Khalid Latif – Perfecting Your Prayer Essentials of Salah (Hanafi) #10
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
So we talked about the obligatory parts of
prayer
meaning,
what you have to do. So as a
quick recap,
we went through
the conditions of the prayer. So these were
the things that
you needed to have prior to entering into
the prayer. We did this like a month
ago.
Right? So in order for the prayer to
be valid,
you need to have these basic things,
being in a state of ritual
purity,
being free from any physical filth,
covering one's
nakedness,
facing in the direction of the Kaaba.
The time of the prayer has to have
come in.
You need to have intention. And then the
opening indication was called the dachrimah.
All these things happen before
you begin to pray. Right. This is a
quick recap. And then we talked about this
bottom section,
which are the integrals
of the prayer itself, right? These are what's
obligatory, what we call faru.
So if you don't have these things then
the prayer isn't valid, it doesn't count.
So what we likened this to was a
skeleton.
So these are the things that if they
don't happen in the prayer,
then the prayer itself isn't valid.
And in the Hanafi school, which is the
school we're looking at, there's not a lot
that goes into
the
obligatory
aspects of the prayer
other than a lot of motions.
So you need to do that first invocation,
which some people say is a condition, for
others
that it is
a part of the prayer.
2nd, you're gonna be standing if you have
the physical capacity to stand
except for voluntary prayers. You're gonna recite
any part of the Quran,
even if it's just a verse.
And,
what we said was the shortest verse in
the Quran
in Arabic says, and
then he looked.
So you don't have to recite the first
chapter in its entirety. You don't have to
recite entire chapters.
This is in its most minute form. So
someone
is learning how to pray. You're a convert
to Islam. You just came back to your
faith. You're
engaging prayer as somebody who was born into
it, and you just are learning it. It's
still obligatory
upon you, your 5 daily prayers, right? So
some of you in this room were born
into this. Some of you are converts. Some
of you are thinking about conversion.
The minute someone converts to Islam,
then prayer
is obligatory upon them.
But you're not going to have learned all
of it as a prerequisite.
That's not something that has to happen in
order to convert.
Someone can convert without even knowing that there's
5 daily prayers in Islam.
Does that make sense?
But now that they're Muslim
yeah. Do you have a question?
So
you don't have to know how to if
you're creating a congregation,
Do you also have to,
make your own intention or it's what the
person that's reciting?
Yeah. You make the intention
that you're following the person that is leading
the prayer.
The intention can just be you can say
I'm intending the same intention as the person
leading the prayer. Right?
If you're praying in congregation, ideally,
somebody who is there would have the wherewithal
to be able to say, hey, like this
is how you do these basic parts to
prayer before they throw you into it. But
it could be all kinds of scenarios. Right?
You could be intimidated.
You might have never, like,
been around Muslim people before. Right? Because if
someone converts to Islam,
they could convert just sitting in their house
and, you know, need somebody to sanctify that
process
or to have, like, people witness it as
such. Right? It's still valid.
But here,
what is a legally
excusable reason
is what we're talking about, right? So what
a lot of people get is what the
prayer is in its final form. And what
we're doing is going through phases.
So as you're doing this,
you recite
even that short portion, you're gonna bow, prostrate,
and have a final sitting.
That suffices
while you are still learning
the prayer
in its entirety.
Then the next section that we looked at
were the necessary acts, what are called the
wajib acts.
So this is kind of like the flesh,
the meat of the prayer, right? That was
the skeleton. This is what we're gonna continue
to do a deep dive into. So
we looked at
in
the first one, instead of just doing like
an indication of some kind,
you are specifically saying Allahu Akbar.
You're gonna recite the first chapter,
Surah Fateha,
as well as 3 verses,
like short verses or one long verse.
In these ways, it's also a necessary act.
And we're gonna do some of that today
because that's the last piece
of the necessary parts, the wajib parts that
we haven't gone through yet. We're gonna go
through 2 short chapters,
and then everything that goes into the necessary
acts we would have covered over the course
of these sessions this summer. If you missed
any of them,
you can go on our podcast or YouTube
channel and still get access to them.
But these are the things you wanna be
learning right now. Right? If you haven't memorized
the first chapter, what is Fatiha
here in point 2,
then you want to work on that. And
you wanna work on learning one short,
2 short, you wanna learn some verses of
the Quran as outlined here as well. We're
gonna look at 2 short chapters
that are easy to memorize,
Right? You just go at it at a
pace that makes sense for you.
And the rest of it again is gonna
be
things that
are rooted
in
stuff we've already went through. So this 8th
point reciting the teshahud,
we talked about this last week. If you
remember, we went through it in its entirety.
Right? For those who are here, if you
missed it, it's up online. We went through
each word, what it meant,
and
kinda distilled it, not just as translation, but
giving an opportunity to relate to the meaning.
Right? Because sometimes even translation can be pretty
antiquated or archaic.
And so you can find all of it
online. If you miss some of those,
let me know. We can get on a
Zoom. We can meet up and go through
it also.
And
then what we're gonna look at through the
course of next week
are just some of the parts that are
recommended.
