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 in old Arabic was the one who could discern a pregnant animal in the
midst of a herd. It was the one who could see what was not apparent to others
and the faqih has a perception that the other people do not have.
When the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa
sallam) said “whoever Allah wants good for He gives him the understanding of
the deen”. Even though it has come to mean jurisprudence it really does not
mean it in that hadith. In that hadith, it means they are able to comprehend
the purpose of the deen and obviously the usooli the real faqih not the one who
knows the ahqaam but the one who knows how to apply Islam in the world
irrespective of the circumstances. That is the real faqih. Then also tufakara,
fakaara is a negative word in the Quran, it is only used once with Al Waleed.
Tafakara which has to do with struggling with thought in other words attempting
to understand, fakara is to produce thought whereas tafakara is to attempt to
understand. Waleed al Mughirah was someone who was thinking what could he say
about the Quran. Is it magic? Is it this, is it that? And so the takafar is
reflection, it is the idea of something enters into you and then you being to
attempt to understand what that means, that is what tafakar is whereas fakara
is coming out of you projecting onto something else. It actually has the
opposite meaning, it is you projecting into something else whereas takafar is
you allowing something to stimulate in you a desire to understand it at its
real level and then also you have tadakarah which is recollection which is very
important concept in the Quran because there is an idea in the Quran that human
beings really do have an understanding of what this is all about in the
innermost and there is a type of forgetfulness that has come over human beings
because they have come into the world and so the Quran gives this idea that
this is a dhikr, it is actually a reminder of something you already know
“remind them because reminders benefits believers”.
You can only be reminded of something you
already know and so there is this understanding that all of these things and so
there is this understanding that all of these things we are being taught, we
actually already know them and so it becomes a recollection that we are really
recollecting something that the human being has already perceived.
Then tawasama is another, wasama is a sign as
well and tawasama is to perceive the meaning of a sign and again the mutawasim
was somebody who could see from the face of a person whether they were good or
bad. That was the jahil understanding of a mutawasim, it was someone who could
see what was hidden behind the apparent.
If you look at all these words and these ideas
they are all revolving around the same idea, that the world is signs and what
human beings are is interpreters of signs and Allah has given human beings what
is in the Quran lubb, qalb, fu’ad, aql – there are all these different words
that are nuances of the same meaning.
Lubb: the people that have lubb, the word lubb,
if you look at the root meaning, it is a seed and again the idea it is a pith,
it is something obviously, when you say pithy, it is deep because the seed is
buried deep in the centre of something that contains the whole thing in other
words the lubb is like the seed of a tree, the entire tree is contained in the
seed, in the same way in the human being, there is something at the essence of
the human that contains this knowledge of Allah and of the universe. Then in
terms of ayahs, there are different types of ayahs. There are ayays of naimah,
so there are signs of Allah’s blessing. Good health, al afiyah is a sign of
Allah’s blessing, it is a ni’mah, all these types of things are signs that
Allah has given you blessings.
The Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam)
said “true wealth is contentment” so somebody who does not desire is really the
wealthy person. If someone has a great deal of wealth and yet they are still
filled with desire and trying to acquire more and more then they are not
wealthy according to our understanding.
Then rahma is mercy and there is a belief that
at the root of this entire universe is mercy. Ar Rahman is really the essential
attribute that Allah is giving to His creation and at the essence of the
Prophet’s (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) being is rahmah. “We only
sent you as a mercy to all of the worlds”.
So there are all of these signs in the world
that are signs of His mercy. Ibn Abbas said when you real a level of perception
everything becomes mercy in other words you do not see anything other than
mercy because even in the punishments that Allah inflicts on human beings they
are much less than we deserve. In that is a mercy so you begin to actually see
that Allah is a Merciful Lord that at the root of His tribulations in the world
is actually mercy more than anything else.
Then also there is tabshir which is the idea of
Allah giving bushra. If you do this then this happens. If they believe then
Allah will given them reign, He will increase their crops, all of these things.
There is tabshir in the Quran so there are signs of tabshir.
On the other hand there are signs of intiqam
which is that Allah takes vengeance. So Allah will avenge His people so if they
are righteous people that are persecuted for their righteousness then there is
a belief that Allah is a personal God in that He will actually take vengeance
upon those who oppress and persecute so that it is a warning.
So these become warnings and again these are
signs as well even though it is very difficult for you to discern. It is not
really permissible in shariah to look at something in that sense and that is
because he did this and this. It is something according to the Quran is a
possibility that should be considered.
So whenever anything happens to people that is
terrible they should always consider the possibility that this is from their
own hands, it is what their own hands have wrought and it is a very important
idea in the Quran.
Iqab comes form a word aqaba which is what comes
after so iqab is a punishment is a result of prior actions. So you do not see
the punishment as arbitrary tyranny that there is something cruel here no, you
see the punishment as a direct result and therefore what Allah says in the
Quran again and again is that He does not oppress His servants.
Then also you have adhab and adhab is a direct
result of also of those who transgress and then indhar which is very important
because just as you have tabshir you have indhar. Just as you have glad tidings
you have a warning. The Prophets are unique in that they have tabshir and
indhar – in other words they warn and they give good news. You will also see in
the Quran whenever there is a verse that deals with punishments it will also be
followed by a verse that deals with mercy. You will never see verses in the
Quran separate like that that you will always see that there us a promise. So
ths is called wa’ad and wa’eed. You have the promise of if you do right then
you get the promise of the righteous which is that Allah accepts you and
blesses you. If you do wrong then you have this indhar this warning that there
is a retribution, there is requital.
Then the human response to all of these because
this is all happening out there, I mean this is the world. There are wonderful
things happening and there are terrible things happening. So the human response
to these events in the world is one of two. There is only two possibilities. It
is either tasdiq or taqdeeb. Either you believe these signs or you deny them. So
those who deny them will turn signs into arbitrary meaningless events which is
what nihilism does. We reduce events to chance and accident, that we do not
live in a moral universe, that our actions do not have repercussions in the
world. If they do, those repercussions are arbitrary repercussions. They are
not repercussions that have any significance in a cause and effect type of
relationship with any moral component there but rather cause and effect as a
certain aggregate of certain variables that come together and then something
happens that so crime does pay, it does not always pay but it can pay if it is
organised, it usually pays very well,
So that type of attitude that they have, the
people that deny these signs. The people that accept the signs are people that
believe the universe is meaningful that we are living in a world where
everything that happens has both existential import so me as in individual my
life is meaningful. The events that happen in my life are meaningful, they are
not arbitrary events. Then we see this is a collective group in other words
groups as collective groups of people have courses. The courses that they take
will determine outcomes as a collective group and this is when you get into the
idea of clans, cities, countries or states. An actual country can bring upon
the wrath of God and because they bring this upon them they are taken to
account as an aggregate not as individuals and that is why the Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) said “that when the punishment of Allah comes it afflicts
the good and bad”. It afflicts everybody. The Quran says “you should fear and
guard yourselves from calamities that do not just affect the oppressors among
you”. The reason for that verses that if only the oppressors were ever harmed
by wrong in the world then no one would have nay cause to stop wrong in the
world. They would simply wait until the oppressor got what was coming to him
but once you begin to understand that wrong in the world affects everybody and
therefore the kind of modern concept “well as long as I do not hurt anybody
then it is alright” but from the Islamic cosmology that any wrong that is done
openly and in public that is not rejected by society will actually affect the
society even if it is not harming anybody per se.
There is no apparent harm but the reality of it
is that it does take its toll and eventually it begins to corrode the society
until all those signs that come in civilisations in the past begin to happen
and then the civilisation will disappear, be overrun by the hordes. If you want
to go into Ibn Khaldun’s philosophy that societies decay and then they are
invaded by hordes and then the hordes will tend to reinvigorate the society so
America gets invaded by the hordes of the south or something if you want to
look at Pat Buchanan’s type of scenario of what is coming that south America
and Mexico overrun in America but then from that comes a reinvigoration. That
is projection. In the past it would be things like Moghal hordes coming down
and completely decimating the Muslim societies but from the Moghal sprung this
entirely invigorated Muslim culture and civilization so they ended up being a
blessing whereas you cannot see the blessing when it is happening. All you can
see is the massacre and the slaughter and this is the part of the thing the
Quran reminds us “do not judge things because you cannot see the whole picture”
so you might think something is terrible when it is happening. That is why the
Quran says “sometimes you detest things and yet they are very good for you” so
you can see something in the short term. The short vision of something you see
it happening and you think it is terrible but then in the end it actually
becomes something that there is a lot of blessing in it. That is why it is
always important to wait and to withhold judgment because ultimately it is only
understanding the things in its entirety, can you judge it. That is why the
people of bayan which is one of the sciences of rhetoric in Islam they say
“before you can judge something you have to conceptualise that thing in its
entirety” that you cannot make a judgment about a thing if you only understand
one facet of it. You really have to be able to comprehend it. That is why
ultimately it is God alone that can judge humanity see we can only judge by
what is apparent. That is a limited type of judgment but it is only God alone
who can judge human beings because He is the only One that can encompass all of
the facets and variables involved in judging.
So the immediate consequence of the human
response which is one of two things is either gratitude or ingratitude. That is
the human response. You are either grateful which is called as-shakir or a
mumin or you are an ingrate which is called a kafir. This is the only two
outcomes of interpreting the signs that are in the world. For the one who has
gratitude because he wants to maintain this state this causes this person to
enter into what is called a state of taqwa. Taqwa is protecting yourself from
losing what you have and the way that you do that is by maintaining gratitude
because the Quran says “if you show gratitude I will continue to bless you” but
when you stop showing gratitude then those blessings stop. That is why Ibn
At’illah said that “the hobbling cord of blessings is gratitude”.
If you have an animal and you want to make sure
it does not go astray you hobble its legs. He said “hobbling cord of blessing
is gratitude”. Therefore if you are not showing gratitude you allow your
blessings to wander off. You are not protecting them and the final result of
this is iman or kufr. The results of iman or kufr are jannah or jahanaam.
