Peace in Ramada

foreign online i know uh the amazing work that
imams online does in the uk and i think they have a broader reach than that
the um the imams are it's such an important walifa or
office in our tradition and um unfortunately uh we often don't honor
our imams as much as we really should because of the service that they do
um the maintaining the masjids also there there's actually a lot of
social service that many of the imams do and i you know every once in a while we hear uh
unfortunate uh things that happen to uh individuals that fall by the wayside in
our community some of the more celebrity uh imams and things like that but we forget
about all those unsung imams around the uh the globe that just do
their work they don't get a lot of fanfare about it and they're maybe not known but
inshallah they're known by the angels and uh and they're known by their
communities that where they do their work so just a little shout out to the imams online
the um the topic that i want to talk about was salaam which is an extraordinary
word in arabic because the arabic language has what are called semantic fields in in
linguistics the one word will have many many
permutations many different possibilities and while some words in arabic are extremely
specific other words are very rich in their possibility and salaam is one of those
and we actually we greet ourselves with saddam when we greet each other we also greet the prophet saw he said
him 17 times a day in our
prayer when we give our saddam which is to say it directly to the prophet we don't say asarama
we say asaramu as if we're speaking directly to the prophet
sallallahu alaihi and we know from the hadith that the prophet isaiah was given our salams
and somebody said how is it possible if you have a billion people giving salams to the prophet
um how how does he hear all of that then and then how does he reply and one of
the scholars said the sun gives its rays to millions of people at the same time
and so the prophet saw is greater than the sun and we have supercomputers that monitor
millions of phone calls in new zealand apparently there's this massive super computer
that monitors millions of phone calls at the same time and they can pick up keywords like if
you say jihad it'll automatically they have algorithms that will pick up keywords
so it shouldn't surprise us that the protocol is greater in his capacity than any supercomputer
on the planet so just i i have no problem with that concept but anyway the um saying
is is actually to call first of all it's letting people know that you're not aggressive when you say
as-salaam alaikum you're basically giving them peace and that's why ibrahim when the angels came
in it says that he didn't you know that they were people unknown to him
they were people unknown and it says that oh jesus that he felt some fear in his heart
about them because when he said they didn't eat and in the bedouin tradition
if if you don't take food from a person it meant that possibly you meant them harm
and and there were a lot of brigands and things like that so he when they didn't eat because angels don't eat he was worried
and and but they said uh saddam and when they said saddam he said
he said which gets us to what i wanted to talk about in the quran
in surat al-baqarah allah says
and they're both meaningful so when allah said enter into the
which means enter into peace now allah could have said in that verse
could have said that but when he said ut
what he was saying was enter into so you're literally going into peace
and fee in the arabic language which is the preposition that's used there is a proposition used for varfia or
majazia so it's it's it's used for um like an adverbial phrase to go into
something and that could be literally like i entered the house the halto phil bates i
entered the house or it could be figuratively the khal tofi of i entered into his
thoughts so when he says enter into peace i think he could be taken literally and
figuratively in other words to really enter into a state
of peace and it's also you know people there's a lot of
islamophobes that like to say that oh muslims they say their religion is a islam a religion of peace but
it's not and islam doesn't mean peace well islam does mean peace it comes from the same root and many of our scholars
said that islam and salam are related in that when you are in a state of
submission you're in a state of peace because you're not fighting anymore and so entering in a
state of submission is simply to enter into the hadood that have been placed upon us
and by entering into those limits that allah has placed upon us
we actually become well and this is the meaning of salam is salama which is wholeness or wellness
and so islam is a religion that actually invites us to become well
to to restore the wellness of our submission as children because children
generally are very healthy and and but we lose that as we get older
because we enter into uh the sinfulness of our of our nature which is the inclination
towards sin and this is why when allah says
allah follows that by reminding us not to enter into the the uh
the the the of iblees foreign
do not follow the progress of shaytan is progress shaytan is the first
progressive because he will take us by degrees and the thing about
uh about most progressive ideologies is they're constantly shifting the
goalposts they never tell you where they're going and so for instance uh obama could be
against same-sex marriage in his first inauguration and nobody called him a
bigot but then in after he had the second he said no he was in support of it and
suddenly everybody has to be in support of it and if they're not they're a bigot so this
is this is how shaitaan takes people by degrees now when we look at at uh the
interstates of people we see that most people are not
well because they're not in a state of submission and again submission to the limits of
allah and and those limits were placed upon us for our own benefit
so we know for instance unwon who wrote a book called sex and culture
in in 19 i think it was published in 1934 i mean this was a came an oxford scholar who studied
all of these different cultures and he found that whenever a culture unleashed
the the sexual promiscuity that it was gone within three generations which is about 75 years
and so if you think about the 1960s being the beginning of that we're we're coming to a close
on that and he said he could not find any exceptions to that so people say oh why is religion so
obsessed with sexual morality because maybe just maybe that's one of
the ways in which we maintain the health and solidarity of our society
because family is the foundation of society if family breaks down that's the fundamental unit of a
civilization if family breaks down society breaks down and so we see we can't even use towards like
illegitimacy anymore it's their unacceptable words there's no shame anymore
in any type of sexual behavior and so that's an area of hadood that allah
