Vision of Islam

'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 Greece?” They said “Socrates” and he said “that cannot be right”. So he went around to disprove it, he went to all these wise people he ended up finding out that they were all really ignorant and so that is why they condemned him to death. He said “you guys just don’t like me because I go around talking in public examining your so-called wise people and exposing their ignorance in front of everybody so it has made them mad so they want me dead”. I just want to set that for people who have not read this just to know, what interest me here is that he said that he had what was called a damon and it was a voice that he heard that would tell him, he said he never wanted to do anything bad but that voice would stop him even if he wanted to do something wrong. What he said is that people think death is bad, he just says to them it is not a lack of arguments that has caused my condemnation but a lack of infantry and impudence and the fact that I refuse to address you in a way that would give you most pleasure. You would all like to hear me weep and wail and doing and saying all sorts of things which I regard as unworthy of myself that you are used to hearing from other people but I did not think then that I ought to stoop to servility because I was in danger and I do not regret now the way in which I pleased my case. I would much rather die as a result of this defence than lie as a result of another resort. In a court of law just as in warfare neither I or any other sought to use his wits to escape death by any means in battle it is often obvious that you could escape being killed by giving up your arms and training yourself on the mercy of your pursuers and in every kind of danger there are plenty of devices for avoiding death. If you are unscrupulous enough to stick at nothing but I suggest gentleman that the difficulty is not as much to escape from doing wrong which is far more fleet of foot. That is what really takes doing.

 

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 Ajax son of Telemon. I would actually like to compare my fortunes with theirs because they all got unfair trials as well.

 

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 Morocco and she said all of these people that were not wearing the hijab before are wearing the hijab and she asked somebody who was a friend. She said all the stuff that is happening in the world is making a lot of people think and so then you begin to see is it evil or is it good? What is happening? Are these things happening because it is bad or is it happening because we have forgotten who we are, we have forgotten what we are here for and it is unfortunate we need these massive calamites to wake us up.

 

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 Egypt, Allah says “men were being killed and women were being left to be servants” and then Allah said “and in that is a grave tribulation not from the Pharonic people, from your Lord” that is what the Quran says to Bani Israil. This is from your Lord, that tribulation and then what does it follow  with “and now your Lord has announced if you show gratitude we will increase not with tribulation but in blessings” because the verse begins with “remind them of the great days of God when He relieved you of your tribulations so knowing that real calamity when it gets to intense levels that is when the relief comes and that is why the Arabs they say “the darkest portion of the night announces the dawn” and there is a poem by Imam Nahawi where he said:

 

“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:

 

1. 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.

 

2. 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.

 

3. Then also ignorance. One you realise God is Al-Alim you realise that you are the jahil.

 

4. 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 Cannes film festival was being made in Iran where apparently they have all this artistic censorship but at the end of the film they had an interview with him. The thing about the film is it almost put me to sleep. At the end of the film he says they ask him what kind of films do you like? He said “I like films that put people to sleep but then they cannot stop thinking about them after that”. The thing about American films is you go watch it for 2 hours and you are at the edge of your seat and you walk out of the theatre and you cannot remember anything like what was it about because it is all spectacle. There is no thought and then they asked him about censorship and he said every artist is censored. It is just where do you draw the lines of censorship. He said Americans have censorship. I mean there are things that they cannot go beyond simple as that. In Iran we are basically not allowed to deal with two things: sex and violence. It forces us to create films that are actually intelligent and he said when Hollywood was not allowed to use sex and violence they actually made intelligent films He said now the films are all stupid and the reason is all gratuitous spectacle, it is just stimulating people’s lower energies. It is all it is because people respond to violence. It is very intense to watch violence and so there is adrenaline. It is a very powerful drug. People get addicted to it, adrenaline junkies. Romans used to go and watch Christians eaten by the lions, we do the same thing when we go watch these Arnold Schwarznegger  films of people getting their heads blown off. It is sanitised but it is the same gore. It is a human thing. We see the Romans as decadent, why do not see it about ourselves, that is all decadence. That is what it is, it is vulgarity. It is decadence and the thing about it is thresholds get higher and higher and so you need more stimulation, you need more violence, the sexuality becomes more perverse. That is what happens. Film has immense potential because it is a very powerful medium but it is a medium spectacle. You never want to be in a theatre if there is an earthquake or something, how do you justify that with God? Watching a movie when you died

 

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. Paradise is pure good and hell is pure evil whereas in here it is all mixed.  

 

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 Afghanistan during the jihad. I saw these Russian soldiers, I will never forget it because it was so different from what Hollywood does. I mean it was very real and that is the nature of miracle in relation to the magic is that it is real and that difference between art and life, we can see that a film is not real. You come out of it, you can fall into the willful suspension of disbelief which you are watching the film but when you come out you are back in reality. It is not the same, it is not real.

 

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.