against this, that or the other. They're actually just angry at their father for neglecting them. I mean, I'm not... This is just... I'm telling you the truth. People might not want to hear this. And I can speak from my own personal internal self-reflection", "dealing with my own childhood traumas and things that happened to me, and my own evolution. But I think a lot...I was once with really remarkable psychiatrist from Ghana, and he's beautiful. He was from a traditional family whose father had been a scholar but he had a PhD in...he actually MD in psychiatry. And we were at a conference, and I won't say which Muslim group, there was a Muslim group", "One of them, he was just shouting in such agitation and he was really going on and on about this that and the other. And this man from Ghana said, isn't it tragic that people can use public platforms to express their personal pathology? It wasn't like backbiting, he genuinely felt sorry for this person. He could see they weren't well", "public platform and so that i mean that's a lot of what's out there that just people aren't well there's all these unwell people and so we shouldn't allow ourselves to be psychologically manipulated by people that understand how to manipulate us and they do it through these techniques and so one of the ways that people are vulnerable to this", "this internal manipulation is, is this tendency to mix likes and dislikes with judgments of good and bad. So that's why the Quran is telling us maybe you like a thing and it's actually bad for you and maybe you dislike I think it's Actually good for you so this is one of the ways that you can actually reprocess your feelings in judgements by considering what is bad about what you like and what is good about what", "what you dislike. And so when it becomes, when Dr. Khoury says, when the exercise becomes an ordinary reflex then it is much harder to be deceived by appeals to emotions disguised as appeals to reason. A really important point I think that's being made because both individuals and groups can", "can be fixated on things from outside. And this is real manipulation and we're living in a time of manipulation, let us not forget that the multitudes follow the Antichrist they follow the antichrist he has at-ba followers that's what the Prophet called them and he said that he would have drones Ya'asib the prophet literally said drones", "that the Antichrist would be followed by drones. And I just... You have to wonder about these drones, that they called them drones and that was the word Sallalahu Alaihi Wasallam used to describe something that the antichrist had with him. So I hope people just reflect on this idea of being triggered", "this idea of not being triggered is clearly in the Quran because Allah says that those who, the servants of the merciful they tread lightly on the earth and if ignorant people speak to them they say peace. They just simply say peace and then Allah says also", "that when they hear any vain talk, they just pass by it nobly. And in the tafsirs I say They overlook it. Because the only way we can live together... The Prophet said that the best people are those who mix with people and are patient with their other, with their harm. It's like this is the world! People are going to bother", "People are going to bother you. People are gonna upset you. Don't let them take control of your internal states. Don' t let them control you because Allah has... We have made some of you a trial, a trigger for others. Will you show patience? That's what Allah says.", "trial for others. Will you show patience? So again, patience is moving from the default setting of impatience, of getting angry, of blaming, of feeling victimized to moving to what Allah is given us in that operating manual. Here's how you need to reprogram from the", "the higher setting. Like, don't allow people to trigger you. Don't feel triggered. Don' t even use the word. You're triggering me. No! Have control of your internal emotions and just recognize who's that person for me to allow that person to take control of my internal world? One of the things about... And this is something that Kierkegaard pointed out. He said, People demand freedom of speech", "speech as a compensation for lacking freedom of thought. We have an internal world that we completely control if we learn how to control it, but if we don't other people will control it. Don't let other people control your internal world. Take control of it. You can do it. It's called the Prophet told us to take control", "ourselves. أمسك لسانك he said, take control of your tongue right I mean the Quran tells us to to take control over ourselves قل أنفسكم save yourselves don't let yourselves take control you you take control yourself don't be that they're not left elephant ride you", "If you let the elephant ride you, it'll crush you and destroy you. Don't let other people control you. Control yourself. And the only way you can do that is by reflecting. And that's why reflection is so important about thinking, Why am I getting upset? Why am i feeling this way? These are things that we can do. We wouldn't have been commanded to do it.", "The yujahidu nafsuh li rabbal aalimi yitihallab bima qamat al yaqeen was in Ibn Ashar at the end of Sidi Abd al-Wahed's beautiful text. And I said to him, you know, it says that yujAHIDU NAFSUHU he struggles with his self for the sake of the Lord of the world. I said wa idha ghalabat hu nafsahu I asked him what if the self overwhelms you? He said no, no, you have to fight it", "to fight it. That's the whole point and he told me that Allah would not give us this takleef if it wasn't in our capacity. لَا يُكِلِّفُ اللَّهُ نَفْسًا إِلاَّ وَسَعَاهَا He will not give you any responsibility that was not in your capacity. That is what he told Me, and he said you just have to keep doing mujahidah until you take control of it but don't let other people control you. Don't let", "important, especially in an age where there's so much mass manipulation. You can't trust any of the news. You think you can trust what you're being told? What world do you live in? How many times do you have to be lied to before you realize that you just... That's why the best advice I think I've ever heard from any Western tradition was the advice", "Henry David Thoreau, and it was the advice he gave about newspapers. He said don't read The Times, read The Eternities. And what everybody's doing today is reading The Times now on New York Times or whatever London Times, now it's the internet but that's what it is whereas we actually have a book of The Eternties", "to know everything, it's all in there. And I'm not just saying... It really is! I mean that. It's a difficult book, I'd be the first to admit that.It's not an easy book but nothing that's worth achieving or attaining in this world is easy. Nothing. All the easy things are the default settings.", "to be lazy. All the default settings are easy, it's when you change those default settings which is the Mujahidah, which is struggle. And those who struggle in our way we will guide them to our paths and these are the paths of righteousness may Allah make us from the people of righteousness. Ameen. As-salamu alaykum" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Munafiqun among people - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_151EpkOTw8o&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW3SBwkJvQCDtaTen9Q%3D_1743056916.opus", "text": [ "These are two-faced people. It's interesting that the Arabs use the same word that we have in English, I'm sure the Turks have the same because this is a universal type of character you find them in every culture, two faced people and then you have what are called the Ma'amayoun and these are just people that are they're just non confrontational type people and they don't like... They just Anamaak, anamaaak so they're not really so much two face their multi faceted", "multifaceted because they're pretty much, they don't have enough spine to take positions on anything so they just go along with everybody and the Prophet warned about being from these type of people. And Imam Madaq also said you know if you're with people just be silent unless there's a reason to speak. So but there's always and we know in group dynamics social psychology", "there's been a lot of studies that people will go along with the group. The man in South Africa who was interviewed him about reaching 105 and the interviewer said, you know is there any perks in reaching 105? And he said no more peer pressure. So obviously there's a lot", "You know young people are particularly susceptible to this because especially at school you get into group and herd mentality, and there's an element to humanity that is we are heard creatures like other herds creatures There aren't that many Species that allah has made that don't gather in groups And humans are one of them and herd Mentality as a type of mentality the quran", "The Quran in some ways could be read from one perspective, could be red as a book of individuals going up against groupthink. Because you will find almost all the people that are on the truth in the Quran are individuals and they're always going up to a group of people who have gone astray. And so it's a very interesting aspect to the Qur'anic narrative. And that is why what sad is the danger of Islam becoming a group think where for instance", "one of the things Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayya said about the revolutions is he said that in these revolutions, the standard becomes the revolution and not the truth. So once a revolution starts you're either revolutionary or your counter-revolutionary there's no more debate because it's a fitna and so suddenly nobody can speak openly without getting their head crushed right? And this is what happened", "the reign of terror, Robespierre comes along and suddenly all the counter-revolutionaries, anybody that criticizes the revolution has to go including some of the people that started it like Marat. He had him assassinated even though his pen was one of the great instigators of the revolutionary fervor in France. So that's what happens is that the revolution becomes the mayor", "fall into that herd mentality and suddenly a scholar can't even speak, they might have a different perspective. One of the things Confucius said in his Analects is that when everybody says this is good, that is bad. When everyone says this as good,that is bad and that's one of the blessings of our tradition is there always has been dissenting voices in everything because if you squelch", "If you get rid of dissent, you don't allow for the possibility of alternative perspectives that are often very important. And this is something really, really important because the principled people have principles and sometimes they don't compromise those principles in certain situations when everybody else thinks you should compromise them. Now they could be right or wrong in that given situation", "people are entitled to their opinions in that way if their opinion is based on sound criteria. And that's why we have methodologies, like we have a tradition. In our ethics we have an ethical tradition of reasoning and so you can arrive at different ethical conclusions but if the reasoning is sound because not every situation has one clear answer", "clear answer. If the situation is sound, if the reasoning is sound we can arrive at two different conclusions I have to acknowledge yours and you should acknowledge mine but if the reasonings not sound and that could be pointed out then that's a different matter then it becomes mu'adid somebody who's obstinate refuses to budge on that so basically that's what he's warning us about being these people that just go and your with these people i'm with you and then you're with these", "with these people, I'm with you and you don't take positions. And he says if you're doing it to get secrets from them like spies do this. And spies will infiltrate groups and we have agent provocateurs. In the United States we had several almost all of the cases of people that were tried in these terrorist cases were actually people who were on the internet", "some radical writings but they weren't doing anything other than just voicing some radical opinions. But then, they would send in these undercover people and they would actually say oh let's go do this or let's goto that. And then these people would go along with it and suddenly you know they've got their phony bomb strapped to their vest and they're going down to blow something up and the sting comes", "was working for them all along and that was an entrapment situation. Now obviously, I mean what the person was doing was wrong irrespective but would have he done that thing had they never contacted him and gotten him to do that? The idea is a preemptive police work which is a very strange way to go because traditionally that is not how western", "It was not designed to be preemptive. But obviously terrorism is... it's not a new problem, but it certainly has some new manifestations that have become much more dangerous than previous situations in the past. So next one?", "Excellent. As for one who is simply courteous to each group and sincere in that, then he is not to be considered among the two-faced people.", "where somebody's acting as an elixir to take a bad situation and turn it into a good situation. He said if that's their intention, that's not a bad thing. So he goes to two groups and he's with this group and he is with that group but he's really trying to rectify between the two groups so that's very different from... Now also, Mujamilat. Amma idha yamara kullan minhumaa.", "into a type of hypocrisy also, but there's courtesies and decorum. In certain situations you'll find yourself in a situation where you might not agree with the situation, but you know there is a difference of opinion about it. And so because of the unique situation that you find yourself, you might tend to not do anything and be with the people and do what are called Mujammarat. Now I can get you into trouble as well. So you could be", "and you might not agree with what's going on in the gathering or other people might think it's a bad thing but you found yourself in it for whatever reasons, and then you just do your best to make the best of a difficult situation. Those situations do arise in life and the Arabs say", "The difference between مُدَارات, you know, مُدارات are where you're not compromising your principles. So it's not نِفاق because there is a very different between موداهنات وَادُّوا لَوْ تُدْهِنُوا فَيُدَّهِلُونَ They want you to go along with them I'm okay, you're okay type situation when they're not okay that's a very", "you're courteous with people and you treat them, especially if you're in their land. وَارْضِيهِمْ مَا دُمْتَ فِي أَرْضٍهِםْ If you're somebody's land, you're a guest and you don't want to be a rude guest. And when in Rome do as the Romans do with the caveat that they are not doing something haram because the Romans did a lot of haram things but if they were just doing something from their culture or tradition then you can go along with it. That is all he is saying", "being the wajhain it's basically just being polite and being a gentleman now if that was tough to enter our who you're busy be he told us all and you've either easy because I had to be under in God Daraa mean kun he he could have whom about the horror also prohibited is giving a fatwa to someone who is seeking a legal opinion by which he intends to realize something", "in a case where he knows that its reality is quite different from what it appears to be due to some foreknowledge he has about one of the people involved. So you don't have... Some mistakes in that text. Add this one.", "So basically what he's saying is it's not permissible to give a fatwa with a weak opinion. Now this is certainly where the majority of our tradition reached this point several hundred years ago, and this is a whole", "This is a whole, I mean really it's a muhadara to get into this. But I'm going to try to give you a summation because this is important to understand. If you look at the Islamic tradition, you have basically five dominant schools today. You have a few others like Zaidiyah and the Ibadiya in Oman. But you have five dominant school. You've got Ja'fari School which is what the Shia tradition follows", "based on Ja'far al-Sadiq. Ja'afar al-sadiq is considered one of the Imams of Ahl as Sunnah, so there's a... Each one claims him but Ja'afar al- Sadiq, Imam Malik relates Hadith from him in the Muwattaa. So he's one of Rijal of Imam Malek in the muwata and Imam Malick took from him. So He's a teacher of the Sunni imams I think Abu Hanifa also I'm not sure if there's but I think about Abu Hanifah also took from Ja'fara", "So if you have the Ja'fari Madhab, the Shia follow that in fiqh. In aqeedah they have their own aqeedah but the four Imams Imam Abu Hanifa , the greatest Imam he has the greatest number of followers The next is Imam Malik because Abu Hanifah was born in 79, Imam Maliks born probably in 89", "probably in 89, there's 89, 90, 91 they say. And then Imam Shafi'i is born in 150 and then you have Imam Ahmed bin Hanbal 189 I think. So you have the four Imams in that order Abu Hanifa is the oldest he's considered from the Tabieeen and then we have Imam Marek there's a Khilaf is the Tabia or Tabea-Tabieeen", "tabi'a tabiin also. Imam Abu Hanifa and Malik met, and they exchanged opinions but one is not considered a student of the other. Imam Shafii was a student", "though there were about, there were several schools. There were probably around 13 dominant schools at that time. You had the Auzai Madhab, Laytha bin Sa'ad had a madhab, Sufiana Thawri had a Madhab so you have these different Madhabs. Dawud al-Zahiri's Madhab all those Madhhabs die out and these four Madhhab become the established schools each Madhhb", "I'm just going to use the Maliki because that's what I know. If you look at the Malik-e Madhab, or I'm familiar with, if you look a the Malaki Madhab You had several Maliki schools. You have Khorasan-i Maliki school, you have an Iraqi Maliki School, you had an Indian Maliki, there were Maliki in India. You had a Yemeni Malik school, a Hijazi Maliki. You've had a Najdi Maliki", "school and you had a Andrusian and Moroccan Maliki school. So, you have all of these different Maliki schools and all of them had their own teachers. The Baghdadi school was a very prominent school with people like Abu Bakr al-Baqalani, Qadhi Abdul Wahab. These were great Maliki scholars. Then you had the Andrusi Maliki School. The Egyptian school becomes the dominant school. The reason for that is Allah knows best.", "It's tawfiq from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. The other schools, the Iraqi school is a very interesting school but the Maliki school becomes dominant from Egypt and the great Ibn al-Qasim is really the dominant voice in that school. The Medini school died out. Ibn Majishun, Mutarraf these were great scholars but it dies out. Their opinions are still in the books but they die out. From the Egyptian school", "Egyptian school, you have Ibn al-Qasim. Ibn Wahban is one of the Egyptian masters. Ibin al-Kassar. All these different Malikis are in Egypt but for some reason the dominant opinion is Ibn Al Qasim's. So the Mudawwana becomes the book. You had four books, the Mawaziyah, the Wadiha, the Utbiya and the Mudowna. These are the Ummahat of the Madhab. But for some", "And so over time, different people add their opinions and the school emerges. The Egyptian Maliki school becomes dominant wherever the Malikis are. So even the Moroccans, despite the fact that they had their own school, they adopt the Egyptian school. The Tunisians had their old school, They adopted the Egyptian School. The Andrusian's, their school dies out. They didn't adopt the egyptian school. They have their own schools and it lasted until", "And the Roussian Islam died out. But, The school has... Even the Egyptian school has several opinions. So just to give you a few examples Ibn al-Wahbin Great Muhaddith, great Faqih Student of Imam Malik, direct student Qarin of Ibn Al-Qasim He was of the opinion that like the Shafi'is You could join prayers anytime you were traveling even when you were stationary in a place", "So Shafi'i Madhab has that opinion, Ibn Wahab from the Maliki's have that opinion. For some reason, the dominant opinion is not that opinion It's Ibn al Qasim's opinion that you had to be moving while you travel so what he's saying is if you're giving a fatwa in a madhahb and somebody who's a maliki asks you Can I join my prayers when I'm traveling? You don't give them the opinion of ibn wahab. You give them", "Do you see? You don't give him the opinion of Ibn Asaq or the opinion Qadi Abd al-Wahhab, or the opionon of Ibb Majishun. In the opinion on Ibb Magishun he said, That was the opinion. The Iraqi school left their hands at the side, the Egyptian school left there hand at the", "The Andrusians didn't make a big deal out of it. They said you could do either one. Ibn Abd al-Barr is an Andrusian. So that's just an example, I'm just explaining to you that the Madhhabs have what's called the Mashhoor. The Mashhoors are what the majority of scholars of that madhhab, of the agreed upon methodology of the madhhabs. When you get into the Hanafi school, you're going to find there are different schools also. You have Indian schools, you have Muslim schools, and then you have the Hindu schools.", "Indian schools, and even the Barelvi and Diobandi schools will differ on fiqh issues as well as aqidah issues. So you'll get these different schools. You have a Syrian Hanafi school, you have a Turkish Hanafi School then you get into what's called Orf which is the cultural practices that get incorporated into the religion so you have the orf of Ahl al-Thas. For instance in the Qira'a of the Quran", "Ma'riki positions, they didn't agree with that. It was makruh. The later ma'rikis said no it's a good thing so the qiraat al-Quran in a group which is the shafi position according to Imam Al Nawawi in At-Tidkar. So those are all debates that go on but as we move into this last phase of Islam on planet earth obviously these things have been breaking down considerably and there", "And there are definitely, in Western Islam, there are situations where you need to give people rukhas. That's the opinion of Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyaf and my teacher, Hafizullah. And so the mufti has to have some flexibility and be aware that these things worked very well in very integral Muslim societies where everybody was held together. Now you're finding a real disintegration and fragmentation", "fragmentation of the Muslims and so this is going to get harder and harder to prevail upon people, the idea that you follow the dominant position. But certainly in the ibadat and things like that it's the best way to hold the Muslims together and keep us harmonious and unified because one of the nice things when you go into a Turkish masjid here if you notice", "they all say, have you noticed how they all said the salam at the same time? I mean you feel like your in the army. They just assalamu alaikum. Everybody turns at the sametime and then turn the other way. That uniformity was all over the Muslim world because people followed the same schools in areas right? And there's a real blessing in that to have that type of uniformity. On the other hand we're living in a globalized environment where", "environment where people from different schools are mixing now and that's been the case in places like Egypt and Syria and Palestine. You've always had Hanafis and Shafi'is and Hanbalis, even small groups and certainly on the...in Arabia also I mean it's amazing you go to Mecca and Medina and everybody is basically praying the same prayer. It's pretty awesome that we can go to mecca", "Zaydi or a Ja'fari or a Maliki or a Hanafi or a Hanbali and yet it's pretty much the same prayer. There's going to be slight differences this guy moves his finger that might be a little distracting to you because you're not used to it he's put his hands at his side, this guy's got them under the belly button this guy is over the belly buttons some have them over the heart, some are doing something where they're grabbing their neck but the basic form is the same", "They're coming up from ruku'ah. They go into sajda. It's a miracle of Islam that we have this same prayer and the same tajweed, the same Qur'an agreed upon. Alhamdulillah, we have agreed upon qaraat. Could you imagine if there was differences and people wouldn't pray behind him because no he is reciting and that's wrong and that tajweed is wrong? Is it unified tajweet? You know, warsh they might be reciting warsh but as I said agreed upon reading. Hafs, agreed upon", "Ibn Kathir agreed upon. It's amazing, we have so many elements of unity that are extraordinary in this religion and these are the things that we should focus on. In terms of the khilafat you know the best approach is just acknowledge the khilafat. The only way we're going to be unified as a community and be strong with our differences is to acknowledge khilafaat broad-based khilfaat as long as they don't go outside of the parameters of what's acceptable", "acceptable, right? Have a good opinion of people. If you see somebody doing something that normally you wouldn't think they were doing just think maybe they were in a situation where they didn't know what to do and so they just did something, right I mean this is what you have to do." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Monthly Book Club with President Hamza Yusuf__1742888411.opus", "text": [ "Read in the name of your Lord. This is the first commandment of the Qur'an. There's a deeper level of reading. Choose the best things to read, but also to learn how to read. I'm hoping inshaAllah that it will be a rich and rewarding experience for all of you. And I look forward to reading with you inshallah." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/How wahabis goes astray - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _shay__1742886481.opus", "text": [ "One of the most interesting things I think about deviant groups in our tradition, every single one of them without exception almost that goes astray based on language, on loha and on misinterpretations. And usually it's rhetorical, it's from balaqah It is actually not understanding the rhetorically nature of the Qur'an The other problem is that they go astray from not having a comprehensive perspective because", "because you can see one thing and think you're convinced of its truth, but then there's something else that like the poet said, You know something, but there are a lot of things you don't know. So Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah once said to me that this religion needs ilm kabir. That's how he described it." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/_ Kisah Lucu dari Persia _ Syekh Hamza Yusuf _ Kis__1748542014.opus", "text": [ "Orang Persia punya kisah mendidik tentang seorang laki yang berobat ke dokter. Dia berkata, Dokter saya sentuh disini dan semuanya sakit. Saya pegang disini juga sakit, disini jg sakit semuanyasakit.Saya sakit apa? Dokter itu memeriksa lalu berkta Jari anda patah. Makna dibalik kisahi ini jelas kita perlu mengidentifikasi sumber rasa sakit dan penderitaan itu dari mana datangnya Dan banyak orang tidak tahu darimana asal rasa sakiti mereka" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Signs of the End Times by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamz__1743302897.opus", "text": [ "The Prophet predicted that children would be in utter rebellion against their parents, that fornication will become prevalent. That swearing would become prevalent He said that foul language would become consistent. He said the Arabs would buy-in building tall buildings. He says that goat herders would build skyscrapers. He say that the buildings in Mecca would reach the tops of the mountains.", "The Prophet Muhammad. It was all recorded, yeah. He said that people would sell their souls for a paltry price of the dunya and this has always been the case but in the end it's exacerbated by the numbers of people that do these things. He says religion will be on the wane and atheism would be on wax. In fact he said that the end of time won't come until there won't be anybody that says Allah, Allah," ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/This is what Satan want - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamz__1742892887.opus", "text": [ "But until you do that, it's going to just bring you down. And then you're just a victim of Iblis because his whole goal is one, to make you ungrateful and nothing will make you more ungrateful than being miserable. Because grateful people, a hallmark of people of gratitude is joy." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Rely on Allah ﷻ Only -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamzay__1742883985.opus", "text": [ "Allah is the only one that can defeat your unseen enemies. If you rely on yourself, you can't overcome these things and that's why it's really important because one of the problems with people is they rely on themselves like with addictions The most successful addiction program in the world is a 12-step program And the first step is to surrender to a higher authority", "like I'm helpless, it's to admit that you are helpless. And that's one of the few programs actually works for people to do that and that's what people have to do if you rely on yourself, , the Prophet made the dua, do not leave me to myself for even a glance of an eye" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Artificial intelligence - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_RdUnzpOfgPo&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748539373.opus", "text": [ "The first question we have, Sheikh, is how do you view the role of Muslims in guiding the ethical development of emerging scientific technologies specifically artificial intelligence? That's an easy question. I mean, I think AI is one of these really interesting events that's happening", "events that's happening irrespective of what people think about it. They're just unrolling it and I think that's one of the problems with a lot of technology is there's not a lot deliberation or thought that goes into it. Technology is not neutral, there's a lot simpletons that actually thinks somehow technology is a neutral phenomenon and then how we use it is simply up to us. Technologies by their very nature have behavior embedded in them.", "they have also power embedded in them. So if you take, for instance, nuclear power, nuclear is will centralize by its very nature. You can't have people building nuclear reactors in their backyards, right? Whereas solar power's a decentralizing type of energy. People can have solar power on their roofs and then they get the power. There's people that live off the grid", "There's people who live next to rivers and they have these generators that they put in the river, and it generates water from the technology. So AI is something... I mean, I just had dinner. I was at the Vatican, and I was out of symposium on AI, and i was asked as one of the people to talk about the ethics of AI. And to be honest with you like I'm studying", "and trying to understand it. Quantum computers is also another area because quantum computing is developing, I mean they're right across the road, MIT, you know, it's developing at a very rapid rate and there's going to be this emergence between quantum computing and basic computing that's going really enhance the power of computation so I think about the Kitty Hawk, do you know what Kitty Hawk is? Yeah, so", "Anybody remember Kitty Hawk? Nope. Yeah, the Wright brothers, thanks. So you know, like about 120 years ago these two fellows down in Carolinas they built a glider that had almost like a rubber band type thing and they flew for like 30 seconds or something. And then you think of a stealth jet. Or I think of my grandfather", "of my grandfather who saw cars introduced into San Francisco and how you think of the self-driving cars. So when you think about AI now, like they're just introducing it. It's only been around since the 1950s so where is it going? Well one person that I talked to a physicist and apparently he's a world famous physicist, he told me it was gonna eliminate the PhD dissertation which might be", "it's going to eliminate it in quantitative sciences, that there will not be PhDs in that type of research because the AI works very algorithmically. The conversation I had with this man who is head of research at one of the main computer like Microsoft-type place he told me that the computational power now is just so immense and the power to imitate", "So these machines are learning through programming, obviously. I mean there's programming but they are learning to imitate and that's what they're trying to do. Quantum computing is trying to imitate nature. And so I don't know. Like I got a call from an AI robot that sounded human. It initially passed the Turing test. But then I noticed something", "are you a robot? And it went, ha-ha-ha. Do I sound that bad? And then I was like, are you the robot? Are you a Robot? And they said exactly the same thing. Ha-ha do I sound That Bad? And I knew it was a robot but they're gonna work it out where they can, they doesn't, it'll fool you so I don't know. I mean I think we should all be very troubled about these things.", "these machines. I've been talking about this since the 1990s, people thought I was crazy, thought I as a Luddite. I think everybody should read under technology's thumb. You should read Langdon Winner who was at MIT who wrote autonomous technology. Read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein that's a good place to start. Do we really know what we're doing? And I'm not a believer in determinism and this idea that you can't stop progress", "If it's killing you, you should. If I may just ask a follow-up to that question. You know, it comes down to this question of life and what is life? If something imitates life, is it life? And what is that distinguishing factor, that definition as you mentioned earlier in your talk? Can you talk to kind of what that definition could be? Well, for us, life has to be infused by God with a... We have vegetable", "and then we have animal life, and then the highest which is human life rational life. So I mean there was an argument that Al-Razi made Abu Bakr that even inanimate things have a type of life And I did read an interesting of Imam Ar-Rifa'i who somebody said that can't be true and then when he dropped a plate He heard the plate go ouch", "And they say it was a miracle of Imam al-Rifa'i. But there is in our tradition this idea of treating things gently, like not throwing things, like pens and anything. So you see Muslims have this concept of adab to creation. Like you have adab for creation which has been lost on human beings the way they throw things away. So I think the idea of AI having life or robots having lives", "robots having life? I don't believe that. They can imitate and look like, you know the Jewish has the golem right so they could create some kind of golem but is it life? Unless there was an embodiment of demons or something who knows? I mean I don' t know these are all really difficult things because we're all here in the same boat and people have different views about different things", "The idea that it's thinking, I don't believe that. I think human beings...I don't but I could be wrong because if you pour water into a cup is it drinking? Is the cup drinking? You know? Is...is the boat swimming? Are the submarines swimming? You now, I dunno. It depends on how you define thinking. But for us, thinking is...it's a very profound metaphysical", "truth that human beings uniquely think. I mean, we know that animals have some levels of perception and memory even. I'm mean, Aristotle talks about that but thinking the ability to abstract Adam was given the ability", "essence is what enables us to talk about universals, the uni versus, the one in the many. So you're able to particularize, you're a universalize the particular which is why like in logic it's very interesting in our traditional logic we always use singular and I really appreciate the fact that doctor...I'm tooting his horn because you guys really have a gem over here so I just want everybody know this but when", "They're not written properly because they make it, there's a fallacy in them. In all the traditional Latin and Arabic and Hebrew, they always use the singular. So they don't say all men are mortal. They will always say every man is mortal.", "the ability to abstract The one in everything and that's why we're muwahidun by nature. It's what God has given us We are designed to see the one in Everything, and ultimately to see The One behind everything And that's Why the Arabic word Muwahidoon means the one who makes one When we say Allah is one it's actually we're doing it", "reality, but to say Tawheed is a wahada yuwahidu. It's the second form, right? So it's a transitive. You are making something one in your understanding. Yeah, and that is unique to the human being, and I don't believe a machine can do that, although when I asked Mr. Gill, who's a PhD from MIT and really at the edge of his field on this,", "if you put all the cats into the AI, and then you put like all these different cats. What's that? The AI said, oh, that's a tabby. What is that? Oh, it's a Russian blue. What' s that? That's a Siamese cat. Then you showed it a cat where you shaved off all the fur, you cut its tail off, you'd cut its ears off. Horrible thing to do to a cat but I'm doing this hypothetically. And then you cut off his whiskers and you just show them the computer of that cat.", "the AI see the cattiness? Would it see the essence, you know, in the same way that as a human, you can see a chihuahua and you can say a Great Dane. And I don't know how the mind does that but you say that's the same thing right so he said yes. He said yes and if that's true, I don' t know, it's amazing. I'd like to see it. He might have been just saying yes too.", "All right, so great question to start us off. Let's move on to the next. The next question is what are some of the main challenges to the Islamic tradition of learning in the Western contexts? How do you view the contradictions of the Western academy and its approach to Islamic studies? I think the biggest challenge is Arabic, and there's a very important book called Romancing an American Elite by Kaplan which was about the inability", "and the orientalist tradition in American academia. Because Europeans did it, I mean the Europeans had Van Es in Germany. I mean Van Es probably knew Ash'ari Qadam better than the vast majority of them. And I'm saying this not because I know Van Es but because I say that he was a brilliant Lebanese philosopher who was a student of Van Es and he told me that. So then you have people like Arbery, I think Arbery really knew Arabic,", "translation of the Quran is amazing. But Americans, I don't know. We have yet to produce a really great Orientalist tradition in my estimation. There are some great scholars. Dr. Abdullah Omar Farooq is certainly one of them and then there's the ones that come from overseas like Dr. Ruwayhib and Wael Hallaq who grew up with", "with Arabic and things. But I think Arabic is a big challenge. Another challenge, I think, is the academia. You know, we... Arabic studies has to allow for devotional... I think the idea... Secularism and secularity that demands on others its own presentation of reality is a type of religious ideology.", "ideology. And I think it's unfair to people who come from a different tradition to impose that. When I was in grad school, I used to get these papers saying you're essentializing. And i was like, I'm an essentialist! Why is that methodology the only accepted methodology? One of things that David Berlinski says which really interesting in his book called Human Nature he said if you took a modern academic from European or American University", "university and plumped him down into 13th century University like in Paris, and he knows French or German or in England at Oxford. In all the dogmatism of that time he would acclimatize in a few days but he said if you took that same academic and put them in Baghdad in the 10th century", "differences of opinions held by the scholars at that time. And I really think there's a lot of truth to that, and we've become so dogmatic in the West about things that we just assume are reality, but they're not necessarily reality. So I think we... Western academia has some amazing things.", "store, I find really interesting things all the time. And then I found that about Chauncey on Jay's store. So there's some great research and things done. I have a kind of idea of an academic devotional approach which is where it's academically rigorous but it allows for devotional expression. So in some sense how do we allow for knowledge to be a means of devotion rather than like an act or vocation? Yeah, I think knowledge for Muslims", "For Muslims, knowledge is devotion. I mean we...our prophet said one of the signs of the latter days is people will seek knowledge for other than the sake of God. Our Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam also said that anything that does not begin in the name of God will be cut off from blessings. And it's interesting to see in these university foundations such as Cambridge and Oxford... They're all founded on God. ...and Harvard and Yale and Columbia and they are flourishing", "Is it in its foundation that there is... Well, one of the things that I think our civilization doesn't understand is that they think a lot of modern people think it was all scaffolding. Religion was just the scaffolding that built all of these but it wasn't. It was devotion and if you take away the devotion you lose your civilization and I genuinely believe that every civilization before our civilization had some foundation of the sacred", "of the sacred. Even the polytheists had sacred sense of things of ultimate concern. Paul Tillich, who taught here at Harvard said that even the cynic who believes that nothing is sacred holds that as sacred. All right we'll move on to the next question.", "Students at Harvard who are studying Islam will generally have no training of the liberal arts that you mentioned, even though we are at the Liberal Arts College. What is your advice to such students already enrolled? Yeah grammar is best learned in grammar school It's unfortunate that it's not taught there if you want to understand why there's a book by David Mulroy called The War Against Grammar and You know linguistics", "You know, linguistics has kind of blown grammar out of the water. There's this idea that teaching grammar was not healthy for kids, but also that linguists who are closer to nominalists in their approach to language as opposed to essentialist who would see... For instance, essentialists would see maybe eight or nine parts of speech.", "would say that's not true. There are thousands of parts of speech, so that's part of the problem. So when you study linguistics, you're just studying all these names for different things whereas when you studied traditional grammar it really helps you understand basic I mean and have what is an adverb? And knowing how an ad verb works is really important. Knowing how it qualifies", "Determiners is probably an interesting word introduced because that's not a earlier word, but that comes out of linguistics. But it is a useful term, a determiner, which would have traditionally been an adjective. So I think learning grammar...I would get a good book on grammar. Kittredge and Farlage is a really good one, but I would find a good books and just go through it. Sister Mary Ann Joseph wrote a wonderful book called The Trivium. Eva Brand, a friend of mine", "really, truly great liberal artist who taught many years at St. John's. She's in her 90s now. She said whoever owns that book owns a treasure and I agree with her. It's a little difficult as a book. There's some nice books now coming out and like I said these get revived all the time. Rhetoric is not that difficult to learn. When you get into the schemes and figures, the names because they're they have all these Greek", "weak names like antideplosis and hyperboton. Hyperboton is Yoda speak, you know? So you can learn that like Yoda he'd said much fear I sense in you. You know, that's a hyperbotan. So learning the terms, I don't know how useful that is but literally knowing the basic, the most important ones like how alliteration works", "what the types of, in Arabic, majaz is very important. And what's called bayan is really important. So you have like majaz aqli, you have majaz logawi either istiar or mursal and then you have the different types like sababia, mushabibia. These are the problems with modern Arabs", "who find all these poems to be like shirkiyat. It's because they never studied balagha. You know, anybody who studied balaghah knows that to swear an oath when Imam al-Busayri says, you know, like I swear an oath by the moon. There's a hadith what Busayri knew the hadith. You", "commentaries, it's a rhetorical device. And there are many examples of that. In the Quran, there are things. That's there in the Quran. But Allah says also you guide to a straight path. So in one verse he says you don't guide and another person says you guide. That is understanding rhetoric. Those will make sense. They're not contradictions. These are really important tools. At Zaytuna we teach both", "we teach both. So, we teach the Western and we teach Arabic traditions. So they do . If you're going to do Arabic logic and you're a non-Arab I would recommend doing English first. There are some differences because of Avicenna but generally they're very transparent subjects especially at the most basic level. As a follow up this is in some sense bringing Harvard and Zaytuna together can you speak", "to how Zaytuna brings this kind of diversity of thought into its campus, I think we're increasingly seeing that on campuses you're living in echo chambers. Diversity of thought if anything is being stifled. So in what context is ZayTuna as a university allowing for diversity of thoughts in the modern world? Well, I mean, that's a fantastic idea there, is that one studying revitalizing .", "that there's two types of debate, what's called monadhara and munakara. So monadharah is dialectical where each like if I debate with Dr. Haroun Spebek and we're gonna debate whether or not the Ash'aris are rightly guided or they're astray so I'm the muallil", "the proponent, he's the opponent. Or vice versa. In monadhara you're supposed to purify your intention and you want the truth. You're not there to make the other person look bad. And so there's a whole adab of not being, you know, not making fun of them, not laughing if they make a mistake, not just respecting your interlocutor.", "on anyone who was in debate. It's a folkifaya of the later tradition, you know it's a collective that some people had to learn it but for people who debate it was considered an obligation on them to learn and Monacara is simply where one wants to...it's like the raiders, my friend said the problem with Christian Muslim debates is it's like", "You know, when the Raiders beat the 49ers, the 49er fans don't just all said, hallelujah, I've seen the light. I'm a Raiders fan now. They just, ah, we'll get you next time. And that's what happens in those kind of debates. It's not to find the truth. It is just to kind of make fun of another person or so and then you have ilzam and ifham. So if the person who is the proponent loses he is mufham like he has to accept I was wrong, you are right", "right. And one of the most beautiful statements in our tradition is Imam Shafi, he said I never debated anyone except that I asked God that He would put the truth on my interlocutor's tongue so that I could submit to it. In other words, that the ego wouldn't have any part in it because the ego wants to jump in there. So I think that would be really nice. We have to allow for debate. We", "of what's right and what's wrong. If we would restore some basic agreements about things, but we're living in an age of radical skepticism, a lot of relativism, you know, we have to get back to some foundational truths. So just as a follow-up to that, I mean, you mentioned modeling what conflict diversity of thought looks like through debate. And I think, you", "role models? How do we, I mean, I think we can all say you're a role model in that respect and building. I had the chance to visit Zaytuna. I think it models it in that respected as an ethos of sort that penetrates across multiple dimensions in the university but how do we find those models in the local communities that were in right because it is one thing to teach something and read it in a book and it is another thing to see it lived so how do", "it's a lot the people like the type of people that I saw when I was young, I don't see them anymore in all honesty. Like I really don't and I know Sheikh Mashouk can say the same thing you know we saw like Sheikh Irr the likes of that, Sheikh Mahmoud Effendi these type people very rare you know people now whereas there was a time in the Muslim world where", "this is one of the tragedies of our time, is that it is getting harder to find. Even educated, I mean we're not educated in the tradition in any sense like the level that I understand between me and Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayya or Marab Darhaj there's just no comparison whatsoever. I cannot compare myself to either of them just in terms of the vast amount of knowledge that they have and the wisdom that they are able to navigate that knowledge with.", "Can you speak to what wisdom means?", "then you're able to make wise decisions. And God has given us a rational soul, but the rational soul he's put this massive neocortex on a midbrain that's filled with emotions and on a reptilian stem that's filed with fear and appetite. So if we don't learn to navigate that triune brain, then we lose our way. That takes work and effort", "And that's where virtue ethics is so powerful because it's something, you know, habitus can be acquired but it takes time. And you have people trying to do this out there. You have people like Ryan Holiday is a good example of somebody who's trying to teach people Stoic tradition and popularize it and try to help people deal. Because the ancients, they really did have great wisdom. And I think one of the problems with modern people is that they just don't think we can learn anything from the past.", "anything from the past. They think because Aristotle's physics was wrong, it must mean his ethics is wrong. But the Nicomachean ethic speaks to us today. The politics speaks to our today. I mean, the politics has immense wisdom. Set aside what he says about women or what he said about natural slaves and things. You can get caught up in these things but there are people of their time in some things and then there are", "You know, people, everybody has something to teach you. Either through a positive or a negative experience but everybody will teach you something if you're open to it. So life is the university? Life is the liberal arts? Alhamdulillah. All right we have about 15 minutes before he wraps up so maybe try and get some other questions. So this is actually an interesting one.", "importance or should the focus move more towards understanding? Yeah, that is a great question. Memoria is one of the five canons of Western rhetoric. Hifdh is really important. You know, the Arabs say,", "The Mauritanians say. Like, if you gather books, you should memorize them because they have certain faults that will ruin them. And then he says water and my wife knows and I know I never put any water near books ever. Like tea, never. Don't think you can do it.", "Like if you have books on a thing, you put your cup of tea there. It's doomed. And I speak from bitter experience. Yeah. So what? And then he says fire will burn them. Although I'll tell you a true story and God is my witness. Really, God ismy witness. Many years ago, I was with a person from Libya who was a dissident opposing", "Gaddafi. And I was staying with him. we left the car and I left two books in the front seat, the Quran it was leather bound really beautiful leather bound and Ibn Abisayy al-Qairawani this is like 40 years ago I was studying Dar Risalah and doing memorization of Quran. And Gaddaf somebody from Libya they bombed the car. And it blew up.", "He lives in Santa Fe. I'm not making this story up, so I was so worried when we got back to the car The whole inside of the car was burnt up except for the Quran and the precepts of Imam Abid Zaid Like there was nothing left it was just thing and it was paper A true story yeah, I saw it people can believe it or not but I believe that I saw So that's what they said and then the rat or the", "or the worm will eat it and the thief will steal it. And Imam al-Ghazali had his famous experience that he tells in his Inqad, in his... That when he had gone to Central Asia and learned all this knowledge and had written everything down. And he was on a caravan coming back and the chief was going to steal all his books. He said, no, you can't steal my books.", "And the thief laughed and he said what kind of knowledge is that, that somebody like me could steal it from you? And Imam al-Ghazali said It was God who made him speak. And he said after that I never learned anything except that I put it to rote memorization So while I think our society has gone to the other extreme where memorization is not important You can look it up But don't we know that the best teachers we have tend to be the ones with the most prodigious", "the ones with the most prodigious memories, the ones that seem to retain a lot of things. I mean, that's just our experience. So memory is a beautiful thing. It's one of the gifts. It best done in what Dorothy Sayers, in her famous essay on the liberal arts calls... On the Trivium, calls the parrot stage. Memory is best done when children... I had my children memorize a lot and poems and things. And like my son, when he was in college,", "Amherst, and he was with his college friends. And they were there, and I had made him memorize a lot of Emily Dickinson. So he was there reciting all this Emily Dickins poems, and they were all shocked at it. But it was a very memorable experience for him and for the other young men that he was wit. There's something beautiful about having a poem in your heart. You know, you say, I memorized it by heart. It's very powerful.", "the poem of uh it's the most famous poem quoted in in or anthologized in in american poetry two woods diverged into yellow wooden sorry i could not travel both and people want to travel long i stood where i've been to the undergrowth that that poem which i memorized many many years ago because my dad memorized a lot of poetry i thought about that poem a lot and i was walking once with", "I started reciting it, and I had read a whole book on this poem, which I hated because I thought the guy completely misinterpreted the poem. But I was thinking about what that poem meant, and then I realized what it meant. When he repeats the I, you know, I, I took the one less traveled by, I realized that that poem's about free will, and that that's what he was saying makes the difference.", "difference of being human is actually actualizing your free will because most people are on a kind of default setting. That's my interpretation, somebody else could come with a different one but had I not known that poem by heart I could not have had that experience yeah so and that's happened to me many times I was I was with my boys once we were there and and and we we were sitting and there was a man there young man little older than they were and I asked him what he", "you know, just taking some time off. I said, are you going to school? He said, I'm thinking about it. I don't really what I want to do. But I'm just kind of playing around. That's what he said. So when he left, I read to my boys, be strong. We are not here to play, to dream, to drift. We have work to do and loads to lift. Shun not the struggle. Face it is God's gift. You know, so that was like they memorized", "So I really feel like memory is a beautiful thing. It's an important thing, and I still memorize every day something. Every day. I don't let a day go by without memorizing something. Yeah, no, that's... I have so much to think about personally about memorization in that context, and it's kind of removing that effort that it takes to kind of retain and hold on to wisdom, to truth.", "So we have several questions in here and I'm trying to pick what I think would be most well, and I want to be respectful of these questions. So one of the questions is it not beneficial to bypass the tradition to escape the biases of the past that have become so solidified? I mean that's a great question there's no doubt that there are things in the tradition that need", "because people can follow their own passions and want to get rid of things that are... So I think the challenge of our generation is determining what is, what I would call, this is not a popular word but what I'd call trans-historical. Those things in the tradition that are trans-historic that transcend every time and place and then those things that", "renovation is the key because I really genuinely believe the house is solid, but you know, the pipes are rusty. The plumbing needs replacement. You know, that the faucets aren't working anymore, but don't destroy the house and kind of try to rebuild something new. So I really think that...I mean this is a beauty we just read in my book club. We read The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis and one of the most important things", "at the very end of that book, he has all these traditions saying very similar things. So I really do believe there are universals that are very important that all of us share. Identifying those what we call a thawabit in Islam. You know, those things that are fixed and then there's the mutagayyarat, those thing that change with time and place. So, I think Sheikh Abdallah bin Bayyah is one of the few people that I know that is capable", "because he's such an encyclopedic master of the tradition, and yet at the same... I mean, I'll give you an example. I was asking him about canceling culture, you know? It was very interesting. Like, I was asked him about people that feel hurt or sensitive, and he just started talking about darar and the concept of darar, and", "Don't harm people and don't reciprocate harm once it was done to you. And he said, People should be sensitive to other people's concerns. Sensibilities really. You shouldn't go out of your way to offend people which some people really enjoy doing. And then he said but on the other side of that our tradition teaches us Be patient with what they say.", "You know, and sabrun jameel. Allah musta'an. All those things about not taking offense. At-taghafi. The Prophet talked about taghafil. Pretending not to understand. One of my favorite hadiths is when they called him mudhammam which means the blameworthy. He said isn't it wondrous how God has removed their tongues from me", "tongues from me. They call me, they're calling someone named Mudhammam and I'm Muhammad. So it's like he just didn't give them any reality as opposed to these Muslims flipping out at the slight this poor woman in Minnesota or somewhere with the painting. You know? What's going on where Muslims have become so sensitive? She wasn't denigrating. If you don't den migrate", "Manqis is one thing, but she was showing Persian art written by a scholar. There's a difference of opinion. It's a very weak opinion, but there is an opinion. There is actually a hadith Imam Ibn Kathir relates of the man who Hisham ibn al-Aas who was sent by Abu Bakr to Syria and he met Hiraqal and Hiraqul took him into a room and pulled out these boxes that were covered with black", "a statue. And the first one, he said, do you know who that is? He said, no. He said it's Adam. And he looked at him amazed. He had a long neck. And then he took the next one out and he said do you now who that was? No. He says Ibrahim. And next when he took out, did you know that? He says Musa. And finally he gets to, do y'know who that? That's my prophet. That's Muhammad. And it was a statue of the Prophet . This is in Bayhaqi and Dalael al-Nabuwa.", "relates it. None of them condemned the tasweer, not one of them, condemned the Tasweer. Abu Bakr and Ibn Kathir says, And it's mentioned in many scholars, Hisham said when he told Abu Bakar, he wept to hear that. So, in the Maliki Madhab even a statue as long as it's not three-dimensional", "three-dimensional. It's only one side of a person. It is not haram. The Malikis are the most lenient on pictures, and that's why if it's abstract, it's permissible. Abstract sculpting would be permissible in Sharia. On the fres in Washington D.C. at the Supreme Court, there's a symbol there", "a symbol there of the, symbolizing the Prophet Muhammad . I don't want to see that taken down. But there's Muslims saying ah this is you know speak for your own like speak for yourself. You're not speaking for all Muslims. They honor, that wasn't for it was for they were saying he's one of the great lawmakers in the world and it's not the prophet. You know , you know the famous picture of the pipe", "A picture is not the thing. Don't get caught up. So we have that problem in our community, we need more maturity. All right, we'll wrap it up with two more questions. The one here and I'm gonna let you take it as you wish but I would like to ask it on behalf of whoever did ask it. In our hyper-partisan society how do you recommend American Muslims engage with the political system in this country particularly as our faith does not align with either political party?", "Right. I think it's important for Islam not to be associated with a party. It can't be democratic, it can't Republican. I should learn from our Jewish brethren and sisters. The Jewish community... When I went to Russell Moore's Southern Baptist Convention, Dr. Senussi and I were the only Muslims there. They had on the table books like", "Islam and Satanism, it was pretty bad. But anyway we went and they gave me an opportunity to talk and they had one man who'd written a book against Islam and he gave his thing and I said I'm sorry you know I've spent my life studying this religion the type stuff you're talking about is just wrong. And then I refuted it but then we went shoulder-to-shoulder", "meeting, there were Orthodox rabbis. Then we went to shoulder-to-shoulder the same day, which is a more left-leaning group, and then there were the liberal rabbis there. And so I think Muslims are foolish to kind of condemn people on one side, you know, they should recognize that it's good for Muslims to be in any...you know, if you're not at the table, you're on the menu, you", "present. I was lucky, you know, I met Dr. Marian Glendon who's a professor emeritus from Berkeley but I was one of the commissioners with her and I genuinely believe the fact that I was in that room conversations changed because if there's no Muslims in there then they can say things about Islam when there's a Muslim there. One of our traditions is whenever you're going to talk about somebody to imagine them in the room just to avoid backbiting.", "So it's the same idea. If you have a Muslim present, that's very good. That's why I'm glad there are Muslims in Harvard. We should have Muslims all over. It's a globalized world. The Muslims aren't going away. We've been here from the start. There were Muslims in America early on. We had that beautiful Fulani man, Yarrow Mahmood, who used to walk reciting", "reciting Quran. They said he used to walk and that's the way the West Africans do it, they walk at night after Maghrib and do their...they call them surat when they recite the Quran. And he made his own fulani hat and everything. Beautiful man! He was here Peale, the great painter who painted George Washington, painted him. He said originally he intended to spend one day with him, he ended up spending like several days with him because he enjoyed him so much but he was here from the start with the founding fathers we have people on", "They're on the rosters, their names are on the roster. So Islam is an American religion it's always been here. We had an American captain Bafis Muhammad who was a Civil War Captain he's the highest ranking Muslim in the civil war. He was African-American so Muslims have been around they've been around not going anywhere we're actually good neighbors generally I mean there's crazy Muslims but there's Crazy everything you know", "You know, like I mean some of the worst human beings don't believe in anything. Right? I mean Jeffrey Dahmer, what did he believe in? You know eating your neighbor? Yeah. Alhamdulillah. Barakallah fikum. It's been such a pleasure. That was the last one? We can call it the last on. Yes. Was there one more? There is one that I will wrap it up with if you'll answer one more.", "if you'll answer one more okay and that is so someone asked and i i hope this can maybe be important for this person but they said um is god dead and to add on to that question what is the role of love how do you get to know god through love how did he love the prophet at a time i don't think we're not taught that in some context so just the relationship with between god and love and if", "I mean, that obviously comes from Nietzsche who was a very interesting character. Who you know, I guess it was 1882 maybe in the gay science? Yeah, I think so. Was it the gay sciences? He said it in The Seek and Speak Zarathustra but I think he said it before that in the Gay Science. Yeah? Yeah okay thanks. Michelle Long. That's Zaytuner representing right there.", "So God in 1900 said Nietzsche is dead. Yeah, so anyway. Look I mean God can die in the hearts of people and that's a tragedy you know? And that's why Abu Bakr said that amazing thing when they were all, when the Prophet died he said", "If you worship Muhammad, he's dead. But if you worship God, God is living and never dies. So I think it's a choice everybody has to make. It's an amazing choice. You choose on meaning or you choose on meaninglessness. If you choose", "Some people do it through gluttony, hedonism, sexuality. There's lots of ways to fill the void but they're all empty and they never lead to satiation. And it's our belief as Augustine said that God created our hearts so that they would only rest in God. And so the heart by its very nature is restless until it finds God. Rumi talks about", "in the oyster that irritates the oyster and finally becomes a pearl, that he says that's what's in the human heart. There's an irritation which until we find God, we don't... We're not at peace. So I think there's a lot of interesting evidence now. I'm a big fan of Stephen Meyer and some of the people that are doing cutting-edge microbiology", "and the idea that the evidence for design is not like the old kind of creationist school of design from Seattle, that the Evidence for Design is becoming pretty overwhelming. So Theistic Evolution is a really interesting book edited by Stephen Meyer. And I think these are areas where Muslims and Christians and Jews and people who do believe in God can really look to as sources.", "to prove God's existence. What they wanted to do, and Aquinas' five ways were never meant to prove the existence in my estimation. What we're meant to do is show believers that it is a rational proposition to believe in God. It's not irrational. But it's not beyond a reasonable doubt. In our legal system you have criminal evidence", "and you have civil evidence. Civil evidence, the best of it is clear and compelling evidence. That criminal evidence is beyond a reasonable doubt. Allah has made the world so that he's given us clear and compelng evidence but its not beyond a reasonabll doubt. It's left there for faith and that's the difference. But I do think it's a stronger proposition and that why that's why I'm on that side.", "And thank you so much for all the patience and may Allah bless all of you. I really appreciate it." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Ayatul Kursi explained by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_l5iVLWVMZ20&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742892553.opus", "text": [ "And so it begins Allah. So this is really essentially the Mubtada in grammar. It begins with Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala and Allah is the Ism of that, it's the indication of the essence. It's not a name of attribute. So there's no attribute associated with that name. Some say you know the ulama differ on", "and then there's an Idgham, and then others say no it's actually specific to Allah . It's not the God. It's Allah's name so you have The Man and then you have Yahya So this is like that Ism Al-Alam to Allah , indicates Allah's essence And that's why many of them say that it's the Ism Allah al-A'zam, it's greatest name There's Khilaf, these are all khilaf issues", "issues. But the point is, the name Allah is Allah's alone and it can't... You can have alihats just like in English you can have gods. You can God and Gods but you can't have THE god, like the only God so this is Allah. And then la ilaha illa Hu So here's there is no God but He", "But he, so this indicates immediately Allah. La ilaha illa hu. So Allah is letting us know that He is the only one because the Jahiliyya Arabs believed that Allah was the greatest God but all these other alihat were ways that they worshipped them li yuqarribuna ilahi zulfa like to get close to God. In fact just a little interesting side note the great Algerian Mujahid and Alim", "Um, Amir Abdul Qadr al-Jazairi. He actually said that it was the humility of the Arabs that they didn't see themselves as worthy of asking Allah directly. And so they really saw like who are we to ask Allah? And so this was like Allah removing all of those and say no you are my special creation I created you to ask me directly", "to ask me directly. And so Allah removed the shirk. So la ilaha illahu and then this is an inshara ila tawheedu that just to know that this is absolutely one God, there's only one. Alhayyul qayyum This is really important too because what are the first two attributes that he gives to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala in this? Alhay and alqayy", "and al-qayyum. He doesn't say hayyun qayyumu because if he was hayyun, if it was nakira then you could have death also like we're hay but there's no al-hay no human being is al-Hay because the ma'rifah indicates that he is THE living in other words he doesn't die Al Hay and then al Qayyumi is a very", "vast word. It has a lot of different meanings. It's a sifa mubalagha in Arabic, so it's a hyperbolic form from qa'im. And so the qa'm is the one who takes care of things. In dunya if you have a qa'tm alashayy, it's somebody who takes cares of things Here, the Qayyyum is the One He's Al-Qayyyuun bi umur al khalq. He takes care all of His creations", "creations matters. But it also indicates he's قائم بنفسه so it has both meanings, he is self-subsistent, he has ipsiyati in and of himself, he does not need anything, he needs no space like we need space, we have to occupy space. He's made us creatures that have to", "There's no time or space. Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala, there is no place, He's in no place because he's infinite so we can't imagine this and that's why the Prophet said don't think about the essence of Allah it means don't thing about the Essence of Allah because you can't take it and that why in fact Kantor the great German mathematician who did all his research on infinity", "ended up in an insane asylum. Because if you think about infinity, you will go mad. And so the Prophet ﷺ told us don't think about infinite. Only think about the ala of Allah. Reflect on His creation. Reflex on His attributes. But don't thing about infinity because you are a finite creature and you can't grasp this. So Al-Hayur Qayyum is he is self sustaining,", "he's also sustaining his creation, both. And it's in that. So this is an ishar ila sifat al-dhat wa jalalihi the magnificence of it for the meaning of self subsisting and all sustaining as one who is self-sustaining while other things are sustained by him. So one of the definitions of Al-Ilah is al mustaghni a'an al kull wal kullun muftakirun Ilahi That's one of... Theologians give this definition of Allah He is the One that is completely", "independent, rich in himself and yet everything is dependent on him. Allah hu al-ghani, right? Allah is al-gani wa antum al-fuqara You are in need of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. laa takhudhu sinatun wala naam After saying he's alhayyul qayyum, Allah tells us that neither slumber nor sleep overtakes Him", "here, sinna is just to it's the beginning of sleep what the Arabs call nu'as. It's where you begin to doze off like people now when they're fasting at the end of the day they feel the dozing off so Allah is telling us that and the thing about sleep there's a beautiful Milton called Sleep The Gentle Tyrant", "Because you cannot, sleep will take you over and you cannot fight off sleep. It will win always about you see little children because consciousness is so interesting to them when they're little, they don't want to go to sleep because they're excited and they know I want to stay up because", "And then they just crash. We call it crashing, right? So ta'khudhu here, he didn't say that he doesn't sin or la yanam. He said la ta'khoduhu because sleep is something that overtakes you, right. And then he repeats wala naum because in the Arabic if it was la taqhudhu sinatun wa naum, then it could be one or the other overtakes him but here sinah wala noom", "neither drowsiness nor sleep will overtake him so he's constantly in fact if he turned away from creation his for one it would disappear isn't it enough that he's", "But if you're looking at something and then you turn away from it, from your subjective experience, it disappears. And in fact there's a whole philosophy based on whether or not that exists or not. Right? Salafism. Do things exist when we're not witnessing them? So Allah says it's enough as a proof that He is witnessing everything because without His mushahada , it doesn't exist.", "And that's his ayn al-lutf, you know, he's looking. His inayah is constant. Because these are qualities of created things. So he has tanzih, he has transcendence above and beyond these attributes of accidents which are impossible in his case.", "is impossible in his case, it's not one of the obscure divisions of knowledge of him. Rather, it is the clearest of them. So this is the via negativa, the things that we negate about Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. This is the easiest thing. It's harder to say things about God. It''s easier to say thins that aren't God, right? Kullumma yakhtoorubi baadik allahuhilafu dharik Anything that comes to your mind, Allah is other than that. That's a qaida in Muslim theology.", "Anything, anything that occurs to your mind, Allah is other than that. Again you see the beauty of the Arabic language because he doesn't say because it's muqaddam indicates that it's solely his. It's solely", "in the heavens and in the earth. So this is a ishar ila kulliha wa anna jami'aha minhu wa mastaruhu wa ilahi marji'uha All of it is His. Ma fi samawati wa ma fil ard So it's for umum, the Arabs call that sigal al-umum Everything in the heaven and the earth is His Man dhal ladhi yashfa'u andahu illa bi idhni Who? And this is what", "what the Balaghi call istifham inkari. This is actually stronger than saying no one can intercede except with his, so if I said for instance, no one is a greater poet than Al-Mutanabbi or Rumi for the Afghan people here.", "No one is a greater poet than Rumi. That's very different than saying, who is a great poet than me? It's stronger because it's a challenge. Right? You're challenging him. Let's hear you say so Allah says, man dhal-ladi and then man tha. He could have said men alladhi but he says man tha and this is again the challenge like in", "when Ibrahim challenges them, he says, مَاذَا تَعْبُدُونَ But when he asks them, what are you worshipping? When he's saying, ماذا تعبدون He is telling them, What are you worshiping? So this is stronger than saying من ذا", "Shafa'ah is a very important concept in our tradition. And the Prophet ﷺ is the greatest of, you know, he has the shafa'a on the Day of Judgment. He's the only one, sallAllahu alayhi wa sallam, that has that maqam initially. And then after that Allah ﷻ gives permission for others but nobody can intercede before the Prophet, sallaAllahu wa ta'ala, he says.", "But it's with the idhn of Allah. So Allah is letting us know that no one has intercession, so nobody speaks before the merciful إِلَّا بِإِذْنِهِ So this is a ishara إلى انفراده بالمُلك والحكم والأمر These are all His alone sovereignty authority and command. So whoever will have the right of intercessions will possess it only because", "and this negates partnership. Many, many people will have intercession on the Yawm al-Qiyamah like the Hufaab who actually practiced the Qur'an will have an intercession, the Shuhada will have a intercession. Many people but always the first is granted to the Prophet ﷺ then the other Prophets will have their intercessions. People can intercede for their families that's why one of the things some of the Arabs they say", "Then when they leave, they'll shake hands and say, الناجي أخذ بيد أخيه. You know, the one if you're saved, take my hand. Whoever of us is saved, let him take the other's hand as an intercession. So this is something. يعلم ما بين أيديهم وما خلفهم ولا يحيطون بشيء من علمه إلا بما شاء.", "And he knows the past. He knows everything that will happen to us. He know everything that's happened to us, everything has been recorded. He has his angels because Allah has created a world of Asbab but he knows and one of things about his judgment on Yawmul Qiyamah this is very interesting there's a principle in fiqh that al-Qadi la yaqdi bi'ilmihi so the qadi whoever is a judge cannot judge by his knowledge So he has to recuse himself", "So for instance, if I know that this person murdered somebody. I can't judge with my knowledge. I have to hear all the facts. The judge can't just say oh you're guilty and Allah has established that principle for himself on the day of judgment out of his justice even though he's just even if he condemned us without any court He would be just", "He would be just because he can't be unjust. But he has established justice in the world and he's told us to be just. إِنِّي حَرَّمْتَ الظُّلْمُ عَلَى نَفْسِي فَيَعِبَدِ لَا تَظَالَمُوا I have prohibited my own self to oppress, even though he can oppress by his very nature but he is telling us that he prohibited it for himself and then he said to his servants, oh my servant do not oppress, in other words be just", "other words, be just. So he will not judge with his knowledge. He could just send us to hell or to heaven. Inshallah everybody, Allah give us, make us people of Jannah. But he could just sent the whole of creation, he would be just in that because he can do what he wants with his creation. So when he said that we will be judged based on testimony, so our hands will testify against us.", "us. Our eyes will testify against it, our ears will tell... We can't deny it! They'll say no I stole he made me steal and that's why the limbs are there they fear because they don't want to go to the body doesn't want just like nobody wants to go through the fire in the dunya. Like you see a fire and if somebody is trying to force you into it you're going to have immense fear", "not want to go to hell. And so we're being told that he knows everything, and yet despite that, he is going to have a trial for everybody. They will all have their trial, and they will have their day in court. Everybody will have theirs. Even the animals are raised up. The animals get there their day. You know, they say in English every dog has his day. That's true. It", "And then, that he alone, Allah alone is Al-Alam. He's Allam al-Ghuyub. He knows everything. Right? He's with you. His Ma'iyah is too. So he's with the believers in Allah. Allah is with the impatient in his knowledge but he's", "the patient in his ʿināyah. So he's always, his knowledge is لَيْنفَكُّ عَنَّهِ عِلْمُ اللَّهُ He's always aware. And then وَاسِعَ كُرسِيهُ السَّمَوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ Now this is really important in light of what we know about other dimensions and all these things they're talking about all these possible dimensions", "know that dark matter is they think it's the vast majority of the universe is unseen so they actually see what we can actually see as a tiny portion of what's actually there so they're actually theoretically their own scientists are saying there's a whole unseen realm that we know is there but we can't see it because we don't have material access to", "matter. They don't know, it's dark to them but it could be light so when he says there are hadiths that indicate there's many variations of it and they have some weakness in them but the meanings are sound where the prophet and they're different versions. The Prophet once was sitting with sahaba and he said do you know what's beyond this heaven? He said it's another 500 years and beyond this", "beyond this heaven is another five. So he's letting them know, and he might have just been using numbers that are high to indicate that we don't know because in some it says 70 years, and 70 is used by the Arabs to indicate something extensive like elf. A thousand is something the Arabs use just to mean a lot. Like we say in English, I told you a thousand times. You probably didn't tell", "times but it's a hyperbole so the same is true like alf layla wa layla, a thousand and one nights. It's like they go on forever. So in the traditions the Prophet said that the kursi maal kursilil arsh illa kahalka milqaat fi ardhi falatin right? The footstool to the throne", "mention of it to the throne is like a ring of hadid in one riwayah, in the midst of a vast desert. So this is just between... And that's why Allah, in many du'as you'll see Rabb al-Arsh al-Azim for that reason. In many du'ts because we can... so you can imagine this is the footstool contains in the entire universe is contained", "footstool. And the footstoo to the arsh is like a small iron ring in the midst of a desert. So it's just, you have to put your head on the ground. This is the point. You just do sajdah and say Allahu Akbar. Which can mean the greatest but really it means greater. Allah is greater than anything", "of and people will exhaust themselves. They will never give Allah his true estimation because Allah cannot be measured so this is just His throne I mean the Qursi there's a khilaf about like a chair you're not even supposed to do that because it's anthropomorphism we can't do that in fact", "Qadhi al-Baqar said, anybody that mentions the hand of God and then uses his hand to indicate, he says you should be flogged. So we can't... These are analogies to let us know that every king in the dunya has a throne and a footstool. So Allah is giving us but His modality is bilakif. There's no way we can comprehend", "we can comprehend what these mean. They're just approximations, taqrib al-ma'ani, everything. That's why in the... Somebody came to a Syrian sheikh, Sheikh Hisham Al-Burhani told me this story. Allah yirhamahu wa ta'ala. He said that somebody came and he saw on a dream that he was eating macaroni in Jannah, makrona. The Arabs say makroni. He says la la la kunta takuru ma qara'na", "No, you were eating what we read about in the Qur'an. And the point of that is that there's nothing in the afterlife that relates to the dunya according to Ibn Abbas They share the names but we can't conceive", "That's Jannah. It's what no eye has seen, no ear has heard and never occurred to the heart of a human being. So everything that you read there just to give you some kind of a problem in the same way that we know Allah is hearing only because we know what hearing is but you can't in any way think that his hearing is like our hearing. It is just to approximate those meanings. So this indicates the greatness of God's sovereignty,", "perfection of his power and it is a noble and obscure knowledge so, it's something hidden from us. And then again there's no weariness from preserving the heavens and the earth and he is the most high the magnificent the vast, the tremendous", "So he says this is an Ishaara ila sifat al-qudra wa kamaliha wa tanzihi ana al-da'af wa nuqsan or al-baaf. So, so this indicates divine attributes of power and its perfection and freedom from weakness and imperfection. He says that he could go into great detail about those." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Don_t Miss Fajr Prayer -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_XRt04h2EnIg&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742883953.opus", "text": [ "Allah says, Those who are forgetful about their prayer. They're people of prayer but they forget their prayer When they get up to pray, they pray lazy. They pray lazy and the Prophet sought refuge from laziness", "from incapacitation and laziness. Incapacitation is when you want to do something but don't have the strength to do it. Laziness is when your have the strenghth to do, but you don't want to. And Allah says about these people When they get up to pray, they get lazy. They don't really want to pray. Adi ibn Hatim Al Ta'ee said I never heard the adhan except that I was yearning for prayer", "prayer. I never heard the Adhan except I was yearning for prayer. The way to our humanity, if we want to leave this infantile state of anxiety and enter into a state of peace, the way is prayer. And this is why prayer is Ainauddin. It's the pillar of the deen. And as an ummah, we have to go back to establishing prayer in our communities. We have to get up for Fajr. You see, the Muslims have to", "You see, you have to get up for Fajr. And I'll give you a good mechanism for not missing your Fajar. The first thing you do is recognize that Shaytan takes Benny Adam as a toilet bowl and the toilet bowl is your ear. It even looks like a toilet ball from one point of view. Now Shaytan, the person who doesn't wake up for fajr, Shaytan urinates in his ear. That's what he does. Don't laugh. Wallahi don't laugh", "Don't laugh. How many times in here, and you ask yourself how many times has Shaytan taking you as a toilet? How many time in your life so far? Because the Prophet only missed the prayer Fajr we know twice for Tashree'ah to show his Ummah. This is from our Usul. Sometimes the Prophet will do something", "just to explain it to the people. You see, and it's actually for him. It's drawing near to Allah. So how many times has Shaytan taken your ear as a toilet bowl? Now the next thing to remember on the Isra'an al-Mi'raj, the Prophet saw a group of people who had their heads smashed up against a rock and then their skulls would come back together and they would be smashed again by shayateen. And he said,", "تَفْخَلُونَ عَنِ الْفَجَرِ Those were the people that didn't really care about getting up for Fajr. So we had to become people of Fajar. And that's the first victory against Shaytan of the day. If you haven't won that victory, you've lost the battle already. Forget about the rest of the Day because the Prophet said you'll wake up lazy and foul in your nature. So forget the rest if the Day. If lose that first battle, Shaytaan has got you", "got you. Forget the rest of the day, which doesn't mean, no make tawbah because inshaAllah Allah accept your tawbaah and we have to establish our prayers on the time and become jama'at because the prayer in jamaa is extremely important so we want to learn humanity Ins, uns, insan is from uns and uns is with Allah and our uns with Allah, our intimacy with Allah is in prayer it's called munajat intimate discourse with Allah", "with other insan, with other bani adham, with others. And finally Allah says, Say I seek refuge in the Lord of Nass, of humankind. The King.", "you have to reject your shaitan. You have to rejection your Shaitaan and the way to reject you're Shaitaans is seek refuge in Qabd al-Nas, Marik al-nas, Ilahi al-nasa Rabb al-naas, mariki al- naas, ilahil nas" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Duas of our Prophet ﷺ - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_veJs_jsoPtQ&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748540573.opus", "text": [ "Whoever does these dhikrs, they're called the munasibat, the occasional supplications. He said whoever does them on a regular basis will be written from the dhakirin allaha dhikan kathira So this is a beautiful way to become mindful Is to try to remember and to habituate ourselves to these things but also to do them with intention in other words not formulaic and not perfunctory", "perfunctory not in some way in which you go on to automatic pilot where you actually stop and you supplicate Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala so Umm Salama said the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam said never left the house except he said this is a perfect prayer", "I don't know any other religion that has these prayers. It's to me one of the proofs of our Prophet ﷺ is that all of these prayers are so stunningly beautiful, they're very difficult to translate because they're so comprehensive. He said, أُطِيتُ جَوَامِعِ الْكَلَمِ I was given the comprehensive words. He says so much with so few words. So when he went out, he said, Oh Allah, I seek refuge that I should trip or be tripped. That I should go astray or be led astray.", "I should oppress anyone or be oppressed, or wrong anyone or would be wronged. That I should become angry or foolish or somebody should display their anger or foolishness on me against me.\" That's a protective dua as you go out when he went into the...when he went to relieve himself he said Because these are foul things like emptying yourself even though nothing foul came from the Prophet", "And the earth swallowed up. The Prophet ﷺ, when he came out, he said, غُفْرَانَكَ You know, your forgiveness. And then he said، الحمد لله الذي رزقني لذت وابق في قوة واذهب عني أذاه What a perfect dua. Praise be to the one who provided me the delight of the food, retained in me the energy of the", "These are perfect prayers. Perfect prayers. So all of these things that the Prophet ﷺ, when he went to bed, بِسْمِكَ اللَّهُمَّ أَمُوتُ وَأَحْيَا In another riwayah which is مُتَّفَقٌ عَلَيْهِ He actually says that أَسْلَمْ تُنَفْسِ إِلَٰيكَ I have surrendered myself to you. وَفُوَطُوا أَمرِ إلَیكَ And put my back to you in other words for protection. رَغْبَةً وَرَهْبَّةً إِلاَكَ", "And then he says, I believe in you. I believe In your prophet. And the Prophet said that whoever Says these things and then dies has died on Fitrah. This is The real human being. This Is the fitrah. So He said go to sleep and not expect To get up in the morning.", "This is attentiveness to time. People die in their sleep. We don't know. We're living in a place, earthquakes happen. The house could collapse. لَا قَدْرُ اللَّهِ سَلَّمُكُمُ اللّٰهُ جَمِيعًا When waking from sleep, I slept in the tent of Marab Tarhaj for the first few months that I was with him and then I actually asked because it was very intense.", "dhikr all the time. He did dhiker in his sleep and I have only seen a few people that do dhikkur in their sleep there was one man Sidi Ali in Maknas who I was with him and he was sleeping and snoring and doing prayer on the Prophet sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam and he fast asleep so I mean I saw that with my own eyes but Rabta Al-Hajj used to say La ilaha illallah, the prophet said", "sleeps my heart doesn't sleep so there's people that do zikr are so much that they're even in their sleep they're doing dhikr. In fact sahabi used to have to put rocks when they went to the bathroom, they would put rocks in their mouth to remind themselves not just say the name of Allah. So every time the marabat al hajj got up", "لكنه يقرأ من ألي عمران في الحديث ويقول في خارق السموات والأرض واختلاف الليل والنهار ربنا ما خلقت هذا باطرا سبحانك فقينا عذاب النار", "I bear witness that there is no god but Allah, and none can be a partner in this cause. And I bear the witness that Muhammad is His servant and messenger", "And he would always, when he completed, This was the dua on the completion of wudhu. That is a beautiful dua.", "you're, you know a man can be in a cell like Tobias Tubbs could be in A Cell and And he's he's ex-he's in an expansive place another person could be mansion, and he's in a Cell Because it's subjective. It's all how you perceive reality This is one of my favorite duas. It just such a beautiful dua and Then when he got on a camel which is taken from the Quran also", "always the Akhira because time for pre-modern people was always related to eternity this is why when you eat Alhamdulillah The ni'mah baqiyya is always mentioned with the ni'ma thaniya", "a blessing that dissipates but submission to allah is a blessing and it goes on forever this is also when leaving the home allah this is khairul mawlaj now this is when you come into the house coming into the home when heading to the masjid one of my favorite also", "And in the riwayah, Allahumma ja'alni noora. And he had no shadow. Ibn Hajar says he had not shadow. This is something that the Salaf said. He was always shaded by clouds but he had now shadow . One of the proofs of his hairs are if you cast a light on them they don't", "They don't show shadow. Allahumma ja'alni noora, make me light. God place light in my heart, light on my tongue. Light in my hearing, light in sight. Place light behind me, light before me. Place above me, and light below me. Oh God, make light, grant me light.\" When entering the masjid, Allahumme iftah liya buwaa bar rahmatika And then mindfulness, he entered with his right foot first and made this dua", "When leaving the masjid, left foot. Because the rahmah is in the masjed, the fadl is in world, the bounty of the world. When hearing the adhan And then when you finish it", "We say it the prophet al-islam is our Sayyid Some most of these rewires have without the Sayyad, but it's been the the off of the Muslims to say say you Our prophets I've just out of adab to him. I mean there's a position and this is a position That's a totally valid position that it's also the adeb to To do it just as it came down and there are people that do that", "And there are people that do that. So both are correct, but I've always found it difficult not to say Sayyidina Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. Allah says don't call him like you call other people. One of the tragedies of the modern time is first name. Everybody's on a first-name basis and I hate these who they call you up hello Hamza. I'm like its Colonel Hamza to you.", "call you by your first name. People used to take a long time before you gave them your first names. If you look at the old English like Jane Austen, they called people by their last name, like Willoughby. That's not his name, his name was John Willoughb but he called him Willoughbey because he was called by his last name and if it was an elder then they would call them sir or mister we say Abu Yahya, Abu Muhammad , you give kunyah that's how the Arabs do it", "One of the things that I realized, because I went to a Catholic school in high school and they always called you by your last name. This was early 70s so it hadn't changed yet to the degree. They always called me by my last name, so if you raise your hand they say Mr. Hanson. That's how they called you. And my father went to the same school. What I realized later is that the whole purpose of that is that you don't just represent yourself,", "that you shouldn't dishonor your family name. So we're in a time when it's just everybody is an individual, they no longer have any sense of being part of a family or a community. So it's one of the tragedies I think of this all this familiarity. And then Allahumma hadhi iqbaru laydika wa idbawru naharika wa aswatu du'atika fa ghfirli forgive me. You know this oh God now is the arrival", "the arrival of your night, the departure of your day and the sound of your callers so forgive me. Imam al-Bukhari. Bismi Allah, Allahumma jannibna shaytan wa janniba shaytana ma razaqtana You know in the name of Allah the Prophet said if you're going to be intimate then this is something to say to protect the child.", "Very, if you wake up from a fright, you say this in sleep. There are many, many of these. I mean we have beautiful books. Imam Ashokani wrote a fantastic book, Tuhfat al-Dhakireen. Imam An-Nawi's great book Al-Adhkar is one of the finest books in our tradition. And many, and many scholars have written small books like this one that my teacher wrote", "They want the vodka of teaching these things to people so it's why people write tajweed books Like I used to really bother me tajweed books. I See all these tajweet books, they're all the same. They say the exact same thing They're all little books and they say the exactly same thing and I was like, why do people keep writing tajwede books?", "Because anybody that learns how to read Quran from that book, the author of that book gets the reward of all their recitation. So this is why shiukh always made their own awrad. That's I realized that because I was like, why they keep making new awrad? Because they want the reward for people doing the dhikr that they put together. It's one of the blessings of our religion so I totally have no problem anymore with it because I get it.", "I'm going to write a book on Tajweed, inshallah. Allahumma agfir li dhambi kullahu diqquhu wa julluhu wa awwaruhu wakhiruhu walaniyahoo wasarruhu Oh Allah forgive my sins. This is in prostration. Forgive my sins entirely the lesser and the greater, the first and the last, the revealed and the concealed. He also said you know there are many many beautiful iterations. Allahuma agfirli warhamni wahdini wajburni waafinni warzuqni One of the things of the Afiya", "afia one of the meanings of it according to imam al-kushayri was to be focused on god in other words not to be distracted which i thought was really interesting you know this is between the the uh again between the uh and these are the what are called", "I seek refuge with you from the cheese, and I seek your refuge with the bukhli. And I seek you to return to earth for eternity.", "given dementia, Alzheimer's all these things are so prevalent. So O Allah very well I seek refuge in you from timidity and stinginess. So fear is like fear. is related to fear because you're afraid to give out your money. And in one it's So the is the one who wants to do something but they can't. The", "is the one who is able to do it but doesn't want to do. So he sought refuge from both. These are really stunning in their meaning so these are and then the dua from anxiety", "There's a slight difference, but essentially the same meaning. So again, a beautiful comprehensive dua to make the Quran the rabi' of your heart and one of the best ways that you can honor your Prophet is to read the Quran. The prophet said", "of my Ummah is Quran in prayer and then Quran outside of prayer. This is the best Ibadah that you can do if you're not doing a Juz of Quran a day, then And you're doing other things. I would set aside those other things and focus on doing a juz a day Every Muslim should do a Khatm of Quran every month. I mean this is baseline", "15 minutes in the evening once you get accustomed to reading it at a relative pace. It's What do you say? God, I'm on Yeah, how fast can you do with Heather? How Yeah about 20 yeah so if you do hadar you can do it in 20 minutes So 10 minutes in morning 10 minutes. This is not a lot of your time", "And the book, it's so neglected and the Prophet complained of its neglect. My people have abandoned this Quran. And one of the great blessings of Morocco and one of things I love about that country is every masjid 250,000 khatm every month. That's what the Ministry of Al-Qaf has determined", "determined based on all the hizb. Subhanallah. So this is a beautiful dua and then istikhara is very important he used to teach istikhare for everything, and this is something I'll tell you a true story Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah was in Jordan and they were on their way it was very late at night and they're on their", "Nella broke his nose and there was blood everywhere. And this is a true story, his son told me this. He was in the car and he's his son started screaming because he was worried his dad was seriously injured. It wasn't that bad of an injury but because it was so much blood he thought it was really serious. He screamed and he said his father took his arm squeezed it and said, don't worry I did before this trip", "trip. That's the power of this, that's the Power of the prophetic teaching is that you are in the hub, you're in that place where you're not perturbed by the world and things are going to get very serious on this planet we're entering into a new phase and people need to have strong Iman", "Subhanahu wa ta'ala. They need to be connected I mean one of the things about Edith Stein that was so amazing she actually when when she fled to When she fled after Kristallnacht, when they were persecuting the Jews she fled too they took her to Belgium and She was in a monastery there and She used to go out into the cold like she was preparing for something", "This is eyewitness people that saw this. She was taken to Auschwitz when the Nazis invaded and they took even the converts to Catholicism because she had converted out of Judaism to Catholicist, but she took her to Auswitch. There were eyewitness accounts that she was comforting people in that situation and she only was there for one week. She killed right away. But the point is that people of Iman can deal with this.", "In Korea, when they captured the Americans, they captured Turks with them. So they were actually imprisoned together and when they studied, the Americans all fell apart and they actually started doing recordings for the Koreans like communist propaganda and they're very worried about this because they felt they were brainwashed. It was all from the interrogation but the Turks didn't. They didn't succumb to the interrogations and they wanted to understand why", "Why and what they found out was two things that the Turks did one. They laughed a lot Because they saw the ridiculousness of what they were trying to do in the brainwashing So they just would watch these people telling them these things and they thought it was funny And I know that that's from a type of Eman where you kind of recognize The hilarity of this dunya and the stupidity of human beings, and I know it had to do with their", "it had to do with their upbringing as Muslims. The other thing that they did, they always appointed because they would take away the officers and the morale would break down with the Americans. The Turks always appointed an amir so even if it was a private they would appoint somebody over them and he would keep them all together. So these are really important things to remember we need to be connected to Allah . There's so many", "There's so many things we could talk about. Who are we to talk about the messenger of Allah? One of my favorite poems is from the great poet, the great faqi Ibn Juzayl al-Kalbi who is to me one of the most extraordinary scholars that our Ummah produced. He wrote a beautiful tafsir of Quran. He was one of those polymaths that just seemed to know everything. One of the beauties of his books and one of my teachers", "Muhammad Muqtada al-Shinqiqi was the son of the great Mufassir. He was the one that really first introduced me to Ibn Juzay in Medina when I was very young, but one of the things that he said why his books were so powerful is because he wrote them for his son. He wrote them", "Guys, the sunnah is for the son to pray over the parent. Not for the sheikh or the imam. Why? Because nobody will pray with the fervor that a son will pray for his parent. So it's one of the secrets of our fiqh. He said I attempt to praise the chosen one but I'm thwarted", "I can't get to that station, that exalted height of praising him. The prophet says and then he says Who can measure the ocean? And who can enumerate the stones and the stars?", "Even if my whole body became tongues, even then I wouldn't be able to give the praise that I desired. If all of creation got together to praise the Prophet , they would not achieve", "achieve that due. They would not achieve that do. So I have refrained out of awe and adab, and out of fear and magnifying that exalted station.", "And sometimes silence is the best eloquence. And sometimes speech gives faults for the fault finders. So having said that and knowing my own limitations, I wrote a poem for the Prophet .", "اللهم صلي على سيدنا محمد بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم وصلى الله على سعدنا مهماد اللهم اصل على سيدينا موحد صراط تنجين بها من جميع الأهوار والأفات وتقضيلنا بها جمع الحاجات وتطهيرنا بهم جمعة السياة وترفعون بها على درجات وتبلغنا باقي أقصى الغايات من جمل", "The sun solemnly stated, how can my light compare to his? And the moon laughed. Be like me, content to reveal another's light. The north star declared what guidance can I provide next to his and all the stars exclaimed be like us who revolve around you and show no envy. The sea shouted what secrets can I contain when compared to his wonders", "wonders. The clouds pleaded, be like us, exalted in the sky because we humbly draw our water from another and pour forth in gratitude and service. The rose ruefully remarked, what beauty do I have next to his? The mirror said, be", "be still and let me quote him. Gold complained, what worth do I have next to his? Copper cried, what ingratitude! Your purity was his from the start. Be happy to be compared to him. The dog barked, he mentioned me. The cat meowed, he petted me.", "The horse neighed. He called me an ocean. The camel grunted, I took him to safety. The frog croaked, I was his favorite. The spider stood tall on eight legs and stately stated, I protected him once. The cloud boasted, I shaded him. The tree declared he called me and I bowed to him.", "The date gloated, I was sweet for him. Milk exalted, I nourished him. Water crowed, I quenched his thirst. The kaba shouted, he circled me. The Yemeni coroner replied, he touched me.", "mountains of Mecca called out, he loved us. Medina demurely whispered, He chose me! And humanity cried nafsi, naf si, mi, mi and God said be like Ahmed and Ahmed said ummati, ummati my community,", "you until you are content. Alhamdulillah JazakAllah khair" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Eating beef as a Muslim - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_ot_rOaPdBYw&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748535841.opus", "text": [ "The other thing that's very important is to recognize the problem of food. We live in a completely unjust food system. In America, because sugar can be produced much cheaper in places they put all these restrictions on the importation of sugar and so Americans now are eating corn syrup produced in America and getting fat from this corn syrup. Because corn syrup is actually not a good source of sugar", "That's an example, but I'll give you a worse example. The most important study that's been done on nutrition ever is the China study by Dr. Campbell and his researchers. This was a first-rate researcher from Harvard teamed up with Oxford. He was completely credible scientist. And Premier Deng in China died of cancer of the bladder", "cancer of the bladder before he died, he set aside money to do a study of nutrition in China and disease relation. So this was independently funded. Campbell ran that team and the result of it is the China Study. Some things about the China study that are very important. The first thing is that the results were so radical that the food pyramid was changed to be more scientific", "scientific but because meat and dairy were completely minimized in the diet, the meat and diary industry in the United States lobbied so hard that they actually changed the pyramid which means science is no longer serving humanity it's serving corporate interests. That's what it means. Science is serving corporate interest? That is wrong! In the China study what they found is that in areas where their protein was less than 5% from", "There was no cancer. The original study was done in Hyderabad, India and the Harvard scientists laughed at it and said they must have got the cages mixed up. Campbell replicated this science repeatedly. Some things about meat and dairy consumption. First of all, today's meat is not what grandma and grandpa ate.", "organic. They didn't have a word for it because everything was organic 50 years ago. Organic free-range happily raised animals on farms where they actually treated animals with some dignity. Farmers actually had relationships with their animals, they treated them with dignity. Now and I my grandfather had a cattle ranch so I actually spent my summers on a cattle", "The first time I got on a horse, before I got it he put a pencil in my mouth and yanked it back really hard. He said that's what the horse feels when you're using that bit so don't forget it. That was my first lesson because that is the way people talk. They have respect for their animals. In the United States horses are not categorized as pets they are categorized livestock. You can starve a horse to death in America and not go to jail which is wrong.", "Horses should have rights. Animals have rights in Islam. This is not a new concept. Our religion gives animals rights. Ants have rights! In the book of Zuhd, one of the Sahaba used to go out and put bread crumbs on the ant hill that was near his house. And one of some...one of the tabi'een asked him what he was doing. He said I don't want them testifying against me on Yom Kiyamah that I didn't fulfill the rights of the neighbor. I mean this is an ant hill. What kind of psychology did these people have?", "It's a different world they were living in. Dr. Nassar was alluding to it last night. They lived in a different word. The prophet spoke to animals, he spoke to animal. Our prophets spoke to an animals. He spoke to them and they spoke back to him. This is not mythology this is reality. We have people today that still speak to animals. Animals respond to you. They respond to", "to you. They're sentient creatures, they have nervous systems, they feel pain, they become depressed. In America we have dogs and cats on Prozac this is a fact. Veterinarians prescribe Prozact for dogs in America don't think the dog is depressed because he's a dog. He's happy to be a dog he's depressed because", "The dog whisperer said, he doesn't go solve people's dog problems. He goes and solves dogs' people problems. And the same is true for the horse whisperer, Buck. The horse whisperers said I don't solve people horse problems. I solve horses' people problem. Animals are intuitive they know when somethings wrong. Sayyidina Omar during his Khalifa prohibited eating meat every day", "meat every day. This is a fact. Also, don't think vegetarianism is not from Islam. People say that when they become Muslim and they're vegetarian, they go you have to stop eating meat. I mean you have start eating meat your iman's not complete until you eat meat. That's what they say. And then they give them the biryani and welcome to Islam.", "This is in the tradition. And the Prophet accepted that from him. Now, if you swore off meat for ibadah, that's a different thing. The Prophet told them not to do that. But he didn't want to eat meat. Maybe he didn' like it. But today eating a lot of meat is unethical. I would say that eating fish... this is your choice and I'm not dictating to anybody. You have to make your own choices. You do your research. We're not fascists. Think for yourselves.", "I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm here to make you think about things and you go back and you do your own research, and you decide for yourselves because you're all sovereign human beings and nobody can tell you other than Allah and his messenger and that's it. Nobody can tell me what to. And every scholar who tells you he's telling you what he thinks Allah and His Messenger is telling you to do, that's called Ishtihad. But there are a few things where Allah spells it out and fallibilism is very important. Our scholars need to have more fallibilisms", "We don't doubt Islam, but we should doubt our understanding of Islam. Because to have certainty about your understanding is to arrogate to yourself some divine knowledge that you don't have. So Sayyidina Omar said, It's in the Muwatta, beware of meat because it has", "It has an addiction like the addiction of wine. Beware of meat, because it has an addition like the addition of wine.\" We have Muslims now eating meat three times a day and then they're wondering why they have gout? Why do they have all these diseases? Seriously start cutting that out! The other thing I read a book last year called", "He was arguing, he's not a Muslim. He said everybody should fast at least a month out of the year where they diminish their... This is what he said in his book. He's from LA. Everybody should fast a month or the year and fast a couple days in the month because our bodies are designed to be food deprived. They're designed that way, to be", "and nearly dead. Sick, fat, and nearly-dead. And you look at the miracle that happens on that. A man who fasted 60 days and then got another man who was almost dead to start fasting and the man's transformation was amazing. We need to transform our food. We eat healthy food that is locally grown. If we are going to eat meat, you shouldn't eat meat more than once a day or week. Imam Sahra al-Tusturi when he took on students one of", "One of the conditions he stipulated was they only ate meat once a week. In Maliki fiqh, a rich woman is entitled to meet twice a week Muslims were semi-vegetarians The Prophet ﷺ was a semi- vegetarian He did not eat a lot of meat This is a fact You can read it in the seerah Two months they would see no smoke came out of his chimney And they would say what are you eating? They said al aswadain It's in the sahih collection Al Aswadayn Water and dates", "most beneficial foods in the world. So this is absolutely imperative that you change your diets. We're eating far too much processed food, all of this cancer one out of four people is getting cancer now heart disease diabetes 70% of people and some of the Gulf states over 40 have type 2 diabetes 70%. They are drinking, eating all these processed food. Cancer has become epidemic in West Africa because they're eating all", "healthy foods, eat good food. This is part of our religion. Allah doesn't mention food without mentioning halal and tayyib. Make your food a source of nutrition. Don't eat empty food. Don'eat too much food. Really! Eat twice a day. Sahel was asked he said what do you say about a man who eats once a day? He said that's the way the prophets eat. He said what about twice a they? He says that's how the righteous eat. And then he said" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Give life to your heart - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_raLGyMQ6TCU&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743063918.opus", "text": [ "I would say, Urdu nahi ma'loom hey. And Ma'loomm means it's known but that's Arabic. But the Pakistanis know that's Urdu.", "اللہم علمنا ماں ینفعنا وانفعن بما علمتنا ازرنا علما", "that had had heart attacks. In fact, I took care of a lot of people with heart attacks and I saw people die from heart attacks in front of me. And something always really amazed me about seeing somebody that came into a hospital with a heart attack is that there was a type", "deep within their own souls to assess their situation, to assess there lives and to really think about what they were doing with their lives. And yet as they started getting better, and not all of them did but the ones that did, as they start getting better you could see that window close. And they were back on the phone and making plans to go back to work", "what had happened to them. And then you would have these physicians that would come in and tell him how their cardiac enzymes were down, and looking good, it was a mild heart attack, really nothing to worry about. You'll be back in the fray, in the rat race, they didn't use that word but that's really what it meant. You will be back", "like in those rat cages where they have that wheel that rats spin around on. You're not really going anywhere, the nearer you are to your destination, the more you slip sliding away like an American songwriter said and before long they were gone and who knows maybe a lot of them have died already", "We know that the heart is the most extraordinary organ in the entire body. We know, for instance now, that the hearts is pulsating at about 40 million times a year. In the human lifespan your heart will pulsate about 3 billion times. It takes about 40 gallons of blood an hour. You try to get some buckets", "get some buckets, get 40 gallons and move them from one room to another. And see how tired you are.\" And yet this extraordinary organ that Allah has put into the body continues to pump throughout our lives effortlessly not asking us for anything, not even asking us to tell it", "about the heart is now we know that the heart not only is itself regulating, it begins beating before there's a central nervous system. Who made the heart beat before there was a central nerves system? Who made to heartbeat? The one who created the heart made it beat and sustains its beat and then one day it stops beating", "leaves and goes to another realm. And during our life, Allah has challenged us. He called the hearts . And I say he called because I believe like many of the scholars although there's difference of opinion about it that the Arabic language is , that it was made by Allah for the Quran. That it's a language like one orientalist said", "orientalist said this is the most artificial language in existence. In other words, it's very clear that it wasn't a conventional language like English. English is really a creole that resulted from pidgin languages. Pidgin languages are when people from different original languages come together and they try to communicate with each other. So like West African came to...when they were brought here", "illegally brought against international law at that time, which was the law of the Muslims because they were the International Community. Now it's the Anglo-American Alliance when they say international community read English and Americans Because that it should be inter two nations community. That's what they should call it Right, they shouldn't called international community like it's a whole bunch of Nations together because it's not it's just the Americans and the British and Really there one people to anglo-saxons", "Anglo-Saxons and all the other white people are not really part of the Anglo- Saxon. They're not even accepted by them in this country. They used to have a word they use wasp, but I think that's one of the few words it's still not in the politically correct prohibited dictionary. There's a whole bunch of words that are prohibitive you could still say wasp right because there's a lot of people that have been victims", "And so they're not reluctant to put that in that dictionary. But the Wafs is a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and these were the people that came to this country from England. In fact, they were really like Khawarij in the Islamic history because the Khawaris were people, they didn't like the rulers, so they just broke off and did their own thing, and that's what the Americans did ultimately.", "and they're ruling the world, and they are not doing a very good job of it. And in fact, it's really from the absence of the Muslims from the quote-unquote international community. But anyway at that time it was illegal. In fact, international slave trade was outlawed in the 1820s. A lot of people don't know that but it continued by American slavers illegally even by their own laws.", "They were actually bringing people over from West Africa illegally by their own laws for several decades until it was finally stopped. Really, it's going to go into the 1880s because they were bringing slaves to the Caribbean area and also to South America. But when the slaves came over like in the West Africans in Gambia, Senegal or Senegambia", "over there and he'd say well okay that's how he respond and then that's what that they would say that to them then they understood that means okay they'd say okay and that became part of the language so English is a language that really resulted in a lot of different people's coming together and then their children from a pigeon language the children will create a creole language", "in the world are actually creole languages. In fact, Urdu is a Creole language. Right? Urdu mixed up of Sindhi and Persian and Arabic. Like in Urdu they say, What a musibah! And a musiba is an Arabic word. Where did they get that word from? They got it from the Arabs.", "their own things, right? This is what they say. Or they say like I would say, أُرْدُو نَهِي مَعْلُومْهَي Right? And معلوم means it's known but that's Arabic. But the Pakistani says no, that's Urdu because he doesn't know where it came from. Right?", "But it's not, it's from Arabic. Because Arabic is the first language, it is the mother tongue. It is the language of our mother Hawa and our father Adam . And their words are Arabic names. So this Arabic is not an arbitrary language, is not a conventional language, Is not a glutinated language just sticking things together. The word in Arabic for heart is qalb That's one of the words, the Arabs have a lot of words for heart", "One of the words is qalb. Now if you take that and switch the letters around, you get qabilah. And there's a science of the meanings of the word when you switch the letter around. Like you have a word like ilm which means action. If you switch them around you get amal which knowledge and then you get amar action because knowledge and action are related.", "and قَبْلَ before are also related. Because the heart knows something that it knew before it came into this realm. You see, the heart know أَلَسْتُ بِرَبِّكُمْ The heart knows the answer to that question. بَلًا شَهِدْنَا Indeed we testify to that truth. So every human heart that came into the world knew this truth, this spiritual truth. And then the human being is tasked in his life", "his life on earth. Because he tarries on the earth for a period of time, and he has to testify in truth from his heart that once again, he has testified just as he testified in the primordial world with Allah , He has to testify in this world before Allah in His unseen manifestation because Allah is manifesting Himself", "before we were in a realm in which Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala was dhahir and now he's ba'tin see, Allah subhaanhu wa taa'la has hidden himself from us by manifesting his attributes in creation and it is the human heart that has to recognize this and this is why the heart is the organ of cognition. It's not the brain you see the non-muslims would like to say that you think in your brain This what they would like", "is it that and people who study martial arts know this, that if you cut off the carotid artery for a short period of time, people lose consciousness. They lose consciousness why? Because you've cut off The source of consciousness which is the heart without the heart there is no consciousness. And its blood in fact, the blood which is carrying all the glucose", "by the human brain. And it's the heart that sending it there, so it is the heart, that is the source of human consciousness and now we're only beginning to study things like the atrial peptide this is a hormone now they didn't even know existed before another thing that the heart is telling the brain things is telling in the brain what you do this is very recent research in cardiology. You see they didn' t know that before so how much don't", "No, they don't even know how aspirin works. They don't you ask a doctor as your doctor? How does aspirin work? We haven't worked that out yet It's the most prescribed drug and He said we don't really know how that works And you can ask them a lot of questions if you want to stump a doctor That's an easy thing to do if you wanna stump You can stump any of them you seek and and really in the end of the day", "explain things how but if you ask them why that question will always stump them. If you just switch from how to why, you see for instance you asked them why does the heart beat? You see why does", "You see, diastolic-systolic. Why does it do that? It could have done other ways. There's lots of ways you can get the blood around the body without a beat. Why did Allah make it a beat? And then you ask, why did Allah made the breath expansion contraction? Because that's what embossed up. Allah is qabib and He's bossup.", "and the expander. And the heart is doing that every moment. You see, your heart is... If you listen to it, they call it lebedeb. Right? Lebedeb, right? They don't know what it's saying but if you listen closely, you can hear that... I mean, they say like meow in English. That's supposed to be the way a cat sounds. They say meow. Well, in Japanese, they don't say meow, they something else like kyaa", "So what is it? Meow or kia? Well, it's just the way they're hearing it. Alright, so they're trying to get an approximation but if you listen to the heart with a stethoscope and very closely, you will hear what it says. It says Allah, Allah, that's what it's saying. Contraction expansion", "name Allah. It's a contraction expansion that's what it is, that's the tongue is doing Allah, Allah,Allah, Allah that's was he's doing and this is what the heart is doing the hearts knows who its Lord is but the nafs has forgotten who its lord is and this because we become tainted with dunya we're in the world we've forgotten who our Lord is", "He sent messengers to remind us who our Lord is, so that we can return. So that we could return. Now if you ask how do we bring our Ibadah to life? The first recognition is that it's dead. That's the place where we start. The Ibadh is dead. You see in the Muslim world now, we are in the perfunctory mode. We went on to automatic pilot several hundred years ago.", "We invented it long before these people ever got it. Right? We just turned on automatic pilot and went into what's called ghafla or heedlessness. That's what the pilot does, once they get up in the air if you ever open that door you'll have a heart attack because they're snoring! They are lying back there and even go to sleep. People don't know that but it is true. Right?! They actually go to asleep on those planes, those pilots.", "And that's what happens with Muslims. You see, you can go into a mechanical mode, Allahu Akbar! and you can pray rakats and then like five minutes later, you'll start wondering, did I pray? Or how many rakats did I prayed? Why do we have so many intentions in Islam? It is an interesting thing about...", "The place of intention is in the heart.", "You've got to get the tape straight, right? So this is what people do. They go to sleep. And then there's a lot of people, they've gone to such a degree of sleep because there are different types of sleep. You have REM sleep, rapid eye movement. See, a lot if you learn REM sleep but there's other people that aren't even in REM sleep. The eyes aren't moving. There's no movement and so there's degrees of sleep when necessary", "وَالنَّاسُ نِيَامٌ People are asleep. That's Sayyidina Ali said that, and it's true. You just have to think about it. People are sleep. They asked Sayyida Ali, what is all of this? Creation. Somebody asked him once, What is creation? And he said, هَبَاءٌ لَا يُرَى إِلَّا حِينَ مَا یَقْعَ عَلَيْهِ النُّورُ اللَّهُ This is like the dust in the air that only becomes visible when the light of Allah strikes it.", "You see that was a man who knew Allah . What a more profound description of the atomic realm. You see all of these atoms like floating in this ethereal space that Allah has created and the only reason they're visible is because Allah is He illuminated the heavens and the earth", "that is capable of perceiving that in the most profound and deep ways. And this is why the heart is a gift from Allah, and you have to protect the gift. Look where he put it! He put it behind the sternum, the strongest thing in the body. He put...and then he put a rib cage around it. He didn't put like the genitals. The genital is right out there. Right? Seriously look! I mean a person doesn't have any protection there. That's why you want to down a man. They teach you,", "they teach you in martial arts go for the groin because there's no protection you see but the heart Allah put a protection there a powerful protection and then he gave it a pumping this oscillating power in which the blood is flowing in every single cell of the body in every pulse there is blood so the heart reaches", "made it an oscillator the heart is oscillating and if you know anything about oscillatory physics that's a big word that i learned recently so i'm using it if you not anything about oscilatory physics it's the study of entrainment how things in train with other things like people when they march they start to entrained naturally if you try to walk with somebody out of step", "soldiers naturally entrained. This results in amplification, which is even more frightening the famous bridge story that they teach every engineer in Germany when all these soldiers were marching across a bridge and they were", "And so the actual, the force of the wave activity was amplified exponentially because it was all together. You see and that's the power of being unified. When you're unified, you have power. And when you're disunited, you're weak. Now the heart also has a power. The heart literally entrains the body. The brain and the heart are entrained at the same 0.1 hertz. The mind and the brain are entraining.", "or entrained. There's an entrainment taking place. Now the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said that in the heart of the human being is a lump of flesh, if it is sound, the entire body is sound and if it corrupts, the whole body is corrupted. Why? Because the entire bodies are in entrainments with the heart and if the heart is diseased then the entrainement will be diseased, if the", "bring the heart back to life. The first thing is to recognize that the heart has died. Now, the heart dies for various reasons and there are spiritual death of the heart. One of the signs that the hard is dead is that people don't weep. That's a sign of the death of our another sign of", "then also that has a reality also. And this is part of our problem because we're all dead as well, so dead talking to dead. And then we go into this state where it really... It's a frightening situation and this is the problem with leadership you see when the leaders are sick they have now whales! When the leader gets sick and goes and commits suicide on the beach all the other whales follow it even though they're healthy", "Because that's what happened, and that's why leadership is such an amanah. And that's any intelligent person would not want leadership. Because if he destroys himself, he takes other people with him. And then he has the wrong actions of the other people as well. Because it's an amanh, it's a trust from Allah . So the first thing is to recognize the heart is dead, and then how do we bring the heart to life? The heart can be brought to life. One of the things that brings the heart", "Reading the Quran with reflection. And this is important, why? Because you have to know why things happen. Once you understand why Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has asked you to do these things. Understanding causes or engenders in the heart a desire to fulfill that thing because you're now using your intellect. And when the intellect is behind something it's not the same as when you're just following orders. When you actually believe something you have conviction", "then there's action. And when there's actions, there is change. You will change and things around you will change. So Jilawatul Quran with Tadabbur is one of the reasons that Allah brings the life to heart. Now if you look in the Quran, there are many things. Allah says, When you read the Quran do Isti'aada from Shaitaan.", "Shaitan's realm is the heart. He does not know what's in the heart, it's one of things Allah has veiled from him. Shaitaan does not your heart, he doesn't know what you're thinking so don't think that he does, he does not now what you are thinking but he has the ability to whisper in the hearth and the weaker the hearthe more powerful his whispering, the stronger the hear,t the decibels go down", "Screaming and it's not heard in that heart the heart of a powerful man like Imam al-Nawawi or Qadi Abu Bakr Or Imam Al Junaid who actually said he wanted to see Shaitan He asked Allah to show him Shaitaan and Shaita one day. He came to him He saw Shaitain and this occurred to many of the believers including Abu Hurairah radhiallahu anhu, who saw Shaiatan Abu hurairah And this is confirmed because Shaiton takes form Imam Al junaid saw shaitan in the form of old man", "you bow down? He wanted to understand that. Why didn't you bowed down to Allah? You were right there! And Allah told you to do something, you must be insane! Right? And Shaitan said, Ya Imam Junaid how could I bow down to other than Allah? That's what Shaitaan said. He said, How can I bow", "of somebody who has adab. Now shaitan is a liar, he's kathab and initially Imam Junaid was shocked by the answer because he thought about that like Sayyedina Ali refused to wipe out the name Rasulullah when he was asked to by the messenger of Allah. Sayyidina Abu Bakr refused to lead the prayer these are times when sahaba actually went against the messenger", "He was saying, you know to Ad-Duban how can I bow down to other than Allah? And then Imam Junaid said suddenly it came into his heart. He's a liar had he really loved Allah he would have obeyed Allah and Then when he said that you're a liar and he told him Shaytan fled Because that's a man with a big heart So Shaytaan has no power now Allah tells us", "إِنَّ لَهُ إِلْمَا لَيْسَ لَوْ سُلْطَانٌ He has no authority. عَلَى الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا On those who believe وَعَلٰ رَبِّهِمْ يَتَوَكَّلُونَ And they trust in their Lord, they have tawakkul ala Allah. Shaytan has no Authority over these people. Now look what Allah says. Before he says that, he says if you read the Quran seek refuge in Allah. استيعاذَ And then he said", "over those who believe and they trust in Allah. Now, why is he saying that before? Because he's saying if you believe and you trust in allah shaitan has no authority. But he tells us before that, trust in Allaah but tie your camel make istiaada say a'udhu billahi minash shaytan ar-rajim That's asbaab You're trusting in Allah but you are taking the means", "what Allah is telling us. He's telling us to trust in Allah, but tie your camel like the Messenger of Allah said. And so knowing that when we recite the Quran, we seek refuge in Allah from shaitan. Why? Because we don't want shaitaan to influence our understanding of the Quran and then Allah tells us if you believe in Allah", "You don't say, I'm just going to trust in Allah that I'll understand it. No, you study grammar, rhetoric, logic, tafsir, hadith, all of these things before you try to understand the Quran because that is tawakkul with asbab. We don't just say a tawakkal ala Allah like somebody come over to somebody's house they say, uh... I'm hungry and he said, you know, I am trusting in Allah, the food will come. No! You say get up and go out and yeah, I'am your guest, go and give me some food. Right?", "There are no angels that are going to come in and serve, unless there's a wife, angelic wife who puts up with husbands like that. But there's no angels in there, right? That are going do come and do that. You have to do things with usbab, the means. And the deen of Allah is a deen o f means. This why if you understand the reason we're doing these things, you will have success because it will encourage you. You'll begin to take... See if you understood for instance", "a glimpse of the unseen world, just for one moment. And suddenly you saw Sheatin on peoples right there. There's Sheatin walking around with people. If you could see that out there in Chicago, Cook County, 32,000 abused and neglected children under government authority here. In this county alone, 32 thousand neglected and abused children. Really, Cook", "Cook County, right? Children that throw other children off building tops in Cook County. If you could see the Shayateen in this city, you know what you'd be doing? You'd be saying, أعوذ بالله من الشيطان الرجيم أعود بالله everywhere you look, أَعُوذ بِاللَّهِ مِنْ الشیطانِ أعُدُ بِا اللّٰهِمِنَ الشیاطانِ رَجِيمٍ That's why you just go into a state where you would just be saying أَأُوْضُ بِّاللّٱهِ ۖ مِنت شَيْطًا رَشِيمًۭ The whole time!", "It's a mercy from Allah that you're not frightened. Right? Really, it's a Mercy but you have to be aware of His existence. You have to aware and then you take precautions. What are the precautions? قُلْ هُوَ اللَّهُ أَحَاذٌ اللَّـهُ الصَّمٰدُ لَمْ يَرِدْ وَلَم يُولَدْ ۖ وَنَمِكُلُ اُكْفُوا نَحٰذٍ You do that three times in the morning, three times on the evening. أعود بكلمات الله تام مات من شر ما خلق بسم الله الذي لا يضر مع اسمه شيء في الأرض ولا في السماعة والسلام العليم", "And do all of those adhkar every morning and every evening. You do them, why? Because you want the hizr of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. You want to be in the protection of Allah. If the best of creation did those, and he had protection, there were angels surrounding him, mighty cohorts, warriors around him that if anybody threatened him from the insu, the jinn like the one Arabi who came up", "And he found him sleeping under a tree. And he said, who will protect you now? He said, Allah. And the man dropped his sword and started shaking. And Mazhar ibn Abdullah put it up. And He said who's gonna protect you? He couldn't say Allah. He said go ahead kill me. Right that's an Arabi. You know they were tough people. But he said go head kill me The Mazhar of Allah didn't kill him. He became a Muslim. But the point is that man wanted to kill Him. And HE couldn't. Why? Because Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala", "gave him Isma. He protected him. When he came out the night when Sayyidina Ali took his place, he came up all of the strongest youth of Quraysh, the people of Futuwah, the People of Chivalry from the Qurays, each one of them from each clan had a sword waiting to kill the messenger of Allah . He came out... This is what he said", "If you recite the Quran, we will put a veil between you and those who don't believe in the Akhirah. And he was completely veiled. He was the invisible man. He came out, they could not see him. They couldn't see him, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. And this is, he was doing these things. Why? Because his heart was aware. His heart didn't deny, it did not lie in what it saw of the Haqq, of the truth.", "of the truth. His heart was awake, it was living. The angels when they came, they found him asleep and they said his eyes sleep but his heart doesn't sleep. The messenger of Allah's heart never slept. It was always in the divine presence of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And that's why if you came and you were with Him then you were immersed in that divine presence. And thats why people when they're around them they couldn't do anything but remember Allah. When they left the messenger of allah one of them came to the messenger", "of Allah and he said, Ya Rasulullah when we're with you we remember Allah. And it's as if we can see the Akhirah in front of us. And then we go home and we get with our families and our work and all these things and we forget. Why do we do that? And the Messenger of Allah sallallahu alayhi wa sallam He is rahmatil lil'alameen. He said to him that this is a time for this and a time", "There was a sheikh there, Sayyidi Abu Sa'id. InshaAllah he's protected. I don't know what happened to him. But he was one of my teachers. And I was in a hall with all these people and there were several people on the other end of the room. And they gave some dessert and I was eating the dessert and using my left hand because that is habitual for a left handed person. And then I looked over and saw him and he looked at me and then he looked down at my hand.", "hand, I changed hands. Now whenever I put my fork or spoon or anything in my left hand, i see his face! That happens to me. I'm not making this up. I see His face whenever I do that and I remember. And that's a gift from a teacher who has spiritual authority. That's a give and that's the blessing of being in the company of these people. You see, the time that I spent with", "they call shahidun ghaybun present and absent at the same time because he all he does is remember Allah all he", "When he put his clothes on, he remembered Allah. When he tied his turban, he remember Allah. when he went out to the marketplace, he remebered Allah.", "When he went into battle, he remembered Allah. During the battle, He remembered Allah Hunain was his day All of the battles were his days But he defeated the Hawazim and all these great Arab tribes He defeated them single-handedly Then all the Muslims were fleeing Even the best of them He stayed firm And then they came back and they routed them And this is because he was in a state of remembrance of Allah", "you do once you've seen Jibril? You look out every time you see the horizon, that's what you'll see. If you had the chance to see Jibrill fill the entire horizon, go out and look at the horizon and imagine seeing the angel of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala fill the entire horizon! What are you gonna do after that? What are going to do? Are you ever going to forget Allah subhahnawata'ala? Are", "It's not possible. And this is why the more that we struggle against our souls, the more light that comes in and Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala causes inshiraah to the breast. Why? Because the heart's growing it needs more room. It needs more round because the heart is getting bigger and the bigger the heart gets, the greater power the person has against the forces of evil. And when the heart powerful then other people begin to entrain with that heart like the clocks that tick", "to entrain with the sway of that clock. And so when the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was present, all of the Sahaba were entrained with his divine heart because his heart was beating for Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. His breasts were breathing for Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la. His movements were moving for Allah SWT. And So When this was happening, everybody was in that state, all Of The Sahabah and the day he died , caused such a trauma in those people", "before they would come back to their senses. That's how powerful his absence only in the physical realm was. And this is what the power of Islam is, it's the power for human heart. This is what a power of Islams is, It began with the hearts. Allah revealed this to the messenger of Allahs heart and it was transmitted to the hearts and has been passed on by the hearts, and if the hearts don't wake up, they're going to wake up when they die. When your heart stop beating", "stop beating it will wake up and then it's too late so we have to do something don't just come here and then go back to your homes and nothing's changed make commitment how many people are willing to stop in training with the television because when you watch television you're getting these cathode rays beaming out to you and you're in training", "and you go like this, and they can't see anything because they're completely in a state of magic. A magical spell has been placed on them. And their hearts begin to entrain with that. And they are getting all these ideas put into their minds. People have to be willing to do these things for the sake of Allah. How many people are going to commit to praying on time from this day forward? To getting up before the dawn not at dawn. We have to get into a state where we can call on Allah", "answer us because we're in a state now, we call on Allah and it's just like this hadith that Imam Zaid read. This is our state how is Allah gonna answer us? Look at this Turkey the 45 seconds look at the buildings completely destroyed and then all those mosques and somebody said to me it's a miracle. It's not a miracle! Those people knew how to build they weren't cheaters when they made a contract with the government to build a mosque", "and his messenger's standard, the standard of Ihsan and its Khan. And now these crooks and criminals that build cement buildings that the slightest shaking can knock them down. If it was an earthquake on 4.0 they would have all come tumbling down. There is earthquakes of that magnitude in western countries and you don't see the buildings falling apart. Why? Because they built them up to code and standard. And so the tribulation is from our own selves because we cheat and we lie. Who's going to become a person", "a person of Ihsan and Itzqan, of these people. And then all of those people really... Look at that! It's a metaphor for this time. Those buildings that were built on taqwa, they remained and they go on. And all those other buildings built on ghafla and greed and avarice and enmity and animosity for humanity because no person with a human heart could do that. And the difference between those who remember Allah and those who forget Allah is the difference", "And so you're going to choose each one of you, whether you're willing to be one of the living or one of dead. Each one of will make that choice in your life, whether choose to be on of the livin' or one o' the dead. But we are people who worship Al-Hayu al Qayyum, the living who goes on and by his life were given life." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/How to purify your soul - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_6YsY1pW-e_I&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743309204.opus", "text": [ "Quran said, qadaf lahaman zakkaha. You'll have success if you purify your soul. Tazkiya, how do I purify my soul? Prayer, zakat. And then he gives examples of illa being used as a wow in the Arabic language. Or, I'll give you another example. Wala taqoolu li shay'in. In the rasam al-Uthmani it doesn't say shay', it says shy'.", "So it literally would mean don't say to any willer, I'm going to do that tomorrow. You know? Shay. It has an alif there from the Rasul of Uthman. Many examples like that in the Quran. The fa'a in Arabic. There's fa'asabbiya. Like for instance kun fayakun. Normally a sabbabiya would come after an amar. But that fa is not a sabbabiya.", "It's a fa taqib. So it says, And there's a whole metaphysical understanding of why that fa is not a sababiyya. I'm just giving you really simple examples of the religion takes a long time to learn. I mean, I literally... I am definitely still a student of Arabic. Like,", "very complicated. Kinaaya, just istiaara. Majaz is very sophisticated. There's all these different types of majaz in figurative language. Majazz al-mursal which is a big problem with certain people in Aqidah not understanding majazz and mursal. Right? So that's one major reason but the other reason", "that the Qurun al-Mufaddara were the first three centuries, and that these were the Salaf. And the best Madhhab is the Madhhb of the Salah. And they were using Usul Al-Fiqh. We know that. And so if Malik was using Usual Fiqh, if Imam Shafi'i was... Who are we in our arrogance to think we can bypass their methodology and go directly to the Book of the Sunnah when they didn't go directly into the book of the sunnah without the filter of Usul fiqh?", "But this is what they call jahal murakab. The Catholics call it innocent and arrogant ignorance. Muslims called it simple and compounded ignorance, but the result's the same whether you call it innocence or arrogant or simple or compound. Simple ignorance all of you and inshallah myself, all of us we're simply ignorant because we'll admit our ignorance like I want to know", "And so I'm amenable to learning because I'll say, I don't know. If I don' t know something hopefully I'll be able to say it. The first thing Marab Tarhaj taught me literally one of the very first things that he taught was La Adri is half of knowledge and he said whoever says I don''t know he's given fatwa Imam Malik was asked 40 questions by an Iraqi", "38 of them, he said I don't know. The Iraqi when he finished he said what do I tell the people of Iraq? They asked me to go to you to figure out these things that what I'm going to go back and what do i tell him? He said tell him you went to Malik and he said he doesn't know right? You know they say whoever doesn't like to say La Adri, he's going to be afflicted with mortal wounds so just simple ignorance", "Simple ignorance is a blessing. It's not a good state to stay in, but it's a blessing to be in. It' called the beginner's mind and Zen. They say that greatest learners are people who maintain a beginners mind because beginners are always cautious. Once you get good at something, you tend to become second nature whereas the beginner he's always cautious, alert, awake. And so that's very important but Jahan Murakab is a real problem in our community", "compounded ignorance, not knowing that we don't know. Or we think we know... Our tradition adhere to what they call the correspondence theory of knowledge which is That's a definition of knowledge. So knowledge is what corresponds with reality. If it doesn't correspond with reality then you're either in waham", "There are different things that you can be in. But jahl marakab is one of those, where you think you know something and you don't know it. And our knowledge is... There are certain knowledges that are just... You either know them or you don' t. Grammar? You either no it or you dont. There's seven marfuat. You either kno them or don't. There was 14 mansubaat. It actually goes up to over 20. But the basic ones. There're three majorura generally.", "You either know them or you don't know them. You either no sarp, or you dont know sarp. You're either know that it's a like It's either Hasiba yahsibu right? You either Know that or you Don't know or its hasiba yahsebu both are correct Right I used to when I first started translating for Sheikh Abdullah because I love sarp my first start translating for him I would hear him say", "a word, like a verb or something. And I knew it differently and I thought it was a lahan because most ulama make lahan. The more you say alhanu min qari he makes more grammatical mistakes than someone reading a book. Because Arabic is so hard. It's really hard. You know, I'm not going to... It's sahal mumtana'a. It''s easy impossible. But grammar is...", "is harder than grammar. Grammar is actually not that bad, but is really hard in Arabic because it just takes a long time to learn all these different forms. But I used to think why do you say that? Then I go back to the dictionary and look at them find that it was another way of that it correct. And then all the years I've tried, I never heard him say . Amazing! I stopped looking now I consider him better than the dictionary like because dictionaries make mistakes.", "I told him once that my father and I got into a debate about a word. So, I went and got the dictionary. I showed him the dictionary and he said, do you think I'll concede to that? That's just Webster. So I told Sheikh Abdullah that and he says, congratulations to your father because not all the meanings are in dictionaries right?", "Anyway. And then all the different meanings of the words, there's just so many meaning like means back right? I mean that's generally connotation, denotation but also means road", "or all those are the same ways of saying that among, you know in their midst. I'm in their myths but it's is a place of two roads right? So means your admit there's , right? so you're there in the middle of it all anyway. So let me and so any other questions?", "You can have comments too if you feel compelled, but just make it very short. As-salamu alaykum. So I'm understanding that from the last few classes we've attended and this one too, I think is solidifying that a healthy way of understanding revelation or the moral code that is revealed to us in the Quran is to go through a marhab. However,", "I wanted to ask, like for someone who you know obviously for myself I should speak. I go to the Quran and I try to read a verse or two a day that kind of thing. And I got to it for understanding and coolness from my heart. However, I don't have access to a teacher per se. To be quite honest most people didn't even know about the four madhabs until they got", "for the real. So of course, the access of teaching would be online or you know, the local masjid, you don't even know who that teachers are the masjids what matter have they? You know, they fall into that sort of thing so what I'm trying to ask is what is your advice on how one who would want to approach", "What kind of approach one should have? To the Quran for understanding. Without taking it out on others. That's a very valid point you're making. There are two ways to read the Quran. One is devotional, simply to read it as an act of ibadah.", "the world have been doing this for centuries. Like, if you want to see... If you go to a lot of mosques where people understand the language generally of the Quran, they do eight rakats and very often very short and then they leave in Ramadan. If you", "That's one way of reading the Qur'an, just what's called taabud. Just devotional. يتعبد بالقرآن The Qur'ān أَفْرَيَّ تَدبِّرُونَ الْقُرْانِ أَمْ عَلَىٰ قُرُوبٍ أَكْثَارُهَا Don't they think deeply about this Qur'aan? Don't They ponder the Qurʾān? So the Qurāṋ was revealed to be pondered clearly Then we get to the tools of understanding the Qur-ān and", "and I'm just speaking traditionally, what many people did was they learned basic Islam and they practiced it. And then they read devotional books and Sira. Sira was very popular in the Muslim Ummah. In Mauritania, the women are famous for memorizing long poems of the Prophet's life. They're not scholars.", "They're just people that love the Prophet and they teach their children these poems. So there's a devotional component that's very powerful. Now, for somebody who's educated like yourself, who has an intellect, you want more because that's not satisfying for everybody. Some people are very content with that level. Not everybody is intellectual and not everyone was meant to be intellectual. Some of the best people I've ever met are very simple people.", "that I would take over some of the most educated people, I've met any day of the week. And I have no contempt for people, that are uneducated at all. I really try not to... You know, I'd been fortunate, I had been privileged, to have a relatively good education. I had a good education before I became Muslim. I went to some really good schools, private schools. I was fortunate because there were trust funds to do that from my grandfather.", "And then I studied with incredible scholars in the Emirates. I was really fortunate at a young age to be able to go with a full scholarship to the United Arab Emirates and study with some of the best scholars in UMA at that time. It's very fortunate. That's pure privilege. Like, what did I do to deserve that? I wasn't born in Sri Lanka in an impoverished family.", "We have privileged some of you over others as a test.", "going to look on contempt and think you're superior when in fact if you look at it, they say if you find a turtle on a fence the one thing you know he didn't get there by himself right? And that's the truth for all of us. Wherever we are we did not get here on our own. And so you have to be grateful. You have to see it as a tribulation from Allah. How are you going", "It's a privilege to have wealth. It's privileged. Why does Allah always ask us to give our wealth? Because wealth is a test and Allah is saying, are you passing the test or not? He only asked 2.5. Anything you give above that, gravy, just getting closer to Allah but he wants at least 2. 5 don't stand him on that. Right? So it's very important", "It's very important that you nurture your intellect and help it to grow. And the best way to do that, I mean look we have a lot of tools that we did not have in the past. I'm not a big proponent of online learning but for motivated people it's an option. People have learned Tajweed online, it's pretty amazing right? You can learn Arabic", "I mean, there's incredible resources to do that. In terms of reading the Quran, I would argue as long as you go to it very humbly and recognize that you cannot legislate from the Quran other than morally. And there are things in the Quran... You speak well to speak beautifully to people. We can all read that and benefit from that, right? The Quran says...", "You know, return a wrong with a right. We can all benefit from that. The Quran said, you'll have success if you purify your soul. How do I purify my soul? Prayer, fasting, the company of righteous people that remind me, show me my faults. So all those things are beneficial.", "good thing to read the Quran, even in translation. I think it's a beneficial thing. It's dangerous in that there are many times, even to this day still, where I've read the Koran and I thought I understood something and then I go to Tafsir and realize I didn't get it right. And I have a reasonably good level of Arabic. And", "in Arabic, a lot of time in dictionaries. I'm in a dictionary every single day. My wife's here and will testify to that when I look up words all the time in Arabic so but still there are things in the Quran I'm always finding that just subhanAllah even certain surahs that I read everyday it's amazing I'll just see something I never saw before", "And the great, there's not very many really good tafsirs to be honest with you. Most of them just repeat what previous Mufassirun said because they're scared. I'm telling you the truth. The ulama were really afraid of the Quran. It's like who am I to say what God means? So they'll just say Qala Tabari, Qala Al-Qurtubi. That's literally what they do. If you have Tabari and Qurtub", "and Qurtubi, you pretty much have all the tafsirs. Because they just... It's like the commentators of a hadith. They all go back to the same commentators. They're all quoted by the same sources because very few people wanted that. They were just very careful about saying... Because you're saying this is what God means. That's a big claim. And that's why", "wrote tafsir. There's a million books on tajweed. Everybody wrote a book on tajuweed. There are so many books on Tajweed I can't believe you go to the suq and there is a new book on Tajweeed, I'm like amazed. And I'm always hoping maybe they found some amazing way to teach it. You open up it's all the same stuff. There 17 points of articulation, there's... here's all of madud. It's all", "Never anything new. So if you have a new way of teaching tajweed, by all means write a book on tajweed but if it's going to be the same thing don't save yourself. But there are exceptions. Fakhurddin al-Razi is an exception. He definitely had some new things that nobody said before about the Quran. Also", "Al-Bursawi, you know some of the great Sufi commentators had some really interesting insights. Ibn Juzay al-Kalbi talked about a Sulamese book that he called al-Haqa'iq, The Realities. He did a short tafsir of the Quran and Ibn Juza said some people call it al-bawatil, the vanities instead of the realities. And he said but if we're fair we'll say", "It has some realities and it has some vanities. But tafsir is a very rich study, alhamdulillah. Did that help a little bit? My apology.", "إن الإنسان الذي خسر إلا الذين آمنوا وعملوا صارحات وتواصلوا بالعقل وتوصلوا بصبر سبحان ربك رب العزة عما يصفون والسلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Islam_s view on POLITICS- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_suLgAkT7p_4&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743298969.opus", "text": [ "I mean, our religion is not... it doesn't have a political party. There's no political party, you know? Muslims in America can't say Islam is democratic or republican. It's not. It-it's its own thing and politics is always going to be a divisive thing which is why traditionally ulama tended to stay out of politics because whenever you get into politics people get split on politics so a lot", "so a lot of the ulama just they didn't really have political opinions in that way they just wanted to remind people teach people keep people connected with their lord it doesn't mean they don't and there are ulama that do and and they're ulama worked with governments and there's ulima that stayed away from governments those were all if you look at the history of islam", "uh you know who work in these governments but in the end of the day those are the governments that the muslims have and if scholars if there aren't scholars there to to teach the people if it all just becomes tear it all down then when is when is there going to be any peace for people when is", "don't think about these things. So, these are all issues of where people decide. Even I was saying the other day, I was reading something about how Islam you have to be in a group and you can't. The Prophet said towards the latter days, if they want, they could just check out completely. That's a right of people to do that. They can just check", "to the mountains and they just fulfill their own personal right with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. But the Prophet said, The better is to stay. خيركم من خالط الناس وصبر أذهم The best of you are those who mix with people and are patient with their difficulties because being with people it's not always easy. Everybody has the uncle they don't want over for the iftar but he comes anyway because it's family and that's just part of life. Maybe" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Look at AFGHANISTAN now - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_b41mP48_F7I&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742883746.opus", "text": [ "Because first of all, one of the conditions of the caliph is that they have to be able to defend the Muslim lands. And I'm sorry, these guys are living in a fantasy world. They're literally... They live in fantasy land. One atomic bomb. That's all it will take. And zealots always, you know, well, God's going to give us victory. It's not the way it works, people.", "Allah has sunan. The Prophet ﷺ was not suicidal. When he saw that the odds were not favored for him, then he didn't do it and that's why the Quran, originally it was 20 to 1, right? That's the original parity. Allah said no I know that you're weak so it's 2 to 1 at least don't flee when", "don't flee when it's two to one. So Islam is a religion of sunan, we don't believe in... I read a book when I was very young called Ayatul Rahman Fi Jihad Al Afghan and this book really spread in the Muslim world and it was all about these miracles of the jihad in Afghanistan. Look at Afghanistan now, 30 years ago, where are they?", "Where are they? I'd like to see them. These ayat al-Rahman. And look at Afghanistan now, you know. So Muslims have to be serious about this stuff and think deeply about it. There are big problems in the community. Abu Hamid says, that avoiding the positions of khilaf is important", "of khilaf is important in war'a, fi haq al-mufti wal muqallid. In both the mufti and the one imitating them.", "من الخلاف إلى الإجماع من الورع المذكور. So if somebody is a مقلد and he gives a fatwa that is different from what his imam has said, then getting out of the خلاف and going to the إجماعة is from this ورع, from this scrupulousness. So you should avoid in giving fatwas,", "give what is the dominant opinion or the ijma' and not go against. Imam Nawawi said that the people of knowledge are in agreement, that one should avoid, it should attempt to get out of any khilaf as long as it doesn't lead", "following the Sunnah. And that's called the Murat al-Khilaaf in Usul, which is if the Imam... For instance, if Imam Shafi says you should do the Basmala and he argues that it's part of Fatiha then because normally a Maliki would follow that Muratan al Khilaf but because he's leaving a Sunna", "his madhub, then he doesn't do it. So that's what he means. You should usually follow the khilaf but if it is going to affect a sunnah in your madhab or doing something makroov because quriyat al basmala The basmela is makroo in the maliki madhab so you don't do something to get out of khilaff if it means doing something maqroo or leaving a sunna in your own madhhab If it doesn't, then its good. For instance", "with women who are menstruating and recitation of the Quran. There's a khilaf about that, the Maliki is though permitted and it's not really to follow the Malik position in that because the rukhas are to get out of ibadah so you're trying to get into ibadat and so if a woman says I'm gonna take that position then", "then that's her prerogative. Because she's not doing it to avoid ibadah or to make something easier, she's doing because she wants to do more ibadat and if she finds an imam that facilitates that for her and it's a valid position agreed upon, then that is an example. Or she can follow her madhab that says that she shouldn't read the Quran when she's menstruating. But for some women, that's 10 days out of the month which", "is a third of her lifetime. It's a lot of time, and some women really need to recite the Quran just for their own well-being. So anyway, those are khilaf issues. We respect all the imams about this.", "Wow. Imam Malik, that he used to do a long sujood and a long ruku' in his prayer. And if he stood, he was like a dry piece of wood. Like he was just so straight. Nothing moved from him.", "And in the Maliki madhab, to move around is qidl al-khushu'a. Khushu is stillness. And this is why what's called idhhar al-khushu'a, you know, the Malikis consider they consider like to be like that, idhhrar al-kushu', that's makru'. So like show... You're actually supposed to look relaxed but the khushu' is in your...", "that you don't move. That's the khushu'ah. It's actually not doing that. Like a lot of people do that. Do that. That is actually makruh in the madhab. I am not making fun of anybody, but yeah, thank you. That it's makru to do that, to show... In the maliki madhab, I don't know what the... So he said, anybody that does something for the sake of Allah, he should do really well.", "So he said, look at how these people were. Malik, look how serious he was in his religion and what the ulama agreed upon avoiding these differences of opinion", "of opinion and guarding the breast with God, and preferring difficult things on the self. And recognizing that the best state to be in is if death came to you, you wouldn't want to be any other state.", "So he's saying, as to make some general blanket statement about that this is the only way. He said it's... That's wrong. The nisba is i'adhafiya and he said especially for somebody who's not in this maqam to say that it becomes a hujja against him if that's not his maqaam. And then he says that", "Look at what the ulama have said in the ayah that I opened this book with, that there's three groups. So ibn Abd al-Barr, one of the great scholars of Andalusia, said...", "ومن الرسالة رويم من جملة المشايخ مقرئا فقيها قال", "من حكم الحاكم that a judge should make things easy for his brothers, the mufti in ahkam but he should be hard on himself because making things easy this is اتباع العلم and making things hard on the self is ورع it's scrupulousness وسيتي إن المرء لا يأخذ على أهله بورع", "ومن فقد هذه العلامات كذبا في دعوة المحبة", "other than the atheist with the eye of mercy. And if somebody loses these signs, he's a liar in love because the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam loved people and also I would put it because there is a hadith that Prophet SallaAllahu alaihi wasallam said", "لَا تُؤْمِنُونَ حَتَّى تَرَحَمُوا You know, you won't truly believe until you have mercy with one another. لَاتُؤمِنا حَدَّ تَ رَحْمُو And one of the sahabahs said, كُلُّنَا رَهِيمٌ يَا الرَّسُولَ اللَّهِ All of us are merciful, O Messenger of Allah. He said, لَيْسَتْ رَخْمَةُ أَحَّدِكُمْ لِصَاحِبِهِ وَلَكِنَّهَا", "It's not the mercy that you have to your brother. It's universal mercy. That's in the Musnad. So, the Prophet was a Rahmah for everybody. He even looked at disbelievers with Rahmaha. And so that's important to remember. And then he goes into the Masarat of Istilqa which is an interesting", "because of a hadith. And then he mentions about the dancing, the people of Habesha and... He has very nice story here that I wanted to share with you. He says, he talks about like that Ibn Rushdan said", "لا يمكنك استخدام رؤية ترى في حلم. عندما يكون لديها ألف مقصورة، فهي رؤيت. وذلك لا يستطيع استخداف رؤياً للحكم الشرعي. ولكن إمام شاطبي دعم بعض الأشياء", "So Imam Shatibi relates a story that a group went to Umar ibn al-Khattab.", "من نفسي قال فإنه بلغني أنك إذا صليت تغنيت قال نعم يا أمر المؤمنين قال أتتمجن في عبادتك؟ قال لا يا أمير المؤменين ولكنها عظة أعيد بها نفسى؟ قال عمر فقلها وإن كان كلام حسنا قدته معك وإذ كان قبيحا لهيتك عنه فأنشد أبيات منها نفس لا كنت ولا كان الهوى راقب المولى", "So he said that he heard an imam that used to sing after he prayed. They came to Omar complaining about this imam. This guy prays and then he starts singing.", "And he comes and he says, I heard something really bother me about you. I heard every time you pray, you sing. He said, well first he said, no, no tell me what it is and I'll help you with preventing me. And he said you pray and then you sing, he said indeed I do that. And are you being shameless in your worship? And then he said no, it's just I'd like to remind myself. It's like a wow!", "So Omar said, let's hear it. If it's good, I'll say it with you and if it's not, I'm going to tell you not to do it. So he sang some lines and from them, this is Inshad, and he said, Oh soul, you didn't exist nor did my Hawa exist so beware of your Lord and fear him and be in awe. It's like you're here now but there was a point when you weren't here so have some awareness", "When Omar heard that, he said the same thing. And then he said, those who wish to sing, let him sing things like this. So he says, So look at Omar saying, I've heard something about you that's bothered me and are you being shameless in your worship?", "This is like the worst kind of inkar that you can make on somebody, what Omar said to him.", "He said, look at how he condemns him. But then when he hears that this is something that was wisdom and he was using it to exhort himself, and then he agreed with it, and even more than that, he sang it with him. So he says, this is the way the people were. They didn't just... It wasn't just poetry.", "wasn't just poetry that they used to exhort themselves. They exhorted themselves with anything that was beneficial to them. Also the prayer after the sarawat, Omar radiallahu anhu,", "Al-Sa'ud is the first dynasty in our history that has kept the Prophet's mosque open 24 hours. Because they used to always close it after Isha, from the Sunnah of Umar. So he would close it.", "So he's talking about dua as a group, you know, because some people reject that and say it's a bid'ah and things like that. Right? He's saying look at these people. Anything that was good they supported it like that and this is why he says after this", "So he's talking about the dua after the prayer. Because the reality of a dua is something that kills the sunnah or leads to killing the sunna. But things that are good, like making dua and things, are not. Okay, so can you please mention the three remaining hadith mentioned by Abu Daud?", "He mentioned, is one of them. The hadith from Omar . It's the first hadith that Imam Muslim begins his book with and Imam No'awi he begins his books with it. So everybody has their actions are by their intentions", "intentions, and he said Zerubimun has what they intended. Whoever makes hijrah for Allah and his messenger, his hijrah is for Allah in his messenger. And if he makes hijra for some dunya to attain it or a woman to marry her, his migration is to what he made that migration to. And then the second one was this one. From the good of a man", "It's from Anas and it's a hadith that Imam Nawawi also has in the 40 Hadith. And then, the third one is, . That he is pleased for his brother what he's pleased for himself. The Rewa'ah that Imam Nowawi relates in the forty Hadiths", "It's Abu Huraira, I think relates that and it's the 12th Hadith. I'm pretty sure in the Noe's collection. And then the last one is . So the halal is clear and the haram is clear. And between them are doubtful matters and they're murky and not everybody, not very many people know those matters.", "فمن اتقى الشبهات فقد استبرأ لدينه وعرضه", "And if you fall into the shubhat, then you're going to fall into haram. Like a ra'i, somebody who's like a shepherd, he yarta hawl al-hima. He's grazing his sheep around a sanctuary. Ala li kulli malikan hima alaa inna hima Allah maharimuhu Every king has a sanctuary and the sanctuary of Allah are the things he's prohibited. Ala wa inna fil jasdi madgha iza salahat salahal jasdu kulluhu", "And isn't there in the breasts of the human a lump of flesh? If it's sound, the whole body is sound. And if it's corrupt, the entire body is corrupt. Isn't at the heart? So those are the four hadiths that Abu Dawud said sufficed a person in their religion. Any other questions?", "No other questions? You know, I mean the agreed upon abrogations are about the woman stays in her home until she dies. And then the divorce,", "The abrogated, the idea that the abrogate all of these areas of . It's very difficult to swallow that. And the proof I think", "I think that their is that there's no . There should be no in the Quran. We can differ about what the Quran means, but if you have about whether a is , you should go that it's applicable and those hadiths that they consider abrogated are really abrogate for the government not for individuals", "So the government doesn't forgive for wrongs that occur to citizens. Whereas a person can forgive the wrongs done to them.", "of just doing too much. So my apologies for not, I would really like to spend more time with people but I'm actually physically very, very exhausted and I don't even like to teach in this state because my brain doesn't function as well as it does when I'm rested so I'm worried about recalling things and forgetting things.", "Anyway, I just you know, I, I know everybody's. I'm happy to just be here with you all but my sincere apologies for not being more social. Yeah. So my time is up." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Surah Baqarah explained - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_w2tRppwWSJM&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742891049.opus", "text": [ "Alif, laam, meem. And then you have what's called the maddal lazim alharfi here so the mujawidoon have a mnemonic that they give which is kam asal naqas how much of the asal has diminished So those are the kaf , the meem, the ayin, the seen, the laam The noon, the qaf and the sad", "Qaf and the Saad. So those all have the Med, which is Sit Harakat. So when you recite the Huruf al-Muqatta'at, the ones Hay Tahir, those have just the normal Med but these have six so Alif has the normal med, Alif Lam Meem. And what do they mean? Well", "What do they mean? Well, what's interesting about the حروف المقطعات I mean to me, what fascinates me and I haven't seen this in the tafsir but all of the مفسرون are in agreement that they mean something. What they mean is they say الله أعلم Some of them, and ibn Abbas is one of them said that there actually letters that indicate words So for instance the Arabs in Jahiliyyah The Arabs, one of things that", "Ashur says in his Tahrir wa Tanweer, which is a great tafsir. One of the things he says in there is that he said the Arabs were known for their intelligence. They're very brilliant people and they had an incredible gift with words. And one of the thing's that they did was they would speak with letters. So for instance, and they give the example...and this is from Az-Zajjaj, the great grammarian. He says it's not farfetched", "The Arabs would say things like So I said to her, stop. So she said qaf which means waqaftu so she used a letter to say a word. So some of them say like Alif Lam Mim is And some say it's Allah Jibreel", "is for muhammad these are all you'll find them in the uh to come the commentaries um ibn arabi and uh if ashore mentions this even arab actually says that their names of angels and so when you say them the angels respond because they want to hear the quran recited so it's like calling angelic presence because the prophet said him said that the angels want to here the qur'an and they", "The angels look at the earth and they see places where dhikr is being made. Those are like stars for them, and then they'll go to those places. So the Muqatta'at are very important. They've put...the people have attempted to see how many of the Muquatta'ats, how many sentences you could get from them, And there's only a few but one of them that has all the MuQatta'a't is", "This is an absolute text from God that is wise and there's a secret in it. So, that contains all of the Muqatta'at. There are 14 letters in the Muquatta'ats. They show up in 29 surahs. Now what's interesting about that is it's half of the Arabic letters and yet the number of suras they're in is the number", "It's almost as if when the Quran is coming into language, because we have to remember that the eternal Quran, that when we talk about al-Quran al-qadim and I'm only using this as a ta'lim because generally the ulama say this should not be said unless you're teaching. When we say the Quran", "It is not the letters or the mushaf that we have here. It's the eternal meanings and it's as if here you have these letters are taking form as they come into meaning And one of the things, I'll talk about this inshallah when Allah says", "There's a qira'ah of Ibn Kathir, it says tarqa Adama. So Adam is maf'ulun bihi, it's actually the object of that. Min rabbihi karimatun. And so the karimat is the marfu' because in that case it's acutally the fa'il. So it's saying and the power of this is that meaning is there are two things happening in meaning.", "there's meaning that you are perceiving so what that those two karats indicate is that meaning is not limited to a perspectival approach in other words it's not subjective this is the whole modern philosophical madness that everything is just in your head that there's nothing", "indicating in its two qira'at is that there is a relational, there is relation between meaning which is real and between the one who is decoding the meaning who is also real. And it's Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala that's facilitating that through this extraordinary bringing these two things together which is this world that He has created", "and then the human being which is divinely created in order to recognize all of the attributes and the names of Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala, and see Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la's creation as this incredible epiphany of divine reality that Allah is revealing Himself to His creation through the alam, through the world. The alam in Arabic is called Ismu Alaa", "It's the noun of instrument. So, the world is an instrument to know God. That's why it's from the root alima which is to know. So the world by means Allah is enabling us to know Him and so it comes into language and language according to many of our ulama is taqifiyah when Allah said that He taught Adam the names", "in us the ability to articulate reality and that our articulation of it, if its true it corresponds with reality. If it's false, it doesn't. And so this is the book, it begins, Alif Lam Mim Dhalikam Kitab and then the book comes, the meanings come to us. That book, La Raib Fi Sih", "And this is the beauty of this, this is nature of the Waqoof. And one of the most amazing things about the Qur'an to me, the Waquof are Ijtihadiyya So there are some Waqoof that you can't stop on by consensus but many of the waqoof There are different ways that you", "And so there's this inexhaustible potential for meaning in the Book of Allah. And this is why Arabic was so important to be the vehicle for this last message because Arabic is uniquely positioned amongst the languages to contain all of these possibilities and that's why it's inexhausted. Muslims will always find new meanings in the book of Allah somebody asked Ibn Omar what was the best way to understand the Quran? He said time", "said time it's just time is going to reveal all of the miracles of this book and so in it is guidance for the conscientious but one of the things I want to just say about the Muqatta'at before we go on, and this is really amazing. The people of Tajweed are going to appreciate this and if you don't get it don't worry", "So Ibn Ashur quotes the Kashaf, which is the great book by the famous Mu'taziri scholar Zamakhshari. It's a book that all of our great scholars recognize as being an exemplary book despite having some problems in some of the tafsir but it was later basically rewritten for the Sunni tradition by Imam al-Bayadawi.", "and rewrote it for, so more students learn from Imam al-Bayadawi's commentary than they did. But the Kashaf is a really important book because it's a rhetorical analysis of the Qur'an but he says here in the Kashf They're called Awaira Sur and they are also called Fawatih Sur And Abu Bakr said that", "Quran fawati husoor. Every book has a secret and the secret of the Quran is these opening letters of the huruf al-hijab so he says min asmaa al-huruf huwa nusfu assami huruf almu'ajam So it's half of the names of these huruf that we have, these letters idhiya arba'ta ashara so there's 14 that are found in the huraf al-muqatta'ah", "And then he says, And they're in 29 chapters based on the number of the letters in totality. So all of the meanings, these inexhaustible meanings of the Quran are in 29 letters. Half of those letters are in", "29 surahs. Now, here's where it gets really interesting so he says that those 14 contain half of all of the attributes of the huruf. So all of attributes of hruf are there in those 14 but only half of them. So what that means is...so like for instance you have محموسة نصفها الصاد والكاف والهاء والسين والعصا والمحل", "So that's half of the mahmusa. So, the mahamusa letters these are the attributes of the Hamsa. So then he says", "Right? So there's, that's the Qutb Jedd.", "that you have there, So he says they're all mentioned. The ones that aren't there are throughout the entire Quran and he said glory be to the one whose wisdom is so refined", "So that's something really unusual about those, because I just can't imagine somebody would have ever worked that satin and worked all of that out. But it's... This is called , you know? It's like the salt but it's very fascinating. One of the things that some of the Arifeen said", "the people, the closer you get to Allah. In fact Ibn Ashur says something really beautiful he says that Allah has the oceans of knowledge and the prophets are the valleys and the scholars are the rivers and so Allah gives from his oceans of", "So the water comes and then the Prophets give to the ulama, al-ulamā warathatu anbiyyat. So they inherit from the Prohpets from the valleys of water not the oceans because they can't contain the oceans. They can't", "for the common people, they give just enough for them to get their sustenance. So each group is getting a different amount of water, the amount that they can take without drowning.", "There's a lot of khilafat about the ghayb, but it's definitely what... It's not material. So now that we can see things with electron microscopy for instance We don't consider that ghaybi even though it's la yubsaru It's seen with the eye. The ghaybe is something immaterial according to our ulama", "that this is all of the infaqat that Allah has obliged us to do and those that he's encouraged us as well because believers give a sadaqatu burhan like charity is a proof of faith. And so it's also like what you should, a husband supporting his family is also from this.", "So those who believe in what was revealed to you, which is the Quran and what came before you all The previous dispensations. And with the afterlife they have certainty comes out of Istidla and this is why Allah is not it's not one of his attributes He's not the one Allah doesn't have because Yaqeen is It's something that you gain through", "through experimentation and istidlal, you get yaqeen. Like they say, you know, you, you got burnt by the fire, you have yaqen that the fire burns. So it's not one of the names of Allah for that reason. And that's why we're told to worship Allah until the yaqin comes to us which is death because that's the ultimate absolute certainty of the afterlife is once you're dead everybody's going", "the atheists are gonna, it's going to be a tough day for people that rejected the truth. But they had their chance and they had there choice. Alhamdulillah And then Allah talks about those who disbelieve. So as for the ungrateful, and this is a good translation that Dr. Kool is using because", "means to be ungrateful. So he put there together, as for the ungrateful who refuse? So he's really getting both meanings of the word because when you just say refuse or disbelieve, you're losing that essential meaning of what disbelief is about. It's about ingratitude to the one who created you. Muhammad Ali used", "is the rent that you pay to God for the space you occupy in this world. But service to others is one way of serving God, but service to God and service to other is the rate that we pay.\" So I would just add that addition, but it's a beautiful statement by the great Muslim boxer. And Shaykh Abdullah bin Bayyah said he was a people's theologian Muhammad Ali because", "Allah gives him a lot of inspiration.", "not believe you can show them everything. Khatam is to seal over something like a khatam on a letter and the khatm is this stamp that used to seal something. And there's an over their hearing, and there's a covering over their eyes. So for them it's a great torment", "that amazing statement that Leopold Weiss, Muhammad Asad wrote in his book about just seeing the hell people are in. What's interesting about this is amongst humanity are those who say we believe in Allah and the last day. What really fascinating is if you look at the verses", "It took four verses to describe the believers, two verses to described the disbelievers and 13 verses to describes the hypocrites. So it's very interesting, the hypocritics are a very complicated creature because the inward and outward are disparate they're not the same. And everybody has some degrees with the exception of", "the Anbiya and the Siddiqoon, everybody has a degree of hypocrisy. If you think you're free of hypocrisies, you are definitely a hypocrite. And I didn't say that, that was Hassan al-Basri. He said whoever feels free of hypocricy it's a sign he is a hypocrit. So if Sayyidina Omar could go to Hudhaifa ibn Yaman and say I swear to God you have to tell me am I one of the hypocrites that the Prophet told you about?", "That's Omar ibn al-Khattab. He was worried about being considered a hypocrite, and that's partly because invariably we play different roles, and we have inner lives and outer lives, and sometimes they're not always congruous. So people... But if it's kabair, then you're dealing with real hypocrites. And so there's complete hypocrites,", "The munafiq khalis, a complete hypocrite. When he speaks, he lies. When makes promises, he breaks them. If he gets in an argument, he starts using foul language. These are all signs.", "person, they're just complete hypocrites. So we have to work on that all of us in our own selves and do that. So what they do, يُخَادِعُونَ اللَّهَةَ Now مُخْدَعَةً مُفَعَّلَةٍ in the Arabic language is to attempt something. يُحَادِّعُنَ اللّٰهَا وَالَّذِينَ أَمْرُوا They attempt to fool God so they try to fool", "But they do not succeed in deceiving anybody but themselves. Now what's interesting, there's Imam Warsh in his qira'ah, it's وَمَا يُخَادِعُونَ إِلَّا أَنفُسٌ So they only are really attempting to deceive themselves.", "that they're actually doing this for good reasons and things like that. So there's a real self-deception here, and in the end, self- deception is exactly that. You're only deceiving yourself. In other words if you really, really were honest with yourself, you would see the self deception. Yeah so there's this kind of schizophrenic attitude.", "Lasharon is really a beautiful word. The Arabs in modern Arabic use for the subconscious when they translate Freudian psychology, they'll call it the lasharor. You know, it's under the shur. It's what you're not sensing. Shaara means to feel and shaar is poetry because the poet is somebody who feels more than other people. He has higher sensibilities. His sensibilities are heightened. Shaar is hair", "is hair because it's a very subtle thing to touch when you touch the hair and also because it spreads out so sheen has is harf tafashi, so anything with sheen in it tends to spread out. Shajara shijar like mushagera. Shems radiates ashi'a like rays there's a whole bunch of words that have", "that letter in it. لَعِلْمُ الْحُرُوفِ So they only succeed in fooling themselves. فِي قُلُوبِهِم مَّرَضًا In their hearts is disease, marad. فِّي قِلُبِهَم مّارَضٍ Marad here is shubuhat and shahawat. They have the marad of shubohat which is doubts in their understanding. They don't have any certainty about anything.", "They oscillate. When they're with the believers, they're will the believers. When go back to their shayateen, they are with their shayaateen. So they're sick people. This is Allah allows them to get sicker. And they have a painful torment. They're tormented in their own beings because of what they were", "what they were because of the lies that they tell to themselves and to others. So, they're lying to themselves, and they're like to others, This is really I think one of the most amazing qualities that you see in these people if you say to them don't make trouble he uses make trouble so corruption", "the commentators of Quran said, the first proof that they're مفسدون is they claim to be مصلحون. Because a true person who's doing good, they never claim they're doing good. They just do it. So the fact that they are saying we're مصليخون, that's a proof that their مفسيدون. What does the Prophet say? ما أريد إلا الإصلاح I only want إصلاع", "He doesn't say, I'm muslih. He says, I want islah. Which is very different from saying you're a muslihh because it's not a claim. قَالُوا إِنَّمَا نَحْنُ مُصْلِحٌ Because in the end Allah is the one who decides. إِذْنَ أُيَّكُمْ لَعَلَىٰ هُدًى أَوْ فِي الْضَرَاءَ لَمُب۪ينَ Either I or you are on guidance or astray. The Prophet was told to say that to the disbelievers even though we're certain that he was on guidance. He was told", "knows who's guided. One of us is guided. It's, it's a right? Making opposite claims. One the claims has to be true. It either reigning or not reigning. God exists or he doesn't exist. The prophet says I see him as a prophet or he's not a prophet. One has to", "They have aman That's why it's called iman Because they've entered into this state of security For those who reject We have to wait Let's all wait, we'll see Let's just wait Allah says wait, let's see So nobody should just hurry Hurry this thing up We don't want to hasten Just let it take its course", "See who's true and who's not true. We're going to, يَوْمُ قِيَامًا We believe it's real. If somebody doesn't believe it' s real that's their prerogative. Allah has given them that prerogaive. Allah out of His generosity to his creation has given him free will. They can either accept his gifts with gratitude or accept his gift with ingratitude. It's one or the other but they are all getting the gifts of Allah", "is participation in being. The fact that we exist, that Allah has enabled us to come into the world and participate in this extraordinary epiphany, this extraordinary theophany of divine attributes. I mean it's just incredible. So... And then... See there it's like a subconscious thing they're doing this ifsad", "sad and they really don't, they're not even aware of it. They're fooling themselves. And this is the people that all these do-gooders that go out and do these horrible things. I mean somebody said to me you know was they were like talking about helping the women of Afghanistan here and I just my you know I felt like you know", "You know, it's just... I think they've had enough. People need to be left alone to sort their problems out in this poor situation in Pakistan. So many hopes were put on because people live in that incredible corruption and it's horrible. And many of the best and brightest of that country live now in America for one reason. Because there is rule of law and they could actually flourish here.", "Many of them would much rather be in their own culture, amongst their own family. But it was unbearable for many people. It's just unbearably to be in those situations and so opportunities arise for them to have a better life for their children. Hijrah is a very natural thing to want to do to better your situation but it's like in the Reluctant Fundamentalist when he tells his classroom", "You know in America they have this thing called the American dream. What's the Pakistani dream? To get a green card to America It's you know so somebody shows up and people can say whatever they want people see all these things I personally I Have Hassan Al-Bun The he appeared to me to be a man who lived a very big life Made at Toba to Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala and wanted do something", "and wanted to do something for his country, and was trying to do soemthing. And actually invited us to be part of that in his Rahm al-Alamin and the Qadir University. I mean he was trying t odo something but it's like Sultan Abd Al Hamid, and I'm not comparing the two, but Sultan Abd al Hamid He was a lone figure amidst all this corruption. How much could one person do?", "If you don't have the people around you, He gave you victory with those believers. Look at the people of the Prophet . Look how difficult it was in the early portion when he didn't have protectors. I mean it was very difficult for him his own people were being persecuted. When Omar came and Hamza came", "for those people because they didn't, now they had some people that were going to let other people know that if you mess with these people there's consequences. People need protectors so there's all these people who have their hopes and we should just be praying for these people because it's just really difficult. Life on earth is very, very difficult as it is. When things are going well", "There's difficulties. Everybody has their sorrows, everybody has their tribulations, everybody had their troubles. There is nobody that's free of any of these things. So when in addition to your own personal troubles you're society outside is collapsing it's a mess the level of stress of humm that brings on and the only people who are free", "because they really are in the hub. They're just in that space. The Prophet, I mean, look at Abu Bakr when they're going on the hijrah and Abu Bakar's he keeps looking back and he's got all that and then when he's in the cave he's like terrified you know because he cared about the man who he was with and he wanted to protect him but the prophet the entire time just look at the prophet", "he had no concerns because he was completely inner focused on Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala. So, he wasn't in the... And Abu Bakr has an immense maqam and it would have been appropriate for him to have those feelings, for him not be concerned about his beloved prophet. It would've been inappropriate for him in that maqama so I'm not diminishing his maqaam in any way but my point is that the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam just was not worried", "worried. He did not have those concerns. What he worried about, interestingly enough was us going astray. That was his concern. He worried about non-Muslims not hearing His message. He worries about Muslims falling into the dunya. Those are things that troubled the Prophet and he prayed for us. And then when it said to them", "So when they say to them, believe as the people believe. They say shall we believe as imbeciles believe? Like Sufaha, Safih is like an idiot, a stupid person. Somebody that can't take care of himself. Shall we believe like idiots? And this idea that religion's a crutch,", "Strong people don't need religion. They just stand up on their own, yeah until they get multiple sclerosis. Until they're incapacitated and they need people around them to take care of them. I mean we are constantly in need. We're in need in every instant. Our hearts could stop at any instant. I had a dear friend who literally just collapsed the other day", "multiple surgeries and metal plates put into his head. He was a perfectly healthy person, a mountain climber, young relatively young man really strong but he collapsed and he said it was like a great wake-up call for him even though he's already a devout Muslim but he was like I felt like God was really sending me a huge message I need to change my life I need", "instead of getting angry and why are you doing this to me? Because there's all these people, that's their attitude. Why are you do this to Me? Allah, there is no why for Allah. He's not asked about what he does. He is not asked but you will be asked. They will be ask about what they're doing.", "And when they encounter those who believe, they say we believe. But when they are alone with their obsessions and that's very interesting. You know it's to be alone. One of the things that Dr. Cleary really he had a great knowledge", "and wrote many books on meditation, and on the mind. So he really understood the nature of obsessions obsessive-compulsive thoughts of these type of things that these can really wreak havoc on people. And so Shayateen are like obsessions there's this constant waswasa that goes on", "So, we're with you. We're just mocking them. The mustahzeeen all had terrible outcomes. This does not mean that God... Allah does not do istihza in this way. This is a type of rhetorical device", "in which it's saying that they're going to get what they're doing. So, and amplifying their outrages as they wander astray. They are the ones who have bartered guidance for error", "guidance for error. They gave up their guidance for this . This is a beautiful expression that the Prophet used when Suhaib al-Romi made his famous hijrah and Suhaab, they wouldn't let him leave because he had been... He's called a Romi. There's a khilaf about what his actual lineage was but he grew up amongst the Byzantines", "although he had Arab lineage. But they said, you came to us as a foreigner and you became wealthy here. We're not going to let you leave without your wealth. So he gave up all. He just said, You can have it all. I just want to go be with the Prophet ﷺ. So when he got to Medina, without telling the Prophet what he did because the angel told the Prophet", "up all of his dunya for akhira and these people do the very opposite of that. They are like, what they are like is one who lit a fire and when it illumined everything around God took their light", "So one of the things about life is that people do have insights and they do have periods. Winston Churchill famously said, everybody stumbles onto the truth at least once in their life and the vast majority of people simply get up brush themselves off and carry on. And I think that he was really talking about himself because apparently there was an article", "correspondence between family members, he actually considered becoming Muslim at one time. And he was convinced by his family that it would destroy his political career if he did. And that was published in the Guardian magazine you can look that up so... But people do make dunyui choices like choosing to become a Muslim is choosing right now and in our current", "So although some people seem to be happy to do that as well but it's Nobody said it was going to be easy and Allah promises With the hardship ease so there's great difficulties In becoming Muslim at a time when the Muslim world is so beleaguered, and the Muslims don't look particularly", "like they're flourishing as a community, I think inshallah there's a greater reward than when they're successful. Because a lot of people want to become Americans or Europeans because of their success. I once met a Muslim who actually left Islam and became a Mormon. And I asked him why he did that amazing. And he said he looked to the most successful community and he just wanted to be successful. He actually came back to Islam, thank goodness. But he literally told me he became a", "He became a Mormon because he wanted to be successful. So success with Allah or success with mammon, you choose. It doesn't mean they're mutually exclusive. One of the reasons Abdurrahman ibn Auf, the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam entering paradise crawling was because he was so engaged in the world even though it was for other worldly means but", "as a merchant. So there's no reason why you can't be a successful merchant and a Muslim, in fact the Prophet was the most successful merchant so it's good to be successful in your worldly endeavors but if you're not then it's either... There are couple different possibilities one, you're following the proper sunan of success which is very often... Dr. Cleary told me once that there's a year", "in China where the Buddhists call it the year that grace descended because Buddhism suddenly had this incredible expansion during that year. And he said, it was actually the year", "that work at the top levels, like Google or Facebook. But then they're on the mosque board and they run the board. It's like they're not using any of the skill sets that they learn in this other place, just basic managerial skillsets of how to run things well, how to get things done properly. These are all things that Muslims should be foremost at because", "and you can oh Allah loves a servant should he do a thing he does it with excellence in allah yahoo but I've been more terrific a lot of love as a servant if terapia in modern era because professionalism so a modern translation that could be a lot loves a professional service a servant who does things with with excellence with with her foot with craft with skill a skilled servant", "deaf, dumb and blind. They will not get back. Deaf, dumb, and blind is very interesting. I mean there are people that suffer these grave tribulations in the world and part of their meaning obviously I would never limit that but part of", "There are people that don't have hearing. In fact, Dr. Cleary was deaf in one ear and he is partially deaf. And it's very difficult to be partially deaf or deaf in the world. Many young people now are losing their hearing because they blast these headphones and earphones so they don't know the preciousness of hearing. It's a great gift to be able to hear. And then dumb, not being able to speak. All of us have been struck dumb at one time in our lives.", "our lives. I mean everybody's had that point where they literally were speechless, were unable to speak but there are people who can't speak ever and if their lucky they sign. There was an amazing man at Tuwimarat where I studied with Marabat al-Hajj he was deaf", "and dumb but he was not blind. He could speak somewhat, but he could read lips. He learned how to read lips I don't know how he did that. He's a very unusual person. But all the people around Marat al-Tarhaj you saw things there that just were very unusual. And then blind, to be blind is a great tribulation", "that Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala generally when he takes away some things, He enhances with other things. So blind people are very often... Many of our greatest ulama were blind in fact Al-Azhar had a special place for the handicaps because handicap people unlike in traditional Western culture where they were literally relegated to uselessness In the Muslim world they were often given special training", "training, so they had special ed. And in fact Shaykh Abdullah Al Qadi actually did a study of all the handicapped ulama and he was amazed at how many there were handicapped Ulama. So but Allah is using this as an analogy for people it's as if they have ears but they don't hear, they have tongues but they", "And they have eyes, but they don't see. So they don' hear the truth, they don speak the truth and they don see the truth. And this is the famous... The monkey from India. You know which is a beautiful meaning. Like people take it the opposite of what it actually means. It's that we should hear no evil, speak no evil and see no evil. That that's a type of purity in people so Alhamdulillah I think", "Yeah, I think we have a few more minutes. Or like a rain cloud. I think he has a really nice... He's got it really interesting.", "Yeah, so he says the manifestation here just before this. He says about the obsessions.", "satanic rebellion against God manifests as arrogance, ingratitude and possessive obsession with things of the world. Another name for the devil comes from the root waswasa which has the meaning of whispering or suggestion referring to obsession as the epitome of the satanic characteristic and the activity. This particular verse depicts fools who publicly declare their faith in God yet privately declare", "or anything else that may preoccupy their mind. The very levity with which hypocrites and fools treat their religion as a profession without a reality lets them go all the further both in the outrages committed openly under the guise of piety, and those committed covertly on the prompting of private obsessions. Outrageous here means to transgress, exceed proper bounds, wander. And then he talks about the light", "the unreliable light of artificial knowledge, of which false religion is one variety. God took their light in the sense that falsehood does not stand in the presence of reality. Subjective projections do not remain intact in the face of objective truth. Finite man-made thought fails to apprehend the infinite in itself. They will not go back. They", "fabrications so then about this verse here like a rain cloud from the sky in it darkness thunder and lightning they put their fingers in their ears the manifestation of religion includes mystery warning enlightenment and nourishment these are symbolized by darkness thunder lightning and rain the ungrateful are mostly concerned with ignoring the warning for fear that", "is that reality encompasses them and judges them whether or not they're consciously attentive of this fact. And then he says,", "Although this process seems uncertain and erratic, at least humanity has a chance to use its God-given faculties to recognize revelation and live in its light. It is not the same as if we had no sense at all.\" Blind, deaf, and dumb. Alhamdulillah. Did the Prophet explain the letters adif lam mim at all? I mean, had he, we wouldn't have anything to say about what he said.", "said, the Prophet , so much of the Qur'an, his life is commentary. The Prophet did not comment on very much of Qur'aan because had he done that nobody could interpret it after him. Had he told us oh it means this then who would dare say that it meant something else?" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Your Pain Has a Purpose - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_Wotvkegwjag&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748534543.opus", "text": [ "What Allah says is to remember. يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ عَمْلُوا اذْكُرُوا نَعْمَتِي عَلَيْكَمُ Remember my blessings. وَإِن تَعُدُوا النِّعْمةَ اللَّهِ لَا تَحْصُوهَةً If you begin to reflect on the blessings of Allah, you can't enumerate them. And so when you reflect on a blessing instead of the tribulations then it puts you in a state of gratitude and this is why patience is really a means to gratitude because the highest maqam is gratitude", "in tribulation. And that was the maqam of the greats, and that's the maquam of Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. أَوَّرًا أَكُونْ عَبْدًا شَكورًا Shouldn't I be permanently grateful? Always grateful. شَکور means they're always grateful. وَقَلِينٌ مِّنْ عِبَادِيَ الشَّكور Few of my servants are always grateful, right? And Iblis, what does he say? He says you'll find most of them aren't grateful.", "So Iblis knows that the way to get people away from God is to make them ingrates. And what does kufar really mean? It means ingratitude. And so when you're always complaining, then you're in a state of ingratitute and Ibliss is happy and your Lord is not honored", "Because everything that he's giving you is a gift. The illness that he gives us, is a give. If we didn't bring it on ourselves... I mean some illnesses... One of the sad things about a lot of people is they eat horribly and like people who eat sugar all the time and then they get diabetes and they say, Oh Allah has abtalani sukkah. Allah has tried me with sukkur. No! You gave yourself diabetes because you didn't watch your diet", "or you get really fat and overweight, and you get type 2 diabetes. You shouldn't have been eating so much. Or you're always eating all these trans fats, and then the doctor tells you that your arteries are all blocked up. And then you say, why are you blaming that on God? But if you do everything right, and", "Or you have parents that had genetic dispositions and you inherited those. That's a tribulation from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. The best thing to do is be patient or see it as the gift that it is because everything that Allah gives us, there's the gift is there. It's hidden. And the more grateful we become, the easier it is to recognize those gifts.", "The faraj comes with the difficulty. And that's why Sahaba preferred to be in tribulation because they knew that the ease was coming. But when they were in ease, they knew the tribulation was coming because that's the nature of the world. I was on this plane talking to this Moroccan and we were just talking about what's happening in the world and she said,", "the vicissitudes of time, what they call . He was in that hub. And so the tribulations when they come you have to see them for what they are. Ibn Atayla says That is intense need. So whenever you're in intense need he said these are the carpets of divine gifts.", "They're the spread of defined gifts. Like they're spread out for you, all these intense times of need are gifts from Allah for you. That's what they are. And so that's the thing is to see the gift because it's hidden very often. You have to... It comes wrapped in tribulation.", "So you have to unwrap it and see what the gift is. It's not the tribulation, the tribulations are just the box that the gift comes in. And then he says... He said the dark night has those lights, the suruj are lights, they're stars. So the dark nights have those lights. They have those... You can see that", "that it's not all dark, it's no all doom and gloom. If it was people would commit suicide in large numbers but people always have that hope. حَتَّى يَغْشَهُ أَبُو السُّرَجِ Until the sun comes out. The Sun is called Abu Suraj It's the possessor of all the lights because when the sun come out all those other lights disappear And so the calamity is there But the calamities will come to an end", "And so one of the things of the Sunan is that there's what is called تَدَرَّج في كشف المحنة. That the tribulation comes, it will be removed in stages. It's not always removed immediately. When you have a... One of the", "stage is important. There's people that have, like if they get a cut and then they get the scab, they want to pull the scabs off but the scabb is necessary for the wound because there's it's granulating underneath that scab. There are new flesh that's coming so if you pull it off you're going to scar it. You're not allowing the natural process of healing. You are trying", "And that's one of the things that... But it can be used for a lot of things. That if you try to hasten something that's not meant to come yet, then you're deprived of that very thing that you're trying to haste in. The example they always give in the books of Usul is...", "you don't get the inheritance. You know, just... You have to wait. There's people that are waiting for the inheritance but you can't hasten it. If you do then you're deprived of it. The same is true for like this coup was an attempt to hasten something that will naturally happen. No government lasts forever. No ruler lasts forever everybody has to die", "but you don't have the permission to try to hasten something. This is one of the things that happened in the Muslim world with the revolts against a lot of these rulers, and I know there's difference of opinion about that, but the dominant Sunni tradition is... And people get very angry when you say that now because they're Marxists. There are only Marxist Muslims out there. But it's just Marxism.", "of the modern political ideologies in the Muslim world came from. If you know history and you know Marxism, then you'll see where they came from there are Marxist ideas that were introduced into the Islamic discourse and that happens. There's a lot of Greek ideas that came into the islamic discourse some of them were good some of more negative. Marxism is not all evil there was some very positive aspects to Marxism it wouldn't have caught on like", "But there were other aspects of it. The end justifies the means that people don't count what counts as is the goal and then people are reified, there's this idea something called humanity that doesn't exist. Humanity is aggregate of individuals and if you think people are pawns in your game that we can eliminate all these people for some greater good, you can kill 5,000 Iraqi children", "acceptable, like Madeleine Albright when she was asked do you think that's an acceptable price to pay for to achieve your goals? Yes we do. And and that's how they calculate things like collateral damage which is collateral damage is a nice way of saying innocent people got killed That's what it is so they take into consideration if we bomb this place we're probably going to kill 10,000 civilians", "billions. Is that worth the objective? They say yes. Sharia says no, you can't kill innocent people for some greater good because the end doesn't justify the means. The means have to be consistent with the end. If it's a noble end, it has to have noble means and now that's a very different world but it's so it's an old world and it's", "just had a different concept of, and you can read the Iliad to see that. The Iliads they were horrified by it even though there are very horrible things in there and they have different concepts of morality but they definitely had an idea that warriors should fight on battlefields and fight in noble ways." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Sexual life of a Muslim - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_C7K0ICWO-Ds&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW3SBwkJvQCDtaTen9Q%3D_1742881516.opus", "text": [ "Appetite is a mutual pleasure and both the husband and wife are entitled to that. And I mentioned that traditionally in Sharia it's considered a man's right at any time, and the reasons for that have to do with men being more prone to being overcome by their appetite. The Prophet said that a woman actually has more appetite than", "than a man, but the modesty is so intense in a woman that it protects her. Whereas the man doesn't have the haya component as strong in him and so it can become more dangerous for him. And then a woman generally it's once every four days and if that is not fulfilled then it can be grounds for divorce. I mentioned also I think that if a woman complains to judge about lack of sexual intimacy", "intimacy, then he can command the man to sleep with his wife. And this is not considered... Ibn Arabi said it is not lack of modesty that a woman makes that demand. It should not be considered because it's praiseworthy for her to want to protect her virtue and that that is a right. And so it's one of the maqasid or the goals of marriage. And for that reason that she is not to be seen as an impious", "the Prophet said don't go to women like a camel goes to a she-camel and then he also said send a messenger which is what is termed in modern jargon is called foreplay and they asked him what that was and he said kissing and sweet words so that was part of his teaching was", "His teaching was that women should be treated in that way. And Ibn Abbas said that he liked to adorn himself, أحب أن تزين لزوجتي كما أحبة أن تتزين لي I like to become ornamented for my wife in the same way I like her to do that for me which means wearing perfume, cleaning the mouth, taking care of oneself all of those are important and they're the sunnah of both men and women", "And then they should wear good clothes. They should take care of their hygiene, which includes cutting nails, keeping them clean for a woman, things like braiding her hair using hanna, hair coloring, removal of body hair. And then for both man and woman, obviously removal of the underarm and of the pubic hair on a regular basis. And according to the sunnah it should be done at least every 40 days.", "People are different on that, but it's a Sunnah and it's neglected Sunnah by some people. But Muslims should do that. And then disrobing, it's actually encouraged to disrobe. There's some other traditions where they're actually in the Orthodox tradition and some other religions, the woman is supposed to be a sheet with a hole in it and things like that.", "I mean Muslims don't have any of that, that's another religion so there is nothing wrong with that. And then Aisha said that the Prophet ﷺ he used to suck my tongue and that's related in a sound hadith and actually in traditional Chinese medicine it's considered an actual healthful thing", "partners to actually, there's an exchange of fluid and it's considered to be a beneficial thing. And then it's encouraged before that act that they pray two raka'ah and seek refuge from shaitan. Allahumma jannibna shaitaan wa janniba shaitana ma razaqtuna You know keep us away from shaytan and keep shaitanan away from what you have provided for us", "if it happens to occur. And then also, especially for newlyweds a man has to be sensitive to a wife's natural modesty and shyness and take time because usually these are new things. I think one of the problems with the modern age is because of films people have seen things that in normal societies, healthy societies none of those would be issues whereas", "In modern society, people have already seen more than they should. One of the things that my 10-year-old was at a library and he came up to me and said there was some little girl over there that was really bothering him. She kept staring at him. He didn't understand it at all. The thing about it is traditionally little girls didn't do things like that until they got into puberty", "and older. And even then, most girls would be too shy and modest whereas now the whole culture is teaching them to be immodest, to do things like that so these are really bad signs for a culture or society. In terms of pleasure, the entire body both male and female is permissible to derive pleasure from and give pleasure to with the exception of the rectal area.", "The Prophet ﷺ prohibited anal intercourse. And so that's something and he actually said some strong things about that, just about what type of people do that and things like that. So the next right is mutual inheritance. So shared rights are the right of inheritance between the spouses based on Quranic portions. Allah says,", "if she leave no child, and if they leave a child then to you the fourth of that which they leave after payment of legacies. They may have bequeathed or debt, and to them belongs a fourth of what you leave if you have no child. And if you do have a child, then an eighth of that would you leave after any legacy.\" And part of the reason for the disparity is that when children are there, the children have a legal responsibility to take care of the mother. So it's important that male in all the inheritance laws", "inheritance laws, then understanding has never been that a man gets more because he's better or something like that. Nobody has ever said that in the history of Islam. It's actually seen purely in economical terms. A man's responsibility is more than a woman's and there are few situations in inheritance laws where women will get more than the male relatives but generally", "And the point is always understood to be that the obligations are greater upon the man, to other people. Whereas a woman her wealth is discretionary" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Don_t humiliate yourself - Shaykh hamza yusuf__1748543764.opus", "text": [ "قال النبي صلى الله عليه وسلم لنا لا تضع نفسك في حالات. قال في الحديث المؤمن لا يذل نفسه", "That he puts himself in a situation of tribulation that he's not able to withstand So so he's warning us about that" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/People get bored quickly - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf__1743057223.opus", "text": [ "What benefits people remains in the earth. But people want new things and so they get bored very quickly, what the Arabs call malal. You know, they get board. And Allah says... The Prophet told us that Allah does not weary of giving you reward until you're weary of doing whatever you are doing that's good." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Ash-Shifa of Qadi _Iyad -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _ham__1743060738.opus", "text": [ "This is the Shifa of Qadha'iyyat. This was one of the most important books in the history of Islam It was written by a great Andalusian North African Moroccan scholar, Qadhiayyab They said If it wasn't for the shifa you wouldn't have known the Prophet So many Moroccans they used to carry this book. They would read this book with the Quran In their kashkool", "and they would carry this, the Layl al-Khairat and the Qur'an. When anybody got sick, they read this book with niyatu shifa. This is an amazing book! It's a beautiful book. It's one of the most beautiful things that anybody has ever written." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Everything is from Allah - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _sha__1742885620.opus", "text": [ "So again it's really important to remember that this is not, we have bifocals spiritually. We have biphocular vision. We Sharia and we have Haqiqah And our deen has always understood that distinction between those two so that's really importan to remember. So we assert causation, we don't deny it but we also recognize that it's Allah in the end" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Moinudheen Chisti Ajmeer - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _ajm__1748521045.opus", "text": [ "is remind people of how beautiful the world is because it is stunningly beautiful. And I've said before that we give ovations for great human accomplishment and when you look around you at this world that God has created, God certainly deserves a standing ovation at least five times a day. If the sunset only showed up once a year everybody would go out to watch it and yet he gives it to us every single day. One of the greatest saints of our history", "and many of you are probably, at least some of you, are probably Muslim because of his work. There was a great saint named Mu'inuddin Shisti, and he was an Indian saint. And the last talk that he gave to his students, he said to his student as he was departing the world, love all and hate none. Mere talk of peace will avail you not. Mare talk of God and religion will not take you far.", "you far bring out all the latent powers of your being and reveal the full magnificence of your immortal self be overflowing with peace and joy and scatter them wherever you go wherever you are be a blazing fire of truth be a beauteous blossom", "With your spiritual light, dispel the darkness of ignorance. Dissolve the clouds of discord and war, and spread goodwill, peace, and harmony among the people. Never seek any help, charity or favors from anybody except God. Do not go to the courts of kings but never refuse to bless and help the needy and poor, the widow and orphan if they come to your door.", "This is your mission to serve the people. Carry it out dutifully and courageously so that I as your teacher will not be ashamed of any shortcomings on your part before Almighty God and our blessed predecessors in this Silsila on the Day of Judgment. Alhamdulillah" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/nothing comes from nothing sheikh hamza yusuf _sho__1743303456.opus", "text": [ "The joke about the biologists that meet God and God asks them what they're up to. And they said, well we've gotten rid of you. And God asked the biologist how did you get rid of me? They said, Well, we can explain how we got here without you. He said, How would you do that? He said first we take some cosmic dust. And god says no wait a second, get your own dust. You see because where did it all start? Where did we", "Where did we come from? Even if evolution explained how we have evolved as a species, it doesn't explain where the original material came from. Man cannot bring anything into existence from nothing. He makes organs from already existing cells. The cloning comes from already-existing cells. He's now in stem cell research and doing all of these things. Everything that he makes has pre-existing materials. We cannot make anything out of...out of uh..nothing!" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Purpose of Wudu in Islam - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _ham__1748527233.opus", "text": [ "We have wudhu, which a beautiful translation of that is lustrations because it's something that brightens you. And so we wash before we pray, we wash our face, our hands up to the elbows and then our feet and then we wipe our heads. And that's just to prepare ourselves to enter into the divine presence.", "It's like putting everything behind you, the whole world behind you and you're coming into the presence of God." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/We are stuck in a Trench - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _isl__1742877505.opus", "text": [ "There's a couple of things that really recently came to me. One of them, I met a South Asian man who was, I think probably having some doubts about just religion and many people are and we have to have compassion for these people because when you look at the world as it is, it's very difficult to see. We're in the khandaq", "Syria and the palaces of Persia. They just stuck in the hand up" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Why muslims are the best - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _sha__1742893159.opus", "text": [ "The Prophet prohibited us from doing. And this is why even in traditionally, in war you don't go into a situation where you're going to lose. Right? The Muslims... In fact there's a British historian of military history who argued that the reason the Muslims were so effective is because fleeing the battlefield was not shameful if the odds were against them." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/How corporates fools you - Sheikh Hamza Yusuf_YcK7497CaMw&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742887322.opus", "text": [ "There's a position in fiqh that you have to have, when you buy and sell, you actually have to say there has to be a sira between the one selling and the one buying. So you have see I want to buy this and you say I'll sell it to you for this, I accept. And that was a position if you go now to a self-serve right? You can't apply that. If you go to a Self-Served gas station, they're gas stations don't even have people there.", "or I'll give an example. There's a position that you can't fly in the air, you can pray in it, in the sky, that you have to be on the earth because the prayer has to be متصل بالأرض. Now one school said air is not a جرم. You know there used to be a pre-modern belief that wind was created by the trees, right?", "Right? So the trees actually moved, which created the wind. Another school said, no, wind is a germ. It's actually a substance because it clearly moves things. I mean, you blow and you can feel the force of it. So they said, if you're in the sky, you're by that germ. This is what you call science fiction.", "Right? Like, you have to think. Can you do taymum on the moon? What does the astronaut do? What did Sultan do? what was his qibla when he was out there in outer space? Was he facing the earth? These are problems of modern fit. So that... You have to take into consideration these new things. This is one of the things extremist ideologies don't do. They don't re-examine. The pre-modern world was empires", "Until 1919, you had all these empires in Europe. You had the Haxburbs, the Holenzollerns, you have the Romanovs, right? You had Saxe-Coburgs that are now called... They were then Saxe Coburgs, but now they're called Hanover's. But you had to think about it. All of these empirs, they're all gone except for the Saxe Coburgs. They're still around. But they're almost all gone. There's still some royalty in Spain", "in Spain, they don't have any power. But there's still some royalty in Morocco with power still. But generally I mean the Ottoman right? When my mother was born believe it or not she was born in 1929 there was an Ottoman Caliph. It wasn't that long ago. We forget it wasn't a long time ago. There was an ottoman caliph all that's gone and yet Muslims", "They don't want to convert you to Christianity. They want to covert you to Coke and McDonald's, and they want to converge you to Nike. Really, that's what... They don' t care about Christianity. Yeah, they want you to be consumers of their goods. But Muslims still, there are Salibis. There are still some Salibs out there, but most of the people in power don't even like them. Right?", "Right? But seriously, they're not Salibis. Europe is not... They're not crusaders. There's an atheistic civilization now. They don't even believe in religion. Even the Jewish state, many of them don't believe in religiousism anymore in the Jewish states. I mean, the settlers tend to. But most of the people in power in Israel, they are complete secularists. Totally uninterested. You're an expert. What do you think? Do you know what the stats are", "socialist utopia. If you read the early stuff, the early Zionist literature a lot of it was very hopeful about having the Arabs as their best friends I mean there's actually an Israeli book on Arabic encouraging all the Jews that migrated to learn Arabic because these are the people we have to befriend and live with right? It's very interesting so that I mean", "are becoming, I mean believe it or not and I won't mention any states you know but there are states that you would imagine are like 100% believers. They have high levels of apostasy. There's a lot of Muslims in certain Muslim countries they fast Ramadan they don't even believe in it. It's just a social thing. Like many Christians", "the evolutionary biologist, he's an atheist. He joins in the Anglican prayer at... I think he's at Oxford. Is he at Oxford or Cambridge? Oxford, yeah. He joined in the anglican prayers. Why? Because it's tradition. It is English tradition. There are many upper crusty english people that are atheists but they still go to Anglicans church and you'll see Muslims in some Muslim countries, they will pray. They don't believe in God", "they're just leaving prayer. And a lot of young people, and this is one of the signs of the latter days, people start leaving religion. But you know, the irony of this is atheism has always been around. There were actually much more sophisticated atheists in the past. These atheists are pathetic. If you want to read some real serious atheists, read some of the 19th century atheists. Right? These modern", "don't really know philosophy. I mean, atheists in the 19th century. Even Lucretius, if you read Lucretias 2,000 years ago, total materialist. There were Greek materialists. I was debating these guys. The sophists thought truth was relative. You think relativism is a new thing? Really, these aren't new ideas. There's nothing new under the sun in that way. Right? People say, well, HDS", "People say, well, HDL is new. Now you can send the Amazon. You can send a drone. There's a caliph who had cherries sent from Syria to Egypt with carrier pigeons because he wanted cherries. So they sent carrier pigeons. Nothing new. A cell phone? Sayyidina Omar had a cell phone.", "Sid and Omar, he didn't need AT&T. Actually, he had AT&t it was angel technical." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Marriage _ love in islam _ Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_865_9tKn5JY&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743304545.opus", "text": [ "So this is all an introduction to marriage. Because that's the foundation, that's how this whole thing started and it's how it continues on And it's going to ultimately be the most important relationship in your life because", "Because it's going to determine if you have children, it's gonna have in many ways a major impact on those children. It's going t ohave an impact on everybody involved, the two families involved. Marriage is deep in that the impact of marriage is very profound and moves out, spreads out. And if you reflect on your own marriage", "with another person and the impact that has, the people it impacts. And then just your own experience of life and your spouse's experience of live. So if that relationship is not sound nothing in your life is sound. It's just not. If that's not working then nothing is working. It' a disaster for everybody concerned.", "The first hadith is about men towards women and the second one is about women towards men.", "And it's متفق عليه which means it's related in صحي البخاري and صحيمسلم Which means it is the soundest form of hadith outside what's called متواتر. Which is multiply transmitted to point where it impossible that could have been a lie or some mistake in it. And this hadith says تُنكَح المرأة لِأربعين A woman is married for four reasons. لِمالها The first reason is wealth", "that it's good for somebody from one socioeconomic class to marry somebody from a similar socioeconomic caste because if somebody was raised with a certain level of opulence or a certain standard of living and then they married considerably under that, that can be quite traumatic for that person. And it can lead to problems. And that often happens when people marry for love like a romantic type of love", "Naseb is your lineage. It's who you come from so it would be either your clan in Arabia or your family in most other places, so generally lineage but in the Shafi'i Madhab he considers lineage to be a valid reason for refusing somebody in marriage Imam Malik does not so these are Ishtihadat", "that the ulama differed about. And lineage is certainly like in certain communities, for instance, in some Arabic communities also, for example, in a Somali community. There are Somalis who can take their lineage of marriage back 30 generations. So if you marry outside of that clan and you marry another clan it's considered a calamity.", "So those things here in America should not be real considerations for us. Those are, I think, problems in the Muslim world. But good family does have meaning.", "religious. Now, hasab and there's different riwayah about this but hasab is what your ancestors have done that distinguish you So for instance if you're related to somebody great in history then that's part of your hasab so if somebody's ancestor was a king or an ancestor was", "like if you're the son or daughter of T.S. Eliot, who was a great poet then that's a Hesab because people who know Eliot they are going to be oh really? You're his grandson or his grand... It strikes an interest just automatically That's what Hesb is it gives you a type of standing amongst people because of distinguishing characteristics of your ancestors", "There's a natural inclination in the human heart to children of great people. It's just something that Allah has put and that's what marrying for Hasab is. It' like, oh I really want to marry this person why? Well their great-grandfather was such and such. And it's like an honor to be in that. So that's Hasab.", "accumulation of good actions and that can translate in a lot of ways so You can see people that have that I mean it might not be as black-and-white as people would like to think and so you have to be careful about that because You can marry somebody that looks outwardly the package looks alright But then you find out, you know, it's all about bangles. And you know the it's some real dunya we orientation", "May your hands be filled with dust which the Arabs use it to the opposite meaning and you'll be successful Now, the idea here is that if you look at those three things If you look At the first one, which is wealth. Wealth can can be lost So somebody might be wealthy today they had all their money in stock market And then the next day they don't have anything so is your love still there?", "that reason and they lose that thing, then the reason that you were attracted to that person is no longer there. So maybe the attraction won't be there anymore. The same is true of Hesab. Hesb is about fathers and ancestors. It's not about that person. So after you marry that person, the initial interest, suddenly you have to deal with the fact maybe this person isn't a good person. Maybe their father or their grandfather was a good", "person. And so all that's left is for you to go around, well at least she's this daughter of so-and-so. I mean that's what you're stuck with which might not be the best grounds for a good marriage and then finally beauty. I Mean Beauty 1 initial attractions if you're seeing a person every day You start losing that", "losing that, you know the first attraction of beauty. So you get used to a person and that's something very common so you're attracted to somebody for outward reasons initially but again You might lose the appreciation that the first thing it just becomes something that you get use to seeing And then you see them because people can look very beautiful But when you live with them you see their bad days", "And suddenly, the ephemeral nature of beauty which people can look really bad even beautiful people can really bad on a bad day. The face is strange in that it's very malleable and as you get older it gets more... You know, you can really see differences so if that's the reason you married a person", "and you start being attracted to other sources of beauty. So again, those three are all ephemeral reasons. And what the Prophet ﷺ is saying, marry somebody for something that lasts, not for something doesn't last. And the only thing that lasts is the deen. I mean, that is what lasts. And that's why you should marry a person, for what lasts?", "in your marriage. And if you do it for those other reasons, it's not a guarantee of success. I mean maybe it will become a successful marriage but blame yourself if it's", "then if there's somebody abdeen and it's pointed out to them, they have to respond. The onus is on them. Now the second hadith about this is the hadith in which the Prophet ﷺ said, مَنْ جَأَكَ تَرْضَوْنَ دِينُهُ وخُلقُه فَزَوِّجُه من جاءكم Whoever comes to you and you are pleased with his deen, this is about men.", "And then you're pleased with his deen, which is really important. Deen and character. I love that addition because see somebody can have a religious name but they don't have khuluq They don't' have character. The thing is the Prophet said", "And the reason for that is because the woman is in a weaker position by the nature of the majority of marriages. In other words, you don't want to marry your daughter to somebody who is not going to treat her well So you have to look not just to his religion but to his character because somebody can be religious But they're easily angered and That's why Muawiyah was very religious. But when the Prophet Sallallaahu Alaihi Wasallam Somebody asked him about marrying Mu'awei he said don't marry him Why? Because he was sualoo", "because he is su'luk. And when he asked about another sahaba, he said, لَا يَرْفَعَ عَصَاهُ عَنْ عَتِقِهِ He doesn't take his stick off his shoulder. And the ulama interpreted it two ways. One, he travels all the time which is not good for a woman and two, he beats his wife. So he was telling you don't want to marry him and he left it ambiguous. Because that was his nature sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam but it's not ghibah", "It's nalsiha, it's good advice. You're not backbiting when you're giving somebody advice. So if somebody angers easily, you don't want to marry your daughter to that person. And a woman doesn't want be under somebody who gets angry easy because what happens when people get angry? They do things they don't mean and then you go into this cycle, this dysfunctional cycle of the husband beats the wife and then apologizes and it becomes a very unhealthy cycle.", "So the idea of marrying not just for deen but khuluq, of looking into the character of this person. One thing is to get them angry and see how they react. It's very interesting and people traditionally did that. They got people angry just to see how reacted. That was a traditional way of testing somebody. So you want to have somebody who has good deen, but also good khuluqu. Now what did the Prophet say?", "If you don't do this, there will be tribulation in the earth and widespread corruption. Now this is really important to understand because at the essence of the deen of Islam is an understanding that the deem functions in ideal conditions. And when the conditions are not ideal people deviate", "D.C. And that is why there's always an attempt to facilitate people's deen in the world and That's why Allah is merciful because so much of the Dean that's there's a hadith in which the prophets al-islam said about The people in the end of time they would have the reward of 50 of you and that the sahaba said 50 of us Why is that? And he said because you have helpers supporting you in your struggle with your", "with your, you know to please Allah. But those people won't have any supporters. In other words it will be so difficult in those days that their reward would be greater because the society is not facilitating that. So this is really important to note that if you don't help people get married that's how corruption emerges right? You get people just by overwhelming power of their appetite", "their appetites, their emotions they can actually do things that had they been facilitated they wouldn't have done that. So that's really important to remember especially now because it's really difficult we have big problems in that area. It's good to help people get married and there are many Hadith about the importance of that and there is verses in Quran about that that Allah will enrich them even if they're poor so those are the two Hadith", "that are at the root of marriage. One, marry your daughters to people who have good deen but also who have a good character and two when you look for a woman look for her dean. Look for her Dean because that's going to determine quite a bit of what type of relationship you're going to have and as you get older", "And those things, the spiritual aspect of your life together and the journey that you're on becomes more and more important. And the husband has no right to force a woman to work outside of the home or to do work that is usually associated with a craft or a profession because it's wage work. Just in noting this,", "And I was with a friend of Shaykh Abdullah Al Qadhi's in the Emirates,", "in the Emirates and this little boy came in, he started playing with him. He was saying that he would make animal sounds and then he'd ask the little boy what animal is that? And the boy would say...and he was playing with them. Then when the boy left to finish, he said, The Prophet used to play with children and I love to make the intention of fulfilling that sunnah before I do that. So he was actually fulfilling a sunnah of the Prophet in doing that", "And that's why if you're in your house and you do that, and تَحْتَسِبْ عَنْدَ اللَّهِ You know, that you just consider a reward with Allah. It's not a waste of time. Because there are people who say, it's a waste or I don't have time. Well what about her? I mean her times as precious as your time in the world. So the idea...and Aisha , when she said they asked him how was the Prophet in the house. She said كَانَ فِي مِهْنَةِ أَهْلِ", "He was in the mihna of his family. And it's a beautiful word because she didn't say, She said, The word comes from that which is servile or degrading. And the Prophet ﷺ would never do anything servile and degrading but the point I think that she was emphasizing was that chores that you people might consider to be meheen ,", "and elevate himself above them. And the idea is that any halal work, is not degrading. If it's halal, it's not degraded even if it's what we would call menial task. The fact of the best of creation did it including carrying wood, milking a goat he did all those things so anybody who does those things is not degrade by doing those things but in mere fact that the best Allah's creation did those things", "Qadi Abu Bakr said that the best things a man can serve himself in are those things that relate to his own ibadah. Like getting your own wudu water, those type of things. Preparing the ghusl. I mean obviously in pre-modern times that was much more common in the world than it is now but there are still a lot of places.", "The Prophet had servants in the house. So, it's binding upon a woman to willingly obey her husband if he commands her to fulfill any right binding upon her.", "about obeying your husband, it has to do with حقوق . You see if its his حق and if its not a حق then you don't have to do it. So it's important to understand that. Once you know what your rights are then you know the limits of your... because he has to be obedient in fulfilling his rights to you as well. And that is an important thing to know. It doesn't mean I mean there is this idea", "Muslims have that she's just supposed to do whatever he says and be this slavish obedient servant in the house. It is not true! She can refuse things that she doesn't have to do. She has every right to refuse to cook for his guests, right? In Maliki Madhab and Shafi'i Madhab she doesn´t even have to cook period. Right? So... And she can say go cook for yourself I mean I'm not encouraging that because there's a Hadith", "There is a hadith, the one that ruins the relationship between a man and his wife isn't from me. So I don't want to encourage any but I want people to realize that we have to honor the women and their rights right? So the point is when Allah says obedience He's talking about the huqooq", "where the obedience is. So if you know what the rights are, then that's why if he says we're moving to this house and it's within those four... Then she says no! That's disobedience. Do you see? And now he has a haqq because she's nashiza I mean she's in a state of disobedience do you see because she stinting on his right so it's important to know when this works and when it doesn't work but it doesn' t mean", "mean that she's just in submission to this man, no. But in certain things yes so these are the haqquq So once you know that, so that is a Haq of the man And then another important is adhering to the principles of forgiveness That really forgiving and just letting it go", "hold on to these things and it's just infantile behavior. And you have to see it for what it is, it's your pouting little child that's all you're doing and you're trying to make the other person miserable for doing something to you. That is infantile behaviour and you need to snap out of it and we all will fall into that but you have snap out if it and just remind yourself and if the other", "life miserable for yourself and for others because that's all it is. And, in the end of the day, it doesn't matter. So if something happens that upsets you just let it go. It will happen many times throughout your life but just let go don't hold on to it. The danger is not that it happens, that's going to happen, it's a given. The dangers is that you never learn to overcome the desire to hold onto it.", "pleasure in that so that happens you start get a pleasure making somebody feel miserable and one of the things about you know they've done studies on cheerfulness and things and cheerfulness good nature is very contagious if somebody is in a cheerful and a good nature they can actually affect other people much more powerfully than irritability although", "as good nature. I mean, they've done really interesting studies about this to watch this and depression is difficult very difficult to actually be transferred to somebody it can happen if you live with a depressed person you become you can become depressed but it's actually difficult for that to happen it's quite unusual but well-being does not you can actually transform somebody state quite easily if you're up", "You know, if children pout and do these things you can just with silly faces and things you get them to break a smile. And once you've got them there they know. They can't hold on to it. So it's interesting just breaking that infantile desire. And I think the Prophet was an absolute master like everything he did. He was a master at that of breaking that state that people got into.", "periods, there were difficult periods. But generally that was what he did. Now it's important to keep in mind that marital life due to the constant interaction and psycho-emotional states people go through we go through different psycho- emotional states throughout the day or the week or the month and that there is a situation where discontent displeasure occur and you can do these things these are normal occurrences", "Aisha said to Aisha, I know when you're upset with me. And she said how do you know that? And he said because when you are pleased with me you say warabi Muhammad by the Lord of Muhammad but when you upset with my you say Warabbi Ibrahim by the lord of Ibraheem and Aisha laughed and she said that's true by Allah it is true I would never abandon anything but your name", "Also this idea that the Prophet said, a mu'min should never dislike a believer. If he dislikes one quality, he should focus on the qualities he likes. So every person is going to have things that bother you and things that you like about them. And the thing about your spouse is that you should look at those qualities that are pleasing.", "excellent character and the best of you are the best to your women. And there's a beautiful poem by Jalaluddin al-Rumi where he said,", "the Prophet was talking to some women and he said I've never seen a creature that has more possession over a man of intellect than you so what Rumi was taking that to another level of understanding that the reason they have so much power over is because these are people who conquered their animals", "their animal soul. And so they're not people that are going to dominate women, they're no people who are going oppress, they actually people because of the love and kindness that has overcome their souls, they allow the women their shortcomings without demanding change.", "that men have one degree over women, that's what he said it was. He said it is relinquishing the right of a man for the woman. Whereas he would not relinquish her rights. In other words, he would fulfill all of her rights but he would demand of her all of his rights. That that is the degree that men has over women. And that's Ibn Abbas , who is the translator of the Qur'an. And one of things also is just going the path of least resistance", "Water puts out fire, fire increases fire. If you look at the Prophet ﷺ that was his strategy with people. Umar said I once roared at my wife and she answered back. I rebuked her for bandying words with me. She then said why should you rebuke me for answering you back? By Allah the wives of the Prophet dispute with him and even ignore him for a night and a day.", "So, you know she was saying who do you think you are? Basically I mean that's what it is. He said who do You think you all know the wives of the prophets allies and do this to the problem And he is the best example so I think in that hadith There's a real and and he went and indeed found that from Hafsa He went and asked Hafsa who his daughter met did you do that and he was shocked But it changed his attitude and we have when he was Khalifa the man who came to his house", "his house knocked on the door and then he heard omar's wife yelling at him and he left and almar came out and said to him what happened he said nothing he said no you came knocked on my door would you want he said i didn't want anything and he said he said by a lot tell me what you want. He said well I was going to come complain about my wife but when I heard your wife", "I said, there was no point in complaining to you. And Omar, he said, this is my wife, the mother of my children. She maintains my house, cooks my food. Shouldn't I have patience with her if she gets upset with me? So there's the man who roared. That's the change that occurred in him and that's the point people can change.", "Now we go to the shared rights of both the wife and the husband. The first shared right is called Husn al-ishra, and this is the most important one because it's the foundation of a good marriage. Husn Al-Ishra is beautiful companionship. In other words each spouse has the right to live with the other spouse in which they are actually treated", "treated very well. So this is a mutual right, in other words the wife has a right to be treated beautifully by her husband it's a Haqq It's a right and the husband has a Right to be Treated Beautifully By His Wife that's called Husn al-ishra And that there verses about that treat them with kindness Aisha relates a sound transmission", "the one thing happens is that he marries another woman who was very beautiful and Umm Zar'a became very jealous and ended up causing a divorce to happen. And then she married another man but he was nothing compared to Abu Zar'ah, and she really regretted it. And in the end the Prophet said to Aisha I'm like Abu Zarra to your Umm Zarra.", "So don't destroy it by your jealousy because you'll regret it. And I think that, I mentioned that last week just about the fact that all of his wives none of them wanted a divorce from him and there was difficulty in the household. It wasn't a bed of roses. There was difficulty they had their human troubles that go with", "part of for us but also for the full experience of the human life that the Provincial ISEM live. In terms of what engenders and facilitates these relationships one is really important Islamic etiquette so it's very important just to remember that just like your brother you're supposed to greet them with a smile, you're suppose to...I mean these things you do with people outside sometimes we forget", "than other people to those same etiquettes. And also doing things for each other, ethoch preferring the other to the self this idea and the thing about it is men have to be very careful because there are many women that that is their nature right so in other words a man can get into a very exploitive relationship with his wife because his wife by her nature especially women that were born", "a lot of double standards with the male and female children. You can get into an exploitive relationship with the wife where you're allowing her to do everything, and she says, oh well I love to do it. Well that doesn't mean that she should be doing everything because she loves to do things because she's getting all the reward first of all. And second of all, she is going to appreciate no matter what she says when you help her out and do things for her. She will appreciate it", "human nature so just maintaining the etiquette and Then also a wife should not allow domestic concerns So that she forgets her own husband And then becomes like a domestic servant too because that can happen woman become so preoccupied if she becomes more like a Domestic servant and not realizing that there's a whole Sakina. There should be spiritual relationship spiritual growth between the two things like that and", "And a man also has to be very careful of not getting into the and this is all about I mean, I'll really tell you in all honesty. I mean the thing about life is The challenge for everybody is not to fall asleep And it's really easy to just get into these patterns of perfunctory Behavior and to forget what? You know what life is about now you can really forget", "forget that this is it. You know, your life is an aggregate of moments and that when you're with your wife or your husband It can either be a horrible experience. There can be a wonderful experience or it can be missed experience Right John Lennon said life is what happens when you are busy making other plans And there's a lot of truth in that You can get so caught up", "caught up in these day-to-day concerns that life passes you by and you missed it. So family is like that, your children are like that. It's very easy to lose sight of them." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Some cultures accepted by Islam - Hamza Yusuf_wpgj28GadvI&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748541336.opus", "text": [ "Somebody knows the prophet is a true Prophet and they reject that. That's not a good place to be in, you know so that the Mufassirun say that those are for the previous before the advent of the Prophet , that those who followed previous prophets of their time every group is raised up with their Prophets Imam al Ghazali I think of all the ulama has the most nuanced view because he argues that people", "who have lived amongst Muslims and been shown true Islam, they will be taken into account. But he said people that haven't or have been shown negative Islam and they reject a negative version of Islam which is why the Prophet said whoever harms one of the people, the protected minorities in my community like Jews and Christians or Hindus because the Muslims accepted Hindus and Zoroastrians according to the Maliki", "The Maliki Madhub and I think that was the even though the Shafi'is don't have that opinion But the Hanafis and the Malik is took that opinion so they took They even the Musharri Kun except on the Arabian Peninsula, but even the Moshiri Kun could Could could live under the Muslims. There's not an idea that you have to you know this thing All even omerton or cotton and NASA station That hadith has cost been Navy slice him it's not", "It's not... it's khas, it's from the Prophet's khasa'is. The Arabian Peninsula was a special place for the Prophet and there couldn't be And then the jazeera even like people say well in the Gulf now they have non-Muslims living there I mean Muslims can come in temporary They can't be permanent residents But also the Gulf not all the ulama considered that part of the Arabian peninsula", "said that the Prophet was talking about most say it's the hijaz you know there's different opinions about that so but I mean I was once I knew a scholar I mean he was a good scholar he did his PhD on Ghazali and and I gave a talk at his University and we were on our way to the airport and he said you know what what's the opinion", "So I knew that he was talking about himself. I just said, I wouldn't want to be in his shoes. You know, it's like, you know, Imam Muhammad al-Ghazali, the Egyptian, he was asked like, what's the hukum of tariqa salat? Because there's a khilaf, like the Hanbali say if you leave the prayer, you're not a Muslim anymore.", "Like if you don't pray even if you just leave it out of laziness, that's the hum is the strictest position The other three imams they say, you know, Lana capital Be them been labby Turkey. He will have be fairly we don't make takfir of a dumb either through talk or fail You know so so so Like the Kabbalah, that the how Irish did that? So he was asked what's the hukum of somebody who leaves the prayer? He said hook mucka fee and to do in a little message", "Like your hukum with him is take him to the masjid. Get him to pray again. Yeah, so people are too concerned about where other people are going. You know, it's just a big problem in our community. It is a big one. Yeah. We should be more considerate about where we're going. Allahu'alam where everybody else is going. The kafirun according to the Quran are going to hell. But if you read the kafirin in the Quran,", "in the Quran, they're puffed up. They're full of pride. You know, they hate the truth. They do takdhib. They have istahzah. I mean look at the qualities of the kafar and then ask yourself about people around you that you see that aren't like that. And maybe our fault is that we've been such bad exemplars. People are no longer attracted to Islam because there was a time when everybody who came to know the Muslims wanted to become Muslim. I", "people that become Muslim just from living with Muslims because they see the good Islam. But then there's other people that are very alienated from it. I mean, I had a professor of religious studies who was beautiful man, you know, he's really, really good man. But he had a very negative experience on the Allenby Bridge. It was during one of the horrible periods, but he had", "We had a lot of conversations about it. And he said, you know, I've been forced to really reassess my Islam. I had the same experience with a black minister from Philadelphia who for him, Islam was the mafia, the Muslim mafia in Philadelphia because there was this kind of Muslim mafia and that's how he viewed Islam. He just thought that was Islam. So there's a lot people that really have a negative view of Islam and our challenge is", "barriers down you know how do we show them what real islam is i mean part of it is just one of the hallmarks of islamis it's beautiful it's not an ugly religion right all traditional islami is beautiful our architecture is beautiful, our clothes were beautiful food was beautiful, food presentation was beautiful everything the muslims their calligraphy nobody has matched uh muslim calligraphry nobody. I mean you go and look at the some you know somebody asked Titus Burkhardt", "heart you know if if you could point to Islam what would you point to he said the Taj Mahal. You know and on the one hand that's not entirely true but there's some truth in it, that whoever built that, the people that built that something inside them was amazing because everybody all over the world is attracted to that place and", "it was from love, it was built out of love. Apparently in today's money it is 11 billion dollars to build it. He almost exhausted me but India was so rich. I mean India was one of the richest countries in the world and it will return inshallah why not? But also with Muslims.", "of India is the Muslims never indigenized fully because the court was always a Persian court. So that the Maghul were always seen as kind of invaders and that's why Hindutva, it recognizes Buddhism cause Buddhism from mother India. It recognizes Jainism cause it's from mother, India.", "um but it doesn't recognize christianity or islam because it sees them as alien religion and one of the geniuses of the muslims is wherever they went, they indigenized. They always indigenize so every Muslim culture has its own dress. They didn't make everybody look like Arabs or speak like Arabs. Arabic was the language of our learning and it becomes the lingua franca to use that term. It was the", "to speak to each other with. So Ibn Khaldun or even Batuta could go from Tangier and go to Sri Lanka, and he would be able to communicate with people. It was like French used to be the diplomatic language. Everybody spoke French. Now it's English. English has become the global language that people speak with. But there is no... The idea of Arabizing people is very alien to the early Islam. They didn't do that. In fact,", "In fact, Syriac Mouwak Al-Abdari he says, he's one of the last great Andrusian scholars. He says that all the hadith about are to the Arabs they don't apply to the Ajam in other words uh the arabs were not all the ones that warn about dressing and things like that", "to become somebody else, to maintain their Arabian identity. Because they have a quality that's very important. Their language and their adat, they have lot of good qualities. The best qualities of the Arabs have spread all over the Muslim world because generosity is a quality of the Prophet , but it was also a profound quality of his people.", "So wherever the Muslims went because of their generosity, even a culture who would not necessarily be a generous culture became generous by taking on the qualities of the Prophet , which are Muslim qualities but there also some of them are Arabian qualities." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/This how your mind works - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_6VfXwFnOiVA&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743063835.opus", "text": [ "So be it. The grammar of thought is to learn how the mind should work properly when it reasons. That's what the grammar of thoughts is, so this is called . Ibn Taymiyyah wrote a book called , even though he was a logician, he wrote a reputations of the logicians because he said and this is very interesting statement, he said logic does not benefit stupid people", "but they don't need it. So mantak is to teach people of lesser capacity how to avoid pitfalls like hasty generalization, it's a logical fallacy in what's called material logic because we do that naturally. I had three South Asian taxi drivers in New York, they all cheated me so every South Asian is a cheat. That's obviously a fallacy. But that's how the mind works.", "And it's a brilliant book. We're actually, alhamdulillah, it's been translated and is being edited now. And so we were actually this going to be part of the Zaytuna curriculum series. So alhamduliilah that book should be out hopefully within the year. The second book he wrote which is I think one of the most extraordinary books in ethics and that is Mizan Al Amal which is...", "Mizan al-Amal is the scales of action. So you could weigh every action and determine whether the action was worthwhile or whether it wasn't. So, it's a book of virtue ethics. It's a brilliant book. It heavily influenced by the great polymath and Persian scholastic Raghubr Isfahani who wrote one of my favorite books, Al-Dhari'atu ila Makarma Sharia'.", "most important books, one is the abridged version. The other's more extensive are Qawa'id al-Aqaid and Al-Iqtisad fi al-'i'tiqa'd. So economy in belief. And the other one is The Principles of the Axioms of Creed. Now so he has his project of introducing the approach using logic in scholastic theology.", "It's important to remember, the last book that he wrote probably is called Not Allowing Common People To Study Theology. So he was not somebody that really encouraged but he recognized a certain group of scholars must learn this because it will enable them to refute the obfuscations and attacks of religion by people from outside", "outside. So for instance, right now we have all of these philosophers. We have deconstructionists, we have structuralist, we post modernists, post colonialists, critical race theorists and then we also the analytic school. We", "who I was fortunate enough to be part of the award ceremony, a brilliant scholar working within a certain school of philosophy to defend faith. So he understood that you're always going to have these people out there who use their intellects and sophistry to confuse people. And if you don't have people trained to recognize it, to see it, and to be able to refute it,", "to the argument of blood. When you can't defend your religion with intelligence, the people that are zealots, that don't have the intelligence or the training to defend it will end up defending it through violence and that's not a defense of religion. Blood is no argument so that's really important thing to remember now in Islam he took the abridgements of Imam Al Juwaini. Imam Al-Juwaini wrote a famous book called Nihayat al Mottab", "called Nihayat al-Mattab fi Dhirayat Al-Madhhab in the Shafi'i Thirq. It's a very important book, but he takes it and he writes a long abridgment of it, a middle abridgement, and a short abridgedment. Al-Basit, Al-Wasit, and Al-Wajiz. In fact one of the Aw Hafs Omar ibn Abd al-'Aziz al-Tarablisi early on only 10 years after the Imam died, he said", "So these are the four books in Furoo' that Imam al-Ghazali writes. The people who are Shafi' know this, Imam al Ghazali is the most important after Imam Juwaini I mean obviously the Imam himself Imam Shafie but all of the later books that come out including Imam Nowy", "So these are foundational books in the Madhab. This is in Faroo' not in Usul, so this is in the branches of jurisprudence and not in legal philosophy. Now in Ihsan he writes a beautiful short book called Bidait al-Hidayah which is really to prepare a person for the spiritual path, to get you to be doing practices on a daily basis but then he writes his Magisterium Ihyya Ulama al-Din which is reviving the sciences of religion", "He then abridges it in Persian, in a book called Kimya Sa'ada, The Alchemy of Happiness. And this is the book, inshallah, I'm going to be talking about in a few days. He writes a book call Jawahar al-Quran. He's referencing all his other books in it. This book is his theory of the Quran and what you realize from this book is that his entire tradition revolves around the Quran", "revolves around the Qur'an. Everything that Imam was doing is really revolving around the Quran primarily and then the Sunnah of the Prophet secondarily, so he is a jurist of the first order and he brings his juristic worldview into the Quranic world and into the prophetic world but it also", "in his spiritual perspective. Now the third book is very interesting it's called Kitab al-Arba'een fi Usul ad-Din, again it's relatively late so these three are the abridgments actually Jawahar al-Quran is three parts and the third part is the Kitab Al Arba'een this is the third", "Because he wrote that, it was later published as a separate book. But it's actually part of the Jawahar al-Quran. So he shows you what the Quran is calling us to. And that is why his entire opus is basically a commentary on the Quran. And The Prophetic Life, as we know, is a commentary", "The Prophet ﷺ's sunnah is an explanation of the Qur'an. Everything is from the Qur-an, it's all from the Quran. I'm not a Qurani, I 100% believe in the Kitab wa Sunnah but the Sunnah is and explanation of that Qur'a and we should understand that. You need the Sunna you can't understand the Qurana without the Sunnah and I'll talk about that.", "Could you expand on the nature of that relationship and their respective ideologies? Ibn Taymiyyah is a, undeniably he's a polymath. He was a brilliant scholar. He as a Hanbali. He wa faqih . He was also a comparative religionist so he wrote books on the Old Testament and New Testament.", "Sunnah. Like he really want, he did not want the type of edifice that was emerging out of the tradition of Islam and in some ways you have to appreciate that because there's something very profound about the simplicity of teachings", "Kierkegaard has a very similar attitude towards what happens within Christianity. So I appreciate Ibn Taymiyyah, I really do. I appreciate what he's trying to do but I really feel like you cannot deny the human creativity that comes out of that initial inspiration and you can't deny the fact", "al-Quran says seek knowledge. It says go out, explore the world. Go look how creation began. That's a recommendation to go study geology. The Quran has history. It say look at the people that went before you. The Qur'an certainly has metaphysics. So all of those are there and so the elaborations that come out of it", "that come out of that initial inspiration, what you want to do is mitigate the influences that are dangerous. And they're going to slip in but you want prevent them and I think that was his project. I have to say this and I'm not the first person who said this but I think Imam al-Ghazali's intellect is just so vast", "And I think Imam al-Subki, Sayyid Ahmad Zarruq and others said that ibn Taymiyyah was more reliable in his naqal than in the way he looked at the naqals. So I think that's fundamentally at the heart of the differences. Like I said, I appreciate it and I actually understand what ibn Tamiyyah was trying to do but I really think", "His project was a critical, like he is criticizing a lot. Like a lot of his books are criticizing. Imam al-Ghazali's project is a project he's building. He's really trying to build a normative Islam that will withstand the onslaughts of materialism,", "of atheism, that's what he is trying to do. He wants to build a fortress around the book and the sunnah. Imam Ibn Taymiyyah, he feels like the book in the Sunnah doesn't need a fortress. Imam al-Ghazali says no it needs a fortress and I'm gonna build it. And I think that's fundamentally the difference. But we respect both of them", "Traditionally, there were far more critics of Ibn Taymiyyah in our Ummah than there were of Imam. They both have critics. Far more are critical of Ibbin Taymiyya's project than they are of Imam al-Ghazali's. But people are going to differ on this and there's people that are gonna stay with Ibbun Taymiyiya. I don't think it's like you have to choose one or the other but I think you have recognize that one of them", "one of them defines the tradition and that you do need to recognize. And arguably for a thousand years, the Ummah considered it was Hujjat al-Islam. And it's interesting he is called The Proof of Islam. What do you use a proof for? You use a proo against people that are questioning you. Whereas Ibn Taymiyyah is called Shaykh al-Issalam. He is one of many but that is a laqab that he was given", "So why was Imam al-Ghazali initially vilified by the scholars of Andrus and Al Maghrib? Well, I think I said that. They were... You know, this is something that a Mauritanian friend of mine says, that the Murabitun were like the Taliban, which I don't think is totally fair. But they were very... In Kalam, they were dogmatic. They did not like speculative theology.", "of theology, and many scholars did not. Ibn Abd al-Barr who's one of my favorite scholars he's one the greatest scholars in the history of Islam, he attacks the Ash'ira terribly. He really just sees them as something really bad for Islam like Ibn Taymiyyah although even Taymiyya is mixed because sometimes he praises them and other times he condemns him but he does recognize that they did play a role", "he's not entirely antagonistic. So these are debates amongst the ulama, it's... You know his books were burnt at one point in Morocco although the men that burned him had a dream where the Prophet came and had him flogged by Imam al Ghazali so he actually repented publicly for burning them. He burnt them in a masjid and then he had that dream and so he repented. That's a well-known story.", "Are there English translations of Imam Ghazali's works or other resources? Fortunately, he has been fortunate to have some good translators. There was a translation done, it is an abridgment of the Ihya that was done by Mawlana... He was a South Asian scholar, Mawlanna Fadl Karim I think yeah and that was reprinted by the Malaysians", "by the Malaysians and they edited a lot of it because he originally did not want, he was actually a very formidable scholar. He did a commentary on the Mishkat al-Masabiha translated into Bengali I think so that is good. Fonz Vidae has done some, I actually wrote the introduction to a couple of those books including The Book of Knowledge", "The Islamic text society has done a good job. I mean, Dr. Winter of the Hakeem winter is I think really excellent beautiful stylist in English language and imam al Ghazali deserves a Good translator because he is so eloquent in Arabic And it's a crime to translate him poorly", "but it was so bad, the English was so baaad. And I just felt sad for anybody who read that book and thought that in any way reflected the style of Imam al-Ghazali. So...and I know he's a great Persian stylist, I'm not able to read him in Persian, but I know from people that do know Persian that he is a beautiful stylist in Persian. He was a very gifted orator, a gifted writer.", "did the breaking of two desires was excellent book and I think he did one other yeah the remembrance of death how can we pursue the spiritual path Imam Ghazali pursued today stay tuned because that's essentially what i'm going to talk about really what his project is because that is his project and so inshallah if Allah gives us life maybe we meet again", "relationship between cause and effect. I'll get into that a little bit, he did not, and that's one of the big problems. The Ash'ira are accused of being occasionalists which are people who don't really believe in cause and affect. It's very important it's a very sophisticated understanding. Cause and effect is the way Allah has created the world. It is the Sunnah of God in the world to deny it is to deny reality", "deny reality. And so we do not deny cause and effect, but we have I think a very profound understanding of the divine nature of what's happening in the world. And that's where Imam al-Ghazali is a mystic. So I would look at it you have Newtonian physics", "have quantum physics. Sharia is Newtonian, haqiqah is quantum. This an analogy I'm not saying don't say oh he said that kalam is quantum physics I'm saying that in the same way that the quantum laws do not work in the Newtonian world that's the same that's happening so it's two different ways we have something called maratab al wujud you know", "In fact, it's not a universe. It's a multiverse. And Rabbul Alameen, he's the Lord of all the worlds. So there are many worlds. Universe is this world. It' one world but there are man universes and so what we know if you look at a Persian carpet that aunt knows nothing about the pattern of the Persian carpet. That is our intellect before the glory of Allah's creation", "And the Prophet indicated that in a hadith about that the mulk, in relation to the malakut was like a ring in the midst of a desert. A small ring. So this whole idea oh people lost their faith because they realized the universe is vast our prophet knew how vast things were he didn't it increased his faith you know this is something material say oh why are there so many galaxies well you can do", "inward like if you magnify yourself inwardly, you'll see the same number of miraculous whether you go out or in. In fact there's a Nobel Prize winner Alexis Carroll who showed basically that the largest things in the universe if you take the largest thing we know and you take smallest things we know of and you divide them by add them together and divide them", "He won the Nobel Prize. So we are the microcosm, like the cosmos is out there but it's also in here. Everything's in here and in fact it couldn't be out there if it wasn't in here that's how we can see it and understand it so anyway we'll get into that inshallah. And then did Imam al-Ghazali only acknowledge virtue ethics in his works? How about other normative ethical theories such as consequentialism deontological ethics I mean these", "that's a kind of looking at the consequences. So I think the point of virtue ethics is the foundation of all ethics, and it has to be studied to understand cultivation of virtues and why it's important. So i think traditionally, virtual ethics has been the most important approach to ethics in our tradition.", "share with non-Muslims. The Quran, you know I found it's very interesting, the Quran...I would not recommend a non-muslim reading the Quran because it's such a difficult book in translation first of all it is a nonlinear book but second of all there's a lot of lacunae in the Quran and", "wonderful Muslim lady that worked with us, with the Rehla group when we were in Singapore. And she was very troubled. She had taken a course in university and the course made an argument that the Quran needed commentary. And so she was like why would God reveal a book that is not sufficient unto itself?", "I just thought about it, but I actually realized in who they couldn't like a little mica It's it's a reminder for you and for your people Imam Malik said that is saying so-and-so on so-And-So on so and so that Allah has made his book Impossible to reach without the intercession of Scholars of the water that would envy. Ah, so you can", "So you cannot understand the Quran without the Prophet and you cannot Understand the Prophet without the scholars. So, you always need commentary And that is because The meanings of the Quran are locked in the hearts of human beings And it is men like...and women sometimes But it's men like Imam al Ghazali who unlocked many of the mysteries Of that book and that's what we're going to look at with Juwahir Al-Quran", "but before we do that, I have a few more things I want to say about the Imam. So inshallah, may Allah bless all of you. May, uh...I hope you remember all of us at Iftar. Remember Zaytuna, all the people at ZayTuna. Also support ZaytuInna, inshaAllah. We-we have some really, really big plans, but we need your help to do what we're doing. May Allah bless All of You and thank you. Subhanakallahu wa mahamdika ashadu an la ilaha illa anta astaghfiruka" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Beyond Wealth and Poverty_ Shaykh Hamza Yusuf on R_t1rgpc1owt4&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742885123.opus", "text": [ "One of the things about Muslim countries, even when things break down people really do recognize the word brother and sister. Like that word actually means something in many, many places around the world. And I've experienced the beauty of that word not so much as it's articulated", "experience of somebody treating you like a brother or like a sister. I was thinking a lot about united against poverty, I actually think it would be better if we were united against wealth because... I've actually lived in the poorest countries in the world.", "I was in Niger, I was Mali, I lived in a place in Mauritania where the rich people had all of their possessions in one box and the poor people didn't have a box. I mean really! And my own teacher, Marab Tarhaj", "him. He was actually considered relatively wealthy because he had a few cows that were milked every day and that's where they drank their milk the milk in Tuamrat is organic milk it's not pasteurized homogenized, it's", "What I noted about living in the poorest places, and I literally lived in a shanty town. I mean complete like open sewage The houses were made out of Chinese tea boxes Literally that were dissembled from tea boxes And that's how they made their houses, and lived with a man al-Maqari From the Masooma clan in his little", "hut made out of tea cartons. And these were some of the richest people I have ever known. They were rich in community, they were rich and culture, there were people that could quote the greatest Arabic poetry ever written. Most of them memorized the Quran by heart", "They would discuss grammatical points. These were really rich people, they were not impoverished unless you want to identify poverty as material poverty and I'm not really against material poverty but I am very much against cultural and spiritual poverty because I think what's happening in this country is we are the most culturally and spiritually impoverish nation", "in the world. The fact that the number one best-selling novel right now is a pornographic novel of no literary merit according to the critics that have read it. But this is what's happening in America. Every airport I've been to has a whole row of these novels just lined up for people just to devour them off the shelves.", "That is poverty. It's poverty not to have, if you're from this culture it's poverty to have ever read Melville so that when somebody like Chris Hedges can tell you about the Pequod or Ahab's Quest you don't have any cultural references to know what that means despite the fact that even the poorest Americans a hundred years ago had very often", "often read that book because literature is not the property of the wealthy. Historically, literature has actually been the property for the most impoverished people. Some of the greatest writers were impoverish people. Read the life of Edgar Allan Poe, somebody constantly in debt, a drug addict dealing with the despair of living in the United States", "in the United States at that time and a lot of his literature is about those aspects. Dostoevsky read about their lives, yet they produced this great body of literature because they were not culturally impoverished. They may have been materially impoverish but they were no culturally imporversed. One of the most celebrated artists in Western tradition is Van Gogh", "and he was a completely impoverished person supported by his brother, never sold a painting during his own lifetime. Another very tortured person but somebody who had a richness of vision that people are still entranced by his paintings. So I think that a lot of what's happening in this country is actually from luxuria.", "used to be one of the seven deadly sins. That's the Latin term for lust, luxuria, you know, gluttony and lust that we're a surfeited culture. We're too full. There's too much. When people talk about the 99% and the 1%, we're 5% of the world's population", "in the 5%. The other part of the world is the other 95%, so when we're talking about the 1% and the 99%, some of the people in that 1% are drug dealers in inner cities. Really? So, the whole dichotomization, this desire to kind of split the world into good", "that I think as Muslims we should reject. We should reject it. There are wretched, demonic people amongst the poor and there are decent, angelic people amongst wealthy. And the Prophet had poor people with him and he had wealthy people and without the wealthy people he could not have done what he did for the poor people. But he transformed the motives of the wealthy. He transformed their motives", "their motives. He didn't create a class warfare, he didn't make the poor people hate the wealthy people or the wealthy feel contempt for the poor no. He gave us a different criterion to judge people we were talking earlier today about intellectual arrogance because you see so many people in academia that are filled with intellectual", "Because if you learn even a little bit, you quickly see how far ahead you are from a lot of people out there. And that can lead to a type of contempt because you have some kind of intellectual training that other people do, because you can work things out quicker than other people can work out, because these references and other people don't know these references. But the reality is that Islam put a different criterion for excellence than intellectual excellence.", "It's spiritual excellence. It's being a human being and that is open to the poorest of the poor and the richest of the rich, and that's what separates people so that street sweeper that janitor might have more humanity ounce per ounce than that PhD professor at Yale University He might have better character More moral integrity he might be a better", "He might be a better father, a better civic member of society. Because the real judge of people in Islam is the judge of character. It's not anything else. The Prophet's standard was a standard of character and he said in fact that the standard of that standard was how you treat your women.", "by how he treats his women. The best of you are the best to their women folk or their families and I'm the best of You to my women folk so He was letting us know right there what the standard of judgment, how you judge a person because you've got all these people out there giving all of their declarations and proclamations and telling you what's right and what's wrong", "They treat their children as if they're subjects of Pharaoh. So the whole stratification, if you're talking about good and evil, give me a break because it's all the way down. This whole crisis, this global crisis that started here in this country was about greed. It was greed on Main Street and greed on Wall Street. All those people that went in", "applications about how much they were making because they wanted to get that house for, they didn't even understand what type of mortgage they were getting. They didn't know that it was going to balloon in a few years. They just saw an opportunity to get some property and maybe it'll rise in price and in a", "about the wealthy and the poor, it talks about character. It talks about the moral character of people and how you transform people. You know I was asked to talk just about the Islamic economic system in relation to the Western economic system or this modern system of capitalism. You can't even compare the two. There's no comparison. Our system is based on real wealth a bimetal economy", "say gold doesn't have intrinsic value, then why do people kill for it? And the only reason they kill for paper dollars that don't have an intrinsic value is because they think that it has intrinsic value. But all you have to do is put a fire to it and you'll see how valuable it is. You put fire to gold and you will see how valuble it is because gold's indestructible. Gold doesn't corrode. Silver doesn't corrod. They don't oxidize. The gold coins that were minted by Caesar", "or probably here in Stanford and buy one of them if you have enough money, because it's still around. This whole dejolic system fooling people into thinking that worthless paper has any intrinsic value, fractional reserve banking. Abraham Lincoln when he needed to fund the war, he wanted to borrow money so he asked the bankers and they told him well its going to be on disinterest rate. So he said to hell with it", "hell with it. In the Constitution we can print money.\" So he printed up greenbacks, that's how he paid for the war. They were non-interest greenbacks that were printed by the US government. Then why today are we borrowing money from a private bank and paying them interest? And the interest now represents 25% of the national debt because the bankers run", "And people don't know this because they're no longer educated. And if you want to know why it's getting so bad out there, it's very plain and simple. Because we have ignorant people. We have an ignorant population. And when you have ignorant populations then you need more and more draconian measures for social control. And this is the history of the world. You just read about it in your history books", "Ignorant people. Educated people are the dangerous ones. It's not ignorant people, you can control ignorant people. Seriously they're not hard to control. Bread and circus is one way that's it that's the old-fashioned way now it's MTV and McDonalds that's just a modern version of pen at circus that's what the Romans used but it's the same game. You look", "cultural impoverishment of this society. You know, people aren't hungry in this society they're starving to death. They're starving too death and they're starving to death even though they are over eating the reason that they have to eat more and more is because there's no nutrients in the food so you wonder why they're all getting bigger and bigger out there? Because the more they eat the hungrier they feel", "to California and we'll give them a real meal like brown rice, tofu. You will see how quick they are hungry. Really! They won't be hungry if you eat a real meals. The Indians eat dhal. You don't see fat Indians down in those villages because they eat dahl. They eat real food. They're eating real bread that they cook with their own hands. Chapatis. They are eating chapatis and they are eating", "than all these people out here. They have better nutrition, but when you go up into that 1%, you know what they're eating? They're eating doll and handmade chapatis. Really, they're the same stuff the poorest people are eating in a lot of these countries. Go to Malaysia and you see how poor people eat. They're real vegetables that they grew. Pakistanis in this country... I know a lot", "did was went in the backyard and started a garden. They grow their own tomatoes to put in their curries because that's just the way they did it. In this country, you used to have what were called victory gardens in World War II. They told people to grow your own gardens. Now, people don't even know what a vegetable is. The closest thing they get to it as a French fries really or pizza. It's cause it's got some red under there I think that's from a vegetable.", "They don't know what vegetables are. Most kids now in the schools can't identify a lot of the vegetables. They've actually done these tests and they don't' know what a turnip is or a Brussels sprout, let alone a collard green. See some people who are old enough to know collard greens because people went out and picked them because they couldn't afford to go down to the store. People were resourceful. This country was a country of resourceful people.", "looking for jobs, people used to make jobs. They didn't look for jobs they made jobs. Now people have been so dumbed down and so convinced that they can't do anything. That only if they get this job and then they go in is all humiliation. Ibn Khaldun said the two most humiliating ways of gaining a livelihood are employment and treasure hunting", "That's what he said. Employment and treasure hunting. In this country, employment was only just to learn how to do something. You became like a journeyman carpenter and then when you finished the seven years, you were free to open your own business. That's the way it worked. You started a store to... You worked in a store", "started at the bottom in a newspaper, but by his 50s he owned three newspapers. Because that's the way America was it was about entrepreneurial tradition of people elevating people not everybody was in that. That's acknowledged. But even if you look in the black communities in the south you look what they did creating their own schools. Lawyers came out", "schools now today are still out of those schools. You look at people like Dubois, look at the level of education that they had. His books are considered classics today. So there were people even from the most oppressed communities that still rose above those circumstances and empowered other people to do the same. The Islamic economic system", "economic system is based on justice. Now, justice even if you read Aristotle 2500 years ago almost, if you his book he has a book number five in his ethics book on justice and he talks about rectifatory justice and distributive justice the idea that you have to have some justice in distribution. You know what these people say in this... redistribution of wealth", "of wealth. That's socialism. That is communism. That socialism and communism when it goes to the poor people, but when it goes to the rich people it's called a bailout. That just redistribution of wealth It's just going the other way And this is the type of Orwellian culture that we are in But people haven't read Orwell So how do they know? If you don't know Orwell You're not gonna know how to use the adjective Orwellien", "Orwellian. And if somebody uses it, you don't know what they're talking about. Orwellians, is that like Orson Welles? You know, if they know Orson Wells because even good films they don't anymore, like Citizen Kane. Right? People don't now that. Now they know about like Dumb and Dumber. You know? Seriously. I mean, I saw a really interesting statement", "You know, just the popular culture and how they take... You know how they dress humiliate these young black artists by getting black males to wear female clothes. There was an interview with Oprah Winfrey that Dave Chappelle had. And he said one day he went into his dressing room and they had a dress on the chair", "He said, Dave, we've got a great part for you. We want you to put on this dress. You're going to be a prostitute. Ha ha ha. Isn't that funny, Dave? And he said, I'm not cool with that. Because in the end, whatever you say about Dave Chappelle, he's a Muslim. I mean, he has limits of where he is going to go. And he says, uh-uh, I am not putting on a dress. Come on, all the greats have done it.", "Why should I do it if all the greats have done it? And then in this clip, they showed all of these films where they had these really strong black men dressed in dresses. You know, humiliating them. What is that about? Why does Hollywood have to humiliate people? What is", "drug addicts and meltdowns. You know, they kill themselves really having all these meltdown... What is that? What kind of culture is that?\" That's what they do to their most creative people, drive them to drug addiction and to public meltdown. That's impoverishment. These are poor people. And if you don't have compassion for poor", "compassion but I'm saying they're all impoverished. Really the richest people to the poorest of the poor, they are impoverish because their culturally and spiritually impoverisht. And that is the poverty we should be united against. But if the Muslims are going to participate in it, if we're gonna degrade our religion and turn our art forms into pale imitations of their art forms. If that's what", "we have to offer. We don't have the richness of tradition looking back into the past what did they do? What, what did that can inspire us today to do it in our own way but where people of legacy we believe in legacy we believing things handed down and you hand down things of worth you don't hand down junk. The Prophet", "I am not him that amazes me and everything about him amazeth me. But one of the things, that I contemplated is the fact that he named his personal belongings And what I realized about that in my estimation, Wallahu ta'ala a'lam Is that he was honoring goods that enhance our lives He had a name for his comb, he had a names for his turban", "life, if he actually took all of the possessions that he had they would fit into a very small box. But he named them because they were meaningful things to him. We live in a society that gives stuff no meaning it's not only nameless its discarded as fast as people buy it we have engineered obsolescence", "Because I'll be your first customer. I have an idea, like I want a shop called Till Death Do Us Part. Things for people that want things that last. Because when I was a kid, if you bought something, it lasted. I used to brush leaves because my grandfather had a cattle ranch and we had to go up and he would always put us to work because he was old school.", "school, and that's what he thought you should do to kids because they put him to work when he was six years old. He was selling bubble gum on Market Street in San Francisco, California in 1899. So that's the way we would be just pushing brooms, and there'd always be a treat at the end. We could go ride a horse or something. But the brooms that I was pushing when I was five years old, they were the same brooms I was", "Because they were built to last. Now you go and you buy a broom, and you sweep your sidewalk three times, and it's broken. And then they tell you, well, it's cheaper to just buy a new one. That's what they tell me now. It's just cheaper to buy a newer one. We have to reject this whole culture of consumption. We've got to reject it. The Islamic tradition most of the... if you look now", "the wealth in this country, 40% of the wealth is not an economy of goods and services. That is the old American economy. It was an economy goods and service. You produce things you sold things or you did things for people like you hired a carpenter and he would do something for you or your mechanic so goods and Services that was it now its financial instruments. It's making money off of money This is the economy of America and it's an economy that", "that takes wealth away from the middle people and increasingly to the upper echelons. There's a Wall Street Journal op-ed writer who has been covering the wealthiest people, he wrote a book called Richistan. Richistan like Pakistan but it is where rich people live. There are some rich people in Pakistan trust me because if you want to talk about wealth moving up right?", "But he wrote a book called Richestan. And what he shows in that book, he had lower Richestand, middle Richestam and upper Richestian. And then in upper Richesdan, he got a town called Billionaireville. A population of 1,230 people. Those are the people who are billionaires. They have half of the wealth of 3 billion people on the planet.", "on the planet. Half. Eight trillion people, eight trillion dollars half of that goes to 1,230 people and the other half goes to three billion people. You think about that. The inequity that exists today on this planet and we're part of it and I'm going to just tell you a few things and I'll close out with this. Tell you a", "One, historically the Muslims had something in that when a merchant comes into town you don't have to ask where they got their goods from. This is what the Fuqaha taught, there's bara'a and asliya and if it's a halal thing to purchase you don tassaru anasha antubdarakum tasuukum Don't ask about things if you find out it's... So if somebody comes in he's a merchant", "you don't ask where he got it, you can buy if its halal. That's traditionally how they viewed it. I think in societies where most wealth acquisition was relatively just that's fine. I personally don't agree with that opinion today for things that we know about and were able to do something about", "The important thing, I think to deal with the impoverished conditions that we're living in this country is to begin to empower people to take back their communities. We have to make our own clothes, stop buying clothes that were made in sweatshops. Really, this what we have to do. We've got to reestablish family as the central most important unit of a society because Islam", "preservation of family. It's one of the six fundamentals, preservation of Family if you look now in the inner cities at the disintegration of the family because if you take a if you Take the father out of Fatherhood If you take the father Out of motherhood if you, take the Father the brother out of Brotherhood and the sister out of Sisterhood what do You have left? You have that the hood That's all you've got Left That's it and People Cannot survive in", "in those conditions. They will die. Camden, New Jersey, Chris Hedges wrote a whole section on his book The Empire of Illusion about that town. They're going to dismantle the police force in Camden. They don't have money so they're just going to regionalize it. Highest crime rate in America. Just leave the poor people there. There's children on the streets. It doesn't matter because these are throwaway", "What has to happen and the Muslims, and I'm going to chastise here the immigrant community. I really believe that the immigrant committee made an ethical mistake as well as a strategic mistake in not seriously taking the existing indigenous Muslim communities that you find in the inner cities to heart and recognizing they had a moral obligation", "to help them build community centers, to help then build their mosques. It is a disgrace when Siraj Wahadj, Imam Siraj went all over this country building mosques for the entire Muslim community mostly immigrant community and he couldn't find the money to build a beautiful center in Brooklyn. That's a disgrace to this community.", "Because as far as I'm concerned, the single most important community for the Muslims in the United States of America is in the inner cities. It is the single-most important and I am not saying this gratuitously, I am saying it from my heart. It's the opinion of Dr Khalid Blankenship who I consider one of the most brilliant Muslim scholars that we have, not just in the US but on the globe. And he has said that to me many times.", "So we have to be real about helping these communities. We want to get the best and the brightest, give them scholarships so that they can give back. We don't want the migration up. This is what happened with the black middle class and upper middle class. They just moved up and they didn't pick anybody else up with them. And now they're completely alienated and you have completely separate African American communities in the United States", "that can't relate to each other. Right? And the situation is so bad in places like East Oakland, really it's so bad and it's right next door, it's just right nextdoor we're seeing social disintegration and we have a moral responsibility as a Muslim community. We have a morel responsibility to serve the underserved. The Prophet promised us", "by the weakest amongst you. And he meant, bu'afa, he meant like poor people. That's who he was talking about. And He lived amongst them and Allah commanded him to be patient with the poorest of people who call on their Lord in the morning and in the evening. Be patient with them. Be with them don't hang out with the rich people. Hang out with", "To be with those people, elevate them. Lift them up. Bring them up We need to dignify poverty in this country because poverty in the country is a blemish It's like somethings wrong with you You're like a moral leper This is Protestantism at its worst This idea somehow that God's grace is when you get lots of money Matthew 1921 Quoting Christian scripture here", "when the man comes to Jesus and Jesus says, go and sell your garment and give it to the poor. Go and sell you goods and give them to the people and you'll have a treasure in heaven. If you want to be perfect, go sell your material possessions and then give it the poor and then you can get a treasure", "the highest thing is to renounce wealth. That's what monks do, they have a vow of chastity poverty and obedience. Chastity, poverty and obedient all those nuns in those Catholic schools they were all working for free. They were working for Free! The Prophet's Elysium chose poverty over wealth he was given a choice", "and he chose to be a slave prophet. He lowered his standard of living so that other standards could be raised up. That's a challenge, that's a moral challenge for people. It is a moral change. Wealth is a dangerous thing. Sayyidina Ali said, What's halal from wealth? The permitted is severe reckoning, and what's haram is a chastisement.", "And that's why the Zuhad, in all the books they say this. The people of Zuhud, the people that give up wealth, they're the most rational, intelligent people. We have to lower our standards of living. Really. Because we're living on a planet right now that's in peril because of all this wealth acquisition, all this greed. Because that's the fundamental problem. It's about Tama'a. It is just wanting more. When is enough enough?", "enough, enough. You know if you watch any program, you watch of these animal shows, you know those animal programs? I was once in West Africa with an Egyptian American from New York and we were in a Jeep out in the middle of the Sahara and he saw this all of these wild animals. He said man this is just like The Nature Channel. I said no, no,", "Yeah, you got it wrong. But if you watch those programs when the lion gets the zebra, watch the other zebras. You watch them because they're all running but right when that lion gets a zebra, they'll stop and go back to eating because they know Harvey's gone, the lion got his lunch, it's over.", "the lion has a limit, a natural limit. Aristotle said man is the only one that has no natural limits. Surely man goes to excess when he deems himself wealthy. When he deem's himself wealthy Allah is the wealthy" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Islam is not what it used to be - Hamza Yusuf Spee_gS2dRx6HZR8&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742887797.opus", "text": [ "You have the tools for NAMIMA, right? Used to be you know that I mean now people it's amazing the internet and The amount of time that people spend on these things Really if you start you know you should clock in and just look and see what kind of time you spend on These things because people say oh, I don't have any time. I never believe that Because I know how much time I waste", "Really. Everybody, we are master time wasters, human beings. Even the most efficient people waste time because you can't... Like a machine has an efficiency rate. You know like a car they say it's about 7%. 