h. The little fish says “life is terrible” the
middle fish says “it is not so bad” and the big fish says “life is great”. So
people have very different experiences. If you take for instance this culture,
minorities that grow up in certain areas they have a completely different experience
of
America. If you grow up for instance in Harlem or East Auckland you will have a very different
experience of America than if you grow up in Los Gattos
or in Auckalnd Hills. If you went to a public school, you will have a different
experience of America than if you went to a private
school. If you went to a state university you will have a different experience
of America than if you went to Yale or
Harvard. So we are dealing with many different experiences of the world when we
look at people. The Prophet (sallallahu
alayhi wa sallam) when he looked at people he saw who he was looking at. Musab
ibn Umayr who actually was sent to Madinah for the coming of the Prophet (sallallahu
alayhi wa sallam) learned about everybody in that city. When the Prophet (sallallahu
alayhi wa sallam) came, he sat next to him and when people would come into his
majlis, he sat next to him and would whisper into his ear “this is so and so,
he has this position”. He would inform
the Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) of who this man was because the
Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) did not talk to the sayyid of a people,
the noble man of a people in the same way he would talk to another person. This
is not because he treated people differently but he said “I was commanded to
observe the protocols of people”. And every people have a protocol. So when you
go into, for instance a judge, contempt of court, being held in contempt is not
the same as if you are in a gathering of a group of people and you start
raising your voice because you want to make a point. In a court, you cannot
raise your voice like that because the judge will not tolerate it, why? He will
not tolerate it because he represents something and if you do not respect what
he represents he will fine you, hold you in contempt of court, he will have you
arrested if he has to. Every society has these protocols and if they are not
understood and observed then you are doing a misjustice to the people you are
dealing with. Some of them are fine, Islam accepts them and other ones that if
people became muslim they would throw them out of the window because not
everything is appropriate and those things that become part of a culture are
understood by those people to have a certain input and if they are not honoured
by other people they see it as a disrespect. That is why a stranger is often
excused for certain things.
When I was in West
Africa one of the things that I did not know is that
if you are married to somebody’s daughter you never eat or drink in the
presence of their parents which is actually a pre-Islamic tradition but the
Arabs of Africa still have that tradition. I was on a journey once with a man
and we were going to the house of his father in law. He said to me “I am really
thirsty” and I agreed. When we got to the house, his father in law was there.
Then they brought some milk. I handed it to him and he said “I don’t want any”.
I said “you just told me that you were thirsty”. He said no, no I am not
thirsty”. I said “Bismillah, just drink”. He said no. Then I heard the women in
the back giggling. I didn’t know what was going on. I drank the milk and he
explained to me later. So that was a breach of adab or courtesy in that culture
that I was not taken to account for but had he taken that, it would have been
considered rude and disrespectful. There are immigrants that come to this
country that think that the Americans have no traditions, that they have no
culture or civilisation and they are wrong. There are many levels of society in
America and you
might have been introduced to one, two or three but this culture has many
levels. You can get into those most rarified circles and there is a completely
different set of protocols than you will find in say popular culture which can
obviously be very crude and popular culture in most civilisations has been
rude. It is a testimony to faith based cultures that often the popular culture
has not been a crude culture. It is an indication that real values and virtues
have permeated the societies so the people are living at a certain level.
When we look at
individuals we have to look at all those backgrounds. I have been in Saudi
Arabia in houses where the
brother of someone who is married to a woman has never seen his brothers wife
face because it would be considered a breach of courtesy and that is in the
eastern province and I have been in those houses and never seen any of the
women. I have been in Hijaz in houses where the women are dressed like American
women and they view no shame and there is nothing wrong in sitting as far as they
are concerned and if you told them something was wrong they would be surprised
because they were not even raised like that. I was once having dinner and there
was some Saudi people there and I said “you know in Saudi I have always eaten on
the floor” and this person said to me “do people eat on the floor in Saudi?”.
And she grew up her entire life in Saudi and she was not joking. She had been
in a certain society that simple that was what the bedouin did. I said “no city
people”. She said “city people that eat on the floor?”. There are people in
this country that you will find they will be shocked to find out certain types
of behaviour in certain areas. So this is something very interesting about all
these multiple levels of existence that are happening on the same planet at the
same time. Therefore in speaking to people you have to recognise, you have to
determine what type of background. Educational background. You have to
determine ethnic background. The Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) was
concerned about tribes, about knowing which tribe the person came from. If he
was a Qalbi or Harbi, it was different in Arabia than being
from the Hawazam or from the Qurayshi or Banu Tamim. That is true in every
culture. You will always have those demarcations, it is part of human nature.
So in looking at how we
are dealing with dawah in terms of muslims and inviting muslims back to Islam
we have to understand there are many people who have been so distanced from
Islam that you cannot expect them for instance if you meet a woman now in
America who grew up, she might be Palestinian or Afghani or an Egyptian or
Pakistani woman but she has grown up in a very secular home but she knows she
is muslim and if you treat her as if “why aren’t you wearing a hijab? Why don’t
you cover your hair? Don’t you know that is haram?”. There was a muslim man who
came to the Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) of Allah who gave him as a
gift a bottle of wine. The Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) said “didn’t
you know that Allah prohibited wine?”. He said “I did not know that”. Then he
whispered to the man who came with him a servant and then the man said “What
did you just tell him?”. He said “I told him to go sell it”. The Prophet (sallallahu
alayhi wa sallam) said “the one that prohibited its drinking also prohibited
its selling. He said “In that case go dump it out”. Now the Prophet (sallallahu
alayhi wa sallam) did not say to him “what is wrong with you, how dare you
bring a bottle of wine as a gift”. There
are muslims who would say “A’udoo billah, go to hell or something”. And slam
the door on them. That is not what the Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam)
did. That is not how he treated the person because he was looking at the level
of a persons knowledge and consciousness.
