Suhaib Webb – Friday Sermon The Qur’an & Freeing The Soul
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We praise Allah who,
blessed praise.
We send peace and blessings upon our beloved
messenger, Mohammed.
Peace and blessings of Allah be upon him,
upon his companions. May Allah be pleased with
all of them and those who follow them
until the end of time.
There is a certain etiquette that should be
observed with the Quran, and often times when
we talk about etiquettes with the Quran, Quran,
we talk sort of about like physical etiquettes.
People will ask questions like do I have
to face taqibla?
And so on and so forth. But what
I want to talk about briefly are these
sort of internal etiquettes
that would be translated
through physical
effort.
And the first is to actually be thirsty
for the book of Allah, Subhanahu wa ta'ala.
To, like, have a longing for the Quran,
to have a a need for the Quran,
to locate the Quran in my life like
I I locate, like,
macros in my diet.
It's a spiritual macro.
That's why
the classic scholars were brilliant in how they
organized the Quran in things like juz
and hisp
and ruba.
These were words
an entire part of the Quran, a half
part of the Quran, a fourth of the
Quran
that actually were used to describe the amount
of water you needed to survive in a
desert for a certain amount of time.
So the hisp actually was what you would
need for, like, a day.
So
that should be contextualized
into how much Quran do I need in
the desert of dunya.
Every day, if I know that my heart
is becoming parched
and my soul is being exposed to this
incredible
ethical famine,
then that should lead me to want to
have a relationship with the Quran.
That's a daily relationship. At a minimum,
a hisp.
At a minimum, this is the amount of
Quran.
I need to stay alive
in the family of this dunya.
So that
iftikar
to the book of Allah.
Like, I need it. I lead the book
of Allah.
So that's kind of the first sort of
etiquette that I have a need because a
need has to be fulfilled.
People will will seek to
solve anything that's creating a sense of that
balance.
That's why
he
says something interesting about
You know, your lord hasn't forsaken you nor
does he despise.
He said that the prophet
was not only
emotionally
overcome by the experience
of the first iterations of Nobuwa,
but also he was sad because once he
heard,
he was an addict.
Like, once he heard the Quran and the
Quran impacted his soul,
he
became sad because he wanted more revelation.
So the way
after
until
it seemed like light years to the prophet
salallahu alayhi wa sallam. Like he wanted more
Quran, once he had it, he couldn't put
it down.
That's why Shoutibi says,
In Herzl al Amani, Sayyidina Shatabhi says that,
when you said and read the Quran correctly,
you'll never get bored with it. Like you
will always mind something new and the more
you repeat it, the more you'll find in
this beauty.
I had a teacher subhanallah who did the
13 qira'at from his sister.
And I came to him one day and
he was like euphoric.
And I said to him, like, what's going
on? He said, today I learned something new
from the Quran. So this is, like, worth
celebrating,
you know. Many of us, what do we
celebrate? SubhanAllah.
Our scholars say what you celebrate is who
we were.
So I said to him, really, ayatul ahaqqam,
verses of rulings, this he said, no, suratul
fatiha. I was young, I said Surat Fatiha
shayd, like you're 60 years old, like Surat
Fatiha, you learned that like when you were,
you know, a child he said, Now, walaise
subhanAllah, I learned something today new from Surat
Fatiha at the age of 16 with 13
different qira'at and he used to make hatham
every 3 days of the Quran. Every 3
days of the Quran.
So the first is to have like a
longing for it, to need it.
The second is to approach it.
And, subhanAllah, shaitan will come to you. Every
time you try to take a step to
the book of Allah, shaitan will come to
you and amplify your sins, amplify
your sense of evil
or on the opposite, He'll amplify your sense
of autonomy.
The whole thing is to either create an
imbalance where because of my perceived evil, I'm
unworthy to have a relationship with faith, or
because of my accomplishment,
faith is unworthy to celebrate me.
So the key is to push in,
not to listen to those voices.
Whenever our teachers used to say that if
you're being called to the Quran,
this is Allah calling you directly.
Allah constantly
is calling people to Jannah
and the key to Jannah is the Quran.
So if I'm being called to have relationship
with the Quran,
my hope in Allah's call should diminish
any insecurities
because of my sins
or any sense of autonomy because of my
successes.
The third is to ask questions.
For every verse of the Quran,
there are 3 or 4 things you should
think about.
Number 1 is pondering on it.
The
Quran says, and this is to the disbelievers.
Will they not
the backdoor. It means I I ponder it.
So wish that I go from the front
to the back.
