Khalid Latif – Perfecting Your Prayer Essentials of Salah (Hanafi) #09
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AI: Transcript ©
So today,
we're gonna go through a couple of the
things in more detail that we talked about
last week. If you remember,
we're discussed, like, a few weeks ago what
are the obligatory
part
of a prayer.
Right? The whole idea is that once somebody
becomes Muslim,
the 5 daily prayers become obligatory upon them.
And whether you were born into Islam or,
you're and you're just kinda rebuilding
a relationship with your faith or you're exploring
Islam as a religion,
or you're a recent convert or you converted
a while ago,
but you haven't built a kinda sound relationship
with the prayer. You're just starting to get
into it.
The obligatory
parts
in the legal school of thought that we're
looking at the Hadafi school are just what's
written here. Right? And
you have, like, very little Arabic that you
would have to do at a minimum.
But the idea is that as you're going
through this, you start to go also and
learn the other components of the prayer,
and this isn't the whole list exhausted. You
can come in. Yeah. I like it sound.
Or you or you don't have to. Oh,
okay. Yeah. Change your mind. It's fine. Yeah.
So the second layer of it are what
are necessary acts. And for the first, like,
month of this session early in the summer,
we did a really deep dive into the
first chapter of the Quran,
Surah Fatiha,
that isn't an obligatory part of the prayer,
but a necessary part.
And we talked about its meaning and what
goes into it. And today, we're gonna look
at what's called the Tashahud.
This is the second half of a list
of necessary acts.
We're gonna look at the Tashahud
which is a necessary act in each sitting
of the prayer that you want to start
to also memorize and build a relationship with.
But we aren't gonna do, like, similar to
what we did with the first chapter, Fataha.
It's not just like about the translation because
a lot of language
is not language that we utilize so much
day to day as much as it's about
learning the meaning of it. Do you know
what I mean?
And it becomes a challenge in building quality
and focus in a prayer
when even
if the Arabic is not something we're familiar
with or the translation
is just words that we've verbally memorized, but
we're not connecting to the meaning of it.
So we wanna get into the nuance
and the meaning of the word.
So,
we're gonna look at the today,
and kinda go through each word
1 by 1. And so this is what
you're reciting as a necessary component.
Right? As you're learning the prayer,
in the course of the prayer, you're gonna
do these obligatory
things, but you want to add elements to
it, right? So people should have started to
learn the first chapter. If you kind of
joined at a later time, you could find
it on our podcast, on our YouTube channel,
those sessions that you missed. I'm also happy
to sit with people 1 on 1,
if you missed those sessions. But we went
into it pretty detailed,
so that you could kinda resonate with the
meaning a little bit more. And when I
do the same thing here in terms of
this part that's considered a necessary part. So
this is in every sitting
of the prayer.
Right? In your prayer,
it's a 2 cycle, 3 cycle, or 4
cycle prayer.
And if it's a 2 cycle prayer, you
have one sitting in it. The sitting is
not like you're sitting in a chair to
where you all are, but the sitting is,
you know, I have a standing position,
then there's a bowing position,
prostrating position,
and then you're in a sitting position that's
essentially like kneeling.
And in the course of the sitting,
when you stay seated, you're not just
coming up and then going down between prostrations,
but you're actually sitting in this kneeling position
in the second cycle of a 2 cycle
prayer,
or the second
and third cycles of a 2 or 3
cycle prayer, or the second and fourth cycles
of a 2 or 4 cycle prayer. Does
that make
sense? Right? And you don't have to kind
of stay with all those because we haven't
talked about those so much in detail. But
when you're in this position,
this is what you're gonna be reciting
in that part of the prayer. It's called
the,
and
you can hear, like, it's got similar sounding
letters to Shahada, for example. Right? Which is
what somebody does when they convert to Islam.
They're saying the Shahada, the
bare testimony of faith. Right? That's what makes
somebody Muslim.
Does anybody already know this, like, memorize it
already?
Yeah? Great.
So,
it's good to even just have a revision
to kinda understand what the words mean,
and we're gonna break it down. I thought
it'd be a little bit easier than me
writing in my chicken scratch handwriting
that a few of you have told me
that you can't read what I write on
the board, that we'll use a little bit
clearer
of
text.
This is
the English Arabic.
This is the Arabic, the English translation, and
at the top is a transliteration.
And so we'll do it piece by piece.
This first
word, is
Arabic is read from right to left. So
you're gonna look at the transliteration
left to right,
but just breaking it down word by word.
So the first word says, Atahayatub.
That word in Arabic,
it has a root
for what
means life in Arabic.
Right? This will get translated as greetings.
And so what happens if anybody does anybody
speak Arabic in the room or know anybody
that's an Arab that talks to you in
Arabic?
Yeah. So some of the ways, like, Arabs
greet each other they'll say, Hayakkola.
Right?
The word Haya means life. Right? So, you
know, may God give you life. Right? Hayakamullah.
You gotta give all of you life. Right?
And we talked about this in a previous
class with the way language is built, words
are built in Arabic
are through shared root letters. The majority of
words have trilateral roots like Islam,
Muslim, Salam,
all has the roots, salama.
You can see a kind of thread there.
The words that are derived from it.
Some words have, like, two letter roots, some
have 4, severity.
So this word,
is the plural
of the word for greetings.
And one of the ways that people used
to greet each other back in the day,
they'd say, Hayakamullah
or even today. Right? They say Hayakamullah.
Right? Like, may God give you life.
So what's happening here
is that this is getting paired now with
God, with Allah. So it says, this thing
of greetings
is for Allah.
And it's an interesting
kinda construct
because you're essentially
greeting
Allah
in this way.
And one would ask the question, well, what
does this mean, like, to greet the divine?
Like, what is one really doing here? There's
a couple of different ways that this is
understood.
There is
an individual who tries to figure this out.
What does it mean to greet the divine?
He goes to somebody
and asks the question, like, what does it
mean to greet the divine? And this person
says, this is a word for, like, barakah,
blessing.
And then that person says to them, well,
like, what does barakah mean then? Right? And
the person says, this is all I know,
right? Like, I don't know anything, don't go
talk to somebody else. And so he goes
and speaks to one of the more senior
students of Abu Hanifa,
whose school of thought we're looking at here,
the Hanafi school of thought. This is like
the rulings that we're taking for the prayer
from that school.
And this person's name is Mohammed Shaibani, and
he says to this individual, like, what does
this mean in terms of, like, greetings, etcetera,
and gets an answer also, but not one
that really gives so much insight. And then
he goes and speaks to another person,
that is
the namesake and founder of another, like, school
of thoughts in Sunni Islam,
that's the Shafi school.
And when he asked Imam Shafi'i,
who is not just somebody who knows, like,
Islamic law and theology
and, you know, Arabic grammar, etcetera, but also
is known to be a poet.
And
the individual asked Imam Shafi,
like, you know, I went and talked to
these other people,
and they didn't really, like, give me too
much of a detailed answer as to why
one would be
giving greetings to the divine.
Right?
And Imam Shafi says, well, you should be
asking me, like, I'm a poet. You know?
He can give you a different kind of
vantage point and framework on it.
And he says, this greeting
is essentially
not like a greeting the way you would
say hello to someone, but you want to
think about it in terms of the essence
of what you're doing in this prayer.
And you're giving a sense of greeting
that is the kind of, like,
greeting that you would give to someone if
you walked into a court of a king.
Right? Atahiyat
is invoking an idea
of
that level of magnitude of greeting. You know,
when you walk into a space and you
have a notion of who it is that
you're greeting with that level of authority.
Right? So these are kinda,
sense of greetings that understand the majesty of
the divine.
You know? That you're beginning in this place
and saying that that's the mode of
engagement
that I am giving this greeting of. Does
that make sense?
