Suhaib Webb – Fiqh Of Nikah – Part One
AI: Summary ©
The speakers discuss the cultural and political importance of Islamic law, including its use in society and potential danger. They also discuss the historical and political views of " ahwal" and its significance in personal relationships and political realities. The speakers stress the importance of learning classics and understanding the meaning of " ADopt" in the western world, as well as the importance of living in neighborhoods and writing about family law. They also discuss the use of "ah wages" in writing and the importance of respect in the Islamic law. The importance of marriage as a base for marriage is emphasized, along with the importance of engagement and critical thinking in society. The speakers also discuss the importance of marriage as a driver of social stability and the primary purpose of marriage.
AI: Summary ©
We often, unfortunately, as we'll talk about it
today, we think of Islam as an abstraction,
especially Islamic law.
But it's important, as we'll see hopefully today,
that Islamic law has value, brings value to
society.
And there's a reason that it's kind of
located anachronistically as an abstraction.
Because the history is romanticized, and the present
is like, you're a modernist, or you're a
sellout, right?
We'll talk about the danger of that, hopefully,
today.
So you can have access to that text,
and then we get to send you all
kind of emails about my school.
That's all good.
Got to help each other scale.
So as you can see, if you were
here last week, it's actually a completely different
text.
There are a number of essays that I
added to the beginning.
Some of them were from our teachers overseas,
alhamdulillah.
And the first one, I think, is very
important, because he talks about the role of
family law in Islamic legal studies.
Because that's what we're going to be studying.
We're going to be studying family law.
And he does something really nice in the
beginning.
I'm not going to read it for you.
He notes that there are different types of
rulings that you need to be aware of
within Islamic law.
First are like doctrinal rulings related to beliefs.
What makes someone a Muslim?
What do Muslims have to believe in?
So that's the study of theology.
The second are like ethical rulings related to
virtues, how we care ourselves, morality, things of
that nature.
The third are practical rulings, which are going,
these three actually are going to fall under,
the third is going to fall under fiqh.
Fiqh is really the science of action.
What are the rulings for action?
So beliefs, morals, and actions, and sometimes they're
going to overlap, right?
Sometimes they'll fall sort of together.
And he notes that under Islamic jurisprudence, we
have really the following four sort of things
we want to think about.
Number one is acts of worship.
So there were classes here.
I taught one.
I think you have a class usually like,
Maliki fiqh, Hanafi fiqh, Shafi'i fiqh, how
to pray, things like that.
Number two, transactions and mu'amalat.
So how do we buy and sell Bitcoin?
Purchasing homes, right?
A lot of things fall under transactions.
The third is public policy or siyasa.
Sharia deals with politics.
And so what are kind of the things
we should think about within that context?
So you have like great scholars who wrote
just books on like political law from ancient
times.
And then the fourth, and this is us,
is family law.
That's what we want to focus on the
four sort of areas of Islamic law.
That includes the laws that are going to
help us organize and facilitate family, marriage, the
laws around divorce, children, inheritance, wills, like it's
a lot, right?
So these are the rulings that are included
under kind of this idea of what's called
ahwal ash-shaqsiyah.
And nowadays, this is sort of the term
that's been used for the last few centuries
in the Muslim world instead of even Islamic
jurisprudence.
They say ahwal ash-shaqsiyah, which is like
personal status law.
And that's very important that that term was
adopted.
It was adopted at a time when the
Muslim world began to adopt two laws.
So it kind of coincides with colonality.
And Islamic law is slowly being pushed to
the periphery in society.
And so in order to recognize this reality,
jurists, the last really great Sharia court was
shut down in 1955 by Abdel Nasser.
There's a great book by Judith Tucker, if
you want to read it, from Georgetown, about
sort of Islamic law and Palestine and like
women's education.
It's really interesting in how like advanced courts
were in the late Ottoman period.
Because you're looking at like 1300 years of
doing this.
It wasn't like they were like Judge Judy,
man.
Like they had put a lot of time,
effort, pain, sorrow, success, failure.
Islamic law is moving.
It's not like, it's not an abstraction.
It's dealing with the world.
So around that time when you have these
kind of multiple laws coming in under sort
of occupation of the Muslim world, there's a
term that comes out called ahwal.
Ahwal, like if you study tasawwuf, hal, kayfa,
haluk, ahwal, conditions, states, situations.