That's my relationship with the
Quran. So the first is to invest
my thoughts in the book of Allah.
Subhanahu wa ta'ala.
Number 2 is to ask questions.
And it's perfectly acceptable to ask questions. In
fact that's a sign of a healthy
reading of the Quran.
Allah
questions are so important, they're recorded in the
Quran. Yes,
yes, yes, They ask you they ask you.
Shashawwarilaladhaadawi.
And harjatullahi
bariyaka. Well al Ansafi says you know they
ask the prophet 13 questions. They're
recorded
in
the
Quran. If we get scoot forward,
The next etiquette is if I come across
questions that I'm not sure of, to locate
people who are trained in the Quran,
and to inquire.
Don't run to Reddit.
Run to Imadet.
Sheikhin,
ask a teacher,
ask somebody who's trained,
ask somebody that has that experience.
The next is after you're given an answer
to
engage in a discussion with that person.
The more you give, the more you get.
The more you push in on jazam and
jins alaamal,
the more you'll receive.
And then finally is to think about
how do I contextualize what I'm reading into
my life.
With that in mind,
Imam Fakhluddin al Razi
and
his excellent explanation of the Quran,
it's very
interesting to see he and people like Al
Portibi and others when they would explain the
Quran, they see waafiha masa'il.
You know, there are questions about this.
They didn't see questions as a threat.
They saw questions as an opportunity,
and often times young people they feel like
they can't ask questions.
All people feel like they can't ask questions.
But the Prophet
said,
Like the remedy before anything is to ask
a question, a good question.
So saying to Imam Barazi, the early scholars
of tafsir, we should tell
people who say like, you know, religion doesn't
encourage me to ask questions. This is of
course a post colonial hangover. We're now reflecting
the product of the experience onto our own
religious
identity which we'll talk about tomorrow. That's the
problem. We're not thinking as Muslims. We're thinking
as reformed Christianists
or reformed Jews.
And so we look at our tradition from
that lid because we're surrounded, we're furnished.
And then you couple that the red pill
and the and the and the blue pill,
now you got a serious problem. We have
to emancipate ourselves from from those thoughts.
Decolonality
begins not thinking in those ways. And looking
at the Quran as the book of Allah.
The best book you can read for this
is the book of Wustat Khur Murad, The
Way to the Quran
in English. Excellent book, The Way to the
Quran.
But why would classical scholars
divide tafsir and say, fihi masari, fihiha masari?
There are questions about this, there's questions about
this, there's questions about this. Why would they
write books called problematic issues of the Quran?
Does it mean the Quran is problematic means
the mind has trouble understanding and engaging. The
onus is on the reader not the book
of Allah. Because
The problem is Imam Shaukani says not the
Quran, the problem is
Is the people reading it?
But Imam Marazi began his Surat of Fatihah
and he says there's a number of questions.
And the first question he poses is one
that we should thank God.
And that is if we're already guided.
If we already have guidance,
why do we say,
Guide us.
Please guide us to the straight path. In
fact, Sayna Al Razi,
and I posted this on my facebook wall
today, the quote.
He actually says,
this is a person played
Because we know usually we recite sultu fatiha
when we are praying, laosalatayillabi
fatihaatil kitab. There's no salah without fatiha. So
if someone is praying,
obviously if they've engaged in a intense
form of liturgy and devotion,
they already got it.
So why then are they saying
We'll talk about the answer in the second
part of the
We praise to Allah We send peace and
blessings upon the prophet and all of the
prophets and those who follow them until the
end of time. The question of Imam al
Razi.
That's why one of our teachers say something
really nice. He said if you really read
tafsir correctly,
when you read
You know, there are some questions about this.
When you're finished reading what those Imams wrote,
you're gonna write Wafi'i Masai'il.
I have questions.
The idea of shutting the door
to engagement
is not something that's from
our religious tradition,
nor was it.
I remember a sheikh Muhammad Al Fazari
He used to sit in Maidan,
one Square in Egypt,
Mahmoud at best.
And he would every Friday, even in his
late, later years of life, he would sit
and just answer questions on the masjid after
the khutva, and you will find
lines of people.
I was recently in Andalus
in in in Granatah.
And there
right there you'll find it's now no longer
a masjid. It used to be the place
of
religious
rulings
and opinions
in the major square.
And every Friday,
qadis and muftis and teachers would sit
and take people's questions. The reason people don't
like you to ask questions is because they
themselves are insecure of themselves.
And if someone is insecure of themselves, they
should not be teaching religion.
They should be getting some other help.
