Khalid Latif – Imam Nawawis 40 Hadith for Modern Times #21
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Does anybody have it in front of us?
We can read the English and the Arabic.
Anyone wanna read? Either or. You don't have
to read both.
What are you doing here?
Just had some fun. Yeah?
That's what you said too? Yeah.
It's good to see. Does anybody have the
hadith?
You do? I got it. Yeah. Go for
it.
Okay.
And
the messenger of Allah and he said, I
have been ordered to fight people until they
testify
that there is no god but Allah,
and that Mohammed is the messenger of Allah
and perform the prayers
and give the zakat.
If they do that, they are protected from
me regarding the blood
and their properties, unless
by the right of Islam,
and their accounts will be with Allah.
Can somebody read the Arabic?
Here. Go for
it.
So last week, we
started to get into some of the content
of the hadith.
And
prior to that, we talked about who Abdullah
ibn Umar
is.
Abdullah is the son of Umar ibn Al
Khattab,
a little bit about his bio. We also
had talked about him when we looked at
the 3rd hadith,
in the collection,
Bani al Islam al Hakams that he narrates.
You can go back and kind of listen
to the audio and the video on some
of those if you missed it. We also
talked about
this in the context
of
a couple of verses from the Quran.
Allah tells
us,
that,
you might dislike something, but there is khayr
in it for you,
or you might like something, but there is
evil in it for you.
But here,
when we looked at the onset of the
Hadith last time, we focused on the word
that
the prophet is saying, I was commanded,
right? And who commands the messenger of God?
It's not any of the companions. It's not
anybody in his family. But if
he is
saying that I was commanded,
that command is coming directly from the divine.
And
the particulars
of the Hadith
giving to us an insight now
onto
where and how
one does what Allah
tells us to do
in the context of these other ayaat that
we looked at that you might dislike something,
but there's khair in it for you. You
might like something, but there's shayr in it
for you
that Allah knows best. I'm not the one
that knows best. And that it's a God
centric worldview. It's not an ego centric worldview.
People remember we talked about this last week?
Yeah.
And so we wanna get a little bit
more into the crux of the hadith
to extrapolate from it a little bit a
meaning,
and see where we land by the end
of this week so that we can move
into something,
maybe the next one for next week.
And so
here,
if
we
start to break it down a little bit
more where the prophet says, This
is not the form of the verb that
says
but when it exists in this form,
it's giving an indication that the participation in
something
is already something that denotes that there's two
sides in it. So it's not like an
aggression that's taking place
in the sense that
I am now overpowering
my way into a scenario
or
becoming provocative in some capacity,
but there's an assumption here that in this
context
that there are two sides
that are kind of going against one another.
A hadith like this, when we're looking at
it now,
it becomes a basis for us to be
able to understand why
reductive understandings of our tradition become problematic.
Somebody could pull a hadith like this and
validate and justify
all kinds of abhorrent behaviors
if they're not understanding in the context of
other texts. So I gave the example,
I think, last week or 2 weeks ago
of when I went to the Maldives a
couple of times
and on one of my visits to the
Maldives, when they were transitioning into a
democracy, to be a citizen of the Maldives,
you have to be Muslim
and their constitution reads that Shafi'i fiqh is
what informs their constitutional law. They were heavily
influenced at that time. I haven't been in
a long time,
by a lot of NGOs
that were
more influenced by kinda outside
apparatus from different countries, mostly from Saudi Arabia.
There was clashes between,
like, local culture
and what it meant to be Maldivian
from a little bit more of a reductive
approach to Islam that didn't necessarily relate text
to context.
But one of the things that I mentioned
was they took me to visit 12 men
who had been imprisoned
because they had tried to blow up the
capital
city and the capital building.
And I said it was the first time
I sat face to face with people
who they were utilizing Quran
as a basis for
these types of acts of violence and atrocity,
right? May Allah protect us from it.
But to have a recognition
that you don't wanna get to a place
where there aren't people who actively think in
these ways
and why we wanna have an understanding or
knowledge
as to how these things function
so that we're not in a place also
where we engage in apologetics
and simultaneously
water down our tradition,
but we're not also learning it from people
who are fundamentally
anti Muslim.
And in their strategies,
they're able to use our religion against us
because we have a low literacy in what
it actually says, because it can create a
conundrum of issues. You can start to internalize
like this feeling of,
their racism and their supremacy
that purposely makes you cast doubt into your
tradition and what it is that it actually
stands for. Does that make sense?
And so
through
an understanding
of
this hadith,
the word nas here, they would say has
a bunch of different meanings potentially also. 1,
which most people would say is that it's
in reference particular
to the Mushakim of Mecca.
Right? When the word Nas is being mentioned.
There's others that would carve out
people who
took on the status
within
a Muslim community
that,
offered them
a place within the society so long as
they paid the Jizya,
right? And you'd want to understand the role
of the Jizya as well,
fundamentally for what it was, the way that
you and I live in this country.
And some of us are citizens and some
of us are not. Some of us are
here on different visas.
Right? And we are then afforded
different rights and access to different things,
but we also get taxed in certain ways
differently
based off of our residency status
and our level of income, etcetera. This is
fundamentally what the jizya is. Right? Like you
are living within the Muslim community,
and you're not Muslim. So you're paying a
tax that enables,
like, the society to still function just as
you and I function
as kind of citizenry in whatever ways that
we function. Does that make sense?
And you also have an understanding of the
word nas
that it's something
that essentially
is
being
understood
as
things
are engaged in this mode
until there's the opportunity
for Muslims to just be able to practice
their religion without anybody being in their face.
Right? So if you come on Wednesdays
to the Seerah class that we do, we've
been talking a lot about the persecution
of the early Muslim community. They're being boycotted,
abused, and even killed.