Before we go back to the book, I just want to
look at because I think this is very interesting presentation of guidance that
Raghab il Hisbahani gives. What he says is the highest thing in the Quran
really the highest thing is called tawfique. This is the highest state a human
being can be in the state of what is called tawfique.
The word in Arabic tawfique comes from a root
word which means to correspond with. Muwafaqa means a correspondence. The
definition of tawfique is that the will of the human being corresponds with the
will of God and that comes about by following the guidance and guidance
according to the Quran has three degrees in this world. There are three degrees
of guidance.
The first is knowing good and evil. So that is a
level of guidance even if you do not act upon it. The Quran says we have guided
the human being to the two paths of good and evil. So every human being has
been guided to this understanding of right and wrong and that is the nature of
the soul and the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) was once asked that “what is
a wrong action?”. A wrong action was that which you did that caused trouble in
the breast in other words your heart was troubled by it. That is the nature,
the fitrah this natural state of a human being is when they do wrong and are
troubled by it.
Human beings have different strategies of dealing
with that trouble and obviously alcohol is one of them, drugs, being immersed
in the world, looking for affirmation. There are people that are doing really
wrong things and they tend to hang out with people who do really wrong things
because that confirms that they are alright.
In Operation Candyman which is the operation of
trying to find all these paedophiles. In the interview they had with one of
these FBI agents they said these guys know what they are doing is wrong and the
reason they need to be connected to the internet is to try and fee a little
better about it. That is a very Islamic insight into the nature of wrongdoing,
you want to be in bad company….he is doing it as well so it cannot be that bad.
That is why one of the worst things in the Islamic tradition is to wrong
publicly because what it does is it causes people to think that the wrong is
not that significance. That is why it is so dangerous and one of the French
ethicists said “hypocrisy is a homage that vice pays to virtue”. That is very
similar to an Islamic understanding.
In this culture there is this idea that it is
better to let it all hang out, let it all out, don’t feel bad. The Catholic Church,
they used to absolve sins by making you do hail Mary’s and all these things. In
this culture sins are absolved by telling you they are not sins. This is what
happens is we say no it is okay nothing is wrong with you. But he is feeling
there is something that is wrong that is why he is at the psychiatrist. The
psychiatrist is saying “don’t feel bad about yourself, you have low self
esteem”. Well why does he have low self esteem? Because the society is telling
him this. Where does all this come from? You see because you get into this
chicken/egg thing.
Where does this idea of virtue come from? In
other words I mentioned this before, this book of ethics that I took in the University
by
You have to ask the question where did sin come
from? Where did this idea come from that human beings knew something was wrong?
Why? Because it is in the first story of Cain and Abel. He feels bad after he
kills his brother. Why did he feel bad? If we were in a nihilistic world where
there is no wrong and right what was in him that made him feel bad? He did
something wrong and that is what the soul knows, the soul knows what is wrong
and that is why the soul is troubled by it.
So the first is a knowledge of right and wrong.
Now there are two ways that that comes about. There is a natural law, which is
called fitrah which is the inherent nature that human beings generally know
what is right and wrong inherently in the same way that a cat, if you give it
food it will eat it in front of you but if it sneaks it, it will grab it and
run away. You could say it is because it got hit the last time but even dogs
and cats know when they are taking something legitimately and when they are
not. So that is the idea that human beings have this understanding.
Now the other is that revelation introduces this
understanding so the Prophets bring this understanding of good and evil of
khayr and sharh. It is an old problem, the old philosophers talk about the idea
– are things good because God says so or did God tell us to do those things
because they are good? They idea is something good in of itself or is it good
because God says so. The dominant opinion amongst Muslim scholars because they
split on this issue, the dominant opinion is that things are good because God
says they are. In other words, the intellect cannot always arrive at what is
good that you need this revelation to come in and tell you so there are things
that we cannot know and there are things we know. So that is the first one and
this is why in the Quran about Thamud which is a people that rejected the signs
of God and went astray. It said about them “as for Thamud We guided them but
they preferred blindness over their guidance” so they preferred to continue in
their error and then it becomes a choice which is very interesting.
One of my boys saw this person smoking and he
looked up at that person like perplexed. The person said to him “don’t ever do
this”. Then he asked us “why are they doing it?”. In other words if they know
it is wrong why are they doing that? This is where human beings become very
complicated because despite the fact that they know something they will often
go against their best knowledge and this is because of an imbalance in the
soul. When rational soul is paramount then these lesser souls, the bestial
souls, the irascible and the concupiscent soul, the appetitive soul the lower soul
are in a harmony so this rational soul is the controlling factor and this is
what Allah calls the aql and tells us to use it. If people capitulate to that
then they surrender to the worst qualities of their self and they end up
digging themselves down into the worst depths of despair. I mean worst case
scenario is terrible but a lot of people kind of survive in this middle ground.
There are some that just have completely surrendered and they end up crack,
cocaine addicts or whatever just completely devastated by their appetites,
alcoholics these types things addicted to all of these attempts at getting them
in a state of distraction from questions of ultimate concern.
The second type of guidance is that which the
servant is given this maddad or this help, this divine help in stages based on
his knowledge or her knowledge and action, right actions and this is what it
meant in the Quran when it says “those who took this guidance were increased in
the guidance and He gave them this piety, this taqwa”. This comes from a hadith
articulated very clearly in which the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam)
said “if you move towards God a hand span God moves towards you an arms length,
and if you moved to God an arms length, God moves towards you like hands outspread
and if you moved towards God walking, God moves towards you running” which is
not meant to be understood anthropomorphically that God runs but the idea is
that if you do a little bit all of this help comes to increase you. This is the
second stage of guidance.
The third stage is noor al wilayah. This is the
guidance of a person who has achieved a level of obedience and a state of
submission with God that they are in an illuminated state and so their actions
are actions that radiate the light of prophecy and this is why the Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) said that “pious scholars are the inheritors of Prophets”
what they inherit is the light of nubuwah.
So these are these three levels and this is
found in the Quran ”if you have piety God will give you true discrimination”.
So you will be able to discriminate in your lives. So that is an example of
this huda that emerges out of a recognition of these signs and then the
appropriate response that the signs are given.
On page 55, they give an interesting analogy of
the natural world and how Muslims and also Christians and Jews would have
looked at it traditionally like this as well and probably the Eastern
traditions but this idea of how the modern world is looked at. The way the
ancients looked at the world was that it was indicating an implicate order,
everything that you saw on the surface indicated something underneath so they
saw it as indeed signs indicating something else. Just as you see a tree, if
you understand anything about trees you realise the only reason that a tree
exists is because it has this massive root structure underneath the ground that
you cannot see. Now once that root structure becomes seen the tree dies.
You see the tree dies so the unseen world is
really the source of the seen world. The unseen world cannot come into the seen
because if it did the seen world has to disappear and so when you look at the
seen world what you are really supposed to be recognising is what are the roots
of the seen world. The roots of the seen world are the unseen world. That is
the real meaning of the seen world and the thing about trees people do not realise
this but the root structure is actually more important that the tree because
what trees do is they keep the earth, actually hold down soil like mountains,
the Quran says the mountains are like pegs and actually prevent the world from
shaking and this is something that is known in modern geology so what you see
of the mountain, what is more important is not the seen part of the mountain
the fact that it is a weighted deep into the earth but you are only seeing the
outward, you think that is amazing well you have not even seen the root. That
is why the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) said the tree that was the
most like the believer is the palm tree because it did not have any roots. In
other words it was not deeply planted in the material world and yet it is this
extraordinary tree that does all this wonderful……while it is here it does all
this wonderful things.
So the two of them say the modern world see what
they say is if you went to a museum and saw a painting by Michaelangelo, the
question that most people go in there will ask themselves “what is the painter
trying to tell me? What is the meaning of this painting?” Or if you heard a
poem you could say the same thing. What is the poet trying to tell me? He
didn’t just make up this stuff. There is something he is trying to convey, a
message well what the modern analyses is, is not meaning, what is the painting
made of? It is made of canvas. What is the material? Well it is made out of
fibres. What is that material? Well it is made of these molecules. What are the
actual colours from? Well those are the light reflections and this one is a certain
frequency and this why the yellow is showing up and the blue is a certain
frequency and so they analyse the painting not for its meaning but just to
explain what it is made out up of. That is the same way that they look at the
modern world. They look out there and they want to just analyse everything but
they never tell you what it means. They break it down, it is to reduce things to
their components and then we feel like we have achieved an understanding of the
thing. Well if you take a human being and take out their eyes, take off their
ears, take off their ears, take off their hair, dissect them, open up their
interior, examine their kidneys and liver and all these things do you
understand what a human being is?
Has that given you the knowledge of what a human
being is? Well it has given you a certain knowledge about something about human
beings that they are composed of flesh and knowledge, that they have hair,
liver, kidneys and the kidney does this and the liver does that. That is a
certain type of knowledge but does that tell you about a human being that can
think, that can speak, that can write poetry, that can paint pictures, that can
play an instrument that can do all these extraordinary things, it does not tell
you anything about that human being. Why does he need to do those things? Why
do human beings even pursue such pursuits?
So that is the idea of trying to understand signs,
it is to look beyond this superficial realm and then he gives this hadith of
the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam). Walking through a town with
some companions and he met an old and decrepit woman from one of the tribes who
was making wool into thread with a spinning wheel. He greeted her and started
speaking to her. He asked her if she had faith in God and she replied that she
did. The Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam)
asked her why. She said the spinning wheel does not turn unless there is a hand
to turn it and the heavens cannot turn unless someone is turning them. The
Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) looked
at his companions and said you should have the religion of old women. That is
faith and there is another story of Fakhr al Din ar Razi who was walking with
some of his students and an old woman saw him and she was amazed at how all
these students were fluttering around him and she said who is that? They
student said “you don’t know who that is? He has a thousand proofs for the existence
of God”. She laughed and said “If he did not have a thousand doubts for His non
existence then he would not need a thousand proofs for His existence”. When
Fakhr al Din ar Razi heard that he said “you should have the faith of old
women”.
