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
So then you begin to perceive the world in a
different way so trials is something that we see as part of the reason why we
have been created. “We have appointed all that is on earth as an adornment for
you that We may try them which of them is the most beautiful in works, blessed is He who created death and life that
He may try you which if you is the most beautiful in works”. When harm touches
or afflicts the human being he calls upon God then we can confer on him
blessings he says I was given it because of a knowledge that I have so this is
a type of ingrate not it is a trial but most of them know not”. When Bani
Israil, the Israelites were afflicted by the Pharonic people in
“O calamity get worse
because I know you will get better”
It is a beautiful poem that he wrote, it is all
about asking for the thing to get worse so iit can get better and that is what
happened when the man in Sahih ul Bukhari, he had stomach problems, the Prophet
(sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) told him to take honey and
his brother gave it to him, he came back and said it got worse. He said tell
him to take more, he took more, it got
worse, tell him to take more, it got worse. Finally he got better and the
Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) said
“your bothers stomach has lied and God spoke the truth because God said honey
was a cure”. It is particularly good for cleaning out the stomach but the
reason that he got more diarrhea was because according to Imam Qayyumul
Jawziyyah in his book on Prophetic Medicine, he said the disease originated
because of things that needed to be cleared out and so when he was given the
medicine it purged him even more so the actual crisis was a healing crisis.
That is what they call it in homoeopathy if they give you the right remedy you
often get worse before you get better and they call it in homoeopathic medicine
a healing crisis.
That is why the most intense period for a woman
in childbirth is just before she gives birth and that is when it gets the worst,
this amazing thing is about to happen.
So that is part of what is going on in the world
and also “do people reckon they will be left alone to say we have faith and
will not be tested” and then this idea of when evil afflicts him he is in
despair, that is the people who do not know the way the world works.
Now one of the things about moderns is that they
have this idea that they are free and what is really interesting about moderns
is that because they do not have particularly in a lot of Western countries is
that they have lost the idea of spiritual liberation and so they become slaves
to the lowest aspect of themselves. They become slaves to drugs, they become
salves to sensual pleasures, they become slaves to food, they become slaves to
image, they become slaves to all these different things out there and they do not
have this inward freedom which is really what the Quran is talking about
because the tahqiq ul uboodiyah which is the realisation of one’s state with
God is to realise four qualities:
- It
is the realisation of impoverishment once you realise that God is
absolutely independent, you realise that you are absolutely dependent so
that is the realisation of impoverishment.
- The
realisation of complete ajiz which is incapacity. Once you realise that
God is absolutely capable of doing all things you realise that you are
incapable.
- Then
also ignorance. One you realise God is Al-Alim you realise that you are
the jahil.
- Then
also the realisation of the state of humility or humiliation, dhul, which
is you are humbled and then that God is Al Aziz. In realisation of that,
and this is the beauty of it is that you become ghanybillah, you become
enriched by God, you become knowledgeable by God, you become dignified by
God and you become powerful by God so in realizing your servanthood you
are actually drawing near to these attributes that God has manifest in
this world which are divine attributes because here the purpose of Islam is
to show the way to tawheed, to be human is to be relatively free but to be
free as it is humanly possible to be free can only come about when full
submission and surrender to reality is achieved.
You can be relatively free, I mean in America
people are relatively free, they can get up, get in their car, drive to where
they want, they can go and eat whatever they want, buy what they want, this
type thing and there is relative freedom but real freedom is realising your
state of submission to God because that frees you from putting faith in other
than good because any faith in other than God is always going to let you down.
It is part of the nature of the world and once you see that, when people let
you down, you realise they are doing you a favour and you do not have anger
towards them because they are being human. It is the whole point because the
only one that will not let you down is Allah. Everybody else lets you down.
