Khalid Latif – Imam Nawawis 40 Hadith for Modern Times #03
AI: Summary ©
The speakers discuss the importance of understanding the meaning of multiple hadiths in the century before Islam, rather than just a transactional or monitory version. They stress the importance of understanding the event surrounding the prophet's story and the importance of contextualizing it. The speakers also emphasize the importance of dressing oneself in relation to one's potential, not just in a self deprecating mode, and stress the need for a strong message to be conveyed. They also discuss the importance of character in learning and teaching, especially in the context of Islam.
AI: Summary ©
So we're gonna start looking at the second
hadith in the collection of the 40 hadith,
Imam Nawi.
I hope everyone made it in okay today
and didn't get too drenched in the weather.
We're gonna go till Maghrib today, and I
think probably then just pause for Iftar.
And then we'll see as the time's getting
closer. Maybe we'll shift the halakha to after
Iftar time,
or what. But it'll be just for a
few weeks until it's daylight savings time, and
then it'll shift back. So people wanna pull
up the second hadith.
This is the Hadith Jibrael
and Imam Nawi,
he uses a narration
that's narrated by Omid ibn Al Khattab
who was also the narrator on the first
hadith. So if you wanna pull it up,
you can just pull
up Hadith Jibrael. You can pull up the
second hadith
in Imam Nawi's 40 hadith, hadith number 2,
but just so we can read through it
together,
and kinda distill. We're gonna focus on the
first part of the narration today,
but we wanna read through the entirety of
the hadith,
and then start to break it down.
Somebody wanna read it for us?
Do you have it in front of you?
How how are we going to get it?
You just Google you can just pull up
on your phone, 40 Hadith.
It's a really famous hadith. You can just
also look up the hadith Jibrael, the hadith
of the angel Gabriel, peace be upon him.
It's the second hadith in the collection of
Imam Nawawi's 40 hadith.
Does anybody have it?
Yeah. You wanna read it? Go ahead.
It was narrated on the authority of Muhammad,
may Allah be pleased with him, who said,
while we were at one day sitting with
the messenger of Allah, peace be upon him,
there appeared before us a man dressed in
extremely white clothes and with very black hair.
No traces of journeying were visible on him,
and none of us knew.
He sat down close by the prophet, peace
be upon him, rested his knee against his
thighs, and said,
oh, Muhammad,
inform me about Islam.
The messenger of Allah, peace be upon him,
said,
perform salah, pray the zakat,
fast,
and perform Hajj to the house if you
are able to do so.
The man said, you have spoken truly.
We were astonished at his questioning him, the
messenger,
and telling him that he was right. But
he went on to say, inform me about
iman.
He answered, it is that you believe in
Allah and his angels, in his books, in
his messengers,
and in the last day, and in other
faith,
both in his good and in his evil
address.
He said, you have spoken truly.
Then he said, inform me about.
He answered, it is that you should serve
Allah as though you could see him. And
though you cannot see him yet, know that
he sees me. He
said,
He said, inform me about the hour.
He, the messenger of Allah, said about that,
the question knows no more than the questioner.
So he said, well,
inform me of the about the signs thereof.
He said there that the slave girl will
give birth to her mistress.
They will see the bare footed, naked, destitute,
the herdsmen of the sheep competing with each
other in raising lofty buildings.
Thereupon, demand went
off. I waited a while, and then the
messenger of the law messenger
know better. He said, that was Jibreel. He
came to teach you your religion.
So
came to teach you your religion.
So as we look at this hadith,
it's distinct
from the first hadith
in a few different ways.
This narration of
it appears
in this way in a lot of different
books of hadith.
So this is recorded
in the Sahih of Imam Muslim,
Nizai,
ibn Majah, Ahmed, Abu Dawood, Al Bayhaki, ibn
Hiban, ibn Khozaima, al Bazar, and so many
more.
And then this particular hadith incident is also
narrated by a lot of other companions.
So outside of
he narrates this hadith. Ibn Umar
narrates this hadith.
Ibn Masood
narrates this hadith.
Narrates this hadith. Narrates this hadith.
But the idea is to understand
that it's being witnessed by a lot of
different people.
And you wanna get into the context of
the hadith so that you're not just reading
the text in a very reductive, simplistic way,
but to also then be able to understand
principally from the way hadith collections
function
and the way different narrations
relevant to individual incidents
can also be understood
because the text is not going to always
be replicated.
Does that make sense?
Like, the Quran in and of itself
is always the same text
always.
So across the board, in word and in
meaning,
the Quran is
always the same in every mus'haf.
You're gonna have different recitations
that
have nuance meanings to it. Right? So a
lot of us when we study the recitations
of the Quran,
we
study in this part of the world a
recitation that's called Hafs and Asim.
And so, for example,
when you read Surah Fatiha, it says,
but there's a recitation
that is warash
that has instead of
it says
The words in and of itself
give a nuance difference,
but that's not changing
the wording or the meaning. Does that make
sense so far? When you're looking at hadith
literature
cause you have different people that are narrating
this in a very human level,
still having a divine protection to it, but
a system that is human
in and of itself,
people are narrating what it was that they
saw and what they witnessed.
Their recollection of certain things might have the
words change in terms of the order of
how it goes,
Or they might not be saying explicitly
this is what verbatim happened, but this is
what we saw happen.
