Khalid Latif – Perfecting Your Prayer Essentials of Salah (Hanafi) #01
AI: Summary ©
The importance of practicing prayer in Islam is discussed, including the use of structures to explain the holy holy holy holy holy holy holy holy holy holy holy holy holy holy holy holy holy holy holy holy holy holy. Prayer is a fundamental part of Islam, and setting healthy eating and gym routine can lead to a healthy mindset. Prayer is not just a way to be connected to God, but also a way to build a connection to God. The importance of praying and not just knowing how to pray is emphasized, and the importance of fixing behavior and setting healthy healthy healthy healthy healthy healthy healthy healthy healthy healthy. Prayer is a focus in the prayer, and the goal is to make it a more concrete and more informed way of writing.
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So,
whose first time is it here? Anybody's?
It's your first time? Oh, great. I saw
that. What we had been doing
for
the last
month or so, was just kind of going
through the different mechanics to the prayer.
And what I was thinking we would do
over the course of this summer, is a
deeper dive into prayer itself.
Talking about outward and inward aspects of it,
but the various terms that are utilized,
I think a lot of us in the
room are not native Arabic speakers and even
if you are,
Quranic Arabic
isn't necessarily
the same as spoken Arabic in various dialects.
So there's a little bit of nuance that
gets lost.
So spending a good chunk of time just
going through the words and what they mean,
you know,
to kind of not lose nuance
on it.
How does that sound?
Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah. People do.
Yeah.
How has it been for those who were
here the last few weeks? Has anyone been
able to, like, try to implement any of
what we were discussing,
kinda as you're practicing or building relationship just
with the mechanics of prayer?
Yeah. When I've been doing prayers, really been
with, what my upbringing has taught me. Yeah.
So I've been able to take, like, your,
your
You guys are late. Oh man.
You're a school teacher and you're late to
class.
That's crazy. I should make you sit in
the corner.
No. No worries.
Anyone else? Sorry. Did anyone else have their
hand raised?
We're just asking if there's been, like, implementation
of things that we talked about over the
last few weeks and how that's been
in terms of just kind of building
a relationship to the mechanics of the prayer
itself.
Yeah. I found it very helpful because I
think I told you, like, I was raised
in this religion at all, and so I
was, like, following a YouTube video. Yeah. Yeah.
And there's, like, just certain things you can't
pick up on from that. And so, like,
when we're talking about, like, really the specifics
of, like, posture and, like, different positions, that
was very helpful because it's not something you
can
quite get from a video.
Great. Glad to hear
that. Okay.
Any other thoughts before we start getting into
some things today?
So why don't we take a quick minute?
I know everyone doesn't know everyone else,
and I also just have to get used
to being in this room
and, kind
of, the shift in the vibe of the
space. So if you just take a quick
minute, introduce yourselves to the people sitting around
you, if you already know the person right
next to you, maybe the person behind you,
in front of you, and then we'll get
started in just a minute. But go ahead.
Okay. Should we get started?
So
we're gonna do a deeper dive
into
what is a particular form of prayer in
Islam
that is called salah.
You might also see it,
people will call it salah.
These are in reference to the 5 daily
prayers
that Muslims have.
Some of what we're gonna talk about, will
rehash over the course of the coming months,
what we've talked about in terms of mechanics
in the last few weeks.
A lot of it will be, kind of,
juxtaposed
to other
information, as well. I think, likely, what we're
gonna do is
try to start we're probably at 6, and
that's my fault. I apologize. I just got
tied up in a couple of things beforehand,
and we're also just trying to tell people
that we're at the end of the hall,
that we're in a different room. We're gonna
be in this room
through mid August.
So just people wanna keep that in mind.
Doctor Madhwa,
who is one of our staff psychologists,
she's not here today.
If you can keep her in your prayers.
Her mother is feeling sick. So she is
at home with her mom.
But she typically will be doing
a class,
concurrently in the prayer room. That was, like,
the time she was doing regularly. The building
closes at 8 now in the summer. That's
why we moved this up to 6 o'clock.
We'll aim to end
between, like, 7:15
and 7:30.
So that for those of you,
who
are
gonna be in need of praying the 4th
prayer of the day, Maghrib,
at sunset,
you'll be able to get to a place
with enough time to actually pray it because
the building will be closed here. We won't
be able to do that here. That make
sense? Likely between, like, 6 and 7 30
is the time frame that we'll be, kind
of, doing this. And what I'd like to
do is utilize,
kind of, a combination
of structures to the class, but the more
generic form of it would be
in talking
about outward elements of the prayer, the mechanics,
the do's and don'ts, these kinds of things,
and
then for a chunk of the class talking
about, like, the inward aspects of it.
Right? Which is a big part of the
prayer in Islam.
We're not just praying with our bodies, but
we're praying with our hearts. Right. We're not
just praying, but we're praying to God.
That's kind of the fundamental idea
of prayer in Islam.
The way Arabic functions as a language
is that words
have,
root letters to them. Does anybody here have
any familiarity with Arabic as a language? Just
so we know. A little bit. You do?
A little? Yeah.
Anyone else?
Yeah. Yeah. Great.
So,
for example, the name
of the religion that we're discussing is
Islam.
Someone who practices
Islam
is called a Muslim,
and you've likely heard other
words that have these letters like, salaam,
for example,
or somebody might say, Assalamu
Alaikum to you when they're greeting you. Right?
But you see a link
where there are
these letters
in each of these words,
sa, la, ma.
In Arabic,
it's
a seen,
a lam, and a mim.
And you can say the link between the
words.