has given us saying do not transgress those limits because there are repercussions
that are going to affect you allah doesn't need any of our worship he doesn't need us he
doesn't all of this is from the bounty of allah his father and and and because
allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has shared with us this extraordinary experience of
existence and consciousness and made us in that metaphysical
surah in that metaphysical image that he has given us
and so he has enabled us to know him through our very creation and we're
unique in that we the outside of the jinn we're the only species that has free will
to come to know allah and we know him through how he has created us because we're hearing we're seeing we're
speaking we have will we have um all of these qualities we have existence it's
contingent but it's existence nonetheless so he's given us all of these attributes in order for us to understand
something about his attributes and so when he calls us to sin to this
piece of submission he's doing it for our benefit uh imam al-khazadi said that if you
uh he said if a sultan had a a minister like a a a ruler had a
minister and that minister wanted to get close to to uh the sultan uh by by uh
moving his finger in the privacy of his home he said that that would be ridiculous
and demeaning for the sultan and he said well the same is true for our he said our worship
for allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is is less than that in relation to the
king and the minister so we have to understand allah does not need us
we need allah and he's promised these things out of his father that that's only out of his
father there's no obligation on allah
he has obligated to to himself out of his father so we have this extraordinary religion
that is calling us to enter into this state of submission and then
to to to work on our hearts and this is why taskia is central to our to riches you cannot
have outward peace if you don't have inward peace and there's all these people that clamor for peace
but because they're not peaceful in in themselves because they they lose their tempers
they get angry they're greedy they're selfish all of these things that you see
in the macro cosmic world are reflections of what's happening in the microcosm world and so
when when a government aggresses on another government because they want their natural resources
that's no different from an individual who's embezzling funds uh at his uh
at his office because he has a a a gambling addiction and and he needs to
uh find a way of getting more money to to to fulfill his gambling addiction it's
the same thing so what you see i mean one of the things and this is a major problem in our community
is that so many of our community think of vivalim as the ruler but if you actually look at
it it's a volume all the way down the the ruler becomes a reflection
of of the state of the people come out as you are so other people put over you
and if that hadith has some weakness uh the great scholar of
abu bakr al-torto she said that i found it in the quran
like that we put some oppressors over other oppressors because of what they were doing and so
if we're not working on ourselves if we're not removing the oppression from our own
cells i mean just fasting alone let's look at a few things about just oppressing the
self we now know that that 78 according to the studies that have been
done of hospitalized people with covid were obesity we also know that people
that that exercise 150 minutes a week that's slightly over
20 minutes a day of moderate exercise not even like really
high level but just walking briskly those people they studied 50 000 coveted
cases in the state of california and they found that those people that did that did were not hospitalized
well the prophet saw i said i'm saying that your body has rights over you so
one of the rights of your body is to eat well another is to exercise because this is a
trust that we've been given it's a sacred trust so you have to do all of these things and if you don't do them you must expect
because you've transgressed the limits if you're eating more caloric intake than you actually need you're transgressing limits and so
there's going to be repercussions if you're not exercising you're transgressing limits you're of volume to
your own body now also you could look at it the prophet's law i said and said another reason we get plagues and again
nobody wants to talk about this because it's just not politically correct but another reason according to our
hadith the prophet saw i said him said that the sexual deviancy
never manifests into people openly except they are afflicted with diseases and plagues and he said
he said clearly that which are plagues and
that were not in in their previous peoples so that's another reason to stay within
the hadoo and out of the mercy of allah according to our tradition if people hide these
things out of shame and conceal them it's not going to affect the greater society but when they shamefully
openly do these things we we believe so people can say all these you know these are all wives tales of religions
that's fine you can believe that but we see with our own eyes the reality of it so whether you like it
or not whether you believe it or not it actually happens to clearly
be shown to us in the actions of people and and we see this and that's why
people that have a religious tradition have lower blood pressure
have less anxiety they they're healthier people they're mentally they're more giving
there have been many studies done showing that religious people are more charitable than other people
so even just from a pragmatic point of view one would think that they would support
religion but they don't because we're living in a culture that is so anti-religious
that is so secular that is so hateful of uh of of belief
it's just quite stunning uh the animosity and you can see it in films the way they make fun of religious
people you can see it in you know i mean mr bean is a wonderful character but
when when he does the kind of uh anglican minister it's it's quite it's
quite sad now unfortunately and i have to say this but many really many religious people have made
themselves the brunt of of that type of uh comedic fodder
so so uh this is this is a problem in in our
community so i really feel like we you know we as muslims we have a short time here
and allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says that the day of judgment is a day yo malayan
on that day it will be of no benefit to people unless they bring a peaceful
heart salim a whole heart a sound heart a heart at peace and allah one of the meanings of
salam is which is quietude so this idea of just being
quiet within yourself being unperturbed being undisturbed allah says
that the the servants of the merciful and he used the merciful there he could have used any
other name he used the name the merciful the servants of the merciful when
