Hamzah Wald Maqbul – States and Stations 3 Ramadn Late Night Majlis 1444
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We reached this,
3rd night of Ramadan.
So already more than a tenth of it
is gone.
And like that, 1 by 1, all the
days are going to pass. So whoever wants
to do something, let them do it right
now and not think that they have,
a tomorrow to live to or even if
they
do that Ramadan is gonna be there forever
for them to do. Whoever needs to take
whatever from it, let them take it right
now
and,
not not delay.
So we continue reading from the
of the sheikh
Ali bin Ruthman.
It's a really interesting book. It's a great
book. He, he's very human. He's not at
all in any way, shape, or form like
the kind of
studio CD that you cannot touch him. You
cannot, you know, like, get near him, and
there's, like, 7,
that are there to, like,
bar you from, like, getting to him in
any way, shape, or form, and you never
see anything imperfect about them to the point
that you have this about them that perhaps
they're even more than the prophets are, alaymus,
so how much people have about their,
which is is is this type of excessiveness.
If you think your sheikh is like the,
like the sultan or whatever,
even then, he's not gonna be Mas'ud.
So this idea, this
kind of popular imagination people have about the
being, like,
above blame and above reproach.
In, yes, you should treat them
you should treat them well, and there's benefit
in it for you. But this idea that
somehow they're divinely protected from error, this is
this is too much. At any rate, so
he first of all, he, doesn't have a
crew who reads with him because he's in
Lahore from before the time Lahore accepts Islam.
And,
Lahore is an interesting city, actually. The presence
of the masha'ih was there for centuries from
before the the city, has a sizable Muslim
population. I don't even know if it actually
has a a Muslim majority until the time
of partition.
Because if you talk to old people, they
say the Anarkali Bazaar, which is the old,
like, Bazar of of Lahore.
There was only 4 or 5 Muslim shop
keepers. All the rest of them were Hindus
in Sikhs,
up until partition.
But, at any rate, he's very interesting. One
of the things that's interesting about his book
is throughout it he actually apologized for for
it in the beginning. He says that,
I'll put my name all throughout the book
because I wrote another book, and someone borrowed
it from me. And then they claimed that
they wrote it and became famous for having
written it, and I'm still, like he's basically
still salty about that. So he'll write from
time to time in his book,
and he'll be like, for this reason, I,
Ali bin Usman,
Hajjwari, like, assert this or that. Said, it's
not because I'm trying to pump myself up.
It's just because I'm afraid someone's gonna, like,
steal this book and, like, pretend they wrote
it instead of me, which is kinda hurts
hurt his feelings a bit. You know? There's
a lot of, like, weird, like, things like
that where he shows his humanity and his
unguardedness. But at the same time, you can
see the genius of, like, his
his thought, how he understands things and explains
things in a way that,
another person wouldn't be able to, but then
he also explains it effortlessly so that it
makes sense
to a person. So we continue, he's explaining
the the tariqa of,
and muhasibi.
And,
he's
explaining the doctrine of of
being pleased with Allah's judgment.
And, he's going to then talk about he
said that
one of the peculiarities
about
al Muhasibi is, first of all, that he
makes
being pleased with the divine,
decree,
kind of the driver of,
toward Allah.
And then on top of that, he has
this doctrine about it being a a state,
a how that a person goes through rather
than a maqam, rather than a station that
a person has permanently, and then he'll explain
all of that.
So,
he continues,
says satisfaction
that the hardship,
consider the eternal choice of god on behalf
of his creature,
I. E. Whatever befalls him, he should recognize
it as the eternal will of god and
his past decree, and should not be distressed,
but should accept it cheerfully.
Again, this is, this is
a
together,
which is what the idea that Allah is
above time and space. He's transcended above time
and space. The that Allah chose for us.
Why is it that we're here and we're
not somewhere else? Why is it that we're,
you know, white or brown or black and
we're not, you know, purple or green? Why
is it that someone else has money and
we don't, or we have money and someone
else doesn't? All of these things, these why
questions that people have,
they're all when you realize that they're in
the end of
before the creation of the heavens and the
earth, not chronologically before because that doesn't exist.
Time and space are a creation of his.
He's not trapped inside of them. So they're
before
they they're before the creation of the heavens
and the earth in rational priority,
not chronological priority. Meaning, Allah created the heavens
and the earth. All of it was in
his knowledge all at once.