93% of the cars energy is just wasted in a combustion engine very inefficient. The human body it's working at about 33% at optimal work. It's dissipating a lot of caloric energy", "of caloric energy. This is the nature of our creation, Allah has made a creation like this right? Al-kamalulillah only Allah is perfect even though his creation has its perfection he put in the creation all these signs that by it's very nature it's falling apart so also like that is your time, the amount of time you use everybody needs lahu the Prophet he permitted", "how we used to have times of recreation. Recreation is an important part of life, but it's how much time you're wasting because you need some downtime. You have to have it. You know the eating also and then there has to be that time just where your mind is...you can't read all the time. You'll get sick really. You will if you read all time. If you do, if you know how to read, if", "reading is more tiring than just empty reading. Reading for tasliya, just for entertainment. Like thinking about what you're reading takes a lot of energy. So people waste time. It's a human condition. But Allah tells us, you know, wa la tusrifu, not to be people of israf. Wa la tubaddhir tabdhiri. Don't be people", "the consumers are brethren of the shayateen. People that they waste, just consume things. I have spent vast amounts of wealth like I destroyed it consumed it. One of the old English words for the devil is the consumer because he consumes souls and that's what this modern world", "with people just consuming them they're wasted away really if you look out there especially where people don't have ibadah anymore you see the vacuity of the faces, you can see the emptiness you can seethe pain a lot of suffering and you should not look at these people with contempt Muslims have traditionally looked with compassion it's arrogance to have this view of superiority because oh they don't worship or they don' know", "Why? Who you should have told them. When he arrived to the ocean of the Atlantic, they say he had his horse ride into the ocean as the waves were hitting his horse. He said to Allah, Oh Allah if I knew there were people on the other side of this ocean, I would build ships to take your religion to them. And that was the himmah of the early Muslims and it was the", "you know to take Islam and the great people of tasawwuf who spread Islam in India and went into the little villages with the Hindus where they're worshiping idols and things like that, and they taught them about Islam So this is a... You know we're in a time where there's tools of shayateen are immense just have so many tools. And so this is really All of us and I include myself wallahi all of us are", "All of us are blessed to have this. This is called leisure time. This time that we have, leisure in the traditional sense of the word. Joseph Pieper a great German philosopher wrote a book called Leisure and what he argues is that leisure is the foundation of civilization. The time to think. It is the time to cultivate the mind and the spirit. That is what leisure is. Leisure comes from a Latin word which means license.", "It's the time where you're permitted to do the things you were created to do fully. Right? It's a rukhsah. And so, you have a time now, this time that you have here, it's a great time of immense benefits, inshaAllah. So my advice to myself and to all of you is utilize this time. This is precious time. It's free time. You're people of leisure right now.", "have people serving us you look at those people they're serving us there's people serving our food there's cleaning our rooms there's driving us to and from right look with the eye of love to those people because without them we couldn't do what we're doing we would be busy doing those things and so what an honor to be amongst people that allah allows this time", "time this time to be afforded to us to cultivate our minds and our spirits to try to get closer to allah subhanahu wa ta'ala what a gift i mean just alhamdulillah", "Three times in the morning and evening. Then if you say it sincerely from your heart, It's enough of gratitude to Allah. But really be in a state of gratitude To Allah because this is just such a blessing to be afforded this leisure time to cultivate our spirits and our minds especially before Ramadan You know cuz this is going to be an excellent preparation inshaAllah This will be the best Ramadan that we have may Allah give us a beautiful Ramadan and a beautiful", "We're going to be here. You know, a nice thing also about the Sunni country, this Sunni Country is they really honor the traditional days like the Nufs Shaaban is a big night you know? It's a big Night I'll tell you there's a Khilaf about it which is fine It's A khilaf Imam Malik did not practice Shaaban, Nuf Shaban Imam Malek himself he didn't The Hadith were from the people of Sham", "considered it a big night the sham ulama of the tabi'een all elevated nushabban but it spread throughout the world and the malikis ended up celebrating it so even though imam malik is fine if people don't want to celebrate that's fine but ibn rushd gave a great qaeda ibn roshid said if you ever have an ikhtiraf about the rahmah of allah always err on the side of rahma", "Does the Qur'an get to dead people or doesn't it? He just said, look, just consider that it gets there. Because it's Rahmah. And wherever there is more Rahmaha then there is Islam. Ibn Qayn al-Jawziya , he said that, Al-Islam kulluha rahmaa fa idhan taqarat minal rahmatiyyira dhidhiha laysa minal Islam. Islam is all mercy so if it goes from mercy to its opposite it's not from Islam.", "It's opposite then it's not from Islam so May Allah inshallah give you all the blessing of this time You may he give you the ability to make use of it We we really owe also a lot to the the Volunteers there's a group of volunteers. Please treat them all with respect You know, there's always going to be things that arise That you know people what can have genuine?", "What a bad taste and cut, O Messenger of Allah!", "criticize food we have so much blessing the food is will be excellent food so you know if you have a valid complaint or something then take it to one of the people with that's fine but don't complain and just to be a complainer nobody likes complainers even other complainers they don't because they want to be complaining in there and you're taking up all their time" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Why I Came To Islam _1996_ Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_ Ins_jrGQb7B1CB8&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742886547.opus", "text": [ "Thank you for being here. We've been planning to get together with you for some time and Alhamdulillah now is the opportunity for us. Let us talk a little bit about your own, how should I say, transitions that have brought you into Islam. Maybe", "Maybe that would be interesting and we'll go into other things. Well, I'm originally from California. My father was a university professor in Northern California. And on my mother's side actually they've been in California for over 100 years so it's an old Californian family.", "my father's catholic, my mother's Greek Orthodox but I was actually if anything more towards the Greek Orthodox side and then 1977 I became Muslim which uh was very early on for me just at my age. How old were you? I was 17. You were 17.", "From then just began a journey that took me several different places You know I studied in the Middle East and I ended up in West Africa Northern Africa But before you you you get into your Odyssey? You said that you became a Muslim at the age of 17 what brought about this change. I mean was there Something extraordinary that is happening in your life or their influences that Or was it just your own no, I think", "No, I think it's interesting because statistics have shown that conversion of people to inter-religiously but also intra-religiously usually occurs between the ages of 12 and 21. Which people don't realize that. But it's actually more common for people of a younger age to have religious inclinations than at an older age.", "to find a religion or at least a spiritual tradition because I was much more interested in spirituality than religion. At that age, I think I kind of... That is unusual though. Spirituality is a heavy topic. I think for me it was a confrontation with death at an early age. I was in this serious car accident and that began a journey of reflection just about death", "of life and also coming to terms with the fact because I think as individuals all of us at a certain point in our lives suddenly become aware of our mortality. And for some people, I mean you're a physician so I think you know that for some it happens quite late in life. Or perhaps never happens. Or never happens at all until those last moments. Like even the Quran points out story of Peran. Right. Yes. So people I think just the idea", "is something that hit me very early on in life. And looking death very close, you know, up front I think will give somebody an introspective perspective and that's what happened to me. And then it began a search because I was in Catholic schools and so I'd been exposed to religion quite a bit and I really although there are positive things", "very negative things as well and i think that can be said about any religion though no any religion and i'm using religion in a very broad sense of how we live our lives right but particularly absolutely i feel how religion manifests in human cultures is problematic well that's interesting we'll come back to looking at the revision and faith and spirituality a little bit later all right", "So that after having gone through an experience, I sort of tend to think that a lot of people who convert have some defining moment of this kind. Do you agree? Well, this is another fascinating topic. If you look at one of the great conversions in the Islamic tradition is Omar ibn al-Khattab and we know that he was literally on his way to kill the Prophet peace be upon him", "So you're saying that there is also this higher dimension?", "a question to answer simply because you're dealing with such a multi-dimensional situation. And there's so many variables from one perspective we could say that our journey to whatever unfolds in our life begins literally with inception and there is an argument, and it certainly is the Islamic one, that it begins prior to its inception. So, you know, we can look at it materialistically", "identity crisis which according to erickson's psychosocial theory i mean this is what happens during that period of time we're trying to resolve our identity and things like that so we can look at it from a materialistic perspective but i don't think it's it simply uh can be limited to that although there's certainly that element exists and i wouldn't deny that yeah but i think by the same token the kind of experience", "I mean, I have this conversation with my patients also sometimes who are going through that and then they say very clearly that something intrinsically or internally happens to them. And their whole view of life changes. Well, this is called Fipra, right? This is what the Quran calls Fipa which is the inherent nature. And I think what happens, which is fascinating because in my own time working in critical care", "I was in a cardiac unit, so I was dealing with people that were dealing with heart attacks. And it's fascinating to see a vista open up to people that are confronted with their mortality and it can be closed very quickly. And oftentimes it is the physician who is complicit in the closing of that vista because they'll remind them that this is... you know things are okay all you need to do. I think you've had a slight infarct there's not a lot of damage to the tissue", "You can have a good long life if you just, you know, cut down on the fat lower your cholesterol and things like this and suddenly you see Within a period of a day or so a patient who's has had this impact in which they're saying wow I need to look at my priorities And what's important in life? And where am I going and what's it and suddenly they're back on the phone calling and I think my doctor says I can get Back to work by yeah, you two weeks or a week. And so it's fascinating", "it's fascinating so i think vistas do open up for human beings and i uh at the age of 17 chose to to you know take yeah to enter into that vista and really to explore it to its fullest and it and it ended up in my conversion to islam and i think that um somebody would have a very similar experience as i did and and they might look at and get interested at that vista but turn", "defining moment for me in my life and a turning point. But you said that you used that moment when the pathway opened to get into Islam. Why Islam, though? At that time if you... Well I think what happened to me is that I became interested in after death, in what happens after death. And I began to study various traditions of what they said.", "in many ways and partly because history of just studying I find you know European history is really embarrassing for European Americans but I got interested looking at after-death scenarios and I think of all the traditions because my background's also comparative religion and university background which i went into later obviously yeah because", "But if you look at comparative religion tradition, I think what you find is that really Islam has added more to the after-death scenario than any other tradition prior to it. Christianity has. Yeah, but they don't have a great detailed account of literally what takes place. And what I find fascinating is work like Raymond Moody's Life After Life and different books. And I actually at 17 went to see him lecture. That's interesting.", "and I got interested in near-death experiences because that's really kind of what I had. And I find it fascinating that many of the experiences that people have are very similar to what has been defined by the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, as what happens after death. And one of the signs of the latter days of the human experience according to the Islamic tradition is that people will be brought back from death. This is in the Hadith literature or the traditions", "of the Prophet ﷺ. Actually, we will get towards what Islam says in terms of hereafter but I'm just keeping track of your story presently so that after this moment or defining moment if you want to put it, you looked at Islam because you were studying... I was just looking at various religions. I was looking", "particularly with this after death and you know islam it's changing now but this is 1977 uh probably 76 77 prior to the iranian revolution and what was happening then and islam is just you know it's the last place people look in the united states traditionally were you up in san francisco i mean you'd look at hinduism buddhism", "looking at Islam you know because there's just such a negative stereotypical image of Islam and the Muslims and it's also there's this incredibly anti intellectual backlash that I mean Islam is what one of my father's friends who was a lawyer educated person in this country they were just in conversation mentioned that Islam was an idiot religion and my father said well you know my son's a Muslim actually", "But you see, you brought up another topic which needs some reflection here. And that is that you said the impression of Islam compared to other religions is so terribly negative. Of course there is a reason for it and I don't know... It's historical and yeah, there are a lot of reasons for it. And certainly the historical tension that existed between Christianity and Islam for centuries.", "and the decline fall of the Roman Empire said that he termed the war between Christianity and Islam as the great debate. So Europe has always felt the pressure of Islam at its borders, and had several wars with Muslims over the centuries. But I think what's happened in the West is that religion in general has a negative perception.", "of it is the Enlightenment period, recognizing that religion by and large is fairy tales. This is something... And this is what a lot of modern research has clearly shown, that we're dealing with mythological conditions in which books were written and pre-scientific, pre-rational magical worldviews were presented. But that's only one aspect of it. One can look at that argument", "at that argument and say well yes it's a strong argument though it is partly there but I don't think that one can dismiss the entire you know substance of any faith by saying that this is what scientists do a lot of modern people do I mean I think that's one of the refreshing things about Islam is that Islam", "pre-enlightenment thinking. I mean, Islam to me is in many ways it's radically postmodern in its approach because... Well again you use the expression postmodern and we're falling into a debate again of semantics and whether that term which has been coined is valid in terms of applying to Islam. However if you look, if you examine the polls that are generated one of the recent polls", "that I saw from Pew Foundation or what have you. And in that poll they said that 95% of the people in America believed in God and a substantial number of them believed in religion. If you took those two... Well, this is fitrah. Belief in God is an inherent part of human creature. We're stuck with this whether people like it or not. This is something fundamental to our being", "is that from the time a child is little, it's looking for the cause of things. It's asking why did that happen? What made that sound? What did this? I mean, this is something you see search for cause and ultimately the great question is how did we get here? What is all this stuff? I'm where does flesh and blood come from? Where did this incredible synergistic biological species come from, you know? Who...where did this eye...who designed the eye because we obviously see", "function of the eye very clearly and it would indicate that there is some type of intelligence behind the thing. So I think people reject this statistical, you know billions of years of random cosmic... No, I think that whole theory that science has advanced given the right set of circumstances the world can create itself is by and large rejected on the basis of what you've just said either fitra or intuitively people rejecting", "the only reason I'm a Christian is because my parents are Christians. It's a congenital condition and I really haven't given it a whole lot of thought, I mean... I was taught that there's a Santa Claus, I was told that there is an Easter Bunny had I grown up in Sri Lanka or in West Africa they call it Girffaf, they scare people instead of the boogeyman they say Girffaff, this bear-like creature that comes out and snatches little kids", "that don't do what their parents say. So, I mean you're going to be defined by this cultural environment you are in and this historical productivity, you know, that we see that produces people and their world views is something the Quran says think about this. Yes, no, I think that... Should you just be following this thing because your parents are doing it? No, I thin that aspect of the spirit of rational inquiry", "Emphasizes to the nth degree. It's something which is but what I'm pointing out here I think is that it's looking at something not just rational inquiry. It is looking at really really deep here, which is Who are you how did your being get formulated to the point where you have all these ideas and opinions? mean Have you given these things a lot of fun? I mean this is a radical. This is night late 19th century", "early 20th century heidi giri and questioning about ones you know how to call your throne in this right but I mean it's fascinating the Quran ibrahim the prophet abraham in the quran when he points out the stupidity of worshipping idols and at one point they say to him you know well who broke the idols and he said that is the big one did it they said the big", "do any and then it says in the Quran a beautiful expression but you know it says they return to themselves in other words hey he's got a point here and suddenly this is the Vista opening up yeah and they chose to not follow it they said this is what we found our fathers doing and this is that is a radical the other thing I've shift that yes a paradigm shift right and you can either go with it or become the Inquisition", "You know the radical implications of the new paradigm that's emerging now we were pursuing this journey of yours now you've Just had a defining moment or experience and then you Already are Pursuing the study of Islam, and then later on you go to college or actually I was", "I was in my first semester of college and when I became Muslim, I left that. And then I went to England... At the age of 17? Yeah. And your parents just sort of...? I actually became Muslim like a month or so before my 18th birthday. And so yeah, I spent a short time there, I think about six months", "yes and then after that um i i left and i think initially uh you know when you become when you do something that radical like changing your uh you Know your entire way of life your entire Way of thinking and islam is not you know Islam is quite monolithic in its In its approach was it an agreeable parting with your parents or at that time? No, I think initially. It was just difficult for my uh parents to understand", "understand and both my parents are university educated very broad-minded people, I mean her father was a humanities professor and Very philosophical inclinations in his worldview and my mother went to Berkeley and that says enough Yeah So you know she was very active in the civil rights movement. I mean I grew up You know she took me when I was 12 to the Soledad", "the soledad brothers oh yes uh so in the sixth yeah to george jackson's um prison trial just to see you know what was happening that there were political struggles going on in this country she was very opposed to vietnam war so i did grow up with a lot of awareness with a", "uh an area that is you know probably a more wealthier area i mean my family my close family there's wealth in my family like particular fan was not wealthy at all so i did not grow up wealthy by any means in fact quite probably the more of the other end um but idealized then but definitely the area we were in was quite wealthy and so i think my mother was you know wanted to make us sure that we understood that this country has a lot of inequities", "So, you know my sister was in Selma Alabama Marching with you know I mean we that's the background that We were raised in and then the 60s was a fascinating time in this country You know Berkeley was right across the street from where I grew up quite literally it wasn't far at all And we were aware that there were big things happening. You know in in in the States so I think initially You know my parents They were just perplexed more than anything", "Islam is a spiritual political movement. It's not politics without spirituality, and it's not spirituality with politics. So there was I think... You still agree with that? Oh very much so, absolutely. We have a personal and social transaction here. Yes. So I spent a few years in that community and then what I... You were not doing anything particularly you were just... I was studying. I think I was", "at a certain point um i realized that i wanted to learn arabic because i wanted get into the sources you know right to really experience islam from the source and i think being at that age because i'm still only at this point about 22. for me it was still probably one of these things that could go either way you know there were a lot of people dabbling in religions", "Right. The transitions are, you know... Yeah, so people did their religion thing in the 60s and 70s. 60s was very much into it. And to early 70s also. You know, it started changing with, I mean certainly 69 was a big turning point because of the Manson thing that happened in this country. But then Jonestown was a major disaster to the idea of communities and religious communities.", "I think those things were going on, but I definitely wanted to study the tradition from sources. And I got the opportunity from a sheikh who was from Sharjah, Sheikh Abdullah Ali Mahmood, who was kind of a minister without portfolio. He was in England at that time? He was an England and I met him and I was just starting to learn Arabic. And he gave me an opportunity to go to the Emirates. So I went to the United Arab Emirates and I entered into Islamic Institute there in Al Ain and I studied there", "And I spent four years there. And then I actually became an imam in a small mosque and... In Sharjah? In Al Ain. In Al Ein, yes. Yeah. And I lived there. Alhamdulillah it was very good experience for me. And during that time I had met West African scholars and became very interested in traditional Islam that was still being taught in West Africa.", "ended up living with me in the apartment that I was living at and teaching me personally so I learned a lot during that period and then I decided to actually go to West Africa yeah West Africa and that began a whole another journey there you again you spent quite a bit of time as I understand yeah I was overseas almost 10 years yeah and there again", "Certainly, there were some very good people. But I didn't like the environment. So I asked somebody who was at the Ministry of Endowments, Religious Endowment, if they could work out a situation where I could be a Mu'adhin and just live because the mosques have in those countries, they have living quarters next to them for the Mu'adhins and for the imam. So, I didn t take money for the work that I was doing. I had a stipend from this institute. Not very much but it was enough. You left to get by. Yeah. And so they let me do that.", "But I was a Mu'addin and I lived in the mosque. And then after a year of doing that, not very much but I learned the last portions of the Quran quite well. I could recite them well so they let me become an Imam at another mosque that was near there. People were very generous to me. They used to bring me food and things like that.", "different cultures all of a sudden within a short period of time in about five ten years and you here you were uh up in northern california having exposure to berkeley and all the things that you alluded to going to england where different culture practically i mean although it's western culture but then you were interacting with different people now", "from many different parts of the world. So what was happening? Yes, that was a question. Well, that's a good question and I think for me it was a big shock because I think when I became Muslim here, I had no idea because I knew so little about Islam and about Muslim cultures and about Muslims peoples and really vague ideas in my mind about... And then suddenly all this Hollywood stupidity starts re-emerging into the subconscious", "Saracens with their sabers at the gates, you know allahu akbar and simbad and all this nonsense coming out of the subconscious So yeah that thrust me on just having look at a whole And that was big shock for me realizing first it make you sort of doubt your sanity about or your validity of going into Islam at that point The reason I asked that is that's a good question because I think there was a", "I think there was a period early on in which I did start questioning that. Have I done the right thing? Is this really... And I think that is part of what really inspired me to want to study the teaching deeply, just to find out. I'd given up my past, my background, in a sense, my country. It was a very alienating experience.", "And now I'm kind of wondering, you know, looking around at the Muslims and the prospects of, you It was it was kind of discouraging. And so yeah, I think that's a good question because I think I did have that period it's hard You know we have this fascinating self delusional States in which we try to remember what actually happened and we often create, you inventing memory is a Fascinating thing", "Because I've tried to do this repeat did this really happen or didn't you know and in many ways? I mean, I think this whole idea of past lives is just our own lives. It's not about living How many lies have you had yeah, if you thought about that it's fascinating thinking about exactly You think the time when you're a student, you know how that was a past life for me, you knows My pre-islamic life was a passed life from me my childhood was a pass so I think reincarnation", "So I think reincarnation is just, it happens in our own lifetime. Actually the reason I asked also this question is that I've sat across from different people who have converted and then I've asked them after conversion whether they relented at any point, whether they had any doubts. It's always that they say that it happened when they suddenly met a whole lot of Muslims", "and the whole interaction to some of them was very negative. And they said, well we were really, really closed off. Well I've always had mixed...I think you know on the one hand yeah there's massive negativity. On the other hand there is all these things that we in the West have lost. That the Muslims still have considerable amounts of community, family is still very strong", "Also just social relations. I mean for instance, you know You and I have not known each other a great deal of time And yet, you already bonds are formed very quickly amongst the Muslims that don't happen amongst people In the West very often is quite rare and yet it's quite common in the Muslim world so so I think this will you think that then Islam is the sort of leveling factor here which which reduces these barriers amongst Muslims", "amongst Muslims? That's, yeah that's a good question. I think definitely that when you become a Muslim or being a Muslim is a very powerful force that is not the same as being a Christian", "I think that the brotherhood that exists in Islam is much more powerful than I've seen in other traditions. And that is not to deny that there are communities of Christians that don't have deep, deep brotherhood but I'm talking about this universal, more global outlook. I think the Amish for instance probably have a much better community than you'll find almost anywhere in the Muslim world. A much better support group and much more of a network. Absolutely. You might find them in the Swat Valley in Pakistan or the Hunzas", "the Hunzas or you know, in the Caucasus mountains or somewhere but communities are disappearing phenomenon. I mean some people consider it irrelevant in informational period that it was necessary in agricultural societies where you need people to stick together and help each other but when you have these massive megalithic cities in which you've got this state apparatus but the state apparatus is falling apart. Yes of course. And now there's", "know communitarianism they call it which is an attempt at reestablishing communities even within inner city there's a new book bowling alone you read that right that's that's by a guy from the east coast department who was postulating this whole thing that uh america is now becoming very different from what it used to be where there were bowling clubs and we would go bowling and there would be opportunity i actually did read our bonding and all of that so anyway going back again", "No, the reason I asked about Islam as a leveling... You know what hit me and probably silenced me is the word leveling. Because Kierkegaard's one of his ideas about the nihilistic age that we're in is that it levels everything. He used it as a very negative term. So when you use that word, it kind of silenced my mind. I don't know if that was the appropriate word. It may not be. Equalizing would be a better word, because I think... The reason I also asked was Malcolm.", "H.H. Hodge is a definitely leveling experience", "You know, one of the conditions that we're finding ourselves in is that provincialism is increasingly becoming detrimental to the human condition because massive groups of peoples of different backgrounds and cultures are thrust together in mega cities like Los Angeles and Burbank and these places. And suddenly it's, you know, you've got a Korean for a neighbor or you've", "vietnam and suddenly it's having to deal with human beings that are very different from yourself and i think that's one of the things that islam does to us is that it forces us to deal", "differences that people do have at these exterior levels, but ultimately our basic impulses are pretty fundamental. I mean we're dealing with people that want the best for their family. This is a universal human situation. We're dealing wth people that uh... want to live harmoniously, that don't want to be violated or violate others. I think the vast majority of human beings share some pretty fundamental", "Absolutely. And all religions have those, the same core values more or less and to that extent. It's just how do we achieve them? This is the crisis I mean we can all agree yeah let's all be human right but how do you do that? How do we become human this is where the whole issue becomes problematic and i think this is Islam's agenda for humanizing people is so radical. Well I don't know whether you would call it an agenda it's a process I think.", "a line in a rank with people of black man as on your right side, white men's on your left side and Chinese. You know this is something pretty extraordinary. And the whole idea of having being forced to touch them you know which shouldn't be feel force it should be a longing or desire for that closeness and that intimacy that takes place in prayer so that the social aspect Ramadan. Yeah I think there's no question that in all those", "those and universalizing ramadan the idea that we're all one-fifth of the world's population is fasting yes one month out of the year together i mean you talk about harmonic convergence so you spent about 10 years in overseas yeah then i came back here you you came back to northern california uh actually southern californian", "I went into nursing program and completed a nursing school. Yes program then I Went to I was working in nursing and then Went back to the university to do a program comparative religion, so how long that take for you? well altogether it's been about Seven years So you finished that yeah, I'm actually now", "And now, hopefully next year I'll be doing some graduate work. Wonderful! So where are you finding all this time? Well it's making time for...I mean I'm very time conscious. I am conscious of the hourglass ticking away so I just try to utilize... Absolutely man is in loss with times passage except for those who don't waste their time.", "So I just try not to waste time. Time is very valuable to me. What sort of relationship now have you got with your parents? Is that all? Oh, wonderful. Absolutely. Both my parents have a great... My sister became Muslim. All of my family now has a very good idea of what Islam is. And I've done it, I think, hopefully in a way that I'm not condemning them or just...", "them or just you know just i think they all have an idea of what my life's about and and i think all of them uh they're very impressed with you know i've one i mean it's quite difficult to have successful marriage in in this modern 20th century late part of it in in california yes and uh you know hamdulillah my children are uh thanks god their grandparents so i think but you know generally they're they're", "Yeah, well that's nice. Now coming back to Islam and of course its impact on your own life which is obvious since you're quite actively engaged in learning and teaching. And now what difficulties do Muslims have in presenting Islam to the West in a proper way? Because we talked earlier", "earlier on about how Islam is perceived. We didn't talk about our own role or our own responsibility of how we have either failed or succeeded. Good points. I think part of it is the fact that... I think Islam's misperceived by the Muslims as well. It's not just a misperception that the Western people have, it's also a mis- perception that the Muslims haven't and part of that is the", "But on the other hand you're dealing with just unfortunately people that were caught up in the flow of what was happening I mean when the Muslims were defeated by the colonialists this was a great shock to the Muslim ummah and And I think what what happened is suddenly they were having to deal with the fact we've been defeated by The Europeans who for centuries the Muslims had looked down on them as being unworthy of even their Consideration, and you can see some letters that were written by Muslim rulers unfortunately", "to the Europeans, really with disdain and loathing. And so I think that one of the things that God does is He cures people with the medicine that they need to be cured and the medicine of arrogance and pride. The medicine is a very bitter medicine. It's called humility and submission.", "and I think what's happened to a Muslim world that became very arrogant, and very prideful we have really been humiliated. And if we don't learn this lesson... But Habib, that is what my question is! You say that our knowledge has been rubbed into the ground... Yeah, and I don't think we've learned the lesson yet. That's what I'm saying. But the wonderful thing about life is it keeps teaching you the same lesson over and over again unlike school here where you can keep graduating on without having learned anything in the previous year", "They'll put you to the next year. It doesn't happen in life Life will just keep giving you the same lesson over and over again And you get your diploma when you get the point right? And we haven't gotten the point because Muslims still think somehow that they even a law it gives you some Exalted position by the mere fact that you state that well if that was true Then the hypocrites would certainly not be in the lowest portion of hell because they say that too so lay la hayl Allah really", "really on the saying that I'm saying it has no You know No meaning unless it's emanating from doesn't get you any bonuses and if it emanates from the heart It manifests on the limbs And if it manifests on The Limbs you have a human being that's called a Muslim, and if not you have somebody that the quran clearly defines as a hypocrite a munafiq Somebody that in fact way the Quran articulates is your hardy on allah when the Dina Amino while my own", "They attempt and it's muhada in the Arabic language is an attempt they attempt to fool Allah And those who believe and they only succeed in fooling themselves, and there's another version Which is the wash version which says well my you had your own a in them for some and they all me attempt To fool themselves in other words that self-delusion ultimately yeah You can be self deluded but ultimately you know in reality what the truth is so then", "You know, to summarize that what we are saying here then is that the prevailing attitudes within the Muslim community is that they haven't really, really come to grips with the humiliating defeat and therefore they will continue to... And this is why we go around Christian bashing which is a very common Muslim activity. You know? To feel good about ourselves. Right. To point out how horrific the Christians are. I don't know...", "Why isn't that there is a change? I mean, what is happening though? What do you think? Let's examine that. Why aren't we looking into it? Do we have the leshava or...? They say the best definition of madness is to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results. So I think in one sense we've been afflicted with a type of madness and unfortunately post-traumatic stress syndrome has deep repercussions", "And I think the Muslim Ummah as a body is suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. Yeah, but then what are the remedies? Where is the CPR? I mean we're now talking about... Where is this CPR? Well you need doctors and nurses for that. This is a good point because I think part of our struggle is the fact that we do not have any more institutions that are producing human beings of a brilliant intellectual caliber", "treat the patient and traditionally this has been the realm of the you know the ulama al-amidun who are called the awliya, the people that are close to God in their knowledge and in their action. And those people traditionally have guided the Muslims through their devastating periods of time. Well you can see quite literally that...and I don't like to get into colonial bashing because i think it's a real dead end for the Muslims victimization is a dead end road but nonetheless there", "features that need to be looked at and one of them is the fact that our libraries, our scholars are you know khanakas and madrasahs and tekkes and all these places where there was spiritual preparation intellectual preparation of the Muslims they were literally shut down. And not only that but the governments that were created and social reform in Syria is a good book", "with the colonial enterprise and the neo-colonial, and we can almost say why say neo-Colonial because as far as I'm concerned colonialism has never ended. It's just changed form because you know the chameleon like nature of the West is one of its most extraordinary features that it's able to change its form. And this is what media and television is all about. Yeah well that is now cultural imperialism", "We will come to that. But then what you're again pointing out is that we are indeed in a double jeopardy, if I might put it like that. One is one is the that we feel that there is a conspiracy that the West has on one hand. On the other hand, who we do not seem to acknowledge that we", "How many small factions have defeated a great faction by the permission of God?", "that you reject the truth out of ignorance, that you only do things that are bad out of ignorant. And this is Socratic teaching as well. I mean even the Europeans had this idea that people don't do bad things if they really knew what they were doing and this is part of what Islam does or what God does through Islam is literally to open the eyes of people to let them see. One of my favorite things that's happened in recent popular culture is this Kathie Lee Gifford incident", "And there was a wonderful picture of her in Newsweek that obviously got out some television broadcasting, which is where she's got this horrified look. Like, you know, a shocked look when she finds out that she's been supporting child labor. This whole country is supporting child labour. The clothes we're wearing are supporting child Labour. The tennis shoes that we jog in are supporting Child Labour. the soccer balls, the baseball bats that we hit our baseballs with. I mean, the whole thing is supporting Child Labor. Don't blame Kathy Gifford", "Kathy Gifford, blame the whole country. You see? And this is what people don't want to deal with, is that no we have to look deeply at what's going on. The human condition... So then in this, what you're saying that I mean as the example that you've used is of how should I say of abusing people or of ab- abusing", "to support the consumerism or what have you. But getting away from, because that brings us to the issue of justice and economic justice in the Quran. We'll get into that but let us talk a little bit now of why is it that looking at all of the Muslim countries 50 and odd 55 56 I don't know. Whatever the numbers. There still isn't either", "isn't either an awareness one or acknowledgement, or formulation of some kind of vision or strategy. What is our worldview now? Well this is part of the crisis again. I mean we're an ummah in search of a world view. One of things that David Shiddick in his Vision of Islam wonderful book, this is one of the things he puts forward", "Because they're doing good deeds. I mean, that doesn't... The moral element of Islam is not what makes us unique as a community because every community has a moral element. No, it's the vision. It's what traditionally was called the Aqidah.", "of what exactly morality is because there's a great deal of confusion in our modern world for instance. But there is confusion within the Muslims too. Absolutely, because we don't have this thing anymore. No, you're asking... Not only that but the thing that is interesting now is that there are Muslims and they are pious Muslims. Wonderfully pious. Wonderful pious, absolutely. But then if you look at that,", "Right. Social justice. Absolutely.", "the collective body is the establishment of social justice, right? Which is called sharia'a, the sacred law. Now one of the things that you see... No but I want you to answer also... This is important because we get back to this colonial idea. The Quran very clearly says لَنْ تَرْضَ عَنكَ الْيَهُودُ وَلَا نَصَارَ حَتَّىٰ تَتِّبِع مِلَّتَهَمْ The Jewish tradition and the Christian tradition which is not religious it's their social phenomenon which I now think is Europe and America this is the Judeo-Christian phenomenon", "phenomenon they will not be content until you follow their millah now in the quran does not say dean which is their personal piety or their personal transactions with god no it says their milla and how they function of a collective body now the dominant uh milla of our of our modernist condition is the consumer society this is the idol of the age consumption that we were born to create", "be happy through buying that you will be happy if you will have all those goods that are going to make you happy this is the constant message of the television the constant messes media the message of government more if we just make more schools if we can just put more computers in the school if we could just have more prisons they'll be less crime so everything is more that unfortunately the part of capitalism absolutely well yeah at its last stages but what Islam", "you have more by diminishing your exterior wants and increasing your Interior wants because we have interior and exterior wants our interior wants are not the same Because if I'm cold is my body that shivering is not my soul And and I can deal with that. I just put a blanket on and I resolve that crisis But if my soul is shivering then what do I use to cover up that? Well, you can attempt to put a", "what consumerism is. You see, no, no buy and the blanket doesn't work well here's a new and improved right this is what they love to use in their commercials the new and improve blanket this will really make you warm oh this new car wait till you get this new stereo this new television it just keeps going and going and in the end this human being is left consumed because the consumer has ultimately consumed because life consumes us" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Aqidah Schools of Islam by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_EXw9czgpt8w&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW3SBwkJvQCDtaTen9Q%3D_1743293952.opus", "text": [ "The great formulators of this science are really three men. Abu'l-Hassan al-Ash'ari is one of them, and he is a fourth century scholar who was one of the great Mu'tazilite scholars", "of what's called the Ahl al-Sunnah wal Jama'ah, which I'm going to get into in a moment. But Abu Al-Hassan al-Ashari is a very maligned scholar of late. Historically he was recognized by anybody as being one of the great Imams. Even Ibn Taymiyyah is very clear in his praise of Abu Al Hassan al Ashari. So when people attack the Asharis today it's very odd for people that know", "tradition to hear that. It doesn't mean that there weren't groups that were opposed historically, but they were never in numbers large enough to really warrant any serious consideration. And then the other one is Abu Mansur al-Maturidi who was in what's now Afghanistan. He was from there and they were living at approximately", "approximately the same time. And then, the third one is probably Imam al-Tahawi. Now generally and what I was taught by a lot of my teachers was that the people of Haqq are the Ash'ari and the Maturidi and everybody else's is off but I think it's undeniable", "that there is a third group of people, that are the Athari people. And I think it's important to acknowledge that because it's not really fair to isolate that group and say that somehow they're not part of the tradition because they are. And one of the great examples of that is Ibn Abd al-Barr and the ulama of the Murabitun. Very few of them were Ash'aris. It was Qadi Abu Bakr ibn al-'Arabi who brought the Ash'arimidhab", "to Morocco and to Andrusia. But prior to that, they were more Athari in their approach, and they tended to really not like what is termed sometimes in English speculative theology or kalam, so dialectical theology. But it's important to distinguish between the Atharia who are the people of Athar", "the text without really bringing in what are called the aqliyat or the rational sciences to buttress the theology. Those people were not mujessima, they were not literalists, they weren't people that thought certain verses in the Qur'an were to be taken literally. They understood those verses did not mean", "they outwardly were saying, but they were not going to say what they meant. They really left it to no middle be hot on a more ideal that we believe in them according to what God says about them and that is also a position within the Asheri and the maturity schools also so that's not just the authorities but that is the early scholars and some of the later scholars from those", "that creed develops out of problems. When the Prophet, peace be upon him, came he was not a theologian in that he didn't come with this systematic theology. He came with a truth about God that God is one and the Quran has a theology", "a type of creed that's formulated the way they are now. This came later, and the Sahaba were people that were in such a powerful experiential Islam. They were living these truths. Imam Ali said that I never saw anything except", "except I saw God before it, after it and in it. In other words that he was witnessing the afaal of God you know the acts of God in creation. The idea that no leaf falls without the knowledge of God so being aware of God, in a very real presence, that was very much how these people were", "debate things and they just weren't interested in that. So when the Muslims came up against the Christians who had a very profound theological tradition, because Christianity has much more emphasis on theology than it does on law whereas the Jewish and the Muslim traditions have been more focused on law, on shiqh. So", "and Iraq and Egypt, suddenly they were asking them questions they'd never been asked before. Like the Quran says that Jesus is the Kelima, you know, the word of God which in Greek is Logos. And in the Gospel of John it says in the beginning was the Word, the Logos, and the Word was with God and the World was God. So does that mean that Jesus", "is the logos in other words is he the eternal word of god and so nobody ever thought about that and then they said and when you say the quran is karam allah does that mean that the qur'an is the logo in other ways is the qura created or is it uncreated nobody had ever asked them these questions and so suddenly they were forced to think about things that they hadn't thought about before", "Hence theology. Because that is the means by which they were able to really come to some conclusions about these shubohat, because these are obfuscations that come into the teaching that create problems in the hearts of people. And the resolution of the problems comes through working through these problems", "and coming to conclusions about them. And this is what the Mutakallimun did, this is", "is almost identical to Abul Hassan al-Ash'ari's creed. They differ on four points according to the Ar-Subki and that's it. Abul Mansoor al-Maturidi whose creed is articulated in the Nasafiyya, is also very similar he differs on certain things", "differences that are insoluble in that you're not going to come to some kind of, uh, I'm not gonna resolve these problems. So they're just there and they are what they are. So having said that the founders of these creeds are called the founders", "Now, Abu al-Hassan al-Ash'ari was very fortunate in having an absolute genius student, Abu Bakr al-Baqallani, who is probably one of the greatest intellects in human history. I mean anybody that really looks at his work and his genius would have to come to that conclusion.", "I mean, he in essence is really one of the saviors of Islam because at the time when the massive onslaught of Hellenistic rationalism was coming, when there were just so many sects and he was refuting all these people with just really extraordinary brilliance and intellect. And one of things that is important to understand about these creeds", "these creeds is that people that attack them, and I can really safely say this, almost have never studied them. And I found this consistently. What they do is they read their teachers who quote these people, and then they attack them from within their own frames of reference.", "study because when you say that oh this is a bid'ah what is a bida exactly you show me where the bedat is in and they'll see well it's a bit out to say this or that for instance us it's about to say that the most half is not the Karam Allah which is a shoddy position that when you stay karama law about the Quran itself the most have", "That we call the Mus'haf is the copy of the Qur'an. It's called a Mus'haf. And when we say Qur'aan, we're really saying it like majazan. But when we see the Qurayn, what is the Qurayan? The Qur'ana is kalam Allah ghairu makhluk. It is an uncreated word of Allah.", "The Quran is the word of Allah. It doesn't have syntactical precedence and antecedents. It does not have articulation, it doesn't I'rab inflection, it does not part or universal or particulars. Because all these things are created by their nature", "Like saying God has acquired his knowledge. So when you say the Quran, the Mus'haf is Kalamullah we say that out of adab because you don't want to say it's not the Kalam Allah. That's not a Kalamallah. You can't say that. It is the Kalama Allah but it's NOT the Kalma Allah that is Hayrul Mahduq because it is in the world.", "That came into the world. Whereas the kalamullah that is qadeem, is the meanings that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala articulated in his essence. It's the meaning that Allah has in His essence. So that's an example of solving a problem where these people were saying are you saying that's uncreated?", "and that's uncreated. And if you say, well yeah, that's un-created then you have a religion of people who think things that are created are uncreated But if you said the Qur'an is uncreated essentially then what you're saying is an attribute of God is created The speech is an attributte of the speaker", "his attribute is created, then you're saying that Allah has created it. That there's an attribute that's created and that creates a problem. And so this is in essence what these men were dealing with. And they did an extraordinary job when you get to the free will and the determination. You know are human beings determined or are they free? These are paradoxical problems", "all the religious traditions that deal with these subjects. But if you look at them, the way they resolve them, they're quite stunning. They're still limited by language but they're still quite stunning and that's so when we talk about the founder, we're talking first and foremost that it is God who gave us this knowledge. It was transmitted by the Prophet , but it was formulated", "And we believe it's providential care because the Prophet said that this knowledge would be protected by people in each generation. They protect it and so that's what they've done. And Imam Pahawi is one of the great people of that science and that's why his creed is so important.", "the Ilm al-Tawheed, it's called the Ilma al Kalam. These are different names for this science but generally is called Usul ad Deen, the roots of this religion because what this religion is built upon is Tawheeed and this is the science of Tawheeed." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/How special are the dates - Shaykh Hamza yusuf__1748526004.opus", "text": [ "The date palm is a miraculous tree because every single part of the date palm", "that's not used by the Arabs traditionally. They built with it, the Prophet's masjid, the first masjids was built with trunks and then the palm fibers they made their beds from it so they would put the aliaf inside the bed. They used it to clean their teeth so the actual mukhalil was used from the palm fronds, the fibers. And then there are over 450 varieties of dates" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Our Prophet_s forgiveness - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf__1742883412.opus", "text": [ "He forgave the women who prepared for him a poisoned meal, giving him thereby a painful illness which eventually caused his death according to some narrations. But he used to get headaches from the poison. He forgavre the ghoulish and ferocious Hind who became a great woman. The wife of Abu Sufyan who devoured she bit into the liver of his uncle Hamza and he sat with her. He sat with Her! He gave her fatwa about her husband" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/When Sahaba fleed the war - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf__1743304830.opus", "text": [ "He goes and Hunayn is an amazing battle when they were all impressed. They thought, and they all fled. They were fleeing. Abu Sufyan was holding because Abu Sufiya now he was there with the Prophet holding his mule. And the Prophet said Like he was calling out to them. He rallied them. They said had it not been for him we would not have come back but he rallied", "them and so when they defeated them and then they went to taif all of these victories now it was one after another he had so much of the spoils of war and so he gave he started giving his own people all he gave one man 100 camels another man and he's giving all this goats and sheep and camels and the ansar the youth from the onslaught they're looking at this" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Day of Judgment and Love -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _ha__1743063163.opus", "text": [ "that the people love each other for sake of Allah, they don't have a problem on that day. And I'm counting on love. I'm not counting on my actions. I am not counting all my prayers, my fasting. I'am not counting any of that. I Am counting on muhabba because I love my teachers. I love Shaykh Abdullah bin Bayyah. I loved the Prophet . Mahabba is what I'm counted on. That's my deen. Wallahi. I I'm countin on mahabba" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/__ Pasang Saja Tato Muslim _ Syekh Hamza Yusuf _ M__1743303269.opus", "text": [ "Banyak orang memakai tato. Mereka punya tato iblis di punggungnya. Saya pernah berada di belakang orang yang punya tata mobil Mustang tahun 1966 di pUNGGUNGNYA karena plat nomornya bertuliskan 1966 saya tahu ini tragis Ini tragis karena juga menimpa masyarakat kita budaya kita sekarang ada muslim yang ikut-ikutan bertahto ada anak muda Muslim yang memasang TATO itu benar Coba dengarkan kita punya taut dalam Islam serius tapi takto itu", "Tapi tato itu sementara. Ia disebut henna. Jika kalian ingin memakai tato, pasang saja yang sementaranya. Jikalian masih 17 atau 18 tahun, saya ingin bertato. Pasang saja yg sementeranya di tubuh kalian. Iya akan lenyap begitu kecerdasan kalian kembali kepada kalian." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Pray for the Arab People -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _ha__1742891678.opus", "text": [ "You hear so many people speaking ill of the Arabs. The Arabs are the Prophet's people and we should want good for them and pray for them. There is a lot of tragic things happening in the Arab world, there have been many mistakes, the leadership has been terrible, the leadership has been bad for a long time. Sheikh Shadid-e Naifar, a great Tunisian scholar that I knew was one of my teachers and actually he gave me years ago ijazah with the Hamziya", "with the Hamziya, I think kash from him or something that I would translate it because he gave me his commentary on it. So he told me that the Tunisians haven't been practicing Islam for 800 years. That's what he said. He was the dean of the Zaytuna College. Amazing man." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Prophet recited this alot - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _qu__1742881748.opus", "text": [ "The Prophet recited Qaf constantly and it made me think a lot about the secret like what are the secrets that are in this book that would have him reciting it constantly. There's one of the women Umm Hisham bint Al Haritha she actually shared an oven with the prophet because they had communal ovens and so the tenor, they would go and bake whatever they were baking", "baking and the bread. And she had a communal oven with the Prophet so she saw the prophet a lot but she said that she memorized, she said I took the Qaf from the Prophet because he recited it so often" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Signs of the end of time by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _sh__1743308260.opus", "text": [ "I mean one of the things that Prophet said at the end of time people would drink alcoholic beverages but call them by they'll drink wine but called it by other names. So, they won't say that it's khamr They will say something else like its beer" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Signs of the latter days by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _ha__1743063800.opus", "text": [ "There's really a lot of very specific signs of the latter days where the Prophet said that there would be widespread knowledge. He said inanimate things would talk, he said that you would find men being satisfied with men and women being satisfied", "which nobody understood at the time. He said that people would have on their sides, they would have things that would tell them what their family was doing at home. He's he said that, uh, people would travel between the cloud and back to the earth. Um, many, many signs, uh that he said, uh That metal would speak um Natak al-Hadeed I mean it is very interesting science. He Said that the skyscrapers would" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/The Story of Forgiveness -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _ha__1748540448.opus", "text": [ "The man who was a mass murderer and he wanted tawbah, the monk said there's no way God is going to forgive you so he chopped his head off made it 100. And then he still feeling bad and went to another person and he said oh go to the land of the Muslims and you can get tawba. So he set out and died on the way he didn't even get there yet.", "came and argued, no he's mine. He's going to hell. Killed 100 people. And the other one said, no, he was trying to make tawbah. And hadith which is in Imam al-Nawi relates it in Riyadh al-Sariheen. It's a sound hadith. They measure and he was closer to the Muslims so he gets to go with them." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/What commerce teaches you - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _co__1748523657.opus", "text": [ "Everything, the chairs that you're sitting on are from commerce. The clothes that you are wearing are from Commerce. The glasses that you looking through if your looking through glasses are from Commerce. The fillings in your teeth are from comers. The medication is keeping your blood pressure low right now is from commerce everything that is beneficial to the material well-being of the human being is from Commerce but there's another secret in commerce", "Commerce teaches you good character because the most successful merchants are the ones with the best character. You go back to people who treat you well and that's why historically they used to say customer is king, the customer is always right. A merchant shouldn't get angry because even if the person buying from him is making him angry he'll lose the sale if he starts getting angry because the person will just walk out" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Hardships of Prophet ﷺ -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _hamz__1743306821.opus", "text": [ "And dunya is hardship. Nobody had a more difficult time than the Prophets. The Prophet ﷺ said, أَشَّدُّوا النَّاسِ بَلَأْنَا الْأَنبِيَاتِ ثُمَّ الْعَمْثَالِ فَرَمتَالٍ The people that have the most difficult time in this dunya are the Prohpets and then those close to them. Our Prophet ﷺ buried all of his children except for Fatima. Who amongst us has had to bury all of their children? He buried all", "They were eating the leaves off trees. The best of creation, they were taking the leaves and basically grinding them down and they were eating leaves on trees during the Ṣār in Makkah" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Meaning of Rab _ر_ب___ by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf rh _h__1743057845.opus", "text": [ "In Arabic, the word Rab which is the root of it is Ra Ba Ba but related to it is Rabaya and this another type of Ishtiqaq where you have one...the last letter in particular will give a nuance of the meaning. So one of the meanings of Rab is Murabi, the one who raises or who nurtures you and cares for you so its really different from Ilah.", "it's more transcendent and then is more imminent, it's closer, it' s more intimate, it is closer to us." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Vision of The Prophet ﷺ _ Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _shor__1743310469.opus", "text": [ "Why he was the most beautiful of people. Physically, he was beautiful and the reason why Shama'ir At-Tarmidhi is so important is because we should know what he looks like Because he will be shown to us in our graves The Prophet will be shone to us on our grave And the angel will say What do you say about this man? And we will see the prophet in our grave", "knew his attributes, that they would recognize him." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/How to be Mindful in life - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_OPcrl4fY8YQ&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743059686.opus", "text": [ "So this is a beautiful way to become mindful, is to try to remember and habituate ourselves to these things but also do them with intention.", "people saying that there was just a lot of madness during that time, but unprecedented times. So we thank Allah for the gathering and mashallah I know a lot people wanted to be here, but because it was so overwhelmingly desirable", "that so many of you came out early and so inshallah people that are online, that weren't able to be here in person we thank you for just your patience and inshalla one day will have a much larger place together but this is a blessed place. It's a sanctified place it was built for God at the height of the depression", "to worship our Lord as we understand him alhamdulillah so mindfulness is a very interesting term it's become very popular as dr. Ayesha said one of the things about mindfulness is it's actually a relatively recent word it goes back in the 16th century but", "From then on you see this rise. So if you look online, you can see usage and you see the line it just goes nothing and suddenly around 1960s starts to creep up and by 2019 its gone way up. There's so many things about mindfulness online everybody now has had some experience if you live in America especially California with this idea of mindfulness. Now they have corporations that have mindfulness", "they have people come and tell you how to be more mindful. But what's really unusual to me is, What is your mind full of? Because one of the most interesting things about the modern concept of mindfulness it's actually what we would call dhikr-unnafs Like you're doing remembrance of yourself So where does this term come from? I got interested in just where did all this come from", "from well it came from Buddhism because the Buddha who I actually wrote an article in a book on Buddhism and Islam a lot of people don't know this but the Afghanis were actually great Buddhists and Afghanistan was one of the major Buddhist centers in the pre-modern world", "the great shrine keepers who are known as the Barmakids. Barmak was not a family, it was actually a clan that kept the Buddhist shrine in Afghanistan. So the Baramika were actually Buddhists that converted to Islam and then they actually helped bring all of their administrative knowledge into the Abbasid Empire.", "many Buddhists became Muslim and I was struck by the fact that one of the great heresiologists and Ash'ari scholars in a book I was reading he actually had the Buddhist as a section in sects what they call millal an-nahal which is religions and sects so", "say is true about this man he must be al-khidr which really struck me and so then I started researching all of what Muslims have said about al khadar and the parallels between al khedr and Buddhist Buddha are amazing so I wrote this article called Buddha in the Quran question mark and it was actually translated to Arabic by the Ministry of Al Qaf in Morocco because", "because al-Khidr, according to our tradition was actually a prince who escapes from the palace and goes on this journey in search of knowledge. And then has ilm ladunni it's not revelation it's a type of enlightenment that happens so the Buddha talked about mindfulness and he actually has a very famous in its called Satipatthana which is", "that he gave on mindfulness. So then I wanted to know, well what was the word they translated from mindfulness? And it's a Pali word which is the original language of Buddha and in fact Dr. Cleary argues that in the earliest Buddhist manuscript called the Dhammapada that the Buddha actually predicted the coming of the Prophet Muhammad .", "So I looked up sati, paali. What did it originally mean? I want to know what it originally meant and it meant remembrance of the sacred scriptures. So it actually literally means remembrance so it's dhikr. So mindfulness that's been translated into English from sati is really dhika. So then it becomes what are you doing dhikkur of? That's the question. Now we live in an age", "live in an age of immense distractions. Arguably this is the most distracted age in human history. Now what does distraction mean? Well, according to the dictionary it means a state of being distracted. This is what drove people like Derrida crazy. But", "Mental distress or derangement. Thank you, that helps. Mental distress of derangements. Now isn't it interesting that we're living in one of the most mentally deranged times in human history where people no longer even know what they are? They've forgotten God. They think that this is all meaningless and they're completely distracted so", "distracting them one of the problems with distraction is if you're looking for it, there's plenty of people that will help you find it and So there are all these merchants out there that are trying to advert turn your attention toward That's what advert means to turn towards so an advertisement Is to entice you and to get your attention now social media was designed to keep you on it", "on it they don't call it surfing the web for nothing first of all a web what do you do with a web a spider knows what you do With a web, you capture flies You liquidate their innards and then you suck the life out of them. And then there's just a shell lying there on the web Right What's a net like internet? What's anette for Annette's for catching things right so", "So, now as somebody who actually surfed in my younger days, one of the really interesting things about surfing is you're just trying to stay on. The wave has you. You're not controlling the wave. The waves are controlling you. Your'e just trying stay afloat and so surfing the web your just moving and it's taking you. So distraction creates mental distress", "distress the third meaning in the dictionary is that which divides attention the word in English decide to decide something it comes from a word which means to cut off desideri why would decide mean to cutoff because what you decide cuts off everything else once", "things and you've made your decision. And so people have to make decisions like where do you spend your time? What do you give your time to? Now the word in Arabic for distraction is ilha, which means", "entertainment which in the dictionary is the pleasurable occupation of the mind So who's who's occupying your mind now what you give your attention to will determine Your reality What you give, your attention, to will Determine your reality What does that mean it means that if you're always watching", "news about crime, you're going to think that crime is far more prevalent than it actually is and you will be scared. You'll be walking around thinking like Chicken Little that the sky is falling. So what you give your attention to is going to determine your reality. And what God is asking us is to give our attention to God. Now what is in Arabic intention?", "What is attention? Well, in English it has a lot of really interesting meanings. One of them is courtesy. Like you say he was very attentive to me. Attentions are what a lover gives their beloved. Attention is also a word for devotion. So your attention is your devotion. It's what you're attending to.", "It's what you're giving your time to. So in Arabic, one of the words for it is اهتمام. It's What You're Concerned With. It'S Your هم. It' s What Preoccupies Your Mind. It''s What Your Mind Is Full Of. And so the Prophet said مَن جعل هُمومه هما واحداً كفى الله له سائر الهموم", "very well may be marfu' because it is often said with qala Rasulullah. He didn't say astayqadhu, if they die they wake up. No! They come to attention. Intibah is nabiha, is somebody who's smart, intelligent because he's focused,", "is what happens when people die. The Prophet said in one iteration, مُوتُ قَبْرًا تُمُوتِوا Die before you die. In other words come to attention before you're brought to attention. And in Sahih Muslim it's اعِدُّ أنفوسكم من أصحاب القبر Consider yourselves already dead. It has the same meaning. In another word wake up now and this is what mindfulness is really about. It's ذكر. It' coming to... One of the words for attention in Arabic is also", "Arabic is also . It's to be awake and aware. You're attentive, you're aware, your mind is present. So already by the 1880s Nietzsche noted one thinks with one's watch in one's hand he complained even as one eats one's midday meal while reading", "This is distraction. Everything is done with the clock. One of the most interesting things about time, and one of my favorite writers, Lewis Mumford, said that when the modern mindset came to dominate, this is what he wrote, eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions.", "In its place came the dictatorship of the clock. I mean, isn't that interesting? People used to think about eternity. Their lives were actually determined by their understanding of eternity and one of the most common things about pre-modern peoples is they mention death a lot", "of modern people and postmodern people is they never talk about death. Why did the pre-modern people talk about that? When I was in the throne room of the former Queen Elizabeth, now the throne of King Charles, I was taken there by Baroness Udine she's a Muslim in the House of Lords so they took me into the throne", "this throne room and there was this massive clock given by the French King to the British monarch that had the grim reaper on top of it. That's what the clock had, it had the Grim Reaper in other words the angel of death was on top with his scythe that takes the souls. In all if you look at Dr. Youssef knows", "In all of the pre-modern sundials, it will say things like carpe diem. Many Latin phrases, things like in one of these hours you'll be seized. People saw time as a reminder of their finitude, as the reminder that they were finite beings in temporality. Modern people think they're going to live forever. They don't think about death and one of the main reasons for this desire for distractibility", "distractibility is because it preoccupies people from thinking about what is inevitable, that they will die. The Prophet ﷺ said, أَكْثَرُ مِن ذِكَّرِي هَذَمَ اللَّذَّاتِ Do much remembrance of the destroyer of delights, death. Not in a morbid sense. This is being unto death. This", "of it. Marabat al-Hajj every night did death meditation he would recite poems about death. Shaykh ibn al Habib in his diwan, tazawudu akhi you know be prepared for death fainnahu nazirun and its coming and they used to sing this on a regular basis to think about death the prophet was completely aware", "Of the presence of death. The Quran, death permeates the Quran. There's not a page that doesn't have the perfume of death scented on it in the Quran and this is not morbidity This is not some kind of morbid or morbidness It's not morbid nests It's actually to make you aware of the preciousness of the time that you have been given This is the precious ness of life itself", "gift from Allah and we waste it away with all of this insignificant concern. There's one of the interesting things about the ancient Greeks is they were actually very concerned about distraction but what they saw was that", "to value the most. Their reason for treating distractions so seriously was straightforward, and it's the reason we ought to do so too. What you pay attention will define you! It will define what you pay. Attention to will define. Seneca wrote a famous short book called The Shortness of Life. He was he's a great Roman philosopher", "and one of the notables from Rome. And he talks about his fellow Romans pursuing political careers, they didn't really care about holding elaborate banquets, they did enjoy baking their bodies in the sun. He literally says that's sunbathing, something Europeans tend to do other peoples don't need to.", "suspect he probably was, right? But the crucial point isn't that it's wrong to choose to spend your time relaxing whether at the beach or on Buzzfeed. It's that the distracted person isn't really choosing at all. I mean, that's the key. You're not choosing. It is quite the opposite. The word in Arabic is one of my favorite Arabic words, akhtara. It literally means if you look at it khayr, it comes from khayer. So akhtarah", "It's to internalize something. So you're choosing the good that's what if TR is but it's either a real or an apparent good That's the difference and so distracted people are not choosing They're not choosing a real, or even in a parent good they're surfing Everything will pull their attention. It's called the noonday devil in in the old scholastic tradition sloth spiritual laziness", "laziness people that don't want to uh to think about the inevitable one of the amazing things and this is what i wanted to really talk about is one of our most important books and it really is", "book known as the Risala of Imam al-Kushayri. This was a foundational book in Tasawwuf and Tasawwwuf is part and parcel with the religion of Islam you cannot take Tasawvuf out of the religion without deracinating it, without uprooting it there are many different types of Sufis", "went astray there's mutakallimoon that went astraight every science has its problems but the idea somehow that tasawwuf like that mentioned in the Risal of Imam al-Qashayri wasn't from Islam nobody would have accepted that including Ibn Taymiyyah and ibn Abd al Wahab so", "time and he says that time for the people who have had realization these are the verifiers, the people that have penetrated the reality of this religion", "that if you practice it, you will get the results. In other words, it's falsifiable. This is Popper's argument for a true science, is that it can be replicated. So the muhakkhun are the people that replicate again and again the truths that were told in our tradition. They falsify the religion. They show you that over and over again we do these things and we get the same results. Therefore,", "says that with the people of tahqeeq it is something that is mutawaham. It's not something tangible, it's something like illusory time but it's associated with something that actually substantial what he means by that is that for us we don't know if we're going to have the next minute so I can make my plans for tomorrow. Tomorrow will come", "come for a lot of people but it's not going to come for everybody that's the quality that it's mutawaham and this is why Sahal was asked when will the human being finally be still? And he says", "that the only time he has is the moment that he is in. And this is why Allah says about the awliya, أَلَا إِنَّ أَوْلِيَ اللَّهُ لَا خَوَفًا عَلٰيهِمْ In other words, they have no fear of the future. وَلَّهَمْ يَحْزَنُونَ And they don't grieve. They have no grief about the past because they are ابن الوقتِهِ They're here. They're present. They'e mindful. They are fully aware. This is the difference between them and everybody else.", "They are present. So that is what he's telling us. So he says, a man will say, I'll come at the beginning of next month. He doesn't really know that. He only hopes he'll see him. But the beginning", "But you might not come with it. And that is the nature of time and then he says I Heard Abu Ali Ad-Dakaaq one of the great Aarifeen say Rahimahullah", "If you are in joy, your time is joy. And if you're in grief, your times is grief.\" And then he says, he means by this that time is essentially what overwhelms the human being. It's your experience. That's what time is. It' s human experience and this is what the clock has taken away from us. The clock is quantifiable thing. Time is not quantifiable in reality.", "Allah is time. The scholastics, and I think they took it from us, the scholastics called it nukstans. God is the eternal now. If you look at in ta'rifat, Imam al-Jurjani says, It is the internal now. It's the now that stands still. God", "time because I am time. Some of the ulama interpret it as batinu zamān, it's what the zaman is to the outward and time is to inward. Anyway he goes on, it a stunning thing. He talks about Imam Shafi'i, he said,", "In other words, if you're not attentive it will cut you down. We don't kill time, time kills us. Whenever you hear somebody say I'm gonna go kill some thyme that is a person in complete ghafla. Whenever your hear somebody, you know, ibn Ataylah he said the fool gets up in the morning and says what am I going to do today? And the wise man gets up and says What is God going to with me today?", "So he said, and then he said... Your ego is such that if you do not preoccupy it, focus it on the good, it will focus you on the harmful. On the evil, on the bad. Allah. Again, Abu Ali", "Then Abu Ali Al-Dakkaq said, Time is a file. It just wears you down. Doesn't obliterate you. It wears you dow until there's nothing left and this is why time is so important he ends this by saying", "It takes a part of me. And it gives remorse to my heart, in other words for the time I wasted and then it continues on, it continues On and Then he says It's like the people of the fire Whose skin is reborn and this from the Quran", "from the Quran. It says every time the skin gets burnt, Allah recreates it. I mean this is we know about these proprioceptors not receptive all the skin has these receptors that's why burn people to get burnt really deeply they don't feel it once they've gone through the skin so the skin according to the Quran is recreated. It's recreated so that the the the receptors experience it and then he", "The dead one is not the one who dies and then finds repose. Rather, the dead is the dead among the living. The intelligent one is the one whose mindful of his time. He's giving the time its due.", "So he's either in the or in the Sharia depending on what time it is. These are very high meanings and Imam, Sidi Ahmad Zarroq says that don't... He says people they should be looked at according to their station so what is asked of the", "with being common people. We should all aspire to rise up, to be higher than our position and common people is not the street sweeper. The streets weeper might be a knower of God so common people in the Western understanding are people that don't have degrees and haven't gone to college and haven' gotten PhDs and things like that very often those are the most common people they're the most", "people. So I wanted to now just talk a little bit about why we celebrate. Really, we should celebrate every day the birth of our prophet and the fact that he came into the world. We should be joyful. And one", "It's a hallmark of the Muslims that they loved our Prophet, peace be upon him. This is a quality that you find all over the world. Even people, bad Muslims often love the Prophet, may Allah bless them. And I'll give you one example when I was in England there was a Kuwaiti man. I shouldn't have said Kuwait but anyway I said it so may God veil us all. Anyway there was man from the Gulf who was he was in a bar", "He was in a bar and he was drinking. And then this man asked him where he's from, he said Kuwait. He said oh that's Muslim isn't it? He said yeah. Then he said something about the Prophet . Well this Kuwaiti man broke his bottle and jabbed this man right. Obviously you shouldn't do that really but the impulse is real. The impulse is there's people somebody said to me", "was killing people over religion. I said, well, I was in England at the time. I you guys kill people over football matches? You know, I mean, and in fact there used to be a billboard that said if your religions football worship with Skype sky sky it was like a football channel because There are people that that's their religion That's their attention is given to that they watch all the games. They know all the names", "That's, they know who can bend it like Beckham. Right? I mean, it's very interesting. This is people giving their time and that's all we have is our time. This what God has given us. This a great gift that he's given us participation in being. So the prophet said to him, He was the most mindful of human beings and that really what I after thinking about mindfulness", "about just how so many people in the West are looking at these religions like Buddhism and they've never considered Islam. It's just fascinates me because our Prophet is so extraordinary, and one of those extraordinary things about our Prophet , is his name! Because all over", "Right now, right now here we are in California. Right now there's people all over the world doing All over the World they're praising our Prophet and his name is Muhammad", "not a name he got later his mother named him Muhammad and it was an unknown name to the Arabs but she was commanded to name him Muhammad so just in his name is a proof of who he is because he is the most praised human being on the planet and the second I arguably is Mary I mean Mary people all over the millions hundreds of millions of people all", "But I've never met any Christians that sit there saying, you know Oh God praise Jesus You know bless Jesus do I have never seen that and I've actually the in Genesis it says god will bless the nation That blesses Abraham. I asked an evangelical friend of mine Have you ever blessed Abraham? And he said I can't think that I have and I said we bless him every day at least five times a day and So by your own book it says we're a blessed nation", "we're a blessed nation because we bless Abraham and of all people the prophet in a sahih hadith said that he was shown all of these prophets and he said who they look like. He actually told them which tribe they looked like, Bani Shenu'ah Moses looked like the people from Bani Shunu'ah Jibril looked like Dihya He said what they looked", "The one that looked most like Abraham is your companion. What a beautiful, not your teacher, not you're sheikh, not... Your companion. Our prophet was the most humble of human beings. He loved people. He cared about people.", "He was he was moderate in every single thing that it's amazing. This is another proof of the Prophet his moderation, he said my way is the middle way meaning the moderate way We made you a moderate nation of people in the middle even geographically The bulk of Muslims are in the Middle of the Earth They're not at the extremes they're in the MiddLe of the earth Everything about him is moderation the prophet said to him. They said about him", "He was of middle stature. He was neither too tall nor was he short. Nobody ever appeared taller than him, but he wasn't tall or short. He said", "inclining toward a reddish light brown. He was neither dark nor was he a pasty white, like the Europeans, you know, the northern Europeans. The Italians are closer to that color. It's the most beautiful of colors. I once asked when they described the Prophet like the full moon did they mean the harvest moon on the horizon with that beautiful coloring", "has or the real brilliant white and he turned to some of his students, he said, like look at the questions of the Romans. For him, Rome was you know so He said it was like the moon on the horizon And that's somebody who is an eyewitness", "And then he said, رجل الشعر. He had wavy hair. It was neither straight nor was it kinky. It wasn't straight. Everything about him was middle. The Prophet, the other aspect about him and I want to because we were", "There's a, from the Buddhist tradition there is a book on Chan Buddhism. It was very interesting stories from the masters", "And one of the students asked the teacher, do inanimate things teach? And he said, inanimate thing teach. He said why can't I hear it? He said because you can't hear. And then he said who hears it? And then the saints hear it and then he says do you hear it. He says no if I heard it you wouldn't hear my teaching", "And then he said, can the common people ever hear? And he said if they could, they wouldn't be common anymore. And so inanimate things. How is it that all of the Sahaba heard the tree trunk moan because they were all saints? If they hadn't been saints, they couldn't have heard it when the palm", "poem when the pebbles in his palm praised Allah not everybody heard it but Abu Bakr and Omar heard it these are maqams so he saw a lot of him heard things he heard trees greet him he heard mountains greet him", "The Taoists say, sages love mountains and mountains love sages. These are teachings that are throughout because these truths have been given to all people but we are the last inheritors and this is the gift of our Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam sent to us that we are from the last ummah of mindfulness in an age of utter distraction. This is his gift to us a path to becoming awakened", "Awakened not woke bad grammar awakened the path to becoming awakened and Grammar is let us modify a logia in the Quran in Jannah. You don't hear bad grammar That's one of the meanings of lagia It also means anything just empty you don't here an empty speech that's the primary meaning that you shara is", "The ishara is no bad grammar. The Prophet ﷺ loved beautiful language He enjoyed hearing the poets come to him and they would say things, and he would tell in fact when Hassan ibn Thabit said He said your invective is harder on these kufar than our spears", "He said, invect and may the Holy Spirit give you aid in doing that. One of the Sahaba who was known for just his humor one day was making all of the sahabah laugh and the prophet was there and he poked him in his side like it's enough", "Humor should be like salt. It shouldn't be the whole meal.\" And so he poked him and he said, , that hurt! And the Prophet said, Then take your vengeance. And he said you have a shirt under and I don't. So the prophet lifted up his shirt and exposed his khasera, like the hip, and he grabbed it and kissed him. He said, That's all I wanted.", "He was the most attentive to his guest. And this is a hallmark of all the Salihin. Every virtuous human that I've visited, always the guest. Let him honor his guest if you believe in Allah and the last day let him honor His guests", "let him honor his guest so this is our prophet sallallaahu alaihi wasalam now how do we become mindful? This is the question and one of the most important ways Allah says يَا أُذْكُرُوا اللَّهَ ذِكْراً كثيراً", "Remind them. In other words, call their mind to attentiveness, to attention. Remind because reminders benefit the believers. In another word they will become mindful by being reminded. By being brought back to reality. And so the Prophet one of his names is Al-Mudhakir The one who reminds, who brings you back to your mindfulness To your remembrance of Allah .", "I had a teacher, he was a beautiful teacher. He was Sudanese, Sheikh Ahmed Badwi Tayyib al-Asma and I read with him the Muwattaa. He is student of Muhammad Habibullah Wadmi Abbas so I had direct connection to one of the greatest Muhaddithin of the 20th century. He's a brilliant Mauritanian scholar who when he went to Al Azhar and he wanted to teach in the masjid so all the Azhari's wanted to test him. So when they came in", "do ta'arruf and so the first one said I'm Shaykh so-and-so he said ibn mann, he said so-an-so, he He said as far as I go back each one gave their whole all their lineage And he began by giving his lineage So when he finished he said salam alaikum fulan ibn Fulan ibin Fulani salama alaykum falana bin Fula nabba Salama alaikom falana. So and he went through all of them and when it came to him", "his lineage. So they say you can teach hadith . So he studied with him, he was a mufti in the UAE and in the court when I was a student there but he wrote a little book which he designed it so that if you did these you would be from the dhakereen Allah zikran kathira And when I told Shaykh Abdullah bin Bayyah that we had translated this book Dr. Asad and I", "that he said his father used to say whoever does these dhikrs, they're called the munasabat, the occasional supplications. He said whoever does them on a regular basis will be written from the dhakirin allaha dhikeran kathira. So this is a beautiful way to become mindful, is to try to remember and to habituate ourselves", "with intention in other words not formulaic and not perfunctory, not in some way in which you go on to automatic pilot where you actually stop and you supplicate Allah . So Umm Salama said the Prophet said never left the house except he said", "a perfect prayer and i know of no other religion that has these prayers i don't know any other religion it's to me one of the proofs of our prophet is that all of these prayers are so stunningly beautiful they're very difficult to translate because they're so comprehensive he said i was given the comprehensive words he says so much with so few words so when he went out he said oh allah i seek refuge that i should trip or be tripped", "That I should go astray or be led astray that I should oppress anyone or be oppressed or wrong Anyone will be wronged that I become angry or foolish or somebody should Display their anger of Foolishness on me against me That's a protective do as you go out when he went into the it when he to relieve himself He said allah mean, I would have been a little bit what habit because these are foul things like", "like emptying yourself even though nothing foul came from the Prophet ﷺ. And the earth swallowed up. The Prophet ﷺ, when he came out, he said, غُفْرَانَكَ You know, your forgiveness. And then he said، الحمد لله الذي رزقني لذت وابقى في قوة واذهب عني أذاه What a perfect dua. Praise be to the one who provided me the delight of the food,", "the energy of the food and remove from me the harm of the Food. These are perfect prayers, perfect prayers. So all of these things that the Prophet when he went to bed In another Rewa which is He actually says that I have surrendered myself to you.", "my back to you in other words for protection and then he says i believe in in you i believe", "He said, go to sleep and not expect to get up in the morning. This is attentiveness to time. People die in their sleep. We don't know. We're living in a place... Earthquakes happen. The house could collapse. لَا قَدْرُ اللَّهِ سَلِّمُكُمُ اللّٰهُ جَمِيعًا When waking from sleep, I slept in the tent of Muraab al-Tarhaj for the first few months that I was with him. And then I actually asked because it...", "asked because it was very intense. He did dhikr all the time, he did dhiqr in his sleep and I have only seen a few people that do dhiqur in their sleep there was one man Sidi Ali in Maknas who I was with him and he was sleeping and snoring and doing prayer on the Prophet sallallaahu alaihe wa sallam and he", "The Prophet said, My eye sleeps but my heart doesn't sleep. So there's people that do dhikr so much that even in their sleep they're doing dhiker. In fact sahabi used to have to put rocks when they went to the bathroom They would put rocks in their mouth to remind themselves not to say the name of Allah.", "ويقوم بهذا بسرعة من ألي عمران في الحديث الأخير ينظر إلى السموات والأرض ويصفح بالنجوم", "When making wudhu, I said, Wudhu is an act of ibadah that many people are deprived of because they do it only for the prayer. The Prophet used to do wudu as an act", "It was just amazing how he did wudhu. And he would always, when he completed, This was the dua on the completion of wudu. That is a beautiful dua.", "dua and that's wasa'li fi dhari you're you know a man can be in a cell like tobias tubbs could be in an expansive place another person could be", "And then when he got on a camel, which is taken from the Quran also. Always the Akhira because time for pre-modern people was always related to eternity This is why when you eat", "with the ni'ma thaniya. Food is a blessing that dissipates, but submission to Allah is a", "one of my favorite also. And in a riwayah, and he had no shadow. Ibn Hajar says he had No Shadow. This is something that the Salaf said. He was always shaded by clouds but he had", "One of the proofs of his hairs are if you cast a light on them. They don't show shadow. Allahumma ja'alni noora, make me light. God place light in my heart, light on my tongue. Light in my hearing, light in sight. Place light behind me, light before me, place light above me, and light below me. Oh God, make Me light, grant Me light. When entering the masjid, Allahumme ftaah liya buwaaba rahmatika", "he entered with his right foot first and made this dua. When leaving the masjid, left foot, because the rahmah is in the masjed, the fadl is in world, the bounty of the world. When hearing the adhan,", "finish it. The Prophet is our Sayyid. Most of these Rewa'is have without the Sayyidd, but it's been the Urf of the Muslims to say Sayyied, our Prophet. Just out of adab to him. I mean there's a position and this is a position that's a totally valid position that it's also", "I mean, why do people assume that they can just call you by your first name? People used to take a long time before you gave them your first. If you look at the old English like Jane Austen, they called people by their last name, like Willoughby. That's not his name. His name was John Willoughbye but they called him Willoughbey because he was called by his last name and if it was an elder then they would call them sir or mister. We say Abu Yahya, you know, Abu Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam", "It's a lie Sam you give the Konya That's how the Arabs do it one of the things that I realized went because I went to a Catholic school in high School, and they always called you by your last name. This was You know early 70s so it hadn't changed yet to the degree They always called me by your name So you know if you raise your hand they see mr.. Hanson? That's they called you and my father went to the same school And what I later is", "is that you don't just represent yourself, you represent a family. You have a family name, that you shouldn't dishonor your family name. So we're in a time when it's just everybody's an individual. They no longer have any sense of being part of a family or a community. So it's one of the tragedies I think of this all this familiarity.", "Forgive me. You know, this O God now is the arrival of your night, the departure of your day and the sound of your callers so forgive me. Imam al-Bukhari To go to the bath or sleep. In the name of Allah, the Prophet said If you're going to be intimate then this is something to say", "to protect the child. Very, if you wake up from a fright, you say this in sleep. There are many, many of these. I mean we have beautiful books. Imam Ash-Shokani wrote a fantastic book, Tuhfat al-Dhakireen. Imam An-Nawi's great book Al-Adhkar is one of the finest books in our tradition.", "And many, many scholars have written small books like this one that my teacher wrote. They want the of teaching these things to people so it's why people write Tajweed books. Like I used to really bother me with Tajweed Books. I see all these Tajweed book they're all the same. They say the exact same thing. They are all little books and they say the exactly same thing and I was like why do people keep writing Tajweed", "aren't there enough Tajweed book? And then I realized it's actually a brilliant thing to do because anybody that learns how to read the Quran from that book, the author of that book gets the reward of all their recitation. So this is why shiukh always made their own awrad. That's why I realized that because I was like, why they keep making new awrad? Because they want the reward", "totally have no problem anymore with that because I get it. I want to do it like I'm going to write a book on Tajweed inshaAllah Allahumma aghfir li dham bi kullahu diqquhu wa julluhu wa awwarah wa akhirahu wa alaniyahoo wasarrahoo Oh Allah forgive my sins, this is in prostration Forgive my sins entirely the lesser and the greater the first and the last the revealed and the concealed He also said you know there are many many beautiful iterations", "One of the things of the afiya, one of the meanings of it according to Imam al-Qushayri was to be focused on God. In other words not to be distracted which I thought was really interesting. You know this is between the again", "month and given to all the 12 000 strong people and then just made available there are good books like this there's a beautiful one that white thread press did uh the the precious pearls reflections from the precious pearl it's a really fine sheikh from england did so there are many good books and the khair of allah is without", "وَاعُذُ بِكُمْ مِنْ أَنْ اُرَدَّ إِلَىٰ أَرْضَ لَالْأُمِرِينَ", "ومن يريد أن يفعل شيئاً لكنهم لا يستطيعون فالكسلان هو من يمكنه فقط ولكنه لا يرغب في فعل ذلك لذا قام بإختيار المتجمعين من كلاهما هذه مقصودة جداً في معنىهم", "There's a slight difference, but essentially the same meaning. So again, a beautiful comprehensive dua to make the Quran the rabi' of your heart and one of the best ways that you can honor your prophet is", "to read the Quran. The Prophet said, the best ibadah of my ummah is Quran in prayer and then Quran outside of prayer. This is the best Ibadah that you can do. If you're not doing a Juz' of Quran a day, then... And you're doing other things, I would set aside those other things and focus on doing a juz' a day. Every Muslim should do a Khatm of Quran every month. I mean this is baseline.", "in the morning, 10 minutes. This is not a lot of your time. And the book it's so neglected and the Prophet complained of its neglect. My people have abandoned this Quran. And one of the great blessings of Morocco and one of things I love about that country is every masjid 250 thousand khatm every month", "every month. That's what the Ministry of Al-Qaf has determined based on all the Hizb. SubhanAllah. So this is a beautiful dua and then istikhara is very important. He used to teach istikhare for everything, and this is something I'll tell you a true story. Shaykh Abdullah bin Bayyah was in Jordan and they were on their way it was very late at night and they're on their", "into a telephone pole. He died, Sheikh Abdullah broke his nose and there was blood everywhere. And this is a true story, his son told me this. He was in the car and he started screaming because he was worried that his dad was seriously injured. It wasn't actually that bad of an injury but because it was so much blood he thought it was really serious. He screamed and he said his father took his arm squeezed it and said", "Astakhartullah. Don't worry, I did istikhara before this trip. That's the power of this. That is the power that prophetic teaching has. You are in the hub, you're in that place where you're not perturbed by the world and things are going to get very serious on this planet. We're entering into a new phase", "And people need to have strong iman and they need to be connected to Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala. They need to connect it. I mean one of the things about Edith Stein that was so amazing, she actually when she fled to after Kristallnacht when they were persecuting the Jews, she fled too...they took her to Belgium", "She used to go out into the cold like she was preparing for something. And this is eyewitness people that saw this. She was taken to Auschwitz when the Nazis invaded and they took even the converts to Catholicism because she had converted out of Judaism to Catholicist, but she took her to Auswitch. There were eyewitness accounts that she was comforting people in that situation and she only was there for one week. She killed right away. But the point is that people of Iman can deal with this", "with this. When they, people don't notice but in Turkey, in Korea when they captured the Americans they captured Turks with them so they were actually imprisoned together and when they studied the Americans all fell apart and they actually started doing recordings for the Koreans like communist propaganda and they're very worried about this because they felt", "They didn't succumb to the interrogation and they wanted to understand why. And what they found out was two things that the Turks did. One, they laughed a lot because they saw the ridiculousness of what they were trying to do in the brainwashing. So they just would watch these people telling them these things and they thought it was funny.", "of this dunya and the stupidity of human beings. And I know it had to do with their upbringing as Muslims. The other thing that they did, they always appointed because they would take away the officers and the morale would break down with the Americans. The Turks always appointed an amir. So even if it was a private, they would appoint somebody over them. And he would keep them all together. So these are really, really important things", "We need to be connected to Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala. So there's so many things we could talk about who are we to talk about the messenger of Allah one of my favorite poems is from the great The great poet, the great faqih Ibn Juzay Al-Kalbi Who is to me one of the most extraordinary scholars that our Ummah produced he wrote a beautiful tafsir of Quran He was one of those polymaths that just seemed to know everything", "to know everything. One of the beauties of his books and one of my teachers, Sheikh Muhammad Muqtar al-Shinqiqi was a son of the great Mufassir. He was the one that really first introduced me to Ibn Juzay in Medina when I was very young but one of the things that he said why his books were so powerful is because he wrote them for his son. He wrote them", "is one of the reasons why if your parent dies, the sunnah is for the son to pray over the parent. Not for the sheikh or the imam. Why? Because nobody will pray with the fervor that a son will pray for his parent. So it's one of those secrets of our fiqh.", "I'm thwarted. I can't get to that station, that exalted height of praising him, the Prophet . And then he says Who can measure the ocean and the ocean is vast? And who can enumerate the stones and the stars?", "وَلَوْ أَنَّ أَعْضَائِي غَدَتْ أُلسُنًا إِذَان لَمَا بَلغَت في المدحِ بعض مآربِ", "together to praise the Prophet they would not achieve that due. They would not", "magnifying that exalted station. And sometimes silence is the best eloquence, and sometimes speech gives faults for the fault finders. So having said that, and knowing my own limitations, I wrote a poem", "The sun solemnly stated, how can my light compare to his? And the moon laughed. Be like me, content to reveal another's light. The north star declared what guidance can I provide next to his and all the stars exclaimed be like us who revolve around you and show no envy. The sea shouted what secrets can I contain when compared to his wonders", "wonders. The clouds pleaded, be like us, exalted in the sky because we humbly draw our water from another and pour forth in gratitude and service. The rose ruefully remarked what beauty do I have next to his? The mirror said, be me who can only reflect on others' beauty. Reason exclaimed,", "Be still and let me quote him. Gold complained, what worth do I have next to his? Copper cried, what ingratitude! Your purity was his from the start. Be happy to be compared to him. The dog barked, he mentioned me. The cat meowed, he petted me.", "The horse neighed. He called me an ocean. The camel grunted. I took him to safety. The frog croaked. I was his favorite. The spider stood tall on eight legs and stately stated, I protected him once. The cloud boasted. I shaded him. The tree declared he called me and I bowed to him.", "hugged me. The date gloated, I was sweet for him. Milk exalted, I nourished him. Water crowed, I quenched his thirst. The kaba shouted he circled me. the Yemeni corner replied he touched me! The black stone laughed and said he kissed me!", "mountains of Mecca called out, he loved us. Medina demurely whispered, He chose me! And humanity cried Nafsi, Nafsimi, mii and God said be like Ahmed and Ahmed said Ummati, ummati my community," ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/People who worship Actors - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_ufq-4mlGCjc&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743056882.opus", "text": [ "It was in Saudi Arabia and they, I have a friend who's in advertising but there was an ad for pizza. And it was all these Saudi young men with their hotarra and there's only one piece of pizza left and they're all going for it. Right? And that was the ad which is, you know, that was obviously done by somebody", "done by somebody that knows nothing about Arabian culture, right? Because are they going to share? No, you take it. They don't want to add where the food looks like they don't", "that they'll follow because human beings by their nature are mimetic. We follow other people and this is why there was a documentary called The Merchants of Cool, and it was how there's people that actually go to places to find who the cool people are and then they market those things. So for instance like hush puppies when I was a kid", "kid that had these shoes called hush puppies well it turned out that these cool characters in New York started wearing hushpuppies so they started marketing hush-puppys but then once it becomes common the cool people don't want to do it anymore because it's not cool so there's this whole culture of imitating like it's cool like and you'll see", "bands, you know like glasses, sunglasses that people wear and even how people talk they'll imitate. Like when James Dean showed up in the 1950s he changed everything. Marlon Brando these people had a huge impact on the youth because they were t-shirts with rolled up sleeve and people didn't used to do things like that but once it was popularized", "all these what they call influencers, social media influencers that people want to imitate. To be like them, to be cool but the thing is it's not cool to imitate, cool people are cool because they don't imitate right? And so you're just an idiot so then if you're going to imitate who do you imitate? You have to imitate the best of creation.", "The paragon, the perfection of God's creation. I mean, I remember once somebody said something and he went, subhanAllah. And he just did that like that. And then I saw in Shama'il of Tarmidh that if the prophet was, if something surprised him, he would do that.", "So he was imitating the best of creation. You don't have to do that. I mean, lovers do that you'll often find in marriages that the spouse will start doing things that the Spouse does Right? That's very common because it's love and you imitate the one you love And so when you love the Prophet ﷺ, you want to imitate him", "about a man but ask about the company he keeps because that's going to tell you who that man is. The seventh one, this, the seventh is really important and this is the difference in human effort in working on themselves with knowledge and action once they become independent. That is a huge game changer just your own personal", "your own personal effort. And people overcome a lot of those other ones through that last one, like people will overcome a lof of those previous ones through... Even physiologically, people overcome great... I mean, I'm not using this as an example but well, I am, don't do this, but I saw this man who had no hands", "And he could actually play piano with his feet. That's not something I'm encouraging to do, but..." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/The Lost Wisdom of Islam -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_XhoFDaVczv4&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742887362.opus", "text": [ "So the word hikmah, which is wisdom, is the word that the Qur'an uses for sunnah. Because the Prophet ﷺ in his sunnah he always does the right thing and in a few times when he didn't do the right things and he was abused by Allah He actually was doing the right but it was not the best thing And that's why he always did the best things so his censure from Allah", "His censure from Allah when he was rebuked in the Qur'an by Allah , it was because the hikmah, in that situation, was to be speaking to the one who wanted to hear the message and not the one that was uninterested in the message. One was wealthy and the other was poor so the Prophet was giving his attention to the wealthy man hoping that he would strengthen Islam. So the Prophet is rebuking there. That's an example, a rare example", "For example, when his hikmah was readjusted by Allah . But the Prophet's tawfiq from Allah is that he was always hakeem. The one who has given wisdom is given a great good.", "that he's the one who sent amongst the Gentiles, amongst the unlettered people a Prophet and he sent him to recite his verses to purify them and to teach the book and the wisdom. وَاذْكُرْنَ مَا يُتْرَىٰ فِي بِيوتِكُمْ مِنْ آیَةِ اللَّهِ وَالْحِكْمَةَ Remember the women of the Prophet's household were told to remember", "and the hikmah, and the sunnah of the Prophet. And this is what Imam al-Shafi'i in his famous book about usool ul fiqh says that the higmah is the sunna. So you can have knowledge but knowing how to apply the knowledge is the wisdom. That's the hikumah. And that's the difference between those who might know the hukum of Allah as a text and those who know when the hokum of", "be sitting on a couch reclining and he'll hold up the book of Allah, and he will say whatever is in this book follow it. And whatever it says is halal make it halal, whatever it has is haram make it haram. And he said he won't mention my sunnah. This is a miracle of the Prophet because the people that reject the sunnah never in the history of Islam did any group reject the Sunnah until these latter days when", "when people rejected the idea that the Prophet came with Wahi. He doesn't speak from his caprice, from his whims, from this passion. This is revelation being revealed. If you look at the Prophet's life every single thing that he did after the Revelation", "How many conversations do we have? We don't record them. They go off into the air, it's just wind coming out of us and we may be having an enjoyable conversation or even a wise conversation but when the conversation is over the words are gone. We might not remember them and over time they're simply gone. But every single thing that Prophet said Sahaba were memorizing. They were recording it. Abu Huraira... people say how could Abu Hurayra relate", "How could Abu Huraira relate over 5000 hadiths? He was only with the Prophet for two and a half years. This is one of the people that attack the Hadith. Because Abu Hurayrah spent his entire life collecting hadith, it wasn't just during the lifetime of the Prophet. And in many of them he doesn't say I heard the Prophet say, he just says the Prophet said. And he doesn'y have to say where he got it from because he's a thika and the person who took it from another Sahabi was a thikaa.", "relates over 2000 hadiths. So the hadith were preserved, now one of the tragedies of the time we're living in is historically the hadits were the domain of the ulama. There were small books written for common people but overall the hadit were in a tradition of isnad. You have to study hadith with scholars and they would explain to you. Ibn al-Wahab bin one of", "He said, I learned so many hadiths and this is one of the Rijal of Al-Bukhari. He said I learned So many Hadith that I became confused. And he said if it wasn't for Malik and Layth I would have perished out of confusion.", "Take this hadith. Don't take that hadith, take this haditth. That hadith is no good. That has no longer practiced.\" And he sorted it out for him. Malik knew over 100 thousand hadiths and yet his Muwatta only has less than 700 hadith He learned over a hundred thousand hadits So now you have people opening up the book or worse going on Google", "looking at hadith and then they get confused, and then confuse others. And one of the groups that Allah cursed on the throne, and the angels said ameen, Allah said la'anullah and the angel said ameen is mudallil al-masakin, the one who leads simple people astray. So this is one of problems, calamities of our time.", "of our time. If you look at the hadith of the Prophet, the Prophet said in hadith that are sound, Maalikul-Rehsit, Tarmidhi and others he said, There's two things I left to you if you hold to them you will not go astray. The Book of Allah and my way. His way is the wisdom because the Quran says there came a light", "there came a light and a book. نور و كتاب You need the light to read the Book, you can't read in darkness. The light is the Prophet . He's the light that illuminates the Book. Without the Prophet , the Book can become a source of people going astray. And every group in the history of Islam that went astray they went astay with Quran and verses. They said this means this, this means that", "means that, and they interpreted it. They all used the same text and went astray but a normative tradition in Islam emerged and it was difficult to come out there were many fabricated hadiths they had to sort those out they put all the hadith collected them all now the Prophet said", "This is a tough religion. He said, No one will become an extreme in this religion except he will be overwhelmed. The Prophet ﷺ said, The zealots will perish. He says it three times.", "The zealots will perish. He said, Beware of extremism in your religion. He says, Moderation, moderation and you will get to paradise. This is our Prophet . He said be upright and do the best you can", "is attempt to get close with Allah. Do your best! Give glad tidings to people, give them glad tiddings. We didn't reveal this Quran for you to be miserable. That's what the Quran said. We did not reveal this", "he got upset with his companions and they were told to obey the Ameer. You just obeyed the Aameer, right? إِنَّمَا كَانَ قَوْلَ الْمُؤْمِينَ إِذَا دُعُوا إِلَى اللّٰهِ وَرَسُولِهِ لِّيَحْكُمَ بَيْنَهُمْ If the believers are called for Allah and His Messenger to deliberate amongst them then what do they say? سَمِعْنًا وَآتَعْنا We hear and we obey. The Prophet said", "He said, obey your ruler. Even if it's a servant that becomes the ruler, obey him. So the Sahaba had this mentality of obedience. They made their fire at the camp because they're out on a trip and he got angry at them. He said you all have to jump in the fire. Wallahi there are people today that if the Ameer said jump in", "The Sahaba had brains. That's one of the blessings that Allah gave the Prophet companions who were intelligent. One of them said, we joined this religion to get out of the fire! And so they refused to obey him. When they got back to the prophet , he told them, don't obey a man if it means disobeying the Creator of men.", "Don't destroy yourselves. So the Prophet said, they were using their intellects. They didn't just say he is the Ameer we have to obey him. Ya akhi! Udkhul an-naar! Qal al-Ameer! Get in the fire! The Ameers said we have obey him! No, they used their intellect. Hikmah. This is hikmAH. It's a gift from Allah . Just to have wisdom, have intelligence and that's why this religion has to have naql and aql.", "mission, the hadith but it has to have the aql. There are hadith that you read them and you know they can't be true just by intellect like the blind man that assassinated the woman because there's different riwaya about that but if you think that a blind man could crawl up a building go into room not wake the children according to the riwayah and then kill the woman no! It doesn't make sense.", "There are many things like that. The early people gathered all the hadith and they put them, and left them for the ulama to sort them out. Imam al-Bukhari he put a hadith in there he doesn't believe but he wanted to show people I know the hadit so the ulma would know. Shaykh Muhammad mentioned about burning the hadits that you cannot burn people.", "somebody as a punishment. He wanted to show both are there and I know both of them, and there many examples that but this traditionally was the realm of the ulama it was not the realm so everything that happens to us that is calamitous and this is hard to swallow, its a bitter pill to swallow but everything that happened to us is from disobeying Allah and His Messenger. That's simply reality until we come to terms with that", "that. Our faith is not sound, and that's why the Quran tells... I was once traveling with Shaykh Abdullah bin Bayyah, and I said it's so interesting how the early people always looked to themselves for the problems but modern people point to other things. He said they were on the madhhab say it from your own souls what happens", "comes from your own souls. Allah says, أطيع الله ورسوله ولا تنازع فتفشل وتذهب ريحكم Obey Allah and obey His Messenger and don't differ amongst you. مُنَزع is like don't start fighting amongst you because you will fail! And your wind will go. What does the wind mean here? قوة Sayyidina Omar brought windmills to Medinah", "to Medina because wind is power. Now we know the modern people are going towards wind, because it's one of the most powerful forces on the planet and you can derive energy from wind. Allah uses wind as a metaphor for energy. Your power will go if you start fighting amongst yourselves. I'll just give an example. The Ottomans defended for centuries the Muslim lands but then the Muslims turned", "turned on the Ottomans. They turned on them. There's reasons for it, and I'm not going to deny that the Ottoman were very... at that time they had lost their way as well but they started allying with the colonialists who were promising them things and they went against their brother Muslims. The last attempt at defending Palestine will bring tears to your eyes if you read what the Ottoman tried to do to defend Palestine. We know that Abd al-Hamid would not sell", "to pay off all the debts of the Ottomans. Because he says, it's not mine to sell. But they were betrayed and people betrayed them and now we suffer the consequences of those people's mistakes because Allah says اتقوا فطرةً لا تصيبن الذين ظرم منكم خاصة Beware of calamities that don't just affect the guilty amongst you, they affect the innocent too so people inherit the sins of people who went before them", "In the Quran Allah says, لا تزر وازرته مو زرة أخرى No soul bears the sins of another. Some of the ulama say in dunya they do. There's things your father does that you end up being disgraced by and people will treat you badly because of the sins are your father. There is people who were born out of wedlock and they suffer from the sin of their father. They did nothing! That ayah is in the akhira.", "or the sins of anybody else in akhira, but in dunya no. We bear the sins other people. We're suffering today from choices people made a hundred years ago, two hundred years, three hundred years. We are still suffering. This country is suffering because they didn't resolve the problem of slavery at the very start it was a problem and they were dealing with it but they didn' so they had to have a civil war we are still dealing with the problems of the Civil War today", "Today, the Confederate flag. It happened over 150 years ago. We're still dealing with it. Syria is going to be dealing with this civil war for generations. These things don't go away. So we were given guidance. We were given a covenant. When the covenant is abandoned calamities happen. The Prophet ﷺ his sunnah is the wisdom of this book and if you look at our prophet ﷺ all you have to ask", "Christians have this thing, would Jesus do it? What would Jesus to do? We should have the same criteria. Do you think the Prophet would tell people to strap bombs on them and go blow up innocent people? Is there anything in his Sunnah that indicates that that would be a methodology he would use because he was in Mecca. He could've had his Sahaba go assassinate people. They were brave. Abu Dharr al-Ghifari", "Ghaffari was a ghifari. Really, he was an incredibly brave man. Ibn Mas'ud was incredibly brave. These men were lions in battle. He could have said go kill secretly, go sneak into so and so's house. He didn't do that. Why? Because that is not his methodology. What he does is out in the open. He never did anything by stealth other than to escape because Allah commanded him to do.", "He told people exactly what he was going to do and he did what he wanted. He didn't shed blood, we have a cult of death. I was just reading a book the other day and it was all about death like these people love death more than life and they quote all these early things that in war you want people to have that mentality. That's not the mentality that you want to have as human beings. The Prophet said don't desire death.", "The only time he asked for death is fitna. He said, وَإِنْ أَرَدتَ بِعِبَادِكَ فَقُبِضْنِي إِلَيْكَ غَيَّرَ مَفْتُونٍ Take me to you without civil strife. And he said that when Allah wants rahmah, this is sahih hadith, when Allah", "to live to see them accept the message. But when he wants to punish an Ummah, the Prophet who gives them the message sees their destruction in his own life. SubhanAllah! And so our Ummah... He wanted Rahmah for this Ummah. Allah wanted Rahma for this ummah and the Prophet said", "يَضْرِبُوا بَعْدُكُمْ رِقَابَ بعضٍ Don't go become kuffar after I gave you this. Don't become kufar! How? By killing one another. The ulama say the kufr here means don't do the actions of people that don't believe in Allah as a rahmah because even Sahaba fought. So, the wisdom of the Prophet is something we have lost in our community. We've lost it.", "I was commanded to be humble until no one deems himself superior to any other. Because if the Prophet was humble, then who am I not to be", "The rest of creation was humble, who am I not to be humble? The Prophet was commanded to be Humble. Everything about him was wisdom. Everything he did the way he ate, the way sat, the walk, he walked briskly. He walked with intention, he didn't meander. When he spoke, he spoke intelligently. He never minced his words, he always spoke beautifully. If he joked, he joked with truth and then he honored people.", "came to the Prophet and she said, I was sent by the women. So they picked this woman Asma al-Ansariya to come and speak to her. And she said Allah sent you to the men and the women We believed in You and in Your God", "وَنَرَىٰ أَنَّ اللّهُ فَضَّلَ الرِّجَالَ عَلَى النِّسَاءِ بِالْجَمْعِ وَجَماعَاتٍ But we see Allah has given some preference. The men, they get to gather like Jumu'ah, they don't have problems there's no little room in the back smelly or hidden with a curtain or something like that. No, they go and the big nice masjid.", "the masjid but they were encouraged to pray in their homes, and men go to the jama'ah. And the prophet said it's 27 times better! And then she said, for the woman it's mandub , because it is Jihad al-Nisa'. And then he says, and then Jihad. They get Jihad fi subheelillah. The Prophet said,", "He looked at his companions with his entire face and he said, Have you heard a better question than the question that came from this woman? Like he's pointing out look at the intelligence of this woman. And the Sahaba they said We didn't think women could come up with things like this. Right? He's teaching them no!", "right? They're your other halves, you better halves. And then he said, listen woman, he said give salam to the women that you left who sent you and then he", "Just being a good companion equals all of that the men are doing. This is an amazing hadith, and that's who he was. He was somebody", "elevated and honored people, male female slave. You know he had in his house Zayd ibn al-Harithah wa Osama bin Zayd. Zaid was very dark and Osama was light skinned and some of the people they said he's not the real son because he was married to a dark woman also so how is it that", "and these two dark people, they had light-skinned boy. So one of the Banu Madrij came to his house, and these people were known for like firasa in genetics. And they came into the room, and Zayd and Osama were sleeping but their feet were outside. One set of feet was black and the other was white. And Madriji he looked at the feet and said,", "feet? In other words, this is the father of that. The Prophet called in Aisha, Aisha! Sama'ati! Did you hear that? He was so happy. He knew but just to have that confirmation he wanted Aisha to hear it she would spread the news. This is the prophet always elevating people.", "الحمد لله والصلاة والسلام على سيدنا وحبيبنا رسول الله اللهم صلي وسلم وبارك على سيدي محمد إنك قدس وقولك الحق إن الله وملائكته يصلون على النبي يا أيها الذين آمنوا صلوا عليه وسلموا تسليما", "في مصر وفي ليبيا وفي هذه الأماكن يا رحم الراحمين اللهم اجعل السنة في قلوبنا اللهم جعل حب السنى في قلبنا يا رحمن الرحيمين اللكم اجعلنا طائعين لرسول الله صلى الله عليه وآله وسلم اللهم أغفر لنا وارحمنا وتوب علينا يا الله إنك قوت وقولك الحق إن الله يأمر بالعدل والإحسان وإيتاء ذي القرباء وينهى عن الفحشاء والمنكر والبغي يعذكم العلكم تذكرون أذكروا الله يذكركم واشكروه ولا تكفرون وأقيموا" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/The Real miracle of Quran - Sheikh Hamza Yusuf_117invcVadk&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742998496.opus", "text": [ "As Shakespeare says, you know there's a the Duke Signore in the play as you like it. His brother takes over his kingdom and he exiles him to the forest but instead of seeing it as a calamity he actually sees the blessings in it and that's where the famous line sweet are the uses of adversity. You know that even in adversity there are benefits", "or benefits uses here means profits are benefits so he says sweet are the uses of adversity which like the toad ugly and venomous wears yet a precious jewel in his head and this our life exempt from public haunt finds tongues in trees books in running brooks sermons in stones and good in everything so even though he's exiled he sees it actually", "that he's got an opportunity to get back to this Edenic life in nature. So we should see the blessings of, that are hidden within the tribulations. Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la throughout the Quran tells us that He is going to try us and in fact it's one of the reasons for our existence. Raqibur Isbahani gives these different reasons that Allah Subhanahu wa ta-Ala created as based on a Quran", "a Quranic understanding and one of them is Ibtila which in Arabic means test, trial, tribulation but it's fundamental meaning Bala is a trial or a tribulation so we're tested and this is obviously a test for Muslims. So because it's Ramadan it's always a blessing if you've been away from the Quran to come back to the Quran", "relationship with the Quran but it is a time of coming back to the Quran and the Prophet told us towards the latter days he said when things get difficult that even the sagacious one, the intelligent one,the forbearing one somebody who is not unsettled easily the prophet said that he would become confused so this part", "And so one of the things that a lot of people, because the Quran is not a linear book in the way that for instance if you open the Bible it begins in Genesis. It literally begins in the beginning and then you have a narrative. You have the Jewish people as a central part of that narrative but it's really, it begins with the story of humanity with the first mother and father of all of us Adam and Hawa", "It gives you the five books of the Tanakh, which is what we call the Torah. And then there's a linear sequence and then you have the New Testament according to the Christian tradition. The Jewish tradition doesn't really like the idea of the New testament because they don't see it as an Old Testament. There's no abrogation for them. But with the Christians,", "is also a narrative if you look at it. In fact, some people have pointed out that it actually follows like a traditional Greek play in its sequence and then you have in the latter part of it, you have these remarkable letters that Paul writes to different peoples and Luke and others, The Acts of the Apostles. I mean there's quite extraordinary things in there", "John of Patmos has this revelation in exile on this island in Greece and sees this kind of end-of-time scenario. So it begins at the beginning, ends with the book of Revelation which is when everything unfolds at the end. So the Quran... When the Quran was revealed we see it as Muslims, we see that as the last testament. It comes as a final testament from Allah, the last dispensation for humanity", "that in our understanding and our tradition, it abrogates the previous ones. It doesn't negate the truths that are in them but it says this is the final testament for humanity. And then it calls everybody to it allowing them the option to stay outside of it. So because it's a nonlinear book, for many people especially Western people when they go into it they find it very confusing.", "this in Carlisle's when he did heroes and hero worship in Victorian England. He chose as a hero the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, which was scandalous at the time because he didn't choose Jesus for instance. But in there he talks about how difficult it was for him to read the Quran. And he said if this is this remarkable book where do we put the Iliad or the Odyssey? In other words", "any patterns. Well, that's I think partly a testimony to the truth of the Quran that it is not like any other book because it is uniquely amongst the revealed books. It is the one that is directly from God so even Jews and Christians understand that the Bible and the New Testament are inspired works so they're inspired by God", "it's transmitted through them that's why they find discrepancies and other things in them that don't really bother them from that perspective because they understand that the scribes can make mistakes and things like that so they don't have the same understanding that we have whereas the quran itself comes directly from god to the prophecy and the prophet is merely a conduit for this revelation", "to the scholars and there's two types of in our tradition. There's and is related to or creed, or what we believe. And art in our Tradition, the Quran in the Sunni Tradition. The Quran is So it's the , you know, in other words,", "of this that the utterances convey, that is eternal with Allah. So that is a very difficult part of kalam or the tradition of dialectical theology that I'm not gonna go into so that's one way to interpret it but the way the Fuqaha interpreted and this is from Sidi Abdollahi wal Hajj Ibrahim one of the great Mauritanian scholars he said love", "He said that the Quran was So, that's the definition in fiqh of the Quran. It is an utterance that was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam in order to incapacitate creation. In other words as a miraculous book that could not be replicated and as a means", "a means of devotion, Ta'bud. Now one of the interesting things about Ta'Bud is that the word in Arabic to recite the Quran which is how we do devotion with the Quran is Tilawa like Yatsroona Kitab Allahi right those who recite the book right Tilawa is we", "with its due and so for the Mujawwad, the person who's doing Tajweed that means like to give Ia'taa kulli harfan haqquhu wa mustahakquhu Like they'll say to give every letter it's due and then it's circumstantial due So like Idhgham is a circumstantional do not every situation The wau you have Idhgham in the letters of Idh'gam assimilation like Yarmaloon", "So for the Mujawwad, that's what that means. But for the Faqih, Tilawa also means to follow. So it means to recite but it also means the follow or to do what the Quran is telling you to do. Wal Qamri idha talaha so like the moon when it follows the sun. So tilawa means to recites and to follow", "Reciting the Book of Allah as it should be recited means you're also following it. So, it's not just simply following it but reciting it but it's following so You're reciting with your tongue. You're believing it in your heart and you're acting according to it with your arkan right? So this is how the book of Allah Now because it's a nonlinear book and I'll just give you one example of something very fascinating", "something very fascinating about the Qur'an. The Jews have a lot of stories in their book, it's a very... In fact though, the Bible is read as literature now. There are many people that will read the Bible as literature not even believing that it's revelation but it's fascinating book with great stories. The Qur'aan when some of the Sahaba came and complained about not having stories like the Jews have stories", "Surah, the 12th sura in the Quran Yusuf is revealed. Yusif is like a biblical story it's a completely intact narrative in the Qur'an. It's the only chapter in the entire Qur'aan that is similar and to me it's as if God was saying I can do that, like I can a book like that, I've already done that but this is different, like this book is different so", "The extraordinary aspect of the Quran to me is that there's a verse in the Quran where Allah says, That I swear by the This is in Surah Al-Waqia. And this is a vast oath if you but knew and this is generous Quran", "Quran. When I lived in the Sahara Desert, every night would look up at the sky and they had the most clear skies in the world because there's no light pollution. And you could... The number of stars that you could see was just astronomical. And it was so extraordinary to look up", "of lights up in the heavens and it doesn't look like there's any order. They just look like... But, there was a man there that I lived with who used to teach me the stars so he'd show me at night they'd say this is you know Thurayya and this is Al-Jabbar and this says Al-Jaathi and he would show me and then he would say this one emerges on this date on the horizon and this one on this day", "this season. He had a complete knowledge of the night sky and over time I got to understand the night-sky in a completely different way because most people grow up in environments where there's no stars anymore they might see a few stars but they don't see stars anymore The Quran is like that if you look at it the way Thomas Carlyle looked at it, it's just a jumble of lights astaghfirullah for even saying that", "to people. It appears as if it's just a jumble of these amazing, you know, lights that are flashing without any cohesion. But if you have the time, the patience and the wherewithal to study the book, you will begin to see these incredibly deep patterns in the book. So it's very much the opposite of in the Western tradition", "study them deeper, they often fall apart. This is what deconstruction is all about and the Quran is the opposite. Outwardly it looks like it doesn't have a cohesion but as the deeper you study it, the more clear the order comes and so what I wanted to do in this short series of lectures is look through the lens of one of the great Andrusian exegetes, ibn Juzay al-Kalbi", "Imam al-Ghazali's theory of Al Jawahir because Imam al Ghazali also has a very interesting theory of the Quran to help people understand the nature of the Qur'an, the deep structure of the Qu'ran. But I'll give you an example somebody recently told me that they found the repetition of the quran a little trying on them cause they were reading the Qurran and they found", "is that there is no repetition in the Quran. I mean, this idea that... And I'll get into that. I'm going to deal with that on one of these sessions. The Quran, when it does use the same stories, very often you will see either it's embedded in a very different sequence for a purpose and then you will just changes in the words", "of the sequence that it's in. And this is why traditionally our scholars understood that the miracle of the Quran is not a scientific miracle. There are some interesting scientific facts in the Quran, that's fine, but it is not the miracle. The miracle of", "and by that I mean the material sciences over other aspects. But, the single most interesting thing about our species is not science it's language. We are creatures of language and this is what makes us unique. And the Quran is ultimately a linguistic miracle. It's a miracle of language. And language is what separates us from the rest of creation. All creation has certain types of languages and codes and everything but we are uniquely", "that is endowed with the gift of the logos, of reason. And language by its very nature is reasonable. It is logical and that's why it has a grammar. It has a deep structure. And that grammar can only be understood by studying it. And the same is true for the Quran. So I just...I'm going to quickly go over", "So looking at these major themes from Ibn Juzay and just a little bit about Muhammad ibn Ahmad bin Muhammad bin Juzai al-Kalbi. He's always from Bani Kalb, Yemeni tribe. Al-Gharanaati so he was from Granada and you can see there that's at the last stage of the Muslim presence in Spain when they were down to a very small kingdom", "before they were finally defeated by the Aragon and the Castilian alliance. And it's interesting because we, the year America was discovered is the year Andalusia falls. So he was born in Granada which is an amazing city that has a famous Alhambra palace but he also died in the battle defending the Muslim land so he's a Shaheed. He's one of the great martyrs Shaheeds of our tradition", "And he actually died as the Muslims were fleeing from the battlefield. He was seen calling them back to maintain their positions and he ended up being killed. His books are some of my favorite books, and this is the book that we're going to be looking at in the introduction in the tafsir tradition. But one of my teachers, Sheikh Muhammad al-Amin al-Shinqiti,", "who was the son of the great Mufassir, who died recently. And he did a beautiful tahqiq, a critical edition of one of Ibn Juzay's books on usool. He told me that the reason his books are so, I think loved by people who fall into his world is because he wrote them for his son. So all of his books were written for his", "Muhammad. He wanted to give him the zubdah, like the cream of our tradition and so all of his books are very short but they're packed with an incredible amount of information and the tasheel which is the book that we're going to be looking at this is a manuscript of it it's called making easy or the facilitation", "to make the Quran accessible to people. And that's part of the beauty of this book because we're in an age where people need more accessible knowledge. I mean, during our periods of great civilizational flourishing, knowledges were very rarefied. If people know the English term gibberish, gibberish comes from Jabir bin Hayyan because he was so confusing when the Europeans translated him into Latin most of them couldn't understand it so they called it gibberish.", "That's a true story. So there's a nice four-volume edition, which I really want to get. I didn't realize this was available. But I have three different editions. They're all reasonably good. They tend to be better. So looking... I want to do the first thing of just looking at the major themes of the Qur'an and then we're going to, I think, end soon. Bismillah. When he looks at the...", "I'll do the summation then. He basically says that if you really want to sum up the entire Quran, he says that the . He said we're gonna speak to them in summation and in tafsir. As for the summation of the Quran,", "The real purpose of the Qur'an is So it is an invitation to Allah's creation To enter, to believe in him right? To come to him and", "And this is why the human being is, you know, if we define a human being and the definition of a human thing is not that easy. But if we defined it like our students here at Zaytuna study logic and one of the ways that you define something in logic, ladies? How do we get a definition in logic? The genus", "The genus and the species, right? Well, the genus on the difference which gives us a species. So when we look at a genus you're looking at something that all the things in that group share, right. For us it's animality so this is the way the Greeks defined it. That we are under the genuses of animal, that were living being, that we have animality but then what's our difference", "as a species from all the other animals. Yeah, that we have reason. We're rational. So we are the rational animal. That's a logical definition of the human being. So for the Greeks, the definition of a human being is a person... The human being", "is in his intelligence. But for the Jew and for the Muslim, a human being is a free individual created by God that has a personal relationship with God and has the ability to enter into a covenant with God. And His supreme righteousness is in obeying and submitting to the commandments of God. This is the Jewish definition. And we would concur with that definition. For the Christians,", "would be a fallen creature wounded through sin and whose supreme dignity is in accepting grace, you know, the salvific grace of God through a sacrifice. In their understanding. And I mean we would acknowledge that we are wounded in sin. The Prophet said all of you are sinful", "of the sinners are those who repent so we know that we have a black dot according to the prophet which is not i you know we don't believe in original sin and in the kind of christian conception of it but we do recognize that we're fallen as a species and and uh and and fallen man has has his his struggles um so", "It's an invitation. Now the Prophet said to Al-Quran, it's the invitation of God to a banquet. That's how in another rewrites as so they're both sound and they both", "Ma'adab is the place where you learn adab. And if we look at Sayyidina Qibra At-Tas, his understanding of our human crises especially in the Muslim world he says that the human crisis is from a confusion about knowledge which led to a loss of adab, which lead to the rise of false leadership, which leads to more confusion and knowledge,", "that human beings find themselves in. And so adab is a very important concept in our tradition, which in essence it's hierarchical by nature. Islam has a very interesting understanding of the relationship between the egalitarian nature of human dignity, that everybody is equal in human dignity but also recognizing the hierarchical nature of", "So it's only through hierarchy that adab really can manifest. When you lose hierarchy, all of these horrible things arise and part of the modern condition is to eliminate this idea of hierarchy that people that know are above people who don't know whereas the Qur'an clearly states that. And then we have deference to people with knowledge and to their expertise so", "You know, Allah says in the Quran, We didn't leave anything out of this book. And an orientalist once asked a Syrian scholar, you know, do you really believe that? And he said absolutely. And he Said well can you find out like how many loaves of bread In a bag of wheat in the Qur'an? He said absolutely", "He said, I have a very hard time believing that. So he told one of his students, go get so and so. And he went and brought this man and he said how many bags of, how many loaves of bread in a bag of wheat? And he said well if it's small bag I can get 10, if it is medium bag I could get 15, if its large bag I would get 20.", "And the orientalist said to him, I don't understand. He said this is our local baker and he said well that's not in the Quran. He says yes it is. Allah says ask the people who know if you don't know. And Allah says like ask the experts so he's an expert so I asked him. Any questions? First question how can", "How can non-Arab speakers approach learning the language to understand the Quran, inshallah? And what can we do before learning, mastering Arabic to understand The Quran?\" They said they're using multiple kind of translations right now. Right I'm gonna talk about Arabic in one of the later classes so I'll defer part", "In some ways, Arabs are disadvantaged in knowing Arabic, modern Arabic because there can often be a kind of compounded ignorance. To understand the Arabic of the Quran takes many years of hard work and this idea that you can learn the language of the Qur'an in a year is just a very dangerous concept in my estimation. The Qur'aan is a profoundly subtle book.", "It lends itself to multiple possibilities and it takes a really long time. Now you can get obviously the core messages of the Quran like if Allah says, any Arab that knows Arabic today would basically understand what that means. I mean he might not understand that taqwa is a very specifically defined type of word or", "understand the derivation of the word from, you know, waqiyah, yaqi, wikayah which is prevention and that taqwa is a masdar and those aspects of it. But they'll get the general meaning of that but to really understand where you get into a deep understanding of the Qur'an, it takes a lot", "Because ذَٰرِك is for تعظيم. And one of the things I learned early on, when I was very young, I was in Mauritania and I was studying and I had this what I thought was an insight into a thing. And I remember I was going to tell one of my teachers you know I had", "ready to do that. Don't, you know, he just said, and when they asked Omar what ab was, you", "I spoke about the Book of Allah without knowledge. So we have to have a type of awe for the Book Of Allah and just be very careful. What the ajam has direct access to is the ibadah of tilawa, and whether you can understand the Qur'an or not, tilawa has a profound effect on your heart, and this is just a fact.", "And there's something very pleasurable about the Qur'an, about tidawah. It takes some time to get there like if you look at the body just as an analogy, exercise is difficult but once you actually start doing it becomes very pleasurable so people that exercise on a regular basis they feel bad on the days they don't exercise. The Qur'aan is like that. If you get into a habit of reciting the Qurraan and we are what we repeatedly do", "emphasized constantly. That habit is very important. Everything is habitual, even devotion. And so you have to get into the habit. And I would say in terms of learning Arabic it's a really important thing and I encourage everybody. It's one of the most rewarding things that I've ever done in my life just having access to this incredible", "legacy of knowledge and over and above all else having access to the Book of Allah and Sunnah. But my own experience, and I guarantee you there are many times when I've read the Qur'an and thought that I understood it, but when I went to the Tafsir there was a completely different meaning than what I was getting from just the Arabic. And so... Somebody asked me, I was in Malaysia last year", "last year and a really, really wonderful Singaporean person there asked me. They had been troubled about the idea that the Qur'an had lacunae. They'd taken a course at the university and they said in the course they pointed out that the Quran can only be understood with tafsir", "couldn't stand on its own, that it would need tafsir. And while the Quran definitely does stand on it's own as the book of Allah, it does need commentary and the reason it needs commentary is because Allah has made it absolutely necessary to have a transmission in the Quran, Allah says", "prophesize and if they learned it properly. And so that's part of the nature of our religion is that it's transmitted. Next question? Okay, thank you for that. Next questions this one from Vimeo and then we'll take one more from Facebook inshaAllah. As-salamu alaykum when reciting the Quran how do you differentiate between quote unquote", "quote unquote singing and quote unquote reciting melodiously when the former is advised against? Okay, that's a good question. The Quran traditionally is chanted we would say it's chanted now what's the difference between that and singing? We don't out of adab to the Quran", "the Qur'an we don't talk about like music, like musiqa out of adab to the Qur-an but the great Qur'ans reciters learned the maqamat which are musical modes and this is why in Egypt for instance the great Quran recitters learn what are called the maquamat", "And this is why some of the great Egyptian singers were actually originally Quran reciters. People don't know that Umm Kulthum, her father was one of the Great Quran Reciters of Egypt and she learned the Quran early on. She could recite the Quran in all the maqamat. And that's where she learned a lot of these things in traditional Arab music. So we don't sing the Quran In that way, we chant the Quran.", "He said in a hadith, he's not from us who doesn't you know. I mean some of the they say that it's and the Prophet also said adorn the Quran with your voices. In other words chant it in a melodious way and the prophet liked to hear it from certain reciters because they recited so beautifully", "One of them, he said you've been given like the pan flute of Dawud. In other words his recitation was so melodious and beautiful. So the Quran we should recite it as best we can but the most important thing as long as you obey the rules of Tajweed and don't... I mean some people go extend the mad more than like a mad al-lazim which is", "the longest madd, you know. So that, the maddal laazm, waladdaalleen, that has six haraka. But if you go on and extend it beyond that then you're altering the book of Allah so you can't do that.", "So, but that's a whole science of that. That the great Quran reciters learned and believe it or not, they're really truly masters of this tradition. They will recite the maqam that is most appropriate for the type of ayah. So we are going to get into different types of ayat, but they will actually recite for the types of Ayahs. So if its an ayah where you should feel some grief", "sadness they'll recite in a maqam that engenders sadness in the listener and if it's something with joy or something then they're reciting in a Maqam al-Rasht or something that will actually elevate the spirit. And so, that's why great Quran reciters because of their mastery of this science", "Because they're using these modes. Is that it? One last one? Because we're going to have to break our fast pretty soon. We're here in California, on the West Coast. Other people in other places have already broken their fast. May Allah accept it from all of you. Pray for Zaytuna. I do need to... I really hope people will support the college. I've got the students here.", "I've got the students here, some of the students that got stuck here. Some of our international students may Allah protect them. But you know, alhamdulillah we founded this college. We're actually in one of the auditoriums in the college and we just need your support. I know it's a difficult time and some people are having a difficult times. May Allah make that easy for you but I really hope that some of you will find", "that right now we're just caretakers. We're all passing through, but we're doing this in order that other people won't have to do it. I would've loved to come back to the United States and already had institutions built that I could've just gone into and I'd much rather be teaching. Now I'm doing a lot of administrative work and fundraising, but I'm going so people after me won't need to do inshallah. So we're are just care takers, we're stewards right now", "soon enough and other people inshallah will be here but we need your support so I hope people find some support go ahead thank you this one is from Harir from the east coast mashallah you mentioned about science in the Quran and we live in a world obsessed with science how are we supposed to balance the truth of science and its imposition on all", "look, science is important and I would never in any way denigrate science as such. However, a lot of science if you read...I had to read a book when I was in college by Thomas Kuhn about paradigms", "always has these anomalies and the anomalies often will create problems for scientific theories. And then a new theory will emerge. So it's very difficult to latch on to something like science as an absolute because much of science is what in logic we call saving appearances. For centuries people were absolutely convinced that", "the sun went around the earth. And that's certainly how we experience it. Nobody talks about an earth turn, like they don't say oh what a beautiful earth turn. We still talk about a sunrise and a sunset. So that's the fitra right? But when Ptolemy wrote his book", "Apodictic proof that it was actually a borhan khatai. It was an absolute proof for That truth well when Copernicus came along with the heliocentric theory He kind of undermined that but even the helio centric theory has its problems It's not like these are absolute. It's just it's the best Explanation, it's simplest using Occam's razor to explain something But it doesn't mean the Ptolemaic doesn't", "it's not also a valid theory. It is a valid there, it's just no longer the dominant scientific theory but people that study the Ptolemaic Theory know that okay now I understand why people for a thousand years believe that theory because he does prove his things. He had to create epicycles and all these things to explain retrograde activity and things. The students here studied that at Zaytuna so how do I view it?", "I think they're both true. I think experientially we're in a Ptolemaic world, but I think in reality Copernicus is right. So this is like sharia and haqiqah. I don't have a problem with two. I can grapple with the both. I mean, they're contradictory at you know, in their basic assumptions about the nature of the sun", "Is it stationary and we're going around it or is it going around us and we are stationary? But experientially I can understand how one is true phenomenologically to use a big word, and how the other is true in that it explains a lot of things also. So that's my feeling about putting too many", "too many scientific eggs in the Quranic basket, I think is very dangerous. Because down the road they realize oh that's not true and then so what is the Quran not true? So if God wanted he could have revealed E equals MC squared and then a thousand years later people would say oh my god they got that way before Einstein. And actually there", "from a Turkish physicist that the theory of relativity is in the Quran. So I don't know, I'm not that adept at theoretical physics so... All right, so may Allah accept your prayers and inshallah forgive us any of our sins and transgressions all of our slips of the tongue", "May Allah forgive us to speak in the Book of Allah without the requisite knowledge. May Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala, inshaAllah bless our physicians and nurses and all the people that are risking their lives for the well-being of our community and for the greater community. May Allaah protect the Muslims unite our hearts, protect our tongues against backbiting and against all those things that we're particularly sensitive to in Ramadan.", "sensitive to them throughout the year. May Allah bless and give peace and prayers upon our beloved Prophet," ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/True purpose of your life - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_XWWLoxTDsiY&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743309942.opus", "text": [ "وعلى آله وصحبه وسلم تسليما كثيرا ولا حول ولا قوة إلا بالله العلي العظيم اللهم لا علم لنا إلا ما علمتنا إنك أنت العليم الحكيم اللوم أفتح علينا حكمتك وانشر علينا رحمتك يا ذن الجلال والإكرام وصل اللهم على سيدنا محمد وعليه الكرام ولا ح ولقوة", "Alhamdulillah. Imam al-Kahtani and Imam al Shatibi mentions this, that on the permissibility of taking things from dreams... He mentions that Imam al Kahtani saw a dream in which he was told by the Prophet ﷺ to say 40", "40 times, يَحْيُّ يَا قِيُوم لا إله إلا أنت And he said whoever says that and continues on it his heart won't die when the hearts die. So in a lot of the scholars have mentioned that يَعْهِو يَقِيوم is رِسْمٌ عَظَام It's the greatest name big خِلَافات about that most of the قوم say it's the اسم الجلال الله", "Allah but it's a name that Allah hid from his servants but Yahya Qayyum is one of the strongest in the Asma al Husna for the effect that it has on the heart and so inshallah we'll start with just 40 of this", "أعوذ بالله من الشيطان الرجيم بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم", "InshaAllah, I want to continue on from yesterday to talk about this journey.", "There are going to be further stages after we die. So there's a... And we have in our tradition one of the clearest explanations of what happens after we died, of all the previous religions that went before us.", "not of the mulk and this what we're in here is the mulch this is called the dominion allah's medic and he's medic of al-mulkul marakut wal jabaroot and these are the three dominions or worlds allah so this is one world the milk", "that Allah has created. And the malakut comes from the jabarut . So, Allah , when we were in the malacut, we were on a state of mushahada . And this is why when Allah ash-had al arwah He made them testify, أَلَسْتُ بِرَبِّكُمْ Am I not your Lord? بَلًا شَهِدْنَا We're in a state witnessing, the ru'h witnessed this", "is made of flesh and blood. So this is the mulk, what we have here is the Mulq but the Ru'ah that resides in this place it's only a prisoner It's going to move on And it will leave this cage behind just like you open a cage and the bird flies out and leaves the cage behind and doesn't look back", "bird it won't look back. It just flies out and it's gone. So we came into this world, and what happens you see when you come into the world, the world's nature is Dhulmani because Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala He in the Malakut is Nur And Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la created the heavens and earth from light", "Allah is the illuminator of the heavens and the earth. All of this came from light. There was a point when all of this was a Point of Light, and Allah said This is the . This comes from the Jabarut. Allah says , and things are. And so from this incredible outpouring of these Tajalliyat,", "Allah has thrust upon existence, we're part of it. And Allah has made us the interstitial space between... You see in the Quran, Allah says, سَنُرِيهِمْ آيَاتِنَا فِي الْآفَاقِ وَفِي أَنفُسِهِмْ If you look at the ufukh, the ufuq is the meeting place between the heavens and the earth.", "The horizon is where the heaven and earth meet, and you can only see this really in the ocean. Because when you're in the Ocean, you see the meeting place. It's the heavens and the Earth meet on the horizon. And Allah says we will show them in themselves, This is the meetingplace of the small, the microcosm. It' s where these two worlds meet, the heavens & the Earth. The mulk and malakut they meet in the self, in the human being.", "And on the horizon, this is symbolic of the heaven and earth meeting on the horizons. These are the two points... So the human being is put in this extraordinary position because see now they want to make us insignificant They want to tell you that you're nothing. They show you all these vast pictures You know if you go to astronomical observatory If you go one of these places, they'll show you these films and they reduce you to nothingness", "They say, oh look here. You're from an insignificant planet in an insignificant solar system in an Insignificant galaxy in the midst of billions of galaxies This is who you are You're nothing and that's true they're not lying But if you go inside the human being all of those vast spaces out there are also in you inside you Imam Ali said in his Diwan", "تَحْسِبُ نَفْسَكَ أَنَّكَ جِرْمٌ صَغِيرٌ وَفِيكَ انطوى الْعَالَمَ الْأَكْبَارُ You think that yourself is some insignificant thing, and yet in you are all of the cosmos. All of the cosmos are in you. تَ حْسِّبُ أَNَّكا جِراً صَخِيرٍ وَ فِيهَا انطول عالم الأكبرُ You're an insignificant thing and yet, in you all of worlds reside. And so when we came into these bodies", "These bodies we enter into, this body is very powerful because it's sensory. It's his and Allah gave us these five senses And these are the inroads of experience you see and this is you have a certain group of materialists that began to argue and you find them all the way through history but they argued that all of knowledge comes from your sensory perception", "You will hear this from the biggest professors that this is merely a chance. You're merely random event and because there were billions of years and multiple possibilities, that this was the conclusion. Here you are playing solitaire on a computer. This is the human being, right? Diversion entertainment.", "Now this is what the world now has created for diversion. It's always been a diversion, but the difference between modern people and ancient people is all of the ancients knew that the diversion was a diversion. There was no purpose in it. All of them knew this. The moderns are unique in their belief that this is the primary reason for us to be here, is simply to entertain ourselves, to be diverted.", "to listen to music, to watch films. This is it! We just entertain ourselves until we leave and then another group comes and they do the same thing and it just goes on until it ends with cosmic collision some giant asteroids going to knock us like it wiped out all of the dinosaurs this is a belief now The ancients all knew that there was a purpose for the human being that you had a reason for existence", "It was by purpose that you are created with purpose, that there's a telos for the human being. There's a hadaf. يَحْسِبُ الْإِنسَانُ وَأَن يُتْرَكَ سُدًى Does the human thing think that he is left in vain? That he simply a suda, random event? Right? This what Allah asks. Does He thinks that all of this was for nothing?", "a from a I mean first of all you have to be nutrition because there was a time when your material body was being formed inside somebody else right? Because for semen and ovum to exist, you need these things to be created. And they're created from nutrition so there was point when we were just nutrition but then there was the point when that didn't exist cause that came from another thing itself right? So there's a point right", "There was a time when you were nothing and then you became something. So all of these events that happen, is it for no reason? There's no purpose to it? This is what the modern people want to tell people. And they're confusing people. It's not fair to people. Children by their nature are spiritual beings. Children love the supernatural. They believe in the supernatural", "what is not real and what's real in the supernatural realm. They know, they have a natural intuitive sense of... And they also know purpose. Fakhruddin al-Razi said, if you want to prove that the human by his nature believes in causation, take an infant before it has any aqal, and just hide somewhere and throw a rock over the head of the child. And when the rock drops,", "When the rock drops, you watch what the baby will do. It's going to look back. It doesn't just assume that the rock popped into existence. Why doesn't it make that assumption? Why doesn' t it just assume it came out of nothing? Right? Because this is what they're telling us now, this all came out from nothing. Why does not it make an assumption because it's completely counterintuitive to the fitrah .", "They will go into ecstatic states. They will often look around you, they won't look at you,they'll look around You. Little infants... Abdul Aziz Al-Dabagh said that the language they speak is Syrianiya. What they call the babbling of babes. When they start doing the babba bubbu and doing these things. Siddi Abdul Azizz Al- Dabagh Said it's actually a language from Syriania which is a language the angels know.", "the angels know, speak. I mean, Allahu'alam but this is one of the people of Ma'rifah, this is what he said and he actually said that bubu means something harmful in Syriania so little babies will often call something into all different languages they'll say bubu or bubu because it's harmful. So the child will still have these experiences", "and into this sensory world. And then the purpose of the parents is to remind the child, and this why the very first thing that you do is you give the adhan , and you give shahada . And then you give them something sweet, the date or honey on the tongue because it's the wa'ad , right? You give them the tathkeer and then you gave them the wa'd . The first thing they experience in the world is hearing what their souls already know", "And then you give them the sweet taste to remind them, the reward of maintaining that truth. So they know... The Prophet would not order us to do anything meaningless. It's impossible. He cannot tell us to something that is like impossible. Everything that he guides us to is Haqq, it's true.", "The soul is what's being spoken to. Not the baby, the baby is flesh and blood. But the soul now has access to these senses. You see because the soul has been embodied. And so the hearing, the sight all of this things affect the soul. And this why what you look at will effect you. What you hear will effect your soul. It effects your soul", "كلُّ أولئك كان عنه مسؤولة You're hearing your sound, your sight and your heart. Right? Your heart, the ma'rifah , the consciousness, your consciousness all of these the human being is responsible for because at the root of the human beings is consciousness And you're consciousness is...you have always had it. You had it when you were a child. You have it when your in somebody la qadr Allah When people go into comas, the consciousness is there", "It's always present. The consciousness is always present and that's what Allah has given us these experiences during life to remind us, and this is why things will happen to you in life. It's inevitable there will be things that will happen", "and people who have a frame of reference, who have the knowledge of the Prophets. They have the Wiratha. They know what to make of these things. The people that don't will be struck by them. They'll often be amazed by them, coincidences, synchronicities. They'd be like Jung. Jung was very struck by all these things that would happen to him. And he knew something supernatural was happening but he didn't know what it was because he didn' t have a science.", "We're so lucky, we are so fortunate that Allah has given us knowledge of these things. And other people really they've lost them. They had them but they have lost them This is the last religion standing that has a complete cosmology That has not been polluted or tainted by other things Really it's all there in Islam and so this consciousness that Allah Has given you It's embodied in this sensory experience", "Latafah and Kathafah. You have the subtle body, right? Which is this latif body. And then you have the kathif body, the material body. Imam Malik said it's like the water in the twig. It's like water in a twig In other words, the Ru'h is in your body We're not dualist in that way and we believe in the bodily resurrection so we don't separate the two in that", "They're not eaten by the earth. And we know incorruptibles exist. This is a scientific, you can look this up on the internet and it's well known that there are bodies that do not decay. They don't decay.", "I mean, these are pre-Islamic saints whose bodies didn't... A lot of them were mummified. Because the popes would actually have them tell them to embalm them just like small prints, you know, just to make sure they didn't corrupt after. Because then they would know. Because in Catholic tradition, in order to be a saint, you can't corrupt. If the body is corrupted by the earth, it's a sign that wasn't a sanctified soul.", "soul. So that's one of the signs that we know this and many of the Awliya their graves were uncovered and people saw them just as they were. Sayyidina Hamza, I met a man who was part of a group that put Sayyida Hamza body back into his grave when it was exposed by a flood and he saw the body completely intact. I mean I heard from eyewitnesses not like somebody...I didn't see", "Him that he saw it and he was a Adam. I have no reason not to believe him so Because of this this This Material body that we're in people forget, and this is why the Quran is called vicar It's a reminder of what you already know when we do the carol ah it's remembering what you all ready know", "that you're learning something new. It's something you already knew. A dhikr al-hakim, the wise remembrance or reminder. Right? So this is... And the human being is... This is our purpose, is to remember this truth and then live according to the truth. And so during periods of time these truths are forgotten. They're forgotten. People forget. They lose their way.", "And Allah has warned us of our enemies. We have the four primary enemies of the human being, nafs, shaitan, hawa and dunya. These are the four primarily enemies. Every human being has to struggle with these their entire life. And you can't be deluded about this. Imam al-Ghazali wrote a book arguing that all of creation was in a state of delusion. All of creation", "the most deluded people are the people of tasawwuf. That's what Imam al-Ghazali said. You know, there is a story I read in one book on Zen stories that this famous Zen master he was like a great Zen master and everybody spoke widely of him and he was coming to a monastery and this monastery was famous for people they were all enlightened.", "They were all enlightened. This is what they say, you know Zen people. And so the Zen master when he came, they wanted this like a lesson and he said, All enlightenment is delusion. And that was his lesson. And everybody just got out and left except one guy, the monk sitting in front. He said, You're not going to leave without... Because they just said he doesn't know anything. He's said,", "I've been sitting here for so many years thinking I was enlightened but now I realize it's only early senility. People are deluded, we're all in deluded states you know if you think about your own state and how often have we not seen things that were so clearly in front of us", "The believer is the mirror of the believer.", "blessing of being in the presence of the Salihun and the righteous people. And Alhamdulillah, we've had the pleasure of meeting some of these people because many of them now they're hidden in their homes. They don't even go out because people can't... you know they say al-awliya' araisu Allah. You know the awliya are the brides of God and only the mahram can see the bride. So if", "If you have no relationship to the bride. And this is why Imam al-Ghazali and others, Imam al-'Shadri, he said, The least rutba of wilayah is belief in the people of Allah. That's the least. You have to believe in them. You need to believe that people had ma'rifa of Allah .", "That reflection for one hour, and it could mean a moment in Arabic, is better than 70 years of ibadah. He's talking about a heart that has been purified. Because we can worship our whole life. 70 years the Prophet said, So what he's saying is you can spend your whole life doing ibadat", "A scholar. You can study those mutun with orientalists now, some of them know it better than a lot of the scholars of Islam know these texts. Really? Because this is outward knowledge that you can learn. The hypocrite can learn them. No, this is the shahada. Right? The Prophet ﷺ in the hadith, and this is second hadith Imam An-Nawawi mentions from Sayyidina Umar when the Prophet ﷺ", "They were sitting with him. And a man appeared before them, and then they described the man. They couldn't see any traveling, nobody knew him. So they knew one he wasn't from Medina, and yet there was no traces of traveling on him.", "knees up to the Prophet's knees. And this is a sign also because in the Muwatta Luqman al-Hakim says to his son, Ya waladi sit with the ulama and put your knees up against theirs right? And he said", "wisdom to grow in your hearts by just sitting with them. Just sitting with Them. كَمَا تَنْبُتَ الْحَبَّةُ فِي أَرْضَ الطَّيِّبَةِ Just like a seed will grow in a good earth, so your soul is a seed قَدْ افْلَحَ مَن زَكّاهَا وَقَد خَابَ مِن دَسَّهَا The soul needs تزكية . تزکية means to make something grow.", "pure soil, pure earth, pure water. It needs purity to grow. If you put something in...in something that is not pure, right? it won't grow. Right? Samud is not neges. It's not nejes the fertilizer. It need something that...that it needs to be in good soil and it will grow. And this is what the hearts of those people are like if you sit with them. So when he did", "that he asked him about is iman right and the prophet told him what Islam is a women on an email he told him to bear witness and then to believe and to", "articles of faith, this is what he told him. And then he asked about Islam and he said it was the five pillars. That's Islam, the five Pillars. And Then He Asked Him About Ihsan What Is Ihsan? And He Said, فَإِنَّمْ تَكُونْ ترَوْا بِأِنْهُ يَرَىٰ That to worship Allah as if you see Him This Is What Ihsan Is. Maqamah Ihsan is maqaman mushahada", "don't see him, at least you're in a state of muraqabah. It's either mushahadah or muraqubah. But that's what ihsan is. So what the Prophet ﷺ is saying is that dharwat al-Islam, the pinnacle of Islam is a state mushaadah and you have to deal with the hadith which is in the same collection of the arbaeen where he says that ma taqarabi ilayhi abdi man adari wadiyan adantuhu bil harb this is sahih hadith and what do people say about it? You have to", "Hadith. That whoever makes war on a wali of mine, I declare war on him. وَمَا تَقْرَّبُ إِلَيَّ عَبْدِ بِشَيْءٍ أحَبَّ إِلاَّ مِن مَفْتَرَطُهُ عَلَىٰ That no one of my servants draws near to me with anything more beloved than the fard. وُلَا يَزَالُ يَتَقَرِّبُ اِلِيَّ بِالنَّوَافِل حَتَّىٓ أُحِبَّهُ And you will continue, he will continue to draw near to Me with extra acts. These are السابقون. أُولَئِكَ الْمُقَربُون", "The ones that outstrip everybody. Right? Those are the three maqams. Maqam al-Islam, maqam il-iman, maqum al-ihsan. If you're in the hour of Islam it's good if you have belief. That's good but you're still", "You haven't completed your faith. لَا يُؤْمِنُوا أَحَدُكُمْ حَتَّى يُحِبَّ لِيَخِيهِ مَا Yُحِّبُّ لِنَفْسِهِ You don't truly believe. It doesn't mean you don't believe, but if you don' love for your fellow human being what you love for yourself then your iman is not complete. It's not complete so that means there is a complete iman So what is the complete mu'min? What is al-mu'minal kamil? What do they look like? Who are they?", "These are real people. Be with the truthful ones. Be what the people of Siddq. These are the people whose hearts are sincere with Allah . And Allah tells us to be with them, seek them out wherever they are, seek the mount and sit with them and benefit with them. And be humbled before them. You know these are the", "Because Allah made ishq in the world, this worldly love. He made it to show us what divine love is like. It's a hujah against us. Layla and Majnoon. It'a hujha against us, you know, Layla & Majnoon because if this is the love of a created thing for another created thing, What is the Love of a creature for his creator? If that's what you'll go to, the depths you'll goto", "Right? You know they have an advertisement for learning Italian. It's one of those, and it shows a farm boy, and he is in love with an Italian celebrity. And he wants to learn, it says that he will only have one chance when he meets her. This is an advertisement because they know, they are talking to people who understand that when you're in love you'll do anything for the beloved. Anything!", "But people, they don't learn Arabic. Really, they do not learn Arabic, they want to learn the language that the beloved speaks his creation in. We are lazy people! We claim love, it's all... It is not true. We're not lovers but there are lovers and if you're not one, you should at least be an awe of them. I wish I could be in love.", "People long to be in love. You know, some people they want it so bad they keep falling in love again and again just for that experience of love. These foolish people, عُشَاق Because it's a disease also you know the عِشْق is actually related to a vine that strangles the life out of the plant that it gets hold of right? But دواء العِشق الاتصال The cure of عِسْق", "the connection. And so you can want to meet somebody, so badly you'll go to the ends of the earth to meet that person. Salman al-Farisi, look at his love! Look what he did. He traveled all over. If he heard of any righteous man, he would go. And his journey is an amazing journey to the Prophet ﷺ. When he got there... and because of his sincerity Allah gave him these signs,", "first time he met him, he brought him dates and he said this is sadaqah. And then he watched him, He didn't eat from it because he knew, he was told he won't eat charity. And the next time he came, he gave him dates, and he says this is hadiyya, it's a gift. And he ate from it, and then he knew. Just like I was told. Right? He knew. And Prophet showed him the khatm , he knew it. And Salman became Muslim.", "And Prophet ﷺ gave him... He was a slave. Unjustly, he was enslaved, stolen on a caravan. But he planted 300 date palms and the man who had bought him stipulated that they have to come to fruition before he could be free. And in a few months, they all came except for one. They went back, the Prophet ﷺ had 299 had come to provision only one wasn't.", "Omar said, stop it Allah, I planted that. So the Prophet planted it and then it came quickly. And he was freed. But look at his love, Salman. Look where love gets you. Salman is our family. He's part of our family, Salma al-Farisi. Amazing man for his love. But Look at Maimuna, look at her love. You know 30 years after she married the prophet", "She was nearing death. You know where she wanted to go? To the same place that she spent the first night with the Prophet ﷺ. That's where she is buried. Look at the love, look at that love. It's amazing that love of the beloved and this what these people had you know they want to just take love out of Islam and make it something else. This religion is about love. لَا يُؤْمِنُوا أَحَدْكُمْ حَتَّىٰ يُحِبَّ لِأَخِيهِ He didn't use any other word", "word until you love. قُلْ إِن كُنتُمْ تَحِبُّونَ اللَّهَ فَاتِّبِعُونِي يَحْبَبُكُمَ اللّٰهُ Say, if you love Allah then follow me and Allah will love you because the alamatul hubb ittiba'il habib The sign of love is that you follow the beloved You will do what the beloved says And the beloved of Allah is the messenger of Allah He's Habibullah He said when they were talking about", "He said, I heard what you were saying. Right? This is the name he was given. He wasn't given the one God spoke to. He hasn't been befriended. He isn't given this spirit. No! He was Habibullah, the beloved of God. This is his maqam and hubb is his way. The way of the Prophet ﷺ is love. And so this journey is a journey of love.", "love. It's wanting to know God and we forget, you know, we just forget because we get caught up in dunya and all of these, you need rest from time to time. You need rest. You but the heart has to be revived again and again. And that's what these journeys are about. That's what you're here for. You're here right now. This is what we're all here for, to be reminded. That", "We want to go the right way. When we die, we want to be ready to die. And that's what this deen is about. It's about being prepared to die . You know take your souls to account before you're taking them to account. You know there's a hadith , it's a sound meaning. The hadith in Sahih Muslim, Consider yourselves already dead. So saheeh hadith. Consider yourselves are already dead, right? Die before you die.", "you die and this is the death of the sensory so that the meaning can awaken. And then, you can have the sensory with the meaning. You can have a sensory with a meaning because Allah put the sensory in here for reason. It's here for a reason it's not a negative thing we're not like some other earlier Christians that hated anything to do with the world and materialism and all these they hated it and so they would flagellate themselves and deny the body", "didn't take baths and that's not our way. Our way is balance, it's the way of balance. And so my reminder to myself and all of you is really this is a real path and it has three elements. You have the riding beast, the saddle and the rider, you need all three.", "Without the beast you're not going anywhere and without the rider. There's no point for the journey, right? But that's it So you need your Islam You have to have Islam and you have to Have the basic knowledge of Islam where we're people of knowledge our way is a way of knowledge And and you learn a text of Islam That's why this program is about Eman islam and sand because this is the foundation of our religion and like I said yesterday People want to make it one dimensional or two-dimensional Islam is not it's it's a holistic", "It's a holistic religion. It has four dimensions. The Hadith of Jibril clearly makes a statement of four dimension. It had breadth, it has length, breadth depth and width. It all four. It have the dimension of Islam this horizontal relationship with people", "that connects you with Allah. So Islam, much of it is congregational like we come together. You know, it's ijtima'ah . You pray together, you fast together, break the fast together all of these things and you have a jama'a and يَدُّ اللَّهِ مَعَ الْجَمَاعَةِ so you need Islam is very important. The religion is protected by these outward things they're not insignificant and they all had profound inward meanings, all of them", "But the outward, even if you remain at the level of the outward it's a path of salvation. It's a Path of Salvation and then the Iman, you have to have Iman You have to know your Lord. You have no Imam al Ghazali you're going to be looking inshallah at the pearls and the jewels of the Quran The Jewels are those ayahs in the Quran Imam Al Ghazalis theory And it's not really a theory. It is a way of looking at the Quran because he proves it", "The essence of the Qur'an are two types of verses. The ones that tell you your Lord and the other tells you your journey to your Lord, what you need to do to get to your lord. وَأَنَّ إِدَىٰ رَبِّكَ الْمُنْتَهَى To your Lord is the end. إِنَّ لِلَّهِ وَإِنّا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعُونَ We're going back to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And that's what this journey is about and getting knowledge of Allah. So you need Iman.", "The knowledge of Aqidah is like the chaperone between two lovers. It prevents anything haram happening. So you need to have that knowledge of aqida, because if you don't, you can say things about Allah that aren't true. And the worst thing it's worse than shirk and taquru ala llahi ma la ta'lamoon", "to say about God what you don't know in the Quran. It's considered worse than shirk. And then finally, ihsan. You have to have ihsan and ihsan is about taskiyah it's about purifying the heart. Now this relates... The reason that the body becomes more and more cumbersome", "and what are called the ذنوب and عيوب. These are the two problems for the heart. The قلب is polluted by two things. It's polluted these natural blemishes that are part of human nature, and then it's pollute by the sins that we accrue in our life. And the تسكية is to protect the heart, and this is through مجاهدة . So you have to have مجاہدة . This is the basis", "the basis of getting close to Allah. وَلَا يَزْهَرُ عَبْدِيَ تَقَرَّبُ إِلَيَّ بِالنَّوَافِلِ This is Mujahidah, doing those extra things. And Nawafil are... Allah has opened many doors of Nafila and we have different personalities, different natures. For some people they have a scholastic inclination and their purpose is to preserve knowledge and to teach knowledge. Imam Malik r.a was", "was the door that Allah opened to him, was a door of knowledge. And he was min al-arifeen, undeniably, he was a Gnostic of his Lord. But his knowledge was in fiqh. This is where Allah opened and in preservation of hadith. This Is the door That Allah opened Him. Other people have the door of zuhd, of detachment. Other People Have The Door Of Charity. Different doors are open. Some people have many doors. Right? Abu Bakr, the Prophet said there are eight gates to get into paradise", "is called the Rayyan and fascists get into it. And the Prophet said, Abu Bakr his himma is so high he said can any does anybody go in through all eight gates? And the prophet said yes and I hope that you're one of them. And he is one of then because the Prophet won't hope that except that its but he doesn't want ghurur to get into the heart so he says it in a way to keep the humility there. The Prophet was guarding", "because of fasting and praying, but by something in his heart. Right? Imam Malik said, Knowledge is not having lots of riwayat, but it's a light that Allah puts in the heart of a believer. And so you need mujahidah", "types of Mujahidah. You have Mujahiddat al-Badan and Mujahidad al-badan is to struggle against the inclinations of your body so people that get up if you're not getting up for Fajr, that's your Mujahida If you're getting up ff a Fajar then the Mujahada would be to get up for Tahajjud you know to do some night prayers The Mujahadah of your fasting right? If you have a problem with food then it's good to do fasting", "Fasting. The sunnah is to fast three days out of the month. If you can't do that, then to fast those that the Prophet ﷺ mentioned like the six days of Shawwal, right? The day of Arafah if you're not on Hajj. Things like that. The day", "So this is a good month, Sha'ban is a Good Month to Fast and doing those extra acts. The Karamat or the wonders that come from the Mujahadah of the body are Hissiyya This is what the Ulama say They're sensory type things so for instance Man Ghaddha there's a Hadith", "is the pleasure in his worship.", "physical pleasure in ibadah, you can get physical pleasure", "the 90% of the game or 95% of that's just... They watch it for those moments where they can't believe it. Right? This is why they watch and that's why most people, they just watched the highlights on the news or something because they show the highlights right? Of these amazing things. That's cause these people are doing Mujahidah with their bodies so they get this gifts because these are Sunan of Allah. If you do this type of struggle, you'll get these results", "care of the lamps in Al-Azhar. And he spilled some oil on one of the students, he was filling a lamp, he spilled oil on the student and told him you know ahmak or something, just said watch what you're doing. And felt so bad that he's a mature man and this young student is looking at him with contempt. So he went to one of sheikhs and he said I want to educate myself. He began to teach them, he", "Did Allah Almighty said it or not? And one of them asked him how he did that. He said, if he said it... He said you know how in winter when you speak you see like a steam come out? He said when they speak a hadith I see light come out of their mouth and if it's not I don't see that light. This is what he said, Subhanallah! Al-Buyazidi, one of the ulema, he was Ummi and Allah gave him all these knowledge.", "really scholars of the Taifatain. You know, he's Imam of Taifatan because he was a great faqih, usuri scholar. He was a muhadith. He is student of Imam Sikhawi. Imam Sikhawi was one of the greatest Muhaddithin. Sayyidi Ahmad Zarruq his teacher who he had his opening with Abu al-Abbas Al Hadhrami was illiterate and he actually took permission when he wrote his book on Abu al Abbas. He asked him could I correct all your grammatically incorrect statements and write them in Fusha?", "Really, I'm not making this up. These are people who were so sincere with Allah that Allah gave them openings. And the reason Allah will keep these unlettered awliya' who are given knowledge is to prove because the karamat of the awliyā' are like the mu'jizat of the anbiya'. So the Prophet ﷺ when they asked Sid Abdul Aziz at the Bagh, somebody said to him,", "He said, You know that I got from him his Ummiyah. In other words my knowledge is not... This is called Wahbi Knowledge you have Kasb and Wahabi Knowledge. And Kasb Knowledge is important. You have to study and learn. That's Kasb knowledge to learn. You've to study Fiqh and you work on it, you do memorization things like that. But Wahbi knowledge is what comes", "If you act according to what you know, Allah will give you knowledge that you don't know. It's not a jumlah shartiyah but the ulama take an ishara from that ayah. Have taqwa of Allah and Allah will teach you. Right? It's an isharah, it's not grammatically... It's no a jumla sharthiya. But the meaning of the condition is sound, the ulma say. That if you have taqwah, Allah would give you knowledges", "And they whisper in the hearts of people. And sometimes the whispering become audible like hallucinations and they do wretched things. Shaitan will get people... And shaitan loves to humiliate us, this is his favorite thing. He loves it because he hates us. He has envy in his heart for the station that we were given. He had envy in His heart. And the envier wants to see... He wants to SEE the source of his envy.", "by the world. He wants to see him in a destitute situation. This is shaitan's... he hates when people get close to Allah. But he's tricky, you see? First he'll get you... his first strategy is kufr. That's his first stratagy and if he can't get kufur from you then he tries to get nifaq If he can' t get nifaaq from you Then he tries like he tries maasiyah Right? And his favorite one is bidaa To get innovation", "But if he can't get from you, he'll get . You know just like sinfulness stealing lying cheating adultery Whatever He wants to get that to humiliate you If he can get any of these things if he sees that you're on a strong path Then he gets really serious Seriously because those people he's they're easy for him to get he gets very serious And what he does is he gets the Riya. He wants put in your heart this sense of superiority", "Siddiqoon is the love of leadership. And the Prophet said, Al-Malu wal Jah. Right? Mal malu wal jah adharru li dinan mar'i min bayni ja'iyini fi ghanim. That wealth, material wealth, and stature being held up. You know, Sheikh so and so or doctor so and whatever it is. All these things people want in the world", "pomp and circumstance of the world. Really, it's but it's you know, it is nothing. It's nothing. So it's empty. The world is empty. Vacuous. Really it's Empty. It has an empty... there is nothing there. Rumi said when you speak always remember you have an audience of one. You know who are you trying to impress? No seriously! Who are you", "meditations Marcus Aurelius he says there's people who say they don't care about the people of today but they care about their legacy. He said these people are only fooling themselves because the same fools that will be around a hundred years to be reading their legacy are the same", "All these people want to be celebrities now. This is like the goal of all these vacuous people, to be a celebrity. Famous for 15... Go on YouTube, you know, get your 15 minutes of fame or whatever it is. Really, it's empty. أَرَىٰ كُلُّ شَيْءٍ مَا خَلَ اللَّهَ بَاطِبًا Everything other than Allah is vanity. It's vacuous, it' s empty.", "That's what Prophet ﷺ said, أَصْدَقُ قَوْلِ الشَّاعِرِ The truest thing a poet ever said is what Labid said. Everything other than Allah is false. بَاطِل حمد لله So those anyway this introduction because the biggest enemy our biggest enemy is the tongue.", "It's really, it's a big one. And you know, you have a quote in there from Confucius or Confucianists about the ancients. The ancients were very concerned with the tongue, rectification of the tongue. This is a question about Riya and inshallah when I get to the section on", "I wanted to read some lines here though about the... One of the things people, the word tasawwuf is a good word. It's not a negative word.", "Tassawuf. But Tasawwuf was never denied, none of the ulama historically ever denied Tasawuif. You will find no alim in the history of Islam that denied Tasauf as one of the sciences of Islam, noneof them. Ibn Tamiyah did not deny Tasawuf, Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziya didn't deny Tasauh, Ibr Rajab Al-Hambari didn't deny Tasawuh, Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab did not", "he was not against tasawwuf. And the Hayat Kibar al-Ulema, Hayat al-Amar bin Ma'ruhun Nahi an-Munkar in Riyadh published the text of Abdurrahman al-Ahdari in Tasawwaf. Well I have a copy published in Rijadh by the Amr bin Ma'truhul Nahi An-Mukhar They don't deny Tasawwwuf but they attack practices and things that some of the Sufis do like", "the people that do the whirling and things like that. That's another thing, and I'm not attacking them but I'm just saying this is what they... But tasawwuf as a science of Islam nobody in history of Islam denied tasawwwuf. It's a word that shows up very early just like many of the technical terms of Islam and it was a word used to prove the people of tajreed or Ahl al-Suffah They were people who didn't have anything and they did dhikr and studied with Prophet .", "He used to feed them. They were homeless people. He fed, on average, every day 70 people. Homeless people. We forget that our Prophet ﷺ was... You know, he was taking care of homeless people It's a sunnah to take care of the homeless people because he was doing that. He would take 70 everyday. There were between 470 people of Ahl al-Sufa and every day he would feed them they used to bring the food to him and he would just send it out to them", "very often just to give them food. Prophet ﷺ fed people all the time, his sunnah is to feed people but nobody has denied tasawwuf you know and Imam al-Shatibi who's also used to kind of attack the people of Tasawwf or Talbisu Iblis ibn Al-Jawzi things like that these are correctives that scholars did in certain times but if you read the A'ti Asam and then you read Mu'afaka they're very different books", "different books it's like two different authors but Imam al-Shatibi says that in the early period they called them the Sahaba, the Prophet said he was yearning to meet his brothers and they said aren't we your brothers?", "My brothers come after me. And then he said, they have set reward of 70 from amongst you. And they asked how could that be? And he said... You have people to help you do your good but these people will come and there's little help. They'll be doing good without much help because the religion loses its fervor. People loved religion now", "They don't want to hear about it. So the first group was called Sahaba and then they call them Tabi'in, the tabi'un are the people that followed the sahabah And then they called them tabi-tabi'in Then they had a problem Because what do you call the tabia tabia tabyain? It gets too much. And so Imam Ash-Shatibi said they called him Ahl al tasawwuf The people of Tasawwf", "They were the people that were on the way of the early Salaf. And this is why people forget, that the people of Sufiyah they were the harshest. They always took Madhhabhum al-Ahwat. They've always took the most difficult things. They didn't take the Rukhas ever. People of Tasawwuf were very strict in their outward adherence. They weren't people of Rukhsa.", "that the big, a-kabir al-sufiyyah did not follow madhhab. They didn't have taqleed. They followed kitab al-sunnah. I mean all the madhhabs are kitab wal-sunna but they would take their ahkam directly from the book and the sunnah because they were people of ishtihad. They went straight from Allah and His Messenger like Imam Al-Sinusi, Idris, he's famous scholar. He had like... You know we have Palm Pilot today?", "The Prophet said about this cow who was being ridden, he said", "created to be ridden. And one of the sahabah said, A baqara tatekallam ya Rasulullah? Does a cow talk? He said, Ana umir bihi ana wa Abu Bakr wa Umar I believe it and so does Abu Bakar and Umar. And Mahalla Shahid is Abu Bakrar and Umars weren't present when he said it but he was just showing them if he said that Abu Bakra and Umarr believed it you know and we know Karamat Saheeha", "The Uqba bin Nafi' when he was in Qayrawan. This is from the great tabiin. He called to the animals in the forest, he said, You know, he spoke to the animal and said we're from the Ummah of Prophet ﷺ", "to leave because we need the wood from the forest. They said for three days they saw the animals leaving and making hijrah. And Mu'awiyah when he heard that, he wanted to hear it. We know that Abu Alar Hadrami, he rode his horse on the water and told this is a sahih karama of the Sahaba. And he said it and that happened. Because that's one of the karamat of the people of Mujahidah.", "يطير في الهواء. These are karamat, and we believe. وَثْبِتًا لِلأُولِيَةِ الكرامةِ وَمَّن نفَاهَ فَانْبِّذًا كَلَامًا Imam Al-Laqani says, make firm your resolve to believe in the karamat of the awliya' and whoever rejects them, reject him. And it's amazing now, people don't want to believe on karamat. They say, خُزَعْ بَلات خُرافات خورافات", "They basically undermine the whole religion. If you don't believe in karamat, then what is the religion? It's a karama. The whole thing is a mu'jiza. The Qur'an is a Mu'jizah. Right? Really. No, there's karamata real. But these sahaba they had karamat. The tabi'in had karamat. One of the cows came out and spoke to the sahaba. وَدَّلَّتْهُمْ سَفِينَةً The mawla of the Prophet ﷺ", "the Prophet ﷺ in a sound tradition of him. His boat sunk and he was on khashab, which is on a piece of wood and it took him to a place and he didn't know where he was. And a lion came out. A lion. And Mawla said, Ya Asad, I'm the ship of Mawlaw Rasulullah ﷺ. He said, I am the ship, the servant of the Messenger of Allah.", "the messenger of Allah. And he said, جاء الأسد وطأتأ رأسه وهمهما ودلني على الطريق ثم همهما كأنه يودعني وانصرف سفينة said He came up to me and he made some noises and then he nudged me and showed me the road and then He said He made noises as if He was saying goodbye and He just left him. I believe in it. I don't have any problem with that.", "with that and you know i'll tell you something this is the truth if you believe in karamat you will see karamat if you don't believe in karma you won't see karamatt okay i'm going to tell you the truth" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/We Are Trapped in a Circle- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_JKcSUUL7wAk&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742887232.opus", "text": [ "Historically we were obsessed with peace. That was the whole point, spread peace. The Prophet said spread peace, our greeting is Assalamu alaikum. It's not Al-Harb wa alaykum. Sayyidina Ali had a child and he named it Harb, Al- Hassan. He went to the prophet, he said, He said no, his name is not war, his names good beauty. He came next time, had a ch...", "He went to the Prophet and said, what did you call him? He said, he had a third child. He wanted a warrior. Because the Arabs they called their sons the names for their enemies. This is Jahili. He was still thinking in the previous time because the Jahili Arabs they named their sons names like Nimr, Asad, Zi'ib.", "Hassan, beauty spread good. Al-Hussain, he's second in line so he's a little less than the first one right? And then Muhsen. So where is Dar al-Salam on the wheel? Come on I just put it there. Yeah so what is this? What do we call this? It's an axis. What else is it called?", "Huh? What's the center of a wheel? What do you call it? Those are spokes or what comes out? It's an hub. Okay, so we'll call it a hub. So it's all good in the hub. This is the hub, we'll write it in Arabic. Hub. You want to get into the hub", "The hub, the hub. The love of Allah. The more you get to the center, the less affected you are by the vicissitudes of time. The most you center your being with God, the more these things become meaningless because you see them as from God. Because God made a world that's very nature is to do this. This is the nature of the world. This", "the eye of the hurricane is complete tranquility, stillness when ships go into the eye the hurricane there's no storm it's all peaceful they're in Darussalam and this is why Aslahu al-Nas in Islam Aslhu al-nas fi qarnan minal quroon", "Because one of us is the best of us in this time. There's one Muslim who's better than all the other Muslims because he represents the heart of the Prophet . The Prophet was the best human beings, the Prophet is the Qutb of existence He's Qutab al-wujud, he's the axis of existence that's why he's perfect stillness. He was never perturbed, he went to Ta'if they spit on him threw rocks at him, they made him bleed Did he say Allah anzal aleyhim al azhab?", "Because he didn't see them as doing it to him. He saw them as a bala from God. And he said, Who are you going to send me to? Like to some enemy, right? Who doesn't know who I am. He said, if you're content with me, I'm fine with it. But afiyah is better.", "conditions than bad conditions. We don't have a victimization complex like some religions, they actually like to be punished right? Muslims don't like that we would rather be ruling then be ruled we would rarther be that but if were under the authority of somebody else then we know who gave them the power. We're not deluded into thinking they did it themselves because we know", "Allahumma Malik al-Mulk You're the owner of the dominion. You give it to whom you please Right? So this is where Ghazali was up here and then at about 38 he was here like, this doesn't look good for me and then He loses his voice and now he's here The thing that put him here was taken away from him and he finds himself here. He went into a state of depression but then", "But then, دَعُ اللَّهِ مُخْدِسِينَ دَاعُ اللّٰهِم مُحْدِّسِيْنَ He called on Allah with sincerity and he started his journey where? Here. Into the center. And he becomes the قطب. And this is why none of it affected him at the end of his life. None of it effected him. He had no interest in power, جَا He said I used to teach كسب للجَا", "He said, now I teach how to get rid of Jah. He said I used to teach in order to get stature. Now I'm teaching to help people get rid off this love. Hubad dunya. What's our disease? Hubad Dunya. Loving to be up here wa karahiyat the struggle. Hating to be down here. This is our sickness that we're trapped in this circle and this is where Allah is telling us to get to. Be here", "Be here. And none of it will matter. And then you can struggle and your struggle will be meaningful. Because right now, you're down here, you are just struggling out of anger. Out of love, of vengeance. Right? When Salah ad-Din al-Ayubi... This is where he was working from. Salah Ad-Dina al-Ayyubi was working form the center. He didn't spend his youth throwing stones at crusaders.", "He was a student and one of the books he studied was Dhahya. He was... A fruit of the madrasa of Imam Abu Hamid.", "Even though the crusaders were occupying Palestine, he knew we don't have any power to do it. We can't get rid of these people now so what should I use my time for? To learn the things that will help me not just free al-Quds but free the people who are oppressing the people in Al-Qud from their oppression. Give help to your brother even your Jewish brother", "brother, your Christian brother. Help them stop oppressing. That's how you the prophet said we know how to help victims. How do you help the oppressor? He said by stopping him from his oppression. At least remind him at least tell him you're oppressing, you shouldn't do this because they kill the people that remind them. Allah says that in the Quran. Martin Luther King Malcolm X All Malcolm was doing", "doing. The tongue was all he had. He didn't have any army and he started from hatred that's where he was and that's why if you listen to his early talks they're just filled with hate but listen to the is his last talk nobody wants to hear Malcolm after Mecca, they don't want that harsh", "Malcolm that suddenly realizes people are human beings white people are humans a lot of them would almost convince you otherwise I understand that but they're human being right Turkish people are white a lot", "You need more sun. The sun makes you happy, doesn't it? When the sun comes up. You live in Europe, there's never any sun. You're miserable. Get a bad attitude. But that's Malcolm. Malcolm got there. That's why he... In the end of his life, that's where he was. What's Martin Luther King do right before he dies? I've been to the mountain. Everybody wants longevity. I've seen him. He was moving. That is where he... But he started. He understood this. Trust me. He knew this model very well.", "well. You know, one thing Martin Luther King said was if I wasn't against violence on moral terms for moral reasons, I'd still be against it for pragmatic reasons. That's why Muslims haven't learned that. I'm against modern violence on more grounds. I really am. I am against modern warfare. I don't believe in a modern warfare, I don' t believe Muslims should be engaged in modern warfare I really don't. I'd rather be killed than kill people with nuclear weapons.", "I'd rather die than drop a bomb. I really would, I'd Rather Die Than Blow Up Children I'd Much Rather Be Killed Than Kill Some Innocent Person And The Prophet Said Towards The End Of Time He Said Be the Best of The Two Sons of Adam Right Kun You Know Khaira Ibnei Adam Be Like The Best of Who What It's It'S A Habl Right Not Qabal It's Abel Not Cain you know in the Tafseer of Imam Al-Baghwi what he Says", "what he says? He says that Ibn Abbas said Cain was actually weaker than Abel. Abel could have defeated him, but he said their sharia'ah was that they weren't even allowed self-defense. And that means if that is true, that means that the foundation of our tradition is nonviolence. And I would argue that the Prophet would exhaust every nonviolent means before he would go to violent means. He would exhaust", "being tortured. And he didn't do anything about it outwardly because he was a profound strategic thinker, completely different approach to the problems of the world. That's... What time is it? 935? 945. I'll give you one more example of the wheel of fortune but you'll see it many times in the Quran. It's a very useful model", "And I believe it is a Quranic model. And Allah is using that example of the mushrikeen. So they're the ones that are in this circle. The Muslims are supposed to be in the center, right? الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا وَتَطْمَئِنُ قُلُوبُهُم بِذِكْرِ اللَّهِ أَلَا بِ ذِكَرِ اللهِ تَطمَأِنَ الْقُلوفِ Those who believe and their hearts have stillness. طُمَعْنِينا From the dhikr of Allah. Isn't it by the dhakar of Allah", "by the dhikr of Allah, the hearts are still. Why are they still? Because there's no movement in the hub. There's no movement here. These people are not still. They're in complete confusion because it's just this is their life. Right? This is their live. They are in that samsara of just this constantly turning wheel and that's why Muslims are confused. They don't understand. Why aren't we on top if we're the truth", "If we're the truth, why aren't we on top? Because that's not where the truth resides. It resides here. It doesn't reside here. This is where the Truth resides. it's not to be on the top, it's to be in the center and we've lost our center this is called Kunya Bilim Markazi", "Kunya's scientific center. Right? The center. There is a man, he's called Markazi Efendi. Does anybody, any Turkish people know him? Markazi Effendi? Has anyone heard of him? You've heard of Him? Who is He? What's that? He was famous scholar, yeah but he was famous... Why is he called Markazii? Do you know why?", "He was called Markazi because this is where he resided. And the reason he's called Markazii is because the Shaykh was looking for a Khalifa, he was about to die so he asked them what would you change about Allah's creation? What would you changed? and The next day the students came so he said what would You change? He said I'd get rid of alcohol He said what Would You change he said I get rid Of Dhulm", "He said, what would you change? He said I'd get rid of poverty. All the students said that and then they look he said to Markazi Effendi What would you changed? He Said nothing Who am I To make the world different from the way Allah made it It doesn't mean you don't fight against poverty. It doesn' t mean you dont fight against oppression. It doesnt mean you do not fight against sickness It means you understand their Hikmah", "their hikmah. They're here for a reason. That's the difference. Bitter medicine, people don't like it. It's a drag, huh? You have to accept this situation. It is unacceptable. Ask Allah for the afiyah. I'd rather be an afiya.", "عَبِيذُ الْإِحْسَانِ لَا عَابِي ذُو الْامْتِحَانٍ You know, we don't want imtihan. We might fail the test but if Allah tests us, we should be prepared for it. Hope for the best but expect the worst. Hope a good farah. وَبَذَارِكَ فَلْيَفْرَحُوا هُوَ خَيْرٌ مِّمَّا يَجْمَعُونَ Be happy about the Akhirah. لِلصَّائِمِ فَرْحَتَانی The Sa'im has two joys", "Two joys. Why? When he finishes his fast, not for the delight of the food. That's not what Imam Nauwi understood. Imam Naudi said his farha isn't because he is eating a piece of sweet date. His farha is that he completed the ibadah successfully. وَفَرْحَةٌ حِينَمَا يَلْقَى رَبَّهُ And a joy when he meets his Lord. That is when our Raghno is. Our Raghna is in paradise.", "Peace. That's when you get peace. There is no peace in this world. There's only peace here, in this World. It's in your heart. There are always going to be problems in the world. You're always gonna have problems. Emotional problems, psychological problems, health problems, sociological problems, problems of kufr, of dhulm, poverty... This is dunya!", "Allah says in Surah Al-An'am, you know this adab comes to you. Right? Or the saa comes. Are you going to call on other than Allah when it comes? You should call on God if you're truthful. And then, بَرِيَّهُ تَدْعُونَ فَيَكْشِفُ مَا تَتْدْ عُنَ إِلَيْهِ So He removes the harm.", "If He wants, and then you forget what you were associating with. We gave you these tribulations to humble you. That's why he does it. When you're arrogant, when you're up there, you get arrogant. Muslims became very arrogant. Trust me. You read our history. Look at the letters that were sent to the year. But they used to send these letters.", "The Prophet didn't say that. He said, إلى عظيم الروم To the عظیم of Rome That's how he spoke to them because he was trying to win them over. He wasn't belittling them. He didn't have arrogance for them. They had total احتقار I'm telling you You see it in the books. I've seen it in books How stupid the Christians are? How idiotic they are? They believe these stupid things This is arrogance فَلَوْ لَا إِذْ جَاءُهُمْ بَأْسٌ تَدَرَّعُوا", "Would that only when this baas comes, when you're at six o'clock, it would humble you. But their hearts are hard and shaitan has made what they're doing appear good to them. Suicide bombing. They think it's a good thing cutting off heads of Shia. It is a good", "and then we bring them back up, right? they get all this joy because of what they've been given. We take it all away from them suddenly. They're in sorrow and despair." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Your plan vs Allah_s plan - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_uc1ixfuREcA&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748535806.opus", "text": [ "Well, the poet said A man is only responsible for expending his effort and it's not up to him whether time supports him or not. So you just do what you should do. Ibn Atayla quotes Abraha Hassan al-Shadri saying", "plan, plan on not planning. But it doesn't really translate into English because the meaning of tadbir is to work out the end. You know, dubir is the end of something. So yudabbiru is to get to the end, yet tadabbaru is try to penetrate thought to get the furthest limit of your thought, of what you're capable of. So when Musa saw the fire, like where did he go?", "What would he go? He went to get... He thought it was, you know the Arabs and the ancient peoples in the deserts they had what's called which they would put fire in an elevated place to let people in the dessert know they were there if they needed to come and get food or shelter. This was like the sunnah of the desert. And this is traditional peoples in most places I mean there's always been wars amongst native peoples", "But Aboriginal peoples also have codes of honor. Like Native Americans did not attack people that had women and children with them. That's why in that famous expedition that Lewis and Clark made, Jefferson wanted to see how far America went so they went all the way to Washington State which is now Washington State then it was", "what they call the Nez Pierce. It's a French name, I don't know what their native name was. Nez Pearce, Pierce Nose People. But they took... What was her name? Sacagawea? Was it? Sacajawea. Sacajawaya. Yeah, Sacajawhaya. So we know her name. She went with the baby because Lewis had lived with Native Americans and he knew they didn't attack", "attack women and children. So that's how they were able to travel through all that land. Some of those places were dangerous. They came upon war parties. There was a Shoshone war party they came upon, and they were scared when they first saw them. They didn't know because they had their you know, they were clearly out for war. But because they the girl with them, they let them go. So", "And so when Moses saw the fire, he wanted to go get a qabas to start his own fire. Because it's hard to start a fire with wood and you have to... He wanted to get aqabas, to go bring it and start afire where his family was. And then he said maybe I'll get some news. In other words they're travelers too and they might know what the conditions are or whatnot. So when he got there, it was the burning bush.", "Man proposes, God disposes. I mean you... Ibn Atayla says, الْعَاقِلُ إِذَا أَصْبَحَ يَقُولُ مَاذَ سَيَفَعلَ اللَّهُ بِيَّةً He said the idiot when he wakes up in the morning, he says what am I going to do today? And he said but the intelligent man gets up and says what's God going to with me today? This is a different perspective of life. So it's not that you don't plan, but you don'y invest in the plans to the point where you miss life." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Be like the sword of time - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _sh_8fQpN3b7cU4&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743305609.opus", "text": [ "Be like the sword of time. The sword of Time cuts. Imam Shafi'i said, Time is a sword if you don't cut with it, It will cut you down. Imam Malik was asked who are the worst people? He said those who lose their Akhira because of their Dunya Is there anybody worse than them? He Said Naam Those who lose Their Akhiri Because Of Other People's Dunya Just wishing they had what so-and-so had and this is why all we can", "And this is why all we can do is hope that whatever is left, we use it for the preciousness, for the pricelessness that it possesses. Sayyidina Omar he said I hate to see people wasting their time. I'm talking to myself, I just want to remind all of you of that. Wallahi. I've wasted so much time in my life." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Free Will vs Divine Decree_ Shaykh Hamza Yusuf on _CnSI5V6IYG0&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748541877.opus", "text": [ "The evidence for determinism is extremely high. Many mathematicians who are not believers, are deterministic like they really believe that the world is completely determined and that when you look at all the variables whatever happens could not have... Nothing else could have happened when you take in all the variable And so there's that aspect that's very real about life", "that things happen and you know had like those kids had they not gone to IHOP. You know? And the prophet said lo, to say use if it'll open the door of Shaitan because Shaitaan wants you to grieve but I'm using this as an example. Had those kids have the food inside the masjid. You could think of a million things that could've been different but when you actually look at the situation", "everything came together to create this horrific, perfect storm. Like that person was just right there at that time when those kids were there and may Allah give them ease and facilitation, Nabra and her family, may Allah gives her paradise. She was at the masjid, you know mashallah and doing night prayers but this is one of the things that makes it very difficult for people to understand. Now that man who did that", "did that, we believe he was a moral agent. He was a Moral Agent and so he's responsible for his actions and that he killed her and that HE did it. But God allows the free will bargain is that God allows these things to happen now one of the things about God is he can bring good out", "and it's very difficult for us to accept it, but there's two views of the world. And in fact, Fakhreddin al-Razi has an incredible taxonomy of people, and he begins that all the world can be divided into two, skeptics and then people that believe that the fire burns, that there's axiomatic truths in the world like something cannot be", "He divides the world immediately into those two. And then he divides, so there's the skeptics over there. They're just saying we don't know, you can never know, nobody can ever know. Then there's other group and he says that's a majority of people that actually believe that the world has knowledge, that there is knowledge in the world, that we can know things. And from those people, there are people who believe in deductive truths that you can not just empirical inductive truths like fire burns but also that you", "you can actually realize things from universals, and you can argue from universales. And then he says, and that group is the majority. And he says from those, you're further divided into people who believe the world was created, and then the people believed the world always here. And He says the majority think it was created. And Then He says from Those, that's further divided", "that it created itself. Remember, this is like we're looking at he died in 1206 I think so we're look at a 13th century scholar that nothing's changed. We have the same people on the planet. This idea that atheists are new or new atheism. The new atheists actually far less sophisticated than the old atheists", "which is a general sign of the overall deterioration of everything on this planet. So, you know, so the atheists of the past were actually much more rigorous in their arguing and their reasoning. Anyway, so then he says for those who believe that the world was created they're further divided into two. Those who believe there are only sages", "and there's no messengers, he calls those the Eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism. And then he says, and then the Abrahamic religions that believe there's messengers. He includes in them the Jews, the Christians, the Muslims, and the Zoroastrians even though they're not technically Abrahamic, they were considered people of the book, we treat them like people of a book. So that's his taxonomy. We believe that we will be judged", "that we will be judged according to our actions. The soul has what it earns, and against it are its sins. And we believe, inshallah Allah will show us mercy because we want mercy, but we do believe that we accrue our actions and that we earn them. It's called kisp according to the majority of theologians. Some of the theologian, their more heterodox views actually believed", "that God, they look at God as more deistic. That God kind of, you know the Mu'tazirite believed that he created us and gave us power that enabled us to do our own so we actually created our own actions. The other opinion which is the Ash'ari and Salafi position and they differ on it also. They're closer than the Mu'stizirite which is that God", "the Ash'ari's believe that when it says, you don't will except Allah wills. That this is what the coming together of the two wills, that nothing can happen that Allah doesn't allow it to happen and he actually creates it even though you earn it. And this is the dominant Ash'ar position. The position of the Athari school which Ibn Taymiyyah and others followed", "you're doing the action, but Allah is the one that has enabled you. But it's actually your action so they... The result is the same and that's why these are really the differences to me are problematic because the view of the two is the thing that you earn your actions. It's whether or not it's a direct immediate creation. It'a new creation and that where the asheris differ from the atheri. But we believe that", "that we have free will and the people are responsible. And in the end, only Allah can judge people because there's too many variables. If you look at human history, the vast majority of people... I mean if you look in this country for instance, people didn't know anything about Islam for a very long time. Now all they know is a distorted version of Islam so we can't judge people like if you want to say they're kuffar,", "The kafir is somebody who knows the truth and rejects it. And Imam al-Ghazali was of the view, anyone who's actively searching for the truth will be saved even if they die before getting it. He says that very clearly in Faisal Al Tafriqa. And he's as orthodox as you can get according to the dominant view. So it's a very difficult one but you have to believe", "responsible for your actions. Do not blame things on God, but once things have happened the best thing to do is accept it that that's the qadr and this relieves you of the burden of like oh my god if I only did this or if I did that nothing else could've happened once its happened but before its happened you have to see yourself as fully responsible. Once its happened", "If you did something wrong, and hopefully if you did right, you also get the reward for that. But you have to see it as nothing else could've happened. So it's like having bifocals. You can't look at this thing without seeing it at these two levels. Allah ta'ala ala." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/What_s happening in SYRIA - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _sy_tKaFRzwPyhM&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742892452.opus", "text": [ "Because he lived through civil wars. He saw what happens when things break down. The people of Damascus, six years ago were eating beautiful food. They had good clothes. It was one of the few countries on the planet that was actually self-sustained and now all of this tribulation... And if you say why is it happening to them and not us? Maybe because Allah loves them more. Because we know Ahl al Sham have a Maqam", "a maqam. So Allah will put all of the torment of the akhirah, He'll put it in dunya for a short period and then they go back to Allah completely free of any tribulation or punishment. Maybe its the places that aren't being afflicted that deserve to be afflicted should be worried. This is the way Muslims traditionally looked at things when the Maghul came down, when the Mongols", "They said, This is a punishment God has sent to us because of our wrong actions. That's how they looked at it. Muslims don't look at that anymore. Evil America, evil Israel, evil... Okay, good! Allah put them in power. He says he gives power to whomever he pleases. Muslim had it. If Muslims had nuclear weapons right now with the idiots that we have,", "Allah knows what He's doing. Allah knows who He gives power to. Yes, they abuse their power but to what degree? Who would be worse? People want the destruction of America? Well let's see what happens when China gets the world power. See if there is going to be an Abu Ghraib that you hear about. See If there is any recourse to redressing any wrongs. Allahu Ta'ala Alam I don't know.", "But sometimes the worst things are answered prayers. I have immense love and sympathy for the Syrian people who have been egregiously wronged and oppressed, for a long time. And many of my teachers were Syrians. Sheikh Hisham al-Burhani was one of my primary teachers in the United Arab Emirates when I was studying there as a young man.", "My first teacher in Aqidah was Sheikh Anas Abu Murad, who was a wonderful Syrian scholar. So I had many Syrian teachers. Many of them were actually refugees in the UAE from the Hama massacre and I was there during that time so I remember very much hearing the stories of what happened. And certainly Sheikh Muhammad Ali Al-Aqubi is...I consider him one of my most important teachers", "one of the most extraordinary living scholars and revivers of the Isnad tradition. Another thing I just want to say about Zaytuna College, which is a college that I founded with Imam Zayd who studied in Syria, that in many ways this is actually an extension of Syrian knowledge because every single one of our teachers that teach us here Islam or anything to do with Sira, Hadith, Quran including our Turkish scholar", "scholar are scholars that studied with the exception of one, that studied was Syrian scholars and are largely indebted to a Syrian scholarship for what they teach in their knowledge. So in many ways this is an extension of the Syrian Islamic tradition which to me is one of most important ones and one that the Prophet salallahu alayhi wa sallam praised. The prophet said," ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Mystery behind your sleep - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_CM5IGGc8ykc&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW3SBwkJvQCDtaTen9Q%3D_1743073917.opus", "text": [ "You're saying a dead thing can't be restored to life. Don't you see every year here in just in our Bay Area, every year all the green now that's everywhere, all these hills are covered. Those were dead hills a few months ago. They were dead. If you go up there, all of that was dead. But then the water comes and it's brought back to life Every morning when you wake up, the Prophet said", "قال الله تعالى هذا كان أول شيء قد يقوله عندما وقع الناس لأن الله يجعلنا ننوم كل رياضة مثل الموت لا يوجد شيئ يمكننا فعله كذلك كما قال الشخص أنت ترى الروح تصل إلى الحلقون لا يمكنك فعل أي شيء لا يستطيع أن تحمله", "Same with sleep. Sleep conquers you. Sleep conquer you. Milton called it the gentle tyrant because it conquers You and so every morning Your eyes open up if You're lucky, and there You are again back to life brought back to light and You actually come up just as they will come in the grave when They're called again", "Who woke us up from our sleep. This is what, and yet we're reminded every single day of our life, of this reality. Every single day. And that's why the Prophet said, وإليك النشور And to you is the resurrection. That's how he viewed waking up from sleep. It reminded him another day", "him another day. I have another day to get close to my Lord, to prepare for this inevitability which is our death." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/It_s all coming from Allah - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf__1748532361.opus", "text": [ "It's because nothing afflicts you except Allah decreed it for you. Like had I not gone there, this wouldn't have happened. Well, it could happen wherever you are. It's like when the Bedouin, the Prophet said, he said there is no infectious diseases and again this is haqiqah so don't think he's not negating because he also said that's in Sahih al-Bukhari flee from the leper like you flee from a lion. So again", "So again, it's really important to remember that this is not... We have bifocals spiritually. We have a bifocal vision. We Sharia and we have Haqiqah And our deen has always understood that distinction between those two so that's really importan to remember. So we assert causation, we don't deny it but we also recognize that it's Allah" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Mountains and earth quakes - Sheikh Hamza Yusuf__1748537010.opus", "text": [ "Allah then says, haven't they considered the heavens over them? We have built it and adorned it ornamented it and you will see no furooj there's no gaps in it Imam al-Biqa'i said this is a proof that the heavens surround the earth so he saw it as a proof for the that the uh the earth was round", "it was surrounded by heavens. He said that if there's no gap in it, it means that it must be completely self-contained. And then Allah says and then go to the earth so you look at the heaven then go", "spread it out and we put in at these anchors, these mountains that are anchors for it. And they do stabilize the earth. The dominant theory is that the mountains emerge when these tectonic plates came together and then they ended up... That's where it stops, the shaking stops because these mountains come up and then the plates don't shake anymore." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Why prophet was a merchant - Sheikh Hamza Yusuf__1742889329.opus", "text": [ "Why was the Prophet a merchant before he became a prophet?", "is caring for a flock. It's caring for people in a way that the shepherd does not want any harm to come to the flock and who does the shepherd guard the flock from? The wolf, the wolf. The reason I believe, the reason that the Prophet was chosen to be a merchant" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Beautiful aspect of Islam by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf rh__1743310628.opus", "text": [ "One of the beautiful aspects of Islam is one, the Prophet ﷺ chose to be poor and he did it for the majority of his ummah. He was given a choice to be like Sulaiman or to be... And he chose to Nabiun Abd Like a slave servant A slave prophet not a king prophet because Allah has both So he chose... And He did this desiring for His Ummah to see well if this is the best of creation", "when Aisha brought all the possessions of the Prophet out, it was two garments and a bowl that he used to wash with. That was his possession. That's what he left behind. He didn't leave anything behind. It's amazing! And he could have been the richest man in the world physically material well but he chose to be poor" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Condition of Muslim Ummah -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _h__1742892938.opus", "text": [ "Quran distinguishes, it doesn't collectivize. It always distinguishes and that's why it is very important that the Muslim community recognize that The only time the Quran doesn't distinguish is with believers And now Muslims too many of us make all the kuffar one thing But the Muslims, he's this, he is that, right? So that's a problem in our community" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Imam Shafi_e _rh_ on Time -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _h__1748541837.opus", "text": [ "Imam Shafi'i, he said I learned two things from the Sufis. Time is a sword if you don't cut with it in other words If you're not attentive It will cut you down we don't kill time time kills us Whenever you hear somebody say I'm gonna go kill some time That is a person incomplete ghaffla whenever you hear someone, you know Ibn Ataylah He said the fool gets up in the morning and says what am I going to do today?", "What am I going to do today? And the wise man gets up and says, what is God going to with me today?" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/You are not Insignificant -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _h__1743073952.opus", "text": [ "If you go inside the human being, all of those vast spaces out there are also in you, inside you. Imam Ali said in his Diwan, You think that yourself is some insignificant thing and yet in you are all of the cosmos. All of the Cosmos are in you.", "You think that you're an insignificant thing and yet in you all of the world reside." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Drawing Near to Allah ﷻ -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _ham__1743298877.opus", "text": [ "Drawing near to Allah, there are basically two paths. You know, to getting close to Allah . One of them is the path of salvation which is for common people. That's the path just the man who came to the Prophet and he said, Ya Rasulullah if I pray five times a day, if I pay my zakat", "zakat if I fast Ramadan, if I make the Hajj will I enter paradise? And the Prophet said yes. And there's a Riwayah that says I avoid the Haram. The Prophet said you'll enter Paradise and then he said well that's all I'm going to do" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Following the prophet ﷺ by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _ham__1742998383.opus", "text": [ "The closer you get to following the sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ, the less delusional you're going to be. And I really believe that. And then his compassion is really important because a lot of people have these outward sunnahs and they don't have the inward sunnah which is a big problem. Just to have the the inward Sunnah of humility and also shafaqah rahmah. He's rahmatan lil alameen he's the mercy to all the worlds", "animal, the vegetable, the mineral. He was a mercy to all of the worlds." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Surah Al Fatiha Explained -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_RLFP9jwgz_A&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742893105.opus", "text": [ "There's a khilaf of whether or not Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Raheem is an ayah. In some qira'at it is, in some it's not. So in the qiraa that I learned, it's NOT from the Fatiha. It's considered a mark between the surr . So that was Imam Marek's position radhiAllahu anhu. And the hadith in Al Bukhari indicates that", "So in Al-Bukhari, Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala in the Hadith al Qudsi begins with . So that was one of Imam Malik's proofs. But in any case there is a khilaf about it. Imam Shafi who considers it an ayah and considers the prayer invalid if the Bismillah is not recited so there's a khidhaf about that whether or", "whether or not it's from the Fatiha. In any case, if we begin with Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Raheem, we always begin the Quran, fa idha qaraatir quran fasta'idh billah If you read the Quran seek refuge in Allah. So Allah tells us to seek refuge, in Allah min al shaytan al rajim From the accursed Shaytaan. So Awadha is to Ma'adh is a place of refuge", "refuge, so we're seeking refuge with Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala from Shaitan because Shaitaan wreaks havoc on our species. Now when we say A'udhu Billahi Minash Shaitana Rajim Shaita is that word there's a difference of opinion does it come from Shatana or does it", "There's a difference. Is it from fai'al or is it from fa-alan? The difference, if it's shaitan with a shatana then it has to do with the one who's muba'd he's far from Allah or he distances others from Allah He causes others to become distant from Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala spiritually", "If it's from shatayishitu, then the meaning is halaka. So it's either the one who's haleq or the one yuhleq and both are true. The word rajim which is interesting also because rajim is one of those really interesting words in Arabic that can either mean fa'il or mafa'ul", "Now when it's fa'il here, which is rajim. It could be marjum the one who stoned or it could be rajm the one yarjumu so in other words he's the one that does it to you. He makes you accursed by following him. So when you become a minion. So we can have both meanings according to Imam al-Akbari.", "So Allah begins, This is basically saying that all praise belongs to Allah alone. And He's , the Lord of the worlds. So... That lamb there is . Praise is due to Allah", "which is why whenever we praise anybody in the dunya, we say masha'Allah because we're acknowledging that it's a creation of God and we're acknowledge that whatever good came from that person is actually really a good that Allah brought into the world. So all praise goes back to Allah . And whoever we praise ultimately we are praising Allah so it's an awareness", "because this is his creation. So whatever's good in his creation, it's from Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala and then he, al-Rahmani al-Rahim if you believe that the Bismillah is an ayah, then it's repeated Imam Al Ghazali was Shafi'i so he clearly saw this as being repeated but one of the things Imam Al-Ghazali says", "without meaning. In other words, if Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala says Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-rahim and then the Bismillah is that and then Rahman or Raheem are attributes. Rahman is Faalan and Raheema is Faeel these are hyperbolic forms in Arabic.", "stronger sense than Rahim. They're both hyperbolic forms. What, what hyperbole is a rhetorical device in which you use to really emphasize something so if you say alama that's hyperboley he's not just a scholar he's a great scholar so Rahman is he's", "These are both hyperbolic forms which indicate the immense Rahmah of Allah. And the reason he says that this is repeated after Rabbil Alameen, is because it is from his mercy that He brought everything into existence. So His Rububiyya is an attribute of His Mercy. The fact that He bought everything into existance is from His Rahma and the greatest Rahma", "for us is the Prophet because it's guidance. So his guidance is the greatest rahmah he gives us after his creation, he created us but then he provides us with guidance. Now Malik-e Yom Iddin, Dr. Cleary translated as ruler of Judgment Day that's one way and that would actually be probably Malik which is the warsh recension and there's a few others so you have Malik and Malak", "and Malik, and Malak. Malik is the possessor, and malik is sovereign or ruler. What's interesting is these two forms both indicate something about Allah . So not every malik a malik, so if you have a king,", "If he's a tyrant, he can take whatever he wants. But if he's benevolent king then he owns what he owns but then he is the caretaker, he somebody who is responsible for his subjects but he's not gonna steal their wealth whereas the Malik, he owns and so Melk and Malik indicate that Allah not only is the sovereign of that day", "does not belong to Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala, which means he cannot oppress his creation. There's nothing that he can do that will be warranted giving God the name of oppressor. It's impossible for God to oppress because you cannot oppress your own possessions if you own something and say you burn something like take a coat", "and somebody sees you burn it, they say why are you burning that? And you say well, it's infected. I have to burn it. So you're explaining to him but he really has no business asking if it's your coat. You can do what you want with your own property so that's the point of medic and malik that he is both. Yom Adin, the day of judgment or the day for acquittal in his larger translation he translates it as the day", "This is the day when debts fall due. So din and dein are related, it's the day where there's a reckoning, an accounting. It is you that we worship and to you we appeal for help. So when you have , when you put what would normally be in the position because it's . But when you say", "in Arabic, it doesn't create the... It doesn't eliminate other things. So you could say that somebody he worships Allah and he worship's the sun but you can't say means that only you alone we worship so when you say , it means you alone.", "وَإِيَّاكَ نَسْتَعِينُ And to you we appeal for help. فَإذا استعنت فَاسْتعِن بِاللَّهِ Like the Prophet ﷺ gave his advice to his cousin Ibn Abbas رضي الله عنه When he was very young, he told him if you're going to seek help, seek help from Allah which doesn't mean that you don't seek asbab but you understand that it's only Allah even the asbab are from Allah so you have to understand everything is from Allah", "it's you alone we help so even when we're seeking help from creation we know that it's You that has facilitated for us help from others. هُوَ الَّذِي أَيَّدْكَ بِنَسِي وَبِالْمُؤْمِنِينَ He is the one who gave you victory Allah gave you a victory and he gave you the believers to help you but that's from Allah So, the help that the Prophet got from his companions was from Allah so only seeking help form Allah", "Guide us to the straight path. is uprightness, so this path is the path of uprightness. The way of those you have graced... Show us a straight path! You've blessed them, you've graced them.", "wrath so the Ghadab of Allah is on them. Al-Maghdoob alayhim, the ghadb is on him nor of those who wander astray. So these are the two ways of going astray one is with knowledge so you know what you should be doing and you don't do it and that's why the Muslims aren't such a precarious situations because so many Muslim I don't know any Muslim in the Muslim world where when I live there that doesn't know the hadith", "that the one who bribes and the one takes a bribe, they're both in hell. I don't know if anybody doesn't know that it's a very well known hadith. You could almost say it's . It's not but you can almost say that is because so many people know that hadith and yet there's so much of bribery. So that's when you incur the wrath of Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala is when you know what you should do and you don't do it whereas", "Because the dhalin, those who are astray, those are people that don't know and they're just wandering. In the verse in the Quran where Allah says that the Prophet was like didn't he find you? It doesn't mean that he was a stray it means that he seeking. That's why he was going into the ghar of Hira", "from people that don't have guidance, that might be looking for guidance or are just astray. So these are people like, for instance, traditionally a lot of the scholars put the religious categories in there. I don't think it's a good thing to... Unfortunately some of the translations actually put between parentheses other religious traditions and things. It's not really...", "translation because that goes under commentary and it just makes it look like, it takes away the level. It takes away , which is the general statement. Those are the two ways people go astray. If you want to see it archetypally, then it's in all religions and certainly in the Islamic religion there are people who know the truth and they don't practice it those are if they continue on their way", "continue on their way and don't make tawbah. And then the Dhalin are people, they're ignorant. There's ignorant Muslims that just don't know and so they don't practice what they should learn." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/The Hidden Power of Taqwa -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_q6KOpiybTQU&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742877547.opus", "text": [ "The end of fare is always for taqwa or the people of Taqwa. So, Taqwah itself... This is what Ibn Ashar one of the great Moroccan scholars said in his summation that Taqwah is Imtithal it's to obey the commandments of God", "of God and ijtinaab, it's to avoid the prohibitions. So there is awamr an-nawahee in the Qur'an and in the hadith. There are things that the Prophet was commanded to tell us were prohibited or disliked or discouraged and then there's things that he was commanding to tell as either obligatory or recommended. So the idea of taqwa is essentially", "commanded and avoid what they were prohibited. And, and they do this through a disciplining of the soul. So there's actually a discipline of the Soul that occurs through your life, through practices. And so one of the things about practice is practice is what enables you to incrementally get better at something. So for instance people who learn a new skill initially it's very difficult", "and continue to practice, it gets easier and easier. This is the process of habituation. Everything is habit even devotion. So in fact the great Greek philosopher Aristotle said that virtue was basically the habituation of the soul to a virtuous practice. In other words you actually habituate over time", "through constant practice and discipline of the soul yourself to a virtuous practice until it becomes second nature. And so basically what taqwa is, is it is practicing these things and because all fall short of the glory of God, because people will always fall short in their practices that it becomes very difficult at times", "we have what's called Tawbah, which is in Greek they call it Metanoia, which means to change your mind. Tawba is literally tawa-taba means to turn or repent so it's going back to God and so the people of Taqwa when they fall short of the expectations upon them they repent, they turn if you're driving down the road going the wrong way", "U-turn. So you might see a sign that says something and you realize I'm going the wrong way, you have to do a u-turn well in the road of life you're going to sometimes make the wrong turns and then you're gonna get signs that tell you that you're on the wrong path now unfortunately what a lot", "those are basically roads to hell. There'll be hell in this life because the nature of sin is that it just creates a lot of misery, so when the Quran tells us, It's telling us that in the end victory is for taqwa, victory is piety, it's for conscientiousness, it' s for all of these things and so an example of that there's a great poet Lowell who said", "said, truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on throne. Yet the scaffold sways the future and beyond the dim unknown standeth God among the shadows keeping watch above his own. What he meant by that? Truth forever on a scaffold. The scaffold is an edifice you build to hang people so it's as if truth is always being strung up. So for instance", "If you look at the Qur'an, many of the Prophets are actually not successful. They're completely attacked by their own people but they're successes in conveying the message despite the fact that they're killed, despite the facts that they turned upon. Ibrahim with Nimrod and his people he was not successful in turning them back to God. He was successful in conveing the message", "And this is the meaning of truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on throne. So Pharaoh chases Moses out of Egypt. Moses has to flee for his life but the point is that the scaffold sways the future, that the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice.", "reminded of that we have to remind ourselves constantly, no matter how dark it looks, no mater how dark is gets. We believe that the end is for Taqwa, the end for piety, the ends for people conscientiousness this is extremely important to keep in mind and insha'Allah I'll explore this some more", "our next session. JazakAllah khairan, wassalamu alaikum" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/They want to DESTROY ISLAM - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_IMMIZA6PwTs&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743303530.opus", "text": [ "Don't split the unity of the Muslims. You know, Syria was a country under an oppressive regime undeniably but most, the vast majority of Syrians were living in relative peace and it was safe to go out at night in Damascus. The Libyans were living under a tyrant I'm not going to deny he was a tyran but there was Amman you could go out any time of the day or night and you didn't fear for your life right? These are great blessings remember we read that", "that a little bit of sinfulness in light of a lot of sinfullness is a great good right so even though these are what's the benefit of overthrowing them when you're going to create mass chaos our ulama said that a tyrant is better than fitna that never ends this is", "This is what our ulama said. So don't shed your blood and the blood of the Muslims with you. Think about where this thing is going. So be patient until you either get relief, right? Or the one who's giving you the problems dies", "leave from that? It's from the Hadith in Al-Bukhari. Now, to end he gives a from Malik Radhi La'anu Malik was very very, he lived through revolutions, he never joined them there was a revolution in Medina, Muhammad Nafs al-Zakiya they called him Nafsa Zakiya, that's not his name. He was so pure that they gave him that laqab he was a direct descendant of the Prophet, he rebelled against the ruler", "the rulers and establish a state in Medina for 18 months. Malik never took bayah with him. Now, you're telling me these guys are better than go take bayah With Daesh? He didn't take bayh with Muhammad Nafs al-Zakiya And you're gonna go take Bayah with Abu Bakr al Baghdadi? Malikum kifatahkumun. Malek! Because he knew this guy is not going to last", "going to be part of this. He never took that with him, even though he was a righteous man and what he was doing was from the impulse of khair, to make good. So Imam Malik had a teacher Abdurrahman ibn Hurmuz in Medina and this is a tradition that Qadha Iyad relates fi Tarteep an Madarik. Mufadhaha, you know the benefit of this, Anna Shaykhahu Abdurrahmn ibn hurmuz Ankar ala rajna min ahlal akda", "He was speaking to a woman in front of his house. In Medina, in those days, the Urf would have been inappropriate.", "And he was a wealthy man. He had his retinue and his servants. فَأَمَرَ مُوالِيهُ أَن يضْرِبْ إِبٍ حُرْمَز So, he commanded his servants to go beat up Ibn Hurmus. They beat him up حَتَّى نُقِلَ إِلٰى بَيْتِهِ فَالنَّاس صَارُوا يَظُورُونَ إبْنِ هُرمَس This is one of the big ulama of Medina. He was Malik's teacher. وَالناس آتَوْا هُوَ يشْتَكِي", "I denied this man and look at what he did to me. And all of them called him, they call him with healing and well-being. Imam Malik was silent. Malik didn't say anything. So they're all saying, oh you poor man, it's unjust, ya sheikh, ya imam, it is unjust what they did. Imam Maliq is quiet. Ibn Hurmuz looks at Imam MALIK and he says, Imam Mалиq says to him,", "He asked him, you know why are you silent? He said You didn't have any right to do that He's doing munkar and this is his student Telling him he said", "His servants and you humiliate him? Do you think I made a mistake? You know like most definitely by Allah, you made a Mistake that this is wisdom And it's not to say look at the ulama they want good but they're not they're, not fools", "They're not fools. Anyway, there you have it. That's the position of our sunnah, of our ulama. This is what they have traditionally taught and I know the tradition's in trouble. We have all these people that, you know, it's a mess but we should do our best to learn this tradition and be guided by it and not do foolish things that end up... And trust me,", "Trust me, just like Mustafa Sabri said, there are people wanting our downfall and our destruction. There are demonic forces on this planet that do not want religion to succeed in all of its variations. They wanna get rid of religion, Christianity, Judaism, all of it. They just want it out. And that's why religious people have a moral responsibility to be intelligent because the thing they always use against us is how stupid we are", "And man, do we confirm that stereotype too often. I'll try to just quickly... In the US blacks are being oppressed. I mean not all blacks are be impressed you know there is a history of racism in the United States There are many successful African Americans in the united states but nobody talks about the Native American people", "people. I mean, the Native Americans, it was their land. The African-Americans were brought to America unjustly. The Native Americans—it was their lands. They're on reservations now, right? So a lot of people have been oppressed in America. Chinese Americans went through their period. Irish Americans went", "Catholic Irish Americans, because the Protestants, the Ulster Plantation if you know that history. Andrew Jackson was a Protestant Irishman he's the real first Irish president but Kennedy was an Irish Catholic in 1959-60 they were calling him saying it was... They didn't want an Irish President. That was one of the arguments against him when he was an irish catholic. So the Irish had a hard time in the United States for a long time.", "looked at as subhuman, classified. In some areas they were lower, they were literally the lowest on the totem pole. So I have a...I'm very wary of race determining how we identify these problems. I am much more in support of Jahiliyyah and Ilm that there is a Jahil system in place on this planet", "better than other people. It's not about the color of the skin, the Turks a lot of them are as white as the moon so their whiteness is not going to give them any kind of ontological status because they're Turks. So if you want to get your white people right there's groups called Anglo-Saxon, the Franks, the Saxons, these are...get your white", "moon read Welsh history white is the moon and look what the English did to them 800 years Irish oppression eight hundred years they don't speak Gaelic because they cut out their tongues during historical periods for speaking Gael so there's a lot of oppression everybody has their oppression narratives you know but the provisional I Sam when when Abu Dhar or the law on who the great Abu Dhabi Abu", "the Ghafari from one of the lower tribes amongst the Arabs. They were looked down upon, Bani Ghifar. When Abu Dhar called Bilal al-Habashi, Ya bin Asawdah, which is like saying the N word to the Arabs at that time. You know it was a humiliating thing. The Prophet didn't say, Ya Ansari you're a racist. He said, Abu Dhr, Anta imrun fikil jahliya. You're a man that still has some jahiliya in him? We need to work on that? So don't alienate people by creating this race war between whites and blacks", "whites and blacks. It's very dangerous. This is what Iblis does, these narratives are Iblissic narratives. Now you've got blacks their films... You know there was a film called 12 Years of Slaves? If I was African-American and saw that film I would just hate white people for the rest of my life. When I wanted to find out who made", "Israeli intelligence agency, which I find very weird. I think there's people that want race wars on this planet and they're minions of Shaitan because Shaitaan wants us to fight each other. I was raised by a woman that had... She just didn't have any racism. People that know my mom know my mother. My mother didn't", "that human beings' color makes no distinction. People should be distinguished by their character, which is what King was asking for. Judge us not by the color of our skin but by the content of our character. That's the criteria of Islam. So if you're going to demonize white people or say the white supremacy power structure and use these terms of critical theory, which", "And I appreciate people can say well, that's because you're white or something like that. I've never considered myself white I consider myself a human being first and foremost I Don't consider myself white You know if you want I'll get that spray paint painted another color I could care less you know I know it's not easy to be brown in a lot of places But it's also not easy be a Ebo Visa Vida Fulani in Nigeria so it's always about skin. It's not to be", "to be a Zahraani in Saudi Arabia, vis-a-vis other tribes. It's not easy to be you know, a Bedouin in a lot of Muslim countries today. It is not easy for me to be an Ahartani in Mauritania. You know? It's no easy to the Zanagi in relation to the Zawayeh in Mauritania. They're same Arab tribes but one of them is the Brahman and the other is the Kishtiriyya like the Hindu kind of category so we have these tribulations all over the world", "You know, the Europeans have been the best racists ever. They've been the most racist ever. The Pakistanis have it. Balushis have It. Right? The Patans have it vis-a-vis the Punjabis. Right ? The Mohajers have it visa vie the natives. Right?. People from Kerala have it VISA VE THE... Seriously! I mean if you're in India, the Keralas man those guys have a hard time. If you are from Kerela", "You're from Kerala, and they're the nicest people in India. I've never met nicer people than people from Kera. Bengalis are some of the nicest human beings you'll ever meet. They're gentle people. Man, have they had a hard time? Read the history of East Pakistan and the massacres that happened against the Bengalis. So if you want to start talking about oppression, it's like Gandhi said, if you", "You know, our prophet taught us to try to forgive, to move beyond. He didn't even allow... You know people commemorate like you have Holocaust commemorations and you have all these commemorations like the Nakba in Palestine. You're remembering always these events. The prophet prohibited that. The Yom Bo'ath was a day they would... The Ansar, the Elson, the Khashwaj used to remember the Bo'ah war between the two of them. They used to commemorate it. And they would get out and they would say their poetry. Those events", "events would always lead to fighting and the prophet forbade it because he was trying to unite people you know that this is the point we want to unite hearts and that's not to deny that there's a real problem of color I'm not denying that at all I just think that we should frame these things within our own tradition and not allow others to define our cognitive frames" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/When you feel LOST in life - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_yeAfFeeijcI&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748525207.opus", "text": [ "So we have a lot of work to do and finally in conclusion I want to say to all of you. I've heard a lot Muslims lately say, I'm so depressed. I was recently in Arabia and I have a Muslim friend he was a very active Muslim and I said what are you doing these days? He said no I just...I've given up. That's what he said to me. He said I've given enough. I had enough. You know there is no hope", "I grabbed him and I shook him, literally, physically. And people who know me know that I'm very capable of doing that. I shook Him and I said to Him, what do you mean there's no hope? If You want a bid'ah, hopelessness is a bid'dah. We are a religion of hope. We live on hope. Every time you're depressed or you say there's", "and survived the transatlantic crossing, and came here and lived in slavery, and marched to get their civil rights. You're saying to them that was all a waste of time. If you're depressed, you're dishonoring all those Andalusians who were chased out of what was called paradise at the time. They were chased", "and today you have Andalusian families that hail from Andalucía, just like you have Palestinians here that were chased out of their homes. You're dishonoring all of those Indians that migrated to Pakistan with the hope of a better life. You are dishonoring the Afghanis who lived in over 30 years of war and they still try to hold their heads high. We can't do that! There is no room for hope. I'm in it till the last breath.", "last breath. I'm in it till the last breath because in that last breath and I pray to God that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala gives me on my last breath, ashadu an la ilaha illallah wa ashaduh al muhammad rasulullah because i believe in the promise of god. I believe that his prophet was true. I believed that hell is true and that the fire is true, and that they have judgment is true. And I testify to the truth of the sirat that we will be weighed in", "and there will be those who are given grace, and there'll be the outstrippers. These are all true things that every prophet has taught and I believe in them. And I will hold to them till I die and the struggle continues. This world was never meant to be paradise. God has created a world that is meant to drive you to God. And if your being driven to the devil, you've been duped my friends because all of the hardships that you suffer in your life", "You will find those rewards on the Day of Judgment. I was in Abu Dhabi and a taxi driver said to me, and I'm done. I said, where are you from? He said, Dar'a. And I said to him, I hope that your family is safe. He said the house caved in on them. My father was killed.", "He said to me, I've worked 12 years. Every month I sent everything I could back to my father to build that house and it was destroyed. I feel like my whole life is a waste. I said to him, Ya akhi bil arabiya, ihsasib and Allah. Wallahi kunta fee birrin biwalidek. You were in filial piety to your parents.", "of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, what you're doing is not to build in this world. If you build for this world, what your build will go to naught. We build for the next world, not for this one. And if what we build... If my college in California is destroyed by an earthquake so be it! So be it. But we are builders for the Akhira and this is the place where do it." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Women are aroused by Sound - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_epjiEXOKatY&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742881060.opus", "text": [ "Women tend to be more affected by sound, men are more affected vision. So a woman will actually be aroused by sound whereas the man is aroused with the vision and so what he's saying is if you know that there's alaqa this first degree of love is called ala'qa with the Arabs If that's there then it becomes haram", "and it becomes haram because you can have an effect on them, and it's not good for them. It's not going to be good for you.\" And then he is saying about also raising the voice of a woman who people will derive pleasure again. These things were in very mixed cultures in the West but in traditional Muslim countries", "you know, there was much more separation. And these rules... If you try to apply these rules in the United States or Canada or somewhere where you're from it's just not really going to fly but it is prohibited to take pleasure if you know you are getting pleasure then it's haram and that's very clear", "In terms of voice, a woman is not supposed to speak in a seductive voice. In America that's usually resolved because women don't. They speak like men now so it's not really a problem. But in traditional societies you tend to find women had very soft voices. You'll still find this if you go to certain Arab countries and you hear the women talk. It sounds so different from... If you go for instance Mauritania", "The women, the way they speak is very feminine. There's a lot of femininity in their words. They know in social studies that women who enter into management will tend to lower the tone of their voice because they get more respect with a less high voice so you'll find in many Muslim countries women actually speak with high pitched voices whereas if you notice in the West the tone up the woman's voices are actually lower", "They'll get more respect from the men if they speak in those lower tones. So generally, it's not permitted to speak in a seductive way and you know a lot of these robotic voices that they use are like more feminine voices and things like that that they used on these message machines and things likes that but that's basically what he is talking about. And then also imitating... Men imitating women is prohibited", "and women imitating men. The Prophet actually cursed the mokhanateen, may Allah curse the effeminate man and the masculine woman. Now the scholars, the khuntha in Arabic is a hermaphrodite. The mukhannath is an effeminent person so you have the khunta", "The Suntha has a special hukum. In fact, in Iran the ulama permitted sex operations to change the sex depending on the hormones. Traditionally the Muslims were very enlightened about these things. They didn't have the types of approaches that you saw in the West.", "that generally you have a male and female but then you get people that have mixed male and females hormones. And this is just part of life on earth so it's that category has fiqh rulings for them, and even subhanallah Abd al-Ra'uf Al Munawi who was a great scholar of hadith in his commentary on that hadith he says", "If the person is effeminate by their nature, فَلَا لَوْمَ عَلِي Then they're not blamed for that. In other words if it's part of their nature but he said if it affected then it's where the curse goes But if its part of there nature He says يَتَّكَلُّفُ اِزَالَةَهُ He should try his hardest to get rid of it So the point is", "you can distinguish when it's affected and when it is not. In my own personal experience, I grew up in California so...and in the Bay Area, so you know, you generally can tell when somebody is naturally effeminate or when there's takellov and what they used to call loose-wristed, I don't know what they called them anymore, probably not politically correct anymore but basically people like that", "make judgments about people either. You know, if somebody... Because you can... I've seen heterosexual men that are effeminate even in the Muslim community you will find there are heterosexual man that are a feminine by nature and so those people just leave them alone don't make fun of them don't Make this is a it's just compassion for people sometime they have more estrogen more hormones oxytocin", "oxytocin hormone and things like that so and then you have women that have high testosterone levels so they tend to be more masculine and you have you know the Baba Hassan from in Saudi Arabia what do they say for the tomboy Baba Hasson or Hassan Baba or something somebody", "I asked him, do you have tomboy? He said yeah. Told me what it was. In Syria, what did they say? Do you have Tomboy? Huh? Yeah Baba Hassan. Yes so tomboy is a phenomenon there are girls that tend to from early on they can show these masculine qualities the Prophet is cursing people that do this on purpose", "Right? خنوثة is being effeminate. So there's also women that have that, they'll tend to be more masculine and it could be a natural thing so you just have to be careful these aren't blanket rules about people and you have to careful judging people because a lot of this is hormonal It's not something that people can control Go ahead next one", "As for women's tzagrit, for Jewish expression, it would appear that according to al-Hattab,", "the subtle sound of her bangles to be heard by striking her feet as a way of calling attention to herself. Right, so if you're studying because very often teachers were men and so the women to learn their fardain they study with male teachers basically it's prohibited for the women too be flirtatious and that's pretty much what it's saying don't don't be flirt atious sometimes women and men will develop", "develop you know amorous feelings towards teachers and things that happens. And that's where they have to stop, they shouldn't be studying with somebody if they're going to have problems like that but certainly they shouldn'y be flirtatious with them unless they are mahram not flirtatius but then they can laugh with them or something like that", "is where they move the tongue very rapidly back and forth. They usually cover their tongues, the women, and they do it in festivals and parties and at weddings and things like that. He's saying that Al-Hattab one of the great scholars of the Maliki tradition his family from Libya originally... There are three of them, the grandfather, father and then son. One of them is from Libya", "and the other two went to Mecca. But Al-Hattab is one of the foundational, later Maliki's books are used. So he didn't consider it permissible. That's a Khilaf issue. Some of the ulama permitted it because they said it just doesn't turn men on or something like that. I mean, that's basically what they said. So it's not a problem because that was their concern. And then he said,", "So it's from Jahiliyyah, you know the women used to when the men would walk by they would and make the bangles sound so to attract the man's attention. And so that was prohibited. Tabaruj in Arabic is prohibited. Don't do the tabaruj which is to display your ornaments and tabaraj comes from a word baraja means", "Wa haqadu min sayyatil alsinaa taghazzuran bi mar'atan muayyinah", "from the sins of the tongue is to write love poetry to a specific woman who you're not married to. You can write love poetry to your wife, it's good thing to do she can write that poetry to you but if it's a woman that you haven't married and you're writing her love poetry its haram but they say that it's permissible to write low poetry if it is not a specific one so good luck with that" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Two ways to read the Quran - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_AawofOVj-Hc&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW3SBwkJvQCDtaTen9Q%3D_1742891210.opus", "text": [ "Quran, there's two ways of reading the Quran. One of them is devotional. Simply to read it as an act of ibadah. And the Ajam all over the world have been doing this for centuries. Like if you want to see... If you go to a lot of mosques where people understand the language generally of the Quran they do eight rakats and very often very short and then they leave in Ramadan. If you goto a lot the Ajaem countries", "countries. They do the 20 rakats and do the Jews every night, right? They're ajam. Sometimes you see people crying. It's amazing. That's one way of reading the Quran, just what's called ta'budi, just devotional. You ta'bid bil-Quran. The Quran, afraya tadabbaruna al-Qurana ma'ala qurumin akfaruhah Don't they think deeply about this Quran? Don't", "Then we get to the tools of understanding the Quran. And traditionally, and I'm just speaking traditionally, what many people did was they learned basic Islam and they practiced it and then they read devotional books", "Sira was very popular in the Muslim Ummah. In Mauritania, the women are famous for memorizing long poems of the Prophet's life. They're not scholars. They are just people that love the Prophet and they teach their children these poems. So there is a devotional component that is very powerful. Now, for somebody who is educated like yourself, who has an intellect, you want more because that's not satisfying for everybody. Some people are very content with that level.", "with that level. Not everybody's intellectual and not everyone was meant to be intellectual. Some of the best people I've ever met are very simple peoples. I've met illiterate people that I would take over some of the most educated people I met any day of the week, right? And I have no contempt for people that are uneducated at all. I really try not to, you know, I've been fortunate, I", "Before I became Muslim, I went to some really good schools. Private schools. I was fortunate because there was a trust fund to do that from my grandfather. And then I studied with incredible scholars in the Emirates. I had the chance at a young age to be able to go with a full scholarship to the United Arab Emirates and study with some of the best scholars in Ummah at that time. It's very fortunate. That's pure privilege.", "That's pure privilege. Like, what did I do to deserve that? I wasn't born in Sri Lanka, in an impoverished family where I had to at the age of eight start working with my father to help support the family and then I never learned to read or write, right? That's a whole other world, right, and that's another human being so that's the nature of dunya.", "We have privileged some of you over others as a test. Allah is testing you with your privilege. Are you going to look on contempt and think you're superior? When in fact, if you look at it, they say if you find a turtle on a fence, the one thing you know, he didn't get there by himself, right? And that's the truth for all of us. Wherever we are,", "we did not get here on our own. And so you have to be grateful, you have the seed as a tribulation from Allah. How are you going to use your privilege? How are we gonna use it? It's a privilege to have wealth. It's privilege. Why does Allah always ask us to give our wealth? Because wealth is a test and Allah seeing are you passing the test or not? He only asked 2.5 anything you give above that gravy just getting closer", "closer to Allah, but he wants at least 2.5, don't stint him on that, right? So it's very important that you nurture your intellect and help it to grow. And the best way to do that... I mean, look, we have a lot of tools that we did not have in", "of online learning, but for motivated people it's an option. People have learned Tajweed online, it's pretty amazing right? You can learn Arabic I mean there's incredible resources to do that in terms of reading the Quran I would argue as long as you go to it very humbly and recognize that you cannot legislate from the Quran other than morally", "And there are things in the Quran, وَقُلُوا لِلنَّاسِ حُسْنًا You speak well to speak beautifully to people. We can all read that and benefit from that, right? The Quran says, ادفع بالاتيه أحسن You know, return a wrong with a right. You can all benefit from it. You'll have success if you purify your soul. تزكية How do I purify my soul? Prayer, زكاة, سلاوة القرآن", "Tahajjud, fasting. You know the company of righteous people that remind me show me my faults so all those things are beneficial So I think it's a good thing to read the Quran even in translation. I think its a beneficial thing It's dangerous in that you know there are many times even to this day still where I've read the Koran and I thought I understood something", "thing and then I go to the tafsir and realize that I didn't get it right. And I have a reasonably good level of Arabic, and I've spent a lot of time in Arabic, a lot time in dictionaries. I'm in a dictionary every single day. My wife's here will testify to that when I look up words all the time in arabic. So but I still there's things in the Quran I'm always finding with just even sort of", "certain surahs that I read every day. It's amazing, I'll just see something I never saw before and then go to tafsir. And the great... There's not very many really good tafsirs, to be honest with you. Most of them just repeat what previous Mufassirun said because they're scared. I'm telling you the truth. The ulama were really afraid of the Quran.", "Who am I to say what God means? So they'll just say, Qala Tabari, Qalal Qurtubi. I mean that's literally what they do. So if you have Tabari and Qurtubee, you pretty much have all the tafsirs because it's like the commentators of a hadith. They all go back to the same commentators. Qala Qad'ayyat, Qal Ibn Fatah. They're all quoting the same sources because very few people wanted that.", "very careful about saying, because you're saying this is what God means. That's a big claim and that's why very few people wrote tafsir. There's a million books on tajweed. Everybody wrote a book on tajaweed. There are so many books on tasweed I can't believe you go to the suqan there's a new book on tasweed. And I'm always hoping maybe they found some amazing way", "You open up, it's all the same stuff. There are 17 points of articulation. Here is all the mudud. It's all in the same. Never anything new. So if you have a new way of teaching tajweed by all means write a book on tajweed but if it's going to be the same thing don't save yourself. But there are exceptions. Fakhruddin al-Razi is an exception.", "He definitely had some new things that nobody said before about the Quran. Also, some of the Bursawi, you know, some great Sufi commentators had some really interesting insights. Ibn Juzay Al-Kalbi talked about a Sulamese book that he called al-Haqa'iq, The Realities.", "And Ibn Juzay said, some people called it al-bawatil, the vanities, instead of the realities. And he said, but if we're fair, we'll say, fi haqa'iqu fihi bawatil. It has some realities and it has some vanities in it. So... But tafsir is a very rich study. Alhamdulillah. So, subhanAllah wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh, I shahadu an la ilaha illallah. Did that help a little bit? Yeah? Ma sohmano?" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/How Muslims Sold Palestine __ Shaykh Hamza Yusuf__1743305323.opus", "text": [ "The Ottomans defended for centuries, defended the Muslim lands. But then the Muslims turned on the Ottomens. They turned on them. There's reasons for it and I'm not going to deny that the Ottoms were very at that time they had lost their way as well but they started allying with the colonialists who were promising them things and they went against their brother Muslims. The last attempt of defending Palestine will bring tears to your eyes if you read what the Ottoman tried to do to defend Palestine. And we know that Abd al-Hamid would not sell Palestine to pay off all the debts of the Ottomas. He said its not mine to sell. They were betrayed and people betrayed them and now we suffer the consequences", "consequences of those people's mistakes." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Modern embryology and Quran - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf__1748540868.opus", "text": [ "Alaqatan. So that's the alaq comes, ala'ka It just clings to it embeds itself. Thumma khalaqna al-alaqata mudgha'tan And then it looks like a mudga is a chewed lump of flesh and if you look at it at this stage and this all occurs in the first 40 days That hadith was clearly misunderstood Anybody who knows modern embryology knows and there was a khilaf about the hadith because there were there was an opinion", "there was an opinion that all happened in the first 40 days even though it says, but it's not 120 days because it's way beyond that. Even by 42 days you already have the fetus is developed. The beginning of the fetuses, the embryo and then so the , then the mudra becomes a And then look at the switch", "The only time in this process, Allah changes from khalaqna to kasona." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Allah can revive your Heart - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf ___1748540265.opus", "text": [ "In medicine when somebody's heart stops or if they go into like a type of ventricle fibrillation, it is very dangerous. They can do this cardioversion where they basically introduce electricity which is energy into the heart to get it back to its normal rhythm. Well like that there is spiritual cardioversion. Allah can literally", "literally take a dead spiritual heart, and I'm saying literally, and bring it back to life." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Be mindful of what you say by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf r__1743063117.opus", "text": [ "The Prophet said a man will speak a word and not give any consideration to it, and it will drag him in the hellfire. That word. He just won't give any... he'll just say it. It's like it's no big deal. No you should be very very wary about what you say. Allah" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/La ilaha illallah in Music -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf ___1742891028.opus", "text": [ "La la la la, that's all Laylahi lallah. It's just they're not getting it right And you can hear the great Irish singer Van Morrison, you know la la La la La ilaha illallah and it's just it's right there Amazing" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Madina is better than Mecca - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf ___1742887300.opus", "text": [ "The Haram of Medina is actually better than the Haram Mecca. That's the opinion of Imam Marek . Although, the entire Ummah is in agreement all of the Ulama of the Ahl as-Sunnah are in agreement that the tomb of the Prophet is the holiest place it's more holy than the Kaaba. That by consensus that Ijma'a is in Qad Ayyad in his Shifa he relates that as Ij Ma'a from Asfarini and other ulama so that's important", "important to know that the medina and also the roda is in the paradise according to the sound hadith so there's a place in medina that we know is actually in paradise and that's not anything we know about mecca" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Muslim who celebrates X_mas - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf ___1742892430.opus", "text": [ "And so if you look at Christianity, they celebrate Christmas here on December 25th. That was the Roman sun god's birthday, Mithra. They have Christmas trees, Noel tide. What does snow have to do with Palestine? What does Santa Claus have to deal with Palestine, right?" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/_ The Body is Afraid of the Tongue _ Hamza Yusuf ___1743308325.opus", "text": [ "Every morning the whole body says to the tongue, Fear God with us. If you're straight we're straight. And if you go astray we go astrays so the body is afraid of the tongue as Ralph Nader said his mother told him to eat the vegetables and he said I don't like that when he was a boy He said I know like vegetable she said who is I?", "He said, me? He said who's me? I said what do you mean? She said You said you don't like vegetables. I know your liver likes vegetables, your kidneys like vegetables, Your lungs like vegetables Why are you letting your tongue talk on behalf of the whole body? So the tongue is a problem right" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/The Ottomans and Palestine -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf ___1742886279.opus", "text": [ "The Ottomans defended for centuries, defended the Muslim lands. But then the Muslims turned on the Ottomians. They turned on them. There's reasons for it and I'm not going to deny that the Ottoms were very... at that time they had lost their way as well but they started allying with the colonialists who were promising them things and they went against their brother Muslims. The last attempt at defending Palestine will bring tears to your eyes if you read what the Ottoman tried to do", "tried to do to defend Palestine. And we know that Abd al-Hamid would not sell Palestine to pay off all the debts of the Ottomans, because he said it's not mine to sell. But they were betrayed and people betrayed them and now we suffer the consequences of those peoples' mistakes. Because Allah says اتقوا فطرةً لا تصيبنَّ الذين ظَرُوا ممنكم خاصةً", "the guilty amongst you. They affect the innocent too, so people inherit the sins of people who went before them. In the Quran Allah says لا تزر وازرته من زرا أخرى No soul bears the sins another. Some of the ulema say in dunya they do. There's things your father does that you end up being disgraced by and people will treat you badly because of the sins your father. There are people born out of wedlock" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/A Christian on Prophet ﷺ -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _ha__1742881571.opus", "text": [ "Anna Moreland, who wrote a book called Muhammad Reconsidered. She's a Christian theologian who had to teach a class on Islam and she had her own crises. Just studying, she said this life sounds like the life of a prophet. And so she wrote a", "people that are just completely hoodwinked. They really don't know and those are the people that we should be communicating to, letting them know who" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/A Christian on Prophet ﷺ -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _ha__1743301311.opus", "text": [ "Anna Moreland, who wrote a book called Muhammad Reconsidered. She's a Christian theologian who had to teach a class on Islam and she had her own crises. Just studying, she said this life sounds like the life of a prophet. And so she wrote a", "Then there's people that are just completely hoodwinked. They really don't know, and those are the people that we should be communicating to, letting them know who we are," ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Claiming to Love Allah ﷻ -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _ha__1743058876.opus", "text": [ "The reason God puts the Romeo and Juliet in the world is as a proof against anyone that claims to love God. That the intensity of erotic love, the intensity between two human beings can be so great that people actually go mad and they'll do anything for the beloved. And those people are there in the World as a Proof", "According to that poet against people who claim to love God you say you love Allah putting quantum to have been a lot fit to be only Say if you love a lot if you have a claim for something at bayonet or Alan with day You know the the proof is on the one making the claim so if you claim to Love Allah The proof is in following the prophet salat and that's the proof. So" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Claiming to Love Allah ﷻ -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _ha__1748526515.opus", "text": [ "If you claim to love Allah, the proof is in following the Prophet ﷺ. That's the proof of your love and the Sahaba had complete tamahih they were completely annihilated in the love of the Prophet to such a degree that Bilal after many years being in Syria came back to visit Medina and some of the Madanis convinced him to give the adhan it was very difficult for him but he decided", "decided to and when he gave the Adhan people heard the Adan for the first time from Bilal since the time of the Prophet and they came out their homes just weeping, they were just crying that's how present the Prophet was in their lives" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Prophet ﷺ about Genetics -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _ha__1742890499.opus", "text": [ "The Prophet said in a hadith in Imam Ahmad's Musnad, he said that all of a person's ancestors participate in his coming into being from Adam all the way down to your parents. So this is really extraordinary knowledge that the Prophet was given about all these different things and so that's the first reason he gives and we would call that today genetics.", "on their genetic background and we don't choose that. We can't choose it, there's people who have really good genes, we say oh he has got good genes and then there are people that really suffer a lot because of weak genes so Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala does whatever Allah pleases and we should be grateful with what we were given but that is in consideration you", "compassion for people, you know it gives you more reason especially if you're healthy. Although there are reasons on the Yom Kiyamah the healthy people actually envy all the sick people." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Prophet ﷺ had Happy Eyes -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _ha__1742886231.opus", "text": [ "He had beautiful eyes. He had very, very white... his whites what they call ophthalmologists in America called happy eyes when the yeah very white he had very very white but the whites of his eyes were very white and then he had striking dark eyes that were penetrating. He has a beautiful aquiline nose which is an aristocratic nose in many cultures. An Aquiline Nose is seen as a beautiful nose one of the reasons it's called Aquilines because", "line is because it's in Arabic, but in English they call it aqualine because it is like the eagle. An eagle has a very beautiful I once saw an eagle perched on a fence outside my house and I just watched it for a little while and I realized the eagle completely is aware that it is an eagle. If you observe an eagle even for a short amount of time" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Walking of the Prophet ﷺ -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _ha__1742998185.opus", "text": [ "He would never let anybody walk behind him. Subhanallah! And he used to say, Let the angels walk behind me. He wouldn't let them walk behind Him. One man there was a servant who he asked him to get up on his camel so he could ride with him and he was too you know he just couldn't do it. So the Prophet said, You go ahead. Go ahead to where you're going. Don't go behind me.\"", "of him. He would never walk faster if an old person was walking he would never go ahead of them. He" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Cultivate Taqwa in Ramadan -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_V4vQiEh5QXg&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742882391.opus", "text": [ "Ramadan is really a school of Taqwa. In fact, the Quran when it says that Allah reminds us that fasting was prescribed for previous peoples in other words it was commanded for previous people So we have prescribed for you fasting just as it was prescribed to the people before you", "or that you might acquire taqwa. And so again, the prayer is really a practice of taqwah going back to the prayer. Fasting is a practice for taqwha. Zakat comes out of taquah and certainly Hajj is a great personification of Taqwha because you enter into the ihram and then your very limited in what you can actually do while you're in the ihrams", "So taqwa is really about disciplining the soul, about aligning oneself. It's a vertical alignment with your Lord. Most people are living on this horizontal plane and forgetting that there is actually another plane. There's a plane that penetrates this plane and that is the vertical plane of reality. And so trying to get to the point where we have the sun of reality directly over our head,", "That's at the essence of what Taqwa is. One of things that the Quran says, استعين بالله واصبروا That take استعانة, take help with God through God Get your help through God and patience إِنَّ الْأَرْضَ لِلّهِ يُورِثُهَا مَنْ يَشَاءُ مَمْ عِبَادِهِ وَالْآقِبْتُ لِّلْمُتَّقِينَ So the Quran is telling us that the earth is God's He gives it to whomever he pleases", "اللهم مارك الملتوة المركب من تشاه O possessor of all dominion, you give dominion to whom you please. Allah can give dominon to whomever He pleases. So Pharaoh can rule Egypt and Moses can be the one who's oppressed in Egypt but that dominion is from Allah . This is a reminder of the Qur'an not to be deluded by the outward", "not to fall into this false perception of reality where you think that the people in power are independent from God. No, they're only there because Allah has enabled them to be there and when He removes their power, it can go in one night or heartbeat all of their power is gone. It can go with a stroke.", "to a muttering idiot. This is the reality of life on earth and so the people of taqwa are the people who they don't seek their help in the outward illusion of the world, they seek their health from the source of the World, from what's behind the world which is Allah . And for this reason their hearts can never be conquered, their bodies can be conquered they can be enslaved, they can being the worst conditions but their hearts are for God.", "And so we're reminded that the earth is God's, but then that He gives it to whom he pleases. يُورِثُهَا مَنْ يَشَاء من عباده Again, من عِبادة . But they are still His servants. It doesn't matter who they are. They are still in the servitude of Allah . But والعقبة للمتقين Despite all of that, the aqiba, the end affair for the people of taqwa", "Taqwa. Now there's another verse, that one is from Surah Al-A'raf There's another Verse Again those who we have established in the earth What do they do once they get into power? And this is the difference between the people of Pharaoh and the people Moses", "into power, they establish prayer. They take care of the poor people. See Pharaoh does the opposite. Pharaoh makes people worship him and then he exploits the poor People. The people of Taqwa are the people who when they're established in the earth, they established the prayer, they give taqwa and they do Amr bin Ma'ruf and Nahi an-Munkar. In other words", "command others to virtue because they're practicing it. So that, they are not hypocrites commanding people to do virtuous things without them practicing it, no! They command others the virtue and they practice that virtue and then prohibit the munkar, they prohibit things that are foul, vulgarity. One of the hallmarks of our current civilization is its vulgarities. The Prophet despised vulgarly, he despise vulgar language", "the ogre language. He said that the believer is not fahash, he said one of the signs of the latter days is yadharat al-fuhsh wa tafahushh, that you will see obscenities manifest and he said you will people being obscene b'takeluf in other words very often when people get upset they might use an obscenity out of frustration here they'll do it for effect", "means that they're doing it on purpose. They are specifically, purposefully using obscenities and so that's a very bad sign. One of the interesting words in the Greek language is the word for vulgarity, aperekalia, means inexperienced in things beautiful. So the Greeks understood what vulgaritiy was. It", "they had no understanding of what beauty is, because beautiful language is never obscene or vulgar. And words do have a reality. People say, oh, what's the big deal about that word? No, there is a big deal it has an impact, it has a foulness, what it indicates is foul. And so the people of virtue are people that they're behaving beautifully and they're commanding others to behave beautifully", "avoiding foul things, things that should not be seen or heard. Those are the people of Allah . And then Allah reminds us , Be patient! The end affairs for the people Taqwa. These reminders are constant in the Qur'an and we have to understand", "Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on throne. This is the nature of dunya. It's very difficult for people to understand that because this place is a place of tribulation. If truth was on the throne in the dunya where is the tribulation? The tribulation is in these difficulties and this is why these religious teachings", "powerful teachings on this planet and that's why they're so dangerous. These are extremely dangerous doctrines because the people who understand them will never be fooled by the illusory power of Pharaoh and his minions. He has power in this world, but he does not have power in the next world. His power is completely obliterated in the", "that the tyrants would be raised up like ants on the Day of Judgment. They are going to be stepped on by the vast majority of humanity because they're nothing, they're NOTHING! And this is the difference between the people of Taqwa and the people who are deluded by the power of Pharaoh. It's an empty power. Doesn't exist. Only God exists in reality", "Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala know. They know that Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la in the end will rectify every wrong, will straighten every crookedness, will elevate every obeis and He will abase every elevated in this dunya. That's the nature and this is what we believe in, it's what we accept and this", "reality as reality. The Prophet said in a beautiful dua, O Allah show me truth as it is in truth and give me the ability to follow it and show me falsehood as it" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Effect of Sins on the Face -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_7XV8i5gCSz4&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743063553.opus", "text": [ "By the age of 25 or 30, there is a darkness that has descended upon their faces. Ahlul Maasiyah See young people whether they're Muslim or non-Muslim or whatever Young people have a light and that light is simply the fact that they have not accrued a lot of wrong actions That's why if you see dark young people, you know something seriously wrong But there is alight in youth that is simply The Vigor Of Youth", "and it's also the fact that young people have not accrued a lot of wrongs. If you look at children, it's stunning! Why are people so attracted to the faces of little children? Because they see innocence. Why is that innocence there? Because there's no wrong actions. So you're attracted to purity by nature. And that attraction in really sick people is what causes these problems in this culture but it's a problem in the Muslim world as well", "because that attraction becomes sick. Because there's platonic attraction, there are people who are attracted to virtuous people. That is their nature. There are people that are attracted those people but Shaytan, nafs, hawaad, dunya they like their portion in attraction and so they will attempt to take something that is pure and defile it. That's the nature of the dunya is defilement. It's what the people of Ihsan call kudurat", "Because we are made of mud, and it's our nature. But we're also made of spirit. So whichever one is dominating is the one that's going to show itself. And this is why the light of the aged... It's not youth. And the darkness of the aged is disobedience. Absolutely sound principle. So if you look out there... I mean, I wanted to do just an experiment where you took all of the pictures of our awliya, our people, righteous people,", "righteous people, and then just put pictures of all the old people in the dunya. And just show the faces. Just show the face and let people see for themselves which group they want to be among when they get old. And this is not about knowledge even because you can see faces of purity in villages amongst the simplest people. One of things about us that should prevent us from any type of arrogance or spiritual superiority", "even practicing the Islam of the most common people in the villages of the Muslim lands. I mean if you go to Mauritania, I can show you people that nobody in Mauritiania thinks anything of and they do a Juz' of Quran every morning and every night. They do the Ma'thorat of the Prophet every morning", "little sadaqah they have to give, which is a lot more than what most of us do because for him a quarter is like $100 to us or more. And this is an Ammi, just a simple Muslim, nothing special there. So that's the type age we're living in when people that do a little start thinking that they really are something. Part of having taqwa is that you don't fall into those traps", "is deceptive, it's constantly trying to deceive you. I mean this is the nature of the self. The self is delusional" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Prophet ﷺ Prohibited this - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_6W4xFgXngJg&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743058680.opus", "text": [ "Fire, punishing with fire. In there he quotes a hadith where one of the Sahaba apparently burnt some people. There's a khilaf about it. Were the bodies already dead and then he had them burnt? Ibn Abbas rejects it. So Al-Bukhari put that in the chapter to know because he has in the same chapter لا يُعذب بالنار إلا رب النار Nobody should burn with fire except the Lord of Fire. So he's letting you know, I know the hadith that somebody is claimed to have done this", "But here's what I see as overriding that. Now, in Maliki fiqh, in the Mukhtasar of Khalil it says, That he is killed by what he kills with even if its fire. Malikis never applied that. They didn't apply that. So here's an example and then second, the qisas aren't even applied during war.", "sauce during war. It's crazy. War is, crimes happen in war. There's collateral damage in the hadith. Khalid ibn Walid, they went into the village and the Prophet saw dead women and children. And he rejected it. But that happens in war unfortunately. It is a terrible tragedy of war and that's why war should be avoided if possible. The Prophet did everything to avoid", "collateral damage, what they now call euphemistically collateral damage which is basically killing civilians. The Prophet prohibited it but it's going to happen in war. It's the nature of war. When the Prophet found out about one of the Sahaba killing prisoners he turned immediately to the Qibla and he said I am innocent of what so-and-so did. He immediately", "he immediately had his Sahaba take blood money and distribute it amongst those people. If you take, you know one of the most fascinating things about these people, you what they quote more than books of fiqh? They quote seerah. They use seeroh. Seerah is the least authoritative of all the texts of our tradition. The seeruh is the", "The seerah is for ibr and wa'w. And tahbib al-rasul sallallahu alayhi wasallam. Ibn Ishaq, you should not read Ibn Hisaq unless you're a scholar. Izn IshaQ collected everything. It's ghatwas samin. There's things in Ibn Ashaq that are clearly impossible. There is torture, there's all overriding but he just amassed everything that was out there", "going to let the ulama sort it out. He didn't write that book for common people. Ibn Hisham comes later and does a tahdib, and then later there's more like Payanbar you know in Pakistan they study as first seerah I read Payanbarr you know it's like a seerat for common People The Shadowless Prophet sallallaahu alaihi wa sallam and some of it is hagiographical its stories I mean Muslims have", "Jilani that the ulama, when he was a baby they went to see if Ramadan started by checking whether he was having suckling from his mother or not. I mean these are clearly made up stories you know but you'll find these things in our tradition. They're made-up stories and this is from the Qusas, storytellers which Malik couldn't stand. He didn't let them talk. We have groups that go and tell stories at masjids make people cry", "make people cry. And there's benefit in stories, the Quran, we're giving you the best story so there is a place for stories but khuza balaat and made up stories it's better to avoid all these things because this is what diminishes the power of this and a lot of them said that these are common people no you elevate the common people don't keep them in their vulgarity and commonality", "Our religion's a religion of erudition, of education. I mean look at you know this country has fallen on hard times right? You can see the jackass culture that's emerged you know. I'm in these are like television programs where people do stupid things and to get famous. Sometimes they die. They just do things... Somebody was doing a selfie with a canyon behind him and just fell over and died", "or somebody's doing hang gliding, doing a selfie and died. These are people that don't understand what life is. They don't know what it is. And the ancient Chinese said that you have a duty to keep your body healthy because things don't start making sense until you get into your 50s and 60s. So you have to stick around just to understand like what's going on really.", "So that's very important. But unfortunately, you know, we've fallen on hard times. But overall what's striking about Europe and Canada and these places is average people are articulate. You see them. They can talk. In our community, you now, unfortunately the level of education is so low in so many places. It's a tragedy. I mean it's a religion where it's to learn how to read", "You know, the Prophet ﷺ encouraged reading. He freed prisoners if they would teach 10 Muslims how to read. And we created the most literate civilization in human history. Iqra bismi rabbika alladhi khalaq. I mean, the first command in the Quran is read.", "Read and rise. I wanted to start a movement in our community called Read and Rise because I saw a map of the people that read the most books in the world, and the countries that were doing the best had the highest number of books read per year per capita. So there's a direct correlation to reading and human flourishing. Direct correlation. And we're not Rousseauian primitivists.", "You know this romanticism that people have about aboriginals and primitive peoples. There's a kind of romanticism, many primitive cultures were brutal. The Peruvian they just found 150 children that were sacrificed by one of the Peruvians Indian culture right? A few hundred years ago.", "sacrifice was common in many parts of the world. And then there was a lot of fighting, this idea they were all living in nature and everything was wonderful. They were fighting constantly. The Irish tribes were constantly fighting. The Germanic tribes were consistently fighting. They would they were barbarians. This idea though is all wonderful living in Nature, this Rousseauian fallacy. Now there's something very noble undeniably about many Aboriginal peoples but if you want to see an amazing", "to see an amazing sign of what it was like in the pre-modern world, which is more Hobbesian than Rousseauian. In the pre modern world there's a image of an Amazonian Indian who meets this white man and they're filming it. It's the first time this tribe ever saw anybody outside of the jungle. And they come out with their bows right on them. Right?", "through, when they would meet Indian tribes, the reason they brought the girl, Sacajaweba, right? The reason they bought her was because Native Americans tended not to attack parties that had women and children. Generally, not always but generally that was a principle. So if there were women and childen, they'd just leave you out of deference. They actually had incredible...they thought the whites were horribly cruel to children", "they didn't have the kind of punitive punishment, which is part Sharia as well. Like children cannot be hit and they should never be hit until they're at least seven. And then even then you would never hit them hard. It's just like a slap or something, but never hard, never on the face, never bruise them. Physical violence against children is criminal activity. But, and also Benjamin Franklin wrote an essay about the Native Americans. He said one of the things", "about the whites that went native, right? They didn't want to come back. And then Native American peoples had many, many virtuous qualities undeniably but they also had a lot of war between tribes. The Pawnee and Lakota were fighting before. The Pequod's were wiped out because their natural enemies allied with the English immigrants to wipe them", "and the English to fight their natural enemies before they came. This is all history, so romanticizing this kind of primitive past is very dangerous for our community. We're people that believe in learning erudition. We believe in scholarship. We honor scholars. It doesn't mean we don't dishonor,", "They never belittled them. They never held them in contempt because they were aboriginal. Our Prophet ﷺ was raised by Aboriginals, and the Qur'an clearly states وَجْعَلْنَاكُمْ شُعُوبًا وَقَبَائِرًا We made you peoples, and we made you tribes. So these are the two ways human beings exist in the world." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/They say Hanafi drinks Wine - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_sQYGFLd5Dfk&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742892638.opus", "text": [ "They ask me about my school of thought, I don't reveal it. Concealing it is much safer for me. If I say I'm Hanafi they say oh he permits wine and everybody knows wine is haram because the Hanafis, the Tila is a type of grape drink that they boil until two thirds of it go they drink it and so the Hanafi's permit nabeeb", "type of fermented, it wasn't wine yet but it still had a fermented and so there was about. Some said it actually had the hukum of wine. So they'll say . If I say I'm Maliki, they say oh he permits the eating of dogs and they're the dogs right? And if I say", "And if I say, they say oh he permits marrying daughters and everybody knows the daughter's haram. And this comes from a . If a man fornicated and the woman had a child that was a girl and then he married the girl later, that legally the contract would be valid. It's a horrible thing but it's one of those legalisms", "And so they said, oh that's he permits marrying the daughter and everybody knows the daughters haram. And then he said . And if I say I'm , they say he's gruff, anthropomorphist, heavy to be around, and somebody that associates with Allah.", "And if I say, I'm like Salafi, you know, like a person who just follows the daliya. They say, you're a goat that doesn't understand anything. And then he says, I am amazed at this time and its people.", "Because nobody is safe from tongues of people. وَأَخَّرَنِي دَهْرِي وَقَدَّمَ مَعْشَرًا عَلَىٰ أَنُّهُمْ لَا يَعلمونَ وَآْلَمُوا And this time put forward people, it held me back. وقدَّم معشرًا So it held my back with all my genius and put these people forward. Why? Because they don't know and I know.", "And since I've seen ignoramuses prospering, I realized I'm the meme. The harf meme and this and the age that I'm living in is Aflah is the one who's the lower part of the lip is defective so it's hard for them to pronounce", "it's hard for them to pronounce the labials, like meme is a labial. And the is the one whose upper lip is defective so he's saying I'm a mean and the time I live in they can't pronounce me . But that shows you this is like when he died in the sixth century. So it's all there. Even said", "Al-Mutanabbi said, is the extent of your knowledge that we have to trim our mustaches? Oh ummah! That other ummam are laughing at our ignorance. And that's Mutanabbi, fourth century. So these are perennial problems in our community. So then he says...", "Ibn Mas'ud said, people will remain in a good state as long as they take knowledge from their elders. When they start taking it from the lower people, the Ashraar, they'll go astray. Omar said, I know when people will be sound and when they'll be corrupted.", "He said, if this knowledge of the religion comes from the saghir, you know, the immature, then the mature one will find it difficult to accept it from him. Right? But if it comes from", "the younger one will follow him and they'll both be guided. Abu Amr relates from Atar Khorasani that when he prays,", "When he used to pray, he would speak. But one day he was absent and so one of the mu'addins spoke in his place and Raja Ibn Al-Huwa heard him and he heard his voice and he said, who's that speaking? And the man said, it's me. He said, shut up. He says, we don't want to hear something unless it's from the people of this knowledge. You know like you don't really have any right to speak in place of the Imam. That's not your maqam.", "Qais made Tawbah from wine in Jahiliyyah and he got all his sons together before he died. And he said to them, listen to me and remember what I'm saying because nobody is more sincere in his advice to you than me. If I die make your Saddam, your leaders from amongst your elders and don't give any authority", "Because people will deem your elders incompetent if you do, and then you'll lose your dignity amongst the people. And then I don't have that source but he says to look at what Siraj al-Murideen is a very important book that Qadi Abu Bakr wrote that still hadn't been published. It's quoted a lot but...", "And look what Imam al-Mawardi said, when they start debating you'll see who they are. And if they're asked about simple questions, they'd have no understanding. In the Ihya he says, What benefit is it to debate somebody that hasn't reached a level of ijtihad? Now listen to this.", "And this is the reality of all the people of our time. Nobody is a mujtahid mutlaq So, all these people debating they really don't know what they're talking about and then he said So if you find something in the person that he's imitating", "he's imitating of the ulama that differs from another dalil, he has to say he must have a dalil I don't know about. If he's not at the level of mastering all the dalils, you have to see the wisdom in this. It's not saying that you're not following the dalil. It says I don' t have the knowledge to question Malik or Abu Hanifa or Shafi'i.", "But if you don't, then don't be fooled by these people that claim they do. هم رجال ونحن رجاء We're men and they're men. It's not like that. ثُلْمَ قَان مِنْ وَظَائِفٍ مُتَعَلَمِ الْاحتِرَازِ مِمَّنِ الاسْغَاعِي الْاخْتِرافِ النَّاسِ One of the things that students have to be aware of is listening to the differences of opinion. فَإِنَّ إِسْغٰأَهُ لِذَٰرِكَ يُدْهِشُ عَقْلُهُ وَيُحَيِّرُ ذِهْنَهَوْا وَیُفَتِّروا رَأْيَهِوْ", "ويؤسه من الإدراك والاطلاع بل ينبغي أن يتقن أولا الطريقة الواحدة المرضية عند أستاذه فإن كان أستاده من عادته نقلا مذاهم فليحضر منه فان إضاءاله أكبر من إرشاده ولا يصلح الأعمى لقوذ العميان وإرشاديهم ومن هذه حاله وهو يؤد في عمل حيرة وتيه الجهل", "Beware of listening to differences of opinion because these will perplex your intellects, confuse your minds. They will enfeeble your opinions and cause you to despair about real truly understanding. Rather, you should first master one way that's pleasing with the ulama. Master one way", "with your teacher. And if your teacher, if it's his habit to talk about the other opinions beware of him because his problems are greater than his good like he'll lead you astray in that you'll get confused and it's not permitted and it makes no sense that a blind man lead the blind. And this is his state then you have to see that he is amongst those", "amongst those who have blinded perplexity and are lost in ignorance?", "one of the truly great scholars, when he was a student. He said I was in the presence of my teacher of usul and Mazari was a great usuli scholar so his teacher was. And he says a sound source came to tell us that Ramadan had begun and so I said according to one opinion on the riwayah of Malik and some of his companions we don't have to make it up but you're supposed", "So he quoted this differing opinion. He said, my teacher took me by the ear. Right? And that's something they call tahkeem al-udham. Like the sheikh will twist your ear. It's interesting because in Chinese medicine it's supposed to stimulate the brain. Right so he twisted the ear and he said if you're gonna study knowledge with someone don't read it because you know it's just little heretics come out of this type of attitude. You won't be a big heretic", "And a heretic, zindiq is the Greek word haraseya means to choose for yourself. That's the essence of heresy is that you don't follow the tradition. You think you're big enough to choose", "Listen to this. This is really, really useful if you get this. If this is all you get, you got a lot. For the muqtasid when you read knowledge so this is somebody who's a moderate in his religion. When you read", "It's not necessary that he become a master of dialectic and debate. And they said, لَا يَلْزَمُ الْمَرْءَ مَعْرِفَةِ الجوهري وَالْعَرَقِ It's Not Necessary For A Man To Have Knowledge Of The Essence And The Accident These Are Theological Terms That Are Used In Kalam. وَإِذَا مَاتَ الصَّحَابَ رضوا عَنَ اللّٰهِ عِلَيْهِمْ وَلاَ عَرِافُوهُمَا وَلَا", "لأن الصحابة ماتوا ولم يكنن يعرفون الجوهر والأساس", "هذا أصدقاء مفهومين لا يجب أن نعرف الأساس والأمر وأننا لقد قتل الصحابة لم يعرفوها لا يوجد حاجة للكتابة هل تسمى الاسم من أصل المخطئ؟ هذه هي التحدثات في الثيولوجيا لا يحتاجون إلى معرفة ما هو تفسير الحديث", "hand and istiwa and kalam or how God comes down, or the vision of God and its nature, or what's the kursi, what's throne. Or the laughing when it mentions bahak in relation to God. Or that God touched the back of Adam. Or Qulhu Allahu ahad is a third of the Quran. A man will not be asked on the day of judgment about the qabaa and the qadr.", "It's not necessary for him to know what the ruling of children who die in kufr before they reach maturity. Nor does he know so-and-so is better than so- and-so even if it's a Sahabi? Or are there angels with the disbelievers or what's the ruling Yajuj and Majuj, or what is the nature of the Ru'ah? Is it an accident or is it a body? Or how is the Ruuh seized? Or what's this debate between Adam and Musa?", "and Musa? Or what's the vision of the Prophet ﷺ when he saw Jesus and the Dajjal? Nor does he have to know the meaning of it diminishes every day in reward a carrot. Carrot being like a carrot of gold, 24 parts. So the qirat is 124th. Nor the meaning that the soul of the believer", "or how far the voice of the Mu'adhin goes, all these knots that Shaitan ties on the back of a man's neck. Or what is the nature of the eating of the Shayateen and how they drink? Or what it means if the Qur'an came down on seven letters? Or when a person fornicates at the time they're fornicating they are not a believer? Or the nature balance of scales of action on the day of judgment? Or difference between faqeer and meskeen", "between the fuqaha, they're the first two mentioned in the ayah in Tawbah about zakat. And so what's the difference of faqeer and meskeen? Some say the faqear has a year's provision and the meskeeen doesn't have a day's provision. Some say it's the opposite. He's saying you don't have to know the differences to get into paradise or the meaning of la darara wa la darar this qaida no harm and no reciprocating harm", "Or, ولا تحسس ولا تجسس. Don't spy and don't seek out information. Or what's the meaning of ذاريات in the Qur'an? Or مرسلات or ميسير. There is a خداف about the meaning Of ميثير. Or أب. In Surah Abasa when it talks About أب أبا one of the seven foods. Umar was asked about أب he said What heaven will protect me And what earth can I reside upon If I speak about the Qurraan Things I don't know. So أب is one of those Mysterious words in the Quran.", "words in the Quran. So you don't have to know that. وَلَمَ تَسْعَى Or when the hour happens, none of these things. You don't even have to learn grammar except what's enough for you to speak. Right? And anything after that is just extra like knowing why something كَرَافِعَ الْمُبْتَدَةَ What makes the مُبتَدة مرفوع and what makes the ظَرْف منصوب", "What a relief. Seriously, what a relief? Ibn Ata'illah said God's not going to ask you about the qadr and the qadaan, yawm al-qiyamah but he's gonna ask you his awamar and his nawahi and about his commands and prohibitions. He said so seek him where he seeks you. Don't seek him in knowing the mysteries of the qa'dar. Seek him where is seeks you", "وقد يكون للعالم في هذا المأخذ مقصد يصير ذلك كله له حسنة بنسبة كقول المأزري لما فرغ من الحكم على من نسي صراحة وثانيتها ونحو ذلك", "They've studied them. There's people here that have studied these things and the debates about these things, but they're not necessary for people to know it's a fard kifaya on some people to study these things. And then anything other than that, they're extra. So he says, for instance when Imam al-Ma'ziri talked about the hukam of the one who forgets his prayer and then the next one, and he said I'm just mentioning these", "I'm just mentioning this to stretch your minds a little bit so that when you come to other things that are really important, that you'll be able to grapple with them. So he's saying sometimes you study things as a kind of mental exercise.", "And in the Ihya he divided that knowledge, the beneficial knowledge and those knowledges that are not from the Sharia like medicine and mathematics. And he said both of them are . In other words they're part of the", "They support the religion. And so some people have to learn it and if a city or country doesn't have it, then they'll be constrained, they'll hard pressed in that city. And if some do it, than others have no obligation. Then he said, Don't be amazed that these are considered collective obligations.", "The foundational crafts are also from Farkifaya. The foundational craft or the things that we need as humans like Zira, agriculture husbandry Hiyaka like textiles engineering Mathematics so you can all of these things are things crafts that need to be studied and so they're all Farkfaya", "And then he says, and he said if you don't have a hajjam like somebody who bleeds people, then it's a very bad thing. He said, وَحَرِجُوا بِتَعْرِيذِهِمْ أَنفُسُمْ لَلْهَلاكِ And they're hard-pressed because they're exposing themselves to destruction. فَإِنَّ الَّذِي أَンزَلَ الدَّوَىٰ The one who sent down the cure", "sent down the one who sent down a disease, sent down to cure. And showed people how to treat these things and gave us the means in order to do so. So you can't expose yourself to destruction by ignoring these things that God has given us?", "and then those things that are virtuous but not an obligation delving deeply into them like knowing the details of mathematics or the secrets of medicine and things like that, they're not necessary. He said nonetheless they give greater strength and so in that way they're good. And then he says this is for things", "that aren't associated with the sharia. So what about those things that are associated with this Shariah? مَا لَيُتْوَصِّرُوا لِلْوَّاجِبِ إِلاَّ بِهِ فَهُوَ الْوٰجْبُونَ What you can achieve without it, when you can't achieve an obligation without it that thing, the means also becomes an obligation. And then he said وَقَالَ فِى الْحِيَاءِ وَأَمَّن مُضَاحٍ مِنَ الـعُلُومِ فِي الْعِلُّمُ بِالْأَشْعَارِ يَلَّتِي لَا سُخفَةً فِیهَا وَالْتَوَاريخَ لَأْخْبَاطٍ وَمَا يَدِيرِ مَذْراها", "As for the permissible, those knowledges you can learn like poetry as long it's not nonsensical like stupid poetry and history and those type things.", "So he says that knowing the ages of the ulama and their death dates, this is a special knowledge for the elect of the people of knowledge. Not everybody has to do it. And those who brand themselves with knowledge, if they mark themselves as knowledgeable people, they should know these things.", "but not everybody has to know them, right? So, you know, I mean Sheikh Mohammed Al-Aqobi, you ask him any alim and he'll give you his name, his father's name, usually when he was born. He knows all those. Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayya knows all of those. We know some of them. But that's a good knowledge to have when people died because you know the generation they were in,", "At the time All of them are in paradise All these people And so The Prophet said", "So our is an outstripper, our moderate one has salvation and the one who impressed himself is going to be forgiven. And we ask Allah and then he says", "May Allah realize this promise in us. May He benefit some of us with others. May he forgive all of us. He is the most merciful of those who show mercy. And then after this maqam, there's the sixth maqama. How much time left?", "So I can finish tomorrow, inshallah. We'll finish the Tadalli because the last few are actually quite short but we should do the sixth one tomorrow." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/You need to know your place - Shaykh Hamza yusuf_7kaj_uhrC64&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743295047.opus", "text": [ "Whoever claims a station, a rank that's not his God will expose him You claim to be firqa al-najiya? You claim the soul group that saved? So the next section is the fourth chapter We finished the first three The fourth chapter is on He said he's gonna go into the psychology the reasons why", "why people have gone into knowledge of differences and this obsession with differences. And then also to go into detail about the dangers of argumentation, dialectic, and when it is permissible to debate the conditions. So one of the things that he begins by just letting us know", "The Khilafah of the Prophet He said after the prophet left and the Prophet was not only teaching Those things that are necessary to live a fully human life so the Prophet taught us How to pray which is obviously devotion is our purpose, and so that's the most important thing but he also taught", "but he also taught the things about eating, about dress modest dress, eating healthfully minimalizing what we eat not eating too much. He taught how to interact with people akhlaq all of those things but he was a ruler and he differs from Isa for instance in that because Isa never ruled", "Prophet Muhammad never ruled. He was a prophet but he never ruled and that's why sometimes Christians will criticize the Prophet for aspects of his life on earth, and those criticisms are largely due to the fact that he was a ruler and so he made judgments that rulers make and he", "But Jesus was never a ruler. So it's much easier to have an idealized view of Christ in their mind because we don't know what he would've done had he been a ruler, had he had the power to act as a political leader as well as a prophet but our Prophet did.", "had to deal with military situations, he had to do with treason which is a capital crime in the governments of the world. So the fact that he had people put to death for treasonous reasons, people can fault him. That doesn't sound like a prophet. No, that doesn't sounds like your prophet because your prophet was never in a position where he was forced to make a ruling", "The Prophet's marriage problems are in the Qur'an", "And people say, well why is that? Well because that's part of life. And he came to teach us all aspects of life and one of the aspects of live is sometimes you're gonna have problems in the house. So how do you deal with it? Domestic violence? No! That wasn't his way. So those are aspects... so what he says is that the Prophet was a political leader and then he trained these men who when they took power", "are capable of not only ruling as politicians but ruling as a politicians following prophetic methodology and so Abu Bakr, Omar, Uthman and Ali these are the four that are agreed upon according to Al-Sunnah that they were Mahdiyoon they were rightly guided Khulafah Ar Rashidun Mahdiyoon and then most of the ulama add to that Omar Ibn Abdul Aziz is a fifth exemplar", "exemplar and then historically there have been others that come close to the prophetic model, but don't go under that. They can be Sunnati wa sunnat al khulafa ar-rashidina mahdini min ba'di they don't fall under that category that the Prophet defined that we should follow their Sunnah as well Because why? because they're on the methodology of the prophets So people like Amir Abdul Qadir Al Jazaeri is an example of a prophetic leader", "leader he was following the methodology of the prophet sallallaahu alaihi wa sallam Uthman Danfodio in Nigeria is another example of a prophetic Amir who's really attempting as a scholar and as a statesman to implement the methodology. Salah ad-Dun Al Ayubi is another", "But our civilization in terms of just pure human legacy I think has far more examples of benevolent and enlightened leadership than other pre-modern civilizations. So that's also in our favor, but it doesn't mean that there weren't serious problems. So what he says is that they were able to judge as exemplars of the prophetic methodology so they didn't need recourse", "didn't need recourse to ulama. And so he said because of that reason, the ulama were not involved in politics they were involved in ilm al-akhirah That's what their concern was it wasn't about the dunya and but as these leaders who had knowledge began to disappear then they began to rely on fuqaha", "According to our tradition, the Imam should be a mushtahid. So that the political leadership should actually be a Mushtaqhid He should be able to get to decide what the hukum shara'i is in any given situation That changed but during the time for instance of the tabi'een they still had rulers even during the Umayyad period and And the Abbasid period the rulers generally were highly educated Muslim scholars as well", "as well and many of them loved the company of grammarians, of literary scholars poets because they had great knowledge of language. Now a lot of them can barely put two sentences together in fact some of them if they just applied for a job as a doorman at a good hotel they probably wouldn't get the job it's amazing how they got into power which shows you", "You give dominion to whomever you please, including the gardener. Or the son of an Ethiopian shepherd. Amazing. Obama in Ethiopia because he's from Luo tribe. You know the Luo tribe? It's a tribe in Ethiopia. A Luo tribesman could not get elected president in Kenya.", "You can ask any person from Kenya, except maybe a Luo. But you ask everybody else and they'll tell you that he couldn't get elected in Kenya just because of his tribe but how do you get... You give it to whomever you please If that's not proof of that verse I don't know what is. I mean a man whose middle name is Hussein And his last name rhymes with Usama", "Amazing. So what he says is that what happens is the fuqaha, when they saw... He's saying that these ulama were distant from governments and they avoided... All of our imams, the four imams all of them had difficulties with the government.", "with the government, all of them. People would not take judge... they wouldn't take...they didn't want to be judges because the Prophet said there's three qadis two of them are in the fire so 2 thirds of judges are in hellfire not good odds So nobody wanted to be a qadi They didn't wanna be a judge Abu Hanifa, they tried to force him to be judge and he said I'm not qualified And they said you're a liar", "proves I'm not qualified. So, that's called the Cretan's paradox in philosophy. All Cretans are liars said the Creten. If it is true he is not lying.", "So people saw this esteem that these ulama, these scholars were held in by the rulers because they were distant from the rulers. They weren't after their money, they weren't After positions of power and so the rulers they had to honor them for that And so because of that Sayyid says فَأَشْرَبُّوا لِيَطَّلَبَ الْعِلْمِ So then they begin to raise their necks", "The next, like hmmm that's something we should do. Because if we get that, we'll get the izz You buy the car you get the girl who goes with it, its marketing Right? I mean that's all those commercials So this is they saw oh these ulama look how high their held in esteem If we get the knowledge thats gonna happen to us too so they sought knowledge for the wrong reason and he said this is the beginning of the decline", "is that they wanted it for the wrong reasons. And then they tried to get near to the rulers. فَأَصْبَحَ الْفُقَّهَا بَعْدًا كَانُوا مَطْلُبِينَ طَالِبِيْنَ After they were sought after, they become seekers after. After the dunya. وَبَعَدَ أَنْ كَارُوا أَعِزَّةً بِالْإِعْرَاضِ عَنَ السَّرَاطِينِ أَذِلَّةٍ بِاقْبٰلِ عِلَيْهِمْ They were dignified in avoiding the rulers, now they've become debased and degraded", "degraded by seeking them out. إِلَّا مَنْ وَفَّقُهُ اللَّهُ تَعَالَى فِي كُلِّ عَصَرًا مِنْ أُولَمَئِ دِينِهِ Except for those who had success from Allah in every time. وَقَدْ كَانَ أَكْثَرُ الْإِقْبَارِ فِی تِغْرِي عَسَارٍ عَلَىٰ عِلْمِ الْفَتَوَةِ وَالْأَقْضِيَةَ People wanted to learn fatawa and aqdiya, meaning the science of fiqh to give fatwa, legal opinion, responsa, and then also legal judgments. I'll give you an example. In Mauritania,", "students now they go to learn Tuhfaht al-Ahkam before they study the like Khalil and they want to learn how to be a judge because there's such a dearth of people that know this anymore so if you learn that master that book then you can get for instance a job in the Gulf, one of the Maliki countries or something like that. So that's an example where", "knowledge, to be knowledgeable. And one of the nice things about the Mauritanian madrasa is that scholars traditionally did not necessarily go into knowledge as a field. Many of them would end up becoming merchants or they just went and studied because they were zawaiya, because they", "responsibility that they felt, that I should learn my religion. So when you lose that then you get this problem. So he's saying that what happens is that people opened up the door of vying for positions and part of this is the need to become adept at argumentation because you want to prove that you're better, that you know more than the other right? This becomes the competitive marketplace", "marketplace and so things began to change but and so he then talks about that this is the main incentive behind this desire to learn all of these differences and the sciences of argumentation and the nafus, egos began to incline towards those who had a lot of dunya", "they wanted to prove themselves and so this is why they went this way. And so now he says, he's going to clarify what the talbis of this is. You know in other words how they've been tricked into this. So he says...", "The real reason why we're studying this is because we want the truth and this is the way that the truth is made clear. That this is how knowledge is increased, and it's beneficial. And this is what the Sahaba were doing. So in other words, what he's showing you is that", "out of their cognitive dissonance, they're justifying in their own minds all of these things. But these are just justifications for going after dunya. Right? And so... and they'll say these are the things that are important to learn. So he says وَيُطْلَعُكَ عَلَى هٰذَا تَنبِس مَا أَذْكُرُهُ And now if you really want to understand", "I'm going to explain it now how the deception works. So he's gonna give you the psychology of Why what they're saying is not true? He says The cooperation in arriving to the truth in this religion Has conditions and it has eight signs", "So if they're sincere, these conditions will be filled and you'll see this 8 signs. So the first sign, that he's not being preoccupied with it knowing that it is a collective responsibility and he hasn't fulfilled the individual responsibilities so that's the first side", "sign. So somebody who's learning Tuhfut al-Akham, which is a collective responsibility and he hasn't studied the Fardain well enough. And he'll say no but he's trying to get to the truth he said he's a Kadab, he's an inveterate liar. And the likeness of him is like somebody", "to trade in cloth and textiles saying people might the real reason I'm doing this is so that the people who pray will have what won't be naked he's not praying but he's saying oh the reason I am selling cloth is so people that pray won't won't", "that he doesn't see the as more important than the So, if he knows that it's not more important and he still does it then he is betraying the reality of it.", "So the likeness of this guy is somebody who sees people about to die of thirst. And instead of getting them water, he says I need to learn cupping because they need a cupper.", "Prophet sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam, and this is a very important hadith. And another one he says about fatwa, he says you'll see people learning how to give fatwa and yet they don't have doctors in their area. So instead of studying medicine which is a farqifaya, they're studying this. Right?", "Because a fard kifaya that's not fulfilled becomes an ayin. You see, it's an ayina on the people capable of doing it. So if a farda kifayah is not being fulfilled, If somebody is able to fulfill it, It's an individual obligation on him. And so if he doesn't, he's the sinner. And he mentioned that the Prophet , Anas relates that it was said to the prophet,", "people stop commanding or when will commanding good stop or end and forbidding evil will be left off. It's amazing hadith that when you see", "When you see flattery in the best of you, when you see the best at you just flatter each other. And foulness in the worst of you and that's sexual deviancy usually but just low class behavior.", "which could mean in age, it could mean an intellect. It could mean stature just the least of you so Those who rule over you are the least view and not they're not the best of you well if a coffee our valley come and thick is now in the The lowest of you and this is one of the big problems in our time with respect to people that study shari'ah", "That the one who's doing this, he has to be a mujtahid. In other words if he is really seeking the truth The truth already been established in the madhhabs So if you're not a mujta'hid You're supposed to follow an opinion that was done by a mujtiha'd You don't have any business Doing this And this is very important So the one that has not achieved this level of independent reasoning", "And this is the ruling of all the people of our time. Then he is supposed to give fatwa, a legal opinion from his, the madhab of whoever he follows. Even if he, it appears to him that his position is weaker, he should not leave it.", "So what's the point of his debating if his madhhab is already known and he's not a mujtahid. So he's now supposed to go outside of his madhhab, and this is the traditional position. And these are the greatest ulama of our ummah have said this.", "That Malik and the other imams, he was Maliki. Malik had to follow one of them. Wajibun. Right? Taqlidah ibran minhumu. That you have to follow on of them And this is what the qawm has said. The unum is what they've said Now in this enlightened time with all these great scholars", "these great scholars people say no you don't have to follow a madhub i mean here's abu hamad who wrote the book on usul al-fiq and mustafa i mean that's the the the umda of is his book the hanbari madhab their book is is uh the book of ibn qudama", "If he's a Hanbali scholar, he'll say, رَوْضَةً نَّاظَر. What is رَعُدَة النَّاضَر? It's an abridgment of Imam al-Ghazali's book. Seriously, it's an embridgment of his book. He wrote the book on أصول الفقه. He could have made ijtihad and he's saying, if you're not a mujtahid, you have to follow the opinion of the imam. Now people say, why is that? Why do we have to", "Why do we have to follow the opinion of the imam? Well, first of all here's the problem. If you take any ayah and you ask ten people even if they have let's say they have a modern degree in from a university from an Arab country You asked them what does this mean? What is this verse mean? You're going to get 10 different opinions It's just a fact and", "They won't know, and if you ask them to make i'rab of the ayah they wouldn't know. They wouldn't! Just ask him! Right? Well what is that? Why is that like... What's al-dhali mean? What is that, what's ahdi? What's the ya called? I guarantee you ask people, you'll see right? So", "So, if you don't have people that spent years mastering these sciences and you unleash this thing and say everybody just work it out for yourself. You're supposed to be a mujtahid not a muqallid. Taqreed is madmoom. It's true. Taquleed is a negative term in our religion. It'a low maqam. Right? It's not a positive term but if you open this, if", "Well, welcome to the modern world. Welcome to the Islamic Dola of Iraq. Seriously? Welcome to Islamic Dolar of Iraq? That's what they're doing. They're opening up... Oh! Here it says crucify people. Let's crucify them. It says cut off their heads. Let' cut off there head. Darb al-riqab ya akhi. Darbar riqab. Ma tafim? Raqaba. Darba. Seriously?!", "Seriously, it's a disaster. Ya akhi fil Bukhari, Sayyidina Ali, go to every grave and flatten it. Ish hadha Mawlana Rumi, ish hadha? Haram ya akhi, wallah I shuf al-hadith, fil Buhari, it' right there. The Prophet told me to go and flatten every grave. They were the graves of the Mushrikeen in Najd that they used to worship. Ahum hum yaabudunhum hula. That's what they're doing here.", "Anybody here worshipping that grave? I never saw a Muslim worshipping a grave. I never, I never see that. Really! I saw some people doing stupid things. That's true. I saw one... somebody making tawaf around the grave. That doesn't mean he is worshipping. I made tawfah around the Kaaba. I'm not worshipping the Kaabaa. Seriously! It's a bid'a muharramah and you should tell him to stop.", "to stop, but you don't blow it up. So this is the problem if you don' follow these rules and then they say oh those madhhabs were good for that time we're in a new time. That's true there needs to be tajdeed but who does it? Who does it every time? Is that who does? Seriously who does some guy that has a four year degree from Al-Azhar?", "Who does the ijtihad? That's what he is warning against. So this is a major problem that we have. You know, if you're not a mujtahid, you have no business doing this munathara. Know your place. مَا مِنَّ إِلَّا لَهُمْ مَقَامٌ مَعْلُومٌ Even the angels they say, everybody has a maqam. What's your maqama? Part of being an intelligent human being is knowing your place, is knowing where you fit in the scheme of things. And arrogant people always put themselves", "above their place. Sidi Ahmed Zarruq said in his Qawa'id that مَن يدعي رُطبةً ليست له فوضحة بشواهد الامتحان Whoever claims a station, a rank that's not His, God will expose him. You claim to be firqa najiyah, you claim to the soul group that saved Allah is going to expose you for the liar that you are", "liar that you are. Right? You claim to be this, that or the other Allah will expose you simple as that and he said whoever claims a rank that's his it'll be taken away from him for claiming it if you say that you're the only one doing our nobody else is doing it maybe you are but just because you claimed it is gonna be taken", "That's the way it works. This is qaida. And he said, if you claim a rank less than your own rank, Allah will elevate you to a higher rank. If you humble yourself for the sake of Allah, Allah would elevate you. So that's important.", "فَإِنِّي لَسْتُ مُّسْطَقِلًا بِالاجْتِحَادِ فِى أَصْرِ الشَّرْعِ And anything that is problematic for you in your madhhab, You should say, Maybe he knew something I didn't know. لَقَدْ حَفِظْتَ شَيْئًا وَغَابَتْ عَنكَ أَشْيَاءٌ You know something but a lot of stuff you don't know Right? Now I'll give you one example Just one example You see people", "that criticize Abu Hanifa and there's modern people they criticize Abu Hanefa because he'll prefer Qiyas in situations over singular hadith or Imam Marek will prefer the Amal of Ahl al-Madinah over single Hadith these aren't ignorant people, they didn't arrive at this conclusions happenstance I mean this came after", "great, great study, great deliberation, great intellectual gifts. And they came to those conclusions and the ummah said you're justified in that conclusion because you are a mujtahid mutlaq . And so we have to even if my madhhab doesn't agree with his madhhb, with his conclusions, we have say but the nature of world you can't...you not gonna", "To please people, it's an end that you'll never achieve. Like Jauha and the donkey. He's riding the donkey, his son sitting next to him. So he passed by some people and he said... The people said look at that man no compassion for his son young boy. He is riding the Donkey the boys... Jauhah says okay, he gets off puts a boy on the donkey they go past another group of people", "Look at that boy, no respect for his father. Doesn't he have So Jauha takes the boy off and then they're just walking along. Look at those idiots! Perfectly good donkey and they are not riding it. So he gets on with his son, they both riding it passed by some people. Don't they know that Prophet said you shouldn't give a beast of burden more than it can bear?", "If you look at the religion, it doesn't have any revelation.", "I just keep it to myself. It's safer for me to do that. فِينْ قُلْتُ حَنَفِيًّا قُدْتْوْا قَالُوا بِأَنَّنِي أُبِيحُ لَهُمْ الطِّلاَ وَشَرَابٌ مُحَرَّمٌ If I say, I'm Hanafi, they say, ah, he permits alcohol. Because Abu Hanifa said Nabid was permitted, fermented Nabid. Right? So if I say I'm Hanafi, They say, Ah, he permit alcohol. وَإِنْ مَارَكِينَ قُطْتَوْوا قَارُوا", "And if I say, they say, he permits eating dogs. And he said, and they're the real dogs. Because Imam Malik, the dog is makrooh in the Maliki madhhab. He said, And if i say, I'm shafi' They say, ah, he permit marrying daughters because...and everybody knows that daughter's haram.", "illegitimate children even though the person knows it is the marriage contract valid or not and then he said when Hanbali Qudtu qalu bi'anani Thaqilun Hululiun Baghidun Mujassimu and if I say I'm Hanbaly they say pfff he's like heavy Huluni you know believes that God moves in space Thaqi Baghild you know hateful", "and anthropomorphic. وَإِن مِّنْ أَحْلَ الْحَدِيثِ وَحِزْبِهِ And if I say I'm Salafi, يَقُولُونَ تَيسٌ لَيْسَ يَدْرِي وَيَفْحِمُوا They say, you know he's like a goat. He doesn't understand anything. Right? That's a 6th century. It's all the same stuff. Right ? Everybody calling the other person names.", "names. This is now they have internet to do it It used to be you had to look for somebody, now You can just tweet it out, you know get ghibah with... Now I mean just imagine the angels what they're having to deal with now Back in the old days, you okay one ghiba he told so-and-so this yeah, you just write it down. Now They must have computers themselves to keep track of all these ghibas because it's like now you do namima to", "Mima to I've got you know 10 million followers on Twitter You know oh so and so's this that the other and now so he just did ghibah it to all those people SubhanAllah So he says, I'm amazed at this time how nobody say from the tongues of people", "Right? He's saying that then. I'm amazed at this, how nobody is safe from the tongues of the people. And then he says that So my time has put forward some people and held me back", "Because I know and they don't know. So because I'm knowledgeable, I'm held back because they're ignorant, they're put forward. That's what he's talking about his own time. And then he says, So since these ignorant people have become so prominent in this age,", "Like I'm the letter Meem, and the time I live in is Aflah A'lam. Aflah he doesn't have an upper lip, lower lip, and A'alam he doesn'T have a upper lip so they can't pronounce meem because it's a Harf Shafawi So he's saying I'm a Meem and I'm living in a lipless age They can't announce me", "إِلَّا فِي مَسَدَةٍ وَآقِعَةً أَوْ قَرِيبَتُ الْوقُوعِ غَارِبًا The fourth is that he shouldn't talk about something that hasn't happened or it's about to happen. And this is the minhaj of the ulama, of the past. Imam Malik used to be asked questions, he said, did it happen yet? They said no. He said when it happens come ask me. That's what he would say. In other words I'm not going to theorize about something", "And the Sahaba, he says used to gather together and they would discuss events and come to conclusions about them. The fifth one he says", "is that these discussions should be in private and not in public. They should be kept in private, right? If you're really out with sincerity to make a change or something like that, you keep these things to yourself and you address the people that they involve immediately. You don't put it out into the public. فَإِنَّ الْخَلُوَ أَجْمَعُ لِلْهَامَ وَأَحْرَى بِصَفَاء الذِّهِن والفِكْرِ وَدَرْكَ الحَقِّ Because when it's in private", "it's in private, it will gather you. You'll be in a gathered state and there is purity of thought and reason and it's easier to achieve the truth but when you're in a large group then the ego wants its portion. And this means that your covenants to win because you don't want to make yourself look bad in front of a lot of people", "مُحَقًا كَانَ أَوْ مُبطِرًا Whether they're right or they're wrong. وَأَنْتَ تَعْلَمُوا أَنَّ حِرصُهُمْ عَلَى الْمَحَافِذِ وَالْمجَامِعِ لَيْسَ لِلّٰهِ And you know that it's not sincere, that this is about popularity. وأن الواحد منهم يخلو بصاحبه مدة طويلة فلا يكلمه And he'll be with a person in private and he won't even speak to them but then when they go out in the public forum they start talking. So why won't he speak to him in private?", "A sad the sixth one and you can be a part of the hockey can actually about That in seeking the truth. He's like somebody who's looking for something lost Let you fit up a Dana and tell her about let's go on a year to year or on a yet the menu I win a hole he doesn't care who finds it if You're looking for a camel", "camel and some Bedouin finds it, you're gonna be happy that he found it. For if its your camel, you are going to be happy because that's what you are looking for but in this situation no! You want to win the debate. If you were sincere, you wouldn't care whether you won or he won. And that's why Imam Shafi'i said I never argued with anybody except I actually asked Allah that He would put the truth on his tongue so that I could submit", "submit to it. Because he knew that the nafs had a portion, and it's a whole other level. That's sincerity. Look at them in their debates and argument how they get angry when somebody else has a stronger argument then they become ashamed.", "they strive to negate it. وَكَيْفِ يَذُمَّ مَنْ أَفْحَمَهُ طَوْلَ عُمْرِهِ And then after that he speaks ill of him for the rest of his life. I mean, this is a man who's telling you from experience. He's not making this stuff up. He lived this world. This was... He's talking about himself. That's why it's so real. Because he knew this intimately. The seventh.", "that he doesn't prevent him from going from one proof to another proof or From one problem to another problem and this is This is in the rules of debate because very often they would say no you can't introduce that So this has to do with the rules Of debate And it's again. He's just using it as an example", "Of this desire to if they were really looking for the truth They would allow The person to introduce evidence In all situations. That he debates the one who he thinks he can benefit from because he's preoccupied in knowledge", "Usually these people avoid debating people that are really knowledgeable. Because they don't want to look like fools. So, they look for people that can defeat them in argument. And then he said other than these eight there also other conditions that are very subtle but these are the ones that should", "that should let you know what is for God and what's for some other reason. If you understand these, you'll know when you see people debating. And then he says,", "and he's got your heart. He has occupied your heart.\" If you're not fighting shaitan, and he has occupied our hearts, and is the worst enemy that you have, and calling you to your own destruction, then you are preoccupied with debating other people? About issues that the mushtahid is moseeb", "Or he's musahim, or he shares in the reward if he's not. Because the moseef gets two rewards and the wrong one gets one reward so they both get a reward. So you're worried about this? And your own heart is in peril? He said, You should know, you are just a joke to shaytan. You are a joke...to shaytaan. You're nothing!", "a lesson, you're an Ibra. You are a wondrous lesson for the people of sincerity when they see you and that's why Shaitan laughs at you he is joyful at your loss because he has immersed you in the darknesses of these faults that we have just enumerated and now we gonna go into their details", "And we ask Allah for good benefit and tawfiq. So now he's going to go into the details of this.", "Amazing statement. Know that this argumentation and this love to overcome your interlocutors or whoever you're having disagreements with,", "And this love to show your nobility over these people, your fadl over them. Your love of being in these positions and your desire to attract people their attention and pull them to you. This is the source of all foul character.", "This is everything praiseworthy according to the enemy of Allah, Iblis. This is what he loves. And its relationship to the internal foulnesses from arrogance and vanity and envy and vying all of these things love of stature, love of position", "to all of the outward things like fornication, calumny, slander, murder and theft. And just as the one... And just that as the One who's given a choice to drink alcohol or murder or steal or something is going to choose alcohol over them", "this is what engenders all those negative qualities inwardly and there are many verses. And you will see in Rub al-Muhnikat, in the fourth section, in quadrant that deals with destructive matters, you will se. So now let's look at what this love of debate engenders. The first is envy.", "يَأْكُلُ الْحَسَنَاتِ كَمَّا تَأكُرَ النَّارُ الـ حَطَبٌ That envy devours or consumes good deeds just as dry wood is consumed by fire. So you become envious. لَا يَنفَقِّن مُناظِرُ عَنِ الْخَسَّدِ Because sometimes he wins, sometimes he loses. Sometimes people praise him, other times they praise somebody else.", "over him and this is a great tribulation. And Ibn Abbas said, He said take knowledge wherever you find it but don't listen to the when they talk about each other because", "goats are jealous in the corral. وَمِنْهَا التَّكَبُّرُ وَالتَّرفُعُ عَلَى النَّاسِ Arrogance, the Prophet ﷺ said مَن تَكَبرَ وَضَعَهُ اللَّهُ ومن تواضع رفعه الله Whoever is arrogant Allah will abase him and whoever lowers himself and humbles himself Allah will elevate him. قَالَ صَلَّىٰ عَنِ الْحِكَايَةَ عَانِ اللَّـهِ", "That magnanimity is my izar, it's a metaphor. Is my izaar and exaltedness is my ridaa It's what the upper that you know when you have gone hajj you have to read that the one you were at top in the izaal The one you are on the bottom so he's saying these this is what covers Allah his magnificence", "He said, so whoever attempts to vie with me in one of these two things I will break his back Allah says, I will brake his back And he said that you'll see the Munathir become arrogant about his associates and his peers And they will vie for positions", "And he said, sometimes the stupid crafty one amongst them, you know like, he's stupid and yet he's clever at the same time. He's a mountebank fooling people. He will say I'm just trying to protect the dignity of knowledge. And then he'll say...", "And he'll say that the movement is said not to abase himself. And so he'll call humility degradation, even though Allah commanded to humility. وَعَنَ التَّكَبُّرِي الْمَمْقُوتَ عَنْدَ اللَّهِ عِزِّ الدِّينِ And he will call arrogance dignity. تحريفًا للإسمِ Distorting the name. وإضطلالًا الخلق به And leading people astray.", "and knowledge, and other names. Another one is the which is resentment it breathes this resentment. The Prophet said , the believer he doesn't resent, he doesn' have resentment towards people. And is a hyperbolic. And there are many many things that we've been told about this.", "And Allah has likened it to eating dead flesh, carrion. And you will see these debaters, these people that are arguing with others, they're always eating their flesh. He'll just talk about his enemy and he'll blame him", "Tell things, he'll even lie about things. And so this is all... It's either ghibah or buhtan. He'll either tell the truth and Twitter I mean there's an example where people say things, the most egregious things about people especially about the ulama you should just shut up about the Ulama. They have their hujj with God. You know the best thing if you don't agree with them explain why you don' t agree with", "don't agree with them but to call them names you know I mean that's and I'm talking about specifically we can talk about ulama generally that we have a problem undeniably but to take somebody who has a position that's different from your position and to attack them and to say this that or the other about them they made their ishtihad that's with God they made", "when Qadr Iyad was with the Murabit Sultan and they heard Abdul Mumin give a speech. He said, أقتله وعليه دمه He told him, he said kill him and his blood is on me. That's an alim who has told the ruler to kill that man who gave a wa'w. He came and gave an exhortation. He", "didn't do it he ended up overthrowing the ruler and create a big fitna. The rest is history but there's an example where the Alim, he gives a fatwa and he's saying this my Ijtihad, I'll take the responsibility for it so you can disagree with them I can say I don't agree with what he did but to say he's a Jahil if he's", "And one of the things Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyad said, he said there's no such thing in our religion as ulama sultan. He said that don't call people names There's a alim and he's either mukhti or musib and he said you have to look at his fatwa what he's saying Is it based on reality? Or is it not but to say that The Alim is simply know he just sold his deen or something like that", "like that maybe he did maybe he didn't but you look at what his if they said look at the fatwa assess the foot as a scholar you're supposed to look at a fatwa is it based on reality or is it not if it's not based on realities then clarify that but because the federal goes against what you like and you say Adam Sultan maybe he made an issue had that year not you didn't grasp this", "And this is a big problem in the community. And we have now, there's just so much anarchy and madness. And the ulama are as confused as everybody else. That's a bad sign. The ulama, yes, they're like... Their heads are spinning too. Don't think your heads are the only ones spinning. I sit with them. They're like what do you think? I don't know, what do YOU think? What do you make of it? I dunno.", "Right? People ask me like, what do you make of so-and-so? I don't know. I don' even know what I make of myself. You're asking about so and so? I'm trying to work myself out. We have to have more compassion for people, human beings. When you have people... people got upset with... you know, Imam Majid in the United States.", "You know at this time because the Israeli thing it's bad You know I got invited to that thing. I didn't go Right, I already went once it caused me enough problems But you know look I know Imam Majid I know him personally And and I'm honored to call him a friend. Imam Majd is a very sincere person as far as I can tell I have no reason other than assume he's a sincere person", "You know what Imam Majid does when he flies? This is true, you know. When he flies on long journey, he does Khatm of the Quran on the journey. Wallahi, he doesn't. He teaches...he's a humble man. He's one of the humble people. His father was a Qadi. Shaykh Abdullah ibn Bayyah knows his father very well. He does things that are very difficult for me like I wouldn't want to do it but he doesn' In United States, you can say", "40% that have a favorable opinion of Muslims to 20%, since the last poll. Things are looking bad in the United States, right? So people say that he's not brave enough to speak up. Just going into the White House you're putting a target on your back from", "terrorists are in the White House. That's what they did, so they're calling him terrorist. Now you've got nutcases in the United States that say oh he is a terrorist let's go get rid of them or something. Seriously it's reality and then you've Muslims attacking him So for me I say we should honor people like that that are trying to do their best because I really believe he is. That his Ishtihad Maybe he is wrong It's possible He could be wrong", "He could be wrong, but that's his ishtihad. He's a scholar of some merit and that's ishtihad. He said I think in my situation this is the best thing that I can do for the Muslim community And I should trust his sincerity. I can say you know what? I disagree with him. I think he should have boycotted it, but...", "gets a reward and the one who makes it in his right gets two rewards so he gets one reward but if you attack him and criticize him and he's in his nia is good then that's not a good thing uh in in 1953 in july of 1953 dr sayid ramadan went to the white house with a ikhwan delegation right it was arranged by", "The people in intelligence in the United States that thought it was important for the White House to engage the Ikhwan al-Muslimin. So he went there, that was his Ishtihad! There's books... I read a book called The Devil's Game claiming that these people were agents of the CIA. I don't believe that because I actually met the man. I met Dr. Ramadan, Saeed Ramadan.", "I don't think he was. I think he made an ishtihad He went into the Eisenhower White House at a time when Eisenhower was undermining the democratic government of Iran He was undermined by the democratic govenment of Iran They overthrew Mossadegh He was directly involved in ensuring Israel's success as a state", "Eisenhower, Truman acknowledged it. The first thing 11 minutes after Israel declared its independence Eisenhower was the first. 