Here it doesn't mean the interstate as it
would in tasawwuf, shaksia, but it means like
person situation and how the law impacts that
situation.
And that's why I think it's very important
that when you study fiqh in America, you
study with someone that studied modern fiqh.
The anachronistic attitude of Western Muslims makes absolutely
no sense to me.
And I'm someone who had to master the
classics and memorize them.
And I'm telling you that because do you
wanna study a law as we're going to
see that was 600 years ago?
Or do you wanna study the culmination of
that law over generations, times, historical realities, political
realities, economic realities?
And if you think about it, ahwal shaksia
is recognizing that Muslims may be living under
a secular Muslim regime and struggling to maintain
a commitment to sharia.
That's more relevant to you here than at
a time where the Muslims were powerful and
running everything.
And so just by running back to the
classics, you may miss that nuance in legal
studies that recognize the fact that we have
duality.
We have Islamic state, now we have Islamic
state of mind.
And so you wanna be a little bit
careful.
And I'm not trying to attack anyone.
I just think we should be academically critical
of this as we'll see hopefully today.
And so I added a section where they
talk about ahwal shaksia, personal status law, its
development, how it happened.
My experience was in Egypt.
I can talk about the Egyptian historical sort
of trajectory of ahwal shaksia.
And in some ways you find academics in
the Azhar are far more advanced and progressive
than practitioners of fiqh in America because of
the anachronism.
Theology, you don't find the same debates.
Like mawlid, people don't even find about mawlid.
It's here, why y'all?
Because we're trying to regurgitate classic stuff.
We've romanticized it.
But what's the ruling on living in a
neighborhood if you're a gentrifier?
That's the fiqh I think we should be
talking about.
It's not just like, well, back in the
days we had like dinars and there was
no inflation.
Wow, okay.
I appreciate that.
That's certainly like, that's like the orange dye
on the biryani.
You know, it's nice.
It looks good.
It makes sense.
Yeah, yeah, it makes sense.
But it ain't the biryani.
It's not the chicken.
And so I've added some essays here.
You don't have to, don't, like if you
want to, it's great.
You can read every single line, mashallah, if
you have that kind of time.
But I would encourage you to look over
it just to think about it.
If you're from India, there's a lot of
sort of similarities what happens in India and
Egypt in some ways, as well as in
places in Africa where they're French like Senegal.
My teacher's grandfather was a mufti of Senegal
before.
So there's like these experiences that you're gonna
find sort of like commonality.
To them, Algeria is a great place to
think about as well.
So that takes us now to the text.
Actually, the text we're doing was my textbook
in the Ezhar.
So with the help of Chat GBT, I
translated that joint, man, you know?
I went back and edited it, so don't
worry.
I'm not that lazy, but I can't lie.
There was a few times where I was
like, ah.
Then I looked at it, I was like,
nope.
Chat GPT has some problems.
Chat GPT needs to come to class.
But hopefully, like imagine, like you'll take an
introductory university textbook, start at the Ezhar, you
know, covering sort of family law, this component
of family law that deals with marriage.
That's important, that's a big deal, man.
Like that's a very big deal.
Alhamdulillah, wa bilahi tawfiq.
So we'll sort of review some of the
things we talked about last week, and we'll
add some things, and then we'll be done,
inshallah.
And what we're talking about is nikah.
And the reason I started with that introduction
is I want you to appreciate like you're
studying, when you're studying this book, you're studying
this kind of, these new developments.
You're not studying something that's archaic.
That's the point I'm making.
So when you're studying like at Ezhar, you
learn the classics in middle school.
That's Hogwarts, right?
But then in the university, you're not learning
the classics.
I remember the first day I sat there,
we studied istinsekh, cloning.
I was like, what?
Like, dang, man, this is hard, you know?
Because I couldn't find the vocabulary in Arabic,
even legal vocabulary to like deal with T
-cells, cloning, cybercrime, you know?
And I was like, wow, this is cool.
This is like, this is what I want,
man.
So I think there's an opportunity for you
to be critical and also inspired.
It doesn't mean everything in the book is
right.
They're gonna say some things at times you
don't agree with, that's good.
That means you're paying attention.
Like I'm not here to force you to
like do anything.
I really, I say I don't care how
you live your life, right, honestly, in a
sense of God bless you, but I'm not
up in your business like that, right?
I got four kids.