Today, tomorrow, yesterday, they're all the same in
front of Allah Even though we're stuck in
them with some sort of sequentiality
that goes, like, frame by frame. So this
is when you think about it that way,
when you understand your properly,
instead of having this kind of new Platonist,
like, pagan
that the universe has been around forever and,
like, that god is,
you know, somehow, like, somewhere in the sky
and, you know, and this and that, this
type of stuff. No. We push that away.
These are the ideas or the conceptions of
divinity of paganism. They don't fit with the,
idea of Allah in the Quran.
When you understand properly,
you will know that,
you will know that Allah
because his transcendence above time, that his choice
is something that's not
it didn't just happen, like, through circumstance.
It's something a lot more solid than a
person really realizes.
And it's, you
know, it's from his
his knowledge, his his omnipotence, and his his
desire.
Right? Is that he knows it's gonna happen.
Is that he's the one who has the
ability and is making it happen. And Irada
is the fact that it's happening, and he
it's not it's not like, you know, like
fire burns without having really much choice in
the matter.
Like, cold freezes things without having much choice
in the matter. Why? Because that's just the
way they are. Rather, no. This is He's
he's doing what he's doing, and he's doing
because he wants to do it.
And that all of these things are together.
When a person ponders over that, they think,
okay. Fine. Maybe this was meant to be
this way for some other good.
And
chose it for me, and he's the only
one that we're ever gonna have. So we
should be pleased with it, one way or
the other. And it takes people to think
certain things that normal people don't don't usually
think, but this is the of the,
which is the sign of people being from
the rather
than being,
from the
not in the sense that, like,
we have a different sharia than other people
do.
But, like,
like, being a human being rather than just
being like an anthropomorphic
cattle,
walking around.
So he says, that when a person thinks
of all things, that they
should accept it cheerfully.
Hadith al Bhasid, the author of the doctrine
says,
rida is the is this is the is
is the quiescence of the heart. Rida of
the sukun of the heart, under the events
which flow from the divine decrees. This is
a sound doctrine because the quiescence and of
the heart are not qualities acquired by man,
but are divine gifts.
And as an argument for the view that
satisfaction
is a and not a matam,
they cite the story of Utba Al Gulam,
who once at night did not sleep, but
kept saying
to Allah,
if you chastise me, I love you, and
if you have mercy on me, I love
you.
I. E. The pain of your chastisement
and the pleasure of your bounty
affect the body alone, whereas the agitation of
love resides in the heart, which is not
injured thereby.
You know the choices from
Allah. Like a person is, like, happy that
Firaun got drowned.
In that sense, even Firaun should be happy
that he got drowned.
But if he knew that, then he wouldn't
be Firaun. Right?
That's what they mean by this.
This corroborates the view of view.
Satisfaction,
is the result of love inasmuch as the
lover is satisfied by that which is done
with the done by the beloved.
Says, during the last 40 years, God has
never put me in any state that I
disliked or transferred me to another state that
I resented.
This indicates continual satisfaction of perfect love. The
story of the dervish who fell into the
Tigris River is well known. Seeing that, he
could not swim,
a man on the bank cried out to
him, shall I, tell someone to bring you
ashore? The dervish said no.
Then should you wish to be drowned? He
said no. What then do you wish? The
dervish replied,
that which God wishes, what do I have
to do with wishing?
This is obviously like I had mentioned yesterday.
Right? These are, like, weird people. The their
love of made them kind of. By all
means, when you're drowning in the Tigris River,
go ahead and ask for help.
But somebody is thinking they're preoccupied with something
different. Sharia actually commands you should you have
to save yourself. Right? But he was thinking
about something else that distracted him from that.
And so, the point is not necessarily to
emulate the
the the conduct of such people,
which there's a nice story about that at
the end of this chapter. But,
it's to think about those things and to
understand them. That imagine if he had drowned,
there's khair in it. If he was saved,
there's khair in it as well.
And so the Sharia obliges us to go
through the motions with certain things, But at
the end of the day, what ends up
happening is what ends up happening, we're just
obliged to, you know, to try, to to
put in
to put in action the commandments of the
Lord,
which is what a slave does. And
then afterward, what happens? That's Allah Ta'al's choice,
So what the master does. So a person
should not be excessively, like, frustrated. Like, why
isn't this working? Like, I've been praying for
40 years or whatever. How come I haven't
become king yet or whatever? That's not your
job. Your job is to pray 40 years.
That's itself a a success. Right?
It's not to resent and ask why this,
why that. Just am I doing a good
job as a slave or not? That's the
preoccupation people should have.
