Ali Ataie – How Muslims View Jesus
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AI: Transcript ©
I wanna begin by quoting the Quran,
the book of God,
in which Allah
God exalted and transcended is he. He speaks
directly to the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon
him. He says,
have we not expanded for you your courage,
which is an idiomatic phrase, meaning have we
not made you courageous?
And removed
the burden which was weighing you down on
your back.
And have we not,
raised your remembrance or exalted
your name?
So it's reported in a hadith.
This is a prophetic tradition of Al Hakim
that Adam, peace be upon him, Adam alaihis
salaam,
when he was, asking God for forgiveness,
he was taught special words of inspiration
from Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala or from God,
transcendent and exalted as he.
Of course, Adam did not commit a conscious
sin according to our, prophetology.
A prophet cannot consciously disobey God. But he
had been deluded by Satan, and he forgot
the command. So he ate of the tree,
and nonetheless, he is in a state of
repentance to god.
Allah says,
That he had learned words of inspiration from
his Lord, so then God relented towards him
or forgave him. And according to this hadith,
which is related by Sidh Umar ibn Khattab
Radhi Allah Tal Anhu, a companion of the
prophet Muhammad.
Adam said, for the sake of Muhammad forgive
me.
And
Allah forgave
him.
Right? And then God, Allah
manifested himself in no anthropomorphic type of way,
without any type of modality.
And he said to Adam, How do you
know of Muhammad?
And he said, well, when you created me
and blew into my nostrils of your ruh,
of your spirit, again in no anthropomorphic
type of way,
I opened my eyes and I saw written
on the Arsh, on the throne,
La ilaha illallah Muhammadur Rasulullah.
There is no god except
Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala, and Muhammad is the
messenger or the apostle of God. And I
knew that you wouldn't put anyone's name next
to yours unless they were extremely beloved to
you.
And then God said to him, yes. This
is my beloved. If I would not have
created him, I would not have created
the cosmos.
So my
question to many Muslims
is
that when we know the name of the
prophet is written on the
throne, and that God has said,
Have we not exalted your name?
What could any one person possibly do to
compromise that about the Prophet, peace be upon
him? No one can no one can touch
his rank. He's untouchable.
It's like one of my teachers
used the analogy of dogs barking at the
moon.
Right? Because the prophet oftentimes is compared to
the moon and a lot of devotional poetry
about him, peace be upon him. So when
dogs are barking at the moon, does it
affect
the moon, the beauty of the moon as
it traverses through the majestic sky?
No. The moon doesn't even it's not affected
one iota by the barking of dogs.
Right? It continues to be beautiful.
And for those of us on earth, the
dark the the barking of dogs
is just white noise.
Right? It's just annoying.
But nothing can touch his rank. So the
name of the prophet is Muhammad,
and this is on the second verbal form
in Arabic.
It's a form, denoting intensity
or repetition.
It's a,
it's a passive participle,
meaning the one who is constantly
praised.
Right?
Now
Muslims,
they're 1 out of 4 human beings on
earth is Muslim,
and Muslims pray 5 times a day. So
someone
right now
in the world is praying to God.
A Muslim is praying to God. 247.
And Muslims in their prayers will send blessings
of peace upon the Prophet Muhammad, peace be
upon him. So every second
of every minute of every hour
of every day,
of every week,
of every month, of every year, of every
decade,
of every
century, of every millennium, 247,
someone is sending blessings of peace upon the
prophet Muhammad
And that's what's going on in the terrestrial
realm. In the celestial realm, we are told
in the Quran,
That God Himself,
who is Allah
The one who created everything.
He is sending blessings of peace upon the
Prophet Muhammad,
peace be upon him.
So what is our praising compared to his
praising?
Right? It's nothing. It's like putting a needle
into an ocean
and extracting the needle and comparing
the ocean water with the water on the
needle. It's nothing. When God praises the prophet,
what is our praise of him? Absolutely nothing.
So these ad hominem attacks,
right, against the prophet, peace be upon him,
These are something you know, these are things
that don't surprise me.
And if something is not surprising to me,
it doesn't make me angry. Of course, it
concerns me. You know, I've I've concern for
the human condition. I'd like to know why
people are doing that.
But if you expect someone to do something,
how can it get you angry? How can
it anger you? If you're,
expecting to meet someone
at 1 o'clock for lunch and they arrive
on time, then that's fine. If they're late
a half an hour,
then you might become angry. But it's better
to show patience.
But if they call you in advance
and they tell you I'm gonna be late
a half an hour,
So they show up half an hour late
and then you get angry. Your anger is
not justified.
Because why? Because you expect this type of
thing. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says in the
Quran,
that you will hear much from those who
received the book before you,
and those who associate partners with God.
You're going to hear much from those who
received previous dispensations,
like Jews and Christians and many other peoples.
That's going to annoy you. That's going to
be offensive to you.
Right?
But then Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala tells us
how to react in these situations.
But to show patience
and to show,
self restraint.
In Nazarikim and Azmul Umur.
This is the final this is the best
reaction.
This is the determining factor in all affairs.
That we show patience and we show
self constraint. Jesus Christ, peace be upon him,
is reported to have said to his disciples
in Matthew, blessed are you when men revile
you and persecute you and say all kinds
of evil about you falsely.
Rejoice and be exceedingly glad
for great is your reward in heaven. They
persecuted the prophets
that came before you.
So we have to understand
that certain people have agendas. Since 2001,
7 individuals were paid a total of $42,000,000
to denigrate
Islamic sanctity. We'll get into more of that
later inshallah ta'ala.
So there's a verse in the Quran which
says, Say
and God is speaking in the first instance
to the Holy Prophet, peace be upon him,
and by extension to all of us. Say,
they are not the same.