There's a woman
by the name of Leila who in that
early period of revelation,
she is going forth
to be a part of the group
to migrate out of Mecca. And Umar ibn
Al Khattab sees her and says, what are
you doing? And Layla says, you've made it
hard for me and for us to worship
our god here like we're leaving this place.
And to her astonishment, Umar says to her,
go have peace on your journey.
And Layla goes and speaks to her husband,
a man by the name of Umar, and
recounts what takes place,
and he says to her, what are you
saying? You sound as if you think Umar
ibn al Khattab will become Muslim. And Layla
says, why can't he become Muslim? And he
says, know this, the donkey of Umar's father
will become Muslim before he does. Like nobody
thought that Umar ibn Al Khattab will become
Muslim. Umar's son is narrating this hadith.
Right? But,
in the context of that, they can't practice
Islam.
Like, they just fundamentally are not able to
be Muslim,
and they're in a place where they're being
persecuted,
they're being mistreated. You can come in, man.
Don't worry. Yeah. It's a Giuseppe, everybody. It's
not like.
Yeah.
And then the broader sense of things and
understanding
the universality of this religion and a claim
that it's meant to be
for people until the end of time,
there's gonna definitely be
things that codify rules of engagement
because you're gonna have Muslims
who
are, like, the only Muslim
in their entire city
in the Midwest of the United States, and
then you're gonna have Muslims that are Muslim
governments.
They're gonna need to have criteria that's set
for them an understanding
on how it is that you engage
within the prism of theories like just war
principles,
right, and not things that are just unnecessarily
hostile and aggressive
or violent for the sake of violence. Does
that make sense?
So I wanted us to look at a
couple of things to help us understand this.
If you can open up Surah Anfal,
it's the 8th chapter of the Quran
and we'll look at its 61st
verse
If people wanna pull that up, 861.
Does anybody have it?
You can read it.
Yeah. Go for it.
If the enemy is inclined towards peace, make
peace with them and put your trust in
our love. And you he alone is all
here and your love. Great. Can somebody read
the Arabic?
Because you can't be scared to read Quran.
Do you know? And you wanna understand, like,
you're not reading Quran
to kinda show somebody that you read Quran
amazingly.
The hadith literally says
that the one who kinda reads it with
fluidity, there's Hajr for that. But the one
who struggles with it, the hadith says, you
know, has twice the reward. Right? So you
wanna build a relationship with these verses,
and when you read them, it'll stay with
you more. Do you know?
And the act of just verbalizing it outwardly
will help make it more concrete. But Shaitan
doesn't want you to read the Quran. Do
you know what I mean? It can't be
that's like a, like something comes from a
good place that's saying don't read the Quran,
right? Like, you know, your heart's not saying
like, yeah, don't read it, Right? The is
telling you not to read it. Do you
get what I mean? So can somebody read
this verse? Go for it.
I don't know very well, but bear with
me.
Great.
Right?
So here,
if you are in a place where
you now have the opposition
and they're inclining
towards
peace.
Right? You can see when you read the
Arabic, the Arabic language,
it derives itself etymologically
on
terminologies
rooted in shared root letters.
So when you have this idea
of peace, you can see, like, the derivation
is there, salama
of Islam, salaam.
Like, these are what gives us an indication
also that when you're reading the Arabic,
you can find yourself in a place where
even if it's not your native language, you
don't know the words, you likely know words
that are cognates or, or have similar derivations
that can help you to understand,
like, what is it that it's seeking to
evoke. Right?
So if you're in this place now where
the opposition
is inclined towards peace,
then you choose peace.
This is what Surah Al Anfal is saying
here. Do you get what I mean? The
hadith has to be understood in relation
to what the Quran is telling us.
Do you get what I mean?
If we can look at,
Surat Al Baqarah,
it's 190th
verse. If people can pull that up.
Which 1?
190.
Does
anybody
have it?
Let's
get let's get somebody else to read too
just to share the other.
Yeah. Go for
it.
Great. Can somebody read the translation?
Fight in the way of Allah, those who
fight against you but do not transgress.
Indeed, Allah does not like transgressors.
So
what does it mean? Right? And And when
you look at it in the context now
of these verses together, these hadith together,
and we're putting them all together, principally, you
wanna understand
that it's not a religion that just says,
here's this one verse.
This is what this means,
but these texts have to speak to one
another. The prophet,
right,
that he is the Quran walking,
that he is the personification
of the Quran.
If you take a hadith and you isolate
it and you just look at it in
a vacuum, then
that's just gonna yield you what it is
that it yields you. But if you don't
contextualize
hadith, if you don't see, like, who is
he saying it to, when is it being
said, like, why is it being said,
the verses of the Quran,
like, what are the verses before and after,
how does it relate to other verses of
the Quran, you can get to a place
where you reduce
the meaning of it to something that
becomes simplistic
and doesn't allow for it to get to
its depths.
And so there are guidelines that we can
understand
in relation to hadith like this that also
principally for people like you and I
necessitate us getting to a place where we
see how this is like an entire
book, and it's an entire corpus
of tradition that is the hadith.
The example that
we utilize in the Sira class that relates,
like, the hadith to the Sira is that
if you have individual narrations of the hadith
and understand its relationship to the sirah on
a whole,
you can liken it to, like, a puzzle
that has 10,000 pieces to it.
And
if somebody could connect, like, 3 of those
pieces
or say, I don't know how to put
them together, but it looks like these ones
make up this corner,
you wouldn't say that that person's an expert
in that puzzle.
And the hadith works the same way. If
somebody knows 1 hadith or 2 hadith
or
has, like, this kind of breakdown,
they're not putting the entire puzzle together.
Right?
And when you put the entire puzzle together,
this 10,000 piece puzzle, it creates a picture,
that's the entire life of the prophet of
God.
You see?
