Part 1

um
and i want to thank everybody for their support of the college
we're really trying our best to provide for our community really
the best uh that we can inshaallah of our tradition
and uh of the beautiful teachings of our prophet isaiah so the the month of ramadan is always a
month of going back to the book of allah for those who have neglected it neglected it for the
the other 11 months out of the year and for those who actually have a
practice it's a way of increasing it intensifying it i'll give you an example
all the very dear brother from arabia who's in the eastern province he
is a hafiz of quran and he recites the quran every month in ramadan
he'll recite it several times i know dr abdullah
who's a kuwaiti scholar who actually does third 30 hatam every ramadan
and um it's not an exaggeration so um
inshallah we should at least if we if we have the practice of doing it
once a year we should at least attempt to do it twice during ramadan which was the traditional practice of many many
people that was the average muslims practice not
the exemplars but really the average muslim so i'll give an example in the country of morocco where i was fortunate
enough to study which i think has a very beautiful tradition a tradition that
has a great deal of sunnah embedded in it in ways that even the moroccans are not
always aware of a few examples the yellow the bulkhead that they wear the yellow shoes
there's actually a hadith from ibn abbas about the prophet's yellow sandals the fact that they they wear the silham
which is the rita that the prophet saw is the fact that they pray still on read
mats which according to imamatik it's a sunnah to pray on something directly on the earth like adobe
or a reed mat but something that actually comes from the earth so it was
considered in the manikin mandubu to do that
and now we know things like grounding you can you can look that up there's
people that are arguing that we actually need to ground on natural earth with our bare skin
every day just to stay healthy so one of the things that the moroccans do
which is quite extraordinary is that they have a khatam that they do every
month and they begin the khatam on the first of the lunar month so today they would
be on either the second or the third jews depending they started on sunday there are other people started on saturday i
think jordan also started on sunday the vast majority of the middle east
started on saturday people have extraordinary eyesight in some places but the
in america i think most people started on saturday so you would start the the jews like they do in taraweeh on that
day in morocco the ministry of estimates that they actually do a hatham of 250 000 just in the masajid alone
every month and i think that's quite extraordinary just in terms of protecting the country just to have that
level of protection because they always make these amazing duas at the end when they do the khattam
so if you don't have a practice of quran i hope that you'll use this month to
establish a practice that you continue on after the month even if it's half a page a day
there there should be some commitment to the quran so that you don't fall under the category
of when the prophet says the prophet salallahu salaam said
you know oh my lord my people have abandoned this quran imam assad is
tafsir he says that they they don't recite it they don't practice its teachings
and they don't reflect on it so we don't want to be people of abandonment of hidden quran we
want to be people of the quran allah are the people of quran the prophet salla isaam said in a sahih hadith
that the people of the quran are the the people of god and his elect that the in
other words they're the people that he has chosen to have a special place with him so what i wanted to do was
really continue on from last year about the jewels of the
quran that imam al-khazadi wrote so i'm going to do a brief summary inshallah of
last year's program and i hope for some of you that did not see it last year that maybe
perhaps you could go back because i know it's available so the the the the jawahar imam zadi
uh did the uh the jawahar of the quran
a a way of essentializing the message of the quran and we're living in a time
where essentialized aspects of things are not promoted so the
essential nature of the self the essential nature of gender gender the essential nature of the human being
these are things that people are discarding but our islamic tradition is a tradition of essences we we believe in
zawat we believe in joaher and and so imam razadi wanted to to really
look at what was the essential message of the book of allah and he identified
it in an extraordinarily brief and concise text but incredibly compelling
for anybody who studies it it's worth a serious study this is a short book
but it's stunning in its presentation of the essential quran so
first of all just to recap about imam amer qazali imam al-ghazali
is muhammad even muhammad muhammad his locker was
he was born in 450 so he was born in the mid half of the
of the fifth century and he dies in 505 after hijra which is 11 11 in the
christian era he is arguably after the set of the single
most important muslim that ever lived and that and that is not a hyperbolic statement that that is a a statement
that could be substantiated with a great deal of evidence is unfortunately in the modern era he's
been reduced to a a in in in some circles a sufi deviant
which is a really bad sign of the times because
he has been honored in the last thousand years by our
community as really the proof of islam
and the reason for that is because he was
almost i would argue that it's really ijmat that he was the majedid
of that century and you can see he he's at that that sixth century of hijarah
he's considered the mujad but he is the single identified majed in our tradition that
did tajid of all three aspects of the faith so he did tashdeed of iman
he did tashdeed of islam and he did yes and nobody else has that
distinction so the the single most important work that he wrote is not the yeah
it's it's the mustafa and it was actually his last work so it's the culmination of his intellectual
brilliance of his intellectual journey and that book is actually a book of juris of us
he had the great fortune and distinction of being the best student of one of the
most brilliant jurists in islamic history the great shattering scholar uh imam
[Music] introduces really even though it was
understood prior to imam juani but he introduces the asid tradition in a way
that it really hadn't been introduced before so there's an identification of the universals of islam the preservation
of the of the dean of life of uh
reason itself of property and of of uh family and and
uh family they also include uh human dignity because dignity comes out of the
family um so that which was added on later uh is really
covered in the idea of the nseb or lineage or family so
he introduces an extraordinary new way of
looking at the quran and at the sunnah of the prophet isaiah and he introduces many
very important technical terms that had not been used before so he really goes
deep into what's called ta'alil which is finding the reasons for rulings he goes deep into what's called
which is an approach to causation in which one determines
uh the monastery of of the the the appropriateness
of the uh ruling being applied in a given situation because sometimes
the appropriate ruling is not to apply the normative ruling but actually to suspend it
so he developed that and that's where sheikh abdullah who is arguably one of the mujahideen of
us in our time and is a master of the ghazalian tradition this is one of the things that
he has focused on because of its importance and centrality to making islam
uh always viable and always relevant no matter what the circumstances we find ourselves in so imam hazari is born in
central asia in tulsa and central asia is one of those places
in in the islamic tradition and it's still one of the most important places in the world in fact
as a big new brzezinski considered it the single most important place in the world he said whoever controlled central
asia will control the world which is why there's so much interest in central asia
it also uh happens to be uh the saudi arabia of micro minerals so
there's a great uh desire to control this place so they have access like afghanistan and places like that
but he was born in luz he goes to nesabor and studies there nishipoor
also to gorgan which gorgan was a a place near the caspian
sea that has amazing scholars sharif and giorgiani
i mean there's really stunning scholars that come from this area and there's a there's a book that was written in english on the enlightenment of the
central asian muslims at the extraordinary output mathematically scientifically astronomically
but also in terms of quran commentary and so many many things he then goes to
baghdad and he he he
becomes part of the coterie of nizam al-mulk and he ends up teaching and becoming the dean at baghdad at the
famous nilamiya and this is where the sunni tradition really begins to solidify and spread
um and then he also uh has a spiritual crisis he travels to
damascus he acts as a janitor in one of the mosques there lives
inside a very small room in the mosque he goes to jerusalem
in jerusalem he writes a really really important book in
he then makes his pilgrimage he goes back to baghdad and then finally he goes back to central asia
where he has a small group of students that he studies with one of the few students
that he studied with uh that he taught in baghdad and one of his last students was the great monarchy jurist
and saints and if you read his rela
his description of coming into the presence of imam al-qazadi is one of the most extraordinary descriptions of the
meeting of a great master because ali abu bakr was already an accomplished
scholar by that time but when he actually goes in to the presence of imam azad he said it
was it as if he had been living in darkness his whole life and he saw the sun rise before him and dispel all of the
darkness of his time prior to that and it's it's very powerful when you
read it you can really sense uh the greatness of the man
so he wrote so many books he's got over 70 books that are
confirmed and attributed to him and many others that people claim he wrote
but among the books is the jawahir and so that's the one that we looked at last year
so 40 years he actually died relatively young the um
the imam razadi project in other words what he was attempting to do
was one what we call in the west the liberal arts which
and this is my contention and i think increasingly a lot of muslims
are understanding this and seeing this is that our tradition is rooted in these
fundamental arts that enable people to think qualitatively and quantitatively
so he wrote in these arts he wrote he has several books in logic he didn't
need to do any grammar books because there were so many grammar books that had been done at that time
also he was living at a time where there were some really great rhetoricians so but he really saw the importance of
logic as a central uh art to be introduced into
kalam and into us so he really in his great mustafa and he
wrote four books in this area but in his great mustafa he actually
and by the way his his crit critic in philosophy ibn rushed actually did a summary of the
mustafa so he had great respect for his um his book the mustafa but anyway
um in in in the mustafa the first 40 pages
is is basically an introduction to into logic but he uses
uh vocabulary that people would not see it as directly being from logic because there was a lot
of animus towards logic and i have a very interesting anecdote which is a true story
the one of my teachers was um muhammad mohtar
who was the son of muhammad ramirez he was a beautiful man a brilliant
scholar and an osuli but he told me when i was studying with him in medina
40 years ago he told me that his father when he taught us
he taught from that ghazalian approach and because the students
in medina at university were prohibited from learning logic he actually wrote a
book that he called adam which they accept but it's a it's a book
of logic so he actually taught them logic without telling them they were learning logic which i mean if you don't see the irony
in that it's it's uh very interesting
i have the book it's a good book too so he iman is
legal theory the inner path and then refutation so he was
mostly focused on a constructive project which was to revive the three aspects of
islam in a time where he thought there was a lot of what he called mutharasimun the formalist they were trapped in just
the the outward rituals and rites of islam and they'd lost that inner dimension
so through that he writes in kalam in usual and then in isan but he also had a a
a deconstructive um uh project which was to refute
uh refute the peripatetic philosophers so people say oh he was against philosophy he was actually dealing with
one school of philosophy the the methodology of the philosophers he actually appreciated but he was he uh
looked at these 20 aspects in his book uh tahafud and philasipha makasidan philasva he wrote first and
then he wrote the tablet and then the occultists so he really
had a a a focus on the botania these are the
esotericists that turn islam into an esoteric religion and see the outward as
a something negative uh that oh those that's for simple people that don't really understand the truths so that was
his project in book eight of the yeah he has the etiquette of the quranic recitation
which i recommend reviewing every once in a while it's very important until these things become really well
established but uh he has adab of tidal quran so the first bab is the father of quran
the virtues of quran and it's folk and then he looks at the just the outward aspects like
not carrying it unless you're in um the and then also
the mental task and to really be focused and then also in the fifth one he looks at
understanding the quran and its tafsir and he looks at both the akala and the
nakal so looking at it and then he has his criticisms and the
dangers also of speaking about the quran without the requisite knowledge in his jawahar he's
looking at these jewels and pearls is what he calls them so the quran he says
is like an ocean filled with jewels and valuables this is what i did last year so this is the road map and if you look
at this i mean first of all the intellect that that that discerned this is just such a formidable
and powerful intellect and so this is really worth getting under your belt so
to speak this is the road map for him to god
which is what the book of allah is it's you know one of the things that when when you buy technology they always have
a user's manual so like if you buy a car nobody ever reads it and then they get
into problems because or the women read it and the men don't but but the users manuals are very
useful because when you assemble something you should read always the instructions before you
assemble it because you'll you'll get into trouble so
god has provided every animal with their hulk and their huda
he created the animal and then he guided it to its natural nature and this is why the bedouin
poet said
i heard the howl of the wolf and i felt comfort in hearing the howl of the wolf
and then i heard a human voice and i almost flew out of my skin so he's
traveling in the desert and he hears a wolf and it's it's another creature so he feels some comfort but then he hears
a man's voice and he's terrified and the reason for that is with the wolf you know exactly what you're going to get
but with the man it could be a demon or it could be an angel and you don't know until they
reveal themselves and this is the thing about human nature is if it's not guided
it it can go one of the two paths right allah says
we guided man to the two paths so there are two paths in life the path of righteousness and the path of
viciousness the path of virtue and the path of vice and this
road map is exactly what the quran is it is the user's manual for the human
being for the creation of the human being it gives us the ability to
navigate our lives and and but it is a map and you have to learn it
and and and you have to make it operational so you can talk about the journey
but if you actually never set out with the map you'll never arrive and so life
is a journey it's a path and we're on that path the outward path is called sharia
which is in arabic a path to water and for the desert
water a path to water is a life-giving path and the prophet salallahu said
my sahabah come to me
they come to me as
and the prophet sallallahu islam said that he was a right and he said
the the is the one who goes out in search of water for the clan when they're when they need water
and and and when he finds it he goes back and tells him so then he becomes a deli
so initially he's called but once he finds the water he's a deleo so the prophet said the sahaba were like
they come for him looking for this life-giving water what in the the european tradition was called fans vitae
the water of life the fountain of life so they go out looking for that and then when they find it they come back and
they can guide others to it so the sharia is the path to that life-giving water the the
is the inner path to that so the body has to make the journey
that's called sharia but the soul has to make the journey that's called
and then when you arrive you you arrive by the sharia
with the inward journey to the which is the reality and these terms are
later terms but they're very useful terms in the same way that we have grammatical terms that the sahabah
didn't know so that's the roadmap the quran is the roadmap so the johar al-quran the jews
of the quran are he he he divides it into the matwa the preliminary matter so
and then the makasid the sixth muqasid of the quran and then the
the subsequent matters so the jewels of the quran relate to the makhasid of the quran
so he defines the 763 verses are he calls them jewels
and then he has 741 he calls durar
pearls these are the two types of verses that he's identifying
that essentialized the meaning of the book of allah the first one is embodied in la illah
and the second one is embodied in muhammad rasulullah so all of the quran
can be divided into la illah and muhammad
that tell you who your lord is they tell you his nature his attributes
his actions um what he wants from us what he doesn't want from us what will happen if we do
what he wants what will happen and so the the it tells us about god
the the the pearls are those that tell us about how to get
to god now it's very interesting that he chose to use jewels because the jewel is formed uh in the earth but the pearl
is formed in an animal and the pearl and and one of the things
she's allowed to you know rumi says is that the heart
is he says it's like encased in the mother of pearl and the pearl emerges
because of sand that gets into the the oyster and so the oyster releases this
um to in case the the in the same way that in when you get sick very often
your body will actually put something around the the uh what's harmful in the body to
protect the body from it so it will actually isolate what's dangerous so what happens with the this aggravation
inside the oyster shell is what creates the pearl and so what he's saying is
that allah is going to aggravate you with all these trials and tribulations
and if you respond appropriately you your heart will become like that pearl
that that it's it's the aggravations and the tribulations of life that will actually bring you into
that beautiful state now you have to dive into the ocean to get the pearls
so it's the deep dive that he's asking us to take in life not to stay at the
shore not to look at the ocean and say oh it's nice no to to go in and so
that's what what what he's doing so these are like for instance just to give
you some examples this is the first one that he uses about the jawahar
he made for you the earth a firash what is a firash
is a bed facade says the earth is neither too hard nor
too soft it's perfect to build on because if it was too hard you couldn't build on it if it was too soft you could
build on if it was rock you couldn't build on it it was sand you couldn't build but he made it this perfect
uh uh like a bed because you don't want a bed that's too hard you're uncomfortable and
you don't want a bed that's too soft because you won't you'll wake up in a bad state
so and then he and was so he made the heaven a canopy a roof
what does a roof do it protects you now we know that we're getting constantly bombarded with radiation and we've got
van allen's belts that are protecting we know now that we really do have a roof
over the earth that's protecting us from cosmic radiation and then a sema
and then so he brought forth from the heaven that he sent down this water and it brought forth the the provision the
fruits of the earth but is
so do not set up undead the nid is somebody who is equal to god and nobody
lisa committed
everything that occurs to your mind allah than that and so the nid is the opposite and that's why a man once came
to the prophet and and he said something and he said
if god wants and you want he says don't put me equal with god because the
wow makes it like they're equal so so you're supposed to say in insha allah
you know you you say something that shows you the separation the difference uh as opposed to a conjunctive
approach and so uh and then this is a beautiful this is in arabic
it's called the joomla this is important because people that associate idols with god out of
ignorance unless the message comes to them the they're living according to the dominant school
and so allah is telling us once you know don't do that if you're living in
ignorance then allah doesn't take people to account until he sends a messenger the more test
said you know you know rasulullah we we don't punish
them until we send a rasool but i said it was that
that the the maturity and the athari they say no it's the rasool that has to come and then
maturity have a nice nuance uh about that too because they do recognize some
um responsibility with with tamiyas and aqua
so another one is
if my servants ask about me say i'm near uji would that with today i will answer
the call of the one calling the prayer of the one calling it when he calls me felies
so let them respond to me in other words if you want god to respond to your prayers respond to his call
and the word is the same so god calls us and we call god
why should we expect god to answer our prayers if we're not answering his call it's
even though allah nonetheless we should answer his call
so and then he says will you be let them or you know let them believe in me
in order for them to be rightly guided which is
kind of intelligence in your behavior so prudence you know
being rasheed
so allah testifies that there is no god but
except for god well and the angels puts and this is very interesting
because these are so it's the angels justify and those who have
knowledge this is this is uprightness and justice
repeat it again
and this is tokid you know it's for it's asserting and and you do this when somebody might
have some doubt about it that's when you use it he could have said adino and allah islam but when he
said innadina and allah islam it's it's for anybody who has any doubt dispel that doubt this
is god speaking and saying that the religion with god is al-islam
and you know some translate that as submission which is true but it also means the religion that
the prophet isaiah gave so it's not simply submission it's both submission and
this religion that we call alisna
and then also another jauhar wamam and [Music]
so anything that crawls on the earth is a dabba there's not a creature in the earth nor
a uh a a bird flying with its two wings
except that they are communities like unto you i mean now we know this in with zoology i mean
it's amazing the communities of animals and and how they commune with one another how they live all these things
they actually have pilgrimages i wrote a a an essay on this
about all the amazing pilgrimages that animals do to these places even the butterflies
the monarch butterfly goes to one place birds will fly across the ocean it's quite stunning
what they do fly across the ocean and one of the things about the birds when they're in flight they say is that they will
literally forego any temptations on the journey they're completely focused so even if they see like a fish they would
normally get they will focus and not be distracted which is why uh in the great um
poem of the uh the birds the thirty birds that set out uh for god i mean uh the persian poet
used the the birds as an analogy of that and so
and then allah says we have not
omitted anything from this book you know there's one of this
syrian scholars in orientalist said to him do you really believe that you know that god hasn't omitted anything in the book he
said absolutely he said so you can tell me like how many loaves of bread you
could cook in a in a uh in a bag of flour
and he said it it's in the quran he said where and he told one of the students go get so-and-so so we went and
got him he came he said how many loaves in a in a bag of flour he said the little bag i can get five out of it the
big bag i can get 20. and he's and he's he said well there's your answer he said
that's not in the quran he said yes it is an expert and he said he's the baker
i have a audience here that's completely silent you have permission to laugh
that's like you know these poor um comedians that say something and then nobody laughs it's a horrible feeling
so [Music]
this is one of the most extraordinary rhetorically extraordinary verses um it's really a stunning verse then it
was said earth swallow up your water and sky hold back and the water subsided the command was fulfilled the ark settled on
the mount of judy and it was said gone are those evil doing people
and then ya yohanas [Music]
this is it now in the pearl so i'm just giving examples from these so this
is now related to the path all those other ones were about god and how and
how god operates in the world this is about the path this is the very first commandment in the quran
is the first commandment linearly this is the first commandment
chronologically this is the first commandment linearly in the book so this is the very first commandment that allah
gives in his book telling us to worship our lord who created us
so don't get into door and tesselso this actually negates dor and tasensel which is amazing because these are the two
problems what they call the chicken and egg problem in philosophy in order to ward off harm in order to to
guard yourselves but also to be mindful to be conscientious so the allegories of the jewels and the
valuables in the quran he goes into these symbols so he he has he has these
names the red brim stone al-kibrita tiriyaka rakbar and
what he's showing is one of imam al-khazadi's contentions is
everything in creation has a meaning that the physical presence of it
is has to be penetrated in order to get to the meaning so for instance uh sheikh
bin habib is divine he says
that allah's creation are our meanings set up in images and whoever understands
these meanings is from the people of discernment and so he's using these to show you
that everything is like what is an antidote well
an antidote will protect you from sumum but he's saying that the quran is an antidote
and so so this thing that's in the world has a metaphysical reality what is
the the red the red brimstone or the red sulfur was
a an alchemical term that was used for it was a substance that's apparently
extremely rare and whoever finds it is able to transmute lead into gold and so
he uses this as a metaphor for the spiritual path that transmutes the toxic lead of the nafs into the spiritual gold
of the ruach and also in mizkad alfar so
this is something that that somebody for instance allah
the beauty of ood or musk is that it this smell comes from it and so
those righteous people what he's saying is that it's similar to that is that the the the presence
that they have is like fragrant musk and uh and then alos it it's only when
you burn it that it produces a beautiful smell and so this is another metaphor that
sometimes allah has to burn you in order to bring forth what's what's beautiful and so these
again are the trials and tribulations of life so he uses these as analogies um for them and so he says that
alloswood is smoke rising from the ashes of god's punishment of hypocrites and his enemies brings great benefit to
believers the fame of a person of knowledge spreads everywhere like musk even if that person prefers obscurity so
one of the things uh even says he says that um
that uh that whoever worships you know wants obscurity is abdul uh al-humul like if
you want obscurity then you're a slave of obscurity if you want fame you're a slave of fame and he said
the servant of god is the same whether he he makes him well known or he keeps in in obscurity and
that obscurity is a great blessing that people refuse and fame is a great tribulation that
people desire and the prophet isaiah said it's enough for a fitnah for a person that people
when he walks by they point at him with their fingers say oh there goes so and so
and many people that become famous they they end up really
wishing i mean there's some people that are addicted to these things but they wish that they had uh remain in obscurity and then he says
that the antidote is cures from the poisons of heresy passions and errors entering the soul and then the kibrita
that which turns the essence of the soul from the vices of a beast and the era of ignorance to the purity of the angels
and their spirituality so these are all things and then he gives an incredible presentation of
al-fatiha opening up these eight doors of paradise bismillah
according to the majority of the quran
begins with bismuth his recitation begins with
alhamdulillah raheem again or maddie omega
those are the um that was a review just of what we did
last year in all the sessions so you i i wanted to bring it back so that we could then look
at these and there are a few things that i wanted to the book that i'm going to be using for this is a book based on the jawahar so
this translation was done by dr thomas cleary it's called the essential quran the
heart of islam an introductory selection of readings from the quran so dr cleary
i think did us a great service in this book because it's
an incredibly accessible book for a lot of people um to get to the heart of the quran
without having to read the entire quran and the the notes that he wrote in the back
are really really quite stunning but one of the most beautiful aspects of this book is the
introduction and i think that um he really
gave us a a beautiful summation of the purpose of the quran in
that so that's the book that i'm going to be using but i also want to draw your
attention i will on sunday i'm going to be talking about this book with the book club before i talk about
[Music] the arborist translation so this book is by bruce lawrence it's
from the lives of great religious books from princeton university press it's called the quran
k-o-r-a-n and he distinguishes between quran which is arabic and quran which is translation so he actually
prefers to keep the old which is the same one that dr clear used here
most muslims prefer the transliterated one where you have a l q u r and then
have a [Music] a little apostrophe for the
the hamza quran like that but he this is a biography of the quran
in english and one of the things that is important for us to come to terms with
is that english has become a preeminent islamic language for whatever reasons
it's my native tongue it's not my ancestors native tongue my ancestors native tongue was gaelic
but it is my native tongue now because the english colonized
ireland and scotland and and cut their tongues out for speaking gaelic so um 800 years of that
now the irish are actually quite eloquent in the english language in fact they're noted for their poetry
um so but it is an important language
it's the language of academia many people from other countries
write in english most scientific papers have to ultimately be published in english to be
well read so it's become a really important religious
language we forget that the south asians were colonized from 18 from
the late 18th century well into the 20th century 1947 the
indian subcontinent which is one of the most important lands of islam was colonized by the british the british
basically instituted english as a formal language in education the south asians actually became very
very skilled at english many of them read english literature and and for that reason some of the best
translations of the quran were actually originally produced by south asians
believe it or not the the reason why the indian and pakistanis began originally
they were all indian but the the reason why the indians
translated the quran was because they actually wanted to address the mistranslations of the ones
that were in english that were translated by religious
uh usually protestants that wanted to proselytize in the muslim world so they
were responses and one of the the main movements against the religious proselytization proselytization of
christianity in india was the ahmadiyya movement so this is how
ahmed became famous because he would debate the christians and
one of his students muhammad ali did the the ahmadi quran
which is published in ohio and still can be found in almost any bookstore in the united
states because they've been publishing that quran i think it's in its 50th edition
there are other great translations of the quran that come
later you have marmaduk pickthal who was influenced by he was at the woking
masjid in um in england which was an ahmadi masjid so he was actually influenced by the
mawlana muhammad ali translation but he was a very famous
novelist in england and he became muslim he's actually one of the most prominent english people to become muslim and he
wrote uh he he ended up learning arabic uh the nizam of hyderabad who at the
time was the single richest man in the world he was i don't want to
compare him odiously to some of our oligarchs just interesting aside here i kind of
was fascinated by the fact that the all the russian billionaires are called oligarchs but they don't call our
billionaires oligarchs i mean that's very interesting so
the the he was a billionaire by today's standards and he basically was the
patron of marmaduke pickthal he gave him a good salary and he was able to translate the quran in hyderabad where
he was living at the time became a very important quran aj arbury who was a professor he was a
student of dr nicholson he also did what i think is the most eloquent in english of the
translations of the quran we can debate on these things and i know there's a lot of debates about that but
i would say that now the other resource that i want to bring to light here
is the lights of revelation this
this is such an incredible work and i have to say that dr jibril haddad who is a really
brilliant scholar incredibly meticulous really really knows the tradition he i
know one of his teachers was a brilliant arabist and islamic scholar
but really really deeply steeped in the arabic language he
he really praised him as a student he said he was really an excellent student but he has become a sheikh in his own
right this is a fantastic if you want to to take a deep dive into how our great
scholars looked at the quran this is the first hisp of the quran translated it has the
arabic for those who can read arabic it actually has the arabic in it but it's
it's really a stunning work and and the meticulousness i mean the the amount of
scholarship that went into this this is worth 10 phds in my estimation
um the uh yeah so
and then the book this is arabic this is a very nice uh edition of imam al-bagui it's a slightly
abridged edition but imam bawi and imam al-bagawi were the two
most popular madrasa tafsirs
the jellalain was a a very basic tafsir and it's very useful and there is an addition
that was done by uh the translator aisha beuli who's an american she actually did her
arabic at university of berkeley nearby berkeley university uc berkeley but she
lives in england and she's translated many works but she actually did a translation for faja publications of the
jalalene the jalalene is an incredibly useful aid to understanding the quran because
it fills in a lot of the lacunae and one of the [Music]
students that was at a regular in singapore were actually in malaysia but she was
from singapore really wonderful um somebody did a lot of work for the
singapore muslim community but she had taken a course uh at university that really unsettled
her and one of one of because one of the things that the professor said is that
the quran is filled with lacunae in other words things that have to be filled in by commentary
and she couldn't understand how a revelation why would god
give us a book that has these lacunae and at the time
i don't think i gave her a uh the best answer but it really got me thinking a lot
about that and one of the things that occurred to me was
in in the ayah in which allah says this is a reminder for you and your
people imam malik said it's saying so and so said about the quran
so and so said about the quran so and so said so it's the is not tradition and
one of the really important aspects and something that i've focused on for probably 30 years since i've come back
to the united states is really trying to drive home to our community the importance
of traditional chains of transmission one of the few areas where it's really
left is in tishweed because people still do learn tischweid based on a synod
but in most of the other sciences and there's undeniably been a delusion of islam so
a lot of people you know go collect is not and people give them freely and
um so it's not it's just like you have diploma mills so are you gonna get
the doctor who trained at johns hopkins or are you gonna get the doctor
uh that you know is a quack and and uh you know
got got a naturopathic diploma from a uh
you know an online course they did for six weeks
i mean there are people that do that you know it's quite and that's not to say because naturopathic there are
naturopathic colleges that are are reputable
um like the one in portland and i think harvard actually has now a naturopathic program
so uh that that's the difference so it's very important to know
that um you know the importance of of chains of transmission
and and that's why i think there are lacunae is because allah
has forced us to be reliant on transmission
that the quran has to be transmitted in that way the prophet explained the quran to his
people his life was an explanation of it and in in any uh
in any case those are just some initial reflections um
so uh the first question comes in how much of the quran is literal and how much is metaphorical and ambiguous can we rely
on one particular approach in understanding the quran or should we apply different approaches there are
the quran has there are very few actual hazy verses in the quran
that are problematic but there are many things in the quran that can be taken metaphorically the the
methodology of sunnah is not to esotericize the quran
but to recognize that there are esoteric interpretations the prophet saws said in a hadith that the
ayah has a had and it has a vahron and a botnun and a muthala or a matala
so the he's indicating that there are four
levels of interpretation and in even in traditional western uh
christian interpretation they had four levels of interpretation so they had the the historical the out the allegorical
the the moral and then the anagogical so there are ways multiple ways of
interpreting things so for instance uh in allah says that some of the verses are
hazy with the shabby hat and then others are they're they're they're they're they're
come they're they're they're clear in their meanings and those who have sickness in their
heart tend to esotericize and wander off into the occult um so we we uh
we we're people of the inward and the outward and we assert that there has to be a balance between the two
that's that's the sunni tradition and and the shia really also
next question for someone beginning to read the quran in translation how can the jews of the quran be discovered
without one being overwhelmed was a good question i mean we have to recognize the limits of translation but also we have
to recognize the benefits of translation so even reading the quran in arabic if
you're not trained in balara and sarf
you have to be very careful and not many people even modern arabs who've gone through 12 years of arabic education or
even into college they don't have the type of grammatical skills or rhetorical
skills that people that went to traditional madrasa acquired and still acquire in places
where where they they're focused on so you still have i mean there's great grammarians in mauritania geraldo benbe
is an extraordinary grammarian he's a rhetorician he's a logician and so
you have to be careful translations are problematic they they um
there are many possibilities some verses literally you will get it's not that
common but in some of the contraries you'll get very extremely different interpretations as if they're almost
like completely opposite so imam al-khazadi's work can sometimes
roughly be divided into works for scholars and works for the average muslim that's true where did the jewels
of the quran fit in i think it fits in an educated muslim i think if you're if
you have a good level of education and i'm not talking about so much islamic education i think you can
benefit greatly from the jewels of the quran but it's a really good question because
there are works that are for scholars and then there are works i i look at it like prescription and
over-the-counter um you know there's things you can buy over the counter
and they're not going to be harmful you read the side and it says you know it might say we recommend that you
ask your doctor before you use this so but generally over the counters are are
pretty safe but even tylenol can kill so
even with just going um you can get into trouble so you just
have to be careful but i i do believe that we should if we don't have access to the arabic my first reading i became
muslim from reading the quran dr almar became muslim from reading the autobiography of malcolm x
there's different ways to get to islam but my experience was with george sales
quran which is pretty amazing because as a really old that was that 1734
was and george sale the first one was uh robert of kenton
uh back in the in 1643 was the first translation into latin
which is actually considered a good translation apparently in latin my latin's too rusty to read that but
um [Music] but uh george sale there was an argument because it was
reprinted in america in 1832 i think and they actually in the introduction
claimed that he was probably a crypto muslim because he he was too he was
he was too uh relatively neutral not entirely i mean
he does you know they you people people have to realize that at that time you had to say nasty things
about islam or you'd be accused of being a muslim and could really get into trouble
it was a different world and so a lot of people don't understand that that that
about that nature of that time is there any methodology method methodical common ground between how
al-khazadi approached the quranic text and the way ibn arabi approaches it well there's two even arabies i mean there
are more than two but the two main ones when you're talking about the quran tend to be
abu bakr binarabhi who was a student of the imam al-ghazadis
and he was largely although he had a commentary that was apparently multi-volume
unfortunately it it was lost with the fall of andre lucia but he did do a four
volume known as if you're talking about mahidin ibn
arabi who was a 13th century scholar
and mystic and he's more known for what some people term theosophy which is
like spiritual philosophy but i uh if so i don't know which one you you
you mean but i would say in terms of even out of the aldi
he's very much focused on camera quran but it has beautiful insights if you
want his more [Music] spiritual book it's called
which is a fantastic book that got published beautifully it was a book i waited for 25 years for and it was
finally done in a really good edition by a friend of mine from algeria um so
it's it's a stunning book rajon and has just amazing insights into it
and he does deal with the quran ibn arabi did there is a a tafsir there is a tough
seer attributed to him which i bought in fez in 1978 my first trip to fess
i actually bought it in a bookstore and i i could have no it wouldn't be possible for me to
have been able to read it at that time but but i did buy it so i have that copy still in my library
that was probably written by his student al hashani but it uses a methodology in which
is consistent one if you read just a few chapters you will learn his methodology
and then it becomes relatively easy to navigate what he's doing so usually for instance
he'll interpret as the heart allah brings the earth back to life
after its death so the heart is the place of cultivation it's where you cultivate good deeds or you cultivate
bad deeds so you're sowing seeds in your heart and you water that that heart with either good deeds or bad deeds so the
seeds grow and the heart either becomes virtuous or vicious and so
what he's that that that's one of his approaches um it doesn't deny the outward either
and so he was not a esotericist i mean even
and even tamiya has his criticisms particularly but even tamiya does say
that he benefited greatly from his book the future so even to me i read ibn aarovi i would not recommend ibn aurobi
i am not an ibrahim scholar by any stretch um i i have read in the future
but i i would not recommend it's that level of
is for it's like trying to go to a a quantum physics book before you've
learned basic physics so i i would not recommend it and see
who i feel more close to uh asked his sheikh about ibn arabi and he
said in other words i don't want to say anything and he asked him again he said
look some people say he was a kotab and some people say he wasn't a muslim he said i say it to sleep you know just
stay out of the debate yeah you don't want to make took fear of people that aren't kafir and
um there's there's a book by uh i think it's called tambihal rabbi
lehmann you know waking up the idiot uh in his making tak
fear of ibn arabi that uh siuti so
you know even arabi was highly honored in the ottoman tradition um
and but he is a he is a contentious um uh even amongst some of the great
scholars uh one of the greatest scholars of islamic tradition is the great
the renewer of the second millennium he did not agree with ibn aurobi and he
actually wrote his own understanding of tohid to
counter the understanding that was presented by ibrahirovi but he didn't make takfir
these are debates so we should be very careful about these
i just want to ask if there are any tips for a mother who struggles with a baby and at the same time wants to finish the quran and understand it well first of
all you get a great reward in struggling with your baby don't throw the baby out with the
bathwater so sometimes you know you just have these problems one of the great
stories that we have in in the western tradition is the story of
the pied piper of hamlin which is about a rat infestation in this
town and so this piper comes to town and says he can get rid of all the rats
and and so he pipes them all out and they follow him and he he destroys them but then
they won't pay him so he gets really angry so he pipes the children out and they all go into a cave and disappear
and they lose their children i i liken that to people that use the
television to get rid of the rattiat the pesky aspect of children um you're gonna pay the piper by losing
your children so it's very important just to be patient with children
the idea of leaving a child crying uh a young infant
crying uh like this that's how the they say the generation of the nazis was a result of
a kind of dr spock book that was published in the 1880s on how to raise
children and and it was all about punitive measures it was all about not
you know letting them cry themselves to sleep it created a generation of people that lost empathy so it's really important to
have empathic children the way you get that according to erickson a psychiat
psychologist that i really liked when i was a read psychology in college you know he had the
these um crises developmental crises and the first one was trust versus mistrust
so if a child knows that it's in a trustworthy family it's going to resolve that crisis but if you're ignoring the
child it's going to really traumatize that child early on
and i'm more and more convinced that most of the problems in the world are a direct result of childhood trauma
um do you have any reflections on nj dawud's attempt to present the quran in the order of revelation rather than
compilation how reliable is the order he offers nj dilutes an interesting
this is one of the important translations that emerges in the 19th century
it was published at the turn of the century in i think the everyman library or something so it
actually became quite widely read it's still in print
we do know that imam ali had a a must-have that was based on
the actual dates of revelation so imam ali kept
that and but it's lost and even jose and kelby said if we had it we
would have access to great knowledge so it's unfortunate
there there are some interesting aspects to what he did it's not entirely
uh verifiable but some of it is i mean we do know when some things were revealed
although one of the miracles of the quran is that as it was coming down gibril was saying
put this here put this there and so which is a much more miraculous way to
do a book i mean it wasn't just given to him in any linear fashion
so um yeah i would take that with a grain of mila
next one
okay i got it you don't have to spell it out
can you please shed light on the idea of a poetic translation of the quran we have a popular product translation of
the quran in the sindhi language by murphy i mean i would argue that
the quran is stunningly powerful we don't call it out of adapt to the
quran but to use the word uh you know somebody
who watched gary wills is what is the quran they we got some emails saying oh he called
it poetry well if you look up poetry in the in the dictionary it has different
meanings and one of them is just beautiful language like we could say his speech was pure
poetry just meaning it was really beautiful and eloquent that's all it means so
there is a translation right now i think it's being done by dr bruce lawrence i don't know if he's finished
it but he wrote this book on the quran in english and he's actually doing one in verse which i personally
wouldn't do because the quran says
you know we did not teach him poetry and it's not appropriate for him
the great algerian mujahid and scholar
who fought the french and was a scholar in his own right has an incredible commentary on the quran
called it's really one of the most amazing books i've ever read
but he and he has a book called tempeh rafi
that i read many many years ago and really benefited from it he says in that book
that the reason that the the they call the prophet's poets is because
a poet is doing something that other people can't do
and and when you hear a great poet uh it just it's quite amazing
and and so there's a there's a there's an inspiration
that is clearly part of a great poet in fact many poets will
tell people that they just the poem was there
frost talks about that and then there's the craft of poetry also
but um the the quran is definitely not poetry
but whoever translated translates it should really have an extraordinary
gift with the language he's translating it into one of the reasons why i really really
like dr cleary's translation is that
he he has this minimalist style which and the quran is very very
minimalist despite its extraordinary eloquence it has a really stunning
um conciseness what's called e-jazz it has ilpanet but generally
e-jazz is is and and he really he has that and he has a
just a very interesting word diction um one of the things that um
bruce dr bruce uh says about
dr cleary's translation he says
that he actually mentions me in light of because he does say um
and he does he he that there's an american who who did his own uh translation of the quran
he's not a muslim but his name is sandal burke and he mined cleary for constructing his
own hybrid version of the quran but he had read he he did it because he wanted americans to know more about islam after
9 11. but one of the things that he said is he read all these different commentaries but it was dr cleary's commentary that really
grabbed him but because it was in copyright he didn't use it he ended up using one that
was out of copyright but dr clear he says here that the translation is
it can be problematic right because for instance that
he seems to lose his way in rendering evil as ill a drastic d metaphysical reading of what
are often used as apotropaic texts and that's because in in
in the the chapter anes he says in the name of god the
compassionate the merciful he says or in dawn rather right he says
say i take refuge in the lord of dawn.
from the ill of what is created and from the ill of darkness when it's
gloomy and from the ill of those who curse and from the ill of the envious when he envies now
dr lawrence was criticizing him because he's saying it's d
it's a d metaphysical reading because he's not using evil but if you actually look up the word ill the fourth meaning
of it is evil and it's actually related etymologically to evil
and one of the things about in arabic it is not just evil the arabs
call anything that's deficient like poverty is
so one of the things that really struck me about using ill there is that
the last two surahs were given to the prophet as a protection
because he was unsettled by some people who had
who had done this these knots the 11 knots that they did and that's why there's 11 verses because 11 is the
devil's number and so there's 11 verses and and in fact 9 and 11
because they they it bypasses 10 which is one with power and and that
this is in like a cult tradition anyway that's what i've read in in these
books on occult numerology so dr cleary understood
that these eyes were revealed to protect people
from mental imbalances from losing their way from having wasa
which is what we today know as compulsive thoughts right so obsessive compulsive people
those are illnesses but but but they have there's an evil when it's comes from a
demonic source as opposed to say a natural imbalance that can occur from
not sleeping eating or drinking properly so that's just one example of that so i
my argument is that whoever translates the quran must have an extraordinary knowledge of arabic
and an incredible sensibility in the english language if it's they're going into english in urdu into urdu persian
into persian that's what i would say alhamdulillah subhanallah
[Music]
we'll see you on thursday for those of you that are going to come back and uh
we'll see uh the the the reading club the first command club
is going to be open for everybody i mean technically it is in that if somebody
can't we've never turned away people at zaytuna college if they if they warranted acceptance we've never turned
anybody away from lack of money and it really bothers me because a lot of people put out this propaganda somehow
that zeitung is elitist and that oh it's too expensive and this well
education is expensive but fortunately we have a lot of really generous uh muslims in the united states and
around the world that have helped us build this college we still want to do a lot more so we really appreciate the
support but we never turn away people for lack of funds it's never been our policy people i i read this criticism of
the regala oh how it's this bourgeois adventure where these rich people go and
have a we've always had uh poor people uh that were given
scholarships we've never gone the prophet said there's no good in a gathering that doesn't have poor
people and so we've never uh promoted that but the idea of not having
beautiful environments our whole civilization was based on creating beautiful environments i mean this is
islam it's a religion of isan and we love so unfortunately there's a lot of wealth
in the world and we hope that the wealthy people will support the other people to do
so alhamdulillah thank you for allah
you 