Pure things and foul things, even though the
sheer amount of the foul things might surprise
you.
Even though the
the the amount of these foul things,
might
sway your judgement,
potentially.
Right? So it's interesting because
when our youth,
go on the Internet, the Google, whatever, and
Yahoo, and they put in the name Muhammad,
you have page after page after page after
page of Chaba'if, of foulness.
Right? And this is very dangerous for youth
because they don't know how to navigate, and
many of them don't know how to have
access to qualified scholarship.
And this is something that's interesting. This is
the kind of a genre of literature now,
is these ad hominem attacks against the prophet.
And they're very good sellers.
Right? The truth about Muhammad,
Islamic invasion. There's one called prophet of doom.
There's one called the psychology of Muhammad. The
latest from Robert Spencer is Did Muhammad Exist?
Right? This type of thing.
I mean, these are things that we find
in a bookstore, a whole genre of literature.
There's many things that aren't even reported by
the American media that we read,
about from over overseas. For example, a very
interesting thing.
Recently, a group of rabbis, they met in
a place called Kiryat Arvah,
which is a
a suburb of Hebron
in Palestine. So it's called Khalil in Arabic.
This is where Ibrahim or Abraham is buried.
And they had a majlis. They had a
gathering.
What was the purpose of this gathering?
Was to send cursings or curse the prophet
Muhammad, laan upon Muhammad salallahu alayhi wasalam. This
was the whole purpose of the gathering, is
to sit around
and pronounce
anathemas, to curse the prophet. It's really strange,
but this thing happens this type of thing
happens all the time.
And it shouldn't surprise us.
Right? Because Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala, God tells
us in the Quran that you should expect
that to happen.
You should expect that to happen. It doesn't
touch the rank of the prophet 1 iota,
not 1 iota.
Allah
is sending blessings of peace upon the prophet,
God Himself.
Nothing can touch his rank.
Show patience
and self restraint.
And then it says, fataqullah.
So fear God. Fear God meaning according to
the, exigits of the Quran, to have self
restraint because violence
is the language of the inarticulate.
And no one was more articulate than the
prophet Muhammad peace be upon him. He said,
I was given
comprehensive
and articulate speech, dropping diamonds and pearls
every time he opened his mouth.
The Quran says. Oh people of albab.
Albab is the plural of lub.
Lub is
the core
or the seed or the kernel of something.
So the heart has these 4 spiritual layers.
The sadr, the qarit, the fu'ad
and then the lub. This is the place
of intuitive,
not discursive
cognition.
The seat of essential understanding
and discernment. Real knowledge
to preserve to pres perceive the world as
it is in reality.
This is what happens in the loop. So
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, god is telling us,
people of extreme intelligence,
people of discernment,
you should know that just because there's a
proliferation
of foul things, it doesn't make it true.
Right? You should be able to
discern.
So that's very important. Now there are 3
ways of looking at the prophet.
There's 3 ways of knowing according to our
epistemology.
The first way is by our senses,
called al Hawasul Khamz.
Our senses. And we know that our senses
are extremely limited. So when you read something
about the prophet that's based on understanding him
through the 5 senses, it's very dry. It's
like reading a description of him in a
history book. You know, names and dates and
so on and so forth. But we know
that our senses can also deceive us. Right?
There's the classic example of the 4 blind
men touching 4 different parts of an elephant.
Right? And then they're asked, what does an
elephant look like? And one says, oh, he's
very long like a snake as he touched
the trunk. One says, he's very light and
floppy because he touched the ear. And one
says, oh, he's huge and he's fat because
he touched the stomach. Who's right? None of
them. Right? They're based that's based on their
senses. Even if they can look at the
elephant, they're still limited. It's what's on the
other side of the elephant, what's on the
inside of the elephant. Right? So Allah subhanahu
wa ta'ala says to the prophet in the
Quran,
When you call them to guidance,
they don't hear you. You see them looking
at you, but they didn't see.
You see them looking at you, but they
don't see.
Right? In other words, they're looking with basar,
with their physical eyes, but the basira,
the insight, the inner eye is blind.
Right? They have hearts by which they don't
perceive.
They have eyes by which they don't see.
They have ears by which they don't hear.
They're like cattle or even worse.
They're heedless. Right? Seeing, they see not. Hearing,
they hear not, neither do they understand. This
is from Jesus Christ, peace be upon him,
according
to the New Testament gospel.
So when people look at the prophet through
their senses,
like many of his generation did, like this
man Abu Jahl, who hated the prophet, right,
and fought against the prophet. When he looked
at the prophet, he said, this is yateem
bani Hashim.
This is,
he's an orphan
from my clan. He's my neighbor.
So he he used to be a ra'i.
He was a shepherd.
So he's a prophet now?
He's claiming to be a prophet. Why can't
I be a prophet?
Right? He's looking at the prophet through his
senses.
When certain Jewish elements in Galilee looked at
Jesus,
same type of thing. This is
a carpenter, son of a carpenter.
He's from a backwater town called Nazareth. Can
anything good come from Nazareth? Right? As Nathaniel
says in John.
Right? They have a weird accent.
The Northern Galilean Jews had a weird, now
he's the Messiah.
Are you kidding me?
Right? Why?
Because they're judging Jesus, peace be upon him,
by their senses. That's one way of knowing
something is from your senses. But again, the
senses can deceive us.
The second way of knowing something, which is
at a higher level, is from the intellect,
which is called aqal.
Right?
So to give you an example
of how our senses can truly deceive of
Imam Al Ghazali,
who's a great theologian and philosopher in the
medieval times, in his book Mishkatul
Anwar,
he says, look at the sun. Someone who
looks at the sun without intellect
may come to the conclusion that the sun
is no bigger than a dirham,
which is a silver coin. Look, it's only
about that big. Right? But his intellect knows
better.