You know it is interesting because the
whole….the ancients looked at all of the world and said this all indicates God
and what the moderns have done what they have said is that we have invented
God. God is an invention of man which is an amazing feat I mean that human
beings created God in their own image instead of seeing that this whole thing
was created to celebrate these attributes of God, it is seen as an illusion
that needs to be given up.
Now the next section goes into the divine names.
This is actually somewhat a difficult section in that if you look at Hinduism
which has this concept of all of these deities. What they do they have Kali and
Vishnu they have a deity that represents the creative force of this universe
and then they have a deity that represents the destructive force in the
universe. The reason for that is people have a difficult time holding opposites
in their mind at the same time. So the idea that God is bringing to life and He
is taking away life. That the same God is doing these two acts giving life and
taking it away and that there is no type of contradiction in that. So the idea
of the divine names is to understand all of these attributes of God as being
and I do not want to use any analogies but if I was forced to it would be like
seeing a diamond that has all these facets to it and whatever facet you happen
to be looking at that is the attribute that you are looking at.
There are times when you witness the mercy of
God, there are times when you witness the wrath of God and there are other
times when you are witnessing the overpowering nature of God. There are other
times when you are witnessing the fact that God is the One who abases people
and He is also the One who dignifies people so God has all of these attributes
and that is what the 99 names are. They are ways of understanding different
facets of how the divine is working in the world. That is at the essence of
this.
So he and she talks about that when we say God
is Merciful that what we are saying is like la ilaha illal Allah, there is no
God but the Merciful and also that there is no mercy but God’s mercy. There is
none more merciful but the Merciful, so God’s mercy overshadows all mercy in
the universe and the best way to understand any of these ideas that when we say
there is no mercy but God’s mercy….in mathematics if you have any number over
infinity that number is zero. So the idea is that anything in the world that
resembles an attribute of God in any way is in reality null and void when it is
compared to God and that is the meaning of “there is no thing like God” but
then immediately after that “He is the hearing and seeing” so the verse gives
you there is no thing comparable to God and then immediately after that it
gives you two attributes that you can only know because you have them but if
you compare your hearing to God’s hearing, it does not exist. If you compare
your seeing to God’s seeing it does not exist.
This is the whole section that they try to
explain about the idea of the transcendental nature of God and also the
imminent nature of God that God is utterly beyond the creation and at the same
time God is imminent in creation in other words we can see the works of God in
the world but we cannot associate those works with God in reality because the
world does not have that of substantial type of existence in relation to God to
God’s existence so the being of God and Shaykh Muhammad talked about this last
night, the being of our being in relation to the being of God’s being is that
we are non existent in relation we exist in relation to the world. In relation
to God we do not have substantial existence and that again is a difficult thing
for people to grasp because we are not like the Hindus who say this is
illusion, it has no existence whatsoever, Muslims do not say that. Muslims say
the world has existence but the existence is contingent, it is not absolute. In
other words it is contingent upon God’s existence, had God not existed, the
world would not exist and as long as God sustains the world and this is the
idea of God being Al Qayyum the Sustainer, Al Hayy Al Qayyum. As long as God
sustains the world the world exists. The instant that God removes His glance of
being onto the world, the world no longer exists.
Then they go into the mercy and the wrath and
this is actually very important because the Quran and hadith clearly state that
God’s mercy outstrips God’s wrath. The reason for that is mercy is an essential
attribute of God whereas wrath is something that occurs as a result of the
actions of God’s creation. It is something that is directly related to God’s
creation whereas rahma is God’s reality. Again to use an analogy and the
Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) used this analogy he said he
once saw a woman who was suckling her child and he said to his companions “do
you think that this woman would throw her child into the fire?”. They all said
“no absolutely not”. He said “God is more Compassionate and Merciful with His
creatures than this woman with her child”. That is at the essence of God’s
nature, is the rahma or the mercy.
What can happen with people, and the reason it
is so important to keep mercy and wrath in balance is that if you remove wrath
in a balance is that if you remove wrath which is what modern religion has done
particularly in the West it has removed the idea of God’s wrath, people do not
even believe in the idea of punishment into the next life anymore. Priests will
not talk about it in a lot of parishes because they will lose their
parishioners. I have actually been told that a Methodist priest, he was a
bishop in the Methodist church and he told me that he can’t even talk about
things and mention verses anymore because people will not come to church
anymore and so God becomes like how we like God as opposed to us being as God
would like us to be, we make God the way we want God. We do not reform
ourselves to make ourselves like God would like us to be, we reform God so He
conforms to our desires and whims. It is amazing what has happened to religion.
Then you have another problem you go to other
side of the wrath, and this is the idea of people that want to eliminate
everybody who does not agree with their religion because it becomes a hateful
thing. You begin to see the wrath of God and you do not see anything else so
that is another problem too. Both are one eyes, both are looking with one eye
and you are given two eyes. You have to see the wrath and mercy. If you do not,
you are in trouble and that is one of the things about Iblees is that Iblees
could only see the material nature of Adam, he could not see the spiritual
nature.
When in the Quran it says that God said to him
why did you not bow down, he said “You created me from fire but You created him
from clay. In other words I am a higher element, why should I bow down to him.
What Iblees was missing was that the spirit had been blown into Adam but the
nature of clay is that it is opaque you cannot see the spirit in the clay. If
you have a clay container you cannot see what is in the container. You cannot
tell whether it is full or empty like you have a clay jar, you cannot see it
whereas if you have a glass jar you could see if there was something in it or
not. So when he looked at the human being he could not see the spirit because
the spirit was hidden in the material form.
So this idea of the transcendental nature of God
and the imminent nature of God and distance you have to have a transcendent
understanding of God but at the same time you have to have an imminent
understanding because there is a personal relationship that you have but there
is also an understanding that God is so beyond the human being. This is the
most difficult balance in the Islamic understanding is to keep these two in a
balance that one the one hand you cannot in anyway associate God with His
creation but on the other hand God is known through His creation so it is
keeping those two in balance, it is called fear and hope, mercy and wrath,
beauty and majesty. There are many different ways that the scholars looked at
it. That is why the attributes of God if you look at the 99 names you have what
are called sifat al jamalia and sifat al jallalia. Dhul Jalaali wal Ikraam. He
is Majestic and He is also Beneficent. He is also giving us and this is why He
has those two attributes of Majesty and Beauty. If you miss one because you
have been blinded by the other you are missing the whole picture and it becomes
dangerous theologically and spiritually and in a lot of other ways.
One page 22, he gives a diagram of this idea of
these concentric circles and then these lines moving out from the centre. Both
of them are not enough, you need the two of them together, you cannot have them
separately and that is why on that figure 3 it is a figurative representation.
Tawheed and then knowing….Imam Ali said “He is near in His distance and He is
far in His nearness”. That is a difficult concept of people to Hold but you
have to understand it in that way and then another thing in the Quran, the
Quran says “I punish whoever I please” but then it says “but My mercy has
encompassed all things” and the point that they make from that is that the
Quran never suggests that God’s wrath is toward all things. It is only towards
specific things whereas the universal is mercy but that is permeating the
universe is God’s mercy. Mercy pertains to the very nature of the real whereas
wrath is a secondary attribute that rises up because of specific situations of
certain creatures.
So Islam begins with the perception of
difference: we are different from God and fear from Him. God is utterly other
and created things are totally helpless because of their lack of any positive
qualities but the purpose of Islamic teaching is not to leave people in wrath
in distance from God but rather take them to mercy or nearness. So people are
supposed to do something about their distance and if they do they will move
toward nearness so this is drawing near. My servant continues to draw near to
Me and then what happens when He finally loves him, He becomes the hand with
which he grasps, the eyes with which he sees, the tongue with which he speaks,
the ear with which he hears in other words it is total, he is in a state when
he is only seeing the actions of God. He is not God but he is perceiving the
actions of God in creation in such a profound and deep way that the world
becomes a theatre of these divine manifestations.
It is not God, it is not other than God in that
if you want to use an analogy. The sun radiates now the rays of the sun we can
see them if you are in a certain spot, you can see the sun coming through, that
is not the sun but it radiates from the sun and in the same way this creation
is not Allah but it is radiating, it is emanating from Allah. It is not Allah
but a creation of Allah therefore it is emanating from Allah so it is the
ability to see the source behind the light of the world and that is why Allah
says “Allah is the light of heavens and the earth”. In other words He is the
illuminator of the havens and earth so it is the light of Allah that is
illuminating the world and then you get into this idea here of light and
darkness and they talk about the angels which are the creatures of light. Human
beings are creatures of mud but have this light in them which is the light of
intellect. It is the aql. They are not strong but there are traditions that
talk about that God created the intellect from light. The aql was made from
light. So this is the light that human beings has despite this material nature
that there is the light that this human being has.
If you look under section 87 which is that we normally
think of light as visible but in fact it is invisible, we can only see light
when it is mixed with darkness which is very important. What that means is the
creation in that it is other than God is darkness but in that it is radiating
attributes of God it is light and this is the mixture of light and darkness in
creation which is one of the most extraordinary things about creation that it
is this mixture of light and darkness.
At this point I want to look at a verse, to me
it is one of the most extraordinary verses in the Quran because it deals with
something which would never occur, it is really hard to believe that this would
just simply occur to someone in this way. It is a verse from Surah Furqan which
means the discrimination. It says have you not considered how your Lord moves
shade and had God wanted He would have made it still in one place but shade is
moving constantly. If you watch throughout the day and that is one of the
beauties of watching your prayer, measuring your prayer by the shadows. You see
the movement of the shade. A lot of people do not even notice that, they do not
even realise that their shadow is short at midday and as the day progresses it
gets long. It begins long, becomes short and then begins to expand again.
Then he says “We made the sun a proof of shade”.
