Khalid Latif – First Steps Essentials of Islam #02
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
So for those who,
are joining us today, weren't here last week
to give a quick recap.
Last week we
kinda did
an overview of just
what are
the foundational
theological beliefs in Islam, like, what makes somebody
Muslim,
and
why those theological beliefs are necessary,
in order for one to say that they've
practiced Islam. And if someone was to say,
I'm Muslim, but I don't follow one of
these beliefs,
And, one could say, well, that's kinda outside
the categorical definition of Islam. It doesn't mean
that, like, you would go to someone with
their faith, they're like, you're not Muslim. Right?
But just so we have a base understanding
of
what renders one to be Muslim is not
kind of an outward identity variable, but it's
kinda yielding to a set of beliefs fundamentally
and then the belief informs
practice and ritual and other things. Does anybody
remember what those three
beliefs were that we said?
There's one God. Right? So Islam is a
very pure monotheism,
and so if somebody was to say I'm
Muslim but I don't believe in God or
I'm Muslim, but I believe in more than
one God, one could say, well, that's kinda
outside of the
normative practice of Islam, it's theology.
You could say that doesn't qualify as being
Muslim.
Right? What else was there?
Yeah. Last prophet.
Yeah. So Islam
claims, like, theologically,
a foundational theology
is not just a prophet, but a final
prophet in the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon
him. So, we recognize starting from Adam,
a 120 +1000
individuals
sent as prophets and messengers
to humanity
and the prophet Mohammed being a final prophet,
who was sent as a prophet for all
mankind
until the end of time.
And then, what's the last,
the third one?
After life. A belief in a afterlife. Right?
That there's
a belief that this world is not simply
it, but there are multiple worlds of existence
that a soul goes through. And we'll talk
about that eventually.
But there's a life that comes after this
life.
When we talked about
and kinda
distilled a little bit more about the concept
of God in Islam,
you know, the question was coming up,
well,
is this like the same monotheistic belief as
other systems that are monotheistic?
The idea that there's other religions that claim
that there is one God is there,
but
the essential understanding of God differs
in Islam from other religious traditions.
Right? So the
prevailing prism of knowing God in Islam
is through a negative knowledge of God.
Right? That we know
who God is by understanding what he's not
because there's a verse in the Quran that
says,
laisak nifli hishe,
there's not anything that's like a likeness to
God.
So
whatever you would conceptualize
God to be, you know that He is
other than that,
that the kinda
extent to which we understand things
within the prism of
our dimensional interaction here, you know, time and
space,
it's
a conceptualization
that transcends this understanding.
Within that, we're gonna start to explore and,
like, look
at different
kinda
names that God identifies himself through in the
Quran
to help just deepen in that understanding
of who God is,
or what Islam says,
like,
and what the Quran teaches
us about God fundamentally.
We looked at a chapter in the Quran,
that's,
quite often recited in a lot of different
prayers. It's a very short chapter. It's got
a handful of verses.
It's called Ikhlas, meaning sincerity.
And it essentially
is a chapter that just gives us now
prevailing qualities of God.
Right? It says, say He is God, the
one,
the source of, like, refuge.
He, you know, does not beget nor is
begotten and there is nothing that's an equivalent
to him. Right? But in Arabic, like, a
lot of nuance is there. It gets lost
in translation. So the word for 1 is
ahad,
in this chapter.
When you're counting in Arabic,
right, this is just a summary of what
we did last time because it's gonna inform
the conversation we have today because we don't
wanna think about these concepts separate but together.
So in Arabic it says, kulku allahu ahad,
let's say he is Allah the one.
If you're counting in Arabic, like the number
one is wahid,
right,
but ahad is different than that. When something
is ahad,
it is not able to it's not divisible.
Right? The way that, you know, I can
take this
and, you know, it's made up of different
parts.
You know, and if we were to break
it down,
there's like felt inside and ink inside
that essentially constitutes
this marker
as
whatever
the sum of its parts are to make
like a whole. Right?
Says
that or what it denotes is
that there you can't it's not divisible into
parts,
right? Ahad is a very unique word also
in Arabic
because you can't pluralize it.
You know, there's no plural to ahed. So
the way I can have like one marker
or 2 markers or 3 markers,
you
can't make ahed into a plural or a
dual. Right? Are people is anyone here familiar
with Arabic as a language?
You are? Great. Yeah. So,
like, you can have, in the way we
have in English,
you know, like a singular and a plural.
In Arabic, grammatically,
you can have a singular
and you can have a plural,
but the plural is also like broken down
into like, you know, a small number pluralized,
a large number pluralized.
You also have a dual which is like
2
instead of just 1, 2, then a few,
then many. Right?
Had
is not,
like, pluralized in any capacity. You see what
I mean?
And it's
speaking about, like, the uniqueness of the divine,
that there's nothing
that is like God.
There's no comparative
kinda entity creation,
etcetera.
And then Samad
is what's in the second verse like the
source of eternal refuge,
right, because God is the one that you
wanna turn to when you're in a place
of need, you know, when you're looking for
support, you're looking for help
and it connects to this idea of oneness
because
there's that uniqueness
in God's
self sufficiency
that everything else in existence
necessitates reliance on something
to exist,
but God alone is free of need.
And you turn now with your own needs
to the divine.
And why I wanted us to, like, recap
some of this is because in these, like,
weekly
sessions, one of the things that I'd like
for us to do is also just, like,
think and contemplate and reflect. If you've read
the Quran
translation,
Arabic,
it's constantly, like, telling you
as a reader
to
think deeply.
It's not telling you to mute your intellect.
It's telling you to engage
like via your intellect.
You have in all of its pages pretty
much words that are like contemplate,
reflect,
ponder,
think,
comprehend,
understand.
These are all different words in English and
they mean different things and they're also different
words in Arabic because they mean different things
but they're rooted in the idea
that you don't come to this text where
you can't really explore the depths of this
religion
if you're not bringing what makes you uniquely
human. That's your intellectual
capacity.
So you wanna think deeply. You want to
ponder. You want to reflect.
And so much
of this religion
is not experienced well by Muslims
because they stop thinking
about
what this means at a deeper level. You
see what I mean? And it's just about
externals and forms. We're gonna talk about some
of that today. We'll go through mechanics of
things
but
that's just one part of something that's so
much bigger
and all of it
always comes back to God and Islam as
a religion.
So if you don't create a conceptualization
for yourself
and revisit it quite often,
then it's just gonna be about the externals
and the forms. Do you see what I
mean? Like, Islam is about God. It's a
God centric religion
and you wanna start to connect to God
in Islam or your understanding of Islam
through
the capacity you have to conceptualize the divine.
Does that make sense?
So this idea of god's oneness, his uniqueness
has to be rooted now as we start
to understand
other ways that he identifies
himself to us. Does anybody have any questions
on any of that?
