Khalid Latif – First Steps Essentials of Islam #07
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AI: Transcript ©
We're gonna probably go just for about, like,
45 minutes, 50 minutes today.
I'm gonna give you kind of like a
quick walk through of what a day in
Ramadan looks like,
and,
we have Ramadan starting tonight. So
in Islam, as a tradition, the night precedes
the day.
So the first day of fasting for Ramadan
is tomorrow,
but the first night of Ramadan is tonight.
Right? So tomorrow night would be the 2nd
night. So the night precedes the day,
in Islam as a religion. Does that make
sense? So we're gonna look
at a particular set of verses
in the Quran from the second chapter,
that's called the,
Al Baqarah, which translates as the cow.
In the kind of Mosaic narrative,
there's an instance that deals with a cow
that we'll talk about some months from now,
but we're gonna look at the verses that
talk about fasting,
and kind of break those down.
So if anybody wants to open up, if
you have like a hard copy or on
your phone, If you just look at the
second chapter,
Bakkara,
from verse 183
onwards. You can come in.
You look scared.
It's okay. Yeah. They're just Muslims. Don't be
scared of them.
Yeah.
You're one
too.
So if you look at 183 and the
few verses after that,
those are the ones that talk about fasting.
Does anybody wanna read
from 183
onwards?
You got it open?
Yeah. You wanna read?
You who believe,
fasting is prescribed for you. It was prescribed
for those before you so that you may
be mindful of God.
Fast for a specific number of days,
but if one of you is ill or
on a journey, then on other days later.
For those who can fast only with extreme
difficulty,
there's a way to compensate.
Feed a needy person. But if anyone does
good of his own accord, it is better
for him and fasting is better for you
if only you knew.
It was in the month of Ramadan that
the Quran was revealed as guidance for mankind.
Clear messages giving guidance and distinguishing between right
and wrong.
So anyone of you who sees in that
month should
sees in that month should fast and anyone
who is ill or on a journey should
make up for the lost days by fasting
on other days later.
God wants ease for you not hardship.
He wants you to complete the prescribed period
and to glorify him for having guided you
so that you may be thankful.
Prophet,
if my servants ask you about me, I
am near.
I respond to those who call me, so
let them respond to me and believe in
me, so that they may be rightly guided.
You can keep going. It's the last one.
187. Yeah. You believers are permitted to lie
with your wives during the night of the
fast. They are closest garments to you as
you are to them.
God was aware that you were betraying yourselves,
so he turned to you in mercy and
pardoned you. Now, you can lie with them.
Seek what god has ordained for you.
Eat and drink until the white thread of
dawn becomes distinct from the black,
then fast until nightfall.
Do not lie with them during the nights
of your devotional retreat in the mosques.
These are the bounds set by God, so
do not go near them.
In this way,
God makes his messages clear to people
that they may guard themselves against doing wrong.
Okay. So this set of verses
starts to create a framework
around the practice of fasting
and it also introduces
the term Ramadan
and aligns it with the word Quran.
Right? So all of these verses, you could
kind of look at them individually, but you
can also look at them separately from one
another. And how we did when we talked
about wudu,
like our ritual washing,
what we wanna be able to do is
kind of go into this a little bit
more than just a laundry list of do's
and don'ts. You can build a relationship with
this,
at a level that helps you to understand,
well, what's the basis of this? Where is
it coming from?
And what are Not just the external mechanics
to it, which are important,
but how does that align to
its relationship with what's inward? And so if
you look at this verse 183 of the
second chapter,
that verse becomes the basis
for the obligation
of fasting in Ramadan.
And there's a bunch of different types of
fasts
in
Islam.
All of them are not obligatory.
So if you weren't here like a few
weeks ago,
we talked about the different
categories that you could fit things into.
So we had obligations,
These were the father
and this is like the fast of Ramadan
fits into this.
You then have
what are in wajib.
Right? That was a lesser category of obligation.
And those are makeup fasts from Ramadan.
You have established, like, confirmed prophetic ones.
These are sunnah.
These are like the 10th of Muharram.
And
9th,
the day of like there's others. Right? But
just to give you an idea, then there's
recommended ones,
like we do Mondays Thursday
if Thar is here.
There's the middle days of the month, 13th,
14th, 15th.
And,
every other day,
this was like the tradition of the prophet
David.
Alright. And then there's ones that are prohibited
and disliked. Like, you can't fast on the
days of eve, on those holidays.