Does that make sense? Right. There's a etymology
there that is important to understand. And the
way Arabic functions as a language, which is
not a Arabic class,
but we wanna understand the nuance of certain
things
through kind of the base meanings of these
words. The way that Arabic functions as a
language
is that most words have
3 letter root systems.
On occasion, you might have a word that
has 2 letters or 4 letters, but predominantly,
all of the words, for the most part,
have a 3
letter
root system. Does that make sense? Probably, like,
my name is Khaled.
In Arabic.
The root of that is Khaleda.
Right? And then, the way that the words
are built out, there's like forms.
So you have kind of
the letters placed into the forms and they
then denote meaning through
the form that the letters are taking. Yeah.
So, in this word that we're gonna be
looking at, in terms of prayer, like, particularly,
the salah, the daily ritual prayers, the
base
root letters of these
are a waw,
a sawd, and a lam,
waslada.
And you could also find it in an
Arabic dictionary
where it would be under Saad, Laam,
Waw.
So this
is a Waw,
a sad,
and a lam,
right? Wasada
or
sad, lam, waw.
You don't have to know the letters. That's
not, like, the point of it.
But this root
of wasalah,
in Arabic, it denotes, like, to be linked
to something
or to be connected to something.
There's like a union that's taking place there.
Right?
And that idea of that link is imperative
to understand because that's the basis of this.
Right? There's so much that goes into understanding
things
through
the names of things, the meanings of things.
So when somebody says to you, sola is
just daily prayer,
like that's gonna have a connotation to you
through language that you have familiarity with
and it's
got whatever
kind
of imagery it's going to evoke.
But, what the Arabic is seeking to evoke
is that this thing
is
a link
between you and God.
Like, that's what it's doing. It's literally linking.
It's connecting you to the divine in these
moments that you're engaged in.
So, where we would have
kind of,
here's me.
This is a prayer.
And then what it's connecting me to is
God. Like a literal
linkage
in the sense of
I'm not standing in prayer, I'm standing in
prayer
to Allah.
Do you see the nuance difference?
And that linkage is something that's important to
understand.
Right? It's a point of connection.
It's a point of
building off of a foundational
theology in Islam.
That the salah
in and of itself is an act of
worship,
but it demonstrates
fundamentally
what
the role is of the worshiper to the
one being worshipped.
So, if you think about it in terms
of things that we discussed
in our prayer
classes the last few weeks for those of
you who are here.
Do you have a question? Are you raising
your hand? No? You can. It's okay.
Like, when I'm going into prayer,
I'm in a place now where fundamentally
everything
that I have going on can I erase
this stuff?
Mhmm. I'm erasing it.
The actions,
recitations,
like, everything that's going on there
is meant to give us
at a more
microcosmic
level and understanding
that I'm not the one that's in charge
of everything.
Right? If you remember when we talked about
the conditions of prayer,
the obligations
of prayer. One of the things that we
discussed was
called the Tahrima.
This is like that initial Allahu Akbar. Thanks,
man. That you would say to enter into
the prayer. Right? If you guys remember, we
said you could say like, subhanAllah
or alhamdulillah
in the obligation
category.
But, the necessary, the wajib is to say,
Allahu Akbar.
What this means, the hrima, the same idea.
You look at the root letters,
its basis is harama,
which you get words like haram from, for
example.
The idea is that when you're doing this
Tahrima
similar to when people go on pilgrimage to
Mecca
and you've ever seen people dressed in their
clothes,
they're in a state that's called Ehram
And it's a state where what's permissible is
now made to be impermissible.
So like when you're in your salah
and you're connected to God,
everything else stops.
That's the idea.
Like that link is something
that there's not anything else that you would
be doing, that you could normally be doing.
So in your salah, it's just you connected
to the divine.
You're not picking up a phone when it
rings. You can normally pick up your phone.
You can pick up your phone right now.
But in your prayer,
you have now entered into this
through this indication
that's saying,
certain acts mundane or otherwise,
they're not gonna happen
as I'm engaged in the course of this
prayer.
I can't watch TV while I'm in a
prayer. I'm not in a place even where
it's about doing things that I could do
stationary,
but my movements, the way my arms go,
my legs go, everything where my eyes are
looking. I'm not turning my head around in
circles.
I'm in a place where
everything
according
to Islamic practice in the course of this
particular type of prayer that we're talking about,
salah,
you're just doing it the way that you've
been told to do it.
There's not room to say, maybe, I'm gonna
do this today
in
like, you know,
a wife beater and like a pair of
short shorts, right? No.
It's an act of obedience that also is
instilling within its practitioner
a notion that says, it's done the way
that you're taught to do it.
You do it at the times that you're
taught to do it. You're in a place
where the direction that you face is even
identified.
The placement of your hands,
the positioning of your fingers,
all of this thing is deeply outlined in
this
because it's giving now
through
the idea of it being
a connection to God.
The fundamental
understanding
in Islam
that
you're the one that is worshiping God and
you're in a state of subservience to God
and it's not the other way around.
So whatever else is going on in that
moment,
barring like emergency situations,
right? If you're in a place of prayer
and something's going crazy around you, like, you
break your prayer, you don't just keep kind
of praying. Do you know what I mean?
Does that make sense? Like, I was telling
somebody earlier today,
I was in a Zoom meeting
and I live in a NYU building. Some
of you have been to our place before
in our building, right? And I don't know,
was like, for any of you who are
in college or you went to college at
some point or even in high school, you
had fire drills and stuff. So we live
in a dorm building. There's all kinds of
kids, they have no idea how to cook
stuff and they'll, like, burn things in their
microwave, the fire alarm goes off, but there's
drills.