Part 2

Music]

this is the second session inshaallah looking at the jewels and the pearls of the quran from

imam al-khazadi's famous work jawahar quran based on the translation of dr

thomas cleary so inshaallah

i wanted to before that just start with a nice hadith

to remind us of the blessing of this month the prophet sallallahu alaihi was reported to have said imam al-bayhaki

relates this

the quran fasting and the quran both intercede for the servant on the day of judgment

so fasting will actually

so everything that allah determines will speak will speak including the hands the tongue when they ask the prophet sam how would

he do that he said the one who did it for all things will do it for the hand and the tongue so fasting itself

some kind of personification will say

oh my lord i prevented him from food and from his appetites during the day so allow me to

intercede for him

and and the quran itself will say i prevented him from sleeping during the night and so allow me to intercede for him

and it and allah subhanahu wa'ta'ala will allow them to intercede so you shaft their given intercession

another interesting hadith which is in the most not of imam ahmed

ibrahim in ramadan that the

ibrahim and this in our tradition the sahel it was given to ibrahim these are the

the actual um revelation that was given to ibrahim was

in the sahaf which are like we would call them today folios uh ibrahim al-salam was given them on

the first night of ramadan

in ramadan and then the torah was revealed on the sixth after the six days had passed of ramadan

so that would be now with injilli ashara

the quran was revealed after 24 days had passed from ramadan so

25 or 27 or 29. so the this is an indication of the power of this month that all of the

previous uh revelations had been revealed uh in this month and the quran was given

to the prophet saw isam in this month it came down in in its entirety and then over 23 years

it was revealed piecemeal to the prophet sallallahu alaihi salam the this hadith which is related by more

than one but it's important in uh in terms of imam al-khazad's methodology

[Music]

there's another reward that says that every ayah that comes down has a hadoon

so there's two different uh recessions of this but they differ on the meaning of this but

one of the meanings that siri zarok points out in his book he says that it has an outward meaning

an inward meaning and then it has the hadith for the fukaha and the matlab is for the

so the quran has outward meanings that use the exoteric meanings then it has inward meanings and

then it it has hudud and then it has a position that allah subhanahu gives

with what imam al-qazadi calls the mukash this unveiling that occurs for the for

these people so imam al-khazadi has his own taxonomy of the quranic verses and sciences in

jawahar quran and that's why the books were studying because he's really giving you his methodology

and even though you'll find some of the ulama disagreed with him overall it's been accepted by

the ummah this was considered a a very important book historically so he talks

about the six types of quranic verses the first one

is it deals with the knowledge of allah's attributes and his work so these are what he calls the jewels the second

is the knowledge of the straight past in other words how do we get to allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to knowledge of god

and to his pleasure and these he calls pearls now one of the reasons that he does this is that jewels and pearls you

don't find them on the street jewels you have to mine for them

in the mountains pearls you have to dive into the ocean to get so he's he's

really letting us know that these are things that we have to struggle for they they're they're not simply i

mean one of the uh in the gospel it says don't cast pearls to swine

in other words don't give something precious to something unworthy of it and this is why

and it's important to remember that imam al-khazadi sees everything in the world

as a having a hidden meanings so he would see jewels

and pearls the physical ones that people hold precious and will actually kill to obtain

that that these have spiritual significances so he's using them in that spiritual

sense the jewels and the pearls and then people's condition on meeting allah subhanahu wa ta'ala there's different

foreign says one group is in paradise and other groups in hell and

we don't know our condition with allah we hope that we're from the nejun the people of najat the people of salvation

but only allah knows those conditions and then the conditions of believers and

unbelievers in if you look you can see the people here their conditions

allah says that the the believers have who are they they're people that they're

they're present in their prayer they give out from what they've been given they have quality so he's saying that

the quran will give us these indications here and then also arguments of the

kaffiron and the rudud so arguments against people that deny the quran that attack the

quran there's arguments in the quran one of the things that the quran does almost immediately is it gives a taxonomy of

the three types of human beings so there's believers there's disbelievers and then there's hypocrites so already

it's telling you you're going to be in one of those three categories not a fourth category

and then the six are the stages of the path to god and how to prepare for it so these are all really related

and the knowledge of the straight path you're going to find them in these others and one of the things

that he says is that there are verses in the in the quran that will contain

more than one he will always look in order to determine which category goes into he

will look what is the most important element so if it's a jewel despite the fact that it has other aspects in the

verse he'll always put it with the jewels if it's a pearl despite the fact that it has other

types in it he'll put it with the pearls so this is his methodology and then he has

the science the the ten sciences so one is he calls the pith which is the

lube what's at the essence of it so knowledge of god in the last day knowledge of the straight path

and these this is the order so he considers uh

the knowledge of allah on the last day is all is going to go under obviously kalam will be knowledgeable on the last

day and of the prophet but kalam is the

the science that emerges out of it just like fick is the science that emerges out of the knowledge of the straight

path so these are sciences that develop later so the quran has the usual of these things in them

but the were brought out by the scholars over time and this takes about 300 years

before they're really solidified and then you see a continual development but overall

within the first 300 years you see the solidification and then also there's

wow and there's preaching and there's story telling so these are at the essence of

the quran and then he has what he calls the shell which protects it so one is the exoteric exegesis which means tafsir

of just what it means outwardly and then also the arabic language because you need arabic to understand the quran

in the quran and arabia we sent it down as a arabic quran so it is in arabic and

although we use translations translations were really debated for for a long time in fact when uh

marmaduke pickthal muhammad marmaduke pickthal went to al-azhar to get permission to translate the quran a lot

of the scholars didn't want to give it because they did not they actually were opposed to translations

traditionally the earliest translations come out of persia where you got interlinear notes so they helped

persians to understand the quran but generally the the the ulama were of the

opinion that the quran cannot be translated that it's an untranslatable work and this is why

al-azhar actually as a prerequisite for giving any seal of approval that it's an

interpretation or the meanings of the quran that it's not the quran and in

fact i thought it was interesting that dr bruce lawrence who wrote this very interesting biography of the history of

the quran in english he actually says that he prefers to leave quran k-o-r-a-n

in english to mean the translation and al-quran which is now the new transliteration for it to mean

the arabic quran so it's it's very interesting but when we say the quran says and then we

quote english that's actually not really the quran and inshallah there's something that the

arabs call majasa where you leave something

ask the village but it really means it's like shahrukh ramadan some of the ulama said you shouldn't say

ramadan you shouldn't say ramadan without saying ramadan because ramadan was considered

by some to be one of the names of allah so you don't say ja ramadan

these are inshallah [Music]

doesn't inshallah take people to account for um

these type of things i think there's there's a generosity with our lord inshallah but

we do make mistakes and um especially when we're fasting

so i'm hoping my brain is going to keep working but the arabic language is extremely

important and then arabic grammar because arabic language is knowing like the the the

sahaba knew the arabic language but they didn't know arabic grammar if you asked one of the

sahabah what's the difference between uh

he wouldn't know what it was if you asked him what uh what's said and what's him he wouldn't

know muktada and khabar he wouldn't know a joomla ismia from a jumble

but he would understand them so it's you can know arabic

the arabic language without knowing arabic grammar grammar

uh is it can go on for a long time to actually really get deep into grammar if you end

up with mullah jammeh for instance which is the great central asian scholar

you're you're in the philosophy of grammar most of the ulama

now will do the alfie of ibn malik which traditionally was an intermediate

grammar but now it's considered an advanced grammar in muritania the the ulama tend to do

the after the alfia and that's three thousand additional lines of of

of uh the alfie is a thousand lines of grammar that's another three thousand for all

the things that alfia doesn't deal with so grammar is really important and it's

highly neglected and one of the things that sheikh abdullah says in his book on

ahmadiyya dallalet which are actually amali in other words he the book was just his lectures from from

his memory and then they were transcribed that's what those are called amalia in our tradition so there's a lot

of amali books where the ulama were just giving lectures and people would transcribe them

so he says in amalia

that the and that it could be dilalat is the way they say north africa it's one of those it's called the muthellath

because it has all three dalala and dilala in arabic but he says that there's a

inficac there was a separation of arabic grammar from sharia studies so the a lot

of the students in the sharia colleges they learn grammar but they don't learn it to the degree that's necessary to

really navigate also because a lot of us deals with grammar and with loha with

diction and things like that and then you have to know the quranic recensions so these are also outwardly

so the ascensions there's 10 karats that are considered

seven are in the shalta bia from the great anderus not the sahih but

but the so or the mokhari rather so imam ashatabhi put all ten of the

seven of the karat and then imam al-jazeera did a

versification of of of the seven so if you learn the sha'atabiya and the dura

which is traditionally what studied to learn the ten karat

then you basically know all the different recessions and then obviously there's riwayat of those recessions but

these are not significant differences but they they do different in their pronunciations of things

not in the actual letters the attributes but in in in the

mudud uh in things like hamza in things like the taklil or the imala so

saying things like or like for instance in in wash you have

pahi it's the only time you'll have a little diamond under the ha to let you know that it's uh it's

it's a kasra it goes to kasra as opposed to between kasra and fatha

so these are these are the recessions and then you get into the haroof

and um and people spend their whole life studying

this it's it's pretty amazing that we have this i mean it is a miracle the recessions themselves and then you have

points of articulation this is really tajweed so learning tajweed

so so it's what it's due and then what occurs to it like idram so

you have it learning those things these are the 10

sciences that he puts forward now if you look

he begins the jawahar with the opening al-fatiha

and the opening is al-fatiha

so it's really the the one that is opening for you um

so surat al-fatiha opens the quran and there's a khilaf of whether or not

bismuth is an ayah in some karat it is in some it's not for

so in the learned it's not from from the fatiha it's

considered a um a mark between the sur so that was imam

matic's position so and the hadith

indicates that

proofs but in any case there is a hit up about it imam shafiri who considers it an ayah and considers that the prayer

invalid if the bismid has not recited so there's a hidal about that

whether or not it's from the fatiha in any case if we begin with bismillah

we always begin the quran if you read the quran seek refuge in

allah so allah tells us to seek refuge in allah minister regime from the

accursed shaitaan so awadha

is is uh is to to ma'ad is a place of refuge so we're

seeking refuge with allah subhanahu wa ta'ala from shaitan because shaitaan

wreaks havoc on our species now when when we say

shaytan is that word there's there's a difference of opinion does it come from

or does it come from so so is the root sha

sheen ah noon or is it

there's a difference is is it uh from or is it from falan

the difference if it if it's shaytan with a shattana then it has to do with the one who's

mubat he's he's far from allah or he distances others from allah he causes

others to become distant from allah spiritually if it's

from shito then it becomes the meaning is halaka

so it's either the one who's halak or the one

and both are true the word rajeem which is interesting also because

regime is one of those really interesting words in arabic that can either mean

or it can be an active or a passive a passive

now when it's here which is a regime it could be marjumb

the one who's stoned or it could be rajim the one yarjumu so in other words

he is the one that does it to you he makes you accursed

by following him so when you become a minion so it could have both meanings according to imam

al-aqbari

so allah begins this

is basically saying that all praise belongs to allah alone and he is

the lord of the world alhamdulillah so

that that pr that lamb there is let us step up praise is due to allah subhanahu wa

ta'ala alone which is why whenever we praise anybody in the dunya we say masha allah

because we're we're acknowledging that it's a creation of god and we're

acknowledging that whatever good came from that person is actually really a good

that allah brought into the world so all praise goes back to allah subhanahu and

and whoever we praise you know ultimately we are praising allah so it's an awareness that all praise is allah's

alone because this is his creation so whatever is good in his creation is from allah subhanahu wa ta'ala

and then he he al-rahman is

if if you believe that the bismillah is an ayah then it's repeated imam rahzali

was so he clearly saw this as being repeated but one of the things

imam al-khazadi says is there's no replication

without meaning in other words if allah

and then the bismillah is the islam that and then the rahman or raheem are attributes rahman is fa lan

these are hyperbolic forms in arabic rahman fa lan is is more hyperbolic in

other words it's a stronger sense than rahim they're both hyperbolic

forms what what hyperbole is a rhetorical device in which you use to really emphasize something so if you say

a lama that's hyperbole he's not just a scholar he's a great

scholar so rahman is he's not just merciful he is really merciful he is

compassionate and and and and so that's these are both

hyperbolic forms which indicate the immense rahm of allah and the reason he

he says that this is repeated after alameen is because it is from his mercy

that he brought everything into existence so his rubobia is an attribute of his mercy the fact that he brought

everything into existence is is from his rahmah and the the greatest rahmah that that he

sent to us for us is the prophet sallallahu isaac because it's guidance

so his guidance is the greatest rahmah he gives us after his creation he created us but

then he provides us with guidance now malaki yomideen dr cleary transit is ruler of judgment

day that's one way and that would actually be probably milik which is the

recession and i there's a few others so you have malik and malak and malik and

malik is the possessor and milik is the sovereign or the ruler

what's interesting is these two forms both indicate something about

allah so not every medic is a malek and and and not every malik is a melech

so the reason for that if if if you have a king a king doesn't necessarily own

everything in his dominion if he's a tyrant he can take whatever he wants but if he's a benevolent king then he owns

what he owns but then he's a caretaker he's somebody who is responsible for his

subjects but he's not going to steal their wealth whereas the malik he owns

and so melik and malik indicate that allah not only is the sovereign of that day but it's all his dominion

there's nothing that does not belong to allah subhanahu ta'ala which means he

cannot oppress his creation there's nothing that he can do that will will be will be warranted

giving god the name of oppressor it's impossible for god to oppress because you cannot oppress

your own possessions if if if you own something

that and and you say you burn something like take you take a coat and you burn

it and somebody sees you burn it they say why are you burning that you say well it's it's got to it's infected

um and i i have to burn it so you're explaining to him but he really

has no business asking you if it's your coat you can do what you want with your own property so that's the point of

medic and malik that he is both yom dean the day of judgment or the day of acquittal in in in his larger

translation he he translates it as the day of requital this is the day when debts fall due so

dean and dane are related it's the day when there's a reckoning an accounting

it is you that we worship and to you we appeal for help so

when you have yaka when you put the

the what would normally be in in the ulambihi position because it's not buduka but when you say buddhuka in

arabic it doesn't create the it doesn't eliminate other things so

you could say that somebody with the shems he worships the law and

he worships the son but you can't say

means that only you alone we worship so when you say it means you alone it is you that we

worship and no one else we are gonna stay in and to you we appeal for help

like the prophet saws gave his advice to his uh his his uh cousin

when he was very young he told him if you're going to seek help seek help from allah which doesn't mean that you don't

seek us babe but you understand that it's only allah even the asava from allah so you have to

understand everything is from allah so it's you alone we help so even when when we're seeking help from creation we know

that it's you that has facilitated for us help from others

he's the one who gave you victory allah gave you victory and he gave you

the believers to help you but that's from allah so the help that the prophet got from his companions was from allah

so only seeking help from allah subhana with that

guide us to the straight path is uprightness so this path is the path of

uprightness and then

the way of those you have graced show us a straight path the way of those you have graced

you've blessed them you've graced them not of those whom is your uh on whom is

your wrath so the allah is on them

is on them nor of those who wander astray so these are the two ways of going astray one is with knowledge

so you know what you should be doing and you don't do it and that's why

the the muslims are in such a precarious situations because so many muslims i don't know any muslims in the

muslim world where i where when i live there that doesn't know the hadith

that the the one who bribes and the one who takes a bribe is they're both in hell

i don't know anybody doesn't know that it's a very well known hadith it's you could almost say it's

