Shadee Elmasry – How To Disagree in Islam – NBF 383
AI: Summary ©
The speakers stress the importance of proving the creator's history and the use of the title of the Bible as a symbol of political ambition. They stress the need for leaders to follow laws and comply with regulations, privacy in policy discussions, and collaboration in shaping society. The speakers emphasize the importance of working hard to achieve goals and privacy and privacy in policy discussions. The importance of cooperation and privacy in shaping society is also emphasized.
AI: Summary ©
Welcome everybody to the Sufyan Sa'adi nothing
but facts live stream on a Thursday in
which Which actually, all week it's been cloudy,
right Omar?
We're getting into the fall.
You start feeling the fall, right?
You start feeling that and you start moving
now into the colder weather, but today we
kick off with Lebanon still continuing bombings in
Lebanon.
Let's look at the logic behind this, Israel's
logic here.
You're going to kill all the Hamas members,
alright?
You're not killing their whole family, right?
So you just produced a group of people
who hate you, more people who hate you.
You just produced a whole generation that despises
you for killing their dads, right?
And their moms, and their brothers and sisters.
So there's only one solution to that.
Kill their other people.
You gotta kill them too.
So it's a perpetual desolation.
So now if you kill them though, well
you think that other Arab countries don't care
for them?
I've seen people who are the most, you
know, you haven't seen anything good from them
in his whole life, right?
But this they care about.
This they're fired up about.
So now those Arabs are now your enemies
too, right?
So what's the solution to them?
You're going to kill all them too?
You do that and then eventually some people,
you know, throughout the world is going to
be noticing this insane amount of killing and
where does this stop basically is the question.
You started off with a rage.
Started off with so much anger and you
did a stupid action.
The only solution to stupid actions like this
is eventually just got to stop.
But I don't see them stopping at all.
At all.
Here you have the latest news is that
the US proposed a ceasefire.
Netanyahu has walked away from it.
This is just one hour ago.
This is being published.
US officials said Netanyahu and his close confidants
were directly involved in the formulation of the
temporary ceasefire.
However, Prime Minister has changed.
It's changed his opinion on this and he's
walked away from it.
The fact that these are called talks, to
me, it's basically useless.
Now what's more accurate here and what we
expect is that Netanyahu orders full force in
Lebanon in the same breath that the US
is pushing for a ceasefire.
So the US is pushing for a ceasefire.
Maybe it's just for show internationally just to
show that they're trying to have a ceasefire.
Ben Gavir, Israel's national security minister, has threatened
to pull his party's support from the current
coalition government in the Knesset if Israel agrees
to such a 21-day ceasefire, which would
threaten Benjamin Netanyahu's hold on power.
In a statement today, Ben Gavir, because you
know his name is Gavir, right?
Yeah, Ben Gavir.
Ben Gavir, Allah will not forgive this.
Yeah, he's the son, he's not the recipient,
for sure.
Of course, scripturally and rationally everything can be
forgivable, but after Tobin we haven't seen that.
Said, when the enemy is on his knees,
you do not allow him to recover, he
said.
He said, you know these people are living
in such a different world than the rest
of the globe.
The rest of the globe sees something totally
different from what these people are seeing and
that's their biggest, biggest, biggest problem is that
there's such a myopic worldview and they're going
to end up doing things and then wondering
why is the world reacting so differently.
He lands in New York,
Netanyahu, vowing that Israel will not stop its
fight in Hezbollah, against Hezbollah.
Of course they say against Hezbollah, they mean
basically everybody who, 19 Syrians killed in an
Israeli airstrike in Lebanon, 100,000 people are
on the move, 100,000 people have fled
their homes and are on the move.
You get all the, you're going to have
all the books now of the, all the
stories of the people, you know, packing whatever
they can from their homes, hitting the streets
and just marching, subhanallah.
Okay.
Anyway, there's, there's just, we all know the
news.
There's not much to say, to be honest
with you, beyond what we all know and
we all been having this outrage and this
anger.
We all know this.
Subhanallah.
All right, let's go to Q&A.
Today will be beforehand because we have a
guest and then we're leaving early today.
So let's straight, go straight to any Q
&A that people may have here.
All right, let's put the La Cocina events
up.
You're going to, inshallah, follow this stream here
on the Safina Society channel.
Omar, are you involved in this?
We will be streaming Imam Tafakini's, Fakini's event.
Nahala Morales.
We're going to have an evening of art,
giving an insight as we try to strengthen
our soup kitchen with this gala fundraiser.
Hopefully you'd all be, be part of this.
Hopefully you'll be, you'll be able to watch
and you'll be the, be able to, to
pitch in something too.
You're pitching something right now too.
And really we're looking for those monthly supporters.
Go up a little bit, Omar.
Sorry.
Sorry.
Go down a bit.
Go to that monthly section there.
That's really the, what's going to be the
success of the org is on this.
The monthly subscriptions, one time gift or a
monthly gift.
Go to frequency.
Click on frequency.
Yeah.
See that monthly one right there.
Now click on a hundred dollars.
That's what we need right there.
Right.
Or $10,000 a month.
That's not even that a lot of money
if you think about it.
I mean, you think about it, if a
guy earns 120 K a month, there's a
guys who earned that.
It's not even far off for us to
earn that too.
120 K a month.
It's not far.
It's not, it's not out of the realm
of one, two, three years if you put
your mind to it.
And then you give 10 K a month.
Nothing wrong with that.
Keep that up for us, Omar, so everyone
can see it.
The La Cucina Gala on October 26th.
And seek the Lincoln to buy tickets, please.
Today, our guest is Sheikh Mohammed al-Shinawi
on the etiquettes of disagreement.
And Dark Chocolate Walnut has asked a question.
I have a three-year-old and live
in the Bronx.
Manhattan.
The Bronx.
Yankee Stadium.
There are no Islamic schools nearby.
I am considered homeschooling my son and sending
him to the local mosque for weekend classes.
That's what I would do too.
That's what I would do.
I would do the same exact thing, Dark
Chocolate Walnut.
I would do the exact same thing as
you.
I would homeschool.
But I would send them in to play
soccer, play basketball, and interact with kids who
they don't know.
Go to the Sunday school.
Go to Hiv's Academies that are there.
Jamaica Queens has a lot.
Bronx, do or not, have a lot.
Ali Ahmed, how do I benefit from the
Alba Alawi?
You can start by going to safinasida.org
and recite the Athkar of the morning and
the Athkar of the evening.
I'm a first-generation convert.
What's the best way to instill Islam in
my next generation?
Surround yourself and live with an environment of
Muslims where they have a lot of Muslim
friends.
That's the most important thing is to have
a lot of Muslim friends.
If you don't have support with your extended
family, you're going to make for yourself an
artificial version of your family.
Sohbah is the number one thing.
What were the people around the Prophet called?
Students?
No.
Worshippers?
No.
Soldiers?
No.
They were called Sahaba.
They weren't even called friends.
The Prophet was not, they didn't all know
the Prophet in a very close way, but
they kept his company.
That's the most important thing.
Anyone who's in a masjid, Sheikh Mohammed Shinawi
is going to be with us today.
He lives in a masjid, works every day
and he's in a masjid as the Imam.
Guarantee you there are 100 people.
He knows them by face, but has never
been to their house.
They've never been to his house.
He may vaguely remember their names, but you
know them.
And you know when they're missing too.
When you go to the masjid and you
haven't seen this person for a week, you
know he's missing.
That's sohbah.
We share space regularly, on a regular basis.
That's the key.
All right, is Sheikh in?
Oh, he's here.
All right, let's introduce our guest for today.
Sheikh Mohammed Shinawi.
Ahlan wa marhaban to the Safina Sa'idi
Nothing But Facts live stream.
Nothing But Facts seems very high pressure.
It is high pressure.
No dhunni allowed, right?
No dhunoon, no awham.
Dhun is speculation.
For those who are studying epistemology.
Facts, 100%.
Then there's dhun after that.
But dhun could be 99% and we
can accept that.
99, 90, 80.
I get to be human now, thank you.
So tell me, you're in right now, you're
in Allentown, Pennsylvania, correct?
West Allentown.
West Allentown in Lehigh Valley.
And I guess it is a valley, right?
Because when you drive in, you see these
mountain ranges.
And I guess they formed this bowl, which
is known as the Lehigh Valley, right?
It's a watershed.
It's a valley.
Correct.
Very good.
So Lehigh Valley there, you have Masjid Aisa
bin Mariam.
And you have like three or four buildings
around that, which you all purchased, right?
Alhamdulillah, yeah.
Mashallah.
So you're being very active.
There's a little playground, gym area for the
kids outside.
There's a basketball court.
There's an outdoor.
Outdoor basketball court.
They have a game room for people just
unwind, play ping pong.
And the reason that's important is because shabab,
they need to get themselves – they need
to be active.
A youth, if all he has is Muslim
friends and they pray five times a day,
you should say alhamdulillah, right?
If he's got Muslim friends, all the friends
pray five times a day, but all they
do is just play ping pong and play
basketball and go out and do all that
stuff.
You should really – I would say you
say alhamdulillah because that by itself is amazing.
And Sheikh Mohammed al-Shinawi's masjid, they're always
offering these types of things.
They're always active with the shabab.
And they have a youth director who used
to be in the NBA, believe it or
not, or he was part of – I
think he was a professional who played against
some NBA teams, some exhibition games.
But he was a European basketball player, so
in the European leagues.
And his grandfather is the one who prayed
the janazah on Malcolm X.
That's the youth leader there.
Our shabab were so impressed by that.
They thought that was the coolest thing.
Yeah, mashallah.
Man of many talents.
Generations into Islam.
Mashallah.
He's a wealth.
So let's do a little bit about yourself
before we get into this.
You're a New Yorker.
Queens?
Brooklyn.
Brooklyn.
Okay.
Which masjid there?
Masjid Abu Bakr?
Oh, my God.
You know Abu Bakr?
Of course.
Of course.
I did that.
Actually, that was my closest walking masjid growing
up.
Okay, so let me tell you the story
about that.
So my dad, he was very close to
a certain sheikh.
And that sheikh and his followers would all
gather at Masjid Abu Bakr.
There was a big brother with a big
white beard named Osama who was in the
food truck business.
There were other people that we were close
to and friends with.
And we'd drive out there from where we
lived in Toms River, New Jersey.
And we'd go to Masjid Abu Bakr all
the time.
I never knew that about you.
Yeah, subhanallah.
We kind of grew up in the same
masjid.
Yeah, subhanallah.
That was my dad's crew up there.
Osama and so we would go there regularly
to Masjid Abu Bakr in Brooklyn.
Yeah, subhanallah.
And did you live in Egypt?
Part of that old crew, Osama and the
rest of them, and my dad, rahimahullah, and
the rest, they were all surrounding, of course,
the famous sheikh, rahimahullah.
And then I sort of like went my
separate way.
Yeah.
Happened.
And then I actually circled back and married
the daughter, the eldest daughter of one of
those OGs.
