Khalid Latif – Imam Nawawis 40 Hadith for Modern Times #01
AI: Summary ©
The speakers discuss the importance of exegotiation and seeking to be informed by the author in understanding hadiths and political statements. They emphasize the importance of deep ethics and avoiding negative consequences of actions in learning hadiths and writing. They also discuss the importance of understanding the concept of consciousness and the importance of understanding actions and deeds in our understanding of our relationship with Islam. They stress the need to focus on actions rather than regretting them and bring consciousness to our actions. They also mention a book called 40 Hadith collections and suggest bringing books with them.
AI: Summary ©
So we're gonna be starting
with a text today.
It's called the
Arba'een of Imam Noe, the 40 hadith of
Imam Noe,
Some of you've likely heard some of the
hadith that we're gonna be looking at in
this text. It's actually 42 hadith.
And the shift in topic
from the book of assistance
was so that we're entering into
new kind of semester here,
and kinda give people exposure to some different
things.
We'll be able to go through it in
its entirety
between now
and probably the end of Ramadan.
Trying to do a deep dive into each
hadith,
extrapolate meaning from it, use it also as
an opportunity to learn about some of the
people that are involved in the hadith itself,
like the narrators, the transmitters of the hadith,
and to talk about what goes into
just understanding hadith
classification,
methodology,
criticism,
through some of this at a basic level.
Right? So,
you know, what's the difference between a hadith
that is Sahih
and Hassan?
What does it mean when we talk about
it's not the chain of transmitters and something
is
meaning it's got
so many different chains of transmissions with so
many people reporting it every level of the
chain
that
there's no way that people could have falsified
that altogether.
Or the hadith that we're gonna look at
today,
is a hadith that's called, being gharib in
its nature. Then in the first
few eras
of transmission, the first few,
kind of levels of transmission,
There's just one person narrating it from 1
person
and then another person until it's narrated by
a lot more people.
We won't get into that today, but just
to give you an idea as to what
kind of the nature of it's gonna be.
We're gonna talk about who Imam Nawi is,
and what makes him so unique as a
person.
His actual name is Yahya,
and
he is from a place called Anoa,
that is near Syria,
but was known as being an individual
who was deeply committed to knowledge.
So there's
kinda instances where he was seen as a
young boy, 9, 10 years of age,
and
individuals who were known
leaders and scholars of that time
would
see him,
and he wouldn't be playing with other kids.
And kids would say to him to come
and play with us,
And he basically would say, I just wanna
be focused on what I'm focused on. You
know, they saw something unique within him. As
he got older, for example,
he took
not just kind of a pursuit of education,
so he said, if you averaged out everything
that he did over the course of his
young life, He passes away at 45.
He's writing about 40 pages a day
over the course of his existence.
You know, not reading but writing. Right? He
would be studying for 12 hours a day.
He was somebody who spoke out against
inequity and injustice.
So it was very well known
that aside from just his deep knowledge of
Islam
and principles of law and practice,
as well as his aestheticism
and spirituality,
they said a third bucket that he was
just very well known for was commanding to
good and forbidding to wrong. Not in the
way that you walk into a space and
somebody says, why are you dressed like this
or not dressed like this And they're annoying,
but he would very much so
speak against the rulers
of the Mamluk dynasty,
the kings of that time,
telling them that the ways that they were
engaging their policies,
these were things that were deeply problematic,
and some of them would actually listen to
what he was saying. Right? One of the
rulers,
follows his guidance and advice a couple of
times, and when asked why are you taking
his advice? Why don't you just throw him
in prison?
They would say that whenever he would speak
to me and give me the admonition,
and I would think about what it was
that he was telling me, I would just
get a unique type of fear in my
heart. Right? That was very impactful.
An explanation
of why, for example, he passes away at
a young age
is because his sense of ethics and morals
are so deep that he refuses to eat
food that is grown and harvested
from the area that he lives in in
Syria
because he believes that the land has been
unjustly usurped
by all of the the the rulers at
that time. And so his father would send
him dried fruits to eat. That was his
diet.
So an explanation
of why he passes at such a young
age, for example,
is that his sense of ethic is so
profound
that he doesn't want to be involved in
oppression against anybody.
And so he refuses to eat from what
he understands to be
unjustly acquired land
by those who are in the elite and
the authority.
Do you get what I'm saying? And why
we want to do a deep dive over
the course of our gatherings together
about who he is is because you wanna
be informed
by the authors,
the orators, the speakers
of the text that you engage. So you
can also understand the context in which they're
working in, and what it is that's kind
of driving and motivating them. Right? It's very
easy these days to just copy and paste
people's words
and then apply isegetical
analysis to it. Right? Isegetical meaning what? Like,
we have a science of tafsir in our
tradition.
It's Quranic exegesis. You're taking meaning from the
text. What many people do these days is
they formulate an argument, and then they pick
verses and hadith to prove the argument,
and that's not exegetical, it's esegetical.
You could turn a book into anything you
want to, right? So somebody
could turn Malcolm X and Ramallah's words into
things that are deeply against what he intended
them to be, right? People can take from
luminaries prophetic voices from all walks of life
and turn their words against them and populations
buy into it because they don't know anything
about the person that's actually
kinda
speaking. Do you know? So Imam Nawi
was somebody who had a deep knowledge
of Islam as a religion, but it also
manifested in such a way
where he was not trying to play games
with anybody.
He really wanted to make sure that people
were treated right. He didn't want to benefit
from the wrong that other people did
even if it was having adverse effects on
who he was and the way that he
lived his life. He'd rather eat dried fruits
than eat from the fresh fruits and vegetables
of land that he understood
was taken unjustly from those whose landed actually
was. Does that make sense? Right? And you
wanna contextualize
this and what that means, you know. I
went to New Mexico
a few weeks ago and one of the
things that I did when I was there
outside of retreat I was leading, I visited
like local,
indigenous community.
