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.