Khalid Latif – Imam Nawawis 40 Hadith for Modern Times #17
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Okay. Should we get started?
So people wanna pull up the hadith. It's
hadith number 7
and the 40 hadith
of the Imam Nawi.
We started,
I think, in January looking at the book.
Right?
It wasn't in September. Right? It was in
January.
Yeah.
We've been going through each hadith pretty concisely.
I know some of you weren't here when
we were doing this last time.
There's a lot of people,
who
are gonna be joining us, from the next
time.
But we wanna just wrap up hadith number
7. So if you wanna pull it up
really quick,
we'll go through that.
Is gonna be in, like,
an hour
and 20 minutes.
Then we're gonna have Iftar,
so feel free to stick around till then.
We'll go until Maghrib time,
and then we'll break for Iftar, and then
we won't resume
after.
Next week, we might start at 6:30 instead
of 6 o'clock.
Just people coming out of work,
6:30 is a little bit easier than 6
PM.
As Maghrib's getting later also,
we'll keep people updated on the email list.
So if you wanna just open up the
hadith, hadith number 7,
we can just read the Arabic and the
English. If people wanna pull it open, shall
we have it in front of them?
Anybody feel like reading?
I have the English. You can read the
English. Go for it.
On the authority of, that
the prophet said,
religion is sincerity.
He said to whom?
He said to Allah and his book and
his messenger and the leaders of the Muslims
and their common folk.
Great.
Does anyone wanna read the Arabic?
You can do it slowly. Yeah. Go for
it.
Yeah.
Like the imams of the Muslim, the.
Yeah.
So we talked about this hadith,
and got through the part where,
it's
says to the prophets.
Right? So, Tamir Madari Radiallahu An, when we
spoke about him so we looked at his
biography.
Everyone is hadith. We've been looking at the
companion,
learning a little bit about who they are
and what it is that brings
their personality and their lived experience to
us being able to extrapolate a little bit
more meaning from their hadith.
So,
he was a convert to Islam,
that came from a monk background.
Amongst, like, some of the things that we
discussed about him, he was the first person
to bring lanterns into the prophet's mosque.
Right? So if you conceptualize
kind of Medina
in
the time of revelation,
There's no lights the way we have lights
here.
And
trying to think about, well, what does that
mean conceptually?
Like, he literally brings light into the masjid.
You know? So when you're in the masjid
at fajr time,
getting there kind of
in the early part of Fajr, and it's
very dark. Or Isha comes, and it's just
very late at night.
You can imagine what it was like for
people
praying, like, their night prayers
in the darkness of the night.
Timur Midari,
amongst the many things that he's known for,
he brings, like, literal lanterns into the masjid.
Do you know? And we're not gonna go
into too much, like, who he is. If
you didn't kinda
have time to be here for the other
ones or listen to them online,
you know, you can pick up on that.
But one of the key words in this
hadith that we wanna revisit before we go
is the word,
which,
we kind of often hear just in terms
of advice and counsel.
It has more of the sense of kinda
sincerity to it
in terms of kind of purification.
There's a verse in the Quran that talks
about that's,
right, like a very kind of sincere
when you turn back to god. So it's
not a advising
kinda
but one that has an inner self that's
really present. You know, some of the examples
that are made of this is, like, when
a
person who is a tailor kinda pieces together,
cloth,
that's been kinda
separated. You know, this is the idea of
kinda bringing something together with that sense of
sincerity.
But for the purposes of this hadith,
the way we were describing it is just
sincere conduct.
Right?
The dean is
the companions say to who, oh messenger of
God? And he says,
that it's sincere conduct to the divine,
to his book, to messengers,
to
the leaders of the Muslims, and to the
common people.
We're gonna talk about the last two categories
today,
and then jump into hadith number 8 next
week.
But that's the frame of how we're thinking
about this. Right? Sincere conduct,
not in terms of, like, advice or counsel
the way someone might say, but that's gonna
be a part of it when we come,
come back to the end part of this
Hadith.
And it fundamentally gives a breakdown of every
way that you and I as an individual
practitioner of this religion
can relate to everything we fundamentally have capacity
to relate to. So as a Muslim,
you're gonna have sincere conduct with God. You're
gonna have sincere conduct with God's messenger,
with God's book. You're gonna have sincere conduct
with the people who run things, and you're
gonna have sincere conduct with just everybody else
who's around you.
And this is fundamentally like a frame that
is subjective
back to the individual.
What does it mean that I have, like,
good conduct with you? How is there a
sense of sincerity
that comes into this?
When you're talking about, like, love and fear,
we wanna think about sincere conduct with some
of these things because you can think about
sincerity to the divine in the sense that
I believe in a God that's an angry
old man in the sky looking for a
reason to punish me,
or I can think about God as how
he identifies himself to us first,
Right? This is what he chooses to tell
us about, but it gives
a baseline of love, like something that's more
positive.
So what he says is that if you're
gonna choose either love or fear
in the terms of how you conduct yourself
with someone, you're gonna wanna choose love
because if you have love for someone,
then out of your love for them,
you're gonna do what you know they want
you to do
whether they're there or not.
Right? But if you have fear of somebody,
then you'll be a certain way in their
presence,
but in their absence, you're not gonna necessarily
be the same way as you would if
there was love present. Does that make sense?
So like my kids,
they love me. Right? My
son, Kareem, my daughter, Medina,
is 8, 11 year old. My daughter's like
a really good girl. Don't know how else
to explain it. Do you know? My son
is also a really good kid,
but he's a little bit different. I think
he's more kind of, you know,
little diva ish like his father is. And
his sister is just, like,
not that way. You know?
But
Medina
will
be in a place where even when we're
away, and even Kadeem,
we just know that they're gonna do what
it is that we know that they're gonna
do. Doesn't mean they're not gonna make mistakes.
Right? They're children.
But fundamentally,
because there's a level of love that we
have that's reciprocated,
my wife and I can, like, leave the
house and leave them together, and we know
they're not gonna do crazy things. Right? Like,
we went out somewhere last night,
and my 8 year old and I were
walking down the street. And he said, Baba,
what time are you leaving? I, like, held
him really close. I was like, you're gonna
throw a party while I'm gone? And he
was like, Baba, what are you talking about?