Some hadith that are revolving around things that
were similar instances,
events that might have been similar over numerous
periods of
time, but the text in and of itself
still
responds
accordingly
because there's elements of continuity
in the replies of certain things.
But here, for example,
in this narration of Umar ibn Al Khattab
to illustrate something what I'm talking about, when
the angel Jibrael asked the question
Islam
then teach me about Islam.
In the narration of Abu Harayra,
the first question that's posed says,
not
Islam.
So
that narration
is putting forth the question of iman before
the question of Islam. We'll get into it
in a little bit
in terms
of why that might be the case, but
just so you understand, principally,
the Quran in and of itself as a
text
is consistent in word and meaning and in
the hadith, which has a different application of
rigor to it, when it's coming now to
the actual text in and of itself,
the meaning has to be something that coincides,
but the words are not going to be
verbatim. So what Abu Herrera says about this
incident is not going to match word for
word what Omar Ibn Al Khattab says matches
in this incident, the way that Ibn Mas'ud
might say something
different, the way ibn Umar might say something
different. Does that make sense?
The same way if all of you left
from this place and you went and said
to somebody, this is what we heard at
the halukkah.
This is what we heard was being said.
And you'll have different
vantage points literally. Right?
That you're sitting and you see things differently
from everybody else. It's not visible the same
exact way
to you.
Like, if I asked all of you to
get up and stand and walk to this
spot right here, none of you would take
the same steps.
If I asked all of you to draw
this microphone,
none of you would draw it the same
way as anybody else. Some of it will
look similar,
but you sitting on this room sees something
different from you sitting on this room. This
is all happening in real time. It's not
being given in a book that is codified.
They're seeing it, and they're saying this is
what we saw. Does that make sense?
This hadith has different narrations. And another principle
that you wanna understand within hadith study when
you're trying to extrapolate meaning from it is
that it's not just
this thing says this and that's just it,
but you look at other hadith
that are also about the incident
to be able to understand
and contextualize a little bit more.
So in particular, with this narration of hadith,
the prophet
we wanna understand a few different things.
One,
this is taking place
towards the end of his life.
A lot of people position this conversation with
the angel Jibrael
taking place around the time of the farewell
Hajj of the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam.
Some would say it takes place after the
time of the Hajj. Some say that it
takes place before.
But in being able to understand,
if you know the seerah of the messenger,
sallallahu alaihi wa sallam,
that part of his life,
he is starting to be consciously aware,
as are his companions,
that he's gonna slowly and surely
leave from this world soon.
Right? If you came to Jummah a couple
of months ago, we talked about what the
last days of the prophet
looks like.
So if he's done Hajj
and this conversation takes place,
that means after the days of Hajj,
the days in the month of Dhul Hijjah,
because Hajj takes place at the same time
every year.
Right?
And there's not so much time now between
the farewell Hajj of the prophet and the
time that he passes away
from the world.
It's about, like, 3 months,
give or take.
It's not a long period of time.
What's he doing
in this time?
What's he trying to accomplish?
You look at the last that
takes place
that many of us have probably read. And
if you haven't, you can Google it. The
farewell sermon of the messenger of God, what
he's doing on the 9th of the day
of Arafah.
Right? He repeats
much of it on,
Yomun Nahr, the day of Eid al Adha,
the next day, 10th of Dhul Hijjah. But
he knows he's not gonna be with these
people for long, so he's emphasizing
things that are important for them to be
able
to carry forward
after the time that he leaves from this
world.
But you also gotta put yourself in the
shoes of the people who are starting to
become aware of what it is that's about
to transpire
and how it is they're going to relate
to the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam
and why this hadith is something that's important
to contextualize.
There was about a 120 to a 140,000
people that made Hajj with the prophet at
the farewell Hajj.
All of them weren't Muslim from day 1.
A lot of them were becoming Muslim
towards the end of that time.
Some of these people had never seen the
prophet in their life. When the announcement went
up, the prophet's making Hajj this year, the
same way a lot of you will frequent
certain spaces because so and so is coming
to speak about something or so and so
is coming to perform in this arena, and
you'll go.
People said the messenger is making Hajj. We're
gonna go to be a part of that
Hajj.
The prophet
experiences this crowd. Right? Jabir
Radialahu An, he says that when he's standing
in front of the prophet with the gathering
of Hajj,
all he sees behind the messenger are people
lined up as far as you can see.
And when he looks to the right, it's
just seas of people to the right. And
when he looks to the left, it's just
seas of people to the left also.
All of these people are now Muslim. It's
not like it was on the 1st day
of revelation
or in the 1st week of revelation
where it's handfuls of people. So when the
prophet is doing this and the hadith is
contextualized,
not only is the words important to understand,
but the way it's being conveyed
from a pedagogical
standpoint, a teaching standpoint,
these words have to stick.
They have to stay in people's heads so
that they know what they're taking is serious.
Do you get what I mean?
Does that make sense so far?
In other narrations, what we find is that
the prophet now is asking his companions
to ask him questions.
They're saying, ask me questions.
Ask of me.
And in this particular instance, nobody's really saying
too much.
They're not putting forth questions to the messenger
of God
in the course of this
interaction where the prophet is saying, ask me
questions. Right? And if you read the Quran,
you have read verses where Allah says they're
asking you something.
And then he says, say this to them.
