Suhaib Webb – Two Misunderstandings About Istikhara
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I'm out here Orange County. I love Orange
County. Long history with this beautiful community. And
one of my favorite places to go to
in Orange County
is Jerreer Bookstore. I love this place. I
live in this place whenever I come here.
Good to see you. How are you doing?
We're just gonna look around and and see
what happens.
So
what I've seen, people ask me all the
time about and
they ask me, like, what are the things
that are most concerning that you see outside
of knowing how to do it properly? And
I would say there are, like, like two
things that I find people kind of fail
to understand.
Number 1 is the prayer asking Allah to
choose something for us is not made, for
example, with the obligatory things. Like, you don't
make istikhara
to, like, pray fajr. You don't break istikhara
to, like, spend time with your family.
The second is we don't make istikhara in
the areas of the sunnah
or the haram
or the impermissible. Why? Because we have rulings
for those things. There's clarity there. Istikhara comes
in the face of ambiguity,
which means in the face of the mubahat,
the permissible as mentioned by Imam Al Ayni.
So when am I making
a on issues that are permissible for which
there is, you know, no clarity, like, should
I take this job or not? Or should
I marry this person or not or should
I, you know,
take this person as a friend or as
a business partner.
That's all falling under the permissible
issues and there's why I make
to Allah
The second thing that I see people really,
I think,
this is concerning actually is that
they wait for a dream or some kind
of, like,
inner
feeling
instead of doing the actual research
and groundwork
to see if that thing is actually good
for them, the strategy.
Allah says to the prophet, sallam, in the
Quran,
take all the precautions.
We know that dreams are important in Islam,
but we wanna understand that dreams are
like Right? Dreams are like salt on the
food. They're not the beef. The beef is,
I wanna marry this person. I wanna take
this job. I wanna, you know, invest in
this in this business.
I have to do the research. I have
to put in the physical effort and I
have to put in the intellectual rigor to
make sure that what I'm doing is correct.
These are two mistakes
that I see people a lot. They make
when they when they talk about istikhara. Number
1 is they make Istikhara for like the
wrong things. Like for example, one time when
I was in MSA, we didn't have a
hadib and there was a brother who could
give the Chutba, So we said, can you
give the chukpa? He's like, I made this
tochar, I don't feel good. Yeah. This is
this is a
obligation upon the community to perform so therefore
you have to do it because you're the
most qualified. This is not the place for
this.
The other thing is I see people all
the time turn down good opportunities
based on dreams or notions. Listen,
if I begin to declare the reality of
someone else without researching them, based on a
dream that I had,
that means that like, I may have a
little narcissism in me. Like I think that
my dream determines the truth.
No no. And that's why we
oftentimes misunderstand
the hadith of the prophet
who said that
the the true dreams are a part of
prophethood.
And that's why sometimes we miss and that's
why sometimes we misunderstand
the hadith of the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa
sallam. The problem of the ummah is not
that it knows hadith and Quran.
The problem of the ummah is that it
fails to understand hadith and Quran correctly. This
is a bigger catastrophe.
So this hadith that says a true dream
is a part of revelation. People think, oh,
I had a dream that means it's revelation.
No. Masha'Allah Sheikh Abdul Doraiz al Azharie, one
of the great scholars he said as Ibn
Hajar mentions,
if
I dream something and later on in life
it happens, that's the true dream.
Not that I dream something and it didn't
happen. That's not a true dream. That's not
a part of revelation,
a part of prophecy because we know that
the hadith of
has said that the beginnings of revelation,
a part of revelation was what? The true
dreams.
So he would see it and then later
on it would happen. So let's say that
I wanna take this job or let's say
that somebody wants to marry somebody and they
have, oh, I had a bad dream about
that person.
Did that actually happen or did you have
the dream? If it didn't happen, you should
ignore the dream
and go based on what you see. The
sound research shows
tethered from religious knowledge.