Abdullah Hakim Quick – The Seljuk Empire And Imam Ghazali Minarets And Thrones Class 9
AI: Summary ©
The Muslim world is complex and the presence of the seven seater is needed to deal with evil. The presence of the ruler and the scholar is needed to balance spiritual issues and fight against evil. The importance of culture in Islam is discussed, including the need for clarification on the presence of the seven seater and the importance of culture in people's belief. The speaker explains that Islam is a purifying filter that takes away all impurities of milk, but the fruit of milk is still orange. The speaker also discusses the influence of Islam on people from Muslim countries, particularly those living in cities.
AI: Summary ©
Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Raheem, alhamdulillahi rabbil alameen,
wa usalli wa usallam ala Sayyid al-awwaleen
wa al-akhireen nabiyyina Muhammadan wa ala alihi
wa sahbihi wa barak wa sallim.
All praise is due to Allah, Lord of
the worlds, and peace and blessings be constantly
showered upon our beloved Prophet Muhammad, the Master
of the first and the last, and his
family, his companions, and all those who call
to his way and establish his sunnah to
the day of judgment.
As to what follows, my beloved brothers and
sisters, to our friends, our viewers, assalamu alaykum
wa rahmatullah.
Alhamdulillah, we are continuing on in our series
of minarets and thrones.
And this is really a critical topic, to
look at the relationship of leaders to scholars.
And we recognize that leadership is a very
crucial issue.
It has always been, and it will always
be.
It's not the basis of power in Islam,
but the leader is like the head or
the heart, you know, in the body, very
crucial to the existence of the body.
And just this week was a major meeting
in Saudi Arabia, you know, of the heads
of state of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation
and the Arab states.
And they met concerning the crisis in the
Middle East.
And there were the leaders of 57 countries
were represented.
And I took some time to look at
some of the leaders, listen to some of
what they were saying.
And I realized that the leaders who were
there were primarily just political rulers.
They may control their country because of their
family or because of their wealth or their
military.
But you couldn't really find somebody who actually
represents the people themselves and then fully represents
Islam.
There are a few other leaders who are
trying in their own way.
Their countries are divided up, like in the
case of Turkey, there's the seculars fighting against
the Muslims.
Their leadership is trying in the best way
Islamically, but a key element in that meeting
was missing.
And that is scholars.
Remember the formula.
The leader has political power, economic, military.
But the scholar is the one who understands
the revelation.
The one who can give direction to the
power of the leader.
And if you don't have that involved, then
people are basically judging issues on their own
ego or on their political situation, their interests.
Not necessarily on the interests of Islam.
The meeting started off with the recitation of
the Quran.
But the person who read, you know, Allah
knows best, did not appear to be a
person who was really into what he was
reading.
And that was the closest to anybody who
had any connection with the revelation.
And so fusion is one way out.
And that is that if there is a
leader who has political power, but also is
God-fearing, they have taqwa, the person has
both.
As in the case of Umar bin al
-Khattab, one of the best examples.
That could be a way out.
But there's nobody like that.
Nobody in the Muslim world.
A few of the leaders who are there
are humble people in their own way.
But they're not connected with the type of
knowledge that is needed to really make a
difference.
And so 57 countries, critical situation in the
Muslim world, people dying, Islamic decisions need to
be made.
Direction needs to be given.
This is why this subject here is so
important.
And if these 57 countries and their representatives
cannot find solutions, then somebody has to.
The younger generation who are coming up, maybe
Allah will replace these leaders with other leaders.
And so we are looking at historically what
happened, what is the relationships, and what is
the result when you had a good, positive
relationship between the leaders and the rulers.
And so we want to go back to
the 11th century AD, at the time of
the ruling Abbasid Empire.
And we had looked at the rulers.
There was the Khulafa Rashidun, the rightly guided
caliphs.
And then there was the Umayyad dynasty, which
was a kingdom.
And they ruled for about 100 years or
so.
And then it went on to the Abbasids.
They seized power.
And they were the rulers at this point
in time of the Muslim world.
The leaders, although legally they had the authority,
they did not really have what it takes.
And so this is where, by the will
of Allah, connections could be made to save
the Muslim world from the crisis that it
was in at that point in time.
This is where Allah brought to the scene
a group of people who were not originally
Muslims, who were hostile to the Muslims.
Allah opened their hearts and they became a
powerful part of the Muslim world.
Remember replacement.
That if we don't practice Islam, Allah will
replace us.
And that is something which is predicted and
it is promised in the Qur'an itself.
And so this group was called the Seljuks,
the Seljuk Empire.
And they were a Turko-Persian Sunni Muslim
empire.
That's a lot of words.
So they are Turkish people.
And I'll show you where Turkish people come
from.
But they're also mixed with Persians and Persian
culture.
So it was more Turkish people who took
on Persian culture.
And they were Sunni, meaning Ahlus Sunnah wal
Jamaah.
And they originated from the Kinnik branch of
the Oghuz Turks.
And the Oghuz Turks are people who live
in Central Asia.
It is a rough environment.
And they are known for their skills as
warriors.
And you can see the clothing now.
Like many young people are watching the MMA
and they watch Habib and Islam and Hamza
and the Dagestanis and the Chechens.