You're you're not allowed to fast. Right? But
just to broaden the idea
that there's not just an obligatory
fast, there's other types of fast as well.
Does that make sense? So, this verse that
we're looking at, it says in the Arabic,
That, oh, you who believe, fasting has been
written for you as it was written for
those that came before you
so that you might attain this thing that's
called taqwa that we'll talk about in a
little bit. But embedded within it, it now
links the relationship of the outward and the
inward.
And so it's establishing
the fast of Ramadan.
When we looked at if you remember the
verse that
talked about
what is obligatory
for you to wash
when you are washing up for prayer in
your wudu,
if you guys remember that.
Similarly,
like, you wanna understand how this verse functions.
So when you have this construct
in the Quran
that addresses people as people of faith.
Oh, you who believe, oh, you who have
faith,
people of iman.
It's
usually
premising now
an act that is
legalistic
or ritualistic,
like a thing you do as a Muslim.
It juxtaposes
itself to verses
that are
premised with
the phrase, you aiyu hanas,
oh, mankind.
Meaning, like, all of humanity
is referenced versus now narrowing it to people
who follow
Islam. So right off the bat, it's an
obligation
for Muslims.
It's not an obligation, Islam says, for not
Muslims
because
Islam can't obligate non Muslims to do things.
Right? So that you ayehv al adhinaamanu
is making a reference
particularly.
And when you read that, oh, you who
believe,
oh, people of faith
in the Arabic or the translation,
it's talking to that specific group of people
in terms of what's gonna come next.
One of the ways that a verse indicates
something is an obligation.
Is now with the next word that comes.
It says,
that
written upon you.
So the idea that is denoted from that
Arabic word of something being prescribed or written
upon
you, if you have that in a verse,
it is usually denoting
that what that verse is telling
you is something that is an obligation to
be performed.
Does that make sense?
Yeah? Are people with me on that?
Right? So when people are trying to engage
and draw meaning and extrapolate meaning from the
text, They're looking at the language utilized. They're
trying to not just look at it reductively
but to start to formulate methodologies
and it says, well,
here, this
means
this and denotes this. So that kutzibah alaykum
is what becomes the basis also of
this is an obligation.
Right? This is something that you have to
do.
It creates a link
to previous
communities.
So the word siam
in Arabic
is
the plural
of the word som
and when you have this root of Samah
in Arabic,
it is denoting
abstaining from something.
Like if we looked at the chapter of
Mary, peace be upon her, there's a chapter
in the Quran
named after Mary the mother of Jesus, peace
be upon both of them. Surat Al Mariam.
And in like the twenties
of that chapter,
there's a verse
where Mary is described
as being one who is abstaining from talking.
Right? She is pregnant with Jesus,
and she has a fast That's a fast
of speech.
But the Arabic is describing her
through
this word.
So it's not just
in general in reference to abstaining from food
and drink which we do in Ramadan
but the word itself
is in reference to an abstention from something
that you would just normally be permitted to
do.
Right? Like you can eat and you can
drink and you can talk
and you can do all these things.
But when you are doing this kind of
abstaining,
you're abstaining from something that otherwise
would be a fine thing to do. Right?
Mary can talk
if she wants to, but since she is
engaging in this
mandated upon her, she has a zone
of
speech.
Does that make sense?
So, this is the singular when somebody's talking
about fasting in Arabic, they're gonna use the
word som
and the plural is siyam
and one who is fasting
is called the siyim.
Yeah? Everybody with
me? Are you sure? Yeah. We didn't start
fasting yet, so you can't be dead tired.
I'm, like, really jet lagged, just so you
know. I went to Turkey
and then from Turkey I came back here
for a couple of days and then we
went to Mecca and Medina.
We just didn't sleep. Some of you came
and I came back here and
also just haven't slept. And then my son,
he, like, got in our bed last night
at midnight
and he, like, poked me in my eye
and was like, Bob, I'm in bed with
you. And I was like, thanks man. I
thought some other dude got into my bed.
Like, every couple of hours. I don't know
if you have little kids in your life,
but my son, he, like, doesn't sleep like
a normal human being. He likes to cuddle,
but his cuddling is very weird,
so he'll try to wrap his arm around
me, but his arm will go, like, across
my face like this.
Sometimes, like, in my mouth. And I'm like,
what is going on? How is it possible
that every time you do it, somehow your
fist goes into my mouth?
