Hamzah Wald Maqbul – Crisis and What to do in Confusing Times DSV 12252020
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Mohammed
from his greatest blessing of the creation
was the sending of,
to
instruct,
human beings in how to live and how
to deal with the difficulties of life.
And from amongst them, the greatest stuff is
Ambi Ali Musa to Islam Sayna Muhammad
the one who is and and and given
help
and given, victory
through, not only miracles
and through,
miraculous physical means,
but through
great
realms of wisdom or amounts of wisdom and
meaning,
that, he brought to this Ummah,
a great hikmah,
through which the Ummah was able to negotiate,
all sorts of difficulties and trials and tribulations.
And through piety and righteousness achieved those things
that,
cynical
materialism,
or calculated
Machiavellian
utilitarianism,
were unable to achieve.
Whoever holds fast to the methodology sent by
the messenger of Allah
will be successful in this life and honored
in the hereafter.
And whoever turns his back to it does
so only, to his own peril
and only to push, himself or herself closer
to perishing.
The
topic of today's talk,
which I chose,
and perhaps the name could have been more
descriptive or
vivid or specific.
But the topic of today's talk is,
very
relevant to,
the situation our community
not only finds ourself in right now, but
has really been teetering on,
for quite some time,
since the
end of
the protection of
the state,
for the dean of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala
in most places,
or the end of those institutions that
protect meaning and protect,
the integrity of knowledge
for the Ummah of Sayyid Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi
Wasallam. When we talk about the meaning and
the integrity of knowledge, what do we mean?
There's a, an entire
branch of
philosophy,
or an entire branch of,
you know, thinking about
about knowledge and about
the sources of truth
and what you consider,
to be truth,
that,
that, you know,
this
is somewhat,
unique,
and it's the the kind of the Badir
al Zaman. It initiated a new age
in human history,
with regards to,
which is what is that when people would
give you information,
as a Muslim, traditionally, you would ask, well,
where did the this information come from? You
try to evaluate what the,
the reliability of that information was,
instead of simply listening to it and then
saying I accept it or I,
I don't accept it.
And, this is,
you know, a skill set that has basically
become dead
amongst people.
And part of
the the the acceptability of information
has to do with
authority,
and part of it has to do with
procedure. Meaning, how did you go about,
obtaining that,
that information?
And
because authority has broken down and people are
ignorant of procedure,
what what used to be, a a marvelous
constellation,
a galaxy of,
of of of
different stars,
that were in the in the darkness of
the night sky of existence by which the
people of this Ummah were able to take
guidance and to move themselves through, you know,
through their path in life. And, you know,
Islam offers you
guidance on so much more than just,
you know, how to make wudu and how
to pray.
And the sad and almost sick and twisted
thing is now that because we no longer
understand the system or hierarchy of authority
or process in order to,
derive,
authority or in order to validate knowledge.
We're stuck in this kind of hamster wheel
of, like,
you know, getting into a fight with the
imam every,
you know, every every day, every week, every
month about the same stupid, like, 3, 4
issues. And the issues aren't stupid. You know?
This is what the stupid part is the
fact that we have to, you know, rehash
and renegotiate all these things again and again
and again. We have to rehash and renegotiate.
Well, what is,
you know,
what is wool do? Do I have to
you know, can I make wool do over
socks, or can I,
you know, do do I have to, you
know, wash my,
my ears this way or that way? What's
your proof? You know, do I have to
sit
a second time after the second sajazah before
getting up, or can I just get straight
up? I mean, these things are important in
the sense that anything connected to the deen
of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is important.
But the idea that the Ummah has to
kinda, like, redebate all these issues again and
again in every, like, little locality,
It should
be clear to anybody who has half a
brain that the the the
Muslims are never going to be able
to understand anything more profound,
about their own existence or about the deen
if they can't
get
beyond this sort of neurotic and,
you know, just obsessive compulsive
questioning of those things that we take for
granted in our dunya all of the time.
And can you believe can you can you,
believe that, like, you know, if a person
were to have this idea inside of their
head, like,
you know, oh, if I turn on the,
you know, my my light in the kitchen,
you know, maybe the gas is leaking, and
it's gonna blow the entire house up.
You know, if they had that thought every
single time they turned on the the light
in their kitchen, like, what kind of life
are they gonna live? And someone might say,
well, Sheikh, you know, like, I actually smell
gas, and it's you know, it might actually
be dangerous. So, yeah, if you smell the
gas, then please don't turn on the light.
But the idea that this waham runs through,
you know, spurious
and unchained thought,
runs through people's head again and again every
time. What does it mean? It means stuff
like what,
doctor Jawad,
told us about. You never gonna be able
to process it properly in the light of
revelation.
It means stuff that, like, you know, the
things that,
Ustad Mabin and
Sharif Tabukhi talked about in the morning.
You you know, you're never gonna be able
to think about any of those things. You're
never gonna get to any of those things.
You're gonna have this Islam that is not
a complete way of life. Rather, it becomes
a kind of, like, rabbinic
training or obsessive training for like some sort
of priesthood that nobody's ever going to enter
in the first place.
And,
it is a it is a it is
a mental illness. And I'm not saying that
we shouldn't talk about these things or discuss
these things or that, you know, precedent from
the past shouldn't be examined, but there's a
time and place for it. And that time
and place is in Facebook, and it's not
Twitter, and it's not Instagram, and it's not
Snapchat.