And I was like, Kareem, don't do like,
you know, I was joking around with him,
but
there's a love that's there
that enables them to not have to then
feel as if they have to act out
in ways
that come from being suffocated
by fear and anxiety.
You know, a very kinda dark prism
of how it is we engage religion
that then has us in this place where
there's not all of the divine,
but a sense of just
scrutinization
that you don't believe in a god that's
watching over you, but just one that's watching
you. Do you get what I mean?
And sincere conduct
has to have that element of, like, Mahaba
to it, love.
So that you are who you are
and there's sincerity
and conduct
whether you're standing, like, in the 27th night
of Ramadan
or you're standing
in,
you know, the 3rd night of Rabiol Auel.
Right? It's just love. So there's consistency
where there's love.
You know?
You are who you are whether your mom
is watching you or not. You are who
you are whether your dad is watching you
or not. Do you know what I mean?
Like, the love enables you to find a
strength
that that sincere conduct
resonates a little bit differently
because love gives you courage
and loving,
like, gives you strength
in a way that fear just fundamentally doesn't
do those things. Does that make sense? I'm
just trying to submit some of what we
talked about
for about 4 weeks before Ramadan started so
that we can get to a place when
we're talking this now
about sincerity,
to Allah, to his messengers, to his books,
to
the leaders
and to the common people.
We're not thinking about it in a prism
of sincerity
that's just like wrote expressions of things from
our tongue, but it's rooted in ethics and
values
that we can demonstrate
metrics of assessment
of how we possess them based off of
how we fundamentally, like, interact in who we
are when there's people around us versus who
we are when there's nobody else around us.
Do you know what I mean? And I
have a sphere that's my public sphere versus
a sphere that's like my private sphere
versus a third arena that's just a place
of secrecy.
Because I could be a certain way around
you, and I could be a certain way
around my family,
and I could be a third way when
it's just me by myself.
And in all of those arenas, it's where
is their sincere conduct?
Where is there an honoring
of those relationships that we have with Allah,
his book, his messenger,
the authoritative figures, as well as people who
are common people. Does that make sense?
Yeah. Are we sure? Okay.
So what I like for us to do
just so we can start getting talking, I
hope people have a long day, some of
you might be fasting,
after you had, like, multiple days of Eid,
you know,
foods and leftovers and whatever else.
How does this kinda resonate with what you
understand they'll see how to be?
Like, if you were to think out sincere
conduct
in relation to these 5 categories,
why is this something that's so important? The
hadith is essentially making an equal sign. A
deen, the deen religion,
right, is Nasih.
Like, that's just what it is. It doesn't
mean that there's not other things that make
up this deen,
but the hadith is very concise
because it's showing the importance of this. So
how do we
understand this? Like, what are different ways we
can break this down? I'm talking about love
as a necessary variable. What are other things
that might come into play when we're trying
to identify
and give to us a sense of metrics
of how I can actualize this
in
my implementation of it. So you can turn
the person next to you. What are you
taking away so far, and how does it
inform for you an understanding of what Nasih
is?
Then we'll come back and kind of plunge
into the hadith. But go ahead. Just so
people can get started talking to each other.
If you don't know people's names around you,
share some names.
Yeah.
Guys, you should
keep telling me to come pray over here.
You should come pray over here
because then people will start crowding near the
door. No. No. It's okay.
Then people will start crowding near the doors.
Prefer like this. I can't focus.
Okay. Whatever is comfortable for you. Yeah. Go
ahead.
So what are some of the things we're
talking about? What did we discuss?
Who wants to start?
Yeah. I guess I'll go.
We were just talking and and when you
mentioned it, the the first thing that popped
in my head was a, of all things,
a Mark Twain quote,
where he said it's better to tell the
truth. That way, you don't have to remember
anything.
And
I I test that to sincerity
because when you operate with a level of
sincerity, you're not seeking to manipulate people. You're
not seeking to
lie to yourself or lie to the people
around you. You're operating within,
like, a state of truthfulness.
And when you operate in a state of
truthfulness,
it's just
there's more,
I don't know the word for it. It's
like, there's more benefit. There's more blessings within
that kind of mindset.
Yeah. 100%. So, like, trust,
integrity, honesty is like a part of this.
Do you know what I mean?
What else?
You think Nausea should say something? Is that
what you're saying? I do. Yeah. What she
she she what she she said?
You made a really great point. I'm gonna
butcher it. I'm gonna butcher it now. But
she was saying how a big part of
love
is trust. So I know we just spoke
about trust, but I think connecting love and
trust together,
is really brilliant because,
see not forgotten there. Basically,
the foundation
of love in any
not, like, relationship, like, any relationship you have
has to be some form of trust in
the other person to have your back or
to have your best interest in mind.
So if you're looking at religion from that
perspective, it's much easier when you're able to
fully
in in theory, I'm not saying I have
this down or anything like that. It's much
easier to follow religion and to follow
the Quran or the, whatever you wanna take
it. If you have a level of trust
that it it is in your best interest
and it will give you an outcome in
life that is for the best.
But without that level of trust, it's not
it it it just makes
life it makes religion harder because you're not
you don't fully understand what the outcome will
be unless you have that level of trust.
Yeah. Great. Sorry. You're gonna say something?
Oh, I was just gonna say I feel
like
the, thought of sincerity, like, it kind of
just guides every aspect of life. So whether
you're interacting with, like, people or, like, Allah,
the Quran, just, like, it's a good way
of kind of thinking about how to live
your life.
Yeah. So and in this tradition,
there's no intermediaries between you
and
any of these things.
That's very purposeful.
So the first three that we talked about
a lot before, we're not gonna get into
so much today,
when the hadith says, right,
that you have nasiha
to Allah
and to his book and to his messenger,
a lot of us
build a relationship
to Allah and his book and his messenger
through somebody else.
Think about if
my relationship
to
my
wife was done through you.
Like, you told me what I should think
about my wife as opposed to me building
a relationship with my wife. You would say,
that sounds ridiculous like what you're saying,
right?
But
a lot of us have a conceptualization
of the divine
that isn't coming straight from the divine.
So we know who Allah is because
people told us when we were little, like,
if we don't do this, then we're bad.