And you see when Habib wins, whenever they
win, they put on their cap.
So this is the Chechen Dagestani cap.
It can be different colors based upon the
fur of the sheep.
This is to protect you in the winter.
And this hat is very significant to the
people historically.
In the past it has a lot of
meaning to it.
So this is a typical group.
Within our own lifetimes, this is not from
a thousand years ago.
But you can still see they are carrying
a lot of the traditions of the Oghuz.
So Oghuz is the general name of the
Turkish people.
And the homeland of the Turkish people is
basically in this area surrounded by red.
What is now mainly Kazakhstan.
But there's also Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan.
In these areas there, this is sort of
the homeland, you could say, of the Turkish
nation.
And right next to it, of course, is
Mongolia.
And in ancient times, there was a proto
-Turkish-Mongolian group from which both sides came
from.
So somehow on the Altai Mountains, which is
in between Kazakhstan and Mongolia, these groups separated
into different nations, tribal groupings.
These names, Uzbekistan, these are political countries.
But generally, Uzbekistan really means the home of
Uzbeks.
So which have their own language and their
culture.
And the same as Tajikistan, have their own
culture and their language.
And you can see Afghanistan as well, but
that's not the original Turkish areas.
Now, the Seljuks who were in this area,
in their relationship with the Muslim world, they
were generally hostile, but it is somewhere around
the 11th century when contact came through wars
that were happening between the Muslims and Chinese
dynasties that the Muslims came in contact with
the Turks.
And they were amazed at their fighting skills
and their courage.
And so they joined on with the Muslims,
became highly educated, and generally they were mercenaries,
slaves.
And that's not ball and chain slave in
a plantation.
This is somebody who's controlled by a master.
But they were basically mercenaries.
So they are like slave soldiers in a
sense.
The Seljuks as a group started to move
west.
So you can see, if we go back
to their roots, you see Mongolia.
And the Mongols started to burst out of
their territories.
And we understood that with mistakes made by
Muslims, Khawarizmi area, they insulted the Turks, and
their leader, Genghis Khan, wanted to take over
the world.
So what was happening is that Mongolia, feeling
its power and being united, wanted to go
to brighter pastures.
It's a very difficult country to live in
because it's extremely cold in the winter.
It's extremely hot in the summer.
The Gobi Desert is one of the most
difficult deserts in the world.
So not an easy country to live in.
So they were looking out for greener pastures
in other parts of the world.
And so the Mongols then, you could say,
pushed the Seljuks and other people west.
So they, under the pressure of the Mongol
expansion, they started to go west.
And it was around 1037 that Tughril Bey,
they used the name Bey meaning their leader,
Tughril Bey and Chagir Bey, they really formed
an empire, a dynasty.
Their progenitor Seljuk, his name was Seljuk, he
is like their grandfather.
But it's really Tughril and Chagir that really
brought them together and united them.
And they lived somewhere in the area of
the Aral Sea, which is in Kazakhstan.
It's not shown on that map, but it's
sort of north center there and then going
west.
But then they started to move into Khorasan.
And Khorasan, going back to our map again,
would be what is now northern Afghanistan and
also Iran, the northern part of Iran.
And all that area there was called Khorasan.
And Khorasan is a very important name, by
the way, because even in our Hadith traditions,
it says near the end of time that
there would be leaders.
They even say the Mahdi's forces will be
coming out of Khorasan.
So it mentions the name Khorasan.
So it still is an important area, but
now would be in Afghanistan and parts of
northern Iran.
So they moved into this area and they
continued.
And because of their organization and their strength,
they actually began to take over territory.
It was not necessarily hostile takeovers because they
were in Muslim lands.
And the Muslims realized they needed somebody to
protect them, especially when the Mongols were coming.
So they started to take over territory and
to take over land until they actually moved
into the area of Iraq in Baghdad.
Around 1055, they reached in this area.
And there was a great crisis that was
going on there in Iraq because a Shiite
group, they had seized control of Baghdad and
they were teaching different concepts, not the Ahlus
Sunnah wal Jamaah, but concepts based on Shiite
ideology.
And we'll talk a little bit more about
this Shia threat that was happening at that
time.
But the Seljuq, because they did take over
this area, Baghdad, which is the capital, so
they became, in a sense, the protectors of
the Muslim world.
They were now de facto rulers of the
Muslim world.
They were not the khalifas because they were
not Abbasids.
They didn't come from the Quraysh.
But in effect, they were ruling.
And some of the most famous names amongst
the Seljuqs, probably the most famous after the
founders is Alp Arsalan, who was a great
leader.
He expanded them into what is now present
-day Turkey and then going all the way
over even towards Europe and other areas.
And he united and expanded them as well.
And underneath them, of course, under Alp Arsalan,
who died just after a battle his son
Malik Shah took over.
But underneath the leaders is a new group,
you could say, in a sense.
It's not part of the original Islamic terminologies.
But the term came in, wazir.
So the wazir is like what we would
say the chief minister, the secretary of state.
But not just the representative.
The wazir is like, you could say the
prime minister.
You can see in the UK and England,
you have the king, and then you have
the parliament, and you have the prime minister.