This is kind of what ornaments the prayer
and beautifies it. You know, so how you
raise your hands when you do that initial
tahrimah,
that first invocation, Allahu Akhfa. It's a recommended
where you're gonna put your hands after, you
know, all of these kinds of things. And
there's a lot of those. So we're gonna
do that at the end.
Some of it is
going to be
still attached to postures.
Some of it is going to be attached
to phrases that you're going to recite.
But
from now through the end of the summer
what you wanna work on are these parts,
these integral parts.
You go back and listen to the audio
from
the few weeks that we went really deep
into the first chapter,
fatiha.
And today we're gonna do a more cursory
analysis of 2 short chapters,
and that will bring us to a close
on all of the necessary acts, that second
tier of acts
that are part of the prayer. Does that
make sense?
Yeah. Is everybody with me? Yes. Yeah. So
we went through all of the obligatory parts
to it.
We are gonna today wrap up on what
are gonna be all of the necessary acts,
which in Arabic could call the wajib acts,
the wajibat.
And then next week, we'll go through a
list of the recommended
acts. There's not a lot that's there
that
has
a lot of
Arabic to it,
and long phrases other than one part, which
is a prayer on the prophet Abraham and
the prophet Muhammad
and their family, peace be upon them all,
and then a short
supplication that happens after that.
But the crux of it is gonna be
in these points right here. Does that make
sense? Any questions on that?
You sure?
Yes. Yeah.
Why are you smiling in the back? Do
you have a question?
No? Yeah. Okay. Great.
So the first one we're gonna look at
is a short chapter.
It's called Surah Al Gautham,
and this is the 100
and 8th chapter of the Quran.
And so it's really short, 3 verses.
One of the chapters that
you wanna acquaint yourself with has got a
lot of deep meaning to it.
But
in and of itself, easy to memorize.
If you meet people who have been praying
for years,
like an everyday Muslim, there's good chance they're
reading this chapter regularly in their prayer. Right?
I can see you smiling on your face
mask. Yeah, she knows what I'm talking about.
Yeah. So the shorter chapter versus the longer
chapter doesn't necessarily
have a comparison
from a standpoint of merit or blessing as
such. Right? Within the standpoint of a metaphysical
understanding
of the recitation of these verses, the entire
text in and of itself
is seen by Muslims as being a noble
text. And there's unique blessings through the engagement
of each individual verse and chapters on a
whole,
as well as segmented
uniquely.
But in and of itself,
you're in a place where you don't want
to think about your relationship to prayer in
that way
that becomes self deprecating or demeaning. There's narrations
in the prophetic tradition
where there were people
who were particularly
known for just reciting the shorter chapters of
the Quran
regularly and consistently in the course of their
prayer. And other people would sometimes complain about
them to the prophet and say that this
guy just recites the same thing again and
again and again. And it was always some
of the shorter chapters. The prophet would ask,
you know, why would you recite these chapters?
And the man would say that they love
to recite this chapter, right? It gives them
the most insight
into, you know, God is the most merciful.
And that's gonna be the second one we
look at. It's called Ikhlas Sincerity, but we're
gonna look at this one first, Al Kawthir.
Is anyone familiar with this? Have you read
this chapter before or its translation?
Yeah. It's okay if you haven't.
So contextually what's happening here
because
all of this is
historically contextualized
in real time.
So the prophet Muhammad peace be upon him
was
someone who has not survived by any of
his
male children.
He had daughters
and the Meccan Society
was a society that had its own challenges.
Amongst them they practiced
the abhorrent practice of female infanticide.
Right? They wanted to have sons. They didn't
want to have daughters. They'd bury women alive
literally.
And Islam came to abolish practices like these
and other abusive, you know, practices against women.
But because the prophet
didn't
have any male offspring that survived,
The people of Mecca,
they were quite often
mocking, ridiculing, abusing him, especially in that early
period of Revelation. This was something that was
quite customary
of prophets of God across the board
that their early followers tended to be those
who came from lower social classes,
did not have the utmost of authority, etcetera.
And in the Muslim experience, it wasn't that
different.
And so the last verse of this that
we'll look at has a word that says
Abtir which means to cut off. Right? So
they would say to the prophet
that he's cut off, but in a derogatory
sense. That is beyond his capacity
to have, like,
children in this way. And it wasn't at
a time also that was just in passing,
but in real time the prophet is burying
his children
as they have passed. He's lost like his
loved ones and they continue to mock and
continue to ridicule
and use it as an opportunity to be
demeaning. Right? The society in and of itself
that Islam was introduced to had positives and
negatives like any society,
but amongst the challenges that it had it
was a very stratified society
that didn't have
a structured mode of governance. The way we
have a mayor of New York City, there's
no mayor of Mecca. Right? There's no governor
of Mecca at that time. The way that
things were built out were based off of
a very deeply tribalistic
structure
and
lineage in of itself
was a primary
variable
to determine
who was
kind of more elite or noble as such.
The challenge that came, the prophet Muhammad
was part of a tribe called the Quraysh.
It was a noble tribe, and he had
elders in his family that were also of
nobility
and
other Meccan tribes couldn't do anything to him
as a result of that
until one of his uncles passes away.