*, subhanallah.
So I didn't know that you knew all
those guys like Nasr or Osama and those
OGs.
Yeah, subhanallah.
Nasr is back in Toms River.
Yeah, he's in Toms River too.
Yep.
Yep.
Subhanallah.
Mashallah.
So we have something in common there.
I never knew that.
Now we got to explore that offline, subhanallah.
Oh, definitely.
Definitely.
Definitely.
We got to.
I don't even, we might get in trouble
if we do that on WhatsApp too.
But so tell me about you, Egypt.
Did you move to Egypt?
I mean, for a very short period in
2013, actually during the coup.
Yeah.
Well, depends who you ask, I guess.
But during, yeah, the debacle that happened in
2013, that was the only period I lived
in Egypt for about three months.
I was just going to take care of
my dad at that point.
Okay.
And where did you do the bulk of
your studies then?
So, yeah, I was sort of thrown headfirst
into the da'wah, eight years, just, you
know, self-learning.
And then I was rescued from that by,
alhamdulillah, I got accepted to the Islamic University
of Medina, College of Hadith.
And then during my first year at College
of Hadith, my father, rahimahullah, he caught his
third stroke at that point.
Subhanallah.
And it began to deteriorate fast.
So I had to take a leave of
absence that became permanent.
And then I started all over again with
Mishgah University, Islamic University of North America.
Did about seven, eight years till I finally
got my first degree with them.
And then I've been studying, I guess, with
Dr. Hatim in your neck of the woods,
Central Jersey, ever since then.
So ten plus years.
Mashallah.
Going to the books, the likes, yeah.
Mashallah, very good, very good.
And today you have a presentation for us.
Omar, is it loaded up?
Yes.
Okay.
Two minutes, we'll get into that.
But I want you to tell us what
are your main specialty, it seems, is now
the proofs of prophethood, right?
That's what you put out there a lot.
So while Omar fires up the presentation that
you have today, why don't you share with
everybody, off the top of your head, the
proofs of prophethood that are the simplest to
transmit to people and most convincing.
So, bismillah, sultan wa rasulullah, that's actually a
very difficult question.
And part of what we're trying to mention
is that, like, every prophet was sent with
proofs that were solid for the people of
their time, resonated best.
But since the Prophet ﷺ was sent for
all of humanity, you know, his proofs had
to be so diverse, such a multitude, that
some resonate with one demographic or generation and
others with another.
But what's really also interesting is that a
pattern I found in the works of our
scholars, when they were discussing the Latin Nubuwwa,
and that's something really beautiful, that our tradition
has endless texts about the proofs of prophethood,
because we don't believe in blind faith.
We believe in blind surrender.
Once you know it's God, then He deserves
our trust.
He's the most wise, not us, right?
But it's logical to expect to not know
the logic, so long as you know that
the Supreme Being is the one, you know,
giving you the guidance.
But when it comes to prophethood, they never
had any qualms with establishing this is why
He is, and there's no blind faith.
So they would often mention that this proof
is enough on its own, and that proof
is enough on its own.
So for some people, it's one proof.
For other people, it's a cumulative, right?
And that's because, like, people's quote-unquote common
sense or their logic is not one undifferentiated
category.
We all have different sort of sensibilities.
So, for instance, like, if you think of
character, that has been a really big one,
to be honest.
And I always wonder, like, how can someone
being a nice person mean they're a prophet?
Because I'm a great guy, for example.
It doesn't mean I'm a prophet.
So sometimes the logic doesn't follow.
But Ibn Taymiyyah used to say that whenever
there's a claimant to prophethood, that's the missing
puzzle piece.
They're either the best of the best or
the worst of the worst.
So once you just inspect their akhlaaq, their
track record, their character, there's actually no middle
ever historically.
They're either, like, the most virtuous ever, impeccable,
and that's why Allah elected them for prophethood,
or they're the scum of the earth, manipulative
and exploitative and ignorant and so on and
so forth.
So character could really be enough.
It really can when you just compare and
contrast.
The other one is accomplishments.
In the time of the Prophet ﷺ, Ibn
al-Qayyim says that was actually the most
common one.
Like, when did people come into Islam in
waves?
They respected strength and power.
It wasn't his akhlaaq.
It wasn't his miracles.
It wasn't the eloquence, sort of the miraculousness
of the Qur'an.
It was like that accomplishment is beyond human
effort.
We respect that, you know?
And it's interesting also that some people can
appreciate that nowadays without being a little bit
of a historian or having some background.
It's like, oh, wait, the 100 most influential
people, that famous Michael Hart book Muslims love
to brag about.
When you compare him with even Michael Hart,
like, it's so funny.
In the intro of the book, he's literally
apologizing.
Like, I know choosing Muhammad's kind of going
to upset people.
It's like politically correct.
He's an American historian writing this stuff in
the 90s, right?
Or 80s and 90s.
So he says, but really, there was no
comparison.
There's no competition.
Like him, second place is, you know, leaps
and bounds.
So you begin to say, oh, man, there's
something beyond human here.
This is divine aid.
For others, it was the prophecies.
That's one that, to be honest, I think
is probably one of the most easily appreciated,
timelessly, which is that, you know, you can't
even nitpick at the Ahadith and authenticity or
anything.
Like it is, as Al-Qadir Iyad, rahimahullah,
said that this genre of Ahadith is like
an unending stream and a shoreless ocean.
That's what he calls it, right?
And so, yeah, like his biography is a
miracle.
And what a thousand years of momentum, inertia
came out of his biography.
Ibn Hazm, rahimahullah, says, no, only the 23
years are enough of a miracle to deliver
you to yaqeen, to conviction about him.
Others are going to say character.
Then there's the Quran, of course, accomplishments, the
physical miracles he performed.
All of those are different chapters of the
book, Final Prophet, which I don't make money
off of, by the way.
Free download.
Just pull it off the website, inshallah.
I like the concept that Michael Hart brought,
that when you look at someone's, quote unquote,
genius, which we don't attribute to the Prophet,
that the religion he brought is due to
genius.
Yes, you may say he, we do say
prophets are the most intelligent of all men,
but what they did is not due to
genius.
But when he looked at it, he looked
at, for example, Jesus, it's in the spiritual
realm.
Newton, it's in the rational realm.
Like da Vinci, Michelangelo, these guys, it's in
the realm of the arts.
You could probably look at some political people
and say it's in the realm of statecraft
or conquests.
Very few people have crossed all the genres
and entered into all the different genres.
So we have from the Prophet, peace be
upon him, spiritual mastery, dominance over his enemies,
law was brought from him, a new order
of civilizations, or at least gave order to
the existing civilizations.
So it crosses over, and that's one of
the reasons why he said, I can't not
put him as number one.
No one else crosses over.
And not just crosses over, he outdoes everyone
in every domain.
Wait a minute, was he sort of like
politically savvy or scientifically savvy?
Or was he like an existential philosopher?
Was he sort of like a mental health
master?
What was he, right?
You know, like if you think about Alfonso
de Lamartine, the French historian, he says something
about this also, it's really cool.
He says that, how do you measure greatness?
If you measure greatness by the smallness of
means and the greatness of outcomes, can anyone
ever be compared with Muhammad?
It's not just you're the best of the
best, head and shoulders above the rest.
But the idea is in the middle of
the desert, in primitive backward Arabia, isolated from
the rest of the world and its arts
and its philosophies and its military, how out
of nowhere comes everything, right?
There's a huge question mark here.
Right.
One of the greatest, Constantine stood on the
empire.
Like he was the greatest of them.
Yeah.
On the shoulders of greats, on the shoulders
of giants.
Aristotle built off of Socrates and Plato.
And all of those are like the top
10 or whatever.
I wouldn't know because, you know, we don't
do Greek philosophy.
I'm just kidding.
I'm just kidding.
I'm not kidding, actually.
Kidding, but not kidding.
But you're right.
Yeah, you're right.
All those greats.
You had a platform already.
All those greats.
Yeah.
All those, the greats of the Roman emperor.
Like how are you great when you were
born into it?
Right.
Anything that you did is just basically adding
to it.
Another one that I love from, say Neville
Buckett even recognized this when he said, you
know, he's been to the Persians and he's
been with the Byzantines.
And he said, oh, master, where did you
learn all this?
Like the way that you're carrying, composing yourself
is not a normal fit, just a fit
way to do things.
Clearly there is, he's been educated.
And that's where the famous Hadith of my
Lord educated me.
And he did it excellently.
So the key is what you said, the
smallness of means, which was basically, who was
educating there in Arabia on how to act,
how to behave?
People, missionaries and Christian academics also love to
say he plagiarized from the Bible.
Yeah.
And I like to say sometimes that like,
let's imagine that bizarre hypothetical.
Because historically, like there's no remnants whatsoever of
anything biblical translated into Arabic until basically Andalusia,
Muslim Spain, sort of the renaissance of literature
and all that stuff.
So hundreds of years after him, you know,
they say that it was like 100 or
200 years after the Prophet, and these are
like Western academics admitting this, that you have
partial, incomplete, poorly translated copies of the Bible
trickling into Arabic.
So let's just play dumb.
And for argument's sake, say he actually had
in Arabic of all languages, the complete version
and the accurate version of the original Gospels
in the middle of Arabia, of all places,
and he was able to write from the
world that he understood, like Latin and Greek
and Aramaic.
Like, OK, fine.
What about the Arabic of the Quran now?
The Quran says, we know that they say,
He's being food fed by another human being.
This tongue language they're attributing him to as
plagiarizing from is a foreign non-Arabic tongue.
And this is a clearly Arabic Quran, which
is a masterpiece of the Arabic language.
So like, pick your poison.
And that's where, have you ever read the
Kitab al-Muqaddas in the Arabic Bible?
It doesn't come close to sounding like a
sacred text.
Translations are not the same, right?
So even translation into Arabic, which is a
sacred language of another sacred text, right?
But you could tell when human beings are
involved in something.
And the Kitab al-Muqaddas, the sacred book,
which is basically the Bible in Arabic, try
to read it, try to listen to it.
It does not, it sounds like clearly something
that, just prose that someone wrote, has none
of the rhythm that you would imagine of
a sacred text.
So clearly, because it's translated.
Also, I would say that there are things,
there are details in those very stories that
are unknown to the Egyptians, sorry, to the
Christians and Jews, and came to be known
afterwards.
And one of the most famous examples of
that being, that Haman was the name of
the pharaoh's assistant, pharaoh's builder.
Right, right.
I mean, there's so much.
There's things that were, until today, historical inaccuracies
that the Quran, like walked around the minefield
and didn't step on, right?
Then there's other aspects of things it didn't
say, like pharaoh's body being preserved, or Haman
being his assistant.
That it did say, despite the...
So like, it doesn't include the inaccuracies there,
and it adds stuff that is not there,
so it really wasn't from there.
Yeah, it's very hard to sell plagiarism when
you have those features.
When you have details that weren't in the
first one, and you have, and you avoided
those inaccuracies.