So there's a prime minister.
But the problem is now in England, the
king has no power.
He's just a ceremony.
But in those days, the sultan did have
power.
However, his prime minister, the wazir, was extremely
powerful.
So underneath the two rulers, Alp Arsalan and
Malik Shah, was a famous person named Nizam
al-Mulk.
Nizam al-Mulk.
And this is like a title.
Because Nizam means like nizam, you would say
in Arabic.
It's sort of like the one who organizes
the kingdom.
And another great wazir was Taj al-Mulk.
So Taj al-Mulk also.
So these two were very famous and played
great rules in helping them to organize themselves.
And because of this, they started to really
expand.
So they expanded all the way to China,
and as I said, way far to the
west in the Roman lands, the lands of
the Byzantines.
And this is a map.
This orange area here shows you the extent
that the Seljuq could reach.
This is a huge swath of territory.
You can only start to compare this with
the Roman Empire and with Alexander the Great.
So this is a huge territory, especially when
you don't have telephones and cell phones and
mass communications.
So this requires a lot of organization to
dominate and control this area.
And this is what is considered to be
the Seljuq Empire, which to a great extent
is the hotlands of Islam.
And so Nizam al-Mulk, he organized a
lot of the internal administration of the Seljuqs.
And in a work that he actually did,
Siyasat Nama, he wrote a text on the
book of the government, how you rule an
Islamic government, what is the principles to stay
in power and how to organize bureaucracy.
The same way today you have ministry of
this, minister of that.
You have different house representatives and local organization,
how to effectively run a mass organization.
So this is one of the great achievements
of Nizam al-Mulk.
And because of this, they were able to
prosper not only militarily, but also economically.
And as protectors of the Muslim world, part
of their protection was to keep the purity
of Islam.
That the basic rule would be according to
the book of Allah and the sunnah of
the prophet, peace and blessings be upon him.
And at that time, there was a great
challenge.
And this challenge was led by the Shiite
Fatimid dynasty.
And the Fatimids, as we have studied in
previous classes here, the Fatimids are part of
the Shia dynasty that came out of the
son of Ali ibn Abi Talib and Fatima,
the daughter of the prophet Muhammad, peace and
blessings be upon him, the Ahl al-Bayt.
So Hassan and Hussein are the two sons.
But from Hussein's side, the Shias started to
group.
First to protect the family and to oppose
the Umayyads.
But later, they started having their own ideology.
Because they grouped themselves mainly in Iraq, in
Basra, and in Kufa, and in these areas.
And these were areas of magic and the
occult.
A lot of the underground groups are there.
The Qur'an even says that when magic
was first introduced, like in Surah al-Baqarah,
it says that Harut and Marut, the angels,
they brought magic into Babel.
That's Babylon.
So the concept of magic, these secret societies,
communication with the jinn, right, using evil and
darkness, these groupings and occult, this is where
it was introduced.
So some of the most dangerous occult groups,
most magicians, most groups in the world who
are dealing with magic, they will eventually go
back to Iraq.
Because this is where it actually began.
And so the combination of wanting to protect
the family of the Prophet, and then the
introduction of these extreme groups, a new type
of religious Shiaism developed.
This is not political Shiaism.
Political Shiaism is only to protect the family
of the Prophet.
And in terms of prayer and their concept
of leadership, it's the same.
But in religious, they looked at the Imams
as infallible, that they don't make mistakes.
And they're almost like prophets, better than some
of the prophets.
And this, of course, is outside of Islam,
along with so many other beliefs.
And so from back in the 9th century,
this early formation of Shiaism, so this is
even before the time of the Seljuks, one
of these missionaries out of Kufa, whose name
was Abu Abdullah al-Husayn al-Shia, out
of Kufa and then out of Yemen, because
from Kufa they went down into Yemen, so
he proclaimed himself to be al-Baab.
He is the door to the Mahdi.
Because they believed that the Imam had stopped
at 12, and the 12th Imam had hidden
himself in a cave, and he was alive.
He was the Mahdi.
So this Husayn person here, he claimed he
was the door to the Mahdi.
So he had all the blessings and the
barakah and whatnot.
And he moved from Yemen to North Africa.
And he founded a base of operation in
a place that they later called al-Mahdiyya,
which is in present day Tunisia.
So these are actually pictures of Tunisia.
And some of the buildings built by the
group called the Fatimids, formed by this al
-Husayn al-Shia, they built some of these
buildings.
Some of the structures are still there.
So the base was Tunisia, and then they
moved east to Egypt.
And they were highly organized.
They were good preachers, effective preachers.
They brought wealth with them.
Highly successful in their organization.
And they succeeded in taking over Egypt.
Remember, the Abbasids and the other people at
that time were over in Iraq.
And so the Fatimids, and it's a long
story, but they succeeded in taking over that
area.
And eventually they spread their rule.
So the orange area that you see here,
all of this was controlled by the Fatimids.
Okay, so this was a strange world.
Because you had the Abbasids who were in
Iraq.
You had the Fatimids claiming to be the
Khalifa, Shia.
And then you also had one of the
Umayyads that had escaped to Spain, Al-Andalusia.
And he formed an Umayyad dynasty there in
Al-Andalus, in Spain.
