Khalid Latif – Imam Nawawis 40 Hadith for Modern Times #14
AI: Summary ©
The speakers emphasize the importance of not being decisive and memorizing hadiths, community support systems, avoiding racist behavior, knowing oneself and setting boundaries before taking action, love for oneself and avoiding distractions from others, the natural beauty of one's heart, and finding the natural beauty of the people around them. They plan to start a essentials class and wrap up the essentials class in about 15 minutes, emphasizing the natural beauty of their heart and the natural beauty of the people around them.
AI: Summary ©
So we're looking at hadith number 6 of
the 40 hadith of Imam Nawawi. If you
wanna pull it up, you can just
pull up on your phone. If you don't
have the text,
Google something like Imam Nawi's 40 hadith number
6.
This is a hadith
that starts.
So we just take a quick minute to
bring it up.
Last week, we started to look at this
hadith
in its first part. We talked about the
narrator of the hadith,
Naman Ibn Bashir,
a little bit about who he was,
One of the first children born in Medina,
the first of the Ansar,
after the grandson of Abu Bakr was
born.
Nomad ibn Bashir was born 6 months later.
We talked about his eloquence as an orator,
as a poet,
and other things relevant to who he was.
And what we'll be doing is we're going
through this hadith is to also talk about
the companions that are narrating them,
just to be able to offer a little
bit more insight contextually.
So, for example,
knowing that Numa'an ibn Bashir is the narrator
of this hadith,
and he was
one of the first children born
in Medina
means that
he was a child
during the time of
the latter part of Revelation.
And the mode in which he's explaining things,
we want to be able to think and
understand also
not with a grain of salt because he's
a child, but this is a child who's
being exposed to these types of teachings.
And the system
of kinda narrating prophetic tradition
wasn't something
that discluded
children of a certain age just because they
were children,
but he is at a young age
at this time.
Then we talked about the first part of
the hadith,
and the concept of,
like,
what's called the,
the categories
of the
legal rulings in Islam
that every action that we undertake can essentially
fall into one of these
typically,
like, structured around 5 categories,
in some schools of thought, 7.
Now we wanted to go through
kind of the rest of the hadith today.
So just 2 things really quickly. We're gonna
take a pause probably at around, like, 7,
7:15,
and then we're gonna shift into another
class that we're starting today.
It's just on the essentials of Ramadan,
which we're gonna use as, like, a prep
for Ramadan.
We did one at 4 earlier for students.
This is open to everyone, students, community members,
etcetera.
But we'll go through
similar to how we went through the fic
of prayer in the summer,
and went through it in a lot of
detail. We'll kind of be breaking down Ramadan,
within the framework of
just what you can anticipate,
whether this is the first Ramadan you're observing,
which,
is true for many of us.
It might be the first Ramadan as a
Muslim for some of us.
It might be the first of many Ramadans
that we've observed,
but are still trying to make sense of
what religion means
or are just being exposed to religion.
So just to have kind of a mindfulness
of the room and the diversity in the
room.
But that second kind of class that we're
starting today on Mondays,
is gonna be focused on just
the essentials of Ramadan,
kinda start to finish
so that we're prepped as best as we
can, but we can also kind of revise
and review,
for those who need that as well as
just get exposed for the first time.
So,
does everybody have the hadith in front of
them?
Hadith number 6 of the Arba'in of Imam
Nawawi.
It's hadith number 6
of the 40 hadith of Imam Nawawi.
Can somebody read it,
in English or Arabic?
We're gonna do both. Arabic and Arabic. Yes.
Hold on. English. Okay.
He'll go first then.
I have in
in Arabic?
Yeah. No. Okay.
Yeah. And
First, you wanna read the English?
The halal is clear and the haram is
clear,
and between them are matters unclear
that are unknown to most people.
Whoever is wary
of these unclear matters
has absolved
his religion and honor,
and whoever indulges in them has indulged in
the Haram.
It is like a shepherd who herds his
sheep
too close to preserve sanctuary,
and they will eventually
graze in it.
Every king has a sanctuary,
and the sanctuary of Allah is what he
has made
haram.
There lies
within the body a piece of flesh.
It is sound.
The whole body is sound.
And if it is corrupted,
the whole body is corrupted.
Verily this peace is the heart.
So we looked at the first part of
this hadith last time. If you missed it,
there's recordings up online. And the first five
hadith we have up online, we've been going
through them in detail.
This text
is a text that's like a foundational
collection of hadith.
Imam Nawawi, his
40 hadith collection.
It's got actually 42 hadith in it, but
it's something that,
gives us a lot of insight on a
variety of topics.
And what you wanna try to do
is familiarize yourself with them,
actualize them, reflect on them,
try to memorize them if you can. Right?
Because if you have some of these things
memorized, they essentially now start to inform decisions
a little bit more.
Right? Indeed, actions are because of intentions.
If you carry that with you, it's gonna
be easier to kinda turn back to it
in moments where you need something to inform
decision making. You know?
And so here,
this particular hadith
is broken into a few different ways,
and we looked at some of it in
regards to the first chunk
that talks about, like, the halal and the
haram being clear. Right? Like, marriage is clearly
a permissible thing.
And in Islam,
fornication
is not permissible.
You know, we said that,
giving somebody a gift
is clearly permissible. It's halal.
Theft is haram.
You know? So if you break it down
with tangible examples,
there are things that one can identify
very clearly in these prisms of what is
permissible and what is not permissible. Just to
recap really quickly,
when we had this spectrum that we talked
about, the Akam Sharia,
that was the obligatory,
what's called Arabic,
the
recommended, the mustahab.
You had in the middle, what's muba, neutral,
then you had what's makru,
disliked,
and then you had what's haram, impermissible.
Everything
to the other end from haram is permissible
in most instances, even at times where
his can be something that you can engage
in.
So what's comparatively
allowed in Islam
is
a 1000 times more than what is not
allowed. Do you know?
And so that area now where there's doubt,
like, we talked about that a little bit,
or a little bit more than a little
bit, actually. Right? But certain the principles that
kind of are drawn from our tradition,
from a legal standpoint, how how do you
deal with certain spiritual elements that are purposeful
to cast doubt within a person.
And we wanna move into
some of the latter part of this where
the prophet alaihis salaam is now creating some,
a principle again
that is illustrated further by
the example he gives of these animals grazing
in this space that is not for them
to graze.
