Hamzah Wald Maqbul – 3 Ramadan 1443 Late Night Majlis Najm Al Din Kubra I Addison 04042022
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Alhamdulillah.
We've reached this Mubarak 3rd night of Ramadan.
The first 10 nights are
characterized
by Rahma.
That the first 10, of Ramadan are Rahma,
and the second 10 are Mabufirah, and the
last 10 are Itbuh Minanar.
That the first 10 are mercy,
and the second 10
are
forgiveness, and the last 10
are deliverance from the hellfire.
And in fact, in a hadith narrated by
That Allah Ta'ala has certain people that he
manumets from the hellfire, and that's every every
single night.
The last 10,
ostensibly being
a time
when this
gift of Allah Ta'ala's Fadl is widened
and opened in scope.
May Allah give us all from his fa'al
and make us all from the and from
those people who are
spared the punishment of the hellfire.
May Allah
make us from the,
Ramadan
from the hellfire in this night
and in every night.
Amin.
So before we, continue,
with our,
readings,
from this nightly majlis,
Just a reminder to myself and to others,
if you haven't made it to the Masjid
yet, go ahead and go.
Just because lockdown happened the first time,
just because it was partially locked down the
second time,
it doesn't mean that,
now we're excused from gathering and from coming
together as Muslims.
If you haven't made it to the Masjid
yet, hustle and make it. I know it's
far away, and I know it's late at
night, and you have things to do in
the in the morning.
For those who cannot pray the entire,
Tara, we,
then let them pray some of it.
For those of you who cannot pray any
of it, at least pray the in
congregation. If
are late, then go for Asar, go for.
But make it to the Masjid. Fill the
masjid up once
more. The lockdown is over
and Islam
is something that has to continue and that
will continue.
The only fear we have is, will it
continue without us? May Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala
take us into his mercy and carry us
in it and not make us from amongst
those who are left behind.
Further than that,
we also have a duty and we also
have a responsibility
even if we ourselves are making it to
the masjid
to encourage others and to help others to
make it as well.
So call your friends,
call your people, call your relatives,
call your neighbors, call those people who you
have connection with. Check up on them. Are
they okay? Do they have something to eat
for, this Ramadan?
Are they struggling with some other issues that
are weighing on them,
that they weigh on them so heavily that
they cannot concentrate on the
spiritual,
benefits of this month and on the
of this month and on the,
purity of this month.
If they do, help them help them get
through,
those those issues. If not through anything else,
then just by giving them a ear,
to speak to and have some sort of
lightning of their burden through catharsis.
If not through anything else.
If you cannot, you know, if somebody is
not making ends meet,
you're not expected to pay for everything nor
are you
possibly able to pay for everything, but you
do give something,
in order to lighten their burden. And Allah
is the one who gives sustenance and risk
to his slaves, both to that person and
to you and me.
And so whatever it is you need to
do, help people solve their problems and then
help them to make it to the masjid.
May our masjid be packed. There's a housing
crisis. There's not enough houses for people to
live in. We have a bigger crisis that
there should be,
not only
no free real estate in the Masjid,
but there should be a demand for building
more Masjid.
That Allah Ta'ala's house should be
more in demand
and that people should
have trouble finding spaces in the house of
Allah
wherever you are, wherever we are, and that
we should have to acquire more land, and
that we should have to acquire more buildings,
and we should have to
train more people to be imams and hafal,
and,
more people to,
serve these places.
This is a mandate of Islam, a sacred
man sacred mandate of Islam. It's why you,
you have
been given a livelihood and why I've been
given a livelihood and given risk and provision.
It's why this world was made so that
Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'a's name could be taken
on the tongues and in the hearts and
in the houses where the people gather and
congregate
as well as,
in individuals when they, separate from one another.
But, this Ramadan has a number of communal,
acts of devotion that Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala
and His Rasool Sallallahu
have legislated and taught to this ummah,
so that we may lift one another up.
And they are great vehicles for attaining the
madad of Allah Ta'ala, the divine aid and
the divine succor from Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala.
And as the ummah passes from time to
time and from difficulty and difficulty,
to another difficulty and from one age to
another,
putting more and more distance between us and
between the Rasul
and the Khayrul Quran
and the best of generations.
We need more and more not to slack
off and not waste these these opportunities for
receiving Allah
So this means that we come together and
we pray
so that the one whose heart has light
in the congregation, that light spreads to the
other hearts. And so the one whose heart
is clean,
that also then purifies the other hearts. And
so that the one who has nisbah through
him, everybody else in the congregation has nisbah
with Allah Ta'ala and his
Rasool So I'm not recording these, majalis as
a,
some sort of
part of a large larger
sales or marketing package.