Then it is interesting that this idea on page
118 they say that all things have something in terms of tashbiyah in other
words in everything in creation and it is not adab to mention things like pigs,
there is no point in doing that, you speak in universals not in particulars,
ignorant people will bring that up, when you say everything has some tashbiyah
or something that expresses something about the nature of God in the world,
when you look, the first they look is the mineral world, that a rock and so one
of the things about the rock is that the tanzih is much more manifest, the
otherness of God in other words you cannot see really much in a rock that would
remind you of God but one of the things that does remind you of the nature of a
rock is its permanence. It is not vegetative, it has a type of permanence. It
is not vegetative, it has a type of permanence in the world that is very
different from other things. It is solid and it is powerful also the facts that
planets which are essentially almost big rocks, God moves them around in a
certain way and can smash them up against each other. It is an indication of
his qudara. If you go the vegetable life then it is has obviously one of the
most important attributes of the divine which is life al hayah and there are
seven attributes and they can them here the seven leaders. These are:
1.
Hayah - Life
2.
Knowledge – Ilm
3.
Samaa – Hearing
4.
Basr – Sight
5.
Irada - Will
6.
Qudura – Power
7.
Qalam – Speech
When you look at a vegetable, a vegetable has life
but it does not have will it doesn’t have you see, it does not have any other
than life so in that way it reflects something of the divine.
When you look at the human being you come to
something very different because suddenly you see a human being has all seven
of those attributes “In your own souls, do you not see?”. In other words do you
not see what God has given you. He has given you as His greatest sign. In your
own souls is the greatest sign of God and this is the meaning of this idea of
man being in the image. It is not in any anthropomorphic sense, the human being
reflects these seven key attributes of God which is life, knowledge, hearing,
sight, will, qudura, capacity and speech. I am muntaqalim, I am qadir, I am
alim, I am all these things and these are attributes of God. He put them in me
in order to reflect his nature so that we would know who God is and that is the
meaning of “if you know yourself, you know your Lord” because this is the
closest thing to you.
That is why self knowledge is at the essence of
Islam of knowing who you are but you have to have it in the proper perspective
because you are also jahil, you are also dead, you are also powerless, you are
also deaf, dumb, speechless without volition. You see so this s the human being,
the human condition is this really interesting…and then in looking at why we
have been given this because we were meant to stand as khalifah in this earth.
“I am placing a caliph in the earth”.
Now on page 120-121 I personally do not like the
way they did this, it is kind of done in a humorous American, I did not feel it
was appropriate, there are a few things in the book, there is another section
towards the end that bothers me but I mean generally the book is so good that I
am going to overlook that section. It is not that bad but things like “God has
something up His sleeve” and “God rubbed it in a bit”. It is not the way
traditional scholars in any way would describe that so I will look at like
“every steed stumbles and every razor sharp sword has a blunt point and every
scholar has slips”. So anybody that writes and does anything is ultimately
going to do that but that is just something, I certainly have done myself on
many occasions so I am not going to take them to account but I just thought that
I would bring that to your attention.
Just about the question now they kind of
indicate that the angels hear, they seemed a bit upset I mean when they ask the
question it is called istifhaan, it is not because there are two types of
questions. A type of question where somebody rejects something and then a
question where somebody is trying to get information. It is considered a
question where they are actually asking for information.
Now one of the things they say like all myths,
this myth can be understood in many sense and applied to the human situation in
many different contexts, it is important to remember that myth is actually a
very good word that does not mean a fictional account. If you look in the
dictionary one of the meanings of a myth and I will give you the exact
definition according to Webster “a real or fictional story that reflects the
ideals of a pre-literate culture”. So obviously Islam has foundational myths.
It is a perfectly acceptable word unfortunately it gives the hint of something
being not true I mean we tend to think of something mythological as a fable or
fabrication, that is not how they are using the word here. The point of a myth
in fact the definition that an American critic of literature gave was that it
is so true as to be unbelievable. One of the things about a myth is it is a
universal story and that is why the power of myth is that…and obviously if
people have read the hero with a thousand faces by Joseph Campbell, he is
somebody who just saw the same myth in all these different stories because it
is a universal story of the heroes journey and certainly we believe as Muslims
that it is a true story.