The notion that something is haram in our
religion
is not because I feel or I think
or I want, meaning it's religiously prohibited,
strictly prohibited.
It's rooted in evidentiary
text.
And so we said in matters of worship,
everything is considered to be impermissible
unless it is
evidentiary
based that it's permissible.
I can't just make worship up. It's gotta
be rooted in the text.
In non matter worships,
non matters of matters of non worship,
the default is everything is permissible unless there's
a reason or a basis to say that
it's impermissible.
Do you know?
And where and how these two things
have areas also
that render gray.
The idea now that says if someone walks
in the gray area,
that's
the
essential equivalent of just getting into the Haram.
Where
you start to tread close to it is
what brings you to it, is the idea.
None of it's gonna make sense
or feel like anything other than burden
if you haven't sat down and reflected on
who, like, the lawmaker is in all of
this to begin with,
there's a paradox to decision making that when
you don't make a choice, you've essentially chosen.
And for many of us, we grow up
with these terms, halal and haram, if you're
born into a Muslim family.
Right? You are not taught to celebrate god
or reflect on who the divine is before
you're told, don't do this, do that, rules.
We have a lot of converts in our
community. Right? Just last week, 4 people took
their Shahada at the center. Yesterday, someone came
to my house. On Friday, there was 2
people at Jummah.
On Wednesday last week, someone did in my
office. Every week, there's a lot of people
who are engaged in this. There's a young
woman who came here some months ago, and
she sat with me.
And her entry point into Islam
was a significant other who was Muslim, which
is a reality for many people. Right? And
it's a beautiful way for someone to enter
into Islam
because you already then have, like, a friend
who's there with you in the journey. And
if you're the means through which somebody is
getting closer to god, like, that's a nice
thing also. Do you know what I mean?
And as she is getting more integrated into
the process
and
now
meeting, like, potential in laws and others,
she's sitting in my office
and the tears just pour out
and she said, I'm trying to learn this
religion
and all these people are giving me your
rules,
you know.
And if you're in a place where you
try to engage
hadith like
this
as a primary
rather than first approaching it through the prism
of faith,
you're gonna read into it a voice that's
everybody that's taught you religion at some point
in your life.
And if the Sunday school teacher or the
guy on the pulpit
or the parent who misused and weaponized religion
to kinda
control in some capacity,
their voice pops up, then it's gonna feel
like this is burdensome in some way.
The reality is that this religion is rooted
on the idea that we're gonna all make
mistakes.
The notion that gets us is twofold. 1,
Shaitan, the devil, wants you to believe that
because you've slipped, it's not the act in
and of itself that he gets you to
do, but because of it, you're somehow now
not able to have a relationship with God.
It becomes the identifying variable of who you
are
in your practice.
The other thing that comes up is then
I have this kind of
guard in front of me, not an armor,
but a barrier
that doesn't allow for me to admit that
I actually can do things that I shouldn't
be doing.
So it becomes hard for me to apologize
to people.
It becomes hard for me to seek forgiveness.
It also becomes hard for me to know
how to necessarily forgive because I've never had
anybody ask me for forgiveness when they've wronged
me.
And it creates now this conundrum where we
carry a lot of hurt and a lot
of heaviness.
And then on top of it, it's like
I just keep screwing up. There's nothing good
with me.
The whole notion is that you're gonna make
mistakes.
You can't have spiritual growth if there's nothing
to improve upon.
If everybody was in a place where everything
they did was already in the realm
of just doing it with
immaculate beauty.
What our tradition teaches us is that
our creator would get rid of all of
us and replace us with a population that
made mistakes
so that he would have a creation to
forgive.
And then, when you struggle, you actually struggle
with something,
it just means something different.
It allows for you to just taste a
little sweeter something when you have overcome or
accomplished or achieved.
You can revisit things that were given to
you in certain ways but not given with
a recognition of how you can actually
have relation to it that's your own and
not somebody else's. Do you get what I
mean?
So you can't read a hadith like this
and then throw your back against the wall,
especially when nobody is even looking to judge
you for anything.
But at the end of the day, you
inventory. At the end of a week, you
inventory, and you sit, and you think, and
you reflect.
What was the good that came from me?
What were the things that could have been
done a little bit better? What are the
things that I probably shouldn't be doing anymore?
The other part you wanna understand before we
look at some of the rest of this
is a lot of people turn to haram
not because they're bad people, but a lot
of people turn to haram in an absence
of community support systems.
They don't have people to lean on.
So when there's heaviness, you have to numb,
like, what you're feeling.
I can't experience this pain anymore.
You have to smoke something or drink something
to lose awareness or consciousness.
You get to a place where things start
to just feel heavy
and you're in a place where you want
some moments
of just clarity.
When you can work with yourself and work
with others to be able to celebrate
the overcoming of Haram. There's a woman in
our community who struggled with alcoholism,
she came to see me, we talked about
it, she said, I don't want to drink
anymore. I said, good.
And
we had some kind of meetings and then
at some point,
she said,
you know, Thanksgiving is coming up and I'm
really worried. And I said, why? She said,
I'm gonna go to my house
and all my family drinks
and I don't know what they're gonna do
if they see me not drinking. So I
said just give me a call if there's
any problems and we'll figure it out. I
didn't hear from her, and then a week
or two passed, I didn't know what was
going on. And then I saw her and
I said, is everything okay? She said it
was amazing. I went home. My family was
so drunk. They didn't know that I wasn't
drinking.
And I said I guess that's a good
thing. I don't know.
But then she started really working at it,
and
there was days that were easy and days
that were hard,
but then the days that were easier started
to exceed the days that were hard.
And when she went 6 months without drinking
anything, I told her get your friends together,
let's go out to have dinner.
We didn't have to tell them why we
were going out, but we were celebrating her.
Do you understand?
And this is hadith, the prophet
says that refrain from that which is haram.
You'll be the most virtuous of people.
He's not saying go and read more Quran
or pray more, do these things,
but it's not about doing, it's about keeping
yourself from doing.
And the level of virtue is not based
off of, like, human validation.
Look at how much charity he gives. Masha'Allah.
Look at how much Quran he knows.
But it's virtue within the eyes of the
divine that certain things are just hard, and
it's hard.
There's gradations to haram as well.
And you can see, like, right now
how crazy it is. People who are driven
by ego, lust,
just their own selfish desires, they don't even
care that they're killing babies.
It's just straight up murder
every single day.
