Ali Ataie – What’s the Point of the Ramadan Fast Ustadh (Interfaith Iftar)
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
The peace blessings of God be upon, all
of you.
Thank you for having us
here and hosting this bar.
It's an honor to be here.
I'm actually not gonna take too much
of your time.
I,
I've noticed that
usually when,
there's a Muslim speaker, people have a lot
of questions.
So maybe I'll actually open it up for
some q and a in a minute or
so. You can ask me whatever you want
about Islam. It doesn't have to be about
fasting.
But fasting is one of the,
pillars
of Islam.
So there's a famous Hadith. Hadith is
a saying of the prophet Muhammad, peace be
upon him.
And there's different grades of these Hadith. Some
are strong, some are weak, some are fabricated.
This particular hadith tends to be strong.
Or he said,
to quote him directly.
Islam is built on 5.
Alright?
By 5, you have the pillars.
So the first pillar is called the shahada
in Arabic.
It means witnessing.
So witnessing that there's only one God. Right?
Muslims call this God,
Allah.
And Allah is not
a foreign god.
According to the Quran, Allah is the god
of Abraham.
Allah is the god of Moses.
Allah is the god of Jesus.
And these prophets
are mentioned in the text of the Quran
itself.
Right? So Allah is not some, you know,
Arab God or, you know, the god
of the Middle Easterners or something like that.
He's the god of Abraham. Right?
So Shehada is the witness that he is
the only one God. When I say he
is the only one God, that's, again, not
to say that God is masculine or male,
but
every word in Arabic
is assigned a gender. Right?
The linguist.
So sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it's not. Sometimes
it's a natural gender. Sometimes
the linguist will assign what's known as a
lexical gender to the word.
So for example, the word the the the
word for sun, s u n in Arabic
is shams.
But the linguist, way back in the day,
decided that the sun is feminine,
and the moon is masterwork. Nobody really knows
why that is. Maybe there's someone here that
studied
the history or the etymology of Arabic,
words.
But the word Allah in Arabic
is masculine
lexically.
So we refer to him as him, that
there's no god but him, and that the
prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. The Muslims
believed to be the last,
in a long line of prophets
starting with Adam,
including names like like he said, Abraham, even
Noah,
even David and Solomon are seen as prophets,
Elijah.
And there's a minority opinion that there are
several female prophets, including
the wife of pharaoh
named Ahasya,
whose story is not told as far as
I know in Jewish sources,
as well as
Sarah and Hagar
and Mary,
the mother of Jesus,
and was mentioned in the Quran as well.
So the shahada
is
similar to maybe the Shama
in
in its importance.
Right? This is sort of the essence of,
Islamic
confession.
And then the second pillar is known as
salaam,
which believe it or not has an etymology
a common etymology with tafinda
Hebrew, which means prayer.
So Muslims,
well, they should at least pray 5 times
a day
at different times.
Right?
And,
these prayers take
a few minutes.
When somebody converts to Islam, it's kind of
burdensome.
I I have to pray again. I just
prayed 3 hours ago.
But then as you
age
and get wiser, these things become much easier.
So they take a few minutes every few
hours.
And then there's something called
which is also known as
in Hebrew. It's related to
which has a root meaning of to purify
something. So it's zakah or
is a
a poor dude. Most things that there's excess
wealth, but this is only for people that
can afford
that. 2 a half percent of their excess
wealth will go to the
less fortunate or to the poor.
And then we have the 4th pillar, which
is called,
Hajj
or Khayi
in Hebrew. Or if you live in Egypt,
it's also called Khagim
because
the the gene and
the letter gene in Arabic,
Egyptian dialect is pronounced like a female.
So they'll say like, Michael Gordon.
So Michael Jordan.
Okay.
So again, this is for Muslims that can
afford to do so. They'll make a pilgrimage
to Mecca.
Once a year is the obligation, if you
can afford to do so. And then there's
something called the which is the lesser
pilgrimage.
And then finally the 5th pillar is
called
This is exactly the same word in Hebrew.
Song, meaning fasting, also known as siam in
the Quran.
The Quran says
Quran says to the Muslims at large that
fasting is prescribed upon you just as it
was prescribed upon those
before you.
And the exigence here,
clarify and say before you means atlibkitab,
the people of the bible,
The people of the book, Jews and Christians.
Alright.
And then.
So the the purpose of fasting is given.
So there's an axiom amongst
the scholars of Islam
that the merit of something is known by
its objective.
So the objective of fasting according to the
Quran
is,
in order for you
to be people of God consciousness.