And the Quran poses
a lot of different questions even to us
as a reader
from a standpoint of reflection and contemplation.
The prophet wants to know what's on the
minds of his companions, and he wants to
know where they're at in this moment. He's
got 3 months left to be there with
them.
And so he's saying
question me, ask of me. He's not really
getting so much from them. And then,
he says now this hadith,
that this person
comes upon them, and the Arabic is something
that's really important to understand.
So when he says
the context of this, the responses to the
hadith of the the questions of the angel
Jibrael, that's not the place you want to
start
by understanding what this hadith is about. You
wanna start from before that and understand that
it's giving us
both in
the actual words of the angel Gabriel. He
came to teach your religion. That's what it
says at the end. But the demeanor, the
behavior,
the entire
presentation
of himself as an angel. And so Umar
he says,
right, till the end of that.
In Arabic,
when people usually enter into a room,
what's the word that is commonly used?
No. Like, somebody if we said, you know,
Ahmed walked into the room, what would we
say in Arabic?
Ata?
Ata. Right? And in the in the hadith,
quite often, when someone's entering something, it says.
Right? They entered into the space. Here, Umar
Radhiallahu An, he's saying.
He's not saying.
Right? The angel didn't just enter in that
way, but
is saying that he just came upon us
from nowhere.
We don't even know where he popped up
from.
If you've ever been walking down the street
in Manhattan
and there's all kinds of people that you
run into. Right? Or if you've ever been
for Hajj or Umrah. Has anybody here ever
been for Hajj or Umrah to Mecca or
Medina?
Yeah. Have you ever ran into somebody randomly
when you're in Hajj or Umrah?
You have? Yeah. Who did you run into?
Not not someone I know. No. But has
any of you ever ran into somebody that
you know? I just yeah. There's a 1000000
people at Hajj. We all met. Yeah. Have
you ever met somebody? Okay. So I'm gonna
use myself as an example because clearly this
isn't working the way I want it to.
Every time I go to Mecca or Medina,
subhanAllah,
I run into somebody that I know randomly.
Run into a guy I used to live
with 20 years ago in the food court
of the shopping center in Mecca. I'm in
Medina and I walk out the door and
I ran into Sheikh Yasser Bierjaz.
I'm sitting near the rauda of the prophet
sallallahu alaihi wa sallam and I run into
a guy that I went to my undergrad
with. There's all kinds of randomness that comes.
They just come out of nowhere.
If you can imagine you're sitting anywhere and
all of a sudden,
somebody just pops up that you were not
expecting them to come.
Here, Umar radiaallahu an is in this place.
And in another narration,
what happens is that he comes upon them
in this way, but he actually asked the
prophet, can I come to you?
And the prophet says, yes. Come to me.
And along the way now, they're all looking
at this man who,
He just came upon us out of nowhere.
And he came out of nowhere, and he
asked our prophet,
can I come to where you are?
And they're looking at him in the most
specific
ways possible,
defining and identifying
everything
that is transpiring
because it's coming in a moment
where they are just very deeply and acutely
aware
that this random person that we don't know
is about to engage our messenger.
Why is this important from a teaching standpoint?
Communication
is not just the words that come out
of our mouth.
7% of impact is rooted in the content.
93%
comes from nonverbalized
aspects.
You want to know all of the characters
that are at play in this place,
and these are senior companions of the prophet,
the prophet Muhammad sallallahu alaihi wa sallam himself
and the angel Gabriel,
who is the teacher
and
you have his teacher, the angel Jibrael. They
and you have his teacher, the angel Jibrael,
they both know how to get everyone's attention.
They know how to get them to be
focused
so that the words that are going to
come after this
are not taking place in year 10 of
revelation,
in year 12 of revelation,
in year 5 of revelation.
The prophet's got 3 months left in this
world. He needs everybody
to be acutely aware of what's going on.
So from the minute the angel walks in
to everything that transpires
is a part of the teaching methodology.
Does that make sense?
And we wanna extrapolate from this now certain
principles that are not going to just be
the focal point of
Islam,
that tell me what is Islam, what is
iman, what is ihsan,
tell me of the hour, what are its
signs. We're gonna get to that, but you
wanna delve deep into this to be able
to then think, what is the relevancy
of this hadith
back to me?
And so as Umar
he continues,
that came upon us all of a sudden,
this
man,
that his
clothes
were just
severely white.
Like, if you can read the Quran in
Arabic or whether you can or not, like,
if you ever see
you know,
this
in Arabic
says Allah.
Right?
If you can't read Arabic, just it does.
It says Allah. Okay?
The little w looking thing on the second
lam, that's called a.
The word
grammatically,
as a phonetic device,
it invokes this word.
Right? A Shadda is so powerful
that it both allides to the letter before
it, the alif, and it also has its
own syllable.
So you're pronouncing that lam
doubled,
Allah.
Right? It's not a law or al a.
It's Allah.
Makes sense?
But it's called the shaddah
because it's got that
severeness to it. It's got that strength to
it. So he's not just wearing white clothes,
he's wearing
really
white
clothes.
Why is this important?
This man who came out of nowhere,
he's in Medina.
They don't know him. They've never seen him,
the Hadith continues.
They're describing him in this way.
I'd like you to turn to the person
next to you, in pairs ideally,
no more than 3,
but change your names if you don't know
the names of the person next to you.
Why is this something that is noteworthy?
