Mohammad Elshinawy – Divine Parables #12 The Tree Of Faith
AI: Summary ©
The transcript discusses the parable of culture, faith, and the importance of faith in the Holy Spirit and conversion to Islam. It also touches on the high percentage of people who pray every day and the importance of faith in the church. A woman is executed after being approached by a man called Jannah, who refuses to admit she is Jannah's sister and shakih. The speaker describes a situation where a believer gets even burned and is forced to remove Jannah from the qiblah, recites the other ayah, and turns away from execution. The speaker also discusses the benefits of a blessed tree and the importance of faith in people's lives.
AI: Summary ©
So Allah
says in Surat Ibrahim
Have you not seen
how Allah has struck an example
of of a good pure word.
Like a good pure tree.
Its roots are firm
and its branches extend all the way up
to into the skies.
And it gives off its edibles, the things
you can eat from it,
all year round by permission from its lord
It is very famously attributed to Ab'b ibn
Abbas radiAllahu anhu. He says, the good word
is the best word in the universe. It
is the statement of tawhid, it is la
ilaha illallah.
And so this is a parable struck for
the testimony of faith. The shahada,
the statement of no God but Allah subhanahu
wa ta'ala.
Allah
says, it is like shajaratin
tayiba. It is like a good pure tree.
A magnificent tree. A majestic tree.
Its roots are deeply entrenched into the ground.
It's firmly in the ground.
And likewise faith, when it enters the heart,
it gets so deep that it can never
be removed.
You know, famously,
Abu Sufyan, when he was leading the the
Meccans, before he became Muslim, he was abducted
by the commander of the Romans, Heraclius.
And Heraclius was not just the commander, he
was also a scholar of the Judeo Christian
scriptures.
And he was an astrologer in lots of
things. He asked him a whole list of
very wise questions. Maybe for a later time
we'll go through them. But one of the
things he asked him, he asked Abu Sufyan
about this man, Muhammad, whose movement keeps gaining
momentum. He says,
Did any one of them ever apostate?
Like enter the religion and then leave.
Out of hatred for the religion.
Abu Sufyan said, I wish I could have
said yes. But I said no. None of
them.
And so Heraclios
commented and said,
And likewise with faith, once it intermingles,
once it gets entrenched, rooted in the heart,
it never leaves.
No one ever left by the way Islam
in Mecca. In Madinah, maybe someone that was
a front runner, a tag along because the
Muslims were getting successful. He said, I'm Muslim
then he left. But when a man actually
enters someone's heart, it never leaves.
A believer, a true believer can never be
broken in his faith. And you know some
scholars also said this is about the believers
on earth. Not just deeply rooted in their
hearts but the believers on this earth cannot
be removed from this earth. Islam will never
die. Islam cannot die.
The obituary of Islam will never be written
by anyone even if the whole world were
to gather against Islam and the believers in
Islam.
So that is deeply entrenched roots.
Then it says,
and the branches of this tree extend into
the skies.
And there's lots to be said here. Of
it is that when the when the roots
are firm, the tree can grow taller.
And so the true believer gets very tall.
He stands tall. He stands out, they said.
Right? Very visible in his faith.
Very admired for their faith. Of course in
this day and age, in the last
180 days or so, the the standout
faith of the people of Gaza has eclipsed
every other
thing we can mention as an example, but
even less than that. I want to say
even less than that.
The religiosity,
how religious the Muslims are compared to any
other faith group is something that deserves pause.
Do you think anyone else in the world
has such a high percentage
of their people, of their adherents pray every
single day?
Do you think anyone else in the world
has a group of people, 2,000,000,000
strong,
that within one day they're all fasting?
That's just different.
You know, I was I seen actually in
the beginning of Ramadan and there's a little
bit of a scholarly discussion on Facebook about
the moon sighting and whatnot. I was just
flicking through the comments very quickly and I
saw one guy saying, guys I just want
to tell you I'm not even Muslim. I'm
Christian and the fact that you guys can
unite within 24 hours is pretty impressive.
Like you guys are like saying, is it
actually today or yesterday? And like, we have
nothing like this. We not even close. You
guys can get it aligned in 24 hours.
This is true. Right?
And also the faith of the faithful, when
it is true, it carries them very high
up. Meaning nothing on this world of disappointments
can break them. They are graceful through the
blows of life.
