Enjoining The Good Forbidding The Evil

Moutasem al-Hameedy

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Channel: Moutasem al-Hameedy

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well. Hey, y'all had ye had yo Mohamed in Salalah. While he was early, he was shot on Ohmori Madatha to have a coulomb desert in Vida Coleby that in Bala All praise is due to Allah. We praise Him, we seek his aid and we ask for his forgiveness. We seek refuge in Allah, the Almighty from the evils of ourselves, and the evil consequences of our actions. Whomsoever Allah guides, none can lead astray. And whomsoever Allah leaves to go astray, Nan guide, I bear witness that there is none worthy of worship. None is worthy of our ultimate love and devotion, but Allah the Almighty alone, and I bear witness that Muhammad Sallallahu it he will early he will seldom is His servant and His messenger.

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Indeed, the best words are those of Allah. And the best guidance is that of Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him. And the worst things in the religion are the newly invented matters for all the newly invented matters in religion, are considered to be an innovation and with and every bidder is misguidance.

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Allah subhanaw taala praised the true believers, the true followers of the prophets who came with the true message by saying in the Quran, contemplate your own meeting, reject Salinas tomorrow, and I believe my roof, but then when at any moment, what took me you know, when I will, you have been the best nation ever brought forth for mankind

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you enjoying the good

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and you advise against the evil you forbid the evil, and you believe in Allah.

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Now, this order, is not chronological, in the sense.

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belief in Allah.

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As an essence as the faith, the foundation of faith does not come after enjoying the good and forbidding the evil, rather, it comes before them. But what this verse refers to is higher levels of Eman and faith are achieved through the application of enjoying the good and forbidding the evil. Because the Islamic view on good and evil is that good and evil, constitute the very fabric of reality.

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This is the ABC of life.

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And we have to align ourselves for a healthy life. For a successful meaningful life, we have to align ourselves with the concepts of good and evil. Predominantly in our world today, most people try to align themselves with profit versus loss.

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Why? Because there's a lot of emphasis today on financial financial gain and profits. And the world is divided societies are divided into the rich and the poor,

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the elite of a society who have the wealth and power and those who don't have the resources or the power.

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And thus we sort of align ourselves in this life in terms of how can I make more money? How can I become rich and you see if you want to if you want to get people's attention today, talk about money. Talk about sources of income. You want to get

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your videos going viral online, or your posts being viewed by millions of people.

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And then emphasize the concept of making profit. And probably many of you see the moment you watch a video on YouTube or any of those social media, the advertisements that take place before that video are usually about people who say that this is my car, this is my house, this is my mansion, this is my profit, these are my profits for this month, and I have a system to show you how you can make this the similar amounts of money and most people are basically are taken into that or people are caught by that. Why? Because for us, this is the these are the building blocks of how we view life whereas in Islam, the buildings building blocks of how we should process Life is good and evil.

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As Muslims we have an affinity with good because Allah is Allah. Allah is the truth and the truth is good in Allah Hapa Yep, Allah is good and everything good comes from Allah.

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And everything that is evil is against Allah automatically by definition is against the law. So this is as Muslims as people who

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who believe in Allah, the way we should or the very the ABC the the very alphabet of how we understand life is a higher overshot.

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Alma ofall munkar good and evil.

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And this is what Allah subhanaw taala says in the Quran

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are the Wilhemina Shefali rajim Bismillah R Rahman r Rahim Al Asad in in Santa Fe Hussain, in the Medina, Amman, what Emilio Sala hurt, what I was hoping will help me what I was always somebody by time, man is in loss. All humans are heading towards loss, eternal loss,

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complete loss.

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Except for those who have believed and belief is the baker is the beacon of truth is the beacon of good faith is the is the house, the original house is the birthplace of good and evil.

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Except for those who have believed, and then expressed that goodness, which they have believed in and align themselves with in terms of external actions, so they perform actions and they do righteous deeds. And then not only that, because it's not enough to recognize good and evil, and embrace them.

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Yes, this is the foundation and this is the journey of every everyone who wants eternal happiness and bliss. This should be the quest of every believing servant, I want to I want to know good from evil. And then I want to align myself with good and evil internally in my heart. And then in my own my inner life, my inner person, my psyche, and then my external life in myself, in my family, then in my community, my society.

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And then after that, I act this out in the form of visible actions.

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So when we Muslims pray, we are supposed to pray in truth, as a recognition of goodness as and as an act of Allah alignment with goodness, every time you pray, you, you're supposed to come closer to good and further from evil. That's what every Salah means. Every time you give us other fire, you are basically bringing yourself closer to good and away from evil. Every time you fast a day, you are actually aligning yourself more with good and departing from evil, every time you do the Crusades, SubhanAllah. Because of that engagement at the tongue level and at your physical actions level, and then at the heart level, you're actually traveling one step closer to the good to the

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ultimate good, and away from the evil. That's what Islam really is. It's only taking steps towards good away from evil. That's the summary of everything we do in Islam. And the point is, and this is why knowledge is important is that we need to know what is good and what is evil. And then take the direction of the good away from the evil and avoid the evil as simple as that. And it's not enough that you do that in yourself and this is why Allah says All humans are in loss except for those who have believed and have done righteous deeds that's at the personal level, but it's not enough because part of good is that it's transitive in the sense that it expands to others. It's not enough

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to one good for yourself. That's not good enough.

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You have to want to extend good for others. You have to wish for others the good you wish for yourself.