His intellect knows better that it appears to
be the size of a dirham, but it's
millions and millions of miles away, 93,000,000 miles
away. Or just look at a small boy,
he doesn't appear to be changing, but your
intellect knows better. He is changing. He's getting
older, but you don't perceive it. But you
know it's happening. Or say, Describe a tree
to me. He says, you might you might
say, the trunk, the branches, the leaves.
Is that it? You say, no. There's also
the,
the roots. Right? You say, well, I can't
see the roots, but you know they're there.
Your intellect
knows better.
But with the intellect as well, we find
that there's
a, a limit. The intellect as well has
a jurisdiction.
Intellect cannot prove everything. Science cannot prove everything.
Science cannot prove morality.
Can science prove someone's moral
morality over someone else's morality? No. Science is
fundamentally
non moral, not immoral.
Fundamentally
non moral. It doesn't deal with morality. It
cannot prove morality.
Science cannot prove metaphysical events, things that happened
in the past. Can it prove what I
did last week? Prove it. No. You cannot
reproduce it. You can't prove anything. You can
produce evidence, but can you prove it? No.
You can't. Science cannot prove human emotion like
love. Can you prove I love someone? You
prove I hate someone? You can't prove it.
So he he's he's sweating his heart. How
do you know what emotion that is? How
do you know what's going on in my
heart? You have no idea. Can't prove it.
Science cannot prove mathematics.
It uses mathematics. It takes it for granted.
Right? If you claim that science proves mathematics,
then you're arguing in a circle.
It takes it for granted.
So when people look at the prophet Muhammad
through
their aqal, through their intellect,
Non Muslims, they have glowing tributes about him
because they understand just from intellect,
just from their reason that this was a
great human being.
George Bernard Shaw. He called the prophet the
savior of humanity.
Thomas Carlyle. He said that he's my hero
prophet.
Alphonse de la Martin, in the history of
Turkey, 18/70,
he says, that is Mohammed as regards
the standards by which all human greatness may
be measured.
We may well ask, is there any man
greater than he?
Michael Hart, he wrote a book in 1978.
All Muslims know about this book. Right?
He said that the most influential human being
in the history of the world was Mohammed.
He's not a Muslim.
Right? This is based on his understanding, on
his research, on his aqal, on his intellect.
Then you have Gandhi, John William Draper, and
the list goes on and on and on.
That's the second way of knowing. And then
there's a third way of knowing, which is
called episteme.
This is the highest way of knowing. Episteme
is a Greek word.
It's a compound word. Epi is a preposition,
which means to stand which means to be
upon something, and histamine means to stand upon
something.
Right? So the the,
the analogy here, according to Platonic Socrates,
is like standing on the top rung of
a ladder and having a god's eye view
of the world. To see the world, in
other words, as it really is. True knowledge.
This is called ma'arifah in Arabic.
Ma'arifah.
And it's by way of Hidaya.
True gnosis is given by guidance from God.
It's only given by guidance
from Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala. The Ahlul Sufiah,
the Sufis I'm talking about the true Sufis,
not the goofy Sufis.
They call it
Knowledge directly imparted by God
through mystic intuition.
And there's evidence of this in the Quran.
There's a person named Khidr in the Quran
who encounters Moses, or vice versa. Moses encounters
Khidr. And Moses is a prophet and he
has exalted status. He's a prophet. And he
meets this man Khidr. And God describes Khidr
by saying,
That we taught him
special knowledge from ourselves.
Right? Given either through a ruya,
a dream, a vision, or ilham,
or some sort of inspiration.
I'll give you an example of this. And
this is,
and Allahu Adam, whether,
God knows whether this is a true example
of episteme, but it's very, very interesting.
And it wasn't reported
it was only reported by one of the
media outlets in Israel, Palestine.
There was a rabbi in 2,008
whose name was Rabbi Yixa Khuduri.
Right? And he died in 2,008. He was
a 108 years old when he died.
Okay?
108 years old when he died. And it
is it had been his claim the last
few years of his life
that almost every night, he would be visited
in his dream by the Messiah, who would
come to him in his dream.
Right?
And he would have this conversation with the
Messiah.
And he was declared a tzaddik, this man,
Rabbi
Yixar Khuduri. Tzaddik means he's basically
a great saint
of Judaism.
He had these visions of the messiah. And
then on one of the visions,
the messiah reveals to him his name.
This is my name, and it was embedded
within a statement.
Right? So he wrote it down, and he
told his son, who is an 80 year
old man,
he said, when I die,
wait 1 year and then open this and
you can read it and you can discover
the name of the Messiah.
Right?
So
Rabbi Khuduri, he died. A year later, his
son opened
the
this note he had written, which the messiah
revealed his name.
And it said in Hebrew,
When you read this statement, the translation is,
he will raise up the people and he
will prove that his word and his law
are standing.
He will prove that his law
and his word is standing.
So
initially, Christians did not like this statement
because it seems to slight their understanding of
the Torah, that it's been abrogated.
Right? That it's,
we're free from the bondage,
the curse of the law, as Paul says
in Galatians. We're living in the grace,
not that his law is standing.
Right? So initially, it didn't like this statement.
But then,
we can actually extract the name of the
Messiah from this statement. You take the first
letter of every word, and what do you
get? You get Yeshua.
Yehoshua,
actually.
Yehoshua,
which is
the word for Joshua,
but it's also the Hebrew way of saying
Jesus.
Right? This is how you say Jesus in
Hebrew.
So
after that, many of the Jewish elements, they
didn't like this statement as well. But we
Muslims have no problem with the statement.
Right? We have no problems with the statement.
Jesus is the Messiah.