No. The other thing that we talked about
was just more kind of ritualistic
categories of actions that we'll go back to
in like 15 minutes or 20 minutes.
But just to start off here. Any questions
on that? Any thoughts that come up for
it? Yes? No? Everybody with me so far?
Yeah? Yeah.
There's like a paradox to decision making. Right?
Does everybody know what a paradox is?
Right? So a paradox is a statement
that seemingly, like, at its surface doesn't make
sense, but then it makes sense when you
like really think about it. Right? So a
paradox to decision making is that when you
don't make a choice, you've essentially chosen.
Right?
And a lot of us don't consciously formulate
a perspective
on God,
but then we indirectly
have formulated unconsciously
a vision of god that we have.
And so you want to
use your intellect to reflect on who the
divine is.
And in a way where what Islam offers
structurally
are opportunities through the Quran,
as well as through the prophetic example
like
constructs, terminologies,
sayings that can help nuance that understanding.
You see what I mean?
A part of that's gonna require
having places of just reflection to begin with.
And in modernity,
you have a diminishing of places of stillness.
Right? In New York City, everything's like crazy
chaotic all the time. You know, people are
always running here and there and there's not
like so much where we just sit and
reflect.
You know, there's a guy by the name
of Joshua Bell. Do people know Joshua Bell?
Okay. Joshua Bell,
he did a social experiment once with,
a a Baltimore newspaper,
where they put him on a DC Metro
platform
during rush hour and he opened a violin
case and he played the violin during rush
hour. Right? In New York City, it's not
any different. You're on the subway, people are
playing all kinds of things. I took my
kids to watch Puss in Boots the other
day in Times Square, and we're walking through
train station, Times Square, there's like a reggae
band playing,
and my son's like, you know, he's telling
me, he's like, Baba, we gotta watch the
movie, but he's just standing there. He's like
bobbing his head to it. I'm like, you're
the one that's moving to this man, not
me. He's like, I'm not dancing. What are
you talking about? I'm like, yeah, you are.
And so Joshua Bell
stands on the DC Metro. He's got his
violin case open. He's playing the violin
and he says that pretty much everybody just
runs by him.
An old man stops for a minute and
stares
and then leaves after a few seconds.
He said children, when they got in front
of him, they just stopped and the grown
ups that were with them had to pull
them and he said, I could see them
looking at me over their shoulders
until I couldn't see their faces anymore.
He said in a few hours he was
there, he made like 10 or $20.
But what's crazy about this is that this
man Joshua Bell is considered to be one
of the foremost practitioners of the violin in
the world.
Right? That the violin he's playing that day
itself
had a valuation of $2,000,000
and he sold out concert hall after concert
hall
in that DC metro area
where tickets started at 100 of dollars.
And all these people had the ability
to witness this act of beauty for free.
They could have just sat there and engaged
in something that they tell their kids about
and their kids kids about,
but every single one of them passed it
by because their hearts were getting pulled by
something else.
Right? You can't have reflection in states of
agitation.
And you can't have reflection if your body
is what's in control and moving in all
kinds of ways through anxiety.
You gotta just find, like, places to breathe.
And through those moments, as you reflect on
so much else, what the Quran
asks its reader to do
is to also, like, think about
everything,
contemplation,
reflection, pondering, etc.
Inclusive of like think about who God is
to you.
You get to a place where you think
about causality
and that
if everything
came from something
there has to be like a starting point
that didn't have
causation that necessitated its existence.
Because it can't just be this endless loop
of there was always something that initiated
because
the
beginning had to come in a way that
it didn't
require an act to then
be the starting point
as it was a reaction to another act.
Do you get what I mean? Right? Something
just had to be without anything else being.
Do you know?
But you, like, get to a point where
you start to think and you reflect and
you contemplate on these things. Does that make
sense?
So this idea of God being Ahad
is something that we want to think about
because
it's gonna inform now how we think about
these other things.
There
is gonna come right in the beginning of
pretty much every act
that you see a Muslim engage in.
There's gonna be like certain terms and we're
gonna go through some of them at the
end of class today
that, you know, if you know Muslims
or you're like exploring Islam or you're new
to Islam or even if you're born into
it, that there's this common like terminology,
right? People will say Insha'Allah,
Masha'Allah,
Alhamdulillah.
It's easy to get lost in the words,
and people just talk to you like you're
supposed to know what it is, you know.
We'll break down what some of those words
are. One of the things that you're gonna
hear quite often
in Arabic
is what's called the Basmala and
Muslims will say Bismillah,
which means like in the name of God.
Right?
The ba is a preposition
that means with.
The word ism
means name.
And then you have Allah.
What gets added to this quite often
in Arabic
is Bismillah
Arwahman
Arwahim.
And these are 2
of God's divine names that we wanted to
talk about today.
These quite often get translated
as the most merciful,
the most compassionate.
So right in the beginning you open the
Quran
and on the very first page, it's the
very first thing
that God identifies
himself through. Right? In the name of God,
the most merciful, the most compassionate.
So when we nuance this idea of ahad,
like uniquely 1,
nothing anthropomorphized,
this also applies here.
Like mercy,
love, compassion, softness, kindness,
Understanding this at a divine level,
it can be through a gateway of human
interaction.
But both the presence and absence of this
on a human level is not the determining
factor of what it is exponentially
on an understanding of the divine. You see
what I mean? I want you to like
think about this. When you meet somebody for
the first time,
what do you tell them about yourselves? Like
if I asked you introduce yourselves to each
other. Right? Do you 2 know each other?
No.
Great. And what did you tell each other
when you said hi when you met?
Where you're from. Name, agent, stuff like that.
You told us your name. Right?
You said, hi,
this is me.
So on the very first page of the
Quran
Allah is saying,
This is me.
I am Allah,
the most merciful, the most compassionate.
Right from the beginning.
That's what he is saying.
Know something about me. The way you said
this is my name and then you said
what?
Like major.
Major? Right? Because we are our jobs. What
did you say?
We talked a little bit about where you're
from.
Yeah.
Yeah. And now you know everything about yourselves,
right? No. You know, like, little tidbits,
but you shared
what you felt like you were most comfortable
sharing,
but also what would help to identify you
when you interact with each other.
Right? You didn't tell, like, a made up
name. Right?
Right?
You weren't like, hey, my name is Robert.
So nice to meet you. You know?
You said this is who I am. In
the space that you're in, you have the
comfort of being vulnerable to that extent.
You're reading this text,
Allah is telling you the same way you
are introducing
to one another,
this is me, this is what I'm about,
I want you to know this about me
because this is what makes me me.
He's saying this is who I am.
I am the most merciful,
the most compassionate.
In Arabic,
the grammatical understanding here is really powerful.