So all my energy is really taken already,
but I wish everyone the best when I
say, ehdina al-surat al-mustaqeem.
That's all I can give you right now,
man, you know?
So nikah in the Arabic language, as I
mentioned last week, the word nakah means to
bring together.
The idea is literally, literally it means *.
Metaphorically it has this meaning of sort of
bringing two entities together.
It also denotes gathering, combining, and intertwining.
We said entanglements, right?
The primary linguistic application of nikah refers to
*.
What it means here is linguistically, like how
the Arabs used the word.
Fa ankahna al-firara.
You know, the old Arabs said like we
bred the donkeys.
Ankahna from nakah.
But it also has a metaphoric application which
means marriage, this union.
And I mentioned to you last week the
pre-modern sort of post-modern notion like
Islam is a motherlode of bad ideas.
Everyone's hyper-literal.
But most of the definitions that you find
in Islamic law are metaphor.
So immediately you appreciate the fact that these
guys aren't like, or these women aren't just
like, yeah, letter of the law.
Most of the definitions, as we'll talk about
today, this is an important discussion that will
have a rhetoric, a rhetorical meaning, not the
literal meaning.
But let's kind of examine some of the
discussions around it.
So some scholars argued, and I actually put
it in numbers for you, like 1.2,
1.3, so later on when there's an
index, you can just like pow, right, you
can go back.
You're not lost in the sea of this
text.
So some scholars argue that nikah is primarily
used to mean * and is only metaphorically
applied to the contract.
This is like Ibn Hazm, of course, the
Zahiri school, right?
They're the literalists from Andalus, from Majorca specifically,
Ibn Hazm, rahimahullah.
He wasn't Sunni, he was Zahiri.
They have their own school that basically says
there is no interpretation, and there's no analogy.
And I gave you an example, the Arabs
say, an-kahna al-firaar, al-firaa, fasa
naraa.
Like we bred these donkeys, so let's see
what happens.
The phrase also takes on a metaphoric usage
when we talk about it, meaning aqid, contract.
So the point is there's this debate, like
when you get into some of the bigger
texts and writings of the older OGs, they're
going back and forth on this issue.
Is it metaphor, is it literal?
Is it literal, is it metaphor?
But it's safe to say that only one
place in the Quran does the word nikah
have the meaning of *.
And that's verse 230 from Surah al-Baqarah.
Hatta tankihu, tankiha zawjin ghayra.
Which here means until he has * with
someone else, until she has * with someone
else, excuse me.
Even the translation, no offense, it says until
she marries another husband.
That's not what it means here.
Here it means that the context is that
she has been divorced more than three times
by that man, so before she can return
to that man, she would be to be
married to someone else and actually have a
physical relationship with that person.
So there's a very strong proof, while the
Quran itself is using it over and over
again with the meaning of contract.
That's the argument here.
That's how they're boxing.
Like only once does it carry this meaning.
So legal scholars are gonna say, well, we're
going to be an extension of the Quran
as a living law, so we're going to
stick to the majority usage of the Quran.
That's sort of their argument.
Also the Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, he
said, you know, kharashtu min nikahin.
I was, you know, came from marriage.
I wasn't the product of adultery, sallallahu alayhi
wa sallam.
You need to look at the footnotes, by
the way.
There's a lot of good stuff in the
footnotes that I put there for you, especially
on some of the contemporary questions that people
have.
Nikah, and it's, so that's like the linguistic
argument, right?
Does it have this meaning?
Does it have that meaning?
That's going to extend now into legal nomenclature.
How do legal scholars define nikah?
With the literal meaning or the metaphoric meaning?
I sort of gave you the answer already.
So many jurists have defined it nikah.
When they use the word nikah, they mean
aqid.
They don't mean *.
They mean the marriage contract that allows the
lawful enjoyment of one another legitimately.
Alternatively, and be patient, it has also been
described as a contract that grants ownership of
a woman for sexual pleasure.
Why would I put that there?
So you can learn to be constructively critical
of the tradition and not simply just romanticize
the tradition.
Ain't no woman, I would think, in this
room letting you get married with that verbiage.
I'm a daddy of four girls.
Three girls, sorry.
Sometimes I forget.
It's a lot, man.
23 to two, man.
Alhamdulillah.
But I'm just saying, like, if you came
to me, you're like, yeah, this is the
marriage contract, and I read that, I'd be
like, it's nice to meet you, bruh.
