Hamza Yusuf – Mukhtasar Sahih Al-Bukhari By Ibn Abi Jamrah #04
AI: Summary ©
The speakers discuss the importance of the umattan's gifts in their book and the use of the book in WhatsApp WhatsApp groups. They emphasize the need for a more just and equitable solution to problems rather than trying to avoid them. The importance of religion, community property, and protecting privacy is also discussed. The use of "will" in relation to religion is discussed, as well as the peril of the drug industry leading to people losing their lives and the need for people to live like the average American living. The segment also touches on the peril of the drug industry leading to people losing their lives and the importance of understanding the people behind the decisions.
AI: Summary ©
The,
Sahid Bukhari
is, I think, one of the great gifts
of the ummah, the prophet sallallahu alaihi sallam.
His
most important words were,
collected
by this great imam
and, and and put into
this one book.
And the Muslims have always
since the time this book really came out,
and the Muslims have,
honored it in ways that,
it's been written beautifully.
I had a
handwritten manuscript from, southern Morocco from the Dila'i,
Zawiya, and it was really beautiful, which I
gave to
a half of the Al Bukhari,
as a gift because he actually found a
mistake in it.
And
I was compelled to give it to him
at that point, but it it really was
one of the most precious things that I
have ever possessed.
The
the scholars,
have even said things like that, you know,
the house won't burn down if it has
Sahil Bukhari in it, a ship won't go
down.
I used to actually fly with Sahir Bukhari.
But
those
are, I think,
hyperbolic statements
to acknowledge the immense,
barakah that's in the in the book.
But one of the most interesting,
I think, aspects of the hadith
is there's so many of them.
And for that reason, people like Ibn Abi
Jamra chose to
to do his Ikh Tisar,
to try to get at the khulasa
of of the book. And and that's
one of the reasons
why there's so many muhtasarat
in our tradition,
is that as the himma of the ummah
declines,
the need for
these, abridged versions become more important because
people
don't have the time, the energy,
or the aspiration
to do what the early people did.
And so what I can
like Imam Laqani says, that because the himmem
have diminished,
abridgment becomes necessary.
But
even more extraordinary than an abridgment is to
get to the actual
very core of something.
And Abu Dawood,
Radiallahu,
one of the great muhaddithun, he's in the
6 of the canonical collections.
These are the 6 that the Ummah
recognized
as being,
the most important
collections, because there are many collections of the
hadith. So Imam al Bukhari obviously
has a preeminence, and then Imam Muslim who
was his student,
and then,
Imam Abu Dawood, or Radillah Anu, was also
a student, and then
Imam at Tirmidhi,
Imam al Nasai,
ibn ibn Umaja. And sometimes the Muwatta is
put
alongside
or in replacement of ibn Maja's book. But,
Abu Dawood was
one of the greats, Muhadithun,
and he said that
he collected
over 500,000 hadith. And when you read that
like it's Imam Malik
anew over a 100,000 hadith, Imam Rehbukhari
600,000
hadith. When you see these numbers,
they're not
the actual number of Hadith, but the different
transmissions.
So there's around
50,000
statements of the prophet, salallahu alaihi, sallam, that
have been recorded
between these various
Sahih,
Hassan, and then the different types of laif
categorizations.
But from those, there's about
7,000
that have
really been transmitted
in in these books.
Imam al Bukhari has 4,000 without the mukharar,
without the repetition, because he repeats many
hadith in many Babs, he will have like,
for instance, he repeats the hadith in the
because
it's an important hadith,
and and it falls into many of the
chapters. And this is why
they say that Imam al Oza'i
Ozai,
you know, in in more than 70,000
fatwas that he'd in his lifetime. Again, these
allahu a'lam, they sometimes,
they can be exaggerations, but sometimes not. In
any case,
I I asked him what he's had and
how's that possible, and he said how many
are answered with in a a matter of
vignette?
Right?
So I mean, I had somebody yesterday
wrote me,
about he he unfortunately had,
broken his fast. He was traveling, and he
broke his fast,
leaving before he left his house.
Right? And so then he was asking,
he wrote me an email and said, you
know, do I have kafara?
Because somebody told him, oh, you have to
fast for 2 months,
because you broke your fast without
but that that you you first of all,
kafara, you have to have knowledge of it.
Right? But secondly,
there are difference of opinions. Like, even
said that if you were traveling, you could
start your
from the home. That's not the of the.
It's not the dominant opinion, but it is
an opinion. So when you have difficulties,
the the
the you want to find ease for people.
The the
the the great
Abu Sufyan, he said
he said,
Like that real fiqh
is giving people dispensations,
giving them licenses, making things easy,
from a source that's sound. In other words,
it has to it can't just
be
then become a liosar,
And and so that's a that's a really
important aspect of the religion. And then he
said, but as for making things difficult, everybody
is capable of doing that.
So we just, there was a fatwa from
a mufti of a major Muslim country who
gave a fatwa. They sent it to me,
some of the Muftis
on the other side of the pond,
that,
they gave a fatwa that, oh, you can't
give
zakat al fatar with nakad
because it's not the sunnah.
And that's true, but it's a ruksa from
a thiqah.
And so for a lot of people it
would be hard to do that. So it's
very important to to recognize that about the
religion.
You can't
make things hard, especially in this time, when
things are hard enough
for people just to be alive.
Like, people people have a very difficult time,
in the modern world,
in ways that the pre modern world, which
was difficult, and I've lived in pre modern
environments. I lived in West Africa.
I I I spent a lot of time
in,
in southern Morocco. I I was,
in the Rubal Khale. I've been to places
that are very,
far from this modern world. It's much easier
to practice your religion in those environments.
