Khalid Latif – Imam Nawawis 40 Hadith for Modern Times #10
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Alihi, Wassa'habihi,
Waba'arikwassalam.
Assalamu alaikumratullah.
Sorry again for being a little late.
Just finishing up the meeting.
Also, I apologize.
I'm still sick from last week. It's not
contagious.
So if I sound a little more monotonous
than usually, please forgive me for that. So
we've been looking at the 4th hadith
of the 40 hadith collection of Imam Nawawi.
And this hadith quite often gets described
based off of its content around
divine decree, predestination,
as well as embryology.
So people wanna pull up the hadith on
their phone.
You can just Google something
like 40 hadith nowawi,
hadith number 4, or something like that.
That would be good.
Or now what we hadith 4.
It starts
on the authority
of Abdullah bin Mas'ud. It might say also,
just the actual text of the hadith itself.
And just a quick recap. Like, we're going
through this pretty slow because we wanna extrapolate
meaning from it. But also as an exercise,
you wanna be able to think like, how
do I reflect on text? You know, how
do I not just take it in a
reductive way at a surface level that what's
the most apparent meaning? Or also just when
somebody tells me this is what it means,
I just kinda take it at an absolute
level. But I can start to see how
there's just such depth in
what it is that's in front of me
from the standpoint of Quranic verse or from
prophetic tradition
that allows for us to then understand how
the religion is something that's purposely, like, accessible.
Right? That you don't have to know, like,
millions of hadith
and Quran
to be able to have a deep relationship
with God. Do you know what I mean?
And you can take just what you have
access to, but utilizing it in terms of
who you are in your entirety to engage
in it with just reflection
and contemplation.
So people have the hadith open.
Yeah. Can somebody read it to us?
You read in English,
or in Arabic.
She wants to read. Are you volunteering her?
Yeah.
Verily, the creation of each one of you
is brought together in his mother's womb for
40 days in the form of a drop.
Then he becomes the cup of blood for
a life period.
Then a morsel of flesh for a life
period.
Then there is sent to him the angel
who blows the breath of life into him
and who is commanded with 4 matters
to write down his sustenance,
his lifespan,
his actions, and whether he will be happy
or unhappy,
whether or not he will enter paradise.
By Allah, other than whom there is no
deity, verily one of them performs the actions
of the people of paradise until there is
but an arm's length between the minute, and
that which has been written overtakes them. And
so he acts with the actions of the
people of the hellfire and thus enters it.
And verily,
of the people of the hellfire and thus
enters it. And verily, one of you performs
the actions of the people of the hellfire
until there is but an arm's length between
him and it, and that which has been
written overtakes him. And so he acts with
the actions of the people of paradise unless
he enters it.
So just a quick kinda recap. When we
talk about the Hadith literature,
a hadith
is something that refers to an action, a
saying, or the tacit approval
of the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.
So if the prophet said to do something,
he did something himself or he saw you
do something and didn't say don't do that,
This all encompasses,
like, what an individual
narration one hadith
could be.
And the hadith has two parts to it.
It has the isnad,
which is the chain of transmitters.
You know, so and so heard from so
and so, heard from so and so, who
heard from the messenger of God. And then
it has what's called the or the text
like the actual content of it what was
just read right now.
And so you have a lot of different
hadith,
that talk about topics of all different kinds.
Imam Nawawi, he puts together this book of
40 hadith that actually has 42 hadith in
it.
And we've looked at the first three
already.
The first one is actions are by their
intentions
in the. And
the second,
is called the tradition of Gabriel.
Prophet is engaged by the angel Gabriel asking
questions of what is Islam,
what is
iman, meaning faith, what is Ihsan,
quite often described as spirituality,
for lack of better translations?
Tell me of the hour. Right? And we
talked about this, you know, where Islam gives
this system to kinda get, you know,
understanding, like, a systematized,
multidimensional
understanding of the religion. But also there's not,
like, so much that goes into it. It's
all packed into this hadith.
The 3rd hadith, Bani al Islam Al Khamz
that Islam is built upon 5. It's like
a deeper dive into the 5 pillars of
Islam. And now we're looking at this 4th
hadith. Right? And we wanna just kinda reflect
and ponder upon the meanings and try to
understand how to actualize them. And so from
this hadith,
we talked first about who Abdullah ibn Mas'ud
was,
early companion of the prophet
converted
at an early stage of Islam.
He came from
a low income
social class.
He was amongst the companions
who was black.
He was known for his
deep connection to Quran.
They said that he embodied,
and resembled the character of the prophet more
than anyone else. He was constantly with the
prophet in different ways.
He was heavily persecuted
in those early years of revelation when Muslims
were mistreated
based off of the stratified society of Mecca,
racism, classism,
all of these kinds of things.
And, you know, we talked about where and
how
his
social identity
as someone who came from a lower social
class, who racially
in this highly stratified society,
you know, had the wrong skin color and
was deeply persecuted as a result. You know,
what kind of impact does that bring into
kind of the
conveyance of
the
text that we're looking at in and of
itself,
the hadith, the particular one.
And we talked about then
the first part of what he says when
he describes the prophet
as being sadaq and masdook,
like the trustworthy one,
you know, the one who speaks the truth
and the one who is trusted. Right? That
he speaks truth and he's believed. And what
does this mean in relation to some of
what the text is gonna talk about,
as well as just the prophet's character?
And then last week, we talked about, like,
the part of the hadith where it says
that a 120 days,
the soul is breathed into the fetus.
And we discussed,
like, just what's the journey of the soul
from an Islamic kinda standpoint.
Right? That all of the souls exist together
in in abode of the,
like, where the souls are, like, all kind
of in one space
the soul individually enters into the womb
and from there there's existence in this world.
Death is not something that is finite, but
a means, a transitory
mechanism to the next existence,
which is the barzakh, the grave.
From there, there's
a resurrection to a day of judgment where
every individual is taken into account for their
actions.
And then after that, there's just eternal existence
that we are created beings, but we're created
for eternal existence. Right? May Allah make us
people of paradise.
But thinking about this in the nature of
the soul in and of itself
and what that means. And we talked about
the
physical and metaphysical parts to us
and what gets in the way sometimes of
us understanding or focusing on the metaphysical parts,
the celestial parts. Right? This not just taking
care of your outward, but taking care of
your inward as well. Does this sound familiar
to anybody from what we're talking about? Yeah.
Say, but, hey. Why are you looking over
there? Yeah. Does that sound familiar? Yeah.
Well,
hopefully, it sounds familiar.
So we wanna get into a little bit
more of this today
and get into the particulars
of the latter part of the hadith,
and try to wrap up with the content
of this particular narration.
So when Abdul Abdul Mas'ud is saying that
he is the one that
is the
the trustworthy one. He's believed, and he speaks
the truth. Right? Huasadiq,
that he speaks the truth.
He's the one that's believed.
It gives an insight now also into a
very important part of Islam as a religion
that some of you might have heard,
in Arabic, we call it the rayb, the
unseen.
Right? And what they're gonna be talking about
are now things that contextually,
14 centuries ago, there wasn't kinda scientific understanding
of these things.
Nobody was sitting
in Mecca in Arabia, let alone sitting in
any part of the world saying that I
think this is the way the fetus develops
in the womb.
And you have in the Quran
an understanding
of where and how
this is kinda echoed. Right? In Surat Al
Mote Minun, there's a chapter. It's called the
chapter of the believers, Al Mote Minun,
that,
it speaks about, like, the nature of the
fetus also,
but
how it aligns with what we know in
terms of just modern science
is something that
relates to this idea
at that time,
this is something that is unseen.
Right? And recognizing that there's still, like, a
belief in it that this has truth to
it.
The unseen elements are something that's important to
understand, especially from the standpoint of spirituality
because
religion in and of itself
when we see these hadith
kind of all together
when the focus is only on ritual and
practice the externals
and not the multiple dimensions that we talked
about in the second hadith.
What it does is it starts to reduce
kind of perspective,
And sometimes what you have to look at
is not what is the most apparent thing,
but what is it pointing towards? What is
it giving indication towards? What is it a
sign of? Where is the deeper meaning that's
coming from something? Like, I could walk through
the park
and experience all kinds of things in Washington
Square Park. Right?
But you can go through Washington Square Park,
and you can see
that a lot of people are really happy
in the park all the time. You know,
whether these are people
who are happy just because they're normally happy
or they're happy because they're like substantively
induced happiness,
Whatever it is, they're smiling. Right?
But their joy is very real,
and you can't discount it.
And there's something that comes from just being
in a place that is unobstructed
by buildings, and you can see the stars,
or even where you walk through all this
concrete and it's got its own beauty, at
times there's flowers that are blooming. Right? Like,
if you've ever been here in the spring
or the summer, just right at the edge
of the park here, there's this beautiful tree
that blossoms into these, like, wonderful pink flowers
that on our holiday after Ramadan and Eid,
there's, like, lines of people just standing under
there to take pictures and photos. Right?
So you use the opportunity to, like, experience
it with all of your senses.
I'm not just seeing something but I'm perceiving
something. I'm not just hearing something, but I'm
listening to it. Right? I'm not just eating.
