keep doing that you become a liar with God because you can tell a lie in
your life but if you do it consistently you become a liar with Allah and a liar
is the worst of creatures and the Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) said
“it is enough to consider a man evil that he relates everything he hears”. The
Quran says if a fasiq comes to you with some news you should immediately find
our whether that is true or not and in a riwayah it says to find out what is
being said and to understand it and to find out whether it is really from that
person. There are things that you hear and you do not know what they meant by
it. So and so said such and such. You do not even know, you have to ask the
person what they mean. A qadi does that, even in the rules of apostasy, the
qadi has to ask the person, “what did you mean?” because he might have meant
something completely different.
There is a hadith that says “if a person drinks
wine, he is flogged, if he does it again he is flogged, if he does it again he
is flogged, the fourth time it says kill him”. Even though it is a sahih
hadith, none of the fuqaha accepted the hadith as a ruling. They leave it on
the books because it has a sound sanad but it is not the fiqh of this ummah, it
is not the jurisprudence of the Shariah. There are other many hadiths like
that. There is a sahih hadith that says “may Allah cure the thief that steals
an egg and loses his hand”. So someone who has his Muhsin Khan Bukhari and
reads it, so if you steal an egg and you get your hand cut off, none of the
fuqaha took that hadith. That is why ibn Abdul Barr in the 6th
century was complaining in his age, a man who memorized 100,000 hadiths by
heart and is called Hafidh al Maghrib with all the isnae and has a 30 volume
book on Maliki fiqh and another 20 volume book on the Muwatta. He said “what a
terrible time I am living in, these people memorise the hadith and they do not
study fiqh” so he was already complaining about people who were reading books of
hadith thinking they knew what they meant.
I mean there are people who think ahle dimmah
are just the Jews and Christian and they go round telling people if you are not
Jew or Christian you cannot live under Islam. That is not true, that is one
opinion. That is not a universal opinion. It was not the practiced opinion of
the ruling powers of Islam. The Ottomans did not do that, the Hanafis in India did not do that and the
Maliks certainly did not do that because Imam Malik accepted jizya even from
the idol worshipper and that is learning fiqh. So part of the problem is that
we have people running around who have not studied. The problem with literacy
is that it empowers ignorant people. They say a little education is a dangerous
thing. That is an American proverb. There is another American proverb “beware
of the one book man” and that is about fundamentalist Christians who only learn
the bible. It is the only book they will ever read and they know it inside out
but it is dangerous when all you know is one book. That is all the Khawarij
knew, they knew the Quran, they did not know the sunnah, the book of the
fuqaha. They knew the Quran inside out and they used to quote from the Quran.
The thing about the Quran is whatever you want to find, it is in there. Ali
said “If I lost a camel, I would find it in the Quran”. I mean whatever you
want to find is in there. Allah says He guides many by it and he leads many
astray by it so don’t think that you cannot go astray with this Book. Allah is
also Mudhil, people forget that name. People like the name Al Hadi. A lot of
people know one name of God but do not know another name of God. That names
goes with Al Hadi. People have to be very careful. The Quran can lead you
astray and you are quoting it right into hell. Imam al Qaradi said if you
interpret the Quran out of ignorance, he considered it kufr, just to say you
think you know what the Quran meant. One of the things about modern literacy is
that it enables people to read things they would never have read before. Part
of the thing about studying with a scholar is that the ulema say “The food of
adults is poison for little infants” and was always seen as tadurruj, that when
you first begin studying with a teacher he takes you through alif, baa, thaa.
You learn the alphabet and then you move on. Now we have people who have a PhD
in engineering but they have not gone to kindergarten in Islam and they want to
read the PhD books of Islam. If you ask them what are the huroof in tajweed,
you ask them basic things about the recitation of the Quran that a 10 year old
in madrassah knows they do not know yet they are reading tafseer. This is the
type of situation that we find ourselves in so humility after compassion.
Having a basic humility about where your level is in the big picture because if
you do not know what the Shaykh said earlier, there is a book in Sahih Bukhari
called learning knowledge before one speaks and there are people who say the
Prophet (sallallahu alayhi
wa sallam) said “teach an ayah even if that is all you know”. I said that is
not what it said, what translation did you read? It says “give news of my
message even if it is one ayah”, it does not say even if that is all you know.
You might quote the wrong ayah. The Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) when
he called At-Tanuki to Islam, he just talked about paradise. He is bashir
before he is nadir. He gives good news before he frightens people but he does
have that message as well. Now that is dealing with muslims with muslims.