So there was a Khalifa there.
There were three Khalifas.
So strange time, right?
But the Fatimids now were highly successful in
their organization.
They founded what is now the present-day
Cairo.
There was a small military base called Al
-Fustat.
That was there before.
But in terms of the base, as a
sprawling city, they were the ones that founded
it, building walls, extending aqueducts, and then building
huge masjids, mausoleums.
And they even established a university.
And that was to teach Shia teachings.
It was called Al-Azhar University.
And we know Al-Azhar today as one
of the great universities in the Muslim world.
It was originally Shia.
It was a Shiite university.
And it wasn't until the time later on
when Salah ad-Din al-Ayubi, the great
sultan, fighting the Crusaders, he took over Egypt.
And he was a Kurdish leader fighting with
the Turkish Zengids.
He took over Egypt.
And then he converted Al-Azhar to the
Sunnah, the Shafi'i Fiqh.
So Shafi'i Fiqh became the rule there.
But still you will see buildings like this
that are there, huge buildings still there in
Cairo that were built by the Fatimids.
So this group then represented a threat.
Look at the size of it.
So this is a major threat to the
whole Muslim world.
And they were expanding.
They even expanded, you can see, to the
point where they took over Mecca and Medina.
And they took over Jerusalem.
So at one point the Fatimids were controlling
the three holy sites in Islam.
Unfortunately, because of the weakness of their faith,
they lost Jerusalem to the Crusaders.
And they even started making deals with the
Crusaders and started working with the Crusaders.
So when the Seljuks came in, they had
to struggle with these schismatic Shiite groups, some
from the Fatimids and other little groups like
the Buwayids that came out.
And they had to fight with the Crusaders.
And so it was a serious time.
Seljuks had a major struggle.
So remember, rulers, scholars.
So the key to, we want to look
at the key to individuals here that represent
this blending together.
And that is the ruler who was the
wazir.
And that is Nizam al-Mulk.
And his name was Abu Ali al-Hassan
ibn Ali al-Tusi.
So he came from the town of At
-Tus, which is in modern day Iran.
It was in Persia.
OK, so he was a Persian person as
well.
And great statesman, organized not only in administration.
As we will see, he was involved in
education.
And this is really where he shines as
well.
And he developed a relationship with the scholars.
And the most famous scholar who had a
relationship with him was Imam al-Ghazali, rahimuhullah,
one of the greatest scholars in Islamic history.
So Nizam al-Mulk had great respect for
the scholars.
And he enabled them.
He empowered them.
And he had the power of the state.
And you can now see the size of
the Seljuk Empire.
Now, who was Imam al-Ghazali?
So Imam al-Ghazali, Abu Hamal al-Ghazali,
he was born in Tus, same place as
Nizam al-Mulk.
So he was also from Tus.
It's part of Khorasan.
Remember that northern part of Iran.
So he was born there in Tus.
And his father passed away when he was
very young.
And he was given over to the scholars.
From a young age, he started to get
into Islamic education.
And one of the qualities of Imam al
-Ghazali, he had like a photogenic memory.
It's the type of memory, some people have
this memory that when they look at something,
when they look at a page, when they
learn information, it stays in their head as
though their head is what we would call
today a hard drive.
So your hard drive is in your head.
So this memory that he had, he became
an excellent student in fiqh, jurisprudence, and aqidah.
He even started reading books on philosophy.
And he was fortunate to come under the
tutelage of a great scholar, Imam al-Juwaini.
And Imam al-Juwaini was one of the
famous scholars at that time in the Muslim
world.
So he came under the tutelage of Imam
al-Juwaini and spent a lot of time
under him, inheriting, in a sense, this great
encyclopedic knowledge.
So this was Imam al-Ghazali.
Every class he entered, he was on the
top.
And as a young man, not only could
he teach, but he also started writing.
And his work, some of the great works
that he did, there's a lot of works
that he did, but one of his famous
works, Tahafat al-Falsafa, which is the Incoherence
of the Philosophers, he actually criticized people like
Ibn Sina and al-Farrabi.
Because not only were they great scientists or
great doctors, but also they went into philosophy.
And they had some Ismaili leanings as well.
So Imam al-Ghazali, he saved the ummah,
in a sense.
Because this was the time, as we learned,
that philosophy is coming in, books are being
translated, and this caused a confusion, to a
certain extent, in Islamic learning.
In the old days, you basically, you want
the Qur'an, you want Sunni, you learn
Arabic, and you don't have that much to
really contend with.
Now, everything they could find was being translated
into Arabic.
So Imam al-Ghazali was one of the
people who studied the teachings of European philosophers,
and he criticized them.
And he criticized also Muslim philosophers who had
gone astray.
But a lot of people, when they think
of Imam al-Ghazali, they think of him
more as a philosopher and a Sufi scholar,
you know, a mystical type of scholar.
When they hear the name al-Ghazali.
But they don't realize that Imam al-Ghazali
was actually considered to be the Sheikh of
Islam.
He was considered, you know, in the Islamic
world to be like one of the most
important scholars in the whole of the Muslim
world.
And that is not just philosophy, and it's
not just spirituality.
Even in Fiqh.