Oh, so that's kinda where I'm at right
now.
So this is, in that verse,
fasting has been prescribed for you. This is
the word, fasting. It's saying,
it's it means something. It's an abstention
from an Islamic standpoint
from things that you would normally be permitted
to do.
Right? That's the baseline of it. Like
as it was for those that came before
you. So it's not a new practice
in the sense that Islam claims that
we are the first to ever fast.
But it's building a link now to previous
traditions
saying that this is a time tested
act, a spiritual exercise
that was done also
by communities that came before you,
so that you might perhaps.
It doesn't say definitively.
The la'alaqum
in the Quran, it means that potentially.
Like, the opportunity is there
that you might attain this thing of taqwa.
Taqwa
is a key value
in Islam.
And just like we said over the course
of some weeks that you wanna not get
lost in the Arabic,
like, you can say fasting. You don't have
to walk around
and say sliam and som and these kinds
of things. Right? If you go upstairs and
you say to somebody tomorrow, how was your
song today?
Like most people are like, wait. What are
you talking about? Right? You just say, how
was your fasting?
Right? You might say Ramadan,
like the way most people know the word
Ramadan,
whether they're Muslim or not, It's carried over
into the English language
because what are you gonna say? How is
the 9th month of the lunar calendar on
for Muslims going for you? No. You're gonna
say Ramadan because it means Ramadan.
The word taqwa,
it is something you want to engage in
the same way that you just utilize it
in its Arabic
because it allows for there to be that
much more depth to its meaning if you
can maintain it in this way. Right?
And on pretty much, like,
every other like, you read the Quran, it's
not a linear text. You know, it doesn't
say here's the beginning, middle, and end
of a story,
but it gives you details
and then it pulls you back
into core values.
And there's a constant
revisiting
of this value that is called taqwa.
It keeps coming up again and again and
again,
and it's one of the foundational
values. You can call it a virtue if
you want, but it's a foundational
value, a virtue
of Islam. This thing called Taqwa.
Its root in Arabic
is
which
denotes a shield.
And so,
taqwa in and of itself gets translated
as consciousness,
awareness,
mindfulness,
but it's a consciousness or awareness or mindfulness
that's rooted in
a consciousness of the divine.
There's an ethical imperative
rooted in that state of mindfulness
and it's meant to be something that exists
within you the way faith exists within you.
There's a consciousness that exists within you
that protects you. It shields you from things
that are wrong.
Right? So if I was walking
down the street,
and there's a pothole in the middle of
the street,
taekwah
is what is the
element within me that's going to say, hey,
there's a hole coming.
Don't fall in the hole.
Right? Protect yourself from it. You see what
I mean?
The way that it is given a description
in our tradition
is as if
you are walking with like your clothes
through
a field filled with thorned bushes,
how would you walk in that way?
So that the thorns aren't kind of pricking
at you or kind of pulling at your
clothes or unraveling the threads or piercing at
your skin, you'd walk with a certain air
of delicacy.
Right? There's mindfulness to it. You're not gonna
just run through a bush of thorned roses
and then at the end be like, what
happened to my arm? But if you know
that those things are there, you're gonna walk
with a certain sense of awareness.
That's what taqwa is.
Right? You have a recognition.
There's not just a default setting of mindlessness
but there is a mindfulness
that you're kind of moving through things with,
right? And what it's saying is that
this practice
of fasting,
that if it is done
the way that it's intended to be done,
then its yield is going to be this
thing.
Right? How does that work for us? I
started fasting when I was like 12 years
old
and
in my home, we're from Kashmir,
South Asian.
People eat dates a lot. I don't know
if you all grow up eating dates but,
you know, I didn't really like dates when
I was younger.
And my parents,
they loved dates.
And they would be eating dates like crazy.
My dad would be throwing these things in
his cornflakes
and he would be like, you eat some
too.
And as a matter of fact that I
don't want to eat cornflakes. I definitely don't
want to eat cornflakes with dates in them.
They look like cockroaches to me. And it
was not appetizing in any which way.
And when I started fasting,
I did not
eat anything sweeter in my life than a
date that I broke my fast on.
And when I started to fast and I
drank water at the end of the fast,
I did not
drink water that was more refreshing
than that water.
But the idea was not to just be
aware
of the freshness
of the water
or the sweet of the date.
The idea was to be aware of the
ability to be aware of those things.
Do you understand?
That's what consciousness is.