When a lot of people pronounce this word,
they just ally
all of the letters together. Right? So they
say, like,
but you can't read the Arabic.
I don't know why I'm pointing to it
because a lot of you can't. But see
this little w looking thing in Arabic, it's
called the Shadda.
Right? The word for, like, severe in Arabic
is shaddid.
So when you have this,
it's essentially connecting to the letter before it
and it also has its own syllable,
right? So it's not adahiyat,
it's adahiyat,
Right? You're
saying not
Do you hear the difference? Right? It's
alighted in and then it has it also.
So that's why in the English here, it
says,
but the
is gonna end with that
and the next syllable is he.
Does it make sense?
Yeah.
And it's connecting it now,
So
that these greetings in particular are for Allah.
They're for the divine.
Right? In Arabic,
there's different
perspectives on, like, this word Allah.
Most people would say this is like the
proper name of God in Islam,
and there's no breakdown of it. Some would
say it's just an elision of
the,
definitive article al which is the and then
ila like the God Allah. Right? But it's
now in this, like, place where these unique
kind of majestic greetings,
the way that you would engage
in this kind of scope,
this is a unique,
like, way
of kind of centering somebody
in understanding
I'm speaking to the divine. Does that make
sense?
Another thing you can derive from this
is, you know, when you walk into a
place, if you have good etiquette, you're gonna
greet people. Right? Whether you know them or
not. My kids
are 7 and 10 since they were really
little. I've said to them, you walk onto
a bus, you say hello to the bus
driver. Right? You say thank you when you're
getting off of the bus. And it makes
a big difference, right? We got stuck in
this downpour of rain,
some time ago and we were trying to
walk on Third Avenue back to our apartment
and an entire bus stopped for us in
the middle of the street.
And my son, my daughter looking at me
and the bus driver is like, get on
the bus.
And it's a bus driver who was not
stopping at a bus stop, had no reason
to stop, and also was going against like
MTA policy just stopping in the middle of
the street. But somebody we say hello to
every day.
And he saw us because likely we see
him.
Do you understand?
But God doesn't need for you to see
God
in that sense.
Right?
Like, the extension of a greeting there
is not in that
mode of interaction. There's no anthropomorphizing
of God in Islam.
So what this is also
alluding to
is a sense of just etiquette
at the end of it.
You don't just do things when you have
to do them, but you do them with
a sense of mindfulness of, like, what is
good character?
What is what we call, like, good adab
in,
Arabic?
Like, good etiquette.
Do you get what I mean?
So the notion isn't like, well, you don't
have to greet God because what does that
even mean?
But the
understanding is back to the one who is
doing it. You wanna, like, have good etiquette
in every space that you can have etiquette.
And you treat people, like,
in a way based off of who you
are, not who they are. Does that make
sense?
So if a 100 people pass the security
guard downstairs and don't say anything,
you, when you're leaving, you say thank you.
Right? And you extend a farewell.
Right? You see people who nobody's asking them
in the restaurant how their day is going.
You walk into places and there's one person
sitting, it makes no sense. I used to
own a restaurant down the street. I own
a butchery up the street, you know, and
I walk into some of these businesses in
Manhattan and there's one person working behind
a counter, how's that person go to the
bathroom?
When does that person get to go and
eat?
Right? They're not notions that kind of pop
in when we are in a consumer driven
society
that centers the self egocentrically
and is not necessarily aware of others in
terms of where they're at. Do you do
you get what I'm saying? So here
too has a foundational
principle in Islam that isn't a religion just
about do's and don'ts and ritual,
but a lot of it is about ethical
conduct and good character.
Does that make sense?
That all
the greetings. It's definitive. Right? It's not just
saying a greeting, but it's saying the greetings.
And we're gonna talk about the whole sentence
in 3 minutes,
but that's what that first word means. Right?
That
the greetings
are for God. Right? Like these majestic
kinda
royal kinda greeting are for God.
This is the plural of the word salah,
which we talked about some weeks ago. These
are, like, your prayers that you do. It's
5 daily prayers.
What about
as well as all things that are good
and pure.
Right?
Anything that has, like, goodness to it.
There's different
kind of perspectives
on what these three words mean altogether.
So some people will say the word,
right, in the beginning,
atahiyatu
is referring to all forms of worship
that are relevant to, like,
verbalized
worship.
If you engage in litanies,
you engage in recitation of the Quran,
you engage in anything that is expressed or
spoken.
Those are things that are all for the
divine.
The salawat
is referring to all forms of worship
that have a physicality
to it. Like your daily prayers,
you're standing, you're bowing, you're kneeling, you're prostrating.
The are
in reference to
forms of worship
that have some element
of financial
kind of mechanism to it. Right? Your charity,
etcetera. These kinds of things. But it's rooted
in this sense that
all of these things are only for God.
These things
are only for the divine.
Does that make sense?
If you break it down more, it's also
giving an indication
that
anything
that has goodness to it in general,
anything
that has some type of beneficial purpose,
I'm reaffirming
this idea
in this statement
that I don't worship anything else.
I am a worshiper of the divine. I'm
not a worshiper of the world. I'm not
a worshiper of my physical beauty. I'm not
a worshiper of wealth.
But this
entity,
God,
is the one that
is the only
entity worthy of these things from me.
And I'm making that affirmation
through
this
invocation
in these words.
In the prophetic tradition, when the prophet Muhammad,
peace be upon him, is teaching people this,
there's a man who's a companion of the
prophet. His name is Abdullah ibn Masood.
And what he does is he turns to
this man, Abdullah ibn Masood, when he's teaching
him. He takes Abdullah ibn Masood's hand, and
he holds his hand in his hand like
this. And he teaches him these words. It's
a very intimate exchange. Right? You wanna contextualize
it in the nature of the words that
are being spoken. It's not somebody with a
PowerPoint
in this bright light, kind of his lecturing,
but with a sense of gentleness and compassion.
It's going from a heart to a heart
that becomes the seat of how you connect
to the divine.
Abdullah ibn Nis'ood,
when he takes it from the prophet like
this, he says
he then goes and teaches one of his
students later in the same way and holds
the person's hand, one hand between his hand.
That person says, I teach somebody else like
it in this way too. Right? Does it
make sense? So the entire
pedagogy
is rooted now and also
demonstrating
a proximity
and intimacy
that isn't about distancing
but in this sense that you
have this unique
kind of
beautiful relationship
with God
individually.
In Islam, it's a very pure monotheism.
There's nothing between you and the divine.
You have no mediator.
No one is going to, like, sanctify
your prayer. Your prayer is as valuable as
the person next to you.
And so in that mode of an exchange,
it's creating now a different
opportunity for intimacy with the words.
There's not just being thrown, but being taught
in a way that you're literally taking someone
by the hand and saying, this is what
you're gonna say at this time. Right? Think
about has anybody ever given you advice in
this way or spoken to you in this
way or shared something with you in this
way. You know? When I take my kids
and I bring them close to me, I
put my arm around them, I'll hold them
close, and I'll say things to them that
are quite meaningful.
Right? My wife and I, when everyone's asleep
and we're just talking about whatever it is,
there's a difference. If, like, she's sitting on
that side of the room and I'm sitting
over here. Right? Or if I'm seated and
she's standing up, one of us is about
to get yelled at, and it's me. Right?
But when you're sitting now in close proximity
with somebody and you can be in that
way and you are looking at them face
to face, and you're saying, hey, in your
prayer, like, this is what you're gonna say
at this point.
It's giving you an insight into what the
nature of these words are. You're not about
to connect to a God that is distant
from you, but you're gonna connect to a
god that is closer to you than your
own jugular vein is what our tradition says.
A god that is not just watching you,
but watching over you. A God that loves
you more than a mother loves his child.