they pass by ignorant people and and jahid is a beautiful word in arabic because it doesn't just mean
ignorant it also means zealous and fanatical so so the the the the jahil
is somebody of hamiyah they have this intense uh you know hamiyah and so that's that's
an example where uh where allah subhanahu ta'ala says that um when when these ignoramuses pass
them these zealous people who try to goad them goat them in to go them into reacting
because they love to do this to get reactions from them they simply say peace with peace
and and and and
again that's uh allah is calling to the abode of peace
your home should be a peaceful place if you have violence in your home if you have uh domestic violence towards
your wife and in some cases it's nowhere near as much but in some cases violence towards the
husband it does happen uh more than people would like to talk about but generally it's the women that are victims
of domestic violence if you have violence in your home it is not a muslim home it's it's something else uh it's your
because the word in arabic for home is mezcan which means the place of sukina it's the
place where a woman and children should feel safe and the reason they feel safe is because
they have a secure place to live in and then they have a husband that's going to protect them
that that's our tradition so that's another problem if you don't have peace in the home
peace in the home begins with peace inside so if if the husband is not at peace in
himself then he's going to be violent with those around them and and and verbal abuse
is as bad sometimes as physical abuse and it can even be worse in some ways because physical abuse you can heal from
those bruises but very often emotional abuse that constant
abuse of somebody can really wear them down and uh and it will it will damper their
fate in a way that's very troubling and then finally one of the really important things is
to to not play iblisa's blame game because iblis is the blamer
and one of the things that islam does is it makes people take responsibility for their own
actions and lives belilinsa
rather the human being [Music]
he the human governs all excuses and one of the beautiful hadiths which
is in sahih bukhari and it's even though it's
because the way it's articulated could only come from the prophet salallahu
but he said there's three things
three things whoever has has them all three he it's as if he has
all of iman and the first one was
which means to be honest about yourself to be honest about yourself and then the
second is which is an amazing articulation
it means to spread peace to the whole world to be a person of peace
blessed are the peace makers you know these the the peacemakers are amazing the people
that rectify the people that want to unite hearts and not sever them and separate them and rent them asunder
and we have far too many people in our community that are so divisive and and just really setting muslim
against muslim group against group it's just very strange one of the things that i really wonder about
is why people spend so much time attacking other people like what pleasure are they deriving in
that it's a very interesting phenomenon go do something go build something go build a
hospital you know go start a food shelter you know go go do something but
keep these armchair critics i just feel sorry for them to be honest with you they're just really not well and that's
an indication of some kind of inward sickness where they become obsessed
uh with doing this and they and then they get so excited when there's fitna i mean they get active and they're
online and they're just typing away and calling people did you hear about so and so i people send me things sometimes and
i'm just like what chipon didn't find anybody else but you to send me this thing i mean i got something about
one group oh all these things are happening and i'm just like i'm not interested and i
[Music] there's a blessed tree in paradise for the one who is preoccupied with his own faults
from the faults of others and and so i just i don't know it's a very strange thing
uh to to do that but the last thing he said
which is to to give uh charity even when you are not well to do like
when you have your own straights and yet you give charity despite that so that's amar
uh in sahih bukhari articulating something he obviously heard from the prophet
isaiah but he doesn't attribute it to the prophet and so the insoft is really important and
that's why ibreeze you know ibrahim
like tell my tell my servants to say speak beautifully to say good
things to speak well of people to to to to do positive things why
inna innis right shaytan will split you
and separate you and shephan has an extraordinary khutba in hell in surat ibrahim allah subhanahu wa
tells us and one of the fascinating things about the quran is the dialogues in hell there are many
uh verses which actually have the dialogues of the people in hell so we actually know what they're going to
say even though they haven't said it yet and and one of the fascinating things is that
the oppressors and the oppressed in hell because there's this idea somehow that uh people that are oppressed are
automatically exempt from moral probity they're exempt from any kind of moral upright
[Music]
virtuousness and that's certainly not to be pressed in oppressors and they're complaining about the
oppressors saying oh they're still playing the blame game and they actually asked that they get twice as much punishment because they
were the ones that were oppressing them and allah says everybody gets twice as much
so it's very interesting but in
[Music] when all is said and done when the people are in hell and the people are in
paradise verily allah made you a promise
and it was a true promise but i promised you and it was a false
promise had no authority over you here's why
people say oh ramadan the shale bean are locked up and yet still everybody's going doing all that bad
has no power over people other than suggestion he's like the ad man you know that you
have these ad people monsters you know that's iblis he's the
pitch man he's the one that uh that just he he he makes things look good you
know candyman he makes the world delicious he makes the world taste good right the candyman can because he mixes
it with love and makes the world taste good iblis is the candy man
right it's not for nothing that pedophiles use candy iblees is the candyman he makes the
world taste good satisfying and delicious you can even eat the dishes
that's ignis so so and the guy that sang that song was an open devil worshiper
and i'm not making i'm not taking that out i did not know that
[Music] don't blame me but blame yourselves
the blame game's over i let you play it while while you were in the world but it's over now you have only yourself
will be them be him oh if only we had used our brains if
only we had used our intellect and listened we wouldn't be here in hell fa taraf will be them to him
they finally admit the blame game's over so don't wait until the afterlife
