Suhaib Webb – Two Misunderstandings About Istikhara

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.