The time and place for that, if you
want to, you know, go go down that
alley,
is, go ahead sign up, you know, for,
Arabic, learn your grammar.
Go learn to learn, you know, logic or
rational,
formation.
Go learn,
your,
you know, learn your basics, and then spend
your life in that if that's what you
want to do. But this idea that everyone
can litigate everything,
it leads to a circus. And the idea
is this, is that someone might say, well,
shit. We have to start from somewhere.
No. You have to start from somewhere. If
you wanna do something, you have to do
it the right way. You have to do
it the right way, which is what?
Suck it up and go and study.
If you're not willing to trust anybody else
with the job, you know, then the the
the if you're, you know, if you can't
trust anyone else with the job, then you
have to do it yourself.
If you're neither gonna do it yourself and
you're not gonna trust anyone else to do
the job, and you're still gonna cause a
fuss and you're still gonna cause a problem,
you're shaitan. And I know a lot of
people who are like this. And I know
a lot of people who are like this
and they have the savior complex inside of
them that they're somehow, you know, they they're
aware of some problem out there, some nebulous
problem out there, in the deen and how
the ulama are misleading everybody, and they don't
know what's going on. And they don't know
about western philosophy, and they don't know about
science, and they don't know about this, and
they don't know about that. And, their sellouts
and their smellouts and their god knows whatever,
you know, things they wanna say. It's so
important to them that they have to get
up and cause a fuss and raise a
ruckus, but it's not important enough for them
to actually learn
the ilm themselves, learn the Arabic themselves, learn
the Nahu themselves, learn the themselves, learn the
themselves, learn the themselves,
learn the themselves, learn the themselves, learn the
themselves, learn the themselves, learn the themselves, learn
the themselves, learn the, the names of the
narrators themselves.
If you were to you know, they'll tell
you about this hadith and that hadith. But
if you were to crack open a book
of hadith in front of them, they would
be unable to even vocalize properly the names
of the narrator as much as understand what's
inside the hadith.
And,
it's enough is enough. You know, enough is
enough. There's a expression
from the wisdom tradition
of the Muslims, which was very
beautifully distilled,
in a lot of the Persianate literature.
But it's there in in the introductory books
of, of of Arabic that most people skip
over because they think they're too they're too
good to read.
And so from that kind of Persianate,
wisdom,
you know, they say that the, the lion
when the lion is, absent from the jungle,
the jackal turns to the hyena and says,
Bideriman Sultanbud,
the did you know my father was king?
Obviously, who's the king of the jungle? It's
the lion.
So when the jackal turns to the hyena
and says that my father was king, it's
a joke. It's a complete joke. It's not
funny, though. It's a joke in the sense
that it's not something that anyone in their
right mind would take seriously. But here we
are,
where the jackals and hyenas are,
saying my father was king. And it's not
a new problem. It's not a new problem.
When the Ottoman state was intact, when the
Mughal state was intact, these are not, these
are not political entities with that are perfect,
but they were,
in the sense that they were what they
were. They they did exist. You know, they
had judges
that, were mandated to rule,
based on the book of Allah and the
sunnah the Rasool
and they had madrasa systems in which,
the knowledge was taught
taught and read and mastered
to a supreme degree. If you look at
the books of,
Sheikh Islam Mustafa Sabri,
the last Sheikh Islam of the Ottoman Empire.
If you look at the books of his
adjunct,
Sheikh Mohammed Zahid Al Khothari
These were giants.
These were people who were
very,
well aware of the in ins and outs
of our tradition.
Those who agreed with them and those who
disagreed with them before Madhabs,
the different,
Masalik in in Aqida and in Kalam.
The different madhabs. There are madhabs of Nahu,
of Arabic grammar. But since you're never going
to, you know, give a glorious ba'an about
Nahu, nobody's ever gonna, like,
you know, fawn over you, and, you're not
gonna get a 100,000 followers or likes,
you know, on on on Twitter or Facebook
or whatever for being a a a a
master grammarian.
People don't know about it, but they knew
all of these. They knew the different of
all of the things, the different opinions of
all the things. And on top of that,
they're very well conversant with,
the the the philosophy
of Europe,
in their age of Western Europe in their
age.
And, you know, Sheikh Mustafa Sabri, one of
the most beautiful works in the last century,
he wrote a a 2 volume work about
the, proofs of the existence of God, and
they completely blow a person away.
And if someone were to, you know, listen
to, some small part of it, you know,
they're just left flabbergasted.
If you wanna know about it or hear
about it, Sheikh Omar Qureshi, who used to
be the principal in IFS, now he's a
an instructor in Zaytuna,
college in
in California.
You know, he's you know, I've attended his
presentation,
about,
Mustafa Sabri Affendi's,
work on the existence of Allah subhanahu wa
ta'ala. It's just amazing. You see people in
the crowd, like, the lights come on, like,
as if their iman
was, like,
was, like, nobody's home. Then all of a
sudden someone turns the lights on. They're like,
oh, bleep. This thing is actually real.
And these people are geniuses.
And
from them going back through Tarikh, going back
through our history,
so many people, just amazing people.
And when you share a little bit about,
like, you know, like, s excerpt about what,
you know, what their ideas were, what they
said, what they thought, what they talked about,
People say, Sheikh, where can I read more
from that person?
I'm like, you read Arabic? No. No. No.
In translation.
I go, why the * is anybody going
to spend years of their life translating a
book when you won't even believe them when
they tell you how to make Wooloo?
Why would anyone do so?
