Suhaib Webb – Bound God Zarrqs Principles of Ihsn Part One
AI: Summary ©
The neophyte Muslim community has faced political instability, political instability, and the loss of loss in Islam. The speaker discusses the challenges of passionate and charismatic behavior, as it can be difficult to be a good Muslim. The speaker also discusses the loss of loss in Islam and the importance of learning to read the Quran and follow rules. The speaker emphasizes the importance of finding foundational principles of law and the importance of wellness, which is the foundation of law and wellness.
AI: Summary ©
So we begin,
by praising God. Send peace and blessings upon
our beloved Messenger, Muhammad,
upon his family, his companions and those who
follow them until the end of time. So
the book that we're about to start, if
Muhammad, if you can scroll it up, it
might make it huge. Thank you, man. May
Allah bless you with a scribe
who can serve you, Jannah, with your
lectures to us in Jannah, Insha'Allah.
I just mentioned.
So the book that we're about to read
is really actually an advanced book.
And
it was written by a scholar who lived
in the 9th century after the migration of
the prophet, peace be upon him.
His name is Ahmed Zorook.
Ahmed Zorook.
Ahmed Zorook is a very interesting person
and because of time we're not going to
be able to go through some of the
economic, political,
And was a lot of division,
especially amongst the Sunni community.
That division had really fallen into kind of
2 camps.
One was focused on the external practices, what
we call fiqh, right?
Hanafi, Madiki,
right, Sha'afi, those terms you've heard like the
4 schools of Islamic law, those schools of
Islamic law focus on the outer actions.
What we mean by the outer actions are
like prayer,
hajj,
and so on.
On the other end were people who were
focused on the inner actions,
the actions of the heart.
What are called people of tasuluf,
sufism.
In the early stages of the Ummah there
was very little division between us. Of course,
during the time of the Prophet
and the revelation of the Quran and the
early Muslims,
you didn't have different faculties of study. So
people studied things in an integrated way.
So spirituality
and knowledge went hand in hand. So a
good example of this is like someone asked
one of the great luminaries,
one of the great companions of Mohammed,
what is knowledge? And he said knowledge is
reference.
Right? He didn't give him some like Piaget
Ericsson cognitive theory stuff.
He said, Al'em Khushur,
like knowledge is being reverent. So he ties
knowledge
to something
internal.
This split happens over time
and it continues to grow. And I would
say now especially with the influence
of this hyper
kind of
a lot of things have happened to us
as Muslims especially with modernity, but
this split has even perhaps become more aggravated
in the last 200 years.
So you have, for example,
even in the Muslim community,
people who will, like, at a more benign
level just censor you for not being so
adherent.
They might just censor you.
That that will be like
normal.
All of us have gone to mosques
and someone has asked us probably why we
dress the way we dress, why we look
the way we look,
why do you change your name,
you know, we've all experienced perhaps some of
us and if you're a woman this is
like exasperated
in more ways than one
and it becomes like a challenge. That someone
that's focused like, it's okay, we should we
should call each other to a higher set
of principles but
not in a way that hurts people.
So the city of Zorukhi lives at a
time where this split has really taken on
an ugly kind of character. And this started
even before him, like the 4th 5th century
in Hijri.
You know, you may be surprised if you're
from Morocco
to know like the Moravidun,
they burned the books of Bezari. They
considered, like, Imam Qazadi as
a problem. Whereas now in Morocco, like, you
can learn books of Al Qazadi basically
anywhere you go.
David Nawi, he's a great scholar
who is a disciple of Qazadhi, continually gets
banned from mosques in Morocco
for, like, teaching Gazali.
They said
Like, this guy is trying to teach us
stuff we never learned before.
So Sidiye Zoruk is dealing with 3 issues.
1 is the split between Sufism
and Filk,
between the inner and the outer.
Number 2 is massive political instability. That's another
discussion.
And the third is neophyte Muslims.
And this, if you looked at our history,
has always been our problem.
What is the neophyte Muslim? The neophyte is
the person who has a lot of passion
and a lot of zeal,
but no wisdom and knowledge.
Until this day, you know, you can find
that. Someone can jump online,
dress a certain way, say some of the
most outlandish insanity
ever heard
and people be like, a lot of like
why this person's on the house. Their insecurities
may be telling them that.
So I'm not a very good Muslim so
since this person is so outlandish, let me
be safe
and buy it. So if you look at
Morocco again in the 5th 6th century, it
continues to get rocked by Abdullah bin Yassin
who finds a convert who's really zealous. The
scholars said about him he had very little
knowledge but he was very charismatic.