And at 2 o'clock in the morning, after
a bunch of people started moving out of
the building,
and we're in New York, and you can
imagine a 1,000 kids moved out of the
building, you know, over the course of a
week. Garbage bags are piled crazy high
and somebody lit the garbage bags on fire,
you know.
And we're in a place where we live
on the 3rd floor
and smoke is coming in and,
you know, you could see, like, the flames.
It's crazy, like, how high they were
going. And everyone's evacuating and then they're telling
us to go back in because the fire
is outside of the building, not inside of
the building. And it's 2 in the morning,
I have no idea what's going on. My
wife, Priya, comes and she shakes me and
she's like, the building's on fire. I'm like,
no, it's not. Go to sleep. She's like,
no. Like, there's smoke everywhere.
And I'm like, oh, it'll be fine. Right?
Because that was a fire drill.
If you are praying in the midst of
that, you break your prayer.
Do you understand?
Right?
That's not the same as, hey, like,
I forgot to turn the stove off,
or
you know, my friend just sent me a
text message. Do you see the difference?
Within it,
the link is to God
and there's not an absolute
severing,
but the links to everything else,
they just stop at that moment.
You're putting aside anything else that you're connected
to
And for 5 times in a day,
you're
revisiting
the idea
that
you are in a place
where you are creation
and there's a creator that you are engaging.
And you're seeking to build a connection through
this practice
to that creator. Does that make sense?
So somebody says to you, Muslims pray 5
times a day. Really, what they're saying is,
5 times a day, Muslims strive to build
a connection to their God.
Right? And it just sounds different. It doesn't
sound the same, you know. Because when you
think of prayer, there's
so many different things that can come up.
Right? People can have a certain sense of
longing in prayer. Right? Some people conceptualize prayer
the way that you make a wish on
a birthday cake. That's what prayer is. You
know, I'm just asking for things. Do you
know what I mean? Right? That's not what
the point is
in Islam with this type of prayer.
The point of it is embedded in the
meaning of the word.
The idea is that it is
not only a way, but the best way
to be connected
to God.
Does that make sense?
Yeah?
So what comes in the Quran
is,
over and over again,
it's like,
you know, almost
There's less than a 100, but probably like
70 to 80 different times this word is
mentioned in the Quran in various ways.
But, the same way when we talked about
wudu
and we looked at the verse in the
Quran
that had
the parts of the body that we said
were the obligatory parts to wash in your
wudu.
Do people remember what I'm talking about? Right?
And, it says,
in that verse,
Father Selous, that you wash yourself.
You know, it's in an imperative and it
talks about then, washing your face
and the arms and wiping over the head
and washing the feet. Right? Does it remember?
We would yeah. You know, the you remember
it? Yeah. Yeah. I I always say it
was 4 weeks. There you go. It was
4 weeks of talking about washing your feet.
You better remember it. That's right.
And so what you find in the Quran
in a lot of places
is also an imperative around prayer,
but it doesn't say,
like, pray.
It says, establish
prayer. And so it'll be in the Arabic
something like,
a famous salah.
It'll
say, something
like that. Right?
And so, when we have, for example, the
call to prayer in Islam,
for our salah is called the adhan.
Right? You might have heard it, somebody gets
up, says, Allahu Akbar Allahu Akbar till the
end of, like, the series of statements. And
they're telling people, literally come to prayer.
Right? And then, when everybody is praying in
congregation,
they do what's called the almah.
It's about establishing
the prayer
and getting to a place where we can
now understand, well, what does this mean? Right?
What does it sound like to you when
someone says, establish
prayer in your life? What I want you
to do is just turn to the person
next to you Cause you're gonna read translations.
Right? You're gonna hear people say this. Like,
establish the prayer. What does that sound like
when you have that terminology?
Like, what is it evoking within you?
If you could just discuss for a couple
of minutes with the person sitting next to
you, and then you can come back and
talk it up. Yeah. Go ahead.
Okay. So,
what does it sound like? Somebody says, establish
prayer,
you know, in English or whatever language you
speak.
Like, how would you take that? What what
do you think it's telling or instructing one
to do?
Diego? The discussion we're having at Sam brought
up a report of having the intention of
establishing a connection with God 5 times a
day in the meetings as well.
Great.
Having the intention,
establishing
5 times a day connection with God. Other
things? Yep? Yeah. Just just going on that.
I was thinking, like, you can go to
a a space,
any space, whatever. But if you're going to
an establishment,
like, there's intention behind that space. So that's
that was kind of the link to
and also we're always talking about intention.
Yeah. Intention. Great. And how does it link
to establishment?
Like you just said, you're going to an
establishment.
So just, like, think about that a little
bit. Yeah. Go ahead. It hit different for
me, like, saying praying versus established prayer. And
it's similar to what was said over here.
Almost like setting a foundation
or creating circumstances that are conducive
to prayer.
I thought of, like, establishing a healthy eating
routine or establishing a gym routine.
Yeah. So it becomes normal in your life.
And what is that like when you establish
healthy if you flesh it out more? You
maybe choose to
stop going out drinking as much or these
sorts of things. As we said here, you
you pick a a setting that's
conducive to Prager.
You put yourself in the energetic space that's
conducive to a very certain mindset. So that's
why I thought of, like, a holistic approach.
Great.
Just to piggyback away, sir. Like when you're
creating a gym routine, something that you wanna,
like,
you
know, wanna create a routine for your prayer,
and, like, find some value in it to
your personal life. So
I think that's pretty much what I go
down to.
Any other thoughts?
Yeah. So,
in the establishing
of prayer,
like, who's doing the establishing?
Yeah. Right? You are, I am.