But you don't want to be in a
place where that comparative mode in and of
itself starts to now
diminish what the impact is.
Because the hadith says that when we're engaging
in this thing of Haram,
it's leaving a dark spot on our heart,
and this hadith is gonna circle back to
the heart at the end of this.
And that's what starts to cloak.
That's the effect of, like, numbing. So why
is this relevant to us?
Everybody's going through some crap, man.
So you wanna be in a place where
you check-in on people.
Somebody walks in, you don't elevate yourself by
denigrating somebody,
but you're in a place where you learn
someone's name, you build a friendship and a
relationship
before you're jumping to just offer advice that
isn't talking to someone, but talking at someone.
You know what I mean? And that can't
be just out of convenience.
If I'm gonna walk with this woman overcoming
her alcoholism,
then I have to make myself available based
off of what she's going through. Do you
get what I mean? Does that make sense?
And this is why we have hadith, like,
prophetic narrations that say even, like, smiling, meeting
someone with a cheerful face is a charity.
You can uplift somebody. You can help them.
Make them feel as if they are entitled
to stand on a prayer mat that God
wants them to hear,
like, to to pray to him. Do you
get what I mean?
If I could give you a starting point
on any of this,
a couple of things inward and outward,
try not to lie so much.
And people lie over the dumbest things,
it's gonna kill your heart.
It doesn't mean you're just blunt and rude.
You know?
There's a hadith where a old woman gives
grapes
to the companions and the prophet. Whenever there's
food, the prophet
shares it with people. He eats last. Leaders
eat last.
These grapes are given. The prophet eats all
of them.
And the companions,
like, what what just happened?
And the prophet said that these were sour
grapes, and I was worried if you had
eaten them, you would have made this elderly
woman feel bad
for giving them to us. Do you get
what I mean?
He's not gonna say to the old woman,
these are gross.
That's not what we're talking about.
But
honesty
is the base
characteristic of this tradition.
Other things that you wanna stay away from
in terms of haram,
don't gossip.
You are hurting people
and the spiritual
impact
is that your good deeds go into their
accounts as you accrue bad deeds.
Hassan al Basri was a spiritual master of
our tradition.
People would accuse him of gossiping,
and he would say to them that, who
do you think you are
that the likes of you would benefit from
my deeds on the day of judgment?
When he found out people would gossip about
him,
he would send them gifts with notes inside,
and the notes would say,
thank you for giving me the benefits of
your good deeds. I will relish them when
I stand in front of Allah on the
day of judgment. Do you know? It's just
paradigm shifts.
You base your relationships on things that
are rooted in actual, like, bonds
that are meaningful. You come and learn together,
you pray together, you volunteer together,
you check-in on each other, you don't have
to have a false trust. It goes back
to lying. It's a false trust that I
will share something with you that we both
know someone doesn't want us to be saying
about somebody else.
Other things you wanna avoid in terms of
haram,
don't be racist.
It's crazy Haram.
Don't think you're better than someone by virtue
of where you come from.
The amount of money you have,
the parents you were born to, you had
no say in any of that.
Abuse, oppression, in any of its forms,
not okay.
No validation,
no justification,
you're killing your heart.
And then when we look at it in
a different category,
don't consume haram.
The permissible
is a lot greater than what is impermissible.
And in our spiritual tradition,
if you are able to control your consumption,
usually
aligned to, like, your stomach,
but you think about it also in terms
of what you watch, what you listen to,
etcetera.
When you're consuming it, it's literally going through
your sensory organs, and it's going to now
nourish your body in a way that's problematic.
So you just try your best.
You wean yourself off certain things.
We came back from UMRA
a couple of weeks ago.
I had gone to Egypt and came back
to New York, and then I had gone
to Toronto and came back to New York,
and then I had gone to South Africa
and came back to New York, and then
I went to Mecca and Medina and came
back to New York.
And some of it relief work, Allah make
things easy for our sisters and brothers in
Gaza, and then the occupation is taking place
there. Cape Town is amazing, and they
definitively love Palestine.
And this minister that you see all over
the news, I got to hear her speak
alive before any of it went public about
what they were putting into the courts and
how they were standing for our brothers and
sisters in Palestine.
But also on all of these things, I
was eating the way one would eat when
they're traveling around the world. And people are
nice, they just kept feeding me.
And so when I came back from Umrah,
I said,
I gotta cut out, like, all this sugary
stuff that I keep eating. When I came
back from Umrah, I I was the heaviest
I've ever been in my life. My kids,
I love them. They're really mean to me.
And my son, Kareem, he gave me a
hug, and then he took a step back,
and then he squeezed my stomach. He was
like, baba, it's never been this soft before.
I was like, thanks, man.
The 4 or 5 days
after I said
processed sugars are gonna get cut out, and
it's not the first time. I went 4
years without eating any of this junk, and
then COVID hit, and it hit really hard.
Those 4 days,
my head hurt.
I was, like, easily irritable.
There was times I was sitting
next to my wife on the couch, and
I would say, don't give me anything I
ask you for. And after 20 minutes, I'll
say, just give me a piece of chocolate.
And she'd be like, no. And, like, just
a little piece of chocolate. I'm not even
joking.
It's not easy.
Right?
But you have a plan or a strategy
that says, I'm gonna wean myself off of
it
because whether I buy into it or not,
it's having an impact on my inside. You
get what I mean?
And as the Hadith proceeds,
it now gives this amazing illustration
of where one goes in the realm of
permissibility,
and they draw closer and closer to a
boundary that they're not supposed to come to.
This is where people say that which leads
to haram is haram in and of itself.
Because if you don't catch yourself prior to
getting to the limit, then the only place
you can go is crossing the limit. Do
you get what I mean?
And it starts somewhere and then ends someplace
else. And then then, Shaitan gets you where
it's hard.
We are at a university.
I work with people of all backgrounds.
The number of young people who have relationship
issues,
challenges as they're trying to get to a
place of figuring out what love means to
them.
2 students here,
long time ago, came to sit in my
office.
They're miserable.
I was like, what's going on? And they're
like, we wanna get married to each other.
I was like, that's clearly a sad conversation.
Like, why do you look so down if
you wanna get married to each other?
And I said,
on Friday night, we were studying in the
library.
It was late, so I walked her back
to her dorm. She said,
do you wanna come and eat something? And
I said, sure.
