That is why the Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) said “your body has a right over you”. Non-Muslims
look at fasting as this incredibly difficult thing, for Muslims it is the best
time of the year because it is the time when they are closest to Allah. That is
why, they are in a state of worship despite themselves. Just by sitting there,
sleeping, they are worshipping because they are fasting. That is why even the
sleep of a faster is worship and that is why you feel good in Ramadhan. You
might not feel physically good but you feel spiritually good. So it is this
beautiful proof every year. Another thing that he points out is that is
beautiful is the justice of God. If you live in the UK, half the year you are
going to be fasting really short periods and the other half really long periods
but over a 33 year period which is the total cycle it will work out to the same
amount of fasting that the people in the middle part of the world so everybody
ends up fasting the same amount of time all throughout the world.
Hajj
Every religion has this idea of pilgrimage and it is the
setting out on that journey and here it is a physical journey with a metaphysical
destination. It is a physical journey but the destiny is the House of God and
God does not have a house in which He dwells. So He put a house there as a
symbol of visiting God and you are a guest of God and that is why you are
called the guest of the Merciful. He put a rock there which He called the right
hand of God that you can go kiss in the same way that if you visit a king you
would kiss the right hand of the king so the rock there is symbolic of paying
homage to the benevolent monarch, benevolent king of whom you are subject.
Obviously it is also a recognition. One of the things about going to
Then also the gift of visiting the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam). That he is there, he
is amongst us, you can go visit him. There is no other Prophet in the planet
that anybody can go visit with any certainty. The Jews cannot go and visit
Moses. No one can go and visit Isa. They can’t visit. This is a great gift that
Muslims have been given, that their Prophet is there physically in Madinah. He
according to the hadith actually returns greeting so this a real visit with a
response and for people who have been there and been in the right state, they
know what they tasted there, they know. You can go in with different states.
There are people who go in there and do not see anything. There are other
people who go in there and they are wading in light. Some people are not wading
they are engulfed in it. Other people that is all they can see. There are many
different visits to Madinah.
Now he talks about the sixth pillar. This is a Shia concept.
He studied in
One of the most important ways to keep in our bodies is to
learn the outward rules of salah very well and to adhere to them in the same
way you would when you first learn to drive. When you first learn to drive, it
is very troublesome because you are so conscious of the rules especially if you
have the teacher next to you but at a certain point it all becomes “it is just
what you do”. So initially being obsessed with the rules is problematic because
you are so focused on the rules you cannot focus on the spirit of the prayer
but that is a necessary stage of the prayer so learning the rules really well
until they become second nature and then you begin to work on your spiritual
presence of the prayer. Part of that has to do with the amount of dhikr that
you do during the day and that is why the more dhikr you do, the better your
prayer. Also wudu is very important. Sidi Ahmad Zarruq said “your presence in
your wudu determines your presence in your prayer”. One of the things that
people do is that they do wudu very hastily and very ritualistically so their
wudu is no longer an act of worship.
One of the best things that I was ever exposed to was
watching Muratul Hajj do wudu because it really hit home the first time I saw
it. It is a deep act of worship and we tend to forget that. Wudu is part of
prayer. It is a very deep act of worship. Not doing wudu in a bathroom, no
doing it where the toilet is very important. One of the things that Sidi Ahmad
Zarruq was saying before you start your prayer recite Surah Naas just to remove
the waswasa.
It is one of the proofs of Iblis because like when you do
takbir sometimes, it is the weirdest thing, why did that suddenly come into my
mind? That is that component that is working. It is very interesting. Literally
you do takbir and waswasa comes. Tasawuf is on the words that is used to
describe the science of ihsan. It is the inner fiqh. So that is all it is, it
is an inner fiqh. Just like you have fuqaha that are wrong in their outward rules
you have people of tasawuf that are wrong in their inward. That is part of the
problem. People throw the baby out with the bathwater because there are people
of tasawuf that went way out there. Then you have extremist fuqaha.
What I was going to say was in the West one of the reasons
that you have so much perversion in sexuality is because people are so removed
form their bodies. Sex becomes a very mental thing. Their experiences of sex is
all mental. It is a disease, they want perverse sex because they cannot just
experience a natural experience of being in the body. Very strange. You do not
have that in traditional cultures where people are very much in their body. You
do not have perverted sex. I guarantee you, in
In the hadith, why are the pillars described before faith?
Obviously the first rukun of Islam is shahada and that comes
out of faith. So faith in a sense precedes Islam but you can enter into Islam
and your faith is very immature and undeveloped. Faith is something that comes
out of practice. It is developed through practice if the practice is done
properly. There are some Muslim countries, I do not want to mention names but
there are some Muslim countries where hypocrisy is the norm. Where people do
these outward ritual which have no impact on their spiritual reality at all.
You see the most horrendous examples of hypocrisy in people that pray, fast and
do everything so it is no guarantee any of it.
During the Mamluke period, slaves actually became rulers so
they saw that as a fulfillment of that prophecy.
Riyaa which is spiritual showing off. It is doing an act of
devotion in other words to God hoping that people see it for whatever reason.
Riyaa is definitely more significant in a spiritual society. We have showing
off, if somebody is a good horseman and they se people, they do a fancy jump, that
is not riyaa. That is just showing off. Riyaa is when you do an act that should
be done for God that you are doing for other people to say “what a generous
person”. That is riyaa. There are two types of riyaa. That which is only for
the people which is the worst type. In other words, you do not even care about
God, you give charity so people will say “he is a generous man”. The other is
when you genuinely want to do something for God but you find this desire. That
is something that people have to struggle with. Imam Malik was asked about a
man who was on his way to the mosque who when he set out solely for the sake of
God but on the way he is hoping somebody might see him. Imam Malik said it is
human nature that that element exists.
There is the famous story of a man who used to go to prayer
and he was in the first line every single day for 40 years. One day he went and
he missed the opening takbir and he did not want people to see him. He realised
he had had that riyaa for 40 years. I do not know if that is true or not but
the meaning is nice. It is just letting you know that there is a lot of subtle
levels there that we are not even aware of. That is part of spiritual
development. That is why they say “the good actions of righteous people are
wrong actions for the people in divine presence”. That is why each maqam that
you move to you start saying astagfirullah for the previous maqam because you
realise how many things you were doing wrong, how many things that you thought
you were doing were right. You get to a higher level of awareness, you realise
“I was doing it for the wrong reason”. It is a journey, that is why it is
called a path. It is a journey. May Allah help us to realise the right one.
I wanted to go over some concepts for people to understand
about jihad because probably of all the topics related to Islam the two most
common misconceptions I would say are probably those concerning jihad and those
concerning women. Most of the attacks on Islam generally tend to focus on those
two elements so I would like to talk about this first from what he mentions in
this book. He mentions the idea of holy war as misleading and it is inaccurate
translation. Holy war in Arabic if you did have a word for it, the Arabs
actually do not, would be Harb Muqasada. The Arabs do not have a concept of
holy war in that way, in fact it is actually a Christian concept and coming out
of the just war concept and crusades. So the word in Arabic that is used and
has in fact become an English word sometimes with a negative connotation and
other times with a positive, it has been used both ways by journalists and
other people.
Jihad comes from a root word which is juhud which has the
idea of exerting energy. “He exerted his utmost ability” so the idea behind the
word jihad and juhud is known as a verbal noun from jahada wa jahidu. The Quran
says “Struggle against them with it, with the Quran a great jihad, a great
struggle” which means argue with the polytheists using the Quran as the weapon
of argumentation against polytheism because the Quran although it never proves
the existence of God it is constantly focusing on the unity of God. So the idea
was to use the arguments that the Quran presents for the oneness of God in
order to explain to the people who believed in more than one god that there was
one God so that is a type of jihad in the Quran. That is a great jihad, that is
why the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) and
the Quran says “struggle with them, with your wealth, with yourselves” and also
it says to the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa
sallam) “to fight with them with your tongues” in other words argumentation. In
fact argumentation not being disputation but rather civil debate, civil
discourse because the Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) if a conversation became heated he would withdraw. The
Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) did not
engage in disputation but rather in civil debate or discourse where we sit down
and try to look at a problem from both sides and so you put your proofs
forward, the other person puts his proofs forward and you attempt to convince
somebody of a superior way. That is a civil discourse and that is jihad bil
lisaan. The Quran says “and dispute with them in an excellent way” which is
civil discourse using intelligence and using reason. Now the interesting thing
is that war is actually when that breaks down in other words coercive force is
what is used when people are not able to speak to each other in any civil way
so war is actually a collapse of intelligent discourse. That is why in essence
it is a very stupid thing. War is an incredibly stupid thing and that is why
the Quran tells us not to be aggressors because the nature of the aggressor is
he is somebody who is unable to obtain what he wants so he resorts to other
ways, violent means to getting what he wants. Those type of people usually want
wrong things, things that are not theirs and that is why the essence of
conflict generally has to do with one person or one group of people aggressing
on another group of people. So what happens is one side if is aggressed on and
the other side is the aggressors. The people who are aggressed upon are the
people in the Quran that are permitted to fight and this is why at the essence
of physical or martial conflict and that is why when we look at jihad, there
are three Quranic concepts.
The first is struggling against the self. The
idea that there is an internal conflict going on so actually have to struggle
with your self and part of struggling with yourself is struggling with the
passions and the passion are your bestial nature. So your struggle with that is
your reason and that is why when somebody is attempting not to do something
that is wrong and struggle against those impulses, what he is using a higher
power and the higher power, is the aql. That is why the essence of intellect in
Arabic means that which constrains you or that which prevents you from doing
some thing that will lead you astray. Aql yaquli means to stop, to prevent and
other Arabic word that they use for intellect is nuha which comes from that
which refuses or that which prevents yanha. So the essence of the intellect is
that it prevents a human being from going astray. Now those people that do not
listen to intellect, Allah says about them “they are like animals” but then He
says “they are even more astray”. The reason for that is that animal do not do
things that harm them. If an animal knows there is harm in something, it will
avoid it. If an animal sees fire, it will flee from the fire. If an animal
seems something that threatens it, it will either defend itself if it does not
see any other venue or if by its nature the threat that it deems within its
power like a lion if it is threatened by a lesser animal, the lion will tend to
fight because it knows it can overpower.
So the idea of human beings resorting to the
bestial element in itself is a capitulation, it is the idea of surrendering the
self to something that is low and that is why if you look at the human body
itself the higher organs, the heart and the intellect are an upper body and the
lower organs the stomach and the genitals are upon the lower body. So the idea
is that this is the way that the human being should be. He should be the ruling
force, in the human being should be the heart and intellect and the subjugated
force should be the bestial nature. What happens with human beings is that they
become overcome by their bestial nature and so hunger and craving which is the
essence of desire overwhelms the intellect so they begin to want things that
are harmful for them. This is why they are worse than animals because an animal
will only take what it needs. Lions do not go out and slaughter, they take what
they need and they leave the rest maybe for another day but if they are not
hungry they are not going to kill 10 zebras. They will kill what they need to
kill and that is the difference between a human, the predations of humans are
not needs. So when a predator animals attacks another animal it attacks out of
need not out of want or desire. So this is very different. There is only a few
animals that appear to be unprovoked. Sharks will attack unprovoked and so will
certain snakes as well. There are a few snakes and there is a baboon that will
attack unprovoked but it is very rare in the animal kingdom for an animal to
attack unprovoked.