11 minutes they didn't even waste time. 11 Minutes That was a quick council They acknowledge and this is fresh all these Muslims got thrown out but he thought that it was probably good at that time to go into the White House because he had some strategic vision", "Maybe he was wrong. But that was his ishtihad, the only one who's gonna judge us is Allah. Thank God! Really, thank God all these people on Twitter are not my judge. Right? Thank God. The only one that's going to judge us, is God. And did you open up His heart? Did you look inside His heart ? Did you determine what was in His heart, what His niyyah was?", "There's two qualities, there is no better quality than these two qualities. Having a good opinion of Allah and having a good opinions of the servants of Allah. We're all trying", "you know, Muslims just... we need to unite. At least be united in acknowledging that people come to different conclusions about situations. We're all trying. You know for me I'm teaching this stuff because I think this is the most important things that Muslims need to be thinking about. Because I look at the Muslim world and I see people cutting peoples heads off", "people and I see people taking a 70 year old ruler and sticking a knife up his backside, you know out of rage and anger. And I don't see the Prophet coming into Mecca. I don' t see Salah ad-Din al Ayyubi coming in to Jerusalem. I dont see Amir Abd Al Qadr Al Jidani, Amir Abdul Qadar Al Jazairi dealing with French prisoners with such dignity that they even went back to France and had to praise him.", "I don't see that. Because the tarbiyah that those men had was this tarbihah. And this is what I want to see, I want see when we do finally go into Jerusalem. That we don't slaughter people. Seriously! That's what I wanna see. When we do, finally going to Jerusalem, then we don' t slaughter people", "That we have the prophetic character. Now, we have power. This is the time to show Rahmah when you're in power. That's the time of show Rahma. They didn't show with us they are not our teachers. Well, they do it to us. They are not out teacher. Our teacher is Sallallaho Alaihi Wasalam . That's our teacher.", "It's a mercy. The Prophet forgave people. Umm Jamil used to put thorns on his path and the wind would blow it away. One day he came out, there were no thorns. He went to see if she was okay. She was sick that day. So he visited her. This is his aunt. Subhanallah. Where is that? Where is", "Where is the akhlaq when people spitting on him, throwing rocks at him? His feet are bleeding. And the angel comes and says, you want us to smash these two mountains? Wipe them all out? No. I want to see their children pray. It's a different... it's just a different perspective.", "That doesn't come from haqad and burghab and hasad. That's not where it comes from, it comes something else. You know that you actually care about people even the bad people you wish for them good. The Prophet didn't wish for people destruction he wanted their salvation. That is what he was concerned about. He didn't want to chop heads off. He wanted to enlighten heads. He wants to restore them.", "That's who our Prophet is. And I don't see him being represented anywhere in our ummah anymore. I don' t see it, I wish I could say you know look this is Islam here it is. This is Islam. Where can we point to and tell these people in the west? These ignorant people they're ignorant. They really not, they don't know anything. Where do you point? You can point to the Taj Mahal,", "You know, point to the blue mosque. Those are stones. Where are the hearts that built those stones? Where are those hearts that that beauty came out of? Where is it? That's what he's talking about. But it's not easy. He was so fed up with himself that he had to go into retreat for ten years. But that's why we're here teaching his book", "All those people that attacked him, the people that burnt his books. We're not teaching their books You know Warghali, the Mufti of Fas The Imam of the Qarweein, the esteemed scholar of his age, the one who gave the fatwa to persecute the Jews He's not the one honored today It's Ahmed Zarruq that said it's wrong we need to protect the Jews", "Not the one that said steal their goods, go into their houses. That's what they did as a pogrom in Fez. It was one of the great disgraces of Moroccan history. But Ahmed Zarouq said it's wrong. That who we honor today. Everybody was against him when he was alive and that why only history... History is gonna you know Allah will judge us but its people that come later that can sort out all this mess. Not the people alive today because everybody got nafs.", "position but we're all just doing ishtihad that's all it is. We're all trying our best and just acknowledge it in the other, it's not my ishtihad I think you should be doing something else but if that's what you think you're doing it's your life you have to live it", "And then also, you think you're better than other people. Allah says, لَتُزَكُوا أَنفُسُكُمْ Don't say you're bette than other peope. لَاتَسْخَرْ مِن قَوْمٍ Right? Don't make fun of a group. Right? لَا يَسخَارْ قَومٌ مِّن قَّوْماً Don't let one people make fun on another people. عَسَنْ يُكْنُوا خَيْراً مِّهُ Maybe they are better than them. Allah knows, we don't know. كُلُّون يَعْمِرُوا عَلَى شَاكِرَةِهِ", "what he thinks is the best thing to do. Did you know that's the ayah written around the green dome? كلُّ يَعْمِرُ عَلَى شَكِرتِهِ Everyone is working according to their own understanding. Sahaba went to war with each other, they had different ijtihad . People have differences.", "And then you start spying on people, following their things. He says even it gets to the point where they look at their inclinations They see faults in their body like he says they point out their baldness There are people that do that right? I mean look at all these horrible people on Fox News and things", "And then, وَمِنْهَا الْفَرْحُ بِمَسَأَةَ النَّاسِ وَالغَمْبِ مَسٰارِّهَم They get happy when bad things happen to people and they're depressed when good things happen", "That's a real sickness. People should love for their brothers what they love for themselves. So to not be happy about good things happening to them, فَهُوَ بَعِيدٌ مِّنْ أَخْلَاقَ الْمُؤْمِنِينَ It's very far from the character of the believers. وَكُلُّ مَن طَلَبَ الَّمُبَاهَاتِ بِيَظْهَارَ الفَضْرِ يَسُرُّهُ لَا مَحَارِتًا وَمَا يَصُئُ أَقْرَانَهِ وَأَشْكَارُهُ الَّذِينِ يُسَامُونَهَا فِي الْفَاضْر", "They hate one another like the multiple wives hate each other. When one of the co-wives sees another co-wife from a distance, she starts her shanks start to shake and her color in her face changes. And this is the same with these", "the same with these men when they see one of their enemies. It's as if he saw a shaitan or a dangerous animal, lion or something ferocious lion", "Where is the intimacy that scholars have when they meet? Where's the brotherhood? Where is being happy for the other and being sad for their difficulties? Imam Al-Shafi'i said, Knowledge between virtuous people and people of intellect is like a womb that binds them.", "That's what he says. He says, these are the people that sweet talk you with their tongues, they show you their love and then they get behind your back and it's a whole other thing.", "mentions this. Imam Al-Tabarani relates it and Ibn Asakir, and it has... It's in the Musnad. He says that if people learn knowledge and they stop acting according to it, and they love one another with their tongues and they hate each other with their hearts,", "that happens he will blind them and uh make their words have no effect and he said what about he said whether the hadith is sahih or not we see we witness its truth by the conditions that we find ourselves in women had", "arrogance and hatred and loving this argumentation. Our Prophet said, whoever leaves off argumentation and he's wrong in it Allah will build him a house in the middle of paradise. And if he leaves it", "Allah will build him a place in the highest point in paradise. And also, رِيَاء وَمُلَحْذَةَ الْخَالقُ وَالجَّهَدْ فِى إِسْتِمَارَةِ قُلُوبِهِمْ وَصَرْفِي وُدُوهِهٍ Also, ostentation, eye service, noticing creation being concerned about what they think and also trying to get people to incline towards you. He said this is a deep disease", "is a deep disease. So these ten things that he's just mentioned, he said, these are ummahat al-fawahish. These are the matrices of foulness, the internal foulness. This is where it all comes from. And he said... Now listen to this. I mean really, listen to", "These ten things that he just mentioned, he said these are for the cool calm and collected ones. As for the ones that start hitting each other and throwing things at each other", "and cursing their parents, and cursinng their teachers, and slandering them with calumny, with open calamny. We don't consider these people. We dont give them any consideration. I'm talking about the uqla here that have this ten qualities. These are the uqula from them. Not the ones that are chopping off heads.", "And then he says, yeah it's true some of them don't have all of these qualities. And then there is ten that come out of these also and he talks about those", "And then he says that, and if you say, it's permissible to do this and there is benefit in it. And it helps people studying knowledge. And if it wasn't for love of leadership, knowledge would have disappeared. He said what you are saying is true but it's not beneficial. It's the same as saying if we didn't promise children ball games with their sticks", "and things, they wouldn't go to school. Right? He says, لَوْلَا الْوَعْدُ بِالْكُرَةِ وَالصَّوْلا جَانِ وِاللَّعْبِ بِالمَخْتَبِ مَارغِبُ السُّبْيَانُ فِى المَكْتِبِ If you didn't tell them, oh, you're gonna get to go playground and have recess and you'll play games. You didn't Tell him that, they won't go the school. So he's saying, that's not saying those are the good thing that they should be doing. And then he said, don't forget the Prophet ﷺ said", "Allah will help this religion with people that have no character. There's no portion of the Akhirah, they have no portion. Allah will support this religion sometimes with a foul person. So seeking leadership is destructive. And then he says in the end", "And the ulama are three. مُهْرِكُ النَّفْسَهُ وَغَيْرَهِ The one who destroys himself and others. وَهَمَّنْ مُصَرِّحُونَ بِطَرَبَ الدُّنْيَا الْمُقْبِرُونُ عَلَيها These are the ones that are just after dunya, and you see them chasing after it. They destroy themselves, and they destroy those who follow them. وِإِمَّا مُسَعِدُون نَفْثَهٌ وَخَي்رَةً And those who help themselves and help others.", "and these are the ones that call to Allah, and they're free of dunya inwardly and outwardly. And those who destroy themselves but help others. And these are those who call to the Akhira, and reject the dunya outwardly But his real niyyah is that people accept him", "accept him and he gains stature from it. فَانْظُرْ مِنْ أَيِّ الْأَقْسَامِ أَنتَ So look to yourself, which are you from? وَمَنِ الَّذِي اشْتَغَلْتُ بِالْاِعْتِدَادِ لَهُ And what have you been preoccupied in preparation for? وُلَا تُضُنَّنَّ أَنَّ اللَّهَ تَعَالَى يَقبَرُ غَيْرَ الْخَارِسِ لِوَجْهِهِ And don't think in any way shape or form that Allah accepts anything other than the one who is sincere solely for his face alone.", "And you will see in the chapter on ostentation or eye service, in the quadrant of the quarter of muhlikaat, the destructive things, what will negate these things. So that's the fourth book. We have the fifth book now. So we have three more books and we'll do tomorrow inshallah al-baab al-khamis", "10 branches for a student. And this is about learning. So any questions? Go ahead, yeah. With regard to argumentation.", "With regards to argumentation, does the imam speak about only scholars or can it be used as a... He's talking about for common people, yeah, it's haraam. He's telling about ulama . Like common people should never argue about their religion because they don't have the requisite knowledge to do it. What about using it as a tool for critical thinking? So set aside your religion itself. It's a really good question", "good question. The next chapter deals with that, about when it's appropriate to challenge or to ask a scholar question and things like that so it's a good question but tomorrow inshallah he'll deal with it in that chapter but it's an excellent question. So we read last night one shouldn't delve too far into any science doesn't attaining mastery of the science entail having", "He's really talking about... he is a man who mastered all the sciences of his age. He had real mastery and he has beautiful Arabic style, it's quite stunning given that he was Persian and learned Arabic as second language. His mastery of Arabic is really phenomenal. And uses words beautifully, his syntax is beautiful. It's actually not that difficult to learn this Arabic.", "but it's very eloquent. It is difficult to reproduce, to write like that. It's called the , the easy impossible. But he mastered all of his sciences. At the end of his life, he was saying look I'm giving you good advice don't waste your time like I did because you don't know when you're going and the most important thing is this. But definitely a scholar, he spent his life teaching and studying scholarship was very important to him", "Allahumma inayya siruka, anman nafi'an", "We need grammarians, we need people to master the Arabic language. It's a jihad to master Arabic language You're protecting the religion, you're protecting knowledge of the Quran and Hadith which we need in every generation it is a fard kifaya We need Qara'at, we needs people to Master the Qaraa'th It's hard to do, it will take you many years to master all 10 variants But somebody has to do it So there are people that have to delve deeply into those sciences undeniably That's important", "And people, Allah preserves the deen and the Qur'an. So he... Allah... تَوَلَّ أَمْرَهُ إِنَّ نَحْنُ نَزَّلْنَا ذِكْرًا وَإِنّ لَهِ لَحَافِظٌ We sent this dhikr down and we will protect it. And He protects it by producing in every generation people that take it upon themselves to learn the religion to the best of their ability. يَحمرُ هَذَا عِلْمًا عَن كُلِّ قَرْنٍ عُدُولَه That this knowledge will be carried in each generation upright people", "They'll negate the interpretations of the extremists, the decontextualization of people attacking it. means like people that take things out of context in order to undermine your religion.", "and the interpretations of ignorant people. So, any other questions?", "you'd be honored to raise a child who is worthy of this deed and it's just hard not to feel lost about what to do and how to raise decent human beings. I'm curious as to what is your advice? Yeah, we're up against big challenges my sister You know really where I have my children were up against Big Challenges It's not easy It's hard to be human today", "It's really difficult to be a human being. And our fitrah is under real attack. You know, a lot of this technology we're not designed for it. Allah did not design us. And we were warned about these times, these latter times when there'd be a lot fithna, a lotta confusion. We were warned abut them so these are our times. It's a good time to be alive because it's our time and it's the time God gave us", "That's a physical law. You know, the cups at rest... I moved over here. That's physics. There is metaphysical laws as well. وَمِنْ يَتَّقِي لَّهُ يَجْعَلْ لَهُ مَخْرَجًا If you have true taqwa of Allah He will give you an exit strategy. وِيَرْزُقُ مِّن حَيْطٌ لَا يَحْتَسِبُ If you're worried about your children Allah says, Have taqwah and he will take care of your children. My own teacher", "My teacher, he had three sons and a daughter. His daughter died in the war.", "His daughter died in childbirth and she only had one child. He's just an amazing scholar, and he was raised without his mother and without his father.", "apart and he said they should go to God because their hearts are in God's hands. You can't go and tell them because you raised them, and they're not following what Yahweh didn't raise them to go astray but if they've gone astray you have to go to god because He is the one that can rectify it and He will, He'll rectify our children. And then there some like Nuh , his son didn't get on", "were true scholars of God but they didn't have a lot of outward knowledge. And if you love the scholars then inshaAllah Allah will make one of your children a scholar like he made this man, his father was a poor wool carter but he loved ulama. He died when his son was less than seven years old and look what Allah gave him. I mean what's his reward gonna be on yawmul qiyamah?", "When he sees his son. One of the men that burnt his book in Fez, he actually saw the Prophet in a dream and the prophet brought Imam al Ghazali and he gave him a whip and he told him to whip him. Next day he made public tawbah. It's amazing!", "And that's one of the miracles of our religion is, the Prophet ﷺ is actively engaged in our community. He comes to people in their dreams, you know he gives them Sikor I mean I had a woman, this is a true story I'm gonna tell ya, you don't usually talk about these things but... I had woman who came to me and she said", "We were in Medina and she just said, you know I have a really hard time with Aisha's age. You know I told her, I said listen first of all there is debate about her age alright? And I said but the important thing about Aisha if Aisha was an insignificant person", "then we would certainly have to question what the wisdom was. But the fact that she carried so much of the relationship, you know, it's undeniable that Allah chose her to be in that position whether she was 12 or 16 or 18 there are different narrations or whether she is nine... That wasn't a problem for Irving Washington who wrote a biography of the Prophet which is not very flattering", "Which is not very flattering, by the way. But when he got to that section, he just said Arabian women were known to be very precocious They matured early so this was not uncommon It didn't bother him in 19th century America, early 19th-century America but today it's very bothersome. But anyway, I gave her my best I could do So about a week later we were in Medina because we're in Mecca and she brought up the question to me", "She came to me and she had like tears. And I said, what's the matter? She said no, no, I just wanted to let you know, I feel so at ease. She said, you know I've been so troubled about this. Said the prophet said he came to", "dream last night and he explained to me why he did that. And he said Abu Bakr was honored by becoming his father-in-law because Abu Bakrs maqam was so high with Allah, you know? And she had that in a dream but totally her heart was just set at ease I just thought SubhanAllah what a gift", "What a gift to be troubled by something and the Prophet comes to you himself, to ease your heart. And that's from ikhlas which means that it doesn't mean that you can't question things. Our religion has never shied away from questions but question them with a desire to know the truth not a desire", "man don't you believe Allah asked Ibrahim, don't You believe? He said no I believe. I just stole my heart so he showed me" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Don_t test people like this - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf __0T5eh1H9t1U&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743060920.opus", "text": [ "But to test people like this is a bid'ah Because that's what a lot of people like to do they want to just suss you out to see, to put you into some kind of box So they'll ask you. Oh, what do you say about this? What do you think about that? What did you say that and they're really trying to catch you out", "in on these wondrous tools that we have. Alhamdulillah, from I think inshallah arjun min Allah and yukun min at-tawfiq, I wanted to do some of Imam al-Bukhari's collection because traditionally it was something actually was done in Ramadan. In many places they did a khatam of Sahih al-Buqhari alongside their khatamat of the Quran.", "of the Quran and it's still done in Medina. And I've attended there, the sessions in Ramadan, the Baaloui clan still do the Khatm in the Rawdah during the month of Ramadan. And so I noticed that the person that I had read the text with and who put me in the chain of transmission was Sheikh Muhammad Al-Aqobi", "30 sessions. I'm doing much less than that, but he's doing 30 sessions, a much greater scholar. But he's one of the people of Isnad at this time. He's a brilliant scholar that we were fortunate to have here at Zaytuna and he actually did a khatm of Sahir Bukhari in Zaytona many years ago and gave the chain of Isnada to the students that attended that.", "that the sahih al-bukhari is it holds a special place in the community for a number of reasons and but i think what's very interesting is that the tradition which led up to somebody like imam al-Bukhary was a very organic tradition. It was not something that was done with any", "any type of organizational structure like setting up schools and colleges, and creating sciences. If you look at the early Islamic period one of the miracles of this religion is how natural all of our disciplines evolved. And one of secrets of our tradition I think it's one of course secrets", "the Isnad tradition. Because unlike Christianity that had went through very disruptive periods because you had so many different views of Christianity and so what would happen is they would have these councils, and they would come together like the Council of Nicaea is a very famous council that occurred in Turkey where they determined it and this is 325 years after", "where they determine that God really was three. So it's very interesting that it took them that long to kind of agree on that as a doctrine, but and what's interesting also is that Nicaea was destroyed by an earthquake not long after that so which is mentioned in the Quran that just by saying", "In any case, the Muslims never had as far as we can tell from our history. They never had any councils they never had these majami' which they have today like Majam-ul-Faqihah they come together there's no indication that they had those what they did have was they had authorities and these authorities emerged organically also they would be recognized by the community so a really good example of that", "and I'm going to use somebody close to my heart. I could use any of the imams, the great imams of our tradition but a really good example of that is Imam Marek ibn Anas. So Imam Mardik r.a who was born in into around probably around 93 he's born into this slight difference of opinion when he came in but about 93 years after the hijrah. He's born in Medina and he's", "alive and whether he is from which group uh is the majority say he's from the tabi but in any case when he was born they were still alive there were people who had lived with the sahaba and imam madikar radhi allahu anhu he basically he was from a very distinguished line", "And his family was relatively poor, but he has a good lineage and his grandfather was one of the Sahaba. So his mother who raised him and early on wanted him to become a scholar, she would literally tie his turban for him when he was very little and send him. And as he began to grow it was clear that he had a level of intelligence that was extraordinary", "extraordinary really almost supernatural and he studied with some of the most important teachers in medina amongst these uh tabi tabi sorry so he he basically um he he studied", "Hadith scholars. He has what they call suhuf, so they begin to write these suhf The Suhuf are basically ad hoc collections of hadees that were written down and Abu Hurairah begins this and Some of the Sahaba there were other sahabah also that wrote down the hadith initially There are hades that the Prophet said not to write them down But it was in the early period when the Quran was still being revealed", "revealed and the Prophet was concerned that they would mix the two so later he actually tells in about being asked about the memory he said in other words write them down so the hadith are written down Abu Huraira who initially did not write them then began to write them out he actually had multiple sahaf and he collected he relates over 5,000", "5,000 hadiths. So he's reading about 5,300 hadith. One of the criticisms in the Shia community was he was only with the Prophet for almost around two years and so they say if you just look at the number of hadith that he relates how could he relate so many hadith but Abu Huraira was collecting hadith He wasn't just hearing them directly from the Prophet. He was getting them from other people because Sahaba can relate hadith", "without mentioning the Sahabi. So it's not necessary that he heard all of them from the Prophet, but he is considered a sound narrator and so he begins to... He's collecting these hadiths and then the next phase after the Suhuf is the Musannifat. So these are collected, they're organized", "and they're usually organized topically. And the first, and most famous one is the Musannaf that's called Al-Muwattaa. So the Muwattab Imam Malik is really the first collection, it's the first book after the Quran in the Arabian tradition. So, the Quran is the very first book in Arab history. There's no book before the Quran that we have. The next book really is the Muwatab Imam Maliq.", "foundational texts are the Quran and the hadith. It's quite stunning even though Imam Marek, his book which has 1720 hadiths in the Yahya bin Yahya al-Laythi recension which came from Andrusiya only there's just over 500 that are actually directly from the Prophet sallallaahu alaihi wa sallam hadith other ones are the opinions of some of the tab'een", "and even Malik Radin Al-A'ni himself. So it's not entirely a collection of hadith, even though it's considered part of the canon of the Hadith tradition. So the Musannafat then begin, and then you have one of the students of Imam Malik, Abd al-Razaqa Sanani makes a much bigger Musanaf, and Ibn Abi Shayba who is his student. So you have these Musannafaat but the actual rigor", "rigor was not in the Musana fat the Mota is proven by Ibn Abdul bar later to be because emetic has these Mara seal he has hadees that are there's a break in the chain and so but even on the bar shows how all of them were we're actually sound which proves", "the people that he was relating from but the musanifat did not have that type of rigor and so it was imam al-bukhari's teacher who said to him an imam of bukhari was very young at this time he said to hem that he wished that somebody would write only the sahih hadiths, only the hadith that have been absolutely confirmed without any doubt in them. And so Imam al-Bukhary", "Imam al-Bukhari initially, I mean obviously he planted the seed in his head but he had a dream in which the Prophet was there and Imam al Bukhary had a fan and he was fanning away like things from the prophet that would bother him. And so he went to one of the Mu'abbireen and he asked him what it meant", "Claim that the prophesized some things they they claim he said so you're going to in the same way I'll go honey for a done. I had a famous He saw the prophets ism The grave and he saw the bones and then he they weren't assembled properly and he put them together That was a sign of the type fit that he would create So these were deeply spiritual people that we're having amazing dreams And in which a lot of signs would come to them, so the", "So Imam al-Bukhari begins to write his sahib. But even before that, he's a miracle child. He was born in Bukhara and when he was born, his mother actually had a dream because he went blind that he would be cured of his blindness and then she dedicated him to learning.", "He had initially a sickness where he lost his sight and then his sight came back. Anything he could hear, he could memorize. He just had a completely photographic memory. So anything that he could here. And modern people have very difficult time because many of you when you were young probably in school they did what was called telephone. Does anybody remember that? Did you have to do that?", "So they have in the classroom, the teacher writes something and then the child, they look at it but then they can't pass it on. They just whisper into the ear of the student and the next student whispers into the year until it goes through the whole class. Everybody laughs at the end because it's always completely mangled so it's completely a different what was the teacher had originally written", "you is how unreliable transmission is. I mean, that's the idea behind it. Well, that' s the very point of this tradition is to make sure only reliable people because I guarantee if you took 50 Mauritanians who studied in this or even in Sus in al-Maghrib these students of the madrasa tradition and you did the same thing with them,", "And that's simply, anybody who has seen this. I mean there is a famous story of what Mayabah I think when he was in Mali he saw two people get into a fight and they spoke Bambara and one of them ended up getting killed so the police wanted to know who started the fight", "just from hearing it. There's many stories of that in our tradition. So Imam Bukhari, when he went to Baghdad for instance they mangled up all the riwayat so you have the metan which is the hadith, the actual content of the hadit and then you have senad or the chain or the isnad its also called. So what they did was they took all these hadits each one took ten, each one of the sheikhs took 10", "one he said and the next one so they started thinking he doesn't know anything because he's not even correcting them and so they actually begin to wonder if this man is who people say he is. So when they all finished, he said are you done? And he said yes. He said", "this is the correct chain and he did all ten then the next and then the until he finished the hundred hadiths. And he corrected all of them after hearing them recited, he knew both the wrong recitation and then he corrected each one. And at that point they surrendered to him as the Hafidh of his time so he had this prodigious memory but he was also a Faqih and one of the things about the Sahih", "has yetasarraf so he'll actually bring insights into these things there's also if you look at some of the hadiths like for instance in the chapter on the prohibition of killing with fire he has the hadiif of Imam Ali from Palestine so what he's showing in that is that he knows the hadis and", "He does this very often in the book. He also, according to the tradition for every single hadith that he narrates, he did istikhara and he prayed two rakats. And many of them he did in the haram. He was in Mecca and Medina. And he traveled to many places to get hadith. So he's just an extraordinary person. When he went to Samarkand they said", "They said for... they came out about more than 12 miles to greet him, like throngs of people. This is how... One, it's how respected knowledge was. Like people really respected knowledge so they would come out and traditionally people would come up to greet Wufud and things like that. It's just part of the Islamatrician tradition. The wift is like a", "What do you say about the word Quran?", "So you're saying the Qur'an is great. He said, no, Qur'ans are not created. And he said, but to test people like this is a bid'ah. Because that's what a lot of people like to do. They want to just suss you out to put you into some kind of box. So they'll ask you, oh, what do you say about this? What do you", "So it took him 16 years to put this book together. There's 97 chapters, it has over 7000 hadith but there are several that are mucarrar often not with the same chain but they're replicated and so he basically has about 4000 that aren't and over 2000 that are directly from the Prophet .", "So then he had a student, Imam Muslim. Imam Muslim does the same thing that Imam al-Bukhari does. He does a collection of Sahih Hadiths. He's only gonna get to Sahih but he had criteria criterion that differed from Imam al Bukhary so in the Hadith there is five conditions for a Sahih Hadeeth right?", "And so it has to be mutasal. The isnad has to mutasel. So the chain can't have any breaks in it because if it has a break in it, like a maqouf, if a sahabi relates it and doesn't mention the Prophet , it might have the hukm of rafa'ah. In other words, it's considered a hadith because they... If they're saying something that could not be said except from revelation", "except from revelation. So for instance, in the hadith that man sama yuma shik faqad asa abal qasim so that is mawquf an al-sahabi so the sahabi that related that he couldn't say that without having heard something from the prophet to say that to fast on the day of death nahar rasulullah an siyam yuma", "the 29th you go out on the 29 at the end of the 29 day to see if there's a new moon. If you don't see the new moon it might have been born but you don' know because there could be ghaym so the prophet said So complete 30 days of shaaban", "obscured for some reason so that's an example of a hadith that's moqoof on the sahabi another one is mustal al-kurshi in sahih muslim relates a hadithe about the people of of uh the europeans says refers to the european and he calls him basically the white people", "in his Rasail on the different groups. And he divides Rome into the Old Rome and the New Rome. So, the Old Roman is Yunan. And Yunan was actually the name of one of the... He goes back to say Nanua according to our tradition. So Yunan is Greece but he's actual... And then the new Rome is the Latin Romans which is when they found Rome", "they found rome according to their traditions found by um aeneas who's a survivor of old you know of uh of the trojan war so that's new rome so in the hadith it says the end of time won't come until the europeans are", "The comments they said, it's not the adat. It's tashabuh because the Prophet said whoever resembles a people is one of them so in the end of time the majority of people will be imitating Europeans in their dress, in their food, in there culture right? It becomes like a monoculture and that's the Sahih Hadith", "The hour doesn't come until the Europeans are the majority of people. So when Amr ibn al-'As heard Mustawrad recite that, he said, think about what you're saying. He said, I heard it from the Prophet. Then he says, if that's the case, they have", "in the fitn of the end of time. That's where Imam Muslim put that section. So, it doesn't have... It's not shadh. So one reciter recites a narration that differs from other thiqat. So in that case, it's considered like shadh", "considered like shed it's it has an irregularity so that that in my it might be a sound hadith but it's not doesn't have the the It doesn't Have the Sahra. It doesn' get the you can't give it the stamp that is sahih because of that or it has ill and these are the defects of the Hadith that are known in the science and that's a Science that goes into the mustara hatir hadith and the types of illal, you have different types of", "in hadith so and then yara we he added on by built on and mystery so the the adder relates the Hadith these are the criteria for the Hadeeth the other relates the Hades so what is an adult in our tradition according to the people of hadith away they look at it is they have", "So they have both taqwa and they also have muru'ah. So taqw is وَحَسُلُ التَّقْوِي اشْتِنَابٌ مِّمْتِّثَادٍ فِي ظَاهِرٍ وَبَاطِنٍ بِذَا تُنَادِ That Ibn Ashur says, Taqwa is to do what we've been commanded to do inwardly and outwardly. And to avoid what we're being prohibited inwardly or outwardly so that's a person of taqwah the highest degree of taquwah there's five degrees according to", "Ibn Juzay records those five degrees. The least of which is somebody fears the kabair, the highest of which they even fear anything other than being in the divine presence. So the adal is somebody who's just and then they have muru'a, which means that they have the character, the ethical character", "They'll, you know, they don't harm people. They have sitqa lisan. They don't do anything that would be inappropriate, break the decorum of a culture. So for instance, in Andrusia it was not the urf of the Andrusians to wear head coverings. So a man who did not wear a head covering did not affect his shahada, right?", "of being upright and just. But in other places, in the East it did. So if you didn't wear... If you were a male and you went out without your head covered that would actually affect your status because you're doing so or if you are known to eat in public places many many things could do this. So there's an element to this that is a bit relative because it relates to al-urf wal-ada right?", "is muhakama, like the ada of a people. And the same with relations between the sexes. Cultures have different urf with this. So in some cultures it's very strict segregation. In others it's not. So when a culture where it was very strict", "an element to this that has to do with the orf. But generally, that's the... And then dhabit is somebody who's very precise. So they're very precise so they don't like those of us who don't have these prodigious memories we might relate a hadith but we might miss a word or we use another word which is permitted according to the ummah to relate with meaning. But you're not dhabi and so you're", "They are dependent on his discipline and his narrations.", "And he used to have his daughter, behind a curtain, would actually make corrections for the reciters when they were reading the Muwatta with him. So she would actually correct because Imam Madik would be listening but it was Fatima that would make the corrections. And then the Ijazah tradition comes out of this where they basically give the Ijaza and initially Ijazaw was very rigorous", "Later, when the books became written down because by the... Imam al-Bukhari dies in 256. So by that time most of the hadiths have been written now but they continue on until the 11th century so you have later in the fifth century you have people like Imam al Bayhaqi and Abu Nu'im who are doing major", "doing major collections. Al-Bayhaqi's collection is a major collection. So by that time, they've really exhausted the hadiths, that you couldn't really find hadith after that period. And then there's amazing collections of the hadits where like Mishkat al-Masabiya is very important by Tabrizi. That collection was the first collection", "the Indian tradition. They would study that one first and then they would do the collection of the six. So these six collections that come and become canonical, and really four are the most important ones in terms of the fiqh. You have Imam al-Bukhari is the first and them Imam Muslim. The difference between the two, they have really rigorous criteria but there was one criteria that Al-Buhari superseded", "even though he was Muslim, was his student. And that is that Imam al-Bukhari had to absolutely be certain that the scholar in the chain, that he was in the city or the place and took from the person. He had to ascertain that there was a Luqya, that they actually met and then Tarakka'anhu, that relates from him. If it didn't have that criteria, he didn't accept it.", "him that he was a thika and that he knew they were in the same area at the same time. He didn't have to absolutely ascertain the meeting of the two, and that's why his is slightly less but not that much, and there's a lot of crossover in the two. I mean, they both... Imam Sahih Muslim has more", "more hadith than Imam al-Bukhari. So then you have Imam al-'Tirmidhi is the next who's extremely important and this is his jami'ah. This is a really important collection because this is where they begin to really want to get the hadiths that are directly related to ahkam especially and things", "The muhaddithun are sayadira and the fuqaha are atiba. So, the muhadtithun like the pharmacist they prepare the drugs right? The medicine but it's the doctor who diagnoses and then prescribes so they see the muhdithun aren't necessarily fuqahaa", "that is really important distinction in our tradition, there's a lot of mistakes that are made because we don't differentiate between a da'iyah and a faqih. And a mutafaqi like a musharik fil fiqh, a muhadith, a qari. In al-Ashr they actually have different colors on their turbans to determine who the Qurra are. In other words, they just memorize Quran. They're not really ulama.", "So a lot of confusion is created from this. And then the word alim is a word that traditionally was not given easily to call somebody an alim. Allama was even more rare because somebody who's an allama really genuinely will know most of the sciences of Islam.", "He knew Sira, he knew Tariq. All these sciences. So the great ulama of our tradition are polymaths and that's really important to remember. The du'a't are more you know they're people that they might have some level of knowledge but there are more people that preach the religion too. And their storytellers, taqasim. There is a famous story of Imam Marek radhi l-anu Yahya ibn Yahya al-Laythi on his way to Medina", "Medina to study with Malik was in a caravan and there was a very pious man in the caravan who used to get up after the prayers and he would do a waw, he would exhortation. And people would cry like he had a real effect on people. But when they got to Medina they went into the masjid and when the prayer ended he got up to do that and the little kids started throwing things at him. And then they took him out of the masjdid", "and yahya lathie asked like what happened and he said imam marik doesn't allow the kusas a storyteller he doesn't allowed them in the masjid of the prophet there's no storytellers because it was a place of ilm tafseer hadith it wasn't a place you know the waad is on friday but it's not you don't get up and do those so that that that was the early period they didn't really look to", "too kindly at these type people that were more shabi people they were very serious about their knowledge so imam madik radhi lano um let me backtrack then when he went to malek's majlis", "I came to see the elephants, I came here to learn", "than Yahya ibn Yahya al-Aithi. But his recension has the tawfiq, so it's the one that got this tawfeeq. So you have to have dhabt, the naqal and these were the criteria for the soundness of the hadith. And Imam Al Bukhari even though he has about 160 of the Mu'allaq traditions they've all been shown", "They're all connected by chains. So everything in there is considered sahih. Somebody is, one of these horrible people that love to follow everything I do and then try to find mistakes and then put it up on... they do these little clips. They put this thing where I said that al-Bukhari wasn't... you know, it wasn't everything and it wasn' t sahih That's not true. I never said that. What I said is ahad hadith are probable hadith", "they're not used according to the majority of our ulama in aqeedah right there are many hadiths in in the sahih collection it doesn't mean they're they are but there's always a possibility in the ahad hadith that there could be error because they're human beings the the hadith tradition does not have the hival of the quran and every muslim in our tradition has recognized that", "that. Which is why there are fabricated hadiths, there are weak hadith, there have been hadith and then there's really strong sahih hadith like Mutafiq Ali and then Mutawatir Hadith which has the same maqam as an ayah of Quran if it's mutawatar which is a small number of hadith that we would call historically factual. A mutawatir hadith is like a historical fact. It's just too many people related that it could've been made up.", "made up and they've been collected. Imam Syulti has a collection of that. There are a few, Imam Al-Qattani did a collection so but there not that many that are . So that's just important to note it's an absolutely Sahih collection. There is no doubt about that we shouldn't have any doubt about the Hadith that's in Sahir Bukhari but in terms of Aqidah", "then there's a higher standard because it's about God. And so, there's not going to be any room for mistakes when it comes to... and that's why our Aqidah is first and foremost, you know, Quran is the foundation of the Aqida in our tradition. The rational creed which you study here", "the ultimate being, the ultimate reality. And that's where you get these 20 attributes. That's where they come from. Even though they're substantiated by the Quran, they are actually rational arguments and the idea behind that is you don't fall into a circular reasoning. That was the purpose of that to get people out of a circle. Why do you believe in God? Because Quran says so. Well how do you know", "Well, how do you know that's because God revealed the Qur'an? You get into a circular reasoning. So that's why taqlid, this idea of taqli'd, like to know God and his messenger with nadhar, like actually think about it, to get out of taqulid. So, that was something that our ulama said we need", "to have absolutely sound hadith without any probable error in them other than that the uh the second thing that i point out about imam al-bukhari is the sahih tradition is in some ways a reaction to imam ashavi because imam shafi departed from his teacher's methodology so the methodology of imam madik was", "was that he would actually prefer, he would take the of the people in Medina over solitary hadith. This is called . His argument was if he found and he had 600 teachers from the in his lifetime. The argument was", "doing the same practice then he would for him they saw it from the Sahaba in Medina because there's 10,000 people buried there so he saw it and he said I'm going to take the fact that the righteous people are fasting on Friday and there is a solitary hadith where", "don't feel comfortable going to that solitary hadith and rejecting something that all of the people here saw the Prophet doing. Maybe the Hadith was abrogated, maybe the Hadit was khasisa it was for a specific person he preferred the Amal and that's why it's mutawatir for him Imam Shafi didn't agree with that when he went to Iraq and then to Egypt so he actually", "The Hadith is correct, it's a Madhhab.", "I don't know what they do in Mecca, but here's what they did here.", "Ibn Wahabin, once somebody asked Imam Malik al-Radayna about going between the toes in the wudu. And he made a remark and then Ibn Wa'habin said that he has a hadith that he got from Egypt that he recited and Malik said, I didn't know that hadith. And so that's one of the arguments of the Ahlul Hadith is that the Imams didn't all the hadiths of ahkam", "Ahkam but if you look and this is really important to remember because it's one of the big confusions about our modern Muslims. The Madhhabs are not the isolated opinions of the Imams. The Hanafi Madhab is not the opinion of Abu Hanifa always, but it's the methodology of Abu", "of Imam Malik is not the opinion necessarily of Malik. Malik's opinion, for instance, was you didn't raise your hands in dua. He didn't rise his hand in dua as his opinion. Maliks opinion was that Quran does not benefit the dead so he doesn't recite Fatiha in the janazah. Salat al-janazah", "So, there are many examples of this. That's a big problem is people don't know that the imams... it's a school with a methodology. All of the hadiths of ahkam are known by all four madhhabs. They know all the hadits. It's a matter of what's the methodology", "to determine that. So Abu Hanifa has his methodology so he won't take a hadith related to fiqh for instance of Abu Huraira if it differs from his methodology. Why? Because he's not amongst the fuqaha of the sahaba. So these are the methodologies that if we don't learn the methodology of our madhhab, we won't understand why they differ from the other madhhabs and you won't appreciate", "the ikhtiraf. So it's one of the great blessings of the ummah is the ikhteeraf and we getting back to what I said about not having the majami' in the history of Islam, we are the only world religion that has a normative tradition with such difference of opinion", "No other religion has that, a world religion. Judaism is arguably a religion for one ethnic group but in terms of the world religions we're the only one that our normative tradition incorporates difference of opinion. The Christians had to split because they couldn't, they could not absorb difference of", "normative traditions. So you have Catholics and Protestants, and then the Protestants because their methodology they opened up a myriad of sectarianism. So this book which inshallah I wanted to go over. I read this book with Sheikh Muhammad Ali Aqobi in its entirety and it's one of my favorite books he also wrote a beautiful commentary on this Ibn Abi Jamra who was an Andrusian", "who was an Andrusian originally, but he ends up in Egypt. He's from the famous tribe of Al-Azd, which is one of the great Yemeni tribes. His student is Ibn al-Hajj al-Abdari, who was a great scholar originally from Fes, who ends up In Egypt. And Ibn Abi Jamrah, one of most beautiful stories about him was Ibn Al-Hadj came to him and said he wanted to study with him. And he said, I don't have anything to teach you.", "to study with you and he kept coming back and finally ibn abijamra said to him i will um i'll sit with you we under one condition we studied together and allah is our teacher that was the condition that he stipulated it's a very humble man he uh he wrote this book it has a taufeeq that's amazing", "And then he did an amazing commentary on it called Bahjit Nufus. In our tradition, we have what are called blurbs where somebody writes something like oh you should read this book because it's amazing. He has 70 at the end of his book, he has 70 visions of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam", "and the Prophet ﷺ told them, if you want to understand my sunnah then read Ibn Abi Jamrah's commentary on al-Bukhari. Seventy visions from all different... So he wrote this book He is an amazing scholar", "When the hadith study and memorization of the hadit is one of the quickest means to Allah", "to Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala based upon many athar in that. Whoever delivers to my ummah one hadith, that by it a sunnah is established or an innovation is refuted for him will be paradise", "I mean, these again, these are So There are many athar The ulama say that for weak You know, hadiths that have weak That they're good for the We don't use them for aqeedah We don'T use them", "And you have seen the Himmah has weakened", "And that's why Imam Al-Laqani says,", "abridgements are necessary these days. Hence, he took the al-Bukhari and abridged it to a much shorter version here. So he said, There's a lot of books now and they have all these chains.", "and from it I will shorten the hadiths according to their need.", "related with at least the Rawi. That was the tradition.", "If you want to make people fitna, then accept me as a non-mufthun.", "war is about to break out let me die before I see it so he saw the fitna and he made a dua within one month he was dead and he relates in the sahih none of you should desire death right but because of some harm that afflicted him", "commentators say Imam Al-Shinawi says that it's because the daraar, that you should never ask to go back to Allah is worldly but if its otherworldly right then that's actually permissible. That's what he said. That how they kind of get him out of that contradiction", "And one of the judges who I knew, who had both knowledge and also had traveled. So he wasn't provincial.", "that he heard from this man who had ma'rifah and also traveled, and he was well known for his virtue. That Al-Bukhari is a book that if you read it during times of tribulation, that's why Sheikh Muhammad, he revived that tradition, Sheikh Muhammad al-Yaqoubi, of doing the khatm of Al- Bukhara because there's great benefit in doing it for removal of trials and things.", "Because if it's on a boat, it's not going to drown. The ship won't go down. And he said I wanted because of the barakah that is in hadith and because of what's the heart of oxidation this rust that gets in the hearts", "on the heart, when you , and it will remove these difficulties of these impulses and desires that are distancing us from Allah. And perhaps that it will save us from drowning in the seas of innovations and sinfulness.", "So he begins it with the hadith of Wahi beginning, how Wahi began. And he ends it with a hadith about people getting into paradise and that's why he called it", "the goodness of the beginning and also the goodness at the end. So, the goodness in the beginning is revelation coming back to humanity through the prophet, and the goodness on the end is the end of our lives. And today Dr. Janner said something really important that got me thinking. He talked about when we collectivize calamities like when", "we hear about people, 10,000 people died or now 30,000. He said that we forget that there's no collective death. Like when you talk about 3,000 died on 9-11 or a million people died in Afghanistan those numbers are they don't have real meaning because the reality of it is each one of those was an individual", "was an individual death. It was a human being confronting their mortality and experiencing it at that moment, and that was uniquely theirs. And it was decreed for them, and there was no way they could escape it. And so this great gift that we've been given which is guidance from the Prophet , it's just important to remember", "life in a collective experience we're all here together but we're experiencing the world through our own unique lens which is why one of the beautiful statements in that book in that poem about wisdom you know you know of knowing what none has known before each one of you has a unique journey to Allah and you will know in a way that no other human being", "It's your unique awareness. It is your unique experience and so it's a great blessing that we have connection with the man who died in 699, and he was concerned about the weakness of the people at that time And all these people that were lost in sinfulness and innovation and these things and then he wanted to write a book That was his Nia and this one of the greatest Salihin", "that it would revive people and help them. So I named it in accordance with the reason, the intention why it was put down.", "one of the blessings of these books is that they make these duas and he was mujabid dua these are people whose prayers were answered so he said that you know my hope is that allah will complete it for me and for anyone who reads it or hears it that the beginning of khair and the end of khayr will be theirs the beginning", "and you know that it removes, remover of things. And for the diseases of our religion a healing. So... That's the introduction.", "from the beginning until the end you know the the mauritanians for instance in muritania they hadith comes very late um so i mean obviously they there's a lot of hades in the books there's hadees in the book of grammar there's hades in the box of bala there's hajis in the in the boxes uh you know that they read infir and in different subjects but when", "go outside of Mauritania to read the hadith so they would go to Morocco and they and they would read today Sheikh Abdullah would Ahmed not memorized Albuquerque in my house the whole thing when he was living with me alhamdulillah is amazing himma", "the quran like you go from indonesia to the united states you find an arabic quran and it doesn't have mistakes in it whereas the hadith it doesn' t have that protection so there are there and then the hadis are difficult because there are different riwaya so sometimes like in the first hadith", "I mean, all of those are related. So sometimes you have to navigate just the different riwayat in the same hadith. So that's how they traditionally... Now they've begun to study the Quran because there's been a revival. In Morocco,", "In Morocco also, there was much more focus on Quran and on fiqh. So when you look at the West African tradition, the Maliki tradition in particular, Imam Malik separated hadith and fiqah. So his fiqih class was not his hadith class. His hadith was completely separate. Moreover he didn't mention hadith in his fiqiq class. Like they say what's your daliil? You couldn't say that in Imam Maliks' class", "Who wants to have goodness and make him understand the religion", "and the Riyadh al-Sariheen for more, just for people like in masjids. You know, people read these hadiths and they're agreed upon hadith. Although in the Arba'in Hadith there is a problem in the hadith Umartan uqatir an nas because people read that. Ibn Abi Jamr has a brilliant explanation because it's in this collection also. But he said that hadith is from the khasais of the Prophet ﷺ", "the prophet he's the only one that was allowed to do that and that's why i said umirtu he didn't say like that's unique to him and it was only for the uh the arabian peninsula and there's an argument was only because the hijaz has a you know it's a sacred space so um that that's that's important to note so but in in in morocco they study i mean", "Muhaddithun Abdullah Tareedi revived that with his teachers the Gumari brothers who were all Muhadithun and very accomplished Muhadidthun so they have still chain and Sened but they tend to read Bukhari, Muwatta and Sahih Muslim They don't have the tradition of the Indians have of doing Sitta So in India you know and probably the Indians are the last community", "that really they've held to that tradition of the ulama have to go through the collection, all six. And in the Indian tradition traditionally they began with the Mishkat al-Masabi' which is late but it's a brilliant collection because it gives you a really good... I mean one of my favorite books is the Ahadith al-muntakhaabah", "Ibn Majid. So those were the six. And Nisa'i has two, he has his longer version which had a lot of unreliable Hadiths but his Mujtaba is it's actually after probably at Bukhari and Muslim you know, he as a very rigorous criterion. Any other?", "Felly, i Hajr ibn Asgolani, sy'n ddyn mawr hefyd ar y hadith, fe wnes i fy nghyleidyddio â llyfr hwn o Bologal Maram. Roedd hynny'n fawr iawn, sut roedd e wedi ei gosod gyda'i gilydd.", "like for Qadis, for judges or something. But I saw a lot of different hadith that I wouldn't see in other books. I don't know if you could speak a little more about that but also my other part question is two parts. When I read certain books such as like certain scholars they would claim that they're Maliki or Asharim but then at some point they reach a level and can what level this person have to go through", "and how did they arrive to that? So about the Bulugh al-Muram, there's two books that are very popular in that genre which is what are called Ahadith Al-Ahkam. So these are Hadith like Umtah Al-Ahhkama, Al-Maqdasi. That and Bulug al-muraam are both used. They're very similar but they have the majority of hadiths that are used because when you look at", "the ayat al-ahkam and the hadith that relate to fiqh rulings they're not that many because many, many rulings I mean I once asked when I was probably like 20 years old and I asked one of the I had read that Imam Al-Awza'i afta bi sab'ina alf masada bi qar Allah wa qara Rasulullah it might be an exaggeration but I read a biography of Imam Al-'Awza'", "Imam al-Awza'i when I was very young, when I in the Emirates studying. And Hisham Al-Burhani had done his PhD on Fiqh al-Awza' and he was one of my teachers. So I read this biography. One of things that I remember from it which I really liked was he was on his way to... because he was from Syria but he's on his ways to Beirut and he came to a fork in the road and there was a cemetery and there is an old woman sitting", "If you want the graveyard, you can go there.", "did and they say that thousands tens of thousands people came Muslim the day he died a lot of Christians and everything there were so many people out in any case I was a little detour so though the books of cam the one even Hodges book and the one of imam al-maqdasi those were very common and and they have generally commentaries by different madhub", "one of the Maliki scholars did a commentary on Umdat al-Ahkam. So he'll show you, oh we don't agree with this for this reason. So that's one of things. So it's important to not use these books to derive your rulings from because that's the level of a mushtahid. So now you asked about the mushthahid so there's different levels of ishtihad. There's ishtihad and mas'ala. You know so you have an ishtihat of a mas'alah", "Sheikh Muhammad Bufaris, Sheikh Talal. There's different scholars here that could do that which is where you study one issue really well and you really know it from a lot of different perspectives and you come up with your like the Yusuf Ismail who will be the first to admit he's not a mushtahid but he's doing ijtihad in the prayer times because so in Masala", "In Masala, even a doctor can do that. There's Ishtihad in Qibb for instance. You know those type things. That just means you're exhausting your efforts to try to understand the situation. Most of us are what are called Muqallidun. Taqleed is that you follow somebody but you don't know their Dali'l. But you know they're trustworthy.", "says that you leave the hands at the side. The Mutab' which is a later term, a Mutab's is somebody who follows the Imam but he knows the Dali'l right? But they're not like a Mujtahid, they just know like if you ask them why do you hold your hands at your side those say oh because it's the Amal of Ahle Madina there's no Sahih Hadith for Qabad all", "as been shown by the Fuqa of the Maliki. Something like that. He'll know how to defend his position of not just being a blind follower. And then you have Mujtahid, just fatwa. Right? So somebody who has enough knowledge and they can do an Ijtihad, like somebody comes and asks them for something. If they know the Mashur of the Madhhab, they can just give the opinion. They're", "Fatwa alif, fatwa ba and fatwajim", "They know the methodology of their teacher that they can if they get a new issue comes up If it's in the areas or they can give fatwa then that and then but is it means more? Like somebody who has to have a deeper knowledge And then jeem is can't be done by individuals It can only be done government bodies like declaring war You can't you can't have an individual declare war. Like I do I declare war on California this ago", "it creates anarchy. And then you have a mujtahid madhhab, which is somebody who's in the madhhb and he chooses Qadi Abu Bakr ibn al-Arabi, he'll choose the preferred opinion for him as a mujta'had so he'll look and even though the madhhab might say that fatwa is marjooa like it's not the raja, it's", "يقول أن الأدلال أكثر بذلك. لذا سيقول أنني سأقوم بالقبض لأنني أعتقد أنه هذا الحديث لأن أعتكر أنه مواجهة", "Actually, that's like Ibn al-Qasim. So those people are... They've reached a level where they're a mujtahid but they're still using the usool of their madhhab of their imam. And then finally you have mujtihid muttaq and that person is somebody who comes up with his own usool. So, those are like Abu Hanifa, Layth ibn Sa'ad, Imam Abdul Rahman", "Some say Al-Bukhari was a mujtahid mutlaq. Some say he was shafi'i. The majority, Tajid al-Subki puts him in the tabaqat al-shafi'iyya. So Allah knows. His opinions seem to coincide with the Shafi-i madhab so there's a strong case that he was Shafii.", "Although I once asked one of the Mauritanians how, why all the great Muhaddithun were Shafi'i. And he said, look a little deeper. He said, Look at all Imam Nowi who's he quoting? He's quoting all Maliki's like Ibn al-Waqal and Qad Ayyab. These are just nukat. Is that clear?", "Taqlid is not a... It's a blameworthy state. But if it's your state, don't think... Don't get above your... Not your pay grade but your pray grade. Yeah. You know because people we can't... The hadith are too... There's hadith that are mutadariba. Their hadith literally contradict each other and they're both sahih. And so the ulama have all these ways of trying to get", "Is to force people to think because the thing about Islam, it's a thinking person's religion. It's not a religion for dummies I mean you can be a dummy and be a Muslim But but the religion itself that the Dean it's it's not early. It said religion The Quran was revealed in a way. It is not a linear book It's a book that needs deep ta'mul the deeper you do the Ta'mul more cohesion you see in it", "But if you go to it just as a book, a lot of people read it and they're like what? It's like changing tenses. It's changing first person second person third person. They really have a difficult time but the deeper you go into the Quran the more cohesion there is and it's been brought out by people like Imam al-Biqa'i", "A lot of the Quranic tafsirs are purely linear, but people like Ibn Zubair, al-Gharanati, Imam al-Biqa'i, one of the great Lebanese scholars. They show that there's a deep tenasb in the Quran that can only be penetrated through deep study and the hadiths are like that they force people to think", "The reality of the good people,", "and because all the books are accessible. Traditionally, you know they called it wijada in our hadith tradition. Wijada was people that found books and read them without being in a chain, without studying. So traditionally I mean they didn't permit it, the ulama but over time", "If like Sheikh Mohammed Al-Aqoubi, may Allah preserve him. He revived the amazing Istanbul publication of al-Bukhari which is the best one of all the printed editions so he actually reprinted that recently and wrote an amazing introduction to that.", "The Deoband have good, they're not well published but they are actually well edited. Dar al-minhaj like this edition of the Mukhtasir of Sahih Al Bukhari is well edited But you still every once in a while find mistakes so if you don't know and then also Imam al-Dahabi famously", "The Prophet said, whoever lies about what I said intentionally he should take his seat in hell. And that's a mutawatir hadith so it's multiply transmitted. It's absolutely sound factual hadith. It is as valid as any verse in the Quran. That should give people", "give people pause, you know just because it's very serious and You know He actually said that he would fear that somebody who did not know grammar and quoted hadith with lehan And may Allah forgive us because I know I've done that in the past so But he said that. He would be afraid that they would fall into that category of people telling a lie because the Prophet never Had had a solacism. He never ever used bad grammar", "bad grammar. His grammar was perfect. So one should know Nahu and Sarf. Especially, I mean, Sarf is the problem with a lot of Hadiths. Nahu's relatively easy as you guys are learning just in terms of I'rab it's not that difficult but Sarf", "because there's just, there's a lot of different. Is it ? I mean they're all possibilities. So if you just see , which one is it? And I mean fortunately a lot these are well commented on so there are great commentaries and very often they will give us,", "So they'll tell you what it is. If it's like, You know, So they will say in the commentary, Because everybody knows Nasir-i Yansuru. But not everybody might know Rajaf-e Yarjufu. Alhamdulillah.", "I'll do inshallah when we do the next session", "Musalsal bal awwaliya So it will be haqiqatan as opposed to Idaafatan because the ulama differ on the musalsal Is it musalsa bal awwaliyah, haqi qatan or ijaafatan? so if it really is the first one you heard from the person then its haqi Qatam", "Before I go into inshaAllah the first hadith which is really an amazing hadith from Imam Al-Bukhari", "Imam al-Bukhari. Traditionally, when you studied Hadith, you began with the Musalsal bal Awaliya and the Musalsa Hadith tradition is still continued throughout the Muslim world they continue it in all the Muslim countries where there's still knowledge that you have this tradition amongst the scholars", "Who basically relate to you the chain and then the musalsal is", "Musalsal is something where there's something in the hadith that is replicated throughout the transmission. So one of the most famous ones, in terms of just the nukat of Ahl al-Hadith, is the qabda ala lahya. So the Prophet related a hadith and then qabada ala lahyatihi. So every rawe would grab their beard", "their beard. Imam Dahlawi's daughter, when she would relate the hadith, she would grab her chin. So that's the Musalsal. There are many like the Adhiyafa Bil Aswadain, water and dates. When we used to visit Sheikh Ahmed Jabir Gibran, one of the great scholars from Yemen, from Tihama who was anybody", "Anybody who had the good fortune of knowing him and visiting him, spending time with him. He always did the Musal Salat like it was just something that he would always do.", "He has a book on, he did Natham of Imam Al-Bayhaqi Shua'ab al-Iman. So he has many books but he was just a really amazing scholar. I once, I've got a brand new watch like a stopwatch sorry pocket watch because a lot of the older ulama they all used pocket watch. Sheikh Mashaik nodding his head cause that's you just for whatever reason", "pocket watch, but he had this really old pocket watch. So I bought a brand new one and I went and asked him if I could trade with him. And he looked at mine it was brand new and then he said, Khuda, I'll be cheating you. And I said no, no, I think I'll get the better deal. So we exchanged watches. It stopped right when we got out of the haram, the hudud, it stopped working. And i could never get it to work again.", "was upset, you know. Because it was he used to do his prayer times in the Haram and I'm taking it to California. Yeah doesn't work so but I still have the watch but it doesn't works. But he always did the Musal Sal and he was the first person that I heard the Musalsal Barawaliya with Sheikh Abdullah Al Qadi in Mecca", "who was called the Musnad of the Hijaz. He was really one of the last great Muhadithun, but I was fortunate also to hear it from Sheikh Mohammed Abul-Huda Al-Yaqoubi, for people that know him they know, I think inshallah have some idea of the level of his scholarship, but for the people that don't know him he's a long line of really ulama from the Hassani scholars of Morocco, the Yaqoub family", "but his father, Sheikh Ibrahim Ali Aqib was one of the great scholars of Syria. And he was also a quite rare, he was a faqi in both madhhabs of the Maliki and the Hanafi. So Sheikh Muhammad grew up learning both madhhabs which is very unusual. It's difficult enough to learn one madhhab but to learn two.", "So I'm going to do this first just for the barakah of it. I'm not, lestu min ahluha hadhusha'an. I am definitely not from this you know the people of this science but for the Barakah to keep these things alive in our Ummah This is the Musalsal Bilawwliya which means the first Hadith The Salsala in it what's the link in this is that they", "this was the first hadith they heard. And then there's haqiqah and idhafa, so is it was the firs hadith that they heard haqi-katan or idhafatan as a musalsal? So for me when I first heard this from both of them I think it was Musalsal bin Awliya haqi qatan. And I was fortunate to read hadith with both of those scholars and benefited greatly from their knowledge but Sheikh Muhammad", "Sheikh Muhammad is a in his . So we're going to read it for the of these names, also to keep the names alive. Because one of things when you think about it everything that we have is from these and one of the things that traditionally the Muslims did like on the 17th of Ramadan they would recite the names of the people of Badr just to keep their names alive there's a great blessing in just their names", "Just by mentioning their names, Rahma descends on us. So I'll do this in Arabic.", "أخص بالذكر منهم العلامة شيخ محمد أبو الهدى لعقوبية الحسنية الإدريسي والعلامة الشيخ أحمد جابر الجبران رحمهم الله وقد اقتصرت هنا على إسناد واحد اختصارا وتسهيلا حدثنا شيخنا العلامت محمود أبوا الهدا لعقول الحسني الإدریسي ابن العلام الكبير العرف الشهير إمام المالكيتي ثم الحنفية", "في الجامع الأموي الكبير بدمشق السيد شيخ إبراهيم العاقوبي الحسني الإدريسي وهو أول حديث سمعته منه عن العلامة الكبيرة العرف الشهيرة السيد شيخ محمد المكي بن محمود ابن جعفر الكتاني الحسيني الإدریسي مفتي الماركية في براد الشام وهو أو الحديث انسمعته", "برمدينة المنورة وهو أول حديث سمعته منه عن وارده السيد اسماعيل ابني زين العابدين البرزانجي الحسينية الشافعي وهو أو الحديث انسمعته", "وقال حدثنا محدث الإمام أبو السعيد الاسماعيل بن أحمد النيسابوري وهو أول حديث سمعت منه", "ويجب أن نتحدث عن أبي محمد عمر بن دينار المكي", "عن الصحابي الجليل سيدنا عبد الله ابن عمر بن العاص رضي الله عنهما قال قال رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم الراحمون يرحمهم الرحمن تبارك وتعالى ارحم من في الأرض يركم من في السماء وفي رواية يرهمكم بالرفع على الدعاء", "May Allah reward all of the men in that chain for carrying the knowledge to us.", "Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala bless them. So we're gonna start now with Imam Bukhari's first hadith that he relates", "ثم حبب إله الخلاء وكان يخلو بغار حراء فيتحنث فيه وهو تعبد والليالي ذات العدد قبل أن ينزع إلى أهله ويتزود لذلك ثم يرجع إلى خديجة فيتزود لمثرها حتى جاءه الحق وهو في غار حرا فجاءه الملك", "فقال فأخذني فغطني حتى بلغ مني الجهد ثم أرسلني فقلت ما أنا بقارئ فأخرزني فاغطني الثانية حتى بالغ منى الجهدا ثم ارسله فقا لإقرا فقوة ماء نبي قارئن فاخذني في غطني ثالثة ثم", "خلق الإنسان من علاقة إقرأ وربك الأكرم فرجع بها رسول الله يرجف فؤاده فدخل على خديجة بنتي خويلد رضي الله عنها", "فقالت له خديجة كلا والله ما يخزيك الله أبدا إنك لتصل الرحمة وتحمل الكلا وتكسب المعدوم وتقر الضيف وتعين على النوائب الحق", "ورقة ابن نوفل ابني أسد ابني عبد العزة ابن عمي خديجته وكان امرأة تنصر في الجاهلية وكان يكتب الكتاب وكان", "فقال له ورقة يا ابن أخي ماذا ترى؟ فأخبره رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم خبر ما رأاه", "ليتني أكون حيا إذ يخرجك قومك فقال رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم أم مخريجيهم؟ أو أم خريجية هم؟ قال نعم لم يأتي رجل قط بمثل ما جئت به إلا عودية وإن يدركني يومك أنصر نصراً", "Alhamdulillah. So this hadith is from Aisha Radhi Allam, Umm al-Mu'mineen and Aisha obviously heard this from the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam because she was I mean her age", "is debated in the hadith that's related in Al-Bukhari and Muslim. In Al- Bukhara it says she was six when there was a betrothal, and then nine when she entered into the house of the Prophet . But if you actually look at the... She dies on 58 after Hijrah but her sister Asma", "sister Asma died in 73 and she was 100 years old. And Asma was 17 years older than Aisha. So, Asma would have been 27 at the time of the Prophet's death which means she would have", "The reason for that, there's several reasons. One of them is that when the Prophet came in she was with all her friends and in the hadith this is when she first comes in they all run away and children love the Prophet . So these were girls who already entered into their puberty. They were not children because the children loved the Prophet and they would not have run away from him but out of shyness", "were already at that age. In any case, the age of Aisha was never an issue for pre-modern peoples. Washington Irving in his famous book which is not a great book and it's terrible book in some ways but he wrote a book about the Prophet, The Life of the Prophet. It was a best seller in the United States. Another man, one of the descendants of George Bush whose name is Reverend George Bush also wrote", "Bush also wrote a biography so people were very interested in the Prophet in the 19th century because of the Ottomans and because the Americans were involved in commerce and the Muslims were in the Mediterranean. In any case, none of them mentioned Aisha's age, none make a comment about it because it just simply was not an issue for them. It was very common", "The custom is determined by our origin.", "And the Sharia recognizes that and acknowledges that. So, that's important. But she was a brilliant woman. She had a photographic memory. She memorized... In fact, al-Hakam in the Mustadrak says that we owe a fourth of our deen to Aisha. She also corrected Sahaba. She corrected Abu Hurairah in the famous Hadith about taking a bad omen from Atiyyatul Minatharaf.", "And when Aisha heard that, she said it's not true. He misquoted it. The Prophet said they used to say in Jahiliyyah that bad omen are three and so she actually negated that. So the point being she is one of the great scholars of our religion", "And she's obviously the daughter of the second. So, she said that the revelation began with the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. So it began as a true visions, a sound vision in his sleep.", "a true dream is 146 of prophecy. So every human being, even people outside of the faith can have access to true dreams. They occur. There are many people that have become Muslim through true dreams I know somebody who actually saw the Prophet before he became Muslim who told him to become Muslim so that does happen and why some people are gifted with those things and why others we that's not discernible", "to us, Allah knows best. In any case a true dream this was the beginning of revelation because it's a preparation. He would not see a dream except that it came like the breaking of dawn which is very interesting because Ibn Abi Jamrah says the breaking", "in full flowering yet. It's just emerging because he had to be prepared for the momentous events that are going to happen to him, because we can't even imagine as a human being seeing an angel fill the entire horizon. I mean Moses had to you know in the Quran it says Hayatun tasaa In one verse it says it was a hayatun", "it says it was a th'abban. When he initially threw it down, it was small snake so that he wouldn't be afraid but when he threw it with Moses, it's a th-abban So could you imagine him being told throw down your staff and then he has to experience this thing These are human beings that have the capacity that the average human beings even the most extraordinary human beings just simply don't have", "But he had to be prepared for this. And so, ثُمَّ حُبِّبَ إِلَهِ الْخَلَى This is very interesting. And Aisha, she's so brilliant and this Hadith really brings out a lot of her brilliance. But حُّبِّي بَإِلِهِ الخَلٰى So he became أَلِفَ النُسْكَ وَالْعِبَادَةَ وِالْخَّلْوَةً وَهَكَذَا النُّجَبَاءُ Imam al-Bursaidi, he says that the Prophet accustomed himself", "to these rituals, um, to devotion, to uh, to ibadah and also to khalwa just to being alone with his Lord. And then he says this is the way of nujabat intelligent people. Intelligent people can only take so much of a lot of time because first of all most talk in Arabic", "is from, you know it's the verb is, it's just empty talk. If you actually took looked at what human beings talk on a daily basis, the vast majority of it is just chit chat backbiting and to how much are those onions? You know that's what people talk. Actually high-talk is not that common to actually be in environments where", "some people, that's all they talk about. They won't go down to that simple level. Like if you spend time with Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah, he just doesn't have chitchat. Murabit al-Hajj had no chitchats. Murabad al-Haajj told me that he stopped drinking tea because of the chitchatz involved in drinking tea. He just wasn't interested. It doesn't mean we're human but you have to see that there are people that are selected out amongst human beings", "human beings and these are the guides. And that's why they just have qualities, and that's one of their qualities is that they tend to be introverted. They tend to have a hard time. As you get older—and I guarantee most of you in here are young people—as you get", "In fact, in Hinduism it's actually a stage of their life. The last stage where they literally withdraw from society to prepare for death. So they actually had it in their tradition that that's what you did at a certain age. Like they give up Rajas food when they hit 50. They stop eating spiced food. They eat simple food. This is part of preparing for that journey which comes after death. Right? Once we die we have another journey and", "was saying in his khutbah today about when you think about these 14 enemies that he talked about, death is one of the things that we're being confronted with. And the thing about death, you could be 20, you", "We're here for a purpose if we really believe this. And that purpose is partly, I mean not entirely because there are wonderful things about the world. Family is a wonderful thing. Company is a beautiful thing. All these things are beautiful things but the fundamental reason is we're here to do work,", "And then Imam Abu Sayyidi says, When the hidayah comes into a heart, the limbs become animated with ibadah. The beautiful expression in the Hamziyah.", "When it comes into the heart, then the limbs spontaneously begin to want to do worship. It could be munsarif or gharmunsarif, the two rewires.", "This is called Idraj in the hadith tradition. So sometimes, the Muhadith will add something for clarification. So for instance one of those famous examples that's used in the books is in the Hadith of Ibn Majah where the Prophet said So the wa muslima was added to make sure people didn't misunderstand that hadith because it meant men and women", "men and women. So the mudraj is an addition that the muhadith adds for clarification. So he's saying yetahnathu is an unusual word I think one of the meanings wallahu ta'ala alam, al-hinth al-azim is shirk so in the Quran hinth is shirq you know these false oaths and the idols worship of the idols. Tafaul in Arabic as you learned", "One of the meanings of it is to jannub. You know, to avoid something. Like tahajjud is to avoid sleep. Hujud is sleep. So one of the meaning of tahnuth in Arabic is to avoids hinth because the Prophet couldn't worship in the Ka'bah was very difficult for him because of all the shirk and idols so he would go off and he would do this in Ramadan", "in Ramadan. He would go off and he would worship in Ghar Hira. And one of the secrets of Ghar Hirat is, in the pre-modern world before the buildings got too high, you could see the Kaaba from Ghar Herat. So he had three acts of worship when he was in Hiraat. He had the worship of khalwa because there's a hadith that says al-khalwatu ibadah just being alone is a type of worship which is one of", "Because people aren't alone anymore. It's one of the sinister aspects of the qareen. You know, the cell phone is like a qareem. It is with us all the time. This little daemon. They actually call it daemon inside if you go in those. Right? And then it opens up and the Prophet said that there is a fitna man tasharrafa laha tastashrifhu", "hole whoever opens it looks at it it pulls it him in well i think that's the the uh the net because you can't go on there for one thing except you find yourself with another thing and i know everybody in here has had that experience is a big problem if you don't have real discipline it's a big", "Wasting their lives away. Even all this, you know Twitter do you really have to have an opinion about everything? Really is it that important for you just to put your little comment there Your two cents that doesn't amount to a hill of beans in the grand scheme of things It's very interesting humans The Imam al-Ghazali said that you should talk when you don't want to talk and you should not talk when", "not talk when you want to talk one of the best things I heard from one of students here everybody had their opinions and then I said to her what do you think she said everything I wanted to say has already been said and I just like well no you don't have to feel compelled to say something silence the Arabs say either can is so cool too either can the car amam in Philadelphia", "If speech is silver, silence is golden. And the English share that. They probably stole it from the Arabs like many things including tea. I mean they call it English tea. It's not right. From India. Very interesting. So then this is very interesting and this is the brilliance again of Aisha.", "So these are Layali. Because Adad can be Adad Qilla or Adad Kathra. So because she phrased it this way, we know that these were multiple nights. It wasn't a few nights. Before he Naza'a Yanza'u is to Zahaba Ilayh Bil Ishtiaq Like you got Nuzua'an Ilayhi One of the Arabs who said", "فمن كان في استعرابه نزوعا إليهم في الفصاحة والفهم", "So he would go to his family with, she didn't say ذهب. In other words, he wanted to see his family and this is also partly because you cannot do عبادة without fulfilling the حقوق on you because the family has حق. So it was important. وَيَتَزُوَّدُوا لِذَٰرِكَ And then they used to meet and there's a masjid in Mecca where we used to visit when we did the Umrahs where Khadija used to", "to meet him as he came down from Jabal Noor and then she would give him his Zad was Kaak and Zabib so it was like a bread with simen not like Kaak today Kaak is probably from Arabic cake, cake but it's a round bread and Zbib raisins", "And then the truth came to him. So he was in the cave. So the Malik came to Him. This is Jibreel Alayhi Salaam. So Ibn Abi Jamrah says, this is a dhalil ala jawazat tawriya. In balagha tawria is when you say something and you say it's ambiguous because Jibril, this for ta'deeb", "Because remember, even though the Prophet is over Jibreel. Jibrel is his teacher and this is something for all of us here as teachers we know there are students that surpass us and if you're a true teacher you want your students to surpass you. You don't want them to be dependent on you. Your teaching them these tools to free them to become independent thinkers themselves access to the books and things like that.", "So the Prophet, his teacher is Jibreel. But he's over Jibrel . So Jibreal , this is for Ta'deeb, Iqraa. He knows he can't read. Jibril knows this and there's an amazing Hadith Imam Syuti has in his book on Isra where before the Prophet went", "But went on a journey. On the Isra and the Mi'raj. He actually had a vision where he was with Jibreel in a tree. And they were in like an ish, like a nest. And Jibrel was in one and he was in the other. And the tree began to grow until it went into the heavens. And he was looking because everything was opening up to him in the unseen. So he was", "and Jibril was looking straight up. And so he said, he learned from him that he should be focused because they were, they were... He was being prepared to meet his Lord. And these are the different types of... The ulama actually there are different types", "But then there's other types of revelation. There's a revelation that came like the reverberation of a bell. There was one like that came, like the buzzing of a bee. Also, there's the The Prophet said He breathed into my heart. is fear related", "So he was inspired. This is a type of Wahi that's akin to Ilham. It just comes into his heart and he knows it. So he", "So don't be aggressive. Don't be greedy. Don' go and ask people for things. Everything will come to you. إِذَا سَأْلْتَ فَاسْأَلِ اللَّهُ If you ask, then ask Allah .", "So then he would go back to the house. And Ibn Abi Jamal says this is a proof that the fact that you go for needs does not break your ibadah because he would return. So it's like when you're in the mu'takif, these are ahkam al-a'tikaf. When you're on the a'tikof if you have something, it doesn't break your a'tikaf to do something out of necessity.", "So the Tauriyah is, you know it's something, it's just ambiguous. And he said the condition though is that you don't harm anybody with this. So when he said He said I don't know how to read. The beauty of Arabic also", "also I mean of the many beauties but one of the beauties is that words are sometimes extremely precise when necessary and then other times they're very loose. They hold a lot of difference. But in the case of qara'a yaqra'u it means to both recite and to read. So, the Quran is a reading and a recital. So it's said by rote but it's all traditionally", "Traditionally the Muslims, it was something they carried in their breasts. But Quran is also a recital, a reading so you read it. So he said There's different Rewaayahs this I think is the strongest one.", "to the angel. Or it could be for those of you who are doing Arabic here. And then he let me go, he released me. So ghatta is it's it's to pull him in and then to squeeze him.", "And until he thought He was going to burst That's how intense it was So and Jibreel We can't imagine the Shadeed al-quwa That's what he said That's How he is described In the Quran Shadeeed al-qwa So you can't even imagine What kind of Pressure that was Abu Bakr Was once with the Prophet When the revelation came And he thought His thigh That he was going To break his Femur It was The weight", "We will thrust upon you a weighty word. It had a physical weight as well. And then until he thought he was going to burst and then he released him.", "He did it three times. So the three times, there's a sirr in the three time Ibn Abi Jamrah says that these are this is what they call takhliya so in our tradition you have what's called takhlia", "similar concept, kenosis of emptying out. Emptying out bad qualities. So takhliya yatakhalla and look where the dot is it's on the top right? It's on top so the takhiliya is to empty out yatakhala to empty-out so there's nothing inside of bad qualities I mean the Prophet was pure but this", "is these all have meanings so that squeezing is the first one the Tahlia and then the second is the tahlia this is all of the positive qualities so the beginning of the path is Tahlial and then", "you work on adorning yourself with all of the virtues, what are called يَتَحَلَّ بِمَقَامَةِ الْيَقِينِ Ibn Ashir says يَ تَحلَّبِ مَقامَتِ الـيَاقِيمِ خَوْفٌ رَجًّ شُكُرٌ وَصَبْرٌ توْبً زُهدٌ تَوَكُّرٌ رِضًى مَحْبَّةٍ These are the qualities that were meant to inculcate these nine qualities that are related in our tradition of fear and hope and gratitude", "detachment from this dunya being content with Allah and finally where you have pure love for Allah and is removed from your heart it's outside of his heart just anything other than Allah and then it becomes, you can handle this because Aisha if you look at Aisha I mean look what she went through", "an aristocrat. She's from this incredible family. Her father is the most upright after the Prophet of all the Muslims and she's accused of adultery. And Allah says don't think it's bad, it's good for you. That's part of the process. There are many things people are going to be slandered attacked. Somebody talked to me yesterday and he was slandering horribly", "And then removed from his position and everything. And I told him, I said, Subhanallah. Like I really meant it. You know this is what happens to prophets. You can go through life and nobody ever says anything bad about you. Doing something wrong. This is the dunya. The people of Allah are always attacked.", "Always attacked. They have enemies. And they'll tell horrible things. They'll tell lies. They don't care. These people are minions of the devil. Without proof, without evidence. They attack people. They had no proof. Aisha lost her necklace. She was very light so they didn't feel the camel and then the poor man he's like walking right when he saw her he said وَإِنَّ إِلَهِ رَاجِعُونَ Like he knew it was a مصيبة.", "a musiba. And then he took her to the Prophet, peace be upon him, and then ah, the chatterers. This is sick people. And now they have, think if they had internet. Now they have internet. I mean, the devil. What tools he has today. In the past it all had to be, it took time. Now the Prophet said,", "He'll tell a lie and then it instantaneously goes to the horizons. You just push a little button. But Yom Kiyam is real, and we're going to see who's who. All the phonies are going to be shown up. They're going be people that will have flags coming out of their rear ends of the treacherous people. Out of their", "It's going to be a good day. It's gonna be a GOOD DAY! If you're, as long as you're a mu'min and you have taqwa of Allah it's gonna to be A GOOD DAY And everybody will get what they hopefully not what they deserve but the bad people will get What they deserve The good people hopefully They are gonna be forgiven But those people that sowed dissension Sowed corruption Spread rumors Told lies Started wars Killed people mercilessly", "mercilessly I mean these people now what they're doing in these different places there's no oppression on that day why would Allah say that because this is a world, this is an abode where there's going to be difficulties. This is the nature of the abode so then he said", "Read this is what he was meant to recite in the name of your Lord So Ibn Abi Jamrah says, this is a proof that Because it didn't say you know Look into the heavens and the earth contemplate. No", "It's that another what is didlal shartu kamal wa laysa shartus saha. Wa laysa sharta sahah. It's the condition of complete or perfected iman, not the condition soundness of iman. And then kharaq al-insaan min alaq wa fi anfusikum afaratubsiroon So Allah goes from the Lord to the self", "Allah will show us signs in the self and on the horizon. In the self, and on The Horizon Until it becomes clear to them that this is the truth So what is the relationship between the Self and the Horizon? The relationship is it's the meeting place of heaven and earth", "So you are a heavenly being and an earthly being in a khalq jadeed. We're a new creation. We have an immaterial reality that's heavenly, and we have a material physical reality that is earthly. And that's why when Allah says in Surah Ar-Rum", "and in the diversities of your complexions, and your tongues, and you're complexions. So in the creation of the heavens and the earth", "And in your tongues and your complexions are signs for people who are alimine, rational beings. People that use their intellect. So that's called tibaq. So he has heaven and earth and then language and complexions. This is because our consciousness, our thought is immaterial. That's from the heavens.", "all the white, the brown, the black, the yellow, the red. That's all from the earth. It's all earthly and that's why heavenly people don't give a lot of credence to complexion. It doesn't have it's just from the Earth. I mean there's albino pigs. There's white pigs. Does that give them some kind of ontological status?", "status over brown pigs. It's ridiculous, but this is stupidity of our species and also this is a minions you know Iblis tricking people like because he literally says what am I going to bow down to black smelly clay? He uses the word black. He's like hmm because what color is smokeless fire that hottest fire it gets white", "gets white. So racism, racism is really Iblisism. That's all it is. It's just Iblise thinking he's better because of something elemental, something related to the material phenomenon not the spiritual and that's why Allah knew what they didn't know. They're looking at the outward of Adam alayhi salam", "You're going to put in the earth The one that sows corruption and sheds blood Not all of them Some are going to do that", "This is Khafakan. So he's having palpitations and this happens when you have like acute anxiety something so we can't imagine this experience that's happening to the Prophet ﷺ none of us can imagine that. So, he goes... This is his cousin and he's married to her they meet in Abdul Uzza and Abdul Manaf were brothers so they're both sons of Qusay", "So they both go back to Qusay. And these are tribal clan people, which is very common. And then, رضي الله عنها. So that's where he goes. He goes to the one that is going to give him solace of what this is. زمّلوني, زمِّلونی. Ibn Abi Jamal has a beautiful latifa that he used the مذكر جمع المذكر السالم. جمعة المذكرة في الفعل الأمر", "Like in Spanish, you use the third person. You say like, como esta usted? You don't say, como estas? How are you doing? You say, how is the teacher doing or the usted, the sir, doing? Many traditional cultures have this. In Urdu, you need a PhD to work out all the different", "Because they have all the, even your birth order is going to determine what you're called in traditional Urdu. So he says, So he has this fright. This is a roar. This Aisha's fasaha. She just says,", "She just says, she doesn't need to say to repeat it because she's already said that. So she says, as opposed to Now this to me is one of the most beautiful. It's just so powerful.", "Because he says, I'm afraid for myself. Like what's happening to me? And she says, This is like a forceful negation. There's no way. No.", "wallahi swearing an oath ma yughzikallahu abada your lord will never degrade you he will never humiliate you he won't do anything to you that is unwarranted abadan and then she says why innaka la tasiru rahim", "You take care of your relatives. You know, you maintain the bonds. You help your relatives when they're in need. You maintain those kinship bonds. وَتَحْمِلَ الْكَلِّ Allah talks about the كَلٌّ عَلَى مَوْلَاهُ The one who's just a'ajiz. He can't do anything. He's just reliant. She said, you bear the burdens of the weary. The people that just can't take care", "And then this is really the mu'dim, but they're using what they don't have to mean. So it's you earn or you give. You help those who have nothing by giving them something. Qiraya is the qira.", "is to be a good host. Like you prepare for the guests, their needs. Not just food but it also can mean like protection and so taqri al-dayf and this is one of the hallmarks of the Arab people. Of all peoples, you know the Arabs, one of my teachers he was an Arab but it's a true statement as an Ajamim I'll say like when he was asked", "asked. He was a Persian, but he knew beautiful Arabic. He said I'd rather be cursed in Arabic than praised in Persian. Sorry for it. And then he was asked once about which you know", "which people he preferred. He said, He said what I don't have in my lineage at least I have an intellect because we're not Shia-Ubiya you know the Shia Ubiya these were people that didn't like the Arabs no matter how they're the Prophet's people", "And whatever difficulties they're going through and things like that, we pray for them. And their language is our language. And then she said... And you help people in these... The reason again she said because nowa'ib, like Labib the poet he says", "There's nawa'ib al-khair wa nawa't al-sharr and there's nawaa'ib bataal and nawaa'ib haq. So you help in those things that are related to the truth, the calamities that come that befall people.", "The cousin of Khadijah. She's Bint al-Khawailid and that's the brother of his father. And so, but they both meet with the prophet at Qusay. Which some say is the beginning of Quraysh. So I'm going to take it back to Quraysch, Qusai.", "become a Christian in Jahiliyyah. He could write in Hebrew, which indicates this must have been one of the original because the Injil was probably in either Aramaic or Hebrew not in Greek which is what it is today Kona Greek", "Oh my cousin. The Arabs say that to their cousin and then they say to the older person, even if it's not their uncle just an older person or or and then so she said listen to your cousin because they're cousins by Qusayt", "Oh my son of my brother, my cousin. What are you seeing? So he told him what he'd seen. So waraqah was educated in Abrahamic revelation. He said this is the namus. Namus, there's different opinions about it.", "about it. Some say it means Jibreel, this is Jibrel. Some says it means the actual Wahi. It may be related to Nomos which is the law, the coming of the law because this is what the Arabs did not have. I wish I was a he says jada'a which is like a young you know, a young sprightly billy goat or something", "Billy goats or something. It's a... So I wish I was a youngster, he's saying, that I could be with you when your people drive you out. He can't imagine this. This is the gentle... He's the most gentle of people. He doesn't bother anybody. He only does good. He's Alameen.", "Nobody has a bad word to say about him. He can't imagine what... And he said, Because no man brings what you're bringing to them except he will be opposed. If I was with you on that day", "I will protect you. I will defend you in a strong way. He died right after that because he had knowledge of the, none of the people around the Prophet ﷺ had knowledge", "in their oral revelation how did he know all those stories and they're consistent with the with what the jews have how did He didn't learn it from the Jews", "about how long it was. And then he adds that Ibn Shihab, Imam Zuhri is one of the great scholars", "And then, so then he said after that,", "Again, filling up the horizon on a throne between the heavens and the earth. And again he ran back and said, Zamiluni, zamiluni. And that's when Allah said, Ya ayyuhal mudathir. And That's something...that's isti'nas So the Arabs in the Arabic language you like the Prophet once came upon Sayyidina Ali and he was sleeping", "him up and he had dust all over him. And he called them, So the Arabs, the hath that you're mutalabbis bihi, the Arabs will tukanik bil hal. So like Abu Huraira had the cat that he was holding so the Prophet called him Abu Hurera. So it's something in Arabic they do. So yeah you had muzzammil, it's the hahd that he", "Alhamdulillah. So that's, I wanted to read one thing that I just, it's very powerful and I just thought this is just a really extraordinary insight from Dr. Cleary. Allah ya rahmahu.", "He said that Khadija, who was not only the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad but also his only wife during her lifetime, was a successful international businesswoman.", "well acquainted with the morals and characters of her future husband. Although she was already 40 years, there's a khilaf about that I mean there is some tahqiq that she was younger than 40. She was more closer to 30 when she and Muhammad were married Khadija bore him six children their first child as son died at age two their last child also as son in infancy. The saintly Fatima mother of the Imams was the youngest of their four daughters.", "been married for 15 years by the time he began to receive revelations during his meditation in a mountain cave outside Mecca. Muhammad was already a mature man of 40, sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam, known in the community for his reliability but what he experienced in the cave created a profound turmoil. It was to Khadijah, beloved wife and mother of his children that he hastened retaining her own composure and keeping", "prophet, reminding him of his reputation for trustworthiness and assuring him that this could not be something like maladyat as he had first feared. Like he said, what he was worried about is that he was going to become a kahan. You know, kahana was something that the Arabs they had these people that got a type of you know, the jinn would give them information and things and that's initially what he", "what he was afraid of. And there's, you know, there are traditions a lot of the scholars will attack them but they're related by scholars Imam al-Bahqi ibn Abi Jamra that the Prophet, you knew that he was really troubled and was in a really almost despondent state of mind at one point. There's...and these are debatable things but the point is", "he's also a bashar. He's a human being with, you know, he had feelings as a human thing. He had grief. He has sorrow. He was in pain. I mean his waqa was worse. He said he had twice the pain of the average person when he got sick. So I think people sometimes forget that but he says beneath the color and drama of this famous incident lies a reminder of a human reality whose poignancy is", "of how one may feel about the reality of prophecy. He's talking to non-Muslims, which this book was written for so I think it's important to see that in that light and that is the plight of a woman whose husband, the father of her children he's in this state, he's just in this incredible state", "State. And even if divinely inspired. His first thought of is this a type of madness? How sublime must have been that sobriety? And how profound the inside of the woman who saw the truth of the matter and did not waver or doubt like she just no doubt", "No doubt. I mean, just to have that support of Khadijah. If she had plunged into anxiety or fear as any ordinary human being might understandably do under the circumstances, the intense agitation and distress, what would have happened? The sustaining wisdom and fortitude of this exemplary woman", "Would have far-reaching consequences. Over the next 10 years until her death at the age of 65, Khadijah continued to maintain her unflinching loyalty and steadfastness as the wife of the prophet. And the first to embrace Islam at any age, at an age when she might reasonably have expected", "a comfortable life and domestic tranquility. Instead, Khadijah shared the pains of ostracization and persecution visited upon the family and followers of Muhammad by opponents of his message. Khadija did not live to see Islam's ultimate triumph but this only highlights the purity and power of her certitude.", "As though her spiritual perception had penetrated the veil of time. Khadija's outstanding strength of character as mother of the believers shines through the darkness of those days of trial, as a beacon of a brighter future. As a truly exemplary woman she is not obscured by the brilliance of her husband in his prophetic role.", "In tradition, the light of the revelation is reflected in the clear mirror of her spiritual perception which had sensed the verity of the message from the very first. By virtue of her qualities, therefore, Khadija became the first earthly matrix of the historical dissemination of the method message through her partner, the prophet.\" Just forget how important she was", "Just to have that solace. Alhamdulillah. SubhanAllah. That's why no matter how dark it gets, when she had to suffer they ate leaves of trees.", "They were tortured. The Prophet saw them being tortured. He didn't tell all his Sahaba to kill themselves, to save them. He told them your destiny is Jannah. We can't do anything right now to help you. The same with Aisha when she, people misunderstand that just that sometimes", "sometimes you have to just bear these difficulties and just recognize that there's not a lot you can do other than just trust in Allah and believe in this revelation. And that, you know, that it's true. It's haqq. So you can look at the Muslims now. I mean, it's actually a nice time to be a Muslim. You know why? Because there's really", "There used to be a time when people, you know, there's all these perks to become Muslim. So this is a time. This is like one of those early periods where we're persecuted all over the place. People don't like Muslims. You know, it's what a blessing because the faith then it's real. It's not because, you", "to do. I don't know why. I want to rule this world. Any questions? Comments? Amazing story, the beginning of Wahi and he began his book with this beautiful", "exactly becoming Muslims? Yeah, well it says that they when they made the Pact of Medina it says So there's a whole khilaf about what that means and you have to study haruf al-ma'ani to appreciate. You know I was present in a debate between two great scholars about that ma'.", "They were two separate ummah. And they were both valid from a grammatical point of view. In any case, we're distinct from the Jews and the Christians. The Prophet made it very clear that we should distinguish ourselves from the Jewish and the Christian. There's no Abrahamic... We are united by Abraham but we are distinct branches.", "deviated, and Christianity deviated. And that's our truth claim. And people can take it or leave it. That's fine. But that's a truth claim the Jews don't accept the Christians, and the Christians don't seem to have a problem with that. I mean if you read Jesus in the Talmud, it's pretty shocking the punishments Jesus gets. If you read what is said about Mary, it is pretty intense but nobody seems to have", "reason Muslims are hammered because we don't accept Judaism and Christianity as valid religions today. We believe they were abrogated, that's our truth claim but the beauty of this religion is you don't have to believe that even in our own tradition we can't force you to believe it. You have your choice, lakum dinukum waliyyadeen and we can live together.", "never had a problem with living with other communities. In fact, John Locke's Treatise on Toleration came directly from studying the Ottoman millet system. Europe learned toleration, religious toleration from the Muslims and that's Edward Pocock who was his teacher at Oxford. Edward Pocock had studied Islam for several years in Aleppo and he went back to England. This is 17th century", "hundred Arabic manuscripts which is now the Edward Pocock Arabic manuscript library at Oxford. He was the teacher of John Locke. John Lockey wrote the treatise on toleration. So Muslims taught the world how to tolerate. I mean, the Romans were reasonably good but you basically had to accept they would allow you", "their pantheon of gods. You know, that was the deal. So you know as long as you and that's why the Jews were very often persecuted because they separated themselves. So the truth claims of Islam are very clear there is no ambiguity but Muslims learned a lot from the Jews, learned a", "respect. I mean, we have our truth claim. We can't just reject our religion to suit you. I that's not really fair but you know that that's the reality of it so you know alhamdulillah there they're you know yom qiyamah Allah says we're all going to be told why we were differing what all this meant and it's we just need to wait and be patient these are truth claims", "I'm very convinced. I mean, I have my yakin in my heart about this truth claim. I believe it. And the early Christian, they had very good relations outside of the Byzantines. The Byzantins did not like the Muslims because the ByzANTINES were persecuting all of the other sects who they viewed as heretics, the Nestorians. There are all these different sects of Christians that were persecuted", "that were persecuted. When the Muslims came, they said no you're all fine we don't have a problem with you and they let them worship and that's why that wonderful book was written by the Stanford scholar when Christians first met Muslims shows that they really... They actually shared prayer space because the Muslims needed prayer space there was a whole iconoclastic movement where the Christians because of the influence of Islam started destroying all the idols", "So none of the churches at that time had idols in them. So the Muslims used to pray in the churches. It was very interesting, Jews cannot pray in a church. Orthodox Jews cannot prayer in a Church. They can pray in Masjid. It's very interesting. They don't talk about those things but that's the reality because we're not idolaters whereas in the Jewish tradition Christians are seen as idolaters. Whereas we don't see them", "per se because we can marry them you can't marry an idolater and we can eat their food but they have a serious misunderstanding I mean there are, and I know there's a khilaf about that but I prefer the opinion that doesn't put them in that camp in any case Any other? Ahmed Khan Jazakallah Khair Sheikh What I'm wondering is what is the name", "name of the religion prior to the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam that they were practicing yeah because like the Quran will often refer to Millat Ibrahim Dinul Qayyim so what was the and I've heard some scholars use the terms Islam A'am and Islam Khas yeah", "were people on the Arabian Peninsula that, like Qasib bin Sa'idah, people like that who just knew God was one. They weren't idolaters. They believed in an afterlife. They were what would be called in Judaism Noahides. Like Noahidek people. There were definitely Christians. The Christians of Najran were there. There", "You know, monophysites. So they're the group that's now called... I mean, they don't like to be called monophsytes so I don't want to insult anybody but the Coptic church you know, they have a belief in the divinity of Christ. So I, you know Islam, Suyuti says Islam was the religion of the prophets. All the prophets are Muslimun.", "saying you're in a state of submission to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala so then you have the Muslim and then you add the Muslim Kamel. So the Muslim kamel would be one who, and that's why don't say you believe but say you've entered into the faith that's the sociological category that you're", "way the other religions aren't Islam but in the way that they were in submission to Allah you know the Christians pray and the Lord's Prayer thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven gives us their day thy will he done in other words I want to be aligned with your will which is Islam in in in the sense of the most thought", "as opposed to the sociological category of designating yourself as a Muslim distinct from other religions. In that way, we're the only Muslims. Does that make sense? Any other ladies? A few more, I'm fine, yeah. What time is the prayer here? JazakAllah khairan.", "I had a question about . I was wondering, do we know if he became a Muslim the same way like Abu Bakr and Khadija converted? Because you said he passed away soon after. Yeah, yeah, no, he was Muslim. He accepted the prophet's . Okay, thank you. Any other questions?", "Right there, Fatima too. Assalamu alaikum. Waalaikumsalam wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. You mentioned that there were three acts of worship that the Prophet ﷺ engaged in when he retreated today. I only mentioned two. You only mentioned one. Oh, good for you. That was a good catch. So there was the khalwa and then there was", "what he was actually doing it was probably some form of what today we would call meditation or invocation and then the third was nazar ila baits the prophet said to look at the kaaba is an act of ibadah so he was looking at the house of allah from the cave but good catch yeah", "My only solace in that is there's a famous hadith where the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam talked about the three evil murderers and they're only two mentioned in the hadith. So some say, I mean obviously it was the Rawi that forgot because the Prophet Salallahu Alayhi Wasallama wouldn't forget. Any other?", "Did the Prophet question how Wal-aqib al-Nafal knew what he knew about the prophet? Was there ever an instance where he came across the Injil, did he read it?", "He knew there's a very famous hadith. It's a problematic Hadith, but I think it's a true hadith But you know because the in the senates are very strong for it where the prophets ism was asked about the melala Fima yukta simo like what are they? What are they debating about and the Prophet said To his Lord and this is a dream So this is this is type one of the eight types of revelation where the Allah speaks directly", "Allah speaks directly to the Prophet in his dream. And this happened to Ahmed bin Hanbal, so we know that this is Ja'iz. So Allah asked him and the Prophet said, I don't know. And so the Hadith says,", "of it in his breast. And then he said, I knew everything and in the I knew what was in the heavens and the earth. And he said He said what they were discussing were the things that remove sins of people", "like doing wudhu when it's difficult and then staying in the masjid after the prayer waiting for the next prayer that's a kafara from sins so that hadith indicates that the prophet he had knowledge of i mean the quran is", "all the previous revelations so he knew all the previously in the same way jesus they don't know where jesus learned the torah because he began to teach in the synagogue and the rabbis were saying who where'd you learn this from because they all have chain that they knew and but isaac was taught directly so that's the thing about the prophets they know things directly", "I mean, Khadija in her genius, you know, her brilliance. She took him to the person that she knew could explain to him what was happening to him because he just all he needed was to be reassured because this was such a traumatic experience. I mean it was Zamiluni, Zamilunni, you now he was shaking and his heart palpitations and so she knew exactly what to do. That's why it's so amazing", "what she did. So he, and there's no indication that he would have questioned that. I mean, there were many signs the Irhasat were all there. The Irhasata or the Mu'ajizat before he actually got their direct revelation when he was a Buhaira, the Rahib al-Buhairah, the monk who knew he was prophet also the cloud cover you know his servant on the way to Syria", "he saw the cloud cover. Many, many examples of that and he began around the age of 38, he started hearing inanimate things which is very interesting because you find that in a lot of traditions just the inanimate world opening up. There's a very interesting in Burhan al-Mu'ayyad", "Imam Al-Rifa'i. Somebody asked him, you know, do inanimate things, is there any sentience in them? And he said yes and he didn't believe him. So he said when he put down his cup too hard, he heard the cup go ouch. Which is very interesting because the Prophet treated things very gently like he didn t throw anything", "throw anything he didn't it's very interesting like just i mean that's a very uh a lot of native traditions have that understanding allah allahu ala Allah knows best right the uh the Mauritanians they say", "Like the isbagh al wudhu is from the kafarat. So it's when you, when it's cold and you do wudu, it's a kafara for sins. When you're not feeling well and it's not dangerous to do wadu, because you can do tayammum but you do it nonetheless. And then", "When... And then when you're tired, like extremely tired. Those are all. And then in a hurry, like somebody's very quick and you stop and do it because voodoo should preferably not be rushed. Some people rush voodooo. I always tell people, you know, I didn't learn voodoooo. I mean, I learned voodooooo", "I learned Wudu when I first became Muslim. In fact, it was one of the very first things I did before I even became Muslim they had me do wudu which is very interesting and they did it properly like they had to sit down with a maqaraj you know like a pot to do it because much better done sitting down than standing up Sunnah has to be doing it sitting down or sitting on a stool", "really know wudu until i saw marabtar hajdu because then i realized wudhu is a it's a distinct it's about the mustaquilla it's not it's its own thing it's", "He did it over wudhu. He didn't need to do it, but he would do wudu ala wudh. Even when he was in wuduh. BarakAllahu fi kum. Inshallah may Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala give us tawfiq, forgive us our wrong actions, bring us closer to Allah and his messenger. Ask Allah subhana wa ta'da inshaAllah to bless this month and our efforts in this month. Forgive us our transgressions, our weaknesses,", "our weaknesses, our bad habits. May Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala inshaAllah just bless these people that are really suffering in these different places. Our brothers and sisters in Gaza, may Allah give them relief, inshallah give them solace in their hearts that Allah would never abandon people that say La ilaha illallah Muhammad Rasulullah.", "aid to the people of Darfur really struggling there and all these different places we know in Yemen, Kashmir, Libya there's still many problems. Our Iraqi brothers, Syrian brothers and sisters, Palestinians in the West Bank may Allah protect them because unfortunately Allah knows", "اللهم أخذه أخذ عزيز المقتدر يا الله اللهم اجعل كيدهم في نحورهم اللهم حفظ البيت المقدس وأهله يا الله سنلان تحفظ بيت المقدسم وتحفض أهله", "We're entering into the last 10 days. This will probably be a 29 day because we sighted the moon on, well, we completed 30 days of Sha'ban.", "of Shaaban. And Imam Zawahirullah pointed out to me yesterday that the calculators always end up fasting 30 days and I think somebody should actually study that because you can't see them, the moon for the first usually it's going to be 20 or more hours before you see it so one of the signs of the latter days is the Prophet said that people will see", "new moon, the Hilal and they'll say oh this is two days old because they won't know that you can have a high moon if you didn't see it the first day when it was actually born so there is what's called a Mufarqa which is where the sun and the moon actually come together and then the Mufaraqa is when the moon begins to move out of the...and Allah arranged it so", "It's one of those coincidences that the moon can eclipse the sun and the Sun can eclipse. The moon so If it's if it's born after the conjunction, so it separates Then then World records are you know like 15 hours perfect conditions perfect eyesight So it wasn't anywhere near that. It was only six hours old in the Middle East so it could not have been cited", "sighted, they fasted on Monday. And somebody actually sent me a picture of the second day the moon was high from the Middle East and he said, alhamdulillah sahas siyamuna you know thank God our fasting was valid. To me the fact that he said that meant it was invalid because he had doubt. He had to wait until the second", "it's on Ammar ibn Yasir related, but it has hukum al-rafa' even though the Sahabi did not say I heard from the Prophet. He said You can't say a maasiyah if it wasn't from the prophet so the sahabi doesn't necessarily have to say that the prophet said he can actually say something and if it's related", "related to if it's related to signs of the end of time, if it is related to a hukm shar'i then it has to be marfu' in other words he's saying it in his own words but he heard the meaning from the prophet so that's called mawquf bi-hukm arrafa and there are quite a few Ammar ibn Yasir actually has more than one", "He might have been afraid to attribute because Sahaba they had such fear. I mean Abu Bakr radiallahu anhu who was the closest of all the Muslims you know outside of obviously his immediate family Khadija and but he burnt his Hadiths so we have very few Hadith from Abu Bakar even though nobody probably heard more", "than Abu Bakr, because he had not only the public events but he had the private conversations. He was his companion. He's the second of the two when they're in the cave. But he did not want the responsibility. He knew that all the Hadiths were out there that were needed and he did no want the responsibilities so it's a weighty thing to transmit Hadith even in this way just to... Because we believe", "We believe this is actually revelation. The Prophet, peace be upon him, This is not words from human appetite or desire or whim. These are from the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wa sallam. So in any case, the calculation is an opinion. I think it's extremely weak opinion.", "a very convincing compelling argument for why we shouldn't follow calculations and one of the reasons is that you're gonna be fasting 30 days every time because you're going to be too early generally so Allah Ta'ala Aalam, the sunnah is to see the moon. One of the secrets of the prophet is he never went outside moon sighting", "had like a you know people see with telescopes the prophets I don't know what the exact power was of magnification but the Prophet saw 12 stars in Pleiades and that's in Qad'a Yaj Shifa. You can only see seven it's called the Seven Sisters, so people with extremely good eyesight can see eight but to see twelve", "see a picture of Pleiades blown up with a telescope, there are 12 major stars in it. You can count them. So the Prophet would have seen the new moon before anybody else. He would have been able to see it before anyone else. So he went out to sight the moon. And Shaykh Abdullah told me that he was in I won't say which country,", "part of our team. But one of the Arabian countries, he was there and they went out to sight the moon. They asked him to come with them so he went out. They were all looking to the east to see the new moon. And he said no it's in the west. I said mashallah it's In the West! They didn't even know. So this is what happened. This is how divorced people are from natural phenomena whereas if you grow up like in southern Morocco,", "in Mauritania, they see the new moon every month and it's an event. And Istihlal which is the birthing of the new Moon, Istihla means to shout for joy because when you see the New Moon and anybody who has had this experience with going out to sight the New moon everybody gets joyous when they first see it and they usually shout so it's just a human experience that we've maintained in our religion", "amazing to connect us to these natural phenomenon which people are increasingly divorced from and as they increasingly become addicted to these machines that they're missing the all of the glorious wonders. I was just reading an article about how they were teaching people", "In other words, to notice small things and to notice. It's in a book called Distracted. And it's a very interesting read but they actually people over like... They did two groups one they just told them to take a walk and the other group they told him to notice things. Like notice flowers, notice trees, notice the way the wind moves the branches of the trees when it's rustling and listen to the rustling", "to the wrestling and people that did that began to it actually increased their um their their mental health they started feeling more joyous they started filling healthier and that's one of the things about the prophet there's a one of my favorite hadiths is mughith and barira which is in in the sahih uh mugheath was a slave", "he was married to but she wanted a divorce because he was a slave and she was free I don't like that term slave, but in any case he was bonded you know cause in Islam the Prophet said don't say my slave is my slave all of you are slaves of God so we don't really believe in this idea of slavery but there is a bonded servitude by Sharia you can get out of", "servitude because you can pay, you can actually get money from zakat. So in any case she did not want to marry him because she was a free woman and he was bonded. And so Mughith would walk around following her begging her to stay with him. The Prophet was with al-Abbas and he said أَلَا تَعْجِبُوا مِن حُبِّي مُغِيث لِي بَرِيرًا", "Isn't marvelous the love of Mughid for Barira? And then, the fact that Barira doesn't reciprocate the love. Like, tajab! He's looking at it and that's the idea of marveling at things. Like to prophesize him he must have looked at everything with just this marveling in Allah's creation and all the different personalities and all different types people because he was so intensely aware of everything and alive", "and alive. So then Mughith asked the Prophet to intercede for her so she went to he went to Barira and he said you know won't you reconsider? And she said are you commanding or are you interceding? And he said I'm only interceded", "And she said, I have no need for him. And so he left it at that. When Mughith heard that his heart switched and all the love for her went out of his heart because this was the human being that Allah accepts the intercession of. So how could this woman not accept the intersession of the messenger of Allah? So suddenly he switched, his heart", "She wanted him to marry her. She wanted to stay with him, he didn't want to have anything to do with her. It was an amazing story. Alhamdulillah. So bismillah this hadith is on Anas and Anas was really brought to the Prophet very young, he's probably about seven by his mother and this is really the greatest home school in human history so she's bringing", "to both serve the prophet but to learn from the prophet and he becomes one of the great transmitters of hadith so anas ibn malik radhi allahu uh and his brother omar also there's a wonderful hadith where um anis was sad and the prophet asked what happened and he said his his his brother's pet died the bird he had a pet no hair it was a little bird so so the prophesy went to visit him", "with Anas. And when he saw him, he was all depressed and the Prophet said, O Umair, what did the little bird do? So he's teaching him about death. That hadith has tens of ahkam in it that one of the great Moroccan ulama wrote a book just on the ahkam that we benefited from that hadith", "from that hadith and one of them was the permissibility or rather the nadab of doing ta'ziyah when somebody's pet dies. Like actually going to them and telling them, you know I'm so sorry to hear your pet died because pets for people that have pets, pets are very often they become part of the family their people are very connected to their pets they get depressed when their pets die. So Anas is amazing", "of Anas is the Prophet came in the room and told him to go do something. And Anas said, So this a young he's probably seven eight years old. This is something seven and eight year olds do to adult authority. It's called testing limits. And so he said that. So the Prophet smiled and he left the room which is an amazing event because the thing that children do is they're testing. They want to see what kind of reaction they get.", "So the Prophet just smiled and left the room. And a little while later, he came back and he said, oh haven't you gone to do that thing? He said I'm leaving right now. So this is real Tarbiyah. And this is why Imam al-Bannani, one of the great Moroccan ulama from Fes,", "The Prophet never said if he did a thing, why did you do a thing? And if he didn't do a think, why didn't you do it? He never... the prophet never faulted him like that. And Imam al-Bannani says, He was raising the children with an inner tarbiyah not outer commands and injunctions but inner because if you love somebody", "If you love somebody, you want to do things for them. So if the child has love for the parent they wanna do... If they have fear for their parents it's a different thing but if they have love for their parent then they want to to do thinsg for them so Anas is a very important figure so", "There's three things in other words. Whoever finds them in him will find the sweetness of Iman, halawat al-iman. So man kunna feehi, these three things if they are in that person wajada halawat al-Iman They experience because wajda is also experienced so it's finding but wajadah has to do with", "with a discovery. You know, if they discover these things within themselves and that's why Allah, the attribute of what they call sifah dati or nafsiyah is wujud because really you could almost translate it as God has findability. In other words, God can be discovered but we can know Allah. This is one of the great gifts", "of our creator to the human being that allah subhanahu wa ta'ala can actually be known by allah's creation and so so and and wajda means to be ecstatic so it has the idea of of the joy of discovery like people get very um so you know i was looking at this masala and and i couldn't penetrate the it was uh", "It was, and I was having a really difficult time. So I called one of my teachers. He couldn't get it either. And then there was one word that I looked up and I said, oh, this means that because we thought it meant something else. And he's much more learned than I am. But we both got it immediately. And so we were like, really got excited. And see where those talking about what a blessing it is to,", "and you can't penetrate something, and then you discuss it with somebody else, and the meaning becomes clear to you. And so there's that joy of discovering something. And Fakhruddin al-Razi says that a child will never discover anything except that it will come and want to share it with someone. And he said that's a proof that the fitrah is to want to", "The joy of discovering something, you want to share that joy with other people. So finding the halawa. So what is halawa? And then Ibn Abi Jamal says, And he says because", "So whoever has halawat al-iman, it's because they have realized. So Allah says about that, that it's a tree that its fruit is like the fruit is constant so he's saying this is a real of the fruit of iman", "that it's a dhawq. So iman has a dhouq and it's sweet taste. It's the sweet... Sharia means path to water, and that water is azbun. It not a bitter water because Allah made two types of water, bitter water and sweet water. So the sharia takes you to sweet water, kufr takes you", "And Isa in our tradition said that those who love dunya are like somebody who drinks salt water. It just makes them more thirsty until they die So that's the nature of the dunya so what are these three things? That Allah and his messenger are more beloved to you than your own soul", "You know, they're more beloved to you than anything other than Allah. Anything other than allah and his messenger. And the famous moment for Sayyidina Omar is he told the Prophet I love you more than everything except myself. And The Prophet said", "until I'm more beloved than the soul between the two. And he said, I love you more than myself. And the Prophet said, Your iman is complete. And that wasn't like a hacha. Omar is al-adl. He can only speak the truth. That was his, some of them", "It's where the prophet becomes everything to you. I was with somebody who is a new convert, like his name Mahmoud. He's a new convere we were in a car and somebody offered him a date and he said I hate dates. And so we told him the prophecy some love dates. He said I love dates and he took one. So that's a real thing", "Because, you know You love what the beloved loves That's human nature You love What the beloved Loves So that's The first one وَأَن يُحِبَّ الْمَرْءَ لَا يُهِبُّهُ إِلَّا لِلهِ تَعَالَىٰ That you Love a person And you only Love them For the sake Of Allah سبحانه وتعالى Because every Other love مَن أحبك لشيئٍ أفغضك لزواله Whoever loves", "loves you for a thing will no longer love you when that thing is gone. This is why there's marriages that end in divorce as one of the spouses gets older and loses their beauty because the person married them, it's very common. You'll see especially unfortunately amongst men they'll marry and then the wife they hit 40, 45 and suddenly oh they want", "because they didn't marry them for the right reasons and that's why the prophet said a woman is married for four reasons uh and that goes vice versa as well i mean the prophet speaking to men but it's always you know you can understand", "by just switching it around. The opposite is true. So a man, there's people marry men for their looks, marry men to their money, marry them for their lineage. I mean here some of the commentaries they say that you know the Christians married for love, the Jahili Arabs married for nesab, for lineage and then the Judeas married to maintain wealth in the family", "That's why mahabba is a high maqam. Somebody said to Abu Huraira, and Abu Hurayra said, then your pocket's my pocket. In other words, your money is my money. He said, I can't... That's a little too much love. Abu Huraya said, go love somebody else. Because that's real love.", "That's real love. He was trying to point out to the man, I mean Abu Huraira could care less he was a Zahid but he was showing him something about you can say that glibly, you know you could say that very lightly oh I love you people say that all the same Ohibbaka fila' But do you really love them for the sake of Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala? In the duties of brotherhood Abu Hamad al Ghazali has a man who comes into a house and he asks if", "the owner was there and he said no. And, uh, and, and he says where does he keep his money? He said there. So he took some money when he came back, the servant told that oh so-and-so came in to and he's alhamdulillah knows I'm his brother. You know that he would feel that comfortable to do that. So, and that's not something you should do with everybody but there are people you can do that with", "because that's the world, hub and bugh. It's you know, everything is created in pairs so hub, the pair of hub is bugh and that's why you can't love something without detesting something else. If you love truth, you will detest falsehood.", "You can't love something without having a corresponding bugh. And so the Prophet is telling us that love has a counter side, which is Qarahiyah. So what do you hate? You hate what Allah hates. You hate injustice. You hat lying. You hae theft. You hte adultery. You had fornication. You hated backbiting.", "Allah hates gossip, so you should hate that. Because if you truly love Allah, you're going to hate what Allah hates. So this is a really, really foundational hadith and there's many I mean, there's a lot you could go into this but I'll leave it at that so we can get more of these hadiths that are so amazing. The next hadith is", "And this is one of the great, I mean all the Sahaba have their greatness but there are some obviously that have higher maqams than others because of the closeness, the Sohbah. Ibn al-Samit is one", "So on the Aqaba Al Thaniya when the Prophet said he took 12 Nuqabah and nine were from the Khazraj. There were more Khazaraj there, and three were from Aus. He was one of them. And Naqeeb is like Arif. You know if you go to the Alhambra Palace, there's a section called Jannatul Arif so that Arif is like the overseer. It's somebody who's the kafil", "the , ameen, you know somebody who's put as a trustee over something. So these are the . He was one of the most learned of the Sahaba. Umar made him a qadi. He went to Homs initially in Syria he was a qadhi and then he became the first qaddi in Palestine", "and he was in Ramallah. He actually died there, but he was moved to Al-Quds. He's buried in Al-Quds. There's a maqam for him there. He lived to be quite... In his 70s, he fought. He fought in Egypt with Amr ibn al-'As, so he was a mujahid as well as being a scholar.", "He had a conflict with Muawiyah because Muawiya didn't like some of his judgments and he actually tried to remove him. And Abu Ubaidah went, told Omar this. And Omar who was the caliph said no. And this is the first proof that the judiciary is separate from the legislative or the executive. So the judiciary has an autonomy", "you know, the ruler can't just remove a qadi on a whim. So that's very important because that's something Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws he is the first one who kind of introduces the idea of having a separation of powers and America obviously took from that philosophy of having this legislative executive and then judicial branch so we understand that also", "judiciary has to be, because they have to judge against the ruler. So if the ruler has power to influence then how can you have real justice? So we know that Ali had a dispute with a Jewish man and Shari'a al Qadi qadha lil Yahudi. And Ali was the caliph so Sharih was his qadi. There's a famous crescent story about", "story about Shurei Harqadi. He went out to sight the moon, you know? And one of the people with the moon sighting him, he said, I see it, I say it. He said where? He said there, there, you can see it as a crescent. He looked and couldn't see it. Then he looked at man, he noticed that he had a hair from his eyebrow that had curled around over his eye so he wiped it away and he said can you still see it? He says subhanAllah its gone.", "So this is a very important hadith again. So there was a group around him in one recension of al-Bukhari and another. So, there's a group about him. He didn't say he could have said", "So the mubaya is a pledge. But it's related to, it's a transactional event. So in a mubayaa there's a transaction taking place. There's the mubaia and then there's the one al-mubaia. So the one making the pledge, the one being pledged to. But if you're pledging to", "He also has responsibilities So the Prophet ﷺ said بَيِّعُونِي عَلَىٰ أَن لَّا تُشِرِكُوا بِاللَّهِ شَيْئًا That you don't associate anything with Allah ﷻ وَلٰ تَسْرِقُوا سَرَقَ يَسِرِّقُو وَلا تَزْنُوا وَ لا تَأْتُوا", "So this is almost identical to what's called", "So take bay'ah with them, ask forgiveness for them. So that is called bay'at al-nisa. The Prophet did a bay'a khasa bin nisa and in that bay'aa he did with the men he actually did musafiha. With the women there's different khilaf about it some say he had a cloth between him others", "there's a rewire that Omar did the bay'ah with them because the Prophet said he didn't unless she was a mahram although all the women were mahrum to the prophet but this was tashreea so the Prophet in reality could be alone with a woman that wasn't married to and like Aisha said", "Who controlled himself better than the Messenger of Allah So these points are very important First of all, they're all Nahi It's very interesting They're not like أن تصلوا تشهدوا الله إلهي لله وتصلوا وتزكوا They're all nahi So it's very Interesting That the بَيع is for the nahi", "So in the hadith, which is one of the foundational hadiths of the Prophet he said, Right? So what I have prohibited you avoid it.", "Right? It's a complete nahi. Whereas with the awamir, it's what you're able to do. And that relates to لَنْ يُشَدَّدِينَ أَحَدٌ إِلَّا غَالَبًا This nobody will take on this religion except it will overwhelm them because the Prophet ﷺ, you cannot do what he did. First of all, his hajj, he made all three hajjs. He made Qiraan, right?", "On the same Hajj Everybody saw him doing Three different types of Hajj And that's Warad So the Prophet These are Mu'ajizat The Prophet I mean he The amount Of Ibadah he did, I mean I saw it to be honest With you and I've seen it with the Marabitun And I know Sheikh Muhammad Abu Faris Has had this experience as well Anybody who spent time with You know real Shiyukh", "These rare individuals that are there. May Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala at least give us their company if we're not from them. May God make us from them but at least, give us our company. But what he did on a daily basis I don't know how he did it just from ibadah Not to mention working and teaching all the things that he did", "that he did but it was amazing just to see how much he could do and and how did Fakhreddin al-Razi do what he did? How even Fakhretin says in the Muqaddimah of his Mufatih al Ghayb, he says I know that one man could not learn what i learned in my lifetime like he knew that there was something supernatural about his these are Karamat.", "He was a teacher. He was doing all these things. How could he do what he did? Just look at the writing that they produced. How can they write 300, 400 books? How could they write all those books? These men were men of the world as well. They weren't just people in isolation. They were people engaged with the world.", "It's amazing. Amazing, I mean he was... He is noted for mathematics in the West so he is a polymath in mathematics. His books on are famous books in the Muslim world but then he has all of these other areas. How did he do what he did? I mean these are just amazing things. So this", "the Prophet is letting us know that the Nawah are Daima they're always there, they're to be avoided whereas the Awamir are Min Fatra Ila Fatra like the prayer comes five times a day you can pray extra prayers Nafida except in the times of Nahi but other than that", "Awamar come when they come whereas the Nawahi you're always in a state where you have to avoid What's prohibited and that's why their focus so the first one is that you should be Shia, and that' s the most important because Allah will not forgive Does not forgive that he is associated with and it's very important that that's put in", "And there's a secret in that. But Allah will not forgive the act of associating with him, but he will forgive less than that and that's obviously with knowledge. Don't set up idols with God knowingly, that's called . So it's very important that somebody who is in ignorance", "Rasoola we don't punish people until they know what they're doing is wrong. So that's very important to note there so let you should be Shia What a tassid equal do not steal and Settica is It's one of the worst things and it's in our culture. It's really breaking down like when I was younger theft was very unusual now, it's just people don't seem to have any problem stealing and part of that is because", "The Marxists have had such an influence on people in the idea that all property is theft, that corporations steal from us so we can steal from them. But theft is one of the worst things. It's one of those worst thing and that's why , the protection of property is one", "in our religion and it's foundational. If you die defending your property, you die a martyr because property is very important. And I was on this commission where, you know, I was talking about the importance of property and that, and this why Richard Weaver says if you lose the property as a foundational principle in a society, he said there's no hope", "He said there's no hope for rebuilding the society once that's lost. And he said you could actually rebuild a society as long as people recognize that and proprium, like you learn this in logic right? The property of something yourself is a property. That's why we have proxemics is this whole science", "space around people because different cultures have, like in the Arab culture they come closer because a more intimate culture than Western culture. In Western culture they don't like you to get too close to them. In Arab culture and that was for me when I lived in their world is something I initially wasn't accustomed to it but I got used to it because Arabs will speak closer to you then they will in the West if you notice when you get on an elevator", "elevator, people are very, you know, they get very stressed out on elevators. They don't talk. Because they're all too close. You've entered into that because that's propium. That's your property. That space around you is there's a sanctity to that space and that's why hitting is a violation like tort law.", "you know, you can reduce things to basically... Law can be reduced to two fundamental principles. Do what you promise to do and don't harm. So property is very important. That's why it's emphasized. Right? Like this is a strong injunction. Obviously, it's very difficult to get your hand cut off in Sharia.", "In the Brunei law, they have 16 conditions before you can fulfill that. And one of the British lawyers that actually worked on that said whoever fulfills all these deserves to get his hand cut off. So they say in 800 years Ottomans never cut hands off. You know it's very difficult. First of all if somebody steals from your store, you don't have to take it to the government.", "I think he was Bengali or Pakistani. People might have seen this about the man who tried to rob him and then, and then he actually flipped it on him but then he said why are you doing this? He said I'm hungry and he said no take some food and then gave him $20 and then ended up saying Shahada with him. It's wise, I want to be like you! You know so that's you know there's a reality to that also that that there are desperate people", "Even in Christianity, St. Thomas Aquinas talks about that, the permissibility. If nobody's feeding you and you're starving to death, you can actually break into a bakery and take bread, right? So this is a kind of universal understanding because haq al-inqad is a right of people. Like it's a haq to save a life. Like if you see a drowning person, you have a moral responsibility", "moral responsibility to save that person. It's a . So, so that's very important. What next lineage? So property family see these are the universals in this bay'ah if you really look at them you will see the the kuliyaat al-khams in this baya. These are these are when you learn you know in usul fiqh you learn these kuli yaats they're all", "So this is to protect family and lineage. Don't go near zina because it's a foul thing, and it leads down a foul road. It's a terrible path. It breaks the society down. There's a book on sex and culture that was written in the 1930s, 1934, Unwin.", "he studied over 80 cultures and he found whenever they released prenuptial sex, sex before marriage that it destroyed the culture within three generations. A generation being 33 years according to him. And he said he found no exception. And wasn't a Christian, he was actually an atheist anthropologist but he said maybe religion has some wisdom in worrying about these things. I mean I got an email from", "from somebody the other day, from a Muslim country. And he was in an illicit relation and he was saying that he was having all this guilt and he asked me what to do but he said unfortunately it's become normal now in my country. This is a Muslim Country so young people now these are breaking down these are very bad signs for our culture they're very bad sign and that's why we guard against these things to protect first and foremost ourselves", "Qoo anfusukum wa ahlikum. Save yourselves. You know, on the airplane they say first put the mask on your own face before even your child. Because you can't help the person if you're don't destroy yourselves. So that's really important. And zina in Arabic means both fornication and adultery. In English we distinguish between", "between the two. This, every pagan culture has child sacrifice. South America they found a huge grave recently in I think Peru of child sacrifice this was done all over the world. This is Iblis", "Iblis. Killing children, the most innocent. This is what Raghub Rasbani says. The janin, the fetus, is a child. In other words you call a walad,", "in the but then of the own, but it's still a wallet. It just has the name Janine because it's hidden from you so once it takes human form It's it's uh, it's a human being and that happens very quickly in the womb So so let up to the old addicum in the Quran khash at imlock You know out of fear of poverty which is then one of the main reasons there's there's two dominant reasons", "is like less than 1% of abortions. The real reason for abortion, two fundamental reasons, fear of poverty and interference with my career. Those are the two reasons. There's an American entertainer who was being interviewed and somebody said to him, you know, oh do you... So what do you think about abortion? He said I'm against abortion", "because they thought he would not be against it when she said I'm against abortion. He said you don't think a woman has a right to determine what happens in her own body? He said well, I suppose everybody has the right to be selfish. This is a great answer cause that's what it is. It's your saying and that's why as our culture becomes more and more narcissistic, lot of people don't want to have children anymore", "And there is an element to children that is a hassle. Every parent knows that, but they're a great blessing. They are one of the greatest blessings in life. So that's really important. And Qadhi Abu Bakr in Ahkam al-Quran he says about this, he says it was infanticide and he said", "and also concealing a pregnancy. Because there were women who could conceal it, and obviously when you have the type clothes that Muslim woman wore in traditional societies, you can hide. And then in many traditional societies women were... They carried weight. Most traditional cultures even in this culture not that long ago, it was preferred to be hefty than it was to be skinny.", "skinny. So he says, min ghayri rishta. And so rishta is waradu rishta, is a child born in zawaj shar'i. So ghayru rishta or rashta, they're both correct, is an illegitimate child. And he says", "So what they would do, and this is very common in Greek culture and Roman culture. When the child was born, if it had defects, they didn't want to just kill it because it's not easy to kill a human. So they would just take it out into the forest or something. There's a famous shepherd who left Odysseus, sorry, Oedipus, in the famous Sophocles trilogy. He couldn't kill him.", "He couldn't kill him. He was told to go out and kill him, but he doesn't. He just leaves them, and somebody finds him. You find this motif in many, many stories. So this is... And unfortunately, this happens in many countries, even here. They'll find a live baby in a garbage can. This is America. You see this? This happens in Muslim countries, I guarantee you. And it's usually from illegitimacy. And that's why, don't go near zina.", "It's related, you know. It's relative. Right? It's relate- Zina and killing is related. And then, is the worst... It's... Is to tell a lie about somebody", "about somebody that's so heinous. And that's why it says, you know, You make this up. Iftira is to make something up. Buhitan comes from buhita, the mabhu to somebody who's shocked. They're in a state of perplexion. There's just shocked.", "What? They said that, that I did that. And so it's a horrific thing to do and it has a terrible end for people that do that. But then one of the things is about wealth according to some there are many interpretations about what these words mean. Is to claim that they had adultery or fornication or something rape to accuse somebody of rape. These are very heinous", "uh things and if they're false allegations you are in big trouble with allah subhanahu wa ta'ala so um this happened to mary my kind of is in the talmud they they the jews accused mary of having illicit relations with a roman centurion named panthera dr ali if he was here he would confirm oh you are here yeah right it's pantera right yeah so talmud if you read that book", "book, Jesus and the Talmud by Schaeffer. Yeah, Schaefer is a very solid scholar of the Talmud. You know it's pretty horrible what was said about Jesus' mother. That's Bohdan because she was innocent. Aisha was accused innocent. There's a famous story of Imam al-Baqalani, the great Maliki", "the great Maliki Qadi and Mutakallam who was sent by the caliph to the Byzantines as an ambassador. And the Byzantine ruler, you had to bow before him so they told him if he comes he's not going to bow. So he had them build a doorway really low so you have to bow just to come into the doorway.", "got there he looked and he realized so he came in backward. And then when he saw the asaqifa you know these bishops, he said to them mashallah kif al-ahal wal ayal how are your wives and your children? And they looked at him and said you're a scholar we're above having", "having families. We're too holy for that and he said, SubhanAllah, like you say God has a family and children but you yourself. And then the last one they said tell us about the hadith of ifk because they study Islam and he", "of adultery, or fornication, adultery. And he said Maryam wa Aisha. Amma Maryam fa hamalat wabarra'ha Allah. Mary got pregnant but Allah said she's innocent. Wa amma Aisha fa lam tahmal. Aisha didn't get pregnant and Allah said that she was innocent. So those are the kind of ulama we had. Allahu Akbar.", "So, so, is a very evil thing. Yeah, it's horrible. And then don't disobey in any . So if you look at these this is really about authority and you're basically entering into a covenant with Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala and his messenger that you are not going to do any of these things", "And this is essentially the things that most destroy. If you look at this, these are the things most break down societies. Just look at the things there. Theft, illicit sex, murder. This is . It's like", "don't say to your parents, so if you can't kill children like that's the least of you then it goes up. So it goes what gossip lies all these things that break down society and then do good things do virtuous things and this is why so the Imam is very important", "Traditionally, there's only a few countries that have this now. Malaysia still has it because they have the sultans. The Gulf states still have this idea of be'a. Morocco still has the be'aa. In fact Jews from diaspora come to Morocco when there is a new king and the Jewish leadership comes and gives be'aaa. So it's very important. Imam Lekani in his book", "In his. That it's an obligation to have an imam. You have to have a name on in other words, you have that political leadership is also one of the seven Noah Hiddick right? You have two courts. You", "to redress wrongs. And the Sultan is very important. You know, one of the things... I mean we don't support tyranny. Nobody, audhu Billah, you know anybody that would even suggest that, that we don´t support tyrany but we also don´tsupport anarchy and so sometimes government that's bad is better than no government at all. That's why the traditional ulama were against", "Because they saw that it led to worse tribulations, the breakdown of a society. And this is why if you look, and unfortunately we have these kind of people that want to bring down all the governments and create all this human suffering for some greater good that's going to come. The communists did this.", "to bring about this quote-unquote equal society. But these are lies. The dunya is what the dunya", "will change their view. And this is one of the great scholars who had nothing to do with governments. He was an extremely warat person. But, this idea that you just abandon governments and have nothing to deal with governments there's people that can do that but if everybody does that then who's in the government? Even Firaun had a believer in the inner circle. Firaoun!", "And he's told Faraun. You know are you going to kill a man because he says his lord is Allah? So even in the inner sanctum of Pharaoh there was a believer. So this idea somehow that no we have nothing to do. If we abandon political process then the only alternative is power struggles where people just kill each other. And these are Ishtihad issues", "The Quraish had issues, recognizably. And it's definitely safer to stay out of these situations. Many of the Fuqaha did not have anything to do but many of them did. Muhammad al-Shaybani and Abu Yusuf disagreed on that. Abu Yusef became a qadi. Muhammad shaybany did not and he thought he shouldn't be involved with them. Abu Hanifa wouldn't take the qada' but to say that Abu Yussuf is not a rightly guided person", "many of the great, Qad Ayyad was a qadi. Many of our greatest ulama were they were jurists some of them were ministers and not every government is going to have problems so the bay'ah is very important and this is also in the three vows right? The Jews and diaspora they have to take these traditionally the Tiddlebaum group", "the Tittlebaum group, right? So these are the ones that support the Palestinians. The Rabbi Tittlebombs people. You see these guys at demonstrations with Palestinian flags and they really bother the Zionists but they follow this rabbi who affirmed a traditional Jewish position in Orthodox Judaism which was that", "So in other words, aliyah. What they call aliyyah. They could not do that until the Messiah comes. That was the traditional position. But one of the three vows was that you do not go against your government. And this was the tradition Muslim position and this is why even living in two days before 9-11 I actually gave a talk in Philadelphia on the prohibition breaking the law in a non-Muslim land", "Two days before. And I think it's really important for Muslims who are in the United States, we don't break the law. It's haram to break the laws and if you can't live by the laws, you make hijrah but you don't brake the laws of the land you live in. And there is an ulama that say insurance is haram", "if you're gonna drive a car, you have to have liability insurance. Can't break that law. So it's very important for Muslims to know this hadith is extremely important. And includes living if you are in a non-Muslim land the people in power over you. We don't disobey the law", "You have to make hijrah. And there's places you can go to. There's places, they're difficult places to live but you can do it. You don't have to live here. So if you're here though, you have to obey the law. And then he said, Oh and then Laqani says about that", "وَلَيْسَ رُكْنًا يُعْتَقَدْ فِى الدِّينِ فَلَّا تُزِغْ عَنْ أَمْرِهُ الْمُبِينِ This is not a rukn in the religion. In other words, if somebody doesn't believe in the political aspect of Islam it doesn't take them out of Islam. Like if they say I don't believe like Khilafah or any of these things It doesn't' take them our of Islam because the Mu'tazirite said it was a حكم عقلي it wasn't shar'i In other word it's a rational thing that it's wise to have governments and things like that", "and things like that. But it's not ma'loom min a deen bat darura, it is from the Deen to have a governor, a ruler. Unless you see kufr buwaah laka an dallah sultan burhan So you cannot disobey", "disobey a ruler or go out of the unless if you're in a Muslim land and and the ruler declares his kufr at that point the I had is broken but if you come into Atlanta are born into a land where they're non-muslims your you have a what's the term that Voltaire used", "He's eluding me by fasting. The brain doesn't work as well. You know, your civil contract. There's a civil contract that you're born into. Yeah. The social contract. So we're born", "to obey that. And then he says, unless it's kufr buah and the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam says they asked him if they see something wrong. He said la ma sallo as long as they pray. So the prayer is the least you know if you hold to the prayer. You can't go against them. And that's why the revolutions they bring a lot of I mean if you look at all these countries where these things have happened people are still suffering greatly. They're really suffering.", "And it was bad before. It's not to deny that, and they were oppressive but nilam is better than falda. That's why Maddox said 60 years under a wali is better then a day of anarchy because it just destroys everything. Anyway, that's the traditional view. It' s not my view, trust me. I mean there are people who think this is what's in...", "What's that? This is what all the ulama said. And now, because Marxism came in and these revolutionary ideas came into Islam, if you look at the Muslims, like the ulma in Morocco, when they lost to the French, they fought. And they fought hard. The Indians fought. You know, Muslims really fought the colonialists. They didn't just surrender those lands.", "were conquered and saw that there's just, now it's nihilistic. It's just bloodshed for no purpose. At that point they stopped. And that's why if you read, there's a book called Oppressed in the Land. It was really worth reading. It is all the fatwas of the ulama during colonization. And they all said as long as they're not stopping you from practicing your religion don't oppose them because it will bring more harm on the community than benefit if you can't defeat them. And", "of Bhopal, you know they have these women the seven begums. I think there's seven. The begums of Bpopal. Do you know about them? Any other ladies? Never heard of the begums or Bhopa is like one of the Mafkhara of India. These are women that ruled the province of Bopal. There's an amazing picture of the bet one of begums with meeting the Viceroy of England and she's in a complete purdah yeah and he's like towering over her but she ruled the country", "Bhopal was the only place during the Muslim rebellion nobody was killed because the Begums prohibited the ulama from riling the masses up. It's the only places and so it's not like we want to see justice, I mean I prefer more Rahmah in the world but just as for a ruler you want to be a just ruler, you want Rahm amongst people but you definitely want to", "So nobody supports tyranny. Nobody supports evil. Anybody that could support what's happening right now in Gaza, it's unbelievable. And I'm shocked at the... You know, not all of them. Many Jewish people have come out against this because they see it for what it is. But unfortunately, a lot of these rabbis, it has just been shocking that they haven't come out agains this. It's more secular Jews who can see it", "religious element here that, and this is one of the things what Voltaire in many ways rightly said. You know, for good men to do evil it takes religion to get good people to do evill things. And that's misunderstood religion. Religion can be very, very distorting when you think God's on your side. We don't believe that. We dont' know when God's", "on our side, but God is not always on our sides. If we're not on the side of truth and righteousness and justice, God's not on our site even if we are Muslims. We say La ilaha illallah Muhammad Rasulullah, God is on your side when you're on God's side. And then he says So other than kufr you cannot remove the ruler. This is aqidah this was taught in Azhar", "Azhar for 400 years. That was the Aqidah of the Muslims but it goes back to these things that whoever obeys the person in charge has obeyed me and whoever disobeys him has disobeyed me so he says even if they go from being a just ruler to an unjust ruler you still don't remove them", "removed them. Even Sheikh Abdullah, when they had the ruler, the woman was elected prime minister he said that you have to do that because to go against it would be greater harm. You know and this is something modern Muslims just I don't know there's enough historical evidence to see but we pray for justice and we pray", "You know in government. I mean, we don't pray for justice. I don't want justice for myself None of us do you really want God to be just with you? I don' think so. Yeah, I want mercy You know the Prophet Sallallaahu Alaihi Wasallam Subhanallah, you know what he would say to the women when he took bayah He said Do what you're able to do and that and the women would say", "Allah and His Messenger are more merciful to us than we are to our own selves. Subhanallah. This religion is about rahmah, you know, we need more rahmahl. And sins bring on... You know be forewarned that if you go against the Prophet's", "His Amr, then you're going to have calamities and painful chastisement. Muslims were not immune to the Sunan of Allah . I mean the Jews when they said, , we are the children of God and the beloved of God. Allah said no, you're bashar, you are just human beings. Like if that's true why does he punish you?", "punish you. So the Muslims, we have to ask ourselves the same question because chosen people syndrome is a dangerous syndrome just to think that you have some special ontological status just because you say something. In the battle of Yamama Abad ibn Bishr he's the famous one who got shot and didn't feel it. He kept praying, got shot with an arrow.", "But he said, because they were being routed. Khalid ibn al-Walid was the head and Musaylim al-Kadhab, he had thousands. I mean, I think like over 10,000 died. It was a horrific battles but they were losing, the Muslims were losing and Khalid was very concerned.", "with your actions. Don't just let it be words, live by it. He lived by the Quran, he was the Quran walking. So then whoever fulfills it his reward is with God so there's the reciprocation you see? The mubaya'a", "So this is the transaction. Allah bought our souls, our lives and our wealth, and against it is paradise. So whoever fulfills this, The hudood, like if you go, these are the hudod of Allah, don't transgress the hudood.", "The had punishment is restorative. It brings you back into, so whoever, so that's why the Prophet said, That removes it. So if you're punished in the dunya, they say some say sharta tawbah and others saying even you don't have sharta tobah. Just the fact you got the had, it finishes it. But sharta Tawbah makes more sense to me.", "So, it removes his sin. So if you're punished in this way and that's why Sahaba the only jald that occurred at the time was from confessions. People went and confessed to the Prophet because they wanted to be purified in the dunya. They didn't want to take their chances in the akhirah. That's how strong their iman was.", "إذا فعلت من أحدهم كبائر ، أعني أن الصغائر أو المم ، تعلمون أنها تخلص بشكل مختلف عن ووضوء ، صلاة الخمس ، تعرفون أن النبي صلى الله عليه وسلم قال أنه لو رأيتم", "The Prophet said if one of you had a river that he went out and bathed in it five times a day, would he have any soil on him? Would you see any filth on him. They said no, you wouldn't see any filter. He said that's the five prayers but that's . And so this is about like if any of these because these are all related to , these things in the Bay'ah,", "So if you do any of them and you're not punished in this world, Allah veils you. And that's why tonight I wanted to get to the hadith about Laylatul Qadr because it's here. Allah. So that's", "You are the forgiver, the partner of sins. You love to pardon so pardon us. So that's really important because whatever sins you've done you're in the mashi'ah of Allah and you should have some trepidation about it until right before death. In the last phase of your life inshallah may all of you reach a ripe old age after lots of ibadah", "But when you reach the end of your life, you have to remove all fear. It's khawf and rajah. لَا بُدَّ مِنْ عَلَيْهِ خَوْفٍ مَعَ الرَّجَةِ Right? Have the two sandals of fear and hope. But right before you die, you give up fear and just trust that Allah, حُسْنَ الظَّنْبِ اللَّهِ Have a good opinion of your Lord. Like the man who he burnt himself,", "to burn him and then shatter, to take his ashes and just throw them to the wind. So Allah reassembled him and asked him why he did it. And he said out of fear of punishment in the hadith, Allah forgave him. That act was an act of kufr because astajj is Allah. He didn't think Allah could bring him back together. So the actual act was", "The fear of Allah. So just to finish this on the, on the Allahumma salli ala Sayyidina Muhammad, the Prophet said the hadith", "It's here somewhere. So, you know there is a different view on this. Yeah, here it is.", "Abu Hurairah relates that the Prophet said, whoever stands, what proceeded of his sins will be forgiven. So this you know there's a big about when is. There is a hadith", "To seek it out on the last ten nights hadiths. Seek it out On the odd nights there's indications is on the 27th night Which is traditionally where a lot of Muslims fast the word here in in Anza now who feel a little battery when you get to hear It's the 27 th word in In that sort of even Abbas pointed that out as a kind of Ishaara But the monarchy position even abijamra holds that it's any time during the year and that's why in the monachy", "That's why in the Madaqi Madhab, it's actually encouraged to do Tahajjud throughout the year. And on the first day of the year, because Madaqis you only have to do the Niyah one time like in Ramadan we do it the first night. We make the Niya for the whole month and that suffices unless you get sick or stop fasting or go on a journey and break your fast then you have to renew it but just that first Niyyah is good for the", "good for the whole month. Although it's good to get out of khilaf, so the shafi'is who do it every day, the madikis say you know it's a good thing to do it just to renew it but you only need it once. So they make the niyyah to stand in Laylatul Qadr and then they do tahajjud every night throughout the year with the hopes of hitting Laylat al-Qadr because some say it's nafs shaaban there's an opinion that", "And then some say it moves throughout the year. Allah akhfahu, they say, the Moroccans say, Allah hid three things in three things. He hid his saints amongst humanity so you never know who's a wali of Allah. He hide his acceptance in the good deeds like you never what deed is gonna save you? Like the woman who gave the dog, the thirsty dog if she was a prostitute,", "and Allah forgave her. And then also his wrath in the, um... In his disobedience but he also hid Laylatul Qadr so it's to encourage us especially in these last 10 nights. It's a great blessing. So it's about 5.8 years right?", "83. Yeah, so 83 years. That's a lot of ibadah. So that was given to the Prophet because the ancients had these long lives with a lot if ibadat. So Alhamdulillah it is a great blessing. There are different opinions about what the qadr is. Is it the decree", "the decree that is revealed to the angels for the coming year. But iman and believing in it, like really believe that Allah is going to forgive you. So Ibn Abu Jamrah says doesn't mean you have to stay up the whole night or just a part of the night. He actually prefers", "As long as you do 11 rakats, You get the reward of the night. But obviously The more you do, the better. But he says if you do the 11 rakat That was the norm of the prophet He did 8 and then he would do The 11 There's another opinion A weaker opinion of 13 In any case If you do those And there is a He actually mentions a hadith", "even if you do two rakats with the last two ayahs of Baqarah, because there's a hadith that he relates. It's usually related to whoever reads it but he relates it. Just to do those two would be enough. So Allah's Rahmah is vast. May Allah accept our sincere fasting and accept our standing in prayer", "اللهم أدركنا ليلة القدر وإن شاء الله بارك في إخواننا وأحبابنا في كل مكان كل من أوصانا بالدعاء نسأل الله أن توفق إخوننا في غزة والله يخفف عنهم ويعطيهم ما يحتاجون نسال الله سبحانه وتعالى أن يبارك بهذا المكان ويحفظ هذا المكان من كل شر ومن كل مكروه ومن", "وصلي لهم على سيد محمد وعلى آله وصحبه وسلم تسليما كثيرا سبحان ربك رب العزة عم ما يصفون وسلامنا وسلم الحمد لله رب الأعين", "Alhamdulillah, the Sahih al-Bukhari is I think one of the great gifts of the Ummah. The Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam his most important words were collected by this great Imam and put into this one book", "This book really came out and the Muslims have honored it in ways that... It's been written beautifully. I had a handwritten manuscript from southern Morocco, from the Dila'i Zawiyah. And it was really beautiful which I gave to a Hafidha of al-Bukhari as a gift because he actually found a mistake in it.", "is one of the most precious things that I have ever possessed. The scholars have even said things like, you know, the house won't burn down if it has Sahih al-Bukhari in it, a ship won't go down. I used to actually fly with Sahih Al-Buhari but Allah Ta'ala, those are, I think hyperbolic statements to acknowledge the immense barakah that's in the book", "book. But one of the most interesting, I think aspects of the Hadith is there's so many of them and for that reason people like Ibn Abi Jamrah chose to do his Ikhtisar to try to get at the Khulasa of the book and that's one of reasons why there are so many Mukhtasarat in our tradition", "Ummah declines, the need for these abridged versions become more important because people don't have the time, the energy or the aspiration to do what the early people did. And so, like Imam Laqani says that because the himmahs have diminished, abridgement becomes necessary but even", "more extraordinary than an abridgment is to get to the actual very core of something and Abu Dawud one of the great muhaddithoon he's in the six of the canonical collections these are the six that the ummah recognized as being um the most important uh collections because there", "preeminence and then Imam Muslim who was his student. And then Imam Abu Dawood, radiAllahu anhu, is also a student. Then Imam al-Tirmidhi, Imam al Nasa'i, Ibn Majah, and sometimes the Muwatta is put alongside or in replacement of Ibn Magih's book. But Abu Dawud was one of the great Muhaddithun", "And he said that he collected over 500,000 hadith. And when you read that like it's Imam Malik knew over 100,000 Hadiths, Imam Rabu Bukhari 600,000 Hadeeth. When you see these numbers they're not the actual number of Hadith but the different transmissions. So there's around 50,000 statements of the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam that have been recorded between", "Sahih, Hassan and then the different types of Da'if categorizations. But from those there's about 7000 that have really been transmitted in these books Imam al-Bukhari has 4000 without the Mukarrar, without the repetition because he repeats many hadiths in many babs he will have like for instance he repeats the Hadith innama al-'Amaru bin Niyat", "and it falls into many of the chapters. And this is why they say that Imam al-Uzza'i, in more than 70,000 fatwas that he'd in his lifetime. Again these allahu a'lam sometimes they can be exaggerations but sometimes not. In any case I asked him what he's telling how's that possible?", "answered with, Right? So I mean, I had somebody yesterday wrote me about he unfortunately had broken his fast. He was traveling and he broke his fast leaving before he left his house. And so then he was asking, he wrote me an email and said, you know, do I have kafara because somebody told him, oh, you have to fast for two months because you broke your fast", "you broke your fast without, but that first of all kafara you have to have knowledge of it. Right? But secondly there are difference of opinions like Ibn Wahab bin said that if you were traveling you could start your taqseer from the home. That's not the mashhoor or the madhab It's not a dominant opinion but it is an opinion so when you have difficulties you want to find ease for people. The great", "Abu Sufyan he said, Like that real fiqh is giving people dispensations, giving them licenses making things easy from a source of the sound. In other words it has to... It can't just be... And so that's a really important aspect", "And then he said, but as for making things difficult, everybody is capable of doing that. So we just there was a fatwa from a mufti of a major Muslim country who gave a fatwas they sent it to me some of the Muftis on the other side of the pond and that They give a fatwah that oh you can't give Zakat al-fatar with naqad because it's not the Sunnah", "but it's a rukhsah from a thikkah. And so for a lot of people, it would be hard to do that. So it's very important to recognize that about the religion. You can't make things hard, especially in this time when things are hard enough for people just to be alive. Like people have a very difficult time in the modern world in ways that the pre-modern world, which was difficult and I've lived in pre-modern environments.", "I spent a lot of time in southern Morocco. I was in the Rub al-Khali. I've been to places that are very far from this modern world. It's much easier to practice your religion in those environments. Tahajjud is not a problem in West Africa. Everybody does it, it's just normal but for people here that are stressed out go to work", "work you know it's we have our ease there's aspects of modern life that's very easy but then there's other aspects that are really difficult and so in a time like this, this is a time to try to facilitate to people as much as possible without compromising your deen. And then wara'ah is something that if somebody's capable of it it's a good thing to be scrupulous. So Imam Abu Dawood he said", "from 500,000 hadith he said meaning the sunan of Abu Dawud. He said I from 500 000 hadith i put these hadees in his sunan and he said but from all of these hades it's over 5000 from all", "three of them are in al-Bukhari. He said it's enough for a person to have four hadiths and to practice these hadith. So this is coming from, and there's other, Imam Ahmed has a similar statement he reduced it to three hadith even Abizail Qayrawani the great Maliki scholar reduced it also to four hadits they agreed on two of them", "But they're all looking at the same thing. And this is like when you take a statement, like the great Imam Al-Razi he said, You could reduce Islam to worshiping Allah and serving Allah's creation, like helping Allah's creations that you can sum up Islam in that way.", "Islam is like all of these things and so he reduced Islam to those four. So, he said if it goes to something that's negative, it's not from Islam. And that's why istihsan is important in fiqh because sometimes a hukum,", "And so that can't be from Islam. So the faqih says, this can't right and he'll actually make a hukam, a ruling based on a more just or equitable solution to a problem. I mentioned, just to give you an example, I mentioned once Sheikh Abdullah, we were talking about community property in the West", "And he said from a Sharia point of view, it would be unjust for a woman to take half a man's wealth on divorce. So I said well here is the way they think about it. So this is when a woman is at home she is doing all this work. She is taking care of the person's house. She's taking care", "What does she have? She can go out without anything. And so they say that it's not fair, that the man who part of why he was able to do what he was doing was that he had somebody taking care of them. This is the original thing. I mean obviously today things have changed because women are working now and there a lot of single mothers and all these different things but this was the original understanding of community property.", "said, you know from the point of view of this there's some validity to that. That view because for instance in the Maliki Madhhab a woman can charge for like for doing domestic service she can actually charge her husband if he doesn't provide for her uh some help and then you have in pre-Islamic societies", "of each other. Now we have women who have children, they don't have the infrastructure that a traditional society provides like having an extended family you know having aunts that will take the children when the woman needs a break or in Mauritania good example the little children when there are four three four years old they just walk around the encampment and go to different tents so the mother's not constantly having", "after by the whole clan. And that was very normal. So one of things Dr. Cleary pointed out, which really struck me when I read this he wrote a really beautiful essay called How Islam Can Revive American Civilization and in there one of the things he said is that the family is so important in Islam because one of five universals Hevlu An-Nasal or family protecting the family", "think the family's breaking down because of divorce is a family broke down 100 years ago with the breakdown of extended families. Like, divorce is the last line of family. That's not a real family, a mother, a father and children. That' s not a family. A family is uncles and aunts and grandparents and nephews and cousins. That''s a real", "So if it goes to and then he said, if it go from Rahmah to harshness Then it's not from Islam Because Islam is Rahm. And even Imam Malik and I think Imam Malek was Musib in this He had the correct view. He said that jihad is not a niqma It's a rahmah That was his view", "for the kufr or fighting the Muslims. It was actually a rahmat to stop them from doing more harm than they were doing. So he saw it as mercy because the more harm people do, the more trouble they make for themselves. These four things he described. Abu Dawud took the hadith and remember this is a man who knew pretty much all of al-Bukhari", "Al-Bukhari, all of Muslims. I mean he knew the hadith corpus of his time. He was a hafidh and so if he's going to reduce it down...he was also noted for his brilliance because he is one of the fuqaha amongst the muhadithoon. You know he's considered a faqi. So the first one he said is", "The third one he said, And the fourth one was, Or in the Riwayah. So those were the four that he said so I thought it would be useful to look at these four hadiths", "Hadith because what he's saying is they're all you need. If you get these rights, then you have from the Sunnah what you need The first one Is the book the one that Imam Muslim starts his book with", "So this is, this hadith is from Amir al-Mu'minin Omar Abu Hafsa. Hafsa is his daughter. Hafsah is the masculine form of that.", "Omar ibn al-Khattab, radiallahu anhu. And he's from the Khattab family. These were the great judges of the Quraysh, this family and noted for their khataba so hence Al-Khattaab They still have it in the Mujaddidis are famous for their oratory So these things get genetically transmitted Alhamdulillah So he says", "and in so actions are by intentions. So an action is something that's done with the right? One of the things, and we'll get this with a lot of people forget that speech is an action. You know, people say oh that's just talk as if talk doesn't have", "doesn't have meaning. I mean, I heard somebody say that once and you know the problem with the it's all words. You know there is no action. The Prophet came with words. I think they are the law. That's what he brought so don't ever diminish the meaning of words by saying it's just", "just words. Because words are what make us human. Words are what give us our distinction amongst creation, the fact that we have language, that we're the . You know somebody said to me oh you know well we are animals I said we're not animals he said Imam al-Ghazali said we were animals I say what did he say? He said we are part animal and part angel", "I said, so why didn't you say we're angels? Part animal is not animal. Right? It's not animal We made them a distinct creation So we are not animals and the people that say that these are materialists they want to reduce us to animals I mean I have cats I watch cats I was looking at my cat today He was looking me And I was printing something", "printing something and I was just wondering what he was thinking I was doing. But he can't work out that I'm printing something on the printer. I can't talk to him about infinity. You know, I can have a conversation. If I did it would be one-sided conversation. He might meow every once in awhile but he's not going to be reflecting on proofs for the existence of God. It's just not gonna happen. Dolphins, Allah'u alaam we're not supposed to eat them", "don't eat the human of the ocean. So, if some people think that because they have very big brains even they have a brain similar to humans apparently so what they're up to? If they're debating whether does God exist or not you know who made this ocean we don't know but Imam Malik said", "Imam Marek, they asked him about it and he said, You know, you named it because it's also called the pig of the ocean. Because it has like a snout, like a pig. So the Greeks called it the pig also. So actions are by intention. So what is an intention? An intention is the root of the word has to do with seed, like an Noah.", "Like a Noah is a seed. So an intention is the seed of your actions. It's what produces the action. If you look at this amazing backdrop that our brother Ismail did from hand, taking wood from a tree. Those were trees in a forest somewhere and somebody went and cut them down. There's a beautiful essay really proving how miraculous just a pencil is", "is because we don't think about these things. So if you look like just the wood, what was the intention of the man cutting down the wood? It wasn't to be a mihrab in California, right? Somebody in South America who went in with an axe or maybe a machine and cut", "We don't know what his Nia was, but he had a Nia. And so then he sends it to the lumber and they make it into sheets. What was their Nia? Probably to make money. And then the man who bought it just to ship it somewhere to sell it for a higher price. He had a different Nia, he didn't cut it down.", "And then Ismail says, I'm going to make this out of mahogany. He could have made it out of other woods but he chose that wood so that wood was destined then to be that. But what was his niyyah? It wasn't money. That was maybe part of it because that's his livelihood. He wanted to make something for Allah. That", "to make it something beautiful so that when people come in they get a sense of Allah is beautiful and loves beauty. And so, beauty evokes things in peoples heart So those niyyahs were all different What was the niyyyah of the person who originally made this geometric pattern? These are the tessellations of the Muslim world that are famous replicable patterns", "a great Russian mathematician who worked out there's only 17 possible infinitely replicable tessellations, these geometric patterns. 14 of them are in the Alhambra Palace. So they missed three. What was their intention? Why were Muslims so obsessed with infinite replications? They were trying to show unity and diversity. They were", "into meshes, they have geometric patterns because there was a symbolism in it that they wanted to evoke in the people who were looking on it. To make them think about these things. So actions are by intention so what is the seed? What is the intention of your action? And this is like in our tradition you don't have to make intention but those", "But those things that are maqasid, like the prayer. You have to intend the prayer and you have to attend what prayer it is. Like you should have the intention of dhuhr because it's different from asr so it's a distinct act of ibadah but the wasail you don't. So when you give sadaqa or on your way to get money to pay your zakat, you don'y have to make the niyyah to go get the money. That's a wasila to paying the zakat", "when you pay the zakat. So, so the intention is very important in your actions, right? If you just have the irada then that's part of the intention also because niya and irada are related. In the Quran there's yu'abir anhu bil-ibtigha You know wa man yafa'alu dhalika ibtighaa marataati la la khayra fi kathiram min najwakum", "So whoever does that, if you do it, that's where you're going to get the reward. But you don't have to specifically make that niyyah, oh I'm going to do or I'm doing . You don't need to make that . The action itself is enough.", "person has what they intended in their action. So the Prophet, an action he could have chosen any action but this is a very important action why are you moving from one place to another? so whoever immigrates to Allah and his messenger in other words intending Allah and His Messenger right", "You're doing it for the sake of Allah and his messenger. His hijrah is to Allah and he's a messenger. And also, the prophet tended to use the female because he was speaking generally to men. He had one day out of the week where he spoke solely to the women", "the women, but generally he's speaking to them with the understanding that they would convey that to their women folk. And so he spoke with that understanding, but they would conve that with the understandi g it's also for if a woman does that to marry a man. So it goes both ways. So that' important. It's not sexist language. I mean this is kind of modern concept of like for instance in Persian you don't have the problem with gender right? Because", "because the Persians, there's no gender in their pronominal reference. If you use a pronoun in Persian it's all the same he or she. In Arabic huwa is also not masculine like huwa could be used for something that's neutral, it could be", "when you translate into English because English is very specific. We have he, she, it. Whereas in Arabic they don't have it. They have huwa for it and he. And in some time it could be also she like the Quran uses the masculine to mean the feminine in the Quran. So what's amazing about this the Prophet said if it's for dunya", "dunya, some worldly thing to achieve it or a spouse to marry. He didn't repeat like in the first one he repeated. He said because of the sharaf of the hijrah but because the second one is dunya he just said It didn't warrant repeating", "repeating. So he just used that ma to say what? And that comes from a famous, a Meskin who became known as Muhajir Umm Qais. He actually made hijrah to marry. The woman told him I won't marry you unless you make hijrah", "important. It's a foundational hadith. The second hadith that he mentions is on Abdullah Nu'man ibn Bashir, who was very young and the hadith of putting the feet together you know which unfortunately in the last... people don't do it anymore but when I was younger, people became obsessed with this thing of putting", "and you had this problem. Like people would actually do it, and it became very annoying because they found this Hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari which was on Nu'man ibn Bashir. And he said we used to... The Prophet of Taras come together so he said, We used to put our feet next to each other. They were in the last Suf, the children. He was a child.", "probably took it literally and that's what they did. But that is hadith, not ma'mool, it's not acted on. And there's nothing in our books that say that to put the feet next to the feet. There is a...in one of the commentaries it says that they did this but if you tried to do it today the person would run away from you like a scared animal. So allahu alam.", "People who've experienced that know how distracting it can be for somebody. So Nu'man ibn Bashir, because both of them, Bashir was also a Sahabi. He said the halal is clear.", "between the two, the halal and haram are gray areas. It's something that there is a shubha in it. Shubha is something...it's hazy. It' doubtful. It resembles one or the other. It can resemble both.", "both have elements. means to resemble something so he's saying the majority of people don't know how to differentiate between these two, the ones that do are the , the people that are firmly established in knowledge and so", "So he says, whoever protects himself from these shubuhat. He has guarded his...he's protected, he's kept pure. Baraa is like innocence and baraat al-asri is the foundation that things aren't you know, the permissibility is foundational in things", "in things. It's free of impurities or prohibition. So what is the irdh? The irdhh is one of the five mahfuzat of deen, nafs, maal, aqal and nasl. Nasl is included in that irdhth and some add it as a sixth", "protection of religion, protection of life, protection property, protection intellect, protection family and then in that is also protection of honor because your family is part of your honor which is one of the reasons why people don't go by last names anymore. It's cause of loss of family. People used to always go by their last name. You see this in Jane Austen novels they always call people like Willoughby. His name was John Willoughbye", "But they called him Willoughby. Why? Because they were referring to his family. In our tradition, the kunyah is to remind the father that he's an exemplar of the son. Ya Aba Yahya, ya Aba Anas. It's to remind a father that He's an example to His Son and to remind The Son that He carries the honor of His Father. So you're not just", "not just on your own. You actually represent a family, and this is why traditionally everybody went by last names. You did not call somebody by their first name because it was too informal. You had to get to know somebody before they would let you in on that intimacy, but when families lost, then everybody's just by their First Name because the family doesn't mean anything, and", "us by our last name. They never call us by first name and many of the students had parents who'd gone to that high school and grandparents because family, you carry your family's name and if you dishonor your family and that's why illegitimacy is so terrible because they don't even know who their father is. So that's", "in illegitimate societies. Because there's why should, what are you upholding? You know the name, the good name. My father's teacher Mark Van Doren his son was Charles Van Dorn who I actually knew and had correspondence with he got caught up in a scandal in 1958 it was this the quiz show scandal", "And he was from, you know, this family is a very distinguished family. There was Mark Van Doren, Carl Van Duren and these were great literary scholars in America poets Pulitzer Prize winning poets so when his son Was found out to be cheating on this quiz show It had a huge crisis in the family because he soiled his name His father gave him a good name", "That's one of the best things that your father can give you is a good name. And the worst thing you can do to your father or your mother is to soil that name. I mean, these are something in the Muslim world they know. The Mujaddadi has a meaning. And so when somebody soils the name of the Mujaddadis by doing things that are wrong, they soil the whole Mujabbidi clan.", "And that's a crime against the clan. And it's a murder against Omar and Omar bin al-Khattab will take care of them on the Day of Judgment. He's not going to intercede for people that soiled his name, I don't think. I mean he punished you know children of the Sahaba. He didn't have a problem punishing them. One of the great Sahaba's son was an alcoholic and he punished him.", "That's one of the things in the Hamziya he says about Omar. He said, the Qareeb and the Ba'id were the same to Omar. Taqwa was what distinguished his judgment on them. Like he... Yeah. So that's really important to remember that about you know. So the Ird is really important. And that's why it's so horrible to tell lies about people.", "people, to slander people, libel people. It's one of the major sins in our religion and it has a punishment, you know, slandering somebody, slanding the mu'minat, the innocent believing women, to say something about their… this is a really serious thing.", "And so then he says, Like the ra'i who yaraa hawla al-hima. Like a shepherd who is taking his flock near a hima. The hima is the sanctuary. So if you take the flock", "the flock near the sanctuary, it's going to end up eating from that grass that's prohibited. So the Hima was the sanctuary of a king. If people who know Western tradition, you know in the Robin Hood story, it is very famous Sherwood Forest which is where they hid and hunted. That was actually a sanctuary of the King but the King was unjust and so Robin Hood", "band of men had no problems hunting. And they thought this is very Western, like Cromwell. He said rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God. That's CromWell. That that's not necessarily the Sunni position, right? Patience is traditionally the Sunnit position with tyrants. You just you have to be patient because rebelling against them makes it worse. So he says", "So he says, Every king has a sanctuary. The sanctuary of Allah are those maharim. This is why So there's a clear demarcation. The Quran has very clear demarcation of", "You know, these are very clearly articulated in the Quran. What's prohibited, right? The mayta, the dam, the lahm al-khanzeer, ma'u hillal ghayri la. These are very clear. In the Maliki madhhab is the... Of all the madhhabs, it's the one that has the least amount of prohibitions because Malik took Nassr Qur'an. So he sees these as muhkamah and the hadith he takes more is for karahiya.", "is for Karahiya. So in the Malik Madhab, anything that's Nijis like carrion things like that and then even if it was a wild donkey who is domesticated those are the meats that are prohibited", "And that's why Imam Zamakhshari famously said, You know he said, I don't tell people my madhhab. Because if I tell them they're going to find some fault in it and he said if I say I'm Maliki they say oh he permits eating dogs which is not true but there's Karahiya as opposed", "as opposed to although there's an opinion in the Maliki Madhab that it's also Muharram. There's room for everybody except the pig eaters, they have to give that up. I heard that Maududi used to say to Hindu converts did you eat beef yet? Which I don't think is very... It's kind of harsh but because they have family yeah", "Apparently Akbar, he did not allow Muslims to eat beef during his time. And that's when a lot of Hindus became Muslim because there's absolutely no tradition that the Prophet ate beef. In fact, there's a Sahih Hadith where he said beef, he said, The meat of beef is a disease and the milk is a cure.", "That's a Sahih Hadith. It's a Mushkil because Ibrahim brought the ʿIjal, veal. He served veal to his... And then amazing ending here. For the students of Arabic.", "So salaha in this, although salaha is valid. إِذَا صَلَحَتْ So the mudgha, there's a mudgah, there'a lump of flesh in the body of the human being. إذا صَالَحًا صلحت صَلاح الجسد كله وإذا فَسَدت فَصَد الجسدا كُلّه If it sound, the whole body is sound and if it's corrupt, the all body is corrupt. أَلٰوَهِ الْقَلْبُ Isn't it the heart? And that's why the Prophet was asked about", "asked about the best people and he said, , the one who's . And they said we know what's . He said the pure heart. means to sweep the house so is a heart that has been swept like it's been cleaned out. You've swept your", "You've cleared out all of the aghyar. So very, very important hadith and many I mean these can you know whole books have been written literally on these hadiths so I'm... The next one is", "So this is anana. So Allah, you know, did he hear it from him or did he heard from another sahabi? So this Mutafakun alayh when you have Al-Bukhari and Muslim agree on the hadith, It's very strong. It's usually the next after,", "the Mutawatir Hadith is then you get the ones that the six agree on because there's, there are hadiths that all six relate. But Mutafiqun alayh is a very high rutba. So this hadith is la yu'minu ahadukum hatta yuhibbali akhihi none of you truly believes and we put truly there because it can't mean la yuu'minoo because that would mean", "what you love for yourself, if you weren't a believer. So it's understood to mean the iman of one is not complete. There's a hadith Ibn Mas'ud said that That you're not a believer until you see a tribulation as a blessing and a blessing as a tribulations", "In other words, your iman is not complete. That's a high maqam to see that. Because everything's from Allah and so you see it as this is there's only two possibilities. Like Gaza right now, there's two possibilities It's a dhulm from these people undeniably the dhulum is wadi and there's no arguing that", "And those people who are inflicting this cruelty on these people, they will be judged. They've already been judged in the dunya but they will also be judged in akhira. But for us when we see these things as we experience it existentially as an individual, as a human being what does it mean for that individual? For Abdullah who is there right now or Khadija or… It's either rafa' darajat or tahara min ad-dhanub", "It's one or the other. It's elevated in maqam with Allah, or it's removing sins. And we believe that. That's our belief. And if you lose that, you will fall into despair because then it becomes purposeless.", "Zain gave me. The equation for despair was suffering minus meaning equals despair. Suffering minus meaning, equals despair All suffering in our tradition Everything that happens to a believer is good everything", "And children are, you know, You know, like children suffer in this world. One of the most extraordinary things about suffering children and those of us who've been in the healthcare, you had to do rotations in pediatrics when I was a nurse. One", "or eight years old with cancer is saying, why me? They just don't do it. And if they do, it's from their parents. But they will not do that naturally. They just accept it. There's an amazing book by a French... He was a freedom fighter who was blind and his book Then There Was Light. It's a very interesting book", "But he wrote this book his job amongst the freedom fighters was to interview potential Freedom fighters now they'd be called terrorists The French was like if the Nazis won the war They would be the terrorist that's the way it works but they at that time anyway, they were free. They still considered them freedom fighters", "things up. They were killing Nazis. So these were like the resistance. So his job was to interview people and he could always detect the insincerity in the voice. He ended up getting betrayed, and he wrote in his book that it was—he had doubt about the man. It was the only time he let somebody go because he fooled him but he did have some doubt about him and he ended up betraying", "In the first chapter of that book, it really struck me. He had lost his sight as a child. He was in the playground and they landed and took out his eyes. The glass shattered. Took out his eye. He said I thank God that this happened to be as a", "something that happened. It's an amazing statement. So, Hamza, Abu Hamza Anas ibn Malik is he was very young. He came into the Prophet ﷺ care and he relates this hadith. None of you truly believe until he loves for his... And this really should be fellow man because", "because Shabrachiti, Imam Nawawi in his... I had an original edition of the Sharh 40 Nawawiyah and Imam Nawwi says, And then I got a later one. We were reading it with Tarif al-Urabi years ago and it didn't have that in it. I said what happened? My edition has that in", "for political reasons. It's amazing, because they don't want to think oh that we want good for Jews? The Jews are the children of prophets like you don't think Yaqub would be upset about his children going to hell or something. Adam alaihissalam in the Hadith he says that in the hadith when he saw Adam on the Isra and the Mi'raj one of the visions", "Adam was he would look to his right and smile. And look to His left and cry. And behind him were, He couldn't make them out. They were like shadows. And so He asked Jabril and He said the people on the left are His children that are for paradise. And the people", "All of these, you know. And that's why Safiyyah when the Prophet said him, when one of the wives said called her a Yahudiya or said they were better than her because they were related to the Prophet . He said, why didn't you say to them my uncle is Moses, my father is Aaron and she was an Aaronite and my husband is Muhammad? In other words like that's a good thing so if a Jewish person", "if a Jewish person becomes Muslim, I mean there's a sharaf in having the lineage of the prophets in your right? So he said like you should want for them guidance. So that's you know his iman is not complete until", "He loves for himself what he loves for others. It's a really important hadith and he says, Sheikh Abu Amr ibn Salah, he says You know some people would think this is impossible but that's not the truth.", "So there he's reducing it down to your brother in Islam. But the great imams, they said it includes humanity like you should want for others guidance. Yeah? It's a higher maqam because then if you make it provincial I mean", "Christian family. Alhamdulillah, manna Allah alayhi wa baris salam. And there were people who gave me da'wah. I mean, I read the Qur'an before I met Muslims but there were People that gave me Da'wah that wanted me to become Muslim and That's one of the things that I think our community has been really remiss about especially in the United States There's not a concern and then part of the problem is Some of the people that do do da'wa don't do it knowing the people", "Because you have to have the tongue of the people. Every message that comes came with the tongue, of the People. You have to understand the people and how they think. And I mean one of the most amazing people is Abduhaq Al-Aqili He was this he's a very famous Swedish painter who studied in France under some of the great Impressionists.", "He's considered one of the great Impressionist painters, but his father was a veterinarian. And maybe you could just look at what his name is in his Swedish name, Abduhaq Al-Akili, Swedish painter Muslim. But he... His father was veterinarian and he taught him to love animals. So when he was in France studying painting", "studying painting. And painters, like poets and others are very sensitive people. You can't be an artist without having a level of sensitivity that normal people don't have. So these are Van Gogh, you know poor man cut off his ear. I mean Van Gog suffered a lot as lovers often do.", "when they introduced bullfighting into France from Spain, he went to the bull fight and shot the matador. Like how does it feel? He shot him in the leg. And what's his name? Yeah but what was his Swedish name?", "No, that's somebody else. This is somebody else He's still alive. Now this man died a long time ago in any case he uh, he shut and he went to prison But there were so many animal rights people that they petitioned to get him out But when he was in prison, he was jail with an algerian Who recited the quran all the time?", "And so because he was reciting Quran all the time, they ended up having all these conversations about Islam. He ended up becoming Muslim and he went to Egypt, entered into Al-Azhar, studied with Abdurrahman Ulesh and became a scholar. He's a Maliki faqih. He studied Khalil and then... But the reason I bring him up is because the most amazing thing that I read about him which really floored me", "Islam back to Europe, but he wanted to see how Islam manifested in a non-Muslim land. So he went to study the Indian Muslims before he went too because you know Arabs have their way, but He wanted to if that if the non-Arabs had other ways of being Muslim so he went and studied the Muslims India before he Went back to europe to do dawah yeah, even Agili That's his name sheikh abdul Hadi alaqeeli sorry not Abduh Haq", "Al-Aqili. Yeah, so he... This man, he died in 1917. He was struck by a train unfortunately. But it was an amazing man. Amazing! He actually was the one that introduced René Guénon into who ended up writing some important books but So he went and studied Islam in India to take", "in India to take it back. All of his paintings hang in the National Museum in Sweden. He's considered a national treasure in Sweden and he's, you know amongst like Monet, there are these great impressionist painters, the pointillists and things. He is considered one of the greatest impressionist painter. So that's really important, that one.", "And then, so then this last hadith which to me is one of the most important hadiths.", "Imam al-Tirmidhi relates. And Imam al Tarmadhi, radhila'na Abu Isa al-tarmadhy was from Tarmd which is in Central Asia or it's also Tarmad with a Fatha and Turmud so there's like different ways of pronouncing it. Apparently they pronounce with a Fatah traditionally. It was Tarmadi yeah but he's known as Imam at Tarmady with a Kasra another one of the great Mahdi", "he had a photographic memory, and he could just hear it one time. And these were people Allah haya'ahum, He prepared them to carry this religion. But this Hadith is a very foundational Hadith Abu Huraira relates it and Imam Ahmad and Ibn Abi Zayd put it in their choice of the most important Hadiths. This Hadith", "Almost all of the problems on this planet come from this problem. Of being concerned with what's of no concern to you. Minding your own business. It's such a difficult thing for human beings to do. Everybody wants to put their nose in other people's business. Ahmed Sarroq said,", "opened by saying, how so-and-so? It's like, you know, just how so and so. Because why are you asking how so und so? Because very often people ask hoping something is wrong with so and So. You know it's a very common thing that people do. And then why are people obsessed with... Why is there a whole section on the news feed on the royal family? Like what is that?", "And then all the click bait. So, Al-Hakim Samarkandi who was one of the students of Imam al-Maturidi Abu Mansour al-Maturidi The great Mutakellam Imam al Ghazali said that he said", "All of the calamities in this dunya are for three reasons. Talib al-akhbar, naqil al-akhbar wa mutalaqi al-ahkbar People seeking news so we would call those news hounds, news junkies", "spreading news, so we call those newscasters. And , people receiving news. All the and he said none of them are free of the blame. And this is what this about you know it's like concern yourself with yourself but if you get outside", "that into these other areas, you're going to be complicit in crimes unimaginable. And people don't think about this. They don't thing about the ethical reality of just being alive here. I have a son, I don't know where he got this from but he will not buy anything that's", "Like we get these cheap clothes. CNN had a report where the average American has 50 slaves working for them around the world just to supply our lifestyles, right? So you're wearing clothes that were manufactured in sweatshops but they're cheap. You know there was a documentary called The High Cost of Low Prices. People don't think about that, of buying local", "buying local of small scale businesses because all these corporations, they'll go where it's cheapest, where they can exploit the workers, where there's no labor laws. That's what they do. Labor is really important. Work is important and one of the problems with our lifestyles is that everybody wants to live... We'd need for the world to live like the average American lives, you'd need three earths to provide the resources for it", "it. It's unsustainable. So this hadith is such an important hadith just to really preoccupy yourself with what concerns you, you know, to work on yourself, to not worry about other people.", "asked him how old he was. Because that's a curiosity for people, I wonder how old is? And he just said, mind your own business. Which might seem harsh but it was a great lesson to him because he would say that whenever anybody asked him about how old they were. So he got the point. Malik said if you tell somebody your age they'll either say oh I thought you were younger than that or I thought", "Like, it's never work out. Yeah. Apparently the Hunzas like add like 20 years to their age or something. That's why you know they said the Hunza are the oldest living people but they get to a certain age they just add like a decade or something so when they're like 80 they say they're 90 and say oh you look great! So from the beautiful", "from the beautiful Islam of a person is that they leave what does not concern them. Ya'ni is one of the most beautiful words in the Arabic language, it's really one of my favorite words Arabs love it so much they say it all the time. Yaani, yaani, right? It's like you know in English people who say you know but Aniya and Ana ya'ni it has to...one of the meanings is to suffer", "You know, so is suffering. So from something is to suffer right? But it's also if you actually looked at it It's a form , it's to attempt something. So it's two attempt to find meaning. So suffering in Arabic If you just look at the word linguistically at what it actually means", "it actually means. It means an attempt to find meaning that's what Mu'anat means in Arabic. He is trying to find maana, that's suffering is. It's to bring you back into reality and", "I mean, Faqeer Bannani said if you could recite in other than the Quran. I mean it's hyperbole but he said it would be with the Hikmah of Ibn Ataillah. It's like Wahi. It is so amazing. But he said whoever thinks that the Lutf of Allah", "of Allah, the care of God, the grace of God is absent in the qadr of God. In the decree of God it's from myopia. It's from your own short-sightedness and then he says because the one who has brought these tribulations upon you is the same one that accustomed you to blessings. In other words the only reason you know the tribulation is because you were accustomed to the husn al ikhtiyar.", "So when things go south, the reason that you're aware of that is because they were up north before. That's a very geocentric, Eurocentric view. You know, the Muslims put the map and I wanted to do a Muslim map for our children's classrooms called the restorative map, which puts the South on the top", "Because all the Muslim maps were made with Africa was on the top and Europe was on bottom. And they switched it around, which is psychological. Right? But like the poet said you'll find out when you reach the top you're on the bottom.", "تقبل مننا صيامنا وقيامنا ركوعنا وسجودنا اللهم إن شاء الله اتقبل منا هذه الأيام الأخيرة جعلنا من عتقائي هذا الشهر يا رحم الراحمين اللهم اجعلنامن الذين يستمعون القول فياتبعونا أحسن اللهماجعلنا", "سبحان ربك رب العزة عما يصفون وسلمنا ورحمة الله" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Islamic Governance _ Justice_ Shaykh Hamza Yusuf o_LYJULqHh1IQ&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742885641.opus", "text": [ "Historically when Muslims conquered lands, there were two types of ways that they came into a land. One was what's called Unwatan and the other one is Sulhan. So Unwataan is where people refused... They refused the Muslim demands so they fought it out and then the Muslims won. That had a whole set of rules that went with it", "And then if they conquered them under a treaty, like a Sulah. Then that also they were able to stipulate things. So one was like a conditional surrender the other was like an unconditional surrenders and you see this in early Islam One of the things In unconditional situations that they would not allow them to build new churches. And so you will find for instance That there are periods where", "And these are things that a lot of people, who are very anti-Muslims, are pulling out. Because they're going into our sources and looking at our history books. What's interesting about their methodology is that they will cherry pick all the things that blacken Islamic history. So, if you look at the history books, you'll see that there are some very different kinds of religious groups in the world today.", "And just they will look at them as simply fact. This is fact and Anything that puts the religion in a good light, they will say oh this is clearly a contrived story It's a nice story told by Muslims to make their religion look nice And this is a very common when you get into orientalist Tradition it's a very calm emotif for me. It really bothers me a lot because They don't challenge", "I would challenge a lot of these narratives that I personally would challenge because the Prophet never destroyed a place of worship. And he prohibited destroying places of worship, so if a Muslim ruler destroys a place or worship that was already built even if it was built against certain codes or legal restrictions, if its being used by a religious community, I don't believe the Prophet would have done that.", "And so, to say that this somehow is normative Islam because our ruler did it. Another aspect we have to remember as Muslims is that Islam was a religious tradition that our Prophet told us would only have a polity for 30 years. And then after that he said it wouldn't be Islam. It would be something else.", "which lasted for six months almost to the date 30 years after the Prophet's death, it aligned with empire and Islam becomes now a vehicle for Empire with all the aspects that entails. Just like Christianity in the 4th century aligned with Empire so the first 300 years", "certain tradition, but after that when they aligned with empire it became very different. One of the fundamental debates in early Christianity was about wealth. This was actually a more significant debate than a lot of the theological debates that will enter into the religion later on. Could a Christian be rich? That was a major discussion. Many of", "And the Desert Fathers really felt, and the Desert fathers certainly felt that the only way you could truly express your true Christian faith was in essence to completely remove yourself from the world. But once Christianity became the religion of an empire it changed, it transformed. Islam is the same. You can't divorce", "and their decisions, and their reasoning from the environments that they were in. You can't separate those two. And then you will find historically the vast majority of scholars that are honored in our tradition had very tenuous relationships with empire. Many of them would not visit rulers. They simply would not go and sit with them.", "If the ruler wanted to see them, they would say he has to come and see me. I'm not going to him. Imam al-Ghazali who in his early part of his life was very much aligned with empire. He worked with Nizam al-Mulk. He was in his coterie but when he had his transformation, he went on his pilgrimage at the tomb of Al Khalil, he swore an oath that he would never visit a ruler. That's an oath he made.", "That's an oath, another that he actually swore. He vowed that he would never visit a ruler and when he was called to the court of Sanjar he went not believing it was breaking the vow because he was forced to because he is accused of... He was accused You know of religious heterodoxy And he had to go defend himself But he did not after that engage with rulers and so there are many many examples of that historically Madik ibn Anas is a", "Ibn Anas is a clear example of somebody who... And Abu Hanifa and Ahmad ibn Hanbal, all of them. If you look at the four imams, all were simply not tied to empire. They would not allow themselves to be compromised in that way because they understood that once you ally with Empire, you compromise yourself. One interesting thing about our legal system is that judges traditionally were independent", "were independent. So even the rulers could not control what we would call the judicial branch in our separation of powers, because we separate legislative, the judicial and the executive branches based on Montesquieu's demarcations. In the traditional Muslim world, the legislative was largely an independent body, the fukaha. And you had the executive branch", "which would also legislate things very often against the independent legislative branch. So they would legislate taxes that the considered unacceptable or unjust. The legislative branch in Islamic history was actually an independent branch generally, but it was also co-opted by empire and so there was a tenuous relationship between what they called the Ulema of Sultan and the Ulemah of Quran", "As we look at as a tool to deal and grapple with the real contingencies of time, that's something that I think Sheikh Abdullah takes very seriously. And this is why he has", "He's come up with certain conclusions about things that... And they're very troubling to some of the ulama. Which is interesting also because one of the things he does, whenever he comes up with something, he always writes his argument from an usuri perspective. He puts it out there and then if you have criticisms write them and I'll address them.", "So when you inherit a tradition, you're grappling with different lawyers of the past making arguments. And that's what I'm trying to do here. I want to make sure that we have a good understanding of how these people are being treated in their own way.", "And just to give you one example, in the verse which is in Tawbah where it says that they're supposed to pay jizya hata yadfa'u jizyatan an yadin wahum saaghirun. So there's the jumlahali as wahum saghirun, that they should pay this tribute in a humbled manner. Wahum sagirun. If you read the books of fiqh, you'll see amazing things. Some of them said oh we have to humiliate them.", "The hand over is better than the left hand.", "The hand over is better than the hand under. Meaning, giving is better then taking. So in this case they had to offer money like that instead of like that. That's one view and you'll find it in the books. These are things that these Islamophobes pull out from our books... ...and say look at this tolerant religion. And then you have people like Abu Ubaid and Kitab al-Amwal. One of the great Islamic tradition who argues that just paying tribute...", "paying tribute is humbling enough. So honor them and treat them well, and don't humiliate them in paying their tributes.\" So there's another faqih who comes up with a completely different approach. And so what is it? Which one is it ? They're both from the quote-unquote tradition, and this is the lawsuit that we inherit. And then", "How was he with people when the Christians of Najran came to Medina according to one recension in the ninth year of Hijrah, how did he treat them? According to our books, he let them pray in the masjid. When they debated with him about for instance Ya'uqta Harun, they said about Mary you've confused Mary the sister of Moses with Mary the mother of Jesus because in the Quran Mary the virgin is called", "And the Prophet said, wasn't she an Aaronite? Because the Aaronites were the shrine keepers. And Mary was from the offspring of Aaron, the brother of Moses. So he was explaining because the Arabs say, When you're from a people, you call them the sister of that people. So she was an Aaronit. So He was saying, that's not a confusion. That's an epithet that indicates her lineage.", "lineage. So he explained, he didn't say off with their heads how dare they question the Quran? How dare they questioned my prophecy? No! He treated them with respect. He debated with them and then when debate was going nowhere he challenged them to the Mubahala which they decided not to do after consulting with the Jews in Medina.", "entered into an agreement with him and they moved back, and he sent an arbiter with them. So there's an example. The point being is that you're going to find this in our tradition. You're gonna find all of these... We've got 1400 years of tradition the same way the Christians have 1400 years. They have 2000 years of Tradition. The Jews have 3000 years. It becomes cumbersome. Tradition becomes cumversome hence the Protestant", "protestant impulse let's just do away with all this stuff let's go back to the original sources and that's hence selafi dawah is so appealing to a lot of people because it's just saying let's", "If you read Augustine on Christian doctrine, he makes very similar arguments to our scholars about the necessity of mastering certain tools before you can even interact with the tradition. The least of which being grammar. And we have very few people that have mastered the grammar of the Qur'an. We have people giving commentary of the Quran that are completely unqualified and in any other previous time they would be in blocks. You know, they used to have those blocks", "They put people with their head and arm. They would be in blocks. In our history, one of the intriguing aspects of our tradition is there are actually very few tafsirs of Quran. And if you look at the men that made tafsir they were literally the greatest scholars in the history of Islam because nobody wanted to touch the Quran. It's like I'm not going to say what I think God means by that. Not me. And then when you read the tafsiras", "The Qur'an is the most important book in our civilization.", "is a book, a two-volume book just on the meanings of the particles and prepositions in the Quran. In the Arabic language. Because there are so many different types of fa. There's different types lamb. لِيَتَّخِذُهُ عَدُوًّا In order for him to take him as an enemy. Moses, Pharaoh took him into the house to take them as an enemy. That lamb can be ta'leel but in that case it's not because nobody in their right mind would take somebody into their house to be their enemy. So it's called", "So it's called the lamb of consequence. In other words, he didn't know that was what was going to happen but that's what he was doing learning those nuances and then diction and word choice takes years to master in the Arabic language because these words are very subtle and they have very subtle meanings and there are words in the Quran that you might think mean one thing but then when you read the tafsir", "And that's happened to me many, many times reading the Qur'an. Where I thought I clearly understood what it meant then when I went into tafsir I realized my understanding was completely skewed. And so tradition... we have to grapple with tradition but we need the tools to grappl with the tradition and that's where were in trouble because it takes many years to master those tools", "And it also demands a really, a type of divine inspiration. That it's not something you could just do on your own there has to be a Tawfiq involved in it and so that adds to the challenge but Sheikh Abdullah he mastered the Arabic language I mean he is arguably one of the great masters of the Arabic Language", "of the Arabic language in this time. And, in fact I saw him in a debate with one of the scholars from Pakistan who's a very great Hanafi jurist and he was arguing with him about you know Ummat al-Mumineen and he said that Ma'a it doesn't mean they're from the same ummah It's saying He is with them. And Sheikh Abdullah started arguing from the Quran", "Of the different meanings of ma' in the Arabic language. And one of them is for musahaba. I'm with you. It could also mean indi. I have five dinars with me. So there's different meanings, but he was saying it's a valid interpretation to say that it's for musuhaba. That the ummah is one. The Jews", "The Jews and the Arabs in Medina were one ummah. Anyway, but the other thing that he really has mastered is usul al-fiqh. And he knows the great textbooks of our tradition. And so, in trying to grapple with what's happening,", "And there's so many brilliant commentators on the internet that are always enlightening us with their amazing insights and they're impeccable grammatically sound syntax. But one of the things that people, like why are you just talking about the minorities? What about all the majorities?", "And part of something that we have to understand as Muslims is that when Muslims fight amongst each other, that's just Muslims fighting amongst each another. But when they oppress minorities in the name of Islam, that a blemish on the religion, when they're doing it in the Name of the Religion. This is about our religion which is not the property of the Muslim community", "Muslim community and we have a type of tribalism there's a tribal mentality you know what I call Beno Islam this idea that this is my tribe and the Sahaba were all converts lest you forget right they were converts to the religion so this ideas that this", "Saudis, or the possession of ISIS, orthe possession of the Pakistanis,or the Turks, or any other ethnicity. No! This is a religion that has an open invitation to humanity. Whoever wants to believe let him believe whoever wants to disbelieve let them disbelieve but it's an open invitation and there's very clear verses in the Quran that if you turn away from it God will bring", "be like you. Like if you're not going to live up to this faith, you'll be replaced with other people because the human project is predicated on worship of the creator. If there's no sound worship, there's reason for the project to go on and it ends when that stops. The Prophet said, the end of time will not come until there's", "win right dawkins and all these people they'll be happy to know that in this world they eventually they win and you can see the way things are going it would appear that that's uh that's the way", "So, he... You know in thinking about this revival of the metood and sexual slavery concubinage and these things that for instance Graham Wood in his article using Bernard Heichel as a foundation argues that These Muslims That think that Isis isn't following their religion. They just have a disability", "And they just have a distorted version of their religion. And this is basically Graham Wood's argument in that Atlantic Monthly article, that what they were doing or what they're doing in Syria and Iraq is actually from Islam. It's not an anomaly. They are just practicing things that Muslims haven't been practicing for 1,000 years.", "People like Glenn Beck, who's written a book recently. It's number three... Last time I looked, number three bestseller on the New York Times bestsellers list called The Problem Is Islam argues that there are many, many good Muslims but they're not good because they're Muslim. They're good because their not practicing Islam. Right? And so we're getting large numbers of people being indoctrinated into this idea somehow", "is a death cult and arguably, a death has emerged within our religion. This whole idea, you know, this slogan that martyrdom is our goal. That's not the goal of Muslims. The Prophet said, he said also don't ask for death. And if there was a better way to die than in the arms of your wife", "in your bed, then he would have died that way. That's where he died. He didn't die on the battlefield. Less than 0.1% of Sahaba actually died on the Battlefield. It's a very small number of the Sahab actually died On the battlefield so this kind of cult of death that has emerged within the religion is actually very alien to the Islamic tradition and we asked about who the martyr was and they said the martyrs are the one who dies", "He said, then the martyrs of my Ummah would be very few. That's in a Sahih Hadith. But he said that the martyr is the one who dies when a building collapses on him or when he falls off his camel or when gets dysentery or when drowns. There are lots of ways to be a martyr. So... In grappling with this, Shaykh Abdullah", "There were several Jewish tribes in Medina. There were three major ones, which all of us know, Bani Qaynuqa, Bany Nadir and Bany Qurayza. And he entered into a treaty in the first year of Hijrah with them, a Muwada'ah, in which they would all agree in their own religious expressions to work towards righteousness and to defend one another.", "And Imam Shafi'i said, this is an agreement of our community. One of the most intriguing aspects of this constitution is that even the most skeptical of Orientalists actually believe that this is authentic legal document. Patricia Crone who died a few years back, one of the Hagarites accepted it for her own benefit.", "accepted it. Fred Doner, somebody who's worked a lot on the origins of Islam, accepted it There are few different recensions that are found Ibn Ishaq in his Sira has a copy We don't have any original copy but we do know that was a valid document and what I spoke on", "in Marrakesh, I mean Sheikh Abdullah did his he gave his what he calls which is giving it a foundational basis in the tradition where he goes he looks at all the different texts. He looks at he's got these concepts that are misunderstood like jihad", "arguing that these are really misunderstood concepts in our tradition. And think about what's important to remember about Sheikh Abdullah is that he is not a modernist by any stretch, he is very much embedded in tradition but he's a creative traditionalist and one of the things about Toinbee, Arnold Toinbeee,", "English historian who wrote a study in history, nine-volume study of history where he studied 21 civilizations. Why they rose? How they maintained their power? Why they began to decline and why they collapsed? And argues that out of those 21 civilizations that he studied there were only seven living civilizations today but what he argues in there is that civilizations are confronted with challenges", "And when the creative minorities that can grapple with these challenges, they're able to withstand the challenges and sometimes overcome them, surmount them. But when the challenges become insurmountable due to a dearth of these creative thinkers then the civilization collapses. This is one of the real trying aspects of our civilization right now. We have very few creative people.", "power I don't think could get middle managerial jobs at corporations with their qualifications. A lot of them, and I've read the SAT scores that they have on a lot of these people in the Senate and Congress, and it's embarrassing. They weren't even good in school. Like Dan Quayle said, if I knew I would have got this far, I would've studied harder. And then that is a case against democracy. It's a case for monarchy because at least they know they're going to be in power.", "So anyway, I'll just go through some of the things that I looked at. Al-Islam al-Mutasamih, tolerant Islam. One of the verses in Surah Al-Hajj, this was a very important verse. I mean everything's important but this", "وَبِيعٌ وَصَرَوَاتٌ وَّمَسَاجِدُ يُذْكَرُ فِيهَا اسْمُ اللَّهِ كَثِيرًا وَلَا يَنْصُرَنَّ اللَّـهُ مَن يَعْنْسُرُهُ إِنَّ اللهَ لَقَوْيٌ عَزِيزٌ Had it not been for God using some people to defend other people, you would have seen the صوامع ,", "and the synagogues, and then the masajid, wherein God's name is oft mentioned. And then the ulama differ. Does it go back to masajids? Is it a'id ala masajd or is it a'd ala all of them? I think it makes more sense to say it goes back to all of these places where the god of Abraham certainly was being worshipped.", "word we share. One of these recent debates at Wheaton College, that courageous lady who said that you know we worship the same God and she's right but the concept of the god differs. The god is the lord of the heavens and the earth, the creator and sustainer of the heaven and the Earth. We can differ on how we conceptualize that god but the god is a same god in the same way if you look at I mean it's a poor analogy but you have Republicans and Democrats", "Both of them believe in government, but they have very different concepts of what government should be. And so people differ in their conceptualization of ideas, but the idea of God is the same. And one of the things about our tradition, like the Catholics call it the via negativa, you know, the negating way, which is the way of the unknowable God.", "read Aquinas on God, even Aquinas is on the Trinity it's very clear that the Catholics believe in a god that cannot be temporal, cannot be in place. It's not complex, it's of simple reality. I mean these are understandings that Christian theologians had centuries ago so the idea and then obviously the logos", "mysteries in that tradition, but the god which is behind the personas what Meister Eckhart calls the Godhead is the unknowable God. Right? The God of... In the Vedic tradition they call it the God of the Nirguna. You know, the God that's attribute-less. That we... The Tao that can be named as not the eternal Tao. So there's... In our tradition", "that God is that which is unlike anything. In fact, to call God a thing is only majaz. It's because out of adab we can't say he's no thing but he's not a thing. God is not a", "which means willed into existence. The she' already is in the Mashiach. So all these things that Allah has created, they're already embedded in our language as a metaphysic of creation. But we call God a thing out of adab to say that he's not no-thing but there is no thing like him. There is no she' like God.", "has a chapter called the permissibility of saying, using thing to talk about God. So this is the God that we worship, the unknowable God but he has revealed himself to us through language and that language is problematic because language always creates ambiguities it's not like mathematics which is the language", "Allah is the most Merciful, Most Merciful.", "an approximation, it's to approximate these meanings to our consciousness. So had it not been then all these religious places would be destroyed so this permissibility for fighting which came in Surah Al-Hajj was in defense of religious institutions", "of all people knew firsthand what it was like to be persecuted for your religion. He tasted the pain of that reality and, and what's interesting and intriguing about the pagans in Mecca is they were worried about the economic impact that monotheism would have on their trade and commerce. Like they never thought that people one day would come from Indonesia or from California", "to go to mecca in those days it was just the arab tribes that were going but they thought these tribes are coming because they've got idols in in the kaba if if he if he gets his way all these idols are gonna be destroyed who's gonna come the jews and the christians aren't gonna come they have jerusalem so we're gonna be stuck here without any revenue and that was the mentality of these people", "Only one God and there's no other god in the law that troubled them. And so, the Prophet during this persecution they first went to the Najashi. And one of the things that I think Muslims forget is that we have three Sunan from our prophet. The sunnah of powerlessness which is the sunna of Mecca. And this sunna is not abrogated but the Muslims act as if it's been abrogate", "been abrogated if you say that it's abrogate that means his 13 years in Mecca have no real meaning like all that suffering he went through all that patience sovereign yeah alias are in the more at the cumul Jenna all those things don't really have any any meaning to us anymore they're just a historical fact so", "The second sunnah is the sunnah of...", "It's what he deems correct. So the next sunnah is how to live in a non-Muslim society that's not persecuting you, and that's the sunnah of Ethiopia, of Habesha. They were allowed to practice their faith. And the last sunnahs is the sunnaah of when you have sovereignty, when God has empowered you again figuratively because", "When God puts you in a position in which you're representing his power. Because all power is God's. So, in that type of situation how do you behave? And again the magnanimity that he showed. Then he made his hijrah to Medina after 13 years of persecution. He makes this hijrah.", "He was thinking about going to Hajar in Eastern Arabia. He went to different tribes, asking them if they would take him. He used to go and ask for tribal protection. None of them helped him. And finally the Ausa and the Khazraj who were in a town called Yathrib. And these were two Yemeni tribes. They're Kahlaji tribe.", "The Yemenis are divided into Himyaris and Kahlanis. They were Kahlani Yemenites who left after the famous dam broke, and many of the Yemenites went to Syria and different places. They went to Medina, Yathrib at the time. And the Ausa and the Khazraj are Benu Eila. They we're from the same ancestors so they're actually one family but like the Hadfari tribe", "and the Khazraj had their allies. And right before the Prophet came, they had a war called Harb al-Buath in which they fought each other. And Horaida was involved and Nadira was involved. So... The Jews used to tell me that when you're fighting with your enemies, you have to fight with them.", "The Jews used to tell them, you know, there's a prophet coming. That's why we're here. He's coming to this city. When he comes, he's going to get rid of all your idols. And they used to hear this. And one of the intriguing aspects of the Arabs in Medina is that if they had a really sick child, they would swear an oath to God because they believed in Allah as the supreme God. They would swear and oath that they'll raise it a Jew if it lives. And so there were actually several Jewish Arab children in Medinah", "in medina and that was revealed because some of them wanted to force their children to be muslim even though they were arabs who had raised them as jews because they have very high regard for the jews, because they were people of the book. And they used to ask them for things even though They didn't convert to judaism. They would ask them and so the quran was revealed you can't compel them to convert to islam", "they want to convert to Islam. That's one of the asbab that's mentioned. So, the Jews in Medina, there were probably... I mean these estimates are hard but there were probabaly around 30 thousand. There were more Jews than Arabs in Medinah and the Jews had primarily agriculturalists and controlled the souq. And Benu Qainuqa in particular", "And so the Arabs and the Jews who were farmers used to bring their crops to the Benuqaynuqa. And then they would buy them, and sell them in the marketplace to Arabs that would come. And there were also goldsmiths and money lenders. So these were the occupations. So when the first thing that the prophet did was he asked about the souk. And they said it's Benuquaynuqua. And he said the Muslims should have their own souk,", "So this is his economic foresight. And so he actually has set up a separate market, which obviously would have angered Benuqaynuqa because they would have seen that as breaking their monopoly. But that's what he did. And his souk was very interesting because it was more like what we would call today a flea market. He did not allow anybody to own a stall. It was first come, first serve.", "So you couldn't get like the best place and it was if you got there the earliest, you got the best Place. And so it was a very egalitarian marketplace. And... So the first thing he did was he built a souq and he built the masjid. Those were the first two acts that he did his first khutbah which Abdullah bin Salam, the Jewish rabbi heard He got everybody together in Medina who said", "And feed food. Feed food. And maintain your kinship bonds. Remember, that's a deep statement in relation to Aus and Khazraj as well as the Jews that were at war with each other. Maintain your kenship bonds, don't fight. You're all related to each other, maintain those bonds.", "and pray at some portion of the night when people are sleeping, and you'll enter into paradise with peace. So it begins with peace and it ends with peace as his first khutbah. Begins with peace, and it end with peace so in Medina he establishes the masjid and the marketplace", "Even though they entered into an agreement, begin to have talks with the Quraish. And so this is the beginning of the breakdown of the Sahifa. They give them basically aid at Badr and so he allows him to take all of their money", "to take all of their wealth and they went to Khaybar. But it's important to note at this time the prophet is very weak, there's probably less than 2,000 men that he has, the Jews were more powerful than he was, and the Benu Qainuqa was expecting Qurayza and Nadir to come to his aid and they didn't which indicates", "and many of the Jews were very upright, they were honest people and they were people of their word. And the Prophet mentioned that about especially Mukherjeeq and others, Rifa'a. And we know the Arabs have a saying, more trustworthy than Samuel who was the famous Jew that would not give up the armor of Imer al-Qais who left it as a trust with him", "his child because of that and he's the famous poet jahili poet as well so these are the tribes uh the yahood of benu zureik bano amar banosaida banujusham was from thanaba then this is a jewish tribe", "Muslims only know the three tribes, but these are all Jews mentioned in the Sahifa. So there were many Jews in Medina that did not break their trust and you can see the dominant tribe is Bani Qurayza, that should be Allah, not Abba. And then Bani Qainuqa, Bani Nadir, and this was later, right?", "protected by these lava tracks and anybody who's ever seen the lava tracks you cannot it's almost impossible to walk on them they're quite dangerous because they're very sharp you can't take animals across them that's why the trench was such a useful way of protecting Medina because it Medina was literally surrounded by in fact an Arabic is called laba with a ba you know it's like this Israeli lady recently said", "Palestine doesn't exist because the Arabs don't have a P in their language. They don't know how to V either, they say Baa so lava is actually laba it's an Arabic word. Ballospine. Buffoon has a B so that'll work", "So this is a very important event. Imam Shafi said, I know of no one from amongst the people of prophetic biography that differed that the Prophet ﷺ when he came to Medina", "into an alliance with all of the Jews without jizya. Now, at Ghazwa al-Uhud, Banu Tha'alaba refused to go out because they said it was Sibt and the only one that went out was Mukhayriq. There were two Jews that fought at Uhud and Mukhayric was killed. Mukhayrik, there's a khilaf about whether he became Muslim or not. Ibn Ishaq says", "He believed in Allah but he didn't become Muslim because he was just too accustomed to his own religion. But he told the Jews, we made a promise to defend the Prophet, we should do it. He went out and fought, he was actually martyred. And he left all of his property with the Jews to give to the Prophet.", "according to one tradition. And the prophet said about him, He's the best of the Jews. And then you have So in the fifth year, the Jews of Khyber and Khybar was a it's right I think 60 kilometers from Medina around there.", "Khyber was an agricultural oasis where the Jews lived and they worked. And they had a lot of date orchards there, and they weren't united. They had several .. And the are these ,, they're called in the Quran, these fortresses. And Bani Nadir, the leadership of Bani", "and they were in Khaybar stirring up, and convincing them that we need to get the ally with the Quraish, with Fazara, with Ghatafan, and these Arab tribes in the area of Bani Sulaym. And just deal with this once and for all. So they actually amassed an alliance of about 10,000. And this is Ghazwat al-Ahzab in the fifth year.", "in the fifth year. And so they march on Medina, this really isn't a battle it's a skirmish because they never fight about 10 people died altogether despite the fact that were there for almost a month and they begin to sow dissension amongst them but during that time", "The Nadiri leadership goes to Bani Quraidah, the leadership of Bani Quraida. And initially the leadership at Bani Quraydah doesn't want anything to do with it. They actually helped dig the trench they didn't wanna be involved in treachery but they were convinced by Huyai ibn al-Akhtab that we've got 10,000 people this is it", "The Muslims at the time only had 3,000 men. That's all and they were not well armed And so they really thought they could take care of it and he could he was very convincing He was a very powerful leader and he convinced cab I said or ID to ally with them and So this is the treasonous event that occurs during the battle of during the skirmish of Allah", "And they really wanted to annihilate the Muslims. So this was kind of a genocidal attempt at ridding the peninsula of the Muslims and so The Quraysh leave, Ghatafan leaves all of the Arab tribes leave and They're left with Bani Quraitha are in their otam A handful of them actually went out to fight Now what happens after that is very", "that is very murky to me. I've read several accounts of it, I went through all the Syrian literature on it, um...I read Barakat Ahmed's book, I read Kistar's work The Israeli Historian which is a very pretty serious piece of scholarship arguing against Baraka Ahmed's books but i'm still convinced that its grossly exaggerated", "on that. The only thing in al-Bukhari, that Sa'd ibn Mu'adh said that the muqatira should be killed and the dharari wal nisaa... And Surah Al-Ahzab clearly says, فَرِقًا تَأْتُلُونَ وَتَأسِرُون فَارِقا I mean, the Quran is very clear that some people were killed and some were taken captive. That did occur. It's undeniable. But the numbers, and if you look at the event, it just doesn't smack", "uh it doesn't sound all the prisoners were kept in the house of bint al-harith i asked abdullah who knows all the houses of medina inside out because they were all very well um very well studied and i asked him how many people could be held in a house like that he said it's a small house maybe 10. and if you read also the idea of digging a ditch in the middle of the marketplace of medinah", "I don't think any number should be mentioned because we just don't know. And Imam Malik did not accept Ibn Ishaq as a Muhaddith, he was not a Muhadith, He was student of Zuhri They actually chased him out of Medina", "the source he did an incredible service to islam and then that goes on diminished but he was not a solid uh source in hadith and the rigor of malik in particular is is well established malik did not like to use anything that smacked of um of weakness and so you know the numbers are definitely problematic but what happens then is that the prophet goes", "And the Quraysh send out a waft. Uthman goes in to speak with them, they sent out a Waft and they have a... They're going to debate about what's going to happen So they come to some agreement", "He said, we don't accept that. So he said not a problem get rid of it every single point The the Sahaba were so distraught at this and they said Everybody wavered except Abu Bakr even Omar Ibn Al Khattab", "Abu Bakr and he said, isn't he the messenger of God? What are we doing? They all had their weapons. They were ready to fight. Why are we compromising like this? Abu Bakir, he grabbed him and he reminded him and just shook him to his core. The Prophet went in. He asked Umm Salama what he should do. She said, look, cut your hair. Go out and sacrifice. Just give them some sense", "sense of closure on their pilgrimage so he did that and then they saw that and they did that they felt better on the way back in the fatah natica that's what's revealed like this is a big opening what's the opening compromise in every situation the opening was peace this is the first time in the history of his message where he's actually got peace because", "So he entered into a treaty that they would take half the date harvest or they could leave and go to Syria. They choose, they decided to choose to stay so they entered into contract with him that it'd be a non-belligerent treaty. Treaty of non- belligerence. This is the first time the Prophet has peace from here on, from the sixth year on all you see is people becoming Muslim. Zuhri says, I'm not going to let you go.", "Zuhri said that, ما فتح في الإسلام فتحم قبله كان أعظم منه. No fatah before this was greater than this fatah. This is an opening that was a peaceful opening. There was no fighting and it's called a victory. It was a non-violent victory and this was the greatest victory second to the opening of Mecca which was also", "So the two greatest victories of the Prophet were victories of non-violence. إِنَّمَا كَانَ الْقِتَارُ حَيْطٌ وَالْتَقَى النَّاسِ People would fight every time they met. فَلَمَّا كَّانَتَ الهُجْنَةَ When they finally had peace, وَوُضِعَتْ الحَرْبِ And they stopped fighting, وآمنَ النَّسِ بَعْدُهُمْ بَاعْضًا And people felt safe from one another, وِالتَكَوا فَتفَوَضُوا They'd meet and then they'd start discussing. فِي الْحَدِيثِ وَالمُنازَعَةِ And debating. فلم يُكَلَّم أَحَذٌ بِالإِسْرَامِ يَعقِرُ شَيئًا", "So nobody that was just talked to about Islam, that had any brains except that he would embrace Islam after that. In those two years more people became Muslim than in the previous 19. It's amazing!", "that Islam would only exist as a polity for 30 years. And I'm wondering whether that is a statement that you'd recommend to us, like explaining to people when they either look at things in Islamic history or governments that call themselves Islamic and are doing things that are not following the Sunnah of the Prophet . Do you think that's something that non-Muslims could hear and understand", "them you know a little bit more wisdom as to how to understand what's happening i mean i you know i don't i don' t know what people or how people react there are so many variables when you talk to people background education i mean the word in arabic for difference of opinion is the word it's derived from a word that has to do with background khalifa what you leave behind so khalfia is your background so khilafs come from different backgrounds", "We're in Black History Month. I mean, there's all these people in America, white people that say things like why can't blacks just get over it? But they never define it. Like 500 years being stripped of your heritage, of your history, of you name, being subjugated, being treated like animals. They were actually categorized as livestock and that went on", "And that went on until 1865 or 1863 with the Emancipation Proclamation. But it takes 100 years to legislate civil rights from that, and we're still not there. We don't have an African-American as president. There's African-Americans first lady. We have a Kenyan American as president who is not African-american. He's East African right? From the Luo tribe too", "tribe too, which in Kenya he couldn't even get elected. Which is pretty amazing. That's what happened to his father. His father went back to Kenya and there was no upward mobility because of his tribal background that's part the problem in the Muslim world and in Africa as well is that you know families determined so much there's no upward", "which house are you from and right when you tell them boom you've been identified you know you're either from a good family or from another type of family and it doesn't allow for upward mobility it doesn' t allow for meritocracy the Prophet tried to eliminate all that stuff judge people according to the content of their character not according", "That's how people should be judged. So, I don't know... We have to embrace the dark. You know we have a shadow in our religion. There is every religion. Dr. Winters says that the history of our religion is the history if its ego and we tend to forget that. There's a lot of darkness in our history. There are a lot beautiful things and in many ways in terms of the pre-modern world Muslims had nothing to be ashamed of", "ashamed of. It's quite stunning what they were able to accomplish given the prevailing attitudes in most parts of the world. Many of the things that the Prophet taught were the dreams of philosophers, and they became common coin. The Muslims have always had racism but they've never had a racism that prevented somebody from eating with another person. They never had that type of racism. There is no history where they would not put their hand on a plate that has a white or black hand in it.", "I mean, they just didn't have that type of racism. But we have a lot of dark things in our history and our past. And our religion, our tradition has a lot horrible things that are there and they're in the books. And I've read them. I spent 30 years reading in our tradition and I've seen stuff that really bothered me but it's there and we have to deal with it.", "or the spirit of Islam, or the Spirit of the Prophet. I would argue that it doesn't. And so... But then there's things that certainly happened at the time of the prophet that are very troubling for modern people. That's going to be undeniable. Concubinage is something that modern people cannot get their heads around at all. It's very difficult for people to grapple with that concept but that was a prevailing concept not just amongst Muslims", "but amongst most of the civilizations of the pre-modern world. And we certainly have types of it now, it's just criminal activity. There is probably more concubinage today than at any other time in human history. It's not regulated, there are no rights...", "Peace be upon you, Sheikh. When you made mention of that mentality of those who have this Bani Islam what maybe even in your opinion or an approach we can take now would be to kind of change that?", "At late 19th century, it just stopped spreading. It was very little done and I just thought that was really interesting that Muslims always had missionaries. They were usually came out of the Sufis. I mean even if Ibn Taymiyyah writes that the Mubtadi'a amongst the Sufi's did great service by spreading Islam in places no one else wanted to go to because they would go like today went to the Boga Mills.", "became Muslim over centuries you know the Turks arrived there in the in the 15th century but it took several hundred years before they really and they're still the albanian out on that oath they're so very nationalistic as a people but but it to go long time Egypt according to a hoted Blankenship who I trust did not reach 50% for the first 300 years it was mostly", "It was mostly Christian. Syria did not reach 50% for the first 500 years, and Russia never reached 50%. There was always a majority of Christians. And so Muslims have this fantasy that, you know, the Muslims just showed up and everybody said, Allah Akbar, La ilaha illallah. It doesn't work like that. They lived with these people of different religions, and they treated them sometimes well, and other times not so well,", "than other places treated minorities. And sometimes they did horrible things. So, they're human. But overall, you know, our tradition just... I think the Prophet inculcated this in his Sahaba. He had an incredible tolerance for idiosyncrasies and bizarre behavior. He really tolerated people as they were. And that's why he had some crazy people", "crazy people around him that are clear in the seerah he had jokesters like nuayman is a clear jokester and the prophet tolerated him you know he went bought them all these gifts and brought them and then the man shows up and he's he said you know you owe me some money to the prophet he said why he said no iman said that you were going to pay for these yeah", "You know, so... And he allowed for different... The one thing that he really did not like was religious extremism. Really bothered him. Probably was very bothered by ghulu. Even in ibadah. He did not want to do excessive ibadat. Like too much fasting, too much... He was very temperate and moderate. Dhikr is another thing. Doing a lot of dhikr but doing you know the kind of... There's no monkery in Islam.", "Islam. So he was very wary of that, he didn't like extremism but you know when we were at the conference in Marrakech and the Imam al-Haramain was there, Abdur Fattah Bin Niz one of the great Munchideen of Morocco got up and sang, he sang and then Sam Yusuf got up in saying well one of Christian ladies from the evangelical tradition she got up", "we're kind of like... And I mentioned it later to Sheikh Abdullah and he said, خليها تغني. Let her sing. He's just not uptight. You know, it's just let people be who they are. As long as they're not harming or... So anyway.", "Can we take one question from online? I'm just here in the back. And this is actually related to something you just mentioned, but if you have any other remarks or summary regarding the essence of what took place in Marrakesh in terms of the meeting. You know, Shidd has an actual declaration. He wrote a very serious paper on framing,", "you know, whereas the conditions in various parts of the Muslim world have deteriorated dangerously due to the use of violence and armed struggle as a tool for settling conflicts and imposing one's point of view. Whereas this situation has also weakened the authority of legitimate governments and enabled criminal groups to issue edicts attributed to Islam but which in fact alarmingly distort its fundamental principles and goals in ways that have seriously harmed the population as a whole. Whereas", "contract between the Prophet Muhammad and the peoples of Medina which guaranteed the religious liberty of all regardless of faith. Whereas hundreds of Muslim scholars and intellectuals from over 120 countries along with representatives Islamic and international organizations as well as leaders from diverse religious groups and nationalities gathered in Marrakech on this date to reaffirm the principles of the Charter, and so we declare our firm commitment to the principles articulated in the Charters of Medinah whose provisions contained a number", "constitutional contractual citizenship, such as freedom of movement, property ownership, mutual solidarity and defense, as well as principles of justice and equality before the law. And that the objectives of the Charter of Medina provide a suitable framework for national constitutions in countries with Muslim majorities and the United Nations charter and related documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are in harmony with the Charters of Medinna including consideration for public order.", "upon various crises afflicting humanity underscores the inevitable and urgent need for cooperation among all religious groups. We affirm hereby that such cooperation must be based on a common word requiring that such corporation must go beyond mutual tolerance and respect to providing full protection for the rights and liberties to all religious group in a civilized manner that eschews coercion, bias, and arrogance. Based on all of the above we hereby call upon Muslim scholars and intellectuals around", "of citizenship which is inclusive of diverse groups. Such jurisprudence shall be rooted in Islamic tradition and principles of mindful global changes.\" Urge Muslim educational institutions and authorities to conduct a courageous review of educational curricula that addresses honestly and effectively any material that instigates aggression and extremism, leads to war and chaos, and results in the destruction of our shared societies. And calling upon politicians", "political and legal steps necessary to establish a constitutional contractual relationship among its citizens, and to support all formulations and initiatives that aim to fortify relations and understanding amongst the various religious groups in the Muslim world. We call upon educated artistic and creative members of our societies as well as organizations of civil society to establish abroad movement for the just treatment of religious minorities in Muslim countries and to raise awareness as to their rights and work together to ensure the success of these efforts.", "religious groups bound by the same national fabric to address their mutual state of selective amnesia that blocks memories of centuries of joint and shared living on the same land. We call upon them to rebuild the past by reviving this tradition of conviviality, and restoring our shared trust that has been eroded by extremists using acts of terror and aggression. We called upon representatives of the various religions, sects, and denominations to confront all forms of religious bigotry, vilification, and denigration of what people hold sacred as well", "promotes hatred and bigotry, and finally affirmed that it is unconscionable to employ religion for the purpose of aggressing upon the rights of religious minorities in Muslim countries. So that's the declaration. And we had a Yazidi there who... Yeah. You know... And he said to me, I spoke to him afterwards", "and he just said, listen, nobody in our community attributes this to Islam. You know, he said we've been living with Muslims for hundreds of years. And the Sabians said the same thing. The Druze said the", "In fact, the most painful cry came from the head of the Sunnis of Iraq. But it was important and they all shared their Christians. We had the Christian Catholic Archbishop. We have a Cardinal from the Catholic tradition with that Bishop from the Palestinian Church also affirming", "affirming that Muslims have treated the Christians in the Holy Lands well for centuries. I mean a book I recently read which i found fascinating are the Syriac sources, that really haven't been looked at this is the first time they've been translated into English but historically what people did when they looked at the Muslim of the early period like Fred Donner, they looked", "a lot of these religious minorities. But when you look at the actual Malachite church and the Chaldean church and then Nestorian Church, and the Jacobite church, and Monophysite church... The stuff they say about Islam is totally different! Like they saw them as liberators and this is the greatest thing that's happened to this region. You know it's very different picture that you get from the Byzantine sources. So anyway I have", "Anyway, I have to go do this interview." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Disaster Leadership of arabs - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf__1742889167.opus", "text": [ "The Arabs and the Arabs, You hear so many people speaking ill of the Arabs. The Arabs are the Prophet's people and we should want good for them and pray for them. There is a lot of tragic things happening in the Arab world. There have been many mistakes. The leadership has been terrible. The leaderships have been bad for a long time" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/OUR PROPHET WAS AN OPEN BOOK - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf__1743299789.opus", "text": [ "So the Hujarat is a very interesting chapter because it's really about adab and how... In fact, it's called the Hugerat which are the places where the Prophet lived. Which is... The real adab is inside the home because people often have decorum outside the home but how they behave inside the homes reveals who they really are", "And the Prophet was a completely open book. We know everything about the prophet, we know how he showered, we knew everything about him. He lived a life without any shadow." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Ramadan before was different - Sheikh Hamza Yusuf__1742880342.opus", "text": [ "I was speaking to one of the Mauritanian at Ulema two days ago and he was telling me how different it was, Ramadan, to what the Ramadan that he grew up with. Because he said we ate very little in Ramadan and now there's like feasting. And then they've turned the night into the day and the day into the night so people sleep during the day, and then they stay up all night. So many of these things are actually antithetical" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Surahs starting with Letters - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf__1743294980.opus", "text": [ "28 chapters that begin with the Muqatta'at. And traditionally, they would teach students to memorize the Muquatta'a was they gave them a line So these are the 14 letters", "that are mentioned in these Muqatta'at. So there are 28 Surahs where they're mentioned" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Meaning of Hadith and Sunnah - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf __1748523299.opus", "text": [ "Traditionally the Hadith and Sunnah were two different things. The Sunnah was the want of the Prophet, and the Hadithe related to his words, his deeds also those things that he saw done in his presence and was either silent about them or encouraged them because silence when clarification is demanded it's not possible for the prophet He will not if he sees something that's wrong he will declare it wrong at the time", "time because to not do so would, to essentially be silent about a wrong which was not the prophet would not do that. And so anything the Prophet said did or accepted either through silence or through encouragement and then also in addition to that are added his descriptions and news history of him all of those will go under" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/People read this for healing - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf __1742885601.opus", "text": [ "When anybody got sick, they read this book with Niyat al-Shifa. This is an amazing book. It's a beautiful book. it's one of the most beautiful things that anybody has ever written and it will tell you who your prophet is when you read this Book if you're not in love right now You will fall in love with this man because everything about this man is beautiful Everything about this Man is Amazing There's nobody like", "nobody like him in the history of our species." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/This is the reality of Dunya - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf __1742890700.opus", "text": [ "This is dunya. Do, dinki, dunyahe. It's two days. It just two days One day you're up the next day You're down it's a half an inch of water and you think you're going to drown as John Pine said so" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Character of the Prophet ﷺ - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _h__1748541125.opus", "text": [ "He would only take from what Allah had given him except just enough for his family. And he said, anyone who gets up and is safe in his person, in his property, he's safe in this person, he has got good health. And...he has enough for that day, just that day. It's as if he has the whole world and everything in it. That's our Prophet .", "Every day should be the last day as far as you're concerned." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Prophet ﷺ is for everyone by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _h__1742998447.opus", "text": [ "Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam is the last prophet, he's the final prophet. He's the prophet that came for all of humanity and he's unique in that even Christ said that I've only come for the lost sheep of the tribe of Israel. His tradition was universalized and there's a verse in John but John's a late gospel of going preaching the gospel to all the nations", "gospel to all the nations but i mean christ was he was a he was the messiah of the jews and they rejected him um so our prophet is for everybody so accepting that is that's the salvific path to god if you if you just know that and believe that" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Prophet ﷺ was Soft-spoken -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf _h__1748539065.opus", "text": [ "I think it's important to remember the Prophet was He always had dialogue. He always listened to people One of his sunnahs is not to interrupt people when they're speaking You can disagree with people, it's okay But these are the Sunnahs... he also never raised his voice Imam in the Shifa says He never raised this voice in the marketplace which is the one place where people can raise their voice", "people can raise their voice. He was actually a soft spoken person, he was a gentle person by nature. He's called the mercy of all the worlds. He has a mercy to everybody including" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Hindu caste system explained - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_eAzO5xJChSA&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743301347.opus", "text": [ "The relationship between the caste system, so you have the Brahmin, the warrior... Yeah, Kshatriya. Yeah, Shudra and Vaishya. And how does that relate to the cosmology of the human being? Because you mentioned... Well, yeah. Go ahead. You mentioned that there were four elements that make up the individual, so we have the rutuba, harara, bardiya but then on a sociological level we have four within the caste systems. Sure.", "Well, I think the caste system institutionalizes what is natural phenomena. Every culture has Brahmin people. Every cultural has Vaishya. Every cultures has the Kshithiya. Every cultur has the Shudra. Our untouchables are homeless people and they're untouchable. Who's going to go down there? Very few people actually go down and spend time with them and talk to them. You see them, they're dirty, filthy", "They're filthy. You don't really want to touch them, so they're in that way. They're like untouchables and then you have the you know The people that do the you garbage I mean traditional Garbagemen were different from now Garbage men are they genuinely our sanitation engineers? I mean these guys have good jobs. They just they don't even touch the garbage They just have these machines come out and turn it over So it's different that'll probably all be AI anyway soon enough but but but in any case And then you the the Vicia are like the commercial class", "the commercial class, the farmers. People do all that and then you have the military. You have police and you have militia... And then you had the Brahmin intellectuals, the politicians, the doctors, the educated people, the scholars. That's all. So those are just natural phenomena they just institutionalized it. I mean the Mauritanians did the same thing. The Mauritianis have almost identical to the Hindu caste system very similar", "And it was done by one of their leaders. I mean, he actually said your tribes are going to do this, your tribes will go through this, you're trying to do that so he just gave them all tasks. So they have what they call the Arab and there's a warrior class, there would be the Kashdiya and then they have the Zawai'a which is the Brahmin class and then we have the Zenaga which are like the Vayishiya and then the Somal which are more kind of a Manbudin class.", "Yeah, it's very strange. It was amazing." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Living in Non-Muslim Country - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_GALZkzBI-vU&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743057875.opus", "text": [ "If you look at the Islamic tradition, you have basically five dominant schools today. You have a few others like Zaidiyah and Ibadiyyah in Oman but you have five dominant school. You've Ja'fari School which is what the Shia tradition follows and they have a Fiqh based on Ja'far al-Sadiq. Ja'Far al-sadiq is considered one of the Imams of Ahl as Sunnah so there's each one claims", "Each one claims him. But Ja'far al-Sadiq, Imam Malik relates hadith from him in the Muwatta. So he's one of the rijal of Imam Malek in the muwatta and Imam Malick took from him so he is a teacher of Sunni Imams. I think Abu Hanifa also, I'm not sure if there's... but I think that Abu Hanifah also took from Ja'fara al-sadiq. So you have the Jafari Madhab, the Shia follow that infiqh.", "In Aqidah, they have their own aqidat. But the four Imams, Imam Abu Hanifa , Imam Al-Adham, the greatest imam, he has the greatest number of followers. The next is Imam Malik because Abu Hanifah was born in 79, Imam Maliks born probably in 89. There's 89, 90, 91 they say and then Imam Shafi'i is born in 150", "And then you have Imam Ahmed ibn Hanbal, 189 I think. So you have the four imams in that order. Abu Hanifa is the oldest, he's considered from the tabi'een and then you Imam Malik there's a khilaf, is he tabi or tabi-tabi'een? And then we have Imam Shafiee, he is tabi tabi een and then we also have Ahmad ibn hanbal who is tabia tabi een also. Imam Abu Hanifah and Malik met and they exchanged opinions but they're not considered", "one is not considered a student of the other. Imam Shafi' was a student and Ahmad bin Hanbal was a students of Imam Shafa but also considered for him because they took from each other so there's a, their mutual in that way. These four men even though there were about, there were several schools, there are probably around 13 dominant schools at that time", "the Awza'i Madhab, Layth ibn Sa'd had a madhab Sufyan al-Thawri had a Madhab so you have these different Madhabs Dawud Al-Zahiri's Madhab all those Madhabs die out and these four Madhab become the established schools each Madhab has a methodology that emerges now if you look I'm just going to use the Maliki because that is what I know if you at the Maliky Madhab or I am familiar with", "If you look at the Maliki Madhab, you had several Maliki schools. You had a Khorasani Maliki school. You have an Iraqi Maliki School. You got an Indian Maliki. There were Malikis in India. You've had a Yemeni Maliki, you have a Hijazi Maliki ,you had a Najdi Maliki .You had a Syrian Maliki and you had an Egyptian Maliki And you had a Andrusian and Moroccan Maliki So you have all of these different Maliki Schools", "Abu Bakr Al-Baqalani, Qadi Abd al-Wahhab", "The Maliki school becomes dominant from Egypt. And the great Ibn al-Qasim is really the dominant voice in that school. The Medini school died out, Ibn Majishun, Mutarraf. These were great scholars but it dies out. Their opinions are still in the books but they die out. From the Egyptian school you have Ibn Al-Qasm, Ibin Wahban is one of the Egyptian masters.", "The Mawaziyah, the Wadiha, the Utbiya and the Mudowna. These are the Ummahat of the Madhhab.", "becomes dominant wherever the Malikis are. So even the Moroccans, despite the fact that they had their own school, they adopt the Egyptian school. The Tunisians have their own schools, they adopted the Egyptian School. The Andrusian's, their school dies out. They didn't adopt the Egypton school, and it lasted until the Andrusia Islam died out. But the school has, even the Egyptian", "Egyptian school has several opinions. So just to give you a few examples, Ibn al-Wahab bin great Muhaddith, great Faqih student of Imam Maliki direct student Qarin of ibn Al Qasim he was of the opinion that like the Shafi'is you could join prayers anytime you were traveling even when you were stationary in a place so Shafii Madhhib has that opinion Ibn Wahab from the Malikies have", "an opinion is not that opinion. It's Ibn al-Qasim's opinion, that you had to be moving while you traveled. So what he's saying is if you're giving a fatwa in a madhhab and somebody who's a maliki asks you can i join my prayers when I'm traveling? You don't give them the opinion of Ibn Wahab. You give them The opinion of ibn Al Qasim. Do you see? You Don't give him the opinion", "of Ibn Majishun. In the opinion of Ibin Majishu, he said, That was the opinion. The Iraqi school left their hands at the side. The Egyptian school left her hand at the", "They said you could do either one. Ibn Abd al-Barr, he's Andrusian. So that's just an example. I'm just explaining to you that the madhhabs have what's called the mashhoor. The mashhoors is what the majority of the scholars of that madhhab, of the agreed upon methodology of the madhab. When you get into the Hanafi school, you're going to find there are different schools also. You have Indian schools and even the Barelvi and the Diobandi schools will differ on fiqh issues as well as aqeedah issues.", "issues. So you'll get these different schools, they have a Syrian Hanafi school, you have a Turkish Hanafi School then you get into what's called the Urf which is the cultural practices that get incorporated into the religion so you have the Orff of Ahl al-Fas. So for instance in the Qira'ah of the Quran in a group some of the early Maliki positions they didn't agree with that it was Makruh. The later Malikis said no", "The Quran in a group which is the Shafi' position according to Imam and now we in a tikka So those are all Debates that go on but as we move into this last phase of Islam on planet Earth Obviously these things have been breaking down considerably and There are definitely in Western Islam. There are situations where you need to give people Rukhs", "opinion of Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyaf in, you know, my teacher, Hafizullah. And so the Mufti has to have some flexibility and be aware that these things worked very well in very integral Muslim societies where everybody was held together. Now you're finding a real disintegration and fragmentation of the Muslims. And", "the dominant position. But this is certainly in the ibadat and things like that, it's the best way to hold the Muslims together and keep us harmonious and unified because one of the nice things when you go into a Turkish masjid here if you notice, the uniformity is amazing. And they all say, have you noticed how they all", "I mean everybody turns at the same time and they turn the other way that Uniformity is was all over the Muslim world because people followed the same schools in In areas right, and there's a real blessing in that To have that type of uniformity on the other hand It's we're living in a globalized environment where people from different schools are mixing now And that's been the case in places like Egypt and Syria and Palestine you've always had", "and you've always had Hanafis, and Shafi'is, even small groups. And certainly in Arabia also. I mean it's amazing, you go to Mecca and Medina, and everybody is basically praying the same prayer. It's pretty awesome that we can go to Makkah, and you're praying next to an Ibadi, or a Zaydi, or Jaffari, or Maliki, or Hanafi, or Hanbali, and yet it's pretty much the same prayers. There are going to be slight differences", "slight differences. This guy moves his finger, that might be a little distracting to you because you're not used to it. He's put his hands at his side. This guys got him under the belly button. This is over the belly buttons. Some have them over the heart. Some are doing something where they're grabbing their neck but the basic form is the same. They're praying, they're standing, they do ruku'ah, they coming up from ruku', they go into sajdah. It's a miracle of Islam", "And the same Tajweed, the same Quran agreed upon. Alhamdulillah we have agreed upon Qaraat. Could you imagine if there was differences and people wouldn't pray behind him because no he's reciting and that's wrong and that Tajweed is wrong. It's a unified Tajweed. You know Warsh they might be reciting Warsh but that's an agreed upon reading. Hafs agreed upon writing. Ibn Kathir agreed upon it's amazing. We have so many elements of unity that are extraordinary in this religion", "in this religion. And these are the things that we should focus on. In terms of the khilafat, you know, the best approach is just acknowledge the khilafat. The only way we're going to be unified as a community and be strong with our differences is to acknowledge khilafaat, broad-based khilfaat, as long as they don't go outside of the parameters of what's acceptable. Right? Have a good opinion of people. If you see somebody doing something", "Normally you wouldn't think they were doing. Just think maybe they were in a situation where they didn't know what to do and so they just did something, right? I mean this is what you have to do. Allahu Akbar. I've been in many situations like that thinking I hope people have a good opinion. Fasting, the fasting for expiation", "Expiation. Sarcasm. I mean, sarcasm, it depends on what you're doing which is sarcastic. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala uses sarcasm in the Quran. ذوق إنك أنثر عزيز الكريم You know that Allah tells them to taste the hellfire and look at you aren't you noble?", "you aren't, you noble and powerful. So there are situations and Abu Bakr was certainly very strong with some of the Kuffar of Quraysh so it would depend on situations but generally is that mocking people is completely alien to", "In certain situations, it might be appropriate. But generally, it's best to avoid those type of situations, making fun of people, mocking people. There is a guy now whose father just got arrested in Iran because he put up on Facebook mocking Shia Imams. He's I guess an atheist or something or doesn't believe in religion and the CNN interviewed him", "interviewed him and he said, you know nothing's sacred. Everything is open to mockery and that's part of the age we're living in it's going to get worse It's just part of time we're Living in Yates has a famous poem Easter 1916 come let us mock at the great that had such burdens on the mind and toiled so hard and late to leave some monument behind nor thought of the leveling wind Come let us market the wise with all of those", "with all of those calendars were on, they kept old aching eyes. They never saw how seasons run now but gape at the sun. Come let us mock at the good that fancied goodness might be gay and sick of solitude might proclaim a holiday. Mock mockers after that would not help the wise the great to bow that fell storm out", "the foul storm of mockery. For we traffic in mockery, right? I mean this is a mocking age and that's what he was talking about. So you know it's best to avoid people like that. Allah says we'll take care of the mockers, right. Allah", "It's a very low group to be in. You don't want to be among the people of istihza, huzoo. In fact when Musa was accused of mocking them he said I seek refuge that I should be an ignorant person So the mocker is actually an ignorant and they are just displaying their ignorance in mocking", "compassion for people. I mean, the worst people are people that mock handicapped people and make fun of people. You know, you have comedians that just make fun or who have Alzheimer's disease or who has handicaps, stuttering or whatever. They just make them fun. It is really dangerous to do that so may Allah protect us from the mockers.", "If Imam Abu Hanifa was considered from the Tabi'een, shouldn't we follow his madhhab without disrespect to the other madhhabs? That's obviously a Hanafi person. I mean he was very young when he met the Tabiiin but...I mean he's not you know he He met Yeah, it's not like he lived", "like he lived amongst the tabi'een and was part of the tabiin ulama. He was part in terms of his contemporaries, but he did have the blessing of meeting... From what I heard in all the four schools, the most lenient opinion about living in a non-Muslim country is if you are giving da'wah it does not affect your religion. Isn't based on giving people license which is against one", "of being able to live in non-Muslim countries. I'm asking for clarification. You know, this is a Khilaf position. Some of the ulama were adamant that you should not live in Non-Muslm lands. The Prophet said that the fire of the Mushrikeen and the believers should not...you shouldn't see their fire they shouldn't your fire. In other words, you shouldn't live close enough for them to see the lights of your house or you to see", "their house. The ulama that permit living say that's only if you're in a state of war with them, so if you are under threat from them but in societies where there is truces with the Muslims, where there's civil society then they don't and the hadith of Fudayk as Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyat quotes", "He was told that he had to make hijrah because his people weren't Muslim and the Prophet said wherever you find good then you can reside there. And he told them, and avoid any evil that they do so if they do evil don't do it with them. So its a khidaf issue. If your in a non-Muslim country", "involved in some way of helping to give a better image of Islam, undeniably. So... Any other? Yeah I think that's good for now. Last one. What is the Islamic stance on swearing on the Bible as in a president being sworn in? I mean a Muslim should not swear on the bible because", "There's two opinions. One opinion is that the meanings have been changed. The other opinion is, that the actual words in the Hebrew Bible have been change so... That's a khilaf. Al-mabani or ma'ani. The dominant opinion is ,that the actual Words have been also changed. Imam al Ghazali there's a book attributed to him which argues that the gospel even in the four Gospels as they exist today can be interpreted esoterically to be in conformity with the Islamic positions", "So that book is probably apocryphal, but if it's not, it's still stretching. And it's a type of genius that people are able to do that and he was certainly a great genius. It's certainly one way of doing dawah to Christians by saying we don't have a problem with your Bible, but listen to our interpretation of what you think that means. Muslims shouldn't swear on a Bible though.", "You can make an oath on the Quran and Keith Ellison in the US when he swore on Congress, he actually swore. And it was a very politically astute move which was to use the Thomas Jefferson Bible that was in his library that George Sale translated from... What's that? What did I say? Well, Bible in Greek means book so I meant Al Kitab", "Al Kitab, yeah. Biblios the book, yeah, the Quran thank you. So Sabq al Lisan that's a slip of the tongue it's one of the problems with all these recordings and everything is like you say things and you misquote something or... And I'm tired my brain has been fagging lately make dua for me", "for a person is to have a quick answer for everything. So Allah has taken that away from me. My answers are a lot slower these days. I did want to say though about the fatwa, being quick in your fatwa because that was the other part I didn't mention. The early ulama were very wary of", "very wary of being quick in fatwa. They took their time with fatwa, they never gave a fatwa quickly and Sahnoun said wallahi I'm never asked about a question except I know the answer, I know where I learned it, I which page its on and I can quote it directly but I don't do it because I don' want people to come after me and take me as an example of being too quick in their fatwa and I was sitting once", "because I used to go to the Darul Iftah in the Emirates when I was a student, and this was 30 years ago. I was with Sheikh Abdullah al-Siddiq who is one of my teachers from Mauritania. Hafudhu Allah. Incredible scholar, just ocean of knowledge. One of the most learned people I've ever met in my life. And memorized everything, encyclopedic knowledge. And I remember that people used to come and ask him questions and he would tell them to come back tomorrow.", "I knew he knew the answer. And I remember once these two Egyptians came, and they were workers, and he asked them a question. And he said, Ta'al Ghadan ana akhubiruka inshaAllah. And this guy turned to me and he said Dab ya arf haga? You know like does he know anything?", "But they're so used to the ulama giving quick answers that they assume if you don't have it right on top of your head, you are not a alim. But the Mauritanians are very... If you ask them about fatwa, Imam Malik in Maliki fiqh, the fatwa is called nazila which means musiba It means calamity We call it nawazil In our Maliki tradition, fatwas are called nawazal Nazila is a calamity", "So fatwas are called calamities in Maliki tradition. And if Imam Malik was asked a question, he used to say, إِنَّ لِلّٰهِ وَإِنِّ إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعُونَ I mean think about that. That's how frightened he was about a fatwa. Because وَلَا تَقُولُوا لِمَا طَصِفُ أَلسِنَتُكُمَ الْكِذِبَةِ هَذَا حَلالٌ وَهَذ΄ا حرامٌ لِتَفْتَرُو عَلَّ اللَّهَ ال்كِدِبًا إِんَّ الَّذِينِ يَفتَروْنَ عَرَ اللَّـهَ الدِّكِثِبُى لَا يُفْلِحُون", "Allah says, Surah An-Nahl, that do not say with your tongues. And your tongues describe a lie. They tell a lie saying, Did Allah give you permission to say that?", "فَجْعَلْتُمْ مِنْهُ حَرَامًا وَحَلَالًا You take this what Allah has given you and you say, This is halal and this is haram. أَلَّهُ أَذِينَ لَكُمُ هَمَا عَلٰى اللَّهِ تَفْتَرُونَ Or are you just telling lies about God? أن تقولوا عَرْضَ اللَّي مَا لَا تَعْلَمُون To say what you don't know about Allah. It's a big thing. It' s worse than shirk according to Ibn Qayyim in the إِعْلاَمٍ الْمُوقِّعِين So the mufti people that want to give a fatwa quickly those are foolish people", "They don't know what knowledge is. And they should be really careful about fatwa because you're basically saying this is what I think and there's different types of fatwa, the fatwa of a madhab, you can give that easily if you know it. So Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah has Fatwa Ali, Fatwa Ba'a and Fatwa Jeeem. He put it into three categories. The first category are", "are fatwas about ibadah, just giving the hukum shara'i. So somebody asks you a question, how many rakats in Maghrib? You say there's three. So you're giving the Hukum Shara'I. If you know that, you can give that and that's not a problem. Somebody says I broke my fast in Ramadan by mistake. I drank water. What do I do? It is a Hukam SharaAi", "is a hukum shara'i, right? In the Maliki madhab you still do the imsak but you have to do qata', right? Other fuqaha said no. It's mukhtafar, it's overlooked so it depends on the madhab. But if you know the hukam you just give the hokam and that's fine. And then you move into what the second category which he says are the fatawa that only the fuqahaa know, the mutafakkihun. So the person who's mutafaqi,", "as a whole, not the individual. And he says those you need majami' fiqhiya. You need groups of fuqaha to determine those. You should not have individuals giving fatwas that affect nations anymore. So you shouldn't have an individual like a mufti of a country and he's giving a fatwa that's gonna effect everybody because the problems are much more... They're much larger than they were in the past. Anyway, that's his position. It makes sense to me. Jazakum Allah khair" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Overcome your bad addictions _ Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_MkAzUn9Z6Os&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743307543.opus", "text": [ "Alhamdulillah last week we were looking at some of the things that Imam al-Rafazali said about basically opposing the self and these appetites that we have. And I mentioned at the end of that podcast that I'd like to talk next week, and here we are, about how we can really fight these things and how we overcome them. The first thing I want to say is that", "that there was a debate amongst the ancients about nature and nurture. Are we just victims of our nature? And can we actually nurture ourselves or be nurtured out of these basic tendencies that we have? The answer to that in our tradition is that", "is that even a dog can be taught to hunt for you and a falcon can be talked to hunt, for you. That we can actually train animals and change their nature so that they become... In fact with knowledge the dogs, even though normally you would not eat from a dog but if a dog is ,", "And that's the actual word that the Qur'an uses. If it's taught, if it has ilm, then it's elevated to a higher status and what it hunts is halal. And so knowledge is the way that we overcome these things but here...and this is where it gets really, really important. The most important and single truth that we all have to understand if we want to actually change ourselves", "That is the most fundamental truth. If you think that you can change, then not only do you have pride but you will never be able to conquer yourself. You will never overcome your appetites. You'll never be over come whatever tribulation you have. The only way that you could do that is through supernatural power and that supernatural power is from Allah . And that's the Imdad that Allah gives us.", "the one that can enable us to do that. Without Allah you cannot do it and so people try, and try again, and again, I keep failing, I tried so many times exactly you tried because you did not rely on Allah but if you rely on allah then you can overcome it and one of the things that secularists hate is that the single most successful addiction treatment program", "And the reason why it's successful is because they begin by admitting their powerlessness to overcome their addiction. They have to acknowledge a power greater than them, and that's the only way that they can do it. And that's why it successful. That is the single reason that it's successfull. And they use a prayer...the prayer that they use is the prayer of Niebuhr, Reinhold Niebuh who was probably one", "theologians of the 20th century, at least in the Western hemisphere. But he wrote a book called Moral Man In an Immoral Society, in which he argued that a lot of sinfulness is because everybody's doing it. That when you have a society that is moral, people tend to be more moral. But when you when you, when you", "for righteous people to be moral in an immoral society because they're going against the grain. But how do they do that? How do we become moral beings in a culture that is constantly assaulting us with gluttony, with lust, with envy? I mean it's amazing how they use envy to sell products and to make you envious of what other people have lifestyles of the rich and famous all", "that they have in their toolbox become powerless when you acknowledge there is no power. There's no power to do obedience. There is no way to avoid obedience and there's no", "avoid disobedience and there's no power to be obedient except with God, except through God. That's one of the meanings of la hawla wa la quwwata illa billah And so Ibn A'taylah says something amazing he says whoever deems it strange", "strange or does not think that God can save him from his appetites and remove him from the state of his heedlessness, he has deemed divine power to be powerless, to be incapacitated. So that is Istighrab here means istibaad. You know,", "save him from his own appetites. So once you acknowledge that Allah is the one only, that can do that then you have the capacity to do it without it you can't do it and that's why it's really important to remember though Allah is capable of doing all things in fact Ohio, the state motto of Ohio I think they tried to change it but it says with God all things are possible", "truth that is acknowledged even in a state motto. So if you're suffering right now from some kind of addiction, if you are going on a pornographic site, if find yourself doing these things over and over again and you don't think God can take you out of that state then you have incapacitated the power of God. And so what you have to do,", "But God is all-powerful. And through God, I can remove these things. Allah will enable me the divine istiqaa. This is what Imam al-Tahawi in his aqidah talks about, the two types of capacity, the divine capacity, and then the human enablement of means and things. When those two come together, that's when reality happens. So you have to acknowledge that with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala", "with Allah . And if you do that, you will be able to overcome. But then and this is where Ibn A'tayla is one of our truly great spiritual geniuses he says رُبَّمَ وَرَدَتَ الظُّلْمَ عَلَيْكَ لِيُعَرِّفَكَ قَدْرًا مَا مَّنَّ بِهِ عَالَيكَ Sometimes these dark things that you fall into are a means by which God causes", "to realize the blessings of being in a state of obedience. I got a letter a few days ago from a man who told me that he had been in such an incredible state, and then suddenly after years of really struggling, he became really successful, and he started making a lot of money. And he said his dean went out the window, and was like asking me for help about this, how do I get my dean back?", "struggling with this. Well, the Prophet mentioned about wealth that causes you to transgress and these are one of five things he warned about, sorry seven things that he warned abut. One of them was ghinan mutghi, like a wealth that will cause you to grant transgress. There was a man who used to come to the prophet and beg him to make dua for wealth. He would say Ya Rasulullah and he", "was always the first one in the prayer line. And he begged, and he kept doing it. And the Prophet said wouldn't make that dua for him but he kept asking and he was unrelenting and finally the Prophet made a dua for Him. And He got some wealth, He got animals and then those animals had animals and suddenly He had more and more wealth and He began because He had to take His animals out and graze them, He", "and further away from the masjid, and then he started not showing up for the prayer. And then when he was...the Prophet sent his zakat collectors, when zakat came down, he said what are we like Christians now? And so when the prophet was told that, he refused to accept zakat from him. And later ones wouldn't accept zakah from them", "And finally, Uthman relented. But the point is that that's a man who didn't know that that wasn't the right thing for him. That's why you never ask specifically. You always do istikhara. Let Allah choose for you what's good for you. You might be struggling in your business. It might be the best thing for you but no we want it our way and this is where... One of the things Imam al-Ghazali says and one of most powerful things I've ever heard him say", "many powerful things. He said that when you get angry about things not going your way, you are basically angry because matters were in accordance to God's will as opposed to your will and what thy will be done, not my", "pride, and that's why pride is the underlying human crisis. This pride thinking you can do it yourself, thinking that you're doing some gift to God. Don't tell me how much you've done for Islam! I mean", "Ask not what Islam can do for you, but ask what you can do. What you think that you're doing some favor to God, everything's from Al-Mannan. He's the only one that can do that. Like he can remind us of all the blessings he's given us. He can do it when we attempt to remind like look how much I've done for you.", "everything you did for me, and I am obliged to thank people for helping me. But I have to see that there are means by which God has helped me because if I don't it's shirk. But we do, we thank the asbab and we honor the asbabs, that's true but we also have to recognize that's what they are their means, they're not ends. That Allah is the end. Everything ends with God. And so that's a very different approach", "So he's saying sometimes he'll do this in order for you to know his blessings. So that's really important, you know, that sometimes your appetites happen to show you the blessing of being able to contain yourself, to restrain yourself from those appetites.", "struggle. And that's why the nafs al-lawama, those are the good people. You're not at mutma'inna yet but you're fighting it. So if you fall, you just get back on. If you fall you get back", "you know, really in good shape and everything. And Shaykh, mashaAllah he has that beautiful aspect and he just has the haybah of the scholars. And we were sitting and this athlete came up to him and he was wearing his these athletic clothes with the team name on it. And he came up and kneeled down before Shaykh Abdullah ibn Bayyah and he told them, he said I struggle constantly with sinfulness. You know astaghfirullah", "I do things and then I make tawbah, and I go back and I do thing that make tawa. And I just feel disgusted with myself.\" And Shaykhullah looked at me said, You know like keep going Keep struggling. That's it! Like you know there is a hadith Qudsi that the Prophet said", "that Shaitan swore an oath to God, I will lead all of your servants astray. And I will put in them desire for sin and they will sin. And Allah said to Shaitaan, and as long as they turn back to me, I", "you fall, you get back up but you don't let Shaitan win and the way you don t let Shetan win is you keep making that Tawbah with an Azeema to conquer your appetite. And you will do it. It can take Ibn al-Munkadir who's one of the great scholars of Islam he was really considered", "man in Medina. He was Imam Malik's teacher and Imam Malek ibn Anas said we used to go to Ibn Munqadir, and we would feel contempt for ourselves for weeks after sitting with him because he was so amazing like his spiritual state was so exalted. Ibn Munkadir...and this is a man who Malik ibn", "50 years before it finally surrendered. So that's the path, it's just, it is that struggle and if you don't know the blessings of obedience and practice and you're not grateful for them they'll be taken away from you and that's why his next hikmah", "قَدْر النِّعْمِ بِأُجْدَانِهَا عَقِبَ بِوَشُودِ فُقْتَانٍهَٰ That whoever does not know the weight of the blessings when he has them, his punishment is to know them once he's lost them. And so our basic state when we're children is innocence and we enter into adulthood", "but you polish the soul with tawbah and with good deeds, and with actions, and knowledge. And that's the struggle. It is a war of attrition, us versus shaitan. If you are a believer, you will win in the end even if it takes a long time. So the single most important thing for you to overcome yourself", "وَعَلَىٰ رَبِّهِمْ يَتُوَكَّلُونَ On their Lord they rely. That's tawakkul. And this is why Imam al-Ghazali, in his genius, he put in his Ihya, the chapter on tawhid is called Tawheed wa't-tawakkal because it's through seeing the unity of God and seeing God behind everything that you're able to trust in God", "omnipresent with his knowledge. He's, he's with us always and he will never abandon us as long as we call on him. He is a generous Lord. He will never abandoned us as well as long how could be calling him? And whatever sin you might be in, you have to know all you have do is turn to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la with tawbah. He has a tawaab and that's who our Lord is. He the oft returning. As long as you return to Him, He will return to you.", "If you come back to me, I'll come back. That's what he said to Bani Israel. The Jews can turn to God anytime they want. They were his chosen people. He elevated them. He privileged them above humanity. He gave them so many gifts and he reminded them. You know, remember the blessings that I gave upon you. They", "they're in disobedience, we should want good for them. We should want guidance for them because they are children of prophets. Who wouldn't want good from children of prophet? And so that's our tradition is to struggle with the self until the self submits to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la but it's recalcitrant and that's the nature of the soul. It will fight and we have to fight better, more intelligent,", "and inshallah Allah will give us tawfiq. Alhamdulillah. InshaAllah I want to talk next week about the particularly the sin of the eye because the eye of all things is the quickest to corrupt the heart so whatever you're watching just know that those images", "they will destroy the spirituality of your heart. And it's said that the inner eye is far more delicate than the outer eye, and look how a little speck when it gets into your eye there's nothing you can do until you get that speck out of your eye. It's just amazing! A tiny little specks and the inner eyes are far more sensitive than that outer eye so you have to really protect", "your eyes. قُلْ لِمُؤْمِنِينَ يَغضُّوا مِنْ أَبْصَارِهِمْ وَيَحْفَظُوا فُرُوجُهُمْ And it's interesting, it says say to the believers to lower their gaze and then guard their private parts. It's a direct relationship. Direct relationship. And then it says ذَٰرِكَ أَزْكَرَهُ That is pure for them. So inshallah that's what I'd like to talk about. The crises of pornography in our community", "community and in the general community, and also globally. It's become such a horrific problem. And it's just involved... The people that are producing it are some of the most evil people on this planet. There's sexual trafficking.", "that they're involved in these things is horrific. So I want to talk about that because I think it's a serious problem and it's one of the major things that we need to overcome, is the sins of the eye inshaAllah. Jazakum Allah khairan, wassalamu alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh Until next week inshallah" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Removing sins from your face - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_tPlEBIKTU80&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743057375.opus", "text": [ "So the point being is that really, the aqal in our tradition is a very mysterious and profound thing. And thoughts are really... The source of thoughts remains a mystery in Western science but for us we believe that the source of thought... We actually have a science of khawater so there are nafsani thoughts shaytani thoughts malakani thoughts", "and Rabbani thoughts, even though they're all from Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala. But the asbab of those thoughts are demonically egoistically inspired thoughts, demonically inspired thoughts angelically inspired thought,s and then lordly inspired thoughts. And there's a whole science to that in our tradition that originally came out of Imam al-Muhassabi's insights", "insights into it. So that's the book and then he goes into qaw'id al-aqaid, so after the Book of Knowledge He begins faith because faith in our tradition is based on knowledge And then he goes into asrarat tahara and what's important and this is really distinct about Even though there are people before Imam Al Ghazali that looked at what are called the hikm, the wisdoms behind traditions", "to help people get out of a formalistic approach to the religion, to where it was perfunctory that these are all outward things that don't have inward meaning. So he really saw that it was very important for people to understand the spiritual realities behind these things that we're doing. When the Prophet ﷺ said, He did not simply mean that water purification, what we call lustrations,", "or the wudu. Water purification is half of iman. Pahor is the purification of the soul, and so what you're doing when you're washing your hands of the sins, which is why some of the scholars consider that water is not reusable because the sins get washed away in it. And so the face, removing any sins from the face", "and the eyes, and the cleaning of the mouth. All these things he shows the spiritual insights that will really help a person to perform them. The secrets of the prayer, the secrets of zakat, the secret of fasting, the secrete of hajj And then...and this is what I find really stunning Is that when he deals with all the roba ibadah He goes through Aqidah, iman, and then he goes through the five pillars of Islam", "brings into focus is the adab of reciting Quran because of the centrality of the recitation of Quran as an act of worship in our religion. This is really important because the Prophet ﷺ said he was commanded in the Quran to worship Allah and to recite the Quran He says I was commanded to worship", "did many, but the most important one is the Quran. And then the Tarteep al-Awrad, like how to do and then Ihya al-Layl so giving some portion of the night even if it's a... Night prayers begin according to the Malikis after Maghrib. So giving some proportion of the Night, even if you just pray two rakats in excess of the Sunan Rakat after Isha You've given some portion Of the night that is devotional. So That's really important because the Prophet said help me help you", "help you get across the Sirat. And the way he said to do that was to give him a portion of the night, like just to give some portion of", "He's an 8th century scholar, originally from Fez, but he resides in Egypt. He wrote a book called Al-Madkhal which is really showing you how you can make every single customary practice that you do and turn it into an act of Ibadah. This is like deep prophetic mindfulness. So he begins out with Adab al-Akal and then Adab an-Nikah and then", "Those aspects of eating and drinking, of marrying, of earning a livelihood. All of those that relate to how we should be in the best way, the adab of them. What are the proper ways of doing these things? The decorum, the comportment, the courtesies. Adab is a comprehensive word so you can't limit it to simply just courtesy. But it's all of those things that relate.", "And the adab means to discipline. So, adab are the results of your discipline. It's your habitual practices. And so, the adib in Arabic, which is the literary scholar, the Adib is somebody who puts words in their proper place. That's the meaning of an adib.", "The things to do in these customary habits of human beings that are proper. And then al-halal wal haram, knowing what's permissible and what's impermissible. This is a very important science. And the adab of just friendship, the duties of brotherhood. So we have certain adabs that are really important with one another.", "And then adab al-uzla. Also, many people don't know how to be alone. And hence Pascal's great insight that most of the world's problems were from the inability of people to sit with themselves alone in a room. You have to know how", "And so uzla is very important as a concept. And then adab al-safar, also traveling, the niyyah of traveling, why you're traveling, how you travel. All those things are very important. And this would go to me in essence under a kind of... The reason he puts it in adat and not in ibadat", "spiritual entertainment. It's really a recreation, and so there is also adab to that. So I find that really fascinating. And then Amr ibn Ma'ruf an-Nahiyya an-al-Munkar, and this is essentially what jihad is. People say oh there is no book of jihad in the Ihya but this is", "and Naha'a an al-Munkar but it's doing it with the hand that's the jihad of the hand not of the tongue or of the heart and then Adab Al Maisha wa Akhlaq An Nabuwa this is the key to understanding, the fact that he puts this as book 20 so this is this is The Heart Of The Book out of the 40 books He put the Prophet's character Sallallaahu Alaihi Wasallam at book 20", "the Ihya and it's actually I think really the most beautiful book to read. It's one of the most enjoyable books to read so fortunately it's been translated and there is a recent new translation that I think is coming out soon then he goes into Rab' al-Muhlikat and this is the section, the quarter on the destructive aspects of the human being", "And this is really important because according to Imam al-Ghazali, when we were talking earlier about the four areas of fasad that he mentioned. The first one he deals with in the book of knowledge which is ignorance. But the second one is love of dunya and love of dunya resides in the heart of the human being.", "that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has created, especially if you understand in our tradition that the intellect resides in the heart. So the heart really is لهم قلوب لا يفقهون بها They have hearts but they don't understand with them. The heart is filled with عجائب. He goes into this because the heart is what Iblis is after. The destruction of the heart", "looking at what happens, these destructive qualities. And then riada to nafs, why we have to exercise our souls. The fact that he uses this word and this was a word that the spiritual masters of Islam used. The same word for physical exercise, riada is very interesting because you see people all over especially where", "at five in the morning jogging because they want to keep their bodies physically in good shape. And usually it's the more wealthier people that exercise more. If you look at CEOs and people like this, they're always very fit and they take care of themselves. And some of them even talk about this because the body is everything to a lot of these people. This is", "get that they have souls. And so just like you have exercise for the body, you have exercises for the soul. Just as you can strengthen the muscles of your physical being, you can straighten your spiritual muscles. Just As You Can Really Beautify Your Outward Through Attention To Taking Care Of It, You Can Beautify", "I think, a very important concept. The idea of exercising the soul. And then he has the book called Kasarosh Shahwatein which is Breaking the Two Desires because he really saw at the root of the human problem was the appetites. That if you could not control your appetites you had no discipline. There's a really brilliant", "he was president of the University of Chicago. His name was Robert Maynard Hutchins, and I read a speech that he gave. He was honored at the end of his life, and he gave a very interesting speech, and in that speech one of the things that he said that really struck me, he said, I've been listening to all these people praise me and say what a great man I am, but I have a question for myself,", "Why have I never been able to give up smoking and obviously people laughed? It's a funny remark, but I actually think he was he He meant it in a much deeper way That if I'm such a great man. Why have i never been to discipline myself and And that's something that's a really important question why do incontinence which now means Physicians know this word to mean somebody who can't control their urine", "their urine or their feces. So they literally urinate in their pants, or they soil themselves. That's called incontinence. So like in the hospital, although rights incontinent to stool and urine. Akrasia which is where the word comes from the Greek word incontinents was traditionally used in ethical traditions to mean people that could not control", "Just like you have to be able to control your bodily functions, you should be able the soul that is similar to soiling yourself. So just as you're incontinent to stool and urine and soiling your physical body, if you're", "idea. And so he really saw if you could control your food, which is one of the reasons why we're fasting, is because food is such a big problem with human beings. If you can control your foot and then if you can't control your genitals, if you control your tongue, all these things become easier with those basic controls. And this is why traditionally you have... The human being is created in a triune", "triune nature. He's been created with reason, with will and with appetite. So these are powers or faculties of the one soul. So they're different dimensions. So the reason is meant to control. Imam al-Ghazali calls this the rider on the elephant. You know you need", "And then you have the appetite, you have will of the beast which is his irascibility. This is called al-quwah al-ghadabiyya, the irascible nature. That nature is meant to ward off harm and then you can concupiscent nature which is meant accrue benefit so it's", "But it has to be regulated by the intellect. And so that's why Kasr al-Shahwatayn is so important because if you can control these, if you don't want to destroy them but you want to break their will so that you control them just like you break a horse by training it. It's called Siyasa. You know Yasusa Al-Hisan. Just like you control a horse you have to train it. The trainer he has a lead", "He has a lead rope and then he's got usually as a whip. And he trains the horse to prepare it, to be ridden because a horse needs to be broken because if it's not broken, It rides the rider and then it's going to throw you off like bucking Bronco. So you don't want your enoughs to be a bucking bronco cause it'll throw you up and you might get up. You're gonna be bruised, but you might break your neck people die or they're stomped by the horse themselves." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Right method to defeat iblees- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_nUAANM-pByk&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743297650.opus", "text": [ "One of the great scholars, Thabit al-Bannani, he said, كَابِدْتُ الْقُرْآنَ عِشْرِين سَنَةً ثُمَّ تَمَتَّعْتْ بِهِ عِشرِينَ سَناً I struggled in this Qur'an for 20 years and then I was just in absolute pleasure for 20 with it. One of these great scholars ibn Abdur Rundi mentions this in his Sharh al-Dahikam He says that initially he had difficulty with the Qur'aan", "the quran but then he said i began to experience it as if the prophet was revealing it to me and then he says and then i went to another level where it was this as if jibreel was revealing", "put the time you will be justly rewarded but it's not it doesn't come easy. It's a book that just demands constant, you know so we have the khatm here we're doing it tonight but there's also a khatam in Zaytuna you know once a month for those of us who are doing it 40 days the Prophet was asked about reciting the Quran he said kam akhtmar al-Quran Abdullah ibn Amr asked him he said in one riwayah arbaeen every 40 days", "which is done here in this masjid and then he said i can do more than that and he said uh then a month he said I could do more", "Rewiah 3. But always go with what the Prophet first says. You know, really. And I'll tell you why. If you take on a practice, you should do it until you die. The difference between them and us is one thing one of my teachers told me which is a really useful piece of advice. If your not even taking on as a practice just do it once for the blessing of doing it.", "But if you take honor practice, don't leave it. The Prophet said, If you learn archery and then you give it up, then you disobeyed Abu al-Qasim. Al-Bukhari, one of his companions, he used to do archery every morning. Imam al-Buhari, every morning, 20 years, one", "And that's how he was with the hadith. He always hit the target. So if you're able to just take, you know, do it. If all you do is Yasin and Waqia, if what you do, if all you if what what you are doing is Yasine and Waquia, Allahu Akbar. Mulk also, the Prophet said 30 ayahs I wish were in the heart of every believer. The Munjiyat are really also Sajda, Yasin, Dukhan,", "There's seven the munjiyat surahs. And then also, but if you can do a juz in the morning and juzi in the evening or a hizb in the mornig, hizbi in the eveninng, then try to do that. If you just do half a page a day, just make up practice. So make this a niyyah for this", "this a niyyah for this month, alhamdulillah, you know always you should be increasing even if it's a little bit just add something on. Ramadan should be a time where you assess your practice and try to add something up for the coming year. Just commit to one or two things and then do them. You know inshaAllah may Allah give you all tawfiq, may Allah bless you increase you elevate you I really hope that those watching we need help to build we're trying to build an institution it's", "It's a very, unfortunately we've seen things happening. It's just it's a difficult time. Nobody knows where everything is going but Shaytan swore an oath So Shaytaan swore and oath I'm gonna sit in wait for them on this straight path of yours.", "in wait and he said I will come to them, in front of them. In front of him and behind them on their Aiman, on the right side, on their left side and you'll find most of them are ingrates that's why he swore that oath He didn't say I will over them or under them because if you're aligned with Allah shaitan has no access to you so just be aligned with", "have vertical alignment with Allah and shaitan has no access to you. Stand in prayer, and in sajdah he can't get you. He actually flees when the prayer comes." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Scholars who envy each other - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_-4DNZPEUJRE&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743306339.opus", "text": [ "I envy among scholars and it's really sad because what you're saying is like why did God give that person that and he didn't give it to me? And Allah knows where He puts His message. So, so it's just... It's important just to be humble but know that you can get close to a god. You don't have to be a scholar. You dont' have to... I mean somebody was telling me the other day that", "They weren't praying Tarawiyah, you know. And I said well just do two rakats with a lot of gratitude and love. You know, just two." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Spiritual Delusion explained - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_WJ95UCeT2kU&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743304443.opus", "text": [ "Last week you mentioned people that are spiritually deluded on their spiritual state and yesterday we mentioned the ayah of those who can't see, can't hear. So can you please share some advice on what we can do to make sure we're not of those people? Well I think all of us are going to have blind spots. All of us", "If the veils were lifted most of us as Imam al Ghazali says, you know if the veil's were lifted We would be wandering in the forest saying Subhanallah You know we so there's a blessing in having The veils that Allah has placed upon us but we should ask Allah at least to", "It's one of my favorite duas. I actually was asked to write in a multi-faith book on people's favorite prayers, and I think that's the one that I put from the Prophet ﷺ because it's such a comprehensive thing to show me the truth as truth and then give me the ability to follow it because there's a lot of people that see the truth and they don't follow it. And show me falsehood as falsehood because a lot", "And like I said, prayer on the Prophet is a really powerful way of yuhad dibbun nafs. To do prayer on The Prophet , to remember The Prophet . To try to implement... Take on sunan slowly but take them on. Try to do different sunan throughout your life. Just add sunan and try to keep them as prophetic practices. The occasional prayers that we just did those are really beautiful ways of remembering God", "And they're not easy to practice. As somebody who really does try to practice them as much as possible, you forget. Sometimes you remember afterwards. You forget.", "becoming mindful, right? Becoming a dhākir. And they're really powerful ways of just becoming more present. And the more you do that, the closer you get to following the sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ, the less delusional you're going to be. And I really believe that. And then his compassion is really important because a lot of people have these outward sunnah and they don't have the inward sunnah which is a big problem. Just to have the", "sunnah, of humility and also shafaqah rahmah. I mean he's rahmatan lil alameen He's the mercy to all the worlds, to the animal, to vegetable the mineral. He was a mercy to ALL of the worlds Online question? We've been talking about the intellect but what about the heart how does one know if they are acting based on their heart or their intellect well I mean it's good", "I mean, it's a good question. The heart in our tradition is the intellect. So there's a khilaf about where the heart, the intellect is centered. Is it the brain? That was Abu Hanif's opinion. The other three imams said it's actually the physical heart. We know now in neuroscience that there are definitely connections between the brain and the heart. The", "I mean, it's quite amazing that these organs have an independence. You can actually have an organ transplant. You could have somebody else's heart and it will be functioning for you. And then there is the all or nothing. The heart has this all-or-nothing law. It's either going to go fire or it won't. It' s an all- or nothing organ.", "Intelligence of the heart is real. Ask your heart, even if people give you fatwa. Ask Your Heart. There's a real truth to heart intelligence and A lot of people are cut off from their hearts What we would call like there's a certain type of intelligence that Is You know it's the intelligence of", "of somebody who would, you know, when a scientist, they develop the napalm bomb. You know? The napalmbomb. And then they find out that the Viet Cong are actually building ponds in their villages so when the bombs come down, they can go into the water because the napom was diffused by water so it wouldn't burn them once they got into the", "water so then they developed waterproof napalm that that isn't has nothing to do with the heart but obviously somebody had to think to be able to do that so that's thought completely cut off from the heart because no real human being could do that they would resign there's no human being that could do it that's a demon that's Shaitan and ins that", "right down the road. And it was developed to kill all the Arabs and leave all their oil installations intact. So, it's like a bomb that doesn't destroy any of the infrastructure. Anybody that could do that is a demon. Aerial bombardment is demonic. The Prophet would have never sanctioned anything like that. It's demonic. Non-discriminatory killing like that? I mean battles are battles but...", "And that's why the Prophet said towards the latter days, he just said break your swords and break your bows. When are those going to be applied? Those hadiths. People just think the Prophet sent them for no reason. I mean, I'll defend my house but I don't know, a nuclear war? I'd rather go with the first blast. I don' t want to be around for the aftermath. And these idiots, they're walking into World War III because they're really not smart people", "smart people and I've been around enough of them to know that firsthand they're not bright people. I mean we had genius people, highly educated people that fell into World War one and two these people are a different... They're just not that bright and you can just tell when they speak that's what Allah says you'll know them by the subtexts of their words", "of their words. They can't even speak properly. If two people speak, you know the veterinarian from the human physician based on what they say. We should be praying because it's crazy times. What's happening in Taiwan is very serious. 