Reforming the Self #06

This one

Al hamdu Lillahi Rabbil Alameen wa Salatu was Salam ala Ashraful, MBIA, almost serene Nabina Muhammad was in a Muhammad Ali. He

was asleep a lot of Marlon and be going and Ferno and fatten at the island and it was even their own money out of that. I mean,

last class we talked about

the foundations of the McHattie machete.

What did we say are the McHattie Machete is the title of the book? What is he talking about? What's the whole point of the book? What is

an McHattie? Machete? Ah

let's see who has been taking notes.

to contextualize it, I'll go with us for Hani, he says there's three levels, right? There's you guys know that I tested you on that before.

There's a metal out. settling upon the earth, there's a bad it's a Rockman there's worshipping Allah. And then there's Phil Atha. See laugh? It's all right. You laugh is our destiny is our purpose is our pinnacle, and our highest idea? Or excuse me, ideal.

Okay.

So

within Khilafah saying, what is theta alpha? How do we get there?

How do we become

a laws representatives on earth?

What do we need

in order to fulfill that role?

That's the McHattie machete.

Which is the title of the book, the path to these McHattie machete. Does anybody want to venture a translation?

You don't need to know Arabic. It's just about the

the meaning of everything that I've asked for hernias trying to tell you about he's setting it up this whole time he's been building he's been building he's been building.

And now he's going to start getting to the meat of the issue. The main course everything up until now it's just been kind of, you know, side dressings, antipasti, if you're Italian appetizers,

the McHattie machete

are the qualities that you need to train yourself in?

If you want to be eligible for a loss Khilafah

Okay, the characteristics, the habits, the qualities that you need to develop within yourself.

If you want to be suitable, be eligible, be qualified

for being a Khalifa of Allah.

Being Allah's representative upon earth.

And the title of his book is the path to these elites qualities. How do we get there?

So the entire book up until now, he's just been kind of building up about your nature and your destiny and where we're headed. What's the purpose of life? Putting the seed inside of you to realize that, yes, you're capable of this. In fact, you're created for this, you can do it.

And then contrasting them situating them.

He hasn't even gotten into talking very specifically about what they are. He's just whetting your appetite. He's building up the anticipation. He's trying to make you want it.

And the rest of the book is going to be about walking that path. How do we walk that path

to develop and cultivate in ourselves these qualities.

He talked about the foundations he said basically there were four routes and four fruits, we could say we wanted to make a little rhyming couplet.

There's four seeds that you plant and if you tend to the garden, they will flower or they will bloom into four fruits

which is the whole point and the objective.

So one of those seeds, one of the foundations, how we get to the macadam machete out of the elites quality

Does that qualify us for Khilafah? is education.

A Muslim has to have

a good education and has to value education

and public school culture. And I'm someone who went to public school. So I should know.

Among the youth, there's often this kind of

rejection, rebellion, better word against

a culture that honors, intellect, and a culture that respects intelligence.

To put it Frank, it's cool to be stupid.

Or we should say more specifically, it's not cool to be too smart.

This is especially true for girls who are often subjected to more vicious and passive aggressive peer pressure than boys.

As Muslims, we have to have in ourselves and our homes, and try to even take it to the streets, into our schools and in society, the opposite the respect for education and learning and knowledge. Not just you know, and Muslims are okay at this. We want our kids to be educated. But sometimes we too often border on

instrumentalizing or operationalizing, that education, it's not necessarily to be educated,

in and of itself, to make you a better worshipper of a law or to be Allah's Khalifa. But it's to get a certain job to become a doctor, an engineer, or a lawyer. Right? We I've heard people call the trinity of Muslims, right? They want their kids to be either doctor, lawyer, engineer, right? A lot of times, we only care about the grade. So we push our kids push our kids push our kids, we don't even necessarily care about their internal development, their respects for learning their respect for knowledge, and its implementation. And experts.

We just want them to get the results, the grades, the diplomas, the honor, roll, the Dean's list, the Ivy League school, so on and so forth. So we have to be careful, we're halfway there, most of us, but we have to take it all the way there. And especially in these times Subhanallah, where expertise and knowledge and intellect has become politicized. We live in a time now where Subhanallah so much trust has been broken,

that people look upon the intellectual classes, or at least people who hold positions of authority and expertise with a lot of suspicion. And a lot of that suspicion is grounded actually in the abuse, the abuse of a trust that used to be there. So if you're looking at you know, one kind of prism that I like to look at Islam, and specifically Islam in the United States through that's very helpful is that the United States is ailing. Okay. It's like a patient. That's ether eyes up on a table. And Islam provides so many solutions to some of the things that are plaguing the United States and beyond.

