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.