We believe that. The Quran says so. And
the Quran says that Jesus said, Musaddiqalimabeinaya
dei mina Torah,
that I have come to confirm
the essence of the Torah, the law of
Moses.
Whether that's an example of episteme or not,
God God knows. Just wanted to give you
that interesting example.
So we have senses. We have and we
have episteme. Now when we deal with with
intellect,
the questions that we ask are what and
how.
And when we deal with episteme, true knowledge,
we ask a question of why. So I'll
give you an example. William Chittick uses this
example in his book, The Vision of Islam.
He says, imagine you have a painting like
the Mona Lisa or something, and you tell
a scientist
to talk about this painting. So the scientist,
he runs a battery of tests
on the painting because the scientist is oriented
towards
what and how. Right?
So he'll say, you know, he'll do some
carbon 14
test or whatever it is. He'll do some
tests on the canvas and on the paint.
Oh, say this paint is from 15th century
Florence.
All of these tests describing these minute details
about the physical
physicality
of of the painting.
But then you ask a small boy,
right, what do you think about the painting?
And the small boy will say, I wonder
what the artist was thinking about when he
drew this picture.
So my question is, which of these 2
has a greater understanding
as to the mind of the artist?
Which of these 2? Is the second one?
The boy.
Right? Because he's asking the question of why.
What's the purpose of the painting? And it's
the same thing with the universe. When it
comes to the universe, we have what and
how. What happened? There's a explosion of a
primeval atom. How did it happen?
Scientists don't really know, but Lawrence Krauss says
13.72
something I mean, they can date the universe
to 4 decimal points, according to Lawrence Krauss.
They can date the age of the universe
to 4 decimal points. 13.725,
6,000,000,000 years. Right? But how did it happen?
They still don't know how it happened
because how can you get something from nothing?
Right? That's impossible.
When does that happen in nature?
How can he get something from nothing?
Right? So to believe in that like, this
this there's an atheist named Daniel Dennett who
said that the universe came from nothing, for
nothing, by nothing.
Right? It's interesting statement because that's worse than
believing in magic.
Right? Because if I pull a rabbit out
of my hat, I'm still producing something in
its real magic, let's say. It's not an
illusion. It's not sleight of hand. Let's just
say I produce a rabbit out of my
hat.
I'm still producing something from something.
Thin air is something.
It's certainly not nothing.
Right? When we talk about nothing, we're talking
about the the absence of being.
Aristotle said, nothing is what stones
dream
about. What do stones dream about?
Nothing.
Right?
How do you get a universe out of
nothing?
So they don't know how this happened.
Right? So ultimately, they're going to make a
metaphysical claim.
So it Daniel Dennett says, the same atheist.
He says, the universe
in an unbelievable
act pulled itself up by its own bootstraps.
Can you pull yourself off the ground by
your bootstraps?
No, it's impossible. That's a miracle. It's a
metaphysical
claim.
Either way you slice it, we all make
metaphysical types of claims. How do you
reconcile infinite regression? Because it used to be
that the universe was infinite in the past.
Right? This was the standard model of the
universe.
That it was chaos
and it's,
and it has negative infinitude
and then God at some point turned the
chaos into cosmos,
into order. No one believes in this anymore.
This is an old world view, an old
cosmology.
Right?
Infinite, but that doesn't solve infinite regression.
Right? There has to be a primary cause.
For example, if there's someone standing in front
of me
and I say to him, I'm going to
give you a hug.
Right? But first, I have to ask this
guy behind me.
Can I give him a hug? He says,
hold on. Let me ask the guy behind
me. Right? And he said, hold on. Let
me ask the guy behind me. Let me
ask the guy behind me. Let me ask
the guy behind me. Let me ask the
guy behind
me.
And this goes on ad infinitum,
like what they used to believe. The universe
is eternal in the past.
There's no beginning.
Will I ever hug the man?
I'll never hug him. So when you ask
the question, then who created the creator? That's
tantamount
to disbelieving in the existence of a universe.
There's something here. Eventually, I hug the man.
Eventually, there was a universe. How can you
traverse
an infinite number of events? It's philosophically
and rationally impossible
to traverse a negative infinitude.
There had to have been a space time
beginning, a cosmogenesis,
where space and time and materiality
came into being.
Who has the ability to do that? One
who is necessarily
spaceless,
timeless,
and immaterial,
and apparently extremely powerful.
Right? This is a simple answer. This is
how we can philosoph this is called the
kalam cosmological
argument that Christian and Muslim philosophers have used
since the Middle Ages.
A philosophical argument
that proves that God creates
out of nothing.
Right?
So
this is
to make a long story short, the
the atheist or the scientist will tell you
what is the universe
and he'll give you an idea of how
it happened,
but he can't tell you why it happened.
This is where episteme comes into play. Episteme,
marifa, the highest type of knowledge. Why did
it happen? This comes from God.
This comes from Hidayah, from guidance,
from God.
It's like one of my teachers, Abdullah bin
Beyah, who's a great contemporary scholar,
wrote a letter to extremist Muslims.
Right? And he said he said to
them,
He said, you know what your Lord said,
you know what he said, but you don't
know why he said it. Anyone can quote
the Quran and justify anything. I can quote
the Bible and justify the killing of anything,
of children massacre. I can quote anything and
make it look like a terrible book. I
can quote Thomas Aquinas and make him look
like a
homicidal maniac. I can quote Augustine of Hippo.
I can anyone can quote anything.
The question is,
what is the per why was that verse
what is the context? That's the most important
thing. This is a higher level of of
understanding.
So let's look at some of the
hadith of the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon
him. These are statements of the prophet rigorously
authenticated.
All Muslims believe in the statements of the
prophet.
Most Muslims have heard of them, but I'm
guessing that most non Muslims have not heard
of them.