And if we don't do this, then it's
haram. And if we don't do this, then
you're going to *. And it creates a
conceptualization
of God.
But that conceptualization
of God didn't come from God or his
book or his messenger.
Similarly with the Quran. Right? Like, a lot
of us engage the Quran for an entire
month of Ramadan, may Allah accept from us.
But to be able to think about the
relationship we have with the Quran, it's not
in a judgmental way, but just objectively speaking.
It sits on shelves quite often. There's not
a regular engagement or reading of it.
So the trust within the kind of
original
part to the relationship
becomes diminished
if there's something that you're going through that
is actually setting for you a standard
of the one that you're building relationship with.
Do you get what I mean? Right? Like,
I've known Danny Iqbal for many years. I
can tell you all kinds of things about
him. Do you know? But if you never
met him
and you only knew about
him through what
I would tell you about him, does that
give you a fully accurate depiction of who
he is
in his entirety?
And what if I don't like him?
Right? Like, the way I like my kids.
I don't ever sit up here and tell
you
things that create, like,
a shadow of doubt upon my wife or
my children, God forbid. I just tell you
nice things about them. You know? And you
walk out of here likely thinking,
man, like, those are some nice people. Right?
It's a different frame than
what we have when there's only fear or
negativity
associated with things that are foundational
aspects of our religion.
If you relate to Allah
and his book and his messenger
through a prism of negativity
that's been channeled to you
through somebody who's spoken on god's behalf
or god's messenger's behalf
or giving you a perspective of god's book
that keeps you from having
sincere conduct.
Because if I said this guy is like
a creepy guy,
don't talk to him so much. Because of
the trust you have in me, a lot
of you would already say, we're not gonna
talk to Dani Iqbal. Do you know what
I mean? Right?
You can't treat Allah that way.
And the impediment to sincere conduct or love
does not necessarily become a product of what
we're bringing into the relationship,
but what somebody else might have brought into
the relationship
that impacts
that sincere conduct, but nonetheless
is keeping it from reaching
its potential
high point. Do you get what I mean?
Does that make sense?
It's why, like, gossiping is really haram
because not only are you hurting somebody when
you speak poor of them, you're hurting somebody
else's perception of someone that they don't know
anything about.
And so when you think about people who
now do this with the divine or they
do it with Allah's book that only certain
people are supposed to read Allah's book or
you take understandings of Quran from people who
are orientalists or people who are supremacists,
people who are deeply entrenched in their anti
blackness and they make you want to internalize
racism
and hate your religion.
You get to a place where Allah's messenger
is somebody
you've never read his or understood his sunnah,
but you were only taught to pray your
sunnah prayers before you were taught whose sunnah
you were following. How can you have full
love
that yields this sincere conduct
if you don't even know who it is
you're building the relationship with? Do you get
what I mean?
And then little things make a big difference.
You walk into a space and there's a
ton of people,
but you don't notice the person that nobody's
talking to because you're talking to everybody else.
You're setting a standard for that individual now
to be able to understand
who are Muslims and in turn how do
these Muslims represent Quran.
There's a woman I met in the UK
when I was sitting with a group of
converts.
It was like 6 or 7 of them.
We were in Denmark, I think maybe not
the UK,
and having dinner. There's one lady who came
from a Sikh background,
and she said, it took me 7 years
to decide to become Muslim.
And I said, why take you 7 years?
And she said everything in this religion made
sense. The Quran was magnificent.
It just took me 7 years to meet
Muslims who actually resembled what this book talked
about.
But the reasons why people don't resemble the
book isn't necessarily because everybody's just a terrible
human being.
But sometimes the way we understand the book
and its purpose in our life
comes from people who didn't necessarily do justice
to us in relation to it, and it
becomes hard to build love when there's so
much other stuff that's there. Do you get
what I mean?
Does that make sense?
Does it? Yes. Yeah. So you can't be
in a place where the conduct is measured
just purely on externals.
A lot of this is gonna be rooted
in internals.
And when he's saying the deen is it's
sincere conduct towards these things.
The base of it is not just in
the performance of acts
because you could get a parrot to say
Right? You could get you literally. Right? I
know because I'm in WhatsApp groups with a
lot of you. Where you have, like, pictures
of cats wearing scarves, prostrating
on prayer mats. Do you know what I
mean? It's not hard to get something to
do something outwardly.
It's hard to build those components,
especially when you live in a world that
doesn't teach you to look at your heart,
but rather tells you to make decisions at
its expense
and not through it.
Yeah.
How does because growing up, I went to,
the traditional meat predominantly,
bengali,
moss,
and just growing up within my community.
As I'm getting older, I feel like a
lot of what we were taught was probably
cultural and religious.
And sometimes they
package them both together,
and they taught you based off of that,
and they use fear mongering on top of
that. How does one unpack the cultural part?
Well, Bengali culture is beautiful, just like every
culture is beautiful. Right? Do that also. But
you wanna you wanna think when you distill
it, because something sounds like it is applicable,
but then you'll buy into the words, but
you're meaning something else. Right? Religion needs culture
to exist.
It can't exist devoid of culture. And what
makes Islam so beautiful,
it doesn't buy into this rugged sense of
individualism
that you find in the prism of modernity
that is a byproduct of supremacy. Right? Ego
centricity
then kinda idolizes the individual to this way.
So there's a lot of really great things
about everybody's culture that's in this room, but
there's also certain things that could become potentially
problematic
that when culture becomes hegemonic in its attitude
towards religion,
but more so what I hear from what
you're saying is you gotta unlearn some of
the things that you have learned in order
to then be able to say, why do
I see it this way?
Right?
And if your heart has capacity, it doesn't
have
just infinite
capacity to hold, but it's finite.
So if it holds, like, things that you
found
indirectly or directly from when you were young,
then you acknowledge it,
and you have to be able to say,
well, like, I don't have
to envy these people.
When I read the Quran,
like and I read the hadith
in my late teens trying to figure out
religion means to me, and I was being
very honest with myself.
I didn't believe in the god that seemingly
this book was talking about.
And it didn't seem to me that I
believed in the God that the prophet Abraham
was talking about, the prophet Muhammad alaihi salam
was talking. I didn't even think about God
in these ways.
So it came from some place.