Going towards dealing
with non muslims. One of the basic policies of muslim states was that they did
not have conversion policies. The Ummayads actually discouraged conversion to
Islam and that is historically documented. They discouraged conversion to
Islam. They way they did it was you had to join an Arabian tribe in order to
become a muslim. That was stopped by Umar bin Abdul Aziz, the fifth rightly
guided caliph. He ended that system. The Abasid who were much more tolerant
than the Ummayids and they dropped the total war policy because the Ummayads
had a war policy. They believed in this idea that it is historical destiny that
Islam has to conquer the entire planet and they basically destroyed their
empire in attempting that, it imploded. They just expanded too quickly, too
far, too fast and it imploded. The Abasids recognizing the fallacy of that
argument adopted a much more tolerant approach and this comes also from the Bar
Meccads who were Afghans who came from an extremely tolerant background who
were the dominant ministers and they had been Buddhist prior to being muslim.
The Bar Meccad family was a famous priestly family in Afghanistan and they
adopted a much more tolerant position of dealing with conquered people and that
goes all the way until 1258. The Moghals were initially very barabaric but
became quite civilized and they also had extremely tolerant policies. The
Ottomans taught them all. They did not have a conversion policy. They did not
in any way proselytize to non muslims. They literally let them, they had their
own court systems and this came from the hadith in which the Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) was asked by
the Jews to judge between them. Allah says “how can they come to you and ask
you to judge between them and they have the Torah and what is the rule of
Allah?” so Allah in the Quran actually says that the Jews have their Torah and
they should not use the Quran as their source of judgment unless they become
muslims. For that reason the Ottomans had courts for the Jews in which the
Rabbis did their own rulings and the Christians had their own courts. The
Otttomans did not get involved unless it was penal.
In the same that in this
country we have what is called people’s courts. If people agree in private
arbitration, they can do that and that is a good aspect of this country whereas
with penal if you get outside civil code and into criminal code then the state
takes it authority and it was similar in the Ottoman
empire. As long as it was civil it was left to the
milat to decide their own rulings and that is according to some researchers
where the West actually got that because Henry Stubbs was an expert on Ottoman
policies of toleration of the Ottomans, if the Europeans adopted it, it would
solve the problems of religious wars. From Hobbs, you get
Locke who invites the famous treaties on toleration which becomes the pillar of
American freedom because America probably
has the first freedom of religion act which is in the 17th Century
in Marilyn. It is quite radical although it is very consistent with the Ottoman
tradition. Then obviously the founding fathers were very wary of having any
state religion and they felt that all religions including Islam and Thomas
Jefferson mentions it very clearly that muslims should have the right to
worship and John Aday says not only should they have the right to worship but
we should prevent religious tests in order to prevent other religions from
actually being in public office so this is a part of early American history.
So where did the spread
of Islam come? It usually came from individuals the people who are called
muhsinun and particularly from people that were associated with what was later
termed the Sufiyah. These people had probably and there is a book called “The
Role of Sufis in the Spread of Islam”. Anybody who is from the Indian
subcontinent and Pakistan knows that the spread of Islam is directly related to
the famous awliya, they call them awliya, who came into that country and just
by their presence and by their spiritual states many people became muslim. This
is also true like Bosnia. It is
very well known that the Ottomans did not have a policy on the Bosnians and it
was the Qadri sufi order and the Beshti sufi order that went up into the
mountains and began to call these people to Islam because they were always very
active in proselytizing Islam. Now one of the things about people of tasawuf
traditionally in the muslim world is that they were known for tolerance. They
were people that were less condemnatory, less judgmental which is obviously why
they were very successful in calling other people to Islam. I will give you an
example, Habib Umar bin Mahfooz who is a Yemeni scholar and has a madrassah in
Tarim, an American was studying with him and he said if you want to call people
in America to Islam, then it is based upon a condition that whoever you talk
to, you see them as better than you and he said the reason for that is Allah
says “We do not punish people until we send them a messenger” and so those
people who have not heard the message of Islam have an excuse with their Lord
for whatever they are doing whereas any of your disobedience you have no excuse
so that is a different way of looking at it. Instead of looking at people with
contempt, you actually look at them with compassion. Instead of seeing them as
your enemies you see them as your potential friends and brothers and that is
what the Quran says “Perhaps God will put between those that you know feel
animosity or enmity towards, put between you and them love and Allah is All
Powerful, and Allah is all Forgiving and Merciful”. Allah when He said to the
Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam)
you have nothing to do with this, if Allah wants to guide them and forgive
them, that is His business. In other words the people who were treating them
the worst at that time, when he saw his Uncle Hamza mutilated, he swore an oath
he would mutilate 70 people from amongst them because was a Messenger from God
but he was also masoom. His nature was impeccable, he was a human being and
felt things strongly and he wept when he saw suffering, it caused him to move
inside. He wept tears when he saw pain. He visited a sick man once and because the
man was suffering he began to weep and when the sahaba saw his weeping they all
began to weep. That was from visiting a sick man. So he was a human being.
After seeing Hamza mutilated, the Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) said
“If Allah wants He will guide them and He did guide both of them” (Hind and
Wahshi). The two people who did that, Allah guided them and the Prophet (sallallahu
alayhi wa sallam) took shahada from them and sat with them after swearing an
oath that he would mutilate 70.