And so, you reading one verse, the translation
thereof,
or anything,
you can then turn a book into whatever
it is that you want.
But you're looking at Allah's book, and the
hadith and the prophet's example is just an
explanation
of Allah's book. And Allah is saying, if
the opposition is inclined towards peace, then you
choose peace.
Right?
That's what the verse says. We just read
it together. You know? If you're engaged
in any of this,
then the guideline is coming.
You can't transgress in some way.
You still have boundaries. You still have limitations.
And you find this in the hadith,
like, quite often. The prophet alayhis salaam, he
tells, like, people,
you do not harm like, women or children.
You don't harm monks. You don't harm a
bunch of things. And then Abu Bakr,
he has very famously
a saying where he codifies this into guidelines
and principles of things that you also don't
engage in when you're in an act of
war, an act of kind of fighting in
some capacity.
And before we look at that, we wanna
think about this.
In Islamic law,
it's not that like the individual
just has the capacity
to go and declare anything.
When you look at the hadith in its
entirety,
it gives to us this indication.
And so here as we read it,
and until they establish the salah and pay
the zakat, and if they do that, then
they will have gained protection from me
for their lives and property
unless they commit acts that are punishable in
Islam, like the hadd punishments.
Again, the prophet is saying, I gotta do
what Allah is telling me to do,
but the capacity there still fits within the
confines
of what is, like, the religion
calling us towards,
and it all attaches itself to this this,
like, link that says it's all fundamentally
coming from God,
like it's coming from the divine.
The prophet sets the condition that says we
can do this across the board except the
carve out is when Allah says that there's
transgressions that have to be dealt with in
a certain capacity.
The implementation of it is not done now
by individuals,
but there are systems in place, structures in
place that then
allow for something to be decided upon.
Within certain locales, those things might exist in
some capacity,
on a state level it might exist in
some capacity,
But none of us in this room are
gonna be in a place where individually we
can say, we're gonna now go out, and
just by virtue of the hadith, we're going
to implement certain injections
that cannot be implemented
in the absence of certain systems and structures.
That's just not how Islam has ever functioned
across the board.
And there's going to be historical incidents that
people can take to validate and justify
still yet again in ways that are not
conducive
to what the fundamental
ethos is of some of these things.
So how do we start to make sense
of it? Well, like, being on the defensive
is something
that becomes a valid mode of engagement
of this type
of action.
So if somebody came into your house
and started to like
fight your family,
you don't just sit back and say, you
know what,
like, I'm not supposed to do anything religiously.
Now what are you gonna do? Right? Like,
if I came into your house
and, I mean, your brother's a lot bigger
than me, right, but if, you know, I
somehow started
beating down your brother,
would you not stop me from doing that?
Right?
You would.
So this is one scenario.
The scenario
that deems itself to build itself off of
this, if there's a recognition
that something has to happen preemptively
because you know something is going to come
at you also.
So in the context of what's taking place
in a prophetic era,
they know that there are empires
that just are in a place where they
glorify these things. We don't live in any
different of a time.
You live in a country that is built
off of the glorification of war. May Allah
protect us from ever putting that glorification in
our hearts. It's sickening.
Entire industries
are built off of
military industrial complexes,
prison industrial complexes,
weapon manufacturings.
Insane
what it is in order to implement that.
Right? Like, nobody creates a bullet
because they don't want it to be fired.
Right? What do they think they're gonna do
when they make the bullet or when they
make the bomb or when they make the
missile? And how do they get people to
rally behind this is through the glorification
of this heinous, atrocious thing that is war.
And you see the imagery right now,
right? Because there are apparatus that have been
created that historically were not created
that allowed for the victor to always determine
what was actually
historically
accurate. You can read a book. I forget
who wrote it. It's from some time ago.
Called The Killing of History, and it entirely
is premised off of this idea that the
people who win get to decide what history
is written.
There's not, like, objective
understanding.
They're writing it based off of what it
is they want people to know,
And so they don't want people to know
what is the actual
realities of things like war.
And now when you have social media apparatus
that enable you to understand it,
this religion is not a religion that glorifies
glorification
of the glorification of things like this because
they fundamentally
could care less about anyone other than themselves.
You can't now start to adopt the attitudes
of those that are other than the prophetic
way of being.
In the prophetic era and thereafter,
you have entire empires that also just like
lust
for blood.
It's insane.
Like, who thinks of the idea of throwing
slaves to lions? This is what they do
in coliseums in Rome.
Right?
The notion of, like, crucifying
somebody. How do you even wake up and
think about that? I'm gonna nail you
to 2 planks of wood.
Right?
These are things that we know historically take
place.
Human capacity
has this.
So at an institutional level, you wanna be
able to think out what's happening
as people grow clout.
In the Meccan society,
they don't want Islam to exist. The prophet
establishes his Medina,
and he comes back into Mecca, and does
he do anything other than say everybody's forgiven?
There's no bloodshed
at the taking back of Mecca.
But they also don't live in a bubble,
and there's people that are engaged in trade
and everything else. Abu Bakr
under his caliphate,
it's not growth as much as there is
during Umar's caliphate.
And people in the world at that time,
just like people in the world right now,
they don't wanna lose their power.
They wanna retain it.
So these guys centuries ago are dealing now
with Persian empires, Roman empires.
They know
that they are going to come to create
war
and conflict.
They know that these things are gonna happen.
And so as people are trying to do
this not in a vacuum,
it's not exerted in, like, what is it
that's going to give me the most money
or the most wealth or the most land.
They're trying to determine,
what does Allah want from us in all
of this?
What's the best course of action for us
to undertake
as we also now grow in these ways?
And we have responsibility
to community and to people. And these verses
and these hadith
are setting still those guidelines because they're meant
to be timeless. People inclined towards peace, then
you choose peace.
