Abdal Hakim Murad – Jummah Khutbah Retreat 2017
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Cambridge Muslim college training the next generation of Muslim
thinkers
Alhamdulillah Alhamdulillah
Alhamdulillah Hilda De Anza Allah Allah Almighty Yuki turbo la mujer
Allah who I would
call uma leon de Robertson Shalida Millard on. Well, you bet she rang
me Nina Ladino Yama, Luna saleha at another home agilon Hassan
Macky thena fie EBITDA
were you on there? Alladhina Paulo taka de Allahu wala de Mola home
behemoth I am well, le e him Khabarovsk Calumet and Tahoe road
roaming FYE him in your pool owner Illa caddy, but
why should I do Allah ilaha illallah wa off the whole luxury
color? The whole milk hola hola Hamed, where la he told her all
more. What should I do? And I say you didn't have Mohamed and
Alberto who was a solo out of sallahu Allahu taala. Bill happy
but she didn't win or the euro, or the yen Illa Allah he beat his
knee. He was Hirogen monniera For Hua Rama Tomas, when I met him was
the was the Raju Monir
Allahumma Salli wa Sallim. Mubarak Ali, wa ala early Hill Aadhaar was
Hobie hill up here. Well, Manitoba also Netta who was our Alana G EDA
yummy, Dean.
I'm about to have a will if it will not be known As salam o
aleikum wa rahmatullah wa barakato.
Call Allahu terracota Allah feel good annual Kareem I want to be
let him initiate on the regime. Smilla rahmanir rahim. Shaheed
Allahu Allahu La ilaha illa hope well, Mala Iike were all I'll meet
him and Bill test. So the caller who owns him.
Allah subhanaw taala says in his book, Allah himself bears witness
that there is no deity safe he and the angels and the people of
knowledge upright in just balance.
They also testify
this is a famous idea
that in some parts of the OMA is traditionally written over the MC
Rob of the masala of a madrasa.
I've seen it myself many times. And that is always in the design
of a masjid, where the Quran is where the eye rests.
Because the masjid is the place where the Quran is there to bind
us to the world of eternity.
An important choice. Sometimes it's the famous first of them as
Rob, about to say that no Maria.
But sometimes it's this verse, particularly in some of the very
old mosques and very ancient and other verses of Islam. Way back in
the time of the best dynasty, they like to write this in hieratic,
beautiful formal difficult Karthik script above the Merab weather
great Allah Matt. We're going to be reading Allah's book. Allah
himself bears witness, that there is no deity safety. And so do the
angels and so do the people of knowledge upright, in just
balance.
This verse is very characteristic of the way in which Allah's book
puts things in order.
The most important thing is the Divine unity. And the most
disastrous thing is to lose sight of the Divine unity, shirk the
only unforgivable sin. Everything else Allah can just say, a well
and into paradise the sinner goes but that not quite. That is where
the door slams tightly shut. Everything else Allah in His
mercy, or hammer Rafi mean, anything is possible.
So that's the first thing, the unity.
The greatest of all catastrophic human misunderstandings is to look
at the many things in the universe. And the physical laws,
and the directions of the compass, and the heat, and the cold, and
the colors and the smells and the majesty and the immensity and the
complexity and the order of it all dismissed.
And to say, well, I don't think that comes from anywhere in
particular.
Or to say, I think maybe there's two people at work here, or maybe
a whole bunch of them. Like the ancient Greeks and the Romans with
all of their gods and goddesses fighting it out,
competing for bits of the created world. That's a fundamental error.
And to have that at the depths of your soul as the foundation stone
of everything else that you do in your life, the basis for your
morality, the understanding of what the world is about where it
comes from, who guides it, where it's going after it comes to an
end. That is the ultimate calamity. shear is the ultimate
crack that destroys the architecture of
The human creature.
Allah himself bears witness. He is Allah cliche in Shaheed he
witnesses all things, not the way we witness some things, not the
way we can log on to some webcams somewhere and see what's going on.
