Khalid Latif – Perfecting Your Prayer Essentials of Salah (Hanafi) #03
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AI: Transcript ©
So last week, if you guys remember,
we introduced the topic of just focus and
mindfulness and prayer.
It's called kushuru.
Right? We're talking about some of the inner
aspects of prayer outside of the kinda outward
aspects, the mechanics of it.
And today, there'll be a few things that
we'll do. We'll continue on with that,
talking about kind of the language elements,
of the first chapter, Surah Fatihah,
which if you remember when we were breaking
down,
like the obligatory parts to prayer, the necessary
parts, and the recommended parts.
In the obligations
in the Hanafi School for prayer,
you just have to recite some part of
the Quran
in the shortest form of the verse, right?
From another is the shortest verse in the
Quran.
In Arabic, you would recite that and that
suffices
if you know, you're learning how to pray.
Whether you're a new Muslim, you're new to
prayer even if you're born into it, you're
kind of rebuilding a relationship.
But in that necessary column,
the second column of acts was
recitation
of this first chapter of the Quran, Surah
Fatiha.
We wanted to do was familiarize,
like, with the meaning of the words as
you're kind of memorizing it also. Does anybody
remember the words we talked about last time?
It was 2 weeks ago. Sorry we cancelled
last week.
The sky turned yellow,
and we felt like it probably was a
good day for people to stay home
instead of being out in the yellow sky.
My son and I
went bowling
the night before on Tuesday,
And my daughter is in 5th grade, but
she did, like, her first overnight trip in
school. They took them to some place in
the Poconos.
And
my son and I because he was now
home alone, and I don't think I don't
know if he's ever actually been away from
his sister,
like, for a night. You know, my wife
very sparingly has traveled and I've been with
the kids.
I travel quite often to speak at different
things. I'm like, you can come in.
But the 2 of them have never been
away from each other, my daughter and my
son.
So my son kept saying, like, I just
wish, he calls his big sister Didi. That's
how you say big sister in Hindi.
So he's like, I wish Didi was here.
So we went bowling, and then we went
to this arcade,
and we got food. And then when we
came out,
like, the world just smelled like it was
on fire. We had no idea what was
going on because we were just in this,
like,
play land for the 3 or 4 hours
when all that was happening.
It was crazy. And then the next day,
I went up to Columbia
for something.
And when I left the building,
like, everything was just this
orange yellow haze. Do you know?
So we figured it might just be better
to not have the class,
just in case people
respiratory issues,
asthmatic, anything like that.
So we're picking up now 2 weeks later.
So it's it's okay if there's kinda like
a drop, but do people remember what part
of that chapter we talked about last time?
Yeah.
Yeah. So and then we went just through
those first two words. Right?
Right? It's technically three words.
But
what was what did that mean? Any does
anybody remember?
Praise and thanks.
Yeah. Praise and thanks.
And yeah. Oh, no. I don't know. The
irony of the fact that I spent so
much time staring at the Arabic, and I
never stopped to read what
the words meant. That's okay. Great.
Did you learn the Arabic?
Yeah. Amazing. Right?
Couldn't remember what it meant. That's okay. You
don't have to. Yeah.
It's a different language. But I And you're
just gonna go through it piece by piece.
I just think that emphasizes the point of,
like, you can be so used to saying
something or just focus on like, you can
forget the meaning behind it. Yeah. And there's
a value to both, right?
So it's not a both end in the
sense that
one is necessary
for the other. In the prayer,
the necessity is just the recitation of it,
you know?
So the recitation to it is what you're
doing in the prayer. What we wanna do
to be able to deepen the inward part
to the prayer,
right? Just not a prayer of the body
but a prayer of the heart, and to
have focus and mindfulness. If you remember 2
weeks ago, I asked you, you know, why
are you able to be attentive
theoretically even in this mode of communication
was because you can understand the words that
are coming out of my mouth. Right? If
I was speaking a language that you didn't
understand.
I don't know what a language is that
all of us,
you know, don't understand any one of us,
right? But let's say theoretically,
no one in this room knew how to
speak like Spanish.
Right? Likely some of you do know how
to speak Spanish in in some capacity or
fluently. Let's assume no one does. Now I
was just up here talking to you in
Spanish. You would fundamentally,
after a bit, just zone out because all
you have is sounds.
Right?
Sounds in and of itself are really important
part
of the Quranic
kind of paradigm,
and we get impacted by sounds constantly. You
know, I took my kids
to a basketball game,
and it was when Kyrie Irving came back
to play for the nets for the first
time. If anybody follows basketball, right? And we
didn't know, right? The tickets went from like
$20 a ticket all of a sudden to,
like, $1,000
a ticket. And I thought it was an
empty arena, and we got there. It was
fully packed. And my son was like, Bubba,
you said no one was gonna be
And it was crazy. And then Kyrie walked
down the court, and everybody went, you know,
whatever. Hey, it's not like him.
And so
if you've ever been to a basketball game
or any type of sporting game, in between
every 10:20 seconds, it's just like a loud
sound music
like,
announcers making all kinds of announcements. They're shooting
t shirts out of like these air guns,
right?