A God that identifies himself from the very
beginning to you as a nurturing God. A
God that is caring for you, a God
that is providing for you, the most merciful
of those who show mercy,
that's who you are greeting here.
Makes sense?
That's in that first sentence.
Right? This is what you're saying.
These beautiful greetings are for God
as our our prayers,
as are all things that are good and
pure.
Then as he moves on in it,
Assalamu
alaikum. Assalam is
the word for peace,
but it's got all kinds of elements of
comfort, security,
sanctity
rooted in it. You probably heard, like, Muslim
people,
Greek people in this way.
The response.
And in this is embedded also a principle,
it's not necessarily taken only from this, but
if somebody teaches you how to greet somebody
as we are taught to greet, this is
an actual prayer you're making for someone. So
when you say, Assalamu alaikum,
you're saying, peace be upon you. And the
notion is that you want to respond
with what is equivalent or better. So the
response would be, Wa Alaikum
Right? Or,
And if someone says to you,
they're saying, may the peace,
may peace be upon you and
the rahma of Allah, which we'll talk about
in a minute, And you could respond,
or you can add another layer to it.
Right? If you guys
like to watch comedians, there's a Muslim comedian
by the name of Mo Amer. He's a
really funny guy. And
he I've known him for a while. He's
also really great. He's got, like, a bit
in one of his shows where he talks
about how Arabic is a language
is so much different from English. Probably not
appropriate, like, segment because then he talks about,
like, bad words in English versus in Arabic.
So don't let's pretend like I'm not telling
you to listen to that part. But, you
know, when he starts off the the piece
in his show,
he starts to talk about how, like, Arabs
when they greet you or Muslims when they
greet you, they'll say, you know, may the
peace of the divine be upon you. And
the person will respond, may the peace of
the divine be upon you and his mercy.
And the person will respond, may the peace
of the divine be upon you and his
mercy and his blessing. And he says in
English, they just say to you, like, hi.
Right? And then that's it. You know?
But you're literally making a prayer for the
individual.
Right? And in this context,
this Assalam
is
Alaykah.
The kaf here is in reference to,
the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. So,
may peace be upon you,
means, oh, Nabi.
There's two words in Arabic,
that refer to a messenger of God and
a prophet of God that you'll come across
a lot. 1 is Nabi
and the other is Rasul.
And Nabi
is a prophet, a Rasul, there's a messenger.
The difference between the two
is not always so complex, but it's it's
got, like, a little bit more detailed of
a conversation to it.
But the Arabic here,
Nabi,
is taken from
potentially a couple of different roots. Right? In
Arabic,
if you have the root,
it's denoting, like, really important news.
So not just news, but, like, super important
news.
Right? And the nabi
is the one that's delivering the naba. So
they're giving this really important
news. Does that make sense?
You also have a different root structure
that
denotes something that is elevated and protruding.
So it gives the idea that a prophet
in Islam
is a little bit different from other religious
traditions,
is just an individual who has, like, good
character.
Their sense of ethics, their values is something
that is very pristine.
And the sense of being elevated
isn't that they're necessarily
separate or inaccessible,
but they're people to look up to in
that sense.
So
the
peace be upon you,
oh, prophet.
Oh, and there's a translation right here. Peace
be upon you, oh, prophet.
And the mercy of God. Rahma
is not just mercy. Right? And this is
hard because in the society we live in,
right, it's a very inequitous society, supremacist
society, anti black society.
When you think about mercy, it's quite often
kind of
thought about in relation to to justice.
Right? In that sense. Do you know? And
Sharia isn't a system that is about,
like,
do's and don'ts, rights and wrongs, getting fines,
I cross a red light, I'm gonna get
a ticket. That's not what it is. Rahma
is not mercy in that way because Rahma
has its own element
of love to it. There's an element of
softness to it. There's an element of gentleness
to it, an element of compassion to it,
as well as an element of mercy to
it. And
here
is being said, may all of that be
upon you from God.
And his blessings.
Alright? Baraka
is,
like blessing,
but it's essentially if we were to kinda
give it a definition, it's the ability to
do more with less. Right? Like, you could
do more
with time because there's blessing in your time.
Right? You could do more with the food
that you have. Many people could eat from
1 dish because there's more blessing in it.
It's got also an element of longevity
to it,
and that's what's being said here in the
second part.
And then at the end, it says,
That
may the peace
not be just upon
you, but may the peace be upon, like,
us,
end
upon,
the servants
Allah of Allah, the
ones that are good and righteous.
The
word in Arabic is a plural of the
word.
They can only refer to individuals
who are servants of God.
You have another plural in Arabic of the
word ab that is abid
that can just refer to servants in general,
but
Ibad is only used in reference to servants
of God in a plural sense.
You're an Abd. Right like we have the
word Abdullah Abdul Rahman
like these are names you know Kareem Abdul
Jabbar
right like the servant of God but in
its base definition
someone is an Abd
because it relies
on something for its existence.
So So when we talked about the first
chapter Surah Fatiha, we talked about this a
lot because there's a verse that says like
the Lord of the worlds,
and God is uniquely because
he is self sufficient.
And everything
in existence, creation
is obbed because everything relies on something to
exist.
Like, you need oxygen
to be.
Right? You need sleep to replenish yourself.
You need food to nourish yourself. We could
go through a whole list.
In in Islamic
understanding
of the divine theologically,
God is the only
one that is self sufficient,
does not rely on anything for existence.
And this is where there's an essential difference
in the understanding of monotheism in Islam in
comparison to other religious traditions.
And so when you say the word Ibad
of Allah,
it's
giving a notion of, like, many
individuals.
And this is just kind of a customary
thing of the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon
him,
that when something is done in particular for
him,
he always brings everybody else into that blessing
also.
The 2 categories here that are being brought
in is alayna
because when you pray, you're gonna say it
exactly like this. When I pray, I say
it exactly like this.
So
this, Ibad,
Allah is
a very specific
segment.
Someone is salih, they're righteous,
when they have, like, all of their stuff
together.
You know?
The opposite of this is facade,
which is just, like, corruption,
chaos.
Being righteous in Islam isn't that you're like
self righteous,
you know, and you're kinda looking down on
people and condescending. Sending.
But it's about doing the right thing also
at the right time. Like, everything has elements
of appropriateness
to it. Do you know?
These are things that are not just let
me throw words at people, for example. You
know, like, there's a verse in the Quran
that says,
like, say words that are good.
In Arabic, when you
hit a bull's eye with an arrow,
that's something that's.
Right? Like, the arrow hit its target.
So the word to hit its target is
that it's the right word
in the right order at the right time.
You know? And there's some people, you talk
to them, like, what is this dude talking
about? Like, some of you right now, that's
what you're thinking. I understand a word this
man is saying. Right?
That's fine. You know?
But in this sense, that's the arrangement of
this. This thing of this very particular group
of people
that they are related to God in servitude
through this qualification,
that they're doing things in the ways that
they're supposed to get done.
And when you pair
Elena
with that group,
it means that some of us who are
not good people like me are also being
prayed for because we're not in that
category. People who do everything
at the time and the place and the
ways, like, they have, like, their stuff together.
Right? They're not in chaos. Do do you
get what I'm saying? Right?
So
peace be upon
us
as well as people
who they're the ones who are in the
world that they're just putting goodness into the
world.
You know, they're the ones that you know
that even when someone else is there, they're
gonna be doing the right thing always.
They're living with a very God centric worldview.
They're not putting qualifications
on, like, how it is that they do
what's right. They just do what's right. Simply
what's, you know, it's the right thing to
do.
That first part is not a breaking point,
but it's a statement
that
has these three sentences
to it. And you want to memorize that
because it's a necessary act in the prayer,
in the sitting portion of it.