You can sit and throw food in your
mouth and have no mindfulness to your eating.
Or you can sit and you can consume
and it can actually be a spiritual
act.
You can be in a place where
there's not paranoia.
It's not that you are walking on eggshells
every step that you take, but you can
walk in a way
where you actually have awareness to what it
is that you're doing.
And so, the active fasting in and of
itself
is something
that
brings this.
Is important to understand
because it's also giving an indication
that it's not rooted just in the singular.
It's in the plural.
Meaning the first time you fast, you're gonna
probably get a headache.
Right?
It's not that right at the onset you
do it one time and it yields this.
You gotta do it a bunch of times.
You get over the physicality
of it. You build a relationship
with the mechanics of it and then as
the spiritual exercise builds itself,
it will give you the opportunity
to do this.
There's a hadith, a saying of the prophet
Muhammad, peace be upon him, where he says
some people will fast and they get nothing
out of it other than just hunger in
their stomach and thirst in their throats.
Right? We're gonna talk about where some of
that comes from.
But just so you have a base understanding
of what the verse is saying,
these are what these words mean and this
is what it's talking about.
Fasting was written for you as it was
for those who came before you,
so you could have this thing of
this thing of awareness, consciousness.
It wakes you up.
It kinda helps. Right?
Probably tomorrow or on Friday, if you come
to Ithar here, when we break our fast,
I'm gonna do the pre Ithar,
halukkah, the program. I'm gonna talk about the
10 benefits of hunger.
Right? So there's a scholar
in our religious history. His name is Imam
Ghazali.
Ramallah is, like, known as one of the
great spiritual masters of our religion.
He writes in one of his books a
list of the 10 benefits of hunger.
And one of the benefits that he starts
off with is that he says hunger but
this is not a this is not like
a this is a voluntary hunger. Right? It's
not a forced hunger.
You know, there's a difference between the 2
because there's hadith where the prophet Muhammad talks
about how difficult it is for people who
don't have food. Right? May Allah make things
easy for them. But the first benefit that
Imam Ghazali talks about is that hunger is
a means to kinda cleanse your heart, but
also to increase your intuition. Right? It deepens
perception. It makes you more attentive in different
ways. Because you're not, like, in a daze.
You know? If you ever, like, eat crazy
I'll tell you, I'm a mess today. You
know what I mean? I met 2 really
amazing people who came to see me. This
woman who took her shahada a month ago.
I never met them before. They bought me
half a dozen donuts. I don't know why
they bought me half a dozen donuts
And I was about to eat all of
these things.
So I ate 1 and then I walked
around trying to get people to eat these
donuts and people took some of them but
then they left them and then I ate
the rest of them. And then I went
up to where the students were having an
event upstairs on 9th floor And they had,
like, LeVain Bakery gave them free cookies,
plus Domino's pizza. So I ate some of
that too. And that was all in the
time span of 45 minutes. I feel so
gross right now. This is like the stupidest
idea before Ramadan to do this thing. But,
you know,
alhamdulillah.
It's gonna impact,
like, and create this kind of fogginess.
Right?
That you've probably eaten in that way
where it leaves you just like delirious.
Right?
So the idea is that there is this
intrinsic link. And one of the ways to
increase this
is to understand
how you interject
awareness
by being in control.
And any spiritual
diet in an Islamic spiritual book
is going to include
this idea
that if you have the ability to control
your stomach,
you have the ability to likely control everything.
That's just something that's emphasized again and again
and again. It's not a practice
that is about, hey, let's just drain you
of your energy.
But the idea is that it's supposed to
yield
this
through this.
The first level of it is that you're
fasting from what's permissible.
And then you get to a frame as
you relate to the physicality
that you're now fasting from what's impermissible.
Right? I get control and I'm like, I
can't eat. I can't drink. And it now
opens the door for me to say, hey,
I'm not gonna gossip.
I'm not gonna curse.
I'm not gonna, you know, be arrogant or
complain unnecessarily
or be negative. You see what I mean?
Does that make sense? Anybody have any questions
on this?
So somebody asks you, why do Muslims fast?
It's because of this verse in the second
chapter
that says,
like, fasting has been written for you. And
then if they ask you what's the point
of it, it's so that you can do
this.
It's not because your mother said to do
it. It's not because everybody in my family
does it. It's not because we wanna be
the only strange person in my office or
my class who is not eating anything and
pretend like my breath doesn't smell bad as
a result of it, it's because you want
to attain
awareness,
consciousness.
You're gonna wake up your heart. Right? It's
not about empty stomachs. It's about full hearts.
That's the idea of this as a practice.
So I wanna really quickly
just run you through what
a typical schedule looks like. In Ramadan,
it comes from the Arabic root,
Ramada,
which means to like burn something or scorch
something.
So the Islamic calendar is rooted in months
that predate
Islam,
and
this is a lunar calendar so Ramadan itself
is actually experienced by most of us
likely in
multiple seasons
over the course of our lifespans
a couple of times. Right? I'm 40 years
old,
you know, and I don't know how long
I'm gonna be alive. Right? Who knows?
Make the best of our deeds the last
of our deeds.
But likely, most of us in this room
have statistically a good chance of living until
we're like 60, 70
years old. Right? Maybe a little older.
So you could probably experience Ramadan in your
adult life
at least twice
in every single
time and season of the year. Right? And
there's equity in this. Because we're in New
York
where right now it's not, like, so long
in comparison to you could go to some
parts of Europe where I get people who
reach out to me and they're like, hey,
man. Mugger pier is at 10 o'clock, right,
sunset,
and Isha is at midnight and Fudger's at
2 in the morning. What should we do?
And I'm like, hey, man. I'm not from
the Netherlands. You need to ask somebody over
there because that's not my place to tell
you, You know, someone has to understand the
locale and so many other things.
But they have, like, a really long day
of fasting that we don't have.
Right? Our winter is very short.
So
December,
mug ribs are like 4 something in the
afternoon.
And so it kinda balances itself out here
the way it does in other times of
the year. So the idea here is that
it's like a spiritual heating.
You know, you are meant to be a
malleable
person. You're not meant to be fixed.
The fundamental
idea is that it's scorching, like, things
that are,
things we've done that are wrong in our
life.
But in the same idea, it's like molding
and helping you to reach your potential best.
Right? That's in Ramadan.
So, because the night precedes the day, if
we're looking at,
like, night
and
day 1
of Ramadan.
It's gonna start where we just started,
with the Maghrib prayer,
which is the 4th prayer of the day,
we just prayed that at sunset.
This is where you will also break your
fast, but we'll talk about that in the
context at the end of day 1. There's
not that on night 1
because, like,
the night precedes the day
in our calendar in Islam.
So, you're gonna then have Isha,
and Isha is the night prayer, the 5th
prayer of the day. We're gonna pray that
upstairs at around 8:25.
Y'all should definitely come
and, you know,
pray with us, like, be a part of
it. If you're still learning the steps of
the prayer, you could follow along with people.
And there's a unique prayer
that takes place in Ramadan, in the Sunni
tradition of Islam,
that's called Tarawih.
The root of this
is
rawha
And that means to rest
So this prayer is
unique
in that
people pray it in different units.
Some will pray it in 8 cycles, 8
rakahs.
Some will pray it in 20,
And some pray 36.
What it is, we'll talk about next week,
like the wisdoms, the spiritual benefits of it,
why this is done.
Why there's an opinion of 36
is the people of Medina,
the prophet Mohammed's city, they prayed 36.
Because in Mecca,
they prayed 20,
and
the resting
that is here, right, this means to rest.
These are prayed
in 2 units each in sets of 4.
So you pray 2, and then you stand
up and pray another 2, and then you
take a rest
after
each 4,
that you've done. Does that make sense? That's
why it's called tarawiy
because you're resting in between.
So what they would do in Mecca
is they would pray for
and then they would do what's called the
tawaf of the Kaaba. They would walk around
the Kaaba 7 times. The way if you've
ever seen the black cube
in Mecca,
the Kaaba,
and people who go for pilgrimage. Right? Some
of you just went with us, and we
walked around the Kaaba 7 times.
Right?
They would do that in between
every 4 rakahs being prayed. So after 4,
they do it, then after 8, then after
12, then after 16.
So in Medina,
because they couldn't do the tawaf of the
Kaaba,
they would instead pray another 4 rakahs to
compensate. So there's 36.
Right?
People will debate, like, should we pray 8
or 20? Right? Nobody ever is like, hey,
why don't you just do 36?
You know?
But it's usually between this or that. The
idea is that you just wanna pray something.