The goal in addressing
what it has to be unlearned can be
rooted
in framing it in well, this is what
brought me to this place,
but it's sometimes too broad of a statement.
Do you know?
Because it then now cast continuity
to what it is that we're trying to
stop. There's things problematic in every culture,
and I'm sure, as somebody who's not Bengali,
that there's things that are problematic in Bengali
culture. Just just like there's things that are
problematic in Pakistani culture and Kashmiri culture and
Punjabi culture. Do you know what I mean?
But
it's not necessarily the culture
that creates the challenge because it's just a
tool fundamentally.
The way I can use my laptop
to, like, read hadith,
I can use my laptop to, like, do
haram. You know?
Like, it's an extension of me,
and there's a lot of people who are
really amazing
in every culture. There's also people who are
real idiots in every culture. You You wanna
get to the base of, like, what creates
idiocy.
And, potentially, one of the parts of it
is that, well, religion stops being fundamentally about,
like, faith and theology,
and it fundamentally then focuses purely on what
is outward and ritualistic.
But if you don't have an inner part
to a practice,
then it's like a corpse. There's no life
to it. Right? You can't have a body
without a soul. Do you know what I
mean? So I would say here, like, what
our brother Kamal is saying is, like,
what I take from it is, like, a
lot of us have to unlearn and unpack
a lot of things.
And where we didn't have room to explore
it,
we'll have a phrase that has validity to
it. It doesn't mean there's not validity,
but the phrase comes up
that then looks for something
that we fundamentally
can't go against
to be able to then remedy some of
what it is, and it gives continuity in
our heart to something that can be toxic.
Right? You don't wanna hate
like your cultural heritage. You want to love
your cultural heritage and reclaim your cultural heritage
in a way that synergizes
with the religion
that makes it robust.
Do you do you get what I'm saying?
Does that make sense?
Right?
So if we say culture is the problem,
it's, like, very broad.
Do you know? Like, no, man. Like, that
guy that went to Sunday school
that said to the other teacher in front
of me when I was 12, when I
don't know the answer, I just make up
an answer.
You know? That person
was a problem in teaching me about who
God was. Do you see what I mean?
And I could be like, man, these Pakistanis,
you know, but it has nothing to do
with them being Pakistani. And then there is
some stuff that is deeply rooted in culture
that the hadith tells us, take from it
everything that's good, but when it starts to
contradict what, like, our text tell us,
then you gotta leave it behind. Do you
know? So if your culture is down with
forced marriage,
then
that's not rooted in the prophetic example.
If your culture validates racism,
that's like the foundational,
like, sin that takes shaytan out of paradise.
Do you get what I mean?
Right? And there are some parts of our
culture, but it's like too broad of a
of a statement
that I know that's not what you're intending
to say, but we wanna, like, start to
distill some of these things. The prophet's nature
wasn't
to make Dua against an entire demographic of
people or like an entire country of population.
Do you get what I mean? Like, he
acknowledged there was, like, good that came out
of the Romans. There were good that came
out of the Persians and the Byzantines.
Do you know there was good that came
out of, like, the Najashi's community in Abyssinia.
Do you know? So there wasn't, like, broader
kind of things that said, all of this
is just categorically
bad. Do do you get what I mean?
So you unlearn some of it so that
you can say, I want to feel these
things. This is what Maulana Rumi says
that your goal is to not seek out
beauty, to seek out
love. Your goal is to merely find everything
that you have built within yourself. That's an
obstacle towards it. What keeps me from seeing
beauty? What keeps me from seeing goodness?
Why do I feel like I'm walking around
on eggshells
when it comes to religion?
Do you do you get what I mean?
And the metrics aren't that, like, you stand
on a prayer mat, and and then you're
just bawling in tears every time you pray.
Right? That's also, like, a very kind of
surface level understanding
because real faith is you get it done
even when you don't want to get it
done. Do you know what I mean? It'd
be amazing if everything was a spiritually intoxicating
experience,
but it's not. But when you have love,
you're not worshiping the feeling, you're worshiping the
one who gave you the feelings, and you're
saying,
like, I trust Allah. So I know even
if I'm just, like, banging out these 2
rakas at fajr time and I'm super exhausted,
I'm doing it because I know he wouldn't
tell me to do something that's not good
for me. Do you do you get what
I mean? And then the person who teaches
you religion,
do you think they had your best interest
in mind when they were teaching it to
you?
Or were they just throwing words at you
And then you have to acknowledge that. Right?
When you go to college or high school
or elementary school, do you remember who was
like a good teacher to you?
Like, teachers who stood out that they had
genuine care for you. They wanted you to
excel.
That's who the prophet of God is.
And somebody taints that image, that's a problem.
Do you know?
Do you get does that make sense?
Yeah.
So here, we wanna think about this. What
is sincere conduct in this regard?
And it's not about attaching
actions to certain things. Right? If you loved
me, you would do this. Can also be
an abusive construct or a manipulative
construct. Do you know what I mean? So
if I tell my son, you know, if
you really love me, you would make your
bed. Right? He's 8 years old. Do you
know what I mean? He doesn't not love
me. He's just a 8 year old. He
can't remember half the time where he left
his shirts and whatever else. Do you know?
Right? But what I grow up with in
an unhealthy understanding of an emotion,
I have to be able to acknowledge that
I bring that into a relationship.
The same way that when I get married,
I need to know what I'm bringing in
terms of clutter and garbage into it.
So too, I'm having a relationship with Allah
and his book and his messenger.
I gotta acknowledge what's all the clutter that's
coming with me into this relationship.
Do you do you see what I mean?
And here,
like, sincere conduct, you just try your best.
You know who Allah is. You know, like,
that he knows you better than you know
yourself,
and then you engage with a deep sincerity
that sometimes what's gets in the way is
the middle person.
Do you know? Or the person
that was conveying
wasn't, like, necessarily thinking about me when they
were giving me information.
It was just let me, like, kind of
throw it at somebody.
Do you do you know what I mean?
This makes sense. So we wanna move to
these last two categories.
Right?
Like for the
of the Muslims, the people who are the
leaders of the Muslims
and the common people.