My son is sitting next to me
and at that point, he was probably 6.
He's now 7,
and he's like moving in every which way.
And I was like, Kareem, I don't know
you're such a good dancer. And as he's,
like, moving around, he's like, baba, I'm not
dancing. Right? But he's literally being impacted by
the sound.
Do you get what I mean? It's going
in,
he doesn't have to consciously consume it, but
the consumption is still having an impact on
him in some capacity.
Right? So sound in and of itself is
not something to undermine.
There can be a gain to that. There's
a lot of people who they hear the
recitation of the Quran, they don't know the
meaning of the words, but the words when
they're engaging it through
all of their organs of sensory perception, it
just can hit a little bit different. But
at some level, we wanna not experience what
people could experience
when there is that language barrier. You know,
and to get to kind of the depth
where some of the nuance gets lost in
translation. And what we're gonna talk about today
can give us a little bit of that
because we're not necessarily using these words when
we talk in English. Right? So last time,
we broke down,
Alhamdu
Right?
And we kinda talked about what do these
words mean, you know, what's really going on
here.
And today,
we're gonna talk about
the second part to that first verse
That is,
Rab
bin
Al Amin.
And when we pronounce it,
we'll go through some more letters today to
kinda make a distinction.
Does anybody have the first chapter open, the
translation?
Yeah.
What does it say?
Just that verse.
Right. So this quite often gets translated as
lord of all the worlds.
Arabic has, like, dictionaries the way English has
dictionaries.
So when you think of a Lord,
which is quite often not a word that
we utilize
in English,
right,
Like, there's not this kind of understanding,
in terms of
our day to day jargon where we're using
a word like this. Right? When was the
last time you said the word Lord
to somebody?
It's very antiquated.
But also, if it was to evoke meaning
for you hey.
Woah. What are you
doing?
So Zayd Zayd and I lived together about
18 years ago.
Yeah. He used to let his relatives wear
my clothes without telling me.
Isn't it amazing? Yeah. I know. Everyone knows
now. Yeah.
Great.
So we are not using words like this,
it's antiquated language,
but it also doesn't evoke the nuance
of the meaning.
There's so much more that's going on here
when we are talking about this word.
In Islam,
this
word denotes
the foundational
relationship
between God and God's creation.
Right? Like there's certain relationships that we have
in our life
that assume that there is
some type of partner in that relationship.
You know? I can't be a husband
without
a wife.
I can't be a father without a child.
Do you know what I mean? Right?
I can be like,
you know, an eater.
Right? There doesn't have to be another person
involved. You get what I'm saying? Right? You
can swim by yourself. Do you know? There's
certain things you can do uniquely alone, and
when you're given that title,
there's not something that's a counterpart
in the relationship that's automatically assumed.
Right? But if I tell you I'm a
father, you might not know if I have
a son or a daughter, but you know
that I have a kid.
Does it make sense? Right? If I'm a
teacher, then I must have students.
Right? You know, if I'm an employer,
it assumes that I have people working for
me.
This word rub in Arabic, that we're going
to talk about its meaning in a bit,
it has also
a connection
to a relationship
that
is pretty much the foundational understanding
of how creation relates to God
within an Islamic paradigm.
Because
the word Rub
assumes a relationship to what is called an
Abd.
The way a teacher has a student,
the way,
father has a child, the mother has a
child. Right?
And you've probably heard words like or names
like Abdullah.
Right? Abdulrahman.
Right? Kareem Abdul Jabbar.
You know?
So that's
connected to this word.
And Abd is essentially
translated as like a servant,
but its base definition
is
it needs something,
relies on something to exist.
And God, uniquely within Islamic theology,
is self sufficient.
Like,
Allah does not require
or rely upon anything for his existence.
So everything in creation
is an abd because everything relies on something
to exist.
But for the purposes of this conversation,
in this verse, when we call upon God
as Rubb El Al Amin,
we're also
creating now
the filler to this gap
that says
by
logical principles, the same way you can assume
if I say I'm a parent that I
have a child,
that the word rub
gives an insight
that there is obd, which is me and
you.
Is everybody staying with me so far? Does
that make sense?
Right?
So now I want to know what am
I actually in?
Right? Because what we said in the
first chapter,
there's a reason why we're reciting this 17
times a day in our prayers.
It's not just about the mechanics of it
and in the Hanafi school, it fits in
that second bucket, the necessary acts.
So you can pray in the Hanafi school
without reciting this, but we want to learn
it and memorize it, so that we're growing
at a pace with our relationship to the
prayer,
right?
So if I'm going to be a servant
of
this,
Rab,
Lord, I wanna be able to know, like,
what that means. So if you open up
an Arabic language dictionary,
it's gonna tell you the word rub,
and then there's a definition.
Right? Like if you looked up the word
chair, it's not going to say chair in
the dictionary.
Right? It'll say the apparatus that you can
sit on, etcetera, etcetera. I don't know what
the definition of chairs clearly. Right? Noun. Right?
You know? So this is going to define
for us
what is
rub
mean.
It's gonna be so much more than just
lord,
right? Which is a word that we don't
use.