That's just what you do.
You're going to engage in these actions, then
you understand
that you can't transgress.
There's hadith where there are battles that take
place and the prophet comes upon the corpse
of a woman,
and he says to his people, how did
this happen?
She's not a combatant. You're not supposed to
do this to women.
Somebody chooses to join the ranks
of the opposition, then that's different.
But the default is women, children,
people who are religious figures,
as much as everything else that you know
is said, and we'll look at it in
more detail in a couple of minutes, about,
like, vegetation and monasteries and places of worship
and whatever else.
It's not like a free for all. They're
confining
ethics in this way, and the inclination
is
towards
building
a state
that is harmonious in its existence
that allows for people to be who they
are, but as long as who they are
doesn't mean
that they get to, like, kill you and
keep you from worshiping God in the way
that you are allowed to worship God.
And when that becomes the norm,
then that's the norm. Does that make sense?
Okay. What I'd like for us to do
just because more people have trickled in now,
if you can turn on the persons next
to you, what are you taking away so
far? What is it bringing up for you?
What's coming up? And then we'll come back
and discuss a little bit. But go ahead.
Okay.
Thanks, man.
Okay. So what are what are some of
the things that are coming up for people?
What are we discussing?
Yeah. Go ahead.
We had some, like,
questions or the
points of curiosity.
The first was about
you talk about
expertise,
and how we need to have a picture
of the puzzle as a whole,
that makes it kind of challenging
in
looking to who can have this type of
expertise
and convey the puzzle as a whole to
someone learning.
And then the second point was about you
brought up institutions
serving as kind of guidance for how war
is meant to be conducted.
And then we were discussing
countries, Muslim countries today that themselves engage in,
transgressions,
and violence,
and, like, how how do we understand?
How do we understand that?
Okay.
What else did people talk about? We'll talk
about that, but what else did people discuss?
And we also discussed about how it is
dangerous to take certain things out of context.
Like,
I just I I'm repeating myself, but,
I said something along, like, for example, I
hate to use this example, the Taliban, let's
say. Like,
they they use Islam as a tool
to drive,
like, to oppress other people around their own,
like, country mates, you know, and their own
brothers and sisters.
And and it can be very dangerous because
it's usually,
taking like, it's ego driven and not
command driven.
Yeah. Great.
Other thoughts?
How the 100 is gonna represent this?
You look so excited too. Yeah.
We were just talking about
sort of having the ability in your faith
to sense sometimes you might not understand things,
but I'm able to say,
really try to understand,
you know,
what what your interpretation of that means to
you and how you can sort of be,
as true to your faith as possible
and how
really to start for a stand where you
sort of have led the connection to serve
every other part of your life as well.
So,
what you learn in one sense is a
lot of times how the application
is displayed.
Great.
Any other thoughts?
So when we're talking about who it is
that you can engage,
your pedagogies
around learning are gonna be varied from people
to people. Right? Some of us are more
visual learners. Some of us
learn better by hearing something or reading something.
But that aspect of learning
also requires us to think about
methodologies
implemented by the ones that we're taking from.
Do you know what I mean?
And
like anyone can be Muslim if they wanna
be.
And we live at a time where it's
actually not hard to access information at all,
but the ability to distill information,
like, how do you know? How do you
know when you go online and you Google
something that the website that you're reading
from about Islam was made by somebody who
was actually Muslim?
How do you know you're not reading something
that was funded by somebody who wants you
to read that and has optimized the search
results to come to their site, and at
the end, makes you wanna doubt Islam or
makes you wanna hate Islam, how do you
know?
And when you wanna learn most things that
have relevancy to critical parts, We don't learn
Islam in a vacuum.
You're not learning Islam because you inherited it
from your parents
and you're not engaging
Islam as a sociological
identity variable alone,
potentially, you might be doing that but you
wanna align it to the idea that says
that through
this and its implementation,
one has the potential yield for inward contentment
and a rendering of a heart that's sovereign,
a theology that's robust that helps us to
understand we're working for something bigger than the
confines of this world.
And it's not just
a set of exercises or rituals,
like as an ends, they're a means to
something. Do you know?
You can't learn Islam
by listening to just audio files and videos
of talks that were given to audiences that
you weren't even sitting in,
it's very purposely meant to be a heart
to heart interaction.
The prophet alayhis salaam, this is what he
did, right? He didn't have mass technology
that he was engaged in, but he was
literally building relationships with people 1 on 1
and individually. You wanna think of criteria
of who, like, a teacher is, there's a
lot of different lists that you can look
at.
In the context of this, I was saying
this earlier
in my office, right, like when,
Imam Khazali has like lists of like who
you should take as a teacher,
One of the things that he tells people
to be wary of are people who
are religious teachers that work for like governments.
Do you know? Because it creates
too much of an overlap
with ideologies
that have agendas attached to them in ways
that now can manipulate religions and
senses that doesn't make any sense, right? But
at the same level,
like, this isn't like, hey, man. Can I
wipe over my socks or not? You know?
Like, what's a miss walk? How do you
make will do?
This is like something that
is important to understand
that a person who knows a handful of
hadith or, quote, unquote, looks Muslim
is not necessarily
going to be the one that is going
to explain to you, like, Islamic
codes of ethics
on engagement
on a military level
or historically what these things mean or how
it is that one implements and executes them.
And at the same level, you don't want
somebody who waters it down and says like
there's no sense of this within Islam because
there is.
The whole idea of it is to implement
mechanisms that enable people
to have justice,
to defend
populations that are oppressed.
And you need some of these things,
right?
To say that we have lived in a
world historically
that has not had tyrants in them, right,
every generation has its own pharaohs,
Like, they do.
We don't learn these stories because they're meant
to just be stories but to understand, like,
pharaonic
world views are very real things.