to give up the blame game don't wait until the afterlife to give
up the game playing games chef thank you so much subhanallah that is what can i say there was so much in
there so poignant really uh really good points um and something that we all need to really
reflect especially the fact that it's ramadan and ramadan is definitely a time for introspection and reflection more so
i guess in the last this is another second ramadan that we're all we're all experiencing in a pandemic
which really um which is you know nothing that i've ever seen um before and first in my lifetime i'm
sure with many others and you said something which is really interesting because you spoke about plagues and then when we think about the
pandemic and it's kind of considered as a possibly a plague um and then you just think you know
you know what where are we going to be after the pandemic none of us really know because you know i mean it
is a play it is a place it's clearly it is it's a play yeah i mean you can play plague usually
refers to bubonic plague even in arabic is generally the bubonic plague but
according to even and others uh is used for waba which is uh like
epidemics and in this case a pandemic i mean we've never seen anything like this they're
making you afraid of air i mean you know
look i'm i'm all for sbab and i'm not i'm i'm not pollyannish about this the covet is
real but but the way i'm just
i don't know if it's it's i hope inshallah it's iman but i just don't have that fear i mean i i'm
not going to be afraid i'm not going to live my life out of fear you can take the azbab
you know but this idea somehow that oh you know and to be honest with you uh
i've had a very good life you know i'm at the age that the prophet said left the world um but people just
hold on to this place as if this is it this is we're in dunya this is the
lowest place we should appreciate it and i don't make light of it it's a great gift from god
and and i believe in the gift of life and that we should be grateful every single moment of our life
for the gift of life and not to squander it but we should also recognize the gift of death the prophet
said al-mautu death is the gift of the believer and if you don't believe this then why
did sahabah ask during the plague for allah to take them because it was a martyr's death
there are there are sahabi made dua for allah to take them during the plague and so i think i mean
people should want to stay alive for their children and for their families and things like that but i think we hold on to death we're
much more of a death denial culture and part of it is because of modern medicine which has enabled us to preserve life in
a way that pre-modern peoples could not where i was in west africa one out of
four children died in infancy now for a woman to lose a child it's it's a major calamity but most of our
great grandmothers probably lost three three or four either in miscarriage or because they got pregnant
maybe 10 times sometimes more and they they lost children to diphtheria
they lost them it was quite common for people and this is why death i think for pre-modern people was
just much more of a a fact of life we we hide it we don't want to think about it we set
it aside but we should think about death every single day of our lives in a positive way not in a negative way
death meditation is one of the traditions the prophet said
do a lot of death meditation and that's our prophesizer told us to do that my own teacher used to do death
meditation every night i heard him he would recite poems about death and so it's something it'll make you
much more appreciative of of your life absolutely we have a thing in
the uk called death cafes actually where people go and they contemplate death or if somebody's passing away and they
they sit down they discuss it and even many people actually as you were saying they contemplate it
but they actually planned they planned over coffee yeah for coffee over coffee is a coffee see
that that just shows you they're not thinking about death because
if you really contemplated death if it was mentioned before a meal you wouldn't be able to eat and that's why it's my crew
of death during food that's a very fun point absolutely but yeah they're quite secular but
they're open to people i'm checking you touch something um i think something earlier which you mentioned about
the fact that we live in a society where we have no shame anymore because everything's oh yeah yeah there's a fine line
between um what we know is predestination and free will and i'm sure you come across this and
there's many muslims or just generally people in the secular society that we live in obviously in the
west where people say well if you have if if everything's preordained
what's the point of free will what's the fine balance when you're dealing with people of faith because sometimes these
questions come along and well you think that they have the right to do what they want then yeah is
it's probably the most difficult thing in theology is dealing with the qadhar which is why
the prophet isam advise us not to delve into it all of us experience free will i don't think
anybody if i if i want like ice can stand up i can sit down we all experience it
and and and and to deny that aspect of our lives is to deny our own human experience at the same
time we know that there are so many variables in any given situation for it to come
together that the the hand of god is so evident so for instance you did not choose your
parents even though some new age people claim you do you did not choose your parents and and and you did not choose
your privileges because some of us have far more privilege than other people in the world as a test as a tribulation
allah privileges some people over others in the quran that he followed
he had privileged some of you over others as a test to see how you behave so uh people that are less privileged
their tribulation is patience and and and people that are more privileged their tribulation is
gratitude and are they going to help those who are less privileged so those are all things that are just
we have no say in many many things health is another thing i mean you can do
everything and you should and yeah and you should blame yourself if you're not taking care of yourself and you get sick but if you
do all the right things if you eat right if you exercise if you sleep well if you do all the right things and then
you get sick that's and and there's nothing you can do about that so it's just
recognizing anything that's happened you have to see it as
an but anything that's yet to happen you have to see that you have it's you
that's going to choose and then you need to take responsibility for it once you've chosen it but don't open that door oh if only
because the prophet said uh lo saying if opens up the door of
ship on so if only i took the my child to the hospital 10 minutes before he wouldn't have died
it's my fault no yeah if if it happened it was meant to happen at that time