I'm actually tasting.
Do you know? I'm not just in this
place where I'm touching, but I'm feeling something.
Do you get what I mean? And the
sensory perception gets to a place that allows
for reflection and contemplation
that
says to me that, hey, if this is
how beautiful
a tree can look
in the middle of Manhattan,
what must a tree in paradise look like?
If this is how nice it is when
like the world is so heavy
and you just see people smiling, and the
nature of their smiling brings you something inwardly
that it becomes a little bit contagious,
What must it be like to exist in
a place that perpetually
is just joyful, but also has no presence
of arrogance or busyness or greed or misery
or any of these things.
There's a narration
where Abdullah ibn Umar who was the narrator
of the previous hadith that we were looking
at. He's a son of Omid ibn Al
Khattab. He's with his father, and the prophet
asks him, as well as, like, a large
group of people,
what tree is, like, the believer the most
like?
And they're all trying to figure out what
this tree is.
And Abdullah ibn Umar, he knows the answer.
The date palm tree, the nakhla tree.
And the date palm tree is the answer
but nobody answers and he doesn't because he's
younger and he feels
embarrassed to speak in this gathering of elderly
people.
And so the prophet says it's the day
palm tree and he begins to explain why
in terms of the shade that it offers
and the benefit from its fruit and how
it's something that people gain from the way
when you practice this religion. It's not meant
to be self serving but it's meant to
bring benefit
to the people around you. And so, Abdullah
ibn Umar later he says to his father,
I knew the answer and his father says,
why didn't you say it? And he gives
the reasons that I didn't wanna speak in
this gathering with others, and he encourages them
to.
There's a lot that goes into that in
terms of, like, parental children relations and how
you want to encourage and whatever else.
But if you think about it in terms
of what we're talking about here, the nature
of the seen versus the unseen,
that tree could have been any tree that
does these types of things.
Bark does this, leaves do this, the fruit
does this.
So what makes the nakhla tree, the date
palm tree, different from these other trees?
And you gotta look into it a little
bit more deeply.
Most trees, they have a root system
that has it all bunched up really tight
in the ground.
Does anybody here know anything about trees?
Like, is that anyone's specialty so I'm not
embarrassing myself?
No? Yeah?
Is yours? I don't know. Do you know
what I'm talking about? So, like, the root
system
is all bunched up like this, tangled up.
That's how a lot of trees are. The
date palm tree,
its root system is not like this. It's
just like very loosely
kind of ingrained
into the earth.
Meaning, if you had a tree that its
roots were all jumbled together,
then it's literally stuck in the dunya.
And to get it out of the materialistic
world, you gotta, like, do a lot to
pull it out of the earth. But the
date palm tree, it's not stuck in this
world.
It's not deeply entrenched in the world.
You can't know that about the date palm
tree if you're only looking at what's seen
of the tree above the ground.
You have to be able to think about
what's happening where it's unseen.
Do you get what I mean? Does that
make sense?
What's where not my eyes can see it,
but other perception allows for me to think
about it. So where there's metaphysical
kind of impact on things, what does the
food that I eat actually do to me
inwardly?
What is the company that I keep influencing
me around? How do I think about things
not just in terms of what is most
apparent, but what is it that is unseen?
What's happening as I get desensitized
not to just imagery of warfare and conflict
but every TV show that I turn on
that's filled with just vulgar, coarse imagery
dehumanizing
people. What does it do to me when
we think about things that are unseen a
little bit differently?
That there's erasure of narrative
that every character that I see on a
television
looks like they're from a certain place only.
But when others are displayed from certain places,
it's in gross caricatures.
So there's nothing that is visible that's there
that is demonstrating
the deep culture of oppressed populations,
The language, the arts, the foods, the cuisines.
I can only think about them in this
place and my mind doesn't allow for me
to go beyond what is most apparent
and understand that there's existence
beyond what it is that I'm seeing visually.
Do you get what I'm saying?
Does that make sense?
Right? So when Anthony Bourdain
is taking
trips to Palestine
and talking about the food that's eaten in
Palestine,
the culture of Palestine,
the arts of Palestine.
But there's people who they can't even think
that
these people
actually live entire lives like this. May Allah
grant them ease. Do you get what I'm
saying? Because when you get stuck in reductive
vision
and says I can only understand through what
is visible to me straight in front of
me, you start to mute now other parts
of yourself that are metaphysical.
Does that make sense?
And so in that unseen
frame,
like, I can't tell you what it does
to you
when you are praying your prayers
or what it's not doing to you when
you choose to forego
something that's fard.
Just like I can't tell you, like, what
it's doing to me when I drink this
water and it's literally flowing through my body
in a way that I have no understanding
of it. If you knew how your inside
actually function, you wouldn't eat a lot of
the garbage that you eat. Right? I wouldn't
eat a lot of the garbage that I
eat if I knew what it was doing
to my body. Do you know what I'm
saying?
Similarly,
consumption in these other ways
has this impact also.
And just because you're not seeing it, doesn't
mean you're not experiencing it.
When you start to think about these things
altogether.
Right? Angels that are documenting what it is
that I do. They're there whether we understand
it or not.
The blessings of being in spaces
where God is remembered,
understanding and recognizing
what it means to be situated also
in a spectrum
of arenas.
What is it doing to my heart to
be in a place where the only thing
that's discussed
is rooted in capitalistic
goals and ambitions?
What does it do when infrastructure
is centuries old? Because think think about how
people have evolution.
Right? The way people create things
in what we know.
The way a wheel looks today is not
the way a wheel looked centuries
ago. Right? When it was first founded, it's
very different.
Technology is different. This phone is not what
a phone used to look like. When I
was
really young, I'm not gonna say when because
you're gonna think I'm a spoiled brat but
I had a cell phone before most people
had a cell phone
and I had my first phone was a
StarTech Digital, which was a flip phone a
long time ago. Right? Cash knows because he's
old as I am.
And then I went through a place where
my relationship with phones were really terrible and
that I just didn't care. I just wanna
be able to call people.
So I got to a place when I
started working here initially.
I just, like,
was volunteer. I didn't have money for food,
let alone to buy phones. So whenever my
phone broke, somebody would just give me a
old phone that they had. So I went
from, like, a blackberry
to, like, old other phones. And then the
last phone I had before my wife who,
after we got married, she told me how
just much of my life had to be
fixed up,
including some of these things.
My last phone, I was almost 30 years
old.
I had,
a sidekick
that was, like, an old phone from an
undergrad girl that she had when she was
16 in high school. So I'm pulling out
this, like, teenage girl's phone every so often
in these meetings. Right? And pulling them, you
know, and, like, whatever. And the only people
who are impressed by it were also other
teenage girls. They're like, woah, that's so cool.
Right? It's not the same as the one
that I had when I was younger. It's
evolved in these ways. Do you know?
Now just think about this in terms of
the evolution of things that are introduced
that have kinda
malicious presence.
You get astonished
as to how
crazy it is the way humans have developed
ways to kill each other,
to abuse and oppress each other.
It doesn't look the same
inequity
as
its point of origin
because when you've had
decades and centuries
to amplify
and enhance
the way that you can gossip, the way
that you can lie, the way that you
can cheat, the way that you can abuse,
the way that you can mistreat people. People
just keep adding on to it again and
again and again.
So you can go from a place where
someone literally
at one point said, hey, you know what?
We're gonna bring all these black people over
here to do this work. We're gonna make
them work, like,
just all day and all night. We're gonna
like kill them because they're no use to
us when they're elderly.
We're gonna make them eat the leftover foods
of animals.
They're not gonna be wearing any clothes. We're
gonna take their names away and give them
other names. Take their religion away and give
them other religion.
And then, they get to a place where
you're like, how can you go from that
to anything else? And then, Jim Crow, mass
incarceration,
the realities
of just how again and again and again,
there's just deeper and deeper dehumanization.
What do you think it's doing to your
inside?
Being in the spaces
that reinforce these things.
And if you don't have an understanding
that you are not just what is outward,
but the unseen elements
bear impact.
This hadith is giving us an understanding
that there is that which is seen and
that which is unseen.
And to have knowledge of the unseen
becomes now a necessary component
in order to then be able to engage
parts of ourselves that are unseen
as well as being able to deal
with realms of the unseen that are around
us. Does this make sense?
And so it becomes purposeful.
Like, I want you to focus only on
what is reductive and what's right in front
of you and on your stomach and on
your body and on the physical and on
the outward alone.
And then the enhancing qualities
in the states that we're in are shown
to us
from things that are not tangible
but are manifest outwardly.
You wanna know the state of your heart?
Look at how you treat things around you.
How do you honor the rights of creation,
those that are above you in societal standing,
those that come from
other places in social standings, quote unquote, underneath
you? How do you treat the smallest of
creatures to the largest of creatures? Do you
throw garbage on the ground? Do you like
put things in a trash can? Are you
conscious of like composting
and recycling or just throw everything, like, into
one box and it doesn't make sense? But
it's telling you about unseen parts of yourself
as a mechanism to then be able to
think out some of these things.