Now this is really extraordinary because when I first read that, I said what
does that mean? Shade comes from the sun. That is where shade comes from, the
sun, so why does it say “We made the sun a proof for it. Then We begin to
contrast this little by little. And He is the One who made for you night as a
garment in other words you sleep in the night. The darkness of the night is
like a garment that envelopes you. We made sleep as a type of hibernation, a
time of renewal of recreation. Then We spread the light of the day out so We
made the day this spreading of light”.
Now if you look at what Fakhr ad Din says about
this. He says:
“Haven’t you considered? He said one of this is
the sight of the eye and the other is the side of the heart. The eyes see but
again that is a sign that the eye is perceiving and the heart is meant to
interpret the sign so it is important to see that. Real seeing the Quran says
“it is not the eyes that go blind but it is the hearts and breasts that go
blind” so the real seeing is the sight of the heart.
Then “have you not looked at the shade, how God
is moving this shade?”. Now he says this meaning of this ayah and there have
been many attempts at understanding this ayah goes back to two meanings. One is
that shade is a middle state between pure light and pure darkness. Then he says
this is the best of states.
Pure darkness, the nature is averse to it,
nobody likes pure darkness and pure light is so powerful that we would be
overwhelmed by it and unable to stay in it.
You cannot look at the sun but here you can look
at it for a moment and turn away and you will see black dots. But if you go
outside of our atmosphere for one moment it would completely destroy your
eyesight to even gland towards that direction.
So what he says is because it is the best of all
states, paradise is described as being shade everywhere. This perfect state of
shade. Then he says if you look at anything in the world you can only see it
because of shade so the fact that we perceive the world, we only perceive it
because it is an admixture of darkness and light. Had it been pure light we
could not have perceived it and had it been pure darkness we would not have
perceived therefore God put the sun as an indication of this state that the
entire world is in. Had He not done that you would not have considered shade as
a phenomenon because we are in shade right now. When you go outside you are in
shade. Outside here you are in shade, even when the sun is shining directly on
you, you are still in shade. It is an admixture of lightness and darkness
because pure light would completely blind you, you would not be able to see
anything. So the fact that the entire cosmos is an admixture of these lights
and darknesses is a phenomenon that is extraordinary to reflect on that.
That is why as it begins to be taken from us, it
goes slowly and so this movement is a way of understanding this blessing and he
said this is one of the most hidden blessings of God, most people do not even contemplate
the blessing of shade, the fact that they are in shade constantly even they are
in the sun.
It is only that they see the shade that they
actually can realise that so the Quran is actually telling is to reflect on the
fact that the sun is a proof of shade, it is not the cause of shade.
So light is a metaphor in that we understand
that darkness is the absence of light and therefore what is other than God is
pure absence because God is light. The Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa
sallam) was asked “did you see God?”. He said “He is light, how can I see God
when He is light”. So that the metaphor in the world that we have for God is
light. The light of God is not like the light of the world because ….but it is
the same way the mercy of the mother is the way we know the mercy of God. The
light of the sun is the way we understand the idea that God is light.
Chapter 7
And so the absence of light is darkness, it is
nothing and that is why other than God is nothing. This is what the Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) said “the truest thing that a poet ever said what the poet
Labib said “everything other than God is unreal” and so what is unreal in the
world is the light of God. That is the only thing that gives the world any
substance at all and that is why the Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) said “this world is cursed and everything in it is cursed
except what reminds you of God and the remembrance of God”. So the world if it
is not fulfilling its function which is to remind you of God then it becomes a
curse for you. It is not benefiting you it is actually harming you to be in it
because the whole purpose of the world is to remind you of God so if when you
look out there you are seeing God in other words the light of God in the world
which are these ayats, these signs, then you have responded to the world
appropriately and you will be requited appropriately.
But if you do not see God and are not reminded
of God in the world then you become an ingrate and that is why the verses here
about light…are the blind and the seeing man equal or are the darknesses and
light equal? And always darknesses when it is related to light, is in plural
and light is in singular. “It is He who sends down upon this servant signs,
clear expectations that He may bring you forth from darkness into light. Why is
he who is dead and We gave him light and appointed for him a light to walk
amongst people as one who is from darkness and comes not forth from them. It is
he who performs his prayer over you and His angels that He may bring you forth
from the darkness into light”.
So angelic luminosity is a light that is in the
world which is the light of the angels and angels according to the Islamic
tradition are creatures made of light. Now the difference between demons which
are made of fire and demons are very interesting because according to the
Islamic cosmology they are made of fire. If you look at fire its nature is
chaotic. Fire is not like light. If you want a light beam even the sun or laser
we can control light in that it follows very exact laws where fire is chaos
theory. That is why in chaos theory they study smoke and light because fire by
its nature is chaos, it is unpredictable you do not know what it is going to do
and it can spread very easily. You can have a controlled fire but it can get
out of hand whereas light is not like that, it does not do that.
So the angels are in a state of total obedience
to Allah and then the other thing about fire is that it exists by consuming
others. Fire exists by consuming wood. Demons exist by consuming men. This is what
they thrive on, this is the hadith about the skinny devil and fat devil. The
Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) said there were two devils
that met. One of them was about ready to die and the other one was looking
really good. The fat one said to the skinny one “what is the matter with you?”.
He said “I have a terrible assignment. Every time he eats he says in the name
of God. He gets up in the morning and prays. He is also remembering God. I am
not getting any nourishment. You see like fire burning wood he is dying. Then
the other one says “I have a great assignment. He never remembers God. When he
eats he never says in the name of God and I eat with him. Then when he goes to
sleep he does not say in the name of God and I get a great nights rest” so the
point there is the nature of demonic realm that is thrives. That is why
consumer in old English means the devil. That is what it means. You can look it
up in the old dictionary. Consumer means the devil because the devil consumes
souls. Modern consumers are devils, the Quran says “profligate people are the
brethren of the devious” so all this gratuitous consumption, all of this
empty…that is what it is, consumption is a disease, I think I might have it.
Then he and she talks about spirits, the nature
of the spirits and the jinn. The jinn are important in that they exist
alongside human beings. They are created of fire, their father is Iblees. That
is the dominant opinion like Adam is our father. Iblees is their father. Some
of them are good, some of them are mischievous. They do not disbelieve in
Allah. Their disobedience is different from the creatures of Bani Adam, the
children of Adam, they do not disbelieve in Allah, they know that Allah exists,
their disbelief is a disbelief of disobedience which for the children of Adam
is not a disbelief but it is partly because they are in the unseen realm and
they have a lot more information than we do so their reckoning is…they know too
much in that way because Iblees knows a lot. Think about shade today.
Any questions?
What is thahir?
Thahir means apparent or outwardly manifest. In
the Quran it says “He is the first with no beginning, the last with no end, the
outwardly manifest and the outwardly concealed”.
So the meaning is He is apparent to those who
can see. If you have this inner eye then you can see this apparency of God that
is why for the Gnostics somebody that knows God to deny the existence of God it
is like….I think it is the H G Wells story where the man goes into the valley
and it is a valley filled with blind people. They say the world is just
darkness, he said not it is incredible, there is a light and there are all
these colours and there are flowers and look at the mountains and the sky and
you people do not have any eyes and they say this man is insane. So they go and
start feeling him and they say O that is why, he has got pressure in his brain
because of these bulging….so they poke his eyes out. This is the idea for the Gnostic,
he is like that man who can see in the midst of blind people that are denying
sight because they cannot see and that is the way the Prophets are when they
come into this world. Everything is perfectly clear to them and that is why the
way they speak is with such intensity, I mean Prophets are intense. If you look
at their messages, they are intense because it is so clear to them and they
want other people to see what they are, they are healers because they can
remove the cataract, they can remove that veiling that is on the eyes. They
will not remove it, they will only remove what is necessary because you do not
want to have a total unveiling, you cannot handle it, you will go insane and
that is why some people end up seeing too much and then they go mad. There is
all this religious psychosis, the world is filled with religious psychotics,
people that have seen too much. That is why it is dangerous, that is why Islam
is a middle way, you do not want to go to this extreme of a religious
psychoses.
There are two possibilities to blessings. One of them is for
people that show gratitude and they are increased in their blessings and the
other are people that are ingrate and they are increased in what the Quran
calls istidraj. Istidraj is according to the Quran that “I continue to give
them blessings despite their disobedience and I take them by degrees and my
strategy or my plan is vast” The same is true when calamities befall.
Calamities befall for different reasons. There are different possibilities,
with Prophets when calamities befall, there are two reasons, one is called
tasliyah which is that other people that follow them the fact that their
Prophets have been through so much, they are willing to endure much more. If
the Prophets never endured any hardship then the people that follow them when
they endure hardship they will lose hope. They will think I am so terrible, I
am so horrible, this is why God is doing it to me and so they will go into a
wrath only seeing wrath whereas when the Prophets suffer immensely they suffer
for us, it is not for them, they do not need it, so their suffering is actually
for the people that believe in them in order for them to be able to get through
the world in one piece so the Prophet lost all of his children, he buried all
of them except Fatimah so if you have 5 children and you lose one and you
remember “my God, my Prophet buried 6 of his 7 children” I mean that certainly
makes it easier for you to bear that hardship and then you also do not fall
into the trap of saying God hates me, that is why He took away my child because
we know that God loved the Prophet Muhammad and yet He took all 6 of his 7
children in his lifetime.
So it makes you bear the hardships of this world and also it
is what is called taqfir dunboob when hardships befall people that believe in
God it is a way of purifying previous wrongs but you can also remove them by
taubah. That is why it is good to make taubah. Somebody said when grace meets
karma, you don’t want to just have all this stuff of the past that you have to deal
with, it is better to try and atone for that and give sadaqah, give charity and
things to remove those wrongs but it can remove wrongs and then also you get
raised in degrees because one of the things about calamities is you always come
out enriched by them, it is always hard to see that at the beginning. But there
is never a calamity that happens in your life that when it is over you have a
whole different perspective on the world that had you not have had that
perspective on the world.