So one of the things that we have to offer, because Islam should have something new to offer to the people around us to make their lives better. One of the things that we have to offer

is kind of

the middle of course, when it comes to education, we have a culture that respects education and respects intellect, not just so that you can become a boss and tell other people what to do, not just so that you can make a ton of money.

But because then you're more qualified for responsibility. You can make better decisions, and you can help more people.

So if we take this model of educate of, of respect for education and intellect, and we implement it, we're going to have Muslim experts and intellectuals who are worthy of trust,

who aren't just in their positions to collect a paycheck to gain the accolades to you know, collect multiple pensions, but they actually have a sense of service and responsibility, which will also gain trust of people who haven't reached out

level of expertise, see out how Islam has a solution for what ails our contemporary society. That was the first seed. The first seed was education. And we said that education if it is cultivated in the proper way,

and it has maintained and is nurtured,

that it grows into and blossoms and flowers into wisdom.

Because education that is based on information alone is severely misguided.

That's the kind of education that results in things that end up destroying us, such as the atomic bomb, such as other things that scientists so

we would say, temporarily blinded by their pursuit of the cutting edge, the discovery, the information,

that they lose their sense of what's the big picture, what's all of this going towards.

If we focus education, in the right way, we tie it to service we tie it to Khilafah, to serving a law upon this earth

then it can bear fruit and true wisdom

that helps and serves everybody.

The second seed or foundation of these McHattie, machete on the elite qualities that we have to have, if we're going to be a Khalifa of Allah is restraint.

Restraint and we talked about the Hadith of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam is had been doing a handbook Allah restrained from the world and Allah will love you was had the mind the NAS your head brokenness, and restrain refrain from that wishes. That which belongs to other people, and they will love you too.

If we harness this restraint, we tend to it we cultivate it, we focus it, it blooms into generosity.

Because you've stopped caring about things, you've realized that they come and go that they're only on loan to you from a law, they were never really yours in the first place. And so it doesn't break your heart to see it go to somebody else. You don't feel envy, you don't feel jealousy, you don't feel tight fisted.

So restraint blooms into generosity. The third is that patience. The third seed was patience and patience if it's tended to, and it's harnessed and it's focused.

It blooms into forbearance

and even courage and bravery.

We think of patients sometimes and we talked about the three types of patients last week, patients in the face of adversity, patience upon worship of along what is good and patience in refraining from what is wrong.

But if patients becomes habitual eyes, patients, which is kind of an after the fact

quality, something that's a reaction to some other stimulus

that we can actually inculcate and develop forbearance, which is a an active

and a pre emptive quality

your patient before you even have a stimulus to be patient from.

And if you have these qualities, this actually unlock something even greater than that, which is courage, and bravery. How How is that possible? What's the relationship between patients and bravery, or patience and courage?

We don't think about it because when we think of patients, we think of meekness, right? Like somebody who's hitting you with a cane, and you're kind of just like,

taking it.

But that's not how patients has to look like.

Patience can be about determination. Patience can be about being undeterred. In what is right. And so if you're on the battlefield, and the enemy army is three times larger than you like the Battle of weather and the Battle of a hood, it takes patience, to stay and to summon bravery to go out and fight all of your bravery and courage is based off of your patience.

Because, you know, you have patients with a law that a law can aid beyond what any numerical disadvantage you have.

And you have patients

Knowing that

the end is already determined by Allah.

And finally, we said that the last seed was justice.

Being just being fair, for or against you, it doesn't matter and how if you plant this and focus this and harness this

and tend to it,

that it will become excellence,

a level above justice, where you're no longer going to be just merely concerned with what's barely permissible, or what are your rights that you get to take from your spouse or from your boss or your employee or anything. But you start to go beyond that and act with accent. With excellence. You go above and beyond what justice requires. You do things in a beautiful way.