We do not believe it is a fictional account but
we also have to remove ideas of anthropomorphism and the idea…this is language
explaining something that happened on a realm that we really have no access to
other than what is described for us in the Quran so that is important to
remember and one of the things about Adam was, he was given all the names is
again one of things about the power of language because if you can measure and
if you can label you have power. People in power label the powerless so a
freedom fighter will be called a terrorist by the people in power and that is
why the British considered George Washington a terrorist whereas the people at
that time who were fighting in the continental army they saw themselves as
fighting for liberty and freedom. So that is the power of the nature of naming
which does not mean that everybody claiming to be a freedom fighter is not a
terrorist, I mean there are people out there, terrorists, anytime you bring in
civilians and indiscriminately kill people you have an element of terrorism and
certainly there is state terrorism and there is individual terrorism but the
point being the power to name or label people and that is something that the
mass media obviously has. They can make people look like they are insane
because they have this power, it is the power to name or label people and that
is something that the mass media obviously has. They can make people look like
they are insane because they have this power, it is the power to name them.
They already determined the discourse when they put you on as the extreme left
position, now we are going to hear from the extreme left so they labelled you
and they have already defined the discourse there.
It is the power of naming so naming is power and
that is why powerless people tend to be people without language and that is one
of things like Paulo Freire, wrote a lot of books like Pedagogy of the
Oppressed, Pedagogy for Freedom. He spent his life teaching Brazilian peasants
how to read and write because he really felt their powerlessness was based on
not having language.
One of the things that the Cherokee did in this
country, the great Cherokee Sequoia who was the great Cherokee leader who is
actually half Scottish but he developed an alphabet for his people because he
said the power of the white people resides in their ability to write. He saw
their power was in language. So he felt he could empower the Cherokee and that
was a really interesting experiment and it almost succeeded had it not been for
Andrew Jackson who acted unconstitutionally in forcing the Cherokee, you know
the famous trail of tears and things like that but language is something that
if you do not have it you are powerless and that is why articulation and the
ability to speak is so important and that is why Islam emphasises the grammar
and rhetoric if learning these things because it is an empowering element.
Now they mention here also that this idea of
microcosm and macrocosm came from the Greeks and I do not think that is true
because Imam Ali said “you think you are some insignificant body or entity and the
entire universe is in you” so Imam Ali that is microcosm, that is what it
means, a small universe.
So the human being is seen as a small universe
and part of the reason that Adam was able to name everything is that everything
was in him because you cannot know something outside of yourself. If you do not
recognise it from inside of yourself and that is why we have mineral in us, I
mean everything you see so the earth is in you. We have mineral, we have
vegetable, we have animal, it is all there so when you see a tree you recognise
vegetation because it is in you, when you see the sun fire is in you, it is all
there. That is what caloric energy is, it is heat so everything you see out
there is in you.
We are even made up of stars, I mean we know
that now, modern astronomy understands that our bodies has constituents of
stars that were constituted of the material that stars are made of. One of the
interesting things about a human being is the human being, the body is placed
on a scale of magnitudes between atom and between a star. In other words we fit
right in the middle of the smallest elements in creation and of the biggest
elements and that is mathematical, you can actually work that out so we are
this barzarkh between the smallest elements and the biggest elements. We are
right in the middle and we have this ability to bridge the unseen and seen
world.
Finally here the reason we have been given this
viceregency is that if we follow God’s instructions on the universal level,
turtles, demons, squirrels, scorpions, mice are all following but viceregency
is specifically a human quality because a human being is able to follow
instructions through his or her free will.
Therefore Adam was created to be vicegerant of
God, he first had to be God’s servant in other words people were created to
represent God on the face of the earth, in order to fulfill this function
properly, they must submit to God’s will as revealed through the Prophets. And
so really that is at the essence of the Islamic teaching is that what we are
here to do is to submit to the will of God as best as we can as servants. In
doing that we enter into a type of harmony with the world so we are not alien
to the world. We are part of the world but also we are part of another world
which is the next world and so again we become this bridge this barzakh and realisation
of that tahqiq ul uboodiyah is a lifelong journey, you don’t just do it in one
day and one evening and you can learn all this stuff theoretically and fill
your heads with a lot of information but if it is not practiced, if it does not
become part of your practice then it is difficult and it is something you will
struggle with all of your lives and you need company, you need reminders, you
need people to put you in your place and inshAllah the goal is to get through
this world in one spiritual piece both peace and piece to get through out it
and get onto the other side and then the important thing is also to expect
great things from your Lord because the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa
sallam) he said that Allah tells us I am in the opinion of my servant so if my
servant thinks good of Me, he will find good and if He thinks bad of Me, he
will find bad” and that is why the hadith says “whoever wakes up in the morning
if you find good, say alhamdulillah. Praise to be God”. Other than that he did
not say if you find evil, let him only blame his own soul because you are still
not seeing correctly what is going on in the world. You are not seeing that if
you really believe in God, it is all good, it is not an exaggeration, it is all
good, it is not an exaggeration, it is all good, if you believe in Allah and
then it becomes that you need to conform to the divine and not make the divine
conform to you because what moderns want to do is to make God conform to them
so we make God just as we are and it is not going to work.