You just learn it word by word. Right?
Take your time with it. And you say
it to yourself a few times
in a day. I don't know what this
website is. Just the first one that popped
up,
but it's got, like, some seemingly
kinda audio file to it, and it's 49
seconds long.
Right? So
in a day,
you could listen to this,
like, 5 times
in less than
5 minutes.
Right? That's all it takes. And as you
listen to it, you just repeat the words,
you know, and you start to build a
relationship with it. But you wanna build it
with a sense of meaning. I'm in this
part of my prayer,
and I'm sending
like majestic greetings to the divine.
And giving an insight that
everything
of my
daily prayers
and all of the things that come from
me that are just categorically
good.
All of that is only for God.
And then embedded in this is
a
prayer for the prophet Muhammad.
And you could see it in
a direct relation to the first part. So
there's greetings for God,
and then there's
greetings
of God to the prophet.
There is,
my prayers
are going
for you God
and God is saying
that the compassion, the mercy, the love, the
gentleness, the kindness of God is going upon
you.
And
the goodness,
the
purity of all of my actions, everything is
for you,
and my blessings are for you is what
God is saying.
And then all of that
is being embodied into.
Well, let's make all of those things for
everybody
as well as people who are good.
Embedded in this also
is an idea
that at every minute of the day,
there's a Muslim person praying somewhere.
It's not meant to be something clever. That's
just how it is. There's 2,000,000,000 of us
in the world. Right? And our prayers are
based off of a cyclical pattern of the
sun.
So the prayer windows are starting
at a different minute pretty much of the
day at every point in time. Yeah. Go
ahead. So
this is
look at your praying,
the is,
longer.
There's other parts to it Yeah. But we're
breaking down the prayer
based off of what's obligatory,
fard, what's necessary, wajib,
and what's sunnah, recommended.
Yeah. So we're going through it piece by
piece,
so that people have a process to learning
it because what most people get from Muslims,
who might not be aware of, like, the
different kind of pedagogy to teach it,
is, like, the final end result only.
Like, in your prayer, here's like a laundry
list of everything you have to do. That
can be very overwhelming for someone who is
new to prayer, new to Islam,
and for us, like, you don't have to
know these things to do it. You don't
have to know why the prayer is prayed
in the way it is in order to
pray, but if you're gonna either be teaching
someone how to pray or you're learning it
for yourself, there's a process that allows for
you to still have a certain ease to
it. Does that make sense? Yeah.
So
one of the things that's also in here
embedded
is a sense of, like, working towards something.
Right?
If pretty much right now, like, there's at
least one person praying this,
they're saying this some place in the world,
likely.
Right? If not, many more.
And, there's gonna be people doing this at
all hours of the day and the night
because of
time zone differences and whatever else. Right? Somebody
in Malaysia is awake while you're asleep.
Somebody, while you're sleeping, is praying in the
same time zone as you.
So
embedded in this just like in the first
part is an idea
of, like, good etiquette.
In this last part, there's also the idea
that
I wanna be in this group of people.
I wanna be in the
Ibadullah his salihin. I wanna be from amongst
those who are considered the righteous servants of
God.
So that when all those people are praying
for the good people, like, they're praying for
me too.
Do you know what I'm saying?
And it creates now a momentum
that says, when I live my days
and I'm making decisions and making choices
and people who don't even know my name
are making
a prayer
5 times a day
in
those prayers
multiple times in some of the prayers,
every single person who's doing this for their
every time they pray, they're praying for,
like, potentially
me
if I embody the characteristics
of those who
are considered to be righteous. Do you get
what I mean?
And so
the person who is salikh,
the person
who
is here, the
the person who is righteous,
as you're starting to narrow down, like, what
are those things? Right? And you can read
from the standpoint of Islamic ethics because it's
not a religion
that is just about ritual, but it doesn't
divorce, it puts together religion, spirituality,
ethics.
All of those things make Islam
and you just ponder and reflect upon this
as well.
That if I'm trying to
create a definition
for me that isn't just about
people who do x, y, or z, because
a person from a Muslim standpoint who's righteous
is not somebody who's only praying and only
fasting and doing this. A lot of this
is about how you treat people.
A lot of it is how you use,
like, the spiritual gifts that were given to
you by the divine in the ways that
he intends for it. Right? Gratitude, appreciation, these
kinds of things, but you can also understand
what something is by knowing what it's not.
So could somebody say, regardless of their faith,
that
lying is a good thing to do,
That being deceitful is a good thing to
do.
That breaking a promise is a good thing
to do. That gossiping is a good thing
to do. Could somebody say,
I potentially. I can't definitively say it, but
I want to as I say these words
in every prayer, I'm also mindful and aware
of the meaning of it that if I'm
saying them, somebody else is saying them, and
I wanna be in that group that somebody's
praying for. So how can I be in
that group if I'm racist?
Do do you get what I mean?
How can I be in that group
if I look down at people because they
come from a certain social class or a
certain country of origin or they have an
accent when they talk or any of these
things? Do you get what I mean?
So just like part number 1
is giving us a sense of etiquette,
this last part is also giving you something
aspirational
that says, hey,
I want to be in that group
that theoretically,
millions of people
at any given moment of the day are
praying for people in that group of individuals.
So make sure, like, your neighbor
has food and they're not hungry.
Right?
Ask people
how they're doing, and don't pretend like you
don't you're just asking, but you really don't
care. Like, actually care. Do you know what
I mean? Right?
Yeah. But how how would you say about,
like, if you are very, very sick, you
can't even go up in a bed with
a bed, and you have the left Isha
left to say.
You pray within your means. So if you
can't get up to pray, right, you do
the physical motions that you're capable of. If
you can't even do that, like my father,
you know, I've said this to people in
the class before. He had a bad stroke
6 years ago. He's paralyzed on the right
side of his body, he can't speak,
and he prays without making the physical movements
and motions.
He can't make will do regularly,
so he does something that we haven't talked
about in this class yet. Probably talk about
at some point in the fall is called
Tayemum,
where you use, like, dust
to kind of go through the motions, etcetera.
But it's very individualized.
There's 5 daily prayers, and you pray your
your daily prayers.
But where you have physical limitations, you do
things in their capacity
as best as you can. And so here,
that's like what we have going on. So
when you're in this sitting position,
it's really easy, especially it might not seem
like it because languages are different. Right? But
it's easy once you memorize things
to stop thinking about the meaning of things.
Right? To not necessarily be so kind of
ingrained in what is it that I'm actually
saying
when I'm saying these words.
Right? And so this is what you're doing
in the sitting position.
These are not just greetings.
Right? But I am
extending with a sense of etiquette,
a set of majestic
salutations
towards the divine
and understanding and affirming for myself that everything
that I am doing, I'm only a worshiper
of God, like, not anything else.
Does it make sense?
Yes. And extends through it. So now when
we get to the latter part of it,
we're not gonna talk today about kinda
positions and postures
that are happening because you might see some
people. Right? Like, my kids are little,
not so much anymore, masha'Allah. My son is
7, my daughter is 10.
But like, they're not like, you know, but
they're still like not 2 years old. But
when they're 3 or 4, 5 years old,
and they come and sit next to me
while we're praying. You'll see Muslim people when
they're doing this
on their right hand that is on their
right knee, they'll do some variation of movement
with
their,
finger. Right? We're not gonna talk about that
today, but it's attached to this. You know?
My kids, they don't know what's going on.
So at one point, my kids had, like,
their hands up like this. And I was
like, what are you doing, man? You know,
and they they and then my kids are
cute. Right? I like them. But my son,
he's like going like this. Right? I don't
even know what he's doing.
And I was like, hey man, like what?
What? Because,
you know, especially when he was really little,
Kareem, we'd be praying
and he can't sit still, so he's like
shaking all around.