And then the mocking
and demeaning this and abuse becomes that much
more hostile and aggressive.
But this is one of the things that
is happening here. And so if we do
a breakdown
of this,
the first word says Inna.
So in Arabic we're reading from right to
left. The transliteration
is still written in English words that are
worded left to right. But the way this
sentence is going this way, the Arabic you
wanna read this way.
So inna is just like a word that's
emphatic.
Right? It's giving,
like, the sense of whatever is coming after
this, it's
very much so
deeply emphasized.
Right? And the na at the end is
donating like kind of a royal we. Right?
So this is God speaking,
is a sense of, like, giving something,
But when you're
giving, utilizing this form of giving,
it's giving in such a way that is
really beyond
the expectation of the person that is being
given something.
Do you know?
And that
ka at the end is
a suffix
pronoun it means you. So he's speaking to
the prophet Muhammad peace be upon him, Al
Gauthar.
Now this word Al Gauthar a lot of
people will translate
in different ways. This says, We have truly
given abundance to you, O Prophet.
There's a fountain
in,
that's mentioned in our tradition that's in the
hereafter. It's a fountain given to the prophet
Muhammad, peace be upon him.
Something that he will have people drink from,
you know, when they are risen from their
graves,
etcetera.
But the Arabic of it,
that
form,
if
if I write here, can people see?
Yeah. Can you all see if I write
here? Mhmm. Alright. So the way Arabic works
as a language, we've talked about this before,
but just
to reiterate,
like, you have,
3 letters,
fa,
a, d,
right? That they make forms
and letters get plugged into the form.
And the form then denotes like grammatically a
meaning of something.
So if you have
for example,
this is like the form that's given for
somebody
that does something.
You know?
So you have words like,
falls into
this form.
That's like a scholar, someone who is a
person of knowledge.
Does that make sense? Right?
My name is Khalid.
It falls into this form. Right?
And,
has that same kinda notion there.
So the word here, I'll
write it in English so it's more easily
understood.
This form
is used to denote just like a lot
of things to begin with. Right? So in
Arabic, one of the ways you say stars
is you say.
Right? And you can see it's got the
same kinda,
like, syllables and pronunciation.
Does that make sense so far? Yes. Right?
So this isn't just like a few stars.
It's like a ton of stars,
you know. My wife, my kids, and I,
we were invited to a wedding in Lake
Tahoe a few weeks ago.
I don't know if any of you have
ever been outside of the city where you
can actually see the stars. In some parts
of Manhattan, you can see it. I was
in Brooklyn
a couple of weeks ago,
and we prayed our sunset prayer in the
park.
And over there, you could also see the
stars. It was crazy. When you go to,
like, some parts of the country,
all you can see is stars in the
sky. It's, like, remarkable when you see that.
There's no clouds.
You're in places where
the air quality isn't terrible.
And when we were in
Nevada
going to Lake Tahoe,
all you could see in the sky was,
like, these beautiful, like, stars. It was crazy
how many you could see.
That's like Gokab.
You know? It's just like tons of stars.
Does that make sense?
So the same way there's tons of stars,
Gauthar
has that same kind of connotation
and it has in it the letters kathara
which is denoting like
many things.
Right? It it means like a lot to
begin with. So that's where the idea of
abundance is.
Meaning like you've been given so many blessings.
You have so many things in your life
that are good,
that are meaningful,
that you want to be mindful of, you
want to remember.
The things with the Quran
is that it's got
application
that has relevance
through all of its words to each one
of its readers.
This is a big
theme and value
within Islam,
the idea of appreciation and gratitude.
Right? And the recognition not simply just of
the gift or the blessing,
but taking it to its most logical conclusion
to also then
do the recognition
of the gift or blessing
to be able to remember and recognize the
giver of the gift, the giver of the
blessing.
So it's not just that here I am
in a place where it's like so great
to have a marker, right, or I love
having a laptop or an iPad,
but I also then by extension understand that
this came to me from some place.
And what's happening here is that the prophet
Muhammad peace be upon him is in like
a very heavy
difficult phase
of his prophethood.
He's got a lot of stuff that's very
hard going on in his life. Is this
something that's characteristic
of the prophets of God that
their relationship
to their own faith, their relationship
to their own spiritual struggle is gonna come
with
challenges,
heaviness,
difficulty.
And as a mechanism of being able to
deal with that, the opportunity is to not
be rooted in kind of a delusional state
of self that says there's nothing hard in
my life.
But the appreciation and gratitude
becomes a means of a vision modifier
of the challenge. It helps me to see
it differently, like what lies ahead of me.
Does that make sense?
And so here,
like the verse is saying,
you've been given
so much.
There's so much that you have that's actually
of bounty and blessing.
Things that you don't want to think in
absolutes.
If somebody says to you to practice gratitude,
it doesn't mean that you're either grateful or
an ingrate,
right? That you can only exist in these
two frames. There's like so much more that
goes on in between. Do you know what
I mean? And that's what happens quite often.
You're only either this or the absolute opposite.