Like when suit a man and woman were both given the case, to decide in the Koran. And one of them ruled with one thing that was just And then the other came and gave a second ruling, which was not just Just what was said it was a level above that. All that was last class, but we were a little rushed. So I just wanted to review it very quickly. Today we have a new chapter.

And it has to do with the importance of purifying the soul.

Rather than us for hunting titles, this chapter, purifying the soul, it's a sentence, it's not a question. purifying the soul is a prerequisite

for Khilafah to Allah for succeeding or representing a law.

And it is also the completeness of worship.

So purifying yourself makes you eligible for Allah's successorship or his to be His representative. And it also completes your worship to Him in the implication being that your worship of Him, Allah subhanaw taala is always not thus, it's always deficient or lacking or incomplete. Without these qualities, the macadam is Sharia, the elites qualities that make you eligible for kanessa?

When I first heard the title of this, you know, the first thing I thought about was modern social movements.

If any of you, I mean, if we've talked about kind of my background, before, there was a time when I was a pretty big activist, when I would go down to protests against the IMF and the World Bank, and you know, these sorts of things.

Climate change, right.

And so I was involved in these various kind of leftist groups

that would always protest these big international organizations that are, yeah, doing a lot of damage across the earth.

And people that were very dedicated to these causes, right? They would sleep over in churches, they would bus in from all over the country, make meals, donate things, you know, eat very little.

But Subhanallah one thing that I noticed in all my time with those kinds of groups is that

people did not have any individual self discipline.

People were controlled too easily by their desires. Whether it was the desire for alcohol or other substances, or

romance, let's use a euphemism and say romance. Attraction, right?

There were kind of these big critiques of all these sorts of things that were going on oppression and so on and so forth. But people weren't disciplined enough in their personal lives.

And if anybody's ever read into the history

of say, like the FBI, okay, I don't know

how much we want to get into this, but it's a historical facts that are in the United States of America, the FBI has actually infiltrated and sabotaged certain activist groups, right? In order to kind of break them up.

Especially in the 60s, but you know, even after

and what have

and one of the ways that they did this is by actually kind of

playing upon people's lack of discipline in their personal lives.

Whether it was drug addiction, or alcohol addiction, or relationships or things like this, basically, whether you agree with that history or that kind of politics is irrelevant. What matters to us

is that even the devil

IBLEES himself will

I leverage a personal weakness against you.

Right? Every yearning that you have.

And every deep seated fear that you have

is a, a weak point in your armor

that the devil can actually see.

And he can try to push you. That's the button to push. That's the thing that

will get a response.

Like Allah says in the Quran, Allah, excuse me, Allah says in the Quran that the devil threatens you with poverty, the idle common federal law.

And so when he gets people to transgress against the laws bounds, we might look and say, Oh, my God, like how can this person do such a thing? Well, it's because they have the earnings that are unfulfilled, and they have fears, they have things that they're afraid of.

And so the devil actually uses these yearnings and fears against the person until he brings them down.

All this to say that if you don't take the time,

or the effort to purify yourself, to relinquish your grasp

on these yearnings,

or your confidence in these fears, that you too, can be manipulated very, very easily by the devil. You can be provoked into acting out and transgressing. And these are barriers between you and these elites qualities the macadam machete, yeah, these are barriers between you and the Khilafah.

into being eligible

for Allah's representation, or for successorship.

And you won't be eligible or qualified for that Khilafah until you tame them, until you master them and until you overcome them. That's basically in a nutshell,

the point

that a lot of us for Hani is getting to with this chapter

He gives an analogy to prove why.

He makes an analogy

between the physical body and the spiritual self, the physical self and the spiritual self. He says, just as the body

can be rendered unclean and unsuitable for worship,

with a physical impurity

that can be ascertained or noticed by your site, the sight of your eye.

Right you have medicine Do you notice something? A mark a stain, something that happened from somewhere.

That nudges on you disqualifies you from worship, you can't pray? You can't read the Koran until you remove that and then just you purify your body with water.

He says, just like this, so too can the soul be rendered unclean and unsuitable for Khilafah

due to the spiritual impurity, a spiritual impurity that can only ask to be ascertained there'd be noticed or observed not by the sight of the eye but the insights, the insight of the heart and the mind.

He says this is the meaning of a loss statement. In the middle of the corner notice the most of the colon the disbelievers better yet the polytheists and the idolaters are only nudges. They're only filth.