So
when we're dealing with the prophet, the verse
of the Quran that is kind of our
anchor is in chapter 21 of the Quran,
verse number 107,
in which it says,
And this answers the question of why was
the prophet sent.
We did not send thee except as a
mercy
unto all the worlds.
He was sent as a mercy to all
the worlds.
Is everything in existence except for God. He
was sent to everything. He's a cosmopolitan shepherd.
This is the greatest demonstration of God's mercy.
And Aquinas, for example, Christian philosopher, will say
the same thing about Jesus Because Aristotle said
that it's impossible.
Right? Aristotle was a deist, so to speak,
that it's impossible for God to truly love
man, cause they're not the same genus.
Right? Like, he'll he'll argue that you don't
really love your dog, do you? You don't
really love him. You might claim, I I
love my dog. But do you really love
your dog? He'll say, no, you can't love
your dog. You're not he's not a human
being. So how do you bridge this gap?
How do you bridge the gap? Right? You
bridge the gap according to Aquinas by God
becoming a man and becoming the genus of
a man.
Right? In Islam,
the gap is bridged by God sending messengers
that he does not need to send. It
is an act of mercy and love. There's
nothing
compulsory upon God.
Right? So we talk when we talk about
God as a primary cause or the first
cause,
Some of the theologians, they don't like calling
him that because they say in your mind,
when you think of a cause, you automatically
attribute to that cause an effect.
There's cause and then there's a necessary effect.
If you're gonna talk about God as a
cause, you should know or detach this idea
that he must necessarily
affect something. He doesn't need to affect anything
unless he chooses to. God is a free
agent. He's al fa'il, as Imam Al Ghazali
calls him.
So this hadith
is
in Musdal Ahmad. The prophet said,
That God shows mercy to those who show
mercy.
Show mercy to those on earth, and the
one in heaven will show you mercy.
This hadith is taught to children at 5
years old. It's called hadith al Rahma, the
hadith of mercy. This is the hadith that
sets the foundation of their Islamic education.
There's 23 links in the chain of this
hadith all the way back to the prophet.
23 links that go back 1400 years. It's
a sound, rigorously authenticated hadith.
Show mercy to those on earth, and the
one in heaven will show you mercy. This
is what children learn at 5 years old.
Another hadith. The prophet said,
You will not enter paradise until you truly
believe,
and you will not truly believe until you
love one another.
Right? Love one another. And he said
to his disciples or,
companions,
shall I tell you of something that will
increase your love? And they said, yes. And
he said, Afshu Salaam Abaynaqum.
Spread peace amongst yourselves.
Love and peace,
fundamentals of Islam.
In case you didn't know.
Another hadith.
He said, oh people spread peace,
feed one another,
maintain ties of kinship,
and pray in the night when others are
asleep, and you will enter paradise in peace.
The person who related this hadith was a
rabbi in Medina named Abdul Abdullah ibnu
Salam. Another hadith.
He said, none of you none of you
believe until you love for your brother what
you love for yourself.
Right?
And the commentators of hadith are unanimous.
That when he said brother here, he's not
simply talking about your Muslim brother. He's talking
about your brother or sister in all of
humanity.
That you prefer others over yourself. This is
called altruism.
In Arabic it's called Ithar.
Right? Imam Nawawi, he commented on his hadith
and he said, this means love for humanity,
Brother and sister, put them above yourself.
One time, Imam Nawawi,
he was walking down the street, the same
man who commented on this hadith. He was
a great scholar of hadith.
He's walking down the street and a thief
ran up behind him
and snatched his bag and and took off
running.
So the imam, what does he do? He
starts running after him.
This is an old man.
He says running after the thief.
And he's shouting
at the thief.
He says,
please ask me for it.
Ask me for it.
And he says, what?
The thief says, what?
Ask me for that.
And he says, can I have this?
He says, yes. And he stops running.
Right? He didn't want him to be punished
by the authorities.
He didn't want him to be punished by
God because he's stealing from a scholar.
He prefers others over himself.
This is called i'thar, altruism. This is the
teaching of our prophet
Another hadith,
He is not a Muslim or a true
believer,
who goes to bed satiated
while his neighbor is hungry.
Right? This is in Bukhari.
The prophet, when he was living in Mecca,
he had a neighbor, who was a woman,
who did not like him, and every morning
she would put his she would put her
filth on his doorstep.
So every morning when he would leave his
house and it was still dark, he would
go to the mosque and worship. He would
have to
cross over and move this filth
out of his doorstep.
Now one day the filth wasn't
there, so now he's concerned.
Now he's concerned about her. Right? The filth
is not there. Now he's asking, where's the
where's this woman? Is she okay?
Right? She didn't leave any filth on my
doorstep.
So he finds out that she is very
ill and about to pass away. So he
goes and visits her, and this touches her
heart, and she becomes Muslim, and she passes
away.
Right? So the Prophet, peace be upon him,
he said, Gabriel exhorted me to be so
kind to my neighbor that I thought he
would command me to make my neighbor my
successor.
Right? This is how much
the love of neighbors is important.
Like Rabbi Akiva said in the 2nd century,
he said,
Leviticus 1918,
love your neighbor as yourself. That is the
entire Torah and everything else is commentary.
Another hadith, the prophet said,
He said, facilitate things for people. Make them
easy for people. Don't make things difficult.
Give people glad tidings, and don't drive them
away from you.
Right? So we talk we talk about, you
know, Islamic law
a lot. Muslims have to pray, they have
to fast, so on and so forth. We
fast during the month of Ramadan,
30 29 or 30 day fast. There's a
story of there's a hadith
of the prophet when he was living in
Medina.
A man came to him and said, oh
Messenger of God, I intentionally broke my fast
during Ramadan. I couldn't help myself. It was
one of the first few days of Ramadan.