And mostly, I would say the biggest difference
is the identity of the pharaoh.
In the Bible, pharaoh is the half, is
the stepbrother of Moses.
And pharaoh was a good man who dies.
And then the stepbrother is like a spoiled
brat who can't stand Moses.
Because his father loved Moses more than he
loved him.
That's not the story at all in the
Quran.
Right, so where's the plagiarism?
The plagiarism of the pharaonic sort of personalities
is all over there.
It's right.
I mean, the very term pharaoh exists biblically,
with the king of Abraham, the king of
Joseph, the king of Moses.
The Quran mentions it 64 times, I think
it was, only with the king of Moses.
And you just look up Encyclopedia Britannica.
The term didn't exist before then.
And even if it existed, the time of
Joseph apparently had like a foreign invader king
from Palestine.
They were indigenous Indians, so you couldn't call
him a pharaoh, because pharaoh means like elite
house or elite bloodline of Egyptians.
Everything about it is sort of like complicated.
Where is your Final Prophet book downloadable from?
You just Google Yathain Final Prophet, you'll find
it there.
If you need a printed copy, it's available
on Amazon, but you can just download it
for free as a PDF as well.
Very good.
Omar, if you could please put that.
That's really honestly one of the most important
things, because the proofs of a creator, the
idea of proving a creator, it's mutadawal, it's
out there, right?
The idea of proving a creator.
That's number one.
It's out there.
You can find it even from Christians who
took from Muslim texts or otherwise.
That's number one.
Number two, proving a creator is wonderful and
everything, but it doesn't prove to you Islam.
It doesn't prove to you anything about the
creator, except certain attributes.
He exists, he has power, he has knowledge,
right?
He has will, he has volition.
It proves those things.
You can prove those rashly, but it doesn't
prove his name is Allah.
It doesn't prove what he wants from us.
Proof of prophethood is a lot harder, because
you actually have to do the work of
transmitting about the Quran and about the messenger
himself.
But once you do prove that, then you've
proven everything, right?
So proof of prophethood, it would include in
it God and all the sifat.
I teach in my class here that God
refers to only the rationally attainable attributes of
the creator, that phrase.
But the word Allah also implies in it
all of the transmitted attributes of Allah in
the Quran, of the creator in the Quran.
So proof of prophethood brings you belief in
Allah and the prophet and all of Islam.
Whereas that's not available in merely rational proof.
So proofs of the prophet need to be
studied far more than the rational proofs on
the existence of a creator.
Alright, so that segment is done.
Let's move to the next segment, which is
the title of today's live stream.
I love this picture here.
Omar, let's fire that up.
Alright, look at that.
The art of fighting without fighting.
Usul al-fiqh edition.
Look at that little picture there.
Come at me, bro.
And that's what some of these...
That's the reality of some of these guys
on Twitter.
That's what they look like.
I'll plead the fifth on that one.
Actually, I probably just broke one of the
rules that you're going to go over right
now.
We'll see.
We'll have a redemption slide, inshallah.
Okay, good.
Alright, let's kick this off.
Bismillah.
So I don't see the slides, but I'm
going to trust, inshallah, that they're aligned with
that segment of the discussion.
How much time do we have, Sheikh Shadi?
If you go onto YouTube on your phone
and minimize it or lower the volume, you'll
see what slide Omar has on.
Okay, cool.
Yeah.
Let me do that.
And are we cut off for time?
No, we have a while.
We usually cut off...
We got 30, 40 minutes.
Whatever you want, 20, 30, 40 minutes.
Okay, I see the slides now.
You put it on.
Okay.
So this slide deck is actually...
I didn't have time to brand it for
NBF for you guys.
No problem.
But it's a short presentation I gave recently
at Yaqeen Institute internally on how does a
layman navigate the spectrum?
Because, you know, alhamdulillah, as an organization at
Yaqeen, we have over 100, between part-
and full-time employees, and some of us
are specialized in certain domains that are not
necessarily research-related, whether it be marketing or
design or engineering or video or whatnot.
So how to just conceptualize all of this.
So obviously someone like Dr. Shaddi or a
student of knowledge knows that we study this
or we should be studying this in the
usool al-fiqh, the legal theory discipline.
But I remember when I first was taught
this, read a few books on this, I
remember vividly feeling like I was educationally hijacked.
Subhanallah.
A term I keep saying because this is
taught in usool al-fiqh, yeah, but it
actually pertains to everything, like every aspect of
Islam.
How do I stratify?
Is this like a deal-breaker or not?
Is this something I should feel my faith
threatened by a difference in or not?
Because sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes
the answer is no.
But you're never given this epistemological framework, this
sort of how can I be consistent if
I have the guts, the courage, the taqwa
to be consistent, to be principled.
So these are the principles.
It's not actually specific to usool al-fiqh
anywhere, any view, whether it's in aqidah, creed,
whether it's in fiqh or otherwise.
Tazkiyah, right?
So next slide.
This is how I think we can conceptualize
this simply enough, right?
So not every difference is a disagreement, right?
Some differences are differences of variety, right?
Meaning it's all traceable to the Prophet Sallallahu
Alaihi Wasallam.
And in that case, we should all agree
that it is haram to object, right?
Because you'd be objecting to something traced to
the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam.
So for instance, maalik yawm al-deen, maalik
yawm al-deen, right?
Anfusikum wa anfasikum, right?
The qiraat of the Qur'an.
Or the wordings of the adhan and iqamah.
You know, whether you do it tikrar or
not, the repetition or not, you know, between
the hanaf and the ruju.
These are actually variety.
These were both, these both have a degree
of traceability to the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam.
They're not right and wrong.
They're right and right.
The most we discuss in this category of
variety, ikhtilaf tanawwar, is what's the better thing
to do in this context, but we're not
allowed to say it's a wrong thing to
do, right?
And you know, you can even think of
like Islamic work.
Like, should we be in the knowledge domain,
the education domain, or an inspiration domain?
Should we be doing more activism, or should
we be doing sort of more political advocacy,
mobilization, printing of masahib, whatever, social work, whatever
it's going to be.
This is variety.
No one can say those are not from
Islam.
We're just sort of tweaking.
We can't undermine any of that, because you'd
be undermining something that is axiomatically Islamic, categorically
Islamic.
Then there's disagreements.
Disagreements is when there's rights and wrongs.
Halal and haram, haq and batil, right?
And when these disagreements exist, they can't all
be right at the same time.
There's times when we're going to excuse them
and times when we're not.
So when we're not going to excuse them,
it doesn't mean we're necessarily going to be
hostile with someone that has them.
But we're just not willing to entertain the
conversation that this could be right.
It's categorically wrong.
And so think of just easy examples, things
that violate ijma'a, right?
Allah is one, the Quran's his book, Muhammad's
his final prophet, salallahu alayhi wa sallam, dhuhr
is for our hearts, hijab is mandatory.
We're not open to sort of like your
acrobatics to tell me why the whole ummah
is sort of like misfired on that one,
right?
It's not up for discussion.
It doesn't mean I have to sort of
like be red in the face about it
every time I meet someone or hear of...
No, that's like a protocol issue for later.
But let me get to where the actual
issue is, the actual sort of practical benefit
for a lot of us listening to this
podcast or the likes or in Islamic work
or in Islam-Muslim spaces deal with, which
is excusable differences.
How do we know?
Because sometimes we have misplaced concreteness.
We think it's concretely unexcusable, illegitimate or the
likes, right?
How do we know when something is unexcusable?
The easiest way for time purposes and is
just matters of agreement when the scholars have
unanimously agreed on something or a number of
things because the Prophet, alayhi salatu wa salam,
you know, said and the hadith has some
substantiation into its chain that my ummah will
not agree upon, falsehood.
And he also said, this is a more
authentic chain, this is mutawatir, like massly transmitted,
like there will always be a group of
my ummah visibly on the truth, apparent, al
-haqq al-bahireen.
That means if the ummah was wrong, someone
would have stepped up and said, excuse me
guys, right?
There will always be dissent, meaning disagreement, to
make sure the truth is never absent from
the ummah for a moment.
And so typically excusable, we're talking about scholarly
views.
There is scholarly precedence for them.
They don't come out of nowhere in an
unprecedented way, right?
Feel free, Shaykh, if you want to just
like, we can send them in this, if
anything I'm dropping or any blind spots, please.
No problem, no problem.
So next slide.
So scholars, again, disagree now.
They have conflicting views.
Let's say they have a set number of
views and these scholars don't condemn each other,
right?
So what does that mean?
When they don't condemn each other, they still
agree to pray behind each other or whatever.
We're saying these views are valid.
Before we get to these three points right
now, the view is valid.
I'm not saying it's correct.
I'm saying it is irrational.
And this is the view of the majority.
المخطئ عن المصوّبة That the mujtahid, the scholars
that exert themselves to arrive at a view,
those views are valid.
If certain boxes are checked, let's leave that
out of the conversation for now.
But valid means we don't know until the
day of judgment, which one was correct.
All we know is that we're all exerting
our capacity.
And if we wind up being correct, we
get two rewards.
And if we're incorrect, we get one reward.
That's it.
That's what the hadith says, right?
حَكَمَ الْحَاكَمُ فَاجْتَهَدَ فَأَصَبْ When a person passes
their judgment, of course you need to be
qualified to pass judgments to begin with.
You pass your judgment and you turn out
to be correct, you get two rewards.
Your effort, your sort of your trophy.
But the trophy is Allah.
It's not something you sort of like, you
know, flex on people and smash over people's
heads, right?
It's about Allah.
And then if you're wrong, you get one
reward, meaning for effort.
Yes.
So now as a layman, what do I
do with this?
I'm going to say, okay, the scholars had
a set number of views and they didn't
condemn each other for these views.
This means they agree on the validity, not
correctness, validity of these views, right?
So let's use the hijab example.
They said, does she cover the face or
not cover the face?
There's a whole long discussion, right?
They're both valid to sort of write one
off as liberal and one is extreme.
And there's always fingers pointing to the other
side.
It is unjustified.
They all actually agree that you're the one
out of line.
In that case, they're disagreeing while agreeing that
you're uncalled for, unwarranted.
The second thing is when they don't condemn
each other, that means they agree it's speculative.
It's steady, right?
Like when someone pulls out something and says
like, zakah cannot be spent on da'wah.
For instance, I'm sorry, I don't mean to
be forceful.
I'm just rushing.
But hold on.
If it were crystal clear, would they have
disagreed on this?
When Abu Hanifa, said it could be used
on Quranic instruction, that's a form of jihad.
Or when Imam Ahmed, it could be spent
on hajj and Umrah because the Prophet shallallahu
alaihi wasallam told Aisha, yes, women have to
perform jihad, but jihad that is void of
combat, hajj and Umrah.
So like, if it were clear, did they
get this out of their pocket?
No, they didn't.
Would they have disrespected the Sharia in that
way?
That is the implication of saying about something
they differed over as crystal crystal clear.
That's the problem.