everybody has an edge even nations have edu like america we don't know where it is in its
lifespan but as far as i can tell i think it's it's pretty old
uh yeah because all of the signs of societal collapse uh can be seen now
in in the united states if you read any of the great historians of uh societal patterns
if you read spangler you read toimbi if you read uh sir john gloop pasha if you read
el macrisi the great even khaldoon all of these can be seen now i mean
we're at late stage one of the things in late stage societies is celebrities become very very
important in in healthy and healthy societies celebrities are
the lowest people on the totem pole like in india it's a well-known fact
that hindu bollywood actors used muslim names because they were so ashamed and they
didn't want to bring shame on their family and muslim actors used hindu names
because they were so ashamed that they were actors but now it's becoming a very popular now
to be actors in india which is a sign that they're in bad shape yeah yeah
because entertainers i mean entertainers it's wonderful to have entertainment
um but entertainers are not they're not emergency room doctors
you know they're not linemen that are really emergency room doctors i know but they're not linemen that are
risking their lives to get your electricity back up when the storm takes it down right they're not they're not um you
know they're not uh emts or paramedics you know that are risking their lives to i mean
let's be realistic and even i you know who i somebody i grew up with and and really uh liked his his lyrics a lot was
dylan and dylan uh somebody asked him about he said well what's in it he said i don't he said entertainers are very low
in my estimation he's an entertainer he said they're very low he said if i if i was going to come back again
i'd rather be something like a brain surgeon you know somebody that actually did something
yeah yeah and and and probably that's not totally fair because i think a lot of
poets and and even a lot of people drive great solace from music in our culture because
they don't have things like the quran and and and other things to get that solos from so
there are a lot of people that that that that has helped them through difficult times especially meaningful
uh lyrics and things like that but generally entertainment is is a it's it's just not a high thing in
any culture yeah it's uh lots of food for thought
there you're absolutely right celebrity culture is everything and anything right now i mean if you look at social media it's all
celebrity-led and you know algorithms and you know when people are obsessed with
numbers like people people obsessed with followers and how many followers they have
and and it's just really sad said your audience is all only always an
audience of one hello you know like just put god in your heart and and and you know the meaning of god
obviously um put that in your heart and then not worry and do what you think is right and that
let things fall where they may because we can't determine if you were going to like me or they're not going to
like me if you just have to be true to yourself and and to do what you believe
and do it honestly and and do it without compromising principles and do what you think is right and we
all make our istihad and they're either right or they're wrong um and we can be deluded and and i'm
very aware of that we can delude ourselves and and that's why we should always be careful and
and uh and think deeply about things but generally um you know we we
we have this short time and and we should be making the best of it absolutely absolutely concur um shaq
um we've just got some comments on facebook and some of the comments coming through people are asking about the death
meditations that you spoke about and where they can access them could you just give a few comments about that well well i mean
the best ones are suratiya and surat al-mulk because if you read
those three surahs with any uh reflection you will see that
essentially those three surahs which are meant to be recited every day all three of them are death meditations
so that's one place to begin the other one is some of the set of there was one of
the andrussian scholars who actually i mean i wouldn't recommend this but he actually
dug a grave in his backyard and he used to when he when he woke up in the morning
he would go and he would sit in the grave lie down in it
and then he would open his eyes as if he was given another day that's fun
and and and i mean that's very extreme but uh you know it shows you that how
serious they took these things one thing that you can do is you can
literally lie down and i do this sometimes and and you you uh um if you do if you do some
like breathing you know uh you can just breathe like 20 times deep breaths and then hold your breath
for a minute or two i mean i can usually hold my breath for three minutes and just no breathing and then and then
and then you literally just imagine yourself in your grave and and and the angels are gonna come
and ask you you know who is your lord who is your prophet and what your deen
is and how you're going to be able to ask because allah youth
those who are firm in their faith allah will make firm their answers but those who were hypocrites or who
wavered in their faith that they'll be too frightened to answer
i mean that i can't imagine i mean just somebody just trying to do that and you're right how seriously they took it
and in this day and age i think it'd be a rarity to get something every day is a gift sabbah every day is the gift there's no
guarantees the prophet salla islam said wake up in the morning as if you're not going to see the evening and go to sleep at night as if
you're not going to see the morning every day is a gift and and what are you gonna do with the gift
and the greatest gift that we've been given is the gift of free will and when you go to the default setting
which is sinfulness that's default one that's the capitulation because the
beauty one of the most profound aspects of the arabic language and i learned this from uh
from one of my teachers who's really one of the i think the greatest living muslims and
and uh one of the most brilliant people that we have in the world he he uh he wrote an essay
about ichthyor about choice and the word arabic
means if you if you just look at choose that's what it means so in arabic choice is only choosing
good and then you get to this kind of aristotelian understanding in the nicomachean ethics where he talks about and the muslims
borrowed from this heavily so in our books of ethics they even though they don't very often attribute it to aristotle
it does come from him aristotle saw the difference between real goods and apparent goods
and so a human being is always attempting for a good but it's either a real good or an
apparent good and the apparent good is usually related to pleasure that they want some kind of