I'm not trying to get people lost in
the language so just let me know if
it doesn't make sense.
But the way Arabic functions
is that words have like forms to them
grammatically.
We have this in English also. Right? Like,
if you have a I n g at
the end of a word, you likely know
that that's a verb. Right?
Sitting, standing, speaking, etcetera.
And you can identify that. Right? You can
learn like a suffix and a prefix and
it'll tell you different things about the word.
Do you know what I'm saying? And you
can see like certain words hidden in other
words
and they have common meanings to them. Right?
So the word condition,
the word conditional,
right, the word conditioner,
like these things all have like a similar
root. Arabic's not any different.
Islam,
Muslim,
salaam,
they all have like the same letters. You
can hear like the link in those. Right?
So,
Rahman
and Rahim,
they have
these
letters
Rahama
and this denotes
a little bit more than just mercy and
compassion.
Right? Because when you have this root, it's
got its own unique element of love to
it. It's got an element of, like, softness,
gentleness.
It's got then an element of mercy and
then an element of compassion.
And when you stick these letters into a
form, right, like the way I took the
word sit and I put it into the
form sitting,
it gives you a different nuance. Right?
I am sitting here
versus
I sit.
Right? The two sentences mean 2 totally different
things, but they still have the same word.
Does that make sense?
So if I put the rahama
into this form,
it
denotes, like,
that that characteristic
is the prevailing
characteristic
at that time.
In Arabic, and you don't have to know
this but just in case,
this is called the Fanaan
form.
So in Arabic,
if you are like
super tired,
I just came from California.
I was in
the bay for some meetings
and,
you know,
I was by myself. My wife and kids
were not with me, so I like hung
out with my friends every night I was
there. And I caught a flight that left
at 6 AM
and I had to wake up at 3
in the morning to get it and I'm
exhausted,
right?
And somebody said to me, like, how are
you feeling?
I would say, anata'aban,
That I'm so exhausted. Exhaustion
is me. But that ta'aban,
it has that same sound. Right? Rahman
Ta'aban.
You see how it sounds the same?
So I'm so tired, tiredness is me. Right?
If I didn't eat on this plane anything.
I just passed out as soon as I
got on the plane. And then I woke
up when we were landing,
the airline
staff said, you know, you're the greatest, like,
customer, we wish all of our, like,
people flying on this plane just slept the
whole entire time.
And I was like still half asleep, crusty
odd boogers in my face. What are you
talking about? They're like, are you hungry?
And I didn't even realize I was hungry
because I was so tired,
but if I was like so hungry that
I was starving. Right? Language is important. If
you've ever met someone who's learning English
and you say to them like I'm starving
and they look at you, they're like you're
not starving dude. What are you talking about?
That's not what starving means. But you're using
it for emphasis, right?
So in Arabic, you would say, Joanne.
Like, I am so hungry, hunger is me.
It's my prevailing
characteristic.
Or if you're super lazy, you know,
family member, significant other, loved one is asking
you why you don't get done what they
are asking you to do.
They might call you kaslan,
that you are so lazy, laziness is you.
Right? It's like the prevailing
characteristic of you. Does that make sense?
When we say arachman,
we're saying that that's like
the ever present defining
quality,
and God uniquely is Rahman.
Rahim
has that same Rahama
and this denotes continuity,
that it doesn't disrupt.
It's just always
flowing
forever.
You know, it just goes.
And this is what he is telling you.
Like, I am the most merciful. I am
the most compassionate.
Right from the beginning,
it doesn't start by saying, I am the
creator.
Right? I am the nourisher, the provider,
you know, I am, you know, the one
who made you. That's not how God chooses
to introduce himself.
And what
Islam posits
and builds itself deeply upon is that there's
nothing without meaning in God's plan.
So you'd have to think to yourself,
why
does this book start off with this type
of introduction?
The same way one could, like, psychoanalyze,
well, why do you introduce yourself in the
ways that you do?
Why are you so prone to talk about
your job or what you study? And we
can like break that down like crazy, right?
But
Allah doesn't tell you like I am the
creator,
Al Khaleq.
He says, I'm Rahman.
I'm Rahim.
Not only is my mercy the prevailing characteristic,
but it doesn't disrupt. It just keeps going.
And English is like a weird language. Right?
When you think of mercy,
it automatically goes into a prism of, like,
justice
in systems that are inequitous.
Islam and Islamic law is not similar to
Western law. You know, I drive through a
red light and I get caught and then
I get a fine and that's like how
it functions.
That's not the point of it.
You know, this is like a proactive sense
of gentleness,
kindness.
It's not mercy in light of something that
could rear punishment,
but it's mercy rooted in love.
It's mercy rooted in, like, softness. Do you
see what I
mean? This is like the first
kind of depiction
that we are being given and we're told
to think about,
You know?
Do you believe in, like, that kind of
God
regardless
of what your faith background is?
Have you ever sat down to think about,
well, who is God to me fundamentally?
Any questions on this? Any thoughts on this
before
I kinda move in a little bit more
on it?
Yeah.
Earlier you mentioned that,
lost characteristics are nothing like you could
imagine them to be or have experienced them
in our lives.
So when we're trying to understand
the most merciful or the most compassionate,
I feel like my natural intuition is to
think of what kinds of mercy I what's
my learned experience
in this world, and then say
it's something way beyond that. But it seems
like
it can never be similar to that or
related to that. So how do I understand
those 2, like, kind of computer? That's the
vehicle.
Right? Exactly. What's like a moment of mercy
that you can reflect on that you've experienced
in your life?
My mom's forgiveness.
Great.
Anybody else, like, something that you've seen that's
just an act of compassion and merciful love?
I don't know if that was directed to
anyone else. Anybody.
You keep talking to we just had a
conversation with you. I like
it. Yeah. But you wanna think about this
now. Right? If the starting frame
is one that then understands that
the experience
can give me a semblance of what real
love is
and then I can start to ponder on
that and like a mother's forgiveness is a
great example. There's a prophetic tradition that we
have that says
God is more merciful to his creation than
a mother is to his child.
I grew up in a Muslim family.
A lot of what I was given, whether
you were born into Islam,
you've converted to Islam, you're exploring Islam,
you have to understand
that these things make a big difference
because they'll then inform
how we engage things like ritual and practice.
And you can go to most Muslims and
the first things they'll tell you are like
here's some do's, here's some don'ts
without telling you about who's the one that
said these do's and don'ts in the first
place.
What do we understand about that one
when we can't necessarily own up to the
do's and don'ts? That we struggle with them,
we make mistakes, we slip, we fall.
There is a narration
that I just mentioned and that narration takes
place in the aftermath
of a battle
And there's a mother and a child that
are separated in the midst of this and
then they find each other and then they
embrace.
