The Jewels of the Qur'an Session 1

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ramadan mubarak to everyone out there alhamdulillah i'm going to start
a short course on the great imam razadi's quran i have some preliminary
things that i want to cover before i actually go into the book itself but alhamdulillah inshallah it's going
to be very interesting i hope and may allah subhanahu wa to give all of you may allah bless your ramadan may
inshallah increase all of you give you lots of openings this is the month of returning to the book of allah subhanahu
wa ta'ala for those who have neglected it for increasing our recitation of it for
those who have been reciting it throughout the year and for delving into deeper understandings
of the book of allah so in essence the ramadan is like a continuing education if you're a
physician or a lawyer or anybody that's in a vocational field a dentist
then you have to do what are called continuing education courses so that you keep your skills
upgraded and you constantly honing your craft well the spiritual path is
actually far more serious than those aspects and so it's really important for us to
to really re-ignite reconnect to the book of allah subhanahu wa ta'ala
which is the foundation of our faith and then following that obviously the sunnah of our prophesies
him and then not just his verbal or oral sunnah but actually the sunnah of practice
what imam called and so the reason i wanted the jew do the
jawahar quran i mentioned this last year because we looked at ibm jose kelvi and i i love even jose alkelby
it's one of my favorite tafsirs the tassiel it's a brilliant tafsir it's short
concise but it's one of those oceans where every time you dip into it you realize
that how how could have he done that how how did he get so much into so a few pages
well imam razadi is is the ocean his own teacher imam joining said that he was
that he was an ocean that would drown you that once you go into him uh he
is an ocean and it's really important to emphasize when we talk about imam marquez
is that he has been much maligned of late by our community
and unfortunately it's one of the signs of the latter days that the prophet sam told us that the
people towards the end of the ummat would curse or speak ill of the people at the outset
of the ummah so this has to be fulfilled i suppose but i feel sorry for those people that
are the ones that are fulfilling that hadith so imam razadi as you can see
i'm using the term the oceanic imam and sheikh the proof of islam the wonder
of his age and that comes from imam dahabi the great muhaddith and historian
who was a stu famously a student of ibn taymiyah the the the
and the uh he was a polymath but ibn temi and imam razadi
have a very interesting relationship i mean obviously even timmy is after him but in many ways have been tamiya's
responding to imam khazadi so it's one of the dialectical conversations in our ummah
so imam al-zabi calls him al-imam al-bahar and bahar in arabic
can mean different things but here it clearly means ocean in the in the facade of in the quran that actually
means in in the bed amongst the beto and in the cities so the baha'i means the the korah and the mudun
because often cities are built by rivers or by oceans because of the trade the
importance of trade coming to them so the bahar can mean different things but it's used for
the meaning of ocean and interesting is related to the word heber in the great derivation so the
the jews are called ahbar because the hebrew is also the bahar he's the bahar of ink and the prophet
sallallahu islam who is the great ocean that we all
are either marveling at on the shore or others have dived into his sunnah
and are drowning in the glories of his sunnah the prophet sallallahu alaihi salaam
interacted with the the akhbar and went and used to debate them so they they the hiber is the person who
spends a lot of ink uh in in his uh occupation
so imam dahabi calls him imam al-bahar
he is the huja of islam the proof of islam and the wonder of the age
and this is important because of who
is he he's he's clearly one of the great scholars of islam
and so when a great scholar of islam acknowledges another scholar and gives him titles like that you have to take it
very serious another great scholar who is the the polymath and the hafel
ibn najar he actually says about about the imam khan imam khan imam
and then he said that he was also the rabbani of the ummah rabbani
rabbani um
that's what he calls him so even ajar who was in baghdad and he lives after imam not
that long after imam al-qazadi but he is one of the great imams of baghdad and and he said that he was
a a an imam in iraq and he was you know and and he had
mastered it so he said he's the imam al-fukah which means that he's really
there they're the master and and and i'm going to go into that more but so as we
move in i want to just begin by before we get into jawahar quran i'm going to take you through two doors the
first door and which i'm going to look at inshaallah today is the door of the imam himself and looking at the imam and why he's so
important and why he has to be restored to his position because some people have tried to knock him off
his pedestal and this is not the first time that it happened it's happened in the past but he is
the most important jurist after the first generation in the history of islam
and he's also one of the most important theologians and he is certainly probably the most
important mystic of the islamic tradition so in that way he is after that first generation he is the
imam of of iman the imam of of islam and the imam of ichsan
for the sunni tradition the shia traditionally have had a difficult time with him because he did spend
the the the little time that he spent in refutation was in refuting the shia so unfortunately because he's iranian
one would think he would be one of the great treasures of iran
he's not as appreciated i think as he should be although the shia did benefit from and not nasiruddin atosi who's a great