The implication is you're saying that they're all
like ignorant or they're all sellouts.
Right?
No, they let each other disagree, which meant
they understood that there is some interpretive bandwidth
there.
Right?
And the terminology and the narrations give fuel
to different opinions.
يحتمل المعاني I'll give you a real quick
example.
I was taught growing up that Imam Ahmed,
this is exactly how it was said to
me, Imam Ahmed had an illegitimate view, basically,
that it is mandatory to fast the day
of doubt.
You know, that it's Ramadan, not the day
of doubt.
Actually, Imam Ahmed, rahimahullah, like now that I'm
Hanbali and I know his proofs, it's a
pretty like, there's so much substantiation there.
You're going to say, but it says, if
it's cloudy, complete, atimmu.
He's going to say, no, that wording is
disputed.
That wording, atimmu was disputed.
The more authentic wording is uqduru, calculate it.
Meaning like, account for it.
He doesn't mean canonical.
Account for it.
You're going to say, you know, faqduru lahu
just means like, account for it means assume.
Why this or that?
Say no.
faqduru in the Quran, qadara alayhi rizqahu means
Allah constricted their rizq.
So it means constrict shaaban.
And just start Ramadan.
Subhanallah.
It has a linguistic basis.
It has a hadith sort of like, authenticity
basis.
There's a lot.
I'm not saying I do and don't follow
it.
I'm generally Hanbali, but the point is, you
need to always know there's more to the
story.
I remember I went to the Hatsimul Hajj
once.
We were praying taraweeh all Ramadan together in
a Hanafi masjid.
And in the Hanafi masjid, they pray their
witr in a particular format.
Their witr involves praying, for those that don't
know, it looks like maghrib, right?
They pray tashahud in the middle and then
tashahud in the end, in the second and
third raka'ah.
So I said, Sheikh, the hadith is clear.
That's why I said so.
Sheikh, the hadith is clear that your witr
should not resemble your maghrib.
So they smiled at me.
You know that grandpa, you're such a fool.
He smiled at me and says, we don't
recite.
They're going to tell you we don't recite
out loud in the third raka'ah of
maghrib.
Subhanallah.
And so I smiled and said, why do
they always have an answer?
He said, that's the nature of these subjects.
There's always an answer.
Your ignorance of the answer doesn't mean that
there's no answer.
Anyway, so the third part is the truth
must be among those views, meaning there's no
room when they differ on a set number
of views for there to be a third
one and we covered that in the previous
slide, the issue of unprecedented.
No one can come now and say, hijab
means modesty.
It doesn't actually refer to a garb or
boundaries for the garb.
No, I'm sorry.
The ummah was not in the dark between
these two views and they're all wrong until
God's gift to the world, you showed up.
I guess it's just like astronomically like colossal
levels of conceit to bring about an unprecedented
view.
You know what?
I want to make two points that you
mentioned there.
You know who, the people who have that
mentality usually come from the demonstrable fields, sciences,
because their heroes made discoveries and inventions that
everyone thought was crazy and then turned out
to be acceptable because in the field of
science and demonstration, you always want to push
the boundary, whereas religion is a transmitted field.
Transmitted knowledge wants to go, is more accurate
the further back you go.
That's the difference between the, that's why those
types of people, these reformers tend to be,
they idolize those people in the demonstrable fields.
They're trying to be like that.
That's the first point I want to mention.
Second point you brought up, when he's correct,
he has two rewards.
So both of them have the reward with
Allah for trying and I always thought possibly
the second reward or the sign of it
comes in the acceptance of the other scholars
that your view has validity.
That's one possibility.
Yeah, I've never come across that.
Yeah.
It's a process, but it's beautiful.
Yeah.
Perhaps, yeah, yeah.
MashaAllah.
You know, Sheikh, also like, we just want
to qualify for people that we don't mean
that like Islam is stuck in antiquity.
Of course, you're not saying that.
Yeah.
But there are principles in Islam that are
made with built-in flexibility to engage the
evolving dynamics and push the boundaries or apply
at least to those on the frontiers of
invention and progress and the likes.
But when it comes to the constants of
our deen, like it's almost like our deen
is like perfectly designed in a way that
like the orbits of the planets, there is
an orbit.
And that's why the planets don't crash.
But at the same time, they're moving within
their respected orb.
So respecting the constants of the deen is
the only way actually to move forward.
Correct, yeah.
JazakAllah khair for that, Sheikh.
So, you know, even I was thinking, I
heard a guy, I'm sure you've come across
this sort of like this revisionist trope.
It's like low-hanging fruit, I guess for
us.
You talk about like, we misunderstood what the
real problem of Qawm al-Lut was.
This, we think it was because of like
same-* act.
It was actually because of *.
Because, you know, Surah al-Ankabut says, Innakum
lataqta'una al-sabeel You're like road bandits.
So they were like, the problem was actually
*.
And you have this whole revisionist thing of
like it's because there was no consent.
Because consent, obviously, the modern paradigm.
The reductionist modern paradigm of it being everything.
But the problem with that is, if this
really was the case, that means not just
were 1400 years of scholars monkeys, right?
Didn't understand anything.
But it also meant that the sahabah, radhiAllahu
anhu, the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam failed to
raise them, right?
He failed as an educator.
And that all means that Allah Azzawajal, when
He told us this is a clear book,
that's not true as well because apparently there's
nothing clear about it if everything is a
discussion.
So I just want people to also keep
in mind the implications of not recognizing the
constants or the off-limits points, right?
On both poles, right?
Next slide, inshallah.
So what do we do?
What do we do in light of this?
Just remember the four rules.
The layman is not entitled to a personal
opinion.
Everyone needs to understand this.
You know Ibn Abd Al-Barr?
Since I'm going to be pandering to the
Maliki's today.
Ibn Abd Al-Barr, rahimAllah, the great Maliki
scholar, he reports ijma' scholarly agreement.
anna almuqallida laysa biAAalim wa anna alAAilma maAArifatu
alhaqi bidaleelih that the muqallid, the layman, you
know muqallid, layman, it comes from qilada.
Qilada means like a chain around your neck.
It means a collar.
Meaning you need to understand that you're just
being dragged along.
And that's why taqlid, and this is not
controversial, taqlid is haram except for darura.
The only reason you would imitate someone in
your deen is because dhuhr time is going
to end and I'm not going to be
a scholar or a mujtahid by the time
asr time comes.
So I have no choice.
But ideally we should all sort of own
our own deen and religious opinions.
So he's saying but recognize that.
Read the rule.
Where are you?
Who am I?
You are not a alim.
And that ilm is knowing the truth and
the evidence is for it, right?
What does he mean you're not a alim?
He's not trying to insult you and say
you're like an ignorant fool.
He's trying to tell you that it's haram
for you to have a view.
You don't have a view.
You're following someone else's view.
So if you don't have a view, you
can't be defending a view or promoting a
view.
You don't have one.
You don't have one.
That's number one.
The second bullet, the scholar is not, now
the scholar, check this out, the scholar is
not entitled to impose their view on others.
Think about that.
Why did like Abu Yusuf al-Qadi and
Muhammad al-Hassan al-Shaibani or Ibn al
-Qasim or others, anyone, why did the greatest
students of the founders of the four schools
sometimes disagree with their teacher because they were
forced to?
Why were they forced to?
Because they understood that it is haram for
me, Allah will hold me accountable to my
jihad.
It's haram for me to follow someone more
knowledgeable than me, more pious than me when
on a particular issue, my jihad delivered me
elsewhere.
And that's why they also don't impose it
on others.
That's why they didn't impose it on their
students or we shouldn't impose it on the
peers in scholarship.
I'm punishable for departing from my jihad.
I'm rewarded for my jihad.
And so how can you bully me into
doing something that is contrary to what Allah
is rewarding me for and Allah punish me
if I ignore?
That's the idea you want to think about
here.
As a scholar, you can't even do it,
let alone a layman.
The third thing is leadership.
Leaders are entitled to compliance within a spectrum
of valid views.
And that's like a rule, like respecting an
imam's leadership in the masjid or a husband's
leadership in the home or the management's leadership
in any sort of organization or collective, the
state's leadership to pick a moonsighting view, whatever
it's going to be.
Leaders are entitled to pick a view because
you can't get stuck in decision paralysis, right?
You don't have to believe in the view.
You just have to take their right to
choose one, right?
No gaslighting, no pressuring, nothing.
The last thing, and this is very important,
which is that cooperation.
Someone shared with me a clip recently speaking
about the importance of cordiality and cooperation, which
I really appreciated.
Cooperation, which some will call unity, that's why
I worded it like that, follows a pros
-cons calculus.
It has nothing to do with everything I
just explained.
It has nothing to do with valid versus
invalid views.
So, like, cooperating in obedience, ta'awwano al
-birri wa-taqwa, you know, like, if someone
believes there's a prophet after Muhammad ﷺ, for
sure that's an invalid view.
If you believe that God is part of
a triune godhead, right, eternity, invalid view, fine.
Inexcusable, fine.
But I can still collaborate with you.
So what about people that have so much
more in common, right?
Even, like, the scholars agree, generally, if you
look at how they operate, they agree that
shunning a Muslim is only allowed when there
is a clear pro there, like a clear
benefit, tough love or sort of, like, protecting
the ummah.
So that's a very dynamic rule that they
agree on.
Like, when is it actually in the best
interest of community or ummah to not interact
with someone?
And we should let those in the kitchen
make those decisions, by the way.
Yeah.
Yeah, next slide.
I want to just make a quick comment
on the compliance.
When you're sort of managing an institution with
hundreds of people in it, you oftentimes need
policies.
There have to be predictable policies for everyone
to know.
And whenever people come and say, well, there
are other opinions.
So I always tell them, yes, there are.
But for practicality's sake, we have to choose
one, right?
So that all of us could live predictably.
One of these, every masjid does, regards the
prayer times.
Like, salat al-asr, are we going to
pray in the earlier time or the latter
time?
You have to pick one.
You can't just do that.
You also can't flip-flop.
You'll confuse everybody.
And you can't allow every group to come
in, pray Jemaah how they want.
Right?
Otherwise, you're going to have chaos.
So a lot of times, it's policy.
It's a perfect example, Jeff.
You just gave two examples.
One example of like an invalid view that
I'm going to cooperate with those who subscribe
to it.
I gave that example.
You just gave an example of a valid
view that I simply just can't house because
I'll just drive people crazy.
Correct.
It's confusing.
So it has nothing to do with valid
and invalid.
It has to do with sort of mafsada.
Exactly.
That's why when those guys come and argue,
happens all the time, I say, Habibi, I'm
not going to sit here and discuss haqq
and batil.
I'm just going to tell you what the
policy of the masjid is.
That's it.
Got a point of policy.
Yeah.
We're not just discussing haqq and batil.
Me and you, on our way out of
Maghrib, or on our way out of Isha
at 9.50 p.m., we're not having
a discussion on haqq and batil here.
Right?
To decide what is the truth of God's
will.