And you have individuals
that when they are given power,
they can be people like Ahmed ibn Abdul
Aziz,
or they can be people who are like
Nimrut.
Right?
And why do we understand it so that
in the context of our time,
we know where we stand in relation to
some of these things. Do you know? Sometimes
there's not two sides to stories.
Sometimes
there is no neutrality
on things,
but our tradition creates guidelines.
If you can't understand why there needs to
be guidelines,
look at the world right now that is
indiscriminately
engaged in acts where they're validating and justifying
in numerous parts of the world,
including
most
critically
a lot that a lot of us have
probably plugged into
over the course of the last year of
of what's happening on the ground in Palestine.
Right?
And
how do you get to a place fundamentally
where people don't care? And you might be
able to say, well, like, doesn't everybody think
it's wrong to kill children?
Why does somebody have to verbalize the idea
that killing children is bad? They've killed so
many children.
Right?
And they could fundamentally care less.
And, there's people who get up every day
and justify it as collateral
damage or necessary this or they'll invert narratives
and say that you are the reason that
we are killing your children. How does it
make any sense?
This is why it's important to know that
the prophet says to Osama bin Zayed, when
we talked about it last week, the man
who says the shahada as they're engaged in
the battle.
Did you kill him after he said?
Why did you kill him? This is why
it's important to know that the prophet of
God sees the woman
in the aftermath of the battle who is
a noncombatant
that is killed and questions, like, why did
you do this?
There's repercussions
of accountability
in terms of standing in front of God.
Somebody is gonna have to own up for
responsibility
of doing why what was shouldn't have been
done was done.
And it's not about creating, like,
retributive
anger. Right? This is not the type of
anger you want that's toxic in your heart,
vengeful anger.
The righteous anger is different from vengeful anger.
You know, you should be angered by oppression
and inequity.
But when you look at the world right
now that has more refugees than at any
other time, you look at the world right
now that, like, humanity has evolved the weaponry
to such, like, a grotesque level
of utilizing its spiritual gift of intellect
to think out how they can kill other
human beings in the ways that they can
kill them.
Why wouldn't our religion say
here are the ways that you have to
operate even in this type of situation?
Even when you're out there, there are guidelines
that you have to follow.
Do you do you get what I'm saying?
There's no, like, free for all. You just
do whatever you want without any consequences
whatsoever. Does that make sense?
Abu Bakr
he says very famously,
10 rules
for a Muslim army.
And so he says, oh people,
I charge you with 10 rules.
Learn them well.
Stop, o people, that I may give you
10 rules for your guidance in the battlefield.
Do not commit treachery
or deviate from the right path.
You must not mutilate dead bodies,
neither kill a child nor a woman nor
an aged person,
bring no harm to the trees
nor burn them with fire,
especially
those which are fruitful.
Slay not any of the enemy's flock
save for your own food.
You are likely to pass by people who
have devoted their lives to monastic services.
Leave them
alone.
The instructions in and of themselves are now
creating criteria for engagement.
Sharia applies to every facet of life, and
it's not in a vacuum.
There are to
the Sharia, their objectives to Islamic law.
What is the foresight
to telling
a
community
of soldiers
that don't destroy vegetations,
especially
the ones that bear fruit.
And this is why you gotta think about
what you know of the prophet's life, the
hadith, the Sira, and not think about it
as stories, but how they inform things. Right?
The prophet goes to Taif,
and the
people abuse him in Taif.
Aisha
asks him, what's the hardest day in your
life? He doesn't say Aisha, we don't complain.
He says, Thayif. Thayif was the hardest thing
he ever had to go through.
This is after he's seen his people be
beaten and abused and persecuted.
He goes to Thayif thinking they're gonna welcome
him in. And not only does that not
happen, but the chieftains of the tribes command
their servants and children
to run the prophet out of the ground.
They abuse him. It's not, like, for minutes.
This takes place over a long period of
time.
He's broken inwardly.
His blessed feet, they say, has so much
blood coming out of it that what he's
wearing on his feet become hardened to the
soles of his feet because of the excessive
amount of blood. When he gets to the
outskirts, there's a beautiful dua
that he turns to Allah with that you
should read and really ponder and reflect upon.
But at the culmination of all of this,
when he's turning to God, he's asking, have
you forsaken me? And he's like, if all
of this is like, happening to me, but
you're still not displeased with me, you're pleased
with me, then I'm good.
That's the crux of the dua that he
makes.
But for this conversation,
an angel presents himself. Yeah, Muhammad. I'm the
angel of the mountains that surround this city.
If you command me to do so, I
will crush these people in it. And the
prophet doesn't say, yes, go seek vengeance on
my behalf and retribution.
He says, no. Let them be. Perhaps the
generations that will come after, they will understand.
If you are
engaged
in
war in your own land,
would it make sense to burn down your
own trees?
No. Right?
So, likely, here, these are guidelines
that are also about you're going into somebody
else's neighborhood.
Don't burn down their trees.
Why?
Because there's gonna be people who are not
these people that are gonna come after
they might understand differently.
There's always elements of foresight to leadership in
our tradition,
visionary
understandings.
If this was a religion that was about,
God forbid, obliterating
people who practice other ways of life,
why is Abu Bakr telling
his soldiers,
reiterating what the prophet has said, to not,
like, kill monks?
Literally, it's what he said. You are likely
to pass by people who have devoted their
lives to monastic services.
Leave them alone.
Why?
If it was meant to be a supremacist
tradition
that was about the annihilation and extinction of
people, why wouldn't it be that the first
thing that they say go and engage in?
And you see people. Right? If I had
it right now, my laptop got messed up,
so I'm using a different one. I would
show you, like, images
of people that I met from Myanmar, Rohingya.