The
have uttered many sayings on satisfaction, which differ
in phraseology, but agree in 2 principles, the
2 principles that have been mentioned.
And then finally, he ends us out with
a
short discussion about the distinction between Hal and
Ma'am, between
state and station.
You must know that both of these terms
are common, in use amongst the amongst the
Sufis, and it is necessary that the student
be acquainted with them. I must discuss this
matter here, although it does not belong in
the present chapter.
Maqam or station denotes anyone standing
in the path to Allah Ta'ala, Tariq to
Allah Ta'ala.
His fulfillment of the obligations appertaining to that
station and his keeping it until he comprehends
his perfection so far as lies in man's
power. It is not permissible that he should
quit his station without fulfilling the obligations thereof.
Thus, the first station is repentance.
Right? So I wasn't making it up day
before yesterday. Right? He says, the first station
is repentance, Tawba,
and then comes conversion, Inaba, then renunciation,
Zuhd,
and then trust in Allah,
and so on. It is not permissible that
anyone, should pretend to conversion without repentance
or to renunciation without conversion or to trust
in Allah without renunciation.
Obviously, this indicates that there's an entire that's,
like, systematized
and that is, understood,
by people that we don't talk about and
we kind of pretend will, go away if
we ignore it for long enough or whatever.
But, there is an entire and there's an
entire system that people should read about and
think about, but it's not enough to read
about it. You actually have to try to
put it in practice as well.
He says, Hal, on the other hand, state,
on the other hand, is something that descends
from god onto a man's heart without his
being able to repel it
when it comes or to attract it when
it goes by his own effort.
Accordingly, while the term station or, maqam denotes
the way of the seeker and his progress
in the field of exertion and his rank
before god in proportion to his merit, The
term state or how denotes the favor and
grace which Allah bestows upon the heart of
his servant, which are not connected in any
way with the mujahada on the part of
the ladder, with the mortification. He he he
describe you know? Nicholson's a good translator. He's
like the best. These are the type of
orientalists. We don't have these anymore. If you
go, like, take Islamic studies, NELQ, or whatever,
they're all CTEEN people.
And they don't put in the time and
effort to learn English properly or to learn
Persian properly, to learn Arabic properly, Turkish, anything
properly. Everything they do is just time passed.
Why is that? Abdul Hakim Winters once
I asked him this question.
And
because when the 2 years I taught at
the, I would try avoiding the head table
because it's very stuffy.
I'll try to sit with the students in
the back and, like, pretend nobody knows me
so I can sit back and relax. And
you go, oh, and so they'll say, oh,
no. No. You go sit with the sheiks.
And so Sheikh Hamza is there and he's
talking about god knows what and, you know,
Sheikh Abdul Hakim is talking about god knows
what. Imam Zaid is there, and there's, like,
just like a bunch of dignitaries and, like,
diplomats and government officials or whatever. So I
just kinda try to stay quiet the whole
time.
I asked him this question. He says, I
think the reason that the old school,
orientalists were good, whereas the new ones are
not, like, good at what they did, is
because they had colonization
as some sort of, like, divine mission. They're
like, look. We have the gospel of Jesus
Christ, and we have to give it to
the, like, savage barbarians for their salvation.
So they studied the deen with religious fervor,
which is the only way a person will
ever even learn Arabic, much less any of
the other, sciences of deen. So his translation
of Mujahadda as self mortification, what does that
mean? It's a means, like, literally to kill
yourself for Allah's sake and struggle. You're fighting
against yourself. Right? You're fighting against the enemy.
How do you win the battle? By killing
your enemy. Right? If your enemy is yourself,
that's kinda rough.
So he at any rate, he's talking about
the howl. The howl is not attained through
mujahada. Is this the maqam is maqamat that
that were aforementioned,
maybe attained through,
which says these are not connected in any
way with mortification with on the ladders in
the part of the ladder.
How, sorry, Maqam belongs to the category of
acts, and,
how belongs to the category of gifts.
One is, one is,
and the other is. Right? The is and
the is.
Hence, the man that has a a maqam
stands by his own, Mujahhadah, whereas the man
who has a hal is dead to the
self and stands by a hal which Allah
creates in him.
Here, the sheiks are at variance. Some hold
that howl may be permanent, while others reject
this view. Hayrat al Muhasibi maintains that howl
may be permanent.