That person is only either this or the
other opposite. You're either like nice to me
or you're the worst thing in the world.
Right? You're either like kind or you're terrible.
You're either good or you're bad. Do you
know? It doesn't only work in these kind
of simplistic frames.
And here,
he's telling the prophet of God, like, hey.
You've been given a lot.
You have many things
that you can account
for that you can see as being of
a blessing. And for everybody,
because it's a short chapter, right, and you
wanna think. This deep message that's rooted in
this
that Muslims everywhere read this
in a lot of their prayers. They're saying
it again and again and again.
This idea that I've been given more than
sometimes I want to admit.
I have a lot more than sometimes I
realize.
I don't recognize
all of the bounties. I I don't recognize
all of the gifts. I don't recognize all
of the blessings.
The opportunity to reflect on that and to
contemplate on that gets attached to the next
verse that's gonna come up. But this deliberate
process
of understanding this,
Like, you have it,
and it's been given to you.
And this is also an important thing to
understand
within an Islamic
understanding
of how this world works. We talked about
the first chapter Surah Fateha,
the opening.
And one of the ways
that God identifies himself is
Madiqi omidin,
right? The master of the day of judgment.
In Islam,
God is the owner of all things.
So anything that we've been given
is actually in that way, like it's been
given to us.
And just because it's been given to us
doesn't mean that we deserve it.
The notion that we have it
isn't by anything
of our own doing,
but
just as God is saying to his prophet
that
indeed
we have given to you
an abundance
of
blessings and bounty.
The same thing gets applicable to all of
us
That you're able to see everything
with a certain
sense of
real dignity
because you know that you've been given it
as a gift.
The spouse that you have, the child that
you have, the clothes that you have, the
food that you have. Right? I've used this
example in other settings, but when the weather
started to change here in New York, and
it got very hot, was very humid. Right?
You all remember the beginning part of the
summer, last few days, you know, thank God
it's been a little cooler on different days
of the week. Right? Some days have been
just like super sticky and really gross. And
when we went from it being like, spring
to that drastic change of summer and the
heat wave, I was walking in Washington Square
Park, and I ran into a guy
who was in the sea of everything. Like
some of you walked through Washington Square Park.
You know what I was liking in that
park. Right?
And this guy was in the park
and is hot and he's got 5 layers
of clothes on.
And you also know, like, people in New
York can be really kind or they can
be terrible.
When you see somebody that is out of
the ordinary, the assumption
can quite often be to elevate oneself
by denigrating somebody else. Right? It's a very
unhealthy
way of seeing the world.
And so this person you engage him. You're
like, why are you wearing all these clothes?
He says,
I don't have any place to put my
clothes.
And if I don't keep them all with
me,
I don't know if I leave them behind
where I'll be able to come across something
like this again down the line.
So if I don't have this long sleeve
shirt on and this jacket,
what am I gonna do if it gets
cold at night?
If I don't have the hoodie to protect
myself from rain and other things,
what am I gonna do if it starts
to rain on me and I'm sleeping outside?
Do you get what I'm saying?
What we can draw from verses like this
and deepen
in our own reflection
is a question that can make a lot
of people uncomfortable,
but something that Islam
is constantly telling its practitioner.
Why do I deserve what I have more
than what that guy has been given?
Like, what did I fundamentally
do differently?
That somehow
he doesn't even have a place to put
his clothes,
and I have clothes that I don't even
know that I have them. Do you get
what I mean?
And the awareness and the consciousness
is rooted just in this short phrase
that you've been given so much.
What is it that
you
are in a place
of
real kinda
difficulty around?
You have opportunity
to make sense of life through a prism
of positivity.
So choose positivity. Don't choose negativity.
Understand that in whatever one is saying that
you don't have, like we have given to
you certain things. Do you know what I
mean?
You just sometimes sit and you reflect.
COVID was really important. I was in Toronto
the other weekend, and this guy was driving
me to the airport.
And he said, he's been to New York.
So he's like, COVID was really bad in
Canada.
And I never had a conversation with him
before. And he said, I heard in New
York, it was really good. Nothing was a
problem. Right? And I looked at him. I
was like, are you being sarcastic?
And he was like, no. That's what my
friends told me, that in New York everything
was fine. And I was like, I don't
know who your friends are, but if they
were, like, super rich, they might have just
gotten up and left New York, and then
they were fine.
But New York was like crazy in COVID.
Right? Our Islamic Center community in the 1st
few weeks had a 100 people pass away
either directly or people lost loved ones, then
we just stopped counting.
Let alone in the first however many weeks,
30,000 people died in New York. Right? Funeral
systems
were all strained, food insecurity,
people were now stuck at home, survivors with
their abusers,
like kinda like crazy stuff.
And I said, how is it here? He
was like, nobody even remembers COVID.
And when COVID was happening,
and we were on live streams and if
you were part of this community back then,
I was telling people,
they're gonna try to make you forget
everything that you're learning about yourself during this
time. You're sitting in your home. You don't
really need, like, to shop as much as
you do. You don't really need to eat
out as much as you do. You don't
really need like as much of the things
that they tell you you need. And you
can just sit
within your spaces
and try to really think. All of this
other stuff that's sitting around you, what is
it doing for you now that the world
is falling apart?
