Zia Sheikh – Ramadan 2015 Khatira Day 24
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The importance of the Prophet's advice in the argument against Prophet's actions is emphasized, along with the importance of finding strong character and friendships to avoid negative consequences. The importance of avoiding interactions with people who may influence one's behavior and avoiding shapeshifting is emphasized, as it is crucial for everyone to be strong of character. The choice of verses is based on qualities of the beast, not arrogance, and forgiveness is emphasized. The blessed month is focused on making a change and staying with spirituality of Islam.
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Surah Al-Furqan, Insha'Allah.
One of the verses I talked about in
passing the other day, and it was the
criticism of the Prophet ﷺ that the Kuffar
of Quraysh had.
And generally what happens is when people get
into a debate with somebody, and get into
an argument with somebody, and they have no
response to the actual argument.
What was the argument of the Prophet ﷺ?
Tauheed, worship one Allah, don't worship the idols,
they don't harm, they don't benefit.
So, why do you worship them?
So, what the Kuffar of Quraysh used to
do, they basically used to twist it around,
and they just used to try to blemish
his character in whatever they could.
And of course we know that they used
to call him Sahir, Majnoon, magician, or crazy
person.
Again, nothing to do with the argument itself,
but just ways to try to blemish his
character, so that the message that he was
bringing could be regarded as unreliable.
And one of those things that is mentioned
here, is that they said, مال هذا الرسول
يأكل طعام ويمشي في الأسواق What is up
with this Prophet?
He eats food, and he walks around in
the marketplace, meaning he does his shopping.
Okay, so if we were to think about
that, as a normal human being, we all
eat food, and we all do our shopping,
we all go about our day-to-day
lives.
As the Prophet ﷺ being a human being,
he should be allowed to, and nobody should
question him for it.
But this was the way that the Kuffar
of Quraysh used to try to undermine the
Prophet ﷺ in such a way, that it
doesn't really make sense, but this is how
they used to do it.
Allah ﷻ responded to that a few hours
later.
And He said, وَمَا أَرْسَلْنَا قَبْلَكَ مِنَ الْمُرْسَلِينَ
إِلَّا إِنَّهُمْ لَيَأْكُلُونَ طَعَامًۭ وَيَمْشُونَ فِي الْأَسْوَاقِ O
Prophet of Allah, nothing to worry about.
This argument that these people have against you,
this is completely irrelevant.
It's null and void.
Why?
Because every single Prophet that came before you,
that we sent, they all used to eat
food, and they all used to walk around
in the marketplace.
So this is not something that should be
held against your character, and doesn't make your
message unreliable.
Now how do we fit that into our
own day and age, and what lesson do
we take from that?
Sometimes when somebody is trying to advise somebody,
and he is giving honest and sincere advice,
and he's telling the truth when he's advising
that person, the person having no response to
the argument, twists around the argument, and brings
something completely irrelevant into the picture, to make
that person feel that that argument that he's
presenting is not right.
So for example, somebody advises a person to
pray.
Brother, you need to really start praying.
You're a Muslim, and as Muslims you have
to pray five times daily.
The Hadith says very clearly that the only
difference between a non-Muslim and a Muslim
is the Salat.
So this should tell you how important the
Salat is.
The person having no response to that, because
as a Muslim nobody can have any argument
against all of these points that are made,
the person turns around and says, well you've
got such a big house, or you drive
around in a Mercedes, and you tell me
to pray.
This is the way that some people try
to argue back.
It's like what they say in English, shooting
the messenger.
The message is valid, the messenger is completely
sincere, and instead of accepting the message that
he's giving you, you turn around and bring
something completely out of the picture, and try
to make him look bad and unreliable.
So this is not what we should be
doing.
If somebody is advising us, and he's sincere
in giving us advice, we should be appreciative,
and we should be grateful that he's giving
us advice.
We should think of him as a person
who wants good for us, and we should
not think of him as our enemy.
Many people have that attitude.
Somebody, he tried to correct me, that he
must have something against me, and he must
want something bad for me.
But the reality is that if somebody is
truly advising you, then he can only want
good for you.
