People do things in the world and actions can be
analysed and discussed without reference to the people so you can look at an
action and you can actually talk about an action without any reference to the
person. That is the most outward form. So if somebody hates somebody else, we
can talk about “I saw a person hit another person” you do not have to talk
about why they hit them, we do not have to talk about who they were. We can talk
about a physical act that occured in the world between two people first the
subject and second the object. So then you move to the next dimension which is
knowledge. It has to do with looking at the thing that is happening an understanding
something about the thing so what does it mean when somebody hits another
person. You begin to look at understanding the action itself and then you move
into what is the intention behind the action. What is the reason why somebody
is doing something. All of these relate to the dimensions of imaan, Islam and
ihsaan. So you have dimension of human experience that has to do with
knowledge, understanding of a world view so that is about faith, it is how you
view the world and then given that you view the world in a certain way, what
are the motives? You can have a person that believes in Allah and they are
doing the outward forms of Islam but they still have riyaa which is hidden
shirk which is doing something for the sake of somebody else and there are two
types of riyaa. One is riyaa al mukhlis which is where you do something only
for other people and the other is called riyaa al mushrik. The first one is
worse than the second. The second one is when you do it for God but you are
also thinking about what other people are thinking. So you can have faith in
God but your motives are still problematic and we all know in ourselves and we
all know in other people do actions in this world and then you find out there
was an ulterior motive behind it. So what you are looking at here then is these
three dimensions. You can have an understanding of how we should behave which
has to do with imaan and Islam. I should pray five times a day. We should
understand why we should do that because God has commanded me to and there
comes the element of faith but then the actual movement of my own inner heart
to doing that action solely for the sake of God is the realm of ihsan. So these
are dimensions he is talking about and she is talking about. It is very
interesting because that is part of the eight fold noble path in Buddhism as
well, the right understanding, having the correct understanding of the world
and then the right action and right reason.
Now he talks about Islamic learning here and one of the
things I really like what he and she says is that the Quran says “over everyone
who has knowledge there is somebody who ultimately has more knowledge” so he
and she mentions the idea of a person in a village in Egypt that goes down to
Cairo, memorises the Quran and learns a bit of fiqh and hadith. When he goes
back to his village, he is like a big alim. But it is relative, when his Shaykh
comes to the village suddenly he is back to being an insignificant student. He
might not have even been that good at the madrassah but in the eyes of other
people because knowledge has that relative aspect to it that some people have
immense amounts of knowledge, some people have less amounts and some people
have a little bit. Each degree one is moving up and that is why Allah elevates
people in degrees according to their knowledge and according to their right
actions. “Allah raises people who believe and were given knowledge in degrees”
so that is very important which is why Muslims traditionally have always
respected teachers. He mentions that there were no degrees offered. I liked
what he and she said about ijaza, the permission to teach. They really felt
that degrees and things like that would corrupt the intentions. That is one of
the things that Shaykh Muhammad Amin who is one of my teachers in fiqh said “do
not give degrees because it corrupts the intention of the students when they
come to study”. That is why if you look at universities today, if suddenly all
the universities said “O by the way, we are not giving any degrees anymore” how
many people would show up to class so learning becomes a means to achieve
something else.
In Islam leaning first and foremost is a command from God to
learn and learning is based not on earning as livelihood and one of the signs
of the end of time, the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi
wa sallam) said people would study to earn money. It is a sign of the end of
time. What happens learning in Islam is to learn how to understand correctly,
how to act correctly and how to have the right reasons. So it is about these
three dimensions. It is about being an ethical and spiritual human being which
does not obviate the necessity of learning trade and things like that,
certainly not but at the essence of real knowledge is an understanding that it
is for moral and spiritual reasons not for livelihood. So he and she says on
page 36 “no degrees were offered so he motivation was learning itself”. One of
the things in Al Azhar in 1882 when they first introduced tests, the great
Maliki scholar Shaykh Muhammad Aleesh was completely opposed to it, the idea of
testing students was anathema to him and I find that really interesting because
it creates another reason why people study to pass the test not to know the
thing. That is why people cannot ever remember anything after a test.
Now one of the things that is also mentioned is
that memorisation, the importance of memorisation, the reason why memorisation
is so important is the idea of young people understanding anything was seen as
a waste of other quality which children have which is the massive ability to
absorb information. So the idea was to put as much knowledge in them in those
early years because it is a divine gift that should not be wasted by teaching
them trivia and much of what is put in the children’s heads is a complete waste
of time. That is why SAT test are ultimately testing vocabulary acquisition,
comprehension, analogical reasoning skills and mathematical skills, arithmetic,
geometry and basic algebra. They want to see if you learned how to basically
think, they are not interested in asking you how high Mount Everest is, what
happened in 1066 because you can always look that up in a book and Einstein
said “anything I can look up in a book I would not waste my time memorising”
which is interesting but you need skills to reason and he certainly had all
those formulas in his head.
So now we move to Islam and this is the first
chapter. Now Islam in Arabic, aslama is a very interesting word, it comes from
a root word selama which means to be whole which is the same meaning of the
root word in Hebrew of shalom which is peace. Peace is a wholeness and the idea
that peace occurs when things are whole. If you look at sickness in the body,
what ultimately sickness is a loss of holism in the body. Some part of the body
is no longer working with the other parts of the body so there is a disruption
of peace because of a lack of wholeness and so the idea in Islam that wholeness
or peace comes through submission to God and it is the exact same thing in
Hebrew. The Jews believe the exact same thing that shalom can only come when a
human being is in a state of submission to God, that is real peace and if you
are not, then you are suffering. Submission is not passive surrender even
though the words are related and some of the ulema say Islam means submission. Submission
is not a passive event, it is an active event and that is where you get the
idea of mujihidah of the struggle to surrender. Surrendering is an active and
not a passive state.
Now in the Quran they gave four different types
of Islam that are mentioned. One of them. One of them is the idea that all of
existence is in a state of submission so Islam in the Quran means, the Quran
says “everything in the heavens and earth is in a state of submission to God”
willingly or unwillingly. If you look at the world al Qahur which is one of the
names of God. Al Qahar is the Overpowering One and Allah says He is
Overpowering His servants transcending above them. Now one of those things that
you see in the world, if I throw that, there are several things that just
happened. One is gravity, I did not throw it, it moved up. Even if I want it
to, it is going to come down. So there are laws working in the world that by
necessity we submit to. One of them is gravity. One of them is our physical
bodies, the way they grew, the way our noses grew, the way our eyes came about,
all these types of things and manipulating them which is starting to occur now
from an Islamic perspective is attempting to rebel against a type of submission
or order which is why the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) was
very opposed to manipulation of nature because it is a type of rebellion. So
this idea of submitting willingly or unwillingly is very important in the
Quran. This is why the very important verse “do they require other than the
deen of Allah and everything in reality is submission”. So there is an idea here that Islam is the
order of nature and this is very interesting because this is the exact way that
ancient Chinese looked at the world, that there was a natural order and that
the Sage was the one who aligned him or herself with the natural order, eating
when you are hungry. The Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) said “we are a people who only eat when we are hungry”. That
is natural, it is natural to eat, you do not see animals that overeat. In
nature you do not see fat lions, you see them at zoos because they are no
longer in a natural state but you do not see animals that are not behaving
according to their natural state. Animals drink when they are thirsty. Human
beings will keep drinking, drinking and drinking. If animals want to eat, they
will just kill. Humans will slaughter. The native Americans when they hunted,
they just killed what they needed because they understood. There are people who
go trophy hunting, they kill to put heads on their walls and that is out of
natural order. This is why a human being who is not in a natural state is in a
state of rebellion. It is seen as they are outside of a fitrah state, the
inherent aboriginal nature which does not mean that people are meant to remain
primitive but there is an understanding that the primitive state is an
expression of something.
There are generally three views of history. One
of them is that history went from fall and it has been downhill ever since.