And most people,
they don't remember anymore that they don't really
need all that stuff
Or be able to recognize the things that
they were surrounded with that they've also now
forgotten.
This verse is saying like have wakefulness,
be in a place where you can recognize
all of the gifts that you have been
endowed with.
We have given you so much.
You have a lot more
than at times you might realize.
Do you get what I'm saying?
Great. Let's continue.
In the next verse
it says Fasalay
li rabbikawanhar
So
it's connected to the verse before.
You've been given a lot of stuff,
you have a lot of bounty. Bless it.
It doesn't mean you don't have difficulty in
your life. Right? It's not a religion
that is devoid of reality. You can have
tough things, but recognizing
what's good
helps to
dispel and confront the difficulty more, right? The
sea of negativity that's overwhelming
and overlooming
can be really hard when you also have
this absolute rhetoric that everything is terrible,
you know.
So the word for prayer, this is what
we've been talking about for the last however
many months, right, is slala.
The fa that's there
in the beginning
is saying
is a connector to what was before.
So essentially what it's saying is you have
been given a lot of things, so because
you were given a lot of things then
do this thing.
And what it's saying to do because you
were given a lot is sali,
like do your salah.
Pray your prayers.
To your Lord. And when we talked about
the first chapter we broke down etymologically what
the word rub means, not just Lord,
but if you were to open up an
Arabic dictionary, the word Rab
is gonna have a definition and it's gonna
say that,
rub is madok,
that is the owner, the possessor. Right? So,
like, I could own the laptop. Right? Rabi
Sayed is the one that makes the decisions.
So just because I own the TV in
my house, doesn't mean I get to decide
what's being watched on the TV. My kids
are deciding what's on the TV. Right? Sayed
is the one that's also making the decisions.
Rub is more ribi.
Right? The caretaker, the nurturer,
the one that rears you and cultivates you.
That there's a prayer in the Quran
that
says, and you know, Be merciful to them
as they did nurture me when I was
young in reference to one's parents, right? Rabbayani
is the same word, right? Rab.
So that nurturing kind of caretaking.
Al Munaim is Rab, the giver of namah,
blessings,
of gifts. That
Al Rab is the healer of all things,
you know, so much more. That's all in
this, right? So if you're gonna pray,
like pray to that God
because He's the one that gave you all
of it in the beginning,
Right? He's the one is the giver of
these gifts, the giver of these bounties. Because
we gave you so much,
because of that then do your prayer.
Li rabbika
to your rub
one har.
We have like 2 major holidays in Islam.
There's after Ramadan, Eid al Fitr.
Some of you joined us for in the
park.
It's a conclusion
and
kind of a day of feasting, a holiday
at the end of our month of fasting.
And then around the Hajj time, we have
what's called Eid al Adha. And the Hajj
commemorates the rights
and kinda
life of the prophet Abraham and his family.
And
that day of Eid
around Hajj time is also called Yom and
Nahr,
the day of sacrifice,
right? And the kind of Abrahamic narrative of
sacrifice, nahar,
is sacrifice in that way, the ritual sacrifice.
In the Quran,
quite often
when you have
like
the word salah,
you have it paired with the word zakah.
Right? So you pray and you've given charity.
Right? And so this follows a similar construct.
Like you're gonna pray and and then you're
gonna go do something to support people in
need. Because when you do the ritual slaughter
in the day of Eid,
a part of the meat is meant to
be distributed to people in need. Otherwise, wouldn't
have, like, sometimes food to eat at all,
let alone,
like have meat that they might be able
to eat. I've been to refugee camps in
the world,
went to Myanmar a couple of times where
people are facing ethnic cleansing and genocide.
And the two times I went, the first
time I went shortly after that day of
Eid,
Eid ul Adha. And 10 months later, I
went shortly before that holiday.
And the second time I went, there was
people that I met who when I asked
them what they would like, they said we
would really love to be able to give
our children. We're survivors of genocide.
Right? They're not just
like they're survivors of ethnic cleansing.
The holiday's coming. They wanna celebrate it. They
say we'd really love to be able to
give them something different. In the 10 months
between I had gone visit 1 and visit
2, all of these people had eaten rice
3 times a day as a meal. That's
just the only thing they had to eat.
They ate it, like what? And they ate
it with gratitude. You know what I mean?
Right? It's remarkable.
I went to Turkey after the earthquake.
I went to all these other places.
Everybody's still in a place where
it's not shattering their connection to God. Right?
They're still praising God. They're still saying God's
wisdom beyond our own. You know? And not
with a sense of just let me sit
and do nothing. They're still getting things done,
but they see it in a mode of
existence that's kind of bigger than just what
the ego sometimes offers. So inna'atayna
garkothar
fasali li rabbikawanhar.
So that nahar
is being referenced there,
and it kind of conjoins this idea of
like you're gonna pray, you're gonna go do
these elements that have social equity to them.
Right? You're gonna engage in an act of
ritual prayer and then another act of ritual
worship that's of charity. You're gonna go and
help people in their time of need. Does
that make sense?