You have to conform to the divine, how the
divine wants you to be and just finally that anything that occurs in the world
and Shaykh Muhammad mentioned this last night but it is important to remind
people that were not there is that Ibn Abbas said that no calamity every
afflicted me in that I saw three blessings in it and the first one was that it
was not worse than it was. The fact that it was not worse than it is, is a
blessing and you should show gratitude. The next one is that it was in my
worldly affairs and not in my deen and that is a blessing. In the dua of the
Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) “O God do not make our
calamities in our religion” The assumption there is already there are
calamities in the world. You are in the world and you are going to have
calamities and you might have not have seen the worst of it yet insha’Allah
Allah makes things easy for all of us but you might not have seen the worst of
it yet. If you think what you have seen is bad, you might not have seen the
worse of it yet, so if the calamity is not in your deen, do not worry about it
because dunya is not so important that you should get upset about it like that.
You should not give it as much power to affect you in that way, to depress you,
if you lose all your money, what can you do about it? I am depressed, why?
Because I associated with no money happiness and now my money is gone so I have
to be unhappy so you therefore have made an assumption about the nature of
happiness, that it is only material goods. So it is a philosophy, that is a
philosophy.
Then finally that it was in this world and not
in the next world. So if the calamity is in this world that is a blessing that
it was not in the next world because you would rather have your calamities here
than there.
According to the hadith of the Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam), everything that happens in this world is a purification so
it might be that you are getting your wrongs removed that is why calamities are
the holidays of people seeking God. A lot of people might not like that but if
you take that on it is not that you ask for calamities because the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) said “do not ask for
calamities because you do not know if you will be able to bear them but ask
Allah for well being” so we ask for wellbeing but when the calamities come,
masha’Allah. That is what happens so alhamdulillah. Any questions?
Cannot hear question
I think the best thing to do is to create our
own venues. Do not allow venues out there to dictate your agendas and things
like that. I mean things like alcohol you cannot talk to people when they are
drinking anyway I mean that is the problem with alcohol and it is not good to
be around it, we believe it is the devil, it is the jinn alcohol, it is what
they call it, gin. I will have a gin on the rocks. I mean man if they really
knew what they were saying, I will have Iblees on the rocks. The rocks are
brimstone. So you just want to stay away from that kind of energy. Cheese
tastes fine without wine. Have grape juice, grape juices tastes a lot better
than wine.
You would be surprised how much you can….if you
really want to keep up with that type of popular culture so you can talk to
people you would be surprised how much just from reading, I have read articles
about films that I can talk about without ever having seen the film. You do not
have to go watch a film and waste two hours of your life for something. I saw a
film once by Khirasani who won Cannes Film Festival. He was Iranian. I think it
was Khirasani, cannot remember. I was interested just wide this film that won
the
The reason Plata outlawed the poets in the
Republic is because of the whole danger of entertainment, what entertainment
does in a society images and……the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) he
had some entertainment and that is something about Islam that a lot of modern Muslims
are not aware of, that there is room for poetry, art, there is room for certain
types of music and things like that. Traditionally it always existed in the Muslim
world but it should be done in a certain way, it should not become something that
takes people away from God. I mean we need to rethink a lot of things and be
more creative about how we speak to people out there.
I mean ultimately everybody is dealing with
their mortality, they are dealing with real essential issues and while Christianity
and Judaism are true religions and we believe in them as an obligation, we are
obliged to believe in them, we view them now as models of like a car that is no
longer taking you there, it does not work anymore and so you can sit in it and
feel like you are in a car and certainly it is vehicle but is it taking you
where you want to go? And on the other hand for Muslims, for most Muslims,
their Islam is stuck in the mud. It is not that the car does not work, it is
like you have driven into the mud by your own stupidity. I will never forget I
was in Mauritania and there was this man that was driving in a gap and there is
this big mud puddle and there was a big dry thing on the side and he was
bragging like what a great driver he was and when we were coming upto it we
said like go over there and he said no no no I know what I am doing and we got
stuck in this mud and we had paid this guy to drive us. We ended up, we could
not get the car out, we had to walk in the middle of the desert for about 5
hours. But the point is he drove it into the mud. It was a perfectly good car,
the road was there and he just took it into the mud to kind of I did it my way
or something like that.