Nothing because they're not attached here. They're really
connected to the heavens now.
You know, I think of the story just
very quickly of Saeed al Jubeir
when he was sort of arrested by Al
Hajjaj, and he was about to be executed,
his name is Saeed. Saeed means prosperous.
Okay. And you know in Surah Hud, the
prosperous are the people of Jannah. That's the
people that are Saeed are going to Jannah.
So Al Hajjaj hated the guy. So he
said to him, you are not saeed, you
are shakih.
You are like doomed.
And so he said to him,
somebody else knows the unseen. Not you. You
don't know what's gonna happen on the day
of judgement. And so he got more provoked,
and so he said to him, I am
going to end your world
and give you an inferno instead of it.
Meaning, I'm gonna kill you now and send
you to Jahannam for your rebellion, your insolence.
Right? You're rising up. He was a tyrant.
He deserved sort of the pushback.
And so Sa'id al Jabayd heard this from
him and he said to him, if I
actually believed you could send me to Jahannam,
I wouldn't have worshiped anybody but you. And
so he calls the executioner, and he brings
the executioner forward, and he's executioner
is taking him away. He turns to the
qiblah
and he says,
I have turned my face to the one
who created the heavens and the earth. So
Al Hajjaj gets even more burned and he
forces the executioner to turn him around, away
from the qiblah. And so he recites the
other ayah, haynama to to walloo fathamma wajjullah.
And whichever way you turn, that is also
the direction of Allah
Not just the direction of the ritual tibla.
And so then they took him and they
forced his face down into the ground before
they ultimately executed him, and he said,
Allah's verse where he says, we created you
out of this, and into this we put
you back again. Meaning you're not doing anything
to me. Allah is the one that gives
life, and he's gonna put me to death
right now. And into it we we insert
you again, and out of it we will
pull you out one more time. There's still
a hereafter.
This is what a believer is like. Right?
He cannot be kept down. He cannot be
broken.
The third and final part of the aya
that we're going to stop at because it
is not difficult to think of 20, 30
parallels
on our own if we had the time
to do so regarding
being this blessed tree. He says,
It provides that which you could eat this
tree
all the time.
So first of all, that's fruits. You know
the prophet alaihis salatu wasalam actually in a
hadith, he said, do you know which tree,
which blessed tree is blessed like the believer
is blessed? Then he told them it was
the palm tree. The date palm tree. Because
they're different kind of palm trees. Coconuts and
pineapples. Right? But the date palm tree is
extra blessed for many reasons.
Of them is that it produces
the dates for a long span of the
year, and even when it doesn't produce dates,
it produces other things that people can benefit
from, or their animals can eat and benefit
from, even the date pit by the way.
They grind it and feed it to their
animals. Everything there is edible. So it is
useful all the time.
Likewise,
renders you fruits all the time. Not just
the duration of your life, not just in
all the ups and downs in the seasons
of our days, but even when you enter
your grave, it keeps you firm and you're
unable to answer.
And subhanAllah brothers and sisters, you know, as
I close here, I want you to catch
all of the
the ways that the different parables we've been
discussing point at each other. You know, the
idea of like weak faith in the beginning
is stop and go. This one is no
seasons. Yes. There's high seasons for a believer,
but there's no off seasons. It's always producing
this faith of ours. The idea of stability
versus being frail. Right? The idea of faith
bringing you up, where the predators and the
thing can't reach you. Whereas shirk brings you
down. Right?
All of these things together.
The ayat actually move on to speak about
the evil word is like a tree that
is uprooted and toppled over, unstable.
And then it says, yuthabbitullahu
ladhinaamanubil
qawditha bitifil hayati dunya. Allah is the one
ultimately though
that keeps people firm with that statement. La
ilaha illallah. In this world, meaning as they're
exiting this world, at death. Wa fil akhira
in the hereafter,
meaning in the grave when they're asked about
it.
And one of the things the prophet salallahu
alayhi wasallam told us to do in order
to invite Allah's support,
help us hold on to that word, make
our faith true and deeply rooted, he would
say And I leave you with this.
Never stop chanting
before our time comes, may it never come,
where you are no longer able to say
it. May Allah
keep us upon
and make it our last words from this
world, and give us firmness in the grave
to say it with confidence to the angels
who question.