Or the way in which GCHQ perhaps can look at us through our
smartphones, when we don't know that's not the shahada, the
witnessing, which is related to the Divine witnessing, which is
beyond any possibility of veiling these everything, at all times he
sees us, he sees our past he sees our present, he sees our future.
He knows the cancer as it grows within us. He knows the thoughts
as they grow within us. He knows Allah Konishi, in Shaheed
inconceivable, unimaginable, total transparency.
Allah sees this, because he sees everything in the world, he sees
the totality of it, he is the first to bear witness to the fact
that he is one.
There isn't a whole bunch of things competing to make the world
the place that it is. One, only one sets the constant that is the
constant of the law of gravity. Only one determines what the speed
of light will be. Only one determines the mass of the proton.
There's nothing else that is determining these things that
fundamental shaping laws of the universe, determined by a wide if
there were others, and it was a fight. Well, the world as we see
it, and understand it, and inhabit it and breathe its air would be
impossible.
Only one.
And the angels also see this because the angels have a
particular way of witnessing that also sees the world transparently.
They're not capable of sin. They can't look at things and say,
well, maybe there's a whole bunch of things that are the ultimate
cause of that. They can't disobey their Lord. And so they also
witness. That's why they say subhanallah Alhamdulillah. Always
what else can they do when they see only he in the in the
complexity of creation, they have no choice. If they have a choice,
they're not angels. And we know that what's happened. But the
angels, the great ones, they only they witnessed, that's what they
do, they bear witness to the only thing that is absolute.
Everything else contingent possible. He alone is absolute. He
alone guarantees what is in the world. He is the one who is the
living in himself as a young, self subsistent, but also the one who
upholds everything else. And there is no outside the cosmos, which is
beyond the limits of his grasp. subhanaw taala, called low level
corny tune.
So the angels bear witness and then the verse goes on and all
enlightenment. People have knowledge. And this is where the
mind gets to work and thinks
people have knowledge. Who is that? Well, you could say some
scientists have this perception if they really look deeply, but
basically scientists only see part of the picture. They do some
equations and not the others. They don't have the complete, divine or
angelic overview of it all. They're living in two dimensions
on the surface and don't see it from above.
But all the people have knowledge that this beautiful verse refers
to other people have knowledge of the Divine.
It's talking about the Alanna.
So the great Imam, Ibn 100, alas, Kalani, or in an Al Haramain el
Duany or Imam Al Ghazali or so Yachty or Adela the or the great
Allamah of Islam as they stand in that myth, Rob, forgetting those
who are behind them, remembering only the one who is before them,
who alone will judge the quality of their prayer. And above it,
they see this verse, they remember the McConnell Khilafah.
They can actually bear witness through not just their
participation in the physical laws of the universe, their submission
to that, but in an understanding of it, a witnessing of it, which
nothing else in the physicality of creation can do.
A rock, my overcoat, the sun and the moon. Everything that has a
physical existence that doesn't have Arkel mind, bears witness to
actually sanel harlots own beingness in the world to the
unity of the Creator. But what it can't do is to bear witness by
speaking of this way, Allah and His angels and the Olomouc can.
They can't do that. It is mute, eloquent. They're just they're
testifying to the divine qualities, but they can't make us
hear their testimony. We can only observe it for ourselves.
So there's something strange about Benny Adam, and the strangeness is
encapsulated in the Quranic vision by the fact that we can speak a
limit will based on the fact that we can have categories
the fact that we can
Do ethics, the fact that we can perceive what is beautiful and
what is ugly, the fact that we can do things that aren't in our
immediate hedonistic interest, the fact that we can theorize out so
many things, the fact that we can have great universities, the fact
that we can do mathematics, all of these extraordinary things are
just for the Benny Adam.
And that any Adam behind all of this has to be able to bear
witness to the unity which presupposes the existence of the
Creator of berry, gelato.
So this is the greatness of the Alama.