From the standpoint now
of the etiquette
of teaching.
Right? Both from the standpoint as a teacher
as well as a learner
because this is what this hadith is. The
end of the hadith says, he came to
teach you your religion.
What did his clothes have to do with
us learning about our deen? Does the question
make sense?
Yeah? So go ahead, discuss with the people
next to you just for, like, 2, 3
minutes because we're gonna just go till muggerab
time,
and then we'll come back and discuss. Go
ahead.
Okay. So what are some of the things
that are coming up for people? Why is
it relevant
that he's wearing this really white
outfit?
What did you discuss? Yeah.
If, if it's if they said that they
didn't no one knew him, it's implied that
he might have been a traveler,
but it doesn't make sense if he was
a traveler, and
white.
So I guess it just
another way over it is just it teaches,
like, the adapt of coming to class, make
sure you're clean and,
yeah, make sure that,
yeah, you're clean.
Amazing. What else? What else did we talk
about?
What did you discuss?
Why are these clothes important? Yeah.
What is it? Angel, can you ask for
permission?
What's up? Were you asking about that too?
Just the white clothes. Yeah.
What are the what's the importance of white
clothes? Yeah. Well, like, when we go for,
like, or someone passes away, like, they wear
the color white. So I thought it kinda
just, like,
symbolized our religion, like, purity.
It's kinda like a color that really,
like, unites all of us because we all
wear it.
Also just like blood nous is such a
big part of our religion, so I think
that kind of symbolizes that as well.
Any other thoughts?
Yeah. So
here now,
clothing is a very relevant factor in all
the ways that we're talking about.
Primarily,
it is strange
that here's a man living in a desert
situation,
and he's wearing these super white clothes, and
they're really white.
You have a deep emphasis
from the standpoint of the sunnah that the
prophet alayhis salaam
love to wear white clothing.
And this notion that the outward is a
reflection
of the inward.
This hadith,
one of the names that is given aside
from being the Hadith Jibrael,
the Hadith of Gabriel,
it's called Umasunna,
the mother of the sunnah.
Within it has
conversations
on things that are external and internal.
Within it has conversations
of things that are ritualistic,
theological,
spiritual.
It has eschatological,
apocalyptic
elements to it.
This hadith, there's scholars that say that if
this was the only hadith that was recorded
in the Arba'een of Imam Noi, the 40
hadith of Imam Noi, the book that we're
looking at, this is all that they would
need.
It's got a lot going on in here.
So,
1, the adab of cleanliness,
and 2,
the adab of cleanliness
as relevant now to ritual. Can you guys
move up and move in Just so when
people come in to pray, they're not praying
in the corner, if we can come in
close. Yeah.
The preparation aspect to this is important because
the angel Jibrael as a teacher knows that
he's also embodying what it means to be
a good student in this regard.
When you go to pray, if you pray
in what it is that you just roll
out of bed in, when you show up
at Jummah and you show up in Jummah
dressed not for the idea that I'm standing
in the Jummah prayer, but I'm just coming
as if I was going to be in
anything.
A serious student of knowledge within our tradition
understands
that the preparation
is not just in the engagement of text,
but in the preparation of the being on
a whole.
And how it is that you're readying yourself
outwardly is going to play an intrinsic role
on what it is that you take from
inward transformation.
You have, in cultures around the world,
Quran
Quran schools everywhere. I've been to Quran schools
in Bangladesh, in Sri Lanka, in different parts
of the United States, in places in parts
of Europe, in
various
countries,
and all the kids are wearing white.
All of them.
It's not just by chance.
The opportunity to take it as a metaphor
also, we'll look at in subsequent hadith,
But because this hadith is about he came
to teach your religion,
one of the facets that it's teaching us
is part of the adobe of being a
student
is that you show up
dressed in your best from the standpoint
of I'm getting ready to go to a
medgeless of knowledge.
All of you look really nice, by the
way.
So the idea is to not go into
a self deprecating mode,
but to recognize
where you stand in relation to what your
potential actually is.
We have companions of the prophets who
when they would teach hadith
in particular
because they were speaking the words of the
messenger of God
They would not only
ready themselves in the best clothes that they
had, but they would purposely
shower the way that we're supposed to shower
for the
day
of
Jummah.
Imam Malik whose school of thought heavily relies
upon the actions of people of Medina.
There is such a beloved
element to that, to the prophet sallallahu alaihi
wa sallam and his city. He would do
the same thing. He would shower,
put on his best clothes before he would
teach hadith.
To be now recipient of it also has
to understand
that it's not a knock on anybody. You
can't be in a place where you are
thinking about this from the standpoint of weaponizing
knowledge to tear somebody down.
But the notion here is to think out
for myself individually,
how do I
demonstrate
to my heart and the rest of my
being
the seriousness of the endeavor that I'm going
to engage in
by being ready for what the etiquette of
the gathering calls for.
And part of that is dressing your best.
You come to a halukkah
after work, after class, it's fine.
But for example, you want a starting point,
treat Jummah as a special day.
You wanna go to Jummah
adorning yourself with the sunnah requirements
that you're in a place where you put
on your best sense and your best clothes.
You get to it in a place where
you're not just in a daze. Even if
you need to,
you take an understanding
that if I gotta change before I walk
into Jumma, so I'm not wearing things that
don't make any sense whatsoever,
not from the standpoint of people's judgmental gaze,
which you have to understand within the course
of this
that these people didn't know what the angel
was doing, but none of them got up
to stop him to say, how dare you?