This tends to be generally the way Muslims look at the world that we have gone
from good to worse. There is another which is cyclicial. Ibn Khaldun introduced
this. I think it is the danger of all theories that categories are very dangerous
because you get locked in categories and you forget that there can be inter
penetration. The idea of cyclical things is that history is constantly
repeating itself. Ibn Khaldun saw that and that definitely occurs. The third is
the idea of progress, we are going from worse to better which is modernity, the
fallacy of modernity. Most moderns are pretty much giving that up as an idea.
Certainly the 20th century, 19th century particularly
enthralled by that idea but the 20th century was so devastating for
human beings that a lot of people are giving that up.
From a Muslim perspective it is a little bit of
all three. The Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) said “I do not know if the
first of ummah is better than the last. My ummah is like rain it will not be
able to determine whether the first part of it was the best or the last part”.
So there is an idea that towards the end of time there is this immense
renaissance that occurs of spirituality and that is part of Muslim belief. In some things we get better and in other
things we get worse. Certainly in some ideas we are better than in others that
existed in the past. In slavery, the fact that most people recognise now to
hold people in slavery is just problematic morally. Christianity never
abolished slavery it was Gestinian in the 4th century that abolished
slavery. Paul talks about treating slaves well and things like that. Christians
do not like to talk about that. Then they say Islam says slavery is OK, well so
does your book. If you live in glass houses, do not throw stones. Slavery exists
in the Old Testament, New Testament and the Quran. But unlike Paul saying treat
your slaves well, the Quran says the best way to get to God is to free your
slaves so already within the Quranic tradition is that there is an evolution
happening here that slavery is not a healthy state because any time a human
being is in an indignant state it is bad because there is anger and resentment
and all these things. That is why the Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) said “do not say my slave my slave, all of you are slaves to
God” so the idea of slavery was abolished in that hadith and what it becomes is
a type of indentured servitude that needs to be worked out.
So that is the first type of Islam and it is the
Islam of natural order, the Islam of the laws of the universe. There are laws
in the universe and they work and they are understandable and certainly the
earth all these things happening on the planet, blossom coming out, this is
Islam. Those trees are in a state of submission. Hibernation, the act that
animals know when to hibernate. The fact that squirrels know when to start
collecting nuts and things for the winter. Who taught them that? That is Islam,
he is in a state of submission to his nature. So the idea of human beings, we
submit, it is painful, we do not do it willingly. See the squirrel does it
willingly. Human beings do it with difficulty. It is a difficult thing and
amongst them are those who do it completely out of desire and love. The second
type of Islam is the Islam of the Prophetic tradition. The idea that all
Prophets have been Muslims. This is Old Testament, they talk about submitting
to God. New Testament, submitting to Islam. Ibrahim said that “I am a Muslim, I
am the first of those who are Muslim in submission”. Yaqoub said to his sons
“what are you going to do after me?”. They said “we are going to worship one
God and we will be Muslim. So Jacob and all these Jewish Prophets, they were
all Muslims. Isa said “we are Muslim”. So there is that type of Islam and then
the third type of Islam is the historical phenomena that we call Islam which
emerges in the 7th century. That is Islam. The fourth type are the
rules and regulations that were given to us, those things that we are told to
do and those things we are told not to do. These are all mentioned in the
Quran, these various types of Islam.
Now one of the things that the bedoiun say, they
mention in that hadith “amana” we believe and the bedouin were people who
looked at the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) and they watched him very
closely and at a certain point they said “it looks like he is going to succeed
in taking over the Arabian peninsula”. At that point they started joining
because they wanted to be on the right side. So they came and said “amana”. The
Quran said “do not say we believe, rather say we submit because imaan has not
yet entered your hearts” so there can be an outward submission without an
inward resignation and that is a danger. So now we move to the five pillars. The idea that we have to
embody the book which means that we do what the book says, that is Islam. We
believe the world view that the book presents which is imaan and then we intend
our actions accordingly to the highest ideals of the religion which is ihsan. So
it is described here by Dr Murata and Chittick as becoming flesh and blood.
This is what really the five pillars are. It is beginning to live this reality.
Shahada
The first pillar is called shahada. This is
actually one of my favourite words in Islam because the word shahada in Arabic
means to testify, to witness. It has the idea of seeing but it also has the
idea of the material world. Shahada, the Quran says “He is the knower of the
seen and unseen worlds”. This whole world is called shahada which is very
beautiful because essentially what the world is saying is “la ilaha illal
Allah”. The world is the shahada because the world is telling humanity that
there is no God but Allah, that everything you see in creation is testifying to
this ultimate truth that behind all of this is a unified reality. It is the
intelligence, the power and the will behind the entire universe and so the
other interesting thing about this is the Quran says “we will continue to
reveal to them our signs in the self and on the horizon until it becomes clears
to them that this is true” and then Allah says a really interesting thing
“isn’t it enough that your Lord is witnessing everything?”. This is interesting
because there are many many philosophers and only recently the physicist like
Neil Bores was the first physicist to say this that “Material and substantial
reality is only real because it is witnessed” in other words the universe only
has reality because of consciousness. Without consciousness there is no world
so this idea of Allah being the One who witnesses all things. The fact that God
is aware that the world exists and that is His Qaumiyah and the moment that He
removes that and that is why to turn away from it “there is no nodding with
Allah and no sleep” because to do that there is no world, to turn away from one
instant, it disappears. So that is the idea of shahada that the world is being
witnessed by Allah and therefore when we partake in that witnessed this is what
we are doing. We are giving the world its true reality. We are saying “la ilaha
ill Allah” that we are witnessing too and this is what Allah says “Allah
witnesses that He is One” so we are sharing in the experience of consciousness
and that is something really extraordinary. That is the gift that humans have been
given. That is why we are taken to account so ruthlessly. It has to be that way
I mean thank God it is not that ruthless, there is a lot of mercy there, that
is why we are told “My reckoning is going to be great because what I have given
you is so immense. I have given you all the tools, look in your own selves, do
you not see what I have given you, sight, hearing, speech, will”. Those are
attributes of God. These are what you learn in tawheed. Look at what I have given you. The problem is
then people start thinking they are God and that is where man goes crazy. It is
because they really believed it, that I can do without God, I don’t need God.
It is the promethion in rebellion, the Titans, that is what happened in Greek
mythology. Originally there was dahar (time). The original god was time and was
time was overthrown by the Titans. It is interesting because it is very similar
to the jinn story. The jinn go into rebellion and overthrow the authority of
God and then it was given to Adam. It is very interesting that the ancient Greek
mythology has a similar idea there that originally there was the real god which
was time, space which is dahar. Allah says “do not curse time space because I
am time space” which does not mean that this is God but it is very interesting
that this hadith exists. Dahar in Arabic means time stretched out. That is the
shahada and obviously when you say “there is no God but Allah” the means by
which you arrived at that through certainty must be recognised because we are
in a world of means and that is why saying “Muhammadur Rasulullah” is gratitude
to that means. That is why filial piety is the second greatest way of
displaying gratitude to God, is gratitude to your parents. “That you should
show gratitude to Me and then your parents”. This is the same as tawheed. First
you witness that there is no God but Allah or the One God but then you witness
that this man taught me this with certainty and that is why you say “wa ashadu
anna Muhammadur Rasulullah” or “Isa Rasulullah” if you were in his time or “Moses
Rasulullah” whoever the Prophet was but for us it is the Prophet and we should
be gtrateful for that. Our time is the time which the Prophet which includes
all of the previous Prophets. When we say “Muhammadar Rasulullah” we are saying
Jesus Rasul, Moses Rasulullah, Abraham was a messenger of God, Noah, Yahya,
they are all in that statement. So that is the shahada and obviously there is a
lot to go but they deal a lot with it in imaan so I will finish there.
Prayer
The second pillar after the shahada is called
prayer or salah and again there are different types of prayer. It is
interesting that in the Quran and this is brought out here, the thing that is
commanded more than other human activity in the Quran is prayer, salah. Also the
Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) said ”the prayer is the imad
of this religion”. It is the central pole or pillar that holds the tent up. The
traditional bedoium tents had four pegs on each side and then they had a
central peg so the idea here is that the four other pillars, the shahada,
zakah, fasting, hajj are these other pillars but the prayer is really what is
giving this tent its real reality so prayer is at the essence.
The Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam)
said “prayer is the bone marrow of worship” and it is really interesting from a
physiological point of view to describe it as the bone marrow because the bone
marrow is the core and that is what it means. The Arabs say the core of
something but the bone marrow is really what gives birth to the blood, it
generates blood. It also generates the defense system or the immune system. The
Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) in
another hadith said “prayer is the weapon of the believer” so the idea that the
prayer is like the immune system of the body and that is why the Quran says
that God does not punish a people that pray, that are calling on God so one
prayer is the salatullah, that He prays on you so Allah and His prayer is
mercy. His mercy is called salah. It is the same word that is used but it has a
different meaning but it is still considered salah.
Then there is everything that is in the heaven
and earth that is praying so there is this prayer of creation. The Quran says
“everything is in a state of glorification”. In verse 24:41, “have you not see
that everyone in the heavens and earth glorifies God, the birds spreading their
wings, each one knows its prayer and its glorification” so each one of the
things in creation has a prayer, a salah and it has a tasbih. When we pray,
what do we do immediately after the prayer? SubhanAllah, Alhamdulillah and that
is tasbih. So we have salah and in the prayer you are doing your tasbih as well
“Subhanna Rabbi Ala”. So salah and
tasbih, the idea of having a means to glorify God and that is what essentially
the prayer is. It is the means by which we have been given.
The third type is the prayer that all Prophets have been
given. Every Prophet was given a prayer, it might not look the same. That is
why different religions have different outward forms of praying because just
like different animals have different forms in which they do worship different
communities have been given different forms. Allah says” We gave every ummah
its own form, its own law and the way it which it goes”. Obviously things are
similar which is one of the reasons why in most traditions there is some form
of praying with the hands and these type of things, you will see similarities
but they do not have to be the same to be a prayer.
Finally there is a specific prayer which is the ritual that
the Muslims do and it is the second pillar of Islam. So those are the different
types of prayer. That prayer is divided into two. Now that prayer is done five
times a day which is interesting also because 5 is an interesting number obviously.
We have 5 finger and 5 toes on each side of our hands. You can say why 5 and
ultimately those type of things are irrational not that they are crazy but they
are not something that our rational minds can arrive at. I am somebody that
does not like to go into numerology, it is not because I think numbers do not
have a reality but numerology is a kind of path to insanity and that is
traditionally the way that Muslim have looked at it. So numbers do have a
reality, do not think they are not significant, they are very significant but
generally we do not like to go there but I will make a few remarks about 5.
There are five pillars in Islam. There are five prayers in
Islam. There are five rulings in every action. Every action falls into one of
five categories. Five is a very interesting number. It is the first number that
occurs as a sum of an even and an odd. So you have after one which is the
divine number and belongs to Allah alone. Allah’s number is One. That is why
Wahid is the first number and Ahad is not. One is God’s number but if you look
at two and three, it is the even and the odd. “By the even and the odd”, Allah
swears by the even and the odd. The even and the odd is also represented in the
male and female. So the coming together of these two numbers produces five. It
is an interesting number and we do pray five times a day.
The quintessence is the fifth nature which is the spirit,
the ruh, because you have the four elements which we are composed of which is
earth, water, fire and air. Then you have the quintessence which was the fifth
essence, which is the spiritual essence which permeates the world. So we pray
five times a day, three of those prayers are in when the sun is not visible and
two of them are when the sun is visible. So they are divided by night and day.
They are also done according to the movements of the sun which again is
harmonising with the world so the idea of watching the sun. If you get up
before dawn, Muslim should do that. You should have been up this morning if you
pray, you should have been up before the sun went up just to see that every
morning is something spectacular, just to go out and look at that phenomenon of
the breaking of dawn, and what that means and then watching that sun move
across and becoming aware of this movement that is occurring every day because
one of the things about modern human beings is that they are so out of sync
with reality just with nature I mean people are completely isolated. Food comes
in packages. They do not experience the earth anymore. People live in cities
that are all just cement and skyscrapers block out the sky. There a lot of
people that do not even know that the sun traverses the sky everyday. They are
not even aware of that fact. These astronomical centres get called all the time
where people are horrified that they saw the moon during the daytime and they
want to know why the moon is out in the daytime. I read that in an astronomy
book where people just see the moon for the first time in the daytime and “what
is it doing up there in the sky? That is only supposed to come out at night”.
So this is the type of detachment that people have and I remember being in New
Mexico with a group of inner city youth who had never been outside of new York
or New Jersey and that night when the stars came out, they were in shock. They
were literally in shock. One of the things that Emmerson said was “if the stars
only came out every thousand years how would we even know how to adore God”.
That is part of what the stars are about. That is why Ibrahim who is the father
of the anbiya, what is the first thing that he does? He was kept according to
one tradition in a sirdab for 12 years, he never saw the light of the day. When
he was 12, he came out and it was his first experience of the world and he saw
the stars and he said “this is my Lord” then he saw the moon and said “no this
is my Lord”. They kept setting and then he saw the sun “this must be it” and
then it set and he said “I do not love things that set”. In other words he knew
that God was the One who did not set. So the ulema say it is using the starts
to prove the existence of God that the order of the heavens is one of the ways
of understanding that God is real. That is something guarantee you that studying the stars will
increase your imaan. Just going out looking at them, watching them, just
thinking about them.
So during those prayers and obviously we have a rakah. I am
going to show you something and this is not mine, it is one of the Eqyptian
scholars Imam Sawhi points it out in one of his aqeedah books. Scholars call
this milah. One of the things that he said is the word Ahmad is the form of
prayer, that you have a standing position and then a bowing position and then a
prostrating position, sitting position. He said also it is in Adam’s name which
is the standing, bending, sitting and sajdah. So the letters, the human being
has been designed to pray.
One of the things you can notice when you do wudu is that
you are designed, the wudu works perfectly. I mean if you watch, if you do wudu,
you will realise that all of your limbs are made to do this. Each one of these
positions of prayer and that is why you do not go down, you stop where it is
natural to stop, as you go further down it begins to hurt, if you try to go any
further you will feel the pain of that. Then the sajdah, the going down on all
seven limbs. This is very interesting as well of putting, everything goes down.
Sitting as well, sitting position so each one of these positions, the prayer
confirms with the body perfectly and these are natural positions to do. Part of
the reason why in Islam you pray is because your body should be sharing in the
worship of God so the body itself is participating. You do not just sit and
meditate, it is not in your head. Your body is actually worshipping with you
and this removes this dualistic mind-body separation. It is very profound and
really if you are on a strong path you will spend your life perfecting it and
mastering it. You will never reach the ultimate prayer, and that is why the
prayer is something that must be done every day five times a day until you die
because one of the things about kadas, when you do a kada, the reason why they
have to do them everyday is not just to keep on remembering the but to perfect
them. Mastery in a martial art is a lifetime experience and every martial art,
I don’t care if he has reached, he will admit to you, I am not as good as my
teacher, I still have not perfected this. They are always working on that
perfection. That is the thing about the prayer. It is a lifetime commitment. So
that is why if you are doing it the same way every day. You are missing the
point. You have fallen into a perfunctory routine. You have gone to sleep. That
the prayer should be a commitment, it is a lifetime commitment to the mastery
of the art of communicating with God.
Chapter 3
Now obviously you have in Islam you purify your self before
you do it and that is preparation for entering into this state like the ihram
before Hajj. You are going into a scared space and you want to prepare for that
space. The wudu is a way and wudua comes from brightness because the face will
be luminous on the day of judgment and the arms and limbs from wudu. Wudua
means to be luminous and bright. They said to the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) how will you know your
followers? He said “they will be like the piebald horse”. You know how these
horses have white, they are brown but they have white on their face and then
the front and hind are all white, this is how he describes his followers. He
said “from the effects of wudu”. Again what you are doing is preparing yourself
for something that occurs in the next world which is the luminosity of
practice. This is why if you have ever met anybody that has mastered anything,
it has affected their being. I do not care if they are a master pianist, a
master ballerina, whatever it is, you will see that they will have qualities
that you do not find in ordinary human beings. I guarantee you, it does not
matter what the mastery is. You will find that a committed practice to
something in which a person has done it religiously every day, it has an effect
on their character. That is why the highest thing that you can do is to work on
perfecting your soul, on your heart, on your experience of the world as a
theatre of divine manifestation. So that is what prayer is about and water is a
purifying element. It is an outward element but it is the purest thing that we
know of in the world. We talk about it in our language in metaphors “it was
crystal clear, it was clear as water”.
