Khalid Latif – Imam Nawawis 40 Hadith for Modern Times #11
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AI: Transcript ©
People wanna
take a quick minute,
get settled in. If you wanna introduce yourselves
to the people sitting around you, feel free
to grab some of the food that's left
over from Iftar also.
Thank you to whoever gave me this cough
drop,
and I hope it was for me because
I'm eating it right now. So it was
for somebody else.
Sucks to be here.
Actually,
Okay. Should we get started?
So today we were gonna start looking at
hadith number 5,
and this collection of hadith of imam Nawawi,
and this is a hadith that talks about
a concept
of innovation in religion, was called bida.
We'll get into it in a bit, but
if people wanna just pull up the hadith,
on their phone, you just Google hadith number
5, Nawawi,
or imam Nawawi's hadith 5.
It'll pop up.
It's on the authority
of,
Aisha.
May Allah be pleased with her.
Does anybody have the hadith in front of
them?
Yeah. Can you read it for us in
English or Arabic?
Anybody?
Somebody wanna read it?
Do
you have it?
No? What are you doing back there?
You're watching something else?
You're the worst.
Yeah. I'm a sick man, guys. Can you
please help?
Hadith number 5.
I also don't have it in front of
me. I was working on something else.
You have it?
Yeah. Can you read the English? Oh, my
gosh. My gosh. My gosh.
You look different with your glasses.
I ran out of contact lenses.
And,
I've never seen you with a glasses.
Really? Yeah. Yeah.
I really like wearing my contacts,
but,
I have very bad eyesight. I don't know
if people have bad eyesight in this.
Mine is negative 10 and a half. You
know?
Yeah.
So it's Mine is like minus 8. Mine
is 8. Yeah. Mine is like minus 2.
Yeah. Oh, I guess I can understand. Yeah.
No.
We can't relate to each other at all,
actually. I don't know. Yeah.
So now that we know about my eye
conditions, does anybody have the Hadith in front
of them? Hadith number 5, Imam Nawi's hadith.
You got it? Can you read it? Thanks,
man.
On the authority of the mother of the
faithful Aisha
who said, the messenger of Allah
said,
he who innovates something in this matter of
ours,
Islam,
that is not of it, will have it
rejected
by Allah.
Or another version says, he who does an
act which is which have not
wait. He who does an act which we
have not commanded,
will have it rejected by Allah.
Is that clock here? Oh, yeah. Does anybody
wanna read the Arabic?
You want, Andre? I'll try. Yeah. Go for
it. Okay.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Great.
So this is a new hadith. The ones
we were looking at before
so far, they've been transmitted by Omar Ibn
Al Khattab,
Abdullah, I've been
Omar, and Abdullah, I've been Masood.
We talked about all of them in a
little bit of detail, may Allah be pleased
with them,
And help to kinda give us a little
bit more context and insight as to who
they are
and where we can place these words within
historical context,
as well as learn a little bit more
about the people who surrounded the prophet of
God, peace be upon him.
So this hadith
is narrated by
Aisha Radiallahu Ta'ala Anha.
For those who are not familiar,
someone is considered to be a companion of
the prophet of God, a generation that we
call the Sahaba.
If
they
both have
interacted with the prophet directly in their lifetime
and they pass away in a state of
faith in Islam, iman.
So if one did not have one or
both of these,
they live contemporarily,
for example, you know, in the same, like,
era,
but never met the prophet, it wouldn't have
worked, even if they were Muslim,
or if they did meet the prophet but
did not die as a Muslim, like Abu
Lahab
met the prophet
but did not die as a Muslim, he
wouldn't be considered
a companion.
Does that make sense?
And then you have generations
that are then understood thereafter
based off of that
initial generation. So the next generation,
they're called the Dab'in or the Followers.
And they're of that generation.
If they had met a Sahaba in their
life and also died in a state of
faith, then the generation after that is called
the Tabit
Abi'in, right, and so on and so forth.
And so the companions of the prophet,
they were considered
within
Sunni tradition of Islam in particular
to all have a very high status
in terms of their,
just existence, so to speak.
There's a narration
that says,
in Allah, another of
that indeed God Allah looked into the hearts
of his Ibad, his righteous servants.
For wajada khayra kulu bida Ibaad kalba Muhammad
Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and he found that the
best of hearts was the heart of Muhammad
Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam
Fastafahudinafsi,
he he chooses him for himself. This is
why when the names of the Prophet is
Al Mustafa, the chosen one. So he selects
him for himself
and he endows him with the responsibility being
the last messenger to mankind. Is that hadith
continues, it says Allah looked into the hearts
of his creation again, and he found that
the best of hearts after the heart of
the prophet Muhammad
were the hearts of his companions.
And so he appoints them to be the
Hadid says his wuzarah,
his advisers. Right? There are people around him
that give him, like, counsel, etcetera.
And so there's a lot of insight that
we can understand
from just the sociological
context of Mecca and Medina,
the way society function, the norms, how people
interacted, but also where
things manifested
from Quranic teaching in the lives of these
people. And what makes the companions
really
important for a lot of us
is that we're gonna talk about a concept
called bida in this hadith.
Sorry, I have a cough drop in my
mouth.
Thank you again for whoever gave me the
cough drop.
It's actually really helpful.
And the opposite of the word Bida or
innovation
is sunnah.
Right? So if we were to try to
understand what something is by understanding what it's
not, like a bidda
is
not good because the sunnah is good. Right?
It is that's kind of the way that
they are juxtaposed to each other.
And so this Hadid is gonna talk to
us about,
like, not just what innovation is, but the
importance of the sunnah.
And taking the prophet as an exemplary role
model within our tradition is something that
likely one could understand why that's a thing.
With the companions offered to us in addition
to that example
is also an access point
that gives us an understanding of not just
how do you
do well when things are going well but
how do you do well when you're struggling
with something, when you make mistakes?
Because
you find tangible examples amongst people who are
now struggling. Right? Like these people that we're
talking about, they either converted to Islam early
on
or like I showed at the Allahu Ta'ala
Anha.
She says in her own words, like, she
didn't know her parents other than them being
Muslim
because she was at such a young age
at that time
that that's all she understood in her home
was Islam.
You see?
But when you're thinking about people who over
23 years of revelation
converted to Islam,
there's people who became Muslim in the first,
like decade plus in Mecca 13 years
and
there's no like a lot of verses at
that point are not about
like rulings and do's and don'ts.
Aisha radhiallahu ta'ala Anha,
and when we say radhiallahu ta'ala Anha
Radiallahu Anha, what we're saying is may God
be pleased with her. Right? It's just a
way of
sending kind of a deference respect
to this generation, the companions, the prophet of
God,
you know, when we talk about them.
She has another narration that she narrates where
she says,
you know, if the first verses that were
revealed
were all about, like, do this and don't
do that, no one would have become Muslim.
But the first verses revealed
talked about God and his oneness and afterlife
as a purposeful means to kind of wean
people towards religion because the theology is the
base of the practice and the ritual.
So what you see is all of these
companions who over the course of these 23
years,
they're
becoming Muslim
and they're making mistakes.
Just like you and I make mistakes because
the religion is not about the pursuit of
perfection.
We have to actually have a pursuit that
is willing to understand
that
you can still be recipient of God's mercy
and love
as well as like love yourself in a
healthy way, not an egotistical way,
both through a recognition of what you do
well and what you have the ability to
improve upon. Right? And you don't try to
hide or move away
from things that are quote unquote
shortcomings or imperfections.
Do you see what I mean?
And so the companions as a generation weren't
just good because they did everything good. They
were good because they knew how to get
back on their feet after they fell down,
and they helped each other get back up.
And there's companions.
We have hadith. There's companions who come to
the prophet,
you know, they
drank alcohol, they committed zina, right? They're premarital
like physical intimacy, sexual relationships, Yaddasulullah,
I kissed a woman I wasn't supposed to.
A companion
gives the prophet a bottle of alcohol as
a gift. You know, he doesn't know. Right?
Like these are all things that are in
the Hadith.
People are struggling with issues around gender, class,
race. It's very tangible.
You see? And so why you want to
know who these people are and what their
actual life experience is, is because it helps
to make Islam concrete,
but also gives us an understanding that you
don't want to romanticize
generations.
You want to be able to understand
what is ideal
is in the prism still of reality. Islam
is about reality,
and these are people who they're implementing these
teachings, and they're still with their real personalities,
their characteristics,
their demeanors. Do you know what I mean?
Like, how much did the last hadith we
talked about just hit differently, You
know,
and he's talking about
You know and he's talking about these principles
of divine decree and we all come from
a common beginning.
We talk about Abdullah bin Umar who's the
son of Omid Ibn Al Khattab
who is the 2nd caliph of Islam where
Islam like grows immensely
and he doesn't want to be a political
figure or a leader.
You know, he goes in a very different
direction than his father does, right? These things
like add nuance
as we understand
these people through who they are and not
just kind of,
in this way where we know a name.
Does that make sense? Yeah. So Aisha Radiallahu
Ta'ala Anha,
she's a very interesting individual,
in that she is like one of the
more prolific scholars
of Islam,
both in terms of what we have access
to of Hadith.