They let the conversation
go to its very end conclusion
because there's still adab that they're observing
in the face of the prophet of God
Do you get what I mean?
So we're not saying take it and start
sizing people up and down, but just start
thinking to yourself.
From a spiritual standpoint,
this is not a religion that is rooted
in insincerity.
Nifaaq, may Allah protect us from it. But
the outward and the inward have a relation
to it. So even if you are getting
your mindset ready,
you want to dress
to understand the occasion.
I'm standing to pray fajr
in front of my god.
What should I be wearing at that time?
I'm in a place where
I'm answering
the call to the Jummah prayer on the
most blessed day of the week.
It's not a day where I want myself
to regret that I didn't wear a belt
as I'm prostrating to the divine.
I can just look to myself to understand
from myself
what is the seriousness I take from it.
And the angel Jibrael,
he's coming in, and
who the prophet has said,
that if there was a messenger after me,
it would be this man, Omar. Omar ibn
Al Khattab is saying that this guy was
dressed
just
meticulously.
His clothes
are just beyond white.
This is what we need to do
when I come into a gathering.
Does it make sense?
He continues now when he talks about the
darkness of his hair.
And in the interest of time, we'll just
go into, like, a few points.
The darkness of his hair is important. Right?
I went to see my father yesterday,
may Allah grant him Shafa.
Many of you know he had a bad
stroke some years ago that left him paralyzed
and without the ability to speak. I haven't
seen my father in
the longest time as such,
but, you know, he's an older man. Cognitively,
he functions well. He can't talk. My father's
lying down on a bed. He can't talk,
and he's pointing at my beard and laughing
at me
to indicate,
look at how gray and white your beard
is.
And I said, your beard is whiter than
mine.
I said, I'm getting old, man. What do
you want me to do?
The relevance
of the angel's hair being dark
and that it's noticeable
is twofold.
1, if somebody's hair is super short, you
don't really pay attention to the color of
it. Somebody's got a shaved head. You're not
like, hey, man. The millimeters on your head,
they look like they got some, like, red
tinge to them. But usually when somebody's hair
is long, it's noticeable.
Do you know?
And when somebody has long hair,
there's a different sense of kind of
just
is
like the Arabic word, a sense of just
kind of masculinity,
machismo at that time.
But it's also
dark, and they use the same word,
meaning
this man doesn't have grays in his hair.
He's got a dark full head of hair,
meaning
he's a young person.
He's not waiting till he's 60 years old
to go and
sit and learn from the messenger of god.
Doesn't mean that if you're an old person
with
gray and white in your beard or your
hair is dark white or anything like that,
you stop learning? No. That's not what it's
saying at all.
I've met people who have taken their Shahada
at 70, 80 years of age.
I've met people who have memorized the
Quran after they hit the age of 50.
May Allah preserve them. It's not a race.
It's not in that sense, but we're pulling
teaching etiquettes from this.
If his hair is dark in that way
that it is so severely
dark that it's noticeable,
it means that the presentation that he has
of himself is that he's a person in
a young form,
which is all of us pretty much in
this room,
which means
that you gotta make time to actually learn.
And that the stage in which you learn
starts not
when the matters of the dunya are put
to the side. I now have wealth. I
now have marriage. I now have a house.
I now have a car. Maybe now I'm
going to go for Hajj.
Illustrated through tangible examples.
How many people do you know who are
Muslim? Again, on a judgmental objective way. They
have the means, the wealth to go for
Hajj,
but they do not go for Hajj.
This is a problem.
From the context of this, the understanding
is that you get it done when you
have the ability to get it done
and that gatherings should flourish.
Omar Ibn Khattab
is with the prophets
when he asked the question,
what tree is most like the
Arab? And the answer is the nakhla tree.
And Abdullah, the son of Amar, he's there,
and he knows the answer to the question,
but he doesn't answer out of deference to
the elders. And then the prophet, when he
gets no answer, he says, is it not
the nakhla tree, the date palm tree? And
then later, Abdullah, the son of Omar, says
to his father who's narrating this hadith, I
knew the answer. And he says, why didn't
you say it? And he said, because
I don't wanna, you know, in front of
older people, etcetera.
But
Omer took his son to the gathering.
Do you know what I mean?
Allah blesses you with children. You choose to
have children one day. Whatever capacity they come
to you, make sure that as young people,
they're getting into the habit of attending
gatherings of knowledge.
It's not something that's reserved just for the
eldest of the elders when they're retired and
then they go sit and there's a value
to it too,
but you are not using your time
and having the etiquette that goes into it
as a student as if a young person,
you're not purposely going to these places.
Does that make sense?
Does anybody have any other thoughts on this
idea of the darkness of his hair?
Anything come to mind before we move on?
Okay.
And then he says,
that we didn't see upon him the signs
of travel, and none of us knew who
he was. Right? Meaning, he just came from
no place
that we knew.
Why is this an important thing to understand
here?
What does it bring up for you? Instead
of us discussing, maybe just a couple of
people because we got, like, 10 minutes left.
This part where he says, we didn't see
any sign of travel on him and none
of us know who he is.
What do we take from this?
Contextualize
it in what we've said already. Yeah.