With all respect, like, we need to sit
down.
We need to have a conversation.
But it's very important to appreciate the Islamic
law, and this is a challenge I have
sometimes with Islamophobes, is that Islamic law, it's
a story, too.
Like, it's a development.
It's an environment.
It's a world.
It's economy.
It's politics.
It's history.
It's race.
It's gender.
It's all of those things.
And those attitudes certainly are going to be
presented in certain areas of the Islamic legal
tradition that we should look at constructively and
critically.
We would be foolish not to.
So what I did is I provided the
definitions of nikah according to all four Sunni
schools.
I put the citations in the footnotes so
you can check it out for yourself.
So within the Hanafi school, you know it's
milkum mut'a, ownership of pleasure, meaning that
the man gains, and no one takes sound
bites from me, meaning that the man gains
exclusive rights over the woman's body for enjoyment.
The phrase, I can't do questions, please, because
I got to close this before anyone takes
it somewhere else.
No, I was just asking the school for
followers.
Oh, Hanafi.
Hanafi.
Yeah, yeah.
Yo, yo, yeah.
That doesn't mean contemporaries of Hanafi say that
though, right?
So we're talking about ancient.
Why would I set it up earlier saying,
listen, we need to not romanticize the past.
We should respect it.
I believe that the underpinnings of Islamic law
in this traditional state are what's important.
How do they maintain law in the Crusades?
How do they maintain law in the slave
trade?
How do they maintain law through success?
That's what I'm more worried about than sort
of the secondary, legal, theoretical opinions.
But that's a different subject, but we'll try
to get to that.
And also, we don't want to throw the
baby out with the bathwater.
Again, we want to engage this sort of,
yeah, I don't agree with that.
That's absolutely atrociously horrible.
Okay, next, right?
And let me work through some things.
I think sometimes the reason Muslims themselves gain
a frustration towards Islam is they're not given
a place to address their legitimate frustrations.
So it's just, I'm mad, I'm out.
Because nobody will listen to me.
And so I think there's like a, as
someone who became Muslim, there's sort of like
a middle area that wrestling has to happen.
Meaning that the man gains exclusive rights over
the woman's body for enjoyment.
The phrase with intent is used to distinguish
from cases where the right to pleasure is
incidental.
Maybe it happened on accident, or it was
a crime.
God protect us.
And we'll talk about * in the future.
Such as when purchasing a female slave, where
the contract of sale implies the permissibility of
* as a secondary result.
I'm just reading to you the opinion again.
So we're gonna walk through this.
Definition according to the Maliki school, they define
nikah as a contract for the mere enjoyment
of physical pleasure between an eligible man and
woman.
This emphasizes that marriage is primarily about a
contract for physical pleasure devoid of any other
considerations.
Ouch.
Definition according to the Shafi'i school, the
Shafi'i scholars define nikah as a contract
that grants ownership of sexual relations using the
term ankah, or inkah, or tazweej, which means
to bring together a couple, or their equivalents.
This means the contract entails the right to
derive pleasure in a known and lawful manner.
Definition according to the Hanbali school, the Hanbali
jurists define nikah, I should say ancient, ancient,
ancient, ancient, right?
As a contract that requires the use of
the terms ankah, or tazweej, in general, where
the subject of the contract is the lawful
enjoyment of one another.
This is an excellent example of a case
for fiqh revival.
You hear all the time people talking about,
we need to revive this, we need to
revive this, and I'm gonna walk you through
it so you can maybe see and appreciate
how jurists didn't just say, yeah, this is
awesome, okay.
People read this, and that's how you can
tell someone's trained in at least Islamic law.
They're very critical, but not in a destructive
way.
They're critical to bring khair, like they're trying
to be critical to navigate, and how they
define goodness is like it aligns with revelation.
Like if we were to take Surah Al
-Rum, verse 21, where Allah says, from His
signs is He made for you wives and
spouses, so that you could find tranquility in
each other and experience mercy and love.
Where does that align under any of these
definitions?
Or when the Prophet, salallahu alayhi wa sallam,
has said, istawsu bi nisa'i khaira, like
be good to your wives.
He said, you know, be good to your
husbands.
We need to, again, we're not thinking critically
just to think critically, we're thinking critically through
the lens of wahi, revelation.
And so here's what my professor wrote.
