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