The Ru is just one part of us
inwardly.
So to understand the nature of the soul,
you gotta understand everything else that makes you
you. And the Islamic psychology,
of the self, the framework of the self
understands the physical. It's called the jesid, the
badin. That's your body.
But you also then have the ruh, which
we talked about last week.
You have your spiritual heart, the kalb, that
has layers to it.
So the outer layer is called the suddr.
Right? This is like your chest. So there's
a verse in the Quran that speaks about
the whispers of the devil, Shaitan.
It goes against your chest.
Right? That's where that outer layer is. The
next layer is, what you call the qalb,
the spiritual
heart. You then have an inner layer to
that that's called the fuad.
This is like the seed of emotions
and other things. So in the Quran, for
example, when the mother of Moses is described
as having an anxiety
by putting the baby into the river,
like the anxiety is in her fuad. And
then you have the most inner part that's
called the lub. And the lub
is, like, likened in its relationship to the
heart overall,
to the pupil
in relationship to the eye overall, or the
relationship of the Kaaba to Mecca. Right? Like,
it's the most central part of it. That's
your heart in its entirety.
You then have the nafs, the lower self,
the ego.
You have irada, sheer will and determination.
This is all going on inside of you
kind of simultaneously,
capacities
in these ways.
And then also inside of you is all
your emotions,
all your experiences,
your memories,
everything that you've gone through to, like, kinda
kick into play in different ways.
And to know the nature of the ruh
is more easily understood when you know the
nature of the rest of these things. And
you can think about yourself
as bigger than just what is, like, the
outward
alone, the body,
You know? Does this make sense?
Yeah. So I want us to take a
pause. I know I'm talking a lot. You
can turn to the person next to you.
What are you taking away so far? What
is it bringing up for you? And then
we'll kind of move into the parts on
divine decree
and the soul as it relates to this,
conversation. But go ahead.
What is that?
I know that number?
201565.
Yeah. It's Hannah.
It's Hannah's. Just text her.
Yeah. But,
it might not be her number anymore.
She might have changed her number.
I tried for my number, but it didn't
the text didn't work.
That's fine. Let's let's see what happens. I
don't think that's Hannah's number anymore.
That's her old number.
Okay.
So what are some of the things that
are coming up
so far? What are we taking away?
Any thoughts?
Do you understand this point of, like, unseen?
You know?
It's like
hostages are being released,
and people are saying, I can't believe that
they're only being given rice to eat.
Then it's like, well, don't you understand why
they don't have any food to begin
with? Do you know? But the mind can't
get to step number 2 because
it doesn't know how to work beyond, like,
what is just right in front of it.
Do you do you see what I'm saying?
But what are some of the things we're
taking away so far?
What do we discuss?
Yeah.
Your intention behind doing a certain action has
to be greater than, like, what your action
is. Like,
like, I
I made the point I'm gonna out myself.
I made the point where it's, like, you
know, we always talk about how we want,
like, the bad to turn into good and,
like, we're good and, like, the bad is
always, like, this other, but, like, bad is
never gonna turn into good unless you go
to the bad, you know? They have to
talk. So, like, sometimes when people, like,
goes back to tension where, like, okay, well,
why are they
doing these things and, like, are they staying
true to themselves and
and all that and, like, that I think
is just to
be right.
Great.
Other thoughts?
Any takeaways?
Why is this, like, an important thing for
us to understand
the existence
of
this reality that is unseen?
Because we're not just like a body.
We're not just a body in this world
that
exists,
and we're all gonna
Yeah. Right? And you think about how does
this permeate so many different existences.
If any of you have ever lost a
loved one before. Do you know what I
mean?
People sit and they're like, I you don't
you don't know how to, like, you're learning
how to love in a new way now
because
there's
distinct existence
that you have to kinda love across
realms,
so to speak. You know, how do I
love somebody who's transitioned into a different world
of existence?
You can understand
conceptually
to the point that it bears conviction
what is unseen,
then there's impact from this worldly existence to
the next worldly existence.
Do you see what I mean? Right? Can
you believe that there's, like, angels in the
space adding blessing to it? Can you fundamentally
understand
the difference between
drinking a cup of water and saying Bismillah
before you drink, or not saying Bismillah at
all, right, taking a sip in the name
of God,
versus not taking a sip in the name
of God.
Drinking and saying alhamdulillah,
like thanking God for the water and understanding
is that adding metaphysical benefit to it. Right?
When I'm eating food and I'm eating mindfully
as opposed to just consuming and consuming and
consuming
without really then understanding how it dilutes my
ability to be a contributor.
So the dua, like before you start to
eat,
that oh Allah,
make blessed for us that which you have
sustained us with
and protect us from the punishments
of the fire.
Like, why do these two things go together?
If you're in this place where,
you know,
you're about to consume,
do you believe that just the utterance of
certain words
can now add metaphysical
blessing to it?
That Barakah in our tradition, blessing is the
ability to, you know, do more with less.
So I don't need to eat as much
Because what I'm eating with is giving me
kind of
strength and vitality,
my sleep,
you know, my consumption gets impacted by elements
that are unseen.
Do you see what I mean?
What's like the difference in a house that
the Quran is read
versus a house that the Quran is not
read
versus a house that the Quran is acted
upon versus a house that the Quran is
not acted upon? Do you know? Right? And
you can look at these through different parameters.
But these things have unseen elements
have to be important.
Can you see somebody's, like, pain?
Do you know?
How many days do you spend in the
world
and you're in this place where, like, people
you know, this this other day,
this young woman in our community,
she is like, I got something for you,
and I'll open it and
it was like,
anti aging oxidation cream or something. I
was like, man, what do I look like
right now? You know what I'm saying? Right?
So I was like, oh, thank you. You
know?
But
being able to understand,
like, most of us walk through our days
and nobody notices
what we're feeling.
You know? The prophet, he uniquely
would just know when his people,
like, were agitated and something was going on.
You walk into a room, right? And people
sit next to you. Your friend is like,
I can't believe, you know, you didn't know
that was and you're like, what? Why? You
didn't tell me you were upset.
But when you're looking from your heart,
like, you can just tell
somebody's not okay.
Do do you get what I'm saying?
These are all like ingrained in this idea
of being able to see that you are
much bigger than just your physical self. And
this hadith is saying there's parts to you
that you got to reflect upon.
Why is this relevant to this other part
of the hadith now that's about embryology?
I mean, it could be, it could not
be. Right? This is something we wanna understand.
You can essentially turn text into whatever you
want to at the end of the day.
That's why you have to be able to
recognize it as a actual
whole text
and what are, like, the objectives of this
text. Because you could turn a book into
whatever you'd like for it to be turned
into. Just like people can turn images into
whatever they'd like for it. You can sit
right now and be like, how do you
see what's going on in the world, but
you see it in a way that's so
different from how I see it? Because people
can manipulate
and turn things into various vantage points and
they could be looking at it not just
from their physical eyes, but their spiritual eyes
or they could not be looking at it
from their physical eyes, but they could be
looking at it through a reconciled pain or
through a heart that's filled with greed
and just all kinds of vices. You know,
may Allah protect us from these things.
So this part of the hadith
is talking about the stages through which the
fetus develops
is pretty remarkable
and you don't wanna take it into like
this kind of like old uncle type mode
of why Islam is like great. You know,
like look it's science in the Quran and
Hadith type thing. But being able to understand
that 14 centuries ago,
they
were talking
in this hadith
and extrapolating
from Quran
things that were proven scientifically
only in the prism
of like modern medicines.
And there are people who become Muslim just
because of this.
I'm supposed to go to South Africa at
the end of December to Cape Town.
I've never been before. I don't know if
any of you've been before or not to
Cape Town. Has anybody been to Cape Town
before?
No?
Amazing. I wanna take my kids to see
where Mandela was imprisoned.
I'd like to go see it also,
I think, as well just visiting South Africa
with the realities that much of the world
can no longer deny
and being able to hear from people who
successfully abolished apartheid in their country,
you know, recognizing what that is like.
But a friend of mine who studied in
South Africa,
he said to me,
you know, what you have to go and
see
is what is
like described in Surah Al Rahman in the
Quran,
like, the chapter that identifies god as the
most merciful. That's what it's named as. And
there's a verse that talks about where, like,
the seas meet each other. Do you know?
And there's this barrier between them, and it
just looks like
they're like 2,
like, distinct bodies of water that are just
kinda hitting against each other and there's a
separation
between them.
The Quran spoke about this, like, centuries ago
and people
see it
in, like,
real time. And they're like, how does this
book talk about this thing?
And you have to be able to make
these connections in a way
that allows for your heart to be open
because
many of us
who get born into Islam,
our sense of validation
becomes very limited
in what our religion offers
because of how much we are
submitted to
supremacist systems.
And we might not admit, but it's there
how we internalize racisms.
And there's different joys when someone converts to
Islam,
but a part of it, not all of
it, is happiness. You see, like, the recognition
of just somebody
who really believes something, and you can't deny
it in their eyes, like it's just there.
Do you know?
But also a part of it is validating.
That's like, hey. You know? This guy converted
to Islam.