What do you think would demonstrate sincere conduct
to people who are in authoritative positions? And
just in the interest of time, right, like
this would be divided
in most kind of text into 2 groups,
like people who are leaders kind of in
a scholarly capacity,
like religious scholars,
and then people who are in other modes
of leadership.
That could be like a king, a Khalifa,
a president.
Right? It could be, you know, thinking about
this from the standpoint
of, Nasihah,
sincere
conduct to whoever is in a place of
leader like the prophet says
that all of you are shepherds and all
of you are responsible for your flocks. So
as a father,
I can't be responsible for my flock
if I don't spend time with my flock.
If you're always elsewhere
and you're not with your kids, then you're
not shepherding your flock.
Do you get what I mean?
If you are like the imam of your
house, the imam of your family, you're the
imam of like these different things.
Right? And the prophet says this, so this
is just true.
All of you are shepherds, meaning you have
responsibility
towards something.
So there's some capacity
of leadership
that we embody
in our day to day.
So in this hadith, when we're talking about
to
the Iyamah of the Muslims,
what do we think that would mean?
Like, how would we understand sincere conduct
to those who are in leadership positions?
Religious scholars
as well as those who fit into other
categories. And why is this important to understand
is that religious leadership is not the only
frame of leadership
that we have. And individually, we have responsibility.
Accountability
comes to us because we have responsibility
to people. Right? Just like was just said
right here where you have people who taught
you about Islam
and they might not have taught you right,
there's gonna be responsibility
on the day of judgment. May Allah grant
them in us ease. Do you know? But
we wanna think about this twofold.
Like, how do we give
this and
how are we also willing to receive it
simultaneously?
But what does this look like? So somebody
said, well, what is sincere conduct to people
in positions of authority?
What would you say? So if you can
turn to the person's next to you for
2, 3 minutes, like, what does this look
like? What does that mean?
And why is it an important part in
this hadith? And then we'll come back and
discuss, but go ahead.
Okay. So what are some of the things
we're talking about? Like, what do we draw
from this sincere conduct with
leaders
of the Muslims?
Yeah. So we were kind of, discussing about
this whole concept
of acquired learning and inherited learning. So acquired.
So a lot of times, like, especially when
we're younger, we inherit a lot of information
from, like, our for example, our parents without
really questioning it.
And I think that's when we rise a
lot of conflicts.
Whereas applied learning is when you actually go
out of your way to do research and
sort of understand the information that's provided to
you, whether it's coming from a scholar or
whether it's coming from your parents, your friends.
So really take the time to kind of,
like, put in the research and understand religion
and your relationship with God. So
Great.
Other thoughts?
How would this look? Like, sincere conduct
to someone in a position of authority.
Yeah.
That's Harith?
Oh,
that,
like,
Yeah. And so if we extrapolate a principle
from this,
one of the main things of this part
is that nobody is beyond advice.
Every single person has capacity to make a
mistake.
Everybody has something that they could be doing
that they shouldn't be doing or it could
be improved upon or could take some kind
of counsel.
So that means, like, in the stages of
life that we're in right now,
the people who are elder than us
are also people who could still stand to
have beneficial
counsel
as a part of sincere conduct
as well as those who are younger
than us.
But as we move through various phases of
existence,
there's never a time in any of our
stages of life
that we are somehow beyond
getting some type of naseeha
if the people who are the leaders of
the Muslims. Right? This is a hadith
that's coming up at a time from the
prophet alaihi salaam towards the latter part of
their time in Medina. Right? Because the narrator,
Tamima Dari,
he takes a Shahada, like, at this time,
you know. And so this is why you
wanna know
the biographies of these people so you can
contextualize
what's really going on here. He's not speaking
to them about this in Mecca
where they're getting persecuted
and beaten and boycotted,
but this is where they have an established
community, an established state. And so then you
see
when there's movement forward in leadership
that there's a constant willingness
for there to be feedback given
to
the people who are running
their communities.
Umar Radiallahu An,
he is in a place where the king
of Rome sends somebody
after he establishes the caliphate,
he takes on to be the 2nd Khalifa,
and he sends someone to go see how
Umar is to essentially, like, assassinate him. And
he comes into Medina, and this man is
in a tree hiding to see how Umar,
like, lives his life. He
sees, like, asleep at the base of a
tree
utilizing a stone as a pillow with no
guards.
And what they say of him is that
you were just so you were safe.
But he's in a place where he's honoring
the rights of people so he doesn't need,
like, an entire entourage of people that are
going to make sure that nobody comes and
does something problematic to him. Do you know?
And throughout
his post,
like, conversion life, Umar Radialahu An is the
40th person to take Shahada,
And when he comes
within, like, normative Sunni understanding of Islam, he's
seen as, like, a very key figure
in the development
of Muslim communal
kind of representation. They can go out for
the first time in public
and, like, just be and no one's bothering
them. Do you know? He goes and he
knocks on the door
of Abu Jahal,
and he's excited to see his champion, Omar
ibn Al Khattab, who makes life difficult. Right?
He says, Omar,
and Omar says to him,
that I became Muslim. And he says,
you know,
don't do this. He says, it's done. And
then there's nothing that can be done because
they can't do anything to this man. You
know? And they're now praying in the confines
of the Kaaba for the first time. They're
walking through the streets.
He's got, like, this reputation,
and there's consistency
of people challenging him. You know, he tries
to limit the for
women, and a woman stands up in the
middle of his sermon and says, who are
you to put
a ceiling on something that
Allah did not put any type of limit
on for us.
Right? And Omar starts to cry. And he
says, everybody is more knowledgeable
than I am. Do you know?
He walks through the streets as the Khalifa
in the nighttime. He comes upon a woman
who is stirring a pot,
feigning having food
because she's got nothing to feed her starving
kids, and she's waiting for them to cry
themselves to sleep so that they are just
exhausted and avoid understanding their hunger. And when
the Ummah sees what's happening,
he goes and brings, like, food from his
own
kind of place of food, and then she
doesn't know who he is so she says,
you're better than the Amir al Mu'minin, the
Khalifa, and he says, why?
And she says that he's entrusted to be
responsible for taking care of all of us,
and he is not, but you are fulfilling
that trust.
And Omar starts to
cry and says everybody's better than Omar.
Do you know?