Well, there's a 140,000
people who made Hajj.
Right? No. No. It's after this, but go
ahead. Yeah.
So this first point is something that's important
to understand.
Again, from the standpoint of etiquette, you're in
community with people.
They all know each other.
Some of you have only been here for
days or weeks, but some of us have
been here for years.
And the whole notion is rooted in the
idea that even if I don't know your
name, I'm paying attention enough to know that
I've seen you in a space before.
You go to the original confines of the
prophet's Masjid sallallahu alaihi wa sallam. It's called
the Rauda. It's said to be the garden
from one of the gardens from the gardens
of paradise. Right? May Allah make us all
people of Jannah.
Here, the
Omar Ibn Al Khattab, who's also a senior
companion. You know? People know his name.
He's in a place where he's saying,
I didn't ever see this person before,
and that's surprising to him.
I went to a masjid that I grew
up in some years ago,
and
I
sat and prayed. And then the imam, he
said to me, you know, we haven't seen
you in a while. Can you come and
say some words? I'm sitting in front of
people who are my elders. They're all uncles.
I love all of them. And I don't
know because a lot of their duas, I
get to be blessed to do the work
that I'm doing right now.
And so I'm thinking, what do I say?
And so I said with as much love
as I could, it's amazing to see
the consistency
that from the time I was a teenager
until now, some of you are still praying
here every day.
And I said
through prisms of hadith like this,
some of you have prayed next to each
other for decades of your life,
but you still don't know the names of
the people you're praying with.
You've never invited the people you've been praying
with to your home or to a meal.
You've not breaking fast with them. You haven't
gathered together or celebrated
the birth of a child together or a
wedding of a child together.
But Omer is shocked that he's never seen
this person before.
Do you get what I'm saying?
All of it is even before we get
to the place of
Islam.
The hadith doesn't start by just telling you
about the 5 pillars.
It's telling you things that the prophet wants
you to know as he has 3 months
left in this world.
Don't get to a place
where the numbers become so large
that you use it as a justification
to stop knowing the people that you are
in community with,
that you stop giving salaams, you stop learning
their experiences, you stop learning their stories.
You know about who it is in the
state that they're in and the condition that
they're in.
We didn't know him.
We didn't see him.
And it's not as if he came from
some place far because there's no signs of
travel upon him.
So what's going on here?
As the hadith continues,
Umar Radiallahu
an, he says that
he comes to him now
with his knees against his knees.
And in this particular narration,
it's a little ambiguous
that it says his hands are on his
thighs.
So does that mean that the angel put
his hands on his own thighs or on
the thighs of the prophet sallallahu anai wasallam?
In other narrations, it says a little more
explicitly
that the hands were on the thighs of
the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam. In some commentaries,
it says that it's not that the hands
were actually on the thighs of the prophet,
but they're just emphasizing
how close the angel Jibrael was to the
prophet
from the standpoint
of him coming to teach you
how to learn.
The idea isn't that he's content
sitting in the back of the room.
He's trying to be as close to the
teacher as possible,
knowing that there's a metaphysical
exchange
from being now in the immediate proximity
of the one that you are taking knowledge
from. It's not about being a professor. We
have a lot of people that we can
learn religion from from the standpoint of a
professorial
relationship.
These are my professors,
but here is my teacher.
In every facet of what you're doing, you
don't wanna be the person that goes into
Jummah and there's nobody sitting in front of
you. Aside from the fact that 20 times
in the chutba I'm gonna say to you
if you pray here, please move up. Please
move up. Please move up. It's not gonna
change
randomly. I ask people all the time, and
they look at me like I'm an idiot
because I walk into an elevator, whoever's in
the elevator with me. They're like, you think
anybody's gonna show up today? And they're like,
what is wrong with you? You think nobody's
coming to joe my
ear?
But I get nervous still.
But in this,
when you are understanding
what the angel is trying to teach you,
the benefit comes not from being distant, but
from having proximity.
And there's twofold to this.
I have sat in places
where I'm sitting on a stage
listening
to luminaries
of our community,
and people are standing
in the audience asking questions
saying that it seems like
over time,
the distance between the ones learning religion and
the ones teaching the religion has just gotten
further and further away.
And during the time of the prophet,
accessibility
was so important.
This is why I value things that my
teachers taught me, that the successful community
is the one that knows where their imam
lives.
If you get into a place where you're
looking for somebody to be your teacher, not
your professor, your teacher, and you gotta know
the difference between the two things, it's not
just that the angel goes and sits as
close as possible, but the prophet lets him
come that close.
There's not a distance that's there.
Do you see what I mean?
So from the standpoint now is you take
on information,
it can't build a hubris that says now
hold on.
Only at this distance are you gonna be
able to communicate with me.
But you wanna be in the trenches with
the people that you're serving and you're learning
with and are learning from you.
You wanna understand that the movement that's rooted
in Mahaba, the love that the prophet speaks
about cannot come if there is literal
distance between the teacher and the one that
is learning.
Does that make sense?
And so when I've gone to places and
people have said to me that they've been
in communities
for decades
and they've said, where are you going for
dinner? And I'm saying, I'm going to shake
so and so's house for dinner. And they
said, you're allowed to go to his house?
I was like, I guess so. Right?
And they said, we've never been to his
home before.
Well, that's the problem.