That's very strong words that allow mean like physical filth, like you can't shake their hands or can't touch them. No, you didn't mean that.

He meant that they have this inner filth.

This inner filth that prohibits them disqualifies them from fulfilling the role of Khilafah they can never be as long as they have that filth with them. They can never be suitable as leaders. True leaders on Allah's Earth in Allah's creation, governing and managing Allah's creation as he wants it to be managed and governed.

This is also why one of the first commands to the Prophet alayhi salaatu wa Salaam.

Well Roger is a fragile

and a shoe. Avoid all impurities, ridges of ridges

Stay away from them, avoid them, clean yourself of them.

So that you may be eligible for the for this role in alpha.

Similarly, Allah says Karateka Yeah, Jolo register on a Latina you know, this is part of the spiritual cycle or the spiritual world that we were talking about last night in our class of Allah's 99 names.

About how, if you believe, and you do acts of faith, Allah will purify you, and cleanse you, and continue to improve

your faith and increase it. And the opposite. If you continue to transgress

and blaspheme

and do these sorts of acts of disobedience, then your soul is going to get covered, and soiled and dirtied and sullied? Bit by bit.

This is just a spiritual law, just as as automatic and natural as gravity throwing something up and coming down. This is the spiritual law that Allah has created the universe with.

So the people who don't believe the people who deny the people who refuse to believe, Allah says, What does he do to them, he covers them with ridges. He, he lets the filth build up on their spirit.

And so they to become disqualified from the station of Khilafah they are ineligible to be leaders.

Because being a hadith of Allah being a representative of Allah has an aspect of godliness to it's not godliness in the sense that we're gods or we're divine, oh stuff for Allah, nothing like that. But in the

in the proportion to which Allah is a Rahman Rahim and he loves mercy, we too must be merciful. Right, that's the godliness, we're talking about those qualities and jode will come these qualities of generosity and a sad and bitter that Allah wants to see in his creation, which is the whole mantle of responsibility, if we're going to be Allah's representative is we're going to bring about these qualities in the creation.

Can somebody who

can somebody who worships idols bring about those qualities in the creation? Can somebody who is mired in their own attachments in their gluttony in their callousness

in their selfishness?

Okay, can such a person bring about these qualities and the creation No, they can't.

They can't do it

and so this is why this process of self purification is essential. It's a prerequisite it comes first. Absolutely has to there's no chance you're going to get to that level unless you take the time to cleanse yourself

he says as another evidence from the Koran because we know that our argument also honey as a master of the Quran

well the better to table yes for Trinidad to be in there will be he will love the hobbit Allah soldier Isla Nikita

the earth that is pure.

It produces

its crops its

foliage,

by the permission of a law and the land that is hobbled that is soiled that is tainted that is stained.

La Astro Isla Nikita it doesn't produce anything of notes, anything of worth anything of use.

Except Nikita weeds, useless things, things that harm rather than benefit.

Rather than loss for honey. He also mentioned the the root of the word

that we use an Arabic for the apostles of Asa alayhi salam and Hawaii Yun.

From how what are you how we grew to here

means to cleanse yourself.

So there's these types of people that Allah praises in the Koran for cleansing themselves like the people of Koba that Allah prays in Surah Toba?

And then the

however you in their name literally means those who claim themselves and purify themselves. So this type of not everybody can be a direct apostle, right? Like this is an inner circle, right? This is the elite, which is what the McHattie machete means the elites qualities. But if you want to get there, you want to be in that inner circle.

You have to, you have to walk the road and you have to fight the fight. And you have to clean yourself of these sorts of things.

We have

eight minutes and we're at the next chapter.

The next chapter is a bit long, but we'll start it inshallah

Raghavan also Hani, he begins by drawing a similitude between water and the forehand. And he does this a lot. He just in the last chapter, he compared water as purifying the body,

making it eligible for worship, to self purification, right, which makes the soul eligible for Okinawa. That was his analogy. Now he's making another analogy very, very similar to that one. But this one is a little bit more specific. If someone's going to ask you, okay, great. I'm motivated. I'm psyched. I'm ready. Let's do it. Let's get these mechanics shut off. How are we going to get them? What are we going to use? Where do I start along with us for honey, he says the Koran.

And he compares it to water.