Then the adhan which is another amazing thing
because it is so extraordinary that other religions have these calls. The Jews
call with the ram’s horn, the Christians have the bell. How did the Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) through a dream, different people saw it, Bilal was one of
them, they saw to call with the human voice, people to pray. Not to use
anything artificial but to use the voice itself to call people to the prayer.
Then saying Allah is Greater, I bear witness that there is no God but Allah, I
bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of God and then hurry to prayer,
hasten to prayer, hasten to falah, falah is harvest, that is what falah is. So
what you are coming to is a harvest. That is what prayer is. You are reaping
the benefit of the day because the day was made for prayer. If you miss the
harvest you have missed the point of the day. It is just like somebody who has
planted seeds all spring and then when the summer comes, it is time to harvest,
they don’t go and they don’t harvest what they planted. So what was the point?
The same as being in the world, the point of being in the world is this
practice and that is why never belittle the reality of the prayer, the prayer
is the most important thing you will do in your life as a constant practice.
You should be committed to perfecting your prayer and it is a struggle. It is a
struggle to be committed to wakefulness, to be committed to doing your wudu
correctly all these things. Some people can see it as tedious but the beauty of
practice and every master knows this is that the proof is in the pudding like
the English say. The better you get, the more important the prayer becomes.
That is why the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi
wa sallam) said to Bilal “give our soul repose by calling is to the prayer O
Bilal”. He said his repose was in his prayer and he said “the coolness of my
eye is in prayer”. The Arabs use the coolness of the eye as cold tears are
tears of joy. Hot tears are painful tears. Cool tears are the joyful tears so
what he was saying was that the joy of my life is in my prayer. Prayer was not
something that was dreadful to him. Adeeb al Hatim said “from the time I became
Muslim I never heard the adhan except I was yearning for the time. From the
time he became Muslim, he never heard the adhan and thought “O I gotta pray
now”. Anybody who does prayer seriously you thank God for that, just that
stopping. So the prayer is a gift and people that really practice it, you
cannot imagine it. Even though I went for 18 years without doing the Muslim
prayer, since I became Muslim I have never missed a prayer. I could not imaging
not praying. I could not imagine it. I couldn’t, it is just something I could
not imagine being deprived of prayer would be like deprived of breathing. The Prophet
(sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) in his beautiful
description points out the prayers effect. The Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) said “tell me, if one of you
had a river at his door and he washed in it five time a day, would any of his
filthiness remain?”. They said ”nothing of his filthiness would remain”. He
said ”that is the likeness of the prayer of five times a day, God obliterates
wrongs with it”. So that is the part of going back to prayer. So that is the
prayer, there is a lot of verses in the Quran to use the prayer as a way of
taking succor and help from Allah.
Zakat
The third pillar is zakat and zakah is purifying
the wealth. So just as you need to purify your body with wudu, you purify your
soul with prayer, you have property in the world and that property needs to be
purified and zakah comes from a root word which means to purify. The Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) said “zakah is the faeces of wealth”, that is what he called
it. He said that is why Bani Hashim does not take zakat because zakat is the
impurities, it is fertiliser. What faeces is, is fertiliser and the animal has
to get rid of faeces in order to stay healthy and pure so zakah is a way of
keeping your wealth healthily. The miser and the one constipated is the same
word in Arabic, mumsik. So a person who is a miser is constipated and they get
sick spiritually. Their wealth is actually causing their soul to get sick and
in giving out it is letting go and that is why it is not a Freudian insight,
this idea that he called anally retentive personality which one of the symptoms
of that person was to be a miser and that was Freud. It is not a Freudian
insight that is the Arabic language. The word for pure gold and muconian stool
is the same. So his insight about gold and facers being the same, the ancient
Arabs knew that because it is in their language. That is what it is and the
Prophet said in Imam Ahmad’s musnad “Allah has made that which comes out of the
Son of Adam a metaphor for the world” and the meaning of that is the reason
that you eat is not necessarily because you need to eat, part of it is the
enjoyment of eating but everything you eat ends up in the toilet and that is
the nature of the world. The world has all these beautiful aspects but at the
end of the day it is a world that is in annihilation. It is going to rot and we
will leave it just as the people before us left it and ultimately everybody has
to leave it. So do not get too caught up in it, see it for what it is.
Now this is a really important point on page 16
which just this idea of zakah that you do not pay zakah unless you are healthy
financially and the insight that they derive from that is that it is a typical
example of how Islam sets up priorities. In other words you do not give zakat
until you are able to do that so in those things that pertain between you and
God, everybody has to do that but when it is you and society you only do what
you are able to do and the reason for that is you need to take care of yourself
before you can take care of the world and there is a beautiful metaphor in that
because we have all these social activists that want to save the world and
their own personal lives are a mess. So the idea of trying to save the world
and your own soul is in jeopardy. It means your priorities are wrong and so the
idea of zakah, it means you start taking care of others when you have taken
care of yourself. That is when you need to start thinking about other people
but if you are still in a mess do not try to help other people. Religious well
being demands that they accept some measure of social responsibility so zakah
has this idea of social responsibility. One of the reasons that the Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) said “a person who marries has completed half of his religion”
so then to look to the other half because if the family is healthy the society
is healthy. When the society is well, it is as a result of the family being
well. The same is true for wealth. If your own house is intact then you can
help other houses.
Fasting
The fourth pillar is fasting. It is fasting the month of
Ramadhan. Obviously the lunar calendar has about 355 days, each month lasts 29
or 30 days and you can do it according to the crescent moon sighting. Now I
want to just look a moment at the idea of looking for a crescent moon and refer
you to what you could call a phenomenological astronomer. Someone who is
interested in astronomy for the phenomena and not for the theoretical aspect of
it. I would just like to read something. This is a Scottish man who is not a Muslim.
He says something very interesting and it just strikes me that so many Muslims
do not seem to see this. When I read this, it just articulated exactly how I
have always felt about the point of looking at the moon and what significance
that has for us.
He said “of prime importance is the determination of the
start of the holy month of Ramadhan a time of fasting and devotion but Muslim
communities have a habit of starting their celebrations on different days in
any one year due to the varying locations and sky conditions for sighting the
crescent moon. Places lying westwards of where the crescent moon can first be
seen from the earth have a better chance of seeing it, the movement of the sun
and moon is westwards and more time elapses before they arrive at the horizons
of these places. For the moon to move out of the sun’s light at the start of
its monthly journey, also some latitudes will have the zodiac standing at a
deeper more visible angle to the horizon than others. That is the belt in which
the moon travels. Then there are delays caused by weather, under good
conditions it is possible to sight a first crescent less than 24 hours after a
new moon. 15 hours is the least. There is a record of 13 hours but it would be
very rare. But it is a common sight to see it 30 hours after. To increase the
Islamic observers chances, two independent witnesses are required. The Ottomans
decreed that the first sighting can be made with the naked eye or a telescope”.
Now listen to this. “there are efforts to standardise the Islamic calendar so
that Ramadhan is started on the same day in various communities but the
relationship of celestial bodies to the earth is a living thing and every
location has its own sky so why shouldn’t religious festivals begin on dates
peculiar to particular places? The modern mind wishes to generalise and
abstract the situation so the phenomena are by passed. As with the length of
the day the average is calculated and becomes the accepted truth to accommodate
the limits of circular wheels and clocks yet none of the celestial bodies move
in circles”.
So what he is saying is you put all your averages in and you
will get this average and it will all work out, you can make your little
calendar and it all works perfectly but that is not nature. People forget that
a 24 hour day period, that is not real time, that is our standard time. Real
time is 23 hours and 56 minutes that is what a day is. So the idea of going out
and looking at the moon is connecting the earth with nature. I think it is
really interesting that before you pray you use water and if you don’t have
water you use earth. It is like touch the world. Touch these things, feel them.
