Khalid Latif – Imam Nawawis 40 Hadith for Modern Times #17
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AI: Transcript ©
Alright. Okay.
Okay.
Should we get started?
Sorry we're starting late.
Maghrib
is getting later,
as everyone knows, and we're trying to cram
in a lot in a short window of
time.
For those who weren't here the last couple
weeks,
we looked
at the beginning part of hadith number 7
of the 40 hadith of Imam Nawi,
this hadith is narrated by a companion by
the name of Tamim Adari Radiallahu An.
Can somebody read the hadith,
English, Arabic? Just so we can get the
barakah of the hadith being read as well.
People can pull it up.
Does anybody have it?
Do
you
wanna
read?
The prophet, peace be upon him, said,
the religion is
necessary.
He said to whom?
Can someone read the Arabic?
Exactly.
So in the first time we were talking
about this hadith, we broke down who the
narrator was, Tamim Adari
is somebody who converted to Islam from Christianity.
Some people said he was a monk. In
the 9th year after the hijra,
he had embraced Islam.
A lot of notable things about him. He
was the first one to bring lanterns
into the masjid, Right? That literally brought light
at nighttime in the masjid. Prior to that,
at Isha time, it just got very dark.
And not to go into too much detail,
we could catch up on some of those
things on our podcast or our YouTube channel.
We talked about also what the word
means,
how quite often we think about it just
in terms of advice, but the connotation here
is rooted in things that are a lot
more deeper than that. There's a notion of
purification
of kinda
having something
be sincere in that sense
inwardly,
outwardly.
It also gives us kinda connotation
of, you know, when somebody is mending things
that are
pulled apart, torn apart, and they piece them
back together,
this is utilized.
Like, when
Allah speaks about a sincere repentance in the
Quran,
he says,
that you have this that
is
kind of pure and sincere in this way.
Do you know? And so that's what this
word here is invoking.
But
I would say in English,
a better way for us to think about
it
is how are you genuine
with
these now
groupings
that the prophet alayhis salaam is describing
in response to the companions,
question. Right?
How are you genuine
with Allah like you yourself?
Right? How are you genuine with Allah's book?
How are you genuine with his messenger?
How are you genuine with, like, the leaders
of the Muslims or the common people? Do
you get what I mean? And that notion
of having that kinda
genuineness,
that kind of sincerity.
Do you know? How am I very much
present and real in my relationship
with the divine,
with the divine's book,
with the divine's messenger, with the divine's creation.
And so we talked about how one has
that type of sincerity with Allah kind of
a a length last time.
This was 2 weeks ago. Last Monday, on
the break, we had a at my place.
I know a bunch of you came to
that from the law. There's a lot of
people, so it's a little bit tougher to,
like, get the halakkah done the way we
wanted to. So I apologize.
We did do a small portion of something,
but it wasn't necessarily what we were anticipating
doing in that sense.
So here, we wanna just continue where we
left off. So if we weren't there last
Monday, we didn't build upon anything. We didn't
actually go through more of the hadith.
So now we're gonna talk about this from
the standpoint
of these remaining 4 groupings. Right?
Until the end
of the hadith.
How is one
able to be genuine with the book of
Allah?
Like, if I was in a place now
where I extrapolated
for myself,
metrics through which I could assess
how I'm being, like, real with the book
of God.
Do you know?
Genuine in the sense that the way that
I'm supposed to engage the text, I engage
it. Like, you all have seen me with
my children. My son, Karim, my daughter, Medina,
make special draw for them. I love them
very much. They're great blessings in my life.
What would you understand
is a genuine
interaction
for a father with their children?
Do you know? If somebody was to say,
like, what does it mean to be a
good dad? Right? And that is a tangent.
My wife was pregnant with our daughter. I
asked a bunch of dads, like, at random.
They didn't know each other.
How was it when you had your your
child, your first child?
And 3 people that I talked to, the
first three,
separately, like random. If I ask one of
you a question and then walking down the
street, I ask some random person a question,
and then a week from now, I ask
some random person a question totally separate from
each other. I asked 3 people,
like, how was it for you when you
first became a father?