90%", "90% of the most sophisticated ships in the world are made in Taiwan. If Taiwan goes, and they'll detonate all those factories. They're not going to let the Chinese get those factories? They're trying to build the factories here right now, the chips because they outsourced everything and now they realize this is major security risk. People have to just really... Whatever comes, comes. It's all from God and we have to accept that but humans", "Humans, if they're not in this tradition, they are very dangerous. So for us the heart and intellect are the same. They have hearts but they don't understand with them. And obviously it's not the physical heart.", "So this is there, right? A lump of flesh. So if it's sound the whole body is sound. If it's corrupt the whole bodies corrupt so that's the physical heart but he was analogizing it to the spiritual heart that if the spiritual Heart is sound then the soul is sound if the Spiritual heart is unsound and thus the soul", "We have one more question that says, how can one analyze oneself deeply without overthinking and following into OCD? Yeah, that's a... Ahmed Zarroq identified obsessive-compulsive disorder. He said that waswasa,", "which is when people have doubts a lot of self-doubt he said it's either um it's like in wudu you ignore waswasa and in the prayer if you're what's called a mowaswis which is somebody that has constant waswasah", "way you treat a kind of obsessive compulsive is to ignore it. But the, I think humans especially modern people overthink a lot. I think that earlier people like Mauritanians to me very fitra people and I just noticed they just did not obsess about the self. It's just I think Africans tend", "much more fitrah people generally. And I think they see a lot of this as, I mean, they might not use the word but for want of a better word it's just a kind of neurosis. You know, it's like you need to get out of yourself and the best way to do that is serve. You", "But he chose to be a servant prophet. He was a servant profit, who constantly served. So I think people just need to get out of themselves more and not obsess about themselves so much. Self-loathing is not good. Make tawbah whatever you did if you've been watching things you shouldn't have seen like a lot of young people watching. Just stop and then make tawba and don't go back to it", "yourself in a position where you're compromised. Put your computer in a place where everybody in the house can see it. Don't go on it when you're alone in your room, if you can't control yourself. I mean hopefully you can control yourself but if you cant do things that protect you and then just make toba. Allah accepts toba and don't obsess about oh did he accept it or not? We should believe that He accepts our toba we shouldn't" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/The Essence of Being Muslim -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_k3QYiXQqt-w&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742890164.opus", "text": [ "There's a lot of Muslims now that are more identitarians. Just because you have a Muslim name doesn't necessarily mean you're actually a Muslim, like a Muslim is somebody who believes in Allah his messenger and what the Prophet came with. And if you reject anything what's known as . means . In other words it's something that everybody should know. Now that doesn't really apply to people living in the West, Muslims,", "because the understanding that the ulama had for that was people who grew up around Islam and grew up Muslims. And there are certain things that every Muslim knows, because they grow up in a Muslim environment. So there could be people now, Muslims, that have Muslim names or they come from Muslim families. When I lived in Southern California, there was an area where these Bengali farmers came in the 1920s, I think,", "Mexican Americans with names like Lydia Muhammad and Fatima Abid, and they were children of these immigrants or grandchildren but they weren't...they were Christians. They were Catholics so they had lost I don't know if their parents had been Muslim or not So you know we kind of assume that if somebody is from a Muslim country that they are Muslim But there are now a lot of people even living in Muslim lands", "really believe in Islam. There are many secular Muslims, um, in all the Muslim countries now. I think the majority of Muslims that live in Muslim countries still do believe in islam but there's a lot of confusion we're living in a time of confusion and it's very important for people just to not be so trigger happy you know there's this kind of desire", "And people should be careful because the Prophet said that, or was reported to have said that whoever says somebody's a Muslim is not a Muslim. One of them is not Muslim. In other words, because if you're making takfir of a Muslim, that can take you out of Islam and so it's really important.", "Alam al-Nubla, which is an extraordinary biographical dictionary of scholars up to Imam al-Dahabi's time who was a student of Ibn Taymiyyah . But in his chapter on Abul Hasan al-Ash'ari he mentions that Abul Hassan al- Ash'ari said in his latter days", "something like that, but that's pretty close. That we don't make takthir of anybody who faces our qibla and eats our dhabiha. These are just semantical points that were differing on. In other words a lot of the disagreements about Muslims end up being disagreement over what words mean. And so even Imam al-Dhahabi", "adding to what he said there, he says and that was the way our Shaykh was at the end of his life. We don't make takfir for anybody who's consistent in his wudhu because the Prophet said only a believer is consistent in", "Takfir is, you know excommunication is a process. A judicial process in the traditional books of fiqh and there's a but this idea of just making takfira people Is very dangerous and so to use a clip of mine To indicate somehow that I was meaning Somebody who? Was in Scotland, you as a man apparently has the same name as I do I think he spells it slightly different from me So I got all these congratulations when", "when he won the first Minister of Scotland. But you know I think people should be very careful, I mean in our Deen one of the creeds that some of you study here", "I mean, that's Imam Al-Laqani. He's been taught for 400 years in al-Azhar. You know, he says whoever rejects what's ma'loom dharouratan bideehatan so if you reject something known by everybody, by all Muslims like you say prayer is not an obligation or something like that. So he's saying that that's that is kufr. It's kufar and so the hukam of ridda goes under that person of apostasy", "And so and then he says or something like that if somebody negates much money Like something, that's much money every there's no he laugh about it. So the if there was a he laughs Then you have to be very careful now There are many traditions in our tradition Of him a reid lemon do hatun on it kiddo this is Something the fukaha talk about the idea of tattie up like There's when you say something you can be sorry", "you can be sariyah, which is there's no ambiguity. It's unequivocal and you're just very clear on what you say or the Arabs were very good at saying things and meaning something else or saying things in a way that the person hearing it thinks something but you actually intend something else so if somebody for instance asked a politician do you think same-sex marriage is a sin? And that politician says", "The majority considered them to be responsible for the whole Sharia, the Awamr and the Nawahi. But there are many scholars, and some of them, the majority in like for instance many of the Hanafi scholars, some of the really strong Ma'riki, it's a strong opinion, it is not the dominant opinion but it is a strong opinions in the Ma'ariki Madhhab that they're not responsible. In other words for the Awamar and Nawahis,", "the prohibitions but not for the commandments. And their proof is that if a non-Muslim prays, he doesn't get the reward of the prayer. If he fasts, like if a Non-Musim fast Ramadan they might get some benefits from the intermittent fasting health benefits But it's not rewarded according to our tradition They're not rewarded for fasting because they didn't. The ones that say that they're responsible you know", "وَكُنَّ نَخْضِبُ مَعَ الْخَائِرِ الدِّينِ وَ كُنّا نُكَذِّبُ بِي يَوْمِ الدَّينِ So they say, what brought you into hell? And they say we didn't pray. We didn't pay zakat and we used to just speak things inappropriately and then we rejected the Yawm al-Din. So that's the proof that they use for being responsible. So this is a khilaf and it's a valid khilaaf", "There is a hadith that Prophet said, The dunya is a prison for the mu'min because he is held to account for the furu' of sharia. So he can't do things he might even want to do them. Some people might want to drink but they don't drink because the sharia says you can't drink. But for the person who's outside of the faith of Islam this is their paradise according", "And so that's the idea that they're not really responsible for the furo' They are only responsible for usool Meaning, la ilaha illallah Muhammad Rasulullah Once they accept that then the foro', the branches of the sharia become obligatory So these are important distinctions But my advice to the Muslims is just be very careful about takfir It's not an easy thing and you can also end up being responsible if a Muslim does something crazy", "and thinks they're doing some kind of good deed, then you could be responsible. You could have blood on your hands for doing that. It's very dangerous to do these things. I mean we are not qudat. They say a duaat laa qudat. People who are calling to Islam, they're not judges. We're not judge. To be a judge those are the people that would have to deal with something like takfir. But one should be very careful about", "Because they have done some extraordinary work. So I'm not one to just dismiss good work that's done, but I'm a perennialist. My belief is that Islam is the final revelation and it abrogated preceding revelations. That's my belief. And I've always held that belief since I became Muslim. So people say things all the time. And we'll meet on Yom Kiyamah. And good luck! Good luck! We'll meet", "And there's a Qantara. There's a place where Muslims are going to have to deal with the things that they did because people aren't going to get into agenda. If you've wronged Muslims, I mean even the goat has its day. The goat with the broken horn will have his day on the Day of Judgment for being butted by goats that had two horns. You know, the one with the broke horns. He'll have his days. Every goat has his day. So, you know, I just think it's really important for Muslims", "be very careful. One of the Mauritanians, he said you can't do until you get deep knowledge because there's so much in our community. There's a lot of difference of opinion. So you could see something and think it's ,", "a munkar, but it's not a minkar. They're following a valid opinion and they said about Imam al-Masri that his knowledge was so vast that he rarely condemned anybody because he would say oh maybe he's on the opinion of so and so. It's very interesting, but there are so many people that just you know these have tongue will travel. You know these people that want to go and make takfir of people and just I mean first of all we're in", "I think people should just leave people alone. Just do what you're doing. You can say, this is not an Islamic belief. We don't believe this. If somebody says something, you can say this is non-Islamic belief and make that clear. But you should be... I think the Islamists are very careful with their deen. Don't throw your deen away for some YouTube likes. One of the things Imam al-Ghazali says is that the ulama asu... And he's talking about ulama.", "He's not even talking about young boys on the internet trying to get hits, click bait. He's now talking about those. He is talking about . These were actual scholars but they were bad scholars and he said their hallmark is that they know that the best way to get followers is to condemn and criticize others. You can look it up in the introduction", "Kithab al-ilm that I did. It's the whole passage that he says. This is a really important point. So, he says they know and that's why if you look at a lot of these people on YouTube, you know, they'll have on their regular... They'll have like 200 views, 1,000 views but then when they attack somebody who's famous, they call it punching up. Suddenly, it's got 10,000 or 15,000 viewers so they know this is a quick way to get people to go to your channel", "your channel because fitness great everybody loves fitna right everybody loves fitness and you see muslims never doing anything but then when the fitna comes oh they're so active it's like because shaitan's prodding them that's all it is he's just he's got his prodder out and he's exciting them so i just that's my advice you know it's just", "I don't know what their beliefs are. And I have no reason to doubt somebody's Islam.\" And then if somebody does say something, we're very clear on that homosexuality in our tradition is very clearly considered a sin. It's a sin! But is it a sin for people outside of the faith? That's the debate. There is a difference of opinion. So what did somebody intend? I don' t know but just to jump at takfir", "I think people should be very careful. Anyway, that's just some advice. You know, take it or leave it. But good luck on the Day of Judgment. That's all I can say is that people... The Prophet ﷺ said a man will speak a word and not give any consideration to it and it will drag him in the hellfire. That word. لَا يُرْقِي لَهَبَالًا He'll just say it like it's no big deal. No, you should be", "Allah. So Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Raheem, we're back to this is a much better world. This is the world of you know not qila waqala and who's in and who out and who said what they said and he said and she said and who was a bad Muslim and who is a mubtada'a and who isn't and who rightly guided and who", "There's no group that saves. There are individuals that are saved. There is no group on Yom Kiyamah. You're not in a group on Day of Judgment. You come as a fard. Everybody comes as an individual. You don't come as the group, so your groups not going to help you out. What's gonna help you all is being an upright human being with dignity that believed in Allah, believed in his message and did your best to follow that guidance.", "So he says the human being, all of the potentialities of the world are gathered in the human", "and were brought forth all of these things that were gathered in him. So they came after. So the one who perfected everything that he created, and he began the creation of the human being with mud.", "with mud. So the human being was created after all these things and all of the potentialities, the powers that are in the world were placed in him. And that's what he is saying here is that he created everything with ihsan", "He's going to argue that it's an abridgment of the whole world that he created. And that was mentioned in the Ka'ba al-Ahbar, the saying of Ka'aba al-Akhbar about what Allah created during the various days.", "So Allah gathered in the human being. So the here means the elements, you know? You have in medicine and in , in the traditional that Ibn Sina was a master of, you have what are called . So you have simple cures or treatments", "For instance, like aspirin is one thing. But if you take a medicine that has several different types of medicine in it or an antibiotic, it's one thing that's in that thing, like penicillin. So that would be basi'at. But it also can mean elements just generally the word basa'it. It's the foundational things, the simple substances.", "The spiritual matters and the material. So he means the spiritual and the materials. All of his extraordinary creations, and all of those things that Allah has brought them into existence and formed them and fashioned them.", "Adam Hassan. So the human being by means of the world he came about. From the very elements of the word. And so like we are made, we know now that were made of even the whole universe what it's made up with. We have all of that in us. That is his point.", "we have the stars in us, we have planets, we all have the ether. It's all in us in the human being and then he says So Allah has really shrunk or demunitized his form", "and gathered in it all of the potentialities of the world, everything that's in the world. It's like an abridgment of the word. So in other words we are the microcosm. That's what he is saying basically. So if you look at the abridgement of a book, it's the one in which the words are diminished so", "It's a paucity of words, and yet the meaning is complete. Because a lot of books as you know have things that expound upon but you can abridge a book to get to the fundamental things and not miss anything from the book. So if you read for instance an abridgment of the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun or Toynbee's abridgement some of you read that here", "of history he took nine volumes and reduced it down to two volumes but and you will get in that book the basic contents of the the nine volumes so woman hado innahu jura min safwat al-alem walubabihi wa khulasatih so he's saying and from the from from from the point of view that he he was made from the essence of the worlds", "the world's, and its pith, it's innermost core. And the summation of it, and it's fruit. He is in essence like the cream or the butter that rises from the makhid. Makhid is like sour milk so the Bedouin, this is something you'll find a lot of traditions but the Bedoans still do this", "So you have this thing called a jaffafa, and it's basically a goat skin. And they've stitched it all up. They put the milk in, and then they rock it. And there are enzymes in there so over time the milk will get sour but then the butter rises. So he is saying that if you look at the creation like that milk, but the essence of the milk is that cream,", "creation. He's using that as an analogy for that. وَالدُّهْنِ مِنَ السِّمْسِمْ Or like the oil from sesame. فَمَا مِلْشَيءٍ إِلَّا وَلِإِنسَانُ يُشْبِحُهُ مِمَنْ وَجْهٍ So there's nothing in the world except you'll find some similarity between that thing and between the human being. كَالْأَرْكَانِ So if you look at the elements of the world, من حيث ما فيه من الحرارة والبرودة والرتوبة واليبوسة From the perspective", "and cold, and moisture, and dryness. So human beings have all those elements based on that four elemental theory. Or like the minerals because the human being has minerals in his body so he's a material form like a rock or... And the Prophet said also spiritually people are spiritual minds", "copper people there's lead people there radioactive people toxic people like people there and then he says what can nabats min I do you talk about the way to rubba and also like we're like the vegetable world because we grow like vegetables we eat like you you pour water on the on the plant and it grows you give", "it imagined something that wasn't there so it's saying we share that with the animals. We know that animals also have pleasure in pain I mean an animal is a cat if you pet a cat it starts purring because it enjoys the petting, the touch of it and then he says", "So, is like to get angry. Somebody who's angry and they get belligerent so he's saying we're like predatory animals that can get belligrant. Or demons or we become like demons in that we plot", "we have these Machiavellian strategies and that we lead people astray, right? Like Shayatin. Or we can be like the angel. We can be liked the angel that knows God and worships God and is in awe of God. Or it could be like to preserve tablet", "put all of the wisdom of creation into that tablet. So he's like, again an abridgment. One of the sages said that in the body of the human being are 4,000 wisdoms and in his soul is something similar to that", "similar to that. And also we're like the qalam that Allah created and said, because it's the pen preserves the words by surah al-ashya fi quroob. So", "you can actually create conceptualizations in the people. So when you speak, it's as if your tongue is a pen because it's having an impression on the one you're speaking to. There's something that's happening. There'a tassweer in their hearts that's happenig.", "of the nutfah is plural. So mashij, it's multicolored, it has a cloth that's mashij. It's woven, interwoven so there's a warp and wolf to it. So amshaj is mixed. So it's a nutfhah mixed. I really think genuinely that this ayah", "because I think it's clearly indicative of the zygote, which is the mixing of the male and female genetic material. And it's very interesting that word...and I don't know why they did this but the word in modern Arabic for the genetic material is the same word that is used here. And I don' t know if they did that purposefully or is that just merely a linguistic coincidence?", "from Allah . It's like Imam Malik was asked about the porpoise. You know, porpoises is called khanzira al-bahar which means the pig of the ocean because porpois in Greek means ocean pig and so... Because it got that snout right? The porpoised. So they ask Malik you know what he thought of it. Did he think it was permissible? And he said, antum sammeytumu khanzirah. You named it a pig. In other words, just cause it has that name I would need it.", "would need it. So names are very interesting in that way. . So, it's mixed from all these potentialities for all these different things. And from this point of view that the world and the human being resemble one another if", "then it's said that the human being is the microcosm and the universe is the great man. وَلِذَٰرِكَ قَالَ اللَّهُ تَعَالًا مَا خَرْقَكُمْ وَلا بَعْثَكَمْ إِلَّا كَنَفْسٍ وَاحِدًا And for that reason Allah said your creation and your resurrection is like one nafs, ka-nafsan wahida." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Why muslims reject evolution - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_D8y9uTw50Wo&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743063248.opus", "text": [ "Hamza, it is characteristic of many scientists that they prefer not to have science and religion conflict and work towards harmonization by putting them so totally separate that there's really no association together. I kind of look upon that sometimes as a cop-out. If there is a problem we should address it.", "A classic area that has been of concern is obviously evolution, where certain aspects probably more in Christianity than in other religions today. Certain facets of it reject the evolution and a small segment of that group would claim to have scientific evidence for it but there's kind of a driving passion", "infallibility of the totality of both the Hebrew and the Christian Bible, which the Christians all accept. I do believe that the Islamic tradition treats the Quran as fully inspired. And if that's the case how do you deal with evolution? So bismillah first of all I think certain scientists", "scientists view Stephen Jay Gould had the two magisteria this idea of you know religion has its own magisterium and then science as its own Magisterium, and never the twain shall meet. The Muslims would reject that if it's true science it has to be compatible with the Quran. The Quran cannot... because God created the world", "logos, you know with this intelligibility and so if there's something in the Quran that contradicts science either the Quran is not true or the science isn't true. It's one or the other. So for Muslims they would say the science has to be wrong because they but it can't be incompatible.", "They've never persecuted scientists. They've always promoted science, and I think some of the strongest Muslims today are people that are in the sciences themselves, in the STEM areas, engineers, doctors. For sure, for sure that's the case. We all know that. But the question comes back if you have a fundamental approach to the scripture,", "a true Muslim would say there's something wrong with science. There's not something wrong... Sure, and about evolution. I mean you asked me about evolution There's a famous story of great West African scholar who was teaching in Saudi Arabia in Medina his name is Muhammad al-Amin al-Shinkiti And when the Americans went to the moon The Mauritanians were shocked because the Quran says that the moon is in heavens They can't penetrate the heavens", "they came in and they said what does this mean? And he said well it either, it means either they're lying or we misunderstood the Quran. So you know that's a good answer. It is true yeah it's a mutually exhausting. Yeah and so generally the view is that they misunderstood the quran you know so that verse doesn't apply to the heavens", "lower heaven. And that's the position that they took. So with evolution, I mean, evolution is obviously... There are different iterations of evolution. There's evolution...I mean we see the virus that afflicted our species recently evolved because you had the Delta and then you had this and that. Omicron. Yeah, omicron so the idea that things don't mutate,", "undeniable. Now, did we come from a previous species? Did we begin in some cosmic swamp and lightning struck that swamp and then somehow the beginning of a cell emerged and evolved over time until we got to this complexity? I think most Muslims would not accept that narrative but there are Muslims now that", "it. They're coming up with different solutions to it, so I think there is a grappling with evolution but overall I think the vast majority of Muslims are still very orthodox in their belief that God created the human being and that we're in the form that he...that God created us. And that would have been in some close relationship to a simple reading of the book of Genesis? I think so. That's the way the majority of Muslim would view it.", "Yeah, I think majority belief is interesting sociologically but I'm interested more in the broad range of scholars. I think there's scholars writing on evolution now. I Think Maurice Bucaille wrote a book arguing that evolution was everything but the human being was dropped into the earth. Everything else was done through evolution but the", "Why I like that, and I'm not saying it's true. But why I like is it's an effort to make a consistent argument to take two things that look on its surface to be contradictory and say okay if I take a firm belief in both which many people would reject but if I'm forced to do that how can I make it work? What are some alternatives making it work you may not think the solution is any good", "and be faithful to both sides. Well, I mean, occasionalism is one of the ways because if God is recreating everything in every instant and at a certain point he created man from that evolution, that would have been a unique point. One of the things that always struck me... They used to do this. They don't do it anymore. And I think somebody wised up to it when they show Australopithecus, the first little guy, and then they move up. And then at a", "And I mean, how did he discover his nakedness? That always struck me as very strange about it. Now they took it off, now he's just naked all the way through because I think they realize that that's a problem because it is consistent with the Genesis story. Right, right. No, I think those are very good examples. And so the idea of this harmonization... Because if we look at the options you have in evolution,", "evolution that's pure random. You run the movie twice and you get a different answer. However many times you run the move, you get different result and human beings are completely accidental. Consciousness is accidental. And I think any religious person in the Abrahamic traditions at least would reject that. Then you have more of a deistic evolution which some people call theistic but it's really deistic which means", "smart and put it all together so that humans would evolve according to the laws of chance, everything would happen. But God does not have to intervene further. Exactly. The world's a washing machine. You put the quarters in. Yeah. But boy, what a wonderful job in designing that washing machine! Paul Davies is a cosmologist who's not a theist but has very sophisticated", "that's a God who is really smart. I mean, if you want to believe in God, that kind of God would be the smartest God that you can think of.\" And I was impressed by that. In other words it's not that it's a less powerful God because he's not intervening. It's a smarter God who could have made it so clever to have this system work to bring about what God wanted. So it's better God. That's actually one of Darwin's early arguments before he became an atheist", "atheist. Like he actually said the evolution is a more marvelous way of viewing God so in his early period, I don't know if he did that just to avoid being attacked by the religious community. Yeah and then of course you have a a theistic evolution which says that evolution is true but God is making interventions along the way critically only when needed at those what they call joints", "when you had to make an intervention. And then some would go on to say, yeah but still have... You can't interrupt the deterministic world so you have to operate at the quantum world where there's uncertainty anyway and so you a bell curve of distribution. From our perspective, the uncertainty. But each of these and then you have people who would be intelligent design. So you have this spectrum. You have a spectrum of ways of dealing with the problem", "And again, my question is from the Muslim community in broader sense you would skew more to the earlier... We kind of reject them all I think. Yeah. I mean if there was, if evolution as it's iterated now, if it was true, the thing that would be absolute disbelief would to believe that it was random from God's perspective. You know that randomness is impossible for God.", "for God. God knows, and so if God created a world in which the mechanism with which He chose to fulfill His purpose was through a hit-and-miss in creation, then that could be possible, but it would not be hit- and-mess for God, it would just be the mechanism that He chose,", "would adopt a kind of Muslim evolutionary theory. But like I said, most Muslims are going to stick with the traditional narrative." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Why you must not envy people - Sheikh Hamza Yusuf_R1F4C04aokM&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743301406.opus", "text": [ "And that's the beauty of our deen is that whoever you are, wherever you are and whatever conditions you're in. You can get close to Allah. You Can get close a lot but don't envy people I mean their scholars. I wish I had The knowledge that sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah has I wish i had the memory that Sheikh Muhammad Hassan Wadidu who has I Wish I had but I don't Envy them. I'm happy for them Why should I envy them? Allah gave them", "I gave them, but He gave me things and Alhamdulillah I should be content with what he gave me. And ask Him for increase." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Dome of the rock in Palestine - Sheikh Hamza Yusuf__1748539651.opus", "text": [ "Imam al-Busayri saw Al Quds under the control of the Salibis. They actually put a cross on the Temple Mount, on the Sharaf, the Haram Sharif, on what was traditionally called Masjid Dawood because Ka'b al-Ahbar showed Sayyidina Omar where the masjid was because that place is where Dawood prayed which is now where the Dome of the Rock is.", "on the dome of the rock, on the Haram Sharif, this sacred sanctuary. 190 years! So this has happened in the past but the Muslims it didn't give them doubt. It had the opposite effect" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Imam Ali _ra_ on Human Being -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf__1742892169.opus", "text": [ "The Prophet recognized manazal. Everybody is equal in their humanity, everybody is equal... ...in their spiritual possibility for salvation. But people are different in their contribution to a culture, to a civilization, to village, to family. They're different. And that's why Sayyidina Ali said,", "what he does well. So, he would always... يُنزِدَ النَّاس مَنْ نَازِدْهُمْ And He said I was commanded to do that. He didn't treat scholars the same way he treated other people. This was our Prophet ﷺ. Whoever saw him suddenly was always taken aback because he had a haybah . But if he sat with them they would fall in love." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Message for Keyboard warriors - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf__1743060880.opus", "text": [ "I don't think humans have ever talked more than they talk today. When you write something on the internet, you can't get that back. Some of them you can delete people delete tweets and things but they're not deleted with the angels especially when it's about other people because then is the haqq of somebody else And there's the Qantara for Muslims like the Qanthra is going to be a problem Because the qanta you can get into paradise until you settle things with other Muslim So you make it across the sirat", "the sirat there's another stage which is the qantara for anybody you wronged they have a right at that point to demand from you so but people just don't think about this they just ma yalfidu min qawlan there is not a word uttered that it's not being recorded and now we know all these recordings all our phone calls are recorded", "We're going to show them our signs. I mean look at all the recording that's going on, hidden conversations. There are people now who get people in these gotcha situations and they record them and then put it up on the internet. The Prophet said private conversations are sacred trust. The prophet said if a man ever before he says something looks around its amanah", "But they also say don't blame somebody for... If you tell somebody the secret, a secret, don't blam them for telling someone else because they said the same thing that pulled it out of your chest, pulled it our of theirs. That's why they say, They say, The breasts of free people are the graveyards of secrets." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/People always want new things - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf__1742886944.opus", "text": [ "And one of the most amazing things about this religion is because Allah who created us knows the human condition and nature of the human being, humans always want new things. Probably some of the best things that are on the internet are very old things but people don't want old things they want new thing, they want the latest thing They're always looking for something new New and improved", "something's going to be better." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Prepare now for Laylatul Qadr - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf__1742881769.opus", "text": [ "It's a day and a night that really we should try to take advantage of. It sought in the last ten according to a hadith, in a hadit it is muttafaqun alayh in Imam Al-Bukhari Al-Muslim The last seven nights and particularly the odd nights And then there are many of our scholars including the great translator of the Quran Ibn Abbas who felt that it was on the 27th night The sign of it is that the sun will rise the following morning without any rays", "rays it will be very clear and I've seen that myself. I felt that there was a Laylatul Qadr, and I went out and looked so it's not necessarily on the 27th and we should never limit it to that day because the Prophet said like seek it in the last 10 nights and particularly the odd nights so don't miss the blessing of all the nights and particular the odd night and particularly 27th night" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Prophet never forced opinions - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf__1743304370.opus", "text": [ "Nothing was given to the Ansar. They started talking. This is so strange! Like our swords have their blood from fighting these battles and they haven't done anything for him? They chased him out? We were called to this, and yet he's giving the spoils to other people that didn't?", "giving them the spoils? If this is what Allah has commanded, then we'll be patient. But if this is from his... This is just his ijtihad. This is a khilaf but this is his opinion. It's not wahi. Then we have some censure here. I mean this... But this shows you who he was.", "He was never a tyrant. He was somebody that forced his opinions on other people. He always allowed people to think for themselves. This is proof, this is not in any way... Something amazing about his companions is they felt they could do this!" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Why Music is not good for you - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf__1742888222.opus", "text": [ "The other aspect is the television and films and music. One of the interesting things about Islam is the tension that the ulama had with music. Nobody can make a blanket statement that it's Mujma'alay. If you read Shawkani in Nail al-Awtar, he has a section on this and talks about the khilaf that existed about music. Imam Ghazali, Abdur Ghani AlNabulusi", "and other great scholars have sections about Samar, which is a sacred type of music that they thought was a good thing and permissible. But the Ulama were very wary of music because they understood how powerful music is" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/_ Favorite Food of the Prophet _ﷺ_ _ Hamza Yusuf ___1743058636.opus", "text": [ "When the Prophet was asked what his favorite food was, he said the one with the most hands in it. Which is such a stunning answer. Because what he was saying was, it's the company that makes food so important. Literally this morning I read at Harvard study about the importance of eating together as a family. That apparently children when they eat with their parents on a regular basis instead of eating alone", "instead of eating alone, it's actually much healthier for their mental health. So there is something very important about this coming together for food so the provost said his religion brings people together." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Sending Salam on Prophet ﷺ by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf ___1743063490.opus", "text": [ "We know that the Prophet , if you say, he hears it. Now people say well if you've got a billion people saying how could he hear all those? You've got computers now that can work all that out. You've go computers that can monitor all the telephone calls on the planet. What, the Prophet's brain isn't greater than a computer?", "He's not a Pentium, he's the whole thing. I mean, he just , you know? You can process all that information without any problems. Because we're only here, it was like ant brains. We're in this ant brain dialogue" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Falling for Shaythan_s tricks - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_6AZGHYRT5V8&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743057970.opus", "text": [ "I mean, this is Shaitan's heyday. He has never had more tools than he has today. It used to be ghibah you needed another person with you. Now all you have to have is a cell phone or the internet. First of all Marhaban welcome everybody They say here marhaba with a soft H So that's the way they say marhaban. They are soft people", "people. First of all, it's an incredible blessing to be here in Turkey. It's a difficult time for the Muslims as you know we have right next door on the border I think it's several hundred mile long border is Syria which", "Shamina wa Yamanina and he said it three times sallallaahu alayhi wasalam and he also made dua against anyone that wished ill of the people of sham or did anything to upset the people", "They're going through a very trying time. Many of them are on the border now, refugees, the Turkish... In fact they're not calling them refugees, they're calling them guests, as a way of honoring their status. So that's troubling always because we're in such blessing and everything is comfortable and we have so many blessings.", "This is the nature of dunya, what's different about our time than other times is that we have television, we have 24-hour news cycle. We're exposed to all these things but the Muslims throughout their history if you look at their history when there were some of the most flourishing times in one place where the worst times in other places this is a human condition What's happened now as it's globalized Imam al Nawawi was", "was living during a very difficult time for Central Asians. Imam al-Ghazali was writing his great works during the occupation of Palestine. People forget that the Crusaders were in the Muslim lands while Imam al Ghazali really flourishing as an intellectual, spiritual genius and all other things he contributed. So it's important to keep that", "It's the weapon of the believer. I mean, this hadith that we... You know, the usuri scholars say, أَصُرَ الْكِرَامِ الحقيقة That the foundation of speech is literal. That you should take things literal before you move to any figurative interpretation. So if the Prophet said, الدعاء سلح المؤمن That's exactly what he meant. The dua is the weapon", "Those are material weapons, but the real weapon of the believer, السلاح, the real سِلَحُ المؤمن is his connection or her connection with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And if you have that connection, the Prophet ﷺ's dua was also وَمِنِ الْيَقِينِ مَا تَهَوَّن بِهِ عَلَيْنَ مَصَائِبَ الدُّنْيٰا Give us the yaqeen that makes all of the tribulations of this world insignificant.", "If you have yaqeen in your heart, if you have certainty then the calamities of this world are exactly what they are. They're calamities OF THIS WORLD and anything that happens in this world is hayyin in relation to what happens in the next world Here our fitn are always limited. They have a beginning, a middle and an end In the akhirah", "It's not like that And Ibn Abbas said In every tribulation are three blessings It could have been worse You lost one hand, you could have lost both hands You lost an eye, you would have lost your eyes You broke your back, you might have lost a life It always could be worse And then it is in the world As long as it is this world It is easy in relation to the next world", "and then it's in worldly matters, and not in religious matters. Because the real tribulation is when your deen is tried. People that lose their faith. That's the real Tribulation. As long as you have faith everything is easy. So think about our brothers and sisters next door make dua for them. Alhamdulillah You can see right beside them a country that's flourishing It's good for those of you who haven't been to this country before", "before, one of the real surprises is to see a functioning Muslim country. I mean it's really nice to see Muslims functioning this is a cleaner city than the European capitals It's a cleaner City then our cities in America who are people coming from America The people had lot of civil society will exclude the traffic driving because they would have to have something of Islam", "of Islam, of the modern Muslims. Or they wouldn't be Muslim, right? But other than that really it's a civil society, beautiful people and they've really welcomed us. And so make dua for them also for the president you know for the leaders of the country Wallahi Abu Hanifa he said that if you have... many of the scholars said this but they said", "The dua, if you have a dua mustajab You should do it for the leaders of the Muslims Do it for them leaders One of the... I wanted somebody to do this Nobody ever did it for me I asked some people to do it But in the haram I wanted to do a decibel count on the duas Because everybody says ameen And they're higher on certain things and lower on other things So like when they say Allah save us from the fire Everyone goes ameen It goes way up", "way up. Then when it says, Allahumma aslih wulata umurina you know, it all goes way down when they ask for them to bless their rulers and but if they really, this is a sign that we don't have common sense anymore because with their rectification is the rectification of the ummah You know, the ulama say that it's the ahmak who makes a dua against rulers It's the fool", "Because the ruler's tawfiq is your tawfeeq. If he has tawfeek, then the community has taufiq. if he doesn't have tawfik everybody suffers from that So it's important you know that we ask Allah to bless the wudat-ul umur in Turkey Give them tawfic there in a difficult time There's a lot of enemies There's people who don't want to see them succeeding like they are. The European countries are in financial crisis", "Here last year they had 10% growth This year it's close to 8% You know, they're close to China in their growth So they're really thriving economically And we make dua that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala Continue to bless them and strengthen them Because their strength is the strength of the ummah InshaAllah This is an interregnum period People forget history If you know history, you can have long periods", "that are called interregnum periods. This is one of those periods for the Muslims, but Morocco went almost a hundred years without leadership during a civil war period so these things happen in time we obsess about our little time that we spend here We're not here very long. The historical story is much greater than our individual stories which doesn't mean that our own individual stories are not significant they are they're very significant and", "and the greatest story is the story of our prophet salallahu alaihi wasalam and that was a historical time um you when you go inshallah we'll go see the panorama amazing", "You know, if you listen the dead speak because everything that they did is here. Traces of it are all here and they did great things these people so", "I feel ashamed to speak in here, you know. Alhamdulillah.", "One of the things about this country that's a great blessing for us is that normative Islam, what academically could be called normative Islamic. An Islam that transcends time and place. It's not particularized. It' s the thing that is handed down. You know when we read... you can take a book written 200 years ago today in the United States", "take for instance Walden Pond by Thoreau and you can read it, and the amazing thing is that you can't read it despite the fact between you and the original writer are a few hundred years. That the greatest tradition we have is language, that its handed down. If I say to you a rose by any other name would smell as sweet even though that was written several hundred", "And this is the nature of life on earth. So our religion also has a tradition now the tradition Has many components to it? but at the root of it are our tools that Have to be learned because it's those tools that enable you To really understand the tradition and and our community develop very extensive tools not to give an example Of one of the most important ones and one of few that is truly protected", "protected in an amazing way is Tajweed. Tajweed is part of our tradition because the Sahaba, if you ask the Sahabah what Idh-Gham was they wouldn't know what Idgham was or Idgham bila Ghunna They would not know what a Madfar'i was or a Al-Siddiq. They wouldn't these things. If you gave them these technical terms they wouldn´t know them but what they did know was how to recite the Qur'an and one of the miracles of our religion", "because if you study any language, you will know that there are many ways to pronounce things in languages and they will debate about how things were pronounced at any given time and place. If you want to study... I studied New Testament Greek in college and high school but my Greek teacher said we don't know how this was pronounced. We think it was pronounced like this. I had a Latin teacher that was of the opinion", "teachers that claim it was pronounced as a V and maybe there were more than one dialect some said when you any weedy and the other said many of any reachy like that right so these differences are all over human language but tajweed is unique there if you go to Malaysia they pronounce the Quran in the same way if you take Shia they pronounce it the same as the Sunni's if", "They would do the same Tajweed. There's no difference in Tajweed, there is 17 points of articulation, there are 5 basic makharij, the sifat of the hurufs are the same. They don't debate. There are a few very minor debates about jim and things like this but they're negligible. How is that possible? That the book is pronounced exactly the same way in the entire Muslim Ummah.", "And even the حركات, you know, the masters of تجويد they know exactly how many حركت are allowed and how much time can transpire between the sounds. That if you go too much then it's wrong. If you do too little, it's wrong. There are things that have to have two حركة there are things have to four حركه", "There's a reason why you have to have, you can't say what abalene. Right? In Tajweed, you have some elongation there. So all of these... This is tradition. These things were handed down and the reason they're the same is because the source was the same. If you go back to the science of this is a PhD thesis for somebody if you go Back to the all of the transmitters of the Quran They go back To the same people All of them without exception", "Only a handful of people transmitted the Quran. They all go back to the same ones and so this is one of the miracles of Islam, it's the tradition that's handed down unbroken chains Quran, Hadith, Fiqh And then the tools, the adawat even though they're different schools and they debate about things you have the Kufan and Basra in schools in language these are different schools, and they will debate about certain things", "So all of this is part of the gifts of Islam. Now in this country, this is a country where tradition has been maintained. It's broken down in many places. People are very confused. But if you come to Turkey there's much less confusion about what religion is and the reason for that is they protected this tradition. Their ulama did not allow these alien forces", "Divide and conquer them. Because Allah says, وَلَا تَفَرَّقُ We forget that it's a prohibition to become sectarian in the Qur'an. It's a Prohibition. There is نَهِيَ عَنَ التَّفَارُّقِ Allah says وَلا تَ فَرِّقُ How did the Muslims do that? They had no synods. They had No Magisterium. They Had no Councils. How did they do that if you look at If you look At The Jews The Jews Have Certain Rabbinical Councils That Meet Together And Decide What'S Orthodoxy And What'S not", "and what's not. If you look at the Christians, they had councils. They had the Council of Nicaea, the Council Chaldea, they have the council of Alexandria. They have all these different councils that come together and they meet and their bishops discuss what is going to be doctrine? And they hash it out. And then they come to certain agreements and some of them disagree, they become heretics or heterodoxic. Right? And that's how the religion... The Muslims had none of that! There are no councils.", "There's no synods. There's not magisterium. How did they come to these agreements? This is a miracle of Islam! The providential hand that is taking care of this religion, is so evident to anybody that's willing to openly look at it. How do they agree that there were... the Sunni community agreed there are four basic madhhabs? How did he agree to that despite the fact we had dozens of madhhab? What happened to Layth? Really where is Sufyan al-Thawri?", "These were great fuqaha, but their ways died out. Where's Imam al-Rawza'i? Where's Abu Dawud al-Zahiri? Why Malik, Abu Hanifa, Shafii and Ahmad? Why these four? These are the people that Allah... And it's not that the others were less than them. But for whatever hikmah, Allah chose these four to be the canonical schools of the Sunni tradition", "and the Ja'fari in the Shia tradition. This is a miracle of Islam to do this, and to have them accept each other The fact that they had four mihrab in the Kaaba is a Miracle of Islam That they weren't fighting each other And if the Maliki was late for his Dhuhr prayer he would I'm sorry If the Shafi'i was late For the Dhuhur prayer He would pray with the Malikis If the Shafei, Hanafi and Hanbali were late", "for their prayer they would pray with the Hanafis if they were late for their fujr prayer they will pray with Hanaf is and this wasn't because they were sectarian they had one mihrab in Medina people say oh look they got to a point there was so much sectarianism they had four madhhab no it's pre microphone Kaaba is a big place they didn't there was space for everybody", "And they let everybody pray there. Each madhhab was honored. The Hanafi obviously got the biggest one because the majority were Hanafi. And the Shafi'i at one point also very big. The Maliki small and then the Hanbali was very small because there were very few Hanbalis. But each was honored . And then in Aqidah, you look at the Aqida schools that were transmitted. There are lots of debates how did they agree on these things? Undeniably there were periods of fitz-et", "of fitz and we went through similar problems that other religions have had but how did they arrive to these agreed upon things this is not to deny that there are people dissenters there are and if they were of a caliber that the other ulama recognized their right to dissent, they would acknowledge it but if they", "is used in Arabic but how to say a in Greek means to choose for yourself a heresy is where you pick and choose your religion. You don't accept what's transmitted, what's agreed upon. And so in the Aqidah this is what they came. They came to the Ash'ari, the Maturidi. The Ottoman Dawla was Maturida. Muhammad Al-Fatih he came into the city and conquered the city. The Prophet praised him. He said", "He said, What a blessed ameer is their ameel and what a blessed army is their army. He was by consensus, So the Prophet was praising And people say, Astaghfirullah, would the Prophet praise him?", "He would never praise a Mubtada. And yet we know he praised the conqueror of this city. He said, Nima is the way the Arabs say the best. That's the best Amir, their Amir. And he would never Praise worldly things not like he was a great general which he was no he was praising his Iman. He was praising His Aqidah. He Was praising his practice because he was Imam Adil and", "Seven are given the shade of Allah on the day of judgment when there's no shade except Allah's shade. The first, a just ruler. That's how high their maqam is. A high ruler. The dhikr of the umara'a is adal. That they're dhiker to practice justice. They don't have to do a lot of", "do a lot of subha even though he did or do a law of tilawa even though they don't have to do any of that if they're just that's their dhikr and they reach these high maqams so that was who he praised so this transmission and then the third area this is iman, Islam and Ihsan how did they agree on the way of Imam al-Junaid? Imam by consensus", "Dr. Omar, you're here. He's a much greater scholar than I am. You know, I'm Astaghfirullah not even put my name under scholarship but student of knowledge. But Dr. Omar, Imam al-Junaid, anybody disagree on him from the Sunni tradition? Do you know? Nobody. Ibn Taymiyyah praises him. Everybody praises Him. He is Imam Al Taifatain. He was a great scholar in his Madhab of Thawri. He", "a great Sufi and his tasawwuf spread because one of his students was the single most important narrator of Abu Dawud's Musnad. So when Abu Dawd, the Sunan of Abu Daud, when he went to Mecca and began transmitting the Hadith, he taught Imam Junaid's teaching there and it spread all over the world. So in Morocco, the little children they learn And that's what they all learned", "all learn. The Aqidah of Imam Al-Ash'ari, the Fiqh of Imam Malik and the way of Imam al-Junaid. And this was Islam, Iman and Ihsan. And people say you know where is that? Where's Tasawwuf in Islam? Where is the word? It's a technical term. It's just like Manthiq, Kalam, Fiq. Fiq is a technical", "mean jurisprudence he meant understanding. He gives him an understanding of the religion they use it later and the books of fiqh always begin with that hadith because its but the original meaning of that you look in the commentaries of a Hadith, it meant you fahimuhu fi deen and the sahaba knew that sometimes somebody who walks around", "information in his head isn't the faqih. They have all the outward, what Imam al-Ghazali calls Al Mutarrasimun, the formalists and he speaks very ill of them in the Ihya. Al Mutarassimun are the people of Rusum they're trapped in the outward letter of the law and they don't know the spirit of the Law In Western if you're studying western tradition that what they call deontological ethics as opposed to teleological", "ethics where everything is just rules, statute law without understanding the teleological nature of law. What's the purpose? Why do we have these rules? Why were we given these things? Allah has reasons for everything. He gave us intellect. He made us rational creatures. We're not irrational creatures even though we behave irrationally and we have an irrational component to us but our nature is rational language is rational syntax is rational", "you can sit here and listen to me for however long you listen to Me is because my words are put together in a way that has meaning. If it didn't, then you couldn't... if I was just table sky letter, I don't know, you know? If you just start talking like that, you walk out and say he's gone mad, right? Because it would be irrational. So we are rational creatures and that's why Allah has spoken to us in a", "فَاعْتَبِرُوا يَا أُولِي الْأَبْصَارِ Think, people of discernment, people Of inner eye, people understanding. فَعْتِبِروُوا اعتِبار It's a beautiful word in Arabic it's related to the word عربية you know The عبر is a bridge الدنيا معبرة فتعبروها ولا تعمروها One of the sayings of Isa that this world Is a bridge so crossover تعبر و لا تعمروها Don't build on it don't think", "Don't think it's a permanent abode. Cross over it. The Ibra is the lesson, but it comes from Ubur which is language takes you from one place to another. That's why all languages according to Ibn Jinnah and other great Arab scholars, the linguists said that language is metaphorical by nature because we're speaking... We are using symbols signs to signify something in order for me", "for me to take your mind from one place to another. So this is what i'tibar is, it's the ability to look at one thing and understand something else by it. So Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala when He tells you يُخْرِبون بيوتهم بأَيْدِهِم وَأَيدِ الْمُؤْمِنِينَ that they destroy their houses with their own hands and with the hands of the believers, Allah is saying فَاعْتَبِّرُوا Think about this,", "Isn't it amazing that Allah can take a people and He will make them destroy their own houses with their own hand, the houses that they cherish, that they built with those hands. And yet he will cause them to destroy their houses as punishment to them. So Allah is saying reflect on this. See the Qudra of Allah in this because nobody would destroy his house. It's a mad thing to do but people do it", "it because Allah is punishing them and so this is what Allah saying see the Ibra, the lesson in it. And when the Ibrah is really penetrated, when it's really understood you get the Abra which is tears that's where the Abrah come from because it's that's were meaning when meaning penetrates the heart the eyes often well up because they're overwhelmed", "You can be filled with pain. So much pain that you begin to overflow and that's what tears are, they're the overflowing of the heart was something. You can have tears of joy and that when the heart is filled with joy so it overflowed. You could have meaning so powerful that you're so overwhelmed by it that you start to overflow. That's what Tears are there are overflowing inside your souls of meaning negative positive", "positive spiritual material but meaning. So this is a great gift that we have, you know, this tradition that we had and there's people who want to reduce Islam into two-dimensional Islam or one dimensional. They wanna make it Islam without Iman and Ihsan Or they wanna make Iman without Islam and Ihsana Or they want to make it Ihsan without Imaan and Islaam Or they wan't to make Ihsaan and Imaan without Islaaam You can't! It's a holistic", "It's a three-legged stool. You have to have all three for it to stand, right? You cannot have one without the other and this is why if Islam becomes divested of its spirituality, it becomes a shell. You", "about Iman and Islam really in reality. But there are people that will want to try to make it that, Islam spiritual, Islam's here brother. It's in the heart. No, Iman is in the Heart. Islam is outward thing, Sharia. It doing outward thing. Anybody can be a Munafiq can be Muslim but he can't be a Mu'min because Mu'mins an interior reality that reflects on the exterior. And then Ihsan is the depth dimension", "It's what gives you, the iman gives you the height. Islam gives you breath but Ihsan gives you depth and that is why what you witness here is Ihsan because these were people of Ihsan. These were great people of Ihsan. And so it's...you know I just to a few statements in conclusion one of things all of us are on a journey", "This is the nature of life on earth. You came into the world, Allah, one of His names... Everything is a tajalli of Allah. All these names are manifesting in the world everywhere. He's outwardly manifest. His names are manifesting themselves before us. He is the muntaqim . He is afu , he is ghafoor . Insha'Allah you're going to do the names this in these coming days. But he is qahirun fawqa ibadhi", "Qahar is powerful, like he is the overwhelming, overpowering. And part of being overwhelmed is that you came into the world and Allah has put you here and you're on a journey whether you like it or not. Some people don't want to go on a Journey but they are forced to. They literally are forced on a Journey. We are on a Journey whether you liked it or no.", "road in front of you and then there's diversions do you see but the problem with the diversions is that they won't get you to your goal but you still end up going on that final journey, you're just not prepared. The diversions will always put you back but without the provision you needed to really make the journey so there's all these diversions and Shaitan is just sitting there on the road he's got everything too I mean", "I mean, this is Shaitan's heyday. He has never had more tools than he has today. It used to be ghibah you needed another person with you. Now all you have to have is a cell phone or the internet. You can be anywhere and do ghiba. It use to be that you had to have another person. Now anywhere you go you've got the tools for ghibas just right there. You have the tools of namima.", "It used to be, you know that I mean now people it's amazing the internet and The amount of time that people spend on these things Really if you start You should clock in and just look and see what kind of time you spend on These things because people say oh, I don't have any time. I never believe that Because I know how much time I waste You know really everybody we are master time wasters human beings", "human beings. Even the most efficient people waste time because you can't, like a machine has an efficiency rate. You know, like car they say it's about 7%. 93% of the cars energy is just wasted in a combustion engine very inefficient. The human body its working at about 33%, at optimal work. It's dissipating a lot of caloric energy. This is the nature of our creation. Allah has made", "He's made a creation like this, right? Only Allah is perfect. Even though his creation has its perfection he put in the creation all these signs that by it's very nature it's falling apart. So also like that is your time, the amount of time you use. Everybody needs . The Prophet , he permitted it in certain times. The used to have times of recreation.", "is an important part of life. But it's how much time you're wasting because you need some downtime, you have to have it. You have to sleep, the eating also and then there has to be that time just where your mind is... You can't read all the time, you'll get sick really, if you read all time, but you can't do it all the times. And if you know how to read, if doing serious reading,", "Reading for tasliya, just for entertainment. Like thinking about what you're reading takes a lot of energy. So people waste time. It's a human condition. But Allah tells us, you know, وَلَا تُسْرِفُوا You know, not to be people of israf. وَلا تُبذِّرْ تَبْذِيرًا Don't be people", "wasted away really if you look out there especially where people don't have ibadah anymore, you see the vacuity of the faces. You can see the emptiness. You ca nsee the pain. There's a lot of suffering and you shouldn't look at these people with contempt. Muslims have traditionally looked with compassion. It is arrogance to have this view of superiority because they don't worship or they don' t know who should've told them", "Uqba bin Nafi' when he arrived to the ocean of the Atlantic they say he had his horse ride into the ocean as the waves were hitting his horse. He said to Allah, O Allah if I knew there were people on the other side of this ocean I would build ships to take your religion to them. And that was the himmah of the early Muslims and it was the", "who spread Islam in India and went into the little villages with the Hindus where they're worshipping idols and things like that, and they taught them about Islam. So this is... We are in a time when the tools of the shayateen are immense. They just have so many tools. And so this is really all of us, and I include myself Wallahi, all of you are blessed to have this. This is called leisure time.", "This time that we have, leisure. In the traditional sense of the word, Joseph Pieper a great German philosopher wrote a book called Leisure and what he argues is that leisure is the foundation of civilization. The time to think. It is the time to cultivate the mind and spirit. That is what leisure is. Leisure comes from a Latin word which means license. It's a permission.", "the things you were created to do fully. Right? It's a rukhsah. And so, you have a time now, this time that you have here, it's a great time of immense benefits, inshaAllah. So my advice to myself and to all of you is utilize this time. This is precious time. It's free time. You're people of leisure right now. We have people serving us. You look at those people. They're serving us", "us. There's people serving our food, there's people cleaning our rooms, there are people driving us to and from right? Look with the eye of love to those people because without them we couldn't do what we're doing. We would be busy doing those things. And so what an honor to be amongst people that Allah allows this time, this time to", "us to cultivate our minds and our spirits, to try to get closer to Allah . What a gift! I mean just Alhamdulillahirrabbar'alamin hamdan yuwaafi ni'muhu yukafi mazeedah.", "your heart, it's enough of gratitude to Allah. But really be in a state of gratitude because this is just such a blessing to be afforded this leisure time to cultivate our spirits and our minds especially before Ramadan you know because this going to be an excellent preparation inshaAllah this will be the best Ramadan that we have may Allah give us a beautiful Ramadan and a beautiful Shaaban is a great...we're gonna be here", "the Sunni country, this Sunni countries. They really honor the traditional days like the Nusr Shaaban is a big night you know? It's a big Night I'll tell you there's a Khilaf about it which is fine. It's Khilafa Imam Malik did not practice Shaaban, Nus Shaban Imam Maliki himself he didn't. The Hadith were from the people of Sham Al-Awza'i considered it a big", "of the tabi'een all elevated Nish-Shaaban. But it spread throughout the world and the Malikis ended up celebrating it. So even though Imam Malik, it's fine if people don't want to celebrate that's fine. But Ibn Rushd gave a great qaida. Ibn rushd said if you ever have an ikhtilaf about the rahmah of Allah always err on the side of Rahmah. You know if there is a valid Ikhtilf does the Quran get to dead people or doesn't it? He just said", "He just said, look, just consider it that it gets there because it's Rahmah. And wherever there is more Rahmaha then there is Islam. Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziya , he said that, . Islam is all mercy so if it goes from mercy to its opposite, it's not from Islam.", "فَإِذًا تَقْرَتْ مِنَ الْحِكْمَةِ إِلَىٰ الضِّدِّهَا فَلَيْسَ مِنا الإِسْلاَمُ Islam is all wisdom. So if it goes from wisdom to its opposite, it's not from Islam. He said, أَلْإِسَّلَامُ عَدْرٌ كُلُّهُ عْدْراً فَأِذَا تُقْ رَمٍ مِ نَدَعَدِ لِيَوْرٍ لَيسَمِنِ الإِثْلَابِ He said that Islam is justice. It's all justice. So If it goes form justice to its opposites then it's NOT from Islam", "May Allah give you all the blessing of this time. May He give you the ability to make use of it. We really owe also a lot to the volunteers. There's a group of volunteers. Please treat them all with respect. You know, there's always going to be things that arise. People can have genuine problems and then you have whiners and complainers", "the food will be excellent food. So, you know, if you have a valid complaint or something then take it to one of the people with adab that's fine but don't complain just to be a complainer. Nobody likes complainers even other complainers. They don't because they want to be complaining and you're taking up all their time.", "and stop complaining so they can start complaining. So, you know, inshallah Aisha Subhani, mashallah may Allah bless her, she's mother and a physician and she did so much work to really make this happen and also Dr. Rajab Shintirk he is the head of this incredible revival here of traditional Islamic studies", "beautiful job and I would say he asked me yesterday, he wants masters and PhD candidates so if anybody is looking to do a master's or PhD then you can apply here. They have a one year program to learn Turkish that they put you in a mahat it's five hours a day and you learn university level Turkish in a year and then you", "Inshallah, Zaytuna during this time we talked about it last year. We're going to have a letter of understanding memorandum of understanding between the two institutions so people that graduate from ZayTuna can come here automatically if they get a degree from Zeytuna to do their master's PhD here. So Alhamdulillah you know and then yesterday we had Dr. Bakar who is beautiful man he was a professor of philosophy. He's very close.", "top advisors to the president and he's on the board here because President Erdogan has been very heavily involved in this institution here, which is part of the Alliance of Civilizations. So he visited us last year so maybe we'll get a visit but just for security reasons and other things they don't really tell us what's gonna happen. But he's a very great man inshallah", "What is the meaning of this prayer?", "And you said if there's an iqtilaaf, if you can just... Yeah. If there is a valid iqtiilaaaf amongst the ulama about something that involves the rahmah of Allah Like he used it as the example of the qira'a You know some of the ulma say you can recite for the dead and give it as charity to them and Some say you cant because there's a hadith", "they don't really give Allah his true estimate. So that was the point. So in a lot of these things, you know, there's a khilafah about many things in Islam. They're not for... You know, the majority of ulama permit the mawlid and some don't. There are some valid ulama that just, you now, they didn't like it. But they didn'y say not to celebrate. You have to celebrate the mawled. If you're not happy that he was born, you're a kafir .", "like the 12th of Rabi' al-Awal and having formal things as a thing. Some of the ulama said, the early people didn't do it, let's not do it. But the vast majority historically said it was, and they had their proofs, the mawlid of Isa is in the Quran. Surah Maryam is clearly celebrating his birth. And when the man asked the Prophet if I could fast on Mondays, he said,", "The scholars have their proofs on both sides", "issue amongst Muslims. And this is part of the problem with modern Islam, well and pre-modern as well but part of just provincial Islam let's call it provincial Islam. Part of the problems with provincial Islam is people want to impose their view about something on everybody. And if its a matter of Ishtihad you can't do that.", "something that has is not condemned by sharia. That's a universal principle in Islam. Now the ulama do have caveats about that if you're living in a country where the majority is following one school like Morocco, where traditionally it was a monarchy country and people started doing things that were against the urf then they said", "In those type of situations, you could tell them not to do it. But generally, especially in our time now, we have to go for the most compassionate view because one of the maqasid of Islam that the six universals or five however you want look at the nasib and the .. The first one is protection of the deen. That's the first one, is to protect the deem." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/How to Overcome Hardships with Faith _ Hamza Yusuf_uHKLz79lXYM&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742887532.opus", "text": [ "Say to them, remind the believers, وَذَكِّرْ فِإِنَّ ذِكْرَةً فَعَى الْمُؤْمِنِينَ Say to Them nothing will afflict you لَن يُصِيبَنَا Nothing will afflict us إلا ما كتب الله Except what Allah has decreed for us. Nothing will affect you except what Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala has a decree decreed For Us هو مولانا He's our protector", "And upon Allah let the believers place their trust. When you enter your house, you say, when you leave your house you say You can be in your house an earthquake comes, you get hit by a car or you get", "Something happens to you. This is the nature of dunya a dunya Darabella It's it's the abode of tribulation anybody that wants a good ride here there in the wrong place It's as simple as that and this is something Muslim for centuries They've known when the Mongols came and invaded the Muslims they knew how to respond in the lillahi We belong to Allah and to him we return this dunya is Fania", "It's effinessing before our eyes, literally. You know one of the interesting things about humans? When we look at each other all you see is dead cells. You don't even see the living person in front of you. Everything that's presented to my eyes and what's presented", "You're dead and they are dead. This is dunya. This Dunya. And so we have to recognize where we are, and then act accordingly. So when tribulations happen one of the things that Prophet saw Ibn Abbas. Now you have to imagine this", "This is the brother of his father's son. So you think about the Hanan of the Prophet, his love in his heart for every human being because he was Rahmah for not just humans, trees, rivers, mountains, stars, planets. He was Rahma. ما أرسلناك إلا رحمة للعالمين So here's Ibn Abbas.", "Ibn Abbas. He's a young boy and the Prophet he loved the Shubban, he said حالفوني الشبان وخالفني الشيوخ. He said the young people believed in me and the old people... you know when he said that verse? When Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala revealed not to be like those who طَلَعْ عَلِهِمْ بِرْأَمَّدُ فَقَسَتْ قُلُوبُهُمْ That time passed and their hearts became hard because older", "They have brittleness in their hearts still, they have idealism. They want to change the world, they wanna make it a better place. They see injustice that upsets them. If you don't guide the youth... if you don'y guide the Youth, they will go astray thinking they're doing right. We have a responsibility towards our youth. So he took Ibn Abbas and said, Ya Ghulam! Come here young boy, Ya ghulam. It's his cousin.", "Let me teach you some words and this is our Prophet ﷺ I was only sent to teach You take care of what Allah has told you to preserve from the awamir and the nawahi, and Allah will preserve you", "You take care of what Allah has told you to do and Allah will take care if you. And then he repeated it again Guard Allah, meaning guard these awamir an-nawahee These commands and prohibitions, guard these things and you'll find God before you He will be before you", "If you want to ask, ask Allah . If you need help if you need support take your support from Allah and know. Look at these imperatives. Understand", "If this ummah in its entirety, and these are Muslims non-muslims the Ummah of The Prophet is the entire world Once he comes into the world as the prophet his ummah is all those people like the ummah Is the ummuh of dawah and istijabah if the whole world wants to configure To benefit you and that benefit was not decreed by Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. You will not get that benefit", "وَإِنْ اجْتَمَعُوا عَلَىٰ أَن يَضُرُّوكَ لَنْ يَدُرَّوك إِلا بِشَيءٍ قَدْ كَذَبُهُ اللَّهُ عَالَيْكَ And if they configured, if they got together, conspired to harm you, all of them, the whole lot of them. They will not harm you except what Allah has decreed against you.", "of suhuf. The pens have been lifted and the ink is dry.\" This is yaqeen, he's teaching him yaqen, be certain about your religion. Now we know that towards the latter days, and we know the Prophet came and said, And he put his sababah and wustat together. I was sent and the end of time is like this. That", "hundred years closer to that. He said, you're going to see in as the hour draws near you will see Harj they said what is Harj Ya Rasulallah? he said Al-Qatal but it's Harj is a specific type of Qatal its indiscriminate killing Sahih Muslim the Prophet", "لا تقوم السعت حتى يقتل المقتول ولا يدري لما قتل يقتله القاتل ولا يذري لمن قتله ويقتل مقتوله ولا يضرى لما كتله صحيح حديث the one killing won't know why he's killing and the one being killed won't", "All of the things that happen on this planet, That are negative, Happen from the sins of humanity. It's as simple as that. Human beings, There's two types of humans. There's bees and there's wasps. And you choose which group you want to be in. Bees are beneficial, Wasps are harmful. But Allah created a world with bees and wasps He is Lul Jalali The Lord of the Bees", "Lord of the bees, the lord of the wasps, majesty. And the lord and the bees. He's the lord both. The bees give us honey we heal our bodies with it nourish our bodies and they give us wax traditionally wax is used for candles to light people houses that's what bees do. Wasp they just harm.", "Not the kind with wings and stingers, human wasps. They just harm people, that's their nature they can't help it. It's like the scorpion and the frog he wants to go across the pond carry me across the ponds. The frog says I'm not stupid you'll sting me. He said that's stupid just get me across we will die. So the frog says hop on halfway across the pound the scorpions stings him. Why did you do that?", "my nature. There are some people they can't help it, the Prophet called them the keys to evil. Why they're here? Allah created good and evil. So there's a hadith in Sahih Muslim in which the Prophet said", "Ismaili says that he said about the Khawarij. He pointed his fingers towards Iraq, the country of Iraq, what's now Iraq. And he said", "These people are going to read Quran, it won't go past their throats. In other words, they won't understand it. And then he said, they will leave this religion like an arrow leaves the bow. In another hadith, he says, SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam, يَأْتِي فِي آخِرِ الزَّمَان قَوْمٌ حُدَثَاءُ الْأَسْنَانِ Young people. سُفَهَاء الأحلام", "The Safih is somebody who's a, he can't control himself. He's Mubadhir. A Safihan wealth is somebody whose extravagant they waste their money. They're incontinent. They can't Control themselves. He said there Sufaha Al-Ahlam Yaquluna min khayri qawla albariya They'll say the best of words in other words though quote Quran and hadith", "You have to remove this plague. It's as simple as that. This is a plague on humanity. Now, that's what the Prophet said. The word Safa, here's what", "They're ignorant people. Their hearts are weak. They have no opinion. Fooled by Shaytan. This is called When Shaytaan plays with you.", "That's the Safiyyah. Now in another hadith, the Prophet said", "now the polytheists they were fighting them, they've defended themselves. He said we kill them every year some die? The Prophet said It's not going to be killing from the Mushrikeen. Some of you will kill others. Now look at what he said", "and a relative. Do we have intellects? The Sahaba were intelligent people they said do we have intellectuals Ya Rasulullah? What did he say? No brains.", "40 of them are without brains. وَلَا يَخْلُفُ لَهُ هَبَاءٌ مِنَ النَّاسِ لاَعُقُولَ لَهم And they'll leave people haba, weightless people, without gravity. Gravitas means weighty. Allah made us faqalein. Jinn and inns were called faqalain because we're weighty physically which holds us down to the earth. If you're too light, you just fly up.", "just fly up, you know like the jinn. Just move up gas but Allah made us ثقل ثقلا right? He made us weighty spiritually and physically but if we lose our spiritual weight our physical weight has no meaning in fact all we're doing is space that's all. The Prophet said", "Your agniya are bukhala and your umara are tyrants. So you're rich or misers, your amirs are our tyrants he said that to be under the earth is better than being over the earth this is our tribulation this is all time Allah put us in his time He knows why he put us", "time I ever saw the Prophet ask for death, in all the hadith that I've read and all the du'as of the Prophet that I have read, I only saw one time he asked Allah to take him. He said... In one he gives the choice if it's better for me then take me but this hadith he specifically says and he said after every prayer according to one riwayah", "He said, Let me do good things. And let me avoid bad things. Give me love of poor people. Why? Because they're Ahl al-Jannah. The Jannah and Nahr got into a debate. The Nahr said, look at these tyrants.", "tyrants, you know I've got all these tyrants they were big people in the earth. They ruled, they had power and Jannah says what do I have? I have all these weak people poor people, oppressed people and Allah said the Naar is my punishment for those tyrants and the Jannah is my reward for those patient ones. The Prophet said can I tell", "every week oppressed. Those are the people of Jannah. So right now Muslims, people think we're causing the problems. Seriously! It's amazing how shaytan... This is Talbisu Iblis. Ibls has made these people think that we're the problem. The Muslims are suffering more. Twenty people died yesterday in Cairo in a restaurant from a bomb thrown into it. There's over", "There's over a million dead Iraqis. A million dead Iraqi's, even Tony Blair admitted that we opened the door. There is no Daesh without the American invasion of Iraq. Something horrible has been unleashed on this planet but unfortunately we have a lot of angry resentful Muslims and when I say a lot it's significantly insignificant", "So even our insignificant numbers are significant. So you might say there's only 400,000 that's the latest estimate of these people. There's only four hundred thousand... That's a lot of people and then you look at their sympathizers they estimate they're about 15 million. These are estimates, Allahu Alim but that's a LOT OF PEOPLE! That is a gross misunderstanding of our religion because anybody", "tell me Islam is a cruel thing, I would tell you are a liar. Anybody can tell me that the Prophet was cruel, I will tell them you're a liar! Our prophet says, لَوْ كُنْتَ فَضًّا فَبِمَا رَحْمَةٍ مِّنْ اللَّهِ لِنْ تَدَهُمْ By the mercy of Allah You have a soft heart! وَلَو كُنتَ فرًّى غَلِيذَ الْقَلْبِ لَنْفَضُّوا مِن حَوديكَ If you were hard-hearted, if you", "you would see them fleeing. Look at these people and you see if everybody's flocking around them. You look at everybody fleeing from these people. And if you think, and Allah knows what happened down south, I don't know. We have to... First of all we're dealing with a demonic element really. There is clearly a demonic... We believe in the jinn and we believe in unseen. CNN doesn't know about that", "they're not going to be reporting about Iblis' activities. That's an unfortunate thing. They used to believe in the devil. In fact, one of their theologians said that the biggest trick that the devil ever pulled on this civilization was making them think he didn't exist. But unfortunately, Ibliss doesn't make the news. Abdullah makes the news, Ghulan makes the", "Some of you have, you know, you fit the profile. And then they show up, they had somebody dressed like Osama bin Laden in their minds saying yeah he was a friend of mine but I'm a peaceful Muslim for the guy in Kentucky he looked just like Osamah bin Laden. This is the mentality we're dealing with now. We have a responsibility as Muslims in this country either you pack up and leave that's an option. Hijrah is an option", "is an option. Seriously, people can pack up and leave. Good luck! Syria? Libya? Yemen? Iraq? Kashmir? Chechnya? Philippines? I mean there's not a lot of options here but we have to deal with the fact that we live in this country. I'm from this country on my mother's side all the way back 1764 they came", "I go way back. I have a great-grandfather who fought in the Revolutionary War, so I've been here a long time. At least my ancestors have. Some of you are new but this is a land of immigrants. The only people that can honestly say they're from here are what they call Native Americans and they're not even from here. They're from Mongolia. So everybody made hijrah here at some point", "point and migration is a Sunnah of God on this planet. Birds migrate. Traditionally borders were open, people should be able to go where they want that's a human right but we have borders now and Allah says We have to obey the law anybody that comes into this country and I said this three days before 9-11 they didn't report", "In Philadelphia. I have it on tape. I said anybody that comes into this country with a visa or is living under the law of this land and they commit a criminal act or terrorist act, the Prophet ﷺ is against them because this is our religion. You have to obey the law in the land you are in. And the Prophet was a law abiding... When he was in Mecca, he was a Law Abiding citizen. You look at his seerah in Meccan. He didn't have terrorist cells", "cells he didn't have anybody assassinated in Mecca. He was oppressed but he was a citizen of that and Dar al-Nadwa were the Ulul Amri in Meccan and the only time you don't obey them is if it's a Maasiyah to Allah, but nobody's no Americans putting a gun at your hand saying drink alcohol or eat pork like they did in Spain and Andalusia right? They used to do that to the Muslims. If you go to Spain today they have this big", "meat of pork and when you come into the little shops in Andrusia they cut off a piece of the pork and offer it to you. Why do they do that? Because that was a test. Hundreds of years later, they still do it because it's tradition for them but they used to test Muslims. Have some pork and if they didn't eat it they would report them to the inquisition. We're not in that situation. Now the other thing, one of the benefits", "this and trust me the only way you get strong is resistance. If you want to build your muscles, you have to have resistance. Allah puts resistance to make us stronger spiritually and physically. Everything that's happened to us is good. It's all good. That's a hadith in Sahih Muslim Suhaib al-Rumi. Everything", "certainty if you're caught up in dunya oh my junior is not looking good that then that's another thing that's not tick Lan on Allah that's a disease of the heart the unsettling state that the Muslims are in this country this is a good thing it's about time Muslim start waking up you've been here for a long time what have you done who have you told out there who you are where all the amazing", "free clinics. Not one down in Los Angeles or one over here. Where's the Muslim hospital where we treat anybody that comes? You don't need insurance because Muslims traditionally did that. In this country, the Muslim physicians are worth several billion dollars. Several billion dollars! Where are our institutions? Where are colleges? Where is our television station?", "television station. The Mexicans have dozens of television stations, and when we do these things, we usually do them so poorly nobody's going to watch. So we have to wake up but trust me you have to accept what comes to you with intelligence but you have", "And it keeps happening until people wake up. You break the covenant with Allah, احفظ الله يحفضك اح فضي لا يح فاضك اِحْفَضِ اللَّهُ يَحْبَضَك You break a covenant with allah Then if allah removes his providential care you have no one to blame but yourself من وجد خيراً فليحمد الله ومن وجدا غير ذلك فلا يلومن إلا نفسا If you find good Thank Allah and if you find anything other than good", "than good don't blame anybody but yourself because that's the Madhab of Islam you want a madhub of Islam? That's the madhb of Islam. The madhhab of Islam is... Why is this happening why did we lose Uhud? We're the people of truth, we were with the Prophet! That's Sahaba, the best!", "those people on the mountain that abandoned their for booty, for dunya they abandoned their place and they lost even the prophet was bloodied he lost part of his tooth he had the chain mail in his cheek the place where his blood dropped still smells like musk I've been there the smell is amazing after 1400 years you can", "still get the whiff of that from his blood that was spilled there. But that's our Prophet . So if Muslims don't obey Allah and obey His Messenger, As long as they don't tell you to disobey Allah. And that's any government you're under whether it's a Muslim government, whether it is a Christian government like in Habesha where they having terrorist organizations planning", "that kafir, that trinitarian kafir? No they went, they spoke to him. Amr ibn al-As went there and said oh they say this and that about your religion right when the prophet's companions went there Jafar spoke he didn't say yeah you're a kafir because you say in Allah tharithu tharaatha no he said here is what our religion teaches he didn'y attack his religion he said heres what our", "This is the hikmah. Our prophet never created any terrorist organization. He never had cells. He's a man of God. He has secret meetings at night. His home is completely transparent. We even know what was revealed in the house. We know the domestic disputes. We", "Zainab. We know about Hafsa. Open book. That's our Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. He had nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of and if you're practicing his faith you have nothing to", "ashamed about of your fathers, your ancestors. But we should be ashamed about how we represent them today? The people that built Taj Mahal if these guys got to India they'd blow up Taj Mahall because it's a tomb! They'd blow-up Taj Maham.", "Allahumma salli wa salam wa barak ala Sayyidina Muhammad. We are very fortunate to be in the Bay Area. This is a very educated place and as you know, you have neighbors, you", "This civilization has been trying very hard to overcome its historical sins of racism. They're trying, they're not there yet but they are trying. There's a lot of people trying. Allah says", "have been brainwashed into thinking this is a religion of hatred, of terrorism. We have a responsibility. And unfortunately when events like this happen and Allah knows what happened but when events happen in San Bernardino where it's somebody who has been working for several years at a place everybody knows him even the Muslims say he didn't appear to be radical and suddenly he goes ballistic then people start thinking maybe Ghulam you know he seems normal", "but look at that guy down there. They're afraid, and you have to recognize that. Do you know? So it's important for us to be aware of the time we're living in. I received something the other day. Somebody was at a place where Bill O'Reilly was staying, and Bill O'reilly was having dinner, and there was a Muslim family in a table next to him, and they started having a debate should we reach out to him", "And some of them said, it's a waste of time. He won't do anything. There's no benefit. And some said, No we should do something. So they got dessert and sent it over to his table just as a gift. Then he acknowledged him. The next day they saw him again and decided to approach him. One of them sat and had a long conversation with him about being Muslim and what Islam is. After the San Bernardino incident when he mentioned it", "this man at the table and he said unfortunately this taints millions of good law-abiding Americans even people that have horrible track records if it's probably let's see he asked listen to the words of Allah in fact billet II he asked son don't return a wrong with another wrong", "وَمِنْ عَفَىٰ وَأَصْلَحَ فَأْجُرُوا عَلَى اللَّهِ That's true. Allah says, you can redress wrong with justice which He called a سَيِّة It's not a سیّة but it looks like it because it's harsh and it's انتقام But he said وَا مَنْعَفًا وَآصْرَحْ فَإَجُروُوا أَللَّهُ Right? But people forget that They forget all those verses in the Quran that tell us And what did our Prophet do? That's his sunnah You want to follow the sunnah of the Prophet? Reach out to your enemies Because that's what he did", "because that's what he did. He sat with them, when his wife's mother came to Medina she wouldn't sit with her because she was a mushrik. She wouldn't seat with her and the verse was revealed... Her own family was fighting but this was a woman who was non-competent. She wasn't fighting you! And Allah said, she is your mother bring her in treat her with birr .", "This is our religion. إِدْفَعْ بِالَّتِي أَحْسَنُ فَإِذَا الَّذِى بَيْنَكُ وَبَيَنهُ عَدَوَةٌ كَأَنَّهُ وليٌّ حَمِيمٌ Then the one with who you have animosity towards, suddenly he's like your best friend. وَلَا تَئَسُوا مِن رَوْحِ اللَّهِ Don't despair of the grace of Allah because the people that hate Islam most according to the Prophet, أَشَدُّ نَاسًا كَرَهِيَةً لِلْإِسْلَامِ become the best supporters of Islam. That's a hadith. So don't think because they hate Islam", "Everybody's looking at death. Everybody is looking at that one of the Rahmahs we had as the study Quran came out, that Harper Perennial published Hopefully many many Americans will buy that and see an intelligent religion in a beautiful scripture that calls people to these high ideals This is this is these are these are great blessings in the midst of the tribulation So", "like Imam al-Mujaddadi said. We're in the midst of tribulation in the dunya, but we have the well being of Allah. Alhamdulillah. So may Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala inshaAllah make us lighthouses that show people what true Islam is. May Allah subhahana wa taaala elevate our community. May allah subhaha nwata'ala restore our intellects for those who have lost them. May Allaah put the plots of those who plot against this religion", "religion, may they fall back on them. May Allah protect us from their evil. May God guide those who are ignorant amongst them who want good. May He guide them and those who know what Islam is yet are distorting it. May he deal with people that are evil.", "May Allah protect our women and give them courage in the face of these calamities, and protect our children. May Allah restore our brothers and sisters in other places to better times. May allah restore security to the Muslim lands and give then sikor and repose and help. And may Allah give us yaqeen in our hearts to know that nothing will afflict us except what Allah has decreed for us.", "of Ibn Abbas. May Allah give us the sincerity of those early people, insha'Allah. And may Allah forgive all of us, protect this masjid and all our masjids, these places of worship, and protect the synagogues, and protects the churches, and protected temples. These are things that we were sent to protect as a community. كنتم خير أمة أخرجت للناس You came out for all of humanity. May", "He commands to justice and charity. He prohibits foulness and dishonorable things, aggression and oppression. He forbids these things to aggress against people. May Allah realize these truths in our hearts.", "He is exhorting us that perhaps we might be reminded," ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Making right decision in life - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_ZjfRdjXD8pI&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742999001.opus", "text": [ "Because of so much of what's going on in the world, it's also a time where we should be thinking deeply about the human condition, about where we are as a species, about our ummah is as a community. Many many things to think about. Allah made this a day of remembrance, a day", "He said that, It's a time of eating and drinking and remembering Allah. We tend to forget in this cornucopia of the modern world that people actually did not have a lot to eat in the past. Many places they had famines were quite common. And this is why today was a day when the Prophet ﷺ, the sunnah is to sacrifice.", "sacrifice and the Prophet told us that the most beloved action to Allah on this day is Ihraq al-Dhamn, is actually to sacrifice. And what do we do with the sacrifice? When he prayed they brought the kibsh after the prayer and he sacrificed it in his own hands and he said I'm doing this sacrifice for myself", "can't afford to do this unfortunately many of us are able to do it now is the time though to really send it overseas to the places where they really need it because we don't need meat here you know but there are many places where people really are having difficult times but he sacrificed for himself and for his ummah and this is a reminder of the great gift Ibrahim who's our father", "He's our spiritual father because this is his millah. It's called the millah Ibrahimiyyah and even though the son is the afdal, the father is always honored.", "Tawheed and Tawakkul. And Imam Al-Ghazali in his book, the Ihyaa, he put Tawkeed and tawakku together. And this is the foundation of our ummah and our teaching is to heed and tawaqkul that we unify Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala and we trust in Allah Subhaanhu wa Ta'ala. And This is why when if you look at the amazing story", "Ibrahim took his wife and she was a legitimate wife of Ibrahim alayhi salam. And he is a legitimate son despite what some of the other traditions say about Ismail. It's not true. Ismail was a", "he took Hajar to a place when you look at it, it's complete trust in Allah . A place that has , there is nothing there. And so he took him and she asked him as he was leaving, Is this you or did Allah tell you to do this? He said no, Allah told me to do it. She said then I'm , she was content.", "She raised Ismail there and the Arabs that were there, these are the original Arabs. They taught him Arabic. Ibrahim when he came they married him because they were very impressed with him. He was a great archer even the Bible mentions about him.", "fact it was not their adha, their norm. They married him to one of their daughters. Ibrahim a.s visited from Sham. When he came there, he saw the woman and he asked where is your husband? She said he's out hunting. And he said how are things here for you? How are things", "And she said, terrible. They're horrible. We are in a state of extreme tension. And the Prophet ﷺ and Sahih Bukhari said, She complained to him about their conditions. So then he said, when your husband comes back give him my salam and tell him to change the ataba", "the ataba of his baab. When you come into a house, the atabah is the thing before the door, the doormat. He said change that. So then Ismail came back and he noticed something and he asked her what happened today? She said sheikh came sheikhun kada wa kada", "She just said, Shaykh, old man came. And he said, well what happened? He asked about our Aish and I told him. And then he said did he tell you to do anything? He said to give you salam and to say to change the door trestle of your door. And that was my father and he told me to separate from you so go and join your family.", "He divorced her. Why did he do that? Because Ibrahim was going, he made a dua with Ismail when they built the house. Send a messenger from them and then he said", "Like make sure that the one you marry is the right one because you're going to plant seeds. So, the earth has to be good earth. So he married another woman from them. Ibrahim came again visiting them and what did he say? He said, Because Ismail was out hunting.", "Oh, we're in blessing. Nothing changed except the understanding, the mentality change. Nothing changes, same conditions but the woman she didn't complain. She said, We're in blessings. She says the opposite of the other woman. The other one said, She said We're blessed. He said, What food are you eating?", "meat and he said, she said water. And he said may Allah bless that meat and bless that water. The Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam said they didn't have seeds. Had they had seeds you would have blessed the seeds. All they were eating was meat and water.", "ليس الابن آدم حق إلا من هذه الخصال", "to as a human being, as the creation of Allah is a house that protects you. And for some it's just a tent. Clothes that you cover your nakedness with and then bread and water. This is basically somebody in prison. That's what a prisoner has. He has a roof over his head they give him prison outfit", "an outfit and they give him bread and water in some places here. They get other things but traditionally, bread and Water was what you gave the prisoner. In the Qarunin in Fas where the students studied, they were given just one loaf of bread every day and water as that was their sustenance for like going to college when you go to college you get that's", "bread and water. And whatever else they had, ate was from their own source. So the Prophet said that's all you deserve. And humans feel so entitled to things. This woman was a pure woman and then she also said", "A beautiful Shaykh came to us today and then she praised him. The other one just said, Shaykhun keder wa keder Some old man came This is the difference between world views of how you view the world And this is what our religion teaches To change your mentality Change the way you think about things Change all these entitlements that modern people have The crisis on this planet Is one thing and one thing alone", "Human beings are relying on themselves and they're not relying on Allah. They think they can do it on their own. All of the things that are happening right now, Are because people no longer call on Allah when they have tribulations. Ibn Atayla says, Al-Faqatu Busuqal Mawahir Calamities are the spreads of divine gifts.", "to take people back to him. That's why he sends them. Ibn Atayla says that sometimes you will find in calamities what you cannot find in prayer and fasting because prayer and fast always has the possibility of ujab but when you have a calamity, you know that you are nothing You know that your faqir And this is why the Prophet", "came to him and said, إِنِّي أُحِبُّكَ And he said, أنظر ما تقول. He said, I love you. He says think about what you're saying. He say, I Love You. He's said it three times. أو قاله مراراً The Prophet ﷺ said, إن كنت تحبني فأعد للفقري تجفافاً Then get ready for tribulation. Get ready for things that are going to break you.", "Subhanallah. Ashiddun nas balaan al-anbiyaatum mar amthal far amthar The people that have the most tribulation in dunya are the prophets and then those like the prophets. But we don't like to think about this. People want ease, this is human nature. People wants ease but Allah wants you to know Allah before you are confronted", "are confronted with your own life on the yawmul qiyamah. To have ma'rifa of Allah . So all of these tribulations that Allah sends to this species is for their benefit and this is what people don't realize, this is a completely different way of viewing the world. When I was in Mauritania, a man asked me, in Maurtiania when they eat there's so many flies because it's a desert environment,", "sugar in the corner to bring the flies there so they can eat without the flies. That's how many flies and very old Shaykh, he was a scholar, Alam Jalil And he said to me do they have flies in America? And I said, we rarely get bothered by flies He said, I seek refuge in Allah Maybe they're getting their blessings", "blessings here in the dunya. You think about life, you know this is a short time all these tribulations it's a short path now here just in conclusion the Prophet said something that struck me as so extraordinary and everything he said", "cats they walk around all the time like i pray they come they do and then you see them walking around the house they're always going in circles the prophet he called them the animals that circle you this is his mullah i don't think i would have thought of that except because", "of the guidance that he gave us. He saw everything, he said, show me things as they are. He said something so extraordinary to me and everything he said is extraordinary. He says, it's a hadith that Abu Hurairah relates. He", "Preempt with action seven things. Initiate your deeds, your good deeds before one or more of seven things will afflict you and what I realize is he covered everything in those seven things every single thing that is going to come to us is in one or", "are you waiting for? Waiting, it's going to come. poverty that makes you forget everything because people lose everything in the dunya and once you've lost everything all you can think about is your situation because it's dire and so the Prophet ﷺ called it", "you forget everything because you can't think straight. All you can think about is where your basic needs are going to come from and there's so many people on this planet right now in this situation, many of the Muslim countries that had beautiful lives they had good lives The vast majority of people have good... Now they're in the worst abject conditions. The worst abjct conditions And this can come to anybody anywhere anytime", "any time. And then he said, or wealth that preoccupies you. A man told me, Subhanallah, I got a letter from a man the other day who said to me that for 10 years he was working", "stones and do all these things he said it finally came and he said i've become a horrible person he said I just I was spending all this money I got into all these horrible things man will transgress because", "social studies people that are wealthy they drive arrogantly, they treat people with arrogance. This is well known, studies have been done on this because they get a sense of entitlement. They also think like Qarun that somehow I was given this because of something I did, because i'm so clever, because I'm so important. So he said", "or a sickness that will incapacitate you. People are healthy and suddenly they have a stroke, and they can't function. They need people to take care of them. Or they get some disease, chronic disease, suddenly they're in pain all the time. Now they can think of anything except their problem. This happens to people.", "or you begin to forget things doting old age dementia you can't even remember some people may allah protect all of you the best way to protect yourself from these things they don't get kharaf you know the people of quran real you know you have to take the book", "Dementia, all these diseases that come to the mind. People forget they come into a room. They can't remember why they're there. This happens when you age. So the Prophet said, You're waiting for fata, ghina, sickness, dementia. And then he said, Or sudden death. Everything's fine. Young people, suddenly a heart attack.", "a heart attack and they literally drop dead. They don't even know what's happening to them. These are all things that the Prophet said we're waiting for. Like hasten to deeds. Hasten to these people have money now, what are you doing with your money? Saving it for something or other. The Prophet when they asked what should we spend", "spend peace of billahi the quran replied just whatever excess you have allah is not asking for what you need he's asking you for what don't need but the dunya tells you oh i need this i need that you don't we don't eat anything i lived with bedouin i know how much a human being needs to live we don t need a lot to live and then he said", "to Tavar or the Antichrist. And this is the most evil of things that people are waiting for, a Dajjal. The Prophet said that the Dajjals won't come until people stop mentioning him on the minbar. They'll forget and you can see the preparation everywhere. People, you look at people now they don't think for themselves anymore. They can't think.", "what they're told, they don't think about anything. It's amazing the ghafla that this species is in, deep ghaflah and this is important too because the Prophet warned us about these latter days that we're in and one of the things you see many Muslims now they're deviating grossly from the book and the sunnah I mean talking about things now we would never in a million years", "things that are so unacceptable in our religion. And you know what I'm talking about. You see this now and then also adapting all of these things that have nothing to do with our religion We don't collectivize people, we don't talk about white people or black people or any other group as if they're a collective The Quran says", "No soul bears the sins of another soul. Whatever the past happened, those people have it on themselves. The children don't inherit their sins. They don't inhabit their sins We don't think about these things. We just adopt all these materialists now. We send our children to these universities where they're going to be indoctrinated. They are not gonna be taught.", "indoctrinated into things totally antithetical to the Muslim community. Every religious community that came to this country, that was serious about their religion built religious schools and colleges every single one because they understood we can't let our children be taught by people that don't share our values That's why the Catholics have schools all over parochial secondary school and colleges", "They took their religion seriously. Where are the Muslim... We've been here so long. Where our colleges? Where are hospitals? Where where are the things that we define our values, we define what we believe in. We don't let them define them for us. This is a materialistic culture. The whole planet is becoming this way. But we have a community", "where we actually believe in goodness and decency, virtue, chastity, justice forgiveness mercy and honor. These are the things that our Prophet taught us. I was sent to teach people, to purify them In the commentaries they say to teach them all of the virtuous behavior and to warn them of all of vicious behavior This is our Prophet", "The most generous of people, the most honorable of people. The Prophet said he never swore. Every time he spoke about anything sensitive, he used what's called kinaya. He didn't ever speak crudely or obscenely. This is our prophet. He said one of the signs at the end of time is foul language would become widespread. People would just use foul language.", "to speak, the Prophet was the most eloquent of people. One of the things when Fakhruddin al-Razi says about Shaitan that one of the thing Allah says is astafsit bisultika like rile them up with your go ahead rile up with you voice he said it's teaching our young people foul lyrics That's what he said Ash'ar khabeethah", "the minds of the young people so that garbage in, garbage out. These are all the things that we have to be aware of the environment and protect our young people because Allah their hearts are pure. Their hearts are cure. They're enculturated into foulness. The fitra is natural even all of this talk about racism. Racism is not the natural state of human beings. The natural state", "have racism. They'll play with any color of child that's enculturated into people and so this whole talk about people are racist by nature it's not true. This is a lie from Iblis to make people despair or people say that oh, racism is the cause of oppression. No! Racism is used as a mechanism of oppression It's not the cause", "as a mechanism divide and conquer divina at impera the romans knew this we can't be fooled where are people that bring people together we don't separate them shaitan he despaired of being worshipped but he was content with creating division amongst you today is a day", "all of your anger, whatever's happened with your family. This is a day, like call up people that you're related to. If there's something between you, ask forgiveness. Bring people together. This our Ummah. It's an Ummah, Ummah is a collective of people that have the same purpose and our purpose is worship of Allah and service to His creation.", "The purpose of this ummah is to worship Allah and to serve Allah's creation. Whether they're black, white, red, yellow, whether they're Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, whether their Jew it doesn't matter we are here to serve. This is our purpose. We are here just serve one of the things we've forgotten is feeding the homeless, feeding the hungry", "They don't enjoy people to feed the hungry. That's one of the signs that people are in shaqawa, that are wretched with Allah is that they don't encourage others to help. We have people all over in need now and many of the Muslims we've been blessed. And you don't have to give all your money away. You don't take one family. This is what Ali Abu Bakr al-Arabi said the Prophet was not somebody who was saying give all", "away. Never! And there's nothing wrong with being wealthy in Islam, we're not socialists. Our religion is against this idea. If Allah has blessed you with wealth, you pay your zakat and then you give sadaqa on top of that. And that's all Allah is asking. Take one family that's in need and help them. If you can do two, then do two. This is what Qadhi Abu Bakr ibn al-Arabi says. So these are things to think about", "The seventh thing that the Prophet told", "قال لنا الله تعالى هل تنتظرون؟ هو الساعة و ساعت أدهى وأمر هذا الشيء الثامن وهو الوقت هناك ثلاثة ساعات ما يسمى ساعة الصغرة وساعة الوسطى وساعت الكبرى سعتي الصغرا هي موتك هناك دور من المفتاح إلى النهاية إنها دور النهايتين", "It's the door of infinity. And that door is waiting each one of us, if you could see your ajal because your ajl was written in the fi batni ummi it was written In the womb of our mothers when we were in a womb rabaytani hashah janeena hu kuntani qabla waridayya You raised me in the womb Of my parents and you were before me before my parents", "This, every single one of us has an ajal. If we could see it. You know, January 3rd 2025. January, you know. It's every single on of us. It is there and we don't think about it but it is real. And this what the Prophet was somebody he said Remind yourselves of death not in a morbid way. In a way that makes you hasten to actions", "to actions. We have little time, we're here for a short period of time, and we have things to do. Each one of you has the gifts that Allah's given you. Some of you have wealth, you can support good things. Some you have muscles, you could labor in good things some of you, Allah has gifted you with intellectual brilliance, you", "And we don't have any ihtabar for any human being. Every human being has the potential to know Allah. The street sweeper has the potention to know allah. There were people in Medina that nobody took seriously and they were beloved of Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala and his messenger like the black woman who used to sweep the masjid, and when she died, they didn't think anything of it. He's why didn't you tell me he was upset because he knew who she was. He knew who She was", "So this is a time for us to think about just changing the trajectory of our lives. Every day is an opportunity to make the U-turn, every single day. With Allah there's no sign that says no U-Turns we can always turn back if we make tawbah, Allah makes tawdah to us and He will forgive. He said even if you came", "بِمِلْءَ الْأَرْضِ خطايا Even if you came with the whole earth filled with your sins وَاسْتَغْفَرُتَنِي غَفَرتُكَ If you ask forgiveness, I will forgive you. And shaitan hates tawbah. He wants to put you in a state of forgetfulness. So may Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala inshaAllah bless all the people wherever they are that are having a difficult Eid. May Allah subhana wa ta'ta make it easy for them. Give them solace in their hearts", "us in their hearts may allah subhanahu wa ta'ala make us people that remember the gifts that we've been given and share them with others may allahu forgive us bless us increase us elevate us may allaha protect this community uh protect the qaimin bless all the people that set all these things up for us and did all this work may allahi subhana bless all", "May Allah accept all the prayers on Arafah that happened yesterday. May Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala inshaAllah give us some portion of those prayers. May Allaah remove this blight, this plague that's on our species right now. May all these terrible things that have afflicted our species. May ALLAH wake people up to their sinfulness and their need", "to make tawbah to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, to recognize that nothing afflicts us except what our own hands have wrought. May Allah subhana wa ta-ala remind us of this. May He remove the drought from this community. May allah give us good rain, give the parched earth uh what it deserves and may all of these creatures forgive us and these trees and all these things that don't deserve anything but they suffer with us because of us we see the trees in so many places are dying", "are dying you look at their leaves from the sinfulness of people not from anything they did and and the prophet said had it not been for the trees and for the animals that the sinfullness of people would prevent rain from coming so may Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala inshallah give us rain give us good rain may Allah protect all of our children protect our women anybody who", "May Allah protect them and keep them safe and sound.", "friends and then to give a third to poor people but we have now agencies that will do this for you know distributed amongst the refugees so i think it's good inshallah to support our syrian refugees our yemeni refugees libyan all there are so many places where muslims kashmiris may allah subhanahu wa ta'ala make it easy for our brothers and sisters in kashmira in palestine obviously i mean this is an ongoing long long struggle" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Prostitution in men and woman - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_mPjJJmapYu0&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748540236.opus", "text": [ "Why is it that women are compelling in the book? Does no one care about women's rights?", "That there's a, you know the afifa. What is called afifa? It's something that is very... And then men have a type of veiling that women don't have. Right? Which is not necessarily good it's just that happens. لَيْسَ الذَّكْرُ كَأُنثَةً You know the Qur'an says The male is not like the female and that ayahs are not saying that the male is better than the female. It's that within a social context There are certain things and these are dangerous for the male because they", "The male. Because if people that don't have taqwa will abuse those differences, right? And that does happen. Well for instance there are many, many men historically who have had premarital relations they're veiled. They go and get married and they used to call it in this culture sowing his wild oats", "Whereas when a woman does that, it's very easy to get pregnant. She is labeled as a bad woman. Whereas from Sharia point of view there is absolutely no distinction between the zina of male or female. And I had a very strong argument with somebody about this who was from Muslim country and there was a Libyan man with me who was agreeing with me you know for him his son or daughter was same", "This other person would say, no the daughter is worse. And I say it's not worse in Sharia, it's worse in social stigma because of the nature of the woman. In other words there's this idea that you know it's a deep breach of the social contract but the male is a breach and it takes two to tango. Right? So these are double standards and they're not going to go away.", "within the human condition for a long, long time. And this is why the Sharia really there's just a lot of preventive measures. The idea of not being alone with a woman. The khalwa. Right? And it goes for the same. A woman can't be alone with man. You know, it's what..." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Sincere advice for Our people - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_D4otM_Q219w&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742999280.opus", "text": [ "You know, I really to all of you the best thing that we can do To love the Prophet is to follow his Sunnah The prophet said That whoever refuses my sunnah they're refusing paradise So he's our he's the door that Allah has given us. He's the threshold His Sunna is the Quran it's the khuluq of the Quran This is what our Ummah needs. It needs to restore the Khuluq Of this religion", "religion. Read the Quran, study the Quran learn the Prophet, learn his seerah, learn His sunnah do those practice these things that he told us to practice try to get up at night it's not easy the thing about the medicinal things is they're not always there is bitter sometimes medicine but you have to take it because everything He did was medicinal", "It's to heal our mental states. He is the healing, he's the shifa. He's the light, the Quran. This light that's come from you and this manifest book his noor is the noor that you read the book with. You have to have light to read a book. You can't read a", "and everything will become clear. May Allah bless all of you, increase you, elevate you inshaAllah. May Allaah Subhanahu wa ta'ala forgive us all our shortcomings. May allah bless our brothers and sisters wherever they are, all these people in so many places there are many places we have the Kashmiris it hasn't changed for them these people In Kashmir The Uighurs, there's still people in these camps. The Rohingyas So many places", "right now obviously because this the terror that has been inflicted on these people most are women and children may Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala just give them solace they have shown what faith is in a faithless world, they've shown people what faith, these people that are saying in the midst of rubble Subhanallah that's a deep well they're drawing from", "of the iman of this ummah when the mongols came and wiped out whole peoples atheeruddin said there's been no greater tribulation than the mongoals he didn't know the europeans yet but but uh the muslims survived it and they were strong when when i was translating the hamziya i had to study that period of history", "Imam Abu Sayyidi saw al-Quds under the control of the Salibis. They actually put a cross on the Temple Mount, on the Sharaf, the Haram Sharif, what was traditionally called Masjid Dawood because Ka'b al-Ahbar showed Sayyidina Omar where the masjid was because that place is where Dawood prayed which is now where the Dome of the Rock is.", "They put a salib on the dome of the rock, on the Haram Sharif, this sacred sanctuary. 190 years. So this has happened in the past but the Muslims it didn't give them doubt. It had the opposite effect and I'll just give you one qaeda from Ahmed Zarroq and I hope you go home with this and think about it. Ahmed Zarrock said in times of bust", "But in times of qabad, the response is fikr. That when you're in expansive times it's time for dhikr but when you are in difficult times it is time for thinking because you have to understand why the times are difficult and then you have work to get out of those difficult times And that's why we need fikr May Allah make us people of intelligence May Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala unite our hearts May Allah bless all of you", "of our prophet in our hearts may Allah give the people of Palestine solace in these times increase them elevate them uh give them inshallah uh the patience to endure any hardships that might be coming inshaAllah may Allah send all of the whatever's meant to harm may it be thwarted and may Allah put peace in our", "May we be people of peace and inspirators of peace, people of salam. Allahumma anta as-salam wa minkas salam wa ilayka ya'udha as-salaam hayyina rabbana bis salaam. That's the dua of our Prophet, make us live in peace. The only people that want war are warmongers. So our Prophet was a peacemaker. May we become people of Peace in our hearts, in our homes, in families inshallah.", "اللهم صلي وسلم وبرك على سيدنا محمد وعلى آل سيد نعمو حمد كما صليت على سعدنا إبراهيم وعلا آل السيدين إبرة همة في العالمين إنك حميد والمجيد وصلي اللهم على سيدي محمدا وعلي أريد صحبي وسلم تسليم الكثير سبحان ربك رب العزة عما يصفون والسلام علي المسرين والحمد لله ربا عالمين" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Success of both world matters - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_wPO5JyAzlyI&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743074471.opus", "text": [ "Praise and blessings be upon the Prophet . Insha'Allah I wanted to go over a poem that was written by Sheikh Abdullah Al-Haddad It's a poem, it's very short. And yet he really put into it all of the qualities", "and in the next it is a poem of advice counsel. It's a poem with counsel, and it was commented on by one of his students And it's actually beautiful commentary so I thought it was so beneficial I wanted to share it with other people because I hadn't seen it before I just recently somebody was kind enough to bring me a copy from Hadhramout and Hadhromout as most of you know is in Yemen there's a place that the Prophet blessed", "became a refuge for a lot of the Prophet's family when they were being persecuted in Iraq. Many of them actually fled to Yemen and many fled to Morocco, and many flee to India which is why you have very large numbers of al-baiths in places like India, Yemen and Morocco. It's disproportionate to other parts of the Muslim world and it has to do with the fact that those are places where the family actually sought refuge", "refuge and obviously one of the reasons that they sought refuge was because Bani Umayyah basically set out to eliminate the family of the Prophet because they were so worried about the political implications of charismatic figures from among them. The major concern of theirs, because this was obviously the initial split", "and many of the Muslims took the opinion that authority lied in the family of the Prophet Sallallaahu Alaihi Wasallam, and that Many of them became The party of Ali or Shia to Ali now we disagree with the Shia on one particular Which is that? We actually believe that the authority that the prophet Sallallahu alaihi wasallam's family were given", "was a spiritual authority, in other words that from many of the family would come some of the greatest scholars of Islam and some of their greatest spiritual guides. But the Prophet informed the community early on that political sovereignty and spiritual sovereignty would separate. And he actually gave a very exact date and said it would happen 30 years after his death", "death, and that occurs with the death of Hassan bin Ali. At that point the political authority became political and was severed from the spiritual reality. And that is in no way to detract from Sayyidina Muawiyah , but Muawiya was a political leader and the people who were under him were political more than spiritual.", "his period of Khilafah is not considered from the Khalifa al-Rashidim, which does not mean that he wasn't rightly guided. It has to be understood. It's just that his political authority became divested of the spiritual authority that the first four Khalifas had. So that's the difference and a lot of people don't understand that and it becomes a problem because if you study the early history, the early", "scholars because it causes so much trouble when people actually read about what happened. Because very hard to understand how Sahaba could have started killing each other, It's very difficult to understand that how people who were in the presence of the Prophet could start fighting over political authority but that shows you how central that issue was early on Now what happens and this is something that is absolutely necessary to understand today which a lot of Muslims I feel", "Muslims, I feel really don't fully understand. And that is the idea of having an absolute separation between spiritual reality and political reality. And the reason for that is that when the spiritual and the political become mixed up, the political denudes it or removes from it its reality. So what you have is state-controlled religion. State controlled religion is always a disaster", "It's always been a disaster. And it will always be a disaster until a prophet comes or the student of a prophet. And that's why the students of the Prophet, sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam, were very adept at doing that for especially Sayyidina Abu Bakr and Omar because of the gifts that they had been given. I mean, there were the Shaykh Khan and the Prophet , made it very clear that Omar , that if there was a prophet after the Prophet would have been Omar. In other words his ability to perceive", "to perceive things was so extraordinary that even in the most difficult circumstances, he was able to come up with remarkable solutions for them. So that's important to note which does not mean that we don't want political leaders to have ethics or morals or... We just don't what them to be mullahs or ulama because once that happens they have to compromise. That's the nature of politics", "of politics. Politics is the ground of compromise, not the ground principle religion is a grounded principal and if you want to biggest proof for this ask yourselves why every great scholar fled from government service in the history of Islam? You have to ask yourself that why did Abu Hanifa prefer jail over becoming a civil servant? Why? If he understood that to be", "was a good thing for a righteous man, then he would have been the first to do that because he would've felt that responsibility. Why then did he as a spiritual and religious leader flee from political leadership? Because he knew what it meant. Nobody's ever pleased with their politicians. It's just the human condition. Even the munafiqun grumbled in Medina. Nobody is ever pleased", "The spirituality that suffers, not the politics. It's the spirituality that suffer. So these people who fled to Hadhramaut many of them actually became great scholars and that is where you get the Ba'alwi tradition And that's what Shaykh al-Haddad was part of that and also it has continued up to the present day They have schools they have traditions but within their tradition there is a complete Islamic system in other words", "They have fiqh, they have Arabic texts, they text in logic, they've texts and usool. Everything including the science of Ihsan And the same is true for instance Morocco, same is truth for Turkey, same as true for Pakistan The same is tru for Mauritania I mean Mauritiania you can study the entire Islamic tradition from beginning to end only reading Mauritanians scholars", "The Nusuls, the Quran, the Hadith those are givens. But I'm talking about Usul. Sidi Abd Allah ibn Hajj Ibrahim wrote the book of Usul that's studied in Mauritania which is his versification of Jam'al Jawami of Imam al-Sukki So when you study Usul in Mauritanian you study his When you study Hadith, Mustaraht Al-Hadith You study Tariat Al Anwar Which is from Sidi Abdullahi ibn haji Ibrahim He versified Al Iraqi's famous book Al Alfiyah", "When you study grammar, you'll study commentaries of the Mauritanian grammarians on the classical text. So that's one of the unique aspects of Islam. Wherever it goes, it develops an intellectual tradition that is indigenous to the people and it actually ends up becoming complete in and of itself. And this has yet to happen in the West but it has to happen. In other words we have to develop within our Western Muslims", "It has a certain color. And that's why when you see it, it's different. In Afghanistan, it is different. So every place it goes, it the same water that has nourished the people but it takes on its own coloring and that's part of the universality because if we were all meant to become Arabs then that's a disaster and it's nothing against Arabs but it's just not what Allah wanted for human beings all to become Arab. I mean people say", "Why don't you speak Arabic to your children? I say because it's not my mother tongue. Their tongue is English That's where I grew up and that's the language for me Arabic is a religious language That's why I learned it I didn't learn it to talk to Arabs to have conversations to say come with them all boom You know how much are the tomatoes? I mean, you can buy tomatoes here. You don't need to go to Arabia to me In fact they came from here when we study We should study for Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala", "Allah and that's why Islam has to be freed of any cultural apparatus. It has to Be freed of that, Islam. It doesn't mean that Islam doesn't adapt to the culture That it's in but Islam in and of itself has to seen as being free of that so he wrote this as a counsel and Really just put everything that was needed for the purification of the self in it", "it so it's similar, it's more abridged than say the Mathara but it really does contain an incredible amount of wisdom in it and all of these texts share similarities because they're largely derived from Imam al-Kushayri, Imam al Ghazali Abu Talib al Makki, Imam Al Junaid. The founding teachers of the science are the same and so they're all deriving", "My advice to you, O possessor of fadl and adab. If you desire to reside in an exalted place amongst the ranks of people a place where you are high and exalted So he begins by saying wasiya and the wasiya is counsel it's an advice Allah says", "And so he's giving counsel and it's to you. Yeah, that'll father He will add a beat Council only benefits people that are willing to accept it if you give counsel to somebody who is A vile person they won't accept your counsel one of the things that the poet and what an abby said in al-karimi Inna al-kareemah either accr. Um, I like to go when unto accr um tella Ema Tamarada That noble people if you're good to them", "if you do a good to somebody who's noble, it's a type of possession because he feels indebted. It's the nature of good people. If you do good to them they feel indebt- But he said but if you did the same to a vile person, he becomes angry, resentful which is very interesting about human nature that there are people that become resentful because you've treated them well and so that's what he's arguing. He's arguing that I'm giving it to you why?", "Because you're somebody who has fadl, which is virtue and you have adab. And these are two really important words in the Islamic tradition because the Prophet ﷺ is somebody who taught makaram al-akhlaq, which are the fada'il He taught makarim al-akhlaq. He said, I was only sent to teach people virtuous character, noble character, the makarum", "And these are called the fada'il. And the fadail, traditionally according to Qadi Abu Bakr ibn al-Arabi, he said all of virtues are reduced to four. The first is courage. The second is temperance. The third is prudence. And fourth is justice. Those are called moral virtues. All virtues are extensions of one of those four. So for instance generosity is a virtue", "virtue out of those four which would it really be classified under courage because generous people are courageous people Because what prevents you from being generous its fear. You're afraid that if I give him this thing I'm at loss If I give them this money, I won't have any money So it's only fear that prevents you being generous so generous people actually courageous people They're courageous with their money now chastity Which is also?", "is also a virtue what would that go under temperance any virtue that you can think of that's a moral virtue you can find it categorized under one of those four virtues and the prophet sallallaahu alaihi was he was the most courageous of men which meant he was also the most generous of men so he was not only courageous in battle but he was courageous", "Allah has purchased yourself and your wealth. Both of them are expenditure, infaq. So both of them our expenditure you have to expend your wealth and you having to expend yourself And those are both acts of courage He's talking to the one who already has virtue You have to have some fadl in order for you to recognize virtue Because if you are bereft of that then you don't", "then you don't. Now also, you have to have adab because advice is only given when you're receptive to it. Now there are people that if you give them advice they get angry at you. Why do they get anger? Well there's a number of reasons one of the reason they get angrier simply they think you know who do you think you are to be giving me advice so what does that mean", "or you're equal to him or her and therefore, you have no right. But if you see somebody actually as being better than you, you'll take their advice. And that's why people look to people that they think are in this culture more together. I'll go ask him because he's got his act together as opposed to me. I'm a mess. So this is what people do which is in this", "And I guarantee you that the reason people get interested in psychiatry is almost invariably because they're deeply disturbed people. They're actually trying to work out themselves, and they often have real serious problems. I mean, that's not everybody, but I'm talking about a lot of people.", "with people that are not prepared to really be giving counsel. If things like that happen, something's very seriously wrong there's a breakdown. So when you give advice one of the things about adab and this is really interesting to me, Adab is the ability to know the place of things and to give things their proper due so it's really translated as comportment or a type", "where things belong and part of recognizing where things Belong is to recognize where you belong in relation to social hierarchies And one of the things that this culture almost never talks about it talks about civil rights a lot or human rights But it rarely in fact I don't think it's ever mentioned the idea of social rights. Is your right to have equality in society You see because that's a quote-unquote ideal", "quote-unquote ideal of democracy people are equal but in fact they're not. In this culture it's very clear that there are social hierarchies and if you fall at the bottom of one well unto you if you try to crash the party of a higher rank in society so social rights are never talked about. In the Islamic tradition, one of the really interesting things about Islam is it teaches us", "that is known only to God and therefore it challenges you to recognize that everyone outside yourself may be better than you in the eyes of God. And so, you have to have complete understanding of your spiritual standing. They could be higher in spiritual standing", "at the doors of beggars in the history of Islam. There's no other religion that I know of that has that quality, where you had literally kings at the door of beggar asking for their prayers. The other thing that is really interesting is in this culture you won't get people from Black Hawk or from Los Gatos going to church in East Oakland. It's just not the way the society works and yet in the Muslim world", "world, the richest man could pray next to the most impoverished man in the same prayer line. And it's always been like that. And that is something really unusual about Islam, is it creates a true brotherhood. There's a recognition of things in the world that Allah has given them and other people lack. But that does not prevent you from seeing this person as essentially equal before God", "Possibly and in fact probably according to most of the hadiths about rich people and poor people The poor person is probably closer to God than you are and that instills in you a desire to actually be kind to them Because you're actually worried that you might upset your Lord by having any contempt or even just simply treating them less than they deserve This is the secret of adab. And that is why our tradition is a tradition of adeb", "tradition of adab and the adib in Arabic is the one who has mastered language. It's what they call a literary person, an adib is a literary personal why? Because the adeeb is the ones that puts words in their proper place. The adeeb is the on that learns language and this is something that if you look at modern man and modern woman we are very degraded creature because", "English, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese. The whole lot of us. There's very few people on the planet that know how to actually speak properly. That really understand the mechanics of language and what words go in what order and for what purpose. And traditionally in the Muslim world, in Arabia at the time of the Prophet , everybody knew how to speak. They didn't know how write. They did not know how read.", "They didn't know how to read, but they knew how to speak. And that's why when the Qur'an spoke to them it spoke to in their language and so they knew what meant. If Allah said , So . They knew exactly what meant When Allah said not . It could have been But it was . So when Allah said they knew exactly", "rank in the dunya. These are Ahl al-Dunya and one of the signs of Ahl ad Dunya traditionally, I'm talking about in the Muslim world, one of those signs traditionally of the people of the duny were people that concern themselves with those things that would ensure social ranking they would ensure a social ranking that they would insure that they will be upwardly mobile and that was their obsession well for the people", "internally upwardly mobile, not externally. That their standard of living was not increasing. They weren't concerned about their standing of living but they were concerned about the standard of conduct with Allah . That's what they were concern about. Were they living up to the standard that Allah had set for them? Because Allah has set a standard for humanity in behavior and that was their concern.", "their standard of spiritual living, not their standard material living. And we're now living in a world where the standard of material living is literally the only one that people perceive anymore and therefore increasingly in order to achieve that people will be remiss in their standard ethical behavior they will actually neglect principled standards", "to achieve that external standard. And then he says, In order for you to be in this forefront, to outstrip, to go ahead and to achieve the ghaya. And the ghayah is traditionally it originally came from a word which meant", "was always out front and it became a metaphor for achieving an end. So a ghaya is originally a raya, a flag but it came to mean to achieve an end if you want to achieve this end and to reach it in the state of felicity and to achieve your goals and desires then what is his advice? Taqwa Allah. That's the advice he's giving", "Taqwa al-ilah. Now, taqwa is an amazing word in Arabic because it comes from a very small group of words which have weak radicals on both ends, waqiyah, and its root meaning is to protect or defend. And wikaya is the word that the Arabs use for prevention,", "of prevention is better than a pound of treatment. So it's more intelligent to prevent illness than to wait until it happens and then have to suffer treatment. What he's recommending here to us is Taqwa al-Ilah, alladhi turja marahimuhu, the one who we desire his graces,", "The unique, the single, the remover of all calamity. So that's what he is saying. This is the foundation of all advice and this is from the Qur'an directly. Allah says, Save yourselves. Same root word. And save your families from the fire. Now how do you do that? I mean how do", "yourself and that's important because allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is saying now we usually think allah save us but allah is telling us save yourself i mean it's very interesting if you think about that we usually", "one would get into paradise because of his actions and they said what about you ya rasulallah not even you oh messenger of god and he said not even me unless allah immersed me in his mercy now that doesn't mean that this is simply you go to paradise and you go hell i mean that's not the way it works so when allah says save yourselves", "telling us is, I've given you all of the means for salvation and you have to use them because if you don't, you haven't allowed me to save you. And this is the idea. If you go to a physician and the physician gives you a medication, why did you go", "to give you a pill and you just had to take it every morning, and you would spontaneously get better. But he told you that you have to start exercising everyday. He told you you have stop eating fats. He tells you how to give up sugar. He tell you couldn't smoke anymore. So he gave you list of things to do. And then six months later you come back and nothing's changed in fact things are worse. And the doctor says what happened? Didn't you take my advice?", "advice I found it so difficult well here's the choice don't take my advice and keep getting worse and then see what's more difficult losing your health completely or taking my advice. And the aqil is the one who thinks things through he goes to the end", "in a deep way. تدبر is the end of something. You have قبل and دبر, the front and the back. يتدبر means to force yourself to the end so it's taking something to its logical conclusion So if for instance you don't like to exercise which at 30 is not really a problem but at 40 it becomes a problem", "getting very serious and by 60 you're immobile. So the person who at 30 was thinking about what's it going to be like when I'm 60 if I don't do something about this, that's just an intelligent person. It's not a genius. It is somebody who's looking around at others and noticing this person he's 60 and yet he's fit and he's got energy and he is doing all these things", "He's been smoking. Now he has to go around with a canister. He's walking around with the canister or he is in a wheelchair, or he's on a ventilator and that just looking at... That doesn't mean the fitness and all these things is going to guarantee because there are no guarantees anything in life other than we're all going to die but the point is that there are asbāb in the world now if you look for instance at people that are filled with ma'asiyah", "They dissipate themselves. They expend all of their energies in ma'asiyah. You will notice that by the age of 25 or 30, there is a darkness that has descended upon their faces. Ahlul-ma'siya. See young people, whether they're Muslim or non-Muslim or whatever, young people have a light and that light is simply the fact that they have not accrued a lot of wrong actions. That's why if you see dark young people", "But there is a light in youth that is simply the vigor of youth and it's also The fact that young people have not accrued a lot of wrongs. If you look at children, it's stunning Why are people so attracted to the faces of little children because they see innocence? Why is that innocence there because there's no wrong actions So you're attracted to purity by nature and that attraction in really sick", "is what causes these problems in this culture and it's a problem the Muslim world as well because that attraction becomes sick cuz there's platonic attraction, there's people that are attracted to virtuous people. That's their nature, there're people that attracted to those people but shaitan nafs hawa dunya they like their portion in attraction and so they will attempt to take something that's pure", "of the dunya is defilement. It's what the people of Ihsan call kudurat, it's the kudarat of dunya. You kadiru. Kadara in Arabic means to stir up the mud at the bottom of a pond. You have a clear pond, limpid, easy to look down and see the bottom but if you muck up the bottom then you stir up all of that dirt well that's", "stirred up, they will eventually muddy the purity of the self. Because we are made of mud and it's our nature but we're also made of spirit so whichever one is dominating is the one that's going to show itself. And this is why the light of the aged is not youth and the darkness of the age is disobedience. Absolutely sound principle. So if you look out there I mean I wanted", "an experiment where you took all of the pictures of our awliya, our people, righteous people and then just put pictures of all the old people in the dunya. And just show the faces. Just show the face and let people see for themselves which group they want to be among when they get old. And this is not about knowledge even because you can see faces of purity in villages amongst the simplest people. One of things about us that should prevent", "or spiritual superiority, is that most of us are not even practicing the Islam of the most common people in the villages of the Muslim lands. I mean if you go to Mauritania, I can show you people that nobody in Mauritiania thinks anything of and they do a Juz' of Quran every morning and every night. They do the Ma'thorat of the Prophet", "They fast the three days of the month. Every month, they give whatever little sadaqah they have to give which is a lot more than what most of us do because for him a quarter is like $100 to us or more and this is an Ammi just a simple Muslim nothing special there so that's the type age we're living in when people that do a little start thinking", "of having taqwa is that you don't fall into those traps because the self by its nature is deceptive. It's constantly trying to deceive you and it's a nature of the self, the self is delusional and there's a psychology of self-delusion which is very interesting and worth reading and I would recommend for people that are interested in this and I think everybody should be interested in it, I would recommended reading Daniel Gorman's book called Simple Truths Vital Lies The Psychology of Self Deception", "one of the things that he points out in there is that groups are completely delusional. Groups enter into delusinal states, and individual delusion is actually less dangerous than group delusion because once groups become delusonal it's very difficult to break it. So we're living in a country that's in a delusinoal group state. We live in a", "themselves in terms of what they're actually doing, what we are actually doing. We! I mean, I'd like to say that I'm not part of all this but I am and so for me to set myself outside of it is really the height of arrogance. What we are doing here, what as a people are doing collectively and we're in a delusional state. The Muslims are in a complete delusinal state. So groups become very delusial and if you study the Quran", "Read the Quran one time as an exercise. If you don't read Arabic, read it in English. As an exercise in looking at group delusional states and what you will find is every single prophet was an individual that confronted a delusinal group. Every single one of them. It's one individual going up against a diluted group and they always want to kill him. I mean that's the thing about groups.", "not with us, you're against us. And that is a delusional state because nothing in this world works like that. That is Manichean. It's actually a theological fallacy that was rejected by the Christians through St. Augustine and by the Muslims through Abul Hasan because the Muslims called them the Qadariya. That was an early group in Islam, the Qidriya who put everything black and white. There's good and evil. I'm good therefore you're evil.", "I was commanded to judge outwardly.", "Because I don't know. There's too many variables. Only Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala can work that out. So he is saying that this is at the essence of this teaching, is to have Taqwa of Allah subhahnawata'ala. Now Allah subhaanawta'ala says in many verses of the Qur'aan mentions that and the first commandment in the Qurán is That's the very first command if you read Surat al-Baqarah", "The first commandment that you come to in the Quran is have taqwa. And it's to all of humanity. The first degree of taqwah is Taqwul Kufr. And that is why when Allah says, My mercy has encompassed all things and I have decreed for the people of taquah If that only meant the idea of ta'kuh that you and I think of when we think of taakwha", "Then we would all be lost but that taqwa includes by the mercy of Allah the Taqwa of kufr which every muwahid enters into Every muwahad is a mutaqi because he has fear of kuffar. He doesn't want to associate with Allah now even Because Allah is merciful and this is something to think about Imam al Ghazali's position, which seems to me it just seems to be the one that", "And that's why he obviously, I think, expounded it. He felt that this included people that had not been shown shirk to understand it. So as long as the people had not really been shown and explained what they were doing wrong, they weren't accountable for it which is closer to understanding of Allah's mercy because Allah's Mercy is...", "And do not make idols of Allah, and you know.", "prior to that we don't believe there's accountability although there is a khilaf about that in Aqidah and the dominant position in the Muslim world which the majority of Muslims follow, is the position actually that there is intellectual accountability. In other words that even if people are never given a message they're accountable for what in the West is called natural law. In the west there's a belief that there", "when they said, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator. How did they do that? They didn't use recourse to revelation in that text. What they meant was in natural law it is discernible that people have rights given from their creator one of them is life. So every human being in essence understands that he has been given life and really doesn't have the right to take life from another.", "according to his people, people would be held accountable for murder even if they had never been given a message. That's a position and I personally inclined towards that just naturally because I think that it's not the position of what Hassan's people. They actually feel that you're not accountable until you're actually given a revelation because of the nature of the intellect. It's too clouded", "Taqwa, the first level of taqwa is taqwal kufr. The second level of takwah is taqul kabair that you're actually fearful of major wrong actions with Allah subhanahu wa'ta'ala What are the Kabir? There's difference of opinion about that but generally Imam al-Dhahabi wrote a book and he's got over 70 and most of the ulama say that it's just too much because people would be held to account for far too much some of the Ulma say", "mentioned in what are called the seven deadly sins in Islam, which are different from the seven Christian deadly sins. But the dominant opinion is that they are those sins that you have performed and a specific punishment has been given in the Sharia for them, a specific punishments. In other words either worldly or otherworldly where it's very clear that whoever does this,", "for that sin means that their hearts bereft of real Taqwa of Allah . So, Taqwah is... Taqwah is putting the self in the protection of the sanctity of the law and what protects it from evils in both abodes. In other words, in this world than the next. So that's a definition of Taqawah. It is placing the self", "Allah says in the Quran, in Al-Mudathir He is worthy of being guarded against. In other words His wrath. Allah is Ahlul Taqwa. He is Worthy of Taqwah. It's a right of Allah that we actually have taqwa", "And also he's worthy of maghfirah. In other words, if you have taqwa then what you expect is maghfira for your shortcomings because everybody falls short and so that's from the mercy of Allah So what we're being told basically is that if you do these things Then you will be forgiven so that gets back to who saves us Who saves us? We save ourselves qoo anfusukum But we only save ourselves", "save ourselves by the grace of Allah . So when Allah commands us to save ourselves, He's not saying something that is meaningless. He means very much, قُوْ أَنفُسُكُمْ Guard yourselves against a fire. Save yourselves. Guard yourselves and your family. Now how do you guard your family? Ibn Abbas said, أن تعلِّموهم وتؤدبوهم That you teach them", "The sharia is taqwa, that's the adab, that'a the comportment of the sacred law.", "I mean it's interesting word because wadifa now in modern Arabic means employment. So muwazzaf is an employee, but in classical Arabic in the technical vocabulary of the ulama, the wadaif were those things that one did in order to draw near to Allah . So again if you look at people in this world why are they in the wadhaif? In their employment?", "Why are the people of Allah in their walaif, in order to raise their station with The Living? And that's the difference. So taqwa is the foundation of the path to God and some of them said it's four matters. Iqamat al-farail, it is to fulfill the obligations. Wa ijtinaa bin maharim, and that's what Ibn Asher says", "that the summation of it is doing what Allah commanded you and avoiding what He prohibited you inwardly and outwardly. So, that's what he's saying. It's doing the fara'idh and avoiding the prohibitions. وَاتِّبَعِ السُّنَّةِ And to follow the sunnah. وُلُزُومِ الْأَدَابِ Because this is an important aspect. You see, the adab... I mean, I'll give you an example. I was in a situation where somebody did something which was a gross breach of adab", "the proposal and that is part of the Sharia. And this is something a lot of especially modern Muslims, I mean that's a whole word in itself Modern Muslim because modern Muslims have a whole other understanding of Islam to the point That many of the early Muslims would pull out their hair if they saw The bay or worse worse and I'll tell you a true story", "The worst calamities are things that make you laugh.", "and he said they all started screaming. And literally, they couldn't believe it. They just went into a total state. And he said it was one of the most powerful things because he'd gotten used to it. But it was the first time they'd ever seen it and they just went in to this state like they thought it was some end of time. It was all something happened that was terrible. And they all start screaming.", "So adab is something that we've completely lost. I mean, we really have forgotten about adab. Now there's obviously...adab can go to another extreme which is where you get into protocol and that's a whole other problem because it goes to the other extreme where the culture becomes so inundated with the particularities of adab that you no longer have freedom. You breach adab in the tradition. That's why I always stipulate", "the ulama that I'm amriki, hamaji. You know, I'm just a primitive American so you have to allow some leeway because in the traditional Muslim world if you spend time with the ulma there's a real expectation of certain comportment which is now only in places like Yemen and some places in Morocco, some places Syria and Sudan but it has been lost in a lot of places. People don't", "I mean, if you read the early stories about the awe. I finished this edit of Imam al-Dara'i's biography who wrote Duan Nasiri and I'm going to tell you this is a true story because I wrote it in The Thing We recorded the Duan Nasi in Fes And we finished at about 1 in the morning and nobody knew I was in Fess except these people and somebody had given me $100 to give to somebody in Fesse", "it was about 3.30 in the morning and we had to go to Tangiers, and as we were driving up the hill I said to this man Muhammad bin Nis, I said you know I have a an amanah for so-and-so and I'm not gonna be able to see him because We just had to leave so quickly out of flight from tangier eyes with Amlatif Whiteman So I said can you give it to him? And he said Bismillah, yeah, I'll give it", "Just as I said that, he said, Subhanallah. I think we just passed him. It was 3.30 in the morning. So he said go back so we drove back and he was standing in front of a white van without any windows. He didn't know I was in Fez. And when he saw me he said SubhanAllah.", "I made dua that I'd see you tonight. Now we had just finished the Dua al-Nasiri, he opened the door of the van there was about 20 of his people in there because they do khatm and dalail kheirah and a lot of things and he went like this Bismillah! And he went down and they all broke into Dua n-nasri and they recited it from beginning to end. True story.", "Believe it or not, I don't care. So Allah does those things. I call them on the shore of unseen oceans. You see because if you look out at the ocean why do people look at the Ocean? It's much more interesting usually what's to their back right the land Because you can see all these plants and trees and flowers but why do they look out", "when we look at the ocean, part of it is what's under. It's all that stuff that's hidden from us and if you wait long enough, you'll suddenly see this fish jump. Did you see that? That's what people do. Did You see that?! Why are they so amazed? And it's really interesting why they're amazed. DidYouSeeThat?! Look over there! And that is what Allah shows you when you believe in unseen. These fish that just kind of... Did You See That?!", "time doing it you don't do that anymore. You just say Subhanallah, SubhanAllah. I'm not making that up. That is the reality of life. Once you open yourself up to belief it just keeps confirming itself to you. That's how you increase in iman by just increasing in ima because Allah gives you more to believe in.", "to have taqwa about. It's a real gift from Allah subhanahu wa'ta'ala for all of us and that's why we should see it as a gift. And then some said, حِفْظَ الْأَمَرُ وَتَرْكَ الوَزَرِ It's protecting the matter which is your deen and avoiding sin. رَحْتِمَا مِنْ مَسَقَةَ البَلْوَى Guarding oneself against those calamities that befall us and cause us to strip and stumble. And our Shaykh, meaning Shaykh Abdullah al-Haddad", "is So that's Ibn Ashr's definition. And that's what beautiful about our tradition, is that in Yemen it's the same tradition as it is in Morocco, as it in Indonesia, as in Mauritania, as is Turkey, as its Bosnia This is the same teaching and it's all from the same source which is the Quran and then our beloved Prophet .", "Man lam yashkuri al-nas, lam yashkuril la.", "the means. See people in this world, the people of dunya are veiled by the means they think the means are the reality so when they take the medicine they think that the medicine cured them when they get their money at the end of the month they think it was their job that fed them no we recognize the means or simply that they are means and in reality behind the doctor is Allah behind the job is Allah, behind the prophet sallallaahu alaihi wa sallam, behind everything", "Therefore in being grateful to everything, we are grateful to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Including being grateful for people that harm us because in reality they're doing us a big favor in drawing us near to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la And so it gets to the point where you begin to feel gratitude towards everything and that's the highest maqam. And what does shaytan say? And you won't find most of them in gratitude That's what he wants to take you away from", "shukur, how few of my servants are grateful. So really it's gratitude that's at the root and taqwa is in essence gratitude. I mean don't become immersed in all this fear. Allah is ahlul-taqwa He is worthy of it. In other words, he's just worthy of It because if it's all about fear then you end up becoming somebody who is doing things motivated out of a very low force", "Which is fear fear is a low force fear is how these people rule everybody That's how they put them all you better do this or this is gonna happen get your insurance Or somebody sent me an ad and it was for insurance life insurance And it said who's going to take care of your wife and children if you die I said Allah, that's my answer They're asking me and then they said Who's going take care your house payments? And you're this and you're that if you died", "If you die. I said, Allah? All the answers, I had Allah. And then I realized I didn't need the life insurance. So why does that work with those people? It works because they don't have the right answer. When they say, who's going to take care of your wife and children when you die? What did Abu Bakr, radhiallahu anhu, when he gave all of his wealth to the Prophet, He said, ماذا تركت لأهلك؟ What did you leave for your family?", "I left them Allah and His messenger. And that's why he is who He is. That's his insurance policy. And aman, the word in modern Arabic for insurance is the same root of iman. They're from the same route. Isti'man. Yista'minu means to insure yourself. But it also means to seek aman. And iman is to make yourself safe. How? Bila. Not with blue cross", "Not with blue cross or not with any cross. So it goes on, this is a great subject so I'm doing that." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/WHY DID ALLAH GIVE US EMOTIONS__SHEIKH HAMZA YUSUF_UoZ7DO0_elg&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742882198.opus", "text": [ "What placed his emotion? I mean, emotion is mid. It's mid between we have a triune brain. So the brain has what they call the R-stem, which is the reptilian stem. Then it has the midbrain and then as the neocortex. So that's also consistent with the ratio, right? This the irascible and the concupiscent.", "which is still, and then you have ratio, which is movement. And then you Have the so the, the, thumos, which Is the spirit is, is, you know, this is The source of like your emotions? I mean, there's different in the Greeks thought that the Emotions were centered in the in the liver. And There's definitely a relationship because I got hepatitis when I was In Africa. And I just became so irritable. It Was amazing. And that's one of the signs of hepatitis.", "And I think that's where the Greeks got that idea. I mean, Hippocrates noticed that people that got hepatitis got really angry because you're not processing your emotions properly. But emotions are... I mean there's good emotion and then there's negative emotions. And so there's a balance but they are high. Love comes out of the emotion. Anger is out of", "a really important component to the human being. There's a reason why God gave us anger. We should get angry about certain things. Things should make us angry, but it's controlling the anger. It's using the anger as a positive force and not letting it control you because once it controls you, it takes over, and then it's the uninvited guest has taken over the house of the host,", "It's terrible. I mean, Sayyidina Ali, it's an apocryphal story but it's important story and it's told in many Muslim cultures this was something that was just told reiterated again and again because of its meaning so it is I recognize that it's apocrophal but it is important about the story of Sayyida Ali when he was fighting", "fighting in the battle and he was going to about to kill this man. And he spit in his face and then he didn't, he didn' t kill him because he felt anger for himself like he was no longer fighting Feast of Bidulah it was Feast Bidin Nafs which is where a lot of people are. People are angry because of what happened when they were children. There's all this pathology out there you know these people shouting and screaming", "There's a lot of people like in America. There's so many people that are they were abandoned as children, just abandoned because the modern world you either have single mothers that have to put their kids into these daycares and these daycare is with people there 30 kids in this room and The caregiver or the two caregivers being paid minimum wage or not very much I mean They just don't have a lot empathy", "a lot of empathy to be giving each child those needs that it has. Those first seven years are really important for children. If they don't get what they need, they're going to spend the rest of their life looking for it and then it becomes tragic. And there's all these people putting tattoos all over their body now on their faces because it used to be like when I was young if you were a rebel you had one tattoo. Well now everybody has one tattoo so what does the rebel do?", "the rebel do? I'll do the whole arm. Well, now a lot of people are doing the whole arms. So now what do I do? Do the neck. And then now people are trying to do the next. What do I I'll face it's you know, so it's just gets more and more extreme but the reason that a lot Of people have a need to do these things is because they weren't looked at when they would they didn't get the glance of the mother when they were young", "bringing attention to themselves, dyeing their hair purple. You know, doing outrageous things and it's a tragedy but it's all from neglect. I mean most of the world's problems are just from child abuse. Really, just child abuse with all these abused kids out there so terrible. I'm even a lot of all this sexual problems are related to child abuse", "child abuse. So many of these women were molested as children and so you know we have to have compassion for people because there's a lot of suffering out there. Anything from the... I'll do online questions inshallah. So the first question is one of the purposes of human being is Aymara what exactly is meant by Aymar?", "meant by Imara? You know, Imara is one of those comprehensive words in Arabic. I mean it's related to the word for life Umar and Amara Imarat al-Masjid was the caretaking of the Masjid this is what the Quraish were given they had Imarat Al-Mashjd but it also means like Imarat", "masjid. That's part of imarat al-masjid So when the community prays in the masjids they're doing imara It's bringing to life things and that's part what we were created to do, to bring our civilizations to life Bring knowledge to life To build all these different things I mean why have stripes on a... Why do that? What is it? That's imara", "Why do the Afghan or the Palestinians or the Moroccans, why do they do all that? Why do they doing that? That's Imara. It's Ihsan. They're making something beautiful. They are making it more beautiful. It is like this carpet. It could have just been one color but it was done in a way to make it more Beautiful and that's part of Imara, it's just making things beautiful. But it's civilization", "You know, one of the beauties of Islam is that it acknowledges Aboriginal peoples. It doesn't destroy Aboriginal peoples because there's something very beautiful about Aboriginal people. They remind us of something. One, they remind us", "in lifestyle. Their lifestyles are not going to impinge on their surroundings to the degree where it actually begins to harm us. So Islam never eliminated the aboriginal people like Christianity did. I mean, Christianity just saw the aboriginals as we need to get rid of them. We", "classrooms and turn them into images of ourselves. The Muslims never did that, but what they did do which is very interesting, and the Mauritanians are a testimony to this, they created the first scholastic Aboriginals. You'll never find this anywhere. There are Bedouin that teach logic and grammar and rhetoric and mathematics", "And they're Bedouin living in tents, drinking and milking their camels. No other civilization has done that. And that is a proof of Islam. The Mauritanians are a proof. Of Islam. They're a proof, and I saw it with my own eyes so I am not exaggerating this. There's no other Aboriginal peoples in human history that I know or have heard of that became scholars", "And now some of the greatest scholars in the Muslim world are from these Bedouin who grew up in tents. They're literally now Some of the top scholars I mean Shaykh Abdullah bin Bayyah is recognized one of the Top Usoori Scholars in the world and he grew up In a tent Muhammad Hassan al-Dadu is considered one of The top scholars in The Muslim World all These Scholars respect his knowledge He's Mauritanian and many others", "Sheikh Muhammad al-Rahman al-Shinqaiti, he was the greatest Mufassir. Probably this maybe... He's up there with Tahir ibn Ashur. I mean those are the two greatest Muffasiroon of the 20th century. Well Tabatabai, all that, there's three but not there's not any other ones that are significant in the 20 th century. Tabataba'i in the Shia tradition incredible Quran to", "Quran, Tafsir he did. And then Tahir ibn Ashur and Muhammad al-Mina Shinkaiti. And Muhammad al-'Shinqaiti did something that hadn't been done before. I mean, Tahir ib'n Ashur it's a beautiful commentary but it's very consistent. I means it has some really interesting modern aspects to it but is very consistent with traditional whereas Muhammad al mina shinkaitiy did a Tafseer of the Quran", "way we, you know, showcase the food. Why do you think we've almost regressed in that kind of department? In the loss of quality? The loss of quantity and what are ways we can almost reintroduce that? It's a really great question. There's a book which I think is an extremely important book that's worth reading for anybody that wants to understand the age. It's called The Reign of Quantity by René Guinault. It''s a it's a", "fascinating book, but I think he really gets to the heart of it. The world... The Enlightenment Project begins with a kind of... Even just before that, if you look at Bacon, Francis Bacon said we must put nature", "like torture it to get its secrets and he actually uses the word rape also um and so there's this kind of violent european sickness um that and i don't like to collectivize because there's many great things about europe and and things that we should benefit from and things like that so i don t want to you know", "Well, you know, it's just not true. The Europeans did a lot of good things as well and they were the ones...the British in fact were the one that really eliminated slavery. The Muslims didn't do it. I wish we did. I really wish we had that badge of honor but it was the British and they spent a lot", "had a kind of rapaciousness that is very unusual and they wanted to understand. And I think the Prophet, peace be upon him, I mean, I believe this, that when he said, In a riwayah, sometimes he said Salman's people.", "don't have the same obsessions. They want to understand everything, they want to know everything and the fact that the Prophet used space exploration for that is just really fascinating to me because they'll even try to get to outer space like if you ask most people in most places like do you think we should go to outer-space? They're like what? You know are you crazy? Like why I mean more Chinese don't even traditionally swim in the ocean", "because it's just, it's meant to give you lots of awe. Right? So they're not going to swim in the ocean for fun. And then when the shark bites you, well, of course, what did you think? It's an ocean. Right. So they wanted to measure everything. They became obsessed with measurement and they developed a science that is so,", "that is so fascinating, which is... And it was interesting that it was the British and the Germans that developed it simultaneously. Which is calculus, which enabled them to do things that nobody before could really do. Calculus has really given an immense amount of power. And it's interesting that the word for measurement and power are the same in Arabic. So qudra", "and to measure something. So calculus is the ultimate measuring tool, and the infinitesimals which the Catholic Church tried to outlaw the study of became an obsession. And so it's just been so powerful as a tool, it has enabled a kind of world that is very different from the previous worlds. And now STEM is everything", "They're just obsessed with STEM, engineers. I mean it's interesting that Imam Nablusi in his book on dreams he says if you see an engineer in the dream it means kharab al-umran wa umran al-kharab the destruction of civilization and the civilization of destruction. So quantity is important. I", "Zaid is the substance, right? And then Tawil is that's the quantity. And then Azraq Black is the quality. So colors are qualitative. They're not quantitative. We can measure the red", "We can measure the red, the amount of red in the carpet but we can't measure the experience of red. That's not measurable and so beauty is qualitative it's something that can't be measured. We can't meaure the beauty of the Taj Mahal. You can't measurre the beauty a perfectly calligraphed work of art or the beauty", "We can only experience it. And so there's just been an obsession with quantity for quite some time in our civilization, and we've lost quality. And the qualitative arts are the trivium. The quantitative arts are quadrivium. I mean they have extended to quadrivia but calculus is still based on arithmetic and geometry. Algebra is an extension of geometry. They're just extensions", "which is number, discrete number and then number in space. So differential and integral you're measuring the rates of acceleration as opposed to averages which is what people had to do before Newton. You can measure the average rate of the fall of the apple from the tree but you couldn't see the rate of acceleration at each point. That's what calculus enables", "what calculus enabled, the rate of acceleration. And that's enabled all these things that we skyscrapers and things like that building up knowing the exact amount of tension, the torque, and all these thing that engineers are able to do. I mean it's amazing and it's remarkable things and they're great achievements but we've lost quality and so that's part of what I think...and character is qualitative.", "of a person is qualitative. You can measure how much they gave you, but the character of giving, that's something that's not really measurable. Does that help? Okay. Any other questions online? That was it? Okay?", "So Laylatul Qadr, where this is the 27th. And I mean, the vast majority of scholars were of the opinion. Although the Prophet told us to look for it in the last 10 days and then in the odd nights especially. Ibn Arabi says you should look for Laylatu Qadir every night of the year. Like the Arifun. They're not going to let a day go by.", "a day go by without. But if you heard that there was a marketplace, if you're a merchant and you heard there was market place one day of the year people are willing to pay 100 times what they were normally willing to", "Trust me, all the merchants would be down there. So dunya is not worth losing sleep over but akhirah is definitely worth losing sleeping over. May Allah give us ability to benefit from the night inshaAllah. Subhanakallah wa rahmatullah, I shadu an la ilaha illa anta astaghfiruq wa atubu ilayk wa al-asri inna alinsana la fee khusra illa alladhina aminu wa amiluh salihati wa tuwasi'ul hafdi wa tasawwuf" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Why Time Is Important in Islam _Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_gHqNFTgd_Lw&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748520612.opus", "text": [ "You know Imam Shafi'i, he said I learned two things from the Sufis. Time is a sword if you don't cut with it in other words if you're not attentive It will cut you down we don't kill time time kills us Whenever you hear somebody say I'm gonna go kill some time That is a person incomplete ghaffla whenever you hear someone, you know Ibn Ataylah He said the fool gets up in the morning and says what am I going to do?", "What am I going to do today? And the wise man gets up and says, what is God going to with me today? So he said, and then he said... Your ego is such that if you do not preoccupy it, focus it on the good,", "on the evil, on the bad. Allah. Again, Abu Ali al-Dakkaq said, Arwaqtu mibrad yashaquka wala yamhaqukaka Time is a file. It just wears you down. Doesn't obliterate you. It wears you", "by saying, Every day passes it takes a part of me. And it's It gives remorse to my heart in other words for the time I wasted and then it continues on. It continues on and then he says", "إِذْ نَضِجَتْ جُلُودٌ أُعِيدَت لِلشَّقَائِقَ لَهُمْ جَلُوْدُ It's like the people of the fire whose skin is reborn. And this is from the Quran. It says every time the skin gets burnt, Allah recreates it. I mean, this is we know about these proprioceptors. All the skin has these receptors. That's why burn... People that get burnt really deeply, they don't feel it once they've gone through the skin. So the skin according to the Quran is recreated.", "It's recreated so that the receptors experience it. And then he says, The dead one is not the one who dies and then finds repose. Rather, the dead is the dead among the living.", "time he's giving the time it's due in cana so he's either in the haqiqah or in the sharia depending on what time it is so these are very high meanings and imam siri ahmed zaroog he says that don't uh", "They should be looked at according to their station. So what is asked of the people who are content with being common people, we should all aspire to rise up to be higher than our position and common people is not the street sweeper. The street sweepers might be a knower of God so common people in the Western understanding", "haven't gone to college and haven't gotten PhDs and things like that. Very often those are the most common people, they're the most commonly so I wanted to now just talk a little bit about why we celebrate really we should celebrate every day", "the fact that he came into the world, we should be joyful. And one of the things about Muslims is that wherever you go it's a hallmark of the Muslims that they loved our Prophet . This is a quality that you find all over the world. Even people bad Muslims often love the Prophet . And I'll give you one example when I was in England there was a Kuwaiti man,", "Anyway, I said it. So may God veil us all. Anyway, there was a man from the Gulf who was in a bar and he was drinking. And then this man asked him where he's from. He said Kuwait. He says oh that's Muslim isn't it? He said yeah. Then he said something about the Prophet . Well this Kuwaiti man broke his bottle and jabbed this man right.", "shouldn't do that and really I mean but the impulse is real. The impulse is there's people in you know somebody said to me oh Muslims are always killing people over religion, I said well I was in England at the time I said you guys kill people over football matches. You know I mean in fact there used to be a billboard that said if your religions football worship with Skype sky it was like a football channel because", "That's their religion. Their attention is given to that. They watch all the games, they know all the names, they have all the stats, they can bend it like Beckham. I mean it's very interesting this is people giving their time and that's all we have is our time. This is what God has given us. This a great gift that he's given us participation in being. So the prophet said", "He was the most mindful of human beings and that's really what I, after thinking about mindfulness and thinking about just how so many people in the West are looking at these religions like Buddhism and they never considered Islam. It just fascinates me because our religion", "Our Prophet is so extraordinary and one of the most extraordinary things about our prophet is his name Because all over the world right now, here we are in California Right now There's people all over", "All over the world. They're praising our Prophet ﷺ and his name is Muhammad That's not a name he got later His mother named him Muhammad, and it was an unknown name to the Arabs But she was commanded to name him Muhammad So just in his name as a proof of who he is because he is the most praised human being on the planet And the second I arguably is Mary", "I mean, Mary, people all over the millions, hundreds of millions of people all around the world praise Mary. But I've never met any Christians that sit there saying, you know, oh God, praise Jesus, bless Jesus. I've actually seen that in Genesis it says God will bless the nation that blesses Abraham.", "blessed Abraham and he said I can't think that I have. And I said we bless him every day at least five times a day. And so by your own book it says we're a blessed nation because we bless Abraham. And of all people the prophet in a Sahih Hadith said that he was shown all of these prophets and he", "people from Bani Shenu'ah. Jibril looked like Dihya. He said what they look like and then he said, وَرَأِتُ إِبْرَهِيمُ وَأَقْرَّبُهُ شَبَحًا صَاحِبُكُمْ The one that looked most like Abraham is your companion. What a beautiful... Not your teacher, not your sheikh, not you're... Your companion, صاحبكم .", "He was the most humble of human beings. He loved people, he cared about people. He was moderate in every single thing that... it's amazing! This is another proof of the Prophet ﷺ his moderation. He said my way is the middle way meaning the moderate way. جَعْنَكُمْ أُمَّةً وَسَطًا We made you a moderate nation, a people in the middle even geographically", "They're not at the extremes. They're in the middle of the earth Everything about him is moderation The Prophet said they said about him He was a middle stature he was neither too tall nor was he short But nobody ever appeared taller than him, but he wasn't tall or short. He was middle", "He was middle. He said, أَزْهَرْ لَيْسَ بِالْآدَمِ وَلَا الْأَبْيَضِ الْامْحَقُ He was of a moderate color, inclining toward a reddish light brown. He wasn't... he was neither dark nor was he a pasty white, amhak like the Europeans you know that northern Europeans, the Italians are closer to that color. It's the most beautiful of colors, azhar alone. I want to ask Mourab Tarhaj", "When they described the Prophet like the full moon, did they mean the harvest moon on the horizon with that beautiful coloring that it has? Or the real brilliant white and he turned to some of his students. He said, Like look at the questions of the Romans. For him was you know so" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Message for Keyboard warriors - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_xOewzVcqThY&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW3SBwkJvQCDtaTen9Q%3D_1742998163.opus", "text": [ "I don't think humans have ever talked more than they talk today. When you write something on the internet, you can't get that back. Some of them you can delete people delete tweets and things but they're not deleted with the angels especially when it's about other people because then is the haqq of somebody else And there's the Qantara for Muslims like the Qanthra is going to be a problem Because the qanta you can get into paradise until you settle things with other Muslim So you make it across the sirat", "the sirat there's another stage which is the qantara for anybody you wronged they have a right at that point to demand from you so but people just don't think about this they just ma yalfidu min qawlan there is not a word uttered that it's not being recorded and now we know all these recordings all our phone calls are recorded", "We're going to show them our signs. I mean look at all the recording that's going on, hidden conversations. There are people now who get people in these gotcha situations and they record them and then put it up on the internet. The Prophet said private conversations are sacred trust. The prophet said if a man ever before he says something looks around its amanah", "But they also say don't blame somebody for... If you tell somebody the secret, a secret, don't blam them for telling someone else because they said the same thing that pulled it out of your chest, pulled it our of theirs. That's why they say, They say, The breasts of free people are the graveyards of secrets." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Rules of Intimacy in marriage - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_2OloCYUZy98&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW3SBwkJsAkBhyohjO8%3D_1748519644.opus", "text": [ "Istimta' is a mutual pleasure and both the husband and wife are entitled to that. And I mentioned that traditionally in Sharia it's considered a man's right at any time, and the reasons for that have to do with men being more prone to be overcome by their appetite. The Prophet said that a woman actually has", "appetite than a man but the modesty is so intense in a woman that it protects her whereas the man doesn't have the the Haya component as strong in him and so it can become more dangerous for him. And then a woman generally, it's once every four days and if that is not fulfilled then it can be come grounds for divorce I mentioned also I think that if a woman complains to judge about lack of sexual", "about lack of sexual intimacy, then he can command the man to sleep with his wife. And this is not considered... Ibn Arabi said it is not lack of modesty that a woman makes that demand. It should not be considered because it's praiseworthy for her to want to protect her virtue and that that is a right. So it's one of the maqasid or goals of marriage and for that reason she is not seen as an impious", "woman if she's demanding that right, if she is being neglected there. And just in terms of etiquette the etiquette of the bedroom, the Prophet he said don't go to women like a camel goes to a she-camel and then he also said send a messenger which is what it's termed in modern jargon is called foreplay and they asked him what that was and he said kissing and sweet words so that", "of his teaching was that women should be treated in that way. And Ibn Abbas said, that he liked to adorn himself, أحب أن تزين لزوجتي كما أحبة أن تتزين لي I like to become ornamented for my wife in the same way I like her to do that for me which means wearing perfume, cleaning the mouth taking care of oneself all of those are important and they're the sunnah", "both men and women. And then they should wear good clothes, they should take care of their hygiene which includes cutting nails keeping them clean for a woman things like braiding her hair using hannah, hair coloring removal of body hair and then for both man and woman obviously removal of the underarm and of the pubic hair on a regular basis", "every 40 days. People are different on that, but it's a sunnah and it's neglected sunnah by some people, but Muslims should do that. And then disrobing, it's actually encouraged to disrobe and you know there is some other traditions where they're actually in the orthodox tradition and some other religions the woman's supposed", "and things like that. I mean Muslims don't have any of that, that's another religion so there is nothing wrong with that. And then Aisha said that the Prophet he used to suck my tongue and that's related in a sound hadith and actually in traditional Chinese medicine it's considered an actual healthful thing", "the two partners to actually there's an exchange of fluid and it's considered to be a beneficial thing. And then, it's encouraged before that act that they pray two raka'ah and seek refuge from shaytan Allahumma jannibna shaitan wa janniba shaitana ma razaqtina You know keep us away from Shaitaan and keep Shaitan away from what you have provided for us", "come to any offspring if it happens to occur. And then also, especially for newlyweds a man has to be sensitive to a wife's natural modesty and shyness and take time because usually these are new things. I think one of the problems with the modern age is because of films people have seen things that in normal societies, healthy societies none", "be issues, whereas in modern society people have already seen more than they should. I mean one of the things that my ten year old was at a library and he came up to me and said there was some little girl over there who was really bothering him. She kept staring at him. He didn't understand it all. And the thing about it is traditionally little girls didn't do things like that until they", "into puberty and older. And even then, most girls would be too shy and modest whereas now the whole culture is teaching them to be immodest, to do things like that so these are really bad signs for a culture or society. In terms of pleasure, the entire body of both the male and female is permissible to derive pleasure from and give pleasure to with the exception", "It's the Prophet prohibited anal intercourse and so that's something, he actually said some strong things about what type of people do that. The next right is mutual inheritance. So shared rights are the right of inheritance between spouses based on Quranic portions.", "inherit half of your wife's share if she leave no child. And if they leave a child, then to you the fourth of that which they leave after payment of legacies they may have bequeathed or debt. And to them belongs a fourth of what you leave if you have no child and if you do have a child then an eighth of that would you leave after any legacy.\" And part of the reason for the disparity is that when children are there, the children have a legal responsibility to take care of the mother so it's important that male in all", "Male, in all the inheritance laws, the understanding has never been that a man gets more because he's better or something like that. Nobody has ever said that in the history of Islam. It's actually seen purely in economical terms. A man's responsibility is more than a woman's and there are few situations in inheritance laws where women will get more than the male relatives but generally", "the male will get more. And the point is always understood to be that the obligations are greater upon the man, to other people whereas a woman her wealth is discretionary." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/40 times a believer_s state will change - Hamza Yu__1742880964.opus", "text": [ "The mu'min's state will change 40 times in a day. And the disbeliever will stay in the same state for 40 years. Now one of the things you notice about children, if you have children or been around children they're constantly changing. A child will be happy one moment and crying the next moment.", "is because the child is always in the moment. The child, he or she, is in the Moment and the Moment is very meaningful to the child so if something happens that upsets the child because they're so present in that moment it manifests quickly in their state If something makes the child happy because they are so present it manifest in their State but there's people walking around in the world", "somnambulant. They're sleepwalkers, they haven't experienced the joy of the moment" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Adam _as__ the first human being by Shaykh Hamza Y__1743303235.opus", "text": [ "Adam is the first human being. Most of them say it's from Udmah, because he was taken from the topsoil of all the earth. That's why we have white, black, brown and yellow. We have all these different colors like red, because all of the different soils are there in Adam. So we have what they call recessive genes.", "The dominant gene is dark. We know that, so light comes out of the... And that's why Adam was tawny, he was dark and Hawa was dark. They had to have been. Hawa in Arabic is one of the meanings of it. Lahwa is very dark. So that's the first... He's the father of humanity." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Allah_s prescription for Anxiety - Shaykh Hamza Yu_ADKjz-o9e_I&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748532484.opus", "text": [ "Today it's going to be from Surah Al-Ma'arij. In that chapter Allah says, Verily or surely the human being, and insan in Arabic is the word for a human being. In fact there's a khilaf, a difference of opinion amongst the lexicographers. Most of them actually say that there is no feminine for this because", "the male and the female. It probably is related to the word unce, which is intimacy but it could also be from nesya there's a difference of opinion again amongst scholars of the language so the human being here really means the human been has ever come upon the human that he or she was not something remembered", "Arabic language also, interestingly enough, means the pupil of the eye because the human being was created for the vision of God. And so what's known as bu'bu', also in Arabic is insan, it's a pupil of The Eye and just an interesting side note about that Ibn al-Jawzi who wrote a book Tanweer Al Ghabash An Fadl Al Habsh removing the darkness on the virtues of the blacks", "mentions because at that time in his country of Iraq, he saw that the black people were being denigrated. So he wanted to write a book about the virtues of blacks. And one of the things he said is that the most extraordinary part of the human being is the pupil of the eye because vision is the greatest of all blessings and God made it pitch black. So", "the human being, halu'ah. Halu' in Arabic is a very interesting word because it sounds halaa'. It just sounds anxious just to say it like somebody...hala'. So it means to be created in a state of angst but also interestingly enough the Qur'an defines it in the next two verses so in essence in English we would say surely the human", "follow. When evil afflicts him, he panics, is distraught so he loses it, he loses his center, his equilibrium and when good befalls him, He withholds, he becomes stingy, he", "Halu' has both those meanings, and that's why what follows in the verse is an explanation of what halu' is. That the human being is created in this state. إِنَّ الْإِنسَانَ Verily. So this is a taqid or it's a strong statement. إلَّا المُصَلِّينَ And this is the mustathna in the Arabic language. Except for those who pray, al-musallin. Those are the people that are exempt from this state of hala'.", "come into the world, the very first thing that the human being does is it just starts to scream. A baby is completely anxious and what settles the baby down is the halama. It's literally the halamah in Arabic is the name for the breast, the nipple. And you give the child the halomah and it becomes haleem. It just calms down. And the word in Arabic for intellect, one of", "So the intellect only functions when you're in a state of equilibrium. And so when you lose it, when you panic, you go into fight or flight or freeze and so you lose It. So the people of prayer are people that don't panic In other words they're always reasonable their intellect is with them and they have Aqal. Those who are constant in their prayer and it's very interesting", "Ajeeba takes an ishara or a type of esoteric interpretation here, that this is the prayer of the heart. This is when a person is in constant prayer with God. But most of the Mufassirun say it means that they do the five prayers every day and they do them on time fulfilling their obligations. And then, والذين في أموالهم حق معلوم Those who in their wealth is a haq ma'loom, a fixed and known right.", "لِسَئْرِ وَالْمَحْرُومِ So this is a right that the one asking and the one who's deprived has in your wealth, if you've been given wealth. So this Is a very interesting aspect of a believer, is that those who are given wealth know that that wealth has a haqq It has a right That others are entitled to but what's interesting about this I mean obviously at the face value it's zakat so it's the tax that we pay the poor tax there's not really attacks", "but the tithing that we give, that God has demanded of us. We give for the poor people. That's 2.5% of your standing wealth if a lunar year passes over it. And also there's a whole set of zakat obligations in harvest and also in livestock. But what's interesting about this is that there's also a haqq in wealth that goes beyond zakat. A sadaqatu burhan. Charity is a proof of your faith.", "the zakat simply without having more than that zakat is something that really is dangerous for a person just like a person who never prays nafila, who only prays the fard because all of the short comes in the Fard prayer on the day of judgment are going to be corrected by the Nafla prayer. So whatever deficiencies you have in the farb, the Nafa is gonna help you with that. So this idea of haq al-ma'alum I've thought a lot about this and one of", "struck me most. For years I'd been waiting for this book, it's called Siraj al-Murideen. It's a book by the great Andrusian sixth century scholar. He was the last student of Imam Al Ghazali and that's Qadi Abu Bakr ibn al Arabi. A brilliant man just had an incredible intellect he said at the age of 13 he'd completed the 13 books of Euclid and had made an astrolabe that he was able to determine where", "though he condemns chess, he actually writes about his experience showing an Egyptian aristocrat certain moves that would improve his chess game. In any case, he was a polymath knew many many sciences but is known in the Maliki Madhab for being one of our greatest fuqaha and he was also muhadith. When he went to meet Imam al-Ghazali, he had just incredible description of coming in. He said when he first laid eyes on Imam al Ghazali", "before him, that he had been in darkness all of his life up to that point. He actually writes this in his Rehla. This was a time when Imam al-Khazari was in khalwa. He was in retreat. He wasn't really taking visitors and things. But anyway, one of the things that he says, and this really for me was a great relief. He talks about how there was a period of time there was famine and an epidemic, a wabah. And during that time, a lot of people were suffering.", "helped certain families. He could help two families and he used to give them loaves of bread every single day to help them during that time but he had a dream and he mentions, he said I fell asleep one night and I saw as if I was sitting at a table and around me were all of my students and there was one of the men amongst", "already passed away sometime before that. And we began to eat and we began then to talk, to jathabna dhayl al-hadeeth. Then one of the students said, here we are eating and satiating ourselves and yet there are needy people everywhere. How could this be? So he's feeling guilty about sitting at a banquet when", "He's seeing this in a dream. But he's feeling guilty about being in a banquet when people are out in this famine and in this epidemic. And so Ibn al-Arabi said, In the dream, فَقُطْتُ لَهُ عَلَىٰ إِسْتَحْيَاءً مِّنَ الشَّيْخِ I said out of some modesty given that my teacher was there. وَقَدْ عَالِمْتュ أَنَّهُ لَّا يَسْ تَقِلُّ بِالجُوابِ But I knew that he would not give the right response to this question because he had surpassed his teachers.", "he said, فَيَغْلِطُوا بِقِلَّةٍ مَعْرِفًا He would make a mistake because he didn't have the requisite knowledge to answer this question. So here's what he said. He said to the students اِعْنَمُوا أَنَّهُ لَا يُمكِّنُوا أنَّ عُمَّهٌ نحنُ بِأَمْوَالِنَا It's not possible for us to give our wealth to all the people We couldn't do it Even if we gave all of our wealth we would not be able to do that وَلَا یَزْمُّنَىٰ أَلَّنُ كُونَ عَلًا مِثِرِ حَالَهِمْ And also", "necessary that we are in the condition that they're in. This is the nature of the world, that there's times when people are in good times and difficult times. And then he says, this is what really struck me, but he said, but if each one of us could do what was possible to help one person, so if you took every wealthy person and he took it upon himself to help 1 or 2 people from the needy", "And then he said, and my proof, this is all in his dream. These are the dreams of the Ahliya and the Salihin. He said, my proof is that during the time of the Prophet ﷺ, during the Time of the Prophets, the Sahaba were... The companions of the prophet were in such difficulty that they were tying stones to their stomachs because of the hunger. In fact Sa'ad ibn Abi Waqas said that he spent 20 nights without food", "one night he was riding and his animal, whatever it was a donkey or a mule or a camel crushed something. And he said he ate it without even looking to see what it was. That's how hungry he was. And He said he was just fulfilling his necessity. So that's how angry he was so then he said at the time", "their roofs, it was drying the date harvest and he said they had meat in their homes من المهاجرين من كان مثرهم And some of the Muhajirin were like that also قليل جدا but very few. And the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم this is what Qadhi Abu Bakr says The Prophet صلاة الله عليه و سلام did not take their money away from them In other words it's not like a socialist state where they take the money away and force you to give it to other people because there's no test", "The test is whether you're going to fulfill your obligations or not. That's how Allah is testing you. He's testing the poor people with the wealthy people and the wealthy with the poor. Are they going to fulfil their obligations or no? If the state comes in and forces it upon you, then where's the test? There's no test. This is a very different understanding. And then he said that the Prophet was constantly telling the wealthy", "And then he was reminding constantly the poor person to be patient. And he would tell them what a greater place they had because of their patience in the afterlife for eternity. And this is something, again, in a materialistic world people don't understand this. This is where they say, oh, this is just piety and asciity. You know, there's an old union song that the communists sing", "that the communists said. It was a song that said, you know, you'll eat by and by, you're going to die. You know, that pie in the sky. So they were making fun of the religious people telling people to be patient. We're actually believers. And the thing about the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, the Prophet Salah Alayhi Salaam went through the most difficult time. They said, Sallallaahu Alaihe Wasallama, he would never go to bed without making sure that people were taken care of.", "I actually did my own calculation, and I worked out that the Prophet ﷺ fed over 500,000 meals to the homeless people of the Ahl al-Sufa. Because I worked 70—on average 70—and then I worked at the time he was in Medina feeding them every single day. He fed at least 500, 000 meals to homeless people. And when he was asked what is the best Islam?", "He said, أن تطعم الطعام That you feed people. This is what the Muslims did. We should have food banks at this time. We Should be helping people in their need These are the things that Muslims do and this is how also that People recognize by their fruits ye shall know them The Christians know that And so when they see Muslims doing things like this Really helping people and people there's a lot of good people doing this and I know that there's free clinics", "free clinics, there's other things. But these are the things that Muslims should be doing if they want to really help and that's what this verse is saying, that in their wealth they have haq ma'doom so if you've been given the benefit of wealth you should be helping people We have a wonderful sister Asma in Baltimore one of the most beleaguered cities in the United States of America but we have this wonderful lady who has a shelter for people she takes in all these battered women", "women and people that have to, and she struggles. These are the people that we should be helping. These other people really need our help. Another person is Yusuf Wiley who's down in Southern California helping inmates who've been released, helping them transition. And he's somebody who has great experience in that. He himself went through immense tribulation so there are lots of things that Muslims can do. That haq ma'num", "we're going to be asked about it. And that's why after that Allah says, See, it's immediately after that because the Prophet said, Guard yourselves against the fire even with half a date. And once Aisha was sitting with one of her relatives and a beggar came by and she gave him half a grape. Grapes were very precious but they came from Ta'if.", "She gave him half a grape. And the person that was sitting with her said, does that benefit? And she said, how many atoms do you think are in that grape? Because on the Day of Judgment, you won't do an atom's weight of good except you'll see it. And so even half a date, just doing something. And", "They believe in the day of judgment. And Qadhi Abu Bakr, going back to him, he has a chapter on Yom El Hisab, the Day of Reckoning. The Muhasib is like the accountant. Every business has an accountant and that accountant hopefully is making sure that your income is greater than your outcome. And so the day", "will be recorded. It's all being recorded and so we come on that day and that's why Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says they believe in the last day and then it says وَالَّذِينُ هُمْ مِنْ عَذَابِ رَبِّهِمْ مشفقٌ That they have fear of their Lord's punishment. So even though they're believers, they don't feel secure like Abu Bakr Siddiq said that if I had one foot", "feel secure until I was firmly in paradise and so this is something that the believers have, they actually have a sense of the momentousness, the awe of that day. And there's a hadith from Abu Hurairah where the Prophet said on that day Allah will meet his servant", "Didn't I honor you? Didn't give you a position? Didn' I leave you to enjoy life? Indeed, You did. Did you think that you were going to meet me? No! Today I forget you just as you had forgotten me.", "The Quran reminds us that the verses come to them and they forgot them. So on that day, they're forgotten. This is what Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala says to him. And then the second he says,", "camels and horses. And I gave you this position, and let you enjoy your life. Indeed. Didn't you think you were going to meet me? I forget you just as you've forgotten me. And then the next one comes, and the next", "Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala, He says, Read your book, the Book of Your Deeds. And suffice your own soul as your reckoner because the human being knows. Human beings know what they've done even if he gives all of his excuses. So then for the believer right?", "And when he sees his situation, he thinks I'm going to perish unless I get the sabaqa of the husna from Allah, the grace from God. And then وضعت له لا إله إلا الله في كفة الميزان. And so this is a great gift", "a great gift to the believers. But this is what Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says about that day, that they believe in the last day. They believe in Yawm al-Hisaab and they're preparing for it. The Prophet ﷺ used to do death remembrance every day. And he said أَكْثِرُوا مِّن ذِكْرِ هَذَمَ الَّذَّاتِ Do much remembrance of the destroyer of pleasure because much of life is matah. We have our tribulations but we also have", "a great deal of enjoyment and food, companionship, wealth, security, homes, all these things that Allah has given us. These are great blessings but there is a reckoning, there is an account. This is what Allah says. Then He reminds us, They're not secure from that punishment. Nobody should feel secure. I always marvel at certain religions who believe they're saved.", "saved. Because first of all, they don't know if they're going to lose their faith. There's people that lose their face even in those religions. There are people who were believers and then come out with a book why I don't believe in God anymore. There is even preachers that come out as atheists or come out of their closet or whatever they were doing and say this. I was once on an airplane with my friend and brother Fredo Maggiadudin", "he realized that his own sexual appetites weren't consonant with his Christianity. So, he gave up his Christianity, that's what he told us. He gave up His Christianity and I just looked down and said, I'm really sorry for you, you know, that you would give up the eternal for the temporal. So that's one of the tragedies of life on earth is that people do lose their faith and that's why , that human beings panic when trials come to them. They lose it", "There's people that lose their faith. But then you have to question, did they have faith in the first place? Because the whole purpose of faith is to get you through all those difficulties. I mean, the word in Arabic for believer is mu'min billah, the one who secures himself with God. I", "They are secure. Those people are in a state of security who believe and don't commit shirk. They're in a State of Security, and so then Allah says those who protect their private parts, and that means that they protect their privacy except in the confines of marriage in lawful sexual relations because sexual relations outside of what God has permitted it leads to", "it leads to لا تقرب زينة إنه كان فاحشا وساء السبيل do not go near adultery or fornication the Arabs have one word for it زين because it's an obscenity, it's foul it's a فاح ش و سأ سبير and it takes you down a terrible way and all you have to do is google the statistics on STDs and on all the things that happen to people who transgress these حدود ترك حدوذ الله فلا تعتدوها", "of God, so don't go beyond them because the hadood are there to protect us. This is God's mercy towards us it's not anything else, it's Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala's mercy toward us and so this is what Allah says that they guard their private parts That's not blameworthy if its rightful and lawful", "And those who go beyond that, they are the transgressors. They have transgressed the limits and those limits are not just moral limits, they're biological limits and they will have repercussions. And one of the tragedies in American society, and I apologize for people because I know we've had people from all over listening to this but in the American context, but this applies everywhere. One of the", "the virtue of chastity because the great virtue of a woman is chastening. This is not sexist, it's not to say this there's nothing wrong with saying this because a woman far more susceptible to venereal diseases than a man is just because in nature of the epithelial lining and this is why the STDs amongst women are much higher they don't tell them that and it's a crime to these poor girls that think that they can be promiscuous", "like some men do and not suffer the same consequences. No, it's much worse. It's worse for them. And it's bad for men. And chastity is a virtue for men as well as women. But women traditionally guarded that. The women of the Arabian Peninsula, sometimes when they were taken from tribes who would come, they would raid other tribes and defeat them and take the women as captives.", "want a man to take them. And this happens, and there's cultures where women do this. I mean, it's a tragedy. I think the rape of the Sabines is one of the great masterpieces of Western art. It's horrible when things break down. It' s the women who suffer. That's why if you have a society where you say masculinity is toxic, where you take away men's chivalry and the idea that they're there to defend", "That will work temporarily in a culture that has still a civil society. But when things break down, look what happens. Who suffers? Everybody suffers, but the ones that suffer the most are the women and children. If you don't believe me, just ask the poor Yazidi girls about what happened to them. Where were the chivalrous men then? Where were", "horrible, bestial ravaging of men that should not even be entitled to the name man. And even to call them a beast would be unfair. Demons are the only word that is appropriate for people like that. Demands. Because even animals don't do these things. Animals take what they need and they leave the rest. Have you ever watched those animal channels? They'll show the lion", "But then they catch one zebra, and then they all go back to eating. Because they know the lion's not... It's not like a man who comes in there and just kills everybody. The lion just takes what it needs. They say, oh, you know, poor Herbert. He's lunch today for the lion, but we're all okay. And that's what happens in the animal kingdom. But humans know. They gloat in their ability to inflict cruelty on others. These are the horrors. So this is what Allah's telling us. These", "والذين هم لأمانتهم وأهدهم رعون Those who shepherd well, who watch and guard their sacred trusts and their covenants. This is a hallmark of believers. The Prophet used to say many, many times أَلَا لَا إِيمَانَ لِمَنْ لَأَمَانِةَ لَهُ Three times. And he said this many times. The Sahaba said that whoever is not trustworthy, he has no faith.", "no faith. And this is something also it's important to remember that, you know, what's up with you? How are you judging? Do you make Muslims like criminals? But you should also not make criminals like Muslims because there's a big difference between the righteous and those who lack righteousness. One of the most fascinating verses in the New Testament", "that whoever feared God and did right in whatever land he was from would be pleasing to the Lord. That's an indication about a truth that many Christians, I don't think have reflected on that verse. But we see that, that people that believe in God and are righteous, those are the people that God loves. One of the heretics once said", "money for a hand he said what's up with a hand that is worth 500 dinars as a dia like if you cause somebody to lose their hand you have to pay them 500 gold coins yet it gets cut off in just a quarter of a dinar so he's like that doesn't make sense to me", "Maliki scholar, he said that the dignity of its trustworthiness made it of great value but its treachery made it worthless and another said when it was trustworthy it was precious but when it became treacherous", "important to recognize that, that there's a big difference between the righteous and between others. It's also very dangerous to think of yourself as righteous. We ask Allah to make us amongst those who are righteous because we don't know if in God's eyes we're criminals. May Allah forgive us. But that's important to remember that those people that are out stealing and doing horrible things, I mean, that doesn't matter. Two wrongs don't make a right. You can't say, oh,", "Allah, Subhanahu wa ta'ala, inshallah. We're the people that stay within the hudud and so that's one of the huda is that we don't do that and that's why there's going to be oppression in this world and the oppression won't end until the world ends. It's the nature of the abode and if you haven't worked that out yet just give it some time. You'll get there eventually. If you have enough life on earth you'll realize anybody who knows history and that part of the problem with modern people they don't study history. They don't read,", "steady. They don't think about things. I heard somebody interviewed recently who, he's a very famous poet but he's old now. He said you know I'm getting very interested in history and the person asked him why? He said because I realize I'm about to become history. People don't thing about that, that we are going to leave the world but history is important and that's why one third of the Quran is sacred history. One third of", "again in different ways with nuances but they're essentially the same stories of people being oppressed that if you believe in God, you're going to be oppressed. You're going have difficulties. This is just dunya. It is dunya and that story's repeated over and over again to let you know that on the day of judgment, believe it or not, on the Day of Judgment and we are people who believe on the", "when they are all manifest before God. Nothing is hidden from God from them, and God says who has the dominion now? All the tyrants, all the oppressors, all that dominions that they held, they're all gone! On that day every soul will be recompensed for what it earned. There's no oppression today.", "That's what Allah says. That's the only day where there won't be oppression So if you don't have patience to wait If you think you can get justice now, you will never get justice in the dunya If somebody wrongfully kills somebody, you know what justice is in our religion? $150,000 approximately that's what you get 150 thousand dollars. That redressing the wrong according to Sharia They pay the Diyah if it's a private crime The family can forgive if it public crime then the family", "then the family doesn't have the right to forgive. But if it's a wrongful death and it wasn't intentional, then it's adiyah. That's what's paid. $150,000. That is dunya justice. How do you replace a life? $150k. That' sharia. A thousand gold dinars. That sharia might be a little higher now because gold is higher but the point is that this worldly justice, the real justice on the day of judgment", "And I'll end here. It's been a long podcast. If you're wise, you won't want justice. You'll want mercy because the Prophet ﷺ said, من لا يرحم لا يورحم Those who don't show mercy, mercy will not be shown. If he wants justice, that's fine. You can have justice but just know by the standard that you judge shall ye be judged. That's it. So God is Al-Adl", "He doesn't begin his book in the name of God, the just, the revenger of wrongs. That's not how he does it. Bismillah al-adhal al-muntaqim. He begins it, Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Raheem, in the Name of Allah, the merciful, the compassionate. Big difference. Thank God. And then Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala says, وَالَّذِينُ هُمْ بِشَهَادَتِهِمْ قَائِمُونَ Those who are resolute and firm in their testimony.", "Testimonies. So they're upright in their testimonies. They don't lie, they don't make false accusations. This is really important but also I mean we could look at it in an Ishaara sense there are also people that establish their Shahada with Allah . And then finally, وَالَّذِينُهُمْ عَلَى صَرَاطٍ يُحَافِظُونَ so it begins with إِلاً مُصَلِّينَ and the very first quality is that they're constant in their prayers", "Those who is like to guard your prayer. That they make sure that their prayer is done on time with the requisite conditions, fulfilling the fara'id, the sunan and hopefully the mandubat, the obligations, the practices of the Prophet that were consistent and also all of the recommended things. And then Allah says They are in paradise", "are in paradises, honored. That's the ikram of Allah ." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Anas R A said this about Prophet - Sheikh Hamza Yu__1742886461.opus", "text": [ "Anas who served him, his little boy. His mother brought him she said I want him to be serve you and this became a great Muhadith But Anas said he served me more than I served him He said he never once said to me oof" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Bad Thoughts Aren_t Always Yours -- Shaykh Hamza Y_axW1DRXhl-o&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748536174.opus", "text": [ "The evidence for determinism is extremely high. Many mathematicians who are not believers are deterministic, like they really believe that the world is going to be determined. And you look at all the variables whatever happens could not happen and nothing else could have happened when you take in all of the variables", "people and this is in Imam al-Bukhari's collection of the Sahih, he heard some people reciting the Quran and it was different from the way that Prophet had taught him. And he's one of the great Quran reciters, Ubayy ibn Ka'b. So he hears it and then he hears another one and it's different. And He said where did you get that reading from? They said the Prophet taught us. So He takes them to the Prophet and He said Ya Rasulullah these men are reading Quran", "Everything came together to create this perfect story. And that person was just right there at that time, because the kids were there. They allowed him to have ease of facilitation in his family and he wanted to give her a blessing. That's a misjid. MashaAllah. But this is one of the things that makes it very difficult", "Iblis, it was Waswasa. And this is very important. There's a very important distinction between Waswas and between your own inner what's called Hadith al-Nafs. Hadith an-Nefs and Waswas are two different things so you can have thoughts that are very foul, that are horrible, that you don't like. These you should see them...and I mentioned this earlier, Dr. Cleary talked about the uninvited guest and the host. You have to distinguish", "that are uninvited into your heart but they just come in as uninviting guests and you have to dispel them. And so he had this, and then he said the Prophet saw what was what had come over him like some kind of something a spiritual state and he struck him in his chest and he said it was is as if I saw God before me in complete awe.", "like he suddenly had to those two like an enlightened divides so there's the skeptic and he is saying we use one of the most important people for transmitting the Quran then there's be out the province did a type of you know that I could world-type cardioversion knowledge a spiritual cardio version on him from those which was quite stunning in the problem I'm also a man once came to empirical complaining about his heart put his hand on his heart", "you have some heart trouble. And he said, go to Haris Ibn Khalidah who was the great Yemeni physician who'd studied in Jundishapur in Iran with the traditional... He studied in the medical school in Persia so he was one of the few Arab doctors. So the Prophet, I think, was like scanning... He was doing like an echocardiogram with his hand and then referred him to the specialist.", "that he created itself. In any case, make the Quran the spring of my heart. It's such a beautiful dua. Bring my heart to life with this book. And make it the light of my breast, of my chest. Make it the", "make it this radiating light within my breast. There's also a riwayat, Jala'ah Huzni and the difference between the two is subtle but it essentially has the same meaning. If it has a Fatha, Jalaa Huzne then its Kashif, its to yikshif, to uncover.", "It's the murhib, it's the hab. It's to make it go. So one is to uncover the other is to make you go. They essentially have the same meaning so that you'll see that both related. Jila ahbizni wa jala ahbizzni wa rahab ha-hummi and the removal of my anxiety. And hum is very interesting because the Prophet said that we treat them like people of the book. Alhammu musfal haram", "that we will be judged according to our actions. And this is what I really think, this word if we translated it today would be stress. That's the word we use. Hum is whatever's preoccupying you. It's what's really troubling your mind. It' s what you're thinking about. It is what occupies your thoughts and when people are stressed out then they have humum. So the hum", "The Prophet said, stress is half of aging. And you can see people when they go through very stressful situations, you can them within one year it's as if they've aged ten years. Many people have seen this and experienced this. People's hair turns gray, they grow bald just from so much stress. So stress really could age people", "the releasing. I mean we know all now about free radicals and all these things but the Prophet was really a stress-free individual because he had complete trust in Allah . And because this dua which he recited often, was answered obviously so the Qur'an would remove his hum.", "you're doing the action, but Allah is the one that has enabled you. But it's actually your action so they... The result is the same and that's why these are really the differences to me are problematic because the view of the two is the thing that you earn your actions. It's whether or not it's a direct immediate creation. It'a new creation and that where the asheris differ from the atheri. But we believe that", "that we have free will and the people are responsible. And in the end, only Allah can judge people because there's too many variables. If you look at human history, the vast majority of people... I mean if you look in this country for instance, people didn't know anything about Islam for a very long time. Now all they know is a distorted version of Islam so we can't judge people like if you want to say they're kuffar,", "The kafir is somebody who knows the truth and rejects it. And Imam al-Ghazali was of the view, anyone who's actively searching for the truth will be saved even if they die before getting it. He says that very clearly in Faisal Al-Tafriqa. And he's as orthodox as you can get according to the dominant view. So it's a very difficult one but you have to believe", "responsible for your actions. Do not blame things on God, but once things have happened the best thing to do is accept it that that's the qadr and this relieves you of the burden of like oh my god if I only did this or if I did that nothing else could've happened once its happened but before its happened you have to see yourself as fully responsible. Once its happened", "If you did something wrong, and hopefully if you did right, you also get the reward for that. But you have to see it as nothing else could've happened. So it's like having bifocals. You can't look at this thing without seeing it at these two levels. Allah ta'ala ala." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Before you mock the flat earthers - Shaykh Hamza Y_EZlSrA2RK0E&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743299842.opus", "text": [ "There's actually a movement out there now, the Flat Earth Movement. And we shouldn't laugh at them because in some ways it's much more reasonable to believe that it is flat than round. It takes a lot of very advanced mathematics. Traditionally, the two most important subjects in our tradition are what they call the Aslan and Osul-ud-Din and Osu-l-Fiqh. So Osu l-Uddin is also called", "called Tauhid, it's called later became known as Ilm al-Kalam or the knowledge of dialectics because it was a type of rational theology that emerged in the tradition. And then Usul al Fiq is the principles, the axioms also means root but here it's used to what things are built upon", "upon or what they're based upon. So, Asul al-Bayt, the foundation of a house is called the Asul Al Bayt. So the origin means root so asala is something that he has deep roots. Aseel is something in Morocco they have what's called the original teaching", "the original teachings. So it's something that is the foundation of something, it's what everything is built upon and so Usul al-Din is what the religion is built on which is Tawheed And Tawheed essentially it's an interesting word because it's a Masdar in Western categorizations It's a masdar or the verbal noun of a second form Which is Wahada", "which means to make one. So tawhid literally means the making of one, and it's you making God one in your heart because in many people's hearts there are multiple gods. People worship a lot of different things, and so tawhi is actually you are muwahid, you make something one in", "In fact, the only reason that you can communicate is because you are muwahid by fitrah. So everything is actually... The basis of communication is seeing the one and the many. This is one of the great mysteries in metaphysics. The one and then any is the great subject of metaphysics so and one is a mysterious number. In fact the monad what the Greeks called monas the monads not a numbers", "not a number. It's considered the parent of numbers. So one in Arabic, wahid is not a numbe. Numbers begin with two. So 1 begets 2 and then from the 2 is multiplicity. And that's why a male and female come, the third is the child so this is the act of creation it begins with duality.", "He created everything in duality. Creation is based on duality, without duality there isn't the creation that we know but the duality is to take you to the one because the two comes from the one. The one is the parent of two and that's why any number times 1 is itself because the one is always hidden inside multiplicity so", "any number by one, it becomes that thing because the one is hidden in it. He's first, last, he's apparent and he's inapparent, he' s hidden. So Allah is hidden, he hides himself and then you have to seek him out. The Ohlone Indians that were here they were the Indians that we're here before the Spanish got here. The ohlone indians I read a book on them", "a metaphysical version of our version because in our version of hide and seek right everybody goes and hides and what happens one person is high uh one person has to go out and find all the other the alonees had one person hide and everybody had to go find that one person that's actually a more appropriate way", "doing here. We're seeking the one and so we are muwahidun by nature, we're making everything's one and we're taking everything into one. If you take...we have 99 names and all numbers exist between 1 & 9 right? That's all numbers exists", "that's producing everything. And so, that's the Usul. Usur al-Din is all to understand the one, to get to the One. Fa'aram annahu la ilaha illa Allah Know that there is no God except Allah. So you have to know oneness. You have to the oneness of Allah. Qul huwa Allahu ahad Say, God is One. That's Tawheed.", "fiqh is dealing with multiplicity. So, and these are the two, the one and the many. So fiqhh, fiqhl akbar, that's how Abu Hanifa phrased it, fi qal akbar deals with tawhid and God and God's nature that we can know. The fiqhil asghar is the lesser understanding which is the understanding of how we were created so how do we behave in creation?", "And that's what Usul al-Fiqh is the foundation of that. So just like you have Usul ad-Din as the foundation tohid, Usul fiqh it's the foundation for multiplicity. It's the foundations working in the world of multiplicity, like how do we live in the World? And we live on the world as Muslimun submitted to principles and this is where things get confusing for a lot of Muslims especially modern Muslims", "especially modern Muslims, is that they don't understand that the ahkam are not... There are very few things that are carved in stone. Like Musa alayhi salam brought the Ten Commandments. Those are carved on stone because you can't change those. There's no religion that's going to say you can covet your neighbor's wife or that you can steal or that", "honor your parents. Those are written in stone, the Ten Commandments. So he brought them in stone because you're not supposed to change those even though they're doing that. But then there's all these other rules that are contextualized and much of the Sharia what we call Sharia are those principles. The Fiqh is how we understand the application of those principles in the real world", "I don't have that many lectures unfortunately, but what I'm going to try to do even though this is more of an advanced Level traditionally in the potable in The secret knowledge would study or solid thick much later First you would do the food work. I mean the first thing Traditionally you would memorize Quran and then you learn a little bit of Arabic And then you learned basic thick and then we study more in depth grammar usually", "and then more advanced fiqh, and then you would study more advanced grammar. So there was a system. Most of our religious colleges had a system of scaffolding where they would teach. But we're in a time where people have to understand the basic principles because there's so much confusion. And this confusion is really leading", "as a madman's religion. I mean, there are a lot of people that view Islam as a crazy religion now and this is actually a profoundly reasonable faith. In fact, I would argue, and I'm really not exaggerating, it's the most reasonable of all the faiths. And there are people... Bruno Guardadoni is a good example. Bruno Guarda-doni if you don't know who he is. He's one of the world's top cosmologists", "top cosmologists. A cosmologist studies universe formation, like how all of this began. He's got literally hundreds of peer-reviewed articles he was running. I don't know what he's doing now but he was the observatory in Lyon in France. He was used to help decode some of the background radiation coming from the edges of the universe that they were trying", "in the modern world. I found out about him by reading an article in the Herald Tribune in Morocco, which is... The International Herald-Tribune is the New York Times outside of America. But they had an article about this cosmologist named Bruno Gurdadoni. And I was reading this article and nowhere it mentioned that he was Muslim but I felt like he sounds like a Muslim because he said the universe is all signs", "and those signs need to be decoded, and it's as if the design was meant for us to understand it. And he was talking in that type of language. So I looked him up, and lo and behold, I found that he had actually become Muslim. And then I read his conversion story, and he said that he always had a belief, but he decided to study the religions, and as a cosmologist, he found them to be difficult for him to accept. Now there's an argument of the two magisteria", "magisteria this is Stephen Jay Gould's argument that these are they should be non overlapping the magisterial in other words science has its domain religion has its dome and like the east and the west never the twain shall meet some people find that unreasonable so you have scientists that reject religion and you have religionists that rejects", "people out there, we have flat earthers because the Bible says that the earth is flat. There's no proof that it's round even though the ancient Greeks said it was round so they could see the curvature of the Earth on the shadow of the moon. The Muslims generally common people thought it was flat but most of the ulama thought it as round. But we have Flat Earthers still to this day and there's actually a movement out there now, the Flat Earth Movement", "it's actually much more reasonable to believe that it's flat than it is round. It takes a lot of very advanced mathematics to actually arrive, we've all just been brainwashed because we saw globes since we were little and we saw this right? And I'm not making this up, it took 500 years to convince people that it was round so the Flat Earthers are actually in a more fitra state then others but my point is that", "There are people that just reject science. They reject the age of the earth, they reject lots of things because they don't square with their understanding of scripture which is often literalist even though traditionally Christians, the Catholic Church certainly never took the Bible literally. The six days were never understood to be six literal days. Augustine and others wrote about that so but there is a literalist approach.", "to this. So the point being is that these two are often very difficult to harmonize. Muslims traditionally did not have a problem with science, they actually felt that the Qur'an encouraged science. Look at , go out and look examine embryologies in the Qurán seeking knowledge is in the Quran outward knowledge was very important", "Muslims really were very active in seeking science and we had great scientists historically, really brilliant. It's been said if there was a Nobel Prize 1,000 years ago they all would have been Muhammad and Abdullah and right? Really! They would have but that was a thousand years ago, right? Now I think there was one man from Pakistan or something, right, and then people say he wasn't even Muslim. So I once said a Muslim", "I got the bill they said no he wasn't a Muslim okay his name was Abdel Qader I think or something so I thought okay Abdel qadir, Al-Qadir. I believe in al-qadir he's Abdel-Qa'der anyway so Bruno Gherbidoni said that Islam was the only religion that he felt as a cosmologist who was not having to set aside his science and", "And that's just an amazing statement. So you can see how far we've fallen in presenting this religion and how it should be presented, because it really is just an incredibly reasonable faith. And scholars always place reason, aqal was very high. Imam al-Ghazali begins the Ihya with Kitab al-'Ilm. He ends it with an ode to the intellect and how important the intellect is and how the intellect has to be cultivated", "cultivated. That revelation has to be supported by aqal, that without aql the revelation can actually become very dangerous which we can see people that aren't using their aqa but they're using what they think is revelation and I've made an argument that without intellect, without the filter of the intellect you know when you look at the sun right? When they have eclipses even", "you have to look through a filter, right? Why? What's that? Why is it dangerous though? Why ? Yeah the light's too powerful, right. So it burns the retina doesn't it? It burns the Retina just and then you're blind or you'll see dots for the rest of your life, right?.", "That's the only way you can look at the sun safely. Revelation is like the sun, it illuminates everything but you have to look at it through the filter of the intellect because if you don't, it will burn you literally and unfortunately it'll burn others so that the aql is the filter and this is not Mu'tazilite doctrine people there are all these people saying we need to revive Mu'taziism", "Ahl al-Sunnah wa Jama'ah. This is traditional Sunni doctrine, right? Are there any teachers here? I need confirmation. Is anybody here who's teaching? One of the teachers at the Rihla. Nobody? Sheikh Wali. Am I making this up? Thank you. Because some people they don't believe. They just think no he's making this", "It's a reasonable faith. There are some things that are called ma'qul, they're rational, we can understand them. And then there's some things called taabudi, they are devotional but our ulama said even the devotional it's only the reason is hidden from us but we know there's a reason right? So that's a really important aspect of our faith and that's why if it's not reasonable", "it's not our tradition. If it doesn't sound reasonable, and I'm talking about healthy intellect, fitrah, an intellect that's healthy because there's a lot of people that aren't well but somebody who's well... When somebody converts to Islam if they converted from Christianity the things their parents taught them are as true in Islam as they were true in their previous faith", "you're not entering into some other type of belief. These are universal truths that you'll find in many faiths, but we have some unique qualities in our faith and one of them is the reasonable nature of our Sharia. And this is why what I'd like to do is just give you an idea of what Usul al-Fiqh is", "Khulasa, a summary of Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayez. What he's doing in his revival of the methodology of husu. There are different schools in usul al-fiqh but there is something which is called the maqasidi school which it's always been there in reality but it really begins to formulate with one of the great shafi'i scholars Imam Al Juwaini", "Al-Jawaini. They call him Imam al-Haramayn. He was a great scholar from Nisapur. He's from the Arab tribe. He is an Arab scholar from Fa'id, in the tribe of Fa'ad. And he arguably was the most brilliant scholar of his time. He fortunate and this is always a great blessing for a great teacher to have great students and he did get great students but his greatest student was Abu Hamad al-Fasabi.", "In fact, arguably his student surpassed him in his knowledge. Now one of the things about Abu Hamid which is to me deeply troubling is that the Sufis have completely taken Abu Hamad hostage and so there's all these people that think Abu Hamada Ghazali is a Sufi.", "and seriously, arguably the greatest scholar of fiqh that this Ummah ever produced. And that is easily debatable from any of the Madhhabs. Abu Hamid was a great critic of the Sufis. And if you read the Ihyaa, you will see his criticisms but the biggest criticism that you'll find is in his Rasail", "One of his letters, he actually says... He wrote a little treatise called To unveil the fact that all of creation is deluded. So he goes through each group like the scholars and their delusions, the merchants and their", "with the Sufis, and when he gets to them, he said, and how great is this group's delusions? And then he starts talking about they're deluded in the way they dress. They always mark themselves off from other people. They're deluted in their speech. They are deluded who they think they are, right? God's elect, right. So now that is not to say that tasawwuf is not important. Very important.", "definitely was committed to the methodology of Dasoul as a way of what's called Tazkiyah." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Cats and Dogs getting depressed - Shaykh Hamza Yus_Fw-ncswImU0&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743297072.opus", "text": [ "Speciesism, you know these kind of people that argue that there's no... There shouldn't be any hierarchy in species. Yeah I mean our view on that the Muslim view I'm saying I think the vast majority Muslims would conclude that was just crazy yeah I mean you can't equate like a mosquito with a dog or cat and you can equate a dog", "equate a dog or cat with human being. I mean, we should cherish animals and treat them well. And the provost was very good to animals. You know he said don't slaughter an animal in front of another animal. He said don' kill them twice because they are sentient. If they see an animal killed, they feel it. Animals grieve, we know that. Dogs get depressed, cats can be depressed, we", "but they're not rational beings like we are. So I think this is part of the modern madness, of just the modern world is... You know, it's gone mad. What can we say? A poet said quite some time ago, We're in a time of such extreme madness that the one not driven", "it was not sane in the first place. So I don't know, I mean it's very odd these things but the way animals are treated is horrific and I think there's an argument for not eating like I know a rabbi who gave up meat not because he's against meat because in the Torah but because he is against unethical treatment of modern husbandry. The way chickens are raised is just sick", "sick. So I think there's a real solid ethical case for getting back to just small, local, free-range type things where animals are treated with dignity because they are creatures of God and they shouldn't be beaten or... And they will have their day according to the Hadith. The Prophet said they're going to have their", "And they couldn't imagine things talking like hands. Allah said, the one that made you talk will make everything talk. The earth will talk. Everything will talk Allah can't make them talk. I mean now boxes talk. You have these ridiculous things Siri. Boxes talk. Allah can not make a cow talk.", "We can make a box talk. But I can't make a cow talk. I don't think so." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Change your life_s perspective - Shaykh Hamza Yusu_-b_JGGx3jrs&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743305780.opus", "text": [ "Because this science is based on the good opinion of Allah and the good opinions of the servants of Allah. That's something that we've lost, our community. We often assume the worst about people if somebody is late, the assumption is they could care less about the appointment. What the Prophet said one of the hallmarks of believers", "excuses for people. And the munafiq is always looking to find faults in people, so it's something central to belief is that people who believe have a good opinion of other people. Now one of the things that in social sciences is that when you have expectations of people they often will respond to your expectation and I'll give an example of that. There was a study done", "of students that were all D students and they put them in a class. And they told the teacher that these were the best students that they had last year, this was actually done in the US. And the teacher thought that they were all like gate students gifted children. That class ended up all becoming A students.", "Because the teacher's expectation was so high. And what often happens is when teachers look at students, how they behaved previously, they make the assumption this is a C student. There's a kind of bell curve assumption about classes. Almost every teacher now because the bell curve is such an idol in our culture. So there's an assumption that you're going to have a certain amount of A's,", "and a certain amount of Ds, and a set amount of Fs. It's an assumption. And sure enough every year the tests and everything predict that. Now when I took statistics at the university, I asked the professor have they ever done a bell curve on the teachers to see if there were more As in excellent teachers? You know like is the bell curve just confirming", "of C students. So, and he said yeah that's a really good idea because people don't think of things from other dimensions but generally what's found is student teachers excellent teachers often inspire students in classes so they become better students because there's more motivation", "people is very important. There's a recent book that I think, this is something I've known intuitively and I've also known from the Sunnah and I really believe in it and it's the way I tried to raise my children but the book is called A Case Against Adolescence by Robert Epstein and he's a psychiatrist and what he did is he studied the phenomenon of adolescent rebellion", "In looking at the social sciences, what he found is in countries where there really isn't an adolescence when people reach puberty they begin to be treated like adults. They don't have the phenomenon of teenage rebellion and so he's come up with a theory that Robert Ellis who is a well-known I'm not particularly like his school of psychology but he was very well respected", "in emotive behavioral therapy. He's a very well respected psychiatrist, but he said it was the most revolutionary book he'd ever read and what this man is arguing is that the reason young people are rebelling is because they're still being treated like children. John Taylor Gatto told me about a group of students who were in Harlem and these were the worst students in this school", "They were all antisocial, they rebellious, had no respect for the teacher. And so what this teacher did is he made a deal with the principal of the school that he would teach his class at the junior college and so these high school students would go to junior college. He told them I'm putting you guys in college.", "The change in these young people just amazed this teacher. It was like an overnight, suddenly they wanted to behave like adults. They were in college. They didn't want to behave likes punks anymore because they wanted it to behave the other college students and so much of what's going on is just that assumption if you expect these people to rebel and behave like children and you treat them with those assumptions", "respond in turn. Whereas if you have adult expectations of a 15 year old, you'll be surprised. So there's so much in what we assume about other people and that's why he is beginning this book like that. He is making the assumption that you are sincere in your love of God. It's beautiful.", "is they keep people down. A true teacher wants his student to even surpass him or her, that's a true teacher. They want the student to be better than they are. Theywant them to master the subject better than their mastered it. That's their real desire but false teachers want to keep people in a state of dependency on them and a type of servitude", "And that's why eventually you outgrow your teacher if you're a serious student. And it doesn't mean that you don't have respect for them anymore, It's just that he has freed you by that education that you've gotten so you are no longer dependent on that teacher like Imam Shafi'i was a student of Imam Malik but at a certain point he started disagreeing with Malik Why? Because Malik had done his job He freed his mind to think for himself", "But false teachers want to keep people trapped in their own thought cycles. They don't want them to go against them or to disagree with them. On the other hand, ignorant students tend to go agains their teachers before they even have mastered the science. They just disagree that's another problem so it goes both ways. The principle of حسن البنان", "my wife knows it, people that are close to me know that. I've had several people think that they came up to me and said Salaam to me, and I just ignored them. And actually say that, and tell people that. Like he's arrogant, I went up to him and I said Selaam Alaikum right to his face, and he just ignored me. I'd never do that to anybody. First of all legally I'm obliged to say, even if I didn't want to say Selaama Alaikum,", "I'm not going to do something that's... You have to say it. I wouldn't do that just because it's my deen, and I wouldn' t do it humanly because I don't like to do that. I try not to treat people like that. But when I realized Asad was there, I said, Oh excuse me, wa alaikumussalam, I didn't mean to ignore you. He said, No, no, I know Shaykh because he knows me.", "he's preoccupied, he didn't hear me. Su'abhan is to think He just ignored me. So the thing about it is maybe the person did ignore you that's possible. Maybe they are arrogant that's Possible but maybe they're not and so the idea is that you err on the side of goodness That's the essential difference between the Sunni and the Shia The Shia have a bad...not all of them", "a bad opinion of Abu Bakr and Omar. They actually think they usurp the... And then, they have a bad opnion of Muawiyah, Amir ibn al-As. We what we say, we believe like Muawiya was wrong. That's our opinion but we believe that he had a sincere intention. That is our assumption about maybe it's wrong. Do you know? Maybe it is.", "on the Yawm al Qiyamah, maybe it's wrong. Maybe Mu'awiya had a bad intention but we don't believe that because Allah knows the hearts what we're saying is he's a Sahabi The Prophet spoke well of him He came late there's no doubt about that. He's not from the Khulafa Ar-Rashidin and Mahdiyin. He made mistakes He started the dynasty in Islam. He did certain things", "that his Islam was a true Islam, he wasn't a hypocrite and that he made the best of this situation. That's our opinion, that's Hussan Ad-Dhan. The other opinions say no, he was bad, his intentions were bad, that is why he did it. It's a completely different methodology. And so when you have Hussin Ad-Dan as a principle in communities", "to live in a community like that. It's a lot less psychologically taxing because one of the most draining things in life is dealing with psychodramas. It just drains you of energy when people have all these dramas and he said, and she said, I know they did it on purpose and I know that they were trying to spite me. Just think of how much energy you've wasted in your life", "your life on conversations like that. It's just, and there's too much work to do. There's orphans to take care of. There're widows to take carer of.There are poor people who need food on their plates. There are injured people that need to be cared for. There is ignorant people that needs to be taught. There thirsty people that needed to be given drink. I mean there's lots to do in the world. You just don't have that kind of time to expend all that human energy because", "God, to have energy to do things and to waste that energy in these kind of... Whereas if you just have a good opinion of people it's just such an extraordinary thing. And so that's why it's very important not to speak ill of people because it generates bad feelings and bad thoughts about people. It generates them. So the Prophet was asked when he said", "mention it and it's true. And he said that is ghibah, if it's not true its buhtan. Buh-tan is what they said about Maryam. And bahat you know is to be totally shocked. See if you speak ill of a person like if you say so-and-so drinks wine and then you go up to so- and-so and he does drink wine and you say you know what Abdullah said? He said you drink...he might", "Because he knows he drinks. Whereas if he doesn't drink and somebody says, oh so-and-so said you drink what? You know that's buhtan. And that's what they said about Maryam that she was a prostitute. That's what I said about Aisha Radilan. She got sick. She was a month. She almost died. She couldn't eat because she just... Aisha was a young girl when she came into the Prophet's house", "Prophet's house. She was nine years old. She, you know, just couldn't even imagine that. It wasn't even in her frame of reference. You know, she was just a pure girl and it wasn't in her framework of reference to even think of something like that so when it was said to her, you now, and then when it mentioned Mista who is related, no he would never say that. She couldn't believe it. That's Bukhtan. So Hiba", "say something that's true about the person. And the reason it's insidious is because the person's not there and they don't have the ability to defend themselves. If they were there, they might explain to you why they happened. وَتُوبَةَ السَّادِكِينَ مِنْ عِلَى الْقُلُوبِ وَالْآفَاتِ The tawbah of people on a path to God is the tawbah of things in their hearts, having a bad opinion of somebody. I'll give you an example. In Mauritania", "And this is a true story. There was a man there, he didn't have his beard. He's young man, a lot of the young men shave their beard and he came into this... He was in this thing, there was an old Imam there one of the Ulama there very simple man, very humble man and he looked at this man and they made some exchanges but the man that was with him who had brought him to when they left", "And the friend of his told me this story. He started saying, you know these old shiukhs... This is what's holding us back and this is the takhallaf of muritania. This is like the backwardness and they're just so pathetic. And he was going on and on. Just backbiting this guy!", "wanted to see the man without the beard. And when he finally got him, he took him aside and said in private, please forgive me. He said what? He said I had a hard time sleeping last night. And he said why? And he says because I saw you didn't have a beard and I just assumed that you were a fasiq . And I had no right", "And that had a complete transformation on this person because he thought about all the bad things he'd said about that man to another man and had no remorse for it. And this man was troubled by having a bad thought about him, and he couldn't sleep from it. So these are maqamat, and that's what he's saying about the people of suluk.", "heart about what they're thinking about people, about hasad, about shuh, tama'at. These type things. That's what's troubling them and they're making tawbah for that. Imam al-Hajmi says that the first degree of wilaya is that you begin to do muhasabah of the khater. Ibn Ashir says yuhasib an nafsa alal anfasi wayisin al khatera bilqistasi. Izn Ashir", "that you begin to take your breathes to account, your soul to account based on your breaths. So you actually realize your breaths are accountable, every breath you take is accountable and then you actually weigh your thoughts in the divine scales whether the thought is acceptable or not. And that's what that Imam was displaying is that he realized that he had a suspicion in his heart about this man and he wanted to ask him for...", "Don't belittle any Muslim because he might be a wali of Allah You know in other words you should just be aware of Muslims in general of harming other Muslims It's not a good thing to want to do So that's the idea of qiyarah and then the next one is the bad opinion of others. So he says وَظَّنُّوا بَعْضًا مِنْهُ لَا يُبَاحُوا كَسُوبِي مَنْ ظَاهِرُ صَلَاحٌ One is suspicion it's also opinion conjecture, it's where you", "It's where you think something without having any facts to support it. It's a one, right? Now the worst bad opinion is having a bad opinion about people who outwardly they have righteous appearance and behavior. And appearance was something that the early Muslims actually considered important as well. In other words although they say beware of people", "It's actually manifest in the face. And so having a bad opinion of somebody who has this wasma, you know, outwardly they appear to be a righteous person, that's a bad type of dhan. وَإِنَّ بَعْضُ ظَنِّ إِثْمٍ Allah says. Some of dham is wrong action. And this is important because generally we don't... The heart you're not taken into account for. But there's a hiba of the heart and that is to have a bad", "against you. So that's really important, it is called Hibat al Qalb and that something it's not like a... see Allah doesn't think you account for what occurs to your heart He takes into account for Azam, what continues. Azam is written against you in the heart right we'll go into that when we get to the Khawater because there are degrees right Hajj, Azeemah", "to nafs and azima is the highest degree. And that, and that is what's written against you. Run in the heart if you actually do believe it and it causes you to have an effect on your behavior towards that person, it's considered ghibat al-qalb. And it's actually a ghiba in which a second person is not involved. It's between you and your own heart. And then that's not permissible. That's why he's saying minhu la yubahu . It's not", "And then he said, So it's عَزِيمًا. It means your heart is convinced and you've judged him based on your heart's suspicions without a proof that warrants such assumption. You don't have a دليل for it. So Sunni says, why do you like that person? He says, I just don't... My heart tells me something's wrong. Now obviously we'll go into that in a second about following the heart about certain things, right?", "And the hadith which is muttafaq alayh says, Beware of bad opinion because it's the most treacherous or the most false of speech. Where there's no jaleel. You say to somebody, do you know so and so? He's a really bad person.", "He's a really bad person. And you say, what's your proof? I just know he is. Right? That's أكثب الحديث. That's a lie because you have no دليل and our شريعة is based أُمِرْتُ عَنْ أَحْقُمْ ذِي الْبَوَاهِرِ I was commanded to judge people in outward matters. So it's really important to look to the outward and see the behavior and things like that.", "With having doubts about someone or having a bad opinion of him if it is based upon sound reason and it is not without evidence Ah, so this is a really important distinction the difference between shift and run is one as you have made when you have your Your your scales right? Check is where both the scales are balanced Easy good question mark easy bad question mark that's check", "that's sick i've got doubt about that person what that means is i don't know and i just i have to be wary because i just don't no that is not haram one is where you make the decision without proof that he's bad does everybody understand this really important difference that'll help you in life so now how do we deal with people", "If he is a Fasiq, Allah says, إِنْ جَاءُكُمْ فَاسِقٌ بِنَبِئٍ فَتَدَيَّنُوا وَإِنَّا رِوَايَ السَّبْعِيَّةَ فَاتَثَبَّتُوا If a Fasik comes to you, find out whether what he said is true or not true before you take it. So if somebody who's known to do Kabair, a Fasek is somebody who does Kabair openly. Or is Mutahawin with Sagair openly and consistently.", "Don't trust anybody with your Deen, your family or your wealth until you've tried him at least a million times. No, alf-alfi, a thousand thousand times.", "And that's called hyperbole, it's mubaligha. What he is saying is you better test them and see if they are true and sincere or not. If you don't know, don't trust them. One of the poets said... He said... A good opinion in these days is foolishness. So think the worst of people", "be on guard. And seriously, that is what the ulama all say. When time... when the period of union is full of corrupt people then the best position is to be distrustful of people. It's not run. Right? It's just that you are distrustfull of people You don't trust people until you've really tested them Just because there're so many people that it's a time like that People don't have taqwa They'll cheat you", "They'll come out to you smiling and tell you, you know what wonderful Muslims they are and this and that. And they cheat you. Right? And it happens all the time. That's why the Udama talk about Zakat. When time is bad, it becomes an obligation on distributive Zakat to check out the people's situation. They can't just give them Zakat if it's a good people. If most of the people are good then in those situations you believe people but when", "When you get corrupted times and people, and somebody comes and says, brother I've got five children. I don't have any money. It's a responsibility for you to go find out if their claim is truthful. And they cannot regret... They can't get upset or angry about that. They have to accept that it's not for you. It' like in this culture they say, well the bad ones ruin it for the good ones. Sorry we have to do this but we've been cheated so many times. That's the type of situation.", "Unfortunately, because you know we've been tricked and this is an amana from a lot We really need to find out whether your situation is as you stated. It's not that word We don't trust you just this is a blanket policy for everybody for that reason And that's unfortunate but that is the reality of it So that is bad opinion of others so having doubts about people there's nothing wrong with that and then a bad opinion", "There's ample evidence that he is a bad person. That's just common sense. On the other hand, if people make toba then don't hold their past. One of the worst things you can do is remind people of the past evil they've done. That is really bad thing to do to people. You should always not remind people", "You know let go of their past don't you hold on to it because it's unfair to other people and Then there's another hadith also that says hustle the tani ma'oochee and more me no higher I'm in home a personal one bill that was not one big bad either a good opinion of Allah And a good of the servants of allah are two things that no movement was given better than it So generally, it's good to have a good certainly about law and generally of the", "until really there's ample evidence of it. The other thing that is really important, the opinion of Allah. There is a hadith in Tabarani, I am in the opinion my servant so let my servant think whatever he wants of me and then there is another hadith which clarifies that which says", "Whoever I'm in the opinion of my servant if he thinks good of me He finds good and if you think evil of me, he finds evil And that hadith is essential to understanding something really important Which is the other Hadith which is in the 40 Hadith of Imam Noe in which he says? That every servant has what he deserves and then he said", "If he finds good, let him thank Allah. وَمَنْ وَجَدَ غَيْرَ ذَٰلِكَ فَلَا يَلُمَّنَّ إِلَّا نَفْسًا And whoever finds other than that, let Him only blame his own soul. The idea here is that if you're a true mu'min, everything is going to be good for you. فَعَجِبَنِّي أَمْرُ الْمُؤْمِنِ فَأَمِرُهُ كُلُّهُ خَيَرٌ The affair of the mu'minin, it's all good. And a true mi'min you will believe that even the bad that happens to you is for a reason. There's good in it.", "Why is this happening to me? I don't deserve it. What did I do to deserve it?", "but the difficulty of the situation for the Mu'min is still a good thing. And so that's having a good opinion of Allah and a good opinions of others.", "to sacrifice the cow they say are you making fun of us? is this huzu? and he said I seek refuge that I should be from the ignorant one from that, the ulama took it that istihzaat is from jahad it's ignorant to have istihzat towards people to make fun of people that's a type of ignorance and this can be lampooning right? making caricatures", "drawing funny things. In this culture you have comedians that make fun of people and anybody they take as their target. What he says about this, first of all, that its cure is the same cure for arrogance because it's a type of arrogance. If you see them as less than you then it's kibbeh, then your arrogant. And this is why", "The Moroccans say this, but it's actually from Sayyidina Ali. They say, لَا تَحْقِرُ عَبْدًا عَسَنْ يَكُونْ لِلَّهِ وَلِيَةٌ Don't belittle anybody because he might be a wali of Allah. And the reason for that is even if you see a man drunk vomiting on the street, you don't know what his seal is. Right?", "The one who was bowing down to idols in Mecca, was still the beloved with Allah . Because... Allah knows what the seal is. So that Ummah who was going down to idol that the Muslims could have looked at and made fun of and what a stupid idiot and polytheist etc., etc. They didn't know Ummah. Right? They were just seeing one stage and that's why it's very dangerous", "Allah is the Greatest, the Most Merciful.", "You incite them to do something that is not only bad for them, but it's also sacrilegious to us. We don't want people cursing Allah. So you shouldn't do that. There's no reason to do it. And that's why the Prophet ﷺ in his victories he was never boastful. When he went into Mecca he went with his head bowed down. He didn't go in triumphant leader. He went with", "Regarding the fact that we don't know the Seer-O-Curse and how they are like,", "You can pray against your enemy. It's mustahab to make dua for people, for guidance. That's musta'hab, it's not a wajib. Musta'hab to make duaa for people.", "Wahshi who killed them became a Muslim. So people can make tawbah and they can become Muslims, and those people that did all those things... It would be interesting to see what they are like now, how they're sleeping at night because people do things in war and they pay for it the rest of their lives. More veterans of Vietnam War have committed suicide than died in Vietnam in this country.", "country right a lot of people don't know that so they paid their price and the people at the Gulf War who saw that carnage you know they'll pay their price they're human beings they have hearts you know I mean you all of you have worked with non-muslims they cry they have tears Allah said you know", "Do you think that the Prophet said, and what he did with it is a case of faith in Allah?", "There are du'as in the Quran against the dhalimeen. So, anybody who oppresses... Which is why the Prophet ﷺ said رُبَّ قَرِئًا الْقُرَانِ وَالْقَرَامِ يَلْعَنَهُ Maybe a man's reading the Quran and the Quran's cursing him. Right? Because Allah says أَلَى إِنَّ اللَّعَنا تَلٰعَ لَكَاذِبِينَ Isn't it that the la'na of Allah is on those who lie? If you're reading the Qur'an and you're a liar,", "Allah gives us Tawfiq. It's all Tawfeeq from Allah, you know to be able to do that. To give from Allah and the same thing that prevents us from Qiyam al-Layla and these things is Ghida, eating haram things, all of that. That's what stops it because", "That's what stops it. Because this is gift from Allah. And people that have done it in their lives and then lost it, they know the time that they were given of that, it was a gift from allah. And when it's taken away, it's like a punishment. So you just make tawba, ask Allah to give us inshaAllah all tawfiq. It is a gift form Allah . And the people of the qaum, they used to have so much muhasabah of themselves that whenever they were afflicted with something, they knew what caused it.", "Hassanatul Abraha wa Sayyiatil Muqarrabin", "And that's why there is a hadith, There is a tree in paradise for the one who preoccupied with his own fault over the faults of others. His own preoccupation causes him to forget the faults other and all you get more seriously should take that. You know really, it's just life too short to be everybody got faults and if you start thinking about other people faults you are just fool", "The point is to get rid of your own. And also, I put in there because it's important but...", "You should hate corruption, you should hate evil. But you also have to recognize that it's there by the permission of Allah. Not by the riba'ah of Allah but by the izn of Allah so that's important so that you don't lose sight that Allah is in control. But we should hate it because Allah has told us to hate it. And the Prophet did not hate things for their essence he hated things because", "manifested, their attributes. The Prophet did not love but did not hate the zawat right he hated the sufifats because Allah created the sufi'fat and then He gave human beings the ability to do bad in attribute in sufisat so you should hate the things that people do but you know not let", "This is not blindness for the sake of Allah. That's not hatred for the take of Allah So this is with the understanding that you have not done a wrong if you're repulsed by your hatred and do not act in accordance with it to harm the person What that means is It means that your qila or your hatred is not... When you find it in yourself, you don't like it", "don't like it. Why don't I like that person? You know, if you don't have a sharia reason for not liking a person and you don' t like them, it's not a good sign. There has to be a shariah reason. If you don''t like them without a shariat reason, it is a disease in the heart. No reason you should not dislike them. It is something in the hearth which does not mean that people have incompatibilities. In other words, you might not be compatible with another person but you shouldn't have hatred towards", "unless they're doing something wrong. So it doesn't mean you have to be their friend or you have spend time with them, but if you feel in your heart that you have animosity towards that person or bughd, it's a disease of the heart. What's that? Yeah we are getting to that inshaAllah", "I think there is a line missing here.", "He said, its cure is to pray for the one you don't like. In other words if you don' t like the person what you do is you actually make dua for them specifically mention their name and ask Allah bless this person give them thing and this is actually I mean it's advice and if you do that you'll get a cure for it. Allah will remove that bulgur from your heart. So but again you have to take the medicine if you want the benefit", "If there is a Sharia reason you should not hate the person,", "You should not hate them if they're Muslim. You should hate what they do and you should actually want good for them. You never should hate a Muslim. A mu'min does not dislike another mu'mina. Even if they are bad Muslims, unless they are munafiq which is another thing. The munafik is somebody... But if you see that there are people who pray, that they are struggling with their deen and things like that but they do bad things,", "Do you want to see a man who is for Paradise?", "He didn't do anything particular. He was just an average Muslim in Medina. He didn' t really see much difference from the other people, in fact less and he told them, finally said you know I've been watching you and trying to see what you do and you don't really do a whole lot and you know do you have any practices that you do? And then he said the only thing that I can think of other than what everybody else does is that I make sure I never go to bed with any rancor in my heart towards another Muslim", "Muslim. And so he knew that was his secret, right? So really removing rancor from the heart is just a bad thing. It'll eat a person up and Bari comes right after that. Bari is another horrible thing. Baring according to the opening of The Truth which is a book is harming creation where there", "The word in Arabic is one of the words for prostitute. And that's what they accuse Maryam of. Again, yeah. I would think that if you don't feel comfortable with a person, you should not consider... You know, to say I don't", "The souls of the Jinn are in paradise.", "What you know of it has changed and what you deny has changed", "were to you on that day of the Mashhad, the more affinity you'll feel towards them and the further away they were from you, the distant you'll be towards them. So there are people you meet and it's like instantaneously you feel like you've known them all your life. Like I had that feeling with Sheikh Abdullah Al Qadi when I first met him, it was just like there was no... It's like I knew that person all my life and I think he felt the same way so you just... There are certain", "with and other people you won't. And then some people it develops over time, and there's wisdom in all of those things. One is where you have a bad opinion of somebody without having any proof. Distrusting people is not one. In other words as a general principle, you are distrustful of people the ulama say its wisdom in bad times. It's wisdom to be on your guard don't become paranoid right I mean it's not", "idea is not to become paranoid, right? Do you hear what he said? You see how he looked at me? You don't want to do that. That's a psychological condition to be avoided. Seriously. I'm doing that." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Christian and Muslim Alliance -- Shaykh Hamza Yusu__1742888346.opus", "text": [ "Our natural allies should be the Christians amongst this materialism. But there are people that want to make sure, the Muslims and the Christians never... This is the Ayago factor. There are people who don't want these religions to work together against the common enemy of atheism and materialism These are much greater enemies. Christians believe in the day of judgement They believe in The Ten Commandments. Our ethics is based on The Ten commandments Read Ali Imran", "Right? 151, 152, 153. Read those verses. That's the Ten Commandments. Those are the Ten commandments in the Quran which our ulama said those are the Wasayil Ashraa al-Lati Utiya Musa And immediately after those verses it says Aatainam Musa Al Kitab We gave Musa the book. This was Musa's... Musa brought the Ten commandment. This is the ethics of our civilization The Jewish, Christian and Muslim civilizations These are the Abrahamic faiths. We're in the umbrella of Abraham" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Connection between Hindu and Muslim -Shaykh Hamza _gYfuRgSQF2w&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742889859.opus", "text": [ "So if you look at Hinduism, Hinduism it's actually...you're born into Hinduism. So you have the Brahmin and the Kishtiya and the Vaishya and then you have Shudra and then Dalit people that are the untouchables so you're actually born into this there are converts to Hinduism but its really a religion this is unfortunately what some fanatical people believe that India which is Hind is only for the Hindus but Muslims are also Hunu they're from India", "And then you have Judaism, which is essentially a tribal religion. It's a religion of Bani Israel and even though that Bani Isra'il was also taught the Noahidek laws they don't proselytize to other people and in fact the rabbis traditionally were encouraged to discourage people to become a Jew.", "in what is now Iran. And then Buddhism arguably becomes a proselytizing religion, like the last three religions are more universal proselyting religions. Although it's arguable that Christianity, that Christ himself was only sent to the lost sheep of the tribe of Israel if you take the Ebionites and the other Jewish Christians who believe", "that you actually have to follow Judaism to be a Christian. So the first religion I want to look at is Hinduism, and Hinduism...I believe, and many of our scholars believe this, that Hinduism is a revealed religion. There are no great world religions that could not have come from God because it's just not possible that by their fruits ye shall know them. It's not possible", "without seeing that God is behind them. Sorry, sorry just... I'm just thinking about", "These problems in India right now. Kashmir. So these are the revealed books, the Shruti and their tradition, the Rig Veda, the Sama Veda , the Ajra Veda and the Atharva Veda . These are the four great revealed books.", "Al Biruni, the great Muslim scholar. He was a great Shafi'i scholar who's a great historian. He actually learned Sanskrit he sat with the Hindu pendants. He studied them and then he wrote one of most extraordinary books on comparative religion. One of things that he said in that book which is so stunning as he said I shall not produce the arguments of our antagonists in order to refute them of such as I believe to be in the wrong my book is nothing but a simple historical record of facts", "So he actually was saying, I want to be completely objective. But what he sees, he differentiated between educated Hindus and uneducated Hindus. He said the educated Hindus were clearly monotheists. So this is really important for, I think, Muslims to understand. The Yajurveda says that", "The Yajur Veda says God is imageless and pure. The Rig Veda, the Brahma Sutra says akka brahmah there's only one god la ilaha illallah Truth is One So is the prophet mentioned in the Vedas? There's something in Hinduism called the Avatar which is one sent down", "believe the Avatar is really an incarnation of Vishnu. But they have a concept of the Antim Avatar, which is the last one to come, the last that will be sent and they come when things are going wrong so the Last Messenger is known in actually in the Vedas as Narashansa, which", "this demigod. And then Ashans is praised, so it's the praised human. And there is a prophet mentioned in the Puranas. Many Muslim scholars actually who studied Hinduism thought he was. Some of them argued that he was the Kalki Avatar who comes in the Kali Yuga period which is the last cycle. It's the age of darkness and strife even though in Hinduism they believe these recur but", "And in the Mahabharata it says,", "Now this man is one of the most extraordinary people, I think. Prince Muhammad Darashikho. He was the son of Shah Jahan who built the Taj Mahal. This man learned Hebrew, he learned Greek, he learnt Sanskrit, he knew Arabic and Persian. He wrote some extraordinary books. He read one book on all of the Awliya'. And then he translated the Bhagavad Gita into Persian. Really really stunning person but", "One of the most amazing books he wrote is called Majma' al-Bahrain. When he studied the Old Testament and the New Testament, he didn't feel there was tawhid in them. He thought it was a lot of anthropomorphism and then the Trinity and these things. But when he studied Upanishads, he said this is pure Tawhid. And so he actually said they have the same teaching that we had. One of those extraordinary things is he actually", "He knew the Qur'an very well. He said that, he said that verse referred to the Upanishads, that the Upanihshads are the secret book because the Brahman did not teach the Upanishad's they kept it secret and you had to go through great purification rituals to actually be taught the Upanshads in fact the person that brought them", "Englishman who became a judge in the 18th century, who was living in India. So he's actually the one that brought them out but the pundit that taught him made him go through...he had to give up eating meat, he became vegetarian, he had to do all this ritual purification before he could be taught the Upanishads so this was the view. But Darshaku Prince Muhammad was", "And for people from Pakistan, Mian Mir is buried near Lahore and still to this day he's venerated by people from pakistan. He was a Qadri sheikh, he was also a faqih, a scholar. And so Dara Shikuh took his suluk with him and then some say also with a student of Mulla Sadra the great metaphysician. So this man is really quite extraordinary but his father built the Taj Mahal based on", "based on Mullah Sadra's view of the world. And that is why this is understood to be the most beautiful building in the world" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Danger of Not Following Madhab -- Shaykh Hamza Yus_Gt5UBMVPK8w&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742998628.opus", "text": [ "And people read the hadith directly and they think they can derive the hadis just by, oh I follow Quran and Sunnah brother. As if Imam Shafi' didn't follow the Quran and sunnah. Did you go and study 17 years? Did you going to study 17 year of Arabic language to follow the quran and sunna like Imam Shafa'i? Imam Shafar went 17 years he was amassing... He was one of the greatest scholars of the Arabic language that's why he was able to write his great book in Usul-e-Fiqh because Usul", "Because the Usul of Fiqh is based on language. It's based on understanding the nuances of language, and what the Ba'a is in wiping your head . What is that Ba'? What type of Ba'ah is that? Is it Tab'eed ? Is it for Ziyadah ? What is it? This is the debates of the Fuqaha . There are many hadiths you have to know what Min means. There are types of min in the Quran.", "Hisham and masters that book before they can talk about this. In the Hadith, the Prophet , Hind in the Sahih collection, Hind comes to the Prophet and says to the prophet that Abu Sufyan withholds money from me. And the prophet said, take from his money what's the norm of your people.", "And that means without his knowledge. The ulama differ on that. Some said he was... Because any hadith, the Prophet is acting as a qadi, as a judge or he's acting as mufti giving a legal position or he is acting hakim, as ruler or he acts as muballagh just giving.. Or he's actings as nasih , he's giving wa'w These are determined through usool al fiqh and the usool scholars differ about these things Now every ignoramus, every Tom Dick and Abdullah", "Ibn Abdallah picks up the Quran and picks up Hadith, and they say, They're men and we're men. We follow the book in the Sunnah as if Malik didn't follow the Book in the sunnah Imam Shafi said If you mentioned the ulama, Maliks is the star The prophet predicted Imam Malik Abu Hanifa and Imam Shaffi and Imam Ahmad all of them were mentioned by Ishaara", "agreed on these four the Sunni scholars agreed on this for" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Description of the Prophet ﷺ _ Shaykh Hamza Yusuf_LRVU9w1dcBA&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742996903.opus", "text": [ "He says, surely you're on this vast ethos, this vast ethical condition. He said swiftly describe his character what was he like and Abu Bakr being Abu Bakar", "from Abu Bakr. It's a great loss, but Abu Bakar was who he was. He had a great maqam, but this was Abu Bakir. He said go ask Omar. So the Jew went to Omar and he said I read in the Quran", "وعمر كان من المدرسة التي تتحدث عنها أبو بكر قال له اذهب واسأل عثمان فقال له ذلك فقد ذهب إلى عثما بن عفان رضي الله عنه كما أنه كان من مدرسته نفسها قال له اسأل علي بن أبي طالب لذلك ذهن إلى علي وقال عليه", "Describe the blessings of this world. He said, The blessings of This World are many and I can't enumerate them. And he said Allah says in the Quran that the", "of this world are very few and he described the prophets as If you can't describe what is few, how can I describe what his vast? But the best answer to that question was given by his beloved wife Aisha", "His khuluq was the Qur'an. The Prophet ﷺ's khuluq, was the Quran. He was the quran walking. If you want to know the prophet ﷺ read the Quran, the Quran says, Speak well to people! The Prophet never spoke other than well to People when people were rude to him some of the Sahaba got upset the Prophet would always calm them down and he would speak well", "Aisha heard one of the Jews say, which means death be upon you. She said, and she gave it back to him and more. And the Prophet ﷺ told her, calm down Aisha. Didn't you hear me? I said, That's all you need to do.", "It's something that can never upset you, no matter what it is. When he was in the cave, imagine this, first of all a spider spins its web miraculously around the cave when these trackers and these were the best trackers the Arabs had and the Arabs have Qiyafah and Arafat they had these sciences of tracking, they knew how to track so they got to the cave. They tracked him to the cape but then he saw the spider web there was dove with", "with the overhead and they were saying, but he looked in the cave and Abu Bakr was very nervous. And the Prophet just looked at him and then he pointed to the end of the cave. And Abu Bakar saw the shores of Jeddah. This is like a wormhole. It's amazing! He never had fear when", "fear when abu bakr the prophet said they're riding the two of them fleeing from mecca to medina surat ibrahim he's one of their great trackers he's right behind them abubakar keeps looking he's very nervous he looked at the prophet he was reciting in the quran that's a son don't don't grieve don't worry allah is with us", "Then the man who was trying to kill him found him sleeping under a tree. He picked up the sword and he said, Who's going to defend you now? And the Prophet said, Allah. The man dropped the sword. And the prophet picked him up. The sword.", "He had no fear. No matter how bad it got, he did not have fear and this is what we have to remember. And dunya is hardship. Nobody had a more difficult time than the Prophets. The Prophet ﷺ said, أَشَّدُّوا النَّاسِ بَلَاءًا الْأَنبِيَاتِ ثُمَّ الْعَمْثَالِ فَالْعُمْفَارِ The people that have the most difficult time in this dunya are the Prohpets and then those close to them. Our Prophet ﷺ buried all of his children except for Fatima.", "has had to bury all of their children. He buried all of his children. The Prophet ﷺ lost everything in... They were eating the leaves off trees, the best of creation, the Best of Creation. They were taking the leaves and basically grinding them down and they were eating leaves on trees during the Hisar in Mecca. The prophet ﷺ for the first five years", "People don't realize he made hijrah, but the first five years they didn't even feel safe in Medina. They were constantly having difficulties in the Quran. They where always feeling unsafe. In the fifth year all of the Arabs came. 30 thousand! The Prophet , Medina was between two...they called Labbatain, in the Muwattas it's called Labbata'in. You know lava is a lava tracks.", "In Arabic, lava is lava. Right? Fa and ba are from the same makhraj. They're labials. So Allah knows I must have come from the Arabs. Lava. But he had these two lava tracks. And they knew they were coming because the Prophet had spies. He had people out. They knew. 30,000 Arabs. They came for genocide to eliminate this community, to finish it.", "This was their plan. So this was a matter of life and death. The Prophet ﷺ was talking about his strategy. Salman said, in Persia we build trenches. You know when the Prophet ﷺ... And this is one of the most amazing things about our Prophet ﷺ. This is a man who had wahi from Allah ﷻ. And yet, when he was discussing things with his companions,", "because he was not... He wasn't somebody that just talked. He listened. He would elicit from his companions. He wanted to hear from them. He want to see what they thought. So if he gave an opinion, they would say, أَوَّحْيُنْ أَمْ حَرْبٌ رَأْيٌّ وَحَرُبٌ يَا رَسُولُ اللهِ أَلْمَكِذَةٌ وَهَرَبٌ Is this revelation or is this strategy? He said, Bel, مَكيدتٌ وحرب This is strategy.", "They said well what about this and they would give their opinions And if it was a better opinion as far as he was concerned then he would take it so Salman Said the trench She had all of God. He showed that this was an engineering miracle Because they built this trench in a very short period of time, and it was between the two lava tracks And and so they couldn't that people don't realize because when you go to Medina now You can understand the trench because the lava tracks are gone", "the lava tracks are gone. You can't walk on them, if you go outside of Medina, you'll find the lava track, you can't work on them. They're sharp and they can't cross with...they're very difficult to cross just with shoes and impossible with animals. So they were in the trench and the Munafiqun were in a trench", "When they hit the rock, because Medina has a lot of rocks. He saw this strike and he saw the palaces of Syria. And then he saw another strike, he saw palaces in Persia. This is like what he said to Suraqa. He said when Sura'as horse went into the sand and then he realized something unusual supernatural was happening.", "The thing about the Arabs, and this is what some people don't understand today because you go to the modern Arab world it's very different. But the Jahiliy Arabs were people of their word. If they gave their word, they didn't break their word And so the Prophet gave him Amman He asked him, What did they promise you? He said a hundred camels A hundred camals", "wearing the bracelets of Kisra one day. Suraqa. This is a Bedouin man, he can't imagine that. In the time of Omar when they brought the bracelets to Kisara, Sura'ah-ka, Omar actually put them on Suraakha. So we can't image this but the Munafiqun are in there and they're saying, He's talking about the palaces of Persia and Syria, We can't even go relieve ourselves", "go relieve ourselves. Because they were stuck in the trench and so many Muslims today are stuck in a trench, they can't see where this is all headed. They've lost sight you know they say the Arabs say the donkey is not honored because the donkey looks at its feet but the camel is honored in their culture because the camel looks at the horizon it doesn't look at its", "at the horizon, the aafaq. That's our Prophet, he was a visionary. He dreamed with his eyes wide open and he realized those dreams. He saw something other people couldn't see and that's the visionary. Allah said, a man came to him and he said, وَلَيْنِ يُحِبُّكَ He said, أَعِدَّ لِفَقِّرِ تِجْفَافًا Like then get ready for poverty. He said I love you. He", "get ready he said prepare for poverty a tijfaf is what the arabs put on the horse to protect it from the spears they called a barding or or uh or a coupler barding it's called on the so he said in other words tribulation is going to come to you because that's the nature of it so", "this world or it's in the next world. It's better in this world. Iblis, you know, the people that sign up for his program he has a great 401k plan. No seriously there are people that signed... You know, I asked my father do you think they sign on the dotted line? He said no. It is a long series of negotiations but there are", "Seriously, there are people that signed. There was a documentary done where they put an ad in the paper for people who wanted to sell their soul to the devil. It's a full documentary and they got people that came and they literally signed and then went through, they took them to these satanic rituals to sell theirs souls and they were totally ready! And one of them just said you know I've been trying to break into... You want to be a rock star?", "I'm 35, my time's almost ending. You know, I'm willing to sell my soul. So don't think people won't sell their soul. But Iblis' afterlife plan is terrible. So our dean is a dean... They're wealthy Muslims but I'll tell you one of the things that I've noted in knowing a lot of wealthy Muslims they have great tribulation. People of wealth have great", "You know, this kind of Marxist view that their lives are all cushy. It's like rulers. People think rulers it's all perks. They don't sleep. Gaddafi never slept in the same place twice. Every night he is worried about a coup. You know they take pills to get up. They take pills go to sleep. These are real headaches. I mean I run a small college. This is very small college, I run as small college there's problems all the time. There's problem. The teacher has problems. Students have problems. Staff has problems", "Life has problems, budget's problem. It's a problem. But Subhanallah!", "But the Prophet told us that towards these latter days we would be weak. He said, we would like froth. Many many things he told us about these times. He told us, that other nations would come and eat from you like they ate from a plate of food. It's an amazing image.", "the conditions of the ummah and in a sound narration that Imam al-Ghumari has a nice commentary on it he said, The Prophet is shown the actions of his Ummah there's a khilaf about whether it's all every individual or whether it' s the general condition of the Ummah but many of them say he sees the conditions", "How is that possible on human beings? We have supercomputers now, that are monitoring all of us. They monitor our phone conversations. There's apparently some giant mainframe in New Zealand. So this is a machine made by man and the Ruach of the Prophet made by the creator of men can't make his supercomputer ability to see people's actions.", "The Prophet ﷺ is not God and we don't make the mistakes of Christians. He said, لَا تَطْرُونِ كَمَا أَطَرَتَ النَّصَارَ عِيسَى بْنُ مَرْيَمٍ لَكَنْ قُلُوا عَبْدَ اللَّهُ وَرَّسُولُهُ Don't praise me like the Christians praised Jesus. Don't go to an extreme. The Prophets all warned their people of this. And our community has never done that. They've never done it. It's amazing. One of the most... I think one of the greatest miracles", "of the Prophet ﷺ is that there's actually a community of people that split from the Muslims that worship Ali. Because there's nobody that worships the Prophet's ﷺ because the Prophet made a dua, لَتَجْعَلْنِي وَثَنًا مِّن بَعْدِ يُعْبٍ Don't make me an idol that's worshipped. So there's people that worshiped Ali but they don't worship the Prophet. If you don't see", "I don't see the miracle in that." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Disease of second wife - Polygamy - Shaykh Hamza Y_jdfScCbW4yM&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW3SBwkJsAkBhyohjO8%3D_1748539911.opus", "text": [ "The birth order is very interesting because firstborns tend to be much less rebellious, according to his research than later-borns. In fact most of the real rebellious type people in history, in social history have been later borns not firstborn and he said it has to do with the fact that they see the firstborn... He's got all the perks and so they want to rebel against that kind of status quo and", "always supporting the status quo and don't want. It's an interesting study. So that's Tahabbuk. Another one is a teacher, people, students that vie for the teachers like teachers' pets type people that want and they have this envy. Another on is it's called the Da'ud Dara'ir, the disease of second wives, right? Hasad because if there's more than one wife in", "in the situation obviously there's one husband, husbands times tend to be limited and so they're vying. And that's why Sharia is so adamant about being fair to the wife if you give one to one you have to give one of the other. Have to! That is a given and the knights are the same thing for that reason now", "is dara, sometimes mispronounced durra but it's actually a darra. Darra means harm right? That's what it means, it means harm so obviously I don't know if the first wife named the second wife Dara or not but it indicates that the Arabs understood something about the psychology of multiple marriages and", "dhara to the first wife. So that does happen and you can get that vying within." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Enemy of Human Beings is Shaytan -- Shaykh Hamza Y__1748527006.opus", "text": [ "But we have enemies. We have the enemy of Shaytan, Iblis. People can say whatever they want. They don't believe in Ibliss. We see the effects of Iblisse all over. If you can't see that, you're blind and many people are blind. They can't See. They couldn't see the prophet. They thought he was Yatimu Bani Hashem, The orphan of Bani hashem. They used to call him ibn Abi Kabshah, You know from Hanima Sa'diyya These are the things they said about him. He didn't care", "He didn't care. He had his blinders on, he didn't listen to what others said. This is our Prophet ﷺ" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Europeans in the Qur_an and Ḥadith -- Shaykh Hamza__1742886183.opus", "text": [ "But he said, The Europeans. And it is the Europeans my friends. When you see in any Hadith and in that chapter of the Quran this is not the Byzantines, It's not the Greeks, it's the Europeans. Their sacred history all goes back to Rome. Read the venerable bead. The sacred history goes back", "كل ما هرك قرن برس قرنا آخر Every time you see one of them, their generation destroyed, another one rises up. That's what the Prophet ﷺ said. How did he know that in the 7th century? How did He know that? How Did He know Persia would end? He didn't see that in his lifetime. How Did he know Rome wouldn't end? And then He said أَوْصَحَابُ سَخْرٍ وَبَحْرًا They will possess the land and the sea", "and now the air but how does one of the words for the hair also as Habib Aaron was a grin hey hata hey hato in other words don't think you're gonna ever conquer them hey hatah hey hot up we in the Mahara katooma sa their end comes with the hour" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Four Enemies of the Human Beings -- Shaykh Hamza Y__1748521126.opus", "text": [ "We have enemies and Allah has warned us of our enemies. We have the four primary enemies of the human being, nafs, shaitan, hawaa and dunya. These are the four Primary enemies every human being has to struggle with these their entire life and you can't be deluded about this" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Fundamental purpose of the Qur_an by Shaykh Hamza __1743305472.opus", "text": [ "The fundamental maqsad of the Qur'an is that it's an invitation. It's like you get an invitation and its RSVP, you have to respond and let them know that your coming. And so the Book of Allah is an invitation, and all revelations are invitations. The difference between the Qurán and the previous dispensations is that the Qurânic revelation is to all peoples. So it's kaffa, you know, it's a naskhafah, it''s all people's whereas", "peoples, whereas the previous dispensations were to specific peoples." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Grammer IN LANGUAGES is a Bida_a - Sheikh Hamza Yu_c0mneSn6S0A&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748539715.opus", "text": [ "If you say that grammar is a bid'ah, it's a bid'da baruriya. It's a necessary bid'daa. It is wajiba because it's the only way the language will be preserved but Sayyidina Omar didn't know the faAAil and the mafAAool and the majroor He didn't kno these things he didn't kow annasbu bilqataee binnazaal khafiith He didn tknow any of this terms But he knew the language And he spoke perfect Arabic And he could understand the Qur'an", "He knew when Allah says, and the there is nafi lil jins And that's why ilaha is mansub. He knew what that meant That it means There's no God illallah istithna he knew what meant illallahu So they understood that by their fitrah so it becomes necessary though and in the same way the taskiyah of the sahaba Was bilfitra They read the quran they understood the qur'an", "about Taskiyah. Imam al-Muhasibi introduced the idea of Khawater, that there's four kinds of thoughts so he differentiated between the thought process of the human being He said there is Khatar Rabbani, Khatar Malakani, and Khatar Nafsani and Khartar Shaitanini So any thought that comes to your mind is from one of these four sources In reality all of consciousness is from God but Allah created a world of Asbab", "on his behalf. So the Rabbani thought is a powerful positive thought that you can't disobey. It's the thought that made you fast Ramadan this year and made you just pray Maghrib. These are the Rabbini thoughts that come, that you", "but it's better to take it. The nafsani is the one that told you, I'm tired, I am not going to do the sunnah now and then the shaytani was the one who stopped people from praying at all out there So these are the different types of thoughts that people have And Al-Muhasibi put that down And then you had Abu Ta'ar ibn Makki Who wrote Qut al-Qulub, the nourishment of the hearts", "identified nine maqams. The Christians have three theological virtues, the Muslims have nine theological virtues. And so Imam Ghazali he began to read these books and he was deeply distressed because what he was realizing was all of the things that they were talking about that were negative he could see in himself. And this is the beginning of his crises", "of his crises. But he was also a very prestigious scholar, he's 38, he is at the 40th... I mean that's the peak. The Irhasat of the Prophet began about 38 and that's really when the human being... Aristotle said 49 is the peak, he was 49 at the time he said it but in our tradition 40 is the", "I think that's a very important point where you're at the peak because you've got the power of youth and wisdom of age. And so, that is really... Some will say 50 and some will say 60.", "The Sheikh Hohab begins at 60, but he was at the peak of his career intellectually financially socially Kings wanted his company all of the ulama admitted that he was the best", "that he was the best scholar of the time, he could win any argument. He literally could beat anybody in dialectics because he'd studied Jadal to an extreme degree so he knew all the ways to argue. He was very arrogant by his own admission but he also said that he realized that what he was doing, he was teaching because he wanted stature, he wanted praise, he", "He said that these are more dangerous for the religion of a person than a wolf in the midst, a hungry wolf in he midst of sheep. And Ja his stature, prestige this is what stops many people in United States from speaking out about Palestinian issue Many people in US they know they've got careers They're in CNN", "all these news agencies or they're in academia and they know that it's a death sentence for their careers. So Jah is more important to them than Haq, than truth. Chris Hedges is a good example of somebody who's completely destroyed his career and reputation. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. Now he's a pariah in that community. They won't put him on TV anymore. Why? Because he speaks out against the injustices in Palestine.", "in Palestine. So that's jihad, that's what jihad does it prevents you from speaking the truth and this controls many many people this concern about what other people think so I was telling one of my sons he shouldn't care about what others think and he quoted to me David Foster Wallace who said", "you when you realize how little they do think about you. So he goes into this crisis and he said, one day I put a foot forward the next day I pulled it back and he was thinking I really have to do something and he felt like he was literally on the verge of destruction so he was really going into a serious crises and what happens is", "What's amazing about that, he says, literally, he shows up. I mean, imagine me tonight coming and I just can't speak. I just look out there and I can't speaking you guys are like what's wrong with him? What's going on? What so? He couldn't do it. And he's got all these students looking at him. And is trying to talk and he couldn't. He said God solve the problem for me.", "that put him on the top and suddenly he was on the bottom. And at that point, the doctors say this is a psychological problem. We treat the body we can't solve this. So who were the psychologists of that time? These were the Atiba and Nafsaniyun. Who were they? They were the people of Tazkiyah", "And so he realized that's what he needed to do. And so, he puts his family in a good situation and he literally sets out on a pilgrimage and becomes a salik. He goes to Damascus. He lives... He literally lived in a... There is the minaret. There is a room where he studied that still known as Ghazali's Room. And that's where he did his tizkiyah.", "But he realized that the people of Tazkiyah are not people of aqwal, they're people of ahwal. They're not people words, they are people of states. And this is the beginning and this is when he begins to write the Ahya Ulumuddin. And that's why the most important book in the Ahyul Madin is the first book because all of the other books are predicated on understanding that first book and what he does in that first", "So, what I want to do just before that is give you a model. It comes out of... it's an ancient model and in the Western tradition it's called the Wheel of Fortune. And the most important source for this is from one of the most books of the classical world which was The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius. Has anybody read that?", "Anybody read that in here? The Consolation of Philosophy, Bothius. Bothius was a Roman consul, brilliant man and he entered into politics even though he was a philosopher, he was Christian, he's a philosopher. He was born in the mid fifth century Christian era", "Anyway, he felt compelled to go into politics because he took very serious Plato's words that the world will not be rectified until philosophers become kings or kings become philosophers. And so he felt it was a duty because the world was in such a shambles this was a very difficult period in history for many areas in the world.", "areas in the world but he went into politics and he becomes very, very popular. He was brilliant, he had everything. He came from humble beginnings, a very simple background but he literally became beloved, he became very close to the ruler, everybody looked up", "the Eastern Church and the Western Church, and he got involved in it. And the next thing he knows, he finds himself in prison sentenced to death. So he was literally on the top, suddenly he's on the bottom. In prison, he writes this book, The Constellation of Philosophy. And in the book, philosophy comes personified as a beautiful woman. He is there grieving and feeling self-pity and sorry for himself", "And philosophy comes and says, you know, you studied all these high things. And now look at you. You're pathetic. And then begins to explain to him. Anyway, chapter two." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Greatest trait of our Prophet ﷺ - Shaykh Hamza Yus__1742882368.opus", "text": [ "He forgave men and women who had maligned or betrayed him only for the welfare of the Muslim Commonwealth. Was he severe in punishment? Never on his personal account, Muhammad was full of virtues but what has charmed me most among the virtues of Muhammad ﷺ was his gratitude a very rare ingredient in the constitution of a great man" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Hopefully ramadan will change you - Sheikh Hamza Y__1742880300.opus", "text": [ "Eating during the night and then not eating during the day as opposed to eating during", "continuing education that they have for people in professions. They have to go like every year and they have to renew their skill sets, they have learn new things so it's very important to be reminded that we have to back to this book and then hopefully one of these Ramadans there will be a shift" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/How to Increase Blessing in Time_ _ Shaykh Hamza Y_saWZxbVQO-w&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743057302.opus", "text": [ "Is there a dua for barakah in time? What a great question. The best way to get barakah is through prayer. I would say there's three ways and by the way, there are things called time warps where you can...time can actually be expanded", "and experienced a day in medina which is not like a day anywhere else in the world and i would argue in muritania my own experience of time time really slowed down when i was in the desert in mauritania um a year there is like three or four years somewhere else so baraka in time is very real what you accomplish", "the least baraka of time because everything's here in nanoseconds and it's just very fast my father told me once that you get to a certain point in life and every 15 minutes it's breakfast so time does speed up and we want to get the best and of our time so the way there's one of the great scholars Ibrahim ibn Abd al-Wahad Al Maqdasi he told", "of his students, Dhiya ul-Maqdasi. He asked him how can I benefit from my time and he said, أكثر من قراءة القرآن. He said read more Qur'an. He says the more Qurán you read the more barakah will be in your time. And so when we read about the Salaf they all read a great deal of Qur'aan. Also the wardh in", "Allahumma barak lana fee ma razaqtana", "But Qira'at al-Qur'an and then praying on time, not missing your prayers. Because Sayyidina Omar and the Muwatta begins with the hadith of the awqaat as-salah. It's very interesting that Imam Malik began his book with the Hadith about prayer times. And Sayyida Omar sent a letter out to all the governors and he said", "And he said guard your prayer time because whoever guards his prayer time, he will be guarding everything else even you know that if you protect your prayer times Allah will protect all your other times. So it's very important to have your prayer on time and then the third thing so a lot of Qur'an making sure that you're praying on time", "getting up early. The Prophet said, my ummah was blessed in the early part of the day and anybody who knows this if you stay up after Fajr you will look at the clock and it'll be like 10 o'clock and you'll feel like you've had a whole day whereas if you sleep after that time which is in our traditions called", "If you sleep after that time, what you'll find is you get up at 8 or 9 and then before you know it, it's 3 or 4 o'clock. And then the day's over. And this is something everybody has experienced. So those are the ways to get barakah in time. Allahu a'lam. How about when you have the time but your brain is overwhelmed and can't take anything in? That's a problem because we all feel that. Recreation is very important.", "Taking walks is important. When you feel that way, just go and take some time. Also, just being in nature, what the Japanese call forest bathing. Just going out into nature. Nature will rejuvenate just by the experience of being in a natural environment. It will rejunate your spirits. Also just maintaining good health like exercising and eating well is very important.", "So brain fog is real and one of the ways to do that, real study is very tiring. It really can exhaust you. It's invigorating and it's tiring like exercise. So you need breaks from that time. Ibn Abbas' advice was to give your heart some repose", "from time to time. And that's why he used it when they studied tafsir, he would say, bring the poetry. Let's hear some poetry. So they would relax from that intensity of study to something that's more enjoyable. And then the dua also is a really important dua because", "because the Ajas is the one who wants to do something but they don't have the energy to do it. The Kaslan is the ones who has the energy, but doesn't want to do It. So the Prophet sought refuge from both states, from laziness and also from incapacity" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/How to make your character better _ Shaykh Hamza Y_FwM70bVgAas&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743306062.opus", "text": [ "The Prophet said, I was sent to perfect noble character according to the Arabic language is called It means the only reason I was send was to perfect Noble Character. How do we do that? There are two primary concerns in Islam", "First and foremost is the heart itself which is called Al-Qalb. It's also called Al-'Aql, Al-Fu'ad, As-Sirr, Arruh. It has many names in the Quran but primarily and foremost it's called The Qalb And the basis of the importance of the qalb is in a verse of the Quran and in a sahih hadith", "On that day, on the Yawmul Qiyamah nothing will benefit the human being except the one who brings a sound heart. In other words, the only thing that's going to benefit you it will not be your wealth nor will it be your children which was the Jahili concept of what benefited you in the dunya. In the Akhirah suddenly the criterion changes", "a dunya we write criterion it's an o'clover e criterion and that is a sound heart if you do not have a sound hard then you better get one if you don't have a solid heart salam at al-qalb and if we're back biting that's the sign we don't to have a son hard if we are cheating we don t have a good heart if were not fulfilling obligations that Allah has commanded us to fulfill we don", "that distance us from Allah are indications that the heart has work to be done. That is the first and foremost concern of the human being, is his own heart. The sound itself, the sight itself and the heart itself all of them man has been made responsible for.", "the most difficult to guard. I came into New York City and I'll tell you something, going from Mecca to Jeddah was like going from paradise to the gates of paradise. Going from Jeddah to Morocco was like a place where I could see paradise off in the distance but I definitely wasn't in it. And then getting to New York was like descent into the bowels of hell.", "Everybody around me was using foul language. It's unbelievable, the only time they don't use foul languages is if they're serving you something. Everybody I was standing in the waiting for the bus and I hear this two people talking and I wanted to plug my ears and that's what Imam al-Azhar used to do when he saw people of bid'ah And these people it was so foul every other word was a foul language", "is in the hadith, the mu'min does not use foul language nor should he hear it. You have to protect because now those words ring in the heart. They ring. They have a resonance because you're hearing filth and if you get polluted by it so you have to guard the ears and the problem... The danger of the ear is that its oral, its circular, it's not linear. The eye you can divert your gaze. If you see something haram you can look away. Allah has given", "with the ear and this is why in the Quran Allah always mentions the ear first because the ear is more difficult and the ear Is a faster and more direct line to the heart than the eye itself And then you have to guard the eye because the eye is a mirror. It's a window into the heart The eye is A window into The Heart But First and foremost, the heart itself", "is more important than anything else that the human being has been given. And so we have to purify our hearts and now I'm based on Qadi Abu Bakr ibn al-Arabi's methodology which is a methodology of the messenger of Allah, this is how we do it and it's not difficult and it is not complicated. The second most important thing is the limbs. So you have the heart and the limb, this are concern as human beings Al Jawarih, the heart in the limbs, you have to guard your limbs. How do you guard your Limbs? Listen to the Hadith", "According to the hadith every morning all of the limbs shake in the presence of the tongue and They say yeah, Lisa It's a filafina in our judge that Our judge now when I stuck um ta as top Amna Oh Tom fear Allah concerning us if you're straight we're all straight and If you go crooked. We all go crooked Because the tongue is called Tarjum Anna", "Tarjuman al-Qalb the tongue is the interpreter of the heart and The tongue is most dangerous organ in the destruction of human being this why messenger of allah said our people dragged on their faces and their noses or their nosing in hell fire other than harvest of their tongues Other than the Harvest of their Tongues our Messenger of Allah upon him prayers and peace Said", "said, if you guarantee for me what is between your two thighs and your two jaws I will guarantee for you paradise. If you guarantee to me what it's between your 2 thighs and 2 jaws I'll guarantee for your paradise. And this is ʾifā concerning the bestial nature of man in other words its purity of our bestial", "To explore our human sexuality in areas that Allah has permitted it and to avoid areas that are impermissible. And then it is to honor our angelic nature which is the ability to articulate, which raises us above the beast because we are called according to the Arab scholars Al-Insan al-Natiq, Al-Haywan an-Natik The articulating animal This is the gift Ar-Rahman Allama al Quran Khalaqal Insan", "The merciful taught the Quran, created the human being and then gave him bayan. The ability to speak and understand which is the basis of understanding and interpreting the Quran. Now concerning the heart there are only two concerns. The heart has only two concern. The first is belief. What do we believe? Because the heart", "the source of our belief it's where we believe from when I say my heart is not in it, it means i don't believe in it right? I don't have the certitude to give my life for it. Belief is in the heart and this is why the Messenger of Allah said Taqwa which is awareness of Allah is here and he indicated his heart", "Now belief is easy in the sense, the outwardness of it is not difficult. The orientalists can learn the outward nature of Islam. They can understand it. You can learn aqidah in a short period of time. You could learn it on a weekend and this is not an exaggeration because our tradition is not a difficult tradition It's a tradition that the Messenger of Allah could teach to people on a visit they used to make wufood", "with the Messenger of Allah and he would teach them Tawheed, and then he would send them off. And it was not an exaggeration what I mentioned about Shaykh Mardab al-Hajj saying that Tawheid is contained in Ikhlas because it really is if you understand Ikhlaas in a deep way you understand Tawhead. I'tiqaad is not difficult. Eman is when the belief becomes a conviction. You see in other words when the creedal formulation that we've learned become something", "And this is something very profound. Because like Imam Al-Busiri said in his Hamziya, إِذَا حَلَّتَ الْهِدٰيَةُ قَلْبًا نَشِطَتْ فِى الْعِبَادَةِ الْأَضَاءُ When guidance penetrates the heart, suddenly the limbs respond in worship of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala.", "is true, that the Naar is true. The Sirat is true all of these things are Haqqa they're true their haqq they're from Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala They're real and one of the most profound realities of this tradition And this is something I've only come to realize one of those profound realities at this tradition is unlike all of the other peoples on the earth or at least a vast majority of the people's on the Earth the Arabian Peninsula", "The time that the messenger of Allah came to it had a unique aspect to its belief system. They did not believe that there was anything after death. The vast majority of human societies believed in some form of life after death, the native peoples of this continent believed in this, the traditional African people's believed in that,", "The ancient Greeks with their Hades believed in an afterlife. Dark and despairing as it was, they believed in a afterlife. The Chinese believed in after life. In Pure Land Buddhism, they believe in an after life reunited with the great Buddhas of the past. The Indians believed in the afterlife.", "of this world and we will not be resurrected. Who will bring dead and decaying bones to life after they've died? Say the one who brought them back the first time. So, this is something extraordinary how is it that the Quran... We have not examined the Quran as an Ummah we have a romantic attachment", "Most of us say, oh the Quran what a great book and have never even read it. They've never read it right? We're like people in the restaurant who look at the menu for 50 years and never order to taste the food. We just look at headlines, right? Right you go into the restaurant and it says shish kebab and you don't even know what that is and you just look", "It's an attachment that leads to extremities. It's a attachment that lead to passion when one is impassioned and passion as every ancient Arab knows, is something that is incompatible with the intellect like in the story Imam al-Kushayri mentions about the Usfor there was a sparrow on top of Suleiman place of worship", "a female sparrow that he was a worthy mate and she wasn't paying any attention. This is the story, and He said You know if I wanted I'd turn this dome right over on the head of Suleiman for you And so Suleyman who knew the alayhi salam who knew interpretation of the birds called him down and he comes down He's all shaking in his little sparrow hearts beating and he says", "Prophet Muhammad said to him, what made you say that ridiculous remark? And the sparrow said, oh prophet of Allah don't you know that lovers are never taken into account for what they say in the presence of their beloved. In other words I was in a state of passion, you can't take me into account. And this is the reality of... You see we have these passionate displays. In fact there was something somebody told me about it and I didn't see it but there", "And they fought. The Muslims were fighting over who was gonna lead the demonstration against the bombing of Iraq. Right? This is a disease of the heart, it's called love of leadership. I'm the leader, I am the spokesman here. Really, it'a disease and I'll tell you something about this age. This is an age... It's a leaderless age.", "Requisite of leadership is not there and that is that you don't desire it because if you desire it according to the hadith You're not allowed to have it. We don't give هذا الأمر لمن يطلبه أو يحرس عليه We don' t give this affair meaning ruler governance leadership to anyone who seeks it or covets it once he obtains it That gives an end to election day, It's over", "vote for me that is the sign that you shouldn't vote for him seriously no only he was a frightening military leader but the only leader that the Americans probably ever should have had was Sherman Tecumseh Sherman who said when he was asked to run for president he said no if nominated I wouldn't", "I wouldn't rule that Sign there is a sign that that should be the man that they should put forward not the men saying vote for me Right. III'm the proper ruler. I can help you out That's the man he can't help you because he's too busy seeking power Right really? He's it's a disease in the heart They would they love it they want to this why that man couldn't he couldn't step down", "This man can't step down. He couldn't even dignify the American people by resigning before this whole thing came out. Just be a dignified human being and say, I made a mistake and it was a mistake that makes me unworthy to be the moral leader of the United States because the president is also considered the moral leade They understand that concept within their own tradition.", "Right? We can't, if an imam did something like that, that's it. It's over. You know, he'll have to come into the masjid if he comes in with his head bowed down and never say another word in public because he's been disgraced. And you don't want that person put forward as a, and as an example. In fact, one of the things they noted in the newspapers was after that scandal suddenly", "in all of their major newspapers. Things that young people are reading, the children are reading and suddenly these things are belittled and this is the destruction of the moral fiber of the society whatever's left of it there's not much left right? It's like whole wheat bread and white bread seriously there's no brand there there's", "And that's really, this is a serious crisis. And like Sidi Muhammad Sharif said, we have the religion that can transform these people and make them great people because these people not only the Canadians but the North Americans in general have the potential for greatness. They have the potentional and we have to recognize that. They had worked wonders in the world and if they would transform their energies and make it for the sake of Allah instead of the sake Dunya", "of dunya they would work wonders for Islam and we should desire their guidance. We should desire, really, we should not desire their destruction. We shall desire the destruction of the worst elements of that society that is corrupting the best elements of it because there are evil people", "that is a reality in our tradition. There are evil people with evil ideas and evil thoughts, and they set out to corrupt the hearts of human beings." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/How to Stay Strong in Hard Times - Shaykh Hamza Yu_50nOjMr8HSU&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748527272.opus", "text": [ "How do we not lose hope? How do develop and sustain strong tawakkul? Well, remember that Imam al-Ghazali in his genius put tawakkal which is trusting God with tawhid in the Ihya. So it's kitab...tawhid wa tawakhil so its really important to have a strong tawhiad an understanding that everythings from god", "And also to understand that this is Darul Ibtila. In fact, one of the things that Imam al-Junaid says is that he took a qa'ida in life and once he took this axiom, this principle in his life, he said nothing ever bothered him after that. And it was that he said dunya is sharun kulluha wa huwa daru ibtilaan wufitnatin wahamman wa ghamm", "of tribulation, of trials, of depression and of anxiety. Like that is the wasf al-adar. That's the description of the abode. And so he says once you accept that, he said after that nothing bothered me that came from Virginia because I said oh it's just dunya. That how it is. So there's a stoic element to that but...", "whatever comes that's not, that doesn't have those qualities is fava. So just be grateful, right? That what you come, be patient with any tribulation but be grateful so it's important everybody has tribulation the wealthiest people have tribulation, the poorest people have tribulatio sometimes the wealthy people have I mean I've known some really wealthy people that I wouldn't there's no way I'd trade places with them knowing what I know about the tribulations that they have", "So this idea that people don't suffer because of their color, or skin, or the wealth they have. That's just not knowing the human condition. Every human being has his trials and tribulations. And so it is important to all be together in ta'awna aloo birri wa taqwa. Watch out for demons because they are around. The human demons are worse than those from the spirit world. They are worse.", "So you have to develop an understanding of your Lord and an understanding the abode. Reading the Quran with meaning, and one thing Imam al-Ghazali says, and I actually really appreciate this in the Jawahar, he says that Muslims should think about the Quran. You have to be careful when you have limitations of knowledge but you should reflect, do tadabur of the Quran, you can do it in English. These meanings, you could reflect on these meanings", "metaphysic that is not spelt out like a book. It can only be determined by a real engagement and Imam al-Ghazali says this is a lifetime of work, I mean he says it's going to take a lifetime for you to do this work and Allah has given you about just enough time and insha'Allah if you know for those who die before that time", "He's merciful and he's just so he's going to take into consideration. I'm sure people's The amount of time they had but if you've had a lot of time, I mean Imam al-Ghazali says if you reached 40 And your good doesn't outweigh your bad get ready for hell Because forty is a lot time To work things out Would you say that we can treat the pronunciation of different riwayat as providing different aspects of meaning well They do provide different aspects meaning and also", "And also, one of the things about tajweed is that a lot of the rules of tajweed actually have meanings embedded in them. So if you look like ghayrun maghdobi alaihim warad-dalleen I mean that mad, mad lazm there should have six harakat", "So in that med, it's indicating something about going astray. Like you just keep going down. So tajweed, I mean a lot of the rules of tajweed enhance.", "So there, it's like calling all these people.", "وَإِن كُنتُ مِّن قَبْرِهِ لَّمِنَ الظَّالِّينَ I mean, there you go. So the rules of tajweed they enhance the meaning like Shay usually has a med it can go 2-4-6 in Warsh You know, وَهُوَ عَلَىٰ كُدِّ شَيِّءٍ قَدِيرٌ I mean shay is thing and think of all the things in the world so in that med there's an indication of something of the nature of things", "just go on. So and then you have the Arabs because the Prophet was sent first to all the Arabs, and then to the Ajam but first to the Arabs he was first sent his own people one way of honoring them was to put all of the lahjads into the Quran so", "They'll find their dialect in the Qur'an, which is a way of saying marhaban. You know, we include you. So it wasn't this Quraish-y hegemony where you just impose your language on the rest of the Arabs. In fact, Hafs, which has been recited most in the Quran today, is Bani Tamim. It's the... Excuse me. It is the Arabs from the Najd.", "you know the people in Qatar are from Bani Tamim, like the ruling family of Qatar. They're from Bany Tamim so that's their language to say yu'man. The Prophet said yu'man he didn't pronounce the Hamzah so nafi on Warsh Qaloon has the Hamza but Warsh has no Hamzat and that's why Malik considered Nafi to be a Sunnah", "read it as a Sunnah. So Malik actually saw Warsh was Sunnah and that's why all the Libyans recite Qaloon because they were next to Egypt, and Egypt, Hafs became the dominant qira'ah. Qaloo is very close to Hafs but the rest of the Maliki's all over North and West Africa recite with Warsh. The Maliki in Sudan recite with Abu Amr like that beautiful reciter Sheikh Nureen", "Sheikh Nurein who died right when he was becoming famous. It's like Allah said time to take you and He had already done the whole Qur'an with beautiful reciter So they definitely give, and then also with the recensions you have things like you know Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala says", "So one has the passive, the other has you know the active form of the verb. So they were given permission those who are being fought but also because they were being fought. But then it also says they were giving permission to fight so it has both and that's why because when they got into the fight in Ashura al Huram I mean the Quran revealed that", "because they were being oppressed. So there, akbar wa ashad so one says akbar the other says ashad. So you have all these nuances. You have for instance in Allahumma salli ala Sayyidina Muhammad you have That's one qira'ah tathabbatu is another", "If you look at how it's written without the diacritical marks, it's in the same way in the Rasam al-Uthmani. But the diaccritical which were added later during the time of Al-Hajjaj The meaning of Tabayyinu is make sure you understand the meaning but Tathabbatu is to make sure that the source is sound So in that one verse are both those meanings and there many examples Mahwa Adal Ghaybi Baddaniin he's not like", "He's not making it up. It's not just his opinions about the unseen so the Qira'at are really, even the Shaddaq Qiraat are very interesting. I mean, it's a Shaddq Qiraa but the reason it's interesting is because the dialect that you find in the Gulf Arabs", "you know, they use the calf. They pronounce it like a sheen or a chet sound. That's a very ancient Arabic dialect so the Qara'ats have preserved also and then things like Rom and Ishmaam I mean if you look at the Ishmaan one it's a proof that you have to take the Quran from Akari because there is no way you can learn Ishmaa without doing it Shafawiyyan You can't read how to do it", "You have to learn how to get that from a qari. It doesn't change the... I mean, that's just a really interesting aspect of the Qur'an. So tajweed to me is one of the real proofs of the preservation of the Quran. Just the fact that all of the sects of Islam agree on all ten quraat. What religion has that? Like they don't debate it.", "And the Shia use the Shaatabiyya and the Durra, which are both from Sunni scholars. They don't have any problem... they use the Al-Fi'af ibn Malik, he's a Sunni scholar. So there is no even like Ahmadiyyat have the same Qur'an as the rest of the Muslims. Every group whether the Ismaili or the Bura Dawoodis every group has the same Quran nobody", "Nobody differs about the Qur'an. The Christians differ, the Protestants only accept the Hebrew Bible they don't accept some of the apocryphal texts it has to be in the Hebrew bible whereas the Catholics except text that are in the" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/How to win against Nafs _ Shaythan - Shaykh Hamza _gshYnsKFXKo&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743064235.opus", "text": [ "I seek refuge with Allah from Satan and the accursed. In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. And may Allah's peace be upon our Master Muhammad and his family and companions. Peace be upon you all.", "at the end of that podcast, and I'd like to talk next week about how we can really fight these things and how we overcome them. And the first thing I want to say is that there was a debate amongst the ancients about nature and nurture. Are we just victims of our nature?", "can we actually nurture ourselves or be nurtured out of these basic tendencies that we have? And the answer to that in our tradition is that even a dog can be taught to hunt for you and a falcon can be talked to hunt", "so that they become... In fact, with knowledge the dogs even though normally you would not eat from a dog but if a dog is muallam, if it's taught and that's actual word that the Qur'an uses. If it's thought, if has ilm then its elevated to higher status and what it hunts is halal. And so knowledge is the way we overcome these things", "Here and this is where it gets really, really important. The most important and single truth that we all have to understand if we want to actually change ourselves and overcome ourselves is that we can't do it by ourselves. That is the most fundamental truth. If you think that you can change then not only do you have pride but you will never be able to conquer yourself. You will never", "to overcome whatever tribulation you have. The only way that you can do that is through supernatural power, and that supernatural power is from Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la. And that's the imdad that Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta-'Ali gives us. Allah is the one that can enable us to do that. Without Allah Subhaanahu Wa ta-'Ala, you cannot do it. And so people try and try again and again and get it, I keep failing, I tried so many times. Exactly, you tried because you did not rely on Allah SubhanaWaTa-Ala", "Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. But if you rely on Allah subhana wa ta-ala, then you can overcome it and one of the things that secularists hate is that the single most successful addiction treatment program is the 12 step program and the reason why it's successful is because they begin by admitting their powerlessness to overcome their addiction They have to acknowledge a power greater than them And that's the only way that they can do it and that's why it successful It's it's that's that is the single", "the single reason that it's successful. And they use a prayer, the prayer that they use is the prayer of Niebuhr, Reinhold Niebuh who was probably one of the most famous Protestant theologians of the 20th century at least in the western hemisphere but he wrote a book called Moral Man In an Immoral Society in which he argued", "that when you have a society that is moral, people tend to be more moral. But when you... When you have the society that's immoral, people slip into sin much easier and that's why it's a challenge for righteous people to be moral in an immoral society because they're going against the grain. But how do they do that? How do we become moral beings in a culture", "with lust, with envy. I mean it's amazing how they use envy to sell products and to make you envious of what other people have lifestyles of the rich and famous all these tools that they have in their toolbox become powerless when you acknowledge there is no power there is", "There's no way to avoid obedience and there is no power to enable me to do, to avoid disobedience. There's not ability to avoid dis-obedience and there's no power be obedient except with God, except through God. That's one of the meanings of لَحَوْلَ وَرَقُوتَ إِلاَّ بِاللَّهِ And so Ibn A'taylah says something amazing he says", "Whoever deems it strange or does not think that God can save him from his appetites and remove", "deemed divine power to be powerless, to be incapacitated. So that is istighrab here means istibaad. You know he deems it unlikely that God can save him from his own appetites. That it's... so once you acknowledge that Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala is the one only that can do that then you have the capacity to do it without it you can't do it and that's why it's really important", "to remember that Allah is capable of doing all things. In fact, Ohio the state motto of Ohio I think they tried to change it but it says with God all things are possible and that is a metaphysical truth that is acknowledged even in a state motto. So if you're suffering right now from some kind of addiction, if you", "find yourself doing these things over and over again, and you don't think God can take you out of that state then you have incapacitated the power of God. And so what you have to do, the first thing you have is acknowledge I am powerless but God is all powerful. And through God I can remove these things. Allah will enable me, the divine istiqaa this is what Imam al-Tahawin in his aqidah talks about", "the divine capacity, the divine enablement and then that human enablement of means and things. When those two come together, that's when reality happens so you have to acknowledge that with Allah . And if you do that, you will be able to overcome but then...and this is where Ibn Atayla is one of our truly great spiritual geniuses", "يُبَّمَا وَرَدَتَ الظُّلْمَ عَلَيْكَ لِيُعَوْرِفَكَ قَطْرًا مَا مَّنَّ بِهِ عَالَيكَ Sometimes these dark things that you fall into are a means by which God causes you to realize the blessings of being in a state of obedience. I got a letter a few days ago from a man who told me that he had been in such an incredible", "became really successful and he started making a lot of money. And he said his dean went out the window, and he was like asking me for help about this, like how do I get my Dean back? And he says I'm really struggling with this. Well, the Prophet mentioned about wealth that causes you to transgress. These are one of five things that he warned about, sorry seven things", "like a wealth that will cause you to grant success. There was a man, Tha'alibah who used to come to the Prophet and beg him to make dua for wealth He would say Ya Rasulullah And he was always in the front of the prayer line Always! He was always the first one in the prayerline And he begged the Prophet, and he kept doing it And the Prophet wouldn't make that dua for him But he kept asking and he was unrelenting And finally the Prophet made a dua for Him", "and he got some wealth, he got animals. And then those animals had animals. Then suddenly he had more and more wealth. He began because he had to take his animals out and graze them, he went further away from the masjid. Then he started not showing up for prayer. When the Prophet sent his zakat collectors when zakat came down", "came down, he said what are we like Christians now? And so when the Prophet was told that, he refused to accept Zakat from him. And then the later ones wouldn't accept Zakaat from him and finally Uthman relented but the point is that's a man who didn't know that wasn't the right thing for him and that's why you never ask specifically, you always do istikhara let Allah choose for you what's good", "struggling in your business, it might be the best thing for you. But no we want it our way and this is where... You know one of the things Imam al-Ghazali says and it's one of most powerful things I've ever heard him say and he said many many powerful things. He said that when you get angry about things not going your way,", "because matters were in accordance to God's will as opposed to your will and what, you know thy will be done not my will be down and that's where you have pride. And that's why pride is the underlying human crisis this pride thinking you can do it yourself thinking that you're doing some gift to God", "Don't tell me how much you've done for Islam. I mean, you can say like that famous speech, ask not what Islam can do for you but ask what you could do for Islam, you know? What you think that you're doing some favor to God everything's from Al-Mannan", "He's the only one that can do that. Like, he can remind us of all the blessings he's given us. He can do it. When we attempt to remind like look how much I've done for you. What did you do for me? What have you done? Everything you did for me and I am obliged to thank people for helping me but I have to see that there are means by which God has helped me because if I don't it's shirk. But I do. We thanked the Asbab", "about that's true but we have to also recognize that's what they are their means they're not ends everything ends with god and so that's a very different approach to this so he's saying sometimes he'll do this in order for you to know his blessings so that is really important you know that sometimes your appetites happen", "able to contain yourself, to restrain yourself from those appetites. So it's what they call in Alcoholics Anonymous falling off the wagon you know that will happen in your struggle and that's why the nafs al lawama, those are the good people. You're not at mutma'inna yet but you're fighting it so if you fall you just get back on. If you fall", "get back on that's the path and i was once in a i was in kuwait with sheikh abdullah bin beya and we were in the airport and there was a soccer team that came from one of the arab countries and they were all young men athletes they looked very you know really in good shape and everything and sheikh mashallah he has that beautiful aspect and he just has the hayba of the scholars and we", "these athletic clothes with the team name on it and he came up and he kneeled down before Shaykh Abdullah bin Bayyah and he told him, he said I struggle constantly with sinfulness you know astaghfirullah i do things and then i make tawbah and i go back and do things that make tawa and i just feel disgusted with myself and Shaykh Allah looked at me and he said istimr like keep going", "Keep struggling, that's it. Like you know there is a hadith Qudsi that the Prophet said, Sallallaahu Alaihi Wasallam said that Shaytan swore an oath to God I will lead all of your servants astray and I will put in them desire for sin and they will sin", "and Allah said to Shaytan, And as long as they turn back to me I will continue to forgive them. So it's like that is...that's it! That's the path. It's like you fall, you get back up but you don't let Shaytan win. And the way you don' t let Shaypan win is you keep making that Tawbah with an Azeema", "your appetite and you will do it. It can take Ibn al-Munkadir who's one of the great scholars of Islam, he was really considered one of greatest of the Tabi'een He was amazing man in Medina, he is Imam Malik teacher and Imam Malek ibn Anas said we used to go to Ibn Munqadir And we would feel contempt for ourselves for weeks after sitting with him", "he was so amazing, like his spiritual state was so exalted. Ibn Munkadir, and this is a man who Malik ibn Anas was in awe of. He said, I fought myself for 50 years before it finally surrendered. So that's the path. It's just,", "And if you don't know the blessings of obedience and practice, and you're not grateful for them they'll be taken away from you. And that's why his next hikmah is That whoever does not know the weight of the blessings when he has them", "is to know them once he's lost them. And so our basic state when we're children is innocence, and we enter into adulthood and we begin to sin, and then that darkens our souls. But you polish the soul with tawbah, and with good deeds, and good actions, and knowledge, and all these things, and that's the struggle. It's a harab sijad , it's a war of attrition, us versus shaitan .", "you will win in the end even if it takes a long time. So, the single most important thing for you to overcome yourself is not to rely on yourself but to rely Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala. On their Lord they rely that's Tawakkal and this is why Imam al Ghazali in his genius he put in his Ihyaa", "because it's through seeing the unity of God and seeing God behind everything that you're able to trust in God, because you're aware that He is omnipresent with His knowledge. He's with us always, and He will never abandon us as long as we call on Him. He is a generous Lord. He will", "be in, you have to know all you have do is turn to Allah with tawbah. He is a tawaab and that's who our Lord is. He's the oft returning as long as you return to Him he will return to you. If you come back to me I'll come back too. That's what he said to Bani Israel. The Jews can turn to God anytime they want. They were his chosen people.", "so many gifts and he reminded them remember the blessings that I gave upon you they were given all those profits, all those things but if they're in sinfulness if they are in disobedience we should want good for them we should walk guide for them because their children of prophets who would not give for children of prophet", "struggle with the self until the self submits to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala but it's for calcutta and that's that's the nature of the soul. It will fight, and we have to we have To fight better more intelligent more strategic and inshallah allah will give us tawfiq Inshallah I want to talk next week about The particularly the sin of the eye because the eye of all things", "of all things is the quickest to corrupt the heart. So whatever you're watching, just know that those images that you're allowing into your heart if they're corrosive, they will destroy the spirituality of your heart and it's said that the inner eye", "When it gets into your eye, there's nothing you can do until you get that speck out of your eye. It's just amazing. A tiny little speck and the inner eye is far more sensitive than that outer eye so you have to really protect your eyes. And it's interesting, it says say to the believers to lower their gaze and then guard their private parts.", "direct relationship and then it says that is pure for them so inshallah uh that's what i'd like to talk about the crisis of pornography in our community and in the general community and also globally it's become such a horrific problem and it's also it's", "it's just involved the people that are producing it are some of the most evil people on this planet there's sexual trafficking, there's just the things that they do to these poor women. They're involved in these things is horrific so I want to talk about that because i think it's a serious problem and it's one of the major things that we need to overcome", "That is the sins of the eye, inshaAllah. Jazakum Allah khairan, wassalamu alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh. Until next week, inshallah." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/I am 35 and ready to sell my soul - Shaykh Hamza Y__1748538470.opus", "text": [ "There's a documentary done where they put an ad in the paper for people that wanted to sell their soul to the devil. It was a full documentary and they got people that came, and then went through, took them to these satanic rituals to sell there souls and they were totally ready! And one of them just said you know I've been trying to break into...you want to be a rock star? And he said I'm 35 my time is almost ending", "you know, I'm willing to sell my soul." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Imams Talking politics in khutbas - Shaykh Hamza Y__1743055975.opus", "text": [ "And one of the tragedies of modern khutbahs is traditionally, the khutba was focused on the Quran. On an ayah or a hadith or some theme inside like sabr or sadaqa or something and if you look at all the traditional khutbas of the Muslim world and we have many books of khutbhas", "the khutbahs that were recorded of the Prophet you won't find any political khutbas. You just won't fine any, I guarantee you. Just look try to find talking about whatever the problems of the time were" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Importance of Sleep in your life - Shaykh Hamza Yu_uZ4lFepekgw&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748521700.opus", "text": [ "How does one balance the desire of sleep and how does one break it in?", "what food is to the body. And we know now that sleep is not... Your metabolism is basically working at the same level when you're asleep as it is when you are sitting or lying down awake. So, what is sleep? Sleep is the soul's need to leave the dunya for a period of time because this is... We're aliens here! This is not our natural abode.", "state is like being fish out of water so we do our work you know we're like amphibians like we're here but we have to go back into the water and that water is the consciousness that happens in sleep. And that's why you feel so refreshed after sleep your soul is refreshed it's not your body,", "really important and people need different levels of sleep you even in life I mean one of the things as you get older people think old people you know can't sleep because they're not supposed to be supposed to beat you any better the older you get the more a bad that you should be doing it's just natural and that's why in the Muslim world all people know what to do with insomnia", "are appropriate for their age because you dry out, you know babies sleep a lot. They're like cats Because cats are that you know, they say that's one of the things about cats there. They more spiritual than dogs They have to sleep all the time So so babies are very wet and and moist and as you dry through life You're gonna need less sleep as you get older but people should have Dolvin Bay had told me because", "told me be careful I'm not sleeping because he said he actually harmed his health when he was young cuz we didn't sleep a lot he just had such high himma and children hate to go to sleep because their consciousness is there they're new here so it's like yeah there I'm gonna miss something right they want to stay awake they fight sleep when", "So, but so you know I would be careful. But during Ramadan we should be sleeping less. Yeah and Sayyidina Ali's dua was وَرَضِّينِ بِيَّسِيرٍ مِن النَّوْمِ You know اللهم هل علينا بلا أسقام والفراق من العمل Like enable us to pray Ramadan free of illness and free of preoccupations And content us with less sleep", "So Ramadan is a good time, you know to but don't overdo it to where you're gonna get sick You have to sleep Sleep is very important So today with regards demons don't snap either, you the prophet said Peter V in the shelter lay up Elon Take naps because the demons don' nap Go sorry go ahead today with regard to psychiatry people create labels for all behavioral patterns", "behavioral patterns should we be using these patterns yeah I mean you know psychiatry is we have a whole tradition of the study of the psyche right psyche is soul and so psychology is the study human soul traditionally and this really for us this is very deep psychology I mean he's giving", "We're living in an age of a lot of mental imbalance, but we're also living in a kind of psychological psychiatric period where everything's labeled. So everything, oh he's got narcissistic personality disorder. Everybody has all these labels and I think we have to be careful about being too quick to relegate people to mental illness. In Islam it's very", "It's very hard to prove mental illness in criminal cases. Because if people act rationally, in any way then they're seen as having basic sanity. I mean if somebody plans shooting up a school you can say it's mental illness but they plan to do something very heinous so they are just a human demon. And why there are human demons God only knows", "for us to penetrate that mystery. But there are human demons, and they're out there, and there's people, they're under like a demonic possession. It's pretty clear. I mean just look at them. They scream and yell, and it's amazing. You know triggered like they can't... People we should be able just to have a conversation about something but there's", "of spirit. They're very troubled by them. So they react when they see any type of, any forms of piety which is a proof that they are under demonic yetawallonu. I mean Allah says that they have taken iblis as their ally. So we live amongst them and you know that's part of what he's saying is look you have it in your own self and you have to learn to live with it in yourself let alone in the world that were in.", "The heart should be in control, but the truth is reached by the intellect. How can you ensure that the intellect is still under control of the heart and you are not depending on it in a harmful way? I mean again, you just have to...the most important things is to follow the sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ. You know, the Christians have that nice thing, what would Jesus do? We have to think about the Prophets ﷺ", "and then do our best just to be guided by those principles of sunnah. So again, I think you can overthink these things. It's also good to get reflection from people that you trust, that have insight into you, who know you well. Because suhba is important. And traditionally, that was the whole point of the fuqara and having the idea of the zawiyah. They were doing work on themselves. That was the purpose of that whole operation.", "whole operation. A lot of it fell into a lot of dysfunctionality, like everything in the Muslim world. The whole enterprise has fallen on hard times so they're not the only ones but that was the purpose of that third space. But you can also I mean... It's very important to preoccupy the self", "things because if you're if you are deliberating too much about things and what they call navel gazing Kierkegaard called it naval gazing yeah it's a dangerous thing to do one of the purposes of one of", "Oh, Imara. What exactly is meant by it? A lot of things. I mean, Imora is the idea of cultivation. You know, Ibn Khaldun's one of his major points in his book is this idea of Umran, you know, civilization that we are civilizing creatures. We take wild nature and we create gardens.", "these vegetables and all the foods, and everything. And we create cuisines. I mean this is all cultivation. This is what humans do. And it's our fitrah to do that. We're artists in that way. So we have liberal arts, we have fine arts, then we have useful arts. So the liberal arts are how we refine or cultivate our intellects that enable us to study the higher truths", "study the higher truths. And then, and then the fine arts are arts that are done for just the sheer joy of you know like embellishing things embroidery all these things that are don't find their means from I mean it's really is the final arts because they're an end unto themselves they're not done for they're done", "Right, so like literature. All those things that humans do. Poetry. It's all cultivation and then you have the useful arts that are really important. The crafts that... And we're losing a lot of some of the most important crafts because a lot people can't do things anymore and the robots aren't going to do it at least not for a long time if they ever do but plumbers like I met this plumber", "because now you can't get a plumber in California. It'd take you like two, three weeks to get a plummer. So I met this plumber and an elevator and pray tell what he used to do. Like he had plumbing outfit and everything. He said, I'm a plumer. I said why is it so hard to get plumbers? He said nobody wants to do it anymore. So this guy gets $250 for just showing up. He doesn't have to turn a wrench. He just shows up and he gets $200.", "And he did it when he was 18. Traditionally, that's what people vocational training did. Plumbers are very useful. Sarab is very useful Carpenters. There's no master carpenters anymore. They used to have what they called journeyman carpenter So these were people that would The juror was from French from the day so they were day carpentors So they apprenticed for seven years with a master carpenter before they got became master carpeners and and they're very rare and they make a fortune", "make a fortune these people because really wealthy people want these master carp they don't want these hackers they don' t want those guys. They want the people that do the fine art so it's really hard to find good carpenters book binders I mean there's like there's a guy here i swear to god he's i used to bind books with this guy in uh in Sonoma one of", "library was bound by him and he did a beautiful job hand stitching you know and I did it slowly over years because I couldn't afford to do it all at once but he retired and and I asked him did did you train anybody said no but these are beautiful crafts I mean dr. Cindy makes those beautiful bags I mean she could make", "always purchase things that are of good quality. And everything is so poorly done now, but it's part of... It's just the time we're living in. It's a time where there's no refinement. So Imara is really about that. It' s about cultivation. Cultivating the arts, cultivating yourself, cultivatng the garden. Just growing food. It is amazing to grow food.", "and then you pick your own food. It's amazing! The best salad you'll ever have is the one you cut off right from the garden, if you have a salad garden you just go and take pieces of it. And it's very different from the lettuce you buy in the grocery store. It is like fresh meat. Sheikh Abdallah ibn Bayyah was in Mauritania and that the best meat you'll", "because they kill the animal and it's still warm, and they bring it and then they cook it. Whereas the meat here is all frozen, so these are all things that are being lost in people, these crafts. They're really important. Useful arts are very important. Then the bow arts are... you know, they embellish life. I mean one of the things that struck me when I was in Mauritania,", "make these leather cases for them that had these beautiful African designs on them. And I asked one of the women why they did that, and she said because a pen's so ugly. And that's a sign of a fitra people, that they're still healthy. Because one of hallmarks of modern society is how ugly it is. Like the clothes are ugly, the food is never presented nicely, like fast food, you know, it's in these horrible containers", "We've lost that sense of humanity, just what makes us human. And this is not just for rich people. I mean in Morocco if you go to the poorest places or in Mauritania and they really present everything. If you see the way they present salads in Mauritanian it's a work of art. You never seen a salad like a Mauritanians salad. I guarantee you. It's a", "What is that in them that makes him do that? That artistry. That's ihsan coming out. It's just ihsan. إِنَّ اللَّهَ كَتَبْرْ إِحسَانًا عَلَىٰ كُلِّ شَيْءٍ So there's ihsaan in dress. There's this ihsaans in eating. Every single thing that you do, there's Ihsan. And so you have to find it and then practice it. Those are the... إِمَّا اللَّـهَ مَعَ الْمُحْسِنِينَ Allah is with the practicers of Ihsan but you have", "find it you know and that's partly what we're trying to do here is make something with Ihsan" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Islam is not an Arabian religion - Shaykh Hamza Yu_PwbR5pW3KDw&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748524218.opus", "text": [ "Islam is not an Arabian religion. And one of the tragedies of modern Islam, is this kind of Arabization of a lot of cultures. In fact, a lot the Arabization is not even Arabic. So for instance, the robe is not a Arab dress. The robe is a Persian dress. Probably the closest thing to his dress is the way Bengalis and Indians dress with the izar what they call lungi", "the kolungi, and then he wore a kameez. And then the Libyan dress also or the way they dressed in Pakistan because he wore sirwal and then had a kamaez over it but the robe was a Persian dress and you can look at all of the pictures of the ancient Persians, they're all wearing robes so when the Arabs conquered Persia, they took on the dress of the aristocrats of Persia that's where the robe comes from but its not native to the Arabs themselves", "It would have been alien to them. But now it's become associated with the Arabs when it's actually Persian. And also the ghutra. The ghutrā was not something any Sahabi wore. Ibn Umar said that the ghudra was doubt in the night, something inappropriate for a man in the day because in the nigh it would make him look like a woman. They wouldn't know if it was... but they didn't wear the ghuttara. This was something adopted later. They wore turban, the Arabs.", "Arabs. And then also the other thing which is really important about the dress of the Prophet ﷺ, he dressed from different cultures so he had a Roman Byzantine shirt, he had an Ethiopian shirt, and very few clothes but they were not of one culture. It was very interesting because had they been people might have said that's the Sunnah to dress like that. But he wore a Yemeni jubba,", "He had a jubba from Yemen made in Sana'at. They're very nice, it was a red and striped jubbah so he wore different clothes but the hallmark of his religion is modesty. Muslims should not have alien clothes because wherever Muslims went they wanted to let people know we are not aliens this religion's not an alien religion" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Jew found out Quran is preserved - Shaykh Hamza Yu__1742880574.opus", "text": [ "There was a Jewish man in Andrusia who wanted to see who had the truth and he was a calligrapher. So, he calligraphed a Torah and he put a lot of mistakes in it and he took it to a rabbi and it was a beautiful calligraph Hebrew Torah and the rabbi read it and said are there how is it? He said its beautiful one of the finest editions of the Torah I've ever seen and he said okay thank you", "And then he did the Bible. He took it to a Christian priest and he read it. And he said, what do you think? He said beautiful, excellent Bible. You said no nothing. He said no is wonderful. Then he did The Quran. He Took it to an Imam and the Imam told him you have to burn this. He Said why? He Said It's filled with mistakes. I don't care how nice the calligraphy is", "people had a preserved book. Imam Qurtubi mentions that, that's from Isnad so when you study the Quran you're studying a book that was preserved" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Jewish Rabbis Knew Prophet ﷺ -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf__1742998476.opus", "text": [ "There are just rabbis even on YouTube that admit That the Prophet is a providential force They admit that Islam is closer to us than Christianity. There are ones but then there's other ones that just tell lies Just tell lies flat-out lies because the great rabbis of their Middle Ages al Fayyumi Al Fayyum is amazing what he says and that's why in our tradition it says you can't say he's Nabi al Ummiyyin", "It's not enough to say he is Nabi al-Umein because some of the Jews actually said that. That he is the prophet for the Gentiles. He is not for us, he is for the gentiles. So they actually knew he was a prophet" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Lessons for beautiful Married life - Shaykh Hamza _f7YkAHKxnCk&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742883652.opus", "text": [ "of an ending, so do you have any advice to give either sisters or brothers? I mean, I think...I actually feel sorry when I look out there. I feel sorry. There are a lot...I see a lot of really decent unmarried pious women that are having a really hard time finding spouses, finding people that are compatible intellectually. We have a lot highly educated women. You know, I'll give you an example in my own country we have", "We have women that are from South Asia, that grew up in America and they're strong women because they grow up in an environment where women are encouraged to be forthright. So a lot of men will go back home to find the village girl that's gonna do everything he tells her to do cause he doesn't wanna deal with... But what we'll find out is after 10 years the village girls gonna be just like the...", "It just takes a little more time to get there. I really think that's one of the reasons why the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam married Khadija. She was an older woman, she was very self-assured. He was never intimidated by strong women. He encouraged their strength and I think Khadijah was what enabled him to feel at ease with strong women because she was such a strong woman, amazing woman.", "She was an entrepreneur. She was the one that he went to for advice. She took him to Waraka. You know, she was the ones who knew what to do when he was struggling. She is the one who encouraged him and told him no this is your Lord's not going to abandon you and here are the reasons why. So when Aisha comes along who was a firebrand I mean Aisha is just amazing intellectually curious brilliant", "forthright, had no qualms about challenging the Prophet sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam about things. I mean it's very clear from the Hadith and she is amazing. He didn't crush her spirit he encouraged it, it's really clear. And she ended up leading an army and that's how self confident she was even though she was wrong in that position just the fact that she did it", "did it is amazing. So, you know I think we need men that are willing to... We have to recognize the age were living in a very different time and we have to come to terms with the time and rise up to the challenges of the time. And part of the challenge is that we need new models for", "for having successful marriages because the old models worked well in a different world. The world made a lot more sense, was easier to navigate, roles were much more well-defined. That's no longer the case anymore so these are difficult times for us but we have to rise up to challenges and part of that is again it goes back to these basic principles purification of self getting control of the self", "of the self, you know setting aside egos because the nafs al-amara and the nafsa is at the root of a lot of these problems so we need a lot education. We need to educate men and women and ourselves I mean you know the educators need to be educated. The husband has no right to force a woman to work outside of the home or", "associated with a craft or profession because it's wage work. Just you know in noting this the man should nonetheless help the wife in the house even if he is working outside and that was the sunnah of the Prophet . And the prophet used to do dishes, he sewed his own clothes, he sowed his sandals ,", "So that's important to remember, that you're doing it. It's a sunnah and I was with a friend of Shaykh Abdullah Al Qadhi in the Emirates and this little boy came in and he started playing with him and he was saying... He'd make animal sounds and then he'd ask the little boy what animal is that? And the boy would say... And he was playing with them and when the boy left he finished he said The Prophet used to play with children and I love to make the intention of fulfilling that sunnah before I do that", "before I do that. So he was actually fulfilling a sunnah of the Prophet in doing that and that's why if you're in your house and you do that, and tahtasib nda Allah, you know that you just consider a reward with Allah it's not a waste of time because there are people who say, ah it's a waste or time around enough time well what about her? I mean her times as precious as your time", "When she said, they asked him how was the Prophet in the house. She said he was in the of his family and it's a beautiful word because she didn't say . She said , the word comes from that which is servile or degrading. And the would never do anything servile", "was that chores that you people might consider to be meheen, to below things he didn't elevate himself above them. And the idea is that any halal work is not degrading. If it's halal, it's not degraded even if it's what we would call menial task. The fact that the best of creation did it including carrying wood milking a goat He did all those things so anybody who does those things", "it's not degraded by doing those things, but the mere fact that the best of Allah's creation did those things. Qadhi Abu Bakr said that the things a man can serve himself in are those things that relate to his own ibadah like getting your own wudu water, those type things, preparing the ghusl I mean obviously in pre-modern times that was much more common in the world than it is now But there are still a lot of places", "Ibn Abbas said that the Prophet rose in the night and he would go to the water skin, untie it and get his own wudhu water. Even though he had servants in the house. There were servants in a house, the Prophet had servants. So the fact that he did that is a sign, that's in Sahih Muslim.", "If he commands her to fulfill any right binding upon her. So when you see the verse about obeying your husband, it has to do with حقوق . You see if its his حق and if its not a حق then you don't have to do it. So it's important to understand that. Once you know what your rights are then you know", "feeling his rights to you as well. And that's the important thing to know. It doesn't mean, I mean there is this idea that a lot of Muslims have that she just supposed to do whatever he says and be this slavish obedient servant in the house. It's not true! She can refuse things that she doesn't have to do. She has every right to refuse to cook for his guests. Right? In Madaqi Madhab and Shafi'i Madhab she doesn´t even have to cook period.", "There is a Hadith, The one that ruins the relationship between a man and his wife isn't from me.", "You see, because she's stinting on his right. So it is important to know when this works and when it doesn't work but it doesn' t mean that he...that she's just in submission to this man, no! But in certain things yes so these are the haqquq . So once you know that, so that is a haq of the man. And then another important is adhering to the principles of forgiveness", "Forgiveness. That really forgiving and just letting it go. And one of the things that people in relationships will do is they'll hold on to these things, and it's just infantile behavior, and you have to see it for what it is. It's you're a pouting little child. That's all you're doing, and your trying to make the other person miserable for doing something to you. That...it's infantile behaviour. And you need to snap out of it.", "out of it and just remind yourself. And if the other person reminds you of it, take the reminder. Don't make your life miserable for yourself and for others because that's all it is. And in the end of the day, it doesn't matter. So if something happens that upsets you, just let it go. It will happen. It'll happen many times throughout your life but just let", "The danger is that you never learn to overcome the desire to hold on to it. And it becomes also people derive perverse pleasure in that, so that happens. You start...you get a pleasure making somebody feel miserable and one of things about, you know they've done studies on cheerfulness and things and cheerfulness", "much more powerfully than irritability, although irritability is also contagious. But it doesn't spread as easily as good nature. I mean they've done really interesting studies about this to watch this and depression is difficult very difficult to actually be transferred to somebody. It can happen if you live with a depressed person you become you can become depressed but it's actually difficult for that to happen it's quite unusual", "You can actually transform somebody's state quite easily if you're up and they are down. And you see this with children, you know, children pout and do these things. Just with silly faces and things, you can get them to break a smile. Once you've got them there, they know. They can't hold on to it. So it is interesting just breaking that infantile desire. I think the Prophet was an absolute master like everything he did. He was a master at that.", "at that of breaking that state that people got into. And it doesn't mean he didn't have periods, there were difficult periods but generally that was what he did. Now it's important to keep in mind that marital life due to the constant interaction and psycho-emotional states that people go through we go through different psycho- emotional states throughout the day or the week", "And she said, that's true by Allah. It's true. I would never abandon anything but your name. I mean, that is an example and then also this idea that the Prophet said a mu'min should never dislike a believer if he dislikes one quality he should focus on the qualities he likes. So every person is going to have things that bother you and things that you like about them", "qualities that are pleasing. Also the Prophet said,", "shackled by an animal ferocity. They have no kindness, gentleness or love since animality dominates their nature. Love and kindness are human attributes. Anger and sensuality belong to the animals.\" That comes from a hadith in which the Prophet was talking to some women and he said I've never seen a creature that has more possession over", "that to another level of understanding. That the reason they have so much power over is because these are people who conquered their animal soul and so they're not people that are going to dominate women, they're actually people that because of the love and kindness that has overcome their souls, they actually allow the women their shortcomings without demanding change.", "change. And that's what Ibn Abbas said about the verse in the Quran, وَلِرِّجَارِ عَلَيْهِنَّا دَرَجًا That men have one degree over women. That's what he said it was. He said it relinquishing the right of a man for the woman. تَنَازُرْ عَنِ الْحَقِّ Whereas he would not relinquish her rights. In other words, he would fulfill all of her rights but he would demand of her all of his rights. That is the degree that men have over women and that's Ibn Abbasa", "who's the translator of the Quran. And one other thing also is just going the path of least resistance. Water puts out fire, fire increases fire. If you look at the Prophet , that was his strategy with people. Omar said I once roared at my wife and she answered back.", "Why should you rebuke me for answering you back? By Allah, the wives of the Prophet dispute with him and even ignore him for a night and a day. So she was saying who do you think you are? Basically I mean that's what it is. He said who do You think you all know? The wives of Prophets Allah said do this to the prophet and he is the best example so I think in that hadith there's a real... And he went and indeed found that from Hafsa. He went and asked Hafsa who was his daughter", "Do you do that? And he was shocked. But it changed his attitude, and we have when he was Khalifa, the man who came to his house, knocked on the door, and then he heard Omar's wife yelling at him. And he left. And Omar came out and said to him what happened. He said nothing. He says no, you came, knocked down my door, what did you want? He said I didn't want anything. And He said by Allah tell me what you want.", "about my wife. But when I heard your wife, I said there was no point in complaining to you.\" And Omar , he said, this is my wife the mother of my children she maintains my house cooks my food shouldn't I have patience with her if she gets upset with me? So there's the man who roared", "Roar that that's the change occurred in him and that's point people can change Now we go to the shared rights of both the wife husband The first shared right is called personal a shot And this is most important one because it's the foundation of good marriage personal is beautiful companionship", "Each spouse has the right to live with the other spouse in which they are actually treated very well. So this is a mutual right, in other words the wife has a right to be treated beautifully by her husband it's a Haqq, it's right and the husband has a", "Aisha relates a sound transmission that the Prophet said, I am to you. It's a famous hadith about Abu Zar' and Umm Zar' is very beautiful hadith there are whole books have been written just on this hadith alone. And it's a hadith where the prophet describes these wives talking about their husbands each one says something about her husband and then it comes to Umm Zar', she starts talking about Abu zar'", "how wonderful he was and her life was just heaven and bliss with Abu Zarra. And then she just, the one thing happens is that he marries another woman who was very beautiful and Umm Zarra became very jealous and ended up causing a divorce to happen. And Then She married another man but he was nothing compared to Abu Zarrah and she really regretted it.", "like Abu Zarra to your Umm Zarra. And what he was telling her was, we have a very beautiful relationship so don't destroy it by your jealousy because you'll regret it. And I think that that... I mentioned that last week just about the fact that all of his wives none of them wanted a divorce from him and there was difficulty in the household. It wasn't a bed of roses. There was difficulty", "There was difficulty. They had their human troubles that go with the domestic situation, all that was part of for us but also for the full experience of the human life that the Prophet lived. In terms of what engenders and facilitates these relationships one is really important Islamic etiquette so it's very important just to remember that just like your brother you're supposed", "I mean these things you do with people outside, sometimes we forget that the people were living with have more right than other people to those same etiquettes. And also doing things for each other. Ethoc, preferring the other to the self this idea and the thing about it is men have to be very careful because there are many women that that is their nature. Right? So in other words a man can get into a very exploitive relationship", "because his wife by her nature, especially women that were born and raised in a more Eastern tradition where there's a lot of double standards with the male and female children. You can get into an exploitive relationship with the wife where you're allowing her to do everything and she says oh well I love to do it. Well, that doesn't mean that she should be doing everything because she loves to do", "And second of all, she's going to appreciate no matter what she says when you help her out and do things for her. She will appreciate it because that's human nature. So just maintaining the etiquette. And then also a wife should not allow domestic concerns so that she forgets her own husband and then becomes like a domestic servant too because that can happen. A woman becomes so preoccupied", "that there's a whole Sakina, there should be spiritual relationships, spiritual growth between the two. Things like that. And a man also has to be very careful of not getting into the... and this is all about I mean I'll really tell you in all honesty. The thing about life is the challenge for everybody is not to fall asleep. And it's really easy to just get into these patterns of perfunctory behavior", "behavior and to forget what life is about. You can really forget that this is it, your life is an aggregate of moments. And when you're with your wife or husband, it can either be a horrible experience, it could be a wonderful experience, or it could", "what happens when you're busy making other plans. And there's a lot of truth in that. You can get so caught up in these day-to-day concerns, that life passes you by and you missed it. So family is like that, your children are like that. It's very easy to lose sight of them." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Look at Palestine and Afghanistan - Shaykh Hamza Y_FL4zKXfQHwc&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748520781.opus", "text": [ "And you have all this mental illness and people unwell because they're not in nature. Like we are meant to be in nature, so the more distant we get from our nature, the more unwell we get. That's why this religion is called Deen al-Fitrah, because it brings people back to that principial nature. One of the elements of our nature is worship. If you study human history", "study human history, human beings worship. You're going to worship something. If you don't worship Allah, you will worship something else or many things and that's why the Prophet talked about the devotees of clothes. The people devoted to clothes. They're worshipping clothes and their whole life is surrounded by clothes and then there are people who worship", "life is around food and they put their whole life around food. And then there's people it's all about power, and this one of the really strange things about uh the modern period it's so obsessed with this idea of power whereas in our tradition we're more interested in powerlessness because we attribute all power to Allah like we are powerless Allah is all powerful and so whatever", "figurative power he has given us it's from him la hawla wa la quwata illa billah it's only through allah subhanahu wa ta'ala it's not it's non-inherent to us so this chapter which in many ways is a imam shafi famously said oh we really need he said if only surat al asr", "Surah Al-Asr was revealed, the sura would have been sufficed for us. Just Surat Al-Aasar would've suffice for humanity. We're at loss by time because every moment that occurs can never be got back. You can't get it back and that's why this modern world that puts you on hold", "It's so sinister because they don't let you talk to a human being so that you can solve your problem. They put you on hold and then they take that time from you, and even worse, to add insult to injury, they'll put Muzak on. This is how sick this culture is. It's unwell, and that's why everybody's unhinged", "practice that your average muslim does i'm talking about average muslims not the not the the sabiqoon you know not those people i'm telling about an average muslin who's just a dedicated muslim five prayers a day praying on time because that's a that's", "and waqia, and mulk every day. There's some regular practice of Qur'an. I'm talking about baseline and then the nafilah prayers at least three shafa' an-watar and two before fajr subh and then two after maghrib. At least that. And yet despite that if you do that baseline you will find yourself incredibly frustrated", "also that you have a worldview that tells us how important patience is. Like your Lord tells you to be patient. So all those things, so what about all these people that don't have any of that? And then you wonder why people shoot up schools and why people completely lose it and do all these horrible things because they're so unwell and they have no medicine. And one", "he said, he has a book called the meaning of man and he said in that book. And actually I think he took it from even because in the Hikmah of , he says that words are the sustenance of the listeners. So he says in his book", "are to the soul what food is to the body that the meaning that you live on is what nurtures your soul just like the food that you eat nurtures, your body. So if you're listening to garbage all day long, if you listen to rap lyrics with foulness in it, if watching the news and all these horrors are unfolding before you, that's all ghida", "That's all nourishment for your soul. But like junk food will destroy your body, junk meaning will destroy you soul and this is where we're at. People are really sick and you wonder why? It's amazing we're doing as well as we are to be honest with you. As far as I'm concerned, like I told people, people think the Muslims are violent. With what you have done to this community in the last 500 years it's a miracle how peaceful the Muslims", "It's a miracle. Just study the history, what's happened in our lifetime? Just in our life time. Afghanistan over 1 million dead Iraq over 1million dead Yemen tens of thousands Syria tens of thousand Libya tens of 1000s This is just in our lifetimes Palestine just in the last year And then they wonder like why are they so upset", "so upset? What's wrong with them?\" No, it's a miracle that because this book is what keeps people... you know they just one the really intelligent and devout ones know we deserve a lot of this as corrupts and as distant as we are from our tradition much of this is purification. The Prophet said", "my umma is in this world it's not in the next world and so that's part of it and also we you know i mean there's so many things uh but i'm convinced that the muslims are far more peaceful than they're giving credit to our community", "one out of every probably four or five people, I mean now they're admitting that the population numbers are grossly under exaggerated. And the idea that we're the second largest religion...I mean Europe if they're calling that a Christian you know Europe is Christian they're empty, the churches are empty what mosques are full all over the Muslim world mosques", "so this you know what i could have had a kind of insanity when I remember to us who's to be enough so who so reminding about help because this surah is about Yama Kiyamah it's about that Allah is father first of all father he's Allah is capable of sending a Warner and a messenger", "in an impersonal god we actually believe that in a god who out of benevolence sends people to explain to us because everything that we make of any sophistication when you when you buy it you get the operating manual now one of the interesting things about human beings nobody reads operating manuals and then they get frustrated and try especially men women are better at that than men are", "than men are but nobody reads operating manuals. You get a new car and there's a book, they give you a book but you just try to figure it out on your own pushing buttons and see which one turns this on or that on. This is the human condition so Allah sent an operating manual which are these books of revelation to tell us about this incredibly complicated creature how you work", "you have reason, you have emotion, you need to be aligned. They need to order and here's how you do it. One of the ways is fasting. To learn to control your appetites. Another is swallowing your anger. To control your emotions so that you don't blow up literally and figuratively because some people now", "literally blow themselves up. They're so angry. So, and then how to operate this? How to make this function properly? So we have a whole understanding that comes with it. So the khalq of the insan is very important. And then that Allah knows the innermost soul of that human being. And", "Allah gives the seven stages of our creation.", "earth those are the two components of the planet and so we have in us we have calcium, we have potassium, we these minerals. And then we have this amazing skeletal system and the muscles, the brain all these things and so and then . And then put the human being as a notfa and the notfa is the zygote right?", "This is the alaq, which is translated and I genuinely believe it's mistranslated as clot of blood. It doesn't mean clot of Blood. The ala q is a clinging thing. It's anything you're telling up to be shape so So when the zygote comes down into the womb yet unlock it embeds itself Into the womb of the woman so it literally at all luck And then it's a perfect description of what it does and this is all microscopic You can't see this we only know these things now", "now so the quran is very accurate in even keith moore the embryologist admitted that the qur'an is really the first accurate picture of embryonic stages and there was no access to this at the prophet's time they believed in the homunculus that there was a miniature human that just grew uh this was a common belief different views", "So that's the alaq comes, it just clings to the, it embeds itself. And then it looks like a mudgha is a chewed lump of flesh and if you look at it at this stage and this all occurs in the first 40 days, that hadith was clearly misunderstood in the... Anybody who knows modern embryology knows and there was a khilaf about the hadith", "the hadith because there were there was an opinion that all happened in the first 40 days even though it says but it's not 120 days because it's way beyond that by even by 42 days you already have uh the fetus has is developed the beginning of the the the fetis the embryo and then so the then", "The only time in this process, Allah changes from خَلَقْنَا to كَسَوْنًا. And Raghb Ar-Shabahani said if you look at the difference between all those previous stages there are stages of خَالقْ but the لحم , the flesh is a clothing because the thing about clothes you can replace them You can't replace bone", "bone you actually have to implant bone from somewhere else but lahm will grow back so he says kasona al-izama lahma is an appropriate because it's the kiswa it's like a, cause you can lose a piece and it grows back just like the cloth you can replace the cloth like that and then thumman sha'nahu khalkan akhar and this is where, this is the insha of the khalk akhar", "is a new creation and this is the rational human being, the human being that has , which is different from all the other creatures. They have a type of intelligence but not the intelligence that we've been given, that this is he intelligence that's we've be given. Glory or blessed is God,", "of creators the best of creators it's the best it's that it's done with the ihsan and then after that you will die like he's created us to die so we have to go through this next stage and like maulana says i was mineral and then i died and became vegetable and then I died as vegetable and became animal", "animal and then I died as animal and became human, and I will die as a human and become an angel. What have I ever lost by dying? It just gets better. Somebody told me today that Sidi Abdullah Shlaifer, I don't know if people who know him but he was a Jewish convert to Islam. He's very interesting man. I met him several times at different places", "at different places but he had, he just died on the 27th night right so actually in, he died in Turkey. But he had been a beat, he was a beat in New York, The Beats people don't know The Beatz they're too young now but The Beat and there before me also", "I'm old, but I'm not that old. So the Beats became the hippies right? But that was the next iteration and then he had a deep sense of justice which many righteous, the real Jews do you know they have that sense that's why so many have been out protesting about what's happening.", "Fidel Castro and fought with the in Cuba. And he said, he was an atheist. And so when they won there, he said okay what we're next? And he's said Palestine. So he went and joined the PLO. This is a true story. And then he actually became Muslim with the Palestinians because not all of them were Marxist but he actually ended up becoming a Muslim. One thing that", "said they were much more like ethical than these so-called Islamists today. It's just in terms of what they would do but so and then he you know, he ended up having a very interesting life but you know this one amazing things about this religion is that all these different people find their place in it.", "I don't know why I brought him up. There was a reason that he passed away. So then Allah says, you're going to die and", "When the time of resurrection is near, they will be resurrected.", "When people are very close to you, they often don't know. You don't recognize who they are because they're too close. Like you can completely miss your spouse. You might have a very pious woman as a spouse and but you miss it because you're veiled by the closeness or and vice versa. Very often spouses don't", "to us that we can actually be veiled from allah subhanahu wa ta'ala because of the closeness it's absolute presence and i mean we believe in the the presence of allah through knowledge because this is not we're not pantheists so it's important not to make that mistake either", "So we have these two angels that receive everything. No word is uttered and why? See putting it in this about the Wa'eed so this is a chapter about the dangers of neglecting the presence of the Day of Judgment and this is one of the most important reminders that everything you say will be recorded", "when he mentioned about the tongue and one of the companions said we're going to be taking into account for what we say. He said, hell, hell like do the people are they dragged in hell?", "that drags them in hell like the tongue is it's an enemy and and the prophet said every morning the tongue all the limbs shake and beg the tongue to be straight because it says if you're straight we're straight if you are crooked, we are crooked because the limbs don't want to go to hell so the tongue", "Like you're hearing, seeing the heart. Those are all your responsible for them. What goes in? What comes out? You're responsible. Don't say anything that you don't have sound knowledge of. Speak from certainty. When I was in Mauritania many, many years ago there was a Shaykh that I met very elderly man and he talked so slow that it was actually", "it was just tough because he really spoke slowly and I thought he had a speech impediment. And I asked somebody about it, and he said since he's known him and this is like decades He said you rock evil Kula kidding Matton like he watches every word that comes out of his mouth That's what he told me about this man. He said he watches everywhere and and he says he puts it in the scale", "SubhanAllah. So people just don't think about these things. No word will be uttered. The one watching it and the one ready to record it, right? There's a watcher, a recorder. Right after that. It's going to come.", "life think about what you're doing think about. What you say, what you are writing on these stupid forums all these things that people are doing and not thinking about it. Because it's like a drunkenness almost it's stupor and some people don't even know what is happening and they realize nobody can help them at that point and they will get there every tyrant", "tyrant will be there. Nobody escapes this, nobody escapes it so don't think any of these people are going to get away with anything they do but you should be more concerned and I should be concerned about myself and yourselves than we are about these other people because they're doing what they were created to do but are we doing what we were created", "and then that's what you were avoiding because everybody nobody wants to die somebody uh imam zaid's one of one of the people in new jersey he said everybody wants to go to jannah but nobody wants", "So we should want a long life because we're told to. The prophet said, don't desire death. He told us to ask for long life, which is proof this isn't a death cult. This idea of people wanting to die. Even in Sahih al-Bukhari he said, Don't want to meet the enemy in battle. That's actually a sickness. People that want to fight are not well. They're not well, it's a sickness", "well it's a sickness. You know all these people that want to go and kill people, these are sick people they're unwell. And historically it's always been difficult to get people to join the military I mean you have resistance to drafts. People don't like to go to war with our species is not a species that actually there's only i think four or five", "four or five species that actually kill within the species if you look at rams rams lock horns they don't gouge another ram they don' t gouge other ram if you watch cats fight they don''t use their claws when they fight each other you know they're very careful about that so you can see that animals don't they won't kill other animals", "Humans will suffer greatly from killing other people. A lot of trauma goes with killing people. If it's justified, it's a little different obviously but it's still the Prophet said You will have for want of a better translation wiggle room with your Lord. You will some negotiating room with Your Lord as long as you haven't shed blood", "blood and one of the Salaf asked Abdullah ibn Omar he said give me some knowledge give me all of knowledge like اكتب لي كتابا وجعل فيه كل العلم it's a good question impossible answer so Ibn Omar wrote back he said write me something that has all of", "There's a lot of knowledge. But he said, but if you're able, he said don't let your tongue speak ill of anyone. Don't misuse people's money. Don' t eat any wealth that is not yours. And then he said do nt share in the shedding of any blood. Do nt Share in the Shedding of Any Blood. Right? And then He said and just mind your own business.", "Do what you should be doing. If everybody did what they were supposed to be doing, because so many of us, people talk about things they can't do anything about all the time. Nothing they can do about it but they love to talk. One Arab told me, this is the first time I ever heard this word, so for the Arabic students it's a good word. He said that we're talking about just in the Arab world", "I noticed when I lived in one of the countries that they used to, um, when I'd go to the bureaucrat offices, you know, it's very bureaucratic. It's almost like a Dickensian type environment. You go in and these people would, they call them sinecures. That's a good, uh, Dickens word, you", "there and everybody all morning they would read the newspapers. And then in the afternoon, they would talk about what they read in the newspaper. I'm not making this up. And I mentioned that to somebody said So I didn't know what meant but it's what the animals that chew the cud do like you chew and then the bolus they swallow it and then they vomit back up and chew it some more", "it some more and then they swallow it vomit back up chew it some or that's what he said so he called that each terror you know just chewing the cut and we actually say that in English you know we were chewing the cud which means we were talking about things just you know nothing important chewing the Cod is that interesting yeah language humans", "is going to be recorded death is coming there's a relationship that day the day of judgment the blast has happened the first one and then the second one", "and a shaheed so the sa'iq is yasuquka min khalif is what we call in english a driver so so so and that's why we say driver for a car but drivers originally like for people that heard animals drivers they're the ones that heard the animal so there's a driver these angels that are driving you there's nothing you can do you can't make u-turns here", "and then there's a shaheed that has all your information. And the miracle of our time, سَنُرِيهْمْ آيَاتِنَا فِى الْآفَاقِ وَفِى أَنفُسِهِمْ حَتَّى يَتَبَيِّنَ لَهُمْ أَلْوَ الْحَقِّ We will show them our signs in the self and on the horizons until it becomes clear to them that this is true. This recording, everything being recorded, everything, and we're told who could have thought of that?", "And now we have all of this, all your phone calls are recorded. There's super computers that analyze all this everything is being recorded but our provost told us everything's being recorded. You know I gave an in-service for diversity at the FBI and I said Muslims", "we actually believe that God has an intelligence system. It's the angels, they're recording everything and then I said even the telephone, everything you say on the telephone. You know, I tried to explain to them about Islam that real Muslims are people that are... The Prophet said the Muslim is", "that people, human beings are safe from his hand and his tongue. That's a real Muslim. Muslims are supposed to obey the law. If you can't obey the Law, you have to make hijrah. But this idea that you can just disobey the law... I mean even civil disobedience if you look at Thoreau, civil disobedient for Thorea was not violent it was", "not paying taxes that's what he stopped paying taxes because they were going to war against mexico and then he was put in jail and everson came to visit him and he said henry what are you doing in there and thoreau said what areyou doing out there like in an unjust system this is a better place to be but he wrote that famous civil disobedience but it wasn't about violence or destroying property", "property or doing these things that's a type of madness they destroy their own homes with their own hands and Allah says think deeply about this in the tafsirs they say how crazy it is to destroy your own homes", "It's easy to destroy. It's very hard to build. Anybody can tear this down, but look how long it took to build, to do these things. This took a lot of time. One man doing all this work, but somebody could come in here and just deface it or blow it up. That's very easy for humans to do, but to build and then look at what it took" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Meaning of being Kafir and Kafara -- Shaykh Hamza __1748542052.opus", "text": [ "To be a kafir is just to deny Allah and His messengers. That makes you a kafr, but it's one denial. You just deny it and then that's... But kafar is those who deny the blessings of Allah because those blessings are happening every moment, everyday. Just the fact that right now the majority of us in this room inshaAllah all of us we have normal temperatures. Nobody has a fever. Who's keeping that at 98.7?", "at 98.6 on average, who's keeping it there?" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Most trustworthy human in the world - Sheikh Hamza__1748531920.opus", "text": [ "And so it actually creates good character. You are on a vast ethos, sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam But the other thing about commerce is if you want your commerce to be successful, you have to be trustworthy That is the essential characteristic of Commerce is trustworthiness If you give your word you stand by it. If you write a note you fulfill it.", "on a certain day, you fulfill that. And if you don't people stop doing business with you. The Prophet before Islam was known as Al-Ameen the trustworthy he was known because he was the most trustworthy of merchants People knew that if you gave him your money not only did you get it back but you got it back with great benefit" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Music that are Prohibited in Islam - Shaykh Hamza __1748539321.opus", "text": [ "Some of the songs in Western tradition, I mean they're just absolutely haram, the lyrics. There's songs calling to adultery and glorifying adultery, you know, if loving you is wrong, I don't want to be right. You know that type of lyric is just totally unacceptable, right? So that was from when I was a kid.", "So that is what he's saying, is that you can't if it's something that leads to the haram, that you cant do it." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Muslims who are economical migrants - Shaykh Hamza_4YH4Wr_x4ek&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743298688.opus", "text": [ "Muslims are having a difficult time. Many Muslims are economic migrants, they move because they're forced to. I was on a plane and don't anybody laugh about this story because you have to understand how powerful and meaningful this is. I Was on a plain going to Kuwait and I sat next to very famous Kuwaiti Mohammed al-Awabi and Very brilliant man The stewardess came and she was a...I knew she was from West Africa because I spent time in West Africa people from West", "from West Africa are always surprised when I say, you're Yoruba. They say, how did you know? Because people don't know that in this country. I was in a taxi and I heard a man start talking and I said, oh, you were from West African. He was really surprised. He said, you are the first white American who ever knew where I was from. But I said to her, where are you from? She said Senegal. And her name was Aisha. She's a stewardess on an airline that serves alcohol.", "Muhammad al-Awadi asked her a question. He said, how do you feel about serving wine? She said it troubles me. She didn't have a hijab so there was no outward display of her religion. She said, it really troubles me and he said but she said, but I always serve it with my left hand. See people laugh they think that was funny. I actually cried", "Because what she was telling me then, was she was connected to her religion. Because Muslims do foul things with it. They clean filth with their left hand. And that's what she articulating by that. She said I always serve it with my left hand That's a level of consciousness. That's conscious connection with your Lord. Despite the fact that she knew that it was prohibited", "It was prohibited. And then she said, and I always ask the non-Muslim stewardesses in Ramadan to serve it for me. This is what people are going through out there. And there's people that can look at her and look down on her. That woman, I just wanted to ask her to make dua for me.\"", "religion together that is the meaning of the hadith towards the end of time to hang on to this religion is like hanging on to a hot coal like a hot cold in your hand that's what that woman was articulating our prophet saw that coming but she was connected to her Lord she hadn't severed that tie with her lord and as long as", "Muawiyah, however flimsy that tie is. If that tie there with your Lord, that door is always open. Ahmed Badwi one of the great saints of Islam said that the door he came to his Lord through was Ta'zeem an Makhluqat exalting the creation of Allah . He said I never saw anybody from the family of the Prophet except", "something great because they were related to the Prophet. I never saw a scholar except I exalted him, because of the knowledge that he was carrying. He said but it got to a point no matter what his state was", "But I saw because he was a servant of God, admittingly open that he was attempting to submit to Allah that I gave him ta'zeem. And then he said, but then I didn't see anybody even the non-Muslim except that I saw", "saw that in that was the will, the divine will manifesting before my eyes. And he said I never saw a rock or a tree or anything except that I saw it as a manifestation of the divine Will. It was God that put that thing there. That's what He was acknowledging and then He said", "The Hurmat of Allah, the sanctified things of God and what is more sanctified than the creation of Allah This thing that Allah has created as a tajalli Of all of his divine attributes And then called us to marvel at it If you look at people when they see people who can do something amazing You had a beautiful singer Who sings his song And people in the non-Muslim society", "clap they do these things ovation they doing ovation right which is to to praise that is because of what's happening in their hearts they see something extraordinary and they want to praise them because they're seeing something that has affected their souls so when they see somebody who's mastered the piano", "or Beethoven, they all stand up and they clap and clap to say what an extraordinary thing you've just done before our eyes. How extraordinary! That's what they feel like doing because it's so amazing. And yet we're in this incredible existence, this amazing creation. Stars in the heavens, galaxies, we've got Hubble telescopes that look at", "the universe, the massive expansiveness. We have flowers that bloom before our eyes. We can watch flowers that move across as the sun moves across the sky, the flowers follow the sun. The Arabs call them Ubaa, the Shams. We animals that can do the most extraordinary things. Elephants that", "even more extraordinary, that can carry many times their own weight. All of these things happening before us. We have women right now in this room. There's a fetus, a baby developing in their wombs. Mitotic cell division at rapid rates. All these things are happening everywhere and we don't feel compelled to give God a standing ovation? To stand up before Allah", "Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala and say Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar really to stand in ovation before our Lord like people stand before some poor soul who's perfected some little trick on a musical instrument who can pipe a tune out", "Bravo! And we can't get up for the Lord of the worlds and say Allahu Akbar. What has deluded you? What has taken you away from the praise of your Lord? This is what Muslims are meant to remind people to do wherever they go, to tell people, to", "sajdah out of gratitude. Our prophet when he saw an eclipse, he went and gave God an ovation. He prayed. He stood up and prayed and went into sajdhah as a testimony to what he was witnessing, a reminder but those reminders are in every instant these are just the great ones to pull even", "Things like eclipses, like volcanoes Like oil spewing out into the ocean Should tell us Ya Rab If Allah wanted He could destroy all of the oceans This foulness has revealed itself In the oceans and on the land Because of what your own hands have been doing Because of you have been", "Look at what's happening around us." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/People taking photos at Khutba - Shaykh Hamza Yusu__1742891006.opus", "text": [ "You have to film for some reason and you'll just miss those experiences. So, you know, you go to the great mosque today and the imam is giving a khutbah and there's all these people like filming it and taking pictures during the khutba which I think would've really shocked earlier people", "people they just wouldn't have understood what you were doing" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/People who are not scared of snakes - Shaykh Hamza__1748543047.opus", "text": [ "Rumi says, show me the people that don't fear snakes. Like those are... Because a snake is makhluk . Fear the khalik , don't feel the makhlok . Doesn't mean you go and just handle a snake, that's not the point. But the point is your fears misplaced when you're fearing creation. So next one." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/People will not admit their envy - Shaykh Hamza Yu_lwKI6IHh1ts&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743297007.opus", "text": [ "When you envy people in a positive way, you want to emulate them or you wish you were like them because they're good people but you don't have any mal intent towards them. So the hasad that Allah condemns is the hasid where you are angry that they have what they have and you feel like you should have it instead of them. I mean one of the greatest literary explorations of envy is in Herman Melville's", "novela called Billy Budd which is a very interesting story about envy and one of the things that Kierkegaard said was that people will admit to a felonious crime before they'll admit to envy. It's just not something people will", "There's only two envies. They say it's the ghibta, it's not a negative envy. There are only two types of envy that are praiseworthy. Somebody who has been given knowledge that you don't have and wish you had it. And then somebody who has being given a lot of wealth. So they spend it out in positive things like building and hospitals and schools. They do that with their wealth. Those are only 2 people worth envying.", "worth envying is people of knowledge who teach people and people who have wealth, who use it to benefit people." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Prophet_s khutba was like this - Shaykh Hamza Yusu__1742877525.opus", "text": [ "The khutbah was always to try to call people back to their Lord. Partly because the ulama understood that the reason there was so much social unrest is that people weren't connected to Allah . And if they wanted to really get over the social unrest, they had to come back to Allah , because a lot of what happens to us in the world is a direct result of our actions and our behavior. These are the tabi'at", "The consequences of living sinful lives, being far from Allah. So if you look at the khutbas of the Prophet ﷺ it was all while he was reminding them calling him back to Allah" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Prophet ﷺ in Mecca and Madinah -- Shaykh Hamza Yus__1742892481.opus", "text": [ "People see the prophet in Mecca and they say, Mamdouk Pekalov says, The sentimentalist. You know somebody who's sentimental, shallow feelings. He says oh he was like Jesus in Meccan but then in Medina he changes his personality change. He didn't change nothing changed about him. He is the same Prophet. He's the same caring gentle human being but now he's the head of a state. It's a different set of circumstances.", "Heads of state have to assassinate. This is part of being a head of state, you don't think the Americans don't assassinate? There's no country that is in power that doesn't use assassination. This as a head-of-state he ran courts. He led armies, he was a general and he wasn't like today's generals" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/PURIFY YOUR SOUL WITH THIS VIDEO_SHEIKH HAMZA YUSU__gWDZ7HetAM&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742891542.opus", "text": [ "Quran said, qadaf lahaman zakkaha. You'll have success if you purify your soul. Tazkiya, how do I purify my soul? Prayer, zakat. And then he gives examples of illa being used as a wow in the Arabic language. Or, I'll give you another example. Wala taqoolu li shay'in. In the rasam al-Uthmani it doesn't say shay', it says shy'.", "So it literally would mean don't say to any willer, I'm going to do that tomorrow. You know? Shay. It has an alif there from the Rasul of Uthman. Many examples like that in the Quran. The fa'a in Arabic. There's fa'asabbiya. Like for instance kun fayakun. Normally a sabbabiya would come after an amar. But that fa is not a sabbabiya.", "It's a fa taqib. So it says, And there is a whole metaphysical understanding of why that fa is not a sababiyya. I'm just giving you really simple examples of the religion takes a long time to learn. I mean, I literally... I am definitely still a student of Arabic. Like,", "very complicated. Kinaia, just istiara. Majaz is very sophisticated. There's all these different types of majaz in figurative language. Majazz al-mursal which is a big problem with certain people in Aqidah not understanding majazz al mursal. Right? So that's one major reason but the other reason", "that the Qurun al-Mufaddara were the first three centuries and that these were the Salaf. And the best Madhhab is the Madhhb of the Salah, and they were using Usul Al-Fiqh. We know that. And so if Malik was using Usal Fiqh, if Imam Shafi'i was... Who are we in our arrogance to think we can bypass their methodology and go directly to the Book of the Sunnah when they didn't go directly into the book of the sunnah without the filter of Usul fiqh?", "But this is what they call jahal murakab. The Catholics call it innocent and arrogant ignorance. Muslims called it simple and compounded ignorance, but the result's the same whether you call it inocent or arrogant or simple or compound. Simple ignorance, all of you, and inshallah myself, all us we're simply ignorant because we'll admit our ignorance like I want to know", "And so I'm amenable to learning because I'll say, I don't know. If I don' t know something hopefully I will be able to say it. The first thing Marab Tarhaj taught me literally one of the very first things that he taught was La Adri is half of knowledge and he said whoever says I don''t know he's given fatwa Imam Malik was asked 40 questions by an Iraqi", "In 38 of them, he said, I don't know. The Iraqi, when he finished, he says, what do I tell the people of Iraq? They asked me to go to you to figure out these things. What am I going to go back and what do i tell him? He said, tell him you went to Malik and he said he doesn't know, right? You know they say whoever doesn't like to say , he's going to be afflicted with mortal wounds.", "simple ignorance is a blessing. It's not a good state to stay in, but it's a blessing to be in. It says the greatest learners are people that maintain a beginner's mind because beginners are always cautious. Once you get good at something, you tend to become second nature whereas the beginner he's always cautious, alert, awake and so that's very important but jahal marakab", "compounded ignorance, not knowing that we don't know. Or we think we know... Our tradition adhere to what they call the correspondence theory of knowledge which is That's a definition of knowledge. So knowledge is what corresponds with reality. If it doesn't correspond with reality then you're either in waham", "You know, there are different things that you can be in. But jahl marakab is one of those where you think you know something and you don't know it. And our knowledge is... There are certain knowledges that are just... You either know them or you don' t. Grammar, you either know it or you dont'. You know there's seven marfuat. You either kno them or don't. There's 14 munsubaat. It actually goes up to over 20 but the basic ones. There're three majorura generally.", "You either know them or you don't know them. You either no sarp, or you dont know sarp. You're either know that it's a... It's like... It is either hasiba yahsibu. Right? You either knows that or you do not know it. Or its hasiba yahsabu both are correct. I used to when i first started translating for Sheikh Abdullah because I love sarp When I first started transating for him I would hear him say", "a word, like a verb or something. And I knew it differently and I thought it was a because most ulama make , right? The more you say he makes more grammatical mistakes than someone reading a book. Because Arabic is so hard. It's really hard. You know, I'm not going to... It's easy impossible, but grammar is", "is sarf is harder than grammar. Grammar is actually not that bad, but sarf in Arabic is really hard because it just takes a long time to learn all these different forms. But I used to think why did he say that? Then I'd go back to the dictionary and look at them and find that it was another way of... That it was correct. And then all the years I've translated, I never heard him say al-lahn. It's amazing. I stopped looking. Now I consider him better than the dictionary. Because dictionaries make mistakes.", "I told him once that my father and I got into a debate about a word. So, I went and got the dictionary. I showed him the dictionary and he said, do you think I'll concede to that? That's just Webster. So I told Sheikh Abdullah that and he says, congratulations to your father because not all the meanings are in dictionaries right?", "Anyway. And then all the different meanings of the words, there's just so many meaning like means back right? I mean that's generally connotation, denotation but also means road", "or all those are the same ways of saying that among you know in their midst I'm in their mix but it's is a place of two roads right so means your admit your there's right so you're there in the middle of it all anyway so let me and so any other questions mm-hmm", "You can have comments too if you feel compelled, but just make it very short. As-salamu alaykum. So I'm understanding that from the last few classes we've attended and this one too, I think is solidifying that a healthy way of understanding revelation or the moral code that is revealed to us in the Quran is to go through ibn al-Mahhab.", "I wanted to ask, like for someone who, you know, obviously for myself, I should speak. I go to the Quran and I try to read, you a verse or two a day that kind of thing. And I got to it for understanding and a coolness from my heart. However, for...I don't have access to a teacher per se. To be quite honest most people didn't even know about the four madhabs until they got to register", "So, of course the access to teaching would be online or you know the local masjid. You don't even know who the teachers are in the masjids, what madhab they fall into that sort of thing so what I'm trying to ask is what is your advice on how one who would want to approach", "What kind of approach one should have? To the Quran for understanding. Without taking it out on others. That's a very valid point you're making. There are two ways of reading the Quran. One of them is devotional, simply to read it as an act of ibadah.", "the world have been doing this for centuries. Like, if you want to see... If you go to a lot of mosques where people understand the language generally of the Quran, they do eight rakats and very often very short and then they leave in Ramadan. If you got to a large of the Ajam countries, they'd do 20 rakats", "That's one way of reading the Qur'an. Just what's called ta'bud, just devotional. يتعبد بالقرآن The Qur'ان أفراي تدبرون القرآن أم على قلوب أكثرها Don't they think deeply about this Qur'aan? Don't They ponder the Qurāān? So the Qurʾān was revealed to be pondered clearly Then we get to the tools of understanding the Qur-ān and", "and I'm just speaking traditionally, what many people did was they learned basic Islam and they practiced it. And then they read devotional books and Sira. Sira was very popular in the Muslim Ummah. In Mauritania, the women are famous for memorizing long poems of the Prophet's life. They're not scholars.", "They're just people that love the prophet and they teach their children these poems. So there's a devotional component that's very powerful. Now, for somebody who's educated like yourself, who has an intellect, you want more because that's not satisfying for everybody, right? Some people, they're very content with that level. Not everybody is intellectual and not everyone was meant to be intellectual. Some of the best people I've ever met are very simple peoples.", "that I would take over some of the most educated people I've met any day of the week, right? And I have no contempt for people that are uneducated at all. I really try not to... You know, I've been fortunate, I'd been privileged to have a relatively good education. I had a good education before I became Muslim. I went to some really good schools, private schools. I was fortunate because there was a trust fund to do that from my grandfather.", "And then I studied with incredible scholars in the Emirates. I was really fortunate at a young age to be able to go with a full scholarship to the United Arab Emirates and study with some of the best scholars in UMA at that time. It's very fortunate. That's pure privilege. Like, what did I do to deserve that? I wasn't born in Sri Lanka in an impoverished family.", "We have privileged some of you over others as a test.", "going to look on content and think you're superior when in fact if you look at it, they say if you find a turtle on a fence the one thing you know he didn't get there by himself right? And that's the truth for all of us. Wherever we are we did not get here on our own. And so you have to be grateful. You have to see it as a tribulation from Allah. How are you going to use your privilege?", "It's a privilege to have wealth. It's privileged. Why does Allah always ask us to give our wealth? Because wealth is a test and Allah is saying, are you passing the test or not? He only asked 2.5. Anything you give above that, gravy, just getting closer to Allah but he wants at least 2. 5 don't stand him on that. Right? So it's very important", "It's very important that you nurture your intellect and help it to grow. And the best way to do that, I mean look we have a lot of tools that we did not have in the past. I'm not a big proponent of online learning but for motivated people it's an option. People have learned Tajweed online, it's pretty amazing right? You can learn Arabic", "I mean, there's incredible resources to do that. In terms of reading the Quran, I would argue as long as you go to it very humbly and recognize that you cannot legislate from the Quran other than morally. And there are things in the Quran... You speak well to speak beautifully to people. We can all read that and benefit from that, right? The Quran says...", "You know, return a wrong with a right. We can all benefit from that. The Quran said, you'll have success if you purify your soul. How do I purify my soul? Prayer, fasting, the company of righteous people that remind me, show me my faults. So all those things are beneficial.", "good thing to read the Quran, even in translation. I think it's a beneficial thing. It's dangerous in that there are many times, even to this day still, where I've read the Koran and I thought I understood something, and then I go to Tafsir and realize I didn't get it right. And I have a reasonably good level of Arabic. And", "in Arabic, a lot of time in dictionaries. I'm in the dictionary every single day. My wife's here and will testify to that when I look up words all the time in Arabic so but I still there are things in the Quran I'm always finding that just subhanAllah even certain surahs that I read everyday it's amazing I'll just see something I never saw before", "And the great, there's not very many really good tafsirs to be honest with you. Most of them just repeat what previous Mufassirun said because they're scared. I'm telling you the truth. The ulama were really afraid of the Quran. It's like who am I to say what God means? So they'll just say Qala Tabari, Qala Al-Qurtubi. That's literally what they do. If you have Tabari and Qurtubis", "and Qurtubi, you pretty much have all the tafsirs. Because they just... It's like the commentators of a hadith. They all go back to the same commentators. They're all quoted by the same sources because very few people wanted that. They were just very careful about saying... Because you're saying this is what God means. That's a big claim. And that's why", "People wrote tafsir. There's a million books on tajweed. Everybody wrote a book on tajuweed. There are so many books on tasuweed, I can't believe you go to the suq and there is a new book on tasweed. And I'm always hoping maybe they found some amazing way to teach it. You open up, it's all the same stuff. There're 17 points of articulation. Here's all of madud. It's all", "Never anything new. So if you have a new way of teaching tajweed, by all means write a book on tajweed but if it's going to be the same thing don't save yourself. But there are exceptions. Fakhurddin al-Razi is an exception. He definitely had some new things that nobody said before about the Quran. Also", "Al-Bursawi, you know some of the great Sufi commentators had some really interesting insights. Ibn Juzay al-Kalbi talked about a Sulamese book that he called al-Haqa'iq, The Realities. He did a short tafsir of the Quran and Ibn Juza said some people call it al-bawatil, the vanities instead of the realities. And he said but if we're fair we'll say", "It has some realities and it has some vanities. But tafsir is a very rich study, alhamdulillah. Did that help a little bit? My apology.", "إن الإنسان الذي خسر إلا الذين آمنوا وعملوا صارحات وتواصلوا بالعقل وتوصلوا بصبر سبحان ربك رب العزة عما يصفون والسلام عليكم المسلمين الحمد لله ربا العالمين بارك الله فيكم" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Quran_s prediction about Palestine - Sheikh Hamza __1748536969.opus", "text": [ "He just showed how if you write a square like... And then each one you do, it makes a perfect square and lines up all the... It's really quite stunning to see it. Like it just can't be a coincidence because for that to just be like that, it really was something stunning.", "You have these people that start delving into the numbers and ayahs, what verses are here. There's a whole tradition that the early people had. For instance one of the scholars predicted long before the crusaders conquered Palestine, the year they would conquer Jerusalem from the Quran. So there is a lot of secrets. The Quran it's a hidden book", "It's a hidden book in the Book of Meknood. It's an hidden book. لَا يَمُسْوحِ إِلَّا الْمُطَحَرُونَ The only people that really have access to it are the mutahharun, the people...it's a passive form. It is the people taharhum Allah. These are the people that Allah has purified but a lot of these great ulama they just had amazing openings in the Quran and then they saw things also that they probably never put down on paper" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Real meaning of being a Muslim _ Shaykh Hamza Yusu_ipnoDd4tVIg&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748521994.opus", "text": [ "Alhamdulillah. Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. Inshallah, we're going to continue on in the fourth chapter but before I do that somebody sent me an email or a text earlier asking me about...I guess some people said that I had was talking in the book club about", "and mentioned something about, you know people there's a lot of Muslims now that are more identitarians just because you have a Muslim name doesn't necessarily mean you're actually a Muslim like a Muslim is somebody who believes in Allah his messenger and what the Prophet came with. And if you reject anything what's known as . means . In other words it's something that everybody should know.", "Now that doesn't really apply to people living in the West, Muslims because the understanding that the ulama had for that was people who grew up around Islam and grew up Muslim. And there are certain things that every Muslim knows because they grow up in a Muslim environment so there could be people now Muslims that have Muslim names or they come from Muslim families. When I lived in Southern California there was an area where these Bengali farmers came", "in the 1920s, I think. And there were all these Mexican Americans with names like Lydia Muhammad and Fatima Abid. They were children of these immigrants or grandchildren but they weren't...they were Christians. They where Catholics so they had lost...I don't know if their parents had been Muslim or not. So we kind of assume that somebody is from a Muslim country", "that they're Muslim, but there are now a lot of people even living in Muslim lands that don't really believe in Islam. There are many secular Muslims in all the Muslim countries now. I think the majority of Muslims that live in Muslim countries still do believe in islam, but, there's a lot confusion we're living in a time of confusion and it's very important for people just to not be so trigger happy you know there's this kind of", "Man kafara muslima fa ba'aa ahaduhuma bil kufri", "So it's really important. And then in the Sira Alam al-Nubla, which is an extraordinary biographical dictionary of scholars up to Imam al-Dahabi's time who was a student of Ibn Taymiyyah rahimuhumullah but he in his chapter on Abul Hasan al-Ash'ari", "latter days, something like that but that's pretty close. That we don't make takthir of anybody who faces our qibla and eats our dhabiha. These are just semantical points that we're differing on. In other words a lot of the disagreements about Muslims end up being disagreement over what words mean", "what words mean. And so Imam al-Dahabi, ta'liqan ala hadhul karam, adding to what he said there, he says, وَكَذَرِكَ كَانَ شَيْخُنَا إِبْنُ تَمِيَ فِى آخِرِ حَيَاتِهِ And that was the way our Shaykh was at the end of his life. كَنِ يَقُلُ لَا نُكَفِّرُ مَن يُوَاذِبُ عَلَى الْوُضُوِ أو يحافظ على الودو We don't make takfir for anybody who's consistent in his wudhu because the Prophet ﷺ said only a believer is consistent in", "So it's not the role of people. Takfir is, you know excommunication is a process, a judicial process in the traditional books of fiqh and there's a... But this idea of just making takfir of people is very dangerous and so to use a clip of mine to indicate somehow that I was meaning somebody who was in Scotland.", "has the same name as I do. I think he spells it slightly different from me, so I got all these congratulations when he won the first minister of Scotland but you know I think people should be very careful. In our deen one of the creeds that some of you study here", "That's Imam Al-Laqani, been taught for 400 years in al-Azhar. He says whoever rejects what's ma'loom dharuratan bideehatan so if you reject something known by everybody but almost like you say prayer is not an obligation or something like that. So he's saying that that's that is kufr it's kufar and then so the hukm of", "of Riddah goes under that person, of apostasy. And then he says or something like that if somebody negates like something that's there is no about it so if there was a , then you have to be very careful. Now there are many traditions in our tradition this is something the talk", "the idea of ta'areel. When you say something, you can be sariah which is there's no ambiguity it's unequivocal and you're just very clear on what you say or there's The Arabs were very very good at saying things and meaning something else Or saying things in a way that the person hearing it thinks something but you actually intend something else So if somebody for instance asked a politician", "do you think same-sex marriage is a sin? And that politician says, no I don't think it is. Well you would have to ask if he's a Muslim, you'd have to him did you mean for Muslims or non-Muslims because there's an opinion and this called Al Mukhatabun Bil Furwa and this is mentioned again in the books of Asool, Al Mukhtabun bil furwa are people outside of Islam", "of the sharia or only for the usul of the Shariah. So, the majority considered them to be responsible for the whole Shari'a, the Awamr and the Nawwahi but there are many scholars and some of them, the majoritie in like for instance many of the Hanafi scholars, some of the really strong Ma'riki it's a strong opinion, it is not the dominant opinion but it is a strong", "In other words, for the awamaran nawai. Some say they're responsible for the prohibitions but not for the commandments. And their proof is that if a non-Muslim prays he doesn't get the reward of the prayer. If a non Muslim fasts Ramadan they might get some benefits from the intermittent fasting health benefits. But it's not rewarded according to our tradition. They're not rewarded for fasting because they didn't. The ones that say that they're", "So they say, what brought you into hell? And they say we didn't pray. We didn't pay zakat and we used to just speak things with it just inappropriately and then we rejected the Yom Hadeen so that's the proof that they use for being responsible", "for being responsible. So this is a khilaf and it's a valid khilaaf. So there is a hadith that Prophet said, The dunya is a prison for the mu'min because he is held to account for the furu' of sharia so he can't do things... He might even want to do them some people might wanna drink but they don't drink because the shariah says you can't drink", "of the faith of Islam, this is their paradise according to that tradition. And so that's the idea that they're not really responsible for the furo'a, they're only responsible for usool meaning la ilaha illallah Muhammad Rasulullah Once they accept that then the foro'a the branches of the sharia become obligatory So these are important distinctions but my advice to the Muslims is just be very careful about takfir it's not an easy thing and you can also end up being", "You can also end up being responsible if a Muslim does something crazy and thinks they're doing some kind of good deed, then you could be responsible. You could have blood on your hands for doing that. It's very dangerous to do these things. I mean we are not qudat. They say du'aats laqadat. People who are calling to Islam, they're not judges. We're not judge.", "I have to deal with something like takfir. But one should be very careful about making takfir, and people that made takfir of me, you know, and I just subhanallah. I mean, I know I'm a Muslim. You know seriously, although he's a perennialist. I'm not a perennialist. Nobody can find anywhere where I've ever said I'm an perennialists.", "from that group of people have done, because they have done some extraordinary work. So I'm not one to just dismiss good work that's done but I'm a perennialist. My belief is that Islam is the final revelation and it abrogated preceding revelations. That's my belief and I've always held that belief since I became Muslim. So people say things all the time and we'll meet on Yom Kiyamah in good luck.", "Good luck. We'll meet on Yom Kiyamah and there's a Qantara, there's place where Muslims are going to have to deal with the things that they did because people aren't gonna get into agenda if you've wronged Muslims I mean even the goat has its day the goat with the broken horn will have his day on the Day of Judgment for being butted by goats that had two horns in the one with the", "So I just think it's really important for Muslims to be very careful. One of the Mauritanians, he said you can't do until you get deep knowledge because there is so much in our community", "You know, there's a lot of difference of opinion. So you could see something and think it's a munkar but it's not a muncher They're following a valid opinion And they said about imam and maziri that his knowledge was so vast that he rarely condemned anybody Because he would say oh maybe he's on the opinion of so-and-so It's very interesting but there are so many people that just you know these these uh, you know have tongue will travel", "and make takfir of people. And just, I mean first of all we're in the West. I think people should just leave people alone. Just do what you're doing. You can say this is not an Islamic belief. We don't believe this. If somebody says something you can say it's a non-Islamic belief and make that clear but you should be...I think people need to be very careful with their deen. Don't throw your deen away for some YouTube likes.", "And one of the things Imam al-Ghazali says is that, and he's talking about ulama. He's not even talking about young boys on the internet trying to get hits, click bait. He' s not talking about those. He was talking about the ulama asu. These were actual scholars but they were bad scholars. And he said their hallmark is that they know that the best way to get followers is to condemn", "You know, you can look it up. It's in the introduction to the Kitab al-Ilm that I did. It is a whole passage that he says. This really important point so he says they know and that's why if you look at a lot of these people on YouTube, you know They'll have on their regular They'll like 200 views 1,000 views but then when they attack somebody who's famous they call punching up", "thousand views so they know this is a quick way to get people to go to your channel because fitness great everybody loves fitna right everybody loves fita i mean you see muslims never doing anything but then when the fitna comes oh they're so active it's like because shaitan's prodding them that's all it is he's just he's got his prodder out and he's", "I don't know that person. I've never spoken to them. I don' t know what their beliefs are and I have no reason to doubt somebody's Islam. And then if somebody does say something, we're very clear on that homosexuality in our tradition is very clearly considered a sin. It's a sin but is it a sin for people outside of the faith? That's the debate. There is a difference of opinion.", "So what did somebody intend? I don't know. But just to jump at takfir, I think people should be very careful. Anyway, that's just some advice. You know, take it or leave it. But good luck on the Day of Judgment. That's all I can say is that people... The Prophet said a man will speak a word and not give any consideration to it and it will drag him in the hellfire. That word. He'll just say it. It's like it's no big deal.", "very, very wary about what you say. Allah. So Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Rahim we're back to this is a much better world. This is the world of not qila waqala and who's in and who out and who said and what they said and he said and she said and who is a bad Muslim and who", "who's in the firqa and najiya. There's no group that's saved, there's individuals that are saved. There is no group on yawm al qiyamah. You're not in a group on day of judgment. You come as a fard. Everybody comes as an individual. You don't come as group so your groups not going to help you out. What's gonna help you all is being an upright human being with dignity that believed in Allah,", "to follow that guidance. So he says the human being, all of the potentialities of the world are gathered in the human", "and after, and were brought forth all of these things that were gathered in him. So they came after.", "perfected everything that he created and he began the creation of the human being with mud. So, so... The human being was created after all these things and-and-and all of the potentialities, the powers that are in the world were placed in him. And that's what he is saying here is that That he created everything", "with ihsan and then he created began the human being as the this is he's going to argue that it's an abridgment of the whole world that he created. And that was mentioned in the Ka'b al-Ahbar, the saying of Ka'ab al-Akhbar about which what Allah created during the various days.", "So Allah gathered in the human being. So the here means the elements, you know? You have in medicine and in , in the traditional that Ibn Sina was a master of. You have what are called .", "simple cures or treatments and then you have compound. So for instance, like aspirin is one thing but if you take a medicine that has several different types of medicine in it or like an antibiotic, it's one thing that's in that thing like penicillin so that would be basilt. But it also can mean elements just generally the word basait.", "You know, it's the foundational things. The simple substances. وَرُوحَانِيَتِهِ The spiritual matters. وَّجِسْمَانَيَةِ And the material. So he means the spiritual and the material وَمُبْدَعَاتِهُ All of his extraordinary creations وَكَوَّنَاتَهِ And all of those things that Allah has كَوّنَ Like brought them into existence", "existence and form them and fashion them. So the human being by means of the world he came about from the very elements of the so like we are made, we know now that we're made of even the whole universe what it's made of", "We have all of that in us. That's his point, is that we are...we have the stars in us, we have the planets, we've the ether. It's all in us in the human being and then he says So Allah has really shrunk or", "or demonetized his form and gathered in it all of the potentialities of the world, everything that's in the world. It's like an abridgment of the word so in other words we are the microcosm, that's what he is saying basically. So if you look at the abridgement of a book", "the one in which the words are diminished. So it's a paucity of words, and yet the meaning is complete because a lot of books as you know have things that expound upon but you can abridge a book to get to the fundamental things and not miss anything from the book so if you read for instance an abridgment", "or Toynbee's abridgment. Some of you read that here, the study of history. He took nine volumes and reduced it down to two volumes. And you will get in that book the basic contents of the nine volumes. So he's saying from the point of view", "from the point of view that he was made from the essence of the world and its pith, it's innermost core. And the summation of it and its fruit. He is in essence like the cream or the butter that rises from the makhid. Makhid is like sour milk so the Bedouin", "And I mean, this is something you'll find in a lot of traditions. But the Bedouins still do this. So you have this thing called a jaffafa and it's basically a goat skin. They've stitched it all up. They put the milk in and then they rock it. There are enzymes in there so over time the milk will get sour but then the butter rises.", "But the essence of the milk is that cream. That's the human being from creation. He's using that as an analogy for that. Or like the oil from sesame. So there's nothing in the world except you'll find some similarity between that thing and between the human", "from the perspective of heat and cold, moisture and dryness. So human beings have all those elements based on that four elemental theory. Or like minerals because the human being has minerals in his body so he's a material form like a rock or... And the Prophet said also spiritually", "spiritual minds. So there's gold people, there's silver people, copper people, lead people, radioactive people, toxic people. There is a person with Adam. And then he says, وَكَ النَّبَاتِ مِنْ حَيْدُ يَتَغَذَّ وَيَتْرَبَّةً And also we're like the vegetable world because we grow like vegetables. We eat, you pour water on the plant and it grows.", "give it you know the potassium and the phosphate and and it grows or manure whatever you do, the compost. So the same with the human being we grow like that. Or like the animal kingdom so mineral vegetable animal then that it's sentient way to and then it also has levels of perception where you have a hummel like an animal can actually be frightened", "an animal can see a rope and think it's a snake. And so, imagine something that wasn't there. So, it's saying we share that with the animals. We know that animals also have pleasure in pain. I mean, animals are cat. If you pet a cat, it starts purring because it enjoys the petting, the touch of it.", "I think it can go both ways. So, is like to get angry. Somebody who's angry and they get belligerent. So he's saying we're like predatory animals that can get belligérant. Or demons.", "Or we become like demons in that we plot and we have these Machiavellian strategies. And that we lead people astray, right? Like Shayatin. Or we can be like the angel. We can be liked the angel that knows God and worships God and is in awe of God. Or it could be like to preserve tablet", "preserved tablet. That Allah has put all of the wisdom of creation into that tablet. So he's like again an abridgment. One of the sages said, that in the body of the human being are 4,000 wisdoms", "thousand wisdoms. And in his soul is something similar to that. And also we're like the qalam that Allah created and said, because it's the pen preserves the words by", "فالنسخة عندما نتحدث يمكننا أن نصنع تفكيرات في الناس", "And from the perspective that the human being is created from all of these different powers, Allah says we created the human beings. So this is a very interesting verse in Surah Al-Insan. It's one of the Ishqalat in Tafsir because", "is singular but the Amshaj which is a sifa here of the nutfa is plural so mashij it's multicolored, it's something that has like you know a cloth that's mashij. It's woven interwoven so there's a warp and wolf to it. So amshaj", "think genuinely that this ayah is one of the great miracles of the Quran because I think it's clearly indicative of the zygote which is the mixing of the male and female genetic material. And it's very interesting, the word in modern Arabic for the genetic material is the same word used here.", "merely a linguistic coincidence. I mean, if it is then it's clearly from Allah . It's like Imam Malik was asked about the porpoise. You know porpoises? It's called which means the pig of the ocean because in Greek means that ocean pig and so because he got that snout right the purpose So they ask Malik what he thought of it. Did you think it was permissible? And he said", "you named it a pig. In other words, just because it has that name I would need it. So names are very interesting in that way. Ay mukhtarita min quwa asyaa mukhtarefa. So it's mixed from all these potentialities, from all of these different things. Wali kawna al-alim wal insan mutashabihaini idha utubir ha qila al-insanu alamun sagheer And from this point of view that the world and the human being", "resemble one another if one considers, if this is considered. Then it's said that the human being is the microcosm and the universe is the great man. And for that reason Allah said your creation and your resurrection", "فإشارة بالنفس الواحدة إلى ذات العالم", "فيهن على انفرادهن كالمركبات من الأدوية والطعمة كذلك في نفس الإنسان حصر معنا ليس في شيء من موجودات العالم وذلك المعنى هو ما يتخصص به من خصائصه التي يتميز بها مثله عن غيره من هيئات له كامتصاب رقامته وعرض الظفري وإنفعالات له", "So then he says, when every compounded thing from all these diverse things, when you see that they are all gathered into... يَحْصُرُ بِاِجْتِمَعِهِنَّ مَعْنًا لَيْسِ بِأَمُوجٍّ فِيهِينَّ So it's the whole is greater than the parts. The sum of the parts I mean that's what he's saying basically. Is that when you", "If you took them as parts. Just like if you take medicine or food that is compounded. So the sum of the parts, the whole is greater than the sum", "the human being. And that's the meaning that is specific to him from those particularities that God has given that human being, that distinguish him from others. From all these different aspects to the human", "like the fact that he's upright, that he has broad fingernails. And then also the passions that he is susceptible to, like risibility or blushing, you know modesty. Or the actions that he capable of, like conceptualizing intelligibles. So we actually have things that exist in our minds only", "that don't exist in the extra there's extramental existence but then there's so you have so we can actually conceptualize intelligibles like numbers. So, the numbers don't have a mathematics. There aren't numbers in the world really they're intelligibles that are conceptualized by our minds their abstractions", "And also learning all of the crafts and skills that human beings are capable of. And also acquiring good character. So this goes back to Imam Ali, radiallahu anhu's famous statement, you know, The cure is in you and yet you don't see it.", "And the disease is from you and you don't feel it. وَتَحْسِبُ أَنَّكَ جِرْمٌ صَغِيرٌ وَفِيكَ انطَوَى الْعَالَمِ الأَكْبَرُ And you deem yourself an insignificant thing, and yet in you the whole cosmos exists. So this is something that the Muslims understood early on. This is not Greek philosophy. The microcosm and the macrocosm is something", "clear from his istidlalat. So al-insan takawwunu al-insan shayan fashayan hatta yasira insanan kamirah. Al-insanu yatakawwuna awwaran jamaadan mayitan kama qala Allahu ta'ala wa kuntumu amwatam fa ahyaakum wadharika haythu maa kanat turaban watina wasalsaran wanahuha thumma yasiro nabatan naamiyan kamaqala Allahu", "So he says the human being begins from an inanimate substance. He begins from", "you were inanimate and we animated you, we brought you to life. So you were inanimate, mayyit, and we brought your to life.\" وَذَرْكَ حَيْثُ كَانَ التُّرَابًا And what he means there is that you were dirt, you were mud, you are soil rather, you're mud and then you were the ceramic preparation ثم يصيروا النباتة", "had growth. And that's what Allah means when He says, Allah أَنبَتَكُمْ مِنَ الْأَرْضِ He caused you to grow from the earth. He caused your to go نَبَاتًا نَبي is vegetable So we go through these stages and this very important because when we get to the end of the book you're going to see that this is a very important these stages that he's spending time on this because he comes to a profound conclusion", "conclusion at the end of this which is really actually it's so overwhelmingly stunning that it'll just give you a completely different perspective on why God has created us in these phases and stages and what God intends by it. So, and then he says", "So that's the vegetative. That's biological life, and that's why even though the spiritual life has not come into the... You're in a vegetative life. So we were nabat, right? And then we go to the animal, and then we do the spiritual, the immaterial when we get our soul. So those are the phases that we go through. Allah has put us through these phases.", "with just substance that was not biological life so we were basically mineral and then we became a vegetable and then become animal and then would become human. So, we go through these phases. And he said, ثُمَّ يَسُورُ حَيْوَانًا and then animal وَذَٰرِكَ مَنْ حَدُّهِ يَتْبَعُ بِطَبِعِهِ بَعْضُ مَا يَنفَعهُ In that you follow by your nature things that benefit you", "So every animal that's healthy will look to secure its benefit and do what it needs to do to avoid harm. And that's why Allah says that the human is more astray than animals because they don't look after their benefit. I was with one of my boys once many years ago, and this lady was smoking a cigarette, and my son had never seen smoke before. Like he hadn't seen anybody smoke.", "shock at seeing this woman smoke coming out of her mouth. And she looked at me and said, don't you ever do this. That is not a good role model. Because somebody who's doing something and telling you not to do it there's a contradiction there. But that's the human being. They will do things they know are harmful for them whereas animals won't. So that's what he's saying there.", "And then those things that make us human, then become part of our nature. So Allah has indicated this in many places in the Quran like when Allah said", "So, oh humanity. If you're in doubt about the resurrection think about this we created you from earth and then from a zygote", "and then from an embedded embryo, and then form this developing embryo that is formed and unformed. And then we... in order to clarify it to you, and we have instilled in the wombs, made firm in the womb whatever we please, to a fixed term.\"", "Do you deny? Do you negate? Do disbelieve in the one who created you from earth and then from a zygote, and then made you a human being? So the first thing that manifests in us is the power of growth.", "of growth, vegetative growth that you see in vegetables. In the vegetable world. And then the next is this , right? Which is . There's a willfulness there that enters in from the animals.", "what is pleasing, and avoiding what one doesn't want. And then sentience. Imagination. Conceptualization. Reasoning. Right? So thought. There would be thought and then reason. And", "once you get to that ability to think and reason. That you can distinguish between good and evil, and this is . So you have this khilaf the Mu'tazirite basically said the aqal was able to perceive good and", "also but they limit it so they don't have the absolute position that the mu'tazilite takes. So, they believe that the intellect can perceive what's tahseen and taqbeeh like the intellect is left to understand that knowledge is good and ignorance is evil. That's the realm the intellect", "theft is bad and that honesty's good, murder's bad. You know treating other human beings the way you'd like to be treated those are things that reason can arrive at so that's a soft natural law right it's a Soft Natural Law not a hard natural law but it's just a soft Natural Law. But where they differ and then they also mul'a'mat al-taba' They also believe that like that you like something or dislike something because a lot of you know there's a whole theory of ethics", "theory of ethics called the Boo Hoo Theory. The things you don't like are bad and things that you like are good, so our scholars recognize that there's an aspect of ethics. We might find it disgusting to eat snails, so we say oh that's bad but then you travel to France or even Morocco", "So that's just nature. And Imam Shafi'i puts some emphasis on that in terms of tahseen and taqbiya. The third though is what relates to iqab and thawab, that in term of the details of right and wrong, the intellect can't reach that. It can't get to... There are many things that the intellect will not be able to understand.", "And then also the punishment and the reward that goes with the action. That's the realm of Sharia, it's not the realm Aqal. I mean you can make, there is Ta'zeer in Sharia which the Aqad can do but in terms of the afterlife, the reward and punishment of the after life for actions that are done in this world only revelation can determine that. The human intellect has no access to that so he's saying", "that the human being can have this ability to perceive right and wrong, but not in an absolute sense. That's my point. It's limited. And then he says... He formed you", "form he gave you, your forms. He made them excellent, made them beautiful. So the human being through the human intellect became the source of knowledge. It's the mine of knowledge this is where you're going to get the knowledge from and the center of wisdom", "So the existence of the intellect in the beginning of the affair is potentiality, it's through potentiality. Sometimes means power, sometimes here it means potentiality like the existence a fire in the flint. So means to strike the flints so if you strike the Flint you'll get the fire", "Or like the existence in potentiality, the whole palm tree exists in the palm seed. So you have to plant it and you have water it. Like these systems of water table waters that are under the earth. So in order to acquire that water, to draw that water out,", "well. So the human being, the human soul then exists between these two powers right? One is the concupiscent and the other is the rational I mean there is a third power which is the irascible power so it's qawwa al-ghadabiyya but here he's basically showing", "the animality and the angelic nature. So we have these two natures that Allah, and they're in tension. There's a tension between these two, the rational and the appetitive. All right? So the irascible is kind of a moderate. It exists between the two, which is in that middle phase.", "And so this appetitive power, it's covetous to... It attempts to obtain pleasures of the body. Bodily and animal pleasures like food and sex. And also to overcome", "overcome like to conquer and all those other more immediate pleasures. And with the power of the intellect it covets, it desires you know it's really yeah desires or wants to achieve knowledges and refinement", "refinement you know there will add that means more like refinement and good deeds and praiseworthy matters that are have praiseworthy consequences we've guided you the two paths", "either grateful or ungrateful. Kafur here, kafir means ingrate. So it also means disbeliever, scoffer. So when he says hadaynahun najdayn, the najd is a parikh murtafa'a, or it's a raised up plain, a road.", "These are two clear roads that we have shown him. So when it was the human nature to seek after pleasure, the pleasures came in two types.", "them are the sensual pleasures, like the pleasures of taste, the pleasures touch, the pleasure of sound, the pleasures of sight and the pleasures smell. So the pleasures are five senses and these follow the animal appetites. And the second type of pleasure are the intellectual pleasures", "That is the pleasure of knowledge, of doing good, of acting virtuously. وَالَّذَّاتِ الْمَحْسُوسَ أَغْرَبُ عَلَيْنَا لِكَوْنِهَا أَقْدًا مَا وُجُودًا فِينا It's very interesting. So these sensual pleasures are more dominant in us because they were the first pleasures that we had. Right?", "Intellectual pleasure takes work, it takes effort. Sarah Babakir gave a nice the other day she was talking about the difficulty that you have in acquiring knowledge but then when you get it the pleasure that you get is great and she likened that to like paradise. Here it's all struggle but then in the afterlife it all becomes meaningful so intellectual pleasure", "If you see somebody who's really mastered something, even a great pianist, you don't see all the hours and hours of horrible repetition that they had to do. To get to the point where they could play something beautifully. So all intellectuals, mathematics, somebody... You know, you see Yusuf Ismail. It's very easy for him but you didn't see", "of ability in higher mathematics. It's a great struggle, you don't get there easy. Very few people find those type things easy. There are some people that seem to... But they're very rare, those type people. Most intellectual effort is very rigorous and arduous and takes time. So that's what he's saying, the sensual pleasures are very quick. You just eat a cake and it tastes great", "And if the people hate what their minds command them to do,", "This is in a book that Erlach and Ornstein wrote called New World, New Mind. One of the things they say in there is that the human being is... The brain is designed to react to immediate things but it actually will put off and delay things that are coming down the road. That's why you have a national debt like 30 trillion dollars really? Really? How long can you keep doing that? They just keep kicking it down the", "road, but eventually it's going to collapse the currency. It has to. It's just economics. Adam Smith, last chapter, Chapter 5, an important chapter in The Wealth of Nations on debts and taxation. He says no country has ever survived deficit financing. It destroys the economy of the country. Now they're going to start dumping these petrodollars because now Saudi is saying we'll take the yuan,", "the Brazilian currency. We'll take rubles. So once the reserve currency is lost, American dollar's worthless. It's going to be worthless. Amazing. Over a war that we should have never had anything to do with. Ukraine. Really? Ukraine? I mean this is insanity. Risking nuclear conflagration for what?", "For what? I mean, people have to deal with their own problems, right? This whole idea that you can police the world. We can't even police ourselves. Have you looked at the crime rates lately out there? You can't govern others if you can't govern yourselves. The khalifa is given to those who self-govern.", "But what is the hallmark of that khalifa? Knowledge. That's what Allah says. Look how many times in that verse knowledge in its different forms is mentioned. It's amazing because that's and knowledge is not just you know theoretical knowledge but it's also knowledge that's applied because he told him to tell them apply your knowledge show them what you can do", "So, you know these are the . You just put off what's coming. Kick it down the road. I mean no ethical generation would ever acquire debt that they're just gonna hand to the next generation. Like you can't hand another generation your debt. It's unethical. You should pay your own debts", "So you're borrowing money for your enjoyment or for your standard of living that is going to end up creating misery for your offspring, either your children or your grandchildren or your great-grandchildren. Somebody's gonna pay the price for what you're doing and that's selfishness which is a horrible thing, horrible quality.", "وَلِذَٰرِكَ يَكْرَهُ أَكثرُ النَّاسِ مَا يَأْمُرُ بِهِ الْعَقْلُ And for that reason, most people disdain what their reason tells them to do. وَيَمِيرُوا إِلَى مَن يَئْمَرُوا بِحِي الْهَوَىٰ And they incline towards what their passions tell them to Do حَتّى قِيلَ الْاَقُلُ صِدِّيقٌ مَقطُوعٌ وَالْهُوَاعَدُ مَجْبُعٌ To the point where it's even been said That the reason is a friend that has been cut off and passion is an enemy that's followed", "So the poet said, you know if your nafs enjoins you to some appetite but", "but to get to it will lead to something untoward, something bad. Leave it and go against what you desire because it's a loving enemy. And to go against it is your friend. And then the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam for that reason said, It's really important hadith", "Paradise is surrounded by distasteful things, like getting up at dawn and praying. You know it's not easy on the self. It's one of the times where sleep is deepest for most people. Doing wudu when the water's cold. Giving money like in San Shahi'a. The Prophet said the best sadaqah is when you're sahihun yakhshal faqar. When you're in a good state", "but you're covetous of your wealth and fearing poverty. That's the best because you're going against your nafs. So all those things when you go against yourself, those are things that get you close to Allah is going against the self. Following the self, the Prophet ﷺ said, المؤمن كيس فطن The mu'min is kayis. Qiyas says intelligence.", "intelligence, the mu'min has intelligence. That... And he works for what's after death so he disciplines his soul and he works", "أَتْبَعْ نَفْسُهُ هَوَاهَا وَتَمَنَّى عَلَى اللَّهِ الْأَمٰنِي He just lets his intellect do whatever, his self do whatever it wants. Follow its own passions and then he has vain wishes. أُمْنِيا is a wish. رَجَاء is a hope that's coupled with action. أَمْنيّة is a which that has no action. There's no action to it. So...", "questions. I didn't finish the chapter, but inshallah we'll get to it on Tuesday, I think is when we're going to make up the class that I missed. So I'll put that mark here. Go ahead.", "In the list of, you know, the potentialities existing in a human I was wondering about the ordering of it. It seems that it's beginning with the four humors and then it ends with the preserved tablet and the qalam And I was wonder if there is intentionality behind that? Definitely Because it seemed to me that, you now, for elements maybe the ordering material world ending at the most The highest point Exactly, activity passivity", "He's definitely, it's very clear. And he brings it all together at the end like he shows you what he's trying to do. That's why for me what he is doing in this book is he really is giving you a complete exposition of what a human being is from what we're made up of and then he looks at us sociologically", "intellectually, spiritually. It's amazing what he's doing. So there's definitely intentionality. He clearly has a process. I mean, he's in that tradition of... These are the scholars that were heavily influenced by Greek... The intellectual", "structure of knowledge, how knowledge should be structured. And so you see a clear difference once the influence of the... Once the Muslims conquer the Levant and these great peripatetic schools enter into Islam and they start translating these books and the Muslim scholars are reading these books, they learned a way of organizing that you don't see as much. Although the Muwatta is", "The Salata is, I think very well organized. But you really see it in these scholars. When you read Aristotle, you kind of get that understanding which is now modern academia and this is the way modern academics works. Also can I ask? Yeah. Is this an exhaustive division of the principles informing the macrocosm or microcosm?", "have gone into more detail probably but he's giving you the most important points. I understand there's lesser principles, but are there others at the same degree of importance? I don't think so. I think he's given you the", "Yeah, yeah. Thank you. So in what way if any does the platonic conception of the tripartite soul differ from the Islamic one? I think the tripardite nature of the soul is really self-evident so I don't think...", "I mean, obviously Plato, he uses the analogy of the charioteer and the two horses. One being better than the other. The irascible horse better than concupiscent. But the point is that the chariotier reason should be in charge of these two. I think these are things that the Muslims saw were self-evident. Qadhi Abu Bakr ibn al-'Arabi actually says", "the four virtues they're really agreed upon so the four Virtues as you all know because your students at Zaytuna, the four virtue are courage and then temperance right? And then Hikmah which here is prudence because the Muslims the Arabs do not differentiate between what they call", "they had a difference between the phronesis and the Sophia. So, they differed. And also in our tradition is wisdom and prudence. So prudance is practical wisdom and that's a cardinal moral virtue which is different from an intellectual or a spiritual theological virtue.", "four virtues and then, so the virtue of the irascible soul is courage. The virtue of concupiscent soul is temperance, ifa. The Virtue of the rational soul is hikmah. And then when those three are working, when you're ordered properly as Allah has created you upright, so your head is on the top", "and then he puts your chest, and then you put your stomach in your genitals. That's the order Like that's alignment if you're mustaqeem Then you're aligned properly your head is governing Your hearts and your lower Once it you flip it over Then that's maqloob so that's the inkilaab when the genitals on the stomach dictates reason then the person", "then the person is lost and they're just following their appetites. Or when you get angry, your irascible soul takes over. That's why equanimity was so important. The idea of sakinah, of having sakinat, like not getting angry. Which that takes effort. It's musara'a. That why the Prophet said that the real strong man wasn't shadidu suraa', it was the one that yaghribunafsu ndal ghazab", "yourself when you're angry. That's the real strong man. It's not the one that can beat another man, it's the one who can actually control himself when he or she gets angry. So those are the cardinal virtues and those are related to the tripart soul so the adalah is the balance. That why justice and balance are related. Ya'tadlil mizaj. Your temperament is ordered properly because we all have a mizjah", "And so when your temperament's ordered properly, you're in harmony. So I think they're not... I think the Muslims would have come up with it whether or not Plato, they got it from Plato or not. It doesn't. It's clear in the Quran. The shahawat are clear. The qawwar ghadbiya is very clear. These are self-evident, I think.", "but can be quickly understood discursively. To say it's self-evident would not be really fair, but they're demonstrative that you can clearly prove that we are tripartite creatures. Yeah? So according to the first question, according to Imam Raghim and other scholars,", "scholars what is the indication that we have started to get to know ourselves and how do we distinguish between knowing ourselves and being delusional very good question so there's a story from the zen tradition that will help here um there was a famous zen master who", "came to this temple and there's all these Buddhists, they'd been doing their for decades. And all he said was, there is no such thing as enlightenment. So they all left except for one. And he said aren't you going to go with your friends? He said no I'm still thinking about what you said because here I've been thinking all these years that I was enlightened now I'm wondering if it was just early onset of senility.", "The point of that is delusion is a big problem. We delude ourselves very easily, so hurrur is something Allah warns us about. One of the best ways to help in that is to have good companionship because people... A true friend is going to help you with your shortcomings.", "I mean, you know... I think all of us human beings really are aware of themselves if they're really honest with themselves. So it's just, I think it takes a level of courage to kind of admit but I think a lot of people do know their shortcomings and", "But there are blind spots. Arrogance is one of them. Arrogances like high blood pressure, it's just a kind of hidden disease and a lot of people are unaware that they're arrogant. A lot of peoplare unaware that their envious so those are things that traditionally you had sahaba for that. You had a sheikh who would help you", "and the servant reaches his master. He strives for himself to be a Lord of the worlds, and he is satisfied with the status of certainty.", "and he said, I listened to my detractors and I took their criticism seriously. So don't just assume if somebody says, yeah, I think you're arrogant. Don't just that they're... It's not true. I mean, think about it. People, it's hard to look at the self. I mea, he talked about that earlier, about self-love, that love blinds and we love ourselves. We have to love ourselves, Allah has created us", "with this idea. But when that love becomes inordinate, then it becomes narcissism and narcissistic personality disorders is well studied. And there are people with these disorders that are very problematic but I think they all... There's no disease whether it's mental, psychological, spiritual, physical,", "Prophet said, There's no disease except Allah has sent down a cure. So whatever troubles or struggles that one is having, don't despair from the grace of God because there's always grace and there's", "that I can do with that one is that we have to be vigilant about that because we really can delude ourselves. You don't want to get to the point where you become completely stifled and almost frozen with the inability to act, because you're constantly questioning and checking your intentions and your actions. There's people who do that, and that itself can be very dangerous, where you just say, oh, is my knee a sound?", "isn't it? Tawakkala ala Allah. You know, trust in Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Do your best. Make tawbah. Ask Allah to yubasiruka, to give you openings. Sidi Ahmad Zarruq says that prayer on the Prophet is one of the best things for tahdhiban nafs, to help with the polishing of the self, is prayer on", "It won't harm you. Some of the other zikrs can be very strong, but prayer on the prophet will only be beneficial. Another question we have says, I know that the basic reason for creating human beings is to worship God, but what is the motivation for God to create in the first place? Yeah, that's a good question. We don't believe that there's nothing", "of god's essence that there's no there's in you know in these in the in what they call the four uh causes you know the the material efficient formal and final so that final cause is called in arabic right that is is why something's done so so the one doing it is being compelled to do it because there's some", "there's some gharad. So Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala does not have gharada in that way, but the bounty of God is that it overflows from Allah subh'anaHu wa ta-A'la's bounty and its the tajalliat of the names and attributes of Allah subhaanahu wa Ta-Aa. There's an apocryphal tradition that's mentioned by a lot of our scholars", "You know, I was a hidden treasure that desired to be known or wanted to be know. So I created creation to know me. I think in the end words will fall short. There's a kind of ineffable state that the human being has to enter into in that presence is that Allah is these are all", "all the tajalliyat of Allah's attributes. See the creator in the creation, see the provider in the provision. The one who knows the truth will see the truth in everything. So Allah doesn't need us and we believe that.", "Allah is ghaniun anna wa nahnu muhtajoon ila Allah, muftaqiroon ilayh. The definition of Ilah is al-mustaqni a'an al-kul wal kulun muftaquroon ilayhi. Independent of everything and everything is dependent upon God. That's God. So Raghub says there are three reasons that God gives us for the creation.", "the creation to worship Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, to cultivate the world and then that we replace the people who went before us and we bring forth our replacements. Our children are our replacements and this goes on until Allah shuts it down when Allah wants", "Allah will close it down. So, you know, these are the things we just have to accept but nothing, Allah is not compelled by anything outside of God's own essence. There's no there's no do I want to add anything?", "What's that? I mean, this is your area. Alhamdulillah. Any other questions? Yeah. So I was just wondering about... So in the class we mentioned there's like the order of creation so you have the mineral, vegetable, animal and the human kingdom", "animal in the human kingdom. And so I've heard the argument that, for example using animals to ride them or even slaughtering of animals is something that's inhumane and I wanted to know it just seems like this argument sort of violates the existing hierarchy that... Like speciesism you know these kind of people that argue there shouldn't be any hierarchy in species", "I mean, our view on that, the Muslim view, I'm saying. I think the vast majority of Muslims would conclude that is just crazy. You can't equate a mosquito with a dog or a cat and you can't equal a dog to a cat with human being. We should cherish animals and treat them well", "and the provost was very good to animals. You know, he said don't slaughter an animal in front of another animal. He said don' kill them twice because they are sentient and if they see an animal killed they feel it. I mean animals grieve we know that. Animals dogs get depressed you know cats can be depressed we know so they're sentient beings but they're not rational beings like we are. So I think this is part", "madness of just the modern world is, you know it's gone mad. What can we say? I mean a poet said quite some time ago were in a time of such extreme madness that the one not driven mad by it was not sane in the first place. So I don't know. I mean it's very odd these things but", "things but the way animals are treated is horrific and I think there's an argument for not eating like I know a rabbi who gave up meat not because he's against me because in the Torah but but because he is against that unethical treatment of modern husbandry I mean the way they the way chickens are raised it's just sick so", "for getting back to just small, local, free-range type things where animals are treated with dignity. Because they are creatures of God and they shouldn't be beaten or... And they will have their day according to the hadith. The Prophet said, they're going to have their days and they will testify against people that abuse them. So... They couldn't imagine things talking like hands. Allah said, the one who made you talk", "will make everything talk. The earth will talk, everything will talk. Allah can't make them talk. I mean now boxes talk. You know you have these ridiculous things, Siri. Boxes talk. Well I can't a cow talk. We could make a box talk but Allah can not make a cow", "We have one more question from online building on the One of the earlier ones is it better to wait for one's intention to be 100% pure for the sake of Allah or To go ahead with the good deed despite knowing that intention isn't isn't fully pure and to fight it in the process No, you have to You have to do Everything you do in the state that you're in", "Whatever good you do, just fight yourself. Imam Madik was asked about a man who sets out for the masjid with a good intention but on the way he hopes somebody sees him on the to the Masjid and he said I hope he gets the first intention because it's just iblis and nafs ego. Ego always wants a portion. Tell me how wonderful I am. Tell", "that and so if you become at least aware of it and just oppose it in yourself, whatever whispers occur in your heart that the heart denies, that's Iman. Like the man who came to the Prophet and told him he was having bad thoughts, he said oh you find that? He said yeah. That's pure faith. That you're rejecting", "not well add to hajj and hula ina you know easy do it don't fight it just let those things go don't get caught up in them because that's what I believe wants he wants you to you know i and i learned this from dr. Cleary but i think it's a really useful way to understand this is the host and uninvited guest and so the negative aspects of your personality are uninvite", "They will wreak havoc on the house, but the host has to become more and more healthy and more assertive until it takes control of the house again. And then when the guest comes in like anger because you need anger I mean this out here in this aqidah that they have out here kindness is everything. You know, it's not everything Anger is important people should get angry when when the anger is appropriate", "anger is appropriate. We should be angry at what happens to the Palestinians when they're being mistreated like they are on their own land, that should make somebody angry. They should be upset about that and feeling that way is what enables people to act, to try to remove wrongs. If everybody was kind all the time there would be no wrongs removed from", "ونحن لن نزيل كل الأخطاء ومن يجعلنا نفهم أنه سيغير كل هذه الأشياء ولكن عندما ترى أمر ما إذا كنت ممكن من رأى منكم منكرا فليغيره فلين يستطيع فبلسانه فإن لم يستاطع فبقلبه", "At least do it with the heart. And that's the lowest of Iman, to reject it with a heart. So traditionally our ulama have made it clear that the Yad is for the Sultan, the tongue is for scholar and the heart is for common person who sees a wrong. Because we can't... you can't go and just... okay so it's a munkar alcohol. You can't destroy the liquor store even if its in a Muslim", "even if it's in a Muslim country. You can't do it, you can't take the law into your own hands. That's...the Sultan is going to be responsible for that not you and the same with the scholar and sometimes the scholars they might not speak up out of their Ishtihad so you have to be careful also, oh that scholar doesn't speak up. You don't know what their Ishtaad is and you don't", "Because the scholars work on a whole other level that common people very often don't see. That's why there is khas and amma. And one of the aspects of the modern time today, is that everybody is a scholar. Everybody is a mushtahid. So it creates a lot of confusion in people because Sheikh Google is there you can look up anything", "And then people think that they know better. And you don't know why people do things. We have a history of scholars who've been condemned in their lifetimes, and then later people realized they were the rightly guided ones. Ahmed Zarroq was kicked out of Fez for defending the Jews. I mean, the ulama kicked him out of Fest but nobody remembers the ulma that kicked them out", "Because he was actually the one that was right at the time. And they were big ulama, they weren't like today if one of them was alive today He'd probably be one of the biggest ulama in the whole ummah So you know it's good to be humble and just know your place", "Allah will have mercy on a man who knows his place and rides his donkey. They say the reason Isa, alayhi salam, rode the donkey was it's the humblest of the creatures that men ride. You know, the horse is very noble. Even a mule, a baghla, is a bardhun, you know, Arabs. That was still quite a beast. Camel, camel, I mean, you feel like a king on a camel. If you've never been on a", "ah, you don't know what life is. Yeah. I'm doing that. The first time I rode a camel it took me right into a thorn bush and just like literally got me all scratched up and they were all the better and were laughing at me. And it's not a nice thing to do but they just thought it was funny. And I said why did it do that?", "didn't know how to ride. So I said, well what do I do to ride? He says the first thing you have to do is there's a little nodule on the head of the camel and you just tap it with the stick. It's very sensitive. And once he knows you know that spot, he doesn't mess with you. Yeah, so that's what you have", "لا في خسر إلا الذين آمنوا وعملوا صالحات وتواصلوا بالحق وتوصلوا", "المصيبة لنا في ديننا ولا تجعل الدنيا أكبر همنا ولا مبلغ علمنا و غاية رغبتنا ولا إلى النار مصيرنا ولا توصلط علينا بذنوبنا من لا يرحمنا يا أرحم الراهمين سبحانك و محمدك أشهد أن لا إله إلا أنت أستغفرك وأتوب إليك" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Reflections on Sura Qāf Session 1 with Hamza Yusuf_e1X4Jnwsi4Q&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742883173.opus", "text": [ "أعوذ بالله من الشيطان الرجيم بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم وصل الله على سيد محمد وعلى آله وصحبه وسلم تسليما كثيرا اللهم علمنا ما ينفعنا وانفعن بما علمتنا وزدنا علما اللهم افتح علينا فتح العارفين وافقنا توفيق الصالحين اللهم ان شاء الله جعل القرآن العظيم ربيع قلوبنا ونور صدورنا", "First of all, Ramadan Mubarak to everybody. May Allah make this a month of healing for people returned to the Quran. We've sent down this Quran as a healing and certainly the Ummah has just been through", "a great deal in the last 500 years really. We just finished a book, Crusade and Jihad by Polk which really highlights the onslaught from the global north on the Muslim south and there's just a great of hardship this is a difficult time in many places but it's also despite all of", "in, it's our time. And we pass through very quickly and the Prophet ﷺ reminded us that the person who suffered the most on the earth from the believers when he's in paradise, he's actually asked did you ever know any suffering? And he says la wallah. It's just obliterated from his memory. And the one who had the most pleasure in the earth, from the people of the nar, he has asked if he ever knew any pleasure and he says no, he never did.", "So we're here for a short time. It's a very quick journey in some ways, in other ways it actually goes on for quite some time I mean we do have a lot of time and if we use our time wisely obviously we can derive great benefit from the time that Allah has allotted each one of us because all of us have a certain amount of time", "when that time is. Each one of us, there's a door we're going to go through into an infinite world from a finite world to an infinite word and that door is somewhere in the world. We don't even know which place it will be on the earth. Allah can bring you to a place you never thought that you would be there and that is the place where the angel death was waiting for you. It's a very interesting story", "story of appointment in Samara, which is about the man who's trying to flee from death and he sees death in the marketplace. And he flees from that city to another city on the fastest horse you could find. When he gets to the city there's an angel of death and said I was wondering are you in that city? We had an appointment in this city. The story is just about that you can't avoid your fate wherever", "It's not just the dissension amongst ourselves, but also internally. That people have struggled with themselves internally. They fight with their voices they hear. So these are all the struggles of the human condition, but the Quran for us is this yearly reminder, just as the prayers are daily reminders, the Juma'a is a weekly reminder", "reminder and then these new moons are monthly reminders. And then the Ramadan is the yearly reminder, and the Hajj is the reminder for your lifetime. One of the most amazing things about this religion is because Allah who created us knows the human condition and nature of the human being, humans always want new things. Probably some", "The best things that are on the internet are very old things, but people don't want old things. They want new things. they want the latest thing. They're always looking for something new, new and improved. Something's going to be better. But the reality of it is that the truest things are the things that have been around for the longest time.", "What benefits people remains in the earth. But people want new things and so they get bored very quickly, what the Arabs call malal. They get bored. And Allah says, the Prophet told us that Allah does not weary of giving you reward until you're weary of doing whatever you're doing that's good. And obviously it's for Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala", "It doesn't mean it literally. So, نوّع العبادة He made all these different types of عباده There's all these Different ways that you can get close to Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala so that you don't Weary of doing The same thing over and over again Just even In the day there's all These different things that Allah subhanahu Wa ta'ale has given The Prophet said just a smile Is صدق", "So just smiling at a person is sadaqah. And visiting widows and orphans, taking care of orphans. People that have money that are able to spend it on positive projects. All of these things are just amazing gifts but one of the great gifts of this religion is Ramadan", "because it was a time that was meant for people to experience hunger, to a certain degree. Just to feel hungry and also to have some time in the night to get used to this idea of night worship because it's a very important aspect of the religion for people who really want to get close to Allah.", "Consumption of food is much greater now and people actually get sick during Ramadan. I was speaking to one of the Mauritanian, two days ago And he was telling me how different it was Ramadan to what the Ramadan that he grew up with because He said you know we ate very little in Ramadan And he said now this like feasting and he said and then they've turned the night into the day and the day into the night so people sleep during the day", "and then they stay up all night. So many of these things are actually antithetical to the actual purpose of Ramadan. It's definitely there to disrupt patterns, but it's not there to invert the day and the night so that you're just eating during the night and then not eating during", "happens when we're in our regular period of time. But the other really important thing about Ramadan is it's almost like you can see it, like continuing education that they have for people in professions. They have to go every year and they have to renew their skill sets", "their skill sets, they have to learn new things. So it's very important to be reminded that we have to go back to this book and then hopefully one of these Ramadans there will be a shift and it continues after Ramadan because a lot of people once Ramadan is over they go back", "And this is one of the beauties of Arabic, is tilawa means both recitation but it also means to follow. So talaha, to follow it. So yatsru al-Quran means to following the Quran but it's also means recite the Quran and part of the secret of reciting the Quran", "It's a dhikr al-hakim. It's the wise reminder, so it's always reminding you and one of the most interesting The Prophet recited Qaf constantly And and made me think a lot about", "There's one of the women Umm Hisham bint Al-Harithah She actually shared an oven with the Prophet Because they had communal ovens And so the tenor, they would go and bake whatever they were baking And the bread And she had a communal oven with The Prophet So she saw The Prophet a lot But she said that she memorized She said I took the Qaf from The Prophet", "recited it so often. So she actually memorized it from just hearing the Prophet . It's the only surah that we know that he actually gave a khutbah with qaf, and in one riwa' says many times like he would often use qaf as the source of his khutba. And one of the tragedies of modern khutbas is traditionally the khutb was focused on the Quran", "on an ayah or a hadith, or some theme inside like sabr. Or sadaqa or something and if you look at all the traditional khutbas of the Muslim world and we have many books of khutba's, many books but we also have the khutbaz that were recorded of the prophet . You won't find any political khutbahs.", "Just look, try to find Talking about whatever the problems of the time were The khutbah was always to try to call people back to their Lord Partly because the ulama understood That the reason there was so much social unrest Is that people weren't connected to Allah And if they wanted to really get over the social unrest They had to come back to Allah Because a lot of what happened", "a lot of what happens to us in the world is a direct result of our actions and behavior. These are the tabiat, the consequences of living sinful lives being far from Allah . So if you look at the khutbahs of the Prophet , it was all wild. He was reminding them, calling back to Allah. And that's this chapter in the Quran which is the 50th chapter of the Quran", "It's one of those chapters that it's very, if you really study it and read it a lot. And one of the great gifts of reading the Quran continuously especially these surahs that we read on a regular basis like Yasin or Al-Waqia or Surat al-Mulk. If you really pay attention", "you will continue to see things in them. I mean, one of my favorite stories is from Sheikh Ahmed Dugan who was a great scholar from Al-Ahsa, Jawatha in Arabia, in the eastern province and he was a really brilliant scholar but he was", "taught the Rahabiyah and he taught the books on which the prophet said was the first knowledge that would be lost. That was the outward knowledge, there's another hadith, the first inward knowledge was khushu'a, which is this kind of awe of Allah . But his son told me that one day he came out of his room and he just said", "He's had some kind of opening about, I mean Bab As-Suth is very interesting bab because there's a lot of situations where people get a sixth in inheritance. But he was seeing something and we have books written on the inner meanings of all these acts of worship. So Allah put this between alhujurat and dhariat.", "So the is a very interesting chapter because it's really about adab and how, in fact it's called which are the places where the Prophet lived. Which is the real adab is inside the home because people often have decorum outside the home but how they behave inside the homes reveals who they really are", "And the Prophet was a completely open book. We know everything about the prophet, we know how he showered, we knew everything about him. He lived a life without any shadow, there's no hidden self. We knew exactly how he lived and so it's", "It's followed by Qaf. And Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala, the title of the surah is Qaf One of the titles it's given in the I'tqan by Imam Suyuti is Al-Basikat which is mentioned in the Quran and some say that's a Ism al-Ijtihadi That it's something they called it but generally", "The titles of the Surah of the Quran are basically from something mentioned in the Quran. So it's obviously very important, but this is begins with what are called the Muqatta'at. So these Muqata'ats are the letters that begin 28th of the chapters of 114 chapters in the Koran. So there are 28 chapters that begin with the Muquatta'ats", "And traditionally the way they would teach students to memorize was they gave them a line. So these are the 28, these are 14 letters that are mentioned in", "In these Muqatta'at So there are 28 surahs Where they're mentioned And then they have different So There are three surah that only have one letter Saad And then This Qaf and then Nun So these are the three that only Have one letter If you notice with the Muqata'ats You will find That usually what follows It is", "It is something about the Quran, an oath with the Quran. So you'll find that Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la is using it. Right? So there's something about The Quran that falls or Al Kitab Hamim right Al Kitb", "So one of the reasons for this is that the Quran is composed of these 28 letters. 29 if you add Hamza, but very often it's 28, 29 if we add Hamzah. Hamz always needs to have a chair to sit on so... Which is not Hamz-a", "of the words there were a few words they did not know that the prophet had to explain to them and that was because they were words taken from other places tribes but those letters are what the quran is made up of they're the building blocks of the meanings that the qur'an gives us and first of all as far as i know it's", "as if they're moving into the qawālib, to the vehicles of language. Because we believe that the kalām Allah, the eternal kalām of Allah is not the letters and the sounds that we speak. The eternal kalam of Allah when we say al-Qur'an ghayru makhlūq We are talking about these ma'ani These meanings And so it's as if the meanings are coming from", "But it occurred to me that one of the arguments that the Western people make is that phonemes are meaningless. So, so the building blocks of language are meaningless what I think what one of things that the Quran is saying is no, it's all meaning that even these letters are meaningful. So it's All Meaning there's no meaning with meaninglessness in Allah's creation. It's all-meaning", "And so it's penetrating those meanings, it's understanding those meanings that is the challenge. And this why we've been given these intellects. This is why we begin at hearts. They have hearts but they don't understand with them. We were given intelligence and told to have this . And so if you look at this, it begins , and this one of those in the", "That it's extended Because it's a med lazim And then So here's the oath There's a big difference of opinion and I don't want to go into all these differences But there's When Allah swears an oath and in the Quran that all these letters come in the Koran", "in the Quran, they usually have a . So there's what is the oath being sworn about. In this case it's not clear and so there's a lot of debate about where that is and some say its , it's been hidden. So it's really saying by this book you will be resurrected", "be resurrected or by this book he is a messenger of allah and so the qasim is there but the muqsam alayhi is hidden and then other there are a lot of difference opinions and they say the lamb is hidden that's the jawab there in any case it begins with quran", "is from Qara'ah and the Prophet said he first and foremost when he was told in the beginning it's at Iqra bismi rabbika alladhi kharak but three times Iqr and he said ma ana bi qari he was not somebody and there's two ways to read that literally there's", "But it's also a reciter Somebody who recites Like somebody who recits poetry And does these things The Prophet ﷺ was not somebody That repeated the lines of the poets He's not somebody that And he was unlettered But Allah says اقرأ باسم ربك الذي خلق And then he's told to read that So, the Qur'an is a reading But it'S also A book", "That's why it is called Al-Kitab. So, it's Al-Quran and it's al Kitab And that's why all in our tradition the children first learn it orally. Like the Arabs say Recite to him my greetings It's not read to him, it is recite to him. So Qira'ah is reading but also reciting. Al Majeed is...", "That bel in Arabic, because we have students of grammar here. The bel generally is what they call . It's to usually redress a wrong like I said . You know I saw Zaid? Oh no I mean I saw Amar so it's used for istidrak. There's a second type of bel which is called intiqali", "which is the that moves from one subject to another. So it's not referring back to the previous, like the . And so here it's just They're amazed. in Arabic, you know, the Arabs use for things they don't understand. In English we would say wondrous", "Like when you have wonder like children are they live in Wonder everything's amazing and they're asking why one of the the The laments of a lot of philosophers is that because of science a lot Of the wonder of the world has gone out So because it's science has explained so much about the natural creation people no longer wonder at lightning Because they understand the the science behind", "the science behind it like what's actually happening so that's why the arabs say either when you know the cause you lose the wonder so here they're amazed that how could a", "They're bewildered by it. Like, how is that possible? فَقَالَ الْكَافِرُونَ هَذَا الشَّيْءٌ عَجِيبٌ So the kafirun, and it's very interesting that Allah says kafiru here because He doesn't use mushrikun Because the Quraysh were mushrikoun But Allah is using kafiroon Because the kafi'r is the one who knows it's true And hides the truth", "And one of the wonders that they have is, is that this man who grew up amongst us and we know him. They used to use terms that were derogatory towards the prophet. They use the term that he was the son of Abu Kabshah who was his father from the wet nursing. The Yetim Bani Hashem, the orphan of Bani Hasheh", "because these were arrogant, puffed up leaders that were mostly dictating to them these things. And so they're saying how is a and the prophet said he gathered them all together when he was told and he told them that if I told you there was an army behind this mountain that was coming to get you what would you say? They'd say we would believe you cause you are truthful like of course we will believe you", "Allah is the One who has the power to change your ways", "many places in the Quran of their denial of the baath. So they're denying that he's a prophet, but they're also denying, they say ahinna mitna? Like if we die wakunna turaban dharika rajum ba'id We die and then we become dust and then", "We know what the earth diminishes from them.", "The law and my food everything nothing is hidden from Allah. So a lie is saying to them Nothing is hidden us every particle that you are made up allah subhanahu wa ta'ala knows where it is And he can reassemble it just as he assembled at the first time what's interesting about this Is this is a very modern? Position now people have a very difficult time believing now in", "In modern people that are quote-unquote educated scientific people They and one of the arguments they make is that we just you can't destroy energy. You just become something else So Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala says, They denied the truth when it came to them but then they're confused about it", "bewildered. So they're, fi aminu marij, they're confused about their own positions about who this man is and what Razi says is this is a proof that that they're completely astray because he said if you have a firm belief about something you don't change your opinion about it but", "What this was and so they had to try all these different strategies And they would actually meet and think about this and in this a always account then they say mmm It's not really it doesn't sound like the Kahana The Quran doesn't Sound like the way they talk because I used to talking such as they had certain Ways of talking, and then they said it's it doesn' fit into the shit that we know You know didn't have the horse yet But they knew that the the share it didn't fit into meters", "fit into the meters that they knew. And then they say, he's always been a sane person. So they're confused about this. And Allah calls them. This is a question, rhetorical question. أَفَلَمْ يَنظُرُوا إِلَى السَّمٰاءِ فَوْقَهُمْ Haven't they considered? It's not saying أَfālam يَرَوّ", "فَلَمْ يَنظُرُوا Haven't they considered the sky above them? فَوْقَهُمْ بَنَيْنَاهَا We built this, which means رفعناها. We elevated the sky. بَنيْنِاهَة وَزَيَّنَّاهَى وَمَا لَهَ مِنْ فُروجٍ And we ornamented with the stars. وَما لَہَ مِّنْ φُر وجٍ There's no شقوق in it. You can't see any holes.", "tears in the fabric of the sky. Look! لَمْ تَرَىٰ فِي خَرْقَ الرَّحْمَن مِّن تَفَوْتٍ You won't see any... you won't se any of these things no matter how hard you look and then Allah says, Go from the heaven to the earth", "from the heavens to the earth. وَالْأَرْضَ مَدَّدْنَاهَا وَلْقِيْنٰى فِيهَا رَوَاسِيًۭا This Earth, مَ دَدْناها So the heaven we raised up, the earth we placed down. So these are the opposites. The Heaven we raised-up, the Earth we place down. و القینا فيها رواسيا And we anchor these amazing mountains روا سي", "anchored them in the earth and in their other verses in the Quran to stabilize. So they're stabilizing factors now we know how deeply anchored these mountains are because I mean, The dominant theory is these tectonic plates as they move together They actually created the mountains which stopped the earthquake That's what stabilized the Earth as the plates came together the mountains formed And then it says", "وَأَنبَتْنَا فِيهَا مِن كُلِّ زَوْجٍ بَهِيجٍ And we brought forth every wondrous type. So, زوج here is pair but it's also نوع, type, species. And we've brought forth everyone this pair. So if you look at this amazing balance... so the heaven, it says look at the heaven", "So the heaven is raised and then the earth is madadna. It's the opposite, it was placed down so you have raised and laid down. The Arabs say like they laid pipe. You know medd is used for laying something down. And then the sky is ornamented with the stars which move part of the beauty of the stars is their movement but the Earth is stabilized", "with the mountains. So, the mountains are fixed. Rawasi. But then Allah says that look at the mountains, tamurru marra sahab. You know, you look at them and tahsibuha jamida. You think that they're fixed but they're moving. And even though that's in... The verse where that is it's in a siyaq", "indicates it's on the day of judgment. But if you actually look at the verse, it's clear that Allah is talking about the sunnah of Allah, that His creation. Because on the yawm al-qiyamah, the earth is, you know, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, ينسفها نسباً Like it's completely obliterated, the mountains. Whereas here, it says, you see the mountains and you think they're stable but they are moving like the clouds move", "This is the creation of Allah that He has made everything with itqaan, with perfection. And so when you look at the stars, you see them moving but they're actually stationary. When you look in the mountains, you'll see them stationary but they are actually moving. So its complete opposite and this is one of the amazing miracles. In the Quran, when Allah says", "Haven't you seen your Lord how He made the shadow move? He made a shadow move. وَلَوْ شَأَّدَ جَعَلْهُ سَاكِنًا And had Allah wanted, He would have made the Shadow still. وُجَعْنَا الشَّمْسَ عَلٰيهِ دَلِيلًا and we made the Sun a dali'l for the movement of the shadow which indicates that the sun is stationary.", "the movement of the sun is causing the shadow to move. It's the turning of the earth that's causing the shadows to move, but the Sun is the delil it's a proof that you're seeing the movement up the shadow so here you've got these opposites you have stars that are moving that ornament the sky but they're not moving in reality for us and then you've", "but they appear to us stable. They're the zina of the earth as the stars are the zinah of the sky and then you don't see in the sky shuquq, but in the earth the nabat is based on breaking through it's all shuqquq so this is Allah is telling us look deeply into creation and reflect on these things and see how Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is doing all these things because you're going to conclude from this that there's a mudabbir behind", "a mudabbir behind this. You're going to conclude that Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala, that there has to be an intelligence behind this, an alim behind this , a qadir behind this . A mureed behind this All of these will lead you do that and that's why after showing that they deny this, Allah is saying, They haven't...you haven't thought about this deeply.", "at the creation and then Allah says this is a some of them say it's a must start like basar who Allah that Allah is making you see it or it's ahal or its maf'ulun bihi I mean there's different ways you can view it grammatically but it's basically Allah is doing", "So that we can actually see because they have, لَهُمْ عِيُون They have eyes but they don't see with their eyes. This is part of the blindness of the human being. سُمٌّ بُكْمٌ عُمِيٌ فَهِمْ لَا يُبَصِرُونَ They don't See and so Allah's telling us to look and think and see. لِكُلِّ عَبْدٍ مُنِيبٌ This is from the Inaba, the people, the servant who turns back to Allah .", "ونزلنا من السماء ماء مبارك فانبتنا به جنات وحبة الحصيد", "Allah brings back the earth after its death", "It's restored back. So this is again reminding them, you're saying the bath is not possible? You're saying a dead thing can't be restored to life? Don't you see every year here in just in our Bay Area, every year all the green now that's everywhere, all these hills are covered. Those were dead hills a few months ago. They were dead. If you go up there,", "ويأتي الماء ويعيده إلى الحياة كل صباح عندما تستيقظ الربط قال هذا كان أول شيء قد يقوله عندما اتكلم لأن الله يجعلنا ننزل كل روعة مثل موت لا يوجد شيئ يمكننا فعله كذلك كالشخص الذي", "reach the hulqum, there's nothing you can do. You can't hold it back and the same with sleep. Sleep conquers you. Sleep conquer you. Milton called it the gentle tyrant because it conquers", "And you actually come up just as they will come in the grave when they're called again. من بعثنا ممن مرقدنا هذا مع وعد الرحمن وصدق المرسلون Who woke us up from our sleep? This is what, and yet we're reminded every single day of our life, of this reality. Every single day. And that's why the Prophet said وإليك النشور And to you is the resurrection.", "هذا هو ما رأىه عندما يستيقظ من النوم فقد أذن له مجدداً لدي مجيداً لتصل إلى الله ليصعد على هذه المفاجئة وهو موتنا", "It's very interesting that Allah chose to highlight out of all the things that grow from the earth because the date palm, I mean there is actually a that says the date poem was created from the leftover clay of Adam . And there's a", "There's a new I at that say that it's our paternal uncle. And the tuna, the, the Nakhir these were in the Arab tradition, the honor of the date palm and one of the things about the date Palm if you look at it first of all, the is the first stage of the flowering and its not leads. It's also I think there's another", "There's another verse that uses another word. The date palm is a miraculous tree because every single part of the date palm was used. There's nothing that's not used by the Arabs traditionally,", "They built with it. The Prophet's Masjid, the first masjid was built with trunks and then the palm fibers. They made their beds from it so they would put the aliaf inside the bed. They used it to clean their teeth. So the actual mokhalil was used from the palm froths, the fibers. And then there are over 450 varieties of dates. Like somebody just sent me, Sheikh Abdullah Qadi sent me", "me from al-ahsa ruzays which they call it barney because that's the muntakhab for the eastern arabs during ramadan they all eat the ruzayz the prophet love the ajwa and the hadith in al bukhari and other praising the ajwan that whoever eats sabaa if you eat eight", "especially the ajwa are very black, but they're dark. And then the water when you drink it from the bowls that they traditionally drank with, it takes on the color of the bowl so it would look dark as well. So it's water and dates. The Prophet said in the Sahih Hadith whoever has dates in their house will never go hungry. Dates can last a very long time. They were enabled to Arabs to travel long distances and that was the food they took and it didn't spoil.", "It's one of the blessings. The nakhla, basiqat. So basiqi is another beautiful word because one of meanings is pregnant. So means the you became pregnant. They're pregnant because dates need to be fertilized so you have to pollinate the male date palm from the male", "onto the fruit of the female date palm and that's what the Arabs do. So they actually do it themselves, they pollinate. And so from that, the female brings the fruit. So it's a very interesting tree that again Allah is telling them to look and think about these things.", "by palm trees. And this is provision for and that's for everybody, right? And then we bring with this water, we bring a dead land back to life. So this is all taking people to an understanding of the bath", "Like this is the resurrection is real. And these verses are to help people understand if they think deeply about this, they will come to the conclusion that one, that this book, the secrets that are in this book and the depth of the book... And part of the difficulty I think is that it's through the Arabic language", "of the Quran manifest. I mean, one can see many things in translation but when you get into the daka'iq, into these very, very fine points of the language and why Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala uses certain words as opposed to other words and then just even the subtle things of just the particles that are used and why they're used. When you start seeing the extraordinary", "way in which this Quran is woven for us. One concludes that a human being couldn't do this and this is why the greatest minds in our tradition were these great scholars, that really went into the depths of this book and wrote these extraordinary works bringing out these meanings.", "All of them denied the prophets. So these are all, if you look at these, you will find throughout the Quran the stories of these different groups and other ones also. But these are the most important that obviously Nuh alayhi salam spoke to the people", "for an extended period of time, the Quran says 950 years and they rejected him and then they were struck with the flood. And then Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says Ashab al-Ras They're mentioned twice in the Quran All the Mufassirun give a lot of different opinions about them but in the end Ashab ar-Rasa are people who The Ras is", "say it's a bi'r, it's well and there are different opinions about who the Ashab al-Ras were but they're one of the people that were destroyed. Arabian, ancient Arabian peoples that were destroy because of their arrogance and rejection. They say they threw the Prophet down into the well and", "And the Ashab al-Aika. Thamud is obviously the people of Saleh. So Saleh came to Thamu. These were people who built incredible stone in stone, they had immense power, they were ancient peoples. They're after Ad, even though they are mentioned here before Ad, but they're close to Nuh .", "kill the camel. The camel was, it would drink one day and then they could drink the next day and they ended up killing it and once it was dead they were told you have three days and then realized that they tried to kill Saleh but he was actually saved. And then Hud is the prophet of Ad and again these were people that were a wayward person", "a wayward people and they did not listen to their prophet. He gave them nasiha, they didn't listen to him and then they were destroyed. And then Ashab al-Akhar the people of Shu'ayb probably again there's some difference of opinion about these people but they were the people Median of Shuayb who is obviously the father in law of Musa .", "ومن ثم قال الله سبحانه وتعالى كلهم كذبوا الرسل فحق وعيد", "لذلك لا يستطيع شخص مبارك أن يتحكم في عقوبته و لكن إخلاف الوعيد هو شيء سعيد. لذا الله يمكنه تأثير و يمكن له أن ينجو من أمانه ولا يدمن الله العظيمة فقط ، فإنها تساعد الله سبحانه وتعالى لذلاله يمكن أن يؤثر على أمر", "وعيداً كما لو أنهم أستحقواه لذلك فقد مكتوبون والآن الله يقول هل نفعلنا بالخلقة الأولى؟ هل سنكون متأسين من خلال الخلق الأول ؟ في آخر palavras عندما قالوا من يحيي العظام وهي رميم؟ قالوا، من يُحِيَ العظَام وهی رمين؟ مثلاً، من الذي سيعطي الجبائر بعدما تدخلوا في الأرض؟ من الذي يجعلهم يعطيها؟", "Say, the one who did it in the first time. Like if Allah did it the first Time It's easier for him to do not in reality It's all the same because Allah is Qadir but anybody who builds something The first time you can't say oh You can't do that again because he's proven to you that he could do it the First time so it'll be even easier", "So it will be even easier for him to do it a second time. Allah is saying there, أَفْعِينَ بِالْخَلْقَ الْأَوَّلِ بَرْهُمْ فِي رَبْسٍ مِّن خَلَقٍ جَدِيدٍ They're bewildered, they are perplexed about being recreated and one of the things now that we know", "has created a world that increasingly we're becoming aware of how finely tuned it is and how perfect it is. So, in the 1970s you had this man Carl Sagan who said basically for life all you need is water and earth and oxygen but over time in the last 50-60 years", "50, 60 years these scientists have come to realize that the whole universe is so finely tuned. They've already identified over 200 of these perfectly calibrated conditions necessary for there to be life and this is why increasingly you're seeing them perplexed by this.", "So for us, this is... For believers it's never been difficult. But for disbelievers there is a type of... There's just some kind of veil over their eyes that they can't see how evident this is. But I really feel that anybody who will give this book serious consideration", "we'll have to conclude that this book is from another dimension. It's not from here, it's not a man who did not have any formal education and he was obviously the most intelligent in our belief, he's the most intelligence human being but it's", "This is the argument of people who at least acknowledge that this is a stunning book. It's not his genius. This is Wahyun, Yuhaylai. It is a revelation that came down to him and this book which begins with Qaf is an indication that Allah does not", "does not tell us everything. There are things that Allah has withheld for a wisdom. So if you look at the ibadat that we have, we have ibadah qalbiyya, we had ibadath badaniyya, and we have liysaniyyah. If you look those three types of ibadh that we do because we do ibaduh with our bodies, we do it better with our tongues then we do Ibadah with our understanding in each one of those", "Each one of those, there are things that Allah has withheld from us. In terms of the qalbiyah, qaf, we don't know, I can't say with any certainty what that means. There are scholars that have said it's a name of Allah, some of them argue that all these muqata'at are names of Allah but we don''t know.", "وعلي بن علي بن عبي طالب كما يقومون بموضوعات حيث قالوا لكل كتاب سر والسر القرآن هذه الحروف كل كتب تحتوي على مخطئ وهذا المخطأ في هذه الحرف هذا أيضاً قافل من أول ما يسمى مفصلًا وقال النبي صلى الله عليه وسلم أنني أُعطيت مكان التورة السبعة الطوال", "of the Torah, the seven long ones. So these are from Baqarah, those first seven long chapters of the Quran. And then he said, وَعُطِيْتُ مَكَانَ الزَّبُورِ الْمِئِينِ Those are the ones that have more than a hundred verses that follow that. وَأُعْطِیْتَ مَکَانِ الـإِنْجِيلِ الَّمَثَانИِ And I was given in place of the Injil, the Mathani. And these are the", "And so those are the previous Semitic dispensations. The Torah, the Zabur, the Psalms and then the Gospel. And then he said, But I was given as this bounty from Allah, the Mufassal. And that's from Qaf until the end of the Quran. So these are... And people who recite the Quran a lot when you get to this section there is always something very special", "there's something very special about this last section. There's a ladda that's different from the other... I mean, that's been my experience and I know that's when other people's experience. There is a special ladda in the Mufassal And I think it's because of that tafdeel that these were given as a special bounty to the Prophet . So this is an amazing", "surah and an amazing reminder. And inshallah Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam said in a hadith that Imam Muslim relates that Abu Huraira told us that the Prophet", "That no people will gather in a place that's for the worship of Allah. That read the Quran and study it, except that the Sakinah will come down upon them. They'll be enveloped in mercy. The angels will hover around them. And Allah will remember them in the Malak of Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala. Alhamdulillah.", "Anybody have any question they want to ask? The question about the story of the , how is that related to ? Is there any relationship", "any relationship or anything that you can share with us? I mean, that's one of Allah says that he is the fariq al-habbi wa nawa. That Allah brings forth these thalaqa to open it up. And so, I mean it's the qudra of Allah that's doing all these things. The day palms go through these stages. Thal' is the first stage and then it goes into", "to the balah stage, and then the ratab stage. And it goes to the tamar. So you can see at each stage... One of the miracles is that it can be eaten at every stage unlike other fruits. The Arabs eat them at all stages for food. It's a very unusual plant, the nachil. I mean, it's very interesting also that it is originally from Arabia.", "And so, and the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam he said that the date palm. He said there's a tree in the desert that's like the believer. And he asked the Sahaba. It was one of those amazing things where one would think it was obvious but none of them got it. They were all talking about all... Because it's usually that thing that is so close that you're, you know the Arabs say the thing most close blinds you. You don't see what's right in front of you.", "Yeah, what is it? Imam Bulsairi and the Hamziah. He said from the because it's so present in front of you like it's hidden. And so people forget. But he was very young but he was with his father Omar", "he was thinking it was the palm tree, but he was too shy to say it because all these big Sahaba were there and he's like a young boy. So he didn't say anything. And so finally the prophet told him that the tree most liked the believer was the date palm. And the reason for that is that the date poem has very shallow roots. It's very shallow. And then it flourishes at the highest point.", "It doesn't have any leaves along the way up. Once it gets to the pinnacle, that's where all the fruits are. They're just at the very top. And so the believers like that. Shallow roots, they're not connected to the dunya. They don't have strong connection to the dinya and their basikat. They are in the heavens and they're fruitful and beneficial. So that's the way the believer is. All those amazing things.", "Now it's a superfood, dates. Everybody is eating dates. Diabetics can eat a few dates because if you don't eat a lot they won't raise the blood sugar. There are studies that were done especially if they're like the balah and the ratab dates.", "with the Torah and the Injil. How do we understand the Quran's relationship with these scriptures? Is it out of adab, is it appropriate to say that the Quran is more superior than these other revelations or that rather the Quran contains the teachings of these scriptures. I mean the Prophet he didn't say like don't say I'm better than this prophet or that prophet because even though the prophet has his Imam al-Mursaleen", "has a maqam, there's no benefit in it. And it'll just upset other people and things like that. But the Quran is definitely we believe its final revelation. It's the only one that's preserved in the original form. There's debate about the Bible. I mean even the Catholic Bible, Protestant Bible they're not the same. They differ on the books that are in it We know that the Gospels have different", "There's four different Gospels. Mark is probably the earliest, then Matthew, then Luke, then John is late. John is very Hellenistic. So whatever the Gospel is, the Injil is in singular in the Quran. It's not anajil. The four Gospel are not the Injal that Isa came with. They call it the Q gospel, the quail gospel. And then the Torah again we don't know. There's a difference of opinion about Tahreef.", "Is it the interpretations that have changed? Or is it the actual physical book? But there's definitely, I mean, there's things in the Bible that we don't accept them. The denigration of the prophets.", "Pastor overcame visited the other day and I told him like we don't believe that About Dawood alayhussalam, and I tell them I said you wouldn't do that. Like you wouldn t send if you wanted to Have a woman and you were a general in an army But you wouldn' t send the husband to get killed. I Said Bob you wouldn''t do that? Like how could a prophet of God do that just a basic", "He's just a basic, decent human being. Would not do that. So to say that a man of God would do that, I mean, that's just not... And we know the Davidic kingdom was divided so there is actually, you know, there's a belief that there was a lot of anti-Daud propaganda at the time. I mean this is, you now, Daud derangement syndrome. Like there's, you knows, this occurs in every time", "that they were permitted, the Prophet permitted them. But he said . Don't deny it and don't belie it unless it goes against our like if its clearly unacceptable then we would say that can't be true at least the way you're understanding it, it can't to be true. So but the Quran is Allah has given us a very clear", "a status. They're all revelation, and we know that all these different peoples had revelations. And the other thing which is really important for Muslims if we can you have to have some portion of the Quran like a word of the Qur'an. There's a lot of people that do awrad and then they don't do the Qur-an. Which is just it's backward because the awrad are better at that time", "وقال النبي عسى موسى هذا حديث لقد كان يملك بعض النظر لكنه من الفضائل فأنا أطلب ما كانت الأفضل تصويراً قال الحال المرتحل مثل الحالة المرتاحل حلا يحله فهو حالون كما لو أنه يجب أن يصل إلى مكان فالحال المرة وهذا هو ما الذي يطلبه الحال المرتحل قال أن يضرب في أول القرآن إلى آخره", "So when he finishes the Qur'an, he starts it again. And that's why when you do the khatm, you always... When you finish with the muawidatein, you go to Fatiha and then the beginning of Baqarah because that's the halal murtahil. It's just a continuous thing. And the more you do that, the more benefit you get out of it. I mean obviously studying the Qurʾān is very important", "and we should think about the Quran is very important but to recite the Quran just to recite", "you see things in the Quran. Even if you read the translations, you're going to get benefit from them. I mean obviously you have to be careful. There's increasingly reasonable commentaries now in English so there are some good commentaries. I think Yusuf Ali has some wonderful notes in there. There is a lot of really beneficial notes in Yusof Ali's translation which has kind of been sidelined it was the main translation for a very long time", "for a very long time. Now they kind of first, they republished it and got rid of a lot of stuff because he was kind of a... He loved English literature so he'd quote Shakespeare or he'd quotes any other... My daughter Asya Mashallah from Syracuse watching right now she asked what is your personal favorite thing about Ramadan?", "My personal favorite thing about Ramadan. I think it seems to be a time when just Muslims are happy, which is really wonderful thing. I mean there's this kind of spirit that you see in Ramadan that you don't see other times of the year. And then I was really struck and really reduced to tears seeing", "seeing the people in Gaza putting up lights amidst all the rubble and celebrating their iftar in that communal. It was pretty stunning", "to see that so may Allah give them some peace and rebuild their homes inshaAllah protect them from any ethnic cleansing Alhamdulillah but yeah I think that's probably one of my favorite hadiths which i think is the best answer ever in that anybody who has been asked what your favorite meal is when the prophet said", "The Prophet said, the one that has the most hands in. Like you could just not give a better answer because he wasn't looking at the food, he was looking at communal nature of eating like one of things that really struck Shaykh Khatri when he came here is people ate alone and Abdul Muttalib would never eat alone", "would never eat alone, and this is Jahili Arabs. But Abdul Muttalib would never ate alone, when he was on long journeys, and he was alone and had to eat, he used to find a rock, and then he would put the rock up, and give a look at it to the rock, so but you know just eating together", "Imam Al-Haddad, he said, He said the tree of Islam is... The brotherhood of Islam Is like a tree that is watered with visitation. And if you stop visiting one another, The tree will dry up and die. So one of the things That happens in America Is people get atomatized.", "and they live in isolation. A nuclear family is not a family, you can call it a nuclear family but it's not, a family is aunts, uncles, cousins that's a family. A family is a clan and it wasn't that long even in this country when that was the way things were now its reduced to just a mother and father if their lucky", "but then both are working so these kids are put into daycare centers and These are tragedies. So I think Ramadan for me It's it's that time when people break the fast together come together I mean, there's a great blessing in just community because this you need community. I Mean we can't as a species will kill us. It's already having horrible effect There's so many unhinged people", "has to do with they don't interact. I mean, somebody said in 2016 it was that somebody said oh, they were so shocked at Trump and he said nobody I know voted for him because all you do is you live in your little bubble. You live in a little bubble and you don't realize there's other worlds out there. There are other peoples, there are other opinions. It's not just your insular world view", "to get out of themselves and recognize. I mean, one of the biggest calamities in my estimation in the Muslim community is our inability to talk freely about things and just to be able to discuss things and have different opinions and not hate one another because you have different opinion. Because this world is not an easy place and it's very difficult for a lot of people. There's a great deal of difficulty in life on Earth", "in life on earth and making sense of the world. And there's a lot of confusion, and young people go through it. It's very difficult to be young today when there is so much confusion. Things are breaking down, authorities are breaking dow,n nobody trusts anything. You can't trust the science. It' hard to trust the sience when science has been co-opted by corporate enterprises and it's more about money than it is about helping people. So people start losing trust, things break down", "when things get confusing, people are bewildered and ask questions. And so traditionally the Muslims were people that had answers to a lot of the questions but now Muslims themselves have become very confused and their religion gets distorted it gets hijacked, it gets impressed into things that was never meant for. Our religion doesn't have political party", "There's no political party. Muslims in America can't say Islam is democratic or republican, it's not. It's its own thing and politics is always gonna be a divisive thing which is why traditionally the ulama tended to stay out of politics because whenever you get into politics people get split on politics so a lot of the ulamas just they didn't really have political opinions", "in that way, they just wanted to remind people, teach people, keep people connected with their Lord. It doesn't mean they don't and there are ulama who do and there's ulama that worked with governments and there is ulama stayed away from governments. Those were all if you look at the history of Islam, there's no black and white. I mean there were great, the two great students of Abu Hanifa one of them became a qadi", "the other one was very upset. He couldn't believe he became a qadi, but they had different views on because the prophet warned about being a qadhi, but at the same time if nobody is gonna take the qada then it's left to the worst people. If the good people don't take it, it's leftho the worse people even in the governments you can talk about people who work in these governments", "those are the governments that the Muslims have and if scholars, if there aren't scholars there to teach the people. If it all just becomes tear it all down then when is there going to be any peace for people? When is there gonna be any teaching? Who's gonna run the masajid? Who is gonna be the imam? Who will give fatwa to the people? All of these things. People don't think about these things", "issues of where people decide. Even I was saying the other day, I was reading something about how Islam you have to be in a group and you can't. The Prophet said towards the latter days, people if they want, they could just check out completely that's a right of people to do that. They can just check it out completely. The prophet talked about people they just flee to the mountains and they just fulfill their own personal right with Allah SWT.", "But the Prophet said, The best of you are those who mix with people and are patient with their difficulties. Because being with people it's not always easy. Everybody has the uncle they don't want over for the iftar but he comes anyway because it's family and that's just part of life. Maybe you don't. Maybe your family is perfect.", "JazakAllah khairan, Subhanaka Allah wa bihamdika. As-shadu an la ilaha illa anta astaghfiruka wa atubu ilayk wa al-'asri inna linsana la fee khusur illa alladhina aman wa amirul sarihaati wa tuwaso bil haqqi wa tuwaso bil sabr. Subhana rabbika rabbal izzati amma yusifoon wassalamu ala musaleema wal hamdulillahi Rabbil Alameen. Jazakallah Khair Sheikh. May Allah bless you. Thank you for the beautiful class. Thank You." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Reflections on Sura Qāf Session 2 with Hamza Yusuf_hueTpFFhhUo&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742882828.opus", "text": [ "In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. May peace and blessings be upon you all.", "guests and visitors here, and also people that are online. InshaAllah may Allah bless this Ramadan make it a time of healing and facilitation and ease for people everywhere. A lot of troubles in many different places but this month comes with its gifts and those who are open to those gifts inshallah will receive them. Alhamdulillah we were looking last week at", "Last week at this amazing extraordinary chapter of the Quran Surah that Allah begins with one of the Amazing letters that several of the chapters in the Quran begin with like Alif Lam Meem The Quran actually at the outset in Surat al-Baqarah, Allah begins after the opener After Al Fatiha begins with", "How many of them are used in the Fatiha? They're half of the Arabic letters themselves and Allah is using them. I think one of the meanings for me is The idea that the structure of language is built upon meaning it's not built upon Meaninglessness which gets to the core of what this surah is about because one of", "one of the extraordinary aspects of time we're living in and it's been for some time, particularly in the Western world this idea what called nihilism or nihilisms. Nihilism is the idea that nothing has meaning but there's no meaning everything is empty and this was something that the Jahili Arabs had concluded about the world they had concluded essentially that it was meaningless", "said we die and we live and nothing kills us except time it's just time and for them time was this experience that we're having that really had no meaning. And their meaning was in enjoyment of life if you read the jihadi poets they're very interesting and they had many interesting things to say,", "And so this surah is really a refutation of that idea. Nietzsche actually goes into three types of nihilism, that he identifies and the great Japanese Keiji Nishitani wrote a book called Overcoming Nihilism very interesting and he quotes a lot from Nietzche but in that book", "argues, and he wrote the book right after World War II when Japan was completely devastated. Their cities have been destroyed with firebombing and people were empty and lost. Their emperor came out in Western clothes for the first time as almost a message to them that we've been defeated and now we have to imitate those who defeated us", "Japan became the great imitators of the West and actually in some ways superseded them in production. When I was young, Made in Japan was not a compliment whereas now Japan makes often superior technology to other places. And so this idea of nihilism is very important historically but one of the things that Nishitani says", "He said that nihilism is a perennial problem. It doesn't go away, it comes especially at times when people are in hayrah, when they're confused, when their perplexed and often what happens in those times is they use distractions so one of the things that Dorothy Sayers argues in her amazing", "introduction to the Divine Comedy, she has a section on the deadly sins and she talks about lust. And she says that lust is something that really emerges in a culture that has lost meaning. It becomes a source of their meaning. And so they begin to explore sexuality as an ersatz spirituality because of what", "of what Nietzsche would have referred to as the Dionysian quality of it, this wildness of getting out of oneself. All religion is at the root there to take us out of ourselves so that we're not self-absorbed. I just want to go a little bit over what we did before for the people who weren't with us last week and then we'll go into the next section.", "but uh bismillahirrahmanirrahim it begins with qaf and then it's an oath where quran in majid so the wow there is al-qasam and then its majorol verkasem Allah swears an oath by the Quran Al Majeed and Majeed is a word which means sharif or", "So the Majid is something that Arabs desire to be considered Majid, in fact it's an Arabic name. To be considered somebody who was Majid. One of the things our scholars say about Qur'an and Majeed is man tabbaqahu majooda That if you actually apply the Qur'aan you will become Majid Like it will transform you into a sharif and kareem person, noble and generous", "and that's why the Prophet he was amjad al-bashar, he was the most glorious of human beings because he was one who followed the Qur'an most closely. So Allah swears this oath and they differ on what follows it", "I think Al-Razi and others conclude that really the best argument is that it's Mahdoof. That it's really swearing an oath, Verily you are a warner and they will be raised up. Now one of the things about the nihilism of the pre Islamic Arabs, the Jahiliyya Arabs, is that they actually believed that there was no afterlife.", "Many cultures have a belief in the afterlife. Even the most primitive cultures, aboriginal peoples have beliefs in afterlife. The Greeks had a belief and the afterlife native people here had beliefs in after life. It's very rare in history to find people that actually don't believe in an afterlife but the Arabs did not believe in", "Quran where Allah is telling us that giving a signs that there is a resurrection of the dead. In Fussilat, Allah says You see the earth khashi'a in Arabic means to be fearful have khushu but here it means", "that it's dry and barren and dead in other words desiccated there is no life in it when we send down earth on it it shakes and then brings forth the growth and then Allah says the one who brought that dead earth to life will bring you to life", "to life. So it's telling you to look at the earth and how it was dead, and how Allah brought the Earth back to life, and He does this constantly everywhere. It's happening all the time right now there are people in such heedlessness they miss the blooming of the trees. People don't even notice these things but the tree in winter looks dead. In fact if you go out", "I actually asked the gardener, is that tree dead? He said no. It's in hibernation. It looks dead but then it comes back to life and this is happening constantly there are so many examples of this around us. So then Allah says", "And again, we sent down from the heaven water. In other words, even the water yesterday they measure it. It's approximation but they can measure water. But Allah knows the exact amount that is coming down to us. If it's too much, it won't produce. If its too little, it wont produce. So when you look, Allah is giving us the qadr", "that we need in order for the earth to bring forth its fruits and gifts. Amazing aspect of life on Earth. They said, you know, this is just the life of the world. And we're not going to be resurrected. So this was the belief of the Arab, that they wouldn't be resurrected so this chapter is almost entirely", "entirely about the resurrection. And the Prophet used it constantly as a reminder, as a wa'w. Umm Hisham bint al-Harithah said that she memorized it from hearing it so often on the tongue of the Prophet . They shared an oven when they used to come to bake. But she heard him many times and she said she memorized just from hearing constantly. So then they say", "The Arabs if they say, , it's positive. They like it. It's just strange. They wonder about it. You know, it's a strange thing. They don't know the cause of it. They consider it like what we would say in our culture weird. It is just strange but it can also mean wondrous", "So here Allah uses kafirun instead of mushrikun even though they were mushrikon and there are different types of kufr. Shirk is one type of kuffar There's another type where they actually believe in God, they believe in the last day They believe in some of the prophets but they reject some of them that's another kind of kulfur That's not the kufur of atheism or ilhad", "of the mushrik who associates with Allah. But kufr is a very important term in the Quran and if you're reading the book with us, Izutsu's book The Great Japanese I'd have to call him an occidentalist because he was in Japan studying the Muslims as opposed to an orientalist but he extraordinary linguists and extraordinary scholar", "about Islam because he was fascinated. In fact, he's the only person in Iran in their great academy of philosophy. He is the only non-Muslim. I mean, I don't know if he was a non-muslim but he's considered a non Muslim. It's hard to believe somebody could have that depth of knowledge and see how extraordinary the Quran was and not be a believer. But in any case, he is the one person they have a picture of him on their wall of all", "philosopher, scholars in the Iranian tradition. He's the only one and he taught in Iran but he had an incredible knowledge of languages. He knew over 30 languages like Dr. Cleary a very similar genius for language among many other things. But he analyzed the word kufr in the Quran and he gives you all these different perspectives on what", "on what kufr is so and this is why in in in this translation of the quran which is uh inshallah we've been working out this ramadan with some of us to try to republish it because it's been out of print for a long time but this translation one of the things that dr clearly did in the translation is he doesn't always translate kafir", "the multifaceted nature of kufr in the Quran. It can't be fixed with one translation. There's not one word that can really get to... Disbeliever is one aspect of it, but the word is... And it might, I don't know, sometimes you have these linguistic coincidences, but cover in English is related in meaning. So cover, to cover over, is exactly what it means and that's why", "The kafir in the Quran are the farmers, in one verse. When they saw the nabat it pleased them to see the nabaat. So the kafir is a farmer because he covers the seed with soil. So, the kafr is the one who covers over the truth. He hides the truth, he conceals the truth or he covers over his blessings.", "is ingrate, that there's an ingratitude in these people the kuffar. They're ungrateful and Allah warns us in many places in the Quran about this idea of forgetting the blessings of Allah to remember the blessings", "And one of the dangers of dunya is when you reflect too much on the world, on the negative qualities of the world. You can fall into a depression. You could fall into state of ingratitude when you don't focus on the positive and that's why Iblis wants you to focus on negative. Ibls wants to fill your life with all these troubles make you feel despair. That's the whole game of Iblas. He swore an oath to Allah", "He swore an oath to Allah that he would lead the majority of humanity astray and he said you will find most of them are not grateful. They're not shakireen so it's a very dangerous thing to fall into ingratitude, so he says Qaf by the glorious recital but they think it strange that a warner has come to them from their midst", "Translating kafaru as scar. This is an astonishing thing when we have died and are dust. If we die, and then were turab or dust that is a very remote possibility.", "know what the earth has diminished from them, has taken from them. Because when we're buried in the earth except for the incorruptibles and they're real, the incorrupables are real there are people who do not perish from the earth and many many people have seen incorruptible. There was a study in discovery some time ago where", "keep the incorruptible bodies and these are pre-Islamic saints that were preserved in their bodies. And some of them they mummified, a lot of the popes actually to kind of ensure that they didn't corrupt, they had them embalmed but there are people that don't, the earth does not take them. I heard from Sheikh Mahmud Sawaf, the Iraqi scholar", "a man of great integrity, but I heard him. He was in a group of people that reburied Sayyidina Hamza when they had floods and the grave actually got uncovered. And so they reburried him and he said he saw him fully intact his body. And there are many examples of that. So it's not...and this is in other traditions as well. It's not just the Muslims that have incorruptibles.", "having corruptibles, or there are other traditions of this. One of the big impacts when I was a 12 year old, I went to an Orthodox summer camp in Greece and they took us to the island of Zakynthos and there was an Orthodox saint in their tradition whose body was completely intact open to air and we were told that they still cut the nails and cut the hair of this saint but there are many examples of that", "of that in history and still today. But Allah says they think we're just going to be dust, and Allah says no. And then we have Kitab al-Hafidh. We have a book, Umm al-Kitab, which is the Lawha al-Mahfud. The Lawha Al-Mafud has everything. One of the most amazing things of our time, and you have to consider this, is that nobody had this idea", "of having all your information in one thing. And Allah says, We will show them our signs in themselves and on the horizon until it becomes clear to them that this is true. I mean if you look at this just this machine the amount of information that you have access to just from...and this is like a loa", "the actual shape of it. It's like a loch, the amount of information that you have access to just in this machine and then this is not... This is just what we have access too. What the intelligence community has access to is a whole other thing because all the telephones are being monitored by computers they have supercomputers that monitor all the telephone they have keywords that if they pick up if they hear in their words now they have AI that can do instantaneous translation so", "So they don't need to have translators actually listening in and doing these things. This is all human beings with these pea brains. We look very clever, but in the grand scheme of things we're very insignificant. And people... this is the thing at the time we're living in there's so many signs.", "where all information is contained. The fact that Allah has shown us this miniature example of this, where they believe they're going to put all human information, everything will be available to everybody instantaneously. All the 25 million books in the Library of Congress, all human", "They deny the truth. This is takdhib, this is one of the hallmarks of kufr, you kadhb, to deny it. It's not true. It is just asatir al awaleen. And again many prophets were belied and attacked by their people. They say these are just the mythology of the past. That's their view, it's just mythology. You're believing in fairy tales", "in fairy tales. There's a British atheist who has made a second career, his first career was in science but he's made a whole second career on this idea of imaginary beings and how ridiculous it is for people to believe in imaginary beings. And he goes around telling people that you believe in these fairy tales but if it helps", "get through the day, that's okay. Just don't try to tell me about that. And these people have always existed. There's nothing new about these people. They existed at the time of the Prophet ﷺ. They insisted before that time and they've always been there. And so, لَمَّا جَاءُهُمْ فَهُنْ فِي أَمْرٍ مَّرِيجٍ They're in this doubt. So they say, oh he's kahin, he's sha'ir,", "They don't have any one thing they're fixed on and even the same person will change his view about the Prophet. One of the things that the Mufassirun say is that anybody who either if you deviate from the truth, you will always be in a type of Amr Marij, that you'll be in confusion. That if you are not straight, if you're not following the truth you will become confused. And then this is a really important thing because", "important thing because I think one of the main reasons why we have so much nihilism and so much lack of belief is artificial light. And it's very interesting that we call it artificial light, you know? The fact that we called it artificial Light, It's not the Nur that Allah created. He did in a sense that", "every maker and what he makes but it's artificial in that we invented it and these are human products whereas the light, the natural light of the stars have been put out. One of the words that you can use to translate, Have they not considered the heavens? Haven't they considered the heaven", "The word consider is from a Latin word which means star. And so to consider something is to reflect on it deeply and the thing that humans have always reflected deeply on is the heavens. All of our sciences come from reflection on the heavens, mathematics", "that Allah put a reckoning in the skies so you would learn mathematics. So, the loss of the stars they've been put out. You go out in the night sky and don't see stars anymore. When people can see stars it will force them to reflect is the nature of the star. That's why in the Timaeus Plato actually says that God created sight", "might look up at the heavens and see the stars, and see that perfect order of the heavenly world. That we might want to bring that order down into the disordered world of humanity. Like to align ourselves, this is this vertical alignment with heaven, to align our selves with the stars. And this is why if you look at our prayer it's all based on this alignment with heavenly bodies. Our prayer", "on alignment with heavenly bodies. Our fasting is based on alignment, we break our fasts with alignment with the heavenly body. Allah's telling us look at the sky that's how you determine your prayer times. Look at the moon that's How you determine mawaqithu linnas wal hajj. Like this is how it's the heavens that we order our lives with our spiritual lives are ordered with the heavens", "they are guided. So what happens when the stars are put out? I mean this is one of the signs, said that sign wasn't for the it was for dunya like the the have been put out so Allah says consider reflect on", "and we ornamented it. We ornamented so there's a zina in the heavens, there are no gaps in it. So haven't they observed the sky above them? How have we constructed it and adorned it without any gap in it? And then to look at the earth", "We place down the earth and we put in it these great mountains that are anchored. And we put every beautiful type, every pair also. As a . In order to enlighten you", "as an enlightenment and a reminder for every repentant devotee. It brings light to you, it gives you vision, it give you inner sight, it gives you basira. And so that idea of the earth... Some of them actually said this is really nice example rhetorically where the tabseera refers to the heavens and the dhikra refers to sky", "to the earth because Tapsira is something to help you see, which certainly the sky does and it helps you see the glory of God. The heavens declare the glory but the Dikra is a constant reminder so the Earth is a constantly changing. So you have this stability", "Muneeb is the one who constantly goes back to Allah and then we set down blessed water because the water is one of the great blessings of the world. And, and to lose water is", "can't survive without water for very long and one of the troubles in the world now are the water tables are declining all over. In central California, the water table are declining it's one of signs of the latter days is that the water tabels decline so this is a huge problem This is a HUGE PROBLEM The blessing of water It's one great blessings that Allah has given us", "وَجْعَلْنَا مِنْ الْمَاءِ كُلَّ شَيْءٍ حَيٌّ We made every living thing from water. Without water, we desiccate, dry up and die. And so Allah reminds us about this. فَانْبَتْنًا بِهِ جَنَّاتًا وَحَبَّ الْحَصِيدِ And so He says,", "palm and you have the male on the female so you use the pollination from the the male to impregnate the female and this is how we get the dates which are one of the great miracles of the trees that Allah has put on the earth. And then, This is provision for the servants both those who were obedient and those who are disobedient", "So now all of this was to take us to we bring like the and with this water, we bring a dead earth to life. And this is why the Prophet said he said They said And then they said And Then they said So between the", "the when when when the last is bro uh the trumpet is is blown that asrafil is according to the hadith literally with the head high like this waiting for the order to blast the trumpet and the prophet said that there would be 40 and he didn't specify what they would be that 40 but he said after that he said", "We will be reborn again and again Allah knows what these things mean but it's very clear that there is going to be some imbat, Allah is going bring us back to life just like we see the dead earth come back to", "There's a literal analogy there that's very clear. And then the Prophet ﷺ said, Except for one. And he said, It's the Ajb al-Dhanab. And", "So he said that it's the what they call us in the commentaries. It's the coccyx, but it doesn't mean it's literal coccyxes because the Arabs have just like an English rhetoric. The something that is part of something can be called the whole thing and so all you need to recreate the human being theoretically now is one thing", "is one cell. One cell, because it has the entire genetic information just one cell to see the cell it has to be magnified 400 times to see a cell under a microscope you have to magnify it four hundred times and then you're just seeing the cell you're not seeing what's in it you have even go deeper to see that so there's some portion of us that's indestructible no matter", "that portion is indestructible. Allah doesn't need, obviously the material means, I can simply say Kun fayakun but these are the Sunan of Allah . And just the fact that we now know this about human beings, that a human being could be theoretically recreated from one cell and the Prophet told us...and he used the word yurakkab which is very interesting too because this is combinatorial DNA", "is one of the words they use for it is which is the same root word you know because it's an assembly, it's like you rakab. It's putting it together so then Allah says after and like that you will be brought forth you will", "bring us to this point that they deny the ba'ath haven't they considered, reflected deeply thought about this and had they done that they would have arrived at a very different conclusion. And then Allah reminds and this is partly tasliya for the Prophet but also for us to know that this is the sunnah of the Prophets", "they denied the Nuh . So all of these, they denied The Prophets. All of them. And there's other ones mentioned in the Quran but these are the primary ones and in this ayah obviously they're put together.", "did da'wah for a long time and finally they were destroyed. Ashab al-Rassi are very unusual, it's all we know about them. And Al-Razi said there is nothing thabit on them. There are different views about who they were. There is a view that they worshipped the pine tree, the sunobar. There was also a view of that they were in Yamama, there was a view they were", "different places there's a view also that they were it was uh they were part of thamud and then there was a one of the israeli prophets was sent to them there's an interesting narration used from Sayyidina Ali that mentions that they that the prophet came to them and um they ended up throwing him in a well rasel they put him in this well", "The first one to enter Paradise is that black slave that believed in him. He was the only one who believed in Allah .", "And finally at the very end, Tar'aun actually does the testimony that he's drowning but completely blinded. And then again the Ashab Ikhwan ul-Lutin are also his brothers through Musahara so he was married into that people. But again they denied him", "angels came and they denied him, and they were destroyed. And each one of these groups have different sins, which is one of the really amazing things about our time, as you see all the sins in the past there was only one or two sins that destroyed a people whereas now with the modern people you see ALL OF THEM compounded.", "the thickets is sometimes translated it i think dr clearly translated as uh the people of the of the yeah the companions of the wood so it's a shajaral it's uh thick forest and again difference of opinion some say that they're that was sent to them that they are different from the people but they were the same prophet was sent", "and they kill the camel. Ad are the people of Hud. Hud is a very important Arabian prophet that, I mean all the prophets are important but he has a chapter named after him in the Qur'an which is an important chapter that the Prophet used to recite. I mean they're all important. You have to be careful what you say. But the Prophet recited it every Friday with Kahab. So that's one of the secrets of Hud", "is that it's to be recited every Friday for people have him the baseline is kahaf, the himma is kahf and hud together. And then all of them denied the prophets so the wa'id and this is the", "Did we weary from the first creation? Did the first question exhaust us in other words, we can't do it again. This is this is a question to the Arabs In other words you see the first", "denied the second creation is they said why do a second creation when you already did the first one like you don't build a house and then destroy the house to rebuild it this is one of their arguments that it didn't make sense to them like why would you take a perfectly good thing and then", "But they are asked. It's not our business to determine why Allah has chosen to do this, but He's put us into this world and into this body, and the body breaks down and dissipates as we get older even while we're still alive. Things tend to wear out osteoporosis. The bones actually begin", "diminish in their effectiveness all these things are the natural part of the curvilinear growth of man which was represented in many masjids including the the prophet's masjid not at his time but in the ottoman masjad this curvi linear these are the nights and days so they put the black and the white to represent the night and the day and then this is the life of man it's a curvial linear", "which is the place where you wage war. Mihrab is the tool by which you fight, so it's Ism ala, it's the tool of by which we fight and they used to have mihrab in their house, all the Sahaba had a mihraab in their houses, that was what they use to fight themselves, to struggle with themselves and so this curvilinear nature of life is just part of life, we're all going to die, there's...we were all not here", "I mean, I don't know how the oldest person in the room is. I might be that person. But really we weren't here that long ago. We weren't hear that longer and there were all these other people having all the same problems and fighting and arguing and family tribulations and the liars and the cheaters and the righteous and upright, the people taking care of the orphans, the", "I mean all this is dunya. It's and we're going to be gone the prophet said he said that every In 100 years there will nobody who will be alive on the earth. That's called the generation. That staccato One hundred years, nobody will be a live on it. That what he said He told us sahaba in one hundred years. Nobody alive today will be life in Siraj al-Muluk He said that the Indians And and one of the interesting things about the early Muslims is they quoted from India", "quoted from India a lot. They had no problem with the Indians, they actually considered the Indians to have a lot of wisdom and so they actually quote these great Hindu sages because they saw them as wise and they had things to tell us. They said that there was a city in India where they would", "and the king would have them announce is anybody here who saw the previous celebration? And only one or two old people would come up maybe like 110, 120. And they would come out and then they would tell the people what they remembered who was King and what the people were doing and how they...and it was to remind them of this ephemeral nature of the world that we will be out", "And so it's amazing these, and then Qawmu Tubba are very interesting. He's only mentioned twice in the Quran here in Qaf and then I think in Furqan. Dukhan, yeah. So Qawmub Tubba were the rulers of Yemen. So they called them Tubba was like Kayser", "like Kayser or the Romans, they would have Caesar. Kisra in Persia so the Tubba were the rulers of the Negev's in Ethiopia They have different names for rules like here we call them president some people They say he is not my president but anyway here we have president So the Qawm al-Tubba were that were the people of Yemen their Himyarites", "They're Himyarites. So the Himyaraite are the brothers of the Kahlan. The Kahlan are the majority of Yemenis and the Kahalan spread out, the Ghassasina and the Lakhmiun were in Iraq. The Ghasssina were in Palestine so the Arabs have been in Palestine long before. I mean this idea that Arabs conquered Palestine and there were no Arabs in Palestine.", "of Arabs in Palestine long before the Muslims ever got there. So this idea that they weren't, and if you want a Hollywood proof of that Ben Hur has an Arab with the horses that he gives to Ben Hur so Hollywood put them in there. That's a historical novel, Ben Hur it was based on historical and they tried to make", "So they say, oh these people weren't there. We're the indigenous people. No, there's always been Arabs in Palestine. There have always been Arab and Palestinian. And many of those Arabs that are now Christians and if they do their DNA, they'll find Jews that converted because many Jews converted to Islam. Many Jews converted Christianity so even the Semitic people there, the Semites were not blonde hair and blue eyed", "Those are called Europeans or Caucasians from the caucuses. They're in the north because people where the sun is heavy, they're brown and it takes its millennia. It's not going to happen like in a thousand years or 2000 years. I mean, it's not gonna change. There've been African-Americans here for 400, 500 years.", "they're still black. So the people that are in the Middle East, they're all... I mean Syrians are light-skinned but many of them are Circassians. They're from the Caucasus Mountains. They were Turks as well. That's why when they started doing DNA they found very strange things like the Iranians are more Arab than the Tunisians.", "in their DNA than the Tunisians do. But there have always been Arabs in that region. So Tubba was, his name is Asad al-Kamil he's called sometimes Abu Karib this a very interesting man so about 700 years so this is before Christ about 700", "He had an army. He wanted to go out and conquer. They say he got as far as Samarkand, Allah Ta'ala knows. But in any case, when he went to Medina and he had no problem with the Madinese. They were the Yathrib people then. So he left his son there as a governor. Well they ended up killing him. So set out he wanted to destroy the city of Medina so he went back to destroy", "in the day and in the night time they would send food to his army so he couldn't understand this you know they suheili says like he said he thought this was really amazing their hospitality and and they were abnaam so because they're kahlan and he was himyar so they actually related from the same from saba bin yashu", "So he sent for some and two Jews from Bani Quraitha came out, Ka'b and Asad. And they told him don't do what you're doing because we can't guarantee you won't be destroyed because of it. Because this is the Muhajirah of the last prophet. The last prophet will make Hijrah here. And his name is Ahmed.", "and the Jews explained to him their religion, and he ended up embracing Judaism. Because Jews don't really proselytize anymore but they used to proselytiese. And many Arab Jews... Many Jews in Arabia were actually converts, and some of them would swear an oath if their child lived because there was high infant mortality rate, they would raise it a Jew. So there are Jews that were in Medina who were actually originally Arabs that became Jews.", "These two went back with him. On their way, they met some people from Hudhail who tried to convince him to destroy the Kaaba. They actually just wanted to destroy him. As the Jews told them, no, the Kaabah is Abraham built that. So he's the first one to actually put the Kiswah on the Ka'ba. And the Prophet said, Do not curse Tubaa. He was a believer and in a Riwaya he said,", "who had Canaan, was he even a prophet? So Tubba is very interesting. But his people initially they became some of them followed him and then other ones didn't and they ended up being destroyed but he was the one that spread Judaism amongst the Yemenis and then you got Dhu Nuwas and al-Shabu Al-Khudud the story of the Jewish Yemeni who ended up... He's from the same group", "He ended up persecuting the Christians in Najran and killing. I mean, they say 20,000 Allah Ta'ala on them but Then Allah says They're bewildered or mystified. I think that's the way Dr. Cleary translates it as", "no but they are mystified about a new creation in other words confused about it uh they bewildered um by it and then what i could have created verily we created the human being right", "We did indeed create man and we know what his ego suggests. So he translates nafs here as ego suggest. And Allah says, we are closer to him, to the human being than . So first of all this is very important because it's letting us know one that Allah knows our inner", "Allah knows our innermost thoughts. So this is what's called the Hadith al-Nafs and it goes under five categories. Our scholars have very clearly delineated in the Arabic language, the levels of thoughts. The first ones are called Hawajas.", "very fleeting and it's you don't really, it doesn't settle. It's just a hajus. And the next one is called khater. So a khater is a thought that settles but there's no, it's not considered in that way. You don't dwell on it. You might have an insight and then it goes. In fact, there's a great book by Ibn al-Jawzi, Abdurrahman ibn al Jawzi", "scholar in Wael and Muhadith called Sayyid al-Khatir, which is an amazing book. If you haven't read it for some of the students of knowledge, it's really a very interesting book. But it's a book where he noticed that he would have these really interesting insights but then he would forget them. He would think oh that's amazing and how could I forget that? But then he'd find he forgot it. So he decided", "insights, his khawater. So that's the book and they're amazing because he was a great scholar. They're really interesting insight so that's that's khwater and then hadith al-nafs which is where you begin to consider something you start thinking about it you think about the possibilities the ins and outs of it and that leads to ham", "really it's something you're seriously considering but you haven't set out there's no azima so the hum is something like the prophet he considered seriously making hijrah to jawatha and in the shafi'i madhah i was told this by sheikh abdullah that the prophet's hum is also a type of sunnah", "not just his azeema, it's also his hum. So and then finally the last one is azeemah so Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala takes you to account for the hum you get rewarded if you man humma bi hasana fatuqtab lahu hasana like if you have a hum of a good deed it's actually written as one good deed", "it goes to ten and then to multiply manifold so that's the hum of a hasana if you have a hum of say it's actually written as a hasanah for you because you didn't do it and then if you do it then it's written as one seyyya as opposed to 10. this is", "So the sayyat and the hasanat, the hum is considered. But you won't be taken to account for a bad thought. Only the good ones. The Prophet said in a very interesting hadith he said tajawaz it's in al-Bukhari in fact it's all six of the collection so it's really important hadith obviously but he said", "and in the ruwayah like Allah has tajawwiz, He's excused for my ummah what their souls speak to them so the internal dialogue this is a rahmah from Allah because the previous communities were actually taking into account for their thoughts", "So because of the Rahmah of the Prophet , this Ummah is not taking into account for their thoughts. And that's why if you look, and that's a strong opinion. Not that they're not taken to account but that previous Ummas were taken to count. There are indications from Christianity because Jesus said if you have anger in your heart it's like you murdered somebody. He said merely to look upon a woman", "same as committing adultery and this is the teaching of Isa so it's very different from the teaching in that the prophet said lower your eyes but the prophet says the first is for you, the second is against you. We're told to guard these gifts that we've been given, the seven limbs", "Waswasa is the whispering. And shaitan, yuwaswisu, it's his real power. If shaitaan has any power at all, it' s his ability to suggest. One of the things that Dr. Cleary told me once which was really interesting he said that... He said that the problem with America", "culture with a lot of vice it's a suggestive culture like it actually encourages vice as opposed to previous cultures where they really saw it is a very negative thing to encourage people to do to indulge in their appetites obey your thirst you know what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas yeah so the", "It's a suggestive culture. There was a company for people to commit adultery, and their tagline was life is short, have an affair, which is crazy. And somebody actually broke into that website, and then it was a big scandal because all the people that were on the website ended up getting there. Allah yaftahuhum, you know?", "So that's very interesting, that Allah does not take to account the hadith al-Nafs, this inner. And some of the sahaba they came,", "We find in ourselves things that occur. That we're horrified of the idea of actually saying them out loud. And the Prophet said, Do you find that? And they said, He said, That's pure faith. It's a beautiful statement. That's poor faith. In other words whatever foul thoughts come to you and you reject them. That is faith.", "That is faith. Because foul people, they don't. They actually act on them. Whereas the believer finds that. And that's why one of the things that Dr. Clear used to talk about and I think he framed it really well. He used to talked about the guest and the host. So he said, don't mistake the guests for the hosts. He said negative thoughts are uninvited guests.", "But don't think that they're you. You're the host and they're like a daifun, like a tufaili that's come in and they are just bothering you. And that is why Sayyidi Ahmad Zarruq said What Shaytan whispers and the heart rejects, that is faith.", "So don't fight with those thoughts. Don't feel disgusted with yourself. Don' t give them any reality, just let them go. Just let them Go. One of the miracles that many people have experienced including myself from this surah is that it will help you with wasawis. There's no hadith that indicates that but I think it's because this ayat is in there", "But many people have said it's Mujarrab that they do that. And there are many things like that in the Quran, that they're just Mujarb and they will say... Many of our scholars would just say, you know, it's been tried and tested. Like you have falsifiability in science, you want to falsify something? You just test it and you do it. So another one obviously is", "Ahmed Zarouq recommends if you have a lot of waswasa in your prayer to say that before you enter into your prayer, right? Before you pray. So there's two that do the whispering, right and one of the dangers of allowing your ears people to have open access to your ears is That you can get thoughts that come in that you heard", "that you heard, that you can't get rid of. And they will bother you from watching things that you shouldn't have watched or listening to things you shouldn' t have listened to. They're called earworms and that's literally the term that is used for them. Things that you cant get out of your head. One of the Sadaf said I heard one of the people of Bida say something that still bothering me after 20 years. He said it was still bothering him. So this is very important not to...", "of not to, and then also the Prophet said, right? Shaytan has a lemma. Right? So this is like an affliction. Shaytaan has a type of he can have an effect on you so there's a lemmah it's an effect. And he said, and the angel has a Lemma also", "also and he said it's to promise evil and to deny the truth threaten you with evil and", "and he will verify the truth for you so the Prophet said if he finds the lemma talmadik praise be to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala but if you find the other one from shaitan seek refuge from him so that's the lemmah", "Imam al-Muhassibi, who really developed what's called ilm al-khawater. He actually put the khawatir into four categories. Rabbani, Malakani, Shaytani and Nafsani. So the Rabbani are very strong. They end up compelling you really to do good. The Malakni are suggestions of good. That's the lemma.", "That's the lemma. It just suggests the good. And then the shaitani, it'll come with one. If it doesn't work, it will come with another. So it shifts strategies. Whereas the nafsani is more compulsive. The one that's telling you to eat the extra dessert after you already ate dessert. That's like the nafsanis.", "This is basically saying that Allah is with us. He's with you wherever you go. His knowledge is with Us, wherever we are. Allah is With us. There's different views on it. The majority definitely say it's the jugular vein. That's the majority. Some say it is the which is the aorta.", "Some say, I mean the Arabs now and even in Lisan al-Arab they differentiate between sharayeen and awridah. So the sharayheen tend to be the arteries and then the awridh are the... Although ibn Haytham and in Lisana al Arab it says it's what carries the nafas which is the oxygen, the habl al-warid. And that would be the carotid artery.", "Some of them say it's under . It's under the one that fills up when somebody gets angry, and that's the jugular vein which is called the wadaj. And they say it under it. Would also indicate... It would make more sense if it was under because it's closer to the... Anyway, the point being is that it's . Like the Arabs say", "The Arabs say, هو مني معقد الإزار. He's like the buckle on my belt. That's how tight the two are. In fact we say in slang I'm tight with him. You know in other words were very close so Allah is just letting us know that nobody is closer to us than Allah. That Allah knows our innermost thoughts and the angels don't know our thoughts. Shaytan doesn't know", "Angels, it has to be uttered. And this is a sitr from Allah. So you have to utter it. And that's why... You know where they put this in Bab al-Waswasa? In the books of Hadith? Does anybody know? Out of the six books, five of them put it in Bab at-Talaq. In the book of divorce.", "book of divorce because somebody might want to and think about it but then they don't so they're saying it's not a divorce if you just hum meby. You know even if you had azima, you have to actually utter it. They say the waswasa, khater, ham and even the azimah", "he has to utter it and then once its uttered so those are the So that's why some of the ulama say in", "that are actually the ones there. Because that is there, is to indicate when at that point So no word is uttered except there is a and an .", "The angel on the right is the of the two. And so even if you have a hum, it's written of the good deed that you make an intention to do something. If you make the intention to something bad,", "wait. So he's told to delay it till the end of the day, to see if he does istighfar and if he doesn't do this, then it is removed. This is like editing that we're allowed to do with our lives because on the Day of Resurrection there's something called the Ard which according to Imam al-Awza'i said the Arad is", "His whole life is shown to him moment by moment. And now we have again, We will show you our signs. Don't try to hasten these signs. Now we have recording. People record their lives now. There's people that they have their cameras in their apartments and everything,", "their lives and it's all being recorded so we have this phenomenon now which is amazing where you can record events and then you can see the events but we are given the ability to edit them, which is tawbah and there's a great Imam al-Junaid they were discussing what tawdah was and one of the ulama in the circle he said that you never forget your sin", "And then they asked Junaid and he said, that you never remember your sin. Like the real tawbah, it's you believe that Allah has completely obliterated it. So these are the angels. And then we have obviously the guardian angels. There is an angel that records the salat on the Prophet ﷺ.", "They're ten angels. And the angels only leave us in Tarawut and Jemaah. Those are the two times the angels leave us when we go to the WC, the washroom, water closet, as they used to call it, and intimacy with one's spouse. What's the time? 615.", "615 a six feet oh yeah so maybe any uh any questions hassan depends on the question", "is a true prophet and they reject that, that's not a good place to be in. So the Mufassirun say those are for the previous before the advent of the Prophet . That those who followed previous prophets of their time... Every group is raised up with their Prophets. Imam al-Ghazali I think of all the ulama has the most nuanced view because he argues that people", "have lived amongst Muslims and been shown true Islam, they will be taken into account. But he said people that haven't or have been shown negative Islam and they reject a negative version of Islam which is why the Prophet ﷺ said whoever harms one of the people, the protected minorities in my community like Jews and Christians or Hindus because the Muslims accepted Hindus and Zoroastrians according to the Maliki Madhab", "And I think that was the even though the chef is don't have that opinion But the hand of his and the Madaki's took that opinion So they took they even the mushiri coon except on the Arabian Peninsula, but even the mushy rikun could Could could could live under the Muslims. There's not an idea that you have to you know this thing All even omerton or cotton and NASA Tisha doan. La la la la that hadith has cost been nevis license. It's not", "It's khas, it's from the Prophet's khasa'is The Arabian Peninsula was a special place for the Prophet and there couldn't be And then the jazeera even like people say well in the Gulf now they have non-muslims living there I mean Muslims can come in temporary. They can't be permanent residents But also the Gulf not all the ulama considered that part of the Arabian peninsula", "Allah, he said what's talking about most say it's the hijaz. You know there's different opinions about that so But I mean I was once I knew a scholar. I mean he was a good scholar He did his PhD on Raza Lee and and I gave a talk at his university And we were on our way to the airport and he said You know what what's the shoddy opinion about somebody who knows Islam is true but then they never say this yet", "I knew that he was talking about himself. I just said, I wouldn't want to be in his shoes. It's like Imam Muhammad al-Ghazali, the Egyptian, he was asked what is the hukum of Tariq as-Salah? Because there is a khilaf. Like the Hanbali say if you leave the prayer, you're not a Muslim anymore. If you don't pray.", "you don't pray even if you just leave it out of laziness that's the hum is the strictest position the other three imams they say you know lanukathiru we don't make takfir either through talk or film you know so like the kabaya that's did that so he was asked what's the hukum of somebody who leaves a prayer", "Like your hukm with him is take him to the masjid. Get him to pray again. Yeah, so people are too concerned about where other people are going. You know, it's just a big problem in our community. It is a big one. Yeah. We should be more considerate about where we're going. Allahu'alam where everybody else is going. The kafiroon according to the Quran are going to hell. But if you read the kafiroons in the Quran they're puffed up.", "they're puffed up, they're full of pride. They hate the truth. They do takdib. They have istihza. I mean look at the qualities of the kafar and then ask yourself about people around you that you see that aren't like that. And maybe our fault is that we've been such bad exemplars. People are no longer attracted to Islam because there was a time when everybody who came to know the Muslims wanted to become Muslim.", "from living with Muslims because they see the good Islam. But then there's other people that are very alienated from it. I mean, I had a professor of religious studies who was beautiful man, you know, he's really, really good man but he had a very negative experience on the Allenby Bridge. It was during one of the horrible periods but he has a very bad experience with Muslims and it really tainted his view of Islam. And we had a lot of conversations about it", "Conversations about it and he said, you know I've been forced to really reassess my Islam. I had the same experience with a black minister from Philadelphia who for him The the Islam was the the mafia the Muslim Mafia in Philadelphia because there was this kind of Muslim Mafi In Philadelphia and that's how he viewed Islam. He just thought that was Islam So there's a lot of people that really have a negative view of Islam and and it's our challenges How do we break those barriers down? You know", "You know, how do we show them what real Islam is? I mean part of it is just one of the hallmarks of Islam is its beautiful. It's not an ugly religion. All traditional Islam is beautiful. Our architecture is beautiful, our clothes were beautiful, food was beautiful, Food presentation was beautiful everything the Muslims did their calligraphy nobody has matched Muslim calligraphies. Nobody. I mean you go and look at the some, you know somebody asked Titus Burkhardt, you", "if you could point to Islam, what would you point to? He said the Taj Mahal. And on the one hand that's not entirely true but there is some truth in it that whoever built that, the people who built that something inside them was amazing because everybody all over the world is attracted to that place and it was from love", "from love it was built out of love right apparently in today's money it's 11 billion dollars to build it so well he almost exhausted but india was so rich i mean india is one of the richest countries in the world and and it will return inshallah why not but also with muslims", "the Muslims never indigenized fully because the court was always a Persian court. So, the Maghul were always seen as kind of invaders and that's why Hindutva recognizes Buddhism because Buddhism is from Mother India. It recognizes Jainism because it's from Mother Indian. It recognize Sikhism even though Sikhism is heavily influenced by Muslims but it doesn't recognize Christianity", "recognize Christianity or Islam because it sees them as alien religion. And one of the geniuses of the Muslims is wherever they went, they indigenized. They always indigenize. So every Muslim culture has its own dress. They didn't make everybody look like Arabs or speak like Arabs. Arabic was the language of our learning and it becomes the lingua franca to use that term. It was the", "other with so even hadoon or even batuta could go from tangier and go to sri lanka and he would be able to communicate with people so it was it was like french used to be the diplomatic language everybody spoke french now it's english english has become the global language that people speak with so um but but there's no the idea of arabizing people is very alien", "uh he says he's one of the last great andrewsian scholars um he says that all the hadith about are to the arabs they don't apply to the ajum in other words uh the araps were not all the ones that warn about dressing", "somebody else to maintain their Arabian identity because they have a quality that's very important. Their language and their adat, they have good qualities. The best qualities of the Arabs have spread all over the Muslim world because generosity is a quality of the Prophet , but it was also a profound quality of his people so wherever the Muslims", "muslims went because of their generosity even a culture who would not necessarily be a generous culture became generous by taking on the qualities of the prophet which are muslim qualities but there are also some of them are arabian qualities", "i wanted to ask uh just a little bit when you were saying that the shaitan and waswasa yeah and the shaytan has the leeway in that regard but then the ayah says what's with will be here just trying to understand is nafs and shaitaan or is that i mean yeah shaiton and nafs are two the the nafs is the egoistic force that we have it's it's the ruach that's not purified you know but it also means self", "means self. So you know, Ta'lamu maa fee nafsuh wa laAAalamu maaa fee nafsiq I mean Isa says nafs for Allah . When nafs is used in Arabic to Ja'a Zaidun Nafsahu. Jade came himself so it means self but it also has a negative quality. So the the the you know ibn Ajeebas says that Ruwh Qalb Sirr Nafs Aql those are all", "those are all types of synonyms for the same phenomenon, which is our immaterial consciousness. And so the nafs has appetites, right? Which is related to its embodiment because we're embodied. So we're a soul that's in a body. But the توسّب نفسه is the حديث النفس, that we have a حدي ثُلنفص. And then there's the external, there's شياطين", "Right, so there's influences that are external. So these are forces You know the provost I said I'm told us about them and gave us lots of protection from them to do to protect us From them like for instance, I mean Sufi that either put a hat above Ramadan in when when when either Jaramadon footy Hatta Bob Rahma right? The doors of mercy are opened up and and what will they cut you know, I've got a shop", "It doesn't mean they're gone completely, but they're diminished in their... They don't have the same There's a chain which they don't know. They don' t have the type of movement that they have in normal times and then some say it's the only I mean there's difference of opinion But Imam Al-Qurtubi said you see evil in Ramadan And he said", "He said it shows you how bad the nafs is also, that people are evil. And then there's shayatina al-ins who they're just their people that have completely capitulated to demonic forces but whatever those forces are in the world we've been warned about them. There are some people that want to reduce them to kind of psychological things and neuropeptides that flow in the blood thing I mean", "their reality is that they're there. And we have to acknowledge them as forces that are negative, that affect us. Shaitan flows in the blood. What does that mean? But just tie into his question I think what you said. I really like the fact that...I come from a country where I think one of the problems when you talk about when there's no positive energy", "energy there's a negative energy it's like when you lack at all of role model of islam in your home country or society that's where the demonic influence start happening on yeah i mean this is where i mean you don't have to go to philadelphia i mean i was born in a country many people came from countries where islam didn't even exist i mean", "that eventually a lot of people go through the waswasa and they follow these roads. Well, also part of Ramadan is for us to learn to control our nafs because the way Allah has created the human being he put the head on top", "then the stomach and then the genitals when people are controlled by their stomach and their genitals they reverse the order it's qalb al-haqa'iq and so fasting is really putting that correct order and that's why even to get angry you say I'm fasting, it's to train you how to control. The Jahiliyya Arabs one of the meanings of Jahiliyyah", "is zealotry, you know, حمية. When they take on that حمياء of جهلية and جهال in Arabic one of the meanings of it is to boil, like", "This is al-Bahli, Amr ibn Ahmad al- Bahli. He's boasting about in his camp the pots are black because they're constantly being cooked like he's talking about his generosity and then he says you know our women are constantly stirring the pot. These big giant pots. When the when the when", "It doesn't become calmed down. So the Haleem is the one who doesn't boil over. The Prophet can't ahlam al-nas. He had the most equanimity, like his soul was balanced. He never lost his temper. You don't see anywhere in the Hadith and Omar, who's a wonderful character among", "amongst the Sahaba and part of his purpose is one to show the transformation because Omar, he lost his temper very easily. He was a choleric nature and he would lose his temper and the prophet would always calm him down. Aisha , when the Jew walked by and said she cursed them", "She got upset, the ghayrah took her. So the Prophet was always calming people down and one of the beautiful stories of the Aws and Khazraj they had this yom bu'ath which is when they would remember their fighting. They used to fight each other in the Jahiliyyah. And there was an older man from Medina Yathrib who was very upset that", "the Prophet had brought the Aus and Khazraj together. So he hired this Jewish youth, he was a Rawi to go and stir up the Aus of the Khazars by reciting lines of poetry from the Jahiliyyah about the Yom Bo'ath. So then the Aus heard their lines and then the Khazar they start getting angry, they started exchanging and then they said we'll meet you there get your weapons", "Prophet got wind of it and he ran out. And he said, you're doing this and I'm amongst you? Like he couldn't believe. And right when they saw the prophet , and when he told them, like you were...and then now your brother... They all started crying and hugging each other and asking forgiveness. You know that the prophet is a", "is amongst, I mean that's why like in Morocco whenever because I lived there for a while and whenever any type of fight or anything would break out somebody would shout Allahumma salli ala nabi they do that in many Muslim countries it's like they want to bring the presence of the Prophet ﷺ into the gathering so that people remember they remember wa'lamu anna feekum rasoolallah you know the Prophet's ﷺ and he's amongst us his sunnah is here", "is here you know his teaching is here wherever he wherever his teaching has been taught the Prophet is his spirit is present so we have to understand that you know that all these things that we see I mean these are things the prophecy says the actions of my Ummah are shown to me", "When I see good, I thank Allah. And if I see other than that, I ask forgiveness for them. So it's very important for Muslims. I mean this book, we have to get back to the book, the Quran. This is the basis of everything that he taught is here and then his sunnah", "is the exposition of it. He expands on it through everything that he does. But we have this problem in the Muslim world, there are many places where the sunnah is just absent and even the ulama now, if we can call them ulama, they attack other ulama online now like the internet. They had one scholar in Kuwait who said something", "start posting things and attacking. Subhanallah! So if these are the quote-unquote learned people, what do you expect from the Amma? Like people that don't have the knowledge they get very confused. So this is one of the things the Prophet said in these latter days even sagacious people would become perplexed and confused so there difficult times and we just we have to remember the Prophet to restore that spirit", "spirit you know the prophet just to bring him back into our lives as the exemplar and there's a beautiful hadith that prophet said to Abu Umama he said to him he said my heart inclines towards some believers", "You know, like he that there's some people who have a special place in his heart. And those are the people that follow his sunnah, the strongest and the real sunnah is akhlaq I mean these other sunnahs are you know they're beautiful and i'm not going to diminish their worth um you know The beard is a sunnah you know, I mean most of them say it's a wajib but some ulama say it says mentioned that", "and we may have mentioned that in Zad al-Muslim, but akhlaq is the real sunnah. And that's what's been lost, you know, is the akhalaq of the Prophet . His hizm, right?", "اللهم اقسم لنا من خشيتك ما تحول بيننا وبين معصيك ومن طاعتك ما يبلغ به جنتك وملا اليقين ما تهون به مصائب الدنيا وامتعنا بأسماعنا وأبصارنا وقوتنا أبدًا ما أحيتنا وجعل ثأرنا على من ظلمنا وانصلنا على عادانا ولا تجعل مصيبة في ديننا ولا تلد الدنياء كبر همّنا ولا مبلغ علمنا ولا غاية رغبتنا", "Sheikh Hamza, what a beautiful class and a beautiful ending Alhamdulillah." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Reflections on Sura Qāf Session 3 with Hamza Yusuf_NHO6loh7WAQ&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742884764.opus", "text": [ "I thought I'd share a hadith. It's actually one of my favorite hadiths, but I think it's very", "I think it's very fitting for the setting. The Prophet was reported to have said, according to Abu Darda , one of the great companions .", "Imam Hakim relates this hadith in one interpretation inshaAllah.", "inshallah allah will raise up people you know is a the singular of a people and the qaum has to they're from the father so your home is your paternal side in the arabic tradition islamic tradition um the jewish tradition has the maternal side but in our tradition the lineage is through the father with the exception obviously of fatima zahara there's big sir in that", "So the qawm, one group of people should not mock another group of because they might be better than them. And women should not, some women shouldn't mock other women so it excluded the women from the in that ayah and if you look in the Quran throughout the Quran, Isa is really the only prophet all", "All the prophets they call their people Ya Qawmi because they're from them. But Isa says, Ya Bani Israel he didn't say Ya Qaumi because his mother was from them but not his father and these are the subtleties of the Quran that the more you go into it the more amazed you get. Somebody sent me from Bahrain, Shaykh Nizam Ali Aqoubi He sent me this, the hendesa", "the geometry of ikhlas. I don't know if you've seen that, it's amazing. I mean, I have to say, I usually don't like those type things but this one really was mind boggling. So he just showed how, if you write a square and then each one you do, it makes a perfect square and lines up all the... It is really quite stunning to see it", "stunning to see it. Like, it just can't be a coincidence because for that to just be like that, it really was something stunning and that's one of the interesting things about the Qur'an is you have these people that start delving into the numbers and ayahs and what verses are here and there's a whole tradition", "It's a hidden book. The only people that really have access to it are the mutahharun, the people...it's a passive form.", "people that Allah has purified but a lot of these great ulama they just had amazing openings in the Quran and then they saw things also that they probably never put down on paper because some things are just, they're not meant for putting down on", "And their faces have lights and they are on mimbars. You know, mimbar is anything... The nabra is your voice so the mimbar that you project a voice with but they're on platforms or diocese of podiums really because the podium is actually what you stand on from the Latin podus which is foot", "the dice, yeah. And so that's a case where the Istama changed. So it went like in Arabic used to be a hollow and then it went to Barazh. And some of the podium has become the name for the actual lectern which is the traditional name very common in language. So he says that they were on Manabar of Pearls, Pearl Manabr", "people will have for them so in arabic is has said that that is it's a positive envy because when you when you envy people in a positive way you want to emulate them or you wish you were like them because they're good people but you don't have any mal intent towards them so the hasid that allah condemns is the hasad where", "have it instead of them. I mean, one of the greatest literary explorations of envy is in Herman Melville's novella called Billy Budd which is a very interesting story about envy and one of things that Kierkegaard said was that people will admit to a felonious crime before they'll admit to envy.", "It's just not something people will admit to. I don't know, me? Envy him? But it's a very serious problem So the ghibta is that it's positive thing They're looking at them and wishing That they were there in their place but not wanting them to lose that place So that's a positive thing And the Prophet said when in the hadith sahih There are only two envies They say it's the ghebta", "It's not a negative envy. There are only two types of envy that are praiseworthy, somebody who has been given knowledge you don't have and wish you had it, and then someone who has being given a lot of wealth. And they spend it out in positive things like building and hospitals and schools. They do that with their wealth. Those are the only two people worth envying is people of knowledge who teach people", "who use it to benefit people. And so he says, so the Prophet ﷺ is describing them. He said they're not prophets and they're martyrs. So how did they get this maqam? They're not Prophets and they are not martyrs.\" So, جَثَىٰ أعْرَبِيُّونَ عَلَى رَكْبَتَيْهِ This Arab goes down on his knees and he's like, describe them so we know who they are!", "Like, let's hear who they are. He wants to be one of them. So tell us what got them there? And then he said, There are people that love one another. They love one other. It's love that got them their. But then the love, what is it based on?", "They don't have tribal affiliations. They're from many different tribes, many different races, many ethnicities, many countries. And why are they coming together? To remember Allah . So may Allah make us from those people on the Day of Judgement because we have so many places all these different people are from different places and I see a lot of light on your faces. May that light increase", "and be there on the Day of Judgment. But what a great blessing, you know, to just be in gathered to remember Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala. There's no other than nothing else brought us here. It's Ramadan. We came to a place of worship and then just to... And alhamdulillah, the love is here. So Allahu Akbar. Amazing. Alhamdulilah. So onward inshallah.", "We went through, we went through just a very quick recap. This is Surah Qaf which obviously is the name of the surah and it begins with the letter these are the letters", "letters these um every book Abu Bakr and Omar said, every book has a secret. And the secret of this book is in these letters. And Allah swears an oath by the glorious Quran, the majestic Quran, The Noble Quran. And then tells us that these people are bewildered that a warner came to them. And they say this is a strange thing", "strange thing that what we're dead and brought back to life. And they call it this is a very unlikely scenario. And then Allah tells them, Allah knows what the earth diminishes from them. And Allah says that he has a book which contains everything in", "everything in it. And then Allah says that they deny the truth when it came to them and they're confused about it so they have this confusion and Allah then says haven't they considered the heavens over them? We have built it, adorned it ornamented it and you will see no furooj there's no gaps in it", "it. Imam al-Biqa'i said this is a proof that the heavens surround the earth so he saw it as a proof for the that the earth was round and it was surrounded by heavens because he said if there's no gap in it, it means that it must be completely self contained", "And then Allah says, and then go to the earth. So you look at the heaven, then go into the earth and look how we spread it out and put in these mountains that are anchors for it. They do stabilize the earth The dominant theory is that the mountains emerge", "And then Allah says this is tabseerah and dhikra li kulli abdil muneeb. This is a tabseera, it's something that will illuminate you enable you to see clearly when you reflect on these things", "and also a dhikra, a constant reminder. So some of them said it was the heaven that enabled you to see clearly the order of the heavens. And then the earth is this constant reminder because it's always changing. The heavens stay the same but the Earth is constantly changing. And so it's this reminder of change that the heavens have a permanence", "it has an effinessing nature, like the nature of the earth is that it's constantly changing. And this is a reminder to us that we are heavenly by our souls but earthly by our bodies and so our bodies are sidereal or celestial. Our souls are celestial but our bodies", "but it can be stunted and corrupted by the behavior of the body, and by the thoughts that go in. One of the very interesting scholars of Morocco he said that the food of the of the Body comes from the earth But the food soul comes from heaven so if you eat", "the food of the earth for your soul, it will corrupt it. And that it's the food and he says the food is words. So revelation is the real sustenance of the soul. So when you are filling yourself with the words of men and the falsehoods of man, it's like junk food for the body. You're getting sick so your soul will get sick", "soul will get sick. Whereas if you feed yourself with the spiritual nourishment of revelation, the soul will well. He has success, he grows the soul. Purifies it but also means to grow. That is why the great souls are souls that kept growing and then there's a beautiful word that comes from Latin", "pusillanimous. So you have magnanimous, which means animus is soul, magnet is great, so a magnanimious person has a great soul. The pusillanimous person has puny soul. This is something that cultures recognize the fact that we have words in different cultures to articulate these meanings. A petty person. In India Gandhi was called", "Gandhi was called Mahatma, the great soul. So all these cultures have this understanding that there are great souls and then there are puny souls. But Allah says that Allah has given us the ability to grow our souls but if you feed it with the wrong food, you stunt it. If you feed", "at the end of his life, his maqam was so exalted that he could not read books that men had written. He could only read Quran and Hadith. That was his maquam. And he was reading Hadith all because he was not a... I mean if he was alive today it'd probably be the greatest Muhadith alive but at that time he was considered a Muhaddith. You know, his area of expertise was the usul al-fiqh in particular and then obviously tazkiyah", "And that's why he has been criticized by some for having these hadiths in the Ihya. But most of them are hadith related to Tazkiyah and the ulama were much more easy on those type of hadith.", "mubarak and so look how it's so i mean this book is just so extraordinary because it goes heaven earth and now the meeting of the heaven in the earth the water so the water comes down to the earth and brings the earth to life so that's a metaphor right there for revelation that it's the nourishment just as the heavens bring the water that", "It's the water of life, what they call it in... The ancients called it , right? The water of light. So again all these cultures have these words that have these meanings because these are ancient truths that were brought by the prophetic traditions and its blessed water . So we brought forth all of these gardens", "all these grains that are harvested. And then the is such an amazing tree, the palm tree and the fact that the dates are so central to the Arabian peninsula this was life and death for them, the date yields", "dates will last for a very long time. You can eat them for a long time and then there's all these different things that can be eaten at every stage so this is a reminder because the Khitab is first and foremost to the Arabs, it's important to know that. The Arabs were given a special status in that it was revealed in their language and they had to convey it to other people and this is why although Islam is not an Arabian religion", "one of the tragedies of modern Islam is this kind of Arabization of a lot of cultures. That's not, that is in fact, a lot the Arabization is not even Arabic. So for instance, the robe is not an Arab dress. The robe is a Persian dress. Probably the closest thing to his dress is the way Bengalis and Indians dress with the izar", "what they call lungi, and then he wore a kameez. And then the Libyan dress also or the way they dress in Pakistan because he wore sirwal and then had a kamaez over it but the robe was a Persian dress and you can look at all of the pictures of the ancient Persians, they're all wearing robes so when the Arabs conquered Persia they took on the dress of the aristocrats of Persia that's where the robe comes from", "the Arabs themselves. It would have been alien to them, but now it's become associated with the Arabs when it's actually Persian and also the Ghutra was not something any Sahabi wore. Ibn Omar said that the Ghotra was doubt in the night and something inappropriate for a man in the day because in the", "wear the Ghutra. This was something adopted later, they wore a turban, the Arabs. And then also the other thing which is really important about the dress of the Prophet , he dressed from different cultures so he had a Roman Byzantine shirt, he had an Ethiopian shirt, and very few clothes but they were not of one culture. It's very interesting because had they been people might have said that's", "might have said that's the sunnah is to dress like that but he and then he wore a Yemeni jubba. He had a juba from Yemen made in Sana'a they're very nice there was a red and striped juba so he wore different clothes, but the hallmark of his religion is modesty and that's why al-Mawardi in his amazing book on adab dunya wad din or adab dina wa dunya", "clothes should follow the place that you're in. They should not be alien, Muslims should not have alien clothes because wherever Muslims went they wanted to let people know we're not alien this religion is not an alien religion and also they indigenized their architecture. You'll never see Muslims in Andrusia building", "building like Hindu architecture, whereas in India they built like Hindu architectures. In China that they look like Buddhist pagodas the mosques if you go to Turkey they look Byzantine churches because they indigenous. They were not alien where you have your culture Islam is not a culture Islam", "it doesn't impose upon you an alien culture. It's a religion, it's a teaching, it has rights and rituals and its sacred language is Arabic but it doesn' t have any culture. And so the Arabs they have that special task of understanding their language and we're all ala aleihim almost all the ajam I mean there are places where the ajm", "have gotten to a very high level. We have like the Amazigh people amazing in the Sousse, these great Moroccan native peoples who know very often Arabic much better than the native speakers now because they study it as and also you have great Persian scholars, you have Indian and Pakistani scholars. I mean some of the strongest Arab scholars today especially in Hadith tradition come from India and Pakistan so", "So the language is accessible to everyone, but the Arabs still it's their language even with all of their Darija when they learn Arabic they have an advantage over the non-Arab. But they're also disadvantaged in some ways because the fish is unaware", "is unaware of the water so just like we don't think about air. So when you're an ajami and you study Arabic, you can see things that the Arabs don't really see because they just learned it whereas a non-Arab when they learn Arabic they see all the patterns. That's why the great scholars of Arabic were Persians.", "the Nakhl, it's very important because it's a reminder to the Arabs. So here is the point, all of this was to take us to that point to show us because this is about Baath, this whole surah is about the resurrection from beginning to end and if you look at the Qur'an", "you will not find a page that doesn't have the scent of death on it. This is a book that is constantly reminding us of our mortality and to wake up. This also called Surat Al-Wa'id, this one of the names. Wa'id is the threat. It's a warning. Awadak. If somebody warns you they threaten you, you better watch out if you keep on that path you're going to end up here right?", "It's mentioned, that word is mentioned six times in the Quran four times in this surah. Four times in his surah This is about waking up. This whole chapter is about Waking up to your mortality That you're going to leave this world and you will be judged and asked about what you did here while you tarried And I think one of the most striking things about this book", "things about this book is the deeper and the more you study it, the more cohesive it becomes. A superficial purview of this book leaves many people thinking that it's a very fragmented scattered book. That's how they view it. The deeper you go into it,the more cohesion you see throughout the book these themes are completely unified. They're not there's no contradictions in them. There's no ichtirafet. You will see that they're constantly", "constantly going back to these themes. And one of the things about basiqat, which means tall but I really like the interpretation that it means pregnant because the basaqata shatu, the you became pregnant so basiqi also means pregnant and so the tal' is the impregnated date palm when it gets impregna-ed the male impregnatates the female", "It's going to give birth to fruit. And so that fruit, so that's one interpretation of it. But generally they say it means tiwal, that they're high. So these are all and there are other ones that are mentioned in the Quran, the people of Madian, the", "all these different people. So here, back to wa'id. The wa'i become thabat. Thabat so that the haq is something that's fixed it's firm that's why your rights nobody can... People can they can oppress you but they can't take away the right. The right is there.", "People can come, they can steal their land. They can take away their land but it doesn't take away the right to the land. The haq that they have there's a rights and that's why you know if whether you call them Canaanites or Palestinians or whatever you call then it's their land they've been there for millennia You know this idea that they were conquered the Arabs came in and conquered There weren't any Jews in the land they had completely kicked them all out", "kicked them all out the christians it's amazing but you know this is a thing nora shows that palestine was always a multi-ethnic place it's never been an ethno state ever in its history it's always had many peoples coming and going it's the nature of the place and so to try to create a ethno-state in a place that never had an ethnostate it's not it's a bad thing to do", "bad thing to do so the haq is it's a right you know it's fixed it's firm so it's saying you know that the threats now is thabit lahum it doesn't mean that Allah is going to fulfill his threat because in the Arab tradition and even in our tradition if you make a promise to someone you break it, it's very negative thing but if you threaten somebody and then you don't fulfill your threat", "your threat is not seen as a negative thing. You've calmed down or you've forgiven them, so if Allah makes a threat in the Qur'an it doesn't mean that he will necessarily fulfill that threat but there are certain groups that definitely because Allah swore an oath that He would fill Jahannam", "So then, Did we tire? Were we incapable of the first creation? So this is a reminder to them. Was the first Creation difficult for us? Because if the first Creation wasn't difficult for", "that calls to people's reason. Now here, after going heaven earth what's the next? And we created the human being so the heavens, the earth, we created all these marvels and wonders now look at this last creation. This is all to get us to think", "We created the human being and we know what his soul or his ego whispers to him. So, the nafs is yourself. And we have this internal dialogue which is very strange. You know people say I need to give myself a good talking-to. Like who are you talking to? Me! Well, who's talking? You!", "It's a very strange thing. So we have this internal dialogue that's going on and they're like waves for many people, in fact some people it will drive them crazy. You see them sometimes talking to themselves on the streets I mean now you can't tell because people have these things in their ears but if people came from any previous generation", "and took a walk around Berkeley or any city now in the world, they would think everybody's gone mad because they're all talking to themselves on their phones. But they literally just walking down the street. And now I used to take, cause I walk every day and I would see people and I'd always just good afternoon. They don't hear you anymore. It's really amazing.", "almost half the country is eating alone or something it's like 35 just eating alone even families now don't eat together and people now the young people in the cafeterias they eat and just scroll their phones they don't sit with other people these are all really bad signs so we're told you know that here that Allah knows what our soul", "of Iblis is waswas. So you waswisu fi sudur ines and waswasa, the origin of the word it was this real subtle sound that the jewelry makes like the hilyah It's one of those onomatopoietic words waswasayu waswusu even whisper sounds very similar in English waswasaa so it's a voice that you can't really hear but here it means the internal voice", "internal voice because it's في صدور الناس الذي يوسوس في ص دور النس من الجنة والناس Because people will get into you. Like if you listen to the wrong people, their words will get in to you and you'll hear them So this وسوصة The Prophet sought refuge in it One of the last verses in the Quran is to seek refuge from وسواصة", "and the Prophet ﷺ, it's actually in fiqh, the muwaswis. And it's used in the active voice even though it's their muwaswas but it's muwasws The one who is muwaswa in our tradition has a separate set of fiq in sujood as-sahu Right? And what do they do? They ignore it because the way that you increase the waswasa", "giving it some kind of reality. Like if you begin to obsess about it, and one of the ways that Dr. Cleary translated the demons was the obsessors. That's how they work. They make people obsessive about things. Sidi Ahmed Zarouq said Waswasa in Wudhu is either he said it's either Jahanum Bis Sunnah or", "that have because there might be some people either watching or in this room that have this problem what's really important to remember is they say a loss the thief he doesn't sneak into an empty house a derelict house he goes into a house that's full shaitan", "And so it's very important to know that, oh am I in wudu? Making these doubts. Malik is, I think of the four he's if you have doubt about wudus usually doubt, but in wudo Malik has a... You have to redo your wudou if you doubt the wuduu.", "generally, shak is ignored unless you have some certainty that it happened. So just ignoring Shaytan I mentioned that last time that Sayyidi Ahmad Zarroq says that وَمَا يُوَسِّرْ سُبِي الْإِنسَانُ وَالقَلْبُ يَأْبَاهُهُ الْاِيمَانٌ That what you hear in your heart that the heart rejects, that's iman and the Prophet said صريح الإيمان", "not obsessing with this is very important and then and the other thing there's a there's so it's what shaitan will tell you to make you doubt your faith so in that bab one of the hadiths which i think is another miracle", "that shaitan would say to the human being, who created Allah? And there's other people will continue to ask one another. Who created this and we said Allah, Allah, and then they say, who", "said if you hear that just don't listen to it. Many years ago I was in Morocco and there was somebody, he was actually working at the gas station but he was a student at the university and he told me he was taking philosophy and the philosophy teacher had asked that question because this is something you hear in the philosophy department okay well so who created God? And he", "What's the answer? And I told him that hadith. He just, he had such relief to hear that and that's why the Prophet said you know, he didn't, he never wavered in that. Whatever he saw that was dangerous for this ummah, he warned us about it. That's one of things he warned is they're going to ask that question because that was not a question of the ancients. It's a question on the moderns. Ancients wouldn't have asked that question.", "So waswasa is just something, it's very important to not get lost in it. Don't argue with him because it just gives him more force. So this is a qaeda that Imam Zarruq put forward like do not", "Do not fight with the waswas. Just ignore him. And one of the salaf was actually asked how you treat waswasa. He said, if you ever have it, just be happy. Feel happy because shaitan does it to make you miserable. So when you get happy, it really bothers them. He just said, just feel joy.", "And so that's a proof about the derelict house. Like you should be happy that he's bothering you because it means there is something there that he is worried about. And then he says, we're closer to him than his own traditionally translated jugular vein", "He knows us better than we know ourselves.", "is part of the sunnah of creation that there's angels and they're all over uh they they're when people come together for the sake of allah the angels there's angles that are sayara they're literally they tr they travel around the earth and and and just as we see the lights of heaven they see the likes of vicar so just like we see stars they see", "feel a sakina when you're in places where there's zikr people feel asakena that we the prophet told us the quran says that we have muaqibat there's these the ones they protect us so these are angels that protect us unless the qadar comes and then", "All of you have probably been in situations where you were about to get into an accident and then something happened, and your attention was drawn. I once fell asleep driving when I was 17. I was driving a car, it was very late at night, and I fell asleep. And I got yanked out of sleep, and literally headed right for a telephone pole. And just missed it! But that's angelic. When it is not meant to happen", "the angel will divert you from that harm. And that's why it's important also never to get upset about missing a flight. Like the Egyptian man in Abu Dhabi, he got really angry screaming at them and everything. And then that flight crashed, you know, a few years back they interviewed him. He said, you", "yeah you shouldn't worry about those things. So he says Imam ibn al-Juzayr al-Kalbi says, like he's sitting with you in other words he's always there with you these are the two angels", "but there are other angels. There's a hadith that Imam Tabari relates and it's definitely, it's a good hadith but it's mentioned a lot and I don't think it's not in any of the major collections but Uthman asked the Prophet how many angels there were? And the Prophet told him in this hadith", "They change at Fajr, at Subh and then at Asar. And so the ones that are obviously in prayer they're very fortunate because that's what they leave with their assignment but the Prophet said in that tradition says that you have the two that are there and then you have those on your sides", "two on your sides and then one in the front, one in back. And you have one that has your nasiya spiritually and if you get arrogant it yanks it down and if humble it elevates it pulls it up. So there's the two on the tongue according to this tradition says they're only there to record Salah ala nabi .", "So anybody that says prayer on the Prophet ﷺ, Daruj Sharif, those angels are there just for that. And then there's an angel that literally protects your mouth from things that are harmful to go in it because these are open orifices. We have Jibreel, we have all these amazing... Mikael who is in charge of", "Quryat awafakum marik al mawt alladhi wukkira bikum", "and it's all the Mufassirun definitely mentioned him by name, but there's no Hadith that give that name. And then also you have the Muqarrabun and the Qurubiyun also which are the Cherubim in the Western tradition. The angels of solace is a whole world that's around us.", "see corresponding to that is the demonic world so there's all the negative forces that are there also um and then you have malik radwan you have uh the malik is the cousin of the fire a little one is the husband of the of paradise and then this is there's 19 of these in hell", "So nothing is uttered out of your mouth except there is a in other words somebody who's monitoring it and ready to write it down. So anything that you say, and it's really important for people to think about this because we're in an age of talking", "I mean, I don't think humans have ever talked more than they talk today. And just something to think about when you write something on the internet, you can't get that back. Some of them you can delete people, delete tweets and things but they're not deleted with the angels. Especially when it's about other people because then it's the haqq of somebody else.", "And there's the Qantara for Muslims like the Qanthra is going to be a problem Because you can't get into paradise until you settle things with other Muslim So you make it across the Sirat. There's another stage, which is the Qanta for anybody you wronged They have a right at that point To demand from you so but people just don't think about this they just", "There is not a word uttered that it's not being recorded. And now we know all these recordings, all our phone calls are recorded. We're going to show them our signs. I mean look at all the recording that's going on. Hidden conversations. There's people now that get people in these gotcha situations and they record them and then they put it up on the internet.", "the prophet said private conversations are sacred trust. The Prophet said if a man ever before he says something, he looks around it's amanah but they also say don't blame somebody for... If you tell somebody the secret, a secret, don't them for telling somebody else because they say the same thing that pulled it out of your chest pulled it", "they say that the breasts of free people are the graveyards of secrets like because it's uh people that spread other people's secrets and tell i mean everything is going to be revealed on the yom kiyamah but sitter is also very important our religion you know and this is a this is", "especially today because there are certain things. But one of the things that people do is they love to put this all up on the internet. Local problems should be, they should be local problems. The Muslim community make, they take a local problem. Some Imam does something scandalous thing in some town and whatever someplace. And suddenly it's all over the internet like these are fitna people. They're spreading fitna. Let the local community deal with that.", "If the person is a prominent person, there might be some need. But generally these are local problems. The idea of just spreading all this fitna it's really not good and it also makes people... Scandal is when scandal happens it has a horrible impact on the community. And a lot of these problems are problems of just not following Sharia.", "They're just not following Sharia. I mean, the Prophet told us don't be alone with somebody who's not a mahram. So any woman should never if some quote unquote spiritual teacher is saying oh you know I'll give you private lessons red flag the dajjal because it's just not in our religion and that's what protects people both people", "Because if you're alone, you are with Iblis. He is the third. And then people also even just seeing people like the Prophet , he was with Maimouna and it was night time and he was walking and they saw the Prophet . He said, he told them, It's my wife. And they said, would we ever suspect you?", "And he said, in the Shaitan flows in the veins. So even the best people can get that doubt. But there's just a lot of... The internet has created such a horrible environment for people. It's really unhealthy. And then all these people that just attack other people.", "I was talking with Sheikh Abdullah and there's a big fitna with one scholar who said something, then all these other scholars jump in. If this is the scholars talking like that, what about the poor people? If they see the quote-unquote ulama attacking one another, Allah says don't call one another names. The Prophet said what's up with the people that do this?", "So ghibah is very dangerous and ghiba is I mean it's to mention your brother with something that they would be disturbed. And then one of the sahaba said, you know, like even if it's true, because this is human right? People like to talk about other people. It's a very common thing.", "Ahmed Zarouq said that the Bab of Ghibah is opened by how so and so. Because some people ask that because they want to hear dirt, right? That's why they asked, oh, how so-and-so. Amazing. Nothing changes. Humans.", "So that's something really to think about, just all these things that you say online and what's going to happen. And then you make tawbah and what do you do? And then again, so just about ghibah, there are seven things that the ulama said that don't go under that category.", "for the benefit of that. It's one of the worst sins is ghiba and, so avoid ghiba except certain reasons to do it", "do it that some of the great ulama have mentioned. Those are the seven things so is if you, if there's a and you want to tell me you need help in getting rid of this volume, it's not a to do that. Another one is like for", "for istighatha, like calling for help. Like, you know, oh this person's doing this or that and then istifta. One of the women asked the Prophet she'd been given two proposals about one was from Muawiyah and Abu Juham and he said he's poor and he says", "In the other, it says . But he said , so he was warning her against somebody who had a propensity to domestic violence. So that's not , you're warning the person. So if somebody is asking you about a potential spouse and you know something about them then you should let them know that's , that's", "the one with the limp you know it's those things aren't it's not if you're doing it to describe somebody so that they know who you're talking about and then you know like warning people which is a problem now because every group thinks that every other groups are and so they think they're free just to and that's why you should do what's", "When there's difference of opinion, just leave people alone. It's a valid opinion to do the mawlid. It is a valid that considers it an innovation. They are both there. The minority opinion is the second but just leave them alone. If somebody is at their opinion, it is perfectly valid for them to take. But don't attack other people that the ulama said they can do that.", "that right so so that's important because it's only the mujma'alay that is yunkar if it's agreed upon then you make inkara of it. If it's not agreed upon just you should leave people alone I mean they said about al-Maziri that and Shaykh Abdullah is like that because he his knowledge is so vast that he'll say oh maybe he's on the opinion of so and so and that's part of why this religion was able", "was able to be a world religion is because it had a tolerance that other religions just didn't have. We didn't these religious wars. If you look at the intolerance of, and they've lost their religion in a lot of ways from their intolerant. And now you have all these Muslims that are becoming intolerant and the prophet said, you'll follow the previous religions down the lizard's hole. And that's one of their hallmarks is the intolerants", "previous dispensations so it's really important just to you know just recognize and then but everybody is an alim today all these amazing ulama like they're just everybody's a scholar you know and everybody has an opinion and everybody ah you're wrong he's wrong you know mashallah it's amazing", "for people because it's just you don't even want to bring that on other people. You know, because you become a source of fitna yourself. That's why a lot of people when things get bad they just go in. They just يعتزل الناس for that reason. وَجَاءَتْ سَكْرَةِ الْمُوتِ بِالْحَقِّ", "So again, this is it's a reminder. The Sakarat al-Mawt, the Prophet himself experienced what we call in English the pangs of death. You know, the Sakarat comes from a word that's like you know, it's the meaning of it is to be kind of intoxicated because it's you don't know what's happening. It's very intense and if you've been around for those of us who worked", "like you know when I was ICU doing ICU and things, I mean you see people die. I saw quite a few people die and a lot of people just don't know what's happening. You can really see and then other people you know I was with both my parents uh I left for like a few minutes you were in the room reciting Yassine yeah", "other was gone but i was with my mother had very peaceful transition so some people have very peaceful transitions other people it's very difficult and the angel of death you know he'll rip out uh he's very gentle with the believer but he's not with the disbeliever so it can be very intense the last words of people are very interesting too when there's a lot of his books that have the last", "The Prophet is, I mean look what his concerns were as he's leaving the world. Guard your prayer, guard your prayer. Treat your women well. Don't abuse your servants. He wasn't thinking about himself. Amazing. Ummati, ummati.", "That's what you were avoiding. I mean, that's one of the meanings. There are a few different meanings of that. That's one meaning. SubhanAllah.", "And then the trumpet, and this is Asrafil who's given the he's Mawakal B'Sur was the Nafkha. And there's two Nafkhah. The Prophet said between them is 40. He didn't tell us how what 40 of what but with the first Nafkah everybody that's the end of life on earth. The second one is the Ba'ath", "one is the ba'ath, the resurrection. And so in the first one there's no ansab, after that, after the resurrection and then what's called the nashr and the ba'th are pretty much synonymous. There's a subtle distinction but they both mean resurrection.", "But there's the which is where we're brought forth. And it's described as a kind of doughy like, it's a white plane human beings are brought there and the this is before the actual reckoning. And there's a waiting period that's very intense. People are very troubled in this period", "people. They go to Adam, alayhi salam, and each one of them says they can't help. The Prophet, salallahu alayhim, is the one that's given the... And that's why he's Shiloh in the Old Testament because Shiluh, Shilah, is Dr. Ali here. See here? No. Dr. Alay knows this. Shilow means the one to whom it belongs. And that when he says ana lahaa because the scepter does not go from Judah, from the Jews", "until Shiloh comes. And that's clear, it's not them. So they rejected the Prophet , but the Prophet he is Shilow. He's the one to whom it belongs and that's on the Yom Kiyamah. He has given the flag of Hamd. Ana Laha. And then he intercedes and then the next phase is to...", "we have the judgment and there's what Imam Al-Awza said, there is the Ard which is you will see your whole life before you. Again think about the time we're living in and how now we have all these people recording their lives like literally on...there are people that you can watch them like living in their homes it's their whole life is online and so these are signs", "that our religion was talking about. Everything's being recorded. I mean, right now this is recording. It's being reported. Nobody had these concepts in the past. They had memories. They knew about memories but the idea of istinzah you know, the idea that everything is being recorded we use the word recording yusajjil tasji'il These are the sigils, right? The records", "where the records are kept. It's amazing. So the Sur is this trumpet. ذَارِكِ يُوْمَ الْوَعِيدِ Again, وعيد. See it again, the word comes back. وَجَاءَتْ كُلُّ نَفْسًا مَعَهَا السَّائِقُ وَالشَّهِدُ Every soul comes, the سائق is the one that's يسوقه Like they're forcing them to go because now your free will is gone. You're just moving according to...", "It's like when you go to these, I mean it's not like but just a worldly analogy. When you have these, you know, like in governments you have lines that you have to wait and go through there is nothing you can do about it right? So you just have to do this so this is the sa'iq And then the shaheed is the one who he knows everything about you as a witness. You were in heedlessness about this", "the ghafil is the one who's they're just heedless about their life and about what they were here for doing, and so this is the warning see Allah is giving us this now so that we're not amongst these people that's what this chapter is about and that's why the Prophet constantly read it and repeated it again and again, they learned it by heart because he read it so much", "Because this is the chapter to wake you up. If this doesn't wake you, nothing will. If This Chapter of The Quran does not wake you ,nothing will. This Is The Chapter To Wake Up You were in heedlessness We remove the veil", "veil, the ghi-tah. The veil is gone now. Your sight is piercing it's had you can see clearly now everything's been all the veils are removed everything is clear now this happens when you die and that's why the Prophet said consider yourself already dead Imam Ali", "who said, people are asleep and when they die, they wake up. Surah Ar-Rum Among his signs are your sleeping in the day and the night. Look at all the sleepwalkers. We have a planet of sleepwalkERS And this is the awakening. And so this is what we're being told is wake up now. Don't wait until you're woken up", "Woken up. Wake up now. Don't wait until the alarm goes off and it's too late. Let me go back, I'll do good. And then Allah says even if they go back they'll do the same thing because people say how can they be punished for you know no because that's their reality. They're not going to change. Not going to", "And then his qareen, which there's difference of opinion about this. But the first one is the angel. The second one is... Is the devil. So you have the Prophet said everybody has a Qareen from the Medek and a Qreen from demons. You know that the ancients understood this as well.", "negative so the Qareen is it's an amazing word there's a Quran that woman yeah sure so the the Ashiya yasha is to be blinded in the night you can't see you have", "It's like night. There's a darkness in this world that if you can't see with night vision, as you go into the dark your actual pupils dilate. You need to open up. You have to open your eyes so you can see. If they don't dilate you can not see at night. So this dunya is a place where you have to", "That's the word, insan. You were created to see and the greatest gift that Allah will give you is the sight of the face of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. You are created to See. Alam tara don't you see? How many times in the Quran it uses that but it's not talking about the physical eye, it's talking about", "and they say that the basr, is the eye of the heart as the basar is the body. The physical eye. The basir is the inner eye. This is my way I call to Allah with basira. So this is what don't wait for your vision to be hadeed when it's too late", "when it's too late. It has to be hadid here, so the ghita is the ghafla and that's what people are in and that why dhikr of Allah is the most important thing just to remember Allah and that they ask the Prophet , which fasting is better? The one that the dhkir of Allah more in it, that's the one", "That's the one. The one that has more dhikr of Allah is the best fasting. And he said that about everything, jihad, hajj, everything. It's the One that has the most dhkir of Allah and they were sitting once in the Prophet , He said that when they heard what the people get Omar said to Abu Bakar They took everything", "And the Prophet said, indeed they have. They surpass you, the Mufarridun. They said who are the Muffarridun Ya Rasulullah? He said, they were passing a mountain in the Hijaz and then he said, and they asked who are these outliers, the ones that are just off on their own.", "and mustahthirun bi dhikrillah those who are really it means addicted istihtaar they're addicted to the dhikkur of Allah they're always mentioning Allah he said leave this world and your tongue is moist with the remembrance of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala so this is the place to remember Allah this is time we've been given", "Imagine everybody, if we had our dates on the top, the expiration date over our heads. What a world that would be. Oh, mashallah you've only got two more days left. What are you going to do? Because we all have an expiration date and we think we're here forever. It's amazing how the ghafla of death people don't think they're gonna die. They just don't", "So that's what he says, قَرَقَ لِنُهْا هَذَا مَا لَدَيِّ عَتِيدٍ It's all prepared. أَلْقِيَ فِي جَهَنَّمَ كُلَّ كَفَّارٍ عَنِيدٌ Put into hell, thrust them into hell. Every kafar anid. It's very interesting, it didn't say kafir because kafir is one's denial. Like the kafir you deny Allah wants", "deny allah once the kafar is not only a disbeliever but it's an ingrate because in gratitude is constant because you know i was talking to this man once we were talking and he asked me why Islam said you should worship Allah and I said to him for blessings and he said yeah I suppose I've had some blessings in my life and I just like looked down I said who do you think's keeping your temperature at 98.6 degrees right now", "you know like who do you i mean you know who's enabling you to blink because there's people that can't blink i don't know if you know about dry eyes and the pain that people who have dry eyes suffer you know dry eyes it's a whole industry for dealing with dry eyes just to have you know the ability to blink and to have some moisture in your eyes it is a great blessing", "never get to the end of them. But Allah says they're kafar and anid. And inad is obstinacy. They're just obstinate people. They just won't see, no matter how much you show them. If they see every sign, they won't believe in it. They Just won't Believe I mean you see these atheists now and these people that debate them and just they talk about all the fine-tuning in the universe and they have to admit it's all true", "admit it's all true and then, and they still deny Allah . I mean even just to acknowledge there is a creator. It just seems like that is... Just that you're created, that you are creature. You didn't create yourself, your parents didn't created you, they are all Asbab so where did you come from? Because it can be infinite regress, it can't be chicken and egg circular,", "We're obviously a creator. Whether it's a personal God or not, that's a debate. You can have that debate but to deny createdness, that is insanity. It just doesn't make any sense. If you look at our Prophet , the Muslims were a mess unfortunately we are a mess and it's difficult for people to see the light but people still see the", "still see the light. I mean, these people that are letting into Medina, you know, some of these people just break down and start crying. You know, these non-Muslim people because they let them go. They don't go into the masjid but they go now into the city and there's people that have gone there and they just burst into tears because of it. And they say it's so peaceful here. Where is that peace from? That's emanating", "incarnated. I mean, it's the ruah of the Prophet . It's his spirit that's in that city and you can feel it. And anybody that goes there that has an ounce of perceptibility they can feel if you can't you're a rock. You're just jama'at inanimate because it's something amazing there. And it's not Mecca. Mecca is amazing", "Mecca is amazing, but Medina there's something just that you can feel permeate that entire city. And people are... a lot of agitation in Mecca and this isn't an observation I made. This was made centuries ago. Malik was asked about it and his explanation was that was the city that drove their prophet out and this was the", "Mecca is a great city and the Prophet loved it. And that's enough to love Mecca, you know? But Medina just has a special flavor I think that everybody that goes there really feels that. . And that is proof they are ingrates because the worst thing, the worst act of ingratitude is not to share your blessings", "Just to hoard them for yourself. مَنَّعْنِ الْخَيْرِ معتدًا And they're also يعتدي على الناس. معتدا They're aggressive people. مُريب, filled with doubts. شاك These are not... They're unwell people. These are the people of hell. They're already in hell here. It's already hell.", "How much time? Oh, mashallah. Okay. Any questions? Yeah.", "Thank you. So like during namaz or tarawih or listening to Quran Sharif, you know when mind wanders or doing zikr how to deal with that? A couple of things one That's just a human thing This is not the fact that you're in prayer and the fact", "that you're in is a good sign and so don't let that discourage you because everybody has to deal with that. There are certain things that can be done, you know? You need to train your mind to focus. A lot of people can't read anymore because they have that problem their mind wanders when they read. One of the things to do is that when you read is to really focus like keep attentive in your reading don't", "Mind is something that you can master. It's not something that can't be tamed, but it's difficult and it takes time. And so there are things that you do types of ways of keeping focus. The Prophet , one of the most important things to do is to be present in your wudhu. Like a lot of people don't do wudu as an .", "as an addendum to their ibadah whereas wudhu is actually an act of ibadat and so if and ahmed says that the degree of your presence in your wudu will will facilitate the presence the degree", "was amazing to watch him and there's actually online there's a Shaykh Khatri I think did a wudu very similar to Mrabt al-Hajj. But it was an act of ibadah, he was so present in his wudhu and so being present in the wudh is really important also doing the Mu'awwitha Tain before you go into the prayer so actually doing the Qul Aadub Barab Al Farqan Qul aadub barabbin nas", "I seek refuge with Allah from the accursed Satan", "but it's Qur'an and its ibadah. And so just the sounds of the Qur'aan have an effect on the heart. And then also doing the prayer on the Prophet ﷺ is very useful. The ulama say to get rid of waswasa, is that the best thing that gets rid of wawasa is dhikr of Allah and just keeping your tongue moist with the dhiker trying to remember one of the things...", "really trying to adhere as much as I can to what are called the adiaat al-rahwal, the duas of occasional prayers. So the supplications that the Prophet like when I come into the masjid Bismillah Allahumma iftaha abuwaa bi rahmatika When I go out of the masjed left foot first Allahumme inayya surukum min fadrika Like I try to do that every time I come", "don't always, but just being conscious throughout the day of the things you do. When the Prophet got up, the first thing he did was he made a prayer. It's the first he did when you wake up. The very first thing He did, He recited . He would recite those verses every morning when He woke up.", "recite those verses. So the prophet, his life was a life of constant contemplation and reflection. And so those are things that anybody can do but it takes conscious effort. It's not going to happen like that. It is work to tame your mind. Some of the other traditions call it the monkey mind, riding the tiger. There", "This is a human problem and it's been around for a very long time. And we're a very distracted species, you know? We're distracted very easily. Distractibility is a hallmark of just being human. And so learning how to focus is one of the most important tasks that you can do in the prayer. You know, we forget that the prayer is practice. It's practice.", "It's something that you do on a daily basis and just try to be present. And I know the difference between, sometimes I've repeated prayers just because I know I just didn't have any presence in the prayer. So it's a problem. And now we have phones going off and ding ring things and just very difficult. Any other?", "Thank you. So, you mentioned the hadith about following the footsteps of those who came before and when you look at where they are now and you look where our ummah is now how can we know that like how do we know how far are we going to follow them because they seem like they're on misguidance", "how do we know that we are not? Well, I mean obviously there's a lot of problems in our community as an ummah. Like I mean community as a ummah and they've been going on for quite some time. You can probably you know, you can really see it's around 500 years", "They asked who were the ghuraba, he said Islam began as an alien thing a strange thing it was strange to the Arabs and then it became normalized. He said it will return a strange things and then he said blessed are the strangers and they say al-tuba is a tree in paradise and then He was asked who they weren't he said Those who rectify my sunnah after people have corrupted it so there's two things that you can gain from that one", "gain from that one, that islah is part of our religion of rectifying but also that the sunnah gets corrupted. I mean one of the problems in our community I think is you know you have traditionalists that get very ossified and they hold on to things that aren't really from the religion they're just from tradition and so the people there's another group who sees", "And so now they reject all tradition because of that. Whereas the important thing is, you know I had one of my teachers say that if you imagine the religion of Islam a little bit like a massive ship, a great ship and it's sinking, what do you put on the lifeboats? What books do you take with you? What do you want to save?", "And so we have to think about that just as a community. What are the most important things? And the single most important thing after Iman itself is prayer and the centrality of the prayer. And I think we've just forgotten about how important the prayer is as an actual... You know, so many people want to sing songs and do these things and have molids and have all... But the prayer", "with the noafel i mean the prophet he prayed 50 nafila every single day because he the original prayer was 50 prayers he prayed 15 africa every single and it's quite stunning when you go to medina one of the things that really strikes you about being in medina is prayer is like a full-time job", "It's really quite stunning. And so the centrality of prayer and really working on our prayer, and also learning and education. I mean, the Prophet said, it's better to learn one ayah than pray a thousand rakats. His religion, when he came in the gathering there were people studying and there were", "I was sent to teach. It's not saying that the other thing was wrong, but he was a teacher and he was constantly teaching. And his religion is a religion of reason, intelligence. Emotions are supposed to be controlled and you can see how emotional our community is. We're a very emotional community. One thing, just think about this. The Prophet never called people names.", "We have all these Muslims that just call, they call heads of state names. You cannot like a head of state, that's fine. But there's also the prophet, he had decorum. He didn't, he was never... And so when the scholars do this, I mean you can expect that from uneducated people but when scholars do that it's very bad sign. There's just a lot of emotion and people not thinking", "reasons to be upset. I'm not going to deny that. There are reasons to", "horrible napalm bombs, you know all these terrible things they did. I mean the Viet Cong when that when they would bomb them with napalms which burns the skin you know so they worked out that it wasn't waterproof so if they went into water it would stop the burning right away. So all the villages made big ponds they dug things and put water so that when the napalmed came because the napon was like a", "So some scientists, probably in New Jersey or something, worked out how to have waterproof napalm. Why would you do that? Napalm is bad enough but not even to give people... It's just evil. These are all evil things. We've seen a lot of evil and I don't watch the news because I don' want let things into my heart like that because one, I'm hypersensitive person,", "or two, I really want to be grateful and Shaytan just wants to make everybody miserable and depress us. I don't want to get depressed. And so I know what's going on. The Prophet said, What an excellent weapon! Prayer and patience because this is just dunya. It's just dunyaa. If people get too caught up in this place", "recognize it for what it is, they'll get lost. This is dunya and I know enough of history 50 million Indians probably starved to death during the British period. 