Yeah.
And then at the end of it, it
says,
indeed,
so that word is in reference to the
people who oppose the messenger of God, who
are saying all these derogatory things about him.
Right? Some people will say this is a
man in specific by the name of Abu
Lahab. Some people say it's a man by
the name of Abu Jahal. Like, they're literally
speaking terrible things about him.
This other the end of the verse says,
who are Abda, that they are the ones
who are cut off. Right? Like, I don't
wanna go into it explicitly,
but they're saying this in the context. They're
saying to him that he is.
He's cut off
in the sense that he can't have male
children.
You know, they're saying that there's, like, physical,
like, deformities.
They're mocking him, you know, at the level
of his manhood, masculinity,
all of these kinds of things.
Does that make sense?
And so
here as a source of support and comfort,
God is saying the ones who oppose you,
they're the ones that are cut off. But
the Abtir
within
the understanding of our framework
is cut off from, like, a blessing
that they're making themselves devoid through their behavior,
their lack of character, their lack of integrity,
their mocking, their ridiculing, their arrogance, their indifference
from blessings of different kinds. And if you
were to put the chapter in and of
itself altogether,
the whole idea is giving you now a
spectrum
of lived experience that someone could have. Because
the people who are saying these things about
the prophet Muhammad,
they're like the elite,
the nobles.
They have wealth. They have clout. They have
power.
But what are they doing with it?
And they still fall into this space where
everything that they were given
isn't because of their own work and their
own effort,
but they're not able to acknowledge
the source of what's being given to them.
Because they have this sense that
I deserve it.
I worked hard. That's why it was given
to me. I'm better than these other people.
That's why they don't have it. Right? It's
not very different than how you see a
lot of how supremacy builds itself up in
most global context
even in this country. Right? You think about
whiteness
and anti blackness
and stratification of society
and what goes into this and people alleging
that because they have power and privilege
that is in some theological
systems
an indication that God's favor is upon them
and that God's favor is not upon one
who is not given like wealth and affluence
and influence.
Islamic Theology doesn't function in that way. It
doesn't indicate that by virtue of the amount
of money you have or the titles that
you have or the worldly success that you
have, that that means that you are closer
to God. If anything, what the Quran teaches
us and what the prophetic example echoes again
and again and again is that the people
who don't have so much in this world,
they're the ones who are gonna have a
lot more ease in the world beyond this
one. Right?
But when you relate, like, all of the
words together,
the recognition
of gratitude
of what you've been given, if you really
like are grateful for what you have, it's
gonna be hard for you to mistreat people.
Right?
Like people who can really appreciate what's been
given to them, they're not gonna, like, be
the people who are racist,
or arrogant, or xenophobic,
or any of these kinds of things.
And people had,
like, this
prescription written here. You don't wanna mistreat people.
You wanna be the person
who says hello
to everyone and acknowledges their presence and all
of these kinds of things.
Well, like, start recognizing what you've been given.
Right? Build up consciousness
through that prism of gratitude and positivity.
It renders contentment inside. But when you have
actual contentment, not fleeting happiness in a consumer
driven society,
but real contentment inwardly,
it's gonna be hard to treat people like
garbage.
You know?
And when you can do this and recognize
the gratitude, the reflection and contemplation,
make it concrete. The prescription is there by
going and praying to God,
thanking Him for what He's given to you,
and then sharing with others of what you
have in whatever capacity you can.
So this short chapter
is one of the ones that I'd recommend
that you start to memorize in relation to
what we were talking about.
The,
And we were over here
on point number 2
to recite
the Fadihah
as well as the chapter or 3 verses
after it in any two units of the
obligatory prayer and in all of the units
of the voluntary prayer. Right? This is
a
necessary act in the Hanafi school, a wajib
act. It's not a fard.
So you want to reasonably start
learning this so you can memorize it and
inculcate it into your prayer. And as you're
learning more, you're able to then start to
add more to your memorization
and recitation of things.
The other one that we wanted to look
at
that is a part of this
There's another short chapter, and this chapter
112,
and it's called Surah Ikhlas.
Can people see that?
This chapter
is a really great base
of, like, theology in Islam.
What is foundational
theology
in Islam as a religion?
And it's very simple.
Contextually,
what's happening
is that in different occasions,
people are asking the prophet Muhammad, peace be
upon him, about, like, the God that he
worships.
What is he made of? How is he
built?
Who are his children?
Who is he the child of?
And so the chapter
is giving
an understanding
of who God is from an Islamic standpoint.
Right? When one converts to Islam, they're affirming
2 foundational theologies.
A very pure monotheism,
there's just one God in Islam,
but distinct from other monotheistic
traditions
in the essence of who God is. Right?
And this chapter gives a lot of insight
into that. It's very short.
And,
the second aspect of that affirmation
of the shahada
when one converts is the prophethood of the
prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. And so
we're gonna go through this one really quickly
too. So it starts by saying, Say
Qul Huwa He Allah
Ahal.
That say He is Allah the 1.
So Ahal doesn't denote just 1 in the
concept of like one eraser,
right, or one table.