Tahajjud is not a problem in West Africa.
Everybody does it.
It's just normal.
But for people here that
are stressed out, go to work,
you know, it's it's we have our ease,
there's aspects of modern life that's very easy,
but then there's other aspects that are really
difficult. And so in a time like this,
this is a time to try to facilitate
to people as much as possible without compromising
your deen.
And then what I is something that if
if somebody's capable of it, it's a good
thing to to be scrupulous. So,
Imam Abu Dawood,
he said,
from 500,000
hadith,
I
he said,
meaning the sunan
of Abu Dawood. He said, I I from
500,000
hadith, I put these hadith
in the his sunan.
And he said, but from all of these
Hadith it's over 5,000. From all of these
Hadith, he said, yakfi
al mara lidinihi
arba.
3 of them in a are in al
Bukhari. He said it's enough for a person
to have 4, 4 hadith,
and to practice these hadith.
So this is coming from and there's other
Imam Ahmed has a similar statement. He reduced
it to 3 hadith. Ibn Abhisayl al Qairawani,
the great monarchist god, reduced it also to
4 Hadiths. They agreed on 2 of them.
They differed on 2.
So
but they're all looking at the same thing.
And this is like when you take a
statement like
the great, Imam Razi, he said you could
reduce Islam to Ibadat al Khalq,
You know,
to worshiping Allah
and serving Allah's creation, like helping Allah's creation.
You can sum up Islam in that way.
Ibn Uqaym al Jawziyyah, he said all of
Islam is adala, maslaha,
right, rahma,
like all of these things, and adala. So
he reduced Islam to those 4,
like Maslaha.
So he said,
If it goes to something that's negative, it's
not from Islam.
Adala, if it goes to idhan taqalilaljawr,
laysaminilal Islam. And that's why istasan is important
in fiqh, because sometimes a hukum, a ruling,
can actually lead to something that's unfair,
and so that can't be from Islam. So
the faqih says,
this can't be right, and so he'll actually
make a hukam,
a ruling
based on a more just or equitable
solution to a problem.
I mentioned I'll just to give you an
example,
I mentioned once,
Sheikh Abdullah,
that
that we were talking about
community property in the west.
And he said from a from a Sharia
point of view, it would be unjust for
a woman to take half a man's wealth,
on divorce.
So I said, well,
here's the way they think about it.
So this is when a woman is is
at home, she's doing all this work. She's
taking care of the person's
house. She's she's doing the the taking care
of the children, doing all these things. Then
when when she gets divorced,
what what does she have? She can she
can go out with without anything, and so
they say
that it's not fair
that the man who
part of why he was able to do
what he was doing was that he had
somebody
taking care of the this is the original
thing. I mean, obviously, today things have changed
because women are working
now, and there are a lot of single
mothers and all these different things, but this
was the original understanding of community property. And
he said,
You know from the point of view of
istasan,
there's some validity to that,
that view. Because for instance, khidma'batina,
the Maliki Mehta, a woman can charge for
chidma'batina.
Like for doing domestic service, she can actually
charge her husband
if he doesn't provide for her
some help.
And then you have in pre Islamic societies,
you had a very different world
where people took care of each other. Now
we have
women who have children. They don't have the
infrastructure
that a traditional society provides, like having a
extended family, you know, having aunts that'll take
the the children when the woman needs a
break, Or in Mauritania, a good example,
the little children when they're 4 3 or
4 years old, they just walk around the
the encampment and go to different tents so
the mother's not constantly having to look after
them. They're looked after by the whole clan,
and that's that was very normal. So one
of the things doctor Cleary pointed out,
which really struck me when I read this,
he he wrote a really beautiful essay called,
how Islam can revive American civilization.
And, and in there, one of the things
he said is that the family is so
important in Islam
because one of the 5 universals,
or family, protecting the family. And he said
people
think the family's breaking down because of divorce,
as the family broke down a 100 years
ago with the breakdown of of extended families.
Like,
divorce is the last line
of family. Like,
that's not a real family, a mother, a
father, and children. That's not a family. A
family is uncles and aunts and grandparents
and nephews and cousins.
That's a real family.
So so
so that if it goes to and then
he said, if it goes from, rahma
to harshness,
then it's not from Islam,
because Islam is rahma.
So if it goes and even Imam Malik,
and I think Imam Malik was Mus'ib in
this,
he had the correct view, he said that
jihad is not
a nikma, it's a rahma.
He that that was his view. He said
it wasn't
a punishment
for the the kufar or for fighting,
the Muslims or something like that. It was
actually a rahmah to stop them from doing
more harm than they were doing. So he
saw it as a mercy,
because the more harm people do,
the more trouble they make for themselves.
So so these these, you know, four things
he described. So
Abu Dawood
took the hadith, and this is remember, this
is a man who knew pretty much all
of al Bukhari, all of Muslim. I mean,
he knew
the the the hadith corpus of his time.
He was a hafil,
and and and and,
so if he's gonna reduce it down, he
was also noted for his brilliance because he's
one of the fuqaha amongst the the Muaddithun.
You know, he's considered a faqih.
So so he the first one he said
is in the Ammar biniyat.
The second one he said
was, minhosni
islamalmarii
sarqhuumalayaanihi.
The third one he said,
And the 4th one
was,
So those were the 4 that he said.
So I thought it would be useful to
look at these 4,
hadiths because,
what he's saying is they're all you need.
If you get these rights,
then
you have from the sunnah what you need.
The first one,
is the book the one that Imam Muslim
starts his book with,
An Amir al mumineen Abi Hafsin Amr ibn
Al Khattab
So this is,
this hadith is from
Amir al Mu'mineen Umar Abu Hafsa. Hafsa is
his daughter. Hafsa is
the masculine form of that. Omar ibn al
Khattab,
Radi'ala Anhu. And he's from the Khattab family.
