Yousuf Raza – Ramadan Conversations Ep 22 We give you victory… Surah alFath 13
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Okay, bismillah, alhamdulillah, alhamdulillah, wassalatu wassalamu ala
rasoolillah, wa ala alihi wa ashabihi ajma'een,
qala tabaraka wa ta'ala fi kitabihil kareem,
ba'd an aqool, a'udhu billahi minash shaitanir
rajeem, bismillahir rahmanir raheem.
Inna fatahna laka fatham mubeena, liyaghfir laka allahu
ma taqaddama min thambika wa ma taakhar wa
yutimma ni'matahu alayk, wa yahdiyaka siratun mustaqeema, wa
yansuraka allahu nasran aziza, huwa alladhi anzala sakinata
fi qulubil mu'mineena liyazdadu imanan ma'a imanihim,
wa lillahi junoodu assamawati wal ardi wa kana
allahu aliman hakeema, liyudkhila al mu'mineena wal mu'minati
jannatin tajree min tahtiha al anharu
khalideena feeha, wa yukaffira anhum sayji'atihim, wa
kana thalika inda Allahi fawzan azeema, sadaqallahul azeem,
rabbish rahli sadri wa sirri yamri wa huwa
lughnatan bil isani yafqoon qawli, Allahumma anfa'na
bimaa allamtana wa allimna ma yanfa'una wa
zidna ilma, Allahumma arana haqiqata al ashya'i
kamahi, Allahumma arana al haqqa haqqan warzuqna attiba
'a, wa arana al baatila baatilan warzuqna ajtinaba,
ameen, ya rabbal alamin, assalamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi
wa barakatuhu Thank you all for joining in.
We are continuing with episode number 22.
We only have a couple of episodes left.
We're nearing the end of this series and
I think we did pretty well, covered quite
a lot of ground in a short amount
of time.
I'm pretty confident that whatever it is that
we had to offer in this particular series
is as unique as it gets in terms
of the combination and the lessons that we
drew out of these narrations from the surah
and the selected ayat.
What we're doing today is we're going to
talk about the first few ayat of Surah
Al-Fath.
This is the 48th surah of the Qur
'an.
After the battle of Ahzab concluded, it was
a victory for Rasulullah ﷺ and the Sahaba.
Madinah won.
Madinah was defended.
The tribes that had settled around Madinah originally
had a pact with Rasulullah ﷺ.
They betrayed that pact with Rasulullah.
They had joined hands with the Quraysh.
The Quraysh had come with an army of
10,000 people.
They had literally put everything that they could
possibly muster in this attack.
As far as the Quraysh were concerned, all
their eggs were in one basket and this
was Ahzab.
All the resources they could muster, all the
money that they had, all the alliances that
they could pull, they pulled them, they brought
them, and they surrounded Madinah with literally all
the king's horses and all the king's men.
And they had this alliance with a Jewish
tribe as well, which was one of the
defenses of Madinah.
Their fortress was on the other side.
If the Quraysh had been allowed entry from
there, then that would have been it.
So Rasulullah ﷺ dug a trench on the
other side.
There were these fortresses from the open end,
so to speak, and then there was obviously
those lava tracks that could not be traversed
by an army.
And so that was the protection that Madinah
had.
They laid siege.
They could not persist.
The Sahaba ﷺ, they stuck strong.
They suffered through the hunger, the difficulty, did
not give in, did not give up.
The Quraysh eventually had to give up.
There was one particular Sahabi who became a
Sahabi right around that time, came to Rasulullah
ﷺ, and Rasulullah ﷺ asked him to conspire
a trick with respect to do not reveal
your iman.
So he went to the particular Jewish tribe.
He said, do you really trust the Quraysh?
Asked them for men.
He went to the Qurayshi tribe.
Do you really trust this Jewish tribe that
you have struck an alliance with?
They developed this mistrust against each other.
Long story short, that didn't work for the
Quraysh, and Madinah was secure.
Now, what happens after this is Rasulullah ﷺ
announces after the Quraysh leave that the Quraysh
are not going to attack you after this
year.
This was their last ditch effort that they,
literally a ditch effort, that they could pull
at you.
Rather, you are going to attack them.
And so, what did this attack look like?
Rasulullah ﷺ had a dream that they're performing
Umrah.
So in the fulfillment of this dream, this
prophecy, him and the Sahaba radiAllahu ta'ala
anhum, they get together, they put on ihram,
1400 of them.
Their swords are sheathed.
They're not going for battle.
They're going for pilgrimage.
They have sacrificial animals with them.
And they're advancing towards Mecca.
Now, the Meccans are shocked.
What do we do?
