Ali Ataie – The Blessed Prophetic Middle Path
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
Just mention a few things.
The Prophet, he
said in a rigorously authenticated Hadith of Hazar,
Sound Hadith, absolutely sound. That
your deeds are presented to me.
And if I see good, I praise Allah
Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala.
And if I see other than that or
in another narration,
if I see evil,
I ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala
to forgive you.
The Prophet
his Rahmatillilaaalameen
even after his passing.
According to the opinion of Abdullah ibn Mas'ud
the prophet
passed as a shahid.
He commented to Aisha
on a day of his passing. I can
still feel some of the tinge of the
poison on my palate
that was given to me by the Jewish
mani Naveel.
So he says he was given the honor
of Shahada.
What does Allah
say about, Ashuhada.
What does he
say?
There was
a rabbi named Samuel
ben Yehuda
al Maghrebi. His father was professor of Morocco.
He's a student of Abraham ben Ezra, who
is the Jewish equivalent of someone like Imam
al Fazali.
Right? Big big kibar of the urnah of
the of the rabbis.
And he died 11/67
of the common era. And he studied
Islam. He was raised in Andalusia,
and he was familiar with the Talikh al
Tabari and the works of Abu Hanifa and
all of the Madayib and aqaid, all of
these types of things.
And he narrates in his autobiography.
He wrote a book called
The Ham of Yahud or something like that.
He narrates in his biography that he went
to sleep one night, and he saw a
dream of an old man with a long
white beard sitting under a tree.
And he approached a man,
and
the people around him said, this is the
prophet Samuel.
He was mentioned in the Torah or in
the, Tanakh, I should say.
And they started having a conversation
in the Arabic language.
And Samuel says to Samuel, Rabbi Samuel, is
it I said, didn't you hear
what
Adonai Elohainu,
the Lord our God says in the Torah.
What did he say? He says
that I shall raise up a prophet
for among the brethren of the Israelites
who's going to be like Moses
and you must heed him, you must listen
to him.
And so Rabbi Samuel said, yes, that's referring
to you. That's what I've been told by
my teachers. Right? This is this is you,
isn't it?
And the prophet Samuel, according to his dream,
he becomes angry and he leaves.
So then he wakes up.
He can't explain what happens. He goes back
to sleep.
And this time the prophet Muhammad
he comes to him in a dream.
Whoever sees me in a dream has seen
me,
truly has seen me. In another tradition, manrani
fadmanami
fakadrahal
haqqah. Whoever is seeing in a dream has
seen the truth.
Shaitan cannot imitate my form
And then he becomes
Muslim
during this time. He wakes up and he
says shahada. Allah
has power over his prophet
He can send the roof of the prophet
wherever he pleases.
This is totally conceivable for Allah Subhanahu Wa
Ta'ala.
May Allah preserve him. He says in the
Moedid,
The prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam is the mercy
of of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, the mercy
of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. The greatest
demonstration
of Allah's mercy after creating us is the
coming of the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam.
The greatest demonstration of his mercy. So this
is a personal deity. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala
is a personal god.
Aristotle
believed that
it's impossible for a human being to love
God.
It's impossible because his justification is they're not
of the same genus. They're not the same
species.
So he would argue that you have a
dog. You you don't really love your dog.
You just say that, but you really love
your dog? No. If your dog dies, he
might be upset for a few moments or
a day or 2, but you really love
your dog? No. Because
it's not the same species as you are.
He's a deist. Right? They believe that, you
know, the first six presidents of the United
States of America
were deists. They're not orthodox Christian. They were
not Trinitarian Christian.
So basically, they believe that God created the
world,
and he's an absentee landlord, basically.
And he kind of we kind of regulated
ourselves.
Right? He created and he let us deal
with
it. Right? The Christian, which is a theistic
tradition, obviously,
they say the greatest demonstration of love by
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala
is becoming
that species.
This is Thomas Aquinas' theology,
who wrote the Summa Theologica,
who was highly influenced by the likes of
Abu Hamid Al Ghazabi.
You look at the
structure of the summa theologica,
you have the first part, which is called
the prima pars, which talks about theology. Then
you have the segunda pars, which talks about,
his virtue,
theory. And then the third part, the terashia
pars, talks about Isa alaihi salaam. And so
this is the this is the essence of
the summa.
Right?
So Imam Ghazali, if look at the and
this is a must for everyone
to have books of the in your house
for barakah and for reading.
Get books of the Ihya. That Ullama used
to say, if you have to sell your
lihya,
get the Ihya.
You have to sell your beard, get the
Ihya.
So if you look at the ihya, what
is the focus of the ihya? Right at
the center of the ihya. Book number 20.
The book about the akhlaqin Nabuwa,
about the comportment, the character of the prophet
Muhammad sallallahu alaihi wa sallam. This is the
goal.
Isai alayhi wasalam
is a messenger of God who was sent
by Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala.
We're in a pure heart
and when the light of Allah Subhanahu Wa
Ta'ala refracted
from or reflected from his heart, this is
Ghazali's mirror Christology, sometimes called as mirror Christology.