And it's connected to this. Alhamdulillah
that all praise and thanks, not just praise
and not just thanks,
right? But all praise and all thanks
is
uniquely for Allah.
Rubbel'alameen.
God is still introducing you to himself.
He's saying, hey, this is me. The way
when you all sat down in the beginning,
and I said, turn and tell people your
names and how your day went, you know,
my name is Khalid. I am a chaplain,
etcetera, etcetera. Right? I'm giving you insight as
to who I am.
You are being told
by the divine
in this first chapter,
like this is how he wants you to
know who he is,
right?
So
the word rub,
they'd say,
firstly,
denotes
Al Malik.
Sorry, my hands
that he is the owner of everything.
So this is
foundational theology
in
Islam.
That everything that exists
is owned by God.
But when you're calling God as,
you're saying that he's the owner of it
all, the possessor of it all. Right?
Everything that's given to you is given not
because you deserve it.
Right? I don't have it, and by virtue
of me having it means I deserve it,
and I'm entitled to it.
That just because I want it doesn't mean
that I need it.
But what's given to me, I understand as
a gift.
Something that is owned by
Al Malik,
the Rub.
If you're the owner of something,
it doesn't necessarily mean
that you are the one that decides
how you can use those things,
nor does it assume that you care for
those things.
Right?
Like, I could own this chair, I could
own this laptop,
and as the owner of the laptop,
I could put it in a nice case,
I could put it in a closet. I
could lock the door. I could also just
leave it on the ground, and my kids
could step on it. I could throw it
against the wall. The fact that I own
something
doesn't
give other insight,
other than I simply own it.
Do you get what I mean? Does that
make sense?
Like, you could own something and care for
it. You could own something and you could
treat it like garbage.
You could own
something and you could honor it. You could
own something
and you might not even be the one
that decides how it gets used. You come
to my house
and I am the 40 year old father
in the house. And I walk into my
house, my kids decide what's watching TV. They
didn't buy the TV,
I bought the TV, right?
But who's deciding what's being watched?
So
being in a place where you own it
doesn't also necessarily mean that you're the one
that's deciding,
like, how it's utilized. Do you get what
I mean? Like, we don't own this room
right now.
Right? We don't own the building,
and why you owns this building.
Right?
But no one's in here saying, you're allowed
to do this or allowed to do that.
Does that make sense?
So al Malik
is denoted
firstly.
From this,
you have then
it denotes that god is,
Murabbi.
Means like a caretaker,
a nurturer,
the one that looks after you. But there's
a verse in the Quran where it's a
prayer, and it says,
It's a prayer for your parents
where you're asking God,
be merciful to them as they did nurture
me when I was younger, like growing me,
right? So that same notion of the way,
like, good parents take care of their children.
You know,
good parents
look after their children,
right? God,
when you call upon him as rub,
you're saying that he is al Malik and
he is murabbi.
Does it make sense?
It's also saying that he is Sayed.
So he's the one that is deciding how
certain things take place,
right?
And these two things are important. They're not
qualifying
God as being Malik,
but they exist
in essence
of who God is altogether.
Do you see what I mean? So not
only do you have a God who owns
things
and gives you what is in his possession,
but it's a loving God, a nurturing God,
a god that is helping to rear you
and cultivate a relationship with you. Right? The
god that's in charge of stuff.
It also denotes that God is Munaim. In
Arabic, the word for blessing is namah.
Right? A gift.
So God is the giver of blessings. God
is the giver of gifts.
It denotes that God is I am.
He's the one that's keeping everything kind of
in its place,
you know? Like, do you remember
when we were talking about
the establishment of prayer some weeks ago, right?
We said,
you call me to salah,
right?
That you're making the prayers stand up. Like,
that's what it's you're making the prayer straight,
right? And I gave the example
of like you walk through New York where
there's just all these saplings of trees,
every block, and that the tree when it's
in a small kinda nascent stage
that there's a piece of wood usually tied
to it that's keeping it upright, but it's
making the this tree upright.
Right? That's what Iqamatul Salaam means, like make
the prayer upright.
Right? So God is Qayim,
like it's got the same letters to it.
Right? He's the one that's keeping things, like,
in their place. Keeping things upright. Do you
get what I mean? Right?
Then in this
I'll just write in English.
That God is
the healer of all things.
So the owner,
the caretaker,
the
master, so to speak,
the giver of gifts,
of blessings,
the one keeping things upright
in their place,
and the mender, the healer of all things.
All of that
is the definition of rub.
And that's what
they're trying to say Lord means.
You understand?
Do you see the difference,
right? Like, if I think of this, I'm
picturing like, if you've ever been to medieval
times before
where has anybody been to medieval times?
Yeah. Yeah. So you got what I mean,
right? It's kind of like, people are like
honoring their night and you know,
royalty is eating, and that's like a lord,
but it's inaccessible.
Do you get what I'm saying? It's like
a stratification
that is rooted in classism
that denotes that I'm not in a place
where I should even think of having a
relationship with you, but that's not what this
means.
This
is if there's anything that I'm supposed to
or should be a servant of, it should
be of God,
right? Who's my caretaker? Who's the giver of
all these blessings,
right? So it's not Lord in that way.