That's when the prophet Muhammad
says to his companions,
do you think this mother would ever hurt
her child?
Do you think this mother would cause this
child pain? I said, of course not, a
messenger of God. He says,
know
that God is more merciful to his creation
than a mother is to his child,
right?
For me, I had to unlearn a lot
before I could
go back to just concrete learning.
Because when I picked up the Quran and
I actually read it, not when I was
told about it, but when I read it,
I didn't
understand
because it did seem like the God I
believed in was the God that the Quran
spoke about.
The God that I believed in,
it
was a conceptualization
that left me feeling
kinda not watched over but just watched.
Made me feel like I was walking on
eggshells. There's a lot of trepidation and intimidation.
Everything was just wrong and I had to
feel like
unhealthy remorse and guilt
about all the mistakes that I made.
And then, narrations like that
are what became an avenue
and then seeing lived experiences,
they were like these people,
they found seemingly empowerment and strength.
They felt bold and courageous
through their belief in God.
Why do I feel like I'm in a
place where I have to pretend like I'm
not Muslim?
There's complexity to that.
You're a minority living in a society
that is rooted in all of the things
that we know that it's rooted in, you
know, in terms of bias, racism, anti blackness.
But fundamentally,
my inward belief wasn't fashioned by me. It
was fashioned by all these externals.
And a pivotal moment for me came
after I was married
and we had our first child,
and I could see, like, this tradition in
front of me.
And so my wife, my daughter, and I,
we went to San Francisco
where I've been invited to give some talks
during our month of fasting, Ramadan.
And
one of the nights we were there, a
lot of people who used to live in
the city, alums from here, community members. It's
amazing for me when I travel anywhere, I
always have people that I can connect with
who are like family,
that it's always nice to see them. And
this group, they took us to the San
Francisco Bay to watch the sunset
as we broke fast. Have you ever been
there? It's a really beautiful scene.
So we went over this, like, small hill
and we're walking to get a better view
and midway through,
people had set up some
rocks
near,
some telescopes
to help you look over the bay. And
my daughter, Medina, who's now 10, she's probably
like the size of this little girl right
here and had the same kinda curly haircut.
I think that's all. It's a boy. Yeah.
That's what I meant.
And
this boy,
who is definitely not a girl,
my son,
my daughter was jumping from rock to rock
and was this age.
And
she has a lot of life and energy
to her especially at that time. Right? Same
way this kid running around like going back
and forth back and forth. You're like, what
are you doing? She's a kid. That's what
kids do. And so my kid is jumping
from stone to stone to stone
then all of a sudden
she
slipped hard,
hit the ground
and then she's just crying.
My daughter had never really hurt herself so
badly before.
It's like bumps and bruises
and so my wife, Priya or I, in
moments like that, we would just take her
and hold her close until she stopped crying.
So Priya went to where Medina was and
she held her against her chest then she
started to turn towards the rest of us.
We saw there's a deep gash on her
head and blood was going everywhere.
Everybody just ran
in different directions.
Water, bandages,
tissue papers.
We wanted to help Medina and the whole
time Priya's just holding her and she's just
like frozen with her in her arms.
We got the bleeding to stop
and Priya's still holding Medina.
We finished
having a meal with everybody
and then we went to this place where
I was supposed to speak.
I spoke it there. We then left
and went and had another meal. This is
what Muslims do in Ramadan. We had like
5 dinners. And so we went and had
another meal and the whole time Priya's still
holding Medina.
Then we take
a cab or an Uber from the restaurant
to our hotel.
It's now like a little late at night.
Priya gets into the bed with Medina,
is holding her still in her arms until
she falls asleep,
then she still lays there with her and
then eventually lets her go after some time
and then is standing and just looking at
her.
In that moment, I asked myself,
do I believe in a God that loves
me more than my wife loves our child?
One that is more merciful towards me, wants
what's best for me
more so than Priya does, Medina.
It was super hard
but eventually, I got to a place where
I said, yes.
And as you're saying,
how do we understand experiences,
you take a moment like that and you
reflect on it
and then you are in awe
as to how it can be
that a being can so mercifully love another
being.
And then God's loving mercy for you
which is what Rahman and Rahim
together mean
is infinite times more than that.
Do you see what I'm saying?
But you can't get there
if all you focus on
are the do's and don'ts, the black and
white, the mechanics of it,
then a moral relativism is going to be
the basis of religion
because why would you want to do something
that a God asks you to do
that you believe
doesn't even believe in you so much?
Do you see what I mean?
And in Islam,
that's not who God is.
Many of you are new to Islam, you're
exploring Islam,
you are converts to Islam or you're born
into it but trying to get a basis
for it,
a generalization that I'm comfortable making. I'm a
chaplain. I don't like making generalizations.
I'm a chaplain. I sit with people and
talk to them in specific. They come with
strengths, non strengths, their own experiences.
They're not just like a
person you push to a YouTube channel to
take advice from somebody that isn't even talking
to them directly. Right? It has to be
more specific than that. The generalization I'm comfortable
making
is that most Muslims you will ask who
God is to them, they're not gonna know
how to answer that question.
Some of them will even get scared or
frightened to answer the question.
They'll be so paralyzed because they'll say, like,
what if I say the wrong thing?
You know?
But it's like really simple. It's really straightforward.
The same way you said when you met
her and she met you,
this is my name. Right? The same way
we just met and I said look at
this little girl and mama said, that's a
boy. Right? We learn about things in these
introductions.
Do you see what I mean? Right?
So God is introducing himself to you from
page 1,
sentence 1,
Bismillahir
Rahmanir
Raheem.
Not just in the name of God but
in the name of God,
Ar Rahman
Ar Rahim,
the most merciful, the most compassionate.
You see what I'm saying?
This is going to inform
everything that comes after.
And it's super easy
when you start taking Islam 101 classes
or like Muslims start to give you answers
about Islam that it stops being about God.
And it's not just the idea
that God is the creator of all things,
but understanding
the the
the the essence of that creator being
through the way that he has chosen to
identify himself to you.
Right?
Does that make sense?
Okay. What I'd love for you to do
is for like 2 minutes, turn to the
person next to you. What are you taking
away from this part of the conversation so
far? What are some of the things that
you can kind of extrapolate from it, if
anything? And then we'll come back and kinda
discuss. Go ahead.
And so
calling upon Allah's Ar Rahman,
that's like a mercy that's applicable to creation.
Right?
When somebody asks, like, how do you know
God is the source of love or God
loves you or loves all of
creation? We're gonna talk about this in a
few weeks, but one of the divine names
the Quran speaks of is that God is
Al Wadud,
He's the source of love.
Right? And Mawaddah is unconditional love, meaning God
doesn't love his creation because they espouse a
certain creed or come from a certain culture
or a certain class. God just loves his
creation because he loves his creation.