This would be Wahid in Arabic.
Ahad
is denoting
a little bit more of a uniqueness
in that oneness of God. The word ahad
is not something
that denotes divisibility,
for example.
So, like, this is one marker.
Right?
But it's made up of parts that can
be separated.
Ahad
is denoting something
that is not made up of parts in
this way.
Right? Like the chair can be broken down,
the table can be broken down, the car
can be broken down.
In Islam,
the knowledge of God that we have is
a negative knowledge.
It's not negative in the sense that it's
pessimistic,
but it's negative in the sense that we
understand who God is by knowing what it
is that he is not.
That God is completely
other than his creation.
There's a verse that says, lasek mithli hishe,
that there's not anything that's like a likeness
to God. So anything that you would conceptualize
God to be, you know that God is
other than that. Ahad is also not made
plural.
It's just ahad,
uniquely
one
in the sense that
there's nothing that is like God.
Right? This is what is being said here.
And in real time, the prophet is having
this conversation with individuals
who are trying to understand
through the parameters of their theology.
This is something that comes up for a
lot of people,
especially those who are looking at Islam as
a religion, and they've come from a religious
background.
Or for some of us, when we don't
study theology,
which,
there's a difference between faith
and creed.
Creed are codified systems,
that you can memorize,
but it doesn't necessarily
denote that you believe in it. Right? Like,
we could go
to the Department of Islamic Studies at NYU,
which is two blocks down. And there's professors
who likely know a lot more about this
stuff than I do, but they're not Muslim.
You know?
They're in a place where they've memorized,
but the faith aspect isn't there. Do you
do you get what I'm saying? Right? So
it's not like a a knowledge base that's
like that. Right? The 2 also don't go
hand in hand necessarily,
but there's some relationship there. So here,
this is like point number 1.
God is just 1 in Islam,
and His oneness
is unique in every
which way that you can understand
that oneness to be. He is Ahad.
I'm just gonna go through it really quick,
just so we can get to a couple
of other things.
Allahu
Samad
that he is the eternal, the absolute.
When we talk about Samad,
we're talking about samad in a way
that this kind of gives some definition,
but it's really
denoting, like,
being a a source of refuge,
that god is the one you turn to
in moments of crisis and moments of need.
And when you look at the 2 verses
together,
quite often in the Quran, stylistically
what you have when there are divine names
of God
introduced,
they
in pairs are giving, like, different ways of
understanding. So ahad
is telling us an essential quality of God.
Samad
is telling us how God
relates to His creation.
God is like the source of refuge.
God is the one that you are turning
to
in your times of need.
He's in this existence
that is different
as
these people are now asking the prophet questions
like, Is your God made of copper? Is
your God made of gold? Is your God
made of stone?
And there's a chapter in the Quran that's
called Anam
that has a verse that says very explicitly
that Muslims are not supposed to mock people
for their beliefs.
Like, you don't make fun of people for
their religion, their theological points that are different
from your own.
So that's not like the points of the
conversation,
but they are looking at things through their
frame. So this the second point that I'd
wanna say here is that this happens a
lot. When people have been socialized in a
certain way, they're understanding
things through their lived experience and terminology.
So you might go talk to someone
who
is Christian or Jewish, or you yourself looking
at Islam
might be coming from a background of another
religious upbringing,
and you've been socialized in a way
where it's hard to mute
what you were given directly and indirectly
because it comes up. Like the concept of
God in Islam is very different from other
religions. The concept of a prophet in Islam
is very different from other religions. Right? Who
God is in His essence is very different.
Do you get what I mean? But here,
these people
are talking to the prophet
from the standpoint of what they are accustomed
to.
And he's speaking to them as someone who
has come from that demographic,
able to answer in a language that they
understand.
Right?
Quite often, because there's some of us in
the room who are born into Islam,
we don't know how to talk to people,
not in the standpoint
of proselytization,
which is not like this religion's goal in
that way. We're not a religion that stands
on the corner just like trying to quantify,
like, people's conversions. You know, it's about a
qualified aspect in every which way.
But
here, like the prophet's having a conversation in
real time with his people,
and he's able to speak to them with
an understanding
of the context that they're coming from. Do
you know? When people come to talk to
you, they haven't gone through everything that you've
gone through. They haven't lived every way that
you've lived. Right? Somebody walks in, and this
is why I was saying even in the
way we teach prayer, we don't teach people
like
phases to get to an end result. We
teach them the last set as like the
beginning and it's overwhelming.
Right? But you gotta talk to people and
recognize where they're coming from.
And then
he says, lam yelid
walam yulad,
that
God,
He does not beget
nor is He begotten.
Meaning
God doesn't have children
nor was He born
of like another entity.
Right? And this becomes a problematic theology
within Islam
that there's
no associating of partners with God in any
capacity,
nor is there a notion that
God has this relationship
to
other gods or, like, deified
individuals in some way, shape, or form. Right?
In a Meccan
society,
there were,
like, tons of
deities and tons of gods that were worshiped.
Their entire system
economically was rooted
in
a lot of this,
but
they had
a theology
that was rooted in the idea that
God
can have children,
that
gods can be born of other deities as
well.