Maybe it's not bad that I'm a Muslim.
Do you know what I mean?
You don't want to be in a place
where you can't see yourself in your entirety,
but you start to build a relationship with
this religion
in these ways. And you start to ask
yourselves,
not in ways that like
some elder man on Thanksgiving and your family
is like trying to convince, you know, your
significant other to convert to Islam by saying
like, the prophet talked about pregnant women like
14. Like, what are you talking about pregnant
women? But understanding
that where does it come from
other than just divine sources?
How is it that this religion
is not at odds with science
the way other religions are at odds with
science.
It's actually a deficiency in your iman, in
your faith, if something is factually scientifically
proven
and you still deny that that's a thing.
Do you know? Like, I would be described
as having a problem with my faith
if I said the sky is not blue,
the sky
is, you know, like some random
yellow.
Do you get what I mean?
Generally speaking, right?
Do you know what I'm saying? Right? But
generally. Right? The grass isn't green. Grass is
purple. Do you know? Like, these are things
that they're just non debatables.
So here,
you have this and there's numerous things in
the Quran and in the Hadith
that are evidence
as being in line with science,
but their validity in our religion
is not rooted in, well, science proved it
and that's what made it true. The whole
idea is whether I understand it or not
because God said it, then it must be
true.
And I don't have to be able to
explain it.
Now you have this black man narrating this
hadith,
Abdullah bin Mas'ud,
and he's telling these people as he narrates
this hadith that he heard from the prophet
in this stratified society,
all of us as humans have a common
beginning.
We all are born into existence in this
way.
You don't know what's going on in that
woman's stomach 14 centuries ago. They don't know
what's going on, but he's saying that this
is what's happening
in this person's stomach. The Quran,
it's telling us this. The Hadith, it's affirming
this for us. Here are these stages
where you have now the interjection of a
120
days
when the soul is breathed into
the fetus
but also in the onset of the Hadith
that talks about 40 days,
Right?
We have the hadith in front of us.
What's the part that talks about these different
stages? Can someone just read that sentence?
Does anybody have it? Yeah. Go ahead. I
still have the book.
Verily,
the creation of each one of you
is brought together in the smallest belly
for 40 days.
40 days in the form of a seed,
then he is a a clot.
A clot of blood for a life period.
Then a morsel of flesh
for life period.
Then there is sent
to him the angel
who blows the breath of life into him
and who is commanded about 4 matters
up to there. Right? Yeah. That's fine. Mhmm.
So a 120 days is how many months?
4. Yeah. 4 months. Right?
So here now, you have two parameters,
40 days to a 120 days.
This Hadith
is also speaking to like the sanctity of
life
from an Islamic paradigm.
And it's giving an indication now as an
entry point that at this juncture,
this fetus
has what gives it life its soul.
The
embryology
aspects to it are things that you can
just ponder and reflect on your own volition
like, hey, what does it mean that they're
talking about this?
But now it bears an entry point for
us to think about how
these texts
understand
or offer understanding in other frames as well.
What happens, for example, if a mother miscarries?
God forbid.
At what stage is that fetus considered to
be,
like, a living creature
that it now has the rights
of funeral
like prayers
and burials and shrouds done upon it. Do
you get what I mean?
Where in Islam
do you have allowances
for abortions
in relation to
what
is the entry point of the soul
and a spectrum of opinions that are understood
from the standpoint
of, like, circumstances,
imminent harm to the mother,
things like assault,
*, etcetera,
to if something happens
prior to the 40 days or a 120
days, is it categorically different than thereafter?
Do you see what I mean?
But it's giving
as a basis
a notion
that you have to think about in historical
context
that this black man who is poor,
who was the first person to publicly read
Quran in Mecca and was beaten in front
of the Kaaba for doing it, he's telling
everybody
we all have a common beginning.
Every one of us had this soul breathed
into
the wounds of our mothers. That's how we
all, like, started.
And this is what gives, like, dignity and
sanctity.
It's not a religion
that conditionalizes
or qualifies
that there is no sanctity
for certain lives,
But it's telling you that even from the
onset
that you have to have consideration
for the unborn
fetus,
let alone once it's born into the world.
To the extent
that you can imagine
what it must be like.
I'm Abdulah ibn Mas'ud
standing in front of
people
who are dealing with the realities. Right? We
talked about it. If you were here for
it, Abdul Ibn Mas'ud was described as somebody
who is like physically small stature, very skinny.
He is black.
He is from like a poor family.
He's not, like, from the elite and kind
of nobility,
and he's telling all of these people
a
perspective
that is revolutionary
in their society.
And the basis of it isn't about, like,
the politics. Remove from it what you understand,
like, the world around you to have in
conversations
that are heavily politicized.
And think about it from a theology
that dignifies humanity
that every single
human has this thing.
And this
is
significant
because it teaches us that we have to
just have
respect for people.
Whether you agree with
their, like, way of life or not, whether
they have your faith or not.
And this is what you find when you
look at supremacist
religion
and extremist religion
and you look at what you find within
kinda the check boxes of privilege that exist
in this country.
Right? And you find like the white protestant
male
mindset
that exists
and you look at where there's just an
absence of sanctity
of humanity.
How? Like you ask yourself the question,
how is it that you don't care that
you're killing this many babies?
The number of people that's not like a
joke, Right? This is why you'd have to
think from your heart and not get lost
in kind of a zeitgeist mode of learning
your faith or what your ethics are but
being in a place where you actually think
deeply or when your friends ask you, like,
hey. How are there hostages on both sides
all of a sudden? Where do these guys
get hostages from? So you're not in a
place where it's your nuffs that's talking, but
your heart that's talking because you're awake. You're
not just a body. And you're like, yeah,
man. That's a good question. Why don't we
actually talk about where these other people came
from? And not just, like, random grown men,
but where do these women and children get
taken from all of a sudden? How do
they just have them and they got a
lot more that they can start bartering out
there? From where? Where does it come from?
So here, you have this idea
that human life is sacred.
All humans
and that means you gotta get yourself in
check sometimes too
because this isn't a religion
that tells us to make distinctions in the
other direction.
You have to love people just because they're
people.
That means you love the person sitting next
to you. That means you love the person
that sleeps in the park. That means that
you love the person that's driving the bus,
that means that you love the train conductor,
even if you don't know where they're driving
the train from.
It means you have a deep respect
and love doesn't mean you have to like
somebody, right? But you are in a place
where you can recognize
the sharedness
at that unseen level.
Does this make sense?
There's all kinds of things that get derived
from it that we're not gonna talk about
right now, but you could look into it
more, and this hadith becomes a part to
it. Right? Like, there's women in our community
who unfortunately experienced miscarriages. May Allah grant them
ease and they will reach out. How do
we bury our child? You know, what do
we do?
And there's
different parameters based off of certain things. Right?
Like, if the fetus has discernible body parts,
it's a little different. I don't know if
anybody's ever seen, like, you know, the
oh my god. I'm, like, half asleep.
What's it called when, you know, they're putting
the jelly on the woman's stomach? It's a
sonogram. Right? Ultrasound.
Right? Is it the same thing? Yeah. Right?
When my daughter,
when Priya was pregnant with Medina,
we went in,
you know, and it's amazing. Like, you should
make sure that
you are
not letting somebody else raise your children.
I talked to a lot of dads before
my daughter was born, and the first three
fathers I spoke to,
all separate individuals. They were not friends, wasn't
like the same conversation days apart, people didn't
know each other. I said, what was it
like for you when your kid was born?
They were very vulnerable with me
and said, you know, we didn't I didn't
the 3 of them all said the same
thing. I didn't love my kid for the
1st few years. I was like, what are
you talking
about? That they were not at doctor's appointments.
Somebody else was changing diapers. You know, they
weren't, like, with their spouse, their wife, like,
in these moments. Right?
And so
I made sure, like, I didn't I didn't
wanna not love my kid. You know? I
can't even tell you how much I love
Medina. I love Kareem too. Right? You know
what I mean? But,
like, I I couldn't I didn't even know
what love meant until my daughter was born.
And,
like, even thinking about what that was like
holding her
in that moment is crazy
when she was born.
But before she was born, Priya was pregnant
with Medina, and we went to the doctor,
we heard the heartbeat, whatever else, and they
were doing the sonogram
and the doctor is, like, going on Priya's
stomach
and showing us things, and Priya got excited
and she was, you know it's a true
story. You can ask her. Don't tell her,
though. She'll punch me in the face. But
she were she were looking at the sonogram
and,
Priya's like, oh, I think, like, I see
her face,
and the doctor was like, that's her butt.
Right? And I was like, amazing. And Priya's
like, oh my god. I thought my daughter's
face was my butt. But,
relevant to this conversation,
like, if the fetus has discernible body parts,
you can make out, like, fingers and things.
Do you know? I don't know if you've
ever been in a place where you've actually
had to
be like in my work.
I am with people a lot at the
end of their life,
or, you know,
in situations like this
is tricky,
you know, like, it's it's heavy. That's why
also funerals
don't have a lot of individual
obligations to them. Like, the way you have
to pray fajr,
right, for your I can't pray your fajr.