The prayer is not establishing itself,
like, you're establishing the prayer. Right? The same
way, Sam says, you go to an establishment.
What does that, like, literally mean?
The foundation of something had to be created
in order for some kind of edifice to
now literally exist
in this location.
Before this building was here, there was a
church that was here. Right? It was a
Catholic church that served the university.
The Catholic community here has supported Muslim communities
amazingly, you know. We likely wouldn't have an
Islamic Center if it wasn't for a Catholic
priest that ran the church here, who was
a great mentor of mine.
And
when
the university bought this land,
the Catholic Center is still on the first
floor. That's why it says, Catholic Center NYU.
It's a part of the deal when they
built the building, but then they took it
down, and then there was just a hole
here for a long time. Right? And then
they built something back up.
Right? And that's how you construct an establishment
of some kind. You're literally establishing
something in that, but the ownership
of the establishing.
Right? The person who is doing the action
is you.
You can do this individually, you can do
it communally,
but the prayer is not establishing itself.
When we talked about standing
in prayer over the last few weeks,
Right? We said one of the
integrals
of the prayer, when you're in prayer, one
of the obligations. And if you weren't here
for that, or you forgot, it's okay. We're
gonna review it in a few weeks. But
one of the obligatory
acts of prayer is standing.
People remember? We talked about this. And then
we said, like, in the Hanafi school, you
have to just recite something of the Quran
in the obligatory
acts, in the standing. Right?
So the word for standing
in Arabic
is qiam.
It's got the same letters
as this.
Right? Do you know that word? Kiam? No.
I was just thinking about the Grand Qiam.
It totally makes sense. Grand Qiam. Look at
that. Right?
Do people come to the Grand Qiam in
Ramadan?
Do we know what Sam's talking about when
we were here overnight?
Right. So, one of the things that happens
a lot
in the calendar year, but also, more so,
at certain times seasonally, is people pray into
the night.
And, if you've ever heard the name, Laila,
for example,
right? Leila means night. Kiamu leil means standing
in the night. Right? So, kiam means standing.
Ikama,
when you say,
ikimaslalah,
it's like you're
establishing the prayer, meaning you're, like, making the
prayer
stand. Does that make sense?
And the way you wanna think about it
is in this same way. Right? If you
walk through New York City, which is not
like other parts of the world, and every
block there's, like, a tree or, you know,
maybe not. But you see, like, these little
trees. It's crazy.
In the park, you can see them, like,
surrounded by concrete and they're baby trees.
Those baby trees are in a place where
if this is like the tree,
it's usually, like,
strengthened by some kind of pole that it's
tied to. Do you get what I'm saying?
You ever seen that in New York City?
Right?
The pole
is what is helping to make
the tree stand.
It needs a support mechanism.
What this is saying
is make the prayer stand
the way the pole makes the fledgling tree
stand.
Be in a place where you have consciousness
of how it is that you give it
that support vehicle, that support structure.
Because the goal is to not
just pray the prayer and check it off
like, I prayed the prayer.
The goal is to pray to God.
And in the course of the establishing of
the prayer, one can think about this in
a lot of different ways. You establish a
place of prayer. You establish
like your kind of ritual washing, the wudu,
you establish this and that. But you want
to think about it in this way. And
then,
if you're in a place where you're trying
to relate
to religion,
Islam is a religion
tells you often just reflect on the things
that are around you. So when I'm walking
down the street and I'm trying to figure
out how am I gonna explain this
and like literally in front of me, there's
this like a little tree,
you know. It's got all kinds of signs
on it that say, don't let your dog
like pee on this thing. Right? It's like
a little baby tree, you know. Your dog
gonna kill it if it does that. Do
you know what I mean? Don't feed the
pigeons because when you feed the pigeons, you're
feeding the rats. Right? Only in New York
City. There's like literal signs like this everywhere.
And all that they're doing
is they're saying like, hey,
we
are establishing
the tree. We've got this thing with its
branches tied up because the wind could knock
this thing down.
It rains really bad, it's gonna get uprooted.
Do you get what I'm saying?
The idea
in utilizing this as a metaphor, it's like
a picture of a tree there. I don't
know where it came from but
try to think about this.
That if that tree
had nothing in it
and you were to seek to push it
down the way that you might have ever
seen a TV show before, where somebody
in a comical fashion,
they're trying to like hang up something and
they take a hammer and it just goes
straight through the wall.
Because there's nothing behind that wall.
They don't know
necessarily,
but it wasn't built in that way. It
didn't necessitate that versus like a solid trunk
that's got everything in it. If you try
to
push through something that was hollow, you would
break through it. But if you try to
push through something that was concrete, you'd probably
break your hand banging against like a solid
tree trunk. Do you know what I'm saying?
That's what this is saying.
Make it like solid.
Help it to stand upright.
Establish it in that way.
The way that when you're standing,
you're gonna make this thing stand in that
capacity.
Does that make sense?
Right? And it's coming in this form to
be able to say to you, like nobody
can do that for you because you don't
pray my prayer, I don't pray your prayer.
Islam is a religion
does not have this established
kinda hierarchy to authority. It's a very pure
monotheism.
It's you and God. There's nothing that you
need between you and God.
If you convert to Islam,
you can literally take your Shahada
sitting in your home
all alone and nobody can tell you that
you didn't become Muslim.
Because you don't need a person to sanctify
it. There's no kind of like
person or individual that needs to bless in
that way shape or form. There's certain things
that can happen communally
that then necessitate
an individual leading a prayer or something to
that extent.