not but you can almost say that it is because so many people know that hadith and yet there's so much of bribery so

that's when you incur the wrath of allah is when you know what you should do and

you don't do it whereas those who are astray

those are people that don't know and and they're just wandering in in the

verse in the quran where allah says that the prophet was

like didn't he find you it doesn't mean that he was astray it means that he was seeking

that's why he was going into the doing these things so don't make us from people that don't

have guidance that that might be looking for guidance or just astray so these are people like

for instance um traditionally a lot of the scholars put

the religious categories in there i don't think it's a good thing to some unfortunately some of the translations

actually put between parentheses um you know other religious

traditions and things it's not really um i don't think it's a good thing to do in a translation because that goes under

commentary and uh it it just makes it look like it takes away the moment level

it takes away the moment level which is the general statement those are the two ways people go astray if you want to see it

archetypally that it's in all religions and it's certainly in the islamic religion there are people that know the

truth and they don't practice it those are nahim uh if if

if if they continue on their way and don't make taubah and then allah are people

they're ignorant there's ignorant muslims that just don't know and so they don't practice what they should learn

these are the sciences the meanings and the sciences of the quran so

this is from ibn juzail kelby's and i think it's a very useful because it adds

to imam al-ghazalis the first one he says these are the ma'ani the seven meanings of the quran

that that allah subhanahu revealed these meanings to us the first one is

which is knowledge of our lord who is our lord so this goes to imam's

jewels and then nubuwa which is the communication that allah has given

us through these people that have this special quality this this extraordinary angelic quality

of purity and allah has prepared them for revelation the third is the ma'at

eschatology what happens after we die what's the eschaton what's coming later

and then the fourth is the basically how to live in the world so this is transactional it's a cam between

the vertical alignment with your lord that relates to all the devotional rules that we have and then in the horizontal

alignment with with creation transactional things of learning how to um

to basically buy and sell in what in marriages how to behave all these things

and then the which is the promise and then the which is the threat so

allah so he's both giving us a promise if you

obey allah then here's the promise and then there's a threat and then finally

which really inform us of all these things so the the the one of the most beautiful

uh stories that we have and all of the quran are uh are ah

they're the most beautiful stories but yusuf ideas you will find all of these in the chapter of yusuf so you're going

to find enmo

you'll find all of them so that embody the the the they're they're really

embodiments of all these meanings and then he he gives certain knowledges that you should not go into the quran and

imam al-ghazalian he talks about

he talks about the this hadith about uh whoever

attempts to interpret the quran with his opinion with his opinion and

comes from from how you see things it's your perspective that's what an opinion is

it's it's your perspective about things so you know he saw something

um and and it's it's it's how you're looking at something he says that that is misunderstood that

it doesn't mean that scholars can't interpret the quran an imam

uh who has a a tough seal that has a lot of in it

facading says that it is not just because it was not said by the

prophet isaiah or the senate that we can't find meanings in the quran that that that's a methodology that's

permitted to seek out new meanings in the quran but it has its requisite knowledges and so

imam al-qazadi says what that hadith means that you know whoever manifested

whoever interprets the quran with his opinion let him take his seat in hell he said it means

like just out of desire to to conform with his own desires so he

has his own nufs desires and and he interprets the quran to suit

his opinion like recently you've had commentaries that try to interpret the story of lult

to say that it wasn't about homosexuality well what's what's the agenda behind that

like who who's who's actually making those interpretations because nobody in the history of islam ever made those

interpretations and so it wasn't just homosexuality but that

was a central part of why they were condemned for acting on their homosexuality

so that would be according to imam al-khazadi interpreting it with opinion

and the same is true and then he said or not having

recourse to the exegetes which means the science of tafsir so you have you have

to know tafsir you have to know the i mean one of the things about that there was a

south asian man who claimed to be this the the seal of the prophets like the last one

because because uh you know you have khatam and nevi but in in nafee it's khatim

so there's hatam which is seal so he said the prophet was the seal but in

nafta it's khattim which means the last the final so

right there because he didn't know the quran he made a huge mistake about the nature of the prophet's

mission the prophet islam abi abadi there's no prophet after him um

this is a really important area imam javas the great hanafi scholar wrote a book on this

the imam kortobi the great monarchy scholar called the abu bakr raven arabi has a

book called the quran in four volumes assays there's many

books that deal with just the quran these are about 500 ayahs in the quran that deal

with specifically with legal matters and so knowing that and then

knowing abrogation and there's a big hit up about this some of them have over a hundred verses there's only a handful of

verses that are agreed upon about and generally with the abrogation

the tell me his principle is sound that if the conditions

of abrogation come again then the they would be mahkama so

many of the hadith the verses that relate to kitab they don't apply in

places where you don't have state authority or anything like that that in those places you actually apply

all of those hadiths all of the ayahs that deal with patience and um

suffering the tribulations of the place you're in if you can't make hijrah and then the hadith

you have to know hadith because the hadith some of the hadith quran and the prophet saws is the

greatest commentator of the quran in his sayings and his actions he was the quran

[Music] the saying that he was the quran or quran yamcha

is is ara it's it's not a literal uh meaning but but uh

aisha said in a sound hadith he he he embodied the

quran like all of his character was from the quran and then

six knowing the stories of the quran there were many stories in the quran knowing them musa and faraon the story

of suleiman story of dawud with the man who comes asking him

he has his question and then tasawolf tasawolf

is a valid science of islam if you get into torokh and into

some of the ways that tasawaf has manifested then that's a completely different thing

but the idea that tashow is not from islam is a completely modern view of some people it has

nothing to do with traditional islam everybody accepted the idea of tasawolf

and and all of the great scholars of islam speak well of this science including

even samia

many many of the scholars so but there are deviant sufis like there's deviant grammarians

there's deviant fukaha there's deviant there's deviant every group has deviants

and so and there's a lot of charlatans in tesol traditionally in fact

you know i've mentioned this before but i'll say it again when i was studying

arabic years ago i i read the makamats you know you have this uh

genre and and the characters in the they were like uh

religious charlatans which was a little shocking for me at the time you know i was

22 23 years old and i read these stories and they would they'd do things like

they'd go to the mosque and claim they saw the prophet and tell all the people that the prophet told him to that they should all give charity to him and then

he'd just steal the money and go off but i realized later as i got older and just the fraudulent nature of so many people

on this planet and i'm dealing with some fraud right now so you really might when

i wrote the purification of the heart my father read it and he was like one page on fraud and i don't think so

that was that was his comment so and he you know so he he he was defrauded

of by some really nefarious people so fraud is part of life and the worst

types of frauds are religious frauds i mean i'll take a a

a goomba from queens or new jersey over a over a

religious fraud you know these people that trick people with um religiosity

so you'll get that you'll find that you know and then also which is basically knowing

um the the akita of the muslims so you have also

also which some people call it this term um

is knowing how to derive the rulings out of filk and then loha

which is really important in our deen to know the language of the quran the quran

uses there's quran there's words in the quran that you think you know what they mean

because you know arabic but then when you look in the tafsir you find out that they don't mean what you think they mean

and there's a lot of that in the quran and then now absolutely necessary you have to learn

grammar and then finally rhetoric al-bayan that's the the 12th so

those are his now when we get to um just beginning with

uh back to the jawahar so i just wanted that as a prelude to this when we get to

the jawahar of the quran imam al-qazadi identifies these what he

calls the jewels and then what he calls the pearls so the jewels

are those that relate directly to allah and to his

attributes and his acts the pearls are those that relate to the muslims so this first verse would be

really a pearl because it's indicating here's the guidance like this is the book that's going to take you to god

so valik and kitab and that's for ta'aleem vadi kadkitab

it's a type of what we call a demonstrative pronoun but it's a dermostative pronoun not for something

close but for something far generally but it's for tao lim so it's this book

this magnificent this momentous this great book

and some stop there there's no doubt in it

that la is nephilim so it's very interesting to start a book by

letting you know from the very start of it that there's absolutely no doubt in the book

in other words rest assured this book is free of doubt

here the huda is put into the what we would call indefinite so it's a

neck it's tenkir litavim so it's nekera for talim uh in in grammar in uh sorry in rhetoric

so so the the nekera here indicates again that this is divine guidance this

is not ordinary guy this isn't guiding you on the road to the marketplace

this is something [Music] it's real guidance

dr cleary and and he i think he's the only person

probably i don't know if ever but certainly

i don't know anybody else but there i think maybe there might be some others

but he could read the hindu scriptures the buddhist scriptures

the the christian scriptures the hebrew scriptures and the muslim scriptures so

those are the five major world religions in their in their original tongues

and and really well i mean he he knew sanskrit he knew pali he translated the

dhammapada from pali and he actually identifies something in there of a prediction of the prophet

sallallahu isaam but he knew greek he knew hebrew and he knew arabic

and so when when you see his word choice

you really have to think about it and one of the things that he says in his um the reason why he chose this word

in fact is one of the most interesting things about this

translation are are the notes that he put in the back because it really shows you the the kind

of extraordinary insights that he had

but he says conscientious this is from the root wakaya which has

primitive meanings of guarding preserving safeguarding protecting

comes from the fifth or the eighth measure of the root and means to be aware to be wary be on guard protect

oneself and fear the wrath of god i have used the word conscientious to render

this on many occasions because its original meaning in other words the original meaning of conscientious in the

english language combines these ideas fairly well and

because the word conscientious has weakened to such a degree in contemporary usage that the connection

between duty to god and duty to humanity is no longer clear and needs to be

revitalized by using the word in such a way as to retrieve its original meaning and force so he's very specifically

choosing this because he feels that it combines both your duty to god because conscientious

traditionally meant somebody who was scrupulous in his moral activities

that's one of the meanings and one of the problems with language and this is where a lot of

people don't understand is that language has multiple usages

so so you can have very specific words like in arabic you can have a really specific

word that's used for like kas cuss in arabic has to have liquid in it if it

doesn't have liquid it's not a cuss so this is a book without doubt

has guidance in it for the conscientious that's how he's chosen to translate it

and now they're described

as [Music] those who believe in the unseen now what

is the right well the reib is anything you can't see but

the question becomes are things that we can now see in

electron microscopy from the unseen uh these are

problems now but um generally the unseen

would be the spiritual world not the material world so anything that's in the material world and this is very

important in imam al-ghazali's in his entire world view because he

really sees the binary of shahada the unseen world and the seen

world and this is constant through his his works so he really sees the mulk and

the manicure occasionally not that often he'll bring in a third

term which is the jabaru but generally

he has this binary of the seen and the unseen so there are people that believe in the

unseen in allah in the angels in the afterlife

all these things that we can't see it's very interesting it doesn't say you

saloon right you could have said you saloon but it says

allah right so the salah is it's an established

practice allah so you can say you sali

but ikama is to be muhim in it it's something that's constant so they

they're constant in their prayers so

this is really really important and also establishing the prayer the congression the congregational prayer is very

important and from what we have provided them they

give out now this is in other words it doesn't say from what they were provided we gave them

we provided for them so this is a risk and your risk has

obligations because you're mustache you have been given a trust that was held by by people

before you if you inherited wealth it was your parents trust or your uncle or whoever you inherited it from but if you

have earned the money here it's a sacred trust nonetheless that allah has given

you because he's the one that gave you your physical strength he's the one that gave you your intelligence he's the one

that provided all the things that enabled you to work in order to get that so whatever

you have earned is actually from allah which goes back to alhamdulillah

all praises do to allah all provision is due to allah so this everything belongs

to god he possesses everything that's in the

heavens earth but he has in essence loaned it to us and and and that loan is an amana now

while we have it we have it's our property so we are the malik by sharia but in

reality we're only renters and and we're going to have to pay that

rent by using it what he has the the conditions of rent the rental agreement

that god has given us is that we follow his sharia that's the payment that you do what he commanded us to do

if you do that you've paid the rent and and then on piano you have no debts

now most of us are going likely going to have debts on the day of judgment and that's when

the renter says i'm going to let you slide that's what

renters do if they have a good renter but okay he he got laid off and he's having a hard time and he's trying to

get a job and then so that the landlord says you know don't worry about it i ca i can

handle this well allah subhana wa allah

has no need for anything so like a kind person here who would

give you a break allah subhanahu wa is the most merciful of those who show

mercy so we should always give out from what allah has provided us now what does

allah ask for right allah says in the quran they ask him what do we give out he says

say whatever they have extra it's tafawi it's what it's what they can give out

allah is not asking for everything he's asking for something

he's given you everything he's asking for something back and not for himself

right he's asking you for something back for others in need and and that's that's that's basically

it [Music] um

and those who believe in what was sent down before you so we believe in all the prophets that were sent down before us

all the prophets that that we gave those 19 that are mentioned in that verse those are all prophets

that were given revelation from allah subhanahu wa so we follow

the prophets by following the last prophet he's our prophet sallallahu alaihi but

all of them are our prophets in that we believe in them and we accept their revelations but our but the prophet

isaiah came with the most updated version and this is why we believe uh in our prophet saw saddam

as being the only one that we need we get the guidance from him directly

and there's a hidden about the verses in the quran that deal with previous dispensations whether or not

they apply to us or not but generally we have all the guidance that we need from our prophet saw isam and the prophet i

said when he saw omar looking in the torah he said why are you looking in that like you have the quran we don't

need that's that book it's a good book right

you know the in it it has guidance in it immense uh wisdom in the bible both an

old and new testament um so but we have been given this and what was

sent down before you and are certain of the hereafter they have a yakin about the achara

so they don't doubt now people i and many people have asked me this you

know that like i have doubts you have to distinguish between what dr cleary often refer to as the

host and the guest so the the host is who you are

that's your essential nature the guests are uninvited thoughts

and so you can you can have uninvited thoughts that come into your heart

and don't take them seriously but they'll come shaytan

you know shaytan is i mean that's one of his names he's the obsessor he's going to

assail you with thoughts and make you think that it's you so we have that differentiation and in

fact some of the traditional christian guilt was based on not having that differentiation of not realizing that

your thoughts are not necessarily yours there's there's

any you know but what is your true nature so if you're a believer that's your host

and then the uninvited guest comes in says

what what comes into your heart from shaitaan and your heart rejects it that's iman

that is iman so don't debate with him don't try to

fight him just let the thought go let it pass these are they're just

what the arabs call sahabu safe clouds of the summer you know they just dissipate they're gone

or sahabi will save

[Music] so these are the ones who are

they are the ones that follow the guidance from their lord they're on the guidance that god gave them here he

translates here he translate there are the happy ones which obviously if you're

successful you're happy in in his larger commentary his a larger interpretation

which is this unfortunately this is no longer available but um it it is available on on

on kindle but inshallah try to get that out again

in here he calls them the successful ones so this was later he did this

several years after this he did this after the gulf war he was very troubled by what had happened

and how muslims were being demonized so he wanted to do the essential quran

to just show people basically what imam

identified as the central essential meanings of this book which is why it's called the essential quran

as for the ungrateful who refuse it is the same to them whether you warn them or not they do not believe so

kaffir is a really difficult word in arabic even theologically it's a problematic

term kafara means to cover over in fact

arguably cover which has the same sounds in it might have some it might just be a

one of those coincidences of language but who knows i actually have a book

that attempts to prove that all language goes back to arabic a lot of it's stretching but believe it

or not in 1828 mr webster

noah webster who wrote the first american dictionary and and noah webster was a very pious

man he actually has a really brilliant little book called advice for the young which is all how to stay on the path

but anyway noah webster felt america needed to have its own

english and not be tied to the old country he was had that real

uh american kind of independence right we're not english we have our own

way of speaking our language so he created this dictionary but what he wanted to prove

in that dictionary believe it or not was that all of english went back to

hebrew as the source language of the world what

he found though was there were more cognates in arabic than in hebrew so he

ended up putting a whole bunch he knew arabic from uh he studied hebrew and arabic i think i

think at harvard but anyway so if you look at the you can get a facsimile of his 1828 edition and it has

got all these arabic words in there which is like he says cave is calf cave calf and then art is earth

earth and then cover kaffar so he's got all these baboos baby

he goes on and on it's very interesting but what what is fascinating is where did

they get lithographic type setting in 1828 in the united states in arabic that's what really surprised me

like where did they get the lithograph to do that amazing

so kafar kufar what's important to know it means in gratitude like the prophet saws said

that that that women in particular had to be very careful what he called quran al-ishara

to be ungrateful for the companionship of their husbands because husbands can be very difficult and can have you know

they can get grumpy they can do all these things and but you know they're important right they're

they're taking care of you they're hopefully paying all the bills and things like

that so the proposal is said you know it was important not to fall into a kind of

ingratitude and vice versa the man said ilano once a man came knocking on his

door to complain about his wife this was in medina was a small

city and so he went to come and then he heard there was a fight inside the house

and his wife was kind of saying things to omar he said oh my god if that's omar's wife what am i

complaining about so he's going to leave omar open the door so where are you going and he said no no i

made a mistake he said no you came for a reason what'd you come for and then he explained to him and he said omar laughed and said my wife takes care of

me she does all these things you take care of the children i should be patient if she gets upset so

it's a it goes both ways so that's kufran it's an ingratitude and then

kafir is also somebody who knows the truth and rejects it i mean that's

really the essential aspect so the truth has become clear and they reject it

that's real kuffar and that's why

we're going to get to that don't put idols beside god knowingly

so in other words you know what you're doing don't do that wittingly don't do it knowingly

so kofar allah always spoke before

the hajja was on the arabs he spoke yay hanes so all

the meccan they even though they were not muslims he's calling them ness he doesn't call

them he calls them nes because they're being invited to the calling once the was

established once they saw the miracles of the prophet once the quran they understood the quran which was their

language and they knew they couldn't imitate it then they had no excuse

so to apply that to the rest of humanity most of the people that you see are nests and in fact one wonders should we

really assume people are muslim before we assume they're not muslim why why would you make the assumption

that people i mean i was sitting with an uh was with me from canada we were sitting

with john taylor gatto and i looked at john taylor gato and i said you know john because he he was a wonderful human

being that really loved people and loved education and and did amazing things in education

unprecedented teacher of the year out of 54 000 teachers in new york four times

like nobody else had ever done even it twice so i said to john you know john you're a

muslim and he looked down for about 30 seconds and then he raised his head and

he said i accept that now according to abu hanifah that makes him a muslim

in fact according to abu hanifah anybody that calls the prophet prophet so if somebody calls the prophet

sallallahu islam muhammad the prophet that must mean that they think he's a

prophet so i mean obviously you can get into details and push people that's fine if

you want to do that but having a good opinion just generally is a good thing to do

but there are kofaar i mean there are kuffar and there are evil people in the world and we shouldn't be polyanish

about that so you know he says

it's it's the same to them whether you warn them or don't warn them well we know if you think about you they could

have said that about abu sufyan because abu sufyan fought the prophet all for that look at how many years he

fought the prophet so could people could have just written him off and said oh it's

right he's not going to believe well he ended up becoming a muslim so just because somebody rejects it

initially doesn't mean this is that these are people that it's allah has sealed their fate

because they're they have rejected the truth and they're not amenable

to remediation so that's the kafir so we should be very careful

about that just about people there's a lot of good people that if if we

were more upright as a ummah if we were delivering the message as an ummah maybe

they would respond but when you look at the muslim world there's a lot of places where it just

doesn't look too appealing and a lot of people think that has to do with islam so in some ways we have become

you know i had a saudi friend who said islam has the best case with the worst lawyers

so um

allah has sealed their hearts there's a khatam on their hearts

and on their site there there's a covering there's a rishawa they can't see

there's an amazing story that leopold vice who became muhammad assad i

don't know if people know but he he became muslim in 1926 and then he

went to arabia and he ended up he knew arabic he knew hebrew he was

actually trained in the torah he comes from a long line of rabbis but his father i think was a successful

businessman anyway he was raised with the torah and then he um he in 26 he converted to

islam and then he went to um saudi arabia and he actually became an

adviser to abdar aziz king abdulaziz

he was he was living in mecca at the time and then and then he ended up after that he in

1932 he went to pakistan which was not pakistan yet because it

becomes pakistan 47 but in 42 in 42 32 he goes to pakistan

and he actually lives there learns i think urdu became a

pakistani citizen and help them he translated

and then he lost the translate got burnt down his house burnt down lost the whole translation it was tragic because he

really knew arabic well but anyway he tells how he became muslim

which is an amazing story in uh in his book road to mecca

he said that he and his wife elsa they were on a train in vienna he was from austria so they're on a train

and he's he's looking at a man across from him he was a businessman a portly businessman and he said he looked like a

well-educated well-fed and wealthy man but he said he looked at his face and he

saw this pain and worry and torment on his face he said his lips were pursed

as if he was troubled by something and then he looked around and he noticed everybody on the train looked like that

and if you've ever been on a subway in new york you know exactly what he's talking about after you know the five o'clock subway

after a day of that horrible grind

you know surely in the afternoon man is that loss so he he he's look and then he looks to

elsa and he's and he says to her what he's noticing and then she looks and she

says you know you're right he actually says she looks like

somebody who a painter would look at faces that they're about to paint you know she really inspects them

and she says they look like they're suffering the torments of hell

so he goes back to the apartment and he had been reading the quran and it was open

and he goes actually to put it away but his eyes fall on al-hakuma takata

that vying for more

has you bedazzled until you go to your graves and then it says surely you will come to

know surely you will come to know the hell that you are in

and you will see it right

[Music] and he he like he said he started shaking

physically and then he called elsa and he says read that isn't that what we just saw

and she said yes and he said i knew at that moment this book was true

because he said he felt it was predicting a state that that would come towards the latter

days in this mechanized world of alienated people living these empty meaningless lives

because the peoples of the past had generally religion they had sacred

they have festivals and things now they're just they're lost without they have spiritual

alzheimer's completely unaware of who they are where they come from who

created them where they're going all of this nine months in the womb

being fed through an umbilical cord and kept at 98.6 degrees fahrenheit

with oxygen coming in through the blood from your mother's breath

forming the brain the spinal cord all of these things all of this for what

billions and billions of cells coming together almost instantaneously

with incredible order an opposable thumb to create all these tools with

a tongue to articulate our needs subhanallah

malakum what's wrong with you allah says that several times in the quran what is wrong with you

what's wrong that you don't help one another

what has deluded you from your generous lord the one who fashioned you and formed you

and then assembled you raqqa and they literally called dna in modern

arabic they used tarqibah as the word assembled you

into this extraordinary creation and so the people that can't see that they have

a rishawa and that's why believers christian believers muslim believers jewish believers believers of any stripe

just don't understand why some people can't see this so clearly well there's your answer

i was with my son yeah we were looking at this incredible sunset

uh up at the upper campus just this palette of incredible colors

and i just looked down i said how can people not believe in god

and he looked at me he said dirty windows

it's about as good as a good good as an answer gets so

painful torment they're already in it you know demonic people living demonic lives all these people defrauding old

people you know all these people cheating and stealing and robbing they're already in hell

you know they're just going from from one hell to another one they're already there

and among humankind one of the things that dr cleary did and i think it's worth

and i'll end with this i think it's really worth

looking at his explanation because you know he was a deeply

contemplative man and just had great insights

but he says here another special problem in translating

from the quran into modern english is in the treatment of pronominal reference to god in contemporary english there is no

third person pronoun perfectly well suited to making reference to the transcendent god beyond all human

conceptions the ultimate shortcoming of human language is natural of course and not

peculiar to english but there are particular reasons for attending to the problem of the third person pronoun

many people of jewish and christian background feel alienated from their native face by what they call the

quote-unquote angry old man image of god with which they have been taught to

associate religion furthermore what has been perceived as the masculine bias of this image is

particularly well known to have alienated many western women from monotheism

this would seem to be an unnecessary waste to avoid short-circuiting the attention

of significant segments of the modern audience at such a rudimentary stage in

other words i'm just trying to get them to think about this and one of the things that he told me once is he said

americans can't think about thinking about islam

so in order to prevent that right i have translated the third person arabic

pronoun on as referring to god as god or god as

truth rather than referring to the english pronoun he or him now remember this is a man who probably

knew around 30 languages so

this is really worth thinking about in technical terms this

means that since the fundamental linguistic resource is the power of reference

one technique for handling difficulties in translation begins with considering language from this point of view

in as much as languages do differ it is axiomatic that manners of reference can never be completely or

perfectly aligned from language to language and therefore the attempt to do so does not in itself reproduce

equivalent powers of reference thus the first priority of translation in terms

of meaning is to seek to engage the power of reference as efficiently as possible in

whatever manner the target language may afford in this case the principle means that a

pronoun in one language is not taken to refer to a pronoun in another language but to the original nominal referent in

other words back to what it's referring to for which the pronoun stands and by which name noun it can thus be

meaningfully translated in this case following the injunction of the quran to call god by the most beautiful names i

have generally rendered pronominal references to the divine by god a name

which is in this context uniquely unambiguous and that's really quite stunning what

what what he's saying there so and so if you read his translation he has no male pronouns

to use for god even though we know in arabic who can apply to god without any

gender reference like it is for somebody to say you know my god is a he or a she that's totally unacceptable

in islamic theology because god is is not a gender god is not he has no binary

god has no is diwajiya god is unique

enough said say god unique

say god unique god is unique god is independent needs nothing

he neither produces nor reproduces in some wilada type of way he creates but

he doesn't produce there's no production

be and it is

and there's no thing there's nothing there's no peer there's no

there's nothing like god god is peerless

alhamdulillah so can you uh delve a little deeper into imam razadi's spiritual crisis doesn't mean

he question the existence of god i don't think he questioned i think what he did was a kind of

cartesian radical doubt as as a type of intellectual exercise i think he really

wanted to to try and he proceeds

descartes in that so i think he he really was doing a uh i mean he was a trained intellectual he was a great

scholar but he was also a trained philosopher like he really knew logic and so i think for him it was much more

of an intellectual exercise i mean not the the the crisis the crisis was

psychological but the exercise was uh

was philosophical so i that that's how i would view it i don't think he would have had any doubts

about that but inshallah we'll get to ask him when we meet him vietnam

in the great library jorge is you know the great writer from south america who won the

nobel prize he's one of my favorite favorite writers in english i wish i could read the level of spanish that he

writes at but he was great he had great interest in islam

but louise jorge his name was jorge

he he said that with the first thing that he was going to ask the angel when he got to paradise

i mean if if he gets to paradise is where's the library

so how is one so in any way

his crisis i mean i would read the uh his savior from error

because that uh that really he goes into great detail how is one supposed to view the bad things that are happening around

us at the personal and global level how do we not lose hope how do we develop and sustain strong torque

well remember that imam al-razadi in his genius

put tawakkul which is trusting god with taheed in in

so it's it's kitab so it's

it's really important to have a strong tohit an understanding that everything's

from god to and also to understand that this is

in fact one of the things that imam al-junaid says is that he took a ka'ida

in life and once he took this axiom this principle in his life he said nothing ever

bothered him after that and it was that he said dunya is [Music]

and it is an abode of tribulation of trials of depression

and of anxiety like that's that is the wasp

that's that's the description of the abode and so he says once you accept that

he said after that nothing bothered me that came from virginia because i said i was just done yet

that's that's that's how it is so there's a stoic element to that but

and then he said whatever comes that's not that doesn't have those qualities is fuzzled so just be grateful

right that what you come be patient with any tribulation but be grateful so it's important everybody has tribulation the

wealthiest people have tribulation the poorest people have tribulations sometimes the wealthy people have

i mean i i've known some really wealthy people that i wouldn't there's no way i'd trade places with

them uh knowing what i know about the tribulations that they have so this idea that peo people don't

suffer you know because of their color of their skin or because of the wealth that they have i

mean that's just not knowing the human condition every human being has his trials and tribulations

and and so it's just important to that we're all here together

watch out for the demons because they're around and the and the human demons are worse than the than the

the ones from the spirit world they are they're worse so you know you have to develop a

an understanding of your lord and an understanding of the abode reading the quran with meaning and one

of the things imam al-razadi says and i actually really appreciate this in the jawahar you know he says that muslims

should think about the quran you have to be careful when you have limitations of knowledge but you should

reflect do tadabur of the quran you can do it in english these these meanings you can reflect on these meanings

but the quran has an embedded metaphysic that that that is not spelt out like a

book it's it can only be determined by a real engagement and imam razadi

says this is a lifetime of work i mean he says it's going to take a lifetime

for you to do this work and allah has given you about just about enough time and inshallah if you you know for those

who die before that time allah is he's merciful and he's just so he's

going to take into consideration i'm sure people's the amount of time they had but if