Sometimes he's like slapping my butt. There's times
when like I'm prostrated
and he, like, literally leans over and kisses
me on my cheek. Right? Super cute. But,
like, bro, I'm trying to pray to God
right now. Like, the whole point is to
not be distracted by things.
And so he's sitting next to me. He's
going like this. Right? And even his sister
has got, like, all kinds of, like, family.
What are you all doing? Right? And they're,
like, well, we saw you put up 1,
and I was, like, okay. And we they
were, like, we thought it's better if we
put up more than 1. Right? And I
was like, I guess that makes sense, but
also that's not how it works. Right? And
so what people are doing when they're putting
their finger up, like, we'll talk about that
in a little, like, in the next class,
but that's as as part of this. And
there's different ways that people do that. They're
all acceptable.
Right? They all have a basis to them.
Some of it looks different because of understandings
of language,
Not because
there's different basis, like different kind of text,
but what the text means and how they're
interpreting, like, the wording of the text is
a little bit different. Right?
Here now in the latter part,
which is from here,
Muhammad and Abu Rasoolu.
I bear witness that there is none worthy
of worship but Allah, and I bear witness
that Muhammad is his slave and his messenger.
So the word,
it
is
a a verb that means I bear witness.
Right? And that witnessing is something that you're
doing in your entirety,
but it's got an element also that's attached
to vision. Like in Arabic,
if I said, I'm watching TV,
I'll say, Ushahed
Dalfaz.
Right? It's got the same kind of I'm
seeing the TV. So you're bearing witness
with that kind of vision
invoked. Right? So I am bearing witness to
this
that this la means no in Arabic. Sorry.
I keep to point to the Arabic.
This
la means no. That's how you, like,
negate something. Right? Or you say no if
someone asks you,
hal, etcetera, etcetera, you can say nam, yes,
or la, no.
But in this context,
this is like a really powerful
no.
It's saying, like, there's nothing.
Complete negation.
Whatever is gonna come after it, it's saying
that none of that is there.
Does that make sense?
So I am
testifying. I'm witnessing
that there is
that there is no god.
There's nothing
that one
worships.
It's complete negation
in that la.
I testify
that there
is nothing
that exists
that is worthy of worship.
And then it puts in the
so
except.
And the exception
now creates
the
extreme opposite
that you have absolute negation
that bridges into
absolute
affirmation.
So there's nothing
in this room
that
I,
you know,
enjoy,
except
and then that one thing is that much
more defined.
Right?
I could say,
I like,
you know,
a red marker.
Versus if I say, I don't like any
markers
except a red marker.
Like, do you see how the language is
different? You know?
And then I say,
I bear witness
that I don't like any markers
except the red marker.
It's denoting, like, a certain level
of kinda emphasis.
Except Allah
and I bear witness
that Muhammad
that Muhammad,
Abdulhu is his servant, or Rasuluhu
and his messenger.
So some of the things that are happening
in the language here,
In the first part, you have
instead of you have an.
Ashhadu
an la.
And here you have
Muhammadan.
The an versus ana,
like ana and ana means the same thing,
but the ana is denoting more of an
emphasis.
And why there's more of an emphasis
in the second part than the first
is the language is a little bit different
already. You already have an emphasis from ashadu
and the an and then this complete negation
and the complete affirmation.
And the
Anna is in a place where it doesn't
have those other elements that are there.
Mohammed
is the name of the prophet,
peace be upon him, and it means the
praised one in Arabic.
And there's a lot of different ways that
people will utilize,
like,
just even the naming of the prophet is
an indication
of kinda certain things. There's more people named
Mohammed in the world than anything. There's all
kinds of prayers we'll talk about going forward,
like what you say after this in the
sitting that includes a specific prayer for the
prophet Muhammad and his family, the prophet Abraham
and his family.
But there's a constant sense of kinda elevation.
And so
that
name means the one who is praised.
Abu
Hu is his servant
and his messenger
is also giving people a reminder
that
Muhammad is the praise one. We testify
to his being a messenger,
but he's also still
an Abduv God.
He is an,
and
we have
the Ibad,
like the plural of.
So you're a human
and your prophet is a human.
Your prophet is not deified in Islam.
The only thing that is worthy of worship
in Islam is God.
That's what's being said again and again and
again
in this
prayer.
I'm affirming
that
I bear witness that he's a messenger of
God,
but he's still also a servant of God.
Does that make sense?
And it becomes a point of
distinction
in comparison to other religious traditions.
There's a chapter in the Quran, it's called
Al Anam,
it has a verse that it says very
explicitly,
you don't mock people's religious beliefs.
Right? Where there's differences in people's perspectives etcetera.
As a Muslim,
you're taught
that
there's no
reason
you don't denigrate anybody's beliefs. You don't ridicule
them for what they believe in. That's not
something that Islam teaches you to do. It's
in the Quran.
And one of the reasons that it says
it is because you're gonna go mock somebody's
belief in God, then
they're gonna just mock yours. Like, don't get
upset, somebody, you mistreat them. Why wouldn't they
mistreat you?
But here is something that is being said
in every single prayer that I only worship
God. Allah is the only thing worthy of
my worship,
and that Mohammed is God's messenger and his
servant. Does that make sense? You're gonna say
something? No. No. No. I'm saying that. Yeah?
Yeah. I was just saying, yeah, you're right.
Oh, I'm glad. Yeah. That makes sense. You're
gonna say something? No. No. No. I'm saying
that. Yeah? Yeah.
I was just saying, yeah, you're right. Oh,
I'm glad. Yeah.
That works out well because it's been bad
for the other way.
And so we're saying this as a necessary
act in every prayer,
in the sitting position, the posture where you're
on your knees,
and this is called the teshahood. Does anybody
have any questions on this?
Can everyone follow along with what I was
talking about?
Yeah. So what you wanna do, the same
way we did with the first chapter of
the Quran, and we broke down every word
and what its meaning was a little bit
more deliberately.
A lot of these words are the same,
and many of these words, like, the meanings
of them we've talked about before so we
don't have to kinda elongate the conversation too
much.
But we want
to memorize this,
and start to practice it. So all you
gotta do is, like,
once a day, just sit down. In the
morning,
say, like,
the first part to it, the first few
words,
and say it, like, 5 times, 10 times
before you go to bed. Right? Once you'll
get into the habit of it, you'll see
when you're walking on the street, you'll be
saying it to yourself,
repeating things, you know,
and trying it at your best. It has
to be said in the prayer in the
Arabic.
There's some, like,
exceptions made in the broader sense of things,
in certain parts of prayers. But fundamentally,
like, if we're following this rubric,
there's not a lot of Arabic you are
required
as an obligation to say. Right? In this
part of
the
the obligations that we still have written here,
like you're only required
as an obligation
to say any short verse of the Quran,
which we said the shortest verse of the
Quran
in it was and
then he looked. Right? You could that could
be the only thing you say in Arabic
in the entirety of the prayer. You know?
And it meets the
obligations.
The necessary components
are different from that. Those are things we're
working on right now. Right? So you wanna
start to work on what we were just
talking about which is this, that the teshahood
which is done in each sitting of the
prayer,
and start to memorize that part to it
also.
Yeah. Yeah.
When you're praying with other people, is it
more important to, like, be alone in terms
of the movements and positions or, like, saying
everything?
When you're praying with other people,
meaning someone's, like, leading the prayer,
then you wanna follow the person leading the
prayer
and,
move at the pace that they're moving in.
Right? So in the Hanafi school, which is
what we're studying,
the person leading the prayer, essentially, their prayer
is, like, kind of
what is qualitatively,
like,
literally leading everybody else in prayer. You know?