There are people that walk though life sleepwalking never
appreciating anything they have and then they lose everything and the first
time in their entire life they feel grateful for what they had. So the fact
that they lost it all if that is what it took to put them into a state of
realising that they were in blessings, it is a blessing. There are many
possibilities there when things happen and it is always best to see the good in
it because the Prophet in Sahih Muslim said “how wonderous is the affair of the
one who believes in God because the affair of that one is all good, if God
gives him calamities he is patient and is rewarded for his patience and If He
gives him blessings he is grateful and is reminded for his gratitude” so it is
all good.
This is an amazing book, there is a lot in there. It is a
good book, I mean these people have thought a lot about it. They are drawing
from a tradition I mean a lot of the insights in this book are from our
tradition. What they are doing is they are pulling it out and they are presenting
it to us in a very palatable way.
Once you get into the old books this is what they talk
about, they are just in another world you know and now you get these modern
books you know “Islam made simple”. What a tragedy because it is deep, you just
have to watch out for what they call the bends, you know the bends when you
deep sea diving. You have to come up slow because you will get these bend
things. That is when you have to go with the Islamic tradition when you go deep
sea diving you have to resurface slowly, you need to go into the decompression
chamber.
We arrived to the section on the qadr. The qadr is probably
the most difficult concepts not just in Islam but in any religious tradition
because the qadr is dealing with the idea of pre-determination and if you look
at the word pre-determine. Determine is to put limits on something
de-teriminus. Terminate is to end. De is from ending our putting endings or
limits on something do the idea of pre-determining means that something, the
limits were already set before the thing actually came about and so there is a
misconception in the minds of not just non Muslims but Muslims as well about
the nature of the qadr, that the idea that things are pre-determined. One of
the thoughts that the authors bring out which is very important is that if that
was the case then the Quran would actually not make any sense because the Quran
is commanding you to do things and if you have the ability to do anything and I
command you to do something then my command is meaningless so it would then be
saying the Quran is meaningless and that is impossible for a revelation to be
meaningless. Everything in a revelation is meaningful so the idea that divine
decree or the qadr is pre-determination is a dangerous one.
One the other hand you have to look at hadiths that indicate
certain things about the world that are also important to understand and this
is where you get into what some religious scholars in the West have called an antinomy
which is not really a paradox but ….a paradox is when you have two things that
are in a sense mutually exclusive but they are both apparently real and the
idea of human beings are free and predetermined at the same time seems like a
paradox. An antinomy on the other hand is that something is true at one level
but at a higher level, a higher truth emerges. And so there is an idea that
there can be a resolution of what is apparently paradoxical by moving to a
higher level of understanding.
So the idea that human beings…I think a good analogy of it
in the modern world is the idea of light being both a wave and a photon because
in modern physics they have this idea that the quanta are particles of light
and there is an idea that on the one hand it behaves like a wave and they can
watch its movement and on the other hand it appears to have the qualities of
quanta or intermittent particles of light as opposed to being something that is
unified. So that is I think is an interesting analogy for the understanding of
free will and determination.
There is no doubt that human beings certain things are
determined with human beings, Your parents were determined for you. You did not
choose your parents and now we have no recorded history of anyone replacing
their biological parents. In other words we do not have any testimony or proof
that anybody has been able to become somebody else so that certainty was not
determined.
The country that you were born in, the time in which you
find yourself, all of these circumstances that we found ourselves in whether we
were from rich families, whether we were from poor families also intellectual
abilities and gifts, artistical qualities and gifts, there are many many
qualities, athletic abilities.
There are people that are more lithe than other people,
there are people that are more balanced, that are more flexible, that are
quicker. When you were in school, there were those people that in the math
classes that just would get the answers seemingly effortlessly and other people
would grapple with it. There are people that word problems were as clear as
instructions on a coke machine or something like that where they would just see
very clearly what type of problem it was and how to arrive at an answer and
then there are other people that would not see it for the life of them. They
would struggle, and struggle and struggle and still it would not get through so
all of those type of things that we find in the world, the discrepancies are
very interesting and Islam has a very interesting reason in why it presents
that.
The first thing just to look at this idea of qadr. If we
look at the root word it comes from qaddara. It has the idea of power. Quddura
– means power. The qadr is the one who is capable of doing something. They have
the capacity to do something. It is one of the names of Allah.
There is a book by
And so the idea that Allah has determined everything is the
idea that Allah has power over everything because He created it and determined
it in that way so in human beings we are determined in our bodies in other
words if you are 5”10” or 5”, there was a point at which your cells stopped
growing, it was a point that your skeletal structure stopped, now that point
that did not occur for someone who is taller than you it went up so there is a determination
in the size of people as well. There is a determination in the size of the
world that we are in. The universe itself has limits. The Quran says “if you
were able to penetrate the limits of the universe then do it”. The universe
itself has limits. The One who put limits on something has power over it
because He was able to put those limits and that is why a King is powerful
because he is able to constrain his populous, his kingdom. If he loses that
capacity he loses his power therefore he is not a real King and that is the
difference between a government that has power and a government that does not.
The government that has power has the ability to suppress and squelch
resistance inside that government so the idea of Allah being all powerful is that
He has absolute power in His creation.
Now in the Quran one of the things that Allah says they did
not measure God which is very interesting because it gives the idea that human
beings are obsessed with measuring and that is what geometry came out of an
attempt to measure and in fact we have Greeks and Egyptians over 2500 years ago
that were already measuring the circumference of the earth and coming within
500 miles of doing that and they did that using some very simple geometrical
calculations with shadows and measuring the pyramids at different times,
looking at the distance between Alexandria and what is now Cairo and the
basically a simple calculation. They basically measure the earth being close to
25,000 miles in its circumference so humans have been interested in measuring.
Now if you look in the enlightenment period they began to
measure air, gas, they began to measure Boyles Law all these things came out of
a desire to measure. The more they come to understand the measurements of
things the more power they had over them so if you look at the jet flight. A
jet flight, they have to understand what liquid fuel. This is the basis of
engineering that you need to measure fully everything so humans have this
obsession with wanting to measure and one of things with the signs of the end
of time, the Quran says “that the humans would actually think they are
completely powerful in relation to creation”. They have qadara over it. This is
part of the idea that really knowing everything that is there so this idea that
we can….I mean now they have sonar waves that they beam into the earth from
space and when sonar waves come back they are like the sonogram that they do in
a foetus. They can actually tell where oil is, where gold is and the HARP stuff
what they are doing in Alaska is similar to that, measuring everything so Allah
puts the interesting ayah in there, they have not measured God, that this is
the one thing. They want to measure the universe I mean they can actually extrapolate
out to try to understand how big the universe is. I mean this is one of their
goals so the idea is yes you can measure everything. God has given you this
qudra and that is part of a divine attribute that manifests in the human being,
it is the human beings have this extraordinary ability to reflect these
qualities of God and one of them is knowing the limits of everything but God has
no limits and therefore God cannot be measured.
So the Quran uses the qadr in ten verses and from this
merges a doctrine in Islam of the belief in the qadr although it is in the
hadith. The Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam)
said the six objects of faith in the hadith of Jibril, one of them is we believe
in the divine decree or the measuring out its good and its bad or its good and
its evil and we are going to talk about that. He and she go into that in a lot
of detail and it is important.
There is khayr and sharh and it is sweet and bitter. Life is
sweet and bitter and it is important I think the riwayah that mentions sweet
and bitter because there is a way to look at khayr and sharh, the believer, a
believer sees it as bitter that there are things in life that are bitter but
they are not things for him and her that are evil and sharh, because the
believer everything that happens to somebody who believes in God and believes
that God is ultimately the One who is creating these circumstances that we find
ourselves in and these tribulations then we begin to see it as a test as
something we need to bear. That has to do with the idea of swallowing a bitter
pill I mean we say that in colloquial English “I had to swallow a bitter pill”
or “it has a bad taste”. Medicines are often bitter in Chinese, the heart
herbs, the herbs that are good for the heart one of the qualities in Chinese
medicine is that they are always bitter which is very interesting.
The next thing in this section that he brings out about is
the idea of the servant, an abd. The word abd has many meanings. At one level
it means a creative in other words it is something that is subservient to God
by its very nature so if you make something it is automatically in a
subordinate position by the fact that you have made it. It is subordinated to
you and it cannot free itself from that condition so the idea of an abd is the
verse in the Quran 19:93 everything in the heavens and earth comes to Allah Ar
Rahman as an abd. It comes as a servant and so that is the general sense that
everybody is an abd of Allah. Now there are conscious servants that are aware
of their uboodiyah and there are servants that are not aware of this
servanthood to Allah. This is the difference so the servant in its narrow sense
is someone who consciously sees God by following a Prophet and in a still
narrower sense it is a human being that serves God perfectly with full awareness
and total freedom of choice.
So this is the idea of the servant in its most narrow sense
is the abd in fact and is somebody who freely gives up his state to his Lord
and this is the gift that Muslims believe that God gave His creation because in
the Quran in Tawbah the verses “that God has purchased from the believers their
wealth and their lives and against that purchase is paradise”. If God owns you
in the first place then how did you engage yourself in a transaction? How do
you sell what is not yours? This is the gift, it is the gift of somebody who if
you come into a shop and he gives you something and then buys it back from you
because he knows you are in need so it is the idea of the fadl, it is a bounty
from Allah that He on the one hand already possesses you but on the other hand
has engaged you in a commercial transaction in which you become a partner in
other words you become a free agent and this is what the idea of taqrim, human
beings have been honoured in that way because everything else in creation can
only be what it is. If you look out at creation, there is nothing that can be
other than what it is and this is something very interesting. A tree can only
be a tree, it cannot be anything else, the dog can only be a dog, the pig, the
horse, the donkey everything is determined in its attributes and its qualities
except the human being. The human being can actually take on qualities that are
strange to its nature. You have people that will actually bark like dogs. You
have people that behave like animals or worse than animals and the Quran
indicates that they are actually worse than animals because animals do not do
things that harm them with knowledge.