you've had a lot of time i mean imam al-ghazali says if you've reached 40 and your good doesn't outweigh your bad get

ready for hell because 40 is a lot of time to work things out

would you say that we can treat the pronunciation of different that's providing different aspects of meaning well they do

provide different aspects of meaning and also one of the things about tajweed is that

a lot of the rules of tajweed actually have meanings embedded

in them you know so i mean if you look uh like

you know

i mean that that uh med med lasm there has should have six harakat so in that

med you it it's indicating something about going astray

like you just keep going down so tashweed i mean a lot of the you

know a lot of the the rules of tajweed enhance i mean if you look

[Music] from

the the rules of tajweed they enhance the meaning like shay usually has a med

it can go two four six and wash you know

i mean shea is thing and think of all the things in the world so in that med

there's an indication of something of the nature of things that they just go on

so and and then you have um you have

the arabs because the prophet saw is was sent first to all the arabs and then

to the but first to the arabs he was first sent to his own people

one way of honoring them was to put all of the lahajats into the quran so you'll

find all the arab dialects have a they'll they'll find their dialect in

the quran which is a way of saying marah you know we include you so it wasn't

this qurayshi hegemony where you just impose your language on the rest of the

arabs in fact house which is the most recited quran today is benitamim it's

it's the uh it's the excuse me it's the arabs from the neged

they're modar arabs but they you know the people in qatar are from benitami like the uh

the ruling family of qatar they're they're from benitameem so that's their language to say yupman the prophet said

human he didn't pronounce the hamza so nafi on has uh the the hamza but wash has

no hamsa that and that's why matic considered nephi to be a sunnah and

particularly the reward of which is why the monarchies all read it as a sunnah so malik actually saw warsaw sunnah

and that's why all the the the libyans recite because they they were next to egypt and

egypt uh house became the dominant is very close to house but the rest of the monarchies all over

north and west africa recite with varsh in the malikis in sudan recite with

like that beautiful reciter sheikh nuren who died right when he was becoming

famous it's like allah said time to take you and he'd already done the whole quran the beautiful reciter

so they definitely give and then also with the recessions you have things like

you know allah says

so one has the passive the other has you know the active form of the verb so

they were given permission those who were being fought but also because they were being fought

but then it also says they were given permission to fight so it has both

and then and that's why because you know when they when they when they got into the fight in in the

i mean the quran revealed that it was you know it was permitted for them to do that because they were being oppressed

would fit into akbar men would fit into a shed al qatari so there akbar was shed so one says

the other says so you have all these nuances you have for instance in um

muhammad you have a confess

in in in that's one is another

if you look at how it's written without the diacritical marks it's written the same way in the rashmani but the

diacritical marks which were added later during the time of

the the meaning of tibet you know is make sure you understand the meaning but better is make sure that the source

is sound so in that one verse are both those meanings and there are many examples

he's not like withholding he's not it's not he's not making it up

it's not just his uh um opinions about the unseen so the the the

karats are really

but the reason it's interesting is because the dialect that you find in the gulf arabs kef harish you know

they use the calf they pronounce it like a sheen or a ch sound that's a that's a

very ancient arabic dialect so the karate have preserved also and then things like rome and ishmael

i mean if you look at the ishmaem one it's a proof that you have to take the quran from aquari because there's no way

you can learn ishmael without doing it shepherding you can't read how to do it

it's just something you have to you know you have to learn how to get that from a party it doesn't change

the [Music] i mean that's just a really interesting

aspect of the quran so to me is one of the real proofs of of uh

of the preservation of the quran just the fact that we all of the sects of islam agree on all

ten i mean what religion has that like they don't debate it

and the shia used the shatta bia and the dura which are both from sunni scholars

they don't have any problem they use the alfie of ibm he's a sunni scholar so so there's no even like ahmadiyya

have the same they have the same quran as as as the rest of the muslims so

every group whether the ismaili or the borah

dawudis every group they have the same quran nobody differs about the quran

the christians differ the the protestants only accept the hebrew bible they don't accept the

the the some of the apocryphal texts it has to be in the hebrew bible whereas the catholics accept

texts that are in the apocryphal as well so anyway

is that

Part 3

[Music] welcome back for those coming back and welcome for those

uh coming for the first time cello we're going to continue with this

examination of some of the verses that imam al-azadi determined were

at the essence of the quranic narrative but before we do that i wanted to

introduce many of you might know this but it's it's a very beautiful dua

all the prophet sallallahu alaihi sam supplications are beautiful but this one has a particular

just beauty to it that um is really worth learning and the prophet sallallahu alaihi sam encourage people

to learn it it's

that is used um for the quran

and it's there's a lot of secrets in this dua but it begins saying uh

there's a etieroff there's an acknowledgement of your ubudia to allah subhanahu ta'ala and and the fact that

you not only are a servant of allah but you're the son of a servant of allah and

you're the son of a maidservant of allah subhanahu ta'ala so there's an acknowledgement getting back to that

quranic injunction on the to abu dhabi

that he created you and those who came before you so we are in this chain of

createdness so i am your servant or your slave the son of

your servant the son of your maidservant naasi the nausea is the forelock uh

traditionally it's something that you control animals with generally is is uh it's something that um

but it's also aloha refers really also to the frontal lobe

this is really where the higher cognitive thinking occurs and um

so that the nausea is in your hands one of the uh in the traditional muslim

uh scholastic tradition they had the tassels that came off the tarbush that you see in western academia

that was actually to remind the sheikh when he graduated they were given the tarbush with that tassel which was like

the nausea and the idea was to remind them that that nausea is in the hand of allah subhanahu ta'ala and if you give a

hukum a judgment from allah subhanahu wa'ta'ala you should be aware that he could seize you at any time so you

should be very vigilant in when you answer questions i was once

with sheikh abdullah he's a great great scholar one of the truly great ulama of muritania of of

this time allah he was this he was a student of um

and he um with the famous he was from the tribe of tajikanit the famous tribe in muritani known for

knowledge in fact the mauritanians knowledge is from tejakanet

but he um he was a brilliant brilliant scholar

who um who was once i was with him at the

sharia court in abu dhabi because i used to spend time with the the mufti's and with the quad with shaykh

i was very young in my early 20s but i remember these two men came from egypt

and they wanted to ask a question in barack and it was a complicated thing so muhammad al abdullah

was a very he was muttaqi in his fatwa he said come back tomorrow and i'll give

you an answer and one of the egyptians looked at me and he

said dab out of haga like does he know anything

because they're so used to people answering immediately so the idea that somebody actually wanted to think about

it and was just completely uncommon for them and i and i said to the man you

know so um that

reminder is very important that we can be taken any time in our lives

your judgment your hukum is what will occur nothing else in in

terms of my life it's your outcome whatever allah has decreed and he is al-haqem and his hakim

so he's both the ruler but he's also the wise and that's both related to hoko it's

also related to the ich kam in fact we have uh speaking of nausea in

in the the jokama or the hokuma if you google this you'll see it is actually a

type of halter that's used to control the horse and it comes from hakima

because the spanish got it from andrussia and then they brought it to the americas so it was a unique arabian

halter that still used uh for people that know about horses

just is your judgment what your and there's

which one is the the pre-existent which one is that is the the one that's uh

implemented in the world but these are semantical differences largely so the adhd

whatever you have decreed for me is just and and the reason for that is because

allah he cannot

his his attribute is justice he cannot be unjust he's also a rahman or raheem

he also has mercy so these these are two they're not contradictory they're working based uh these attributes will

manifest to us based on how we behave if we're constantly demanding justice and

allah will judge us by that accord if we want forgiveness if we're

showing mercy to others have mercy on those on earth and the one

in heaven will have mercy on you well

be just with people on earth and god will be just for you in heaven so justice is important

it's it's it's a beautiful attribute of a ruler but in human interactions between one another in a community you

want more mercy than you want justice and uh there there's a

there's a play by shakespeare called the merchant of venice which is about this conflict in christianity between

the jewish trope of being a religion only of justice without mercy and then the christian being a

religion of mercy that overrides justice and and so they're they're both

important but the point here is that whatever comes it's going to be uh just

and this is about things that happen to you that you might not like

whatever comes we have to see it that allah is he he is our malik

and the malik can do whatever he wants with his property he can do whatever he

wants and you cannot claim that he's oppressed you or he's wronged you because you belong to

allah subhanahu wa ta'ala because

i'm asking you by with the istiyana or

with the name every name that is yours samayta bihinfsek that you have called

yourself or that you have revealed in your book

some of the uluma have worked out that there's about 121 names of god in the quran the 99 are the

famous names that are related in the hadith

but if you go into the ishtar names like khadal for instance in for yacht

and there's a hilar about that about words that allah uses a verb

then can can uh can the name be taken out of that to

give a name of allah so but the actual names of allah are unknown to us the the

number o or you taught

anyone from your creation and some of the ulama derived from this that even people that aren't prophets can might be

given a name that that is uh allah reveals to them

or you it's a name that you have kept hidden inside

this unseen realm so you've you've kept it for yourself

so you're asking through all of these for what and

the spring of my heart which means that which brings my heart

to life in allah brings the earth

back to life after it's dead there are spiritual deaths of the heart but just like that you can have a type

of defibrillation you can you can have a cardioversion a spiritual cardioversion so in in

medicine when somebody's heart uh stops or if they go into like a um

a a type of ventricular fibrillation it's very dangerous um they can do this

cardioversion where they they basically introduce electricity which is energy into the heart uh to get it to uh back

uh to its um its normal rhythm well like that

there's spiritual cardioversion allah can literally

take a dead spiritual heart and i'm saying literally and bring it back to life

and and there's a beautiful one of the most extraordinary hadees in my estimation

is a hadith of ubermen cab when he actually had he had momentary doubt this is called

the hather so it's not he's not doubting because he was a believer but he

actually heard some people and this is in imam bukhari's collection of he heard some people reciting the quran

and it was different from the way the prophet saw isaiah had taught him and he's one of the great quran reciters

obey even so he he hears it and then he hears another one and it's different

and he said where did you get that reading from they they said the prophet sallallahu isaam taught us so he he

takes them to the prophet and he said ya rasool allah these men are reading the quran different from the way you taught me

and and and so the prophet isaiah said and he told them and they recite and he

said that's the way i taught them kadadika owns it like it came down like that and

then ube when he said that he had this he said it

came to him some some doubt in his heart and it's very clear in the commentaries

that this is not doubt of iman it was like a khatar that came into his heart it was from iblis it was waswasa and

this is very important there's a very important distinction between waswasa and between your own inner what's called

hadiths are two different things so you can have

thoughts that are very foul that are horrible that you don't like these you should see them

and i mentioned this earlier you know dr cleary talked about the uninvited guest and the host you

have to distinguish between the thoughts that are uninvited into your heart they just come in as uninvited guests and you

have to dispel them and so he had this and then he said the prophet saw what was what had come over him like

some kind of something a spiritual state and he struck him in his chest

and he said it was is as if i saw god before me in complete awe

and it's extraordinary hadith like he suddenly had like an enlightenment

and he's he's one of the most important people for transmitting the quran but the prophet did a type of you know like

a type of cardioversion a spiritual cardioversion on him

which is quite stunning the prophet saw i said also a man once came to him

complaining about his heart and the prophet put his hand on his heart and he said in the kind of food you have some heart trouble and he said

go to hadith who was the great yemeni physician who'd studied in june de

shapur in iran with the traditional he studied in the medical school in persia so he was one

of the few arab doctors so the prophet i think was like scan he was doing like a

like echocardiogram with his hand and and then uh referred him to the

specialist in any case

make the quran the spring of my heart it's such a beautiful dua

bring my heart to life with this book and make it the light of my breast of my

chest make it the light of my chest you know alumnus

you know that there's an insurance and no as you know spreads out so

make it this this radiating light within my breast

and the difference between the two is is subtle but it essentially has the same meaning

if it has a fat then it's kashif it's it's to

yikshif to uncover um if it's jila ahuzny then it's uh

it's the muthib it's the the hab it's the to make it go so one is to uncover

the others to make it go so they essentially have the same meaning so that you'll see that both related

and the removal of my anxiety and hum is very interesting because the prophet saw

is

that stress and and this is what i i really think this word if we translated it today would be

stress that's the word we use hum is whatever's preoccupying you it's

what's really troubling your mind it's what you're thinking about it's

what's occupying your thoughts and when people are stressed out then they have whom

so the hum is is the prophet isaiah said

stress is half of aging and you can see people when they go through very trust stressful situations

you can see them within one year it's as if they've aged 10 years many people have seen this and experienced this

people's hair turns gray they grow they go bald just from from so much stress

so stress really can age people and and that's the releasing i mean we know all now about free radicals and all these

things but the prophet saw is was really a stress-free individual because

he had complete trust in allah subhanahu wa and because this dua which he recited often was answered

obviously um so the quran would remove his his

so that's something to think about it's a beautiful dua though and i i

would recommend it i mentioned you know i i wanted to do a little bit on the the uh

because i didn't talk about them so one of the really unusual aspects of the quran is that it begins if if we see

al-fatiha as really what introduces the quran and in fact

it's it's a methane it's it's the seven verses that really essentialize the

quran itself so the whole message of the quran is in surat al-fatiha which is why

we recite it every day and it was one of the earliest surahs given some say it's the third

surah the first was ichara the second was mudatyr and the third was al-fatiha there's others

say that it was revealed later and and some of the ulamas say

it's not it's not out of the out of the idea that it was actually

revealed twice to the prophet because of its importance so the the fatiha

really opens the book bismillah there's a big debate i mentioned that

about whether or not that's from the the quran everybody agrees that it's from the

quran in surat

so everybody agrees that it's an ayah in in the quran

but is it an ayah at each one of these and

some of the ummah said that it was a fossil and that was imam malik's opinion imam malik said

and this is opinion and he's reiterating what

imam al-baqalani said that the proof that it's not from the quran is that there's a iftiraf

about it he said that that is just a proof because the quran

there's no about it it's yes

in the letter that was sent to um to

to suleiman from the queen of sheba so uh

alif lam neem and then you have what's called the med de las verhafi here so

the uh the the mujahideen have a mnemonic that they give which is come

how much of the has diminished so those are the the calf

the meme the iron the scene the lamb

the noon the the cough and the sod so those all have the med which is

sit harakat so when you recite the haroof and

the ones those have um just the normal med but these have six

so alif has the normal med eddie fla [Music]

and what do they mean well what's interesting about the hero

i mean to me what fascinates me and i haven't seen this in the tafsir but all of the mufassirun are in agreement

that they mean something what they mean is they say aloha adam

some of them and even abbas is one of them said that they're actually letters that indicate that words

so for instance the arabs in jail the arabs one of the things that

ibn ashur says in his tahrir with which is a great tafsir one of the

things he says in there is that he said the arabs were known for their intelligence they're very brilliant

people and they had an incredible gift with words and one of the things that they did was they would speak with

letters so for instance um and and they give the example and this is from azad the great

grammarian he says it's not far-fetched that these are literally words because

uh the arabs would say things like

so i said to her stop so she said which means

so she used a letter to just to to say a word so some of them say like adiflamim is

like and some say it's allah jibril so the lamb is for jibril and

then meme is for muhammad these are all you'll find them in the uh the com the commentaries

um and uh uh ibrahim mentions this even

actually says that they're names of angels and so when you say them the angels respond because they want to hear

the quran recited so it's like calling angelic presence because the prophet saw i saw him said that the angels want to

hear the quran and they actually travel the earth just like we look up at the sky and see stars the angels look at the earth and

they see places where dikkar is being made those are like stars for them and then they'll go to those places

so the are very important they've put the people have attempted to

see how many of the mukatta's how many sentences you could get from them and

there's only a few but one of them is that has all the muqatta'at is

this is a absolute nus a text from god

that that is wise and there's a secret in it so that so that contains all of

the there are fourteen letters in the mukha they show up in 29 surahs

now what's interesting about that is it's half of the arabic letters and and yet

the number of sodas they're in is the number of arabic letters there are and so it's almost as if

when the quran is coming into language because we have to remember

that the eternal quran that when we talk about i'm only using this as a talin because

generally the ulama say this should not be said unless you're teaching

when we say the quran is karama kadeem

it is the eternal word of god it is not the letters

or the the most half that we have here it's the eternal meanings

and it's as if here you have these letters are taking form as they

come into meaning and and one of the things and i'll talk about this uh inshallah when allah says

and so the kerimat is the uh because it's the it in that case it's

actually the fat in so it's saying and the the power of this is that

meaning is there are two things happening in meaning there's meaning coming to you

and then there's meaning that you are perceiving so

what that those two indicate is that meaning is not limited

to a perspectival approach in other words it's not subjective

this is the whole modern philosophical madness that everything is just in your

head that there's nothing that you can know except what's in your head

what that ayah is indicating in its is that there is a relational

there there is a relation between meaning which is real and between the one who is

decoding the meaning who is also real and it's allah subhanahu wa ta'ala that's

facilitating that through this extraordinary bringing these two things together which

is this world that he's created that is all of his to jelly yet and then the human being which is

divinely created in order to recognize all of the

attributes and the names of allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and see allah subhanahu wa'ta'ala's creation as as

this incredible epiphany of divine reality that allah is revealing himself

to his creation through the alam through the world the alam in arabic is called

ismu allah it's the the noun of instrument so the world is an instrument

to know god that's why it's from the root alimah which is to know so the world is the means by which allah is

enabling us to know him and so it comes into language and language according to

to many of our ulama is when allah

he taught adam the names it it meant that that god gave us he's

imprinted in us the ability to articulate reality and that that our

articulation of it if it's true it corresponds with reality if it's false it doesn't and so

this is the book it begins eddie flamm meme

and then the book comes it's the meanings come to us that book

and this is the beauty of this uh this is the nature of the

and one of the most amazing things about the quran to me is

so there are some will prove that you can't stop on by consensus but many of the

there are different ways that you can stop and it will change the meaning completely and so there's this

inexhaustible potential for meaning in the book of allah and this is why arabic was so important to be the vehicle for

this last message because arabic is uniquely positioned amongst the languages to contain all of these

possibilities and that's why it's inexhaustible muslims will always find new meanings in

the book of allah somebody asked if um what was the best

what was the best way to understand the quran he said time it's just time is going to reveal all of the

the the miracles of this book and so he huddled

in it is guidance for the conscientious and but i one of the things i want to just say about the the

before we go on and this is really amazing the people of tajweed are going to

appreciate this and if if you don't get it don't worry but just understand it really is something extraordinary

so uh if i show a quotes the kashaf which is the great

book by the famous muaticity scholar zamachari

it's a book that all of our great scholars recognize as being an exemplary book despite having some problems uh in

some of the tafsir but it was later basically rewritten for the sunni

tradition by imam marbel baui i mean he took most of what was in the kashaf and

rewrote it for so more students learn from imam bail bawi's

commentary than they did but the kashaf is a really important book because it's a rhetorical analysis

of the quran but he says here in the kashaf they're called

and they're also called and abu bakr radhilanu said that

was every book has a secret and the secret

of the quran is these opening letters of the the hijab so he says

so it's half of the names of these that we have these letters

so there's 14 of of that are found in the in the uh

and they're in 29 chapters based on the number of the letters in totality so all of the meanings these

inexhaustible meanings of the quran are in 29 letters half of those letters

are in 29 surahs now here's where it gets really

interesting so he says that those 14 contain

half of all of the attributes of the hadoop so all of the attributes of the hadoop

are there in those 14 but only half of them so

what that means is so like for instance you have mahamusa nilswaha assad with kaff with how was

seen what so that's half of the mahmoosa so the mahmusa letters

these are the attributes of the hemps so then he says the majora has half

mean

would mean

so there's there's that's the the the right so he's saying that you have there

so

so he says they're all mentioned the ones that aren't there are throughout the entire

quran and he said glory be to the one whose wisdom is so refined so that's

something really unusual about those because i just can't imagine somebody

would have ever worked that sat and worked all that out but it's

these this is called you know it's like the salt but it's it's very fascinating one of the things

that um some of the arifin said is that

allah gives openings to these letters to the people the closer you get to allah

in fact says something really beautiful he says

that allah has the oceans of knowledge and the prophets are the valleys

and the scholars are the rivers and and so allah gives from his oceans of knowledge

the valleys to the prophets for salat right

so so so so the the water comes and then the prophets

give to the ulama so they inherit from the prophets from

the the valleys of water not the oceans because they they can't they can't contain the oceans

they can't contain the valleys but they get the rivers and then they give they become the rivulets

for the common people the people that don't they become like they give the just enough for them to

get their sustenance so each group is getting a different

amount of water the the amount that they can take without

drowning so um oh here we go

so alhamdulillah that's uh i mentioned also

there's a lot of fat about but it's definitely what

it's not material so now when now that we can see things with electron microscopy for instance

we we don't consider that even though it's less it's not seen with the eye the raib is

something immaterial according to our ulama

the in fact that um that this is all of the infalcat

that allah has obliged us to do and those that he's

encouraged us as well because believers give us like charity is a proof of faith

and so it's also like what you should a husband supporting his family

is also from this

so those who believe in what was real to you which is the quran and what came before you

all the previous dispensations and with the afterlife they have

certainty yaquin comes out of istitlad and this is why allah is not

it's not one of his attributes mukin he's not the one allah doesn't have japin

because japin is is it's something that you gain through

experimentation and istidlal you get yakin like they say you know you you get burnt by

the fire you have yapping that the fire burns so that's not one of the names of allah for that reason and that's why we're

told to worship allah until the yakin comes to us which is death

because that's the ultimate absolute certainty of the afterlife is once you're dead

everybody's going to be 100 certain and the uh the atheists are gonna it's gonna

be a tough day for for people that rejected the truth but they had their chance and they had their

choice

and then allah talks about those who disbelieve

[Music] so as for the ungrateful and this is a

good translation that dr crew is using because kaffara means to be ungrateful so he put

there together as for the ungrateful who refused so he's really getting both meanings of

the word because when you just say refuse or disbelieve you're losing that

essential meaning of what disbelief is about it's about ingratitude to the one

who created you muhammad ali used to say that service to others is the rent that you pay to god

for the space you occupy in this world but service to others is one way of serving

god but service to god and service to others is the rent that we pay

so i would just add that addition but it's a it's a beautiful statement by the great

muslim boxer and and uh said he was a people's theologian

muhammad ali because he said that he spoke with real clarity about if you watch some of his arguments about why he

believes in god they're very powerful a lot gave him a lot of inspiration

so it's the same to them whether you warn them or not they they don't believe

and that's why uh some people they they just will not

believe you can show them everything is to seal over something like a khatam

on a letter and the khatam is a the stamp that you use to seal something

and then there's a uh over there hearing about him

and and there's a covering over their eyes so for them is a great torment and i

mentioned that last time about that amazing statement that leopold vice muhammad

assad wrote in his book about just seeing the hell that people are in

women what's interesting about this is amongst

humanity are those who say we believe in allah in the last day

what's really fascinating is if you look at the verses allah took four verses to describe the

believers two verses to describe the disbelievers and 13 verses to describe

the hypocrites so it's it's very interesting the hypocrites

are a very complicated um uh creature

because the inward and the outward are um disparate they're not they're not they're not the same

and everybody has some degrees with the exception of the purified the ambia and the siddiacon

and everybody has a degree of hypocrisy if you think you're free of hypocrisy you're

definitely a hypocrite and and i didn't say that that was hassan al-basri he said whoever feels free of hypocrisy

it's a sign he's a hypocrite so if sayna omar could go to hudaifah ibn

yaman and say i swear to god you have to tell me am i one of the hypocrites that

the prophet salallahu told you about that's um he was worried about being considered a

hypocrite and that's partly because invariably we have we play different

roles and we have we have inner lives and outer lives and sometimes they're not always congruous so people but if

it's kabalyer if it's then you're dealing with hip real hypocrites and so there's there's a

complete hypocrites and then there's a whole spectrum of hypocrisy so the the

monafic charles a complete hypocrite when he speaks he lies when he makes

promises he breaks them either

when he gets in a fight either when he gets in a uh

if he makes a promise he breaks it either either if he gets in an argument he starts

using foul language so these are all signs if they're all four or in a person they're just complete hypocrites

so so we have to work on that all of us in our own selves and do that so what what they do

now allah in the arabic language is to attempt something

they attempt to fool god so they try to fool god

but they do not succeed in deceiving anybody but themselves now what's interesting

there's uh imam in his

own so they only are really attempting to deceive themselves so it's it's it's

that thing of cognitive dissonance that people they they have to believe so they're

going to try to convince themselves that that they're actually doing this

for good reasons and things like that so there's a real self-deception here and

in the end self-deception is exactly that you're only deceiving yourself

in other words if you really really were honest with yourself you would see the

self-deception yeah so there's this kind of schizophrenic

attitude maya is really a beautiful word uh the the

arabs in modern arabic used for the subconscious when they translate freudians psychology they'll

call it the lesher or you know it's under the shore it's what you're

not sensing means to feel and

is poetry because the poet is somebody who feels more than other people he has higher sensibilities his sensibilities

are heightened is hair because

it's a very subtle thing to touch when you touch the hair

and also because it spreads out so sheen has is har tafashi so anything with sheen in it tends to spread out

like musha shims radiates ashiya like

rays there's a whole bunch of words that have that letter in it

so they they they only succeed in fooling themselves

in their hearts is disease

here is they have the mara of shubohat which is

doubts in their understanding they don't have any certainty about anything they're modab the boon you know

they they oscillate uh some that when they're with the believers they're with the believers when they go back to their

shelter and they're with their shelting so they they're they're sick people uh

this is allah allows them to get sicker

and they have a painful torment they're tormented in their own beings

because of what they were because of the lies that they tell to themselves and to others so they're lying to themselves

and they're lying to others

this is really i think one of the most amazing

qualities that you see in these people if you say to them don't make trouble he uses make trouble

so corruption i mean there's a lot of different ways i don't know how he does it in the um

in his final translation but here he says make trouble in the earth

if it's if they're told don't make trouble in the earth they say

they are only doing good they say we that we are only they say we

are only doing good so isla

one of the commentators of the quran said the first proof that their mufsidum is they claim to be

muslim because a true uh person who's doing good they never claim

they're doing good they just do it so the fact that they're saying oh we're

muslim that's a proof that they're musin what does the prophet say

i only want islam he doesn't say i'm muslim he says i want islam which is

very different from saying you're a muslim because it's not a claim

either i or you are on guidance or astray the prophet was told to say that to the disability even in even though

we're certain that he was on guidance he was told to say to them allah knows who's guided one of us is guided

it's it's a right making opposite claims one of the claims

has to be true it's either raining or it's not reigning god exists or he doesn't exist

the prophet saw i see him as a prophet he's not a prophet one has to be true because that's the

law of the excluded middle right it can't both be true so

for those who accept they have ammon that's why it's called

eman because they've entered into this state of security for those who reject

we have to wait let's all wait we'll see and

let's just wait allah says wait we'll see we're going to see so nobody should just hurry hurry this

thing up we don't want to hasten the just let it take its course we'll see

who's who's true and who's not true we're gonna yomo qiyama we believe it's real if somebody doesn't believe it's

real that's their prerogative allah has given them that prerogative allah out of his generosity to his creation has given

them free will they can either accept his gifts with gratitude

or accept his gifts with ingratitude it's one or the other but they're all

getting the gifts of allah and the greatest gift is participation in being

the fact that we exist that allah has enabled us to come into the world and participate in this extraordinary

epiphany this extraordinary theophany of divine attributes i mean it's just incredible

so

it's like a subconscious thing they're they're doing this if sad and they

really don't they're not even aware of it they're fooling themselves

and this is the people that all these do-gooders that go out and do these horrible things i mean somebody said to

me you know it was they were like talking about helping the women of

afghanistan here and i just my you know i felt like you know i think they've had enough of america's help

you know it's just i think they've had enough you know people need to be left alone to

sort their problems out in this poor situation in pakistan you know

i mean the all so many hopes were put on because the people live in that incredible

corruption and it's horrible and many of the the best and brightest of that country live now in america for one

reason because there's rule of law and that they could actually flourish here

many of them would much rather be in their own culture with amongst their own family but it was it was unbearable

for many people it's just unbearable to be in those situations and so opportunities arise for them to have a

better life for their children and for and that's a very natural thing to want to do to

better your situation but it's like in the reluctant fundamentalist when you know he tells

his classroom you know in america they have this thing called the american dream

what's the pakistani dream to get a green card to america

it's you know so somebody shows up and people can say whatever they want people say all these things i personally