All 3 of them separate from each other
said to me,
I didn't love my kid for the 1st
few years of their life.
I said, what do you mean?
Like, what are you talking about?
And they said somebody else was changing diapers.
Somebody else was waking up at night with
my wife. I didn't go to, like, really
do so much. And so I said, I
don't wanna not love my babies. Do you
know? Like, I want to very much so
love my children.
Went to every doctor's appointment with my wife.
Was there when we heard both of our
children's heartbeat for the first time,
made a deliberate
kind of attempt to understand,
like, what her needs were as much as
how I could be involved in the process
of kind of being there,
not because
of anything else. And you have to understand
this. It's not being clever, you know? There's
people early on who would say to me,
it's so nice that, like, you babysit your
kids while your wife goes out. And I'd
say to them, out of love, like, it's
not like, if I'm babysitting them, I'm I'm
their father. You know? Like, you don't you
don't you don't babysit your kids when you're
the dad.
But the notion isn't problematic if I think
that that's it. But if the norm is
such
that these are kinda how some of these
things
happen, one of the consequences
to this
is that you can't love somebody you don't
spend time with. Do you know what I
mean?
Right?
And then it becomes a lot easier
to not be genuine in your relationship
with that individual. Do you get what I'm
saying?
So the same way
you all would have an expectation
that, like, I am genuine with my children,
what should a Muslim be in their genuine
interaction with the Quran?
Like, what would that look like?
Does the question make sense?
Just because we have a shorter amount of
time
tonight,
and get people started, if you could turn
the person next to you, share some names,
if you don't know each other's names. Ideally
in pairs, but no more than 3, just
so everyone's talking and listening.
Like, if one was genuine with the Quran,
had this type of sincerity with the Quran
that this hadith is calling us to,
what would that look like fundamentally?
Do you get what I mean? So you
could talk about it for a few minutes,
and then we'll come back and discuss. But
go ahead.
Okay.
So what do we think this means? If
somebody is being genuine
with Allah's book,
like, how do we understand this? Right? In
this hadith,
you can understand,
that
this entire
kind of categorization of revelation of text of
scripture that's divine,
you know, and more relevant to many of
us, the Quran,
You know? But what is what would that
look like if I was genuine
with Allah's book?
Like, how how can we create some, like,
metrics to assess this?
What are we talking about? Did you have
a hand wrist?
No?
You wanna say something? You like using it?
I would love it. Yeah. You're always so
nice when you talk. Yeah. Yeah. And I
were talking.
I think shared something beautiful
about
seeing ourselves in the Bible. Alright. When we're
reading Ayat, I think that people are reading
Ayat and understanding our place
in those verses and how it relates to
us,
and and developing a connection where,
you know, maybe if we're reading Ayak about
punishment.
We we see ourselves so much in that
that we don't wanna stop until we get
to the good news or the the I
asked about about reward because if you see
ourselves, then you don't wanna finish next day.
Great. If we can pull principles out of
this like, what are some principles you could
pull out?
Like, if somebody said, you know, if my
kid showed up here and he was like,
hey. Like, how are
how do we,
like, relate to this thing, this Quran?
Like, where is the genuine kind of relationship?
What does it look like? So out of
what Harth is saying right now, what are
some of the things that we can take
from that?
So,
I started
writing
this down, how I can I'll take, an
from the Quran and
just quote it, and then write on my
iPad how I can apply it to my
present self or future self.
I did not really contemplate much more before,
but this really helped me
to understand the context
and
why it was revealed and how
I can acquire
it in my life, which was something that
I always had these thoughts in my mind,
but I was never able to,
consolidate them well. But writing helped me.
Amazing. So
just to get us going from what both
of you are saying, in order to do
both of these things,
you gotta first read it. Right?
You can't do it without reading it. You
know what I mean?
So when we're in this place,
right,
like to have that
to the kitab of Allah,
you gotta, like, read it.
If you don't read it,
you're not being genuine in your relationship
with Allah's
book, and it's not anything
more complicated than that.
Taddabur, reflection,
like, to see here. We're gonna talk about
those things in the next 3, 4 minutes.
But in order to do both of these
things,
to
engage in reflection,
contextualize,
etcetera,
to ponder its meanings, to find myself within
it,
you gotta first read the book.