This is a man who in our tradition,
the prophet says,
that if there was a messenger after me,
it would be this man, Omar.
And this is his understanding
of himself and his leadership.
From the standpoint of foundational
ethics in our tradition,
there's just humility
that becomes the counter to unchecked ego,
entitlement,
egocentricity,
exceptionalism
that has breed it in this country. Do
you know what I mean? They don't wanna
hear nothing from nobody
about how they're doing things.
Then you get unchecked egos
that they could care less
that there's migrants sleeping in the street. They
could care less that there's babies dying every
single day around the world from weapons that
we're sending overseas.
They could fundamentally
care less
because
there's no sincerity
that understands
that we are not beyond reproach.
That just because I have wealth and influence
and affluence,
doesn't mean that you cannot tell me that
I need to be kept in check.
Does do you get what I'm saying?
So a big part of this
that there's Nasihat
to the Iyemah of the Muslims
is that the people who are in leadership
positions,
they gotta be ready to take advice
and counsel
and be recipient of this.
How many people do you know that are
elders
in your communities?
They won't hear a word from anybody.
Right?
How many people do you know
that
they are just
not gonna hear it from anyone?
Abu Herrera
has a hadith
that he's guarding the Beit al Mal, and
some of you probably know this hadith. Shaitan
comes
to steal in a human form,
and
he engages Abu Hureira saying I'm in need.
I need this thing. And the prophet asked
Abu Hureira
what happens without Abu Hureira telling him,
and he says, like, this man is a
liar. This man is a liar. It happens
a few times, and then he says, I'm
gonna take you to the prophet. He says,
if you don't,
I will teach you something.
And he tells him that if you recite
Ayatul Kursi, it'll keep like the jinn, the
shayateen away from you. And so he tells
the prophet this is what happened, and this
is summated, right, paraphrase, but the prophet says
like, this man is a liar, but he
indeed spoke the truth. Like, this was Iblis
who was, like, telling you these things.
Abu Herrera
learned something of knowledge from Iblis.
Do you understand?
Like, the way he knew that you recite
the
came
through the entity
that we seek protection from God from on
a daily basis.
You don't think you can learn something from
a child?
You don't think you could learn something from
a homeless person?
You don't think you can learn something from
somebody who doesn't have the degree you have
or went to the college you went to
or doesn't have as much money as you
went to?
So
you and I fit into this as much
as we are the ones giving it.
Now see how to the people in charge.
When you get to your house,
you get, like, kids, Allah blesses you with
beautiful babies, you might already have them, you
have wealth, You have affluence. You are in
a position of authority. You have a job
of some kind.
You're not beyond
your own mistakes.
And you have to be in a place
where you're willing to actually take some of
that.
Does it make sense?
So
I have friends
who I know. I have a friend, his
name is Rahad Khan. You might see him
here at different times. Tall Trinidadian guy. We
hang out all the time. When I ask
you all, like, hey. How was that hook?
Oh, so nice. You're so great. So good.
Right? I'll say, Rod, what did you think?
He was like, here's all the things that
were not good.
Do you know? My wife, she does not
mince words with me. Do you know what
I mean? She'll tell me. Like, this is
what it was like this. This was like
that.
In a way that
is helpful,
but I have to surround myself in a
community that cares about me with people who
also care about me, but they're gonna tell
it to me straight when I need to
hear it.
That this is not a good idea or
this is a good idea or how is
what you're doing fit into, like, more broadly
what it is you're trying to achieve?
Who are these people in your lives?
And at this juncture, there's no fundamental way
that any one of us in this room
does not have responsibility
towards somebody else. You might live in denial
of that as a fact, but you still
nonetheless
have responsibility
towards somebody else. And somebody has to be
in your life that's gonna be able to
tell you, hey, man. You're being an idiot.
Like, you're not doing things right.
Here now we also have the idea of
how we give
sincere conduct to someone who is authoritative.
So you get guidelines from our tradition
that you're not just putting people on blast
constantly.
But think about now how you might give
advice to someone
who is an elder in your life,
somebody that comes from a place that they
have an expectation.
Ethics are situational
in our religion.
The way I talk to my 8 year
old is not the way that I'm gonna
talk to your 80 year old grandparent when
they bring when you bring them here.
When we stand in line to get food
at a thawed, and I see somebody
who is in a wheelchair
or we see somebody who is old enough
to be our grandparents,
we're not gonna say to them that you
should be at the end of the line.
We're gonna say that you are going to
be the first one that we serve, theoretically.
Right? This is what the adab of our
tradition is. You gotta remember who your teacher
is, sallallahu alaihi wa sallam. So it doesn't
matter, like what everybody else thinks is the
norm. You have to be comfortable being different
and being strange.
If being strange is about doing a gram
of your elders and your young people, then
you do that. Right? You treat them with
nobility and generosity
because that's what's the right thing to do.
Who cares what people on the street are
doing? If they're doing something, that's not enough
of a reason as to why you should
do it that way. But how would you
give that kind of advice?
Right? Hassan and Hussain
the grandsons of the prophet of god, they
see an older companion
who is not doing wudu correctly.
So they don't go to this older man
as young children and say, look at how
terrible you are at making will do.
This is why you also have to be
kind to yourself. The companions were the best
generations.
It was an elder companion.
He was making a mistake in his will
do. You're gonna make mistakes in some of
the things that you do.
If a companion of the prophet of God
who's learning Islam
directly from the prophet of God is gonna
make a mistake,
you don't think you and I are gonna
make mistakes?
So they say rather than let's just go
be blunt with this person,
why don't we come up with a way
that's gonna honor his dignity?
And so they go to this older companion,
and they say, can you judge which one
of us makes wudu the best?
And then as they're making wudu,
they make the mistake that he was making,
and then they say to the other, like,
hey, that's not this or that. And then
they turn to him and say, what do
you think?
And he acknowledges
that they let him maintain his dignity.
And in many instances,
this is one of the modes we can
make sincere conduct to somebody
that is in a position of authority.
That it doesn't have to be that I'm
just gonna tear the person down with no
sense of compassion.
But because ethics are situational,
sometimes it does necessitate then
taking
stronger stances.
So there's a reason why
these streets still have to be filled with
people who are protesting
and to give people indication.