And we went there, and her roommates weren't
there. And one thing led to the next,
and then they committed.
Then the next day, they felt very guilty.
And so they said, we're never gonna do
this again.
So, again, they studied,
walked back home. Would you like to have
dinner?
Nobody's else in the room. They've already made
a promise. We're not gonna do it again.
And then, of course, the same thing happens.
Now they're sitting in my office and they
say, maybe we should never talk to each
other again. Maybe we should just, like, forget
about this. Allah is showing us that, you
know, we're not good for each other.
And, like, what are you talking about?
What are you trying to prove that you
don't love each other?
That you don't care about each other and
you don't want to do the things that
people who are in love with each other
want to do?
But if you have boundaries and parameters that
you're setting yourself
aligned to,
then you have to know yourself enough before
you put yourself in the situation that's gonna
cause you to slip.
And this is why I'm telling you. Shaitan's
goal is to not get you to just
do the act. It's all the other mess
that comes into your head after the fact.
And they're sitting there wrestling with it, struggling
with it. What do you think Fajr was
like for them that day?
What do you think it was like when
they made Dua and they looked at their
hands and they felt ugly and disgusted with
themselves?
If you believe that you can't be forgiven
by God for something, it's not just telling
you something about you, but it's telling you
who you believe God to be.
And that's, like, the whole idea.
So here, the prophet, alayhis salam,
is engaged in this conversation,
and he's telling people, and this kid is
picking up on it because it's an important
thing.
You're not about what people will think, or
what will so and so think, or such
and such think. There's literal companions of the
prophet who struggle with drinking alcohol, struggled with
zinna. They would come to them. You gotta
make zinna halal for me, oh, messenger of
God. Like, they just couldn't deal with it.
Do you think they all didn't also pray
next to each other at Maghrib time?
And do you have hadith where companions are
like, that's the guy
that was telling the prophet he struggles with
Zina?
Or they're a community altogether
knowing that they all need to lean on
each other and support one another? Doesn't mean
you gotta get up and tell everybody your
business. Right? Here's all the haram that I
do, guys. You know, love me for it.
No. That's not what I'm saying.
But you have an element
that recognizes
people's
humanity,
and the whole idea is that there's still
opportunity to gain
because you come back stronger when you stand
on your feet the next time. Right?
The prayer of the sinner is quite often
much sweeter than the prayer of the saint.
Because when you've struggled and you've slipped,
you really know what it actually means to
pray
a little bit differently than somebody who doesn't
stumble, which is just fundamentally not possible.
They're just not being honest and real with
themselves. Do you get what I mean?
So here the prophet is giving us
this illustration.
And when he says it's like a shepherd
who herds his sheep too close to preserve
sanctuary, and they will eventually graze in it.
Every king has a sanctuary, and the sanctuary
of Allah is what he has made haram.
What I'd like you to do is just
turn to the person next to you.
What is it that you take away from
this part of the hadith?
You talk to the person. If you don't
know their name, more people have trickled in.
What is it that this part of the
hadith
kinda means to you or even some of
what we've talked about already? We take a
few minutes to just discuss, and then we'll
come back and talk about it. But go
ahead.
Guys, can you move in this way so
people who are praying, they have room to
come to the front of the room? If
you guys
can move on if you can come in
this way, that'd be great.
Can you move the tables back a bit?
Yeah. I know.
Thank you.
Okay.
So what are some of the things
that this part of the hadith makes you
think about?
The shepherd is bringing the sheep to graze
in this way.
What do we discuss?
So,
like, I was just talking to,
to Elmore. Yeah. Okay. And, my friends for
a minute. I thought it's already.
Thanks.
So,
you know, like, it's about it's,
that is clear. Haram is clear. There is,
like, a borderline
between them. And, the more that you would
practice,
the better that
your heart would, tell you
when you are in about, you know, like
to do, something.
And,
he was just trying to resemble it like,
Schiffer, who is trying to protect his sheep.
Okay. So about this part with the shepherd
and the sheep, like, what what stands out
to us here?
Any thoughts?
Are you looking away so that you don't
have to talk to me? Is that what
it is? Should I just stare at you
and make you uncomfortable?
Yeah?
Yeah.
We're talking about how, like, it's not
even,
like, so obvious that, like, you see the
haram
and, like, you see your haram. And, like,
even if you're in the haram,
you have to think, like, several steps ahead.
What could possibly be, like, the trigger that
gets me into the halal? Great.
Go ahead. Keep going. Yeah. Yeah. And then,
like, you
maybe you do something that's Haram once and
you think back and recognize, alright.
It's not enough that you just purely stay
and kinda get you're staying kinda out of
the way that doesn't get you to that
trigger
again. In this part of the hadith,
are you the shepherd or are you the
sheep?
Like, which one is you?
Because there's
multiple
characters here right now. Right?
The shepherd
is
drawing the sheep towards their grazing land
and brings them potentially too close
to a part of the land that they're
not supposed to get to.
Does it make sense?
The prophet is an amazing teacher, sallallahu alaihi
wasallam.
And you wanna think about
where he's at. He's in Medina.
We know because
No Manu bin Bashir, the narrator of the
Hadith,
is born
after they migrate to Medina.
Right?
Medina
as a city
is very different from Mecca.
If you come to the Seerah classes, we
talked about this last semester.
Right? The difference between Thayef and Medina and
Mecca.
Medina is a lot of swampland.
When the companions came, they were getting sick
a lot. They didn't like it there so
much. The prophet makes du'a for people to
love Medina
because his companions didn't like Medina. Right? Now,
everybody loves Medina. If you've been to Medina,
you cannot help but fall in love with
Medina. Do you know what I mean?
So
here,
they're in this place where how do they
function
in this, like, Bedouin tribal society
that is still situated in the establishment of
a city in Medina?
What does it mean when you're talking about
a shepherd with sheep?
And his ability to articulate and illustrate
in ways that actually create now an opportunity
for any person to find themselves in a
place of being able to relate
or at least understand and fathom
like the illustration, the metaphor.
So you gotta get it in your head
right now.
There's a shepherd.
Do shepherds have 1 sheep
in your head?
How many sheep does a shepherd have?
Multiple.
You got a lot of sheep. Right? There's
more than one sheep.
This shepherd is taking
their sheep
around to eat.
And now
the shepherd
leads them someplace.
Which one are you?
Are you the shepherd or are you the
sheep?