If you don't read the Quran,
you're not doing right by your relationship to
the Quran.
And fundamentally, then you're not doing right by
your relationship back to yourself.
This can't be like a self deprecating conversation.
It's It's gotta be one that has a
sense of openness to it. Right? If I
was to ponder inwardly,
why do I read it or not read
it as much as I do? There's a
lot of different reasons we can land on.
You know?
Family didn't necessarily
engage me in this way. I can't read
Arabic. I don't understand its meanings. Like, there's
a bunch of different things, but you can
isolate those
to be able to then say, well, what
is my access point
despite all of these realities?
And nobody's saying you gotta read the whole
thing in one sitting,
but how can you
engage it without,
like,
taking from it as a text? Does does
that make sense?
What other things would we say would demonstrate,
like, we have this sincerity
to this book?
What did we talk about?
And even if you didn't talk about it,
what else comes to mind?
I need to understand it.
Why?
So we can have that connection.
But what like, so but think about why.
Like, why do you need to have a
connection with
it to understand it? Yeah.
Beyond just a book, it guides and and,
you know, kind of building what everyone's been
saying here is to guide the light.
So if she's saying to understand it, but
but
look beyond just the words.
So when you sit and read it,
don't sit
for example, when you sit down,
you need to read. Don't just sit. I'm
gonna read it.
Contemplate your day,
what happened,
and how those
words that are on those pages are coming
out and touching you and how they can
affect you and how we can apply those
lessons to every day.
As the jokingly say, it's like the checkers
got it again.
Yeah. So in order to do this, here's
like another thing we can extrapolate.
Fundamentally, there's something that guides your moral compass.
The decisions you decide,
whether you consciously or unconsciously
know the philosophy on life
that you base those in,
there's something that is determining why you do
things in the ways that you do. Right?
Like, how many people do you know in
your life
that their families say? What would people say
if you married someone from a different culture?
Are they using the book of god
to determine that point of view? No.
Right?
But they're buying into something else as a
guiding principle in their life.
It's not good or bad, but just to
be able to understand
conceptually what we're talking about here. In order
for you to be guided through something,
it also assumes that you believe that that
thing
has the capacity to guide you.
Like, you give it that level of deference.
So just because you have a mushaf,
a copy of the Quran on a shelf
in your house, or you downloaded it on
your phone,
doesn't mean that you actually believe that it
is what it claims to
be. Does that make sense?
Like you can believe Allah is Al Khaliq,
the one who created you.
You might not believe though just by extension
that he is Ar Rahman, the most merciful,
that he is Maliki Omidin,
the one that you're gonna stand in front
of on the day of judgment. May Allah
grant us all ease on that day.
So part of having a genuine relationship with
the Quran,
sincerity
to the Quran,
you gotta believe that this thing is from
Allah.
That's why
the first entity
that Nasih has done in the Hadith towards
is Allah.
Because if you don't have a genuine interaction
with the divine,
why would you have a genuine interaction
with the book of the divine?
Because when you have this construct that is
of Allah, a messenger of Allah, a house
of Allah, a book of Allah, the purpose
of something being of Allah
is not so that it draws attentiveness
to itself.
A house of God is not meant to
draw attention to the house. It's meant to
draw attention to God.
Right?
So who cares, like, how fancy something is?
If you walk in and there's no, like,
presence of the divine, there's no presence of
the divine.
So here,
if you wanna have, like, a relationship now,
this is a book from Allah.
Theologically,
there's a lot that goes into what that
means and how that manifests in different, like,
theological debates.
But across the board,
our theology is based off of that this
is actually the speech and uncreated
word of the divine.
It's entire different conversation
to get into the nuance of what that
means,
but
it's not just
a book that's on your shelf like any
other book.
If you can rec recognize, like, the timeless
nature of the text
because its source is the one
who is
eternal in his beginninglessness.
And you just ponder and reflect upon what
that means.
In relation to
me buying into what it says,
because I buy into a belief of the
one who sent it to me for my
benefit.
And these are reflective questions that are not
meant to be rhetorical, but things that you
have to
really ponder subjectively.
