Peace in Ramada

Transcript Details

Event Name: Peace in Ramada
Transcription Date:Transcription Modified Date: 5/30/2022
Transcript Version: 1


Transcript Text

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
1