But that is the thing about people’s Islam, they
drive it into their mud and then they are like why is this not getting me
anywhere. Well you left the road you have gone off road. You mean it does not
have four wheel drive. It has five wheel drive: Shahada, Prayers, Zakah,
Fasting and Hajj. But you have to be on the shariah and on the road. They are
absolutes yeah that it is, they become absolutes and you will know them because
you remember this world.
If you were put in jannah and you never had any
knowledge of this place but in jannah you have memory of this place, you do not
have painful memories but you will remember. You are aware of hell and the
people of hell are aware of paradise so the opposites are knowns still.
Well that is the point, their blind, deaf and
dumbness is like this, they will not open their eyes, they will not take their
hands of their ears, they will not speak and in the next world they admit that,
that is what the Quran says in Surah Tabarak they will finally admit it was
their fault, they took themselves, that is why the Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) said “every soul wakes up ransomed and either it sells it to
God or destroys it” so that is a human choice. And there is a verse “people do
the acts of good until they are one handspan away from Paradise or arms length
and then the decree precedes them and they do some action of the fire”. That
hadith, there is another riwayah where it says “to what it appears to people”
and that point is that those people’s hearts they were hypocrites, is that they
will do things that expose themselves before they die. That is why Sidi Ahmed
Zarruq says all the things that people do in this world that are bad in order
to obtain things that they deem good, those things will be the cause of the thing
that they were trying to free themselves from. So if somebody learns astrology
to protect themselves from a harmful death, he will have a harmful death. If
somebody learns alchemy to like enrich himself, he will be impoverished. It has
the opposite so the thing you go to literally has the opposite effect on you in
this world.
I mean Harut and Marut are a problem because
they are angels but they are teaching something that is harmful and that in a
sense is almost a negative revelation which is interesting I mean the idea of
you know that you could have a negative revelation which brings in the whole
idea of opposites and things like that again but Allahu Alim.
The thing about the Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) he was affected by magic but he was given the last two
surahs in the Quran and he never left them after that and what happened to him
he was not affected in his understanding but he was physically affected.
Sulayman was not given magic because there is a
difference between magic. Magic is using means that are in the creation. There
are two types of magic. One is called which is like the magic of David
Copperfield, people like that. It is the ability to create illusions, optical
illusions and then the other type of magic is manipulation of things in
creation through magic. Both of them are prohibited in Islam. What the Prophets
do, in other words when Musa threw down the staff and it became a snake, it was
not magic. I mean of the things if you read 1001 nights which is certainly not
anything to get aqeedah from or anything like that but there is all these kind
of interesting things where the genie does all this magic and then the magic
when the genie is no longer working for the person all the stuff disappears so
like the genie will make him a palace but when the genie now has a new master
the palace just disappears so all the treasure goes back to rocks.
That is a good analogy for what magic is. It is
insubstantial in reality even though it appears to be real whereas what happens
with the Prophets is that it is real. It is something that actually comes into
existence. So when Musa pulled his hand out and it was white that was real
without any harm. It was not vitiligo or leprosy, it was light that came out.
That was real, it was not magic so the difference is one is a manipulator the
other is that Allah is directly not through means, there are no means, magic is
usually means in creation whereas the miracle there are no means. It is direct
from God and that is why people that witness it, see it for that.
If you have ever seen a film of somebody shot in
reality you know I saw some films from
Magic in many ways, it is interesting because
Simayu is a magic where you create images. I don’t think cinema is related to
it. It is interesting that in many ways that film is very magical like that, it
is a powerful magic. It is definitely slight of hand because these frames that
are done to create an optical illusion because they are still frames, creating
the optical illusion of motion so technically by shariah I think the
traditional ulema would have seen it as magic, as a type of magic.