But this verse is not really talking about people who just have
a whole bunch of facts in their heads. This witnessing is not
about that. The witnessing is about using those facts in order
to perceive the Shahida shahada is to testify, but also to see
Shahida yesh had to bear witness, but also to see something more
showerhead in the Arabic language is something you can see. And
there is the vape. And those the shahada, the unseen and there is
the scene,
the bear witness to this because they see it. And all of the
knowledge they have is only important to them, and only makes
them all on that got him unbuilt list, if they can see what it
means.
So this is why that that slogan, that motto, that beautiful iron is
used so much, and has transformed the hearts of so many of our great
ones, because in a sense, it is a warning to the scholars.
It is a warning that if all they are is just like a computer
harddrive a whole bunch of memories in there and statistics
and files, and they can regurgitate them to give Hotspurs
and to get jobs or whatever else it is that those things might be
useful for. Even if that was we can help people in various
religious ways. If that's all they are just a hard drive with a whole
bunch of facts, then they're not really scholars know what Andy's
saying. It's about bearing witness testifying to the unity.
Now the great Allamah of this ummah have always striven to
encourage us to see the unity of all of the parts of religion,
a man of his alley in his hair Allama Dean has a section of a
list of 10 things, which the student has to be aware of. And
the first one, as you'd expect, is self knowledge and self
purification. Be aware of your intentions. In America, man will
be new yet, but one of them is an awareness of the mutual
interlinking of the alarm shadow area.
You don't just learn a lot of Tafseer. And you don't really know
your foot and you don't know the Hadith and you don't know your
Kalam and you can't prove the existence of God. And you don't
really know that. That's not how to bear witness. There's not a
scholar who is Shahida, who is bearing witness, that's just
somebody who knows a whole bunch of stuff, even if it's full of
light, and luminosity and blessings. And he can recite the
prophetic words and the divine words, it's not the same as
bearing witness.
So we have to have this rule in Watercare, Mila, this
comprehensive vision, and remember as early as quite hard on those
who just hyper specialize
the problem in the modern university, just down the road
there, you've got the Department of pure mathematics, people who
spend their lives just working out certain complex equations. And
then just down there, you've got the faculty of English where
people are writing dissertations on Macbeth, do they talk to each
other? Not a whole lot. You got the Faculty of Medicine, the fact
of modern scholarship is fragmentation.
That fragmentation makes it difficult for people to see the
whole story, which is one reason why it's almost inevitable that
modern university is quite a secular space. Because people are
not really all on that. They don't really have this renaissance
vision of knowing a whole load of things. They're hyper specialized
idiot servants.
But the island is not to be that
the island is to be the one who has at least a good grasp of all
of the along. He's likely to specialize in one or two, but he
knows the other things as well.
So again, even 100 Alas, Kalani, who's amazing commentary on Buhari
is one of the great monuments of Islamic literature for Tilbury
shadow sahih al Bukhari, which took him years and years to
complete. And he went into a kind of retreat in Cairo at the
Karmakar of salt on Bay bars in order to write this astounding
encyclopedic thing, which is in 3040 volumes depending on who's
printing it, an immense ocean of knowledge, the wellspring of the
Almas understandings of what they can find in the prophetic hadith
of Bokhari a monument.
That, even though he's known as a hadith scholar
in the commentary, you can see that he knows the other things as
well. Not enough just to memorize
Has Hadith to be al Hadith to be more Hadith, in order to
understand and ultimately to bear witness to the unity of Allah
Subhana Allah to Allah, Allah had alcohol, you have to have the
things that he brings in the theology,
the Kalam,
the science of fantasies of the Arabic language, logic, Siraj. All
of these things are necessary to have a complete Islamic vision and
the book itself turns into an amazing testimony for Islam.
Middle is a wonder you see how each of the little jewel like
fragments of the prophetic diction, conserved lovingly like a
treasure passed down the generations you can imagine if
your family had heirloom, say a big diamond, it would go down the
generations and you'd make sure that the diamond was still there.