You know how children, one of the things
they love to touch mud and get in there. They love to do that, why do they like
to do that? Because they are still connected with that. The word is very real
to them. We become so abstracted, so these things are bringing us back to these
basic elements of which we are composed, earth and water, prayer, movement. Get
in your body, people behind a desk all day never stopping. Watch a cat. A cat
could not sit behind a desk all day long. They are not insane. They have to
move, they have to experience, they have to feel that, that is what they have to
do. That is why cats do that. Then they do their wudu. They have to do all
those things. They even do the wiping over the head. Have you ever watched them
do that? That is what they are doing, they are in there. All these animals,
watch them, watch animals. People forget that the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) had goats in his yard,
we knew that he used to go out and milk them. He drank milk that came out of an
udder. Have you ever had milk directly out an udder? Really I mean that is what
Hakim is always asking people about that stuff. Have you experienced nature?
That is what going out and looking at the moon. Look at the moon. Have you ever
seen a new moon born? It is called wilada. It just comes into existence. It is
an incredible thing to witness and when you see it there is this thing that
happens within you SubhanAllah that is what happens and that is why Allah is
saying go out and look at that because I made that and that is a sign of My
existence. Go out and look at it and say SubhanAllah. Feel that because that is
reality. That is you as a conscious creature with this gift of consciousness
experiencing the Creator’s world that He made for your consciousness. He has
put it all together so that you could experience it because nobody else can. We
are unique. That is the gift He gave us and that is what it is about. That is
what Fasting, Ramadhan is – lunar. Why do we have lunar calendars? Here they
have caesarean sections, they do not want natural birth. It makes it so easy
because I have my golfing appointment and then at 11am and I just go and do the
op but children do not come out at
Now one of the things about fasting is that things that are
normally permitted are suddenly prohibited. What does that do to things that
are prohibited? They become extra prohibited and suddenly you aware of
backbiting in a way that you are not aware of it during the rest of the year. Suddenly
you are aware of looking at somebody lustfully in a way that you were not aware
of it because you think “O my God I am fasting”. In other words, what is
normally permissible is now prohibited and it makes the normally prohibited
seem very very real and so it is a discipline of your soul. It is teaching you
how to have taqwa. It is about
purification of the body and soul. The body is here and it is real, do not
ignore your body. Bodies are real, they are real. Allah made them it is such a
great gift to be in the body and we should take care of the body. Be good to
the body because the body is good to us.
That is why the Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) said “your body has a right over you”. Non-Muslims
look at fasting as this incredibly difficult thing, for Muslims it is the best
time of the year because it is the time when they are closest to Allah. That is
why, they are in a state of worship despite themselves. Just by sitting there,
sleeping, they are worshipping because they are fasting. That is why even the
sleep of a faster is worship and that is why you feel good in Ramadhan. You
might not feel physically good but you feel spiritually good. So it is this
beautiful proof every year. Another thing that he points out is that is
beautiful is the justice of God. If you live in the UK, half the year you are
going to be fasting really short periods and the other half really long periods
but over a 33 year period which is the total cycle it will work out to the same
amount of fasting that the people in the middle part of the world so everybody
ends up fasting the same amount of time all throughout the world.
Hajj
Every religion has this idea of pilgrimage and it is the
setting out on that journey and here it is a physical journey with a metaphysical
destination. It is a physical journey but the destiny is the House of God and
God does not have a house in which He dwells. So He put a house there as a
symbol of visiting God and you are a guest of God and that is why you are
called the guest of the Merciful. He put a rock there which He called the right
hand of God that you can go kiss in the same way that if you visit a king you
would kiss the right hand of the king so the rock there is symbolic of paying
homage to the benevolent monarch, benevolent king of whom you are subject.
Obviously it is also a recognition. One of the things about going to
Then also the gift of visiting the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam). That he is there, he
is amongst us, you can go visit him. There is no other Prophet in the planet
that anybody can go visit with any certainty. The Jews cannot go and visit
Moses. No one can go and visit Isa. They can’t visit. This is a great gift that
Muslims have been given, that their Prophet is there physically in Madinah. He
according to the hadith actually returns greeting so this a real visit with a
response and for people who have been there and been in the right state, they
know what they tasted there, they know. You can go in with different states.
There are people who go in there and do not see anything. There are other
people who go in there and they are wading in light. Some people are not wading
they are engulfed in it. Other people that is all they can see. There are many
different visits to Madinah.
Now he talks about the sixth pillar. This is a Shia concept.
He studied in
One of the most important ways to keep in our bodies is to
learn the outward rules of salah very well and to adhere to them in the same
way you would when you first learn to drive. When you first learn to drive, it
is very troublesome because you are so conscious of the rules especially if you
have the teacher next to you but at a certain point it all becomes “it is just
what you do”. So initially being obsessed with the rules is problematic because
you are so focused on the rules you cannot focus on the spirit of the prayer
but that is a necessary stage of the prayer so learning the rules really well
until they become second nature and then you begin to work on your spiritual
presence of the prayer. Part of that has to do with the amount of dhikr that
you do during the day and that is why the more dhikr you do, the better your
prayer. Also wudu is very important. Sidi Ahmad Zarruq said “your presence in
your wudu determines your presence in your prayer”. One of the things that
people do is that they do wudu very hastily and very ritualistically so their
wudu is no longer an act of worship.
One of the best things that I was ever exposed to was
watching Muratul Hajj do wudu because it really hit home the first time I saw
it. It is a deep act of worship and we tend to forget that. Wudu is part of
prayer. It is a very deep act of worship. Not doing wudu in a bathroom, no
doing it where the toilet is very important. One of the things that Sidi Ahmad
Zarruq was saying before you start your prayer recite Surah Naas just to remove
the waswasa.
It is one of the proofs of Iblis because like when you do
takbir sometimes, it is the weirdest thing, why did that suddenly come into my
mind? That is that component that is working. It is very interesting. Literally
you do takbir and waswasa comes. Tasawuf is on the words that is used to
describe the science of ihsan. It is the inner fiqh. So that is all it is, it
is an inner fiqh. Just like you have fuqaha that are wrong in their outward rules
you have people of tasawuf that are wrong in their inward. That is part of the
problem. People throw the baby out with the bathwater because there are people
of tasawuf that went way out there. Then you have extremist fuqaha.
What I was going to say was in the West one of the reasons
that you have so much perversion in sexuality is because people are so removed
form their bodies. Sex becomes a very mental thing. Their experiences of sex is
all mental. It is a disease, they want perverse sex because they cannot just
experience a natural experience of being in the body. Very strange. You do not
have that in traditional cultures where people are very much in their body. You
do not have perverted sex. I guarantee you, in
In the hadith, why are the pillars described before faith?
Obviously the first rukun of Islam is shahada and that comes
out of faith. So faith in a sense precedes Islam but you can enter into Islam
and your faith is very immature and undeveloped. Faith is something that comes
out of practice. It is developed through practice if the practice is done
properly. There are some Muslim countries, I do not want to mention names but
there are some Muslim countries where hypocrisy is the norm. Where people do
these outward ritual which have no impact on their spiritual reality at all.
You see the most horrendous examples of hypocrisy in people that pray, fast and
do everything so it is no guarantee any of it.
During the Mamluke period, slaves actually became rulers so
they saw that as a fulfillment of that prophecy.
Riyaa which is spiritual showing off. It is doing an act of
devotion in other words to God hoping that people see it for whatever reason.
Riyaa is definitely more significant in a spiritual society. We have showing
off, if somebody is a good horseman and they se people, they do a fancy jump, that
is not riyaa. That is just showing off. Riyaa is when you do an act that should
be done for God that you are doing for other people to say “what a generous
person”. That is riyaa. There are two types of riyaa. That which is only for
the people which is the worst type. In other words, you do not even care about
God, you give charity so people will say “he is a generous man”. The other is
when you genuinely want to do something for God but you find this desire. That
is something that people have to struggle with. Imam Malik was asked about a
man who was on his way to the mosque who when he set out solely for the sake of
God but on the way he is hoping somebody might see him. Imam Malik said it is
human nature that that element exists.