They have 19 what they call Pueblos there.
These are areas that have been given back
to indigenous populations
who were the survivors of genocidal violence that
people who colonized and settled in this land
under what they believed was their god given
right, Right? Principle of manifest destiny. If you
go back to, like, your 7th grade American
history,
10th grade American history, if you take AP
American history in this country, you know, they
felt that they were divinely entitled to do
what it was that they were doing, and
they were just killing people in the process.
Do you know?
And there are people
who are still in this place where generations
of their families
have been
destroyed
at this university and many universities.
You don't see a lot of people who
are true native
citizens
of the land, true indigenous
demographics,
and there's reasons for that. Right? But why
do we wanna think about it? Right? Well,
for example, there's a verse in
the
Quran
that
says,
and,
you
know, you're gonna keep your your clothing
pure, and there's a lot of different explanations
given of this verse,
but one of the explanations is that, like,
the supply chain
of your clothing has to also be good.
That if that shirt you're wearing
was produced in a sweatshop,
if the food that you're eating necessitates
mass labor,
child labor,
oppressive, like, wages,
you know, all these kinds of things,
you are impacted by this. Right? And I'm
now we both from the standpoint
of a political statement is saying, I'm not
gonna take from the oppressor, but also from
a spiritual statement. He doesn't wanna feed his
body with what is
a
doubtful
haram
source. Do you do you get what I
mean? That's what he's thinking. That's whose book,
like, we're looking at right now. The 40
Hadith of Imam Nawi. We'll go a little
bit more deeper into
his biography,
a little bit more
into, you know, the methodology of how he
engages
in the collection of these hadith, you know,
what's really kind of compelling him,
you know, to put these and not other
ones,
over the course of, you know, the coming
weeks.
What we're gonna do today is just get
right into the first hadith. So if you
wanna open up your phones
and just pull out,
on you know, you can Google 40 Hadith
Imam Nawawi. Right? Nawawi is spelled n a
w w a w I.
And we're gonna look at the first one
today and then kinda go through over the
course of the coming months,
like, a little bit of a deep dive
into as many as we can
by the holiday time in the winter.
You wanna try to, like, memorize some of
these if you haven't also
or portions of them, whether you speak Arabic
or not. Because the whole idea is to
extrapolate meaning to then actualize it. Right? To
take it as principle and to say, how
are we gonna, like, act upon some of
these words? You know, what are we taking
from it? Oh, man.
You okay? Yeah. Okay. You sure? Yeah. What's
that? Yeah. Is anybody else really, really drenched
right now?
Yeah. I'm so sorry. Thank you for coming
out in the heavy rain, guys.
I wish we had a bunch of clothes
to give to you.
We don't, but but please don't,
let yourself get sick. So anything that we
could do to help, let us know.
So if you wanna just pull up,
just Google,
40 Hadith,
it'll pop up, and we're just gonna look
at the first one today,
and start to go into it, and then
talk about some of those things.
Terminology
is relevant to,
like, the chain of transmitters,
etcetera. But the whole idea is for us
to, like,
take and then act upon it. You know,
so some of it's gonna be very, like,
practical,
like,
some of it's gonna be more kinda,
you know, spiritual.
There's gonna be different things, but these are
really important for the hadith collection because it
creates, like, a
foundation that you can build upon. It really
helped to also understand, like, who is the
prophet Muhammad sallallahu alaihi wa sallam? What role
does he play in our individual life?
How do we, like, not just
know he's a prophet, but actually, like, what
does it mean to follow a prophet, to
take teachings from the
prophet? Does does this make sense? Yeah. So
if you wanna pull it up,
the first hadith
is called the hadith of intentions.
And this particular hadith
is found in
a ton of different hadith books,
usually as the first hadith.
Does anybody wanna read it?
Can I get by a show of hands
and
I'm assuming that most people are gonna say
that they don't, which is fine? But how
many people here understand
Arabic?
Great.
And how many people can, like, read it
fluidly?
Amazing. Okay.
So,
if we go and pull up the hadith,
some of your
sites that you're pulling up are gonna only
have it in English,
some will have it in the Arabic and
the English. Can somebody read the Arabic who
is comfortable reading the Arabic,
and, then we'll have someone read the English.
Oh, you just raised your hands. Yeah. Go
ahead.
Okay. Someone read the English? Anybody
Anybody else who has it pulled up in
front of them? Do you guys wanna move
in this way? Just as people come in
to pray.
They'll have some room.
Scooted in over here. Yeah.
Yeah. Go for it.
Great. So right off the bat, what we're
looking at here, and some of you will
know this, but it's important to review. Right?
Part of the etiquette
of
our learning,
is revision. Right? And you keep going back
to things as you get older so that
it just means something a little bit differently.
A hadith
is
something very particular.
What is like the technical definition of the
word hadith? If someone says the word hadith,
what are we talking about?
The prophet's words. The prophet's words. The prophet's
words. What else?
The belief means, like, someone said something.
Yes. But in the technical sense of the
hadith,
like, the words, is it more than words?
Actions.
Actions.
Yeah. Anything else?
Yeah. Kind of. Right? So, when we're talking
about a Hadith, a Hadith is going to
refer to the actions, the sayings,
and the tacit approval of the prophet Muhammad
So if he did something, he said to
do something, or he saw you do something,
it didn't say don't do that, that all
will fall under this. And it's gonna have
2 parts to it. It's gonna be made
up of something called ISNAD.
This is a chain of transmitters
and the second part is called the metin.
That's the text.
So in what we just read
where it says,
I know Amr ibn Al Khattab
that that's like the endpoint of the chain
of transmission. When we look at this hadith,
we're gonna show you what like a it's
not
kind of tree looks like, you know. And
it's gonna go through levels
that start in more proximity
to,
like, our generation.