It's not like we do this job to
get paid. There are some of us that
do this job to get paid. Those are
the most dangerous and some of the most
mischievous
miscreants,
that are a threat to Islam. If we're
doing this job right, we're not doing it
to get paid. So if nobody's gonna listen,
it becomes a complete waste of time.
And this is the wabal, this is the
complete destruction that has come on our heads.
Because what? We're not able to recognize authority
in knowledge, and we're not able to recognize
the proper method of obtaining knowledge.
And the reason I'm bringing this up right
now, this has been a perennial issue, and
not a perennial issue in the Ummah, but
at least in my life, in my lifetime.
I've never seen a time that this has
not been an issue.
The reason I bring it up now is
that it's laid double bear because of the,
the coronavirus
epidemic.
Why?
Because
now you have a situation where people are
locked down. Doctor Jawad can tell you more
about the psychological
effects that that's had on on on, you
know, a a large number of people being
isolated and, you know, kinda having a little
bit too much time to themselves.
But, as a layperson who's not qualified to
speak about psychology,
if I were to guess, I would say
there's a lot of people who's had a
really ill effect on them.
And I've noticed it in my, you know,
my own personal relations with a lot of
people
that they have changed. And you see it
also in the kind of percentage of vitriolic,
almost, discourse that people have. That you have
somebody walking into a Starbucks and cussing people
out and shouting the n word and, you
know,
racism and just every, like, nasty and disgusting
thing you can think about pouring out of
their nuffs. Why? Because someone asks you to
put a damn face mask on. Like, what's
the big deal? It's a face mask. You're
not gonna die.
What's the big deal? Just put it on.
Just it it should be enough for you
even if you don't believe the face mask
has any efficacy whatsoever. Just as a common
decent human being, it should be enough for
you just to put it on because you
know it'll make another person feel better.
Or is the Rasool Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam's entire
sunnah of all the things that he used
to do in order to honor other human
beings, Muslim or kafir amongst them, elder, younger,
black, white, so much iqram he used to
show to everybody. Is that all like nonsense
now because of corona? Like, we have, like,
a a sunnah free pass that you don't
have to practice the sunnah
anymore?
You see this vitriol coming out of people.
And what is it?
It's now because the coronavirus, you have a
compress a compression like a nexus of a
number of things
that are compressing the, and now they're blowing
up in weird and ridiculous ways.
And the problems were all there from before,
but the circumstances are just compressing them. Like,
I don't know if anybody knows, somewhat like
a weird tangent, but we'll go ahead and
take, like, a minute and a half in
order to explain it. But the original atomic
bomb that they dropped on Hiroshima, Allah Subhanahu
Wa Ta'ala,
Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala protect us from people
who make atomic bombs or from
being people who,
make them or who they're made for and
from being people who drop them or from
being people who, they're dropped on.
The original atomic bomb, they had a problem
with,
detonating it. One of the things was that
when they got the critical mass of,
radioactive,
whatever,
uranium, and they put it together,
in order to make the explosion more,
you know, robust, what they did was they
put it in a chamber,
and the chamber was a spherical chamber lined
with explosives
that would explode inward and cause the uranium
to melt and then compress into a smaller
space. Why?
So that when it actually explodes, when the
the the the kind of nuclear reaction starts,
that compression will make it even even more,
vigorous.
And that's what's happening. So all these things,
these kind of, like, psychological issues people have,
on top of the kind of scatterbrain
that people have of not being able to,
understand or value authority and knowledge or any
methodology in obtaining it.
All of it is like like those those
explosives that are causing the uranium to melt
and compress into a smaller and smaller space,
which is gonna make it just go even
crazier when it blows
up. And so coming back to coming back
to what we're talking about from before, now
all of a sudden, you have people who
are
and many people harbored these feelings from before,
but socially, it was unacceptable for them to
open their mouth in a gathering say anything
without making a complete fool out of themselves,
which is what?
I'm right.
All of the all of those people who
are studying and teaching deen, who have made
sacrifices to study and sacrifice to teach, and
who have kept suhba and traveled, you know,
to the continents of the world and kept
the company of the great ulama
of Islam who are in a direct chain
of narration from the great mashaikh of the
past who connect to the great imams of
the past from before them, who connect to
the salaf of salihadda tabireen taba tabireen
and the companions of the messenger of Allah
who's literally relate the hadith of the prophet
with the unbroken chain of narration.
Now you have people who are willing to
come out and say,
all of these people are morons. All of
these people are idiots, and all of these
people are sellouts, and all of these people
are pushing government agenda, and all of these
people are,
you know, have been duped by this Dajalic
system. And I'm the only one who's right,
and me and some, like, other nutcase guy
who makes tough fear of everybody.
And, you
know, You know, that's not that's not how
stuff is done.
And I'm not saying that everybody who claims
he's a scholar is a scholar.
I'm not saying that everybody who has a
chain of narration knows what they're talking about
or is even narrating something correct.
But there's an entire system by which these
things are, are, you know, litigated.
If there's a difference of opinion between people,
there's an entire system by which that's worked
out. And there are a number of outcomes.
When someone says something, they may be right.
They may be wrong,
or it may be somewhere in a gray
area in the middle where you can't a
100% prove that they're right, and you can't
a 100% prove that they're wrong, and you
agree to disagree.
We consider them to be. They are agreed
upon by the Ahlul sunnahal Jama'a. We say,
I'm right. You're wrong.
Those things that are wrong are also then,
excluded through Aqidah. They themselves are not things
that we believe, but we're thing things that
we believe are incorrect.