There is the famous story of a man who used to go to prayer
and he was in the first line every single day for 40 years. One day he went and
he missed the opening takbir and he did not want people to see him. He realised
he had had that riyaa for 40 years. I do not know if that is true or not but
the meaning is nice. It is just letting you know that there is a lot of subtle
levels there that we are not even aware of. That is part of spiritual
development. That is why they say “the good actions of righteous people are
wrong actions for the people in divine presence”. That is why each maqam that
you move to you start saying astagfirullah for the previous maqam because you
realise how many things you were doing wrong, how many things that you thought
you were doing were right. You get to a higher level of awareness, you realise
“I was doing it for the wrong reason”. It is a journey, that is why it is
called a path. It is a journey. May Allah help us to realise the right one.
I wanted to go over some concepts for people to understand
about jihad because probably of all the topics related to Islam the two most
common misconceptions I would say are probably those concerning jihad and those
concerning women. Most of the attacks on Islam generally tend to focus on those
two elements so I would like to talk about this first from what he mentions in
this book. He mentions the idea of holy war as misleading and it is inaccurate
translation. Holy war in Arabic if you did have a word for it, the Arabs
actually do not, would be Harb Muqasada. The Arabs do not have a concept of
holy war in that way, in fact it is actually a Christian concept and coming out
of the just war concept and crusades. So the word in Arabic that is used and
has in fact become an English word sometimes with a negative connotation and
other times with a positive, it has been used both ways by journalists and
other people.
Jihad comes from a root word which is juhud which has the
idea of exerting energy. “He exerted his utmost ability” so the idea behind the
word jihad and juhud is known as a verbal noun from jahada wa jahidu. The Quran
says “Struggle against them with it, with the Quran a great jihad, a great
struggle” which means argue with the polytheists using the Quran as the weapon
of argumentation against polytheism because the Quran although it never proves
the existence of God it is constantly focusing on the unity of God. So the idea
was to use the arguments that the Quran presents for the oneness of God in
order to explain to the people who believed in more than one god that there was
one God so that is a type of jihad in the Quran. That is a great jihad, that is
why the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) and
the Quran says “struggle with them, with your wealth, with yourselves” and also
it says to the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa
sallam) “to fight with them with your tongues” in other words argumentation. In
fact argumentation not being disputation but rather civil debate, civil
discourse because the Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) if a conversation became heated he would withdraw. The
Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) did not
engage in disputation but rather in civil debate or discourse where we sit down
and try to look at a problem from both sides and so you put your proofs
forward, the other person puts his proofs forward and you attempt to convince
somebody of a superior way. That is a civil discourse and that is jihad bil
lisaan. The Quran says “and dispute with them in an excellent way” which is
civil discourse using intelligence and using reason. Now the interesting thing
is that war is actually when that breaks down in other words coercive force is
what is used when people are not able to speak to each other in any civil way
so war is actually a collapse of intelligent discourse. That is why in essence
it is a very stupid thing. War is an incredibly stupid thing and that is why
the Quran tells us not to be aggressors because the nature of the aggressor is
he is somebody who is unable to obtain what he wants so he resorts to other
ways, violent means to getting what he wants. Those type of people usually want
wrong things, things that are not theirs and that is why the essence of
conflict generally has to do with one person or one group of people aggressing
on another group of people. So what happens is one side if is aggressed on and
the other side is the aggressors. The people who are aggressed upon are the
people in the Quran that are permitted to fight and this is why at the essence
of physical or martial conflict and that is why when we look at jihad, there
are three Quranic concepts.
The first is struggling against the self. The
idea that there is an internal conflict going on so actually have to struggle
with your self and part of struggling with yourself is struggling with the
passions and the passion are your bestial nature. So your struggle with that is
your reason and that is why when somebody is attempting not to do something
that is wrong and struggle against those impulses, what he is using a higher
power and the higher power, is the aql. That is why the essence of intellect in
Arabic means that which constrains you or that which prevents you from doing
some thing that will lead you astray. Aql yaquli means to stop, to prevent and
other Arabic word that they use for intellect is nuha which comes from that
which refuses or that which prevents yanha. So the essence of the intellect is
that it prevents a human being from going astray. Now those people that do not
listen to intellect, Allah says about them “they are like animals” but then He
says “they are even more astray”. The reason for that is that animal do not do
things that harm them. If an animal knows there is harm in something, it will
avoid it. If an animal sees fire, it will flee from the fire. If an animal
seems something that threatens it, it will either defend itself if it does not
see any other venue or if by its nature the threat that it deems within its
power like a lion if it is threatened by a lesser animal, the lion will tend to
fight because it knows it can overpower.
So the idea of human beings resorting to the
bestial element in itself is a capitulation, it is the idea of surrendering the
self to something that is low and that is why if you look at the human body
itself the higher organs, the heart and the intellect are an upper body and the
lower organs the stomach and the genitals are upon the lower body. So the idea
is that this is the way that the human being should be. He should be the ruling
force, in the human being should be the heart and intellect and the subjugated
force should be the bestial nature. What happens with human beings is that they
become overcome by their bestial nature and so hunger and craving which is the
essence of desire overwhelms the intellect so they begin to want things that
are harmful for them. This is why they are worse than animals because an animal
will only take what it needs. Lions do not go out and slaughter, they take what
they need and they leave the rest maybe for another day but if they are not
hungry they are not going to kill 10 zebras. They will kill what they need to
kill and that is the difference between a human, the predations of humans are
not needs. So when a predator animals attacks another animal it attacks out of
need not out of want or desire. So this is very different. There is only a few
animals that appear to be unprovoked. Sharks will attack unprovoked and so will
certain snakes as well. There are a few snakes and there is a baboon that will
attack unprovoked but it is very rare in the animal kingdom for an animal to
attack unprovoked.
All creatures that have emotion and intellect,
humans beings, have a self defence mechanism. It is part of human nature to
defend yourself. If you fall your reaction is to put your arm out, you do not
fall on your face. Human beings will not do that. In fact one of the first
things they teach you in martial arts is to fall properly because you tend to
want to put your hand out and break your wrist. So they teach you to learn how
to fall in a way that is not actually going to harm you but the impulse is to
brace yourself, is to defend yourself. The same if somebody begins to attack
the thing to do is to cover your face, to protect your face. If somebody throws
a blow at you, if you just stand there and o not defend yourself something is
wrong with your nervous system. It is not functioning so self defence is a
human, it is actually ingrained in us to defend ourselves and that is why every
civil law on the planet recognises the right to self defence. There is no law
that does not whether it is a Muslim or non Muslim every law recognises that a
human has the right to defend himself from bodily harm, from harm to property
all of these things. The first jihad is that struggle against the self and this
is what makes a human being human. Bahani says that a human being…there are two
words in the Quran used for human, one is bashar and the other is insaan. A
bashar, it is that quality that distinguishes us from other animals so for
instance birds are distinguishable from their feathers. Birds have feathers.
Mammals have fur. If you look at mammals, they have fur. Human beings have
skin. That is why we are called bashar. Bashar is from bashara which means
skin. So the human is when you say he is a bashar you say he is a man. That is
when the Prophets, what do they say about the Prophets, that say “you are just
a human like us” but they are not saying insaan, they are saying bashar.
All of us share basharia but we do not all share
insaaniyah in truth just as an act of generosity from God that He calls us
insaan. What Ragab says if you can imagine a dog standing on its two legs as
opposed to four and talking in a language then you can imagine the state that
many humans beings are in. That they only share their humanity in the form not
in reality and there is a verse in the Quran “We have enobled the children of
Adam” and that enoblement is that we have been placed in this incredible noble
form, we are not like animals, we do not walk on all fours, we do not have to
go down to a plate, we take things up to our mouths. I do not have to go down
and lick and lap up my water like a dog that I actually have this ability to
feed myself. All these qualities that the human being has been given so
acquiring virtuous qualities or noble qualities is actually a difficult thing.