An animal would never purposely harm itself, it will only do
what it thinks is beneficial for itself so if an animal sees fire, it flees
from fire whereas a human being will actually do things knowingly that harm
itself and this is where the rational soul is overwhelmed by the irascible the
concupiscent soul, those lower energies in the self.
One of the things that this idea in the Quran that God
measures out carefully what He gives to His creatures and part of the reason
for that is Allah did not do that they would overstep greatly, they would
transgress. Now you can already see that there is transgression out there but
if everybody got what they wanted then what would it be like? In other words
the fact that not everybody gets what they want, there are only certain people
that have enough power to sow corruption but if everybody had that power then
what type of world would it be and so the point that there is a balance of
power and this is the idea in the Quran that Allah says “had not Allah used
some people to constrain other people” the entire world would be filled with
corruption so there is a balance of power in the world. There is not one
dictator that can simply do whatever he wants because if one emerges here,
somebody else emerges over where to counterbalance them.
One of the major problems that have emerged in our lifetimes
is the fact that America does not have any counterbalance, most of our
lifetimes and certainly for the older people in the here during the 50’s, 60’s
and 70’s and even the 80’s the Russians acted as a counterbalance to the
Americans so the Americans could not do everything that they wanted because
they only had to take into consideration what is going to be the reaction of
Russia and vice versa and whereas now that has been removed that there becomes
this vacuum and this is a very unusual scenario. It is not historical
precedence, the Romans at one time were probably similar in a large portion of
the world but the Romans did not control
When Alexander the Great who was in Macedonia when he went
to India, he wanted to conquer India, he got sick, all his troops got sick,
they had to leave. That is another thing Horatious mentions that nobody has
ever moved towards the Arabian peninsula except they were stopped so there have
been people…there have been people…in fact Alexander the Great died of a fever
in Egypt, he was on his way to invade Arabia.
When we look at the world, what has to be understood is that
there is a balance in the world that is not always discernable, not that it is
not there because of short-sightedness and one of the things that Imam Raghab
says is that all things are “everything is equal and they are not different in
that everything was created with a wisdom” so at the essence of every thing,
the rock is equal to the human that the rock was created for a purpose just as
the human was created for a purpose so that at the level when you look at the
world everything that is in the world is in the world for a reason and this is
what he meant when Allah says you will
not see disparity in the creation of the Merciful in other words we look at the
creation you will not see that one thing is different from another and then
Allah says keep looking if you think there is keep looking and your eye will
come back to you exhausted and fatigued in trying to find something that has no
purpose in creation, everything has purpose, the least atom has purpose.
Then it says that humans are different in that everything
that is existent is specific to a benefit and if you look nothing has more
difference in all of this but human beings and Allah says they were created in
stages. We raised some humans over others in other words that this is according
to the Quran from God that there are these differences in the creation.
Look at how we have preferred some over others in the world,
you are told in the Quran to look in the world and see how some have been
preferred over others in the world and then immediately after that and in the
next world are even greater differences and more preference. So do not become
deluded by things in other words these are infinite, limited. A person might
have wealth, fame, have beauty, have lineage, have all these things for 50, 60
70 years and then it is over but the next world is infinite and therefore you
cannot compare the two in that way. Had God wanted He could made you one ummah,
one people all the same but He desired to try you in what He has given you. In
other words, the differences “had your Lord wanted, He could have made you one
people and He is the One who made you replace others in the earth” just as we
are here know there were people before us. There were people in Hereward and
those people mostly were Hispanic people who worked in the fields here, before
them there were Indians here, they were native Californians. They were here,
they were living here. They had a whole cosmology, they had religious festivals
on Mount Diablo and they have gone now and now we here and replacing them and
then it says “We raised some of you over others in order to test you to try you
in what He has given you” and then also “Had God wanted He would have made you
one people and look you continue to be different” which means you are different
but also you differ except those who specific mercy has been given them.
After that it says “for that reason He created them” in
other words to differ and to be sharh mercy so that is part of the intention of
the creation. That in the earth, you see all of these different types of earth
out there that are different. Earth are different, soil is different. There is
rich soil, there is poor soil, there is soil that if you plant nothing grows,
there is salt marshes, nothing will grow there or only certain specific vegetation.
There are areas where fruit trees flourish, there are other areas where they
cannot grow because of air.
One of the meanings of Tur (Surah Zaytoun) is a mountain
that trees grow on because there are mountains that no trees grown on. It gets
too high and it cannot sustain vegetable life. So even in creation there is all
this diversity and that is going to have an effect on people living there and
then he says these are signs and we go back to the idea a few weeks ago talking
about signs that human beings are here to perceive signs. These are signs for
people who have intellect that can actually reflect that can actually think and
then he says wisdom necessitates all of this because the human being cannot
sustain himself alone and therefore had a human being been forced to sustain
everything that he needed alone, most human beings would not survive for very
long and so because human beings need other human beings there needs to be this
tafawit. Had everybody been given wealth then how would some people serve other
people? If all of us had equal wealth how would some people serve other people?
There is another important point here which is had God not
created with free will these human beings to feel impoverished then who would
need God? If everybody felt independent they would feel no need and this is
what the Quran says, human beings become aggressive and oppressive and they
transgress when they deem themselves independent of God and so the state of
impoverishment which the human being whether his is wealthy materially or
impoverished materially is the same. Every human being is in reality
impoverished before God, is in need of God for that sustenance and this is why
animals have been subjugated to human beings. They are subordinated, human
beings benefit from animals. We eat, we have leather products, we have all
these things.
Everything if you look around here, a lot of the stuff that
is coming from animals and we do not even think about it, all these carpets you
are on they are Afghani wool carpets. They are coming from animals. We
benefited from those animals. If there was a human being they are not going to
let you shave their hair so you can make a carpet with it or something like
that but what can the animal do? It is subjugated to you.
Now the same is true for most people you cannot ask your
neighbour to take out your garbage for you right, really you cannot do that. So
who is going to take the garbage because somebody has to do that. That is a
function because human beings create garbage and it would be very difficult for
people to have to get rid of their own garbage.
There are people that Allah has subjugated to other people.
Now the beauty of the Arabic language is the word in the Quran that is used for
this suqriah and siqriyah, uses the same word. The word for using and the word
for exploiting, the difference between them is a vowel, it is literally a
kasrah and a dhammah.
So what happens is you can start having contempt for other
people because you are in this position where you can subordinate others to you
and this is the danger. Human beings always become contemptuous of other people
and that is a disease and that is why the Quran warns about that, that it is
God who did this. It is not you and what then is supposed to happen is if you
are a servant of God you begin to see it as a bounty that God has given you not
for any specific reason but that He gives to whom He pleases.
Just as He gave you He can take it away and He can give that
person what He has given you and then in the Quran Allah says that their
affairs between them were all different and every group was happy with what
they were doing. Now one of the things about the modern world which is
different because it is important to note this in fact
So this is a very nice poem by an American poet. It is
called the fear of God:
If you should rise from nowhere upto
somewhere
From being no one upto someone
Be sure to keep to repeating to
yourself
You owe it to an arbitrary God
He means by arbitrary and arbitrary it is somebody that does
things according to their own discretion, nothing is imposed upon them by the
outside to do it, that is what the Quran emphasizes that “He gives to whom He
pleases”. That is an arbitrary decision from God. An arbiter in English is
somebody who has the authority to dictate a judgment.
You owe it to an arbitrary God whose
mercy to you rather
than to others won’t bear too
critical examination
If you really start looking at yourself you start seeing that
you do not really deserve this more than this person so you begin to analyse
that, you see that.
Stay unassuming if for lack of
licence to near the uniform of
who you are you should be tempted to
make up for it
in an insubordinating look or tone,
beware of coming too much to the surface and using for apparel what was mean to
be the curtain of the inmost soul
In other words if you start realizing and this is the sense
of inferiority that you do not really deserve to be…..you do not have a right
to what you have. That can make you feel inferior and so you make up for that
by looking at people with a subordinating look, in other words you place them
in a class lower than yourselves so if for lack of license to wear the uniform
of who you are you should be tempted to make up for in an insubordinating look
or tone, because that reality is an inward reality, that is what he is saying
it is not outward because if you have been given all these gifts and you are
just an arrogant monster with the gifts, they have not benefited you so
anything that you have been given you have to see it as a bounty of God. That
is a beautiful expression of what this is about of recognising that these
differences that we see in the creation are differences that God has placed and
if He has placed you in a position over others, it is not because of some
inherent betterness, it is because that is the nature of the world that you are
in and then it becomes a responsibility. That is why the highest quality of the
Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) is his
servitude to Allah and His creation because He was a servant before anything.
If you look at his entire life was in service to others even before He was
given the revelation, he was a trustworthy merchant in the service of another and
in the service of a woman which for many Arabs would have been seen as
humiliating whereas the Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) did not have that same view of the world that a lot of
people have, he did not see things the way other people saw it that if
something is honourable, it is honourable and it does not matter what it might
appear to others.
One of the things that is brought out which is
really important is that it may happen that you will hate a thing that is good
for you and it may happen that you love a thing and it is evil for you and God
knows and you do not know. God knows and you do not know. If you are given
something someone else was given it might destroy you so you want something
people want to win the lottery, there are all these people that have won the
lottery and it has ruined their lives completely destroyed their lives, they
ended up losing all their friends, they got divorced and this is the reality of
the world. You do not know what is good for you and what is not good for you
and that is why you do not ask for specific things in Islam, the sunnah is not
to ask for specific things because you do not know if it is good for you or not
and Talibah is the great example of that, the man who came to the Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) and said “make prayer that God gives me wealth” and he said
no. He kept coming back to him “Ya Rasulullah please make dua that I get some
wealth and I promise I will use it for good and this and that”. The Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) would not do it, it is called
ilhah, the man did not get the message and the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) out of his generosity, will
not turn away somebody who questions him or asks for something. So he made a
dua and this man who always used to be in the front of the prayer line he
suddenly started getting all this wealth, animal, livestock and he would get
further and further away from the mosque as he would have to go out and graze
his animals, he would end up not praying in the community and when the time
came for zakah and he said “this is like jizyah”. So it actually had a terrible
effect on him and that is what the Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) knew but he became a lesson for others. I mean that is even
why I am mentioning him today as a lesson, he became a lesson for the rest of
the believers so you do not know what is good for you.
