Ali Ataie – Practical Spiritual Tips For Purification of the Heart
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AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
There's a beautiful hadith of the prophet Muhammad
which is recorded by Imam Abu Dhabi and
Muslim.
All of you are a shepherd,
and all of you are responsible
or literally to be questioned
about your flock.
So what is our flock?
Certainly not our goats and chickens.
The urama mentioned here,
our flock is our intellect,
our family,
our limbs,
the 7 inroads to the heart,
your eyes, your ears,
your tongue,
the, stomach, the *, the hands, and the
feet. These are your thoughts. To use a
Vasarian
analogy,
these are the servants of the subjects of
the kingdom, the arid of the malbeca.
And the purpose of
these servants is to protect the king.
The king is the heart, the
the state of the heart. The state of
the heart is the most valuable thing in
your life.
If the hadith al Sahih Muslim, the prophet
said,
there is a there is a piece of
flesh
a heart that is free of spiritual diseases.
And there are many of these on and
we seek refuge in Allah.
We ask Khadik to help us
is a root to every sin.
Seek wealth and status of Allah
The time is short. The affair is very
serious.
Take your mind very seriously.
Ibn Aqibah said that every name or title
of Allah
has three aspects that relate to his creation.
And he called
these and or association,
appropriation,
and actualization.
So for example, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is
Hebraic. He is the king. Now what is
our title? What is our association to this
name? It's a recognition
that he is a king and we are
his subjects. We recognize that. There are people
who know recognizes.
This is self evident for us. It's axiomatic.
There are many people who are not self
evident. They think everything and everything.
Then what does our concept do? How do
we appropriate or assimilate this thing?
Well, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is the king
of the universe, and we have to understand
that we have to be king over our
faculties, over our limbs. So we have to
engage the spiritual path.
And then when we reach our goal, this
is called the hakot. This is called actualization.
So in other words, the goal here, the
telos of the human life is to mirror
the divine names and attributes.
This is the telos. This is the purpose
of our life.
As he
did
There is someone to give a messenger from
amongst yourselves.
To mirror divine names and attributes. This is
true in all of the Abrahamic traditions. This
is Vasilius. This is Aquinas. This is Maimonides.
A theological
or teleological
metaphysic and an end oriented or goal oriented
metaphysic.
So our metaphysicians,
they've identified
4 causes of the creation of the human
being.
There are 4 causes
of the creation of the human being. There's
what's known as inefficient cause,
which is a direct force of production. This
is Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. He is al
Faheen. He He's a free agent, absolute volition
according
to his nature.
Efficient cause. And then there's something called material
cause. The stuff or material from which something
is produced.
What is the prime matter? The materia prenat
in Latin for which the creation of the
human being is produced? What is the prime
matter? It's nothing. It's ex nidio. Allah subhanahu
wa ta'ala created from nothing.
So there is no material cause to the
information of the human being. Now modern science
or Newtonian physics stops here. They only recognize
the efficient and material causes. In other words,
the entire universe, all of the existence
is just matter and emotions. It's a purely
materialistic
mechanistic conception of existence.
But our scholars continue.
Traditional scholars of the Abrahamic tradition continue. There's
a third cause in human creation.
Besides the efficient and material causes, there's something
called formal cause,
which views from the essence of what of
of of what it's produced. What isn't, essentially?
It's quiddity. It's mahia.
It's whatness.
What is the human being essentially?
Of Allah subhanahu wa ta'alaam,
upon the Earth. Modern philosophers tend to be
nominalistic.
They deny essential natures.
They deny human nature. This is led to
a lack of objective morality.
This is further led to massive skepticism
and relativism.
Neutering of the of the intellect, human reason.
Right? And finally, this has led to something
called Volanderism,
which is a strange philosophy which gives privacy
to the will over the intellect. The will
should never exceed the jurisdiction of the intellect.
The purpose of the akhilim intellect
is to keep the will and the desires
in check.
The word
Otherwise, you have this philosophy of do whatever
you want. Not what is right because we
do not know what is right.
Right? This is what they say. We don't
know. We can't know what is right. We
can't trust our intellect.
So do what you want and worship of
the and worship of the
You have interrogated questions in the Quran. It's
the type of effective question
in shakiyah.
Yes. You see the one who was
And then finally you have a final cause
with the Arabic. Arabic is called
Why is it? So the formal cause answers
the question
of what it is essentially. The the final
cause answers the question why is it? It's
purpose. It's temas.
The purpose of creation.
The purpose of the creation of the human
being is given explicitly in the Quran. Allah
subhanahu wa ta'ala tells us. In this ayat,
it's in the first person singular,
part is except to know me. But how
do we know Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala as
he said by associating,
assimilating, or appropriating,
and finally actualizing
the divine names and attributes to truly be
representatives
of Allah
on the earth. To have a
firm grasp of the
So this is our metaphysic.
It recognizes human nature that is unique and
dignified, goal oriented.
By contrast,
the dominance of epistemology and western ecology, really
around the world,
colleges and universities, is something called postmodernism.
We need to understand
what this is and how to deal with
it,
or else this will continue.
This is a pandemic. You have Muslim students
and Saudi Arabia.
Made it easy for us. We need to
understand what this is. The postmodernism
rejects ultimate or absolute truth with a capital
t. There is no ultimate or absolute truth,
they say.
Right? You have to find your own subjective
truths.
Lowercase t, plural. Live your truth as they
say. There is no true self
and God's image through you actualize
by disciplining your desires. You must invent your
true self. Self invention by engaging your desires.