That's not going to happen right here.
So this is the masjid policy for different
reasons.
Right?
And that's it.
And we have to enforce it.
So that's sometimes, a lot of times, people
conflate policy with capital T truth.
Right?
Exclusively.
It's not the case at all.
Nothing but facts.
Yeah.
Okay.
So now moving on, because I made the
mistake that I told myself we're going to
present, but I made it anyway, which is
I spent too much time already on the
fiqh of it.
And here's why I think it's so much
time.
Yeah.
In this ayah in front of you, you
know, Ibn Taymiyyah on his book on unity,
or his discussions on unity, he says that
Allah Azza wa Jal's two descriptions of the
human being, dhaloom and jahoolah, unjust, ignorant, they
actually summarize all of the reasons for disunity
among them.
Dhoolm and jahoolah.
Dhoolm and jahoolah.
So being unfair, transgressive, and being ignorant, unaware.
Of course, ignorance, I just removed it.
I removed it in three slides.
We're done with ignorance.
It's over.
It's actually the easiest of the two.
It's the easier of the two.
The dhaloom is the harder part.
Because we're like, by nature, we're selfish creatures.
Right?
That's going to run us into a whole
lot of messes, having double standards, having our
group prejudice, our individual preference, our clouded judgment.
We're more emotional than we are rational.
And so the rational, even scriptural stuff, is
actually the smaller part of the puzzle.
But how do we work past our emotionality
and our egotism and the diseases of our
hearts that manifest in religious sort of discourse
and all of that?
And so if jahoolah is going to be
removed with ilm, education, knowledge, then dhaloom is
going to be removed with taqwa, with tazkiyah,
right?
With spiritual labor.
Only through tazkiyah can you bring about pious
restraint, right?
To check, to not bully others, to bow
to my views.
You know?
That's what you're doing.
You're asking people to bow down to you,
your group, my, my, my, my, my.
It's like that caricature sometimes we draw about
the idol worshiper who's like, you know, obsessing
over the, make sure he eats, and he's,
we have an inner idol sometimes, an invisible
idol.
And we want others to bow to it,
right?
And so only through working hard, putting in
work, labor, to humble, will we be able
to humble ourselves, or Allah will humble us
through that, to be more accurate, to realize
that, yeah, I don't have a right to
do this.
I need my brothers and sisters.
I can't uphold this mission alone.
It basically prevents us from carrying out the
disagreements in the wildest, fullest iterations of them,
right?
And if we don't spend enough time on
morality, and spirituality, and tazkiyah, we're gonna find
ourselves in a lot of the places we
find ourselves in today, right?
Even if we have the ilm.
You know, actually, you can jump straight into
the next slide.
I'll show you that even if we are
scholars, we can still fall into this.
So this is Ibn Aqil al-Hanbali.
He died about 950 years ago, and it's
not a streak we should be proud of,
but read what he has to say.
He says, for those that are just listening
in, he says, I have personally witnessed how
nothing prevents people from transgressing but their inability,
meaning not their taqwa, not their fear of
God.
I'm referring to the common folk, but even
the scholars.
During the reign of Ibn Yunus, the political
leader, the hands of the Hanbalis were unleashed.
They would unfairly abuse the Shafi'is in
matters of jurisprudence to the point where they
would not allow them to openly recite the
Basmala or perform Qunoot, meaning Infajr, which the
Shafi'is do, which are both matters of
Ijtihad, scholarly interpretation.
When the era of Nizam came, or Nizam,
and Ibn Yunus passed away, the Hanbalis lost
their power, and the Shafi'is then overstepped
against them like tyrannical rulers.
They prepared for them imprisonment, and they harmed
the people with slander, and the scholars' accusations
of anthropomorphism, likening God to his creation.
I reflected on the situations of both groups,
and found that neither of them had internalized
the ethics of sacred knowledge.
What are these actions but those of soldiers
who assert themselves during their reign, and occupy
the mosques in their idleness, or with their
idleness?
SubhanAllah.
And it's tragic.
Ajeeb.
Yeah.
This is us.
This is our destiny.
Ummah.
You know when the Prophet ﷺ, I mean
that famous mosque in Medina, people often visit
Masjid al-Ijabah, it's called the Masjid of
Response, because it's where the Prophet ﷺ very
famously got a response for three of his
du'as.
He entered and prayed two rak'ahs, the
Hayth al-Mu'awiyah, in Sahih Muslim.
No, the Hayth al-Sa'ad.
He entered the Masjid of Banu Mu'awiyah,
and he raised his hands for a long
time after two rak'ahs, and then he
turned to the people and he explained, I
asked Allah for three things, and He gave
me two, and He withheld one.
I asked Him that He not allow an
external enemy to ever eradicate my ummah, and
He promised me that.
He said, if the whole planet were to
unite against your ummah, it would not be
able to remove it, or put it into
extinction.
And I asked Him to not allow some
plight or epidemic to annihilate my ummah, and
He promised me that.
وَسَأَلْتُهُ أَلَّا يَجْعَلَ بَأْسَهُمْ بَيْنَهُمْ فَمَنَعْنِيهَا And I
asked Him to not allow their hostilities to
be against each other, their aggressions to be
inward facing.
He withheld that one from me.
It hurts, because first of all, this is
your Prophet ﷺ, this is what he's worried
about.
So are we worried about this?
SubhanAllah.
The second thing is that Allah said, no,
this is going to be a recurring, you
know, Medusa head of a problem that's going
to keep rearing its ugly head on the
ummah.
And it doesn't mean all times, all places.
We need to work to be the exception
to that.
Right?
And all over, like you know, let me,
after sort of blasting the Hanbalis, Ibn Aqil
Hanbali's hands right now, let me reverse it.
It's all of us.
You know, Imam Tabari, rahimahullah, did not get
a proper burial.
Two?
Imam Tabari, Sayyid al-Mufsid.
SubhanAllah.
Because when he came to Baghdad, he had
a book like that documented all of the
points of scholarly agreement, ijmaa, or the scholarly
views, and Imam Ahmad's views weren't in there.
Hmm.
So like the toxic mobs beat him up
and they stoned him in his house.
And how dare you disrespect our, you know,
Imam Ahmad was the last of the Imams.
SubhanAllah.
He was not yet in the books if
you will.
Yeah.
Right?
SubhanAllah.
So they took it as like an affront.
SubhanAllah.
And so they say that they buried him
almost incognito in the middle of the night
because he was stuck in his house for
so long.
SubhanAllah.
When he eventually died, they couldn't even make
public calls for the janazah.
Hajeeb.
And this is not like an isolated incident.
Like Imam al-Bukhari, you know Imam al
-Bukhari, rahimahullah, when he came to Nishapur, when
he came to Nishapur, for 12 kilometers, people
lined up throwing gold and like rice and
stuff at him.
Like, you know, that 6 foot, 10 foot
wedding line with the red carpet?
12 kilometers.
And then he gets to Nishapur and then
some people sort of like misrepresent him and
the whole Qur'an being created thing was
abound and someone kept trying to bait him
into a question for, you know, a gotcha
moment for, you know, TikTok.
So, and you call the Qur'an created,
you call the Qur'an created.
And so, what do you say about the
Qur'an?
So he used to ignore him and one
time he answered and he said, القرآن كلام
الله غير مخلوق وكلامنا مخلوق or نطقنا به
مخلوق right?
The sound we make is created but the
word of Allah is not created.
So this guy, of course, took it didn't
know what to do with it or he
knew exactly what he wanted to do with
it.
And so the greatest imam of Nishapur who
had those 12 kilometers of people out there
to celebrate said, whomever sits with Muhammad ibn
Isma'il is just like him.
SubhanAllah.
And everywhere he went, no one returned his
classes anymore.
SubhanAllah.
And he goes back to Bukhara and sort
of the jealous scholars of Bukhara also sort
of like rile up the government against him.
And that is why Imam Bukhari, rahimahullah, famously,
the night before he dies or a few
nights, he grabbed his beard and he said,
اللهم ضاقف علي الأرض بما رحبت فاقبضني إليك.
Oh Allah, there is no room for me
left on earth.
The earth is suffocating me.
So take me back to you.
SubhanAllah.
SubhanAllah.
And it's not just Imam Bukhari, you know
like, you know I was reading, you know
Ibn Taymiyyah, rahimahullah, like maybe a little bit
more uplifting.
When he got jumped in Egypt, he got
jumped for sort of speaking out against what
he believed were very extreme, superstitious, mystic groups.
Right?
Extreme, unsanctioned forms of tasawwuf.
And so, when his brothers and his students
tried to like bring it to the guys
who jumped it to Ibn Taymiyyah, he said,
I don't permit you to.
He said, you're either doing it for me
or for Allah or for yourselves.
If it's for Allah, they may be rewarded
for what they did.
SubhanAllah.
Because this is their Ijtihad, as far as
they know, their scholar is trustworthy and their
scholar told them I'm an enemy of Islam.
SubhanAllah.
He said, and if it's, that's if it's
for Allah, no.
If it's for me, I've forgone my right.
And if it's for you, go ahead and
do it, but you won't be allowed to
sit in my classes anymore.
SubhanAllah.
I follow it.
So like, we're going to have to rip
past the deadlocks.
We're just going to have to tolerate each
other and like, look inward a little bit.
Maybe the problem is a little bit here.
You know, Shaykh, I teach classes on like,
Tazkiyat al-Sauf classes at Mishka for years.
And, you know, it's the importance of biographies
what I'm trying to say because time is
now.
But biographies are so important because they are
what teach us, as Dr. Haytham often mentions,
like, how to instinctively respond when things hit
the fan.
The application of the theory.
Christians often say like, what would Jesus do,
right?
Yeah.
But in a sense, like, you try to
internalize the ethos of a certain spirit.
Yeah.
Right?
So the Islamic brotherhood spirit, the Islamic spiritual
refinement spirit, the Islamic ego-less spirit, when
you see it through biographies, it helps you
apply it in a different scenario instinctively.
That's the idea.
That's why Abu Hanifa, of course, as you
know, like, he used to say, فَرَاجِمُ الْرِجَالَ
أَحَبُّ إِلَيْنَا مِن كَثِيرٍ مِنَ الْفِقْرِ The biographies
of men, meaning the righteous, are dearer to
us than all of these technicalities about law.
Not to, عَوْذُ بِاللَّهِ disparage, you know, sacred
law.
But that's what he means.
Sometimes it can backfire.
Ibn al-Jawzi said this too.
It can become ammo.
Right?
I think even you, you one time shared
a very nice, it's kind of stuck with
me, a meme of sorts about Imam al
-Haddad, رحمه الله, who said, knowledge is like
fire, it can inflict sin, and it can
also burn the place down.
Right?
Ending on this, the receptacle.
That's right.
You're getting in there.
And so, when I was teaching Tazkiyah, the,
Imam al-Harawi, رحمه الله, Imam al-Harawi
is like a very interesting person.
He was like larger than life in his
life, but extremely controversial.