Any questions on that?
Any thoughts on that?
So what I like you to do just
for 2 minutes, you turn the person next
to you. And if you don't know their
name, share their names. Are you taking away
from that so far? Just so we can
kinda
process it a little bit, and then we'll
come back and discuss. Just for 2 minutes.
Go ahead. Yeah. Okay. So what are some
of the things we're talking about?
What are you taking away so far?
Anything
comes up interesting?
So what happens for yeah. Go ahead.
We were just talking about how it's really
beautiful how can be all these negative and
recognitions and that,
it can mean different things in, like, different
seasons of your life. Like, how today I
might need him to be my caretaker
and tomorrow I might need him to be
like the person not the person, but the
thing that's making me straight or keeping me
straight.
And it
just it's not just this stagnant one word
like Lord,
where you just think of it as like,
okay, like that's the Lord, that's it.
Living in medieval times example that you gave.
But it's really
just this kind of this it's ever changed.
Not ever changing. I guess it's still growing,
but it just can mean different things.
Yeah. Any other thoughts?
And you wanna think, right? There's nothing in
Islamic theology,
this is like a foundational principle.
There's nothing without meaning in God's plan,
right? So there's a reason why, like, Allah
in the Quran
introduces himself
to the reader, literally the first page, in
this way.
As opposed to introducing himself on the first
page
as the creator,
as opposed to introducing
in other ways.
Right? So it's that foundational relationship.
If God is rub,
that means I am obd.
We're gonna see a verse in the middle
of the chapter
that you'll find quite often. If you were
here, I talked about this maybe at Jumah
last week or the week before,
where like a key ingredient to the relationship
between
an Abd
and
Rab
is guidance,
right? And that's a prayer that's gonna be
asked for by the one reciting this chapter
in a later verse. It
says,
Guide me to the straight path.
And a lot of the times in the
Quran, when you see this word rub, you'll
see at some point
like in close proximity
within that chapter,
a mention of guidance,
right?
That if this is my Lord,
who is all of these things,
the way that I demonstrate
my servitude
in Islam to my rub
is by like doing what he says to
do,
Right? Not by not doing what he says
to do. Do you get what I mean?
You know, so if I go home, the
way that I know that I am not
the Lord of my children
is because they don't do the things that
I asked them to do. You know what
I mean? Right? And I'm like, like literally,
I have this conversation with my kids. I'm
like, can you and they're super nice, some
of you are my my children, they're beautiful.
But I'll be like, hey, can you do
this? And they'll be like, wait a second,
I'm gonna do this first. And it's not
even that they're doing something that's belligerent,
or like, impolite.
But it's just do the thing I asked
you to do, man. Why are you doing
these other things before that? Some of it
doesn't even make any sense,
you know.
The relationship
here
is rooted in that.
In Arabic, the word for guidance,
the
word for gift is.
It has the same root letters. Right?
And that's the way that it's that it
is. Like, you're given this as a gift,
and all of it is there
because that's how language works. You find meaning
through words,
and you can then
create an entire
sense
of, like, the moment that I'm in
just by knowing what does this word mean,
right?
By extension,
what happens
also is that this word obd
is a baseline characteristic
of everything in creation.
So if you're not willfully choosing to be
an obd of God, you're gonna still be
an obd of something.
Right? You can choose to be something that
is subservient to example wealth, but then you're
never gonna be satisfied.
Right?
You can choose to be subservient to, like,
just your physical
demeanor, what you look like, beauty,
and you're gonna die a 1000 times over
as you get older and older, and
you just keep looking at yourself in the
mirror. Right?
My friends and my wife and I were
hanging out this weekend, some friends we hadn't
seen for some time. And someone took a
picture of my wife giving me a kiss
on the cheek, and the sun was hitting
us in such a way where, like, I
have a lot of gray hair in my
beard, and it looks really, really white in
this picture. And my friend says, woah Priya,
it looks like you're kissing your grandfather.
And I was like, oh, that's amazing. You
can laugh. It's okay. You don't have to
cover your face. Right?
If I was in a place where I
was subservient
to my physical demeanor only,
it would get to a place where every
time I looked in the mirror as my
physical being aged,
it would just destroy myself, right? And people
manipulate
our core belief structure, not abstract doctrine or
theology,
but the cognitive mechanisms through which how we
process reality. I am beautiful, I am not
beautiful.
What the Quran is saying is that you're
beautiful
even when you're 60 or 70 years old.
Your beauty lies in not becoming submissive to
something
that is going to inculcate a sense of
deficiency within you in some capacity.
But you should be subservient to a God
that we're gonna talk about in a little
bit more, how he further introduces himself to
you. But ultimately, everybody is going to be
a worshiper of something.
You know. So the Quran is saying choose
to be a worshiper
of the one that's worthy of worship. Right?
That's why the Shahadah says,
There's nothing worthy of worship
except Allah.
Then we add in the part Adamin.
So the way if you remember,
we talked about Arabic
being a language
that is based off of a root letter
system.
So the word Muslim,
Islam,
Salam,
it all has these letters,
Salama.