All creatures that have emotion and intellect,
humans beings, have a self defence mechanism. It is part of human nature to
defend yourself. If you fall your reaction is to put your arm out, you do not
fall on your face. Human beings will not do that. In fact one of the first
things they teach you in martial arts is to fall properly because you tend to
want to put your hand out and break your wrist. So they teach you to learn how
to fall in a way that is not actually going to harm you but the impulse is to
brace yourself, is to defend yourself. The same if somebody begins to attack
the thing to do is to cover your face, to protect your face. If somebody throws
a blow at you, if you just stand there and o not defend yourself something is
wrong with your nervous system. It is not functioning so self defence is a
human, it is actually ingrained in us to defend ourselves and that is why every
civil law on the planet recognises the right to self defence. There is no law
that does not whether it is a Muslim or non Muslim every law recognises that a
human has the right to defend himself from bodily harm, from harm to property
all of these things. The first jihad is that struggle against the self and this
is what makes a human being human. Bahani says that a human being…there are two
words in the Quran used for human, one is bashar and the other is insaan. A
bashar, it is that quality that distinguishes us from other animals so for
instance birds are distinguishable from their feathers. Birds have feathers.
Mammals have fur. If you look at mammals, they have fur. Human beings have
skin. That is why we are called bashar. Bashar is from bashara which means
skin. So the human is when you say he is a bashar you say he is a man. That is
when the Prophets, what do they say about the Prophets, that say “you are just
a human like us” but they are not saying insaan, they are saying bashar.
All of us share basharia but we do not all share
insaaniyah in truth just as an act of generosity from God that He calls us
insaan. What Ragab says if you can imagine a dog standing on its two legs as
opposed to four and talking in a language then you can imagine the state that
many humans beings are in. That they only share their humanity in the form not
in reality and there is a verse in the Quran “We have enobled the children of
Adam” and that enoblement is that we have been placed in this incredible noble
form, we are not like animals, we do not walk on all fours, we do not have to
go down to a plate, we take things up to our mouths. I do not have to go down
and lick and lap up my water like a dog that I actually have this ability to
feed myself. All these qualities that the human being has been given so
acquiring virtuous qualities or noble qualities is actually a difficult thing.
It takes time, it is not something that human beings are born with. Compassion
is something that needs to be nurtured now some people you will have this
naturally. It is something that Imam Ghazali mentions and other great scholars
that there are some people who have virtuous qualities by nature. There are
other people who do not. You will see in children, some children want to share
things, other children refuse completely to share things and will become
belligerent if they are made to share things. They have to learn. There are
children that beat other children. There are other children that could not do
that and would feel terrible about that. Now these qualities tend to be the
more aggressive qualities in human beings are much more marked in men than they
are in women and there is a reason for that as well. There is a reason why that
even in their form they are less bestial than men. Women have certain qualities
that are related to their biology and it has to do with the fact that they produce
children. So there are certain qualities that are inherent just because they
have the hormones. Some it is purely chemical and also it has to do with the
fact that there is a womb raham and the essence of the womb is mercy. The word
in Arabic raham, rahma are the same root words – the womb and mercy because the
essence of mercy is in the womb. That is why Allah has derived the womb, He
actually derived the womb from His name the Merciful. So the womb is derived
from an attribute of God. That is what women have that men do not have. That is
why the humanising factor in societies are women. The mother is the humanising
factor and without that if the mother is destroyed then it is a disaster for
the rest of society.
So this idea of acquiring virtue to become a
human being to achieve one’s insaaniyah to achieve one’s insaaniyah to achieve
one’s humanness is very difficult. That is a struggle.
At the root are four virtues. Courage,
temperance, wisdom and then justice. These are the root virtues that human
beings are meant to develop in their lives. All virtues come out of one of
these four virtues. So courage which is the first and most important virtue
because upon it the other ones are based. Generosity is actually the daughter
of the mother virtue which is courage because generosity is courage with one’s
wealth. Patience is also a type of courage because it is a lack of anxiety when
a calamity afflicts you and that is from a type of courage. So being patient is
rooted in courage so courage in English, courage the root word is core which is
heart. The essence of courage is the heart and so somebody who has courage has
a lot of heart and that is why the Arabs when they say in
From that it gives birth to contentment and from
contentment, what comes from contentment is trustworthiness because somebody
who has chastity and chaste used to mean not just with sexual mores, it has to
do with everything now it is pretty much limited to the idea of temperance had
to do with moderation in all things and that moderation lead to this chastity
or chaste nature – a pure, virtuous nature. Then obviously from wisdom comes
understanding. The virtues of the mind and intellect and then finally justice.
At the essence of justice is a desire for fairness. The essence of justice is
insaaf is fairness and it is very difficult. Very few people are fair in this
world. Even people who are oppressors or who are oppressed will always look at
the other with total lack of fairness, always. So an oppressor will always look
at the one he is aggressing upon with a total lack of fairness. That is why
true justice is very difficult to come about in the world because of human
nature, it is so difficult for human beings to be fair to be truly fair.
The beauty of justice comes mercy. In the
traditional understanding mercy came out of justice and the reason for that is
an emotion that emerges when one sees somebody who is suffering or who is in a
situation that he is not and from it arises this sense that this person does
not deserve that. In other words, that fact that I am not in that condition, I
do not want that condition for that person and that is justice. That is why
mercy emerges out of justice. It is an extraordinary concept because we usually
tend to see mercy and justice as mutually exclusive. You are either just or you
are merciful but true mercy is actually emerging out of real sense of justice.
That you do not observe that. That is why when God shows mercy to His
creatures, that is coming from His justice. That is why the Quran says “my
mercy outstrips my justice”. In other words, justice if the two race mercy
always wins and from this idea of mercy emerging then the idea of forebearance.
Forebearance is the ability to despite somebody
aggressing upon you, to actually have this forebearance, this ability not to
desire retribution. From that virtue emerges, the virtue of forgiveness or
pardoning, that is why that is the highest virtue. The amazing thing about
forgiving, there was a really interesting study that was done in Stanford I
think, they worked with these people that were in
This is ancient tradition. Now the second type
of mujahidah is the mujahidah of shaytan. Shaytan in the Islamic tradition is a
force that exists in the world. There is an obersive element within the soul, a
whispering that comes into the soul and also outside of oneself. It has two
forms: human shayateen and jinn shayateen. Shayateen al jinn are the demons
that work within another realm. Just as we are here and can see each other.
There are other creatures that love along side of us that have impact on our
life and we have an impact on their life but we cannot see them, they can see
us. Every culture in every civilisation has reference to them. There is no
culture in that you can find, I don’t care where, whether it is Japanese, if it
is Indian, Russian, Irish no culture except that it has reference to this
realm. German the poltergeist, mischievous spirits and things like this.
Japanese culture is filled with it. They are real and they do have an impact.
The way that one struggles against them is by cleanliness, by maintaining vigilance
and cleanliness – urine and faeces, wudu, ritual washing, things like this.
This is why most culltures have some traditions that they ward of these
elements. Some of the native American tribes would burn sage in south western
parts of the country to remove these elements. Incense traditionally was one of
the things because the idea was they do not like good smells. That is why
incense is almost a universal phenomenon. You find incense in the Christian
traditions, in the Shinto, Buddhist, the Islamic tradition. The Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) said “fumigate your mosques with incense”. That is part of
why this is there and also wearing perfume is also a good thing. Not listening
to these impulses in the self, everybody has them whether you call them
obsessive compulsive thoughts, whatever people want to call them. Psychiatrists
have words for them when they get out of hand, people start having auditory
hallucinations. This is what they are called, auditory hallucinations. Muslims
believe that they are real. You cannot deny their reality because there are
people that experience and hear them. To say it is all in your head, well it
might all be in your head but it is still there. So these guys walking around,
you can see them. You go to some place and they are talking and shouting. They
are having these battles going on and that is called majnun, somebody who is
majnun.
Now the third type of jihad is the jihad which
demands that you defend what is right. That is the jihad of the sword. There
are many verses in the Quran that indicate this. It did not come down all at
once. It came down for 13 years. The Muslims were not allowed to fight in
Makkah. They were given no permission whatsoever. That is why they simply
suffered silently. They did not fight, they did not oppose what was happening
to them. That was very difficult for these Arab men, people like Abu Bakr,
these were men who were raised in a tradition of murooha, shaj’ah, shahama,
these virtues of the Arabs of strength bravery and magnimity. So for them to
watch people being persecuted in the way that they were watching and not able
to do anything about it was incredible difficult. So that in itself was a test,
not being able to fight was a big test. It is not the other way round but when
the verse came down after 13 years the sahaba migrated to Madinah. Now at that
point the difference now is that there is a state of authority and I am using
the word state loosely. In other words I don’t want to use state like it is
understood in the modern concept of a state because that is not really what Madinah was but they
did have power that was centralised and it was a city state in that way. So at
that point they were permitted to fight. This was the first verse that came
down permitting them to fight “permission has been granted for those who have
been fought to fight because they were oppressed”. Now remember this is 13
years later, they were persecuted from the start but permission came when the
circumstances changed. The idea of fighting when you do not have legitimate
state authority is not permissible. It never has been. The Muslims have never
viewed that. Permission to fight comes when you have state authority. That does
not mean an individual does not have the right to defend himself from being
killed but if you look at the sahaba and the situations that they were in: some
of them were tortured, some of them were killed. Sumayyah was stabbed with a
spear, the first shahida, the first martyr in Islam. This was the first verse
that came down and Allah said “those who were chased out of their homes without
right for no other reason than saying my Lord is Allah”. Now this is really
important because these are the two reasons that permission is granted to
fight.
- People
who oppose your religion
- People
who steal your land
This is why Allah says in the Quran “Allah does not prevent
you from showing kindness to people who have not opposed you in your religion
or chased you out of your homes, to show them kindness, righteousness, to share
your wealth with them and Allah loves those who are upright and just and
fair”. Allah does not prevent Muslims
from being kind to non Muslims but if they are fighting you in your right to
worship your Lord and stealing your land and chasing you out of your homes then
you have the right to fight them. That is the permission that is granted by
Allah in the Quran. The second period is to fight the mushrikeen “fight those
fisabilillah who fight you and do not be aggressive for Allah does not love the
aggressors”. The ulema say that the fact that Allah does not love aggressors,
you cannot change that. In other words the muhaba of Allah, the love of Allah
is not fickle love. If Allah does not love aggressors, He does not love
aggression in any time or place and so aggression is always wrong. That is why
when Allay says that “fight those who fight you and do not show aggression”.