These things are not for sale,
nor does anybody to my knowledge pay me
for them.
And
you aren't consumers of them in that sense
for your
own entertainment or for your own relaxation.
Rather, these are reminders that remind ourselves and
remind one another
about
the signs
and the indications
of how to find the path to Allah
Ta'ala and,
how to
fuel up and how to
energize oneself in order to have the him
and the courage to traverse that path.
And so, this is a reminder to myself
and to everybody else
that we also need to in order to
make it ourselves, we also need to take
people with us as well.
And so don't forget don't forget people who
are forgotten easily,
and don't leave behind those people who, are
easily left behind.
Rather, bring them with you to the masjid.
And if they need some problems solved
in order for that to happen, go ahead
and solve those problems.
And so today, we read from a,
an article that I wrote
about a month
before, leaving to,
Uzbekistan.
We had this trip in this month of
Shaaban
to Uzbekistan.
And, subhanallah, it seems that here in Chicago,
every day that, I sit in the masjid,
and I'm just sitting next to Uzbek's
and they all kind
of have a very strange reaction when I
speak to them in their language.
But,
I very quickly assure them
through my love of those places and the
people who live there
that there's nothing to freak out about.
I wrote an article about a sheikh that
I heard mentioned in the Hanqa of my
sheikh Syed Nafeez Shah
a number of times
and,
who seems relatively unknown to
the western audience,
or really the the the Muslim world in
general with the exception of some people who
have connection with history.
And that is the name of,
the Sheikh Hajj Hajj Madin Kubra.
And so we'll read a little bit about
him from the, paper that I wrote. It
may
take more than, one majlis, but inshallah, it's
worth it. He's a very interesting individual
and his story is a powerful story and
his impact on us
lives on in many ways that we probably
haven't thought about, but,
slowly,
in the following majalis, inshallah, it will become
it will become clear to you,
what your connection with the sheikh is.
So, Bismillahir Rahmanirrahim,
the sheikh Najmuddin,
Kubra.
He was the noble and saintly sheikh Abu
Janab Ahmed bin Umar
of Khorasan.
Khorasan was
a great city from the great cities of
Central Asia, but unlike Bukhara and Samarkand, unlike
Shash, which is the modern city of Tashkent,
Khorasan was never rebuilt, really.
It was never rebuilt nor was it resettled.
Rather, it was completely destroyed by the mongols,
and, it never really came anywhere near, what
its previous,
status was. It was the great metropolis
of, Transoxonia
Mawarat
Nar, at its peak.
And that's when it was completely desolated and
destroyed by the mongols.
And may Allah, subhanahu wa ta'ala, have mercy
on the souls who had to suffer
both
by paying with their lives,
and also by seeing the heartbreak and the
sorrow of
losing,
these great centers of Muslim civilization.
And so he was from Khorasan. Khorasan, if
you want to get an idea of where
it lies on the map, it's
somewhere on the
eastern border of the modern nation state of
Uzbekistan
with Turkmenistan.
I believe there is a modern city called
Urgenc,
and there's 1 Urgenc on the
Uzbek side of the border and there's an
on the,
turkomen side of the border as well and
I believe that horizon
as well
the,
old city, which again has been ruined and
desolated and is is is is gone.
That that city
lied somewhere
between these, you know, on both sides of
this this modern,
border
between these,
2 states.
I actually,
read somewhere that Khadijah Nadjmuddin,
about whom we're reading right now, his
Mazar, his grave is
in Urgenc. So I was
actually
planning to
because is on the other side of the
country from Tashkent, I was planning to fly,
to
after
our group was gone in order to visit
but, when we were graciously received by the
office of the grand mousti of of the
republic of Uzbekistan,
I asked, his assistant who was himself, Sheikh
Abdul Hakim,
a man of learning. I asked him if
if Khaja Najmuddin's,
Mazar was there or was it known. He
says it's known, but it's on the turkoman
side. So if anybody wants to visit,
remember that. Perhaps, inshallah, either today or tomorrow,
we can take a couple of minutes to
talk about what the point of visiting,
the Mazarat and the graves,
of the,
mashaikh and the oliya and the aslaf
is because I feel like people have a
little bit of, OCD,
with regards to kind of some bad ideas
and bad habits that were taught to them
by,
people of deviant understanding within Islam.
But, inshallah, we continue.
So he's buried on the Turkoman side of
of of Urgenc.