We can't just allow them to walk in
and do Umrah.
But then again, their legacy is that they
don't turn anyone away from pilgrimage.
To allow them in, Badr has happened.
Uhud has happened.
Ahzab just happened.
And with that humiliation, letting them in to
do Umrah, that's not happening.
Rasulullah ﷺ and the Sahaba radiAllahu ta'ala
anhum camp outside of Mecca, they send emissaries,
they send messengers to talk to the Quraish.
Hazrat Usman radiAllahu ta'ala anhum, he goes
to talk to them.
There is a delay in his return.
Because the Muslims are apprehensive already, what if
they do something?
And if they do anything to harm Hazrat
Usman radiAllahu ta'ala anhum, this means war.
This means we have to fight.
They took a pledge, which is called the
Bayt Ridwan.
They took a pledge, a bay'ah, they
gave to Rasulullah ﷺ, and this was known
as the pledge of death.
Because again, they're not a full-fledged army,
but still they have resolved to stand strong
for Hazrat Usman radiAllahu ta'ala anhum.
Now, of course, the Quraish are in no
position to defend.
And even if they are, even if they
have the ability, the men to put together
to fight, their confidence, their resources are shattered
so much after Ahzab, they're just not ready
for it.
And they already have this intimidation of Rasulullah
ﷺ.
It started from Badr, of course, after the
incredible victory at Badr.
It's something that they haven't been able to
recover from.
They somewhat recovered with Uhud, but then at
Ahzab, that's gone again.
So when they look at Muhammad Rasulullah ﷺ,
there is this deep-seated fear that we
are fighting a man of God, and we
don't want to do that.
We have not come out well in any
of our previous encounters, barring Uhud.
So for them, that's not an option.
So they have to do something.
And this is where the Treaty of Hudaybiyah
comes in, that the Quraish agree to sign
a pact, a peace treaty, with Rasulullah ﷺ.
Some of the clauses in that treaty are,
they look like they are giving the Quraish
the upper hand.
The Quraish are turning the Muslims away.
You're not going to do Umrah this year.
You're going to have to come back next
year.
The treaty includes that we're not going to
fight each other.
We're not even going to assist our allies
against each other.
Our allies are not going to be assisted
either.
If one person, if anyone from us, from
the Quraish, goes to Medina, even if they're
Muslim, Medina has to return them to Mecca.
They cannot keep them.
They have to return them.
They have to hand them over.
However, if somebody from Medina comes to Mecca,
somebody from the people of Rasulullah ﷺ goes
to Mecca, they don't have to return them.
They can stay in Mecca.
So it's a double standard within the treaty
itself.
And so on.
So for a lot of the Sahaba, this
was unacceptable.
They're like, why are we coming off as
the losers, so to speak, in this treaty?
This is not a treaty between equals.
You're the Prophet of God.
This is a holy pilgrimage.
And these people are not giving you that
respect that you deserve.
We are on truth.
Why are we signing a treaty with these
clauses?
Rasulullah ﷺ is signing a treaty and he
dictates that this is a treaty between fulan
and fulan from Quraish and Muhammadur Rasulullah.
They're like, strike out Rasulullah.
We don't believe that you're Rasulullah.
Rasulullah agrees.
Okay, strike it out.
He tells Ali ﷺ, erase that.
Hazrat Ali says, no, I'm not erasing that.
Not Rasulullah, not from in front of your
name, not me.
Rasulullah is like, okay, I'll erase it.
Tell me where it is.
Because he couldn't read, so he pointed towards
where that was and he erased it himself.
Similarly, Hazrat Umar ﷺ, when the treaty is
signed, he's like, what is this?
What are we doing?
Why are we doing this?
Why are we signing this?
You are the Prophet.
We're on truth.
We shouldn't have to do this.
We can fight.
Rasulullah ﷺ says, no, we're doing this.
This treaty is happening.
And it is important that it happens.
Right around that time, when it's over and
done with, the treaty is signed, Rasulullah ﷺ
tells them, okay, open your ihram.
Now for them, it's a big deal.
You came for pilgrimage.
You're not getting to do pilgrimage.
It's something spiritual.
Rasulullah saw a dream.
That dream is not going to be fulfilled.
We're going to return without having performed pilgrimage.
We came for pilgrimage.
Rasulullah ﷺ tells them, no.
Ihram open.
Shave off your heads.
This is it.
Offer your sacrifices.
We're not going in there.
The sahabah are shocked.
They're like, uh uh.
Rasulullah ﷺ tells them they're not doing it.
Rasulullah ﷺ becomes worried.
He's like, what's wrong with them?
Why are they not listening?
He expresses his concern to his wife, Umm
Salma radiyallahu ta'ala Anha.