The next level Allah said “fight the polytheists completely
just like they fight you completely”. Now this time because these people broke
treaties with the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa
sallam), this is something very important to remember about the
nature of war, that war occurs generally
between two states. This is the nature of war. You can have what is called a
civil war but in Islam that is called fitnah. What occurred between the Muslims
and the mushrikeen was in a type of sense a fitnah and the reason for that is
that they were one tribe. They were related by a shared father. Quraysh was the
father of all the people in Makkah and for that reason Allah when they fought
in the sacred month “they ask you about the sacred month” because the Arabs had
four months that they never fought in. They asked about the sacred months,
fighting in it because they had never heard of this. So Allah says “fighting in
the sacred month is an enormity, it is a grave thing”. Preventing people from
following their religion, disbelieving in what was given to them, rejecting it
completely, preventing them from the sacred sanctuary, Makkah and then chasing
people out is worse than that. This type of social division and dissention is
worse than killing itself.
In other words, that there are times that the actual
engaging in martial conflict is better than allowing certain situations to
emerge. That is why when Allah says in the Quran “you will have see churches,
temples, synagogues and mosques wherein Allah’s name is recited often destroyed”
because of predations of aggressive and velacose people fighting each other so
Allah says “if Allah had not used one group of people to stop another group of
people” and in another verse it says “there would be nothing but corruption on
the earth”. This is an admittance or rather a teaching in the Quran that the
root of human nature is aggressive. The founding fathers when they were arguing
whether you had a confederation, this was the first big debate when they were
ratifying the articles of federation. Hamilton wrote a piece saying “we did not
want confederation because if you have a group of confederate states, each one
of them an individual state, you are setting yourselves up for war and that is
why he said there should be a centralised government and this is what monarchy
means “ one source of authority”. It is what it means in Greek. War occurs when
people do not accept the same sources of authority. This is at the root of war
and that is why the idea of international law is only valid in an international
community that accepts the laws. If you have vogue states that do not accept
the law, now part of the trickery of modern state theory is that the
international community itself, they are vogue states. This is part of the problem.
So far instance the real calamity right now, people do not know this, it is not
on
Chapter 4
So if you look at the Muslim world now the fact
that there are not mass revolutions and revolts is a testimony to the
incredible patience on behalf of the Muslims. I mean I really believe that. It
is a testimony to the fact that because they believe in God, because they
believe in a sense that they know in essence that this about their own states
not their governmental states but their spiritual states. In other words the
conditions that we find ourselves in a society are reflections of the overall
health of that society which at root is a spiritual health. A society is either
well spiritually or sick spiritually and unfortunately the vast majority of
people are very sick so this idea of jihad it is a noble concept. It is the
idea of fighting for what is right, it is as simple as that and people have a
right to do that. They have a right to defend their homes, to defend their
religion, to defend their lands against the predations of aggressors. The Quran
says “always be in preparation”. Why? Because the best way of maintaining peace
is to always be prepared for war and that is unfortunately a truth of the world
that we are living in until human beings can sit down and have a civil
discourse and work out their problems like human beings. As long as you have
people out there that are living to get and take what they want by hook or by
crook by force and by power then you need to have people prepared to stand up
against that.
Pacifism, the pacifist at the end of the day is
somebody that becomes landless and a victim and that is why Aboriginal people
traditionally the reasons they survived is that they lived in places that nobody
wanted. Now they want the
Now unfortunately in the modern Muslim world and
are signs of the end of time and I will say about jihad if you look at the rules
of enagagement, who determines the rules of engagement? Islamic rules of engagement
in the Mukhtasir of Sidi Khalil, it is prohibited to use poisoned arrows which
is basically biological warfare. I mean Muslims developed rules of engagement. The
Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) said “do not poison the wells
of your enemies” This is biological warfare or chemical warfare basically. “Do
not use fire in fighting your enemy because only Allah punishes with fire”.
Nuclear holocaust. We use incendiary
bombs all the time in this country. We use incendiary bombs. People are
incinerated literally and you can see in Nagaski,
One of the worse crimes in Islam and one of the
greatest wrong actions is predating during war, to actually take property from
people. No, the imam has to collect the property and then it is distributed.
There are rules of engagement to make people civil in their behaviour. Abu Bakr
when he sent his troops out said “do not poison wells, do not cut fruit trees,
do not kill old people, do not kill women and children”. He would actually walk
about and remind them of these principles and these were completely alien to
the jahili Arabs. These were deeply revolutionary ideas. Jihad is grossly
misunderstood, it is an unfortunately reality. I just want to finish this
section in saying one thing. Last century, almost 200 million people were
killed in war. 200 million people, the majority of whom were civilians.
Unprecedented by far more than all of the human wars prior to that in one
centuary because of modern technology. Now those people were not killed in the
name of religion. They were killed in the name of communism, socialism, facism,
democracy, whatever. Everything but religion. So this idea that religion causes
wars is simply not true. Humans cause war, it is as simple as that. Humans are
belligerent and Aristophiles the Greek playwright indicated that is really the
men who are belligerent and the only war is going to stop this is if women go
on strike and stop producing sons for these old men to send out to die.
There is a beautiful scene in a film that was
done, I think it was 1929 or 1930 “All Quiet on the Western Front” it is
an-anti war film that was prohibited. They did not allow it be shown in this
country. There is a scene where these German soldiers are all sitting around.
It is World War One. One of them says “how did the war start?”. The other
German says “Well France offended
The next section he goes is the shariah which is
the sacred law and I want to say about that when people think about the shariah
you have to be careful because there is no concept whatsoever in Islam of a
theocracy. This is one of the modern myths that have been perpetrated by
modernist types of Muslims. The idea that Islam is a theocracy. If you look up
theocracy in the dictionary it says “the rule of God or those who stand in the
place of God”. Isn’t it interesting that the word for Abu Bakr when he was
called the Khalifah, he was called Khalifah ta Rasulullah. He was not called
Khalifatullah. He was called the Khalifah of the Messenger of God not of God
because the only one that can truly rule with God’s judgment is the Prophet of
God. No one else. If Prophets are not walking the earth then nobody has that
authority to say that this is the rule of God. It is as simple as that. What
the Muslim shariah is in essence, understanding any circumstance you find
yourself in. Each circumstance will have a ruling. One of the five rulings:
1. An obligation or a requirement which is
wajib, you have to do it, paying charity
2. Something which is recommended highly encouraged to do.
Zakat is wajib, sadaqah is mandoub. If someone is in need even though you have
paid your 2.5% of zakat, if you see somebody in need, it is encouraged, you do
not have to do it. It is highly encouraged to do it.
3. The permissible which is the majority of things in this
world are simply permissible.
4. Mubah. Nobody can tell you have to do it, nobody can tell
you, you cannot do it. It is just a permitted act. The majority of acts in this
world are permitted. Then you have disliked actions like talking too much
without benefit is disliked. To talk as in just chew the fat or something like
that in this culture that type of talk is permissable unless it becomes
excessive because there are things that are prohibited to say. You cannot backbite
against people.
5. Prohibited: the things that are prohibited in this world
are very few. If you take Imam Malik’s position all that is prohibited “what is
prohibited is from eating is carrion (dead flesh), blood, pig, meat and
anything that is sacrificed for other than God”. That is it and even that if he
is forced to do it not out of transgression then there is no sin in that you
can even eat pig if you have to eat pig if you are starving. So those are the
only things that are prohibited. That intoxicants are prohibited, that is it
“Do not go near fornication” it is a foul thing and has a bad end effect on
society”. One you allow fornication, just look at the end results, venereal
diseases, illegitimate children, breakdown of family. That is all the Quran
says, it is a bad road to take. Do not go down that road. Do not slander
people. Do not steal. Pretty basic things that is what is prohibited. If you
want to understand the essence of shariah is that it is a logical set of
understandings that enables you to live your life without harming yourself or
others, that is the essence of shariah. I will give you the essence as the
usoolis understand it. There are five things or six, some break the dignity
into lineage, honour and name.
Every single ruling in the shariah in the sacred law of
Islam is designed to preserve one of these five things:
- Religion
because that is why you were created to worship God so preservation of
religion and the beauty of Islam even though it is the preservation of
Islam it also demands that Muslims preserve the right for other people to
worship in their land. That is why the Hanafi and Maliki fiqh have even
supported the Hindus, Buddhists and every religion to worship as they see
their God or whatever they worship. Therefore commanding us to pray is to
preserve religion. Commanding us to fast to preserve our religion. All
these things hajj to preserve the religion.
- Protection
of life: That is why the prohibition of killing to preserve life. So all
the laws that related to transactions and treating people correctly in
things have to do with the preservation of life and property. You can
create wars and things like that if you treat people wrongly. You can end
up fighting and things like that. “Do not kill a soul that Allah has made
sacred”, “whoever kills a soul without just do or as a result of brigands
or highway robbers and things like that in the earth (people that sow
corruption on the earth) it is as if he has killed all humanity” so the
soul is sacred, every human soul whether they are Jew, Christian,
Buddhist, Hindi whatever. The soul is sacred and you have no right to take
the soul without permission so those laws that related in shariah to
preservation of life.
- Preservation
of property, of intellect. The prohibition of intoxicants is to preserve
the intellect. That is why they are prohibited because the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) said “intoxicants are
the roots that the matrix of so many foul things” and he said “that a man
will become so drunk and end up sleeping with his child or his relative or
kill somebody and not even know it”. Manslaughter, 50,000 people die every
year in US because of drink drivers and people intoxicated. Most of the
deaths on the road in accidents in
- Preservation
of lineage. Prohibits fornication to preserve lineage and also honour,
dignity. That is why it is prohibited to slander and backbite, to speak
ill of people because they have their name, their name is sacred and also
you honour people’s names by not speaking ill of them. Unless you have a
just reason to do that like in a court of law where you have to testify
against somebody and then that rule is set aside for the greater good so
there is a situational type of ethics here. There are things that override
other things. That is why it is permitted to kill somebody who has taken
life.
So that is the shariah. Shariah is a logical set of
principles and precepts. There are a few things that the Quran has legislated
clearly. One of them is inheritance and the reason for that is because one of
the things that breaks families apart is the distribution of wealth after death
of a wealthy relative so what shariah does it apportions that. Now out of nine
categories, six of them are women. The things about Islam is that women did not
inherit even in 19th century
The Quran and Sunnah and the historical embodiments talks
about the madhabs and I want to go over that very quickly. The basic four Sunni
madhabs came out of a recognition that there are many ways to interpret a verse
for instance the Quran says about divorce that you should wait, the word it
uses is “quru” and qur in Arabic means it is from the opposite words. It means
the time in which a woman is menstruating but it also means the time she is
free from menstruating. There was no clarification from the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) about which one it was and so
it became an ijtihadi issue. Some of the scholars said it means the time
between periods. Other said it means the time of the period. The reason that we
believe that God left it like that is that it forces people to think that part
of the reason that the Quran was revealed was to force people to use their
intellect “We sent down this Quran in order to force you to think”. That is one
of the meanings of that verse, in order for you to use your intellect. Ijtihad
means it comes from jihad to exert one’s utmost intellectual endeavour, to
understand the intentions behind a verse of hadith. That is what ijtihad is.