People are on an
evolutionary journey. We believe in evolution in a different way. People in
this culture associate evolution with moving from lower order creatures to
higher order creatures. But evolution of the soul is something very real. There
are people at different levels. There are Arabs that say “the good actions of
the righteous are the bad actions of the people in the divine presence” because
the evolution is different. So somebody might be a very good muslim but he does
not even know that his actual state, there are many muslims, that outwardly
everything is fine but there is an inward fiqh and an outward fiqh. There are
inward rules for the prayer. You could do a perfect prayer outwardly so your
fiqh of the Dhuhr is perfect but your inward fiqh, the khushoo in the prayer,
the sakinah in the prayer, the hudoor in the prayer, the presence of mind in
prayer, you could be thinking about whether the Giants won the game yesterday.
There are muslims in the Bay area that are concerned about that right now. But
that might be where the heart is and where your heart is that is where you are.
So your body might be in prayer but your heart is in sin. That is Bani Adam.
So you have to look at
the level of the persons spiritual evolution in speaking to them and
understanding. I have heard people years ago that got into these big arguments
with me and then years later they met me and apologised. In fact that just
happened to me recently from somebody who just came up to me and apologised. I
said “don’t worry about it”. But where that person was, he could not see
something that he was not able to see later about something he thought was
wrong but later on he realised it was not wrong based on his knowledge and
understanding at that age. That is something we all go through. There are
things that we think are absolutely wrong and later on were learn they are
right or they were at least possible, that there was room for interpretation
but people that are hasty to judge, that is a sign of spiritual immaturity.
Imam at Mazhari, it was said about him that his knowledge was so vast that he
rarely saw anybody do something wrong because he would always find that is so
and so’s opinion or maybe he is following so and so’s fatwa. So traditionally
the ulema considered it a sign of immaturity for people that were so hasty to
condemn other people. It was actually a sign of immaturity. One of the
tragedies of the modern muslim condition is that because of mass education
which is largely secular, people have been introduced into literacy and that
enables them to read books that in previous periods of time they would not have
been able to read.
One of the things about
reading books without suhbah is that you take rules without realities. You will
take the outward but not the inward with it and one of the signs traditionally
of an auto didact in the muslim world is that they had a habitual condemnation
of others. Ibn Hazam, he was a great scholar and I love his books but he was
known for being really fierce with some of the other scholars, attacking them.
He was also known for being didact. He was somebody that did not study with a
shaykh. He had a brilliant intellect and he studied on his own. There are many
scholars in the history of Islam that were like that. They were brilliant and
the ulema actually debate whether you can acquire knowledge without a teacher
or not and most of the ulema believe you can if you have enough brilliance or
intelligence, natural gifts that you but you will always be deficient in tarbiyah
that the person will not have those qualities that are associated with taking
knowledge from people who have taken knowledge from people who have taken
knowledge back to the Messenger of Allah because there is a tahdeeb, polishing
of the soul, that goes with the knowledge because as that scholar you are
studying with, he is breaking away ignorance because knowledge is already in
the soul and what he is doing is sculpting what is already in the soul. You
cannot acquire anything that was not already in you. That is what knowledge is.
Education in latin means to bring out of. It means to lead out of. Alama means
that Allah has already imprinted in the human being knowledge and that is why
the Quran is called dhikr. It is the remembrance because what you are doing is
you are remembering what was already put in you. If your heart is so encrusted,
there is blockage and you are unable to recollect. It is like a person who
lived through an event but he cannot remember. What will often prevent you from
remembering things is trauma, trauma of the world. There are people who are
unable to study or learn.
In terms of dealing with
muslims, the basic premise has to be compassion. We have to have compassion for
our brothers and sisters. We have to recognize that all these ayahs and hadith
that are brought such as frowning in the face of an innovator, those hadith
were all related when the ummah was filled with knowledge and they applied to
times when people’s deviancy is clearly unacceptable. When you have times where
nobody knows anymore what the truth is, I mean, our books are now being
manipulated. Last night I was showing people that I have in my library the same
book that was printed in 1970 and it has things in it that were taken out in
later editions. The publishing house was purchased by a certain sect that did
not want those ideas being disseminated in the ummah so people do not even
realise that their books are being manipulated. The tradition of Islam is being
changed in computers and things are being blocked out or deleted, just retype
set. You read a book and you think you are reading what the author said and
people have removed from it. That is one of the things that Allah says “those
who change or alter words from their appropriate places”. So people do not even
realise that the deen is being changed before their very eyes although the deen
is protected and we believe that but that does not mean you cannot have a type
of treachery. Historically it has occurred also, in the time of Imam Sharhari
who said people put things in their books. There are people on the internet who
write things about people that have never happened and then it becomes a lie.
One of the hadiths in the sahih, the Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) said
“there is coming a time when somebody will tell a lie and it instantaneously it
will reach the corners of the earth”. The hadith says a man will speak a lie
and he did not say thumma, he said fa, it will immediately thereafter be all
over the world.
One of the things about
liars in Shariah, you are a liar if you tell something that you have not
confirmed its veracity. A lot of muslims
do not know that because they have not studied the rules of the tongue. Kadhab
in the Arabic language is somebody that continually tells lies. It is different
from Kadhur. In the hadith literature, a person would be declared a liar if he
did not verify the sanad. There are people who read the books of hadith now and
it says the narrator was a liar and they do not understand that the ulema meant
he was not someone who fabricated hadiths, he was somebody that did not verify
the truthfulness of the hadith and would relate it as if it were true which is
a liar in Shariah. So if somebody tells you something about somebody and you go
and tell somebody else and it is not true then you are written as a liar and if
you 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
