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 subse