For that reason there are multiple interpretations and therefore the shariah is
open to interpretation as long as it is not crazy or something that is off the
wall. Generally there are many different opinions. Abu Hanuifah for instance
believes that Muslim and non Muslims are equated in murder so if a Muslim kills
a non Muslim the the Muslim dies. Imam Malik did not. He said that they had to
pay the blood money. That is a difference of opinion. You get those types of
differences of opinion in the shariah and those are all open to discussion and
debate.
I think a very interesting section here which is
jurisprudence and politics. One of the things that modern Muslims have really
come to believe is Islam is a political philosophy which is very interesting
because that at its essence is the claim of Zionism. Zionism turned Judaism
into a political philosophy. One of the signs of the end of time is that the
Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) said that “you will follow
Bani Israil”, you will become like Bani Israil and just as Bani Israil wanted a
Zionist state there are now modern Muslims that want this thing called an
Islamic state. An Islamic state is the idea that you can force people to be good
Muslims which is a completely instance idea. It has never existed and it will
never exist. If you think religion can be legislated by a government you are
completely deluded. It is a delusional state and I have no other word for it
and Allah says in the Quran “do you think that you can force people to be
believers?”. Do you think that you can force people to believe? It does not
work. Islam is an internal mechanism. The best thing a government can do is to
provide as close as possible a court system that is not open to bribery. Even
the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) said
“out of three judges, 2 go to hell” which is bad odds. That is why
traditionally Muslims scholars never wanted to be judges and that is why all
four of the imams were completely apolitical. They were not involved in
politics. The only political stand that Ahmad bin Hanbal took was actually not
a political stand. It was related to aqeedah because he declared openly that
the Quran was uncreated because the mutazalite had convinced the ruling party
that the Quran was created. It was a stupid period, people did stupid things.
Abu Hanifah refused to enter into politics and was imprisoned for it. Imam
Malik, if you read the entire mu’aduna does not have one political statement .
He was once accused of sympathizing with Muhammad Nafz Zakia who was on the
family for the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa
sallam) that led a rebellion in the Hijaz. He did not have political positions.
All he was doing was teaching shariah. If you want to learn and apply it,
murhaban, if you do not then good luck in the akhirah. That is the way that
religion has to be. It has to be free of politics. Once the scholar becomes
engaged in the political process he is corrupted by it because that is the
nature of the world. It is a corrupting element and you do not want religion to
be tainted by the temporal. You always want religion to have that atemporal
quality to it. That is why Islam did not create a priesthood an ecclestical
society. The idea is that every believer should try and be as close to God as
he or she can. So you do not want a group of priests dictating for you. Anybody
can become a scholar. There is no ordainment. Scholars if they are really
routed and trained can have differences of opinion. There is no official church
theory. The Pope says “no you all have to agree with me”, no the ulema differ
one of them says this and another says that and people are deemed intelligent
enough with common sense to be able to discern right and wrong in a healthy
society.
This modern concept is really unfortunate. It
has just had a really bad effect on the Muslims because what happens is that if
these guys get into power they will be just as bad as the previous governments
if not worse. They will create the same intelligence mechanisms and they will
do the torture, the same thing. If you do not think that this country has it,
we have it. It just does not happen in the same way. The school of the Americas
they trained people to do torture and do all that stuff but they do it in South
America, they do it in the Middle East that is why some of the Qaida guys, they
want to interrogate them in other countries. So they can put the electrodes on
and do all that stuff and feel good about it because it did not happen inside
the
That is why Muslims always saw that scholars
that were aligned with government rulers or leaders that were in their pay and
things like that to visit them, to speak the truth that is encouraged. An alim
should go and if he is able to tell the truth to an oppressor or a ruler. Most
rulers are oppressors in one way or another, that is encouraged but to become a
court mullah, the real scholars fled from that like they would flee from a lion
because they knew what it meant and then in our view of things politics was
never a very important issue for the vast majority of Muslims throughout
history like most people. Many Muslim thinkers were intensely interested in
establishing social harmony and equilibrium on the basis of shariah but they
did not see this as something that should or could be instituted from above and
that is the truth. I mean you look at all these ulema and read their books,
they never saw the idea that you could institute ethics and morality in a
society. Ethics and morality comes from families, comes from how you were
raised, how your parents taught you and whether you are going to live upto
those morals that they gave you. In bad societies, parents do not have ethics
and morals to transmit to their children. A lot of the world now it is just
very little real ethical and moral behaviour because people are not raised with
those ideals anymore. They see their parents cheating and doing all those
things and that is what they end up doing. So it is as simple as that.
Questions
It is mentioned that the Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) considered suicide……
That was wrong. Those narrations have never been
considered sound by scholars. The Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa
sallam) would never have contemplated suicide but he was troubled by that.
As we as American taxpayers accountable for our
states decision to sell weapons?
There is some accountability if you are paying
taxes. There is some accountability. Theroux went to jail because he would not
pay taxes. Read “Civil Disobedience”, when I was growing up they taught that in
high school. I am not sure if they still teach it anymore probably not pay
taxes because he thought the government was supporting slavery. He thought that
was wrong. When his friend Emmerson went to get him out he looked up and said
“Henry what are you doing in there?”. He looked at Ralph and said “what are you
doing out there?”. He said “in an unjust society the only place for a just man
is in jail”.
The global war picture, is it a war of religion?
I think it is a very strange thing but I think
right now what it seems to me that is going on is there is a lot of money to be
made now in war. The one great detriment historically for war was commerce
which is why Muslims are always commercial states and Muslims actually
preferred peace to war because they liked to do business, they liked to trade
with people and when you have a society whose number one industry is war, you
have a problem and Israel is the biggest arms producer outside of America and
France. It is just massive arms production. I do like fairness, you know the
Arabs have been saying for years they are going to chase every Jew into the
ocean and Europeans were stuck in the middle of the
Unfortunnately the Jews were treated like dirt
for centuries in
One thing that I wanted to say about jihad that
I did not mention in the session was that and this leads into the madhabs.
There is a difference of opinion about the reason for jihad. Out of the four
Sunni imams and they are Abu Hanifah, Imam Malik, Imam Shafi and Imam Ahmad and
before I go into explaining that I’ll just…..and that is the section here. When
the initial Islamic event occurs which begins in 610 with the Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) the beginning of the revelation and ends in approximately
632 in which the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi
wa sallam) passes. During this time the Quran was being revealed and initially
the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam)
prohibited them from writing down his words because he did not want the Quran
to be mixed with the hadith. Just to explain the difference for the people who
do not know. The Quran is Muslims believe that this is directly from God to the
Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) through
Jibril. There is no other means of transmission. The Quran came, everything
that the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam)
uttered that as from the Quran according to the Muslims came through Gabriel.
There is a second source of revelation which is
called hadith and hadith is anything that the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi
wa sallam) said or was said of him or was done in his presence or said
in his presence and he agreed with it. Then some add to that a fourth category
which is descriptions of the Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam). So generally that is what hadith is, obviously the
strongest one would be the one he himself said.
Now the Quran is over 6000 verses and it comes
in 114 chapters or surah which means enclosure. It is made of ayah which are
roughly translated as verses and of over 6000 verses of the Quran there are
approximately 500 that directly related to legislative matters. The vast
majority of the Quran does not relate to legislation. It actually relates to
what we understand about God and then the historical process, history, its
purpose, what human beings are here for, a lot of it is calling human beings to
reflect on the creation, some of it tells us of the stories of those who went
before us, this conflict between the prophetic tradition and the pharonic
tradition. The Quran in a sense sets up a dialect in the world between a
pharonic impulse to control and a prophetic impulse or prophetic truth to
liberate people from control models and to enter into a type of submission in
which they are no longer subjugated to these control models that tyrannise them
and keep them basically trapped in delusional ways of viewing the world and
what the world is here for. So the pharaoh, his symbol is the pyramid. It is a
very interesting symbol because the pyramid is moving to a human apax which is
the Pharaoh and his inner circle and the rest of that society is supporting
that structure. So human beings are really seen as servants of those in power
or those in charge and those in charge then have magicians.
They have four components that the pharonic
model has. Firoun which is the political component, Haman which is the economic
component, it is the economic power base. Then there is the military component
which empowers both the political and the economic to do what they want. Allah
says that all of them are wrongdoers. So being a soldier for this system is
also participating for the crime of the system. There is a fourth component and
these are the magicians. These are the ones that keep people in awe, that
bewitch people, that put veils over them to make them think something is real
when it is not real so that is the Pharonic system. Those are the fourth
components of the pharonic system that are mentioned in the Quran.
One of the things about the pharaoh is that he
is very sensitive, he sends spies out so he uses a spy network. He wants to
know everything that is happening in society. He is very forceful because what
he is afraid of, what Allah says in the Quran “Allah is going to show Firoun
his economic power, his military power, the very thing that he was fearing” so
Pharaoh focuses the Prophetic element in the society because a Prophetic
element is exposing the lie of the pharonic culture and so the Pharonic culture
has a deep seated fear of the element because it is an element that is telling
people you were not created to create pyramids, you were not created to serve
pharaoh, you were not created just to make money, you were not created to
exploit, you were created to worship Allah.
Now the Pharonic model uses manipulation of
nature and that is why when then threw down their sticks they looked like
snakes whereas with the Prophetic model, it is truth. It is not illusion. When
it shows its hand, it gobbles up the falsehood. That is why they do not like
the two to be together. They like to make sure that element is not allowed any
type of mass audience because if it is it becomes very dangerous so that is one
of the most important elements in the Quran is this model and that is why the
Pharoah and Musa is the most important story in the Quran, it is repeated more
than any other story. Each time it comes in the Quran it has nuances because
ultimately that is the human conflict. It is between a control model which is
about getting the creature to submit to higher creatures and the Islamic model
is that you do not submit to creatures, you submit to the Creator. So these are
in opposition. So that is one element of the Quran.
There are many different aspects of the Quran
but the legislative aspect is really, it is not the major portion of the Quran.
From the hadith now which are the sayings of the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi
wa sallam), one of the really interesting things for me as somebody that
learned Arabic and can read both the Quran and the hadith is that are
completely different.
Anybody who is well trained in Arabic will
immediately recognise the Quran even if he does not memorise the Quran because
it has a unique quality to it that is different from other Arabic speech even
great poets, great orators when you read their speeches you know it is not the
Quran even if you do not memorise the Quranm, the Quran has a mysterious
component. It is very different to other speech and that is what the Quran says
“it is not like other speech”. The Quranic challenge is to imitate the Quran
and in 1400 years nobody has ever done it and there have been people who have
attempted it. There is no doubt, there were attempts. Now what happens with
language is because language is such a strange phenomena in the world for
instance if I say “John came yesterday”. If you read that would not see
intonation. I could say “John came yesterday”
Chapter 5
The corpus of hadith is not the proof for everything in Islam
and that gives you the next category of proof which is called qiyas, analogical
reasoning. A large portion of shariah and a lot of Muslims do not know this, a
large portion of shariah or sacred law is actually not directly from Quran or
hadith. It actually comes out of human understanding. Now who do we trust? We
trust people that first of all the Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) said that the best generation are my generation in
the understanding of Islam and behaviour according to it. Then the next
generation and the next generation. That third generation ends with these
groups of imams. They are the last group. So they are called the people who
wrote everything down. The people before them were people who heard it from the
sahaba and the sahaba were people who lived it. So each generation is less
adherent to the tradition then the one who preceded it. That is why the Prophet
(sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) said “no time
will come except the time that follows it is worse that it until you meet your
Lord”. What that means is that each generation, they are less understanding,
less practising and less aware of God. The ulema say that in each generation
there is always exceptions so you will have somebody in a generation that might
actually be better than some of the scholars that preceded him, more
knowledgeable, things like that but they will still not be from a generation.