In the middle
is a majority of what we refer to
as fiqh.
And then there are things, you know, fiqh
is, like, probably right, but possibly wrong.
And then there's a whole bunch of stuff
that's just like politics. It's just like this
is, you know, you choose what works best
for you. You have an option of a
number of different ways of thinking about things
or doing things. And, you know, you're mandated
to choose what's best and some things that
are are not even politics. You know, if
you wanna have, there's, you know, 2,
you know, 2,
choices at the lunch line for soup. You
know, there's the split pea soup and the
chicken corn soup, and you like chicken corn
and the other guy is likes split pea,
then let everybody eat what they're happy with.
And, really, one cannot say objectively that one
is better than the other. One can say
why it's better to them, but objectively, the
Sharia itself rules that one is not all
that much better than the other,
or not in a way that a person
can say definitively.
And so what happens, we bypass all of
that. We bypass all of that and then
make our feelings, our emotions into the mufti.
And, that mufti will then start making up
its own aqidah.
And it gets to ridiculous points, You know?
People will you know, this coronavirus,
the vaccine came out. Darul Qasim gave a
fatwa.
Moana,
Mufti,
Moana, doctor Abdul Mateen,
Khan, who is,
going to be
a presenter in this, in this conference if
he hasn't already presented yet.
He also gave Fatwa about its permissibility.
And what is it? You don't know. It
is a diddolic system. You don't know about
eschatology. Someone says to me, you don't know
about eschatology.
Eschatology is a word.
It means the the knowledge about the end
of time.
I suspect the person who said it probably
learned what that word meant, like,
maybe 3, 4 days before making that comment
and was very proud of it.
And, brothers,
and sisters,
we are
as people of the law, whether you are
a,
a graduate of Madrasah and you talk about
fiqh,
Or like our good friend Osman Chaudhry in
the office in,
Indar salaam. You know, you're like a lawyer,
like an American lawyer.
One thing that's common between all of, these
different types of practitioners of the law is
that we're wordsmiths.
We put together words for a living, and
we also deconstruct them. And
we are
paid, so to speak,
to see beyond the words that are used,
not to be impressed by the words that
are used, and look and see what the
meaning behind them is.
And anybody who doesn't think about the yomotiyama,
that person isn't to move to your faqih
in the first place.
And just because you know that Dadaal exists,
and just because you know that Dadaal is
coming one day, and just because you know
that the Dajal has a system,
it doesn't allow you to
buck the
necessity for going through procedure,
which is what? Even if the Dajjal is
in front of you, even if the Dajjal
like Zoom bombs this meeting,
and he sticks his fingers in his ears.
And he says, mia, mia, mia, mia, mia.
I'm the Dajjal, and, like, I'm interrupting Dar
es Salaam's
video conference.
And Dar es Salaam or Dar es Salaam's
conference, not video conference. There's actually no video
on it. What if he shows up with
the video? Right?
If anyone has a fit question at that
time, the same methodology that was used to
run the Ottoman Empire, the same methodology that
was used to run the Mughal Empire, the
same methodology that Banu Abbas used and the
Ulema used and Banu Umayyah, The same methodology
that was used by our staff, that's the
same methodology you're gonna use to answer a
fit question at that time that you are
right now.
The fact that the is
going to happen
does not allow you to throw
the the the methodology of Islam out the
door,
and now it's, like, special. As if you're,
like, playing Super Mario Brothers, you just grab
the star, and now you're completely on fire.
You do whatever you want to or, you
know, all bets are off or, you know,
we just entered into an alternate dimension, and
things are different now. They're not.
They're not different. In fact, if you read
the books of our
read the the Hujatulwal Balikar, it's literally sitting
right here on my desk. If we're on
video, I would've showed it to you right
now, proved it to you if you didn't
believe me.
The whole brilliance of the book is what
is to say that the Sharia law gave
us the same Sharia which mandates us to,
you know, wash our limbs 3 times or
wipe our head once and we'll do or
to, you know, that it's to pray after
the sun rises,
you know, from the time it sunrises until
it comes off the horizon by a certain
amount or whatever. That same Sharia, the principles
on which it's based in this material world,
those principles are immutable
through all sorts of different dimensions of existence,
in life and in death and in resurrection
and in the hereafter.
They're immutable in the hellfire and they're immutable
in,
in
in in Jannah. May Allah
take all of us there despite our faults
and our unworthiness.
They're immutable. That's the beauty of the system.
That's what it means when you say something
is haqq. It doesn't mean that, oh, look,
something changed and now all bets are off
and that's like brave brave new world. We
throw everything else that was,
there in the garbage from the past.
And that's one of the things people have
to understand is that that process is the
only thing that's that's gonna get you get
you through this. You cannot say, oh, look.
Coronavirus
is happening,
and the ICUs are filled
in hospitals all across America. And I I
feel very passionate about helping people who are
sick. So I'm gonna open up my own
board and start treating my own patients.
If you don't know what you're doing, you're
gonna kill people. Your wish to do good
by people is not going to help.
At that point, your wish to do good
by those sick people is going to be
best served by what?
By making dua for them, by feeding them,
by helping put together competent care for them.
But you're not going to be able to
care for them because you didn't plan for
it and you didn't ready yourself for it.
And the same thing has to do with
serving the dean.
If you don't plan for it, you don't
ready yourself for it with the requisite knowledge,
just shouting people down, it's not gonna help.