But it's not the same as what you
would find in other religious traditions. Do you
know what I mean? Like I used to
be a chaplain for the NYPD
and they have ceremonies of all kinds like
for everything,
you know. And as chaplains, we were on
a rotation
because there was always an indication at the
beginning of ceremony and a benediction at the
end of it. And one of the things
that I got invited to early on was
they were doing like a street nay name
for somebody
and I came and I asked the people
who were part of the ceremonial unit, what
are we doing and they were like an
invocation,
benediction
and you have to do a blessing for
the plaque that they're gonna put up. And
I was like, I don't how do you
do that? And they're like, just bless it.
And I was like, I just asked you
how to and you told me to do
it by doing it. Right? Like, one of
us is not making sense here. Like we
don't have this in our religious tradition.
Do you know?
And I said it's not like I'm not
knocking somebody else's belief, but there's not something
like this in in what we do.
And it trickles into this idea
of like, there are religious scholars in Islam,
there are individuals who study Islam,
but it doesn't become the base of
being like a mediator between you and God.
You get what I mean? Why is that
important?
Because this
is an individual
obligation in Islam. Right? I'm gonna give you
like some terms in Arabic,
but they're gonna be overarching
categories of things. And so, what
salaf fits into
is not just an obligation,
but it's an obligation,
a farr. Right? People remember the word obligation.
It's called the fardayn.
It's an individual
obligation.
This is different from a fard that's called
a fard kifaya
which is communal obligation.
So for example,
somebody passes away
in the community.
That person has a right to,
as the deceased, for their body to be
washed and shrouded and prayed over and buried.
As long as one of us knows how
to do that,
the entire responsibility
towards that person
is lifted. Not just knows, but does it.
Do you know what I mean? They have
to get it done. Right?
I had another funny story pop up my
head, but has nothing to do with talking
about. Maybe we'll tell you at the end.
And if nobody knows how to do
it, then the entire community is responsible
and bears the burden
of that obligation not being fulfilled.
Right? So,
you, for example, could fit social services under
this.
Right? If you have capacity
to
build a shelter for survivors of
abuse. You have capacity to set up food
pantries and clinics.
Right? There's certain gaps, The underserved and underprivileged
needs are not being met. Right? Their communal
responsibilities
that need to happen. Does it mean everybody
has to do it? No. But some people
have to get it done and if nobody's
getting it done and there's capacity too, then
that's a problem. You see,
we're talking about individual obligations. The faderayin.
That your prayer is your prayer. That's what
salah fits
under. You have to pray your fajr.
I can't pray it for you as much
as you can't pray it for me.
I could do the janaza prayer, the funeral
prayer for everybody in the room. Right? Some
of you might be able to do mine
because you know how to do it. Do
you know?
But, it doesn't mean all of us have
to know how to do it. Just one
of us needs to do it.
But, you can't do something that you don't
know how to do.
And in some acts, like, you're the only
one that can do that thing.
And sala,
that's one of them.
I wanna share like some narrations that echo
the importance of this as we're gonna get
into it at a deeper level over the
coming weeks. The mechanics, the do's and don'ts.
We talked about the obligatory
actions,
the necessary actions,
the recommended acts.
We haven't talked about
what nullifies the prayer, like what are disliked
acts in the prayer, you know, and these
kinds of things.
We'll get into those as well.
But here, we want to know, for example,
like
some of
the
kinda
importance of this,
there is
a prophetic tradition
where the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him,
he says to his companions,
that Islam is built on things, on 5
things,
right? And in Arabic, when you say building,
it's binaya.
So Buniyal
Islam is that like you're literally building on
these five things.
And in normative Sunni
practice of Islam,
these are referred to like the 5 pillars
of Islam,
right? 1, to say the Shahadah,
that you testify that there is nothing worthy
of worship except
God alone
and that Mohammed
is his messenger.
And then in this particular narration,
it says, the establishment
of the prayer,
the giving of the obligatory charity, the zakat,
which we'll probably talk about towards the end
of the year.
Then it says,
the pilgrimage
to God's house.
Hajj Al Bayt, it says. Right? The pilgrimage
to Mecca, the Hajj.
And then it says, the fast of Ramadan.
Those are the 5 things that are
obligatory
in terms of like ritual and practice
across the board.
For Muslims
who are sane
and post pubescent.
And then, they get nuanced
in terms of
which ones
are applicable to some, but not others.
Right? Like everybody
has to pray.
Some people, they won't go for Hajj because
they don't have the means to go for
it.
Right? Some people they won't give zakat
because they don't have the wealth that requires
them to.
Some people, they're not gonna fast in Ramadan
because they don't have the physical capacity to
fast.
My father
who had a severe stroke some years ago,
they left him paralyzed on the right side
of his body
and without the ability to speak.
He still prays.
The prayer changes a bit for him because
of his physical
restrictions. But the narration say that even if
you were to just pray
with moving your eyes in the ways that
your body would normally go, Right? But prayer
in this form
is not something
that is undermined.
It's not a choice also. There's another narration
that says, bein al mari wa kufri tarakos
salah, the between an individual
and
disbelief,
meaning like leaving Islam,
is the abandonment
of salah.
What most people would say is that this
is a qualitative
understanding.
That it's not an essential understanding.
But we're gonna learn
like prayer and mechanics according to one
legal school of thought in Islam,
in Sunni Islam called the Hanafi School. There's
another school that's called the Hanbali School
and the namesake of that school was a
great scholar by the name of Ahmed ibn
Hanbal
and he was of the opinion that said,
no. If you don't pray,
it is an essential
distinction
between somebody who's Muslim and somebody who's not.
Not a qualitative
distinction.
And there were opinions that said, somebody wasn't
praying then that meant that they were outside
of the fold of Islam.