He says any mentions a ton of verses from the Koran to show the similarity in language because Allah sends down the rain when that's the lamina sama EMA and right.

Just as Allah uses the same verbiage, the same word to talk about how he

reveals the Koran

10 Ziva.

So he says just as water is sent down, to purify our bodies, and to make life in the dunya possible so to is the core and sent down to purify our souls and make our afterlives our life after death possible.

The next little part is where it gets long. I'll just do a teaser for next week.

He asked the question, okay, that's what we use to purify what needs purify? Where do we start

and he's going to identify three human capacities that have to be purified.

The first is thought

the second is desire or appetite, depending on which word you would like to use Shaha an Arabic

And the third is a himedia your your fury or your zeal or your rage you could translate it as

and that's where we'll stop there. That's the teaser for next week in sha Allah next week is going to it's a good it's a good chapter Masha Allah. So I hope to see you there. Does anyone have any questions in the remaining five minutes that we have?

Questions about anything inside the class outside the class

what am I plans for tomorrow?

Good we have a private question that came in.

That's a very challenging question.

Excellent.

Quote. You said, idol worshipers cannot manifest these qualities such as mercy.

But don't they?

Ah, excellent. These are the kinds of questions we want.

These are the kinds of questions we want.

Okay, shake family has a really easy question when Juma is Anna's call, can we pray soon? Or do we wait until Hosanna is finished? You can do either. Some of the scholars said because listen, there's a Hadith of the Prophet saw a Salam he said when

Then is called don't stand up or sit down. And because the devil flees from the event, and so there's to shove, there's a similarity made

between

the devil and somebody who's standing and sitting. But obviously, if you're praying, you could say, Okay, how close is the similarity between me and the devil? If I'm standing to prayer sitting to pray? So there's some scholars who said, No, it's best to stay put and wait until the event is done. Or conversely, if you're already standing, stay standing and wait until the event is done. There's others that say, you know, you're praying, you don't look like the shaytaan. So, and Allah knows best.

Okay, so the first question, okay, um,

don't we see polytheists who are merciful?

Don't we see polytheists? Who have good qualities?

Hmm.

It seems that we do. Isn't this a contradiction? This is excellent, because these are the questions that we need to encourage our youth to ask to, because they are demanding consistency. And we deserve to demand consistency from our faith from the Quran from the cinema. If it's true, it's got it's got to be consistent.

We only have three minutes. But I'll try

when it comes to things like mercy

rather, but also Hani actually mentioned this in a very passing way. If I could, if I could get it back up on my I would have to take time to look through it. But he says when he first in the book lists all the macadam machete, wisdom, and justice and mercy and this and that, and the other, he then says at the end, all of them intended for Allah subhanho wa taala.

And this is the answer to any sort of question that has to do with Well, aren't there good people? Among the idolaters? Aren't they good people? Don't we find some of them being very nice? Don't they given charity? Don't they help people?

And then we say that, yeah, there's two aspects to that to every action. There's the outer aspect, and there's the inner aspect. So the outer aspect is what is its effect on human beings around us.

And if we're just looking at the effect on the outer effect on human beings around us, we say yes, we see mercy. This person is doing this for this other person. And it's helping them money, food, shelter,

domestic violence, homes, halfway houses, all these sorts of things. But when we go to the intersection, the inner aspect,

what's their intention behind doing it?

Because you can do an action and as we learn from the prophesies that I'm in the amount of in the yet, the only thing that's going to purify your soul isn't just the external action, it's the external action paired with the proper intention. Because we could intend anything. When we do these external actions. I could be snapping myself with a with a with a phone and making it a selfie so that I get lots of likes on Facebook or Instagram. I could be doing it because I think about because I

It makes me feel good. As a person, it relieves my guilt.

Right? I could be doing it for recognition or for pride, praise, there's all these sorts of intentions. There's all these sorts of intentions. And if someone's not doing it for Allah subhanaw taala.

If someone's not doing it for Allah, subhanaw taala for the Creator, then they're not doing it for the right reasons. And it's not going to do that internal work.

And so it

doesn't count in the spiritual realm. And Allah knows best, and we can talk about it more later because I'm gonna get cut off any second here.

Okay, thank you very much, everybody. I appreciate all of your participation on Honda de la sol, sol. Sol is that what's salatu salam ala Rasulillah I'm very tired. Excuse me.