Sounds familiar politically. Right? He has a populist
movement
that's not really found in any kind of
deeper understanding. I mean, we don't wanna get
trumped by what's happening nowadays.
Hint. Hint.
And because populism can be a challenge. And
then after him, it's interesting that
by Ibn al Tamrut who also is this
charismatic
neophyte who doesn't really have a lot of
knowledge,
and they keep going back and forth. So
one of the challenges also of Ahmed Zoruk
is dealing with
passionate charismatic people
who don't have a lot of knowledge, but
that charisma,
you know, charisma is a good thing. Charisma
can be seductive. Right? There there's the prophetic
charisma which
inspires us to be better people in the
middle of Beyani rasikr. Right? The Prophet said
that, you know, eloquence is a form of
magic.
Right? It can captivate people, but they can
also be a problem
if it's used to,
you know, motivate people to act their responsibly.
And through our history it's very interesting to
note
that most of the great scholars
were appreciated when
after they died.
But during their lifetime,
they continually ran into either
hyper irrational conservatism,
the neophytes,
or
untethered liberalism.
They always find themselves kind of in the
middle and that's why the Prophet SAW said
that every generation of the Muslims will have
people in the middle.
And he said they will refute the notions
of
the conservatives that are like off
and also tether
the irresponsibility
of from using these terms just in our
language, of the liberals
and they'll be in the middle.
That's a hard place to be. So he
does something.
His life he's born at 846 after Hijri.
SubhanAllah, mani had a hard life, like it
sounds like a Tupac song for real.
Like I'm being honest. His his his grandfather
dies like 7 days before he's born.
His mother dies at the age of 23
a week after he's born.
His father dies less than a month later.
So Ahmad Zarruk
is born
in a time where he doesn't have his
parents.
So he's raised but
we as Muslims believe that loss,
if we're patient, can actually be gained. Right?
Even though it's hard. Like it's not fun.
Imam Ibn Uttaha'a Allah said God doesn't take
anything from you except he gives you something
back better. You just gotta, like, wait for
it. We want it now,
but it takes time so he's raised by
his grandmother.
And our Shia brothers and sisters, you'll appreciate
his grandmother's name, Umul Bani.
And Umul Bani was
a massive
Maliki
beast.
She is a jurist man.
His grandmother was a Faqih.
So he was raised by her. His grandmother
was a scholar of Islamic law.
And she actually took him, he says, and
and that's it's really beautiful if you like
scholars or you like certain,
you know, personalities in Islamic history.
You know, they don't come out of the
vacuum.
Like, they come out of
being
in touched by people
whether by love or whether by
some kind of external influence, but they're touched.
So his grandmother at the age of 5,
he said, she took me to the mosque
and she taught me how to pray.
And then she started to telling me like,
you're responsible,
like you're responsible as a person on this
earth
you have like a mission.
You can look at many Islamic personalities.
Sheikh Zayed,
Molani Yousef, the founder, his father,
the founder of Jamat Tablik in Pakistan,
his in India, excuse me, his mother used
to say, his grandmother used to say to
him, when I see you I smell the
Sahaba.
Right? Just like as a young boy, she
just will like motivate him.
Imam Malik, his mother, through our history
is like made up of incredibly powerful women
who were
like pushing men to achieve like true masculinity
and true
sainthood and spirituality.
Ella Collins, Malcolm X's sister,
her family told me that when Malcolm she
was Muslim before him.
When Malcolm came to her and said, like,
I'm gonna go to Hajj and I'm about
to do this and I'm about to break
away from the nation.
She made him take a vow of poverty
and she said to him like the work
that you're about to do,
the the work that you're about to what
are you guys doing? No. I don't want
regular water, man. I'm not I'm I'm from
Oklahoma, man. I don't drink that fancy stuff,
man. It's
inspires Malcolm to be someone who is very
frugal.
And she tells him, like, if you're gonna
take on the cause of black folks in
America,
you can't be tied to dunya.
You have to be tied to Aqira.
So
the city Ahmed Zoruk
is the product
of his grandmother.
It's very important. I experienced this. My first
teacher from West Africa
who had memorized the Quran in 14 different
ways,
I asked him,
man, how the heck did you learn to
read the Quran, like, even the authentic ways
and non authentic ways? He's like, yeah, man,
my sister told me. I said, dang, dude.
Who's your sister? And he told me, you
know, in my country, the old part of
Senegal,
your sisters would teach you Quran.
So I was made a half of
by my sister.
And I was like, what did your dad
teach you? He said, he made me memorize
the Muwata.