It's not gonna benefit. Even if you feel
really strongly inside something's wrong and everybody you
know, you know something, everybody else doesn't know,
At worst, you're going to just be one
more person in line amongst a group of
people who don't know what they're talking about.
You're gonna be like x number of people
don't know what they're talking about. You're gonna
be x plus 1. It's not gonna help
anybody.
At that time, what can you do? Migdua.
What can you do?
Make the intention, I will go through the
difficulty
myself or I will sponsor another person to
go through the difficulty, or I prepare my
children to go through the difficulty
in order to do those things
that they need to do in order to
prepare for actually being able to help. To
fulfill those prerequisites to being able to help.
Just like if you want to help somebody
when they're sick right now, but you don't
know anything about medicine,
what can you do?
You can
support financially the people who are doing it.
You can support them with your duas. You
can cook dinner for them or make lunch
for them. You can help fundraise for their
buildings.
But you can't actually treat the patient until
you know what you're talking about.
And
there's a very interesting parallel, you know.
It's a hadith of the prophet
The
person who
talks about the Quran from their own, opinion.
Meaning what? Not something that's based on something
that's transmitted or a solid source of knowledge,
but from what they feel like this is
what this ayah means to me.
That person is wrong even if they're right.
Meaning, even if they're even if they're the
thing that they say ends up matching with
what the olamas say, or on the day
of judgment end up matching with the Haqq,
they're still going to be written as one
of the people who lied against the book
of Allah ta'ala.
I give the example of it as as
like what? Like, imagine, like, I I used
to travel a lot before the, lockdown.
And so oftentimes,
I can fly over my house in Addison
and see it,
and, then we landed O'Hare, and then I
have to drive back. So what if one
day I was like,
my house is right there. Why should I
waste my time, you know, landing, taxiing?
And, you know,
our Muslim community doesn't really buy you first
class tickets, so we have to wait for
the rest of the plane, the deplane before
we can get off.
So why should I wait for that? I'll
just open the emergency exit door and jump
off.
Is it a smart idea?
Is it a good idea? It's not a
good idea.
First of all, because there's very low likelihood
that you're going to land anywhere near your
house. You you're you know, the person doesn't
have the precision to be able to time
to jump and, like, you know, have a
such a,
calculated knowledge of, you know, aerodynamics and whatever
that they're gonna land in the correct place.
But more importantly than that, even if you
do land right at your doorstep, you're gonna
land in pizza form.
You're not gonna land intact.
This is what Allah ta'ala's Rasulullah alaihi wa
sallam says about the person who
says his own opinion about the Quran. Meaning
what says his own opinion about the deen?
That he's wrong even if he happens to
be right.
Whereas on the flip side, the person who
did the preparation.
That on the flip side, if a alim
is alim, a person who knows what they're
talking about. And I when I say alim,
I'm not talking about somebody with
a with a son or a degree. No.
A person who actually did their homework and
understood all the aspects of the
particular item of knowledge that they're gonna open
their mouth about or run their, pen about
or their keyboard typewriter swipe their finger on
the screen about.
That person
that person,
if they exert their
utmost in order to figure out what they
think is the closest to the solution,
and then they say their solution,
it's something the messenger of Allah salallahu alaihi
wasalam is pleased with.
Said that Mu'adh ibn Jabal radiallahu anhu expressed
that this was what he would do if
he had to judge between people and he
couldn't find an answer in the book of
Allah
The Nabi Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam tapped him on
the chest with pride.
He's pleased with him and said,
praise be to Allah
who gave,
the ability for the messenger of the messenger
of Allah, meaning Mu'ad bin Jabal,
Gave the ability to the messenger of the
messenger of Allah.
The ability to say that thing which pleases
the messenger of Allah sallallahu alaihi wa sallam.
And this is why we also attribute to
the sunnah that the mujtahid,
that person who takes the time and effort
in order to prepare
themselves,
in order to speak on a certain topic.
Meaning that they prepare so much that they
don't slack in in any way, shape, or
form in their preparation to speak about what
they're talking about. They leave no stone unturned.
Not just like, well, I read about that
and have some ideas. No. You read and
you read more and you read more and
you read from the ulama you agree with.
You read from the ulama you disagree with.
You read from the Muslims you agree with,
you read from the kafirs you agree with,
you read with the from the Muslims you
disagree with, you read from the kafirs you
disagree with. You thought about it for a
while. You reflected about it.
Then you open your mouth. Then what what's
the what does the sunnah tell us that
that person if they give the right answer
in that case to get 1 2 good
deeds
written for them. And if they give the
wrong answer, they give one good deed. Why?
Because the process is important.
The process is important.
And the parallel
between that and between medicine, because we're talking
about the coronavirus right now.
The parallel is what?
Is that in the Maliki fiqh, we have
Masha'Allah, our great Hanafi Muftis here. They can
chime in during my talk, after my talk,
before my talk, if they're
adept at time travel.
They can chime in and tell us what
what, you know, what the opinion of the
Hanafi School is. And the Maliki School, I
suspect it's somewhat similar in the Hanafi School
and all the schools of FIP.
In the Hanafi School in the Maliki School,
if a person gives medical treatment to another
person and they die of it,
or they're harmed by it. That person is
legally that person is legally responsible for the
harm they did. Why? Because they know that
they they weren't qualified.
They opened their mouth anyway. They knew they're
not qualified.