The best generation were the first three, that does not negate the possibility
of individuals coming later that are great like the people who went before but
as large numbers of people, that disappears and it increasingly does so until
the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam)
said “till people will have sex in open public places and the best people in
those days will say “would you go do that somewhere else?”. There is a hadith that says that. So things
get morally worse and all of these things.
The madhab is when you have a hadith that is open to several
interpretations and most words by their nature can have more than one interpretation.
If the imams differed on it then because they have reached a level which is
called ijtihad mutlkaq where you reach a level of absolute ability to determine
or derive legal rulings. That does not mean that you cannot be wrong but it
means you are so knowledgeable that you have the authority to be wrong.
Somebody who is a fool, even if he is right, he is wrong whereas somebody who
is very brilliant and very humble and capable of his limitations which these
men were then even when he is wrong, he is still right because he is basing it
on deep deliberation. He is basing it on thought, he is not basing it on
thoughts, opinions or foolishness, no his judgment has arrived out of serious
effort. It is a very different when you meet somebody who holds an opinion
because he read it in Newsweek or someone who holds an opinion because he has
thoroughly examined the issue, he has weight and authority. If somebody just
reads the headlines and then he is just going to spout his opinion then he is a
fool and it is a fool that takes his opinion seriously. I mean that is the
reality of it. That is when the Quran says “are they the same those who know
and those who do not know?”. They are not the same even when they are wrong, they
are not the same. Somebody who is wrong, who is speaking out of knowledge is
not the same as someone who is right and speaking out of ignorance. You are
still safer with the one who is wrong with deep knowledge and understanding.
The thing about these people is that they will never be way off because they
know the principles.
One of the things that the ancients, particularly the
Greeks, they had this understanding that if you understood the universals, the
particulars would take care of themselves. One of the things about modern men
and women is that they are obsessed with particulars and they know nothing of
universals and so when you know the general principle you are not going to make
big mistakes in the particulars. You just will not make big mistakes. If you
know it is a general rule “there is no harming and there is no reciprocation of
harm”. That is a principle of Islam. If you know that principle that is going
to save you from a lot of problems. If you know the principle “that matters are
based on intentions behind them”. That is going to affect how you view people’s
actions. If you understand the principle “duress necessitates facilitation or
ease”. That when people are under stressful conditions you need to help them by
making things easier in order to remove that stress because people in stressful
situations will begin to break down mentally so that is why rulings will change
in times of great difficulty. So a scholar who knows that like Shaykh Abdullah
bin Bayyah he has opinions what other scholars they do not see it because he knows
the universal so when he moves into particulars he knows how to work with them
in a different way whereas there are people who lean the particulars of
shariah, they memorise all the rules for a do b, for c do d and when they see c
then that is what you do. Well is that always in every situation? So there is a
very big difference between people who have this and this is what these imams
are famous for. There were famous for this vast understanding of this
philosophy behind the shariah is for human benefit and therefore if they found
things that were harmful to people even thought the law said do it they would
change the law and that is hard for a lot of Muslims to understand because they
have lost their flexibility. Intolerance generally comes from ignorance. That
is a root of intolerance.
You want to remove intolerance first you have to remove
ignorance. So the madhab are based on those differences of understanding. So
what I want to say about the jihad. There is a difference about what is the
reason for jihad. Out of the four imams: Imam Malik, Abu Hanifah, Imam Ahmad
believed that the reason that fighting was legislated was to remove aggression
or belligerence. Imam Shafi said no it was to remove kufr, it was to get rid of
kufr. Now that is a big difference in understanding. Generally in the history
of Islam the ruling governments favoured the Hanafi and Maliki madhab which
created an incredible tolerance for other peoples, non Muslims. But even with
the Shafi when they had authority they basically applied the principle of the
other imam. So even thought that is the principle of Imam Shafi it was not the
practice of the scholars of this madhab.
As we move into Islam and iman. What is the difference
between Islam and iman? Islam in the Arabic language comes from the root word
“salimah” and salimah means to be whole. It is the same root of the Jewish
Hebrew ward they get Shalom from shalama, The idea that salaam is wholeness,
when we speak of God as as-Salaam, that is a name of God, what it means is that
God has no parts. Now when you have wholeness you have peace. War comes about
when you have divisiveness. Do you see how the understanding of peace comes out
of this understanding of wholeness?. If people are whole, if there is an integrity
in a people then you will not have wars. But when a people become divisive, you
get belligerence. In Islam generally when they ruled they believed that Jews
and Christians and other religions had a right to live and practice amongst
them. They were certain conditions but they had that belief. It is in their
religion whereas there are other religions that have ruled that did not believe
that. They actually believed that they had no right at all so that creates a
very different type of society. It creates a divisiveness that leads to a war.
So the Muslims have always seen that.
If you look at the human body there are things on the body
that do not serve a purpose for the body as a whole but they are part of the
body. You can have scars on your body. They are part of the body, you do not
dig further to get rid of the scar, you just leave it the way it is. There is
still a wholeness even thought it might not be something you necessarily like
or want there but you tolerate it because it is part of the body.
So traditionally Muslims saw other religions not as
co-religions but as co-human beings. They are human beings we would rather they
be Muslim but they are part of the social body and so we should tolerate them.
The Quran says that they can be part of families, they can be married into
families, they should be treated with dignity but even with kindness and
friendship and these things.
The difference between Islam and iman is the word salimah
which means whole relates to the outward of Islam. When we say Islam what we
mean is an outward practice. That is why a Muslim is anyone who basically says
I am a Muslim. The way they say that is “la ilaha ilal Allah”. Anyone who says
“there is no God but one God and Muhammad is His messenger” is considered a Muslim
whether he practises or not. That is enough to come into Islam and then they
are treated as a Muslim. They are buried as a Muslim as long as they never
reject that.
According to Islamic teaching the more you practice with
good intention the stronger the iman gets. So the iman is the inward component.
It is not something you can see. Islam you can see basically. Iman is something
only God can see. That is the secret of bani Adam. The unseen element of faith.
That is why in the Quran when the Arabs say…. These desert Arabs came to the
Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) and said “we
believe”. Allah said “don’t say we believe but say we have submitted because
iman has not yet come into your hearts”. So the Quran clearly distinguishes
between Islam and iman. Now we can also see Islam as a greater rubric that
includes iman and ihsan. So it is looked at as a specific but also looked at as
an inclusive word.
He takes the mutazalite approach here a little
bit. Generally the Sunni scholars believe that iman was merely tasdeeq which means
to verify something in your heart, to believe it in your heart, that is all it
was. Then there was a difference of opinion whether you actually had to say it
with your tongue. Obviously if you were mute and could not speak it, you
didn’t. But if you could they said it was an obligation and then action
according to this.
This is a classic debate between the Protestants
and Catholics, also, is it faith and deeds that one is saved or is if faith
alone? Obviously the Protestant tradition says it is faith alone, deeds do not
come into it. In a sense that is closer to the Islamic tradition in that
particular aspect the Muslims believe that faith alone in God is enough
although there is an idea that there might be some purification in the next
world for those people so it is a very dangerous and precarious type condition
to be in where you have faith in your heart but no deeds. Malik bin Dinar tells
a story that he saw a funeral and he decided to go help them bury this person.
He helped put him down into the grave and it had a very powerful effect on him
which it often does if you go to funerals. Muslim funerals are particularly
powerful because the body is just in cloth. It is not in a coffin so you are
putting the person right into the earth and throwing dirt on them.
So he went to his home and fell asleep and he
had a dream that he was in the grave with the man. He saw the angel of mercy
and the angel of punishment. They look at the man and one of them says, the one
of punishment says “this man is mine”. He said “look at his eyes, they are
filled with the prohibitions of Allah things that Allah prohibited. Look at his
ears, they are filled with things he never should have listened to”. Look at
that tongue, it is filled with a life spent in speaking ill of others,
deception and lying. Then he said “look at that stomach, filled with haram,
look at those genitals, going where they should not have gone”. Then the angel
of mercy says “but look at his heart, it is filled with faith and he is mine”.
That is at the essence of the idea of no matter what a person’s actions are,
only God knows the heart and ultimately it is the heart by which people are
judged. If we were judged by our actions we would all be like Hamlet says “if
you give people what they deserve, who would escape a whipping?”. Don’t give
them what they deserve, give them out of your magnamity. That is what Allah
shows people on yaum al qiyaamah because the hadith in which it says that Allah
has 100 parts of mercy and one part He sent down to the earth and that part is
the part that every mother that shows mercy to her child is from that part.
Every foal that will not step on its mare from that part. Every good kind act
in the world is from that part so all mercy in the earth comes from that one
portion that Allah allowed to come down from the celestial sphere and then the
Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) said “and He has saved the
other 99 for the day of judgment”.
So the idea of just being Muslim on the tongue
is part of Islam. People as long as they say that, that is why the man simply
recites shahada with two Muslim witnesses, like two people who marry, they use
the example of a man who wants to marry a Muslim woman. This happens quite a
bit. He just officially goes and does the shahada. Muslims are generally a
little wary when they see that but they accept it nonetheless because that is
what Islam tells them to do.
There is a man in our history known as Muhajir
um Qays the man who emigrated for this woman who he said “I want to marry you”
and she said “emigrate to Madinah with the Muslims and I will marry you”. So he
did for her. He is called Muhajir um Quys. So even if someone does something
outwardly and he has a different inward intention, we are commanded to judge by
the outward.
Now about the location of faith in the heart.
The Quran says that Allah knows what is in the breast and what is in the heart.
Then the idea of actions according to Islam, actions confirm your faith, the
action itself is what confirms the faith. That is why charity is called sadaqah
which comes from the root word to be truthful because charity is a sign of
truthfulness of your faith. When you are charitable, you are showing that your
faith is true.
That is why when somebody sees someone do a lot
of good actions, the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) said “if you
see somebody who frequents the masjid a lot, testify to his faith” because
those actions are indications of his faith. So an action is always an
indication of somebody’s faith but not necessarily. There can be hypocrites,
there can be people who can be ostentatious, all of these types of things.
He talks about kufr. We go into the idea of
opposite of faith which is kufr. Now kufr is generally translated as infidelity
or disbelief. If you look up the root word of kufr it comes from kaffarah which
means to cover. In fact, cover might actually be a cognate. It means to cover
over something. Kefir which is a yoghurt you do by covering over with a cloth.
It is called kefir. The kafir is also a farmer in Arabic because he covers the
seed with earth.