Right? So so and so heard from so
and so, heard from so and so, heard
from so and so, heard from so and
so, heard from the prophet
This is like a big deal
within
our religious tradition. It's not.
And it's very thoroughly
analyzed, broken down.
There's a lot that goes into it. There's
a book by Jonathan Brown,
Doctor. Jonathan Brown, Jack Brown, he's a Muslim
guy. If you haven't heard of, he's a
professor at Georgetown. The Sun Hadith methodology,
It's really simple. There's another text,
by
a scholar,
named Sadiki.
I'll bring some of these next time. I
just came from Morocco,
this morning,
and there's a bunch of books that I
intended to have, but I didn't know I
was gonna go to Morocco this weekend. I
went for earthquake relief. Michelle,
really proud of our community. We raised about
$400,000
so far to assist our brothers and sisters
there. Make special dua.
Things are really difficult right now.
And, you know, it's important.
Gatherings like this are also like, Mubotic gatherings.
Right?
Make this a gathering of barakah. It's an
important time for us to make dua.
If any of you are from Morocco or
have friends from there,
if you need anything, let us know.
But,
there's a bunch of books that I wanted
to bring to give us, like, opportunity to
deepen in this conversation. We can learn about
these things. Right? And they're not, like, dense
texts.
So you can engage in them, familiarize yourself
with them, and to understand. The of this
is
the actual, like, content.
Is what we're gonna be looking at today.
How this relates to a couple of other
things.
Right? The word sunnah
is in a technical sense referring to the
authoritative example of the prophet Muhammad
You're deriving like what is sunnah from the
hadith literature,
But it's not derived
in such a way where every Hadith
becomes a basis
of
explanation for a legal ruling, where every hadith
is a basis for,
a theological principle, where every hadith is a
basis
for ethics and character and value, but there's
a bunch of different topics that you can
look around.
And over the course of the semester as
we go through it, we're gonna talk about,
like, the different
levels of authentication
of the SNAD
that then tie into, like, certain kinda parameters
of what's acceptable to become a basis
for why, you know, we might pray in
certain ways, why do other people do it
in different ways,
but just to give you that as a
background.
Okay.
So we wanna do a couple of deep
dives
into certain things. The main transmitter on this
hadith
is a man by the name of
Omar
Ibn Al Khattab.
Has
a lot of different things that we know
about him,
within normative Sunni tradition of Islam.
He is the 2nd caliph.
The prophet
spoke about him very deeply in a lot
of different ways.
There's a hadith that says for example,
that if there was a messenger after me
it would be this man, Omar.
Before Omar radhiallahuhan was a Muslim, he was
somebody who was a staunch opponent of Islam.
He was somebody in his own words that
describes a lot of the characteristics
and qualities that he had that were just
not anything
that were really praiseworthy as such,
and nobody thought there was anything good within
him. Right? He went out of his way
to be abusive, and to be hostile.
On one occasion he sees a woman by
the name of Layla, and Leila looks as
if she's going on a journey.
And I'm gonna ask, what are you doing?
And she says, you made it hard for
us to worship our God here. I'm going
someplace else where I can worship freely. And
she expects an onslaught
at the hands of this man, Umar ibn
Al Khattab, and to her astonishment, he says,
go and have peace on your journey.
She returns home and tells her husband, a
man by the name of Amir, everything that
happened. And Amir says in the midst of
her explanation of what went through that what
is it that you're really saying?
You sound as if you think
actually become Muslim.
And Leila says, why can't he become Muslim?
And says,
know this, the donkey of Amr's father will
become Muslim before he does. Nobody thought there
was anything good about this man except the
prophet Muhammad
Wa Salam. So when everybody is downplaying and
looking at him in a condescending way, fearful,
the prophet's making du'a for him.
Allah bring Izzah to Islam. And there is
a kind of strength
that's distinct from, like, physical strength, which is.
If you speak Hindi or Urdu, there's cognates,
like izza
is a certain sense of dignity and respect.
So is there is a strength
that's rooted in dignity and respect. And in
the Dua, the prophet is saying that by
the one of the 2 men who is
more beloved to you,
and
the dua is accepted as Omar. One of
the things that we learned from this is
that the prophet is making dua for 2
men who aren't Muslim,
and saying of those 2 men who are
not Muslim, the one you love more, Meaning
that Allah loved these people even when they
weren't Muslim.
Does that make sense?
There's Hadid where the prophet, for example,
is,
you know,
experiencing, like, drinking milk in dreams,
and then as it's kind of coming from
him through his hands, it's going to Umar
who's drinking it. And when he's asked to
give explanation on what this means, he's saying,
like, this is knowledge, you know, the milk
is metaphorical for knowledge. There's a bunch of
different things that we can talk about in
terms of who he is and what he
represents,
but
when we start to go through these narrations,
we're gonna do biographical
sketches of these people also, so that we
know and get familiar with them, and understand,
like, how is it that they're the ones
that are transmitting this hadith because some of
this becomes really important.
It's super easy to become reductive
in our approach to Islam, right? And then
somebody could turn something into something that makes
no sense, do you know? And then there's
importance
to, like, certain hadith for example,
alaihis salam is describing
to his companions
in a large gathering
that numerous companions are transmitting
about how we all come from like a
common starting point,
right? We are all born into our mother's
wombs.
And you can look at just the text
of it but without the context,
it's not gonna mean the same thing when
he's telling these people who lived in a
meccan society heavily stratified that, hey, all of
you have to understand
people
amongst
people amongst you, the Arab people amongst you,
the Persians amongst you, the Romans amongst you,
the stratification
based off of race and class,
not part of this religion.