When we have
6,000 people in Washington Square Park
and people say, like, I can't believe, like,
you know,
that,
you know, we had, like, all kinds of
media that was there, for example. You don't
wanna be siloed in your perspective.
So it's a New York Times article that
had people, like, in all kinds of cultural
attire, photographs.
There was, like, other articles that were more
about why we were standing there with the
people that
oppressed. If you look at the comments that
people were making
on some of these things on social media,
not Muslims,
but, like, you know, why are you bringing
your religion into the public sphere? Unlike the
New York Times article.
Right? Why don't you go do this in
private?
You shouldn't be bringing, like, Islam into the
forefront.
We're making a statement
when we're standing 6,000
strong in the park,
and then they see after the fact that
we come from these diverse backgrounds
that then creates an understanding
we're here. Like, we're not going anywhere.
Sheikh Saheb Webb
led a Jamaah for e, the 40,000
people in Sacramento.
And somebody could say, why do we wanna
have 1 big jamaa, all these kinds of
things in an election year
as people have been voting
uncommitted
as they've been voting in these ways to
demonstrate
that they're not parts of certain things. And
then in California,
you have
one
person leading
40,000
people in a gathering.
These politicians
are gonna be shaking in their boots
that you can get these people together
at this time in the morning
all to, like, be praying in unison.
That's why you gotta think a little bit
more broadly
about what some of these things are
and how sometimes the sincerest mode of conduct
is to stand with boots on the ground
saying that we're here unapologetically
as who we are.
It's gonna not always fit into what we
think makes the most sense,
and this is where another aspect of sincere
conduct comes in. The religious scholar,
the leader, and the strategist,
they're going to try their best to make
decisions.
And in the public sphere, if you become
the mechanism through which there becomes
a sense of disorganized
connectivity,
then people are gonna continue to play games
with us because they know that we're not
organized.
So there's a lot of Muslims
who they purposely scrutinize
religious scholars
to purely be able to say this is
why you're wrong and you're making a mistake.
That doesn't make us necessarily better. Sometimes it
makes us weaker.
If you're looking to see where someone is
inadequate or deficient,
to be able to jump and pounce
at where it is that they've slipped
without being able to say anything
of positivity that they might have contributed
within measure. Right? Somebody's doing things that are
grossly just
adding to oppression. It's very different than what
we're talking about, but the generic understanding of
certain things. You go to most Muslim communities.
Think about how religious leadership is treated.
In a lot of cultures,
right, like where my family comes from, the
free schools, the way my kids go to
public school here, the free schools in the
Indian subcontinent
are the religious schools.
And the elites
of those societies where there's a huge gap
between a low income and high income class
creates now disdain
because the poor people are the ones who
go into religion, not the ones who are
affluent.
And you have intergenerational
understandings that you acquire religion in these ways.
We had a guy that came here
in 2,008.
Before this building was built, there was a
church that used to serve
the university,
and there's an Indian film director, a Bollywood
director, his name is Garan Johar. People know
Garan Johar? Right? Some of you know who
he is. And he had,
one of his,
like, family members was coming because they were
doing research for what I think ended up
being the movie My Name is Khan. Right?
Where Shah Rukh Khan is going to tell
the president, like, terrorism is bad or something.
Right?
You know, and his kid in the movie
is, like, a brown kid that goes to
a school where he's the only brown
kid, and they essentially
like, it's not funny, but the storyline is
is pretty interesting.
This kid gets harassed and beaten up and
bullied,
and then he the child dies from being
pummeled by soccer balls, right, in the movie.
You know? This is, like, the way that
they're framing,
like, this narrative around Islamophobia,
etcetera.
When they came here to do research,
we were a much smaller community in 2008,
but still a lot of people
that were practicing religion
as, like, young people, like all of you
in this room. Right?
Like, they're coming from a place where he
said to me,
like, you're at a college
and all these people practice religion here?
And I said, yeah.
And he said, in my country,
educated people do not practice religion of any
kind. In my country, the poor people are
religious, not the wealthy people or the educated
people.
These are some of the things that come
up.
So when you go into
a lot of masjids,
generalization, uncomfortable meeting,
everybody praying behind the imam thinks they're smarter
than the imam,
or they think that they're there to just
do like their bidding and their service.
It creates a lot of challenges in building
healthy community.
You see people just tearing people down. And
I say this to people quite often
that it's an oddity that I'm blessed to
serve a community that checks in on its
leadership and cares about us,
and something I thank God for every single
night.
But when you're in this place, like, of
sincere conduct,
that's not the idea that I'm just gonna
catch you every time you slip or every
time you make a mistake.
There's a lot of room to be able
to do this within the prism of, like,
privacy
that honors, like, the rights of the person,
the
way Hassan and Hussain,
they're not inflating their ego
and elevating themselves by denigrating somebody, but there's
a love attached to it. They want what's
best for this person.
They don't want to make themselves feel good
by making somebody else feel bad.
Does does that make sense?
Right? And so here, you have this notion
relevant to us.
You should be, like, speaking out to people.
Don't be scared.
A lot of us are not reaching out
to electeds anymore.
You have full right and authority to be
doing this kind of stuff. You should still
be taking to the streets and protesting.
Right? The number of kefirs that we see
has dropped substantially
in a lot of different gatherings and spaces.
Do you know?
But you also understand,
I'm gonna be in my own place, a
shepherd of some kind.
And so I have to be in a
place where I'm willing.
This man was willing to take advice from
Hassan and Hussain, who are children.
If a child told you that you weren't
treating them well,
how would you respond?
When you were a little kid and you
were trying to have your voice heard by
an adult,
did they listen to you?
The prophet of god is saying that the
deen is Nasija,
and one of the categories
is to the people who are in charge.
And it's not just you just give
good conduct.
You have to be willing to receive it.
You gotta be willing to take it.
You see?
And then the last category,
and like the common people,
the people who are there,
who are just everyday people like you and
I, we fit dual roles
of how it is
that
we
are,
you know, like, recipients to advice and sincere
conduct.
You gotta have some people in your life
who you're willing to hear from them when
they're telling you again. Might not be an
authoritative person, but just somebody who's who's gonna
be able to tell you, they're like, you're
not actually living right, man.