I added it here.
He said, it is evident from these definitions
that marriage grants the husband's rights, he's talking
about those definitions, so over his wife's body.
However, contemporary legal thought suggests a more balanced
understanding of marriage, defining it as a mutual
contract between a man and a woman, intended
for the mutual enjoyment of each other, as
well as the formation of a righteous family
and a sound society.
I can roll with that.
And so here we see the example of,
we have to be very careful of labeling
people like modernists and sellouts and changing the
deen.
That's not changing the deen, that's changing a
tradition that we find problematic.
And it's not, qala Allah, qala Rasulullah.
It's a faqih, it's a person.
Like you and I, they had the same
challenges, the same mistakes that we all make.
And so commenting, here's what my teacher wrote
in the college, this is a superior definition.
Because the purpose of nikah is not limited
to mere enjoyment.
I mean, anyone that's married knows that's just
a very small part of your relationship and
marriage, right?
It also, as one OG Muslim told me
in Masjid Muhammad, I fight with my wife
more than I enjoy my wife.
I said, wow, man, glad I didn't hear
that before.
But then I said, what does that mean?
He said, no, like we learn to engage
respectfully.
It's part of life.
It also encompasses this definition, the higher objective
of building a righteous family.
And I think also achieving happiness, like none
of them mentioned this, but I think happiness
is very important in a marriage.
I love my wife.
I love my kids.
Like I enjoy being awake at three o
'clock in the morning to my daughter acting
like she's possessed.
Yeah, she's screaming, she goes through this phase
where she screams.
And it's so, I'm like three ghouls like
400 times, man.
So terrifying.
And fostering a healthy society.
Both spouses are meant to benefit from one
another, not just a husband.
Highlighting the necessity of modernizing, I would say,
you know, maybe another word, or our approach
to the issue.
This reflects our need for renewal in understanding
the classical definition of marriage, particularly women's roles
and men's roles.
While sexual relations are one of the goals
of marriage, they are not its sole purpose.
Thus, some have defined marriage, and then he
shared with us this definition, the lawful companionship
between a man and a woman.
I have a problem with sexualizing it that
way, right?
No doubt, that's an outcome of marriage.
Alhamdulillah, it's a great thing.
We're protected from, you know, falling in haram.
We find a very special relationship with a
person that goes beyond, you know, anything else.
But that's not marriage.
It's part of marriage.
The lawful companionship between a man and a
woman and their cooperation, which outlines their mutual
rights and obligations.
So I added these definitions there so you
can, but what I want you to think
about is the importance of contemporary scholarship.
Because without it, people will leave the deen.
Like some people will read that and never,
I can't handle this, right?
And you know, if they're thinking in the
light of the Quran, and they wouldn't be,
you know, off in their critique.
Their reaction may be off.
But if a community is not there to
help people navigate this stuff, they have no
right to complain.
You can't blame the sick people if you
close a hospital.
And throughout history, scholars did this, you know.
I mean, it's just thousands of examples of
this constant need to update, to review, to
be contributive and to be critical.
You know, Sheikh Ahmed Dardir in the Mariki
Madhhab, he wrote the most important book for
us in law.
And he said, مُبَدِّلًا غَيْرًا الْمُعْتَمِدْ مِنْهُ بِهِ
He said, you know, like, I'm taking this
classic, massive legal book and I'm gonna change
what's wrong in it and readdress it.
And so that's why Khalil, you know, his
book is 62 chapters, 63 sections that he
took.
Sheikh Dardir takes that book and shrinks it
into 77 chapters and 59 sections.
And one of the things that he deals
with largely are definitions.
Why?
Because his time is different.
He comes way after the other writer.
There's a book in the Mariki Madhhab called
Muqtad Shul Khalil.
It's like our book.
That's our jam.
Senegal, Mali, Gambia, Morocco, they're memorizing that.
Egypt, we memorize it.
It's massive.
The French, they took it and based their
law on it.
Napoleon stole it from Egypt.
And it was considered like, you can't touch
this book.
Then a Dardir from Egypt comes and he's
like, no.
And he changes it and he adapts it
and he writes why.
He mentions brilliantly like, arjah al-aqawi, like
sometimes the opinions aren't the strongest.
Sometimes he restricts something that should be left
open legally.
Sometimes he opens something that should have been
left restricted linguistically.
He goes all through it.