He argued that love and longing,
and contraction, qabl, and expansion, bust are all
ahawal, they're all states. If they cannot be
permanent, then the lover should not be a
lover until a man's state becomes his attribute,
hisifah, and the name, of the state is
not properly applied to him. Him. It is
for this reason that he holds satisfaction to
be one of the ahuwal, one of the
states. And the same view is indicated by
the saying of Abu Uthman al Hayri who
says, during the last 40 years, God has
never put me in a state that I
disliked.
Other Shirkhs deny that a state can be
permanent.
Junaid
He's
kind of
like the
complimentary,
juxtaposed and diacritically opposed
Sheikh to Muhasidib.
And,
Imam Ahmed's tariq
is more
akin to,
that of Imam Jannid
The masha'if of the Mujdahidun,
they're also masha'if of the tariqa. The reason
their names don't appear on the, shajarah is
because of Urlul. Otherwise, too many names go.
There's a shorter connections between people. So as
to save the the isna, it's for the
barakah that that it connects to the prophet
for the sake of meeting names so that
the becomes shorter, they're not there. But Imam
Ahmed is very clear, actually. Junaid is a
a an even in his to the point
where he was, had the licensure of a,
that he's he's he's connected with the the
with the, Imam Ahmed
So Junaid said,
states are like flashes of lightning. Their permanence
is merely a suggestion to the nafs.
Some have said to the same effect that
states, Hawal, are, like their name. They vanish
almost as soon as they, descend on the
heart. Whatever is permanent becomes an attribute, an
attribute subsistent in object,
which must be more perfect than the attributes
themselves. Right? This is talking this is a
monthly,
not discussion about, like, a falsify discussion about
the the Johar and Arab. Right?
That
you guys read that. Right? You you guys
read it. Right? That the the the the
itself has to have a to subsist in.
If the if the itself is impermanent, then
it's not a at all, and so it
cannot take attributes.
All this stuff has applications in the study
of Kalam, by the way. He says, and
this reduces the doctrine of states, that are
permanent to an absurdity.
I have, set forth the distinction between state
and station in order that you may know
what is signified by these terms wherever they
occur in the phraseology of the Sufis or
in the present work. In conclusion, you must
note that satisfaction is the end of,
and the beginning of.
So this is the genius of
He's saying that, you know, they say that,
being pleased with Allah's decree.
Is it a is it a maqam?
And the masha'ih differ with each other.
What the sheikh is saying is that what
when you get to the maqam of Rida.
Right? Right? Remember what he mentioned yesterday that
the shrine is greater than the gate.
A person has,
they're doing without the dunya because they're seeking
something. Whereas the person who has has already
arrived there. They don't want anything else anymore.
The shrine is better than the gate. What
he's saying is that this
this attribute that the the has inside of
him that he's pleased with Allah Ta'ala and
his decree.
This is the dividing line between
That you've gotten to the maximum sign that
a person who's pleased with the Lord's decree
to arrive there, they've gotten to the maximum
extent of their mujahada.
And now afterward, what they experience, there's still
word, but these are all. They're they're gift
gifted by Allah for a
person, taking up residence in that in that
place.
It is a place,
of which one side rests on acquisition and
effort and the other side,
on love and rapture. There's no station above
it. There's no above it. It is at
this point that mortifications
cease.
Hence, its beginning is in the class of
things acquired by effort, and its end is
in the class of things that are divinely
bestowed.
And therefore, it may be called either a
station or a state. This is the doctrine
of Muhasabi as regards to the theory of
Sufism. In practice, however, he made no difference
except for that he used to warn his
pupils against
expressions and acts,
which,
though sound in principle, might be thought of
as evil.
And so this is remember the, like, don't
try this at home, type of stuff. I
mentioned he'll mention it at the end of
the chapter.
So, Mohseniyu was very careful because a person
who's truly
pleased with the divine decree may start acting
weird.
Like, really, it's weird. It's not normal for
a person, like, oh, look, I got, like,
shot. You know?
It's not normal. Not, like, part of the
normal human human human experience. Then we saw
some didn't used to do stuff like that.
Some of the companions would say stuff like
that that time, but you see from the
from the from the top of the pyramid,
you know, the
they used to actually these types of feelings,
there's indication they used to come over them,
but they used to
hide them from people. Why? Because, otherwise, if
that's the part of the that everybody else
has to take their example, you're not gonna
be able to take the example of somebody
who's
experience is so far removed from that of
normal people that, that that you just can't
relate to it.