You can't pray my fajr. Do you know
what I mean? But if, God forbid,
somebody died in our family
and it was too hard for you to
go to, like, wash the browdy, you don't
you're not required to do it. Does that
make sense?
Do you know? So when I'm on the
phone with, like, people who have lost their
loved ones and they're like, this person's telling
me that I'm a bad son or daughter
because, like, you know, like,
hesitant to wash, like, my dad's body.
And it's part of, like, the funeral process.
You wash the body, like, and then it's
shrouded
before it's buried.
It's a very simple process.
So I'll say, like, you don't have to
do it, man. Like, I I'll do it.
You know? Does it make you more or
less of a son?
Right, or a daughter or a wife or
a mother or a husband or a father?
You're just a human being, do you know?
That's where there's beauty in our religion
that you can understand God's mercy even through
fiqh.
Then can you imagine if you were required
to have to be the person
to, like, do this as you're mourning your
your your loved one that's lost. Do you
know what I mean? Right? And then you
think about it in this way. I'm gonna
go tell a mom, hey. I know you,
like, just lost your baby.
But are there any discernible, like, features from
the body in the feet? Like, no. Like,
this lady is, like, grieving
the loss of her child. Do you get
what I mean? Does that make sense? And
you can think also about this from the
standpoint
of,
you know,
from abortion,
which comes up quite often
in, like, kinda modern conversations,
especially because of the politics in this country
and how people
become very indifferent
towards just everyone's day to day life. So
as a Muslim person,
your idea is to be able to understand
that
all of this rhetoric is not just about
the politics of a situation.
You know, you wanna know also what something
means
in relation to
just, like,
people's lived experiences
and their realities,
and you don't want it to be something
that just kinda gets thrown off
because of some kinda misinformation
or sound bite knowledge of Islam. Does that
make sense?
So as this kind of moves forward, you
then have a discussion or conversation
on what's called predestination
or other divine decree.
Right? And it mentions 4 specific things
that this angel is writing at this moment.
Can somebody read what these four things are?
Does anybody have it in front of them?
Yeah. Go ahead.
You have? Yeah. Go for it. Daniel is
commanded to write 4 decrees that he writes
down his provision, risk, his lifespan, his deeds,
and whether he will be among the wretched
or the blessed.
Great.
So
Islam
theologically
deals with this challenge
doctrinally
just like other religions do.
There is a theological
paradox
within this religion
that there is divine decree and within that,
there exists human agency.
Like these two things coexist.
The spectrum of it
is in a place where it's not at
the absolutes.
Right? You have, for example, a notion
that everything is just, like,
absolute
determinism,
and this becomes a problem.
And people, like, politically
usurp religion.
Right? So there is a dynasty historically in
the Muslim world, the Umayyad dynasty.
They were very
big on validating
this, like, theological opinion
that said, well, everything is just by, like,
God's decree.
There's no point in us doing anything. Because
it gave them the argument to be able
to say, well, like, don't blame us that
we're in charge or we're the authority or
we're just doing this is, like, from God.
Like, we what what can we do? Do
you know?
Or on the other end of it, you
have, like, this idea
that is just of, you know, human agency,
devoid of any aspect of god's control.
Right? And so there's 2
kind of broader
theological schools that exist. You don't have to
know their names. Right? But just if you
want to. On this end of the spectrum,
the absolutist
perspective
is from the Jabariya
kind of perspective.
And,
you know,
everything is, like,
just divine decree determinism.
And here, you have the Mu'tazilite
perspective
on this realm
that is
just about, like, human agency.
These two things are very different,
or sorry, Islamic principles on this also differ
from, like, Abrahamic theologies and other kind of
theological
schools' perspectives on this. But you wanna be
able to understand
where, like, there's this balance
has to be in just the essence of
knowing who God is in Islam
and the essential understanding of who God is.
There's not an opportunity for
God to stop being God at some point.
Does that make
sense? Right? So when you say Allah is
Al Khaliq, he is the creator.
Islamic theology
doesn't identify
God as the creator
only after he has created something.
He is the creator
whether
creation was created or not.
Does that make sense?
Because there's eternal beginninglessness
to God
and who God is is like always.
So
it creates now, for example,
a challenge
in theological
discussions.
If I was to take this phone,
say it was like £300
heavier,
sharp object
and I threw it full force against the
window
and the window shattered into pieces.
Would I say
I am the one that made the window
break
or
is the breaking of the window an
act that is created by God?
Do you understand?
If I am the creator of the act,
it means
that
there's 2 creators
independent of each other.
And then this is a problem
because
how can God
stop being Hanukk?
Then he can't be God.
Right? It's not to knock people's belief systems,
right? In our Quran, we're taught that you
don't mock people's beliefs. You don't mock other
people's faith. It's not something that Muslims do.
Right? Islam says don't do this regardless of
what people believe in. You know? Because you
and I, when you get down to it,
there's things that we believe in. People are
like, what are you talking about, man? You
know, I'm not gonna eat or drink or
smoke or do nothing while the sun is
up in the air. You're like, it's the
middle of July. Why are you doing this
to yourself? Do you know? It's just a
difficult,
like, a different framework of existence.
Do you know what I mean?
And we can apply it to a lot
of different things. You know, why is your
foot in this sink, like, 5 times a
day? You know? Like, you don't want to
go down that rabbit hole
that is rooted in, like, this kind of
subjective sense of perspective. Do you get what
I mean? So don't make fun of people
for their beliefs. It's a terrible thing.
Right? But this is where, for example, there's
a challenge
in, like, theologies
like in Christian theologies.
If god became man,
then he, at that moment,
became
halted in essential characteristics of being God.
And if God stops being God, then that's
then he's not God at that. You know?
Do you get what I'm saying?
How this influences our theological
understandings
individually,
you don't want to like go down the
rabbit hole
of trying to, like, do it in a
vacuum.
So the foundational
understandings
become important
before you try to delve into
topics that have more layers to them. Do
you get what I mean?
So here, we want to be able to
understand this. Principally,
a lot is
alim in our religion. He is the all
knowing,
the most knowledgeable,
the source of knowledge.
God knows everything.
God knows what you do, what you do
not do.
He knows what will happen, what has already
happened.
He knows what would have happened
had it happened in a different way. We
can, like, go down that route in a
lot of different, but the knowledge of God
is
infinite and it's always
God is Hakim.
He's the most wise.
So it doesn't need me to understand it
in order for it to be true.
You can sit and rationalize
and try to intellectualize
and it becomes important because certain things you
have to be able to explain the ethics
of. Right? I couldn't explain to somebody who's
not Muslim
why if they asked me, do you pray
3
cycles of prayer? 3 rakatmagrib
versus
4 at Isha. Right? So at sunset, why
are there 3? Why aren't there 30?
I don't I don't know the answer to
this. You might think you know it, but
you don't know also. Nobody knows. How would
you know why there's 3 or 4?
But somebody says to you, like, why don't
you eat certain foods?
Why do you dress in certain ways?
There's a recognition that there has to be
an understanding
of explanation of the ethics
and the spirit of the law in certain
ways
but foundationally
Allah's Hakim is the most wise I'm not
the most wise
So I yield to the idea of this
circumstance. There's a verse in the Quran that
says,
like,
deeply
this notion
that gives indication
that you might have been given something,
right, that
you dislike and there's good in it for
you and something that you enjoy that you
don't have that, you know,
there was bad in it for you. But
Allah knows that which you do not know.
It's looks like a constant theme in the
Quran.
Right?
You can believe that God created everything,
that doesn't mean that you fundamentally
believe
that God knows and is the most wise.
And then a third
kinda
understanding
of a divine name is
That Allah
is the one who is capable of everything
and that capacity is also always.
But in understanding these things,
there are certain things
that then are not in this conundrum of,
well, if God could do it, why would
God just not how can you tell me
God couldn't, like, turn into this or turn
into that? Because principally,
you would have to stop being God to
do that.
Does that make sense?
And so what you'd want to be able
to think about here, right, is we have
human agency. We have accountability
as a result of it. We are in
a place where that plays a role
in accountability
in terms of when we stand in front
of God, but
Allah is still the creator of our actions.
Like I'm not the creator of the action.
You could delve into this in a lot
of different topics also.
Here when we look at it contextually also,
abdulayben miz'ud telling all of these people we
have a common beginning
and these are the things that are written.
Why is he going to stand out more
amongst the diverse society
that doesn't
really honor diversity but mistreats people.
The Meccans pre Islam,
no women's rights.
Daughters are being buried. We want sons. People
are being abused. Rights are not being restored.
And Abdul Abin Masood is telling all of
these people,
god is the one that determined these things.
You're not special
because
you come from a certain clan.
You have nothing to do with who your
parents were.
Nothing.
You cannot stratify
existence in this way
based off of your moral relativism.
Allah is the one that in his infinite
wisdom
decided
that my skin is gonna be black and
yours is gonna be brown, that I'm going
to be born to these parents and you're
going to be born to those parents.
Does this make sense?
When you start to think about this now
in relation to this last part of the
hadith
that talks about actions and what's going on
towards the end of one's life.