Most people would say no. Like that's not
the case.
But I'm saying this to give you an
understanding
of what the importance is of it as
an act in Islam
and why it's also an important act
because it's an obligation
and these are things that are owed to
God,
but the benefit comes to us back. So
if you meet somebody
as you are exploring Islam,
somebody
who might have a tangential relationship with their
faith.
A lot of us don't grow up necessarily
learning so much. I didn't pray for a
good chunk
of
like my adolescence
and teens.
I just left it behind and I forgot
how to pray for the most part and
had to reteach it to myself. Now, I
started to explore religion and spirituality,
when I was about 16 years old, I
started looking at more different things
and I would, as I got older, I
was 17, I would cut class and go
to the mosque. I just didn't know what
to do. I was very intimidated asking people,
you know, for advice or anything like that.
But,
where I'm at now is not where I
was,
but I'm also a product of where I
came from. Do you get what I mean?
And so,
I didn't have
that sense of a connection so to speak
because I didn't learn it in that way.
I learned it only as like do's and
don'ts.
And it wasn't necessarily taught to me in
Sunday schools. I went to like 12 different
Sunday schools. It's terrible, you know.
And fundamentally,
like, it it didn't like click
because it was just given in terms of
lists.
It's much harder to do this
if it just becomes an ends and not
a means to something. You're not recognizing it
for what it's intended to be and then
thinking out, well how do I establish it
in that meaningful way that allows for me
to sever connection to other things and then
just focus on this connection
in this way. The gain that's there, another
prophetic tradition.
The prophet peace be upon him, he asks
his companions like, what would you say of
an individual
who
essentially like bathed themselves in a river flowing
in front of their home 5 times a
day.
Like, how would you understand the state of
this person to be?
And there is like, yeah like he's gonna
be clean like it's not dirt. You know
what I'm saying?
And the prophet said, this is what
your relationship
is to the salah.
Like it's a cleansing mechanism
but the cleansing mechanism is not only outward
because think about it, there's aspects that are
about physical cleanliness also,
right? You can't pray
if you don't make wudu. You can't pray
if there's filthy things on your body, right?
You haven't like
kind of washed off like urine or excrement,
somebody drops alcohol on you, these kinds of
things. Like those are not clothes you can
be praying in. So there's a physical
aspect to the cleanliness
also because anticipating that I'm gonna pray is
just gonna create better hygiene in relation to
the prayer
regarding like other things, otherwise.
But also, it's like a metaphysical cleansing,
right?
It's a inward cleansing
that becomes a protection.
The way that when we fast, we talked
about it that it yields consciousness.
What the Quran says
is that establish prayer because the establishment
of the prayer is a protection
from things that are kind of corrupt and
wicked and evil.
That's what the yield is supposed to be.
Right? It shields you from doing like terrible
things or problematic things. Now, are there terrible
things that happen in the world? Yeah. Like
I was talking to my wife, you know,
it's a long weekend
and
I said to her like 2 weeks ago,
hey, what should we do this coming weekend?
You know, a long weekend coming up. And
she was like, oh, you know, let's just
kinda stay home. I was like, why don't
we find some of our friends staying home.
She's like, no, fine. Then yesterday, she was
like, why don't we hang out with some
people this weekend? I was like, oh, what
a great idea. I wish I had said
that 3 weeks ago
and
I was sending names to her like, you
know, why don't we talk to hang out
with this person, that person.
And one, it's like crazy
just what some people do with their lives,
right? And one person I said, she was
like, yeah,
you know they have kids also our age
and like we're close in age to the
husband and wife too. And she said, the
wife isn't here this weekend because she's gone
down to the Texas border
to help protect,
asylum seekers.
And she's gone with a lot of her
own law students
who themselves are undocumented
or DACA recipients
and they can't cross the border because of
that reason,
but they're in a place where,
you know, they want to help whatever they
can, right? And it's like wow, like there's
people who are built that way. You know,
any one of those kids let alone the
professor who's our friend, they could step just
like in the wrong place and someone will
just send them out of the country.
You know what I'm saying?
But
juxtaposing it now to the people
who
are willfully
planning
to make life difficult
for asylum seekers.
People who like will deliberately
sit and plan
about
let's get these size cages
to put children in them when we separate
them from their families at the borders. Like
that's a literal conversation that someone has. Do
you get what I mean?
They don't have just like in a giant
warehouse a bunch of cages.
Someone had to sit
and plan and say when they come, what
should we do? And someone had to say,
why don't we stick them in cages?
And then someone had to go through the
process
of actually taking the step
to buy and assemble
and line up and lock the door behind
people.
How can you do that every step of
the way? Do you know what I mean?
Right?
What the Quran is saying,
if you do this thing right
and it's going to be transformative
inwardly,
you're not gonna be in a place where
you fall into that kind of mess.
It's going to be a mechanism
for inward transformation
and healing,
cleanliness.
It's going to serve as an agent
of polishing your inside in a meaningful way.
Does that make sense?
Yeah. What I want you to do is
just turn to the person's next to you
a couple minutes. What are you taking away
from this so far? And then, we'll come
back and discuss. Go ahead.
Okay. So what are some of the things
we're taking away from today?
Where
are some of the things?
Anything?
Yeah.
We've been discussing a little bit about
how
the salah is kind of
not kind of. It is stated as a
necessity in Islam, and our metaphor was kind
of like drinking water. Like, we have, like,
water
to stay hydrated, but also to clean,
you know, kind of impurities in our body.
And maybe some of us do something
like that.
Yeah. It's something that you need to do
a certain amount of time
a day and just kind of gets rid
of
It's And it's amazing,
like, analogy. Right?