In
an Islamic standpoint,
it is something that is just off the
table,
you know, for a variety of reasons. Like,
God and his essence is seen as the
all powerful,
for example. Right? The all knowing. There's 2
gods. Like, how does this work?
You know?
Where and how do we kinda make sense
of this in these ways?
And so this becomes like another
kinda point theologically
that makes Islam different.
And there's not
for Him
an equivalent,
of anyone,
right? So the word Khufuwan
is kind of the keyword in this part
of the verse.
Like in marriage,
in Islam,
this is a quality that people are told
to look for in a spouse,
like somebody you're compatible with.
Right? Somebody that you are kind of in
a similar place and background.
Doesn't mean that you only marry people from
your culture or your race or, like, your
home village or any of these kinds of
things. Right? Or that you require that. Because
that's just racism when you think that someone
can't be in your family because of their
different backgrounds or these kinds of things. Right?
But here,
that equivalency is utilized in those ways. You
know? That you wanna have somebody that's kinda
similar to you in some capacity that you're
getting married to. You know, you're gonna have
things in common, compatibility.
Here, like the verse is saying, there's nothing
that is similar to God.
There's nothing
that has
that
remote equivalency to the divine.
And so for a lot of people, like
scholars, they'll say if someone reflects on this
chapter, they understand its meaning.
It becomes sufficient for them in terms of
what they would need in order to have
a base understanding
of the concept of the divine in Islam.
This chapter and the chapter we looked at
before are 2 short chapters. They have a
lot of deep meaning to them. You wanna
spend some time engaging them,
memorizing,
like, learning them piece by piece. A lot
of the words repeat
themselves,
and they're short verses. They're short lines
so that they're gonna be easier to memorize.
This site that we're on, quran.com,
if you hit the play button on these,
it'll play the verses for you. Right? You
can just hit listen to it again and
again. You go on YouTube,
there's some videos that are up there that,
like, literally have these shorter chapters on repeat,
like,
10 times, 50 times, a 100 times. They're
short,
so you can just hear it again and
again, and it'll help in the memorization
of it so you can add it to
the prayer.
Does that make sense? Any questions on that?
No.
Okay.
So we've gone through
all of the
necessary
acts, the wajib acts. Right? So in relation
to
the obligatory
acts
that you're entering into the prayer, there's a
standing.
Right, these things all still keep carrying over
in the prayer.
Right? So there's a standing,
the recitation of the Quran, even if just
one verse. Right? So this was the short
verse, If
you say that it suffices
from the validity of the prayer an obligatory
standpoint.
Right? You're new to Islam, you're just learning
the prayer, this is where you want to
start. And then outside of the prayer you're
memorizing these other chapters that we've gone through,
right? The first chapter of Fatehah,
the 100 and 8th chapter, Al Qathir, and
the 112th
chapter, Al Ikhlas.
You're gonna have the bowing, the prostrating,
and the final sitting.
And then in the necessary acts, you're gonna
begin by saying Allahu Akbar,
the recitation of the first chapter, Fatiha,
as well as a chapter or 3 verses
after it in these settings.
Perform the prostration, the second prostration,
to be still
between like each in the movement
and
and not kind of being like rushed. And
you're gonna have that first sitting as well,
reading the entire tashahood that we talked about
last week
and saying the word Assalam.
Right? And then there's other things that we're
gonna get into that you've likely seen people
do in their prayer. Right? If we look
at the postures
here, for example,
that
the person leading the prayer says the takbiras
out loud.
You're gonna say these takbirs when you're going
into these positions.
In the bowing and in the prostrating there's,
like, certain litanies that we recite in those
times. These are all from recommended acts that
we'll go through in the coming weeks. That
is gonna be, like, a long list of
things that we're going through.
That's why we wanted to kinda space it
out. But you want to
be, like, memorizing these other parts
at a pace that, like, literally
every day you could just learn a word.
Right? And then within a week, you know,
you know
about a verse, a verse and a half,
like, you know, 2 verses depending on which
chapter you're looking at. And you're kinda
utilizing the opportunity to also think and reflect
upon it in your own accord. So it's
kinda giving you meaning, and it's not just
the recitation of it. Did does that make
sense?
Yeah. So we're gonna go into
this next section
that is on
the emphasized
sunnahs of the prayer.
And
after that,
these are, like, just basic things that we'll
look at.
We'll talk about in the emphasized sunnahs,
like, 2 more things that we're gonna memorize.
We'll look at briefly the things that invalidate
the
prayer.
So, you know, there's things that can break
your prayer. Right? So for example,
if you start speaking in your prayer, like,
that's not something you're allowed to do in
your prayer. Right?
You know, if you're gonna eat or drink
or these kinds of things. Some of them
we're gonna explain a little bit more so
it doesn't kinda create, like, hecticness.
But you basically can't do something in your
prayer
that is going to make it seem like
it's an action outside of the prayer,
and then things that are disliked in the
prayer.
But the crux of it is gonna be
focused on the recommended acts,
in the coming week,
and we will pick up from there in
the next week.
Okay. Thank you.