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And the prophets Allah Selim says in the Hadith, la Yamuna

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I had to come. Hector, you hit belly early. Now you hipbone NFC him in Ohio, none of you one of you, none of you would truly believe meaning none of you would reach a higher level of faith, unless this person loves for their brother for their sister for their fellow human being the good that they love for themselves. Why? Because the moment you start dividing yourself, you're dividing people categorizing people, this man deserves good, This man doesn't deserve good, I deserve good, other people, I don't care about them.

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By definition, this goes against good because good, does not no racism does not not individualism, good is good, it's universal, and is not contained within personal boundaries, you cannot contain it, the moment you contain it, you have gone against the very definition of good, the nature of good is that it is the birthright of every human being. And if you have it, that nature of good that that is shared by everyone wants to expand to others. So naturally, you're supposed to enjoy the good and forbid the evil. So enjoying the good and forbidding the evil is not an act of policing

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is not an act of judging others and appointing ourselves as judges of others, that AI have an authority over you. That's wrong. That's why you're not supposed to do this, you're not supposed to do to do that. If you take power from that, then you have brought some evil into a mixture of goodness. And that spoils it. It is similar to when you have, let's say a box of good apples and you put a rotten apple in them a bad apple and then what happens all of them go bad. The same thing happens with clot in classrooms, in schools, you have a great classroom of wonderful students. And then

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naively, sometimes they bring a bad kid and say, we want the bad kid to become better by associating with these good kids. And what happens and this has been proven over and over again, that the good kids in the class start becoming bad.

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So it's a beautiful principle in Islam, to enjoin the good and forbid the evil.

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And enjoying the good and forbidding the evil is not about me, or you. It's about the good itself. In and of itself. It has its value, we are in the service of good.

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We are in the service of truth we are agents for for the good, and for the truth when we enjoin the good and forbidding evil.

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But oftentimes this principle is abused. And it becomes a serious violation when we contradict ourselves. Akula already had our staff for Lalibela conference.

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hamdu Lillahi Rabbil Alameen wa salatu salam ala Sayyidina Muhammad, while earlier he was happy he made so we are supposed to be agents for the truth at the service of good.

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That's why we are supposed to enjoin the good and forbidding evil. It's not about us. It's not about our position. It's not about our power.

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It's not there's no personal gain. In that sense. Here we are merely agents serving the greater good regardless.

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But this right could easily be abused just like anything good in Islam. It can be confiscated, kidnapped, hijacked and abused. So you find sometimes people and not none of us is free from that.

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We start using enjoying the good and forbidding the evil as a way to whip others, to lash out at them, to establish our power and authority to pump up our ego, to send a message I am better than you.

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I know more than you do. I'm more righteous than you My heart is better than yours. You should listen to me. I quote you.

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Imagine such a beautiful principle, selfless principle, can be hijacked and turned and rendered to the opposite, where it becomes at the service of the ego.

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And that's why the Prophet SAW Salem in the hotbar that we start the section of the Buddha we start the hotbar with the prophets of salaam used to say we are all below him in shorty and fusina We'll see at our Marina we seek protection and refuge in Allah from the evils of ourselves.

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There are so many elements in this self naturally that if we are not aware of them

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If we are not careful about them, they can can hijack any good thing. And thus, they render the good deed, into an evil deed, where we abuse the religion that is supposed to be for Allah for the sake of Allah, and we start serving our ego by means of it, instead of us being added service, we put it at our own service. And that's a big problem. We do it as parents. We do it as children. We do it as spouses, we do it as teachers, we do it as Imams, we do that as practicing people. We do it as non practicing people, we all do it, why I'm not happy with someone who's someone displays, some kind of a deed that I have, but I'm unable to sort of critique myself, and be honest with myself. So I

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projected that person, I personify that part of me that I don't like I personified in this person, then I lash out at them. Right? That's a very known psychological trick. It's very common, almost everyone exercises that. And then we say what I'm enjoying the good forbidding the evil.

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And in the field of practicing Islam, in the field of advising people, this is unfortunately very common. And this is one of the reasons why there are people who don't trust Imams who don't trust, so called their use, who don't trust the good advice when it comes. Why? Because people are traumatized, from advice that most of the time, or most of their experience with it is that it has, it's there as a personal grudge against them, or as a personal attack, or as a personal gain for the person who's doing it, or as a power gain. So people don't trust.

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And this is why anyone who uses any part of Islam for their own personal gain, they're gaining double sin.

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Because first they are making a huge violation. Number two, they're using something good for bad because people lose the trust in what is good.

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And they develop some kind of immunity and resistance to this.

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So what is the solution? The solution is that everyone keeps themselves in check. That's it to the best of your ability every time you want to say to someone that's, that's wrong, that's good. Hey, you should do this, you should do that. Just take a moment and inspect yourself see where this is coming from? Is there any payoff you're expecting from that? Do you feel happy at any level that hey, I'm just having a point against this person. I'm going to put this person down, I got one against them, one for one, etc. If you see that, and try to treat it, try to fix it, figure out a way to give the advice without getting without getting any credit for it.

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This is the hardest work that a person can do which is keep themselves in check and make sure that they do things for the sake of Allah, not as a service to themselves and this callers have always warned about They said your karma held over will never seem to

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be so careful of yourself share your personal gain from acts of worship because they take away from your sincerity and they could jeopardize your your reward from Allah subhana wa Tada We ask Allah subhanaw taala to help us perform all of the good deeds for his sake alone and to stay as selfless as possible. And we ask Allah to accept from us Lama Filomeno aluminet and Muslim no one was commanded here even more than what Lama for Luna the moving away so often I think Emelina with a bit of a Domino's neither of whom will carefully no longer Fergana Valley Valley Dena walima entrepreneur Elena Jada jewelry will go on Subhanallah bigger a bigger city, a nice salon or a more

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serene, we have to rely on planning