Right?
And you can see the link between the
words.
So Alameen
in Arabic
has
the letters that we'll get to
in the next few weeks.
Rain, lam,
mim.
Right? It's,
al
alamah.
This means, like, knowledge or knowing something.
Right?
So the idea here is that this word
can mean a lot of different things.
Alamin
can be in reference to, for example,
everything that's not rub.
Right? Because Allah uniquely is the rub, so
he's the rub of everything else.
You know? So this is anything that's ever
been created,
you know, across
galaxies and universes and worlds, etcetera.
Because it's rooted in knowing
is also making a categorical
difference, For example,
between a word of a world of knowing
and a materialistic world. Right? Which in Arabic
is called the dunya.
Right? So your time on this world is
not, like, shackled
by things that are materialistic,
things that are just externals,
you know. But it's a world of knowing
so that when you walk down the street,
you actually take a pause to say, look
at how beautiful this flower is, right? Look
at how gentle
like
the mother bird treats
its
baby chicks.
You know, look at how sweet to the
sound of a child's laughter is. Do you
get what I mean? But
you're taking steps of knowing
in a world of knowing.
You know, you're not taking steps of forgetfulness.
Right? There's steps
that increase you in an opportunity
of finding depth of perspective.
So
some people would say this word adamin
refers to, like,
everything that's ever been created.
Some people would say that he's the Lord
of
it also meaning, like, the knowing worlds or,
like, those that have the capacity
to know in the world. Meaning like all
humanity,
right?
What this is denoting fundamentally
is also a linkage between all people. It's
not a theology
that
denotes
like selected individuals
having a relationship with God.
But people in all of their racial diversity,
their cultural diversity, their socioeconomic
diversity,
everything
falls into this connection.
And that we don't exist in a sphere
that
seeks to
pursue independence
as like a goal, but interdependence
as a goal. How do we lean on
each other? How do we exist within one
another, right?
That we're all connected in a God centric
paradigm
that
isn't despite but embrace of our diversity.
Do you know what I mean?
So it's giving an indication
to a deep sanctity of humanity
and something that is not to knock other
religions, but it doesn't exist in other religions
in the same way. Right? So
all of that is being kind of denoted
when we're saying.
Does that make sense?
This is the first verse
of the chapter that you're gonna recite in
your prayer.
Yeah? Does anybody memorize this already?
Yeah.
And how is it, like, for those of
you who are working on it so far?
Oh, they're good.
Yeah?
Which words are silent?
Which words are silent? Which letters are silent
and which words?
Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. And how are you going about
it? Well, I just use the app now.
Yeah. And then it gives you, like, the
word as it's like. There's like a bunch
of a's and a bunch of e's. Which
i's? I'm like Yeah. Which one do I,
enunciate more than the other? Yeah. Go ahead,
Kira. So something that I can be memorize
it. I'm a very visual person. I need
to write that over and over and over.
Yeah.
Me memorize it. I'm a very visual person.
I need to write that over and over.
What I did was, I listened to it.
Oh, sorry. I printed out, like, a a
copy of what it said online, how it's
written over here.
And then I listened to it and I
took out whatever letters didn't make sense to
me. Whatever I didn't hear, I took it
out. Because at the end of the day,
I'm the one, like, looking at it and
trying to memorize it.
So maybe that can help you. Just, like,
write it out and get rid of the
letters you don't hear. And then over time,
it'll just, like
in your head, you'll probably see what you
wrote down over and over again.
Yeah.
And it's a transliteration.
Right? So you're transliterating
based off of where you're at as we're
learning the letters to the alphabet
and getting comfortable then, like, a month and
a half from now to reading, like, more
kinda fluidly.
You know?
But that's a great, like, idea.
So as you listen to it,
you kinda take out what the transliterated
letters are.
And so here, like, we'll say it altogether.
Right? So if you wanna repeat after me,
Alhamdu.
Alhamdu.
Lilahi.
Rabdil.
Rabdil.
Alhamdu. Alhamdu.
Yeah.
How is that for people? Go ahead. Sorry.
This is gonna be a very annoying question.
Do people
have to sing
when they are
reading the Quran? No. So what you're calling
singing
is just, like, different aspects to the recitation,
and we'll get into it more in detail,
but there's an actual,
like, science to the recitation.
And
what happens when people are learning how to
read the Quran,
they first go through every letter and its
pronunciation.
So remember last week, we did 4 letters.
Right? Or 2 weeks ago. Right? We didn't
meet last week because the world was on
fire. Right? So
how we did, alif, ba, ta, and the.
Right? So we did,
e, oh,
babi, boo,
and then we said was like theta, right,
in English. Right? So.
What happens is there's some letters that have
cognates,
like, in English and some won't. Like, in
in.
That letter doesn't exist in English. You know?
When we get to it, we'll talk about
where,
like, you pronounce it from. You know?
What parts of your mouth, your throat, etcetera.