pleasure out of it so like you know you you have a big chocolate cake or or pecan pie or in my case it would
be um baklava because my mom used to make really amazing not the chocolate when i was a kid not the chocolate baklava
yeah i can totally uh i can totally withstand chocolate
you know you what the persistence that you're going to get but then after you eat it you feel sick and you're asking yourself
why did i just do that right that's an apparent good it's not a real good it's not to say you can't enjoy sweets every
once in a while but if you if you eat them too often you're going to get sick and and so then it becomes
focusing on choosing the good so that is true exercise of free will is to choose
real goods not apparent ones yeah okay that's that's a really good way of uh
yeah and analyzing the team if you look at you know look well also if you look at the word sin in
in in old english if you look at the word um in the new testament and these are all
archery terms for missing the mark and so that is what sin is
it's you missed the mark yeah you you saw
a false good aimed for it but it wasn't a real good like a forced negative
absolutely check there's something that comes to my mind actually when we talking about peace and salam and um i often wonder especially when
you touched upon the whole idea of class because part of our ethical framework is having
good class good etiquette and being english this is something that's part and parcel of our tradition
good etiquette but all too often sometimes muslims can have the most aggressive you know
behavior or tendencies when we're calling to dawah or in our everyday experiences so that's why
a lot of non-muslims don't really gravitate towards muslims because of the way that we behave um and also muslims can be quite
reactionary as you touched upon you know the oppressor and the uh oppression and the
oppressor and those who are oppressed and with what's going on in the world we will also have this kind of political
identity that our muslims identifying with rather than actually understanding their faith in the entirety now one of
the things that comes to my mind is when allah has 99 attributes beautiful attributes but the two that we
constantly recite is the most merciful allah the most
beneficent or the most beloved or loving but when we talk about mercy there's
something something that strikes becomes my mind all the time it's not the same it's not the
mercy that you're doing something wrong and allah is now merciful to you which is a very christian
kind of analogy that because you're guilty of guilt but it's more of mercy of love
because allah has this beyond optimal love for for for us as human beings for for for
his creation and i just wondered like how i guess the question is how can we go around sort of attaining
that mercy from allah and understanding that it comes from love and it's not fear of allah well well i mean the easiest way is to
understand the first hadith that is taught in our tradition it's called
it's the very first hadith that i learned from in islam i mean obviously you know
saying hadith without is not but this is the first one when you actually learn
uh in the is not tradition sitting with a scholar who's a muslim like sheikh muhammad is one of the great
muslim of this time you know so he has all these smes so if you're going to study with him the
first hadith that he's going to do i mean sometimes they have hakita and ilafa but generally the very first
hadith they do is and that is the hadith of mercy
which says those who are merciful those who show mercy allah will be
merciful with them have mercy on those in the earth and the
one in the heaven will have mercy on you and and and so that if you want the
mercy of allah you have to show mercy to other people and sometimes mercy is
is literally uh waging war against somebody
in other words yeah it's it's if if your act is to stop the harm
then that's actually an act of mercy and so it's not always just kumbaya that kind of idea yeah no
it's yeah it's not possible it's not sentimental yeah yeah you know something profound
yeah yeah i know that's a really really bad point jack we're just getting um a couple more questions
um so the next question was could you um provide any book
recommendations for ramadan some people are asking and some of you haven't recommended it i know you get
this all the time there isn't this one's either the only book recommendation i have done
i would say i mean it's good to read tafsir if you have access to it
because you know devotional recitation is really important but also understanding is important
there are some really good tough years now that you can have and also
[Music] the some of the
books that are written on the etiquette of quran there was a good translation done of
imam nowy's which is the kid of those who carry the
quran that's an excellent book so also because this is the
report i'm going to cover this all in a few days i'm doing of course
i'm going to look at book eight which is uh in the yeah which is the book of the ada of reciting the quran because it's very
important to have ada towards the
um one of the set of used literally when they opened the most house he would pass
out and then when he came to say how the kadama this is the speech of my lord
in other words so overwhelmed
and he had the most half out and even though he was a hatfield it's actually better to read from the most huff than
it is to read from your memory unless you're doing it as muraja because with the most half your hand
sharing it your eye shares in it so there's more of your limbs that are sharing in the in the ibada
and so it's actually considered better to read it from them but um imam shafi he said
that he's talking to this he said has preoccupied you from the book of
allah he said when the isha comes he said i open the book
and i don't close it until so imam shafi used to read the quran all night every night
and abu hanifa uh as doing that so so we we think that
that's you know how i know for a fact i saw my own teacher uh and i've seen this with so
and that's why my recommendation
and so it's really important even if it's half a page a day just take what you can imam
razadi in in the quran has a section about how much you should recite every
day and he said some of the sellers recited it every three days some did it every seven
some did it every two weeks and some did it once a month and he said maybe once a month is too little
and once a week uh one once every three days is too much so he recommended once a week which
would probably take somebody who could recite
reasonably well about hours so that would be an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening
but i because of the time we're living in i would not get overwhelmed by statements like that and i would just recommend
that if you can do a juice a day uh that's excellent um if if if but
you know at least just do half a page a day uh just every single day just
it's only a few minutes people read the the online they read all these news things they read