They were these were the the the great
judges of the Quraysh, this family, and noted
for their
khataba, so hence, al khatab.
They still have it in the
the Mujedidis
are famous for their oratory. So
these things get genetically transmitted.
So He says,
So
actions are by intentions. So an action
is
is something that's done with the jaware.
Right?
One of the things, and we'll get this
with,
a lot of people
forget that speech is an action.
You know people say, oh that's just talk,
as if talk doesn't have
meaning.
I mean, I heard somebody,
say that once and,
you know, you know, the problem with the
the,
you know, the Musa, it's all words. You
know? There's no action.
The prophet, alayhishim, came with words.
I mean, they're the Kerimatullah.
That's what he brought. So don't don't ever
diminish
the meaning of words by saying it's just
words,
because words are what make us human.
Words are what give us our distinction
amongst creation.
The fact that we have language,
that we're the Hainan Native.
You know, somebody said to me,
oh, you know, we're we're well, we are
we're animals. I said, we're not animals. He
said, Imam Al Ghazari said we're animals. I
said, what did he say?
He said he said, we're part animal, part
angel. I said, so why didn't you say
we're angels?
Part animals, not animal.
Right? It's not animal.
We're we're We
made them a distinct creation,
so we're not animals, and the people that
say that, these are materialists that want to
reduce us
to animals. I mean, I have cats, I
watch cats. I was looking at my cat
today.
He was looking at me, and I and
I was printing something,
and I was just wondering what he was
thinking I was doing, but he can't work
out that I'm printing something
on the printer. I can't talk to him
about,
infinity.
You know, I can't have a converse if
I did, it'd be a one-sided conversation.
You know? He might meow every once in
a while, but he's not going to be
reflecting on proofs for the existence of God.
It's just not gonna happen.
Dolphins,
we're not supposed to eat them,
And, Imam Leys said,
don't eat the
the don't eat the the human of the
ocean.
So
if some people think the dog because they
have very big brains. They even they have
a
a a a brain similar to humans apparently.
So aloha on what they're up to. If
they're debating whether the do does god exist
or not? You know? Well, who made this
ocean?
Although,
we don't
know, but,
Imam Malik said they asked him about it,
and he said,
You know, you you named it the because
it's also called the big pig of the
ocean,
because it has the,
like, a snout, like a pig. So,
the the Greeks called it the pig also.
So
actions are by intention. So what is an
intention? An intention
is the the root of the word has
to do with seed, like a Noah is
a seed.
So an intention is the seed of your
actions.
It's what
it's what produces the action. Like, if you
look
at at this amazing backdrop that our brother
Ishmael did from hand,
taking wood from a tree, that was once
a those were trees in a forest somewhere,
and and somebody went and cut them down.
There's a beautiful essay
really proving how miraculous just a pencil is,
because we don't think about these things.
So so if if you look,
like just the wood, what was the intention
of the man cutting down the wood? It
wasn't to be, a mehrab
in
in, in California.
Right?
Somebody in South America who went in with
an axe or maybe a machine
and cut down, he wanted to make some
money,
maybe to feed his family. We don't know
what his nia was, but he had a
nia.
And and so so then he sends it
to the the lumber and they make it
into
sheets. What was their nia?
Probably to make money.
And then the man who bought it just
to ship it somewhere to sell it for
a higher price,
He had a different niya, he didn't cut
it down.
And then
it goes to
some warehouse somewhere, and then Ismail says I'm
gonna make this out of mahogany.
He could have made it out of other
woods, but he chose that wood, so that
wood was destined then to be that. But
what was his niyyah? It wasn't money, that
was maybe part of it, because that's his
livelihood.
He wanted to make something for Allah,
That was his niyyah. What was the niyyah
of of those of us here who wanted
to we wanted to adorn
Allah's house
to to make it something beautiful, so so
that when people come in, they get a
sense of,
Allah is beautiful and loves beauty,
and so beauty evokes things in people's hearts.
So those niyas were all different.
What was the niyyah of the person who
originally made this geometric pattern? These are the
tessellations
of the Muslim world that are famous,
replicable patterns.
There's,
a a great Russian mathematician who worked out
there's only 17
possible infinitely replicable tessellations,
these pa these geometric patterns.
14 of them are in the Alhambra Palace.
So they missed 3. What was their intention?
Why why were Muslims so obsessed
with infinite replications?
They were trying to show unity and diversity.
They were trying to show the 1 and
the many.
So there's a reason why when you go
into masjids, they have geometric patterns
because there was a symbolism
in it that they wanted to evoke
in the people that were looking on it,
to make them think about these things.
So
so actions are by intentions so that what
is the seed? What is the intention
of your action?
And this is like in our tradition,
you you you make,
you know, wasa'id, you don't have to make
intention.
But but those things that are that are
of like the prayer, you have to intend
the prayer, and you and you have to
attend what prayer it is, like you should
have the intention of zohr, because it's different
from asr, so it's a distinct act of
ibadah.
But the wasa'il,
you don't, so like,
you know, when when you give sadaqa,
or when you or on your way to
the, you know, to get money to pay
your zakat, you don't have to make the
niyyah to go get the money, that's a
wasila
to paying the zakat, but when you pay
the zakat,
so
the intention,
is very important in your actions,
Right?
If you just, have the irada,
then that's part of the intention also because
niya and irada are related.
In the Quran, there's you
You
know?
So whoever does that,
if you do it, that's where you're gonna
get the reward.
But you don't have to specifically make that
niyyah, oh, I'm gonna do Amr bin Marov,
or I'm going to,
do ilslabin and ness. You don't have to
make that niya. The action itself
is enough.