And as hard as it is, you gotta
be in this place. A lot of people
don't, and that's why they have difficulty.
Somebody who's been abused their whole life, they're
not gonna suddenly be able to hit a
switch on themselves and their recipient of the
love that you give to them.
It takes a different sense of tenderness and
compassion. So the Nasih Adair isn't why aren't
you listening to me when I tell you
that this is not good for you? You
need counsel that says, how do you talk
to somebody who's broken inside
and doesn't even know that they're broken?
To be in a place where you're
able to
understand
the conduct now
amongst us
is not just in, like, hey, man. Pick
up the chairs. But in these broader themes,
sincere
conduct at the level locally
is we're reminding people
about how all of this fits into the
prism of what's worldly and what's otherworldly.
It's not just in a vacuum, like, hey.
You made me not feel so good, but
the way you treat me, that's not gonna
stand up well when you stand in front
of god.
What are you gonna do when you stand
in front of Allah with all of these
things?
How is what you're doing right now make
sense in terms of a world that comes
after this one?
And sincere conduct at that level
is one that we want to start to
think about in those ways.
Other things that are embedded in this,
sincere conduct,
you don't, like, throw people's garbage out for
the public to consume.
If I open up to you about something
that's going on with me,
you gotta, like, conceal my stuff
within reason.
Abusive situations,
oppressive situations, they don't fit into it. Right?
So the things people talk about today that
should be hidden
and the things that are hidden are things
that should be talked about. We don't tell
people, oh, man. We're gonna pretend like that
we don't know that that dad
abuses his kids
versus I'm gonna put a ton of my
energy into being like, did you see that
boy hanging out with that girl last night
or she was listening to this or or
watching this or dressed in this way or
that way.
Privacy is a part of our tradition.
He sees somebody
in his home committing haram,
and he says to him, like, you shouldn't
do these things. And the person says to
Omar, why are you looking in my house?
And he has to give in to this
as a reality.
Since your conduct amongst us is that we
are not a population
that just
pushes out without really thinking consequently
about what we're doing.
And the difference between someone who's ghadab and
gavib
is whether you're actually even verifying the story
or not or just kind of pushing things
out having only heard one side of something.
If you don't give an opportunity to somebody
to be able to speak their piece
in some capacity,
what are you filling the gaps in the
information with?
Does this make sense?
The Prophet says in the hadith that there
is no person whom Allah gives authority over
others and he does not look after them
in a sincere manner except that he will
not even get the scent of paradise.
So you have responsibility
as a shepherd
towards, like, people
more generally,
the people you work with, the people who
work under you, the people that you kind
of engage
in various ways.
And that conduct is something
that
we don't necessarily,
like, hear about so much. You know?
Like, you go to all these bookstores
and there's entire sections about self help and
personal development.
There's not sections that are about how do
you treat others.
How can you be a good Muslim
if you don't treat people well?
Right?
It might sound a very simple statement,
but this is what it is. Right?
And the last category
is for, like, just the people.
The people who you can get away with
not treating well.
The people who don't have as much authority
as you do.
The people who if you do right or
wrong by them, there's fundamentally no recourse that
they have.
The prophet is saying, sincere conduct even with
these people.
What we wanna be able to distinguish with
here
is what actual Nasih is
versus what it is to just embarrass and
shame somebody.
This is an important distinction.
So I'd like for you to do is
2 things just because I'm talking a lot.
We're gonna get to Maghreb in 10 minutes.
Where some of the things that are coming
up for people, and how do we distinguish
this now? The difference between
giving counsel
versus just kind of breaking somebody down.
What's, like, the 2
things, like, how are they different from each
other? Because the prophet didn't break people down.
He built them back up. Do you know?
So how how do I know that what
I'm doing
is actually building someone up or breaking them
down?
And we wanna be in the former of
bringing someone up, not breaking them down.
So what does this look like? How would
I do this well if I'm giving this
to someone? If we could talk about this
for a minute, and then we'll come back.
And channel like stuff where you know you
weren't trying to hear something from anybody
versus, like, when was it really resonating with
you? You know, counsel and advice. And we'll
come back and discuss, but go ahead.
Okay.
I thought was a little later than it
actually is. I think it's in a minute.
Right? 7:35?
So just really quickly,
we're gonna have Iftar after.
We're gonna bring in some stuff here. Mondays
Thursdays, we're gonna be continuing our potluck iftars.
If you're trying to make up fast, you
could do like the 6 fast for Shawwal.
During these times, you wanna bring stuff with
you,
that would be really great just for all
of us to kinda be able to eat
together.
And I recommend sticking around for Iftar. It's
a way for us to build community,
kinda deepen in our relationships.
I know a lot of us are missing
Ramadan
and some of the times that we had
just being together every night for a month
straight. So if you can stay for Iftar,
that'd be great.
We're gonna have all the rest of our
holocaust this week that we normally would. So
doctor Murmur tomorrow,
doctor Madwa and myself on Wednesday,
and
on Thursday.
On Friday night,
is gonna be here.
You should come and listen to him. He's
really great. He's gonna give a talk at
7:30.
Thanks so much. You're the best. And he'll
give the chutba on Friday as well.
And then on Saturday, we're starting a new
program. So myself
and Sam, who some of you know, he's
a public school
teacher, but does a lot just in terms
of nature. We're gonna start doing monthly
kind of a
spiritual retreat for a lack of better words,
but it's really like a reflection
kinda experience as a community. The prophet
would regularly practice what was called,
like he would separate himself from the society
to seek solitude.
We already have, like, a 120 people signed
up for Saturday.
So this first one we're doing in Central
Park just so it would be easier to
get to. We're gonna work out the kinks,
but we'll get people together,
kinda have a short kind of framing, and
really have people just sit and reflect together,
and build that as a kind of key
spiritual tool, what's called.
Right? You're engaging in contemplation reflection.
We'll come back,
debrief, pray together,
then wrap up for the day, but try
to come if you can. We'll send out
more information on that as well.
So be able to put their chairs against
the wall. We don't wanna delay.
And,
did Harith leave?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah. Do you guys wanna call the
Azzan for my group?
And then stick around for Iftar, Inshallah.
And maybe during Iftar, we'll make a couple
of more announcements as well. Yeah.