That's why one of the qualities our teacher
used to say,
a good religious Muslim is someone who's confident.
We say, how can you he said, there's
a difference between confidence and arrogance.
And confidence comes when I've I've qualified myself.
So Sayidina Arvazi, he asked this question. If
we say
and
we're praying,
why?
He said,
we say,
are you asking for what you already have?
And so he says, actually,
for the person who is a believer,
there will be
a perennial
challenge
that once they've arrived to a state of
iman and devotion,
it will never leave them
until they leave this world.
And that is that Allah has
created
natural characteristics in every human being.
And it is upon a person
to struggle and work hard
to maintain balance,
and he goes into great detail.
He says, for example, emotional balance.
Imam al Muqaddesi in his exhalation of Imam
al Bazir is ahiyah, he said every characteristic
that you know in the world has a
good and a bad.
Hate.
There's times where hate is obligated.
We hate injustice.
But there's also forms of hate,
bigotry, racism,
which are forbidden.
Spending.
There's a commendable component of being charitable but
People who waste are the,
you know, the siblings of shaitan, the devil.
Love
there's a good form of love like Aha
Shelpi says about the prophet
You know, if you blame me for my
my passionate love of the Prophet, this is
qadr.
To sacrifice for what you truly love, you
should rightfully love. To be injured is not
really an injury.
But then when you see people love things
that are harmful,
that are actually
extremely counterproductive in their lives, take them away
from Allah
destroy their families,
so there's duality to love.
So what Al Razi says is when the
believers says
They're asking Allah for balance.
Protect me from Gefraat al Tafreed.
Expect protect me from negligence.
And protect me from being
irrationally passionate.
As Allah says in the Quran,
as a condition for proper dawah,
We have made you in the middle as
a community
so that you can be witnesses
to humanity.
As the prophet says,
you are the witnesses of Allah on the
earth.
That's why whenever you see the dawah
to non Muslims
is nonexistent,
it's a sign that the community is extreme.
It's not able to locate itself in the
vital center
which naturally and organically brings people together.
So a very simple
doesn't need to be
too long.
And that is that when we say, we're
begging Allah for balance. If you ask a
structural engineer, what's the most difficult thing to
do is to balance the structure?
Believers, we cannot sleep on the fact
that it is not easy to be balanced
unless while we ask
for it no less to the 17 times
a day. How do we achieve that balance?
Number 1 is to learn not to
live vicariously
through YouTube figures or TikTokers
or Instagrammers
or Shoo for Imams. I have to own
my own basic learning.
Not learning scholarship,
learning functionality.
In America we have a lot of dysfunctional
scholars.
We have very few functional
actors.
So
I learned for Ibaril.
As Imam Abuhamad
says,
The fruit of learning is to to worship.
We used to have a teacher from Algeria.
We used to read to him everyday,
5 or 6 texts and when we'd finish
he would say, 'At least pray turakah, or
go give sadaqa.
Translate this time into hayv.'
And this is from the prophet
when sayin Jibreel would come to him in
Ramadan, he would become incessantly generous. He would
become more generous because the fruit of the
knowledge, the fruit of the Quran
is translated into what?
Chariot.
Number 2 is to be part of the
broader Muslim community.
It's very tempting because if I can find
3 people that agree with me that actually
agrees with my hawa.
But the opposite is really what's good for
the nafs to work and engage and
we say,
right? To be with the community, to be
patient with the haters, to be with the
lovers, to be with those in the middle.
That's actually where the is, that's actually where
prophecy lies.
The walkeths the the prophets walked in the
markets. The markets saw the most hated place
to God, but still they walked there because
they knew that's where the job was.
It's very easy to be a saint in
my room,
but it's very difficult
to be a saint in the streets.
That's why I say, Nur'amur Abdul Khattab said
that those who mix with the people,
Of course somebody knows their own iman, they
know who they are if they feel that
they're going to lose their iman by being
with others,
no problem. But with the believers?
With the faithful?
So we have to be careful because the
symptom of postmodernity
is acute fragmentation.
The safe way is to be with the
jama'ah. What does the jama'ah mean? Not the
group salafi, sufi. That's not what that means.
Al jama'ah means al ummah.
The group, the broader community.
That's why the Prophet said
my community does not disagree.
And the outcome of the colonial experience within
the Muslim world is this micro fragmentation,
whereas the opposite. That's why I say to
Yusuf, he said
Bring me with the people. So when you
go to the mosque and you find somebody
said something or someone rubbed me the wrong
way, just push to it. Have some resilience,
man.
