Zia Sheikh – Tafseer of Surah Yusuf Ayah 109
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
I seek refuge with Allah from the accursed
Satan.
In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the
Merciful.
And We sent not before you except men
to whom We revealed from among the people
of the towns.
Did they not travel through the land and
see how was the end of those before
them?
And the abode of the Hereafter is better
for those who fear Allah.
Do you not understand?
Until when the messengers are dismayed and think
that they have been slandered, Our victory will
come to them.
So We save whom We will, and Our
punishment will not be averted from the criminal
people.
If you remember, in the last lesson and
the last ayah we discussed, Allah subhanahu wa
ta'ala was informing the Prophet ﷺ to
tell the people that this way of da
'wah and calling people towards Allah subhanahu wa
ta'ala is my way.
And not only is it my way, but
it is the way of the people who
follow in my footsteps and claim to be
my followers and claim to be my ummah.
They have to also uphold and implement the
work of da'wah and calling people towards
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala.
It is not simply the responsibility of a
select group of individuals or the imam or
just the prophets or scholars, but it is
the responsibility of everyone in their own capacity
that they should be doing and inviting people
towards Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala.
So related to that very ayah is today's
ayah, which we start from, in which Allah
subhanahu wa ta'ala describes the prophets and
the anbiya' alimus ﷺ that were sent, what
were their qualities.
And there are basically two things that we
can derive from the beginning of the verse.
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says, وَمَا أَرَسَلْنَا
مِن قَبْلِكَ إِلَّا رِجَالًا نُوحِي إِلَيْهِمْ إِلَيْهِم مِّن
أَهْلِ الْقُرَىٰ Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says
that the people that we sent, they were
none other than men.
So when the word men is used, there
are two things that we can derive from
that.
Firstly, whenever Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala used
to send a prophet, one of the biggest
objections that the people had against the prophet
was that why is he a human being
and not an angel.
In one verse of the Quran Allah subhanahu
wa ta'ala says, وَمَا مَنَعَ النَّاسَ أَن
يُؤْمِنُوا إِذْ جَاءَهُمُ الْهُدَىٰ إِلَّا أَن قَالُوا أَبَعَثَ
اللَّهُ بَشَرَ رَسُولَ The only thing that was
preventing people from accepting iman and accepting the
message of the prophet was that they said
that did Allah send a human as a
prophet?
So the fact that he was a human
was an issue for those people.
So Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala responds, قُلْ
لَوْ كَانَ فِي الْأَرْضِ مَلَائِكَةٌ يَمْشُونَ مُطْمَئِنِّينَ لَنَزَّلْنَا
عَلَيْهِم مِّنَ السَّمَاءِ مَلَكَ الرَّسُولَ If there were
angels on the earth walking around and living
in peace, then we would have sent angels
to guide those people.
Those angels, so angels would be sent to
angels.
You are human, so a human is sent
to you.
It's a very easy equation and the reason
behind that is that when Allah subhanahu wa
ta'ala sends a prophet, he sends him
to be a living example of humans so
that the humanity can follow him.
So the prophet will follow dietary restrictions and
say these are the dietary restrictions that you
are supposed to follow.
He will have marital restrictions and rules and
regulations and he will say look the way
that I marry, you should also marry.
النِّكَاحْ مِنْ سُنَّةِ The prophet ﷺ, he said
النِّكَاحْ مِنْ سُنَّةِ فَمَنْ رَغِبَ عَنْ سُنَّةِ فَلَيْسَ
مِنِّي Whoever turns away from my sunnah, he
is not from me.
So the marital life was shown as an
example for the prophet.
The way he prayed was shown to his
followers as a human being.
The way he slept was shown to his
followers as a human being.
Now if you can imagine if Allah subhanahu
wa ta'ala had sent an angel or
angels as prophets, then the excuse would have
been from the people that you angels, you
don't need to eat, you don't need to
drink, you don't need to sleep, you don't
have human needs and you are telling us
that we need to worship Allah subhanahu wa
ta'ala, we need to pray five times
a day and we need to fast in
the month of Ramadan and all of these
things and yet you don't have those same
needs.
You don't have the needs, you don't have
to eat or get married or sleep, so
it's easy for you to do.
But we humans, we have X, Y and
Z needs and it's impossible for us to
do the same thing that you do.