So that's one point.
The second thing is related to a story
that took place between two disbelievers, Uqba ibn
Abi Mu'idh and Ubaid ibn Khalaf.
Uqba was a person who sometimes used to
listen to the Qur'an being recited, and
he was inclined towards accepting Islam.
He was getting closer and closer to accepting
Islam.
Ubaid ibn Khalaf, however, he pulled him back,
and he told him that you, you're going
to follow these people, you're going to become
a Muslim, and he held him back.
So that's when Allah revealed verses, which are
in the beginning of the 19th Juz, about
what is going to happen to such people
on the Day of Judgment, who used to
follow in the footsteps of their friends.
And this is again, in our day and
age, we need to understand that who our
friends are, are truly a reflection of what
we are.
And this is what the Prophet, peace be
upon him, said, A person is on the
religion of his friend, Each one of you
should see who he is befriending.
If I want to know what my character
is like, then I should see who I'm
sitting with, who I'm walking around with, who
I'm hanging around with, who I'm eating with.
The Prophet, peace be upon him, also said,
Only a pious person should eat your food.
What does that mean?
There's no, there's nothing against giving a person
who's not pious food.
There's nothing against that.
Okay, you can give food to anybody you
like.
But the question is, that you invite people
in to your house.
Why?
Because you love them.
Okay, if you've invited somebody into your house,
it's because there is some level of respect
and some level of appreciation for his friendship,
some level of love there.
That's why you brought the person into your
house.
Now, if that person is not a muttaqi,
he's not a person who has taqwa, he
doesn't have the taqwa, the fear of Allah
subhanahu wa ta'ala within him, then he's
going to make you slip up one day.
So that's why the Prophet, peace be upon
him, said, means, the indirect meaning is that
you should not love a person who doesn't
have taqwa.
Okay, you should not have love for a
person who doesn't have taqwa.
The food is not the point here.
The feeding is not the point.
The point is that loving a person to
such a degree that you are inviting him
to your house and his friendship may influence
you.
Okay, so this is for the people who
generally get influenced by friendships.
But if a person is strong of character,
strong of iman, and he feels that his
friendship can influence people, then obviously the other
thing applies.
Invite a person, talk to him, give him
dawah, and advise him as much as possible.
This is what every believer should be doing.
This is what's known as, ordering people to
do good and forbidding them from evil.
So Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala describes what
will happen to a person who will realize
on the Day of Judgment that his friendship
led him astray and led him to the
ultimate destruction of the hereafter.
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says, Allah
subhanahu wa ta'ala says, On that day,
that person who was led astray by his
friend, he's going to chew on his hand.
What does that mean?
When a person is nervous, what does he
do?
He bites his nails, right?
On the Day of Judgment, he's going to
bite his nails so much that he's going
to basically start even chewing his hand.
And he's not going to even realize it.
And he's going to say that, I wish
that I had taken the path of the
Prophet.
I have taken the right path, the path
of the Messenger sallallahu alaihi wa sallam.
And not the path of the people that
led me astray, not the path of my
friends.
I wish, the next ayah says, Alas, woe
unto me.
I wish I had not taken that person
as a Khalil.
Khalil means a close friend.
He took me away from the remembrance.
And he took me away from taking heed
after it came to me.
Meaning, after I was about to be guided,
I was about to come to the Masjid,
I was about to become a good Muslim.
He, this person, he took me away.
And the Shaitaan is for the human being,
his Khadool, meaning he wants to disgrace the
human being.
So basically, a human, he's a Shaitaan in
a human form that led you astray, led
me astray, led us astray.
So we need to make sure that we're
not this person who on the Day of
Judgment is sorry for the friendship that he
kept in this world.
Either we try to influence our friends to
do good, or if we feel that we
are being influenced by them, then we need
to get out of that friendship.
And we need to make sure that we
do not interact with such people that could
influence us in a negative way.
Towards the end of Surah Al-Furqan, Allah
SWT describes Ibadur Rahman.
And this basically about a page and a
half of qualities of the believers of Allah
SWT, all the qualities that they have.