You saw many of you, like, because a
lot of you didn't see that. Some of
you might have been here in 2017,
2018. Is anybody here in 20 17, 2018
at the IC? Do you ever see the
pictures from when I went to visit the
camps in Myanmar and Bangladesh?
These were refugees that I sat with
between 2 Eads in 2017
and 2018.
I went as close as to Myanmar as
I could. They wouldn't let me in because
the relief agencies I was with, they said
anything that looks Muslim
is being burned at the border.
I got to the Naf River. I could
see into Myanmar
like clouds of smoke in the middle of
the day because they're setting everything on fire.
There wasn't a refugee that I met who
couldn't tell me that they hadn't seen loved
ones burned alive in front of their eyes.
How can you have a religion that does
not have ethics
to engagement?
It's going to still tell you at the
end of the day, how it is that
you engage in this way that demonstrates a
sense of dignity,
both for the other, but what self dignity
means. That as a Muslim,
you are not meant to be people who
go out and just engage in these kinda
indiscriminate acts of transgression and violence.
Here, like Abu Bakr is saying,
you do not mutilate dead bodies. Why?
There's instances in the hadith where people come
and they offer the prophet
like tons of money to be able to
get the corpses of their loved ones back.
And the prophet just gives it to them.
He says, I'm not in the business of
selling bodies.
Why would you not want somebody to have
the body of their loved one back?
And what pleasure would you derive from like
mutilating?
And then you think like when people, you
read their accounts of how it is that
they're recognizing
the loved ones that they've lost in Gaza.
It's crazy that a human can do that
to another human.
How do you get to this place?
Do not commit treachery is an important
injunction
in our codes of engagement.
You don't enter into treaties to pretend like
you didn't make a treaty.
So if you made a treaty, you honor
the rights of the treaty.
It's not that we would sit down
and broker a treaty
for the sole purpose of them kind of
breaking it.
If someone else broke the treaty, well then
that's different. Right? This is what happens at
Hudebayyah,
you know. The Meccans break the treaty, not
the Muslims break the treaty.
But the prophet honors the rights of the
treaty. He goes back,
they slaughter their animals. They don't have Hajj.
People don't want it. Right?
Umar
says to the prophet, he says to Abu
Bakr, aren't we the Muslims? And aren't they
the mushrik? Like, why are we making these
deals? What's going on? Because we are people
of integrity.
We treat people based off of who we
are, not who they are.
And it applies even in these types of
contexts. Does this make sense?
Neither kill a child nor a woman nor
an aged person. Bring no harm to the
trees nor burn them with fire especially those
which are fruitful.
Slay not the enemy's flocks save for your
own food. When you look in books of
fiqh,
there's interesting
discussions
on animate objects, inanimate
like
creation,
and animate creation. Right? And what does it
mean to still honor the rights of these
things?
When Allah says,
that I'm going to send onto the earth
a khalifa.
The angels say, right,
they say
that you are going to send those
who create facade on the earth, right?
Is what is being defined here, what constitutes
facade of the earth.
You're not meant to be Muslims, people who,
like, destroy the earth and the trees and
the fruits and all of these things.
And they just shed blood.
You're not, like that's not who you are.
You're not meant to be those things. You're
just not, like, predatorial for this. Even if
you look at animals in creation, you don't
see lions that walk around and they just
kill other animals for the sake of killing
them.
That's just not a thing.
There's a certain, like, sense of decorum and
majesty that exists there. Do you get what
I mean?
And it has to be applicable
because it's gonna exist in numerous frames and
modes.
And these things are just like the tip
of numerous Hadith and other verses of the
Quran that we can understand and draw upon
that sets for us criteria.
Now when we get to like the second
part of this question, well, like what's happening
with Muslims who are doing these things? Right?
Muslims are killing Muslims.
They're engaged in actions of transgressions
against people of different backgrounds.
Where does the disconnect come in?
Religion can be very easily
a mechanism of empowerment
but can also be very easily weaponized
to get people to reach objectives
and goals of demographics
that don't have other worldly
intentions in mind.
And you want to be mindful of that
so that you are not getting caught in
a place too where your approach of religion
is simply rooted
with those whose intention
is to have materialistic
gain from religion.
And it can be very empowering. You go
to demographics
who are traditionally oppressed, held down, persecuted,
and say, you know the way that you
are gonna get yours? Here's a gun that
we put in your hand. Here's this that
we put in your hand.
You want to create violence.
You think that people care
about the number of people
that
they are
giving access to killing within minority populations?
No.
You have weaponry that gets created purposefully that
it looks like toys.
You have guns that are sold that like
are able to have no fingerprints on them.
Who comes up with these things?
And if we don't know our religion
and ethics that go into it, it creates
like a conundrum
and all kinds of
inward angst.
Like even in a lot of what we
see,
it's horrendous
that much more
because there's no real honor to it.
There's no sense of dignity that's rooted in
any of it. They've stopped recognizing
that there's humans that are on the other
end.
And
the absence of that now enables there to
be
like indiscriminate
violence.
And Muslims who seek validation
from
systems of oppression,
They believe that their sense of self worth
is based off of how much wealth they
have and how much money that they have,
or like
what colonization
purposely seeks to do is get you to
believe that you're only acceptable
when the colonizer
approves of your way of life,
why wouldn't they also just start killing people?
Who's who's creating a famine in Yemen?
Who's doing that?
Right?
Who where is that coming from?
So you leave behind the sunnah outwardly and
inwardly, or you allow for people to trivialize
and teach in reductive ways,
it can then validate and justify things that
don't make any sense. And then when you
got like to, you know, use like a
coin phrase, scholars for dollars,
who are willing to take like seats and
have recognitions and titles
that then enable them
to justify things that are unjustifiable.
And you're like, well, like, what version of
Islam do I offer back to the world?
A world right now
that
fundamentally
is watching
babies die.