And he's telling you that he loves creation
not because of who you are, but because
of who he is. Do you see what
I mean? Right? These are important things to
ask because you want to think for yourself
now too, right? Where and how
you are going to interact with Muslim people.
And I appreciate your vulnerability
because many of you are going to interact
with Muslims
you
You know, what do I do
in this situation
with my prayer if this is happening or
that's happening? You know what I mean?
It's the same idea.
Somebody might not be able to actually say
to you,
this is
what
Islam
has to say about God.
This is what God teaches us through the
Quran. But doesn't mean they won't give you
an answer. Do you know?
And, I'm not gonna pick on you, but
I feel like you won't mind. So let's
just use you as an example. Right?
If you grew up and nobody
spoke to you about Allah's Rahmah,
but then somebody asked you what Islam is,
you'd still give them an answer
in the onset.
Right?
Based off of what you've experienced.
And it's not that that's not a valid
experience,
but it's not complete necessarily.
Because you can't have, like,
ritual
without the one that the ritual's sake is
being done for
and that's where the paradox kicks in.
Somebody will tell you who God is to
them
based off of what they're telling you this
religion is about. And if you're looking to
convert to Islam, you're a new Muslim, you're
trying to revisit, you go ask somebody who
quote unquote looks like they're practicing,
and the first thing they tell you is
well you got to do this mechanic and
that mechanic and do this and do that.
Nobody can give you something that they don't
have in the first place to give
and if all they have is the mechanics,
then that's what they're gonna have. Right?
But the mechanics are a means to something,
not the ends in and of itself.
Everything in Islam goes back to God,
but your belief in God will be subjective.
It's not going to be what's written in
a book for you to embrace it as
a conviction. It has to be rooted in
here, not just something that's spoken from here.
And this is just fact.
Right? You can open up any Quran
and you can see
literally on the first page,
right at the beginning, it's going to say
this, in the name of God,
the most merciful, the most compassionate.
Maybe the translation will be a little bit
different and then you're gonna see it at
the beginning of every single chapter
that comes after that in the book. Other
than one chapter,
it prefaces
all of them.
Like why?
And that's where the thinking process has to
come. Don't mute it. Right? We're not in
a place
where we are talking to children whose mental
faculties
are like my 7 year olds or my
6 year old or my 7 year old
or my 10 year olds. Right?
We're in a place where we're all grown
individuals.
You have to ponder this question
as you would ponder like creation and existence
and how did this all come to be
unless there was a point of
origin
that didn't
like come into existence
but just always existed,
you start to think about
why is God introducing himself
as the most merciful?
Why is that the first thing that it
says?
Do you see what I'm saying?
You contemplate on it. You start to think
about it.
Is that your phone?
Yeah. The baby stole my phone. Yeah.
It's okay.
But you you get what I mean, right?
And in an Islam 101
conversation,
this is the foundation
of your relationship with the divine.
This is it.
That's what it has to be built upon
fundamentally.
He's telling you
Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim,
so you just now have to decide, are
you going to yield to that or not?
And then in the world, you start to
think about this. We have tradition that says
that God divides his Rahmah
into a 100 parts. He sends 1 into
this world
and 99 parts remain with him for when
we meet him on a day of judgment.
Right? So that mercy is what is there
in loving forgiveness from a mother to a
child. Right? If you see
a deer with, like, its baby exerting compassion
and mercy,
you see, like, each one of us who
is so elated
that the beauty of a child running amongst
us. Right? None of you are in a
place, thank God, that's like, what is this
kid's problem?
Right? But it comes from Rahma
inside of you
that you are
happy
and that's not because it's a child but
it's giving you an indication
that your heart is drawn towards things of
real beauty at the end of the day.
If you were irritated and annoyed
and you found ugliness in that,
how you see things tells you what's going
on within you. That's not to offend anybody
but that's what you have to understand.
Right? And a heart that is connected to
Ar Rahman
is gonna be connected to things of beauty.
It's gonna be drawn towards things of goodness.
This is foundational
and it's rooted in Allah being Al Ahad.
There's nothing
like
God.
So when I can sit and fall more
in love with my wife every day
through every part of what makes her an
amazing person,
the work she does, she cares for our
children, she cares for me, all of these
things,
that love that I have for her
is nothing
in comparison to the love that God has
for her. Do you understand?
And the love that I feel from her
and the love that I feel from my
kids and all of these things,
it's just an opportunity
to then reflect on wow, if this is
what love feels like
at this level,
what must divine love really be?
What must this rachma actually be? Do you
get what I'm saying? Does that make sense?
Any other thoughts?
Any questions? Anything that comes up?
What else do we talk about in our
groups?
Anybody?
Before we move on, maybe 1 or 2
other people.
Yeah. I'll just, it came up in my
head that this sort of thing, the the
more that I learn, the less I know.
And sort of this idea that,
the more the more you engage in something
and try to define something right, you,
can sort of have this,
realization or recognition that
you can't really get a grip on it.
But it brings meaning still. Right?
You you see? So what we didn't do
last week that I wanna now introduce to
you all, that's gonna be important,
is just wondering like the actual basic
elements of Islam
as a religion on a whole.
And thinking about this dimensionally,
so we have the actual name of the
religion
is Islam.
Right?
Yeah. The answer to that is yes. So
the name of the religion is Islam. Yeah.
Great. We're doing well.
But this is broken down now into a
few dimensions.
You have now Islam
which also refers to practice.
You know, these are gonna be things like
prayer,
charity,
fasting,
etcetera,
pilgrimage.
You have what's called iman,
and this refers to
theology.
Right? Faith.
This is like belief in God,
angels,
scripture, books,
etcetera.
You know, there's
the last day,
messengers,
prophets,
what we call Qadr, predestination,
the good of it, the bad of it.
Then you have what's called Ihsan,
and this is quite often understood
to be Islamic spirituality.
And on Monday nights we're going through a
book of spirituality
that you're more than welcome to join, we're
doing it very slowly.
There's a lot more people in that but
you can like interject yourself
into it.
This is not one of those things you
necessarily have to be at every week to
kinda take something from it.
So these are like the
fundamental dimensions of Islam, but you want to
think about them dimensionally
also.
Right?
Meaning,
if we put on one dimension
what we call now
Islam in the sense of practice and ritual,
that's like what a lot of people get.
If you
became Muslim
at a later stage of your life, you're
exploring Islam as a religion, people reach out
to me and they're like, hey, this person
that I know is looking at Islam, you
know, how do I teach them this, this,
and this? Or what are the things that
I should teach them?
We go to like Sunday school, they're giving
you mostly this,
which is this.
Like the mechanics, the do's and don'ts. That's
a part of it, but it's not absolutely
the whole thing.
If you only have one dimension,
which is what a lot of us have,
regardless of what you look at, it's going
to just look like a line.