Before you answer, his I want everyone to
talk about it. Right? Because at a face
value, you can walk away and read a
hadith like this. Just like the other hadith
we read. It's like it means only this
thing. There's very few things in our religious
text
that only mean one thing. You can take
so much from different stuff. This is a
beautiful example of how the prophet teaches, and
how he's effective as a communicator
and an illustrator. Right? He didn't just say,
don't go to haram because then you'll do
haram and you're haram. Right? The way people
tell
us, but he's giving them now something that
they can visually
comprehend and understand.
And you have to think about it in
your head.
Shepherd
taking the sheep.
Which one is me in the Hadith?
Am I the shepherd or am I the
sheep? If you turn to the people around
you and just talk about it a bit.
Right? What does it make you think about
as you're visualizing it? And you hold on
to your thought too, because then we'll come
back and and start with that. Does it
make sense? If you see somebody not talking,
just bring them in to talk with you.
If you talk a lot, let other people
talk. Listen to them. Right? And it's not
about negating somebody's ideas.
This is how we learn from each other.
What does it look like to you? And
which one is me in this situation? Am
I the sheep or am I the shepherd?
Am I both? Am I neither?
Go ahead.
Do you wanna come sit closer with everybody?
Yeah.
You sure? Should we have some people just
come join you in conversation?
Oh, yeah? Okay.
And just as you're talking, don't stop talking,
but you can hear my voice, but keep
talking to each other.
If you're not the shepherd
or you're not the sheep, then who is
or what is?
What's the shepherd then and what's the sheep?
Makes sense? Let's talk for a little bit
more and then we'll come back and discuss.
Okay. Let's come back.
So
who is who in this part of the
Hadith?
Like,
there's nothing without meaning in Allah's plan. Right?
And the Messenger
is representative
as best in the human form of
who
Allah intends for him to be.
His words are
just meticulous, they're amazing.
So
who's the sheep in this? Who's the shepherd?
Like, which one am I? Which one are
you potentially?
Right? What do we think? What do we
talk about?
Yeah.
It's
through our conversations, we we seen ourselves, like,
as on a shepherd role.
One of the things we mentioned is that
we attend classes
and, we we are we seek the knowledge
from that. When we seek the knowledge, then
we share it with our brothers and sisters,
the younger generations.
So they're in the,
sheep
area,
transitioning in as they continue to practice and
advance
in their knowledge,
then they get to that shepherd role.
Okay.
Great. Other thoughts?
Yeah. Go ahead. I understand. Would the shepherd
be the individual and the
Yeah. It could be.
Yeah. Is that clear? Other thoughts?
You're gonna say something?
I thought so, my son was a shepherd
and the sheep the different struggles you have,
all the things that you're wrestling with and
trying to keep and controlling the right space
and crossing over
into where they should not be.
Yeah. I'm gonna share something. He said that
the shepherd is the soul. Right? Yeah. And
the sheep are the is the body.
So I think part of that is you
gotta
govern where you allow yourself
as in the body to be,
and stay away from you, sitting that way.
Yeah. It's Hadith, the prophet alayhis salaam. All
of these are great answers. Anybody else have
anything else they reflected on that we wanna
share? Yeah.
Actually, both depending upon the situation.
As he had said,
sometimes you are the shepherd yourself if you're
guiding yourself, but as you get close to
that heron, the sheep mentality takes over.
In this scenario right now, in this situation,
especially in my situation, I see you as
the shepherd, myself as the sheep. So I'm
looking for you for guidance and knowledge.
My children who haven't
embraced Islam, they may see me as a
shepherd and I know it's just
I think it's more relative to I think
it can be seen in many either or
depending upon the situation that you're personally experiencing
at that point in life, and it can
be applied to
and recognizing, am I right now a role
model, a figurehead?
You know, as as I was saying in
too. Like, I'm new to Islam. He's been
in it. If he was if I saw
him doing something out there, I would see
him as my shepherd.
And say because he did that, well, then
it must be halal because he's been a
Muslim his whole life and I have not.
So I think it also gives a lesson
on, like, being that proper example
because you don't know who's watching.
And you don't know who might you know,
that that might be a sheep that's watching.
There might be another fellow shepherd, but you
should always
strive to stay away from those boundaries.
Amazing. Right? You can extrapolate
so much, but you can also just gloss
over this part of the hadith
and never sit down and take a breath
and say,
something is driving something. There's the driver and,
like, the one that is driven.
What's going on here?
And what's compelling me? What motivates me? What
am I compelling towards? What am I motivating
towards?
The prophet tells us in another hadith
that all of you are shepherds,
and
all of you are responsible for your sheep.
That dual role is something that we've, like,
extrapolated a lot when we're looking at the
prophet's upbringing
in the Seerah class on Wednesdays. Right? So
you gotta take information from one place and
apply it to other places
so you can not have to have, like,
a quantifiable
relationship to knowledge
because you're not meant to be a dictionary
or a the source that just memorizes things.
Like, you can have little bits of information
and go really far with them based off
of how you create a prism of just
understanding the world through, like, new information.
So here,
there's capacity
to be a driver
as well as the one that is driven.
What is your shepherd?
And what falls under
what you are a shepherd of.
In any scenario,
the shepherd, what they shepherd
as a shepherd,
is not theirs to begin with.
Because if I'm shepherding sheep, it's not my
sheep that I'm shepherding. I'm shepherding somebody else's
sheep.
Right?
What?
It's like a one more time.
I can show the back there. If you
give me your sheep to look after,
you gave me 10 sheep.
I better come back with 10 sheep. Right?
Right?
And if I took your sheep someplace else
and fed them from places that were terrible,
I'm still responsible
for where I led them.
Everything that you have in our religion
is god's to begin with.
The notion of choice that comes under,
like,
supremacist
driven
models of liberalism
tells us that liberation
is in this idea, I can do whatever
I want.
Islam doesn't tell you you cannot do whatever
you want.
It just says, you're gonna have to explain
why you did it the way you did
it.
And that this thing that you were given
as the vessel for your soul,
even that doesn't belong to you.
And when you can see things as gifts,
not thinking that just because I have it,
it means I deserve it,
I start to think about, well, what's the
reason as to why I was given it,
and how do I utilize it? Everybody's got
different spiritual gifts. Do you know what I
mean? Some of us can sing really well.
Right? Some of us should never sing in
our lives.
Do you know what I mean? Right?
We have talents
that are coming from God.
But in being able to understand what drives
me,
am I being driven by the validation
of a world
that is purposeful
in trying to create psychological shackling of me?
Am I unwilling to acknowledge the control shaitan
has over me or whiteness has over me
or capitalism has over me?
Do I have a core belief structure that
I understand,
positive or negative, how it draws me to
the decisions that I make?
And what are the things that I'm driving
then in turn towards things that don't make
any sense?
Do you get what I'm saying?
So the dual role of the shepherd and
the sheep is applicable.
The sheep in and of itself
has limited foresight. It literally can only see
right in front of it. It requires the
shepherd to be what it is that is
defining
its trajectory.
This is where the end of the hadith
brings it all together.
That indeed in your jesed, in your physical
body,
there is a morsel of flesh.
If it's good,
everything is good.
If it's not good,
everything is not good,
it's your heart.
That's what you want to be the shepherd.
You don't want the nuffs, the lower self
to be the shepherd.
You don't want irreconciled
pain to be the shepherd.
You don't want ego and arrogance to be
the shepherd.
You don't want insatiable
lust and desire to be the shepherd. You
don't want, I feel, I think,
I want to be the shepherd.
You want the heart to be the shepherd.
How can the heart be the shepherd
if you don't take care of the heart?
How can the heart be
in control?
There's a hadith where a companion comes to
ask the prophet
about acts of goodness
and what they can be doing. And the
prophet tells them to reach out hands to
people and to speak good words.
But in the midst of the Hadith, the
prophet
says,
that are you in control of your tongue?
Are you in control of your hand? But
it uses
the word that derives from malik. Like, are
you the master of your body,
or is your body the master of you?
And if you reflect within yourself and say,
what drives you?
A lot of us are driven by pain.
May Allah grant us healing.
It's not the sheep's fault that the shepherd
is driving them through it,
but they still, at the end, are gonna
be the ones that are gonna get screwed
the most.
I have anger. I have sadness. I have
grief. I have anxiety.
This is why also it's important to understand
the dual role because if you are driving
people towards pain,
they still are going to respond to it,
and then there is consequence.
So the notion
of that which leads to haram is haram
itself is not just, man, you're sitting on
the barstool,
did you think the drink wouldn't go in
your mouth? But
make it broader.
When you put
adult emotions in children's hearts,
what do you think it's gonna bring them
to later on?
When you make jokes at the expense of
people, mocking, ridiculing them, When you don't take
serious
relationships,
you treat significant others like you would treat
a cup of ice cream. Always wondering if
something else is better than what you have
in front of you.
And what are you driving people towards?
And what from your heart is defining those
decisions?
The nature of the heart is something that's
important to understand
because you can gauge from a metric standpoint
where your heart's at
based off
of just how you treat people and you
treat things.
You wanna know what your heart's actually at?
What kind of choices and decisions are you
making?
The prophet had a wakeful heart,
he says, when he's asked about his sleep,
that my eyes, they sleep, but my heart
does not sleep.
So it's not just something that's random. We're
not surprised that he smiles at everybody,
that he greets people that he knows and
does not know,
treats everybody the same, whether they are rich
or poor, whether they are Muslim or not.
Because what should somebody look like in terms
of what they're doing if their heart is
doing okay?
If you got clutter in your heart, it
doesn't mean that you're the cause of it,
but you gotta love yourself enough to do
something about it.
You gotta also love yourself enough to not
be the reason that someone else gets clutter
in their heart.
And that happens in 2 ways, that you
are either
initiating it
or you are just carrying on generational pain
that has to stop someplace.
That's why what we were saying before is
really important.
Somebody walks into a house of God,
and they find everything other than the presence
of God.
They come in, and they get directed
to a back alleyway
because women are stuck in the basement,
and nobody's even there to talk to them.
They come, and the languages that are spoken
are not common amongst everybody, but everything is
just catered to a majority, not a minority.
There's a woman who came to Jumah here
who told me that she comes from
Germany or Switzerland,
one of these countries.
And she said,
I watch
your here
every week.
I said, that's very nice of you.
And she said,
if we didn't listen to this where I'm
at, there'd be no place else to go.
And I was like, you know, sister, there's
masjids in your country.
And she
said, they don't speak in English
or in Dutch or German or whatever else.
When I went to Holland, Holland is filled
with Muslims.
And I sat with a group of people
who were converts,
and I'm on a project studying integration
patterns
and, kinda, domestic policies. Right? I'm meeting with
ministers
who are, like, smiling. Politicians are the same
everywhere, man. And all these, like, Moroccans and
Berber speaking and Turks, they don't know. Nobody's
ever talked to them about, like,
privilege and all this kind of stuff that
stems from race and ethnicity.
As we're talking,
they're, like, talking about how it's great that
they all live in their own, like, kinda
places.
And this, like, man who's a minister is
saying, you know, we try our best. We
bring buses to them as, you know, our
kind of development plans necessitate
moving people. And I was like, they're just
gender finding you and smiling in your face
as they do it.
As I'm talking to people on the ground
who are not Turks or Moroccans,
and every masjid is either speaking in Arabic,
Berber, or Turkish.
I said, where the Dutch people go when
they wanna learn about Islam?
And then
across these cultural communities,
every one of them said something uniform,
regardless of their distinct cultural background, whether they're
Moroccan
or Turk or whatever.
Why would Dutch people wanna go to a
mosque?
I said, what do you mean, man?
But do you understand what this hadith is
telling you?
People don't have people to lean on. They're
gonna still try to settle the pain they
have inside.
This society
feeds you
in pursuit of numbness.
It wants you to over medicate.
It wants you to engage in what is
going to just render
unconsciousness
and a lack of awareness, and then to
just feed into it habitually again and again
and again. And it builds it by teaching
egocentricity
that says, don't
ask somebody how they're doing.
It's crazy the way this society functions. When
there are economic
downturns,
the solutions that they run are that they
have mass layoffs of people in companies.
Can you imagine?
People are having an economic downturn, and
in the midst of that, they go to
work every week, wondering if at the end
of the week, they'll still have a job.
Some of you experience this. Don't you?
It's purposeful
to create that level of control.
You see what I mean?
And you know why people do this nonsense?
Because their hearts are not what the shepherd
is.
They're being governed
by Hawa,
desire.
They're being governed by the nafs, the lower
self.
They're being governed by dunya, the materialistic world.