Because this man that nobody knows
walks into
the space
and sits knee to knee with the messenger,
and the prophet lets him sit there
close enough that some people think that his
hands are actually on the prophet's thighs.
And you wanna contextualize it. The angel is
holding the thighs of the prophet.
Islam.
There's an air of desperation.
Give me some teaching.
Give me some knowledge.
Give me some information.
He wants to know it. When you show
up in the space, it's not about entertainment.
I'm just trying to do this as a
pastime
to get from 1 hour to the next,
but there's gotta be a yearning to say
that this knowledge is transformational,
and I need to hear it.
So much so that let everybody else sit
wherever they're sitting. I'm gonna sit front and
center.
And I can tell you on a practical
level, from the time I was 18 until
the time I was 21,
22 years old, I still have binders that
are probably the length of shelves on books
that wherever I knew there was a sheikh
coming, I would go and sit right in
the front and just take as much information
as I could. And I was the type
of person that would ask questions,
and I would just keep asking questions because
that's what they're there for. They're not there
to hold the information themselves.
They're there to give you the information.
This is not the same as going online
and googling something or listening to talks that
there's still value in, but it can't be
the absolute
way that a lecture you weren't even sitting
in delivered years ago in a space that's
miles away from you is not going to
always bear relevancy to the specifics of this.
So the demonstration
here also is that you gotta have a
close relationship
with somebody who's gonna give you advice.
Somebody called me on the phone today from
the other part of the country. 2 minutes
into the conversation, they said, do you think
I should marry this guy? And I said,
I don't even know your last name, let
alone the name of guy that you want
to get married to.
How irresponsible would it be of me
to give you some type of particular
response in the form of choice?
And she said, you're the first person who
said something like this to me. And I
said, I'm sorry that there's people who say
to you things when they should be saying
I don't know. How can I know? I
don't know anything about this person. I don't
know anything about you. And even if I
did, how is it my place to do
that?
And so here,
you want to be in the place
that is said to have the most Barakah.
Don't be
just in the back. Be where you want.
Be where you're supposed to be.
And then as the hadith continues, and then
we're gonna stop here,
He says,
Islam.
So this part where he says, you Muhammad,
already has
a distinct
attentive
grabber
of the audience
because nobody calls the prophet Muhammad by his
first name.
In Surat An Nur, there's actually a verse
that prohibits
this from happening.
It's not just out of baseline adab, but
the verse of the Quran says that you
do not call upon him in this way.
So the explanations that are given here are
a few different ways. 1, when the Bedouins
would come, you see this distinct in the
hadith
that when they would speak, the Bedouin comes
to the prophet.
Yeah, Muhammad.
Teach me about this religion. What's the minimum
we need to do
to get into Jannah? Right? He tells him
the 5 pillars, and that's it. And he
says, I'm not doing anything else.
And he just walks away. And the prophet
says, if he sticks with it, he's a
man of Jannah.
That person's nature is very similar to what
other Bedouins would be going through. They would
speak to the prophet in this way,
but the
companions,
There's a different air of etiquette and adab.
The angel coming to teach now, there's a
few different things that they say. 1, he's
calling him You Muhammad
with the intention of saying the name Muhammad
as the praiseworthy
one,
as his title
of the one that is deserving of this
praise, o Muhammad.
2,
he is utilizing it as a teaching opportunity
to maintain the attentiveness, the attention
of the people that are gathered there.
And 3,
he is in a place where out of
anybody
who could call the prophet by his name,
it would be the angel Jibrael because he's
the teacher of the prophet.
So the same way you could sit and
you can call people by their titles, which
is an important part of other peer.
You cannot
just engage in what is the norm of
people outside.
My kids go to New York City public
schools.
My kids
have said to me, my teachers have said
that you can we can call them by
their first names. Literally, my daughter came out
of kindergarten, 4 years of age, and she
came home and she said, today, John taught
me this. And I said, who taught you
what?
And she said, John, baba.
And I said, we call him mister John
or something different.
And she said, but he said it's okay.
And I said, Johnny,
our teacher is somebody different sallallahu alaihi wasallam.
You talk to your elders
out of a recognition that they're your elders.
In your classrooms,
if the professor says call me this, still
call them professor.
This is hadith
of the prophet
that
you give people the respect of the stations
that they hold.
You call them doctors. You call them
Sheikh. You call them
whatever. You don't call your parents by their
first names.
But there's a
framing here that says that the greeting is
done
in the understanding
situationally
of the ethics.
And so
when you have a teacher,
you could be whoever it is that you
are,
they're gonna still call you
by
what you are known to them as.
Right? My mother, regardless of, like, wherever I'm
at in the world,
I've spoken on stages where there's 20,000 people.
My mom is in the audience. I come
off of the stage, and literally, the next
speaker says, sometimes verbatim what I just said.
We were in Canada, and this happened. And
my mom is sitting next to me. She's
like,
he's so smart. And I said, Ami, I
just said that. What he just said, I
just said that. She was like, no, stupid.
You didn't say that.
But she's my mom.
She's gonna always see me as her kid.
Do you understand?
So you can walk into certain places,
and the titles are still in relation to
other types of relationships.
And here, we have all of these different
elements
of adab
even before we get into the parts of
what is Islam, what is iman, what is
Ihsan.