It takes time, it is not something that human beings are born with. Compassion
is something that needs to be nurtured now some people you will have this
naturally. It is something that Imam Ghazali mentions and other great scholars
that there are some people who have virtuous qualities by nature. There are
other people who do not. You will see in children, some children want to share
things, other children refuse completely to share things and will become
belligerent if they are made to share things. They have to learn. There are
children that beat other children. There are other children that could not do
that and would feel terrible about that. Now these qualities tend to be the
more aggressive qualities in human beings are much more marked in men than they
are in women and there is a reason for that as well. There is a reason why that
even in their form they are less bestial than men. Women have certain qualities
that are related to their biology and it has to do with the fact that they produce
children. So there are certain qualities that are inherent just because they
have the hormones. Some it is purely chemical and also it has to do with the
fact that there is a womb raham and the essence of the womb is mercy. The word
in Arabic raham, rahma are the same root words – the womb and mercy because the
essence of mercy is in the womb. That is why Allah has derived the womb, He
actually derived the womb from His name the Merciful. So the womb is derived
from an attribute of God. That is what women have that men do not have. That is
why the humanising factor in societies are women. The mother is the humanising
factor and without that if the mother is destroyed then it is a disaster for
the rest of society.
So this idea of acquiring virtue to become a
human being to achieve one’s insaaniyah to achieve one’s insaaniyah to achieve
one’s humanness is very difficult. That is a struggle.
At the root are four virtues. Courage,
temperance, wisdom and then justice. These are the root virtues that human
beings are meant to develop in their lives. All virtues come out of one of
these four virtues. So courage which is the first and most important virtue
because upon it the other ones are based. Generosity is actually the daughter
of the mother virtue which is courage because generosity is courage with one’s
wealth. Patience is also a type of courage because it is a lack of anxiety when
a calamity afflicts you and that is from a type of courage. So being patient is
rooted in courage so courage in English, courage the root word is core which is
heart. The essence of courage is the heart and so somebody who has courage has
a lot of heart and that is why the Arabs when they say in
From that it gives birth to contentment and from
contentment, what comes from contentment is trustworthiness because somebody
who has chastity and chaste used to mean not just with sexual mores, it has to
do with everything now it is pretty much limited to the idea of temperance had
to do with moderation in all things and that moderation lead to this chastity
or chaste nature – a pure, virtuous nature. Then obviously from wisdom comes
understanding. The virtues of the mind and intellect and then finally justice.
At the essence of justice is a desire for fairness. The essence of justice is
insaaf is fairness and it is very difficult. Very few people are fair in this
world. Even people who are oppressors or who are oppressed will always look at
the other with total lack of fairness, always. So an oppressor will always look
at the one he is aggressing upon with a total lack of fairness. That is why
true justice is very difficult to come about in the world because of human
nature, it is so difficult for human beings to be fair to be truly fair.
The beauty of justice comes mercy. In the
traditional understanding mercy came out of justice and the reason for that is
an emotion that emerges when one sees somebody who is suffering or who is in a
situation that he is not and from it arises this sense that this person does
not deserve that. In other words, that fact that I am not in that condition, I
do not want that condition for that person and that is justice. That is why
mercy emerges out of justice. It is an extraordinary concept because we usually
tend to see mercy and justice as mutually exclusive. You are either just or you
are merciful but true mercy is actually emerging out of real sense of justice.
That you do not observe that. That is why when God shows mercy to His
creatures, that is coming from His justice. That is why the Quran says “my
mercy outstrips my justice”. In other words, justice if the two race mercy
always wins and from this idea of mercy emerging then the idea of forebearance.
Forebearance is the ability to despite somebody
aggressing upon you, to actually have this forebearance, this ability not to
desire retribution. From that virtue emerges, the virtue of forgiveness or
pardoning, that is why that is the highest virtue. The amazing thing about
forgiving, there was a really interesting study that was done in Stanford I
think, they worked with these people that were in
This is ancient tradition. Now the second type
of mujahidah is the mujahidah of shaytan. Shaytan in the Islamic tradition is a
force that exists in the world. There is an obersive element within the soul, a
whispering that comes into the soul and also outside of oneself. It has two
forms: human shayateen and jinn shayateen. Shayateen al jinn are the demons
that work within another realm. Just as we are here and can see each other.
There are other creatures that love along side of us that have impact on our
life and we have an impact on their life but we cannot see them, they can see
us. Every culture in every civilisation has reference to them. There is no
culture in that you can find, I don’t care where, whether it is Japanese, if it
is Indian, Russian, Irish no culture except that it has reference to this
realm. German the poltergeist, mischievous spirits and things like this.
Japanese culture is filled with it. They are real and they do have an impact.
The way that one struggles against them is by cleanliness, by maintaining vigilance
and cleanliness – urine and faeces, wudu, ritual washing, things like this.
This is why most culltures have some traditions that they ward of these
elements. Some of the native American tribes would burn sage in south western
parts of the country to remove these elements. Incense traditionally was one of
the things because the idea was they do not like good smells. That is why
incense is almost a universal phenomenon. You find incense in the Christian
traditions, in the Shinto, Buddhist, the Islamic tradition. The Prophet (sallallahu
'alayhi wa sallam) said “fumigate your mosques with incense”. That is part of
why this is there and also wearing perfume is also a good thing. Not listening
to these impulses in the self, everybody has them whether you call them
obsessive compulsive thoughts, whatever people want to call them. Psychiatrists
have words for them when they get out of hand, people start having auditory
hallucinations. This is what they are called, auditory hallucinations. Muslims
believe that they are real. You cannot deny their reality because there are
people that experience and hear them. To say it is all in your head, well it
might all be in your head but it is still there. So these guys walking around,
you can see them. You go to some place and they are talking and shouting. They
are having these battles going on and that is called majnun, somebody who is
majnun.
Now the third type of jihad is the jihad which
demands that you defend what is right. That is the jihad of the sword. There
are many verses in the Quran that indicate this. It did not come down all at
once. It came down for 13 years. The Muslims were not allowed to fight in
Makkah. They were given no permission whatsoever. That is why they simply
suffered silently. They did not fight, they did not oppose what was happening
to them. That was very difficult for these Arab men, people like Abu Bakr,
these were men who were raised in a tradition of murooha, shaj’ah, shahama,
these virtues of the Arabs of strength bravery and magnimity. So for them to
watch people being persecuted in the way that they were watching and not able
to do anything about it was incredible difficult. So that in itself was a test,
not being able to fight was a big test. It is not the other way round but when
the verse came down after 13 years the sahaba migrated to Madinah. Now at that
point the difference now is that there is a state of authority and I am using
the word state loosely. In other words I don’t want to use state like it is
understood in the modern concept of a state because that is not really what Madinah was but they
did have power that was centralised and it was a city state in that way. So at
that point they were permitted to fight. This was the first verse that came
down permitting them to fight “permission has been granted for those who have
been fought to fight because they were oppressed”. Now remember this is 13
years later, they were persecuted from the start but permission came when the
circumstances changed. The idea of fighting when you do not have legitimate
state authority is not permissible. It never has been. The Muslims have never
viewed that. Permission to fight comes when you have state authority. That does
not mean an individual does not have the right to defend himself from being
killed but if you look at the sahaba and the situations that they were in: some
of them were tortured, some of them were killed. Sumayyah was stabbed with a
spear, the first shahida, the first martyr in Islam. This was the first verse
that came down and Allah said “those who were chased out of their homes without
right for no other reason than saying my Lord is Allah”. Now this is really
important because these are the two reasons that permission is granted to
fight.
- People
who oppose your religion
- People
who steal your land
This is why Allah says in the Quran “Allah does not prevent
you from showing kindness to people who have not opposed you in your religion
or chased you out of your homes, to show them kindness, righteousness, to share
your wealth with them and Allah loves those who are upright and just and
fair”. Allah does not prevent Muslims
from being kind to non Muslims but if they are fighting you in your right to
worship your Lord and stealing your land and chasing you out of your homes then
you have the right to fight them. That is the permission that is granted by
Allah in the Quran. The second period is to fight the mushrikeen “fight those
fisabilillah who fight you and do not be aggressive for Allah does not love the
aggressors”. The ulema say that the fact that Allah does not love aggressors,
you cannot change that. In other words the muhaba of Allah, the love of Allah
is not fickle love. If Allah does not love aggressors, He does not love
aggression in any time or place and so aggression is always wrong. That is why
when Allay says that “fight those who fight you and do not show aggression”.