So for those that don't know, Imam al
-Harawi, رحمه الله, was like an athari, like
scripturalist, when it came to aqeedah, hanbali in
fiqh, sort of very much in the Sufi
tradition.
Right?
But he was always like, there was a
lot of beef.
Is this like Abd al-Qadir al-Jailani
then?
Perhaps, yeah.
So, al-Harawi, let me share with you
a few things.
I actually pulled them out.
I'm going to pull out my notes for
a second.
But basically he says, just to give you
a high level, I was subjected to the
sword, meaning the guillotine, execution, five times in
my life.
Subhanallah.
Not a single time was I ever told,
change your madhhab, like change any position.
I was told, be silent about those who
disagree with you, and I couldn't keep silent.
Right?
And so he felt a certain obligation to
teach a few things and so on and
so forth.
So, let me tell you about how shaytan
does this even with scholars when there's not
enough tazkir.
Right?
When Alp Arsalan, the famous commander, you know,
Manzikert, and Nizamiya Academy and whatnot.
Alp Arsalan, when he came to Herat, Afghanistan,
Al-Harawi is from Herat.
Yeah.
So a lot, lots of the Hanafi and
Shafi'i scholars, they came complaining of Al
-Harawi.
And like, they did to like, you know,
debate him and things like this.
And when he came, they refused to debate.
They rescinded.
But, let me share with you the part
that when, when he first came to town,
Alp Arsalan, the warrior, the commander, they were
all The scholars came to Al-Harawi's house.
And they enter his house.
And they tell him, the Sultan is here.
We need to go pay our respects.
But we wanted to come give you salam
first on our way there.
Okay.
And they had this sort of like plot
in mind.
They created a statue, a sanam made out
of brass.
Okay.
And they slipped it in his mihrab under
his sujada, under his prayer carpet.
Listen.
And then they go to the Sultan.
And they're like, there's this guy.
He's a deviant.
He's a mujassim.
He gives God human attributes, appendages, limbs, right?
And he even, he goes, you don't have
to believe us.
Go to his house.
You're gonna find that hidden under his sujada
that he prays on is a sanam.
And he claims that Allah corresponds to this
image.
A'udhu billah.
Wow.
So he sends, he sends the cops.
Devious.
They flip the carpet.
I mean, look.
Shaytan can get you to justify whatever you
want if your heart can house shaytan.
I don't care how knowledgeable you are.
Right?
Subhanallah.
So he sends the cops.
The cops sort of raid the house.
They find this.
He drags him, brings him in.
He's infuriated.
And he asks Al Harawi, what is this?
So he says, sanamun yu'malu minas sufra shibhi
lu'ba It's just like, it's an idol
made out of brass.
Looks like a stupid toy.
And he said, that's not what I'm asking
you.
He said, then what are you asking me,
He said, I'm asking what is this doing?
These guys, he saw them standing.
So like he knew.
These guys say you worship this and you
claim that Allah corresponds to this image.
And so Al Harawi, he raised his voice
very high.
And he said, subhanak hadha buhtanun azeem Glorified
you are.
This is the statement that Allah Azzawajal spoke.
For those that don't know, when Aisha radiallahu
anha was praying, she was slandering.
And that's all he said.
He refused to defend himself.
He just said, subhanaka hadha buhtanun azeem And
so Allah Azzawajal caused something to land in
the heart of Al-Barsilan.
This guy's being honest.
And that these guys tricked him.
So he sent him home like honored and
like all these apologies and stuff.
And then he turns to these guys and
he says, be honest with me and he
threatened them.
You know what they said?
They said, this guy gives us so much
trouble.
No one listens to us.
He has the crown.
SubhanAllah, subhanAllah.
Right?
And we wanted to, listen, fa aradna an
naqta sharrahu anna We wanted to protect the
people from his deviance.
You know, what is it?
SubhanAllah.
Trying to protect you from Moses, altering your
religion and the world.
You know, you know, it's great.
I'll tell you why they hated him.
I'll tell you why.
And we're, I'm in a safe space.
Good thing we're not recording.
I'll tell you why they hated him.
They hated al-Harawi because al-Harawi used
to consider Abu al-Hassan al-Ash'ari
to have left Islam.
Ajeeb.
SubhanAllah.
I don't, of course, I don't subscribe to
you.
But that's the idea.
That's the image he had.
That's sort of like the way he went
about explaining Islam or whatever it is.
Yeah.
They had this, they held this against him.
Right?
This person.
However, when Abu al-Waqt al-Sijzi rahimahullah
He says, I went to Naysabur.
I attended the classes of Abu al-Ma
'ali al-Juwayni.
Rahimahullah.
Great, great, great.
Of course, you know, scholar of the Shafi
'i Madhhab and Ash'ar.
I mean, like big name, right?
Notice that al-Sijzi, the student of al
-Harawi is attending for who?
Al-Juwayni.
But not all.
He says that when I got there, new
face.
Who are you?
Man ant.
He said, I am the servant of Sheikh
Abu Ismail al-Harawi.
So al-Juwayni said, Radiyallahu anhu.
Subhanallah.
May Allah be pleased with him.
You understand?
Like, you know, separate issue.
Like this is just deen for us, right?
Yeah.
And a lot of times when we don't
go through the biographies, we get caught up
in sort of like the intellectual conclusions or
sort of.
We see the ummah with those things and
I'm not sort of trivializing them.
But in the grander scheme of things, those
who we got our views from don't necessarily
hold those things, right?
Yeah.
Like even I'll be extra.
Let me not.
Let me just stay on something.
But al-Sijzi, when he heard al-Juwayni
say that, he reflected on all of the
noise regarding his teacher.
He said, Isma' ila aqla hadhal imam.
Wata'at al-tugham inhum illa kal-an
'am.
Hmm.
He said, look at this guy.
Look at al-Juwayni.
This is an imam.
Subhanallah.
Look at the intelligence of this man.
Stay away from sort of like the loud,
wild mobs in the masses, right?
Hmm.
Also something else.
I'll make this the last part about al
-Harawi rahimahullah.
Al-Harawi rahimahullah was like, you know, a
tier one scholar in like nahu and sarf
al-tarikh and tafsir and all of this
stuff.
And but also, you know, he had this
approach in da'wah where he would dress
very, very nice and expensive.
And of course, as a malik, you can
appreciate that because imam Malik rahimahullah had that
view about shukr.
Correct.
You might have to distinguish yourself sometimes even
if it's ordinarily not correct to do that.
Correct.
Speaking, right?
Because knowledge will be lost if the scholar
is not distinguished.
So he kind of had that view.
He used to wear very expensive clothes, never
come to the sultan.
I don't want your money.
You can't impress me.
But he used to also say, I dress
this way so people can look at me
and say, wow, I wish I was Muslim.
Subhanallah.
He says, bi-arghabu fil-islam.
Hmm.
And when he would go home, this is
what the biography says.
I'm reading to the biography.
Thumma idhan sarafa ila baytihi And then when
he goes home, he goes to his sort
of clothing.
Subhanallah.
Subhanallah.
And sitting with people like the Sufi practitioners,
the people of Sufism, the people of asceticism
and minimalism and the likes.
He eats with them.
Subhanallah.
And you can't tell him apart from anybody
else.
Then he says, look at this.
He says, and through him, people, he basically
was revolutionary.
People started showing up early to fajr.
Hmm.
And the whole town started naming their children
Abd, like Abdullah, Abdurrahman.
Right?
Subhanallah.
And he would defend the sunnah and he
would not speak in language that the sunnah
or Quran didn't use, meaning he was Athari.
Right?
And so he understood that he was confusing
to people.
Subhanallah.
That's why he said, a final quote, man
lam yara majlisi wa tadkiri wa ta'ana
fiyya fa huwa minni fi hil.
Hmm.
He doesn't understand my project and what I'm
sort of entrenched in and what I believe
and what I don't believe and where I
get my stuff from.
Whoever doesn't know my biography and accuses me,
I forgive them.
Subhanallah.
So anyway, so this is a little bit
of, a little bit of everything.
Right?
There's like three, four more slides I'll just
walk through if you don't mind and I'll
be done.
Yeah, sure.
Something reminded me when you said about his
books and the interaction with him is that,
can you imagine if someone did a history
of dawah in America?
Let's say someone did a little MA thesis.
Two people.
One guy, his primary source was the Masajid.
So his primary source about you, about myself,
about whoever is to go to that mosque
and talk to the people in that community.
Then write your thesis on the history of
that person.
The other person's sole primary source was to
go to Twitter.
Look at the responses and the tweets and
the comment sections and write your history of
this person.
You would have two different books.
You wouldn't even know who the people were
because the written word and the exchanges of
the written word are so different.
There's no body language in the written word.
There's no tone.
There's no chitchat in the written word which
all soften hearts, which all changes everything.
And I would say that in the past,
their tomes were their books that they wrote,
the fatawa they wrote, and the interactions they
have also were completely different which points to
your whole point of the importance of the
biography of the person.
Sometimes it tells you a lot more or
something that would never have been in their
book.
Yeah.
Right.
Exactly.
So the next slide, Wa Ma Tafarraqu.
This is, you know, recurrent actually.
This is not one ayah, right?
They only became provided after the knowledge came
to them.
So it wasn't the knowledge.
It was the transgression.
Right?
Not enough taqwa to curb the transgression.
Like the transgression of the tongue, guys.
Like to know that everything you ever said,
you're not just gonna be asked was it
right?
Was it right?
Did you have enough reason to believe it
was right?
And did you say what's right with justification
for the right reason?
And there's the intention component.
If any of those fail, like you're gonna
self-destruct.
You're destructing, you're destroying yourself by yourself.
That's it.
You know, like one said to us something,
I was sitting on the couch with him.
He was like saying, do you have any
idea how arrogant we were as youngsters?
And that's the idea.
We hope that as we age, the very
least, we can help others get past this
stuff faster, and we don't stay in it.
And some of us will stay in it.
May Allah protect us all.
But he's saying, we used to sit there
and talk about the rajih this, rajih that,
the stronger view this, the stronger view.
He said we used to sit there refereeing
between scholarly views, and we didn't even know,
this is how he put it, some of
the disciplines, we didn't even know the name
of the discipline, let alone mastering it.
Some of the disciplines they used to arrive
at those conclusions.
Al-ajtah al-nazair, al-qawa'id al
-fiqh, whatever it may have been, right?
You don't even know the name of the
science that they used to arrive at that
output.
So how can you be qualified to sort
of assess the output?
SubhanAllah.
So the tongue, the tongue is the downfall.
Hold your tongue, find some taqwa to tie
your tongue up with.
This is the problem.
You know, the poet, when he says, ihzal
lisanaka ayyuha al-insanu, hold that tongue of
yours, oh human being, la yaldagannaka innahu thu
'banu.
You know, his tongue is like a snake.
You have a snake in your mouth.
Right?
Hold, grab it.
You know, la yaldagannaka innahu thu'banu, kam
fil maqabiri min qatili lisanihi, kanat tahabu liqaahu
shuj'anu.