i have hassan al-ban he appeared to me to be a man who

lived a very big life made a toba to allah subhanahu ta'ala and wanted to do something for his

country and was trying to do something and actually invited us to be part of that

in his rahmalullah and the universe i mean he was trying to do

something but it's like sultan abdul hamid and i'm not comparing the two but sultan abdul hamid

he was a lone figure amidst all of this corruption

what how much could one person do if you don't have the people around you

he gave you victory with those believers look at the people around the prophet

saw isam look how difficult it was at the early portion when he didn't have protectors

i mean it was very difficult for him his own people were being persecuted when omar came

and hamza came it was this huge spiritual uplift for for those people

because they didn't they now they had some people that were going to to let other people know that if you

mess with these people there's there's consequences people need protectors so there's all these people that have their

hopes and we should just be praying for

these people because it's just really difficult life on earth

is very very difficult as it is it when things are going well there's difficulties

everybody has their sorrows everybody has their tribulations everybody has their troubles there's nobody that

that's free of any of these things so when in addition to your own personal

troubles your your society outside is collapsing it's a mess the level of stress

of hum that that brings on and the only people that are free of that are are the aulia because they really

are in the hub they're just in that space the prophet saw i mean look at abu bakr

when they're going on the hijrah and abu bakr he keeps looking back and he's he's got all that and then when he's in the

cave he's like terrified you know that because he cared about the man who he was with

he and he wanted to practice and he was but the prophet the entire time just look at the prophet he was just reciting

quran he was just he had no concerns

because he was completely inner focused on allah subhanahu wa

ta'ala so he wasn't in the and abu bakr has an immense

and it would have been appropriate for him to to have those feelings for him to not be concerned about his beloved

prophet would have been inappropriate for him in that mukham so i'm not diminishing his mohammed in any way but

my point is that the prophet's law is in him just was not worried he did not have

those concerns what he worried about interestingly enough was us going astray

that was his concern he worried about non-muslims not hearing his message he worried about muslims

falling into the dunya those are the things that troubled the prophet saws and he he prayed for us

and then when it said to them

so when you they say to them believers the people believe they say shall we believe as imbeciles believe

like sufha safi is like a idiot a stupid person somebody that can't take care of himself

should we believe like idiots and this is this idea that religion's a crutch that it's for weak people

that that uh strong people don't need religion they just stand up on their own yeah until they get multiple sclerosis

you know until they need and until they're incapacitated and they need people around them to take care of them

i mean we're constantly in need we're in need in every instant our hearts could stop at any instant

i mean i had a dear friend who literally just collapsed the other day and

crushed his skull he had to have multiple surgeries and metal plates it put into his head he was a perfectly

healthy person a mountain climber a young relatively young man really strong

but he collapsed and he said it was like a great wake-up call for him even though he was already

a devout muslim but he was like i felt like god was really sending me a huge message i need to change my life i need

to get better that's an appropriate response to tribulation

instead of getting angry and why are you doing this to me because there's all these people that's their attitude why

are you doing this to me allah there's no why for allah you said

he's not asked about what he does he's not asked about what he's but you

will be asked they will be asked about what they're doing

and when they encounter those who believe they say we believe but when they are alone with their obsessions and

that's very interesting hello

is to be alone and and one of the things that dr cleary really

he had a great knowledge of the the mind and wrote many books on

meditation and on the mind so he really understood the nature of

obsessions obsessive-compulsive thoughts of these type of things that these can

really really wreak havoc on people and and so

shayateen are like obsessions there's there there there's this constant waswasa that goes on

um and they say we're with you

so we're with you we're with you we're just mocking them

the mustache all had terrible outcomes allah yesterday would be him this does not mean that god

shazam and jin salaam so allah does not do is in this way this is

this is a type of rhetorical device in which

it's saying that they're going to get what they're doing so

allah yes and amplifying their outrages

as they wander astray

they are the ones who have bartered guidance for error so they they traded guidance for error they they they gave

up their guidance for this

this is a beautiful expression that the prophet said and used when suhabar romi

made his famous hijrah and so hey they wouldn't let him leave because he had been

he's called a romi there's a giraffe about what his actual lineage was but

he grew up amongst the byzantines although he had arab lineage so but they

said you came to us a foreigner and you became wealthy here we're not going to let you leave without your wealth so he

gave up all he just said you can have it all i just want to go be with the prophet sam so when he got to medina

without telling the prophet what he did because the angel told the prophet what he did he said

your tijara was profitable because he gave up all of his dunya for

akhirah and these people do the very opposite of that

method is [Music]

they are like what they are like is one who lit a fire and when it illumined everything around

god took their light and left them in darkness unseeing so one of the things about life is that people do have

insights and they do have periods but winston churchill famously said everybody stumbles on to the truth at

least once in their life and the vast majority of people simply get up brush themselves off and carry on

and i think that he was really talking about himself because apparently and there was an article in

the guardian about some of his his diaries

and some correspondence between family members he actually considered becoming muslim at one time

and he was convinced by his family that it would destroy his political career if he did

and that was that was published in the guardian magazine you can look that up so but

people do make dunya choices like choosing to become a muslim

is choosing right now in our current time to become part of an oppressed minority really

so although some people seem to be happy to do that as well

but it's uh nobody said it was going to be easy

and [Music] allah promises with that with the hardship ease so

there's great difficulties in becoming muslim at a time when the muslim world is so beleaguered and the

muslims don't look particularly like they're flourishing as a community

i think inshallah there's a greater reward than when they're successful because a lot of people want to become

americans or europeans because of their success i once met a muslim who actually left islam and became a

mormon and i asked him why he did that amazing and he said he looked to the most

successful community and he just wanted to be successful he actually came back to islam thank

goodness but he literally told me he became a mormon because he wanted to be successful

so success with allah or success with mammon i mean you choose it doesn't mean

they're mutually exclusive one of the reasons

the prophet saw him entering paradise crawling was because

he he was so engaged in the world even though it was for other worldly means but he was so engaged in the world

as a merchant so there's no reason why you can't be a

successful merchant and a muslim in fact the prophet sam was the most successful merchant

so uh there's and there's it's good to be successful in your worldly endeavors

but if you're not then you it's either there are a couple different possibilities one you're not

following the proper sunan of success which is very often when dr cleary told me once that there's a year in um

in in china where the buddhists call it the year that grace descended because buddhism suddenly had this incredible

expansion during that year and he said it was actually the year that the monks got organized

so it's not mutually exclusive but people often i mean muslims are often

really poor at organization and execution i mean i know muslims that work at at the top

levels at like google or facebook or but then they're on the mosque board and they run the board

it's like they're not using any of the skill sets that they learn

in these other places just basic managerial skill sets of how to run things well how to get things done

properly these are all things that muslims should be foremost at because

allah loves a servant should he do a thing he does it with excellence

a servant in modern era because professionalism

so a modern translation of that could be allah loves a professional servant a servant who does things with with

excellence with with her with craft with skill a skilled servant

[Music]

they will not get back deaf dumb and blind is a very interesting i mean there are people that suffer these grave

tribulations in the world and and par part of their meaning obviously i

would never limit that but part of their meaning is for something like this to

to be realized that there are people that don't have

hearing in fact dr cleary was deaf in one area he was partially deaf and it's very

difficult to be partially deaf or deaf in the world many people now are young

people are losing their hearing because they blast these they have the headphones and earphones and so they

don't know the preciousness of hearing it's a great gift to be able to hear and

then dumb not be able to speak and all of us have been struck dumb at one time in our lives i mean everybody's had that

point where they literally were speechless were unable to speak but there are

people that can't speak ever and if they're lucky they sign there was an amazing man

at tuimarat where i studied with uh who who was um

he was he was a uh he was he was uh

blind he was deaf and dumb but he was not blind he could he could he could speak somewhat

but he could read lips he learned how to read lips i don't know how he did that he was a very unusual

person but the people all the people around you saw things there that just were very

unusual but and then blind to be blind is a great tribulation

but it's also something that

allah generally when he takes away some things he enhances with other

things so blind people are very often uh many of our greatest ulama were blind

in fact da lazhar had a special place for the handicaps because handicapped people unlike

in traditional western culture where they were literally relegated to uselessness in the muslim world they

were often given special training so they had special ed and in fact

actually did a study of all the handicapped ulama and he was amazed at

how many there were handicapped ulama so

but but allah is using this as a an analogy

for people it's as if they have ears but they don't hear they have tongues but they don't speak because they're not

speaking the truth and they have eyes but they don't see so they don't hear the truth they don't speak the truth and

they don't see the truth and this is the famous the monkey from india

you know which which is a a beautiful uh meaning like people take it the

opposite of what it actually means it's that we should hear no evil speak no evil and see no evil that that's a type

of purity uh in in people so alhamdulillah i think

yeah i think with a few more minutes or like a rain cloud

[Music] yes

i think he has a really nice

it's kind of really interesting

yeah so he says the manifestation here just before this he says about the

obsessions obsessions shayatin from this is derived english satan one of the names of the devil this arabic name

comes from a root meaning to be perverse or obstinate essential characteristics of obsession referring to satanic

rebellion against god manifests as arrogance ingratitude and possessive obsession with things of the world

another name of the devil comes from the root which has the meaning of whispering or suggestion referring to obsession as the

epitome of the satanic characteristic and the activity this particular verse depicts fools who publicly declare their

faith in god yet privately declare their devotion to their personal idols and

obsessions be it status wealth or anything else that may preoccupy their

minds the very levity which with which hypocrites and fools treat their religion as a profession without a

reality lets them go all the further both in the outrages committed openly under the

guise of piety and those committed covertly on the prompting of private obsessions outrageous here to yan means

to transgress exceed proper bounds wander and then he talks about the light that they see this

describes the unreliable light of artificial knowledge of which false religion is one variety

god took their light in the sense that falsehood does not stand in the presence of reality subjective projections do not

remain intact in the face of objective truth finite man-made thought fails to apprehend the infinite in itself

they will not go back they will not they will not get back to reality or their source as long as they are totally

preoccupied with their own fabrications so then about this verse here like a

rain cloud from the sky in it darkness thunder and lightning they put their fingers in their ears the manifestation

of religion includes mystery warning enlightenment and nourishment these are

symbolized by darkness thunder lightning and rain the ungrateful are mostly

concerned with with ignoring the warning for fear that it will prove true against

them what they do not realize is that reality encompasses them and judges them

whether or not they are consciously attentive of this fact

and then he says the clarity of divine revelation is blinding to the eye accustomed to the darkness of human

confusion with each renewal of revelation or revival of true knowledge humanity makes some progress when the

infusion of inspiration subsides however humankind again stagnates although this

process seems uncertain and erratic at least humanity has a chance to use its god-given faculties to recognize

revelation and live in its light it is not the same as if we had no sense at

all like blind deaf and down alhamdulillah

did the prophet isaiah explain the letters eddie flam meme at all i mean had he we wouldn't have anything to say

about what he said we the prophet saw i said so much of the quran he the prophet

his life is his commentary the prophet isaiah did not comment on

very much of the quran because had he done that nobody could interpret it after him had he told us oh it means

this then who would dare say that it meant something else

so the prophet's life is his commentary on the quran the chapter in al-bukhari on the uh

what the prophet sam said about the quran is actually quite small and in the tough sears there's there's not a lot

of of comment from the prophet saw isaiah about the quran itself

because his life is the comet the sunnah is the commentary

the the the companions did ibn abbas had things to say about it the the companions did

have remarks about alif lam you can see them in the mottawalat if you read fakhrizin al-razi's

first volume there's a lot on that again imam

extraordinary translation and really commentary as well because he has a lot of annotations

you you can find things in there in english

you spoke earlier about the two tough years that bail bowie and el bagawi has two approaches to quran can you

elaborate a little more the alberta and al-baghui are very important uh historically um

they albe is arguably the most read commentary in in in the madrasa

tradition the scholastic tradition imam al-baghui is is up there a lot of

al-berdawi is dealing with he he uses the mufradat of espahani

and then he uses the kashaf is one of his sources

so he he he uses um a few different sources

and does a lot of linguistic analysis but it's it's a brilliant commentary it's it's it's excellent imam al-baghwa

has a lot of he does it's

he gives a lot of early

exegesis so that he's more looking at a it's a lot of self

influence on it um it's a shorter commentary but they're

both they're both excellent commentaries the uh i mean you have some really truly

great imam with has a great commentary um

the uh in andalusia was very popular it's it's

more used in the west my go-to and favorite commentary just for kind of an immediate

uh look is uh the tassiely matanzi i mean i've been using this book for

decades you know it's it's a really beautiful there's a critical addition too that

came out from one of the saudi scholars which is it's actually really good um this one has just two two volume out

of there's four volumes but in two um books

so but that that this one has a secret like i uh

even just it has a secret i i've always been amazed at what's in there

um he was given the gift of really being succinct but but packing meaning and the

introduction is one of the finest introductions and i think um [Music] the american scholar

musa ferber sheikh musa ferber has a translation of that of the the mokhadima

of eventual and he's very qualified translator he's

graduate from um program and has studied for a long time

so that's that's something available in english

immaterial then are angels jinn and satan also immaterial

well in that they're not in our dimension so when we're talking about materiality we're talking about things

that can be that our tools and and what allah has given us

has access to so the jinn are alongside of us we we can't see them

but they can see us in the afterlife it's the opposite we can see them they can't see us

so um and they're called jinn because they're unseen now jinn also means anything la

upsar so technically and this is the famous controversial

interpretation of muhammad abdu about jinn being microbes

and if you've ever seen electron microscopy of some of these viruses i mean they look

like really bizarre little creatures so um even though viruses there's a debate

about you know are they do they have life or are they

they're inanimate so they have they have some kind of

form they certainly can wreak havoc through through their replication and using our cells

but um the the gin

are um they're all they're all around they tend

to according to our tradition they live in more um isolated places but they do they can

bother human beings and and wreak havoc

so and they're a good jinn and they're bad gin and every tradition i mean it's one of

the mysteries of our planet that there's there's no traditional culture that doesn't have some concept

of the spirit world there's no culture you'll you'll find no pre-modern culture that doesn't have

some understanding now material scientists would say well of course because they're trying to

explain all these phenomena that they couldn't understand and it was just an easy way of doing that

well that's fine again we'll just have to wait and see the prophet saws was asked about how his

ummah would end and aisha and ibrahim wrote a book called

at my own fifa

you know help in the virtues of plagues

because again muslims have a very different way of viewing things i mean i'll give you a good example

i was once in mauritania with a very famous sheikh his his he's the father of one one of the former muftis of muritani

uh he's a beautiful sheikh in moritani very learned man and a student of sheikh

abdullah bin bayez but mukhtar will dambara his father was amazing sheikh and he was well into

his 90s and we were eating and in muritani they have lots of flies

so it's just allah because it's hot desert climate there's a lot of flies in fact moritans would often pour sugared

water in the corner to get all the flies to go over there so they could eat without the flies i mean that's how bad

it could be and so there's constantly swatting flies away so the sheikh asked me you know do they

have flies in america and i said actually you know we don't really have that many fly we

don't we don't see flies very often he said

he said you like getting all the blessings here

like he didn't see it as a good thing he saw this there's a different way of looking at

the world you know it's just dunya is supposed to be you know zubab

right i mean that's the name of the devil lord of the flies beelzebub

yeah lord of the flies yeah so this is the dunya is a place of flies

you know it's a stinky place you know it's got this is the nature of the dunya and that's why the unum say you know don't

bathe for a few days and you start stinking like just even our bodies you know just and children don't like babies

don't stink because they don't have sin no sin

for those who do not understand arabic but can read it is it better to spend time reading the translation for strongholds or reciting it you never i

mean i don't think they're mutually exclusive it's creating a bit of a false dilemma there i i don't i think you can

do both um work on your arabic it's

you know but reading it there's a great blessing in reading the uh the quran

especially in ramadan so just reciting the quran in arabic is a great blessing whether you understand

it or you don't it it really does affect the heart and

so i i would try to do both

is that is there any other what are some of the ways which we can tune out our unwanted guests

allah

remember allah that's that's a dua you know allah allah is with us allah is

present with his knowledge he's with you wherever you are

and uh you know they they'll go if you let them go don't hang on to them

you know you if you try to kick them out they can get aggressive you know

just yeah just let them go

but dicker is good you know also the with the ten are really important because

you know that that those were given to the prophet because of the

shale thing that that were doing the blowing on the knots you know there were 11 knots because 11

is one of the devil's numbers and that's why he was given 11 ayahs to combat their 11. so we have r11 they have their

11. yeah

why was the quran mostly directed to male interlocutors for example women referred to secondary like tell your

women well i mean it's it's a yeah this question is not a question

that would have come up a hundred years ago so this is a very modern question

although arguably one of the women one of the

wives of the prophet asked why the quran was addressing the man all of the verses

after that that began to say

men and women believing men and women and so i felt for me when i read that

i really felt like it was all i was telling the women to speak up you know that you need to be heard that you need

to and that if if you do then allah responds i mean the woman that that uh

you know if you look at the uh patsemia i mean it's a very powerful because she

went to the prophesizem and asked him for help and he told her be patient

she was really being tormented by her husband and so she complained directly to god and god spoke to the prophet

sallallahu alaihi salaam and it's an amazing story in the in the quran

so i think men are

you know men are meant to be maintainers and to take care of the women and

islam has a traditional understanding of these roles it doesn't

mean that one is to oppress the other and in fact a lot of the problems and the reason for the rise of feminism was

because of all of the egregious abuses against women

and there's a lot of women that don't want to go back to that because out of fear

that um that they're they're going to lose out but we've also lost a great

deal by losing um these these orders of taking care of

women the modern world has removed a lot of the roles that traditionally men played

but one of the things that's very dangerous and it's very interesting ukraine suddenly uh masculinity is in in

favor like suddenly you know they're talking about these heroic men i

mean there was a man that blew himself up the other day it was literally a suicide bombing and they were praising him

and the hypocrisy of it's just incredible but the point is is that when things

break down and they do break down and they can break down here just like anywhere else i mean this idea that

americans think somehow we're immune to what the rest of the world goes through things can collapse we have an economic

house of cards that could literally collapse and what happens when it does well what

happens when it does when you have uneducated irreligious people

it's rape and pillage that's what happens so who's going to defend the women in those situations all the

feminism is out the window it's just out the window you know we're

we're supposed to educate our women and you know the prophet did set aside a day for the women

but generally they were in the homes they were taking care of the family they were doing those things that was the traditional world so the modern world is

very different and this idea somehow that we have to readjust islam

i mean islam has always recognized the barsa there are women that are in the world and active in the world

islam is always recognized khadija is a good example of that you know but she used agents to do

she wasn't the one going on the caravans she hired people to do that type of work

so and we know there are brilliant female physicians they're brilliant female

lawyers imam tabari was of the opinion that women could serve in all those including the judiciary

so he considered women capable of doing that that wasn't the dominant opinion amongst the other imams but there there

are those opinion abu hanifa accepts uh women in the judiciary in certain things in civil courts not in criminal but so

these are these are things that we're all grappling with and i don't necessarily have the answers but um

i know that a fool in his culture are soon parted and and that um

that you shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater you know there's a lot of good from the past that we need to conserve

and our religion is essentially not a politically conservative religion i'm not using the word in that way it's a

conservative religion in that it tries to preserve the best and it's very wary of

innovation because innovation is very destabilizing and unsettling and so it's

always you know our tradition teaches us to have another to look down the road

see what are the consequences things are moving way too rapidly which is one of the signs of the latter days the prophet

is them said a day would be like an hour

last questions

my

you

Part 4

starting the last 10 days of ramadan i know there's a slight difference for

some people it's the 20th

21st and for other people's 20th but last night for some was the 19th and for

others it was the 18th right now 19th or 20th yeah so tonight's

21st for most people this i wanted to again

bring this dua to the forefront after bismuth

i think it's a extremely important dua for a number of reasons one the

prophet isaiah said in the reward relates is that anybody who hears it

should learn it so that in itself is justification enough to learn the dua

but it's also prefaced by a statement that the prophet isaiah said whoever is suffering from

depression should recite this and if they recite it sincerely then inshallah the depression

will be removed so this is an antidepressant dua and i think there's a secret in that

it's a dua of asking allah to make the quran the spring of

your heart because the quran will bring the heart back to life

allah brings the earth back to life after it's dead and the quran is

is it has the bushra i mean one of the reasons why

the um one of the reasons why the

the news is so depressing is because the good news that the

prophets bring would not have the type of impact that it would have uh

if everything was good news if it was all good news then what really is the bushra

of of the prophets their bushra is that this abode is a trial and tribulation

for a short time and then after that for those who pass the test

it's busha it's a good news and so for for people that live in the light of

that truth they the world is not going to bring them down in the way that it will bring down other people because the world

really is designed to break hearts it's designed to wear people down that's the

nature of the abode and if you accept that truth then you'll really appreciate the good

times that you have you'll really be grateful for those times that allah intersperses

between the tribulations to keep you going because if it was all tribulation

people couldn't handle it so this dua is very important

mella answered that prayer i wanted just to look at a few of the hadith

they're very strong hadees about these last 10 days relates that the prophet sallallahu

alaihi saw him said kana rasulullah is allah he said that the prophet sallallahu alaihi salaam

then he would bring the night to life and remember that most of his nights in the normal year

were brought to life so the fact that she's saying this about these nights

is very strong so he also woke his family up

because save yourselves and your family so we have an obligation also to

to to wake our families up and he was very very

uh serious during this time means he tightened up his loincloth in

other words the the izaar what they call lungi in india which is

was one of the prophetic raymond's the prophet isaiah wore a

lungi um so he he bound it up so he was very serious during this time

and that's obviously a kinaya for he he wasn't he didn't

he wasn't with the women so and even um

so they had a vision this is a which is different from a dream a vision is a true

event that occurs the prophet sim said it's 146 of prophecy it's that aspect of

prophecy that every human being even an a disbeliever can have access to this i

like the pharaoh who had a true dream so

in the last seven nights so you're going to see 7 and 10 you'll see some different views

so what he means there is that the all these different people have the same vision

so that's the tawapat you know they they coincided in those seven last days

so especially those last seven days although all 10 are important obviously

the 25th the 27th and the 29th are very strong

days um and the unimah differ about that allah says

so that leila mubaraka which is in surat is considered to be

leila some say it's which is another big night there's a

hidap about nushatban but historically it's been practiced it's interesting that the maliki

school traditionally it was not practiced but the monarchies themselves ended up

doing it so it's practiced all over the maliki countries in the south asian culture it's very strong

and it was the opinion of many of the great scholars that it was a good night it was a blessed night to

to do of there's certain you know people that see it that it it wasn't strong and or

there wasn't uh validity to it those are the in the rahm of allah and it's very

important for people not to make incar of other people that are doing these practices but these are

firmly established practices in the muslim community so abu hurairah radhillah who said ani nabi

is that the prophet saws

so whoever will stand in prayer on the laila

out of faith in you know in belief with with faith well also

in other words yeah and allah that they they're really trusting that allah is going to reward

them so there's a there's a they're reckoning with their lord that that he's going to

reward them for that so they're doing it with that intention that allah is going to respond

to their worship it's forgiven all the things that

proceeded obviously generally with these it's the the

what are called the venial sins the lesser sins not the major sins the

enormities you need tawba specifically so the seven mubicads things like that

[Music] again she said this is another hadith but reiterating that imam muslim relates

cannot rasulullah is allah

he was constantly with allah so in ramadan it was even more intense but then in the last 10 days it was even

intensified so there was more during this time than any other time so

those are all really i think important reminders we're in the last 10 days so inshallah may

allah give us the ability to fulfill these these

just encouragements from our prophet's life and the prophet did not make things that were not far

he encouraged people so these are really encouragements this is all from the men do bad there's no there's nothing wajib

here but but this our our prophet saw i if he is

doing it and and and his his sins were forgiven

even though his sins are the the hassanath of you know we we don't say his sins like he doesn't have

his mason but it's

you know so that's but if the prophet saw isaiah has a completely clean slate with allah

and yet he's doing this and when i saw his feet had

become swollen from standing so it's called venostasis when you when you stand for a very long

time especially a an elderly person when they stand for a long time sometimes the

the the the fluid will gather around the ankles so you'll see that kind of

so she saw that and and he said she said to him you know you don't have

anything to worry about with your lord he said shouldn't i be a grateful servant and

shakur is meaning constantly grateful you know shouldn't i be always grateful

for what allah has given me so we go back to surat al-baqarah inshallah this is such a important

it's such an important surah in our tradition i mean all of the quran is important but there are so many

there's so many rulings that come there's so so much uh

knowledge in this single chapter and the prophet called them the zaharayan the two zahara

the the uh surat and he actually said that they would

defend they would be shade for people in their graves so and he's he said to

leave this is you know to take it as barakah to leave it as hasarat to take it as a blessing

to leave it is remorse and only really firmly rooted people are

able to take on al-baqarah so we were looking at the early ones he's

giving the analogy now of these people so the hypocrites um

you know it's if they're in darknesses thunder and lightning they put their fingers in their ears and literally they

did this literally um this is one of the proofs for majaz in the quran because they don't

literally put their al-sabih they put up so some of them

call that a hat you know where it's just omitted

like assad

are in their ears because you can't put the whole finger in the ear so this is a figurative figure of speech

but they used to do that when the prophet isaiah came in when they came to mecca the hypocrites when they ever

heard they heard the quran they would plug their ears so they didn't want to hear it

and even the kofar they would give people cotton

when they would come into and they'd say oh we have a big magician here you don't want to hear him because

he bewitches people so

you can't

to strike um and so it it seizes their their light

[Music] every time that their light is shed for them they walk in it and when it grows

dark upon them they stand still and if god will god could remove their hearing and their seeing for god has power over all things

and we did this so now this is uh the first injunction in the quran this

is the very first command in in in the quran

linearly if you begin not chronologically because the first command chronologically but if you begin linearly this is the very

first command and it's a command to all of humanity

this book is unique in that it was sent to all of humanity and it was sent in a

clear arabic language the prophet isaiah was given this book it's not written by men it was written

down by men but the book unlike the bible unlike previous dispensations

this is a direct revelation and it's the final in our in our understanding this

is our faith that this is the final book yayo hannes oh you owe humanity o people

dr cleary is translating it oh people oh people ur

serve your lord worship your lord serve your lord allah

the one who created you allah

so that you may be conscientious and he chose conscientiousness which i think is a really good

word choice he was a master linguist and knew many many languages

but he really understood the importance of going to the roots of languages so here

conscientious obviously there's it's a latin word khan usually means with and then siencia

is knowledge with understanding so you may act with understanding it's

very interesting that all of our world religions see ignorance as fundamentally the

fundamental problem with human beings is that they're ignorant so the buddhists say that the

fundamental problem is ignorance the the jews and the christians have this understanding the muslims have this

understanding i mean we call the time before islam is called jahaliyah the time of ignorance now it's interesting

that the word in arabic for ignorance has both the meaning zealous

and the meaning of ignorant so it's somebody who's who is easily excited

they get angry easily because that is from a lack of of knowledge about how the world works

so the fact that you're getting upset the fact that you're getting frustrated is your spiritual immaturity

because when you are when you have knowledge of god

everything is from god and so you have a completely different perspective of reality it's just a very

different perspective so one of the early meanings of conscientious in in english was to be

scrupulous in one's moral behavior and this is really what taqwa is

wakaya is prevention the arabs say that a penny of prevention is better

than a pound of cure right so the wakaya is prevention

uh the the the the muttaqi is the one that guards himself

he guards himself so and that's why tokya is when it's permitted for instance if

you're under threat of death you can actually deny your faith which is called tokyo because you're you're guarding

your your your you're guarding yourself with that so this is a this is the meaning of the

word taqwa in in in arabic is a really important concept in islam

the uh even asha the great north african scholar and really

somebody who taught most of north and west africa their their islam

says

so taqwa is ishtinab avoiding what's prohibited

because right whatever

the prophet isaiah has prohibited you avoid it and and the prophet saw i saw him says

that if i command you to something then do it if i prohibit you something avoid it but if i command you do what do mustafa

so it's more important to avoid the prohibition because the awamer are many

the owamir are many and in fact

that he understood the amar there was for

wujoub because if it was for the umar of the prophet isaiah because

the prophet has awamer he has commands that are for that are recommended or or macro like

telling you not to do something so it's really important to understand that taqwa is essentially