It's 1 dimensional. It's simplistic.
Right?
When you add in theology
as a dimension,
It now
brings
more to it. Right? So if I'm in
a place where I have one dimension,
regardless of what I'm looking at, it's gonna
look like this.
How much of the world sees you as
1 dimensional?
How you dress, how you don't dress, your
skin color, your accent, all these things.
Intellectual
laziness,
racism,
it's all rooted in 1 dimensional perception.
I can't see you bigger than the box
I put you in. But when I now
add in a second dimension to this,
the line,
like gets shaped to it.
It goes from being 1 dimensional to 2
dimensions.
You can have Like a line is now
a rectangle. It's a diamond. It's whatever. But
you can extrapolate more. So I know that
there's things that I don't know, but you're
still able to ascertain meaning from it. Right?
That's why the theology is important in relation
to the ritual and the ritual isn't just
as a vacuum, but it's like an experienced
theology.
Not just rotely regurgitated
and like spit out, that's like there's one
God and this and that, but like you
feel it, you know, you reflect on it.
And then where Ihsan comes in is that
it adds now
this 3rd dimension.
That's what brings, like, depth. It brings volume
to things. Right? Like I am right here
in front of you right now. Right?
Yeah. Yes. The answer is yes.
Oh, my God.
And if off, why are you laughing so
hard?
Because, okay. Yeah.
I'm like right here in front of you
right now. Right?
If every one of you took steps towards
me,
not any one of you would take
the same exact steps as anybody else.
And even your vantage point of me is
all uniquely
situated
to, like, your positionality
in the room.
Right?
That's what like depth necessitates.
Islam as a religion
is not something
that tells us
to be afraid to embrace
our individual identities. The goal isn't
to make you into something that you're not,
it's definitely not to commit cultural apostasy.
You don't become South Asian or Arab if
you become Muslim. Right? I'm South Asian so
I'm not self loathing. Right? No offense to
any Arabs in the room or other brown
people. But that's like just not what it
is.
But the ability to find beauty,
which is what Ihsan also translates into, it's
like a vision rooted in beauty,
but not just outward beauty. Right? The ability
to find beauty and meaning in things. This
is what spirituality is. Like all 3 have
to come together
to create the ability to find depth in
things and meanings in things. Right?
So what we are doing in the beginning
of this
is to focus on how these three things
relate to each other rather than me standing
up here and saying, this is how you
wash up for prayer,
and these are the kind of waters you
can use to wash up, and here's what
happens
if
animal dies in your water bucket.
And you're like, what? I don't even have
a water bucket, man. That's what the book
is gonna tell you. Right? Because it's a
manual
of law that was written for a place
and a time where people had buckets that
they may do with, right? Where they washed
up with. You're just gonna go turn on
a faucet,
but
all of it is going to be just
anxiety inducing
if it's not about God.
Like,
what what's gonna be the advantage of me
telling you here's how you get water on
every part of your hand
if you don't first connect it to God
and understanding
and nuancing who that God is
and Allah is telling you,
I'm Rahman and I'm Rahim.
And then ritual and practice isn't burdensome,
but it becomes liberating.
Right? I'm doing this for an entity
that is the source of, like, loving mercy.
That is not like anything else
that I've ever come into interaction with. That
has limits
on its compassion towards me,
that has limits
on the way that it is merciful towards
me, or caring, or nurturing,
but just loves me and wants what's best
for me. Like, that's all
encompassed in this first verse of the Quran,
like, in God's name, the source of rahma,
the one who is rahman, the one who
is rahim. Does that make sense?
Okay. I wanna be mindful because we went
over time last
week. I don't want people to go on
a marathon. I can talk a lot. How
are people feeling right now?
People are feeling good?
Great.
Between this week and next week, what I'd
like for you to do
is focus on 2 things.
Just go and witness in the world where
you see mercy.
Like, try to pay attention to it.
That's like one aspect. Where in your day,
in your week, in your like it's just
a week between this week and next. Where
do you find mercy?
Like merciful love.
And it's gonna be eye opening
because if you go a whole day and
you don't see it,
then that's probably a problem. Right?
That you're spending an entirety of a day
and you can't find anything that's an act
of mercy in front of you, your heart
needs to experience that. Right? It needs to
see that.
And where do you see the opposite of
it?
Right? Compromise on ethics,
compromise on values,
inequity,
like greed, my Whatever you think is the
opposite
of these words,
where do you see that?
That's part 1, just reflecting on it. 2,
we talk about Rahmah,
there's,
sorry. I'm gonna erase this.
So Muslims believe
in what's called the Quran.
What is the Quran
if we give it a definition?
It's a book.
What else?
Yeah. A guide.
A guide.
Yeah.
Theologically, what is it? What is it? No.
It's the word of God. What do we
know about it?
It's in Arabic.
It's in Arabic. It's in Arabic. It's in
Arabic. It's in Arabic. Great. All these things
are correct. Right? So no one's saying anything
wrong.
Right?
Anything else we know about this?
It was, passed to the Prophet Muhammad. It
was given to the Prophet Muhammad. Great. Anything
else?
So this
is what in Muslim theology and Islamic theology,
we understand is a revealed text
from God to the prophet Muhammad through the
angel Gabriel.
Right?
There's a distinction between Sunni and Shia tradition.
In Sunni tradition, it's revealed over 23 years.
In Shi'i tradition, it's revealed all at once
and then disseminated over 23 years. Right? But
it's the same text, and the belief in
and of itself still rooted in what it
was.
But
this Quran
is
understood by that definition.
Right? And within it, we'll talk about it
and look at it closer.
This is like
a primary
source
of
Islam as a religion draws upon this as
a primary source
of saying, like, this is how
God wants us to live our life. Right?
So
we have then
also what's called the sunnah,
and the word sunnah in Arabic
refers to the authoritative
example of any individual.
Right? So if we came in here
and,
you know,
somebody,
like if you go for the Hajj pilgrimage,
has anybody seen like the Hajj pilgrimage?
Pictures of it on like Instagram or TV.
And there's like, in Mecca, the Kaaba.
So part of the Hajj rights
are enacting upon
the actions
of Hagar, peace be upon her, right, who
is the wife of Abraham
and the mother of Ishmael, peace be upon
all of them.
And one of the Hajj rights is you
walk between
2 hills called Safa and Madwa,
where our tradition teaches us that Hadjar Hagar,
she had her infant child. They ran out
of food and water, and she was running
up and down these hills as a mother
trying to find some food and sustenance for
her child
and then
the angel comes and strikes at the feet
of the child, the ground, and a well
of water called zumzum springs forth.