The point is, he did what we're talking
about.
This is before modernity, so you can't call
him a modernist.
Ibn al-Malik, the great poet, the great
scholar of language, he wrote a poem, we
memorized it in the high school, called Al
-Fiyat al-Bimarik.
It's a thousand lines of poetry.
It's nice.
It's really so beautiful, alhamdulillah.
But he actually wrote that poem, critical of
someone named Ibn al-Mu'ti.
Ibn al-Mu'ti came before him.
They say he's the first one to write
a thousand lines of poetry in the grammar.
Just grammar.
So Ibn al-Malik, when he first wrote
his poem, he put him on blast.
Like that poem's not like us.
Honestly, like it had that kind of impact.
Like it was bad.
It was so bad.
Ibn al-Mu'ti was done.
And then Ibn al-Malik, he said, I
had a dream.
I heard this from Shaykh Imar Iffat.
If you know who Shaykh Imar Iffat was,
he's the Shaykh who was killed in the
Egyptian revolution.
That was my teacher.
He taught me Al-Fiyat.
Allah yurham.
And so he told us that Ibn al
-Malik, he got writer's block, man.
Like after he wrote the bars where he
was attacking Ibn al-Mu'ti, he got writer's
block.
And he's a polymath.
Ibn al-Malik is the teacher of Nawawi
in Arabic.
So he gets writer's block.
And then he begins to write like, what
happened to me, man?
And he's stuck at the line where he's
like, that stuff was horrible or whatever he
said about him, I forgot.
Then he said he had a dream.
And in his dream, this guy came.
He had a big beard and a turban.
And he said, he grabbed me.
He started shaking me.
He said, what's wrong with you?
How dare you insult your elders?
How dare you insult your elders?
And then Ibn al-Malik was like, hey
man, who are you?
He's like, I'm Ibn al-Mu'ti, the guy
you wrote the lines about.
Until you fix it, you won't be able
to complete it.
So then he woke up.
He said, wa huwa bi shadqin ha'izun
tafdeela mustawji mu thana'i al-jameela wa
allahu yaqdi bihi ba'tin wa fira liwa lahu
fi darajat al-akhira Then he said like,
it's the better book.
He preceded me.
He was amazing.
He's so good.
He's incredible.
And then he said, after I finished, kalamuna
lafthun mufeelun kastaqeem wasmun wa fa'nu thumma
harfun al-kalam He said, I finished the
poem.
But the point is, academic criticism is good.
But shady criticism is where we're thinking is
a problem.
But what I'm trying to show you is
like, throughout history, the 40 hadith of Nawi,
how many of you have that book in
your house?
It's like your parents for sure, right?
Imam Nawi didn't write that.
Sayyidina Imam Nawi, he didn't write that.
He started around hadith, I think he went
from hadith like 13 to like 39.
Before him, Abu Amr al-Salah, he used
to teach a book called Al-Kulliyat, which
was the first 15 hadith.
Then Al-Nawi comes, if I remember correctly,
and he's like, you know what, there's more.
So he adds more.
Then Al-Nawi dies and Al-Hafidh ibn
Rajab, he makes it 40.
Point is that book that everyone thinks 40
hadith, Al-Nawi is the work of engagement,
change, thinking critically, thinking constructively.
This is a constant within the Islamic academic
tradition.
But unfortunately, public intellectuals are not necessarily held
to those standards anymore.
So you could just get online and talk
about red heifers.
Everyone will believe you.
But the process of never said anything about
red heifers.
Like why am I wasting my time with
this?
What I need to worry about is red
bodies.
But there's no way to hold anyone accountable
academically.
And so be careful of ijazat.
Be careful of, oh, I have ijazat from
teachers and books, I never saw them.
I had a sheikh one time, he's like,
I give you ijazat in all 125,000
books I have.
I was like, sheikh, I don't have room
for 125,000 books.
He's like, no, no, I'm just gonna give
it to you there, bye.
I was like, ooh, 125, what?
But what you should ask people when they're
teaching is, where did you study?
Have you studied not only the classics?
Have you studied contemporary?
Have you written?
Have you written?
Were you sitting with people who ask you
to write?
Were you engaged in critically?
Those are questions that's not disrespectful.
That's the height of your trust of a
teacher is you can ask them those questions.
I'm scared of you so much I'm not
saying anything and I hear something absolutely insane
and I lose my mind.