When it reflected from his pure heart, those
who don't may not have a basis of
sharia,
they mistook the reflection for the essence.
It's like someone who jumps into a lake
to grab the moon.
It's a reflection.
It's not the moon.
So the Sharia is absolutely fundamental.
So we have I was asked to talk
about
how to find the middle path to be
balanced. To be balanced means you balance obedience
and knowledge.
We learn from those who came before us.
We take heed from those who came before
us.
That many people have a lot of obedience
to Allah
but they don't know what they're doing or
why they're doing it. There's no knowledge. Why
are you doing this? I don't know. I
was told to do this. These people focus
on orthopraxis.
And you have people who
have a lot of knowledge
and they can pontificate,
right,
on a soapbox for hours and hours. May
Allah
save us, especially me. But
they don't have obedience to Allah subhanahu wa
ta'ala. So what happens then? You don't work
on the heart. The heart becomes hard.
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala
refers to a group of people in the
Quran.
After that your hearts became hard like stones
or even worse than stones or like a
donkey who carries books on his head.
You don't gain any knowledge. You don't gain
any benefit from their knowledge. There's nothing in
the heart.
The heart is very important.
That's why this this concept
of Ihsan and the the technical term for
it is tasawuf.
That's a technical term for ehsan. And this
is found in the Quran. This is found
in the Hadith. It's not taken from Hinduism.
It's not taken from Buddhism.
It's not invented in the 3rd century.
This is what Al Junaid said, and he's
mentioned in our creeds. Imam Al Aqali mentions
him. Ibn Ashar mentions him. Our knowledge, the
knowledge of the sufia
is based
is is tied
to the book of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala
and the sunnah of the messenger sallallahu alaihi
wasallam. What is sufism? What is tasawuf? What
is ihsan? Cultivating
prophetic characteristics to be like the prophet sallallahu
alaihi wasallam.
How do we do this? What is I
was again asked by Sidi Asif
practical advice.
How do we cultivate prophetic characteristics?
The best thing we can do is sit
with
Sit with the
There's many in this area. Just sit with
them, be in their presence. You might say
I I don't benefit anything. They speak over
my head. Just sit with them for a
minute. When I was overseas, I sat with
a great scholar
and my Arabic was terrible when I got
there. And I wanted to get up and
leave, and another brother said, oh, just sit
down. Did you listen to smile?
Just sit down and and listen. I said,
I don't understand.
And I broke it up off on him
too. Shay, I don't understand anything.
It's okay.
Just unbo him. If you don't if you
can't, listen, unbo him. Just watch
him. Watch what he does. A picture's worth
a 1,000 words.
There's that presence around them. This will affect
your state. One glance of an Arab, these
things are real.
Sheikh Abu Bakr bin Salam, he said that,
you know, these people from the city, they're
filled vest they're filled vessels.
They're filled with all these ideas and they
want and they wanna come sit with me.
They don't come as empty vessel. So they
come and sit with me.
I'm losing my voice so that means I
should be quiet. I've already gone over my
time. I'll end with this inshallah. So they
sit with me and they we go back
and forth about an issue or something and
they leave and they don't benefit 1 iota
from me.
But then a Bedouin will come who's an
empty vessel who doesn't even know that he's
not supposed to urinate in front of me.
He'll urinate on my thigh and I'll give
him one nuthra,
one glance
and it'll change his life.
Don't underestimate these things. Don't underestimate
sitting with your urnama. This is the best
advice I can give you, to have
to have to to, have a nearness to
Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala.
To be near to Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala
is to be like the prophet sallallahu alaihi
wasallam. He is the epitome. He is the
epitome. He is the the the standard
of of our spiritual tradition. There's no such
thing as a Sufi without being a Muslim.
It's like saying I'm Jewish but I'm not
a rabbi.
It doesn't make any sense.
The prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam, his moral his
his character, his sira, his sunnah is the
basis of our spiritual tradition.
To be like the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam,
to draw near to Allah
and to purge ourselves.
And take from them as calm. They have
they have, prescriptions
for diseases.
Umraal al purub
that they'll give you and you'll do them.
And this is a process via purgativa, the
Catholics call it. And they took from us.
Taqleah, to empty
the the the nafs
of of of terrible attributes or traits.
And then after taghliya, there comes what? Taghliya,
ornamentation of the nafs, a change.
Right? This happens to habitus.
Right? You do things for a while and
it becomes relevant into your very nature,
but you have to be consistent. The prophet
sallallahu alaihi wasallam said, the most beloved actions
of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala are those that
are little, but they're consistent
are consistent even if they're little.
And then after that, you have tajaniyah,
you have theophany, you have openings, you have
futuhad.
This is proven and tried over time. This
is not this this is not some sort
of mythical idea.
This is something that's proven over time to
work. This
is where it begins. You cannot achieve this
without bidding with urnama.
That's my that's my spiel to use a
Yiddish word.
Thank you for listening. I'm sorry if my
voice is
incomprehensible.
I apologize to Yohannamah for going too long.