Divine Parables #12 The Tree Of Faith

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

who question.

who question.