The only thing you can do in this
world
that we talked about last week, the series
of experiences one can go through. Right? We
are in the material world right now. None
of us is in the womb of our
mothers right now. Do you know what I
mean? Right? You're not in your mother's womb.
Do you get what I'm saying? Yeah.
You're also not dead. You're alive.
Like, you're living in this world right now.
Let that sink in.
You only have what's left now from an
Islamic theological standpoint,
death which takes you to the grave,
you then have a day of judgment
where everyone's taken into account, and then you
have eternal existence. May Allah make us people
of Jannah.
You don't have what came before, the womb,
the abode of the souls. That's already happened.
There's still souls there. There's still babies in
wombs right now.
You know?
So where we're at right now,
this world
categorized
is the world of choices and actions.
That's all you can do here is you
take actions.
There's no other existence
where you act.
The only place to do is here,
So get done the things that you should
be getting done right now
because you're not going to be able to
get them done later.
This part of
the
hadith,
you want to look at other hadith that
are in similar topics. So somebody
can look at
my brain just stopped.
It'll come back to me. But
you want to be in a place where
you understand it. And so here,
what the hadith is saying is
all of the time you're allocated is important.
You could be on point until you get
towards the end of your time
which
already has been stated, has been written for
you.
So you don't know if that's tomorrow.
If you wake up tomorrow
thinking you're going to live a month from
now then you don't understand
Islamic theology.
It's not meant to be a morbid thought.
In a supremacist
society,
one of the byproducts
is it gets you to be afraid of
your mortality.
There's a reason why,
like this society
doesn't have its elderly living with its young
people, but it pushes them into homes far
away where they're hidden.
Well, what's honored is kind of the vibrancy
of youth. I don't know if you've ever
met somebody
that's like a dignified
old person. Do you know what I mean?
But there's so much beauty and grace and
honor in being able to sit with somebody
who has
with dignity
like lived an entire life in existence in
this world.
But here, you are a product and this
is why this hadith is also about the
unseen.
Because when you're only living in this moment
and you're just present in what's in front
of you right now, you get to this
place where things catch up. You don't know
how to deal with like aging and whatever
else.
But mortality and the reflection on it is
actually a spiritual act in our tradition.
So I would just like you would think
about it. Right? If you died on Friday,
are you ready to go?
Do you know?
And if you're not, like, what are you
doing?
Or forget about you, right, if I died
on Friday.
My family has to deal with that reality.
If my friend died on Friday
and I didn't seek forgiveness from him for
something I did wrong to him.
I didn't apologize for, like, a promise I
broke.
You know? You got something going on with
somebody you see every day and you didn't
squash it. Forgiveness is your right. It's not
your responsibility.
But there's a difference between somebody doing something
abusive to you, which you don't owe them
something,
versus
you did something wrong to someone and you
didn't get that taken into care while you
still had the time.
Right?
So here we have in this, like, this
idea.
Like, hey, there's an interjection of a notion
that you're gonna have just a limited amount
of time in this world. And there's a
bunch of people who are gonna do things
that are great and then towards the end
of their life,
they're gonna do something that is very much
so off like what they're supposed to be
doing.
And the opposite is true. There's gonna be
people who are gonna have just terrible existence
and at the end of it, they're gonna
do things that are just beautiful, and then
that's good.
There's literal people who came to the prophet
of God, and there's, like, battles taking place.
And they say, should we take our Shahada
and then fight or should we fight and
then take our Shahada? The prophet says take
your Shahada. The man took his Shahada and
fought and then he
died and then that's it. And the prophet
said, he lived like a short life, but
it was a good one, you know.
What did he do?
Do you get you get what I mean?
So understanding this,
Abdullah
is the son of a prominent
religious scholar in the Sunni tradition, Imam Ahmed
ibn Hanbal
who is one of the namesakes of of
4 legal schools
of Sunni Islamic law, the Hanbali school. And
so Abdullah hears his father, Imam Ahmed, one
day saying, no, not yet, no, not yet.
And Abdullah
asked his father later like what was going
on. He's worried because his father's elderly.
Were the angels of death coming to take
you from the world?
And Abdullah
is concerned.
Imam Ahmed says, no, that's not what happened,
you know, but Iblis came to me, Shaitan,
and was saying, fitaniyah
Ahmad fitaniyah that you have left from my
grasp. Oh, Ahmed. I don't have any control
over you anymore.
And I said to him,
the no not yet, no not yet until
death, you and I are gonna take each
other on because he knows that that last
portion of time
is not just as crucial but even more
so than what's taking place
prior to.
And if you understand what the hadith is
saying, it's saying that it's already written.
So you got a value every minute that's
given to you.
When I went to Turkey after the earth
quake, I went to Morocco after earthquake, I
sat with Rohingya refugees
in Malaysia,
Bangladesh,
seeing, like, homes being burnt in Myanmar.
I've been in the West Bank of Palestine.
May Allah grant them ease and end the
occupation that's taking place there. Saudi Syrian refugees
in Europe and different parts of Turkey. I
could tell you story after story of people
in conflict zones and natural disasters in all
these places.
A constant theme for many of them,
when I asked them like, what can I
do for you and what would you like
me to tell people?
A thread in all of these distinct tragedies,
there's always an advice and admonition
to be given that they say, tell people
that none of us woke up this day
thinking this would be happening to us right
now.
Nobody woke up in Turkey thinking an earthquake
was gonna hit them.
I met a guy man in Morocco
who I showed you all his picture when
I came back at Jomah. You remember him.
He still exists.
He left his home for minutes.
He came to visit his sister who had
just given birth some days before to his
newborn niece
and their elderly mother who lived with them.
He said, I went to get a birthday
gift for my niece. I came back 5,
15 minutes later. The earthquake had demolished the
whole house and all 3 of them were
gone.
They said don't waste time.
Don't waste time fighting over stupid things.
Don't waste time chasing after stuff. That's just
stuff. You can't take it with you. Who
cares how much stuff you have? Who cares
how many things you have? If it means
somebody else has to have less in order
for you to have more especially.
Don't waste time gossiping and lying.
He said,
tell people to tell the people that they
love that they love them,
to express gratitude towards the ones that are
important to them,
to be in a place where they seek
forgiveness from those that they have wronged.
And they're experiencing
this in this way
that not any one of us woke up
thinking we were gonna get hit by this
thing today.
And also a common thread amongst all of
them
that were Muslim
was that
this is the Qadr of Allah, this is
what Allah has written for us then Alhamdulillah
Allah knows best.
It wasn't why is God doing this to
us? Where did God like, you know, this
and that? So the two things go hand
in hand. You see?
You weren't given the time
to just, like,
pursue what exactly?
And you have to have this consciousness, this
wakefulness
that isn't about perfection
but it's about the recognition
of, like, futility,
which is what we're spending most of our
time doing. Right? And so it's saying, like,
be mindful of this in relation to these
things. These things are already written like your
sustenance is written for you. Sustenance and provision
in our religion
is not about what is acquired but what
is utilized.
So if you have a billionaire that's got
1,000,000,000 of dollars
but
it's not being used, then that's not in
his risk.
You can sit in a home that's got,
like a 100 rooms in it, but you
just use the same 2 rooms every week,
every month, then that's like your sustenance.
Do you hear what I mean?
We bring this food for iftar,
I'm not eating all of it, you're getting
your risk from what you're eating from here.
And this is what you think about it
at the level
of the phone hitting like the window, that
little piece of rice that fell on the
ground that you didn't consume, it wasn't written
for you.
And being able to imagine
what that means in the recognition
of god being the all knowing, the most
wise, the one with full capacity,
and being open to the idea in a
way that's liberating
can bring illumination to one's
inside.
Abdullah bin Masood is telling these people
that, hey,
this is already there, like work for what
you have capacity to. So what is like,
what are we told?
Yeah. Make money. It's not a problem.
You're gonna be asked about how you obtained
it and what did you spend it on.
This is where human agency
coexist with divine decree. It's not like
coming out of nowhere they're telling you what
it's gonna be.
You are going to chase after dollars, go
for it. Your risk is already written. You
are going to be asked
how did you obtain it and what did
you spend it on.
That's what it is.
So there's those elements
of your agency
within it.
What did you use your youth for? What
did you use your skills for? The spiritual
gifts that were given to you by God's
decree and wisdom.
What was the intelligence used for? What were
all these things gifted to you for? You
could do whatever you want, you're just gonna
have to explain why you did it in
that way and you don't want to get
caught in a place that says, look at
how great I was, now I could just
kind of coast towards the end of this,
right,
or
put somebody off in a place that says,
well, they're just terrible. There's nothing good in
them
because you don't know. Like, you just fundamentally
don't know where anybody's gonna be. This is
problematic for me to say that I am
destined for this place or that place as
it would say that somebody else is destined
for this place or that place. We just
have to try our best and you try
till kind of the end point of it.
Does that make sense?
Okay. So let's do this just as we're
wrapping up. If you get turned to the
people next to you, what are you kind
of taking away from the conversation,
what's coming up,
And then we can, like, also
kinda come back and discuss it a bit.