So this would have been the excuse that
people would have had if angels had been
sent as prophets.
And the other thing was that this would
be obviously in the case of the angels
actually becoming visible.
Otherwise the issue is that also that angels
by their very nature, Allah subhanahu wa ta
'ala has created them invisible and the only
way they could become visible is by Allah
subhanahu wa ta'ala giving them the nature
of humans, meaning that they look and their
features become like humans as Jibreel alayhis salaam,
he used to come in the form of
a Sahabi named Dahiya al Kalbi, sometimes to
give the Wahi to the Prophet alayhis salaatu
was salaam.
He used to be in the image of
one of the Sahaba.
So in that case, if the angel is
coming in the shape of a human being,
then the same thing applies.
They would think, well you're a human and
why didn't Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala send
a prophet, so then we're back to square
one again.
So this is why Allah subhanahu wa ta
'ala sent men as prophets and not angels.
This is the answer to one objection.
The other thing is that Allah subhanahu wa
ta'ala did not send women as prophets.
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala did not send
women as prophets, and the reason for that
simply is because, and again it's kind of
a sensitive issue nowadays because of the feminist
movement and all that the feminist movement want
from society is to be recognized and to
be on the same level as men, to
be put on a pedestal and to be
recognized.
And yes, women have made great achievements and
great strides in education and in many, many
achievements, but there are roles and responsibilities, roles
given to men and roles given to women.
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala did not send
women as prophets, he only sent men.
And the reason for that is basically that
men can basically lead a community because they
don't have the same needs and necessities and
the same emotional needs as women do.
So for example, the issue of childbirth, if
a woman is giving birth to a child
or is pregnant, she has her needs at
that time.
After giving birth to a child, she has
her needs, the children have the needs, they
need their mother, so again she is busy
at that time.
Whereas the man can free himself up from
all of these kinds of obligations and focus
on the ummah and the people that are
following him without these kinds of distractions that
women tend to have.
And women should not feel that this is
kind of an insult to them or demeaning
to them, this was just the way through
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala's wisdom that he
actually gave the responsibility to men and not
to women.
I heard something interesting once, and that is
that the problem with women and their attitude
of feminism is the fact that they look
at men and they aspire to be similar
to men that in itself is self-derogatory.
It's derogatory to themselves.
Why?
Because they feel that they are inferior to
men, therefore they must try to be on
the same level as men.
That in itself is self-derogatory.
So Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, like I
said, gave different roles and responsibilities to men
and different responsibilities to women in Islam.
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has obligated and
made it obligatory upon the man to provide
for his household.
And to fulfill the role of the man
in the household is to provide financially, to
give shelter to his family, his wife and
his kids, and to provide, to go out
and work, and basically to provide peace to
the family.
Whereas that is not the woman's role.
It is not her responsibility to provide for
the family.
Her responsibility is to basically look after the
child, and that is a great responsibility too.
A person, a woman, should not feel, oh,
I'm just a stay-at-home mom.
That is, again, demeaning to herself that she
is claiming that being a stay-at-home
mom is something derogatory.
It is one of the most honorable things
that a person could be, and that is
why the Prophet ﷺ asked from a Sahabi,
Ya Rasulullah, man ahaqu bi husni suhbati?
Who is the one who is more deserving
of my good companionship and my good dealings?
What did the Prophet ﷺ said?
He said, Ummuk, your mother.
Thummaman, he said, then after her, who should
it be?
He said again, Ummuk.
And then Thummaman, who should it be after
that?
He said again, Ummuk, your mother.
Three times he said mother, and then the
fourth time he said father.
So if the mother, the stay-at-home
mom, who thinks of herself as being somehow
inferior to the father who is going out
to work, she simply needs to look at
this hadith and understand the status that the
Prophet ﷺ and Islam gave to her.
She should not think of herself in any
inferior terms.
The scholars say that the reason that the
Prophet ﷺ gave her this status and said
three times is because during the course of
becoming a mother, she goes through three difficulties,
three difficulties that men do not endure.
Firstly is the difficulty of actually being pregnant.
If you can imagine, the woman, when she
becomes pregnant, she raises her weight, 45 pounds
during the pregnancy, approximately, some even more.
So if you could imagine, if you could
put like a 45-pound weight and tie
it onto your stomach and walk around with
it 24 hours, sleep with it, walk with
it, cook with it, do the housework with
it, then you realize how easy it is
to become pregnant.