So he says he says that in practice,
however, he made no difference except for he
used to warn his pupils against expressions and
acts which, though sound in principle, might be
thought of as evil. For example, he had
a a king bird, which he, which used
to utter a loud note, Shahmuri.
He had a pet bird, basically, that used
to utter a a loud screech.
One day, Abu Hamza Bardad, who was Harith's
pupil,
an ecstatic man, came to see him. The
bird piped, and Abu Hamza also shrieked back.
So what is this? It's just like the
sign of, like, he was like
like Majzub.
He was like, what is Majzub? Majzub is
like different than Majzunun. Both of them would
be like crazy, like a normal, like a
Kafir saw them. Majzub is someone who's the
the akel is mahlut, like their ability to
reason has become like mixed up, jumbled
up. The majzub is the person who is
so absorbed in,
thinking about Allah to Allah that
he no longer functions on on worldly logic.
He's thinking he's thinking about things in a
different way.
And so what happened was in that time,
there was a set of
and
that had, the doctrine of hulul that they
used to say, I see Allah in everything
and everything monism, which is
like kufr. It's completely wrong.
And so some of the some of the
people who,
made so much liquor that they didn't, and
weren't able to control, these experiences that came
over themselves. They would utter things
that, looked
like Kufr to the others, and God knows
if they were or not. But, at any
rate, the the judges didn't take kindly to
it. So if you start saying, oh, I'm
the hap. I'm the hap. Like, you know,
someone might say, well,
someone might say, well, this person has made
so much zikr that they don't see their
own nafs anymore, you know? And so that's
all that's going on. He's not actually thinking
that he's saying he's God. But it sounds
like he's saying that he's God, so the
judge is still gonna hang you for it.
The judge will still hang you for it,
and he should.
Allata will sort it out later on if
there's another explanation.
But it's very unfortunate, and the didn't take
kindly to this. So he mentions about Muhasabi
that this guy shrieked back at the bird
when the bird shrieked at him, which was
something that made him look like he's one
of those guys.
And so,
and so, Harith rose up,
seized his knife, and said, you're a Kafir,
and and
would have killed him if the disciples did
not separate them. So the had to save
save, save Abu Hamza
from the sheikh.
He then said to Abu Hamza, become a
Muslim or miscreant.
The Murids, exclaimed, oh, Sheikh. We all know
him to be one of the elect saints
of the people of Dohid. Why does the
Sheikh regard him with suspicion? Hayarth replied, I
do not suspect him. His opinions are excellent,
and I know that he's a profound person
of Tawhid. But why should he do something
that resembles the action of those people who
believe in,
in monism, the?
Why why should he do something that that
resembles them? And thus has the appearance of
being derived from their doctrine. If the census
bird pipes after its fashion, capriciously,
why should he behave as though the note
were the voice of god? God is indivisible
and the eternal does not become incarnate or
united with phenomena or mingled with them.
Again,
it's all.
This is why we don't say Allah is
a body in time and space and things
like that. Allah
have
within time and space within the Hadith world.
So, you
know, he was upset and offended. And this
was something
that I read Kalam with. He mentioned this,
Fafrudir Razi, who's, like, level 7 black belt
of of the Ashari school.
Once he came to the he came to
the, pulpit,
and,
someone left a nasty note for him and
says, you're like this, and your mother is
like this, and your wife is like this
is a complete like, just completely, like, went
off on him in in the worst way
possible.
And so, he read the note in front
of everybody, in the Masjid. And then at
the end of it, he said, Alhamdulillah, fumal
hamdulillah, at least out of all the things
he said about me, at least he wasn't
able to say that you ever said that
God has a body and sits in a
chair.
So at any rate, so he says he
says, if the census bird bird pipes after
its fashion capriciously,
why should he behave as if it's noteworthy
voice of God? God is indivisible and eternal
and does not become incarnate or united with
phenomena or commingled with them. When Abu Hamza
perceived the sheikh's insight, he said, oh, Sheikh,
although I am right in theory,
nevertheless, since my action resembled the actions of
heretics, I repent and withdraw.
May God keep my conduct. This is the
Sheikna Ali Hajuri saying, may God keep my
conduct above suspicion,
but this is impossible when associates with worldly
formalists whose enmity is aroused by anybody who
does not submit to their hypocrisy. And,
if you're a Sallik on the path, Insha'Allah,
you're gonna have a lot of haters and
some of them actually pray 5 times a
day and have good Tajweed as well. So
Allah protect us all.