Do you get do you get what I
mean?
And when you look at this now as
we go through the the rest of this
hadith,
the prophet is that,
he talks about
the inviolability
of humanity here. It's not the only time
that this phrase is utilized,
right?
Like literally their blood and their property, their
wealth becomes inviolable.
We're gonna be reaching like the days of
Dhruhija soon. May Allah
make us from those who take benefit from
them.
The day of Arafah, like the farewell Khutbah
of the prophet alaihis salam, this is like
what he says, right? He stands in front
of the companions and they're in the place
of Arafah.
He points in the direction of Mecca,
Ayubbaladan
Hazah, like what city is this? They know
it's the city of Mecca.
Right? But they're silent.
And
people
will explain their silence
towards the prophet of God.
Right? They don't want to come across as
disrespectful.
They want him to be able to answer
the question. And there's also, like, what our
teachers tell us is that if the prophet
said, this isn't called Mecca anymore, this isn't
Adafaa anymore, They just say it's whatever it
is that he says that it is. Right?
Ayub Baaladin Hatha, what city is this? Ayushaharan
Hatha, what month is this? They know it's
the month of Dhul Hijjah. Right? They're in
the month of Dhul Hijjah. They're aware of
it. Again, they're silent. Is this not the
month of Dhul Hijjah, he says.
And he says, ayuyominhada, that what day is
this? And they know it's the day of
Arafah, 9th of Dhul Hijjah, the day that
the prophet is going to give this farewell
khutba.
And again, they're not responding.
And if you look at the
last khutbah of the prophet,
one
of
the
statements that are there. Oh, people, just as
you regard this month, this day, this city
is sacred,
so to regard the life and property
of every Muslim as a sacred trust.
You have a recognition
of what it means to have respect for
life.
The farewell Khutbah of the prophet is something
that we should go through in deep detail
because embedded within it is pretty much
the root of every vice that plagues humanity
right now.
Racism,
financial
injustice,
violence
of all kinds, how it is that women
get mistreated.
I mean, you could go through everything
that fundamentally
becomes the base of all of this stuff
and that the last opportunity of a khutbah
and the entirety of a 120,000
companions in front of him, the prophet chooses
to talk about this instead of anything else.
And he's saying, this day of Arafah, which
is arguably the most sacred day in the
calendar, in the
in the
in the confines of the city of Mecca,
the most Barakah
filled place in the world, arguably,
that
more
auspicious than this day and this month
in this place
is how it is that you treat one
another,
how it is that you provide care to
each other.
Do you do you see what I mean?
And that becomes the basis
of, like, these ethics of engagement.
And then he says,
if they transgress those things,
their reckoning will be with Allah.
It's always interesting to see
at various junctures in the prophetic
tradition
that the prophet alludes to judgment fundamentally being
with God at the end of all things.
Right?
He's not categorically saying somebody who leaves behind
this or does this or does that, they're
definitely going to *.
Do you know?
Because he is not
Allah is.
You and I are also not.
Right? What does he say to Osama bin
Zayed in the hadith we looked at last
week? Like did you open up his chest
and look into his heart to see that
this is why he said what he said?
Right?
After the man in the battle says and
Osama bin Zayed takes his life.
So what I like for us to do
just because we're kinda coming to
closer to the building closing,
the building's gonna close at 8 today. So
for those who are not aware, we're gonna
wrap up around 7:30 so people have time
to get to a place you could pray
Maghreb.
Don't stay in the building past 8 o'clock.
It costs us $400 an hour to keep
the building open past its hours of operation.
Right? So when you're heading out and you
like to hang out in the lounge and
talk to everybody, just go stand outside and
talk to each other. Right? It's the same
thing. It's it's not that that much of
a problem.
But if you could turn to the person
who's next to you,
what are some of the things you're taking
away from today's conversation?
What is it bringing up for you? And
then we'll come back and discuss,
and we'll
we'll go from
there.
Okay. So what are some of the things
we're taking away from today's conversation?
What's coming up for people?
What do we discuss?
Anyway, we got a couple of people for
your wrap up.
Yeah.
We were talking a little bit about, like
I've had the privilege of visiting Palestine, and
one thing that hit me over and over
when I was there was just, like,
how hurt people hurt people. Like, my brain
couldn't wrap my head around,
like,
experiencing
a a tragedy or a genocide or a
holocaust and or knowing about it generations in
your family and then
literally enacting it and what the strategies around
that. And
it's it's something you said a lot earlier.
But,
we were just talking about, like, what are
the rules of war? Right? Like, how do
you,
what are the tools of, like,
because, obviously, from an out well, not obviously.
From an outsider's point of view,
it's not like, I literally can't conceive of
it. And what are the tools that help,
enable those sorts of things? So, like, fear
is obviously a tool.
Scarcity mindset is also a tool. So that's
a little just about.
Yeah. And how could those guidelines
come from any individual human being?
Right?
When we think about moral relativism
in a scenario that would be the most
dangerous of scenarios,
a divine system
that claims
universality the way Islam does,
and also claims itself to be a final
testament
applicable to people in any place, in any
walk of life, in any background.
How could other than God, who is the
creator of all creation,
be the one to determine something like this?
Like only it can come from Allah, right?
Because
what persons
wouldn't then
interject some aspect
of inequity or injustice
into like those guidelines. Do you know what
I mean?
And that's why these verses are important to
understand. If they incline towards peace, you choose
peace.
That's just what it is.
Literally,
the man is fighting Osama bin Zayed in
the battlefield
And he says, La ilaha illallah, and
the prophet tells Osama bin Zayed, you shouldn't
have done that to him.
Do you know? These are the guidelines coming
from the divine.
You see? What what else do we talk
about?
Yeah.
So in the conversation
that we had, we kinda summarized everything.