Do you believe that this is
the book of Allah?
Do you believe that the Quran
is from Allah?
The one who provides for you, sustains you,
the one who puts you in this world,
the one who will take you out of
it.
Knowing who Allah is becomes important also because
we're saying it's from Allah
and not from our unconscious conceptualization
of who God is.
And the
hadith Qudsi says, I am as my servant
thinks I
am, is not that actually God is who
you think God is to be. Because the
Quran says,
there's not anything that's like a likeness to
God. So anything we can fathom God to
be, we know that God is other than
that.
But if I was to ask you who
is God to you and have you reflected
on that?
You live in a society
that's an anti black society.
It promotes whiteness at every level.
And to understand this now as an ideology,
the Quran
gives us an understanding of a divine entity
that is rooted in a negative knowledge, not
pessimistic,
but we know who God is by knowing
who God is not.
When you live in a Judeo Christian
society, it's not a grammatically
masculine,
like, god that we understand,
but it's a very male centered god.
So even if you don't worship the iconography
that you see, you are heavily influenced by
the notions of God the father, God the
son, God the spirit. It's a very male
centric god.
So we're not saying take your unconscious
representation
of who God is to then say, is
this book from that God?
We're
saying that you believe
that this book is from the God that
the book speaks about,
Not the one that you might have not
ever pondered, but still have an unconsciously
formulated decision on.
Right? This is the paradox of decision making
that when you don't make a choice, you've
essentially chosen.
So in the very beginning,
Ar Rahman Al Raheem is the first thing.
This is how Allah introduces himself to you.
The way when you introduce yourselves to each
other. What did you say? My name is
Khalid. I'm the chaplain.
I got babies.
Right? These are my, like, things that people
know about me.
So Allah is telling you before he tells
you anything else that he is Rahman. Right?
In Arabic,
this form
is, like, super emphatic
that the characteristic
that you're defining
is, like,
equivalent to who you are absolutely.
So if I said, you're so lazy. Why
don't you clean up after Ithar? I'd say
that you are.
It's got the same form, fa'alan. That you
are so lazy, laziness is you.
This kid saw me walking down the hall.
He said, are you okay? I said, I'm
great. He said, you don't look great. And
I said, oh, you know, that you know,
I don't know, like, if I feel good
about that. And he said, you look very
tired. And I was like, yeah, man. I
am tired. You know? But I can still
feel great. But if I was just exhausted
and exhaustion
was me, I would say
that
I am so exhausted, exhausted is me.
Right? When you fast all day and you're
hungry,
that that's called Jo'an,
that you are so hungry, hunger is you.
It's all that same form. Rahman is fitting
into it that Allah is
like mercy,
compassion,
gentleness, softness, kindness.
Rahim,
that form denotes continuity.
It doesn't stop. It's not interrupted. It just
keeps going.
It's the first thing he tells you.
Do you believe the book is from that
god?
Or
when you think about this religion, are you
thinking about the angry old man that was
yelling at you from a pulpit,
the father or mother who didn't honor your
rights as a kid, everybody who told you
that you did haram and
more haram than anything
before they told you how to celebrate God
in your life. Do you get what I'm
saying?
So it's a nuanced point, but it's important.
You're believing
in the book
being from the God that the book speaks
about,
which might not necessarily
match up to who we know God to
be. And may Allah make our understanding of
him, what it is that is as close
to who he is as possible.
Because once you can taste that, nothing else
feels the same.
Then it's not just about do's and don'ts
and rights and wrongs. Right? Rabi al Basri,
may Allah be pleased with her. She says,
I will not serve God like a laborer
in expectation of my wages.
Her doing for God is not because she
expects in return, it's just out of love.
There's a different connection point that's there. Do
you get what I'm saying?
So a part of the genuineness to Allah's
book is that you believe
that this book is from Allah.
And in order to believe that, it's not
just to believe this is a divine book,
but also
buying into
the God that the book teaches you. That's
who Allah is.
It goes back to the first point. How
can you know what the book tells you
about who Allah is
without knowing what the book says?
Do you know?
Does that make sense?
Other things that we feel like could fit
into this genuineness with the book of Allah.