He actually mastered all of the sciences.
So if you start talking about grammar, he's
mastering the grammar.
If you start talking about poetry, he's mastering
poetry.
You go into tafsir, he's mastering tafsir.
Now, he was so strong in Fiqh, Islamic
jurisprudence, that he laid foundations for Fiqh, or
Usul al-Fiqh, al-Mustasfa.
And his book al-Mustasfa is still one
of the main books in Usul al-Fiqh
today.
Okay?
So if you want to look at Fiqh,
especially in the Shafi'i school of thought,
al-Mustasfa is one of the key books,
and it's influencing people legally up until today.
So this is how powerful Imam al-Ghazali
was in terms of the basic knowledge that
he had.
And, now, what is the relationship of the
rulers and the scholars?
Nizam al-Mulk had developed a series of
madrasas.
And so this system was called Nizamiyyah.
So the Nizamiyyah madrasa system.
And this Nizamiyyah was spread to different parts
of the Muslim world.
And some of the books that we use,
like al-Qaeda al-Baghdadiyyah, if you're learning
Tajweed, some of these books actually go back
to the Nizamiyyah.
And if you study Hanafi Fiqh, Shafi'i,
some of the texts you're reading go back
to the Nizamiyyah madrasa in Baghdad.
Okay?
So the main madrasa was in Baghdad.
But they opened up centers in different areas.
Imam al-Ghazali got connected with one of
the centers in the area of Persia where
he was living in Khorasan.
And because of his brilliance, his reputation reached
Nizam al-Mulk.
And Nizam al-Mulk, because of his love
of scholarship and wanting to advance the Muslim
world, he invited Imam al-Ghazali to come
to Baghdad.
That he would be one of the great
teachers in the most prestigious institute in the
world.
It was really the pinnacle at that time.
And so he accepted this.
And he became one of the leading scholars.
And after a short period of time, because
of his literal ability to take in information
and to compare and to understand, his reputation
was widespread.
And he became the leading scholar of the
Nizamiyyah Institute in Baghdad.
Okay?
Now, this university, you could call it today,
was not only just situated in Baghdad, it
was financed through Nizam al-Mulk by the
Seljuks and the Abbasids.
So therefore, the wealth that had come into
the Muslim world at that time, you could
say that Baghdad was one of the richest
cities in the world, was this area.
Unlimited amounts of gold and silver.
And so, they enabled the scholars.
They financed their work.
They financed research work.
They financed traveling.
They financed the writing of books.
As we've learned in different classes before, even
the papyrus in Egypt, which is hard to
get, the Muslims found out about papyrus from
the Chinese.
And they actually exported it.
And they brought it from China into the
Muslim world.
And bookbinding, until the books produced in the
Muslim world exceeded the ones in China.
So they became the leading book people on
earth.
Europe at that time did not have books,
only in Al-Andalus, which was Muslim Spain
and Portugal.
Okay, there the Muslims, of course, had institutes.
They connected with Baghdad, great cities of Cordoba
and Granada and Toledo.
They were connected.
But other parts of Europe, the Germans, the
French, the British, Scandinavia, they were in darkness.
They did not have bookbinding, writing, any of
the things that we understand is part of
scholarship.
Now, the challenge, the importance of this relationship.
And again, we're in a crisis today.
And we need this kind of a relationship
to come again, where scholars support leaders.
If these leaders who gather together in this
major leading can't do anything but complain to
the United Nations or just write another paper,
they need somebody to fire them up.
They need somebody to make them realize what
their responsibility is as leaders in the Muslim
world.
And that's what the ulama are supposed to
be doing.
Okay, so what happened in this time?
In this time, as we learned, there was
a great challenge with the Fatimid dynasty.
It was a power struggle.
They were the leading people, power struggle, power
groups in the Muslim world.
The struggle was not just military or economic.
It was ideas.
Because the Fatimids were bringing in strange ideas
that we call batiniya.
And we have done a course on this
in sects and groups in Islam in the
Muslim world, right, to show the different groups.
And the batiniya groups are the ones who
use this philosophy from the occult.
And they put it into the Muslim world.
And a lot of schismatic groups started to
develop out of this batiniya teachings.
And the Fatimids took this on.
And from the Fatimids, as we know, one
group broke away from them because they thought
the Fatimids were not extreme enough.
Their leader was Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Darzi.
And they thought that, you know, he said
that God is in him.
And he took it to Lebanon.
And he formed a group called Duruz, the
Duruz.
You'll see this name in Lebanon and in
Palestine and in occupied territories, these Duruz people.
So the Duruz are not Muslims.
They're not Christians.
They're not Jewish.
They have their own religion.
They're extreme Shia to the point where the
mainstream Shia has considered them to be not
Muslims.
So these schismatic groups were developing.
And they're spreading poison.
So they were spreading their teachings.
People who do their dawah, the evil dawah,
into the Seljuk lands, the lands of the
Abbasids, to teach these strange underground botanical teachings.
And they use a lot of philosophy.
They can catch people up in words.
Okay, so somebody had to respond.
And this is where the Nizamiyya group, led
by Imam al-Ghazali, took the stand against
them.
Because Imam al-Ghazali was not a regular
scholar.