That is not your
business and if you have that hatred or animosity in your heart, you are missing
something very important about Allah’s creation. So looking at people with
compassion. I will tell you another very interesting thing. A lot of muslims do
not know this. It is the opinion that makes most sense to me and because it is
from an Imam Murshid and it is a valid opinion. It is from Imam al Ghazali from
a book that he wrote. He categorises non muslims into three categories and
places two of them in paradise so you think about that. He said non muslims
fall into three categories:
1) Those who live under
the justice of Islam and see the beauty and truth of Islam and reject it. He
said these people are for hell. Or they live near the lands of Islam and know
the benefits of Islam because in those days Hungarians used to flee from
Christian rule to live in the Ottoman empire.
Hungarian Christians and this is all documented. There was upward mobility
which did not exist in the muslim world. Some of the greatest Ottoman sailors
were not Turks, they were Greeks who fled the Greek navies because there was
upward mobility in the Ottoman navy. You could actually move up, in the Greek
navy if you were a man that just rowed the oars, that was your life because
only aristocrats got into positions of authority. In the Ottoman
empire, there was meritocracy so if you showed that
you had leadership qualities, if you showed that you had that ability, you were
upwardly mobile. Murada was a Scottish man who became an admiral in the Ottoman
empire. He was a Scottish man, what you call renegados
because in Britain a lot of the Scots and the Irish, because there was no
upward mobility in England, if you were not born into the sacred caste of the
Brahmins or if you were a Shadra stuck being an untouchable, the Dalits, that
is it, that is how the world is. If you were born into a bricklayers house, you
were a bricklayer whether you liked it or not irrespective of your abilities.
Brilliant people are sons of bricklayers. In a meritocracy, you are allowed to
be upwardly mobile which is often what the Ottoman
empire was.
2) People who live far
away from the lands of Islam and have not heard anything about Islam. That is
the dominant Maturedi and Ashari opinion about those people. They are
ahle-fitrah, they have the same hukm as the people between the messengers like
the Arabs before Islam. That is the dominant opinion, there are other opinions
but that is the dominant opinion. Ibn Rushid says when you talk about the
rahmah of Allah, always try to expand it, do not try to restrict it. He said it
is the nature of rahmah. He said the womb expands, it does not contract, it expands
in order to accommodate the growth of the foetus. We want to contract it, that
is called abortion. So that is the nature of rahmah, it expands to accommodate.
A lot of people do not know what hell is and that is why there are so many
people that are so quick to put people in hell because if you knew what it was
you would not want your worst enemy to go to hell. But people do not know what
it is so they just want to send everybody there, the guy who raised his rent,
go to hell.
3) People who have been taught
since they were little that there was an impostor in the Arabian
peninsula named Muhammad ibn Abdullah. He lied and
claimed he was a Prophet. They are all terrorists and this and that. That is
what they have heard. Imam Ghazali said these people have blocks to the truth
because they were already indoctrinated. We know the power of this in modern
psychology. The power of what happens when you are a child. When the Prophet
emerged in the Arabian peninsula, those
people had the opposite, they only had the positive opinions of him. The
Quraysh only knew good from him. If you go to a people and all you hear since
you are little is that this is a lie like Masonite Christians are taught since
they are little children, this is an evil religion, an evil man and many Jewish
people grow up with that as well that Islam is bad. So that creates blockages
from the truth. Imam Ghazali said that he felt because it was presented to them
in a distorted fashion they would not be held accountable for it. He said that
in other words that to him seemed most consistent with divine justice.
So when you look at
people out there, you should look with the eye of mercy. That is if you want to
be effective. Allah says “God does not forgive that you associate with Him, He
forgives whatever He wants after that”. That is important for us to remember.
Now the other thing important to remember is according to our dominant
theologians, shirk that you are taken to account for is the shirk that has been
made clear to you because Allah says “do not associate with God once you know”
and that is why when a man came to the Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) he
said “Masha’Allah, Allah willed and you willed” (Ibn Majah, Tabarani) but the
Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) did not call him a mushrik or kafir. He
said “say Allah willed and then Muhammad willed”. You see he taught him how to
remove that dangerous shirk. That is something very important for people to
recognise. It is haram in Shariah according to Abu Bakr ibn Al Arabi, in Ahkam
ul Quran, he said it is prohibited to make dua against any specific individual
because you do not know their khatimah whereas you can make dua against enemies
that are attacking muslims. The Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) made dua
for people to lose battles and things like that because they were persecuting.
Persecution is worse than killing. Making dua against individuals specifically
is not something you should do and the few hadith in which the Prophet (sallallahu
alayhi wa sallam) specifically mentioned individuals is considered to be unique
to the Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) because he knew some people, he
was told. There is a hadith in the jariyah where a girl sang “we have a Prophet
who knows what is going to happen tomorrow” and the Prophet (sallallahu alayhi
wa sallam) said “do not say that, just say what you were saying before”. The
Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) did not say haram. We have all these
muslims now that are ready to turn 90% of muslims into mushrikeen.