How many victims of their own tongues exist
right now in the graveyard that the bravest
of men were afraid to stand in front
of in this world?
Everybody was afraid to step to him, but
he was his own demise.
The tongue did.
May Allah azza wa jal purify our hearts
and not make this share of it just
speaking and listening.
And may Allah forgive me for the hypocrisy
of my words.
But there's an ayah here.
Last ayah, I think.
Last slide, last ayah.
Once again, this is a recurrent theme in
the Quran.
I'm not really pointing to an ayah.
When Allah azza wa jal always says, except
for the time Ibrahim a.s. is asking.
But every time it's Allah saying it, it's
always that I sent you a prophet to
recite to you the book.
And thereby, I stuck that in the translation.
I believe that's the correct way to translate
it.
But thereby, doing what?
yuzakkihim wa yu'allimuhum It's always tazkiyat al
ta'leem.
Because when you flip these, the ta'leem
just becomes tribalism and recognized for religious tribalism.
It's the same.
He sent you a prophet to pull you
out of your mess.
The mess was tribalism in many respects.
Even the idolatry was a product of my
grandparents weren't wrong.
When you don't follow the process, we don't
use the book right, it becomes what?
Religious tribalism.
No difference.
If you go back to the previous slide,
Omar, I'd like to make a comment about
that.
It says, and of course, the concept or
the ayahs was referring to the people of
the book when the new revelation came.
But there is something for us to learn
too.
When it says, wa maa safarraqu illa min
ba'di maja'ahum wa ilmu baghyam baynahum people
who have tribal hostilities or class hostilities possibly
or different families that are feuding with each
other and they're just average Muslims.
When knowledge comes, they're so far apart, they
will choose different paths and they'll resume their
hostilities on the side of madhhabs or manahij
or what have you.
Can I get to see both pictures, Omar?
Yeah.
Let's get both, no, both myself and the
Shaykh so I can see him.
Yeah.
Right, so that happens all the time.
The two tabaqats that are at each other,
the rich and the poor or east side,
west side, whatever tribalisms that, feuds that people
have, when they both get religious, with knowledge
first and tazkiyah second, then you'll find that
very quickly, they're just going to resume their
feud on different manahij of knowledge.
That's it.
Yeah, this is called sort of God-centric
religiosity versus identity-centric religiosity.
Is Islam sort of a token with which
you sort of manifest or like materialize your
identity?
It's all about me and my group and
my preference or is it really about God?
Yeah.
What's religion for?
Many of us tokenize religion for sort of
self-serving purposes.
And when it's truly for the sake of
Allah, sometimes the best thing is to leave
it because Allah is watching.
Why would you play around with it?
Why would you meddle when Allah is watching
and He's going to take care of it?
And that must be the logic of everyone
who lets go of a feud.
That's the only logic to have is that
Allah is watching.
That's what I need to worry about.
And if Allah is pleased with me and
I'm being pummeled and people think I'm bad,
but Allah is watching.
That's all that matters.
I could live with that.
If you forget about Allah at that moment,
that's when you have to fight back and
you have to say, no, everyone's watching.
Everyone else is watching and they got to
know that I'm right.
Yeah, that was it.
It's who are you trying to impress?
Who's watching you?
That's what's really going to be the motivator
for going and stopping, talking and staying silent.
And that must be the main motivator of
all the greats in our history who were
able to handle so much hatred from others
or condemnation from others and I'll tell you,
the hardest to handle is the condemnation of
the righteous person who, for some reason, either
misunderstands you or has a different view.
That's the hardest part to handle.
What's that?
Speaking of biographies, there's one of the senior
mashayekh.
I wish I could mention his name to
give him credit, but I'm just going to
have to share this, fudging the details.
I'll never forget being in a living room
with him and there was a whole bunch
of scholars that are differing on some issue.
It was a hot topic, but in Arab
-speaking world, and there was one particular person
doing takedowns left and right with viral videos
against this shaykh, this shaykh that I'm in
the living room with.
And the brothers are bringing it up to
the shaykh and the shaykh's like, it's no
big deal, it's all right, no worries.
And then they're like, shaykh, no, but he's
framing you as a crazy conspirator and like
an agent for this and that.
And he's like, guys, what do you want?
You want me to speak about someone who
spends hours at night praying?
I just, I don't have the luxury to
do that.
And then he said, he said what?
He said, huwa mubtala bi wa ana mubtala
bi He's my test and I'm his test.
He may believe that the people feeding him
this information are reliable and maybe, maybe there's
no negligence there.
Maybe Allah will forgive him for it because
he thought it was like a reliable path
of transmission.
He's saying, and it's my test too.
And Allah said, wa ja'alna ba'dakum li
ba'din fitnatan a'tasbiroon wa kaana rabbuka basira We
made you test, we made you all.
There's no exception to this rule.
Even the guy, the guy at the red
light, your parent, your spouse, we made you
all test for each other.
We made you.
So like if you realize it's from Allah,
you start reacting as you said, shaykh, to
Allah, not to the person, right?
Oh, a'tasbiroon, will you put up with being
principled, right?
wa kaana rabbuka basira and your Lord is
watching.
And then he said, what did he say?
He said, yeah, he's my test and I'm
his test.
He said, I actually know.
I know why he thinks that I'm sort
of like a double agent.
It's because I got my US citizenship.
There was like a different spelling on the
passport.
And so someone handed him one of my
old boarding passes.
And so he saw like a discrepancy in
names.
And so the poor guy thinks I actually
am, you know, working for this or that.
And he's even like giving him excuses.
He's like, I need more of this in
my life.
You know?
This is in private.
This is not me posturing, you know, a
podcast right now.
This is, he's refusing to do it behind
closed doors.
That's the hardest part.
When it's people who are clearly wrong that
are against you, that's far better for you,
right?
It's far better for everyone.
And that's why it's important to, there's a
book, I think, I never read it, but
I like the title, Choose Your Enemies Wisely,
right?
And your enemies, you want your, and you
don't want your enemies to people, to be
people of taqwa.
It just doesn't sit right.
It is not pleasing to the prophet.
It's not pleasing to Allah.
So I said, Ali had so much sabr
with those people.
Even they had to wage war against some
of these people, but he has so much
sabr with them.
And because he's a Muslim, like if you're
not going to have some, but he's a
Muslim person of taqwa, like, like need to
be more strategic and sort of like principles,
allyship outside of our community.
What about the community?
Yeah.
Like, you know, we can all agree with
the Khawarij, even though the Khawarij today, you
know, the Khawarij of old, but in general,
usually you think of certain parts of the
world, but the Khawarij called Uthman kafir.
The most righteous human being on the earth
called him kafir.
And when Adi ibn Khayar, this is in
Sahih al-Bukhari, actually.
And what's cool is in Sahih al-Bukhari,
this is the chapter on Babu, Imamat al
-Muftuni wal-Mubtadi.
The chapter praying behind someone who's deviant or
an innovator.
And he said, it says that Adi ibn
Khayar comes to Uthman and says, he was
under siege.
So they're not even calling him kafir.
They've already laid siege to his house.
They're about to pince.
Go in for the kill.
Rahimahullah ta'ala, radiallahu ta'ala anhu wa
rahimah.
And he goes, I go inside and I,
Adi ibn Khayar says, I tell him, listen,
you're the big Imam.
I'm on your side and you're the superior,
you're the khalifa.
And we pray behind an Imam of fitnah.
So like the Imam of my local masjid
is among those who excommunicated you, called you
an apostate.
And we don't know what to do.
He said to him, Uthman said to him,
radiallahu anhu, Salat is the best thing people
do.
When people do good things, collaborate in good
things.
And if they do wrong, just don't do
wrong with them.
And then you just said, like Ali radiallahu
anhu had to live through not just the
siege, but watching the massacre of Uthman.
And he comes and says to him, listen,
you got three promises.
I will not prevent you from the masjid.
I will not prevent you from coming to
jihad and the spoils of war.
I will not initiate fighting with you.
But if you take up arms, I have
no choice.
Panic dictate is clear, right?
There's Babi here.
And they called him kafir too, for people
that don't know.
But still, it's our brothers.
You know, Al-Harawi, I promise is the
last thing I'll say.
I don't need to sign up.
I'm really taking advantage of the platform.
Not at all, not at all.
Subject is very near and dear to my
heart, to be honest.
A lot of people have done this one.
But Al-Harawi himself, in his book, Manazir
al-Sa'ireen al-Tazkiyah, I think it's
under the Bab al-Khuduq.
He says, maybe it's for two words.
He says, along the lines of, I'm paraphrasing,
كيف لا ترضى لك أخا من رضيه الله
لنفسه عبده SubhanAllah.
How do you not accept as your brother?
Yeah, we can all call, say brother and
say MashaAllah, JazakAllah and all the performatory stuff.
But how can you not truly accept as
your brother?
Someone that Allah has accepted as his servant.
Allah has deemed him worthy to be a
Muslim, to be your servant, his servant.
How can you not?
And your problem is not with him, it's
with Allah.
SubhanAllah.
Like you're sort of, are you one-upping
the assistant?
That's the mentality we want to cultivate and
more of that.
That's the logic.
Like how could you pick an enemy who
is someone who is devoting themselves, is, okay,
maybe has some things to which either are
mistakes or perceived mistakes.
At the end of the day, this person
may have a position with Allah.
And the implementation is so different from the
idea.
So there may be ideas in books, but
the implementation may be something different.
Sayyidina Ali and the Khawarij is the best
example.
Because Sayyidina Ali did this with the Khawarij.
He said, you have your mosques, you can
join us in Jihad and you get your
spoils of war and you're safe as long
as, until you pick up arms.
And he let them live in their village,
in their town.
He is the narrator of the Hadith of
the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam about the Khawarij
and if I was amongst you, I would
kill them all.
The Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam himself said this
and Sayyidina Ali is the narrator of the
Hadith.
The Hadith pertaining to executing Khawarijites.
So if Sayyidina Ali knows the theory, but
he also knows the right application and this
time was not the right, that was not
the situation.
What is the right application?
When they pick up swords.
Right?
When they pick up the sword.
So, there you have the theory and the
application.
Like you said, what's in the books is
one thing, how they actually interacted in real
life is a whole different thing.
Hamad Shihab, you know, maybe it may even
be useful since you've been with me.
You know, we gave examples also on the
sort of the extreme, more hardcore than us,
whatever way we're going to put it, right?
In front, like the Khawarij, but even on
the other side, right?
There are many Muslims who subscribe to a
version of Islam that when we may, you
know, consider just unexcusable views, sort of like
the modernist, progressive, you know, even they're still
our brothers and sisters until they truly and
knowingly, right?
Violate some of these axiomatic matters, some of
these red lines and in that Hadith of
Uthman when people are doing good, do good
with them and when they do bad, don't
do bad with them.
You know, in Bukhari itself, I'm not going
elsewhere.