And this was the ma'mla.
This was the practice of Rasulullah ﷺ.
This was his sunnah.
He would always do shura.
And he had people to do shura with.
And in this particular case, his shura is
with his wife, Umm Salma radiyallahu ta'ala
Anha.
He shares his concern, his worry with her.
What do I do?
What are they doing?
Why aren't they listening?
Why are they instigating God by not listening
to their prophet?
At that point, Umm Salma radiyallahu ta'ala
Anha, the advice that she gives him now
exhibits her wisdom, which she's gathered over the
years.
Now she's one of the first people to
convert to Islam in Mecca with her husband,
Abu Salma.
They were one of the first people to
migrate because of the persecutions.
So she's migrated twice.
She, after having lost, and her husband was
an incredible person, one of the foremost of
the companions of Prophet ﷺ.
After that, coming to marry Rasulullah ﷺ, now
all of this, she is a very wise
woman.
And the advice that she gives Rasulullah ﷺ
reflects that wisdom, and he takes it as
a wise counsel.
She says, you do it yourself, they will
follow suit.
She understands them in that particular situation as
having been overwhelmed by emotions.
This is their emotions having gotten the better
of them.
And if they see you practically do something,
demonstrate, despite themselves, they will be able to
follow suit.
So Rasulullah ﷺ does so, and that's exactly
what happens.
They follow suit.
It is in all of this that one
of the Sahaba, one of the companions of
the Prophet ﷺ, who has been imprisoned by
the Quraysh for all this time, he was
not able to migrate.
Why?
Because he was imprisoned, he was captive.
He finally, after all of these years, is
able to escape Mecca.
And he comes to Rasulullah ﷺ and he
says, I need for you to accept me,
to give me refuge.
I'm running away from them.
I can't go back there.
I need asylum in Medina.
I am a Muslim.
Rasulullah ﷺ of course wants to help him,
wants to give him asylum, wants his suffering
to end, but he can't, and he doesn't.
I have a treaty, and the treaty is
with who?
It's with the Mushrikeen of Mecca.
It is with the perpetrators, the torturers of
Islam, of Muslims, for all these years.
People who, the first opportunity they would have
gotten, they would have killed Rasulullah ﷺ.
Those are the people that the treaty is
with.
Rasulullah ﷺ honors the treaty.
Even if that means letting Abu Jandal, and
he wasn't alone, he had some other people
with him as well.
He has to let him go, or actually
he gathered those people later, but he has
to let him go.
He cannot give him asylum.
That would be going against the treaty.
He's returned.
He's not returned to Mecca necessarily.
He's just not given asylum in Medina.
Now wherever Abu Jandal goes after that, that's
up to him.
So in the aftermath of all of this,
the believers are shaken.
The sahaba are, they're confused.
What just happened?
The surah is revealed.
Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim.
Inna fatahna laka fatham mubeena.
We have granted you, Ya Rasulullah, a clear
victory.
Wait, what?
This is a clear victory?
The Qur'an announces it as such.
It is interesting that you will not find
the conquest of Mecca, the fatham mubeena that
Mecca was, is not narrated as fatham mubeena.
It is narrated, actually not at all.
It is indirectly alluded to in a couple
of places, and that's pretty much it.
Hudaybiyyah is mentioned as a victory.
This needs to be mentioned.
Inna fatahna laka fatham mubeena.
We have opened up Mecca for you.
This clear opening, this clear victory.
We've given you this victory, Ya Rasulullah.
So that Allah may forgive you.
Now it's addressing Rasulullah ﷺ in the singular.
Whatever has preceded you of your dhamm, of
your mistakes, dhamm would quite consistently be translated
as sins.
Now, of course, Rasulullah ﷺ, as far as
his prophetic responsibility is concerned, as prophet in
terms of communicating revelation, there is absolutely no
possibility of making any mistake, of committing any
error or sin.
He is protected from that.
And for him to experience revelation incorrectly.
And of course from communicating it, that is
a responsibility that he has, which he could
do otherwise, but he doesn't, which is to
his credit, of course.
And he consistently delivers the message.
But as far as the mu'amalat in
this world are concerned, when you have a
variety of choices in front of you, not
all of them are equally good, equally right
or equally wrong.
There is necessarily a good choice, a better
choice, a best choice or a bad choice.
We have spoken about in the aftermath of
Badr, the choice that Rasulullah ﷺ made.
His interpretation of the events and of the
ayats that relate to the events was to
let the prisoners of war go for a
ransom.
Allah ﷻ reproaches, no, not the best choice.
We expected better.
We expected better.