So you gotta get with it that we're
all kinda in the same kinda sphere of
existence
with God at the center, not any one
of us at the center. So knowing who's
narrating it, knowing, like, what's the reasons that
this is coming up helps to deepen in
an understanding of the meaning
and where it is then that it bears
relevance
to us. Does that make sense?
Contemplation
in our tradition is not done in a
vacuum alone. But one of the ways you
want to contemplate
is to think about what does this mean
to me? How does it apply back to
me?
So what I want to do today was
just give like that generic
understanding of how we'll approach some of this
and so that you're ready for it. Right?
You wanna bring a notebook? Bring a notebook.
Write things down. You'll retain it a little
bit more. If you sit here and listen,
you might be able to hold on to
some of it. But the idea with foundational
tradition
is that there's an opportunity for us to
actually grow by learning from it, you know.
And that learning isn't gonna be just how
much can I absorb
after a full day's worth of work or
a full day sitting in dense class material
or coming in through the rain,
like, majority of it is gonna go in
one ear and out the other if you
don't have something that you're writing in? And
if the apparatus you're writing in is something
that is
typically,
you know, engaged for just kind of like
mindlessness.
Right?
Objectively speaking. You have a phone that you
just scroll through constantly.
Do you know? Like, I was a few
minutes late to a meeting earlier today on
Zoom, and the young person I I was
talking to, I said, I'm sorry. I was
getting on a little late. And she said,
I didn't even notice. I've just been scrolling
on my Instagram this whole time. Right? I
was like, oh, what are you watching? She's
like, I don't know. You know?
That's not like a sign that that's the
thing you want to take notes on. Do
you know what I mean? Especially notes about
teachings
from the best of creations.
You wanna be open to the idea of
saying how is it relevant to me and
how do I adapt it as a philosophy
and think about its application to us, which
is gonna be the crux of the conversation
for us.
This is like a part that you should
memorize. And we're gonna go through
all of these words,
which is just a handful of words
saying what does it mean. So
the first word in Arabic,
Right?
It is used to denote
exclusivity.
It's telling you that what's coming after, you
can translate this as, like, it's
only
x, y, or z. Right? And that's really
important to understand.
Exclusivity
doesn't have to be absolute.
So there's a verse in the Quran,
in the chapter called Surat Rad where
Allah
says to the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam,
you were sent only
as a warner. And the word only that's
used is this word,
But the prophet was sent for a lot
of different reasons too. Right?
That we sent you to be a mercy
to the words. Right? That he was sent
as al Bashir.
He is the bearer of glad tidings.
So the inama
doesn't have to mean necessarily
just, like, only this
and nothing else, but it still denotes a
sense of exclusivity.
Meaning that what is going to come after
this, you have to know that
this is what it is only about. Does
that make sense?
So whatever is coming next, know that there's
not like a lot of room to kinda
say, well, that's not really what's happening here.
I'm writing the English backwards. Sorry.
So
is the plural of the word.
In Arabic, there's two ways to say like
an action. This means actions.
The alif and laam in the front
is giving a sense of just
general
actions.
So general meaning like any action
can fit under this bucket.
Sitting,
looking,
staring,
right, speaking
even is considered an action
within our religious understanding.
Right? But anything
can be an action.
An amal is different from a file,
and the whole hadith is going to be
rooted in this concept.
A file is something that you can do
without presence or consciousness.
What makes an amal different is that it
actually has presence of mind to it. There's
consciousness
there.
There's a sense of
awareness
and wakefulness
to it. Right? Like right now, you're breathing.
If you weren't breathing, it would be a
problem.
You are not thinking
as a mercy from God that
every breath you took, if you could imagine
that you had to think about it again
and again and again,
All your day would be spent just now
I'm gonna breathe. Now I'm gonna breathe. Now
I'm gonna breathe. It just happens on autopilot.
You blink your eyes. You don't have to
do that with a stream of consciousness sometimes.
Right? But it just happens. There's a mercy
to this. The notion isn't that every single
act has to be something, but for the
purpose of what we're talking about,
this word in particular
is rooted now in
this idea of consciousness.
The next word that comes in, I wrote
in the corner, sorry,
is just
Gonna be in the bath.
Oh my god. It's so ugly.
Right? This is a ba. It's the same,
like, letter that we have in Bismillah,
but the word ba grammatically,
it's a word. It's a preposition.
And there's like tons of different ways you
could use this preposition.
The two primary ways it's understood in this
hadith
is that it's a ba of
accompaniment
that
the is accompanied
with the next word which is
or
it's called the
that
this is a
cause based relationship.
That
the causality
of it, causation is rooted
from the intention
impacting now the action.
Does that make sense?
Yeah? Are you sure?
So
is the entire hadith
And the Nia
is essentially
that
intention that we're gonna take a deeper dive
into today
that
is
why am I doing what I'm going to
do right now?
The consciousness, the wakefulness is rooted in this
thing.
The example
that comes after this
is rooted in 3 categories.
Right? So whosoever makes the migration for Allah
and his messenger has made the migration for
Allah and his messenger. It's category
1. Whosoever
migrates for some worldly matter, category 2.
Or to marry like somebody, category 3,
then their migration
is for what they intended. This is what
the hadith says. The latter part of it,
we'll get into, like, somewhat. But the crux
of it is rooted in this part of
the hadith. You want to memorize this. Right?
Surely
actions
are only
by
intentions.
Now I wanna focus on each of these
words a little bit to get us to
a place where we can think about it
more. Can we have everybody move in,
just so there's room for people as they're
coming in to pray?
If you can turn to the person next
to you, the two things we wanna discuss
in detail today
is the concept of Amal
and then the concept of Nia
and how the 2 go hand in hand
together, what this hadith is trying to convey.
Right? So
indeed, actions are by their intentions.
What is the point of
actions,
deeds
within Islam?