Whereas a person who is qualified,
that person treats a person, that person dies
anyway. They're not legally they're not legally responsible
unless there's some sort of gross negligence that's
that's displayed that can be proven in court.
Why?
Because one person has
demonstrated the capacity to,
to show that they can try their best,
and another person doesn't have that their capacity.
So even if they are trying their best,
they know their best is not enough from
the get go. And so what they're doing
is reckless, they're responsible for it.
Now,
when it comes to the actual virus, I'm
not going to give a fatwa. Masha'Allah doctor
Matinas here. Darul Qasim is literally just up
the road from Dar es Salaam. They already
gave a fatwa of Jawaz. And now you
have,
the the the jackals and the hyenas,
saying what? Not writing a fatwa against it
that has
and that has,
reasoning.
And what are the the fatwas of, you
know, Dar Darul Qasem and,
Moana, doctor Matin?
That the
not that the the vaccine is farb, that
you have to take it. No.
They're saying that the vaccine is.
It's permissible.
And so in order to refute it,
you either have to bring
the proof that it's
obligatory to take it, which most of these
people are not, you know, in that camp.
Or you have to bring proof that it
is haram to take it.
If you cannot bring proof, then you have
no,
you have no,
standing,
on which to disparage,
those masha'ik and those olamah who said what
they said.
And really your,
burden of proof is uphill. It's much easier
to prove something is permissible than it is
to prove something is impermissible or obligatory.
And who are the b team that are
that are are are are saying all of
these things?
Who are the b team that are saying
all these things? They're not people of any
repute amongst the olema.
They're not people who have taught any of
the great olema. They're not people who run
any of the great institutions of ilm.
And they're not even people who are all
that advanced in medicine.
And all I see when I ask people,
I say, you know, you just came out,
you know,
swinging
right out of the gates. You came out
guns blazing,
saying these people don't know about eschatology,
and they don't know about the Dajjal, and
they don't know about the system of of,
you know, the United States government, and they
don't know about,
you know, the system of of the, you
know, World
Health Organization and the UN and this and
that and the other thing. Don't tell me
about that. I was going to protest against
the Iraq war and against sanctions when I
was like a teenager in high school.
I know
I know that our government has done great
wrong.
I know the UN is
not a an organization
that lives up to its ideals, to put
it very, very mildly.
I know what this government has done
injecting,
you know, African Americans with syphilis
and the Tuskegee
experiments. I know these things.
I know that Adjal exists.
And I'm not a person who says that
whoever talks about the Adjal is, like, has
their mind stuck somewhere in, like, you know,
in a hole and, like, we need to
get beyond. I'm not that person. If you
want, you can go look up like, I
gave an entire,
series of talks about the end of time.
They're,
almost all of them are on SoundCloud. They're
the Jumah Futba in our our Masjid
in,
in Cleveland. You can hear them all on
SoundCloud,
several weeks to talk about to talk about
the the the Imam Mahdi and the Dajjal
himself, and then the, Sayna Isa alaihis salaam,
and, you know, how the Yom Kiyama will
start and all of these things. These are
important things. We have to talk about them.
This is part of fiqh.
Every mufti has to know about these things,
and every mufti has to think about when
before giving a fatwa, how is this gonna
affect a person in this world? How is
this gonna affect a person in the hereafter?
And this is why I'm not happy about
this
trend where people are like, well, you know,
and Islam,
is, you know, there to give you benefits.
And so this is jayes, and that's jayes,
and that's haram, and that's haram, and that's
what it's fine. If you want to talk
about worldly benefits and preserving life and preserving,
you know,
preserving wealth. Then if that's the only thing
or that's the dominant
thing, that you put into the calculation in
your fatwa, then what's I don't know understand
what's the difference between a person who believes
in Allah in the last day and and
and a kafir. I I don't understand.
I say you have to know about these
things. We all need to know about these
things.
However, that being said, having established that that's
important.
You have first principles that you rule by
when giving a ruling,
when giving a fatwa.
You cannot bypass those first principles to talk
about secondary principles.
You cannot say, oh, look, pharmaceutical
companies are, you know, providing money or sorry,
providing cures that are more concerned with making
money than they are with health. I agree
that I I agree that's a by and
large, it's a correct statement.
But it doesn't mean it doesn't mean that,
you can bypass
first first principles,
questions of whether the sting is efficacious or
not, whether it's gonna benefit you or not.
Every vaccine still has to be decided on
its own merits.
You cannot say,
oh, look, you know, we're getting close to
the end of time. And in the end
of time, we know that everything is going
to be deception. Therefore, this also must be
a deception. Well, Why is this the first
thing that you invoke deception on?
Why why wasn't deception deception last week? Or
why is it not gonna be deception next
week and this week we're still,
you know, we're we're we can still trust
our hospitals or we can still trust our
doctors.
Rather we, you know, run through first principles.
This is a hadith of the prophet sallallahu
alaihi wa sallam. Actually, there are a number
of of different hadith,
that that
described the same, incident that happened,
narrated by Al Khamatubnu,
Wa'il,
from his father Wa'il bin Hajar
the companion of the messenger of Allah sallallahu
alaihi. So a very well known companion of
the prophet
who accepted Islam relatively early. He went back
to his home and called them to Islam,
and they accepted Islam at his hands. A
number of hadith about, like, simple things like
about how the prayers prayed are
narrated by.
So
a man from Hadaromot,
which is a place,
that's
east of, the traditional,
land of Yemen, although it's part of Yemen
politically
now. So a man from Hadaromot and a
man from Kinda came to the prophet sallallahu
alaihi wa sallam. And the Hadar army said,
oh, messenger of Allah, this man has taken
my land I inherited from my father by
force.