The Quran uses the word kafir to mean farmers.
Someone once saw Imam Ali who was planting something and somebody asked him “how
are you doing today?”. He said “I am a kafir” in other words “I am a farmer
today”.
Now the idea is very interesting because at the
root of this idea is that people know the truth but what they are doing is
covering it over. The idea that God is so outwardly manifest that to reject God
is to reject what is so blatantly apparently in the world. Only a kafir could
do that, someone who is covering over. That is why the word literally can also
mean in gratitude. Ingratitude is another meaning of kufr. Kufran means
ingratitude. So a kafir is actually an ingrate. It is somebody who is not showing
God gratitude by repaying the debt of consciousness and the debt is the deen.
It is the deen that you owe to God.
He likes the word truth concealing for kufr. She
says someone might object to the use of truth concealing by saying “I do not
know these truths” nor do I accept that these are truths so how can I be a
truth concealer”. Traditional Muslims would typically reply that such people
have simply not understood what the Quran is saying. In other words if they
really understood it they would not reject it but it is because they do not
understand it. If they would pay more attention to the message they would
actually say, this is an interesting exercise to do with anything. Let me look
at this unbiasedly. Le me look at this without judging it because if you ask
most people about Islam they assume it is just wrong. They have not studied it
“that religion, they are just this or that”. It is no basis or foundation for
that remark. So if I am a Christian, I say no, Christianity is right. Why?
Because my mother told me and my mother does not lie. Well that is the same
thing that the Sri Lankan Buddhist mothers said that Buddha was the one he
should call on and mother does not lie. The Muslim in
So who is right? Most people have inherited
their beliefs. They have never thought about them, they have never examined
them. That is why people or fanatics or extremists tend to be people whose
belief is very shaky because they are actually so afraid if having a challenge
that they are willing to kill anyone that challenges it which means they do not
really have a challenge for their beliefs because someone who is deeply rooted
in faith would never be afraid of sitting like Abu Hanifah who sat in huge
auditoriums and debates with atheists because he was not afraid. He really
believe that I can, my faith and my understanding of it can stand up against
anything that falsehood has in its arsenal but if I don’t have a strong faith,
I am very afraid of the arsenal of disbelief that it might overwhelm me so that
is the way that traditional Muslims would say that.
This is a more personal belief, not an Islamic
belief. My personal belief that the variables involved in judging anyone are so
overwhelming and it is so complicated that it is best not to judge people. Just
leave it to God, because you have not walked in their shoes, you did not have
their childhood, you do not know what was done to them. We do not know enough
and this is why people their filters are often as a result of the families they
had, the society they grew up in and delusional states are types of madness.
Delusion is a sign and symptom of madness, to be in a deluded state, junoon.
So even with the outward we are commanded to
judge certain things by the outward. We should always do that in this world.
The best thing to do is to reserve judgment for the next world in those
ultimate things because Allah says in many verses in the Quran “you will return
to Him and He will explain to you all these things about you which were
different”. He will tell you, He will inform you so people should have some
patience. Things will be made clear and you do not know where people are in
their evolution.
An example is Michael Wolf, Michael Wolf is a
person who told me, he said the reason I am telling you because he said it on a
television programme, he thought about becoming a Muslim for 20 years so was he
a kafir for those 20 years? The thing is he ultimately became Muslim. So where
does he lie on the spectrum? It is a fuzzy logic question. At which point do
you go into kufr from iman and vice versa. It is a fuzzy logic there, because
only a life in its totality can be judged, You cannot judge anyone at any specific
point in their life because you do not know what the total life is. At the end
of the day if he dies saying tawbah and Allah accepts that tawbah, he could be
the worst human being that ever lived and that is success according to the Muslims.
So you cannot judge people at any particular point in their lives. You have to
have the whole life. Only God can do that. So do not judge people unless
somebody stole, you have to deal with that problem, that is a problem and there
is a judgment that goes with it. Even in that case you can forgive them. If I
own a store and someone steals and I can say it is yours. The Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) said “have mercy on anyone in the earth, on those in the
earth”. It doesn’t just mean specific people. Have mercy or compassion with
those on the earth and the One in the heavens will have compassion on you. This
is what Thomas Jefferson said “when I looked at people I demanded divine
justice. Then I started looking at myself and I began to beg for mercy”. That is
a powerful statement.
You look outside and you want justice. You start
looking inside and you want mercy. I will tell you another thing and people do
not realise this, every fault that you see out there and this is from
misbahaani every fault you see out there is a fault on you. It is a fault in
you either manifest or like fire in flint. In other words had you lived that
person’s life you might be doing that exact thing that that person is doing.
So because you are human and humans are
susceptible to all things human, anyone you see out there with a fault is a
fault in you either manifest or hidden in you like fire in flint. In other
words the right cause can start the spark and that is a way of looking at the
world with compassion. You actually begin to look at human beings in a
different light because you do not know what they have been through, you do not
know the suffering they have had.
The three principles: this deals with tawheed
because we are going into tawheed. The foundation of tawheed falls into three
broad categories. The first is called the divinities, the second is called the
things related to prophethood and the third eschatological matters. Those
things that are related to eschatology or what comes after we die. So we have
theology, then you have revelation and then you have eschatology. Those are the
three branches of tawheed.
Now one of the things that is important here is
God is the foundation the beginning of everything Islamic according to our
belief. The angels are creatures nearest to God in cosmic hierarchy and they
play a central role in God’s interrelationship with human beings so they are
intermediaries. The measuring out which is the qadr both its good and evil
refers to how God interacts with creation. To each thing God measured out a
certain limited amount of good and as the negative consequences of exactly the
same act a certain amount of evil.
Everything is created in pairs because only
Allah is without pair. This world is a mixture of good and evil, light and
darkness. The whole world is shade, there is no pure light in the world. The
only reason you can see right now is a mixture of light and the absence of
light. If it was pure light you would be blind. If it was pure darkness you
would be blind. So the whole world is a mixture of light and darkness. Now what
Allah is telling is that He created this world to take you from darknesses into
light so the process of being in the world is a process of moving through
shades. It is a process of coming from darkness into the light but that is a
process. He is taking you out of darkness so there are different degrees of
darknesses to the one light which is the light of guidance. This is an
evolution so human beings if they are on a spiritual are evolving, things are
becoming cleaer because more light is coming in. More light is being introduced
into the darkness of the material world. So this is the penetration of the
spiritual realm into the material realm. This is what revelation in essence is.
It is the movement from the unseen into the seen from that pure light, it is
light moving into the darkness of the material world. Because the material
world in a sense not pure otherness but because it is other than God because it
is corruptible because it has elements that are suscepitble to corruption. The
degree to which these elements exist in the world is the degree of darknesses
in the world because it is other than God.
The elements in the world of light relate to the
fact that the creation is an act of God. So tawheed, the first is the shahada.
The first shahada expresses tawheed while the second speaks of prophecy. Now
this I think is very important insight for all of us to understand here. If you
look at the shahada la
ilaha ilal Allah. Now the way that is said is significant. There are three
letters here in the whole shahada that is all, there is just three letters. The
alif, hamza, laam and ha which means ilah, God and this is the definition of
ilah. Another thing about shahada is if you actually say it la ilaha ilal
Allah. It is the same thing. It is just moving the tongue up and down. Now what
that is is contraction and expansion. Contraction la, expansion la ilaha ilal
Allah. Contraction, expansion. That is related to the two aspects of shahada
which is negation and affirmation. You have negation which precedes
affirmation. In other words you have to negate before you can affirm.
So when you say in Arabic, when you negate you say la. In
Arabic when you affirm you say ajal. La is the negation, a is the affirmation.
That is the Arabs say awai, awaillahi, that is how you affirm something. When
you negate you say la. That is why the first thing a child learns in most
cultures is negation, la because it hears it obviously “don’t do that”, no no.
So it learns quick that it is a powerful thing. They realise it is powerful
because negation is very powerful but more powerful than negation is
affirmation.
Affirmation wipes out negation. So what happens is you begin
by negating and you end up by affirming. You begin by saying la ilaha ilal
Allah. That is the beginning of tawheed, negation la ilaha, there is no God.
What does that mean? There is no God worthy of worship. In other words there is
nothing worthy of worship. In reality, this is why the Arabs say “there is
nothing worshipped in truth other than God”. That is what it means. There is
nothing worshipped in truth other than God, that is what it means. There is
nothing worshipped in truth other than God. That is why when you say la ilaha
ilal Allah, you are saying there is no God in reality except the one true God.
You are also saying that there is nothing that I should devote myself to except
God. There is nothing I should be devoted to in truth except God. Not money,
money is not God, fame is not God, fortune is not God, beauty is not God,
material world is not God, nothing is worthy of worship except God. There is
your affirmation except the true God, Allah. That is the essence of tawheed and
then because that is not self evident in reality. You need to understand it
through a medium because self evident truths are not truths that are simply
obvious. They are truths that are simply not obvious on reflection and that is
why, if you look at the declaration of independence, it says we hold the truths
to be self evident that all men are created equal. That is not something that
is obvious to everybody but if you begin to reflect upon it, it is a self
evident truth. It does not need to be proved from outside of itself.
So what we mean by God’s existence is self evident, it does
not mean necessarily everyone is going to get that, that there is only one God.
In fact most cultures fall very quickly into polytheism because it is very easy
to think there is more than one God and that is why the Brahmin actually
believe that most people are too stupid to understand divine unity even though
the highest
Some psychiatrists that were doing that study about just the
soothing effects of people just saying the divine name and it is true. I once
met somebody, she was given the name, she didn’t know it, she didn’t know what
it was, she was told repeat la ilaha ilal Allah over and over for depression as
a treatment. She got cured of her depression and she ended up becoming a Muslim
but she didn’t even know. She told somebody that her psychiatrist gave her this
amazing formula to say. He told her do it in the morning preferably before the
sun comes up and in the evening before she went to sleep for about half an
hour. She would do that and she said she started to feeling better. She said
what was it? He said that is the Muslim creed. That is a true story, she died
rahimullah but I met her in
So when we go into tawheed, understanding God. One of the
things they point out that I think is very important is that there some Muslims
that believe that God is something else and there is also non Muslims that
think Allah is something else. I saw a Christian and a Muslim having a
dialogue. The Christian said “I just have to say that I don’t believe in the
God you believe in”. If you read certain Christian literature about Islam they
will say that Muslims believe in another God like the moon God or whatever God.
There are Muslims that think the Christians because they believe in the trinity
that they believe in another God. Now the point that that Quran makes when it
says let us look upon what we agree upon before we discuss anything else that
we worship only one God. The understanding there is are we talking about the
Creator of the heavens and the earth? Yes then we are talking about the same
God. What we are differing on is the particulars, the universal we agree on.
But we begin to differ when we look at what is our concept is of that God.