Postmodernist philosophy is self contradictory, and we have
to be able to, expose these contradictions.
To say that there's no absolute truth is
to make a statement that is absolutely true.
In other words, they're saying the only absolute
truth is that there is no absolute truth.
Traditional
Morality is fluid and relative, they say. This
is why traditional students are religiously confectional students.
In other words, college
students are Muslim who believe in the Quran
and Sunnah. They're so reluctant, even afraid at
times
to take a theological
or moral stance in a university classroom.
To say, for example,
that pantheism
or incarnationism
is incorrect theology
or to say, for example, homosexuality
is sexually perverse is to invite among oneself
a hailstorm
of anhominant
epithets
such as close minded, arrogant, ignorant, antiquated,
dogmatic, obedient,
traditionalists.
Postmodernists are dogmatically opposed to dogma.
So for many of these young believers, there
are only 2 viable solutions
in their minds,
either to sell out or to punch him,
basically, in his face shape. There's nothing like
a lost child without whatsoever. He doesn't have
a cause. He doesn't have a cause or
else you're stuck in infinite regress.
This is how the Quran wants to reason
with people. So if you are a Muslim
educator,
a professor,
a chaplain,
a teacher from graduate school to Sunday school,
it is your duty to say to our
young people, salaf
Allah,
Allah
speaks the truth.
Which is following our appearance.
One of the meanings of this is to
imitate
imitate.
For he calls to perversity and falsehood. So
these words have meanings
nor as a definition.
They are defined by Allah
and the Sultan.
The Quran is theologically
and morally judgmental,
And we must be prepared with reason
to defend those judgments even if people have
discounted reason.
Continue to be reasonable. It is reason that
makes us human according to our philosophers. If
we are rational animals, it is our differentia.
It is what makes us distinctive.
Continue to use reason. Engage in dialectic with
people. Don't engage in a type of rhetoric.
Don't try to change an opinion based solely
on emotion. We have to appeal to logic.
This is very, very important.
Now
the literary method of postmodernist I don't have
a lot of time.
Just bear with me. The literary method is
called deconstructionism.
According to deconstructionism,
no one interpretation
of a text,
such as a religious text, should be privileged
over other meanings. They love this word privilege.
The social sciences aside, even the hard sciences
are feeling the pressure of postmodernism. Emily French,
feminist philosopher who said that I'm not making
this up. She said the equation e equals
n c squared is sexist
because it privileges the speed of light over
other speeds.
Apparently, there are now also infinite number of
genders.
Reason, and scriptures. They are 2, x y
and x x, but
now you're told by social scientists, college professors,
and Facebook
that people who maintain
this rigid binary
are just bigots.
This is Hajeem al Hayim.
A great American Muslim scholar once said, Shaytan
wants to change
the and
to.
He wants to change the immutables into immutables.
So there are classic laws of thought, such
as the principle of identity, the principle of
non contradiction.
So male is male and not male is
not male. There are 35 100 biological differences
between men and women. It is not currently
a social construct or a ceiling.
If you're a man putting on your grandmother's
shoes, does it make you into an old
woman any more than barking like a dog
when they say it's for a dog?
This is very, very strange. We consider these
things axiomatic,
but all of these things are being called
into question. It's very, very strange what's happening.
It's a zoo out there.
People can't handle it. It is Satan who
wants to blur the values of gender. This
is why and I won't say it. The
the
official symbol of the church of Satan is
androgynous
because he
shatters the gender binary,
as it were. So according to deconstructionism,
metanarratives,
that is to say, standard interpretation,
standard of steel of text is totally rejected.
All readings are valid and equally important, they
say. What is only demanded is to be
interesting.
In other words, as long as it's entertaining,
as long as it feels good.
So now we have in religious departments and
seminaries
all around the world, a method of textual
interpretation
called radical hermeneutics.
Queer hermeneutics,
transgender hermeneutics,
3rd way feminist hermeneutics.
Neo Marxist hermeneutics
is a zoo out there. The quest for
truth or the intended
authority of meetings of a text are totally
abandoned.
Rather sacrifice upon the offer of self interest
and feelings.
So grammar, logic, rhetoric, syntax,
definition,
consistency,
context, who cares?
Scripture now bends to accommodate us, not us
to accommodate it. Rather than interrogating our own
positions of life and scripture, we interrogate scripture
in light of our own positions. In short,
scripture can now mean whatever we want it
to mean according to them. The prophet
said there will come a time and nothing
will remain of this religion.
Nothing will remain of this religion except its
name. It's just gonna be a name without
a reality. A non man without an essence.
And nothing will remain on this Quran
except this script. This word on a page,
deprived of its meanings. We ask Allah to
give us the Tawzid.
Because people out there,
it's there's an increase
in,
in,
apostasy, an increase in in depression,
in despair. We ask the lost of Allah
to have a deal of faith to feed
to give people hope, give people a sense
of purpose, give people a sense of a
goal. The prophet, sallallahu alaihi wa sallam, he
said,
speak the truth even if it's bitter.
And don't be afraid of people. Don't be
afraid of people. See Allah
He will need an alternative to this madness.
Everything is being questioned. The very foundation for
being shaken apart. We have to stay firm.
The is
the greatest miracle. It's greater. He said he
said
Ahmed al Rifari. He said, if you see
a man flying through the air walking on
the water, don't believe in him unless you
see his Istiphama, his uprightness
to the religion. A man came to the
prophet, gave the advice.
He said,
Say, I believe in