Just be ready to kinda share your thoughts
and ideas, and then we'll wrap up for
for tonight. But go ahead.
So just while you're talking, this is a
hadith I wanted to share where the prophet
says,
the son of Adam will not be dismissed
from his lord on the day of resurrection
until his question about 5 issues.
His life and how he lived it, his
youth and how he used it, his wealth
and how he earned and spent it, and
how he acted on his knowledge. Right? So
it's it's given to us, the questions, and
where those are the elements of choice to
it. But go ahead.
What's that?
Can we speak? Oh,
Oh, it's so sweet. Thank you.
Is anybody watching online?
Yes. What's on my Oh, wow.
Okay. So what are some of the things
that are coming up or taking away?
Maybe we can get a few people
before we wrap up.
Yeah.
I think
one one thing we were talking about
is trying to conceptualize
this idea that this life is a a
test,
and we're supposed to make them with the
right decisions,
but at the same time balancing
this idea
that everything is prewritten. Right? So, like, if
everything's prewritten, then
how do you conceptualize this idea of both
making the right decisions? Even though those are
also prewritten.
So
how do those two things fit together?
How do they not fit together?
Right? And so some of it necessitates
not, like, just physical prostrations, but mental prostrations.
The notion of recognizing that
regardless of what I know and what I
don't know,
like, do I fundamentally
believe
God when he's telling me who he is
and how he has created this system
and that
within that, there is infinite justice.
And so the system in and of itself
necessitates
me having
to have some element of agency to my
decision
in order to have accountability
for it. I don't have to know how
it works,
but that's just what it is.
Do I buy into that idea or not?
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah. No. I I definitely think that
that comes up,
inherited me in Islam and a lot of
different things where you just sort of have
to you have to, but doesn't necessarily
Logic doesn't always
come into play and everything. Yeah. I think
before you walked in, that's what we're saying.
There were people who had these theological perspectives
on the ends of spectrums
that said, like, there's no point to doing
anything.
Right? Because all is just written anyway. Do
you know?
Right? It's like, what do you mean? Why
don't you just sit here
and just do nothing?
Do you know? You fundamentally,
innately don't even believe that.
Right? Because you just sit here and what
how are you gonna feed yourself? How are
you gonna go to the bathroom? How are
you gonna, you know, hygiene and whatever else?
Do you get what I'm saying? Right? And
so in just reflection
on where you're at and how you are,
and
where
we play this kinda role in
this determination.
Do you see what I mean? Right?
But there were people who had this opinion.
Right? And you could see how some of
it gets propagated
and can stick into our head
because
fear
is a very powerful
opposite to hope.
And when you can create narratives of fear,
that render dystopic understandings of reality,
like Muslims
in the midst of this heaviness
should feel heavy
but also have an understanding
that there's a much bigger world beyond this
one. Do you know? So when people say
things like, we know, like, this is really
terrible but how could you not vote for
this guy? It means that this other guy
will, like, get into office. Right?
Well, we have a prophet who told his
companions,
let these people have this world. We're gonna
have the next. Political power isn't the only
form of power.
And to be in a place where we
have to, like, weigh out pros and cons
to certain things, But we're not functioning on
the same, like ethical plane, because our theological
planes are different.
Like you're speaking from the standpoint of
everything is only in this world. So just
do what you need to in this world.
Versus
I'm not bothered
because I already knew this is who this
guy was.
That's just what this system is.
It's like a supremacist system. It's an anti
black system.
None of them
care, and that's not conspiracy esque. They're showing
you they don't care.
And so in being able to recognize and
understand it in this concept of
this, I just got to do what I
need to do when I stand in front
of the divine.
That doesn't mean that I have to teach
my community to be doormats to people, or
be in a place that says that, like
the avoidance of
this harm,
to validate this oppression.
Sometimes the anti Muslim sentiment that we experience
is necessary
to
ensure that someone else isn't oppressed.
It's just a byproduct of it. And when
you're one body like the Hadid says, like
you sometimes have to be the part that's
feeling pain in order for somebody else to
kind of be in a place of healing.
Do you see what I mean?
But that construct of fear
is rooted in materialistic
understandings
of secularism
that says this world is all that there
is. And when you can embrace with liberation
the idea, they're like, hold on a second.
This world is not the only thing that
there is. Do you know? A friend of
mine was sitting with me the other day.
I was really distraught because he's wrestling with,
like, what do I say? What do I
not say? Like, and I'm like, look, you
can't measure in gradations
against everybody is not the same. I was
like, hey, man. How much money do you
have saved up right now? I was like,
if you lost this job for some reason,
could you live,
like, for the rest of your life?
And he was like, not the way I
live now.
But I said, that's not what I asked
you. I didn't ask you if you live
the way you live now.
I'm asking you if you had all the
stuff that you have right now,
and you didn't have this revenue stream
any further,
could you still get to the end of
your life
in a way that still has dignity to
it? And he had to sit and say,
like, yeah, I could. And I was like,
then that's what it is. Right?
Do you know what I mean?
And what are you gonna do?
Like, what are you afraid of?
And how does that show you what your
belief is?
And are you in a place where the
trust is in the stuff
versus the trust is in the creator of
the stuff?
And then if the creator
is telling me that, yes, like, I'm in
charge of it
but you have accountability
for your actions,
who cares what these other people are saying?
They can build theologies
off of this end of the spectrum
because it then validates racist theologies.
There's no point in you doing anything
because it's all outside of your realm.
This is why God gave us power and
you are sitting in prisons.
This is why we have privilege and you
are underprivileged.
This is why we are in the parts
of the neighbors
where you call the cops and they come
right away and you are in the part
of the city where when the cops come,
they come at their own leisure. And even
when you're being troubled, they're just gonna cause
more trouble for you.
But all of it's from God,
and it creates this perverse understanding of determinism
that then trickles down to us, which is
what we talked about in the beginning. You
are learning your theology
unconsciously
through the capitalistic structures
that you frequent quite often.
And at a foundational level, if you don't
sit down and think, what do I actually
believe in?
How does this world like function and what
are my convictions
seen and unseen
then you're gonna get into the minutiae of
these debates in a place that that's where
people want you to be.
So at a foundational level, it's not actually
hard to understand.
But once you admit that you can understand
it, you can't then deny responsibility
that stems from it. Do you see?
And that's what Islam endows in its
practitioner.
It's not a sense of accountability
based off of what I feel like doing.
It's a sense of accountability
that also says why am I not doing
what I have the ability to do?
So not every person is going to be
able to speak. But when I'm talking to
my friend and he's wrestling with it, he
needs a friend to have a blunt conversation
with him and be like, hey, man, if
you lost your job, you still got enough
that you could spend however many years left
you have in this world. Maybe you won't
live in a house. Maybe you gotta stop
taking these vacations, but you're gonna have food
to eat.
You're gonna have a blanket to sleep in
which is more than most people have in
the world.
So why do you need
this like nice car? Why do you need
this many TVs in your house? Why do
you need this many rooms in your house?
Do you know?
It's not to knock people. You should have
what it is that you have. Just remember
the person
that you were before you had it and
the person you are after you have it,
and that the people who don't have it,
they're just as good as you.
And the end result is meant to be
about
recognizing the one that gave it to you
all in the 1st place.
Do do you get what I'm saying? And
when I can connect the idea that the
theology is actually simple,
Right? God is the ultimate authority,
and I'm gonna be judged for what I
did.
So let me just do what's right and
stop making excuses.
Do do you get what I'm saying? Does
that make sense?
And it's
different from the Meccan society
because
they believed in God
but they didn't believe in an afterlife.
So there was no accountability
structure
from the absence of this theology.
Your belief in an afterlife
is meant to inform your actions here and
to create an accountability.
How can you believe in Jannah
and be somebody who abuses your wife?
Like, how?
How can you believe in a day of
judgment? Right? And when people ask me like,
how do you have evidence of free will
and determinations
of human agency?
I work with a lot of survivors of
abuse
and I know who my God is from
his book and the authority of his messenger
and the fact that a husband
could abuse their wife, the fact that a
father could abuse their child
shows to me that humans have capacity
to do things on their own volition
and then they have accountability for it.
Allah's allowance of these actions, and this is
why you got to spend time in learning
your conviction and learning your belief and understanding
that theology is not just rote memorization of
stuff, but through reflection and contemplation.
And what does it mean that allows for
me to find the contentment that only comes
from the knowing of the divine and being
able to understand the questions of why that
are not from empirical based sources that answer
how and what but get me to a
place of saying like the goal isn't that
I have more money than everybody
or that I have acceptance from the system
that was built to oppress me in the
first place.
The goal is recognizing that I'm bigger than
any of the boxes that the world put
me in
and so are you.
The goal is recognizing that I'm good
whether I live at the top of the
building
or I can never afford to live in
the building to begin with.
That's not what goodness is measured in. Do
you do you see what I'm saying?
And this understanding of accountability
becomes the base of it and where we
struggle with it and I say it with
love
is that the minute I can understand that
I actually get it, I then have to
put into check all the things that I'm
doing and trying to figure out why am
I not getting it done
because some of us struggle with certain things.