My teacher in Egypt, Sheikh Adesaleh,
he was a blind man,
but he was a great poet.
And and and poetry in Arabic is is
is hard. Like, there's principles and rules that
you have to follow.
There's no mambo poetry. You know what I
mean? Like it's all it's all Nas. Like
it's all it's all Kendrick. It's art.
Right? It's real.
So
I I brought my children to his home.
My my daughter's name Shifa, my son is
Madic, and he said to me, because because
he can't see, his wife used to make
khatam every 3 days she was blind to.
She would finish the Quran every 3 days.
So she passed away rahi mola. So I
asked him,
he said to me, who's with you? I
said, my kids. He said because I was
leaving Egypt so I wanted to say salaam.
You know I've been reading with him in
his home so I wanted my children to
meet him and you know give him some
gifts and stuff. Thank you and everything.
So
he said, what are your kids names? I
said, Shifa and Marik. He said, Shifa
He started dropping the bars.
Then Arabic.
And I was like, woah. Did you did
you, like, write that before I came home?
He's like, no. I can't write. I can't
see. Like, how could I write? I said,
no. No. You can see.
We can't see.
Right? Then I asked him. I said, I
just there's a question I've wanted to ask
you since I've known you,
and that is like how did you learn
all this stuff, man?
I mean the elephant in the room,
you can't see.
And he said, my mother told
me. I am a product of my mother.
I said, what do you mean? He said,
my mother was also blind. SubhanAllah.
And she used to play in the mosque,
in Ezehar Mosque 100 years ago, and she
would just play, man. That's why we shouldn't
keep children out of the mosque.
You have people out of the mosque, you
know, because the nur may spill into their
heart, and you just may not. You can't
see that nur. I can't see that nur.
So he said,
she memorized everything, man.
Like kids who run around people playing Fortnite.
They'll know that the the sounds of Fortnite
or kids growing up, you know, around Sephora.
They'll know what is considered. They'll they'll know
what that stuff is because that's what they're
exposed to. So he said, my mother, she
spent the first like 16, 17 years of
her life because as Hermas till now, if
you're from Egypt, you know this, there's this
huge square that's very cool. The air blows
through there. So in the afternoon, people hang
out there and drink tea. The poor people
in the hood
because they don't have air conditioners.
So they go there and that's where you
chill because the masjid is on the inside.
So she grew up in that.
And then he said, when she when I
was young, she made me memorize Molot Yedlak
in the hand of Yedlak. She memorized that
book.
Then she taught him grammar. She memorized that
book.
So she taught him poetry
because she was a natural poet. She was
a naturalized poet.
There were no walls
between her and naturalization.
So alhamdulillah,
he was a product of his mother. So
the point is, Ahmed Suroub,
many of the great scholars that we know
and love
were
baked
by their
mothers or their sisters
or their aunts
or someone that influenced
him. He becomes a world renowned scholar. He
goes to Fes, Morocco.
From Fes, Morocco,
he finishes his studies. He goes east.
He spent some time in Cairo,
and he achieved a lot of fame in
Cairo.
People really embraced him.
In those days, Egypt was known as a
place that welcomed,
intellects
and
people who were considered even like
pushing the envelope.
There's a great Maliki scholar,
he came from Iraq. Maliki is originally Iraqi
and forced out by the Hanbalis
and the Hanafis and the Shafi'i because those
3 were fighting each other all the time.
So the Malakis they dipped,
said we're good, we're trying to fight people
and they left. And when Qari Abdul Waheb,
Malachi,
he came to Egypt.
The Egyptians welcomed him
in front of Cairo like a white horse
and the whole nine, you know, it was
like a parade. And they asked him like
how was life in Iraq? And this is
not to offend any Iraqis now, this is
1000 years ago. He said,
He said in
Iraq, I was like a Quran in the
house of an apostate.
That's how I was treated.
So he was welcomed in Egypt. Same thing
with Ahmed Zorouk, although he didn't have the
trauma.
Comes to Egypt.
He's welcomed.
Then he goes to Hejaz. He studies in
Mecca and Medina.
Goes all over
the world, and he goes back to Morocco.
And then it initially
settles in a place, maybe you've heard of
it if you're from Libya, called Mislata.
Subhan'Allah, I had a teacher from Miserata. There
is a school in Miserata
for girls. It's more than 2,000 women memorized
in the Quran, Subhan'Allah.
And maybe you've heard of city Ahmed Zuruq
because about 7 years ago you heard about
Isis
destroying a mosque in Libya with a massive
library.
That was his library
and that mosque is where he's buried
and he was known as Sheykh ul Islam.