Do you know what I mean? And it's
gonna be daunting
because it's a totally brand new language, Do
you know? And that's why it's beautiful the
way Islam is structured
because it's not requiring
you as a new Muslim
to somehow already have downloaded everything into your
head
and be able to recite it in a
certain way from day 1. Right? Because if
god doesn't understand who you are, then who
is going to understand who you are? And
if the system creates, like, a gap that
you can't fit into,
then that's, like, showing a lack of understanding
between God and his creation. Do you get
what I'm saying? Does that make sense?
Yeah. So we just wanna go at it
at a pace that makes sense. Right?
And so as you're reciting it, like, this
is what you're saying,
and it's giving an introduction as to who
the divine is. And now in the next
verse,
what's gonna happen
is
the next verse
is going to give a deeper
qualification
to who is this Lord of the worlds.
Right? So
it's gonna say, Ar Rahman
Ar Raheem.
And
when you're reciting this,
right, what it's gonna be as Arwahman
Nir Rahim.
Right? We'll talk about that in a few
minutes. But these are 2 divine names of
God.
So
the notion is that
if you were to take all of the
water
of bodies of water in the world and
all of the trees in the world and
the trees,
know, were turned to pens and the water
was turned to ink, you would exhaust them
and still not recite
or write down all of the divine names
of God like the way you could qualify
God. But there's certain ways
that Allah has introduced himself to us through
the Quran,
and
pondering and reflecting upon these words
are
where we can draw some insight. The theology
of God in Islam is a negative knowledge.
Right? Not a cynical or pessimistic knowledge,
but it's a negative knowledge meaning that the
assumption
is we don't have full capacity to fathom
the divine
in his true essence.
And so we know who Allah is by
knowing what he is not
and where we have
opportunity
to have a baseline understanding
in our own limited capacity.
It's different essentially from other monotheistic
traditions.
But in this chapter that you're reciting every
day,
God is saying, this is who you should
know me to be. Right? As an introduction.
The word Rahman
and Rahim,
how does it get translated in your translations?
Yeah.
The lord have mercy. Give her mercy. Yeah.
Right? So when you think about mercy,
especially in, like, inequitous society, supremacist
society,
capitalistic
society.
Mercy quite often goes hand in hand with
justice.
You know? Punishment.
Right? You cross a red light, you get
a ticket. Did you wanna say something? Get
your hand raised? No. Yeah. So rahma,
the root of these two
letters of these two words
has
the same
letters, Rahama.
And they denote, like, this idea of mercy,
compassion.
The word for womb in Arabic, for example,
is Rahim.
It's got the same letters. Right?
And it gives a great illustration
like the womb, you know, expands to accommodate
life. You know? So mercy, compassion is meant
to be expansive not restrictive.
Right? It's meant to kinda grow
with the person's need, not meant to kinda
collapse and suffocate it. Do you know what
I'm saying? Right?
Rahmah
in Arabic is not just mercy,
but Rahmah
has its own unique element of
gentleness,
softness,
kindness,
love,
as well as mercy.
All of this
goes into that word rahma.
And you want to break it down because
if we said just mercy,
we'd be thinking about
it unconsciously in the way we think about
mercy, right? Have mercy upon me. This is
what like the prisoner says to the judge
at a sentencing.
Do you know? That's not the relationship
that like Allah is telling you to have
with who He is.
Rahman
in Arabic
is something that denotes
a few different things
and
it functions off of, like, a form in
Arabic. That's the way Arabic
words are built.
Is anybody here speak any Arabic
or has any, like, Arabic speaking people in
their lives?
Yeah.
Yeah. So, like,
if I told you, for example,
hey. Like, when the class is done,
put all the stuff away
and you didn't do it, and I'd be
like, you are so lazy.
You know, you're so lazy.
Laziness is you,
Right? It's the defining quality of you right
now.
Emphatic.
I'd say, you are.
Do you hear how it has, like, a
similar sound to it as Rahman?
If I was exhausted,
you know, I'm sitting here and I'm, like,
passing out in the chair, falling asleep,
and I'm just so exhausted,
so tired.
I'd say I'm.
Right? The tiredness is me. Exhaustion is me.
If you hadn't eaten anything all day, right?
I've been eating gross food all day. It's
kind of a norm to the stories that
I tell people.
I woke up this morning. I don't even
know why. I was, like, half asleep,
and I went to the kitchen.
My kids had, like, I don't know what
kind of cereals in the closet
from, like, Reese's peanut butter cups
to Cocoa Puffs. We don't usually buy them
these things,
but on occasion. We're like sometimes really strange
parents. Right? My kids on their birthday, we
might get them a box of Fruit Loops.
That's how terrible we are today. You know?
Like, oh, it's your birthday. Here, eat some
Fruit Loops. Congratulations.
And then we had Trader Joe's cereal. I
was eating all 3 of these things. I
don't know why. It's a bad idea. And
then 2 hours later, I was like, oh,
I'm gonna have a long day, should probably
eat some things. My wife always says, you
don't remember to eat. So I ate some
pasta and chicken,
and then I came here
and there's some box of donuts in our
office. And Khaled
was like, I'm gonna eat these donuts. And
I was like, I'm not gonna eat them.
And then 5 minutes later, I was eating
them also. And I ate a glazed donut
from Monday that's been sitting in our office
from Dunkin Donuts.