So this is the first difficulty that the
woman has to endure.
Then the second difficulty the woman has to
endure is the childbirth itself, which is the
pain of it, we cannot even imagine, it
is the threshold of pain, it is mentioned,
I read somewhere, that at the time of
giving birth, the woman has the threshold of
pain which is nine times more than any
man could endure at that particular time.
And now, subhanAllah, we have the epidural which
kind of numbs the pain at the time
of giving birth, but even despite that, some
women choose to have a completely natural birth
and don't take any kind of numbing epidural
or injection.
So again, this is the second difficulty that
the woman has.
Then the third difficulty is to look after
the child for the first two years of
the life, breastfeeding and changing and bathing and
making sure that the baby doesn't put something
in his mouth, childproofing the house, so many
difficulties that mainly the woman has to endure
and it is because of these three difficulties
that the Prophet, peace be upon him, he
said, the right of the mother three times
over the right of the father.
So in any case, we're going back to
the point that Allah, subhanAllah, He sent only
men as Prophets but the women should not
feel that they are somehow inferior because of
that.
Many women were given their own status in
Islam.
Maryam, she is the only woman mentioned by
name in the Quran and the mother of
Musa, peace be upon him, Allah, subhanAllah, refers
to her as being given a form of
Wahi.
وَأَوْحَيْنَا إِلَىٰ أُمِّ مُوسَىٰ أَنْ أَرْضِعِي Allah, subhanAllah,
says, We gave Wahi to the mother of
Musa that you should breastfeed him and then
فَإِذَا خِفْتِ عَلَيْهِ فَأَلْقِيهِ فِي الْيَمْ Once you
are fearful of what's going to happen to
him, then put him into the sea or
the river.
So Allah, subhanAllah, refers to the mother of
Musa getting a Wahi from Allah, subhanAllah, the
scholars say that that wasn't the Wahi that
prophets get, it was something of a lesser
form of Wahi, which is known as Ilham.
Ilham, intuition, a thought that comes into her
mind directly from Allah, subhanAllah, but not the
Wahi that prophets are given.
So keep that point in mind, inshaAllah.
So these are the two things that we
derive from the beginning of this verse, وَمَا
أَرْسَلْنَا مِن قَبْلِكَ إِلَّا رِجَالًا نُوحِي إِلَيْهِمْ that
we only sent men who we used to
give Wahi to them من أهل القرى from
the people of the dwellings.
So the word القرى, generally it refers to,
it is the plural of القرية and it
refers to villages.
But here it refers to towns where people
inhabit and it is the opposite of البادية
which is the desert or places which are
very remote where people who do not get
good access to education, they don't mingle with
too many people and because of that they
are hard-headed and stubborn as Allah subhanAllah
mentions in another verse of the Qur'an
الأَعْرَابُ أَشَدُّ كُفْرًا وَنِفَاقًا that Allah subhanAllah refers
to the أَعْرَاب the villagers and people who
live in these far-off places, the Bedouins,
as the people that are the most ungrateful
and they have the most hypocrisy within them.
So the Prophets were not sent to those
kinds of people.
In fact there are many hadith where Bedouins
came to the Prophet ﷺ and asked him
the strangest of questions because of the fact
that they were from the بادية, they were
Bedouins and they didn't know any better.
Sometimes they used to deal with him with
great disrespect not knowing the etiquettes of dealing
with a person of his status.
So the fact that Allah subhanAllah sent the
Prophets ﷺ to people of cities that were
educated, that were accepting of the message, this
was the reason that they were sent to
such people and not generally to the Bedouins
because obviously the first people that accepted and
then the masses grew and then the people
of the Bedouins after they saw that people
are becoming Muslims then they would have followed
suit.
So that's why Allah subhanAllah mentions من أهل
القرى أَفَلَمْ يَسِيرُوا فِي الْأَرْضِ فَيَنظُرُوا كَيْفَ كَانَ
عَاقِبَةُ الَّذِينَ مِن قَبْلِهِمْ Why do they not
wander around on the earth and see what
was the outcome of the people before them.
So this is a message again to people
to reflect upon what happened to the people
before us.
