'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 th