These are the treasures that the Holy Prophet is bequeathing to his
successors and to ourselves. And the Allamah are the ones who hand
them down to generations. And from these diamonds, and these rubies
and emeralds and the sapphires, they find this luminescence
sometimes you'll find 30 or 40 different meanings in a single
Hadith and each one enriches you as a Muslim. Why? Because he has
this comprehensive vision.
And he's been lifted up. He knows the meaning of Allah Subhan Allah
to Allah saying, yoga Allahu Allah, Dena MnO. We're all told
that ajet all our raises up those who have Eman and those who have
knowledge to high degrees.
The alternative is to be something potentially very subversive.
And the Allamah have always
warned us against that. Remember, Bukhari right at the beginning of
the amazing collection of Hadith, which has hypnotized and in trance
and delighted the scholars for so many centuries for 12 centuries,
begins with the book of the beginning of Revelation. She table
bed Ilahi, logical place to start a collection of prophetic Hadith.
But right at the beginning of that he surprises us by giving us a
hadith that doesn't seem to be about the beginning of Revelation
And the angel coming to Hara and Accra and that great story before
that. You get the Hadith in the Muhammad Obinna yet we're in the
Maliko limited in man our
actions are only by intentions. In other words, you only credited for
what you intended by a thing.
For men can add heat to who Ilahi are solely for Hijra to Illallah
he was solely with his Hijra. This was the great event in early Islam
people remembered it and people knew they had different
intentions, whether it's hatred or thoughts for Allah and His
Messenger, his hedgerows that Allah and His Messenger in other
words, he'll be credited with that great intention for man cannot
teach it to who the dunya you'll see boo ha imra Athenian CAHA
fajita to who Ilana Hydra LA. And whoever is Hijra was for a dunya
thing that he wanted something in Medina that he could get his hands
on, or a woman who he wanted to marry then his Hijra was for that?
Why does he start the book of the beginning of revelation with a
hadith it's not about the beginning of Revelation, he puts
it there as a warning to himself is saying, Don't be proud. Be
proud, buhari, you're writing this amazing thing that's going to
change the world and is the core of the Ummah ever since. But those
because only Allah knows if your intention is a good one. In other
words, you only bearing witness, you only carrying the shahada, you
only testify to the unity of your Creator, which is what religion is
to help humanity to do, ultimately, the beginning to the
end, it's about that
if your intention is right,
otherwise, you're just kind of carrying a whole bunch of Hadith
to another generation and you're just like a hard drive, or
something you could download from the internet. And it doesn't
really have any human quality to it and isn't bearing witness to
anything at all because it can't speak the danger of scholarship.
This is Earth to Ireland. And the effort of Ireland has a lot to do
with pride.
Say the Prophet says In another Hadith liquidly che in EFA
whatever tool I'll milho yalla
there's some beautiful Hadith in which he says everything has a
particular weakness and the weakness of a particular thing is
such and such a thing. So
Eartha to Tiara Academy.
We're thinking about that the weakness the vice of doing
business is to tell lies in order to sell some somebody something
without really telling them what it is or to say you're going to
pay it at a particular date but without having that intention.
That's the setting vice of the person who's in business.
And he warns us sallallahu alayhi wa sallam against that and then he
says we're Erfurt, online, milho yella
and the weakness the pitfall. The Achilles heel of knowledge is
pride
Eight vainglory, which is serious because that's actually worse than
lying. If you put it in the list of the seven deadly sins, which
Islam has a sub onmobile thought, it's right up there.
Why is pride such a deadly sin? Because it's the one that can't
coexist with the fear of God.
Because you're kind of putting yourself into the divine position.
He alone is a motor carrier of Jabbar. What are you doing being
proud? That's a fundamental misunderstanding, akin to
idolatry.
You are Allah's slave. That's it.
So the danger of the scholar is this this ego trip
that he just has a lot of knowledge, and he gets some kind
of maybe dunya
facilities as a result of that knowledge. And this has been
something that the Allamah have always been worried about, and
warned against and sometimes being tempted by then as now.
Methyl Latina home Milan, Tao Murata, some Milan, Mia beluga.
Kamata, Lil Hey, Maria Camilo as Farah
bit so call me leadin occur, there will be a Tina, hola, hola, como
zali mean?
The likeness of those who were under the yoke of the Torah,
burdened with carried given to carry the Torah, and then didn't
carry it
is like a donkey carrying books or carrying scrolls, was an obvious
and alarming image, the scholar in ancient Israel, they were the
scholars who knew their Torah and Talmud, but they didn't really
have an integrative religious vision, it was just a way to make
a crust of bread, or to get status in the eyes of people, whatever
else they might have used their knowledge for. That was a
possibility.
And then, Allah says, Woe betide those who deny our signs. Why does
he say that after telling us about the donkey in the books, because
Allah signs everywhere, in the books, and on the horizons. And if
you're denying those, even though you're full of the science, and
the books are telling you, I told you how to read the signs, and
still you're not reading the science, then you're really in
trouble. Like somebody who spends his whole life learning Sanskrit
for instance, but he just learns the shape of the letters, and he
knows the alphabet, and he memorizes a dictionary, but he
doesn't actually know the language. He doesn't communicate,
he doesn't read texts. Sometimes scholars can be like that. The
purpose of aim is to enable us to read the world, to know what it
means in its deep reality, to see it as science so that we can bear
witness to the being and the unity of the one who is the author of
the world. That's what Islamic scholarship is ultimately about to
enable us to testify.
But well, there are some people who don't quite get around to
doing that, because
academics have a lot of other stuff to do and committees and
conferences. It's testifying to the unity
and Allah does not guide that the people of darkness the people of
injustice, and this is adverse, which according to the many of the
people of Tafseer, was revealed in connection with something that
isn't the is the in the stories of the ancient Israelites. And it's
alluded to in the Bible, and certainly in the Talmud,
which is a certain Balaam been better in Hebrew. And according to
the story, this was a sage, a wise man, a rabbi, if you like from the
people of Moses alayhis, salam, Moses knew he was a scholar and
sent him to be a messenger to the king of Midian Madeon, who was not
a believer, hoping that he would, because of his knowledge, be able
to negotiate with that King, and cut a deal that would be favorable
to the Israelites who are going to come across the Red Sea and into
the land of the Midianites.
And when he gets there, and the story is elaborate, and cut it
short, he because of the immensity of his knowledge, and according to
some of the Allamah of Tafseer, so great was his knowledge that he
even knew and isn't as on the greatest name, by which According
to some accounts, if Allah is prayed to then he will grant a
response. And the king of Midian says, well, here is a treasure.
Here is a chest of gold, and jewels, and a chariot of silver.
Come over onto my side and maybe I'll listen to your religion we
can cut a deal we can negotiate.
You don't have to be it doesn't have to be then against us. Well,
maybe paganism has something to be said for it and let's see where we
can cut this deal. And he accepted this bribe, he becomes a kind of
if you like state
mufti, I don't know what the contemporary equivalent would be
for somebody who is corrupt, evil, manipulative, not a witness
bearer.
And the king of Midian says, I want you to use his greatest name,
I want you to use all this knowledge that you have of the
Five Books of Moses, in order to bring seven kilometers upon his
people to seven kilometers, and then
everything will will be sorted out.
According to some accounts, he actually does this, with his
immense knowledge and his ailment that then equivalent of Hadith and
tafsir and natto and sulfur and Mantap, a great scholar.
But Allah turns those calamities to blessings.
Because he will not according to this ayah here, those who are
denying His Signs, He will not
the prayer of such people, the Dianna of such people as
ineffectual. They are not truly men of religion.