Right? So I broke my fast. And according
to Islamic law, there's a kafara, there's an
expiation you have to pay if you break
your fast intentionally.
Right? So the prophet said to him, you
have to fast
60 consecutive days now.
And he said, I I can't even fast
5 days,
and I couldn't control myself.
So the prophet said, can you afford to
free a slave?
He said, no. I can't afford that.
So then the prophet said to him,
you have to feed
60
people.
He said, I have nothing.
Feed feed what? I don't have anything. So
the prophet himself, he goes out and purchases
a large basket of dates
and gives it to the man.
And says, Here, take this and feed people
with it.
And the man says, Who feed who?
And the prophet says,
the poor people. Go give it to the
poor people. And then he says, oh messenger
of God, wallahi, I swear to God,
nobody is more poor
in the city of Medina except my own
wife and kids,
my own family.
There's no one more poor.
The prophet laughed
and he said take this and give it
to your family.
Right? So this is
justice being meted out of him
by the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam. You
break the law, you're gonna get punished.
Right? This is the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa
sallam
fulfilling this man's kafarah, his expiation for breaking
the law.
Another hadith.
This is a hadith of the prophet
that he uttered
during the farewell pilgrimage,
Hajjatulwada,
in front of over a 100000 people. One
of the last things one of the last
sermons he ever made, he made sure that
there was hundreds of thousands of people that
were there to record his statement.
Right, and to remember what he had said.
Treat women
well.
Treat women well.
A man came to him and said,
Oh Messenger of God, who do you love
the most
from from amongst the people?
So and he said, Aisha. His
wife.
Right? And according to the Arab culture at
that time, it was seen as sort of
uncouth
to admit that you love your wife.
Right? It wasn't seen as quite chivalrous
or
manly
to admit that you love of course, you
love your wife, but you'll go into the
tent and say, you know, honey, I love
you.
But to say it out in the open
like that. Right? So he's breaking this cultural
norm. And he's using her first name, which
is something the Arabs did not do either.
Aisha.
Right? He loves his wife. When his daughter
Fatima used to come into
his gathering, his little daughter Fatima, when she
was very young, he used to rise from
his seat.
Right? And he used to kiss her on
the hands and on the forehead.
I heard from a Muslim one time. I
was in a mosque a couple of years
ago. My daughter ran up to me. I
grabbed her and I and I hugged her.
And he said to me, What are you
doing? He said, Astaghfirullah.
May God forgive me. What are you doing?
I said, What? What's wrong brother?
If my father saw you do that, he'd
beat you with a stick. I said, why?
Back home in our country, we don't even
look at our daughters. Really?
You don't look at your daughters?
The Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alaihi wa sallam, who's
best of creation, according to our prophetology, when
his daughter Fatima entered the room, he would
rise from his seat.
A little girl walk into the room, kiss
her on the hands, kiss her on the
forehead.
He used to pass his hand over
small children who were playing in the street,
touch the tops of their heads, and blessed
them, make du'a for them, and he would
greet them first. It was very hard to
preempt
the greeting of the prophet.
He would say salaam to you before you
even knew he was there. Right?
The person who initiates the salaam alaikum,
the person who initiates the greeting
is free from arrogance. This is what he
said. And he would not let let go
of your hand unless you let go of
his hand.
Right? And he used to talk to children
by getting down and looking at them eye
level, instead of looming over them and intimidating
them.
He was a huge man. Right?
He would get down and look at them
eye level. He used to play with his
grandsons.
One time he was kissing his grandsons. He
kissed his grandson on the cheek in
in this tough Bedouin Arab. Right? And the
the Bedouin were very rough around the edges.
The prophet said, whoever lives in the desert
becomes harsh, becomes gruff.
Right? So this Bedouin saw him kissing his
grandson. He said, you kiss your sons? You
kiss your grandson? And the prophet said, nam.
Yes. And he said, I have 10 sons,
and I've never kissed a single one of
them.
And he was so proud of this fact.
I've never kissed a single one of my
sons. The prophet said, there's nothing in my
religion
for those who don't have any mercy in
their hearts. There's nothing in my religion for
those who have no mercy in their hearts.
Right?
So this is how he was with with
children.
Another hadith. He says,
He said this is Bukhari and Abu Dawood.
He said, feed the hungry, visit the sick,
and free the slaves.
He said according to his wife, Aisha, and
who knows a man better than his wife?
Right? So this next hadith is not reported
by a male companion who might have seen
him once a month, or once a week,
or something, or in public places, but never
in private.
This is his wife, Aisha, who grew up
in his household.
When, when she was 8, 9, 10 years
old, she's been in his household. And Imam
Ali reports the same hadith, almost verbatim, and
he was also raised in the household of
the Prophet.
She says,
In another translation,
or another transmission,
She says, the prophet Muhammad
did
not strike anything with his hand.
Did not strike anything with his hand. Did
not strike a woman, did not strike a
servant,
did not strike a child.
This is what his wife says. Who knows
better than his wife?
The Quran says,
You have in the messenger of God a
beautiful pattern of conduct.
He said, peace be upon him,
He said, don't take the back of your
beasts
as pulpits.
Right? In other words, don't sit on your
camel, don't sit on your donkey, or your
horse, and start pontificating
about things.
Right?
Dismount and then you can talk, because it
hurts the back of the animal.
So animal rights.
He
said, Don't curse the rooster.
Why? Because he wakes you up for prayer.
Don't curse the We don't hear a lot
of roosters around here, do we?
But in pre modern times, we'd hear roosters
right at the time of suhoor, just before
the dawn prayer.
Another hadith. Aisha relates,
That the prophet was not crude
and did not engage in crude language.