the even jose kelby he says there's five categories of taqwa the first one is

taqwa shirk or taqwa kufar and that every muslim is a muttaqi

so that puts us all inshallah in the huddle

i mean that's a great blessing so that's like you know enough so that's

but he's still muttaqi because he's afraid of shirk and then you have

the the person who's he fears the the the haram right

i mean he's fears like kabalyero and things like that and that's another level of taqwa and

then you have the person that fears the makuru you know just

and then you have the person that fears the mobile hat imam adi said

about the dunya he said

what's permitted from it you're going to be accounted for and what's haram from it you're going to

be punished for i mean allah can forgive people but that's the essential principle

so that means that so that's why they say

the people that do without in the dunya those are actually the bet the highest people they're the most intelligent

people and uh so that's uh very important and then and

then finally the uh the last one is just the people who fear

uh just that other than god occurs to their hearts

and that's mohammed the highest mohammed

this is a really amazing uh analogy here so he made the earth

a bed a couch for you a firash so it could be bed or couch

the ulama say that the reason allah used firaj is because if it was too hard you

couldn't build on it and if it was too soft you couldn't build on it so allah made the earth

soil if you look at soil it's perfect for building on it's not too hard and

it's not too soft you can dig it you can put your foundations in it and yet it's stable so it'll it'll hold you and

that's how you want a bed you don't want it too soft you don't want it too hard you want it right in that middle and so

that's why it uses that term wasabi and the heavens a roof now what does a

roof do a roof protects you well sama with dunya you have different heavens

but we have this it's called the the protected

roof over us and now we know with van allen's belts that we actually have this

extraordinary roof over us that's protecting us from radiation bombardment like it's going on

constantly and had we not had that roof it would annihilate us there could be no life on earth

so the fact that allah calls it a bina that it's a roof over you is quite

stunning because that's exactly what it is it's a protective barrier

um and and one set of mines and he sent down and who sends water

down from the skies

and who brings forth from it fruits for your sustenance

generally first and foremost means fruit like the fruit how we categorize food so

we have fruits and vegetables and grains and and then and then the animal

products but if you look at uh the arabs use fruit also for anything

that's beneficial like the fruit of his wealth it's what you

get benefit from so he brought forth all of these benefits for us as provision

risk so now he's giving us a reason like

allah is saying look he did all of this he created you he created those who came before you so you can't say oh my

parents created me because who created them who created those before them it has to go back it's chicken and egg

right so that's circular reasoning or infinite regress

they're both false it's impossible so allah is saying we did all this that

perhaps you might have taqwa you know guard yourself be conscientious about your lord be aware of your lord and then

he made the earth this wonderful abode for you he gave you a protective uh roof over you a canopy he

and then he sent down water from the from the skies and brought forth all of this provision for you janna

we made every living thing from water so all this provision comes out and you see like the dead earth brought back to life

it's amazing all the green that takes over and and so then allah says

[Music] don't set up anything

do not suppose anything to be like god don't set up idols besides god the nid

is alike it's it's the same as don't make something the same as god

and that's why the a man once said to the prophet either

allah don't don't make my mashiach it's a conjunction that indicates

they're the same so if you will then if god wills and you will so he was saying

no my will and god's will are two different things don't make me

a partner with god i don't have the meshia of god i have my own volition but it's not god's

mashiach so now what's important about this verse is the jumlah halia that

you do it knowingly when you know and this is this is why our tradition

and this there's a lot of about these issues but i'm inshallah giving you the the normative most common

belief that the prophet told us we should be with the majority of people be with the vast majority of believers

the belief is is that if people have not been given a message if they don't know then they're not taken to account for

what they do out of ignorance they have to have something

we will not punish people until we send a messenger now the martezra said the

rasool is that the messenger is the intellect and there is a maturity understanding

that the intellect does have some tech leave in it but generally

the the dominant opinion of both the two dominant schools the maturity and the

is that people are not punished until the message comes to them it's made clear to them and they reject it and so

this is a really important point because a lot and and i'll just say we'll get to this if we get to it inshallah there's

another verse in baqarah and and uh that

just indicates the previous dispensation dispensations but one of the things that's important to understand is that

imam al-ghazali wrote a book called which is a very important book and the

american scholar [Music] dr abdul hakeem

jackson translated into english it's it's called

the boundaries of tolerance i think in english so it's available in english but it's it's a very important

work that imam al-ghazadi wrote to to really define kufar

one of the things that he makes clear in there and he actually says that he can't say more about it because he had a kind of opening from a kish

about it one of the things he makes very clear is that the vast majority of people

you know we have to be very careful about condemning people because

there's so many variables in dealing with why people believe what they believe

and this is something even understood because he was a great sociologist he really understood

enculturation and how people are inculturated into their beliefs so it's very hard for people to give up the

beliefs that they grow up as children in fact the famous jesuit

the founder of the jesuit saint ignatius loyola he said if you give me the child before seven i'll have him on his

deathbed that was that was a understanding like if we can get them really early and indoctrinate them which

is why a lot of this horrible stuff that's happening now is happening through childhood

indoctrination because they know if we can get them young i mean just look at some of the children's books that are

being published because they know that they the a whole generation is going to die

off the dinosaurs the people that knew how life was before all this madness

and once they're gone nobody will know it'll be like reading old history right

so i mean my my grandfather told me

he witnessed the introduction of cars into san francisco as a 10 year old

which is quite amazing i mean and now we have

you know flights to the moon and people are have cell phones like dick tracy that

was all fantasy in the 1950s and 60s dictation had a little

watch where he could talk to people on it and now people do it all the time i mean i i knew that the end of

time was near when i went back after 10 years to mauritania there's a young bedouin boy

in the desert and he said to me hasta la vista baby and i just i knew that this was because

when i first went to mauritania they they didn't even some of them did not know where america

was they just vaguely heard of a place called i'm not making this up like people say i exoticized moritan i

know what i saw i know what was there it's very different now it's still

amazing but it's very different from what i saw i mean i saw a place that was relatively

untouched in fact i would argue entirely untouched by modernity pre-modern people

living with pre-modern understandings and to see that because i don't i don't there probably

still are a few places where you could find that i'm sure but it's very rare now everybody's been

tainted by modernity and post-modernity now so this so he mentions in there that

even if people get a distorted version of islam they're not rejecting islam they're rejecting a distorted version if

you look at how much propaganda has been done on western peoples about islam it's

first of all it's a thousand years of propaganda it's not just recent it's been going on for centuries

about how evil islam how evil the muslims are the cruel turk

right i mean turkish people are very it's amazing anybody that goes to turkey they're really struck by the the

goodness of the people they were they were very tough in war that's undeniable but as a people

they're they're actually very kind to animals they had all these alcohol for animal helping animals endowments and

things anybody that goes to turkey is struck by the general goodness of the people

um so

there's really really important verses about that so you know if you see somebody

who's worshipping idols you know just recognize that a lot of times it's just out of ignorance it's what they were

raised doing and really it's i would blame the muslims

more than anybody because we've just failed to to really bring tohey to people like

bring because we're the last people of tahite i mean we really have i i one of my professors when i was

doing undergraduate in religious studies he he was a christian but he's when he

taught the the different types of monotheism when he got to islam he said well now this is

radical monotheism like that's how he defined it radical monopoly in other words it

doesn't tolerate any association with god because you know in christianity you

have you have the mystery of the trinity in judaism there's quite a bit of

anthropomorphism in the tradition traditionally i mean i think rabbis would argue that but traditionally there's

there's quite a bit there's and there's been books written on that

now this is like a real question keva

how can you deny god there really should be an exclamation point there you know how can you deny

how can you deny god well kuntum awata you were dead

in other words you were la shay you were nothing like

like he brought you to life god and god gave you life you me to come and then he will cause

you to die he will then kill you and then bring you to life

[Music] then you'll be returned to god so

that's a really just it's so clear there's no commentary needed

no commentary needed [Music]

he made everything in the earth for you this is a proof that al-ashad iba

that the foundation of things there is a khilaf about that but the dominant opinion is that

everything is halal unless there's a proof that it's haram this is one of

them that proves for that

so god it is who created for you all that is on the earth then turn to the heights and estawa

means to direct one's attention even though we have to recognize that there's always going to

be some anthropomorphism in language when we speak about god we can't get away from it but we have to

understand that you cannot take it in a literal sense that god then turned his

attention to there's there's no time god is is in the eternal

he he is the eternal now a god is present there's no past present or future it's

always present so so there's no turning any direction

in that way but the mastawa is after so we're in a time-based

understanding so thumb is used and then i mean that it does mean that but it's

really about the chronological creation of how allah did it but allah

the reality is outside time and space we cannot place god within time or space

he's he doesn't take he doesn't occupy space because if he occupied space it would mean he would be limited

and if he was in time it would it would mean that there he had

there's a past and a future that there's change within god because

time is actually according to aristotle time is the measure of movement

and movement is change and so god doesn't change there's no change in god

so the seven heavens these are these are mystical concepts but there's

also we know now there's also the seven layers uh so

it could have multiple meanings and the thing about the quran is you can't limit the meanings there are there are

multiple possibilities in the quran and and god is completely aware of all

things now here we're entering into a very

interesting section uh because this is a foundational story

so this is really rooting our species in a cosmology like

how did we come about where did we come from and what are we doing here so these

are the big questions in in philosophy they say there's five big questions the the ontological the cosmological

the um uh eska know the ontological cosmological epistemological

uh satoriological and the eschatological so those are really big words for

basically saying you know what what what it what is this

where did it come from how do we know what should we do while we're here and

where are we going those are the five big questions and the beauty of religion

is that they answer all five scientists can't answer they'll attempt to answer maybe the

cosmological now but they don't still know where the big bang came from like okay you got to the big bang what

was before the big bank and if the laws preceded the big bang then

there was something before there was there was something

so uh so this is a really important

and when your lord said to the angels

i am placing a deputy on earth khalifa could be translated in different ways

deputy is certainly one of them because you put a kharifa in your place and that's essentially what a deputy when

you deputize somebody you're putting them standing like a deputy stands in place of the law they represent the law

it can mean steward it can mean also a successor and it can mean also

sometimes translated as vice gerund and vice regent so like a vice president somebody who's

when when the president's not there they they they fulfill that that role

in any case the khalifa here according to our udama

is adam ade so allah says i am placing a deputy on

earth

when allah tells the angels that i'm placing a deputy on earth they say will you put someone who will cause trouble

there he he uses trouble for facade you see so corruption is another translation

there are several translations but in any case and shed blood

and and while we sing your praise so there the wow is a again it's a had

this is you're doing this and we're in this hall of total obedience to you

so this is called it's not they're not

challenging god it's called sual estefan explain to us we know you're

hakeem we know you know all things explain to us why you're doing this now

there's different versions the ulama in the tafsirs

they say mentions this some some of the uluma

said that they were making ps the angels that they had seen the jinn

had been down on earth before and they had free will and they wreaked havoc and

iblis didn't get it under control and so when allah said he's placing another one

and they were like we just saw what happened to this like

you're going to do this again like they're trying to understand like is this all gonna happen again

and so and then and then they say you know they're they're gonna sow corruption and

they're gonna shed blood like the jinn did and then we're praising you like this

can explain this that's that they're asking for an explanation and this is a really good question

in fact uh according to a wonderful book written

by jeffrey lang even angels ask i mean it's a beautiful book but one of the things that he was

he was an atheist it's actually one of the best conversion stories that i know of because he was an atheist and when he

read the he had these arabs in his class he was a mathematician he was teaching the arabs

you know given the quran and and he was just thought this mythology

he was completely just uninterested so anyway he decided to read you know just

he said he got to this like it's right at the outset of the book and he was like this is my question

like the angel they're asking god he said that was my question like why would god create a world so he's already

preempting he's preempting god is preempting you

on the problem of evil because that's what all the atheists say how could god create a world that has all this evil in

it well god's gonna explain why so this is really a beautiful

refutation of the problem of evil it's like the angels wanted to know like it's

you're going to start this again all this evil why would you do that

so allah says i know what you don't know

now what's interesting is look now the very first usage of alamo

here that's the very first usage that allah is setting up in these coming eyes it's

quite stunning how many times the word is used here and yet it begins i know

and you don't know and that is the equation that that's it

god knows and everybody else doesn't know other than what god has taught them

and so there's a humility that's that we're being called to in this

animal

[Music]

is a beautiful word alima in arabic means to know but allama means to put an

imprint and it actually means to imprint in clay so in cuneiform the original

writing they were literally imprinting it into clay and so the alama is a sign

that you put into the clay those kuniforms so that those are the alamats

and so allama adama is to imprint give us this knowledge and this is why we

have these the potentiality for knowledge

in human beings is what's there allah has put that in us the potentiality is

there and it's going to be displayed by adam allama adam alasma

so adam was taught now adam in arabic some say it's from adeemur some say it's

from udmit

so it's that that he's created unlike the jinn

who are hidden creatures adam and his offspring are manifest

the other one is that he's created from top soil

and it's also utma is sumra so it's it's it's a dark tawny color so he he was

created from he was created from all the soil but if you look on the soil the vast majority of soil is dark and tawny

which is the majority of people on the planet the outliers are extremely dark and extremely light

so those are the outliers so there is soil that's white and there's soil that's pitch black but the majority of

people are somewhere in that spectrum of summer and and so that's why adam alayhim

he had all the recessive genes for white and for uh extremely dark but the

the the the he was he was of that dark tawny so it's more the middle types of

people on the earth that have these it's a dark color he was not white and he wasn't

extremely although hawa in arabic tends to mean very dark

so i mean we do know with genetics that that the lighter skin is recessive and so we

know that the first people were dark how dark and i mean that's all we'll

we'll know inshallah when we see our father and our mother inshallah

so so allah and ibn abbas said even the

name of kasa

is the wooden bowl and the milk is the ladle that you take out of so he was taught all the names now what is this

ability and this is where fakhrin al-razi to me is really one of the most interesting he of all

the mufasyron he had the most profoundly philosophical mind and he's been criticized for that

because he did but all the scholars

have really marveled at his tafsir but one of the things that he

says and this is extremely important to me because i it really understands what

we're here to do he said that what adam the ability that adam had

was to see the universal in the particular

of of the of of things what enables us to name

is to see the one in the many and that's what universes mean so one out of many like diversity you know you

have a lot diversity university is one out of many

and so the universal is the one from which all the others the

particulars are understood through it's the universal that so that ability

to make one is central to the human condition and that's why we're called

literally means to make one and and that's why taheed is making god want god is already one so what does it

mean to have tahit it means you are understanding god's oneness you in your own mind are understanding

the oneness of god and that's what tohit is so toheed is used constantly

the only reason we can communicate is because of the tahit the tohatic ability of the human mind the ability to see one

in many that's the only reason humans can communicate and that's why if we say if you say

camel why do we call a bacteria in camel and a dromedary why do we call them both

camels if you look at them one has the bacteria and has two humps

it's got that um tina turner hair style it's it's and then you have the uh you

know the dromedary has one hump like how is that possible

how is that possible because you are seeing the universal essence of that

thing you're seeing the one in the many and that's why you can look at a chihuahua and you can look at a great

dane and you can see the dogginess of those two things you can see the

universal in the many differentiations of god's creation you can say that's a flower

because you know what a flower is you can say that's a tree because you know what a

tree is now nominalists argue that that's just a trick of the mind this is kind of the kantian

category that the mind is simply playing a trick on you by that these aren't the

same and that's nominalism where i mean that's a radical nominalism where there's no there's nothing there's no

universals there's they don't even have a mental existence it's it's it's

if you get into islamic tradition you'll find that there

there were some differences is there a mental existence and is there actually what are called ayana thabita

which some of our scholars argued that there were actually these original source forms

that were shown to adam and that's where we get our knowledge from from those original source forms

and and and so this is a really really powerful and important

section for understanding our tradition

and the home there some of the ulama say it's because the that's

it's a pronoun for rational beings you you would say he or

or or or who for if it was uh but but because they're the rational

beings were in there also it's included in there so when you have you know

they all got up except for the donkey so that's called a um

so the home is the donkey's included in the pronoun of

anyway those are grammatical problems

[Music] so allah showed the names to all the angels

the musamayat and asma al-musamayat he showed them and he said tell me their names

if you're telling the truth

right i know what you don't know subhannaka that's tanziya that's for

just glory be to god transcendent as god above anything we can imagine

[Music] we have no knowledge there that

la nifidejins we have no knowledge except what you have taught us

you are the all-knowing the most knowing for you are most knowing most wise so al-alim is

hyperbolic form of and hakim is hyperbolic form of hakim so these are exaggerated forms to indicate

that immense you know all knowledge and all wisdom you have all knowledge you have all wisdom you are the most

more than any anything any one

so this is uh you know them admitting but look at the look at all the

allama

and then the imba which is a type of you know transmitting knowledge ambioni you

know let me hear you transmit the knowledge um and then

which is in kuntum because real knowledge is truthful and

so you know if you have knowledge then you're truthful if you're speaking knowledge because

knowledge corresponds with reality knowledge is not false knowledge is true

subhanallah

and then hikmah what's the purpose of knowledge is wisdom so look at all of that just in those few eyes it's really

quite stunning just how much is there

and then he said

adam tell them their names

and then when he told them their names god said did i not tell you i know the mysteries of the heavens and the

earth i know the unseen i know we're animal and again i know look at

that i know

i know what you disclose and what you've been concealing in other words i know

that they're going to sow corruption i know they're going to shed blood i know but i also know what you've been

concealing about them that there's going to be mbf from them there's going to be awliya from them

there's going to be uluma there's going to be righteous there's going to be salihun they're going to do good they're

going to and they'll do it unlike you purely out of free will

because you do it because i have programmed you to do it you can't

disobey me they have the ability just to disobey me and yes many of them will

but but many of them won't so it's really just um

stunning

see now okay as a toba for your bad opinion

as a toba for your bad opinion show them respect

in in in asian cultures in asian cultures they bow to show respect

you bow to your master like the sensei and and so in

the the sujood here is bowing according to most of our scholars so they actually were told to bow to do like a bow

of respect for adam with

so they all bowed down and and it's he's right to translate it bao because you could say prostrate but

bow is the correct transition i think so here again this is called is

so it's it's it's this is how the grammarians would interpret that for sahaja yogis like i

said they all got up except for the donkey so you can you can have something outside of um

so when it said we said to the angels to bow down well iblis was included in them

because he was among them he was honorary in that mella even though he was from the jinn kanam and el

jinni you know the quran says that he was from the jinn some you'll find these

in tafsir some of them say that he was transmogrified into a gin that he was originally an angel

and that he was given that free will and then he disobeyed and so he was you'll see these things i once was in a measure

this many many years ago this is like 40 years ago almost and

it was the majjis of sheikh muhammad mariki and sheikh muhammadan the mufasir was in the masjid and he

mentioned this ayah and then he said he really got upset and kind of really gave a strong

darts about nobody should say that anybody was from the angels he was from the jinn

shouldn't be any khilaf but there is weak but you know you have to acknowledge

these things so that's the normative opinion and the correct one of

course so he refused and showed arrogance

you know the beauty of arabic the cinta is is used in arabic it can be used for

for to seek something out so you you say like you stat limu like

to seek out information or it could be used for to deem uh yourself a stasi no like i

consider it very beautiful so it's used that it also means

it can be less aurora to become something so these are different ways

that that adif affects the noun in this case it's he

deemed himself great is so kabura means to be vast or great

right so these are all so

he refused about because he deemed himself too great to bow down and he actually said

like i should bow down for and he actually says like black clay so he actually uses that

word and that's why racism really is a demonic it's from iblis

we should really call it iblisism because he literally uses the word black

and smelly like he said it's black stinky clay like

i'm gonna bow down to black stinky clay and i'm made out of fire like i'm i'm

this high element you created me from fire and and you want me to

bow down to this black stinky clay so he's arrogant and so that really is

the beginning of what what modern people call racism it's arrogance and that's why the root problem is arrogance

racism is real arrogance that's what it is it's just it's arrogance in the heart if

anybody thinks they're better than another person they're arrogant it's as simple as that

and and the prophet sam said you will not enter paradise if you have even a mustard's weight of arrogance in

your heart so and that's why you know the sahabi that called bilal

even a soda which he obviously meant it as a negative term

you know akin to maybe using a derogatory slur against somebody um

when the prophet said he he didn't call him like you're a racist or he said

you still have jihadiya in you so he wants to treat him like

he's letting him know that's a jihadi statement he wasn't jahil because he was a

believer and he was a devout believer but he was saying yeah you still have something in you that you need to excise

and when he understood that he went and he he asked the man to put his foot on his his cheek he

literally went onto the ground and said put your foot on as a way of making toba like he humiliated humiliated himself

before that man as a way of making tawba to humble himself and that's why

adam was given the the the khalifa be the khilafah because he was humble

iblis see if you if you look at it please iblee says you let me astray

now when when when when adam was led astray by iblis he could have

very easily said the devil made me do it and a lot of people take that route

the devil made me do it so he could have said that but he didn't

he said we i oppressed myself we oppressed ourselves

we did it he took responsibility and that's the person that can be in charge the one

who's willing to say the buck stops here the one who's willing to say i'm responsible not to put the blame on

somebody else right napoleon famously said that

victory has a thousand fathers but failure is an orphan

you know nobody wants to take blame but if so and you know there's a great story

of um cervantes who wrote the famous it's considered the first novel in the west there is

actually a novel before that i think in japan but it's the first

novel uh in the west called don quixote it's very interesting

and it's heavily influenced by islam but don quijote

cervantes a spaniard living at the time when the muslims were being persecuted in spain

this is right during the inquisit height of inquisition and there's a lot of characters in his play that are in his novel that are

clearly hiding out from the inquisition they're muslims and he's he actually got he you know he's got this scene where he

puts on his little toupee and starts doing subaha and he has his little is

a very interesting story but anyway there's a great uh

event that happens in his life he was captured and [Music]

by um corsairs algerian and he was taken to algeria

and and he was put in prison well they tried to make an escape and so the uh

the the the warden of the prison he ordered them all to be punished and

cervantes came out and he said no no only punish me

he said you can give me all of their punishment because i was the one that instigated this

and he he knew immediately that he was a nobleman

just from that act because it was such a noble act and he was he was an aristocrat so he pulled him out he ended

up learning arabic he lived seven years he became the governor's secretary and he learned a lot about

islam which is why you find hadis all throughout cervantes and i discovered that i read

don quixote in spain many many years ago and could clearly see a lot of the muslim

influence it was one of my father's favorite books but there's recently been researchers that

have started to recognize the he actually says it was written by

ben hammett bengali you know mohammed bengali so he

attributes it to an arab the whole book that he's just the amanuensis in any case that was a little diversion

so uh and here really it's about ingratitude

which is the meaning of kuffar he was an angry he was of the ungrateful

because he's not a disbeliever in that way there's a masada masala the moafat masala there's a famous

masala in the almond about this because

this is the between the the ashaira and the maturity

because does was iblis always a kafir with god

right and that's the the masala it's it's how you come to god on the yom

qiyama that determines the reality and that's why i say you can say inshallah not out doubting your iman but

not knowing your hatimah so you're you're you're you're not you're admitting that i don't know my

hating i'm hoping that i'll die a believer but there are people that the prophet isaiah

said they lived their whole life a cafe and then right before they they they

become a believer and there's other people they live their whole lives

[Music]

and we said adam live in the garden you and your wife and eat of it comfortably as you wish but do not go near to this

tree for you will become abusive tyrants vladimir meaning you will become

basically your your lower self will

that it'll be tyrannical over your higher self so

this is now adam is in jannah he's he has his mate

she's not mentioned the only woman that's mentioned in the quran is maryam

all the other women are mentioned like this and the reason for that is

because in arab tradition you do not mention

the wives of other people in a or major gathering it would

it would be considered a naive i mean modern arabs now do it because they've lost these kind of formalities but

traditionally it would have be a huge idea to mention that but and so

a man can mention his wife but not so this is like an adab

a a type of adeb but it's a distinction of maryam because she is amateur law

so it's her makam that she's the only woman named in the in the quran is that

she has that maqaam with allah subhanahu ta'ala it's as if he's saying she's mine

and and it's it's her makam is so high ale hasanah

so

you know comfortably you're going to have all you need to

so there's always these are always the the caveats in in life you always have

this you can do uh whatever you want but don't do that don't open the box

it's like there was um had a his wife who he loved zainab

and uh he he was the adan had gone off he he there was a

there was a a a a scorpion in the room and so he put a

bowl on it he was going to deal with it afterwards because the on went off and he just said zainab

don't don't lift the bowl so she goes in of course you know the moritan says

she got curious she goes in she lifts the bowl she got stung by the

so shure comes back he sees his poor wife she's got stung by the scorpion

and he looks at her and he says

he said i've seen some men they strike their wives may my hand be paralyzed if i ever lifted

against zainab because she was a good woman a beautiful story

so uh but that's the thing you the temptation is always there now there's a difference of opinion

because we know the prophets cannot disobey they don't disobey openly some of the

ulamas say that the alif lam there is for ahad in other words it was specifically that that that

that he thought that it was specifically that tree but not the fruit

whereas it was actually for the estebarak it was for all those types of trees so that's some of them say that

you know there's different opinions about this some say the nehe was tenzi that it was it was makru

it wasn't so you're going to get different opinions of trying to get out of this

problem allah but

what is the tree now in the in the christian tradition they always use the apple even though

the apple's not mentioned in the bible in our tradition the majority said it was wheat

and in fact imam nasifi says that some of them say

like how could man not disobey his lord when his main staple is from the tree of

disobedience because we eating wheat some say it's the karma

which i was thinking is interesting if indian you know that word is from karma because they say they use that word

karma you know like the vine like is that where all the karma began

it was from the karma hello adam so anyway those are those funny

like phony etymologies that people find

so he was told you you you you'll oppress yourselves

[Music] but then the obsessor he uses that term because wasa is a type

obsessive compulsive thoughts that iblis uses he gets people to use these terms so

made them both slip and fall from there and azella means zelda is to slip and

then obviously it can cause a fall

because he convinced them to he tells them in another ayah

another chapter he tells them can i tell you this tree of eternity

and a dominion that never ends so he tricks them

and they and they eat from the tree the quran doesn't put the onus on the woman you

find that in the bible um i mean it's not it just clearly says

they both um ended up you know they both ate from the

tree and that's what happened so uh

so some say because the the devil was regime

that he actually was at the gate of paradise when he called them

and then there's also a that says that he he went into the femme the mouth of a serpent and that's how he got in

was the haze and didn't see the serpent so it wasn't that he was a serpent but that

that was the vehicle that he used to get into jannah allah

these are all you know in the end we only know what's sound

which is in either the mutawatar quran or in the sahih hadith but you stand you statin

they're mentioned in the tough series for a reason

go down descend let you all descend

[Music] so some of you this is a heart it's a description of our state

so go down you're now you're in the world of you were in paradise now you're in the world

of free will and appetites and so this is tabari with adi this is the badukum

uh that means some of them say it means the humans fighting one another and then iblis also

and others say it's iblis is our enemy and he's really the source of all the problems

but ramadan is a proof that you know there's more here working than iblis

and and and there you will be be there and there will be housing and food for you so you have this musta in the earth

on earth for a while um so you have a residence

and you have matat you have what you need you know food and provision really provision

then adam received instruction from his lord and god relented toward him for god is most relenting

most merciful

so we said let all of you descend from there so in the commentaries they say

here it's adam hawa and then iblis but if guidance

does indeed come to you from me then whoever follows my guidance will have nothing to fear in other words you won't

fear this the future and you won't have sorrow for the past so that's why health and husband are

used often in the quran and the hadith because one is fear of makru in the

future some harm and the other is hazan of what's passed

and as for those who ungratefully repudiate our signs and that's a beautiful translation of kafaru

because it's it's getting both meanings ungratefully repudiate

he's he's really getting both meanings of ingratitude but also repudiation the fact that you're rejecting

so it's it's really a nice i don't know if that's his or if there are other people that that use that but he he

dr clear actually had many creative uh solutions to the problem of translation

of these words and um bruce lawrence acknowledges that and and

so does uh actually thought that he said it could potentially become an

important translation like he recognized that there were some really interesting aspects to it

um and accuse them of falsity and they are the company of the fire of habanar

companions of the fire company of they are the ones who will stay in home feed

how much time oh okay you know uh just before i end uh

i just want to say please um support the college

you know we have lots of plans but we can't implement the plans without your help

we're really almost done with a just a phenomenal

studio so we're going to be able to be providing you world-class inshallah that's our hope anyway no claims but

really we're going to aspire to really producing world-class

materials um for online learning different subjects

have provided you know interviews have have doing lots of plans for that

the college is growing we need your help to grow further this has

been a labor of love for a lot of people i know we've had an immense amount of support