He goes beyond the text.
So he can literally listen to your philosophical
argument, and he can counter, he can refute
you.
Okay, so they addressed the theological arguments, the
philosophical arguments that were coming out of these
schismatic groups that were there.
And there was even one group which was
led by a person called Hassan al-Sabah.
And they called themselves Hashashin.
And this Hashashin group, which came out of
the major Shiite sect called Ismailis.
Okay, so the Ismailis really is the Fatimids.
So it's a wing of the Ismailis.
And their leader went into the mountains of
Syria, in this area, and he formed this
group.
And he was totally out of his mind,
but he believed that he had keys to
paradise.
And he formed a group up in the
mountains that were there, Alamut.
And he promised his followers paradise in this
earth by smoking hashish and having harems.
And if they died for him as assassins,
they would go to paradise.
And his people trained in the martial arts.
So they trained like ninja.
You know the Japanese ninja who cover their
face with black.
So these Hashashin, they train themselves and they
hide.
They'll hide in your ceiling if they're supposed
to assassinate you for a week.
And then they fall down on top of
you and poison you to death.
So even the word assassin comes from Hashashin.
That's an Arabic word.
Because hash is the drugs that they smoked.
So the people who were smoking this hashish,
Hashashin, so the word become assassin.
And we're using it today, the assassin.
The assassin's creed.
That's an Arabic word.
So these people were attacking the Muslim world.
Terrorizing the Muslims.
And the Seljuks had to deal with them
militarily.
But Imam al-Ghazali and the Nizamiyya Madrasa
had to deal with their ideas.
So this was a main struggle that was
going on there.
Unfortunately in 1092, the assassins succeeded in killing
Nizam al-Mulk.
And they killed, a lot of the Seljuk
leaders were killed by them.
Abbasids.
It was very difficult to really defeat them
because of their abilities.
It was only the Mongols.
When the Mongols came, one of the good
things the Mongols did was to stop the
assassins.
But otherwise it was very difficult to get
with them.
But the death of Nizam al-Mulk had
an impact on the life of Imam al
-Ghazali.
And the struggling going on in the courts.
Even they say Imam al-Ghazali had an
intellectual crisis.
An intellectual crisis.
Because he studied so much philosophy.
He started going into terminologies and things so
much that spiritually he was drained.
He started to lose the spirit of Islam.
You know, there's great scholars, Imam al-Razi.
For instance, they ask Imam al-Razi about
Qadr.
About the will of Allah.
This is a big topic in Islam.
We have a will and Allah has a
will.
So where does our will meet Allah's will?
Does Allah know everything you're going to do?
Does He control your will?
So there's a philosophical debate that goes on
about that.
So they went to the Imam and they
said tell us about Qadr.
He said if you want to know the
truth about the will of Allah, look outside
at the farmers.
The farmers, they know that if they don't
work and plant their crops, nothing will grow.
But they do all the work and then
they wait for Allah to send the rain.
That's the perfect understanding of Qadr.
So you don't sit around and think that
Allah is going to do everything.
You do all the things that you need
to do, but you depend ultimately on the
will of Allah.
You see?
These philosophical type of debates.
And so Imam al-Ghazali, Rahimahullah, he had
a crisis.
He had a personal crisis.
He had studied most of the books, memorized
everything.
Nobody could out-debate him in any topic.
You could not out-debate this man.
But he started to feel a vacuum inside.
Right?
And this is why studying too much in
areas, it can actually kill your heart.
Especially in areas where you start to question,
why does Allah do this?
Right?
Because ultimately our Iman is the power and
back of everything that we are doing.
But we use our reason in order to
understand what is happening in the world.
So Imam al-Ghazali had a crisis and
he heard that there were people who had
dedicated their life to spirituality.
This is what you'd call people of the
Suf or the Sufis at that time.
They would do what is called khalwah.
They go out and they give up the
world.
And so he wanted to experience this.
Okay, so he left his teaching post in
the most prestigious institute in the Muslim world.
And he went to try to find some
people like this.
And he ended up spending a lot of
time in Jerusalem.
You know, there in the masjid, in the
minaret and around there.
You know, spending time by himself.
And while he was there, after a few
years, then he realized there was still a
turmoil in the Muslim world.
And so he returned to his teachings.
This is Imam al-Ghazali.
He returned to teaching in Nesapur.
And started to answer some of the questions
of the people again.
He was more balanced now.
Because he had answered some of the spiritual
questions that he had.
And they say he ended his life reading
hadith.
He was actually studying hadith and teaching it
at the end of his life.
So he went through a lot of changes.
But it is during this change when he
had to answer a lot of the questions
of the Muslim world.
And some of these questions can't be answered
alone by the text.
It's something wrong with our hearts.
Something was missing.
And so he wrote a book called Ihya
Rulum al-Din.
So this is the revival of the religious
sciences.
So he literally looked at a way to
revive the teachings of Islam and the spirit
of Islam.
And to try to synthesize what was going
on.
Some people became extreme in Sufism.
Where they went outside of fiqh.
Some people went extreme in the texts.
In being textual.
And they lost their spirituality.
So what Imam Ghazali was doing, he was
trying to harmonize the two sides.