There are so many nations that came before
us, so many civilizations, the Egyptian civilization, the
Greek civilization, the Roman civilization, the Babylonian civilization,
all of these they had their time in
history and they peaked at a certain point
and they were at these points in history
the people that were looked up to and
people wanted to follow in their footsteps because
they were at the peak of their knowledge
and the peak of whatever they were doing
in those times.
And Allah subhanAllah mentions other nations in the
Quran too.
The people of Shu'aib that excelled in
businesses and the people of Aad to whom
Hud a.s. was sent they were known
for their strength and their power and different
nations were given different qualities and different abilities.
The people of Thamud were given the ability
to carve castles and palaces out of rocks.
They were experts in doing that.
So Allah subhanAllah tells us that we should
just reflect upon what happened to those people.
Where are they now?
They refused the message of their prophet.
Allah subhanAllah destroyed them off the face of
this earth.
And all we can see, remaining are the
ruins of the palaces that they built and
the civilization that they used to be proud
of is nothing but ruins.
There is a very beautiful example of a
place called Pompeii.
Pompeii which is in Italy which is on
the base of a mountain called Mount Vesuvius.
If you see the ruins of the people
of Pompeii while they were sleeping a volcano
came and out of the blue basically engulfed
them.
You can just look it up online actually.
Pompeii is spelled P-O-M-P-E
-I-I.
Look at the images of those people that
became mummified in the lava.
There is somebody who is basically taking a
nap, lying down and you can see very
clearly that he is taking a nap.
Another person is just sitting, maybe doing some
cooking, sitting in front of a pot and
the lava engulfs him and he becomes mummified
and becomes like a statue with the lava
around him.
There are many, many examples of that.
Just looking at those images makes a person
think that what would happen to us if
something like this was to happen in such
an instant that we were engulfed by the
lava and we were destroyed by this, what
would happen to us?
So Allah SWT tells us to reflect and
think about what happened to the people before
us.
The same thing can happen to us.
And even if it's not a punishment from
Allah SWT, but at the end of the
day, just like those great civilizations or those
civilizations that used to think of themselves as
great, they left this world.
One day we have to leave this world
too.
We have to meet Allah SWT.
Just like the most pious of people, just
like the Anbiya' al-Mustafa, just like the
Sahaba, the Tabi'in, the scholars, different aspects
of even good, pious Muslims have left this
world.
They had to leave this world behind.
We have to also leave this world behind.
So we need to take a lesson from
that.
So Allah SWT is saying, أَفَلَمْ يَسِيرُ فِي
الْأَرْضِ فَيَنظُرُ كَيْفَ كَانَ عَاقِبَةُ الَّذِينَ مِنْ قَبْلِهِمْ
Do they not wander on the earth and
see what happened?
What was the outcome of those people that
were before them?
وَلَدَارُ الْآخِرَةِ خَيْرٌ لِلَّذِينَ اتَّقَوْا أَفَلَا تَعْقِلُونَ Indeed,
the abode of the Hereafter is better for
the people of taqwa.
Do they not understand?
أَفَلَا تَعْقِلُونَ Do you not understand?
So, this is what we should be aspiring
to.
This worldly life is a temporary abode for
us.
It is temporary.
We do not know what's going to happen
in the next five minutes, next five days,
next five years.
The understanding that many of us have is,
I'm going to live till I'm 65, 70.
I'm going to retire, have a nice nest
egg, get a retirement home, maybe in front
of some ocean or something, and relax and
live out the twilight of my years in
that kind of relaxation.
The reality is that we don't know what's
going to happen to us in the next
five minutes.
We could leave this world, and time after
time we see that people whose janazah we
pray, not all of them reach the age
of 70.
Sometimes they don't even reach the age of
30 or 25 or 20 even.
Many people have left this world in their
young age.
It is incumbent upon us to make sure
that we are prepared for that day which
is so certain that Allah calls the death
certainty.
It is so certain that Allah calls death
certainty.
Worship your Lord until al-yaqeen comes to
you.
Something that is certain, Allah refers to it
as al-yaqeen, the death.
It is so certain that Allah called it
certainty.
So again, Indeed, the abode of the Hereafter
is better for those people that have taqwa.
Do you not understand?
Do you not have aqal?
Do you not ponder?
Do you not think?
So this is a beautiful lesson for us
to learn today.
I pray that Allah gives us tawfiq to
understand and practice what has been said and
heard.
InshaAllah we will continue with the lesson next
week.
Jazakumullahu khairan.