That the contemporary meaning of this Well, it's an eternal meaning
is that you have to be clear about your class. And your tell heed,
doesn't matter what manipulations Dunia might be attempting,
doesn't matter what agenda might be creeping in. And you might
think yourself incredibly sophisticated, because you're
taking on board all kinds of stakeholders. One has to act and
operate and get by in a complex world. But unless you have this
ultimate bearing witness to the unity of all things, and the
compassion of the one who is sustaining all things, and to the
eventual judgment of all things, and all souls by allotting
alcohol, then you're just part of the scenery. Here as part of the
the give and take of dunya you're just another phenomenon in the
manifest world, and you're not rising up to the status of bearing
witness, and that is a calamity. In an outrage. Many of the Muslims
are disappointed or confused by some of the scholars who seem to
be in state positions, or engaging in certain agendas of certain
governments. Sometimes one has to engage with even setting the Musa
alayhis salam has to talk to their own Sedna, Yusuf Ali Salam has a
job with a pharaoh of his age, it's, it's not intrinsically
wrong, but remember the prophetic priority,
that it's for testifying, to the unity of Allah subhanaw taala. And
anything else that you might be playing with, that makes you feel
so cool and sophisticated, is actually just wrote on that in
neffs, the turbulences of the ego, and an evidence of your, your, do
your dance with the spiritual death of hypocrisy.
We need to watch out for that.
And so the meaning of all of this is that learning sacred knowledge,
and at CMC, we constantly try to inculcate this learning sacred
knowledge is not an end in itself.
If you want to you can teach your computer or the Hadith that have
ever existed. It can do it quicker than any human being. But that's
not the point. We teach human beings those things because human
beings, unlike computers, are able to testify
in themselves, to be living representatives of somebody who is
Halifa of that extraordinary individual, that unique phenomenon
in creation to whom the angels could legitimately bow down
at astonishing beginning of the human story, that angels bow down
to us creative clay, because we have this rule within ourselves,
which is the center of everything that makes us ourselves truly,
everything that makes us able to be moral, able to discern good
from evil, able to tell beauty, from ugliness, able to act
altruistically and ultimately, through all of those things, able
to see the one on one hit Subhan Allah to Allah in the many, which
is the most fundamental testimony for which human beings were
created. We didn't have any other purpose but to worship and to
testify through our worship, to the unity of Allah subhanho wa
taala. And in our final Abrahamic, restorative reparative monotheism,
we have that in a very clear form.
We have this in a very clear form, whether I call the mind and the
forehead which is close to it, which is the symbol of our pride
gets pressed appropriately into the dust, and that is where the
mineral Duany worshipped and achieved his true greatness. And
that is where if and Hotjar worshipped and achieved his true
greatness and all the great solid Allamah of this ummah, have
achieved their real greatness as scholars on this agenda, not in
the lecture room, because ultimately, it all leads into the
integrative holistic, complete, single minded McCullers project to
turn themselves into humanists and extraordinary and selfless human
beings. And when the soul is reconfigured like that it can do
extraordinary things as a scholar
How do they memorize hundreds of 1000s of Hadith? How do they have
these photographic memories? How did they write hundreds of books?
It's like a miracle. Allah subhanaw taala gives them a
certain orderliness in their minds because they have only one
intention. They're single minded. They're compassionate, they have
families, they do their Hajj, but they're single minded and pure in
the way they think. That the usual rubbish which wastes our time is
not there, and they can be productive and productive not just
of any old Qalam but of witnessing to the one which are nature's
constantly shy away from but which ultimately our souls crave. So we
ask Allah subhanaw taala to make us all a man who act upon their
knowledge and bear witness to the unity and the compassion of the
Creator, and also servants of the Allamah and to identify the best
ways in which we can serve the fundamental purpose of humanity.
In which alone we can find the true hearts ease, which is to know
our Creator and to love and adore and serve our Creator. Insha Allah
Akula Kali has a structure Allah Holly welcome. Well, he said it
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