When you go upstairs,
like, people are gonna be praying this. And
when they go on this marathon, if you've
never prayed it before. Right? You're new to
Islam. You're exploring Islam. They pray Isha and
it's nice and it goes for like 6
minutes. And then someone's like, hey, join in
this dourabi thing. And you're like, okay. And
then they pray 20 of these things. And
you're standing there for an hour. You're like,
what did I just walk into, man? And
nobody explained it to you. This is what
they're doing.
There's not a minimum of what you have
to read in this.
You can pray it in your home. You
don't have to pray it in congregation.
You can go to different communities and culturally
they will do it differently. So if you
go to a Turkish community, for example,
when they pray it, they'll pray 20,
but they'll read, like, the shortest chapters of
the Quran in each unit of prayer. So
it goes, like, really quick. It's amazing.
Right?
Some people will try to read one whole
part of the Quran in each night so
they can read an entire
completion of the Quran
with the congregation,
and that takes about, like, 45 minutes or
so.
But, that's not a necessity.
Does that make sense?
Yeah. So, that's what's gonna happen upstairs,
in like 30 minutes.
Then after this,
like,
come sleep.
You want to sleep well.
If you are going to fast,
especially if our fast starts
at quarter to 6
and goes till about 7, and then over
the course of the month,
it's gonna be longer on both ends of
the day because the day is getting longer.
Your sleep is going to be very important
in the course of how you respond to
the day.
One of the benefits of fasting that we'll
talk about on Friday
is that eating less
and being controlled in the quality and quantity
of your eating,
physiologically,
will require you to also sleep less.
So one of the reasons that we fast
in Ramadan
is not that the fasting
just stops at sunset,
but a purpose of the fasting
is that it enables us to sleep less
so that we can actually pray at night
in Ramadan.
And when you get over like the physicality
of it in the first few days, you
know, the tiredness, your body will adjust
After about 3 or 4 days, you won't
feel the hunger and thirst anymore.
Unless, like, in between these times,
you're not eating sensibly or drinking sensibly.
It's not the time to gorge or go,
like,
deep fried foods or, like, compensate for all
of the, you know, caffeine you didn't drink
and then it ruins your life. Right? But
you have to think about it seriously. It's
a spiritual act. So if you turn into
something animalistic
at sunset,
then you haven't necessarily
tamed the ego. You let the ego take
control of you as soon as it had
capacity to do so. You see? So here
you want to sleep well,
and what's going to happen
when you wake
up, you're gonna have a meal
that's called suhoor.
Right? Suhoor is a pre dawn meal.
There's a lot of blessing in it in
our tradition.
Right? We have a narration in the Hadith
where the Prophet, peace be upon him, he
says in the imperative,
the sahru,
eat the suhoor
Right? He's saying it like do this, Tesahru
Then he says eat the suhoor
that indeed in this meal there's blessing to
it even if it's just a sip of
water,
you know? You think about physiologically,
you get up in the morning, you get
your metabolism going,
you're in a place where you're starting the
day mindfully. I gotta go through a whole
day. This is not the time to eat
like all kinds of crazy gross things.
Right? It's a time to say what's gonna
sustain me? How do I start to bring
strategy and plan
into my physical wellness routine?
This can take place
any time before
the
time of the Fajr prayer,
which is at true dawn.
So our fast starts
not when you've prayed this,
but at true dawn when the light from
the sun is visible above the horizon.
So that's where that
last verse that we read,
it talks about the threads. Right? The black
thread of the night and the white thread
of the day, like, separating from each other.
You can eat
any time
from here until here. This is many hours.
Right?
This is at 7:10.
This is at 5:45.
So you wanna think, how do I kind
of acclimate and adjust to this?
And then the rest of the day
is your other prayers,
duhr,
asr.
And then in Maghrib,
this is the end of day 1,
you are going to have here what's called
iftar
and that's just the breaking of your fast.
Right?
This can be done traditionally on dates and
water.
It's not meant to be like, again, a
gorging of a meal.
You'll find different places will do this at
different ways.
There will be different cultural customs,
traditional familial customs,
but it is something that you want to
think now will repeat as a cycle for
30 days in a row.
Right?
And where and how
these things all kind of fit in,
are going to be a very subjective decision.
Because at the same time, you gotta go
to school, you gotta go to work, you
gotta do all these different things. But it's
a basic skeleton
of what's taking place.
Any questions on this? Yeah. Okay.
Let's take the shoes.
Can we leave after 8 or 12? You
can leave whenever you want to. Yeah. You
can leave whenever you want. You don't have
to stay for the whole 20.