shia scholar did so he was born in tulsa which is in a area that was really called
khorasan so today you can have afghanistan you have turkmenistan and you have northern iran all of that
was called horizon so the avrahanis are really the turkey
the turkmen the turkmenstanis are harassanis and the people of northern
iran because it's a persian word that just means where this is so from uh the sun is
is is sun is that right it's yeah sun so is where it rises
is that correct yeah so he was born in this place uh in in in tus in northern iran
and his father was a a simple some say he was a gazelle like
a a person who was a wool carter and that's why there's a debate about his name was he imam ragazzali or is it with a
soft zay but his his his father was a very simple man who
loved the ulama and he used to serve them and he would honor them and he would
treat them and do whatever he could for them and he made sincere du a to allah that he had two
sons ahmed and muhammad muhammad is muhammad ahmed
becomes a scholar and a great mystic but his son abu hamid really becomes
hajjit and i think it's from the sincerity of his father but he was raised an orphan because his father dies
in his early years he left him to be taken care of by somebody when the money ran out
he put them in a madrasa because he couldn't afford to keep them and so they grow up in this madrasa
in tus which is where he learns the beginnings of his his knowledge and he studied with an
imam there uh where rath kali is his name and he's he's very interesting and then
he moves to georgia and that should say georgian which is gurgan which is near what they call it
and he studies there ima many great imams from this place imam jirjani was from there both
giorgiani's because there's two of them but a really truly extraordinary place of knowledge
so he goes there and he studies with abu nasar al-isma'ili some says
this is around 465 he was born in 450 and so he's about 15 years of age
so he's literally on his journey now and he spends he stays there with uh with this sheikh
was a former boshich in um in in in and he basically memorizes
quran uh he did that earlier he studied arabic but he studies with him
chavez and and he basically writes what's called the talika which is essentially all of his notes of
the lectures because this is a time when scholars did what is called amali they just umly
so for instance has a book called amalia dalalet which
is a a very formidable book in also all of it was from lecture he did it
without notes simply lecturing off the top of his head his students recorded it and then it was
transcribed and then he edited it but those were his amali very few scholars can do that today i
know one more italian scholar who told me that he could write in this moment
he um me i could i could dictate to you 40 books in 40 sciences
and he said since i mastered those sciences i've only been asked about three out of out of the so 37 he was never
even asked about so he he basically writes on his after four years
close to five after studying with this man he's on his way back and he tells this story
where these brigands come and they and they basically robbed the caravan this was quite common in those days
and they robbed the caravan and so imam al-ghazali i mean you can imagine he's 19 years old
and he's just studied and he's mastered all of this uh knowledge that he's learned
but he hasn't memorized it so he understands it but he hasn't memorized it so the thief takes his uh
his his bag of books and the imam runs after him and begs him
please don't take my knowledge from me and at that point the thief laughs at him and the thief says to him
what kind of knowledge is it that a wretch like me could steal it from you
can you can you really call that knowledge and says i knew then
that allah made him say that for me to know that that is not knowledge if it
can be stolen from you by a thief it's not knowledge and so he goes back to those
and spends the next three years memorizing everything he had learned by rote so that nobody could ever take it from
him again and then at that stage he sets out for what's
called nisabur or nishapur and this was another great
center of learning in northern iran today it's called northern iran and he studies with the great imam abu
ali imam al jawaini he's also called imam haramein he was probably the most brilliant
scholar of his age in phike he was a chef a jurist but he was also an osuli which
means he studied legal philosophy so the philosophy of law and what's more important is he's really
even though arguably imam shafi malik imam and imam abbahanibah all are
working in a makasidhi approach that's undeniable if you if you look at their methodologies
but it hadn't really been articulated the beginnings begin with imam shafi when he writes his famous
resala but then it's imam al-juwani that really develops the makasidhi
school so he comes up with the five universals uh that these are the makasid of of
of our religion like protecting the religion itself protecting life protecting
intelligence reason itself protecting family and then protecting
the property and then the the sometimes they add a six which is
dignity but most of them include that in family because honor and that all goes under
your name because you carry your family name so anybody that disparages it is disparaging your honor so they put
havoc in heaven so imam al-ghazali now you can imagine
the toffee that imam al-juani must have felt by having a student like imam razadi because he actually has him teach
in his madrasah very early so he studies with him there for uh five years he goes there when
he's 23 imam al-juni dies but what's really important
this was a time when there was a lot of fitan imam jueni or adilanu was actually there were assassination
attempts on his life because of the botania he actually had to flee at a certain point he goes to
he's called the imam haramein because he goes to mecca and medina he taught in mecca and medina