out there but we really need continued support i know it's difficult times for a lot of people also but

it's in difficult times that it's it's good to do what you can it's always good to do what you can because

allah is our lord in difficult times and in easy times

and with hardship comes east occurs on one night how can we understand this in life the fact that people begin fasting on different days

well stay up for all ten i mean that's the lesson in that

because it definitely is one night i mean obviously allah can do whatever he wants

he can give you the reward for your nia you know that's up to god to do

that i i don't know but there is one night in the last 10 nights

it could be any of the 10 nights but traditionally it was because of the hadith to look for it in the in the odd

nights tonight is an odd night for some of us and it's an even night for others

i would say that's all the more reason to just try to benefit from all the last 10 nights

why is polytheism and unforgivable sin in islam

that's a good question i think what's important to remember again

that the um who allah forgives and who he

doesn't is entirely up to allah wa ta'ala and allah does say

that that on you like he does not forgive that he is

associated with um and like i said earlier

it's clearly stated

so it's a very um arrogant thing to

associate with your lord who's given you everything

in terms of allah being infinitely merciful this was it's a problem in in qaram and you you

do see different attempts at solving this ibn utamian there's people that argue that

he didn't say this but it's very clear that he did argue for what's called

that the fire eventually is extinguished um even onoby's solution to it was

that eventually the fire actually they become nadiyun like they're just people

of the fire and so they actually they still have the ad that but it's like a masochistic

um there's people and it's very interesting we have these people on earth that enjoy being

punished i mean that's a very interesting phenomenon like people pay people to whip them

you know or do these funny things so and then uh

you know so and then also there are hadith about

that allah continues to take people out of the fire as long as they had even a mustard weight of of

iman in them so we don't know

i'm not i believe in the quran i believe whatever allah said

i don't have any problems with whatever allah wants to do because it's his world

he created it i imam ali said oh allah you are the way

i love so make me the way you love and i i think one of the things that

there's a kind of arrogance that that we i don't know that we kind of assume that god should be a certain way or like we

don't like things about god i mean i whatever i have never had a problem with sharia

i just don't have problem with sharia i actually really understand property laws

like i really i do understand why you have to have mercy as well and

and you don't implement hud punishments when people are in very dire straits but

i think if if some of the shariat laws were applied you you'd see behavior really get a lot

better pretty quickly you know there's a reason because

you have in these laws of retribution life because life becomes very difficult when

laws break down and people don't obey the laws and it just becomes dog eat dog and people just take over so

ring structures in the quran have all been discussed in the last two decades where they discussed classically not

that i know of there's there's some interesting studies and ring structures you find ring structures in

a lot of ancient literature so it's it's not unique uh to the quran although

the um cuper's book is a very interesting book

and and i think also farin who's in kuwait i think he did his work

at uh uc berkeley but he's he's done some very interesting work on that and showing that the types of

ring structures are they couldn't have been worked out like as a kind of pre-planned the way the

quran was revealed you couldn't have put it together like that so there are some very interesting

things i don't know enough about it to have an opinion though

any other questions

what are the names that allah taught adam what the prophet well i mentioned what ibn abbas said he said it was all

the names which there's amongst our ulama but i think it's an argument

you know that he taught the the language is tokifiya so the original language and there's a

khilaf about what it was some say it was arabic some say it was

a type of siryania imam says woman

little babies when they babble they're actually speaking the first language

because they're talking to the angels well adam i don't know but um

so the names were like he named things he gave everything a name

can you please explain ayah there's no compulsion in religion it's pretty self-explanatory that one

deen you shouldn't force people into a religion

because they just create monafie you just create hypocrites

people sh the prophet isaiah didn't compel people the people entered islam freely i mean

obviously there are the laws and some people find those

confusing in light of deen

there's written on this of late and and it's it's something that i think modern

muslims are are grappling with in the modern world but i think that is not an abrogated it's a very

late verse it's not abrogated and i think we should take it at face value

it's a it's a it's the we're the only world religion that has that principle

no other world religion has that we're the only one that that made that statement

so uh and and we should just honor people you know this is an age of fardenia it's

an age of individualism um in the past you know the apostasy laws

were to protect the believers that was the purpose of them and most people were happy to see them implemented even

though they were rarely in in a muslim history rarely were there any read the laws implemented that's simply a fact

many many heretics lived to ripe old ages i mean there are periods where you

have these things in fact the blasphemy when you have the martyrs of cordoba which were christians that

were really distraught at how many christians were becoming muslim that they started going into mosques and

and cursing the religion and doing things to become martyrs like they actually wanted to be martyred and the

cadet would find all these excuses not to to do it like they were crazy and

muslims did not like to implement capital punishment

i'm not going to say it was all rosie and kumbaya because it wasn't there's a lot

of horrors in islamic history and just like all human history but

overall i think it was certainly a lot better than anywhere else on the planet i think if

if you had a choice to live anywhere in the world a thousand years ago most people would choose in the muslim world if they if

they could see the world as it's as it was they would have chosen the muslim world so we've fallen on hard times but

the religion hasn't you know muslims have but the religion's the same same truths

that's it [Music]

strong we've had a really good uh response to that in the last few months and i really appreciate that and the

whole college on behalf of the whole college just really thank all of you for your support but i do hope that you'll

think about giving a donation in these last 10 days to zaytuna even if you've already given one maybe just just a small one for the

reward of doing that something extra but

you

Part 5

 

[Music]

a

[Music] ramadan invites us back to the book of

allah scholars and sages of the past would devote this month of revelation to the

quran marveling over its endless delights and wonders in the spirit of this tradition

president hamza yusuf invites the 12 000 strong community to the first command

book club named for the quranic command read the first verse revealed to the prophet

muhammad upon him be god's blessings and peace this unique book club takes devoted readers on a literary journey to

the great books of past and present join us this ramadan to study the

greatest of all books the quran we will read a daily segment of our berry's translation

and engage in weekly discussions with president youssef where he will guide us through the linguistic miracles and

timeless wisdom of god's speech join twelve thousand strong and our community of learning today

[Music]

[Music] many of us remember what it was like to

be a student it's a time when the mind and heart open to new ideas

and we marvel at new discoveries [Music] what is it like to be a student at

cetuna college you walk through a campus that seems hidden from the world

an oasis of natural beauty you learn with teachers who nurture both the heart

and mind [Music] you come together and study and worship

breaking bread with kindred spirits and enjoying the fruits of the zaytoon

garden zaituna is different it's a special place

it merges the best of the east and west and prepares young minds for what's ahead

they'll be ready to greet the world with tools for any field of study without the burden of debt

this is your gift and it is transformational when you give to the tuna college you

help revive an intellectual legacy and a tradition of spiritual excellence

most importantly you remember the glorious promise from our creator

those who give of their wealth and the way of god are like grain that sprouts seven ears with a hundred kernels in

each year and god gives manifold increase to whom he will and he is all embracing all knowing

[Music] many of us remember what it was like to

be a student it's a time when the mind and heart open to new ideas

and we marvel at new discoveries [Music] what is it like to be a student at

cetuna college you walk through a campus that seems hidden from the world

an oasis of natural beauty learn with teachers who nurture both the

heart and mind [Music]

you come together and study and worship breaking bread with kindred spirits

and enjoying the fruits of the zatuna garden zaituna is different

it's a special place it merges the best of the east and west and prepares young minds for what's

ahead they'll be ready to greet the world with tools for any field of study without the

burden of debt this is your gift and it is transformational

when you give to the tuna college you help revive an intellectual legacy and a tradition of spiritual excellence

most importantly you remember the glorious promise from our creator

those who give of their wealth and the way of god are like grain that sprouts seven ears with a hundred kernels in

each ear and god gives manifold increase to whom he will and he is all-embracing all-knowing

[Music]

for most of you it's the 27th uh for some of you where it'll be the 27th

tonight inshallah allah subhanahu wa ta'ala accept all of your prayers and our prayers and

allah

the last segment of the jewels i wanted to just

present a little project one of the things about

my commitment to this dean has always been the it that i saw in islam especially in the

early community the the muslims

really mastered life on earth they mastered all the sciences but they also

mastered the art of living just living really beautifully

san was so central to the entire islamic civilizational project so

everything was done with the sun there are a few areas where it's remained in our tradition surprisingly

one of them is the quran itself one of the most fascinating things to me is that

i have a lot of arabic books that i've purchased and i'm always struck by how many mistakes there are in modern arabic

publishing about a hundred years ago the bulacria and the other

publishing houses the halobi publishing house there were several of these publishing houses also the

hydera in fast they're actually error free generally i mean very very

rarely you find an error in the because the uluma were the ones that were doing it they were publishing the books but today

the books are filled with mistakes largely because there's it's just commerce

but the quran is produced consistently without mistakes and that is a real miracle of the quran itself also

calligraphy there's still really some great calligraphers turkey still has many great calligraphers the great

sheikh chellabi who i was fortunate to meet him he's the chef of the

great american calligrapher mohammed zakiriya who studied with him and also aisha

holland who was a student of mohammed zakiriyah so this tradition of really a

commitment to essan in in that but if you look at the architecture the modern muslim

architecture it pales in comparison to the great architecture of the past the schools are almost like prisons

just really ugly whereas the traditionally the muslims built the most beautiful schools in the world nobody

has schools like the early muslims if you go to fess it's filled with these great matrasas that are museums that

people go and literally just gaze in awe at the structure so one of the things

that i i really want to do with say tuna is just make it a just a place that

people want to visit for the sheer beauty of it and we we have in uh

in in our tradition this beautiful hadith allah is beautiful and he loves beauty

and that's why muslims dressed beautifully they spoke beautifully they were committed to beautiful language

poetry just excellence in everything and

i think this is something we really have to reestablish because people by fitra are attracted to beauty there it's just

a fitra aspect and one of the hallmarks of modern society is the the attraction to

ugliness and this is because people are so divorced from their fit so clothes have become ugly buildings have become

ugly schools have become ugly there's so much ugliness in the modern world that it's quite stunning

uh when when you're accustomed to beauty it's just so stark

so in san francisco there's a famous place they call the japanese tea garden if you go there it's it's very beautiful

but it celebrates japanese culture uh japanese culture is famous for

this commitment to and when i was in japan i was so

amazed by the commitment to ehsan that's still there they they do everything with

and even in the western things that they master they master it with essen some of the greatest classical musicians alive

today are japanese musicians many of the great conservatories of america are

filled with asian students both chinese and japanese but the japanese have this incredible commitment to sn but also to

cultivation cultivation of the spirit uh even the warrior the traditional

bushido culture but cultivation of gardens the tea ceremony for anybody who has

ever witnessed a tea ceremony it's really quite beautiful the dress the traditional japanese dress which you

still see especially in places like kyoto so it's really just it's a stunning

civilization that i was just amazed at and they would i just felt like islam

they would bring so much to islam and they would gain so much from islam because

they they really have so many qualities the the cleanliness is amazing

but this is the japanese tea gardens people walk through it and just enjoy the sheer beauty of the place and then

uh we come to zaituna so we have the blessing of the barakat garden which

we've only started this is just the beginning but it's going to be something really stunning and barakat is a

beautiful word because it's about blessings this was from a really great palestinian

farmer adul barakat who who was a philanthropist and a very

successful businessman and many other things but here he's opening the garden for us so he actually donated

these are i think members of his family so it's

the son of palestine for his leadership in business philanthropy and moral guidance

so we only donations we do not uh

put money people's money into things unless they've given us permission to use it for this

that or the other so in terms of the garden all the donations are specified for this

the people that are committed to this project but we're actually producing fruit and vegetables

we have an incredible piece of property it's probably one of the finest pieces of property in the bay

area and it's on the top of holy hill which is quite amazing so it already had beautiful gardens

they've just fallen on on bad times but we have a whole plan to renovate these

gardens so this is an example here we've had a really brilliant persian architect

who designed this for us i was inspired by the alhambra i used to

give tours at the alhambra palace when i lived in granada i was studying with the moritanis i used to go up there and give

unofficial tours until they actually kicked me out because people would join my tours from the official tours and and

uh they they got upset but uh because they would tell lies on the official tours they would literally

just make up these horrible things but the alhambra this is an example just

of muslim beauty the alhambra palace there is a

very strong argument that actually a large portion of it was a matrasa it was actually a college

a lot of people don't know that so and it's designed like a traditional

madrasa so this is zetuna this is how it looks today but

we really have plans just to make it something really stunning sofia hall

this is how it looks again beautiful we have just these

beautiful gardens so my hope is that we create something where people

will visit it so when they come to the bay area they'll want to go to the zatuna gardens

like the japanese tea gardens and then they can learn about our religion we can educate people

um about so this this is uh you know i think a really really good and then

obviously always in america you have the monetization of things so you have a

bookstore a a tea thing so at the japanese tea gardens you

end it with a tea and then it's overpriced tea usually

but also have you know a bookstore because books are so important to our civilization so i hope you know some

people are inspired by that by that vision so now we go back to dr cleary's the essential quran alhamdulillah we

reached to um [Music]

do not obscure truth by falsehood or knowingly conceal the truth obviously the verses that were perceived this are

two bani and so the argument was that don't conceal what you know about this

messenger that the prophet saw sentiment is is uh is foretold in your book so we

know that the prophet sam was foretold he is

in arabic shiloh in uh in genesis in 49 10 when

jacob is telling his sons he had 12 sons and he's telling his sons that the scepter will not go from judah in in

other words from the jewish tradition uh to

anyone else until shiloh comes and shiloh in hebrew there's a

difference of opinion about what it means some say it means the peaceful one others say it means a gift a divine gift

like that's one of the names of our prophet isaiah the merciful gift but it also

means the one who it is it belongs to and the prophet on the sh

shiloh is the one who on the yom kiyama says it belongs to me it's mine and so and

then also we have in deuteronomy 18 we also have in isaiah

there are several arguably um

also in the song of solomon there are several references to our prophet sam some people say why isn't it clear

why is it done like this and

part of these things are just about iman and

i think for me it is clear like when i looked at it and really studied it it seemed very clear to me um

obviously there's confirmation bias that i'm not um you know

immune to that but it really did seem very clear to me so well

be constant in prayer and give charity this is constant theme in the quran prayer and charity prayer and charity

the zakat is the obligatory charity there's also other types of charities

this is uh it's a it's a type of figurative speech in other words you know

using part of something like to represent the whole of something

do you do do you command people to be just he's

translating as just here and there is i think one of the meanings of probity or

righteousness and to be just as to be righteous in fact justice in latin

means it comes from jews which is law but it also means right and so doing what is

right do you command people to do what's right because it's appropriate in this verse

to that it really is about are you telling people to be one way and then you're not so you're telling them to be

righteous but you're not being righteous so i think it's a what i've realized in studying his

translation is that he really finds the most what the french call him

the real perfect word for any of the given situations and

it's it's actually quite stunning what he's done uh in in many of his word choices so

watan sauna and then you forget yourselves even though you read the book

now won't you reason won't you understand won't you use your intellects

so now allah gives the treatment so after defining the illness he gives

the treatment was allah you know seek help with patience

and prayer some of the mufasa and say here is fasting so it actually means

it's really holding the heart together on things that will unsettle the heart so patience

is like shahawat

and and things like that the appetites so patience is really important

so in prayer is very important and the is an inward state

um one of the salaf and this mentioned in the tafsir

one of the salaf was at a monastery and he was one of the monks he asked him if

there was a place a bokata a pure place where he could pray and he said the monk said to him

purify your heart and then pray wherever you want and

he said that like i felt shame

because there's a lot of truth to that if you have in your prayer then you have everything you need

in fact the monarchy opinion in in monarchy fifth books on this is there has to be at

least a moment of in the prayer even just one moment but you can't let the prayer go in a total

state of heedlessness

so these are people who consider that they will meet their lord

and that they will return to god so again this is consistent with his

practice of not using the male pronoun as a referent

so he he's using names of god

uh

and beware of a day when no soul can recom can compensate for another soul at all

this is the at the outset of the piano and this is why when when

the quran states that when the trumpet is blasted there's no la and sababen you know there's no

relationships that's at the outset but there is a point where allah gives permission for

shafa'a so at this stage there's no shafa'a and

that's why this has been misunderstood so some of the sects have misunderstood because

[Music] do you believe in some of the book and reject other parts of the book so this

is true there's no shaft at this stage but then

no one will intercede except without him so once god gives permission then

there's intercession at that point

so adiron here normally means justice but in this case it means ransom so adaline in the quran

has five different meanings but this is one of them and so this is why if you don't have commentary

you can often get lost in the in the quran because

so it can it can mean insof to be uh in the moro

there actually generally it means kirimata tohit so it can also mean shahada of tahit

be fair in your judgments be just it can mean

like the the value of something it can also mean um

ransom as in this case but other can also be shirk so

so because to make it like it so to make god like

make something like god so these are all meanings and and most of the major terms

in the quran have this uh difficulty that they can mean very different things in the context

this is a famous verse verse 62 and also it's repeated three times in the quran a similar iteration

was

[Music]

jews christians or sabians those who believe in god in the last day and who

do good have their reward with their lord they have nothing to fear and they will not sorrow so

whether they're muslim or hadoo from yahudah that was one of the

names of one of the sons and so uh

yahood in in arabic they're called yahood or so those who

uh who are jews and then nasara there's a khiraf about

some of the ulama say it's from nazareth so they were called the nazarenes the nasara from nassaran

and then sabine dr cleary actually has a very interesting

i really like this here so he said in verse

256 of the same chapter there's no compulsion in religion it is not certain

exactly who these sabians were pen rice it was one of the orientalists that did a

dictionary says they consider themselves followers of the prophet noah as islam spread over the globe after the

passing of the prophet muhammad sallallahu alaihi salam the term sabian seems to have been understood depending on the time and situation to include

other great eastern religions like zoroastrianism and buddhism the primary verb from the

root sabaa means to rise as of a star hence some of them said they were worshipped the stars

but here i mean they couldn't worship the stars if they're amongst people

so using the sense of the root as referring to rising stars the name and the image

of revering celestial bodies might also figuratively represent

followers of remote lights of revelation so these are

the remote lights of revelation that were more distant from the early community of islam

than where judaism and christianity so you know muslims tend not there are in

our history many muslim sages that really understood hinduism to be

a a divinely revealed religion we can't say that for any certainty it's not

it's not possible unless the quran or the clearly states that but the great dara

shuru the the great scholar

and prince he was the son of shah

jahan who built the famous taj mahal incredibly pious person but devout

devout committed to

just finding the truth and he wrote an amazing book called mashmal bahrain in the meeting of the two oceans he

actually learned sanskrit he knew he read the the torah the

new testament the hindu scripture all in the original languages he's a

brilliant man but he um

in his own right he was given a mantle by his sheikh who was a kashmiri and he actually said he went to the paradise of

kashmir to learn these these realities he so he wrote a book on

the shepahat of the of the oliya he wrote biographies of the saints but

he he actually translated it's the first translation of the of the upanishads

into persian and so it was a really really momentous event that he did this

and from that came the first translation into french so it was translated from translation into french and then it came

into english but he was convinced that the um

that the hindu religion was a religion of toheid and that the common people misunderstood so what you see in the

kind of common expressions is just like you see in some of the muslim lands where you have ignorant muslims

you know tying things onto tombs and doing things you always find ignorance amongst uneducated peoples but aloha

adam who the sabians are

those who believe in god in the last day those are the real two fundamental things believing in god in the last day

there's a hadith in a bukhari that even if there's a mustard weight of belief in

god that people are going to get out of hell eventually so who do good and have

their reward with their lord they have nothing to fear hof and husan are

are put together because hope is fear of something in the future housing grief is

over things that happened in the past so these are people that are live in the present and this is the they say

that the the the sage the the person uh this of this um

commitment to reality is somebody who lives in the present they're not in the past or the

future this begins really with bani israel and

dr cleary removed that i think because he wanted to focus and he actually mentions that he he he

uh he mentions in his uh in his commentary that this verse of which i have only translated

part contains a beautiful summary of a believer's relationship to god and

humankind and i think it's really important uh because i think the reason

why he omitted is because again these many of these verses are speaking to benny is

and and looking at kind of the the view of that they had they were remiss in in

practicing what they were told to practice and that's how the verse ends but this middle section so this is what

bani is commanded and we this is a so

so it's a beautiful summary of what he said of your relationship with god and then your relationship with humankind in fact

ibrahimovic says that this is the summation really of

the the prophetic uh message because he said it has uh an action that is hospital

it's specific to the heart and that's tohit and then it has an action which is cross to the body the specific to the

body which is the physical prayer the movement of the prayer salah because that's the comma of the

prayer is a physical thing and then it has it's it's got something specific to

wealth so it's got the heart to heed the body prayer the wealth

your zakat and then the general ruling which is

towards allah's creation and then he puts it in the order that it's appropriate so the first is walid

because of their huck your parents their right is so great and then your relatives and he says

so those people that are related to you first and foremost uh that have blood ties with you and then with religious

ties and then waliyatama because they're the orphans are the the weakest people there's nobody

weaker than an orphan if if you think about it because these are children

children that do not have parents and who cares more about a child than the mother and the father so a fatherless

child is the weakest and that's why immediately after you know your blood ponds the orphan

itself taking care of the orphan and also the widow many many examples of that

because they also are at the end of life like the children at the start of their

life they don't have their caretaker very often there are widows at the end of their life that don't have the

caretaker the husband that was looking after them and then the mesakin

the weak amongst us is not to the people over you they're the ones that give hassan to you so it's looking at those

below you this is where your son is and then how do you treat all of humanity

i mean this is a the the power of these verses really are

they're just so stunning in their perfection really and and this is this is what's so

extraordinary about the quran is that you can look at it superficially but when you actually go into it and see the

arrangement and then

that's the general relationship with him just just how many problems result from people not

speaking kindly we recently had this poor boxer get in a fight on an airplane because

somebody was just wouldn't stop unrelenting you know and

or we had uh you know a a slap that was heard around the world

because somebody made a joke about somebody's uh bald wife you know that was a fa i mean just

you know how many problems would be eliminated just by implementing and all of humanity and lin nasi

speak beautifully to people speak speak nicely to people just being nice it's

not that difficult but there's just so many angry people out there

and partly because people haven't weren't speaking nicely to them

right i mean that a lot of it is just the abuse when they were young being told horrible things being bullied

all these things and then what he was like i'm really stunning

and when we took your promise that you should not shed blood of your own and would not drive your own from their

homes and then you confirmed again this is bani israel as you yourselves bear witness

so this came because in in medina in medina when the prosaicer moved to medina and

remember the the medaneese people they were agricultural people and

commerce people the jews had the commerce so the jews controlled the marketplace and then the the elves and

the khazraj they had date farms mostly so this is but the jews were merchants they were

they were buying and selling the the beni porreira had a they were the uh

hula fa the allies of al-aos and benin with al-khazraj so

they were even though they were both from benica they're from the same yemeni tribe

and beautiful people also even before islam there's a famous story because they knew

the last prophet was coming there so they always treated people they were famous for their hospitality

because they they believed that there was this last prophet that was going to come and in fact there was about a

hundred years before the prophet isaiah arrived um they were attacked

uh by uh the city was actually and at night they would send food out to

the to their enemies and the the the chieftain who was leading this

assault on medina was so struck by that he didn't understand and then they explained to him

that they had heard that this last prophet would come and they should honor them and this is

why they've the ansar were always famous for this for honoring people so what would happen

is because it was like that you know allah but you know we have in our

tradition with this famous feud for people from this country that know about this the hatfields and the mccoys and

they were actually related so there's this these things that happen and they usually happen over ridiculous things

but you have these uh these fights that occur between people so they had this famous day yom

which they used to say poetry and then it would rile them up they'd get in fights

again but the jews would actually fight with them and what they would do so that

would that because they wanted the else to win they would fight against uh the benin

aldir so the benigoreda would fight against their own co-religionists and they would actually destroy their homes

they would kick them out of their homes they would take their wealth but but here's the odd thing when they were captured

by the house they would actually ransom them so they would pay the ransom

and the elves couldn't figure that out this is like you're you're fighting against them and then you're paying your rent well the torah tells us that we

have to do that because there are co-religionists and so they the owls thought it was crazy that like

on the one hand you're fighting and then on the other hand you're ransoming them so this is why it says

you admitted that it was prohibited for you to fight your co-religion so they told them that and then they asked them well then why are you fighting them and

he said we don't want our allies to be humiliated so it was purely out of pride

that they were going against their uh religion

says you're killed your own people but it's actually the way it said is you kill yourself but it means killed your

own people it's a proper translation but the way it's said in arabic gets lost in here you kill but then you yourselves

killed yourselves and this is because when you kill

your own people it's like killing yourselves and even when you kill anybody unjustly

it's like you killed all of humanity so this is really important

so and drove out of their assisting efforts against them with iniquity and enmity

so

so we gave moses the books and the book is the the pentaton the torah

which has the five books of the genesis exodus deuteronomy

numbers in leviticus so those are the five books of the old testament

and caused the messengers to follow after them so there's a whole succession of prophets

and then we gave clear proofs to jesus son of mary and one of the things that was very

interesting in arabic normally you omit the alef so isa it would normally be written bin

maryam not ibn even though the the aleph isn't pronounced here

but what's really interesting is this makes so it says jesus

but it's like it's a second name so it's like jesus but also the son of mary so

it's it's really letting you know the maqaam of mary and mary's macam after

the prophet sam there's nobody that's blessed more on this planet than mary

i mean no billions of blessings go to mary i mean the the catholics

have a devotional practice to hail mary the ave maria it's a very famous

classical piece hail mary so so uh the um

he is the son of mary and he was given these bayonets so

amongst the beginner first of all she she was impregnated by an angel

so and these are the four the quadra of god is displayed in

these aspects so adam has no no father or mother

has a father no mother isa has a mother no father and everybody else has a father and a mother so the

quadra of allah is displayed completely in in our creation

the um the bailly nuts are many so one she only she was only pregnant for an hour so it

was a very quick uh and then she um

when he came out of the womb he he was speaking and in fact when kash

this is in the talmud by the way so this is not this this was said to mary according to

their own uh and if you read jesus in the talmud which was printed by princeton

university press there's a whole section about this that this is the soundest opinion even though later

there were attempts to say oh we're that wasn't talking about jesus it's talking about somebody else but there's a claim

in the talmud that jesus was the son of panthera who was a roman

centurion and that that stuffed allah that that his mother was was a prostitute and

that's why it says in the quran your mother was not a prostitute so the jews said to her you

are a prostitute and but mary then she just said you know the child and the child spoke

it was so intense that they all left except for zechariah he was the only one that could take it when the child would

speak because it was a newborn child and it spoke and so that was one of the big unite and

then also ibrah al-aqma right the that he he

ibrahim he healed the blind and blind was not like cataract

in arabic is blind from birth so the akma is the

one blind from birth so there's no sight there's i mean these are these are problems with the uh

the actual nerve so the optical nerve so they can't see whereas other types of blindness can be

cured um so that would be less miraculous than the akma right and then and then the abrasive is

the one who has like um these diseases of the skin like leprosy and vitiligo

and other types of i mean about us can be used for different things but it's leprosy is one of the meanings so he was

given these clear proofs and and then he knew what they had in their homes

in in their what can you do like what they had in their homes he also

raised lazarus from the dead i mean that's and that was witnessed by many many

people he expelled the demons from possessed people many many nights

and we strengthen him with the holy spirit so we believe in the holy spirit and that's a pretty literal translation

spirit that is holy they say it's

the holy spirit the sanctified spirit so um the holy ghost or the holy spirit

in in traditional orthodox and catholic and then later protestant iterations

they believe that this is one of the what what in arabic is called the

hypostasis so these are these are like parts of the godhead uh the the persona of the godhead the

three persona uh we don't believe that we believe that the holy spirit although we believe in

the holy spirit the holy spirit we believe is actually the angel it's the the head angel of all the angels

um so gabriel and that's why the prophet saw i said when hassan abu nuthabbit was

reciting his poetry he said may the holy spirit you know strengthen

you in that and people can have that the angelic spirit strengthen them in

their in their um

are you not haughty and arrogant whenever a messenger comes to you right

so whenever you don't like what he comes yourselves don't desire it so then you get arrogant

so some of you branded liars like jesus they they actually called him they didn't believe him they didn't

believe his message they called him a magician and other things

and then others you killed like yahya i mean he was actually killed zakaria according to our tradition