What some people would call the outward religious
practices and the inward religious practices.
In the time of the Prophet ï·º it
was all the same.
There was no outward Islam and inward Islam.
But because of the changes that Muslims had
gone through.
Because of the philosophies that came into the
Muslim world.
Because of the extremes.
Somebody, some scholars had to balance this.
He was one of the scholars and there
are others who actually took this on.
And in this major work he did, he
was able to answer some of the issues.
The spiritual issues.
And to try to synthesize things.
So people become more balanced.
And not into extremes.
And so by the end of his life,
he returned to Neshapur and he continued, he
ended his life teaching.
And his teachings and his influence is touching
us up until today.
And so this is one of the things
we need today.
Because we have a lot of extremes in
the Muslim world.
We have some groups who even do Takfir
on each other.
This one is not Muslim and this one
is not following my Shaykh or not following
my Aqeedah or not following my school of
thought.
So this type of synthesis is needed today.
And this came about because of the coming
together of the ruler and the scholar.
You see?
So when the two sides can come together,
when that power in the Muslim world can
come together, we find there can be great
results.
And so this is what we recognize what
had happened during the time of the Seljuks.
It was like a golden age for scholarship.
There were a lot of trials and tribulations
that were going on.
But Alhamdulillah, it was a great period of
time and there's a great legacy coming out
of this golden age of Islam.
So I want to open up the floor
for any questions that you may have on
this.
Again, this is to show the cooperation between
the scholars and the rulers.
And it is such an important gathering or
synthesis that is needed today.
So the floor is open for any questions
that anybody may have there.
The Muslim world is very complex.
And the question comes, why are the Shias
coming to the aid of the Sunnis?
Why?
What we have to realize, and I say
this because I lived in Medina for a
period of time and I experienced Iranian people
and all types of people, and you'll find
that 90% or so of what Shiites
do, and I'm not talking about the extreme
groups like Duruz and the Ismailis and the
ones, but 90% of what the mainstream
Shia do is Islam.
It's 90% Islam.
The 10% is where some of their
beliefs come in extreme things, and they're in
different groups come in.
So the fact of a group of Muslims
in the Muslim world fighting against evil, wanting
to be Shaheed, is not just a Shiite
ideology.
That's Islam.
And it manifests itself through them.
Because most of where they're coming from is
Islam.
And that's the complexity of the Muslim world.
But what you have to realize when you
look at the situation in Palestine and Gaza
is that the tip of the spear for
the Muslim world are the people of Gaza.
The people of Philistine.
And they are 100% Sunni.
100%.
So therefore, it is a struggle that involves
all elements within the Muslim world.
And if you just go to ideas and
start arguing about ideas, you can see differences.
But if you look on the ground, people's
countries are under attack, evil is there.
To stand up against evil is an Islamic
act.
And it has nothing to do with your
grouping that you're doing.
It is following the way of Allah subhana
wa ta'ala.
You know, through Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings
be upon him.
Question.
So this is the situation.
Now again, the Muslim world is very complex.
I do not have the answers of what's
happening in the Muslim countries.
However, you can see that there's a big
problem happening where the leaders generally do not
represent the people.
They do not represent Islam.
And in some cases, some parts of the
Muslim world, they are actually suppressing scholars.
So scholars have been imprisoned and suppressed in
different parts of the Muslim world.
In these classes, we don't go into names,
calling this country and that person.
We're dealing with issues.
And so, yes, there is suppression of the
scholars and there needs to be the true
coming of the real Muslims.
That's why we're studying this course, to try
to understand, at least for the younger generation
and the new Muslims and revived Muslims, you
know, so we can see where we have
to go for the future.
Yeah.
Well, you know, again, to look at history,
you know, the Muslim world is very complex.
And we have to understand what has happened,
especially in the past 200 years, what is
called the colonial period, when the Muslim countries
were conquered over by European colonialism.
And you'll see that in the 20th century,
the great movements that struggled against colonialism were
generally led by scholars.
Abdul Qadir of Algeria, Imam Shamil of Chechnya,
Mohammed Ahmed of the Sudan, and, you know,
you will see great scholars, you know, in
Libya, all over.
You'll see the scholars taking Omar Mokhtar, Sheikh
Omar Mokhtar, he's a great scholar of Libya.
He led the revolutionaries against the Italians.
So, you will see the scholars who are
directly involved.
And that's up until recent struggles that have
gone on in different parts of the Muslim
world.
You'll see the scholars involved.
But our problem is now, we are broken
into so many small pieces because of colonialism,
and then our own tribalism and nationalism.
That in terms of a movement, like you
have Seljuq's movement, to have a movement that
actually represents will take some time.
So scholars are struggling, scholars are dying, scholars
are involved, you know, and rulers of different
types are there.
And the more we come back to the
Book of Allah and the Sunnah, inshallah, is
the closer we'll get, you know, to our
answer, but it will take some time.
Any other questions online?
Yes, the question is the fact that the
Turks and many people retain their culture after
Islam, you know, does it show that culture
can be part of Islam?
Yes, you know, Islam does not come to
take you away from your culture.
So whatever your culture is, because culture, we're
talking about your customs and your behaviors and
your language and your food, that is developed
over centuries.