At the juncture of life that we're in
right now,
none of us in the room
is, like, 6 or 7 years old. Right?
I could be wrong. You might be a
very mature looking 7 year old. Right? But
likely,
the majority of us in this room are
in a place
where we are beyond now that phase of
existence.
So we wanna be able to understand
what these hadith are giving to us
from the standpoint
of
how
we benefit from them
and understanding
it not just in guidance from the standpoint
of things that only manifest as externals,
but also manifest in terms of inward,
understandings,
and the relationship between what is inward and
outward.
But knowing conceptually
what these things are, not through platitudes,
not through sound bites, not through 10, 30
seconds, 60 second
videos that go in one ear and out
the other, but to think deeply about it.
Why is it important for me as a
Muslim
to understand
what the role of deeds are
from
my engagement
with my time in this world.
So if you can turn to the persons
next to you, there's a few more people
who trickled in now. Introduce yourselves. You don't
know each other's names.
What
is the importance of actions, deeds?
For this to work, because some of you
have not come to one of my halakas
before,
don't only speak when you feel like you're
saying what's most correct.
That's the worst thing to do.
Don't also hesitate in talking because you're afraid
you're gonna say the wrong thing.
That's also not gonna work. But let us
benefit from your ideas. You also have to
get to a place where you're comfortable expressing
so that you have more of a sense
of ownership
over this part of your identity. And it's
not just front facing.
And the most important thing is that your
perspective
might add a frame that we're not even
thinking about
that could help us to engage more deeply
in some of this. Right? I sat with
2 of my friends, an example I like
to use to illustrate, and we were talking
about the story of Musa Alaihi Salam.
One of my friends, Bengali, the other one's
African American.
We're speaking about this in the context of
the exodus
of the Bani Israel.
And my black friend said to my brown
friend, we love the story of Moses,
especially
the emancipation
because in our family,
my grandfather and my grandmother,
they're rooted in slave experience in this country.
And My Bengali friend,
at the end of it, he said, I
have never thought about the story of Musa
and the emancipation from Faraon in this way
before.
But I said, did it make you feel
anything terrible? He's like, no. It just means
so much more. Do you get what I
mean? That's why we have to hear from
you,
and you have to understand that this is
a community
that's going to ask you what you think
about things. And part of your deepening
and then actualizing
on some of this is that you verbalize
so that you can even think about what
it is you're thinking about. Do you get
what I mean? So what is the role
of actions, Amal? Like, if somebody came to
you and said, what is, like, the point
of this deeds thing? Right? Why are there,
like, what's the emphasis
on this? What would you say to them?
If you can turn to the person next
to you, talk about it for a few
minutes, and then we'll come back and discuss.
Go
ahead.
I don't know. Maybe.
Mugger's in, like, 25 minutes, so maybe not
so much.
Yeah. Yeah. Don't worry about that. I won't
I won't I won't do it. Yeah.
Is it on the board in any way
right now?
Anything's fine. Whatever you wanna do.
I'm gonna probably sit here a lot
for the rest of it.
Probably not.
I think I'm gonna just leave it for
the rest of the class like this.
Yeah.
Okay.
So
what is what is the importance of
atmaal
in Islam as a religion? Like, how do
we understand this from multiple facets?
Like, to have a good intention
or intention even,
presence
in acts
necessitates first understanding,
like, what's like, actions got to do with
anything in Islam.
Do you know what I mean? So what
would you say? What did you discuss?
Yeah.
So we talked about, like, how
intention can, like, corrupt some things that you
do. Like, if you do it for, like,
showing off or something, it can turn a
good deed
bad. But it can also, like,
make, like, really mundane things that you do.
But you're supposed to be talking about actions,
not intentions yet. Right? Just what are what's
the role of actions in Islam?
Why is that something that's important? Just the.
Then when we talk about intentions, we'll come
back to that.
Did everybody get that when I said that?
You didn't get that? No. Sorry. I'm, like,
half asleep, man.
I got I woke up on Saturday,
and then some guy called me and he
said, hey. Can you go to Morocco? And
I said, yeah. I asked my wife first,
and she said, sure.
And I got on a plane,
and
we just landed and went. You know?
And I thought I would be able to
push through it. And then I was sitting
with Amira and Sheikh Fayaz
in the office, and they were asking me
how it went. I couldn't remember the,
like, term exit row. I was trying to
describe it. You know, I was like, you
know, this row and then there's the door
to the plane, and they're looking at me.
I'm like, I'm the dumbest person in the
world.
So forgive me,
if I'm not as coherent as normal. You're
gonna say something. Go ahead. I was gonna
say,
action is, like, the only way someone could
see that you're doing something,
like, it's like a
portrayal of your intentions, basically. Great. So an
action is like a portrayal of a trait,
but not like rooted in the hadith. Just
what what's how do acts relate to us?
Like, what's their importance? Why do we need
to know what they're about?
Yeah. I said, the
the intention of your action is what distinguishes
you between
being a hypocrite and a believer.
So
anyone else have any thoughts?
Like, the only thing you take from this
world with you are actions.
That's all you take.
The clothes you're wearing right now, like take
a good look at them.
As nice as you look,
it's not going with you.
The chair you're sitting in, it's not going
with you.
Anything you have on your physical body right
now,
not going with you.
Whatever's filled up your closets, the car that
you drive, anything in your wallet, whatever's in
your house,
none of it is going with you.
The only thing that goes, what our religion
is based off of, the only thing you're
taking with you
are the actions.
Deeds
are what carry over. Deeds are also what
benefit those who have carried over. You wanna
do something for somebody
who is no longer in this worldly existence
but has moved into an otherworldly existence. They're
in the barzakh, the intermediary realm. Right? Allah
grant all of our loved ones peace in
their graves. The only thing that benefits them
are deeds,
actions.
