One of the calamities of religions is when the Messenger
becomes exalted over the One who sent him. We do not believe the Prophet
Muhammad (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) is
divine. We have been given the gift of understanding the Messenger in relation
to the One who sent him. The Prophet Muhammad (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) is central to
teachings of Islam. You cannot exalt the Creator without exalting His Messenger,
and you cannot exalt His Message without exalting His Messenger. We are
commanded by God to magnify the Prophet (sallallahu
alayhi wa sallam). Shaykh Hamza Yusuf eloquently explains why we
must celebrate the Prophet every day of our lives. He also adds at the end an
elucidating explanation of how Muslims should emulate the behaviour the Prophet
Muhammad (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) had
during trying times, reminding us that Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) taught. The
believer is one from whose evil humanity is safe and that he was sent only as a
mercy to everyone.
Love (mahabba) for people arises from three characteristics:
1) their physical outward beauty, 2) their inward beautiful character, and 3)
the good or the sacrifice they do for us. To increase and maintain his love for
the Prophet Muhammad (sallallahu alayhi
wa sallam), Sayyidina Hassan (the Prophet’s grandson) sought descriptions
of all three of these aspects of the Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) because he
wanted something to hold on to. Adding his own commentary to these intimate
descriptions, Shaykh Hamza, with his usual eloquence, passionately relates what
Sayyidina Hassan gathered about the Beloved of Allah. Shaykh Hamza says if you
knew what the Prophet (sallallahu
alayhi wa sallam) did for you, you would fall in love with him
and explains that mahabba grows like a seed. For those who desire to fall in
love with the Beloved of Allah, this talk is for them.
Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem
CD 1
Hasan ibn Ali asked his maternal uncle Hind bin Abi Haalah about
the description of the Messenger of Allah (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam). He said about his uncle
that he was very capable of describing, he had given an excellent description
of the Messenger of Allah (sallallahu
alayhi wa sallam). He said “I desired to hear this description
from him because I wanted something to hold onto”.
One of things about the ulema, they say mahaba (love) for
most human beings arises out of three things. The first is the physical love.
You see something beautiful and your heart inclines towards it. So He put the
love of beauty in the hearts of human beings. If you see something beautiful,
you incline towards it. Your eye delights in it. If you see a human being that
is beautiful, you can fall in love, it can happen just from sight. The ulema
have maintained the physical description of the Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) because that is
a level of mahaba – to actually hear how beautiful he was. He was the most
beautiful human being. He was more beautiful than Yusuf. One of the gifts of
this ummah is that we have an exact description of the Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam), it is as if
you are looking at him. There was a desire to keep the description of the
Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) so
people could have a physical attraction to him as well as the first stage of
love.
The second type of love comes when you hear about the
beautiful qualities. You have outward beauty and inward beauty which is akhlaq.
They moved to the akhlaq of the Prophet (sallallahu
alayhi wa sallam) and the next level of love is love you feel for
somebody who has done good to you or that you find out somebody made a
sacrifice for you. If somebody does good to a good person, they love them more
and more for that reason. But other people, if you do good to them, they have
envy and start feeling resentment towards that person because their heart is
diseased. So they actually get sick because they feel indebted and they do not
like to feel indebted so they begin to use strategies in themselves to not feel
indebted to the person. These are the sick people, this is why the munafiqun
are the sickest people, they are in the lowest place. If people do good to you,
human hearts by nature love those who do good to them. If somebody does good to
you and then you do not have love for them it is because your heart is not in a
natural state. It is in a diseased state.
If you knew what the Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) did for you,
you would fall in love with him. Not just for you, but for humanity. His
concern was not just for his sahaba, his family. Most human beings, their
concern is limited. Their concern might be their wife, children, husband,
family, extended family. Some people, their concern is the community. They care
about the poor people in the community. They want to find them and help them
because it is about the heart. The bigger the heart, the more capacity for
love. The smaller the heart, the lower the capacity for love. It grows like a
seed. Haba is seed in Arabic. That is the nature of mahaba, the bigger it gets
the bigger the heart has to be to bear the love. There are people whose love
extends to the ummah. Their concerns are the concerns of the ummah. They think
about people in other places. Umar said his concern was for animals. He said
“if an animal was being unjustly wronged in
The physical description is what he is talking about
initially.
- He
was very awe inspiring when you saw him.
- He
was monumental, grand in nature when you saw him.
- His face was like a moon on laylatul badr. It had a light comin