But
when
Muslims go as pilgrims to Mecca
and they
run between these two hills of Safa and
Marba, You're not gonna, like, actually sprint up
and down a hill because, you know, some
of you have not gone and we're gonna
go. It's like much different now and you're
like just walking back forth. It's a lot
easier. But you're following the sunnah of Hagar
when you do that. Right? We're following the
authority or authoritative example
of Hajar, peace be upon her. Does that
make sense? So that's what the word means.
We understand it from its definition when we
talk about Islamic practice,
referring to the authoritative
example
of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.
And the Sunnah is derived
from narrations
that are called Hadith.
And the Hadith
essentially
refers to an action,
a saying,
or the tacit approval of the prophet Muhammad,
peace be upon him.
So if you saw him do something,
he said to do something, or he saw
you do something and didn't say don't do
that, It all is written kind of within
these narrations, hadith. You're gonna hear this word
a lot.
A hadith has two parts to it.
It has a part that's called the isnaab,
this is like a chain of transmitters,
so and so said such and such from
such and such, you know, back to the
Prophet,
and then you have a part that's called
the Matin,
this is like the actual text.
The only reason I'm sharing this is if
you go online
and you start, like, looking these up,
you can find books of Hadith
and they're gonna have all of these things
and people's names.
The names are just the people who, like,
were transmitting the Hadith. Right? The way like
some of you would leave from here
and you could go tell somebody and be
like, Khalid said this and then
you say that to somebody who says it
to someone, and they're creating a chain back
to the point of origin
of the actual wording. Right?
Does all of that make sense?
Yes?
Okay.
So there's a Hadith, yeah go ahead.
The other aspect also is the grading of
the Hadith, maybe?
Yeah. So these things
have kinda,
there's a gradation scale
that it's like very rigorously
authenticated
and there's different levels
that go from
like the most authentic
to,
a slightly lesser degree of authenticity
to something that is considered weak in its
authenticity
to something that is considered to be fabricated.
Right? You'll find these classifications and we'll go
through those, you know, as we kinda deepen
in the conversation.
We just wanna relate to like these three
words first.
Quran,
sunnah, and hadith. Like what do they mean?
So there's a hadith
that is like the first hadith
that many people teach
when they're formally,
like, teaching Islam
and many people learn in their engagement of
Islam. And that Hadith
is called
the Hadith
Al Rahmah.
Right? It's
the tradition
of mercy.
And when it says in Arabic,
So you hear the word Rahma in there
like a bunch of times. Right?
So, Arwa Himuna yarhamukum Arrahman that
the Merciful One is merciful
to those who are merciful.
Be merciful
on
the
earth.
Irhamkum manfisama,
the one who is in the heavens will
be merciful to you.
Right? In Islam,
one of the things that we're taught is
that
absolutely
God is good
and when we think about things,
you know, through this prism of moral relativism,
somebody might say this is bad, this is
Right? There's people in the world right now
who think it's okay to have kids in
cages at our borders. Right? There's people who
literally, like we're gonna see in the next
few weeks, when healthcare policy changes, it's no
longer an emergency state around COVID,
30% of people who are on Medicare
are gonna get kicked off of it.
Vaccination prices are gonna go up. There's some
people who think this is like a good
thing. Do you see what I mean? Right?
It's hard to get lost in the ambiguity
of like good and bad
when there's so many competing
kinda traits
that
people exert when they're making these types of
decisions.
What Islam
posits
are that certain things are just good.
Right? The Quran is good. The prophet Muhammad
is good.
God is good.
So the idea then is that if God
is good,
then you want to try to be like
God where you can be
because if God is good, then being like
God is good.
So if God is merciful and God is
good then being merciful is good.
Does that make sense?
So the first thing that I asked you
was
like
go and
like just see where you witness
like mercy in the world around you or
the absence of it.
And then the second thing I would say
is like try to think about
what you are doing
to interject, like, loving mercy into the world.
Does that make sense? Like, how do you
actualize
this idea of Rahmah?
And then the last thing that I would
say to build a relationship
with, like,
this divine name and and we'll start doing
it every week on your own,
you wanna write a prayer
in your own words,
right? We have ritual prayer, 5 daily prayers
that we're gonna talk about probably like 3
weeks from now get into it, the how
to's and the mechanics of the prayer, but
you also have like supplicative
prayer
that can be done in any language.
Any person can do it whether they're Muslim
or not. The Quran says in a verse,
We'll call it Rubukumudiruni
astajiblakum
and your Lord says, Call upon me, make
du'a to me,
I will respond.
Right? Dua is just supplication. You could pray,
you know, and there's kids right now praying
in their dorm rooms at NYU,
like, God help me pass this class because
I don't know what I'm gonna do. You
know what I'm saying? So what this verse
is saying is that anybody who calls on
God
that, like, prayer is accepted. They don't have
to be Muslim. Like, anybody calls on God,
like, God is listening and hearing that prayer.
Right?
And so
one of the recommendations
in our tradition
is that when you have prayers like that,
your Dua,
which is you talking to God,
outside of ritualistic
prayer, you want to use words that are
familiar to you.
Right? Language that is your own language.
So what I would ask you to do
is just write a prayer
in which you're invoking God as Ar Rahman
and you're invoking God as Ar Raheem.
That, Oh merciful God, Oh source of compassion,
and then what's the prayer that comes after
it?
You understand?
So you start to build a relationship with
the divine through this. Does it does that
make sense?
Okay. Any questions on that before just a
quick
bunch of wrap up things?
Yes? No?
Yeah.
I never understood the the concept of merciful
without,
thinking of it in conjunction with, you know,
forgiveness
or punishment?
That comes from, like, just our own socialization.
Yeah. Rahma in Arabic
is not just like mercy the way that
it relates to justice.
But Rahma has an element of compassion to
it. Rahma has an element of its own
unique love to it.
Rahma has an element of, like, gentleness
and softness to it. So All of that's
in rahma. You know? So that's my question.
So how is it different
from compassionate?
Well,
when you
have like a mother, like my wife
that is
holding our child for hours,
that's an act of mercy still in there,
but my child didn't do anything wrong. Do
you see? There's just like loving mercy that's
coming
from the mother to the child.
Right? The compassion that's there,
compassion is essentially like, if you break it
down etymologically,
it literally means you're like walking with someone
through their suffering,
you know. A lot of people don't suffer
because they did something wrong, a lot of
people end up suffering because we do things
that are wrong, right? You know, animals in
creation,
they just are who they are. When they
live abnormally,
it's because humans are not necessarily living the
ways that we're supposed to. Right? We live
in a world right now
where more people die of eating too much
than eating too little. That's crazy, right?
But how does that come into place? Well,
it's like, well, where is their mercy? You
know? Where is there, like, a sense of
compassion?
Where is, like, the softness, the gentleness?
Islamic Spirituality
functions off of a paradox
where it understands
that a strong heart is a soft heart
and a weak heart is a hard heart.