So
every
person has what they intended in their action.
So
the prophet Abra'an,
an action he could have chosen any action,
but this is a very important action.
Why are you moving from one place to
another?
So whoever immigrates
to Allah and His Messenger, in other words,
intending
Allah and His Messenger. Right? His niyah is
to Allah and His Messenger. You're doing it
for the sake of Allah and His Messenger
His Hijra is to Allah and His Messenger.
And also,
the prophet tended to use the the the
the female
because he was speaking generally to men. He
had one day out of the week where
he spoke solely to the women, but generally,
he's speaking to the men with the understanding
that they would convey that to their women
folk,
and so he spoke
with that understanding, but they would convey that
with the understanding it's also for if a
woman does that to marry a man, so
it goes both ways.
So that's important. It's not sexist language.
I mean, this is kind of a modern,
concept
of,
like, for instance, in Persian, you don't have
the problem with the gender. Right? Because the
Persians,
there's no gender in their in their
the pronominal
reference.
If you use a pronoun in Persian, it's
all the same, he or she. In Arabic,
huwa is also
not masculine.
Like, huwa could be used for something that's
neutral, it could be used for
feminine, it could be used it's it's not
it's
so so
that's a problem when you translate into English
because English is very specific.
We have he, she, it.
Whereas in Arabic, they don't have it.
They have huwa for it and
and he.
And in some time, it could be also
she, like the Quran uses the masculine to
mean the feminine in the Quran.
So
what's amazing about this, the prophet
said,
if it's for dunya, some worldly thing to
achieve it, or
a spouse to marry,
fahijaratuhu
ilamahajara'i
raihi.
He didn't repeat, like in the first one
he repeated.
He said,
illallahiwarasulihi
because of the sharaf
of the hijrah.
But because the second one is dunya,
he just
said It it didn't warrant
repeating.
So he just used
that ma
to say what.
And that comes from a famous
a miskin who became known as Muhasr Qais.
He actually made hijra to the woman told
him I won't marry you unless you make
Hijra to Medina. So he made Hijra to
Medina.
So he became known as Muhaajar Umqais.
That was his nia.
This is very important. It's a foundational,
hadith.
The second hadith that he mentions is An
Abdida Noaman Ibn Bashir, who was very young.
And the hadith of putting the feet together,
you know, which unfortunately is in the last
mean, people don't do it anymore, but when
I was younger,
the
the people came obsessed with this thing of
putting the the feet next to each other
in the prayer.
And and you had this problem. Like, people
would actually
do it, and it became very annoying
because because but some people because they found
this hadith in Sahil Bukhari, which was on
a man ibn Bashir,
and he said we used to the prophet
Taraso, you know, come together. So he said
we used to put our feet
next to each other. They were in the
last soft, the children.
He was a child. He was in the
back with like anas,
and so they probably took it literally,
and and that's what they did. But that
is hadith is not. It's not acted on,
and there's nothing in our books that say
that to put the feet next to the
feet.
There there is a in one of the
commentaries, it says that they they they did
this, but if you try to do it
today, the person would run away from you
like a, you know, like a scared animal.
So aloha, Adam. But I I don't I
I think it's it peep people who have
experienced that know how distracting it can be
for somebody.
So
because both of them Bashir was also a
Sahabi.
So he said the halal is clear.
The halal is clear. The haram is clear.
Between
the 2, the halal and haram are gray
areas.
It's something that there's a shubha in it.
Shubha is something
it's hazy,
it's doubtful,
it resembles 1 or the other, it can
resemble both,
have elements. Yushbihu means to resemble something.
So so
he's saying,
The majority of people don't know
how to differentiate
between these two.
The ones that do are the
the people that are firmly established
in knowledge.
And so
so he says,
Whoever
protects himself from these shubuhat
is
He has guarded his his he's protected, he's
kept pure.
Bara'a is like innocence. Bara'at al Asri is
the foundation,
that things aren't,
you know, the the the the the the
the permissibility
is is foundational in things.
It's it's free of,
impurities or prohibition.
So what is the erud?
The eirub is one of the 5 mahfodat
of Deen, nafs,
Ma'al, Aqal,
and nesal.
Nesal
is included in that erb, and some added
as a 6th in the in the mahfodah.
So you have religion, protection of religion,
protection of life,
protection of property, protection of intellect,
protection of family,
and then in that is also protection of
honor, because your family is part of your
honor, which is one of the reasons see
one of the reasons why people don't go
by last names anymore is cause of the
loss of family.
People used to always go by last name,
and, you know, you see this in Jane
Austen's novels. They always call people by like
Willoughby. You know?
His name was John Willoughby, but they called
him Willoughby.
Why? Because they were referring to his family.
In our tradition, the kunya
is to remind the father that He is
an exemplar of the son.
You you abba Yahya, You Abba
Anas,
you know,
it's to remind the father that he's an
exemplar to the son and to remind the
son
that he carries the honor of his father.
So you're not just
on your own, you actually represent a family.
And this is why traditionally everybody went by
last names,
you did not call somebody by their first
name because it was too informal,
you had to get to know somebody
before they would let you in on that
intimacy,
but when when family is lost,
then everybody's just by their first name because
the family doesn't mean anything. And this is
one of the great tragedies.
The high school I went to, all the
teachers called us by our last name, they
never called us by our first name.
And many of the the
the the students had parents who'd gone to
that high school and grandparents.
Because family, you carry your family's name, and
if you dishonor your family and that's why
illegitimacy
is so terrible,
because they don't even know who their father
is.
So that's why there's so much criminality
in illegitimate,
societies
because there's why should why
what what are you upholding?