[Music] wretched is that for which they have sold themselves and here estero most of

them will facilitate it means this again arabic you have to be very careful with

the arabic in the quran because ashtara usually means to to ba to to purchase but here it

actually means to sell that they should reject what god has sent down them in arrogant jealousy

so there's a kind of there's a jealousy here you know that

that that why is it coming to them why didn't it

come to us and if you look you know this began if

you look at these verses it's it's you know allah says

remember my blessing that i have blessed you with so the nema there

the bani is being told to remember the nema as a way to direct them to the muni

so one of the things that the people of allah say is

the slaves of blessings are many but the slaves of the blesser of blessings are few

so the the nema here they're reminded you know that allah

gave them all these blessings but he can give bless these blessings to other people as well that it's not simply for

them that that the prophets that there are other peoples that had prophets and

that the final prophet was not from bani israel he's from uh

beni adnan he's from ismail and i will make of

him a great nation how could it be great if it's not a

religious nation how could it be great with god what numbers like god cares about numbers

how could it be great and yet genesis abraham was told that i have heard thee

about concerning ismail and he said i will make of him a great nation.

and the the tents of shiloh i mean the tents of shiloh are in

so that shiloh is is our prophet isaiah so

so they have brought on themselves wrath upon wrath if you reject

this thing if you reject because it doesn't suit yourself

then you you're bringing and that's him you know you you incur this

the wrath and it's not wrath like petulance it's not god's a petulant creature

you know like like human beings god is is beyond emotion god does not

have emotion he's the creator of emotion but his

is only for us to understand because he's given us

so but he doesn't he's not getting angry like oh you've he knows everything

people are going to do so we we don't anthropomorphize our lord

but he says wrath upon wrath

in other words he didn't use magic as some of them claimed the book of solomon is a a cult

book claiming that it was this magic that solomon had so far uh

in in islam not with uh like you know muhammad ali used to do coin tricks and things like that that's that's different

i mean that's my crew but but but

is magic incantations invoking putting spells on people doing these

things that's kofar

they were the ones that used the magic so the he calls them the obsessive were ungrateful

and if you look at his argument for using that term it's very interesting um because

it's it gets to the root of what shaitan is about

and what what came down to the angels at babylon so babel is near al-khufah in

iraq in in the in the country of iraq there was a place babel and babylon the

scarlet lady the of babylon babylon is in the old testament they were very very profligate people

diverted and they were warned and and they were destroyed so babylon is everything

negative in the old testament is personified in babylon

so these two angels americanis

are these two angels there's khiraf about this and you'll get into uh you know

even actually says the hadith about them being given free will they were they were

the most worshipful among the angels and all the angels were complaining about humans because constantly there was all

this these horrible the angels would bring their reports on

what humans were doing and it was all just negative and corruption and all these things and so harut and marut

were given the free will and then they because of that they lost their melakia

they lost their their angelic nature and were given human nature and they did what humans

did and so it was to show the angels that that's one opinion so but you'll you'll

see different things but the point is they did teach

and but they said in them we are a test and that's that's one of the fundamental

fitna also in the quran means different things it can mean sedition it can mean

civil strife right so like civil war is called fitna that fits in

so but here it means test we are a fitna because fatanah iftinhu the original

meaning of it in arabic is to test gold for dross so when you heat up gold you test it for

dross and that's why when things break out when fitna breaks out you see who's gold you see who's silver you see who's

copper and you see who's toxic lead like people really reveal themselves in fitna and that's why it's such a useful

word in that way because whenever fitna when fitness come suddenly people that never do anything they're full of energy

and they're on the phone and do oh did you know this and that and there's where were you like

you never volunteered at the mosque i tried to get you to volunteer for the bake sale you were too busy

but now that there's a fitnah you have so much free time

very interesting humans yeah

and the worst ones are your beast friends right

and this is really demonic because the worst thing that you can do

is separate between a family so when there's love in a family when there's a bond and people that separate that in

fact in the hadith which is in sahih muslim ibris

you know it's it says that

he put his throne on water because god's throne is on water so iblis is a great mimicker

when i first went to to las vegas i realized that it's a perfect imitation of not

perfect stuff of the law but it really looks like the area around mecca

like anybody who's been there and been to mecca they're struck by that fact and

and and las vegas is a international hajj of sin

people make pilgrimage from all over the world to las vegas

to to to sin it's called sin city and and people go

from all over the world to mecca for piety and so

it's clear that he made his his hajj there i mean that's

so he put his throne on water and then he ba

so he sent out his raiding parties syria is a raiding party in a military term so

he sent out his saraya his raiding parties like they're going out to raid

human beings that's what they do

and the one closest to him in station is the one that does the greatest harm

in in the raiding parties so when they come back

so they come back and they say to iblis oh and he's like on his throne you're listening to oh i did such and such and

such as he said you didn't do anything you know i got him to kill i didn't do

anything i got him to steal you didn't do anything and then one of them that one of them

had

i didn't leave him until i separated him from his wife and iblee says

you're the you're the best so that shows you because all those

other things come from that fundamental breakdown like all the social problems come from

family breakdown and that's why if you look in all these places where there's high crime

just look at the kids where's the father where where was the where was the father

to discipline him to show him the right way to give him the path it's all very clear so that's why all those other

things are nothing because from doing what the one he said

he gets all those other things so break the family destroy the family

that's it

yet they hurt no one thereby except by the evil god and this is important because this is in the end our deen you

know it's only by the island of allah subhanahu wa ta'ala allah has permitted these things for ahikmah and we have to

respect that we looked already at you

you know are you going to put in the earth the one who sows makes trouble and trouble is a brilliant

uh translation when i when i looked at it because i realized you know if you translate a facet as

corruption that's only one aspect whereas if you look at trouble in the dictionary it's got all it's got civil

strife in fact the troubles of ireland are the civil war of ireland they were called the troubles so it's

got everything it's got mental troubles you know like he's in trouble with the law

you know so it really is a it's actually a really good term for that at that point but anyway

so they learn what would harm them not what would benefit them

that those who had bought it had no share in the hereafter khalakleb

that had no share in the lab

and wretched was that for which they sold themselves if only they knew that's bit it says

it's an interesting um like sanne so one is the worst and the

other is the best you know you know what a good man zayd is or

so now anno

so if they had only they had been faithful and conscientious the reward from the presence

of god men and would have surely been better if only they had known

to god belongs the east and the west so allah possesses the east and the west

and here is a joomla so wherever you turn them

so it's it's really indicating the essence of god so there is

the face of god in other and also it's translated um some of them say jihito

law that it's the direction you're wherever you face you're facing god

in allah and that's why

the secret of allah's book is in the names at the end of the ayahs

why would he use that here is it's a brilliant translation i don't know if he's the only one that used that

but it means

that he encompasses all things which literally in arabic was means vast

or wide but here it literally means the omnipresent he's encompassing all things all-knowing alim

so he is in other words wherever you turn there is the is the law and then he knows so

he knows what

and they say god has begotten a son subhanah there's tanziya transcendence

god glory be to godzilla bella who

no to him belongs all this is istit daraq in arabic

in other words it's going no rather no it's changing the the humafist

everything is obedient to god kunut is obedience khan it is the one who's in a state of obedience it's it's the pious

one before god swarath is done at fajr for the shaffirs and the

monarchies

so imam says that the reason that this

whole error came in was because one of the names of god

in the previous shariah was father so the jewish tradition and the christian

tradition use the name father as and and i don't know if it's related

to father you know allah because it's a it's a sanskrit father comes from originally

from sanskrit but it's very interesting that father is very similar

but so he says that it's because

god the father and which was a valid name in fact even tamiya in his extraordinary six volume work on the uh

the bible says that it it was abrogated for the muslims as a name so we can't call god the father because of the

gendered language which makes it very interesting that dr cleary decided to translate this in a gender to this

language because people were thinking that god has a gender with that name

it's very interesting so

the uh god uh subhanah bellahumaf is

he possesses everything in the heavens and the earth

and it is isn't it interesting but badiru the originator didn't use fatiru badiru-samawati the originator so

it has no badiya is truly creative and that's why

you know they used to have uh traditionally there was no such thing as creative writing

courses because there's no such thing as creative writing actually the courses previously were

learning how to imitate other writers so it was imitating great writers so he

actually learned how great writers wrote creative writing is this idea oh you

create it in arabic the word to

to for a human means to lie because the only creator is allah

everything else is imitation humans are only imitating allah is the only

khalakha and that's why there's no such thing really as creative right like he's a creative person creative like how what

what did he create everything is just imitation

and so uh ibdah is is this word vedir

art is a better term it's innovative so you can innovate you know it's something

that somebody does something new and that's from the latin

novaree which is new novus you know new so vadiya is is something

you know an innovation pediru

whenever god decrees anything god says to it be and it is fayocono and that pha is not sababia it was very interesting

because usually if you have an amar you'd have a first sababia

be and it is there's no severe you know there's a because this the sub

of you know them there's no illa there's no there's no cause and effect in that way

there's no sebabee we we use it majasan with allah you know it's a figurative it's purely figurative

and now say we believe in god and what was revealed to us and what was

revealed to abraham and ishmael and isaac and joseph and the tribes

there's but jacob had 12

sons and i think five were from leia

and then he had uh two uh concubine and then he had um

raheel or rachel and raheel who's rachel who's the mother of

um yusuf and benjamin and benjamin uh in the jewish tradition she died in

childbirth with benyamin but raheel was honored by the muslims

and her maqam was in palestine it's still there but now it's a jewish mam the muslims don't visit anymore but it

used to be it was the muslims that actually it was the ottomans that built the makam of

amazing i think leia is buried at the where the uh

where sarah and where all the um in in khalil al-khalil

so the the asbath are the tribes so there's 12

sons reuben was the oldest and you have levi and and and danny and

and jad god which god is still used in egypt that's

one of the sons god jad yeah so these these were the sons

that and and what was given to moses and jesus

now look at this so they're all the the jewish prophets right

so but then it says

all the prophets

they're all from god so we unlike the previous dispensations

reject some of the prophets and accept other ones we accept them all

we accept moses i mean we have palestinian kids named musa

you know and they're under israeli occupation they name their kids musa

the the prophet of the jews we have muslims named isa

the prophet of the christians because there are prophets that's why when i was talking with rabbi

lerner may god give him a healing he wasn't well but uh when i was talking about

brother he said when arch i said your citizens are tradition you know we're like

we get what you have and then we get more i mean

we don't make any distinction so even though there's tafadal in the messages and the prophets have greater numbers

they have different makama those things that's that's all but in their essential

prophecy we don't make any distinction between them the prophet saw islam said don't let father

don't prefer me over eunice evan metta in the nebula don't think that

you know no we're we're all from god and and that's why you should never say our prophet's greater than your prophet

or something like that because there's no there's no benefit in that there's no point in in that i mean we

should know who our prophet sam was we should know that but you don't

attack other people's religions or traditions

and your god is one god

there is no god but the one

that is right there everything is right there

and and how does god choose to define himself

after telling us he's one what does he want us to know about him

so the mercy of participating in creation that you participate in being

because god is is the ultimate being and so he has allowed us to participate

in an attribute of his even though it's temporal he's allowed us to participate

in wujoud and that's namited ejad and that is such

a great blessing but then within imdad that yumidu he's constantly sustaining us he's

keeping our bodies most of us 98.6 temperature we've got

things in our body right now that are fighting viruses and bacteria allah

created all of that for us allah is doing all that that's his in debt and then food and sustenance he

enables you to break down your lipids and your proteins and your carbohydrates oxygen to sustain yourself

you know that you breathe in and going to all that and this all from allah subhanahu wa ta'ala

and then look like okay right after that

after he says there's no god but god

he he wants us to see what he why he's god why we should worship him why we should

adore him why we should submit to him

behold in the creation of the heavens and the earth and the alternation of night and day and the ships that sail on

the sea to profit the people and the water god rains from the skies thereby enlivening the earth after it has died

and spreading animals of all kinds of

and spreading animals of all kinds there upon and in the shifting of the winds i mean now we know the whole wind system

on this planet it's a completely organized and in fact it's our human beings that are causing the disruption

of these incredible do not disturb the earth do not corrupt

the earth after we rectified it for you we said it right there in our

signs right and then with sahab and

and then the clouds enslaved there between the heavens and the earth

you know there in our signs for a discerning people they're in our signs for people that

have reason that can think about these things and then uh a little further this is further down

lei said or alberto [Music]

it's one of those comprehensive words it's hard to translate but it has to do with

it can also be charity it can be upright behavior it can be piety it can be obedience

all these things that you turn your faces east and west so in other words it's not the formal

aspect and i think i i really like she has a very nice

here is one of the most beautiful summaries of essential islamic beliefs and practices

it is not righteous that you turn your faces east and west this seems to mean that the heart of religion is not

defined by superficial profession or allegiance as defined in terrestrial terms

some translators what render the wow here as or but the more usual and seems to me

to be more inclusive and thus more suggestive of the transcendental aspect of devotion even as is practiced within

everyday life so it's quite beautiful which you know so

like the east or the west he says the east and the west to make it inclusive here

[Music] the treasured light verse included in this section of readings from the quran

says that the light of god is like a lamp a lit with oil from a blessed olive tree that is neither of the east nor of

the west and then so they those who believe in god and the

last day and the angels and the books and the prophets so there except for the qatar it pretty sums up our belief

and who donate goods and money goods and money it was very interesting

see these are really nice nuance aspects of this translation who donate goods and money

for love of god it also can be despite your love of the goods of the money so

the could be so it has both meanings they give it out of love of god but also they love those

the things they're giving so it's it and that's like the prophet saw i said was asked

you know that you are the best when you're

healthy you're sound because people on their death bed you know will give it away right no when you're healthy and

sound and you fear poverty you you hope for increase and

you fear poverty i mean it's quite stunning to relatives and orphans again the most

important what masakeen women is and the wayfarer and to the needy was

the needy here really are the beggars people who are asking

freeing the slaves and who are constant in prayer and who give alms for welfare and those

who fulfill their promises when they make them and who are patient and suffering adversity and hard times

so is difficulty in your circumstances the is

difficulty in your actual body so they're patient when they have difficulty also

can mean like and poverty and also humiliation those

difficulties the ra can mean here marat or zamana like chronic disease

people have chronic pain for those of us who have chronic pain you

know people who have chronic pain know how difficult it is and traditionally those type people

you know like my mother and father's generation they didn't even complain they didn't even mention it to people because they didn't

want other people to know that we would make them feel bad it's like

you know there's a there was a comedian who died a while back and he

had cancer for 10 years and he never told anybody even his own family didn't know uh jan or daddy

mentioned this to me because he liked this uh norm macdonald but he

he didn't tell anybody he was sick and they asked him why when he they found out he was dying and he said he just

didn't want to make anybody sad you know so there's people that they just they they suffer enduring that's

what it means enduring law you know patient enduring

in war and jihad but also hard times they're all sound meanings suffering adversity and hard

times they're all sound meanings they are the truthful ones

[Music] and then 254.

so there's spend before that day comes there's no

bartering there's no friendship there's no mediation and it is the ungrateful who abuse and oppress

and then this is the great ayat the prophet isaiah said it was the greatest verse abu under he asked him

what was the greatest verse in the quran he mentioned this and he struck him on it gave him a strike on his chest and

said you know congratulations on that knowledge

because this really gets at the again the essence of the quran is really a book about god

from god about god and goes back to god like he he recites

it the prophet isaiah said the best thing that you can give to god is what came from god which is the quran

so it came from god it goes back to god god

allah exclamation mark

the end of time won't come until nobody says allah allah you know you know there is no god but

the one the living the self-subsistent these are two really important

attributes of god drowsiness does not overtake him sinneh is like just a nod off just a knot

does not overtake god nor sleep well i know the humaf is

he possesses that's who god belongs what is in the heavens and the earth who could there be who can intercede with

god ladies who can intercede except by leave of god

god knows what is in front of them and what is behind them but they do not comprehend

anything of god's knowledge

the throne of god extends over the heavens and the earth and the preservation of them both is not oppressive to god it's not a burden

it doesn't weigh him down

and then [Music] comes immediately after that once god's declared

it's amazing no compulsion in the religion

it's clear so if somebody's blind you can't guide them unless they want guidance

but if somebody just says leave me alone you have to leave them alone

[Music] so whoever just believes in idols are things worshipped other than allah

and believes in god and has taken hold of the most reliable handle that uh does not break for god is all hearing

all-knowing those who spend their wealth in the way of god and then do not follow what they spend with reminders of their

generosity or with abusive treatment they have their lord they have their reward with their lord and there is

nothing for them to fear and they will not sorrow again hope kind and forgiving words are better than

charity followed by abuse because there's people that are abusive with their charity they could remind you of how much they

helped [Music] don't tell me uh how much you've done

for this religion that's what the prophet was told to say to these bedouin who were coming out we

supported you we join your religion you know wanting something

don't tell me what a great boon your islam is to this religion

no allah can remind you of his blessings to you so and that's why al-manan is a

negative term except for god god has every right to remind us but when you remind other people

and partly it's because in reality it's from god you were just a subup so don't tell them what goodness you've done for

them because in reality it came from god it's just god has told us you know we have to thank people and encourage people

and then don't nullify your charities by reminders of your generosity or by abusive behavior

as do those who spend their wealth to be seen by the people without believing in god in the last day and what that is

like is a hard stone with dust on it on which a heavy rainfall so it's just barren and there's nothing nothing comes

out of it the example of those who spend their wealth seeking to please god and strengthen their souls is that of a

garden or a null and that it's quite beautiful i mean i don't know if he's the first

one to use that but it's a perfect term because uh noel is a you know the grassy knoll at dallas there's a place where

you know they think there might have been other gunmen but it's called the grassy note because it's an elevator it's an eminence so is

elevated it's in english language no it can also mean null like the null of a bell like nell the death knell of the

bell ask not for whom the bell tolls it tolls for thee but also asks not for whom the bell knows

it knows for thee so null can also mean the ringing of a bell it's a verb to know the bell

the messenger and then this alhamdulillah we got to the end so the mecca i want to get to at least finish

bakara the messenger believe

so the messenger believes he believes the prophet when the jewish rabbi came and gave his description of the torah he

said i meant to be rasulullah i bear witness that i'm the messenger it strengthen his iman

remember when he got the message he was troubled he didn't know

and that was his sincerity who am i that was who am i to get a

message from god who am i and that's why it's so arrogant you see

these people that god spoke to me really god

creator of the heavens and the earth knower of the scene and the unseen spoke to you what did he tell you

i mean it's like that is a sure sign of madness and that's why the prophesied sin was so troubled

but then look here's the proof this is what came out of him it's not like somebody wandering around talking to

himself saying that god's speaking to him i mean this transformed the world

this transformed western civilization all these things that western people see they don't even know that it came from

ikra bismi arabica lady all the mathematics all the architecture all the

science if you read george sartan's multi-volume on the history of science

the first two volumes are all muslim names right

so this is what came out of god speaking to a man

by their fruits you shall know them don't look at isis in the same way you can't look at pedophilic priests to

determine what catholicism is you know no look at our civilization look at what the muslims built

look at look at the taj mahal look at the alhambra palace

what kind of people built those

these are the remnants that we leave behind to tell you who we were so after we're

gone look at what we have left behind if you want to know who the muslims were

look at what these people left behind and those were people that were following this book and they were

following our prophet saw isaiah and that's why they were given toffee and when they die

deviated and the prophet isaiah said you will deviate you will follow the way of other peoples

that went before you the jews and the christians and the other religions he told us that and he warned us of that

and that's why muslims have to make taubah and so do all the faith each believes in

god and god's angels right well mo minoon we believe in allah

and his angels and his books and his messages

we don't make distinction these are all prophets from god and they say we hear and we obey him

we ask your forgiveness our lord

does not compel a soul to do what is beyond its capacity this is from allah's rahmah

it gets what it has earned and it is responsible for what it

deserves our lord

do not punish us do not take us to account if we forget or if we air

in because nisian and khatta are different you can forget and you can make a

mistake if we forget or we air to air as human to forgive is divine

right so we make mistakes but we're asking allah and then we ask him for what we know and

what we don't know because sometimes we make mistakes not even knowing

do not place on us a burden

[Music] like you put on those who went before you they had great burdens of piety and

practice the muslims we have it easy compared to the previous dispensations of what they had to do to get close to

allah and we're in the latter days of this ummah which is even easier to get close to allah subhanahu ta'ala in these

latter days when so many people are turning away from allah

and please our lord do not make us carry that for which we lack the strength

and please grant us pardon and forgive us

and have mercy on us you are our mawlana you are our

protector um they have no protector you are our protector

so help us against the ungrateful people help us against the ungrateful people

that are wreaking all this havoc in the earth alhamdulillah so that is uh

i that's what i was hoping to how relevant are concepts like stress syllable intonation pitch the quranic restoration

how do they affect the meaning is there a book explaining the poetics of the quran you know poetics we're using that term

obviously i i understand how he's using that term because quran is not poetry

but but it has in it in english poetry meaning beautiful language not poetry not sure

right so stress civil intonation pitch these are all very important in in in the quran

what are called the in in tajweed those are ishtihad so those are the ishtihad of the the

quran and they're different israel so you have different there are places where it's haram to stop obviously

because it will it will affect the meaning and in the house quran it's very nice because they give you the a little

signal uh of the huh yeah

like not just yet don't stop here right because you can uh

corrupt the meaning of it um like the khatib who said to the prophet

something and then he said because he added a wow where there shouldn't be so

stress is very important syllable intonation all these things when you get into deep tajweed studies

the great quran of this ummah actually learned the muhammad

and recited the quran based on the mahamat so the are

what traditionally in music theory are called modes which are slightly different from key signatures so in music you have key

signatures but you also have modes so you have these famous modes that have been identified like the doric mode

right the phrygian mode these are modes so like there's melancholic modes like if

you look at irish music it's it uses uh melancholic modes that's why when you

listen to it it's it's just not the jigs are very upbeat but a lot of irish music is very mournful

so so uh the great masters of tajweed learned the

modes and they would recite that they still do this believe it or not in fact there's on on youtube there's actually a

then from turkey who shows you the different makaams that are used in the different prayers so the fajr he uses a

makam to wake people up and so the this is how sophisticated our religion got was that they were using

uh the intonations uh to do that and stress so

raising the voice i mean one of the sheikh nuren who allah

lot of people very attracted to his recitation that's those

where he's going up and down those are all regulated so the stress will affect the meaning the wakufa are interesting

because you have like imam who aloha i mean i have no problem with

this some people have a problem but he actually his he said were purely from kash

that uh although according to you can't use it for like you can't the

you can't use kash for the prayer time like to have a question the prayer times in you can't use it you have to

do the go out and measure the shadow or now people just look at the prayer time

on their watch or their adhan which they can end up praying at the wrong time in any case

the um the very interest like help the imam is moroccan he has like kalila

[Music] it completely changes the meaning so

kalila they are a few minaleili they don't sleep at night whereas if you

don't do the waku there it's [Music] they only sleep a small portion of the

night so the the stops can really affect the meaning

that's different from raibafihi and then hudalin so the walks

it gives a lot of possibility for many many interpretations which is really interesting one aspect

of the quran the names of jacob's sons and wives are not in the quran does that information come from yes

they're mentioned in our tafsirs they it comes out of the bible the prophet sallallahu alaihi salam

permitted us to quote the bible and just he said

don't be absolute don't deny it and don't be absolute in its affirmation but

there are many useful things there's been a modern trend amongst the mufasirun to

completely remove all of the israelites there is some benefit in that because a

lot of the superstitions that got into the tafsir came out of

the previous dispensations but on the other hand there's a lot of interesting things how do we understand the quranic

verses give giving glad tidings to jews christians jews and saviors in the light of perennial thought i mean obviously

the perennialists like that verse i think for me the best thing that i've

read on this subject is faisal which is imam al-qazadi's book

that allah allah is going to judge people we're not judges we can't say anybody's

going to heaven and hell the quran makes it very clear that if

people do this this and this they're going to hell but in the end there's something called

in our tradition the of allah allah fulfills his what in terms of his threat if he does not

fulfill his threat it doesn't diminish him whereas if he if he didn't fulfill his

promise it would diminish him so the example they give if if a ruler says

to you know some somebody in another land he said wallahi is

like if he comes here i'll slaughter him and then the man comes and he forgives him

nobody's going to say oh that he didn't fulfill his promise they'll actually see it as a good thing

he said oh he's a merciful ruler whereas if he said

if he comes i'll give him a thousand dinars then he comes he says sorry i'm not giving you anything everything you

say ah what a miser that guy was right so allah makes threats he doesn't have

to fulfill the threats but he makes promises and he has to fulfill the promise although he has promised that he

will fill jahannam so that's not a threat that's a promise so

you know people should be concerned about that i'm trying to study arabic to better understand the quran how long did

it take you i mean i'm still learning arabic so it's going on 44 years

arabic is an ocean and you know i still

i still study arabic i learn words i learned a word today that i didn't

know so it's it's the ocean the the muritan is

nobody can learn all of arabic except a prophet so there's always something new to learn

always something new to learn i didn't know tamara meant to for your

hair to fall out you know there's in the hadith it says

the prophet seems his face changed like the the

they say like you know you could see that he was upset in his face but also means for your hair to follow

i didn't know that so there's always something you learn any other questions

i understand the quran is eternal means but i don't see how many verses with us how can those verses be applied in different scenarios then

well remember that the quran is in quran

which is the matrix of the book so the quran there are infinite possibilities with

allah's words allah says if the oceans were inc and the and the forests were pans

the words of god would never be exhausted so allah could rearrange he could i mean

it's just infinite possibilities out of 29 letters allah can adi

and then but there are other possibilities i mean the there are infinite possibilities to

the meanings that that allah could generate from uh from the quran

so what do you think of the view by imam and other scholars that say the mary was

i mean yeah that's been pointed out some of them said asiya also

the prophet isaiah mentioned about the perfected women the kumbh amongst the women

i mean maryam is you know i my understanding the word or what i was

taught the dominant opinion of uh the school of uh of akida that i was taught is that

the prophets are males and the reason for that is

is that the the position that allah has put the the

male in the male is and the male has a daraja the male is

has allah has given an authority to the male

which doesn't diminish the female and it shouldn't be seen like that it's actually a tribulation for the male

because it's it's a it's a big tribulation to be put into that position

so um but if if she was a prophet you know we'll find out in the afterlife

i mean this is a valid difference of opinion the mature the dominant opinion

is that they're from the men but clearly the angel spoke to her which

i mean that's that's a revelation certainly

and there's a difference obviously between the messenger and a prophet so the rasool has the book or has a new sharia

whereas the prophets are given revelation so the idea that that she

had revelation from god i mean that's clearly in the quran and that's why i mean many mention this that that they

considered her to be amongst those who received prophecy um

aloha adam you know i the safe position always to stick with

the majority and the dominant opinions are there for a reason so that's that's where we hold to inshallah

inshallah i hope that you continue to support the college in the last few days of ramadan

even if you've already supported it maybe you could think about giving a second one just out of

a desire to see more that we can do the more you help the more we do the garden

project that has to be specified we don't use any of your donations

uh for things that somebody might think that's extravagant or why are they doing that and

they should use their money more wisely and that's a valid opinion i've thought about that too but my goal is about dawa

and about making this religion again as attractive as it should be

and that's one way that people are attracted it's it's a way to it's like honey you know to bring

uh to to uh to attract people with beauty and then then you can explain to them

what the religion is because we have a lot of bad information about our religion in this country and around the

world and we need to work better you know another thing i've been thinking a lot about is we really need to have more

outreach to the hindu community in the united states because the hindutva is is a very

serious problem um and and the muslims are really under threat

uh in many places where there are there are extremists it's always ignorance

because educated i know that educated hindus that really understand their religion must be horrified by a lot of

what's happening and it's really important not to collectivize people and not to generalize about people but to

really to recognize that there's good people everywhere i mean we have

a hindu lady that's helped us every year with taxes she's a really good lady and she's all you know just a

really sweet lady and i have no reason to have any animus towards her

at all on the contrary she's been very helpful to me and so i feel gratitude and

you know and i think that's the way we should be with people is just judge people

by the content of their character not by the the creed that they happen to follow

because there's a lot of bad muslims you know and and then there's a lot of good

people outside of islam and it's really important just to acknowledge that and to recognize the goodness in people and

i think in doing that we're truer to the nature of our religion and certainly truer to the

nature of our prophet samus he was a mercy to all the worlds

and and and we were said speak nicely to people inshallah

[Music]

[Music]

foreign

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