You need to drink a lot of water.
It's not only
kind of fleshing things
out, but it's just giving you energy. Right?
It's like literally, it's gonna make your skin
brighter. Right? Like, you're not gonna have all
the kind of challenges you have. And you
think about the alternatives that you turn to,
people
overdo like caffeine,
coffee, all kinds of stuff is just killing
their insides, you know.
And that's what you can see with like
your salah.
If you do it and you do it
consistently
with, like, the regularity that you're supposed to,
the yield is gonna be positive, as well
as pushing out what's detrimental.
If you turn to other modes of engagement,
it's just not gonna give you, like, what
it what it's intended to. Yeah. Other thoughts?
Other takeaways? Yeah.
It resonates when you describe it as a
form of protection.
And and and then back to this, thought
that it's an establishment,
like, providing
a a root or a foundation. So I
think
of the people who, as you mentioned, sort
of go through these intentional processes to create
cages for children.
And
I would assume or come to conclusion that
maybe that
They they're not I don't mean to put
it like this, but they're sort of, like,
lost in the wind or they're just they
don't really maybe they don't have a sense
of ground and morality.
So if that's the energy
around them, they're just kinda going with it
versus having a reference point or their own
foundation where even if there's chaos around them
or evil around them, they have nothing to
sort of
root themselves in.
Yeah. And Islam is like a religion that
sees prayer as an anchoring force.
You know, it's a mechanism for grounding
when it's done with that like inward and
outward
aspect understood.
And it's not just then like the shell
of it or the mechanics of
it. But you're simultaneously
utilizing your body as a means to
connect to God through your heart, right? And
that connection, that sinna that we're talking about,
it's not like a bodily connection. Do you
know what I mean? Because
we have an essential
understanding of God that is different from other
religious traditions.
And so, there's no anthropomorphizing
of God in Islam in any way. So
there's not like a literal connection taking place
on a physical sense, but the part of
you that if you were to think about
yourself on a whole,
that you're connecting now through salah to God.
Like, what's that connection being made through?
Do you know what I mean? And what's
like the driving
part of you in formulating that connection?
And a lot of times, we make decisions
through our stomachs. We make decisions through our
sexual organs. We make decisions through like externals.
We make decisions through all different things.
Fundamentally,
the prayer and all of its postures
has your entire physical body oriented
in a certain capacity,
but the idea is that the driving force
is your heart. Right?
That's what it is that you want to
be sovereign in the midst of this. And
then, it enables you to have that presence
outside of the prayer as well.
In Islamic tradition,
the mandate for 5 daily prayers, we talked
about like some weeks ago when we first
started talking about prayer.
But the catalyst for it wasn't something that
we discussed.
Right? So, if you remember
for those who are here,
the mandate of 5 daily prayers comes to
the prophet Muhammad
when he goes on a journey from his
home to the city of Jerusalem
and ascends into the heavens
and there's a conversation that we discussed
where Moses, peace be upon him, like asks
him, what did you speak to God
when he enters into this level of heaven?
And he says, you know, God told me
to pray 50 times a day for my
community.
And Musa, alayhis salam, Moses, peace be upon
him, says to the Prophet Muhammad, alayhis salam,
peace be upon him, like, go back. Your
people are not gonna do 50.
Mine didn't do what they were supposed to
do. Yours are definitely not gonna do what
they're supposed to do. They go back and
forth in this way until it comes down
to 5. Do people remember when we talked
about this? Yeah.
Do you just nod your head to to
make me feel good? Yeah. And remember? Great.
Yeah.
What's happening before this,
when
Islam is revealed
and the first revelation comes to the prophet
Muhammad, he thinks he's lost his mind.
He's seeking solitude
in a cave known as the cave of
Hira,
the top of a mountain. The angel Gabriel
is a very important,
entity within Islamic tradition similar to other religious
traditions.
He comes with this initial revelation
and what the narrations and the traditions say
is that everywhere the prophet looked in the
horizon, he just saw the angel, really massive
creature.
When he goes home, he is shivering out
of shock.
He doesn't know what's happening
and his wife
Khadija,
may God be pleased with her, puts a
blanket on the prophet's shoulders.
He like says everything he has to
and she gives him affirmation. You're a good
man. You treat orphans with
dignity,
and you remember the world's forgotten. You honor
rights of guests. You wouldn't be tested in
this way, you know.
Then, she's with him throughout all of it.
She's supportive of him. Like, has his back
through everything.
There's a really deep love that's there. Right?
When the prophet describes the love that he
has
and the love he receives for his wife
Khadija,
the Arabic word he uses is a derivation
of rizq which is your sustenance.
But he's saying like her love was something
that God like instilled within me and gave
to me. But it was a source of
sustenance, he's saying, right?
She passes away
and when she passes away, they say he's
not the same person as he was
prior to her passing.
Like years later, to give you an idea,
there's an instance
where
a necklace that belonged to his wife
by chance came into his hand and tears
just started pouring out of his face because
it was a reminder of this person that
he loved so much.
Not only does she die that year,
but his uncle, Abu Talib,
also passed away
and he was
an elder in this very tribalistic Meccan society.
Right? So, when you think about Mecca,
just on a sociological
level,
there's like no mayor of Mecca.
There's no governor of Mecca.
The city itself is not ruled by policies
and these kinds of things, but it's broken
into clans.
And the way a clan is kind of
given strength
is through how it protects its kind of
most underprivileged
members.
You know. There's kind of a connection, right?
So you all could be like one clan
and the most elite and powerful amongst you
had the responsibility
of caring for the ones that were most
underserved and underprivileged.