You know,
the name, the good name.
My my father's teacher, Mark Van Doren, his
son
was Charles Vandoren, who I actually knew
and had correspondence with.
He got caught up in a scandal in
1958.
It was this the quiz show scandal.
And he was from,
you know, this family is a very distinguished
family. There was,
Mark Van Doren, Carl Van Doren, and these
were great literary scholars in America, poets,
Pulitzer prize winning poets.
So when his son,
was found out to be cheating on this
quiz show,
it had a huge crisis in the family,
because he soiled his name,
his father gave him a good name, and
that's one of the best things that your
father can give you is a good name,
and the worst thing you can do to
your father or your mother is to soil
that name.
I mean, these these are something in the
Muslim world they know. The mujeddidi
has a meaning,
and so when somebody soils the name of
the mujeddidis
by doing things that are wrong,
they soil the whole Mujedites
clan.
And that's a crime against the clan,
and it's a crime against Umar, and Umar
ibn Khattab will take care of them on
the day of judgment. He's not gonna intercede
for people that soiled his name, I don't
think.
I mean he punished, you know,
children of the Sahaba. He didn't have a
problem punishing them.
I mean one of the great Sahaba's son
was an alcoholic, and he punished him.
That's one of the things in the hamziyyah
he says about Omar. He said the qareeb
and the bayid were the same to Omar.
Taqwa was what distinguished
his his judgment on them.
Like he yeah.
So so that's really important to remember that
about
So the is really important,
and that's why it's so horrible to tell
lies about people,
to slander people, to libel people,
to to to, you know, accusations.
Is one of the it's one of the,
major sins in our religion,
and it has a had punishment,
you know, slandering somebody, slandering the mominat and,
you know, the the innocent
believing women
to to slander them, to say something about
their
I mean, this is this is a really
serious thing.
And so then he says,
You shikon yartaafi.
Like the
the ra'i
who
yartaalalalhima.
Like a shepherd
who is
taking his flock
near a a hima.
The hima is is the sanctuary,
so if you if you take the flock
near the sanctuary,
you shikon yurta'afi,
it's going to end up
eating from that grass that's prohibited. So the
hima was was the the sanctuary of a
of a king. If people who know Western
tradition,
you know, in in the Robin Hood story,
it's a very famous Sherwood Forest, which is
where they hid and hunted. That was actually
a sanctuary of the king,
but the king was unjust, and so
Robin Hood and his married band of men
had no problems
hunting, and
and they thought they thought this is very
western,
like Cromwell. He said rebellion against tyrants is
obedience to God.
That's Cromwell.
That that's not necessarily the Sunni position.
Right?
Patience
is traditionally the Sunni position
with tyrants. You just you have to be
patient because rebelling against them makes it worse.
So he says,
Every king has a sanctuary.
The sanctuary of Allah are those maharim.
This is why, Inalhalalah
bayinu inalharama
bayinu. So there there's a there's
a a clear demarcation,
the Quran has very clear demarcation of
matawmat,
mankuhat,
you know, these are very clearly articulated in
the Quran,
what's prohibited.
Right? The Maita,
the Dam,
the lahmer kanzir,
ma'uhil lalireidila. These are very clear, and the
Maliki Madhhab is the of all the Madhavs,
it's the one that has the least amount
of prohibitions, because Malik took Nasr al Qur'an.
So so he he he sees these as
Maqama
and the the the the hadith he takes
more is for karahiya.
So in the Malik Madhab Al Muharram
and nijis, anything that's nijis, like carrion, things
like that. And then,
khinziron,
baghlun,
farasun,
donkey who is domesticated.
That that's those are the meats that are
prohibited. The other ones like cat,
they they and that's why
Imam Zamak Sheri famously
said
You know, he said you
know, I I don't tell people my medheb,
you know, because if I if I tell
them they're gonna find some fault in it.
And he said if I say I'm Maliki,
they say, oh, he permits eating dogs,
which is not true, but it's there's karahia
as opposed to Tahrim. Although there's an opinion
in the Maliki method that it's also Maharam.
There's room for everybody
except the pig eaters. They have to give
that up.
Yeah.
I heard that,
Modudi used to say to Hindu converts, did
you eat, beef yet?
Which I don't think is right. That's kind
of harsh, but because they have family.
Yeah.
Apparently,
Akbar,
you know, he did not allow Muslims to
eat beef during his time, and that's when
a lot of Hindus became Muslim,
because there's no there's absolutely no
tradition that the prophet ate beef.
In fact, there's a Sahih hadith where he
said beef. He said,
The meat of beef is a a disease,
and the the milk is a cure. That's
a Sahih hadith. It's a mushkil,
because Ibrahim
brought,
tajal
veal, he served veal to his
to, to his
and then
amazing ending here.
For for the students of Arabic.
The
the with
fathalayin,
So salaha
in this, although salaha
is is valid.
Idha salaha.
So the mudra there's a mudra, there's a
lump of flesh
in the the body of the human being.
If it's sound, the whole body is sound,
and if it's corrupt, the whole body is
corrupt. Allahuhiil qalb. Isn't it the heart? And
that's why the prophet
was asked about
the the best people and he said, Mahmoom
al Kalb.
The one who's Mahmoom al Kalb.
And they said, we know
What's
And He said, the pure heart. Khamam tu
albayit means to
to sweep the house. So maqmum al qalb
is a heart that has been swept,
like it's been cleaned out. It's you've you've
swept your heart. You've cleared out all of
the
ahiyar.
So very very important hadith. And many I
mean, these these can, you know, whole books
have been written literally on these, these hadiths.
So I'm I'm
the next one is
So Allahu'alam,
you know, did did he hear it from
him, or
did he hear it from another sahabi?