they go on what's that you know yeah newspaper and i mean they watch tv people sit and
watch a two-hour film every day there's people that do that and and i mean that could have been
uh reading quran once a week so at least i think especially most of without the
people much much more and and and the south
that
the the war get fighting to actually your own interstate
absolutely um you mentioned um imam al-ghazali's book
um and obviously you've touched upon death which is um obviously there's his book on uh he
ends that the 40th book yeah the 40th yeah that's the 40th but um we have some people also asking are there any particular
books out of imam al-khazazi out of imam al-ghazal
that you would recommend um any particular highlights um i mean there martial there are 40. in
the uk um the translation uk there's only 13 volumes that are translated so far by
the islamic text societies but obviously not everybody speaks arabic as their first language wait are there any particular ones out
to the 14th one the malaysians have done yeah the malaysia the malaysians have
done a full they did all 40 books oh have they you heard it hey everybody um and i the
islamic tech society has done a really good job they've done dr dr what you had you're fortunate to
have dr uh yes and he's he's done uh wonderful yeah he's done
yeah he's done some really good translations um i you know look imam razzali
is is the architect of an entire approach to the religion of islam and
and so he wrote all of his books to be read together he he really didn't write them
uh you can read them piecemeal and you can get a lot out of it but he has a complete program so for
instance his book on on on on rectifying the mind is called
and he wrote that specifically to teach people how to think correctly and then his book on on behavioral
modification is called and he wrote that specifically
to teach people how to act properly and and and and then he wrote jawaharlal to teach
them how to approach the quran yeah he taught them how to get prepared
to leave this world so that book it begins with which is where it always
has to start and one of the crisis in the muslim world is a crisis of knowledge and literacy that we are no longer a
literate nation and and and the first command is
read in the name of your lord so that's really important it begins with knowledge we have to
study and we're people of learning and and people have different
that's everybody has to study a basis
is getting your correct understanding of god and then he goes through the five pillars the very first book after al-hajj is the adab of the quran so he's
really the the architecture of that book is so stunning the way that he has laid it out the
heart of the book like yasin is called quran the heart of the book is book 20
which is the book on the prophet sallallahu alaihi and i think it's really the most
beautiful book to read is very important and dr winter i think
translated that the marvels of the heart no he he did uh breaking this kasaru which is excellent and and then the the
book on taheed the fact that he put those two
together and this is his genius i mean he really was i think one of them i mean this isn't my
opinion who am i to say who he was he he he our ummah has testified
that this man is one of the greatest muslims that ever lived and and the world that knows him
knows that he's one of the most brilliant human beings that ever lived and i will say in all honesty his
greatest book is his book on legal uh theory
uh and and and and people forget they see him as a sufi he was the greatest jurist that the
muslim ummah ever produced after the salaf i mean he nobody comes
close to imam and everybody after him is influenced by him even if in russia
there is no ibn russia without imam al-hazari there's no even russia without imam
oh great thank you so much yeah really good recommendations for the book so those of you
who heard sheikh hamza he did say that um there the full translation has been done
by the malaysians so i'm sure we can find that online and the islamic tech society by abdullah they've done a really great
job and i've got all 13. also does um uh sister aisha gray henry
i don't know yeah but i i actually i've not come across i've not come across her translation i i
know she's done she's done something like she's she because i did the uh the introduction to the book of knowledge for her
and i also i also we worked on a prime she did all the work but uh but the razali for children
that is a great book
i wrote the internet but but um she she allowed me
the honor of writing the introductions to the the to the series mashallah martial uh check just one
interesting question that's come through actually which um it's quite esoteric so uh to do the metaphysical but somebody's
asking are near-death experiences a gift from allah so people can reflect on their life
purposes and this is quite interesting because people talk about near-death experiences when they don't have surgery or when they're coming to the end of
life and they tend to have apparitions and i know well in the uk this is anecdotally um
reported that in the uk most people that work in um hospices or nurses will tell you that
most people come to the end of life genuinely don't pass away without a faith because
when it comes to the end of faith people tend to believe in something um but near-death experiences tend to happen when
you know people are sick or you know uh they're not of the sound of mind or doing surgery
what would you say about that i mean i i'm my own i think probably in
some ways the catalyst for me become becoming muslim was a near-death experience so
i mean i had a near-death experience i was in a head-on collision and um and
what was interesting about the event is uh whatever mystical experience happened
to me in that moment which was very powerful um it it led me to really search for
understanding i spent almost a year just studying uh afterlife like what happens after you
die and and looking at different religions and what they said i actually went met dr raymond moody who had written books
about life after life because he was the man that studied all the near-death experiences so i i
met him and he told me what had happened to me was actually far more common than people realize that there are many people that
have near-death experiences so i think for me it was a gift uh i
when you're 17 you i think you have a sense of immortality that you're just invincible
and uh and for me it was a real wake-up call because i was the kid that would that
would do the dare you know i was the kid that would jump off the crazy cliff into the water below
i was that kid and i broke i i broke my leg very badly twice i broke my arm you know
so i really was a daredevil and uh and
after that experience i just really came to i just became much more
appreciative of how fragile life is and that's why i'm i i don't do anything like that i mean i