He did not raise his voice in the
marketplace,
which is very interesting because a lot of
Muslim scholars, they'll look for Mohammedan
typologies in the Old Testament, very much like
Christian scholars do with with Jesus.
They'll look at prophecies, Christological
typologies in the Old Testament, and say these
are fulfilled by Jesus. In Isaiah chapter 42,
we're told of a slave of God who
is the chosen one of God, and it
describes him by saying,
that he will not raise his voice in
the marketplace.
Right? So Aisha says this,
He will not return an evil for an
evil. That's what she says. The prophet did
not return an evil for an evil.
But he would forgive and overlook.
The prophet said,
There is neither facilitating harm
nor reciprocating
harm.
Do not facilitate harm, and if harm is
done to you, do not reciprocate harm. Right?
This is what he said.
We all know this famous story. The Muslims
know it quite well.
One time, a Bedouin again, they're kinda rough
around the edges. He comes into the mosque
in Medina, and begins to relieve himself.
Right? And the hadith says,
The people got up and they were going
to attack him
in mid urination, which is a big no
no. Right? So the prophet said, Daruhu, leave
him. And he said, oh, turn around and
Yeah.
Leave leave him alone. So then the prophet
himself approaches the man
and he says,
Right? He's, oh, my Arab brother. He's trying
to
make a connection with him. So, you know,
these are places of worship
and reading of the Quran,
and remembrance of God. You don't do things
in here. And the man honestly didn't know.
So he washed himself and he prayed with
the Muslims, and he became Muslim.
Right?
Because the prophet showed him this,
gentleness, this rifq.
Right?
In the Quran, we are told that God
tells Moses and Aaron to go to pharaoh,
and to speak to him,
Speak to him with mild words
to pharaoh.
Who on earth is worse than pharaoh?
Nobody.
Who on earth is better than Moses? Nobody.
Right?
One time the prophet was in Medina
and he was walking with Aisha. And there
was at times in Medina there was some
animosity
between,
Jewish elements and the Arabs.
Right? They're walking past a group of Jews,
and one of the Jewish men who passed
by the prophet, he said, Samu Alaikum.
Right? Very quickly,
sounds like, but
means may death be upon you. Instead of,
may peace be upon you. So Aisha
immediately jumps all over the guy and says,
Right? And upon you, and the curse of
God, and the wrath of God.
Right?
So the prophet looks at her and says,
Yeah, Aisha.
Oh Aisha, I exhort you to have gentleness.
I exhort you to have gentleness.
And I warn you not to have violence
or harsh language.
Right? So then she says, O Messenger of
God, she thought maybe he didn't hear what
they said.
Maybe he thought that they said, Assalamu Alaikum.
Right? So she said, didn't you hear what
they said? And he said, didn't you hear
what I said?
Right? So he's setting He's the teacher. He's
making the example.
That's important. There's a hadith of Anas ibn
Malik, one of the companions of the prophet,
where
he says that there was a boy in
Medina whose bird had died.
His pet bird, it was a bulbul, a
nightingale.
Right? And this boy was just inconsolable. You
know, like children, they love pets, and then
when the pet dies, they're just you know,
for a couple days, they're just inconsolable.
Right?
So the prophet heard about this and he
said, I have to visit him. Now if
you think about this, the prophet from a
from a temporal perspective is the head of
state in Medina.
Right?
He's got so much on his plate. Now
he's gonna visit a boy whose bird died.
Right?
From a spiritual standpoint, he's the prophet of
God.
He is the best of creation.
But he goes and visits his boy,
and he says to
the
boy,
Oh father of Umer.
The bird's name was Umer apparently.
What did the bird used to do?
Tell me about the bird.
And then the boy says, he used to
sing this song, and he used to chirp
in the morning. You know, it's therapeutic.
Right? So he used to visit children who
were sick.
This was not he didn't oh, I'm I'm
the messenger of God.
What do you think? I'm gonna go visit
some boy?
Right? He didn't consider it above, below him.
The prophet, peace be upon him, had compassion
for
everything and for everyone.
And this is evident in many hadith. One
time they were traveling to a place
with a group of his companions, and there
was a shortage of food.
It was very little food. And a companion
named Abdullah ibn Mughafal al Muzani
He found this piece of meat,
right, a small piece of meat that he
had, and he puts it under his
arm like this.
Right? So he gets down low to the
ground and he says,
And he just says it under his breath.
I'm not going to share this with anybody.
I'm not gonna share this with anyone.
Right? And then he said, he looked up
and at a distance away,
Several several
yards away.
Was it possible for him him to have
heard him? He sees the prophet looking at
him.
And the prophet is smiling at him.
And it's a disapproving smile.
Right? And you can tell the prophet was
angry.
How can you tell the prophet was angry?
One time Sayidna Umar was reading something, and
he looked up and the prophet was angry.
So he he dropped what he was reading.
They asked our model, how did you know
he was angry? And Omar said, he was
smiling.
What?
He was smiling? He said, yes. Because the
prophet, when he would get angry, unlike us,
when we get angry, we start cussing,
we start throwing things, they're beating up people.
Right? We start acting like tyrants.
No. No. No. When he got angry, his
face would turn slightly red. There would be
a vein protruding in the middle of his
forehead, and he would smile. This is how
he got angry. Did not raise his voice.
Right? So Abdullah ibn Muqaffal al Muzani, he
sees the prophet smiling at him, a disapproving
smile. So he called 5 other men, and
they all shared this little piece of meat
that he had found.
Right? So the prophet has,
concern for his ummah, even to that degree.
According to descriptions of the prophet,
he's described as Mutawasil Al Aghzan,
that he had the appearance of being grief
stricken.
Right?