And I'll just go through a couple of
them.
Allah SWT, He says, The slaves of Rahman,
the slaves of Allah SWT, the ones who
truly worship Him, they walk on the earth
with humbleness and humility, not with arrogance.
They don't have arrogance.
They are humble, and they belittle themselves in
front of others, and they don't become arrogant
in front of others.
When ignorant people try to argue with them,
they say, They don't get into that argument.
They don't fall prey to these kinds of
petty things that last for hours and days
and weeks, and even get the whole family
involved.
From the very beginning of an argument, which
is foolish, He says, walk out of it,
even admitting defeat, saying, okay, brother, you win,
I lose.
You know, let's move on.
This is what the slaves of Rahman do.
Later on in the selection of verses, Allah
SWT describes some very important qualities.
Allah says that who are the Ibadur Rahman?
Those that do not call with Allah SWT
as any other Ilah, meaning they don't commit
shirk with Allah SWT, and they do not
kill somebody that has no right to be
killed, meaning that somebody just walks up to
somebody and kills him, or even if the
person murdered your relative, to kill him without
the due process and taking the person to
court and having the judge pass the sentence,
even that is included in this.
Not killing a person without its right.
And they do not commit zina.
They do not commit zina.
And whoever does this, he has met with
sin.
So what does this mean?
Whoever has done this?
Some scholars say it refers to zina.
Others say that it refers to all three
of the sins being committed.
So some Sahaba after they became Muslim, or
some people that were about to become Muslim,
they came to the Prophet and said, Ya
Rasulullah, we've committed this sin, that sin, we've
committed, we've killed people, we used to commit
shirk, we used to worship statues, we used
to commit zina, so what do we do?
Allah SWT says, well, this is truly a
sin.
And for that person who does it, Allah
says, The punishment will be multiplied for such
a person who does these sins.
And he's going to stay in that punishment
in the state of disgrace.
But then he makes an exception for those
people that came and asked the Prophet that
what if we did these things in the
days of Jahiliyyah, we've done them in the
past, is there any hope for us?
Allah SWT makes the exception and says, Such
a beautiful verse that really shows us how
Allah SWT truly wants to forgive us.
Allah is not a tyrant that just wants
to punish us and put us in a
hellfire.
He truly wants to forgive us.
But we have to want that forgiveness.
And we have to want to ask Allah
SWT to forgive us and make a sincere
tawbah.
So Allah says, except for those people that
make tawbah and they repent and they have
Iman and they do good deeds.
And the wording is very beautiful here.
In Arabic, you just say, It's enough to
get the message across and get the meaning
across.
Repeating the verb twice, once in the form
of the verb itself, and then in the
form of which in Arabic, people who have
studied Arabic, this is known as, Repetitive repetition
of the verb indicates stress.
So the person, he just doesn't do good
deeds.
He basically does good deeds continuously all the
time.
Meaning he doesn't fall back into that sin
again.
Meaning he is continuous with his good deeds.
What does Allah SWT say about him?
Not only will he forgive his sin, Allah
will take those sins and convert them into
good deeds.
Can you imagine that?
Allah SWT will convert sin into good deeds.
A person has mountains of bad deeds from
the past.
He makes tawbah and he's sincere in his
tawbah and he continues to be a good
person.
Then Allah SWT will convert those bad deeds
into good deeds.
And indeed Allah SWT, He is Ghafoor Rahim.
And that is why He has given us
these incentives to make tawbah as much as
possible.
This is a blessed month of Ramadan.
It's time for us to turn over a
new leaf and not just be Muslims for
Ramadan, but after the month of Ramadan also,
keep on carrying on with the good deeds.
Make sure that this spirituality that we've built
up in this month, we don't lose it
on the first day of Eid and we
just go back to our old ways again.
But to go back to Allah SWT, to
stay with Allah SWT, to stay with that
spirituality and be good Muslims until the next
Ramadan.
This is what the objective of this blessed
month is.
And this is what we should be trying
to achieve.
I pray that Allah SWT gives us sufiq
to understand and practice what has been said
and heard.