Build a well, it's a deed. Read Quran,
it's a deed. Make Dua, it's a deed.
When I pray my sunnahs, I pray nafuls
for the prayers that I pray. I pray
today. 4 sunnahs, 4 fard, 2 sunnahs, 2
nafil.
My kids, when I'm trying to teach them
how to pray, I'm not telling them you're
gonna bang out, like,
12 rakas right now in the middle of
the day. But when they say, baba, like,
why are you doing it? Never do they
push back. I'll tell them,
your grandfather
and your grandmother. My parents,
they're the ones who taught me how to
pray,
and they're still alive. But every time I
act on something they've taught me, they get
benefit for it. So when I'm feeling lazy,
that's when love comes in.
So, like, well, why would I pray 12
rakas at Duhr time and make the time?
Because my sick father, I want
some percentage
that inshallah Allah will accept of my deeds
to be a means of benefit for him.
Do you know what I'm saying?
If you don't think about what an amal
is,
then you are not going to think about
what the role of intention is in an
act.
If everything is just done on autopilot,
you're walking as a body,
not tapping in to organs of cognition that
you have been endowed with, a heart and
mind.
There are certain things that are good that
you don't have to think about. But in
the role
of Amal,
you wanna know it inside and out because
across the board, that's what each one of
us are taking into account for. The acts
that we did, the acts that we also
did not do but could have done.
So when somebody says to me, like, hey,
man. Why'd you go to Morocco this weekend?
Because I can.
My wife said to me a few days
before
that why aren't you traveling anywhere, like, in
the next few weeks? You've been at home
a lot. I was like, you want me
to leave, man? Just tell me. It's okay.
I'm not trying to be in your face.
She was like, no. But isn't it weird?
I was like, I don't know why I'm
not going anywhere. I was like, October is
gonna hit. I'm gonna be on a lot
of planes going different places, but the day
was just open. I had nothing that I
could say
that would allow for me to say I
could not go.
You don't have to go to Morocco,
but I have to be aware of things
that I have been given.
Intention is gonna become really important because I
gotta still do it without doing it, trying
to get people to praise me for doing
what I'm supposed to do in the first
place.
But if I'm not thinking about it in
terms of what it is at its most
basic level.
Right?
Indeed, man is in a state of loss.
This is what a lot of us read
in our recitation,
short chapter, Surat Al Asr.
The ones who are the exception to this
loss, the ones who have iman and they
do
righteous deeds,
good acts,
everything.
Your day is just filled.
Decisions,
choices,
acts,
inactions,
these are things that are important
to do.
Even an inaction is something. Right? You think
about doing the good deed, then you get
reward for it. You do the good deed,
it's written 10 times over for you. You
think about doing what's wrong and you don't
do it, you still get written a good
deed because you've kept yourself from doing what
you should not have been doing.
The inventorying
was called in
our spiritual tradition.
It's just about taking a look at the
day ahead or the day behind.
What did I put into this world?
To not exist in a prism that seeks
out notoriety,
wealth, fame for problematic reasons.
But to understand if the impact is even
just on one person and that one person's
on me,
how did I do well for myself today?
Books are given to us on the day
of judgment. You're given your book in your
right hand, you're gonna be happy. You're given
your left hand, not so much. May Allah
be make us those who are given our
books in our right hands. The books are
gonna be filled with actions.
What we are taught some of these books
is not that they're gonna be filled with,
like, crazy
terrible things. You are not bad people. You
have to understand this. Right?
Most of you,
likely all of you,
are not walking on the street,
going to taxi cabs, and kinda
robbing them outside of Washington Square Park. Right?
Do you do that on your no. Right?
You don't do it. Right? You didn't shake
your head. Do you do it? No. Right?
Yeah.
No. You're not you're not committing highway robbery.
The scary thing isn't about
books filled with, like, horrendous stuff. May Allah
protect us from it.
A lot of people are gonna stand on
the day of judgment, and their books are
gonna have nothing in them.
Angels are gonna look at the books with
them and say, how long did you live
in the world, man?
And they're gonna look at the book, and
they'll be like, maybe I was just there
for a day
after living an entire life.
So the key part to this hadith is
not just about intentions,
but it's also about understanding
the role of actions from the standpoint of
our tradition.
This world is a world of actions.
The next world, the barzakh, the intermediary realm,
the grave. May Allah make our graves places
of light and illumination.
You can't do things then.
The day of judgment, you cannot do things
then. Nobody gets to stand on the day
of judgment and say, you Allah,
let me, like, go give that poor person
some of the money that I have.
Samir and I were just looking out the
window
outside in the rain. People running around. Some
of you were probably running into here. There's
1 guy just standing right by the gate.
Right?
And I said to her, that's one of
the guys that lives in the park.
You can't do anything for him when you're
in the grave.
You can't.
Every time you passed him by without acknowledging
his presence,
every time you did not think about how
your degree acquisition,
the job you have, the wealth you've been
given
can apply to actions relevant, maybe not to
him in specific, but not taking his example
in vain and understanding it bigger.
On the day of judgment, you can't say,
Allah, let me just pray 2 more rakahs
right here.
This is the only place you're able to
perform your prayers. Don't sleep through fajr,
not for any other reason. Today's fajr only
happens today.
Does that make sense?
So the is
attached to this worldly existence.
In Arabic, I said this at the
on Friday. I don't know if anyone was
paying attention or not, but we were talking
about Surat al Maarij,
and there was a verse,
that says,
something about people who are in a state
of frenzy. Right?
And the letters are the same as in
a Dua where the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa
sallam
seeks protection.
That will Allah I seek your protection from
anxiety and sorrow.
And from incapacity and laziness,
and then it goes on more. And the
root of
is and in the verse in
the 20th or so verse, it's like the
same letters inverted.