So you wanna be able to, like, recite
it
as best as you can in the way
that it's meant to be recited.
You want to do that within your own
ability
also,
and then the application of it becomes important.
Right? Fundamentally,
the only thing we can do in this
world is this is a world of actions.
It's a world of deeds. If you're a
jam on Friday, I tried to talk about
this a little bit. I don't know if
it was making sense or not. But fundamentally,
all you take with you when you leave
from this world are deeds and actions. Right?
May Allah grant us Jannah without any judgment.
So a lot of stuff
doesn't come with you. People don't come with
you. The day of judgment is described that
people don't even wear clothes because you have
nothing.
There's nothing that you own. Allah is the
only owner on that day.
So all you take with you are the
actions, the choices, the decisions
formulated
either in an understanding that that day is
a reality,
the hereafter is a reality, or this world
is the only thing.
And so when you're doing now your decisions,
your deeds,
what governs the decision making process?
And the whole point of the Quran
is that it's sent to influence your behavior.
It's not just so you recite it and
then you leave it, but it's meant to
be something that influences
your actions
and where it is that I think your
wife is waiting
too.
It's meant to influence your behaviors. Do you
get what I mean?
Right? So reading it in that sense also
is not just taken out, like, once a
year in Ramadan.
It's not just brought out
at certain major life events,
funerals,
weddings, etcetera.
This is a book
that is meant to influence your behavior.
How can it influence your behavior if you
don't read it?
And it's not to belabor the point,
you have to read the book
like, one verse a day,
one verse a week, even if it's 1
verse a month. Right? I'm 41 years old.
You know? I don't know how much longer
I'm gonna live in the world. It's not
a morbid thought. You have to embrace mortality
as a spiritual exercise
to recognize that you don't get to decide
how much time you have, but every minute
then is something that you treat as a
gift. So I'm not gonna go yell at
my kids. I'm gonna tell them I love
them because what if the last thing that
they hear from me is me yelling at
them?
My father had a bad stroke about 6
years ago. Many of you know this. He
can't speak anymore, and he lost,
he's paralyzed on the right side of his
body.
Before he got paralyzed
and lost his ability to speak, one of
the things that we were blessed to do
together was go to a conference I was
speaking at in Toronto,
and my mom and my dad came with
me, and we spent like a week together.
And when we came back,
we were parting ways at the Newark Airport.
I was taking a train back to the
city. They were going back to their home
in New Jersey, and my dad came, gave
me a hug, kissed me on my head,
and he said, this was one of the
best weeks of my life. I'm so proud
of you, and I love you so much.
That was the last thing I ever heard
my father say to me.
Like,
why
take a
chance?
And all of it's just written there in
that Quran.
If you read it and engaged it, it
doesn't have to be in competition with anybody
else. You're not a bad person. The whole
idea also is that it's not an obligation
to read the Quran
the way it's an obligation to pray your
Fajr prayer,
but you cannot benefit from the book without
reading it and engaging in it and reflecting
upon it.
So to apply it, you have to know
what it says to begin with.
The application of it, the ability to read
and recite it properly,
to understand what it's
saying and what's going into it,
And a lot of what's there is also
rooted
in an opportunity for us to be connected
to something that's bigger than ourselves. The world
that you live in, this consumer driven world,
this supremacist
world is based off of egocentricity.
It centers the self rather than centering God
and putting us all in a sphere of
influence together.
So when you don't read the stories of
the Quran,
you also don't see that you're connected to
something bigger than you, that you came from
a place, a historical narrative, and that there's
others that will come from you. So decisions
then are just made in what? How much
money I make? What kind of clothes do
I buy? You know,
income can attribute itself to comfort and convenience,
definitely,
but it can't give you contentment.
And I could tell you because I've met
rich people and poor people who are content
and rich people and poor people who are
not content. It has nothing to do with
the amount of wealth. Their comfort and convenience
can be a part of it. It can
also become a distraction in a lot of
different ways, but it's not the source of
contentment.
Right? May Allah make us people of.
A part of it in its genuine nature
is to also stand up for its teachings.
You can't be genuine the way the Hadid
says. Right?