Right after the Hadith, there is a statement
from Az-Zuhri that could actually be like
pulled in here, invoked here regarding our brothers
and sisters who may have a more liberal
understanding of the do's and don'ts in Islam.
Az-Zuhri, he said right after the Hadith,
he says, in our opinion, even the way
he worded it, he qualified, وَلَا نَرَى أَن
يُصَلَّ خَلْفَ الْمُخَنَّةِ We don't think that the
Imam should be someone that is مُخَنَّة meaning
effeminate, right?
إِلَّا مِن ضَرُورَةٍ لَبُدَّ مِنْهَا Except if there
is a ضَرُورَة like some pressing necessity, shortage
of Imams, the next Masjid is too far
and so sometimes even within our Masjid, we
say, no, I don't go to this Masjid,
it's the conservative Masjid, I don't go to
that Masjid, it's the liberal Masjid.
Might be wrong, these actually might be mainstream
views, but even if you're right, are we
not going to attend the Masjid?
Are we not going to come together as
a community?
Are we going to just sit here and
sort of just like take these pre-packaged
labels and say, you know, cancelled and sort
of approved of?
And we also have to look at, and
then we can close with this because we
kept you a long time, but there was
one time a child who came, it was
a girl, I believe, who came to take
food from the plate and the Prophet ﷺ
pushed her back, which was not the norm
of the Prophet.
Prophet would feed everybody.
So when they clearly were wondering, what is
this?
He said, إِنَّهَا مَجْفُعَةً Shaytan is the one
who pushed her.
In other words, Shaytan, even though it looks
normal, this request looks normal, seeking food, but
the Shaytan is behind this because this is
part of some plot that he's plotting, right?
To cause fitna of some way, shape and
form.
And somebody recently said, SubhanAllah, so many things
are actually innocent, you know, comments or innocent
questions, but they possibly could be egged on
by Iblis to stir the pot, right?
To get someone to say something that Iblis
has calculated in advance, that's going to bother
that person and that person is going to
go nuts, right?
They communicate amongst themselves in ways that we
don't know.
Shaytan, we know that.
They communicate amongst themselves and then they whisper
into people's ears without that person having any
clue that he actually just lit a fire,
right?
So it's important this day and age to
realize that not everything has to be talked
about all the time and sometimes Iblis is
what's behind it.
So it's a thing where we always have
to be, I would say, considerate of how
much things could be misunderstood on the other
side in order to avoid that.
Alright, Shaykh, closing comments from yourself.
JazakAllah khairan.
There's so much to be said and I
don't want to, like, crowd what I've said.
Just this genre of, you know, how do
we get the Ummah on the same page
and the necessity to do, you know, loving.
You know, one brother, maybe I'll end with
this, that one brother, after having been in
that sort of embattled world for a very,
very long time, he finally went to a
university and didn't see him for years and
visited him in Umrah and he told me,
you know what, when I finally snapped out
of it, I realized that this group makes
it hard for me to love my fellow
Muslim.
SubhanAllah, subhanAllah.
The irony for me is that you don't
need to be in an Islamic university to
see that, right?
No one believes until they love for themselves.
You don't enter Jannah until you believe.
You don't believe until you love each other.
You know, shall I tell you something?
If you do it, you love each other.
Spread Salaam.
That I do, not giving Salaam to each
other, looking as a default with an eye
of suspicion at each other, you know, sort
of hearing, you know, the ayat and the
hadith they mention as sort of like deliberately
deviant ways to hijack Islamic understanding.
This is a problem.
You know, it's a real problem.
Even the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam said, It's
a very interesting hadith narrated by Ahmad that
the destruction of my ummah, meaning phases of
it, will happen at the hands of the
scripture and the milk.
And so they said, how would that be
possible, Ya Rasulallah?
So he said, يَقْرَأُونَ الْكِتَابَ يُنْزِلُونَهُ عَلَى غَيْرِ
مَا أَنْزَلَ اللَّهِ That they recite the book
and they interpret it in, you know, unqualified
ways.
And limiting the interpretation is one of the
unqualified ways, by the way.
He said, وَاللَّبَنَ يَبْدُونَ That they go out
into the desert.
وَيَتُرْكُونَ الْجُمْعَ وَالْجَمَعَاتَ Basically, they leave the big
city to make a nice big dairy farm.
And it's crazy because the Kitab is the
source of guidance.
And the Laban also represents the Fitrah and
the other hadith purity.
But even the purest things can become poisonous,
can become toxic in the way they're used,
not in what they are.
Right?
If they're passing through the wrong receptacle.
So it's cloaked and they want to be
puritans away from all the rabble of the
Muslims and the misguided city folk and sinful
city folk.
Is that what it is?
No, this was more about like, I need
more space for more cameras.
So basically, it's shubuhat and shahwat.
So shubuhat with the Kitab and shahwat with
the materialism.
I see.
It's not just getting stuck in dunya and
the glitter of dunya that will destroy the
ummah.
It's also an unqualified, unpure approach to the
book as well.
SubhanAllah.
Religious and non-religious, shaitan is not sparing
anybody.
SubhanAllah.
JazakAllah khair.
This is very beautiful and hopefully we do
it again.
Make it a regular visitation to us on
the live stream.
I really appreciate your time.
I appreciate the opportunity, Sheikh.
JazakAllah.
My pleasure.
BarakAllahu feek.
Shukran.
Alright, folks.
There you have the talk that we've been
talking about on ikhtilaf.
And I think you mentioned a lot of
things that we've been talking about.
Qata'i and dhani.
There are things that are qata'i.
There's going to be no discussion on them.
Those qata'i things, we're going to divide
them into two.
Is it proliferated with tawatur?
Or is it not?
If it's qata'i in its dalalah and
it's mutawatir in its riwayah, there's no discussion
on that.
There can be no discussion.
That person will have left Islam.
But if it was qata'i only, but
it proliferated not in a mutawatir way, not
in a mass transmitted way, solitary transmission, then
we also cannot, we are not allowed to
deviate from that.
Any parting from that would be a deviation.
And that would put someone in the middle.
Neither are they out of Islam, nor are
they practicing the sunnah properly.
And that's what we call the muqtadi'ah.
And then you have that which is neither,
not qata'i at all, it's dhanni.
It doesn't matter whether the dhanni has, how
it's proliferated.
Once it's dhanni, now at this point, we
have discussion.
And you could be correct or incorrect.
But we would not say that.
Even the incorrect amongst them, we would not
say that.
He's an innovator.
And we will have brotherhood with all of
these groups that differ on these speculative matters.
That's what he said in the slide, right?
Speculative matters.
It's so important to know that, what is
speculative?
And what is qata'i?
So that's really the first question we should
ask.
When we hear an opinion, we should ask,
is this mas'ala, is it qata'i
or is it dhanni?
Or this subject matter.
Is there a room or no?
I'll give you an example.
Men wearing gold.
The question is, is there room on this
or not?
Is there room for discussion?
Happens to the answer is, believe it or
not, yes.
Because if you use it for nose, for
teeth, gold jewelry, no.
There's no discussion for that.
There is no discussion.
But there is a time where you can
use teeth.
You can make, in the old days, of
course nobody does that now, but they used
to make a nose out of it.
They used to use it in warfare.
In the things they used in war.
So those are the exceptions.
But that's really what, to elevate our discourse,
the first question we should be asking, is
this explicit or is this up for discussion?
The moment it's up for discussion, now we
enter into the realm of right and wrong
as brothers.
That's maximum I could say is I disagree
with that.
But you're not allowed to break the bonds
of brotherhood over those matters.
I'm only going to take two, three questions
today.
Ali Ahmed, I see that, and it's a
beautiful, it's a beautiful comment that you made
there.
Right.
Let's go to Rizwan al-Islam.
And by the way, Ali Ahmed, I could
only see that it means, the Ali Muhammad
can mean the lineage of the Prophet, and
it could mean the supporters of the Prophet
that are with the Prophet.
With support.
Every pious person is from the Al of
Muhammad.
When we say the Tashahud and Tarawih, I
mean in Salah, and the Tahiyyah, Al Muhammad
is all the pious people who support the
Prophet, salallahu alayhi wa sallam, who practice Islam
with all their effort.
All right.
Let's take this question here.
What is the difference or distinguishing point between
Ahl al-Sunnah and Ahl al-Bid'ah
in terms of Qati' and Dhani matters?
As we said, deviating from a Qati' verse,
or Hadith, that's what would render a person
into innovation.
Innovation is what?
Your good deeds don't count until you fix
your belief.
So it's very dangerous.
Are you saying we should not go and
dig out people's dirt?
Yes, you shouldn't dig out people's dirt for
no reason.
But when you're going to get married, you
should investigate the people and what's out there
and in the open about them and what
their friends tell you about them and what
their family tells you about them and what
they are willing to tell about themselves.
I lost friends, says Mr. Curry Swag.
I lost friends in uni because I wronged
them by repeated lying.
I saw forgiveness.
I'm trying to rectify myself.
They forgave me.
I no longer get invited to hang out
with them.
Is there anything I should do or accept
my fate?
Accept your fate.
Make tawbah.
That's what I believe you should do.
Make tawbah and when Allah Ta'ala...
If Allah Ta'ala wants to change their
hearts, He'll change their hearts.
And when you've paid your price of being
ostracized, you have to pay a price, right?
Yes, they may have forgiven you but you
still have to pay a price.
And that's the price that you pay.
And hopefully, you could teach people out there
after the harm of such things.
What's the hukmah on killing insects, spiders in
the house?
I personally like to try to remove them
from the house.
However, you are allowed to kill pests in
the house.
Nothing wrong with that.
How do you increase memory?
Do tasmiyah a lot.
The push-ups of your memory is tasmiyah.
Recite from memory.
Every time you're with someone, give them the
page.
Give me a tasmiyah of this section.
All right.
We have to go unfortunately.
And we will be back on Tuesday.
We have a very, very busy weekend.
We got tonight classes and a short Salah
on the Prophet, peace be upon him.
We have tomorrow, Long Island, all day with
Mufti Azimuddin.
You coming?
From morning.
Jum'ah there.
Jum'ah, lunch, meeting, rest, event.
Anyone here from Long Island?
Meet us there.
Saturday, it's MCGP.
Sunday, it's class at MBIC.
And then, ISBR, which is Basking Ridge.
SPQR.
You know SPQR?
It's with the old Roman symbol.
SPQR.
But this is ISBR.
All right, ladies and gentlemen.
We got to run.
I wish I could stay and answer all
your questions.
بارك الله فيكم و جزاك الله خير سبحانك
اللهم وبحمدك نشهد أن لا إله إلا أنت
نستغفرك و نتوب إليك والعصر إِنَّ الْإِنسَانَ لَفِي
خُسْرٍ إِلَّا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا عَمِلُوا الصَّالِحَاتُ وَتَوَاصُوا بِالْحَقِّ
وَتَوَاصُوا بِالصَّبْرِ وَالسَّلَامُ عَلَيْكُمْ رَحْمَةً