Right?
And there's a principle in Arabic language
that words that have the same root letters
in the same order, they have a similar
meaning. Islam,
Muslim,
salaam.
In words that have the same root letters
but in a different order,
they have a relationship,
right? So here in the verse is talking
about anxiety
and then Ajay is talking about incapacity
and there's a relation there because when you're
so overwhelmed,
it just paralyzes you. So Ajis isn't like
I can't do it, like I can't lift
this with one hand. I don't have the
capacity.
Hajj is I have the ability, but I
still don't do what I can do. Right?
So when we call upon Allah,
the lord of the Alam,
it's rooted in.
It's a difference from dunya.
Has the same root letters
as
So there's a link between
elam, knowledge, and amal, action.
Do you get what I'm saying? So you
want to embed that into this idea
that the alam
is the place of Amal.
And as you take steps and you know
things, when she and I can stand
at the window and see that person and
we know he exists,
what am I going to now
act upon that knowledge with? Do you get
what I mean? Does that make sense?
The first part is recognizing
the importance
of the role of the
action
in our tradition.
That's what makes you different.
You have the ability to choose.
You can choose beauty or you can choose
ugliness.
You can choose righteousness,
You can
choose unhealthy righteousness.
Right?
You can be in a place where presence
is removed,
but step 1 is to just think about
actions
and not let anything
be seemingly mundane
because the small ones are the important ones.
Right? Smiling at people,
greeting people,
like extending a hand. Do you know what
I mean? You can walk into a space
and not even acknowledge the presence of individuals.
Right? It's a problem. Do do you get
what I'm saying?
Okay.
Turn the persons next to you. What are
you taking away from this
conversation
on the role of actions, the role of
deeds,
how that fits into some of our understanding
of not just this hadith, but just your
relationship with Islam as a religion. Right? What
are you taking away from this part of
the conversation? And then we'll come back and
discuss. Go ahead.
Okay.
So what are some of the things coming
up for people?
This conversation on actions,
what does it make you think about?
Any thoughts? What are we discussing?
Yeah. You're talking about the impact about how
when you pass away, the only thing you
can take with you is your actions. So,
really, the best time to make the right
decision is now. It's not before or later.
It's always now.
Yeah. It's always now. Right? I said this
to you when I went to Turkey,
and I was just saying saying it's the
earthquake again. Morocco. May Allah make things easy
for them. I'm sitting with people, man.
And this one brother, his name is Hashem.
He took me into his house. He's got
scars on his arms,
rocks like fell on his head, and we
went across the street and sat in the
rubble of the house, and he's just in
tears
because people he grew up and shared community
with,
a mother, 3 daughters,
and a son,
all, like, lost their lives in the earthquake.
Same thing as people in Turkey. You go
back, tell people, don't waste time.
Don't waste time doing things that just don't
make sense to do with your time.
None of us woke up thinking this was
gonna happen to us. Tell them to tell
the people that they love, that they love
them. Tell them to tell the people that
they're grateful for, that they're grateful for them.
Right?
The only thing you take with you is
actions.
And in the world, you don't want to
regret
that you didn't take the time to execute
on something today
that you thought tomorrow could come and tomorrow
is not going to come. It's not meant
to be a morbid
paralyzing
thought. Right? This is where the intention part
is gonna be critical,
shifting the paradigm
to make it now a motivating
factor. They're like, hey, man.
I was created, but I'm created for eternal
existence.
Allah make us all people agenda. So I
don't know how long I'm gonna be in
this place,
but I know that it's got, like, a
limit to it. So why am I doing
what I'm doing here?
Do you get what I mean? What else?
What else is coming up for people? Yeah.
Getting the knowledge which will affect the action
and the intention.
Yeah. And a great part to this also
of the many things we could pull from
what you're saying
is that when you start to reflect on
the things you're doing,
you're gonna see that certain things lack intention
because
you didn't let yourself just breathe and rest.
Everything doesn't always have to be done right
in the moment.
This hadith is also something that calls you
to a place of stillness
so that you can bring intentionality
to what it is that you're doing.
How can you bring intention if you're always
running,
always on empty,
always just overworked,
never making time for the places from you
that allow for intention to manifest.
He says that the place of intention
is in the heart and in the mind.
It's not just on the tongue. You could
just spit out whatever you want to from
your tongue, but exhaustion
overwhelming the rest of you. Right? I gotta
figure this out right now. You know how
many people I've sat with in my office
who for years are trying to figure out
how to marry the person they wanna get
married to, and then they come and they're
like, you just have to help me fit.
I'm like, hey, man. You ain't figured this
out for the last 1200
days of your life.
You don't need to figure it out by
tomorrow morning.
Just take some time to rest.
You likely will not figure it out by
tomorrow,
but you can bring some stillness
that actually allows for purposeful intention to come.
Right? The same thing that happens now with
ritual and practice.
Fudger does not feel the way Fudger should
feel because the inward part to it is
not there when the outward is in such
a state of agitation
and the inward is just also agitated.
I gotta pray in the last 10 seconds
every time. I missed it again. What's the
point of even trying? I'll just pray it
when I wake up. Oh, man. I'll just
make it up when I get home. Right?
There's a pattern to it. Right? And when
you sit and you understand
your actions from you,
Just spend some time looking at your actions,
not somebody else's actions. It's not religion about
judging other people. If you get your kicks
off of, like, making other people feel like
garbage, you're not doing this religion right. You
know? May Allah make it easy for you
and forgive you. But you gotta spend time
in honest self reflection
upon what's coming from me.
Anybody else?
Other takeaways from what we were talking about?
Yeah. This is a hadith where a woman
is known as a prostitute in her community,
and she gives water to a thirsty animal,
and Allah gives her Jannah.
Right?