They're being governed by waswasa, Shaitan's whispers. May
Allah protect us from these things.
So what is my shepherd?
What is it driving me towards? You reflect
on it.
What pushes me? What compels me? What motivates
me? And in the beginning, the prophet's saying,
amen.
Haram is clear.
Halal is clear.
There's a lot more on this end than
that end.
And then it
with,
this is what should be
the sovereign
over you.
Make it the heart. Make it
the,
but make it one that is righteous,
wakeful.
So do things for your heart.
I want you to think for a minute
just as we wrap up.
If we looked in your routines, your schedules,
not what is forthcoming, but what transpired.
So there's actual record. We went back and
wrote down minute by minute
from this
day that is already
completed
to yesterday till a week ago.
Where could you show me evidence in your
schedule that your heart is important to you
And then just think. What are the things
that make your heart feel uplifted?
You know you like being around certain people.
Why are you not around them more?
You know certain spaces
bring you up.
Why do you not orient your routines around
these spaces?
You know certain things on the other end
just bring you down.
It doesn't mean you just run away from
it.
You're a shepherd. You're responsible
for sheep.
So you draw the rest of yourself
towards things that help to compensate.
It takes a little bit of light to
push away darkness.
But if all you do is immerse yourself
in darkness, then why wouldn't the world feel
dark?
Do you get what I mean?
No'man ibn Bashir radiAllahu an is a child
narrating this hadith.
He's gonna remember
in what we know him to be,
an excellent orator,
eloquent in his communication,
a poet.
You can't be a poet if your heart's
not in it.
Right?
What artist do you know that doesn't have,
like, a piece of themselves personally?
And how constrained
do they get when they have to create
art
that is not what they want to be
creating? Do you get what I mean?
So this little boy,
8 years of age,
hearing these words from the best of creation,
he's gonna grow up knowing
this religion
is about your heart.
It's not about Haram and Halal only,
but even halal and haram
is a subcategory
under your heart.
Do you get it?
Does that make sense?
So the hadith is also telling us, how
do you teach religion to children in Islam?
Do you just give them a list of
do's and don'ts?
Or is he explaining conceptually
what all of this is about? What makes
you you?
Because then it fills default gaps. Right?
If I got a heart inside of me,
what else do I have in me, oh
messenger of god?
Because you're not just a body and a
heart.
Something's gotta be the shepherd if it's not
the heart.
Something's gotta be the sheep.
Right?
So what else makes you you?
You have Akal,
intellectual capacity.
You have the nafs, the lower self. You
have Ira, the sheer will and determination.
You also have all of your memories,
all of your experiences,
everything you've ever felt, your thoughts, they're all
within you.
And you can't just have something arbitrarily
assigned
saying
that this is my shepherd is gonna fluctuate
day after day. Do you get what I
mean?
But as consistently as possible,
you want it to be the heart.
The last thing I'm gonna say before I'm
gonna ask you to turn to people next
to you, and then those who are here
for the second, we started this a little
bit late. So we're gonna wrap up in
2 minutes, and then we'll move into that
one.
We'll probably take a break to pray Isha
before so people can get up and stretch
legs.
If you know somebody is, like, a good
person
and they have a good heart,
then you should try to spend time with
that person
because you don't need people's permission to take
characteristics.
And if you spend time with people who
are just like money, money, money, money, money,
money. Right?
Then that's just what it's gonna be.
Do you know what I mean? You might
not like it, but it's gonna impact you
here.
So if you know being around these people,
being in these places, it brings me light.
You start to flourish inwardly by surrounding yourselves
with company that's gonna also
help bring healing
as well as help you flourish inwardly.
You find people who their love for you
is not rooted in the parts of you
that remind
them of themselves,
but they love you as a full person
so that they can help teach you how
to love you and let your heart be
in a place where you're then able to
say that, yes, this is the most precious
part of me. I want this to be
my shepherd.
So I'd like you to do between this
week and next week when we move on
to hadith number 7.
You go home. Pull out a notebook
right at the top. What is my shepherd?
What is it that drives me?
When I'm in charge, what am I, like,
being
in that seat? What am I driving people
towards?
You get what I mean?
And just reflect on it. Not in a
way that's self deprecating, in a way that's
productive.
In order to get to where you wanna
be, you have to be honest with where
you are in this moment.
Right? So if I come back from Umrah
and I'm sitting on my couch and I'm
looking at Priya, I'm a just give me
the chocolate.
Right?
What is driving my decision at that point
in time?
You know?
And I have to be honest with myself.
You're not me.
If I'm embarrassed by me, then I've already
given shaitan victory over me. Right? I'm not
embarrassed by me. I enjoyed eating all that
stuff that I ate, but I know that
that's not gonna be what's gonna bring me
to where I need to be. I gotta
get it in check.
Does it make sense?
Just gotta be honest with yourself too. Right?
And then as you try to detangle
all that other stuff that wants to be
the shepherd, it's gonna get in the way.
And it's gonna say, no, man. Your kids
are asleep. Your wife is asleep. You work
so hard. All these people, they rely on
you. What's the problem?
Just eat a Reese's peanut butter cup.
Right?
But sometimes,
small victories actually render deep impact.
And then I can get up 5 days
later
and say as miserable as that mess was.
And you as crazy, when you're trying to
do it, maybe it's just me. I walk
into places. People are really nice, but people
give me stuff. You know, we went to
this thing. My kids and I went to
the program that was happening here,
this, like, weekend seminar we were doing on
the proofs of prophethood with Almagrib Institute.
And this is, like, day 2 of me
not trying to eat any sugar. We walked
in,
and they're, like, handing out chocolate bars to
everybody. Right? So they're like, mom college, just
have some chocolate from us. And now I'm
gonna look like a jerk. What am I
gonna do? Right?
And then my kids walk in and come
out. They're like, baba, they have all of
these things. There's, like, gushers
falling out of their hands, and they're, like,
look, Baba, it's so great.
And,
of course,
the people who are there are very nice,
and they're like, you don't have to pay
for it. Just take it. Take as much
as you want. I'm like, no. Just get
it away from me. I want it I
could, like, smell it through the back. That's,
like, how much my nuffs is in control
at that time.
And I take a breath and say, like,
do I control me
or does my stomach control me?
And then 5 days later, I can look
in the mirror. I don't need, like, anybody
else. I can just say to myself, good
job, man.
You got through it.