You cannot have that genuine nature. Guys, we're
gonna stop in, like, 5 minutes. If you
guys wanna wait, we'll pray and shut together.
It's 5 minutes. You can't be genuine
in your nature to the Quran,
in your relationship to the Quran
if you're in a place where you allow
for its meanings and teachings
to become
misinterpreted
or kinda made other than what they're supposed
to be.
So distorting the text does not make you
genuine to the text.
Do you get what I mean? The religion
is about subservience
to God, not making God subservient to you.
A God centric religion
is gonna assume that there's certain things that
Allah asked us to do that we enjoy
doing, certain things Allah asked us to do
that are difficult to do, and certain things
Allah asked us to do that we don't
even understand why. But it's not existing on
a frame of rational and irrational.
Something makes sense to me or does not
make sense to me, but it exerts a
3rd frame that is super irrational that I
don't have to understand it in order for
it to be true.
My comprehension
is not the validator
of its validity.
Do you get what I mean?
So if I had a genuine relationship. Right?
Like, think about it. Do you know? Say
we were best friends. Right? Are we best
friends? Yeah. Yeah. We are. You know?
What kind of friend would I be
if I let somebody speak poorly about you?
I'd be a terrible friend. Do you know
what I mean?
If I made somebody mock you or ridicule
you
or
somebody identified you to be something than other
than what you are.
So you're not genuine with the Quran if
you're letting people turn it into something that
it's not.
And that's not just about orientalists
or bigots who are anti Muslim,
but it's also people who are Muslim
that are turning it into something that it's
not supposed to be.
The Quran was not come to validate
culturally hegemonic attitudes towards religion
that breed racism.
The Quran was not sent so that we
abuse women through it or mistreat people based
off of the color of their skin.
You cannot allow for people to turn it
into something that it's not.
In addition
to
people
who might be your closest of relatives,
but they don't get to make the book
something that it's not supposed to be.
This is not a book that its verses
are only about *, fire, and brimstone.
It's supposed to influence and transform your character,
your conduct. The prophet who is the walking
manifestation of this book, he was described as
being a mercy to the world,
gentle,
compassionate,
kind, smiled at everybody,
greeted those who he knew, and those who
he did not know.
So genuineness to this is that its meaning
does not get distorted.
So when you walk into places, say salaams
to everybody,
not just the people whose skin color matches
your skin color.
When you have a meal,
invite people from everywhere,
not just the ones you're supposed to invite.
When my wife and I got married,
we had a open invite to our wedding.
Some of you might have been there.
And there was literally thousands of people.
And there was a elderly woman who's probably
70 or 80 years of age. She came
up to us after,
and she said, thank you for inviting us
inviting me to your wedding.
She said, I'm so happy that I'm here.
I've been praying for you both since I
got the invitation.
And then she said, nobody's ever invited me
to a wedding before.
I couldn't stop crying.
And I said to her, you're thanking me
that I get the barakah uniquely of you
being at my wedding?
That's why we have hadith, where the prophet
says the worst wedding feast are the ones
where those who should be invited are not,
and those who were invited, they shouldn't have
been there in the 1st place.
But you read the book and you treat
it the way you would treat like a
friend.
You don't allow for it to be distorted.
You defend it when people make false claims
about it.
And you're in a place where
you have a respect for it, and this
might be something that your mind might not
take you to. But the Quran is a
text that we're taught to engage,
like, when we're in a state of wudu.
Don't compromise on it. It's not a book
that we're supposed to leave on the floor
or just sitting around aimlessly.
If you're in a place where you got
something on your phone and you're scrolling and
scrolling,
be mindful of the spaces that you take
certain things into and you open them up
and you start reading them. Just it's not
it's still like a a a text that's
meant to have a sense of dignity in
the ways that we engage it.
But you don't wanna be in a place
where it's disrespected
in the form of the.
And then
the last thing that I'll say, and then
we'll take a pause. I'll ask you guys
to just talk about some of what we've
been discussing and then we'll.
The Quran was not sent as a tool
to hurt people.
And knowledge in and of itself can be
something that's empowering, but can also be a
source of arrogance. May Allah protect us from
it.