If you live in a mountain in Afghanistan,
your culture is not going to be the
same as somebody who lives on a seashore
in Malaysia.
Because in Malaysia, it's a nice, you know,
30 degree temperature all year round, mangoes coming
down and you know, people smile and they're
easy going.
You know, in a mountain of Afghanistan it's
rough all the time.
People are rougher in how they deal.
So there's going to be a culture that's
developed.
So what Islam actually does, you know, is
it purifies the culture.
So what Islam actually does is it's like
a filter.
So you have a glass, so you have
two glasses.
One has got milk, another one's got orange
juice, and then you put a filter on
your cup.
So you pour the milk into the cup
and the filter, which is your Islam, it
takes away all the impurities that were in
the milk.
But what you finally have in that cup
is milk.
It doesn't turn into lemonade.
It's milk.
The same way with the orange juice that
you just squeezed, and you pour it into
the cup with the filter, which is Islam,
the filter takes away all the impurities of
the orange, but the juice is still orange.
So therefore you will find halal food with
pepper, halal food, you know, with all types
of things.
It's halal.
So that's the culture.
So your culture can be part of Islam,
and for the most part, what I've found
in Muslim countries is the majority of the
practice of the people from Muslim countries is
Islamic, especially in their lifestyle, in their families,
in their food, especially those who are not
in cities.
Those who are in countrysides, because the country
people tend to maintain the culture more.
So a lot of the ways.
However, there are some bad ways from before
Islam that people carried into Islam.
Some of them have remained up until today,
and Islam has to purify that.
Like for instance, you know, when I went
to Turkey and visited there, they always have
this blue eye.
So if you go to a Turkish house
or a restaurant, you'll see this blue eye.
It's turquoise covered with dark blue.
It's this eye.
And it's something to do with Tengri.
It's their previous religion.
And they believe in the power of this
amulet that it protects you from evil.
And that stayed with them.
When they were practicing Islam, you don't see
it that much.
When they start to get into superstition, you'll
start to see this thing coming up.
But now, Alhamdulillah, they're actually taking away a
lot of these eyes now.
People are realizing this is a bad, this
is a pre-Islamic ignorance to believe in
the amulet and not Allah subhanahu wa ta
'ala.
So culture is culture, and Islam filters out
the bad part of the culture.
Any other questions or anybody has?
Nizam al-Mulk's book that he wrote is
called Siyasat Nama.
Siyasat Nama.
So judging by the title, it's probably in
Persian.
Because Siyasat does come from Arabic.
Siyasat means politics.
But Nama, that's Persian.
So it was probably a Persian book.
It may be translated into English.
So Siyasat Nama by Nizam al-Mulk.
This is his work on governance.
Al-Mawardi.
Al-Mawardi is an Arabic-speaking, famous writer.
He wrote a book about Siyasat al-Sharia,
about Siyasat, politics, and Islam.
Al-Mawardi.
He wrote a book about Islamic politics.
So there are a few writers who have
actually done this, but this was Nizam al
-Mulk.
And then we look at where the scholar
comes in to influence.
Because there's so many different plays in creating
a city.
For example, it's not only about the ruling
or dealing with the people.
It's also sometimes structural.
You come in and influence things.
What departments or sections do they have the
most control or say over?
Because there's things like, for example, sewage, storm
drainage, those kind of systems.
Even things like urban planning, like the street
networks, the placement of major places that people
gather, whether it's markets or the mosque, that
sort of thing.
What place would the scholars have influence over?
Well, you know, the scholars, of course, when
we talk about scholars in the original Islamic
way, a scholar is not just somebody who
only studies hadith and Quran.
The scholar could actually be an engineer too.
The scholar could be a doctor.
The scholar could be an architect.
So they combine, you know, different things.
And so really, you know, science is science.
If you've got to build a dam, you've
got to build a dam.
But the thing is, though, is that where
the scholarship comes in is that there may
be an issue concerning a graveyard.
So is it permissible to build a highway
through that graveyard?
Or how do you deal with the graveyard?
That's where you've got to get a scholar.
Now, if the architects or the engineers have
scholarship, they can solve it.
But if they don't, then they'll have to
go to somebody who has scholarship.
He analyzes this, and he may tell them,
no, you've got to go around.
That's the fetwa.
So that's where a fetwa is needed.
But, you know, when we look at scholarship
in general, it does include sciences and, you
know, other things as well, you know, within
the area of scholarship.
Today a lot of things have been, it's
the secular way of doing things in the
colonial period.
Religion and secular, you know, it's church and
state.
That's the secular way.
We didn't have, we didn't separate church from
state.
It was the same.
It's all part of the same issue.
Also capitalist, because so many of the decisions
are decided based on what saves us the
most money, what's the best thing to do.
That's right.
So the secularism comes in, you know, for
worldly issues, as opposed to submission to Allah
subhanahu wa ta'ala.
Okay?
So, um...
No problem.
Okay, so we're going to end the class
now, and inshallah we'll go on to another
interesting relationship with scholars and, you know, leaders
to try to get some answers to our
problems today.
So I'll leave you with these thoughts.
Alhamdulillahi rabbil alameen.
Wassalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh.