Khalid Latif – First Steps Essentials of Islam #12
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AI: Transcript ©
So let's get started.
People are ready, inshallah.
So we're going to shift into a new
topic.
We've been looking at
the practices around Ramadan because we just came
out of Ramadan.
We talked about fasting, we talked about some
of the more internal parts of that,
we talked about Quran briefly,
but now we're gonna be pivoting into prayer
and I know some of you were present
when we talked about wudu and the how
to's of wudu.
If you missed that and you weren't here,
we can definitely check-in on that later,
but we're gonna just go through
with the assumption that that was a conversation
that we already had, and you can find
some of the video and the audio
on that,
online,
but that's going to be part of what
we're going to talk about today.
So we're going to get into discussions
on
what is
essentially a very
foundational ritual within Islam as a tradition
and one of the key forms of worship
that we have,
between us and our creator, which are 5
daily prayers, which in Arabic is called sala.
And the idea,
etymologically,
within that form of prayer is that you're
creating a link, a connection to God.
And today, what we're gonna talk about is
not the actual mechanics of the prayer,
but what are the conditions that need to
be met outside of the prayer,
even before we start the prayer for the
prayer
to be something that is valid when it's
performed. Does that make sense?
So in Arabic,
this word has a cognate in Urdu, Hindi,
if people are familiar with those languages.
But it would be called the or
in plural. Like, what are these conditions that
you would need to have for the prayer's
validity,
but outside of it. And then next week,
we'll talk about what are the integral
components,
like the mandatory parts of the prayer itself,
standing, recitation of the Quran,
you know, bowing, etcetera.
What are some of the things that are
necessary components?
Meaning if you didn't do them, it doesn't
mean that the prayer is invalid,
but you'd have to do what's called like
a prostration of forgetfulness,
what are the things that are recommended and
what are the things that are disliked in
the prayer itself.
But right now, we're gonna just talk about
things that are kinda outside of the prayer
but linked to it, that are conditions that
have to be met before one goes into
prayer. Does that make sense?
Okay. So just really quickly again,
these people are trickling in. If you wanna
take a minute, just introduce yourselves to the
people sitting around you and then we'll get
started with just the first one and work
our way through it.
But, yeah, just really quick intros to people
sitting around you.
And if you're online,
if you wanna just write in where you're
coming from,
introduce yourselves online as well, that would be
great.
Great.
So
if we just jump right into it, I
wrote down these things
on the board. I don't know if you
can read my handwriting or not.
If you can't, I'll just I'll read them
out loud. I apologize.
So the first condition
when we're approaching our salah
is that you have to be pure from
any ritual impurity
from the beginning to the end of the
prayer.
Yeah. What do you mean by ritual impurity?
We're gonna talk about that right now. Yeah.
So, you're essentially need to be in a
state of wudu
which we talked about for
like about a month. If you remember, we
went into wudu really deep. Right? We talked
about the spiritual aspects of it. We talked
about the how to's, what breaks it.
But the condition
for
1 to even come to enter into the
prayer. Condition number 1 is you're gonna need
to be in a state of wudu.
So you're not gonna be able to be
in a place
of what is major or minor ritual impurity.
Meaning, if you went to the bathroom,
you're not in a state of wudu at
that point. Right? If you passed wind, you're
not in a state of will do.
If you went to bed for, you know,
the nights, you're not just dozing
in a class or in a work meeting,
but you knocked out and you're asleep.
Like, if you wake up, you're gonna have
to make will do again.
So
point number 1
is you're gonna be in a place where
you're in a state of will do and
that has to last for the duration
of the prayer. It's like a general principle,
right? Now, we wanna be able to do
in this is that people have specific circumstances.
We have people in our community, for example,
who struggle with things like OCD.
You know, they're in a place where
the was was gets to them very deeply.
Those specific circumstances, you want to be able
to talk to somebody about.
This is not a religion that shies away
from wellness conditions.
If anything,
historically, what we find is a deep understanding
of the self in its entirety.
Physical,
emotional,
spiritual, mental and not just any one part
to it, but a recognition that where and
how
this tradition understands
that everyone is not necessarily built to the
same way. And why is that important?
Because this gets a lot of people. Just
even in kind of the most,
typical of circumstances,
you'll have many people who are constantly in
a state of doubt. Do I have my
wudu? Do I not have my wudu? You
know, did like something happen? Did something not
happen? You want to be smart about this
too. Right? Condition number 1, because it's from
the beginning and the to the end of
the prayer. So, you're gonna meet like lots
of Muslims
who are gonna be in a place where
when you talk to them, they're just fidgeting
a lot, they're moving around a lot as
they're going to prayer and you're like, what's
wrong with you? And they'll say, I have
to go to the bathroom.
And they'll say, well, why don't you go
to the bathroom? And they'll say, I don't
want to redo my wudu again, and I'm
gonna have to pray Maghrib in a little
bit. They're like literally dancing around, squirming, trying
to hold everything in. That's not how you
want to approach your prayer. You know what
I mean?
If you understand that this is something that
has to be from start to finish of
the prayer,
and you want to maintain that state without
any distraction,
then just deal with whatever it is that's
gonna come up that you know is going
to be there
that allows for you to have a peace
of mind,
but wudu is something that
has to be
present
in order for you to approach the salah.
Does that make sense? Yeah. And we talked
about wudu a lot. You don't have to
redo your wudu every time you pray.
But
if you break your state of wudu,
then that has to be redone
before you can
enter into the prayer.
Yeah. What if you can't remember if you
have it?
So the default is
we have,
in our tradition, things in our in our
legal tradition, there's things that are called maxims
and there's one that says, certainty
is not lifted by doubt. So if you
know you made wudu
and you're kinda wondering, do I still have
it or not? You go with what was
certain that you made the will do. Does
that make sense? Yeah. If something comes up,
right, or you talk to your friends or
people in your family. My kids are 7
and 10
and they are just like any 7 and
10 year old. Most of you probably met
them during Ramadan
or saw them running around. Right? They're really
nice kids,
Anytime I say to my kids when we're
gonna pray together as a family, hey, do
you have wudu?
No matter what, the first answer is always
yes.
Right? And I'm like, how? How do you
still how do you when did you even
do it? Right? And they're like, well, let
me think about it. You know, and my
son will say, you know, I took Baba
like a bath, like, 12 hours ago. And
I'm like, bro, wait. What are you talking
about? Right? My son will go through that
process. My daughter will. But they'll sit and
they'll think about it.
But for some of us, we just fundamentally
get to a place where
doubt gets the best of us. You don't
want to give in to doubt. You want
to be in a place where what's certain
is what you go off of. And then
if you think about it, right, you trace
your steps,
you kind of do your best,
and that's really kind of where it's at.
But you don't wanna prevent,
like, focus and kind of gain from the
prayer
because
what you know could disrupt your will do,
you're not dealing with it out of just
kinda laziness or exhaustion
or reasons that don't make any sense.
Number 2,
and we're not going to go into that
too deeply because we talked about wudu for
so long. So if you trickled in, as
we're going through this, we have like the
videos and the audio up on our podcast.
I'm happy to meet with you 1 on
1. We'll likely circle back to this when
we start all over again the next time
we do this.
But don't
let
the idea that you missed like a session
or 2 be something that prevents you from
it. We can walk through it and talk
about it, if people are not familiar with
it and the ways that we were doing
it. So that it's strategic. Right? You're trying
to make will do in the workplace, in
the classroom. So we went deep as opposed
to just a list. So you can know,
well, in these situations, these are the ways
that I can adapt.
Number 2,
the body and clothing has to also be
free
from any types of impurities.
And this might be something that you feel
like is a given,
but for example,
making will do in and of itself
is not necessarily the same as ensuring that,
okay, like, I've washed from my body
anything of urine or fecal matter
or I'm in a place, for example, where
my clothes might have something on it that
are considered to be, from a religious standpoint,
impure.
That I want to make sure those clothes
are also clean.
Clothing, in our tradition, relates to the body
in a way that what constitutes
clothing
is that when you are
wearing it,
it actually like moves with your body.
Does that make sense? So for example, if
you're wearing your shoes
and you took off your shoes
and then you stood on top of your
shoes while you were praying,
then you're not wearing your shoes. Do you
know what I mean? Your shoes are now
kind of beneath your feet but they're not
they're still clothing, but they're not clothing that
you're wearing at that point in time. Right?
I have on a jacket.
If I take my jacket off and I
put it down, then we get into 0.3
for a clean place of prayer.
What I'm wearing
has to be something
that
is also free of impurity.
But if you're not wearing it, right, you
take your shoe off
and at the heel or the base of
your shoe, there's something that is not clean,
but what you're standing upon is clean,
then you're still praying on something that is
clean. Do you get what I mean? It's
the equivalent of if you took a prayer
mat and you put it down on the
ground where there's a lot of filth but
you're praying on something clean
and that's like the clean area. Do do
you get what I mean? Yeah. What's annoying
if, like, you come from, like, the gym,
sweating, is that like in here? No. Sweat
is clean. Right? In the sense that, like,
it's it's
not one of the things that are considered
yeah.
I have another question that's maybe silly, but
I was thinking, like, if you stay outside,
like, you
or do you do We're gonna talk about
it when we get to 3 Okay. Which
is a clean place of prayer.
But your prayer mat isn't your clothing
because it's just it's a mat that doesn't
move as you move. Do you get what
I mean? So your clothes have to be
clean and free of any kind of impurity
and your body also has to be cleansed
of any kind of impurity. Yeah.
The default
of things are that they're clean unless you
have a reason to believe that they're not
clean. Right?
So if you're walking
and you step in New York City, there's
like a dog that just peed in front
of you. Right? And you didn't you missed,
you know, you you stepped in it, then
you one of the reasons why we're removing
shoes quite often in masjids
is because shoes can track a lot of
things of dirt and jesa and this kind
of stuff.
But if you're in a place where people
have different perspectives on some of these things,
some people will say, yeah, take those shoes
off no matter what. And some people will
say, if you're outside
and you're not aware
of, like,
what you're praying in or whatever, it's cold
outside, it's snowing outside, these kinds of things.
But fundamentally,
the idea isn't that just because you're wearing
a shoe outside,
that what is accumulating on it is going
to be, from a religious standpoint,
considered impure.
Do you know? Does that make sense? Yeah.
And these are things that you're gonna see.
Different people will do them in different ways.
When you're praying individually,
you are gonna pray
kind of in accordance with what, you know,
you are gonna make that decision for yourself.
You know what I mean?
And we talked about wudu, for example. If
you remember, I used the example of my
Timbs and, like, I wear them purposely when
I travel on planes
because they constitute all the requirements
of what you can wipe
over when you're making will do. So you
don't have to remove your socks and remove
your shoe in your entirety because the boot
goes above the ankle, you can walk a
certain distance and it's not perforated
or permeable by water, you know, all those
things that we discussed.
So in order for me to be able
to pray
with that
condition, I'd have to keep that shoe on.
You see what I mean? Does that make
sense?
Yeah.
The body and the clothing must be free
from impurity. You also just want to be
smart like what you're wearing and we're gonna
talk about wearing clothes here that cover the
body in a certain way but here too,
like, just be smart about what you're wearing
in the course of the prayer. Right? Shouldn't
be something
that is incoming Yeah.
Isn't something that, you know,
has like any kind of vulgar language on
it. Right? You don't want something that's like,
you know, the person praying behind you is
gonna be kinda distracted as they're reading, like,
whatever is written on your back or they're
like, what is this guy wearing to pray?
You know, because you're in a state of
prayer. You want, like, the clothes to also
be something
that,
are going to be indicative of, like, hey,
I'm standing in front of God right now.
Do you know?
In this place where the entire experience is
not just a prayer of the body but
it's a prayer of my heart. You know,
I don't wanna just be in a state
where my body prostrating and bowing but my
heart is also prostrating and bowing. So you
think out
when you go to do anything,
what helps you to get into a mindset?
You're going for an interview of some kind.
You're gonna go meet, you know, the person
you want to marry, their parents for the
first time. You're gonna be in a place
where you're getting yourself
ready and presentable
and so
where
there's an understanding
that also
you want to
allow for yourself to fall into
kind of a mindset
that is
as integrated into the prayer as best as
possible
by like wearing clothes that are indicative of,
hey, this is like the act that I'm
engaging in.
How is how I present myself to it
something that
gives me an insight onto
what I really deem it to be in
terms of importance.
You know? So if I roll out of
bed at fudger time
and I just am in like my pajamas,
the same thing I slept through, I like
throw some water on my face
and I just do some variation of standing
and going up and down and up and
down, you're gonna get out of it what
you put into it. You know what I
mean? But I've met people who, for their
entire lives, they have, like,
just a prayer outfit that they have in
their home, you know. And it takes like
2 seconds for them to throw it on
even if what they're wearing is totally fine.
Like what everybody's wearing right now, you know,
nothing is like inappropriate
as such, but you get to a place
where you're like, this is what I wear
when I stand in front of God. You
know, I put some mindfulness into it, thoughtfulness
into it. Do you know what I mean?
It might not be as easy when you're
out in the workplace,
you're in class, you're trying to navigate some
of it. But when you're at home, you're
there, you have more of a comfortability. You're
going to the mosque. You're going to gatherings
where there might be other Muslims and you
know they're gonna pray, then you're in a
place where you can anticipate
that where some of the day might be
a little bit more hectic.
Here's now an opportunity for me to engage
this at moments of ease that allow for
this to increase some of the presence. Do
you see what I mean?
Does that make sense? Yeah. Go ahead.
It's my stuff a bad question, a crazy
question, but, like for instance, one of my
part time jobs though, it doesn't work with
a lot of dispensaries. I don't put them
with the businesses and stuff like that advertising.
But,
you know, smelling like marijuana
is something that's, you know, kind of don't
really know how to go about that. I
mean, I understand what you're saying and the
principle of, like, presenting myself
that marijuana is not high. We can talk
about that separately more, but just to give
you an idea for example, like, I own
a butchery,
you know. I don't know if people know
that and when we open the butchery,
me and my partners, I told them, we
should learn every part of what goes into
butchering.
And so, for a butcher, for example,
because of the nature of their work,
there's an exception made in terms of the
clothing that they wear
because it's going
to, at some point, have, like, certain things
that the norm is you shouldn't be wearing
that kind of stuff. Right?
Or there's other things that we'll talk about
when we talk about clothing, for example,
in the Hanafi school,
there are two opinions for a woman, what's
considered an oda, in terms of her forearms
showing. Right? And some of what they say
in the Hanafi school is that because
there's certain tasks that women would do on
a daily basis, they could be, you know,
in medicine,
like doing things or work that necessitates them
having, like, forearms exposed,
that there's indication that in those specific situations,
if a forearm is exposed, it's not the
same
as if just, you know, the normal course
of action is that, it should be covered.
Do you get what I mean?
But
let's talk about that offline,
you know, and see, kind of, you know,
where where we can land on that particularly,
but those are certain things that do come
up in certain regards, right. It's not the
norm, you know, even with fasting for example.
You know, there were people who, if you
look at thick books,
people whose jobs was to like harvest food
and work very deeply,
laboriously
were sometimes given the exemption from fasting.
If they weren't able to perform their job
because of the fast, and their job had
a time sensitivity to it, so if they
didn't harvest the crop at the time that
they needed to, then like, they wouldn't have
anything to eat and people wouldn't have anything
to eat. You know, so the specificities
of it though are not kind of devoid
of what the normal principle is. Do you
know what I mean? Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah.
I I was kind of playing with that
in my mind, like, if, you know,
I worked with my brother painting houses over
the summer. Right? Scraping
lead paint.
I'm thinking if I, you know, wash up
as much as I can, but I got
dust on me or whatever, and the intersection
of, like, intention and circumstance. Right? If it's
not your, like, all the time or, like,
or the bar that you set to be
covered in dust But it's not a problem.
Like, if you had dust and paint on
you, those aren't things that are considered
ritually impure. Okay. Right? And there's actual hadith
where the prophet says that God loves to
see his servant come to him, you know,
in this kind of state of of need,
you know, in certain ways. Right? They're like,
you're still well groomed. Doesn't mean when you're
going to pray, just like take a bucket
of dirt and throw it on you. Right?
That's not the idea. But even when you're
on Hajj, for example,
you know, you're in Hajj, you're in your
e Haram, the white clothing. If you've ever
seen like pictures or You guys saw pictures
of Mecca
from Ramadan
where people are praying around the Kaaba and
the last nights of Ramadan or on the
day of Eid. On that first, like, area
around the Kaaba,
they only let people in right now who
are performing Umrah,
the smaller pilgrimage. So the men are all
on the white garb.
On Hajj, you wear that for a series
of days,
you know, and you're getting covered in dirt
and dust and all these things. Those things
aren't problematic.
Right?
So when we talked about what makes will
do and what are these things that, from
a religious standpoint, are considered substantively
impure. If those things are on your clothing
or on your body, you want to remove
those things,
and cleanse yourself of them,
as a condition for the prayer. Right? And
if these conditions aren't met, what we're saying
is the validity of the prayer is not
met then. Right? The prayer in and of
itself
is not valid at that point.
A clean place of prayer
is the third that you would need, right?
So it's, I'm getting ready to pray. What
are the things that I need
in order to pray? So in the Hanafi
school, these are the conditions that you need
in order to pray.
A clean place of prayer,
the default is that everything is clean unless
there's a reason to believe that it's not
clean.
Does that make sense? So you could go
and pray on the sidewalk
right outside the building. You can go in
Washington Square Park and you can pray over
there. You can go and pray. There's like
men who drive taxicabs
that literally prey on the hoods of their
taxicab.
They can pray over there. The default is
that things
are assumed to be clean unless there's a
reason to believe or understand that they're not
clean. Right? The physical presence of something,
the discoloration,
the smell, you know, these are the kinds
of things that would give us indication,
you know. And if you're in a place
where you like literally see something in front
of you, then that's what
you have to go off of. Yeah. What's
the feeling of like having a prayer mat?
Is that like what is
required? All the prayer mat is is that
you essentially are carrying with you now something
that is a clean place to pray,
but it's not a requirement
as such,
right, and it's not something that's sanctified. It's
not like a sacred object
in that way.
And so, to go back to Anna's question,
like, when you have a prayer mat and
you're putting it down, some people are very
meticulous
when they fold up the prayer mat so
that
when you fold it,
the underside is not touching the top side.
Do you know what I mean? Does that
make sense? Right? So you can fold it
in a bunch of different ways like you
could roll it up and then the underside
will touch the top side. Does it mean
if the underside touched the top side like
the prayer mat is ruined? No. Like, that's
not what it means. Right? But when you
see people being very meticulous with it, what
they're doing is they're avoiding the bottom from
touching the top
because you could put down a prayer mat.
It doesn't mean like the whole place in
the whole, like, space has to be clean.
Just the place where you are praying and
the parts of your body that are going
to touch the ground,
those places have to be free
of anything that's considered
to be ritually impure. Right? So if I
went and prayed in Washington Square Park near
the dog park, and there's all kinds of
things around the dog park but like right
where I'm praying is clean,
that in and of itself is still a
clean place for me to pray.
The hadith says that the entire world is
a masjid,
you know. So you can pray
like more or less theoretically
wherever you would want to
But you have to ensure that the place
in and of itself is also a clean
place. Yeah.
So like usually, you know, I carry like
a scarf
better to, like, wait when I have the
scarf with me to pray, or, like, carry
without one.
Like a scarf or what? Like a So
like cover your hair? Yeah. We're gonna talk
about
next, like, what clothes you have to wear,
but we're gonna, we'll get to that in
the 4th point. Yeah. Will you list,
exactly what,
substances are considered impure?
We talked about it in Wudu. We can
go through it again if people want
to, in terms of what would be impure.
Yeah, that would be helpful.
Yeah. And that's what I was saying before
too. If you miss some of those sessions,
we can, like, talk it out 1 on
1. You can find the audio and video
online but I'll put up a list also,
so that people know what those things are.
What were you gonna say? Actually, it's on
that topic. I was just wondering if you
could provide clarity on the cleanliness of animal
fur
and then of, like, dog saliva.
So I've had some Muslims
be like, oh, if a dog likes you,
you have to do a whistle and I
don't know if that's true. Can I still
pray? No. You don't have to do a
whistle. Right? So there are different opinions
on, like, the saliva of the dog, right?
And
where the saliva in and of itself is
considered to be ritually impure,
and if you come into contact with it,
what you have to do is just wash
it, you know. The recommended washing of the
clothing,
your body part, etcetera,
you'd wanna wash the clothing,
like,
you know, 7 times 3 to 7 times
is kinda like a recommended
kinda range.
But rinsing it through once, like where the
water is flowing through it, just that part,
if the dog's saliva touches it. And then
by extension, the saliva,
you know, because of the nature of the
animal, that they'll say if, like, the dog
brushes against you or its fur brushes against
you, but you don't have to do a
whistle
if you have a dog lick you or
touch you.
Then there's other opinions
that distinguish between domesticated
dog versus a wild dog. Right? That,
the idea would be that animals that you
were training for hunting for example,
so a dog would be utilized as one
of the animals that would hunt with
and when the
hunter
would send out the dog to retrieve the
animal that was hunted, right? And hunting is
not done for sport in Islam.
You can't just kill something because you feel
like killing it. You know, this is done
out of a necessity,
like for food,
and the prophet alayhis salam was not someone
who was known to eat meat everyday,
right? So the idea was that he wouldn't
go 40 days in a row eating meat,
but he also didn't go 40 days without
eating it. There's a lot of people who
are vegetarian,
vegan,
people are in places where that's
acceptable from within our tradition,
but you're not,
like, going to kill for the sake of
killing. Does that make sense? So when this
dog is now sent by the hunter,
the
dog is bringing
the animal back in its mouth.
Right?
So this creates like a scenario that says,
okay, if the saliva of the dog is
problematic
and considered ritually impure,
as a default, right? What are things that
are ritually impure like wine is ritually impure,
you know,
urine is ritually impure. So if somebody was
to mix that into food, for example,
is considered just impure
because its default state is impurity.
If the dog's saliva we're saying is impure
in that way,
then it's problematic now that it's bringing the
food back in its mouth.
And so, there's opinions that distinguish between
the
domesticated animal
and the non domesticated
animal. Alright. And what they would say is,
you know, subhanAllah, like knowledge
is such an empowering
mechanism in Islam as a tradition that even
the animal that has knowledge
is given more of a status than the
animal that does not have knowledge. Right?
But if you get something on your clothes,
you know, like a dog licks your hand,
just watch that part of your hand. The
dog, like, you know, licked your jacket, you
just wash that part of the jacket, you
don't have to, like, throw the whole jacket
in. Right? And it's varied.
You know, some of you are still exploring
Islam, some of you are new to Islam,
some of you are born in Muslim families.
You'll meet Muslims, right? I'm not saying it's
a good or bad thing. They'll see like
a dog come in front of them and
they will like freak out as if the
worst thing in the world is like coming
their way. Right? It's just a dog, you
know what I mean? You don't have to
run away from it. If anything, if you
run from it, it's gonna likely think you're
playing with it. It's gonna start chasing you
and you're just making yourself worse, right? If
something, like, kinda comes towards you
and you're
engaged in that opinion,
that it's saliva, it's fur, you know, it's
something that renders Nejasa,
then,
like,
it's fine. You just wash it off, you
know. It's not, You don't want to use
the opportunity
to then start, like, you know, kind of
grilling somebody, you know, your dog is the
worst thing in the world. Right? It's a
dog. It's just being a dog. That's what
dogs do. They're playful.
They're, like, very loyal.
The Quran speaks about a dog as being
a companion of the people of the cave
in the chapter that's called Surat Al Kahf,
right?
And so there's a lot that goes into
it
and something that I think we talked about
but I'll say again,
you don't have to know a lot to
be Muslim,
right? But there's certain like sound bite pieces
of information that Muslims have that they don't
know where it comes from. And so when
you convert to Islam, they're gonna give you
this list of things
and one of those things is gonna be
about dogs probably.
Right? There's different opinions on it,
and
where you might come into contact with a
dog or somebody who's a dog owner, like
that's fine. There's room for that in Sharia,
and there's opinions that say the domesticated dog
is fine and there's others who would say
no, like, by the default, it's not and
they would still make room for it saying
like, you should have a guard dog. Right?
The dog could stay outside in your yard.
They're protecting.
Right? If you're a shepherd, many shepherds have
sheepdogs. They're there also to protect from predators.
Do you get what I mean? Yeah.
What time is Mugger Can you clarify? Oh,
sorry. What time is Mugger? 7:47.
747?
Yeah. Go ahead. So I have a pet
cat.
Right? Is his hair,
the jossa? No. Cats do fun. Okay. So
it's Dogs
are also mentioned in the feast.
Dogs are mentioned in the feast. Yeah. Dogs
and birds for hunting.
Yep. Thank you so much. No problem. And
you don't need to redo voodoo. Right? The
dog lifts you, you just wash the area
with water. You just wash the area. Yeah.
You can wash it. So, where
you have a clean place of prayer,
like, you want to establish this also in
your homes, you want to think about it
in the course of your day cause you're
getting yourself also mentally ready, right? Like,
where am I going to pray this prayer?
And this can really mess around with a
lot of people
and it can create, like, anxiety.
I was having dinner with a friend of
mine in Times Square
and Times Square is Times Square, you know?
But I'm at a point where
I'm pretty comfortable praying in most places, so
I just went around the corner, prayed on
the sidewalk and then a tour bus parked
in front of me and like 55 people
walked out from this tour bus and I'm
in my prayer. I can't start, started, you
know, praying. I didn't know what was gonna
happen and while I'm in prayer, a woman
came and walked really close to where I
was
and she then took a scarf off from
around her neck and put it down where
I was prostrating
and then by the time I finished, they
had all left. So I didn't get a
chance to, like, talk to her, like, speak
to her to say thank you. It's really
nice. It's probably not like the normal experience
that's gonna happen. Do you know what I
mean? So, a lot of the agitation that
comes
that isn't necessarily about, let me find a
clean place of prayer.
Embedded in finding a clean place of prayer
is the idea that you're already situating yourself
with a recognition of, like, where am I
going to pray?
You know, in the course of my day,
I know that I'm in this building at
this time. I'm, you know, in this part
of the office building at this time. Like,
how do
I preemptively
understand
what the next day is going to look
like so that I'm able to execute on
this and that I'm now not in a
place where
I am
limiting myself
but I'm able to perform the prayer as
best as it can be. We're gonna talk
about the intergoals of prayer, the Farayed. If
you remember we did like the spectrum of
what every act can fall
into, obligatory,
recommended,
you know, impermissible,
etcetera,
that thing. And if you weren't here, we'll
we'll go through it again. Don't be overwhelmed
by it. We'll go through it if you
miss those classes.
One of the things that are required to
do in your prayer
is, like, in your obligatory prayer, you gotta
stand in the prayer.
Right? If you're, like, confined to an airplane
and there's not room, like, there's differences and
we'll talk about that when we talk about
how to pray when you're traveling.
But when you are thinking about it, right,
you don't want to get caught off guard
that I'm stuck on 5th Avenue,
the sun is setting, mugger is about to
finish, I'm just gonna grab some jeans off
of a rack and find an empty dressing
room that doesn't allow for me to go
through the movements of the prayer fully. If
you can make it work in the prayer,
like in the in the dressing room, that's
fine. Right? Because it's still a clean place
but you want to be in a place
where these things
are things that you're thinking about
prior to but not like 2 minutes before
the prayer. Right? But thinking about it well
before
so that it's actually like a replenishing act
and it doesn't become then very burdensome and
anxiety inducing. Do you get what I mean?
Yeah.
So I have a question.
I've seen, like, you know, you're able to
just, like you said, like, you did, like,
the world is your masjid.
Is it, like, the same for women and
for men? Because I feel like
is it just, like, based off your comfort
or is it okay for, like, a woman
to, like, just be praying out anywhere
where, like, people could see them? I don't
know. I think you wanna consider your safety
more than anything.
Do you know? And be in a place
also where you're not creating anxiety for yourself,
but the prayer times, which we're gonna talk
about in the 5th
group,
are things that we know in advance. You
know what I mean?
So, where and how you're preemptively understanding,
hey, I'm going to be in these areas
around this time of prayer. Right? Like, when
I pray in an airport or pray in
the street, if I have a bag with
me, right, I'm gonna put it in front
of me because I need to be able
to watch my stuff too, you know. It's
not like, oh, I'm praying. Let me just
throw my laptop bag behind me. Now, I
turn around, it's like, who took my shoes?
Who took my stuff? It's like, well, why
did you put it somewhere where nobody you
know what I mean? Right? So similarly,
like, you gotta just be mindful for yourself.
Like, where is a place that I'm going
to pray that I have comfort, that I
can feel, like, a sense of security and
safety?
The idea in and of itself
that you're not in a prayer place
is not enough of a reason to say
that you don't pray and it's time.
So you're gonna pray
in the course of the time period
unless there's like an extenuating
circumstance which doesn't really come for most of
us. Do you know what I mean? Like,
what would constitute that type of situation. Does
that make sense? Yeah. But all of this
is about not getting caught off
guard. Do you know? Right? Because the prayer
itself, when we talk about the mechanics and
what goes into it, it takes just a
few minutes to actually do, especially when you're
praying on your own.
But what gets a lot of people are
all of these things that are taking place
around the prayer itself,
you know. So, the more you can think
out, okay, like, how am I gonna have
my wudu
when it's time to pray?
And, am I like
in a place where what I'm wearing and
like my body, is it clean? So when
I'm using the bathroom, am I washing up
properly
from that?
And where are the actual places that I
have designated
in the course of my day that are
gonna help me to pray.
It's really hard for a lot of our
college students, right, and all of you aren't
college students here, but when you can just
walk into a room that's built for you
versus you now go into the world and
you try to figure out how to be
Muslim out there in a world that's not
sensitive
to your Islam always. Right? You're trying to
figure out how do I do this with
my job and how do I do this,
know, with coworkers and all these kinds of
things.
Where you're able to then think about it
beyond just the moment you find yourself in.
Do you know what I mean? And you
start to think out, like, there's windows to
these prayer times,
there are, like,
ways that I can create for myself clean
places of prayer
that would allow for me to understand,
like,
still a little bit of autonomy
in the course of it because whether I'm
in
a class
or I'm at work or I'm hanging out
with friends,
the time to pray is
upon you, that window.
You gotta pray the prayer in that window
of time. Does that make sense? Yeah. Okay.
Any questions on these first three things?
Yeah.
I wanted to kind of discuss like,
praying and then,
like, praying with him, like, the idea of
also, like, bathrooms. I know it's like a
kind of something that people would like to
look into. I don't know if I might
go into that now or anything or if
you thought about it for it? You shouldn't
pray in a bathroom
because it's a bathroom.
You know? But given the nature of the
audience that we have here, right? It's people
learning about Islam, people who are new Muslims,
there's converts that I know
who
they write to me and they say,
I live with a family that hates Islam,
you know, Muslims
don't really reach out to me or I'm
the only Muslim when I go back home
to,
like, my Bible Belt family,
my Midwest family,
my, like, you know, Western Texas family
and the only place that I can find,
like, a place of
quiet
is in the restaurant bathroom when we're out
to eat dinner
or, you know, in my home in the
restroom. Right? These are specifics. Do you know
what I mean?
But where and how individually,
we have like a lot more probably room
to be flexible
and if you think about this in terms
of the convert experience,
where even despite those challenges, they're still like
staying committed to their faith. And a lot
of people who are born into Islam,
quite often we just take for granted, like,
some of the privileges that we've been afforded.
Do you know what I mean?
So, you wanna be in a place where,
like, you're at work,
you got to, like, tell your boss you
kind of need to have a place to
pray. Right? You can't go into a stall
and pray in the bathroom over there. Do
you know what I mean? Right? It's a
place that is definitively,
like, of impurity,
you know? You find like empty meeting rooms,
these kinds of things.
Okay.
So we went through the first three of
these, these are conditions
of the prayer according to the Hanafi school,
outside
of, like, the prayer. When you're coming to
the prayer, these are things that have to
be met as conditions before
you pray the prayer, right. So we talked
first, you got to be in a state
of wudu
from the start to the end of the
prayer, right. So if we were praying right
now and I broke my wudu,
I would have to go and redo my
wudu
in order for the prayer to be valid
and unless there is an extenuating circumstance, which
is not the majority of us, right, so
you wanna take the exceptions out and just
understand the norm. Somebody has like some kind
of ailment or condition
that impacts
how they retain
kinda, you know, urine in their body for
example or, you know, they have kind of
just excessive dripping that comes,
or, you know, their ability to control
kind of,
releasing of gas or anything like that, you
know, but those are things that you would
engage in kind of a conversation with both
a religious scholar
as well as a doctor who could give
you an idea as to what's really going
on there and then there's particulars that might
come up. That's not necessarily applicable to us
in a general sense. Do you know what
I mean? So we'll do You want to
make sure your body and clothing are also
clean.
We're we're talking about what constitutes,
an impure substance.
So what we would find here are things
like urine,
fecal matter,
wine is considered an impure substance,
blood,
things that would also come from animals in
these regards as well,
seminal fluid,
pre seminal fluid, sperm, you know, these are
all things that are considered,
inherently
impure.
In order for that now in point number
2 to be something that creates a challenge
for us,
the transference has to be something that also
takes place. So if you have like a
dry substance
and it doesn't transfer to you because it's
dry,
then it's dry.
But if it's wet,
then the transference
comes
more into contact with you. Does that make
sense, right?
But at a baseline,
like don't pray any place where there's pee
on the ground, right. Don't pray any place
where a dog just pooped, you know. And
if you have a mat with you, you
can put a mat down. All mats aren't
like big and thick. You can get really
thin ones, traveling ones,
and the places where your body is touching
the ground
is where it has to be clean. So
that's not like, you know, I need a
10 foot radius around me
to kinda be, but just in the place
where you're gonna be performing your prayer and
your limbs that touch the ground. We'll talk
about this as we go through the mechanics
of the prayer like how your body is
positioned
and what parts of your body
need to be touching the ground, which ones
should not be touching the ground,
but a clean place,
your body clothes free of impurity and a
clean place of prayer. Meaning that the place
that you're praying is free also of these
impurities.
They want it to be a place where
also,
it's now not The cleanliness of it is
attached to the validity,
right? So this is outside of the validity
but for example,
you know, you could go and pray in
a place that you know purposely is just
going to be fundamentally
distracting for you, right? There's all kinds of
sound and noise
circling. You just wanna try your best, right?
We're in New York City, right? The noise
doesn't necessarily stop in too many parts of
the city. We were praying
Zohar earlier. There was some kind of party
going on in Washington Square Park. Right?
We prayed to Eve in the park on
Friday. I don't know how many how many
here were on on Eve with us in
the park. It's really nice, right? The night
before
on April 20th, like a crazy party in
the park. Do you know what I mean?
We're praying here. We have a beautiful view
of the park. But whatever happens in the
park, even if it's not a party. Bernie
Sanders campaign in the park, there's like 100
of thousands of people in the park. Obama
spoke in the park. We get front row
seats
every time this happens. You can just sit
outside the window and see whatever is happening
in the park, but all that noise is
gonna carry in
to the room. Does it mean that the
validity of the prayer is attached to that?
The cleanliness
is
here in that sense, like, in terms of
what is physically clean. So outside of that,
you wanna just do your best to also
make sure that you're not situated in places
that are going to be very distracting
and kind of draw your attention away. Does
that make sense? So we're gonna move into
the 4th,
bucket here.
In here. I'll read through them
as well.
So,
when we get to Yeah. Go ahead. So
I wanted to ask,
when we talked about how the bathroom is
kind of a place, like, kinda not just
some things like that, we wouldn't pray in
a bathroom.
Would that would the validity change at all
if someone brought a prayer mat into the
bathroom?
You should try to avoid praying in the
bathroom, right? We talked about this when we
talked about wudu because a lot of us
make wudu in the bathroom, right? A lot
of our showers and bathtubs are attached to
the bathroom.
So I have teachers who have said that
the functionality of the space in and of
itself,
you know, switches in that moment, right? And
it's now not a bathroom but it's, you
know, something different. When you go for a
Hajj, for example,
the unit that the bathroom is in also
has a shower head over it. So the
toilet and the shower is all in one
kind of thing. Do you know what I
mean? But unless there's like a reason as
to why one would and we can talk
about it more offline if you want, you
know, just so we can understand the intricacies
of it. But
pretty much, like, the default of bathrooms is
that you don't you shouldn't be praying in
the bathroom. Do you know what I mean?
Yeah.
So I just have 2 questions. So if
you're, like, in the middle of prayer and
there's a congregation and you break your wazoo,
like, do you stop in the middle of
prayer and go and do wudu or do
you finish the prayer and then No. You
have to stop and make your wudu. Okay.
Right? Because you can't you need to be
in wudu to pray your prayer. And, if
you go on an airplane, like, stay overseas,
like, do you just pray in the airplane?
Or like Yeah. We'll talk about but, yeah,
you have to pray when the prayer time
comes in in the plane, in real time.
So it's not like from the place you
left or the place you're going to,
but in So when you're flying east,
right, the prayers are gonna come really fast,
you know, because you're going across time zones.
When you fly west,
like, you're just making up hours, right? So
when we went for Umrah to Mecca,
it was like a lot of prayers back
to back to back to back but when
we left from Saudi to come back to
New York,
we didn't pray anything,
right, because it was just fundamentally, like, just
a really long,
like, kinda
just situated in, like, the mid afternoon for
hours because
we were flying westward and we were making
up hours. Do you know what I mean?
You said praying to see.
Yeah. Well, we'll talk about this when we
talk about prayer when we're traveling but essentially,
if I'm praying,
I have to do as much of it
as I can in the ways that it's
intended. The obligatory prayer, the Fard prayer,
right? So
when you're in your seat,
like, if you can't prostrate
but you still can stand. So you're gonna
stand
and we're gonna talk about facing the Kaaba
in a bit but you're gonna face the
Qibla and all the standing parts you should
be able to do
when you're in your seat because there's still
room for you to stand in the seat,
right? If now you're sitting
and you can't prostrate because there's no place
to prostrate,
then you're gonna just, you know, do your
ruku
by
Like, if you're seated, you're gonna put your
hands on your knees and bend a little.
Then for such that, you're gonna go down
a little bit more. And then when you're
in your kneeling position, you're gonna have your
hands rested on your knees still seated. Do
you get what I mean? But then the
second rakal, you stand up again. Do you
know?
Does that make sense? And you can find
places
in the plane
and some airlines have like prayer areas.
Some places you just talk I fly all
the time.
There's like some planes I fly on
that there's no room for anything, you know.
It's like literally
seats and seats and the aisle way is
this small
and there's there's nothing, you can't do anything.
You still gotta pray your prayer and it's
time when it's there. And you do it
to the best of your ability.
And there's other planes where there's a lot
more room,
and, you know, you wanna just still fundamentally
try your best. Tell the attendant what you're
doing so that no one is, like, kinda,
like, what is happening here right now? And
ask them if there's a place that you
can. And if they say no, that's also
totally fine. Just go back to your seat
and you do what you can do over
there. Yeah.
Yeah. Go ahead.
So if
if
if someone's on a backpacking trip and they
don't have access to
they don't have the ability to wash their
clothes. They're getting their clothes
in contact with things that aren't considered,
unclean. They can't wash their clothes. Maybe they
can wash themselves properly sometimes.
Can they still pray?
Yeah, you have to pray.
Yeah. You know, you have to still pray.
Like, any What you could do
is, like, use different substances to clean the
clothes,
like the the dirt, the dust, these kinds
of things.
Carry water with you, like, pre plan, you
know, in different ways if possible.
But you still have to pray, like, the
prayer
in the circumstance. And what is preventing you
from praying
might then require to repeat a prayer, but
the specifics of that, so that it doesn't
become complicated,
you know, we can talk about in a
in another time where I'm happy to talk
to you about it separately.
Yeah.
Go ahead and then we'll keep going.
No. Like, if you're on a flight, right?
I'm flying from New York to London,
you know,
and
I have to pray Maghrib.
Maghrib is prayed
at the time
it comes in while I'm on the plane.
Not like, at the time it comes in
at New York
or at the time it comes in at
London, like, in real time when I'm in
the plane,
I pray those prayers and then you're done.
So if you prayed, like, we could pray
fajr when we're leaving Saudi Arabia,
and then on our layover, we prayed dulhur,
maybe somebody prayed Asar, they combined prayers.
But then you might not pray anything for
12 hours coming back to the States because
you're just in
that prayer time for the next 10, 12
hours because you're making up the hours because
you're going west,
right? The time zones are kinda
going back, you know, like California's 3 hours
behind,
behind us. You see what I mean? Yeah,
go ahead.
Say you, like, forget a prayer, should you
make it up later?
Yeah. Let's talk about that when we talk
about making up prayers. Yeah.
You should plan before you leave
and just know what the flight pattern is.
And we're gonna talk about the prayer times
so that you you start to learn how
to tell the time of the prayers from
the sun,
which isn't really as hard as one might
assume that it is. Right?
It's everything in our religion
that everyone is entitled to access
is purposely, like, very easy.
So none of it's supposed to be unnecessarily
complicated, right? Like some of many of you
are converts, some of you are thinking about
Islam.
To become Muslim, you just say the Shahadah.
That's it.
There's no prerequisite course of study.
It's not about so and so validated your
Islam or this or that, whatever.
You only say the Shahadah because anybody can
be Muslim if they want to be, regardless
of their culture, their race, their class, their
ethnicity.
It's purposefully a very simple process
because anybody can do it if they want
to. If it was very complicated, it would
pose undue hardship on people because we're so
diverse, right? So the ability to determine,
but also the leeway that you have when
you're making these determinations,
is things that we're going to talk about
in a bit. Right? Like when we talk
about facing the Qibla, the Kaaba, right? You
could tell that
from the sun
but it's very different if you're standing in
front of the Kaaba or you're at a
masjid
that is right in front of the Kaaba
and everything's oriented versus in the middle of
New York City and you're trying to figure
out the direction to pray. Like, that's where
there's kind of leeways on some of these
things and you wanna know those so that
you're not giving yourself anxiety or headaches on
things. Let's just continue and then we'll go.
Okay. So we're gonna talk about
what you have to cover when you're in
the prayer, right? So before you dress for
prayer or before you enter the prayer, you
have to be dressed in the clothes
that you are going to be wearing through
the duration of the prayer.
For men,
what is called the aura,
right, which gets translated
as like
nakedness, but it's not really like a good
translation if you're reading things online.
Essentially, like the parts of your body that
we're talking about this only in prayer,
right? So this word
can exist in different settings too. What has
to be covered in front of people who
are, you know, certain relatives of yours? People
who are of the same gender background as
yours? What has to be covered in front
of people who are not your relatives. People
you could essentially be married to potentially.
These kinds of things, right? They all have
like different kind
of nuances to it. So we're only talking
about this in the course of prayer. Does
that make sense? In your salah,
this is what has to be covered for
a man and a woman
as a condition for the prayer. So for
men,
this is
from below your navel
to below your knee, including the knee.
And for women, it's everything
in the Hanafi school except your face, your
hands, and your feet.
So, what constitutes
now
an understanding
of the covering of it,
like loose clothing,
things that are not transparent,
they're not, like, see through,
and things that are going to remain covering
you throughout the course of the prayer, right?
This happens with a lot of men, for
example,
where
we're dressed in clothes
that when you bend over,
they weren't made for you to bend over
like that. Right? And
I like lined up people in prayer throughout
Ramadan
and there's a lot of guys who I
was seeing things I did not want to
see, man. You know what I mean? But
from the standpoint of this,
that then breaks the validity of your prayer.
And the mechanics of these are not things
to undermine. What you're gonna see is a
common thread
through a lot of what our ritual is
based on, is the cultivation
of just awareness and consciousness.
You're conscious of, are you in the state
of will do or not? Is my body
free of any like impurities or not? Is
the place that I'm praying in clean or
not? Right? The mechanics in and of themselves,
they're giving you wakefulness before you come to
the prayer. So you're not just in a
place where it's I'm in a daze and
I'm just gonna go up and down and
up and down. The way the hadith says,
to not pray like you're a rooster just
pecking at the ground. Do you know? But
you're in a place where there's consciousness
as you're going through this and every one
of these things
has a sense of consciousness to it. I
got to think about this and not undermine
the mechanics,
but recognize them as something that's important.
In the Hanafi school,
if a quarter
if more than a quarter of a limb,
a quarter or more,
gets exposed,
then that breaks the validity of the prayer.
Does that make sense?
In general, of certain limbs.
Of the areas that essentially
are your private parts,
front and back, if those get exposed
by like a really small amount, the size
of a dirham they say, then that
also invalidates the prayer. The prayer doesn't count.
But other limbs
which are going to be different for men
and women because what needs to be covered
at a minimum is different for men and
women.
And we'll run through a list of what
those things are. But if, for example,
a quarter
now for like, for the women,
like, because you're covered
other than your hands, your face, and your
feet.
So when somebody says to you like your
hair is considered to be a part of
this, your limbs,
right? So when some sisters have like some
hair sticking out, it's not a quarter of
that limb. Do you get what I mean?
So that doesn't invalidate
the prayer in that sense. Does that make
sense?
But what happens now is if more than
one limb
is exposed.
You have
people
who
are going to have, like, a part of
their wrist is exposed or their arm
or their ankle, or their neck, or these
things. The sum total of which,
if it exceeds a quarter
of what is the shortest limb, which for
most people generally is the wrist to the
forearm,
that thing. If the sum total of that
is exceeding a quarter,
then that
constitutes
a breaking of the prayer.
Right? It's not
what needs to be covered
of the clothes. Does that make sense?
Yeah? Are we sure?
Yeah. So conceptually, what you want to think
about, right? And this is not applicable
like in a place to just any one
particular gender is for both people. And more
often than not, Right? The people who do
not dress the way you need to dress
in prayer are guys.
Like, they fundamentally don't
and it's it's very serious
because
if your backside is popping out of your
pants, you're breaking your prayer at that point
in time. Right? So, just get wear belt.
Right? Get a t shirt and tuck it
into your pants, you know. But the clothes
have to be loose.
They have to be things that are also
kind of mindful of like, I'm in a
state of prayer. We don't want to like
limit this to conversations
that become devoid now of like cultural understandings.
This is why we read Islam and the
Cultural Imperative some weeks ago. If you didn't
read it, you should read it. Doctor. Omar
Farooq Abdullah, you can Google it online. It'll
come up in a PDF. You don't abandon
your culture to become Muslim,
right? Islam is not about committing a cultural
apostasy.
So wear like all the things that you
want to wear and be in those things.
We're talking about in the state of prayer,
this isn't about, I think, I feel, I
want, so and so said this or that.
But fundamentally,
the exercise has mechanics to it. And so,
if you're in a place
where a quarter of what are these other
limbs outside of what constitutes
the kind of front and back side of
our private areas.
If those things are exposed
a quarter or more,
then that creates a problem.
It invalidates the prayer. Does that make sense?
And the sum total of multiple parts exceeding
that,
also then
then becomes an invalidator of the prayer. So
why we want to go back to
just what
you're wearing in point number 2?
Like, just have an outfit that is your
prayer outfit. Do you know what I mean?
And be in a place where you're taking
it with consideration
as best as you can. So when you're
getting to a place, you're trying your best,
like, you want to be mindful
of it as you're readying yourself for the
prayer
and allowing for yourself to say, like, this
is a part of it. You know what
I mean? This is something that goes into
it, right? In the Hanafi school, you might
hear some people say, well, for a woman
there's some exceptions made in the forearms.
Right? Because of what we said before,
certain tasks, certain jobs
would require people to be engaged in such
a way where their forearms would be exposed
in some capacity. That's fine even if you
take that opinion, but in understanding everything else
that goes into
what this constitutes,
I just wanna be mindful of the time.
And when I get through the other things
really quickly So if we understand this point
conceptually,
the next week, I can tell you, like,
what the breakdown is of the list of
what each limb is,
so that you just have that. But you
can also, like, Google,
like, you know, limbs
in prayer, like, aura,
like what limbs need to be covered in
prayer. You'll get a list of what those
things are.
But just so we don't go too much
over time,
why don't we just go through these other
things.
Number 5, the condition is that the prayer
time must have entered and you have to
have surety that the prayer time is on
you.
Right? So you have all these apps that
tell you when the prayer times start and
finish.
The way the prayers function
for us are based off of a cyclical
pattern of the sun. So if this is
the horizon,
essentially,
there's so much that goes into
this religion
that builds like an elemental relationship. Right? Wudu
is with water.
Right? The Qibla, you can tell from the
sun. The prayer times with the sun and
the stars and the the night and the
moon and whatever else. The start and end
of months through the moon, you know. You're
not supposed to be just like stuck staring
at a device. You're supposed to like engage
the world around you and build a relationship
with it. Do you know what I mean?
So when you are in a place
where you're trying to figure out the prayer
times,
you have these apps. You have all kinds
of websites.
They tell you these things.
Don't look at them only when you're trying
to pray that prayer, but preemptively.
Like understand,
okay, this is when Fajr is starting. This
is when Duhr is starting. This is when
Asr is starting. This is when Maghrib is
starting. It's when Isha is starting. There's a
hadith where the prophet is asked what is
the best of actions
and he gives different answers to these questions
in different narrations.
But in one narration, he says,
prayer in its time.
And what's meant by that is not that
you pray it right in the minute that
it comes in, but in the window of
time that you have to pray it. So
if we look at Fajr,
what's happening is that the sun is moving
in its own movement cycle. Right? And if
this is the horizon,
when the Sun gets to
different
degree marks,
and you'll find different places.
I'm not trying to make it complicated, but
you're gonna meet people
in the United States who do all of
these things. You just wanna be aware of
it. You go to different mosques and they're
gonna be giving you sometimes different start and
end times to prayers. What they're doing it
is based off of degree markings. So
18 degrees, 15 degrees, and 12 degrees.
What the Quran says is that Fajr comes
in
at, like, true dawn,
not a false dawn.
That there's still something that looks like it's
light visible above the horizon,
but a true dawn when it's the actual
light from the sun that's coming up.
At 18 degrees,
you have an indication
of some type of light that is coming
in.
There's many people
who would tell you just out of caution,
you want to consider this to be the
start time of fudging.
Then a lot more people are adopting,
like, these degree marks of 15
degrees,
But what's happening essentially
as this is coming,
the sun is rising
and as it rises,
you're going to see different colors coming into
the horizon.
Right? So when the sun is at the
18 degree mark,
that's when that sense of like whiteness starts
to come. Do you know? And the sky
looks a little bit blue in that
kinda frame. Right? And when you're on a
plane, it's really amazing because if you're flying
west from here, this way is not west,
that way is west. If you're flying west
from here, right, you can be in, like,
a perpetual
sunrise
for a long time
and you can see all of these magnificent
colors as you're, like, above the clouds. It's
really, really beautiful
to to witness.
But Fudger is gonna be in a place
where
the time for Fudger
is going to be not when the sun
is at any of these degree marks below
the horizon,
but when the light
from the sun being in these positions
is visible above the horizon.
And when a portion of the sun now
comes above the horizon,
you can't pray in that window,
that's when the time of fudger stops.
And it's going to go until,
and then at that point, you can't pray
until the sun is completely above the horizon.
So, say you slept through Fudger,
right, which nobody's gonna do, right, but say
you slept through Fudger
and you woke up
like right at this point.
One of the times that it's prohibited to
pray
is when a portion of the sun
is above the horizon. Partially,
you have to wait until the sun is
fully above the horizon
in order to pray again. Does that make
sense?
So, the prayer time coming in, this is
what those prayer times will be. Right? So,
a lot of you when you were fasting
in Ramadan,
you weren't starting your fast
based off of this timing.
You are starting your fast based off of
this timing.
But there's some messages you could have gone
to
where they prayed Fudger
like 30 minutes before you were praying Fudger
and if you're like, what just happened here?
It's because they're going by an 18 degree
mark rather than a 15 degree mark. Does
that make sense?
Yeah. Okay. So that's Fajr.
The second prayer is called Dhuhr
and what happens with Dhuhr
is when the sun
is at its zenith
And the only part of the world where
like the sun is going to be directly
above you when it's at its high point
at noon is if you're living on the
equator.
Right? So for the rest of us, we
don't live in the equator. Right? We live
north of the equator. If you go back
to like 6th grade social studies or whatever
class, they taught you about the hemispheres
and
like quadrants of this and that, whatever, you
know. I don't know if you guys do
this in your school or not, if you
know what grade it is because I don't
remember what grade it's in.
I'm an English teacher, Ron. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Amazing. Yeah. Our children's future is very true.
So, what's happening here, when the sun is
at its zenith,
you're going to have
a period
that is about 5 minutes
before and after,
it's called the Zawal time.
This is another time where there's no prayer.
The prayer for Lohr starts
after
this
the sun starts to descend from its zenith.
And so to just be cautious,
5 to 10 minutes
is a window. 5 before, 5 after, maybe
like 6, you just don't pray in that.
So when you're in your prayer time app
or on the websites,
it's gonna give you the time that you
can start to pray. Like, we have people
that show up at Jummah here, for example,
and they walk in and they just start
praying something.
And I have to remind them, like, the
time for Duhr right now
is later than what it was before daylight
savings time. So that prayer, if you're praying
in that time, it's not a time where
the prayer count. Like, you can't pray in
that time. Does that make sense?
So you have now from dohr time
till when Asr comes in, the 3rd prayer
of the day. In the Hanafi school, there's
two opinions on this. That Asr starts
when your shadow is 1 times its length
or your shadow is 2 times its length,
right? So why are these things relevant?
Because here, when you wanna know Fudger starts,
like look at the color of the sky
and see what's going on there and you'll
be able to tell if Fudger's in.
For Zohar,
you wanna look at your shadow.
Right? If we lived in a place where
the sun was directly above us,
then at its zenith,
you'd have no shadow.
Does that make sense?
Yeah. Right now, because we don't. Right? We
live north of the equator.
There's going to be like a little shadow
because the sun is not directly above us.
The sun is gonna be just slightly,
like, angled in a way,
but you're gonna know, like, that's when the
earth comes in. So you're stuck in the
wilderness, you don't have cell phone service,
but what do I do? Right? Well, you
just start to engage
in a deeper relationship with the world that's
around you and you pay attention
to the signs that are there.
So you're looking at it and it's okay,
like, as my shadow now starts to increase,
as the sun is going down,
When Asar comes in, there's 2 opinions in
the Hanafi School,
when your shadow is one time its length
or twice the size of its length. It's
the mid afternoon,
right? So here's where you have Asr.
You can pray the her
anytime in this window.
You have that whole
chunk of time to pray duhr
and then Asir goes until
the time of Maghrib which is at sunset
so you have that whole time to pray
Maghrib
and then Isha
is when the sky is dark enough, you
know, it's nighttime, stars. You know what I
mean? All of these things are in, like,
your
your phones. You have computers in your pockets,
you know? But don't engage it mindlessly because
as an apparatus,
it's quite often something we just scroll through.
So if you get to a place when
you wake up tomorrow and you're like, every
day I have to check the time of
prayer,
Why is it hard for me to remember
when it's only a minute different from the
day before?
Right?
So if you're engaging the apparatus in that
way,
then you're already removing a part of developing
the consciousness
that comes from the act because you're a
little bit more present in it. So, like,
sit and be still. So you're not just
looking at it or the app, like, has
the athon go off and you don't even
know what the time of day is, but
you, like, take a breath.
Right? We're gonna talk about the call to
prayer and what happens when it's made and
what we do in relation to it. But
all of it's about, like, centering yourself
and getting to a place where the prayer
isn't meant to create hecticness,
it's meant to create ease. You know what
I mean?
And these are things when you start to
get them down,
they are pretty easy,
to just start to maneuver. So you wanna
be kind to yourself. Right? If you've
never looked at the sun before
and understood, like, its relation to you in
that way, it's it's gonna take time to
adapt to get to that place. Does that
make sense? Any questions on the prayer time
having must being entered?
Just when
the transition between, Asir and Maghrib, that's also
forbidden time. Right? After you pray Asir,
you've prayed Asir,
like you don't pray anything
until Maghrib comes in. Yeah, Zukla. But also
when the sun is,
is descending, setting. Unless you haven't prayed Asr.
Mhmm. Oh, okay. Right? If you didn't pray
Asr, you gotta pray Asr.
But if you prayed Asir, you're not gonna
pray again
until the time of Maghrib is coming, which
still includes what you're saying, that descending time.
Gotcha. Yeah.
You pray out there, there's no prayer with
a prostration. If there's a janaza, a funeral
prayer, which we'll talk about in a few
weeks, you could pray that. But, he wouldn't
pray, like, extra prayers at that point.
Yeah.
You had a question? Yeah. Is there, like,
an app that you recommend?
Yeah. There you go to website, islamicfinder.com,
it'll tell you, like, with your location
on,
but you'd have to keep your location on
for it to be accurate. Do you know?
And it'll just give you the Windows a
time, and you could use that. I would
use that. Some of these apps,
like, were selling data
and privacy information, so just be mindful of
that. There's one called Muslim Pro that was,
like, very popular,
and it,
came out that they were selling
people's
data to government.
So don't use that one.
Yeah. Right?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, delete that one. There you
go. Thanks. Yeah.
So like in this lane, is there a
way to go where the Qibla is?
We're gonna talk about the Qibla next.
Face and the Qibla.
Does anybody else have questions? Praying Yeah.
Is the Maghrib Maghrib time violent until Asia
or is there a shock to remember that?
Yeah. I mean, there's a couple of different
opinions on that, but you should try to
pray Maghrib,
you know, within,
like, the earlier part of Maghrib. Yeah.
Yeah. And there's a question about the adams.
We can get to it later, but my
question is if you're in a space like
this or a masjid where someone will probably
make the adhan if there's people here, can
you still make your sunnah
prayers when the time comes in if the
sun has been cold?
Yeah. What would happen also is that people
would pray their sun is at home. Right.
Right? And there was a lot of reasons
for that. You know?
That whole notion that there's not, like, a
high bar of entry to
Islam, it's not that you're discouraged to pray
in a prayer room, but
the idea also isn't that you would set
a standard that is,
this is the norm, necessarily, you know. So
there's gonna be some people who they're doing
the bare minimum,
and we don't
ours is not like a religion that's let's
be in competition with each other,
but to give people this idea also that,
like,
you're not a bad person if you are
where you are. Do you know what I
mean? And you're not in competition with somebody
else, and so you'd pray you'd see people
pray their sinus at home. If you're not
going home, pray your sinus here. Right? And
we have a nice community on the left
for the most part. Okay? Yeah.
So I thought the whole idea was to
create your smile, like, when the time comes,
like, don't delay
it. Like, if there's Delay it means don't
push it after the window.
So So I know I think, like, after
the moment, like, this like a time like,
when it's not for you
have You can pray Asir you can pray
Zohran anytime in that window.
And people who use words, right, and you
want to be careful too when you're telling
people about things, when you use words like
better or worse,
they're taking it as obligatory and haram when
that's not what it means.
Do you know? So if you have the
capacity
to do certain things, like, yeah, you can
go pray in the masjid 5 times a
day, go pray in the masjid 5 times
a day. Right? Can everybody play in the
masjid 5 times a day? No. Is it
somebody says, it's better for you to pray
in the Masjid 5 times a day, like,
maybe you can make that statement. Right? But
the person hearing it might be in a
place where they're, like, I have to, no
matter what, do this, you know. And it
ruins people's lives because we're not conscious of
how our words
are actually being heard when we're saying to
somebody, this is better, or I heard that's
better, or this is better.
Better doesn't mean that it's an obligation
or it's worse doesn't mean it's a prohibition.
Do you do you get what I mean?
Does that make sense? So you can pray
in the window of time, you know, and
for people who are working, people who are
in school, those are, like, very important things
to know. Do you get what I mean?
Yeah. Okay. Facing the gible
is a condition also. So you're gonna face
towards the Kaaba. You're gonna face towards Mecca.
In the Hanafi school,
you have
the
leeway
of not
of
of 45 degrees in each direction
after you've done your best.
Right? So it's not just, I'm gonna stand
in like a random way,
but for example, like a lot of us
have apps on our phone. If you don't
have certain things turned on on your phone
or your phone also is using an app
that gets thrown off by, like, certain things,
like, there's people that come in here all
the time and they turn on their phones.
They're like, hey, the cable is that way.
I'm like, no, man. It's not. They're like,
no, it is. I'm like, it can fundamentally
cannot be. Right? Like, look at where the
sun sets and look at where the sun
rises. Right? The sun,
like, what part what direction does the sun
set in?
Yeah. And what's that what direction does it
rise in?
East. Right? We know this. Do you know
what I mean? So if you just pay
attention to the sun and you see where
it's setting over there and it looks beautiful,
you see where it's rising over there. The
sun sets over there in the west, right,
and west is that way, then that means
east is this way
and north is this way,
then Northeast cannot be this way, right?
Do you see what I'm saying? And when
people are like, but the phone says that
it's that way. You're like,
well, the sun is right there and it
sets in the west. Right?
So, you want to just build that relationship
elementally
again
because it can be a check, for example,
because sometimes people's phones are off because of,
like, magnetization
of things. Sometimes if you're wary of, like,
turning on your location
or Bluetooth is necessary for certain apps, it
throws things off substantially.
But you want to try your best. So
trying your best means what? Like, talk to
people who are of the community you go
to. They're praying
and they probably know what they're doing. You
know? So you talk to them and say,
hey. Like, I'm
in the middle of some place I've never
been before, and we're not in a prayer
space. We're praying outside.
Like,
how do you pray in your hometown? What's
the direction? It's cloudy. I can't see the
sun. They'll be able to give you insight.
You see what I mean? But you're doing
your due diligence. You're not just, like, gonna
do eeny meeny miny moe and feel like,
well, that's just the way that that I
did it.
Google has,
online,
what they call their Kibla finder, and they
are pretty accurate. Like, they do theirs is
pretty good, and it's Google, so they're also
just, like, a beast at all things technologically.
So it's something you'd want to maybe, like,
kinda use if you're looking for an app.
So what happens is, if you're in Mecca
and here's the Kaaba in front of you,
regardless of where it is you're praying around
it, you're gonna know what direction to pray
in.
In. Fun fact, if you're praying inside the
Kaaba, then you can face wherever you want
to. You don't have to face any particular
direction. So if one day you go and
somebody lets you pray inside the Kaaba,
just pick and choose anything.
But we're all facing the direction of the
Kaaba when we pray. So what happens in
the Hadafi school is that when this is
in your line of sight,
there's no excuse.
Like, this has to be
what you face towards. Right? It's right in
front of you. And when you leave from
the masjid how many of you have ever
been to Mecca before?
Yeah. Great. So when you leave from the
masjid, what happens is
the
area around the masjid,
there's tiles
that are also directionally facing the Kaaba. So
you know just based off of that. Just
like you could go into a prayer room
and in ours, like, these lines face towards
the direction
of the Kaaba.
So what happens
when you don't have the Kaaba in plain
sight,
You are
given a leeway in the Hanafi school after
you've tried your best.
Where you've gone through these steps and now
we're over here in New York
and we are trying to face the Kaaba,
you have a leeway of 45 degrees
in either direction.
After you've tried your best to figure out
the direction of the Kaaba. Does that make
sense? So it's a 90 degree
angle,
but 45
degrees off in either direction.
If you find out after you did all
of those things and you completed the prayer
that you weren't praying in the right direction,
you don't have to repeat that prayer, the
prayer still counts.
Because you went through your due diligence,
but you gotta
be oriented towards the Kaaba, towards Mecca.
And then the last condition
is that you have to have an intention,
for the prayer. Right, because the intention is
made
prior to the prayer. It's not made when
you're in the prayer itself. This is an
intention that's made in the heart.
It can be verbalized. Some spaces you go
to, they might, like, express this
outwardly in some way,
but this is something you're saying within yourself.
You're intending to pray the prayer and when
you're intending the prayer, you're intending like the
specific of the prayer.
So,
for example, the only difference, and we'll talk
about this in the coming weeks, at Fajr
time, there's 2 recommended units of prayer, 2
sunnah prayers and 2 obligatory
units of prayer, 2 fard prayers.
The only difference in those 2
units from one another
is the intention that you make when you
make them. So in one, you're gonna make
an intention
of 2 cycles of prayer, 2 rakas of
prayer that are sunnah for fajr and in
the other you're gonna make 2
units that are fard and they're prayed exactly
the same way. Does that make sense? So
that intention
is something
that is important
And, those are then the conditions
of the prayer
outside of the prayer.
Right?
These seven things are what's gonna be
necessary
for one who is entering into a state
of prayer. Does that make sense? Okay.
I'm sorry that took a lot longer than
I thought it would. I didn't I don't
know
if, like, I anticipated mugger being shorter than
it was, so I apologize for that. I
hope it wasn't too exhausting or tiring. If
you guys wanna sit on it a bit
and then come with other questions that you
might have next week,
but just build a relationship with these things,
right, Especially, those of you who are new
to it, you're trying to understand
how it is.
Right? It's not something
that you just, on day 1, are going
to have perfection
with nor even perhaps maybe on day a1000.
You want to just try your best with
them. But you want to
be aware of what they are in detail
so that as the mechanics are things you
become accustomed to, like any exercise,
this is spiritual exercise.
You want to be able to adapt to
it as best as you can
by having a familiarity
and then building a relationship with each so
that it's elevating
the inward state of the prayer as much
as it can. Yeah?
Okay. So why don't we take a pause
here?
Let me see what time the show starts.
So it's just gonna come in in, like,
15 minutes.
If people,
wanna stick around for that,
we can pray together.
If you need to head out, feel free.
So next week, what we'll start to do
is talk about the actual mechanics of the
prayer. So you remember how when we talked
about wudu, we talked about what was obligatory
in the wudu and what were recommended parts
to the wudu, right. So, for example, your
mouth and your nose, the number
of
times, the order, these are all recommended things,
outside of the other things that are just
obligatory. And we looked at the verse that
named these things. Right? So we wanna know
what are the obligations.
You wanna know what are kind of the
necessary and what are recommended because there might
be times when you have like a short
window of time to pray, right, and you
have to complete the prayer.
You don't want to do it in a
way where you're adding stress because you're going
through every single part because you don't know
the distinct thing parts to it. Or like
you're new to Islam, you know, you're just
getting familiar with it. You don't wanna create
burden for yourself thinking that somehow you're gonna
know an entirely new language
as soon as you say the shahada.
So as you're building a relationship with it,
you're building a relationship with the words, and
what is obligatory
is going to be a first step, and
then what is kinda beyond that is a
second step. Do you do you get what
I mean? Does that make sense? So we're
gonna get into that next week, and then
we'll just keep going from there. Alright. Sound
like, well, we'll see everyone next week in
the show. Thank you.