The prophet went to 5. Did he give
up? He didn't give up. He kept going.
People are complex. You don't know what kind
of day they had, what they've been, what
their experiences. Maybe the guy lost his job.
Maybe she and her husband had a fight.
Maybe the girl, she didn't get into the
graduate program if she wanted to. Whatever, you
don't know. But it's not about you. The
alter of postmodernity
is the individual.
Islam doesn't put the individual
first, It puts the jama'ah first.
That's why praying in jama'ah is more
murderous than praying alone.
The third
important
component of staying balanced is to experience Iman.
Like live your life,
and don't orwaili
and kinda, you know,
look at your life every single step you
make, oh Allah hates me. Like, I'm not
petty. We're petty.
I made a mistake, it's all over with
you. You're not that important man. Imaan doesn't
orbit around you. Often times a sinner
mask a hyper sense of selfishness that you'll
never find an elective person because the sinner
thinks my sin is so great it destroyed
the earth. Who are you?
Just repent.
And so it became a sorrowful song where
Allah hates me, Allah as it gives me,
and I find value in this is very
dangerous.
That's why scholars said after you repent, forget
it.
Leave it to Allah. It's not your business
now.
And finally is to use religious educators.
And one of the challenges I see now
is that the
injection of political thought into every aspect of
American society
is causing problems. I'll give an example.
Recently,
I I was at an event, and the
imam
was reading the constitution of the prophet salallahu
alaihi wa sallam to the people, and and,
individually, he came late.
Afterwards, he went up to the imam and
he said, you're a communist.
You're a socialist, leftist, communist. This is a
blue pill mosque.
That imam, subhanallah, he's from Palestine, he doesn't
need blue pill, red pill, he doesn't know
anything about this stuff. The monks said what's
he talking about? What meth has? He said
meth was kind of a myth but it's
different.
Then I said to him bro what's wrong?
Did you hear what he's talking about? Like,
this this is socialism, communism.
Let me just bring all the bullet points
I've heard from someone else who now owns
my mind
as they tucker me into sleep.
And so then I said, Man, this is
the constitution of Rasool
Then he said, Man, Stafal, I didn't know.
I said, That's where you should have started,
I don't know.
Now I know.
I also saw recently where an imam, he
talked about things within the Sharia, and someone
came to him and said, You know, you're
far right, you're off the path, this is
unacceptable.
They brought, like, I tried to drown him
in this blue pill stuff.
I said to him, he's quoting the hadith
of the Messenger of Allah.
I thought this was just us until yesterday
on NPR.
I heard a Christian minister say that he
read the Beatitudes
and people tried to get him fired for
being a communist in his church.
He said this is God quoting according to
our text,
Jesus
alayhis salaam,
Jesus.
There's no j.
The point is,
y'all gotta be careful of how this political
stuff is working in this country right now.
It's destabilizing
mosques, destabilizing
families, destabilizing
children with their parents, because secular
ideology
is built to destabilize.
And how do
you kinda protect yourself from that? You have
good imams.
And now you have a good iman.
Got a teacher now in your community.
My dear friend,
Imam Dawood
Yaseen,
and Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala and the balance
between because some people come to say we
shouldn't celebrate people. Yes, we should. That's that
balance.
Quran says to celebrate
So it's very important that you lovingly
and kindly push into building a relationship with
him. And tonight, I'm here. I'm here to
celebrate.
I came here to celebrate
my brother's appointment as the imam
of this community. So I want to invite
everyone to come, alhamdulillah.
It will have a big impact on your
children. I've seen this. When you celebrate the
imam coming to your community, children say, I
wanna be imam.
So may Allah
bless us to be.
And may Allah
bless our new imam
and bless his family and bless his kids
and give him light and hayr and make
him a means of goodness
for the city.
And may Allah bless you to be a
means of goodness for him.
We ask Allah to
protect our brothers and sisters in Jenin.
Ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to help the
people in Pakistan
to bring unity
and belief to Pakistan.
We ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to help
our brothers and sisters in Mali, in Chad,
Salaham.
Ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and Yahmina,
to to protect us and protect us from
all forms of fitin.
We pray for our brothers and sisters in
the Gulf countries,
Moscow, and all over the world.
We ask Allah to help us
in
the state of Texas
to be the stars that they see when
they look up at night deep in the
heart of Texas.
We ask a lot to make us a
means of guidance for them. We ask a
lot to help us to bring a sense
of higher and value to hearts that are
struggling.
Ask a lot to make us the the
the minarets of light for hearts that are
looking for something in days of great, great
difficulty.