And so the scholars of hadith, they elaborate
on this, and they say that in his
isolation or in his solitude,
right, when he was by himself, he had
the appearance like he was grieving, but he
was not grieving.
He was contemplating.
He was very contemplative.
He was raptured. It's called istighraq.
He was absorbed
in the presence of his Lord.
Right? He was very contemplative.
And then it says that when he was
with the people,
But when he was with his people, he
was always smiling
and laughing.
And this is one of his names, Adhaq,
the laughing prophet.
The Quran says,
You're almost killing yourself with grief over them
because they won't believe. He had great concern
for people. The Quran says,
And there's no taksees in this verse. There's
no specification
that this is only for believers.
He says, there has come unto you all
a messenger.
It grieves him that you should perish. Deeply
concerned is he about you.
I want to tell you a story by
way of comparison.
So in the book of 2nd Kings
in the Old Testament,
we're told the story of a Hebrew prophet
named Elisha.
K? He's a Hebrew prophet according to,
Judaism and Christianity. He's believed to be a
prophet. His name is Alisha.
Right? Alisha is going up to a place
called Beth El.
And as he's going up,
a group of boys begin following him.
And the the Hebrew says, very small boys.
And the boys,
they start making fun of him.
They start saying to him,
in Hebrew.
That means go, Baldy. He has a bald
spot. Get going, Baldy.
Hurry up, Baldy.
So Elisha, a prophet of God,
what does he do?
He supplicates and curses them in the name
of God.
Then what happens? These 2 bears
bears
come out of the forest, and they completely
rip apart.
42 young boys who are making fun of
a prophet's bald spot.
Right? Apparently, he's very very sensitive.
We look at the prophet Muhammad sallallahu alaihi
wasallam. He went to a city called the
Ta'if.
Right? Outside of Mecca
to call the people to Islam.
He was rejected by the people. He was
stoned out of the city by the slaves
and the children.
And they were punching him. His feet were
covered in blood. He lost consciousness,
pushing him down, kicking him, spitting on him.
Right? He collapsed under a tree and an
orchard.
And we're told according to our traditions
that the angel of wrath descended
and said, Oh messenger of God,
give me the word
and we will destroy the city.
Right?
What he said,
No. I have hope in their descendants. If
they're not gonna accept it, maybe their descendants
will.
Stoned out of the city.
Bleeding unconscious.
Did not
seek retribution.
On the day of the conquest of Mecca,
I highly recommend people to read the biography
of the Prophet.
Read about how he used to treat his
enemies.
Right? The conquest of Mecca, people that had
fought against him for years
years years years, over 23 years, constantly trying
to kill him and
have killed many of his companions and family
members.
Right? He forgave them on that day,
There's no blemish on you today.
There was a woman named Hind bintu'utba,
who at a battle called Uhud,
cannibalized
the Prophet's uncle Hamza.
Cut off his,
nose and ears, made a necklace,
split open his belly, took out his liver,
took a bite of it.
This woman, Hindbit Zir Bashir did this. And
Hamzah was very beloved to the prophet. He
was only 3 years older than the prophet.
He's like his brother. He loved him. The
same woman comes to the prophet on the
day of
Fat Hamakah, on the conquest of Mecca. And
she's completely veiled.
And she says to the prophet, praise be
to the one who made his religion victorious.
And the prophet says, man ant. Who are
you? And she says, this is Hind
bint Utbah.
And he says, what?
Kill her.
Marhaban.
Welcome.
Marhaban. This was his response.
There's many many examples
of this.
The Quran says,
Repel evil with that which is better.
Repel evil with beauty.
Right? This is a great Quranic
imperative.
So the question is then, if all of
these things are true, then why haven't we
heard about them?
Right? I mean, we always hear about Jesus
on the cross saying,
father, forgive them. Right? Even though most, by
the way, most New Testament scholars don't believe
that Jesus actually said that.
It's a later addition to the text. Nonetheless,
we hear about it all the time. That
doesn't mean Jesus wasn't merciful. Of course he
was. This particular text, according to the majority
of textual critics,
is not an authentic verse from the gospel
of Luke. But nonetheless, we hear it all
the time, but we don't hear any of
these things about the Prophet
And the level of misinformation
staggers me. And I'll end with this inshallah,
then we can eat and I think later
we're gonna have a q and a.
So I gave a talk one time at
a university
to students of to master's degree students, people
going for their master's in religious studies,
Christian spirituality,
getting their MDivs.
One of the questions I got from a
doctoral student,
doctoral student,
she said, why do Muslims worship Mohammed?
What? I said, wait a minute. Do do
you think we worship Mohammed? She said, no.
Why do you worship? We don't we don't
worship Mohammed. So you don't?
Right?
So this is something that's just
just so amazing to me
that the foundation of Islamic theology
is that there's nothing worthy of worship whatsoever.
Nothing worthy of worship except
God, except the creator of everything. No one
else is worthy of worship. Nothing in creation
has any intrinsic power in and of itself,
except God.
Right?
But this is someone who's going to is
almost a doctor of religion.
Imagine the average
Joe Schmo on the street. What is he
thinking about Islam?
What's his
perception about it?
What is he thinking about Muslims?
What what Muslims believe?
What Muslims what what their quote unquote agenda
is in this country? Things like that. It's
really scary stuff.
So, I hope that
I might have shed a little bit of
light on some
things and maybe
caused you to think about a few things
as well in a different way.
So at at this point, I think I'm
going to
because it's past 7 now,
and we're scheduled to have dinner.
So,
kinda let that marinate a little bit
while you're eating, and you can speak amongst
yourselves. And if you have any questions or
comments, I'll be more than happy to I
think we're gonna I'm gonna come back up
after dinner, and we can do some q
and a. And I'd like to hear from
you as well,
Thank you very much, and may God
bless you.