So this is Mutafakan Aleih. When you have
Al Bukhari and Muslim
agree on the hadith, it it's it's very
strong. It's it's usually the next after,
you know, the
hadith
is then you get the ones that the
6 agree on because there's there are Hadith
that all 6 relate.
But
is
a very high rutba.
So this hadith
is la yumminu ahadukom hada yuhibali ahi, none
of you truly believes,
and we put truly there because it can't
mean
because that would mean that if you didn't
love for your brother what you love for
yourself, you weren't a believer. So it's understood
to mean,
la yakmulu
imanu
ahadikum.
Your the iman of 1 is not complete.
There's a hadith that ibn Mas'ud said that,
That you are not a believer until you
see a tribulation as a blessing and a
blessing as a tribulation.
In other words, your iman is not complete,
that's a high maqam
to see that,
to where because everything's from Allah, and so
you you you you see it as this
is this is paha it's there's only two
possibilities. Like, Gaza right now, there's two possibilities.
It's a
from from these people, undeniably.
The is,
and and there's no arguing that. And and
those people who are inflicting
this, cruelty on these people,
they will be judged. They've already been judged
in the dunya, but they will be judged
in the akhirah.
But for us, when we see these things
as
we experience it existentially,
as an individual, as a human being, what
does it mean for that individual, for Adalla,
who's there right now, or Khadija,
or the it's either Rafa Darajat
or Taharamin ad Dinub.
It's one or the other. It's elevated in
in maqam with Allah,
or it's removing,
sins,
and and we believe that.
That's our belief. And and if you lose
that, you will fall into despair
because it then it becomes purposeless.
And that's why
that's why
in in the in the, emotional equations
of this book that,
Zane gave me,
The equation for despair
was
suffering
minus meaning
equals despair.
Suffering minus meaning
equals despair.
All
Everything.
And and children
are are, you know,
You know,
like
children suffer in this world.
One of the most extraordinary things about suffering
children and those of us who've been in
the health care, you know, I I,
had to do rotations in pediatrics when I
was a nurse.
One of the most amazing things about children,
no child that's 6 or 7 or 8
years old with cancer is saying, why me?
They just don't do it, and if they
do, it's from their parents,
but they will not do that naturally.
They just accept it.
And there's a Lavoisier, there's a amazing
book by a French
he was a freedom fighter who was blind,
and his book,
Then There Was Light. It's a very interesting
book,
but he wrote this book.
His job amongst the freedom fighters was to
interview
potential
freedom fighters. Now they'd be called terrorists.
The French was like, if the Nazis won
the war,
they would be the terrorists. That's the way
it works.
But they at that time anyway, they were
they still consider them freedom fighters.
But they were, you know, they were blowing
things up. They were killing Nazis.
So these were, like, the resistance.
So his job was to interview people, and
he could always detect the insincerity
in the voice.
He ended up getting betrayed, and he wrote
in his book that it was he had
doubt about the man. It was the only
time he let somebody go because,
he fooled him, but he did have some
doubt about him, and he ended up betraying
him. He got arrested. He went to a
concentration camp. In any case,
in in in in the first chapter of
that book, it really struck me. He had
lost his sight as a child.
He had thick glasses and a kid pushed
him on the playground,
and they landed and and took out his
eyes. They the glass shattered,
took out his eyes. He said, I I
thank God
that this happened to me as a child,
because people tend to get very angry when
they're adults whereas for me,
it was just
something that happened.
It's
an amazing statement.
Yeah.
So Hamza,
Abu Hamza Anas ibn Malik is
he was very young. He came into the
prophet sallallahu alaihi sallam's
care, and he relates this hadith. None of
you truly believed until
he loves for his and this really should
be fellow man,
because Shabrakhiti,
Imam Nawawi in his I had an original
edition of the Shar Arba Ina Noiya,
and imam now he
says. And then I I got a later
one, we were reading it with Tarifa Al
Arabi years ago, and it didn't have that
in it.
I said what happened? I have my edition
has that in it, but it was a
new edition where they took it out
for political reasons.
Amazing.
Because they don't wanna think, oh, that we
want good for Jews.
The Jews are are the children of, prophets.
Like you don't think Ya'qub would be upset
about his children going, you know, to *
or something? Adam and they sent him in
the hadith,
he
says that that that,
in the hadith, when he saw Adam on
the isra on the Mi'raj,
one of the visions that he had of
Adam was he would look to his right
and smile and look to his left
and and cry.
And behind him were he couldn't make them
out, they were like shadows,
and so he asked Jabril and he said,
the the people on the left are His
children that are for paradise,
and the people on the right, and the
people on the left are His disobedient children
that go to *.
He cried when he saw them.
So
all of these,
you know and that's why Sophia,
when the prophet,
when when one of the the wives said,
you know, called her, Yehudiya,
you know, or said that they were better
than her because,
you know, they they were,
related to the prophet, he said, why didn't
you say to them
my uncle is Moses,
my father is Aaron, she was Aaronite, and
my husband is Mohammed.
In other words,
like, that's a good thing. So if a
Jewish person
becomes
Muslim, I mean there's a shutoff in having
the lineage of the prophets in Yore.
Right? So He said, Yeshma'al yhudi banasrani,
like you should want for them guidance.
So that's,
you know, laiyastekmeru
imanahu. You know, it's his iman is not
complete
until that. He loves for himself what he
loves for
others. It's a it's a really important,
Hadith,
and
he says,
Sheikh Abu Amar,
ibn al Salahi says,
What is a kathatik?
You know, some people would think this is
impossible,
but that's not the truth.