Now one of the things is that good comes to us
through the qadr, one of the things that is measured out is the degree of
freedom that Allah created everything and guided it to its purpose and because
the human being was created by Allah, the human being has a purpose and he and
she was guided to that purpose which is servitude and servitude means that one
knows that one is in a subordinate position with one’s Creator and not with
anybody else and therefore what happens is you begin to look at things
differently. This does not mean that you do not recognise hierarchy in the
creation but you do not have this value statement on the hierarchy that the people
of the outward have. In other words, if you look at creation you do not know if
the street sweeper is closer to God than the physician. The physician might be
more beneficial in worldly terms, the street sweeper might be more beneficial
in worldly terms, the street sweeper might be closer to God in piety and in
awareness of God and have answered prayers and actually be more beneficial
without even knowing.
The inward eye is different than the outward
eye. When you look with the inward eye, it has a different vision than the
outward eye has but the inward eye is in most people, it is veiled. It is like
when children are born they cannot see, they can only see very very closely,
they cannot see anything and some of them have this gunk in their eyes that prevents
them from seeing so part of growing up is being able to open your eyes and also
sleepers do not see because their eyes are close when they sleep.
We have different awakenings. There are three
basic human awakenings. You have the bestial awakening which is the awakening
of the senses and this obviously begins with touch, this is why children put
things in their mouths. They want to experience everything in their senses and
that culminates in intimacy between husband and wife, I mean that is the height
of that culmination of the sensual awakening.
You also have the emotional awakening and this
is the feelings that one has of love and hate and these type things so that is
a type of awakening that you begin to awaken to feelings that you have and why
you have them and why he makes you angry or she makes you angry or why you love
this person and why love that person.
Then there is an intellectual awakening that
people have and many people unfortunately do not have that in school and things
like that. The school actually do the opposite because the teachers are often
incompetent and do not respect the awareness and understanding of the students
that they have, that they sometimes end up making people actually hate learning
which is a real crime. I once met a guy in Marilyn who was a bricklayer. He
said he had never really thought about anything. He was interested in sports. A
brick fell on his head, they were building a house, it fell on his head and he
ended up, he was in the hospital for a long time and somebody gave him a book
“how to read a book” and he had never read books before and what he told me was
it is in the first or second chapter, the chapter begins with you have a mind,
he said it was the first time he even considered that and what happened from
this point because no one ever told him that, he was always told that he was
stupid and he had been told that in school, he was a stupid person and he ended
up becoming a bricklayer, it does not mean that bricklayers are stupid but it
was a job of labour but he had this intellectual awakening. He began to read
and got interested in literature, he got interested in history and actually his
wife because his wife married someone who did not have that and so they
actually began to grow apart because she was not growing with him, she was not
having the same awakening.
Now the final awakening, the fourth awakening,
the great awakening is the spiritual awakening and many many people never wake
up to this or it is too late like Firoun. It happened as he was being drowned,
his spiritual awakening. So the idea of realizing at a certain point that just
as you realised you are a sensual being though the bestial awakening you
realise you are an emotional being and at a certain point you can realise that
you are an intellectual being, that you have an intellect.
Every human being has an intellect. People that
are called average in this culture or even below average have immense intellectual
capacity but it has not been tapped, it has not seen exploited. So human beings
have immense…people say “I have a terrible memory” you have an immense memory.
If you start thinking about all the things that you remember, where your bank
is, what it is called, what type of dishwashing soap you buy, I mean you have a
massive amount of data stored there. It is phenomenal. That is part of the
problem, you are memorizing the wrong things so the spiritual awakening is
something that will often occur with some trauma, it is very common for people,
people have a heart attack, people will have a sickness, people will lose a
parent, people will lose a child and suddenly these questions come into focus,
they had not been in there before and that is the greatest awakening because
ultimately we are spiritual beings you know the bestial that goes, the emotional
one goes, the intellectual one according to the Muslims everything that you
learn you lose when you die except what you learned that was beneficial for
your next life ultimately even the intellectual, the true intellectual
awakening is a spiritual awakening as well.
So the baseera is that inward sight. It is the
ability to perceive something with the inward eye and one of the things about
the world is that when you look at the world and this is where the good and
evil are very interesting, when you look at the world most people look at the
world in terms of good and evil by what they think is good and evil in other
words when I look out at the world this is good, why? Because I like it and
that is evil, why? Because I do not like it and so things that I do not like
happening are evil and things that I like happening are good. This is the
criteria of the human being.
Now one of the things about the Arabs is they
say in a proverb “the calamities of one people are the benefits of another people”
so one people’s good is another people’s evil. So for instance if you look at
this country the fact that you can go to the store and but really cheap
clothes, that might be something that is good that you like about this country
but if you really understand the reasons why those clothes are cheap it is
because of suffering that is going on in South America or in Indonesia where
people have to work in sweatshops that make those cheap shirts that end up in
mass produced malls in America where these people go in and they buy the thing
because somebody was working for $1.50 an hour and in some places they have to
use these children because their hands are small, they do not want big people
because they are cheaper. So what is good and what is evil and that is a really
difficult question.
Now if you look at the Islamic definition, khayr
and sharh do not really correlate to good and evil, they are really not good
translations for khayr and sharh because of this idea “maybe you hate a thing
and think it is evil and it is good” and therefore to determine it with any
type of moral certainty is very very difficult thing to do. Now obviously the
shariah or the scared law of Islam gives the criteria for determining. Killing
is bad. Is it always bad? No. It is not always bad. Sometimes it is a benefit.
If somebody is about to kill you unjustly, you have a right to defend yourself
and if you kill them you did something that was sanctioned by scared law. On
the other hand the other person who was doing it was evil and if the other got
his way it was khayr. Do you see that? Same act but two different. Now the
person who was killed maybe that causes a complete spiritual transformation in
several people who knew that person or maybe some law comes into being because
of that person’s death that changes and has an effect on the whole society so
then what was evil as a singular act actually produces much good again, this is
something, the whole point of the Quran is you do not know and then there is a
really interesting…I think this is so fascinating the way that this was
articulated which is from the …… and apology if people who know this story
which is from Socrates, he was condemned to death for blasphemy because they
said that he did not believe in the official gods of the state and also for
corrupting the youth and he says in there the real reason he was condemned was
that he said that “I spent all my time going about trying to persuade, young
and old, to make first your chief concern not for your bodies nor for your possessions
but for the highest welfare of your soul’s proclaiming as I go. Wealth does not
bring goodness but goodness does bring wealth and every other blessing both to
the individual and to the state now if I corrupt the young by this message, the
message would seem to be harmful but if anyone says my message is different
from this he is talking nonsense”. So his corrupting of youth was that he was
making them lose their materialism and parents always get upset when their
children became less materialistic because they start worrying about who is
going to take care of me when I get old if he does not make any money? So they
have this idea of no you have to do this, go out and make a lot of money so
anybody that will change that gameplan becomes a corrupter of youth so that is
the real reason.
The other reason he said is “because somebody
went to the oracle and asked who was the wisest person in
And so he says I will tell you in killing a good
man I want to tell you my executioners that as soon as I am dead then vengeance
shall upon with a punishment far more painful than your killing of me. You have
brought about my death in belief that though it you may be delivered from
submitting your conduct to criticism but I say that the result will be just the
opposite. Not only will you be condemned historically by people that come after
you are going to get punished in this world and all these men they were all
just killed when the Spartans came in, they just massacred the whole lot of
them. It is very interesting. He said “I feel moved to prophecy” that is what
he said.
I mean if he was an Indo-European Prophet, I do
not know, Allahu Alim but he is a very interesting character in any case. But
he says “if you expect to stop denunciation of your wrong way of life by
putting people too death there is something amiss with your reasoning. This way
of escape is neither possible nor credible, the best and easiest way is not to
stop the mouths of others but to make yourself as good men as you can in other
words do not wipe out your critics, listen to their criticisms and take them
seriously and rectify yourself so that they don’t….but again this is an
interesting dialogue here but what he says is I will tell you, he is now
telling him because they have now condemned him to death, they said you choose
what you think would be an appropriate punishment, he said “well since I am
doing social welfare here by showing you all your ignorant and telling you not
to engage in materialism. I think you should provide me with free meals for the
rest of my life. That is his punishment so he said now you are going to hell.
They condemned him to death but he said “I will
tell you I suspect that this thing that has happened to me is a blessing and we
are quite mistaken in supposing death to be an evil see because that is all
people want to do, they want to live and what he is saying is “look you think
it is an evil that is just your perspective I have good grounds for thinking
this because my accustomed sign could not have failed to oppose me if what I
have been doing had not been sure to bring some good result” because it never
failed him in his life. This damon, what he called a damon, it was a voice that
he used to hear. We should reflect that there is much reason to hope for a good
result on other grounds as well. Death is one of two things either annihilation
and dead have no consciousness of anything or as we are told it is really a
change a migration of the soul from this place to another. So if it is nothing
then he said it us like a sleep and if it is something then he says if on
arrival in the other world beyond the reach of our so called justice, this
phoney justice of this world, one will find the true judge who presides in that
court in other words you are going to get real justice in the next world and if
you are a good man why do you have anything to fear? And I am willing to die
ten times over if this account of true. In fact I am particularly interested in
experiencing those on the other side like Palamites and
Then he ends it by saying I bear no grudge for
my own part against those who condemned me and accused me although it was not
this kind of intention that they did so but because they thought they were
hurting me so I forgive you all because I don’t think you are hurting me, I
think you are doing me a favour. You are making me a martyr. So here is what he
says “Now it is the time that we are going I to die and you to live but which
of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God so you see you
think you are getting rid of me, an evil, and you are doing your society a good
but as far as I am concerned what you are doing is the evil and you will be
recompensed for it. As for me all I have done is good in my life, I have been
warning you, I have been trying to tell you not to have lives of profligacy and
that I why I am not afraid of death”. So that is another example of this
perspective and he called it compounded ignorance to see that death is an evil
because he said you do not even know what is on the other side. So your
assumption that it is evil, it is just your own ignorance.