You can leave whenever you'd like. Yeah.
Yeah. You could do that. You can go
home, pray at home, and do what you
gotta do. Right? Like here
in the IC,
a lot of our staff, we're serving the
community.
So we are not necessarily participating as much
as we can
in the ways and that's fine. That's like
our job and we love to do it,
but
then we'll at times either be able to
participate on different days of the week,
or we'll just go home and do certain
things. It's not an obligation. Right? It's not
like going, how are you? It's not an
obligatory
prayer. It's a recommended prayer.
Right? So if you don't do it, you're
not it's not like you're missing one of
the 5 daily prayers.
Right? But the idea behind this is also
still attached to that value
of taqwa.
Right? You're praying in the late nights
so that you're kinda creating wakefulness in your
heart. You know, you're in a place where
it's a source of illumination.
You're reading Quran, you're hearing Quran. There's different
blessings in this. This is a skeleton here.
So when we're now engaged between
the time of Fajr to Maghrib,
the basic
act of fasting
is about
no food,
no drink
and no
intimacy
with one spouse
and these two things are about consumption
that go in through any
kind of of your body cavities. Right? So
it's not just like, I can't eat food
and drink,
but for example, I take allergy medicines
every night. I take a ZYRTEC and I
use nasal cord. The nasal cord, when I
put in my nose,
like, it is going in through my nostrils,
down my throat,
and I couldn't do that during the day,
for example. Does that make sense?
Smoking is not something that one is allowed
to do
for the same reason. Right? There's nothing that
you're consuming,
in the course of your day. So you
could literally
just
sleep the whole day.
I'm not saying you should do that,
but you could sleep the entire day
and you will have fasted
in Islam.
The idea is that it's an abstaining.
It's not necessarily
like an active
kind of engagement. Right? The way when you
pray,
and we talked about wudu for like 4
weeks. Right? You better know wudu now because
we talked about a lot.
You know, you gotta wash up different things.
You gotta find a clean place. You gotta
make sure you're wearing clothes that you can
pray in. You're facing in the direction of
the Kaaba. All these kinds of stuff. Right?
You don't have to do any of that
when you're fasting.
When you're fasting,
you're in a place where you could
just sit in your room and not eat
or drink anything the whole day,
and you will have fasted.
You don't want to make that your fast,
but you want to get accustomed also
to the first parts of it, which in
the first days are very physical. Right?
There is a recommendation.
We will see in the last 10 nights
of Ramadan.
People are both instructed
but also they are motivated
to just pray a lot more in the
last 10 nights of Ramadan.
But by design,
there's nothing that is without meaning in God's
plan.
So those first 10 nights are different from
the last 10 nights because in the first
10 nights, you're getting used to all of
this.
You're trying to, like, figure out how do
I relate to no coffee, to no this,
to no that. You see what I mean?
I don't know why it is,
but, you know, it's the blessing of Ramadan
that
Muslims get really excited about this. And people
who are not Muslim, like, what's wrong with
you people? You know? But, man, I'm so
excited. Ramadan's here. You're excited to not eat
any food or drink any water
for 14 hours straight.
Yeah. It's amazing. You know?
But what's happening in the practice that makes
it amazing
is that you are actually tapping into what
makes you
essentially human
which is to live with wakefulness.
You're not living
in a state that is purely
rooted in the satiation
of your stomach or your sexual organs,
But you're in a place where everything is
controlled.
You have reclaimed the ability
to determine
why and how you would choose your choices
And self restraint is not about being kind
of in an air of trepidation when you
walk, but you live on your own terms.
You don't live on your stomach's terms. You
you see what I mean? Does that make
sense? That's why people love it because you
want to be somebody
who lives with wakefulness.
You don't wanna live like a cow,
right? That's like what the Quran says.
It makes the comparison.
It says they're like the cows, Right? The
ones who,
Have you seen the one who takes their
whims, their desires as being their lord? Right?
You know? Have you I mean, look at,
like, literally. I'm not saying this about you.
I just told you what I ate in
the hour before we started talking to each
other. I clearly need Ramadan in my life.
Do you know what I mean? Right?
I like, oh, this is no sense whatsoever.
You know?
But this is what people are celebrating.
They're celebrating the ability to have clarity.
They're not making decisions that are just simply
in terms of immediate gratification.
Making decisions in the pursuit of something that's
much bigger than that, contentment.