So before we call the Adan, just for
2 minutes, if you can talk to the
person next to you, because after Maghrib, his
brother is gonna take a shahada,
and then we're gonna have Ithar, so we
won't continue with the halakha.
But if you can just talk to the
people next to you, what are some of
the things you're taking away from this conversation
thus far? And then we'll discuss.
We'll break for Maghreb,
and then we'll eat. But go ahead.
Okay. What are some of the things we're
taking away from today?
Maybe we can get a few people just
to respond. What are some of the things
that are take or takeaways from today?
Yeah.
Trying to get information from someone, like, trying
to understand what is,
you know, revolving around that
Yeah. Doesn't it hit different
where it's like, man,
the prophet is saying this with 3 months
left in this world
versus just not having that aspect to it.
The companions are
recollecting this,
experiencing some of these things. They have very
human emotions. They're still people. Like, he still
is a very human person. Do you know?
And all of that's bleeding into
kind of the words that are coming out.
Do you know what I mean?
What else are we taking away?
Yeah.
Just the concept, Adele, with everything that we
do, I think that you use
that door of the soul.
But,
that transfers over to anything that we do,
especially
in terms of,
the, you know, learning or teaching,
just constant
rituals,
to enhance.
Yeah.
Right? And that becomes the base of everything.
And think about it from the standpoint of
pedagogy in Islam.
When you learn something
remotely memorized. Like, you got babies in your
life, you can teach them the mechanics of
stuff, but even if they don't get that
from you,
they'll learn
it. But if you don't teach your kid
how to be a good person and they're
a jerk, they're gonna be a jerk forever.
That's just how it works.
And so in this religion,
character is the foundation of all of it.
Right? The hadith,
they asked the prophet, alayhis salam, what do
you say of this woman who she's
praying, like, extra prayers, giving a lot in
charity, doing all these things, but her neighbors
are harmed by her tongue?
There's nothing good within her. She is from
the people of fire.
What do you say of the person just
doing the bare minimum? She's not doing so
much, but people are protected from her tongue.
She's not hurting anybody.
She's from the people of paradise.
How you treat people is indicative of what's
going on in your heart. That's the metric
of it. And in this religion,
Allah has prescribed
excellence on everything.
That means the way you treat this earth,
the way you treat people you know, people
you don't know, the ones you see once
a year, the ones you see every single
day, all in between.
It's all about good character.
And the way you know the ritual is
actually doing something and it's molding your heart,
it's gonna be based off of how you
treat people. And
somebody, just think, somebody who's prayed fudger every
day of their life,
would you picture them being somebody who is
mean to people?
So you don't wanna just pray with your
body. You wanna pray with your heart. And
before he gets into
Islam,
He's laying the foundation through nonverbalized
aspects,
communicating
what it means to have just other,
etiquette,
ethics in a situation.
Womin, you were gonna say something, and then
we'll close out.
I was gonna say something similar to what
the brother said,
and it was more so
how
this had brought a lot of attention onto
the things that we ought to overlook in
in in life,
such as the kind of respect that we
show our elders, for example, or the way
we present ourselves. And it showed that we
do not trivial things and that they actually
do matter and have significance over the way
that,
you relate to other people and then they
will get back to us.
That's what,
Ritz and I were talking about.
Yeah. Marcela. Right? And a part of that's
also about respect for yourself.
The angel knows he's gonna stand out, and
he's not as scared of that.
He's comfortable enough with what's going on inside
of him
that
being noticed is not something that throws him
off his trajectory. Do you get what I
mean? There's gotta be a lot going on
there for us to be comfortable. Sometimes that's
not our fault. Sometimes the world puts a
lot of clutter inside of us that makes
it really hard and makes us sit in
boxes that were bigger than. But this is
an angel, a creature of light.
Only does what is good.
And so the outward is the reflection of
that inward, and it sets now as an
exemplary model of engagement. This is where I
want to be at. Does it make sense?
Okay. So a couple of quick reminders.
This Friday at around 6, we're gonna have
a program with the Nasihah Mental Health,
Organization.
It's gonna be on,
mental health in Islam. I forget what the
title is, but it's a little bit more
particular than that. I'll be at 6 o'clock
here in this space, so come to that.
All of our regular halakas are gonna be
happening also this week.
Tuesday, doctor Murmur on Quran.
Doctor Madwa will do something on,
emotions and Islamic psychospirituality
at 6 on Wednesday.
I'll follow it up with a helicopter on
the Sira at 7 o'clock.
Thursday, we'll have our,
and
Friday,
after Jumah will be that other program as
well.
So please do come out for any of
those. If thars are potluck, you don't have
to bring stuff in order to stick around
because they don't have to fasted in order
to stick around. The idea is also for
us to bring community together, right, and even
using this hadith as a basis. Some of
you don't know the rest of you. Do
you know? And you wanna understand that in
this community, we recognize there's a value add
to every person being here, which means
you. And so hang out a bit, talk
to the people around you, be in a
place where you allow for yourself to deepen
in that bond.
So we're gonna stand to pray Maghrib. After
that, we have a brother who's gonna take
a Shahada.
So once you pray your sunnah and nafal,
we'll do that. And then we'd love for
people to stick around and eat with us.
Then we'll pray,
when it comes in at, like, 8 something,
8:20 something.
Okay. Sound like.
Can one of you guys call the Azzan?
If you could put the chairs against the
wall, we'd appreciate it.