And you're you're following them in that sense
of of the word. If you're gonna lead
people in prayer, right, in a community like
ours, you know, I had this conversation,
with somebody
which was very eye opening to me. Right?
Somebody's learning their prayer, and it happened, like,
years ago also
and reminded me of it where there's a
young woman who is in our community. She's
new to Islam, her prayer, and we all
prayed.
And she came up to me afterwards, and
she was, like, in tears.
And I said, what's going on? She was
like, I just can't keep up with everybody.
You know?
It's an important thing to know. Right? Like,
in the prophetic tradition,
the prophet Muhammad would keep his prayer short
sometimes
when he would hear a baby crying because
he didn't want the mother to be distressed.
You know? Or there's elders in it.
But you also, like, recognize who is part
of your congregation and community, and somebody is,
like, new to prayer in and of itself
and trying to get the whole thing done,
then, you know, it might be a reason
to kinda do it a little slower, you
know, than kind of faster. Does that make
sense? Yeah. So when you're following somebody in
prayer, your prayer is gonna count. You're following
them in the movements of the prayer. You
know? So you just kinda go at it
at at the pace. And as you do
it, you'll get more accustomed to it. Yeah.
Okay. So
what we wanna do
is do people have,
those whiteboards that Kiara got for us? If
you don't have a whiteboard with you, there's
still some up here.
If you don't wanna use a whiteboard, you
don't have to. But we'll go through
some of the letters again
and kinda review some of what we did
before. Yeah.
You can come and sneak up. Don't worry.
Yeah. That's we might have,
done this before, but what's the different, I
guess, some nuance in the repository and necessary?
Something is deemed obligatory
if it has
text that is definitive,
and the meaning of the text is definitive
also.
And where the necessary is interjected in the
Hanafi school,
as well as, like, on the other realm
on the other end of the spectrum, there's,
like, strictly prohibited
haram, and then they have disliked what's called,
but they break it into 2 categories.
A it's got like the word haram in
it, so closer to haram, and a which
is a little less disliked,
is where text can have potentially
more probabilistic
meaning to it.
And within that,
they're very hesitant
in saying something is,
like, definitively
obligatory
or definitively
impermissible
unless it's very clear that that's what it
is. Right? Because their attempts are not to
be done to
kinda elevate oneself. They're trying to do what
they believe is what God wants them to
do. You know? So, you know, we are
making a claim that this is what God
is saying is obligatory. So So when you're
reading the Quran, it says don't eat pork.
There's not really any ways around that. Right?
Because it just says don't eat pork. Do
you know?
The mandate of, like, 5 daily prayers, these
kinds of things. But then when you look
at some of the narrations on it,
nobody disputes that there's 5 daily prayers, but
there's different opinions on what are the start
and end times of those windows potentially.
You know? Does that make sense? Yep. Yeah.
And so,
I studied the Hanafi School of fic, but
also just from the standpoint of, like, a
class for new Muslims and converts and these
kinds of things.
You know, the mode in which prayer is
broken down,
also creates, like, a little bit of a
ease to it,
so that one doesn't have to be super
overwhelmed or feel like I need to know
everything,
you know, from day 1,
because it's not even possible. You know what
I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead.
From my understanding,
the is,
also it was at at one point in
time, a conversation between Allah and the prophet
in the 77th?
Yeah. There's some people who say that that
there's this journey that's called the Israan Miraj.
The prophet goes from his home to Jerusalem
and then is taken to the heavens.
What most people say is that when you
kinda look into text
to see where there are chains of transmission,
like, associated with some of these reports,
that it's a little bit hard to find
those things. So they don't know, like, what
it's based in, like, fully. And the
that we just went through in the hadith
literature,
you'll find,
5 different versions of it. And in some
of the different schools of thought, just the
content of it. Right? Each of them is
valid,
and different schools will sometimes,
like,
emphasize one over the other based off of
the methodology that they use.
So for example, there's one that instead of
it saying,
It'll say
Muhammad
Right? And it's valid. There's another that you
know, this one said,
There's one that
says
Right? So
the is at the end,
and it puts all of these other terms
in the beginning and adds in,
and there's no wa in between. So it's
not saying, like,
the greetings are for God and prayers and
all things good, but it's saying greetings,
like, you know,
blessings,
prayer,
and,
good things
are for Allah. Right? And you think about
this in a sentence.
Right? If I said to you,
I have markers
and the microphone
and the table. Right? And it's giving a
delineation of a list. But if I said
to you,
I have
I don't know.
What's something that can be, like,
2 separate words, but also combined into, like,
one apparatus?
Does that make
sense?
Do you get what I mean?
Yeah. You do get what I mean? What
what do I mean?
Like, mac and cheese?
Mac and cheese. Yeah. If I have macaroni
no. Because it has the word and in
it. Right? So it's gotta not have the
word and in it. You know?
Chalkboard.
Like chalkboard.
Yeah. If I have chalk and I have
a board amazing. Thank you. If I have
chalk and I have a board, I can
say, I have chalk
and a board.
But if I say, I have chalkboard.
Right? You see the difference in the kinda
The semantics are not just semantics. Do you
know it's denoting something else?
Right? Or like in the version we looked
at
that says,
that it's saying, like, these greetings are for
God and prayers and this. Right? So if
I say,
I like mac and cheese
and also,
like,
you know,
candy
and donuts.
Right?
The more the emphasis is coming on the
first part of it that I've defined it.
But if I say,
like,
you know, so here, it says greetings are
for God
and prayers and things that are good. But
in this other version, it says,
you know,
the greetings
and the blessings. But it says greetings, blessings,
prayers,
pure things are for God.
Right? The language is different. Do do you
see what I mean? Does that make sense?
Right? That's what a lot of people would
do. They'll look at the language and they'll
reflect on it. Like, what is it evoking?
Right? They're all, though, based in various narrations
that are taught in different ways. We just
looked at it in one way. You might
come across people. What you don't wanna have
is like somebody comes to you and you
say to them, like, hey, this is how
I learned it. And they say, this is
how I learned it. And you're like, well,
you're wrong. Right? Which is what happens with
a lot of people. They become very myopic.
Islam as a religion
is not rooted in this kind of set
of just
black and white
that is
somehow
definitively
rigid
that
everybody is gonna do everything exactly the same
way all the time. And that principle is
applicable
in so many other ways. The idea of
being Muslim is to not remove your innate
sense of identity,
but to enhance who you are. Right? Like,
a lot of people when they convert to
Islam
becomes hard because the people that they talk
to are trying to turn them into, like,
an Arab Muslim or a South Asian Muslim.
There's nothing wrong with being that. Right? My
family is South Asian,
but that means I'm not Irish, you know,
but you can be Irish and be Muslim.
You're not converting to
Pakistani like you're converting to Islam. You know?
Right?
Do you know what I mean? So that's,
like, embedded in some of these principles also.
Does does that make sense? Yeah.
So this instance
is something that when people look at the
journey of Isra and Meiraj,
they're deriving it from, like, the conversation that
comes
principally, but as like a kind of
reported narration,
there's not something that exists in text
that many people will find that has, like,
a chain of transmission to it. And that's
where they'll say there's not that's there's like
a,
to qualify it in that way becomes a
little bit. Does that make sense? Yeah.
Okay.
So
after, like, many weeks,
You remember when we talk about Arabic as
a language,
you wanna conceptualize letters in relation to this
like line that exists.
And there's letters that are above a line.
There's letters that are below a line.
There's letters that will kinda be like in
between the line.
Right? And we'll review really quickly,
the four letters that we did last time.
Every letter is gonna have,
like, you know, its original form, and then
it's gonna have
a beginning,
a middle,
and an end
form.
Because the letters are not separate. Right? Like,
the way my name is Khalid.
And in just regular print, like, that's how
it is.