I remember one time in Egypt, there was
a very famous person, Dr. Ali Juma, who
was speaking at the gynecologist syndicate in Egypt
and he said in front of them that
the gestation period of Imam Shafi's mother was
three years.
So these are gynecologists.
And they're all, you know Masris, when they
start going like, drinking the tea and stuff,
something's happening.
The audience, something's going down.
Like, sallu ala rasulullah, you know, you know,
it's like, oh snap.
And then someone raised their hand, they're like,
with respect, I respect you, you're a religious
teacher, I'm sort of in a tough situation
because like, that's impossible.
This is not possible.
It's not possible.
And then they began to argue and then
one of the other teachers, mu'ammams with
the turban, he said, it's in the book,
be quiet.
Right, so that's the kind of people, you
don't really want, it's gonna hurt your religion,
man.
It's gonna lead, in my own experience, it
leads to a crisis.
And I remember I met one of those
people afterwards and I was like, and he
came, like, how do you feel?
He's like, I feel like an idiot.
Because I know this is right, but I
didn't say anything.
But then also, like, these are shuyukh, some
of them, not all of them.
These are people, I thought, I don't trust
them anymore.
Like, I don't feel comfortable.
So these kind of changes that you're seeing
are something that should be there as long
as they're rooted in a system and a
way and a method that can be proven,
a system, as well as in the text.
The basis or the legitimacy for marriage is
found in the Quran, third verse of the
fourth chapter, فَانْكِحُوا مَا تَعْبَرَكُمْ مِنَ النِّسَاءِ Marry
those women that please you.
You find happiness in them, you find joy
in them.
Every verse of Quran like this can also,
as even Rishad, be understood for a woman.
So marry men that please you.
The inverse.
Allah says, وَأَنْكِهُوا لَأَيَامَ مِنْكُمْ مَا الصَّالِحِينَ مَنِ
عِبَادِكُمْ وَإِمَائِكُمْ And marry the unmarried amongst you
and the righteous amongst you, your male slaves
and female slaves.
Surat An-Nur, verse 24, chapter 24, verse
32.
Also from the hadith of the Prophet ﷺ,
we all know the hadith, O young men,
also means, O young women, whoever amongst you
can afford marriage should marry for it is
more effective in lowering the gaze and guarding
one's chastity and whoever is not able should
fast for fasting diminishes sexual desires.
We said for some people it doesn't so
they shouldn't fast.
I had a classmate in college, he would
fast and it was worse for him.
Yeah, so tell him, eat.
Fourth, the wisdom and purpose of marriage.
The primary purpose of marriage.
Go to awful house, man.
Just go eat, bro.
That's the only thing, that's what helped him.
He went to Whataburger, man, it's from the
Midwest.
Whataburger would kill anybody's libido, man.
The primary purpose of marriage is to establish
a social unit.
I don't know if I agree with that.
I would say the primary purpose of marriage
is to be happy.
Awww.
I'm too old for this class, man.
I'm too old for this class.
The primary purpose of marriage is to establish
a social unit and then what I said
earlier that I'm not going to repeat again.
No, I'm just saying like those of us
who are married, we know.
Like, you know, there's a level of happiness
and trust and protection.
هُنَّ لِبَسُوا لَكُمْ وَأَنتُمْ لِبَسُوا لَكُمْ The Qur
'an says, you're garments for one another.
Like, what else do you want, right?
Also, a noble family is founded on mutual
love, cooperation, and moral excellence.
I would say effort.
Excellence is hard.
Marriage is considered one of an individual's most
significant and impactful social institutions.
It is through marriage that a harmonious and
virtuous society is built, ideally, emphasizing the importance
of family life and promoting good character and
maintaining social stability.
But also, man, we have people, if we
had time, we would do it.
Like, you're married, you learn a lot about
how to be more mature.
You learn a lot about how, you know,
how to express yourself, right, how to be
in touch with your emotions.
You know, it's a lot, man.
It's a lot of blessings that come through
marriage, alhamdulillah.
The Prophet ﷺ said, whoever marries has completed
half the religion.
Let them fear Allah and the rest.
And this was the question that you guys
asked me last week, and it's in the
footnotes.
It's under, I think, number 10 and 11.
And that is the famous statement that marriage
is what?
Half your deen.
I know there's a thing called half your
deen, so I don't want him to get
mad at me for this.