The Kindi replied, it is my land. I
possess it and I work its fields. He
has no right therein.
The messenger of Allah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam said
to the Hadarami,
do you have any proof for your claim?
The Hadarami said, no. The messenger of Allah
Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam said to the Kindi,
you may validate your claim if you swear
an oath on it. Meaning what?
The Kindi had possession and the Hadarami
claims that it was taken from him. 1st,
the prophet
asked the Hadarami provide proof.
When he couldn't provide
proof, then he turned to the Kindi because
possession is 9 points of the law even
in the American system.
And he says, then I want you to
swear an oath affirming that this is rightfully
your land.
The prophet salallahu alaihi wa sallam turned to
the Kindi and said, you may validate your
claim if you swear an oath on it.
The Hadar army said, oh, messenger of Allah,
the man is a profligate who doesn't care
what he swears on, and he's not cautious
in any of his affairs. Meaning you're gonna
ask him to swear an oath, he'll swear
anything in order to get the land. Like,
he doesn't care. The messenger of Allah
said what? He said there's no remedy for
you in this case other than this.
So the Kindi went forth to swear when
the messenger of Allah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam said,
as for if one swears an oath against
another's wealth in order to unjustly misappropriate it,
He shall indeed,
meet Allah and find that Allah has turned
away from him. Meaning Allah to Allah on
the day of judgment will not listen to
any of his pleas.
Thibi who is,
one of the canonical commentators on the Mishkaat
al Masabi mentions in regard to the meaning
of turning away to be
humiliating him on the day of judgment.
Narration in the sunun Abu Dawood,
includes mention of being resurrected as a leper,
as a punishment for for using the system
to misappropriate,
land. In this narration, the Kindi after hearing
the prophetic admonishment forgoes the claim.
Meaning the Kindi out of fear of Allah
says, you know what?
Just let him have it. Because even if
even if I happen to be wrong in
this, even if I happen to be wrong,
and I don't know about I don't even
wanna take that risk because the the punishment
is too much, just let him have the
have the land.
And one might say, well, it's maybe because
he's guilty or maybe because he fears a
lot more. Allah knows best. Why? We don't
know what's in people's hearts.
Right? In this narration, the Kindi after hearing
the prophetic admonishment foregoes his claim.
A similar incident is narrated by Ahmed and
the Sahihain about a property dispute, but between
Arab and Uwais,
and no less than Saeed bin Zayed, one
of the 10 companions promised paradise during the
lifetime of the messenger of Allah
wa sallam. A point which is mentioned as
a matter of aqidah by the Ahlul Sunnah.
The matter was adjudicated by Marwan bin Hakam
during his governor governorate over Madina Munawarah, may
Allah increase her in her in her honor,
in favor of Arwa. And Sa'id bin Zaid
was understandably
upset given that he was in the right.
He asked how he could misappropriate
any part of her land,
when
he personally heard the messenger of Allah
say that whoever misappropriated
even a hand span of land would find
it in all its weight running down through
the 7 earths tied around his neck on
the day of judgment.
At that occasion, he prayed, that Allah take
Arawa's sight away from her and turn her
property into her grave. She later lost her
sight and would say it was a manifestation
of Saeed's prayer. She would later
fall into a well on her property and
was never retrieved from it. It does become
becoming her grave. Now what's the point of
me mentioning these these these narrations?
The point is is what?
There are a lot of things in life
that are legit. You don't
know what the truth is. It's not it's
not completely, like, clear to you right away.
Because there is a lot of stuff that
just doesn't fit,
you know, when you put the pieces of
the puzzle together.
There are a lot of things you just
don't know. There are a lot of things
that make you, you know,
that that make you wonder, like, what's actually
going on here?
You know, I think a person who doesn't
trust the government,
you know, I don't think that person is
crazy.
I personally don't trust the government for a
lot of things. They do a lot of
crooked things. They say see something, say something.
Well, that only counts when you're, you know,
ripping on minorities or on Muslims.
Edward Snowden, you know, see something, say something,
reality winner, see something, say something. All of
them ended up 1 in exile and 1
in jail.
I I know that the government does crooked
things. I'm not an idiot. I wasn't born
yesterday.
I know conspiracies exist.
At the same time,
the fact that a conspiracy
exists or that conspiracies do exist
doesn't allow a person to clock out of
the system or clock out a procedure.
Everything we judge, we judge according to the
system. This system is our najat. It is
our salvation in this world and in the
hereafter.
And the GIST system has first principles.
If you wanna say something is haram, you
bring your proof. You can't just say that,
oh, look. These people work for the Dajjal,
and Dajjal is coming at the end of
time. He's going to
he's going to deceive people, and these people
are all deceived.
Those are secondary issues. Those are secondary issues
that are not directly related to
what we know is in the vaccine or
what's not in the vaccine.
They're not, you know, they're secondary issues. They're
not primary issues
with relation to the issue at hand.
And you can't invoke these secondary issues and
use them to bypass
the system, the methodology that's given us to
us by the Sharia. Look at 2 of
these during the life of the prophet sallallahu
alaihi wa sallam and during the life of
the companions radiAllahu anhu.
Two examples.
Two examples
of
our sacred and holy sharia that we swear
by and the belief in which makes us
a Muslim and the belittling of which will
throw a person out of the the the
the circle of Islam.