I don't even know if I remember how
to, like, write fully in script. Oh my
god. I just try to think how to
write my name in script, and I
how does it is that
it?
Is that right?
Do you like cursive?
Yeah.
No. It's a name. No. No.
This is my last name, Batim.
Oh.
Oh,
Batim.
Right? The letters all connect to each other.
Do you know what I mean? That's how
Arabic works. The letters
fundamentally, like, they connect to each other. Right?
And so, you're gonna have a beginning form,
a middle form, and an end form,
And in a lot of the letters
are the other letters
from like a script standpoint.
So some letters
will not connect
to the left. It's written right to left
because if you connected them, then they would
look like another letter. Does that make
sense? So, like, in Arabic,
the letter for la is a lam,
and the letter for a is a alif
that looks like this.
So when you collect
lam to the left,
like this
says, Allah. It's a alif, alam, alam, and
a If the alif connected from the left,
it would just look like another Lam.
Right? So it distinguishes the letters. Does that
make sense? You get used to it, but
this is where like as an exercise you
wanna commit to as we learn the letters.
What I ask people to do is open
up a Quran,
and go on a website, and just start
to identify the letters. If you don't wanna
do it with a Quran,
get like just look up anything that's in
Arabic, and just start looking at the letters
and circling the ones that we're going over.
So you start to build a relationship with
them visually,
and you start to also practice, like, writing
them,
because it'll feel amazing as we go through
it when you can actually just start reading
through the Quran very fluidly.
You know?
And altogether, it shouldn't take so long,
and this will be a consistent part of
what we're doing in the class also.
Okay.
So to review really quickly, the first letter
we're gonna look at is called alif.
Right? This is an alif.
And in Arabic, it's very similar to
the letter a in English.
And,
generically,
every
word,
every letter in Arabic,
there's no like letters that are vowels as
such.
Right? You have
vowel markings that we'll talk about,
but what they yield is a pronunciation
that is
essentially in like 3 modes of pronunciation,
an a, an e, or an oh sound.
Right? So every letter is gonna have this
a, e, oh.
And as you're pronouncing it, you want to
over exaggerate
because
you're gonna then be able to be more
accustomed
to pronouncing it
more instinctively the way it's meant to be
if you're just comfortable, like, opening your mouth.
So don't think how ridiculous you sound. Do
you know? Or look. Right? Because you don't
wanna say, like,
right? Because then you're not you're gonna say,
like, ah, right? Like, open your mouth and
say, ah,
so that as you do that expressively,
it's gonna get you to a place that
when you're, like, reading, you're not then swallowing
letters
because you learned them
in this exaggerated
way or emphatic way, and then as it
becomes more instinctive,
you're still
prone to pronouncing the way that it's meant
to be. Does that make sense?
Yeah?
I don't know. People just, like, nod their
heads. Yeah.
Oh.
So Aleph is just a straight line and
it doesn't connect from the left and it's
above this line that we're talking about. Do
you know?
So it doesn't go below the line.
Makes sense so far?
So in the beginning of a word, Alif
is gonna still just be a straight line.
It doesn't connect
from that side.
If it's in the middle, it's going to
connect
and still maintain its entirety of a letter.
And in the end, it's going to also
be the same.
Does that make sense?
You sure?
Yeah. So Oh, it's the placement of the
letter.
These
these are the placement of a letter in
the word.
So if it's the first letter in a
word,
then it's like this. Right? If it's in
the middle of a word or at the
end of a word, like, then it's gonna
be like this. Does that make sense?
Yeah. Or
I mean, beginning, middle, and end are generic,
and we'll talk about it as you see
more words. Right?
But, like, if there's a letter that's not
connecting,
the next letter takes on like its beginning
form.
Does that make sense?
Yeah. No? Great.
Yeah. Go ahead. So when this is being
read,
like, in a word,
it says all the words that we learned
in prayer, I've never heard the sound alef
or the word alef.
So it's a Arabic letter. So it's letter
it's named alif in Arabic.
That's what the letter is called. It's an
alif. It's like how an a is a.
We say a. Or w. There's just a
e w. Yeah. Like w is wa.
Right? Like, z is a z sound.
X is like what sound is x? You
know? Right? Yeah. Right. There you go. Right.
Do you know what I mean? So we
have, like, also like, it's normal to us
because we grow up in a curriculum that
utilizes this. But if you try to explain
the letter x to somebody
who speaks Arabic, like, how what would you
tell them? How does it work?
Why is excitement excitement, but xylophone is xylophone?
Do you know what I mean? Like, how
do those things make sense? So all languages
have kinda their, like, intricacies to them. And
with this, it's its own language. Right? But
it's got an alphabet.
And so
there's a cognate in English.
The alif is similar to, like, the letter
a.
Make sense?
And we'll do this in terms of vowel
markings really quick, and we'll kinda go back
to it. So you have 3
basic
vowel markings.
We use the letter.
If there's a line and a diagonal above
it,
this
is called the Fatha,
and it makes a
sound, like one syllable, ah.
If the line is below it,
it's called the and
it makes a e sound.
And if you have,
this kind of symbol on the top,
that is not like this line or that
line,
That's called the damma.
That makes a sound. In the Quran, they
have these markings,
in, like, printed Arabic.
You won't always find them in Arabic as
a language. They're not always, like, using it.
People just recognize words the way that when
you read a sentence,
you've, like, learned the word. Right? You know
book. You can just see it book, you
know, and it's book. Somebody will know, like,
the word without the vowel markings. In the
Quran, when you open it, it's gonna have
the vowel markings
as a mechanism to help people who who
are not native Arabic speakers, who don't know
the language, these kinds of things to pronounce
it, the way that it's supposed to be
pronounced. So these are like the 3 kinda
base vowel markings,
and we'll add each week, like, other
kinda
punctuation other markings that come in,
so that, you know, you're familiar with them.
But for now, let's do these 3. So
alif
is just gonna look like a straight line,
and and it's if it's the first letter,
it's gonna just be this way. It doesn't
connect from the left.
Does that make sense?
Yeah. And,
you know, you're writing a word.
You're gonna
start from the top and just come down.
Okay.
The next letter, we're gonna go through a
bunch of these today.
Sorry. Can you repeat the the
sound again?
Yeah. So the
is a.
This makes a sound.
This makes a e sound,
and this makes a sound. So with the
letter, it would be a, e, u. Right?
Like, a is like in the sound cat.
Right? E,
you know, u.
Yeah. One syllable.
Okay. The next letter
is a
ba.
This is like
the letter b.
Ba
is gonna look like a little boat
and it's gonna have a dot underneath it.
Ba is much closer to the line. Right?
It's like a shorter
thing.
So you have Alif and Ba.
That's how Ba relates to an Alif. Does
it make sense?
So, ba is gonna always be distinguished
by this dot that's underneath it because there's
a bunch of letters that are gonna look
like this
and they're gonna have a different number of
dots. Similar to these vowel markings,
the original, like, Arabic of the Quran,
it didn't have also these dots underneath it.
So, for example, the word for house in
Arabic is bait.
And if you write it out, it looks
like this. These are 3 different letters.
The ba has 1 dot, the yeah has
2 dots below, and the ta has 2
dots above.
What it would look like back in the
day
is just like that.
But somebody would just know that that's what
the word bait looks like. You know?
So could be much harder. Right?
So
in the beginning,
va is going to keep
the first half of
its shape.
So you're essentially making the boat but keeping
it in half, and what people call this
is like a tooth. So it's got one
tooth.
Right? And then you're putting the dot. That's
how you know it's a bow.
In the middle,
it's going to maintain
also,
it's got its tooth and there's a ba
And at the end,
it's going to retain its entire shape
so it connects and
it's the entirety of the letter.
Makes sense?