Right?
And when you think about things, right, like
this is strong,
not because it's soft, but because it's tough.
Right? That's not the way our hearts are
supposed to be in a spiritual sense and
when you interject
like loving mercy into the world, it's also
a source of benefit back to your inward
state.
But that question that you just asked, you
wanna like go and think about it. Do
you get what I mean? Because we know
the meanings of things through the names of
things. You know what a marker is? Can
I just say marker? Everybody know what a
marker is? Right? And we all have the
same
understanding of the word marker.
Camera,
live stream. I don't say to you hand
me
the cellular apparatus that connects me to a
mobile network of millions of people around the
world. And say, give me the phone and
you know what a phone is. Right?
The way somebody taught you 2+2
equals 4,
Who taught you what the word 'love' means?
And how did you learn what it means?
Who taught you what mercy actually is?
Compassion. Who taught you what Rahma is.
Right?
And it's the 4th word in the Quran.
And the words that come before it, one's
a preposition,
right, one is just means name, then there's
Allah. When you put Allah next to Ar
Rahman and Ar Rahman,
it's crazy
that most Muslims
jump to teach you the how to pray
before they teach you who you are praying
to.
Right?
Our experiences
are what they are. And then when you
have a question, you reflect on it productively.
Why do I understand,
like, God's rahma
to be
equivalent to
inequitous
systems
as exist today, right?
You can't take experiences
of injustice
like look at Tyre Nichols,
How does this happen?
How do we like have continuity
to challenges with policing,
brutality,
murder,
again and again and again.
And that system
is what is going to shape for you
ideas
of justice,
injustice. Do you see what I mean? That's
where the unlearning becomes a necessary point to
being able to learn something.
Do you see what I'm saying? Does that
make sense?
Okay.
Sorry. I know I talk a lot and
I promised everybody last week we would not
go until 9 o'clock. We're not gonna go
until 9 o'clock.
So,
next week,
everybody's here.
We're gonna continue with some of this. I'll
introduce,
like, 1 or 2 other divine names. It'll
go a little quicker. The exercise will be
the same. Right? Write a prayer, how do
you actualize it, these kinds of things.
And then what we'll start to do is
go through
like the process
of some of the actual ritual.
So next week, what we're gonna do
is start to go through
the process
of
kind of ritual purification.
So it's called wudu. Right? We wash up
for prayer, for example. Right? We'll talk about
the mechanics of it, the do's and don'ts
of it. We're gonna literally, like, bring
a
bucket of some kind in here, like a
table, so we don't mess up the room.
And we're gonna have just like a bottle
of water. So I wanna show you, it
doesn't take a lot of water to make
will
do. Right? It's it's pretty easy and we'll
go through the mechanics of it
and how you actually properly make wudu
and we'll talk about different situations that will
come up, right. How do I do this
when I'm in the workplace?
Like, what do I do when I'm traveling?
What happens when, like, I'm outside of my
house? So that you're pre planning and bringing,
like, your
intellect and your strategy
to some of this. We'll also talk about,
like, the spiritual
kinda understandings of this process of kinda ritual
washing, so to speak.
It's something that is necessarily
understood
and taught before prayer is taught because you
have to be in a state of ritual
purity,
we call wudu,
before
you can pray. You know? So you can't
enter the state if you don't know how
to do it. You see what I mean?
Does that make sense?
Yep?
Okay. So why I share that with you
is, like, next week,
so we're gonna do it. Just, like, wear
clothes that you're okay getting wet. You're not
gonna get drunk, it's not like, it's not
like a like a water fight. Right? Right?
Not gonna be like spraying each other and
like water balloon. It'll be like really
simple, but something you can like roll your
sleeves up in if need be, you know,
things like that, because we want to have
a hands on experience.
And you want to assume
that even if you've done it for years
or months
that there's always a benefit in just going
back to be like, am I actually doing
it it right? We have a hadith
I erased the board. We have a hadith
where the grandsons of the prophet Muhammad,
peace be upon both of them,
Hassan and Hussain,
they come upon an older companion of the
messenger of God and he's making his wudu
wrong.
They now talk to each other because this
is an elder person. They want to have
respect towards them and so they say, like,
how should we help give advice
and they come up with the idea
that
they'll ask the person to judge them who
makes will do the best
and then one of them will purposely make
the mistake that the elder man does and
then when that comes up, they'll say like,
wait, you're not doing this right. So they
do this in front of the older man
and then at the end of it all,
he like thanks them, right, because they don't
put him on the spot, they don't point
a finger at him, like, oh man, you
suck at this, right?
But there's, like, kindness and gentleness there. But
why I share that with you is that
in our tradition,
this person was somebody who lived during the
time of the prophet Muhammad
and he's considered within like Sunni understandings of
who the companions are, they're all considered to
be like good people
and he was making a mistake in his
wudu,
right? That's not like what makes you good
that you're perfect at everything.
So that person who is literally learning Islam
during the time of the prophet could make
a mistake in this
14 centuries later, like it's
like we're making mistakes. Right? So it's just
like reviewing it, revisiting it, and being comfortable
with that. Right? And for some of us,
it's gonna be our first exposure, so you
can just kind of like understand it.
We wash our feet in this,
so just be ready that, you know, if
we actively ask people to participate,
then, like, that's something that might happen also.
Probably not with everybody in this room. We'll
take people to, like, we have Vudu rooms
that we can show people how to do
that there as well too. So you get
like a hands on engagement of it. And
what I wanna do is show you, like,
the verse from the Quran, some different hadith
so you can understand, you know, from the
legal aspects of this, like, what is this
based in? As you open the Quran and
you can be like, oh, when I read
this verse, like, that's the verse
that is the base for the how to's
of wudu.
You know? So it's not just like aimless.
Do you know what I mean?
Does that make sense? Right? Because when you
study Islam, traditionally,
what they're also teaching you first is like
how to study,
you know, it's like going to any school.
So as you learn, they're also teaching you
how to learn the way when you go
to like elementary school, middle school, you're growing
as your like capacity is growing.
All of you like have gone through this
process,
you know how to learn,
now it's just about plugging in the information
pedagogically in a way that resonates with the
learning systems you're exposed to. To. You see
what I mean? Right? So you can do
it a little bit different than a primer
text might teach you because the primer text
is still teaching the individual
to learn as they're going through the process.
So you've gone through a lot of that,
so we can say, like, here's this verse,
this is like how it's broken down. Does
that make sense?
Great.
Anything else before we wrap up for tonight?
No?
Okay. Thank you all so much. So next
week,
we'll start with another two
names of God that we'll look at,
and then we'll get into a conversation
on,
just the ritual washing,
and kinda have that be more workshopped as
well. Alright. Assalamu alaykum. Thank you.