That Sharia, two examples of it,
giving a ruling of
minimally questionable,
maximally dubious, or even wrong
outcomes.
1, in the case of the Kindi being
able to take the land from the Hadarami
even though the Hadarami swears up and down
that it's his land.
And the second,
in which Marwan bin Hakam, who is not
a very well liked individual. He is not
a companion, first of all. And the companions
didn't look well,
upon him. They didn't think he was upright
and honorable individual. He was actually a person,
you know, to put it very mildly, around
which
a great amount of strife and, even bloodshed,
including the assassination of Saidna Uthman
who kind of orbited,
like a planet orbits the sun. Like, wherever
he goes, trouble happens.
But he was the judge,
and he judged in the case according to
the methodology given by the Sharia.
And so Sahid bin Zayed knows
that the outcome of the case
wasn't conformant with
what he knew to be true,
but he abided by it.
And he he he he was right, and
it was the entire
history of Islam bears witness that he was
right.
He was right.
He made against this woman. His was answered.
She went she went
blind,
and she tripped and fell into a into
a well on that land, almost to a
comical degree. Well,
the the curse of the righteous is not
something to laugh about. But if you look
at it, like, literally,
unfolded like clockwork.
But nobody,
neither Saibin Zayed himself,
nor any of the commentators or ulama throughout
the history,
none of them raised this objection that what?
That
that court case was ruled wrong. Why? Because
they all knew that it it was ruled
according to a particular methodology.
And so those people who are Olamah Absheikh
Amin with Darul Qasim. Masai came to Chicago
with Darul Qasim in 2,012.
Since that 2,012,
I remember they have regular meetings about bioethics
with doctors, with nurse practitioners, with scientists, all
sorts of people. I sat in them, some
of them, doctor Asim Padilla,
you know, trained on the Islamic and by
sheikh Amin doing excellent work in this in
this field. These people have been at it
for quite some time. They're experts in in
what they do.
And it it really opened my eyes a
lot and made me realize how much more
I had to learn, in the field of
of, Islamic bioethics.
Than to have people just, like, shout them
down. You don't know because the government lies
to people. You guys are so naive. No.
They know.
If you want to bring proof, bring your
proof.
If it's just a feeling inside of your
heart that you are uneasy,
then know that not every case
in life is going to be a slam
dunk.
Sometimes a procedure
will lead you to something
that may turn out to be wrong. But
sticking to the procedure always will give you
a statistically higher chance of
a good outcome than than than bucking the
procedure will and just, you know,
rolling rolling the dice.
The Sharia is not dice.
The Sharia is a system.
And Allah Ta'at promises the person who keeps
that system, even if the outcome seems to
be wrong to you, that still some and
some good is going to come from it.
And if you wanna buck that system, if
you want to, like, throw that system away,
then it's a sign of a weak intellect,
of a weak
That you want to take the thing that
has a higher probability of of goodness in
this world and a complete probability of goodness
in this world and the hereafter
in favor of just,
you know, just doing something random.
That never helps. It never does anything good.
And unfortunately, the Ooma has
been, like, far too okay with that method
of doing stuff for far too long. And
this is why you will see, no 10
Muslims can get together and stay together on
any one issue.
We have we don't have the ability to
to to digest those things that we don't
agree with.
Or or those systems or methodologies that we
set up through mutual consultation and mutual agreement.
We don't have the ability to sit through
them. And why what is the wabal? What
is the
the the the ill effect of it? The
ill effect of it is what if we
never, respect any sort of authority in in
the the sharia? Well, guess what? You don't
get any sharia.
If we don't set up any systems by
which we can rule,
like a court or rule any law, well,
guess what? Your law will never be applied
anywhere.
If you don't have any systems by which
to,
say what you consider ethical in medicine,
or not, and at the last minute, every,
you know, shove and fuzz is gonna show
up and, give their opinion and, you know,
talk about how stupid everybody else is. Well,
guess what? Nobody's going to care about what
your ethical,
edicts, and verdicts are with regards to medicine
or really with regards to anything else.
And,
you know, this is a pain in my
heart.
I wanted to share it.
I consider,
that,
the other
presenters in this conference are far more qualified
and will probably give you a far more
beneficial
presentation.
And, when,
the brothers, Mufti,
contacted me to speak at the conference, I
said, you guys have the of the Qom,
the great of the Qom, Michelle, that are
going to be addressing you. I don't know
what you know, if you want me to
do a comedy hour or something.
But they insisted, so here I am. And
I had this one,
sad,
melancholic
ballad that I wanted to sing in front
of everybody.
Like, one of the opening
abhiat of the Masnawi Sharif, Moana Tamim taught
me that Moana Rumi said that I'm the
one who in every in every gathering, I
cry the same,
I cry the same, lament.
Those people who are of a good state,
I'll sit with them and cry the same
lament. And those people who are in a
bad state, I'll cry the same lament. So
this is, part of the thing that hurts
me with regards to seeing the state of
the Ummah of the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa
sallam.
And I would hope that, anyone who this
talk makes any sense to can kind of
bring it in and, and help,
establish a culture of,
you know, accepting accepting authority and accepting methodology.
And the test is when that authority and
that methodology,
you know, results in something you don't like
or that's not in your benefit. That's the
day we see, you know, that the iman,
is it is it ripe or is it
still raw? Is it still undeveloped? Is it
still immature?
Allah give all of us so much tawfiq.
If I went over, please,
please, forgive me.