Christians believe God is One, they do not believe God is
three. They really do not. They do believe God is three, He is One but He is
tripart in this mystical mysterious way and they will never explain it and they
believe in One God. They are not idolaters like that, they believe in one God
and the Jews definitely believe in one God. In Judaism there is some anthropomorphism
where you begin to describe God as human having hands and feet and limbs and
things like that which is haraam to do that. You cannot do that. One thing that
Ghazali says that the word in Arabic for hands has 17 meanings yet which one
are you going to choose that God meant? In other words do not interpret that. Leave
it the way it is but we know it does not mean this with absolute certainty. We
now that when God says hand of Allah, He is not talking about something like
this (holds up hand). We know that. There is a universal, there is nothing like
God and therefore it is not like this because if I said that I am saying that
God is like His creation which is impossible.
So when we look at the word God in the Quran, Allah is used.
Now the Orientalists say it is obvious this is from ilah. Well that is not
obvious to the Muslims. Muslim theologians do not think Allah is from ilah.
People say it is from the same letters. It is like saying
Now before we can understand really, how we understand God,
the important thing is how we do not understand God. That is why he goes into
this idea of shirk. One of things that he and she point out before that which
is important is the idea of ilah. In the Quran ilah which can have a plural is
called alihat, gods and gods as well as goddesses and things. The word ilah is
used sometimes positive, sometimes negative. It basically means the objective
of devotion or worship. In the Quran it says that there are those that take
their own desires as gods beside Allah. In fact, the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) in a hadith that Imam Qurtabi
relates says “the thing Allah hates, the idol that Allah hates more on the
earth that is worshipped is man’s own desire” which is very interesting because
most people do not think of idolatory as being something inside of you, they
see it as something outside. You have to have a stone or a wooden form or
something, a cow, an object of worship but the Quran says “have you not
considered the one who has taken as his God his own desires”. His own caprice,
his own whims.
That is very interesting because that is the
thing that is the most difficult to remove. That is the real shirk that becomes
difficult. Worshipping our opinions because we become absolutely devoted to
them. We are not willing to give them up for anything. We will even die for
them. That is a God beside Allah. There are many idolaters amongst Muslims from
that category, may Allah protect us from that. Many Muslims do not realise that
they fall into that category. The Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam)
said “somebody who is addicted to drugs is like the worshipper of an idol”
because you will do anything for your God. There are people who will kill for
drugs literally kill for drugs. Money, people will kill for money. Desires, it
is just for desires not the object of desire. What is forcing someone to steal?
It is inside, it is not outside. The object is called cause occasionalis, a
good latin word in logic, it is the occasional cause, it is not the deep cause.
The deep cause is desire because another person sees the object, they do not
have any money, they might even want it but they do not steal it. Why? Because
they are in control of their desire. So when the object outside, it is only
seen, the delusional state is “I had to have it”. That is what made me do it.
No, it was inside from the beginning, that desire was there and that was only
the exciting cause, it was not the deep cause. The deep cause is covetousness
for the things of the world.
So shirk in the Arabic language means to share,
to be a partner, to make someone share, to give someone a partner, to associate
someone with someone else. Shareeq, literally, this my partner in commerce. You
are sharing. Musharqa, if we share things, food, conversation, whatever. So the
idea of associating or sharing with God something which is God’s alone. This is
why the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) said that Allah said in a
hadith qudsi “whoever associates, I have no need of those partners”. So if you
associate with Allah partners, you have associated with Allah what He does not
need. Why do you go into partnerships? Because you need them. In commerce why
do you have partners? Because you need them. So Allah is saying you are associating
with Me something I have no need of and therefore it is batil because there is
no purpose.
So shirk is the reverse side of tawheed. Now the
literal sense of the term shirk may suggest that one has to be conscious of
associating other than God in order to be guilty of it. How can I give a
partner to someone if I do not know the someone? Well that is actually true and
that is why the Quran says “do not associate with God once you know”. That is
why a person whose in that state without knowledge is forgiven. But once it has
been explained to you, then after that you are taken to account for your
knowledge and that is why the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) in
hidden shirk taught us to say “O Allah I seek refuge in You from associating
with You and I am aware of it, I ask forgiveness for that which I am not aware
of”.
There are subtle things that modern psychology
called the subconscious mind. The Muslims understood this. The Quran says “they
are not conscious of it, they attempt to deceive God and those who believe but
they only succeed in deceiving themselves, but they are unaware. The modern
Arabic word for the subconscious la shuhur which is exactly the way Allah
describe the state of hypocrite except he is not aware.
Now the thing about la shuhur the subconscious
is there is an understanding in the Islamic tradition that in a truly deep
sense you are aware. It is not an excuse. That is why the Quran says in the
next world people will say “would we have only listened and comprehended what was
being said to us we would not have ended up in this wretched place?”. Then
Allah says “they finally admit they are wrong”.
These defence mechanisms of projection and
denial and all these things that human being do are essentially according to
Islamic understanding, they are still responsible for it. The reason for that
is this power that Allah has given us it is just too vast and too enormous. If
you do not make use of it, then only you have yourself to blame. All the tools
were given to you so it is like someone is given a plot of land. They have the
cow, they have the plough and they just sit there and watch it. Then when the
harvest comes and everyone else is harvesting and they are saying “Nothing
grew”. Well you had the seed, you had the plough, you had the cow, why didn’t
you do anything? “O you mean I should have done something?”.
Rumi has a poem about the day of judgment. He
says on that day you will come with your head bowed and you will look at the
Prophets and say get me out of this mess, the mud of my life because I am mired
in the mud of my life. He says “you left the plough in the middle of the field
and now you want us to harvest for you”. You had all that time, you had all
that energy.
So there is a belief in Islam that tawheed is
from the fitrah of human. It is something we deeply know. It is in our inherent
nature to know. That is why children will completely accept the understanding.
They will just completely accept it. They will accept tawheed. It makes perfect
sense to them.
Now the idea of hidden shirk. The Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) came out, this is a hadith that Ibn Majah relates, the
Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) came
out and they were talking about the anti-Christ and he said “shall I tell you
about something that is more frightening to me than the anti-Christ?”. They
said what. He said “hidden shirk, riyaa that a man should perform prayer and do
it beautifully for the sake of someone who is watching”. Sahdi tells the story
about the man in the mosque praying and he hears the door open and he decides
that I am going to pray a long time because that person will think…and when he
finishes his prayer, he looks to see if the person saw him and it was a dog
that came into the mosque. You see it is all in your head. It is not about what
is out there, it is all your perception.
Now this is my favourite section here which is
the signs of God. The Quran is called qalamullah which is God’s speech directed
at human beings so whatever is said in the Quran we believe is an expression of
God Himself. In the same way when we speak we express ourselves. So I speak I
am expressing myself.
We may be playing a role and no one else will
play the role in the same way. Every role we play we express something about
ourselves. Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet is not Laurence Olivier’s. Same text but
they have different interpretations. So even an actor reciting the same line,
he is still expressing himself. So the idea of words being an expression of the
nafs according to the Quran when Allah speaks we believe it is an expression of
Himself in the Quran. The Quran expresses Allah. It is not the only thing that
expresses Him. Other scriptures also express him and so do His creatures.
So now we get into something very interesting
which is this idea of the expression. What is an expression? It is when I speak
what I am doing, I am articulating symbols. If you speak my language, you are
familiar with. So when I say “look at that tree” I do not have to look at the
tree. You will begin to look around at the tree. You can ask me which tree but
when I say tree an image emerges in your mind of something which has a trunk,
branches and leaves. If it doesn’t have a trunk, branches or leaves it is
something else. It might be a bush but when I say tree that is what comes to
your mind. If I say in Arabic to an Arab tree he will say what are you talking
about it? I will say shajarah.
Now shajarah to an English speaker does not mean
anything but to an Arab speaker he has the image in his mind that you had when
I said tree. So what is shared? It is the tree but what else is there? What is
the nature of language is that it is a symbol, it is a sign that signifies
something else. This is called in Arabic an ayah. So an ayah is something that
signifies something else. Now when we say that God has signs what we are saying
is there are things that signify a God. There are the prophetic signs, the
revelatory signs but then there are the natural signs so ayah in the Quran
means in a general sense anything that means something else. Anything that
indicates something else. This is what ayah means. So that is a general sense.
In the Quran it means everything in the heavens and earth, everything is a sign
and this is why We appointed the night and day as two signs. The day and night
are two signs, of what? Of God. A sign for them is the dead earth, from amongst
those signs the dead earth and then it is brought back to life. That is a sign
of God, you are seeing a sign, it is indicating something else.
Amongst His signs are ships that run on the sea
like landmarks that is on the ocean like a landmark, like mountains, these are
all signs. In the earth are signs for those who have certainty and in yourself.
In the earth are signs and in yourself are signs. Do you not see? In other
words, do you not make the connection in the same way when I said tree you
connected that with this thing that has trunk, branches, leaves. This is what
Allah is saying, do you not see the connection between all the signs out there
and all these signs in here, what they are indicating? What they mean.
The second narrower sense is the miracles and
scriptures given to the Prophets so Prophets are given two types of signs:
- Scripture
which is an ayah
- Things that break the normal chain of events so with Moses,
it was his staff. It was his sign and the magicians recognised. That is
why when they saw it they said “We believe in His God” not in you because
they knew. Firoun said “this is a conspiracy” this is what he said. “You
planned this, this is a conspiracy you did somewhere else”. He cannot
believe because he is not seeing the same thing.
The other is the wahy itself, the revelation is
a sign. They said to Prophet Salih (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam)
“you are merely one of us who are bewitched, you are a mortal like us. Produce
a sign if you are truthful” so they want a sign. People, they want signs. This
is what they said to Jesus (sallallahu 'alayhi
wa sallam). He said “wicked is a generation that want signs”. In other words,
it is so clear like Lut, someone asked him “what is a proof for the existence
of God?”. He said “you are asking for a lamp to see the sun”. That is what the
Arabs say “nothing will make sense to you if you need a proof for daylight”.
This idea of signs which is very interesting
because the essence of 20th century philosophy is semiotics. They
have become obsessed with signs. This is what philosophy has been reduced to
which is very interesting that the question, that is what it is talking about,
it is talking about signs.
That is why one of the brilliant philosophers of
the 20th century was Izuzu a Japanese philosopher. He spent his life
studying the Quran and wrote this amazing book on the signs, the semiotics of
the Quran because he was just so engrossed in this idea.
So now the most specific sense of the word is
the Quran, the actual sentences of the Quran which is called ayat the actual
syntactical components. They are meaning statements that are called ayat. Now
use of the really interesting things about signs and I just want you to think
about this and everybody has had the experience when you do not know a word and
suddenly you look it up in the dictionary and now you know it and then suddenly
it starts appearing everywhere. You are like that is amazing, what a coincidence.
Why dos it suddenly start appearing everywhere? Because now you know what it
means. Suddenly it becomes meaningful and before you were just knowing it from
your field of vision. Now you are allowing it in because you have accommodated
it into your frame of reference.
Now one of the things about human beings. If you
are traveling on a trip and I love road signs. I just got a traffic ticket
yesterday in
Ignorance is not an excuse in the eyes of the
law. Your have a drivers licence, you are driving a car. There are signs, you
are supposed to know what they mean. You took a test to prove that you know
what they mean. Then you are going to plead ignorance. I did not see it. Well
you should be more attentive. This is what he is saying so he wants to write
you a ticket and then you have to pay a fine. When I said hey, he said this is
my job to write tickets. That is what the angels say, I am just doing my job.