It was super gross. I took a bite
out of it, and it was gross. And
I still ate the whole thing. And now
I feel pretty terrible.
Say, I did not eat all of those
things, and I hadn't eaten anything all day,
and I hadn't eaten anything
maybe like, for a couple of days.
And hunger was just like, so apparent in
me.
The way that it would be described is
Joanne,
right? That I'm so hungry. Hunger is
like the
emphatic quality of me in this moment.
And all those
descriptions,
laziness,
exhaustion,
hunger,
they have the ability
to be remedied, to go away, right? I
can eat something,
hunger ends,
right? I can sleep, exhaustion ends, right? I
can pick up my stuff. Laziness ends.
So Rahman
is saying it's now,
it's emphasized,
and it has the potential
of like having a stop to it. Right?
Rahim
has the same root and it's gonna still
be these words and translations.
The beneficent,
the benevolent.
It's like who uses these words when we
talk in regular everyday English?
Raheem
denotes continuity.
It's like happening always.
There's no stoppage to it.
Does that make sense?
It's something that has the capacity for forever.
And so the way these 2 get linked,
1, in description of this, you don't want
to see the verses
as separate sentences in a vacuum, but it's
saying,
all praise is for God, the Lord of
the worlds. Well, what kind of Lord is
he? He is a Rahman and Rahim Lord.
That he
is super merciful,
compassionate,
loving, kind, gentle.
It's what's the prevailing quality right now,
and it is continuous. It happens forever.
Does that make sense?
And we think about this now in like
a servitude
based mode of the relationship.
Most people
who lord over people,
they're not nice to them, right?
They don't treat them well.
There's not that element
of love to it.
But here, Allah is saying, this is a
kind of rub that I am that you
should know.
I am a loving God. I am a
merciful God. I am a gentle God.
I am a kind God. I am a
soft God.
Does that make sense? Ar
Rahman
Ar Raheem.
That's how God is introducing himself.
Again, it's a qualification
to this,
and that's what you're invoking him by. Right?
It's a conversation
with the divine. The first chapter, Surah Fatiha.
And then the 3rd verse where we'll stop
today
says,
Yom
Adeen.
So we already
saw this word in the definition of rub,
then Malik is the owner.
Yom Adin
is the day of judgment.
Right? In Islamic theology,
there's
a
recognition that you go through numerous realms of
existence.
And from this world, there's
a life in an intermediary realm, a grave.
Then there's a concept
of a day of judgment
that everyone is essentially raised from their graves
and taken into an individual account,
and God is the owner of the day
of judgment.
Right? God is the one that is the
master of the day of judgment.
And what
this is giving now
is, like, an essential understanding
that if you know these things about God
in Islam
and you didn't know anything else,
then this should suffice you in your relationship
with God.
That
God is rub,
so you are obbed,
and he is rub of everything.
That he is Rahman and Rahim,
merciful and compassionate,
and that he is
the owner of the day of judgment, that
you're gonna stand in front of that god
one day. And accountability
is a big part of this religion
that you have a recognition then that you
have a return to that god, and you'll
stand with your decisions, your choices, etcetera.
Does that make sense?
So what I like for us to do
is to try between this week and next
week.
It's like the first half of
the chapter,
and it's got a handful of words.
So you wanna
try to memorize these 3 verses as best
as you can. It's okay to work with
a transliteration.
And what you'll notice
if you listen to it enough,
it has this kind of melodic
element to it.
Don't get lost in that. Do you know
what I mean? When you learn to recite
it in your own voice
with the rules,
like it's just gonna come on its own,
but it's purposely constructed in a way where
it's recitation,
If you are engaging it enough, it's gonna
just stay in your head. You're gonna see
yourself
going down the street, and you're just gonna
be, like, reciting it to yourself and these
kinds of things. And spend some time with
it. If you could do more than the
first three, that's fine.
But do these 3,
and spend some time just recite them like
5 times, 10 times, and take a break.
At the beginning of the day, the end
of the night, you know, the next day.
Right? And you'll see it'll just start sticking
with you. You know?
Yeah.
I have a question.
If Allah is
and
then
on the day of,
Today
Well, this word isn't about forgiveness alone. Right?
It's about other things. So the day of
judgment
is like a theological
concept
that also
provides us
the opportunity for questions of why
to be answered. Like, why did certain things
go the ways that they went in this
world? Right? It's a day of, like, balance.
So we're taught that the goat that has
horns
will have recompense against it by the goat
that had no horns. Right? If there's anything
that kind of
was inequitous,
oppressive,
you know, you certain
but all of these questions of why and
balance will be restored, like there'll be restitution.
Do you know?
Does that make sense?
Right?
And it's yielding to this idea that God
alone
is like the Lord of all things.
So the wisdom of God, the knowledge of
God
is
one that far surpasses anything that we might
be able to understand on a human level.
And this is where there's no anthropomorphizing
of God in Islamic theology.
Right? So there's no human understanding of the
divine, right? Or God
existing at a human level,
or there being multiple gods.