That's what the Meccan society was like and
the stronger clans were the ones that had
more nobility.
The more powerful ones that had like certain
lineage
and the prophet came from a clan
that was called the Quraysh.
And they were given a certain dignity
because amongst other things,
they were the caretakers
of the Kaaba in Mecca.
The black cube, if you've ever seen it,
when people are going for pilgrimage to Mecca.
And Abu Talib
was the prophet's uncle
and because he was alive and he was
an elder with like noble
kind of status,
Nobody could do anything to his nephew.
They could do things to his followers and
to other people, but they couldn't do anything
to him because he had the protection
of his uncle.
And then, his uncle passes away too. And
both of these things happen in the same
year.
There's a genre
of literature
in our tradition
that's called the Sira.
And, this is in reference to the prophetic
biography.
Right? It's like the prophet's life,
You should read, like, some of these books.
There's one by a person named Martin Lings.
That's pretty popular.
And so, in the seerah literature,
this year
that the prophet's wife and his uncle passed
away,
is called, the Amad huzin. The year of
sadness, the year of depression, the year of
grief.
He's like really
in a downstate.
These 2 people he loves so much had
passed away and they passed away in the
same year.
And so, what happens
when this takes place
is after that,
he goes through this difficult experience
of
just
inward angst,
right?
And there's more stuff that we could talk
about in the interest time we won't,
but in the aftermath of that is when
he's taken on this journey
and he's given
this thing of prayer
as a mechanism also for like inward healing.
Do you know what I mean?
You think about the person you love more
than anybody in the world.
Think about who you love like so deeply,
Right?
I love my daughter, Medina, so much.
I didn't know what love was until we
had my daughter.
And some of you heard me say this
before, I literally loved her so much. When
my wife was pregnant with our son, I
said to my wife, I don't think I'm
gonna like him so much.
And she said, what? You can't like
go, don't talk about our child like that.
And I said, I wasn't being facetious, I
just couldn't fathom
how I could love somebody as much as
I loved our baby girl.
And then when Kadeem was born, not only
did the love I have for his sister
not diminish and increased,
I had just as much love for him
and the 2 of them just helped me
fall more in love with their mother every
day.
I can't imagine what it would feel like
to lose any one of them let alone
losing more than one of them
and all within a short time span.
Like what it would do to me?
And that's what happened to the prophet
and then God who's watching over the prophet
could give him anything
When he brings into the heavens
as a mechanism for his healing,
he gives him the 5 daily prayers.
Just like any kind of prescription,
you could turn something into a vice
rather than it being a virtual source of
healing. You get what I mean?
But the intended
purpose of this act
is what it is
and in order for it to yield it,
that's where the establishment
of it has to be something that resonates.
Right?
You have to be the one that as
you explore this religion,
you're a new convert to it, you were
born into it and trying to rebuild a
relationship to it. When you walk past the
tree
on the sidewalk,
that's branches are all tied up with strings
and there's this giant pole that's holding it
up. That's what it's doing. It's helping the
tree to stand.
It's establishing
it.
That's what it means to establish the prayer.
You're helping it to be stood upright. Do
you get what I'm saying?
We're gonna start to use is a text,
it's called ascent to felicity.
It's a hanafiq
like manual.
It's got some aspects of theology in it.
If you can't buy the book, which you
don't have to,
you can find excerpts of it online.
If you Google Hanafi Fick books,
you know, it'll come up on like archive.com
and stuff. But try to support, you know,
where you can, if you have the money.
We're gonna be looking at the prayer sections,
as we go through the mechanics of the
prayer. The other thing that we'll do when
we start that next week,
next week we're gonna talk about a concept
also
that is called hushur
that is like focus in the prayer, concentration
in the prayer, how to build that. Right?
And so what I'd like to do is
use half of the class
to go through, like, the outward mechanics, as
well as half of the class to talk
about inwards,
relatively speaking.
And then end, like, around this time, so
that for people who need to find a
place to pray,
the building's gonna close at 8, so we
won't be able to pray our sunset prayer
here. You'll have adequate time to get either
to, like, a nearby mosque, or you could
wash up and pray in park, or in
front of the you know, there's a big
open space in front of our business school
down the street, or, like, a more quiet
park, like, right behind this building. It's called
Suzuki Garden. There's hardly anybody ever there.
It used to be, like, my quiet place,
and then COVID happened, and I didn't have
a place to feed people indoors.
And so I made the mistake of showing
people my secret place,
and now they do of things there.
But you could play there, if you want.
It's a really nice quiet place.
But if you wanna look for this text,
you can just also
Google this with PDF
attached to it.
And then one of the things on archive.com,
it'll show you, like, 8 or 9 different
Hanafi fic books. The second one is Ascent
to Felicity.
That's the one. You can buy it on
amazon.com,
as well.
If you want to buy a copy, but
you don't have the funds, let me know.
We can help to get that, but we'll
start to go through it.
It'd be great if people
who aren't,
are bringing some kind of, like, recording tools,
notebook, paper,
just so it becomes a little bit more
concrete. Right? Statistically, when you write something down,
you're gonna remember it like 60 to 70%
more than if you're just trying to like
absorb information.
You know?
And we're gonna like, do it a little
differently than,
what I was doing in the prayer room,
where we were writing on the whiteboard, but
we'll kind of delineate a little bit more,
because I realized my handwriting is terrible.
And have some PowerPoints that kinda show you
how these things are more categorized,
as well as give, like, some of the
basis
of where does it come from,
you know, so that we're a little bit
more connected to
kinda the particular
postures and movements and kinda indications
in the course of the prayer itself.
Yeah. Great. So we'll see everybody next week.
Thank you so much.