Ali Ataie – Practical Spiritual Tips For Purification of the Heart

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