He
said,
So there, he's he's reducing it down to
your brother in Islam. But the great imams,
they said it includes humanity,
like you should want for others.
Guidance.
Yeah.
It's a higher maqam.
Because then you if you make it provincial,
I mean I I was born into
a Christian family.
Alhamdulillah,
man Allah alayhi abir al salam.
And there were people who gave me dawah.
I mean, I read the Quran before I
met Muslims, but there were people that gave
me dawah that wanted me to become Muslim,
and that's one of the things that I
think our community has been really remiss about,
especially in the United States.
There's not a concern. And then part of
the problem is,
some of the people that do do dawah
don't do it knowing the people,
because you have to have lisan omi, you
know, you have to have the the tongue
of the people. Every every message that comes
came with the tongue of the people.
Like you have to understand the people,
and how they think,
and and I mean one of the most
amazing people
is Abd al Hakraqili.
He he was this,
he's a very famous Swedish,
painter,
who studied,
in France
under some of the great impressionists. He's considered
one of the great impressionist,
painters, but he
he his father was a veterinarian,
and and he maybe maybe you could just
look at what his name is in, his
Swedish name, Abdelhak
Alakhili,
Swedish painter, Muslim.
But but he
he his father was a a veterinarian,
and he taught him to love animals.
So when he was in France studying painting,
and painters like poets and others
are very sensitive people,
You you can't be
an artist without having a level of sensitivity
that normal people don't have.
So so these are Van Gogh, you know,
poor man, you know, cut off his ear.
I mean, Van Gogh suffered a lot,
and
as lovers often do.
So
he went they introduced
bullfighting into France
from Spain.
He went to the bullfight
and shot the
matador.
Like, how does it feel?
He shot him in the leg.
And he went what's his name?
Yeah. But what was his, Swedish name?
Yeah. Leif Carlson.
No. That's somebody else.
This is somebody else.
He's still alive. No. This man
died a long time ago.
In any case, he,
he and he went to prison,
but there were so many animal rights people
that they petitioned to get him out.
But when he was in prison, he was
in jail with an Algerian
who recited Quran all the time,
and and and that was his cellmates.
And so he because he was reciting Quran
all the time, they ended up having all
these conversations about Islam. He ended up becoming
Muslim
and he went to Egypt, entered into Al
Azhar,
studied with Abdurrahman Ullash,
and and became a scholar. He's a maliki
faqih.
He studied khalil and
and and then but the the reason I
bring him up is because the most amazing
thing that I read about him, which really
floored me,
was he wanted to take Islam back to
Europe,
but he wanted to see how Islam
manifested in a non Muslim land. So he
went to study the Indian Muslims
before he went to because he because, you
know, Arabs have their way, but he wanted
to see if the if the non Arabs
had other ways of being Muslim.
So he went and studied the Muslims of
India before he went back to Europe to
do dawah.
Yeah, Ivan Aghili, that's his name. Sheikh Abdul
Hadi al Aqili. Sorry, not Abdul Hadi
al Aqili.
Yeah. So he Ivan Agi this man, he
died in 1917. He was struck by a
train, unfortunately.
Yeah. But
he he it was,
amazing,
man.
Amazing.
He he actually was the one that introduced
Rene Guenon into,
who ended up writing some important books.
But,
so he went and studied Islam in India
to take it back.
His his all of his paintings hang in
the national museum in Sweden.
He's considered a national treasure,
in Sweden.
And he's,
you know, amongst like Monet, you know, there's
these great impressionist painters, the Pointillists and things.
He's he's considered one of the great impressionist
painters.
So that's really, really important, that one.
And then
so then this last hadith,
which to me is one of the most
important hadiths,
This hadith is a hadith that Imam At
Tirmidhi relates,
and Imam At Tirmidhi
was, from term Tirmid, which is in Central
Asia, or it's also Tarmad with a Fatha
and Tormud.
So there's, like, a different ways of pronouncing
it. Apparently, they pronounce with a Fatha, traditionally.
It was Tarmedi.
Yeah.
But he's known as Imamat Tirmedi
with a kasra.
Another one of the great he was a
student of Imam al Bukhary's. He had a
photographic memory,
and he could just hear it one time,
and and it was with him. These were
people, Allah He
prepared them to
to, carry this religion.
But this hadith
is a very foundational hadith. Abu Hurairah relates
it,
and,
ibn Abi Zaid said it was
but Imam Ahmed and ibn Abi Zaid put
it in their,
choice of the most important hadith.
This hadith,
almost all of the problems on this planet
come from this this this, problem
of being concerned
with what's of no concern to you.
Minding your own business.
It's such a difficult thing for human beings
to do, everybody wants to put their nose
in other people's business.
Ahmed Sarrouk said,
the door of of peril, of destruction
is opened by saying how so and so.
It's like,
you know, like, just how's so and so.
Because why are you asking how's so and
so? Because very often people ask hoping something's
wrong with so and so.
You know? It's a very common thing that
people do.
So and then why why are people obsessed
with why is there a whole section on
the news feed
on the royal family?
Like,
what is that?
And then all the clickbait.
So,
Hakim Samarkandi,
who was one of the students of
Imam al Maturidi, Abu Mansur al Maturidi, the
great,
Muteqallam.
Imam Al Ghazali said that,
he said,
All of
the the calamities in this dunya
are for three reasons.
People
seeking news,
so we would call those news hounds,
news junkies,
people
spreading news, so we call those newscasters,
and
Mutalakih al Akbar,
people receiving news.
The the all the and he said,
none of them are free of the blame.
And this is a very important point because
one of the things Cormac McCarthy, who wrote
a screenplay called
The Counselor,
which is a Greek tragedy, really,
modern Greek tragedy, but
But in there, there's a character, the counselor,
who's he's buying,
cocaine. He's actually a a a lawyer, but
he wants to make this $20,000,000
cocaine deal, and he's gonna retire.