That his name was Sheikh Abu Janab Ahmed
bin Omar Khorasan,
but he would be better known by another
name,
Najmuddin al Kubra.
And so,
uh-uh, Najmuddin al Kubra who drank
from the chalice of martyrdom
in the year 618
Hijra,
which corresponds to,
the year 1221,
in the,
in the,
Christian calendar or in the common era.
Peculiar due to its grammatical misgendering, the sobriquet's
origin points to its owner's great status.
So,
referring to a male.
The word,
Najam itself is grammatically masculine,
and it definitely refers to a male as
the name of a male.
Whereas, is the, superlative,
the superlative adjective
in Arabic
in the feminine gender. This is peculiar due
to its grammatical misgendering. The sobriquet's origin points
to its owner's great status.
It is said that he was originally known
as,
or the star of the great ones, exalting
his rank amongst the.
The the the the people of knowledge who,
were connected with
the who had godly
status. Godly not in terms of their own
intrinsic
but,
in terms of their with with the
and
the. However,
reported in his
that when the sheikh was young, he excelled
at,
his studies
so much that the other students,
when seeing how quick witted and swift he
was in understanding, the most complex of matters,
they would call him a,
or the greatest overtaker,
which is an expression in the Quran used
to
refer to doomsday, to the.
And this was because of his ferocious intellect.
Says in the Surat
he
says,
that,
that the day that
the comes, meaning the day of judgment,
the greatest of overtakers,
That day,
man will remember all the things that he
strove for, in his life.
And the blazing fire, will be brought forth
for all who can see.
So they used to call him a
as a as a kid. Like, you know
how we, you know, we like, we say,
oh, that's wicked. That's that's oh, that so
and so is a beast or whatever. So,
if you're, I guess, a Madrasa kid in
Central Asia,
back in its golden age, you're not gonna
call somebody a beast or say they're beast
mode, but you're gonna say this guy is
Yomu Kiyama.
He's a Tamatul kubra, in terms of the
ferocity of his intellect.
And so,
later on when he became a great sheikh,
the word fell out of use but the
remained.
The the people the people this is kind
of a carryover from his Madrasa nickname.
And it's a sign of his,
his his mastery of the uloom.
He was a Shafi'i and fit,
and a recognized transmitter of Hadith,
an encyclopedic
master of the various disciplines of Islamic learning,
and an imam of Islam to the point
where,
the great, historian and chronicler and biographer,
and Muaddith
referred to him as the Sheikh of Khorasan.
And he mentions that, Ibn Nuqta called him
an imam in the sunnah,
and he transmitted,
Hadith from the great Hadith scholars of his
age, the great hadith of his age, including
Abu Taher Salafi.
And is,
you know, he's not gonna give these,
accolades out for free.
He's one who, although he has great other
been an open mind. He does speak his
mind
from time to time And when he wants
to hack somebody down, he he goes ahead
and does it.
So for him,
to, call him the imam of the people
of Khorasan is is is a big deal.
The sheikh Najimuddin Khubra was born in Hayuk,
a town near Khorasan, one of the villages
near Khorasan.
And in his prime,
he took up residence in the latter, meaning
in Horazam.
By the way, Horazam is the way that
the locals pronounce the the name.
It's written with a wow and alif. So
in Arabic, usually, they'll say
or
And so there's another famous,
who,
is
a mathematician
that people
attribute
much of the modern form of algebra to.
And so you'll hear people in Arabic say,
In Persian, when you have this,
these two vowels,
next to each other, the waw and the
alif,
In modern Persian, usually the waw becomes
silent.
And so
they would say,
like, like the word or or
the like
Like the word.
Whereas,
the locals in Uzbekistan, they they seem to
pronounce it as so I I choose this
pronunciation, but,
I guess a person can
say it in different ways if they wish
to and, I don't really know which one
one can point to as
being more correct than the other except for
through context. If you're gonna speak with, Persian
speakers, say it like a Persian. If you're
gonna speak with Arabic speakers, say it like
an Arab. And if you're gonna speak with
Uzbeks, say it like a Uzbek, I guess.
And so he's born in this village of
Hayuk, in a town near Khorasan, and then
he took residence,
in Khorasan.
It is there that his renowned disciple, Baharzi,
will take up his discipleship and audition hadith
from him. And, if you look through my
social media, which I encourage you to do
after Ramadan is over, because I myself am
not looking through it nor am I posting
it. And, Ramadan is a time that, we
should be focused on other things.
The Mazar
Baharziz in in Bukhara.