i did trek across the sahara and got dysentery and things but but uh yeah i'm very cautious about
um things like that i i'm with you i'm with you i am so cautious you wouldn't catch me
jumping out my wife would argue i'm not a good driver which i do admit that um i i well i'm like yeah i won't be
jumping out any planes um but i i i'm definitely cautious like you i i would never jump out of a plane yeah
no open your mind not your parachute i i agree definitely i'm with you on
that one like yeah because because open parachutes don't work if they're not open and mines don't work if they're
not open absolutely oh that's so beautifully put um shaq i just want to touch upon one thing um you know um
two questions actually i think before we close up really um one one comment that i wanted to make is
that you spoke about how you know how we can move forward you know we're in a
troublesome state you know and we really need to move ahead but there's a there's um a scholar in the uk
who i know you're you're aware of um mohammed
al-nadawi who's just produced a 14-volume encyclopedia really on the female
scholarship in islam and women in islam he says something really interesting he says the failure of the ummers for two
reasons one the lack of scholarship and two the fact that we
won the lack of female scholars should i say the lack of female scholarship and two the fact that we've not given women their rightful place in society
i think there's there's a lot of truth to that i think it's important
not to uh time of development and bashing demand because you know
just as an exercise it's good for women to sometimes maybe go outside and
look around at all the infrastructure and think about who built all of that
and they largely built it for women and children um so the prophet said that one of the
worst things that some women have is what he called just a a a kind of ingratitude towards the
service of men most on-the-job mortality happens over 95 percent happens to men because they
do the most dangerous jobs when things break down it's the man you want to be defending you because
the the women are always the victims of societal breakdown wars and things like that it's always
the women and children that suffer the most so that's really important but i do agree that historically if you look at
the babakat literature and this is the biographical literature of our scholars on average
up to the 15th century over 10 in in the books were women and that
means notable scholars so that that's that's not just scholars those are like
the notables of that time and so that's quite a lot uh over 10 given that
most women had a lot of children they had other things to do but you see a real shift from the 16th
century on it just goes way down and so i think there is a lot of truth to that
um i think it's very important for for us to have these spaces i you know i
had a dream the other day about a a female mosque trying to convince somebody to open
a female mosque the reason i really my mosque yeah i like i like the chinese i like
that chinese model the idea of having a space for women one of the things that they had in
that one of the one of the alpha that they had in baghdad was for divorced women to perform their
idda in a spiritual environment so they actually would go into a type of khalwa
to get close to allah because very often divorce allows that opportunity to to get close
to allah because there is a type of you know unfortunately there can be a type of um
well no there there's a type of uh you know some women invest so much in the husband yeah and
to the detriment of their relationship with their lord and and and you know there's so many women that get
i mean the giving of women we as men we have to appreciate that the amount of giving
i mean i just see it um you know in my own family the amount of giving and care and
uh the way uh you know our five children just all that time and all that effort and all of us have
had mothers uh uh and if we didn't we had some kind of caregiver that
played the role of the mother so that's just really important to to recognize that
we're a complimentary species you know
you know you're a garment for them and and they're a garment for you and
and a garment is something that you use to to cover yourself to for warmth
uh for um
so this is the relationship it's a complementary relationship it's very important one so i'm i think we're starting to see
some good young female skull
are standing up i mean uh intisa who's a professed hard i recently uh
looked at her book quite some time ago and uh and for me i i took a long time to but it's
a brilliant and uh just a really really solid uh piece of scholarship um and then we
have some great uh uh you know uh young scholars that are and and
as well yeah you know we have have some really good
legendary people like that you know that that are uh you know speak from the heart and
maybe the hearts of others you know so not are really important but we also need charismatic
duats that can invite people back to the faith and uh and invite others to the faith they just
have to know their limits and that's the really important thing because ada is um
and so people really need to know their limits that's really important what they can talk about and where they
have to say i mean one of the things there was a family i won't mention his name there was a famous
uh who used to do interfaith and i didn't
particularly like his style but one of the things i really appreciate about him that he would always say
i'm not a scholar you know you know that's a question for a
or something and that's really important because you can't learn phil from books
you need uh scholars to teach you fil and so you have to be really careful with fatwa
absolutely i think fiki issues definitely need to be done with those who actually can deal with for
towers absolutely um as for um uh yeah uh starter hosai
she's a of the best kind of dies i've come across some of recent
uh days shall i say so uh yeah one one for people to look out for alhamdulillah
um shaq just one more question actually um ramadan we're halfway through um you
know we have two more weeks left inshallah um what's the one piece of advice you can give to everybody listening
um to attain or the like one basic piece of information that a takeaway today to attain that inner
peace inshallah um
isn't it
hearts find peace the most important thing is for us to just reconnect with our lord throughout the
day and just be reminded that we're just passing through we're travelers the prophet saw isaiah
said be in this dunya like a traveler a stranger or a traveler so
i think that's the most important thing is just to remember allah and and to really you know guard the
prayer the prayer is very important the prayer should be above and and beyond everything else if if you're guarding
your prayer everything else will fall into place if you relax on your prayer then everything else is going to be
problematic
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