Kevin narrows down to
that the true judge of everything is a
lot even as you think about, like, some
of the sort of engagement,
and,
you know, the declines were peace and you
know? So if if anybody was thinking tactful
or tactfully in a war, like,
those could be called weaknesses,
you know, and a disadvantage toward the ultimate
what people might call victory. But then you
understand that we do those things because Allah
is the one who told us to. And
it becomes less of a, we're trying to
win this
more of a
I mean, this is the I guess the
greatest success suggest good what Allah says. And
then it's not about what we see, what
we feel, what we want. It's about loving
the judge and trusting that.
And then following this.
Yeah. It's it's
like, if you see doctor Farhan Aziz,
who has a video up, he went to,
like, to Gaza
to provide medical support,
and he was recounting how they, you know,
went into homes and were given some, like,
guidelines instructions. But there's, like, purposely household items,
like cans of food
that
were left behind in homes that were freestanding
still
that are, like, actually like bombs.
Do you know? Who's gonna pick that up?
It's not gonna be a soldier.
Right?
How do you get to that place? Do
you know what I mean?
And you'd wanna be able to think how
people
take advantage
of an absence of literacy
of our tradition and tell us what our
religion is when it's not what they're saying.
And if you were to look at systems
that are in place from the Quran and
Hadith in this mode of engagement,
that the way Allah tells us to do
it, if it needs to be done, and
it's better to avoid it at all costs.
But if it has to be done, which
in certain situations inevitable,
like these are the guidelines that you work
it through, it's like categorically
better than how any human does any of
this stuff.
Do you know?
Right? Like, when we give the example of
the prophet coming into Mecca and the people
of Mecca know he's coming, they're getting ready.
And we said, how many people can be
around a fire? Right? You said 10. Right?
Remember last week?
Right? What the prophet does at the outskirts
of the city of Mecca
is that he tells individuals, one person each,
to each build a fire. So when the
people of Mecca are seeing them coming in,
it looks like there's 10 times as many
people because psychologically, they're thinking for every fire,
there's 10 people around it, not one person
around every fire. The prophet wants to make
it seem like they have a massive
more number of people because he wants to
avoid any type of fighting.
That's like the crux of it. Do you
see what I mean?
And so you wanna ponder on some of
these things in the context of like the
text and what it says to be like,
yeah, like if it's gotta be done, then
this is the way to go about it.
Right?
And at whatever juncture, there's an opportunity
to bring a stop to it, then you
bring a stop to it. You see?
Okay.
So we're gonna take a pause.
Next week, we might talk a little bit
more about this, but then get into hadith
number 9,
and people wanna read that a little bit.
Tomorrow, doctor Murmur will be doing his halakhah,
and,
we'll do the Siraj Halakhah on Wednesday.
And Sheikh Fowls will be doing his helica
on Thursday.
And I think going into next week, we'll
know by Friday night,
when the month of Dhul Hijjah is starting.
And so, you know, you came to Jomar
the last couple weeks. We talked about a
little bit. These are like 10 really important
days, these 10 days of Dhul Hijjah.
So if you have capacity in the 1st
9 days, you want to try to fast
in those days. The Hadith says that in
these 10 days,
righteous actions are, you know, better in these
10 days than any other 10 days.
So
volunteerism,
charity, whatever, it's categorically different
from Ramadan because the fast of Ramadan is
the obligation.
Right? So not having to do something
becomes an inroad to inculcating, like, love and
inward transformation that much more. If you're not
doing it because you have to do it,
you're doing it because you want to do
it. Right? There's no requirement to do it.
If you can't do every day, like, at
a minimum, try to fast on the 9th
of the day of Arafah,
and we'll have Istar here on that day.
9th of Dhul Hijjah will either be
Saturday 15th or Sunday 16th.
So if you wanna block out those, and
Eid is gonna either be then subsequently
Sunday 16th or Monday 17th.
And we're anticipating
being in the park and brunch and whatever
else,
but
utilize, like, those 10 days and start thinking
about it as best as you can.
Last night, we put out an email about
a toy drive that we host annually. I
think it's the 9th time we're doing it.
This toy drive brings toys to children on
the day of Eid who are pediatric patients
in hospitals,
25
states in the country.
And,
this year, we also added
heal Palestine,
which brings children from Gaza right now with
medical needs to the states.
And we're working also with the Sudanese American,
Physicians Association.
And there's a hospital in Sudan that they're
gonna be taking
toys to at the end of this week.
So I don't know if they're gonna do
a second round. I think they might be.
But in particular,
if you wanna contribute
to the shipment going to Sudan this week,
then try to make some contributions to that
now. It's not to undermine. I know people
are at different levels of wealth. Some of
these toys cost, like, $2.
Right? But go a long way for a
sick kid
who imagine being, like, in the hospital on
the day of eve. You know what that's
like. Right?
And so if you could help spread the
word on that, we're gonna probably next week
put out a campaign that we do for
the the Qurbani,
the ritual slaughter that's attached to the Abrahamic
narrative
around the days of Eid.
And similar to last few years, we're gonna
give opportunities for people to contribute
to people in the United States, but also
multiple countries around the world.
There's just a lot of people who don't
have food. Right? And so you wanna be
able to give what you can.
If you have questions about it, we'll put
it in the email. Right? There's some opinions
that say the is
on every adult Muslim
who is passed a certain threshold of wealth.
Right? About 612
grams of silver is the basis of that,
threshold.
And there's others who say it's a sunnahawaka,
so every person doesn't have to do it.
It's a recommended act. Doing one is a
minimum though. You can do like much more
than that. Do you know what I mean?
But if you can help us spread the
words on those things as well,
you know, I'll go a long way in
helping
a lot of people.
Great. So let's take a pause if people
wanna just help put the chairs back against
the wall,
And we'll see everybody next week.