My job is to punish you. That is what he was saying to me. My job is to punish
you not to sit here and debate. You broke the law. It is an infraction and that
is my job and I am sorry. It is a painful thing to do if I really think about
it but it is my job. There you go, so what can I do? Rip it up, the police take
your car away. If you ignore the warnings, that is just a warning, if you
ignore that there are more repercussions. It just gets worse and worse and
worse.
So imagine humanity on this highway. You are
driving along. The first sign they see Lustville, 100 miles. Suddenly speeds
up, only 100 miles, if I do 100 miles an hour, I will get there in an hour. On
the way there is a sign
Now if you were given a job and this is Vanity Fair.
I think it is Thackeray or whoever wrote it. The story of vanity fair where the
man was given a job by the King but on the way to fulfill his job there is a
fair on the side of the road and he thinks I have all the way to sunset so I am
just going to stop and just enjoy the show and there are some distractions and
I will have a little fun then I will go and do what the King told me to do. So
he goes in and Vanity Fair filled with distractions. He is having a great time
and he gets too engrossed in all of these distractions that suddenly it is
sunset and Vanity Fair is closing up and he has not done what he was supposed
to do. Now he has to go back to the palace and tell the King. The King says “I
sent you in the morning, you had all day to do it”. Is the King going to accept
the excuse that I saw this beautiful fair on the side of the road. On my time?
You were playing on my time?
Somebody works for Fedex but he has a gambling
problem so he goes out in the morning with all these packages and then he
passes by a gambling casino. I will just go in and do one time on the slot
machine. He goes in one time and then suddenly one time leads to another and
then suddenly the day is over, he goes out and he has all these packages he has
not delivered that he has to take back, is he going to keep his job. No. So
that is the nature of the world. The task is very clear but the signs are
ignored. It is not as if they are not there. They are just ignored and that is
why how many a clear sign there is in the heavens and earth that they pass by,
turning away from it. It is all there. It is very obvious. That is what the
Quran is saying. The people ignore these signs because they do not have time
for them. They are too occupied with their worldly things, making more money,
getting that bigger house, enhancing my portfolio, building up my CV.
Chapter 6
The beauty of Islam is it does not turn away
from the world. It says be in the world like a stranger, just know that you are
not going to be here forever and then act accordingly because a stranger does
not behave like other people. You come into a village and you are passing
through it, you do not set up shop, marry and have a family in the village when
you know that you are going to leave. I am not saying that it means that you do
not do that in the world but you do it with that understanding that there are
things I am going to leave behind so that you do not become totally obsessed
and attached to them.
Questions & Answers
Words have an intrinsic value in themselves but
their purpose is to signify something else definitely and there is a
correlation. He goes into a little bit, but he is taking it from a 13th
century Andalusian scholar philosopher who thought that the world was composed
of letters. Like DNA you have four nucleic acids and these four nucleic acids
combine into 64 possible combinations. Those 64 possible combinations then
translate out into certain structures and that is what gives things their
uniqueness but it is all based on the same basic building blocks of life.
Basically it is the same thing, everything has the same DNA. So his idea was
everything in the world is a manifestation of speech and the letters they were
like DNA so liver is a certain combination and in every body it will be the
same combination. Any creature that has a liver, the liver is composed of the
same archetypical letters. It is a philosophy. I don’t know what his proofs
were from the Quran or anything like that. I am sure he had them. It is an idea
but the world alam in Arabic means sign. Alam is ism f’al. F’al is the thing
that you do something with like tabih is the thing you seal with so alam is the
thing that you know something by. The world is that by which you know, the
alim, the knower who is Allah. The difference is between fathah and kasrah
between God and the world. So if you have that faith from the world then you
get opened up to see the truth of the world which is that it is an ayah of God.
What kind of desires are halal? What kind of
desires are haram?
I mean the desires are not bad things. Desires
generally unless it is things that are haraam in shar’iah, the desire for food
is a good desire. If you do not have the desire for food, you will die but if
you have desire for pork then you have a problem or if you have a desire for
excessive food that is going to harm you, you have a problem. It is not haraam
to overeat but it is makruh. But if you do it until it damages your health and the doctors tell you, you have to cut
down your food consumption then it becomes haraam because “don’t kill
yourselves”. They say most people dig their graves with their teeth.
Can you divorce a person who has haraam desires?
Is this a good reason for divorce?
If it is things that are prohibited and they
want that person to partake in that, it is haraam to do that, that would be
grounds for divorce if the person was forcing them to do something or demanding
them to do something like rectal intercourse.
What are the natural signs of God beside nature?
The natural signs of God are other than Prophets
and revelation so everything other than Prophets and revelation is a sign. Our
own souls are signs of God, ourselves. The fact that we are hearing, seeing and
living, all these things. These are signs of God. Sight, speech, understanding,
comprehension.
Question about the Japanese philosopher Isuzu
He has a book the Quranic Veleter Chalen. He
spoke like 32 languages or something, phenomenal intellect. The book is called
Quran veleter Chalen which is German word for world view and he has another
book on the ethical……..If you are interested in his books you can get them
through Fons Vitae on the web.
Can someone say shahada on the phone?
You need witnesses, you can say the shahada
wherever you want to but to make it sound you need witnesses, two witnesses so
it would be better to do it in person. If you are living on a desert island
with a cellphone and there was nobody there, and you want to say shahada so you
called a Muslim country and asked for a second operator to come on or something
like that then you could do that. It is a good question.
Cannot hear question clearly
Lichtenstein at the end of his life did not
speak because he did not believe you could say anything true in a language and
he was a philosopher of language. The whole world is running or not running, it
is actually probably not running because of language as well as it is running
because of language. The problem is language, communication. Rumi one of my
favourite stories of Rumi is one of the three, there is an Arab, a Persian and
a Roman. They are traveling together on a road and they come across this
dirham. They all grab at it at the same time. The Arab says we have to buy enab
with it. The Persian says no we buy angoor, the Roman says no we are going to
buy venatas. They are all words for grape so they start fighting each other and
Rumi’s comment is all that was needed was a good translator.
Part of the problem is language, one of the
things they point out here that I really believe in is that when people say I
don’t believe in God, Muslims should say what is your definition of God because
I do not believe in that God either. A lot of people do not believe in an
unbelievable God. That is true but in dealing with somebody who is trapped in
that rejection of language….you have to establish first that language can….if I
tell him to stand up and he stands up, that my language has been meaningful
enough to make him do and act and therefore something that has meaning can be
conveyed in language and can be demonstrated very easily and that language is
meaningful. If he means that we cannot use language to speak about transcendent
truth which is the idea of logical positivism which is another modern
aberration, the idea that any metaphysical language is meaningless that we can only
speak about material and concrete things. That is also very problematic because
the human mind has universals and yet you will never see a universal but when I
point to a particular tree that is not the universal tree. That is one
particular tree so there are even within language abstract things that we
recognise to be true that indicate a shared or common thing that particular all
share.
I have gone out and watched trees. Trees are very
interesting things. I have gone just walking and looking at all these different
trees realising each one of them is completely unique and feeling whoever
invented this idea of a universal tree, it is not true, because every human
being on this planet is unique yet we share the fact that we are human beings
although I cannot point to your particular example as a human being.
We have a concept in our mind of what is human
that is not to be seen in the world and universals you cannot find them and yet
the mind recognises them. That is a metaphysical concept because it is beyond
the material world, the universal concept. The idea of God, the brain is wired
for it, simple as that.
There is a book “Why God will not go away” and it
is the neurobiology of belief. People are wired to believe and there is truth
in that, simple as that and people do have belief. Unfortunately you get caught
in these mind games. I think ultimately for me it was a car accident. Sometimes
it takes real powerful shocks to wake people up put of that type of slumber.
Shaykh Saeed Ramadan says for the Muslims the atheists are signs of God just
the fact that somebody can deny God in this world it is a proof not only of God
but that He is merciful and compassionate. That he can walk around and say it
with impunity “I don’t believe in God”. Some of them will do that “I don’t
believe in You”. What is that? Then they will say “no lightning bolt came down”.
People say that “there is no God, strike me down now strike me down. God if You
are really there do it”.
God is Merciful. Sidi Ahmed Zarruq said for him
one of the biggest proofs of God was sailors because he said they are some of
the worst people on the planet and he said yet that can safely cross an ocean.
No offence to any sailors. In English, they say his language is so bad that he
could make a sailor blush and port cities are famous.
How do we know we are forgiven after tawbah?
We should assume that because the Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) said Allah says “I am in the opinion of My servant” which
means if you made a sincere tawbah and you don’t believe God forgave you, He
will not forgive You. But if you believe He did, He will if it is a sincere
tawbah.
Some of the words that the Quran uses for those
who can discern signs or who can understand signs and one of the fundamental
points that the Quran makes, is that there are two types of people. There are
people who reflect on the signs and then there are people who ignore the signs.
They ignore the signs to their own detriment. The Quran also gives us a clear
picture of the results that happen from people that ignore the signs and those
signs to both effects in this world and also effects in the next world. So for
instance the Quran gives a lot of signs of what happens to societies when they
are irreligious and begin to deviate from the path that Allah has given them.
Consistently the Quran is saying “travel in the land and look at the people who
went before you, look at how they built buildings that you built and yet they
came to nought because ultimately they began to disbelieve in the signs of
Allah”. The analogy that the Quran strikes is of the city “Allah strikes the
similitude of the city or the likeness of a city, it was safe, content and then
its provision would come from all over and this was really to the Meccan
people, reminding the Meccan people and then the Quran says that “they began to
deny the bounties of Allah”, In other words they forget that Allah was the
Provider. That is what happens when you ignore the source of the blessing and
begin to see yourself or your society as being the providers of whatever you
have done. There are people who see their work as being the reason they are
getting something out.
So the Quran uses certain words in relation to
these two signs. The signs being out there and in ourselves. Those are the
natural signs and then the signs of the revelation. The Quran uses the world
akala which means “don’t you use your intellects” so the aql which is the component that Allah has given
man is there to be able to comprehend. So the idea of using your aql and Allah
says He gave you hearing, sight and a heart. The ulema say the reason that
these three are mentioned together is because the ways in which knowledge comes
into you are though your sight and sound. They are signs in themselves but it
is through the sight and the sound. That is why Allah says that are signs “don’t
you see them?” in Surah Mulk when Allah says that the people in hell say “had we only listened” and you will see
these two attributes. Allah says “We gave them sight in order that they show
gratitude” so the idea of showing gratitude through these capacities so the
idea of showing gratitude through these capacities that Allah has given you to
perceive these.
So the aql is rooted in the fu’ad, that is the
Quranic view “they have hearts but they cannot perceive with their hearts”.
The second, the idea of understanding. Allah gives the human being the ability to use the intellect to understand meanings and so you have faham, and also you have the fiqh in the Quran which is the faqih i