The word in Arabic is taqwa,
which is very very difficult to translate.
Sometimes it's translated as fear of God, in
in order for you to fear God,
which is the beginning of all wisdom according
to God. Sometimes it's translated as
in order for you to repel evil,
to guard against evil.
Right?
In pre Islamic times, the word actually meant
a shield,
something to block
the blow of a sword.
Right? So probably the best
translation is
to be conscious of God. So when Muslims
are fasting,
when anyone's fasting,
in theory,
they should
there should be a sort of
focus on
the inward.
Right? You're not eating. You're not drinking. There's
no miracle relations in the daytime according to
a Muslim's fast.
In order to if we want to focus
on god completely.
Right?
And how does one focus on god? Try
remembering god
and by guarding one's limbs.
And this is something that a Muslim is
supposed to be doing all throughout the year,
by the way.
So Ramadan is really more like a training
program to set the stage for the rest
of the year. It sort of wanes through
the course of the year. It shouldn't, but
it tends to.
And then Ramadan, again, you enter into this
training program. We're not we're not looking at
things that are forbidden. So it's not just
a fast in the stomach.
Right? There's a hadith of the prophet where
he said, there are several people
it's a rhetorical question.
How many fasters are there that get nothing
from their fast, except hunger and thirst?
Meaning that they're missing the point of the
fast.
The point of the fast is to really
master the self.
Right? To master the self. There's a hadith
of the prophet and there is some weakness
of this hadith.
But generally, the the scholars of Islam will
quote it,
because they would say they would argue that
the meaning of the hadith is true even
though it's a chain of transmission. It may
have some weakness. Anyway, it's reported that the
prophet said,
the translation is whoever
knows himself knows this lord.
Right?
So the word in Arabic here, harafar or
maghafar, really needs to recognize
recognition.
Whoever recognizes himself,
will will recognize
his Lord.
So one of the meanings here according to
the scholars of this hadith
is that if you recognize your origin
as God's creation, as God's beloved creation,
you will come to know
that God is the beloved.
Another
shade of meaning of this tradition
is that if you master yourself, then you'll
come to know God.
If you can guard your eyes, guard your
ears, you know, if you can guard your
tongue from lying
and from, you know, speaking ill of people
behind their backs,
from cursing,
from even raising their voice. So we have,
you know, descriptions of the prophet Muhammad as
far as his disposition
goes.
And all of the hadith say that the
Prophet did not even raise his voice.
That he was, easygoing personality.
Right?
That he said the best of you are
those who are best to their family members.
He said that he is not from us
who doesn't
honor the elders and have mercy on our
young.
Right? He said, none of you will enter
paradise until you truly believe, and none of
you will truly believe until you love one
another.
And then he said, shall I tell you
of something that will increase your love? And
they said, yes. And he said,
Spread peace amongst yourselves.
So,
this is the main sort
of focus or point of the fast,
is
to really,
transcend the physical,
and also to empathize.
Right? With those who are less fortunate.
Right?
To experience something of what they're experiencing
for the sake of increasing our concern for
them.
The more empathy one has, the more compassion
one has. And the more compassion one has,
the more godlike as it were, or more
angelic they are.
Right? Jesus is actually quoted in the Quran
as saying,
which is obviously Arabic.
But he said, be lordly.
Be like God.
Right?
You know, be perfect as your father in
heaven is perfect in the language
of Matthew.
What does it mean to be like God?
It means to
appropriate, if you will, define qualities at a
human level.
None of us can be God.
Right?
Despite what some world leaders think.
Or perceive themselves.
We're not gonna name drop.
But
to be divine, the lowercase d,
is to,
assimilate qualities of God, such as mercy and
compassion.
Right? And this is accomplished through these
pillars of Islam.
Through prayer, through charity, through pilgrimage, and especially
through fasting. The prophet said in the Hadith,
quoting God,
he said, all of the actions of the
sons and daughters of Adam
are forgiven
except fasting.
For indeed, that is mine. And the exigence,
they say, what this means is, no one
knows that you're fasting. When you pray, people
can see you praying. When you go to
pilgrimage, people can see you in your garb,
and you're making your circumambulations,
and so on and so forth. When you're
getting charity, people can see that. When you're
fasting, no one knows except God.
So the prophet said, God says,
fasting is for me and I will reward
them for that,
up to,
add add infinity.
So
fasting has a very,
honor placed amongst the practices of a Muslim.
That's all I wanted to say.
If there's time for a few questions, I
can't. I thought I'll just use it now.
What do you think?