Yeah. Everybody good with that?
So the ba is similar to the letter
b.
So if you wanna repeat after me with
those 3 kinda pronunciations,
ba
B. B.
B. Boo.
Right? Simple. Right? Yeah. So you're gonna look
for just the dot below.
That's gonna tell you it's a ba.
Good?
Yeah?
And that will have the same,
punctuation.
The marks are not enough. All every letter
has the same punctuation marks. Yeah.
There's a
and a And then next week, I'll tell
you 3 other pronunciation marks, like, vowel markings
that you'll have. Right? The we'll have, like,
2 of these.
You know? And that's called,
and it just adds,
like, an n at the end of it,
an
and
this is, like, an indefinite
word
versus, like, a
if it doesn't have it, if it's just
one, it's definite. So it's a difference between,
like,
the book and a book.
Does it make sense? But don't worry about
that right now. I just wanna get used
to the letters. So the next letter
is a ta,
and that's similar to the letter t.
So it's the 3rd letter in the Arabic
alphabet. It's a ta. Right? So it's not
kind of aligned with the English alphabet. You
know? It's its own alphabet. So it's going
in its own kinda order
that doesn't match up letter for letters. So
the next letter doesn't sound similar to the
letter c. Right? So we went from a,
bah, now we're going to ta.
And ta is shaped just like ba
in all of its positions
except it's got 2 dots above.
Does that make sense?
In the Quran, it's gonna always have 2
dots. If you read like a newspaper
or something else,
if you decide to engage a different type
of Arabic text,
what the two dots might end up being
replaced
with is instead of like that
or even in script when people are writing,
they'll make, like, a straight line
as if they've connected the 2 dots.
Does that make sense? But in the Quran,
you're gonna always see it as 2 dots.
Right? The same way you have, like, script.
People are writing, you know, they're going a
little bit faster,
and they're connecting things.
So the ta is gonna be noted with
2 dots.
Right? So we do if you repeat after
me, ta.
T. T. 2. 2. Okay.
Then,
the 4th letter
is a and
it's like the English word theta.
Right? So you wanna, like,
be conscious of where
your mouth is going organically, where your tongue
is placed,
as you're pronouncing these things. Right? So when
you say, the as in theta,
your tongue should be going to the top
part of your mouth.
Right? It's not going at the bottom, you
can't say it, right? Because it won't work.
Right? You could say ba like that. I
say
ba, my tongue is not at the roof
of my mouth,
right? That doesn't work. I don't know what
that was,
but it's ba and the tongue is resting
at the bottom. With ta, you're bringing it
up to the top. So the ta and
theta
as you go against the roof of your
mouth with your tongue, theta. Right? So when
people say theta.
Yeah. Can everybody say it? Theta.
Not even not just like 1 peep 2
people. Can every person in the room Can
we say theta theta? Theta. Theta. Right? So
where is your tongue going?
Theta.
Yeah. There we go. So fa so repeat
after me. So this
ta is gonna be distinct from
the ta. It's gonna have 3 dots,
kind of like a triangular shape.
Right? So if you say
Right?
Yep. And on each one, your tongue is
hitting the top of your mouth. Right?
Right?
Yeah. Great.
So what I'd asked people to do, like,
a month and a half ago was nobody
did, But now you all will do it
before next week. Is those first four letters?
Just get into the habit. You could take
your whiteboard home and play around with it.
Can you put yours up?
Look how nice Giselle's whiteboard looks. Amazing.
Yeah. Great. So if you take your whiteboards
home
and practice,
and all you wanna do
is make
nonsense words,
you don't have to worry about whether they're
actual words or not. Right? But the four
letters we just did,
alif,
ba,
ta,
the,
You connect them to each other in
three letter words.
So make Alif
the first
letter, ba the second, and ta the the
third. Make ba the first letter, alif the
second letter, and ta the 3rd. Do you
get what I mean? Just every combination that
you could think of. Mess around with it.
So you're getting used to writing and seeing
what it looks like. Because if I had
alif first
and ba and ta, it will look like
this. Right? If I had ba first and
then alif
and then ta, it will look like that.
Right? If I had
ba, ta, and,
do you see what I mean? That's all
we want you to do. Right? You don't
have to care. Does it is it a
actual word? Is it not a word? You
know? And the nice thing with the whiteboards
is that you can erase it and then
just keep doing it again and again and
again. You don't have to worry about, like,
having these large notebooks filled with kinda random,
like, script.
And it's just about being able to first
recognize the letter and how they relate to
other letters.
We're not trying to make you like calligraphists
in this class. Right?
You just want to get to a place
where you're recognizing the letter,
and then seeing how it fits with other
letters, how it connects.
Does that make sense? And then if you
want to, you can just say it with,
like, these other,
like, letters on it, like the pronunciations.
Right? So, but a the. Right?
Abata.
Do you know what I mean? But you
don't even have to do that. Just as
an exercise,
start writing it and, like, connecting the letters.
See how that goes. Does Does it make
sense?
Okay.
So we're gonna do 3 more.
And all of the four letters that we
just did right now,
they're all above this this line that we
have.
Or, actually, maybe we should just stop and
not do all,
like, 7
yeah. I'm also I don't wanna be conscious
of people's time. So we're gonna do the
next
we'll do the next,
7 letters next week. So bring the whiteboards
with you.
If you don't wanna take them home, just
put them in the box and put the
markers in the marker bag and the eraser
in the eraser bag.
But you should take them home. They're for
you. Right? Kiara got them for everybody,
who's in the back.
And they're really great,
to be able to utilize.
But just literally,
it's not like you guys spend an hour
doing it. You know what I mean? Like,
5 minutes, 10 minutes, and you'll be surprised.
And then the second part to it that
you wanna do is pull up, like, on
a website,
open up, like, a copy of the Quran
that's in Arabic. Just start looking for those
four letters. Right? In the first chapter, Surah
Fateha,
like we've gone through it in detail. Look
at that chapter.
Like, where do you see the letter alif?
Where do you see the letter ba? Where
do you see the letter ta? Where do
you see the letter? It's a. Right? Maybe
it's not there. Maybe it's there. It's not
like a trick question. And then just move
on to the next page. Right? Do you
see any of those things? So you can
start
visualizing
it and building a relationship with it, and
then we'll go through all of the letters
within the next, like, 3, 4 weeks,
and start to do some other kind of
drills and exercises with them so we can,
like, compare. Because some of the letters, they're
gonna sound similar. Right? Like, there's a letter
that's like our letter s seen, and it's
like a sound,
but then there's also a letter that we
don't have a cognitive that's a slob. Right?
So it's a, like, a fuller mouth. Right?
Like, the word seesaw.
Right? It's kinda you can hear the difference.
1, you're saying would like a like a
more lighter sound and one is with a,
like, a heavier sound. Right? So seesaw.
Right?
Or there's ta
that we just did, and then there's a
letter that's called ba.
Right? And this is about how you punish
in your mouth and kind of being able
to recognize the letters.
But we'll pick up from there next week.
So we'll do the letters first, and then
one of the other necessary acts in the
prayer that we discussed last week was along
with the first chapter of the Quran
that you're reading
either one long verse or 3 short verses
of the Quran. So we're gonna look at,
like, 2 short chapters of the Quran.
They're, like, really short that most people memorize.
One is called Surah Gauther,
one is called Surah Ikhlas.
Means, like, a multitude of blessings. It's also
a fountain that said to be given to
the prophet Muhammad on the day of judgment,
and means sincerity.
So if you wanna look it up in
terms of, like, the English, the chapters,
and, like, the books that you have,
that would be great.
But we'll go through those in the next
seven letters. So we're just chipping away at,
like, the necessary
acts.
Okay. Great. So we'll see everybody next
Wednesday. Thank you.