And and because he's a lawyer for these
drug people from
but one of the things that the
the man that he's doing business with tells
him,
he said,
he said, you know, this is a very
dirty business. He said, well, I'm only doing
it you know, I'm just doing it for
this one deal.
And he says he asked him, have you
ever seen a snuff film?
And he so a snuff film is a
film where people actually really get killed in
the film,
and, apparently, these films exist. People produce them.
They're often women that are killed
after being raped brutally or something.
In any case, he said, have you ever
seen a snuff film? And he said, no.
And he said, have have have you?
And and and then he says, well, let
me ask you this. Have you ever done
a line of cocaine?
And he said, yes. And then he says,
well, you know,
snuff films are only they're only there because
there's consumers for them.
And so if you do
view a snuff film, you're complicit in a
murder.
And if you do do a line of
cocaine,
you're complicit in all that horrific stuff that
these gangs in South America, Central America, and
Mexico do to these poor people,
all the people that disappear. Nobody thinks about
that. The karmic elements, you know, to use
a word from our Hindu brothers. You know,
this this
this element of
you reap what you sow. Like, you look
at this country and you look at the
devastation
of all these drug addicted people, and you
think about these people that are using drugs
that are empowering all of this horror
in places like Venezuela,
in places like Central America,
in just 30,000
disappeared people in Juarez, Mexico.
You know, literally bodies hung from bridges,
and that's what those narcotraficantes
do.
Right? So every time you're doing your line
of cocaine
or consuming your *,
right,
because a lot of this * is produced
by traffic to, women,
women that are being * trafficked. So this
consumer of *
who's watching it thinking somehow that, you know,
oh, it's a victimless crime.
No. All these things have realities, and this
is what this is about, you know, it's
like,
concern yourself with yourself,
but if you get outside of that into
these other areas, you're going to be complicit
in crimes
unimaginable.
And people don't think about this, they don't
think about the ethical reality of just being
alive here.
I mean, I have a son. I don't
know where he got this from, but he
will not buy anything that's not made
locally or in the in the and
and it's very interesting because we don't think
about that. Like, we get these cheap clothes.
CNN had a report where the average American
has 50
slaves working for them around the world
just to to
to supply our lifestyles.
Right? So you're wearing clothes
that were manufactured in sweatshops,
but they're cheap.
You know?
There there was a documentary called the the
high
cost of low prices.
People don't think about that, of buying local,
of of of small scale businesses,
because all these corporations,
you know, they they'll go where it's cheapest,
where they can exploit the workers, where there's
no labor laws. That's what they do. Labor
is really important. Work is important.
And one of the problems with our lifestyles
is that
everybody wants to live
we'd need for for the world to live
like the average American lives, you'd need 3
earths
to provide the resources for it.
It's unsustainable.
So
this this hadith is such an important hadith,
just to
to really preoccupy yourself with what concerns you.
To
to to to to work on yourself,
to not worry about other people.
Aqbalah al Shanik.
And and that's why that was Imam Malik
when
Imam Shafi asked him how old he was,
because that's a curiosity for people, I wonder
how old he is?
Uh-uh. And he just said Akhbala Alla Shannik,
mind your own business,
Which might seem harsh but it was a
great lesson to him because he would say
that whenever anybody asked him how old he
was.
So he got the point.
And Majdanek said if you tell somebody your
age, they'll either say, oh, I thought you
were younger than that, or I thought you
were older than that. Like, it's never work
out.
Yeah. Apparently the Hunsas,
like, add, like, 20 years to their age
or something. That's why, you know, they said
the Hunsas are the oldest living people, but
they get to a certain age, they just
add, like, a decade or something.
So when they're, like, 80, they say they're
90, and say, you look great.
So
from the beautiful Islam
of a person
is that they leave what does not concern
them. Yaani is one of the most beautiful
words in the Arabic language. It's really one
of my favorite words. Arabs love it so
much they say it all the time.
Right? It's like you know in English. People
will say you
know. But
it it has to one of the meanings
is to suffer.
You know, so mu'anats
is suffering.
So yu'anit
from something is to suffer.
Right?
But but it's also
if you actually looked at it, it's a
mohawalah form, yuhaawilu,
it's to attempt something.
So it's to attempt to find meaning.
So suffering in Arabic, if you just look
at the word linguistically, mu'anat
means
in
Arabic.
You are Mu'anaat
means in Arabic.
Is
trying to find Mana.
That's what suffering is.
It's to bring you back into reality.
And and
I mean,
Fakir Banani said if if you could recite,
in other than the Quran,
and it's hyperbole, but he said it would
be with the hekim of ibn Aqlayla. It's
like, why?
It's so amazing. But he said, whoever thinks
that the lutf of Allah, the care of
God, the the grace of God is absent
in the qadr of God, in the decree
of God, it's from myopia.
It's from your own shortsightedness.
And then he says,
because the one who has brought these tribulations
upon you is the same one that accustomed
you to blessings.
In other words, the only reason you know
the tribulations
is because you were accustomed to the hosun
alikhtiyar.
It's so beautiful.
So when things go south,
the reason that you're aware of that
is because
they were up north before.
That's a very geocentric,
Eurocentric
view. You know, the the Muslims put the
map, and I wanted to do a a
Muslim map for our children's classrooms
called the restorative map, you know, which puts
the south on the top,
because all the Muslim maps were made with
the Africa was on the top and Europe
was on the bottom,
and they switched it around,
which is psychological.
Right?
But like the poet said, you'll find out
when you reach the top you're on the
bottom.