What he does and what makes him has
endeared him to people outside of the specific
studies that pertain to us who are Malachy
in our our worship
is he tries to marry
2 sciences that became unhinged from each other
and this is very important.
And this is what makes him an innovator
in a good way
and and this is what makes this book
really really Masha'Allah
times
10. And that is that he sees, as
I mentioned earlier, one of the plagues that
had affected the society that he lived in
was the division between the inner and the
outer.
You see that now in in, like, American
Muslim community
where
for some reason the more religious people become,
they may believe that allows them to turn
off, like, their sense of morality,
like their sense of empathy.
But Deen is right,
like religious empathy.
And the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam, although he
holds people accountable,
he teaches people discipline.
He roots people in an in an outlook
on life that demands,
you know, holding myself accountable,
but he inspires people.
He loves people.
On numerous occasions, people were touched by the
prophet
just caring about them, man,
just being there for them.
On the other end, we have
a liberalism in this country,
especially within the activism sphere which has untethered
itself from religion.
And that should be concerning also.
Both of those are problematic. 1 will lead
to,
could lead to hypocrisy
in its benign form. We talked about rebuking
people. In its cancerous form, killing people in
the name of religion. We've all unfortunately
seen this or been exposed to it or
heard about it or had people that were
impacted by it.
Then on the other end, it could lead
to heathenry.
Just like a very lonely life,
like a life with no purpose.
So Ahmad Zorroki marries the inner and the
outer,
and he did this for two reasons.
Number 1 is he was a judge because
his grandma was what?
She was a judge.
So he he comes through the Wu Tang
Clan 36 Chambers. You know, he comes through
being trained
as a Jedi
Knight by his grandma, his grandma's Yoda.
I mean, that's how you wanna think about
it. It's like that Gandalfian moment.
All who wonder aren't lost, Bilbo.
Right? There's this moment of
having
an influencer.
An influencer is not someone that I look
at and feel bad about my life all
the time. That's not an influencer. That's an
intimidator.
An influencer is someone that
loves me so much
that they inspire me to see what I
didn't think I can achieve.
So she does that. So he's a he's
a jurist. So the jurist is focused on
the outer earth.
That's the law.
At the same time he's exposed to people
of Tassol, so he's a follower
of Imam al Shahedri,
Buhas al Shadri, one of the largest sufi
tariqas in the world
and he becomes an adherent to that tariqa.
So he says, I need to marry these
together as they were in the early days
of Islam
to bring unity to the community,
to
bring those who are focused on the outer
a little bit closer to the center,
and those who are focused
on the inner
a little bit closer to the center.
So that's the purpose of the book. So
it does something remarkable.
He writes the book like a legal manual.
The style of writing is the writing of
what are called kutubal qalait,
these books that are legal principles.
We'll talk about maybe that in another time.
But in Islam, we have foundational principles of
law.
A principle is something in Islamic law that's
so general,
it covers an infinite number of issues. I'll
give you an example. One of our foundational
principles, you use it every day. Actions are
by what?
That's a foundational principle.
Qaida esasiyah.
Because like baby why you late? Actions are
by intention.
You know.
You were a little bit late for salah?
Actions of high intentions. You know, you woke
up late and accidentally had suhoor? Actions of
high So you're now using it
in an infinite number of ways. That's called
Al Qaeda,
not the group
principle.
That's for example what we call the foundations
of the house of Qawait.
Says when Abraham and his son Ismail
laid the Kaaba on the foundations of Kawai.
That rule.
Because it's something that other things were built
on.
So what he does he said I'm gonna
write a book that has the field of
the kawait of law.
That has the field of the foundations of
law,
but the subject matter
is tisolef.
We learned something. Why do you think he
did that?
Why would he do that if you're from
India and Pakistan?
Why why did Islam spread with Pilates?
Right? What what what were scholars
in those days thinking about? Right? What
why would Islam in Malaysia spread through business?
Very rarely in its history has Islam spread
strictly on being
something that was like I'm gonna teach you
theology.
Why would Ahmed Zorouk now as he's faced
with this dilemma,
and what does that tell us about about
our community now? The Muslim community that's so
divided.
Right? As a wisdom,
maybe the way to bring people together is
to honor what they
have and then show them that it can
even work on the opposite side of the
aisle.
So what he's saying is, look, I'm gonna
marry my judicial scholarship
with my
Sufi side
and compose a text
that's gonna bring people together.
The sign of a great scholarship in our
history
has been its ability
to always
bring the Muslims together.
Although,
sadly, the time line, especially in recent years,
is it's been people who bring us apart,
pull us apart.