So within our day-to-day affairs, the
choices that we make, as far as the
overall picture is concerned, we can make choices
which aren't the best, which are worse, and
there were better options, and they would have
their consequences.
But the way we have been created and
the way the world works as Allah has
created it, there are opportunities for repair and
correction.
There's exits on the highway.
You can take a U-turn and go
back, correct yourself.
Whatever consequences there are, you'll face them, of
course, but not to their nth degree or
not to every single consequence that should have
been there.
Allah lets things go.
In Allah, being a tawwab, the one who
accepts tawbah, the one who forgives, the one
who lets go, necessarily means that in this
material world, in our day-to-day lives,
there are opportunities to go back.
To go back, not in time and undo
something.
There's no Ctrl-Z to that level, to
that effect, but in terms of fixing things,
making repairs, in terms of, yes, suffering through
some of the consequences, but not all.
Actually drawing life out of the damaging consequences
of your mistakes and bad choices.
They're always there.
That is what it means to believe in
Allah being a tawwab, Allah being al-ghaffar.
That you can have committed some horrendous sins,
even.
Of course, when we're talking about Rasulullah ﷺ,
that is inconceivable.
Those are strategic errors.
But strategic errors in our day-to-day
affairs, even for us, things that would constitute
spiritual errors or religious errors, there are always
opportunities to turn them, the worst of them,
as enriching, as sources of enrichment.
As sources of growth.
There is always those opportunities.
Yes, it becomes more and more difficult as
we age and those mistakes become habits and
they become rigid to grow out of those
rigidities.
But even when the habits are good, possibilities
of error, of mistakes, of sins, of zunub,
are definitely there.
Allah's active engagement in our lives, day-to
-day affairs, is such that He curtails the
damaging consequences.
Allah is part of the process of damage
control.
As long as we're willing to put ourselves
forward, take some of that pain, be delivered
from a lot of it, grow overall as
a result.
So the forgiveness of those zunub, the forgiveness
of those mistakes, yes, there is of course
the afterlife implication of it, that you don't
have to pay for it in terms of
punishment, but there is a payment for it
in this dunya.
And that is a necessary payment, that's an
important payment, that's a payment that results in
this upliftment, this growth, this development that what
all of spirituality is about.
So forgiveness is a process.
And whatever is to come later, you're going
to make mistakes again.
You live with that humility, with that fallibility.
وَيُطِمَّ نِعْمَتَهُ عَلَيْكَ And for Him to perfect
His blessing upon you.
There is this incredible blessing.
A blessing that does not make you infallible.
A blessing that does not make you absolutely
perfect in the sense that you can't put
a foot wrong.
No.
A blessing that you have and you're confident
in its being a blessing, but you're not
arrogant, so that you maintain that confidence with
humility.
And how important is it for an individual's
development to balance these two apparent contradictions, confidence
and humility?
Because there is a very thin line between
confidence and arrogance.
There is also a very thin line between
humility and humiliating yourself.
Self-denigration, self-degradation.
Very, very thin lines.
To maintain this balance, again we speak about
the psychological hygiene that these rather deeper understandings
of spirituality hold.
That what you gather from Allah's attributes, from
Allah's relationship with Rasulullah and what we learned
from there.
What that Iman gives is confidence, not arrogance.
Kibr is a contradiction in Iman.
You believe, you hold on to that belief,
but you're not absolutely rigid and stubborn and
arrogant.
That evidence in the form of ayat of
Allah presents itself before you and you're unyielding,
you don't move.
That you're giving definitive judgments on other people's
state of their hearts and their guidance before
Allah and their afterlife based on this Iman
that you have.
That's not Iman, that is Kibr.
At the same time, you carry this humility
in the sense you understand that you're fallible.
You understand that you're going to make mistakes,
you have been actively making mistakes.
You know what those mistakes are, at least
a portion of them.
If you're completely oblivious to your own sins
and your own mistakes, all you have are
justifications and excuses, that's a very dangerous place
to be in.
But those mistakes don't get to you.
Those mistakes, those errors, those sins, you don't
define yourselves through them and completely label yourself
as a gone case, as lost.
You understand Allah's forgiveness and His being At
-Tawwab and what fruits are there in that
fallibility.
How much life you can draw out, how
much good you can draw out from the
bads that you've done.
Hazrat Umar radiAllahu ta'ala Anhu has a
case in point.
And so this forgiveness of Allah and how
that is followed by He guides you to
a straight way.
And Allah helps you with a mighty support.
That this help of Allah, this guidance of
Allah, this is all in the aftermath of
forgiveness of Allah which is of course preceded
by the human being making mistakes, making important
mistakes.
وآخر دعوانا أن الحمد لله رب العالمين