Right?
Any questions on any of this?
Yeah.
So
on the medication side, if you use eye
drops
Eye drops are fine.
Yeah. Because you could put, like, contacts, contact
lens solutions, these kinds of things in your
eyes.
Yeah.
We do 20 here?
Yeah, but it would go with the same
like, if people did 8,
they're just dividing what they would have divided
over 20 over 8. Right? So they pretty
much read the same stuff. But, yeah.
We should not end very late. If we
end very late, I'm gonna yell at the
guys leading the prayer.
These are going too slow. But
we will pray Isha by, like, 8:26
it comes in. We'll call the Adan.
So by 8:40,
we'll be done with Isha. Maybe 8:45,
we'll start praying Tzalat Otarawi or Otarawi prayer.
And anywhere from an hour or so to
an hour and 15 minutes. Because if they're
reading one part of it and a little
bit more,
but likely just one part to it.
It's 20 pages of the Quran.
And so it shouldn't take, like, you know,
2 and a half hours to to to
do it. And you wanna be patient with
these guys. Right? I mean, really think about
it, subhanAllah.
They know every single word in the Quran.
They've memorized it by heart. That's crazy to
think about. You know what I mean? Right?
And may Allah protect all of the guardians
of his book. It's really remarkable as a
feat. And it's no joke to get behind,
somebody
who's leading, like,
a few hundred people, let alone so many
more every night. Just wanna encourage people. Right?
I'm a little bit obnoxious,
so don't be like me. But, you know,
say thank you to them. Right? Encourage them
with kind words.
And where you can stay, you want to
be measured. Right?
You don't want to
do things without strategy,
but it makes a difference. If you're leaving
for a reason that is not like, you
know, you don't have to leave, then don't
leave. Because now when these guys turn around
and they see the lines are lesser in
number than more in number,
It's just a different motivation
when you can see that your community is
behind you
versus, like, they all left. When you leave,
which is also
fine, just be mindful people are still praying
in the room. Right? So you wanna keep
voices down and just kinda be mindful of
of that part to it as well. Any
other questions?
Yeah. As well as the inhalers.
Can you say again?
Asthma inhalers?
Yeah. So there's different opinions on an asthma
inhaler.
People would say no because you're consuming
through, like, your mouth and it's going past
your throat. So essentially anything that goes past
your throat. We'll talk about it in more
detail next week. Right? Because you're gonna make
wudu
and you can wash out your mouth, but
you don't want to swallow anything.
Right? So there's some who would say an
asthma inhaler's
fine because it's going into your lungs. It's
not kinda, you know, like, very definitively.
A lot knows best. Right? There's different opinions
on it.
Yeah. If you have
like medicated related reason as to why you
have to do something then then you gotta
do that. You know, you take that as
a precedent.
Anything else?
Yeah. Yeah. Just wanted to suggest to people,
remind them please to stay hydrated.
There's a lot of times we focus on
the food aspect, but Oh, yeah. We like
the hydration aspect. And I find that that's
been more important
for me and a lot of people. We
have a prophetic tradition
that recommends
1 third
food,
for your stomach, 1 third water,
and then 1 third air.
Like when you're having a meal.
Right? So it means, like, you're not eating
till you're full,
but also means you should be drinking as
much water as you're eating food. Right?
You need to stay hydrated,
you know, in in these ways. Yeah. And
we'll talk about like the specifics, how we
did what we do, the do's and don'ts,
next week and kinda get into some of
this a little bit more. And then over
the course of Ramadan,
we talked a lot about wudu
in the beginning part of the class,
so in the first few weeks. So we'll
start to talk about like prayer in general,
like how that functions,
get a little bit more into the practical
aspects,
of being Muslim.
If you weren't here last time we met,
we read an article,
as kind of a shift from like the
legalistic
aspects.
It was called the Islam and the Cultural
Imperative
by doctor Omar Farooq Abdullah,
which,
essentially is saying, like, Islam exists in various
cultures
and to be Muslim doesn't mean you commit
a cultural apostasy.
Right? You stay true to your cultural identity.
It's a really great article. If you weren't
here last time we met, you should take
a look at that. Okay. So we're gonna
pause. If people wanna go upstairs,
you're more than welcome to stay down here
too,
if you like. But we're gonna pray upstairs
today instead of down here.
And we'll see everybody
next week at 6 o'clock, not 7. We'll
do the essentials class here,
at 6.