She's one of the companions of the prophet
of God who narrates an abundance of Hadith
and
she also is known amongst her people
as being someone who's a great fucky like
she knows legal rulings. She knows Quran.
She knows like
all kinds of nuance points of theology,
practice, etc.
The companions, they're recorded as saying that if
somebody had a question about Islam, they didn't
know the answer to it, they go ask
Aisha Radiallahu SAW Anha.
She's a daughter of Abu Bakr, who is
the close friend,
arguably the best friend of the Prophet Muhammad
peace be upon him. And
there's a very close relationship
that the prophet
has to this entire family.
And as I was saying before,
Aisha she says that all she knew in
her home growing up was Islam, that her
parents were Muslim
because their interactions and engagement of Islam
came within the early period of Islam. The
prophet got revelation,
Khateja Radi Allahu Ta'ala Anha, his wife
was the first person to become Muslim, like,
right in the immediate. And then there was
Abu Bakr after that. Do you know? And
then you start to see kind of this
kinda movement forward, but she's growing up within
this.
There's a lot of different things that we
can say about her,
in terms of just her character, who she
is.
But
we wanna think about it from the standpoint
of accessibility
and learning
as a priority.
Quite often,
religion in and of itself just turns into
a boys club.
And Islam is very interesting in that
even our conceptualization
of God
is one that is rooted in a negative
knowledge,
that we know who Allah is by knowing
who he is not. This is a verse
of the Quran.
There's not anything that's like a likeness to
God. So anything that you would understand God
to be,
you know that he is other than that.
So
the grammar of the Quran
utilizes
a grammatical
masculine frame for the divine,
but our theology is different from other,
monotheistic
and polytheistic
traditions
in that Allah is not a gendered entity.
We don't believe in a male God.
Right? And societally,
when you are, especially in this part of
the world, bombarded by a lot of iconography
and imagery
consciously or unconsciously. And this is where there's
a paradox to decision making because when you
don't make a choice you've essentially chosen.
And when many of us don't think about
who God is,
you live in a Judeo Christian
kind of framework
that
is embedded, right? Like in a few weeks,
there's going to be all kinds of things
I was dropping my kids off to school
today. There's giant like, you know, balloon Santa
clauses
and everything else that's going around.
And, you know, you're gonna see this imagery
again and again,
that's rooted in a theology that's not just
like a grammatically masculine, but a very male,
like, centered
divine entity. God the father, God the son,
God the holy spirit.
And when you have
religion
and religious instruction
that quite often is defined and dictated now
by like a male imperative,
you're being socialized in this way
that
it starts to render this kind of impact
unconsciously.
And when we don't think about who the
divine is to us, a lot of us
conceptualize God as an angry old man in
the sky looking for a reason to punish
us. Do
you know? But Laysa Gameth Lehi Shei, there's
not anything that's like a likeness to God
and the prophet being someone who had no
role in the writing in the Quran, it
means this Quran is not written by not
only any human being, but it's not a
male
defined text.
Do you see what I mean? Like Allah
in who he tells us he is, the
he that we utilize
is not in reference to like maleness.
It's just a grammatical
context. Does that make sense?
And why is that relevant? Because you wanna
think there's this young woman, Aisha Radiallahu Ta'ala
Anha.
She is now the wife of the prophet
after the prophet Muhammad's first wife, Khatija, passes
away,
who he is married to for 25 years.
We're talking about this on Wednesday nights in
the SITO class right now. Right?
He
is now in a place where
societally at that time,
polygamy is something that is practiced,
and within Islam there's an allowance that creates
a limitation
for men
to be able to
marry up to 4 women,
where prior to men had no limit on
the number of women they can marry. Women
can marry as many men as they wanted
to marry also. Here's now where limitations came
into play, and we could talk about that
in more detail if that's an interesting thing
for people to talk about.
Where and how, though, it's relevant here is
that
every
woman that the Prophet married thereafter
was a widow or a divorcee.
In Khadija
Radiallahu Ta'ala Anha, who he was married to
and it was just the 2 of them
for that long period of time,
she also had been,
married twice before she married the prophet of
God. So Aisha
radhiallahu ta'ala Anha,
she was the
only wife of the prophet
who was never married or like
before. She wasn't divorced or widowed.
And they had a very unique bond, a
very unique relationship
that was very deeply rooted in love.
Amad bin Al As,
who,
you know, had different interactions with the Prophet
of God,
all these people just felt that the prophet
loved them more than they loved anybody else
because he was very much
focused on centering people's needs in certain ways.
And so he asks, like, Who do you
love the most?
And the prophet says to him, Aisha,
like no hesitation.
And then he says, well, then who? And
he says, Abu like her father, still denoting
a relationship to Aisha still, right, not just
kind of an independence Abu Bakr, but he
says her dad, and then he continues to
go and go and I'm gonna ask it's
like stops asking him because at some point
he was just like he's not gonna say
my name at the point, but he very
much so loves his wife.
But think about what we know in this
society, whether you were and like the Sierra
class we've been talking about, how it functions
sociologically,
how gender is like a part of the
stratification of the society.
A meccan society
is burying their daughters alive pre Islam,
right? Women cannot inherit
money. There's a lot of challenges
and this young woman
is not only like a woman, but she's
young
and she's establishing
herself authoritatively
within this society
that still has to deal with the remnants
of
an ignorance
that is very much rooted in racist, classist,
sexist
kind of mindsets.
And this isn't anything other than just objective
fact.
And so you'd wanna think about in relation
to the deep legacy our tradition has around
Islamic scholarship.
There's,
for example, a text
that was written
by a contemporary Muslim religious scholar. His name
is, sheikh Mohammed Akram Nadawi.
He's in the UK.
Habidullah.
He wrote a book called Al Muhadithat,
the female transmitters
of Hadith.
So
not just like Quran,
like interpreters
or people who know other aspects of Hadith
or various Islamic Sciences.
Just this specific
like nuanced
scholarly endeavor.
His book was 40 volumes long
and he wrote about more than 40,000
female scholars who did this one
thing
being a transmitter of Hadith. And he didn't
stop because he ran out of women to
talk about. He stopped because he was worried
nobody would read a book that was longer
than 40 volumes.
Right?
So where does the disconnect come in? Do
you know what I mean?
And to understand and recognize that we wanna
see there's gotta be shifts in certain ways
that come into play
that are not just about kind of
what we fall back on.
And when you have
like
Aisha radhiallahu ta'ala on her, very prolifically narrating
hadith to you, and she's not narrating hadith
to you that put her in a gendered
box. Do you know what I mean? She's
teaching people about everything.
Does that make sense? Right?
And she,
you know, there's
indications that she was amongst the women who
participated
in Uhud.
She plays various roles,
so there's
different times that the Quran
is giving
kind of revelation
is coming down in relation to instances in
her life.
So on one occasion, for example,
you know, she wasn't like a physically
large person.
And
when,
they would travel in caravans,
The prophet's wife would travel in what was
called a.
And so what would essentially happen is you'd
have this, like,
you have 4 people carrying this thing.
And there was like a apartment on the
top. You know, Can you picture this in
your head? And it's kinda like a little
tent.
And she didn't waste so much.
And so as they were returning from a
journey,
she had separated from the caravan
and the 4 men that were carrying
this contraption,
they couldn't really tell she wasn't in there
because not only were they
4 of them who are holding this, so
weight is displaced.
It wasn't like heavy to begin with.
One of the customs that they had at
that time
was
that when the prophet would go on a
journey, he'd leave somebody
kind of trailing the caravan
in case somebody left behind something or someone
got separated.
They would now have someone to walk back
to the city with. And so there was
a companion by the name of Safwan
Radi Allahu An, who was appointed to this
task and this instance.
And Sifuan Radiallahu an, he comes upon Aisha
who she returns back to the place of
the caravan and
is waiting knowing someone's gonna come.
He doesn't, like, really interact with her too
much because now at this point there's verses
that have been revealed,
like legalistically
around hijab and what that means in particular
for the prophet's wife and these kinds of
things.
So he recognizes her from before those days
and he simply just walks her
back.
There's a group of people
that are known as Hypocrites, the Monafiqin.
They outwardly express Islam but inwardly detest it
and they utilize this opportunity
to start gossiping.
There's a tradition is called the Hadith and
Ifq,
that speaks about this in deep detail.
And the prophet
is also instill a nascent stage in his
leadership.
And these hypocrites,
they
are speaking really poorly about the prophets wife,
but he's trying to figure out how to
manage
and
is going to do what he knows he
should do, or wait to get instruction on
how do I respond in this instance.
