Abdal Hakim Murad – 2018 Ramadan Moments 5
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
Cambridge Muslim College,
training the next generation of Muslim thinkers.
May Allah give us strength
and joy and mildness as we travel through
this great annual journey of the fasting month
of Ramadan.
I mean,
one of the benefits of the fast, and
you can never list them fully, they are
so numerous,
Is that it breaks us a little bit.
What the Arabic language calls butter,
Which means
a kind
of flaunting,
fragrant,
striding
arrogance.
And which the holy prophet, alaihis salatu sallam
detested
becomes a little bit harder if the blood
sugar levels are down.
And you're not walking towards the next
cafe macchiato, or
visit to the
confectionery machine or the next cigarette, but you're
in this kind of arid
space where only
important
things
appear around you.
That
with that
sort of cockiness, that arrogance, that flaunting nature
of us, kind of broken a bit,
and having to husband our strength,
we acquire humility.
The virtue of humility.
And the sin of pride is no longer
there, and the scholars debate endlessly.
The 7 deadly sins,
We have this in Islam as in other
religions.
Says the holy prophet
beware the 7 deadly sins, the 7 destroyers.
Oh, messenger of Allah, and what are they?
Now if you turn to that chapter in
Sahih Muslim, you'll see
there's different versions.
The first is always, sin number 1,
the unforgivable
catastrophe of thinking that the many comes from
more than 1,
which destroys everything else.
And then there's other things,
filial impiety,
breaking
willfully breaking ties with parents.
Is another one, and the list varies. But
pride,
is certainly up there.
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says in the remarkable
hadith,
That glory
or pride
is my garment.
He is the lord of
He
is the.
Even.
The one who in his own nature is
great and glorious.
And human beings
fall and fail to the extent that they
think that they're great. They become like
or
And Allah says,
I shall deflect from my signs
those who are proud in the earth
without right.
Even if they see every sign,
they don't
see it, or they don't believe in it.
In other words,
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala can show
and this is the great passage in the
text that shows how this aspect of human
psychology works.
Sign after sign.
The boils and the frogs and the blood,
and it's pretty clear that Saidiya Musa, alaihis
salam, is not just doing conjuring tricks, but
this is serious.
Destroying the land.
And still,
he is so proud
that he can't
can't accept it.
If they see every sign, they don't believe
it.
And human beings are given very many signs.
Allah subhanahu ta'ala is not is not
tight * with his spiritual gifts.
So many people are given sign after sign
after sign.
Everything is a sign, but some are more
evident to our frail faculties than others.
Allah gives us very many signs,
and sometimes
truth is staring people in the face.
Absolutely evident.
Like the the the signs that Abu Sufyan
saw.
He was late in his conversion, the conquest
of Mecca. And he'd seen so many things,
and this man, Abul Qasim, was clearly astounding.
And the story of Arabia had clearly changed
so profoundly. And yet,
the ego made it hard for him.
He saw those signs, but he didn't see
them.
And this is part of our problem.
I shall turn aside
from my signs those who are proud in
the earth without right.
And only Allah has the right to be
proud. We are
just bags
of organic material, full of impurity,
impure thoughts, as well as impure
intestines. And we're only gonna last a few
decades if we're lucky, and then we become
even more impure. Not really much grounds
for pride there.
We're just part
of the cycle of the organic
world.
In ourselves,
Nothing much.
But still we have this pride.
We have this arrogance.
I really deserve this big, sleek new car.
I really ought to live in this big
house that is designed
so that passes by can envy me.
Like the palace of of of
Karun. I really deserve
this
tailor made customized suit
for
$5,000 And half of the world is preoccupied
with this. And the only way that they
are at peace with their conscience is by
telling themselves that they actually deserve this. You
worked so hard, you deserve it.
You've been doing this and you've done this
for humanity, so you deserve it. So they
think they have the hack,
but
no, they don't.
Not when
10,000
desperate people a year are drowning trying to
cross the Mediterranean and the world is an
uproar. You think you can have a spiffy
new Italian suit every year.
Don't think so. This is not the prophetic
way.
So Allah is saying,
if you are proud in the earth without
right, this pharaonic dreadful deadly sin,
I'll I'm gonna turn you away from my
signs.
In other words, you see
everything,
but you're like the illiterate person trying to
find his way
driving and he sees the signpost but he
can't read them.
He just sees weird shapes and he knows
the letters and
there for some reason otherwise it's all very
weird. They must be there for a purpose,
but he can't make it out. He goes
drives around aimlessly
until he finally keels over or crashes. And
this it's it's tragic. He hasn't learned to
read.
And in this case, because of his arrogance,
I could work it out.
I don't need a GPS. I don't need
to read signpost. I didn't need to read
a map. I'm such a great guy. This
is how many human beings, maybe most human
beings are in this age.
We don't have the road map. We can't
read the signs. We don't know what anything
means any longer. We're confused even about basic
things about our identity and truth and beauty
and obvious stuff that to our ancestors were
evident.
We've been turned away
from the reading of the signs.
And this happens not just in the signs
in creation, but the signs in scripture as
well.
In other words,
we have appointed
We
have placed over the hearts of those who
don't have faith in the akhira
veils, lest they should understand it, and as
their ears are stopped up.
The Quran
is astounding
to people of pure hearts. But there are
some people who read it but don't read
it. Even the ancient Arabs heard this
amazing symphony, and because their ears were stopped
up. What is it that does that? Just
ego. Only ego.
Nothing but ego.
So the holy prophet says,
Your biggest
enemy is your ego, your nafs, which is
between your two sides.
You have enemies in the world, rivals, competitors,
etcetera. That's part of being alive. But the
greatest
enemy is
the which
is
your ego within yourself.
Which makes you make these huge claims about
yourself, that makes you admire yourself whenever you
pass a mirror, that makes you
really concerned
about what other people think of you and
are saying about you. And this is all
rubbish,
because you'll come to an end. That chitchat
will come to an end. All of the
rubbish gets forgotten. The only thing that lasts
is that which contains dhikrullah and which brings
about
human healing. So
we need to recall this. It's important.
Ramadan breaks our pride. It
cracks us a little bit, brings us down,
makes us stoop we're carrying this new thing.
Life is harder.
And insha'Allah
with the pride diminished,
the spirit will start to spread its wings
and insha'Allah to fly. So may Allah
help us all to overcome our pride by
his grace and Insha'Allah taste some of the
sweetness of this month which is promised to
those who approach it with humility and open
heartedness.
Cambridge Muslim College,
training the next generation of Muslim thinkers.