but he had the greatest student of the age and it's just extraordinary that
allah brought those two together and that's very important to remember that you know they say if you see a
turtle on a fence the one thing that you can deduce from that is that it didn't get there by himself
and there's a lot of truth uh to the fact that wherever you are in the world you did not get there on
your own and if you study it's your teachers that are
going to make you or break you i mean just it's it's the reality teachers will either turn you off of
knowledge and unfortunately many do that to young people or they will ignite a fire
in you that that is in it's it's just the kindling is there it's all ready but it's it's a great
teacher that will ignite that fire in in the student and this is imam al-khazadi already had that fire
but when he goes to imam jawaini amazing things happen one of the first things that he does is
he masters his book al-burhan in us and then he actually abridges it so he
br bridges his teacher's book and then brings it to him and and shows him the book so he's very
impressed with it then he goes uh after imam joining dies in um when the imam is 28
he he actually goes to the court of nitham and you have to understand that imam razali will be the first to admit
that he was an incredibly ambitious person and in fact so one of the things that the the people
of uh of uh you know the spiritual masters of the religion say is that the last thing to leave the
heart of sincere people is habriasa it's love of leadership because it's love of leadership that often
it gets them there without that they won't have that drive to outstrip everybody else because they
have that thoroughbred nature and so he goes to nilam
now nidham al-mulk who was a seljuk minister nilam al-murk was actually a righteous
minister the government arguably was not a great government like all governments it had
its problems and there were a lot of there was a lot of dissent but even tamiya one of the things that
he points out is that the idea that you cannot work with governments unless they're perfectly angelic
is he said it's insane because it will lead to all of the aspects of the religion
falling into disarray because governments are the ones that establish the mosques in muslim countries they're the ones that have the mahakam
the the courts they have the uh ifta the fatwa places so if if all the ulama
in their righteousness say i'm not going to have anything to do with the government then who runs the government and i'll give you one
example of this there was a man named muhammad sharif who was a libyan
and he worked in the government under qadhafi and i actually
visited him in 1978 in libya with one of my teachers
and he hosted us he's a beautiful man he helped so many people he helped
africans he helped all and then but he stayed in the government for years never said anything
he was doing everything in spite of what what was happening he hated
gaddafi he hated the government but he was the he was a hidden man he was like the men amongst ali faraon
the believer within alif raon and they actually wanted to try him after
the the um the rebellion and uh the death of qaddafi but thankfully
because of the intercession of some good people particularly jordanians he was able to go to jordan he has spent
his life doing his works he's he's one of the few people that did critical editions of his
works so that's an example of somebody at the time there were probably people that saw him he's adam sultan he's just working with
the government imam
he said i learned knowledge for other than allah but knowledge refused to be other than for allah
and so even though he might have had his nia was not always the best his
path because he was a sincere seeker his path was his purification and so he went
through great tribulations so he gets into the court he completely floors
nizam and moku was adam himself and was surrounded by ulama and he sees him as somebody
this man is going to be very useful and and
had a project at the time they were cursing the ashari's on the mimbars literally cursing them the ashari
mutikalimun the theologians there was a lot of fitnah in the community
the the the ismailis the botania were very strong the occultists and i'll talk about that later
so there's all these problems and he it's just amazing what he does because
he comes in and he he can win every argument he is just so formidable and so
irrefutable that um the ulama just they can't they can't handle him and so
they a lot of envy a lot of jealousy but nilamon mok sends him he becomes a full professor in baghdad
at the neva mia now you have to understand at the at the young age i mean he's in his early 30s
and he's a full professor at a place where most of these teachers are going to be in their 60s and 70s right so it's quite stunning and
but then he has a crisis the crisis comes about the age of 38.
he goes into what we would call a an existential crisis in the west they'd probably call it a
midlife crisis where he really begins to he goes through a period of radical
skepticism and doubt and just is wondering and this is partly because of his own
genius and because he's he penetrates so deeply into things but he really begins to question everything
and because of that he actually loses the ability to talk he can't teach anymore and this is a man
who the ulama came to listen to even appeal the great grammarian and
and scholar used to come and sit i mean this is a man who the great the ulama of baghdad
would come to sit in his lectures that's that's how formidable he was
but he he just can't talk and the doctors basically say
you need a psychologist you know we're we're physicians we we can't we can't do this you you
need somebody adam and neff's because this is a it's not a physiological problem this is a psychological problem
and so he basically decides to to just really examine everything and he he
looks he he identifies four sources of knowledge he calls them the theologians the mutu<