It's hard to wake up for fletcher if
you don't you know what I mean? Like
it's not easy
but it's not hard to do some of
the things that we don't do.
It's not.
Then we'd have to think. Right? And we
have a big thing. How many of us
are hurting right now because of what's happening
to people in Palestine? May Allah grant them
ease.
Inshallah, when all of this is done, we're
gonna have choices to make. There might be
a few years where money spent on the
self is much lesser than spent on others.
You could engage in government
discussion. Why are they're not like world governments
do? Why are these like Arab countries not?
Who cares?
If you believe in an afterlife
and you believe in a creator of an
afterlife,
who cares why they are not doing what
they're doing if that conversation becomes an excuse,
a passivity from keeping you from doing what
you're doing.
I gotta let God be God and I
gotta be me and I have to understand
that I have to build a shelter in
the Bronx for no other reason other than
I have the ability to do it.
And if I don't do it, then I
have to be able to explain to God
why did I not get it done.
Do you get what I'm saying? So if
you have the capacity to do and you
still choose not to do, not because there's
not struggle or whatever else, but the over
intellectualization
of things that are just simple. Right? Allah
is in charge, and you gotta, like, be
responsible for your actions.
Because you don't know when it ends. This
is what the hadith is saying.
And every human has a soul, so don't
conditionalize
your giving. You're gonna consume,
great, but balance consumption with contribution.
So don't just be a taker, be a
giver also and give unconditionally
with love. So it's not just the hand
that matches my hand in skin color and
country of origin and race and social class
is the one that benefits from a greeting
for me or an extension of
love. You you see what I mean?
And you can extrapolate all of this
just from this one belief.
What does it mean to believe
in a day of judgment, in an afterlife,
in one God that is the master of
these things. Do you see what I'm saying?
And he's endowed me with accountability.
Does that make sense?
Yeah. Okay. I know I talk a lot,
so I'm gonna take a pause here.
Think about it. Just think. That's the whole
idea to get us to think, to shift
paradigms,
and to not be in a place where
you make excuses.
I tell my babies this all the time,
and I love them. Right? Excuses give us
a big pile of nothing. That's just what
it does. It's a big pile of nothing
at the end of the day. Just take
a deep look at yourself. You'd be like,
am I getting it done? You can still
do fun things and laugh and have social
lives and that's not what it's about. We're
not people who just live in caves, nor
were people who just 247
live without honoring responsibilities.
I chose to have children then I have
to take care of my children and I
gotta make sure my children get to be
children. It's not either or, it's a both
and.
But just as a starting point, you just
think what does this mean in terms of
belief? And how do actions reflect the belief?
And I can't have actions reflect the belief
if I haven't defined for myself what I
actually believe in no matter what else. Right?
And then I can just sit and you
try to make sense of things. And I'll
say this to you. It won't help heal
like fully but it'll help to remove some
of the anxiety.
It will make it a 1000 times easier
when you can say,
well, that guy does that because he doesn't
believe in what I believe in.
It doesn't hurt less that they're killing babies
and they're engaged in just other variations of
anti blackness
yet again.
But I don't have to waste my time
trying to decipher
how can somebody treat somebody in this way.
They're showing you what they believe in. You
just now have to acknowledge,
I might not know what I believe in.
And when I can say, this is what
I believe in, I could be like, well,
that guy's doing that because he doesn't believe
in this thing.
And then we're different from each other. Doesn't
mean I have to dislike him. It doesn't
work on this plane as I do. Right?
And then it's not about just, like,
unnecessary
proselytization,
you know, that's not what this deen is
about. That's just like statistics and numbers. Oh,
we got another Shahada. No, man. Like, we
value people.
But when you can start to see it
that way, it's like, why wouldn't I want
people to see the world this way?
Not through moral relativism,
but something that can be accessed through all
diverse populations.
That's why it's not an inherited religion. It's
a religion that is very much so like
a thinking person's religion,
but it requires you to have spaces where
you're thinking with stillness.
This is the point. Walk away from this
conversation.
Do I believe in this thing?
And do I have conviction in this idea?
And how does it inform my worldview, my
perspective,
and my engagement
of myself,
of others, and the world around me?
So
later this week,
we're gonna still have, like, all of our
regular halukkas.
So doctor Murmur will be tomorrow.
Doctor Murmur and I will do something on
Wednesday.
And Thursday,
we have Imam Zakir will be here with
Faith NYC, which is we do for, like,
our professional community, a monthly halukkah with him
so you can come to that as well.
And on Saturday, we're doing a film screening
and a dinner,
of a movie.
This name is escaping
me. They should come. It's supposed to be
really good. 1 of our alumnis from our
school of the arts is working on this
production,
team, and they're screening it here. It's relevant
to the Muslim community. I'm doing a terrible
job talking about this. There's gonna be free
food,
so come for that as well.
And it'll be in the room. We do,
from 5:30
till 9.
The screening will be happening, and then there'll
be a talk back and dinner.
It's just a good place to meet people
and also be in community.
On Sunday, we're gonna be doing,
IC professionals meet and greet meet up.
If you came to the last couple,
we did one, like, a month and a
half ago maybe. Right? Is that when we
did it? We had other events planned, but
because of the escalated violence,
the most recent cycle of violence in Palestine,
we put some of those things on pause.
May Allah grant them ease, and we're trying
to reimplement some of these programs
also from the standpoint of community convening.
It's usually, like,
300, 400 people that show up to this.
It's not just a space for people who
have, like, certain
job pursuits or whatever else, but just we
built this
realm of our center,
for people who are out of the undergrad
phase of their life. Right?
And so come to it on Sunday. It'll
be on the 10th floor of the building
next door,
from 5 till 9.
The last couple that we did were really
great. And I think also if you know
people
who are kind of in the demographic of
most of us in the room, I can
invite them to come too.
Next Friday,
we're gonna be doing a black Muslim meetup.
So we have a black Muslim initiative in
our community,
We have a convert group, a Latino Muslim
women's initiative, all these different things. The idea
for us here is to have multiple entry
points
that enable people from diverse backgrounds to come.
So Friday night
in room 914 of the building next door,
we're gonna be doing,
a black Muslim meetup and starting in a
lot of our programs again, our black Muslim
lecture series and other things that we were
doing. But if you self identify as black,
or know people who do, please encourage them
to come to it.
And that'll be in the evening with dinner
as well.
And,
this Friday,
we're gonna be doing a know your rights
workshop,
but with Spanish interpretation
also.
And next Saturday,
9th, we're gonna be doing a program,
with Imam Daniel Hernandez,
who is a Latino
identifying
Muslim scholar.
He's gonna be talking about
the role of Mary and Jesus in Islam,
and that event is gonna be done in
English and Spanish also,
hosted by our convert group and our Latino
Muslim group. It's open to everybody. And with
the idea for that is to,
like,
come,
you know, to understand and learn ourselves, but
in particular to bring, like, friends and family
who might not be aware of what does
Islam say about this.
So the idea was formulated by our Latino
Muslim group, many of whom come from families
where they're gonna be spending the winter holidays,
in households that celebrate Christmas, etcetera.
And so kind of as a bridging point,
you know, that people can recognize that, like,
Jesus is important to us. Also, I was
in the subway the other day with my
kids, and there was a homeless person that
was sleeping on the stairwell.
And,
you know, we had just eaten at a
place,
and I gave this person a full meal.
And this lady walked by
and looked at me, and she said, you're
such a good Christian man.
And and I looked at her and I
looked at my kids because I was like,
do I not look like what I think
I look? You know what I mean? Like,
what do I look like
right now? So I I turned around, and
I don't know. I'm an obnoxious person sometimes.
So instinctively
because my kids are laughing. Right? And so
I I said, I'm, you know, I'm not
a Christian. And she, like, kinda looked at
me because I think she, like, didn't actually
look to me. And I was like, but
don't worry. Like, we love Jesus too. Right?
And she still didn't also really kinda, like,
understand how to respond. So I was like,
okay. Let's just leave now.
But, you know, it's it's, like, a thing
that you might not realize
how many people don't
understand that in Islam we also have a
deep
reverence for both Mary and Jesus, peace be
upon them, both
the kind of station that they hold,
as well as
a recognition that we wanna cater more to
our Latino Muslim community,
as well as we're gonna start doing a
lot more Spanish speaking programming.
But it's not only for people of those
kind of backgrounds. So that's a lot in
the next couple of weeks. You should come
to as much of it as you can
and encourage people to come to it.
We can be in community together. People are
not alone during these times. We're also using
it as ways to kind of benefit
and understand from each other.
Yeah. Okay.
So let's take a pause here.
We'll
meet next Monday and the next couple of
Mondays,
and then there'll be kind of a break
towards the end of December,
with the buildings being closed.
We'll still have programs going on, but I'm
gonna be leading our Umrah trip.
You all should consider coming
if you'd like to.
You can sign up at icnway.org/omrah.
That'll be from January 3rd to 12th.
And if you have questions, let me know.
But we will see everyone next week, InshaAllah.
Alright. Assalaikum.