I met a lot of people in the
work that I do. We have a domestic
violence shelter in the Bronx. There's people that
I've met. They don't have food. You go
to refugee camps.
People can be really ugly, full of garbage,
and they take advantage of people in their
most vulnerable states.
You don't want to read hadith like this
in this way, but you read about the
mercy of our God, and you think contextually
about a woman who lives in a society
where if Mariam, peace be upon her, the
mother of Jesus, peace be upon him, right,
one of the greatest women ever created
is essentially
mocked, ridiculed, and slut shamed by the people
of her time.
What do you think people thought of this
woman who is a prostitute that the prophet's
talking about? And he's telling his people
she's going to paradise.
Do you understand?
This is why we wanna understand and talk
about hadith more deeply. So we're not thinking
less of somebody.
She is from the inhabitants of Jannah.
Do you get what I mean? You can
learn something from everybody.
Does that make sense?
Right?
The first time I could tell you, a
woman sat in my office and she said
she was homeless on the street, and the
person who gave her a sandwich for the
first time was the person who eventually started
to traffic
her.
There's more depth than just what we sometimes
understand.
Does that make sense?
And then the broader frame of things. Right?
Allah's
for that woman
is still paradise. May Allah make us all
people of Jannah. So
step number 1 is getting comfortable with the
fact that I'm accountable for these actions.
The inward and the outward both have to
go hand in hand.
And for that inward to be resonant well,
the outward also has to be in a
state that makes sense.
Doesn't mean you just throw things at people
hoping they stick.
An act is righteous in our tradition,
not just because it's the right act, but
it's also done in the right time, in
the right way.
Makes sense?
So
let's take a pause here. We're gonna start
right at 6 next week. Maghrib is coming
a little bit earlier. We do have that
we're gonna be hosting. We're trying to do
our similar to how we did in the
summer for those who were there with us,
potluck style. So if you bring stuff with
you, that'd be great. It'd be amazing if
people could do that. We're gonna also order,
like, what will be a little bit different
of a setup than just the pizza we
normally have. Because I don't know about you,
but I got really sick of eating pizza
again and again and again.
So we have a bunch of different things
that we have here,
and, you know, we'll be bringing more of
that as well. And I love to hear
from you all as things go forward because
there's content that we can go through. Next
week, we'll go through the part that's about
Nia, kind of how that relates to actions,
and where this is relevant to us. The
idea is not to just say, I'm gonna
do something
and then get frustrated. Well, why did it
not happen?
Do you know?
But to get to a place where we
can understand
why it is that we might be doing
the things that we do. Like, some of
you pursue certain things,
not for the reasons that you think you're
pursuant of them. Some of us pursue things
as sources of validation.
I married my wife. I'd like to believe
because I'm in love with my wife. Do
you know?
But there's a chance I could have married
my wife because I think I'm incomplete unless
I'm married.
Imam Nawi, whose book we're reading, 40 Hadith
Collection,
never got married.
There's explanations offered for it.
Muslims across the board
read this text, read Riauddin.
Nobody says, it's such a shame he never
got married.
Right?
Do you get what I mean?
Right? I was driving with my in laws
jokingly saying, I wish I could become a
doctor. Right? I'm turned 41 years old this
year. Do you know? And my father-in-law
says to me, you can still be a
doctor if you wanna be. Right?
Some of you wanna be doctors or pursuing
medicine or whatever careers you're pursuing
because you have a passion.
You know that there's actions you're gonna carry
forth with you. Some of you do what
you do
because you think if you did not have
access to wealth,
access to certain possessions,
that would mean that you're not a successful
human being. The man that we saw standing
outside in the park that we looked at.
Right?
Are we better than him?
Are we?
But if you were in his situation,
would you feel
as if somehow
you were inadequate?
And may Allah never make us those who
have to experience hunger to understand what it
means to be hungry.
All of it goes into this hadith.
The understanding of why do I do what
I do? What am I really seeking from
the act? Is it rooted in what is
actual intention
that is pleasing to the divine?
Why would Allah be pleased with you hating
on yourself?
Why would Allah want you to be self
deprecating?
Why would Allah want you to think of
yourself
as an inadequate
deficient,
anything like that? Because then what you're also
saying indirectly
is that Allah made a mistake in making
me.
There's nothing without meaning in God's plan.
There's purpose in all of it. Do you
get what I mean?
So what I like you to do is
just sit on some of this.
The Hadith
methodology text that we talked about,
Jack Brown's,
the Siddiqui text, others, I'll bring next week.
There's large commentaries
on the 40 Hadith of Imam Nawi. This
Hadith that we're looking at,
there's
scholars who have said across centuries
that this is the most comprehensive
hadith of the prophet of God.
It makes up one half of religion, one
half of knowledge, Imam Ahmed and Imam Shafi
say.
Imam Shafi also says oh, sorry. Imam Ahmed,
Imam Shafi also Imam Shafi also says Imam
Ahmed says, it makes up 1 third of
religion.
Some people would say it makes up 1
fourth of religion.
There's so much that's in it. They say
that it can apply to every matter of
topic of fiqh.
But we don't wanna think about it only
in terms of legalistic frames. We wanna think
about it in terms of just bringing consciousness,
wakefulness
to what it is that we do so
that everything's not on autopilot.
I'm able to enjoy with presence. I can
also feel my feelings a little bit differently
with a certain presence that they don't overwhelm
me,
both positive as well as negative.
Right? So let's take a pause.
Somebody can call the Adan. If you can
put your chairs back while we pray Maghrib,
and then whether you're fasting or not, if
you wanna join us for,
an iftar,
and then we'll pick up next week. You
can bring books too with you, 40 hadith
of Imam Nawawi,
and a couple of other texts,
that we'll mention next week that are commentaries.
But we'll see everybody then.