50 million! I mean talk about a Holocaust you know at least 20 million Russians killed under Stalin. At least 20 millions. A lot of them Muslims. You know? I mean if you want to talk about the horrors of the world I could go on all day", "But there's also the marvels of the world and the beauties of the word, and the amazing things about the world. And the tenacity of people despite everything. I mean the display of the Palestinians that they've shown is just inspired like a lot of people even non-Muslims. It's just unbelievable. So these you know I'm very anti war, I really am very antiwar but the Muslims 500 years we've been doing the same thing and getting the same results", "Historically, the Muslims converted their enemies when they couldn't beat them. You know, they say if you can't beat him, join him. The Muslims said if you cannot beat him convert them. That's what they did. They converted...the Mongols converted to Islam, the Ilkhanid. They became the defenders of Islam. Within 70 years it happened and that means there were people still alive who saw Baghdad completely devastated that were probably praying next to people who were the children or grandchildren", "or the grandchildren of the people that conquered them. It's amazing, you know it was one of the things my dad said when he read The History of Islam He told me, Islam conquers its conquerors That's what he said, Islam Conquers Its Conquerors Why have we lost that ability? You know the Arabs say", "Every vessel can only pour forth what it contains. If all you have is emotion and anger and resentment, most people here if they really knew what was going on, they would be opposed to it. We have to educate people. A lot of people are waking up to what's happening but the Muslims I think we need to really think about ourselves a lot more. We think too much about what's", "enough about rectifying our own selves. And the book that's just been translated into English, I would recommend everybody read it. In fact, I'm probably going to read it in the book club that we do. It's called The Generation of Salahuddin and it really shows...it's an amazing book by this Jordanian scholar, Ersanan al-Jilani or Al-Kilani", "He's a historian. And he wrote this amazing book and he did it for Allah, and I think there was real tofiq in the book because he actually didn't want any copyright for it. He said anybody could publish it. Yeah. So he is very sincere in his... It's really well written too. The English translation, I've only looked at it looks reasonably good that they got the title wrong. It's kind of ESL English but the actual", "but the actual book is not bad. But that's a really important book. Until they break fast? One last question from the sisters. Okay, yeah. I think you said a creator and personal God. Yeah.", "this question has to do with that, the atheists are saying that God doesn't really care what happens to you. Look at what's happening. A benevolent God would not let that happen. So how do you respond to that? And a second quick question. You talked about the Nafla prayers. I talked about what? Naflaprayers. Yeah, Nafalaprayer.", "rakats or many rakats? Good one yeah so so so one of my teachers has a qasida about that and he said uh in he said go easy on yourself so that your journey is with desire. And then he said", "Two rakats with love are better than a thousand without love. So the Prophet ﷺ said, Every action has a shirra, like it has an excitement and energy, like you want to do it. But he says, but also it has the waning.", "And he said, So if you leave my sunnah in your time of waning, you'll perish. Which means when you have energy, do what you're doing. But when you lose your energy, don't stop doing but be moderate. And that's why the Prophet ﷺ, he said Nobody will try to take this religion on completely", "completely except it will overwhelm him. I mean just qira'at, you can spend your whole life studying one branch of the Qur'an which is not even... It's an amazing branch but it's not a branch, it's more a technical branch than... It''s not really so much about knowledge like what the Qurra means but it''s how it's recited and there's so much in that alone", "This religion is just so amazing. Like it's got so many different areas, hadith alone you could just spend your life, seerah the usool al fiqh, Arabic literature all these different... It's amazing and so you have to just have a practice that's consistent and the Prophet said khairu l'amaal adwamaha wa inqal", "constant even if they're a little. So the most important thing is just, if you're not doing any nafira, try to do at least as a baseline the two rakats after maghrib, the shafa' and witr after Isha, and the two", "before Asar and then the Tahajjud. Even if it's two with love, it's better than eight without love or just feeling like I have to do this. But also there's a great blessing in just being consistent. Sometimes you'll have the energy, other times you won't. It's but it's like exercise. You just do it because you have", "What I find is once you start doing it,", "May Allah bring peace to our brothers and sisters in Gaza and in the West Bank. Give them security.", "inshallah and every place where muslims are having difficulties may allah make it easy for them insha'Allah thank you to everyone for coming alhamdulillah" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Reflections on Sura Qāf Session 4 with Hamza Yusuf_5YajWt3eUFo&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743056006.opus", "text": [ "Assalamu alaikum. Jazakallah khair for coming to tonight's Khatm in the class. Some of you will be leaving after the class for your Iftar somewhere.", "We live in a world where things are not always what they seem. Truth is presented as falsehood and lies warped into truth. Confusion abounds even though information is at our fingertips. Technology now reaches astonishing heights, yet we suffer from an epidemic", "from an epidemic of anxiety and depression. As we look ahead, what can be done to discover truth without prejudice? Preserve beauty amidst the profane and promote peace in a destructive world. God's great gift to humanity, the intellect, the ability to reason and think that sets us above all creation is the key. In an increasingly artificial world", "natural intelligence, where creativity, imagination and virtue come together in pursuit of excellence. At Zaytuna College this is our mission. Support us and invest in the human potential toward truth, goodness and beauty.", "Hannah Kim, Lafayette California. My name is Hannah Kim and I graduated from Zaytuna College in 2019 from the bachelor program. Currently I am a third year law student at University of California College of the Law San Francisco formerly known as UC Hastings", "So I wanted to share a little bit about how Zaytuna has really helped prepare me to be successful as a law student and inshallah soon, as a Law professional. So one aspect of the ZayTuna curriculum is the fact that it expects its students to get through large volumes of reading and then through the Socratic method synthesize that information and be able to discuss it in the classroom. As law students", "is reading a lot of case law, statutes, regulations codes things about nature which can be very difficult to get through. So the fact that at Zaytuna during all four years I was trained in that skill has really helped prepare me to be successful and not aspect of the legal education. Another thing as they ZayTuna know was that we were trained informal logic and I remember that our professor used", "to identify fallacious arguments in the articles. And that has been very useful to me, uh, in two ways as a law student. Firstly, in mock court settings such as the moot court competition that I competed in most of the job was for-was for me to be able to identify fellacious arguments that my opponent was making and come up with good responses um, and my own strong arguments.", "training helped me be prepared for law school was the fact that at law school and in the profession we are faced with the full spectrum of political ideas and views. And so, this skill of being able to identify bad arguments and track the ideological ideas that underpin them has really helped me to be able to hold my own as a law student in this setting.", "graduate culturally competent Muslim Americans and I resonate very deeply with that mission. And so, that mission has really helped me to identify what it is I would like to use my education for. So inshallah, my aim is as an estate planning attorney to be able to use My Zaytuna Education in fiqh", "able to pass down their wealth in a way that complies with and preserves this Islamic worldview. And at the same time, to do so in a ways that is legally valid. I am eternally grateful for my Zaytuna education and experience at the school that has prepared me to navigate my career and life as a law student in this climate we live in. So thank you so much to ZayTuna College and thank you for listening!", "Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuhu Shams Khan here with Zaytuna College and I have the honor and privilege of serving as the head of advancement for this incredible institution. I'm here talking to you today to share the amazing potential we have at ZayTuna in our 12,000 strong program. As you may know many universities are sustained by multi-billion dollar endowments built over hundreds", "over hundreds of years. At Zaytuna, we are a newer Muslim college and we're working to revive the Islamic tradition of endowed funds which are also known as Waqf to secure the financial sustainability of our college Our 12,000 strong program is built on the power of consistency and collective action It's inspired by the prophetic saying that 12,00 hearts united as one will not be defeated for lack of numbers We place our trust in Allah SWT", "and our hopes in the global Muslim community. The Prophet also told us that the acts most pleasing to Allah are those which are done continuously, even if they are small. And we clearly see the miracle of this in the impact of our 12,000 strong program, which once actualized is capable of being the functional equivalent of a $100 million endowment. SubhanAllah!", "Allah. Allow me to explain. A typical university spends about 5% on average of their endowment towards operational costs. If you take a $100 million dollar endowment, 5% of this is $5 million dollars. $5 Million divided by 12 thousand and further divided by twelve months of the calendar year would equal $35 a month. That's a little bit over a dollar a day.", "and maybe throw in a muffin once a month. So imagine you're buying Zaytuna College's cup of coffee a week. Your $35 would be the functional equivalent of all of us united sustaining ZayTuna College with a $100 million endowment. Alhamdulillah, we currently have just under 6,000 people as part of the program so we're halfway there and we're asking you to join us. Help us get to our goal of 12,000 believers supporting Zaytuana College", "As our beloved Imam Zaid likes to say, a dollar a day keeps the shaytan away. Join us today at zaituna.edu or click the link and become a member of 12,000 Strong, a global prophetic community. JazakumAllahu khairan Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh", "الحمد لله بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم والصلاة والسلام على سيدنا وحبيبنا", "May Allah make us from the people freed from the fire these last 10 days. Because this chapter that we've been reading is also known as the Surah Al-Wa'id,", "the threat but it's also one of the names for the yom ar-wa'id is the day of judgment so and people don't realize how significant not only life is, but how significant our actions in life are no matter who we are whether", "simply cleaning streets. Everybody's life is momentous because they were created by Allah and brought here for a purpose, and not only that but when you look at what it took to bring one human life into existence which is why the Quran reminds us actually quoting the Jewish tradition you know that to take one life as if that you killed all of humanity", "think about just all the lives that existed before our lives to bring us as individuals, each one of us into existence. It will boggle the mind just to reflect on it. Of your two parents and then there's four and then eight and 16 and it just goes on until you've got this massive amount of ancestors", "at a certain point so they go out like this but as a certain they go back to the two. So we're one inverted pyramid of all these inverted pyramids that go back, to the actual pyramid which is Adam and Eve. So the entire humanity is just this massive pyramid", "and so nine months in the womb that's a very small portion of what it took to bring you into existence um and so people don't realize the momentousness of life and that's why to turn it into lab to turn It into activity playful activity and play is part of life but it's the first part of Life. You're supposed to get out of it very quickly", "because that children play as work so they're actually playing to like that's why in fitra not socially constructed but in fitrah most girls not all girls because there are tomboys but most girls like to play with dolls because they see their mothers taking care of the baby this is fitrah so every traditional society has that quality and so to to to pervert the fitrah of people", "and to try to take an anomalous element, and make that the norm. It's called centralizing you know the peripheral, and peripheralizing the central this is modern demonic theory where everything's inverted and that's one of the things that the Prophet told us in the latter days things would be inverted what our tradition calls qalb al-haqa'iq it's the inversion of realities so fitra", "So fitra suddenly is called a social construct. In other words, it's society that creates these things not the natural inherent principial nature of the human being and so they pervert human beings and it creates a lot of confusion and then you have all this mental illness and people unwell because they're not in nature like we are meant to be in nature", "nature the more unwell we get and that's why this religion is called deen al-fitra because it brings people back to that principial nature one of one of the elements of our nature is to worship if you study human history human beings worship you're going to worship something", "And that's why the Prophet ﷺ talked about the devotees of clothes. You know, Abd al-Qamisa, the people devoted to clothes. They're worshipping clothes and their whole life is surrounded by clothes. And then there's people that worship their stomachs so their whole lives are around food. And they put their whole live around food and then there are people it's all about power.", "La hawla wa la quwwata illa billah", "not inherent to us so this chapter which in many ways is a Imam Shafi famously said all we really need he said if only Surah Al-Asr was revealed the sura would have been sufficed for us just", "in al-insana lafi khusar. We're at loss by time because every moment that occurs can never be got back. You can't get it back and that's why this modern world that puts you on hold, it's so sinister because they don't let you talk to a human being so that you can solve your problem. They put you on", "And even worse, to add insult to injury, they'll put Muzak on. This is how sick this culture is. It's so unwell. And that's why everybody's unhinged because I think about the amount of practice that your average Muslim does. I'm talking about average Muslims, not the sabiqoon al-awwadoon, you know, not those people. I am talking about an average Muslim who just said a dedicated Muslim five prayers", "Five prayers a day, praying on time because that's a committed Muslim. You pray on time five prayers a some dhikr outside of that, some recitation of Quran even if it's Yasin and Waqiaa and Mulk every day there's some regular practice of Quran. I'm talking about baseline and then the nafilah prayers at least three", "shafaa and then two before fajr subah and then uh two after maghrib at least that and yet despite that if you do that baseline you will find yourself incredibly frustrated and not and include in that also that you have a world view that tells us how important patience is like your lord tells you to be patient so all those things", "And then you wonder why people shoot up schools and why people completely lose it and do all these horrible things because they're so unwell, and they have no medicine. And one of the things, Sidi Adel Jemal, not the Egyptian but the famous Moroccan, he said he has a book called The Meaning of Man, Ma'na al-Insan.", "in the Hikmah of Ibn Ataylah, he says that al-ibarat quds al-muslimi'een. That words are the sustenance of the listeners. So he says in his book that words are to the soul what food is to the body. That the meaning that you live on is what nurtures your soul", "your soul just like the food that you eat nurtures your body so if you're listening to garbage all day long if you are listening to rap lyrics with foulness in it, if you watching the news and all these horrors are unfolding before you that's all ghida that's nourishment for your soul but like junk food will destroy your body junk meaning will destroy", "People are really sick. And you wonder why? It's amazing we're doing as well as we are, to be honest with you. As far as I'm concerned, like I told people, people think the Muslims are violent. With what you have done to this community in the last 500 years, it's a miracle how peaceful the Muslims", "Tens of thousands. Syria, tens of thousands Libya, tens and thousands. This is just in our lifetime Palestine, just in the last year And then they wonder like why are they so upset? What's wrong with them? No it's a miracle that because this book is what keeps people you know they just one", "the really intelligent and devout ones know we deserve a lot of this as corrupts and as distant as we are from our tradition much of this is purification the prophet said uh the punishment of my umma's in this world it's not in the next world and so that's part of it", "things, but I'm convinced that the Muslims are far more peaceful than they're giving credit to our community. I'm serious. I genuinely believe that because we're one out of every probably four or five people. Now they're admitting that the population numbers are grossly under exaggerated and", "And the idea that we're the second largest religion. I mean, Europe if they're calling that a Christian... You know, Europe is Christian, they're empty. The churches are empty. Mosques are full all over the Muslim world mosques are fall. So this you know,", "Because this surah is about yawm al-qiyamah, it's about that Allah is qadir. First of all, qadr, Allah is capable of sending a warner and a messenger. So we're not deists or theists that believe in an impersonal God. We actually believe in a God who out of benevolence sends people to explain to us because everything", "of any sophistication when you buy it, you get the operating manual. Now one of the interesting things about human beings nobody reads operating manuals and then they get frustrated especially men women are better at that than men are but nobody reads the operating manuals You get a new car and there's a book They give you a book But you just try to figure out on your own", "and see which one turns this on or that on. This is a human condition. So Allah sent an operating manual, which are these books of revelation to tell us about this incredibly complicated creature. How you work? You have reason, you have emotion, you've appetites. They need to be aligned, they need to ordered. And here's how you do it. One of the ways is fasting.", "To learn to control your appetites. Another is swallowing your anger. To learn how to control you emotions so that you don't blow up, literally and figuratively because some people now literally blow themselves up they're so angry. So then how to operate this? How to make this function properly", "so we have a whole understanding that comes with it. So the khalq of the insan is very important and then Allah knows the innermost soul of that human being And if you look again, the consistency throughout the Qur'an because Allah says He gives the seven stages of our creation", "First stage. So our essential nature is mud and earth, like if you look at the things that we are composed of it's mud and Earth. It's mud but it's literally water and earth those are the two components of the planet and so we have in us we have calcium, we have potassium, we", "skeletal system and the muscles, the brain all these things. And so and then . And then we put the human being as a , and the is the zygote right? This is which is translated and I genuinely believe it's mistranslated as clot of blood. It doesn't mean clot of", "It's anything you tell a cubby shape so so that when the zygote comes down into the womb yet I'm luck it embeds itself Into the womb of the woman, so it literally it on look and then it's a perfect description of what it does And this is all microscopic. You can't see this we only know these things now So the Quran is very accurate in Even Keith Moore the embryologist admitted That the Quran really the first accurate picture of embryonic stages", "embryonic stages that and there was no access to this at the prophecy some they believed in the homunculus That there was a miniature human that just grew This was a common belief different different views so so The Mahalo can annul Tata Anna cotton So that's the alaq comes alaka it just clings to the it embeds itself whom mahalak, Nile anapatha mother gotten and then if it looks like", "it looks like a mudra is a chewed lump of flesh. And if you look at it at this stage, and this all occurs in the first 40 days that hadith was clearly misunderstood in India. Anybody who knows modern embryology knows. And there was a khilaf about the Hadith because there were an opinion that all happened in the 40 days even though it says . But it's not 120 days because it's way beyond that by even", "two days you already have uh the fetus has is developed the beginning of the the the fetis the embryo and then so the for halakna mudgata then the the mudra becomes irama and then look at the switch the cassona the only time in this in this uh", "and Raghb Ar-Risbahani said if you look at the difference between all those previous stages they're stages of khalq but the flesh is a clothing because the thing about clothes, you can replace them. You can't replace bone. You actually have to implant bone from somewhere else but lahm will grow back so he says kasawna al-'idhamah lahma isn't appropriate", "Then We created another creation", "intelligence that we've been given, that this is the intelligence that We've been giving. This is a glory or blessed is God, the best of creators, it's the one done with the ihsan. And then after that you will die", "that you will die like he's created us to die so we have to go through this next stage and like molana says i was mineral and then i died and became vegetable and then I died as vegetable became animal and then died his animal and became human and I will die as a human and become an angel what", "It just gets better. I mean, somebody told me today that Sidi Abdullah Shlaifer, I don't know if people who know him but he was a Jewish convert to Islam. He's very interesting man. I met him several times at different places but he had...he just died on the 27th night, right? So actually in...he died in", "He died in Turkey. But he had been a beat, he was a beat in New York, the Beats. People don't know The Beats, they're too young now but I'm there before me also. I'm old but I am not that old so The Beatz became the hippies right? That was the next iteration and then he...", "But he had a deep sense of justice, which many righteous, the real Jews do. They have that sense. That's why so many have been out protesting about what's happening. So he went and joined Fidel Castro in Cuba. And he said he was an atheist. And so when they won there, he said, okay, where next?", "and he said Palestine. So, he went and joined the PLO. This is a true story. And then he actually became Muslim with the Palestinians because not all of them were Marxist there was you know but he actually ended up becoming a Muslim. One thing that he told me he said they were much more like ethical than these so-called Islamists today just in terms of what they would do. But", "But so and then he you know, he ended up having a very interesting life but You know in this one amazing things about this religion is that all these different people find their place in it I don't know why I brought him up. There was a reason That he passed away", "So then Allah says that you're going to die. And then, like you're gonna be resurrected. And so this theme is constant throughout the Quran. You will constantly find this theme of resurrection and a reminder of it.", "closer to him than his own self and that's you know like Imam al-Bursari says when things are so close the Arabs say when people are very close to you they often don't know, you don't recognize who they are because they're too close. Like you can completely miss your spouse. You might have a very pious woman", "woman as a spouse and but you miss it because you're veiled by the closeness or and vice versa very often spouses don't recognize uh the blessing that they've been given if they're not careful so Allah is so close to us that we can actually be veiled from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala because of the closness", "We believe in the presence of Allah through knowledge. Because we're not pantheists, so it's important not to make that mistake either. So we have these two angels that receive everything. No word is uttered. And why? See, putting it in this", "putting it in this about the wa'id. So, this is a chapter about the dangers of neglecting the presence of the Day of Judgment and this is one of the most important reminders that everything you say will be recorded and you'll be answerable for it. And that's why the Prophet when he mentioned about the tongue and one of his companions said we're going to take into account what we say", "because it says if you're straight we're straight, if your crooked were crooked. Because the limbs don't want to go to hell so the tongue is right there. It's right there like you're hearing seeing the heart those are all you're responsible for them what goes in what comes out you're", "Don't say anything that you don't have sound knowledge of. Speak from certainty. When I was in Mauritania many, many years ago there was a sheikh that I met very elderly man and he talked so slow that it was actually just tough because he really spoke slowly and I thought he had a speech impediment", "he's known him and this is like decades, he said يُرَاقِبُ كُلَّ كَرِمَةً Like He watches every word that comes out of his mouth. This is what he told me about this man. He said he watches every Word and he said he puts it in the scale. Subhanallah! So people just don't think about these things مَا يَلْفِظُ مِّن قَوْلٍ No word will be uttered", "the one watching it and the one ready to record it right there's a watcher, a recorder right after that it's going to come so think about your life think about what you're doing think about... what you say what you are writing on these stupid forums all these things people are doing and not thinking about it", "about it. Because it's like a drunkenness almost, but it's stupid and some people don't even know what's happening and they realize nobody can help them at that point and they will all get there every tyrant will be there if nobody escapes this so don't think any of these people are going to get away with anything they do", "Fariquf al-jannah wa fariqf as sa'ir", "one of the people in New Jersey, he said everybody wants to go to Jannah but nobody wants to die. Death is the gift of the believer so we should want a long life because we're told to you know, the Prophet said don't desire death. He told us to ask for", "which is proof this isn't a death cult. You know, this idea of people wanting to die. Even in Sahih al-Bukhari he said don't want to meet the enemy in battle. Like that's actually a sickness. People that want to fight are not well. They're not well, it's a sickness All these people that want go and kill people. These are sick people they're unwell. And historically it's always been difficult", "always been difficult to get people to join that military. I mean you have resistance to drafts, people don't like to go to war with our species is not a species that actually there's only I think four or five species that are actually killed within the species if you look at rams, rams lock horns they", "If you watch cats fight, they don't use their claws when they fight each other. They're very careful about that. So you can see that animals won't kill other animals within their species. Humans suffer greatly from killing other people. A lot of trauma goes with killing people.", "but it's still the Prophet said, You will have for one of a better translation wiggle room with your Lord. You will some negotiating room with Your Lord as long as you haven't shed blood and one of the Salaf asked Abdullah ibn Omar he said give me some knowledge give me all of knowledge like", "The good question, impossible answer. So Ibn Omar he wrote back, he said write me something that has all of knowledge in it and so he said, he wrote him back, He said there's a lot of knowledge but he said but if you're able, he says don't let your tongue speak ill of anyone. Don't misuse people's money. Don' eat any wealth that is not yours", "not yours. And then he said, don't share in the shedding of any blood. Don't share it in the shedding of any Blood. And just mind your own business. Do what you should be doing. If everybody did what they were supposed to", "because so many of us, people talk about things they can't do anything about all the time. Nothing they can do about it but they love to talk. One Arab told me, this is the first time I ever heard this word, so for the Arabic students it's a good word. He said that we were talking about just in the Arab world, I noticed when I lived in one of the countries that they used to, when I'd go to the bureaucrat offices, you know it's very bureaucratic, it's almost like a Dickensian type environment. You go in and these people would", "These people, they call them sinecures. That's a good Dickens word. Sinecure is like a job where you don't have to do anything. Doge. So I used to go there and everybody all morning, they would read the newspapers and then in the afternoon they would talk about what they read in the newspaper. I'm not making this up.", "And I mentioned that to somebody. He said, So I didn't know what ijtarar meant but it's what the animals that chew the cud do. Like you chew and then the bolus they swallow it and then they vomit it back up and chew it some more. Then they swallow, vomit it, back up, chew it, some more That's what he said. So he called that ijtarrar You know just chewing the cud and we actually say that in English", "we were chewing the cud which means we were talking about things just you know nothing important chewing the cut is that interesting you know language humans so there it is you know after telling us every word is going to be recorded death is coming", "The day of judgment, the blast has happened. The first one and then the second one. And then... Every soul comes with it is a sa'iq and a shaheed. So the sa'aq is yasuquka min khalb. It's what we call in English a driver.", "is originally like for people that heard animals drivers they're the ones that heard the animal so there's a driver these angels that are driving you there's nothing you can do you can't make u-turns here you have to just go where you're meant to go so there' s a driver and then there's", "We will show them our signs in the self and on the horizons until it becomes clear to them that this is true. This recording, everything being recorded, everything, and we're told who could have thought of that? And now we have all of this, all your phone calls are recorded, there's supercomputers that analyze all this, everything's being recorded but our Prophet ﷺ told us everything's been recorded", "You know, I gave an in-service for diversity at the FBI. And I told them, I said, Muslims, we actually believe that God has an intelligence system. It's the angels. They're recording everything.", "recording everything and then I said even the telephone, everything you say on the telephone. And I tried to explain to them about Islam that real Muslims are people that are... The Prophet said, the Muslim is . That people human beings are safe from his hand and his tongue", "That's a real Muslim. Muslims are supposed to obey the law. If you can't obey the Law, you have to make hijrah. But this idea that you can just disobey the law... I mean even civil disobedience if you look at Thoreau, civil disobedance for Thorea was not violent it was not paying taxes. He stopped paying taxes because they were going to war against Mexico and he was put in jail and Everson came to visit him", "and he said, Henry what are you doing in there? And Thoreau said, What are you out there? Like in an unjust system this is a better place to be. But he wrote that famous Civil Disobedience but it wasn't about violence or destroying property or doing these things. That's a type of madness. They destroy their own homes", "with their own hands and Allah says, think deeply about this in the tafsirs they say how crazy it is to destroy your own homes with your own hands like the place where you live to destroy buildings. It's easy to destroy. It''s very hard to build Anybody can tear this down but look how long it took to build to do these things This took a lot of time", "one man doing all this work. But somebody could come in here and just deface it or blow it up, that's very easy for humans to do. But to build, and then look at what it took to build you, and the destroy that. What is that? So this is a serious matter. This is all gonna happen. It's all gonna", "You were in heedlessness about this. You were unaware of this and it wasn't that you weren't warned, you just didn't pay attention. You didn't play attention. It's like you get these notices in the mail and you don't open them and it turns out that it's about something you're supposed to do and then you all owe all this money or something because you just were in ghafla about it", "You know, you have things in your health that you just ignore. And then it gets worse and worse and worst. You don't want to go to the doctor because you don't what bad news. But then the more you delay it, the worse it gets. This is the ghafla that people are in. We removed this veil from you. Now your sight is piercing", "is piercing. And his qareen, so there's khidaf about the qaree in this chapter but in this one it's the angel. So this is what's you know it's all been prepared he's got it all he's prepared for this and then Allah says to", "to the sa'iq and the shaheeds, thrust them into Jahannam. It's very interesting so it doesn't say kafir it says kaffar which is a sigha mubalagha fa'aal is a sigha mubala in the Arabic language it's somebody who's constantly in kufr and so to be a kafir is just to deny Allah and his messengers that makes you a kafira but it's one denial", "is those who deny the blessings of allah because those blessings are happening every moment every day just the fact that you right now the majority of us in this room inshallah all of us we have normal temperatures nobody's had nobody has a fever who's keeping that at 98.6 on average who's", "literally travel throughout the body, any foreign invader. These are like the border patrol. Any foreigner invader, you know that in Islam, border patrol is one of the highest maqams and murabitun. Those are the people that guard the borders of the Muslims from foreign invasion. Those blood cells, anything that comes in that's foreign, they will immediately go to it, surround it. And they have these phagocytes", "consume it to protect your body and that's going on 24 7 while you're sleeping all the time I mean what a ni'mah, the immune system that Allah has given us and he the prophet told us about these unseen beings because Aisha asked him about ta'un. What is she said what is what is the the thought because he said", "like in war where you stab somebody or pierce somebody and then is a plague. So she said, this is the genius of Aisha. She said I know what that means. What's? And he said it's a pierce from your unseen enemies", "A pierce. It's a pierce from your unseen enemies. So he was describing plague. If you look, like just... You can Google this and see it because they have these images of how it does it. But when the virus comes to a cell, it literally pierces it and then injects it, the viral. It has to pierce the cell. It literally piercers it", "literally pierces it. And the jinn, there's no doubt that it's one of the meanings because jinn includes angels. If you look in Lisan al-Arab, angels are part of the unseen world. Jinn just means unseen. So these microbes that we can't see are our enemies. So the Prophet said the plague is from your unseen enemies meaning these viruses and bacteria that ta'un, that pierce you.", "And Allah knows if that's a biological weapon because the fact that he used a war term and then a term for plague, you know, Allah knows. Because this madness of our species, these insane people that are messing with Allah's creation. Shaytan swears an oath I will compel them until they change the creation of God. And that's what they're doing. They're changing, you", "Lyme's disease and this COVID, things like this. This is all from manipulation. And that's why the Prophet told us if you stop taking care of the ship, they'll drill a hole under you. The people who don't follow the hudud will drill a whole and you'll all drown. That's what the Prophet said. This our own fault. It's our Ummahs' fault. I mean not as personally but the Ummah lost its mandate", "We're supposed to stay within the hudud of Allah. And then مَنَّعْنِ الْخَيْرِ مُعْتَدٍ مُرِيبٌ مناع means again hyperbolic, they're constantly refusing to do good for people. مُعتَدًا يَأْتِدِّ عَلَى النَّاسِ They're aggressive people that aggress upon others", "aggress upon others, one of the meanings of that is they cause doubt. They sow doubt. The love to sow doubt in people's hearts. Those who put gods beside Allah, put them in this intense chastisement and then this is shaytan.", "So there's a, you know, there's the Quran tells us that they argue in hell. I mean and that also tells you about their personalities. You know? They didn't learn how not to argue in dunya because the Prophet he didn't argue. He never argued. He did have debate like he used to go to the midrash and he would talk to the rabbis but he wasn't somebody who would ever argue. Imam Malik never argued", "Imam Malik said, argumentation is not part of our religion. And flee from argumentative people. Just flee from them. If you meet people that... Because it's a sickness. People love to argue. They have these books on how to win every argument. I don't want to win", "Because Imam Shafi'i, this is our tradition. Imam Shafa'i said I never debated anyone except that I prayed that the truth would be on their tongue and not mine so that I could submit to it because his nafs would have a hub in winning the argument whereas if it came from the other person his naf had no hub so there was more submission in it completely different way of viewing reality completely different", "So he says the Qarin, I didn't lead him astray because see Allah doesn't and it's almost like He doesn't give the person the honor of having his declaration in this chapter. Because there is a missing part which is He says that's the one who led me astray so", "So the person who's going to help points to the Shaytan and says, no, he did it. He got me here. And then so the Qarin then says, I didn't do it. You see? And this is so Iblis, this is... And again one of the most amazing things. It really is one of truly most amazing thing about this book. And the more you get into this book, the more will realize this because the deep structure of this book is uncanny", "because it's from Allah, you will see this book never contradicts itself. But because it is a book that Allah created us to receive His revelation with tadabbur . It wasn't...it's not like a book where it just all spelled out to you. You have to think about it.", "to think about it because this is what we were created to do, to think, to ponder, to contemplate. The Prophet said one hour of meditation is better than 60 years of worship. Contemplation. This is our fort. This", "they're not doing thikr, they're all in dhikr everything the birds the bees the whales. The whales are amazing if you've ever heard those whale sounds but Allah gave us this incredible intellect and so he says I didn't lead him astray and this is why shaitan when he gets everybody once it's a what you know when the whole amr is done right", "When the when the is done Shaytan gets there and he said Allah He promised you and his promise was true And I promised you but i was lying So it's only a what?", "power over you he can't put a gun to your back right he can put a down to your all he can do is suggesting that's all that his power the power suggest which is it powerful suggestion very powerful but for somebody who has any inner sights any awareness so", "apparently on a minbar of fire and so he says to him I didn't have any authority over you I just invited you You responded to my invitation it was just an invitation RSVP It was just the invitation. You didn't", "could have said sorry, not interested. But you came. His declaration of to me is he's basically saying the blame game's over. You can do that in the dunya. Can't do it here. Blame game's", "Blame your own souls. I can't save you because they go to him, because they were with him in the dunya so then they go when everybody's going to them. They go to Shaitan, hey remember you promised us. Shaita says I can' t save you.", "associated with me i reject it i disbelieve in it the oppressors will have a painful chastisement now so that's it that's what he says we didn't we didn'y demonstrate but they can kind of feel bad they were woefully astray don't argue", "presence the argument's over though you had your chance there's no and you know there's a court to be and this is another thing about the yom uqiyamah which is so interesting because again everything in the dunya is to teach us about the akhira it's all it's", "not judged by his knowledge. He has to recuse himself, so if you saw the murder, the qadi doesn't judge but he's not a witness in his own because Allah does not judge by His knowledge. Allah doesn't need witnesses but He is letting us know, no here are the witnesses, you did this on such and", "it the hand doesn't want to go to hell he makes everything speak on that day i told you about this i told", "So, first of all, there's no... The qawl is... Allah promised, He swore an oath that He would fill hell with the insan jinn. So that's not going to be... And that's why the murji'iyah who were a group that actually believed that everything was just it was all takhweef", "that there wasn't really going to be like a you know any punishment or anything this was all just to scare people so this rejects that, that there will be people. There has to be. This is a promise. وما أنا بظلام للعبيد The Mufassirun said why ظلم here and they said because the عبيد is plural So if there was ظل for a whole bunch then it would be ظلام It would be hyperbole", "But there's other ones. We didn't oppress them, but they were oppressing themselves. Allah says to Jahannam, are you full?", "Are you full? And hell says, هَلْ مِن مَزِيدٍ So they take this from two different perspectives. One is that Jahannam's like there's more and the other is هَالْ مُن مَّزِידٍ There's still room down here. And then there's an amazing Sahih Hadith about the Qadm of Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala and in a Riwayat Rijluhu and these are the Mutashabihat in the Hadith", "Any any Nass that has some kind of Tashbih where it's anthropomorphic Like Allah is transcendent above anything Anything that can occur to your mind Allah is other than that so the words", "the words these words we believe in it according to whatever allah intended by it so those are and then the some of the later people were they made that wheel of it um i was once in a hotel in", "in England and there was a man, it was one of these places where you sit and wait. And he was actually having a beer across from me. And I remembered it was a Heineken beer, German beer. And was reading the Quran translation. He's like having this beer, reading Quran . And I said to him... You know, I was dressed in Western clothes and I said how are you finding that book?", "just put he said this book is amazing and then I said wow what's striking about it? He said it's tension release, tension release. Tension release that's what he said. He says like it's like hell and all these and then suddenly paradise and all they say so he says just constantly tension release and it just has a really interesting effect on you as he said to me. I just said to him that's amazing you got that from a first reading", "but see all that tension and now the release right this is this is for the people of taqwa not far not distant it's all near now because", "This is what you were promised because when they wake up in the grave from the second of the, you know, when the first blast, the second blast, when they awake up. Who's waking us up? The believers, that's what the kuffar say. The believers say, this is what the merciful promised and they use the merciful like", "Because we're aware of it. So awwab is the one constantly returning to Allah, hafidh, the one who guards Allah's hudud, the limits of Allah. Those who have khashya, the merciful. Those", "So there's a which is related to the letters that are all in it. So if a word shares the letters, it has some shared meaning. So like and knowledge and action they're related right? So this one is related in the to sheikh Which is a venerable person so khashya is a type of fear", "that is out of veneration. It's not like khawf, so a donkey can fear you, a cat will flee from you. That's khawaf, that's not khasya. Al-qit la yakhsha. Khasya has to be with some type of understanding of who you're afraid of. And that's why innama yakhshallaha min ibadi al-'ulamah", "know are the ones who have khashya. Tawf is something different. Bilghayb, bilghaybs so when nobody's there they have taqwa because a lot of people super Muslim at the masjid and then like I told you about that man who he was in Jeddah friend of mine", "who later made toba but he told me the story. He's Syrian and he said there was a guy, he used to come, he was like a mutawa'a and he would say, As-salah! As-salaah! And he'd come in and always hound the people. And he took a vacation in Egypt, he had a discotheque and he saw that man dancing. And went up to him and he says, As salaa! As salaah! The man just begged him not to tell anybody. But after that he didn't, he left people alone.", "But there's people like that. It's very strange, just pure nifaq. That's why it's man khashya rahmana bil ghayb, not in front of other people, not out of shame. And that's why the ta'a comes from love, the obedience to Allah. Love in the Quran, hub and ta'aa have the same amount of times they occur in the word.", "word hub and pa occur the same number of times in the quran it's one of the mu'jizah you know they have these what they call numerical miracles there are a lot of them like shahar 12. there are only 12 times shahars mentioned in the Quran because there's a whole bunch of really interesting ones like Allah says surely with hardship comes ease but then he repeats", "has a it has the article definition whereas is right. It's indefinite so ease is indefinit which means it's more than one whereas is So, with hardship comes ease and ease with hardship as mentioned again but the hardships the same one time where as the ease is more than", "And that's why Imam Ali, I think it was Ali one of the Sahaba he said that That to one Hardship will not be will not overwhelm two eases So if you look at ease in the Quran Yusr is mentioned 36 times Whereas Usar is mentioned 12 times. So it's three times the number", "Many examples of that. So, coming with a sound heart. It's a good heart and that's why working on the heart this is the work of the human being is to work on the", "don't be deluded by people that have these passports where they can travel anywhere in the earth. That's what Allah says, don't get deluded that these people who have passports can travel wherever they want on Earth. Like if you're from one of these poor countries, you can't go anywhere. You even have a hard time getting a passport in some countries. Don't be deluded that these", "He said the Prophet told him, no one will enter paradise without a passport. This is a modern word for passport, without permission which is the modern word of passport. Enter it into peace so and so the son of so-and-so", "We're going to show them our signs. This is the day of eternity, we're on the doors of infinity all of us were on the Doors of Infinity there's a door waiting for every single one of us in this room everybody on this planet there is a door it's your ajal and once you go through that door", "you go from the temporal to the infinite because we were created for eternity and that's why you'll never feel old your soul is not it doesn't age that's right doesn't matter how old you are you're going to feel the same in your consciousness your body will feel old you get up and suddenly realize I'm old but it happens just wait you're not there yet but you'll", "You hear sounds that you didn't hear when you were young. These are all people here laughing. Young people say, really? Look, see. So hell has... Yeah, but then Jannah. So what's the mazeed? Sahih Muslim. The Prophet ﷺ said", "that on the yawm, that Allah once he puts everybody in paradise He says to them like do you want anything? They say Didn't you brighten our faces? Didn't You put us in Paradise? Like what more could we want?", "Like what? Didn't you save us from the hellfire? And then it says that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala removes the veil. There's nothing more precious to them than to gaze upon their Lord. What time is it?", "Yeah Allah, I have to get through this. I'm almost done. So all these people that were destroyed look at them you can see their remnants go to Rome Go and look at these places Syria is filled with these places all these empires", "all these empires that came and went, they're all gone. They're just ruins. These ancient via, you know, these ancient roads. The Romans built all these roads everywhere so that they could move their armies quickly. All these things, they are all gone, all the Caesars, hail Caesar! But they knew more than these people today because one of", "Because one of the things that they did whenever the general came in who had won a great victory for the Romans, they had a victory parade. They'd always have a slave behind him holding the victory wreath over his head and whispering in his ear that it's all vanity. Vanitus. Just to remind them. Vanitous. It's all vanity. One day you're up, the next day you are down. This is dunya.", "Though dhinkhi dunyahay. Inni isba'i zara. This too shall pass.", "Didn't they travel in the earth? Don't they have hearts that they could use to look around them and see the nature of things? أَوْ آذَانٍ يَسْمَعُونَ بِهَا فَإِنَّهَٰ لَا تَعْمِلْ أَبْصَارٌ وَرَكَنْ تَحْمُلْ قُلُوبًا لَّتِي فِى الصُّدُورِ Didn't They use their ears and listen? There it is. This is the تناسب . You see, that ayah and this ayah is the tenasub It's not the sights that go blind", "the chest that go blind. It's not sight that goes blind. We created the heavens and the earth in six periods of time, a day with Allah is like fifty thousand in one, a thousand in another meaning it's just we can't reckon what a day", "reckon what a day is for the arabs elf was the highest thing in the in the jahili arabs in these six periods of time we created we didn't tire we didn were getting back to did we were we wearied by the first creation see it goes back to the beginning of the chapter because they the jews came to the prophet and they asked him how did allah create them and he told", "And the Prophet didn't say anything. And they said, what about after that? And the prophet didn't stay and they said astaraah he rested because in the Bible it says on the seventh day he rested. And so the prophet actually ghaadiba he got upset and that's when this was revealed. And then Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la said to them", "Be patient about what they say. Look and see again, Allah said Allah knows that your sadr in another he says it. See this is all related everything's rated in the Quran It's the same meanings that are coming in different contexts to show you", "of this amazing religion. And he says, just be patient with what they say. Because there it says, Like just be in tasbih. Be in sajdah. Don't preoccupy yourself with what the say. The chatterers are going to chatter.", "chatter. The detractors are going to detract. Suleiman Yang told me years ago, Allah yarhamahu he said don't listen to what they say keep doing what you're doing just focus don't get distracted because always there's going to be people on the sidelines telling you oh you're this wrong you're that wrong oh you know your truth and then just follow", "based on this amazing teaching. And then Allah is going to judge us on Yawm al-Qiyamah. He'll judge that there will be, you know, we'll see who's right, who's wrong. Allah told us, They didn't start differing until knowledge came to them. Each one saying, I know more than you now. There's people that were my students and", "and then they started attacking me after that. It was amazing, okay, that's fine, mashallah, you learned. We'll see yawm al-qiyamah, who's who, what's what, right? We'll all see, just be patient. There's a qantara, if I wronged you, we can sort it out but this idea of just, don't be one of those people, that is my advice to you, just don't", "but we should have started at 5 30. So adbar or idbar, there's two qira'a on this one. You know do some tasbih in the night and idbar as-sujud after you pray. And listen because that day when", "When everyone will come out of their graves. We bring life and we cause death, and to us is the مصير . You're headed back to Us. When the earth will bring forth and they'll come out hastily. This is an easy thing.", "The easy thing for Allah, yaseer, the hashar. Don't be deluded. The beginning of the surah is there and this amazing, like even look at Surat al-Nahl because one of the secrets of the Quran is the beginning and ends of the Suras. Like it ends So it starts with , it ends .", "The very last verse is, right? The disbelievers won't have any success. Look at Surat Al-Isra how it starts with Tasbeeh, it ends with Hamd. Look At Surah An Nahal Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala begins Surah Al Nahal", "Subhanahu wa ta'ala amma yushrikun The Amr of Allah has come, don't try to make it any quicker. And look at it says ماضي أتى أتى امر الله It's already come. The Amar has already come there is no past present future with Allah. It's all present tense. So the Amar is already there فلا تستعجلوا انكم قوم تستعدون You're trying to make things too quick. The Christians were there 191 years", "21 years in Palestine. The day they were meant to leave, they left. Everything will be in Allah's time not in our time and that is why this about patience. Look Sabr is mentioned 104 times Shiddah is mentioned", "So difficulty is mentioned 104 times, patience is mentioned a hundred and four times. The Prophet said this is the month of patience. We're supposed to learn patience and patient people say oh how long are we going to be patient? How long will you be patient?. You don't know what patience is if you say that because patience is", "be amazed at the difficulties of this as long as you're in this abode don't be bewildered by difficulties in this Abode because he said it is mustahakku wasfihah, this is the nature of the abode that you are in is difficulties.", "This is the nature of it. You won't get the honey without smoking the bees out. You smoke the bees, this is what Allah does in our lives. The worst thing for a spiritual path is a life of ease and every artist even an artist knows that you know ease destroys great art. This is a worse thing that's why Allah he", "The Prophet said, if Allah loves the people He gives them lots of tribulations. So this is the nature of the above. We know what they're saying. You're not here. You are not a dictator over them. You aren't there to force people to do something. You can't force people", "people to believe just give them the message remind them with this book those who understand what this is that's the day and so I was going to have you see here let's do we have enough time", "This is the summary. It's all going to be summed up right now. You're going to see the whole thing because Allah, one of the most amazing things about if you watch a film and this is one of worst things about films, if you watched it long enough even as a bad film you want to see what happens at the end. Everybody's nodding their head because it's a horrible experience that too many of us have had like cause you just wanna see what happened at the", "at the end. But Allah tells us what's going to happen, so you can leave this dunya knowing the end of the story. You don't need to be here for the thousands and thousands of years that humans are here. We know how this ends, and we will get all of the commentary on the Day of Judgment. You're gonna know who killed the Kennedys. You won't have them released. Everything will be revealed.", "Nothing will be hidden. Bismillah.", "والأرض جميعا قبضته يوم القيامة والسماوات مطويات بيمينه سبحانه وتعالى عما يشركون", "فصعق من في السماوات ومن في الأرض إلا من شاء الله ثم نفخ فيه أخرى فإذا هم قيام ينظرون وأشرقت الأرض بنور ربها", "أبن نبيين والشهداء وقضي بينهم بالحق وهم لا يظلمون وغفيت كل نفس ما عملت وهو أعلم بما يفعلون وسيق الذين كفروا", "وَالَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا إِلَى جَهَنَّمَ زُمَرًا حَتَّى إِذَا جَاءُوْهَا فُتِحَتْ أَبْوَابُهَा وَقَالَ لَهُمْ خَزَنَةُهٰ أَلَمْ يَأْتِكُم رُسُلٌ مِّنْكُMْ يัتْلُونَ عَلAYكُםْ آيَاتِ رَبِّكُмْ", "وينذرونكم لقاء يومكم هذا قالوا بلى ولكن حقت كلمة العذاب على الكافرين قيل دخلوا أبواب جهنم خالدين فيها", "فبئس مثوى المتكبرين وسيق الذين اتقوا ربهم إلى الجنة زمرا حتى إذا جاءوها وفتحت أبوابها وقال لهم خزنتها سلام عليكم", "وقال لهم خزنتها سلام عليكم طبتم فدخلوها خاندين", "وقالوا رضي بينهم بالحق وقيل الحمد لله رب العالمين صدق الله العظيم سبحان ربك رب الأزة عما يصفون وسلام على المرسلين والحمد للہ رب الآلمين الفاتح", "And the earth will shine with the light of its Lord, and the record will be set out. And the prophets and the witnesses will be brought, and judgment among them will be made according to truth so they will not be treated unjustly. And every soul will be recompensed for what it did, and God knows best what they do. Those who scoffed will be driven to hell in crowds. Then they will get there.", "there its gates will be opened and its keepers will say to them didn't messengers from among you come to you and recite to you the signs of your lord and warn you of the meeting of this day of yours they will say yes but the sentence of judgment is justified the sentence", "Those who were conscious of their Lord will be conveyed in crowds to the garden. When they arrive, its gates will be opened and its keepers will say to them, peace upon you, you have been good. So enter herein to abide and they will say praise be to Allah who has fulfilled the divine promise to us giving us the earth as an inheritance. We can live in the garden wherever we wish and how excellent the reward for workers", "Surrounding the throne Praising God And judgment among them will be made With true justice and it will be said Alhamdulillahi Rabbil Alameen Allahu Akbar Allahu Akbar Subhanallah SubhanAllah You know Alhamdullilah this month such a blessing And may Allah Insha'Allah inspire all of you to just Make a commitment to this book To study it, to learn", "to study it, to learn it, and to reflect on it. To try to apply it in our lives. This book is so extraordinary. One of the great scholars Thabit al-Bannani said I struggled with this Qur'an for 20 years and then I was just in absolute pleasure for 20", "mentions this in his Sharh al-Dahikam, he says that initially he had difficulty with the Qur'an. But then he said I began to experience it as if the Prophet ﷺ was revealing it to me and then he went to another level where it was as if Jibreel was revealing", "as if the was revealing it to me. So this is a book, if you put the time, you will be justly rewarded but it doesn't come easy. It's a book that just demands constant so we have the here, we're doing it tonight but there's also in Zaytuna once a month for those of us who are doing it 40 days, the prophet was asked about reciting the Quran he said", "asked him he said in one every 40 days that's the which is done here in this masjid and then he said i can do more than that and he said uh then a month he said I can do", "and then he said, so he went down to five in a riwayah three. So but always go with what the prophet first says you know really and I'll tell you why if you take on a practice you should do it until you die. The difference between them and us is one thing one of my teachers told me which is really useful piece of advice if you read a hadith that says to do something", "20 years one of his companions with him he said in 20 years i never saw miss the target once and that's how he was with the with those hadiths he always hit the target so if you're able to just take you know do it if all you do is yasin and waqia if what you do", "which was in the heart of every believer. The munjiyat are really also sajda, yaseen, dukhan, waqia, bayina, Allahumma salli ala Sayyidina Muhammad. There's seven munjiya surahs, al-balad. And then also... But if you can do a juz' in the morning and juz' in evening or a hizb in the", "If you just do half a page a day, just make up practice. خَيْرُ الْعَمَالِ أَدْوَامَهَا وَإِن قَلْبٌ So make this a niyyah for this month. Alhamdulillah, always you should be increasing, even if it's a little bit, just add something on. Ramadan should be a time where you assess your practice and try to add something out for the coming year. Just commit to one or two things and then do them. Inshallah may Allah give you all tawfiq, may Allah bless you, increase you, elevate you.", "those watching we need help to build, we're trying to build an institution. It's a difficult time where it's very unfortunate. We've seen things happening. It is just a difficult times. Nobody knows where everything is going but", "So Shaytan swore an oath, I'm going to sit and wait for them on this straight path of yours. I will sit in wait. And he said, I will come to them in front of them. In front of the and behind them. On their right side, on their left side. And you'll find most of them are ingrates. He swore that oath. He didn't say I will over them or under them because if", "Because if you're aligned with Allah, shaytan has no access to you. So just be aligned with allah subhanahu wa ta'ala have vertical alignment with allahu subhanhu wa taa and Shaitan has no Access to you stand in prayer and in sajdah he can't get you Yeah, he actually flees when the prayer comes, you know Subhanallah what a beautiful night to finish this beautiful class", "guidance for us on the and Shayk's commentary was incredible. I want to thank each and every one of you who have been coming through the process, especially our students, staff faculty, and our guests. So what we're going to do now" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Salafi People Follow Ibn Taymiyyah -- Shaykh Hamza_eG-NqPFLB18&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742881971.opus", "text": [ "You have to have Imam in Fiqh. You have an Imam in Aqidah. Who's your Imam and Aqida? Somebody say, oh well I just follow the book and the Sunnah. Who is understanding? The Book and the sunnah have to be understood so who's understanding it? Ibn Taymiyyah Okay then that's your imam and aqidha is Imam ibn Taymiyyah So don't say it's the book in the sunna say it", "Say it's the understanding of Ibn Taymiyyah. Now, the fact that the vast majority of ulama in the history of Islam after the 8th century were opposed to his understanding of many things and aqidah, that might not bother you. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe you think they're all wrong and he was right. That could be possible. Right? Highly unlikely but it could be", "could be possible. You have to allow for that if you're honest about the nature of knowledge. But, the Prophet said, Be with the majority. The Prophet said that, يَدُ اللَّهِ مَعَ الْجَمَاعِ Be with them. So, you have an imam in aqidah whether you like it or not. You can't get out of taqlid.", "We're all muqallidun. I mean, why? You know, when I went to Turkey, I had some shirts made. They make them like here, the women's shirt, they button on the opposite side. Did you know that, Fatima? Yeah, men's shirts, they bottom on the other side of women's shirts. So when I got Turkish shirts, I found that there are on the", "On the left side and you go over to the right because they follow the Sunnah. So, they like to put the right over the left. Wallahi he told me that I asked the khayat why you put this thing? He said Sunnah brother. So I had to get used to that. You know it's very strange when your whole life you've buttoned one way and then suddenly it felt very awkward but I was just muqallid", "I'm just following the culture I came from in how they put buttons on. Because you could do one or the other, right? The egg, you know people when they crack the egg, some put the pointy side of the egg up, some puts the broad side of it up. When you stir tea... Like I was stirring tea once in front of this Syrian, this way he said, that's the way they do it in Homs. In Damesh we do it like this .", "So even in the tea, there's taqlid. Right? So everything you're going to be following somebody." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Salafi People who are Misguided - Shaykh Hamza Yus__1748527117.opus", "text": [ "The Salafi people that condemn tasawwuf, they're misguided. But those who condemn the Sufis, it depends which ones are you talking about? Because there's a lot of deluded Sufies, there's all over the place. They're all over them with some world. Right? But they're just like everybody else. It's an overall misguidance. There's no exceptions.", "decadence that has afflicted our community is found in every group. That doesn't mean there aren't righteous people of Tasov out there and I would never deny that, but historically they warned against these things. Early on in the third century they're already saying things like... second century they were already saying tasov used to be a reality without a name now it's a name without a reality" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Salafi people who condemn Tasawwuf -- Shaykh Hamza__1743058759.opus", "text": [ "The Salafi people that condemn tasawwuf, they're misguided. But those who condemn the Sufis, it depends which ones are you talking about? Because there's a lot of deluded Sufies, there's all over the place. They're all over Muslim world. Right? But they're just like everybody else. It's an overall misguidance. There's no exceptions.", "decadence that has afflicted our community is found in every group. That doesn't mean there aren't righteous people of Tasov out there and I would never deny that, but historically they warned against these things. Early on in the third century they're already saying things like... second century they are already saying thing like Tasov used to be a reality without a name now it's a name without a reality" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Scholars from India and Pakistan - Sheikh Hamza Yu_tMJZX0luJi0&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743060570.opus", "text": [ "The age where they began to actually formulate the legal schools and theological schools. So you have to learn a creed, and then you have the Maturidi which is what they do here most of the Hanafis are Maturidhi. The Ash'ari and the Maturidi differ on around 13 issues there's some debate about that and even amongst those issues they consider majority of them to be semantic differences and not does Iman increase or not increase", "or not increase in actual ziyadat al-iman, or is it as you increase in knowledge, you just believe in more. So people that have more knowledge, they believe in these are the types of debates that they got into but these are negligible in relation to the overall picture so you have to learn one of those three as a basic and I mentioned earlier that traditionally the people of Tasawwuf", "were much more in the Athari tradition. They didn't incline towards speculative theology, they're very strict about just learning the basic theology and then moving on because it wasn't something... Ibn Atayla actually says that Allah won't ask you about his that and his sifat about explanations of them, you just have to believe in them", "the ahkam of salah, you know what's fardh, what's mandub, what sunan in it muakkadah for instance how you perform sujood as-sahu then you have to learn your fasting. The rules of fasting they're not hard but you have learn them and know like for instance it doesn't break the fast to taste something is makroo You should know that because some people think they put food in their mouth", "And the month is proven by seeing the crescent moon.", "And the Prophet said, and if it's cloudy then complete 30 days. It's a nas sariah. And there is no ijtihad when you have the nas. You don't make ijtiad. If there is a nas sarih, there is not ijthihad. So... Then you have to learn the zakat, how to pay your zakat. You have to know that...", "If you're doing commerce, you have to know what you have pay in terms of what's... Like if you are muhtakir, if you're somebody who holds goods for a higher price later or if your goods are always in circulation there is difference. So you have those differences and how to pay that. You have to now if it's jewelry, gold jewelry or silver jewelry whether or not you have the pay zakaran. Some say you do some say you don't but you have know that what your madhab says", "And then you have to do that. Because if not, you're holding on to something and it's prohibited. You have to know what a nisab is. You need to know when zakat is due. It's a lunar month. It' s not a solar month. Zakat is not income tax. You don't pay zakat on your house or on your car or something like that even though some of the zakat forms that they put have those things on them. Those are Ishtihadat of some modern people. And then", "and especially if you're in debt, you have to know about the Zakat related when zakat is not an obligation and when it's an obligation in relation to debt. And then you have the Hajj You have to make it once in your lifetime. You have learn the rules of Hajj The four wajibat of Haj, what's a rukan? What's wajeb? And then we have the four arkan sorry, and then you what blood how you rectify something", "What you can use and what you can't use. Because, for instance, alcohol is permitted. But you should know that in doing it. It's permitted to use in medicine. Even in medicines that people take if it's necessary to preserve it. And it's the best way to preserve them. So those are the type of things that you have to learn. And then if you're a merchant selling, buying and selling, you have learn the Ahkam al-Bai' wa Shira. If you're going to get married, then you have", "These are all fard'ain when you do them. Before you do then they're not considered farda'in, they're considered fard kifaya And then you have to learn enough tasawwuf to purify your heart of the internal things that Allah has prohibited because the Prophet said that", "Nobody will enter paradise if they have even the way an atom's weight of arrogance in their heart So you have to know how to deal with kibur first of all, you have what it is There's a difference between Kipper and a rigid right you'll bother enough You thought her up out of them in Ria II what has said then I was been working lead a he had to purify his heart from", "from Riyah and from Ujab, and from Hasad. And so knowing those differences is really important. Kibar you need another person to be Mutakabr With I'jaab you only need yourself in a mirror So vanity is something that is done... it's a person who is vain in and of themselves But kibr is ghamt al-naas batra al haq wa ghamta al naas", "the truth when it comes to you and its to have contempt for people seeing people as beneath you so you have to know those and then you have how to treat those things because there are ways to treat kibar. And so tasawwuf is an important aspect of Islam, I'm talking about tasawwwuf of akhlaq what we call tahdhibun nafs tazkiyutun nafas", "Suluq to Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala that is real and We're all going to Allah subhana wa ta'ala, but people that take a path of suluq a serious path of salute historically they have they have not been the majority of People in The majority Muslims so there's the path of salvation which is just to be saved And that that's the Path of the Bedouin man who came to the prophet salallahu alayhi wasalam and said if I just do this", "If I just do this, this, and this Am I going to paradise? He said yes And when he left he said He'll be saved if he follows that Which was to do the five pillars And then consider what was halal-halal And what was haram-haram That was enough for the Bedouin So that's a way of salvation But there's a Way of sanctification This is what the ulama say May Allah sanctify his soul A sanctified being Is", "what you call the Wali al-Khas. These are the awliya, and they're very rare people that their souls are sanctified, and there will often have signs of that sanctification, and certainly some of the people buried in this city, some of these people buried", "they're in the world, if people who visited some of the Salihin like Marabtar Hajj or Habib Ahmed you know these people were, you know if you meet them you'll understand what I'm talking about. If you haven't met them then may Allah inshallah enable you to meet some of those people because they're few and far between they're rare people but they do exist and they're people that spend their life really working on themselves purifying themselves, struggling against themselves", "against themselves and it's a long journey. And usually you don't see it until later in their life, you'll see the signs in their early periods of their life but it's after a lifetime of doing that work that it really begins to manifest. So that's an option for people but that's a different path of just learning how to work on the self and the tahdeeb. You should have a teacher", "Yes, how much you can arrive in Masada? You should have a teacher In and in your religion the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasalam had a teacher. I'll let me show you the power The Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala sent him jibreel and even though the teacher was less than the student That he still had a teach her the provost islam was commanded to recite the quran to some of the Quran reciters that were masters of the qur'an not because the provisional is it em", "But he was told to actually recite the Quran. Uvayy ibn Ka'b is one of them. And so that's an important aspect of the religion, that teachers are important and finding a good teacher, a teacher you trust, a teacheer that you feel safe with.", "In terms of learning the religion for preservation, this is an obligation on a group of people. That they shouldn't all go out. There should always be a taifa of people that stay behind in order to", "in order to learn the fiqh. So that they actually learned the fi qh And so even on jihad, they were commanded not everybody to go out because the jihad is to protect those people Right? It's to protect them. So if everyone goes out and then they all get killed and there's nobody to preserve their religion Because jihad was just one means of protecting the religion from any physical threats against it", "And then you have the spiritual jihad to protect the religion against spiritual threats against it. So this is important, that you have a group of people. That's a fard kifayat. For people that want to do that, they can do it over time. And there are scholars traditionally who... I mean, I'll give you one example. One of the greatest Mauritanian scholars, Muhammad Yahya al-Walati, he was actually an orphan and he was taking care of his mom", "mom and his siblings. And the way he did that was by transcribing books, but he happened to have a brilliant memory and he was incredibly intelligent. So he actually became an alim from copying out books to sell them because he would retain everything he copied out. He ended up becoming a scholar. Muhammad Yahya Al-Walati who's recognized in West Africa as one of the greatest Mauritanian scholars, he was a complete autodidact", "act very rare but it does happen you self-taught didn't have a share very rare, but it doesn't happen he's proof so learning from you know those things and then you have a home where I'll pay that them before what the soul who added to be hash or there is a turkey below alone. So the most important is up either the next is for work and fit not also live you have to learn the floor", "Al-Furu'a first, because those apply to you and then you learn Usul. And the next one is Tasawwuf, Tazkiyah. And that Aalatun biha Shuru' means a tool with which you begin with, which is the Arabic language. Now fortunately, I mean this is in Arab countries but fortunately increasingly we're creating a corpus of material", "In the English language, just like the Turks have their own books that explain the religion to them. The South Asians in Pakistan... There are Pakistani scholars of Islam and Indian scholars of islam who most of their knowledge has been through the vehicle of Urdu They have tafsirs they have Books on hadith everything now they do learn Arabic but much of what they read is in Urdu", "and that is increasingly happening in the West. So you can have people who know a lot about Islam, but they might not know Arabic. But to become a preserver of Islamic knowledge, you have to learn Arabic because our canonical language is Arabic. It's the language of our liturgy, it's the langauge of our Sharia. And so it's important to learn it.", "Arabic you can do that over time and then you get a baseline set of knowledges so you learn for instance in fiqh, you learn a basic text like in the Maliki Madhab Al-Akhdari for prayer and Tahara or the Ashmaweeh for prayer, tahara and fasting. And then you learn Ibn Asher for the five pillars. You learned the Risalah which is just", "a summary of the whole Sharia for the most basic level. And then there's books like Ta'izziyah and Aqarub al-Masalik or Tahdhib as-Salik, many many books that are those between advanced and beginning. They're little more than intermediate but they're", "So you have these in all the Madhhabs, and they're well-known texts. And they all say the same thing basically. The commentaries are different but the text is very much talking about the same things. Same abwaab, same chapters, same subjects. They just have different levels of detail. And then in the Maliki Madhab, the Mukhtasar Khalil is considered... ...the book upon which fatwah is based.", "it's the fatwa and it has its limitations in the Mu'ammarats because a lot of the modern problems are not really dealt with. And this is one thing Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayya said, especially in economics there are many problems today that classical books did not deal with because they didn't have fractional reserve banking, they didn t have inflationary problems, they dn't have the types of buying and selling schemes that exist today,", "but not all of them. So that's fiqh, and then in Arabic you have basic texts like the Ajr Rumia, you have Qatrun Nada, you Have the Al-Fiyef Ibn Malik, Moulhat al-'Arab is an intermediate text, The Al-fiyef ibn Malek, in the classical tradition there are now modern texts that are used like Shadar Arfi Fannasarf by Alhamlawi which is a good book", "but it's not, the earlier books were memorized generally so the people that mastered them are much stronger in Arabic. And increasingly again we're having good materials in English to teach Arabic So if you're trying to learn Arabic there are some good materials out there now that are coming out and so those things you can do and you can continue on in your studies There are some online courses that are developing", "If you're not able to do that, Imam Afroz works with the Seekers Guidance. They have online courses. There's other online courses You have the Dean Intensive programs that are weekend programs that very good what Dr. Aish is doing and then you have the possibility of going to like somewhere like Zaytuna College", "Zaytuna College. There's some good schools for the males in England and in the United States, and in South Africa, in the South Asian tradition, the Darcy Nizami tradition. There are some good school there. And there is obviously some limitations in terms of modern application", "which we're all struggling with. But there's some really good scholars, Abdurrahman Youssef from Threshold, White Thread Press. He's doing amazing work. Imam Tahir in the Bay Area. Some of these up-and-coming young traditional scholars from the Diobandi and the Brelvi traditions that you find.", "So, and then Zaytuna Institute, ZayTuna College is what we want to do is have graduates that have a baseline education in the Islamic tradition with some understanding of the western context for it.", "I would definitely recommend it as a college liberal arts type of training. What we want to do is have a seminary branch which would focus solely on traditional madrasa curriculum with some of the tools that Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayy has given us like", "really, really excellent works that are taking the tradition and making it relevant for the time we're living in today which is really important." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Secrets of First chapter of Quran - Shaykh Hamza Y_kvrfMtAGL34&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743300119.opus", "text": [ "Alhamdulillah. The next section is about what are called the Qawari of the Quran, Qawar'a al-Shaytan. And these are the... You know that Qari'ah in Arabic is a... There's a chapter called Al-Qari'atum Al-Kari'a and Al-qari'aa is something that strikes", "It's the name of the day of judgment, al-qari'atu. And it's also a musiba. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala talks about the qari'a that afflicts the people of kufr or it will be in their vicinity. And so the qawari'ah of the Quran, this is actually a technical term that Imam Al-Ghazali uses and it was used before him. There's actually a book", "There's actually a book by one of the Central Asians called Qawari al-Quran. So this was a term that was used to mean those verses of the Quran or surahs that are recited daily and they're recited to taqra' shayateen, to actually withstand the assaults of the shayaten so they protect a believer.", "of the really important verses. And one of things about the ummah historically is that they were, because so many people were doing these verses on a daily basis there was a herd immunity for the whole ummah. They had a herd immunity but as they fall into ghafla and less and less people do this", "lessons and diminishes until you can be invaded, just like viruses come into you or bacteria if you don't have immunity. And so these are really to protect us as individuals. And one of the things that Amir Abdel Qadr al-Jazairi, the great Algerian mujahid, he said in his muwaqif", "of the sinfulness of the Ummah. And he said that the inayat will remain for individuals, so the way we restore that inayah for the Ummat is by a critical mass of believers that are actually doing what we were told to be doing and staying within the hudud of Allah . Because when you have large numbers", "they get impacted by that transgression. So the Fatiha is one of the most, it is the single most important for this and this is why Allah has put it at the center of his book. It literally is the entire Quran in seven verses so all of the Quran is in the Fathiha", "He recited it for healing. Ibn Qaym al-Jawziya says that he used the Fatiha and Zamzam to be healed of a serious illness that he had when he was in Mecca. It's been used as a Ruqyah, which is a type where you actually recite over sick people. There's a famous story of Imam Sahnun who was known as Al Raqi because traditionally", "Traditionally they would recite the Fatiha and then take some spittle and just put it on the sick person that they were treating from the prophetic Sunnah. And one of his students after Imam Sahnoon passed away, he would go and they would ask him to do the Fathiha over the sick", "to some of the it's permissible to take on , not just stipulated, but to take if the person gets well immediately. Not if they don't and so they used to get well immediately and afterwards his student would do the ruqya and they wouldn't get well. And they would ask him you know when did that? They would get well he said is the same I think it's in the spittle", "In other words, you know I'm not of his maqam so I don't have that kind of power to operationalize the Fatiha in a way he could do that. But the Fata is the Shafia it's a healing surah and we recite it every day. It has many Asrar Sayyidina Ali said that he could fill 70 camels with commentary", "with commentary, 70 camels with commentary. So the secrets of Fatiha do not end and there are many, many secrets in it so it begins the book and Al-Fatihah which Al-fateh is a name of Allah and Al Fatah the opener and the one hyperbole of Al-fatah is fatah, yeah fatah. And so the Fatiaha they call it opening technically its literally", "It's literally the one, it's a fa'il. It's the one that opens. So the Fatiha opens the Quran and it begins according to Imam Shafi'i and some of the Quran not all of them. Imam Nafia which is the Qiraa of Imam Malik, the recension of Imam Maliq he begins with Alhamdulillah Rabbul Ameen so this is a khilaaf. Some of them everybody's in agreement there are seven ayahs", "Ayahs, because it's Sab' al-Mathani. What they're in disagreement about is that is about the last ayah some split it into two and then about this Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Rahim Imam Maik did not consider the Bismillah from the Fatiha and that's why he in his Madhhab you don't read it in the prayer so but", "It's in the Fatiha, al-Rahman al-Rahim. So this is naba'un anadhat. This informs us about God's essence. When we say bismillah, there's a different debate about what type of ba that is. Ba al-isti'ana, right? So there's some debates about the ba. But the bismillahi is in the name of Allah or with the name", "I seek help with the name of Allah. So, the Bismillah is the opening and then Ar-Rahman Ar- Raheem these are the two attributes that Allah has chosen to define His essential nature and they're both from Rahmah and they are the attributes that allah has chosen", "of his attributes, like the Prophet , all those attributes. The prophet it's called . It's taking on these qualities that Allah reveals to His servant through His creation and the proof for this there are many proofs but one of the proof is the Prophet saw a woman once suckling her baby", "obviously it was under the hijab so he wasn't exposing her nakedness. But, he said to the companions do you think this woman would throw her child into the fire? And there was also the woman who was running to find and when she saw the baby she grabbed it and clutched it", "and he said to his Sahaba, do you think this woman would throw her child into the fire? And they said no she would never do that because the mother, the mercy of the mother. And he said Allah is more merciful to His servants so what He was showing was that tajalli of His mercy because every mercy in... Allah has a hundred parts all", "So he saved 99 for the Day of Judgment. So all the mercy that exists in the world is for the one part of Allah's Rahmah. The other 99, He's reserving for the day of judgment and He said if you see a mare make sure that she doesn't step on the foal, that's out of the Rahmuh. That's from that part of Rahmoh that Allah put into the world so all the", "in the world is from the mercy of Allah. Every mother that gets up at night when she hears her child cry, you know every person that defends somebody, every person who gives charity to help somebody, and every physician that goes the extra mile out of compassion for a sick person or nurse that takes care or somebody who has an invalid husband", "serving. All those acts are from the Rahmah of Allah . So that is why the Qur'an begins with Ar-Rahman Ar-Rahim and there's a lot of differences about that but Rahman was a unique name, Quraish did not know it this", "about the Quran is that there's so much newness in the Quran. And Rahman was one of those names, it's not permissible to name a person Rahman. You can call them Rahim but not Rahman . The Prophet called Rahim in the Koran as an attribute, it is one of his names Sayyiduna Rahim. So the Rahman is the mercy in the dunya , the Rahim is the Mercy in the Akhirah according some others say the Rahmah", "of creation in his general love for all of creation i wrote about this in the prayer of the oppressed the rahim is the specific love that he shows to the people of taqwa to the", "And so, Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Raheem. He says this informs us about God's attributes and fills people with hope and longing. So that it's encouragement to obey Him. That's why he begins the book. He could have begun the book with other attributes but he chose these attributes because he is calling us to him.", "And the first hadith which I mentioned earlier, which is called the Musalsal Bil-awwaliya is Arrahmun Yarhamuhum Arrahman. Irhamu man fil ardh. Yarhamkum or yarhamukum man fis samaa. Those who show mercy, mercy will be shown to them. Have mercy on everyone in the earth. Man, Sighatul Umum. Have Mercy on everyone. Even the one, the Mujahid according to Imam Malik", "He is Rahim because he's stopping people from their oppression. So to stop an oppressor, even if you have to fight them, it's actually out of an act of rahmah. It's actually an out of a act of mercy to do that and so this is the thing that will make us understand our Lord most is understanding the beginning of al-Fatiha.", "Alhamdulillah, Rahman, Raheem or beginning of the Quran if it's not from the Fatiha. And then AlhamduliLlahi RabbilAlamin. Hamd there is hamdal qadim lilqadim the praise for the eternal, the praise of the eternal for the hadith, for the created, the praises of the created for the Eternal and then the praise", "And that's why the Prophet ﷺ is called Muhammad. But he's also Ahmad, which is the one who praises more than anyone else. He does more praise than anyone other. So he's Muhammad. He's the most praiseworthy. So, he's the one that praises and he's one who's most praised. And his name is Muhammad. If that's not a miracle of our Prophet ﷺ then I don't know what's a miracle", "Prophet ﷺ, just the fact that his name is Muhammad. That's his name and everywhere around the world he's praised. We're in California we're praising him ﷺ all this everything that comes from this is through him and by means of him. Everything we have is from him and through him, and by mean of him so wherever you are on the earth there's people praising the prophet nobody has praised Mary is the second most praised person probably", "But the Prophet, peace be upon him... And Allah says that's another miracle because that's clear in the Quran also. That he raised her to that place, that station that she has. So the Prophet , that's his name, Muhammad. No matter what anybody says about him it doesn't matter in that way. He said they talk about mudhammam you know the blameworthy? He said I'm..that's not me.", "When they think they're talking about him to denigrate him, they can't even say his name. They say other things like Muhammad or something. It's not his name, they cannot even say it. That's what he said, he removed their tongues from my name so that they can even curse him . And then the foundation of is comes", "comes from gratitude. And I've said this before, but one of the ways that we praise people is through ovations like clapping, bravo, or standing ovations because what you're doing it's an expression of gratitude for the incredible performance that somebody has given a great orator", "or a civil servant, or somebody who has done something immense for humanity when they give them prizes. These people that give them prices like Jonas Salk who gave the world the polio vaccine and wouldn't patent it because he didn't believe you should patent something that would benefit humanity. Like we should do these things de gratis.", "is you know gratitude and so what we do five times a day is we give God a standing ovation. We stand up for him to give him a standing ovations for this just looking around and just seeing just how beautiful the world", "He made it beautiful. Even his terror is beautiful. A tsunami is beautiful, people will watch it just to see it, a hurricane. People go to places where these things are happening to see them. There's tornado chasers because even his terror", "do we stand up and that's what this is about alhamdulillah these are the hamidun and and the prophet sallallaahu wasalam his ummah are called the hamidoon because we say alhamduli'lalaa about everything we say Alhamdullilah even when things are horrible", "I mean, that's from the Prophet ﷺ who taught us to be Hamidun no matter what happens. We're Hamidum because it's all from God. And then he says this is the beginning of the Siratul Mustaqeem just to say Alhamdulillah to be from the people who praise. That's that you've entered into the path once you become somebody who praises his Lord.", "الحمد لله رب العالمين الشكر إشارة إلى الأفعال This is gratitude. It's all an indication of these actions, like it's gratitude for everything. له كل شيء The Qur'an says he has everything and so we have gratitude for every thing in our praise for everything", "too, because Rabb al-Alamin he's the Lord of the worlds. I mean some say Alamin because it's called a plural of the rational Jamal Aqil right? Because Awalam is Ghairaqil It's the plural of Ghair Aql so he could have said Rabbal Awalam but he said Rabb al Alameen So some although he called cats Tawafoon and Tawafaat", "You kind of suspect that maybe they do have some aqal because they're very mysterious creatures. But he called them tawafun, the ones that just walk around your house because it's what they do all day long. They just walk through your legs and when you pray sometimes they'll walk around you. So the Rabb al-Alamin are the Lord of the worlds", "the world and rab is the one murabi it's what that's one of the meanings is the nurturer he's the one that takes the echo he's creator of the acorn but he's", "even see you can it's very, very small right but you can see it with a microscope. It is yellow and the Prophet said it was yellow he said that the woman's water was a yellow opaque yellow which one of his miracles and those two come together and this explosion happens", "4, 8, 16, 32. It's just... And suddenly you've got billions of cells and those cells are all working together. And from those cells you get the liver and the kidneys and the brain and the heart and the eyes and then the ears split at a certain point. And the Prophet said, الَّذِي شَقَّ البَصَرُ وَشَقِّ السَّمْعِ Now we've seen through the miracles", "science the splits that occur they're literally shock that occur in the ears and in the eyes. And so the Prophet used the exact word to describe what's happening, and all of that is happening... The miracle of life just in those few moments what happens is beyond belief you're into millions of cells in a very short period of time complete miracle that", "You created me in my mother's womb as a janeen, as an embryo. And you were mine before you were my parents.", "You nurtured me. You gave me sustenance in the womb of my mother. I mean, we were in three veils of darkness. All of us, every single one of us that's alive on this planet or who has ever been alive on", "He is al-Khaliq al-Bari al-Musawwir. In whatever surah, in whatever form he wanted to combine you. He used the word Tarkiba which is the word they use now in Arabic when they talk about the DNA all the combinations of DNA.", "of just the coding of one human being. And that's why to kill a human being is like as if you killed all of humanity. To take one life out of the world, it's as if You've taken all of Humanity because in essence You have. So He is Lord of the World and then Ar-Rahman Ar- Raheem there's no repetition in the Quran", "He's saying don't think this is repetition. There's no repetition in the Quran. There is never any repetition. Because something that's replicated doesn't add any more . So he again is reminding us,", "that rabbal alameen is the rahman or rahim like he did it with mercy intended right so allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to show them mercy like he told us that they're all disagreeing but he created them for liturhamu", "And then there's two . There is actually more. There's Malik and but the two famous ones that people recite in which is on , they say with a, you'll see a dagger in the in the . The original Uthmani is but that was added.", "So the Malik is, every Malik as Malik. But not every Malak is Malik and it's the distinction is important because this is really beautiful in Arabic. You need both because the Malek does not have even though he's sovereign a Malik if he's not Malik then the", "Then the mulk is not his so the king like King Muhammad in Morocco, Allah yafadhu, King Muhammad In Morocco Is He's the Malik but he has no authority to go into the homes of the people and take their goods or anything like that But if he's malik then he can So Allah says he's Maliki omitin and Maliki Omitin. He's both", "He's the sovereign and he's the one who possesses all that is in his mulk, in his kingdom. And so he can do what he wants with it because the owner can do whatever you want. If I took this phone and I threw it over the Golden Gate Bridge which from time to time I'm tempted to do if I did that it's my property. It might be illegal to do it on the bridge but", "So, this is an example of a person who has taken something that's not his own.", "So this is an Ishaara ila al-akhira fil ma'ad. So this the eschatology, what comes after and the yom is the last day It's called Yoma al akhir, the last Day and din, Din is a really interesting word because it's related to debt so in some ways it's the day that debts fall due everything has a reckoning in life and so There's a day when the debts are going to fall due the accounting is taken", "Al-Hisaab, the day of accounting. The day of reckoning. This is when the tax man shows up and you have to show all your... And they do all their... And then they say, You haven't paid your taxes. That's an auditing. And then you get fined. In some cases if you did it intentionally like sinners, then you go to jail. So this is the dunya. Everything in the duny", "Everything in the dunya is to give us analogies for the akhira. So there's a day of reckoning. You think you can just eat? There's no free lunch. Do you think you could just eat and drink and enjoy all this? Does the human being reckon that he'll be just left without any accounting?", "went into creating you all of this thousands of years, all those people that survived wars and famines and plagues to bring you into existence in this time, in this day. And you think that your life is meaningless and that you can just simply do whatever you want and there's no accounting doesn't work like that. Doesn't work", "in the fact they had to remind us that day is coming it's an indication of the life to come and then yeah can I boo do what you're gonna stay in this again the Quran it's just amazing first of all if I said if Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said now Buddha her yeah can i would do if we said naboo duka when a stain oka in Arabic two things about", "So when you say, it separates it. It's a transcendence. Like we know that God is... So even in the rasam, there's a spiritual indication. Like your transcendence, you're so beyond me. But then if I said, in Arabic,", "and I also worship Laat, and Uzzah, and others. Whereas when I say, and I bring the mansoob, the mafa'un bihi muqaddam forward, it means you alone. It's for hasar. So, means only you. I only worship you. And I only seek help from you. Even... That doesn't mean you don't seek help", "That's a sabab, that the help is from Allah. What the Prophet told his uncle's son, his cousin, he told him, Ibn Abbas, if you seek help, seek help only from Allah, meaning that you recognize all the asbab", "the Asbab. So highlight two important, this highlights two important pillars of faith sincere worship of God the spirit of the straight path and none other than God deserves worship the essence of Tawheed so now look at this so there's the Tahliya is in the Ibadah", "remove your negative qualities without Allah's help. And that's why the most successful addiction program in history here is the 12-step program, which was done by somebody who had a deep faith and he begins by saying that you acknowledge a power greater than you. That's why it works because they're acknowledging", "they're acknowledging Isti'ana. I can't do this on my own because the addict fails over and over because he's relying or she's relying on him or herself. When they rely on God, they can do it but when you rely on yourself, you're left to yourself and you can't", "So that, إِيَّاكَ نَعْبُدُ وَإِيِّاكًا نَسْتَعِينُ اهدِنَا الصِّرَاطَ الْمُسْطَقِيمُ So here's the straight path. A question and a supplication that is the marrow of ibadah. So the question and the supplications are the marrow worship and it reminds us about the need of supplicating which is the spirit of servitude just being in need that you're عبد الله", "So the path of those that you blessed. Not the Sirat Ghayr al-Maghdobi. So that's the Mudaf to the Sirah. Mudaf ilayhi. Mudauf.", "nor those who have gone astray. So not those who incurred anger, who are those who've incurred Anger? In some of the commentaries they mention specific groups but Allah didn't mention specific group in the Quran for a reason because this applies to anyone", "and act in contradiction to the truth. Those are the مَغْضُوب عليهم They know what they should do, and they don't do it That's how you incur the wrath of Allah You know murder is wrong, and yet you murder You know theft is wrong and yet steal For a Muslim we know a lot of things We know usury is haram We know alcohol is haraam", "you're incurring the Ghadab. The Dhaleen are the people who don't know, they're just astray. They don't have knowledge, they haven't been given knowledge. In the Quran when Allah says, أَلَمْ يَجِدْكَ ضَالًا فَهَدًا Da there does not mean astray and this is why in Arabic,", "to Yaqub that he's in his dhalal, in his previous dhala. It means his love so because when people fall in love there is a kind of you go little bit astray when your in love and so it was used to mean somebody who's in love, dhal, he's", "He's dhal, but he was never astray. And he found you looking for him in love. So he guided you.", "The awliya, these are his allies. You know the awliyat, these the ansar, the people that support God in the world. God needs no support but he has told us to be ansar. In tansur Allah yansorkum Like if you help God, God will help you. That's why they said some of them one of them but you know one of these clever deviants said you know oh is God is poor", "Like he's asking for our money. So what, he's poor? Right? So no, you're the poor one. He's testing you. It's a test to see you claim that you love God. You claim that believe in Allah. You claimed that you are Sadaqatu Burhan The hadith says charity is a proof. It'a demonstrative proof of faith. So if you're not giving it", "it then where's your faith allah doesn't need it so this also is to give us raghba and rahba. Raghba is this kind of hope desire and rahaba is fear", "It's like a deterrent. De terere, from the Latin, out of fear. That's what a deterent is. That' why in the Quran they translate لِتُرْهِبُ عَدُوَ اللَّهُ وَعَدوكُمْ to strike terror in the hearts of your enemies, the enemies of God and your enemies. That not the right translation. It's to deter. You deter! And terror is in deter because you", "Because they don't want to fight you because they see how powerful you are. That's why, أَعِدُّوا لَهُمَّ اسْتَطَعْتُ مِن قُوَّةٍ Be strong so that they are deterred from attacking you. So when we become weak then they come and they take over your lands. That is why people say oh this national defense it's crazy. Countries that...that's what they do.", "There are people out there that are going to take over your country. This is the dunya. If they're stronger than you, they'll come. Oh, that's good land. They've got lots of minerals there. Oh! There's uranium. We need uranium. You know? Look at...they don't have any national defense. Nowadays they do it very...you know, they come saying", "Because we have this international, you know all these, the enlightenment brought all these ideas like human rights and what we should like. So now it's just they do it through deception but it's the same thing. It hasn't changed. Just different. You know we're bombing you because we care about you. That's all that is. There still, it's still the same things. People suffer people die. But when your strong right? Teddy Roosevelt walk tall and carry a big stick", "That was what he said his foreign policy was. You know, just so nobody messes with you. So traditionally the Muslims that's the way they were. Everybody was in awe of them. They didn't want to attack them but when they used to go... In Andalusia they say that the Christians used to send spies down and then they'd ask what they were doing. He said oh they're all studying there they get up at night there they do a lot of furosiyah", "military, and they said not time yet. Sent later come back still same situation not time it's a comeback oh we now they're partying a lot they have a lot of their drinking wine there are listings there are a lot poetry recitations a lot right? And they said it's time that's what happened that's why you have to you know", "in this country who actually they're just useful idiots. They don't even know it because there's countries that really want to see this country go down, a lot of people want to this country to go down and but they are also you know there is an idea be careful what you wish for because there are other countries out there that have a very different I mean at least you find", "Abu Ghuraib. At least you find out about Guantanamo. There's countries where you don't find out any of these things and if you try to they kill you it's as simple as that so Allah knows best we just ask for whatever is good for us, we ask it from Allah but for you to think that you can decide what's good for you it called istikhara for a reason", "good, you know make it happen and if it's not don't make it happens. So we don't know but there is a lot of people that are supporting they're really what Lenin called useful idiots. You know they think that they're doing good but actually doing the enemy's work for them. And one thing that Thomas Sowell said about the communists he said he read a book", "called When China Shook the World. There's a couple different books that have that title, but the one he read was written about the takeover of the communists in China and he said, he read it when he was young man, I mean he is 90 now or 91, he said he read when he as a young man and he says that the book made the argument that it was through the educational system", "and then when they were ready, they had all their minions. He said he found it hard to believe that but he said now watching American academia for the last 40-50 years, he said it actually makes perfect sense that's how they do it. You destroy trust in institutions you teach them all these ideas to hate authority even though when it breaks down", "for people and in particular, for women. When things break down the Tigray women right now they're begging for real men because they're being raped horribly. I mean what's happening in Ethiopia is so beyond belief it's just beyond but you know you see these sayings and it's like where are the human beings? It just really makes you wonder like where", "Opening contains all of these meanings All these things that he imam al Ghazali Right. He gave us ten do you remember it has eight there's only two that aren't in the fatiha So it has vicar with that the divine essence It has a divine attributes it has the divine works it has life to come it has straight path and it has both Tuskegee and Talia", "And then it has, It has all eight. The only two it doesn't have are, Which he says the reason for that is because these are the least important aspects of his message. And so he did not put them in. One is arguing with the kuffar.", "which is and the other is the details of the Sharia because of the danger of becoming these legalistic people that lose the spirit so he left those two out for that reason not they're not important but they're", "The Fatiha opens all eight gates of Jannah. So each one of these opens a gate of Paradise. Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Raheem, if you use that as the beginning. The other one is Sirata al-Ladhina Ana'mta Alayhim and then the second ayah is Ghairul Maghdubi Alihim wa Radda'al Liyin. So that's Imam Warsh an Nafi. So those are the eight.", "So, alhamdulillah, we'll stop there inshallah. Anyway difficult time so my apologies for it's a little difficult to get through some of this stuff today but may Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala make it easy for our brothers and sisters wherever they are there's a lot of suffering out there and we're blessed you know just to be in safety and security and may Allah maintain it you know", "And may He give us the ability to help others that aren't in these kind of conditions, help them get out of their conditions, inshallah, at least with prayer. So does ana mean different universes? I mean obviously there are different dominions. We use universe to say everything that is in the world that we're in.", "that we're in. So this is the mulk, there's the malakut, the jabarut and then the malacut in relation to the mulq is like a huge desert in relation", "you but knew now we know I mean we don't we have put it this way we know more about the vastness of the positions of the stars because of telescopes and things like that it's still we don' t know. We don't know how fast this thing is, but it's huge. Why are certain stories in the Quran repeated multiple times? One of the", "The things that children demand is that you tell them the same story over and over again because it's the way they learn. So, they want to hear it again. And I used to read to my boys and I would get really bored with the stories so I would switch it up and try to like tell it differently than it was in the book. They would get so upset. That's not the way it is. Please read it the way", "something else is going on here. So, and then also there's no replication they're not repeated like Imam al-Ghazali said every story when you see it again is told in a different way I'll give you one example in one narration it says that Moses threw down his staff", "a jinn, you know it was Jinnah like it was a so in one it was Hayatun Tasaa It was a Hayat un tasa. So in one is Tha'ban and the other is Hayat Un Tasa well the difference between Tha-ban Tha's Ban is like a python Haya is a small snake so there's a difference of opinion about it but what I prefer is that it was", "But large snakes are very slow. Whereas a Haya is very fast. So it was big in its size, but fast in its speed. The others say when he first threw it down, it was a Hya because he made it something that wouldn't cause him a lot of fear. But then when he threw it", "examples of that in the Quran, of the stories. What is your opinion on sharing personal reflections on Qur'anic verses? Sometimes I feel that I understand a deep meaning behind verses but I'm cautious. You should be cautious, I would agree with that. We can reflect on the Quran definitely and...but never say this is what it means because only Allah knows", "and the scholars, we know what the Arabic words mean. But to take isharat out of them. Imam al-Ghazali in this book goes into detail about that. But you really have to have requisite knowledges. Sahaba were very loathed to speak about the Quran. In fact they asked Omar radiallahu anhu about... They asked him about ab in the Quran", "in the Quran. You know, when in the A'bas wa tawalla it talks about the foods you know and the last one is Abba And so he was asked about Abba and he said Like what heaven would cover me? And what earth would hold me up if I spoke about the Quran from my own opinion like He didn't know what it meant", "He didn't know what it meant, so he just left it. So you have to be very careful and you really need to learn Arabic and just be careful. Even Arabs who read the Quran they think they understand it because they know modern Arabic but when they go into the tafsir they'll find that is quite different from what they thought it was. There are many examples of that. And then I have a question about al-Fatiha. Allah created everything purely from His mercy", "and this is a gift. If Allah asks us to worship Him in return, how is His creation then a gift? I get what you're asking. Well the thing is when somebody gives you a gift you feel gratitude", "So the thing is, he's not demanding. And if you're an ingrate then... You know? You suffer the consequences of an ingrat. But it is a gift from Allah so I think what you are saying is that it's a gift with strings attached. I think that's the idea.", "Life is a gift, but it's a gift that does have demands on us. It comes with a responsibility and for whatever reasons we accepted it. That's what the Quran says, that we accepted this amanah, this sacred trust. So the word is amanah which is a trust so we use gift more as", "more as a you know this is uh it's it's uh the quranic term is amana you know that we were given a trust so a trust you're responsible for but but it still we feel the gift of creation the gift", "It's a trust. And that's what I think, that's how I would answer that. How do we attain peace of heart at times like this? Well you have to... We cannot allow the world to rip us apart. If you despair, if you get depressed, you're just another victim of iblis and we can't. The Prophet said", "When Fatima, it's one of the most powerful hadiths. When Fatimah saw him because he has Sakerat al-Maut and she saw him and she said you know Oh how terrible this is! He said no no don't say that. He said it's all peace after this. And that's why we have to remember we're not people of dunya. The dunya is what", "It's always been like this. It's had these elements in it and the problem now is television and the fact that you see it from everywhere so, and it's perfectly acceptable for you to just... I would really caution about watching this stuff because it will rip your heart apart. Certain people have to know things and the rulers are responsible for this. In the end they have the biggest and that's why I don't pity them.", "them rather because it's the rulers that have the biggest responsibility in these type things those of us who don't have power we can condemn things those", "i mean that's like attacking the vatican on christmas you know for the christians or or or the you know church of the sepulcher you know um so so you know we would expect from them and and and the tzaddik in the jewish tradition he stands by righteousness irrespective of who it is so", "They have the same teachings as we have about justice. They can't side with their tribe when things are just wrong. They have to side with the truth, and then we have to decide with them when our tribe is wrong. I mean that's the way it works. We can't play it both ways. When our side does things that are unjust, we have", "Muslims attack churches, we have to condemn that. Or synagogues. But this is the... For the Jews it's a sacred spot also. They're not even allowed by Orthodox Judaism to go on to the Temple Mount. It's illegal in their religion. And they know this. It' s illegal. By halakhah law. I'm not making that up. They are not allowed to go onto the Temple", "according to their own tradition. So actually those soldiers are going against Jewish law and desecrating their own religion, so it's a double crime in that way. It's a crime against our faith and it's the crime against their faith. But like I said this is the world and the Prophet suffered greatly but it doesn't stop you from moving and he was always hopeful despite it all", "I mean he was treated terribly, but he encouraged us. We're people of faith, we are people of hope and also were people that know that suffering is redemptive, that a lot of the sins of our ummah are being removed through this because we were sinful. If you look at the Muslim Ummah and the types of things that are going on in the Muslim world right now, we have to take some responsibility. But there's also things that", "There are things that have to happen, and these are in the knowledge of God. And we have to leave it to God. But all of us have our own individual areas, and we have do that. So don't... It's almost like it's self-indulgent to be depressed. They're smiling as they're being carried off to Israeli prisons.", "I mean, if anybody they're the people that have a right to be depressed about things but they're standing firm and there And and and and I think we should support them in that in that way whatever you know, whatever ways we can So What can regular Muslims do in these times of pressure? I mean again, I think You know", "You can't worry about other people, the silence of other people. That's their own business. If you want to condemn everybody, you can condemn everybody. We condemn what is unjust but people are in different situations and they know their situation and we know our situation. We're fortunate to be in a country right now as far as we can tell still, we can speak up", "But we have also a culture that's becoming incredibly totalitarian, just canceling people and anything that goes against whatever the zeitgeist or whatever people think is the way we should be. So but you know, we can still speak and so we should use that to the best of our ability. But we should also use it with wisdom and not alienate people and just... We need allies. We need Allies.", "allies. Are there signs of someone being a wali? What was Imam al-Ghazali's view? I mean, the greatest sign of wilaya... First of all you should really consider every human being a potential wali because Omar was a waly in the knowledge of God when he was worshiping idols in Mecca so you just don't know. The Moroccans say", "and say you know that every person you should think of is a potential wali because you just don't know but wilaya amma, every Muslim has that Allah will you ladina amenu so wilaya Amma is for every Muslim. Every Muslim you should consider a Wali even if they deviate because the you know their dhalimun li nafsi", "They were wronged by their own selves.", "When you see real uprightness in their character, they don't backbite. Those people are quite rare and we should consider them people but nobody knows who the awliya are. The Moroccans say Allah hid three in three. He hid his awliyā' in His creation so you don't know who they are", "Laylatul Qadr in his month of Ramadan and he hid his acceptance in your actions. Like you don't know what action is going to be accepted to him. So it could be like the prostitute that gave the dog water from her shoe, Allah forgave her. Even though she was a prostitute. It says baghi, I mean it's in the hadith. She was like a fallen woman", "And yet that act, Allah forgave her for it. So we don't know. I mean, that's a saying, but it's a nice saying. Did our beloved Prophet ﷺ read... The Prophet was commanded to believe in himself. So he taught us the salawat. He's a believer and he has to follow his deen.", "follows it more than anybody so the prophet said we pray on ourselves in the prayer right well what why are they bad right I mean yeah we so we're hoping to be from them inshallah I mean we don't know but and then we also give salam when we enter our house right a Salama Elena wanna bed last saw the", "So the Prophet, it's not surprising that he would do that. Like I said, may we utilize these last few days of the month that we have and it looks like we're going to have 30 days which is good. There are some people there who are like, but I think we should be happy one more day of Ramadan." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Sensual Pleasures and Intellect -- Shaykh Hamza Yu__1742891520.opus", "text": [ "The sensual pleasures are very quick. You just eat a cake and it tastes great, and then you regret eating it. That's the nature of sensual pleasure. Most of it is actually a little remorseful because generally a lot of it's a waste of time. Then Allah says, كَالَّا بَلْ تُحِبُّونَ الْعَجَرِ You love immediate things and you put off what's coming. So you procrastinate the difficulties. And this is in a book that Erlach and Ornstein wrote called New World, New Minds", "called New World, New Mind. One of the things that they say in there is that the human being is... The brain is designed to react to immediate things but it actually will put off and delay things that are coming down the road. That's why you have a national debt like $30 trillion. Really? How long can you keep doing that? They just keep kicking it down the" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad Interview of Shaykh Hamza_mxkKWDo9y00&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743062733.opus", "text": [ "I have with me a very dear friend and colleague, an American Muslim whom I've known and admired for perhaps 15 years now? He's here on a lecture tour in England, very briefly. And I'm going to ask him a few questions about Islam and Muslims in the West but focusing particularly on how we get this most precious of commodities, ilm . How do we become scholars or even now", "or how even nowadays do we find scholars? Many people, including I think Sheikh Hamza believes that they are something of an endangered species. So how is it the young Muslims in the West particularly can overcome this obstacle? We don't have proper institutions of our own so can we travel to the Islamic world? Should we do it the traditional way by sitting at the feet of ulama or should we put our faith in these great new Islamic universities that are appearing in all sorts of countries? Anyway perhaps Sheikh Hamzah if I could start with that", "I know that you've been perhaps one of the last true advocates of the traditional practice of al-rihla fi talabil a'lim. We know that the great medieval ulama, from Imam al-Bukhari to so many of the great scholars even in the 19th century almost spent all their lives travelling. They would have like Ibn Sina was well known for having 1000 camels who would carry his books wherever he went and you somehow in this age of mass communications", "and they would talk about their experiences traveling, and the importance of actually leaving one's place of birth. In fact Imam al-Junaid, the famous scholar and what they call him the imam of the two groups because he was both a scholar but he was also deeply spiritual man and a spiritual educator", "is complete when he enters into a state of ghurba which is estrangement from one's own land and I think he's getting that from the hadith that the Prophet said in Sahih Muslim that Islam began as strange thing and it returns as strange things and he said blessed are the strangers and ghreeb, as you well know is one of the meanings to be in a strange land where you're not from", "of going out is really you become ghareeb and that in itself is a spiritual station in Islam to be a ghareeb. And what you do is attempt to find kindred spirits, and I think also there's a blessing, I found that there was a blessing in setting out because there's hadith that the Prophet said", "whoever sets out on a path. And salak is suluk, whoever sets our on a pass seeking knowledge is in the path of God. In other words like a mujahid, somebody struggling in the paths of God until he returns and then there's another tradition that says that Allah has taken it upon himself to provide for the seeker of knowledge so I think one of the wonders for me", "setting out was to see that my provision came from places unexpected because I really, when I went out, I did not have money. I didn't really have the means to take care of myself and yet I saw just really wondrous things happen without ever being forced to ask or beg even though the traditional scholars consider", "You must have met some extraordinary people during our travels. Do any particular experiences or individuals stand out in your memory?", "share some common remarkable people that we've met and this is another one of the blessings, is that we are in an age. I mean, I liken this age to... In terms of what a human being is, I think you know in a lot of ways we're... To point to people now and say this is human society, this is what human beings are for me is like somebody going into a room with a decrepit old man on a bed", "like 80 years old and literally defecating and urinating in his own bed, and completely incapacitated to say that this is a human being. In other words not to recognize it was once a young man in his youth and vigor. And then a lot of ways the age we're living in is like that. It's that the state of human beings is really so horrifying. So going out and literally seeing individuals that still represent you know Benny Adam", "Adam, you know the Adamic man and the Adam woman. And they still exist but unfortunately many of them are literally hidden. Sayyidina Ali said that people in a tradition that our Qada'i relates that people will always... Allah will always have His Hujaj, his proofs on the earth.", "or khayf al-maghmur, or obscured and hidden out of fear. And unfortunately this is that type of age where people's adab, their spiritual manners have become so detestable that a lot of really righteous people, out of mercy to the ummah, have withdrawn because of the hadith whoever is harmful of a friend of mine", "I declare war on him. And so for that reason many of the scholars have said that in times of great distress, oftentimes the people of Allah will literally disengage from society until conditions change. So that for me was a great blessing. Marab Tarhaj, the man that I studied with in Mauritania lives in the middle of the Saharan desert and it wasn't just his knowledge", "knowledge. I mean like Imam Madak's mother said to Madak, when he went as a child to Ibn Hurmus learn from his courtesy before you learn from His knowledge and just seeing this man it's one thing to read about the ancients and to read people that spent their nights in prayer like Abu Hanifa praying Fajr with the wudu of Isha for 40 years or something like that we can read these", "these great Auliya and things like that. But to actually see a human being that embodies that is really shocking because what you realize is, these aren't mythologies that we're reading about, that these people did exist. And that is something for me that I think that's one of the greatest benefits that I have gotten from meeting these people is to realize 1 The potential of a human", "that our path, the path of Islam is a path that elevates and dignifies and exalts the human being. This is something that's so difficult for particularly young people I think brought up in the West isn't it? Because the educational matrix here stresses so much the imparting of information and the ability to make one's own independent judgment on the basis of that information but the idea of education as being a process of osmosis whereby you're not just packed with facts", "but your potential as Allah's Khalifa on the earth, as a beautiful dignified compassionate being something that you learn from teachers or learn from your society. That is never stressed whatsoever I've noticed a lot of young Muslims in England they have not just lost in many cases the traditional beautiful adab, the politeness compassion, the way of being, the metabolism of the traditional Muslim because of the school they've been brought up with", "100,000 of them who proceeded to go out and change the entire world. 23 years just of his presence had that effect. And the ulama traditionally have tried to be heirs of that tradition and try and pass on some of that light they've gained from their own teachers in a continuous chain going back to the Prophet . I always thought one of the most astonishing things I encountered in studying with as I occasionally did real traditional Hadith scholars was this institution about Hadith al-Mursalsel", "Hadathani al-walid rahimahullah, anis sheikh ulan, anish sheikh bulan", "and channels whereby the wisdom, and also this sense of being of the older generation can be transmitted to the new generation of Muslims. I don't know what your opinions are of Islamic universities that have been popping up in various Islamic countries. I studied for a while at Al-Azhar, and Azhar was unfortunately nationalized by Nasser who almost closed it down but one of the nasty things he did was abolish the traditional system of Azhari education", "bearers of the beautiful adab of islam but nasa abolished that and he put all of the students particularly the non-egyptian students in this great concrete encampment on the outside of cairo right and he actually demolished a cemetery and built this student hostel on top of it four thousand students there and they just play around some of them are listening to pop music some of that was quite appropriate they built it over uh cemetery yeah and the environment there is occasionally they come back with a certain amount of knowledge", "which means to be effaced. It has the idea of درسة الأثار, the traces literally disappeared and part of the madrasa was that the ego or the nafs was effaced, the crude, you know, the jewel, literally what the teachers were doing were carving. In fact they say التعلم في الصغر كنقش فالحجر that teaching a youth is like carving in stone", "really what they were doing was taking this jauhar, this essence that has the coal around it and chiseling away all of this black coal until you have this diamond, this precious jewel that then can go out and literally illuminate like you said and transform the places where they came from. But the system was beautiful in that you had literally small madrasas all over the ummah", "the villages would study in these kutab and would memorize the Quran, and memorize basic mutun, the texts like in Al-Bayqouniyah and Hadith. And Ibn Ashar for instance in Morocco and North Africa in basic fiqh. And then they would take the extremely bright students from that group", "sent to the major areas of learning like in Morocco it would have been fast. So, the Mauritanians, the scholars of the Sahara would study in the madrasas there which are now considered these producing these great ulama and they're the first to admit that they're not ulama that this system that they had was really a preparatory school for the real universities", "And so they would go then to Fas, to Zaytuna, to Tremesan, to Al-Azhar, to the Nighamiya schools Baghdad, Syria, Qeyumiya all these different or the Jauzia. All these different schools and there they would after memorizing quite a considerable amount of textual material", "but also how to literally take this material and apply it with intelligence contextually. And this is something that my experience of the Muslim world is, that we have people that oftentimes learn a considerable amount of information. It's certainly there's in the Muslim World There's much more emphasis still on rote memorization than say the Western universities now which teach", "more learning kind of theories and understanding how things work and are formulated rather than having the rote that you can keep your calculator to plug in but just understand how the thing works. But despite that fact, what I'm witnessing and I don't know if you'd agree with this but what I am seeing is we have yet to deal with the issues of our age", "We have yet to be able to take the Islamic, all of this massive amount of information and literally apply it to the age we're living in terms of dealing with issues of the age and healing the diseases of the ages because that's what it was sent down for.", "The student who stayed with the Shaykh for years and the Shayakh used to go, he would do the Ruqya on people and read Fatiha. And then use his spittle and they would get well usually immediately. When the Shayikh died they went to the student. So the student read the Fatiah and put the spittle on the person. Nobody got well and they asked him what's the matter? He said, Well the Fattiah is still the same", "the same but I think those spittles changed. So you know, I think this is part of our problem is that the information's all still there but the men and women that possess the wisdom because in the Quran when Allah says لِيُعَلِّمُهُمَّ الْكِتَابَ وَالْحِكْمَةِ That it wasn't simply the book that was to be taught but also", "contextually because this is something a lot of Muslims especially our youth don't understand, is that a great deal of our literature is contextual and the Muslims understood this long before Wittgenstein and you know linguistics theories of contextual... You know the contextual nature of language. That the hadiths many of the hadits are contextual and you can't simply take a hadith and apply it universally. There's a whole science of Asbab al-Wurud", "There you go. Whereas of course, anybody who tried to do that in a traditional Islamic state would immediately be hauled before the Qadi and given 20 lashes for his cheek. Exactly. And yet this is how Islam is developing now. They think that's the correct procedure. But do you think there's any hope? I mean what would be your advice if you were confronted by say a keen intelligent 18 year old Muslim in England who wanted to study the deen? What would be counsel? Well this happens to me a lot, people come to me because...", "My education, I think you would certainly admit this as well is that really our educations have been extremely limited but because we've had some background in an age where many people have had none or even less that it might appear impressive to some people. But I feel very impoverished in terms of my own Islamic education.", "these type things unfortunately because of the politicized atmosphere that exists now in the Muslim ummah and really what's happening there is kind of like the 60s in America during the Vietnam War where universities ended up being kind of war zones ideological war zones, and this is what's happened in the muslim world and unfortunately unlike America where you have although it's you know", "it's certainly got its own internal structures that are rather totalitarian but nonetheless you know Kent State was one of the few examples where somebody was actually shot whereas in the Muslim world we're dealing with some very ruthless tyrants and dictators and secret polices and these type of things that deal with people with impunity", "what the public opinion might be about how they deal with dissidents and these type of things. And the other thing, it's unfortunate that I think students become dissidents because I think although it is absolutely important to have our own moral and ethical perspectives and understandings for a student who set out on the path of knowledge", "a good amount of time to that and the abstractions of the world which have always existed, you know we can become We can become caught up in In the world I mean You know the Muslims have been for over 100 years now in massive turmoil political turmoil And it's very easy to get caught up these things as youth but if somebody is actually committed to learning something to be beneficial to the you know", "spiritual tribe. When I was there, there were about 11 or 12 brilliant fuqaha maliki ulama that had madrasas. When i went back, I think nine had died and you could see the results of their deaths in the village which was one of the most impressive places I've ever been to. Going back there last year, I was really shocked to see the disintegration", "time young people listening to Michael Jackson and I mean all of this madness going into a place that had really been preserved so you know I'm taking a long time to get to this but I really think one of the most important things for us at this stage is to develop institutions within the West we this is an imperative that really we don't have an alternative we must develop. I think there's now", "attempt to do this. I don't know much about it and I don' t know how successful its going right now but we, there is a modicum of freedom in the west that enables people to set up institutions and study and do these things unfortunately in the vast majority of the Muslim world that freedom does not exist and Islam and particularly the quote unquote Islamists", "are a major threat to, a perceived threat I think, a perceive threat to both the interests of the West as well as the governments in the East and North Africa and these places. So for an 18 year old right now, I think what I would if they're unmarried and if they if they are able to then I think", "to then I think there are still some places where they can go if they're committed to at least six years. I think anything less would be, I mean there might be some benefit in going less than that learning Arabic but I think we need people that really are committed and I want to emphasize at this point I really don't think and I think you probably agree with this the goal of Islam is not to become an alim quote unquote it's certainly a wonderful achievement", "the higher callings, if not the highest of all callings. But many of the ulama were not ulama. Many of the sahaba for instance they were not scholars but they were people that what they did know they acted wholeheartedly on it. They had absolute sincerity. Khalid ibn Walid was not a scholar he was a warrior. That was the gift that Allah gave that man and it manifested. Abu Dhar was an", "an ascetic and a deeply spiritual Muslim who was an inspiration to anyone who saw him. And that was what he did. Abu Hurairah was a scholar, he was a hadith scholar. He wasn't the Mufti, was he? Yeah, Abu Hurayrah is not one of the muftis. Ibn Mas'ud was a mufti as well as being a scholar and a judge. Omar ibn al-Khattab was a judge", "brilliant scholars. Sayyidina Ali is of course one of the greatest, you know, the shining monuments of intellectual achievement. Historically he's been called the first intellectual of Islam because he was just such a profound thinker as well as being a deeply spiritual person. Aisha was a great scholar she was not only a scholar in Islamic matters but she was a scholar", "remarkable woman and a remarkable human being. Setting aside her femininity, she's just...she is a remarkable being. Anyone male or female that achieved what she would achieve would be honored equally.", "Q. What is the relationship between the Muslim and the Sahih?", "that seems to have died away. So do you think this obligation to study the ulama of Islam, which is so urgent for our young people today actually applies to our young women as well? The hadith that's related Ibn Majid relates it, al-Bayhaqi I believe relates it seeking knowledge and there its talabal ilm has the instrument of definition definitive article", "unless it's an emphasis in order that it is not misunderstood. And that was one of the times when he did stress the female component because, 1 It was very alien to their culture for women to be educated. Omar recorded as saying that we considered women similar to animals prior to Islam. This was the Arab perspective and there was just a radical transformation. I think it's really fascinating one of western", "the criticisms of Islam is the idea two witnesses, two females to one male and what I find really fascinating about that is that in Hadith if the woman fulfills the five qualifications of a Sahih Hadith If she is a Babita you know meticulous in her narration Adila just in her actions that there's no Shadood", "social allowing for a really an excuse for women not to have to get involved in affairs that would preoccupy them for more important affairs and I don't really know anybody that wants to bear witness against people. I certainly don't, I mean it's not...I always find that odd it's kind of people say you don't see people lining up to be on jury duty or yeah so yeah absolutely", "Yeah, absolutely. Women... I think probably one of the greatest causes for the state of our Ummah now is the fact that our women are deplorably uneducated and they raise their children in Mauritania which although it's certainly not an example for economic flourishment It's still a place where Islam is practiced on a large scale One of things that I noticed in the children", "and they've been the healthiest children I have seen in the Muslim world, is that many of the women are scholars. Now one of things that fascinated me was that the women particularly emphasize Sira. They learn Sira and what they do is transmit these stories instead of like reading ridiculous bedtime stories to children. They tell the stories of the Sahaba, of the Awliya, you know, the great scholars", "scholars and they inculcate this in their children. And there are also oftentimes scholars of the Quraysh, they know like the Meccan all the lineages and the names of the Sahaba and who they were related to is fascinating so we absolutely need female scholars Amina Muhsen Wadood", "African-American scholar in America. She talks about the need for the feminine perspective being presented, and I think that there is a validity to that critique although i don't agree with like", "like Fatima Mernissi's whole idea.", "And I should think 15% of the great hadiths of Islam have women as key figures in the isnad. Right, Aisha is one of the seven that of the Sahaba that relate over 2000 hadith in the Sahabah. Umm Salama is another great muhaddith. So absolutely it's imperative you know if we're going to reinvigorate this ummah with any", "Absolutely. But it wasn't just that, was it? They were also out teaching in the madrasas and the istitutes. If you look at Ibn al-Sakir's history of Damascus he names about a thousand of his teachers and eighty of them are women. And that is already what, the sixth century?", "is there any equivalent of that in European? In Christianity, absolutely not. I mean Julian of Norwich or something. They were so excluded from life. Well i think they didn't think that they actually had intellects for a while. Yes, I think it was the 7th century they had the council at Poitiers and they decided that women didn't actually have souls. Right. And hence they were sort of like household goods you know nowadays you get a washing machine but", "But they had no more souls and did a washing machine, or a toaster.", "The wife of my teacher, who is a faqihah in the Maliki fiqh and she knew grammar very well and had memorized two-thirds of the Quran. And was still studying at about the age of 65, still memorizing things but she did not write. She literally never learned how to write", "how to write but in a sense that's the sun as well isn't it right so uh so what would we say to this 18 year old we didn't really deal with that you've gone a bit into this extraordinary feat of memorization that seems to be sine qua non the traditional scholar a lot of young people say nowadays", "activated in my brain can I really study Islam seriously if I simply don't have the ability to memorize hundreds of pages of texts?", "and the memory techniques that were used, mnemonics and acronyms and these things. Certainly the Renaissance produced some extraordinary phenomenal examples of the human capacity to memorize. One of the things we are not taught in the West is techniques of memorization. And this was something I learned from the Mauritanians. Mnemonix is used very often in Mauritania. Just to give two very quick examples... It's certainly used in Tajweed", "Fasiqun, Valimun, Kafirun, Mushrikun", "In the breasts of those who have been given knowledge", "One of the things I think we have to do and you know, we're both fathers. So I think it's something that you've obviously thought about Is you know what what's literally taking place in the brain within the first? 11 years actually it's now in Neurology they found that 11 years is when all of the myelination is taking place And at the age of 11 it literally stops so and", "is one of the most potent ways of developing fields within the brain itself. And basically at 11 we have what we're going to use for the rest of our life, that's what has been developed and I think memory prior to 11 is absolutely essential. The main emphasis...I'm gonna talk about this later on today, I would talk about", "little emphasis on actual ratiocination and spatial reasonings, things like this. Even Piaget and their own Western educational theorists have really proven a lot of this stuff. This was the traditional approach that you memorize when you're young and then you learn what they call the appellate, the intellectual sciences of", "Dialectics of Jadal and Mantra, Philogic and these type things learning how to think. And then you begin the process after about 15 or 16 is to learn the tools whereby you can actually begin to reflect and think deeply on much of what you've memorized in terms of an 18 year old who's coming in who has not memorized sometimes almost nothing both in English and other languages", "I think that we need to literally learn the techniques for increasing our memory.", "The ability to retrieve, to bring present what is known.", "And I've seen this, where some scholars have their capacity to do that is not as great. They kind of go through the scanning, where you ask them an ayah and they'll kind of... The hard disk has to turn three times in a wait. Exactly! It's like a CD-ROM there, it's not as fast as others so you got 286 memories 386 and 486. So I think that's one aspect but I don't think we should despair of it.", "I don't consider my memory to be that great. But what I found personally is there's a facilitation that Allah gives to His Deen. I have found memorizing, for instance, du'as of the Prophet Hadith verses of the Qur'an, trying to memorize comparable treaties or amounts of words in my own language is extremely difficult and I don''t know if it has to do with the cadences of Arabic", "the Arabic, but I personally really do believe that there is a divine facilitation. And certainly the most important element there is intention, is pure intention. So I think that people can still do that even at the age of 18, 19, 20. I personally have known people who have memorized the entire Quran as adults and very worthy and honorable task to set out and accomplish.", "Hadiths, whoever learns knowledge to impress the scholars or to amaze the ignorant people that you know there's no... he just take his seat in hellfire. There is no.. That's not why we should be seeking this knowledge. You know it should be part of it is really to make intention to preserve, to become a preserver of the deen of Allah because the deem of Allah", "is not preserved in books, and it never has been. It's preserved by human beings that are willing to really struggle against their own selves. I mean, it's easy to come home and turn on the TV and sit back and watch... And I think it's worse here because BBC programming is more sophisticated and more interesting so you can convince yourself you're kind of learning something. But it's very easy just to sit back", "by the age but it's like Neil Postman's book amusing ourselves to death you know that that's ultimately what this culture does it just amuses its populace to death and we're told in the Quran that life wasn't created for an amusement or a pastime and you know ultimately where we should be people of I say the Muslim should be a mujahid mushtahid you know somebody who is a man of", "to be aware of is that youth, and it's something we cannot appreciate at 20 but we can appreciate say at 35. And I think hopefully at 50 it'll be even more clear. But one of the things at 20 that's very difficult to appreciate is that people that are older than us have been through certain stages. And we have to understand this contextual nature", "of 20 have to do with the age that we're in. And, to be a man or woman of depth and substance, we have to have the continuum constantly in perspective. The Muslim is somebody that recognizes that this is a journey from the cradle to the grave, and we will go through stages but ultimately the goal should always be present.", "the fleeting matters of youth is very dangerous without the guidance and wisdom of age. I mean, we're not called shiuch for nothing. Shaykh means old man and sheikha means old woman. And people can be shaykh before their time but it means they have the wisdom of old age and it might happen at the age of 25 or in Malek's case at the", "giving fatwa and teaching in Medina. So the idea of having the depth of old age, and recognizing that Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam articulated it beautifully in the hadith, لَيْسَ مِنَّا مَنَّمْ يُوَقِّرْ كَبِيرًا وَلَا يَرْحَمْ صَغِيرٌ He's not from us who doesn't respect the age and the wisdom that comes with age, And also who does not have compassion and mercy on the youth", "what they want to do. I mean, I think for instance there's in England I've come across there are some politicized groups of youth that are getting very politically active and I think there is a lot of sincere energy there that these people are struggling with injustices, disenfranchisement, the conditions of the ummah but we need guidance it can't simply be that our young people become really anarchist in a sense", "or a nurse, or you know heal the sick absolutely that's an excellent point but just to jump up and down and shout one's frustration doesn't dissipate frustration at all it might do momentarily but you go back home and you're in the same problem", "Allah is reported to have said, that the Ghazwa would just end up being shouting. And really it's a pathetic statement about our condition because ultimately I think over 30 years or even longer of Western demonstration, because it's", "La hawla wa la quwwata illa billah", "be really careful about getting caught up in all that. Because Allah tells us constantly to rectify ourselves, you know, to deal with... You know, instead of constantly looking at the non-Muslims, look at the Muslims. I mean let's stop blaming them. They're only doing what they understand to be the best thing for them to do. I think a lot of the fault is that we haven't taken them the message", "directly engaged in combat with people that are out to destroy us or to subjugate us. I think it's very important for the Muslims in this age to literally disengage and start reflecting deeply about how we got here, where we are, and some serious strategies for getting out of this morass and horrific condition that we found ourselves in. And if I think if we do that something positive can happen.", "We have Fard Ayn and Fard Kifaya. Has it become a Fard Ayin nowadays? I personally believe, and this is my... And I think a lot of ulama would agree with this but I do believe that Arabic language is now an ayin because there are so few people who actually know it that there's not a kifayat. Because if Fard means enough, if there's enough people doing it then it's no longer obligatory on everybody else. So I personally do believe hadith sciences are obligatory", "Memorizing the Quran is obligatory on all of us. Because there's not enough people to do it. We don't have enough people, hufadh of Quran now, to teach the children. And the Prophet said, The best of you are those who learn the Quran and teach it. So this is the best and highest thing somebody can do. So I think personally what we need to do as individuals is make a commitment.", "It's like almost Mujma'Alaik. Imam As-Suyulti, when he talks about this hadith which is a sound hadith that they'll be a mujaddid at the beginning of every century He lists all of the ulama up to his own time and only one he says there's no difference in opinion Allah-u-Akbar. Is it Imam Al Ghazali? That's my understanding that he was by consensus... Bismillah ala alamullahu khilafat. ...mujadid of his... Allah-U Akbar", "That's extraordinary. My Ummah doesn't agree on error", "on error. What he did was literally write a book called Ihyaa Uloom-ud-Deen I'm talking to a man who's translating it in beautiful language which is wonderful that you've done that, that you learned Arabic to such a high level and Mashallah you also got the gifts of English because I think you mentioned these appalling translations", "of our age is people who are not qualified to translate, translating books. I mean, I have struggled personally in my own self in trans... should I translate or shouldn't I? Just out of a kind of awareness of my own limitations, not only with Arabic but with English as well because I think to take works of such majestic language and you know the language that these books have been written in and certainly", "It's making our Prophet look like he was not comprehensible. That he couldn't put sentences together, really! I mean this is the effect of it and I think that this is a crime. It really is. And I think people like Matraji in Lebanon...I'll say their name, this woman just translating these works...they need to fear Allah. They really do, they need to Fear Allah.", "but I know you've had to go to scholars, ulama and have them explain to you passages from the Ihya which is written in a reasonably... I mean he's not one of the more abstruse writers. He was writing for the awam. Right. I mean al-Mustasfa his book in Usul is extremely abstrus and complicated language", "for general educated Muslims. And I know that you've had to... Isn't that true? Absolutely. So this idea of getting the dictionary out and people using Hans Wehr, which is a wonderful dictionary personally. I feel it was a useful job but it's not a scholastic tool for translating. It's a dictionary you use for the newspaper. Wouldn't you agree?", "It's modern Arabic. So you have to go to the great, you know... Lainey's lexicon is certainly a remarkable achievement but it's limited in that after Qaf he died. That's what I said, he never got to Quran. We need quality works in English. But getting the whole point we kind of transgressed here", "was that Al-Ghazali wrote Ihya Ulum al-Din. Abduqadir Al-Jazaeri brought back knowledge to Algeria. Othmane Danfodio, I really think we need to seriously study as a methodology because he was dealing with the colonial impact one of the great Mujahids of the Islamic Ummah historically but not only that he literally established Khilafat and he did it", "I think that the man, he truly meant that. Because Allah, like Sayyidina Umar said, we are not given victory because of superior munitions or numbers. He says, Sayyida Umar says to Sa'ad ibn Abi Waqas, that almost always these people are over us in munitions but we are given victory", "which is based on knowledge. Knowledge is the imam of action and this is something if we really want a true renaissance and not just these kind of slogan you know Islam is the solution and Islam la sharqiya la gharbiya If we want to transcend the slogan Islam then I think we have to revive the sciences of the deen", "and we need youth that are willing to commit. I think there's benefit, Umm al-Qura in Mecca and Medina University have adopted Western methodologies completely. And I think my own experience from people who graduated from those schools by their own admittance had told me they actually felt deprived at the end of the experience", "not be true for all graduates, I can't speak for all the graduates but I have met a considerable amount particularly Western people that have gone there and really did feel at the end of it that they actually had not acquired a whole lot of knowledge. And also the actual experience was very frustrating and difficult because of the social issues involved. I have not been to Syria myself. I think Mauritania is an incredibly difficult place", "I got dysentery. You know, I really suffered physically living there but I did in the Emirates...I lived with great Mauritanian scholars and benefited greatly and I think that the Emirate is a place where there's potential to study traditional sheikhs. There are considerable number of them. But I know Syria has some very good madrasas that are still in existence and you know people have this idea of government", "And I think we need to get beyond this. What we want is the knowledge. If the government is, you know, if these shiur are not speaking out against the government,", "They're trying to preserve the Deen. And I think if they are out there shouting against the tyrannical leadership and end up in prison, they're not a whole lot of benefit to the Ummah in prison. We know the Hadith that the greatest Shaheed is the one who speaks the truth in front of an unjust tyrant but I think we also have to understand that historically those who did were one of literally tens of thousands of Ulama", "The people who were present with institutions functioning. We're in an age that to lose one scholar is a tragedy, it's something really frightening. To lose one Scholar in Syria or Egypt now is the equivalent of maybe losing 10 thousand a few hundred years ago and I don't think that's an exaggeration.", "A man must know the age he is living in.", "There are many things that are different.", "a lot of young people are... This black and white tendency, I suppose is understandable given the fairly desperate situation of disenfranchised youth in the West. It's not just among Muslims, I think. You see, given that the established churches in British Christianity are dying on their feet now precisely because they can't give clear-cut answers to the issues of the age, bewildering problems of the ages you see young people joining strange sects and factions and cults like the Moonies or David Koresh", "not this ideology that we learn like a Marxist learns, you know the vocabulary of Marxism and then... The slogans and your membership card. Yeah, the slogans, the parut as it is. The takvir which becomes kind of Sikh-Hail that you shout on your rallies. Absolutely. No I think there's a lot of useful comparisons that one can draw between the strange sects in Christianity like the Munis or the branch Davidians whatever and some of the young cults that are appearing in Muslim situations. In Islam, it's a good point.", "In the West, but also in Islamic world. They are the same paradox really.", "there are going to be historical footnotes in the history of Islam. We have the murja'iyya, we have the qadriyyah, we had the mujassimah, mu'tazirah, khawarij, all these ibadiyyah and on and on... The sabavidz and all these sects that have come and gone but Islam has remained. It has remained! Islam is not an ephemeral temporal contextual idea.", "It's Deen al-Haqq. It is the deen of the truth and it will remain, it will be preserved by the promise of Allah and the promise His Messenger by us or by others than us. وَإِن تَتَّوَلَّوا يَسْتَبْدِرْ قَوْمٌ غَيْرُكُمْ ثُمَّ لَا يَكُونُوا أَمْثَارُكَمُ If you don't do it, Allah will replace you with people that will do it and they won't be like you. And this is it. Islam will remain. We will all die but Islam will", "people by human beings that stand up and preserve it in every age and teach it. And do you think that preservation is exclusively academic? What if a young person says, okay I'm just not very academically gifted, I don't have that. Absolutely. What kind of career path would you advise such a person to aim for? What would be more generally your advice to young people here? To young people yeah I don t think everybody is academically inclined and I don", "You know, it's like saying in these books this wretched statement that the main purpose of a woman is to bear children. Have you come across that in some books on women and Islam? I mean nowhere in the Quran does it say that. In fact it says that we make some women barren. And what she has lost her main role? A woman's role is to know Allah and His Messenger and act accordingly.", "The main role is, like Ibn Asher says, أَوَّلُ وَاجِمْ مِنْ عَالَمٍ كُلِّ فَامُّ مَكِّنٍ مِّن نَذْرٍ وَيَعْرِفَ اللَّهُ وَّ رَسُولُهُ بِالصِّفَاتِ مِمَّا النَّاصِبَ عَلِي الْآيَاتُ The first obligation of every human being who has taklif is to know Allah and His Messenger based on how the knowledge has been preserved. So I think that people should learn the fardain but I also think they should be committed", "You know, it's not the idea of maybe becoming an academic or becoming a scholar but we should be maintained to growth, to intellectual growth because I really don't see any excuse for that. We should all be committed to some. People should commit themselves to learning the Quran, to reciting it, to thinking about it,", "in circles that are beneficial, right? That are imparting knowledge. And other than that I think we need to look at areas... We need people in media. We need journalists. We needs artists quite literally. Art is an essential element of civilization and the Muslims... The Prophet ﷺ told us", "And he loves beauty. And one of the beauties of Islamic civilization is that even the Bedouin have these, you know they make beautiful rugs, they have beautiful pillows. You know in Mauritania I always like to mention, you take these big pens, these plastic pens, they take off the plastic and they make their own beautiful metal cases because they think it's the pen.", "you know we ornament our houses with plastic calligraphed plastic cups and things like that have been made in some factory in China by non-muslims or something like that. And, and we don't respect the... So I think we need calligrapher's. You know we need people to go learn calligraphy. That is not an academic task but it is a beautiful and wonderful...", "a proof against all their claims about this. No, but we have to stop living on the glories of the past as an ummah. We have to start pointing to the past like Andrew Seen said تلك أثارنا تدل علينا فانظروا بعدنا إلى الأثار These are our traces they indicate who we were so look after we're gone at what we left behind and this is what we as an Ummah have to ask ourselves can we say this?", "to the generations that are going to follow us. Here's what we've left behind. Look at our traces and see who we are. What is it telling the future generations about who we were? Look at out pamphlets, we don't even have academic... We become an Ummah of pamphleteers. Everybody writes these pamphets. What Islam is? Why you should move your finger in prayer? Why should hold your hands here as opposed...", "You know, where are the great works? Where are the intellectual achievements? Where the artistic achievements? Even clothes have become... It's true. I'm sure that one of the most damning indictments one could make of modern Islamic revivalists or ideologists and I am not talking about all individuals who follow them but general parameters which they set out for themselves is the fact that really for the first time in Islamic history we have a mass movement", "a mass movement with no cultural riches to it. If you look at what the Sahaba produced within 100 years there was the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, one of the great monuments of human civilization. And they're the Salafs! They are part of the Salah! The Mus'hafs that they wrote, their architecture, their art, extraordinary poetry... They're outpouring of creativity from the human spirit because if the human Spirit is truly enlightened by religion", "make the world beautiful. But where is the cultural renaissance that goes with modern Islam? You go into a mosque now and Muslims, we've been transmogrified into just these odd creatures I mean even our clothes don't... you know one of things about Western clothes they're really kind of ugly clothes in my perspective I thought that before I was Muslim Muslim clothes are beautiful They're Khalifa clothes", "call them their Khalifa clothes that they honor Bani Adam but one of the things about I mean at least a lot of Western people know how to wear western clothes. One of the thing you find Muslim people, they don't even...they look like caricatures. You take a Sudanese villager out of his robe and turban and put him into what western clothes he can find and it's appalling. Suddenly he looks pathetic. They become sort of guest workers rather than these noble", "The turbans are the crowns of the Arab people.", "about this and I am, but when one of the things that they did was literally get the turbans off the ummah. And this is a really major turning point in the beginning of the decline and disintegration of the Muslim power and dignity and... Because if you change people's outward form it has an effect on the inward. We believe in the intermingling of the body and the spirit unlike the Christian way to do something to your outward it affects your spirit. If you do something", "Absolutely. SubhanAllah, it's very true. Anyway thank you very much for your time. I hope you have learnt ten times more than you have. No that is not true. One of the reasons why I was excited about coming here and this isn't just some mudyamadat but I really was looking forward to seeing you.", "You're just one of the few scholars right now that's just doing work of such a high caliber that I think it's... We just hope that Allah will accept our intentions in Shalaa. And I really hope that more people begin to take this task upon themselves of presenting Islam to the West. I think that, you know, just to finish this off,", "The Europeans and the Americans are at such a deep crisis right now. They really are, they're aware of it, their intellectuals are aware of that, their writings are shouting it out. Thoreau said most people live lives of quiet desperation. Desperation is no longer quiet. It's literally... People are shouting at the top of their lungs. And Islam took the most savage bloody people", "people that could bury their daughters alive, people that eat the livers of their enemies on the battlefield. A woman who can do that. It took those people and transformed them into these deeply human compassionate people that had a thirst for knowledge", "went and they transformed the world. And we cannot, you know, the Anglo-Saxons have a horrific history of what they've done to the world, the havoc that they wreaked upon the world but they are recipients of the mercy of Allah just like anybody else. The French, we know what they did to the Muslims but we also know what the Mushrikim did to", "They became the people that literally went out and transformed the world. And I think Allah in His deep and infinite wisdom has placed the Muslims in the heart of the Western World. This is happened historically before, the Christians were thrust into the heart Roman Empire and they transformed it. They really did, they transformed", "I don't see why it can't happen again. I believe in the power of Allah and I believe that this is Deen-ul-Fitr, people will recognize the truth of it. We have a massive amount of work ahead of us. You're fully aware of that and we just don't have time to bicker.", "We don't have time to get in petty confrontations with each other. This is a time where we really have to unite and do some serious jihad and ishtihad, and do dhikr, fiqar and shukur, and take this deen out to the people. I think they are thirsty for it. The earth is thirsty for that.", "and the earth is thirsty for it. And we need to heal the earth as well, not just the people on it but the earth suffering from our gross injustices so I hope inshaAllah you know the people hearing this will just think about these things and I hope there's some benefit one of my favorite verses in the Quran and all of the Quran is really my favorite verse", "and they follow the best of it. So inshaAllah, ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala that this conversation is some benefit and people can derive some benefit meaning from it and take what's useful from it, and discard what's not. Alhamdulillah. Jazakumullah khair." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Shia and Sunni read the same quran - Shaykh Hamza __1742880362.opus", "text": [ "But the reality of it is, we have from Indonesia to California. From the furthest east to the furthers west and everything in between. And every sect of Islam whether its the Ismailis, whether its Yemeni Yazidis or Zaidis, Whether its the Ibadiya of Oman, whether it's the Hanafis, Shafi'is, Malikis, Hanbadis of Sunnis,", "see it when they were there whether it's the shia ishariya uh the eight the eighters the seveners the twelve-ers the fivers all of the shiite groups every single one of the muslims reads the same quran none of them differentiate on the quran not one why what how is that possible how is", "Bible. They don't know how the Greek was pronounced in some cases, they don't have a science of phonetics we have Tajweed if you go from Indonesia if you take an Indonesian Qari and you take a qadi who learned to read in California they will recite the Quran exactly the same way" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Signs of end times and Dajjal by Shaykh Hamza Yusu_0klSGTQvolc&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743314052.opus", "text": [ "The lack of concern of many Muslims with the last hour, with the actual signs of the end of time. Now I find it fascinating that this has been a major concern of ulama for over a thousand years and it was a concern of the sahaba. There were sahaba that were so worried that the dajjal would appear during their own lifetime. One of them said,", "so much about the Dajjal out of fear that I would be taken into his sedition, into his fitna, into His seduction because fitna is also means seduction. That finally the Prophet said don't worry you won't see him and he just gave him ease and the prophet in a hadith said if He shows up and I'm amongst you then I will defeat Him by argumentation. In other words I will", "because he will fool people through this false doctrine, this false teaching in which he gets many people to follow him. Now it's also interesting that we literally end our prayer by saying and certainly I know in the school of Imam Marek r.a., the last thing that the person says before they say Taslimah, which is the khuruj min as-sara, leaving the prayers", "وَأَعُوذُ بِاللَّهِ مِنْ فِتْنَةِي مَسِيحَ الدَّجَّالِ That is literally how an individual leaves his prayer, that is the last word before he says, السلام عليكم and I seek refuge from the fitnah of the false or the imposter Messiah. Now I would just like to use an example of the importance of these signs.", "The creation of the Deen of Islam is a tradition that's related in several collections and it's a Sahih Hadith, and it is in Imam al-Nawawi's Arbaeen. In fact, it's the second hadith that Ibn Omar relates in which he says, We were sitting with the Messenger of Allah on that specific day and then he said A man appeared and he mentioned that he had dark black hair", "white robe and there was no evidence of traveling which is a very interesting point because it would be clear in that time Medina was an extremely small city and to get to that city you would have to traverse a desert and by traversing the desert you would become disheveled this is the nature of travelling in the desert and anybody who's traveled especially on camel or even walking in the", "But the point is he sat extremely close to the Prophet and then he asked him about Islam which was the first thing. And the Prophet informed him, and he said, , and the Sahaba said, . We were amazed! Here's a man who has the audacity to ask the Prophet a question and then tells him that he was correct in his answer. So they were shocked by this statement.", "important because generally although the sa'a and the sciences of the last hour are what's called in aqeedah al-ghaybiyat or asam'iyyat. And they're usually studied under the section which would be categorized under the rubric of iman. But despite that, in this hadith we see that he asked specifically about the signs of the", "the one being questioned about it doesn't know any more than the one asking the question. And then he said, so tell me about the signs. Tell me about alamats. Tell what is going to happen and then the Prophet gives an extraordinary explanation. He said,", "to her mistress and in a riwayah that she taridu rabbaha, her master the stronger one is her mistress now there are...one thing that has to be understand when we look at the hadith is the prophet said utitu jawami al kilm I was given the comprehensive words in other words he will say a very short statement like addinun nasiha", "And with that one simple statement made up of two words only, books can be written. Entire books can been written because of the gradations and variations of meaning. So the Messenger of Allah spoke although he spoke in clear Arabic tongue which could be understood at many levels.", "the Sahaba understood clearly what the Prophet was saying and their understandings were not the same. The understanding of Abu Bakr as-Siddiq is not the understanding of the other Sahabah, and that's confirmed in more than one hadith. So there were different understandings. It does not negate the fact that one person understood one thing and another person understood another thing does not in any way negate that one is right and the other is wrong.", "many ways of understanding the same thing but they must be within the rightly guided boundaries of The people who know and that's why Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says first I don't have a caring quantum later on a moon ask the people who? Know if you don't know the people of liquor the people up to double or the people have to fuck core so Having said that. I just want to make it clear That what we want to do all of us is to reflect deeply", "Not to be people that simplistically take things without reflecting on them. They take them at face value. You want to be a people of ulil albaab The Muslim should be somebody of lubb and somebody of Lub is you go past the qishra, you go pass the outward shell which is important And we should not belittle in any way the outward meanings of Islam We're not bataniya. We are not people of bataniyya like esoteric", "like esotericists who turn Islam into some kind of esoterical tradition. But in this hadith he said that you will see the maid servant give birth to her mistress. Now if you look at the most outward meaning, it's been interpreted different ways and it was interpreted by Izz ibn Abdus Salam and others as meaning that there would be great social confusion. In other words, the natural order would be turned upside down because in the natural", "you would find that the amma, who is the servant will obey the mistress and do what the mistress tells her. This is the natural order of things and that is the first and primary meaning so when the mistress now is being commanded by the servant it means things have been turned upside down and this is a sign that the social order goes into chaos Now one of the interesting signs of this hadith is that the ulama traditionally said", "said that children would become rebellious against their parents which is a sign of the end of time. The Prophet said that the children would command their parents, that children will have no fear, no respect, no reverence towards their parents and this is an extremely dangerous sign and you will see this now. And also the Prophet said", "The child will not inherit the father. And one of the meanings of that, wallahu ta'ala aalam is the inheritance of the anbiya because the inheritance on the anbiyah is knowledge and what happens is that the children will not take the knowledge. And this why you see particularly in this age many of the greatest ulama whose children didn't take any of their knowledge.", "Now traditionally most of the children of scholars were also scholars though not always in", "though not always. Imam Malik , his son Yahya, was not a scholar and he didn't have the qabiliyah, he didn'y have the ability whereas his daughter Fatima was a great scholar who used to correct people from behind a door who were reciting the Muwatta to Imam Malek . And if Imam Malak would doze or take khafaqa or something she would remind him if they made a mistake", "I think one of the possible meanings of this hadith is that if you look at the word amma, amma is actually a very positive word. In fact we call... The female is called Amatullah like the male is called Abdullah If the amma'a is a servile creature then the rabba'ah is the one who is the master Now the idea of the mistress giving birth to the master", "Hadara for Darul Islam, for the Thaqafah For Marifa most of these words you will find are feminine in nature and the word actually for civilization which is Ummah or Hadara is a Feminine word now one of the things that has happened in recent time And I would say modern history because modern history in a sense begins with the Renaissance Is that the Muslim ummah gave birth to Europe quite literally in other words Europe was a completely", "abject, servile ignorant society that had no knowledge whatsoever and through the knowledge that was transmitted by the Muslims the Muslims literally gave birth to a civilization that becomes the master of the Muslims in other words it's the Muslims who empowered Europeans and secondarily Americans to literally become the masters of the Islamic Ummah", "where the Amma of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala which is the civilization that was in servitude to Allah, is now the slave of the arrogance. Mutakabira This arrogant and proudful European civilization which has no submission to the authority of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la And is in fact an absolute and utter rebellion to the traditions of the prophets", "divorced themselves entirely from their own Christian tradition. And they mocked their own prophets on their television programs and their comedians who make fun. They take my signs and my messengers, not just the messenger of Allah but Isa alayhi salam and Musa alayh salam, and Ibrahim alayhis salam , and Maryam and all of the Prophets. And this is not something you can just turn on your television", "human beings. So this is the type of environments in which we're in, where literally Islam gave birth to a civilization that would take over and supersede the Islamic civilization and treat it like some abject servant that it orders about. And now in every single Muslim country you see these servants, these pathetic barbaric people who are ruling", "their masters in the Pentagon and in Langley, and in Washington DC, and London, and Paris, and Tokyo. This is the pathetic condition of the Ummah. So we literally see where this Ummah has now become an Amma. And the Amma is this Rabbah which is western civilization and Allah knows best. Now the next thing that Prophet said... I mean you can take many other meanings from that.", "that can possibly be extrapolated from that is the fact that now you also have rich women in this so-called first world, right? They call their world the first world. And the people in other places which they have derogatorily termed the third world literally they rent their wombs. In other words, they go to poor people and women in Philippines and in South America and in India and they rent the womb because they don't want to bother having a child. They don't", "wrinkled and this happens in our day and age, this is happening. This is not something that's imaginary it sounds like science fiction but it's not it's actually happening now the next thing the Prophet said that you will see the barefoot the Alaa the bare-footed destitute", "The shepherds, they will vie with one another in building exalted buildings. Now this again can be taken at many levels. One of the ideas of bonyan in the Quran is the ideology. In other words, the bonyans are conceptualized constructs of thought and these people vie in one another trying to create better ways of ruling their societies", "theorists who write whole books on what civilization should be and how people, what rules they should adhere to without any looking at the book of Allah or even their own traditions. But the obvious meaning is quite clearly the Bedouin of the Arabian Peninsula who literally 40 years ago were barefoot destitute and naked some of them during World War...", "Great Depression had to make clothes and I've heard this from people who lived during that time, had to made clothes from the palm leaves. From the palm leafs! To cover their nakedness because it was so difficult to get cotton during that times. These people...and the Bedouin traditionally you would see the people were almost half-naked out there. Because they have so little. And you will see them buying in building large buildings", "Within our own lifetime we've seen that and I was in Dubai going in a taxi And I saw an old building and a larger building next to it and on the old building there was new construction Going on, and I said to the man. What are they doing there? And he said sheikh so-and-so Built the first the old one and that was the biggest building in the whole area and then another sheikh came and He wanted to outdo him So he built the second one and then sheikhs owns though got mad", "So he's building another series of stories in order to compete with so and so. And this man was a Bedouin, and I said to him the hadith, he didn't even know what it meant. And I told him do you know this hadith? And then I explained him the meaning and he just said Subhanallah. He said Subchanallah. Because he knew that he saw the ayah but he didn' have the source to take it back to.", "and I was seeing it with my own eyes. A sign that the Prophet would happen towards the end of time, which is extraordinary! Now another thing means according to Raghb al-Isbahani also to build by degrees and then break down and rebuild again. Now this is something unique to the 20th century. You will see whole buildings destroyed and flattened in order to build a new bigger and larger building.", "So it can also have that meaning, which is happening all over in these cities where they build a perfectly good building just to build. And that's... It's Israf! It's Hadam! It' s Israf, it's absolute profligacy and yet it happens and we're witnessing it in our own time. So the Prophet gave us these signs. Now from I want to look briefly at some of these other signs but i also want to", "Emphasize the importance of the fact that the fourth element mentioned in this hadith is these signs at the end of time and when the Hadith finishes Omar says, I waited some time and then asked the Prophet , the prophet asked him Do you know who the one asking the question was? And he said no. And he", "He came in order to teach you your deen. Now what did he teach? He taught Islam, Iman, Ihsan and the Alamata Sa'at. And these people, the Sahaba were waiting and watching to see the signs manifest. And Hudhaifa ibn Yaman is one of the great scholars of the signs at the end of time. So amongst the Sahabah themselves they had specialists that were specialists in this knowledge. And it is a knowledge.", "Now what I've noticed is that a lot of Muslims are almost embarrassed to mention the end of time It's like you never hear it and that in itself is a sign at the end Of time because the prophet said The Dajjal will not come out until people have forgotten And he said, and our Imams will leave his mention from the minbar", "from the minbar. Now one of the things you never hear in khutbah is the mentioning of the Dajjal I lived in the Middle East for almost 10 years and I never heard a khutbah on Masih al-Dajjal And that in itself is a sign of the end of time And the Prophet mentioned also that people would they would forget about him, the Dajaal himself", "signs that come before the actual Dajjal and if you look there is not one of them that has not manifested now there is an argument that they were existing 500 600 years ago in fact Ibn Al-Hajj in his Madkhal which was written in the sixth century already is saying and all the alamats are here Wallahi, if he could be alive in our time he would drop dead he would pass out because he was living at a time when Fes", "within our own lives and sakarat al mawt are like the zanzerat asaa they're like the shaking of that last hour so those are there now if you look at the Christian tradition, they have some understanding of the last hour and they will speak to great length about it and the odd thing about it is they only have about five signs in their book that's all they have we literally have hundreds hundreds! They have like 5 or 6 signs", "wars and rumors of war, there'd be famines and earthquakes in various places which we have all those signs but then add all of the other signs Sayyidina Ali relates a tradition from Sayyida Ali to one of his companions asked him about the Dajjal and he said I can't tell you about the dajjal but i can tell you abut the signs right before he comes. And then he mentioned several signs in one riwayah it's almost about 70 signs", "them he said that you would see people with a matel Salah they would literally the prayer would become dead lifeless routine it would be routine and also many people would leave it now in the Islamic civilization leaving the prayer did not happen you did not have Tariqa Salah people left the prayer if they left it it was their own business nobody knew about it because they would look should we take him to the muhakimah and this is a fact then", "But it is a modern phenomenon in which the Muslims have left the prayer. And there are Muslims all over the world now who do not pray, which is extraordinary because the Prophet said in the Musnad of Imam Ahmed , The oath between me what's binding between me and you is the prayer whoever leaves the prayer has entered into kufr Now usually that's interpreted as", "that it doesn't make them a non-Muslim unless they leave it out of not believing in it, like they don't believe in it or something like that. But Ahmed ibn Hanba was the opinion no, that they were kafir. If they didn't pray, they were Kafir. Now one of the interesting things about him and I think there's some strength in his position although the other three Imams are opposed to that position and say he is Muslim asi and he is buried with the Muslims but if you look at the Hadith that's in the Muwatt of Imam Marek", "Imam Malik relates a hadith in which the Prophet said he knows his ummah by the azar al wudu. That that's how he is going to make shafa'a for us because he'll see the white on our skin from the, which means the light from the wuduu.", "Like the horses that have the white on their legs and on their forehead. Now if people aren't doing wudu, then where's the light? There is no light! And if there is no Light, then how is the Messenger of Allah gonna know them? And there will be some that he says, come, come! And the angels say, they change things after you left.", "Go distance yourselves from me. So people should have fear of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala because these are enormous affairs. Now one of the signs at the end of time also is the Prophet ﷺ said,", "that the end of time will not come until you see amazing things, unbelievable things, grandioses things. Things that just are unbelievable and then he said, This matter will become increasingly grave towards you. It's matter, the affair.", "is things that move towards a critical head where people become increasingly more concerned. Now if you look now at what's happening in the world, things are becoming so frightening that people are becoming increasingly more concern and increasingly more confused at the same time. And the Prophet said that in those days, يُصْبِحُ الْمَرءُ مُؤْمِنًا وَيُمْسِى كافِرًا A man will wake up in the morning a believer and go to sleep a kafir.", "And he also warned about people would go just to see the Dajjal. He'll think that he's a Mu'min, but he will become confused by the arguments of the Daja' The Dajja' will literally confuse his mind, his intellect and he warned us, the Prophet said, But let me get to these other matters. The Prophet said", "will marry a man and a woman will marry A more Woman And he Said me car and it doesn't mean Zina Because at that Time Things like That were Happening They Knew About Zina The Zina Is Mentioned in the Quran He said Me Car Marathi Which is Primary Meaning Is Marriage That A Man Will Marry A man and A woman will Marry a woman and Now This is in the Legislation in the Supreme Court in the United States of America in which they have Legalized in Certain States the marriage of two of the same sex", "sex become legal and we're witnessing this in our own time. And this is going to become a norm. Now one of the other things that the Prophet said, That you will see people feel sexually satisfied a male with a male and female with a female again becoming an increasingly gross matter in cities all over the world. The proliferation", "homosexuality and lesbianism. Unbelievable things that people will lie 20, 30 years ago even in these countries people couldn't openly admit these things they would lose their jobs. And this is becoming a norm within our own lifetime in the last few years these things are becoming norms. This is something phenomenal really and I think we're just all asleep. We're just watching these things happen in the daydreams. I mean we have to really think about these things. These are deeply frightening.", "frightening matters that we should be concerned about, that our children are growing up in environments in which human beings grow... They're not even human being. Less than human beings. Worse than animals because even the animals don't do that and they'll try to use proof that monkeys have homosexuality amongst them. And the Prophet ﷺ and the Qur'an uses the monkey as the lowest example, the lowest metaphor for a human being In fact he said at the end of time people would dance all night with him", "and he said, on their heads are musical instruments. And Allahu'Alam now people wear these things on their head over their head these phones and they dance to musical instruments that are on their hands with their tape recorded and radios in these things. And he said They'll wake up monkeys and pigs and this is called maskh. And the maskh of the people of the last days is an internal maskh it doesn't mean they literally take the forms of monkeys and", "put forward like they're rational arguments or something like that. Unbelievable conditions, . The Prophet said that people would drive up to the masjids and he said , which means they would ride very elegant seats. Now was the seat of the kings. The seats of the", "like king seats of the ancient times. The kings were the ones that rode in the closed containers, like a hodad for women. The noble women used to ride in the hodads which was very similar to a car. It looks like a car in its outward form and the Prophet said they would drive right up. Now in the old days they didn't bring the animals near the masjid so it doesn't make any sense that they would", "be naked, their women would be naked and they would go in and pray. And the Prophet said, They have no portion of the Akhirah. And he said, There are people that are cursed. They're sick people. I mean this is the type of condition we're in. It's unbelievable. We're literally daydreaming going through life daydreamy. The Prophet said that you will see... He said,", "I haven't seen them. And then he said the first one, he said They would be have these as an app like the tails of donkeys of cows which are the whips that these disgusting despicable soldiers of these tyrants in the Muslim countries and you see them carrying their sticks", "The interpretation that Shaykh Muhammad al-Rameen al-Shinqiti gave, that these are the police that do the orders of the tyrants and they go and beat the people. And this is happening in all of the prisons and jails in the Muslim countries right now. People that pray and fast, young men and women that pray fast are being beaten by these despicable less than human beings. Those people are for the fire! They have no excuse before Allah to say we're just doing what we were told. Even the kuffar rejects that as a proof", "at the Nuremberg trials when they condemned those people who said we were just following orders. No! You have a conscience, you've been given a dameer by Allah and you have to reflect on that fact. You have to refect on that because Allah says that Firaun wa Haman wa Junuduhuma, Firaon and Haman and his armies all of them are in the wrong. You can't just say oh I was just following order. That's not an excuse with Allah. There is no following the created one", "if you it means disobeying the creator and this is what the Islam came to take us out of this ibadah, this ubudiyya lal makhluqeen. The worship of created things This is the pre-Islamic disease of the Persians in the Romans the Arabs interestingly enough did not worship their leaders This is something they learned from the persians and the romans Following the ajam", "that you will follow the other peoples and The interesting thing now they've left the worship of divine kings See these Europeans have left all that the worship their rulers. mean, they Throw them out office But the Muslims now everywhere look there statues and pictures of these tyrants and the muslims They put picture out fear in their in their how I need of the thing you go to Syria", "You go to Syria and somebody who doesn't have the picture of this kha'in in that place, he doesn't has a picture and somebody going what's matter? Don't you like Sayyid Al-Ustaz, Hafiz Asad? Don''t you like him? Something wrong with you? Where is the picture? Like it's abudiyya. And he is too afraid to say...", "doesn't come in a house where there's a picture and a dog, so what about a picture of a dog? They're too afraid to say that. And really from one sense we can't blame them. You know? Wallahi I mean we should have pity. We should have pitty for these people and many of them have suffered because of their just not even speaking out,", "not going along with it. So I'm not in any way making fun of those people, really we should have shafaqah and rahmah for those people. It's a wretched condition to be in but this is our state. And many signs the Prophet said zakat would be seen as maghram like its some kind of fine. People wouldn't pay zakat. I mean if you had zakat al-fitr just after Eid al-Fitr there would be no starvation in the world. If one billion", "and there must be something going on. Where is all that zakat going to? I want to know, where's it going... If one billion people are paying zakat al-fitr, where is it going to?\" I mean really, have you thought about that every Ramadan each one of us is supposed to take for every member of the family the amount of grain to take to the poor people? So why are people dying of starvation? And people in Muslim countries in Somalia died of starvation", "How is it with you if your strength is in your stomach?", "That means that's , that all you care about is your livelihood. It just how to fill your stomachs. And your matters go to the women folk, which is not a denigration of women but the affairs are to be at the affair the woman domain is the domestic domain she is", "Those things that Allah has made incumbent on them. So all of these things, of this end of time is just extraordinary. Now I just want to briefly just... I mean, I could go on and on because I've read too much about this stuff and it just really will get you a... You know, it'll put you into a very... And you know, I'm... SubhanAllah. Because it's happening all around. I just feel like we're just like asleep. We're sleepwalking just in a daze.", "didn't have CAD because they didn't eat the fats that they eat now. And the Prophet said one of the signs at the end of time was fat plumpness, people would be fat and he said which means people would have hemorrhoids which is an extraordinary hadith and it's a sound hadith which indicates people would sit around all day doing nothing because that's the way you get those things. If you're out working and moving about you don't get that stagnation", "in western medicine where there's no the liver is not detoxifying and you get this stagnation in the veins so there's not proper circulation because people aren't moving about. And that was something that old people got, not young people now in Western civilization and I my time in the hospital it was like prison the time that i spent in the Hospital will lie I just everybody has Bawaseer It's amazing and and I saw it as a sign of the end of time", "Sadaqah Rasool Allah I mean it's amazing that he even mentioned that because he was a very shy man and he didn't mention things you know that He was very shy about but he's telling us so that we can know so we recognize the age We're living in now the importance of all this and just to say a few things about the Dajjal first of all the Daja is Their men", "were a concentration of power, political-economic instantaneous communication rapid transportation and a system of information storage capable of keeping track of every event within the province of the divine king. Once these accessories were available the central establishment would also have a monopoly on both energy and knowledge. And this is what they have now. You see they have a monoply of energy which is the oil that's an energy of the age and of what's called the information. They have all the information they're storing it.", "No such complete assemblage had been available to the rulers of pre-scientific ages. Transportation was slow, communication over distance remained erratic, confined to written messages, information storage, all these things could be destroyed by fire and military assault, etc., etc. Then he says, with nuclear energy, electronic communication, and the computer, all the necessary components of a modernized mega machine at last became available. Heaven had been brought near. Theoretically, at the present moment, 1962,", "1962 and actually soon in the future God that is the computer will be able to find, locate and address instantly by voice and image via the priesthood any individual on the planet exercising control over every detail of the subject's daily life by commanding a dossier which would include his parentage and birth, his complete educational record an account of his illnesses and mental breakdowns if treated, his marriage, sperm bank accounts income loans, security payments taxes pensions", "disposition of such further organs as may be surgically extracted for him just prior to the moment of his official death. Because you can't die unless they officially pronounce you dead. In a hospital, if you're a nurse, you cannot say that guy's dead. It has to be this priest comes in his white suit and says he's dead, you know? And the nurse has to say oh thank you for enlightening us.", "In the end, no action, no conversation and possibly in time No dream or thought would escape the wakeful and relentless eye of this deity Every manifestation of life would be processed into the computer And brought under its all-pervading system of control Now he says This does not simply mean the invasion of privacy It means the dissolution of the human soul And this is what we're in This is the situation And the Prophet ﷺ said", "If the end of time comes upon you, then let him sow it.", "The Prophet said, and you can count it yourself. Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, Ali and then Hassan for the six months equals 30 years and that's the hadith. And then the prophet said it will be kings that hold on to their kingdom with ferocious authority. And he said, then it will Jababira, the tyrants which is the age we're in now, the age of Jabbar. That's what all these rulers are called. They're called Jababirah in Arabic language", "whether they know the hadith or not. If you say, Ta'araf al-Jabbar fi fil Iraq and he'll say, Naam Saddam Hussein Like you don't even have to, you just say, ta'arafa al-jabbar fii Syria? Naam Hafid Asad. Ta'arafa al- Jabbar fi Masr? Naaam Hosni Mubarak. Taarafa Al-Jabbari Fi Libya? Naaaam Muammar al Qaddhafi. Taarafa Al-jabbari fi al Jazar? Naaaaam. Taarefa Al jabbari fii... Every single country you will see and they'll give you the right answer It's a test no Muslim who has any political astuteness can fail", "can fail. Now, what then do we do? What's the seed that we hold in our hands? The seed that you hold in your hand is the deen of Islam because the deeen you have to have a qabwa. The Prophet said at the end of time holding on to the dee would be like holding onto coal but you still have to hold on to it. In other words its painful, its difficult. Holding onto coal is hard and you have keep it...you know its difficult thats all point of hadith", "All of us have to grasp this deen. Now what I want to do is give one at this point, just give the first slide. Now if you look at this, this is by a man whose name is Robert L. Good. Now he has identified in a book called The History and Future of Faith. He's identified five categories that take place in the history of religions. Now I think this is an accurate identification and this is part of the sunan of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And Allah says in the Quran", "The person who is the one who thinks deeply, who scrutinizes, who looks into the sunan of creation. Now part of what he has pointed out is that there are these five states. The first he calls the apostolic which in Greek Apostle is a Rasool so it's the time of the messenger himself and his immediate companions.", "The founder or founding exists the first generations. This is what we call a Salaf as-Saleh These are the righteous people that are on the minhaj of the Prophet . The next group is the Imperial which is what the prophet called the Muluk So, the prophet said that it would go from the khilafa ala minhaja nabuwa which we call the apostolic stage and then it would to the imperial which is the mulukiya", "I'm articulated this is what this professor at UCLA has identified now What you see at the imperial level that its wisdom dominates an Imperial Alliance. What that means is kings will use the religion as a way of Maintaining their power as a social cohesive force and it will spread because of that And so there's positive things to it, and there's benefits So if you look at the Kings Benny Omeya Benny Abbas wallahi we wish we had one of their times", "we had one of their tyrants. Wallahi, I would give my right and left arm if we could have one of the tyrant ruling the Muslim land because they'd straighten things out. They would! The worst of them will do a better job than the best of the ones we have now. You know it's like Muhammad al-Ghazali said, If one of these rulers now didn't have a job and they went with their qualifications to get a job as security guard,", "they wouldn't get it. They wouldn't, if they gave their resume, Saddam Hussein primary occupation killer, qualifications mass murderer have killed several thousands of human beings and you can check families all over Iraq to confirm that and all over Iran so I mean that's what we're dealing with now the next stage", "The next stage is the devotional. Now you can see this happen in the Muslim world, the Muslims went into a deeply spiritual period where really spirituality and this was part of the reaction to the imperial dominance when dunya became so corrupted a lot of these Muslims went in to a deep internal state. Now the Prophet said that there would be", "but there would be some Dachen in it.", "They have no religion. It's just charismatics like these preachers that go around on the television, they're called charismatic. They have not brains, no intellect, they just stir people up. They are charismatic speakers and orators and they get people all stirred up and that's... They have know intellectual awareness, right? I mean even a man Ahmed Didat who just recently had a stroke and may Allah give him a speedy recovery or take him with Lutf whatever Allah wills he", "He is a man who really is not by any traditional standards considered an alim. But he used to run rings around their leaders. Why? Because he had knowledge of their book, they don't know their book. They're just charismatic that's all they are and you'll never see them...they quote from there..they've always got their book with them right? That's all the have it's just they don' t have the scholars that we have. Now if you look Buddhism has been in there for long time.", "urine for centuries. If you don't think that's a folk religion, then I don't know what is. And the poor women that suffer they have to in Hinduism traditional classical Hinduism they burn the widow alive when her husband dies because in their tradition they don't believe a woman has any spiritual what they call Dharma. She has no spiritual path other than service or husband and then she's a sati", "he dies she can't remarry. And unfortunately according to Imam al-Kandahlawi, he said some of that Jahliyyah has affected the Muslims on the subcontinent. There's a lot of women who can't remarry they go into what like a Hindu sati state if the husband dies she is expected even she is young woman for the rest of her life to live without a husband. That's a horrific practice that should be eliminated from those Muslim and that's what Imam al Kandahlawi said. It's horrible thing to do to a woman. So then Christianity", "then Christianity again they had their reformation with Luther and these type of thing now there in a folkloric stage and it's finished if you look at Islam he says its just now going into the reformation period just now in other words we're literally right at the verge of a return to khilafah ala minhaj an-nabuwa", "So don't despair. It's just gonna take some time, you know? And alhamdulillah, the opening from Allah comes with patience. The Prophet was commanded, You have to be patient! The Prophet , he was commanded to be patience. So what about us? And he was the most patient of the people who are patient. Now one thing I wanna say about this religion. We are a religion of success.", "of success. We are not a religion of failure and we have to understand that this is the deen of tawfiq and success, and there has never been failure in this ummah until just recently when people have this conquered mentality. We've entered into this conquered mentalitiy where we think these people are somehow superior to us. They're not superior to use, we're being tried with them. لِنَبْلُوَكُمْ That's why Allah is testing us and one of the tests we have now is that these people", "The last portion of this Ummah will not be rectified or reformed. That's what it means", "The last of this ummah will not be reformed except by what reformed the beginning of the ummah. And that means going back to basics. That's what we have to do. Now there is another word in English which is going back fundamentals, which they love to banty about and call us fundamentalists. They'll say listen to that Imam ranting and raving up there about the end of time and those silly Muslims.", "said they make fun of us that's what Allah said when they pass by the nudge and wink and laugh at them that's why they say about us these people are just in obvious error their stupid people", "The Prophet before the previous Prophets they say that only Aradilunas follow you, just the low people, the stupid people. Right? Now the Hadith that says, That's not a sound Hadith. That majority of people in Jannah are stupid. Maybe from the perspective of other people but majority of People in Jnah are", "He didn't say, المسلمون يعلون ولا يعلون عليهم. He said, الإسلام يعلو ولا يعلى عليه. So there's nothing over Islam. But Islam right now is hovering over the ummah. You see we allowed it to be رفع. And this is what the hadith says. يرفع It's going to be raised up. We have to bring it back down. And the way we do that is through إصلاح. Now I want to give... We've got just a few minutes but", "But could you go to the next slide there? In fact, no. Go to the last one. I'll just forget those others too because I don't have much time. I think you need to... Okay, good. You can get that all in there. All right. This is a model of what's happening here. What this book of Allah... You see, this book that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has sent down", "Subhanalladhi khalaqal azwaja kullaha", "that happens in this Risalah is that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala sends down a Tanzil. Now, this Tanzil is deep. It's not a simple book because it's coming from Rabb al-Alamin. It comes literally from Allah subh'anaHu wa ta-hala. It is not the Sunna al-bashar. A human being didn't invent this book. This book is not from the Prophet Muhammad sallallaahu alayhi wasalam. He is the conduit. He", "That is what he is . Now, the tanzil comes. There are certain reactions. Here's what men of understanding and women of understanding do. They either... they... يَعْقِلُوا Right? أَفَلَا تَعَّقِلاً They use their intellect. They look at a book. Oh! From the Lord of the world let me see what it says. And they think about it. أَ فَلاتَعَقِالُونَ They يَفْهَمُون They use there fahm, their understanding", "You see, they're people of fahm. They are people of fiqh. That's the kuffar. They don't have fiqhh and fiq means deep understanding. The original faqi was the one that could tell which of the sheep was pregnant. In other words it had a... It looked to the inside. They had a deeper understanding. They were mutawassim . And then they", "They deeply reflect. is deep reflection and is for . In other words, it takes work to reflect. You see that wasn't in the Arabic language usually means , you have to think deeply. You can't be simplistic people. And then because it's already something you know. It's a reminder of something we already know which", "which is our inherent fitrah, which is am I not your Lord? We all know that. And we witness to it so Tauheed is the dominant call of the Book of Allah. It's something we already know but it takes tadakkur you have to remember oh! I remember that. I was in the presence of Allah and He said and this is what we have to remind our children. And then tawassam and you can go on etc., you go on", "I call to Allah with the inner sight. They're people of basair. These are internal proofs that take basira, inner penetrating vision and sight to perceive them, to understand them. So who the one who sees them, sees them for himself. And the one whose blind is blinded", "is blind against his own self. Now, the organ of understanding is the lube and the qalb and the fuad because Allah gave you this hearing which is called the ability to hear and He gave you the ability", "The ability to process what you're experiencing, your information, your knowledge. It has to be processed by the fu'ad Now there are...the meanings of the ayahs are two and they're categorized as A and B In the first one it's ni'ma rahma etc. It's called tabshir And this is what Ibn Juzay al-Kalbi in his beautiful introduction to the Quran in the tasheel says that the Quran is two things basically", "It gives warning and glad tidings. And usually the glad tidning precede the warning because it's . So you can look at as being , which is Allah enticing us, telling us to come because there's benefit in this or its which is . So, you have . And the Prophet is what?", "He's a giver of good tidings and a warner. So this is basically what the Quran, the vast majority of ayahs can be reduced down to this understanding. If it's telling us about good things that happen who people do good things, that's bushra. If It warns us its indar There are two responses to these Tasdik or takthib You either believe it or you disbelieve it. If you believe it you are called a mu'min Now you have to increase in iman", "in Iman. Iman is something that you see it increases with and it decreases with . So this is what we have to be people of Tasbeek, and then B is are the , those who reject these signs. Now if you study the book of Allah, it will explain everything that's happening. It will tell", "Why things are happening but the book needs understanding and depth and study and research to understand the Sunnah of Allah now the immediate consequence of Tasdeeq or taktheeb if it's tasdik then two things happen shukr which is called Ittiba al awamir that is how you show gratitude to Allah gratitude is not saying Alhamdulillah wa shukrulillah, that's shukra ala lisan But shukur has to penetrate the entire body", "the entire body. What comes from the lisan, إِنَّمَا جُعِلَ الْلِسَانُ عَلَىٰ الْقَلْبِ دَلِيلًا The heart has been given the tongue to interpret for it so the shukr of the tongue should be coming from the heart if there's a barrier between the tongue and the heart in other words that the tongue is saying one thing and the hard is believing another thing that is called nifaq you see so if your saying on your tongue الحمد لله وشكر الله but your actions are takdheel", "speak louder than your words. Your actions speak louder then your words, so if we're talking about all these things and we are not implementing them in reality we are mukaddibin, we are musaddiqeen And the other one is taqwa which is ijtinaab an nawahi Which is avoiding what Allah has prohibited Now the last number three which is what we don't want to do those are the people who have A&B", "have A and B plus the small b which is takdhib. So about ni'mah and intiqaam, they don't believe it. They don't belive in the rewards Allah promises and they don' t have fear of the punishment that Allah warns us about. And so those people are in kufr. And then...so the mu'min is up there and the kafir's down there. And", "it means in this life and in the next life. And for the kafir, it means shakawa in this live and in a next life and this is it. That's it. So can we pray and then finish because I can close up when I want to get to questions and things. Can we do that? Is that alright? Maybe you had enough passing out here.", "Alright, so I guess inshallah. It's time for the prayer? Is it time? Oh, ten minutes? Alright. Then let me just finish what I want to say and then we'll do the prayer. I'll break in a few minutes so people can go do wudu. And then when I come back it will be just questions and answers.", "I wish I had an overhead for it, I'm done with those. But this is a schema that was given to us by the great Moroccan scholar Ahmed Zarouq who lived and died in Libya and he's buried in Misrata and he was called Muhtasib al-Ulema wal Awliya which is the quality control person of the ulama and awlia because he's a reformer of a lot of the innovations", "Because this is how we will be reformed as an Ummah. The nasiha to Allah has three important qualities. The first one is, which means to follow those things that Allah has commanded for us to follow. At the most primary level it's the arkan, that we have to pray, we have renew our shahadat, We have to give our zakat, we", "We have to become people of the arkan, really. And we have to spread these arkan and revive the arkaan in this ummah. And not just routinize. We need to bring life to these things which means serious depth and understanding. And then the next one is nusratu deenihi . We have give victory to this Deen. We have commit our lives to Allah's Deen Don't be foolish people waiting for the last hour or their death to come upon them and you're in a state of heedlessness", "Be people of depth and sincerity to Allah . We have to commit to the deen of Allah. And this involves three things, commitment to the Deen which is... Al-Jihad is the first one. We have be people of Jihad. There's basically 3 types of jihad. Which is Jihad al-Safe, which means the martial jihad with fighting the enemies of Islam who are either attacking", "or under the Khilafah we do pre-emptive strikes which is to prevent any danger of the Muslim borders and so that is Al Jihad. And there's a hadith, the Prophet said, The jihad will remain a good thing as long as rain comes from the sky This isn't the time for jihad anymore.", "If you reach that time, he said, نعم زمان الجهاد That's the best time for jihad. When people are saying, no there is no more jihad, that's the BEST time for Jihad And this Ummah is an Ummah of Jihad and struggle. Some of them originally made it a sixth pillar of Islam I mean this Deen is literally a deen of struggle It means struggling in the cause of Allah", "to continue the struggle and the best ways to expend your life. Allah is with the people of Ihsan, the people that are trying to do something out of their love for this deen, trying to beautify their world because Ihsan means to make beautiful and this deean is Jamil. Allah Is Beautiful and He loves beauty and the Ihsan the Muhsin is the one who brings beauty about. And so there has to be...", "And then, We have to do things that preserve the deen. Which means we have to be people of study. We have two people that preserve this deen, the sciences of the deein. We had to be a people of , the people who literally revivify the deeen and the sciences at the deene. And we have those people. If were not those people than Allah will change us.", "Allah replaces you with other people. Allah doesn't need us, we need Allah. And then the last one from these things so you have اِتِّبَعْ وَأَمِرِهِ نُصْرَةُ دِينِهُ and then التسلیم لِأَمرِه We have to submit to Allah's command His affair and there are two types تَعريضي وتكليثي تَاعريض is those thing that happen we have no control over. We have surrender and submit to that. Allah will do things to us we have", "And then the taklifi are those things we have control over. Those things that we brought upon ourselves. Allah told us not to do them and we did those. There are four things that are necessary. The first is tawbah, which has three primary concerns. Radha al-Madhalim, which is to return those things you've taken from people, harmed them. If you stole money, you give it back. If made ghibah, you go ask for forgiveness.", "those type of thing. Which means that you have to avoid what Allah has made prohibited, so part of is not going back to the and then the last one is that you never intend to go back to that thing. So part of Tawbah is that You don't return to that Thing that Allah has prohibited and And Then The Next Three so Tawba and Then The next three is", "is sabr, you have to have sabr. And then you have shukar and you have the shuhud al minna You have to see the bounties of Allah even in our tribulations because there's bountys in it If you look at Lebanon those people that were killed by those people they're shuhada Wallahi, our dead are shuhadah their dead are finnar So even in the tribulation we have to recognize no its a purification for this ummah The prophet said", "The last portion of my Ummah would have much punishment. Why? Because we didn't purify ourselves with fasting and getting up in the night and praying and things, so we have to get purified by other ways because we're people of . So our tribulations are , nothing afflicts this Ummah except you", "except you get a reward for it. So we have to see even in our tribulation, there's a blessing from Allah . There is a blessing form Allah , even in out tribulation and we have witness that and people of hamd and shukr. And so that is for Allah . So the following the commands giving victory to the deen and submitting to Allahs amr. The next is to the Prophet .", "We have to follow his sunnah, we have to be people of sunnah. We have the people that begin to really take upon ourselves to follow the sunnah of the messenger of Allah and not lip service. I'm talking about following the sunna. And this is not sunnat al-adat which is a good thing. We shouldn't belittle sunnatal adat but we should follow the Sunnatul ibadah. We should follow those things that the prophet gave us to purify us. You see? Really!", "Those type of things which are part of his jabilah because he was an Arabian prophet so he has a certain Arabic Character to his nature that is not considered by the people of usul as Something that is incumbent on people to follow no it's something that if you want to follow that there's istihbab according to some of the ulama Ibn Omar would like to follow every single small detail of the sunnah of the Prophet and that's a good thing to do but we should be concerned with awlawiyat", "of remembrance. Make your prayer long and make your ma'siya short, you see? But people now it's everything is put upside down. Really we have our priorities completely crazy. And one of the signs of the sickness in people, halak and mutanatiaoon. The people who become obsessed with detail they're destroyed. Lan yashadateen ahadoon illa ghalaba. And this is the sickness of the Jewish tradition in the Quran in Surah Al-Baqarah. They", "which is in no way denigrating or detracting the importance of the deen, or of the fine details of sharia. But if you become obsessed with that and lose sight of the big picture... And this is why, take this into consideration people, think about this. Al-Quda'i relates a tradition from Sayyidina Ali in which he said, The polluted group is better than the pure sect.", "authority to throw people out of the ummah just because you don't like them. This is the Prophet's ummah, this is Ummal Muhammadiya it's not the ummuh of Abdullah or Zainab or Khadija or Abdurrahman or anybody it's the ummahh of Muhammad and the people that say Shahada they are the people of Muhammad . And the prophet said in a Muhammad he is their Shafi'a He is the one who will intercede for them so don't be so quick to chase your brothers and sisters out of Islam", "Because Islam is a broad gate and it brings a lot of people in it. And there's people that find all the hadiths that suit them to constrict..." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Sins of your parents affecting you - Shaykh Hamza _FjYVDj1uU6M&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743294894.opus", "text": [ "is very important. One of the things that a lot of people who are on the political plane, they see injustices and they fight against the injustice but they don't understand where the injustice come from because metaphysically a lot what's happening is a result of our own sins and the sins of our parents and grandparents and what we've inherited because even though you don't bear the sins previous people you are affected by their", "their effects. So the Palestinians today are directly affected by the betrayal of the Ottomans, by what happened 120-130 years ago. They're directly affected. So a child who's an illegitimate child even though that's not a word used in this culture anymore but a child whose an illegitime child in our tradition there is no sin that he bears but", "of the sin of his father. This is an unfortunate reality of life on earth, so we suffer the effects of previous peoples and in fact one of the great Andalusian scholars said that The wazirah is the one who bears the sins. Wizar is sin, awzar You know it's the weight of sinfulness So the wazer who carries the sins Allah says", "وَعَزِرَةٌ وِذْرَ أُخْرًا No sinful person bears the sins of another. He bears his own sins. One of the Andrusian scholars said, that ayah is not in this world. It's in the next world. That we do, we're affected by the sins", "Tafsir says the seventh grandfather, because he was righteous. Allah wanted good for these people. Well, the same then, مَفْهُمٌ مُخَارَفًا that very often the sins of fathers are visited on their children. I mean, what did the Jews do? They have the burden of the past. They carry the burden", "ancestors killed prophets. They fought the prophets. That's a burden to carry. So if you only stay on the political, it'll just make you angry. You just become another angry activist. And there's real justification for getting angry but Sun Tzu in The Art of War says anger your enemies and send them into disarray. It's actually a strategy", "Strategy get people angry the prophesized him didn't get angry. What do you say? Let's talk about don't get he said man was at a height and fell yeah, maybe that whoever finds good let him thank Allah and Whoever finds other than that woman was your dog later that it fell I am in the inner Nasa Don't blame anybody else but yourself because blaming others is a waste of time It is disempowering and it will get you nowhere Look at your own selves. I mean one of the", "I mean, one of the amazing book. This book really changed my whole perspective on politics. It was written by Abu Bakr al-Tartushi and Alhamdulillah actually encouraged a publisher in Jeddah to publish it. And they just published it in Darul Minhaj. It's called Siraj al Muluk by Abu Baker al- Tartushi. It is a brilliant book on political science but one of things that he shows in that book", "in that book is that there is a relationship between the ruler and the ruled. And, and the ruler is a mirror by which you can see yourselves. If you want to understand America just look at who's president of the United States. If You want to Understand the Muslim world Look who their rulers are because that's going to let you know they reflect the reality", "When you have a society that people, what do they want? What do the majority of people want? They want to be famous. They want To have a reality TV show. They Want to have lots of money. They won't have a tower with their name on it That's what a lot of people are pursuing in this country and So it doesn't reflect everybody but it reflects a lot", "leads to those conclusions. And when you divorce a religion from its metaphysics, you lose the ability to really understand things at the deep level, at the wide level. And the Quran is a profoundly metaphysical book. It's always taking you back to first principles. It' s taking you" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Snakes and scorpions among people - Shaykh Hamza Y_3qEuBGETc6g&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743073449.opus", "text": [ "Alhamdulillah, the book of Imam al-Ghazali which is known as Ahya Ulumuddin. Which is giving life to the sciences of the religion and it's important to note that when we say science", "It's the understanding of the science according to the pre-modern world, sciencia in Latin which comes from a word meaning knowledge. So ilm is what is known, the ma'loom and the ulum ad deen are those knowledges or sciences that relate to one's transaction with Allah . And Imam al Ghazali makes very clear", "to deal with what are known as the Mu'amalat. He divides the knowledges of the religion into Mukashifat and Mu'milat. The Mukashafats are things that Imam al-Ghazali makes very clear in his book, they are things people are not allowed to speak about. They're the ineffable aspects of the teachings of the Prophets. And those who deny those aspects", "religion are only revealing their own ignorance of the religion because he makes very clear that the inward experiences that occur in the unveilings of the heart are actually the goal and aim of the religious tradition, that you're worshipping Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to know Allah subhana wa ta-ala. And that knowledge,", "is not a formal outward knowledge. It's a knowledge which he often refers to in his book as a knowledge of experience or taste, what he calls dhawq. And so he begins this book by really for me I think grabbing you by the throat because in essence", "knowledges that were once living and vibrant have died. And they've died because of the scholars, he's really blaming the scholars. He is speaking in Muqaddimah before the book of knowledge which is his introduction, he is speaking first and foremost to the scholars which is why he begins the Muqaddima with the hadiths and this is the first hadith quoted in this book and this hadith will return. It's a hadith that Imam At-Tabarani relates", "And although it has some weakness in its senad, the meaning is a sound meaning. He says that the Prophet ﷺ said, أَشَّدُّ النَّاسِ عَذَابًا يوم القيامةِ عارمٌ لَمْ يَنفعه الله سبحانه بعلمه That the people that will be most severely tortured on the Day of Judgment are those scholars who did not benefit from their knowledge.", "not enable them to benefit from the knowledge that he gave them. And so, he begins the book by telling us this and when he speaks, he's speaking, he says, لَقَدْ حَلَّ عَنْ لِسَانِي أُعْطَةُ صَمْتٌ My tongue has been freed from the inability to speak because he's referring here to his spiritual crises. And one of the things that Imam al-Ghazali r.a does in this book is unlike many other scholars", "other scholars who write, he will bring himself into his book. And he does that in a way that has a very powerful effect on the reader because he will tell you I have done this. I have tried this.", "that he has acquired. And one of the things that he mentions in his monqid, which is his autobiography about the time that he was on his way back after three years of transcribing all of his notes of lectures and the caravan is attacked by brigands and they take his notebooks and he tells the chief of the brigands please, please just allow me that bag it's of no benefit to you", "What's in it? And he says, My knowledge. And the man laughs and says, what kind of knowledge is that when somebody like me could steal it from you? And Imam al-Ghazali says, I realized that Allah had made him speak. Allah made him say that to him to let him know that he did not really possess that knowledge if it could be taken from him.", "This silence was removed and my ability to speak came back. Referring to this crisis that occurs in 1095, he's born in 1058, he has a very intensive period of study at 19 he becomes the student of Imam al-Juwaini, Imam al Haramein one of the greatest intellectual scholars in the history of Islam in the Shafii Madhab, a great Uthuli scholar somebody who understood", "amount to the collective knowledge of usul al-fiqh, which is the foundations of jurisprudence. He was his student and he was his best student. And he was an extraordinary mind. He very sharp. Imam Al Juwaini says about him, he was a sea that you could drown in. He would somebody who could win every argument. And often did. And liked to display his knowledge.", "extraordinarily erudite. He knew poetry. He had an incredible capacity for language, even though he claims that it wasn't one of his strong points. The eloquence of his book is clear to anybody who reads it. So he's referring to this period where he goes into a crisis and then during the six-month", "path because he has been speaking all this time and it hasn't really penetrated him in his core. He feels like he's a phony, he feels that he's not really even though he's this master dialectician, a master philosopher, a Master Jurist, a Masters Theologian everybody admits that he is the greatest of the time he saying I knew in myself", "that I wasn't authentic, there was nothing real about it. It hadn't penetrated me and this is his crisis and its resolved by him leaving everything he settles the affairs, he puts his family in a good situation and he tells his family I have to do this, I have leave and he goes out and sets out on this journey The first two years he writes the Ihya", "and he writes this book, and he begins with this Muqaddimah to tell us that He says look at you how you are trapped in your arrogance. He's speaking right in the beginning to the man who is reading this book. He is speaking to him saying look at You how you're trapped in Your arrogance because he is a master psychologist and he is addressing the people of knowledge of his time", "knowledge of the afterlife. Everything else is in essence irrelevant because the only certainty that you have in coming into the world is that you will die. That is your only certainty. Nothing else is certain. The next breath is not certain, the next heartbeat is not", "Nothing should take priority over your concern about what happens after you die. And in light of what the prophets tell us, upon them all be peace, that we are on the doors of infinity. We are literally at the door of infinity, we're moving from a temporal abode to an eternal abode and what we do here during this time is going to determine our experience", "boat. So he says in the light of this knowledge, you should have no other preoccupation than to concern yourself with what you should be doing right now, right here for this imminent reality of death and this is why he begins the book telling us this and he will end 40 chapters later with the book of death. He begins telling us, why are you following your takabbur? What", "how they have forgotten their way, they're filled with ignorance. And this is such a vast and important affair. Don't you see your afterlife coming quickly and your worldly temporal world is dissipating before your eyes? Your appointed death date is near. The journey is far. You have little provision.", "This is a vast affair. The path is blocked. And there's no other way except for the one who has real sincerity with Allah, only doing things for the sake of Allah, with knowledge and action, and a discerning insight, critical insight not to be fooled.", "This is the one. He said, But to take this path without a guide with all of its obstacles, with all it's perils Is very very exhausting and difficult And then who are the guides? The guides They are the scholars They're the guides And then he goes on", "they're absent in our time. Where are they? Our time has been emptied of these people and then he says that there are those who wish to tell us that this religion is basically, and then it's basically fatwa for government giving legal opinion for government or knowledge that will help judges solve what he calls the petty argumentations of the riffraff", "of the riffraff. Somebody coming in because, oh so and so took such and such and I want it back. He says they think that this is the religion or learning argumentation, disputation, learning logic and learning how to win arguments so that you can get people to look at you or learning sajja, muzakhraf clever rhyming words so that", "amazed at your exhortations. This is istidraj al-awam, to get the common people, oh you're so great. See he's and the thing is he's speaking because he went through this and he had the intellectual honesty and the courage to admit that and that's why it's so powerful", "This empty dunya, the world. And he says, but knowledge of the akhirah, the afterlife. This is the path of the salaf as-salih. You know people talk about the salifiyyah. This whole book is to get back to the salifiyeh. This isthe manual to getback to the way of the Salaf. That's what he's saying. He's saying that the way for the Salaph is gone. They're right! The people who say they aren't following the Salap anymore. This exactly Imam al Ghazali argument.", "But he's saying what you think is. What is the Salaf? Is not what is the salaf what you thing is knowledge is not knowledge and and you have distorted and corrupted The technical vocabulary that the quran gave us so that you've given different meanings to the words that allah is using or limitations of those meaning that have deluded people and led people to the to think for instance that jurisprudence is", "ijara and hayl, that it's knowledge of forward buying and renting and menstrual cycles and whether a woman can go into the mosque or not. What he calls hair splitting. He calls these ulama, he says so no one remains except the mutrasimun. And this is a word from rusum which the rusum are like the descriptions. What", "in the husk of knowledge and have never penetrated, they've never peeled it to actually taste the fruit of knowledge. They're trapped with the outward forms and they don't realize that no these are powerful inward meanings. And so he says, So because I saw this and I recognized that Allah sent this book down and He called fiqh, this understanding hikmah, wisdom, knowledge, guidance, light", "light, distinction, discernment all of these things have been lost. He says فَصَارًا نَسِيًّا مَنْسِيا They're just forgotten things. He said so I wanted to write this book in order to bring life احياء لعلوم الدين كشف عن منهج الأئمة المتقدمين as a way of bringing life to the sciences of this religion and to reveal", "the more you realize how much inspiration went into this. Because this man, first of all, was a man who mastered all of the sciences of his time. We could argue... They say in Europe that Goethe was the last man that knew everything. That when he was alive, you could still know medicine and astronomy and physics, and you could actually learn and master all these sciences. Now the information has become so great, it's hard just to master the kidneys in medicine, like a nephrologist", "like a nephrologist. That's all they do, and they won't ever get to the end of just the secrets of the kidneys. But during his time, Imam al-Ghazali mastered the sciences of his time. He was a master of grammar, logic, rhetoric. He wrote books on... A few books on logic. He", "We tend to forget because people see Imam al-Ghazali as a Sufi, but he is first and foremost an Usuli. He is a jurist par excellence. And he has noted the Mustafswa is probably... I once asked Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah if he was on a desert island with only one book of Usul, which one would it be? And he said Al-Mustafsfa without even hesitating, the book of Imam al Ghazali. That's how central that book is. And this is a man who has spent his life reading the great books of Usu.", "books of Usul. So the Mustafah was his book in Usul, he wrote Mi'yar al-Amal which is a book of philosophical ethics how to reason ethically, he wrought Mizan Al Ilm a book about the prioritization of knowledge He wrote all of these different books and then Al Khulasa he has an extraordinary book in Fiqh he takes Imam al Muzani's book and gives you the Zubdah or cream of the Shafi'i Madhab", "And then he writes to Haftar Falasifa, which is refuting those aspects of philosophy. When he uses the word philosophy it's important to note also that philosophy today is limited to one aspect of philosophy, which basically metaphysics or ontology and in his time was logic, metaphysics and natural sciences. So natural science is like physics", "sciences like physics and biology and chemistry went under philosophy. So when he's talking about the philosophers, he's also talking about people today we have materialistic scientists who argue that the world is just matter and there's nothing beyond this world. These are the people that he's speaking to. He's refuting their arguments and showing the sophistry of their arguments. And then he says so he put it in four volumes. One he calls which is", "The section on ibadat, which is how we worship Allah And then rub' al-aadat Those which are about the norms and customs amongst people How you behave amongst people And then, rub'al muhlikat Those destructive vices in one's life And rub'an munjiyat And the last section is those things that are salvific The things that will save you in the afterlife So this is the structure", "And then each is ten books. And he begins it, and this is very important He says I began it with the book of knowledge Why? Because This is the end. This is really the purpose. Knowledge is what we're after. And also because it is knowledge which Allah has worshipped with", "Allah came and he said seeking knowledge is an obligation on every Muslim man and woman in the Idraj of the hadith of Ibn Majah. And he says that, I will differentiate in this book between what is useful and what is harmful. And then he says because the Prophet said,", "Knowledge, but it's of no benefit. You can know things that will not benefit you and that benefit when the Prophet ﷺ is talking about benefit he's talking about afterlife, the akhirah, the benefit of the afterlife. And whatever is beneficial in the world if it's not beneficial in after life it's harmful. And what's beneficial in a world that's beneficial on the afterlife is beneficial knowledge. And then He tells you that the first book is the Book of Knowledge and then the Aqidah because this follows", "Once you understand what knowledge is, he gives you the dogmatic tools to understand basic creed. But he makes it very, very clear that theology... And he has a beautiful analogy of theology. He says, theology is like the husk around a fruit. And he said one of the distortions of the mutrasimun, the formulas, is that they call tawhid the science of theology, aqida.", "He says that is not what Tawheed is. Tawheeed is to see the Musabbid in the world without the Asbab It's to see what is behind the world. Tawaqool and that's why he puts them together in his book it is absolute trust in Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala but he says the husk that protects this thing is dogmatic theology which is necessary", "because we're in a teki from that tradition, that he said that the theologians are like chaperones. When the lovers get together you need a chaperone there to make sure nothing illegitimate happens. He said the theogian is the chaperon for the one who loves God. He just makes sure because in your love of God lovers always say things like, Your face is like the moon.", "It's not really like the moon, but that's what the lover says. Your lips are like cherries. They're not really liked the cherries right? But that's why he said because he is in love and ecstasy comes from love. And so what Imam al-Ghazali is saying is that the theologian is the one who protects the person from transgressing the boundaries of what he can say or believe about Allah .", "And then the Asrara Tahara. This is really important because what Imam Al Ghazali is saying is that one of things that has happened in our religion, is we learn the outward things but forget the meanings behind those things and what he's trying to show us constantly is that appearances are not reality. That you have to get beyond the outward.", "that creation is meaning set up in images so the meanings behind those images are what differentiate Allah says is to discern but if you look at the root is a bridge", "take something's outward form and penetrate its meaning. That is what i'tibar is, it's making that jump. And this is the power of language because all of language in the end like Ibn Jinnah says, all of languages in the ends are metaphorical we're speaking in metaphors whether we like or not. Because the metaphor takes you from one thing to another so if I say shajara to an Arab it means tree", "In English when I say tree an image pops into your mind of a tree That is the metaphor because it takes you from one thing to another thing The Shajara is not necessarily a shudder up because in English. It's a tree But that's the meaning that enables us to understand the concept, but then what is the meaning of the tree? What does a tree mean? Because a tree has meaning and so that that's a whole other aspect of", "other aspect of getting to the meaning of a tree. Why are so many metaphors? Allah draws a metaphor of the good word is like a good tree. You see, so what does a tree mean? Some trees bear fruit. Some of that fruit's edible. Some", "of prayer or the secrets of prayer, the secrets zakaat, the secret fasting, the secrete hajj, the adab of tilawa. How to recite Quran and then book of adhkar and da'wat and he ends it, this is very important, he ends the first section with knowledge and he end it with time management of your dhikr because what he's saying is look this is the key if you want the key", "The key is in your practice. Because your knowledge will not benefit you if you don't have constant practice. And so he ends it with how to organize the awrad that you do, the practices, the spiritual practices that you", "the book of livelihood, the book halal and haram. The book of companionship who you take for friends when mu'ashara conviviality ma asnaaf al khalq then tells you different types of people that you're gonna be confronted with in the world And then it's the book uzla which is seclusion and then the book traveling and the book samaa which is audition listening to poetry", "poetry that will... and then the book of Amr ibn Ma'ruf, and then he ends it. You see Book 20, and 20 out of 40 is the heart. It's the midpoint. He ends it with the book", "This is the perfect man. This is a culmination. It's in the perfect Man. If you want to understand how to behave, look at the character of the Prophet because everything is in his character. The third fourth is the Muhrikat and he begins it with the wonders of the heart and then spiritual exercise disciplining the soul and then the book of the two desires", "foundation of sinful behavior was the Shahwa Tain the button in the fudge Which is the stomach and the genitals that this is the power of man? This is this is generating power of men, and if you don't discipline those two powers They'll lead you astray if you discipline them they become useful for you And and that power becomes a source of fuel For your spiritual path if you if you Don't discipline them it will take you to destruction and then", "And آفات اللسان, the tongue. Because the majority of people are in the fire because of the tongue and then the problems of anger, resentment and envy very important this triad. And then the book of censoring the دُنْيَة and this is important that it's seen as the دنيا is the lowest part of the world It's not the عالم The Qur'an differentiates between حَيَت الدُّنْیَةِ and عالم رب العالمين Allah does not say رَبُّ الدُنَّيَه", "Dunya is a low thing. The Aalim is the tajalli. It's where Allah's attributes of afaal manifest in the world, so it's a high thing. And so then he shows you that tarteeb and he explains why he did that. And then in the final, the munjiyat, and then he has the book of bukhal, the book", "with delusion because again this is the essence of the problem, it's the delusional state of human beings. We're a deluded species, we're deluded about ourselves, we don't see ourselves,we see others faults very clearly but can't see our own faults and then he has the munjiyat and begins with tawbah because this is beginning of the path and then patience and gratitude and then the book of hope and fear", "and tawakkul, he puts them together because once you have tawhid, you can trust in Allah because you realize nothing happens except that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala wills it. And then he has the book of mahabba and shauq love and desire wal uns waridaa. And the book niyyah and sitq and ikhlas, intention sincerity and truthfulness. And than the book murakaba and muhasabah being aware of God and taking your souls to account", "And then he has the book of Tafakkur, which is reflection. And finally he ends the book death and so he explains that these have inward and outward meanings. Then he explains you have the Mukashibhat and Mu'ammarat. Next he moves into the Book of Knowledge and he has seven chapters. Now what he will do with the chapters? Generally his methodology is he will bring you the verses of the Qur'an and then he will", "the athar, which are basically the sayings of the sahaba, of the great men and women of Islam. And then he will have his discussion. And sometimes he will mention also the aqal, the intellect, the rational proofs for these things. So he begins the book with fadhr al-ilm wa ta'lim wa taaleem, the benefit of knowledge, of teaching,", "Tell us the extraordinary and exalted position of knowledge in Islam. So he says Allah bears witness that there's no God but He, but God, and the angels, and those who have knowledge firmly rooted in justice, in equity. And he said so look how he begins with himself", "with himself, Allah and then he seconds with the angels and then talks about the people of knowledge. And he said this shows you the honor, bounty, exalted nature, nobility of knowledge and then He says that Allah will elevate people through knowledge. يَرْفَعِ اللَّهُ الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا مِنكُمْ وَالَّذِّينَ أُوتُوا العِلْمُ دَرَجًا He will raise up those who believe from You and those who are given knowledge in ranks.", "Are they equal those who have knowledge and those who do not have knowledge? Ibn Abbas said that the ulama are over the average believers by 700 degrees. And so he goes on and talks about this, and then he looks at the hadith. The Prophet ﷺ said whoever Allah desires good for, He will give him understanding in the religion, and He will clarify what He means by that.", "that the scholars are the inheritors of the prophets and then even the birds and fish in the sea will ask forgiveness for those who have knowledge", "Eğer Muhammed'de ümmet olursan bilinme zikriyle.", "Kur'an genek diri Mahmudum Allah", "ilayet kuluna artar gerekdi. Mahmudun Allah", "Yer dergah-ın aman, Erbek dilersen yolda canın.", "a statement that Sahaba made, and the meaning is sound because the Mujahid, his blood is spilt to defend what the scholar is doing. Knowledge is why the Mujahid is fighting. The Mujahed is striving to protect an environment where people can learn about their Lord", "There is a very important section where he talks about the excellence of teaching and then he says that", "before you can do the practice and I was sent to teach you that so that you could do that. And this is also in the famous tradition where Omar saw a man in a masjid, and he said to him what are you doing? He said I'm remembering Allah. He said who takes care of you? He says my brother. He says your brothers better than you. Then he left. Now people will say oh he was denigrating him. No! He was teaching him to beware of ajab because he could be in the masjids", "in the masjid, his brother's out in the market and he thinks that he is better than his brother. But his brother is getting the reward for everything that he does because he is the one enabling him. And that's why Umar ibn Abdulaziz said be a scholar, a teacher, a learner or somebody who helps them, facilitates the process. And then in another one it said or one who just loves them but don't be anybody else because you'll perish.", "So that aspect is very important, the importance of learning and setting out for knowledge. But one of the things that he says constantly is that it is knowledge that makes us human. This is where the insania comes from. And he uses that word, insania. He says without knowledge we are like Baha'im. We're like the beasts. It is knowledge", "mentions that the first step of learning is silence and listening, and then retention, and practice, and teaching. That you have to learn in a certain order. And then he gives us evidence for the excellence of knowledge from reason after he tells you what Allah said, what the Prophet said, What the scholars have said. He gives you evidence of the excellence.", "of what's called the زيادة. He says that فضل, when you say العلم أفضل من غيره knowledge is better than anything else he says the فضλ is زيادا it's extra, it's what's extra and he said when we say that the horse is better then the mule both of them are beasts of burden they can carry but the horse has extra qualities it can be used in war and it's more beautiful so he's saying", "that's why we would say the horse is better because of what's extra in it. And so he says knowledge is better, and he tells why. He said that a precious thing or desired object may be any of three categories. What's sought as a means to an end, what's sought for its own intrinsic value, and then what's", "that are clearly means, like the Arabic language is a means to understanding knowledge. And then he says that happiness in the hereafter and the ecstasy of witnessing the face of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala are sought for their own intrinsic reason. That's their own intrinsick value. And that people are naturally disposed to honor their scholars.", "sections to me is where he talks about the four sciences. And the first, there are four fundamental activities. He says if you look at the activities of the world, you have agriculture for raising foodstuffs, weaving or textiles for manufacturing clothes, architecture for erecting houses and then politics for establishing human relationships and society.", "important thing. A lot of people would say, oh it's agriculture because we need food. He actually says the most important thing is politics from those. So that's the first category. The second category are auxiliary sciences and those are things that help the other things. For instance, metal works helps agriculture because you need hoes and plows and things like that. Medicine also is something", "Those involve like milling and bread making, things like that. So you have agriculture then you have the tools you need to do that and then you those things that complete it like the baker who bakes the bread. And he shows how these are all important and necessary and he likens them to body parts. He says the fundamental ones are like the heart and the brain and the liver and then the auxiliary ones are", "He loves metaphors. He uses them all throughout the book. He's constantly using metaphors to drive points home in very visual images. And then he says, the most important of these is politics and then he said that politics are the politics of the rulers but then the politics", "of the rulers only governs the actions of men. This is a very important distinction and then he said, the third category are the scholars because they are the inheritors of the prophets and they also govern the activities and the minds of people because they're the ones that teach people but then he says, the ulama are really specifically towards those educated people what he calls the khasa", "of the political people are the wa'al. They're the preachers on Friday who give the Friday sermon. He said they also influence the minds of people, but they have no influence over the actions of the people. They influence the mind, they influence the actions in that they can get them to do things, but he said that all of these have to be working with right knowledge, justice, equity, wisdom,", "wisdom and then he talks about the The difference between the religious knowledges, and then those Knowledges that are useful for the worldly affairs And then the next section section 2 is what he says Those aspects of knowledge that are deemed farbaim. And this is important also because What he says is that when the prophet is saying seek knowledge", "It's an obligation on every Muslim, Sikh knowledge even to China. He says this has been turned into by the formalists into all this outward stuff and he said I'm not denying the importance of that and he will reiterate that. He said don't misunderstand me. I'm Not denigrating these other knowledges but what I'm saying is you have forgotten What this affair is really about? This is about Akhira And that is why you have made these things into something they are not", "In the end, fiqh is about understanding. He said that the Prophet ﷺ had 10,000 sahaba when he entered Mecca they were all Gnostics of God but out of those 10,001 only ten of them gave fatwa So he says if this knowledge was just about fatwas and giving legal opinions wouldn't the Prophet have given that to all his sahabas? No! He was teaching them knowledge of the afterlife And so he says it's very important to recognize", "And then he gives to recognize the importance and centrality of that. And then, he says, he uses Abu Talib al-Makki one of the great Ash'ari scholars and a Sufi who wrote several famous books But he says basically The Fardain what is meant by that is what Islam is based upon the pillars? And this is why He will...the next sections are about Aqidah and then the Tahara Salat", "Ramadan Hajj to the house of God and then Tilawa of the Quran as what infuses that with meaning, and the Awrad. So he's basically saying the five pillars but he wants you to know... He says it's three things Aqidah your understanding dogmatic theology Then your actions How you worship Allah And then what is prohibited? What you should avoid so understanding what should be avoided", "He goes on to say that the other type of knowledge is the knowledge of fard kifaya. But before he does that, he ends by saying don't forget that it's also farda'in if you have a diseased heart to purify your heart. So you can learn the outward but if you don't change your heart then you have no salvation in the afterlife because Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala reminds us", "Allah reminds us that it's the pure heart that will help us on the day of judgment. And he says there are three things, He said these are at the essence of the human problem. Avarice, greed, and he argues that really all of the... The only reason we need judiciary systems is because of greed. It's all about greed.", "over somebody else's goods. And this is where arguments come from, it all comes from that. And then following our hawa and he will argue in fact that this is the real idolatry. He says even the idols of wood and stone, he said what's really happening is the hawa of following our ancestors, of thinking somehow that they knew what they were doing. So he argues that hawa is at the root", "Finally, this ijab. And this is from a hadith. This is somebody fascinated by his own opinion. And then he goes into the fard kifaya and he talks about things like medicine. And he says medicine is very important. And He shows how medicine is better than for instance arithmetic but then he distinguishes and says it's better in its fruit because you're healing people But he says in the fundamentals Arithmetic is better because arithmetic is exact whereas medicine is not an exact science", "which are the branches and he talks about for instance, the Prophet said that a judge should never judge if he's angry but what was understood from that is he shouldn't judge if his constipated or if he has to go somewhere so comes...he shows how the branches of knowledge come out of the And that's traditionally now", "now what we call fiqh, jurisprudence. So learning like shafi'i fiqhh, that's furoo'a. The usool is how they arrived at it. And then he says the muqaddimat, the auxiliary sciences, like linguistic sciences. And finally the mutammimat and this is the those are things like tajweed, the things that complete knowledge", "And then he says that one of the things that he argues in here is that the jurisprudence have turned this thing into something completely different. And they've argued that all this knowledge is simply the knowledge of argumentation and dogmatic theology, and he's very much opposed to this,", "if you think that the knowledge that the Prophet ﷺ came to bring is the knowledge of renting and buying and selling and these things. Those things are important, and there is an element to the Sharia, but this is not what this matters about. He's trying to take us back to the centrality of it. And then he goes on, and he talks about the next section. I mean, there's so much detail in here because this is one of the largest books", "and there's a lot of detail, but my time is limited. And then he uses the example of astronomy where he says astronomy has two branches what's called tanjin. The mathematical astronomy which measures the heights of stars and the movements of stars. He said those are important to learn prayer times and to be guided by and to understand that the universe we're living in. But he said going too deeply into them also can become blameworthy and harmful.", "and the example he gives of astrology, and he says astrology is more guesswork than it is a science. But one of the things that he says is that the problem with astrology, he said, is that people actually think these planets have influence. And he likens them to a person like an ant. He said imagine an ant who's been given knowledge, and it's on a piece of paper,", "appearing on the paper will think that the pen is the one that's causing that because it can't see the hand holding the pen, it's too small and then it can see the arm behind the hand and then you can't even man behind the arm and then he can't seem to bring behind the movement and then I can't feel well inside this compelling he said like that is the human being when it looks at the us bad", "the means outside of the world are what are dictating things. He said, people think when the sun comes up, the light shines because they don't understand that it's Allah who is illuminating everything. He's only using this as a mean in the same way and this is the limitation of human beings. And then he talks about the sciences whose names have been changed and this important aspect of this because he says fiqh was understanding and it became jurisprudence so he talks", "which was knowledge he said becomes the knowledge of argumentation, disputation and then Tawhid which was seeing Allah in his creation and the Asbab being simply the Musabib or the reality behind the means which is real Tawhi'd He said it's reduced to this And then Tathkir which is reminding people and exhorting people he said become like stories", "comes philosophy because it became used in Arabic for philosophy. So he argues that we need a restoration of these proper technical terms and then he goes on to say, like for instance, he gives a definition of tawhid which is very beautiful. He said theology at the time of the salaf was a belief that all things come from God,", "Both good and evil would be seen as coming from God. And the fruits of this is dependence, tawakkul. And that's why he puts the two together later on. And he said but now it's become like a precious fruit encased in two successive husks. And then he talks about the dhikr and how that has been completely altered.", "The early scholars warned of the storytellers. There's people who come into mosques and they tell stories Imam Malik actually prohibited them in the mosque of Medina because he didn't feel it was appropriate And there is a famous story about Al-A'mash, one of the great Muhaddithin He was in a mosque once and he heard a man giving a qas And I heard from Al-a'mash and Al-amash knew that he never gave him any knowledge", "Ya Rasul, aren't you ashamed to do something like that in the masjid?", "Storytellers will do anything, like a comedian who will do Anything to get a laugh. These storytellers Will do anything to get A tear So they use this Technique of learning how To move people's emotions and sway Their emotions and he says That that's not something from the Salaf And then he talks about Some Of the Sufiyah And The Shatahat He goes into that about the problems with that", "the problems with that. And then he gives you how to determine, determining how much is praiseworthy from a science. So he says some sciences you should learn to the extent of it. Like this, he said knowledge of God is endless. You can keep going. Not theoretical knowledge but he's talking about experiential knowledge. But he says that learning too much of fiqh where you go into all the khilafat, he", "said you waste your life. Learning too much of grammar is a waste of time. He's saying that take from these what you need and then move on. Don't waste your in these things because life is too precious. He said it's the single most precious thing that you have is your time, and how you spend it determines everything. And then he talks about people, scholars,", "That therefore those who pursue branches of knowledge whose acquisition is fard kifayah, especially when they have already been taken up by some and they pursue these things. And they argue that it's important to study these things He said these people are like somebody who snakes and scorpions have crept under their clothes and they begin to whisk flies off somebody else Like he's saying they should be preoccupied with their own self But they'll argue that no I'm learning this to preserve this knowledge so we can teach it", "so we can teach it and this and that. So he said they forget themselves, and he warns about this. And then he talks in the end of that section, he says that a certain Shaykh, and it's said that it's Imam al-Junaid, was asked about all the sciences he learned, and He opened his hand and blew like that, and said they're all hadaa manthura.", "me was prayers that I used to pray in the middle of the night. So he's saying that, look this is real you can learn all these things but in the end what are you doing to save your soul? And then in the section four that he talks about why people seek polemics and it's very interesting his argument because what he says is in the early period of Islam scholars everybody loved knowledge so much", "Desired by people especially the rulers so they would bring the rulers into their courts and The rulers would do arguments So you'd see like Imam Shafi'i would argue in defense of this that or the other. Imam Malik They would give him lots of money The rulers, and they and they would bestow upon them so other people saw this and they said There's money to be made in this And so they began seeking knowledge to get the power that these scholars had and this is one of the things that", "The early people were saints. They were awliya, Imam Marduk, Imam Shafi'i. But the other people wanted their outward, like the", "word, like Simon who wanted the power that Peter had. And so what he says is they learn these tricks to get into the palaces, to get money and this becomes a great calamity for Islam because he said that this is what the ulama are all involved in now. He said the sincere ones are gone", "will use as an excuse, we're only following the way of the Salaf. But he's saying they're liars. This is not the way", "that we need this argument, you need to have this to pursue the truth. But then he says what are the evils that come from this? And he talks about envy because he said debaters envy people that are better than them and then he talked about pride because oh did you see that I really showed him? Did you see when he said that and I said this? So they get pride and then", "speak about them afterwards. Ah, he was so stupid. Did you hear that one argument he made? Unbelievable. And then self-justification. He'll start claiming tazkiyah la tuzakwa anfusukum and each one will claim that he's doing it for high and exalted reasons. And the reason why this is so powerful from Imam al-Ghazali is because he is that man. He knew. He's saying look I did this. I know it.", "And then he goes on to talk about, he tells us that if you look at the great scholars of Islam, you will see that they were all following this path of Akhira. And he uses Imam Shafi' as his great exemplar.", "that are necessary for a student. And then he gives the duties, that are necessarily for a teacher. He says the student has to be patient with his teacher. You have to listen to him. He can't want to show off and again remember, he's speaking from his experience because he was the big show-off. And he admits that so he is speaking from experience. Then he says that the teacher has to have compassion for the student. He has to treat him like a child. A father would treat a child out of love. He wants to see him grow", "And then finally he talks about, in the sixth section and then he ends with the seventh which is about the intellect. He talks about the evils of knowledge and how you distinguish between the ulama of the akhira and the ulma of this life. And this for me is the most painful one because it's hard to read it. Because when he shows you what the scholars of the afterlife are like", "Does this match? Do you see yourself in here? He's asking the reader, do you see your self-love? Do I see myself in here?\" He said, look these people are people that prefer the next life over this life. They're not people of luxury. They are not laziness. He talks a lot about the indolence of scholars. He said how do these scholars sit at home eating their food basking in all this luxury and there is people who don't know how to read the Fatiha in their neighborhood. There is people that are ignorant all around them. How do they justify their existence? How do", "And so he really painfully looks at these teachers and he gives you very powerful standards to judge teachers. He talks about modesty, he said that these teachers today will say that humility is dhul, it's humiliation, and that kibr is izzah, it' dignity, arrogance is dignity. So he said they'll", "So he said they'll change the words to give a different meaning and just to justify their own arrogance. And the conceit that he talks about, and he says a characteristic of these learned, true learned people is that they walk their talk. He said you will see them implementing what they practice. One of the great sheikhs here, Sheikh Mahmoud Effendi, who hopefully we might meet him, but when he does dhikr,", "He never lets the subha go below his heart. And he said to his students, if you ever see me leave one sunnah, leave me. And He's not exaggerating. That's why He reached the maqam that He reached, His station. People recognize it. But this is what He's saying, is that these are their qualities.", "Also that they seek useful things and they avoid things that are inconsequential. They don't really lead to anything of any value or benefit to them. And once the Prophet saw some people around a man, and he said, oh, he's an expert on what? And he said poetry and lineage. He said that's something the knowledge of which doesn't benefit", "Ta'limu al-ansab ma tasiruh bihi arhamakum", "that they're not disposed to indulgence in food and drink, and luxury, and dress, and furniture, and housing. But they prefer economy in these things following the salaf as-salih. But then he goes on to mention a story, and this is his balance. He mentions a story of Imam Malik where Yahya ibn Yazid wrote him a letter, and he said I heard you eat good food, and you wear beautiful clothes, and ride beautiful horses. And Imam Malek wrote back to him", "And then the man told him, it's better if you left all these things and practiced zuhud, detachment. Imam Madik wrote him a letter and said, I do indeed eat good food and I wear good clothes. And he said, and I know that leaving those things is better but they're permissible and I'm not doing anything haram. And the door that God has opened to me is the door of knowledge. For other people He opened the door", "with the door that God opened for me. So he explains that this is not extremism, it's not becoming like the Darawish who give up everything. He's not saying that, he's talking about balance but he's saying in the end your heart has to be detached from these things and then another characteristic is that he keeps away from rulers and there's a hadith in which the Prophet said that the best of rulers are at the doors of the ulama and the worst of ulama are at", "The first part of that statement is absolute. The best rulers are at the doors of the scholar, but the second one is it's restricted by the intention of the scholars. If they go to the ruler to get money from them or to get something then its blameworthy, but if they go with a pure intention to benefit or to make shafa'ah", "Al-Ghazali, in the end of his life, he made an oath at al-Khalil near Jerusalem. He made an Oath that he would never enter a ruler's domain again and at the end if his life he was called to the court and he sent a beautiful letter saying that he'd made this oath and in the End they were coming to him so before he had been seeking them In the end They were seeking Him And that was the way of the Salaf is that the rulers sought them out", "ruler sought them out, not the other way around. And so he goes on and explains that he's also not impatient to give his opinion, that a true scholar is not quick to tell you what he knows but he deliberates I was once with Sheikh Abdullah with the Sadiq great scholar from Mauritania as a Mufti in the Emirates really truly great scholar and I remember this man from one of the Arab countries asked him a question", "And Sheikh Abdullah said, come tomorrow and I'll give you the answer. And this man turned to me and he said, does he know anything? And I said, he's one of the most learned people in the Emirates. And then he just left because he had been so accustomed to ulama just giving their opinion right off the bat. Whereas Sheikh Abdullah was somebody who would always deliberate", "The Maliki is called a Nazila fatwa. It's called a tribulation. And Imam Malik, if he was asked a question, you say, إِنَّ لِلَّهِ وَإِنِّ اللَّهُ رَاجِعُونَ He'd use the word for مصيبة. If somebody asked him a question in their religion because it was such a weighty thing. ثَنُّلْقِ عَلَيْكَ قَوْلًا ثَقِيلًا One time Imam Maliki was asked", "There's nothing light in Allah's religion. We're thrusting on you a weighty word. And this was the feeling that these ulama had. And then finally, he says that they seek muraqabah and internal transformation more than they seek the outward. So they're more concerned about their internal states than they are about the outward", "the state of Yaqeen and developing Yaqen. And he gives a different explanation of the two meanings of Yaqun, which is one is from the Dhawq and the other is an intellectual type of certainty that comes. One is experiential. And then finally in the seventh section this is how he ends his book. He ends it with a description of the intellect its noble nature, definition and divisions.", "the fact that Allah uses in the Quran light as a metaphor. That light is the metaphor for knowledge and darkness is the example of the intellect is the light that Allah gives us to guide us in the world and he uses the example", "He gives four meanings for the intellect. And the first is his quality which distinguishes man from others. So it's his ability to grasp abstracts. For instance, one of the secrets of our religion is it's centered around facing the Kaaba, which is a complete abstraction because there's no cubes in the world.", "we worship is something that's beyond the senses. It's not it's not something we can see in the world, it's something that we need to understand through and then second it's the knowledge of knowing the things that are possible and impossible necessary and unnecessary and the third its empirical knowledge. It those things like science that we use the intellect and finally in the fourth he said", "And this is really, he said, this is the most important thing. And when you can do this, when you understand what's harmful by thinking it through rationally, the aqil takes its function which is ya'qiluka. It will prevent you from doing harm. So he basically ends by saying the foundation of knowledge is the intellect but he's not using the intellect in the sense that it's understood by modern man as this rational component and he actually says", "will censure the intellect is because they're talking about the intellect that people think is the intellect, the intellect of mathematics and arithmetic and the obsession over these things. He's saying no, the intellectual is something that is capable of knowing its Lord. It's a light inside the human heart and that's at the root of that book. And that's why in the end The Book of Knowledge is the foundation of the Ihya and he will return to it again and again", "and again because the Ahiya is a book of reviving ulum. And so he begins it with a definition of what are the ulums, and why should they be sought? And with what are they sought with the intellect, and what is the intellect? And this is part of the profound architecture of his great book, his opus, The Ahiya Ulum al-Din.", "الحمد لله اللهم صلي وسلم مبارك على سيدنا محمد وعلى آله وصحبه وسلم تسليما كثيرا ولا حول ولا قوة إلا بالله العلي العظيم والعصري إن الإنسان لا في خسر إلا الذين آمنوا وعملوا الصالحات" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Stop Running away from Marriage - Shaykh Hamza Yus_vgpuGKqexDU&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748542410.opus", "text": [ "Marriage is a bond that was established by Allah SWT between the male and female. And it's interesting that in America now there's even a debate about marriages between same sex, I mean this is the level of degradation that human species has arrived at because marriage itself is a prophetic tradition It was given to human beings through prophecy, through revelation", "revelation and so the bonding of a male and female is done through the gift that Allah gave them which is called nikah. And the Prophet said he was the son of nikah, not sifah. He was the Son of lawful marriage and not the son fornication or any adultery. This is a hadith which indicate even though the Arabs before who had traditions they", "A divine contract from Allah . Now the next thing to note is that there are many words in Arabic for family but the basic word that's used is Usra which relates to Asira, to bind. You get the same word asir which is a prisoner. Families in a sense we're prisoners once we were born into a family we're prisoners to that family you cannot choose to disown your parents. Your parents are your parents until you die", "Until you die, they're your parents even in the next world. They're still your parents So there's a type of binding that happens that really we are Binding to it in a way That is not flexible now also the word related to Children is often a yard which is I is a dependent somebody in need the word for different In Arabic the child is means in its root meaning it has to do with parasitic action in other words the child itself", "The child itself is completely dependent, like the parasite is dependent on the host body a child is dependent upon the family. Now the other word which is related to clay that is malleable so a child in a malleble entity within the family and also in society. Now Allah has given of parents. Allah has told you that you must take care of your children", "Arabic language relates to both the male and female unlike Abna which are generally males in the Arabic language, Awlaad Alwalid relate to the male & the female. And so the male or the female children are responsibility Allah has made it incumbent upon parents now Qadi the great scholar from North Africa Ibn al-Hajin his Madkhal has a session on Tarbiyatul Aulaad and the importance of Tarbiatul Aualaad of nurturing children", "to nurture. The name of Allah , which is Rabbul Alameen, is related in its root form according to some of the semantics in Arabic to Tarbiyah, the one who nurtures, the One who literally yurabbi, He grows and causes to fashion. So Allah is the murabbi of His creation and He has made the parents", "Allah when he speaks about the parents He will say after saying and be grateful to allah and to your parents well in wali dayne And this is a very significant thing that allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has literally put the half of the parents next to the half Of allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la in showing gratitude because they're the means and the one that does not thank the means Has not thanked the giver of the means so allah. Subhanahu Wa Ta'Ana has commanded us to respect already", "Subhanallah. This is the age of television, you know, you can't say anything and it's a commercial. I should just get up and have a commercial because this is sound bites. There's no substantive... Mashallah. It's a big topic. We're in a crisis situation. The Americans are in a", "before their eyes. Really, it's going there. You know not in this world, not in the next world that's later. In this world they're living in hell. This is where they are. They're in a very dangerous situation and the amazing thing about it is it's happening and they're all watching it happen. Allah says", "Allah says that he told them enjoy life temporarily and then they transgress the commands of their Lord. And so the Sa'iqah took them suddenly with great ferociousness and fierceness, they were seized by the punishment of Allah . And then Allah said, They were watching it happen before their very eyes. They couldn't even do anything about it. They could not help themselves nor could they get help from anyone else.", "This is the condition of these people. They're watching it happen. They know that television is one of the most destructive elements in this society How can you compete with eight hours in these state schools which you can see their places in which drugs are sold there places in? Which promiscuity is taught to the men and women in which Modesty is removed completely we have a culture in which modesty is honored We have a cultural in which a child that displays modesty", "that a woman who lowers her gaze and the man who lowers his gaze, these are attributes of excellent people or fine people. No this society sees modesty as neurosis. And I can tell you we can ask the psychiatrist for his opinion they see modesty is a neuroses something that needs to be cured overcome that deals with some trauma from the original incestual crisis of their family situation. The first...I mean this is what it's all crazy", "And he's saying, these people are diseased. Really? So this is their suffering. And we the Muslims are literally following them down the lizard's hole like the Prophet ﷺ. Down the lizard hold. We're going. So we have to literally stop turn around and reassess our situation. We are women are completely that really Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala prohibited burying the women alive. Allah subhahana wa ta-ala says", "Do you keep her alive in subjugation and humiliation? Or do you bury her in the earth out of shame? What a wretched way you're using your judgment. And this is what we're doing, our women literally, what's going on?", "We bury them in the type of environment in which they grow up in. In which males are raised up, in which males praise over women. We have double standards in our communities. Really we have double standard. You know look I mean this is... Subhanallah! They're very patient. It's by the rahmah of Allah that Allah made them patience.", "It stinks, it smells. And look at the suffering, look at this degradation, look on this planet we are living on. Look at the condition of our children. I hear people, the way their parents speak to their children is unbelievable. The Prophet said he was so gentle with children. They're little creatures that have no blemish. They have no taqlif . We begin to teach them taqleef before 7. What is wrong? What's the zem that they've done? That we call them names.", "We give them alqab. Allah commands us not to call adults names and calling children names. And I saw it when I lived in the Arabian world. It's unbelievable, the way children are treated using degraded words, himar and donkey, calling children donkeys and things like this. The Prophet called them by their father's names to honor them. He raised them up. He used to stop on the road and talk to the little children, put his hand on their head. This is the best of creation,", "creation, the prophet of Allah. We have to honor our children, really. Allah, Ibn Qayyim says that Allah has enjoined upon us the rights of children before he enjoined on the children the rights their parents and when a man came to Sayyidina Ali and said my child is in gross disrespect to me and he said how did you treat it when it was young? He said I neglected it. He said then what do you expect? What do you expected now? And this is what happens in America we're neglecting our children. You look at these", "Look at these young people. You're the good people in America, this is representative of a lot of strong practicing Muslims. What about the other Muslims out there? This is a small portion of what's in this country. We have millions of Muslims in this county right now and we are dealing with... And if you look at our children and some of their situations it's frightening! It's really frightening! They've been completely absorbed into this wretched culture,", "I get depressed from my mother, her bad language, her beating me and my American friends tell me to leave home. There you go. And that's part of the tragic situation. Another one, I'm an 18 year old sister. I have a terrible relationship with my father. I want to get close but he moves away from me. He hits me", "to this day I feel like have no more patience, I don't know what to do anymore how should i deal with all this abuse? This is what's coming up and it's all over. It's rife in our communities we're not dealing with it were in a lot of denial about the situations in our community Muslims traditionally are people that don't display the dirty laundry", "There are three conditions there.", "They want a reward from Allah. They believe in the Yawm al-Hisaab, when Allah will take people to account for their oppression and they do much remembrance of Allah. If you're not remembering Allah then Shaitan is the one you remember. And Shaitaan his best weapon is anger. This is what Shaita uses. If You look Imam Ibn Ashur, Tahir ibn Ashor, The great Tunisian scholar, One of the greatest scholars this century", "century in his book on Al-Maqasid and in his Tafseer relates to the verse in Surah An Nisa that the actual verses dealing with the domestic violence are if you look at them and understand them, the purpose behind them is to eliminate domestic violence. This is what he said is the Maqsad of the Sharia. The intention behind the Shari'a is to", "The people of the Jihadi, a deeply patriarchal culture. A culture that was used to treating women like chattel, property. This is a fact with the exception of aristocratic women. The lower class women were treated like property and Sayyidina Omar even said We used to look at women like beasts of burden until we saw what the Quran was revealing in them and elevating their status. And so the eyes if you look at them Allah commands first of all", "First of all, that there's wa'w. There has to be admonition. And nushuz, which is what Allah says is the only time for this. Nushuz is gross disobedience. Nusuz is not that they didn't make dinner that night. Right? Which according to some of the imams isn't even wajib on the women in the house. Right ? It's not even min al-wajibat according to sum of the Imams. And the other one say that wujub is khafif and aqabi can't impose it on the woman. Now the idea of obedience", "The idea of obedience, ta'a. If you understand the word ta'aa in Arabic Allah talks about tawaan wa kurhaan coming willingly or unwillingly. The mukrah is the one that does things out of compulsion they don't want to do them. The tayi is the ones who desires to do the thing what Allah wants for us is ta'aaa which is that we do things for Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala out of desire and yearning", "in her home, she by her nature desires to serve her husband. This is part of the khidmah. This has been a true of a woman and you can see it in the way that children are raised. Now, part of problem is that many of our women grew up in very environments that these young people are talking about and same with men. In other words we recreate the same pattern. We hear the same tapes from our parents", "our parents and we begin to replay those tapes. And this is part of being in the unconscious mode. People who are in ghafla, who are a sleepwalking state. We use the same strategies that our parents used on us. If our parents beat us then we beat our children. We repeat these patterns. What Allah is commanding us to do is break the pattern. We have to break the patterns. And This is why the foundation of the science of psychology in Islam which was traditionally called tasawwuf or ihsan", "is called Khawarq al-Adad, breaking patterns. Becoming conscious human beings. If you look at the Prophet of Allah ﷺ all of his actions were done with conscious intention. He did things with conscious intentions. He was a man who every single act he did he remembered Allah in it. If he went to the bathroom he remembered Allaah. If came out of the bathroom, he remembered ALLAH. If put on his clothes, he remember ALLAAH. if took off his clothes he remember AllaAH.", "to his wives he remembered Allah, if he ate food he remembered a lot when he finished food he remember a lot. When he got up on the minbar he remembered allah, when he came down from the minbarr during the time he was on the mimbar he rememberd allah. His state was the remembrance of allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. He described him he remembered in all of his states this is becoming conscious now one of the words for that Arabic means to get kicked in", "this is being in the moment it's being present right a male knows if they're kicked in the groin they become very aware of the present they're not thinking about the past or the future you see and this is what zikr Allah is supposed to do it is supposed bring people into the present to make them present of their state at the moment this is the story I mentioned yesterday about Abu Abu Umair the Prophet was aware of his state we have parents who are completely", "completely unaware that their children are depressed. They're not even aware that their children are suffering in their rooms, weeping about the situation in the household. Really! I'm not making this stuff up because they're sleepwalking, they're going through life and say how you doing? Fine, I'm fine. And this is a type of interaction. Now the Americans are finally admitting after all this rubbish about quality time, but quality time is a load of rubbish.", "They say quantity time now. Quantity time, not quality time. They say it's better that you're just there all the time than you even interacting with the children at least they have a sense of security. A sense that the parent is present. So I mean this topic what we are talking about is fundamental to the Muslim situation. Not just here but all over the world because we will not break", "the cycle of humiliation, the cycle a deep lack of awareness of our deen and Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala until we break this basic cycle that's taking place in the family. We have to raise a new generation of children. And this takes conscious adults committed to breaking these cycles. You know? And if it is not this first generation or the immigrant generation for the immigrants and the first generation of Muslims, it will be the next generation. Somebody has to break it but the cycle has to be broken", "The cycle has to be broken. Wallahi, the cycle has been broken. We need to wake up. Wake up! The Prophet said, wake up! It's time to wake-up. Don't go to sleep. Don' turn on the television. Don''t turn on music. Turn it off. Because all that stuff is there to put you to sleep Look at this situation I told these youth last night Life is not a beach This is the American lie There is war zone out there", "a beach if you watch commercials where people are happy because they're drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes right feel the pleasure right go look at these billboards feel the Pleasure as you get emphysema right 100 million people right are going to die from these tobacco tyrants right that one of the drugs of this so anyway I mean we don't there's no time to deal with these issues", "Seedy Ahmed and the speakers here just trying to put out some things with people. We have to do something in our communities. We need infrastructure, our women... There's domestic violence going on! I get calls all the time. I know Ahmed Saqar, I know you do. Huh? I know You do. I don't even have to ask him, I Know because I get called in my community. It's going on. We Need To Do Something This is not the way of the Prophet .", "who are going to have a big awakening on Yawmul Qiyamah. We need our children to be nurtured. The Prophet said, teach your children love of the Prophet. How can you teach them love ofthe Prophet if you're not practicing the character of the prophet . We have to be examples to them.", "And they're at war with Allah . And there is no doubt that America is at war Allah and Allah is at War with America. Because America's a country founded on usury, and Allah has declared war on usuray. The banks are running this country, They buy the politicians, they do these things. And another thing is that the Muslims are the Awliya of Allah. Allah says,", "as their wali, their protecting friend. The Iraqi people are suffering greatly. The Palestinian people are sufferngg the Tunisian people are sufrringg we have Muslims suffering all over the world. The Kashmiris are suffering and a good deal of that suffering is directly related to foreign policies that take place in this country and there's no doubt about that. And I'll tell you the Iraqis since 19... very interesting thing since the Iraqi war", "Because I guarantee you, if you've got your nice house and your Mercedes and your dunya all taken care of. And your children are going to hell. La ilaha illallah wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuhu. Inna liillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'oon. Really? Inna lillahi wainna ilahirajioon. We have a musiba. We had big affliction in our communities. So people have to think about it. What's the situation?", "وَلَا تُصَلَّتْ عَلِيْنَا بِذَنُوبِنَى مَنَّا يَرْحَمْنُ وَلاَ يَخَافُكَ فِينَا يارب العالمين وصلِّ وسلم وبارك على سيدنا محمد وعلى آله وصحبه أجمعين سبحان ربك رب العزة عما يصفون والسلام عليكم السلام ورحمة الله رب المؤمنين" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Study Hadith _ Sahih Bukhari _ with Shaykh Hamza Y_jMGFblGHbjo&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743067132.opus", "text": [ "الحمد لله بسم الله وصلاة والسلام على سيدنا وحبيبنا رسول الله وعلى آله وصحابته ومن ولا الحمду لله نحمد الله سبحانه وتعالى ونستعينه ون استغفره و نعوذ بالله من شرور أنفسنا ومن سيئات عمالنا من يهده لا فلا مضل له ومن يضلل فلا هدي له وصرواته وسلم على أفضل خلق الله على سعدنا و حبيبا رسو الله وعل آله صحابتها أجمعين آمين", "tools that we have Alhamdulillah from I think inshallah Arjun Mano line you can minute Taufeeq. Yeah, I Wanted to do some of imam al-bukhari's Collection because traditionally it was something actually was done in Ramadan In many places they did a khatm of sahih al-Bukhara alongside Their hatamat of the Quran and it's still done in Medina And I've attended", "attended the sessions in Ramadan, the Baaloui clan still do the Khatm in the Rawdah during the month of Ramadan. And so I noticed that the person that I had read the text with and who put me in the chain of transmission was Sheikh Mohammed Al-Aqobi, who's actually doing also 30 sessions.", "doing much less than that, but he's doing 30 sessions. Much greater scholar. But he is one of the people of Isnad at this time. He's a brilliant scholar that we were fortunate to have here at Zaytuna and he actually did a Khatm of Sahir Bukhari in Zaytona many years ago and gave the chain of Isnaad to the students who attended that. The Sahir", "It holds a special place in the community for a number of reasons. But I think what's very interesting is that the tradition which led up to somebody like Imam al-Bukhari was a very organic tradition. It was not something that was done with any type", "structure like setting up schools and colleges, and creating sciences. If you look at the early Islamic period one of the miracles of this religion is how natural all of our disciplines evolved. And one of secrets of our tradition I think it's one of course secrets is the Isnad Tradition because unlike Christianity that had", "had went through very disruptive periods because you had so many different views of Christianity. And so what would happen is they would have these councils and they would come together like the Council of Nicaea, it's a very famous council that occurred in Turkey where they determined that...and this is 325 years after the beginning of the Christian era", "So it's very interesting that it took them that long to kind of agree on that as a doctrine. And what's interesting also is that Nicaea was destroyed by an earthquake not long after that, which is mentioned in the Quran just by saying that God has three, the earth would almost split from saying that. In any case, the Muslims never had,", "they never had any councils, they never have any of these majami' which they have today like Majam-ul-Faqihah. They come together. There's no indication that they had those. What they did have was they had authorities and these authorities emerged organically also. They would be recognized by the community so a really good example of that and I'm going to use somebody close to my heart", "any of the imams, the great imams of our tradition. But a really good example of that is Imam Malik ibn Anas. So Imam Malika radi al-Anhu was born in into around probably around 93 he's born into this slight difference of opinion when he came in but about 93 years after the hijrah. He's born in Medina and he's borne at a time where there are still some tabi'een alive and tabia tabiin whether he is from which group", "The family of the group is from the majority say he's from the tabi' tabiin. But in any case when he was born they were still alive there were people who had lived with the Sahaba and Imam Marek al-Radiyallahu Anhu, he basically He was from a very distinguished line. He was Yemeni from the Asbah, a well known Yemeni clan and", "but he has a good lineage and his grandfather was one of the Sahaba. So, his mother who raised him and early on wanted him to become a scholar she would literally tie his turban for him when he was very little and send him. And as he began to grow it was clear that he had a level of intelligence that was extraordinary really almost supernatural", "He studied with some of the most important teachers in Medina amongst these tabi'in. So he basically, he studied with Imam Zuhri as one of the major ones, Muhammad bin Shihab al-Zuhri who's really one of great and early hadith scholars.", "So they begin to write these suhuf. The suhf are basically ad hoc collections of hadiths that were written down and Abu Huraira begins this, and some of the Sahaba there were other Sahaba also that wrote down the Hadith. Initially there are hadith that the Prophet said not to write them down but it was in the early period when the Quran was still being revealed and the Prophet was concerned that they would mix the two", "the two. So later he actually tells in about being asked about the memory, he said, In other words write them down so the hadith are written down Abu Hurairah who initially did not write them then began to write them out He actually had multiple sahaf and he collected...he relates over 5,000 hadiths so he's reading about 5300 hadith", "heard all of them from the prophesied son but he is considered a sound narrator and so he begins to he's collecting these hadiths and then the next phase after the suhuf is the musanifat. So, these are collected they're organized and they're usually organized topically and the first and most famous one", "Al-Muwatta. So the Muwattab Imam Malik is really the first collection, it's the first book after the Quran in the Arabian tradition. So, the Quran is the very first book in Arab history. There's no book before the Quran that we have. The next book really is the Muwatab Imam Maliq. When you think about a civilization, the two foundational texts are the Quran and the Hadith.", "It's quite stunning. Even though Imam Marek, his book which has 1,720 hadiths in the Yahya bin Yahya al-Laythi recension, which came from Andrusiya, only there's just over 500 that are actually directly from the Prophet's hadith. Other ones are the opinions of some of the tab'een, some of", "entirely a collection of hadith even though it's considered part of the canon of the Hadith tradition. So, the Musannafat then begin and you have one of the students of Imam Malik Abd al-Razaqa San'ani makes a much bigger Musanaf and Ibn Abi Shayba who is his student so you have these Musannafaat but the actual rigor was not in the Musannafaat", "the muwata is proven by Ibn Abd al-Barr later to be because Imam Marek has these marasil he has hadith that are there's a break in the chain and so but even now the bar shows how all of them were actually sound which proves that Imam Marduk knew his people that he was relating from", "rigor and so it was Imam al-Bukhari's teacher who said to him, and Imam al Bukhara was very young at this time he said to Him that he wished that somebody would write only the Sahih Hadiths. Only the hadiths that have been absolutely confirmed without any doubt in them. And so Imam al Buqhari initially I mean obviously", "obviously he planted the seed in his head but he had a dream in which the prophet was there and Imam Bukhari had a fan and he was fanning away like things from the Prophet that would bother him. And so, he went to one of them Mu'abbireen and he asked him what it meant? And he said you're going to remove lies that people claim that the Prophet some", "going to in the same way Abu Hanifa had a famous he saw the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam the grave and he saw bones and then they weren't assembled properly and put them together that was a sign of the type fiqh that he would create so these were deeply spiritual people that were having amazing dreams in which a lot of signs would come to them so Imam Al-Bukhari begins to write his sahib", "But even before that, he's a miracle child. He was born in Bukhara and when he was born his mother actually had a dream because he went blind that he would be cured of his blindness and then she dedicated him to learning so he initially had a sickness where he lost his sight and then his sight came back", "he could anything he could hear he could memorize he just had a completely photographic memory so anything that he could here and modern people are very difficult time because many view when you're young probably in school they did what was called telephone today remember that to get to do that so it so they have in the classroom the teacher write something", "They look at it, but then they can't pass it on. They just whisper into the ear of the student and the next student whispers into the year until it goes through the whole class. Everybody laughs at the end because it's always completely mangled so it's completely a different what was the teacher had originally written. And what they want to show you is how unreliable transmission is. I mean that's the idea behind it.", "Well, that's the very point of this tradition is to make sure only reliable people. Because I guarantee if you took 50 Mauritanians who studied in this or even in Sus in Al-Maghrib these students of the madrasa tradition and you did the same thing with them it would be the same at the end of the chain. And that simply anybody who's seen this", "famous story of what may have I think where in when he was in Mali he saw two people get into a fight and they spoke Bambara and one of them ended up getting killed so the police they wanted to know what how who started the fight and he didn't know the language but he was able to say what each one of", "traditions so Imam Bukhari when he went to Baghdad for instance they mangled up all of the riwayat so you have the metan which is the hadith, the actual content of the hadit and then you have senad or the chain or the isnad it's also called. So what they did was they took all these hadits each one took ten each one of the sheikhs took 10 and they would mangle", "thinking he doesn't know anything because he's not even correcting them. And so they actually begin to wonder if this man is who people say he is. So when they all finished, he said, are you done? And he said yes. He said the first one and then he actually gave the correction. He", "the hundred hadiths and he corrected all of them after hearing them recited. He knew both the wrong recitation, and then he corrected each one. And at that point they surrendered to him as the hafidh of his time so he had this prodigious memory but he was also a faqih and one of the things about the saheeh is that he has yatasarraf", "insights into these things. There's also, if you look at some of the hadiths like for instance in the chapter on the prohibition of killing with fire he has the hadiith of Imam Ali from Palestine so what he is showing in that is that he knows the haditth and he doesn't accept the hukum of that hadith He does this very often in the book", "the tradition for every single hadith that he narrates. He did istikhara and he prayed two rakats, and many of them he did in the haram. He was in Mecca and Medina, and he traveled to many places to get hadiths. So he's just an extraordinary person when he went to Samarkand they said for... They came out about more than", "about more than 12 miles to greet him like throngs of people. This is how... One, it's how respected knowledge was. Like people really respected knowledge so they would come out and traditionally people would come up to greet Wufud and things like that. It's just part of the Asambha tradition. The wift is like a... It's good translation for what?", "Delegation, yeah. Like a delegation or group of people that are traveling for some purpose. So Imam al-Bukhari... One of the things they said don't ask him about is it because there was a big fitna at that time and so when they got in the first day everything went fine second day went fine", "On the third day, somebody asked him, ماذا تقول في لفظ القرآن? Like what do you say about لفض القرٰن? And he said اللفظ من الافعال ولفعل مخلوقه. You know to utter is from the actions of human being and the actions that are created. So then they went oh he's saying Quran is created. so it created a fitnah for him. And then he said also you're saying the Quran is great. He said no Quran غير مخلاق", "What do you say about this? What do I say about that?", "97 chapters. It has over 7,000 hadith but there are several that are mukarrar often not with the same chain but they're replicated and so he basically has about 4,000 that aren't and over 2,000 directly from the Prophet . So then he had a student Imam Muslim", "Imam Muslim does the same thing that Imam al-Bukhari does. He does a collection of Sahih Hadiths. He's only going to get the Sahih, but he had a criterion that differed from Imam al Bukhara. So in the Hadith there are five conditions for a Sahih Hadeeth. And so it has to be muttasal, the Isnad has to", "So the chain can't have any breaks in it. Because if it has a break in it, like a maqouf, if a sahabi relates it and doesn't mention the Prophet ﷺ, it might have the hukm of rafa'ah. In other words, it's considered a hadith because they... If they're saying something that could not be said except from revelation. So for instance, in the hadith", "that man sama Yuma shake fuck the house of a pass him so that is more cool on a sahabi So the sahabah that related that he couldn't say that without having Heard something from the prophet to say that too fast on the day of debt now Rasul Allah and see I'm you're my chick. So the The Day of Doubt is the 29th? The 30th day the 29 you go out on the 29", "29th at the end of the 29th day to see if there's a new moon. If you don't see the new moon, it might have been born but you don' know because there could be ghaym so the Prophet said So complete 30 days of shaaban if it is obscured for some reason. So that's an example of a hadith that's mawqoof", "Another one is in Sahih Muslim, relates a hadith about the people of the Europeans. Ibn al-Babar says refers to the Europeans and he calls them basically the white people. So he said all the hadiths that relate to that. He has a section in his on the different groups.", "And he divides Rome into the Old Rome and the New Rome. So, the Old Roman is Yunnan. And Yunnan was actually the name of one of the... He goes back to say Nunu'a according to our tradition. So Yunnan is Greece but he's actually... And then the new Rome is the Latin Romans which is when they found Rome according to their traditions found by Aeneas", "Aeneas, who's a survivor of old... you know, of the Trojan War. So that's New Rome. So in the Hadith it says, The end of time won't come until the Europeans are the majority of people. In the comments they said It's not", "Because the Prophet said, whoever resembles a people is one of them. So in the end of time, the majority of people will be imitating Europeans in their dress, in their food, in there culture, right? It becomes like a monoculture and that's the Sahih Hadith. The hour doesn't come until the Europeans are the majority", "So when Amr ibn al-'As heard Mustawrad recite that, he said, think about what you're saying. He said, I heard it from the Prophet. Then he says, if that's the case, they have in them four qualities. And then he mentions these four qualities in the fifth one.", "and the fifth one. Is that mawqoof or not? It could be mawquoof because Imam Sunusi says, the Romans didn't have those qualities. The Europeans did not have those quantities at his time. So was that mawwqoof? Is he talking about, did he hear that from the Prophet that the qualities they would have would be those qualities? There's an example where there is some khilafah about whether it has hukum al-rafa' whether its actually from the prophet but it is in the fitan of the end of time. That's where Imam Muslim put that section.", "section so uh it doesn't have it's not shadd so one reciter uh recites a narration that differs from other thickot so in that case", "It might be a sound hadith, but it doesn't have the sahha. You can't give it the stamp that it's sahih because of that. Or it has ilal. And these are the defects of the hadiths that are known in the science. That's a science that goes into the mustarahat al-hadith and the types of ilal you have different types of Ilal in Hadiths.", "So the adal relates the hadith. These are the criteria for the hadit. The Adel relates the Hadith so what is an Aadl in our tradition? According to the people of Hadith, the way they look at it is they have to have Malaka that That They have Mulazimah Taqwa and Murua'a So they have both taqwa And they also have muru'a", "So taqwa is that Ibn Ashur says, Taqwa Is to do what we've been commanded to do inwardly and outwardly. And to avoid what we have been prohibited inwardly or outwardly so that's a person of taqwah the highest degree of taquah there are five degrees according to the ulama Ibn Juzay records those 5 degrees", "least of which is somebody fears the kabair, the highest of which they even fear anything other than being in the divine presence. So the adal is somebody who's just and then they have muru'a, which means that they have the character, the ethical character of decent people. They'll kaf al-ada an al-akhareen.", "They have sitqa al-lisan. They don't do anything that would be inappropriate, break the decorum of a culture. So for instance in Andrusia it was not the urf of the Andrusians to wear head coverings. So a man who did not wear a head covering did not affect his shahada. His testimony of being upright and just. But in other places", "in other places, in the east it did. So if you didn't wear... If you were a male and you went out without your head covered that would actually affect your status because you're doing so or if you are known to eat in public places many many things could do this. So there's an element to this that is a bit relative because it relates to al-urf wal ada right? So the ada is muhakkama like the ada of people", "you know, relations between the sexes. Cultures have different with this. So in some cultures it's very strict segregation. In others it's not so in a culture where it was very strict, segregation is someone who is known to mix then they would lose that status. So there's an element to this that has to do with . But generally that's the... And then", "dhabit is somebody who's very precise. So they're very precise, so they don't... Like those of us who don't have these prodigious memories, we might relate a hadith but we might miss a word or we use another word which is permitted according to the ummah to relate with meaning. But you're not dhabi and so you're", "in that you got the hadith right and then also your naqal. Now, after the early period because these books were written down if the teacher had a solid collection and they could transmit the hadit from... Imam Marek for instance his son Yahya did not take hadith from him but his daughter Fatima did and he used to have his daughter behind a curtain", "would actually make corrections for the reciters when they were reading the Muwatta with him. So she would actually correct because Imam Madik would be listening, but it was Fatima that would make the corrections so and then the Ijazah tradition comes out of this where they basically give the Ijaza and initially Ijazaw was very rigorous later when the books became written down because by the", "the imam al-bukhari dies in 256 so by that time most of the hadiths have been written down but they continue on until the 11th century so you have later in the fifth century you have people like um who are doing major collections collection is a major collection", "So these six collections that come and become canonical, and really four are the most important ones in terms of the fiqh. You have Imam al-Bukhari is the first, and then Imam Muslim. The difference between the two, they have really rigorous criteria, but there was one criteria that al-Buqhari superseded Imam Muslim with, even though he was,", "Imam al-Bukhari had to absolutely be certain that the scholar in the chain, that he was in the city or the place and took from the person. He had to ascertain that there was a Luqya, that they actually met and then Tarakka'anhu, that He relates from him. If it didn't have that criteria, he didn't accept it. Imam Muslim, it was enough for him that he knew they were in the same area at the same time.", "same time he didn't have to absolutely ascertain the um the the the meeting of the two and that's why his is slightly less but not that much and and there's a lot of crossover in the two i mean they both imam sahih muslim has more in his collection even though he has only uh 54 chapters he has", "So then you have Imam al-Tirmidhi is the next, who's extremely important. And this is his jami'ah. This a really important collection because this is where they begin to really want to get the hadiths that are directly related to ahkam especially and things that the fuqaha are going to need. They say the muhaddithun are syadila", "the so, so the are like the pharmacists. They prepare the drugs, right? The medicine but it's the doctor who diagnoses and then prescribes. So they see aren't necessarily . And this is something that is really important distinction in our tradition there's a lot of mistakes", "are made because we don't differentiate between a da'iyah and a faqih, an amutafakhi like a musharik fil fiqh, a muhadith, a qari. In al-Ashr they actually have different colors on their turbans to determine who the Qurraa are in other words they just memorize Quran they're not really ulama so so a lot of confusion is created from this", "A'alim is a word that traditionally was not given easily to call somebody an alim. Alama was even more rare because somebody who's an alama really genuinely will know most of the sciences of Islam and it's something that a really brilliant person with a very prejudiced memory could do our tradition can be mastered", "tradition can be mastered. I mean, they can't know everything but it can be master and there are masters. They'll tend to have some area of expertise like or . But if you look at somebody like , he knows hadith, he knows tafsir obviously, he's a faqih, he knew the qiraat. He knew sira, he new tarikh all these sciences so", "The du'a are more, you know they're people that might have some level of knowledge but there's more people that preach the religion and their storytellers. There is a famous story of Imam Malik , on his way to Medina to study with Malik was in a caravan", "pious man in the caravan who used to get up after the prayers and he would do a waw, he would exhortation. And people would cry like he had a real effect on people. But when they got to Medina they went into the masjid and when the prayer ended he got up to do that and the little kids started throwing things at him. And then they took him out of the masjdid.", "Imam Malik doesn't allow the qusas, like a qas, a storyteller. He doesn't allowed them in the masjid of the Prophet. There's no storytellers because it was a place of ilm, safseer, hadith. It wasn't a place... The wa'ad is on Friday but you don't get up and do those. So that was the early period they didn't really look too kindly at these type people that were more shaabi people", "Ka'bi people. They were very serious about their knowledge. So Imam Malik, let me backtrack, then when he went to Malik's majlis, he was there studying and somebody came in with news that an elephant in the caravan had come into the city. So everybody ran out to see the elephant.", "elephant and Imam Malik looked at Yahya al-Aithi and he said don't you want to see the elephant? He said I didn't come from Spain to see elephants. Yeah, I came here to learn. And Malik da'a lahu so his recension and he wasn't the most learned. I mean Shaybani is more learned than Yahya b. Yahya l. But his recention has the tawfiq", "So it's the one that got this tawfiq. You have to have dabb, the naqal and these were the criteria for the soundness of the hadith. And Imam al-Bukhari even though he has about 160 of the Mu'allaq traditions they've all been shown to be... They're all connected by chains so everything in there is considered sahih", "Somebody is, one of these horrible people that love to follow everything I do and then try to find mistakes and then put it up on... They do these little clips. They put this thing where I said that the Bukhari wasn't... You know, it wasn't everything in it wasn' sahih. That's not true. I never said that. What I said is ahad hadith are probable hadith which is why they're not used according to the majority of our ulama in aqidah", "Right? There are many Ahad Hadith in the Sahih collection. It doesn't mean they're not Sahih, they are Sahih but there's always a possibility in the Ahad hadith that there could be error because they're human beings The Hadith tradition does not have the Hifl of the Quran and every Muslim in our tradition has recognized that which is why there are fabricated Hadiths", "There are Hassan Hadith. And then there are Sahih Hadiths. And the really strong Sahih hadith like Mutafiq Ali and then there's Mutawatir Hadith which have the same maqam as an ayah of Quran if it is mutawater, which is a small number of hadith that we would call historically factual. A Mutawatr Hadith is like a historical fact. It is just too many people related that it could've been made up. And they've been collected. Imam Suyuti has a collection of that", "collection of that uh there are a few Imam al-Qattani did a collection of the Mutawatir hadith so but they're not that many that are mutawatar. So, that's just important to note it's an absolutely sahih collection there's no doubt about that we shouldn't have any doubt about the hadith that's in Sahih Al Bukhari but in terms of Aqidah then there's a higher standard", "Standard because it's about God and so there's not going to be any room for mistakes when it comes to And that's why our Akita is first and foremost you know Quran is the foundation of that in our tradition. The rational creed which you study here is the whole purpose of a rational Creed, which are the Ilahiyat and the Nabuwat", "are not part of the rational creed it's the illahiyat and the nabuwat these are based on the human intellect in other words what are the attributes absolutely necessary for god what will reason determine to be absolutely necessary", "And that's where you get these 20 attributes. That's where they come from, even though they're substantiated by the Quran, they are actually rational arguments and the idea behind that is you don't fall into a circular reasoning. That was the purpose of that to get people out of a circle. Why do you believe in God? Because Quran says so. Well how do you know that because God revealed the Quran?", "you get into a circular reasoning. So that's why taqlid, this idea of taqleed, like to know God and his messenger with nathr, like actually think about it, to get out of taquleed. So, that was something that our ulama said we need to have absolutely sound hadith without any probable error", "any probable error in them. Other than that, the second thing I would point out about Imam al-Bukhari is the Sahih tradition is in some ways a reaction to Imam al Shafi'i because Imam Shafii departed from his teacher's methodology so the methodology of Imam Mardik was", "he would take the Amal of the people of Medina over solitary Hadith. This is called Amal Ahl al-Medinah. His argument was if he found, and he had 600 teachers from the Tabi'een in his lifetime. The argument was, if he", "would he would for him they saw it from the Sahaba in Medina because there's 10,000 people buried there so he sought from the sahabahs so he's saying I'm going to take the fact that the righteous people are fasting on Friday and there is a solitary hadith where now Rasulullah and asiam yamil Jumaa he said I don't feel comfortable", "If the Hadith is true, then it's a Madhhab.", "And that's why the adhan of the Maliki is different from the adan that's done in other parts of the Muslim world. Many other examples of that with Imam Marduk. So, in response to that, the idea was let's find the soundest hadiths, collect them all because there were traditions where Imam Mardiq for instance Ibn Wahab bin who was one of Madiq students. Ibn Wahab bin once somebody asked Imam Mardaq about", "about going between the toes in the wudu. And he made a remark, and then Ibn Waban said that he has a hadith that he got from Egypt that he recited, and Malik said, I didn't know that hadith. And so that's one of the arguments of the Ahl al-Hadith is that the Imams didn't all the hadiths of ahkam. But if you look, this is really important to remember because it's", "The Madhhabs are not the isolated opinions of the Imams.", "Malik's opinion, for instance, was you didn't raise your hands in dua. He didn't raised his hand in dua That is his opinion. Malik opinion was that Quran does not benefit the dead so he doesn't recite Fatiha in the janazah Salat al-janazah So there are many examples of this", "So that's a big problem is people don't know that the imams, it's a school with a methodology. All of the hadith of ahkam are known by all four madhabs. They know all the hadits. It's a matter of what's the methodology to determine that?", "So he won't take a hadith related to fiqh, for instance, of Abu Hurairah if it differs from his methodology. Why? Because he's not amongst the fuqaha of the sahaba. So these are the methodologies that if we don't learn the methodology of our madhhab, we won't understand why they differ from the other madhhabs and you won't appreciate the ikhtiraf.", "of the ummah is the ikhtiraf. And we, getting back to what I said about not having the majami' in the history of Islam, we are the only world religion that has a normative tradition with such difference of opinion. No other religion has that,", "world religion. Judaism is arguably a religion for one ethnic group, but in terms of the world religions we're the only one that our normative tradition incorporates difference of opinion. The Christians had to split because they couldn't...they could not absorb difference of opinions in one normative traditions so you have Catholics and Protestants", "their methodology, they opened up a myriad of sectarianism. So this book which inshallah I wanted to go over...I read this book with Sheikh Muhammad Ali Aqoubi in its entirety and it's one of my favorite books he also wrote a beautiful commentary on this ibn Abi Jamrah who was an Andrusian originally but he ends up in Egypt", "of Al-Azd, which is one of the great Yemeni tribes. His student is Ibn al-Hajj al-Abdari who was a great scholar originally from Fes who ends up in Egypt and Ibn Abi Jamrah, one of most beautiful stories about him was Ibn Al-Hag came to him said he wanted to study with him and he said I don't have anything to teach you. He said no, no, I want to study", "I will, I'll sit with you and under one condition we study together. And Allah is our teacher. That was the condition that he stipulated. He's a very humble man. He wrote this book it has a tawfiq that's amazing. He did it because he wanted people to memorize at least something from al-Bukhari. And then he did an amazing commentary called Bahjat al-Nufus", "In our tradition, we have what are called blurbs where somebody writes something like oh you should read this book because it's amazing. He has 70 at the end of his book he has 70 visions of the Prophet Sallallaahu Alaihi Wasallam where people saw the Prophet and told and they and the Prophet told them if you want to understand my Sunnah", "and my sunnah, then read Ibn Abi Jamrah's commentary on Al-Bukhari. Seventy visions from all different... So he wrote this book. He is an amazing scholar. And he begins it, Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Raheem", "Allah tells us that we're all. So, beginning with the praise of Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala and prayers upon our master Muhammad SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam", "the choicest of his creation and upon his sahaba, those chosen for his companionship. When the hadith study and memorization of the hadit is one of the quickest means to Allah based upon many athar in that", "Whoever delivers to my Ummah one hadith that by it a sunnah is established or an innovation is refuted for him will be paradise.", "وَالْأَثَارُ فِي ذَرِكَ كَثِيرَتٌ", "at his time was called a da'if hadith. So when people say, Imam Ahmed yufaddara al-da'if ala alqiyas is not totally accurate. In any case, fadailal amma there are many hadiths that are beautiful and useful. And they're not thrown out for that reason. The modern kind of reaction against weak hadith is not something that was part of the ummah traditionally.", "The fuqaha were very rigorous about ahkam, but in things like these type of hadith they were much easier with them. So he says I've seen the himam have weakened. So He's already saying this. Ibn Abi Jamrah right? He dies 699 so He's", "he related a hadith about all the signs of the end of time and he said we see all these signs now in our time so he's 699 in Egypt and he's already seeing the signs at the end-of-time. So, that's why Imam Al Laqani says وَعْنِ التَّطْوِيلِ كَلَّةَ الْهِمَامِ فَصَارُ فِي الْاِخْتِصَرُ مُّلْتَزَمٌ Because the himmah are weak abridgements are necessary these days hence he took", "the al-Bukhari and abridged it to a much shorter version here. So he said, There's a lot of books now and they have all these chains.", "take the soundest book and then abridge it based on the need of the hadith, wa-aqtasiru asanidaha, and to shorten their chains. Ma'ada raweel hadeeth, fa labudda minhu, except for the rawee because he said that's, fa la budda minhul. And traditionally, I mean may Allah forgive us but traditionally you know hadith should be related with at least the raweh. You know that was the tradition.", "It's said that when the fitna broke out, he actually made a dua and he asked Allah to take him.", "take him. And the only time I've ever seen in any of our tradition where the Prophet made dua for death was in time of fitna, right? So take me to yourself. In other words if civil war is about to break out let me die before I see it.", "So he saw the fitna and he made a dua. Within one month, he was dead. And he relates in the sahih, لا يتمن أحدكم الموت None of you should desire death. Right? لِيَضَّرَرًا يُصِيبُهُ Because of some harm that afflicted him. The commentators say, Imam al-Shinawi says,", "He says that it's because the darar, that you should never ask to go back to Allah is worldly. But if it's otherworldly then that's actually permissible. That's what he said. That how they kind of get him out of that contradiction.", "one of the judges who I knew, who had both knowledge and also had traveled. So he wasn't provincial. That he heard from this man who had ma'rifah", "and he was well known for his virtue, that Al-Bukhari is a book that if you read it during times of tribulation, that's why Sheikh Muhammad, he revived that tradition, Sheikh Muhammad al-Yaqoubi, of doing the Khatm of Al- Bukhara because there's great benefit in doing it for removal of trials and things. And he says if it's on a boat,", "the ship won't go down. And he said, I wanted because of the barakah that's in hadith and because of what's the heart of oxidation, this rust that gets in the hearts. That maybe by the bounty of Allah it will remove the rust on the heart when you and it will", "of these impulses and desires that are distancing us from Allah.", "So he begins it with the hadith of Wahi beginning, how Wahi began. And he ends it with a hadith about the people getting into paradise and that's why he called it by collecting this ultimate collection in the goodness of the beginning", "goodness of the beginning is revelation coming back to humanity through the prophet and the goodness of end is the end of our lives. And today Dr. Janner, I thought said something really important that got me thinking he talked about that when we collectivize calamities like when we look at we hear about people 10,000 people died or now 30,000", "He said that we forget That there's no collective death Like when you talk about 3,000 people died on 9-11 or a million people died in Afghanistan Those numbers are they don't have real meaning Because the reality of it each one of those was an individual death. It was a human being confronting their mortality", "and experiencing it at that moment. And that was uniquely theirs, and it was decreed for them, and there was no way they could escape it. And so this great gift that we've been given which is guidance from the Prophet , it's just important to remember that everybody is living an individual life in a collective experience. We're all here together but", "but we're all experiencing the world through our own unique lens which is why one of the beautiful statements in that book, in that poem about wisdom you know, of knowing what none has known before. Each one of you has a unique journey to Allah and you will know in a way that no other human being in human history has ever known because it's your unique knowledge, it's", "it's a great blessing that we have connection with a man who died in 699. And he was concerned about the weakness of the people of that time and all these people that were lost in sinfulness and innovation, and then he wanted to write a book. That was his niya. This is one of the great salihin. So his niyya was that it would revive people and help them.", "So I named it in accordance with the reason, the intention why it was put down. So that's one of the blessings of these books is that they make these duas and he was", "He was مُجَابِد الدعاء These are people whose prayers were answered. So he said that, you know, my hope is that Allah will complete it for me and for anyone who reads it or hears it, that the beginning of khayr and the end of khair will be theirs. The beginning of Khayr is the revelation and the End is entering Jannah. فَنَصْرُ اللَّهَ الْكَرِيمُ رَبِّ الْعَرْشِ الْأَظِيمِ لَن يَجْعْلَهَا لِقُلُوبِنَا جِلَٰئًا", "removes, remover of things. وَلِدَعِ دِينِنَا شِفَاءً And for the diseases of our religion a healing. وُبِمَنِّهِ لَا رَبَّ سِوَاهُ وَصَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَىٰ سَيْدِنَّ مُحَمَّدٍ وَعَلٰى آلِهِ وَ صَحِبِهُ وُسَلّامٍ الحمد لله So that's the introduction. Any questions? Anybody?", "Sheikh, can you explain in the Maghribi tradition how they study hadith from like from the beginning until the end? You know the Mauritanians for instance", "in muritania they hadith comes very late um so i mean obviously they there's a lot of hades in the books there's hadis in the book of grammar there's hadeeth in the in the you know that they read infaq and in different subjects but when they actually do study the hadith and traditionally in muritania they tended to go outside of muritaniya", "and they would read. Today, Sheikh Abdullah ibn Ahmadna memorized Al-Bukhari in my house the whole thing when he was living with me. Alhamdulillah, his amazing himma. And because they have... The ulama of Mauritania have very strong Arabic because one of the biggest problems", "The hadiths are difficult because there are different narrations", "all of those are related. So sometimes you have to navigate just the different riwayat in the same hadith. Now they've begun to study the Quran because there's been a revival, I mean the hadith because there has been a revival. In Morocco also, there was much more focus on Quran and on fiqh.", "So when you look at the West African tradition, the Maliki tradition in particular, Imam Malik separated hadith and fiqh. So his fiqah class was not his hadith class. His hadith was completely separate. Moreover he didn't mention hadith in his fi'k class. Like they say what's your daliil? You couldn't say that in Imam Maliks class. What's your Diliil? He was the Diliiil!", "Who wants to have goodness and make him understand the religion", "He didn't say, Umirtum. He said, Umirthum. That's unique to him and it was only for the Arabian Peninsula and there is an argument that it was for the Hijaz because the Hijazz has a sacred space so that's important to note but in Morocco they study I mean they have great Muhaddithun Abdullah Teredi revived that with his teachers", "I mean his teachers, the Ghomari brothers who were all Muhaddithun and very accomplished Muhaddish. And they have still chain in Senate but they tend to read that Bukhari, they read the Muwattaa and they read Sahih Muslim. They don't have the tradition of the Indians have up doing the Sita so in India you know and probably the Indians are the last community that really they've held to that tradition of", "have to go through the collection, all six. And they use it in the Indian tradition. Traditionally, they began with the Mishkat al-Masabiha which is late but is a brilliant collection because it gives you a really good... I mean one of my favorite books is the Ahadith al-muntakhabah which is by Muhammad Alias for the Six Points. It's a brilliant book,", "and then they would do Tirmidhi first, and then Abu Dawud because they related to Fiqh more. And then Al-Bukhari, and Muslim, and Nasa'i, and Ibn Majah. So those were the six.", "version which had a lot of unreliable Hadith but his Mujtaba is it's actually after probably at Bukhari Muslim you know it's his he has a very rigorous criterion any other", "wouldn't see in other books. I don't know if you could speak a little more about that, but also my other part question is two parts. When I read certain books such as like certain scholars they would claim that they're Maliki or Asheri, but then at some point they reach a level and can what level does this person have to go through that? And how do they arrive to that? So about the Buddha and Muram", "There's two books that are very popular in that genre, which is what are called . So these are . That and are both used. They're very similar but they have the majority of hadiths that are used because when you look at the", "I was probably like 20 years old and I had read that Imam al-Awza'i", "And Hisham al-Burhani had done his PhD on fiqh al-awza'i. And he was one of my teachers. So I read this biography. One of the things I remember from it, which I really liked, was he was on his way to... Because he was from Syria. He was on His way to Beirut and he came to a fork in the road and there was a cemetery. There was an old woman sitting on the side of the road. And He didn't know which one went to Beiroot.", "meaning the city. Ma'mura means the place where people are living and she said, like she pointed to the graveyard. If you want the graveyard, you can go there. And he took it as an ishara that they needed ihya, like that he went to revive the city and he did and they say that tens of thousands of people became Muslims the day he died. A lot of Christians", "A lot of Christians and everything. There were so many people out. In any case, that was a little detour. So the books of Ahkam, the one Ibn Hajj's book and the one of Imam al-Maqdasi, those were very common. And they have generally commentaries by different madhabs. We have like one of the Maliki scholars did a commentary on Umdat al-Ahkam. So he'll show you, oh we don't agree with this.", "I don't agree with this for this reason. So that's one of the things. So it is important to not use these books to derive your rulings from because that's the level of a mujtahid. So now you asked about the mujtad. There are different levels of ijtihad. There is ijthihad al-mas'ala, so you have an ijtihad of a mas'ala.", "different scholars here that could do that which is where you study one issue really well and you really know it from a lot of different perspectives. And you come up with your like the, you know Yusuf Ismail who will be the first to admit, you now he's not a mushtahid but he's doing ijtihad in the prayer times right? Because so in Masala even a doctor can do that there's ijtihad", "for instance, you know those type things. That just means you're exhausting your efforts to try to understand a situation. Most of us are what are called Muqallidun. Taqlid is that you follow somebody but you don't know their dalil. But you know that they're trustworthy. So if I follow Malik", "imam because all the ummah says he was rightly guided and so I trust him. So when Malik says, you know in the mudawwuna they asked about holding the hands at the side or doing qabalt. He said la'arfu fil farida. I don't know it in the farida . So he saw it as a, you now...so most of the maliki's, the mashhoor of the madhhab is sadru yadin like ibn Asher says that you leave the hands", "The muttaba' which is a later term. A muttabaa is somebody who follows the imam but he knows the daliya, right? But they're not like a mujtahid. They just know, if you ask them why do you hold your hands at your side? They'll say oh because it's the amal of Ahl al-Madinah there's no sahih hadith for qabad all of them have ilal as been shown by the fuqa of the maliki something like that", "If they know the Mashor of the Madhhab,", "they've studied enough to where they can if a new issue comes up, they can actually examine the issue. Now Sheikh Abdullah bin Biya has a haram, a triangle he calls it fatwa alif, fatwa ba and fatwajim. Fatwa alf he says are those things that people that are educated in their madhhab, in their school, they know the methodology of", "if it's in the areas or they can give fatwa then that and then ba is it means more like somebody who has to have a deeper knowledge uh and then jeem is can't be done by individuals it can only be done government bodies like declaring war you can't you can have an individual declare war", "they've reached a level where they're a mujtahid but with, they're still using the usool of their, the madhhab of their imam. And then finally you have mujtadh muttaq and that person is somebody who comes up with his own uh... uh..usool So those are like Abu Hanifa, Layth ibn Sa'ad Imam Abdurrahman al-Awzaee Imam Jaafar as-Sadiq", "Imam Ahmed ibn Hanbal, Imam Tabari. Some say Al-Bukhari was a mujtahid mutlaq. Some said he was shafi'i. The majority... Tajil al-Subki puts him in the tabaqat al-shafi'iyya. So Allah knows. His opinions seem to coincide with the Shafi-e-Mathab so there's a strong case that he was Shafii. Although I once asked one of the Mauritanians", "why all the great muhaddithun were shafi'i. And he said, no, no. Look a little deeper. He said look at all Imam Nauwi who's he quoting? He's quoting all Malikis like Ibn al-Waqar and Qad Ayyab. These are just nukat. Is that clear? Taqleed is not it. It's a blameworthy state but if it's your", "don't think, don't get above your not your pay grade but your pray grade. Yeah you know because people we can't the hadith are too there's hadith that are mutadariba their hadith literally contradict each other and they're both sahih and so the ulama have all these ways of trying to get tawfiq between them is it nasikh? Is it mansukh?", "I've read too many hadiths to get confused", "leave that one, there's no amal on that hadith. And so he actually helped him understand the hadith, yeah. I mean partly I think one of the secrets is to force people to think because the thing about Islam it's a thinking person's religion", "religion. It's not a religion for dummies. I mean, you can be a dummy and be a Muslim. But the religion itself, the deen, it's a religion... The Quran was revealed in a way that is not a linear book. It needs deep ta'mul . The deeper you do the ta'mal , the more cohesion you see in it. If you go to it just as a book", "the Quranic tafsirs are purely linear, but people like Ibn al-Zubair, Al-Gharanati, Imam al-Biqa'i one of the great Lebanese scholars. They show that there's a deep tenasob in the Quran that can only be penetrated through deep study and the hadiths are like that they force people to think. Any other?", "أردت أن تقوم بإعادة قصة الحديث عن طريقك", "It's best to read hadith with a teacher initially. It really is. I think the Quran for ibadah, but yeah, I think a lot of trouble has been caused because people went directly to the hadith. It's created a lot confusion in the modern world Muslims and because all the books are accessible traditionally you know they called it wijada", "in our hadith tradition. Wijada was people that found books and read them without being in a chain, without studying. Traditionally they didn't permit it the ulama but over time because like Sheikh Muhammad Al-Aqoubi may Allah preserve him", "him he revived the uh the amazing istanbul publication of arabokhari which is the best one of all the printed editions so we actually reprinted that recently and wrote an amazing introduction to that if you have a really good sound um", "published, but they're actually well edited. Dar al-minhaj like this edition of the Mukhtasir of Sahih Al Bukhari is well edited But you still every once in a while find mistakes so if you don't know and then also Imam Al Dahabi famously The Prophet said", "whoever lies about what I said intentionally, he should take his seat in hell. And that's a mutawatir hadith. So it's multiply transmitted. It's absolutely sound factual hadiths. It is as valid as any verse in the Quran. That should give people pause just because it's very serious and", "you know he actually said that he would fear that somebody who did not know grammar and quoted hadith with lahan, and may Allah forgive us because I know I've done that in the past so but he said that He would be afraid that they would fall into that category of people telling a lie because the Prophet never had a solacism. He never ever used bad grammar His grammar was perfect", "So one should know Naho and Sarf. Especially, I mean, Sarf is the problem with a lot of Hadiths. Naho's relatively easy as you guys are learning just in terms of I'rab it's not that difficult but Sarf if a problem, you know? And also the... Just the different... Would you guys agree? Yeah Because there's just There's a lot", "I mean, they're all possibilities. So if you just see ha-zay-noon, which one is it? And I mean fortunately a lot of these are well commented on so there are great commentaries and very often they will give us, they'll tell this is like", "So they'll say in the commentary, Because everybody knows Nasir al-Yansuru. But not everybody might know Rajaf al-Jarjufu.", "I'll do inshallah when we do the next session the so it will be as opposed to", "Because the ulama differ on the musalsal. Is it musalsa al-balawaliya, haqiqatan or izaafatan? So if it really is the first one you heard from the person then it's haqi qatan.", "continue on but before i go into inshallah the first hadith which is really an amazing hadith from imam", "when you studied hadith, you began with the Musalsal Bal Awaliya and the Musalsa Hadith tradition is still continued throughout the Muslim world. They continue it in all the Muslim countries where there's still knowledge that you have this tradition amongst the scholars and then the students like myself of scholars who basically relate to you", "chain and then the musalsal is so Imam al-Baquni says that the musalasal", "is replicated throughout the transmission. So one of the most famous ones in terms of just the nukat of Ahl al-Hadith, is the qabda'a la lahya'. So the Prophet related a hadith and then qabada'ala lahyatihi so every rawe would grab their beard. Imam Dahlawi's daughter when she was", "relate the hadith she would grab her chin so that's the the the musal sal there are many like the adiyafa water and dates so when we used to visit Sheikh Ahmed Jabir Gibran one of the great scholars from Yemen from Tihama who was anybody", "He was a Muhaadith and a Shafi'i Faqih.", "So he has many books, but he was just a really amazing scholar. I once got a brand new watch like a stopwatch sorry pocket watch because a lot of the older ulama they all used pocket watch. This is Sheikh Maashukh nodding his head because that's you just for whatever reason they would have the pocket watch But he had this really old pocket watch so I bought", "I bought a brand new one and I went and asked him if I could trade with him. He looked at mine, it was brand new. He said, Khuda'a, I'll be cheating you. And I said, no, no. I think I'll get the better deal. So we exchanged watches. It stopped right when we got out of the haram, the hudud, it stopped working. And then he used it to do his prayer times in the", "times in the Haram and I'm taking it to California. It doesn't work, but I still have the watch, but it doesn't", "but I was fortunate also to hear it from Sheikh Mohammed Abulhuda Al-Yaqoubi who for people that know him they know, I think inshaAllah have some idea of the level of his scholarship. But for the people that don't know him he's the son of a long line of really ulama from the Hassani scholars of Morocco, the Yaqubi family. But his father Sheikh Ibrahim Al-Yaqubiyah is one of the great scholars", "of Syria and he was also a, quite rare. He was a faqi in both madhhabs of the Maliki and the Hanafi so Sheikh Muhammad grew up learning both madhhabs which is very unusual. It's difficult enough to learn one madhhab but to learn two. So I'm going to do this first just for the baraka of it.", "I'm not, lestu min ahlu hadhushan. I'm definitely not from this, you know the people of this science but for the barakah to keep these things alive in our ummah. This is the musalsal bil awwaliya which means the first Hadith, the salsala in it what's the link in this is that they...this was the first hadith they heard and then there's haqiqa", "So is it was the first hadith they heard or as a . For me, when I first heard this from both of them, I think it was and I was fortunate to read Hadith with both of those scholars. And benefited greatly from their knowledge but Sheikh Muhammad is in his .", "to read it for the barakah of these names, also to keep the names alive. Because one of the things when you think about it, everything that we have is from these ulama and one of those things that traditionally Muslims did like on the 17th of Ramadan they would recite the names of the people of Badr just to keep their names alive there's a great blessing in just their names the ulama say", "Rahmah descends on us. So I'll do this in Arabic.", "أبو الهدى العقوب الحسني الإدريسي والعلامة الشيخ أحمد جابر الجبران رحمهم الله وقد اقتصرت هنا على إسناد واحد اختصارا وتسهيلا حدثنا شيخنا العلامة محمد أبوا الهدا العقوبي الحسن الإدریسي ابن العلام الكبير العارف الشهير إمام المالكية ثم الحنفيتي في الجامع الأموي الكبيرة بدمشق السيد شيخ إبراهيم العقوف الحسين", "محمد بن جعفر الكتاني الحسني الإدريسي مفتي الماركية في بلاد الشام وهو أول حديث سمعته منه عن السيد أحمد", "عن وارده السيد اسماعيل ابن زين العابدين البرزانجي الحسينية الشافعي وهو أول حديث سمعت منه عن الشيخ صالح بن محمد الفلاني العمري وهو الأول حتيث سامعت منهم عن شمس الدين محمدا بن مهمدا المغربي وهو أو الحديث انسمعت منها عن مسند الحجاز الإمام عبد الله ابني سالم البصري", "محمد بن علاء الدين البابلي المصري وهو أول حديث سمعت منه قال حدثنا الشهاب أحمد ابن محمدة الشلبية الحنفي وهو أوّل حدي ثاني سمعتي منه. قال حداثنا جمال الدين يوسف ابن شيخ الإسلام زكيري الأنصاري الشافعي وهو اول حاديث انسمعتي ومنه قال هداثنا برحان الدين إبراهيم ابن علي ابني أحمدا القلق شندي وهو هو حدي تنسمع", "العبدي النسابوري وهو أول حديث سمعت منه وهنا ينتهي التسلسل لا قال حدثني أمير المؤمنين صفيان بن عيينة وهو الأول حداث سمعتم منه و هنا ينتاهي المسلل عن أبي محمد عمر ابن دينار المكي عن التابع الجليل أبي قبوس المتوفى بعد المية عن الصحابي الجليلة سيدنا عبد الله", "رضي الله عنهما قال قال رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم الراحمون يرحمهم الرحمن تبارك وتعالى ارحم من في الأرض يركم من في السماء وفي رواية يرهمكم بالرفع على الدعاة يرخمكم من", "May Allah reward all of the men in that chain for carrying the knowledge to us. May Allah bless them. So we're going to start now with Imam Al-Bukhari's", "Bukhari's first hadith that he relates", "فيتحنث فيه وهو تعبد والليالي ذات العدد قبل أن ينزع إلى أهله ويتزود لذلك ثم يرجع إلى خديجة فيتزود لمثرها حتى جاءه الحق وهو في غار حرائن", "ثم أرسلني فقال اقرا فقلت ما أنا بقارئ فأخذني فغطني الثانية حتى بلغ مني الجهد", "وربك الأكرم فرجع بها رسول الله يرجف فؤاده فدخل على خديجة بنتي خويلد رضي الله عنها فقال زملوني زملني فزملوه حتى ذهب عنه الروع", "وكان إمرأة تنصر في الجاهلية وكان يكتب الكتاب العبراني فيكتوب من الإنجيل بالعبرانية ما شاء الله أن يكته وكان شيخا كبيرا وقد عميا فقالت له خديجة يا ابن عم اسمع من ابن أخيك فقل له ورقة يا ابني أختي ماذا ترى", "فقال رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم أم مخرجيهم؟ أو أم خريجيهما؟ قال نعم لم يأتي رجل قط بمثل ما جئت به إلا عودية وإن يدركني يومك أنصر نصراً مؤزرة", "Alhamdulillah. So this hadith is from Aisha Radhi Allam, Umm al-Mu'mineen and Aisha obviously heard this from the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam because she was I mean her age is debated in the hadith", "In the hadith that's related in Al-Bukhari and Muslim. In Al-Muqarri, it says that she was six when there was a betrothal and then nine when she entered into the house of the Prophet ﷺ. But if you actually look at the... She dies in 58 after hijrah but her sister Asma died in 73 and she was 100 years old.", "years old and Asma was 17 years older than Aisha so Asma would have been 27 at the time of of the prophet's al-aysim's death which means she would have had been 17 when he made hijrah, which means that Aisha was probably 15 when she entered in the house in the second year of Hijra. And there are several reasons one of them is that", "the prophet came in she was with all her friends and in the hadith this is when she first comes in they all run away. And children loved the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam so these were girls that were already entered into their puberty. They were not children because the children loved The Prophet sallaallahu walaikum and they would not have run away from him but out of shyness", "The age of Aisha was never an issue for pre-modern peoples. Washington Irving in his famous book, which is not a great book, I mean it's terrible book in some ways but he wrote a book about the Prophet, the life of the Prophet. It was a best seller in the United States. Another man, one of the descendants of George Bush whose name is Reverend George Bush also wrote a biography so people were very interested", "the 19th century because of the Ottomans and because the Americans were involved in commerce, and the Muslims were in the Mediterranean. In any case, none of them mentioned Aisha's age. None of them make a comment about it because it just simply was not an issue for them. It was very common for girls to get married. According to the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible, Mary was probably about 12 or 13 when", "when she was impregnated. So this was very common in the past. Obviously, this goes under orf. So in America, in these times it would be inappropriate for these times because it goes under and you follow the of a people so in some places they marry very early and other places they don't and the Sharia recognizes that", "So that's important. But she was a brilliant woman, she had a photographic memory, she memorized... In fact Al-Hakim in the Mustadrak says we owe 1 4th of our deen to Aisha. She also corrected Sahaba, she corrected Abu Hurairah and the famous Hadith about taking a bad omen from", "And when Aisha heard that, she said, That's not true. He misquoted it. The Prophet said, They used to say in Jahiliyyah that bad omen are three. And so she actually negated that. So the point being, She is one of the great scholars of our religion. And she's obviously the daughter of the second.", "in the cave. Abu Bakr al-Siddiq radiallahu anhu. So she said that the revelation began with the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, a good vision in sleep.", "people outside of you know the faith can have access to true dreams they occur there are many people that have become Muslim through true dreams I know somebody who actually saw the Prophet before he became Muslim who told him to become Muslim so that does happen and why some people are gifted with those things and why others we", "this was the beginning of revelation because it's a preparation. He would not see a dream except that it came like the breaking of dawn, which is very interesting because Ibn Abi Jamrah says the breaking", "Because he had to be prepared for the momentous events that are going to happen to him. Because we can't even imagine as a human being seeing an angel fill the entire horizon. I mean, Moses had to... You know, in the Quran it says, In one verse it says it was a hayatun tas'a when he threw it down. In another verse it say's it was th-eban When he initially threw it", "that he wouldn't be afraid. But when he threw it down with Moses, it was a th'aaban. So could you imagine him being told throw down your staff and then he has to experience this thing? These are human beings that have a capacity that the average human beings even those most extraordinary human beings just simply don't have but he had to be prepared for this. And so", "This is very interesting. And Aisha, she's so brilliant and this hadith really brings out a lot of her brilliance. So he became Imam al-Bursayri says that the Prophet accustomed himself to these rituals, to devotion", "To. Ibadah and also to khalwa. Just to being. Alone with his lord. And then he says this is the way of. Nujabat intelligent people. Intelligent people. Can only take so much. Of a lot of time because first of all. Most talk in Arabic logha. Is from lagha yalghul. You know it's the verb is.", "verb is, it's just empty talk. If you actually took, looked at what human beings talk on a daily basis, the vast majority of it is just chit-chat, backbiting, empty, how much are those onions? You know that's what people talk. Actually high talk is not that common to actually be in environments where and that's why when", "simple level. Like if you spend time with Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah, he just doesn't have chitchat. Murabit al-Hajj had no chitchats. Murabad al- Hajj told me that he stopped drinking tea because of the chitchatz involved in drinking tea. He just wasn't interested. So it doesn't mean we're human but you have to see there are people selected out amongst human beings and these are the guides and that's why they", "qualities, and that's one of their qualities is that they tend to be introverted. They tend to more...they just have a hard time. And as you get older, and I guarantee you most of you in here are young people, as you gets older you will be less inclined. People as they get older tend to withdraw. In fact, in Hinduism it's actually", "the last stage where they literally withdraw from society to prepare for death. So, they actually had it in their tradition that that's what you did at a certain age. Like, they give up rajas food when they hit 50, they stop eating spiced food, they eat simple food. This is part of preparing for that journey which comes after death, right? Once we die, we have another journey and what Sheikh Abdullah was saying in his khutbah today about when you think about these 14 enemies that he talked", "enemies that he talked about, death is one of these things that we're being confronted with. And the thing about death, you could be 20, you", "Is partly. I mean not entirely. Because there are wonderful things about the world. Family is a wonderful thing. Company is a beautiful thing. All these things are beautiful things. But the fundamental reason. Is we're here to do work. To come to know our Lord. To prepare ourselves for what's coming next. So he. And then Imam Abu Sayyidi says.", "When the hidayah comes into a heart, the limbs become animated with ibadah. The beautiful expression in the Hamziyah.", "When it comes into the heart, then the limbs spontaneously begin to want to do worship. It could be munsaraf or gharmunsaraf, the two rewires. This is called idraj in the hadith tradition.", "So sometimes the Muhaddith will add something for clarification. So, for instance in one of those famous examples that's used in the books is in the Hadith of Ibn Majah where the Prophet said So the was added to make sure people didn't misunderstand that hadith because it meant men and women so the Mudraj", "hadith ads for clarification. So he's saying, yet the is an unusual word. I think one of the meanings, Allah Ta'ala Alim, al-Hinth al-Azeem is shirk. So in the Quran, Hinth is shirke. You know these false oaths and the idols worship of the idol. Tafaul in Arabic as you learned in Sarf all of the students. One of the meaning of it is to jannub, you know to avoid something", "Like tahajjud is to avoid sleep. Hujud is sleep. So one of the meanings of tahnuth in Arabic is to Avoid hinth because the Prophet couldn't worship in The Ka'bah was very difficult for him Because of all the shirk and the idols so he would go off And he would do this in Ramadan, He would go Off and he would worship in Ghara Hira", "And one of the secrets of Ghur Hira is in the pre-modern world before the buildings got too high, you could see the Kaaba from Ghur Hirat. So he had three acts of worship when he was in Hira. He had the worship of khalwa because there's a Hadith that says, just being alone is a type of worship which is one of", "It's one of the sinister aspects. Of the Qareen. You know, the cell phone is like a Qareem. It's with us all the time. This little daemon. They actually call it daemon inside if you go in those. Right? And then it opens up. And the Prophet said that there's a fitna. Whoever looks at it, it pulls him in.", "him in, well I think that's the net. Because you can't go on there for one thing except you find yourself with another thing and I know everybody in here has had that experience. It's a big problem. If you don't have real discipline it's a bit problem and you can waste your life all these poor TikTok people victims of TikTok wasting their lives away even all this Twitter do you really have to have an opinion about everything?", "about everything? Really? Is it that important for you just to put your little comment there, your two cents, that doesn't amount to a hill of beans in the grand scheme of things? It's very interesting. Humans. Imam al-Ghazali said that you should talk when you don't want to talk and you should not talk when", "If the words are of silver, then the silence is of gold.", "And the English share that. They probably stole it from the Arabs, like many things, including tea. I mean they call it English tea. It's not right. From India. Very interesting. So then, This is very interesting and this is the brilliance again of Aisha.", "يمكن أن تكون عدد قلة أو كثرة لذلك بسبب أنها أخفت بهذه الطريقة نعرف أن هذه كانت مجموعة من الليل لم يكن هناك بعض الليل كانوا مجتمعين", "say ذهب. In other words, he wanted to see his family and this is also partly because you cannot do عبادة without fulfilling the حقوق on you because the family has حق. So it was important. وَيَتَزُوَّدُوا لِذَٰرِكَ And then they used to meet and there's a masjid in Mecca where we used to visit when we did the Umrahs where Khadija used to", "You would give him. And his Zad was Kaak and Zabib. So it was like a bread with simon. Not like Kaak today. Kaak is probably from Arabic. Cake, cake, kaak. But it's a round bread. And Zabim, raisins. So...", "So the Malik came to him. This is Jibreel. So Ibn Abi Jamrah says, this is a dhalil ala jawaz at-tawriya. In balagha tawriya is when you say something and you say it's ambiguous because Jibril, this for ta'deeb because remember Even though Jibrill", "The Prophet is over Jibreel. Jibreeel is his teacher and this is something for all of us here as teachers we know there are students that surpass us and if you're a true teacher, you want your students to surpass you. You don't want them to be dependent on you.", "but he's over Jibreel. So, Jibrel is for Ta'deeb, Iqra. He knows he can't read. Jibreal knows this and there's an amazing Hadith Imam Syuti has in his book on Isra where before the Prophet went on a journey", "On the Isra and the Mi'raj. He actually had a vision where he was with Jibreel in a tree, And they were in like an ish, Like a nest. And Jibril was in one and he was in the other, And the tree began to grow until it went into the heavens. And he was looking because everything was opening up to him In the unseen. So he was Looking but then he looked at Jibrill and Jibrille was looking straight up. And so he said he learned from him", "That he should be focused. Because they were, He was being prepared to meet his Lord. And these are the different types of, The ulama actually, There are different types Of revelation. So the first revelation Was this ru'ya as-sadiqa. Right? The true But then there's other types of Revelation. There's a revelation that came Like salsalat al-jaras.", "It came like the reverberation of a bell. There was one that came like buzzing of a bee. Also, there's . The Prophet said He breathed into my heart. is fear related.", "So he was inspired. This is a type of Wahi that's akin to Ilham. It just comes into his heart and he knows it. So he", "Don't be greedy. Don't go and ask people for things. Everything will come to you. إِذَا سَأْلْتَ فَاسْأَلِ اللَّهُ If you ask, then ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. So he said that", "So then he would go back to the house. And Ibn Abi Jamrah says this is a proof that the inqita' doesn't, the fact that you go for needs does not break your ibadah because he would return. So it's like when you're in the mu'takif these are ahkam al-a'tikaf. When you're on the a'tikf if you have something it doesn't break your a'tiqaf to do something out of necessity.", "is it's something, it's just ambiguous. And he said the condition though is that you don't harm anybody with this. So when he said Iqra, he said ma ana bi qari? I don't know how to read. The beauty of Arabic also,", "are sometimes extremely precise when necessary, and then other times they're very loose. They hold a lot of different... But in the case of qara'a yaqra'u it means to both recite and to read. So the Quran is a reading and a recital. So it's said by rote but that's traditionally the Muslims", "It was something they carried in their breasts. But it's also a, Quran is also a recital, a reading. So you read it. So he said, There's different riwayah. This I think is the strongest one. So the fa'il goes back to the angel or it could be", "For those of you who are doing Arabic here. And then he let me go, he released me. So ghatta is it's to pull him in and then to squeeze him until he thought", "That's how intense it was. So, and Jibril we can't imagine the that's how he is described in the Quran so you can't even imagine what kind of pressure that was Abu Bakr was once with the Prophet when the revelation came And he thought his thigh that he was going to break his femur It was the weight We will thrust upon you a weighty word", "word it had a physical weight as well", "He did it three times. So the three times, there's a sirr in the three time. Ibn Abi Jamrah says that these are... This is what they call takhliya. So in our tradition you have what's called takhiliya. The Christians have a very similar concept of emptying out bad qualities.", "qualities. So, and look where the dot is. It's on the top. Right? It's in the top of the word. So the is to empty out. To empty out so there's nothing inside of bad qualities. I mean the was pure but this is these all have meanings.", "That squeezing is the first one, the takhliya. And then the second is the tahliya This is all of the positive qualities So the beginning of the path is takhiliya and then the middle stage is tahliyya so you first get rid of your vices and then you work on adorning yourself with all of", "These are the qualities that were meant to inculcate. These nine qualities that are related in our tradition of fear and hope and gratitude and patience, trust in Allah, detachment from this dunya, being content with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala,", "And finally, where you have pure love for Allah . And is removed from your heart. It's outside of his heart. Just anything other than Allah. And then it becomes... You can handle this because Aisha , if you look at Aisha, I mean, look what she went through.", "father is the most upright after the Prophet of all the Muslims. And she's accused of adultery. And Allah says, don't think it's bad. It's good for you. That's part of the process. There are many things people are going to be slandered, attacked. Somebody talked to me yesterday and he was slandering horribly and then removed from his position and everything. And I told him, I said SubhanAllah", "Subhanallah, you know like I really meant it. You know this is what happens to prophets You can go through life and nobody ever says anything bad about you doing something wrong This is the dunya The people of Allah are always attacked they have enemies", "And they'll tell horrible things. They'll tell lies. They don't care. These people are minions of the devil. They say without proof, without evidence, they attack people. They had no proof. Aisha lost her necklace. She was very light so they didn't feel the camel and then the poor man you know he's like walking right when he saw her he said Like he knew it was a musiba", "And then, ah, the chatterers. This is sick people. And now they have... Think if they had internet. Now they have internet. I mean, the devil. What tools he has today. In the past it all had to be... It took time. Now the Prophet said, يَتَكَلَّمَ الْمَرْءُ بِالْكَدَبِ فَيَبْلُغَ الٰفَقِ He'll tell a lie and then it instantaneously goes", "goes to the horizons. You just push a little button. But Yom Kiyam is real and we're going to see who's who. All, you know, all the phonies are going to be shown up. They're going be people that will have flags coming out of their rear ends of the treacherous people. Out of their back end so everybody can see Ghadr. It's going to", "If you're, as long as you're a mu'min and you have taqwa of Allah it's going to be a good day. And everybody will get what they hopefully not what they deserve but the bad people will get What they deserve. The good people Hopefully they're going to Be forgiven. But those people that sowed dissension Sowed corruption Spread rumors Told lies Started wars Killed people mercilessly I mean these people now What they're doing In these different places", "There is no oppression on that day. Why would Allah say that? Because this is a world, this is an abode where there's going to be difficulties. This is the nature of the abode. So then he said Read. This was meant to recite. In the name of your Lord", "of your Lord. So Ibn Abi Jamrah says this is a proof that because it didn't say, you know, look into the heavens and the earth, contemplate. No. So he says it's that", "إنها حالة من صحة وليس حالتين للصحة", "Allah will show us signs in the self and on the horizon. In the self, and on The Horizon until it becomes clear to them that this is the truth So what is the relationship between the self And the horizon? The relationship is it's the meeting place of heaven and earth", "an earthly being in a khalq jadeed. We're a new creation. We have an immaterial reality that's heavenly and we have a material physical reality that is earthly, and that's why when Allah says in Surah Ar-Rum that Inna fee kharqa al samawati wal ardh In the creation of the heavens and earth wikhtirafal sinatikum wa alwanikum And in the diversities of your complexions", "Your complexions and your tongues. And your complexions. So in the creation of the heavens and the earth. And in your tongues and your complexion are signs", "Are signs for people who are alimeen. Rational beings, people that use their intellect. So that's called tibaq. So he has heaven and earth and then language and complexions. This is because our consciousness, our thought is immaterial. That's from the heavens. The complexions, all the white, the brown, the black, the yellow, the red.", "It's all earthly. And that's why heavenly people don't give a lot of credence to complexion. It doesn't have, it's just from the earth. I mean there's albino pigs, there's white pigs. Does that give them some kind of ontological status over brown pigs? It's ridiculous. But this is stupidity", "But this is stupidity of our species. And also, this is a minion, you know, Iblis tricking people. Like because he literally says what am I going to bow down to black smelly clay? He uses the word black. Because what color is smokeless fire? The hottest fire gets white. So racism", "Iblisism is really iblis-ism. That's all it is. It's just iblise thinking he's better because of something elemental, something related to the material phenomenon not the spiritual and that's why Allah knew what they didn't know. They're looking at the outward of Adam . You're gonna put in the earth", "the one that sows corruption and sheds blood? Not all of them. Some are going to do that. This is khafaqan, so he's having palpitations", "Happens when you have. Like acute anxiety something. So we can't imagine this experience. That's happening to the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. None of us can imagine that. So he goes. This is his cousin and he's married to her. They meet in Abdul Uzza and Abdul Manaf were brothers. So they're both sons of Qusay. So, they both go back to Qusai. And these are tribal clan people.", "clan people which is very common and then so that's where he goes he goes to the one that is going to give him solace of what this is even abu jamal has a beautiful latifa that he used the mudhakkar jama' al-mudhakkara salim right", "is for plural and then it's masculine but it said to Khadija because of her maqam. Because first of all when you speak to people that you have great respect for in the Arabic language, you use the plural like in Spanish you use third person", "You know, you say like, como esta usted? You don't say, como estas? How are you doing? You say, how is the teacher doing or the usted, the sir, doing? Many traditional cultures have this. I mean in Urdu, you need a PhD to work out all the different... Because they have all the... Even your birth order is going to determine what you're called.", "and what you're called in traditional Urdu. So he says, So he has this fright. This is a roar. This Aisha's fasaha. She just says, She doesn't need to say", "to repeat it, because she's already said that. So she says, as opposed to . Now this, to me is one of the most beautiful... It's just so powerful. Because he says", "I'm afraid for myself. Like what's happening to me? And she says, This is like a forceful negation. There's no way. No. Swearing an oath.", "Your Lord will never degrade you. He will never humiliate you. And then she says, why? You take care of your relationship", "relatives. You know, you maintain the bonds, you help your relatives when they're in need. You maintain those kinship bonds. Allah talks about the one who's just he can't do anything. He's just reliant. She said, you bear the burdens of the weary, the people that just can't take care of themselves.", "And then this is really the mu'dim, but they're using what they don't have to mean. So it's you earn or you give. You help those who have nothing by giving them something. Qiraya is the qira. Qara yaqri. Al-dayf is to be a good host.", "a good host like you prepare for the guests their needs not just food but it also can mean like protection and so taqri al-dayf and this is one of the hallmarks of the Arab people of all peoples you know the Arabs, one of my teachers he was an Arab but it's a true statement as an Ajamie I'll say like Ibn Muqaffa when he was asked, he was a Persian but he knew beautiful Arabic he said", "I'd rather be cursed in Arabic than praised in Persian. Sorry for it. And then he was asked once about which people he preferred. He said,", "He said, what I don't have in my lineage at least I have an intellect. Because we're not Shia-Ubiya you know the Shia Ubia these were people that didn't like the Arabs. No matter how they're the Prophet's people and whatever difficulties they're going through and things like that", "that we pray for them and their language is our language. And then she said, وَتُعِينُ عَلَى النَّوَائِبِ الْحَقِّ And you help people in these نوا'يب الحق. The reason again she said نوائب الحاق because نواعب like Labib the poet he says نواءب من خير ومن شر كلاهما There's نوا่ب الخير ونواعبة الشر", "And there's. So you help in those things that are related to the truth, the calamities that come that befall people. So then she said. Ibn Asad ibn Abdul Uzza. So this is the cousin of Khadija. She's been to the Khawaylad", "And that's the brother of his father. But they both meet with the prophet at Qusay, which some say is the beginning of Quraysh. So I'm going to take it back to Qurayish, Qusai.", "He could write in Hebrew. Which indicates this must have been one of the original Anajir because the Injil was probably in either Aramaic or Hebrew, not in Greek which is what it is today, Kone Greek. Oh my cousin. The Arabs say that to their cousin.", "their cousin and then they say to the older person, my uncle even if it's not their uncle just an older person or or or and then so she said listen to your cousin because they're cousins by Qusayt oh my son of my brother", "my brother, my cousin. ماذا ترى? What are you seeing? فأخبره رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم خبر ما رأى So he told him what he'd seen. فقال له ورقة هذا الناموس So ورق was educated in Abrahamic revelation. He said this is the ناموس. ناموز There's different opinions about it. Some say it means جبريل This is جبریل. Some", "the actual Wahi it may be related to Nomos which is the law, the coming of the law because this is what the Arabs did not have. I wish I was a he says Jada'a which is like a young you know a young sprightly billy goat or something", "So I wish I was a youngster, he's saying. That I could be with you when your people drive you out. He can't imagine this. This is the gentle... He's the most gentle of people. He doesn't bother anybody. He only does good. He's al-ameen. Nobody has a bad word to say about him.", "And he said, Because no man brings what you're bringing to them except he will be opposed. If I was with you on that day, I will protect you. I will defend you in a strong way.", "Then he didn't get it. He died right after that. Because he had knowledge of the... None of the people around the Prophet ﷺ had knowledge Of the books. Because people would accuse and say, Oh, he got it from this person or that person. Even where all the midrash teaching Well, how did he get all that knowledge? Because that's in their oral revelation. How did he know all those stories? And they're consistent with the", "with what the Jews have. How did he know those things? He didn't learn it from the Jews. And then, وَفَتَرَ الْوَحِي And then the Wahi انحبس عنه for a period. There's difference of opinion about how long it was.", "And then he adds that Ibn Shihab, Imam Al-Zuhri is one of the great scholars.", "And then, so then he said after that, he saw the angel again on a filling up the horizon on a throne between the heavens and the earth.", "and the earth. And again he ran back, and said, Zamiluni, zamiduni. And that's when Allah said, Ya ayyuhal mudathir. And That's something... That's isti'nas. So the Arabs in the Arabic language you like the Prophet once came upon Sayyedina Ali and he was sleeping and he woke him up and he had dust all over him and he called him", "So the Arabs, the hal that you're mutalabbis bihi, the Arabs will tukannik bilhal. So like Abu Huraira had the cat that he was holding so the Prophet called him Abu Hurera. So it's something in Arabic they do. So ya yuhan muzammil, it's the hal when he was being called. Alhamdulillah.", "Alhamdulillah. So that's, I wanted to read one thing that I just, it's very powerful and I just thought this is just a really extraordinary insight from Dr. Cleary. Allah yirhamuhu. She said, he said", "that Khadijah, who was not only the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad but also his only wife during her lifetime, was a successful international businesswoman. Twice widowed before marrying the Prophet at one time, the astute and self-possessed Khadija employed the young prophet to be in her business which she had inherited from her father when she was 30 years old. Through their professional relationship, Khadijah became well acquainted with the morals", "Although she was already 40 years, there's a khilaf about that. I mean, there is some tahqiq that she was younger than 40. She was more closer to 30 when she and Muhammad were married. Khadija bore him six children. Their first child as son died at the age of two. Their last child also as son in infancy. The saintly Fatima mother of the Imams was the youngest of their four daughters. Khadeeja and Muhammad had been married for 15 years by the time he began to receive revelations during his meditation", "in a mountain cave outside Mecca. Muhammad was already a mature man of 40, sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam, known in the community for his reliability but what he experienced in the cave created a profound turmoil. It was to Khadijah, beloved wife and mother of his children that he hastened retaining her own composure and keeping her presence of mind. Khadija calmed the nascent prophet reminding him of his reputation", "him that this could not be something like maladyat as he had first feared. Like, he said, akhsha' ala nafsi. That what he was worried about is that he was going to become a kahan. You know, kahana was something that the Arabs they had these people that got a type of you know, the jinn would give them information and things. And that's initially what he", "the scholars will attack them but they're related by scholars Imam al-Bahqi Ibn Abi Jamra that he was really troubled and was in a really almost despondent state of mind at one point. These are debatable things but the point is he's afdor al-khalqila but he's also a bashar, he's a human being with you know he had feelings as", "He had grief, he had sorrow. He had pain. I mean his Waqa was worse. He said he had twice the pain of the average person when he got sick. So I think people sometimes forget that but he says beneath the color and drama of this famous incident lies a reminder of a human reality whose poignancy is inescapable regardless of how one may feel about the reality of prophecy.", "which this book was written for. So I think it's important to see that in that light. And that is the plight of a woman whose husband, the father of her children, he's in this state. He's just in this incredible state. And even if divinely inspired,", "Inspired. His first thought of. Is this a type of madness? How sublime must have been that sobriety. And how profound the insight of the woman. Who saw the truth of the matter. And did not waver or doubt like she just no doubt. I mean, just to have that support of Khadijah.", "If she had plunged into anxiety or fear, as any ordinary human being might understandably do under the circumstances. The intense agitation and distress. What would have happened? The sustaining wisdom and fortitude of this exemplary woman would have far-reaching consequences over the next 10 years", "Over the next 10 years. Until her death at the age of 65. Khadijah continued to maintain. Her unflinching loyalty. And steadfastness. As the wife of the prophet. And the first to embrace Islam. At any age. When she might reasonably have expected. To enjoy the fruits of her labor. Including a comfortable life. And domestic tranquility. Instead.", "Khadijah shared the pains of ostracization and persecution visited upon the family and the followers of Muhammad by opponents of his message. Khadija did not live to see Islam's ultimate triumph, but this only highlights the purity and power of her certitude.", "As though her spiritual perception had penetrated the veil of time. Khadijah's outstanding strength of character as mother of the believers shines through the darkness of those days of trial as a beacon of a brighter future. As a truly exemplary woman, she is not obscured by the brilliance of her husband in his prophetic role. As we see in her in tradition, the light of the revelation is reflected in the clear mirror of her spiritual perceptions", "spiritual perception, which had sensed the verity of the message from the very first. By virtue of her qualities, therefore, Khadija became the first earthly matrix of the historical dissemination of the method message through her partner, the prophet.\" Just forget how important she was now.", "Just to have that solace. Alhamdulillah, SubhanAllah. That's why no matter how dark it gets... I mean she had to suffer they ate leaves of trees you know? They were tortured Sumayya", "The Prophet saw them being tortured. He didn't tell all his Sahaba to kill themselves, to save them. He told them your destiny is Jannah. We can't do anything right now to help you. The same with Aisha when she, people misunderstand that just sometimes you have to just bear these Nawab", "these difficulties and just recognize that there's not a lot you can do other than just trust in Allah and believe in this revelation. And that, you know, that it's true, that its haqq So you can look at the Muslims now I mean, it's actually a nice time to be a Muslim You know why? Because there's really not a of perks in being a Muslim And so, you There used to be A time when people, you Know, there's all these perks to become Muslim", "So this is a time, this is like one of those early periods where we're persecuted all over the place. People don't like Muslims. You know, it's what a blessing because the faith then it's real. It's not because you're ruling the world which so many Muslims for some reason want to do. I don't know why. I didn't wanna rule this world", "Any questions? Comments? Amazing story. The beginning of Wahi. And he began his book with this. Beautiful.", "Assalamu alaikum Sheikh. BarakAllahu feekh for your daras, mashaAllah. I think we all benefited a lot from it. In light of what you said about Waraka could you comment on the relationship that the early Muslims had with Christians? Because I know there's the trend where some people will say the Ummah included Christians and Jews without them exactly becoming Muslims. Yeah well it says", "that when they made the Pact of Medina, it says, So there's a whole khilaf about what that ma'a means. And you have to study haruf al-ma'ani to appreciate. I was present in a debate between two great scholars about that ma'. So did it mean it was one ummah or did it", "a grammatical point of view. In any case, we're distinct from the Jews and the Christians. The provost made it very clear that we should distinguish ourselves from the Jewish and the Christian. There's no Abrahamic... We are united by Abraham but we are distinct branches. And our belief is that the Jewish branch Judaism deviated and Christianity deviated.", "claim and people can take it or leave it that's fine but that's a truth claim the Jews don't accept the Christians and the Christians don't seem to have a problem with that they don't I mean if you read Jesus in the Talmud it's pretty shocking the punishments Jesus gets I mean, if you what said about Mary is pretty intense but nobody seems out of a problem amongst the Christians but for some reason Muslims are hammered because we", "as valid religions today. We believe they were abrogated, that's our truth claim. But the beauty of this religion is you don't have to believe that even in our own tradition we can't force you to believe it. You have your choice and we can live together. Muslims have always had never had a problem with living with other communities", "In fact, John Locke's Treatise on Toleration came directly from studying the Ottoman millet system. Europe learned religious toleration from the Muslims and that's Edward Pocock who was his teacher at Oxford. Edward Pocock had studied Islam for several years in Aleppo and he went back to England. This is 17th century and he brought a library of 400 Arabic manuscripts which is now", "Scripps Library at Oxford. He was the teacher of John Locke. John LocKE wrote the Treatise on Toleration. So Muslims taught the world how to tolerate. I mean, the Romans were reasonably good but you basically had to accept they would allow you to put your gods into their pantheon of gods. You know that was the deal", "So, you know, as long as you... And that's why the Jews were very often persecuted because they separated themselves. So the truth claims of Islam are very clear. There's no ambiguity but Muslims learned a lot from the Jews, learned a lots from the Christians and vice versa so there is no reason why there can't be benefit and respect I mean we have our truth claim", "We can't just reject our religion to suit you. I mean, that's not really fair. But, you know, that that's the reality of it. So, you Know Alhamdulillah there they're you know Yom Kiyamah Allah says we're all going to be told why we were differing what all this meant and It's we just need to wait and be patient These are truth claims I'm very convinced", "in my heart about this truth claim. I believe it, and you know the early Christian, they had very good relations outside of the Byzantines. The Byzantins did not like the Muslims because the Byzanteans were persecuting all of the other sects who they viewed as heretics, the Nestorians, you know there are all these different sects of Christians that were persecuted. When the Muslims came,", "And they let them worship. And that's why that wonderful book was written by the Stanford scholar when Christians first met Muslims shows that they really, they actually shared prayer space because the Muslims needed prayer space. There was a whole iconoclastic movement where the Christians, because of the influence of Islam started destroying all the idols. So none of the churches at that time had idols in them. So the Muslims used to pray in the churches.", "in the churches. It was very interesting, Jews cannot pray in a church. Orthodox Jews cannot play in a masjid. It's very interesting. They don't talk about those things but that's the reality because we're not idolaters whereas in the Jewish tradition Christians are seen as idolaters. Whereas we don't see them as idolators per se because we can marry them you can't marry an idolater and we can eat their food", "but they have a serious misunderstanding. I mean, there are... And I know there's a khilaf about that, but I prefer the opinion that doesn't put them in that camp. In any case. Any other? Ahmed Khan. JazakAllah Khair, Shaykh. What I'm wondering is what is the name of the religion prior to the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ? That they were practicing?", "that they were practicing? Yeah, because the Quran will often refer to Millat Ibrahim, Dinul Qayyim. So what was the name and I've heard some scholars use the terms Islam Aam and Islam Khas. Yeah. I mean there's a lot of debates about these things. The Hanif are the people that had a natural inclination to Tauhid. So the Hunafa were people on the Arabian Peninsula", "Qasib bin Sa'ida, people like that who just knew God was one. They weren't idolaters. They believed in an afterlife. They were what would be called in Judaism Noahides. Like Noahidic people. There were definitely Christians. The Christians of Najran were there. There are monophysites. The Ethiopians were probably you know monophysis so they're the group that's now called", "called, I mean they don't like to be called monophysites so I don't want to insult anybody but the Coptic church you know they have a belief in the divinity of Christ. So I you know Islam Sayyuti says Islam was the religion of the prophets all the prophets are Muslims That's Abraham alayhi salam", "I mean all the prophets were Muslim meaning they were in a state of submission to Allah . Islam as a sociological category like Islam where you check the box what religion do you practice that sociological Category has a distinction whereas You know Aslam tuwajhi lillah You're saying you're in a State of Submission to Allah so then you have", "the Muslim and then you have the Muslim Kamel so the Muslim kamel would be one who and that's why don't say you believe but say you've entered into the faith that's the sociological category that you're in your defined distinct from other people's and in", "But in the way that they were. In submission to Allah. You know, the Christians pray in the Lord's Prayer. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. Thy Will Be Done. In other words I want to be aligned with your will. Which is Islam. In the sense of the muster of Aslama. The Fi'l Like really doing it. As opposed to the sociological category of designating yourself", "as a Muslim distinct from other religions. In that way, we're the only Muslims. Does that make sense? Any of the ladies? A few more, I'm fine, yeah. What time is the prayer here? JazakAllah khairan. I had a question about Waraqa bin Nawfal.", "I was wondering, do we know if he became a Muslim the same way like Abu Bakr and Khadija converted? Because you said he passed away soon after. Yeah, yeah, no, he was Muslim. Okay. He accepted the Prophet's eyes. Okay, thank you. Any other questions? Right there, Fatima too.", "Fathima too. Assalamualaikum. Waalaikumsalam. You mentioned that there were three acts of worship that the Prophet ﷺ engaged in when he retreated to... I only mentioned two? You only mentioned one. Oh, good for you. That's a good catch. So there was the khalwa and then there was tahannuth which we don't really know what he was actually doing. It was probably some form", "we would call meditation or invocation and then the third was nathar ilal baits the prophet said to look at the kaaba is an act of ibadah so he was looking at the house of allah from the cave but good catch yeah", "There's a famous hadith where the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam talked about the three evil murderers. And there are only two mentioned in the hadith. So some say, I mean obviously it was the Rawi that forgot because the Prophet Salallahu Alayhi Wasallama wouldn't forget. Any other?", "Salam alaikum, Sheikh. I just had a quick question. Did the Prophet ﷺ question how Wal-Aqib al-Nafal knew what he knew about the Prophet? Like did he like... Was there ever an instance where he came across the Injil? Like, did he read it? I don't have any indication of that. He knew... There's a very famous Hadith. It's a problematic Hadith but I think", "But I think it's a true hadith, but you know because the end the senates are very strong for it Where the prophet said was asked about the Melala? female to see moon like what are they What are they debating about and the Prophet said? To his Lord and this is a dream so this is this is one of the eight types of revelation where Allah speaks directly to the Prophet in his dream and", "And this happened to Ahmed bin Hanbal. So we know that, that this is Ja'iz. So Allah asked him and the Prophet said, I don't know. And so the Hadith says, and he felt the coolness of it in his breast.", "he said, I knew everything. And in a . I knew what was in the heavens and the earth. And then he said , and he said He said what they were discussing were the things that remove sins of people. And than he said like doing willful acts", "Doing wudhu when it's difficult. And then, Intidhar as-salat. Ba'd al-salah. Like staying in the masjid after the prayer, waiting for the next prayer. That's a kafara from sins. So that hadith indicates that the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam he had knowledge of I mean the Quran is a mukhtasar of all the previous revelations.", "way Jesus, they don't know where Jesus learned the Torah. Because he began to teach in the synagogue and the rabbis were saying, ooh, where'd you learn this from? Because they all have chain that they knew but Isa was taught directly so that's the thing about the prophets, they know things directly, they have direct communication there is no indication and I think the reason that Khadija in her genius,", "she took him to the person that she knew could explain to him what was happening to him. Because he just, all he needed was to be reassured because this was such a traumatic experience. I mean it was Zamiruni, Zamironi you know he was shaking and his heart palpitations and so she knew exactly what to do. That's why it's so amazing what she did. So he but there is no indication", "he would have questioned that. I mean, there were many signs the Irhasat were all there. The Irhasata or the Mu'ajizah before he actually got their direct revelation when he was a Buhaira, the Rahib al-Buhairah, the monk who knew he was prophet also the cloud cover his servant on the way to Syria, he saw the cloudcover. Many examples of that", "examples of that and he began around the age of 38, he started hearing inanimate things. Which is very interesting because you find that in a lot of traditions. You know just the inanimate world opening up. There's a very interesting in Burhan al-Mu'ayyad of Imam al-Rifa'i", "Somebody asked him. You know do inanimate things. Is there any sentience in them? And he said yes. And he didn't believe him. So he said when he put down his cup too hard. He heard the cup go ouch. Which is very interesting because. The prophet treated things very gently. Like he didn' t throw anything. It's very interesting.", "I mean that's a very, a lot of native traditions have that understanding. Allahu'alam, Allah knows best. Right? The Mauritanians they say", "Like, the isbagh al-wudu is from the kafarat. So it's when you, when it's cold and you do wudu, it's a kafara for sins. When you're not feeling well and it's not dangerous to do wудu, because you can do tayammum but you do it nonetheless. And then,", "And then when you're tired, like extremely tired. Those are all. And then in a hurry, like somebody's very quick and you stop and do it because wudu should preferably not be rushed. Some people rush wudus. I always tell people, you know, I didn't learn wudhu. I mean, I learned wuddu when I first became Muslim. In fact, it was one of the very first things I did", "before I even became Muslim, they had me do wudu. Which was very interesting and they did it properly like they had to sit down with a maqaraj you know like a pot to do it because much better done sitting down than standing up. Sunnah is to do sitting down or sitting on a stool but the I didn't really know wudhu until I saw my rabbi do waduh", "Because then I realized wudu is a distinct act of worship. It's not just preparation for the prayer, it's a distinct and very interesting act of ibadah. And that's why the Prophet did wudhu ala wudhuu. He didn't need to do it but he would do wuduh", "but he would do wudu ala wudhu, even when he was in wuduh.", "just bless these people that are really suffering in these different places our brothers and sisters in Gaza Allah give them relief inshallah give them solace in their hearts that Allah would never abandon people that say la ilaha illallah muhammad rasulullah may Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala inshAllah give some aid to the people of Darfur", "and all these different places we know in Yemen, in Kashmir. In Libya there's still many problems. Our Iraqi brothers the Syrian brothers and sisters. The Palestinians in the West Bank may Allah protect them because unfortunately Allah knows you know people that anybody that has any bad intention for", "اللهم اجعل كيدهم في نحورهم اللهم أحفظ البيت المقدس وأهله يا الله سأل أن تحفض بيت المقدسم وتحفذ أهله يارحم الراحمين اللهم إن شاء الله تقبل منا صيامنا وقيامنا", "In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.", "the last 10 days, this will probably be a 29 day because we cited the moon on well, we completed 30 days of Shaban. And Imam Zaywas pointed out to me yesterday that the calculators always end up fasting 30 days and I think somebody should actually study that because you can't see the moon", "moon for the first usually it's going to be 20 or more hours before you see it so one of the signs of the latter days is that Prophet said people will see the new moon, the Hilal and they'll say oh this is two days old because they won't know that you can have a high moon if you didn't see it the first day when it was actually born. So there is what's called a Mufarqa which", "where the sun and the moon actually come together. And then the Mufarqa is when the moon begins to move out of there, and Allah arranged it so that they're perfectly fit with each other. It's one of those coincidences that the moon can eclipse the sun, and the sun can eclipse", "world records are, you know, like 15 hours perfect conditions, perfect eyesight. So it wasn't anywhere near that. It was only six hours old in the Middle East so it could not have been sighted they fasted on Monday and somebody actually sent me a picture of the second day the moon was high from the Middle east and he said alhamdulillah sahas siyamuna You know thank God our fasting was valid", "And to me, the fact that he said that meant it was invalid because he had doubt. He had to wait till the second day and the Prophet named that day Yawm al-Shakq It's a Mawkuf Hadith you know it's on Ammar ibn Yasir related but it has Hukam Al-Rafa' even though the Sahabi did not say I heard from the prophet he said", "You can't say a ma'siya if it wasn't from the Prophet. So, the Sahabi doesn't necessarily have to say that the Prophet said. He can actually say something and if its related to the unseen, if its relate to ghaybiyaat, if it is related to signs of the end of time, if It's related to hukum shar'i then it has to be marfu'a in other words he's saying it in his own words but he heard the meaning", "the meaning from the Prophet, so that's called . And there's quite a few. Ammar Ibn Yasir actually has more than one, so I think he might have been afraid to attribute because Sahaba they had such fear. Abu Bakr , who was the closest of all the Muslims outside obviously his immediate family Khadija", "Khadija and, but he burned his hadees. So we have very few hadees from Abu Bakr even though nobody probably heard more from the Prophet than Abu Bakar because he had not only the public events but he had the private conversations. He was his companion. He's the second of the two when they're in the cave. But he did not want the responsibility", "the responsibility. He knew that all the hadiths were out there, that we're needed and he did not want the responsibilities so it's a weighty thing to transmit hadith even in this way just because we believe this is actually revelation. The Prophet said . This is not words from human appetite or desire or whim these are", "from the Prophet, sallallaahu alaihi wa sallam. So in any case, the calculation is an opinion. I think it's extremely weak opinion. And I wrote a cesarean moon verse. I thought a very convincing, compelling argument for why we shouldn't follow calculations. And one of the reasons is that you're going to be fasting 30 days every time because you're gonna be too early generally", "generally so a lot of the Sunna is to see the moon one of the secrets of the proselytes him as he never went outside moon sighting and we know that he had this the vision of whoof he had like you know people see with telescopes the Prophets I don't know what the exact power was of magnification but the Prophet saw 12 stars in Pleiades", "And that's in Qad Ayyad Shifa. You can only see seven, it's called the Seven Sisters. People with extremely good eyesight can see eight but to see 12 and if you Google you can actually see a picture of Pleiades blown up with a telescope there are 12 major stars in it. You could count them so the Prophet would have seen the new moon before anybody else he would have", "before anybody else. So the Sahaba went out to sight the moon and Shaykh Abdullah told me that he was in, I won't say which country, a veil of Sitar is part of our team but one of the Arabian countries, he was there and they went out site the moon, they asked him to come with them so he went out. They were all looking to the east to see the new moon", "No, no. It's in the West. MashaAllah it's in west. They didn't even know. So this is what happened. This is how divorced people are from natural phenomena. Whereas if you grow up like in southern Morocco, if you grew up in Mauritania they see the new moon every month and it's an event. And Istahlal which is the birthing of a new moon. Istahla means to shout for joy because when you see the New Moon", "have this experience of going out to sight the new moon, everybody gets joyous when they first see it. And they usually shout. So it's just a human experience that we've maintained in our religion which is quite amazing to connect us to these natural phenomenon which people are increasingly divorced from and as they increasingly become addicted to these machines", "All of the glorious wonders. I was just reading an article about how they were teaching people to walk with awe, in other words, to notice small things and to notice. It's in a book called Distracted, and it's a very interesting read, but they actually did two groups. One, they just told them to take a walk, and the other group, they told them", "notice things, like notice flowers, notice trees, notice the way the wind moves the branches of the trees when it's rustling and listen to the rustling. And people that did that began to... It actually increased their mental health. They started feeling more joyous, they start feeling healthier", "one of the things about the Prophet , there's a, one of my favorite hadiths is Mughid and Barira which is in the Sahih. Mughi was a slave and Barirah was this woman who he was married to but she wanted a divorce because he was a slaving and she was free. I don't like that term slave but in any case, he was bonded you know? Because in Islam, the Prophet said,", "slave, my slave. All of you are slaves of God. So we don't really believe in this idea of slavery but there is a bonded servitude that by Sharia you can get out of like so it's more like indentured servitude because you can pay you can actually get money from Zakat you know if so in any case she did not want to marry him because she was a free woman and he", "Don't be surprised by Mughith's love for Barira", "like the prophet, he must have looked at everything with just this marveling at Allah's creation and all the different personalities and all different types of people because he was so intensely aware of everything and alive. So then Mughid asked the Prophet to intercede for her. He went to Barira and he said,", "And she said, you know, won't you reconsider? And she says, are you commanding or are you interceding? And he said I'm only interceded. And she say I have no need for him. So when Mughith heard that his heart switched and all the love went out of her because this was the human being that Allah accepts the intercession of", "So how could this woman not accept the intercession of the Messenger of Allah? So suddenly he switched, his heart switched and her heart switched. So then she wanted him to marry her. She wanted to stay with him. He didn't want to have anything to do with her. It was an amazing story. Alhamdulillah. So bismillah, this hadith is on Anas radiallahu anhu", "And Anas was really brought to the Prophet, very young. He's probably about seven by his mother and this is really the greatest home school in human history. So she's bringing him to both serve the prophet but to learn from the prophet and he becomes one of the great transmitters of hadith. So Anas ibn Malik , and his brother Umair also there's a wonderful hadith where Anas", "Anas was sad and the Prophet asked what happened. And he said his brother's pet died, the bird. He had a pet, Nughair, it was a little bird. So the Prophet went to visit him with Anas. And when he saw him, he was all depressed. And the Prophet said, What did the little bird do?", "him about death. That hadith has tens of ahkam in it that one of the great Moroccan ulama wrote a book just on the ahkam that we benefited from that hadith and one of them was the permissibility or rather the nadab of doing ta'ziyah when somebody's pet dies, like actually going to them and telling them you know I'm so sorry", "For people that have pets, pets are very often they become part of the family. Their people are very connected to their pets. They get depressed when their pets die. So Anas is amazing and one of my favorite hadiths of Anas Is the Prophet came in the room And told him to go do something and Anas said laa. So this is a young he's probably seven eight years old This is something seven and eight year olds do To adult authority It's called testing limits And so he said la", "he said, let. So the Prophet, peace be upon him, smiled and he left the room which is an amazing event because the thing that children do is they're testing. They want to see what kind of reaction they get. So The Prophet just smiled and left the And a little while later he came back and he said oh haven't you gone to do that thing? He said I'm leaving right now. So this is real Tarbiyah and this is why Imam al-Bannani one", "one of the great Moroccan ulama from Fes, he said in the hadith where Anas radiallahu anhu said, the Prophet never said if he did a thing why did you do a thing and if he didn't do a think why didn't you do it? The Prophet never faulted him like that. And Imam al-Bannani says", "He was raising the children with an inner tarbiyah. Not outer commands and injunctions, but inner... Because if you love somebody, you want to do things for them. So if the child has love for the parent, they want to have fear for the parents is a different thing. But if they have love for their parent then they want", "a very important figure. So, radiallahu anhu. There's three things in other words. Whoever finds them in him will find the sweetness of Iman. Halawatul Iman You know so these three", "If they are in that person, wajada halawat al-iman. They experience because wajda, wujdan is also experience so it's finding but wajadah has to do with a discovery you know if they discover these things within themselves and that's why Allah the attribute of what they call sifat dati or nafsiyya is wujud", "Because and really you could almost translate it as God has findability In other words, God can be discovered That we can know Allah this is one of the great gifts of our Creator to the human being that Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala can actually be known by Allah's creation. And so so and wajda means to be ecstatic So it had it has the idea of", "of the joy of discovery. Like people get very, so I was looking at this masala and I couldn't penetrate the, it was, and I was having a really difficult time so I called one of my teachers he couldn't get it either and then there was one word that I looked up and I said oh, this means because we thought it meant something else", "than I am but we both got it immediately and then we were like really got excited and see where those talking about what a blessing it is to because he said so often you'll be alone reading and you can't penetrate something and then you discuss it with somebody else and then the meaning becomes clear to you. And so there's that joy of discovering", "that a child will never discover anything except it will come and want to share it with somebody. And he said, That's a proof that the fitrah is to want to show you and to share discoveries. The joy of discovering something, you want to sharing that joy with other people. So finding the halawa. So what is halawa? And then Ibn Abi Jamal says,", "And he says because the The which is Iman, which is So whoever has It's because they have realized So Allah says about that that it's a tree", "That its fruit is like the fruit is constant. So he's saying that this is a real of the fruit of Iman, that you are tasting the fruit Of Iman that it's a . So has and it's A sweet taste. It's the sweet means path to water And that water is", "It's not a bitter water. Because Allah made two types of water, bitter water and sweet water. So the Sharia takes you to sweet water, Kufr takes you too bitter water And Isa in our tradition said that those who love dunya are like somebody who drinks salt water it just makes them more thirsty until they die.", "What are these three things? That Allah and His Messenger are more beloved to you than your own soul. They're more beloved for you than anything other than Allah, anything other that Allah, Allah and his messenger. And the famous moment for Sayyidina Omar", "is he told the Prophet ﷺ, I love you more than everything except myself. And the Prophet said, Until I'm more beloved than the soul between the two. And he said, I Love You More Than Myself. And The Prophet Said, Your Iman Is Complete.", "And that wasn't a, like a phone hashah. Omar is al-adl. He can only speak the truth. That was his, you know some of them It's where the prophet becomes everything to you. I was with somebody who was a new convert. Like his name Mahmoud. He's a new convere we were in a car and", "And somebody offered him a date and he said, I hate dates. So we told the Prophet sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam, love dates. He said, i love dates! Then he took one. You know so that's a real thing because you know you love what the beloved loves. That's human nature. You love what your beloved loves", "that you love a person and you only love them for the sake of Allah because every other love whoever loves you for a thing will no longer love you when that thing is gone this is why there's marriages that end in divorce as one of the spouses gets older and loses their beauty because the person married them it's very common", "You'll see, especially unfortunately amongst men They'll marry and then the wife they hit 40, 45 And suddenly oh they want a younger wife And that's because they didn't marry them for the right reasons And that is why the Prophet said A woman is married for four reasons", "ويقول النبي صلى الله عليه وسلم لأمان من أجل الأنباء ولكنه دائما مفهوم المخالفة يمكنك فهمه بسرعة تقريبا والتعامل معه هو الحقيقة الآخر هناك أشخاص يزوجون الأمان لأجل حصولهم على الأموات ومن أجله لأدوارهم", "the Christians married for love, the Jahili Arabs married for nesab, for lineage and then the Judaists married to maintain wealth in the family. And he said but the Muslims marry for love. For deen. That's the difference. So you should love a person for the sake of Allah . The Prophet told us that people will come on the day", "judgment. There's no nasib amongst them and they're in the shade of Allah, what's their quality? They loved one another for the sake of Allah that's why mahabba is a high Maqam somebody said to Abu Huraira he then he and Abu Hurayra said then your pocket's my pocket in other words", "He said, I can't. That's a little too much love. Abu Huraira said, go love somebody else because that's real love. He was trying to point out to the man. I mean, Abu Hurayra could care less. He wasn't that good but he was showing him something about you can say that glibly. You know, you could say that very lightly. Oh, I love you people say that all the time", "but do you really love them for the sake of Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala? In the Duties of Brotherhood, Abu Hamad al-Ghazali has a man who comes into a house. He asked if the owner was there and he said no. And he said where does he keep his money? He said there. And so he took some money when he came back", "oh so and so came and he said alhamdulillah, he knows that I'm his brother. You know that he would feel that comfortable to do that. And that's not something you should do with everybody but there are people you can do that with. Pray dun. Allah.", "to return to disbelief or also ingratitude as he would detest to be thrown into the fire. So two of these things are about love and one of them is about hate because that's the world, hubb and bulldh. It's you know everything's created in pairs so hubb, the pair of hubb is bulld", "why you can't love something without detesting something else. If you love truth, you will detest falsehood. If your love beauty, you'll detest ugliness. You can't have something without having a corresponding . And so the Prophet is telling us that love has a counter side which is Karahiya. So what do", "you hate? You hate what Allah hates. You hate injustice, you hate lying, you have theft, you had adultery, you've had fornication, you hated backbiting, you'd hate the things Allah said. Allah hates gossip so you should hate that because if you truly love Allah you're going to hate what", "really, really foundational hadith. And there's many, I mean, there's a lot you could go into this but I'll leave it at that so we can get more of these hadiths that are so amazing. The next hadith is and this is one of the great... I mean all the Sahaba have their greatness but there are some obviously that have higher maqams than others", "others because of the closeness, the sohbah. Ubadah ibn al-Samit is one of the twelve nuqabah and he mentions that, radhi Allah anhu, So on the aqaba al-thaniya when the Prophet ﷺ took 12 nuqaba and nine were from the khazraj there were more khazaraj there and three were from", "Areeb is like Arif. You know, if you go to the Alhambra Palace there's a section called Jannatul Arif so that Arif is like the overseer it's somebody who's the kafil, the dhaman, ameen, you know, somebody who was put as a trustee over something. So these are the Nuqabah. He was", "One of the most learned of the Sahaba, he was Omar made him a Qadi. He went to Homs initially in Syria. He was a qadi and then he became the first qadi in Palestine. And he was in Ramallah. He actually died there but he was moved to Al-Quds. He's buried in Al-Quds. There is a maqam for him there. He lived to be quite in his 70s", "He fought in Egypt with Amr ibn al-As. So he was a mujahid as well as being a scholar. He also, he had a conflict with Muawiyah because Muawiya didn't like some of his judgments and he actually tried to remove him. And Abu Ubaidah went told Omar this and Omar who is the caliph said no.", "proof that the judiciary is separate from the legislative or the executive. So, the judiciary has an autonomy from you know, the ruler can't just remove a qadi on a whim. So that's very important because that's something Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws he's the first one that kind of introduces", "And America obviously took that from that philosophy of having this legislative, executive and then judicial branch. So we understand that also that the judiciary has to be because they have to judge against the ruler.", "with a Jewish man and Shurih al-Qadi qada lil Yehudi. And Ali was the Caliph so Shurah was his Qadi. There's a famous crescent story about Shurayk al-qadhi he went out to sight the moon you know, and one of the people with the moon sighting him he said I see it I see where? He said there there you can see it as a Crescent. He looked he couldn't see it they look at men he noticed he had a hair from", "from his eyebrow that had curled around over his eye. So he wiped it away and he said, can you still see it? He said, subhanAllah, it's gone. So this is a very important hadith again. So there was a group around him in one recension of al-Bukhari", "and another this. So there's a group around him, Isaba, min al-sahabihi. Bay'uni. So bay'uni, he didn't say, which is very interesting, he did not say ahiduni. He could have said ahidoonei but he said bay'unni. So the mubaya'a is a pledge. But it's related to, it's a transactional event so in a mubayaa there's transaction taking place. There's the mubaia", "the and then there's the one . So, the one making the pledge is the one being pledged to. But it has a reciprocal reality so the one you're pledging to he also has responsibilities. So, The Prophet said that you don't associate anything with Allah", "So this is almost identical to what's called", "So take bay'ah with them, ask forgiveness for them.", "a bay'ah khasa bin nisa and in that bay'a he did with the men, he actually did musafiha. With the women there's different khilaf about it some say he had a cloth between him others actually there's a riwayat that Omar did the bay'aa with them because the Prophet said ma safiha imraatan qat illa mahram unless she was a mahrum although all the women were", "So these points are very important. First of all, they're all Nahi It's very interesting", "They're not like, they are all Nahi. So it's very interesting that the Bay'ah is for the Nahi so in the Hadith which is one of the foundational hadiths of the Prophet he said", "So what I have prohibited you, fashtenibu, avoid it. It's a complete nahi. Whereas with the awamir, it's what you're able to do. And that relates to This nobody will take on this religion except", "that will overwhelm them because the Prophet you cannot do what he did first of all his Hajj, he made all three Hajj. He made Qiraan right? He made Ifrad and he made Tamattu on the same Hajj everybody saw him doing three different types of Hajj and that's Warad so the Prophet these are Mu'ajizat the Prophet could not I mean he", "the amount of ibadah he did. I mean, I saw it to be honest with you and I've seen it with the marabitun and I know Sheikh Muhammad Abu Faris has had this experience as well. And anybody who spent time with real shiukh these rare individuals that are there may Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala at least give us their company if we're not from them. May Allah make us from them but at least", "what he did on a daily basis, I don't know how he did it. Just from ibadah. Not to mention working and teaching all the things that he did but it was amazing just to see how much he could do and how did Fakhreddin al-Razi do what he", "man could not learn what I learned in my lifetime. Like he knew that there was something supernatural about his, these are karamat. How could Imam Noah do what he did? He was a teacher, he was a mufti, he doing all these things. How can he produce what he does? Just look at the writing they produced. How", "And these men were men of the world as well. They were not just in their, you know, inziwa. They weren't just people in isolation. They Were people engaged with the world. It's amazing. Nasir al-Din Al-Tusi Amazing! I mean he was noted for mathematics in the West so he is a polymath in mathematics. His books on Ilm al-Hay'ah are famous books", "or famous books in the Muslim world. But then he has all of these other areas. How did he do what he did? I mean, these are just amazing things. So this, the Prophet ﷺ is letting us know that the nawahi are da'ima. They're always there. Theyre always to be avoided. Whereas the awamir", "Allah will not forgive, does not forgive that he is associated with. And it's very important that that's put in Madni Lil Majhool and there's a secret in that but Allah will no forgive the act of associating with him but He will forgive less than that. And that's obviously with knowledge you know", "Don't set up idols with God knowingly. That's called . So it's very important that somebody who is in ignorance, you know, we don't punish people until they know what they're doing is wrong. So it' s very important to note there. Do not steal and is one of the ways", "It's one of the worst things and it's in our culture. It's really breaking down like when I was younger theft was very unusual now, it's just people don't seem to have any problem stealing and part of that is because The Marxists had have such an influence on people In this idea that all property is theft that corporations You know steal from us so we can steal from them That I mean it's this is this is a but", "This is a, but theft is one of the worst things. It's one of those worst thing and that's why , the protection of property is one five universals in our religion and it's foundation . If you die defending your property, you die a martyr because property is very important and I was on this commission where, you know, I was talking about", "And this is why Richard Weaver says, if you lose the property as a foundational principle in a society, he said there's no hope for rebuilding the society once that's lost. And he said you could actually rebuild a society as long as people recognize that. And proprium, like you learn this in logic, right? The property,", "The property of something. Yourself is a property. That's why we have. You know, we have proxemics is this whole science of studying. You don't like you to get too close to them in Arab culture. And that was for me when I lived in their world.", "in the Arab world is something I initially, I wasn't accustomed to it but I got used to it because Arabs will speak closer to you than they will in the West. If you notice when you get on a elevator people are very stressed out on elevators. They don't talk because they're all too close. You've entered into that", "property, that space around you is there's a sanctity to that space. And that's why hitting is a violation like tort law. You know this idea of like because you can really reduce things to basically... Law can be reduced to two fundamental principles do what you promise to do and don't harm. So property is very important. That's why it's emphasized", "This is a strong injunction. Obviously, it's very difficult to get your hand cut off in Sharia. In the Brunei law they have 16 conditions before you can fulfill that and one of the British lawyers that actually worked on that said whoever fulfills all these deserves to get his hand cut", "hands off. You know, it's very difficult. First of all, if somebody steals from your store, you don't have to take it to the government. You can just let that person... There's an amazing, I think he was Bengali or Pakistani. People might've seen this about the man who tried to rob him and then he actually flipped it on him. But then he said, why are you doing this? He said, I'm hungry. And he said", "end up saying Shahada with him. He says, I want to be like you. You know, so that's, you know, there's a reality to that also, that there are desperate people. And in fact, even in Christianity, St. Thomas Aquinas talks about that, the permissibility. If nobody is feeding you and you're starving to death, you can actually break into a bakery and take bread, right? So this is", "understanding that because there's a right of people like it's a to save a life. Like if you see a drowning person, you can't ignore that. If you can swim and you can save that life, you have a moral responsibility to save that person. It's a so, so that's very important. What next lineage? So property family. See these are the universals in this Bay.", "you will see the Kulliyat al-Khams in this Bay'ah. These are, when you learn, you know, in Usul fiqh, you learn these Kulliyaat. They're all in this bay'ah, they're all there. So this is to protect family and lineage. Don't go near Zina because it's a foul thing and it leads down a foul road", "It's a terrible path. It breaks the society down. There's a book on sex and culture that was written in the 1930s, 1934, Unwin. And in this book he studied over 80 cultures and he found whenever they released prenuptial sex, sex before marriage, it destroyed the culture within three generations, a generation being 33 years according to him. And he said he found no exception", "found no exception. And he wasn't a Christian, he was actually an atheist anthropologist but he said maybe religion has some wisdom in worrying about these things. I mean I got an email from somebody the other day from a Muslim country and he was in an illicit relation and he saying that he was having all this guilt and asking me what to do but he", "And this was a Muslim country. So young people now, these are breaking down. These are very bad signs for our culture. They're very bad sign and that's why we guard against these things to protect first and foremost ourselves. Right? Save yourselves. You know when on the airplane they say first put the mask on your own face before even your child.", "and if you're, don't destroy yourselves. So that's really important. And zina in Arabic means both fornication and adultery. In English we distinguish between the two. This every pagan culture has child sacrifice.", "South America, they found a huge grave recently in I think Peru of child sacrifice. This was done all over the world. This is Iblis. Ibliss. Killing children. The most innocent.", "Isbahani says, the janin, the fetus is a child. Al-janin waladun ma dama fi batni ummihi In other words you call a walad, a janin in the batan of the um but it's still a walid. It just has the name janin because it's hidden from you. So once it takes human form it's a human being and that happens very quickly in the womb.", "So, so... You know, out of fear of poverty. Which is one of the main reasons. There's two dominant reasons. The incest, rape, all these things like less than 1% of abortions. The real reason for abortion, two fundamental reasons. Fear of poverty and interference with my career. Those are two reasons.", "American entertainer who was being interviewed and somebody said to him, you know, oh do you... So what do you think about abortion? He said I'm against abortion. And the person was surprised because they thought he would not be against it. Well he said I am against abortion, he said you don't think a woman has a right to determine what happens in her own body? He says well I suppose everybody has a rights to be selfish. This is a great answer", "It's a great answer, because that's what it is. You're saying... And that's why as our culture becomes more and more narcissistic, a lot of people don't want to have children anymore, because they are a hassle. There is an element to children that is a hassle, every parent knows that. But they're a great blessing, one of the greatest blessings in life. So that's really important.", "And Qadi Abu Bakr in Ahkam Al-Quran, he says about this. He says it was infanticide and he said and also concealing a pregnancy because there were women who could conceal it and obviously when you have the type clothes that Muslim woman wore in traditional societies, you can hide", "societies, women were you know they carried weight. Most traditional cultures even in this culture not that long ago it was preferred to be hefty than it was to be skinny so he says min ghayri rishta and so rishta is waradu rishta", "in Zawaj Shar'i. So Ghayru Rishta or Rashta, they're both correct is an illegitimate child and he says Warramyuhu Kaqatlihi Ramyu you know so what they would do and this is very common in Greek culture and Roman culture when the child was born if it had defects they didn't want to just kill it because you know it's not easy", "the forest or something. I mean, this is a famous shepherd who left Odysseus, right? Sorry, Oedipus in the famous Sophocles trilogy. He couldn't kill him. He was told to go out and kill him, but he doesn't. He just leaves him, and somebody finds him. You find this motif in many, many stories. So this is—and unfortunately,", "find a live baby in a garbage can. This is America, you see this? This happens in Muslim countries I guarantee you and it's usually from illegitimacy and that's why la taqarabu zina don't go near zina right? wa la ta'kturu anfusikum it's related you know it's relative wa la taktu awladakum right? It's related. Zina and killing is related. And then wa la tatoo bi buhtan", "is the worst. It's to tell a lie about somebody that's so heinous and that's why it says, you know, You make this up. Iftira is to make something up", "Buhitan comes from buhita, you know the mabhu to somebody who's shocked. They're in a state of perplexion. They are just shocked. What? They said that? That I did that? What? And so it is a horrific thing to do and it has a terrible end for people that do that.", "according to some, there are many interpretations about what these words mean. is to claim that they had adultery or fornication or something. Rape, to accuse somebody of rape. These are very heinous things and if they're false allegations you are in big trouble with Allah . So this happened to Mary. This is in the Talmud. The Jews accused", "accused Mary of having illicit relations with a Roman centurion named Panthera. Dr. Ali, if he was here, he would confirm. Oh, you are here? Yeah, right. It's Panthera, right? So Talmud, if you read that book Jesus and the Talmud by Schaeffer. He is a very solid scholar of the Talmud. You know, it's pretty horrible what was said about Jesus' mother. That's Bohdan.", "because she was innocent. Aisha was accused, innocent. There's a famous story of Imam al-Baqalani the great Maliki Qadi and Mutakallam who was sent by the Caliph to the Byzantines as an ambassador. And the Byzantine ruler you had to bow before him so", "So they told him, if he comes, he's not going to bow. So he had them build a doorway really low so you have to bow just to come into the doorway. So when Qadhi Abu Bakr got there, he looked and he realized what...so he came in backward. And then when he saw the asaqifa , these bishops,", "and how are your wives and your children? And they looked at, he said you're a scholar. Like we were above having families. We're too holy for that. And he said . You say God has family and children but you yourself.", "And then the last one, they said tell us about the hadith of ifk. You know because they study Islam and he said Two great women were accused of of adultery or fornication adultery and he", "didn't get pregnant and Allah said she was innocent. So those are the kind of ulama we had, yeah. Allahu Akbar. So is a very evil thing, yeah it's horrible. And then don't disobey in any . So if you look at these this is really about", "Authority. And you're basically. You're entering into a covenant with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and his messenger that you're not going to do any of these things. And this is essentially, you know, the things that most destroy. If you look at this, these are the things", "illicit sex, murder. This is mafhum, right? It's like, don't say to your parents, so if you can't kill children, that's the least of you, then it goes up. So it goes", "gossip, lies all these things that break down society and then do good things do virtuous things so the imam is very important and the bay'ah traditionally there's only a few countries that have this now Malaysia still has it because they have the sultans the gulf states still have this idea of bay'a Morocco still has the bay'd in fact Jews from diaspora come to Morocco when there's a new king", "a new king and the Jewish leadership comes and gives bay'ah. So it's very important, Imam Laqani in his Juharat al-Tawheed That is an obligation to have", "You have to have an Imam. In other words, you have to political leadership. This is also one of the seven Noahidek, right? You have courts, you establish justice so there has to be some type of government to redress wrongs and the Sultan is very important. One of things I mean we don't support tyranny. Nobody, anybody that would even suggest that", "don't support anarchy and so sometimes government that's bad is better than no government at all. And that's why the traditional ulama were against khuruj al-hakim because they saw that it led to worse tribulations, the breakdown of a society.", "that want to bring down all the governments and create all this human suffering for some greater good that's going to come. The communists did this, you know they killed millions tens of millions of people to bring about this quote-unquote equal society but these are lies. The dunya is what the dunya", "leadership. And this is why one of the most important books to read in this area is Siraj al-Muluk by Abu Bakr al-Tartushi. Anybody that reads that book will change their view and this is one of great scholars who had nothing to do with governments. He was an extremely warat person but this idea that you just abandon governments and have nothing to", "There's people that can do that. But if everybody does that, then who's in the government? Even Firaun had a believer in the inner circle. Firaan. قَالَ مُؤْمِنٌ مِّنْ آلِ فَرَعَوْنِ يَكْتُمُ إِيمَانَهُ And he told Firaon, you know, are you going to kill a man because he says his Lord is Allah? So even in the Inner Sanctum of Pharaoh there was a believer. So this idea somehow that no we have nothing to do.", "If we abandon political process, then the only alternative is power struggles where people just kill each other. And these are issues recognizably and it's definitely safer to stay out of this situation. Many of the did not have anything to do but many of them did. Muhammad Al-Shaybani and Abu Yusuf disagreed on that. Abu Yusef became a qadi", "Muhammad Shaybani did not and he thought he shouldn't be involved with them. Abu Hanifa wouldn't take the qada but to say that Abu Yusuf is not a rightly guided person, and the same is true for many of the great Qad Ayyad was a qadi Many of our greatest ulama were they were jurists some of them were ministers And every government is going to have problems so the bay'ah is very important", "And this is also in the three vows, right? The Jews and diaspora. They have to take these traditionally, the Tidlbaum group, right. So these are the ones that support the Palestinians, the Rabbi Tidbom's people. You see these guys at demonstrations with Palestinian flags and they really bother the Zionists.", "But they follow this rabbi who affirmed a traditional Jewish position in Orthodox Judaism, which was that they could not go back to Palestine on mass until... So in other words, Aliyah, what they call Aliyyah. They could not do that until the Messiah comes. That was the traditional position. But one of the three vows was that you do not go against your government. And this was the", "This was the traditional Muslim position. And this is why even living in two days before 9-11, I actually gave a talk in Philadelphia on the prohibition of breaking the law in a non-Muslim land. Two days before. And I think it's really important for Muslims who are in the United States we don't break the law. It's haram to break the", "And if you can't live by the laws, you make hijrah. But you don't break the laws of the land you live in. And there's ulama that say insurance is haram. But in this state, if you're going to drive a car, you have to have liability insurance. You can't break that law. So it's very important for Muslims to know this hadith is extremely important.", "And includes living if you're in a non-Muslim land, the people in power over you. We don't disobey the law. You have to make hijrah and there's places you can go to. There are difficult places to live but you can do it. You don't have to live here. So if you hear though, you have to obey the law", "And then he said, Oh and then you know Laqani says about that. This is not a rukun in the religion In other words if somebody doesn't believe in the political aspect of Islam it doesn't take them out of Islam like if they say I don't believe", "they say I don't believe in like Khilafah or any of these things. It doesn't take them out of Islam because the Mu'tazirite said it was a hukum aqli, it wasn't shar'i. In other words, it was rational thing that it's wise to have governments and things like that but it's not maaloum min ad-deen bad darura. It is from the deen to have a governor, a ruler", "بِذَنَّ عَهْدًا فَاللَّهُ يَكْفِينَ أَذَاهُ وَحْدَهُ Unless you see kufr buwaah. لَكَ عَنْدُ اللَّهِ سُلْطَانٌ بُرْهَانٍ So, so you cannot disobey a ruler or go out of the unless if you're in a Muslim land and the ruler declares his kufar at that point the ahad is broken but if you come into a land or are born into a", "where they're non-Muslims, you have a... What's the term that Voltaire used? He's eluding me by fasting. The brain doesn't work as well. You know your civil contract. There's a civil contract that you've born into.", "The social contract. So we're born into that and so, that's rallying. So, we have to obey that and then he says unless it's Kufr Buah and the Prophet said they asked him if they see something wrong. He said As long as they pray.", "you know, if you hold to the prayer. You can't go against them and that's why the revolutions they bring a lot of I mean if you look at all these countries where these things have happened people are still suffering greatly. They're really suffering. And it was bad before. It's not to deny that and they were oppressive but nilam is better than falda and that' s why Maddox said 60 years under an adhalim is better then a day of anarchy", "Because it just destroys everything. Anyway, that's the traditional view. It's not my view. Trust me. I mean there's people think I'm just... This is what's in... What's that? This is all the ulama said. And now because Marxism came in and these revolutionary ideas came into Islam if you look at the Muslims like", "the ulama in Morocco, when they lost to the French, they fought. And they fought hard. The Indians fought. You know, Muslims really fought the colonialists. They didn't just surrender those lands. But once they were conquered and saw that there's now it's nihilistic. It's just bloodshed for no purpose. At that point, they stopped. And that's why if you read, there's a book called Oppressed in the Land. It was really worth reading.", "And they all said, as long as they're not stopping you from practicing your religion, don't oppose them. Because it'll bring more harm on the community than benefit if you can't defeat them. And that's why the Begum of Bhopal, you know, they have these women, the seven Begums. I think there's seven. The Begams of Bpopal. Do you know about them? Any other ladies? Never heard of the Begs of Bopal. It's like one of the Mafkhara of India. These are women", "the province of Bhopal. There's an amazing picture of one of the begums meeting the Viceroy of England, and she's in a complete purdah. And he's like towering over her. But she ruled the country. Bhopol was the only place during the Muslim rebellion nobody was killed because the begum prohibited the ulama from riling the masses up. It's the only", "justice. I mean, I prefer more Rahmah in the world but justice for a ruler you want to see a just ruler? You want to rahmah amongst the people but you definitely want to be the government being just with the people so nobody supports tyranny. Nobody supports evil. Anybody that could support what's happening right now in Gaza and it's unbelievable and I'm shocked at the...you know not all of them there are many Jewish", "this because they see it for what it is. But unfortunately, a lot of these rabbis, it's just been shocking that they haven't come out against this. I mean, it s more the secular Jews that can see it from what it really is. So there's a religious element here and this is one of things Voltaire in many ways rightly said, you know, for good men to do evil, it takes religion", "misunderstood religion. Religion can be very, very distorting when you think God's on your side. We don't believe that. We hope God's not always on our side but God is not always in our side. If we're not on the side of truth and righteousness and justice, God's", "So other than kufr, you cannot remove the ruler. This is aqeedah that was taught in Azhar for 400 years. That was the aqeedah of the Muslims but it goes back to these things", "the person in charge has obeyed me and whoever disobeys him has disobeyed me. So he says, even if they go from being a just ruler to an unjust ruler you still don't remove them. Even Sheikh Abdullah when they had the ruler, the woman was elected prime minister, he said that you had to do that because to go against it would be greater harm", "be greater harm. You know, and this is something the modern Muslims just I don't know. There's enough historical evidence to see. But we pray for justice and we pray just rulers in government. We don't pray for...I don't want justice for myself. None of us do. Do you really want God to be just with you? I don' think so. Yeah, I want mercy. The Prophet said subhanAllah", "when he would say to the women, when he took bay'ah, he said, do what you're able to do. And the women would say Allah and his messenger are more merciful to us than we are to our own selves. SubhanAllah. This religion is about rahmah. We need more rahmAH", "And sins bring on. You know, be forewarned that if you go against the Prophet's his amr then you're going to have calamities and painful chastisement. Muslims we're not immune to we're", "when they said, you know, we're the children of God and the beloved of God. Allah said, no, you're bashar. You're just human beings. Like if that's true, why does he punish you? So the Muslims, we have to ask ourselves the same question because chosen people syndrome is a dangerous syndrome. Just to think that you have some special ontological status just because you say something in the battle of Yamama.", "The battle of Yamama, Abad ibn Bishr, he's the famous one who got shot and didn't feel it. He kept praying, got shot with an arrow. He was with Ammar ibn Yasir. But he said, because they were being routed. Khalid ibn Walid was ahead and Musaylim al-Khathab, he had thousands. I mean, I think like over 10,000 died. It was a horrific battles but they were losing.", "losing the Muslims were losing and Khalid was very concerned.", "So then, whoever fulfills it his reward is with God. So there's the reciprocation you see? The mubaya'ah. So this is the transaction. Allah bought our souls, our lives and our wealth and against it is paradise.", "فَمَّنْ أَصَابَ مِن ذَٰرِكَ شَيْئًا", "If you're punished in the jinnah, they say some say sharta tawbah and others saying even you don't have sharta tobah. Just the fact that you got the had it finishes it. But sharta Tawbah makes more sense to me. So fahuwa kafaratun lahu It removes his sin so if you know if your punished in this way and that's why sahaba the only zhild that occurred", "Confessions people went and confessed to the prophet salallahu alayhi wa sallam because they wanted to be purified in the dunya They didn't want to take their chances in the akhirah. That's how strong their iman was and so So if you do one of these kabair, I mean the saghair are lamam You know, they're removed by wudhu", "by the Prophet said, if you saw The Prophet said that if one of you had a river that he went out and bathed in it five times a day would he have any soil on him? Would you see any filth on him. They said no you wouldn't see any filter. He said that's the five prayers", "prayers. But that's Saghair, you know? And so this is about Kabair like if any of these because these are all related to kabair the these things in the Bay'ah These are all Related to kabir So if you do any of them and you're not punished in this world Allah veils you Fahuwa illaAllah insha'afa and that's why tonight I wanted to get to the hadith about Laylatul Qadr because it's here", "Allah. So that's why tonight begins the last ten nights and what is the dua? You are the forgiver, the partner of sins you love to pardon so pardon us. So, so that's really important because whatever sins you've done you're in the mashi'ah of Allah", "about it until right before death. In the last phase of your life, inshallah may all of you reach a ripe old age after lots of ibadah and good deeds and ma'ruf but when you reach the end of your live, you have to remove all fear. It's khawfa an raja la budda min alayhi khawfin ma'ar raja Right? Have the two sandals of fear and hope", "But right before you die, you give up fear and just trust that Allah, have a good opinion of your Lord. Like the man who he burnt himself, in his will he told his sons to burn him and then to take his ashes and just throw them to the wind. So Allah reassembled him and asked him why he did it. And he said out of fear of punishment, in the hadith Allah forgave him. That act was an act of kufr.", "Because astajj is Allah. He didn't think Allah could bring him back together. So the actual act was an act of kufr, but the fear saved him. The fear of Allah. So just to finish this on the", "on the, Allahumma salli ala Sayyidina Muhammad. The Prophet said, the hadith, man qama laylatul Qadr imanan wahtisaban ghafara Allahu lahuma taqadman min dhanbihi It's here somewhere. So there is a different view on this", "of his sins will be forgiven. So this, you know there's a big khilaf about when Laylatul Qadr is. There is a hadith to seek it out on the last 10 nights. Hadiths seek it our on odd nights. There's indications that it's on the 27th night which is traditionally where a lot of Muslims fast. The word hiya in Anzalnahu Fi Laylatu Al-Qadri", "it's the 27th word in that surah. Ibn Abbas pointed that out as a kind of ishara but the monarchy position, Ibn Abi Jamrah holds that it's any time during the year and that's why in the monachy madhab it's actually encouraged to do tahajjud throughout the year. And on the first day of the year because monachies you only have to do the niyah one time like in Ramadan we do it the first", "We make the niyah for the whole month and that suffices unless you like get sick and stop fasting or you go on a journey and break your fast. Then you have to renew it but just that first niyah is good for the full month although khuruj an alkhilaf mustahab, its good to get out of khilaf so the shafa'is who do it every day, the madikis say you know its a good thing to do it just to renew", "to stand in Laylatul Qadr and then they do Tahajjud every night throughout the year with the hopes of hitting Laylat al-Qadr because some say it's Nafs Sha'ban there is an opinion that it's on the... And then some say moves throughout the Year Allah Akhfahu They say, The Moroccans say Allah hid three things in three things He hid His saints amongst humanity so you never know who's a Wali of Allah.", "acceptance in the good deeds, you know like you never know what deed's going to save you. Like the woman who gave the dog, the thirsty dog, she was a prostitute, she gave thirsty dog water and Allah forgave her. And then also his wrath in the in his disobedience but he also hid Laylatul Qadr so it's", "It's to encourage us, especially in these last 10 nights. It's a great blessing. So it's about 5.8 years, right? 83. Yeah, so 83 years. That's a lot of ibadah. So that was given to the Prophet because the ancients had these long lives with a lot", "So, Alhamdulillah. It's a great blessing. There are different opinions about what the Qadr is. Is it the decree that is revealed to the angels for the coming year? Allah Ta'ala Anam. But Imanan, believing in it. Wa ihtisaban, yahtasibu and Allah. Like really believe that Allah is going to", "to forgive you. So Ibn Abi Jamrah says, doesn't mean you have to stay up the whole night or just a part of the night. He actually prefers the opinion that as long as you do 11 rakats, you get the reward of the Night. But obviously the more you do, the better. But he says if you do the 11 rakat's, that was the norm of the Prophet. He did eight and then he would do", "11. There's another opinion, a weaker opinion of 13. In any case if you do those and there is he actually mentions a hadith that even if you two rakats with the last two ayahs of Baqarah because there's a hadit that he relates it's usually related to whoever reads it but he relates", "just to do those two would be enough so Allah's rahmah is vast may Allah accept our sincere fasting and accept our standing in prayer and all these things inshallah Alhamdulillah", "و الله يخفف عنهم و يعطيهم ما يحتاجون نسأل الله سبحانه وتعالى أن يبارك في هذا المكان و يحفظ هذا المقام من كل شر ومن كل مكروه ومن بدعة ومن شنيعة يا رحم الراحمين", "Alhamdulillah. The Sahih al-Bukhari is, I think one of the great gifts of the Ummah, the Prophet . His most important words were", "collected by this great Imam and put into this one book. And the Muslims have always, since the time this book really came out and the Muslims honored it in ways that... It's been written beautifully. I had a handwritten manuscript from Southern Morocco", "and it was really beautiful, which I gave to a Hafidha of al-Bukhari as a gift because he actually found a mistake in it. And I was compelled to give it to him at that point but it really was one of the most precious things that I have ever possessed. The scholars have even said things like that you know the house won't burn down if it has Sahih al- Bukhara in it,", "I used to actually fly with Sahih al-Bukhari. But Allah Ta'ala, those are, I think, hyperbolic statements to acknowledge the immense barakah that's in the book. But one of the most interesting, I thing aspects of the hadith is there're so many of them and for that reason people like Ibn Abi Jamrah chose to do his ikhtisar", "to try to get at the khulasa of the book. And that's one of the reasons why there are so many mukhtasarat in our tradition is that as the himmah of the ummah declines, the need for these abridged versions become more important because people don't have the time, the energy or the aspiration to do what the early people did and so", "And so, like Imam Laqani says that because the himmah have diminished abridgment becomes necessary. But even more extraordinary than an abridgement is to get to the actual very core of something and Abu Dawud one of the great Muhaddithun he's in the sixth of the canonical collections", "These are the six that the Ummah recognized as being the most important collections. Because there are many collections of the Hadith, so Imam al-Bukhari obviously has a preeminence and then Imam Muslm who was his student. And then Imam Abu Dawud radiAllahu anhu is also a student.", "Ibn Majah and sometimes the Muwatta is put alongside or in replacement of Ibn Magh's book. But Abu Dawud was one of the great Muhaddithun, and he said that he collected over 500,000 Hadiths. And when you read that like it's Imam Malik knew over 100,000 hadiths, Imam Mirabal Bukhari 600,000", "they're not the actual number of hadiths but the different transmissions. So there's around 50,000 statements of the Prophet that have been recorded between these various Sahih, Hassan and then the different types of Da'if categorizations. But from those there's about 7,000 that have really been transmitted in these books.", "Imam al-Bukhari has 4,000 without the Mukarrar, without the repetition because he repeats many hadiths in many babes. He will have like for instance, he repeats the Hadith innama'l-'ammaru binniyat because it's an important hadith and it falls into many of the chapters. And this is why they say that Imam al-'Uzza'i", "70,000 fatwas that he'd in his lifetime. Again these allahu alam sometimes they can be exaggerations but sometimes not. In any case I asked a Mauritanian how's that possible and he said how many are answered with innama'al amaru bin niyat? Right so I mean I had somebody yesterday wrote me about he unfortunately had broken his fast", "leaving before he left his house. And so then he was asking, he wrote me an email and said do I have kafara? Because somebody told him you have to fast for two months because you broke your fast without but that first of all kafara you have knowledge of it. But secondly there are difference of opinions like Ibn Wahab bin said if you were traveling you could start your taqseer from the home.", "you're from the home. That's not the mishur of the madhab, it's not a dominant opinion but it is an opinion so when you have difficulties, you want to find ease for people. The great Abu Sufyan he said, Like that real fiqh is giving people dispensations,", "things easy from a source that's sound. In other words, it has to... It can't just be... And so that's a really important aspect of the religion. And then he said but as for making things difficult everybody is capable of doing that. So we just there was a fatwa from a mufti of a major Muslim country who gave a fatwah they sent it to me some of the muftis on", "on the other side of the pond that they give a fatwa that, oh you can't give zakat al-fatar with naqad because it's not the sunnah. And that's true but it's a rukhsah from a thikaa and so for a lot of people would be hard to do that. So it's very important to recognize that about the religion. You can't make things hard especially in this time when things are hard enough", "for people just to be alive. Like, people have a very difficult time in the modern world in ways that the pre-modern world which was difficult and I've lived in pre-modern environments. I lived in West Africa. I spent a lot of time in southern Morocco. I was in the Rub al Khali. I've been to places that are very far from this modern world. It's much easier to practice your religion in those environments.", "Tahajjud is not a problem in West Africa. Everybody does it, it's just normal but for people here that are stressed out go to work you know we have our ease there's aspects of modern life that's very easy but then there's other aspects that are really difficult and so in a time like this", "without compromising your deen. And then is something that if somebody's capable of it, it's a good thing to be scrupulous. So Imam Abu Dawood , he said . From 500,000 hadith I, he said meaning the sunan of Abu Dawud. He said from 500,00 hadith", "500,000 hadith I put these hadees in his sunan and he said but from all of these hades it's over 5,000 from all these hadis he said three of them are in al-Bukhari. He said its enough for a person to have four hadees and to practice these hadeas so this is coming", "And there's other, Imam Ahmad has a similar statement. He reduced it to three hadiths. Ibn Abi Zayl al-Qairawani, the great Maliki scholar, reduced it also to four hadith. They agreed on two of them. They differed on two. So but they're all looking at the same thing and this is like when you take a statement like the great Imam Al-Razi he said you could reduce Islam to", "to worshiping Allah and serving Allah's creation, like helping Allah's creations. You can sum up Islam in that way. Ibn Qaym al-Jawziya he said all of Islam is , right? Like all of these things . So he reduced Islam to those four. Like so he said if it goes", "it's not from Islam. And that's why is important in fiqh because sometimes a hukam, a ruling can actually lead to something that's unfair and so that can't be from Islam So the faqi says this can't right and so he'll actually make a hokum, a Ruling based on a more just or equitable solution to a problem I mentioned out just to give you an example", "I mentioned once, Sheikh Abdullah that we were talking about community property in the West. And he said from a Sharia point of view it would be unjust for a woman to take half a man's wealth on divorce. So I said well here is the way they think about it", "So this is when a woman is at home, she's doing all this work. She's taking care of the person's house. She're taking care the children, doing all these things. Then when she gets divorced what does she have? She can go out without anything and so they say that it's not fair that the man who part of why he was able to do what he was doing", "This is the original thing. I mean, obviously today things have changed because women are working now and there's a lot of single mothers and all these different things but this was the original understanding of community property. And he said, you know from the point of view of that there's some validity to that, that view because for instance in the Maliki Madhab a woman can charge for like for doing domestic service", "service, she can actually charge her husband if he doesn't provide for her some help. And then you have in pre-Islamic societies, you had a very different world where people took care of each other. Now we have women who have children. They don't have the infrastructure that a traditional society provides like having an extended family, you know, having aunts that will take", "Britannia, a good example. The little children when they're four, three, four years old, they just walk around the encampment and go to different tents so the mother's not constantly having to look after them. They're looked after by the whole clan. And that was very normal. So one of the things Dr. Cleary pointed out which really struck me when I read this he wrote a really beautiful essay called How Islam Can Revive American Civilization.", "and in there one of the things he said is that the family is so important in Islam because one of five universals, Hevlu An-Nasal or family protecting the family. And he said people think the families breaking down because of divorce is a family broke down 100 years ago with the breakdown of extended families. Like divorce is the last line of family like that's not a real family", "not a real family, a mother or father and children. That's not a family. A family is uncles and aunts and grandparents and nephews and cousins. That' s a real Family. So if it goes to... And then he said if it go from Rahmah to harshness, then it's not from Islam because Islam is Rahmuh.", "and I think Imam Malik was musib in this. He had the correct view. He said that jihad is not a niqmah, it's a rahmah. That was his view. he said it wasn't a punishment for the kufr or fighting the Muslims or something like that It was actually a rahma to stop them from doing more harm than they were doing So he saw it as a mercy because the more harm people do", "the more trouble they make for themselves. So these four things he described, so Abu Dawud took the Hadith and this is remember, this is a man who knew pretty much all of Al-Bukhari, all of Muslim I mean, he knew that the Hadit corpus of his time, he was a Hafidh And so if he's gonna reduce it down,", "he's one of the amongst the . You know, he's considered a faqih. So the first one he said is The second one he says was The third one he say And the fourth one was", "So those were the four that he said. I thought it would be useful to look at these four hadiths because what he's saying is they're all you need if you get these right then You have from the Sunnah what you need The first one Is the book, the one that Imam Muslims", "that Imam Muslim starts his book with.", "So this is, this hadith is from Amir al-Mu'minin Omar Abu Hafsa. Hafsa is his daughter. Hafs is the masculine form of that. Omar ibn Al Khattab radiallahu anhu and he's from the Khattaba family. These were the great judges of the Quraysh, this family and noted for their khataba so hence Al Khattaab they still have it in", "in the Mujaddidis are famous for their oratory. So these things get genetically transmitted, Alhamdulillah. So he says, and in Riwaaniyah, so actions are by intentions. So an action is something that's done with the Jawarih, right?", "One of the things and we'll get this with a lot of people forget that speech is an action. You know, people say oh, that's just talk as if talk doesn't have meaning I mean, I heard somebody say that once in you know, you know the problem with the The most it's all words, you there's no action", "The Prophet came with words. I mean, they're the Kareemah to Allah that's what he brought so don't ever diminish the meaning of words by saying it's just words because words are what make us human. Words are what give us our distinction amongst creation. The fact that we have language that were the", "Somebody said to me, oh well we are animals. I said we're not animals. Imam al-Ghazali said we are animal. What did he say? He said we were part animal and part angel. Why didn't you say we are angels? Part animal is not animal. It's not animal We made them a distinct creation so we are not animals", "we're not animals. And the people that say that, these are materialists that want to reduce us to animals. I mean, I have cats. I watch cats. He was looking at me and I was printing something and I just wondering what he was thinking I was doing but he can't work out that I'm printing something on the printer. I can't talk to him about infinity. You know, if I did it would be a one-sided conversation", "You know, he might meow every once in a while. But he's not going to be reflecting on proofs for the existence of God. It's just not gonna happen. Dolphins, Allahu'alam, we're not supposed to eat them and Imam Lays said, Don't eat the human of the ocean. So, Allahu',alam if some people think that because they have very big brains even", "humans apparently. So Allah knows what they're up to. If they're debating whether does God exist or not? Who made this ocean? We don't know, but Imam Malik said, they asked him about it and he said, You named it because it's also called the pig of the ocean. Because it has like a snout, like a pig.", "The Greeks called it the pig also. So actions are by intention. So what is an intention? An intention is, the root of the word has to do with seed. Like a Noah is a seed. So an intention is the seed of your actions. It's what produces the action. If you look at this amazing backdrop that our brother Ismail did from hand taking wood", "taking wood from a tree that was once those were trees in a forest somewhere and somebody went and cut them down there's a beautiful essay really proving how miraculous just a pencil is because we don't think about these things so if you look like just the wood what was the intention of the man cutting down the wood it wasn't to be a mihrab", "In California. Right? Somebody in South America who went in with an axe or maybe a machine and cut down, he wanted to make some money. Maybe to feed his family. We don't know what his Nia was but he had a Nia. And so then he sends it to the lumber and they make it into sheets. What was their Nia? Probably to make money.", "And then the man who bought it just to ship it somewhere. To sell it for a higher price. He had a different Nia. He didn't cut it down. And then it goes to some warehouse somewhere. And Ismail says I'm going to make this out of mahogany. He could have made it out of other woods but he chose that wood so that wood was destined then to be that. But what was his Nia? It wasn't money, that was maybe part of it because that's his livelihood.", "He wanted to make something for Allah. That was his Niaa What was the Nia of those of us here who wanted to we wanted to adorn? Allah's house To make it something beautiful so that when people come in they get a sense of Allah is beautiful and loves beauty And so beauty evokes things in people's heart, so those niyaas were all different", "What was the Nia of the person who originally made this geometric pattern? These are the tessellations. Of the Muslim world that are famous replicable patterns, there's a great Russian mathematician who worked out. There's only 17 possible infinitely replicable tessella shins these pat these geometric patterns 14 of them are in the Alhambra Palace. So they missed three what was their intention", "What was their intention? Why were Muslims so obsessed with infinite replications? They were trying to show unity in diversity. They were tying to show the one and the many. So there's a reason why when you go into masjids they have geometric patterns because there was a symbolism in it that they wanted to evoke in the people who were looking on it, to make them think about these things.", "so that what is the seed, what is intention of your action? And this is like in our tradition you make... You know wasa'il you don't have to make intention. But those things that are maqasid, like the prayer, you have to intend the prayer and you have attend what prayer it is. Like you should have the intention of dhuhr because its different from asr So it's a distinct act of ibadah.", "You don't. So like, you know, when you give sadaqah or on your way to get money to pay your zakat, you don't have to make the niyyah to go get the money. That's a wasila to paying the zakat. But when you pay the zakats... So the intention is very important in your actions. If you just have the irada then that's part of the intention also", "of the intention also because niya and irada are related in the quran there's you know so whoever does that if you do it that's where you're going to get the reward but you don't have", "or I'm going to do Islah bain al-Nas. You don't have to make that Nia, the action itself is enough. So, every person has what they intended in their action. So the Prophet an action he could've chosen any action but this is a very important action.", "Why are you moving from one place to another? So whoever immigrates to Allah and his messenger, in other words intending Allah and His Messenger. Right? His niyyah is to Allah And His Messenger You're doing it for the sake of Allah and He's Messenger .", "and also the prophet tended to use the female because he was speaking generally to men. He had one day out of the week where he spoke solely to the women, but generally he's speaking to them with the understanding that they would convey that to their women folk. And so he spoke without understand, but they would", "So it goes both ways. So that's important. It's not sexist language. I mean, this is kind of a modern concept. Like for instance in Persian you don't have the problem with the gender, right? Because there's no gender in their pronominal reference. If you use a pronoun in Persian, it's all the same, he or she. In Arabic, huwa is also not masculine.", "not masculine. Like huwa could be used for something that's neutral, it can be used feminine, it could be use... So that is a problem when you translate into English because English is very specific. We have he she it whereas in Arabic they don't have it. They have huwa for it and he. And sometimes it could also be she like the Qur'an uses", "Quran uses the masculine to mean the feminine in the Quran. So what's amazing about this, the Prophet said if it's for dunya some worldly thing to achieve it or a spouse to marry he didn't repeat like in the first one he repeated he said", "because of the sharaf, of the hijrah. But because the second one is dunya he just said it didn't warrant repeating so he just used ma to say what and that comes from a famous a miskin who became known as", "He actually made hijrah to marry. The woman told him, I won't marry you unless you make hijrah To Medina. So he made hijra to Medina so he became known as muhajir umqais That was his niya This is very important it's a foundational Hadith The second hadith that he mentions is on Abdullah Nu'man ibn Bashir who was a very young and the hadith of putting the feet together", "you know, which unfortunately in the last... People don't do it anymore but when I was younger people became obsessed with this thing of putting the feet next to each other in the prayer. And you had this problem like people would actually do it and it became very annoying because some people found this Hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari which was on Nu'man ibn Bashir", "And he said we used to. The prophet of Taras come together. So he said, We used to put our feet next to each other. They were in the last Saf, the children. He was a child. He is not Ma'mool. It's not acted on and there's nothing in our books that say that to put the feet next", "says that they did this but if you tried to do it today the person would run away from you like a scared animal. So Allah is the Greatest. But I think people who have experienced that know how distracting it can be for somebody.", "So he said the halal is clear. The halal and haram are gray areas.", "It's something that there is a shubha in it. Shubha is something, it's hazy, it doubtful. It resembles one or the other, it can resemble both. Have elements means to resemble something. So he saying The majority of people don't know how to differentiate", "between these two. The ones that do are the , the people that are firmly established in knowledge and so he says, whoever protects himself from these . He has guarded his,", "He's protected. He's kept pure. Bara'ah is like innocence. Al-Bara'at al-'Asri is the foundation that things aren't, you know, the permissibility is foundational in things. It's free of impurities or prohibition. So what is the Irdh? The Irdhh is one of the five Mahfuzat", "of deen, nafs, maal, aql and nasal. Nasal is included in that irdh and some add it as the sixth in the mahfuzat so you have religion protection of religion, protection of life, protection property, protection intellect, protection family and then in that is also protection of honor because your family is part of your honor which is one of the reasons see one of", "go by last names anymore it's because of the loss of family people used to always go by name and you know you see this in jane austen's novels they always call people by like willoughby you know his name was john willoughbye but they called him willoughbey why because they were referring to his family in our tradition the kunya is to remind", "It's to remind the father that he is an example to his son. And to remind his son, that he carries the honor of his father. So you're not just on your own. You actually represent a family. This is why traditionally everybody went by last name. You did not call somebody by their first name because it was too informal.", "on that intimacy. But when family is lost, then everybody's just by their first name because the family doesn't mean anything. And this is one of the great tragedies. The high school I went to, all the teachers called us by our last name. They never called us", "your family's name and if you dishonor your family. And that's why illegitimacy is so terrible because they don't even know who their father is. So, that's what I'm saying. That's why there's so much criminality in illegitimate societies because there's why should, why, what are you upholding? You know, the name, the good name. My father's teacher Mark Van Doren his son", "His son was Charles Van Doren, who I actually knew and had correspondence with. He got caught up in a scandal in 1958. It was the quiz show scandal. And he was from this family is very distinguished family that was Mark Van Doreen, Carl Van Dorean. And these were great literary scholars in America poets Pulitzer Prize winning poets.", "So when his son was found out to be cheating on this quiz show, it had a huge crisis in the family because he soiled his name. His father gave him a good name and that's one of the best things that your father can give you is a good thing. And the worst thing you can do to your father or your mother is to soil that name. I mean these are something in the Muslim world they know. The mojeddadi has a meaning", "So when somebody soils the name of the Mujaddidis by doing things that are wrong, they soiled the whole Mujaddi clan. And that's a crime against the clan and it's a criminal against Omar and Omar bin al-Khattab will take care of them on the Day of Judgment. He is not going to intercede for people who soiled his name I don't think.", "I mean, he punished children of the Sahaba. He didn't have a problem punishing them. One of the great Sahaba's son was an alcoholic and he punished him. That's one of the things in the Hamziyah he says about Omar. He said the Qarib and the Ba'id were the same to Omar. Taqwa was what distinguished his judgment on them.", "So that's really important to remember that. So the ird is really important and that's why it's so horrible to tell lies about people, to slander people,", "and the innocent believing women to slander them, to say something about their... I mean this is a really serious thing. And so then he says,", "Like a shepherd who is taking his flock near a The Hema is the sanctuary. So if you take the flock near the sanctuary, it's going to end up eating from that grass that's prohibited. So the Hema was the sanctuary of a king. If people who know Western tradition,", "in the Robin Hood story, it's a very famous Sherwood Forest which is where they hid and hunted. That was actually a sanctuary of the king but the king was unjust and so Robin Hood and his merry band of men had no problems hunting and they thought this is very western like Cromwell. He said rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God. That's CromWell. That that's not necessarily the Sunni position", "Sunni position, right? Patience is traditionally the Sunni Position with tyrants. You just you have to be patient because rebelling against them makes it worse So he says Every king has a sanctuary The sanctuary of Allah are those", "So there's a clear demarcation. The Quran has very clear demarcation of You know, these are very clearly articulated in the Quran what's prohibited, right? These are very clear. In the Maliki Madhhab is the...", "the madhhabs it's the one that has the least amount of prohibitions because Malik took Nasr Quran so he sees these as muhkama and the hadiths he takes more is for karahiya. So in the malik madhab, anything that's najis like carrion things", "even if it was a wild donkey who is domesticated. Those are the meats that are prohibited, the other ones like cat and that's why Imam Zamakhshari famously said You know he said", "I don't tell people my madhab, because if I tell them they're going to find some fault in it. And he said, If I say I'm maliki, they say, Oh, that he permits eating dogs, which is not true but there's karahiya as opposed to tahreem although there's an opinion the Maliki Madhhab that it's also Muharram. There's room for everybody except the pig eaters. They have to give that up.", "Maududi used to say to Hindu converts, did you eat beef yet? Which I don't think is very... That's kind of harsh. But because they have family. Apparently Akbar, he did not allow Muslims to eat beef during his time and that's when a lot of Hindus became Muslim because there's no, there's absolutely no tradition that the prophet ate beef", "beef. In fact, there's a Sahih Hadith where he said beef, he said, the meat of beef is a disease and the milk is a cure. That's a sahih hadith. It's a mushkil because Ibrahim A.S. brought the ijl, veal, he served veal to his", "Amazing ending here. For the students of Arabic, the afsah is with fath al-ayn. So salaha in this, although salaha is valid. So there's a mudgha, there's an empty space in the body of the human being.", "If it's sound, the whole body is sound. And if it's corrupt, the entire body is corrupt. Isn't it the heart? And that's why the Prophet was asked about the best people and he said The one who is And they said we know what's", "And he said the pure heart. Means to sweep the house. So is a heart that has been swept, like it's been cleaned out. You've swept your heart. You're cleared out all of the . So very, very important hadith and many I mean these can you know whole books have been written literally on this hadith so", "Hadith. So I'm, the next one is on Abi Hamzah Anas ibn Malikin. This is an Ana so Allah Alam you know did he hear it from him or did he heard from another Sahabi?", "So this is, when you have al-Bukhari and Muslim agree on the hadith it's very strong. It's usually the next after the mutawatir hadis then you get the ones that the Sikhs agree on because there are hadis that all Sikhs relate but Mutafiqun Alayhi is a very high rutba.", "is none of you truly believes and we put truly there because it can't mean because that would mean that if you didn't love for your brother what you love for yourself, you weren't a believer. So it's understood to mean the iman of one is not complete. There's a hadith of Ibn Mas'ud said", "That you're not a believer until you see a tribulation as a blessing and a blessing as a tribulations. In other words, your iman is not complete that's a high maqam to see that because everything is from Allah so you see it as this is", "There's only two possibilities. Like Gaza right now, there's two possibilities It's a dhulm from these people undeniably The dhulum is wadi and And there's no arguing that and those people who are inflicting this cruelty on these people They will be judged they've already been judged in the dunya but they will be judge in the akhirah But for us when we see these things as", "We experience it existentially as an individual, as a human being. What does it mean for that individual? For Abdullah who's there right now or Khadija or the... It's either rafa' darajat or tahara min ad-dhanub. It's one or the other. It is elevated in maqam with Allah or it's removing sins and we believe that. That's our belief and if you lose that you will fall into despair", "Because then it becomes purposeless. And that's why in the emotional equations of this book that Zane gave me, the equation for despair was suffering minus meaning equals despair. Suffering minus meaning", "All suffering in our tradition, everything that happens to a believer is good. Everything. And children are, you know, like children suffer in this world. One of the most extraordinary things about suffering children and those of us", "those of us who've been in the health care, you know I had to do rotations in pediatrics when I was a nurse. One of the most amazing things about children no child that's six or seven or eight years old with cancer is saying why me? They just don't do it and if they do its from their parents but they will not do that naturally. They just accept it and there's a love us where there's an", "where there's an amazing book by a French, he was a freedom fighter who was blind. And his book, Then There Was Light, is a very interesting book. But he wrote this book. His job amongst the freedom fighters was to interview potential freedom fighters. Now they'd be called terrorists.", "Nazis won the war, they would be the terrorists. That's the way it works. But at that time anyway, they still considered them freedom fighters. But they were blowing things up. They were killing Nazis. So these were like the resistance. So his job was to interview people and he could always detect the insincerity in the voice. He ended up getting betrayed", "doubt about the man. It was the only time he let somebody go because, uh, he fooled him, but he did have some doubt about him and he ended up betraying him. He got arrested. He went to a concentration camp in any case in, in, In, in the first chapter of that book, it really struck me. He had lost his sight as a child. Um, so he had thick glasses and a kid pushed him on the playground and they landed and took out his eyes. They just, the glass shattered, took out", "took out his eyes he said i thank god that this happened to be as a child because people tend to get very angry when they're adults whereas for me it was just something that happened an amazing statement", "is he was very young. He came into the Prophet's care and he relates this hadith, none of you truly believe until he loves for his... And this really should be fellow man because Shabrachiti Imam No'wi in his I had an original edition of the Sharah 40 Nawiyya and Imam Nohwi says", "And then I got a later one. We were reading it with Tarif al-Arabi years ago, and it didn't have that in it. I said, what happened? My edition has that in It but it was a new edition where they took it out for political reasons. Amazing because they don't want to think oh that we want good for Jews. The Jews are the children of prophets like you don't think Yaqub would be upset about his", "children going you know to hell or something. Adam alayhi salam in the hadith he says that, that,that in the Hadith when he saw Adam on the Isra and the Mi'raj one of the visions that he had of Adam was he would look to his right and smile and look to His left and cry and behind him were...he couldn't make them out they were like shadows and so he asked Jibril", "that are for paradise and the people on the right, and the left are his disobedient children who go to hell. He cried when he saw them. So all of these... And that's why Sophia, when one of the wives called her a Yehudia or said they were better than her because", "related to the prophets. He said, why didn't you say to them my uncle is Moses, my father is Aaron and she was an Aaronite and my husband is Muhammad? In other words like that's a good thing so if a Jewish person becomes Muslim there's a sharaf in having the lineage of the prophets in your right? So he said like you should want for them guidance", "So that's, you know, la yastakmaru imanuhu. You know, his Iman is not complete until that he loves for himself what he loves others. It's a really important hadith and he says, Sheikh Abu Amr ibn Salah, he says", "What is a cathartic? You know, some people will think this is impossible. But that's not the truth. He said, So there he's reducing it down to your brother in Islam.", "should want for others guidance. Yeah, it's a higher maqam because then you if you make it provincial I mean I was born into Christian family Alhamdulillah manna Allah alayhi wa barisalam and there were people who gave me da'wah when I read the Quran before I met Muslims but there were", "And that's one of the things that I think our community has been really remiss about, especially in the United States. There is not a concern. And then part of the problem is some of the people who do Dawa don't do it knowing the people because you have to have lisan qaumi and we have to know the tongue of the People. Every message that comes came with the tongue from the People You have to understand the People and how they think", "is Abduhaq Al-Akili. He's a very famous Swedish painter who studied in France under some of the great Impressionists. He was considered one of the greatest Impressionist painters, but his father was a veterinarian and he... Maybe you could just look at what his name is in his Swedish name. Abduhac Al-akili.", "Swedish painter, Muslim. But his father was a veterinarian and he taught him to love animals. So when he was in France studying painting, and painters like poets and others are very sensitive people. You can't be an artist without having a level of sensitivity that normal people don't have.", "Van Gogh, poor man cut off his ear. I mean Van Goghe suffered a lot and as lovers often do so he went they introduced bullfighting into France from Spain He went to the bull fight and shot the matador Like how does it feel?", "He shot him in the leg. And he went, what's his name? Yeah, but what was his Swedish name? Leif Carlson. No, that's somebody else. This is somebody else, he's still alive. Now this man died a long time ago. In any case and he went to prison", "that they petitioned to get him out. But when he was in prison, he was jail with an Algerian who recited Quran all the time and that was his cellmates. And so because he was reciting Quran all of the time, they ended up having all these conversations about Islam. He ended up becoming Muslim and he went to Egypt, entered into Al-Azhar studied with Abdurrahman Ulaish", "He studied Khalil and then, but the reason I bring him up is because the most amazing thing that I read about him which really floored me was he wanted to take Islam back to Europe. But he wanted see how Islam manifested in a non-Muslim land so he went to study the Indian Muslims before he went too cause you know Arabs have their way", "Non-Arabs had other ways of being Muslim. So he went and studied the Muslims India before he went back to Europe to do dawah Yeah, Ivan Agili that's his name Sheikh Abdul Hadi Al Aqili. Sorry not Abdel Haque, Abdul Hadi al aqili Yeah, so he Ivan this man. He died in 1917. He was struck by a train unfortunately yeah, but it was amazing man", "Amazing. He actually was the one that introduced Rene Guénon into, who ended up writing some important books. But so he went and studied Islam in India to take it back. All of his paintings hang in the National Museum in Sweden. He's considered a national treasure in Sweden", "these great Impressionist painters, the pointillists and things. He's considered one of the great Impressions painters. So that's really, really important, that one. And then... So then this last hadith which to me is one of most important hadiths", "This hadith is a hadith that Imam al-Tarmidhi relates. And Imam al-'Tarmadhi, radiallahu anhu Abu Isa al-tarmadhiy was from Tirmidh which is in Central Asia or it's also Tarmed with a Fatha and Turmud so there's like different ways of pronouncing it. Apparently they pronounce", "Apparently they pronounce with a Fatha traditionally. It was Tarmidhi, yeah. But he's known as Imam al-Tirmidhi with a Kasra. Another one of the great, he was a student of Imam al Bukhari. He had a photographic memory and he could just hear it at one time and it was with him. And these were people Allah haya'ahum, he prepared them to carry this religion but this Hadith is a very foundational Hadith", "Abu Hurairah relates it and Imam Ahmad and Ibn Abi Zaid put it in their choice of the most important hadith. This hadith, almost all of the problems on this planet come from this problem of being concerned with what's of no concern to you. Minding your own business.", "It's such a difficult thing for human beings to do. Everybody wants to put their nose in other people's business. Ahmed Sarroq said, the door of peril, of destruction is opened by saying how so and so. It's like, you know, just how so-and-so because why are you asking how so? And so, cause very often people ask hoping something's wrong with so-", "You know, it's a very common thing that people do. So and then why are people obsessed with? Why is there a whole section on the news feed on the royal family? Like what is that? And then all the click bait. So al-Hakim Samarkandi who was one of the students of Imam Al Maturidi", "Abu Mansur al-Matureedi, the great Mutakallam. Imam Al Ghazali said that he said, All of the calamities in this dunya are for three reasons.", "People seeking news, so we would call those news hounds. News junkies. People spreading news, So we'd call those newcasters and people receiving news. And he said", "none of them are free of the blame. And this is what this is about, you know? It's like concern yourself with yourself but if you get outside of that into these other areas, you're going to be complicit in crimes unimaginable and people don't think about this. They don't thing about the ethical reality of just being alive here, you now.", "I mean, I have a son. I don't know where he got this from but he will not buy anything that's not made locally or in the and it's very interesting because we don't think about that like We get these cheap clothes CNN had a report where the average American has 50 slaves working for them around the world Just to supply our lifestyles Right so you're wearing clothes", "So you're wearing clothes that were manufactured in sweatshops, but they're cheap. You know, there was a documentary called The High Cost of Low Prices. People don't think about that, of buying local, of small-scale businesses because all these corporations, you know, they'll go where it's cheapest, where they can exploit the workers, where there's no labor laws. That's what they do. Labor is really important. Work is important.", "And one of the problems with our lifestyles is that everybody wants to live. We'd need for, for the world to live like the average American lives you'd need three Earths to provide the resources for it. It's unsustainable. So this hadith is such an important hadith just to really preoccupy yourself with what concerns you. You know", "to work on yourself, to not worry about other people. And that's why that was Imam Malik when Imam Shafi asked him how old he was because that's a curiosity for people. I wonder how old is and he just said mind your own business which might seem harsh but it was a great lesson to him", "would say that whenever anybody asked him how old he was. So, he got the point and Malik said if you tell somebody your age they'll either say oh I thought you were younger than that or I thought older than that like it's never work out yeah apparently the Hunzas like add like 20 years to their age or something that's why you know they said the Hunza are the oldest living people but they get to a certain age they just add", "decade or something. So when they're like 80, they say they're 90 and say, you look great. So from the beautiful Islam of a person is that they leave what does not concern them. Ya'ni is one of the most beautiful words in the Arabic language. It's really one of my favorite words. Arabs love it so much they say it all the time.", "Right? It's like, you know, in English. People that say, you now. But it has to... One of the meanings is to suffer. You know? So is suffering. So from something is to", "It's a muhawala form. Yuhawilu, it's to attempt something. So it's an attempt to find meaning. So suffering in Arabic if you just look at the word linguistically what it actually means? It means an attempt of finding meaning. That's what Mu'anat means in Arabic. Yuani is trying to find maana", "suffering is it's to bring you back into reality and and man wanna in Ficaco lot for here on the cut it man wanna infecate a little bit here on a battery he say in the home in min kisarino very he well lady watch had men who are up at our whole world the oh what I can", "said if you could recite in other than the Quran, I mean it's hyperbole but he said it would be with the Hikmah of Ibn Atayla. It's like Wahi. It is so amazing. But he said whoever thinks that the Lutf of Allah, the care of God, the grace of God is absent in the Qadr of God and the decree of God. It from myopia. It' s from your own short-sightedness. And then he says because the one who has brought these tribulations", "brought these tribulations upon you is the same one that accustomed you to blessings. In other words, the only reason you know the tribulations is because you were accustomed to the husn al-akhtiyar. It's so beautiful. So when things go south, the reason that you're aware of that is because they were up north before. That's a very geocentric, Eurocentric", "Eurocentric view, you know the the Muslims put the map and I wanted to do a Muslim map for our children's classrooms called the restorative map You know which puts the south on the top because all the Muslim maps were made with The Africa was on the Top and Europe was on bottom And they switched it around Which is psychological? right But like the poet said you'll find out when you reach the top", "عندما تصل إلى الأعلى أنت على الأسفل لا إله إلا الله", "اللهم اجعلنا من الذين يستمعون القول فيتبعون أحسن اللهم أجعل نمن الذين وطبقون سنة رسول الله صلى عليه وسلم اللهم آريني نبينا يا الله آرئنا نبيا في المنامات يا الله اللهم متعنا برؤياه يا رحم الراحمين وصلي لهم على سيدنا محمد وعلى آله وصحبه وسلم تسليما سبحان ربك رب العزة عما يصفون والسلام عليكم السلام عليك" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Sufism and Mysticism in Islam -- Shaykh Hamza Yusu__1743303423.opus", "text": [ "When they talk about Sufism and mysticism, all of the Muslims had some commitment to mysticism. All of them. Ibn Taymiyyah uses the word fanaa. Iban Qayyim al-Jawziyya... Scholars that are traditionally associated with a kind of anti-mystical doctrine, they use these doctrines. They were first formulated by a great Baghdadi scholar, Imam al-junayd. And they're accepted by the Muslims. So I believe it's", "I believe it's core Islam. And, and I'm not saying that as some kind of heterodoxic view. This is orthodoxy. It really is traditional Islam." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/The Beauty of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ _ Shaykh Hamza Yu_B0KKpzYNYuQ&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743058913.opus", "text": [ "Allah says, وَإِنَّكَ لْعَلَى خُلقٍ عَظِيمٌ Surely you're on this vast ethos, this vast ethical condition.", "ما كان رأسه؟ وعن أبو بكر، عندما يكون أبا بكر قال له اذهب واسأل عمر لدينا بعض الحديثات من أبوا بكر إنها مخاطرة جداً لكن أبوبكر كان كتوموسر كان لديه مقام جميل ولكن هذا كان أبابكار", "So the Jew went to Umar and he said, I read in the Quran, And Umar being from the same madrasa as Abu Bakr, He said go ask Uthman. And so he went to Uthmann ibn Affan .", "Being from the same madrasa as those two, he said go ask Ali ibn Abi Talib. So he went to Ali and Ali said to this Jewish man describe the blessings of this world. He said", "and I can't enumerate them. And he said, Allah says in the Qur'an that the mataa of this dunya is qaleel. That the joy or pleasures of this world are very few. And He described the prophets khuluq as azeem. Fa-iza la tasifu al-kaleel kayfa asifu l-azeem If you can't describe what is few how can I describe what", "But the best answer to that question was given by his beloved wife Aisha. His khuluq was the Qur'an. The Prophet's sallallahu alayhi wa sallam's khuluqu was the Quran. He was the Qura'n walking. If you want to know the Prophet's Sallallah alaihi wa salam, read the Qurra'n. The Qur'a'n says, قُلُوا لِنَّاسِ حُسْنًا Speak well to people.", "to people. The Prophet never spoke other than well to people when people were rude to him some of the Sahaba got upset, the Prophet would always calm them down and he would speak well When Aisha heard one of the Jews say Salaam Alaikum which means death be upon you she said Wa alaikum Salaama wa la'natullah and she gave it back to him and more And the Prophet told her calm down Aisha", "Didn't you hear me? I said, وعليكم That's all you need to do. It is something that can never upset you no matter what it is. When he was in the cave imagine this first of all a spider spins its web miraculously around the cave when these trackers and these were the best trackers", "trackers the Arabs had and the Arabs have Qiyafah and Arafat they had these sciences of tracking, they knew how to track so they got to the cave. They tracked him to the cape but then he saw the spider web there was a dove with overhead and they were saying mmmm... But he looked in the cave and Abu Bakr was very nervous and the Prophet just looked at him and then he pointed", "saw the shores of Jeddah. This is like a wormhole! It's amazing, he never had fear when Abu Bakr, the Prophet , they're riding the two of them fleeing from Mecca to Medina Surah Ibr Malik, he's one of their great trackers, he was right behind them. Abu Bakar keeps looking,", "the Prophet he was reciting in the Qur'an. لَتَحْسَنُ إِلَّا اللَّهَ مَعْنًا Don't grieve, don't worry Allah is with us. He had absolute tawakkul ala Allah. He completely trusted Allah when the man who was trying to kill him found him sleeping under a tree. He picked up the sword and he said, Who's going to defend you now? And the Prophet said, Allah! The man dropped the sword", "The sword. And then he asked him, and he said, you're a noble man, he wanted his hilm. And the Prophet did it. This was our Prophet. He had no fear. No matter how bad it got, he did not have fear. And this is what we have to remember. And dunya is hardship. Nobody had a more difficult time than the Prophets. The Prophet ﷺ just said, أَشَّدُّوا النَّاسِ بَلَأْنَا الْأَنبِيَاتِ ثُمَّ الْعَمْثَالِ فَالْعُمْفَارِ", "The people that have the most difficult time in this dunya are the Prophets and then those close to them. Our Prophet buried all of his children except for Fatima. Who amongst us has had to bury all of their children? He buried all his children. The Prophet lost everything, they were eating the leaves off trees. The best of creation! They were taking the leaves", "basically grinding them down and they were eating leaves on trees during the Hisar in Mecca. The Prophet ﷺ for the first five years in Medina, people don't realize he made hijrah but the first 5 years they didn't even feel safe in Medinah. They were constantly having difficulties in the Qur'an. They where always feeling unsafe. In the fifth year all of the Arabs came.", "30,000. The Prophet ﷺ Medina was between two they call labbatain in the Muwata it's called labbatin you know lava is lava tracks. Lava is in Arabic labba is lava right? Fa and ba are from the same makhraj they're labials so Allahu a'lam I must have come from the Arabs labba but he had these two lava tracks", "They knew they were coming because the Prophet had spies, he had people out. They knew. 30,000 Arabs. They came for genocide to eliminate this community, to finish it. This was their plan. So this was a matter of life and death. The Prophet ﷺ was talking about his strategy. Salman said in Persia we build trenches. You know when the Prophet ﷺ", "And this is one of the most amazing things about our Prophet . This was a man who had Wahi from Allah and yet when he was discussing things with his companions because he wasn't somebody that just talked, he listened. He would elicit from his companions. He wanted to hear from them. He want to see what they thought. So if he gave an opinion they would say", "Is this revelation or is this strategy? He said, This is strategy. They said, well what about this? And they would give their opinions and if it was a better opinion as far as he was concerned then he would take it. So Salman said the trench. Shaykh Abdullah Al-Qadi showed that", "engineering miracle because they built this trench in a very short period of time and it was between the two lava tracks. And so, people don't realize that when you go to Medina now you can understand the trench because the lava tracks are gone. You can't walk on them if you go outside of Medina you'll find the lava track you can't work on them. They're sharp and they can cross some with their very difficult across just with shoes and impossible with animals", "So they were in the trench and the munafiqun were in a trench. And the Prophet saw these strikes when they hit the rock because Medina has a lot of rocks, he saw this strike and he saw the palaces of Syria. And then he saw another strike, he see the palces of Persia. This is like what he said to Suraka.", "He said when Suraqa's horse went into the sand and then he realized something unusual, supernatural was happening. He asked for aman. The Prophet gave him aman. These Arabs... The thing about the Arabs and this is what some people don't understand today because you know you go to the modern Arab world it's very different but that the Jahiliyya Arabs were people of their word if they gave their word they didn't break their word And so the prophet gave him Aman", "He asked him, what did they promise you? He said a hundred camels. A hundred camals. And he said, what do you think about wearing the bracelets of Kisra one day? This is a Bedouin man. He can't imagine that. In the time of Omar when they brought the bracelets", "Omar actually put them on Suraqa. So we can't imagine this, but the Munafiqun are in there and they're saying he's talking about the palaces of Persia and Syria. We can't even go relieve ourselves because they were stuck in the trench. And so many Muslims today are stuck in a trench. They can't see where this is all headed. They've lost sight. You know, they say the Arabs say", "is not honored because the donkey looks at its feet. But the camel is honored in their culture, because the camel looks at the horizon. It doesn't look at its' feet. It looks at a horizon, the afaq . That's our Prophet he was a visionary. He dreamed with his eyes wide open and he realized those dreams. He saw something other people couldn't see and that's the visionary. Allah said,", "man came to him and he said, He said, Like then get ready for poverty. He said I love you. He's had it three times and the Prophet said get ready. He says prepare for poverty a tijfaf. Tijfah is what the Arabs put on the horse to protect it from the spears they called a barding or a coupler. Barding it's called on", "So he said, in other words, tribulation is going to come to you because that's the nature of it. So you either get it in this world or the next world but tribulation coming. It's either in this word or it's in the next word. It better in this . You know the people that sign up for his program? He has a great 401k plan. No seriously there are people", "There's people that sign, you know I asked my father do you think they sign on the dotted line? He said no. It's a long series of negotiations. Right but there's people who sign up with Iblis. Seriously there are people that signed. There was a documentary done where they put an ad in the paper for people that wanted to sell their soul to the devil. This is a full documentary and they got people that came", "through they took them to these satanic rituals to sell their soul and they were totally ready. And one of them just said you know I've been trying to break into you want to be a rock star, and he said I'm 35 my time's almost ending you know i'm willing to sell my soul so don't think people won't sell", "our dean is a Dean they're wealthy Muslims there but I'll tell you one of the things that I've noted in knowing a lot of wealthy Muslims they have great tribulation people of wealth have great Tribulation you know this kind of Marxist view that oh their lives are all cushy it's like it's rulers people think rulers it's all perks rule that they don't sleep enough he never slept in the same place twice every night", "up they take pills to go to sleep these are real headaches i mean i run a small college this is a very small cause i run asmall call it's problems all the time problem the teacher has problems students have problems that staff has problems budget problems its problem but subhanallah diagnosis it's really the sins of our community the ummah we're sick ummah were not well we haven't been well for a long time", "long time and like the body as you get older, you get sicker. And so when they were young, when the Ummah was young it was full of health and vigor but the Prophet told us that towards these latter days we would be weak he said we would", "and eat from you like they ate from a plate of food. It's an amazing image, such an image that even during the colonial grab for the Muslim land some of the European cartoonists actually showed people around Turkey and they made turkey like a turkey and all the European powers were about to devour it. They didn't know the hadith but the image was there", "the Prophet saw what he saw is amazing and he's it's grievous you know he has for uh the conditions of the ummah and in a sound narration that Imam Al-Ghomari has a nice commentary on, he said that the prophet has shown the actions of his own but there's a khilaf about whether", "Every individual or whether it's the general condition of the ummah. But many of them say he sees the conditions of the people individually also and people could say how is that possible on human beings? We have super computers now that are monitoring all of us. They monitor our phone conversations. There's apparently some giant mainframe in New Zealand. So this is a machine made by man", "of the prophet made by the creator of man can't make his super computer ability to see people's actions? The prophet is not God and we don't do, we don' t make the mistakes of Christians. He said, Don't praise me like the Christians praised Jesus. Don't go to an extreme.", "because the Prophet made a dua, but don't make me an idol that's worshiped. So there are people who worship Ali, but they don't worship the prophet. If you don't see the miracle in that..." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/The Concept of Taqwa in the Qur_an -- Shaykh Hamza_gxpssttRHA8&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742888246.opus", "text": [ "One of the extraordinary aspects of the Qur'an is that because it's a non-linear book when you read it, unlike for instance the Bible or previous dispensations that have come to people. It's constantly pulling you back into these core virtues so there are verses that will come in different ways again and again.", "concepts in the Quran is their idea of Taqwa and this is why it's foundational. In fact, the very first verse that gives a command in the Qur'an is that we are told in Surah Al-Baqarah", "So worship your Lord, humanity and know that He created you. The one who created you and those before you so that you don't think you're in some kind of infinite regress or circular type of reasoning there was a beginning to all this. There was a first parents Adam and Eve", "your species had a beginning. Although you came from your parents, your parents had parents who had parents all the way back. There's no infinite regress and there is no circular reasoning. You have to arrive at a first cause. So Allah is reminding us that once you determine, once you understand that you have a Lord, you have to worship that Lord. And the purpose of that worship is to achieve what the Qur'an calls", "that perhaps you might gain this piety. Taqwa is a difficult word to pin down because it has a semantic field that gives a lot of nuanced meanings, but primarily it has to do with prevention. Waqaya is prevention and so when you taqi , when you ward off something, you're warding off harm. The word in Arabic for believer, mu'min means the one who secures", "secures. Al-Mu'min is one of the names of God, because God secures us. Aamana means to secure something from Amina Ya'manoo means to be secure so Aamna means to Secure Something How do you secure something as a believer? Bilah. I have secured myself through God in other words with God I find security and this is at the essence of what Taqwa is it's a way of protecting yourself", "through your devotion to your Lord. And so no matter what comes to you, you will be in a good situation. So for instance when we read the Quran in a very interesting hadith about the latter days in which Sayyidina Ali heard the Prophet ﷺ say that calamities civil strife sedition fitna would continue and become so constant", "eventually it would become like portions of a dark black night. And that's certainly the case in some places right now in the world. There are Muslims that their lives are like portions, of a Dark Black Night and the Prophet when he said that Sayyidina Ali said to the Prophet what's the way out of that? How do we get out of situation? And this is one of the interesting things about the companions they always ask the right question if you see hadiths", "If you see hadiths where they ask questions, they always ask the right question. He didn't say oh how terrible that day is going to be. No he wanted to know what's the right out? How do we get out of that situation and the reason that he asked that question in my estimation is because he knew a Quranic principle. Whoever has taqwa of God,", "him an exit strategy. God will always give him an way out of a situation, always. This is a promise. وَمَنْ يَتَّقِ اللَّهُ يَجْعَلْ لَهُ مَخْرَجًا This is known in Arabic as a Jumla Sharqiyah or a conditional sentence. If you fulfill this condition then this is the result and so if you have Taqwa you will have a way out. And so when the Prophet said it was the book of Allah, Kitabullah he told them", "and therein is the revelation of what will happen to you in your graves, and the revelation that will happen after you.", "The historical nature of them is not what's important. It's the lessons that are important, and that's why it's sacred history in that way. So we could never prove the Garden of Eden or what happened in the Garden Of Eden but we know that it is sacred history In order for us to understand the lessons of the beginning of our species. The most constant story that we find in the Quran coming in different ways with different nuances", "nuances is the story of Pharaoh and Moses, of Pharaon and Musa. This conflict between good and between evil, between humility and between arrogance, between the divine revelation and between one's own independent thought free of revelation, the difference between those who exalt themselves", "who serve others and those who have others serve them. This is the fundamental problem on this planet, and the people of the prophetic tradition, the Mosaic people, the Jesuit people, The Muhammadan people, sallallaahu alayhi wa salam, and prayers and peace be upon all of the prophets, these are the people service, and that's why even if you look at the religious iterations that exist today,", "In the next session I'm going to talk about Taqwa and its meaning. So, Taqwah itself... This is what Ibn Ashar one of the great Moroccan scholars said in his summation that Taqwah is Imtithal it's to obey the commandments of God", "commandments of God and ijtinaab, it's to avoid the prohibitions. So there is awamr an-nawahee in the Qur'an and in the hadith. There are things that the Prophet was commanded to tell us were prohibited or disliked or discouraged and then there's things that he was commanding to tell as either obligatory or recommended. So the idea of taqwa is essentially the people of taquah are the people that do what they", "what they were commanded and avoid what they prohibited. And they do this through a disciplining of the soul, so there's actually a discipline in the soul that occurs through your life, through practices. So one of things about practice is practice is what enables you to incrementally get better at something. For instance people who learn a new skill initially it's very difficult for them but over time as", "as they continue to practice, it gets easier and easier. This is the process of habituation. Everything is habit even devotion. So in fact the great Greek philosopher Aristotle said that virtue was basically the habituation", "over time through constant practice and discipline of the soul yourself to a virtuous practice until it becomes second nature. And so basically what taqwa is, is it is practicing these things and because all fall short of the glory of God, because people will always fall short in their practices that it becomes very difficult at times", "this we have what's called Tau'bah which is in Greek they call it Metanoia, which is very nice term which means to change your mind. Tau'dah is literally Tau'tabba means to turn or repent so it's going back to God and so the people of Taqwa when they fall short of the expectations upon them they repent,", "You have to make a U-turn. So you might see a sign that says something and you realize I'm going the wrong way, you have to do a U turn. Well in The Road of Life, you're going to sometimes make the wrong turns and then you're gonna get signs that tell you that you are on the wrong path. Now unfortunately what a lot of people do they just ignore the signs.", "In the end, those are basically roads to hell. There'll be hell in this life because the nature of sin is that it just creates a lot of misery. So when the Quran tells us, It's telling us that in the end victory is for taqwa, victory is piety, it's for conscientiousness, it' s for all these things and so an example of that there's a great poet Lowell who said", "who said, What he meant by that, truth forever on the scaffold. The scaffold is an edifice that you build to hang people so it's as if truth is always being strung up. So for instance", "If you look at the Qur'an, many of the Prophets are actually not successful. They're completely attacked by their own people but their success is in conveying the message despite the fact that they're killed, despite the facts that they turned upon. Ibrahim with Nimrod and his people was not successful in turning them back to God he was successful in conveing the message", "And this is the meaning of truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on throne. So Pharaoh chases Moses out of Egypt. Moses has to flee for his life but the point is that the scaffold sways the future, that the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice. This is what we have to be constantly reminded", "Al-aqibatu lil muttaqeen wal aqibatul taqwa", "Allah could have said, وَاصْبِرْ عَلَيْهَا Be patient with it. When you add something, it intensifies the meaning and here the letter that was added to the verb صبر يصبروا to be patient was ط which is an emphatic letter It's one of the emphatical letters in Arabic So it's a very strong وَاسْطَبِعْ عالَيها means to really be deeply patient in it استعين بالصبر والصلاة", "that seek help from prayer, from patience and prayer. And then Allah reminds us, we don't ask for provision. We're not asking you for provision What we are asking you is devotion. We will provide for you. We have to do those things that get the provision but the provision is there.", "over oppression. This is what prayer, at the essence of prayer it's in order for you to constantly go back to God no matter how difficult things get that you go back Allah with prayer. Take isti'ana, take awn from God, take your solace, your help, your succor from Allah . And so this is what Allah is telling us. Now in another verse in Surah Al-Qasr", "in Surah Al-Qasas, Allah says about that this abode of the afterlife that we have made. That they don't want to be exalted in the earth nor do they want corruption in the Earth and the end affairs for the people of Taqwa again it's a reminder", "has been set aside so the great victory if we don't we can there are times when the Muslims have seen victory in this world they're the people of truth when it was Bani Israel when the Israelites were on the truth God gave them victory over Pharaoh. Pharaoh was drowned he was he drowned in the ocean and God gave", "of truth. They were adhering to these principles and being guided by them. The Prophet gave victory also to the people of Jesus over his enemies at that time, so in that case it was the opposite now the people Israel who opposed Jesus at the time. So this is part of the problem with human beings", "So there are times when we're powerless, there are time's where we're in power. Depending on how we respond to that power is depending on who we're with. Are we with God or are we with Pharaoh? Those are the two choices. You're either with God of you're with Pharaoh and there's really no in between in this. And so this idea of the Daur al-Akhirah being placed for those who don't want to be exalted in the earth like Pharaoh. Pharaoh elevated himself in the Earth", "earth whereas the people of the Mosaic people, the Jesuit people, and the Muhammadan people peace be upon all of our prophets these are the people who humble themselves. وَعِبَادُ الرَّحْمٰنِ الَّذِين يَمْشُونَ عَلَى الْأَرْضِ هُوْنًا وَإِذَا خَاطَبُهُمْ الجَّاهِدُونُ قَارُوا سَلَّامًا The servants of the merciful and inshallah we're going to look at those 12 attributes that define", "The servants of the merciful who tread lightly on the earth. They walk lightly on Earth. يَمْشُونَ عَلَى الْأَرْضِ هُوْنَ They tread lightly in the earth It's interesting now we talk about carbon footprints, people that have heavy carbon footprints that pollute a lot. The people of Allah are people that they tread lightly upon the earth, they don't want to be exalted in the Earth and so this idea is that the Akhirah is made for those", "الذين لا يريدون علوم في الأرض والأفسادة", "Kutba alika masiyamu kama kutiba aala alladeena min qabrikum", "fasting is really a practice of taqwa, going back to the prayer. Fasting is a practice for taqwah. Zakat comes out of taquwah and certainly Hajj is a great personification of Taqwa because you enter into the ihram and then your very limited in what you can actually do while you're in the ihrram so taqawah is really about disciplining the soul about aligning oneself it's a vertical alignment with your Lord", "Most people are living on this horizontal plane and forgetting that there is actually another plane. There's a plane that penetrates this plane, and that is the vertical plane of reality. And so trying to get to the point where we have the sun of reality directly over our head, the shadow disappears, that's at the essence of what taqwa is. One of the things that the Qur'an says,", "Isti'ana, take help with God through God. Get your help through God and patience. إِنَّ الْأَرْضَ لِلّٰهِ يُورِثُهَا مَنْ يَشَاءُ مَمْ عِبَادِهِ وَالْعَاقِبْةُ لِلمُتَّقِينَ So the Quran is telling us that the earth is God's. He gives it to whomever he pleases. اللهم مارك المرتوط المركب من تشاه O possessor of all dominion you give dominion to whom you please", "Allah can give dominion to whomever He pleases. So, Pharaoh can rule Egypt and Moses can be the one who's oppressed in Egypt but that dominion is from Allah . This is a reminder of the Qur'an not to be deluded by the outward, not to fall into this false perception of reality where you think that the people in power are independent from God", "from God. No, they're only there because Allah has enabled them to be there and when He removes their power, their power goes it can go in one night, it can in one heartbeat all of their powers gone. It can go with a stroke. Allah can reduce the most powerful human being to a muttering idiot this is the reality of life on earth", "They don't seek their help in the outward illusion of the world. They seek their health from the source of the World, from what's behind the world which is Allah . And for this reason their hearts can never be conquered. Their bodies can be conquered, they can be enslaved, they could be in the worst conditions but their hearts are for God. This is a reality of the people of Taqwa and so we're reminded that the earth is God's", "Again, but they're still His servants. It doesn't matter who they are. They're still in the servitude of Allah . But despite all of that, the end affair is for the people of taqwa. Now there's another verse with that one from Surah Al-A'raf. There's another", "Again, those who we have established in the earth what do they do once they get into power? And this is the difference between the people of Pharaoh and the people Moses. Once they get to power, they establish prayer, they take care of the poor people. See, Pharaoh does the opposite.", "Pharaoh makes people worship him and then he exploits the poor people. The people of taqwa are the people who when they're established in the earth, they establish the prayer, they give taqwah and they do amr bin maruf and nahi anamunkar. In other words, they command others to virtue because they're practicing it so that they're not hypocrites commanding people to do virtuous things without them practicing it. No.", "practicing it. No, they command others to virtue and they practice that virtue and prohibit the munkar, things that are foul, vulgarity. One of the hallmarks of our current civilization is its vulgarities. The Prophet despised vulgar language. He said that a believer is not fahash.", "that you will see obscenities manifest. And he said, You will see people being obscene b'takeluf. In other words, that very often when people get upset, they might use an obscenity out of frustration. Here, they'll do it for effect. In another words, tafahush means that they're doing it on purpose. They're specifically, purposefully using obsceneties. And so, that's a very bad sign.", "bad sign. One of the interesting words in the Greek language is, the word for vulgarity, aperekalia means inexperienced in things beautiful so the Greeks understood what vulgarities was it was people that didn't they had no understanding of what beauty is because beautiful languages never obscene or vulgar and words do have a reality", "People say, oh what's the big deal about that word? No. There is a big deal with that word. It has a reality. It had an impact. It was a foulness. What it indicates as foul and so the people of virtue are people that they're behaving beautifully and they're commanding others to behave beautifully and their avoiding the munkar. They're avoiding foul things. Things that should not be seen or heard. Those are the people", "And then Allah reminds us, Be patient. The aqiba, the end affair is for the people of taqwa. These reminders are constant in the Qur'an and we have to understand the reason for that is because truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on", "because this place is a place of tribulation. If truth was on the throne in the dunya, where's the tribulation? The tribulation is in these difficulties and this is why these religious teachings that empower people with these understandings are the most powerful teachings on this planet and that's why they're so dangerous. These are extremely dangerous doctrines", "because the people that understand them will never be fooled by the illusory power of Pharaoh and his minions. He has power in this world, but he does not have power in the next world. His power is completely obliterated in the Next World. In fact, the Prophet said that the tyrants would be raised up like ants on the Day of Judgment. They are going to be stepped on by the vast majority of humanity", "because they're nothing. They are nothing and this is the difference between the people of taqwa and the people who are deluded by the power of Pharaoh it's an empty power doesn't exist only God exists in reality and this what the people Allah know, they know that Allah will rectify every wrong", "will straighten every crookedness, will elevate every obeis and He will abase every elevated in this dunya. That's the nature. And this is what we believe in, it's what we accept and this is where we'll be raised up on insha'Allah ta'ala. May Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala give all of you taqwa in your hearts when you see the reality as reality. The Prophet said in a beautiful dua", "Oh Allah show me truth as it is in truth and give me the ability to follow it. And show me falsehood as it, falsehood and give be the ability avoid it." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/The cult of Satan Hiding from us- Shaykh Hamza Yus_QiJkSSsgBmY&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748542888.opus", "text": [ "of the time we're living in. And so, the question about authority, how did Muslims deal with this? Because again, one of the things that we can learn from the ancients is that they went through the same things that were going through. They had authority problems in the early part of Islam. They went through their own types of disintegration.", "The Sunnah Shia split is a schismatic split. And the Prophet said that you will split. He told us that. It's human nature. But then he said, but one group is guided. So everybody, if they're all claiming that, how is that claim substantiated? Because the Ismailis claim that they have the botany authority and this is what gives them the truth.", "chain of the twelve impeccable Imams that can't make mistakes. Within the Alawi or the Nusayri, also a sect, radical sect of the Shia tradition claims that they have a direct line to Ali who's an incarnate like the logos, like Jesus. So you have all these different competing", "what enables us to discern Haq from Ba'tal, the Furqan. What is that? And somebody was talking about assumptions earlier. It's a problem because we assume many things. Most people were simply born in a place and they take on the historical cultural nature of that place they were born. One philosopher terms them historical products. They're products of their historicity", "trapped in a religious, ethical, social economic situation that determines everything they're going to think about those things. And so we live in a time where people have pre-packaged ideas and really the great leisure domain of the time is to make people think that these are their own ideas. That they came up with them themselves.", "that this is some kind of self-actualization, that I believe these things and I came to these conclusions myself. Everything's relative. You can trace that there's a synod with that idea. That has a lineage, and you are in a chain of transmission when you make that statement. And we can trace", "There's also a chain of atheists. You're in a chain, you're in an isnad. Whatever position you take that you think is uniquely your own or original, you are in a train of transmission. Now from our perspective and I'm talking about from believers whether you're Christian or other traditions because almost all these religious traditions do believe in a dark realm those chains either go back", "Chains either go back to demonic sources or they go back", "He's your source But people don't recognize that Or you go back to حَدَّثْنِي عَنْ فُلَانٍ عَمْفُلًا عَعْنْ عِيسَىٰ Ibn Mary عن جبريل Right? Or from God So these are the basic The two فَرِقٌ فِالجَنَّ وَفَرِّقٌ في السَّعِير Those are the two chains You're in one or the other There's no other chain in dunya", "or you're in the chain of prophetic transmission. Now, Iblis, people forget that the occult... People don't want to deal with the occul. The occult is everywhere. You're dealing with a cultic phenomena everywhere. There are cultic elements in the way San Francisco was designed architecturally. There's a reason why Pier 33 is the central pier in San Francisco.", "in the actual street structure of San Francisco. Washington, D.C., is designed in an occultic design. Why? Because there are people that have religious beliefs, spiritual beliefs, and those spiritual beliefs impinge the way they see the world, the way", "developed a type of fuel that enabled the whole telecommunications period. And he was an open worshiper of whatever you want to call that dark force. He was open about it. It's on his Wikipedia site, and there's books about it So you have scientists that are in the occult that are at the highest levels. You have people", "Government at the highest levels that are in occultic rituals. And this is part of the world. The Christians have a saying from Paul, That our battle is not of the flesh and the blood, But it's with the principalities of darkness. And so if you want to know who's behind Syria, It's not the Alawiyah, It' s not the Iblis is behind that situation.", "These are dark forces working to destroy people's homes, to destroy their lives, to destroyed their livelihood. To make them suffer, to put them into a state of despair, ablaseh. To Make Them Question God Where is God? How could there be a god? How can he let little children suffer like this? these are the questions that Iblis always poses and People in weakened states", "when their faith is low, when they're suffering, they will succumb to those demonic insinuations. This is called telbisu iblis, the dupery of the devil. Telbisu Iblis" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/The Exit Strategy from your Dark Nıghts - Hamza Yu_z6l1SSdoCe4&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742883101.opus", "text": [ "The month of Ramadan, which the Qur'an was revealed in.", "fast, not just of your physical appetites but also what you put into your mind. Go on a fast from social media, go on a Fast from television if you're watching television, going to fast from all those things that are distracting us from really one of the most important things that we have in our life which is to focus on where we are and where we're going. And so this about spiritual development. So my advice", "benefit of this month to its utmost. Attempt at least one reading of the Qur'an, don't let this month go by without going through the entire Qur'aan. Hopefully you can also hear it recited in Taraweeh if you're able to and maybe give some portion of the night if you are able to. These are all really important. The doors of mercy are open and Allah is waiting for us to come back to Him.", "to him, returned to Him. One of the extraordinary aspects of the Qur'an is that because it's a non-linear book when you read it unlike for instance the Bible or previous dispensations that have come to people it's constantly pulling you back into these core virtues so there's verses", "One of the most important concepts in the Quran is the idea of Taqwa and this is why it's foundational. In fact, the very first verse that gives a command in the Qur'an is that we are told in Surah Al-Baqarah", "So worship your Lord, humanity and know that He created you. The one who created you and those before you so that you don't think you're in some kind of infinite regress or circular type of reasoning there was a beginning to all this", "So it's a reminder that you had a beginning, your species had a begining. Although you came from your parents, your parents had parents who had parents all the way back. There is no infinite regress and there is no circular reasoning. You have to arrive at a first cause. Allah is reminding us that once you determine, once you understand that you have a Lord, you have to worship that Lord. And the purpose of that worship is to achieve what the Qur'an calls", "Quran calls لَعْنُكُمْ تَتَّقُونَ that perhaps you might gain this piety. Taqwa is a difficult word to pin down because it has a semantic field that gives a lot of nuanced meanings, but primarily it has to do with prevention. Weqaya is prevention and so when you taqi, when you ward off something, your warding", "one who secures. Al-Mu'min is one of the names of God because God secures us. Aamana means to secure something, from Amina Ya'manoo it means to be secure so Aamna means to security something. How do you secure something as a believer? Bilal, I have secured myself through God in other words with God I find security and this is at the essence of what Taqwa is. It's a way of protecting yourself", "from harm through your devotion to your Lord. And so no matter what comes to you, you will be in a good situation. So for instance when we read the Quran in a very interesting hadith about the latter days in which Sayyidina Ali heard the Prophet ﷺ say that calamities, civil strife, sedition, fitna would continue and become so constant", "that eventually it would become like portions of a dark black night. And that's certainly the case in some places right now in the world. There are Muslims that their lives are like portions, but dark black nights and the Prophet when he said that Sayyidina Ali said to the Prophet what's the way out of that? How do we get out of this situation? And this is one of the interesting things about the companions they always ask the right question", "question. If you see hadiths where they ask questions, they always ask the right question. He didn't say oh how terrible that day is going to be. No he wanted to know what's the right out? How do we get out of that situation and the reason that he asked that question in my estimation is because he knew a Quranic principle", "God, God will always give him an exit strategy. God will ALWAYS give him a way out of the situation. Always! This is a promise. وَمَنْ يَتَّقِ اللَّهُ يَجْعَلْ لَهُ مَخْرَجًا This is known in Arabic as a Jumla Sharqiyya or a conditional sentence. If you fulfill this condition then this is the result and so if you have Taqwa you will have a way", "Allah, Kitab Allah. He told them فيه نبأ ما قبركم وخبر ما بعدكم It tells you what happened in the past and it gives you insights into what's going to happen in the future What that means is there are many stories in the Quran That our sacred history while we can't prove them in some historical account That archaeologists and others go through We believe them to be true because they've been revealed but", "but the historical nature of them is not what's important. It's the lessons that are important and that's why it's sacred history in that way so we could never prove the Garden of Eden or what happened in the Garden Of Eden, but we know that it is sacred history In order for us to understand the lessons of the beginning of our species The most constant story that we find in the Quran coming", "in different ways with different nuances is the story of Pharaoh and Moses, of Pharaon and Musa. This conflict between good and between evil, between humility and between arrogance, between the divine revelation and between one's own independent thought free of revelation, the difference between those who exalt themselves", "difference between those who serve others and those who have others serve them. This is the fundamental problem on this planet, and the people of the prophetic tradition, the Mosaic people, the Jesuit people, The Muhammadan people, sallallaahu alayhi wa salam, and prayers and peace be upon all of the prophets, these are the people service, and that's why even if you look at the religious iterations", "their religion seriously are people of service, whether they're Christians or Jews or Muslims. You will see that this is a fundamental hallmark of profoundly religious people, is that they serve others, they don't serve themselves and the reason they're serving others is because they're serving their Lord through the service of others but the reminder in the Quran is al-aqibatu littaqwa, that the end affair wal-aqi'batu littaquah, the end" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/The garbage you feed your mind - Shaykh Hamza Yusu_7p7UDLGiSTs&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743301182.opus", "text": [ "People don't realize how significant not only life is but how significant our actions in life are no matter who we are. Whether were a ruler or whether were somebody who's simply cleaning streets, everybody's life is momentous because they were created by Allah and brought here for a purpose", "And not only that, but when you look at what it took to bring one human life into existence which is why the Qur'an reminds us actually quoting the Jewish tradition. You know that to take one life as if that you killed all of humanity because when you think about just all the lives that existed before our lives to bring us as individuals each", "it will boggle the mind just to reflect on it, of your two parents and then there's four. And then there is eight and 16. And that just goes on until you've got this massive amount of ancestors. And they go back at a certain point so they go out like this but at a", "of all these inverted pyramids that go back to the actual pyramid, which is Adam and Eve. So the entire humanity is just this massive pyramid of human beings that have existed from the beginning of time until our time. And so nine months in the womb, that's a very small portion", "people don't realize the momentousness of life and that's why to turn it into lab to turn It into activity playful activity and play is part of life, but it's the first part of Life It's not you're supposed to get out of it very quickly Because children play as work so they're actually playing", "But in fitra, most girls, not all girls because there are tomboys. But most girls like to play with dolls because they see their mothers taking care of the baby. This is fitra so every traditional society has that quality and so to pervert the fitra of people And to try to take an anomalous element and make that the norm it's called centralizing you know the peripheral", "and peripheralizing the central. This is modern demonic theory where everything's inverted, and that's one of the things that the Prophet ﷺ told us in the latter days, things would be inverted, what our tradition calls qalb al-haqa'iq. It's the inversion of realities. So fitra suddenly is called a social construct. In other words, it's society that creates these things, not the natural inherent", "being and so they pervert human beings. And it creates a lot of confusion, and then you have all this mental illness and people unwell because they're not in nature like we are meant to be in nature. And so the more distant we get from our nature, the more unwell we get. And that's why this religion is called Deen al-Fitra because it brings people back to that principial nature.", "One of the elements of our nature is to worship. If you study human history, human beings worship. You're going to worship something. If don't worship Allah, you will worship something else or many things and that's why the Prophet talked about the devotees of clothes. The people devoted to clothes they are worshipping clothes", "clothes and their whole life is surrounded by clothes. And then there's people that worship their stomachs, so their whole lives are around food. They put their whole live around food, and then there're people it's all about power. This one of the really strange things about the modern period, it's so obsessed with this idea of power whereas in our tradition we're more interested in powerlessness because we attribute all power to Allah", "to Allah. Like we are powerless, Allah is all-powerful and so whatever figurative power He has given us it's from Him. It's only through Allah . It's not inherent to us So this chapter which in many ways", "Imam Shafi famously said, all we really need. He said if only Surah Al-Asr was revealed, the surah would have been sufficed for us just sort of that also would have suffice for humanity. We're at loss by time because every moment that occurs can never be got back you can't get it back", "get it back and that's why this modern world that puts you on hold. It's so sinister because they don't let you talk to a human being so that you can solve your problem, they put you on the whole and then they take that time from you and even worse to add insult to injury, they'll put music on. This is how sick this culture is, it's so unwell", "unwell and that's why everybody is unhinged because I think about the amount of practice that your average Muslim does. I'm talking about average Muslims not the sabiqoon al awwadoon, you know, not those people. I am talking about an average Muslim who just said dedicated Muslim five prayers a day praying on time cuz that's it that's a committed Muslim you pray on time five", "outside of that. Some recitation of Quran, even if it's Yasin and Waqiaa and Mulk every day there is some regular practice of Quran. I'm talking about baseline and then the nafilah prayers at least three Shafa'an wa-tar and two before Fajr subh and then two after Maghrib. At least that. And yet despite", "if you do that baseline, you will find yourself incredibly frustrated. And include in that also that you have a worldview that tells us how important patience is. Like your Lord tells you to be patient. So what about all these people that don't have any of that? And then you wonder why people shoot up schools and why people completely lose it and do all these horrible things because they're so unwell and they have no medicine.", "the things uh city al-jaman not the egyptian but the famous moroccan he said he has a book called the meaning of man man and he said in that book and actually i think he took it from um even atayla's because in in the haikum of ibn attila", "the sustenance of the listeners so he says in his book that words are to the soul what food is to the body that the meaning that you live on is what nurtures your soul just like the food that you eat nurtures", "if you're watching the news and all these horrors are unfolding before you that's all gida that's, all nourishment for your soul but like junk food will destroy your body junk meaning will destroy. Your soul And this is where we're at people are really sick and you wonder why it's amazing We're doing as well as we are to be honest with you as far as i'm concerned Like I told people people think the muslims are violent with what you have done", "you have done to this community in the last 500 years it's a miracle how peaceful the Muslims are. It's a Miracle! Just study the history of what happened in our lifetime, just in our life time. Afghanistan over 1 million dead Iraq over 1million dead Yemen tens of thousands Syria tens of", "Palestine, just in the last year. And then they wonder like why are they so upset? What's wrong with them? No it's a miracle that because this book is what keeps people you know they just one, the really intelligent and devout ones know we deserve a lot of this as corrupts and as distant", "This is purification. The Prophet said, the punishment of my ummah is in this world it's not in the next world and so that's part of it and also we you know I mean there are so many things but I'm convinced that the Muslims are far more peaceful than they're giving credit to our community. I'm serious", "I'm serious. I genuinely believe that because we're one out of every probably four or five people, now they're admitting that the population numbers are grossly under exaggerated and the idea that we're the second largest religion. Europe if they're calling that a Christian... Europe is Christian, they're empty, the churches are empty", "mosques are full all over the Muslim world, mosques were full so this you know So reminding of our khalq because this surah is about yawm al qiyamah it's about that Allah is Qadir first of all Allah is capable of sending a warner and messenger", "warner and a messenger so we're not deists or theists that believe in an impersonal god. We actually believe that in a God who out of benevolence sends people to explain to us because everything that we make of any sophistication when you buy it, you get the operating manual. Now one of the interesting things about human beings nobody reads", "Nobody reads operating manuals. And then they get frustrated, especially men. Women are better at that than men are. But nobody reads operating manuals. You get a new car and there's a book. They give you a book but you just try to figure it out on your own pushing buttons and see which one turns this or that on. This is the human condition. So Allah sent an operating manual", "about this incredibly complicated creature how you work you have reason you have emotion you have appetites they need to be aligned they need it ordered and here's how you do it one of the ways is fasting to learn to control your appetite another is swallowing your anger what call me mean a light to learn", "you don't blow up literally and figuratively because some people now literally blow themselves up they're so angry so and then how to operate this how to make this function properly so we have a whole understanding that comes with it so the khalq of the insan is very important", "Allah created man from a seed of clay", "the things that we are composed of, it's mud and earth. It's mud but it's literally water and earth those are the two components of the planet. And so we have in us, we have calcium, we potassium, we these minerals and then we have this amazing skeletal system and muscles, the brain all these things.", "human being as a notfa and the notfa is the zygote right this is which is is translated and i genuinely believe it's mistranslated as clot of blood it doesn't mean clot of", "It literally is a perfect description of what it does. And this is all microscopic, you can't see this. We only know these things now so the Quran is very accurate in even Keith Moore, the embryologist admitted that the Quran really is the first accurate picture of embryonic stages and there was no access to this at the Prophet's time. They believed in the homunculus, that there was a miniature human that just grew. This was a common belief", "a common belief different views so that's the alaq comes it just clings to the it embeds itself and then it looks like is a chewed lump of flesh and if you look at it at this stage and this all occurs in the first 40 days that hadith was clearly misunderstood", "understood in the, anybody who knows modern embryology knows. And there was a khilaf about the hadith because there were an opinion that all happened in the first 40 days even though it says thumma, thummmah, thummah but its not 120 days because its way beyond that by 42 days you already have the fetus is developed. The beginning of the fetuses, the embryo and then so", "so the then the the mudra becomes irama and then look at the switch for kasona the only time in this in this uh this process allah changes from khalaqna to kasona and rahm said if you look at", "The flesh is a clothing because the thing about clothes, you can replace them. You can't replace bone. You actually have to implant bone from somewhere else but lahm will grow back. So he says kasona al-idhamah lahma isn't appropriate because it's the kiswa. It's like a... Because you can lose a piece and it grows back just like the cloth, you", "And this is where, this is the insha of the khalq akhar is a new creation. And this the rational human being, the human being that has , which is different from all the other creatures. They have a type of intelligence but not the intelligence that we've been given. That this is intelligence that's we've be given. This is a you know it's", "glory or blessed is God the best of creators, it's the one done with the ihsan and then after that you will die like he's created us to die so we have to go through this next stage and like maulana says I was mineral", "and then I died and became vegetable, and then i died as vegetable and became animal. And then I die as animal and become human, and I will die as a human and become an angel. What have I ever lost by dying? It just gets better. Somebody told me today that Sidi Abdallah Schleifer", "who know him, but he was a Jewish convert to Islam. He's very interesting man I met him several times at different places, but had just died on the 27th night right? So actually in he died in Turkey. But he had been a beat, he was beat in New York", "New York, the Beats. People don't know the Beets. They're too young now. But they were before me also. I'm old but I'm not that old. So the Beates became the hippies right? That was the next iteration and then he had a deep sense of justice which many righteous, the real Jews do.", "sense that's why so many have been out protesting about what's happening but he had a deep set so he went and joined fidel castro and fought with the like in cuba and he said he was an atheist and so when when they won there he said okay where next and he says palestine so he joined the plo this is true story", "all of them were Marxist, but he actually ended up becoming a Muslim. One thing he told me is that they were much more ethical than these so-called Islamists today just in terms of what they would do. He ended up having a very interesting life. This one amazing things about this religion is that", "All these different people find their place in it. I don't know why I brought him up, there was a reason. Yeah that he passed away." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/The Islamic Approach to Inheritance - Shaykh Hamza_USNb4Q6A6jQ&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743059833.opus", "text": [ "All of you are dead. You are all going to die. You're all dead, and they're all still dead.", "of Adam, will all taste death which is a beautiful expression in Arabic because it's an experience. It's not something that you can describe. You can't really describe the taste of strawberries. Somebody has to taste strawberries and death is the same. In fact there was a German philosopher Martin Heidegger that I studied long time ago in a graduate course", "He actually, he really thought that the only single original act that you will do in your life is to die. Like he said everything else you're going to learn from everybody else but he said death will be uniquely yours. Nobody can do that for you or teach you how to do it. You can see other people die but you have your unique death so he actually, that was central to his philosophy what he called a being unto death like to embrace your death and accept it.", "accept it. Yesterday in the khutbah, I mentioned the hadith that Prophet said in a hadith, , these hearts oxidize. And are there any doctors in the room? Just curious. No? One? What type of medicine do you practice? I'm a research scientist. OK. So now they know the oxidation, these free radicals", "in order to prevent oxidation, you have to polish the metal. And he said .. By doing much remembrance of death and also recitation of the Quran. So this really is a death meditation because we all, the prophet warned us of not allowing time to go by without having a will.", "And, you know, in the early part of Islam there was the Wasiyah. Because the rules, Nisa hadn't come down yet. And it's interesting that it's in the chapter of women inheritance. That the fact that Allah revealed in the Chapter of Women because women prior to Islam were... You know, it was not a good situation for the women and in the people that were added on that the Jahiliyyah did not consider for inheritance", "for inheritance, most of them were women. So the concern for making women giving women some kind of independence in their wealth was very important and so hopefully you know we have a legal expert on both the Islamic fara'id or furod, the inheritance laws mawarif", "our brother, Abdullah Qureshi who is a graduate of Zaytuna. Came here out of high school. His father has been a major supporter of the college but he went from here to... He was shortlisted at Harvard Law but he got into also top law university Georgetown and graduated recently and so he has a special interest in this subject", "student who's now no longer in the role of a student but in the roll of a productive member of our society so happy to have him here with me we also have Sheikh Mashuq who is a very serious Shafi scholar I think one of the best scholars we have in the United States and we and we have also", "and also studied the tariqah, the laws of inheritance. Which traditionally was that area they tested you on to see a scholar's weight. They would test them on the inheritance because even though math is basic, you get into some very tricky problems in trying to work out how to resolve the portions. So I'm gonna just here", "hand it over to you and then we can, you know. It's really an honor to be here with all of you and I was, Brother Noman was giving us a tour of the campus before and SubhanAllah it's so amazing when I was in law school here at Berkeley,", "Alhamdulillah, inshallah. These people do.", "in the room. So that's amazing. The other thing I was thinking about on the way here, subhanAllah, is we're talking about inheritance and this conversation it's so rare these conversations you know the Prophet talks about like this this conversation discussions just aren't talked about very much in our community. And that it's half of knowledge. Given that life is one half and death is the other half. SubhanAllah.", "So I was thinking, subhanAllah we're talking about inheritance and he also mentions that al-ulama'u wa rathas ul anbiyaa. That the scholars are the heirs of the prophets. And so we're able to take essentially everybody here and joining online is receiving a portion of that inheritance inshaAllah from this conversation benefiting you and the institution. So we're very excited. We have a lot of questions. We're gonna try to get through some of the questions that Abdullah and I had been working together for the last year and a half", "kind of study these questions um about how we apply inheritance in the united states and so i want to sort of present some both theory and practical questions about you know inheritance and its application in the United States but maybe to start if we could just talk to to kind of give a frame of as you mentioned in certain nisaa how sort of when these ayat were revealed", "to the Islamic inheritance system and some of the wisdoms that underlie that? Well, yeah. I think women were more like chattel too. The aristocratic women have always had a high position even in jahiliyyah so there's some exaggeration I think amongst some of ulama about how bad it was for the... But the aristocratic woman were very powerful they always are in every civilization", "you know, women find a way. Women have always found ways of expressing their power. You know, kaid in the Kaida al-Qunnaadhim I mean one of the things that they say about that is that when women are prevented from a kind of ability to assert their power openly, they find other strategies of doing it and that's where the kaid comes. And as one of Moroccan faqihas", "faqihat said, you know, kaid is also an attribute of God. So it's not necessarily always a negative thing. It's people find ways to assert their authority. And so but many women especially the more impoverished and we shouldn't forget that Arabia was a very impoverish area. I mean Mecca was a fruitful area Medina was a fruitful area but many people lived in what we would call today abject poverty. There was a lot of starvation", "Clothes were very expensive, textiles, these type of things. So a lot of people wear rags. We know about Sahaba that used to they would run after the prayer back to their home and then the prophet asked them why they would do it. And he said the wife needed his ridaf to cover her nakedness because she didn't have enough cloth. So we kind of forget about the environment.", "And that's one of the signs that the Prophet told us about the latter days is that there would be an explosion of wealth. And one of things he said was that there will be a lot of food, which very interesting because historically the Muslims were encouraged by the Prophet to have at least a year supply of dry foods in their homes and he kept that it would be exhausted during the year because he would give it out to the Fuqara and the Masaqeen but it was his sunnah to actually have supplies in the home for", "in the home for famine because famine was so common in many places until very recently. I mean, it still is in certain places but it's not because of in the past. That has to do with just bad distribution and neglect from... 200 years ago Algeria sent bumper crops to France during one of their famines. So the Muslims used to send aid to non-Muslim countries. We know that Turkey sent a huge", "several shiploads of wheat to Ireland during the potato famine that was prevented from getting there by the British because they didn't want to look bad. So, they actually stopped the ships so the Turks had to smuggle food in. We don't think about that type of difficulty that people have. Inheritance wealth is always a problem. The nafs is shahi'ah by nature and", "is . And when Allah says, , so it's in a passive form. Like the one who doesn't prevent himself but he has prevented from his own greed. So greed is part of human nature and people get very strange around money. The Arabs say wealth is the blood brother of the soul.", "So there are people that find it harder to part with wealth than they do with their own lives, which is why sometimes we have suicides when people lose vast amounts of wealth. It's as if they died because they've lost their wealth. So I think it's important to remember that. But the women, I think, did suffer a lot. One of the things that Islam did, which", "They gave the woman. And the purpose of the dowry really was to let her start with some financial independence coming into the thing. So I think there are a lot of rules in Sharia that were designed to give women a type of independence because the dominant dependence that a woman, especially women in the childbearing years, the dominant dependents that they have on men is money.", "And they are the maintainers of women. And that is a natural order, and it has been for millennia. And so the idea of giving a woman some type of financial independence, one of things that fascinates me even though there's a khidaf about this but in the Maliki's Khidm Batina for a woman is generally unless she's like an aristocratic-type woman then the husband has to provide help for her in the house.", "But for normal women, she can actually charge her husband for domestic service. And I think it's only recently in the last 40 or 50 years that economists started thinking about actually women's contribution to the GDP inside the homes. Like, it wasn't really factored in. They just took all this labor that's done without any monetary exchange.", "was already considering this 1,400 years ago. It's one of the many things that the West kind of catches up on. It takes them usually about a thousand maybe give or take two or three hundred years like slip-on shoes. So I guess building upon that, the system of inheritance with the Farahid comes and", "and mandates, you know, in addition to the obviously discretionary we'll see a portion that a person is entitled to. At least the residuary portion is in predetermined shares. Fara'id. Right. Yeah. So though the reason I think that is like my own family, on my grandparents side they were very wealthy it wasn't true for my generation but from my grandparents generation", "and my great grandparents, but the money was destroyed by fighting over the wills. And lawyers took a huge amount of my maternal grandfather's legacy because they split over the Will. And I think that's one of the things that destroys families is fighting over... You must see this all the time. So I think it's part of the Hikmah of... Because this is one of few areas in the Sharia there is some difference", "but it's relatively small. It's remote and like residual, like Maliki put it into the public, you know, the , things like that, but they're very small and don't occur that often. The majority... This is an area where the Quran clearly defines who gets a half, who gets 1 3rd, who get 1 8th, who gots 1 4th, Who gets 2 3rds? I mean all that defined very clearly", "it has a, you know the primary inheritors are to preserve that solid family. That's very important and then the secondary ones, it's the extended family because I think a lot of people, Vivek Ramaswamy has been talking a lot about how central the nuclear family is. The nuclear family already a broken family like people don't think about that.", "of what was once real family. And Zimmerman in his book on civilization and family, he argues that there's three types of families. There is a clan family which governments do not like because they present threats to governments. When you have the Mujaddadi clan in Afghanistan, that is a serious clan and they have clients or the Qatani in Morocco", "in Morocco was a threat to the government. I mean, Moulini Abdel Hafid actually had one of them killed because he was so worried about you know, the threat that he presented too. So but then you have what he called the domestic family and that is the best family which is an extended family with uncles and aunts and cousins because it takes the burden of government in taking care when families break down whereas the nuclear family", "According to Zimmerman, he wrote this in 1947. He was a Harvard sociologist and he said the nuclear family was the worst form of family because the burden on the government when it broke up was immense right? And so Islam is there to preserve you know one of my teachers said that the Sharia, the fundamental maqsad of the Shariah I mean we have the six but of all", "one is preservation of family. Because if that breaks down, everything else breaks down. And so if you look at the hadith when Iblis sends his saraya out, right? So when they come back he said, what did you do? He said . You didn't do anything. And then one of them says ..", "So I thought about that hadith and I realized, you know he is a metaphysician. Iblis. So he was going to first causes like murder, ah you didn't do anything. Stealing? You didn't anything. But you do that, you get everything else. You get all of that social dysfunction and that's what he knew. And so inheritance is fundamentally to preserve the family from breaking up over something as insignificant", "as property in terms of our hearts. So SubhanAllah, I think in America, in particular what's interesting is that they say about some 30 or maybe 40% of people have created an estate plan. I think anecdotally the Muslim community it's way lower and it's an interesting irony given our tradition is so rooted", "focused in on thinking about death and remembering death in every capacity. And yet, at the same time there's this just lack of awareness about the rules and understanding the rules. We want to shift a little bit to some of the wisdom behind some of those rules and the challenges that people have in understanding the rule in sort of today's modern context. So I think the first question maybe even just foundationally is these rules that come into Quran", "of all the injunctions in the Quran, are they binding upon us as Muslims in America in 2023? Or are these things open to reinterpretation like other issues. I mean you know I feel first of all these are generally there's no room for . Like when you have a text that's unequivocal", "If it's like that, then we have no opinion. In other words, for people who don't know this terminology, so the Quran everything in it is if it's . So that means that we know this is from God but", "And the dilalah or the significations of the verses, dilalat al-alfad. There's differences of opinion because language is ambiguous very often. You know, if you read the verse in Surah Al Qasas about the man who came, you know, rajulun yasa' min aqsa madina, right? So in one verse, in that verse it could be that he came", "he came and he was from the furthest part of the city. But Yaseen clarifies it, it's mubayan because that one is mubham. So in Yasein it says, waja min aqsal madeenati rajulun yasa'a. So there's an example where something that's ambiguous in the first one like if I say jaa rajulum min Suria so you could live in Berkeley but you're originally from Syria", "it's very clear that, oh you came from Syria. So in one it's mubham and another it's mubeyyin so sometimes things are ambiguous and other times they're clear when it is unclear there's room for ijtihad and that's why we have a lot of difference of opinion and I believe that's from the maqasid of Sharia because had God wanted He could've gave us absolutely unambiguous legal statutes for everything and we would've been robots just programmed", "But language by its nature is ambiguous because it forces us to think, it forces to do Ishtihad. So Ishtihad is part of our religion and a very central part of the religion. Most of these verses are unambiguous. Fractions. There's no room for reinterpretation of what half means or what one sixth means or one eighth. You can't misinterpret these things.", "reason to go against these things means you're going against Nasr al-Quran and putting yourself in a very dangerous... If you reject it, you're outside of Islam. If you just don't want to follow it because you're in Ma'asiyah, you are still a Muslim but you're putting yourself into a very danger place with God. Now there are considerations in our time which are important. One, because we are reduced to families that don't have the same type of social structures", "structures. So the wilaya of a man for a woman in the zoj, right? The reason there's awali is because women are very often oppressed. There are men who are oppressed and they estimate that it's anywhere between 20% and 30% in marriages that have domestic problems. The men are actually suffering more than the women but these are all debatable because we you know it's hard to... But", "from the muscle. Don't oppress them in that way, especially because we've been given this . And it is a , it's not a big difference but it is there and it's of .. It's not there to oppress, it's there to serve and help. So that's really important for us to remember", "that women do have these things. So because of that, I have seen many cases in the United States where I clearly believe a woman was oppressed because of following the letter of the law, of the Sharia. And this is where Istihsan comes in and so I'll give you an example. I had a discussion with Sheikh Abdullah because we were talking about community property in the", "So they view it as a woman's works 20 years in a home, taking care of her husband. Should we clarify community property? Yeah yeah. The idea here in California or in... One of the worst, yeah. It's generally prevalent on the west coast of the United States and certain jurisdictions where all the wealth that is acquired inside of marriage is deemed to be the community", "then the 50-50 split would occur. So it's actually... And this is... Yes, so in Sharia, a woman's wealth is her wealth. Khadija, whatever she earned was hers. And the Prophet ﷺ, whatever he earned was his in their relationship, right? So Sharia that's what it says. If a woman has her own private business, she makes her money. And what's interesting is a woman", "So she has no obligations of maintenance over a man unless she chooses. Like if the man gets sick and she can work, but that's de gratis. I mean, that's from the goodness of her heart and she'll get a reward for that. But and so in California, because a man's out there working like, you know, I mean comedians, this is the fodder for comedians. You know, these men who have like $100 billion", "and takes half of it, right? And all she was on his arm at those galas and things like that. So that, Sheikh Abdullah just said, you know, it's a . And so I explained to him how they view it, like here is somebody who is enabling this man to be out there, and she creates the home in the domestic environment that renews him to go out. That's the idea with the underlying thing. Yeah, and then she's probably ironing his shirts", "they've got maids to do that. But, you know, in most situations she's doing the theory underlying it. And so when it breaks down, you should get half of it. So I explained that to him and he said, you like from an is there a sign? And I mean, there's different types of this test. But the basic idea behind it is where the letter of the law can be can actually end up being oppressive or unjust", "or unjust, the faqih sees something in the situation that takes him outside of the letter of the law. And he does something because he deems it. It's something I mean some say . You know, it's something that he understands in his own mind but really can't express it. But there is an intuitive element to istihsan where this doesn't seem right.", "up, you know determining a situation where the woman should get more perhaps. Like I've seen women lose the home because the man bought the home and she's a believer and he just says well I bought the it's my home. That to me if especially in a nuclear family situation that's a volume because I have seen women just literally end", "We really need our own civil courts. I mean, one of the beauties of the United States and the Jews really understand this and they utilize it. So the Jewish community has their own civil court for devout Jews where they actually have rabbis. Exactly. And we can do this. Yeah. And these are binding legally if you once you sign, you have to accept the arbitration.", "to reconcile and come to that. So I think there is cases where we have to be really careful. So, I have two thoughts before Abdullah will jump in. The first on the idea of community property and . It's usually present over Islamic inheritance and then we'll talk about what's in following people often say some Islamic inheritance rules are unfair to women. What's interesting is if you take the community property rule", "it the woman who works in california uh and the husband let's say doesn't work yeah under islamic law she would get a hundred percent right it's her money but under californias progressive you know seemingly progressive rules he actually gets 50 right right so it's like it's often important to it goes both ways it goes one way you know and so if we invert that that's important um", "you know, the fractions that you said there are versus there's no room to figure, to reinterpret what is a half or what is 1 3rd and what is 4th. But you do have the ability to determine what are we dividing up? Like what is the of before we get started and there's a husband and a wife who actually owns what like that's the first conversation that we have exactly. Is this 50-50? Is this 100-0? Is it 75-25? She's got jewelry. It's hers. So defining that you can't define fractions without knowing", "fractions without knowing the denominator. That was a very sexist, stereotypical statement I apologize you know but I mean many women have gold jewelry especially our Muslim women have 24 karat gold jewelry which is quite valuable you know so yeah that's a good point what because is the car you know did he give her the car then it's her car yeah yeah it's not so and most of time as you can imagine that conversation has never taken place right so now when first spouse dies that's really", "without having that conversation, even internally. Yeah, that's a really good point. Is that the area then that you would say has the most room to adjust for differences in today's society? I'll give you an example. I know many situations where family situations where the sons are very well-to-do and the women aren't. They don't need the inheritance whereas the woman does. In those type of situations,", "arbitration because you know in our tradition and I don't know about the Hanafi Madhab but in the Maliki Madhab, if the inheritors are in agreement then they can come to an agreement with the person who's doing the will where one of the inheritor gets more than the others. So let's take this question, Shafiq. Because this is like the question that's presented out of all of the questions", "the first question is the first ayah, this share of two to one male to female. Yeah which is the son and the daughter. The son and a daughter. And I mean that again the woman's wealth is discretionary. The man by binding by Sharia is going to have to take care of that daughter if she doesn't have anybody to care for her. That becomes", "obligated to care for the parents if they become destitute and need care. I mean, there's a lot of obligations on the wealth of men that... The inherited wealth. Inherited wealth that don't exist with the women. I really given much more free reign. Their wealth is discretionary. I other than Zakat, they pay Zakat but outside of Zakat their wealth is just discretionary whereas the man has the Qiwama he's got the obligations of maintenance", "maintenance. He has a lot of, you know and these things again, things are breaking down. I mean these worked very well in traditional societies. We're not in a traditional society and I think that's where the questions come, is there room for Ishtihad? The argument is essentially that, that there is no legal enforcement mechanism today for the girl or daughter to go to the Qadi and say my son needs to pay my rent. But there are certain things like for instance we have 1.7 billion Muslims.", "Say Europe and America become Muslim. Now we have 2.7 billion Muslims, what do we do? Create another Mecca so that people can make Hajj there as well or 10 Meccas? We can't do that. There are certain things that we just do not have. And this is why istiqaa'ah is foundational in our tradition, what you're able to do. It's what you are able to", "There are ways of getting around things, and this is for the fuqaha and the mushtahidun to work out. And unfortunately, and This is part of why we in the United States have to create world-class institutions where we can develop our own scholars and our own mushthahidin because one of the rules of the mufti they're really not supposed to give iftara outside of their own area. They should you know The Mufti should live in the area he should be local", "Because he knows the customs. Like, custom has legislation to a certain degree. So these are important considerations. But this is ijtihad and it's difficult to do. And like I said, If the nas is qat'i al-warud an ad-dilala there's no ijtihad in it. There are situations where the tahqiqan manat which", "where the faqih is looking at the manat. Does the hukum apply in this situation? Those situations, and that's the most difficult form of ijtihad. And that's not just for the fuqaha. That can be for a doctor. Everybody does that type of ijdihad if it's related to their thing. So there are situations... I mean, I'll give you an example. It's basically, mujma'alayh,", "non-Muslim male. And I looked for a difference of opinion on this issue because it's a big problem in our community. I could not find any difference of opinions on that issue, but there is an ibn Abi Shayba, there is in the Mus'annaf, there was a hadith from Ali that he permitted in Iraq Ahl al Kitab, a kitabiya who became Muslim and her husband remained in his faith", "with the man. And he said, He has more right to her. So Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah used that as an ishtihad in the West, that if a woman becomes Muslim and her husband remains Christian or Jew, that", "not the hadith, but the actual opinion is not an opinion that the vast majority of ulama went with. And it's not the Jamhur, the four madhhabs were opposed to that. So, but we have seen women who've left Islam because they were told they have to divorce there. I've seen that personally. And then I saw, we had a situation of a woman in Philadelphia who became Muslim and they told her you have to", "she stayed in Islam. She was actually a lawyer, she stayed and then six months later her husband became Muslim so we gained two and could have lost one or two. So those are examples where the manab, where the hukum hinges what it hinges upon in this circumstance. So Sayyidina Omar when he did not implement the hadd punishment of theft during", "the year of Ramadan when there was a Maja'ah. He didn't implement the punishment. People say he suspended the hukm of Allah, no! He saw that the hokum in this situation was to do this. It wasn't to apply that hukam it was to apply another hukum so that's very important to understand that that's why we need mushtahidun like we need qudat and fuqaha", "But somebody like Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah does this on a regular basis. And those are the type of ulama that we need, that are able to make these momentous decisions. Now there is an opinion also and this in Ghiyathi of Imam al-Haramain. He actually says that in the latter days very little will be known of the Sharia. In those cases it's the fundamental principles that should be preserved. Just you know people are going to lose the Shariah", "the sharia and when he said the first thing to go would be the fara'id it's clearly not the knowledge of the farai'd because the knowledge is there but what is it? I think its the implementation and the knowledge that this is something we should all be concerned about. I think thats what were losing cause i think a lot of people no longer divide their wealth when they die according to these rules", "the hadith of Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam mentions also there'll come a time where you won't find someone. Somebody who can do that, yeah. Who can do it today like you're saying, I don't think just in America, I think across the globe there's very little implementation unfortunately. So if we move just going back to practitioners,", "the obligation on a person was very little, right? It was more or less make a walsiyah and make sure that that walsiya is not... Right. It doesn't harm the heirs in the chronic shares. Today of course in the West, in America, the default system is not distribution according to Islamic shares. It's distribution according", "the whim of the deceased yeah right or the test so for a person living in America what is actually the obligation on them because there's a few different iterations that we could say we could perhaps the obligation is uh there is no obligation and that it is on the heirs and the executor to make sure that everything after death is distributed properly you know", "to die and so I'm going to build a masjid. We get this a lot. You know exactly, and it's...I mean I think that's a healthy thing because you know they say it's one of the wisdoms of Allah that we don't have to think about death all the time because most people wouldn't be able to go to work. It paralyzes them. Yeah it's very paralyzing and that's why I think when the Prophet said do much", "is in that sense, just live your life fully. Because if you forget that you're going to die, your days don't have the kind of weight. If you really wake up and don't expect to see the evening, you can have a different day when you say goodbye to your spouse going out and not knowing if you're ever come back. That's going to be a different goodbye. I think it really will make a life", "will make a life much more fully lived by being aware of mortality. And, you know, when I was 17, I was in head on collision and had a near death experience. And that's what shook me out of my sleep. You know, like, whoa! Like I could leave the world any time? Because young people don't often have that awareness. And I used to think as you get older, you're going to think more about death. But actually concluded after a while that actually people think less about it", "about it. And the reason I think that's true is because they get so used to being here. Like you've been here like for 60 years, you think, oh, where am I going? You know, it's like every day you just wake up and it's... Well now there's this whole movement of trying to live forever and anti-aging. Yeah, yeah, anti-ageing, live forever. There's this health guru that says live forever, really? And then there's people cryonically frozen thinking... They want to freeze until they develop a cure for that.", "to develop the cure for that thing that killed them. Yeah, amazing! So I mean, I don't know anybody that has spent enough time in this place and really thought about this place. Death is one of the great reliefs. There's a dua of the Prophet may death be reposed from every evil, you know? And so death... That is the gift of the believer", "is a beautiful word in Arabic. It's, you know, special type of gift. So I think, you really aware of death is an extremely important thing. In terms of the, you what we were talking about, the fara'id being distributed, I think now the onus is on the person to make sure because in the United States if it ends up", "where you know there is no will the state intestacy rules yeah intestines e rules are really complicated and then your in probate court or in probit courts and then the family starts fighting over you know what's what and and then mistake can take the wealth as well so to follow up on that I mean if we look at the progression of the of the revelation of the rules about inheritance", "and then once the ayat are revealed in Surah An-Nisaa, then that obligation was no longer present. Right? Exactly. So now... It's abrogated. So for us... Because it was all Wasiyyah. And you can do... I mean what people don't realize is you can give all your money away before you die. Sure. And so if you have concerns about your daughter, I mean the Prophet would not witness", "giving one son something and another son. So it's better that they understand your reasoning behind it, and hopefully if they're good and dutiful children, they won't have a problem with that. This is the Hibba you're talking about? Yeah, like a Hibbub, like giving a gift to the daughter. In particular. I think in particular because some women are high-powered. They're doing well and working and everything. But some women, a lot of our community,", "They're taking care of kids. They're in the homes they're in and then They might get a divorce and then who's going to take care because a lot of times we have deadbeat Husbands, you know that just don't fulfill their obligations and we've seen this in our community so it's big problem And we have situations where like parents might know for example that Their son is not gonna take care exactly", "of like Jane Austen, you know, novels. Like, you now the father begs the son to take care of his five girls and he's saying that but then they just rationalize it away. Oh, he could have meant money. He means just be there to support them emotionally. And this is what the devil will do. You know? He'll just completely convince them. I mean, this is a type of human beings", "you know the buddhists have this interesting concept of an existing um uh illusion so like just something that dr cleary talked about but we don't believe in the devil like we don´t say he's not part of our creed to say that", "And so in Buddhism, they call that an existing illusion. In other words, it's like you don't give it reality even though it does exist but you don´t give it a reality. But when you obey the an existing delusion, it becomes a delusion and so when you're acting upon the dictates of that existing illusion...", "Do not let him delude you. He wants you to operate on his illusion because he creates the waham, like he tells you this is good. She's a beautiful woman and she's inviting you over. Just go it's good. That's that's the illusion but once you act on it now you're deluded, you've entered into a whole other realm. And so I think it's really important for people", "people to be aware, you know that Shaitan operates and people can convince themselves of the most egregious things in their mind. They can create victimhood where it doesn't exist. Well I deserve this because this or this person he's doesn't deserve my inheritance, you now he's never done anything for me. I'm going to make sure he doesn't get any. So there is a vindictiveness sometimes", "Yeah, it's common. I mean, it is common in modern society and then among Muslims we are not immune to the human emotions. And so interestingly like this is where it comes back to Abdullah's question about what obligation do we have to plan? Some people have a noble intention which is my kids either they don't deserve it or they don t need it. Either one.", "I'm going to go ahead and make that decision. And so therefore, I'd like to give it all the charity. Like you said buy your ticket to Jannah in this way. Well they can do that before they... But not yet. It's like they want to do it on death. If their children are really well-to-do, there is a case for waqf. Yeah if the children are well-todo, if they're not, I mean I think any, you know, it's good to leave something behind.", "because whoever reads that every day will never enter into poverty. And also, you don't have to make sure the seventh generation is still wealthy. There's this obsession with just people... Wealth is something... The Prophet didn't fear poverty. He feared for this Ummah wealth", "for people, you know. Imam al-Ghazali says even wealthy people should not give sumptuous food to their children because it will accustom them to luxury and it won't be good for their souls, you now? So I think that the pre moderns had a much better understanding about wealth so but there is great wealth in the Muslim community and there are many very successful Muslims", "becomes huge, I don't know. Personally if I had a lot of money... There's a book of wealth by a pre-Islamic Indian scholar it's called the Book of Wealth. It was actually translated to Arabic from that tradition but he said that the world has two types of people. People with too much money and not enough time", "but not enough money. I mean, a billionaire could not even if he spent like $20 million a day or something, they're just not going to exhaust their wealth. So there's people that really have a lot of wealth and the prophet said, you know, if the son of Adam had one mountain of gold, he'd only want a second amount. You get a house and no, I need a second house, a vacation house. You", "That's al-haqqa mutakath. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so it's just an endless kind of thing about money. So and as people get older I think they start to realize that and that you know it's not all that it's cut out to be. I mean one of the beauties and this is something that Pope deals with in his amazing poem on an essay on man is that what he argues is the thing that God has made equal in the world is not wealth but access to happiness", "access to happiness. That's why a poor person can be happy and a rich person can miserable, but everybody has equal opportunity in terms of happiness. And that's why the Prophet said like being content is a treasure that's inexhaustible. So he put that real happiness was contentment with what you have. And I think the worst thing about our society is they've made poverty ugly", "poverty ugly. Like in traditional societies, poverty was something like when I went many years ago in the 1970s we visited some of the poorest people in southern Morocco but I saw them as some of richest people that I ever met and these are people who lived in adobe huts may Allah help our brothers and sisters in Marrakech you know that's a great tribulation", "They would have this stack in their front room of these adobe houses, no electricity. You know? They would a stack of blankets for guests. And the guests were just we slept on the floor with these blankets. But that was like something they had these things for their guests. Their food was beautiful. It was good. It healthy. They didn't have a lot of clothes but they were beautiful clothes. That's poverty with dignity and our culture erases poverty with", "with dignity. And so it becomes this kind of degraded, horrible poverty and that's why it's horrible to be poor in America but poverty is not the cause of crime I've lived in the poorest countries in the world that the crime...I mean I lived in Tuaymarat you know there's no crime in Tuamarat nobody stealing anything So you mentioned the possibility of oqaf", "Because what happens a lot in practice is if people learn what the shares are and they say, you know, if I go down this route, this and this will happen. That's unjust. And so a practitioner might say, well, there's this option of a waqf that you can make for the family. And they often cite to the Madaki Medhab. Yeah, yeah.", "plan for the family instead of normal inheritance. But the intention there is almost we're trying to contravene the law that has been placed down by Allah. Is that something that we should be using? I wouldn't look at it like that. There are many alqaf that were done to help families and to always give access to families so that they... The nazara", "the is a problem. So the overseers of those there's a lot, I mean you know Imam No'i wouldn't eat fruit because he thought a lot of the lands were and they've been corrupted and Ahmed ibn Muhammad famously wouldn't take fish from certain places. You know I've seen things about fast where some of the ulama said that to buy something in fast was dangerous", "dangerous because most affairs with al-qaf. I mean, 1400 years Muslims have been putting homes into al-quf. They've been doing all these things. So there's a lot of al- quf. There is a reason why some of the most important ministries in the Muslim world are wizarat al-al-quw. The ministry of al qawf in Morocco is in the king's palace. It's actually inside the palace because it is the richest of all the ministries", "so many al-qaaf in Marawi. These are devout people that for 1,300 years have been giving endowments and if the endowment were properly cared for in the Muslim world there would be ample money to support religious endeavors like universities and colleges but the al-Qaaf of many of the Muslim countries has been really corrupted. So that's always a danger. My point is that the nalara", "in the corruption because the Nevada is based on, you know. Even any real society America is based trust it's a civil society like I'm sitting with you on an airplane and you tell me your nuclear physicist. I have no reason to disbelieve this is human nature but if you're a grifter you know that's what every grifter knows that people believe what they're told right? And so you know most", "Most people just, I think religious people have a really difficult time understanding how somebody could steal from a religious waqf. But people do these things. There are people that don't believe. There's people who don't... That's about cheating people. They don't think they're going to be raised up on the day of judgment and judged by Allah.", "And I think that's always a concern. How do you protect even this institution? I mean, I have to think about that. Like how do we protect this institution from getting into the wrong hands? This is like over... You know, since 1996 really but since 2009 incorporating this, this is a hefty waqf and how do you protected it so that down the road they're not teaching some of the things they are teaching in these other religious institutions?", "I mean, that's something I'm concerned about. Right? Yeah. So I think the subtle point in... I mean everybody agrees that the establishment of Vukov, I think is necessary in America to keep our institutions. We've built a lot as a community in America but most of them are not self-sustaining at this point and so there's a tremendous need for it. There has been short sightedness. One of the Turkish models that I really appreciate", "is the Turks do not build a masjid without building al-qaf around it. It's a part of our tradition. Yeah, when you go to the masjids all the stores around there are actually al-kaf for the masjed and so that should be factored in when you do any type of major endeavor is really to try to ensure that there's some type of perpetuity. You know sadaqah jariyah, that's really important and that's endowment building. It takes vision, it takes trust", "It takes trust. Muslims don't trust themselves by and large because there is a lot of corruption, but Iblis... He's called Ibls because he despaired. And one of the things he wants to convince everybody of is to despair of goodness that there aren't actually good people in the world, that everybody's a crook, everybody's trying to get something for nothing. And that's not true. There are a lot", "Even if we fail, we have to still continue to try. And in America, most of the wealth transfer occurs on death. I mean, the percentage, if you look at the giving percentage, the lifetime giving is a fraction of the death giving. Yeah.", "If you're going to be subject to estate taxes at 40%, I mean, there's an incredible opportunity to give and to lower your tax. And that's the case for giving before too. Of course. Yeah. Like I think waiting till after your death is – I mean it's important to have a well-seen everything but I think it's also important to – and then it depends as you know like liquid is not that common. Sure. Like even wealthy people don't have a lot of liquid. Right.", "so much more because it opens up more assets. Yeah, exactly. But things are fungible and people can liquidate. There's a lot of ways to give and that's one of the blessings of our tradition. There really are a lot ways to gives. I hope people are aware of that is a major option. We've already been the benefactors of some peoples", "people's um we got and we were in a difficult situation because this person had given the wealth that exceeded the exemption no, the shares. Oh okay yeah yeah and so that was a problem so the onus was on us to kind of cause I didn't want to take the money if there were people that rightful heirs", "It was a situation where they were in a good situation. And I think the father just thought, oh, they don't need it. He might not have known the rules. Sure. And so that was a solution where I just got them to donate it. Okay. Just like even though legally... Voluntarily? Even though legally we had by the law this law... Because we're working on two legal systems. Yeah, two legal system. So legally by Western law, we had every right to it. Right. If we didn't take it,", "Right. Which was very interesting, and I explained that to the family. I said look we don't want to take this without your consent because it's going to be bad money for us. And then I just found out about a property that we're gonna inquire that it looks like maybe the people that originally got it might have cheated a widow out of it. I want to find out if the widows alive cuz I'm gonna go talk to her you know? I mean I just you know I don't wanna use words outside", "there is a reality to bad. You know, they say that was the seventh grandfather. And so if there's something bad and you end up getting it, I don't feel comfortable with that.", "that I did not feel comfortable taking. Because Allah is pure and only accepts the pure, so if you build something that's not built on purity it won't last. It just won't. So we have to be really careful about where the money comes from.", "I don't want to be a part of the NIA.", "What if the parent created an estate plan? Just take a simple example. A parent created in the state plan that left their wealth equally to their two children, one is a son and one is daughter. Well, if the son was in agreement then it's fine. No let's assume there's no agreement. There's no agreements like the child says that's the plan I'm you know does the child have an onus on them also tend to change a plan that was drawn by the parents that was not Islamic. Yeah, I mean if they're devout Muslims they do. They do yeah okay", "They do? Yeah. Okay. That example that you gave earlier of a person that was donating more than their one-third discretionary portion, we found that sometimes that happens for example for tax purposes like if I divided", "divided if I divided it and gave the children or the heirs what they should actually inherit, they would probably inherit less because of taxation so high. I mean, if that was generally the case, I think there's a valid argument for that. Yeah, I I think that could be good. Because what is that? I think That's a case of this test and you know where you'd have to see that if we follow the letter of the law,", "that actually going to end up harming... Everybody's gonna get less because the government is going to take its cut. That would make sense to me, Allahu'alam. I mean these things are momentous. Imam Malik called the fatwa nazila which means musiba and whenever he was asked a question you say inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajiun. That's what he would say like when he", "because it's such a momentous thing. Because your... Shaykh Abdullah said that the Mufti, Sidi Mayara called the Mufte Al-Wazir. He's like the Wazeer of God. He is fulfilling the you know he's giving the dictates from the Malik, you know? Shaykh Abdallah said it's An-Natak Bismillah You know, It's the spokesperson for God, you", "So it's a big thing. Like, do you really want to say what you think God thinks about this? I mean, that's a heavy weighty thing to do. But, you know, on the other hand, Islam is a very common sense religion. And I always tell people if it doesn't make sense, it's probably not Islamic. You know, if it just doesn't ring true, you", "would sort of substitute their judgment and say you know for example we get this all the time I understand the rules I believe in the rules but my family's different right and it's like there's this somebody did something to me or there's you know like what room does a person have to say absent them not being Muslim which is a different case yeah you know to take", "Yeah, they can't do that. As long as they're... You know, if they're practicing Muslim and yeah, they cant' do that If they are not a Muslim you know the difference it's which is not by the way Right So like I had this situation because one of my family members who wasn't a Muslim left money This was when I first became Muslim And I was told oh you can't take that", "You can't take that because it's not... Whereas I asked a Mauritanian faqih at the time. This is like 40 years ago. He said, no, no. He says, no way. He doesn't believe in himself. He didn't believe. He just said, he said, take it, you know, because it wasiya. It's not farida. You know, that's the difference, you So two deans don't inherit, you Know? So ikhtirafuddeen is one thing. I mean, in the Hanbari madhhab if they don't pray, They're not considered Muslim but the other Madhhabs, they do. If there are seculars and they're really anti-Muslim we have identitarians", "in our community. And I could see leaving that person out of the faridah if they're just an identitarian, if they really aren't a believing Muslim, which there are a considerable amount these days, I think, of people like that. The other very tricky part of that is that the last thing you want is a court battle determining who is a Muslim. So some secular judge having this discussion about, like, is this person actually a Muslim? Well, in this culture...", "Well, in this culture though, I mean Fara'i aren't considered. It would be...I mean nobody has a claim. In this culture it's purely like the original Islamic ruling of Wasiyya. The whole thing is Wasiyyya. Absent the spouse who has some shares. Yeah, the spouse has community property rights. So there are community property", "Which is, you know, in the Sharia, I mean, the primary ones are those key, you and the parents. Yeah. I mean that is the primary elements. Right. So what happens is on the East Coast there's oftentimes elective share which", "share that the surviving spouse in particular a widow is entitled to which I think always or almost always is going to be greater than the share that Sharia gives interesting usually a 50% sure usually a fifty percent so it depends on it might it's less in some cases depending upon if they have children or not but invariably it's gonna be greater", "you have this trying to traverse two legal systems concurrently where the person can create their plan and say, I'm going to leave an eighth or I'm gonna leave a quarter. The judge determines otherwise. Or the surviving spouse might elect against the plan which comes back to the family. In the end of the day look we don't that you know in the Muslim world they're not problem with the moon sighting because the government just says Ramadan's tomorrow everybody fasts.", "Whereas here, we don't have the Sultan. You know, a sultan yurfa al-khilaf . So in the end of the day these are situations where this is between them and God. We don't any authority. And so I think just leave people alone. It's between them an God they're going to answer on the Day of Judgment like all of us. Maybe Allah will overlook it, maybe Allah will forgive them,", "that the person did something that was necessary. Who knows? I don't know, I'm not gonna judge them in the afterlife, you know? But by all for all intents and purposes by Sharia, you have to follow these faraidh. You know, i mean, I don' see any way around it. So initially, Abdullah is asking this question earlier there's perhaps multiple ways to achieve the same goal so a person wants to make sure that their wealth is left according to shariah", "according to Sharia. One option might be simply this good tarbiyah and just telling your kids, hey after I'm done, I'm not here make sure things are Islamic. Another is engaging in the legal exercise to do so. And by and large the system allows us to opt out of the defaults and to create our own structures if we...", "really believe that we need civil courts, that Muslims use arbitration. I think we'd solve a lot of our problems. Personally and this goes back years ago, we had a situation in Zaytuna where in order to you know... We had a situation where some property was taken by a group and we had debate and the lawyers said that it's legitimately your property if you want to take them to court you'll get it.", "the court, I don't want to sit in front of a non-Muslim judge and have two Muslim parties fighting over a piece of property. And my view is just leave it to them.\" It ended up coming back to us. But that's how I feel but not everybody feels that way. Like I just... I don´t want... You know, I just, I dont' want to be humiliated in front o f a judge. People feel they're madhrum well that's why there's a day of judgment.", "oppression on this day. And I just feel like, let's just wait for the Day of Judgment. You know? And probably you'll end up forgiving them anyway because all you want is forgiveness. Right. So, I don't know. Dunya is not worth fighting over. You're a sadi woe sadi. We're going to talk a lot about... This series is six parts and so we're gonna talk... Oh wow! Okay one sixth.", "So we're going to talk a lot about community property and property law and rights of survivorship and all of the secular sort of framing that people have to understand. But the beauty of the system is that as long as you meet the legal requirements, with few exceptions, mostly for the spouse,", "You can opt out, you can create a trust. You can do whatever you want. There's a lot of flexibility. America has a very strong libertarian spirit. I think California is probably the worst. It really is. It's a state that... I don't know. The tide will turn. It used to be a purple state which to me, I'd much rather have a purple", "far, it gets pulled back. Whereas because we've been... We've got a radical element now in Sacramento that's pretty strong. I mean 12 year olds getting sex changes and things like that so it's crazy. And I think people are getting fed up with this so I'm hoping maybe there'll be some... But overall America, we do have a good legal system and we have a lot of room to", "a lot of room to be creative, not just in terms of inheritance laws but marriage laws, commercial laws. Even local government is much more interesting than... Because you can outlaw gambling and outlaw pornography. You have enough signatures. You know, you can do a lot things in this country so it's very interesting that way", "political participation has eroded so much and I think there's a lot of people that are in power that like that because they're left to do whatever they want. If you look at a lot the oversight people, they're very interesting people. These people that just the consumer advocates that watch what the banks are doing.", "people have to stop other people. And the Muslim, in the tafsirs they say .. If it wasn't for the Muslims to stop the Kufaq. But I think Allah said nas for a reason that in every society there's people that really do try to stop wrongdoing of other people and that dialectic is very important. So I hope that we do get more creative on these things but", "say my experience when I was an imam many years ago, I did a lot of arbitration with families who were having problems. And what I found which really troubled me is if it didn't go their way they just went, ah, I'm going somewhere else. It's good until... I had a situation where this, it was a custody situation, Havana and you know it was", "one of the Muslim countries, and his wife. She was from the same country, and they got a divorce. And so he said I'll only accept him. I was the imam at MC at the time. He said I will only accept Him. And she said OK well I accept that. So I judged for her. And then he said ah, I don't accept that.\" So it's like he thought I was going to judge for him. Right. You know? And there is a great story of Imam Malik where", "sent him by the emir for a judgment. And Malik judged against him, and the poet said to Malik he said, He sent you here so that you would judge for me. He said, It doesn't work like that. So he said I'm going to do an invective poem against you, flay you alive. And", "pettiness to me. And he said, nobody's incapable of behaving like that. Everybody can do that. He said what's really difficult is maru'ah, you know, is to have like that dignity, to have that magnanimity, you now a virtue. That's the hard thing, is be virtuous. And the really beautiful thing about arbitration in this country aside from child custody really", "is completely enforceable by the courts. Yeah, if they agree once they sign. Yeah it's people's court. That's fascinating. I mean this tradition comes from Maliki fiqh even the jury tradition because in the absence of a qadi in Maliki madhab you take 12 notables", "The idea is, because in the Maliki fiqh, 12 is the number for the jama'ah. So the idea is that the jema'ah can't go wrong. And I've only served on a jury once but my brother who's a lawyer in San Francisco he told me there's something very mystical about a jury. That something happens and I experienced it in the jury. It's a very magical experience when you have these people disagreeing like we had one holdout", "And it drove us crazy because everybody was kind of in agreement. It was actually a hate crime against a Palestinian, right? So it was a felony so it was pretty serious. He was a Christian-Palestinian. The holdout or the... No no no, the guy their two men were being accused of beating this Palestinian up and so they were charged with a federal yeah it was", "was a moment where everybody realized that they were guilty. It was really amazing, and even the one guy who was holding out, and it was based on physics because they claimed he was running at them but all the witnesses saw him fall backwards when they punched him. He claimed that he was sucker-punched. And so when somebody pointed that out, no, no. He couldn't have fallen backwards if he was charging them and they hit him.", "They're guilty. That was the point so that tradition of having You know people in the community in the absence of a qalbi I mean, that's a perfectly valid Muslim position Yeah, and I mean we can have qudat as well like we can appoint you know, like Like we need our own institutions to resolve our disputes essentially. I think it would be a lot better yeah because the probate court system is messy", "It costs a lot of money. It's something that if you're not Muslim, you still want to avoid. It is also humiliating. Yeah, you'll still want it avoid and so that's that. I wanna shift one question that we get a lot which is different than some other things that we've covered and has to do with the idea that everybody who is planning is worried about their kids if they have kids like that's a human concern that they have", "Young people. Yeah, great question because traditionally it would have been like 15. It's very young in the classical books. Yeah. 15-18 Malik says 18 or 15. That could be one of the other but yeah that's a really good point you know the Tamiz begins about seven similar to Tamiz but the Rushd is you know if you find in them Rushd. Right. So that is an Ishtihad issue in and of itself", "because not everybody, we're not supposed to give the Safih is the one who doesn't know how to do the Tasarruf. Like he'll use the wealth lacking intelligence. It's not used wisely. And that's a concern that if you give an 18-year-old a bunch of money, especially if we talk about a family where they're getting an inheritance,", "You have to realize your own self", "planning is that you have to preemptively plan for when you're not there and someone else will be making that determination. Yeah. So like, I mean, I think a good thing is maybe trust fund for education is a very useful thing to have a trust fund. For education. So could we, in other words, restrict the share of inheritance for certain things and only certain things? No, no, not to my knowledge.", "Yeah. So the trust fund for education, for example, that you mentioned... I mean, that would be done before while they're still alive. While they're", "inheritance. You can't stipulate in fara'il like that. The thing what people have to know, money is your mustakhlaf. It's an amanah. It''s not really yours. It ''s yours majazan but in reality all money belongs to Allah and so those furood are not yours it's not your money", "people are who gets it. You don't determine that, all He's giving you a right to determine is one-third of that the other two thirds belong to God you know. It all belongs to God in reality but he's giving new discretionary use of that 1 third as long as you're alive its discretionary used for all but as long", "It's mustakhlaf. And so the one-third goes to whomever you determine, the two-thirds those are their farail they're not yours. They belong to God and He designated these people and you can't tell them how they can or cannot use that well. Sorry, one follow up here is those waratha, those heirs can voluntarily after death redistribute however they want? Yeah exactly.", "But what about in advance? Yeah, no. If the person who's writing the will approaches them and says here is what I want to do and they agree to it then that's... As long as they're adults or...? Yeah, they have to be Rashid. They have to somebody whose... So you can't do it for your young children but if your kids are adults basically...", "and the daughter is, and I want to leave the money to the daughter. If the son agrees to that then he's giving up his right. It's his right but he can relinquish that right. Even before the death happens? Yeah. Oh no, he has to do it before the dead happens. He has to consent to it because it's his rights. It' s the son's right. But if he consents to...", "a woman in a polygynous relationship, she can give up her rights to the other wife. They're her rights. Your haq is yours to give up or to demand and that's why dhulm even in dhulum you can give your right when you are mazlum for God. Like just say, you know what? It's like Abi Dhamdham.", "فَدَّقُوا بِعْرْضِهِ People that backbited against him, he gave it as charity to them. So he was مظلوم but he gave It back to those people because if you Backbite somebody they get your حسنات and If you don't have any more حسنات They have to take your سيئة not a good deal. So the challenge of the preemptive disclaimer is That you don' t actually know who's going To be alive so you could", "So you could... Right. No, good point. Yeah, because people die before, yeah, like a will. Yeah. So you would be able to do that. So what you're saying is... There could be a hajb or something. Somebody loses their right. Right. But at least in the natural order of deaths type of scenario, what you are saying is that if somebody does want to... Relinquish a right. Even if part of them relinquish it and part of", "I mean, that's the Maliki. Again... We get stuck with the same example you gave which is the legal instrument has to say something and that would be binding and then the Sharia air let's say it's vested in somebody else at that point can make a claim to whom? To Allah of course but... So what happens by this if I just wrote in my will", "will i want my wealth to be distributed according to uh islamic law based on abu hanifa's madhub like if i leave that yeah and and you know that that's going to be fulfilled right by well so so uh so that that s uh that's what the that's why we're only doing a sixth today so basically um there's a lot of factors that are gonna come into play before we can answer that question", "answer that question. So for example, if the properties are owned jointly and there's a right of survivorship attached to it, the will has no effect so the spouse is going to get 100% regardless of what that will says. For most people their assets are comprised of let's say a home as for a married couple most of the time it's jointly titled bank accounts and retirement accounts I mean this is an assumption that they're Muslim", "point right if you have obviously if you people that contest that then you have a problem but I'm talking about people that accept that so what I'm saying is that what happens as a matter of law in the overwhelming majority of cases is that the surviving spouse will get 100% at that regardless of what the will says just as a legal matter now there's an onus would be that it's on her to distribute yeah him her whoever", "Because your will didn't do anything. That makes sense. Most of the time we recommend trusts because we can actually... Yeah, then it's protected in a way. You can do that. So then you have a fiduciary like... A trustee that you name to do that but that's usually what happens is that... Do you do that? We do. Yeah, you act as a fiducialy. Not as a fuduciary. A trusteer. Not so much. Usually what we recommend is that they name most of the", "And then the family members will seek out professional help when they need it. Got it. There are trust companies and professional fiduciaries that people appoint, but you know, they tend to charge a percentage of the estate and it ends up getting expensive in some cases if someone doesn't have someone to serve in that role, it makes sense to appoint a professional. Yeah. We're going to answer all those questions I think that have been coming in in those next sessions inshallah. Well thank yeah, I really appreciate this.", "I think it's very useful and inshaAllah may Allah bless the people that want to do the right thing and give them the ability to do that. And make the wills we need to think about this, yeah? We're all passing through. It was a very interesting day now. Alhamdulillah. Thank you very much. I really appreciate that. It's an honor. So proud of our young man here alhamdulilah.", "MashaAllah. We're going to close with Dua inshaAllah?", "النافع والعمل الصالح نسأل الله سبحانه وتعالى أن يوفقنا لما يحب ويرضاه لا إله إلا أنت يا أرحم الرحمن وفق هذه الجماعة وكل من يهتم بدينك وفقته لما تحب وترضاه لا إلى إله الا انت اشهد أن لا إليه الا الله شهد محمدا رسول الله", "ومتعنا بأسماعنا وأبصالنا وقوتنا أبدًا ما حييتنا وجعل ثأرنا على من ظلمنا وانصرنا عدانا ولا تجعل الدنيا أكبر همّنا ولا مبلغ علمنا ولا غاية رغبتنا ولا إلى النار مصيرنا اللهم لا تجعل مصيبة في ديننا اللوم لا تصلط علينا بذنوبنا من لا يرحمنا ولا يخافك فينا سبحان ربك رب العزة عما يصفون والسلام على الموسيم", "Okay. And we're going to cover the next session is basically an introduction to the secular rules that are governed in America, so probate, property law, all of those things. And then we're gonna talk about this integration piece that we alluded to today and then we have a session on end-of-life... We're thinking only so far talking about death and dying but what happens before? So biomedical questions", "the plug in organ donations and sort of that comes under the umbrella of estate planning yeah um great and so so that's going to be the fourth session oh and then and then historically and how we can create that today relationship endowments to okaf too endowment has their own concept right well we have to fit them into those instruments that exist exactly", "Once you have taxable estates above the, let's say the exemption amount of 13 million. Everything above that is taxed at 40%. Got it. So we're going to do sort of the advanced planning, the advanced charitable trust some of this stuff that other communities are taking advantage of that Muslims should learn about and figure out. I mean, this country has a massive multi-billion dollar industry on avoiding taxes. Right? Yeah. So death and taxes.", "DAVID BATTS- Taxes. That's what they say." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/The Life of Prophet ﷺ is Preserved -- Shaykh Hamza__1742882172.opus", "text": [ "Every single thing the Prophet said, Sahaba were memorizing. They were recording it. Abu Huraira... People say how could Abu Hurayra relate over 5000 hadiths? He was only with the Prophet for two and a half years. This is one of the people that attack the Hadith. How can he relate over 5,000? Because Abu Hurera spent his entire life collecting hadith. It wasn't just during the lifetime of the Prophet. And in many of them he doesn't say I heard the Prophet say", "heard the Prophet say, he just says what the Prophet said. And he doesn't have to say where he got it from because he's a thika and the person who took it from another sahabi was a thikaa. Aisha relates over 2000 hadiths. So the hadith were preserved. Now one of the tragedies of the time we're living in is historically the hadits were the domain of the ulama. There were small books written for common people but overall the hadit were in a tradition", "in a tradition of isnad. You had to study Hadith with scholars and they would explain to you" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/The Life of the Prophet Muhammad by Shaykh Hamza Y_CoJPDtl8kJ0&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742997840.opus", "text": [ "Alhambra Productions presents The Life of the Prophet Muhammad by Sheikh Hamza Yusuf", "Allahumma a'lamna maa yanfa'una wa anfa'ana bima a'alamtana wa zidna ilmah. Wa salillahu ma'ala Sayyida Muhammad wa alaa ali wa sahbihi wasallam taslima, wala hawla wala quwwata illa billlah. Amma ba'd. Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Rahim InshaAllah I'm gonna go over what we're going to do inshallah in this class and then go through for people that were here yesterday I'm going to go through the same", "ten principles except related to seerah. And this class, inshallah, is I'll get to it in the hukm but it's considered mandub so for me it's a very enjoyable subject and it's it's completely stress-free subject also because it's not meant", "There aren't ahkam related to it in the sense that you're not learning things to actually relate it to ibadah and things, but it's more an internal type of subject which I'll get to talking about when we get to the benefits of it. The goal is to cover the salient features of the Prophet's life and mission", "for him through learning about his noble life and struggles. The books that I'm going to use, inshallah, I'm gonna go through the Bayqouniyah How many people were in that class? Of the Mustarhaht al-Hadith Alright so it'll be a review for you And I'm not gonna go into great detail I'm just gonna cover the Bayquniyya which is only 34 lines of poetry So I'll do a few lines every week and they will be very short", "But that's the book I'm familiar with because I have read it more than once in English. For Sirah, I've mostly just read Arabic literature but I like it, it is very eloquent and basically what he did was took the Muqtasir of ibn Hisham and translated into English pretty much", "pretty much. I mean, I've actually compared sections in there with the Muqtasir of Ibn Hisham and it's very similar. And I'll talk a little bit about Ibn Hisham later. The class schedule today inshallah will cover the ten foundations. And then in the second class we're going to cover the qualities of a sound hadith, a hadith sahih. And look at the four babs of Imam al-Tarmadi's book. And cover one through 10 in Ning's book They are short chapters, it is about 30 pages. I'm planning on doing 30 pages a week", "to cover the book. And if you don't have a copy of it, there's going to be some copies available and you need to talk to Frey Dune about that. It's available at bookstores. Then the third week I want to cover... And I put them in Roman numerals because that's the way he does them in the book, all right? There's not any preference for Roman numeral.", "Martin Lings is a classicist, by the way. I mean his background is Greek and Latin He knows Arabic very well. He taught Shakespearean literature in Cairo for about 20 years So you'll notice that in his writing that he tends towards a kind of archaic classical Writing which for some people is really enjoyable other people find it a little bit", "difficult. Abd al-Hakim Murad is another person that writes somewhat in that style, probably not as much as Martin Langdon. I haven't really thought about it that much but I like both their styles a lot and then we'll look at five through ten in Imam Tirmidhi's book which is not a lot of material either", "The class 4 will cover 12 through 30 in Lings, a week hadith and 11 through 15 in Imam Karmadi. And then you can just look through that yourselves. It's on there. Finally, the... There are some other material particularly Shifa Fadayat which has been republished in paperback and it's really worth having.", "I think, I haven't read the whole English translation but I think it's a reasonably good translation. It's a brilliant book. If you can read Arabic, I would recommend getting in an Arabic. They say, Had it not been for Ayyab, nobody would have ever heard of Morocco. And they said, And had it not", "in explaining or teaching you the rights of the Prophet . It was also traditionally, in Morocco, a book that people read when people were ill. They would go to their house and read the entire book at the bedside of an ill person with the intention of a shifa. It's a book which has been extensively studied in West Africa and North Africa", "But there will be some discussion, so I hope people read the pages before they come to the class. Write some notes about it, what you want to do. A good thing to do is outline it also. And then my request particularly in this class because of the nature of the class is...I mean in all classes but particularly in", "because part of what learning about the provostal ism is learning about edab and how to behave. It would include dressing properly for the men and women I personally really don't like people to wear informal clothes like jeans, t-shirts and things like that Traditionally students of knowledge were supposed to dress accordingly to reflect what they were studying", "to take a shower before he taught classes about the Prophet . He would take a ghusl, put on scent, put it on his turban. Actually do in the majlees burn oud to create an environment and also elevate the nifus because when they smell good scents it reminds them of paradise which is one of the reasons why the Prophet said", "three things were made beloved to me from your dunya women and perfume and prayer was made the coolness of my eye, was made in prayer. In other words his enjoyment in life was in prayer so is part of the sunnah of the prophet", "that perfume, there's no extravagance in perfume. In other words if you buy expensive perfume you don't look at it like you're wasting money because perfume is actually considered sadaqah for other people. In another words if put on perfume initially you'll smell but after that you don' t smell it whereas when you come up to people they smell it. You see so really the point of perfume is not you its for other", "considered a sadaqah and for that reason they say you should buy good scent. And the Prophet bought the best scent even though he was very frugal in his other matters, in perfume he actually wore the best perfume so that's just a reminder about that it is a good sunnah. For women obviously its not a sunnah to wear perfume that emanates unless she is in her home", "unless she's in her home and not going out. So that's a reminder to the sisters. And then also another thing, in all these classes hopefully just men and women should have regard for each other. And there shouldn't be allow the women when they need to get through for the prayer things like that, the time for them to get back so that there is this not an inappropriate mixing of men", "is also part of our deen. And then, lowering the eyes is also important and lack of inappropriate interaction. Respect towards each other and also to the facilitators, Freydoon and the people that are facilitating the madrasa. And also to teacher as a part of tradition and vice versa. The teacher towards the students. No raising of voices.", "One of the things Imam Marek said that if a hadith is being related, if you actually speak during the relation of the hadith You have done a grave wrong action Because the Quran prohibits us from raising our voices in the presence of the Prophet And when you hear a hadit they say that the adab of listening to a hadid is to actually focus In that you actually experience the presence as if he himself is telling you", "is telling you the hadith even though it's being transmitted through a chain of transmission but that change should be with an isnad so it's linked back to the prophet sallallaahu alaihi wa sallam So when you hear a hadith, you should have respect for and Imam Marek r.a when he heard a hadit that said his actual face, the color of his face changed and he would often lower his head And this was the type reverence that the early community showed to the hadis so that's also important", "and then also not speaking when other people are speaking, and not speaking to each other when the teacher is speaking. These are all part of our traditional adab, and I think most people would even who are not Muslims would recognize the basic humanity in those principles. So in terms of looking at Sira,", "The Islamic literature is very vast and many, many people have written on the Prophet's life. And it has been an area of concern in this Ummah since the very beginning. To look at its definition, traditionally in the Muslim world when a subject was taught they looked at the ten foundations or mabda or mabaadi.", "which is the definition. The second is the ,, which is a topic. The third is the wadik, which was the founder of that science, the person who first set it down. The four is the issam, which are the name and there might be more than one, which", "know that. And then also the istimdad, which is sources of that science where it's being derived from and then also hukam shar'i which is the legal ruling according to Islam in other words what", "considered legally. It goes under one of the five categories and then is conceptualizing the concerns of the science. It's similar to the topic only it goes into a little more detail, just understanding what you're actually studying. And then the virtue", "is the ,, which is what is the virtue of the science? In other words, more than just a benefit but actually what is merit of studying. Thank you. What is the merit of study in the science that's a good way to say it. And then the nisba is", "What is the relation or in other words what is the association of the science? What category do you put that science in so it's the category that that science goes under. Is it like now we would say hard sciences, the humanities, that type thing. Which category do we place it in? And then finally what is", "the fruit of the science? What is the fruit up the science, what are the benefits derived from learning that. So these are the 10 foundations of any science but particularly this was the way our Odoma looked at what they were studying first and then this is also the way that they would introduce", "And what that means is remind them of how Allah has interacted in his creation through giving victory to his prophets and their people, and through destroying the people that were adverse to him. And there's also a tradition called Ayam al-Arab. It's an extensive literary tradition in the Arabic world which relates to the Jahili times, you know, the days of the Arabs before Islam. They're kings, they're rulers,", "rulers, their virtuous people like Hatim al-Jud or Hatim Al Ta'i and or Mundir. Many stories about Watha very famous there was one man who had what he called he was a Yemeni king had Yom Arboas wa Yom Al Farah you know the day a good day a black day and a white day bad day and if a guest came to him on", "If he came to him on a good day, he'd give him a lot of money and it was just every other day that's what he did. And people didn't know when they were going to show up. Once a Bedouin came to Him and it wasn't a bad day. He begged Him, he said I've got a lot affairs that I need to take care of and just give me one year and I'll come back and then you can do whatever you want with me. So he left", "after a year, right before the sun was going down he was kind of pacing backward and forward realizing that he probably shouldn't have let him go. He wasn't gonna show up. And this Bedouin man showed up right before when the Sun went down. He said it's been a year you can kill me now. And he said why did you come back? And he says al-wafa which is fulfilling one's word. So he was so impressed with that he decided to stop killing people", "people on his bad day and so that's called ayam al-arab you know it's telling you about the stories of the jahiliyya Arab. The ayam Allah are telling us about the story of the prophets in the Quran those things and the prophet was commanded to remind us about these events because they increase one's iman. The seerah is about ayam an nabi . It is the life", "That is its concern. So it's هُوَ الْعِلْمَ الَّبَاحِثَ عَنْ أَيَّامَ النَّبِي صلى الله عليه وسلم That's its definition. And it also looks at his احوال, the conditions of the Prophet ﷺ, the condition of his hunger, the conditons of his house, his family, how he lived, his birth, the state of his society before him, who his parents were,", "his maghazi. It's a very important aspect of Sira and it's actually considered a branch of Sera that is, which is the battles of the Prophet . Very important aspect in the first three centuries put an incredible focus on Maghazi they really focused on actually studying the Maghazis of the prophet and Lingz I think does a reasonably good job at dealing with a lot", "with a lot of the Mughazi because they're very important. Badr, Uhud, Hunayn these are important Tabuk, the Ghazwa of Tabuk These are very important for us to understand really that jihad is an essential aspect of this deen it always has been and its supposed to always be And thats the importance of learning about the Mughazi is learning about Prophet's military struggles as well as his spiritual struggles and his social struggles", "So it's concerned with the ayam of Nabi ﷺ and then it is also concerned with character of Prophet ﷺ both in description and behavior. So his ʿKhalqahu wa Khuluquhu His character is his Ṣalq, his outward form is his ḥalq And his inward form is khuluk Alright so its concern how the prophet physically looked and also how he behaved outwardly and inwardly", "and inwardly with other people and between his Lord. So that's part of it, and that is traditionally called Shema'il. Shema-il. That science. It's part Sira literature. And they have also included in the Sira his mother's pregnancy, the condition of Amina,", "his is the weaning of the prophet, the wet nursing and the weening of the Prophet , and these matters are considered part of his . And then it's all should be understood that this is not hadith. In other words, seerah is seen as a distinct science outside of hadith The hadith literature is concerned with three things", "The aqwaal of the Prophet, the af'aal of the prophet and the taqreerat or taqareer of the Prophets .", "depending on what type of action it was and that's the business of the usuliyin to decide that, people of juristic methodology so if it falls under one of those three categories then its considered part of the hadith literature now some of the muhaddithun will include the descriptions of the prophet, the sifat in the hadit literature also but generally that goes under seerah literature although you'll find it in hadith", "found in the hadith literature. So people just understand that, the focus of seerah is not the focus on hadith. Another important distinction about seerat and hadith, hadith there are the hukam, the legal ruling in sharia' is based on hadit where it's not on seerath. Seerah literature is not considered a source of legislation in Islam", "the ulama were very lenient about what got into the literature unlike the hadith collection. The hadith collections has very stringent methodologies which we'll talk about inshaAllah whereas in the seerah literature there's a tasahud, there is a type of just acceptance of narrations because they relate to what are called fada'il amma", "called fada' al-aman, virtuous actions and manaqib which are virtuous qualities. And so you will find that the people of Sira will hear a story and relate it even though they don't have a strong Senate for it and sometimes it might not have a Senate at all because Ishaq is very early and at that time", "Imam Marek, who does that in the Muwatta based on belief that the sources were valid and people are still reasonably good. So... That's basic definition of what Sira literature is about now the topic the Madu'a of it is literally the Zatun Nibi , the essence of the Prophet", "to his days, the events of his life and to his descriptive states and to moral character. That's the topic which is different from the definition. And then you have the founder. Who is the founder of this science? Really the founder", "the Sahaba. Because the Sahabah early on recognized the importance of the Prophet's life and they recognized also the importance transmitting every detail about the Messenger of Allah because they realized 1 that he was a messenger of Allah 2 that he would be the last messenger of allah and there would not be a messenger after him", "that love of Allah is linked to following the Messenger of Allah. And if you don't follow the Messenger then you cannot achieve the love of allah and following the messenger of Allah according to the first community was not simply in ibadat which is from an obligation but in adat or habitual behavior as well", "to get to the benefits of the science. So, the other thing about this science is that the first founders were obviously the Sahaba who are transmitting what they witnessed in the presence of the Prophet , his miracles, his character, his descriptions... We have very accurate descriptions of the prophet to the point really where if somebody wanted I mean we're prohibited to do this but if somebody", "of the Prophet who was good at that, like these people who do police... who can just hear a description and draw very good picture of somebody. And oftentimes when you see the person once they apprehend them in their original picture it's pretty extraordinary how close they can actually get to the people. And that's based on eyewitness descriptions of people that describe them well. And the truth is although that's a very bad analogy I don't even like to put the Prophet in that category", "of analogy at all whatsoever. But the point being is that if somebody was good at that, they could probably draw an extremely accurate picture of the Prophet ﷺ because of the extraordinary precision with which the Sahaba conveyed how his face was including his nose, his eyes, his mouth, his teeth. We have a very accurate description and his beard, how many gray hairs were in the beard, the fact that his hair was wavy and all of these things", "these things are related in the shema of Imam Tirmidhi which you'll see and part of the blessing of the Sahaba transmitting that is that it gives us access to the Prophet despite the fact that we actually did not witness him while he was walking the earth but we have an opportunity to draw close to him through his description now about", "about the first person who actually began to write about the Prophet as a seerah is actually a book called Seerat Rasool Allah by Abu Bakr Muhammad Ibn Ishaq.", "Bishr. And he dies in 151, he was from Iraq, he's Baghdadi, he died in Baghdad, he is buried in Baghad. He is the first person that actually writes a seerah and you can see how early that is because it's important to remember 151 seems like a lot of time because it is about 120 years after the Prophet's death. I mean from the point of his birth", "his bi'tha until that. It's about 130 years. Now, that can seem like a reasonably long time. The reality of it is, it's not and the reason for that is Islamic tradition was by and large oral for the first hundred years. In other words, there was very little actual documentation. Ulama were writing down things. Abu Huraira was writing down hadiths. The Quran was being written down but that is not the way it was being taught.", "And to give you an example, in Mauritania, people memorize the entire Quran without ever looking at a Mus'haf. Ever. And that's the way they memorize it to this day. And we were there just recently and Sheikh Khatri was teaching somebody a child the Quran and he recites it and the child writes it down on the loah. So there was somebody there, an Englishman who just said, SubhanAllah, you don't ever look at a mus'haaf?", "look at a mushaf and he said evident he said most people here don't even have masahid you know the people that memorize the quran in mauritania in the desert they literally don't", "looked at the Mus'haf and he said a few times. Even though it's actually better to read the Qur'an from the Mus-haf by Sharia, it's more virtuous to read it from the mushaf than it is to read from memory unless you're doing qiyam al laya but normally because consider the eye and hand sharing the ibadah. But the point being that the Qurana is still transmitted and one of the ways which is called", "And that's the way it has been transmitted for 1400 years without any mistakes. So, for the first 100 years this is the way Sirah was being transmitted and this is how Hadith were being transmitted. The Shaykh would literally sit and he would tell the story from memory. And if you've been around people who have phenomenal memories, you'll appreciate this. If you haven't, it's a little difficult to relate to that but I have actually met people that memorize entire books by heart, several books not just one.", "and I actually met a man who memorized the entire Qamoos al-Muhyit of Fayruz al-Abadi which is about probably four or five thousand pages, small print. And he just memorized it by heart. His name was Wad Adud, famous scholar in Mauritania. So you say a word and he'll give you the direct quote from that.", "I think it was Muhammad al-Khadir, went to... He was asked by the Basha of Egypt to go to Turkey and to get because the best copy of the Qamoos was in Turkey. And to go and transcribe it for him and do Muqabeda of it near me. So after a few months he came back and he said where's the book? And he said bring some scribes. And so he brought the scribes and he just dictated the book by heart.", "heart he just gone there memorized it and came back. And another story is Mohammed Salem I think who was another Mauritanian, was once in Mali and two Bambara people started arguing in front of him and one killed the other. And when the police came they asked what happened? And he said I don't know but bring somebody that knows their language. And so they brought somebody and he said he said...and then", "And then he said, and then he quoted it. He didn't know what it meant and went back and forth until the man determined what actually had happened. And that's a true story. It's not like a made-up story. So there are people in our tradition, and not just Muslims. I mean non-Muslims. There have been non-Muslims that have these type memories where they can literally just memorize everything that they hear.", "whose husband was Murabda Muhammad Ahid, I think, who died not that long ago. And Murabdah Muhammad Ahad said that he never heard anything or read anything except that he remembered it ever. And so there's people that Allah gives that gift to. The early community had that. So what that meant was is that they did not need... They were actually... The person was more reliable than the book.", "That's what's extraordinary if you think about that. The person was more reliable than the book and what the ulama said is that the knowledge in the salaf was in their breast, in other words wherever they went it was with them. And Imam Shafi says my knowledge is in my breast, it's not in a chest back at home so if I go to the marketplace it's with me and if I goto the masjid it's", "And also Imam al-Ghazali, he had spent two years transcribing his several books from a library in Samarkand. And on his way back some brigands robbed their caravan and they were taking all these books that he just spent two year writing down. And he said to the chief of the brigands, you know please don't take my knowledge it's of no benefit to you.", "And he said, what kind of knowledge is it that the likes of me can steal it from you? And Imam al-Ghazali realized that Allah had made him say that to let him know that if you didn't memorize it, it was something you could lose any time. And after that, he memorized everything that he studied. So this was how the early community was. They said in the beginning their knowledge was in the breast and they transmitted it", "to people that way. And then they said, but later it went from the breast to the books. But the ulema became the keys through which the books could be unlocked for the students. In other words, now knowledge is in the books, it's no longer carried around by people. But", "meanings so that they don't make mistakes and that's what happens. So 151 is actually an early period to have actually the Sira written down, and even Ishaq is still considered the foundational Sira of all Sira literature. And then the next person is Imam Muhammad bin Omar al-Waqidi who died in 207, and Imam al- Waqidi", "His seerah is not as strong as Ibn Ishaq's in terms of his sources, and it's an important seerat because also it's a very early seerath but there's less reliability in it than in Ibn-Ishaq. And then probably the most famous of all the seerahl literature", "Abu Muhammad Abdul-Malik ibn Hisham. And that was, he died in 219. And Ibn Hisha, some actually consider his seerah really a tahdeeb of Ibn Ishaq. In other words, he took Ibn is Haq and he really separated the fat from the skinny like the Arabs say. He took out what was good,", "what was bad and he maintained what was good. And his seerah is really probably the most famous now, it's the foundational one that is studied traditionally in the madrasa systems and by the ulama. There have been since these men... but these are really the foundation of seerat writers, these three men. Since then there have been many, many seerats. The Seerah al-Halabiya is a famous one, Rawd al-Anf which is another famous one from an Andrewsian scholar", "Andrew Sein scholar, Qad'i Yath, the Shifa. And then some Mokhtasarat, Nur al-Yaqeen is a nice Moktasa by I think Khadeer Al Baik or something he was an Egyptian scholar and it's also gone even into Persian Paiambar is a Persian Sira, it's in Persian isn't it? Paiamba is a persian Sira literature.", "So you'll find in all the languages of Islam, and now including English which has become a language of the Muslims. You'll find seerah literature And this is part of the fulfillment of Allah's word when He says We have elevated your remembrance The fact that the Prophet ﷺ is remembered in all these written languages His seerat is in all those languages that people speak with and write with", "and stories are told in many non-written languages. If you go to the tribal languages in Africa that some are not written, they have storytellers that tell the stories of the Prophet ﷺ to this day. So this is part of a fulfillment that the prophet is Muhammad , right? He is the one who's praised. And the seerah is really praising the Prophet .", "no other mu'ajiza than the name of the Prophet ﷺ, that would be enough for people to recognize the truth of his message. The fact that he was called the praised one and that is what human beings have been doing. And interestingly enough even the fair-minded non-Muslims if they study his life and this is the truth the fair minded non-muslims you look at people like Michener you look", "He really didn't have anything bad to say about him. That's the truth, they couldn't and Abu Lahab even said wallahi he is not a liar we know he is no a liar. You know he has never told a lie to us so even his enemies have to praise him if their fair and that's why the Arabs say عَدُوبٌ عاقلًا صديق جهد Give me an intelligent enemy and not an ignorant friend because the intelligent enemy he will be fair", "Whereas the ignorant friend, they say يَضُرُّكَ مِنْ حَيْثُ يُريدُ إِفَادتِك He harms you but he wants to help you. So I think that's a really interesting and important aspect. And then its name, the name of this science is called سيرة or علم السير and then it's also called there's a branch of it called مغازي It's also", "al-waqaya, ilm al-wakaya. It's called as shamail if it relates to his outward or his inward character which is why he calls it shamail Imam Karmadi. So it has these different names. These are all names that it's given. Sira and the plural is sir. Sera comes from a word sara yasiru which means to go", "It's the way you go. Literally, I mean if you take a literal meaning it means the way a person goes his hey-ah. In Arabic is called Ism Hay'a that pattern seerah is Ism hay'a. It means the Way in which somebody goes. If you say Seeratahu is the way his seir is the", "His behavior in giving, in taking, in speaking, in acting. How he looked, what his physical heya was. The fact that when he walked, anybody who walked with him, he appeared taller than that person even if that person was known to be tall and even though the Prophet ﷺ was considered to be of middle stature. He was neither extremely tall nor short. He is a middle sture. Despite that whenever he walk with somebody", "taller to them if they were known to be tall, which is an indication that's part of his seerah or his hay'a, his way of being. And that's what seerAH means. It's talking about the way in which the Prophet ﷺ is to be understood outwardly and inwardly. Right? And also the seerAh of his life, the way it which his life manifested or unfolded to us. That's the meaning of seerA. So that...it's important. The name really tells a lot about the actual subject.", "subject. Now in terms of the maghazi, maghasi is from a root word ghaza yaghzu which literally means to intend something qasada talabahu it means to intent something or ichthaza so if I say ghazautu al fawza i intended to succeed and it comes", "meaning is to fight somebody right so and the intention in fighting somebody is to conquer them and also to achieve some goal usually right war is politics by other means like Klaus Witt says right in other words politics the whole point of politics is to achieve certain ends and if those ends aren't achieved through", "war becomes an extension of the political means, right? So it's really a branch of politics. The point of this is that war is a means to achieve something. It's not an end in itself unless somebody's insane, right. A madman makes war and end in himself for human beings. It either a means for justice, establishing justice or it's a means", "injustices. Quite literally, it's one or the other. Ibn Farhun, radhi Allah anhu, in Tabsir al-Great Maliki Mushtahid said that siyasa is of two types in Islam. In other words, Islam views siyasi as two things. He said siyase is a means whereby justice is achieved in a society which includes war. Or it's a means where by oppression and injustice is achieved. It's one", "If it's siyasa shar'iya, then obviously is a means to achieve a just society which is part of the point of the sharia. If its siyassa kufriya right? Then it's a means whereby oppression is achieved so the maghazi of the Prophet they are called the magza like the Arabs say what's the maghaza you know? What's the intention behind this speech", "or the ma'azi are the intentions of the Prophet in defeating the kuffar who were becoming barriers to achieving an end which is the establishment of Islam. And that's the only reason why Muslims fight. Muslims fight to break down barriers, right? They fight to achieve that end and that's why the ma'mazis are called the ma'thazi. Alright?", "and the , there's different words that are used which we'll go into when we get into lingua. And then, the other definition is the . And the is... are those qualities that characterize the of a person. In other words particularly relate to good qualities", "qualities even though the original root word of Shamal means Taba, nature. The nature of a person but the Shama'il of a Person are those qualities that are considered to be the good qualities of that person right so it's used as a technical term for our ulama to mean the Mahasin of the Prophet", "his outward Mahasin. So it would include his description because one of the miracles of the Prophet is he was the most beautiful human being that ever lived. I mean, he actually physically was a stunning person to look at. Physically he was beautiful. He's more beautiful than Yusuf . And the ulama say that it's only the veils that Allah put on the Prophet that people didn't cut their knives when they looked at him.", "In other words, his light was so intense that people had to be limited in how much they could actually see of him or else they would just...they wouldn't be able to contain themselves. So those are the names that are used and then the istimdad which is the sources right?", "this science. The sources are those or and narrations, traditions that relate to the subject matter itself preferably like Imam Hafez al-Iraqi, the famous muhaddith from Iraq said they should really be sound it's better", "sound but the other ulama preferred to take because all of it was good now you do find some things that are absolutely incorrect for instance the Salman Rushdie Salman rushdie took a story that's found in Imam poverty's book one of the", "according to Ibn Tamiyah, between the people of Bida'a and the people Sunnah. Ibn Taimiyah said that the people have bid'ah will only take what suits them whereas the people are Sunna they transmit what goes against them and what is for them because they want the rizq of Allah they don't want just a partisan you know position", "So what will happen in the literature, and another person, Fatima Mernissi. I don't like to mention names but it's important to warn people about certain people. And that's part of nasihah. Fatima is somebody who also does that. She goes into the book. Some people say she doesn't do it. I know some Moroccan scholars that actually don't think she's capable of doing it. And she actually has people research for her. But her books have been published by Berkeley.", "So, I mean, you know what... I mean why is it... You know, it's amazing if a Muslim woman in the Arab world wants to make a lot of money right now. Unfortunately. I shouldn't even be saying this to give people bad ideas. But all she has to do is attack Islam and tell horrible stories about her childhood whether true or false and write a book about it. Whether she can write or not like that Bangladeshi writer who can't even write. And that was one of the unfortunate... Salman Rushdie is a writer. He's won the Book Award", "He's won the Booker Award, and he is a capable writer. Whereas that woman, Nusrat or whatever her name was, she couldn't even write, and they realized it when they translated her books. They were disasters. But all you have to do is speak against Islam as a woman now, and you can get a publishing contract right away. You just go down to University of Berkeley. I'm interested in writing about", "Islamic tradition and they'll sign you up right away. You don't have to have any degrees or anything just that you're a Muslim that was born in the Muslim household or something like that So The point being is that what Rooster did he studied Islamic history at Cambridge? it's an orientalist hotbed of Orientalism and One of the things that was obviously introduced to him was the history of Imam poverty which is in English and In there, it mentions about these verses", "about these verses in which, according to the tradition, the Prophet ﷺ actually gave concession to the mushrikeen in Mecca by recognizing that. And then later, according", "Abu Bakr ibn al-Arabi says it's a completely fabricated narration and has no foundation. But there is an example where something got into the seerah literature, and now has been used by the enemies of Islam whereas traditionally it was left in the books because Imam Tabari was an imam and he did record it, and the fact that he recorded it is noteworthy in and of itself. So that's just an example", "what can happen with Syrah literature. So the other thing is it's also related to the Quran and the Hadith because there are Badr is extensively mentioned in the Quran, Bahud is extensively you mentioned in Quran things about the Prophet . Events that take place are in the Qur'an and need clarification through the Syrah for instance Zainab when the prophet married Zainb and", "except for three, and the Prophet ﷺ wanted them to leave because it was his wedding night. But he was too... Out of his generosity, he didn't tell them, you know, please leave. He stayed with them, and then he left, and Zaynab sat with him. It was before the separation. And then he came back, and they were still there. So the ayahs came down telling people if you eat with the Prophet, then when you finish eating, just leave.", "are explained through the seerah literature. And there are many, many other examples of that and that's related to asbab al-nuzool , the reasons why things aren't revealed. And obviously the sunnah is a strong part of the seers' sources and in the akhbar of the salaf or the community. In terms of its hukm, Shaykh ibn Hamdun says", "Although one could say it's a fard kifaya in terms of maintaining an understanding of the Prophet, really its mandub to study the seerah for us as common Muslims. And the nadab comes from the fact that whoever studies the seera literature will come to understand more fully Allah's word. وَإِنَّكَ لَعَلَىٰ خُرقًا عَظِيمٌ You are on a vast self-form, you're on a", "you're on a vast ethical nature, that the more you study this year of the Prophet, the more realize that. And also because it is an obligation to love the Prophet by Sharia. It is called . In other words your Iman is actually not sound if you don't love the prophet . It is a condition of Iman that you love the", "that there's a fault there because if you don't know somebody, it's hard to really love them. You have to come... I mean, it is a famous line in this culture, you know, I love you and they say, you don t even know me, right? How can you love me,right? In other words, you really don't love a person until you come to know them and then you could really tell them I love", "is based on knowing him and knowing him is based in studying his seerah it's also a shart so its a shard everybody knows that shard is a condition it's the condition of soundness of iman to love the prophet it's a condition of perfection of imaan to love prophet more than anybody including your own self so your iman is not complete until the prophet is more beloved to you then everything in creation with exception of allah subhanahu wa ta'ala", "In other words, you actually love the Prophet more than your own self. And the famous story in which Sayyidina Omar said, I love you more than everything other than my own self between my two sides.", "and Omar immediately said, Ya Rasulullah I love you more than my nafs even that's between my two sides. And the Prophet said, now your iman is complete. So that's important in really understanding the Quran.", "in really coming to love the Prophet ﷺ is recognizing that our iman is not complete until we love the prophet." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/The Life of the Prophet Muhammad by Shaykh Hamza Y_NOrmlwNPedc&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743070558.opus", "text": [ "Is there any question about the reading? 30, I think to page... I'm going about 30 pages a week. And if we maintain that pace, we'll be able to complete the book in that time.", "the reading should have been from the chapter entitled The Pact of Chivalry through to Abu Jahl and Hamza, Chapter 20. So, Chapter 12-20 or Chapter 11-20 Now this section on", "A section on the... This book, a lot of people find it difficult because of the names. It is a problem. And you know what would be really nice? If somebody actually went through the book, wrote down all the names and then had a glossary of names that you could kind of keep with you as you read the book. That would be very useful. Because the names... Another problem, some people have", "The other thing that's important, you should really read his seerah once a year.", "Now, the story of the Prophet should be read at least once a year. Traditionally Muslims tended to read it in the month of Rabi' al-Awwal But it should be red at least Once a year So you get used to the names and things Now The Half Al Fadoor is a very interesting event", "in the Arab history. And, the reason for it is there was an event that took place which... The Arabs had a extraordinary sense of wafa this idea that really your word was equivalent to you if your word", "If your word wasn't sound, you weren't sound. And so the Arabs really had an incredible dislike like most people for things like treachery, khiyanah very wretched but at the same time they were really a nomadic people that had only recently settled They didn't really have a civilization like other people and for that reason their laws were not developed", "pretty crude tribal laws. And in a lot of ways, it's not all that dissimilar to the laws of the street in some communities for instance in America. In other words you have gang culture and in gang culture you have a gang and the gang is tight and they defend each other irrespective", "irrespective of whether they're right or wrong. So if another gang takes out a gang member, then that gang member goes and gets revenge, irrespectively of whether the person did it or not. And this is a jahiliyyah phenomenon, and it's called ta'r in the Arab tradition. So here what happened... One of the things he mentions", "as the prophet was growing up he was trained in war which is important and i just like to mention something about that i think muslims tend to have an idea that these arabs you know when time for jihad came they all kind of just went out to fight which is not true and anybody who knows anything about uh martial arts knows that if you don't train", "not strong, your reflexes aren't the same and any warrior knows that they have to continually train which is why armies train every day. I mean they do, they basically train everyday shooting running doing all these things and so these Arabs because their life you know you had to be able to defend yourself because somebody might throw down", "gauntlet and say, you know, let's go. And so part of being a man in that culture meant that you were strong and that you had muru'a, that you are able to defend yourself. You weren't a weakling. And weakness was seen as a very negative quality. So these people were physically very fit. They were hunters. They used bows. They use to go out practicing bows. The sahabi used to practice in Medina.", "in medina they used to practice between asar and maghrib they would shoot the bows um they used it and the prophet was a great bozeman sallallaahu alaihi salam and he said in ahadith whoever learns archery and then leaves it has disobeyed me you know i mean he felt that you should continue if you're going to do that training that you continue it so he was also they were trained in swordsmanship you have to know how to use a sword and a sword", "like kendo or a screamer, where you have a weapon like a sword. You'll know very quickly that you have to train because somebody comes at you. So they definitely did that. Now Abbas and Hamza. Hamza was an extraordinarily powerful man. He was also a warrior by nature. That was just part of his nature.", "He is his brother in Radha'a, the Prophet. He's the uncle of the Prophet , but he's also his brother, in Radhah'a So as an uncle, he's going to have a status like the father even though they're almost the same age And as a brother in the Radha', there's another bond there", "So Hamza was very close with the Prophet and being of average height and weight, to say that he was of average strength I don't agree with that. Because the prophet had the strength of 40 men. And so to say you should kind of put a cross through that. He was not of average", "never been thrown ever in his life. And he threw him twice and the first time, the man jumped up and said do that again because nobody had ever done it right? And a wrestler told me he wanted to learn the move right? How did he do it? He wanted to see him do it again so he could learn the moves. So the Prophet had the strength of 40 men but he definitely had an aptitude for archery", "Partly because, like he points out is true. He had very powerful eyesight. He could also see from behind like you can see in front. And whether that was before or after the prophecy I don't know but he could see behind him and a man once was making fun of the way he walked because the Prophet Sallallaahu Alaihi Wasallam walked fast and in a downward incline and Arabs tend to have a Tabakhtur they like to walk with a kind of", "like a tough guy type walk. And that's how they did walk. So this man was imitating the way he was walking in a funny way and the Prophet saw him not like that, and he turned around and said be like that. The man had paralysis for the rest of his life. He couldn't... That is true that the Prophet counted I've seen nine", "this says 12 stars in Pleiades, which is called Thurayya. And there's only seven visible ones. There's only 7 visible ones with the human eye. Right? And he saw 12 in that constellation. Which now we understand the possibility of that because of distant stars and things like that. But he said that during that time so that's one of his mu'jizat, sallallaahu alaihi wa sallam, that he could see those.", "see them. Now during that time the Arabs had a very interesting phenomenon and that is despite the fact that they fought, they have this understanding of four sacred months and in those sacred months you did not fight. In other words these Huram months they had an inviolability which meant", "allowed them to make their pilgrimage? Is it allowed a safe movement of caravan? And they really respected this. And some of the ulama have indicated that this was actually in preparation for the whole concept of taqwa because the Arabs, interestingly enough, despite the fact they didn't have a divine revelation, they recognized that these months were sacred and we're not going to break this inviolability.", "it was considered an incredible wrong in their culture. Now, what happens is a very tough man he was really tough man from this tribe of Kinana which was a very powerful Najdi tribe He... This man Amer What happened is", "He was actually jealous of him because he was given safety from one of the Arab rulers at that time. And he said, will you even make him safe from the Kinana? And the Hawazim tribe was a very powerful tribe in that area and so was Kinana. And so what happened was is that they went out on a journey together and he got him drunk", "got him drunk, and then he just killed him. Very treacherous thing to do. And what happened is that the man then went and took refuge, right? And he had his tribe behind him. But the Hawazim had allies, right, the Quraish were involved as allies of Kinana. So they were actually allies of the tribe of the man who was treacherrous.", "And what happened is that because of this alliance, they had to defend their men. This was part of the Jahili tradition. They had to defen their man against the Hawazim and so this led to a fight which is called Harb al-Fijar.", "of this man, who is Barad ibn Qays. Because he killed this other man and it was done in one of the sacred months. It was done on the Shahr al-Haram So the fact that he did it in the Sharr al- Haram when he was treacherous, it was a really bad thing to do. Despite that, the Quraysh got involved in it. And so what happens is", "What happens is it went on for about four years and there were only actually a few days of fighting during the whole time. And this was part of that, you know they had a tradition in the Philippines or maybe in Burnao, its one of these islands that when these tribes would go out against each other if it rained they wouldn't go out because it would like wreck the headdress of these warriors.", "things didn't uh... if it wasn't a good day to fight you know they just call it off so this is basically the type situation now during that time the prophet actually collected arrows for them there was about which he collected arrows and there's also it said that he also actually shot some arrows on that", "The interesting thing that happens from this is that after this, not shortly thereafter, there was a merchant who comes and he'd sold some goods to a notable of the clan of Sahm. And then the Sahmi refused to pay the promised price. So this wronged merchant, he was a stranger in Mecca, didn't have any power", "didn't have any power and no tribe at this point to defend him. He went up to this mountain, Abu Qubais which is where they used to go to give some time talks and in a very powerful rhetorical manner he said I've been wronged and is there anybody in this city who has a sense of justice? And this had a powerful impact on the Quraysh.", "And the promise was that anyone who was oppressed, that did not have somebody to do that, then they would all be for that man irrespective of the tribe. And this is a major change in the psychology of these people. That they would support them even if it was against their own benefit. So this is", "that Islam is going to bring. Because this was very alien to this Jahili culture. And they did that, and they all went, and poured water over the black stone, and then each man drank the water, and raised their hands and made an oath, right? That every act of oppression in Mecca, they would stand together as one man on the side of the oppressed against the oppressor whether the oppressors were Quraish or from somewhere else. So you have to understand the importance of this", "of this . And then the other thing is, the Prophet said about this. He said that I was present at an oath of allegiance in Jahiliyyah had I been called to it in Islam, I would have gladly responded. And this is also an indication that Muslims should be on the side of the truth even if it's coming from non-Muslims", "from non-Muslims. See, so again it's getting even letting the Muslims recognize that we should not be in a jihadi framework where I defend my Muslim brother against say a Jew or a Christian when it's clearly the case that the Jew or the Christian is oppressed and the Muslim is oppressing. And it's really important to recognize this. This is a radical change from the psychology of the Arab", "is letting us know that Islam is no different. Don't make Islam, don't make the Muslims into a tribe where you take vengeance for your brother Muslim if he's an oppressor against an oppressed and there are some really interesting stories in the Sira about the Prophet supporting the non-Muslim against the Muslim when he saw that it was wrong and Omar does this also", "occurs several times in the history of Islam. So that's a really important aspect of this and the man who was in Mecca, who was a Taimi from the clan of Abu Bakr it was in his house Abdullah bin Jud'an and he is the one that offered his house for all the lovers of justice right? Calling people to this idea of justice now the next section here is about marriage and basically it's interesting that the Prophet", "The Prophet had actually, there was a woman here who was of a marital age named Fakita. She's also known as Umm Hani and the Prophet had grown up with her knew her quite well. Now Umm Hani is she, the Prophet", "his cousin Hubera was the son of the mother of this clan of Makhzum and he asked for the hand of Umm Hani, right? And he had a lot of substance. He was a poet. He had all of these things. And so he was given in marriage and the Prophet ﷺ, his request was unanswered. When the Prophet went to him, he was told that a generous man must requite generosity", "And this would probably mean that Khadija had heard from Waraqa during this early period, that there was a prophet coming. And then we also heard about Qutayla who's very interesting, who is the sister of Waraqu and she actually wants to marry Abdullah. We heard earlier that she wanted to marry Abdallah because she recognized that this might be the man who has the prophet in his loins or he might himself", "he might himself be that man and it didn't happen. So basically, the Prophet is now becoming known as Al-Amin. He's a young man, he's trading in the community and Khadija actually employs him. The other thing here that's mentioned", "which is in the south of Syria. He took shelter beneath the tree and there was another monk there. Now this might be the same place, the people of Sira differ on it. Some say it might be where Bahirah was and others say that this is actually a different event. In any case, the Prophet sat under this tree and when Nastor saw this thing he went and said only a prophet sits under this", "had sat under. So when he saw that, he asked the servant, Maysara who was Khadija's servant, who is this man? And he said he's from Quraysh, the people of the sanctuary and then he said, he's a prophet. So now Maysar wouldn't be that surprised because he's seeing some pretty extraordinary things on", "the fact that he's clouded, the fact there is Baraka in everything that he does even the goods they purchase and sell. He makes much more than anybody else Maisarah had ever gone on a journey with. And so what happens here is... now another thing I think this is really good footnote here is that the Prophet is identified by some of the Muslim scholars to be Shiloh who has mentioned", "who's mentioned in Genesis 49, 1 and 10. And this is a really important verse because although the Christians interpret it to mean Christ, if you look at this, it says here, quote,", "you in the last days. The scepter shall not, in other words, this oath between God and between Bani Israel, shall not depart from Judah, right? From the Jews nor a lawgiver from between his feet. In other words all of the messengers are going to come from this tribe until Shiloh comes and unto him shall the gathering", "So in other words, when he comes the scepter is going to go from Bani Israel to another people and then the gathering will be on. So this is a prophet from Bni Israel foretelling a prophet who will not be from BNI Israel because it doesn't mean anything that the verse doesn't make any sense now for the Christians to say Jesus Isa alayhi salam is a direct descendant of Dawud according to their own tradition so he would have been", "And so he does not fit into this category. So, this is a really important event Now what happens is when Maysara comes back the Prophet had an incredibly successful journey and Khadija Sees the truthfulness Al-Amin He's known as Al- Amin and all these things she wants now to marry him now This is a woman who has been married twice before She's 40 years of age right?", "The Prophet is 25 and she was a very beautiful woman. And according to the seerah literature, she was still a beautiful woman and she wants to ask the Prophet for marriage. Also this is not unusual for a noblewoman to be able to be forthright in that way. She was also", "the traditional restrictions or things like that, that would tend to be on a virgin in not being forthright or immodest, would not be placed on her in a cultural context. So she gets a woman named Nufaisa and she asked to go and see if this is possible. And Khadija says, told Waraqah about first of all he saw these angels when they were on the journey and then the other things that he sees.", "the things that he sees and she went and told waraka and he said if this is true then he is the prophet that we've been waiting for so this is an indication that khadijah was aware of who the prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam was so anyway the prophet salallahu", "of his uncles, the only one that was really doing well was Abu Lahab. So anyway she's asking the Prophet and he is saying you know she wants to see what's going on and this is matchmaking and things like that so she's asked him what do you think about a noble woman with wealth and all these things ask you for marriage? And the Prophet said who would that be right?", "And he said, I don't have the ability to marry and this and that. And she said, well what if she wanted? Who is she? Khadija. And then he asked how could I do that? She said right leave it to me. And Then he said that he would do that so she goes tells Khadijah and then things begin to happen. So Hamza Goes and asks for the hand in Marybn Awan", "There's a lot of really amazing connections here. Anyway, Hamza goes and he asks for the hand of Khadija and it's agreed and they'll give 20 she-camels nuq as a dowry. So now what happens? The Prophet ﷺ is establishing a household in this early community. And then she from Khadijah alayhi salam, she gives six children two sons and four daughters Qasim", "and that's why the Prophet is named Abu al Qasim which again, is a clear indication because he actually says ana al qasim He's the distributor. He's one who makes between people And so Abu al-Qasim not only has that idea of being the father of Qasem but also being the possessor of Al-qasim or the one who can do that Abu al qaasim", "So he has Qasim, Tahir and Ibrahim. These are the three sons. All of them will die in their first few years of birth. And then the daughters he has Zainab followed by three other daughters Ruqayya, Umm Kothum and Fatima. Right? And then on the marriage day also he sets free Baraka who was a slave he inherited from his father. Again the name is I think very interesting.", "Very interesting. His own slave's name is Baraka, and he sets her free, and Khadija also gave him the gift of a boy, Zaid ibn Harithah. And this is interesting too. Now at the time Baraka goes to... She marries somebody from Medina, Yathrib, again ties here, and has a son who's very important, Umm Ayman.", "And then Zayd, right? He was bought in Uqab by the uncle of Khadija here. But what happens is very interesting or her nephew. What happened this man Zaid was actually an Arab from the Kelbi tribe which was a good tribe and he was unjustly taken as a captive in like they used to raid places", "sold into slavery. Haritha, his father was of the Kelbi tribe there between Syria and Iraq and then his mother was Atai from Hatim Atai, from the same tribe of Hatim. So he was actually a noble from good birth but what happens is he lives in this area. Now this is an incredible event I think personally. What happens is Zayd radiallahu anhu", "is growing up here in the house of the Prophet ﷺ. And Haritha, his father, is looking for him and then finally gets news from some pilgrims because they meet some kalbis on pilgrimage. And he has to tell them because it would be a disservice even though he's actually very happy where he is. He tells them and the news gets went to his father and he comes with his uncle and they come and they meet the Prophet,", "And they explained to him what happened. Now here's somebody who was purchased, given to the Prophet by Khadijah and this is in the Arab situation really kind of acceptable condition. So he says let Zaid choose I'm not going to... They say we'll ransom him, we'll give you money. See so they're recognizing this is an unfortunate situation, we will pay you for it. The Prophet", "will let him choose. If he wants to stay with me, then he stays with me. If He wants to go with you, no ransom.\" And this is part of His justness, the Prophet's fairness. So they bring Zayd to the Kaaba and he meets his father, he recognizes him as uncle, and the Prophet explains to him the situation. And Zayd , he says, I would choose no man over this man.", "Which is amazing because this is his father who was a good man. He's been spending all this time looking for his son. So again, this is a clear indication of who the Prophet shallallahu alaihi wa sallam is because here's a man in his house. His slave. His mamluk and he's choosing to stay with the person that owns him over his freedom. And his father says", "Say, Ya Zaid. You know, think about what you're doing. Do you choose to be a slave over freedom? And he says, I've seen things from this man. I can't leave him. So they leave and at that point the Prophet ﷺ announces to the Quraysh, Zayd is my son. Right? Zayd ibn-i. So this is called Tabanni in the Jahiliyya which again", "and has his two sons Ja'far and Ali who are very significant also later on. And the Prophet agrees with Abbas, his uncle to take to relieve Abu Talib because he had a lot of children so the prophet took Ali and Ali is a child now small boy and Umm Fadl who's the mother of Abbas who was one of the first people she has always loved the Prophet incredibly they decide to take Ja'afar", "Ja'far. And so Sayyidina Ali now becomes part of the Prophet's household and then Baraka comes back to the house, and another important event happens which is Abu Lahab proposes to the Prophet for his two sons Uthman and Uteba. Ruqayya and Umm Kulthum are both betrothed to Abu Lahabs son. Now this is important", "there's a recognition in Bani Hashim now that the Prophet is al-Zayin. Even though he is not somebody who is in any way asking for this position, he's not somebody that's out there rallying Bani Hasim to take what's theirs which is the leadership of Quraysh but they all recognize there's something extraordinary about this person", "the wisdom that he has, his abilities, the eloquence of speech. Although he spoke very little when he spoke everybody recognized that he had an eloquense that was unmatched in Quraysh despite the fact that he's not speaking poetry and so Abu Lahab is obviously here trying to get in because to marry his children to the daughters in their culture you're marrying also for social positioning", "positioning. And so the Prophet, sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam, at this point is really not somebody that looks in terms of his material well-being. He's got some money now because of Khadija but he's not a Makhzumi, he's from the stronger tribes, he is not a Shamsi or Umawi, he has a Hashmi and although there is a blood bond here with Abu Lahab despite that fact, Abu Lahb I think really indicates", "and he indicates this, is looking for some benefit here. And so he marries the Prophet Sallallaahu Alaihi Wasallam agrees to them and they become part again of the household. And this will create a problem later on we'll see that when Abu Lahab becomes such a vehement enemy of this causes a lot of turmoil for both Ruqayya and Umm Kulthum because of their marriage to Utbah and Uteyba", "and their fathers become one of the biggest enemies. Now, another event that's really important here is when the Prophet ﷺ is 35 years of age, the Quraysh are going to rebuild the Kaaba. And the Kaabah was, you know, according to their tradition and according to our belief,", "that was harmful, was considered an incredible sacrilege. And so they're actually very worried about doing this. Does he mention about Walid ibn Mughirah? I'm not sure if he did. Yeah, Mughira. Walid Ibn Mughira who's a very tough Quraishi one and... They are all afraid to lay a hand on the Kaaba. And what happens is a snake is coming out every day when they go to do this.", "It's a mean-looking snake, and they take it as an omen. We shouldn't be doing this. And then one day a bird comes and takes the snake off. And so they say, okay, now we've got permission. But they're all still really afraid. And Mughira goes up there, and he says, don't be worried to the Kaaba. He said, this is for your benefit. And he takes the first strike. What they do is decide to wait a day", "wait a day and see if Moghera drops dead or not. And in the morning, Mogher is alright, and so they begin the rebuilding of the Kaaba. Now, he mentions also in here now that the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam oh, important note, is that at the point where they finish rebuilding the Kaabah", "something he doesn't, I don't think mention in there which is really significant. Is that the Arabs collected the money for the building of the Kaaba but it was on a condition that the money had no interest in it. It had no price of a prostitute and nothing, there could be no haram so it's a recognition they knew that interest was not a good way of making money.", "making money. And so they were unable to complete the building on the original foundations of Ibrahim and that's why you have that Shadarwan which completes the foundation. And when they were arguing about who is going to put the black stone, which is the most sacred stone in the Kaaba, who is gonna put that in place? In the cornerstone? They start arguing", "we're more rightful. So the Taimis want the honor, the Makhzumis want to honor, everybody wants the honor. So they decide, the first person that comes through the Kaaba will let him decide. And sure enough, the Prophet ﷺ comes in and they all see the Prophet and they say, رضينا بالأمين Let Ameen decide. So in other words, here's again an indication because these are the a'yan.", "These are older men. The Prophet is still a young man. He is not fully... Because it was a society based on elders, so these are going to be men in their 50s and 60s who are tribal chieftains. So the fact that the Prophet is a young male coming in, he's not fully admitted into this group yet. I mean they see he's up-and-coming leader but he's really not admitted into the group. That's important to recognize their psychology", "psychology but when they see him radina i mean they recognize this we're all content with it he lays out the cloth has each group pick a corner of the cloth they lift it up and then he himself uh places uh the the the stone in the uh the cupboard now what happens now is that the prophet salat begins to have dreams and this is the beginning of prophecy", "He starts having true dreams. And then at the age of 40, when these dreams begin to occur, he is going off to a place, Ghar al-Hirah, which is just outside of the city. Ghar Al-Hira is a mountain. There's a cave at the top of the mountain,", "can actually see from the cave, you can see the Ka'bah. I don't know if you can anymore because of the building but yeah, you could you can See the Kaabah from the caves so it's really not far outside of city. The Prophet would go to this cave and according to the tradition that he would do it for Tahnuth and Hint in Surat al Waqia means Shirk. So Hint is like idols", "is like idols. It's shirk. Tahnuth is from tajannub. It means to avoid the idols. So, the Prophet ﷺ is going to this place outside Mecca to get away from the idol and this is the Hanif tradition and he begins... He's doing his... The ibadah that he was doing, his meditation in the cave and he has a vision which is that... I mean not a vision actually.", "vision actually it's he sees the angel so it's actually a clear seeing. The angel comes and tells him to read, and he says I don't know how to read now it's important because the angel takes him and squeezes him until he thought his sides were going to burst. The ulama say one of the meanings", "The Quran is not an easy book. It's literally going to squeeze the nafs, right? It's going to completely take you to a point where your nafs can't bear it anymore. And so he does that three times and each time the Prophet says I'm not a qari and then... And qari, important to note, qari to the Arabs meant somebody who could read", "could read. I mean generally they say reciter, but qari is an interesting word because it means both a reader and a recitor. The Quran is a recitation, it's also a reading. And so the qari he was not a reciter. He did not recite poetry, the Prophet . He was not known as a rawe or a qari nor could he read. So it really has a couple of meanings.", "this angel in the form of a man that he is Jibril and this is prophecy. And the prophet is in a complete now, he's actually terrified and partly because he's worried that he's they believe, the Arabs believe that poets were often possessed by jinn what they call in Greek tradition the muse right? There's an idea", "heard, they had a muse on the side of their like Ta'abat Sharra was a poet that had this jinn that was reciting to him. That was the idea and so he was actually terrified that this was a jinn. He goes down to Khadija very significantly. He's shivering because of this experience and you can imagine this is an incredibly traumatic experience for a human being", "And somebody with the Prophet, his absolute balanced nature is worried that it's an unbalanced experience. It's uncanny. There's that element there. I think we should all recognize that the Prophet in this situation is really troubled by this. He goes to Khadija. Cover me up because he's shivering. He's really traumatized by this experience.", "this experience. And then she asks him what happened? And he tells her what happened. Now Khadijah, a couple of things. One, if we recognize that she was aware at a certain point this is going to happen because she really did have a knowledge that the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam was going to be a prophet. So she's not now finally it's making sense. In other words,", "she's been waiting for. And she confirms it to him and says, tells him, reminds him, you take care of the orphan. You look after the widow. You give sadaqah. You gives charity to people in need and you help the oppressed. How could your Lord abandon you? In other words doing all these upright things how could this be an evil experience because the evil influences", "have access to people that open up venues for them. And you have never left a venue open for them, so how can they the jinn have access? Then she says let's go to Waraka bin Naufat. Now this is a really important and significant event also because one it teaches us something really important, and that is when in doubt go to an expert right", "close person to him, his own wife who knows him better than anyone else. Human people and then from Waraka who's an expert in the very thing that's happening to him and so he tells him a few things that are interesting. One your people are going to Zunek they're going to harm you and they'll chase you out of this city and this is something that Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam cannot believe because not that", "Not that he can't believe it, but it's something so shocking to him because he was somebody who never had a bad word for anybody. He'd never done anything to harm these people. He always been absolutely upright and just in their city and in their tribe. And so he is deeply shocked by that. Then Waraqa says that even though he's an old man about to die which again is really significant", "What would have people said? What's that? That he taught him. See, had he lived... And this is what the Christians would have said because they're always trying to find where did he get this information from. Yeah, absolutely. So they'd say, oh, he had an aide. Waraka bin Naufal was with him throughout his mission teaching them the Bible and the Torah. You see, it's important. Warakah dies immediately after this. But he says,", "and this is a proof he was a Muslim, he says I would that I would live to be with you to give you victory on that day. And then he kisses him. So he's had these two assurances now and then the next revelation so the first one is Ikhra and then it's very interesting that the first", "that the first revelation is iqra, write. And then the second revelation is noon. Right? I mean read. So here, the first two revelations are related to how we learn. Through reading and writing. Transmission of knowledge. And there's a period, a break here, and a period now. What happens", "What happens is the worship, the Prophet is commanded in the Quran He's told in the Qur'an do what you're commanded to do submit to it and avoid the Mushrikeen In other words don't fight them, don't do anything just avoid them And this actual verse in the quran once the prophet was at the Kaaba and he read that verse", "And the Arab said, did you change your deen? And he said, la wallahi. He said, by Allah I didn't change my deen. They said, why did you make sajdah? He said because of the fasaha of those words. You know, the power of those word. He was just so impressed by that. Fasda bima ta'mar. He is so impressed with that it put him into sajdhah which again, you know, they really recognize the power", "of this book. So he's commanded to do that and the, he says that the religion is based on ritual purification in prayer. Allahu'anam I mean at this early period of time even though he's commanding to avoid Najasa, Rijs and these type things there's really they're being taught Tawheed during this first period and obviously they are making dua and these things but the prayer", "but the prayer is given to him later. And so he begins, the first to embrace it according to our tradition is Khadija and Waraka although he's not generally placed amongst these, he definitely believed in the Prophet , but from the Ali in the household accepts and he's only seven years of age, a small boy", "Then Abu Bakr, who is his closest friend from the Taimi clan. He also embraces it and Zaid, who's still the adopted son of the Prophet because that hasn't been abrogated. And then what happens is some of the others like Abdul Amir is a very interesting person he's known as Abdur Rahman bin Auf later. The Prophet didn't like the name Abdul Amar which is like a Jahili name. He gave him the name Abdur-Rahman bin Awf and he also becomes Muslim which is important", "See, these people that are with the Prophet at the very earliest point, these are the people that will be with him throughout his mission. And they're also people that were coming into Islam at a time when there weren't any perks here. There weren't social benefits. This is all at a times where it was actually incredibly difficult to be doing it. So these people are really important and they'll be important throughout the mission. Now another person who...", "Ibn Sa'id is important also. He had a dream in which he sees the Prophet ﷺ, he's about to enter into a pit of fire and the Prophet pulls him away from the fire in a dream he's seeing this. And then he goes Abu Bakr is known for dream interpretation amongst the Quraysh. So he goes to him and tells him, I have this dream explain it to me and he explains that he becomes Muslim.", "and he on his way back from Syria heard something in the desert telling him that the Prophet Ahmed has come, and he's asking who is Ahmed? Which is something very unusual. And then he becomes a Muslim because he goes...and there's another man Talha also who meets a monk who tells him that it's time for Ahmed to come out. The monk", "The time has come for Ahmed to come out. And that's the name that the Christians had for the Prophet ﷺ. And so Falha ibn Ubaidullah, he is a Taimi also. Uthman is an Umawi, another clan, very powerful. And basically they go to Abu Bakr r.a and he explains. And UthMAN submits, he's 34 years old when he becomes Muslim. So he's mature.", "He's mature. He's not like a lot of these men who were very young. Zubair ibn Awam was 12 years old when he became Muslim. He'd just reached puberty. So, a lot more very young and then another one is Abdullah bin Mas'ud who was... he was a confederate of Zuhrat. Very dark-skinned, very short. He was very small and he used to watch animals outside Mecca", "passed by and they asked him for a drink, and he says I can't. I'm taking care of these, which is a sign of amanah. Nobody's going to see him giving some drink. It's a sign if amanah He said I can' t. It was a trust. They're not mine. So the Prophet asks for one that doesn't have milk. And so he brings it and puts his hand on the udder and the udders fills up. So here's a clear muʿjizah. Ibn Masud sees that and then asks Abu Bakr what was that?", "He becomes a Muslim also. He's very important because he's going to become one of the greatest of the scholars in Islam, right? Abdullah bin Mas'ud. And he eventually goes to Iraq, becomes a teacher in Iraq and Abu Hanifa radiyallahu anhu's madhhab is based mostly on his position at Tawwid but he really is considered one of", "he's memorizing everything that comes down from the Quran. And he actually says at one point, there's no verse in the Quran that he doesn't know where it was revealed and why it was revealed. Right? So he saw very early on. And unfortunately, he had a Mus'haf that gets destroyed. It's lost. And they say there would have been an incredible amount of knowledge had we had access to that. And also Sayyidina Ali's Mus'haf which went according to the revelation as it was", "as it was revealed. And then there's a period in which Yahya al-Muzzammil comes down and also Yahya Al-Mudathir, and during this time Khadija is beautiful, is given greetings from Allah SWT, also indicating her incredible rank amongst the women and amongst the men.", "And really what's happening here now is there's not a whole lot of hostility yet. Although it's starting to get out, the word's getting out. But then something very important happens which is Allah commands the Prophet to warn his tribe. Right? And this is a command. So now he has to go to his tribe and what happens", "He calls the people, the Quraysh to a gathering. Not Qurayshi, Bani Hashim and he tells them that first time they eat and then as he's about to talk Abu Lahab gets them out and so they all leave. He calls them another time and again Abu Lahb who is really just not a nice person I mean that's the least we could say", "we could say about him. And his face was like, they called him Abu Lahab because it looked like it was on fire. You know, subhanAllah. But he the Prophet tells them that what if I told you there was an army just over the hill about to destroy you? And they said we'd believe you because you're al-Amin no reason why we wouldn't believe you. He said what if", "And I have to warn you from this fire, this raging fire. And then Abu Lahab says, تَبَّنْ لَكَ الْإِهَاءَ جَمَعْتُنَا تَابًّا لَکَ Which is may your hand be lost. Is this what you called us for? And Allah reveals تَفَّتْ يَدَاء بِرَهَبٍ وَتَبِّ Which is another really significant thing because one, this is very early on and that's an early surah", "had Abu Lahab become Muslim, right? I mean this is a clear mu'ajizah because the Quran condemns him to the hellfire and he doesn't become Muslim. Many of these people end up becoming Muslims. He never becomes Muslim. So he's commanded to do that and then he says will anybody help me in this matter? And all of his relatives... You can imagine it's devastating", "event. Because here the prophets gathered them all, they've eaten, they ate from a small amount of food that was enough for all of them and then the prophet says will any of you believe in me and help me? They're all blank faith. Sayyidina Ali stands up he's a few years old, he's probably now about 10 years old and he says I'll be with you and stand by you. And they all start laughing." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/The Life of the Prophet Muhammad by Shaykh Hamza Y_wzk6-BTRS64&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743072897.opus", "text": [ "of the Prophet through love of him and the ma'iyya of Allah . It's not a physical ma'iya. Allah is not physically with you, right? The Prophet is not physical with you but there is a ma'ia of nusra , fawz and madad that comes from loving Allah and His Messenger And if you love them then you get that and if you don't, you don´t", "and also one of the things Ibn Hamdoun says is it should never be said that most of the seerah relates to the habits of the Prophet, the adat. And the adats there's no amal related to them because part of the usool our usool in juristic methodology that there are two types of actions of the prophet", "One is an action which is called an adah and another is ibadah. It's interesting in Arabic how it has these, you know, adahs and ibadas, differences of daa. And this is interesting there are a lot of things like that in Arabic. That the adah is a norm and ibaada is an act of worship.", "A proverb of the Arabs which says, Everything is an adah. كل شيء عادة ولو العبادة Everything is a ʿādah even ʾibādah What that means is everything is a habit including worship in other words you have to habituate yourself To things that you do regularly including worship so you habituated yourself to praying on time You habituatet yourself", "and flip his hand over like that. That was an adha that we'll read about inshallah in the shama'ir of Imam Karmadi. So there are many things, another adha of the Prophet ﷺ is when he walked and somebody called him, he would stop and turn fully around. He wouldn't just like stop and look to see who's calling him. He would stop", "That's an adah of the Prophet. Another adah is that he ate on the floor There's no hukm shar'i that says you have to eat on the Floor There's No hukam Shar'a that says You have to Eat with your hand there's no Hukum Shar'ai that Says that you Have to Wear Certain Types of Clothes right Those are all related to the Adat", "related to the adat. But what Ibn Hamdoun is saying here, radiallahu anhu, is that we should not consider studying the seerah as looking at these habits of the Prophet ﷺ as points of interest. Oh and by the way, the Prophet liked pumpkin or squash. When you read that he likes squash, you should like squash. And that is the way our early community was with the Prophet .", "In fact, Muhammad ibn Aslam one of the great sadaf actually refused to eat batikh which is watermelon even though there's a hadith that the Prophet liked watermelon but he refused to it because he didn't know the way the Prophet ate it. In other words, there was nothing in the sunnah that told how the prophet actually ate watermelon whereas with grapes it's told for instance that he would put a few grapes in his mouth from the stem and he would pull them", "would flow onto his beard. So there are many examples of that, but the point being is that is how much they loved the Prophet ﷺ. They wanted to follow him. Now just to mention something about that that I think is very significant. One of the things that we know now from studies in psychology is that human beings are imitative by nature and it begins early on. The baby will begin to imitate micro-movements of the mother when she talks to the baby.", "talks to the baby. One of the interesting things about babies is that when they're first born, the actual distance of their vision is from the breast to the eyes and the face of the mother. That's all they can see. They can't focus beyond that. And what happens is they begin to absorb immediately from the mother certain movements which is often why you can recognize in grown children", "and you watch them, you'll notice that they laugh the same way that they do. They'll often have similar gestures. They even sometimes blink in a similar fashion or do things with their facial gestures. It's very common. Why? Because human beings imitate. Not only human beings but animals imitate immediately. So the point of all this is we are imitative by nature. This is part of the human nature.", "the things that the Western, particularly America has perfected is what they call this kind of operative conditioning which in behavioralism they for instance I mean the reason they pay these athletes millions of dollars to be on a Wheaties box or to wear a certain type of tennis shoes", "They see them as something that they want to be like. And this is human nature, that's the whole point of it. You can say oh that's just stupid I don't do that. You think you don't, you just do it on a different level. Everybody does this. It's just there are degrees of it some are quite gross and unreasonable like wanting to be Michael Jordan or something like that.", "another person might not. I mean, this is why Michael Jordan makes millions of dollars for selling goods that he probably doesn't even use. So the point being is that this is part of our nature. Now what the Quran says, وَلَا قَدْ كَانَ لَكُمْ فِي رَسُولِ اللَّهِ أُسْوَةٌ حَسَنًا You have in the messenger of Allah the best example to imitate. In other words, since you're going to imitate which is human nature", "Allah gave us the best human being to imitate and that is why when you learn about his character and his qualities out of love, you will want to imitate them because if you love somebody your tendency is to imitate one of the things that disturbed Imam Shafi'i a great deal was when he went to Egypt after being in Iraq and he was a student of Imam Ahmad", "wanted to know how did Imam Malik eat? Because they knew he was his student. They would come to him, How did he eat? Which finger did he wear his ring on? What did he do when in his mud? It really troubled Imam Shafiq. It really bothered him because they were more concerned about Imam Malek and what he did than they were with the Prophet of Allah. And this is why he began", "the people of Medina and these type things because he felt that there was a danger in that. The way I would interpret it as a Maliki is that what their concern was, was recognizing that Malik adhered more to the Sunnah than anybody of his age. They wanted to know what he drank because they knew it would have been what the Prophet drank. And this happens in every generation. This is part", "This is part of human nature. You want to imitate the people that you follow and that part of our tradition is finding people who follow the Prophet ﷺ, and then learning from them. And so that's really the point of learning this subject. That's what Ibn Hamdoun is warning us. Don't think these are just adat that you should say oh that's the way he did.", "that modern Muslims have been focusing on for about a hundred years. In fact, I actually heard somebody once in a lecture, a Muslim, noted Muslim speaker say how there was no benefit in listening to all these physical descriptions of the Prophet and that's really not the point. And well what we have to ask ourselves is why is it that Abu Isa", "al-Kirmazī would have put a book in there with all those descriptions and why is it that the ṣaḥābah would have even transmitted them if they weren't relevant? In other words, the first community recognized the importance of loving the Prophet ﷺ and learning about him in all these various aspects. And one of the things about lovers is they want to hear about their beloved. You know, oh what did she say? Really? She said that? What was she wearing?", "a blue dress? Oh, you know and this is what the lover does. They want to hear about the beloved right? Tell me more and that's the nature of Ishq, of being in love and there are people historically who have died from love of the Prophet salallahu alayhi wa sallam It's transmitted as a hadith I don't know, I've never seen", "They mention it and there's a wisdom in it. Whoever falls in love, conceals that love and then dies from it he dies as shaheed. And A'fa, A'fwan, Affa, man A'ffa wa kathama and he was Afidh In other words, he didn't do anything haram with the object of his love. There is also a famous story of Imam Ibn Sina He was once", "taking a case of this woman who was dying like marasmus she was just withering away young girl and he took her pulse and and he started talking to her about her family and where she lived and when she mentioned where she live he said oh I know that area and i guess do you must knows the people you know that family and she said yeah you know", "And then he said, oh who do you know from that family? Do you know so and so? Do yo u know so-and-so? And then it got to a young man in the family and her pulse started racing. And then she realized that she was in love and she was just dying from ish, you know. So he told the parents what the problem was. So that is a real thing. It's not an unreal thing and I think people now...it's probably less so because people don't have that capacity anymore", "But that does happen to people. And Imam al-Busayri is said to have died from his love of the Prophet . So out of just yearning to be with him. Now, another thing that Imam Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziya in Zad al-Ma'a'd , he says", "If the sa'adah, the felicitousness of the two abodes, the dunya and akhira is connected to the guidance of the Prophet then he says that it becomes incumbent on anyone who's sincere with his own soul to desire his souls safety and salvation. And its felicitusness.", "to do that through learning about the guidance of the Prophet and the seerah of the prophet, and the affairs of the Prophets in order to remove him from the ignorant people and to place him amongst those people who follow the Prophet, and are from his shia'a , his group, and his hizb . So what he's saying there really is it's an obligation. To actually learn about the states of the prophets so you can follow them.", "of this science is , it's conceptualizing what its concerns are and its concerns, are going into the detailed descriptions of the life of the Prophet and a knowledge of what is connected to his inward, his outward qualities. And also the history of his days and the struggles and successes of his life. So that's the area of the .", "Fadila, the merit of this knowledge is what Shaykh Ibn Hamdoun says is that the merit a knowledge is connected with the subject matter and since the subject matters of this Knowledge is the greatest subject after Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala, the messenger of Allah it is obviously an extremely virtuous science and one of the noblest of all the sciences. And now its benefits", "benefit. Nisbettahu is, it is one of the ulama shar'iya. Right? Its category is that it's categorized as one of sciences of the sharia which is about the Prophet . So that's its nisbah. The benefits there are many benefits of this science. One of them is that guides you to the path of sulukh of the Prophet", "is salak means to go down a path. The salik is the wayfarer. The suluk is the path that one goes down, the way one goes on that path and so learning about the Prophets is learning how to be in the world. It's learning about", "can imitate this character. And one of the wisdoms of the Prophet ﷺ being a human being is that he is accessible to us in order that we imitate him. In other words, if the Prophet had been an angel who came down to the earth then people would say after that well we can't be like him he's an angel right? We have no access to him but the fact that he was a human", "and that he had the struggles of a human being, he had pain of a huma being, He had grief of a Human Being. He had love of a Humane Being and he had human perfection realized in him. So the degree by which you follow Him is the degree to achieve your own humanity. In other words, the closer you adhere to His character inwardly and outwardly", "come to human perfection. And this does not in any way eliminate the women by the fact that he was a man because the Prophet ﷺ is the most balanced human being. In other words, the Jamal and the Jalal qualities, the beautiful qualities which are more dominant in women and the majestic qualities which were more dominant men were perfected in him and realized in the most", "In other words, he is the perfection of the Adamic creature. He is that perfection and therefore his qualities and characteristics are as accessible to women as they are to men with obviously certain exceptions but his generosity applies to both male and female", "applies to male and female. And in terms of those things that relate to women, then obviously the examples are in Maryam alayhi salam because she's an example to women. In Khadija al-Kubra alayhis salam. In Aisha radiallahu anha. In Umm Salama. In Umar Masakin. All the wives of the Prophet sallallahu alayhim wa sallam and their noble qualities. And that's why it's important for women also", "the characters and the lives of the Prophet's wives because that increases the Iman. And they're also examples for men as well as women. In other words, Allah makes Maryam an example for the Qaniteen which is a male before it's female. In another words, Maryam is for the qaniteens the people of Qunut, of obedience.", "So that's just, I thought important to memorize. Another benefit of learning about the Prophet is that it fills one's heart with awe of the Messenger of Allah because when you begin to realize who he was, the struggles that existed in his life and his responses to the tribulations that he had because he said the greatest of you in tribulation is the Prophets", "أَشَدُّنَا اسْبَرًٰئًا الْأَنبيَّاءَ ثُمَّ الْآمْثَلِ فَالْأُمْتَلُ And then the closest to them, the Siddiqeen. And then they're closest to then the Shuhada and then the closet to them the Sariheen. Because that's the order of the Nabiyeena, Siddiqueena, Shuhadaa wa Sariheen That is the order or closeness to Allah The closest are the Prophets, the next closest are Siddiqueen", "mentioned Maryam and Yusuf who is also a prophet but he has Muqamat Siddiqiya. And then also Abu Bakr from the Siddiqeen, and many of the other Sahaba. And there are people who come after them who are the Ulama al-Ameeloon or the Siddiqun, the Awliya of Allah. And the Shuhada are the next in rank, people who died, Fisubiillah.", "It could be a very simple person who has very little knowledge, but he has taqwa of Allah inwardly and outwardly. And that's a salih. A salih is somebody who does what Allah tells him and avoids what He prohibited him with the exception of the lemam small wrong actions that are purified by his wudu and by his istighfar and other things. And then everybody else is fasiq. They're fasiqun. That's from the Muslims. And than from the other people they're kuffar. And thats the lowest.", "the lowest and obviously the kuffar, the lowest of the kufar are the munafiqun who are kafir inwardly and muslim outwardly. So that's the ranking humanity is in ranks and everybody has a maqam every human being has a Maqam you're none of us are prophets we're out of that possibility but you're either a sidiq, a shaheed,", "can fall into one of those categories. And the reality of it is, you might be a shaheed and you don't even know it. In other words, actions are by how they're sealed. So it's irrelevant where you are now. You know somebody's life could look really bad now but Allah gives them tawbah and they become from the people of Allah later or somebody's like could look", "la qadr Allah, they lose it and they lose their iman. So that's why we don't... Al-aman min makarillah is from the kabaa'ir. To feel safe from Allah's plan is to... Is from the Kabaa'iir. It's an enormity. To be safe from a law you know that something might happen that you fail the test. And to have yaas, to have despair from the mercy of Allah", "This is why the deen is based on khawf and raja. And when you study the life of the Prophet, it will increase your understanding of that because you see somebody who had more khawth than anybody and had more raja than anybody so he's the imam of all the maqams. And then the other thing is when you have awe of the prophet , you will have awe for his teaching and you will", "Quran in Surah Al-Baqarah. وَمَنْ يُعظِّم شَاعَائِرَ اللَّهِ فَإِنَّهَا مِنْ تَقْوَى الْقُلُوبِ Those who have ta'adhim, exaltation of the symbols of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala that is a result of taqwa in the heart so part of learning about the Prophet ﷺ is increasing in iman which will increase you in ta'dhim which is a", "from that aspect. And that is one of the greatest means that will save us in the Akhirah, right? The people of Taqwa are the people that Allah gives safety to. Another thing is learning how to draw near to Allah through the two rungs of Sabr and Shukar.", "which is patience and shukr, which is gratitude these are two rounds on the ladder of drawing near to Allah. Patience and Gratitude And when you study the life of the Prophet , there's nothing greater than his patience and his gratitude. That's what constantly shows up", "is that he was a grateful servant and he was patient servant. He was shakur and saboor. Battle of Badr, he won the battle and showed great gratitude when he got back from the battle he found out the news that his daughter died and yet he was with absolute patience with Allah .", "all of his children except for Fatima. I mean, how many parents will do that in their lifetime? How many parents would bury all of their children with the exception of one? Six children! It's something awesome if you think about that and yet no complaint never to Allah. He stood in the night until His feet swelled from edema which happens if you stand so long because", "to impact and you can get swelling in your ankle very common as you get older. And Venus, Stasis I think I remember my terms right? He got until his feet swelled and Aisha said, رضي الله عنها يارسول الله، الله سبحانه وتعالى has forgiven you all of your actions what went before and what comes after meaning", "a more virtuous thing for a virtuous thing. That's the worst that he can do. But she said that to him, and he said, shouldn't I be a grateful slave? In other words, for doing that, shouldn'T I show up? So that's one of the benefits, you know, just... And that's really one of greatest benefits of all those things.", "thing to do that. Another thing that is very beneficial is learning about his husn and his ihsan. In other words, husnahu and his", "is His beauty inwardly and outwardly. And his Ihsan is the expression of that beauty to others, and to Allah", "Because if one of the things about human nature is that we incline by our nature towards beauty. It's part of the fitra of the human being and when people lose fitra, they incline towards ugly thing which is why one of interesting and notable aspects of modern society is that it's incredibly ugly as compared to classical society", "society. If you look at traditional cities, they were extremely beautiful. If we look at modern cities, there very ugly and this is part of the loss of human fitrah, that people are actually inclined to an ugly thing. If even look at music, in a traditional music for people that listen to music but traditional music tended to be very harmonious and based on harmony. Modern music is very cacophonic it's", "really disharmonious sounds, which is related to ugliness again. One of the things if you look at human beings, traditionally human beings used to actually beautify themselves now they actually make themselves look ugly. It's very interesting. Women cut their hair very short, one of the ornaments of women is their hair it beautifies them", "I'm not, you know... Because I know there's some women maybe here that have that. And I'm just not... You know, I'm sure a lot of this is unintentional now because these are trends and things that people do. I mean, my mother has short hair. She has really short hair so I'm no... I think my mother is very beautiful. So I'm saying but it's interesting that this is a phenomenon. Another thing is all these piercing that people", "piercing and all these things that they put on their faces, that actually make them look really if you have fitrah it's very alien or tattoos is another thing. Tattoos are not there's nothing beautiful about them by fitrah and I'm saying this because Sharia prohibits it when somebody say well that's your opinion you know and my opinion is they're beautiful and that's why i put them on me the truth is most people regret tattoos later in", "in their life and they'll pay a lot of money actually to get them removed which is obviously something that young people do say now Ali said that that a Shabab Darbat um in an June you know youth is actual type of madness and its cure is growing old so that you know that's one of the things", "his outward beauty and his inward beauty, it causes you to incline towards him. Your heart inclines towards him when you learn about his Ihsan You also by your nature you are inclined to love people who do good for you the Prophet said The hearts are naturally inclined towards falling in love with people who", "is what he has done for us nobody has showed more ascent s including our parents because your parents only secure your worldly life that's all they do 60 70 years they can help you out they can start you on your path they can educate you they can get you started in business they can support", "gratitude for that come out of bayani like they nurtured me when i was young so we show gratitude to our parents but the ihsan of the prophet on us is much much greater than the ihsana of our parents because he has secured for us eternal life if we believe in him so that's one of the great great benefits", "And then another benefit of this is the fact that it's a condition of Iman to love the Prophet and a condition Of perfection in Iman, to love him more than your own self Loving him actually becomes a cause for being saved from the hellfire Because of a khabar which Abu al-Na'im relates that a man, one of the tabi'een said to ibn Umar", "I would have loved that i had seen the messenger of Allah and Sayyidina Omar said to him that he said what would you done had you seen him", "I would have believed in him and kissed between his forehead out of love of him. And ibn Umar said, You want me to give you some good news? And he said, And he says,", "My love does not mix in one of you. فَأَحَبَّنِي حَتَّىٰ حَرَّمَ اللّهُ جَسِدُهُ عَلَى النَّارِ Until Allah prohibits the fire from touching his body. Right? In other words, The fact that the love of the messenger is flowing in your veins and it's part of your cellular structure because one thing about love right I mean there are people when you mention the beloved and they start sweating", "In other words, there's a physiological response to their love. Sayyidina Malik , they said the color of his skin changed when he heard the name of the Prophet which means that the love of the Messenger of Allah was flowing in the entire body. That there were physiological manifestations of that love and the fact that it is flowing in your body means that fire can't touch it because that love is permeating into cells", "of your body and so Allah will make the fire haram for anyone whose love has mixed in their body. And it's an amazing gift, and that's why Sayyidina Anas in the hadith related by al-Bukhari and Muslim, Anas and Ibn Mas'ud relate the hadit which says about the man who came, Ya Rasulallah, when is the hour? And the Messenger of Allah later said, Who's asking about the saa'?", "In other words, what did you do for the last hour? You're asking about it. Are you ready for it? Because it could come any time. And he said I didn't do much prayer nor much fasting except that I love Allah and His Messenger. That's all I prepared for it. And the Prophet ﷺ said A man is with the one he loves.", "We didn't rejoice for anything greater than hearing that from the Messenger of Allah because all the Sahaba loved him. So love of the Prophet is one of the greatest reasons for success in the hereafter by loving the Messenger Of Allah and if you learn about him then you will come to know him actually just to make that hadith correct", "My love does not permeate the heart of anyone. And obviously, the heart is what transmits blood all over the body. And so that's the center of the human being. And then it's also the reason for the ma'iyya from Allah. Whoever obeys Allah and His Messenger out of love for Allah and", "why you obey somebody because you love them. Because in Arabic is willing obedience. That's what means people forget that, because in the Quran it says to the heavens and earth, it said come , you know, come willingly or unwillingly. So is a willing obedient and you only obey somebody willingly when you love him. And so by obeying Allah as messenger, you get foes, you", "In the hadith, a group of people came to the Messenger of Allah and he said, Ya Rasulullah, inna nuhibbu allaha. We love Allah. And it was revealed that ayah came down in the Quran, Qul inkuntum tuhibbuna allaha fattabi'uni yuhbibkum Allah wa yaghfillakum dhunubukum. See, it was", "of Allah is in following the Messenger of Allah. That's a conditional sentence. You see, that's a condition. If you love Allah then the proof is that you follow the Messenger Of Allah. Now what Ibn Hamdun said is the secret of that ayah is that it's not important that you love allah. What is important is that Allah loves you because there are Jews and Christians that love Allah.", "see but Allah puts conditions and the conditions that that Allah has placed on people is that they follow what Allah has commanded them to follow as a sign of their love in other words that is real love it's not just saying I love Allah what's important is that Allah loves you and that's why I mentioned last night Abu Hassan's dua which was a beautiful dua", "Oh Allah, make my wrong actions the wrong actions of someone you love and don't make my good actions the good actions of somebody you hate. And we believe that Allah has . Right? Allah said about Bani Israel for knowing the truth and not following it that they only receive the wrath of Allah . So when you think about the hate of Allah and the love of Allah, it's not like our hate.", "our hate it's not a petulant emotional i'm mad at you right it's now allah is not like that allah doesn't have human emotion we're not anthropomorphic allah's love and his hate is related to his riba his contentment which is his acceptance and to his displeasure which is", "in order for them to be acceptable. So that is, there are many, many, to be honest with you, there's many, other benefits in studying this science but that's just some of the ones that have been mentioned by our scholars at Zamil al-Khairan. So are there any questions? Anybody have any question?", "and then he took it to some rabbis, and he asked them to check it and to make sure that it was free of error. And so he came back to them, and...and he asked what is the book? They said this is a beautiful edition of the Torah, and the calligraphy's wonderful, and they praised it. So he knew it wasn't preserved because they were the learned men of the", "people told him the same thing. It was an excellent addition and they didn't notice the mistake but when he took the Quran to the Muslim scholars, he showed them that and they said this has to be burnt because it had mistakes in it. And so he knew that the Quran was preserved. So one of the gifts of this Ummah is that we're the only ummah that memorizes their book. Now it's said that Uzair memorized the entire Torah", "is that he preserved the Torah. And so, they do memorize parts of their book and part of their bar mitzvah even though that's an American bid'a really but part of there bar mitza is that they have to memorize sections of the Torah or the Talmud maybe. There are Baptists who memorized the whole Gospel but in English. Even if they had it in Greek, it's still not the original language of Isa .", "you know, I mean there but there are Baptists that memorize the whole G-d. I mean they just by wrote it. Please explain what the Prophet meant when he said he loved women as one of three things he loved from the dunya? Many women were confused by this. There are different types of Alif Lam in Arabic and one of them is has the idea of Istirah which includes a totality. When the prophet said that he loved", "qualities that women possess because women by their nature possess qualities that are beloved to Allah whereas men they have to learn those qualities, they're difficult for men. One of them is Rahmah most women in by their Nature have Rahm which is derived from the womb. Women have wombs men don't and the womb is the source of Rahm according to the Hadith in the world so the woman by nature has Rahm", "man it's something that he has to really strive and work on to get another thing is women tend to be by nature humble there's more humility in women women are less prone to boast for instance and this is known even in academia and things like that women will tend to take less responsibility for something they've done than men will men will tend", "and everybody knows what they've achieved. And many, many other qualities. One of the scholars from Andrusia said that the secret of that hadith is that the greatest contemplation of Allah's attributes is in women. Contemplating on a woman's qualities there are more divine qualities in a woman manifested than there are in a man. And Allah knows best. So it doesn't mean like asexual type thing, hasha.", "The Messenger of Allah ﷺ, although he did love women and he did his women. And Imam Nawawi said that the Prophets were made to love also relations with women. He mentions that in the Hadith, that's a Fitrah quality which is one reason why lust is a lesser wrong action than many other wrong actions because it's related to Fitra. Human beings by their Fitra have lust.", "a fitrah, Allah has put in human beings a natural desire for sexual relation. But that hadith does not relate to that. The Prophet was by no means somebody who had those type of qualities at all and he never looked at a woman ever who he did not have direct...was", "or was not one of his wives, sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam. So anything else? When he married her? When she married her. It's in Sahih Al-Bukhari. No it's in Al- Bukhara. You know? No no that's a well known, that's confirmed hadith", "Hadith. Absolutely. And it's not mutawathar, you know, you can't swear by it and there is difference of opinion about it but Aisha relates the hadith in her Bukhari says that she was six years old when she married him and nine years old When the marriage was consummated a couple of things about that one according to the Oxford dictionary of the Bible Mary alayhi salam was 12 years old that when she conceived Asa", "And, you know, I'm just mentioning that to say that at that time in those cultures it was very normal for somebody to get married. In oral cultures according to Neil Postman's book The Disappearance of Childhood, in oral cultures seven years was traditionally considered the entrance into adulthood and Islam actually delayed it and it's not permissive.", "If she has menstrual blood before nine years of age, it's not considered menstrual. It begins at 9. So that is a sign the age of 9 was an accepted entrance into adulthood because by Sharia, menstrual Blood is the sign of adulthood and Aisha even though a woman can get married before she actually has menstruate Blood if she is older right?", "and it can be consummated. But if a woman has a period, she's considered an adult by Sharia. And that was very common, and still is in many cultures. In this culture, it's obviously considered child abuse or... I mean, it would be in this culture. That's a relative arbitrary assessment of this culture amongst many other things. This culture considers 18 to be the age", "to be the age of adulthood or 21 in certain cases. Who decided that? That's called istihsan, it's just da'aham, you know, the intellect. Whereas now they're trying to get it changed because they're getting so many 15-, 14-year-olds killing people and they can only put them in juvenile hall for a few years and then they let them go and these guys are monsters which is part of their problem as well doesn't relate to that", "justices that relate to child abuse and split parents, families etc. So the Prophet according to one tradition she was 12 years old I mean the point is the Prophet we accept whatever he did as being acceptable because he's the messenger of Allah and we believe that and if somebody has a problem with that that's their problem it's not our problem and we don't have to defend our Prophet simple as that", "Simple as that. Because anybody who studies his life will recognize clearly that he was a messenger of Allah and also that he would do anything by command, and he actually was commanded to marry Aisha. He was commanded her. He married Sauda first, then he married Aisha, he was also an older man at the time, he's already in his 50s, and you know, he...he was past his youth, I mean for people to...", "The thing is, they say, كلُّ يَعْن بِمَا ثِيهِ يَرْشَكُ Every container will only spill out what they have in them. And sick people will always interpret things through their own diseases. Whereas pure people will interpret things though purity. However way you want to look at it if somebody has a disease in their heart They're going to interpret all their things from their own disease. When Abu Dharr brought a few dates for the Ghazwa of Tabuk", "said he just wants to be remembered. And when Abdurrahman bin Auf bought a tray of gold in, they said that he just want's to outdo everybody else. That's their own disease, that's their problem. The thing is because they don't have any altruism and because they dont' have any purity in their heart, they can't recognize purity when they see it. They have to interpret through their own diseased nature. And that's the nature of diseased hearts. It's colored", "it's colored. It's like when you have hepatitis, everything is yellow. You start seeing everything has a yellowish tint and the problem is your eyes. You have a disease. And that's what Imam Abu Sayyidi said", "from the eyes of a sick person.", "Their problem is not our problem. Any other question? Uh-huh? You went over the different digest, Sadiq. Uh-uh. Sidiq. Siddiqu. Could you just go over another example? It comes from the Quran in Surat Al Kahf. Right? Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala mentions that", "and those who Allah has showed in'am to. He's given them their ni'mah. And that's generally the ranks that the ulama have given. The first is the prophets, and then next is the siddique, who are considered to be the ulma al-aminun. People who have knowledge and act according to their knowledge inwardly and outwardly.", "outwardly people of taqwa but of knowledge as well the siddique is always somebody who has ma'rifah of allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and then the next is the martyrs, people who die feesebidda and then next is just somebody the salih is the one that does what allah tells them and avoids what he prohibited", "Isn't there something about the ulama allowing a lack of standards in seerah and then the way that they get slide in line?", "And they had meanings in them. Because there's no hukam, legal ruling related to it, that it would just be a waste of a good teaching story that did have some credence to just reject it because of its weak isnad. Well, there are some baseless things that get in there. But they can't be completely baseless. I mean, that's not a good way", "I mean, that's not a good way to put it. In other words there are things that don't have isnad but they do have a basis in other stories or in the meanings that they convey you see what I mean? So it's from the deen to see the prophet vision of the prophet is a bushra that somebody gets or it might be somebody else sees them for another person and the prophet's ru'ya is true", "Whoever sees me in a dream has seen me in truth because Shaytan does not take my form. And there's difference of opinion about exactly what that means. Ibn Sirin was of the opinion if the Prophet ﷺ did not have the qualities that he was known to have, his descriptions, then he rejected it as a true vision.", "says that's not really the preferred position. The preferred position is if you do see the Prophet in a dream and there's a clear indication that it was the prophet, then you feel that you're in the presence of the prophet then it is a true dream. If he has any...if there are characters or qualities that he had that are not in his description then its deficiency that he is reflecting to you about your own self. In other words", "In other words, if he was doing something or had some characteristic or quality that was inappropriate then he's telling you that you're doing that. And so because al-mu'min mir'atul mu'min the believer is a mirror of his believer and the fact that it disturbs you in a dream means that it disturbed him. Because there is a Hadith which is a sound Hadith in Imam Al Bazaar relates which says that", "That the actions of my ummah are shown to me in my grave. And if I see good, then I praise Allah and if I other than that, then ask forgiveness for them. And that's considered a Sahih Hadith, the Senate of it. Shaykh Al-Ghulmari al-Siddiqi great Muhadith of this age said it's confirmed hadith. So there is a difference of opinion does he see all", "he see all everybody's individual actions or does he see the actions of his own as a as an umma like collective uh qualities and i think most say that it's collective but there is an opinion that actually sees uh individual action so the point is if he comes to you with something that disturbs you then it means that he's disturbed by it about you", "in a dream there's no hukam shar'i related to it none so for example there is a story of one of the muhaddithoon was once giving a hadith relating a hadit and this is one of proofs they used to say that the prophet can be seen in a waking state as well and the man related a hadis", "the Prophet didn't say that and he said how do you know? And he said because I saw him just now saying, I didn't' say that. And Sidi Abd al-Aziz mentions in Al-Ibris about Sidi Abdul Aziz at Dabagh that one of the things that he used to do was he would ask him about hadiths and he would say it's not a hadith even though he was illiterate", "He would ask him, how do you know that? And he said have you noticed how in the summer when somebody talks there's no vapors. But in the winter there is vapor. And he says what I see when a hadith being related is a coming out of the mouth and if it's not a hadit I don't see that . So that's how he could tell the difference. So these are Karamat of the Awliya which we believe in.", "and whoever rejects them, reject him.", "claimants and people that said they saw the prophet's license." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/The Life of the Prophet Muhammad by Shaykh Hamza Y_YW_zYxwzFIQ&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742997475.opus", "text": [ "And then Zamzam reemerges. Now this is an extraordinary event, it's a very important event and they begin to argue about what should happen. Now Abdul Muttalib obviously his argument is look I had the dream you know this is my stuff and I'm also a Hashemi I'm supposed to give water to the Hujjad so I'm just fulfilling my duty here.", "they obviously have an argument and they begin to, so what they do is they go to the Kaaba. And there's these divining arrows, right? Divination, right, everybody has an idea I think of what that means, divination. Divination is still used to this day. Probably one of the more dominant ways of divination is the I Ching, which is a Chinese thing, a lot of new age type people", "type people use the I Ching. Astrology is a form of divination. There are many people like Ronald Reagan who when he wanted to do something important, he would contact an astrologer and ask them, is this a good time? Are the stars in the right thing? And they would say it's a good times to do whatever you want to do. And that's what he would do. So this is an ancient thing that even the Pharaoh his people, he", "ask his divination. It's in the story of Yusuf, this is an ancient thing and that's why the fact they're still doing it people can laugh about it but the truth is this is part of human behavior. Human beings tend to be very superstitious so divination is a way of working out what does the divine want? What does that sacred world want me to do in this situation? So they had arrows", "arrows that they would cast and depending on which way they would face another thing the Arabs used to do and this why they call it clear off which is a bad omen is they used to go to birds and and what they would do they find some bird sitting and and they would want to do something and they run to the birds and scare the birth and the birds would fly if they flew to the left because birds fly in a flock", "And if they flew to the right, they would take a good omen which is called a yumin. And so this is how the Arabs would do things. Now they do this and the lots are casted and basically the Quraishis accept this. They accepted that Abdul Muttalib, the treasure some of it goes to the Ka'ba, some to Abdul Muddalib but none to the Quraysh in general", "of the Quraysh in general, and the clan of Hashem should be in charge of the Zim Zam because it was their function to water the pilgrims anyway. So they accept that. Now I want to bring out something because the next section is about the vow to sacrifice a son. One of the things that Abd al-Muttarid really troubled him on that day was when things were getting tense he only had one son whereas the other tribal members had a lot of sons. And the Arabs, in fact in Surah", "Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says, in mudathir, وَأَمْدِذَنَاهُمْ بِمَالٍ وَبَنِينٍ In one verse in there it says that Allah subhana wa ta'ta'ala gave him مَمَّدُودًا مَالًا وَمَمِّدُونًا وبَنین شُهُودا He gave him wealth. مَامْدُوْد A lot of wealth. And this is مُغِيرًا Right?", "like children that are going to be there to protect him. And so this was important to the Arab. And he makes an oath and he says, if Allah will grant him... And all of the Prophet's ancestors didn't worship idols including Abdul Muttalib. They did not call on idol they called on Allah. And Abdul Muthab does this in the Amul Thil which is coming up. Now what happens is that he makes a vow", "says, another. He says, oh Allah, if you give me ten sons and he's already in the prime of his life. If you give him ten sons I'll sacrifice one for you. Now this goes back to the Abrahamic tradition here that Abraham was ready to sacrifice a son. This was an exaggeration. Abd al-Muqtari really, I don't think thought that he would have ten sons", "But it was kind of like saying, you know, just give me some sons and I'll... If you give me 10, I'll even kill one for you. You know, it was like saying I really want this badly and I'm ready to do something really drastic for it. Now, a really important thing here for you to understand. This is from Herodotus who is about 450 BC, before Christ, right? Before the Christian era.", "And he's talking about an event that happens where, yeah, the wine jars in Egypt used to be taken and distributed in different places. And there was a burgomaster who is responsible for that each town. He had to collect the wine jar within his district, carry them to Memphis where they were all filled with water by the Memphians who would then convey them to this desert tract of Syria.", "And so it comes to pass that all the jars which enter Egypt year by year and are there put up to sail find their way into Syria whither all the old jars have gone before them. This way of keeping the passage into Egypt, fit for use by storing water there, was begun by the Persians so as they became masters of that country. As however at the time of which we speak, the tract had not yet been so supplied. Cambyses took the advice of his Halicarnassian guest and sent messengers to the Arabian", "to beg a safe conduct through the region. In other words, the king of the Arabs at that time, the leader. The Arabian granted his prayer and each pledged a faith, right? Made a faith pledge to the other. In another word, this Arab told this Greek, I promise that we'll support you as long as you're in my land. Now listen to what Herodotus says because it's really important. The Arabs keep such pledges more religiously", "religiously than almost any other people. You see, that's a testimony by a Greek in 450 BC. In other words, recognizing that Arabs did not break their religious oaths. They kept their oaths more religious and this is really important to understand the whole reason why Allah gave these people the banner of Islam. You", "And the reason they were given it was because they were people of wafa. They didn't break their oaths. If they made an oath, they kept it even the Jahili Arabs. I mean look at what happens when the Prophet ﷺ when he's signing putting the stamp on a tree says Muhammad Rasulullah. They said if we thought that you were Rasulallah we wouldn't be fighting you or preventing you from getting to the house. In other words", "conviction, we don't believe you. If we believed you, we certainly wouldn't be fighting you. The point is they weren't people who... They were people that really did have deep convictions more so than other peoples and this is really important. So Abdul Mubbalib is a Sayyid of the Arab. His oath is worth even more than your average Arab who by", "religious oaths more than any other people. So he's a Sayyid of the Arab, and he made an oath to God that if he gave him ten sons, he was going to kill one. Now what happens is, he gets ten sons. He gets ten son! And they're all extraordinary people. Al-Harith was the first, Zubair, Abu Talib, Abu Lahab, Abdullah, al-Abbas, Hamza...he has six daughters", "six daughters, and then here it says he has six other sons but there's a few more. But there's ten altogether. Now what happens is as his sons are growing up and finally right? He gets his son here born and Abdullah is born. And he again, Abdullah is an extraordinary I mean obviously he's the father of the Prophet", "a very fine young man, and he has to sacrifice one of his sons. So what happens is, is he decides to go to a diviner. Well first he's just going to go sacrifice his son. So he goes out there, he takes a knife out, right? And he casts lots and it shows Abdullah. The arrow comes out to Abdullah which again is important because this is a divine intervention here.", "Now, the women. Never underestimate the women of the household. And this is Fatima who's the mother of Abdullah. His other wives were from outlying tribes of relatively little influence in Mecca but Fatima was a woman of Quraysh that she was a maqzumiyya.", "This is the Makhzumiyyah, Waleed ibn al-Mughirah's people. These are very powerful people in Quraysh. Now and also from her mother side she descended from Abdu one of the sons of Qusai. All of her family were at hand within easy reach ready to help her if need be. Three of the ten sons were hers Zubair Abu Talib and Abdullah. So she's also the mother of Abdul Muqtadir's five daughters so", "Now what happens is, is that the Mahzun might say, What are you going to do there? Because he's got the knife ready. What are You going to Do there? He has to listen to them. They're powerful people. He made an oath. Now they convince him to offer a sacrifice instead and ransom Him. And they say The sons of Mahzum will take care of whatever that ransom is. We'll do this.", "begging him now. You can see this amazing scene here, and Abdel Moparib, right? He's got scruples. He said I made an oath to Allah, and he's not fully convinced that he can get out of it so easily, and so he says I'll tell you what. I'm going to go to a woman in Yathrib again another significant event who could tell me whether an expiation was possible in this case and how he should do it. So she goes to this woman in", "her divination and she says what is the blood wit amongst you? She asks him ten camels. So, she says return to your country put your men in ten camel by his side cast lots between them if the arrow falls against your man and more camels and cast lots and if need be add more camals until your Lord accepts the thing. Alright so she's telling him how to get around it and he accepts this. So he goes out again begins", "begins to cast the lots. Now, they keep following to the camels. In other words, yeah, against the camel. They keep following Abdullah saying that he has to kill Abdullah until he gets to 100. Right? And then they go towards the cameles. Now at that point, he's still not convinced so he says I have to see", "I have to see, and this is again trust. You know a deep trust. He has to see another time and he did it and it fell against the camels for three times and at last he was certain that Allah had accepted the fida. And so all the camel were sacrificed and this was a big celebration. Now what happens here is Abdul Muttalib", "If you look at the Arabs at this time, most of the Arabs were idol worshippers with the exception of a small group of people who were known as Hunathah. And the word Hanif in Arabic means to incline towards what's straight. It means to", "In Greek, you would probably say orthodox because orthodox means straight path or straight practice or straight belief. So they were a group of people who did not believe in the idols. They did not believed in them. Most of them did not condemn the idol. They just stayed out of it. They prayed to Allah. They didn't have anything to do with the idol Now there were different idols there", "there. And obviously, again interesting here to note this is 450 where Herodotus makes mention of the idols also of the Arabs. Oh I don't think I photocopied that section but he mentioned that the Arabs mainly worship an idol which he said they called a lat and he considered it to be Bacchus", "God of wine and pleasure. So there was obviously the Quran mentions Lat, Manat, Uzza right? These were they called them the Banatullah the daughters of Allah and they were very prominent idols in their whole pantheon. Lat was also the lady of Pa'if", "big temple in Ta'if. And Bani Thaqeef are the people in Ta-ib who were an important tribe and also in history later they come up again, particularly Al-Hajjaji bin Yusuf of Taqafi kind of gives them a type of notoriety that they probably didn't need. Now when in the Qur'an it mentions you know had this Qur'aan been revealed to one", "to one of the two great men in the two cities, Qaryatain. The Qarytain were Mecca and Taif. And obviously because of Latt's position amongst the Arabs, the temple in Taif is an important temple second to the Kaaba. So it does have a relative importance within the Arab. Now, Abdul Muttar knew four of the Hunafa and one of them more respected was Waraqa bin Naufal.", "Same Khadija is the daughter of Naufal, the son of Asad. And Waraqa is the cousin of Khadijah. Now Waraqu could actually read and he could read text. He knew the scripture. It's important one of things that he says to the Prophet is this Namus.", "which is nomos, which means in Arabic sharia. Right? And nomos was the word that the Hellenized Jews used for the Torah. You see? So he said because there's the Septuagint version which is translated in Alexandria from", "into Greek. So the Torah was in Greek and there were actually many Jews who only knew how to read the Torah in Greek, and they called it the Nomos. And so this is what Waraka says, a clear indication that he was educated. You see? That he did know what terms they used and things like that. So he said this is the Namus that came to Musa alayhi salam. And he could also read the New Testament.", "So he was, and it said that he had become a Christian. Now the Christians of that time there were different Christians. There's obviously one theory because the Christians in that area and most of the Christians were in Yemen. There were no Christians in the Arabian Peninsula here in the Hijaz or the Nejd. There are some Christians here near Bahrain", "There were Christians in Yemen, and there were Christians from the Rassasina and the Lachmud. So there were Christian amongst the Arabs but in this area there were no Christians all of this area. I shouldn't put a... that's kind of like a cross. No Christians right? So what happens is that many of the Christians believe", "a prophet coming at this time. The Jews also believed this. Now, the Jews actually had Bani Quraiva, Bani Kuniqa'ah, Bni Nadir. They were in Yathrib and they believed that there was the final prophet would show up. They had it in their books that the final", "there's massive amounts of prophetic literature. The only people that are interested in it, are the Jews. They've done all the research, seriously. Unfortunately Muslims, very few Muslims have any interest, they don't even have an interest in their own literature. Not to mention the literature of other peoples but there is a great deal of literature in the Vedic tradition, the Hindus have the tradition of the end of time", "the Buddhists have a tradition of the end of time, the Jews had very strong tradition at the end-of-time. The Christians had a very strong traditional of the End of Time and obviously the Muslims have a strong tradition. The point being is that these people knew that a prophet was coming to that area and the Jews were very interested in it. They thought that it was going obviously to be from them and that's why they were there.", "would be Muhammad. They did have a knowledge of the name, the name was mentioned and there were actually four people on the Arabian Peninsula prior to the prophet's license that had been named Muhammad all hoping that their son would be that prophet. So there was a knowledge that this prophet was coming. Now what happens is one of the things", "you know he mentions in here that he shall not speak of himself whatsoever he shall speak. Here, he shall speaks which is from the Gospel of John 1613 which is about paraclete obviously most Muslims believe that's speaking about the Prophet . So Abdul Muttabib basically had after once the sacrifice of camels been accepted", "he wanted his son to marry, and it fell on Amina, the daughter of Wahab, who's a grandson of Zuhra, the brother of Hosein. Now, Wahab was a chief, very important person in his... So she's a noble woman, has a very strong position. And so he decides also to marry at the same time, Abdul Muttalib. You can see he's obviously very happy about what happened. This was a big event for him.", "And this Qutayla, who's a son, a sister of Waraqa. Qutaya is very interesting because Qutala on the actual way to the wedding, Abdul Muttalib is walking with his son Abdullah and obviously he's going to be dressed in his finest and look very spectacular. Qutaida sees him and she says you know where are you going?", "And he turns, and you know, he's kind of struck by the question because everybody knows he's going to get married. To Amina. And she says, marry me right now. And I'll give you all the wealth and these things. She was a wealthy woman. Now obviously because she is the sister of Waraqa, she's going be talking with her brother about this prophet who's coming.", "And so, according to Ibn Ishaq, the next day after he has his wedding night with Amina, she sees him. She doesn't say anything about getting married anymore and he says, what's the matter? You were ready to marry me yesterday. What happened today? And she just said, the light that I saw with you yesterday it's gone. So she saw that prophetic light in his face", "And when it left his loins, then it was now in Amina. And so she said I don't have any need of you anymore. So that was 569. Now this is going to be very important because the next year an event happens that's really important. There's a character in Ethiopia whose name is Abraha.", "probably Abraham from that is a Christian and the Ethiopians had very strong ties with the Yemenis to this day they still do there many enemies whose name is al-habashi very common family in Yemen so the a bash and the Yemeni's have a lot of intermixing which is why you'll often find very dark skinned Yemeni their Yemeni some of the Emmys they look African more than", "and between Habash. And what happens is Abraha builds a church in Sana'a, and it's a huge church, and he writes a letter to the Najashi in Ethiopia, and then he tells him this church will become the pilgrimage of the Arab, and I'm going to remove them from the pilgrimage in Mecca. Stop them going to Mecca", "And he sends this letter to him. It was a beautiful church, incredibly ornamented, all these things. Well the Arabs get wind of this. They hear about this and it really upset all these tribes in the Nejd and the Hijaz. Now there was a man from Kinana and Kinana is one of the fathers of Quraysh. Kinana goes back to Adnan, its an Adnani tribe and they're in the Najd.", "is a Bedouin character. He's a tough guy. When he hears this, he says what? Who does he think he is? And he makes an oath that he's going to go defile the church as a way of showing so he goes there and he defecates in the church just to let him know that's what the Arabs think about his church in relation to the Kaaba. Now this is obviously not a wise thing", "to any religious group and certainly against the spirit of Islam. But anyway, he did that. And what happens is Abraha when he finds out this, he said, What's this? And they say, Oh some Arab came and said this is what he thought of your church. And so he makes an oath. And they took their oaths very seriously that he's going to raise the Kaaba to the ground. Well,", "and they actually go out to fight him. Because the Yemenis, they were Arabs. They said no you can't do this. He defeats them takes their chief prisoner I think Nufail was his name and then he goes they continue on another group of Arabs attempt to stop him they can't", "They were tough people and they could fight. But they didn't have an army. This is a king with an army, you know? This is this is a government it's not and So they meet they had a place that Jose built called dar and Nidwa Right, it's a place the Jose built and it's where they used to meet they their meetings in this house and Basically Abdul Muttalib says", "says, there's nothing we can do. If we go out to try to fight them, we're going to all be killed. And so he says, we have to call on Allah. And he actually goes to the Kaaba and begs Allah to protect his house and says, We can't do it. It's your house. You have to defend it. We're not able to defend", "and just leave the sanctuary completely empty. Now, meanwhile, Abdul Muqtadib who had a lot of camels he gets his camels 200 of his cameles are taken by Abraha. And what happens is that he goes to meet Abraaha asked for the Sayyid of the Quraysh. He actually goes and meets Abraah and he's let in. There's different", "There's different riwaya about it, but he basically is let in. Now, he was a stunning looking man and he was also the Sayyid of the Arab. When Abraha saw him, he actually overwhelmed by him and he did something very unusual which was he got off his kursi like a type throne that he took with him on his journey and actually sat on the same level as Abd al-Muttalib which was very unusual", "obviously were kind of struck by this. And so he says, he has a translator and he says what do you want? And he's on. And he says you have 200 camels of mine and I want them back. And the Habashi said to him when you came in here and I saw you I was very impressed but I've lost my respect for you because", "for you because I'm about to destroy your most sacred sanctuary and you're asking me about your camel? And Abd al-Muqbari said, oh the house has a lord. He'll take care of it. I'm the lord of camels and I have to look after my camels. In other words, I don't have any business with the house. That's not my problem. My problem is my camel so he gave him his camels back.", "So he goes off. Now, he meets this Arab who he knows and he tells him they can't do anything but he asks him to tell the leader of the elephant here who's leading the elephants. He asked him to give a message to the elephant", "And he actually tells the elephant, they're going to destroy the house of Allah. And there was another elephant here who actually died in Mu'ammas and he was brought as a guide, a dalil, to show them how to get to the Kaaba and he dies in Mu'man. And Ibn Hisham says that Arabs have stoned his grave since then. Now what happens is this elephant whose name", "is supposed to be Mahmoud, that's what's mentioned in the book. He stops in Wad al-Muhassir which is in the Rites of Hajj you're supposed to go quickly through it between Arafah and Mina he stops there now at that point Abraha should have realized somethings going on here but people that get something in their minds like the Pharaoh become very stubborn", "and stop seeing signs, blinded. So what happens is they're hitting this animal to try to get it up to go, and it won't go. So they turn the direction back towards the Yemen. It gets up, and its starts walking. And then they turn it towards another direction, and that'll do that when they face it toward Mecca, it goes down.", "know continue on they don't care and Abraha tells his troops continue on there gonna raise the Kaaba at this point something very extraordinary happened and that is birds very large that were seen flying over the Mecca heading towards Wad al-Muhassir these birds were described to be like bats", "from Shu'ibiyya which was the port of the Meccans. They come from that direction near Jeddah and they have three pellets, the size of a chickpea one in the beak and two in their claws and they begin to fly down onto this army thrusting and spitting these pellets like bullets and they pierce the people and they all start dying and obviously this creates", "complete havoc in the Arabs, in the Habashi. And they start fleeing. And not all of them were hit. And then they start to flee. Abraha some say he was hit and died from that and others say that he actually escaped and dies not soon after that, you know immediately after that. Now the important thing about this story is one it's a story", "that goes under the category in hadith of mutawatir. In other words, so many people witnessed it and it was transmitted by these people who witnessed it to so many peoples that it becomes mutawatr amongst the Arabs.", "and they saw these birds fling these stones and kill all of these soldiers. And the important thing also to remember is at the time when Li'ilayfi Qarashin was revealed, there were still people alive who had seen that event. And none of them said it's a fairy tale. None of them", "Don't you remember that sign Allah showed you? That this house is really Allah's house. And so they saw that house and it comes to be known as Amal Thil, which is also very important because the Arabs tend not to be very... Traditionally, they did not keep track of dates. So, you know,", "not know when somebody's born and this is true still to this day if you go into like Mauritania in the deep desert a lot of them don't know how old they are no and he asked him what year they were born they just say I don't but if they were worn in a year where some big event occurred they always remember when they were borne oh he was born in the year of the flood right he was borne now I'm at field was an extremely significant year for the Arab", "to the other Arab. Really, this is very important because it's establishing something about Quraysh. These are special people and they live in a special place and don't mess with them because if you do birds will appear out of nowhere and destroy you. I mean that was really the message to the rest of the Arabs so it's an important message and they got it. They understood it.", "it. So, what happens is now, Abdullah the son of Abdul Muttarib was actually in Palestine during that time. He used to go on the caravans and on the way back he stops to visit his blood relative, Akhwar because his mother Salma is from them and so he used to stop there. Now Yathrib", "Yathrib was famous for a fever. They had a fever there, very well known. It was a very strong fever and people would die from it. And they got ill from this fever. In fact all of the Sahaba, most of them came down with that fever when they made the Hijrah and the Prophet made a dua to remove the fever from Medina", "be occupied but that fever actually did leave Mecca or Medina. But his father Abdullah becomes sick with this fever and dies there, right? Which is again going to be very significant which means his fathers died and was buried in Medina, right so again establishing ties with Medina", "in some of the Syrah literature, in which a Yemeni king wanted to go and conquer Yathrib. And he goes there and he laid siege to it. This was you know, a few centuries before the Prophet . He laid siege too it and at night the Arabs of Yathri who are originally Yemenite, another very important thing", "Another very important thing too, establishing a very strong tie with the Yemeni who will become great scholars and great supporters of the Prophet through Bani Ash'ar al-Ashariyeen. But this they sent food out at night when the battle because the Arabs used to fight in the daytime, they didn't fight at night so these Yathribis sent food", "at night and this Yemeni king was so struck by it. He said, you know who are these people? We're coming to fight them and they're sending us... And so he asked to see their leaders when they came out and he said why are you sending us food? And he said well even though you're fighting us you're still our guests. You know and we don't want to be bad hosts. And he", "And he was told, some say that the last prophet will show up in this city. So he actually said I want to buy a house from you and leave it for that prophet which was the house of Abu Ayyub al-Ansari which is where the Prophet descended. The point is whether that's true there's no Senate for these things but these are stories", "The point is that you can very clearly see divine intervention constantly in this story. That Allah is guiding these events very clearly. Now, the Prophet ﷺ is born in that year. Amina now is without husband.", "She actually saw a light so bright that she could see the Christian castles of Busra, which is in Syria. Which is another important place. Bahira, the monk is there and it also comes up again in the signs at the end of time. She heard a voice say to her you are carrying in your womb Sayyid al-Qawm, the Sayyida of this people, the master of this", "arwahid. From the evil of every envier, min sharri hasidi nida hasad, wasammihi muhammadan and name him Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. Ibn Ishaq relates that. Now she actually gives birth to him. Abdul Muttarif is overjoyed that his beloved son Abdullah who dies nonetheless has a son and at the same time when he married Amina's cousin", "Aminah's cousin, Hala he also has his last son which is Al-Abbas. So this is important Abbas is the uncle of the Prophet but is born at the same time with the Prophet and he's a little older than the prophet He's just a few years older And he actually greets the Prophet in that story Now the Prophet is born", "and he's in the household of his grandfather, Abd al-Muttarib. But what was the tradition of the Arabs is that they would send their children to be wet nursed by Bedouin. And the reason for that is that the cities tended to be reasonably unhealthy. I mean think about now. They literally considered Mecca to be an unhealthy environment because they said the air was not a good air. There were too many people living in it", "living in it, so the unfast polluted the air. And they felt that the sedentary life was not healthy because they didn't move a lot. They tended to be less... I mean now people sitting all day long and things like that. So you can imagine the difference then. Anyway what would happen is that the Bedouins would come into Mecca and women would sit with their children. Now the Beduin would look to see the powerful family", "family because it's important to note the Arabs have a concept of Ihsan, fire to Islam and the idea was if somebody gives you a good turn you have to give them a good as well as a way of mukafa'ah paying back so it's not that they did things solely for that reason but they recognized that that was part of their social structure and this still to this day like when I", "One of the things I was always struck by was the generosity of the Bedouin when you would like, you'd just be traveling and come to some tents and they'd say oh well let's go and spend the afternoon in the tent until the sun goes away. They'd sacrifice a goat for you. They treat you like a king and all these things. And I asked Abdullah one time why do they do that? What's really the impetus behind it? He said first of all Karam, the idea of Karam. It's important", "his generosity because it's from the dignified nature of a person and he prides himself in that, that he's Kareem. But also, he's aware that he is going to be in need sometime as well. And so he wants...and then goes back to the golden rule, do unto others what you would have them do unto you. It's the same idea. You're gonna be in", "And they'll remember your ihsan to them. And so this is not really expecting immediate. Now, Abdullah did say to me also which is interesting. He said some people will actually give them something at that time just so they don't have to worry about him showing up at their door sometime. So there really was that idea of mukafa'ah. And it's in the hadith if somebody does you a good turn kafi'uhu then show him reciprocate his good", "He's good. وَهَلْ جِزَاءُ الْإِحْسَانِ إِلَّا الْعِحسَنِ Is the reward of showing good to people other than the people that show good to you, that you show good for them or that Allah shows good to them أَحْصَن كَمَا أَخْصًا الله إِليكَ Show ihsan to people just as Allah has shown ihsan for you. He supported you help other people all these things so they had this understanding So what happens is now at this time another important thing to remember", "despite the fact it's Abd al-Muttalib. Abd al Muttalb is getting old, he's already in his 70s, he is not going to be an important person. It diminishing his authority in Quraysh. Also from his sons there's no one of great distinction that is really showing these kind of leadership qualities that are going to emerge. In fact it is the Maghzumites now that are reemerging and the Umayyads", "Now, what happens is that all these Quraishi babies are taken by the different tribes. And Bani Sa'ad was one of the tribes that used to come down and take them. And there, Bani sa'ad it was a drought year so the Arabs were having a hard time inside Mecca but the Bedouin were also having a", "father for the livestock so that the milk wasn't there she didn't even have milk from her breasts very much to give her own child who was uh she was suckling and she goes in hoping uh to get a good child they're all taken and nobody's left except the prophet salat islam who's with amina and he's an orphan right and amina doesn't have any money and so halima says her husband", "who's known as Ibn Abi Kibshah, she says to her husband as they're about to leave, you know it's horrible that we're coming here and we came to get a child and we're going to go back without a child. And so she says why don't we just take this orphan? Which is amazing also because her name Halima is somebody who shows concern", "for others so this is definitely part of her nature. So she takes the baby and Aminah's pleased with it now one of the things that she said also is maybe some barakah will come from taking, in other words there's no material gain here but maybe we'll get some baraka some grace from Allah if we do because it's an act of charity she's recognizing", "So there's a pure intention here. So she takes the child, now one of the things that happened is she had this wretched donkey that she rode into town with that was so emaciated it could barely move and as they're going back with Benny Saad her donkeys ahead of all the other donkeys and the women are saying where'd you get that donkey from? She said it's the same when I came with and they said what happened to it", "they saw it she was lagging behind and now she's in the forefront because she had the provost a license and then what the other thing she noticed is when she begins to suckle him her breasts fill up right so she's witnessing something interesting that's happening here and then when she goes in uh back to where bunny saad is from", "and they come back full whereas the other goats of Bani Sa'ad are coming back empty. And so, they start telling the shepherds go where Halima's goats are going. And they do it but still the same thing happens. So this baraka is entering the house or the khaymah, the tent of Halima Sa'di and her husband. And then what happens at another very significant event when the Prophet , he stays for two years", "for two years and he's weaned. They wean them after two years. She takes him back to Amina, and she wants to keep him. And this was obviously a common thing. A wet nurse will get attached to the child because she is also considered a mother to the Arab. Amina wants the child but she says it was a bad", "It was a bad year with them and she convinces Amina that she wants to keep the baby for some more time until it gets strong because the desert is going to be better for him. And so, she goes back when he's about four years of age an event occurs that's very significant and that is her son comes running and saying you know the Quraishis something terrible has happened to the Qurashi", "And she says, what happened? He said, two men came and they took a knife. And so obviously you can imagine this woman's probably just in a total state of... She runs out and finds the Prophet, peace be upon him, and asks him what happened. And he tells her that two men come, split in white, split his chest, took out the heart, put it in a bowl of ice, which I think is really significant because if you've ever seen open-heart surgery", "seen open heart surgery either on film or live the heart is in a bowl of ice I guarantee you, you have to keep the heart in ice because it slows down the metabolic rate and so the cells don't die. And then they poured on them the water of Zemzem and this is if you watch an open-heart surgery they pour cryonic fluid which is a salty fluid that has electrolytes", "Zemzem was more salty than it is now, but traditionally it was a very salty well. And it would obviously have been very rich in potassium and in natrium muriaticum which are the two dominant ingredients in cryonic fluids that are poured.", "and pour it over the heart while they're waiting to put it into the chest. And so here's these two angels who would obviously be completely sterile as well, I mean they wouldn't have any germs on them. Quite literally they would've been sterile beings because that's another concern is infection with operations right? So that was open-heart surgery! Now at that time that was something completely...", "I mean, who could think of that? You know, taking a heart out of the chest, splitting the chest. The sternum was split. Splitting the sternum, taking out the heart, washing the heart keeping it in ice. Where are you going to get ice in the middle of the desert and then putting the heart back and sewing up. And there's two riwais one said he didn't have an atar and another said that they were actually stitched traces on his body which is seen with people that have open-heart surgery.", "You have stitches. The point, though, is this event happens. Halima believes it. She doesn't know what it means but she knows it's something very big and so she gets very nervous and takes the child back and she gives the child after saying that she was going to keep a child Amina says, What's the matter? She says nothing. No you have to tell me what happened. She told him and she said I'm not worried because I know this child has a great shetan", "A great affair. And so that is a really major event in the life of the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wa sallam. And then what happens is the Prophet salallah alaihi wasalam another major event is that the Prophet's mother herself dies. Right? And this is called the year of the two bereavements or not the year but the two", "bereavements, , and this is when his mother dies. And then two years later, his grandfather dies which is so obviously this is very eventful for the public to license because now he's an orphan completely. His grandfather's dead, his mother's dead and his father's dead. And he's only eight years old or seven years of age", "years of age. And one of the things that happened also, that is significant here, is that Abdul Mubbarib used to take the Prophet ﷺ to the Dar al-Nidwa and he would ask him his opinion when he's seven years old. And the Arabs you know just what are you asking him for? He said don't worry this man has a great future. So he recognized in him this. Now he dies", "he dies, he entrusts Abu Talib. Now if you look on your sheet here, you can see out of those sons there's Zubair, Abu Talb, Abu Lahab, Abdullah al-Abbas, Hamza and then the daughters. Abu Talbs is entrusted with the Prophet . So obviously Abdul Muqtadib is choosing the one that he felt would be the best for the prophet and Abu Talbi was going to have Ali and Ja'far who become very important Sahaba", "And then another event happens which is very significant. And this is an event, one of the things that Abu Thadib used to do is that he would go to Syria and he would purchase things, sell things, and then come back. So he was a merchant. At one point takes his son, now the prophet has considered his son in terms of the Arab, you know the uncle when he takes over", "takes over the, he's like a father to the child. He takes the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam when he was 12, some say nine and they get to Busra, Bustra in Greek but Busra in Arabic. And now Busra was a stop along the way. And one of the things about Busra is that there was a monk's cell there that was very well known", "whose name was Bahira. And some say it was Jarjiz, which is in Greek, Sergius. Bahira was a monk who knew about the end of time. That was one of his specialties.", "to each generation. So he actually knew that there was a prophet coming soon and he didn't know when but he knew that he was coming and that he would be from amongst the Arabs. And he used to watch these Arab caravans come, and he knew he would visit that spot. There was actually a tree there that he told that the last prophet would come to this place. So, he was very concerned about this. What happens is one day an Arab", "an Arab caravan comes, and this is the caravan that has Abu Talib in it. And Bahira notices something, and what he notices is a cloud over the caravans giving its sun that moves with it which he thought was very unusual. So that night he asks the Quraysh to come and have dinner with him in his monastery. The Qurays think you know what's going on? He's never even said hello to us", "So they thought it was very unusual and they answer him, but the provost allies said he was 12 years old. And at that age in their environment a 12 year-old would look after the camels because he wasn't a man yet. And so Baher is looking around and he says, Is everybody here? And they say yes. He says no, somebody's missing. They said the only one missing is we have a young boy who's looking after things.", "no, he has to come. And so they say oh you're right we should have thought of that and so they out go get him and bring him the prophet comes in all through the dinner Buhaira is watching him and at one point Buhairo asked him something by lat and the Prophet says I don't like that name and so now he knows something's up because where is he getting", "And so finally he asked to see his back. And on the back there was a raised, between the shoulder blade, there was an raised circle that had some hairs around it. And some say that there was actually writing on it, but it was a raise circle and he knew", "Khatim, to indicate that he was the last of the prophets. And so he knew who he was at this point and he tells, he said whose son is this? Abu Talib says he's my son. Bahira says no, his father can't be alive. So they knew that he would be raised an orphan. So Abu Talb says he is actually my brother's son but he died and I'm his uncle. He said that's correct.", "take him back to Mecca and guard him. And don't let the Jews know about him." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/The Materialists are Polytheists -- Shaykh Hamza Y__1743063523.opus", "text": [ "The materialist today is a mushrik. Anybody that gives power or attributes of God, that are gods alone to other than god... If you're a Darwinian evolutionary biologist and you think that somehow nature has a mechanism that it can do these things and you don't acknowledge that that comes from God, That's shirk because you're giving nature an attribute", "nature an attribute. In fact, nature is a modern day word for God but whenever you hear people say well nature, mother nature doesn't like promiscuity because that's why you get diseases and things like that. No, God doesn't it and that's the way he set his creation up" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/The Life of the Prophet Muhammad by Shaykh Hamza Y_zo-rTL09s-I&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742996984.opus", "text": [ "InshaAllah I'm gonna begin by going over the reading that we did. How many people actually had the book and were able to read it? If you're reading in Arabic, are you reading Ibn Hisham? Yeah. It's pretty much the same.", "It's the Mukhtasar of Ibn Hisham. You should get it, they probably have it at the... It's same if you can read Arabic, I would suggest reading the Muktasar Ibn Hisham If you can't read Arabic I would recommend reading Ling's book, Martin Ling's Muhammad based on the earliest sources and you can supplement with other books", "Christian before he was a Muslim, and extremely educated person. So there's some things in their first thing he begins talking about the book of Genesis which I think is somewhat alien to the Islamic tradition but it's significant because we do believe in the Torah and also remember that he's writing also for non-Muslims many of whom are Christians", "them to relate these events to their own historical background. And so he begins by mentioning that Ibrahim alayhi salam was without child, his wife Sarah did not have children she was barren and according", "told Ibrahim to look towards the heavens and he told him that his count the stars if you're able to number them, and he looked up and he said so shall your seed be. In other words, you are going to have so many children because he was barren and obviously particularly people who in this culture for some people it's not really a problem", "problem. In fact, a lot of people now don't want children in traditional cultures and certainly in ancient cultures that was a very big an important part of life if you did not have children it was like you didn't have anything whether you had wealth or not and so that's important to recognize that and also for the prophets because their children are prophets also and there is obviously a desire so Ibrahim , it was", "that he should have a son like Zakaria who actually makes a dua, because Sayyidina Zakaria asked for an inheritor which is an inheriter of prophecy his son and he was given Bushra of Yahya . So like that Ibrahim desired a warith or an inhertor of this prophetic knowledge. Now Sarah", "was, according to that tradition, extremely old. And so, according the tradition she gave Hajar who was a handmaid given to Sarah by some traditions by the Pharaoh who actually tried to rape her and as the stories mentioned amongst our Mufassirin", "is that Ibrahim, when he went into Egypt and was brought before the Pharaoh, Sarah was extremely beautiful. And the Pharaoh said, who is this? He knew if he said it was his wife that he would kill him because he knew what he wanted.", "which is one of the lies in quotations of Ibrahim , which is really called a... It's not alive in Sharia. It's a hila or tauriya. What he meant, she's my sister in the deen, . And so according to tradition, the Pharaoh took Hajar and was actually going", "And he went into epileptic fit. In the tradition also it says that Ibrahim actually saw everything that happened so he would have no doubts about his wife. He tried three times and finally, he said this is a sahira, a magician or sorceress. Then he became afraid of her. One of the ways he honored her was by giving her money and also by giving hajar . Hajar in some traditions was also actually a noble woman.", "woman. The point being is that Ibrahim, just like in our Sharia, it is permissible for a man to have relations with his Amma who's not a wife and so this is why we reject the Christian and the Jewish view modern really that Ismail is like an illegitimate son. This", "If you even read the Bible, it's clear that Ismail is honored. He was not an illegitimate son and certainly for prophets, it is impossible for them because they are masum, impeccable and can't make major mistakes according to all of the scholars and they can't minor mistakes according", "had child with Hajar and named him Ismail, which in Syriania means God hears him. Il is God and Isma'a is like Ishma'. Isma', is the same Sami'ah to hear. So Ismail is the one who God hears, Ismail. And which is important, it's significant also his name. When Ismail reached 13,", "13 according to the Bible, according to our traditions Imam Sayyuti says seven years of age. Allah told Ibrahim that he would promise him a son through Sarah and Ibrahim", "said that he asked about Ismail and that Ismail might live before thee. And so Allah said, as for Ismail according to the Torah I have heard thee which again means the name of Ismail God shall hear him. Behold I have blessed him and I will make him a great nation but my covenant I will establish with Ishaq", "this time in the next year. Now, it's important to note that he said I will make him a great nation. Now it is impossible for God to say that about a nation that would not be a righteous nation. In other words, the fact that it's mentioned a great Nation in the eyes of God, the only thing that is great is piety towards Allah. So that means very clear", "would be the father of a spiritual nation, a prophetic nation, and nation following prophetic teaching which is very significant because the only nation that is known to be descendants of Ismail are the Arabs. Which is a clear indication from the Bible that the Arab would have a religious nation and they would be chosen by God. It would have to be", "would not say he'll make them a great nation. And then like the Jews say, these are the enemies of God. God would not that they'd be a great if they would be enemies of god, right? So Sarah gives birth to Ishaq and then here according to their tradition it says that Hagar or Hajar", "Hajar and Sarah had animosity towards each other. We don't accept that in our tradition. They were both righteous women, and although it is natural when you have more than one wife in a marital situation, it's very natural for there to be jealousies. But those jealousies with people of taqwa would never lead", "to Allah . If you look at the Prophet's wives , if you look all of them, there were jealousies. But there are also jealousies between Abu Bakr and Omar for the love of the Prophet . In other words everybody wanted to be closest to the Prophet , so that was natural but they never did anything other than playing very simple", "simple pranks on each other. They did not do anything in any way that would have been a wrong action with Allah because they were not those type of women and this we believe about Sarah and Hajab. According to our tradition, Ibrahim was commanded to take Hajab to this place for a reason and the reason is going to become clear it's clear to all of us but", "it becomes clear what the secret of taking Hajar to Mecca was. So Ibrahim a.s. then takes Hajar, see here he says that we don't really know how Hajar they were guided there according to our tradition and I'm surprised that he says this, Ibrahim took her there and left her there, it's in Sahih Hadith, left her and made dua for her", "nervous and then she said to her husband or really she's own wallet or she said two Ibrahim alayhi salam you know why are you leaving here why are we leaving me here are you much more you know did a lot tell you to do this and he said yes and she said then then I don't go in other words this is a moment right", "go and she didn't have any trouble. Now he leaves and goes back to Canaan or to what's now Sham, and she is in this place and there's no water and there is no food and there are no people. Nobody lived there it was an empty barren place because people don't live where there", "And what happened was she became very distressed because of her child. And so, she began in the story to go running between these two hills trying to look to see if there was anybody that she could get their attention or to find water and then finally when she comes, she's shown the well of Zemzem that springs up", "come and they begin to settle in that area. And the Jerahim, these were Arabs originally from Yemen although their children of... There's difference of opinion about the Jerohom people but some say Jeroham was actually the only Arabic speaker on the Safina of Nu'a alayhi salam and that he preserved the Arabic language because Syriania according to some of our scholars which is called Syriac", "it's called Syriac, is the language of the early Semitic peoples. And it's actually an Arabic that was muharrafa. It was changed. It's like a dialectical Arabic or corrupted Arabic. So she settles in there and then Ibrahim comes periodically", "periodically and visits her. And during that time of his visits, and again there's a difference of opinion about this but at a certain point he is commanded to sacrifice his son. According to our scholars there is a difference in opinion about it whether it was Ishaq or Isma'il. The Quran according to Imam Suyuti the context of the ayahs", "or the verses that deal with the sacrifice tend to indicate Isma'il. But there are big Sahaba that said it was Ishaq, including Sayyidina Ali who was one of the greatest people who understood the meanings of Quran. So the point is the Muslims should not make that an issue because the point of the story is not about who is being sacrificed,", "sent him to the commands of Allah and the submission of his son. Now, there is a hadith that would indicate that Ismail is the dhabiah, the one who was going to be sacrificed because the hadith says, I'm ibn Dibhain, I am the son of two sacrifices and that's obviously in the story for the people who read it or the people already know it. So we would tend to say that it's Ismail because there are many scholars that have preferred that opinion but the Muslims should not make that an issue", "And unfortunately, they do make that an issue sometimes when they're in interfaith-type dialogues and things like that. And I think it just becomes confusing for a lot of people. It's really not substantial to the story itself. Now, according to the words of Genesis here, he says,", "heaven said to her, what ail thee? Fear not for God has heard the voice of the lad where he is. Arise and lift up the lad and hold up the hand and he will make him a great nation. And God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. So that's right there in their, uh, the story of Zemzem is in the old Testament, which is important again because this is part of, we believe it's an Abrahamic tradition, right? That we're, we're part of the Abrahamic", "of Bani Israel is that they have deprived people by altering their book from the truth, but even the truth is still there embedded in the book if you look deeply. But there are alterations. Now, the last thing as to Genesis really mostly emphasizes Isaac or Ishaq and not Ibrahim. And Ismail, there's only one thing that God was with the lad which indicates", "and dwelt in the wilderness, in the Arabian Peninsula. And became an archer. And he was known for his skills with weaponry. And that is in the Hadith. And then it says that Ishaq and Ismail both buried Ibrahim , which is also important because it means there was still a connection between the two brothers. There was a connection", "they did bury Ibrahim together. And then it says also in the Psalms, there is a Psalm which says, Blessed is the man whose strength is in thee, meaning Ismail, and whose heart are the ways of them who pass through the valley of Beqa make it a well. Right? So there also Dawud alayhi salam is praising Ismail", "prophet and not see there any animosity between them. When Hajar... And then again, according to the Quran, Ibrahim A.S builds the Kaaba with Ismail. And that's why there is still Maqam Ibrahim is there in the Kaabah. And he sets the foundations of the Ka'ba. So basically", "Basically, the Ka'bah is set up to the four directions.", "known as what? Hijar, what? Ismail. And this was the place according to tradition where Ismail and Hajar are actually buried which is the proof for the Maliki's that it's permissible to pray in a grave, a place where there's a grave. In fact, it's a good thing to do according to the Malik because this is the best place", "the haram. There's no better place to pray nafila and the reason for that is according to the Mariki ulama, Isma'in and Hajar are buried there so there's a barakah there that's more than in other places and Allah knows best. And then this is obviously the Rukn al-Yemani or Yemeni and there's the Yemeni corner which is mustahab to touch that now we have around it what?", "What's that? Well, it's called Shadarwan in Arabic. And the Shadrwan is marble stone that comes out of the Kaaba and that is an indication of the original size of the kaaba when Ibrahim built it. That's the foundations of Ibrahim. The Prophet actually wanted to rebuild", "he wanted to rebuild the Kaaba according to the proper, because it was rebuilt several times in history. And the Prophet ﷺ wanted to build it according to Ibrahim's specifications because they were given to him by Allah . But he felt that because the Arabs were new to Islam, he didn't want to create a fitna for them by bringing the Kaabah down. He also wanted to make a door", "a door so that people could actually go into the Kaaba. And he chose not to do that. So, the Kaabah was built by Ibrahim and his son Ismail. There's many traditions about this but the point ultimately is in the house here there is now Baba Salam is here.", "Zemzem is here. And there's actually a little... Actually, it's not. It's about right here. You can still see it. There's on the floor when you make alaaf, there's a circle that says bi'r zemzem where the original bi'ir was. The in here are two footprints which according to tradition", "which according to tradition, there was a stone that Ibrahim actually when he was building the Kaaba it would move up for him to lay the foundations. And so his feet are in there and you can look into them. There's thick glass around it but it has the feet of Ibrahim , which is again proof of Athar, Tabarrath bi-Athar al Anbiyaa, which is taking blessing from the remnants of the prophet.", "That's one of the proofs. The other proof is Ya'qub taking Yusuf's shirt and putting it up against his eyes, and his sight coming back. I mean there are many proofs but there are people now who say that guarding the remnants of the Prophet which is what this Ummah did for centuries is a bid'a. And in fact a lot of the places that were preserved by the Muslims for centuries", "destroyed in Arabia in the last 40, 50, 60 years. Which is unfortunate because Muslims don't have access to see those places. So Ibrahim A.S built the Kaaba with Ismail and then it becomes a site of pilgrimage for the Arabs and for the Jews. There were Jews also that used to come to the Kaabah because they did recognize it as a site", "house. Now, also in the Kaaba there's a stone here, the black stone which was originally according to the Hadith white and it became black by people touching it for again, Tabarruq, touching it and what happened is it became", "and that it is not of earth origin, that the stone is actually... I mean they would say now like it's a meteorite. But the point is it's not of earthly origin, the stone itself, according to that research that I read, Allahu'alam. But we believe that it did come from outside. Now...", "From paradise, yeah. And an angel brought it to Ibrahim alayhi salam and he set it in as the cornerstone of it. Now a couple of things about the Arabs. There are basically three types of Arabs. The first are the Arab", "The Arab al-ba'ida, the Arab al-'arba', and the Arab almusta'raba. The Arab Al Ba'ida are ancient Arabs that disappeared like Thamud, Ad, Jeds", "These were Arab, the fathers of these ancient Arabs. And they're all destroyed. They were all destroyed for transgression. The second type of Arab are the . And these are Arabs from Qahban. Right? Qahbaan is of the offspring of Jorhum and Qasim.", "And Qahtan is now the father of what are known as the Himyarites. Himyars ibn Sabaa was, these are the Arabs of Yemen and they have a different dialect from the", "The Himyar people, their ancestor is Ya'rub. And Ya'rub is according to the tradition, the one who taught Ismail Arabic. Now the Himyari, even though they're pure Arab, they're not called Khullas. The Khullals are the Arabs that are gone.", "So there's already a change. And this is why some say that Ya'arab also was not a native Arab speaker, but learned it. And some say Qahtan is also from Ismail, right? But the dominant opinion is he's not. Now the third type of Arab are the Arab al-musta'ribah and these are people that became Arabs. They're not by", "they're not native Arabs, right? And this is what you call somebody. Anybody who learns to speak Arabic is musta'arab. He's a sta'raba. You know, he became an Arab. So he's not a pure Arab. He was an Arab by tongue. And Ismail alayhi salam was an arab by tongue . He learned Arabic through the tongue. Now this is important because the Prophet sallallaahu alaihe wa sallam is from the arabal musta-ariba.", "of if you look at the peninsula, right? The Qahtanis are here and then the Adnanis are there. And also the Lakhmites, the Bakris, the Ghassasina these were all Arab tribes that were in the Sham and Iraq prior to Islam, right. And they were very powerful.", "from the Hanifa and the Kinana, Bani Kinana. So the Arabian... The thing that we know about the Arabs is the Arabs are all united at some point by fathers. And this is really important. This is going to be important to the unification of the Muslims under the leadership of Quraysh, the Arabs at that time.", "And also, interestingly enough, the jihadi conflicts reemerge after Islam. There's a reemergence of jihady conflict which is also unfortunate but important to the whole overall story. Now in obviously the well of Zamzam is a sacred well. It's an honored well and the Jorhamites were the people who", "Ismail marries from them, from the people of the descendants of Jorhum. And they become the caretakers of Mecca. All right? They become the caretakers of mecca. Now there's another really important thing going on on the Arabian Peninsula and that is this area here produces a substance known as Luban", "which we call frankincense. And that also can't be underestimated in terms of its influence. And also myrrh is another one that's produced here. Now, the peoples in this area and also Iraq, Egypt used great deals of frankincens. It was a sacred scent.", "They used it to purify their temples. They used for funerals, they used it for ceremonies, weddings these type things. Very important and it becomes important also in Byzantine Christianity. Frankincense is still used to this day in the Greek Orthodox churches. They have these big incense and the priest he you know they burn a lot of incense and completely inundate the church", "inundate the church with the smell of frankincense. Now, this is important because it creates a commercial base for these Arabs. And so what happens is you have a trade route from here all the way to Sham that takes this perfume to the Shamis, Byzantines and prior to that to other peoples. Now along the route is Mecca", "Mecca so they pass through Mecca and they venerate the Kaaba it's a place of veneration for the Arabs so this is important also now what happens is the Jorhumites start doing a lot of bad stuff abusing pilgrims", "Zahra actually becomes the lords of Mecca. And one of the things that the Jochamites did is, before they were kicked out of Meccan was they buried the well of Zamzam. In other words if we can't have it nobody can have it right? Common human thing to do and so", "And so they buried the well of Zemzem and then they left. And Khuza'a, which is a big tribe there, takes over. And they obviously don't know where the Zemzim is and they don't really bother to dig it up. Now one of the things that happens that's really significant, Khuja'a brings an idol into Mecca for the first time.", "And this is the beginning of idolatry. This is after, this is like probably like 300 Christian era. They bring... No, this before that I'm sorry. The Khuzail was going to be before that. They bringing an idol from Palestine which is known as Hubal", "And this becomes the chief idol of Mecca. And the prophet actually cursed the man that brought that idol. He asked, because he saw them idol worshipping in Sham and he thought oh we should do this. So he brought that Idol. Now as time goes on more and more idols are added to the pantheon of idols", "and tribes begin to bring their idols there, and place them there. And it becomes a reason for the tribes to come and actually visit Mecca. So the Meccans actually don't have a problem with that because it's like bringing more... Bring your idols! Because it's going to bring tribal members and the way they're looking at is it means money for them. And so they actually encouraged this to happen.", "Now, if you look at this here. One of the chiefs of Khuzaa was named Hulail and Hulai is the chief of Mecca. And what happens is he has a son whose name is Qusay. It's not his son but he marries the daughter of Hulain. And Hulian actually prefers Qusai to his own children", "he places Qusay as the caretaker of the Kaaba. And this is the move from the Bani Khuza'a to Bani Quraysh. Now, if you look on this sheet here, Qusai is next to Zuhra down here. Qusaya is the son of Kilab, the son Murrah, the Son of Kaab, The son of Lu'ayy, the Sons of Ghalib who's the son Fihr, who's also known as Qurayj.", "Now, the difference in the Qur'an Allah says He created peoples as شعوب and قبائل. In Surah Al-Hujarat Allah says إِنَّا جَعْنَاكُمْ شَعُوبًا وَقَبَائِلًا We made you nations or peoples and tribes. The word for شعووب or peoples", "comes from a root word, شعبة or شعب which is a branch. شعבה is a Branch. Now قبيلة is the other word that Allah uses and this divides people into two types. You're either from a شعَب", "obviously a unique and special people on the planet. They have a very distinct historical role in the obvious overall picture, one because they were given more profits than anybody else but two because it will have an ongoing impact and influence on humanity at large despite the fact that there are incredibly small number of people in relation to the total population so", "They are important and you can't underestimate their importance in world history. And that is, in a sense why they are distinct. They're different from other people. They are not like other people Now some say the Qabila though which the plural is Qabail and Qabilah, the idea is acceptance it's related to this Qabil'a", "acceptance. Your qabilah or your qabil is your group, it's those you accept which is not the same as a shaab because a shaaab is a loosely affiliated group of people usually language is what brings them together and they generally don't have a common ancestor, they don't know like for instance if you ask an American", "whole diverse background, right? And some don't have a clue where they're from. Either because they don't really keep... The truth is a lot of them don't want to know where they are from because a lot people that came through this country were actually criminals and people who were in massive debt and came here for those reasons. They were actually fleeing Europe", "That's not all of them, but there were quite a few Americans like that. Georgia was a debtor prison basically. It was where they were sent to work off debts and things like that, and Australia has a similar problem. And then you also have a lot of people now that came obviously from different places. I don't want to go into the history of America, but the point is that most Americans don't know where they're from,", "They're not a qabilah. Now, it's very important and if you've lived... And I had the good fortune of living with a tribe. It's very different. A tribe is an extended family. It'a big family. And they view things very differently from a people. In other words, if you have a tribal member, you take care of them even if they are from a distant branch. There's a blood bond that peoples have a hard time relating to.", "The point is, that was his name. Now he has two sons that are known as Al-Harith and that becomes a clan of Abu Ubaidah and Ghalib. And Ghaliib is the important one because from him comes Lu'ayy and then Lu'ai has two son's and the clan of Suhail comes from one of them which is a tribe very well known Arab tribe.", "There's still Suhailis, aren't there? Yeah. So they're still Suhilis that are known on the Arabian Peninsula and so their distant relatives to the Prophet by Lu'ay. Lu'ays son Kaab has three sons Murrah which is the important one for us Adi the clan of Omar and so Omar ibn al-Khattab", "No. I think it's an Omari, but I'm not sure if that... It shouldn't be Ibn al-Khattab. It might be though. I Think it is actually. Ithink Omar from there. Hussais and then Amr And from there comes the clan of Omar. He's from Adi one of his father's name Adi From there, Saham the clan", "Ibn al-'As is a Sahmi. And then the clan of Uthman ibn Mad'um, another very important Sahabi comes from Amr. Now Murrah has three sons all are very important. Kilab, the most important. Taim and Abu Bakr is known as Abu Bakra Taimi. Taimi is one of the tribes or the branches this is called a Fakhad which means literally in Arabic like a thigh", "Arabic like a thigh, right? It's a branch of a tribe. So you have a qabilah and then you have butoon. You have branches from that qabila, right ? So these people are all related to the Prophet . And that's what's important to know. The Quraysh are a tribe and then there's branches. And the prophet's particular branch is Bani Hashim, alright? So the Taimi's which is Abu Bakr is from there in Talha", "the Makhzum, a very powerful tribe. Bani Makhzoom and Khalid ibn al-Walid is from them and also Waleed ibn Al-Mughira, Al-makhzoomi He's a very important figure because he's probably the most prominent of the Qurayshis at the time of the Prophet's revelation. He's definitely one of the most important. Now from Kilab comes Qusai and Zuhra", "prophet's mother Amina is from Zuhra and his cousin is Sa'd ibn Abi Waqas and Abdurrahman ibn Auf. So you can see these are major Sahabis who are related to the prophets, there's a blood bond here as well as a spiritual bond which is important. And then Qusay has different sons he has Abd al-Dar is", "this group. And then Abd al-Manath and Abd al-'Uzza, now from Abd al'Uzza is Khadija Waraqa bin Nawfal and Zubair ibn Al-Awwam again very important people. Khadijah's the daughter of Asad and...and then up now what's important here", "these two sons, Abd al-Dar is the first son and Abdul Manaf. Qusay preferred Abd al Dar he was the firstborn although from these sons he was not the most capable. Abdul Manaaf was the more capable one out of filial piety Abdul Manaef does not go against his father's wishes because", "the taking care of the pilgrims, all of these things. Because this was Qusay's responsibility. And what happens is that Abdul Manaf has a son here. He's got several. Abd al-Shams, which is where Uthman ibn Affan comes from and Abu Sufyan bin Harb. Very important group of people here. This is a really important group", "again and again in not only the history of the Prophet's mission, but also after. And some old rivalries between Bani Umayyah and Bani Hashim reemerge. And it's the Umayyads who will less so probably than the Abbasids, but they will persecute the family of the prophet unfortunately. Now, the other son is Hashem and Al-Mutbalib and Naufal", "you know, in relation to how they respond to the Prophet because these are old rivalries that reemerge later. What happens is that Bani Hashim...that Hashim is supported by Zuhra and Taym. And this is also important because if you notice Abu Bakr is the closest person to the prophet before Islam, right? And he's a Taymiyyah, you see?", "Abdullah marries Azhari. So there's links here related to affiliations and support. Now, one group they all go to the Kaaba and put their hands in the perfume and swear allegiance to each other. And then also the Maghzoum, Abd al-Dar's group swears allegiance to him", "between them. Now, because violence is restricted in the sanctuary and around Mecca they can't fight this thing out so there's a compromise suggested and that is let Abdul Manaf have the right of levying the tax and providing pilgrims with food and drink whereas Abd al-Dar should retain the keys of the Kaaba They're the ones who are going to open the Kaabah, they used to clean it out perfume it and let dignitaries enter", "dignitaries enter into it and so this is how they want to compromise. And this is also important because this is the way tribes tend to try to deal with things. They didn't want their family, they don't want to kill each other right? I mean they're blood bonded people. They don't wanna kill eachother so there's compromises and this is a way tribes can work now what Hashem is the one who establishes the", "They have two journeys. In the summertime, they go to Sham. In wintertime, they get away from the heat of Mecca. So they have these two journeys", "Qureshi's were Tujab, they were merchants. He begins to travel and on his ways he stops in Yathrib. This is part of his stopover in Yatrib. And while he's in Ythirib these are Awlat Qayla a woman that unites them and there were two dominant tribes the Aus and the Khazraj", "Now, one of the most influential women that Ibn Hisham points out was Salma, the daughter of Amr from the clan of Najjar. Again very important people Bani Najjar they're going to show up later. Bani-Najjar are the people who greet the Prophet when he comes into Medina. So you can see the divine work here and this is the way we view it. This is Allah .", "work of Allah . These people are going to be related to the Prophet through blood. And it's an amazing event. Now, Salma was a very strong woman and she agrees to marry Hashim but she puts stipulations down which is very common in Islam actually continue that tradition of allowing women", "of allowing women to stipulate things when they get married. And she begins to, she gives him a son and this son they name Sheba. And Sheba is the Arabs often use names that have to do like gray hair or something like that has hoping that they'll get old.", "and so Shaybah there is Salman's son right now if you look here Hashem his son here is called well that's Shaybah and as the story goes Abdul Manaf has other sons and one of them is who's another very important person", "he actually gets very sick and he dies. Now, what happens is this man Mutalib or Sheba is becoming well known in Medina for being an extraordinary... He was extremely handsome. He was extremly eloquent. He had a lot of really extraordinary qualities which according to the Arab are leadership qualities.", "Now, what happens is Al-Muqbalib is the important man in Mecca. But he needs somebody to take over his place because they want to maintain the authority in Bani Hashim. And when he hears about this son, he goes and he meets Salma. And he sees the son and he's struck by this man. He's a really extraordinary youth", "to take him back to Mecca and she refuses. Mother, she wants her son with her. He convinces her saying this he has a sha'n. Again divine work here because Abdel Mutbarib has to come to Meccan in order to have... He discovers the Zemzem, he does all of these things. So she comes, she finally agrees recognizing", "the potential here of her own son to be the ruler of Mecca, which even to the Yathribi Arabs was a great place of distinction. So it's not simply that she wants him to be a leader or something. No, the leader of Quraish is going to be", "And he comes, Sheba is coming in to Mecca. And he had him on the back of his camel. When the people saw him, they saw this young youth. They didn't know who he was so they said oh look at the new servant of Mutbalib. They call him Abdul Mutbalb. And this becomes his name. He's known as Abdul Mutmalib even though his original name was Sheba. Now this man is truly an extraordinary man.", "And what happens is he grows up to be a major influence in Mecca and the tribe of Quraysh. But an event happens that's very significant, and he has only one son at this time whose name is Al-Harith. He used to spend his nights, he would sleep at the hijab", "And he really enjoyed sleeping there. And one night, he has a dream there. The dream is a very strange dream in which a speaker tells him dig Zemzem. He says what is ZemZem? Now remember this is centuries later. This is centuries latter the story of Hajjah they know this is the sanctuary of Ibrahim but they really don't know a whole lot anymore about what happened.", "He's told to dig Zemzem. And they know about a well, there was a well there. And he says what is Zemzem? And then he's told, To dig this well and you won't regret it. It's your inheritance. Right? It's Your Inheritance. And dry she never will nor fail to water all the pilgrims. So then he was told to look where there's blood, dung, ants nest and pecking ravens. And then, he was called to pray for this water", "water to give the pilgrims. Now, siqayat al-hajj which is giving water to the pilgrim was a responsibility of Bani Hashem They had to give water to Hujjat It's been taken over by Al Sa'ud they now provide water for the Hujjaj and that's why you have these big trucks that pass out water it's an ancient tradition because obviously", "Obviously, in Mecca it's an extremely hot place. You need water. So it was very important. Now what happens is he has this dream that's repeated and finally he goes out one day and he finds the place and it's a place where they sacrifice animals during the pilgrim. And he begins to dig. He only has one son, Al-Harith. And the Quraish start coming, hey, what are you doing? And he says, I'm digging. They say, no, this is a sacred place.", "here and he just says leave me alone and he tells how to stand there right and then the other Arabs are coming they start bringing their sons and it's getting heated right and and but I'm gonna put up just keeps digging" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/The Prophet ﷺ Never Ate Beef -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf__1742996881.opus", "text": [ "There's no hadith that indicates he ever ate beef. The Prophet said there is no hadath. Ibrahim , the Quran, indicates that he served veal as a meal so he came with a well-nourished veal but the Prophet did not. He said", "The meat of cows produces sickness, but the milk is a cure. It's a healthful drink. So the Prophet indicated that red meat now... We know that the worst meat for health reasons is beef and the Prophet said, and that's considered amongst the ulama" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/There is a Creator behind Creation -- Shaykh Hamza__1742886254.opus", "text": [ "The prophets, I mean one of the most interesting things about the prophets is they don't contradict one another. They really do say the same especially the Abrahamic prophets continually say there's a God he's going to judge you and you better behave. And every PhD disagrees with his...the previous guy, his mentor. Aristotle disagrees Plato. Philosophers are always disagreeing with their mentors but these prophets are very consistent", "And they told us the universe had a beginning. Nobody believed that at the time, they just thought it was always here. Now we actually do believe that it had a begining and they told is it has an end. I mean, I think that's a very compelling argument but one of the things about God is He has left it, he has not given us a criminal type of evidence. It's not beyond a reasonable doubt. He has made it clear and compelling evident. And I think for the principle sufficient reason", "argument is that there is a God behind creation." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/There is no Randomness in Islam -- Shaykh Hamza Yu__1743305560.opus", "text": [ "The Quran says there's nothing, there is not an atom that God is not aware of. So everything is in its place, everything is fulfilling it's function, everything was doing what it was intended to do and we believe that about God so from that reality there is no randomness" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/These groups are people of Shaythan- Shaykh Hamza _s5YhlVJRw_c&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748526556.opus", "text": [ "But that's what he says, even though they have this low rank, they're not civilized They still يوقرون المشايخ بالطبع They still have this immense Respect for their teachers in their nature and it's a good quality to respect teachers And then he says Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala called beneficial knowledge روح which is life and He called it life", "And he called it life. So, وَكَذَرِكَ أُحَيْنَا إِلَيكَ رُوحًا مِنْ أَمْرِنَاهِ We reveal to you a spirit from our command. So knowledge gives you life. Without knowledge, you're like a dead person. أَوَامٍ كَانَ مَيِّتًا فَأَحْيَيناهُ جَعَلْنَّا لَهُ نُورًا يَمشِي بِهِ فِى النَّاسِ Right? Haven't you seen the one who was dead and we brought him to life with knowledge? And it's a light that he walks amongst mankind with.", "And Allah says, يُخرِجهم من الظلمات إلى النور. See he uses the plural in ظلمت and the singular in نور. He takes them from the darkness of multiplicity, from the Darkness of Shahwat to the light of Tawheed, to the integral Light, the holistic Light of true knowledge. And the Prophet said, this is you know Imam Al Ghazali in this section relies heavily on Dawud ibn al-Muhabbar", "Ibn al-Muhabbar. Dawood ibn al Muhabbar wrote a book called Kitab al-'Aqal and he quotes a lot of hadiths about the place of the intellect in Islam, and it was very popular book unfortunately as a muhadid he wasn't really relied upon and so the hadith tend to be some consider them fabricated even Aljozi did Imam al-Bukhari considered him very weak", "Asked about him. And his aunt, فضحك Just said he kind of laughed when he was asking what do you think? And he just ضحك which means yeah we're not given a lot of credence. But أَبُو دَعُود رضي الله عنه وثقه Considered him to be sound. So these are خلافات amongst the مُحَدِّثِين and this is a problem with the حديث tradition is that some of the مَحَتِّثَين will say he's weak others will say strong. This why you have a lot", "about these things. Generally, the book has... The hadiths make a lot of sense and I think that's why Imam al-Ghazali who was not a master of hadith and he admits that and this has been one of the major criticisms of his book by his critics is that he put hadith there that weren't highly considered by scholars but he was a brilliant man and he certainly wouldn't quote something that he didn't think was sound in terms of its meaning", "So he quotes these hadees, one of them and many of these hadee are mentioned by some of the other scholars as well. But one of the them awlu ma kharqa allahu al-akal The first thing that Allah created was the intellect fa qala lahu akbil come fa aqbala And it came thumma qala lahu adbir go and it moved back Thumma Qara Allahu ta'ala wa izzati wa jalali Ma khraqtu khalqan akrama alayya minka", "I haven't created anything more noble than you and by you, I give. By you,I take. And by you I reward and by You I punish.\" And so he quotes that many mentioned several other hadiths about the place of Aqal Abu Sa'id Al Khudri mentioned everything has a foundation with the Amitul Mumin Aqlahu and the foundation of a believer is his intelligence", "intelligence according to his intellect that's going to be the foundation of his devotion Allah says in the Quran had we only listened and used our intellects because it's one thing to hear but if you don't understand it, it's of no benefit so in Jahannam they finally admit", "We wouldn't be here if we used our brains and so it's the aqal that keeps you out of hell I mean, that's clear from Surah Mulk What is uprightness with you? He said al-aqal And he said it's true what you say So there are many", "So there are many hadiths that he relates. He relates a hadith, again it's from Dawood ibn al-Muhabbir from Kitab al-'Aqal, that the Prophet was reported to Aisha, it was reported, to have asked the Prophet ﷺ, بِمَا يَتَفَاضُرُ النَّاس فِي الدُّنْيَا How are people preferred one over the other in this world? بالعقل With intelligence. قُطْوَ فِى الْآخِرَةِ And in the Akhirah, بالعقد وقتوا أليس إنما يجزان بعمالهم Aren't they rewarded with their actions? فقال صلى الله عليه وسلم يا عائشته", "Do people only act according to what God's given them from their intelligence? In other words, it's intelligence that gets you to act. When you're following your shahwat, you've capitulated. The intellect's capitulated to the shahawat. It's the intellect that should rule and when it rules... So the ulama basically say be careful with hadiths that have these because the Mu'tazilite were there", "They definitely, they're met. But I would recommend for all of you to read John Walbridge's book which is The Caliphate of Reason. It's a very important book in my estimation. He's an Orientalist from the United States but he was here in Turkey at Ithar for a little while. He knows Dr. Rajab. It' s a brilliant book. I found it really to be an excellent book. What he clearly demonstrates", "clearly demonstrates in that book and in some ways it was a book I would have liked to have written because you know, it just dovetailed so much with many of my conclusions about the crisis in the Muslim world. But what he clearly shows in that is that the Sunni intellectual tradition was a tradition completely predicated on the intellect intelligence, the . And this idea that the Mu'tazilite were the rationalists", "and Ahad As-Sunnah were not is a complete fabrication, it's a modern fabrication. The Muslims... the Mu'tazilite were a necessary confrontation with Ahad as-Sunna wal Jama'ah It was necessary for them to work out their positions And so it was actually a very useful event and the Prophet said in the Hadith of Hudhaifa in Sahih al Bukhari", "I have an exaggerated vasovagal response. I really do. So like loud noises just send me through the roof. If people honk behind me, like please don't honk, I'm neurotic or something you know? I want to get a bumper sticker because I literally go through the room. It's not... it's just... I have what they call Barlow syndrome so when my mother was pregnant she had rubella or something and at least", "which sometimes happens, but the nervous system gets wired a little. So they really... Like I feel it in every cell of my body, those loud noises. That's why I really like quiet. You know, I spend a lot of time in quiet and I like peace and quiet. Oh, so where were we? What's that? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like just now.", "just now. Sometimes you need confrontation to remind you and so that's what happened. The Mu'tazilite had a position of Aqal, and then the traditionalists had Naql. And so what came out of that dialectic if you want to use a Hegelian term I mean, what came our of that was a synthesis. So the Ahadith Sunnah took positions vis-a-vis the Aqals. Our tradition believe it or not", "If a hadith goes against an aqli qata'i, you reject the hadith. And that's in Ahlus Sunnah wal Jamaah. That's not the Mu'tazilite position. If there is a hadit... if you know something qata', by the aql and the hadit, In other words, you know, the dalalat of our tradition, You have the wahi, and that's hadith and Qur'an.", "All the hadith is qatay al-wurud. It's all from God But the dalala which means what it means that is some of its qata'i, but most of it is dhanni So it's probable we don't we don t...it could mean more than one thing and so if the dalalah is qahtaya There's no khilaf Like for instance the zina nobody there's no Khilaf about what Zina means", "Khilafah about what it means none everybody's in agreement those are Qata'iyat al-Wurud they're absolute certain in the source and they're certain in what it mean but then you have Dhaniyah, Dhaniyat al Wurud is Ahad Hadith those are Dhaniya tul Wurood we don't know absolutely with any certainty if the Prophet actually said it we can't say with a hundred percent certainty", "If it's in al-Bukhari, if it's Muslim, if its in the Muwattaa, if It's in those traditions then it is highly probable. It's like an A. You give it a A but it's not 100% unless it's mutawatir. Mutawatir hadith has the same level as the ayah of Quran. The exact same. A mutawatr hadith have the same as the Quran and that's why those Quraniyoun people", "Now that reject and some in other places, but in their world. There's this movement to say oh the hadith is all fabricated We don't believe in Hadith will be even Quran these are shouting The or they're at Bowsha upon I don't know made them out now They're just diluted or misled or something But the real how did they come about because they read al-bukhari and Muslim And they're not scholars and so they got confused and they said it's clearly the hadis is fabricated It's all contradicting each other", "science of tawafiq al ahadith. The ulama looked at all these hadith and they worked out some are nasikh, some are masukh Some are just not sound or some you have to interpret it different ways So they arrive at the same conclusion even though the outward statements some of them the sahaba Said one word and in another narration They said another word so these are the situation but the prayer The five prayers is mutawatir", "It's not in the Quran. If you read the Quran, it says to go on Hajj. It doesn't tell you about the seven times around Tawaf. It doesnt tell you how to do this Sa'i. It dosent tell you whether you have to be in wudu or not. It donesn't tell what to do. Right? It's no in there. The details aren't there. They are in the Hadith and those are because so many people saw the Prophet do it. The same with the Umrah. The fasting. There are many things about fasting that we wouldn't know because the Quran doesn't", "Quran doesn't tell you كُتِبْ عَلَيْكَمُ الصِّيَّامِ It doesn't Tell You how to do it it Doesn't Tell you Those are all the details that come from the prophet so the mutawatir is very important and Then the ahad are important too but there of degrees so you have the sahih, you have The hasan ,you have the daif And then There's lots of different types of ba'ith some will take it over 30 different types Of Ba'ith and then Ahmed ibn hambar he takes ba'it hadith Over qiyas", "Abu Hanifa takes Qiyas over the Ahad. So these are different, and they come up with different conclusions. It's a blessing. It was a weak Hadith in Al-Bayhaqi but the meaning is sound. Omar Ibn Abdul Aziz said the same thing. So this is important to know that people can go astray. And even if you hear a Hadith that doesn't ring true or you have a problem with it don't say that's not a Hadithe", "At least say that. If he said it, I believe it. Right? Because don't deny prophecy. It might be a prophetic hadith and if it's in the sahih, it probably is. But the possibility of fabricated or weak hadith getting in these things is still there. In al-Bukhari, it's very slight for fabrication but it's still there, it could have happened because the hadith does not have the same hifah", "in its particulars, in the summation of it, it is a preserved tradition. Undeniably. But in the particulars it doesn't have the level of preservation that the Quran had. The Quran is 100% without any doubt from God. Whereas in the Hadith it's only the Mutawatir that have that 100% certainty and then the Sahih and they have Tarteeb.", "Shart al-Bukhari, shart Muslim Like that So there's a whole way That the ulama look at it So that's important to know But the aql is very important And so we have aqal and naqal Right? People that don't have a qal They only have naqel Right? Naqal heads Yeah Seriously It's literally It's a disaster You have to have a Qal Imam Al-Razi says", "In the ayah, light upon light It's the wahi Coming down on the intellect You have to have the two together Because you'll go astray And every sect has gone astray because Like the Moroccans say No So that's really important To know that And he was very Committed to intelligence", "And hamaka is a real problem. In fact, Marx, I don't like to quote him, but Marx considered stupidity to be one of the most important factors in human affairs. That stupidity has done more in human history to have an impact on us. I think he rated it number four in terms of actual world affairs. I mean look at all our stupid rulers. Look how stupid these people are. Like war is such a stupid thing.", "War is literally like surgery. It's the very last thing that you do. They don't exhaust all the possibilities, they want to go to war because they're idiots. They think they are going to make money. You know? They're gonna greet you with flowers in Iraq. Yeah right. People don't like to be bombed. They dont' like it. They like to have their toes stepped on.", "if you bump into them. And woe unto you in America, if you might by accident run them off the road. God help you. I mean like gun control, I don't mind having guns if you have civilized people. But when people aren't very educated or they're rednecks and they hate people, they're just haters because you're off white. You know? God.", "God. And most of them, seriously, if they go back and find their roots and things like that, they were spat on at one time. The Irish are as white as the moon. Look how the British 800 years of Anglo-Saxon persecution. The Welsh, as white is the moon, Irish slavery. Just read the history about Irish slavery They had slaves. They took Irish as slaves. The Ottomans sent all this wheat during the potato famine", "famine right where all these millions of Irish were starving the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Majid sent wheat and to help the Irish because that you know they heard about it so he sent ships that the British the Anglo-Saxon the British government wouldn't allow the wheat through because they didn't want to make the English government look bad because the Turks were helping and they weren't they let", "If you want a good Anglo-Irish take on the English attitude towards the Irish, read Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. It's a great essay and it's tongue in cheek but he was basically articulating the sentiment of those people. Let's just bake their kids. Bake them. Make them into food. So that's what happened. My ancestors fled Catholic persecution in Scotland", "and they fled English persecution in Ireland to America. And then they got to America, my great-grandfather got to Philadelphia, and he met the Irish riots. They went and burnt down all their churches, and the Protestants, because they're from Anglo-Saxon. So The Irish is a book you can read when the Irish became white, which is about how the Irish got integrated into American society, because at first they were treated like African Americans or Native Americans.", "or Native Americans. That's why so many blacks have Irish blood. Imam Zaid is half Irish, right? Because Irish couldn't marry Anglo-Saxon women in America, right ? So there are sick people just racist people that have these diseases. Racism is a sickness you know and it's more tribalism because the color is not so much the issue trust me Turks are Turks and many Turks are as white as the lay", "Did I say that right? No, ay. How do you say moon? Ay? Ay. Yeah. How to you say white? White. Beyaz? Beyaz! Yeah, the beyab. The Arabs must have got it from Turkish. Beyazaay. Turks are as white as the moon but they're still Turks as far as Europeans are concerned. They're Asiatics so it's not about color we have to get out of this whole color thing. This is about tribe and socioeconomics", "It's about money, and it's about this idea of blood purity which is a disease some of the Arabs have that disease Well lie. It's a disease in our community some South Asians have that they think that you know Belushi's are below them right They think that petons are below Them right and then you go to India And you'll find that you've got people from different parts of India I mean they look down on people from Kerala Keralas sweetest people in India really", "Really? They speak Malayalam. The Arabs say, Kerala, nice people. I lived in the Emirates. All the Keralan people that were there, a lot of people from Keralat, they were the sweetest people. It was amazing, the Kerela people. They're just really humble people. Bengalis are very humble people, people from Bangladesh, they're very humble", "the highest, it had one of the highest per capita incomes in the world. It was one of most civilized countries on the planet. The wheel of fortune, Bangladesh. Dachau was considered when the first British explorers got there in the 16th century they could not believe how advanced Dachauer was. They couldn't believe it. You know that they have a great tradition highly civilized people so you look at", "You look at people, they've fallen on hard times. You have to have compassion for them. Africans the same. You look African Americans, the fact that they're still standing after 500 years is a miracle when you look at the history of what they went through. If you study Mexican history, you will weep tears of blood. Tears of blood! I'm telling you. If read Mexican history and you look how Spanish treated them, they had 10 racial classifications in Mexico. 10 racial classification. Unbelievable.", "Rape was a standard practice of the conquistadores. It was a standart practice, so you got the mestizos that were mixed Spanish and Indian blood If you study American Native American history You will weep tears of blood if you studied Jewish history your weeped tears of Blood they used to strip them naked and make them run through the villages in Europe and spit on them and throw stones at them utter humiliation and degradation and Then look at look at what these Nazis did with them", "did with them. It's unbelievable, unbelievable! There has been so much human suffering on this planet and we have to have more compassion for each other. You know really everybody suffered, everybody has suffered on this plan except the English but everybody else has suffered. Really you study the history and you will see people have suffered immensely. Everybody has suffered so we have that", "That's what our religion is about. It's about teaching us, تعاونوا عن البر والتقوى. That was revealed about the mushrikeen. It wasn't about Muslims working together. It was about working with good... The world is divided between people that are mostly good but have some bad and people that Are mostly bad that have some good. That's the classification. And then the next classification, the Abrahamic peoples and other peoples.", "The Semitic truths are the closest, right? These ancient Aryan mythologies and the Asiatic traditions, I believe they're revealed traditions. They definitely have truth in them. There are clear indications that many of these traditions were revelations from God. They have different ways of looking at God and the world and everything but they have truth", "Hadith Wallahi you read the Analects and you'll think this are these hadith it sounds just like hadith because he came He was a great teacher. I don't know if he's a prophet Maybe he was maybe wasn't but he was definitely in in the tradition of the prophets teaching people how to be human teach them How to treat each other teaching him? How to have filial piety how to take care of their parents how to honor those who had benefited society", "The best of you are those who help Allah's dependents the most. Those are the best of us. So all of this madness that we're in today, we have to go back to using our intelligence again. Really, we've so much stupidity in the world. Lot of stupidity. People just behaving with utter stupidity and so the last, the very last section", "mentions here is about the nature of the intellect. What is it? And so I'm going to quickly go through this. He said there's basic four meanings to the intellect and he said all the differences about intellect come from this difference of understanding about its nature", "The human from other animals. That we have this thing called the aqal. So, we are aqil. And so it's the rational component. This is what intellect is. It's rationality. It intelligence. Rationality means that there's reasons why you do things and humans are rational even in their irrationality there's rationalty unless it's madness and there there's no intellect somebody just kills somebody because he's mad or whatever", "or whatever. That's just, that's madness. But if you eat a cheesecake, you have a reason for doing it because you want pleasure. That is the reason. It might not be the best reason but there is a rational reason why you are doing it. If I eat it, I am going to feel good. If i feel good, I'm gonna be happy. I wanna be happy therefore I should eat it. Right? This is a syllogism and we're always doing this. Always!" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/THE SPIRITUAL DANGERS OF PORNOGRAPHY__SHEIKH HAMZA_ssFRImQP1MQ&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748519377.opus", "text": [ "The topic, I really wanted to deal with the root of this issue and that's why I chose to look at lust which I'm glad that Dr. Vogler mentioned that lust is a state And not a specific act we tend to conflate the two and think that Lust is an act but when we talk about the deadly sin of lust it's a state of the soul of will One of the things you know my father said by 20 everybody's in", "everybody's an expert on at least three of the seven deadly sins and by 50 you've got all seven pretty much under your belt. But I did ask him about lust, he's 84 now, and I asked him last year about lust when do you finally overcome that one? And he said about a half hour after the cadavers cooled. So...", "worked in a nursing home or knows about what goes on in nursing homes will testify to that truth. You know, dealing with this problem, let me tell you how I got involved in this first. I went to Catholic schools and I was in a boarding school for high school. And I think the,", "This is the way I think people of my generation were introduced into pornography. But what's interesting is that memory of that first experience is very strong, and I think that people can testify to that. It's very strong which indicates how powerful sexual images affect a person. They imprint on a person Now one of things young people do tend to react initially especially with hardcore pornography", "pornography, they will act in disgust. Their reaction is one of disgust You know the 60s or 50s playboy I think today would be considered like great art compared to what's on the internet and I think a lot of people don't realize just how vile this stuff is but I want to quote Pope here One of things about poets is we tend to forget that they are social scientists of the past", "have extraordinary insights into the human condition through observation, but Pope's advice is a monster of so frightful mean as to be hated needs but to be seen. Yet seen too oft familiar with her face we first endure then pity than embrace.\" And I think this is in light of neuroplasticity. I think it's very interesting that the normalization", "to pornography when it was initially introduced into society, was not an instantaneous acceptance. There was immense amount of revulsion especially when you're dealing with a culture that was still rooted in a Christian ethos. Now as the Christian ethose has eroded and Christianity in many ways has become more like the world as opposed to making the world molding it in the image of the celestial world,", "opted Christianity in many ways. So there are a lot of Christians that will actually argue that there's not really much wrong with pornography. I mean, you will find this out there. You will even find ministers today that might recommend going to a sex counselor and using this to enhance one's life. But one of the things that I wanted to look at was the object of desire. Before", "a devout practitioner at about 18 and really led a monastic life for several years. When I came back to the United States after being abroad, now I married fairly quickly and really didn't think about pornography as an issue other than that I was seeing it out there on the periphery but somebody two years ago came to me with the Google indices of pornographic downloads in", "sex searches, which were some of the highest in the world. And that really shocked me to find that out and that got me interested in the topic so I read Pamela Paul's Pornified, if you have not read it I recommend that book because that opened my eyes to the extent of this problem but I decided to open up this issue in the community and invited Pamela last year to speak in Toronto she spoke to an audience of 15 thousand", "15,000 Muslims. And then I spoke after her and both of us were very surprised at the reaction. First of all there was an immense amount of relief that this subject was being brought up many women in hijab wearing the traditional covering came afterwards and told me that they were so happy because their husband had a problem with this issue. So this is an issue that is affecting", "communities. We know that pornography is a problem in the Christian community, it's certainly a problem of the Muslim community. Now this creates an immense amount of cognitive dissonance so I think you can imagine especially for Muslims when in many ways Islam is far more pre-modern in its practice today than Christianity which has been through an enlightenment industrial revolution and a lot of different perspectives and reformations but", "But in the Muslim world, lowering the gaze is a Quranic injunction. It says in the Quran, tell the believing men and women to lower their gaze that is more pure for their hearts and to guard their chastity. And then it says, and tell the believeing women not to display their ornaments except what is naturally shown from them. So the idea is asking women, and I think that was brought up yesterday,", "help men in this visual problem that men have, that they are deeply stimulated by the female image. But if we look at desire I mean desire is a very interesting English word it comes from a Latin phrase which actually meant to await what the heavens would bring so desire is rooted in something celestial in the classical understanding of that word What's interesting in Arabic the word for desire baghi is also", "also a cognate of the word for oppression and the word prostitution. So it's interesting that when we get to these root words, we tend to get to how ancient peoples viewed these things. Now Socrates mentions in Philobos which is an often ignored dialogue about the relationship", "points out in there, which I thought was very fascinating is he talks about desire and uses the analogy of having thirst. Thirsting for something to drink and he asks Protarchus, Is it a desire for the drink? And he says yes, obvious Socratic foil. And Socrates says, Is It for the Drink or for the Replenishment with Drink? In other words, is the drink a means to an end, which is the replenishment,", "comes from being thirsty, and Protarchus agrees. And Socrates says therefore when somebody becomes empty he apparently desires the opposite of what he is experiencing in other words to fill himself. So desire is essentially an attempt to fill a void. This is why when we look at pornography we have to look at it in light of an emptiness. What is the emptiness in people that this is an attempt", "for looking at that is Kierkegaard. I think it's really beneficial to look at what Kierkegaard, because Kierkaegad really saw a lot of what was coming he recognized that something very serious was happening in Europe and he saw a lof of what was coming but I think his identification of three modes of existence is very important relation to this the aesthetic mode which is basically", "People live for pleasure and desire. And one of the things that he says is this is rooted in boredom. And that's why to me, one of fascinating things about people that become addicted to pornography is they get bored quickly with soft core, they move to harder core. Some of these people according to Pamela Paul's book, some of these end up in pedophilia who had no interest in pedofilia when they entered into pornography. So we can see the mechanism of lust.", "mechanism of lust. Now, if we look at lust as a problem I don't think anybody in the history of the English language has summed up this thing better than Shakespeare in the 129th sonnet when he said the expensive spirit and a waste of shame is lust in action till action lusts. And I think this is the hot state that was mentioned yesterday where people will literally change their moral views about things in this state.", "is bloody, full of blame. Savage, extreme, rude, cruel not to trust. Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight. Past reason hunted and no sooner had past reason hated as a swallowed bait on purpose laid to make the taker mad. He doesn't tell us who lays the trap. Mad in pursuit and in possession so had having an inquest to have extreme. A bliss in proof and proved a very woe before a joy proposed behind a dream and there he means nightmare.", "nightmare. All this the world well knows, yet none knows well to shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.\" And I think if people that are in pornographic addiction or seeking help they would be the best commentators on what he's talking about because this really creates a hellish state of the soul and I don't think we've looked enough at the pain of these", "Now, I would argue that moral philosophy has as much to say about this as religious philosophy. And I know that some of the religious people have asked where is the religious perspective? But I think as religious people in this room we have to deal with the fact that in many ways religion has failed because this problem is so widespread because of the failure of religion.", "the founder of The Salvation Army, I think made that observation. And so his strategy was to use the tunes of the devil in hymnals. That's a little difficult with pornography. The devil has the best images, so what do we do? Well part of that is recognizing that there are other types of awakenings. The sexual awakening is only one type of awakening in the human being and", "no reason for nine months of gestation and then several years of nurturing a human being if they're basically going to have the existence of a slug that seeks pleasure and avoids pain. It would be better to produce human beings like larvae, that are just hatched out of filth. If so much energy goes into the production", "to a human being than simply the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure. And this is where he argues that it is the ethical life, that is so important. Now the ethical live is a life in which Kierkegaard said has to be at least one commitment to another human being. You cannot live an ethical life without commitment. One of the most important and really terrifying aspects of pornography is that it's an utter disregard for human beings.", "There is no thought, and Dr. Scruton mentioned this the other day about using images where these are objectified images there's no person behind the image and yet that person is often an abused woman whose moral agency is questionable given her life history. Some of these women are in sexual slavery we know that in sexual", "in these busts of people that are sex trafficking. And this again is the optimization a profit it's a lot cheaper to use a sexual slave in the production of pornographic film so we have to look at immoral capitalism and I think a lot was tend to forget that Adam Smith was a moral philosopher as well as being the father of capitalism So, this type of pursuit of wealth without any morality is a major problem", "Aristotle says, if he have not virtue man is the most unholy and the most savage of all animals. And the most full of lust and gluttony. It's interesting that he puts lust and gluttony together because in the Catholic hierarchy Gula is the substrate of Luxoria you need Gula. I think our obesity problem should be looked into because when you have an abundance of animal spirits", "have too many calories. And this is why there's a recent study that's going on about caloric deprivation, people are eating 15,000 calories a day in a scientific study to see the longevity effects. They've committed to this but in Time magazine where I read about this one of things they mentioned was a decreased libido in these people so the relationship between gluttony and lust", "Catholicism used in addressing this problem was fasting, literally to deprive oneself of caloric intake. Now, uh, in the Catholic tradition and I think this is very fascinating to me, the deadly sins are sins that kill the life of the soul leaving the sinner without sanctifying grace they are not individual actions these", "with the deadly sin of lust, they are in a state of lust. When they look at women, they cannot help looking lustfully. Christopher Hitchens is a wonderful example of this when he said in an article in Vanity Fair that it was hard for him to look at the mouth of American women, young American women without thinking of fellatio. So I mean and this is you know you can read that on the internet if you're interested in the article but this is a state", "This is how you are looking at the opposite sex as a means and not an end. A means to your own pleasure and gratification. Now, what's fascinating to me about the Catholic understanding of this is that what is rooted in sinfulness is love. Love is the root of sinfulness but it is either love perverted,", "or love excessive. The perversion of love is in the cold sins, the seven deadly sins that anger is necessary for social justice. Lawyers have to get angry if they're going to do anything about it and Haley Arcus I think can testify to that and other people that become indignant about things but when that love for justice becomes perverted into a love for vengeance", "his mind saith the Lord. And this is the sinfulness of anger, of ira. You have also the perversion of to get to the hot sins that are obviously the most interesting to us you have the perversion of the three animal kingdoms excessive love, wow five minutes okay man I'm gonna get to", "Let me just finish. You know, chastity which unfortunately has been conflated with prudery in modern culture and there is a difference between chasty and prudary. St Thomas Aquinas says that chasties the regulation of the sexual urge and as Joseph Pieper shows Aquinas was not approved. Aquinas actually believed that part of the purpose", "did not see it simply as procreation, which is often a misunderstanding in the Catholic tradition. That the Catholics recognize that sex is also for pleasure similar to the Judaic and Islamic view of sexuality. That pleasure is part of the reason why God has given so much pleasure in that intimacy but that pleasure in a true loving relationship unlike a lustful relationship is far more about giving the other pleasure than taking one's pleasure. Anybody who has been in a truly loving intimate", "relationship with the opposite sex knows the truth of that statement. That is far more about giving pleasure than taking pleasure. I just, one of the things I really wanted to point out was and I'll just... Is about concupiscence of the eyes. Joseph Pieper says not for nothing does the Holy Scripture name", "which constitute the world that lieth in the power of evil. It reaches the extremes of its destructive and eradicating power when it builds itself a world according to its own image and likeness, when it surrounds itself with the restlessness of a perpetual moving picture of meaningless shows.\" What better description of pornographic images? And with literally deafening noise of impressions and sensations breathlessly rushing past the windows of the senses behind the flimsy pomp of its facade dwells absolute nothingness", "nothingness. And this is what Kierkegaard talks about, despair being at the root of the hedonistic lifestyle. And and this pursuit of pleasure is merely an attempt at masking the emptiness that they feel. The void of emptiness is being filled with titillation stimulation and purience. So you know there's two things I want to close just with something before i get into dealing with this problem", "problem. You know, William Blake says the nakedness of a woman is the work of God. Chastity and purity have always been the great virtues that come naturally to women but which men must learn. The Quran uses Mary, the mother of Christ as a great paragon of chastity in virtue and purity of heart and describes her as an ideal for men and women. An ideal for Men and Women quote And God has made an exemplar for those who believe in Mary", "her chastity. So we breathe our spirit into her and she confirmed the pronouncements and scriptures of her Lord and was among the pious. It is from women then that men learn chastety and purity, which in turn protect the sacred nature of women alluded to in the Arabic word for woman, hurma, which means that which is sacred. Now the failure of men in imitating women in their natural virtue has resulted in women rejecting the double standard of men and imitating men in their", "vice. The spiritual power of women is great, but so too is the power of their physical attraction to men. It is this power that causes vile men to dominate women and virtuous men to honor and want to protect them. But that physical power of the female form over men is a sensory power that veils man from her metaphysical meaning. Her sensual form prevents man lost in carnality", "The Arabic and Hebrew word for womb is Rahm. From that is derived the word for mercy, Rahma. And expression...and the womb is also an expression of the creative power of God in man. In degrading women we degrade the highest qualities of our human nature. In elevating her we elevate our highest nature. When her natural virtues compassion, kindness, caring selflessness and love predominate in men", "are able to overcome their natural vices and realize their full humanity. When, however, those virtues are absent men descend to the lowest of the low and are worse than beasts. In unveiling the outward beauty of a woman we become veiled from her inward beauty.\" As a poet from the distant past Jami' who's the equal of Rumi in Persian tradition said,", "She laughed and said, unlike the beauties of your world in the veil I'm seen but without it I'm hidden.", "type of degrading images. In the 60s and 70s, feminists argued that pornography was exploitation of women so what was the pornographic reaction? Well okay we'll make it equal opportunity at exploitation so now we have to bare naked images of men on Calvin Klein advertising and things like that. The second is I think to recognize Callie Lawson's approach in Ad Busters, the uncooling", "movies now you often see cool references to pornography. It's a hip thing, I'm a porn star in practice this type of thing that we have to make it uncool losers do this. This needs to be done in Hollywood films things like this so it's seen for what it is that it's a pathetic and degrading state of a human being also business studies because if you really want to get some funding for serious studies then just show businesses", "and productivity because of people using online porn. Last week, Time Magazine mentioned that since the recession pornography in a workspace has gone up considerably. One of the things they're only measuring is paid pornography. They're not measuring free downloads so I think there's some important studies if we can show the business community the harm in productivity we're going to get some funding to really look at this thing on a deeper level.", "and family is very important. Toynbee warned us the vulgarization of culture, when the elite become vulgarized it's a sign you're on your way out. And he studied 21 civilizations to come to that conclusion. When Paris Hilton becomes a porn star somethings very seriously wrong in our culture when these people are completely vulgarised. Finally censorship taboo topic but hey Carl", "But hey, Karl Popper in his last interviews which are worth reading and this is the man who wrote The Open Society was arguing that we have to enforce censorship laws when it comes to violence on television. He said we're going to destroy our culture and I think if he knew the devastating impact of this and the social science behind it, I think he would be saying about that it's something to think about. Finally, I really want to thank you. We are not the first pornified culture.", "People tend to forget Pompeii was a pornified culture. When Pompeii excavated, one of the things they found in houses were murals, pornographic murals. Cunnilingus being performed. These were taken and hidden and used in private museums for aristocrats. So aristocrat's use to visit this now they're open for public because it wasn't deemed acceptable to show plebeians these type of images but I think in many ways Pompeii is beautiful metaphor", "If we allow the pornification of this culture, we may find ourselves buried in the ashes of the meaning of our society. Thank you." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/They KNOW nothing about Islam __ - Sheikh Hamza yu__1748526967.opus", "text": [ "The great scholars of our tradition were generally practitioners of tasawwuf. To say they weren't is just, it means you know nothing about Islamic history. You just haven't read tabaqat literature. You haven't really studied. But the Sufis also had some pretty significant deviance and because", "to lose your way. And so you had antinomial Sufis that abandoned Sharia, people that said I've reached knowledge of God, I no longer have to pray, things like this. So y'all have that. These traditionally were called Mutasawwifa. The Sufiya were kind of people that we're seeing as over... But Tasawwuf is a very important science" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/THEY READ THIS BOOK WITH QURAN - Shaykh Hamza Yusu__1743058605.opus", "text": [ "This is the Shifa of Qad'iyat. This was one of the most important books in the history of Islam It was written by a great Andrusian North African Moroccan scholar, Qad-Iyab They said If it wasn't for the shifa you wouldn't have known the Prophet I want you to just think about this This is a handwritten...this is a facsimile but its handwritten", "Gold ink embroidery anytime the Prophet's name is mentioned, gold ink. Gold ink! Gold ink. There were so many copies when I first went to shop for handwritten manuscripts in Morocco there was so many of this because so many Moroccans they used to carry this book they would read this book with the Quran" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/This happens every hundred Year - Shaykh Hamza Yus__1742886898.opus", "text": [ "We're all going to die. There's we were all not here I mean, I don't know how the oldest person in this room is. I might be that person but really we weren't here that long ago. We weren't hear that longer and there are all these other people having all the same problems and fighting and arguing and family tribulations and the liars and the cheaters and the righteous and upright the people taking care of the orphans the people neglecting the orphan", "The people causing the orphans. This is dunya and we are going to be gone. The Prophet said that in 100 years nobody will be alive on earth. That's called degeneration, that's the Qarn. 100 years, nobody will live on it. He told his Sahaba that in a hundred years no one will be alived today. In Siraj Al Muluk he said that the Indians...", "And one of the interesting things about the early Muslims is they quoted from India a lot. They had no problem with the Indians, they actually considered the Indians to have a lot of wisdom and so they actually quote these great Hindu sages because they saw them as wise and they had things to tell us. They have no problem quoting them but they said that there was a city in India where", "EVERY HUNDRED YEARS WHERE EVERYBODY WOULD COME OUT AND THE KING WOULD HAVE THEM ANNOUNCE, IS ANYBODE HERE WHO SAW THE PREVIOUS CELEBRATION? AND ONLY ONE OR TWO OLD PEOPLE WOULD COMES UP. MAYBE LIKE 110, 120 AND THEY WOULD COME UP AND THEN THEY WULT TELL THE PEOPL WHAT THEY REMEMBERED, WHO WAS KING AND WHAT THE PEPPOL WERE DOING AND HOW THEY...AND IT WAS TO REMIND THEM OF THIS EFFEMERAL NATURE OF THE WORLD THAT WE WILL BE IN", "that we will be out of the world soon enough." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/This is called Pattern disruption - Sheikh Hamza Y__1742889374.opus", "text": [ "Once he went in and he saw Anas, he said, Anas go do this. And Anas looked at him and he said leh! And the Prophet smiled and left the room He came back a little while later and he says, Anastasia you didn't go yet? And I say I'm going right now Ya Rasulullah This is called pattern disruption" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Those who rejects Ḥadith _ Sunnah -- Shaykh Hamza __1742891307.opus", "text": [ "The Prophet said, a time will come when a satiated man will be sitting on a couch reclining and he'll hold up the Book of Allah and he will say whatever is in this book follow it. And whatever it says is halal make it halal, whatever it's says is haram make it haram. And he said he won't mention my sunnah. And this is a miracle of the Prophet because the people that reject the sunnah never in", "Never in the history of Islam did any group reject the sunnah until these latter days, when people rejected the idea that the Prophet ﷺ came with wahy. مَا يُنْتِقُ عَنَ الْهَوَىٰ إِنَّ هُوَ وَحْيٌّ إِلَّا وَاحْيُونَ يُوحَى He doesn't speak from his caprice, from his whims, from this passion. This is revelation being revealed." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/TIME explained like never before - Shaykh Hamza Yu_ZOLdxRrKuzk&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743306374.opus", "text": [ "There's a book known as the Risalah of Imam al-Kushayri. This was a foundational book in Tasawwuf and Tasawwwuf is part and parcel with the religion of Islam", "of Islam. You cannot take tasawwuf out of the religion of Islam without deracinating it, without uprooting it. There are many different types of Sufis there are many Sufies that went astray just like their fuqaha that went a stray, there's mutakallimun that went as tray every science has its problems but the idea somehow that tasawwwuf like", "Nobody would have accepted that, including Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. So in the Risal of Imam Al Qushayri he has a chapter called Al Waqt . And he says", "That time for the people who have had realization, these are the verifiers. The people that have penetrated the reality of this religion and they have confirmed that it is true and if you practice it, you will get the results. In other words, its falsifiable. This is Popper's argument for a true science is that it can be replicated. So the are the people that replicate again", "and again the truths that were told in our tradition. They falsify the religion, they show you that over and over again we do these things and we get the same results therefore it is a science. It's not waham, it's not an illusion. So he says that with the people of tahqiq it is something that is mutawahm,", "time. But it's associated with something that is actually substantial. What he means by that, is that for us we don't know if we're going to have the next minute. So I can make my plans for tomorrow. Tomorrow will come for a lot of people but it's not gonna come for everybody. That's the quality that it's mutawaham and this is why Sahal was asked", "When will the human being finally be still? And he says, لَمَّ يَعْرِفُ أَنَّ الْلَيْسَ لَهُ إِلَّا الْوَقْتَ الَّذِي هُوَ فِيهِ He will never be still until he knows that the only time he has is the moment that he is in. And this is why Allah says about the awliya, أَلَا إِنَّ أَوْلِيَ اللَّهُ لَا خَوَفًا عَلٰيهٍ In other words, they have no fear of the future. وَلَّهَمْ يَحْزَنُونَ", "and they don't grieve. They have no grief about the past because they are ابن وقته. They're here, they're present, they'r mindful, they fully aware. This is the difference between them and everybody else. They are present. So that is what he's telling us. So he says a man will say I'll come at the beginning of next month", "next month. He doesn't really know that, he only hopes you'll see him. But the beginning of that next month will come, it will come but you might not come with it and that is the nature of time. And then he says I heard Abu Ali al-Dakaaq one of the great Arifin say", "That's exactly what I was saying earlier. What you give your attention to is your reality. This is exactly what Abu Ali al-Dakhaq said, rahimuAllah.", "Moment. Because waqt can be moment, it can be time. This is the Arabic language. Time is what you are in. If you are In the dunya, your time Is the dunyā. If You are in the afterlife, Your time is the afterlife. If YOU Are in joy, your Time is joy and if you're in grief, your TIME is grief.\" And then he says, He means by this that time is essentially what overwhelms the human being", "It's your experience. That's what time is, it's human experience and this is what the clock has taken away from us The clock is quantifiable thing Time is not quantifiable in reality Allah is time The scholastics, and I think they took it from us, the scholastic called it nunc stans God is the eternal now", "If you look at in Ta'rifat, Imam al-Jurjani says, It is the eternal now. It's the now that stands still. God is time. Do not curse time because I am time. I am Time. Some of the ulama interpret it as It's what the zaman is to the outward, time is to", "Anyway, he goes on. It's a stunning thing. He talks about Imam Shafi'i. He said, I learned two things from the Sufis. Time is a sword. If you don't cut with it, in other words, if you're not attentive, it will cut you down. We don't kill time. Time kills us. Whenever you hear somebody say, oh, I'm going to go kill some time, that is a person in complete ghafla.", "somebody, you know, Ibn Ataylah he said the fool gets up in the morning and says what am I going to do today? And the wise man gets up and says What is God going to with me today? So he said and then he said Your ego is such that if you do not preoccupy it", "Focus it on the good, it will focus you on the harmful. On the evil, on the bad. Allah. Again, Abu Ali al-Dakkaq said, Time is a file. It just wears you down. Doesn't obliterate you.", "till there's nothing left. And this is why time is so important he ends this by saying, Every day passes it takes a part of me" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/True Path to Success and Salvation - Sheikh Hamza _YT9Dt3WaqQc&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748539192.opus", "text": [ "Amongst the signs of the scholars of the next world is that they're more concerned about inward knowledge and about being vigilant, about the states of the heart. And knowing the path to the Akhira and the wayfaring and having sincere hope in that being unveiled to them. So Mujahidah is struggling with yourself. Murakabah is guarding your states.", "As if you're in a state of mushahada But if you are not in the witnessing Then at least you know that Allah is witnessing you So these are the two states And it's a high station and the practice of muraqabah The best thing to do is To have a practice that you are consistent with So you take a wurd In the morning and then in the evening Do the Quranic Wurd", "Like Yaseen in the morning, you do the waqa and mulk. And then you can add to those like alif lam nim sajda also at the end of the day. And than you can do dukhan hamim dukhaan. And that you can ad to that. The best thing to do is try to do a khatmul Quran every month.", "At least do it twice a year. Abu Hanifa said if you do it less than twice a Year then you're actually stinting on the haq of the Quran and You're from the people that they abandoned the Quran So it's important to do it once during Ramadan at least and then once Throughout the rest of the year but to have a word from the Quran is important to Do something from the quran also trying to memorize the Quran taking some verses", "some verses and memorizing them that you could pray with. And then having the adkar in the morning and the evening. The word al-latif is a good word, it's an over-the-counter word. You don't have to get a prescription for that one. Some they're specific to certain people. The 99 names, you shouldn't do any of the names", "of the names can like over and over again because the names have khasiyah and they can actually be dangerous for people if they're doing the names over and Over again, because their tajalliat can come from a lot of repetition so you can have things happen that you're really not ready for something like that. So that's that's something that you have to be aware but doing the 99 names is good knowing the names", "تسعين وتسعین اسم منحصاها دخل الجنة Allah has 99 names. Whoever knows them will enter paradise. And so it's good, Fattah is a good name when you need help in something. Basit, when you're feeling depressed. Ya basitu, ya basitu. So that's important and then he says that", "With Mujahidah it leads to Mushadha so when a lady Najada Fina Lenna Deanna whom subalana Allahumma and Mohsenin allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says at the end of an kaboot, and this is a surah Makia So this is not the jihad of Medina. This is the Meccan Jihad which is jihad if the nafs Which precedes the outward jihad? If you don't do jihad up enough It's dangerous to do the outward Jihad because", "Because you end up doing what these people that haven't done jihad of their nafs do which is Endangering your faith inwardly and outwardly so that's the mujahidah that leads to Ihtidaa, that tahtadi So Allah will actually guide you to his subul, his ways And that's mukashifa that he's talking about. And this is daqaiq al-ulum subtle knowledges that come into the heart", "Wisdom begins to emerge from the heart. And then he says, one of things that he says that Sayyidina Ali said in a long hadith", "that the hearts are vessels and the best of them are the ones that hold the most. And people are three, a scholar who elevates and raises people which sound Tarbiya, Tarbiyeh Muhammadiyah . And then a student so a scholar", "And then a learner who's on the path of salvation, and then he said . And then you have the . In Arabic are like insects. But they're used to mean just people that have no education or training, no , they're just like . And in the are like the rabble we would say in English, the riff raff and the rabbl.", "or at least a learner on the road to salvation, then you're from the riff-raff. And then he says, أتبعوا كل ناعق They'll follow anybody that just shouts out. So they're people that don't have discernment and they end up just following anybody who comes along. يميلون مع كل ريح They incline towards every wind. So there's just blown around like feathers because their light.", "They're not guided by the light of knowledge. وَلَمْ يَلْجَأُوا إِرَىٰ رُكْنٍ وَثِيقٍ They don't depend on something firm. And knowledge is better than wealth. Knowledge guards you, and you have to guard wealth. So, knowledge increases as you expend it. Wealth diminishes as you spend it. The love of the scholar is a religion that we should practice. So دينٌ يُدَانُ بِهِ So it's actually a practice that we", "just loving scholars. And so that through the scholar, obedience is acquired in this life and also you leave behind good memories people have good memories of you after your death and then knowledge as a ruler and wealth you have to rule over it", "And then he said the benefit of wealth goes when it goes. But the ulama, they stay as long as time is here, knowledge is benefited. Like Sheikh Salih was saying one of the girls is going to be studying with somebody I mentioned to him in Istanbul and he said oh that's my student so through him you'll become my student because the student of a student", "student of in that lineage, we're people of Isnad you know we believe in the silsila. That there's links in this chain living links and those chains of the past are still there right? You know what a flake is? Do use that word in England who's from England? What about do you use that work flake yeah what is it in Australia", "You can't rely on them. Exactly, that's a flake. Flaky people in California say it's flaky. A flake is actually flaking the chain with something sailors did so you took before they set sail They would take the chains and hit them with a hammer because they oxidize out in the salt water So you can have a weak link And so the flaking was to make sure that the chain was strong so it wouldn't break On the journey", "And so that's the importance of being in a strong chain, is that the links are strong. And obviously unfortunately as time passes the links get weaker just like a photocopy each copy gets less and less but you're still to be in those chains is a blessing. Like for instance I have", "So I have isn't it all back to Imam al-Ghazali through Sheikh Abdullah, through Sheikh Muhammad Al-Aqoubi, through Sheik Ahmed Jabir and through others. It's a link back to the imam so each one studied with them and then they gave permission to teach it there is a blessing in that because there is secret in that tradition. And so then,", "This is in the Riwayat. It said, He heaved a heavy sigh. And then he said, Like the Arabs say that. There's so much knowledge in here. If I could only find people that could carry it.", "I see Imam Ali complaining. I see seekers that aren't trustworthy, they're looking to use the religion as a tool to get dunya. So they are using it just to elevate themselves over others.", "but doubt comes to their hearts for the first difficult obfuscation that comes along. Or they're just completely immersed in pleasures, incontinent, salis alqiyat, incontinent in seeking after their appetites. They can't control themselves, no restraint.", "Allah. He said one majlis of knowledge will make takthir of 70 majlises of entertainment so it's important to do that and then he said this is how knowledge dies, and this is the earth loses the proofs for God", "مَظَاهِرٌ مَكْشُوفٌ Sometimes those proofs are evident and outward. وَإِمَّا خَائِفٌ مَّقْهُورٌ Or they're hiding, they're afraid to come out. And this is the thing about أَوْجَسَ فِي نَفْسِهِ خِيفًا I mean even Ibrahim alayhi salam had fear. He was taking his hidr. The people from the kahf, they fled persecution to the cave. This whole idea of going out and just oh standing we're gonna get massacred.", "get massacred and somehow... Where is that? The Prophet said when they fled back to Medina, they fled the battlefield. When they fought, Khadib came back and he said that we were farron , you know, we fled. And he said bal karron . No! You come back to fight another day. There's times to withdraw, there's times", "is that because it was an ummah based on intelligence, you know, that there were times to do things and times not to do thing. And one of the secrets of the early victories of the Muslims was the karfar tactic. In fact, one of things in Sahih Muslim that Amr when he mustawrid al-Qurashi,", "The dominant culture all over the planet. That's a hadith sahih amazing and Amr couldn't believe it He said observe my tackle think about what you're saying he said wallah is Mattum a Rasulillah I heard the Prophet say it he said in the fieham luck his fallen are bad they have four qualities and Then he said ahlamun nests under Mosiva Oh and then we'll see button that they're very forbearing when calamities happen They have a lot of him in there", "in their nature and he said, he said that they're the most forbearing when you have a fitna like civil strife and calamity. They show a lot of restraint and then he said and then", "After they fled They're the quickest To come back after they've been defeated You look at Germany Amazing How they came back After World War II And then he said That they're The quickest to", "to get back on their feet after they have something that afflicts them. And they're the quickest to, asra'uhum karratin ba'da farrat, they're quickest to attack once they've retreated. And then he said, wakhayruhum li miskeenan wa yateemun wa daeefin, and they are the kindest to the orphans and the weak and the handicapped", "And then he said They're the ones that stop their rulers from oppressing more than other people So, he noted the good qualities in them But they're definitely... They're definitely the dominant culture right now And so people, you know, sometimes you have", "They withdraw like the people of the cave they withdrew from the society So that the proofs of God don't dissipate or are lost There few in number but they have great stature You might not see them their essence, but you", "Their hearts are present. يَحْفَضُ اللَّهُ تَعْلِ بِهِمْ حُجَجُهُ حَتَّى يُدِعُوهَا نُظَرَاؤُهَمْ They preserve the proofs of God until they find places to put them amongst people like them. يُزْرَعُوا هَا فِي قُلُوبِ أَشْبَاهِهُمْ And then بَاشِرُوا رُوحَ الْيَقِينِ", "Or basharu, sorry. They have direct contact with the spirit of certainty. So they find easy what's difficult from it or what the mutrafoon found difficult from them, the extravagant ones. They're intimate with the things that the heedless people find alien.", "Their bodies are in the world, but their spirits are in highest place. These are the awliya and these are the trustworthy ones And these are God's workers in the earth and these other ones who invite his religions. That's Imam Ali saying, and then he wept. And then he said oh Would that I could just see them. Abu Nu'in mentions that", "And he said, this is all you need to know if you want to know the ulama of the Akhirah. Imam al-Ghazali says, the eighth one is that they should be very concerned about cultivating Yaqeen in their hearts. Remember when he talked about the Yaqreen? And then I did that already. So we went through that.", "Now, everybody's talking to themselves with these headphones and things in their ears. You see people now walking around, they're talking, having conversation but then you realize they're on the phone. They're just walking down the street. And then they said, Which are the best companions? When you remember, he helps you.", "He helps you. When nasi' dhakarak, and when you forget he reminds you. And which ones are the worst? He said, If you forget, he doesn't remind you. In dakar, lam yu'anka. And if you remember, he doesnt help you. Which people know most? He says, The ones that have the most awe of Allah. And then they said, Tell us who are the best of us. So that we can sit with them.", "Those who when they're seen, God is remembered. Which are the people that are the worst? Oh Allah forgive us, the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam said. Oh please tell us and he said Scholars if they go bad.", "The Prophet said the people that laugh the most in this life will cry the most In the next. People that have the most like Farah in this line he's talking about being happy about dunya He said they'll have the greatest grief on the day of judgment And then, then this is very important he says there's five qualities that true scholars have", "And you can derive this from five ayahs in the Quran. The first one is khashya, so awe. The second is khushu'a, which is reverence in the heart. The third is tawad'a', which is humility. The fourth is husnul kholq, which has beautiful character and the fifth is ithar al-akhirati alal dunya'.", "that Zuhd. So it's preferring the next life over this life and this is called detachment. Sometimes it's translated as asceticism but detachment is better because in our tradition you can have Dunya and still be considered Zahid as long as it's in your hand so if you lose it, you don't fall apart. This is Mashallah. It's like this, you're in the hub. If you're", "becomes the same. So, the first one khashya inama yakhshallah min ibadiyyil ulema those who have awe of God are the ulama The khushu'a khashi'in lillah also qad filhan mu'minoon alladeen hum fi saraatul khasiooon so khushooh khasi'ini lillahi la yashtaruna bi ayati llah thamanaan qalila they don't sell the signs of god for some cheap price tawada' wa khfid jannahaka", "that lower the wing of humbleness to those who follow you from amongst the believers. So, the Prophet was commanded to do that. He said, I was told, I command it to be humble so that nobody would boast of being better than anybody and nobody would oppress anybody.", "He's commanded to be humble and he has every right to do men on us, but he wasn't. لَا تَمُنُّوا عَلَيَّ إِسْلَامُكُمْ أَمَّا حُسْنُ الْخُلُقِ فَبِمَا رَحْمَةً مِّنَ اللَّهِ لِنْتَدَهُمُ By the mercy of your Lord, you're lintadahum. Like you look now at these shayateen, everybody's fleeing from them. These people that are claiming to be some dawla,", "Some Dawlah Islamiyah Everybody's running away from them So they're not following the prophetic sunnah If they were following the prophet People would want to flock to them Go to them But no, they're fleeing لو كنت فضا غليظ القلب لنفض من حولك من حولك If you were harsh and hard-hearted They would flee from you So these people have fadha", "And they'll say, let them find harshness. That's what they use. They read the Qur'an. They don't understand the Qur'. They don''t understand the Quran.", "They say watch out, the reward of God is better for those who believe and do good deeds than this dunya. So you should prefer the akhirah over dunya, the people that have knowledge. And then the Prophet was asked when he recited Those whom Allah wants to guide, He expands their breast to Islam. They said what is this expansion?", "He said, That when the light of Iman enters the heart If it's thrust into the heart The heart becomes expansive Is there a sign of that? That you move away You don't want to be in the abode of delusion", "What is and your inclination is toward the eternal abode? And getting prepared for death before it comes upon you. Those are the signs. And then, the tenth one He's more concerned about knowledge that relates to actions Imam Malik didn't like theoretical knowledge. He wanted to know... You know what an interesting things about Malik , he memorized over a hundred thousand hadith", "Hadith he was a half ill his Mota only has 800 hadith He spent 40 years taking it down and And when Abel awesome when his teacher went into his house His student went into house. He found all these hadees Written that Malik had collected over the years you couldn't believe how many had collected, and he never related any of them and", "You wanted Allah for your knowledge. You weren't there just to show people how much you knew. They used to say, He said, He knew the hadith but he said I don't relate that and they said but so-and-so relates it and he said then go to so-And-So. He was interested in hadith that related to actions and there are many hadiths that there's no action on them and that's why he was very concerned about the Amal of the people of Medina because he was interested", "These things And that's why the hadith See one of the problems Amongst modern Muslims is that they read Hadith and they're not trained To read hadith, the collections of Hadith were written for scholars They weren't written for common people And many of those hadiths have no application Many of them Are not meant to be implemented They were collected And some of them The ulama recognize that there were problems They're not just problems in the senate Sometimes there's a problem", "there's a problem in the metan itself, even though the sunnah is sahih. But people don't know that and that's why it's very important to learn a madhhab because the ulama, that's what they did. They looked at all these hadiths. There's only 500 hadith about, 500 that relate to fiqh. There are only a few hundred hadith that are absolutely certain at the same level of the Quran. And those were things that Imam Malik was much more interested in. So the hadith are a source of...they can lead you astray", "Ibn Wahabin, one of the greatest Muhadditheen in our tradition. Literally, if he had a Hadith it was considered a solid Hadith. Ibn-Wahabin said, I learned so many Hadiths that I became confused. This is one of greatest scholars in the history of Islam who's saying that I learned Hadith and if it wasn't for Malik and Layth I would have perished from the Hadith!", "He went to Malik and Malik would say, leave that one. Leave that one, take that one So he clarified it for him so now you've got common people buying Sahih al-Bukhari And getting confused and what's it say that? You know Sayyidina Ali says he burnt Christians in Palestine So then they say okay we should burn Christians in Iraq Seriously first of all any hadith I don't care what collection it's in", "Any Hadith that puts Sayyidina Ali in a bad light is a negative hadith I don't care what collection it's in, I don' t care how sound the narration is And these things crept into even the best of the books It's just the nature of the beast Because there was unfortunately a lot of fitna at that time So any hadith that makes Sayyida Ali look bad You look at the claim about Hassan ibn Ali How he was marrying everybody", "He was marrying everybody and divorcing. Any hadith that makes Hassan look bad, you have to question it This is a reality but this is for the ulama. This isn't for common people This is for ulama to do, the people of tadqiq So that's very important And that's why if you want to read hadith, read Riyadh al-Sariheen because he wrote it for all of us But you should still read it with somebody preferably Most of them are pretty straightforward", "It just means you push him back. Right? I mean, but this is a problem. People read these things and they think they know Arabic. So that's one of the aspects that's really, really dangerous." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Unnecessary thoughts in your mind - Shaykh Hamza Y_0cOSWwgkZNk&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743071164.opus", "text": [ "You know, tweeting and chatting what they had for lunch to their friends who tweet back what they have for lunch as if these were really important things that we should be using this incredible technology that took millennia to develop. This is what we use it for? So you know not eating a lot in one of the Arabic traditions", "In Arabic traditions they ask Socrates how he surpassed the people of his time. He said, The only difference between me and all those other people is that they live to eat and I eat to live. Food is its fuel. Muslims in all cultures traditionally have ornamented it and done things to take it out of its bestial qualities,", "of eating because animals eat also. So they did things in order to enhance the human aspect and the fellowship of eating and breaking bread together. So those are important, but in the end, the food is like Imam Ibn Atayida says, the one whose concern with what goes in his stomach is his primary concern. His value is the same as what comes out of his stomach.", "of his stomach. He said you go to the marketplace and you'll spend several minutes feeling fruits and melons to send it to the toilet, and he said then you go into your prayer and it's like a little chicken pecking away and you're sending that to your Lord. He says what's your priority? I mean if you want to see", "in Ramadan before Fajr. They don't do it the rest of the year, but in Ramadan they do. Why? Because they're going to get food. If they don't, they miss their food. And this is all to let us know what's ruling us. So that's what he's saying. You know, if you want to move on this path, diminish your intake. Food shouldn't be a major priority", "have what's called grazing. Humans graze, you know like five meals a day they tell you should eat five little meals a because it's better for you. So and then he says wa dhikra adim do be consistent in your dhiker", "and altism that these two surahs, and this comes from you know if you want salama min afat al-lisan then they say do a lot of the recitation of inna anzalnahu fi laylatul qadr and then qul a'udhu bi rabbin nas. Ibn Zukri mentions that one of the great scholars of Morocco", "then you write them down as contentions and they're worth writing down. But for most people, the thoughts are it's better you just let them go. Just let them pass. So dhikr is يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا اُدْكُرُوا اللَّهَ ذِكْراً كَثِيرًا Do much dhiker. كان يذكر الله في كل أحيانه صلى الله عليه وسلم Aisha said he remembered Allah", "all of his different occasions. So when he woke up in the morning, he remembered Allah. It was the first thing he did. And then he would recite He would recite those verses to the end of the surah.", "he had a dhikr, when he always put his pants on sitting down. That was his practice to put his pant's on sitting-down. He never put them on standing up so that is a sunnah and that requires a type of attention to be aware. So the Prophet ﷺ was a completely wakeful human being. He was in a completely wakful state, fatan. And because he was completely awake everything he did was with intention", "They want to stay asleep. Because it's very easy just to go to sleep. It's really easy. Just to fall asleep. That's how the pod gets you, right? That's they get you to fall sleep. Because you have to go sleep in order for the pod to suck your... In the invasion of the body snatchers. That is how they get fall asleep So but people just...it's easy to go", "But dhikr is, dhakara in Arabic, the root of it is to be kicked in the groin. Right? That's the root meaning of the word. It's like being present. Because if you want to get somebody present quick, just kick them in the groyne, they'll be present. Won't be thinking about yesterday or what they're going to do tomorrow. They'll be right there with you. So dhiker is to remember your Lord.", "Lord, to be present with your Lord. And that's very difficult to be presence it takes a lot of energy to be president with people most people are present when you talk to them they're not there somewhere else and you can see in their eyes when they're talking to you that's the most people and when you go to these places where there is", "around. When people are having conversations with you, they're literally like this. You know, they' re looking around to see if there's somebody more interesting to go have a conversation with. So I mean it's so rude but it's amazing. So if you go to any of these Hollywood events or any of that, that's where the people are. They're not with you. They never were with you There was somebody else. They off somewhere else because it's a gift to be present with people just to", "becomes completely present with you. So he takes your salaam and returns it back to you. And somebody said, if you have a million people giving salaam to the Prophet, how could that be happening? They said the sun is shining on everybody and we all get the rays. It's the same sun. I mean why should the Prophet ﷺ not be able to give everybody salaam?", "click and send salam to everybody on your list. And what the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam is, you know a computer is more vast? I mean seriously it's amazing how people think. They've limited their Lord. They have limited their understanding so", "So Dhikr is, that's the foundation of our tradition and the Prophet came with a Dhikrul Hakeem which is the wise reminder which is Quran. And the best Dhikur that I said in the Prophets before me was La Ilaha Illallah", "said that the best adkar to do in this time, and they've said this for many hundreds of years now is istighfar salaa' an-nabiyy and la ilaha illallah. These are the foundational dhikrs of our time astaghfirullah allahumma salli ala sayyidina muhammad. There are many different ways to say that allahuma sallia ala Sayyida Muhammadin abdika wa rasoolika nabiyya ummi wa aalaihi wa sahbihi wasalamu allama sallie ala", "Muhammad will send them many different ways to do that and then la ilaha illallah And then recitation of Quran the other car of the subah and massah To be consistent with these things is very important. The Prophet Sallallaahu Alaihi Wasallam said in a hadith", "You know, can I tell you the best of your actions, the purest of your action with your sovereign Allah and the thing that will raise you the highest thing in all the degrees and ranks that you have. وَخَيْرًا لَّكُمْ And better for you than acquiring gold, spending out gold. اِنفَقَ الذَّهَبِ وَالورَقِ Giving gold and silver", "and better for you than jihad itself, like... Better than... Better then you striking their necks and them striking your necks in Jihad. They said... It's a Hadith Sahih. And the ulema say...", "People say how could that be better than jihad the prophet said that jihad is there what to send me he it's the It's the pinnacle of my religion is defending the religion The ulama say that vicar is a end in and of itself Jihad as a means and a means is never over an end So the jihad Is a means To protect and preserve Vika, that's the purpose of jihad now in a situation", "In a situation when the Muslims are under attack or threatened, then it becomes jihad is the best dhikr that you can do at that time. So that's not negating, it's not saying one or the other but and then jihad with dhiker being present with dhirkar is better than jihad without dhikkur and people can be in battlefield situations", "Most people are in those states. So, next one.", "So what he's saying there is that dhikr is even better than charity.", "and because all the social works of Islam which are very important and should be done, dhikr is why you were created. You were created to remember your Lord. You weren't created to build bridges or to heal the sick or to do all the things that we do as human beings. That's not why you", "that comes from your creation. Allah doesn't, He's not asking us for our provision. That's not why we were created. So even though part of what we're here doing is plowing the fields, building the hospitals, taking care of the orphans, we're supposed to do all those things. The reason we were", "The adhkar of sabah and masaa, astaghfirullah, la ilaha illallah, sara'a al nabi.", "you know all these rich people that aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing. What he's saying is, you're getting two sinful deeds the first is You know you're accusing your brother of something if he's paying his zakat then it's none of your business what he does with his discretionary wealth and even if he not paying his zakat its none of our business because thats a state can impose that but other than that", "it's not you know if you're a scholar you can remind them or tell them but other than that it's just leave people alone so he's saying that it is disobeying your Lord because you could have got a reward in doing dhikr of Allah instead and just not saying anything, not backbiting. So you don't even know that you don' t know so he is saying that that's a real problem. Next one", "One thing, this is very important because I want to... Imam Al-Ghazali and this is from the Ihya. He said that because the Prophet said in the hadith, From the good Islam or beautiful Islam of an individual is to leave what does not concern him.", "So what does that mean, to leave what doesn't concern us? Imam al-Ghazali defines it as... ...from some of the things that are of no concern. Just talking about travels and things like this. You know, the stories of journeys, travelogues and things", "different foods from different places. And the different cultures and things that go on. And talking about the conditions of people also. And", "is just a waste of time. And what these people, you see, I mean the thing about these people is that they understood that you have limited amount of time and that's what they were vigilant about. What do we do with our time while we're here? Because we're all here right? You're here, I'm here, we're hear and we're for short time before we know it we go the way that all humans go", "وَكُلَّ الَّذِي فَوْقَ التُّرَابِ تُرَبٌ Everything walking on turab ends up turab. That's the human condition. And so, what did they do with their time? What did they doing with their times? Because people do different things with their times. So that's... Their concern was time. Time management.", "time management people and the most important thing to them was to utilize the time that you have on earth to purify your soul. He has had success, the one who purifies the soul and he is destroyed, the One who stunts his growth, the growth of the soul." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/We might not see another Ramadan - Shaykh Hamza Yu_oh89R-HNmko&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742884037.opus", "text": [ "as a clarification. In other words, not only the guidance but also the clarification of what the guidance is. So the purpose of Ramadan really there are many reasons for Ramadan but the two fundamental purposes are clear in the Quran Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says that fasting was prescribed", "was prescribed for you, it was made obligatory for you just as it was obligatory to the people before you that perhaps you might or happily become a people of taqwa. So that's the primary reason because if you look at the beginning of the Qur'an the very first command in the Qur-an is Ya Yuhannas, it's to all humanity, Attaqu Rabbakum like have Taqwa of your Lord. That's the first command", "from al-Fatiha to An-Nas. The very first command is to humanity, not just to the Muslims. يَا أُيُّهَا النَّاسِ اتَّقُوا رَبُّكُمْ الَّذِى خَرَقُكُ مْ He created you. So that's a reason why you should be conscientious of Him, aware of Him and then also want to please Him like the son wants to please the source of his material existence which is the parents. The child wants to", "The created being should want to please his or her creator. So Allah says to have taqwa of Allah . But then we ask what is taqw? And that's where the comes because Allah begins His book,", "So in it is guidance for the people of taqwa. So, the book begins by telling you it has huda but for whom? The huda is for the People of Taqwa so the Quran is very very self-explanatory The best Tafseer is Tafsir al-Quran bil-Qur'an Because the Qur'an will explain itself It doesn't leave you in the dark. It's Kitab Mubeen. It''s a clear manifest book", "and a clear book. The light is what enables you to read the book. You can be in pitch black dark, and if you have a book, you can't read it. You have to have light. So the light that enables us to read this book is the Prophet ﷺ. He is the light which enables us reading the book But what is the Book? The Book is the lens that you put on to see the world clearly because without the Qur'an, the world is a blurry place. And that's why there is so much confusion. People are in confusion", "They're in hayrah. You know, hayrah? They're confused about where they came from, what they should be doing while they're here and where they're going after they leave this place. They're confusion. عَمَّا يَتَسَأْلُونَ عَنَ النَّبَءِ الْعَظِيمِ What are they asking about? نَبَئِ الـعَضِيم What is this place? Is there really an afterlife? Are these things true? Those are the people that are thinking even the atheists have to think about this.", "about this. And some of the atheists are the most obsessed people with this question because they spend a great deal of time and effort on this question. But the prophets who came, they came to give the hudah to the people, to give taqwa to the", "The Prophet was the embodiment of the Book of Allah. They asked the Prophet who are the closest people to Allah and he said, the people that have the most taqwa and the people who have the best character. So what is character? Character is an awareness of how you should be human in the world.", "In the right circumstances. Sometimes it's to be kind, other times it's cruel. You know they have this slogan here in the Aqidah of Ahli Barclay They put these aqidat on their front doors and they say kindness is everything. Kindness is not everything. Sometimes the best thing that you can do is be harsh in a situation And that's why there are things in the Sharia that are actually harsh", "In that situation. Hikmah is distinguishing between that situation and when you should be kind, when you shouldn't be harsh because there's a time the Prophet was a gentle person but there are times when he executed very severe orders Because it was necessary Allah says You have in The Lex Talionis in the law of retribution you have life", "Because you can't live in a world where criminals run free and do what they want. And don't have any fear of authority. They have to have fear of Authority. Allah will prevent with political authority, What he will not prevent with the Quran itself. You know? And that's why Mary when the angel came and she didn't know who the angel was She said", "And this is an issue in the Tafsir, but to me it's very clear. Like she's reminding that person are you a person of Taqwa? Because this is what people of Taquah do She didn't know it was an angel. She thought it was a strange man and she became frightened of the situation. In kuntu taqiyaa Taqwah, people of taqwah so that what is taqwa ? Taqwuh is clarified throughout the Quran", "Like Ibn Asher says that taqwa, the meaning of taqw is to obey Allah's commandments and to avoid his prohibitions, God's prohibitions inwardly and outwardly. Because there's a prohibition against kibar. Kibar is an inward state. It's not an outward act. There's a", "or any rides over, you're not going to get into trouble. You get the elevator, there's somebody in there from the opposite sex, you just wait for the next elevator where it has two people or three people. That's sharia. So that will protect you. The sharia is basically if you reduce it down to the fundamental, it's the ibadat which are basically doing those outward things, the five pillars.", "He didn't mention hajj in this hadith, but in another hadith he mentions it. And obey political authority over you. You will enter the paradise of your Lord. If you do those things, that's an outward thing. Like the Bedouin who came to the Prophet ﷺ and he said,", "I heard that I only have to pray, fast Ramadan, pay zakat, make the hajj. Is that all I have to do? He said, That's all you have to Do.\" He said,\" Wallahi, I won't do anything else except that.\" And he left. The Prophet said, قَدْفْ لَحَرَّ وَيْجُلْ إِن صَدَقْ He'll be successful if he is truthful in what he said. He will be successful. Low himma but it will get you through.", "All it is, just to be removed from the hellfire. So the Prophet let people do a very minimum amount and that's the path of salvation but then there's a higher path which is the path for sanctification. People who want to get close to Allah, to know Allah, have ma'rifah of Allah in this world That inward path is an arduous path It's difficult path, filled with pitfalls But if you follow it, you will get results because all science has to be recklable", "replicable. All science has to be falsifiable. If you do it and keep doing it, you get the same result. If not, if you falsify that result one time, first you have to check your instruments and everything but if you get more than 1, 2, 3, you realize that's not accurate. The spiritual path is the same. We have centuries of people. Imam al-Ghazali", "why he proved Islam himself, in his own self. He's a proof. People who knew him as the arrogant brilliant scholar that could win every debate and then they saw his spiritual transformation ending up being somebody who was completely humbled. People went to see him that couldn't believe that he'd changed but he took the path and he took it seriously. He couldn't talk. He went into a", "He was so worried because he saw all the faults in himself. The Prophet ﷺ said that you had to be مَخْمُوم القلب مَحْموم القرب And they asked him, مَن بقى مَكْمون القلب يا رسول الله? He said أتقي النقي أتقيا نقي لا بغض في قلبي ولا حسد It's a pure, it's a taqi, it is a person of taqwa So outwardly he is متقي but inwardly he's naqi", "So it's He has done the outward work and he has done inward work. The Arabs say, I swept the house out. The heart has been swept. One of them said that we sweep ourselves with our soul", "with our souls. Because you have the higher self and you have lower self, And Ramadan is a time to do this work because what are the two fundamental things in Mu'minat? The two biggest problems you have outwardly not inwardly, the two biggest problem you have outwardly What are the 2 biggest problems about really? The Prophet said", "Whoever protects himself from two things, وَلَجَ الْجَنَّةِ He will enter paradise. أُولُوج خَيْر المولِج When you come into your bait, you ask for خَير مولِاج So he said, وِلَقْهِ He would enter Paradise And then they asked him what were those two things and he was silent. And then he... They asked him again, he was Silent! And he waited a time because this is", "that a teacher will put into the hearts, it's a desire to find something. It's like these things they write to get you to read the article. Right? What is it? What are those two things? You get even more curious if they don't tell you right away. What are", "Whoever protects what's between his two jaws, فَكَّيْ وَرِجْلَيْهُ وَلَا الْجَنَّةُ Whoever protects his tongue and his genitals he will enter paradise. What is fasting? الإمساق The إمساء in the Quran that Zakaria swore was to not speak That was his صوم We don't have that صوم in our tradition", "But the point of that is, that is imsak. Imsak anil maharim. The Prophet ﷺ says whoever fasts and doesn't leave telling lies and backbiting, Allah has no need of his fast. Allah has not need of His fast. So what's the point in the fast? Guarding the tongue. And that's why it's very easy because most people don't back bite in Ramadan unless they're really pathetic.", "But most Muslims, they suddenly get aware of their fasting and they stop. Right? And there's aid, there's spiritual aid. Shaytan's marada are locked up so there is spiritual aid in that. But why is that tadreeb? What is the madrasa? What's the school we're in in Ramadan? It's the School of learning to control yourself. And then what is the shahwa? The shahw comes from food. Without food there's no shahwah. Starving people aren't thinking about", "You know, they're not thinking about appetites. They're thinking about food That's all they want starving people are thinking about soon. They don't think about anything else The provost Allah said that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says a Siam Lee what an ad CB he Allah is the only one that doesn't need food He summoned he has no need We need food so breaking the nafs it's called kasha customer of Shah watain", "has a whole book in the Ihya about breaking the two desires. The Batan and the Farj. So, the tongue, the Batan, and the farj. This is Ramadan. It's learning to discipline your soul. But the other thing is returning back to the Book of Allah . Because the guidance is in the Book. And one of things that's very clear in the Muslim Ummah for anybody that looks at our conditions now, إِنَّ قَوْمِي يَتَّخْذُوا هَذَا الْقُرَانَ مَحْجُورًا My people have abandoned this Book.", "in this book. The practice of the Book of Allah, the spiritual insights that the book gives you, the understanding of the book of Allah our community has lost it because they've become divorced from the Quranic worldview and the Quranical view is in the Quran but it takes time, it takes work to actually learn it. It's learned in Aqidah. The Prophet said", "To wake up in the morning and learn one ayah from the Book of Allah, خَيْرُ لَكَ مِن مِئَةِ رَكَّعٍ It's better than a hundred rakat. Because your devotion without knowledge is not... it doesn't have a lot of traction. He said to learn one Ayah is better than to pray a thousand or a hundred Rakats. And then he said لِأَن تَغْدُوَ فَتَعَلَّمَ بَابًا مِونَ أَبْوَابِ الْعِلْمِ", "To wake up and learn one section of knowledge is better for you than to pray a thousand rakats. Whether that knowledge is theoretical or whether it's practical. In other words, like aqeedah, you practice aqeadah in your understanding but it's not ma'bu bihi. It's not something you do. So you learn fiqh. You learn how to pray properly.", "to pray properly, you learn how to worship Allah properly. You learn how understand what Allah is asking of us and then you learn to understand how to perceive the world so the Quran is the lens with which you look at the world through without it your blind or your... It's all opaque its... Your blurry So there are spectacles that you have to put on", "And this is what the Prophet ﷺ was teaching us. He said, عَلَيْكُم بِكِتَابِ اللَّهِ Take this book of Allah. خُذِ الْكِطَابِّ قُوَّةً Take this Book seriously. It needs study. You have to study it. The Muslims they keep it on the top shelf almost out of reach but take it down open it read it that's what Quran it's coming back to the Book of Allah", "and then wondering why you left it during the rest of the year. Because people experience the difference, the qualitative difference between this month and the rest 11 months. If you don't then you have to work on your iman because its very evident for any serious Muslim the qualitative different between day before Ramadan and the day of Ramadan is very striking. Time even the dilation of time", "Dilation of time. The experience of time dilation. You're getting more done, you need less sleep. Things are different. Experience is different. So this is really, really a month to get back to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, to get closer to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la, to bring us also the hearts. You know, mahmum al qalb. A swept heart. Because there's just a lot of haqid in our community. There's a lot", "of hasad you know that and people won't admit hasa they'll never admit hasid this human nature they will not admit hassa but there's a lot of hasid in our community there's hasid for people that are successful there's hazard for uh people that um have things that you don't have that you want i mean imam zaid told me that when he lived in one of the muslim countries he said people used to sneak new furniture into their house after midnight because", "I'm not making that up. There was a brother from Syria, he worked at one of the internet companies and he did something which was huge. He invented something, he got a patent and he said what struck him, he told me this, he said all the people that were here they were all high-fiving him", "and they were really happy. He said the Muslims in the group, he said none of that. He could see the envy in their faces. That's a disease, hasad. And the Prophet ﷺ said that he said the disease of umam will creep up on you. It will creep", "and just animosity towards other people. Because the believer has a pure heart, he goes out to people with a pure Heart. He doesn't have those diseases in his heart. And if he does, he works on them. He struggles with them. There's a مَطْهَرَةَ الْقُلُوبِ That's why he wrote that book. إحياء علوم الدين is filled with these meanings. Imam al-Ghazali filled his book with how to work on yourself, how to purify yourself. We have a whole tradition but you have to practice it. You can read all day long.", "scholar quote all these other scholars you can do that but if you don't work on your heart on yom qiyamah what is the benefit? إِلَّا مَنْ آتَهَا اللّٰهَ بِقَلْبٍ سَلِيمٌ That's the قلب المخمون, the sound heart. يَوْمَ لَا يَنفعُ مَالٌ وَلاَ بَنُونَ إِلاَّ مَانَاتَ اللّـهَى بِي قَلِّبٍ صَل۪ينٍ And that's what this month is about it's", "We're facing Mecca, the house of Allah. That's the physical house that you make a journey to but there is a spiritual house it's called Dar al-Akhirah It's the abode of the afterlife. It was made for the people of Taqwa because Rahmatullah waase'at kulla shayy But he said saaktoobuha lilladheeni yattaqun The people of taqwa, the people who pray, the", "The people that make the pilgrimage if they're able to. These are the people that get close to Allah.", "a month of openings for us in our inner worlds and in our outer worlds may allah subhanahu wa ta'ala give us the peace of this month uh allah says that the hearts are only made tranquil with the zikr of allah this is a month when where we should increase our dhikr but hopefully try to maintain it after the month closes", "says that if the true believer is content with whatever Allah sends him or her. And we're living in a very strange time, lot of disruptions, a lot of instability, also distraction, immense amount of distraction and so it's very important to people just align with their Lord, be aligned with Allah . And then come what may, that you'll be prepared for whatever comes because we don't know what's coming", "But there are very ominous clouds. There are very omnisus clouds and we don't have wise people running the world, they're not wise people. They're venal people, they are very corrupt people and they don't really have a lot of concern for the vast majority of people but we have nobody to blame and not individually but as an ummah we have no body to blame but ourselves because the Prophet said that the ship of humanity", "We're all on it. And he said that the people who are people of Sharia, they should be on top governing the ship. And Muslims once were. They were. And it was a much better situation. But the Prophet said the people below, instead of having water given to them by the people above, let's just drill a hole in the hull so we can get water for ourselves. So we don't have to have them give us the water.", "the water, right? And so they drill a hole and then the Prophet said they all drown. So this is the crisis we don't have sovereignty as people of God, as people Allah . In that case were just , you know where people are weak but there's a strength in weakness because when your weak you know When you're powerful you can become deluded thinking", "هو ملكك ولكن عندما تكون ضعيفاً تعلمون", "وفي كل مكان حيث يعانون من المصائب والبلاءة ونسأل الله سبحانه وتعالى أن يردنا إلى ديننا مردا جميلا ويجعلنا من أهل القرآن ويزعلنامن الذين يستمعون لقوله فيتبعون أحسن إن الله وملائكته يصلون على النبياي والذين آمنوا صلوا عليه وسلموا تسليما اللهم صلي وسلم وبارك على سيدنا محمد صلاة تنجينا بها من جميع الأهوار والآفات", "وتطهرنا بها من جميع السيئات وترفعنا بي عندك على الدرجات وتبلغنا بأقصى الغايات من جماعة الخيرات في الحياة وبعد الممات وعلى آله وصحبه وسلم تسليم كثيرة واذكروا الله يذكركم واشكروه ولا تكفرون وأقيم الصلاة" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/What to do when Fitna is around you - Sheikh Hamza_d-9d8J80598&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743303903.opus", "text": [ "Alhamdulillah, I want to talk inshallah about just a few things. One of them is the purpose of human beings which is a metaphysical question and then I also want to talked about how we're doing as human beings and then finally I wanna talk about what perhaps we should be doing as humans beings. The first question", "the purpose of human beings? Unfortunately, for the first time in human history there are civilizations that do not really have any answer whatsoever to this question. This is actually unique in human History because human beings have always had some reason for existence whereas the current dominant model in the Western civilization is really untenable metaphysically", "amongst Western people is essentially what they would call in their term an existentialist problem. In other words, that each person has to work out what the meaning of his life is for him or herself. That nobody's going to tell you what your life means. You simply have to work it out for yourself and this is why suicide is actually a very serious option", "had a very famous person commit suicide and there were actually articles arguing that this was his choice, and people should be allowed to have this choice. And you can't refute that argument unless you have a metaphysical argument to counter that argument. Camus is a good example in the West. He was a French Algerian philosopher.", "But he also eventually committed suicide. And so in essence, the philosophy, the dominant philosophy that is in many, many parts of the world is actually a philosophy of nihilism. It's a philosophy what the Arabs would term Adamia. That there's really no purpose to existence. If we look at our tradition... Most people if you ask them why are we here?", "we hear, most Muslims would say وَمَا خَرَقْتُوا الْجِنَّ وَالإِنسَ إِلَّا لِيَعْبُدُونَ We only created humans and the spirit world for عبادة. And they would actually believe that this was essentially the purpose of our existence is عبада. But there are other reasons that our scholars gave from the Quran for human existence because if somebody was not a conscious worshipper then that would mean essentially that their purpose", "and void. And this would mean that people outside of the faith, whatever the true faith would be at the time, at one time it was the way of Moses, at another time the way Jesus, at other times perhaps the way Buddha if he was a prophet as some have argued we have no absolute evidence but there are some who made that argument in the past. Isfahayini is one of them.", "But if the final way, the prophetic way is the way of the Prophet Muhammad then his way actually describes different reasons for the creation of human beings. In the Quran one of them is Isti'mar that Allah created us from the earth and then Isti'marakum fiha that he gave you isti'ma in the earth", "Umran, that you actually build and cultivate the earth. This is called Umran. And the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam he came as a prophet of the city first and foremost. He's a prophet also of the Bedouin. He is a prophet for the farmers but first and foremost he is a profit of Al-Medina, the city. And reason for that is because", "that people all over the world have increasingly flocked to cities. And the city is, it's an ancient concept but the modern city is a very new concept. The idea of a megapolis this massive city which allows for anonymity it allows for people to do things that they would not normally do if they were in a small village where everybody knows who", "Now, the Prophet ﷺ came to a city, Medina. And he taught people how to live and behave within that context. And then he also taught the Bedouin how to Live and Behave. For that reason one of the unique aspects of our fiqh, The jurisprudence of Islam is that it actually deals with people in isolation. It teaches you how to be even if you're one person living on a mountain, You can be a Muslim", "that Robinson Crusoe can be a Muslim whether or not Friday, Jumu'ah comes to the island. So this is one of the interesting aspects of our religion but primarily Islam as a collective religion it's a religion of a group of people an aggregate of people that are bound together in a milla or jama'ah and يَدُّ اللَّهُ مَعَ الْجَمَاعِ Allah loves the group He loves unity", "one and he loves unity. He loves unity through diversity just as his attributes are diverse. He's Rahman but he is also Muntaqim, he is the merciful but he's also the avenger of wrongs. And these aren't contradictory they're diverse attributes but he has won and in the same way the Muslim civilization is diverse but it is essentially one so if you go to Malaysia there's a certain flavor to Islam here", "Your women wear colorful dresses. Muslim women have done that in the past, you go to other places and the Muslim women wear very plain dresses. If you go Nigeria, the women wear a very colorful dress. But this essence of modesty is there whether it's colorful or black-and-white, its essence is there. And this is the beauty of Islamic tradition is that it has this diversity. So one of the reasons is Isti'mar", "the Hegelian dialectic. A tadmir lit ta'mir, destroy and tear down to rebuild, to build up. And this is one of the phenomenon that we see around the world. Wars come in they destroy everything and then people make a lot of money rebuilding those places. The real umran is cultivation. The Prophet ﷺ was not a revolutionary in that sense of the word that he turned everything upside down. In fact the Quran says", "The Sabah, the queen of Bilqis says that kings when they enter into cities. They turn everything upside down. They make the high people low. They makes the low people high. And Allah confirms that. وَكَذَرِكُمْ يَفْعَلُونَ Like that they do. So Allah actually confirmed what this woman said in the Quran. The Prophet when he went into Mecca. He said مَن دَخَلَ بَيْتَ أَبِي سُوفِيًا كَانَ آمِنًا He took the Aziz of the Quraysh and he held him in that position.", "that position when he took the keys of the Kaaba and Abdur family, Banu Abdar these were the Abdul Dar people. And Talha Ibn Amr came to him and asked for the keys Allah commanded him give the keys back to the people who have the sacred trust and he gave the keys", "The Prophet did not turn everything upside down in Mecca. He purified, he made tahdhib. He said, I was sent to restore, to complete the good character of the Arabs. The Arabs had good character. They weren't... Islam did not come into an ethical vacuum. It actually came into a society that had very high qualities and this is very important to remember", "Islam cannot function in an ethical vacuum. In the same way that it cannot function where there's mercy is absent in the hearts of people. When the Prophet kissed one of his grandchildren, one of the Bedouin desert Arabs said, أَتُقَبْرُ الْأَوْلَادِ You kiss children? He said I have ten children and I've never kissed one them. The Prophet ﷺ said do I have anything in my religion for somebody who has no mercy in his heart? In other words if you're a cruel person this religion has nothing for you", "for you. It has nothing for you because it's a religion based on Rahmah, it'sa religion based upon Mahabbah and those things are the things that unite people. The Prophet told us that Allah shaqqa ismu al-Rahman min ismihi ar-Rahmaan That he derived the womb from his name the Ar-Rahmaaan And this is why kinship bonds bind us first and foremost as Banu Adam", "All of you are from Adam and Adam is from Turab. He's from dust. So outwardly we're all the same. There's no superiority of one group over another group, I'll get to that. So this is very important. This is why anybody that is cultivating the earth,", "fulfilling a divine function. He has a purpose in life, whether he's worshipping or not. The second reason is istikhlaf. Now istakhlaf has a couple of different meanings but one of them is this is I'm taking this from the great ethicist Raghbir Isfahani. He was also a mufassir of Quran, one of the teachers through books of Imam al-Ghazali. Raghpir Isfahanian dharia ila makaram as sharia says that", "was for istikhlaf, that they actually are replacements for the previous generation. So as a new generation comes, they replace the previous generations. When you look at your children, you're seeing your replacements. They're going to take your place one day because you will die and they will fulfill that function that you were fulfilling before. That's one of the meanings. Another meaning is to act as a steward.", "I'm placing in the earth a caliph. So Allah gives us these tools, He gives us the means that we need to fulfill this function to be khulafa in the Earth and when Dawud was told he was being made a caliph, Allah told him to judge with justice and not follow his Hawa because this is what will divert you from justice so this is the second purpose that we are created", "Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala created us is that we are here to adore Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la, to know Allah Subhaanahu Wa ta-Aa. To know our creator. Allah SubahnaWata'ala when he said that I only created the sprites and the spirits and the humans to worship in order to know me so", "So the ibadah comes out of knowledge, you have to know Allah . Now, the way that we know Allah according to our ulama is through the aqal. It's actually through intellect it's not through naql which is revelation. The way that We know Allah , No! Have ilm that there is no God except Allah . And the ulama derived different proofs for this", "Burhanat Tamanu, Burhan at-Tawarid for people that have studied some Aqeedah they know these proofs. They looked at different proofs The intellect can arrive at an understanding through thought That you have to have a creator nothing can come out of nothing You cannot get something from nothing there has to be a source behind this which my 15 year old was studying biology and", "biology and his teacher was an atheist. And he came and told me that, he was studying biology and he said that his teacher said that we can explain life without God. I said that biologists should not interfere with cosmology. A biologist should stay in biology and not start talking about cosmology because that's another science, cosmology, and it reminded me of the", "the joke about the biologists that meet God and God asked them what they're up to. And they said, well we've gotten rid of you. And God asked the biologist how did you get rid of me? They said, Well we can explain how we got here without you. He said, How would you do that? First we take some cosmic dust. And god says no wait a second, get your own dust. You see because where", "Where did it all start? Where did we come from? Even if evolution explained how we have evolved as a species, it doesn't explain where the original material came from. Man cannot bring anything into existence from nothing. He makes organs from already existing cells. The cloning comes from already-existing cells. He's now in stem cell research and doing all of these things. Everything that he makes has pre-existing materials.", "out of nothing. It's impossible for humans to do that because nothing comes from nothing and this is why my own teacher said,", "الْجَهِلُ لا يَلِدُ العِلمِ Ignorance cannot bring knowledge into existence. And then he said, إِنَّمَا هِيَ انتِكَاسُ عَقْلِيٍّ كَمَنْ يَمْشِي عَلَى رَأْسِهِ وَرِجْلَاهُ فِي الْحَوَاءِ This is the inversion, this is an intellectual inversion of reality like somebody who's walking on his head and his feet are in the air. That this is something that humans have never believed", "And this argument now of the modern atheists, this is an ancient argument. Atheists have always been around. In fact, atheists were actually more sophisticated 100 years ago than they are today. And this is the truth because 100 years", "who was an atheist, his PhD dissertation was on the Greek materialists. So he had studied materialistic philosophy. So this argument, this modern argument is not a new argument. It's a very old argument and our scholars dealt with this argument extensively but people don't read their books anymore. And one of the simplistic views of some of these modern Muslims that deny theology and the tradition of theology they have no response to these new atheists. They have no", "They have no response other than to say kuffar. But this is not enough because Muslims have always dealt with these things intellectually in a tradition called radd al-shubuhat, which is refutation of the obfuscations that are brought out by the atheists. So it's important for us to remember that we were created to adore Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala but to know Him through ma'rifah and this is through the intellect first and foremost. And our intellect is a spiritual concept. The intellect is immaterial", "Our intellect is immaterial, it's not of this world. And this is why we don't know where we go when we dream but we know that we leave this place and we enter into another realm because we're in a realm that's immaterial. So this is important for us to remember that now as our young people are exposed to a lot of these ideas, we need to address these ideas in sophisticated ways. If we don' have trained intellects", "intellects that can address these problems metaphysically. The second thing I wanted to talk about, so in terms of our tradition the human purpose is cultivation of the earth which is also true civilization not a pseudo-civilization, not the civilization of monetization to use a word that is very popular in corporations and how we monetize everything.", "Muslims did not monetize everything. There were things that Muslims actually did for altruistic purposes. Now the dominant belief, if you believe in evolution, you believe it's a selfish gene. That everything a human being does is for his selfish nature. That people are not altruist. This is not true! This is a lie. This one of the lies they teach. Human beings have dual natures. We're nefis and we're monafis.", "but we're also, and munafis, we relieve people of their troubles, but we are also munafi. We are competitive by nature. All this is taken from the same root of the soul. So the human soul has munafisa, it has competition, it as tanfis, it relieving the sufferings of others and helping others, and it has nafasa, it had preciousness. This is the human nature. Allah made us a hybrid creature.", "We have the power of lust, anger and rationality.", "appetite is insatiable. The Prophet said that,", "He would want two valleys of gold. And he said, The only thing that will fill the mouth of the son of Adam is the dust of his grave. That's what we'll fulfill. So the appetites are endless and that's why people that pursue the appetite will literally destroy themselves through that pursuit", "degrade themselves because they will take their Hawa, their appetite as a God beside Allah and it will take them to utter despair. And this happens many, many people. The second aspect of the human being is the Ghadabiyya which is the irascible nature. Human beings have an irasvable nature. This is put there for a purpose just like the appetites are put there to preserve us. We have an appetite for food and drink which preserves our bodies and also for sexuality which preseres our species", "preserves our species, but these can be perverted and they can go into perversions that lead to overeating or sexual incontinence where people begin to do things that are harmful. That cause diseases to be brought upon themselves. And then the irascible nature of this which is where anger comes from. This is there to protect us from harm, to ward off harm.", "And then he's given us a rational, the Aqliya. And this should be the ruler. This should rule. But what's happened on our planet is the appetites and the anger have ruled. And that's what the Prophet said, The disease of civilizations will creep into you. That envy, the appetite for more. And hatred which comes out of this other.", "These will creep into you. And then he said, وَالْبَغْضَاءُ هِيَ الْحَالِقَةِ And hatred is a destructive force. And he said it literally shaves everything. And He said I don't say that it shaves hair. It shaves the religion. It will remove your religion this hatred and you can see this now in amongst Muslims where this disease has entered into their hearts they no longer have mercy. They no longer", "people and chop their heads off out of this anger. And then they say, well, this is what they do to us. Well, they're not our teachers. They're not Our teachers no matter what they Do to Us we don't do What goes against our Prophet Sallallaahu Alaihi Wasallam? Don't be like those who harmed Musa in other words don't harm the prophet Muhammad by", "his good name by attributing deeds that are not from his religion to his religion. Don't besmirch the name of the Prophet Muhammad . He was sent as a mercy to all the worlds, he wasn't sent as terror, he was sent has a mercy on all the world and these people misquote the Quran. The Prophet said at the end of time there would be young men", "They're young in age. They have empty intellects. Iman will not go past their throats and in a riwayah, they will read the Quran but it won't go beyond their throghths In other words, they won't understand it. They will speak from the words of the best of creation", "They will be shot out of Islam just like an arrow is shot from its bow. And he said in a Sahih Riwayah, he said, whoever can kill them let him kill them because in killing them is a reward from Allah . This is the situation that we find ourselves in everywhere there's fitan", "The Prophet said, There will be events, momentous events. There will tribulations and civil strife. There would be sectarianism. There'll be differences. And he said, If you're able to be the one being killed instead of the one killing then do that.", "In fitna, what is the point? What is all this madness that's going on? Human beings that have lived for centuries together suddenly they're being driven from their homes. Look at all the people fleeing and you are lucky! And we believe in luck. Health is a blessing because God gives it to whom He pleases. Health", "You are very fortunate in Malaysia because you have been blessed with relative security. Nothing is secure in this dunya. Do you feel so secure that God won't open the earth and swallow you up? And we know about sinkholes now, which is a sign of the end of time. The Prophet said that there will be sinkholes swallowing people up. So you shouldn't feel so", "you have relative security. This is a blessing. The way you protect the blessing is obedience. If you're outside of obedience, you lose your blessings. Malaysia has... You have the blessing of a uniformity of faith. I just came from Turkey. It's one of the few countries where you go into masjids and they pray the same way. It' s a great blessing to have uniformity in faith. This i the way that it used to be in North African countries when I first went 30 years ago people prayed the same", "Now everybody prays different ways. Because all these different factions and ideologies have come in, And people read the hadith directly and they think they can derive the hadis just by, Oh I follow Quran and Sunnah brother. As if Imam Shafi' didn't follow the Quran and sunnah. Did you go and study 17 years? Did you got and study the Arabic language to follow the quran and sunna like Imam Shafa'i?", "He was amassing, he was one of the greatest scholars of the Arabic language. That's why he was able to write his great book in Usul al-Fiqh because Usul Al Fiqh is based on language It's based on understanding the nuances of language and what the ba'a is In wiping your head What is that? Ba'a. What type of ba'aa is that ? Is it tabAAeed? Is it for ziyadah? What is it? This is the debates of the fuqaha There are many hadiths you have to know", "What min means there are many types of men in the Quran when you know zero mineral Quran that's mineral by an Allah subhanahu the prophet sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam said man sama Ramadan what about who sit and mean show on The chef he said that's men from the tabaeed. In other words six days of show up imam Malik said no It's minimal if tida it's the it's initiative men, in other words", "the next Ramadan comes. These are valid khilafat, but who knows these things now? Who studies in Mughni al-Labib of Ibn Hisham and masters that book before they can talk about this? In the hadith, the Prophet ﷺ, Hind, in the Sahih collection, Hind comes to the Prophet and says to the prophet that Abu Sufyan withholds money from me. And the", "the norm of your people. In other words, for your socio-economic class take the money that you need and that means without his knowledge. The ulama differ on that. Some said he was... because any hadith the Prophet is acting as a qadi or he's acting as mufti giving a legal position or he is acting hakim , or he acts as muballagh . Or he is actinng as naseeh . He is giving waww", "These are determined through usool al-fiqh. And the usoori scholars differ about these things. Now every ignoramus, every Tom, Dick and Abdullah picks up the Qur'an and picks up hadith and they say, هُمْ رِجَالٌ ونحنُ رِاجَالٍ They're men and we're men. We follow the book in the sunnah as if Malik didn't follow the Book in the Sunnah. Imam Shafi said إذا ذكر العلماء فما لك النجم If you mention the ulama, Malik's the star. The Prophet predicted Imam Malik Abu Hanifa and Imam Shaffi", "Imam Shafi' and ala riwayah, Imam Ahmad. All of them were mentioned by Ishaara in the hadith literature. Our ulama agreed on these four. The Sunni scholars agreed on this four without synods, without councils, nothing! Our Quran is one book. We have no other book. When you heard this Qari reciting he learned the seven qiraat. If you go to Morocco they recite with Riwa-e-Twarsh, annafi. If", "Iran, they recite Hafsa and Asim. If you go to Malaysia, Hafsan Asim They're all sound Rewa. How did they all agree on these? Because of Isnaad. All of them came from the same source No other religion has a unified book no other religion The Christians differ on the Bible the Jews differ on their Bible the Buddhists differ on there Their scriptures the Hindus different their scriptures no Tradition except Islam has a Unified Scripture not only that we", "only that we recite it the same way if you're in Malaysia you learn the are the same as they are in America. If I teach , the are are the ones, you teach the same ones are the . All of them are the The ishum, it's the same how is that possible? How because all", "religion has the unity of this religion. If you go to Mecca and Medina, and you go into the masjid at maghrib time, you will have an ibadhi next to you, you'll have a shi'i next to", "Some of them might put their hands here, some might put it here, but the prayer is the same. No other religion has that uniformity and there are people coming into your country that are starting to confuse your people about your religion You have a good solid foundation The people who spread Islam in this country knew Islam If they didn't know Islam you would never accepted Islam And the thing about these modern people, people flee from them", "fleeing from the cities in Iraq. When they come into town, people run away and Allah says in the Quran, It's a mercy from Allah that you were gentle with them. And if you were harsh and hard-hearted, they would have fled from around you. And this is a proof that these people had nothing to do with the way of the Prophet Muhammad . Nothing at all!", "Because his way is a way that brings people in, it unites people. It makes ta'leef Allah will unite the hearts if you follow the Prophet But woe unto you if you go against His Way", "They will be afflicted with a fitna, a horrible tribulation. Or a painful chastisement. And his way is the way of Ahlul-ilm, the Salaf as-Saleh. Not how people interpret it today. No! The Prophet ﷺ, his ulama were rightly guided. He said,", "This religion is carried in each generation by just and upright people. They will negate, they will negat the extremists and they will not get the decontextualizers, the people that take his religion out of context and they won't negate the interpretations of the ignorant ones. Those are the people of Senate,", "from the people that took, from the People that took back to the Prophet . This is our tradition and this is the tradition that was in Malaysia. And so I'm warning you as people, I am warning you, I'm a Warner and I'm telling you because the prophet is Bashir al-Nadhir and his people should be people of Bishara and people of Nadhara they should give good news but they should also warn people if you allow these seditious teachings into this country", "Sectarianism you will see your houses divided. You will see religion become a source of fitna and tribulation. You are Shafi this is your tradition, your Aqidah is a sound Aqida And you believe in Taskiyah This is your traditional hold to your tradition and don't let people pervert your tradition All traditions need reassessing. This is the job of the scholars", "Things get in that maybe should not be in. That's true, all that is true but don't let that be an excuse to throw the baby out with the bathwater. No, don't like that being excused. This is my warning to you because the people of Malaysia are good people generally. Everybody has bad people and all of us have some bad qualities in us but generally I've been here three times, I'm amazed at the kindness of your people.", "I'm amazed at your adab. I'm amaze that you're gentleness Wallahi, I'm telling you the truth and you still have smiles on your face despite what's happening in the world You hold on to what you have Hold onto the love in your hearts This religion is about loving each other The mu'mins are brothers and sisters We're in solidarity And anyone who wants to sow division and strife be reminded of what Imam Ali said", "that the group with its impurities is better than the sect or sectarianism with its purity. Did you hear that? The group with it's impurities, is better then sectarianisim with it' s purity. So woe unto those people who tell you we are following", "the firqa al-najiya, that we're the only people that are rightly guided. All these people are astray. No! These are Muslims. They say la ilaha illallah Muhammad Rasulullah. They deserve dignity. They reserve their honor. Some of them are astraight khalatu amaran sayyan hasanun wa akhru sayyya. They mix good and bad. That's true. Allah says thumma aurathnal kitaballadheena aftafayn min ibadina", "He's wronging himself. He is still Mustafa. Allah istafahu, he is still from the chosen.", "and care about all of them, and have Rahmah in our hearts for them. And want to see them make tawbah. And now in conclusion, Tawbah! If you look at this planet, everywhere you look we have strife. Everywhere you look, we're seeing environmental degradation. You are a fish people. Historically Malaysia has lived on fish. We've lost 80-90% of the fish in the oceans that people", "that people eat. 80 to 90 percent, the fish have been completely depleted from the ocean. There's a... The foremost expert on jellyfish lives nearby in New Zealand, nearby relative to where I'm from. She did her PhD at UC Berkeley and she wrote a book called Bloom about the jellyfish that are taking over", "Jellyfish are spineless, mindless. They have no brain and they have no spinal cords. And they're consumers. They just eat plankton. They're taking over the ocean because this is... The ocean is metaphysically representative of human consciousness. And this is what's happened to the human being. We have become spineless mindless consumers like jellyfish. We're like jelly fish.", "spineless, mindless consumption is taking over the ocean of consciousness. People now without thinking they consume. They don't think about future generations. All of this that's happening on the planet it can't go on. You cannot keep producing the garbage that you're producing. We cannot keep consuming at the levels we're consuming. If people consume at the level of the average American around", "We represent 5% of the population. We consume over 20% of world's natural resources. We are mubadirin and Allah says, إِنَّا مُبَدِّرِينَ كَانُوا إِخْوَانًا شَيْطٍ That those who are extravagant are like brethren to the demons. They're like brethren for the demons we should be turning away from this fortunately we have people in the United States that are speaking out against this consciously", "that are downsizing, that are going to small houses, that getting off the grid. We have people going back to simple farming techniques because they realize this is untenable. It can't continue on but there not enough and this is why you here in Malaysia, you have to think all of these affects all of us. We're a global community. The part and whole cannot be separate anymore and those that are polluting in one place,", "other places. We have now radiation has affected us, we know that the Fukuyama what happened in Japan it's affected us. The radiation is levels of increase there's a massive the size of Texas there's garbage pit in the middle of the Pacific Ocean between you and my country. Is a massive garbage pit the size", "لِيُذِيقَهُمْ بَعْضًا الَّذِى عَمِلُوا لَعَلَّهُ مِن يَرْجِعُونَ And this is in Surah Ar-Rom, in the chapter called The Europeans. That corruption has manifest on the land and in the ocean because of what humans are doing with their own hands. And Allah allows that to happen لِیُذِّيقُهُMْ In order to let them taste the harm of what they were doing that perhaps they might make tawbah, that perhaps", "We need people to turn back to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. We need People to understand we cannot continue, we have children I think about my children's future I think About the world that they're going to inherit but not just my children I travel all over the world and I see education levels in Africa are abysmal Education levels in Ferguson America in Missouri are abismal", "He said, for humanity. Why? Because you enjoy what's right. You forbid what's wrong. You condemn vice when you see it and you believe in Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. This is the function of our community. We should be condemning what's", "used to tell people when they had difficulties, to fast. They had days of fasting that were actually national days of Fasting in the 19th century where they told everybody to fast and ask God for forgiveness. This is United States of America it's no longer a Christian country we don't even know what it is I don't know what happened to my country all I noticed when i was a kid nobody had tattoos now everybody has tattoos when I was a", "and homosexuals. Nobody gets married, the only people that want to get married are the people who used not to want to marry. Annie Leibowitz, brilliant writer from New York, Annie Leiboitz was asked about that she's a lesbian, she said when I was young that's why you were a lesbian so you didn't have to get", "you said you were homosexual just to get out of the army. He said, now that's what everybody wants to do. So I don't know what's happened to my country. It's changed a lot and you're going to get the same diseases in this country. You will get the thing if you allow these things in without thinking about what you have. Your families will break down. You'll start building old folks homes instead of taking care of your parents. You", "This is what happens because the Western civilization is a package deal. Don't think you could just take part of it. Arnold Toynbee said, It doesn't work like that. You get the whole thing and that's why you're creative people. You need to be more creative really. You have to be creative. You've got to think about Malaysia being a model country. You are one of the best Muslim countries. There are few Muslim countries on this earth", "countries on this earth that I go to and I think, alhamdulillah there's some Muslims who are actually normal and they're functioning. And Malaysia is one of them. May Allah bless you and keep that. Wallahi may Allah bless and keep you and that. So Imam An-Nawawi in his famous book called Riyadh As-Sariheen he has an introduction the first bab is Ikhlas", "The first chapter is sincerity. We need sincerity, but the second chapter is tawbah. We a sincere tawbah. You know turn all of you together back to Allah . The Prophet said Ask forgiveness of your Lord because I ask forgiveness every day at least 70 times.", "no sin and yet he's asking forgiveness of our Lord. We need to ask forgiveness of Allah. The Prophet ﷺ told us, he gave all the diseases of the world in his final address. He said that the blood of Jahiliyyah is over. There's no more revenge in my religion. And the first blood he put down was Rabi'a ibn al-Harith bin Abdul Muttalib, his own family. So if anybody was going to take vengeance it would have been his family. He", "He said no. And then he said, so this jahili hatred it has to end. And in our tradition we have the ability and Dr. Al-Afifi who's one of your muftis here will confirm this. The Prophet ﷺ said that it was permitted for a Muslim to give security to anybody. He can give security", "and let those people go. They don't do that anymore because they don't know the Sunnah. This woman who went on YouTube to speak to these people that are holding her son hostage, she had a better understanding of Islam as a non-Muslim than these people in Iraq have. She said I studied your religion and your religion says that one soul is not held to account for what other souls do.", "she said, my son's not responsible for what American foreign policy does. And then she said and then I read that your prophet Muhammad he had amnesty and he forgave people so I'm asking for my son back. She said I just want to hug him. Now that's one woman and I know that Muslims have untold suffering. I know tha. If you look at what happened to the Iraqi Muslims", "than all of the Christians, but they only talk about the Christians. I'm aware of that. I am very aware of it and it should all stop. But for me, the most important thing in this religion is the preservation of the honor of our Prophet . When we harm each other, that's what we do amongst ourselves. But when we harm people from other religions", "It's so odious to me. All of it is bad. What the Jews in Israel have done to the Palestinians is heinous and condemnable. It's heinous but what Muslims who claim to be Muslims are doing to people in these places is, to me, more heinous because when an Israeli attacks a Muslim, it doesn't affect the religion of Islam. But when these people attack innocent people,", "It makes our Prophet, people think that his religion was a cruel religion. And I want to end with a quote by Amir Abdul Qadr al-Jazairi, one of the great Muslims of the 19th century who died in 1883. He said,", "in barbarity, it is time to repeat these words. Sabrun jameel wa la mustaan Beautiful patience and our help is with God. Jazakum Allah khairan wa salam alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/What you need to know to stay in Islam _ Hamza Yus_Rw---8_0M_w&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742889395.opus", "text": [ "A valid Iqtidaf amongst the ulama about something that involves the Rahmah of Allah. Like he used it as an example of Qira'a Some of the Ulma say you can recite for the dead and give it as charity to them And some say you cant, because there is a hadith, If you die, you will be killed by Adam, and cut from your life, but not from your death", "and give the thawab to a dead person. And that's a khidaf. The majority of ulama say that you can, and that it does benefit the dead. But Ibn Rushd said this is a khilaf about the rahmah of Allah. And so when there's a khilaf about he said, it's better to assume the rahma side of it because they don't really give Allah his true estimate. So", "It means Makkan and Zaman. You know, it's Ism Makkan & Zaman . You have to be happy. Ihtifal b'l-Mawlad. You have t have i'tifal in your heart that the Prophet was born. And you should love the place he was born which is Mecca. You Have To. So... Wa nnah tafiru bi Mekkata bi mawlidihi. We have to. But the idea of specifying a day like the 12th of Rabi al awwal", "formal things as a thing some of the ulama said the early people didn't do it let's not do it but the vast majority historically said it was and they had their proofs the maldad of isa is in the quran so that maryam is clearly celebrating his birth and when the man asked the prophet if i could fast on mondays he said fihi wudittu", "So it's saying, it's an auspicious day. Just because he was born in that day, It's an Auspicious Day! And so he was acknowledging in the question of that man That one of the blessings of Monday is that was the day he was Born and so you know the Ulama have their proofs on both sides But again it's a Khidaf that shouldn't be an issue amongst Muslims and this is part of the problem of modern Islam", "The difference between them is not to be denied.", "condemned by Sharia. That's a Qaida Fiqhiyya, it is a universal principle in Islam. Al Mukhtarifi la Yunkarun. Yunkaran Mujma'Alayhi. Now the Ulama do have caveats about that Qaidah if you're living in a country where the majority is following one school like Morocco where traditionally it was a Mariki country and people started doing things that were against the Urf then they said you know in those type of situations you could tell them not to do it", "that today would actually cause the opposite to happen. And this takes understanding. If you applied apostasy laws today, it would have the opposite effect of what it had in the past. In the past everybody believed they were actually glad to see an apostate gone. Right? So religions had apostacy law, they applied them right? But if you apply the apostasy law today, you'll drive people out of their religion.", "It has the opposite effect. Sayyidina Omar suspended the cutting off of the hand during drought because people would do things in those situations and he understood that the Hifl al-Nafs was over Hifal al-Ma'ad. And so they were stealing because they were just trying to protect themselves.", "And then Allah says, oh khala. Nabadhahu al-Islam. I mean they just have this lackadaisical attitude about that as if it's you know Allah yamti khabatha No there is Asbab and we're going to be taking into account if the Prophet will stand beside a dhimmi who was wronged in a Muslim land he'll be his advocate", "his advocate with Allah on the Yawm al Qiyamah. In other words, don't burn him because he was mistreated by the Muslims. He didn't know what my religion was. He only knew the foul deeds of people that claimed to be my followers. The Prophet is an advocate of Rahma and if there's a reason", "reality any another Mashallah there you go alright well may Allah make this a blessed time for you we're going to really see some wonderful places for those of you who haven't been here before, we're gonna get to see the amanat and the amanats are these are sacred trusses that were with", "The rest of the Jews were in their Taboots, some of them were in the Taboot like the stick of Moses. The Jews had that it was part of their Baqiyah that Allah says in the Quran remained with the family of Moses and the Tass of Abraham you know the thing that the hearts of the Anbiya were washed in these were all in the taboot of Bani Israel", "and then they went to the Christians because they had the amanah during their period but then finally they ended up with the Muslims so these are amanat, and then added to the Christian Jewish amanat or the Muslim amanat which are the things that the Prophet left behind. So it's a very powerful place to go in there don't be frivolous you know don't squander the presence that is in that room because it's awesome really", "the hudur in there is amazing and you know a lot of tourists and things like that but inshallah we'll get an opportunity to go in there as a group but really have adab in that room you know it's a place of presence and a place reflection because the you know yaqub he had his eyes were healed from the shirt of yusuf you know just having just", "what was on the body of his blessed son healed his eyes and he knew it was his son you know so", "No, these people are not reading the sound hadith from the Sahaba about these things. And every religion acknowledges relics. All these religions they always acknowledge relics So these are things that are left behind and my final advice you know Alhamdulillah we're students of knowledge We're doing our best", "No claims here. I mean, unfortunately we didn't have Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah He was here he had to go you really want to stay told me just give his greeting I mean he's real Alim You know so they say if there's no water use tayammum, you know But even tayammums claim I'm not making them up. Just so you know the ulama they say that you have to take from", "from people. In hadith literature, we have what's called an wijada. Wijada is the early muhaddithun were completely against it. The idea that you could just take a book of hadith and start transmitting them or something. No, you had to take books from scholars either munawala or qira'a or imba some way. I mean sometimes they would give", "text and give you ijazah, then you could relate it even if you didn't read them with them. But the idea of just going and buying a book in a store was completely rejected by the early community. And we're in Asr al-Wijada, this is the asr of wijada. It's just people go and they get on Google or they buy a book and they become faqih", "Our ulama say, Abu Hayyan al-Tawheedi has some famous lines. He said, يظن الغمر أن الكتبة تهدي آخ فهمني إدراك العلوم That the inexperienced one thinks that books will guide the one of cleverness to understanding. You know somebody who's smart, he's smart. ولا يدري الجهول بأن فيها غوامط حيرة عقل الفهيم", "The ignorant one doesn't know that in these books are difficulties that confuse even the most intelligent people. إِذَا رُمْتَ الْعُلَوْمَ بِغَيْرِ شَيخٍ ضَلَمْ تَعْنَى السِّرَاطَ الَّمُسْتٰقِيمِ If you try to get these sciences without a teacher, you will go astray. وَالتَّبِصُ الْأُمُورُ عَلٰكَ حَتَّى تَسِيرَ أَضَلَّ مِنْ تُومَ الـحَكِيمُ And you will more astray and things will become so confused", "Al-Habbatu Sawdaa Dawa'un Min Kulli Daa", "snake bite him and he died. So that's Tumar Hakim. Ibn Arif has some lines, he says, If you don't hear orally from teachers and the foundations that they have, your certainty in the difficulties will just be doubt.", "If you reject things without ascertaining what they are, like people that just make a rejection. Oh, that's حديث موضوع. They don't know. You know, they don't now. There is a hadith and I quoted it one time. It said أنا مدينة العلم وعلي بابها.", "You know, and just like... I was like okay. I didn't know but I went back and I checked and it's a hadith It's there you know the ulama there's some difference of opinion about this hadith that is related by muhaddithun The hadith once I heard another time Hadith quoted uttab al-ilm walaw fassin, Sikh knowledge even in China people say these things like they're nothing just oh", "Oh, the ulama of adab if you read their book they say lam aqif alayh I didn't find this hadith. They don't say la asla lahu Every hadith in the world mashallah you You acknowledge there are books of hadith that were destroyed we lost hadiths I mean a lot of the hadith and the ihyas some of the ulamas say that those hadith came from other sources But that hadith is related by Hafiz Al Maghrib", "Al-Maghrib Ibn Abd al-Barr in the Kitab ul-'Ilm and the meaning is sound. And it's been quoted for centuries by the ulema as being a sound meaning, you know? So he says if you reject things without really ascertaining whether they're true or not and tathabbut He said you were just mu'anid maftoon You are an obstinate deluded person And then he said books are a reminder", "a reminder for scholars who already know. وَالصَّوَابُهَا بِمُحَالِهَى مَعْجُونُ And what's right in those books and what's impossible or difficult in those book is mixed together. They're mixed together, and then he said والفكرُ as the beautiful last line because he says والفكر غواص عليها مخرج", "He does in the last, the very thing he's warning you from. He makes it very hard to understand the last line. He said that the idea, understanding can only be brought out by somebody who dives deep and the haqq in these books is like pearls that are buried. You know, you have to... The pearl diver has to learn how to hold his breath.", "you know, it's a science that they... It's transmitted but pearl divers traditionally they can hold their breath much longer than normal people and they dive deep so they know how to get the pearl then they come up. And that's the same with books, The Warning that he is making Ibn Arif about that. So, you know Alhamdulillah all of the teachers here have studied with teachers. You know Mashallah we have Dr. Omar", "in the West definitely but we're students of knowledge and so you know claims just will do our best inshallah try to overlook any mistakes", "وقلوبا خاشعا وعينا دامعة اللهم اشفينا واكفينا يا الله اللهم لا تدع لنا ذنبا إلا غفرت ولا همّا إذا فرجت ولا حاجة كلك فيها رضا إما يسرت وقضيت يا رحم الراحمين اللهم أشرح صدورنا اللهم قبل عمالنا اللوم وفق القائمين على هذا المكان وفقتهم يا رحمن الرحيمين", "جعلهم من ضيوفك يا رحم الراحمين اللهم كما سقانا وأشبعنا اللهم أسقيهم وأشبيعهم يا رحمن الرحيمين الله إن نسرك رضاء والتقى والغنى اللهم وفق إخواننا وأحبابنا في الشام وفي كل مكان حيث يعانون في سبيلك يا رمى الراحيم الله أجعل كيد الكائدين في نحورهم وافق المسلمين وانصرهم" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/When i became muslim _ INSPIRING _ Shaykh Hamza Yu_mNA86PhkXIs&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742998676.opus", "text": [ "The madhhab of the masters, the muhaqqiqa are the people of tahqiq. They're the great ulama. The madhhab of the Masters is the madhhb of musawwiba that every mujtahid is correct Now the hadith says", "and is correct, he gets two rewards. If he makes it validly with the tools of ijtihad and he's mistaken then he gets one reward. How does that square with that they're all correct? Because that yutaawwal al-hadeeth That hadith is interpreted by the musawwiba to mean that the khata' is with God but not with us. We consider", "If they did it correctly with the proper ishtihad tools, but Allah knows. So as far as we're concerned, It's a sound ishtihad I disagree with it But it sounds so every mujtahid is musib And that's the muhaqiqueen those are the masters that concluded that The other madhab is the mukhattia ones that say no They're wrong But this is the true school that will unite our community", "Ibn Hazm's opinion that those who follow licenses are Fasiq is rejected.", "whoever becomes Muslim, he can follow anybody who's a scholar and take his opinion. So when I first became Muslim, I happened to become Muslim with monarchies so they just told me pray with your hands down move your finger like that do one Taslima That's what I learned then I saw other Muslims, what are they doing? Don't worry about that They're Hanafis or they're okay you know", "They're all correct. That's what they said, they're all Correct but Sheikh Nuh He met Shafi'i so he became Shafii Imam Zaid Went to Syria and studied with Shafiee So he is Shafiai All of them Took from the Prophet Sallallaahu Alaihi Wasallam So they are all correct Even though the Ishtihadat are different", "that you should really teach the mashhoor of a madhhab because Madhhabs have so many diverse opinions that again, you will create disunity in the community. Now I would argue in our time this is true for ibadat. For muamalats it's a little trickier and that's why with the muamilat there needs to be a lot more leeway just to make things easier for people but for the ibadah its that's true", "true. Unless it's a difficult situation you can get people out of. Those who know Allah are better than those who simply know the rulings of Allah. But those are things that Allah knows. It's part of scrupulousness to get out of khilaf, difference", "But you cannot impose wara' on other people. You can only impose it on yourself. So, it's better to follow a more conservative position. Islam is actually quite a conservative religion but if there's a liberal opinion and it's accepted by the scholars as valid... And these are scholars that are in the Isnad tradition.", "If you can only get to an obligation through a means, then that means becomes an obligation. To go against the group in things that are permitted is not from the characteristic of true leaders. So when you see people doing something in their", "You don't go against the Urf just to be different. Or you think this is the Sunnah. The Sunnah is to be with the group. The Prophet ﷺ said, الجماعة رحمة والفرقة عذاب جماعة is a mercy والجماعة طائفة من الناس على غرض واحد جماعات", "are going to the same place. So they're called jama'ah. Our jamaa'ah, because our goal is Ridwan Allah and Jannah. To please God, to please His Messenger, and to get into Paradise. So we all have the same goal. Everybody in this room has the same go as a Muslim. Is to please God and get into paradise. Right? Hopefully that's our goal.", "to protect your dignity, even if it means leaving a sunnah is from the deen. So there are situations where if you're going to be humiliated for the sunnah then you leave the sunnaah. If you're in an area where to dress in a certain way is going to cause people", "Don't split up and don't be divisive.", "Right? Don't turn your backs on one another. So he said, if we don't stand in these days when the Urf is to stand, we'll end up creating division because people will see the person and say what's his problem? Why isn't he standing? He doesn't respect me? So he's saying that it's worse to create dissension. That's one of the greatest ulama in the history of Islam, Ibn Abdus Salam. That was his fatwa. And there are many examples like that amongst the A'imah.", "Qadi Ismail, one of the greatest Malikis was in a gathering in Baghdad and the minister of the Caliph who was a Christian came into the room and he stood up and greeted him. He saw the Ulama that were in his gathering look at him and he was the biggest Maliki scholar of that time. He was considered Mujtahid for Madhab. They looked at him like what's he doing? Why is he doing that? And when", "And when the Christian left, he said I saw you got upset about me standing. He said this is a minister from the government. You know that he has the affairs of Muslims whether you like it or not in his hands and Allah did not prohibit us from showing birr to them if they don't oppose us in our religion. Right?", "That Allah didn't prohibit you from showing those, لَمْ يُقَاتِرُكُمْ فِي الدِّينِ They didn't fight you in your religion. أَوْ يَخْرِجُكَم مِّن دِيارِكُםْ Or chase you out of your homes. أًتَبَرُّهُم Right? To show them birr. So he used that verse over the other one. فَلْيَجِدُ فِكِمْ غَلَّةً Let them find harshness. That's another time! That's when you're at war and you don't want to be soft and gentle. You know, let's all sing Kumbaya", "and they're shooting bullets at you. That's stupidity, but that's not normally how you should behave with people. If they're nice to you, be nice to them. Ibn Abbas, a Jewish man said salam alaykum, and the other man greeted him back, and he got angry, and they went to Ibn Abbas. He said, wallahi if Faraon said something nice to me, I'd say something nice back to him. You know this is the way they were. This whole harshness, where did that come from? Right?", "Right? Where did that come from? It's a very strange thing. The reality of Taqleed, Taqeel is to conform to the opinion of another without knowing the proof. It's to accept the opinion", "which is a negative thing in our religion. But it's the hukum of people that don't have knowledge. To get out of taqlid is a good thing, but if that's where you are, that's what you hear from the Prophet. If you have understanding, it's important that this is like... You can't follow the hadith without knowledge of Arabic and grammar and studying hadith with ulama.", "If you have niyyah with a mubaa' to make it something good, and you don't have niyya with a virtue then the mubaaa' is better than the virtue. The mubaa' can become a positive thing by intention", "intention an honorable thing that you get a reward for so to eat is permitted cool wash rabu it's permitted but if you eat with the intention of takuya for ibadah then it becomes makruma and maasiyatu latin kariboo abadan makrumatan bisababan niya no disobedience can ever become a makroma because", "But they excluded from this مصلحة شرعية لم تنال إلا بمفسدة دونها. But they took the lesser of two evils out of this, so if you have to do something that normally would be a معصية but it's a way of preventing a greater معصي then that's the exception. المعاصية إذا كانت تدرأ معصيت أعظم فإنها تفعل If doing something prohibited will prevent", "will prevent something greater that's prohibited, then it's done. I want to finish this but I'm going to stop here. These are very important. But I'll end with one. A common person if he fornicates or steals", "That a common person, if he fornicates and steals it's better for him than he speaks about knowledge of this religion without any training. And that's based on the ayah", "Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziya in I'ram al-Muqeeeen, he says that this ayah is a tarteeb of the severity of prohibitions. The first are the fawaahish and those are like any foul thing, fornication is a faahisha. Don't go near fornications because it's a faaahisha so fawaahhish", "than that you say about God what you don't know. So he's saying it's better for that person. Here means less evil, it's not a good thing but is less evil and this is if people understood that really we would stop talking. I mean these are momentous things", "when he was asked a question in fiqh, he would say, إِنَّ لِلَّهِ وَإِنِّى إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعُونَ That's what you say when you إِذَا أَصَابَتْهُم مُّصِبَةٌ قَرُوا إِسْنَ لِالَّهَ وَأَنِى إَلَیْهَ رَجِعٌ He would actually see it as a calamity that he is being asked about the deen of Allah. Because he has to give an opinion that he thinks this is God's opinion. Who wants to take that responsibility? There have been incidents of people being murdered for committing blasphemy", "towards the Prophet . What would be the approach to this? Well, first of all, nobody can take the law into their own hands. Blasphemy laws are judged by Qabis. Nobody can kill another... I mean look think about this if I wanted to murder somebody all I have to tell the judge oh yeah I heard him say something bad about the prophet so I killed him", "them. Oh, okay, you can go. What kind of... Think about that. It's crazy. You can't... Nobody can take the law into your own hands. And then the laws of Islam do not apply in the lands of other people. They can do whatever they want. We will take care of the mockers. The Prophet was mocked in Mecca. His Sahaba didn't go and kill anybody.", "Even when they were making fun of him and intending him, they wrote a poem and they used the name Mudhammam which is the opposite of Muhammad. He said look how Allah has removed their tongues from me. They're talking about some guy named Mudhammamm and I'm Muhammad. You know it's like he didn't give them any reality. It's like have you ever seen that surrealist painting? That it's a picture", "says this is not a pipe right to make you think it's not a pie it's just an image of a pipe not the pipe so anybody who draws a caricature and says that that's the prophet Muhammad they're lying and if you bring me anybody from the ulama or the Muslims that have any two sense of brains to have them swear oath that that our prophets Allah islam their kafir if", "it? It's some stupid thing from their own imagination. And unfortunately, some Muslims are painting those pictures for them by their behavior. They contribute the pens and the paper. In the Islamic tradition what are the most effective ways to learn and perfect a language specifically Arabic and English language is there book recommendations help doing so I mean first of all language", "language speaking and writing there's an element of it that clearly a gift but there is also a large part of it acquisition so you can learn and master Sheikh Saeed Ramadan Al-Buti told me that he tried to write poetry but he never could I know people like Zain Abidin who the son of Sheikh Abdullah bin Dey, he's brilliant poet in fact I'm gonna read one of his poems for you guys", "I'll read it for you guys before I go, inshaAllah. But a brilliant poet, he didn't study Arood, Shaykh Said studied Aroob, he studied prosody and the rules of versification. Zainal Abideen could just do it from hearing it, he just hears the meters. Those are muwahib gifts but to learn grammar in any language is difficult. English grammar is complicated, I've spent a lot of time studying English grammar", "and Arabic is also difficult. The most difficult thing in Arabic is sarf. Sarf is just a tough one, sarf but the grammatical rules of Arabic are actually relatively easy they don't take a long time to master I would suggest if you're an English speaker first studying through the medium of English", "I did the immersion method and there were a lot of nuances that I did not really understand until I started teaching Arabic through the medium of English. And it really helped because when you, there are certain idioms in Arabic that became much clearer to me when I saw translations for them in English so I would recommend doing that first", "I would recommend doing that first if you're Ajami and that's traditionally how Ajam were taught. They were taught through the medium of their own language in a lot of Muslim countries, like in Urdu speaking countries they use books written in Urdo to study Arabic grammar it helps but eventually you have to go into the Arabic grammatical text. The Ajur Rumia, Qatar al-Nadam, Al Hatar Arab. I would reccomend studying the traditional ones some people prefer Nahwar Wadiah and some of the modern ones", "or it's, is good grammar. It's a good book but the earlier ones are easier to memorize and a lot of the rules need simply to be memorized by rote so... But there's good books. There's a very nice book called Gwynn's Grammar which I'm using in my freshman seminar. It was written by an English grammarian. It short gives you a very good overview", "grammar is so important. He actually believes that grammar can save the planet, like if we would just learn proper grammar we could start communicating again and he makes a very solid logical argument that the lack of grammar is threatening the well-being of the planet. With reference to quantitative and qualitative sciences which are the most important amongst them", "The qualitative sciences are more important in our tradition than the quantitative because the qualitative relate to revelation. You don't need to know mathematics other than very simple fractions to practice Sharia and Sahaba had very limited knowledge of mathematics but they were masters of language and they were natural logicians and rhetoricians so they did not know the formal sciences of rhetoric and logic but they knew them intuitively", "and like Socrates. Socrates is one of the most brilliant logicians in history, but he did not study logic it was Aristotle that looked at what Socrates was doing and developed the rules of logic from Socratic method. The same is true of Imam Shafi'i Malik was practicing usool al fiqh But Shafii looked at", "we're doing, and he codified it. It's a type of genius that's able to derive rules from natural practice. And so for instance there is a reason why if I say to you ask not what Zaytuna can do for you but ask what you can do ZayTuna. That somehow sounds better than saying instead", "that can do for you, you should really think about helping Zaytun. It just sounds better and you'll remember it for some reason. So all rhetoric is looking at great rhetoricians and noticing that they use certain tropes and figures and then like for instance alliteration, genus. For some reason a man should not be judged by the color of his skin", "his skin, but by the content of his character. Listen to all the kuhs in there. We like alliteration just naturally and that's why if you said don't judge people by the way they look, judge by the ways they act it doesn't sound as good. And so rhetoric is partly a bag of tricks that you learn in studying rhetoric, but", "because Abu Bakr al-Baqalani, who was a great rhetorician, wrote a book proving that there is not one sentence in the Quran that could be rhetorically improved upon. And he shows how the jahli poets, all of them, the greatest of them had bad lines and he said that you cannot find any verse in the Koran that could rhetoricaly improved upon based on these rules of rhetoric", "In a time with much confusion and shortening of usuri, how can we reconcile difference of opinion or know what's right if we're not on the track of becoming full scholars? Well part of it is to try to identify people that you trust which is difficult in and of itself. For me I haven't met anybody that I trust more than Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah but he's", "be wrong on something. So, and there are scholars that I really like but I don't agree with them on all the issues so in the end you know at one level Islam is very simple and you don't need to complicate it really. The simplest person can understand this religion but there's certain you know one of the things", "is the four criteria that you should always use to judge anything. That Islam is mercy, it's rahmah and it's not cruelty. It's always rahmuh. Even when it's a harsh thing like a surgeon's knife should be extremely sharp. It would be cruel for the surgeon to use a dull scalpel or a saw. Like what are you doing with that? Well I need to open up your stomach. Why are you using a saw? I don't have a scalpel.", "have a scalpel. So you don't want to cruel surgeon. So it's all rahmah and it's also all, it's al-maslaha, it is all benefit, it not mafsada so if its harmful it's not from Islam. And it's hikma, it wisdoms so if it foolish or stupid", "It's justice. So if it's not just, if it is oppressive or wrong, it's Islam. A lot of that you can... Just your common sense and what your mom and dad taught you are good standards and criteria. If it doesn't sound right, it probably isn't. Now unfortunately people can get brainwashed and there's a lot of people doing that. But the Prophet did not have anybody do any suicide missions in Mecca or Medina", "And he didn't permit it. I think that was one of the biggest mistakes because there are some ulama that justified it, but they always justified it only in the context of Palestine. It doesn't work like that. You open a door and then you open a", "have killed more Muslims than anybody fighting the Muslim. I have read from Al-Ghazali some texts recording talismans to depict the logically unexplainable. Is it condemned? You know, there's something called a ta'wida which there are hadiths against it because", "do them but the ulama in Maliki fiqh I don't know about the other madrasahs, but in maliki fiqi it's permitted to write them they're not encouraged but some people have a lot of waswasa and so it's permited to write something from the Quran that they can carry with them to give them some kind of it's almost like a psychological treatment of just waswasan just to calm them down or", "And there is a hadith that the Prophet put them on Hassan and Hussain, which is where they take that from. When speaking of khilaf or something being agreed upon does he mean within one madhab across the four madhabs or even the dead ones across? Yeah, khilaff it means if it was a rightly guided mushtahid who's recognized by the ummah as having achieved the level of ijtihad", "level of ijtihad. And there are levels of ijdihad, so you have the mujtahid al-mutlaq is an absolute mujtad. This is like Abu Hanifa, Imam Shafi'i, Ahmad Ibn Hanbal, Imam Marek Ibn Anas, Imam Layth, Imam Abu Sufyan Al Thawri, Imam Al Uzaa'i and some claim suyuti initially claims ijtihaad mutlaq. Some say Imam Kandahl", "Imam Kandahlawi from India who wrote Hujjatullah al-Baligha was a mushtahid muttaq. There have been claims later but in the early period, the agreed upon ones there were several people that reached this level and those are people that actually have their own usool so for instance Abu Hanifa he has a position where he will not take hadith even if they're sahih", "against something in a Quranic principle that he makes from Qiyas. Or for instance, there are certain hadiths like Abu Hurairah if it's an issue. Abu Hurayrah was not known for his fiqh. He was known as al-rawi of hadith although he did give fatwa but rarely.", "the Sahaba, but he did give some fatwa. But for instance Abu Huraira has a hadith about you know whoever does wudu it will give you nur and the Prophet said so let him increase in that. So he used to do the wudhu beyond the elbow to like get more nur. The ulema said that was a misunderstanding of the hadith because", "because it was actually meaning doing wudu on wudhu. So even if you're in wudh, to do wuduh again before the prayer, that's how you do it. So that's an example where he understood something but it wasn't what the fuqaha understood from it. And radiallahu anhum. So there are many examples of that", "from Imam Malik. Imam Malek took the Amal of Ahl al-Madinah over Ahad Hadith. So if the Hadith was a solitary, which means that there's two basic types of Hadith, Ahad and then Mutawatir. Mutawatitr means so many people related it's factual. It's a factual Hadith it's impossible like the Quran is mutawatir", "And so this is called qata'iyat al-wurud in asool. It means that it's a decisive statement that cannot be denied. And there are hadiths like the Prophet, naha an qataran nisa wal awlaad. And then you have tawatur labdi, you have twater ma'nawi. So you have hadith that are mutawatir in actual level of it. Man kadba alayhi muta'midhan fal yatabawa mak'ado min an naar. That's labdi.", "many times in the same way that it has factual. It's as good as an ayah of Quran, in terms of its reliability. A hadith that is manawi means even though it's related in different meanings, in different phrases, the meaning is mutawatir. So for instance, the prohibition on killing women, children and non-combatants is mutawatar.", "war. It is haram as strong as anything in the Quran, it's haram. The mutawatir are you know there's a difference of opinion about how many there are but they're not more than 500. It's a small amount of hadith. There over 54 thousand hadiths altogether only five hundred of them around 500 considered mutawatr and then they've been collected in books from the ahad hadith", "you have variations, so you have sahih. Every mutawatir is sahih I mean it's higher than sahih but you have Saheeh, you have and then you have da'if and then You've got over like several categories of ba'if. I mean you're getting into Depending on the types of words they use you'll get into dozens But there's over 20 categories of", "of hadith. And so the weak hadith, depending on how weak they are depends on what you can use it for. So most of the ulema agree that you can us them for which are virtuous acts like reading Yaseen over the dead people some people differ on that. It's a weak hadit but most of them say its permitted.", "It said this is a khidaf about Allah's rahmah. It's better to err on the side of Rahma Don't make a big deal out of it So these are fadaila al-amaat, a weak hadith is not fabricated If it was fabricated it would be called mawduar It means that the Prophet probably said it but the probability is less than a sahih hadith", "Like a Sahih Hadith and then you have A plus. And then you 100% which is the Mutawatir So, and then weak that's very weak it's a D and Then flunk is a Mawdu' so you don't throw out a d paper But it's not the one you put up as the example Right? You don't use it for an example", "has something that you didn't find in an A paper, then you might point that out. So that's where فضايل العمال if you find it in a weak hadith or in أخبار like the غيبيات The weak hadis about the end of time are used because if they come true, then even if they're weak in the senad, the fact that they've become true proves that the prophet probably said it and", "And that's why even if and then moon car, you know people say oh it's a moon car. I did they don't even know what moongar means You know that the moon car hadith can have soundness in the transmission but only one person You know or some so and then some it's not known So if they say yara we and manakir is different from who among karol Hadid in in the techno these are these are you know? Very very these are all technical terms", "The one who is more strict, the one who has a stronger grip", "The Prophet said, إِذَا اخْتَرَفْتُمْ فَعَلَيْكُم بِالسَّوَادِ الْعَظَامِ If you differ, follow the vast majority. It's better to be with the group." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/When I Joined Trump commission - Shaykh Hamza Yusu__1748522726.opus", "text": [ "It's really important to remember that Trump is not the government. He is the head of the administration and our system differentiates between the government and the administration This man was a political appointee meaning that the the the administration appointed him for a temporary position The civil servants are there all the time They're a different kettle efficient So if we start, if we don't understand even the Commission like people like I joined the", "Like I joined the Trump, give me a break. Seriously this commission is an independent body of academics it is literally illegal by federal law for the State Department to put any pressure on this committee to come up with what they want" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Why Dhikr is better than charity - Shaykh Hamza Yu_fjmG2Uc65HE&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742892189.opus", "text": [ "Dhikr is even better than charity. Because all the social works of Islam which are very important and should be done, dhikr Is why you were created? You were created to remember your Lord. You weren't created to build bridges or to heal the sick or to do all the things that we do as human beings. That's not", "Allah doesn't, He's not asking us for our provision. That's not why we were created So even though part of what we're here doing is plowing the fields building the hospitals taking care of the orphans We're supposed to do all those things", "The reason we were created was to worship Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And all of those things can be a means by which we worship Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la, but to do them... To simply do them? That's not why we're here. And so that's basically what he said you have to know that. That dhikr is why you are created to remember your Lord and Those three dhikkurs will not harm you other dhiktur can be dangerous", "Over the counter dhikr can be dangerous, so you have to be careful. There's people that will start doing divine names. Divine names are very powerful and you have really... You know, you can't just start saying over and over again a divine name and not stopping because you can really...you can have psychotic breaks People can really be harmed by that if they're not...if it's not done with somebody who knows what they're doing in those situations", "dhikr and then you have prescription dhiker. And you should, you have to know the difference. But those dhikkurs are the adhkar of sabah wal masaa, astaghfirullah, la ilaha illallah, sara'a al nabiyyat. These are all over-the-counter dhickers that any Muslim can do and they will not... They'll help them and benefit them. They won't harm them. So then he says, you know,", "and we do this all the time, you know Muslims talk about You know all these rich people that aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing. What he's saying is you're getting two sinful deeds the first is You know you're accusing your brother or something if he's paying his zakat Then it's none of your business what he does with his discretionary wealth And even if he not paying his zakaat, it's non of your busines because thats", "A state can impose that, but other than that it's not... If you're a scholar, you can remind them or tell them. But other than in that, just leave people alone. So he is saying that you are disobeying your Lord because you could have got a reward by doing dhikr of Allah instead and just not saying anything, not backbiting. You don't even know that you don't know.", "To leave what does not concern him. تَرْكُهُمَا لَا يَعْنِي So, what does that mean? To leave What doesn't concern us. Imam Al-Ghazali defines it as وَمِن جُمْلَةٍ مَا لا يَأْنی From some of the things That are of no concern. حِكَايَةُ الْأَسْفَارِ Just talking about travels And things like this. You know, The stories of journeys, Travelogues and things like that.", "Talking about different foods from different places. And the different cultures and things that go on. And talking about the conditions of people also. And, talking about different", "From the daily life that people have, they take from it.", "it's a waste of time. The majority of what people are talking about is just a waste", "humans go. Right? وَكُلَّ الَّذِي فَوْقَ التُّرَابِ تُرَبُوا Everything walking on turab ends up turab. That's the human condition. And so, what did they do with their time? What did they", "time, time management. These are the real time management people and The most important thing to them was to utilize the time that you have on earth To purify your soul He has had success the one who purifies the soul and he is Destroyed the one whose stunts his growth this the growth of the soul", "إذا لم يكن لفضل الله وعباده لا أحد منكم سيكون محاولاً للتزكية", "That you should accompany people that will remind you of God when you see them. They will direct you to God when they speak. And these are people, There are people that take their breasts to account. They realize their breasts are accountable.", "their thoughts in the divine balance. They look at the mi'ya, even their thoughts. These are people that don't let thoughts come into their mind that are not proper. That's the work they've done on themselves. These people had a khalwa of three years in those rooms down there. Three years! And that's how serious they took this. And this is the problem with modern people. They don't realize your time's limited. You're moving.", "We're going to be out the door before we know it. So what are you doing with your life? And what are You doing with Your time? وَيُكْثِرَ الذِّكْرَ بِصَفْوِلُ بِهِ He does dhikr with His essence. وَالْعَوْنُ فِي جَمِيعٍ بِرَّبِّهِ All of that is with the help of His Lord. إِيَّا كَنَ عَبُدُوا وَإِيّا كِنَ اسْتَعِينُ Our help is from You, we worship You but our help to do that", "help to do that, the awn of that is from you. يُجَاهِدُ نَفْسَهُ لِيَ رَبِّ الْعَالَمِينَ They struggle with their souls for the sake of the Lord of the worlds. وَيَتَحَلَّ بِمَقَامَاتِ الْيَقِيمِ And they adorn them. So the first part is تخليّة, is emptying the soul. خَلِّي بَالك مِن نَفسِكَ Emptying the mind of the ego, getting rid of this destructive self. النَّفْصَ الْأَمَارَتُ بِالسُوءِ", "Mara to besuit. Getting rid of this commanding self. Cultivating it so that it becomes nafs al lawama and then it moves into nafs mutma'inna, a soul at peace with its Lord. We yathahalla bi maqamat al yaqeen khawfun fear of Allah that we're going to meet our Lord. Khawfun rajan hope. Yarzu allahu liyum al akhir", "And the people that have in the Messenger of Allah, who are they? That really take his... The paragon of perfection of the Messenger Of Allah. Who are these people that They have the Uswa of the messenger of Allah. They're people that... They're aware of the coming of the Day of Judgment", "They're looking forward to meeting their Lord. That's what they want. They're on the journey to meet their Lord and they're looking forward to the journeys end. They are thinking about the journeys ends. وَأَنَّا إِلٰى رَبِّكَ الْمُنْتَهَى To your Lord is your end. إِنَّ لِلّٰهِ وَإِنّٔا إلٱيهِ رَاجِعُونَ Even when a moseebah afflicts them, إذا أصابته مصيبة قالوا إنّا لله وإنّا إله راجعون كل شيء بعدك هيئن يا رسول الله", "her whole family got killed, she said everything's easy after you O Messenger of Allah. وَمِنَ الْيَقِينِ مَا تَهُونِ بِعَلَيْنَا مَصَائِبَ الدُّنْيٰة Give us certainty that enables us to find everything easy after You. لَيَّتَكَ تَحْلُوْا وَالْحَيَاتُ مَرِيرَةٌ Would that you were sweet and the whole world this life was bitter.", "Would that you were pleased and everybody else was angry. Would that what's between me and you is flourishing, and what's", "If I have your love, everything else is easy. Everything walking on this earth is just dust." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Why I chose Islam over Christianity - Shaykh Hamza_OrYRq_ruCUg&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742890067.opus", "text": [ "So I want to know what following the Islamic faith has done for your life personally. How has it helped you put yourself together? And also, I'm interested in again why you found the Islamic tradition preferable let's say to the Orthodox tradition that you did enjoy the rituals that were part of that at least. So let's deal with practical issues first.", "In terms of why I chose Islam, I mean, I'm not completely convinced that I chose to Islam. I mean in some ways Islam chose me as well. So it's guidance is a very strange thing for people like I saw an inevitability when I look back on what happened and I saw and inevitably ability of my embracing Islam.", "that could be termed mystical or however you want to determine them. But the tradition itself, what struck me was one, I got to keep all of the prophets that I believed in already and I added in addition what we consider to be the final prophet. And just as very often Christians marvel at how Jews miss Jesus,", "Christians and Jews miss Muhammad, although to be fair to the Jews they do acknowledge the prophet as a providential force. And they do acknowledged him as a Noah Hiddick messenger preparing the way for the coming of the Messiah so they do recognize that he was a providencial force at least the great you read George colors book on Jewish theology as a chapter on Judaism in Islam, and certainly the Great Father of Orientalism", "Ibn Aziz Golziher, he actually said that he felt that Islam was the only religion that somebody of a philosophical bent could actually accept. And he wanted to really bring in the gift of philosophy into Judaism that had been, that the Muslims had so richly participated in. In fact, you know, there's an argument that just as Judaism prepared", "for a philosophical Western Christendom. Because if you look at the transmission of all that knowledge that comes into Europe, it's quite extraordinary. I mean, St. Thomas Aquinas, who's 13th century, he dies in 1274 and yet he's the doctor of the church. Just look at number of times he quotes Muslims. He calls Averroes the commentator. So I think Islam... One of the beauties of the religion to me is that you'll find whatever you're looking for", "whatever you're looking for in it. I mean, Islam, it has a very simple theology that anybody can understand in Surah Al-Ikhlas, the chapter that says, say God is unique. God is completely independent. God neither gives birth nor was God born and there's nothing like God. So it gives", "yet embedded in that simplicity is an extraordinary complexity that actually created a metaphysical tradition that Western scholars have spent their lifetime studying. People like Henri Corvin or somebody, it's like Maxine Rodinson, not Maxine Rodeson but the great Catholic theologian and a metaphysician Jacques Maritain recognized the genius of people like Al-Halaj", "like al-Halaj and things. So within the Islamic tradition, there's just an extraordinary spectrum. You can spend your entire life and have a satisfying life. And I know people that have done this, just mastering the recensions of the Quran and the Qira'at, the actual oral expression of the Qur'an through the rules of Tajweed. You you can spend", "spend your life studying the great mystics of Islam. We have the best poets in the world. We also have the architecture. I mean, there's nothing like the Taj Mahal or the Alhambra Palace and even Western architecture. If you read Stealing from the Saracens, she shows how some of the finest Western architecture was basically taken from the Islamic civilization, including Notre Dame in Paris. So you can find incredible...", "came to Islam through music. I mean, I know some really professional musicians that fell in love with Arabic music which led them into Muslim culture people that love just...I mean one of the most interesting things about Islam is it is a truly universal religion in that you can go from Indonesia", "different expressions of the same central truths of Islam with their own local colorings. So, the West African Muslims are not like the Middle Eastern Muslims. The Middle Eastern Muslim are not the Indian Muslims and you have people like one of the great impressionist painters of Sweden. I think he's actually considered a national treasure in Sweden but his paintings hang in the museum there. He became Muslim", "Muslim in jail for actually, he shot a matador because he was raised by his father was a veterinarian and he shot him matador. Because he was so horrified that they were bringing bullfighting into France. And there was such an uproar that they actually released him. But when he was in jail,", "ended up becoming Muslim and then studying in Egypt, and then going back to his native land. He died in Spain, but extraordinary individual. So you have people like that. You have people that anybody can find what they're looking for. And that is the power of the faith, I think, is that it is truly a universal faith.", "One, they don't recognize that it's a Western faith because it is. It's part of the Abrahamic faith. It was in Spain for centuries. It has been in Eastern Europe for centuries and even Istanbul which is the great capital of Islam for centuries is half in Europe and half in the East and that's why it really bridges these two worlds. And so there's so much... I mean, why did all-", "Christians, Jews and Islamic alike to focus on their commonalities in the face of the things that are disintegrating our cultures. We could start by trying to make some peace between us if we're going to consort ourselves reasonably as religious individuals. Right. And I commend you for trying to do some bridge building because arguably there's been so much negativity", "much negativity around this faith and around its adherence that there's an almost instantaneous um association with the most negative aspects of humanity with the religion and it's quite tragic. And so just as an exercise, a kind of bracketing for a second and try to think about things, a mentor of mine and a friend of mine Dr Thomas Cleary wrote", "translated the Quran. He's one of the brilliant translators of our lifetime, but he wrote a book called Zen Koans and in the introduction of that book, he actually says that the purpose of a koan is to snap people out of sloppy thinking. I think I read that book. Yeah. But he says in there, you don't need a koaun to do that. Just ask an educated Western person what they think about Islam and they'll start expressing all", "Do you know anything about the Prophet Muhammad? No. Other than maybe something they read in a newspaper article or in Time or Newsweek or The Atlantic Monthly, something like that. Yeah, well it's not an easy thing to try to get a toehold in a different tradition especially when you don't even have a toe hold in your own. It's not that hard, especially for an educated person. You're obviously a highly educated person, it's", "It was a very easy religion to understand. So this idea that I can't understand it, I'm having a hard time, it's not that hard to understand Islam is actually very straightforward. Okay then give me a five minute summary of the core beliefs. I don't want to put you on the spot. It's not a question for you. No no no, that's not hard at all.", "So lay it out. That would be very helpful.", "in the last day, the Day of Judgment and to believe in measuring out of good and evil. That good and Evil is part of life.\" And then he said, tell me about Islam? And he said Islam is that you make the testimony of faith, that you pray five times a day, that fast Ramadan, that pay Zakat, 2.5% of your standing wealth at the end not your income tax but your standing", "2.140 is given to poor people, there's eight categories that are given in the Quran and if you're able to, you make a pilgrimage once in your lifetime to Mecca and then he said tell me about Ihsan which is the third dimension of Islam and this is the dimension of virtuous being like being a person of arity, of excellence in the world and he said Ihsan is to worship God as if you see God", "If you see God and if, and if you don't see him at least you know that he sees you. So you have an awareness of that, that, That there is a divine presence and you should be in a state of awareness in your behavior. I mean one of the things about, you know, if you're driving and everybody's speeding and then somebody sees a cop they all suddenly slow down. You know,", "he slowed down and he pulled him over. And he said, why didn't you slow down? He said, I felt like a hypocrite. So the guy let him go. But that's people when they're in the presence of authority, they tend to behave well, unless they're an utter rebel. There are those people. I'm trying to figure out how to be a Jew and a Christian", "the beauty of Islam is you get the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Last Testament. I mean that really is for me even the Jews acknowledge this because Islam in many ways is a universalized Judaism it's Judaism for the Gentiles we have the Nikvah they do Roussel which is the ritual the baptism a total immersion in water ritually to purify yourself which is done at least once a week" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Why SCHOLARS are against MUSIC - Shaykh Hamza Yusu_fDC6mlt9raE&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1743058793.opus", "text": [ "Traditional like ragas in Indian music, they have a whole science and they know that they're having an impact on people. Al-Farabi wrote a book called Kitab al Musiq al Kabir And in that book he gives you the maqamah to use where you can make people laugh", "The section on singing and music, so inshallah we'll look at a little bit more detail on that because it's an important section. It's obviously a problem and it's always a topic of a lot of debate and discussion amongst Muslims. So he says,", "and then he says, if people noticed last night at the dinner when the waiters walked by and they were all talking amongst each other, Sri Abd al-Fatah said, he stopped singing and said, He was basically letting them know this is called because means to listen or audition.", "So, Sama' is a tradition that arose out of the Islamic spiritual tradition which was where people would sing Qasaid. Now the Prophet undeniably and nobody could deny this had people amongst him who did sing and Anjasha was one of them, Amr ibn al-Akwaa was another in the Sahih of Imam Muslim", "Imam Muslim, he's there. He sang for the Sahaba in front of the Prophet . We know that two jarias were singing, some young girls were singing on Eid day and Abu Bakr came in. We know the Intermediate and Ahmed and others. The black woman who swore an oath that if the prophet returned safely she would bang her drum and sing", "and the Prophet said if you made that right so if you if you, made that another if you Made that vow then fulfill it and she began to bang her Drum over the prophet's head and he allowed that And then in one rewire Abu Bakr came in and she kept Playing her drum and singing then the next one", "The next one Ali came in and then Uthman came in. And when Umar came in, she stopped put it behind her and sat on her drum. And the Prophet was amused by that and said that even Shaitan is afraid of you. That implies some scholars took from that a negative thing. But the scholars...and that hadith is considered a mushkil hadith", "Hadith because you cannot make an oath in something that's prohibited and You don't fulfill an oath if you made an oath to do fulfill something That was haram. You don' tfulfill that because it's not a vow rather another so The Prophet mentioned that and in the hadith when Abu Bakr came in he said", "Is this a pipe from the pipes of Shaytan? And the Prophet said, leave them alone because it's an Eid. So in other words and in fact, who argue in favor of the permissibility of these things say that Abu Bakr was making", "making a ruling over the dominant aspect of music which is it is a mizmar from the mezamir of shaitan and if you look out there around the world and just look at what music is used for, and the people involved in music, its pretty clear who's running the industry. Like one of Billy Joel said, If the devil had an industry it'd be the music industry", "Well, little does he know. He does have an industry and it is the music industry so that's just a reality and anybody that studies the history of a lot of these things you'll see the type of debauchery that's involved in these things and some of the artists are some of lowest creatures that walk the planet", "I mean really, you just have to look at their faces after a career in music to see what type of lives they've lived. And then I actually wanted to take a photograph of Yusuf Islam and put it next to one of the rolling bones just to let people see what happens when somebody takes a spiritual path and what happens", "Because like somebody once said, at 50 everybody has the face they deserve. Really? So basically that's what he is saying now The Sama'a is a tradition that the ulama differed on undeniably and some of the ulma prohibited it", "In fact, Ibn Arabi argued that sama'ah by his time was no longer permissible because of all the things associated with it. And you will see in tasawwuf every generation talks about how the tasawwwuf is over and people are gone. Imam al-Junaid was already making complaints. So this is part of the overall decline and fall of spirituality", "in its curvilinear, it's not really curvilinare. It reached its pinnacle with the Prophet's community and after that the Prophet said which is a sound hadith that no time will come or even a day will come that is not worse than the one that preceded it", "Until you meet your Lord and some of the people want to limit that to the time of the Sahaba But it's simply not true because every generation is one generation further away from the Prophet So there has to be That the distance Anas said that we didn't finish burying the prophet until we were already Feeling the the knucks in our hearts", "That we were actually denying our hearts. Just his physical presence, sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam, was so important to their spiritual well-being so that you can see and that's a proof of the Prophet how quickly it fell apart. I mean these people that he brought together that were completely dispersed. They were literally on the brink of a hellfire", "came, united this people that had never been united before. And within a very short period of time they were fighting each other again. So it's not surprising and the Prophet when Abu Bakr filled that vacuum that was left by his physical disappearance, when he filled that vacuume it's like coming into the hub, that empty space that keeps the wheel because there is no ego", "Because there's no ego there. It's the egoless space. That's what keeps the thing turning. And so Abu Bakr was able to come in and then Omar came in. By the time Uthman gets there, the torque is so great because all these new people come into Islam and they don't have the spiritual qualities that the earlier people had.", "and then it begins to come apart, and then Ali comes in, and by that time the community is fragmented. So the Prophet ﷺ, getting back to this, the deterioration of the quality is something that has been remarked on since the beginning. And so it's not surprising that you'll find these", "find these constantly now the prophet sallallaahu alaihi wasalam permitted al-han al arab the tunes of the arabs that were used is the tune and even the quran was to be not sung but chanted with the al han it's permitted to chant the quram which is why we have quran reciters that will chant and the master quran", "they're doing a very sophisticated rhythm and when they speed up, they all speed up at the same time. They can stop on a dime because they are following the ʻauzān and maqāms that they are singing in each one of those songs that they sing have maqāmāt that are sung", "So they sing the Hijazi or they sing Maqam al-Rast, or Isfahani. They have all these maqams that they sing. According to legend there were 24 maqamas originally and then some got lost but we know that this is where music becomes a serious problem", "the pipe the Pythagoreans worked out that music is related to geometry and in classical Western tradition you had what was called the quadrivium, and so you studied arithmetic first Which is number discrete number arithmetic one two three four and and obviously not simple arithmetic but the meaning of numbers Because numbers are related all numbers or multiples of 1", "are multiples of one. Everything comes from one and then you went into geometry which was number in space, and then music which is number in time and space,", "So there was a cosmology to the Qudrivium and these are related to cosmologies. Now different maqamat affect different parts of your soul, and this is why the prohibitions of music are there because music is very dangerous and a lot of people don't know what they're doing with the music. And if you don't believe this all you have to do is look at some documentary footage", "and how mad people went over new sounds of music that were being popularized and promoted over the airways. And rock'n roll had a massive impact on people, and as it got darker and darker you went into these heavy metal and all these other types of... You get some really serious problems at these concerts where people literally go mad.", "I mean obviously there's drug involvement and this is another reason because you'll find many of the hadith that talk about the prohibition of Music also have drugs mentioned in the same Hadith. In fact, There's an argument that all of them have drugs Mentioned in the Same Hadith and the Prophet said him said the end of time won't come until people permit and then he said Music", "I mean basically the sex because that's the word he used meant that and then And drugs, intoxicants. So he actually mentioned those three together right which in Western parlance is sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll which became a kind of Mantra of the 1960s", "of the 1960s and we're still feeling the repercussions of that in the West since that time, which was a massive change. Plato argued that you will never change musical modes in a society except it will have a radical effect on the culture and nature of the society. So musical changes actually are harbingers of shifts within society. And so this is called ethos theory in the Greek tradition", "Rumi and the Mesnawi, Rahimullah talks about the soul being really almost seduced into the body with the flute, the reed flute. And that's an indication a mythological indication of the power that music has. And he talks about morose sounds of the reeed flute and the impact they have on the heart.", "and it's really not something to be played with because people don't know what they're doing. And in traditional, like if you go into traditional ragas in Indian music, they have a whole science and they know that they're having an impact on people. Al-Farabi wrote a book called Kitab al-Musiq al-Kabeer and in that book he gives you the maqamah", "they'll start laughing uncontrollably. You can play other maqams and they'll star crying. And so this is the power that exists in this form. So what you have to understand is that religion does not have a blanket permissibility, and it doesn't have a blank prohibition but it has a dialectic of tension to make sure we don't go astray in either way", "either way and so for instance what we just heard which is sama you can if your present if your heart's open to it it can actually have a very powerful spiritual impact on you i mean they can put you into a state of hudur of presence with your lord and this can happen and obviously the quran does this as well for people and I don't want", "Everything other than the Quran in terms of this has a vacuity to it. But the meanings also are embodied in these words, the things that they're saying you know are very powerful things Imam al-Bursaidi They were just reciting very powerful meanings from Imam Al-Burseidi so just to look at a few things He says that the Imam", "Muhammad al-Hassan says, quoting Mufatih al-Kunuz, that sama' has three categories. The first is absolute prohibition and this is for the majority of people and this the traditional view I'm just giving you what traditionally what the ulama have said And these are for young people that become very affected by it and the shahawat are ghalib alehim when they have too much of their licentious nature is too strong so there the shahuats", "the Hawats, the concupiscence soul is very strong and they haven't learned to control that yet. That this can actually arouse in them passions. And so for these people it's not a good thing. Also because they haven' purified their hearts and worked on that. So the Samakh can have a negative effect on those people. Then the second one is Mubah. This is people who can listen to it", "They just enjoy the sounds of it and so it doesn't have a negative impact on them but It's something that they take pleasure in. They get some repose or something And the third one is Mandub, these are the people that love Allah and it actually encourages them to get closer to Allah That they feel a nearness from it and sort affects them in that way", "and this is very interesting, lafta of Sidi Ahmed Zarouq, an indication that he got out of it. He said, أما آلة اللهو This is in his commentary. The وغلسية is a famous primer that was used by the Malikis in North Africa. He was a great Algerian scholar, Abd al-Rahman al-Waghlisi, and his book was used for many hundreds of years as a primer like Ibn Asher. Ibn Ashir pretty much became the dominant text but before that", "that and what did he see in the court to be a were more dominant anyway it's a beautiful text and see that Mazaro did a very nice commentary on it but he says one matter to lehwi kel bookie will re thought would rude waiting ham and it added men are at a parable for a hello Samara if tiaran so CD Ahmed Zarrouq says as for these instruments of diversion leho is diversion anything", "So, don't listen to them by choice", "And when he was with Nafi' and he didn't ask for help from that, it is possible that the benefit did not affect him. So he doesn't need to close his ears.", "indicates is that Nafi was not affected negatively by these things and so He didn't have to close his ears now. He says And this is Imam al-Wazani who wrote I think one of the finest Legal arguments that I've ever heard for the permissibility of music he was a great scholar from Morocco and the Moroccans tended to follow the Andrewsian school because the Andrew scenes Tended to be more lenient about this, and it's important for those of us who are in the West", "who are in the West, in societies where music is profoundly central to the cultural heritage. Even though there's a lot of negative music, nonetheless music is profoundy central to cultural heritage and so we have to be careful about making this an issue whereby people actually are alienated from Islam. So it's very important to have a nuanced understanding of this because in certain countries", "that's not a problem. But if you take certain types of Islam as the way you introduce people to Islam, that could have a very negative effect and that's why triaging is very important. You have to let people see what Islam is before you start giving them all the details many of which are not agreed upon. And this part of the problem we've got so many people that think this is Islam", "It's my Islam or no Islam. And so what he says here, Imam Rukhzani,", "at the subtlety of this argument he's saying that if it affects you negatively right then that's really what they're arguing that you shouldn't be listening to this and Nafi was not affected by it so he did not tell him to close his ears so had it been haram to hear it he would have told them to close the ears do you see", "is specific about the effect that it has on you." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Why Scholars oppose Photography - Shaykh Hamza Yus_B7LREkusXDI&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1742889748.opus", "text": [ "I think people... something very strange has happened in my lifetime which is the complete ubiquitous nature of the camera and this idea that everybody can take pictures of anybody they want to, and take the image of a person and then put it up on Facebook or do whatever they want with it. As if individual images don't seem", "don't seem to have any meaning whatsoever. You know, a lot of the early scholars were very opposed to photography when it first came into the Muslim world and wrote very extensively about it. It was a major issue that was debated. And the ulama settled on two different opinions which they often do. One is the rukhsa and the other is the shiddah", "of the Sharia, this balance between these taking a more rigorous position and taking an easier gentler position. But even the people that took the easier position if you look at the early fatwas which I did a long time ago but they were very interesting. They tended to argue things like the usefulness of these things for science and for teaching people.", "just taking pictures of everything for no reason. And one of the things I think that's happening to people, and I'm talking to the more younger people here is that you'll tend to miss experiences because you're in this kind of mediated reality that you have to film for some reason. You'll just miss those experiences. So...", "the great mosque today and The imams giving a hutban. There's all these people like filming it and taking pictures during the khutbah Which I think would have Really shocked earlier people they just wouldn't have understood what you were doing But it's it's just something that I want people really to think about the idea of just taking candid pictures", "If you look at one of the interesting things about 19th century photography is almost every single picture you will ever see, you'll never see anybody smiling in those pictures. You will not see candid pictures.You'll always see people in an incredibly dignified mode even gangsters like if you look a pictures of Billy the Kid or somebody from that period they're standing and their upright and there trying to look their best", "because it's a permanent frozen image of that person and those people even the worst of them had a sense of dignity and a sense what permanence was and what it meant so this idea taking pictures when people are eating you know I mean I was literally having dinner and somebody would start taking pictures and I just as you know the Tuareg actually wear a veil when they eat", "very private thing, eating. So I just want people to be a little more conscientious about that thing. I would prefer no cameras in this room unless you're really authorized to do that and I would really beware of like...I haven't...I've never carried a camera. I've never taken pictures on any trips I've been all over the world and I had a Moroccan", "You know, there's a Moroccan one of the in Meknes and everybody wanted to take a picture. And he just clicked his heart. He said that's where his camera was. Just to click the heart. You don't really need to have these images. I was there.", "using ourselves to death, especially the second chapter in that book which is about image-based societies. And one of the things he reflects on in that books is why God would make it a prohibition to make graven images in the Decalogue and the Ten Commandments? Why would making graven Images be a prohibiton? He argues that any society that is going to be a society of abstraction and imagination", "then the worst thing for a society like that is to produce images. It would be the worst things and so if you want to have an abstraction because God is a complete abstraction, you cannot imagine God. And so if we want to inculcate in a people the ability to have the highest abstractions than the preference for that would not be to have images", "Muslims were very, very strong about that. And the iconoclastic movement in the Orthodox Church which was centered here because of their interaction with the Muslims and that seriousness with which they took that prohibition of tasweer, of graven images, the Christians started destroying all of their icons.", "that were in the Muslim lands because they were protected from these fanatical iconoclasts who are going around into all the churches and destroying all the images of the Greek Orthodox icons during that period. But that response was a response from interacting with Muslims, and you can see this also doing the Protestant period where they went and smashed all the idols in the Catholic Churches or the images rather. So I'm not saying", "I'm not saying don't take pictures, people can do that. I'm just saying there's times when it might be useful to think about putting the camera down and just experiencing something, not necessarily through a mediated reality. And that's partly why there is a photographer here doing this, to do that,", "and things like that from this. So, that's just my own peevish perspective about this thing. Food for thought. That's all. He deals with the eye at the end of this poem but we're dealing with the tongue now.", "So he says, This is on the prohibition of saying anything that has been said about any of the prophets that is not appropriate and shouldn't be said about them.", "This includes cursing them, and you will find statements made. Obviously in the Old Testament, you'll find statements about certain prophets that are completely unacceptable from a Muslim perspective. The idea that a prophet would send a man into battle to be killed so he could covet his wife. Even an average person wouldn't do that, let alone one of the best of God's creation.", "God's creation or the idea that a prophet could sleep with his daughters. I mean all of these things are mentioned and there is no, it's prohibited to talk about these things unless it was in a teaching situation to warn people even if its mentioned in the Quran and he'll mention that about Adam . So he says", "So if there's a If there's A reason for doing it So For instance so that somebody Who's not very Intelligent can avoid it Somebody who's You know might not realize How serious that is So you have to tell somebody like that To warn them", "according to the dominant opinion of the scholars. So that's very important because there is a lot of things, and he'll talk about later in the text, he will talk about interpreting the Quran from your opinion or what it appears linguistically to mean. So in the Quran there are many things that the apparent linguistic meaning of it is actually different from the actual meaning of if you just interpret that,", "So if you just take that purely linguistically, it means one thing. But you have to understand what the commentary is and this is why the ulama prohibit it. And he'll get into that. So he's saying other than in tadawa, you should not do that. Or to talk about the things that happen to the prophets.", "to the scholars and we are among those who fear that they may hear it, and go astray.", "it they won't go astray because of it so there's things that you can hear that could lead a person astray and one of the things about seerah is very important to remember that seer ah the early seer especially ibn hisaq even as haq is seerat is the weakest form of narration in Islamic tradition like the history of bar and seer these are very weak forms", "and the early collected everything because they're called Asura Tedween. They were the period where they were just gathering everything, and this is why the hadith, they gathered all the hadit. They put them in these collections, and then they left it for the next generation to begin to sort them out. So you will find there are sira for average people to read that you can read but then there are sirah", "If you read Ibn Ishaq, there's things in there that can lead you astray. And one of the things that people who are against Islam do is they take these old seerah books and they put stories and say oh look here this is Islam. And Muslims getting confused by this so this is what he's warning about. That you can't relate these stories unless your a scholar or student scholar and you understand that not all of these things are accurate", "and the early ulama were very honest in their collection of all these things. But this is not normative Islam. Normative Islam comes later where everything is sorted out, and this happens in fiqh so you will have fiqhh positions that are completely insane in some of the early period. You'll find these in the books because they just collected them and they put them in the book but they're not the positions that the schools take. So if I take a position", "out of context and say, oh here this is what the Maliki said. No that's what one Maliki he said and they call it hafwa or zalla It's a mistake and the hafwat al ulama, the zallat al ulma are the worst. Itha zallah al-alim, Zallata al-alam You know the Ulama say if the scholar trips the whole world trips with him you Know that his trip is very dangerous because other people are looking at it So he's warning about that that it's very important", "وذكر ما بين صحابة شجر إلا مبينا أنهم على بصر So this is also important Mentioning what happened between the Sahaba and last you're clarifying that each one of them was a مشتهد so again, You have narratives in the early period and you will find a lot of difference of opinion about what happened for instance between Muawiyah", "and Sayyidina Ali, and certain groups in Islam took certain positions. The Sunni position is a position of husn al-dhan. It's a position having a good opinion of people and that these people were companions and what was in their heart was good it wasn't bad. And one of the things about that early period you see is they were human beings", "blows and they did fall into just like families do even people that love each other can end up doing terrible things to each other right I mean this is part of the human condition so it's making sure that if you speak about these things in common people shouldn't discuss these things because this is a dangerous thing to go into that and he's warning", "you should not be doing it because it can be very dangerous." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Why you must read these Surahs - Shaykh Hamza Yusu__1743295014.opus", "text": [ "This chapter in the Quran, which is the 50th chapter of the Quran. It's one of those chapters that it's very... If you really study it and read it a lot, and one of the great gifts of reading the Quran continuously especially these surahs that we read on a regular basis like Yaseen or Al-Wa'id", "or Al-Waqia, or Surah al-Mulk. If you really pay attention, you will continue to see things in them" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/World is a prison for believers by Shaykh Hamza Yu__1743302430.opus", "text": [ "The world is a prison for the believer and its gentleness to the disbeliever.", "the idea that they're not really responsible for the furo'a, they are only responsible for usool. Meaning la ilaha illallah Muhammad Rasulullah Once they accept that then the foro'a the branches of the sharia become obligatory so these are important distinctions" ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/Wudu _ablution_ before prayer by Shaykh Hamza Yusu__1742998424.opus", "text": [ "We have wudhu, which a beautiful translation of that is lustrations because it's something that brightens you. And so we wash before we pray, we wash our face, our hands up to the elbows and then our feet and then wipe our heads. And that's just to prepare ourselves to enter into the divine presence. And then you come to the prayer and you say God Allahu Akbar", "It's like putting everything behind you, the whole world behind you and you're coming into the presence of God." ] }, { "file": "hamzayusuf/You might be reading Quran wrong - Shaykh Hamza Yu_zDavnvbEEwQ&pp=ygURaGFtemEgeXVzdWYgaXNsYW0%3D_1748540905.opus", "text": [ "Reciting the Quran they were worried about after what we talked about with the Tajweed About reciting the quran and this was somebody who Arabic was not their native language, and They didn't grow up at the qur'an so if you learn the qura'n at a later stage Then it's obviously much more difficult than when you learn it as a young person in fact There are linguists that say that if you don't get", "If you don't get some of these letters before the age of about seven or eight, it's very difficult to acquire them later on. And so you will find many people unless they have very good mimicking skills will have a difficult time articulating some of the makharij or points of articulation in Arabic. So as long as a person has learned from a Qur'an teacher who is qualified", "qualified in teaching, they know the proper Tajweed then you can read the Quran if you've learned even though you're having difficulty or not able to fulfill everything as it is. The scholars differentiate between like I said what's called a and . The is something that changes the meaning. It's a mistake in the actual Arabic of the Quran itself", "Arabic because it's part of the religion and The early community was very They were very scrupulous about ensuring an adherence to the exact wording of the Quran and not changing these meanings And this is why the quran was taken by talaqki or direct transmission the earlier", "it by the teacher reciting to the student. The later people learned it by", "of tajweed. So some of the scholars say that the warnings about that do not go under that and then it makes it too hard for people so they do, the scholars do mention that Mulla Ali Al-Qari in his commentary on the Jaziriyah prefers that position other scholars will say not. Muhammad al-Mawlud is of the opinion that the Lahn al-Khafi is included", "There is a wa'eed and the other is a tahdeed. So in terms of the lahna al-jali, if it's a mistake in the grammar that changes the meaning then there's a promise of... If you're not qualified Jew, obviously if you make what's called sabqu lisan just a mistake of the tongue, a slip up the tongue that's not included and you ask forgiveness", "any mistake that I made to correct it and the angels correct your mistakes also so that aspect of it is not a problem. The Prophet mentioned that about the people that find it difficult to read the Quran have double the reward as long as they're learning or have learned from qualified teacher so i just want to emphasize that, that's not...that people if they've learned then you know just recite the Quran", "There's always room for improvement and I would say in all honesty that any of us who've been leading the prayer here Including dr. Omar, who I know knows tajweed very well and studied with some very good Quran teachers Imam Zaid Sheikh Walid myself anybody that's led the Quran up here if you had a quran master They would find mistakes in the recitation. It says they really would but you're dealing with calibrations that get", "It's not between him and his leaving, but the practice of Imran with his breaking.", "rules except exercising your jaw in their practice. That's what Imam al-Jazari says in his metan on Tajweed." ] } ]