And so the Quran
in a walking form, the prophet alaihis salam,
this is who he is. He is the
walking Quran. This is how his wife describes
him. He brings people close.
Right? Rahma
is meant to be expansive, not restrictive. That's
why the womb is called the rahem because
it expands
for life that's in it. It doesn't kinda
collapse on life. Do you know?
So as you read the book,
don't turn it into something
that brings other people down.
Right? There's hadith where the prophet tells his
companions, don't make the Quran boring for people.
There's a time and place for everything and
everybody is not necessarily where you're at.
You understand and recognize that this is a
final testament
for all humanity.
It's got universal
ethics to it.
It's
purposeful
in its ability to engage, like, with everyone.
So you honor people
who read it and engage it from all
walks of life.
And this is a problem. I have friends
who have memorized the entire book.
They know it, like, every page. You can
think about how magnificent
that is, that someone has the capacity to
do that. May Allah preserve the guardians of
his text. And to understand,
I've gone to masjids where friends of mine
who are that recite beautifully,
they get pushed back from leading the prayer
because they're black.
And then they push forward people who are
brown,
South Asian, Arab,
whose is atrocious.
How is the Quran then turned into that
mode of divisiveness?
Like, what do you really understand of what
it is that you've just kinda memorized for
your tongue, but hasn't really penetrated your heart?
Do you get what I mean?
And so recognize what the point of the
book was to begin with.
Don't be afraid to read it.
Think about what's keeping you from engaging it.
Allow for yourself to ponder and reflect upon
it. Have this genuine relationship.
The next three categories, you can apply the
same principles to.
That there is Nasihah to the messenger,
to the leaders of the Muslims, and to
all people.
Notice that in these 5 groupings, Allah, his
books, his messengers,
the leaders of the Muslims, and all people,
there's no idea about
how you kind of bring the self into
it. It's how you relate to everyone else.
Right?
It's not that you are unimportant, but you're
not the only important thing.
So you enable yourself to be in a
place where you see
my entire categorization
is about how I can engage
these five things.
God, his book, his messenger,
people in leadership, and people who are not
in leadership. It's everybody.
But when you read hadith and you see
the words that are there, you also wanna
see the words that are not there.
What is it not telling you to be
genuine to?
It's not saying the is
to, like, the
and the materialistic world.
It's not saying, like, it's about genuineness to
the wealth that you've accrued.
It's not about genuineness
to your cultural heritage alone.
It doesn't tell you to hate it, but
it's not meant to be something that creates
arrogance.
And when you see the words that are
not present and then you think about what
is it that I bring most of my
kind of sincerity to?
If I was to look at my actions
and my choices and to categorize them,
where does it show that these five things
take any type of precedent in comparison
to just the materialistic
world, to Hawa,
desire, the lower self?
Where am I genuine to? To what extent
and effort do I go to plan and
strategize
and to have sincerity
to things that are temporary and only of
this world
versus
things that have eternality to them and are
bigger than that.
So what I'd like you to do I
know we rushed through things and have as
much discussion as we normally do, but the
window was a little shorter. If you could
turn to the persons next to you before
we take a break for Isha, what are
some of the things you're taking away from
tonight's conversation? What's coming up for you?
And then we'll pray Isha, and then we'll
have the Ramadan
after that. But go ahead. Just 2 minutes.
What are you taking away? What's coming up
from tonight? And then we'll discuss.
Okay.
What are some of the things we're taking
away from tonight's conversation?
You have something to say? Yeah. Go ahead.
My mom's side of the family. Like, we
have fair skinned people. We also have dark
skinned people. You know, my dad's side of
the family, but my dad is a kid.
So
Okay.
Great.
Other thoughts?
What are we taking away? Did Did you
wanna say something? Yeah. The most important thing,
like, that struck me today was the the
whatever would be our last words. Like, you
mentioned that whatever whatever we're gonna say to
our children, children, it should be something
positive, something
that is empathetic, that that shows their love.
What if those are the last words?
We told them that was, like, really important.
And I just want to add to his
words.
I mean, I believe as Muslims,
we need to become kind to any people
of the color even if though they are
not Muslims.