And again, it's not to knock someone's belief,
right? But when you're talking about
kind of absolutes
in knowing everything
or like
understanding everything,
right? At these levels
that exist beyond
our realm of experience with time and reality,
etcetera.
How could it work if there was 2
beings that had that capacity?
Do you know? How would it work if
there was 5 beings that had that capacity?
Do you get what I mean?
And so
in thinking about that in relation to other
aspects. Right? How could a god be those
things
and also die
or sleep or eat?
Do you see?
So the theology has elements
of reflection and contemplation
that even through your own kind of rational
mode of thinking,
it has necessary questions that have to be
answered. Do you know?
How God will judge
on a day of judgment
is like on God's volition. The theology of
Islam
is not built off of an idea that
just because you're Muslim,
you guarantee
yourself entrance into heaven. And if someone is
not Muslim, that they're
guaranteed a destination in *. Right? That's like
a very Protestant theology in some denominations theology.
Again, it's not to knock anybody's belief, but
it's not a Muslim theology.
Right?
Yeah.
If
someone
were
to if someone were to recite if someone
were to memorize both the Arabic and the
English translation,
could they technically pray
all everything in English?
Can they recite all 5 prayers in English?
In the prayer? Yeah. The prayer would have
to be done in the Arabic. It has
to be done in the Yeah. That's why
we wanna learn the Arabic,
but that's where also like, that first bucket
that we talked about that you weren't here
for. We're gonna go through it in, like,
a week or 2
that the minimum that you need is not
this.
This is, like,
beyond the minimum.
The minimum is just reciting
any, like, short verse of the Quran in
the Hanafi school. I guess I have a
bigger question of
why does prayer have to be said in
Arabic?
Because the Quran itself is in Arabic,
but the translation
of the Quran
is not considered to be Quran. It's considered
to be a translation of the Quran.
Yeah. Yeah.
Okay.
So why don't we do this just in
the last 10 minutes that we have? Did
anybody actually try to mess around with the
letters that we talked about last time? The.
You did? How did that go for you?
Looks like chicken scratch. Nice.
Did you find any of them in the
chapter? Did anybody do that?
So one person tried it, and no one
looked up the list. A book. You got
a book? Gonna write it. Yeah. Give me
a book. Oh, look at you. Dollars. Yeah.
So
I ordered a book that's gonna come in
tomorrow
that I'll make photocopies of also, but it's
great that you have this.
You wanna get into the habit of doing
it and practicing it. Otherwise,
it's not gonna work. Right? And it might
seem like it's a daunting task,
but,
it literally will just take, like, moments.
And as you learn the alphabet and how
the letters connect,
it'll open up a lot of different things
because then we'll have the ability to have
you start, like, reading
from the text. Right? And then you work
on, like, the fluidity of it. You can
learn, like,
kinda
meanings of words and have conversations and these
kinds of things. Do you know? Yeah. Hey.
I have a suggestion. Sure.
So when I
so when I first started learning the alphabet,
I got a, a whiteboard at home, and
I just learned it over and over again.
And it also helps with learning the
the kind of narration that we were talking
about. Just writing it over and over activities
and, like, erase it.
It helps with the English as well. I
I started off in a notebook and I
realized how annoying that was to, like, use
all those pages. I just got a whiteboard.
Yeah. And that's how, like, people actually study
Quran in some parts of the world. If
you go to Mauritania,
they're really big on memorization.
That isn't just about memorizing the words, but
memorizing it to the extent that you can
actually write it too. And they write on
clay tablets, and as they learn the lesson,
they write it out and then they just
erase the clay and write on the same
tablet again. Do you know?
So
I'm not saying this as in problematic way,
but since nobody did what they were supposed
to do,
then let's do that from this week to
next week. Those first four letters that we
looked at. Right? We had alif,
we had ba,
we had da,
and we had the.
And as we learn more letters, you're gonna
see why they connect in the ways that
they connect.
Because essentially
within the letters you'll find the other letters
also. Right? Their shapes and how they're drawn
and why they connect from one end and
not the other
so that there's distinction between them. Right? So
what I'd like you to do is we
went through the beginning, middle, and end of
the letters. Right? So connect them in groups.
In groups of 3. Right? So, you know,
put alif
first, ba and ta. What does that look
like? Right? Mix them up a bit. You
know, ta, alif, ba.
Right? Put the 3 that look similar together
in words. They're nonsense words. Right? Some of
them might be a word. So ba alif
ba
is
bab, and it means door, for example. Right?
But, like, most of the words are not
gonna mean anything. Do you know? Just so
you're getting a familiarity
with it. And then open the Quran,
the Arabic. You could do it on the
computer.
You could, like, do it in the actual,
the actual text,
but just
look for the letters
in Surah Fatiha.
Right? So you can start identifying them. You
know? You don't have to do anything. You
don't have to highlight it, circle it, but
just look. Right? Like, Alhamdulillah,
there are a lot of alifs in that.
Right?
It has the ba in it. Do you
see? Does that make sense? Right?
Malik
has alif in it. You know? And you
can start noticing them in the text,
so it'll start helping to kinda
bridge some of that gap. Right?
Okay. So we'll see everyone next
Wednesday.
Thank you.