Now do it for another 5 days. So
what happened after 5 days? What happened after
5 days? He just I just stopped craving
it. Okay. You gotta know the nature of
the nuffs is that it's lazy. Not only
does it compel you to laziness,
but in and of itself, it's lazy.
So if you can combat it for a
few days, whatever your lower self, your ego
is asking you to do or compelling you
to do for a matter of time, it's
gonna wear off because it's inherent characteristics are
that of laziness. It's not gonna just keep
getting you in the same place again and
again. Do you know what I mean?
Then, like, a couple of days ago, I
ate a peanut chocolate with some peanut butter,
and then I looked at my wife and
I said, it doesn't taste good. And I
was really sad, you know, because the same
nonsense happened when I cut it out for
4 years. And I tried to eat something,
and it tasted
really bitter. Do you know what I mean?
And then I tried to eat a Oreo,
and then I looked at her and she
was like, what do you think? And I
was like, I don't like it. And I
felt really sad because I like eating these
things.
But that's what happens. Right? You get acclimated.
It's remarkable the way God has made your
bodies
that you're able to adapt. Fasting is a
very powerful tool.
And if you can, like, detox from something
for just a few days, it pretty much
gets out of your system at that point.
You know? All kinds of substances, including, like,
certain types of foods.
And then you do something for 30 days.
Right?
You don't want to, like,
1st day of your eat, go nuts. You
know? Because you're just gonna bring it all
back in unless you're doing it with intentionality,
and you know, like, this is something that
isn't what the norm is gonna be. Do
you get what I mean? Okay. Let's take
2 quick minutes. Return to the person next
to you. What are you taking away from
our conversation today? And then we'll take a
pause,
and make Isha.
If you don't know the names of the
persons, just share some names,
and we'll come back and discuss.
You're not supposed to be talking to me
right now.
Why are you ruining everything? Did you guys
talk to talk to those people over there?
I don't want
She does need help. Doesn't she need help?
What do you need help?
How do you put 1 drops of sugar
in the
It's not in everything.
It's in lots of things. It's not everything.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It is.
You screwed. Okay. I was gonna tell you.
Life's gonna suck, bro.
Okay.
Let's come back.
What what are some of the things we're
taking away from today?
Maybe a couple of people. No more chocolate.
No more chocolate? That wasn't the point of
the conversation.
Right?
What are we taking away from today? Maybe
1 or 2 people quickly, and then we'll
take a break. Anybody?
Yeah.
Definitely, we all love chocolate. I think, you
know, that came up in the subject dessert.
But one of the things that we see
is is time as well, what we spend
our time on. Right?
And I think that's one of the important
you mentioned earlier, time management, with this discipline
ourselves, right, and spending the appropriate time, you
know,
so we can benefit from it.
It's not gonna come back. Right?
Yeah. Great.
Anything else?
Takeaways from today?
Like, I think, like, a summary is which
would be
the drivers
rather than being
driven by, you know, like, any,
behaviors or desires or sins or
flaws.
So this
requires,
like you said, that we should have, like,
a good heart, which can,
better
guide us
just to to
maintain,
the good
things.
Yeah. So you just spend some time thinking,
what do I do for my heart? How
do I make the heart what it is
that's in control?
It doesn't mean you have to, like, abandon,
like, yummy things. That's not the point of
the conversation. Right? But just being able to
understand how all of you is connected to
the rest of you, and it's kind of
reflection on these hadith that have such deep
meaning to them. Do you know? That allow
for us to be able to start to
think about why we do what we do,
what kind of mush pushes us in the
ways that we are pushed, you know, what's
really driving me.
Most of us are not in a place
where it's like what we believe is actually
compelling us so much. Right?
And when you can turn to Quran
and just understand
the way that God sees you is the
way you wanna try to see yourself
so that you have an inherent understanding
that you don't have to live
in pursuit of, like, proving something to anybody,
you know. You're good whether you're a doctor
or not. You're good whether you're married or
not. You're good whether you have children or
not. You know, you're good whether you have
a lot of money or not. Right? Whether
you have a house or not, whether you
drive a fancy car or not. The people
who are standing in lines as migrants right
now, they're as good as the people who
are serving them the food. Right? It's not
a metric of, like, what we understand certain
things to be. Do you get what I'm
saying? Right? And when the heart is the
driver,
it allows us to find what's inherently beautiful
and things around us.
And even when there's just
undeniable ugliness,
it allows for us to be able to
identify
and see that and see where we can
be a source of beauty in relation to
what is inherently just vile and disgusting. Do
do you get what I mean? Does that
make sense? Right?
Okay. So next week, we'll,
start
people can try to come, like, as close
to 6 as possible. That'd be great. We'll
go to, like, 7, 7:15,
and then we'll take a pause for Isha,
and then we'll start the essentials of Ramadan
class. So people who want to
stick around for that today,
we're gonna be going through
essentially all things Ramadan.
Ramadan
is really close to us, and Allah allow
for us to reach it.
And it's something that we wanna be able
to engage in. Whether you have never observed
Ramadan in your life or you've observed many
Ramaldans in your life, there's always
an opportunity for us to draw,
like, residual,
benefit from previous Ramadans,
but also have new opportunities.
Because even if the actions and rituals stay
the same, we should be different every time
we're turning to something
because there's change
embedded in what our religion calls us towards.
But sometimes the elements of change, we're not
necessarily able to embrace.
So we're not thinking about the things we
don't think about fully. Do you know? So
we start to look at things from different
vantage points. Do you know what I mean?
Like, some of you have read this hadith
we looked at
well before. Have you ever thought about it
in the ways that we're thinking about it
today? This is where we benefit from hearing
from each other. So you can stick around.
We'll go till probably about 8:30 or so
tonight,
and then we'll wrap up at that point.
So if people haven't made ish, we'll call
the.
People wanna make,
and then we'll call the in, like, 5
minutes, and then we'll start the essentials class,
in about 15 minutes or so.
And then we'll wrap up for the night
after that's done.
Yeah? Okay. Is that okay? Alright. I think
I'll call you.
How'd that go for you, man? It was
awesome. Is it okay? I loved it. Oh,
good. Definitely gonna be coming back, after I
get very early for work. Yeah. I did.
Thank you. For this too, but I gotta
I gotta sleep. Let me know if anything
comes up. I mean, anything. I'll see what
you get. For sure. This one. Alright, brother.
Take care.