Bukhara is Sharif and, he actually is one
of those who,
because of him, Bukhara is resettled and isn't,
isn't
left as ruins like Khorasan,
is.
And so in in Khorasan, it is that,
Baharzih,
took up the discipleship of the sheikh Najmuddin
and,
discipleship meaning not just in hadith and in
fiqh,
but also he took the tariqa from him.
And that'd be quotes,
who's different than the, the
who wrote the
who wrote the the kaffia the great grammarian
as well
although interestingly enough
he is
he he is
almost contemporaneous
with him.
Writes about,
about him. He says he wandered through the
countries and auditioned Hadith.
He then took up residence in Khorasan and
became a sheikh of that land. He was
a master of hadith and the sunnah
and,
a refuge,
for destitute strangers,
and a greatly honored man who feared not
the censure of others when it came to
the right of god.
And,
this is
this is, Ibn Hajar
Rahel who wrote in his
book about the,
the the the different,
lands and cities and names,
geographical names.
Sheikh Najwuddin was also a great sufi of
his age.
And it was at his hands that Baharzih
was,
vested with the.
The is what is what we
refer to as the in in this day
and age
that the the sheikh gives a disciple
the mantle of successorship that the the disciple
now can also
take on and train initiates.
The way that that was given back in
the day was that the sheikh gave his.
The word in Arabic literally means
a patch,
at least in this context. A patch that's
put onto,
onto
clothing. Like if clothing rips, you're not as
soon as not to throw it away, rather
to
sew a patch in it and keep on
using it as long as it's usable. And
it said that he
had, 40 patches or more in his,
in his Juba that, that he wore.
And so
in the terminology of the Sufis, the word
ends up referring to the the the actual
jubba, the the coat or frock
that the sheikh,
wore,
and that was patched up and passed down
from generation to generation.
And,
literally and then sometimes metaphorically that the sheikh
would give some article of clothing,
that would be a and it would be
a sign of
that,
that disciple
receiving,
successorship,
in the tariqa.
And then later on, you know, we consider
it more like an ijazah, and there's no
physical
object,
necessarily given with it.
And it says that, that received
the from
From from Najmuddin al Kubra.
It's worth noting by the way that both
of them are Shafiri's
and tracks, transaxonia
is,
later on
very very solidly
identified with
Hanafi, the Hanafi Madhab, the learning and practice
of the Hanafi school.
And indeed, before the Mongol desolation, there were
definitely great Hanafis that were there and it
was a stronghold of the Hanafis for sure.
However,
before the Mongol desolation,
because
this area is so lush
in terms of its spirituality
and in terms of the people there and
their love of Dean
and,
so solid in terms of its
mercantile status
that it's a crossroads for the for the
for the trade of a number of goods,
going from China to Europe,
to India and, to and from all of
these places.
So the merchants were quite wealthy. And so
they, you know, there's a great amount of
coming together of ideas you'll see in Central
Asia.
A number of different Madahib great mashaikh and
great masters of
those they they live there and they
coexist.
And so it said that shash in particular,
shash is tashkent
that was a great center for the study
of the Shafiri school
and you'll see great Ulamah, the Shafiri and
the Hanabula
in other parts of Central Asia.
You'll see that they're they're they're they're they're
not, you know, it's not like
a completely,
you know, a completely, like, monolithic type society.
Whereas nowadays,
really none of the other have much of
a hold in in those places except for
the Hanafi school and even that because of
communism and,
and and secularism.
That's not as strong as it used to
be, at one time.
But it's important. It's worth noting that both
of these
are both great and they're both great scholars
of the school,
and all of the schools that are based
in the sunnah,
and all of them,
even if we have one that we pick
and that we learn and that we practice,
and that we see as
making more sense to us than the others
that, you know, we do see the in
all 4 of them.
The Habib mentions
that the Tatars
said upon Khorasan
and Rabi'ul Owal of the year 618
Hijri.
And Najmuddin Kubra was amongst those who went
out for jihad,
and they fought, at the gates of the
city.
And, this is a a good place to,
stop. Will continue,
tomorrow with the rest of the story.
And,
we ask Allah
to give us in this Ramadan and to
fill our masajid up again
as much as they were filled from before
even more we ask allah subhanahu wa ta'ala
to fill our hearts with noor and to
forgive us our sins and to change our
lives for the better
and to, give us the nisbah with the
ones that he loves so that we can
also be ones that he loves And that
whoever meets us and whoever we interact with,
whoever we speak to, whoever we talk to,
whoever takes from us or gives to us,
that that person also can be dyed in
the color of Allah Ta'ala's love.