And
for a month's time now, they're going through
this. And eventually, like, the 2 of them
are in different homes,
as they're trying to figure out what needs
to get done. You can imagine like the
toll this is taking, right? Like, if you've
ever been in a place where somebody has
gossiped about you, you know, it's not like
a easy thing to go through. Right? I'm
sorry if that's ever happened. That's why it's
like a big deal in our tradition
that if you gossip,
you know, the kind of recompense for it
is that you get sin for gossiping like
and your good deeds, anything good that you
do, they get transferred to the person that
you're speaking poorly about,
you know,
because it can really ruin people's lives. Do
you know what I mean? And if you
gossip about people, you should not be doing
this. It's like a really terrible thing. Do
you know? And if the base of your
relationship
is speaking poorly about others or speaking about
others behind their back,
you'd wanna probably reconcile that a bit because
there's consequences to it, worldly and otherworldly.
We could also talk about more.
So essentially, like Aisha Radi Allahu Taanha, she
just bears like her patience, you know,
People encourage her just, like, seek forgiveness, apologize.
She's like, I didn't do anything.
So what am I apologizing for? And she
says to them, my response to you will
be the response
that
Yaqub Ali Salam
Jacob,
he the father of Yusuf Alai Salam Joseph
said when his son was cast into the
well, that I put my trust in Allah
and Allah is sufficient for me. He is
the best disposer of affairs.
I know God's got my back.
And so there's a revelation that comes down
in a chapter called Surat An Nur,
chapter of the light that exonerates
Aisha Radi Allahu Ta'ala Anha.
And her father who says Abu Bakr is
the prophet's best friend, she said go
and, you know, like express this appreciation and
gratitude like you can, you know, and she's
like I'm only thanking God
because God is the one that set this
record right. You see? And so whenever people
are reciting these verses from Surat Anur
they are recounting
this instance
where, like,
dumb people gossiped
about a woman
and God demonstrates
he's always on the side of the woman
who's being abused,
never on the side of the abuser.
Does it make sense?
Another instance,
they are
again traveling
and Aisha Radi Allahu Ta'ala Anha loses her
necklace.
The prophet says like we got to find
her necklace, they're spending some time looking for
it and the day is getting delayed, the
caravan is getting delayed
and the time for prayer comes upon them.
The prophet is asleep in Aisha's lap.
Abu Bakr, he comes and he starts like
getting upset with his daughter. You know, if
you had a dad, right, that does this
to you, or maybe even your mom, you
know, like, this is all your fault. Like
what you do? We're all late because of
you. Right? Like, it's very tangible, real experience.
Do you know what I mean? It's young
woman's
husband sleep in her lap. The dad is
like soft yelling at her. So not like
yelling loudly. He's not trying to wake up
the prophet, but he's like, we're gonna be
late. All these people are delayed. Like, what's
wrong with you?
And the prayer time is coming in.
So
the
verses of tayamum get revealed
in this instance because there's not any water
to make will do. Right? If you don't
know what I'm talking about, like when we
have our regular prayers,
we wash up before we pray
in a ritual practice called will do and
you can maintain that state of ritual purity.
Like for the whole day pretty much unless
you, like, use the bathroom, take, like, a
long period of sleep, these kinds of things,
they have to redo it.
And if there's no water within
a kinda certain distance,
you can use, like, clean earth in a
variation of this. And so these verses are
revealed at this time around Tiammum
in this scenario.
And once it's revealed, the prophet says, like,
to Abu Bakr and Aisha and their friend,
like, rejoice to your family.
You know, you become, again, like a means
of benefit
for people.
Abu Bakr is now really happy because he's
like, yeah, look at what we did. Right?
But again,
like, I
plays a role in relation to actual like
a revelation. Do you see what I mean?
Surah Noor exonerates her like she is a
part of this experience
with Tayam mum. There's more things that we
can talk about in relation to her.
This hadith
calls her,
Abdullah,
right, the mother of Abdullah.
The prophet doesn't have any children with Aisha.
His surviving children are from his marriage to
Khadija Radiallahu Ta'ala Anha. And he has many
children who pass away also
in very infant stages of their life.
And so
you have like this,
kind of
tradition where people are given,
what's called a Cunha.
You know,
you are like the father of someone or
the mother of someone. Do you know what
I mean?
Usually after the firstborn child,
you know, I have a friend,
like, if you guys know Sheikh, Amar Ashukri,
who's come here, he's the only person in
the world that calls me Abu Medina because
my daughter
is Medina, and he's, like, really trying hard
to get people to call me this. And,
like, it's not gonna work. You know? Nobody
everyone calls me Khalid. I'm the father of
Medina.
You know?
And so
when people try to explain, well, why is
she called Abdullah?
She doesn't have any kids.
So there's 2 explanations given. 1,
that she actually had a child and unfortunately,
in a pregnancy miscarried,
which is something that happened,
right, 14 centuries ago. We were trying to
think out just kinda health care and what
that looks like, etcetera.
But the other explanation is that she asked
the prophet, peace be upon him, She says
like, I want to have this kind of
nickname. Do you know?
And so
her nephew
is Abdullah.
Abdullah is the son of her sister Asma.
And so the prophet says like you be
named like Abdullah.
The Prophet had like a lot of nicknames
for a lot of his companions and friends.
They weren't just like Abu, the father of
or the mother of. It's not even like
a nickname type thing.
But
he used to call Aisha in some of
the, like, narrations we're taught, he would call
her just like Aish,
you know, out of kind of love and
endearment.
She's known as Siddiqah.
Right? There's other names that we know her
to be of.
There was a certain endearment that's there
when you have that proximity to someone
that you're able to give them a special
name or, you know, you call them something
uniquely
in that way.
The other thing that's introduced here
is a title that's reserved particularly
for the women who are married to the
prophet of God, peace be upon them.
They're called Umul Mopminin.
Right?
The
the mother
of the believers is what she's referred to
as here.
It's just to give, like, even that much
more deference and respect
that
there's a certain sanctity to this bond and
love.
That's not kind of familial
in the way that one might assume,
but to show
that there's still like a respect that's there.
Do you know what I mean? These are
people
who play a very pivotal and special role,
and especially
within, like, the Sunni tradition of Islam.
The deference that's given
is something that's really, really important,
you know. So
in this
notion that these are considered to be like
a unique group of women who
are
poised
to give us insight, but also are representative,
in their own right to being people who
are exemplary
for all Muslims,
in order to kinda take and learn from
them.
There's instances
where Aisha
Radi Allahu Ta'ala Anha like argues with companions,
you know, Abu Herrera
speaks about
what invalidates
a prayer, for example, and he says, if
like this thing walks in front of you
or this walks in front of you, and
at one point he says, if a woman
walks in front of you in prayer
and I shadow the load on us, like,
that's not a thing.
Do you know?
And again, you want to just try to
contextualize this. Do you know what I mean?
Right? Think about how many spaces you go
into.
Right? It's not to knock anybody, but just
think about like, where in Muslim spaces, it's
like very overtly separated,
but there's no access point
for women
to religious leadership. There's not a hiring
of, like, the equivalent of a female religious
scholar or female religious scholar herself,
let alone sometimes spaces. Do you know?
So here the notion isn't like a quietude
within our religion that creates a disparity,
across genders. Right? Aisha Radiallahu Ta'ala on her,
she's speaking up because she knows. Do you
know what I mean? And nobody's telling her
like you don't talk when men are talking.
Do you see?
She roots herself in a knowledge base
that becomes critical for the development
of all of Islam. There's scholars of Islam's
legal tradition
that come after the prophets
like time
who say a 4th of all legal rulings
come to us through Aisha Radiallahu Ta'ala Anha.
You know, she plays a very pivotal role
in the development of Islam legislatively.
Right? And all of these things get embodied
in understanding
when we're looking at these Hadith.
We don't want to look at them through
the prism of this is just a name
and a character. It's in a person who
lived and lived in a time and in
a place where they had to play a
certain role, right?
You imagine what it's like everybody knows you
are the wife of the messenger of God,
and your father is the first caliph of
Islam.
She after the passing of the prophet,
she says, you know, there were like 3
favors she had that no one else had,
that when the prophet passes,
he passes away in her house,
laying down on her chest
with her saliva in his mouth, referring to
how he was very sick when he was
at his later stage. And in order for
him to eat, she had to like kind
of chew the food down and kind of
help him to consume
what it was that he was
eating. And if you remember that hadith that
came before this that we just looked at
hadith number 4, the last part of that
hadith talks about in reference to like, what's
happening to you at the end of your
life,
right? You know, manmata Allah shay, both at
a day, whosoever dies upon a thing is
resurrected upon that thing. And when the prophet
is in his last moments in this world,
his last breaths are literally
in the lap of this woman,
you know,
and he could have gone in any state
he wanted to. And Islamic theology posits
around the death of a prophet differently than
a person who's a not prophet,
and that the prophets can determine,
you know, when they want to leave.
Right? You and I, the angels of death
come, we just get we can't say no.
Right? But a prophet can,
like,
play a role in this saying, I still
want to stay. I'm not ready to go.
So he chooses to leave this world
like in the lap of his beloved wife.
You know, it's a really beautiful thing.
But she understands this,
in terms of
also just like the unique blessings that she
has.
Over the course of now the years that
come after his passing,
so I sell them.
There's a lot of different things that we
won't have the time to go into, but
authority
becomes now a divisive
like
metric within Muslims that are coming after the
prophet's passing.
And there's still like respect and deference that's
given
to the mothers of the believers,
Aisha in particular.
If you want to read about it,
there
are actual, like, internal civil wars that take
place intra like Muslim community.
There's a battle called the Battle of Saffin,
the Battle of the Camel, that you could
read about some of these things. But after
a certain point, she just kind of takes
a step back away from things that are
political.
And she passes away from the world at
about 67 years of age.
But a lot of what we have
in terms of access
to not just like information,
but insight
comes from her as a person.
You want to think just how remarkable this
is,
given like some of the odds that she's
going against. Because you you gotta think right?
Also through this, like what her personality
must be
that,
like,
she's married to the messenger of God. Do
you know what I'm saying?
So
where and how there's that much more importance
to how she conveys things,
but she takes it seriously. There's like a
sincerity and dedication that's there. Does that make
sense?
So this is who's narrating this hadith,
Aisha Radiallahu ta'ala Anha,
the mother of the believers.
And so she says in this hadith,
that he who,
essentially innovate something in this matter of ours,
meaning Islam,
that
is not of it will have it rejected.
Right? It'll be kind of refused, pushed away.
And so it's talking about a very particular
topic.
It's called in Arabic bida,
in innovation.
Right? And if you weren't here at the
beginning
of our discussion,
the opposite of the word bidah is sunnah,
right? Sunnah
refers to the authoritative example of any individual.
But in this context, in the more technical
kind of references
refer to the authoritative
example of the prophet Mohammed, peace and blessings
be upon him.
And so here,
we're gonna kind of talk about these 2
things conceptually.
But what I'd like for you to do
just because I know I was talking a
lot about who Aisha Radi Allahu Ta'ala Anaha
is,
why do you think this is like something
that gets rejected?
The idea of an innovation,
if we were to give it a baseline
definition
as something that is, like, added
after,
like, the establishment of the religion. Do you
know? Whatever it is that that thing might
be, you know, we could talk about with
a little bit of nuance.
But why is there this kind of definitive
kind of sense that
something that innovates
in this
is just by default something that's going to
be pushed away.
You know, that it's something that has no
place.
If you could turn to the persons next
to you, just so we can kinda get
going in, you know, getting our, like, own
thought processes going.
Why is this something
that is rejected, this idea
of adding to the religion?
Then we'll come back and discuss.
You know, but what are your thoughts on
some of this just at a first glance?
And then we'll come back and discuss. If
you don't know the people sitting next to
you, just introduce yourselves.
If you haven't been, like, in this type
of conversation before,
the goal isn't to like tell somebody
like why they are wrong and you are
right, right? Just listen to each other, share
ideas and thoughts you want to get comfortable
in expressing around, like, concepts of religion,
and then we'll come back and and talk
about it just in a few minutes, but
go ahead. Yeah.
Okay.
So what do we think? Like, why is
this
such an important thing?
What is it that this is really kind
of bringing what's what's it bringing up for
people? What do you think? What's the hadith
trying to convey?
Or what is it conveying?
What do we discuss?
Yeah.
So, like, in Islam, one of the things
is about, like, prioritizing things part
of
it
that could be rejected is because,
part of it that could be rejected is
because,
it's not because, like, it's just fear in
people. It's a reminder that
don't reshuffle the priorities
as they're set forth by.
So there's, like, a foundation practice in Islam,
5 prayers, like, the foundation belief,
the foundation practices,
foundation principles.
And then based on those things, I, you
know, scholars have discussed, debated
what's permissible, what's not. But the idea is
that
I think that the reason why there is
this, reminder in the hadith and, like, this
idea keeps coming up is so that we're
still,
yeah, we're still grounded in the
priorities
that are then the process of settlement has
to set forth for us. Like, we don't
reshuffle those rates. Like, some new matter comes
in and if it was, like, free for
all and you could bring in whatever you
wanted it because you thought it was
a it was a good thing for the
religion, then
it would have diluted,
the, kind of, the standard practice that,
connects all of us. Or, like, the dean
would have been jeopardized in some way. Like,
maybe the
the idea of a community and the community
practice would have been
But this hadith is saying something particular,
right?
Like it's saying, if you do x, then
y, do you know?
So it's saying like, if you do this
thing, what is it what is it saying?
What happens if you do this thing? What
is the hadith telling us?
It's not part of Islam. Uh-huh. If you
add something new to it, it's not part
of Islam. Like, it's just not part of
Islam.
Yeah. But what so what does that mean?
It changes the book or the word of
love? No. But it's reject like, it's it's
to to the individual.
Right? So the individual, like, I'm coming in
and I say to you,
like, we used to have a lot of
kids that would go to school here before
this place got really big with a number
of people.
Was just a lot of students,
and we were in, like, the church that
was here before this building and the church
basement over there. A lot of people used
to do impressions of me. There's this one
kid
who was, like, spot on on his impressions,
and he was a upperclassman,
and he called this 1st year student.
And
he said, come to the Islamic Center. I
need you to, like, mop the floors right
now. And the kid didn't know what to
do because he thought it was me. And
then he also told the kid there's now
7 prayers in the day, right. And the
kid also didn't know what to say, right.
There's not 7 prayers in it. We have
5, like, obligatory prayers.
Right? I can't add
2 extra prayers.
This kid who's impersonating me, he was trying
to make a joke to this kid who
was freaked out. Right? They didn't know what
to do. But
if I was to suddenly say
I'm going to start praying
not like recommended prayers, extra prayers,
but if there's 5 obligatory that are established
and I say I'm going to start doing
7 as obligations,
what's the Hadid saying consequently
will happen with the 2 that I am
not
like, I'm just adding on?
Rejected.
It's rejected. Meaning what? Like, what does that
mean?
Added on to the the part of it.
But there's no point to it. Do you
know what I'm saying? It's not like an
extra credit assignment. You know? Like, I teach
classes here. Some of your students here. Right?
Like I have students. I don't know why.
They just don't do their work, you know,
and I get it. But then at the
end of the semester or like a semester
later, I don't understand why I got, you
know, this grade in your class and I
look up their attendance and their grades. And
out of 14 classes, I'm like, you attended
6 classes
and you wrote like 8 of the weekly
reflection papers out of 16. That's why you
got the grade that you got. Do you
know what I mean?
They can have an opportunity to do something
extra to contribute
to what it is that their overall grade
will get impacted by. But that's different than
you, like, praying in the middle of the
night in Ramadan.
You can do that if you'd like to.
You can read Quran,
like when, you know, you decide to read
Quran. You give in extra charity and volunteerism
and this other kind of stuff.
And the idea is that potentially
it will be accepted.
The notion of something being rejected
has to be understood consequently
with its opposite, which is accepted.
And the acceptance of it, if you remember
the Hadith we talked about before,
the only thing you take from this worldly
existence,
this is a world of actions and deeds,
and all you take from here, you don't
take any of this stuff.
Right? You're not taking the clothes. You're not
taking the cars, whatever else.
You take what you do.
So
why do something
that off the bat you're already told
there's no room for it to be accepted?
It's just already in a place where
there's no point.
Forget about the arguments you're making. Forget about,
like, the basis of why you want to
do it. What it makes you feel like
doing.
It's not gonna do anything for you.
And
the doing
for you is rooted not in what I
believe,
but where I'm yielding now
to something that's much bigger than me in
a God conscious mode of existence.
Historically speaking,
you have
an innumerable amount of religious traditions
that you can look
at do not exist in the original form
of what they were.
And this is a challenge that comes up
even during the time of the prophet Muhammad,
peace be upon him. There's a lot of
religions
that no longer
are what they were prior to that time.
And where you can read text, right, if
you're into this kind of stuff, you can
read a book by Weber on the sociology
of religion that talks about like how characteristics
like charisma become a really important part to
building community.
But where ritual and practice gets changed
and people start to now remove it in
order to create more entertainment
to kinda just hold people
within their respective congregations,
they start to change like what religion says
to meet the needs of a demographic
that no longer want to adhere to what
religion says. Do you know?
In our tradition, for example,
the mandate of 5 daily prayers
comes from,
the
prophet getting advice from Moses.
Right? There's a journey called the Isra and
Mehraj,
and the prophet goes from his home to
the city of Jerusalem
where he prays with every prophet of God
in an act of just kinda collegiality.
So every messenger, a 125,000
prophets sent to mankind, the prophet prays with
them and then ascends
into the heavens
on this very vividly described, like, journey
in these narrations. You could look it up,
Isra and Mehraj. And one of the things
that happens
is he ascends through the levels of heaven
where he meets a different prophet
and right before he gets to the highest
point,
he interacts with Moses, peace be upon him.
And then he goes and he engages
in conversation with Allah in whatever capacity that
transpires, right? It's not a religion
that yields to anthropomorphic
thoughts and ideals.
Then he comes back down
and Musa, alayhis salaam, Moses, peace be upon
him, says, what happened?
And he says,
Allah told me 50 prayers for my community
and Moses says, go back. They're not gonna
do 50. My people didn't do what they
were supposed to do. Your people are not
gonna do what they're supposed to do. And
so they go back and forth and back
and forth until 50 goes to 5. And,
you know, it said that, you know, it
will be 5 but written as if you
did 50. Right? And this is like the
notion,
like, we were made to do 50.
We're just doing 5.
Right?
And even at 5, Musa, alayhis salaam tells
the prophet Mohammed, peace be upon them both,
that go back again. They're not gonna do
it. Do you see what I mean? Right?
But the not doing,
the inaction
in and of itself also
can be a part of innovative practice
depending on the intentionality
through which one is saying, I'm not gonna
do this thing. Right? As much as adding
to
can be a tangible thing. We will now
have, like,
4 rakas at Maghrib instead of 3. Right?
Is just as problematic as saying
prayer is not an obligation in Islam.
If you're changing the categorization
of it, you're making what's
definitively
established
in certain categories to not be what those
things are. There's a lot of different opinions
on things that have textual basis, but it's
not I think I feel I want. It's
not a religion
that is other than anything about submission to
God And when you now make God submissive
to you, it's like the opposite of what
the religion is. Do you know? It's a
religion that's gonna assume you're gonna have struggles.
You're gonna have challenges. You're not supposed to
be perfect. That's the whole idea. Right? It's
gonna be hard at certain times. So it's
a god centric religion.
But from just the standpoint
of
utility of time,
if you buy into what we were talking
about in the previous hadith
that talks about this journey of a soul
and you're gonna stand in front of God
in the day of judgment and eternality
or hereafter,
like, don't do things that'll have no point
to them.
They're not gonna necessarily yield anything
that is of benefit
in these ways.
Why do you think
somebody might start to
innovate in their own religious experience?
Like what can be a catalyst or a
cause of some of these things, right? And
we don't want to think about this. The
notion here is also not to create like
elevation of the self by denigrating somebody else,
right? This is not a religion.
The hadith says that even if you have
a mustard seed worth of arrogance in your
heart, like, it's gonna prevent you from going
to heaven. Right? May Allah protect us from
it. So you wanna look down at people.
You wanna just think objectively.
Right? Why do people do this?
Where did it like the kinda,
you know, blanks get filled in certain ways
so that we can understand for ourselves too.
Like, what's like the root and basis of
this? Do you know what I mean?
As you're thinking about that, like understanding here,
when you have a very
low bar of entry in Islam, there's not
a lot of obligations, a lot of prohibition.
Everybody doesn't have to be this, like, super
Muslim on steroids, the way the world sometimes
makes us feel like we have to. You
can just be like a Muslim here. You
don't have to be Muslim up here. You
want to work to your potential definitively,
but that's different for each and every single
one of us. Do you know?
But when we're talking about ritual and practice
in Islam,
it's understood that these are time tested
spiritual exercises
that have
divine
crafting to them,
And they don't have to be changed in
any way. When executed upon in the ways
that they're intended to be executed upon,
even if you're struggling with it, the struggle
adds more benefit to the person who struggles
in their practice of it than the one
who could do it fluidly. Right? We have
hadith that say the person who, like, struggles
with reading the Quran
is getting more reward than the person who
does not struggle with the recitation of the
Quran. The idea is not perfection.
The idea is
to yield to what God says is best.
And here now, like, this is the way
we pray because this is how God said
to pray to God.
Right? This is what we eat. This is
how we
dress. This is what we don't eat. This
is like language we use. We don't gossip
because God said don't gossip. Right?
Right? That woe be to the person who
slanders and tale bears. So somebody's like, you
know what? I think in Islam,
gossiping is actually like a meritorious act. Right?
Like, what religion do you practice, dude? That's
not what this religion is about. Do you
know? I make justifications
for certain things. Do you see what I
mean?
I get this a lot with couples that
come to see me who
are interested in getting married. You can't control
who you fall in love with. Do you
know? And sometimes I wanna shake the Muslim
person in a relationship
who's not doing right by their non Muslim
partner because they weren't honest with them in
the beginning. Right? There's people who have varied
understandings of how this works. It's very beautiful,
like where there can be synergies and understandings,
but I've also sat with people in my
office who are like, can you just make
me Muslim? And I'm like, I don't have
like a Muslim wand, dude. Do you know?
But they're struggling
because they want to believe in the religion,
but for them subjectively,
it's hard to explore the religion
when they have now this added caveat that
if I don't do x, I'm not going
to get y.
And so the exploration of it is not
objective
in that way for some specifically,
and then I'll sit down with some people
who they're just like, I don't want to
become Muslim.
Why can't I marry my Muslim boyfriend or
girlfriend?
Like you're a grown person. You could do
whatever you want to. You don't need my
permission.
There's a guy that came to sit with
me. He is Catholic. His girlfriend is Muslim,
and you know why can't we have a
wedding that's 50% Catholic
and 50% Islamic?
You can. You can have whatever you'd like
but it's 50% Catholic and 50% Islamic
then it's neither Catholic or Islamic. You're just
making your own religion at that point. You
see?
And that's your prerogative, like do whatever you
wanna do. I'm not your dad, and even
if I was, most of you are bigger
than me. Like what can I do to
you? Right? I can't hold you to that
place. You just have to know what you're
doing and why you're doing it.
So why do people do this?
Right? What is it that can be something
that we have awareness of and consciousness of
in this regard.
It's not struggle.
It's not like it's hard for me to
wake up for fudger. Do you know? Like
fasting is really tough, you know, especially in
the summer. Do you know what I mean?
That's not what we're saying. We're saying there's
a change.
What's compelling,
like the change
in a way that is outside of what
the religion allows for. The question makes sense.
So you can turn the person next to
you. What are some of the reasons as
to why these things might come up as
as actual things? And then we'll come back
and discuss. But go ahead.
Okay. So what are some of the things
that contribute to this? Like, why would somebody
or many people,
what would contribute to kind of the shift
or the change?
Individually,
communally,
you know, what what are we discussing? What's
coming up for people?
Or how might somebody fall into a place
where what they're practicing is just not part
of this thing?
Any thoughts?
Yeah.
I think what we talked about is there's
a lot of different reasons. One could be,
with trying to to
I've seen a lot of people
I think that also sometimes it's, like, the
easiness
in our own, like, practice and then the
I think they all come
But it's important. Right? These are all things
that that could be there
as long as they are in a concluding
point that is changing religion.
Like if we're in a place where
you and I went out to watch a
movie
and the movie's getting good and you're like,
hey, call this mug group time. And I'm
like, I don't know. I just wanna watch
the movie. Right?
That doesn't mean I'm adding to the religion.
It just means I'm not following the religion.
Do you see the difference?
Right? I know I'm supposed to be out
there praying,
but I'm sitting watching this thing. Right? It's
very different than me saying
that is not a part of Islam.
Do you know?
I'm not obligated to go do it
versus
I know I'm obligated to do it,
but this is just so
amazing
in terms of the cinematic experience.
How could I leave it behind? Do you
know? Do you see what I mean? Right?
Or if like, I'm in a place where
I'm just, you know, lazy Sunday,
and
it's like, hey, let's do this or let's
do that.
And I'm not
moving
because I'm not motivated
versus
it becomes like this slippery slope
that out of it, I just go down
and down and down further,
which attaches itself to the hadith that was
before this,
right? What does that hadith say at the
end?
People could be like good their whole life
and at the end of it was written
for them catches up because they start to
change their actions. Or they could be like
on this path that's crazy.
And at the end,
they start doing like stuff that's really good.
Do you know? But think about how the
motivation goes
from like the whim, the desire
being compelled by a thought that now manifests
itself from a whim to an action and
it becomes habituated,
Right? The entry point of the laziness
can come now to be the entry point
to a broader conversation
of a justification
that creates something that says, that's not Islam.
And what's like this minute early on can
become this big and then you could pass
it on to your kids, or you could
pass it on to, like, the new Muslim
that came to learn Islam for you. Right?
Where your own practice
starts to define what Islam is to them,
and then they come and they're like, this
guy didn't know anything about what he was
talking about, man. Right? He was just telling
me how to be called Latif. He wasn't
telling me how to be a Muslim. Do
you know? Do you see the difference? Right?
What else can contribute to this?
Yeah.
Having access
to a lot of the things that we
wouldn't have access to back home and, like,
kind of falling trapped into
Yeah. And when you're surrounded by people
who they try to compromise on things
that
it's not in their jurisdiction,
Do you know? When the guy comes and
says, can you do this wedding? It's not
that I don't want to. Right? It's just
like I I can't.
Do you know what I mean?
I can't walk into a Catholic church and
say give me communion.
The priest is not allowed to give me
communion. Right? I'm not Catholic
and I'm not like I said, you know,
regular, like, everyday Catholics.
I've sat this close to Pope Francis. We've
spoken at things together. Catholic people are really
great people. Do you know what I mean?
I can say to the priest, well, I'm
just gonna give myself communion,
and then I can't drink this wine,
so I'm gonna drink orange juice. And I
can't eat this wafer that you think is,
you know, symbolic of this,
so I'm gonna eat this Oreo cookie.
The priest is gonna say, none of this
is communion.
And he's not being mean
by telling me, like, this is not like
Catholicism. This is not communion.
You could call it whatever you want to,
but it's not in the jurisdiction
of the priest
to change
what is not in his jurisdiction to change.
When you live in a society
that has a modern day shirk that is
egocentricity.
Right? This supremacist
mindset
rooted in overt consumption
that says
not only
should you want the things that you want
as much as you want them at the
expense of your needs, you're actually entitled to
have it however you want to have it.
You should have your coffee made exactly the
way you want it to be. You should
have somebody announce your name and write it
on your cup.
You should have every single thing that your
ego desires.
And as it gets pumped into you again
and again and again, and from a distance,
you see all these people that that's the
way they get to live and it's that
must be the key for acceptance for me
or that's where I can find normalcy.
Bida being the opposite of sunnah
meaning innovation is the opposite of the prophetic
example.
The prophetic example also
is what is the primordial
state of existence.
Right? And when you have supremacy
claim that it is the primordial state of
existence,
that's why these things also clash with each
other. Do you see what I mean? So
innovation
gets inherently linked to whiteness and anti blackness
in this way because it's also an opposite
of the prophetic
tradition
that is about kindness and gentleness,
the common good,
like finding beauty in all things around you.
Whereas,
like,
whiteness
says it's the primordial state.
Blackness is on the other end of the
spectrum and you're always in this constant state
of validation that says, I need to be
in pursuit of what's on the end of
whiteness. Do you see what I mean? Right?
And so that societal
impact that says, well,
they are good in terms of wealth and
power and privilege
and they just do whatever they want to.
Maybe I should just start doing whatever I
want to. And that's how I'm gonna start
making changes.
You can't compromise on a farad in Islam.
Something that's an obligation, it's an obligation.
Something that's haram, it's haram,
and those are things that are immutable.
When the people come to the prophet
to get him to just start bartering with
them on theology,
we'll worship your God for a day and
my God for a day, your god for
a week and ours for a day, yours
for a month and ours for a day,
yours for a year and our for a
day. Prophet says no. Like, I can't I
can't do this. It's not just out of
want and desire.
It's not in his authority.
That's not something he can barter on. Right?
Compare this to
there is something we'll talk about in the
sera class like probably next year. We're talking
about Medina.
They go from Medina to Mecca for the
first time many of them since they left
Mecca years before, and they're going to perform
Hajj,
and they're going back home, and they miss
home. And along the way, they meet the
people of Mecca, and they engage in a
treaty called the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah.
And at this treaty, one of the things
they agreed to, they're not going to Mecca
anymore, and they're gonna go back to Medina.
And the people are not happy. Umrah bin
Al Khattab is upset with the prophet, right?
Like,
are we not the Muslims and are they
not the mushrik? Why are we making deals
with them? Do you know? He's agitated.
The prophet can compromise on these things because
they are not
like
things that are beyond
compromise on. Do you see what I mean?
That's not what we're talking about here in
this instance. Do you know?
But when everything is purposely designed to get
you
to feed the self and to feed the
ego,
then is that much more that says,
I should make God submissive to me.
Religion comes about in I now worship what
I feel
as opposed to worshiping the creator of the
feelings that I have. You see you see
what I'm saying? What else did we talk
about? What else can cause this?
Yeah.
Didn't really talk about this, but brother's comment
just reminded me about environment.
And,
I think a lot of times, culture and
tradition can be mixed
in with religion, and I feel like that
might be a part of innovating,
unquote.
Yeah. And it could be.
Right? And this is, like, a tricky thing
because anybody can be Muslim.
So Islam
in
Nigeria
is gonna look Nigerian. Just as Islam in
China is gonna look Chinese,
and Islam
in Turkey is gonna look Turkish. Right? It's
gonna look different
in those ways,
and it's very purposeful in that sense. It's
not about muting your identity.
It's about enhancing it.
But where you have now practice that gets
passed on generationally,
I might be doing something a certain way
because I don't actually know what it is
I'm supposed to be doing. Do you know?
And if I'm not taking time to actually,
like, learn concretely
and have, like, a
structured understanding to it.
It's not gonna always be, like, my mom
said this and my dad said this. Right?
Mom and dad can sometimes be incorrect,
you know, and
where and how.
The other thing we take from this is
like,
I don't wanna say something is or isn't
Islam and be wrong.
Because as much as you add something to
it that's problematic,
if you're taking away something that's a part
of it, it's also a problem.
So if you take away from someone their
cultural identity,
telling them that being Muslim is somehow now
committing a cultural apostasy,
it's a big problem
because you're definitively
adding to the religion something that's not there.
The Quran and the Hadith doesn't say that
to be Muslim, you have
to
be
Arab,
nor does it say you have to pretend
to be Arab.
Do you know?
And so understanding,
like, when we say obligations and prohibitions are
very few, and there's a lot that gets
inter mixed to this
that has gray area to it. It's probably
a lot more that we can do than
we realize.
A couple other things that we wanna talk
about here before, like, next week, we'll get
more into, like, what are the categories of
this,
thinking about also the importance on the other
end of, like, the sunnah and where you
want to embrace that
from different aspects outwardly and inwardly.
Quite often these terms
also get associated
with labels and categories of Muslims.
Do you know? So people have a knee
jerk allergic reaction
to the word bidah at any time. Do
you know what I mean? A lot of
people don't use it properly because they excessively
use it. Like when I was 18,
it was the first time I
performed like a spiritual retreat at the end
of Ramadan.
That was a sunnah of the prophet,
peace be upon him. The last 10 nights
of Ramadan, he would just stay in the
masjid
in, you know, the the end of Ramadan.
It's a really amazing experience. Like, you should
try to do it. You're just consuming things
that are good. You're not hearing, like, people
yell and fight or lie, you know, and
all you're hearing is, like,
good kind of conversations. There's a lot of
silence,
reflection,
and it can make the world feel very
different. You're not away from people, you're away
from distractions.
And I got sick,
you know, during this 10 days because I
was sleeping in the Masjid,
and I was sleeping near, like, the front
where there was windows exactly like this, and
it was cold. When I was 18,
it was Christmas time was Ramadan.
Right? So the Islamic calendar is a lunar
calendar,
and the month shift, like, 10, 11 days
earlier every year
in relation to the Gregorian calendar. You know?
And so that year,
it's like the year 2000,
essentially,
and Ramadan
was during Christmas holidays. Do you know what
I mean?
The middle of the masjid is where, like,
all the heat was circulating.
Retreat, you're not supposed to leave the masjid
unless there's an actual reason to leave. You
just stay in the masjid the whole time.
So I got a cup and I'm just
like spitting congestion into the cup. It's gross.
Right? You know, you'd be I'm 18 years
old. What am I supposed to do? Do
you know what I mean?
So this man comes next to me
who is, like, very excited
to be Muslim.
He grow up with it, but wasn't really
practicing.
And he, like, in the beginning of the
10 days, sat next to me. It was,
like, very much, like, you know, I'm very
nervous. I didn't really grow up so much.
They spent the next nights
like with these guys
who were sitting towards the back and just
like
teaching him about Islam. And now everything became
an innovation.
And so he came and sat next to
me. And I'm like, exhausted. There's, like, burgers
coming out my nose. I'm spinning this cup.
And he's, like, I think this is bida.
And I was, like, what?
And he's, like, you're spitting in the cup,
Like, this isn't, like, established in the sunnah.
And, like, what are you talking about, man?
Right? I don't have a cold.
It's like the equivalent of me blowing my
nose. Like, what what is what do you
what do you mean? But he doesn't know
what the word means. Right?
And, you know,
I'm not, like, upset with him, but I'm
worried because even me at 18 not knowing
anything about my religion,
I could tell that this guy is way
off. You
know?
So there's there's a group of people
who they're overly excessive about this.
But
the problem that comes from it is then
you have people
who are very much anti this methodology
that also then become allergic to the idea
that anything is an innovation.
You see what I mean? Right? And you
can't see these terms just linked to categories
of Muslims
that interpret theology
and law in distinct ways, all within, like,
a banner of Islam. Right? But in just
understanding what they mean at a base level,
You know? And there are things that are
not established, like within religion in and of
itself,
that definitely people are adding on. There's things
that people get heavily influenced by different cultures.
My family comes from the Indian subcontinent.
And you have a lot of influence from
like Hindu culture, and Hindu religion,
and a lot of practices
that Muslims
engage in, in India, in Pakistan,
you know, in the entire Indian subcontinent.
It's not like a good or it's just,
like, objectively true, you know,
and people won't be able to realize or
recognize this
in this way if that's just what's being
passed on to them. Do you know what
I mean?
And a demographic that reminds us they're like,
hey, we have a Quran and a sunnah
can have a value add because they're saying
this is what the root and base is
of this.
As long as that's not becoming like the
excessive point of it. Do you know? So
here,
it's like,
one,
if you do this thing,
there's just it's it's pointless. Like, that's what
it is.
And it can go past the boundary
that actually creates, like, detriment back to you
if you're miseducating
people on things. Do you know? 2,
you're not getting, like, the contentment that can
be harnessed in spiritual transformation
from actually doing the exercises in the way
that it's intended to do. Do you know
what I mean? Like, some of you are
gonna go for us with Umrah to Mecca
and Medina, a smaller pilgrimage to Mecca and
Medina.
When you,
like, walk around the Kaaba,
right, your left shoulder
walks
in like circles around the Kaaba. You stay
with your shoulder kind of parallel
to the Kaaba. Right? If we go there
and I'm like, hey, man, you don't make
a lot easier. Let's just walk with our
right shoulders facing the Kaaba. Do you know?
It's not like what the exercises
and the metaphysical
benefits can't be yielded
without the performance of the exercise being done
in the way that it's intended to be
done. If you decided to do a reverse
fast, right, you're like, you know what? It's
hard fasting, like, when the sun is up.
I'm just gonna fast more hours when the
sun is down, and I'll be asleep for
most of it, so it'll work. This is
great. You might, like, feel more hydrated and
all of this other stuff, but the spiritual
impact of it cannot be yielded because the
exercise is not being performed
in the way that it was ordained to
be performed.
And its benefit is not rooted in your
determining
what the gain is from it or the
ease. Do you know what I mean? It
doesn't need you to follow it in order
for it to
bring benefit.
Aisha Radi Allahu Ta'ala Anha
is not saying this to us
in the way that the man who's telling
me I'm spitting in a cup is saying
it to me. Right? This guy, may Allah
bless him, he didn't know anything about anything.
Do you know? Right? And that's okay.
In his own words,
he went through, like, this 10 day retreat,
and, like, day 1 was different. And then
he met these guys who just, like, I
don't even know what they said to this
poor guy. And now he's like kind of
drunk on, like, one verse of Quran he
learned. Right?
But Aisha
is the person that we said that people
said of her a quarter of all, like,
legal rulings
are
because of her contributions.
Right? She is a master of spirituality,
of Quran,
of Hadith.
She's knowledgeable,
like companions of the prophet
would go to her to ask for understandings
of Islam,
and she's telling people
as this young woman
who honors the role
of being a mother to the believers
that has that love and consideration
and commitment.
She is teaching us this Hadith
that is rooted in the prophetic tradition,
don't add things to this thing.
You don't need to.
It's good the way that it is.
What we find towards the end of revelation
is a verse that says,
that on this day,
I completed for you your religion.
Right?
There's not anything else that's gonna get added
to the Quran, and the Quran historically,
like factually
historically
is in the same form as it was
when it first revealed.
Academics who hate Islam will tell you this.
There's no revisions, there's no changes to it.
It's the exact same text
and it's purposeful
because the idea is that you are practicing
it with elements of continuity and change, right?
So like how you play on an airplane
when there was no airplane before, but there's
still like mode through which you can draw
analogously
circumstances that are there, right? So no one
could tell you it's wrong to prey on
an airplane. That doesn't make any sense.
But
if
there's like an absence of understanding how these
things work,
you'll have people who
they speak
when they don't know what what they're talking
about.
You have like Aisha also say, Radi Allahu
Ta'ala Anha
as she talks about like innovative practices.
She said, one of the first
like newly invented practices after the passing of
the prophet
was that people
started to eat to their stomachs full,
that they would fully satiate themselves.
Do you see?
Right? So it's not just about mechanics and
postures and these kinds of things, but the
consequences
of when you start to leave behind
what is the ethos of the religion,
it is going to have you delve deeper
into what is just about materialistic
gain and individual satisfaction.
You see what I mean?
So next time we'll talk about like the
sunnah a little bit more, how that plays
into this. A text you want to read
in between this week and next, it's written
in the nineties.
It's called the sunnaz primordiality,
Right? It's written by Abdul Hakim Murad,
TJ Winter. He's a convert to Islam. He's
a great sheikh, a great scholar. He's at
Cambridge University. He founded the Cambridge Muslim College,
as well as the Cambridge mosque.
It's really like deep substantive
individual,
remarkable person, may Allah preserve him. So he
wrote this article like years ago, and I
read it quite often.
And it really, like,
highlights this idea of
why we should, in the prism of modernity,
be taking the sunnah as something as, like,
a moral philosophy on life. Do you know?
And so I'd recommend reading that. We'll talk
about also, like, different categories of what the
term bidah means, because there's going to be
different kind of semantical understandings, right? There's a
group of people that they would say anything
that happened in the time of the prophet,
his companions,
and the first four, like, caliphs, that's all
considered
to be within, like, what is, like, authoritatively
sunnah.
So anything that happens at that time. There's
others who would say no. Like, it doesn't
transcend all those generations.
So they would coin a term
that says like you can have a good
bida also a bida hasana.
Like in Ramadan, for example,
in the Sunni tradition we pray a prayer
in the nights that's called
the Salatul Taraweeh
prayers like some of you have probably prayed
it before.
That wasn't established
as a congregational
prayer during the time of the Prophet Muhammad.
It became established
as a congregational prayer during the time of
the second caliph, Umar ibn Al Khattab,
And they would say, like, this is like
a good bid'ah. Right? When we have 2
Adans at Jummah
time, there wasn't always 2 Adans at Jummah
time. There's just 1 Adan at Jummah time.
Do you know? But you think about, like,
how communities grow, people grow. That first athon
is like, hey, everybody close the shops, get
everything down, right? Joma time is upon us.
Then the second athan is, like, the, like,
Khadib has stood on the pulpit to start
delivering the sermon. Do you know? So there's
an awareness,
but, fundamentally,
the idea is the same. The semantics of
it are a little bit different.
Do you know?
Okay. So let's do this for 2 minutes.
You just turn to the people next to
you. What are some of the things you're
taking away from tonight's conversation?
And then we'll come back and discuss, but
go ahead.
Could you repeat the title of that text?
The sunnah as primordiality.
Yeah.
Okay.
So what are some of the things we're
taking away?
What's coming up for people?
What are we taking away from this conversation
today?
Yeah.
We're having a well, I think it's very
interesting conversation
about,
you know, certain things, like, we were talking
about
inactiveness
could
be equal to
innovation
in in the context of this hadith,
but, like, compromise when you you might not
necessarily know something.
And now we have this
amazing Internet where we can kind of, like,
search for answers when we're not sure if
something is,
innovation or if it's, you know, a fard
or sunnah or whatever.
But I feel like
the resource that is the Internet
can
kind of be a little bit overwhelming. Yeah.
It's the worst. Like,
At the same time, it's like you can
scroll and find whatever answer is suitable for
you in that moment in time. And that
might be an innovation
in in the context of this study. But,
like,
you know, it's it's
correct me if I'm wrong here, but in
terms of what we were discussing, it just
seems
difficult
to to navigate
what is innovation, what is not.
Yeah. But if you have kind of a
foundation
because it's it's it's purposeful. Right?
And we have to we'd have to recognize,
like,
a lot of us just at some point
didn't have exposure
to
kinda
Islam as we grow. Right? And that's that's
fine. Most everything everybody is doing is probably
pretty solid. Do you know what I mean?
But the idea is that there can be
things that are are just not a part
of it. Do you know? And some of
it's not just the act in and of
itself,
but it's what we're looking at. Like, the
first hadith
that was in this book in the Malama
alu baniyat, that actions are by their intentions,
that hadith and this hadith,
some scholars say like these 2 hadith comprise
everything you need to know about Islam,
because one is about the inner part, the
intention,
and the other is about like the outer
part, like how that informs. Because not just
that the intention has to be good, the
action has to be good.
So how does one learn
anything? Do you know?
Most of you in this room have gone
through some
level of curricular study. Do you know what
I mean? Right? Even if you have homeschooled,
you didn't homeschool yourself. Do you know what
I'm saying?
And the Internet didn't homeschool you also.
So principally, you wanna think like where does
that structured element come in? That doesn't have
to be a 5 day a week experience
from like 8:30 in the morning till 3:30
in the afternoon with co curriculars and recess
and lunchtime.
But like an hour a day, you know,
2 hours a day. Right? A couple hours
a week, like a few hours a month
that I'm making deliberate time
to think out what's the foundational aspects that
I'm building upon
in a more structured way And how do
these 2 hadith inform one another? Do you
know?
And there's certain things that, like, could be
done
that have nothing to do with religion that
are just fine to do also.
Do you know what I mean? Like,
you could get married and it could look
a bunch of different ways from an Islamic
standpoint,
because permissibility doesn't equate to normativity.
You know,
just because it's done a certain way doesn't
mean that's the only way for it to
be done.
So it'll look different from country to country
and place to place,
you know, in in in certain ways. Right?
But a challenging thing would be if you
added obligation to something that's not obligation.
Like,
we had somebody
whose father passed away. We don't typically host
like Quran katoms here. Do you know? So
he said, hey, can we like get people
together read Quran?
And there's different opinions on like, you know,
whether the recitation of Quran for the deceased
is something that reaches people as a reward.
And like most people would say, yes, it
is, Right?
But even there you'd have
the where the where the Bida comes in
is not about the recitation of the Quran
following somebody's death is if you say it's
obligatory to do it and it has to
be done at this time and this place
like definitively.
Do you know what I mean? Do you
see the difference in like what the concept
is? Do you know what I'm saying?
And the better thing to do is just
if you don't know, just be like, I
don't know. Right? And this is a big
problem that comes with
entitlement and exceptionalism.
I always have to have an answer, an
opinion on something. If I don't know something,
like, I don't know. Right? I had a
good friend
who
he was getting upset with me.
I was like, I'm not gonna hate on
myself if I don't know something, right? Like,
what do you want me to do? Like,
I'm not,
like, I don't know, like, this, why would
I know what you're talking about? I don't
know it. You know, I don't have to
feel bad about myself not knowing something, but
you can cause more damage if you continue
to act like if you don't know. I
wouldn't say don't use the internet, but
like, it's really hard
and can create a lot more confusion,
because
you can access information without somebody helping to
distill it,
which some of these things only have to
be distilled as a one off. Do you
know what I mean? Because like, once you
learn how to pray, then you learn how
to pray,
then you don't have to keep like learning
how to like you already did it, you
know,
And you just kinda break it down
in a more systematic way. Does that make
sense?
Right?
Yeah.
Other thoughts, like, what are people taking away
from this?
Just don't be sectarian.
Learn your religion and, like, try and be
as a as a person that you can.
Because,
idea of innovation. Okay. That's a problem.
So you can have a problem with that
methodology, but
not with the idea of innovation or, like,
how to navigate itself and as you, like,
the other extreme is that, oh, anything is
okay, you know, because as a bit like,
as an over correction, I'm gonna negate the
other group. Yeah. The best thing as you
just mentioned,
trying to learn your religion
and practice it in a structured way,
and be objective. And, you know, if you
look for the truth,
the level will,
show you the truth and based on what
Allah knows is the best way to use.
Yeah. And it's a god centric religion. Right?
So it's gonna assume there's certain things that
god wants you to do that you love
to do, certain things that
are a difficult struggle to do, and certain
things you just don't get. Like, why am
I doing this thing? But you're yielding to
the idea that, like, God is at the
center of it. Do you know? It's not
just it's not me, like, being there.
Other thoughts, anything else that comes up for
people? Yeah.
Definitely throughout the discussion.
This definitely reminded me of, like, when I
was reading Surat Al Najim.
And I, you know, I was reading through
it. I just want to read the tafsir.
And basically,
I remember it talks about 3 goddesses, right,
plus idols.
And also it's just a concept that I
just put in my head where I was
like, you know, you see like around the
world where they have, like, you know, multiple
gods or whatever, you know, how people create,
like, these false beliefs.
I asked myself, well, I understand how one
person can do that, but how can a
collective society help everyone do that? And definitely
when we were and definitely, when we were
talking about,
definitely I feel like, it's when the human
it's when it's when, like, a a person
will
their wants onto onto something.
So everyone wants something. Everyone wants something. This
is why when you look at a lot
of these, like, false titles, it's basically like,
oh, the goddess of rain or the goddess
of, you know, bounty or this or that.
It's because people want those things. Right?
So that, that so so that is why
I feel like, you know, it's important where,
you know,
we we need to remind ourselves that this
is, you know, god centered and not centered
around what we what what we believe and
what we want out of it. Right? Because
everyone wants because at the end of the
day, you know, people will try to look
for shortcuts, and people will try to look
for something to pull out of their religion
saying that I want something out of this.
Yeah. And, like, what is deifiable
also changes. Right? Like, you can worship money,
you can worship physical beauty,
you know, you can worship your own desires
Do you see what I mean? And religion
is a very powerful tool.
And when you can manipulate religion for the
masses,
it can create group think. It it can
create all kinds of things. I mean, look
at, like, what people in the world believe
right now. Do you know? There's literally people
in the world who believe right now it's
okay to kill babies.
How how, like, is that a possible thing?
Do you see what I mean? Right? And
they make justifications and excuses for it. Do
you know? And you're just like,
well, what what renders
this line of thinking? Right? And I think
one of the things that you're saying that's
really important
that goes kind of hand in hand with
what Diasdek is saying is, like,
don't be afraid to pick up the Quran
and read it.
Do you know what I mean? Because a
lot of what this conversation is gonna highlight
is not like, hey,
like,
do I struggle
with knowing what is or what isn't?
But the base of my struggle is,
like, I don't know why I do what
I do,
and
I potentially don't really know,
like,
too much.
It's not a religion that requires you to
know too much, do you know?
But what is getting kind of shooken
is going to be something that has to
be accurately named also.
Do you know what I mean? So how
can you know what the Quran actually says
if you don't read the Quran,
right?
And it just goes hand in hand. Do
you see what I mean? Like we're reading
hadith
to talk about hadith.
And we're not just like looking at them
to say, oh, this is about embryology.
This is about spirituality.
This is about this, but to contextualize it
more, to draw more like message hearing from
each other so that it becomes actually something
that can be influencing
decision making and choices. Do you see what
I mean?
Okay. So why don't we do this?
We'll take a pause here,
just to give people a couple of things
later this week.
Tomorrow, doctor Murmur is gonna be doing his
halukkah,
on the Quran.
On Wednesday,
doctor Murwa will do her emotional
and kind of spirituality halukkah. She's one of
our staff psychologists.
It's really amazing, halukkah. You should definitely come
to it.
You'll you'll gain a lot from it. And
then after that, we'll do, like,
the the one that I do on the
life of the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon
him.
We're doing
a look at the Sira of the Prophet,
the Meccan period.
On Thursday,
we're gonna have a guest speaker come in,
Anissa Diab.
She's gonna be talking about,
how to deal with trauma and grief, a
lot of different kind of topics relevant
to some of what it is that we're
seeing today. It's called
spiritual crisis, managing soul trauma and burnout.
And Anissa Diab
is a mental health clinician with over 10
years of experience in psychology and counseling.
So that's gonna be
this Thursday,
at 6 PM, and it'll be in, like,
the rooms right across
from this window.
You can see in the building next door,
but the buildings connect.
On Friday night, we're gonna be doing
a black Muslim meetup, part of our black
Muslim initiative.
So if you or somebody you know self
identifies as black,
one of the community groups that we have
here as well as a student group is
a black Muslim initiative is very robust.
So the idea of this is to convene
our black identifying community,
hear from them
how
the initiative itself has been going for them,
any feedback,
other services as we're kinda getting out of
this post COVID
framework,
and rolling out our community programs more.
You know, we want to kinda
put out there again some of the things.
Like, some of you might have come last
night to the professionals event that we hosted.
It went really well. There's about 400 people
that came out. Our professionals group isn't, like,
people with jobs necessarily, but people out of
the undergrad phase of their life,
even though there were some undergrads that showed
up yesterday. It's for people who are 23
and older.
Yesr, why are you trying to hide your
face back there? Were you there?
Yeah? No? Yesr is actually
57 years old.
She just looks young for her age.
But, you know, it's a nice program, and
we wanna create these kinda segments as entry
points into the broader community experience.
So come to that. And Saturday,
through our converts group and our Latino Muslim
group, We're really open to the community. We're
doing an event,
with an imam. His name is Daniel Hernandez.
It'll be in both English and Spanish
and talk about the role of Jesus and
Mary, peace be upon them, both within Islam
as a religion.
You could bring family members to it who
are not Muslim,
coworkers, friends, whoever.
It's one of the things that we try
to do to create
a bond
or understanding,
especially for communities or families that are blended
where someone might be a convert and the
families are trying to understand how to relate.
You know, it creates that opportunity
and just a good way for us to
also learn about some of the kind of
basic aspects of our religion. So that'll be
on Saturday
in the evening,
in the room upstairs that we do Jumah
in.
There'll be dinner provided
for that event and the black Muslim meetup
event as well.
The last thing really quick. Convert brunch.
Oh, yeah. And on Saturday,
we're gonna do our monthly convert brunch in
my apartment.
So if you're someone who is exploring Islam,
you're a recent convert or converted,
like, some time ago,
or you are a family member or partner
of somebody in one of those groupings, the
brunch is open to you.
We're gonna send out some information about it
in the next day or 2,
but try to come, or if you know
people who would want to come,
it's usually a really nice
nice gathering.
It's potluck style.
People make a lot of really good stuff
for it as well.
Great.
So why don't we take a pause here,
and we'll see everybody
next Monday.
And then
we'll only do this for another 2 weeks,
before the building closes, I think.
So just so people have that timeline,
3 Mondays from now is 25th. It's Christmas.
The building's gonna be closed, and it'll be
closed
through the following Monday, which is New Year's,
January 1st.
But then we'll pick up again after that,
Okay.
Take care.
I see. You're praying, Isha?
If anybody wants to join us for Isha,
we made a jamah beforehand but feel free
to if
you wanna pray with him.
How are you? I'm good. Good.
What can I do for you? I was
at the event yesterday, and I saw you
guys
Yeah.
Do you do that? Yeah. Great. I'm gonna
do, like, social media, graduate designing, something like
that.