But that hadith is weak.
And I put here, is marriage half a
person's religion?
Well, a popular phrase.
Imam Ibn Hajar, he wrote a book called
Popular Hadith Amongst the Masses That Are Absolute
Fabrications.
I think you have to be very careful
nowadays, man.
What, yes?
Yeah, like popular hadith amongst the masses that
are absolutely fabricated.
I'll put it in here.
Like I'll add it, because I thought about
it earlier.
I can't tell you how important it is
to look with an eye of discernment any
meme, anything you've seen online, man.
I'll give an example.
All of the memes that talk about this
is the end of times, right?
Like there's no hajj when COVID happened, right?
Of course, there's going to be no hajj.
It's a health, it's a public health crisis,
right?
So I saw the meme like the hour
will not start until there's no hajj.
And then people start getting scared.
Like, oh my gosh, it's like to hear
after Ghutba if you're from Syria.
Like again, we're talking about this abstraction, but
we're not talking about like Syrians are being
pummeled by everybody, right?
It's like you get lost.
Fiqh isn't going to get lost.
It's like people are being killed.
And that hadith about Ghutba, it's fabricated.
It's a weak hadith anyways.
But the context of all of those hadith
are after Jesus leaves.
Because there's going to be no good people
left because the Prophet ﷺ said in an
authentic hadith, that after that, a short time
later, Allah will cause a breeze to come
and take the souls of all the believers.
And after that, He said, شَرُّ الْخَلْقِ The
worst of creation will be on the earth.
There'll be no hajj because there's no good
people.
And that's why the Prophet ﷺ said, the
hour will not start until Allah's name is
not mentioned.
It's this, that time.
It's not now.
Like, oh man, we're at school.
Nobody's remembering Allah.
The hour is not going to start until...
And actually there's about 50 years of things.
We can do a section on this in
the future on the hereafter.
That have to happen before any of these
things happen.
But when you see these memes, man, it's
evocative.
It can bring like a cathartic vibe because
it's like, oh my gosh.
But that's a disaster.
So just be leery, man, of things.
So, is marriage half a person's deen?
Well, a popular phrase, there's nothing authentically reported
that the Prophet ﷺ actually said, النِكَحْ نِصْفُ
الدِّينِ أو نِصْفُ المِلَّةِ أو نِصْفُ الإسْلَامِ There's
not one authentic statement.
In fact, the only thing we can find
is something that goes back to one of
the early Muslim scholars, Tawus, T-A-W
-U-S, who said this.
And this happens sometimes in history.
Islam is very axiomatic.
So a scholar will say something that's very
axiomatic sounding.
And then after like a few years, it's
like, well, actually the Prophet said it.
And then you're in trouble.
But people hunt that stuff down.
Like our scholars that are not making memes
are telling you, yeah.
And I actually wish they would make memes.
I think that's the other criticism.
Why aren't you making memes with the good
stuff?
Right, because most of the scholars like that
aren't financially supported.
They're not on stage.
They're not great.
They don't have the charismatic kind of style
maybe that's needed.
But they have a lot of fa'idah.
There are a few hadith that state this
in different ways, but there's weaknesses in their
chains of transmission.
I did a quick breakdown.
You can read it for yourself because it's
a lot, but it just shows you that
it's not authentic, man.
Because last week someone asked, like, well, if
I'm not married, it means like half my
deen is not there.
Like, I'm not like I'm a half value
Muslim.
Right.
But also that's not what the hadith means.
I'm rocking at 50 percent.
Yeah.
So Imam al-Ghazal, and I'm so thankful
that you share this way because it means
I'm doing a good job that you feel
comfortable because that's like Imams needs to hear
this stuff, man.
Right.
But Imam al-Ghazali, he said, you know,
the Prophet ﷺ said this because it's like
use it to protect half your deen.
Right.
Like marriage is, because the hadith says, you
know, مَن تَزَوَّجَ فَقَدْ اِسْتَقْمَرَ دِينَهُ فَلْيَتَّقِ اللَّهِ
فِي بَاقِهَا وَكَانَ مَقَارٌ Right.
Like whoever marries has completed their religion then
let them, half their religion, let them fear
Allah and the other half.
Meaning like marriage is helping them stay away
from things.
But the taqwa is still going to be
there.
So it doesn't have to do with the
value, like rock and, what was it?