Because I have seen so many incidents in
past few years in the name of blasphemy
blasphemy
that people just because someone did something as
a non Muslim, they did something because they
don't they're in a Muslim country. Like, I'll
just go example of my own city. I'm
from Pakistan. Someone, he was non Muslim. He
did some he did something.
And the whole mob of the village, they
just they just killed the person because they
believe that
he did something against Islam or something. He
was a non Muslim. We don't even know
what he was doing. They didn't even give
him the chance to explain something. They all
just went on him and
in that unfortunate incident, he just got killed.
So it's just like he left his family
behind there. He had small children. So as
a Muslim, I think this is our first
priority to be kind towards any kind. Not
even people of color, non Muslims, anyone. Because
I believe Allah has like, the prophet, he
himself has placed the kindness, humanity above everything,
color everything.
Other thoughts?
A person that is,
loving
is actually very concerned
on how to,
please
is actually to,
to please a person or the subject, whatever
he's, you know, looking at.
And you might do more, you might do
less. It's very concerning. Did I do enough?
Did I not do enough?
And so, basically,
one of the best gift that a loved
one would receive is actually knowing what
when knowing if his beloved is being satisfied.
Was that enough as pleasing or not?
And I believe in relation to in, you
know, relation to Quran, the Quran tells you,
how,
it would like to be treated by you.
And so you don't exhaust yourself and you
don't do this. And so for example, when
you mentioned something like about not sitting with,
people mocking Quran
Quran tells you in in it that, you
know, it doesn't matter. I I don't remember
the
speech. Or for example,
for example, like,
read what you can. So sometimes, oh, did
I read enough? Did I not read enough?
Whatever is being facilitate facilitated to you.
So it's just
that that maybe tells you actually how to
have your relationship with them so that you
don't exhaust yourself. You don't do less than
what you is expecting from you.
Yeah. Exactly.
There's a lot we can kinda extrapolate from
it. Right? But just engage the text. Like,
read it, allow for yourself to actually submit
to it. That's the whole idea that it's
gonna take you someplace. The stuff that's easy,
the stuff that's not easy. If you struggle
with certain things, read the text. It's gonna
tell you about a god that's a forgiving
god, a god that wants you to get
back up on your feet and just try
again and try your best. Do you know?
But allow for yourself to engage
the text
as it's intended to be.
So we're gonna take a pause here. Next
Monday, we won't have,
this halukkah. I'm gonna be going to Turkey
on Monday. Inshallah.
One of the programs we're raising funds for
this Ramadan,
there's a lot of children who evacuated from
Gaza. May Allah make things easy for them,
who need medical attention
that are in Turkey.
They're amputees. They're in need of prosthetics, surgeries.
So we're gonna be raising funds for them.
So I'm gonna be visiting them and their
families,
and our hope is to raise as much
as we can to help as many of
them as possible.
So many of the videos and other things
that you see of children,
those who survived
and were able to vacate and seek medical
help because there's no hospitals in Palestine anymore,
right, in Gaza. So they are in Turkey,
and we'll be meeting them next Monday.
And then from the Monday after, InshaAllah, it'll
be Ramadan.
And so we'll have, like, our pre iftar
and other things going on, but we won't
have this there'll still be iftar next Monday,
but we won't be meeting on Monday night
next week.
Just make Dua that that trip is beneficial,
and they were able to come to these
little angels,
support.
You know, Allah has blessed us with a
beautiful child here in the gathering tonight.
And this is what I think. Right? These
are, like, babies. Some of them don't have
parents anymore.
You know, they've experienced all kinds of things.
And because we love the child that's with
us,
our love for this child should
increase the love that we have for all
of these children because they are still our
sisters and brothers, and we wanna dig deep
and give as best as we can.
And,
we're gonna take a pause now for Isha,
and then after that,
for those who stick around for the Ramadan
class,
we'll do that. Sorry again that things were
kinda constrained
with time. Was just getting late. Did you
wanna say something?
Hadithas and?
Yeah. We're gonna do something every night before
Iftar in Ramadan, but the exact topics are
gonna just be depending on who is available
what days. Yeah. But there will be, like,
halakas every night before Ramadan
and before iftar and Ramadan.
Okay.