If like me because in another dialogue in Gorgious
he says that he believes there is a hell and paradise and that everybody is
judged by a just judge, he says they are stripped naked and they are going
before this court, they will not be able to fool anybody with fancy clothes or
articulate arguments and he tells this one guy “maybe you can box my ears off
in this world but in the next world you are going to get your ears boxed off”. He
says “you probably think it is a myth but I do not think it is. I believe it to
be true” and he said “the good will go to the Isle of the blessed” that is what
he called it, the Isle of the blessed. That is the idea of you do not know what
you think is good and what you think is evil.
Now another really interesting thing that if you
look at good and evil in the Quran is about loss and gain and that is the point
he is making. You think you are gaining something by getting rid of me, I say
you are losing something. You think I am losing something by depriving me of
life I say I am gaining something better because I believe in life after death.
Chapter 8
He is putting it in terms of loss and again and
that is the real understanding of good and evil. It is about loss and gain so
who gains and who loses. That is what you have to look at when you see the
world, who gains and loses? Because you can see this man who gains all this
wealth though his corrupt transactions but has he really gained. Even in the
New Testament “what has a man gained if he has obtained the whole world and los
his soul?” What have you really gained? That is a different way of seeing the
world, of seeing good and evil and that is why when you look out you do not know
what is going on. You do not have an idea, I mean once I was with Shaykh
Abdullah and we were in Mauritania and in West Africa, in maintaining the
people with the least in that country are the blacks and I asked him once about
just that situation because it always bothered me, it is something that really
bothered me when I was there and he said to me one time he said you know if you
look in the terms of this side of the world you only see the one thing but he
said that if you look in terms of the other side the people that have the
greatest difficulty in this world and have the patience in dealing with that
have the least hisab in the next world. He said maybe these people are just the
people of paradise. So it is a different way, it does not justify the condition,
you still have to oppose the condition but it gives you a different perspective
on it you know in other words the way that was used in the past, is to opiate
people and to justify injustice and Islam never does that. It says you still
have to oppose the wrong but do not assume that it is all evil, do you see?
That is the point because you do not have the full picture, you only have a
portion of it and that is at the essence of what this is about of recognising
good and evil as loss and gain.
That is why Allah says (in the first line of
Surah Asr), Allah could have said “La fee sharh” by time the human being the
nature is that he is in loss, he is losing, except those who believe and do
good deeds and they enjoin what is right and they enjoin people to be patient”
because it is difficult, there are many things that are wrong in the world so
you enjoin right but you have also to enjoin people to be patient and bear the
difficulties of the world because if all you have out there is the demand for right
and not recognising that one, not all the wrongs will be righted in this world
and that is where we believe in the next world that the wrongs of this world,
there is a grave that I saw one of the Muslim slaves that was here in America,
I think it is in Mississippi but it shows a hand like this, his name was Yusuf
and on the gravestone it was not a cross, it was a hand with the fingers
pointed up and it said on the tombstone “there is justice in the next world”.
It is going to happen, if it did not happen in this world, it will happen in the
next world and so that is a different way of again of seeing the world is that
if you do not believe in that world then you will go insane by looking out
there because there is just so much wrong out there. You will go insane and it
does not mean to accept it. That is what is important, it is not that you
accept it in other words that you should do what you can to redress the wrongs
of the world but it does not destroy you that they are there because you know
they are there for a wisdom.
That is the point is that there is a hikmah
behind that, that there is nothing that happens in the world that does not have
wisdom.
Now one of the things that the Quran points out
is that God did not have the attributes of a wise parent and there are hadiths
that indicate that Allah has that care of a mother, the love of Allah for His
servants is greater than the mothers love but He said He would give the foolish
children of this world what they want and this is one of the things about this
world. Most people are so spiritually immature because you can have an adult
emotionally, you can have an adult intellectually, you can have an adult
sensually. Somebody can go out and fornicate and do all these things, it is an
adult sensually, a child cannot do that, an adult can. Somebody can go and work
in the world with their mind and acquire wealth and do all these things but as
an adult, a child cannot do that.
But a spiritual adult, that is a different
category, because most people are spiritual children. They are in the state of
the infant in terms of their spirituality and because of that if they were
given what they wanted, it would be like giving a child poison. It would like
giving a child a gun to play with that is loaded. This is why the Quran says
“what is it they who divide up the mercy of your Lord? We have divided among
them their livelihood in the life of this world and raised some of them above
others in rank.”. So some take others in forced labour and that forced labour
here is the idea of using them not oppressing them but the mercy of your Lord
is better than what they collect in other words do not get deluded by this
dunya and all these categories in dunya, to strive for the akhirah is better,
the mercy of your Lord is a higher thing, were it not that people would be a
single community through ingratitude and truth concealing in other words
through kufr we would have appointed for those who have kufr towards the
Merciful roofs of silver to their houses, stairs where up to mount and doors to
their houses and couches whereinto recline and ornaments surely all this is but
the enjoyment of the life of this world and surely the next world with your
Lord belongs to the people of taqwa in other words it is saying all the kuffar
had all this wealth and luxury, the believers would want to be like the kuffar
and that is one of the signs of the end of time is that people want to be like
the non Muslims. That is from hadith is that people imitate non Muslims.
When the Muslims had all their wealth, it was
the non Muslims that did not have anything so the Muslims looked at Europe, the
Europeans had nothing to offer the Muslims so they never got deluded whereas
now the tables have turned and all you have is the Quran which should be enough
because if you read those verses you would have the guidance to see that it is
not the real thing that there is something different and that is why in the end
of time what did the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) said to Imam
Ali when he said “how do we get out of all this confusion?”. He said
“KitabAllah”. You have to go back to the book of Allah and understand its core
messages, understand the centrality of this book so one of the things that they
talk about is this idea of good.
The dua of the Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) “all good comes from you and evil does not return to you”.
The reason for that is the essence of Allah is purity and there is no room for
evil. There is no room because evil is absence, it is like darkness. Darkness
is the absence of light. Evil is the absence of good and therefore that element
does not exist but Allah created evil, sharh, it is a creation of Allah so it
is not God but it is a creation of God and this is the odyssey in Christianity,
the biggest problem that they have is the problem of evil because they do not
know where it comes from. The problem goes if God is Omniscient, All-Knowing
and all good then He would know where the evil is and He has the power to
remove it and because He is all good He would not want it in the world and that
is called the problem of evil. Philosophers always love that one to challenge
Christians with and what Christians tend to fall into is this manichaeism that
free will, the devil but if it is free will then it is against the will of God
in other words the fact that it is in the world, where did it come from?
Because the world is a creation of Allah and everything in it is a creation of
Allah so the fact that he created creatures that He knew would do evil means
that He created evil and this is something that Christians, they do not want to
admit that whereas Muslims we are told that right from the start and the point
again that the Quran and the Hadith emphasise is it is relative to you. You do
not really understand it and therefore do not assume what you think is evil is
evil or what you think is good is good because you just do not know. You do not
have all the variables and you do not have the complete picture so the mirror
image is identical to the real in as much as it reflects the reals attribute
but it is other than real in as much as it is supported by non existence so
this is not talking about the world itself that the world what is good in it is
what reflects the divine and what is evil in it is absent of divine attribute or
qualities.
So when you look at the world, if you look at the world as a
mirror that does not exist. If you can allow your mind to imagine a mirror that
does not exist and if you could imagine looking into that mirror and seeing
your image and then the mirror has other than your image because you need the
mirror to reflect the image so the image is not reflected completely in the
mirror, part of the mirror is there so you see your image in the mirror. Now
good is what is reflected, if you look at the universe as a reflection of God,
it is not God but it is a reflection of God’s attributes that the evil in it is
what is demarcating the good in other words you could not see the image without
the evil. You could not see the good of God without knowing the sharh because
if you had no evil in the world, you would not know good. You would not know
what it is because like the Arabs says “by opposites things are distinguished”.
And so Allah created a world and then reflected his
attributes. Now the human being is called insaan which means the pupil of the
eye and one the meanings that some of the scholars indicated in a sense the
human being is like the reflected vision of God in other words the human being
has been created to witness God in the world because God is reflecting on
Himself in the world in other words the world is also because it is a desired
act of God, God brought the world into existence and there is a purpose for the
world which is that God is known “I only created the world that I might be
known”. Who can know God in the world, it is not the bird, it is not the frog,
it is not the donkey, it is not the rock. They cannot know God with cognizance,
they only know God as a state in which they are in of absolute worship but they
cannot cognitively know God. That is the human being and that is why he and she
has this extraordinary position in creation which is where we get to the next
section which is the trial, the idea of a trial, that human beings have been
brought into the world and they are tried so God measures out good and mercy to
test people’s faith and to allow people to prove their own nature not to God in
other words when God says He created us to try you to see which of you is best
in action, He does not need to see which of you is best in action because He
knows that. It is to show you your true nature and that is the word for trial
in Arabic is to test metal and the Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) said “human beings are minerals, you have hold, you have
silver, you have copper, you have lead and then you have toxic metals” and what
tribulation does is that it shows people their nature and that is why when some
of the worst calamities happen to people what they say when they get though it
is “I didn’t know I had it in me to get though that”. In other words, they saw
something about themselves they did not see when they survived the immense
hardship and another thing about tribulation is all of us who have lived, I
don’t think there is anybody in this room that had had a tribulation that when
all of the bitterness and all of the difficulty was gone they were not able to
look back and say they learned a great deal from the experience.
In other words it is the process of human and
spiritual evolution it is through calamites and that is what Shaykh Muhammad
was talking about last night when he said “calamities are the holidays of the
people seeking God” because when a calamity comes who do you run to? God, that
is part of the beauty of tribulation is that my sister just visited