Shadee Elmasry – Before Thinking About Spirituality, We Need This
AI: Summary ©
The speaker discusses the meaning of "by default" in Arabic, which refers to a person who has achieved a
AI: Summary ©
begins with a play on words, that is lost in translation. The word
for beginning in Arabic is bad. And the word for heart is calm.
Also means the word for heart calm also means to reverse something.
And if one were to literally reverse the reverse the word value
in Arabic, the word added would result, which is the term for
courtesy. Where this tree is begins since courtesy is the
portal to the purification of the heart. So just in that first line,
this we talked about this last week, the chef who wrote this is
doing a play on words. This is part of what the average did in
their poetry. They will try to make it really complex and put
hidden meanings into it is also one of the reasons why just
getting a book like this, in its original form, even if it's been
translated and sitting with it, you're gonna miss a lot of what's
going on, you'll only be able to really to access to surface
meanings. Unless you have a teacher like Sheikh Hamza, who can
then give us all of this explanatory. Additional
explanatory notes.
added in Arabic, means a combination of things in addition
to courtesy, a deep a derivative of added for example has come to
mean an erudite person, someone who's learned for high manners,
and courtesy are associated with learning and erudition. But at the
root of the word, is the idea of courtesy. The idea of courtesy is
firmly established. A man Malou starts his treatise his treaties
with courtesy, since excellent behavior and comportment are the
door keepers to the science of spiritual purification. One must
have courtesy with regard to God to behave properly with respect to
his presence, if he or she wishes to purify his heart, or her heart.
But how does one achieve this courtesy in my mouth fluid
mentions two requisite qualities associated with courtesy, modesty,
hyah, and humility. The
HIA in Arabic conveys the meaning of shame, though the root word of
hat is closely associated with life and living. The Prophet
sallallahu alayhi wa sallam stated every religion has a quality that
is characteristic of that religion, and the characteristic
of my religion is higher. An internal sense of shame, which
includes bashfulness, and modesty.
Most adults alive today have heard it said when they were children,
shame on you. Unfortunately, shame has come to be viewed as a
negative word as if it were a pejorative. Parents are now
advised never to shame a child. Never correct the child's behavior
by causing an emotional response, instead of the current wisdom
suggests that people always make the child feel good, regardless of
his or her behavior. Eventually, what this does is disable
naturally occurring deterrence to misbehavior.
So here's shad Hamza is taking a position on child raising, which
is that traditionally, at least in Eastern cultures very often shame
not only for children, even among adults, but shame was a strong
deterrent to
illegal or immoral behavior, thank you was a strong deterrent to any
kind of immoral or unethical behavior. You were ashamed to have
this known about you in public chat, Hamza was reading this
translation originally, in I think, the early 90s.
And things have only really gotten worse, in this regard. In our
society, where the idea of shame or modesty or bashfulness is
completely out the window, it's not a bad thing. And it's not a
bad thing to tell the child that that behavior is shameful. This is
part of what it takes to have having shame before a lot of what
we do. You know, just as an aside, oftentimes, we might know that
something is wrong, we might understand that we have to make
repentance from what we've done, that was wrong.
But we still keep returning to it. And one of the things that I've
noticed that does keep
us even as adults away from repeating these mistakes, or these
sinful actions is if we honestly, truly internalize the fact that
Allah knows what we're doing sees us. And we feel shame for that.
And then it's almost impossible to return to such to something
that's, you know, some kind of aberrant behavior that there's no
necessity for that you're just doing out of whatever reason.
So he goes on some anthropologists divide cultures into shame and
guilt cultures. They say that guilt is an inward mechanism and
shame and an outward one. With regard to this discussion. Guilt
alludes to a human mechanism that produces strong feelings of
remorse, when someone has done something wrong to the point that
he or she needs to rectify the matter. And that's what I was just
saying, right? So you might feel really bad and go, I have to make
repentance or I have to make a plan to not do this again.
But that's often not going to keep you from repeating it. Most
primitive cultures are not guilt based but shame based, which is
rooted in fear of bringing shame upon one
itself and the larger family. What Islam does is honor the concept of
shame and take it to another level altogether, to a rank where one
feels a sense of shame before God, when a person in the knowledge is
and realizes that God is fully aware of all that one does, says,
or thinks, shame is elevated to a higher plane to the unseen world
from which, from which there is no cover. In fact, one feels a sense
of shame, even before the angels. So while Muslims comprise a shame
based culture, this notion transcends shame before one's
family, whether one's elders or parents, and admits a mechanism
that is not subject to the changing norms of human cultures.
This is a really important point here, right? Because what we're
going to be dealing with the things that we're going to be
talking about some of them may seem anachronistic from another
time,
perhaps not applicable to the culture that we live in. But the
fact is that rights, rules, proper behavior, what Allah expects of
us, and what we've recreated for is timeless.
It doesn't change with culture, it doesn't change with whatever the
the new norms are, this day, rather, it's eternal, and it's
unchanging at the core of it, right? So some things will never
change, some rules will never change, and some behavior is never
acceptable, even if it's become acceptable in the wider society.
You follow my way, follow my example. And the example of the
rightly guided, Khalifa is after me so the five leaders after the
Prophet peace be upon him. We follow their examples. So they're
examples is part of our religion, what they did their judgments. And
why do we say these five leaders because the Prophet peace be upon