So does everybody now have a clear kind
of understanding of what he's gonna do in
this book?
And I'm gonna help walk you through this
insha'Allah.
So the book is called kaway
at the Sobhu.
The word as I said earlier, means foundations.
Usually when we hear this rule, we think
of law, we think of
Arabic grammar, for example, of kawaii. We think
of rules,
our rules.
The word tasawaf,
sometimes people get upset like this word was
never used by the prophet
well, tatwid was never used by the prophet.
I heard anybody called tatwid bida
or
fiqh in the sense of how we understand
fiqh or medhad.
These are rules never these were words never
used by the Prophet SAW.
We have a very important principle that bila,
innovation,
is only an acts of worship.
And even in that, there's
a broader discussion. I'll talk about it on
my podcast soon.
But the general principle is that bira, innovation,
doesn't apply to things like terms,
doesn't apply to things for which there's no
physical act of worship.
So we have a very beautiful axiom that
you can use inshaAllah that will
help you to
be an equalizer in your community, not a
divider.
This is one of our foundational principles of
thought.
It means we don't argue over terms, man.
You call whatever you wanna call. I don't
care.
Well brother, you know and I'll give you
a great example of this. We used to
test this out on Facebook
back in the days. We would say like,
oh Masha'Allah,
brother Richard
just embraced Islam. And then Richard would write,
I'm so happy that I converted.
The world record before all * broke loose
is 22 comments.
That's the world record.
Check it out. Look it up in the
Guinness Book World Records.
22. Masha Allah. Masha Allah. Masha Allah. Masha
Allah.
Masha Allah. Then you get to 22.
Actually, brother, you're not a convert.
You're what?
You're reverb. Although reverb is the wrong usage
anyway of the active participle,
but let's not go down that direction.
And then
people would start fighting
on the post
celebrating
this former alcoholic
embracing Islam.
And the whole post
turns into, like, reverb, convert, reverb, convert. Well,
I went to, you know, dictionary.com.
I went to urban dictionary. What are you
talking about? And they start going back and
forth.
And one time one of the converts wrote,
I'm like, I'm sorry I converted.
Like, or whatever I was supposed to do.
Like, they thought they were the cause of,
like, this
MMA match
on Facebook.
Where
Islamic scholarship
does not care what you call it.
Because if I'm worried about names,
I'm not worried about what?
Meaning.
So there's the other axiom that says, al
Ibaratu bil ma'ali laysat bil asna, which means
we care about the meaning not the name.
Imam Shafi was accused of being Shia.
He was brought in chains. You know what
he said? If to love ahlubayt
means I'm Shia, I'm Shia.
He didn't argue in the terms.
He argued with what?
And try this. When people start arguing with
you, because it's gonna happen at a dialect
or online or whatever. You can ask them
in any sphere of life. You can ask
them
what do you mean by that?
And they'll be like, you
know, the Sobeys are people who worship graves
and worship sheds. I'm not a Sobeys to
do.
You shut it down
according to your definition.
But maybe you want to ask me what
I understand it to me
And I might say to you, turning to
Allah, following the sunnah,
being above all the truth,
being disciplined as a person,
and in your life even in things like
marriage.
Right? I want a great household. Me too.
Okay. Let's get married. Wait a minute.
You leave your socks out on
us. That is not what I define as
a good life, brother.
He's like, why does it take you 3
and a half hours
to get ready?
Takes me, man, we're ready in 5 minutes,
man.
Wrinkly shirt, we don't care. Nails not done,
we don't care.
Right? Did you ask each other what that
means to you?
So
that's a problem when we tell people like,
Islam will solve all your problems.
What does that
mean? People can't give you meaning, they're just
talking out the side of their mouth.
So Sheikh is saying
later on he defines Tasuluf, we're gonna get
to that inshaAllah.
But nobody should be caught up in terms
and names,
and I'm gonna keep it real with you.
Muslim governments that are invested in autocratic dictatorships
get us busy this kind of stuff.
So we're busy fighting about names, and 80%
of the people that live in a Muslim
country.
We're busy fighting about names,
and Yemeni babies are dying of things that
we could get right here at the local
pharmacy
and keep them alive. We're busy arguing about
names,
and we forgot to love each other.
So scholarship in its
its
goal has always been to create expanse for
people in general
that will keep us from basically killing each
other.
So he calls it Khawai'rutasul,
and he begins we'll go through the introduction,
then we'll take a little break, and then
we'll start
with the first concept.
The first concept
is wellness.
And as we go to the break,
I want to challenge you to think about
what wellness means to you.