The next level Allah said “fight the polytheists completely
just like they fight you completely”. Now this time because these people broke
treaties with the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa
sallam), this is something very important to remember about the
nature of war, that war occurs generally
between two states. This is the nature of war. You can have what is called a
civil war but in Islam that is called fitnah. What occurred between the Muslims
and the mushrikeen was in a type of sense a fitnah and the reason for that is
that they were one tribe. They were related by a shared father. Quraysh was the
father of all the people in Makkah and for that reason Allah when they fought
in the sacred month “they ask you about the sacred month” because the Arabs had
four months that they never fought in. They asked about the sacred months,
fighting in it because they had never heard of this. So Allah says “fighting in
the sacred month is an enormity, it is a grave thing”. Preventing people from
following their religion, disbelieving in what was given to them, rejecting it
completely, preventing them from the sacred sanctuary, Makkah and then chasing
people out is worse than that. This type of social division and dissention is
worse than killing itself.
In other words, that there are times that the actual
engaging in martial conflict is better than allowing certain situations to
emerge. That is why when Allah says in the Quran “you will have see churches,
temples, synagogues and mosques wherein Allah’s name is recited often destroyed”
because of predations of aggressive and velacose people fighting each other so
Allah says “if Allah had not used one group of people to stop another group of
people” and in another verse it says “there would be nothing but corruption on
the earth”. This is an admittance or rather a teaching in the Quran that the
root of human nature is aggressive. The founding fathers when they were arguing
whether you had a confederation, this was the first big debate when they were
ratifying the articles of federation. Hamilton wrote a piece saying “we did not
want confederation because if you have a group of confederate states, each one
of them an individual state, you are setting yourselves up for war and that is
why he said there should be a centralised government and this is what monarchy
means “ one source of authority”. It is what it means in Greek. War occurs when
people do not accept the same sources of authority. This is at the root of war
and that is why the idea of international law is only valid in an international
community that accepts the laws. If you have vogue states that do not accept
the law, now part of the trickery of modern state theory is that the
international community itself, they are vogue states. This is part of the problem.
So far instance the real calamity right now, people do not know this, it is not
on
Chapter 4
So if you look at the Muslim world now the fact
that there are not mass revolutions and revolts is a testimony to the
incredible patience on behalf of the Muslims. I mean I really believe that. It
is a testimony to the fact that because they believe in God, because they
believe in a sense that they know in essence that this about their own states
not their governmental states but their spiritual states. In other words the
conditions that we find ourselves in a society are reflections of the overall
health of that society which at root is a spiritual health. A society is either
well spiritually or sick spiritually and unfortunately the vast majority of
people are very sick so this idea of jihad it is a noble concept. It is the
idea of fighting for what is right, it is as simple as that and people have a
right to do that. They have a right to defend their homes, to defend their
religion, to defend their lands against the predations of aggressors. The Quran
says “always be in preparation”. Why? Because the best way of maintaining peace
is to always be prepared for war and that is unfortunately a truth of the world
that we are living in until human beings can sit down and have a civil
discourse and work out their problems like human beings. As long as you have
people out there that are living to get and take what they want by hook or by
crook by force and by power then you need to have people prepared to stand up
against that.
Pacifism, the pacifist at the end of the day is
somebody that becomes landless and a victim and that is why Aboriginal people
traditionally the reasons they survived is that they lived in places that nobody
wanted. Now they want the
Now unfortunately in the modern Muslim world and
are signs of the end of time and I will say about jihad if you look at the rules
of enagagement, who determines the rules of engagement? Islamic rules of engagement
in the Mukhtasir of Sidi Khalil, it is prohibited to use poisoned arrows which
is basically biological warfare. I mean Muslims developed rules of engagement. The
Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) said “do not poison the wells
of your enemies” This is biological warfare or chemical warfare basically. “Do
not use fire in fighting your enemy because only Allah punishes with fire”.
Nuclear holocaust. We use incendiary
bombs all the time in this country. We use incendiary bombs. People are
incinerated literally and you can see in Nagaski,
One of the worse crimes in Islam and one of the
greatest wrong actions is predating during war, to actually take property from
people. No, the imam has to collect the property and then it is distributed.
There are rules of engagement to make people civil in their behaviour. Abu Bakr
when he sent his troops out said “do not poison wells, do not cut fruit trees,
do not kill old people, do not kill women and children”. He would actually walk
about and remind them of these principles and these were completely alien to
the jahili Arabs. These were deeply revolutionary ideas. Jihad is grossly
misunderstood, it is an unfortunately reality. I just want to finish this
section in saying one thing. Last century, almost 200 million people were
killed in war. 200 million people, the majority of whom were civilians.
Unprecedented by far more than all of the human wars prior to that in one
centuary because of modern technology. Now those people were not killed in the
name of religion. They were killed in the name of communism, socialism, facism,
democracy, whatever. Everything but religion. So this idea that religion causes
wars is simply not true. Humans cause war, it is as simple as that. Humans are
belligerent and Aristophiles the Greek playwright indicated that is really the
men who are belligerent and the only war is going to stop this is if women go
on strike and stop producing sons for these old men to send out to die.
There is a beautiful scene in a film that was
done, I think it was 1929 or 1930 “All Quiet on the Western Front” it is
an-anti war film that was prohibited. They did not allow it be shown in this
country. There is a scene where these German soldiers are all sitting around.
It is World War One. One of them says “how did the war start?”. The other
German says “Well France offended
The next section he goes is the shariah which is
the sacred law and I want to say about that when people think about the shariah
you have to be careful because there is no concept whatsoever in Islam of a
theocracy. This is one of the modern myths that have been perpetrated by
modernist types of Muslims. The idea that Islam is a theocracy. If you look up
theocracy in the dictionary it says “the rule of God or those who stand in the
place of God”. Isn’t it interesting that the word for Abu Bakr when he was
called the Khalifah, he was called Khalifah ta Rasulullah. He was not called
Khalifatullah. He was called the Khalifah of the Messenger of God not of God
because the only one that can truly rule with God’s judgment is the Prophet of
God. No one else. If Prophets are not walking the earth then nobody has that
authority to say that this is the rule of God. It is as simple as that. What
the Muslim shariah is in essence, understanding any circumstance you find
yourself in. Each circumstance will have a ruling. One of the five rulings:
1. An obligation or a requirement which is
wajib, you have to do it, paying charity
2. Something which is recommended highly encouraged to do.
Zakat is wajib, sadaqah is mandoub. If someone is in need even though you have
paid your 2.5% of zakat, if you see somebody in need, it is encouraged, you do
not have to do it. It is highly encouraged to do it.
3. The permissible which is the majority of things in this
world are simply permissible.
4. Mubah. Nobody can tell you have to do it, nobody can tell
you, you cannot do it. It is just a permitted act. The majority of acts in this
world are permitted. Then you have disliked actions like talking too much
without benefit is disliked. To talk as in just chew the fat or something like
that in this culture that type of talk is permissable unless it becomes
excessive because there are things that are prohibited to say. You cannot backbite
against people.
5. Prohibited: the things that are prohibited in this world
are very few. If you take Imam Malik’s position all that is prohibited “what is
prohibited is from eating is carrion (dead flesh), blood, pig, meat and
anything that is sacrificed for other than God”. That is it and even that if he
is forced to do it not out of transgression then there is no sin in that you
can even eat pig if you have to eat pig if you are starving. So those are the
only things that are prohibited. That intoxicants are prohibited, that is it
“Do not go near fornication” it is a foul thing and has a bad end effect on
society”. One you allow fornication, just look at the end results, venereal
diseases, illegitimate children, breakdown of family. That is all the Quran
says, it is a bad road to take. Do not go down that road. Do not slander
people. Do not steal. Pretty basic things that is what is prohibited. If you
want to understand the essence of shariah is that it is a logical set of
understandings that enables you to live your life without harming yourself or
others, that is the essence of shariah. I will give you the essence as the
usoolis understand it. There are five things or six, some break the dignity
into lineage, honour and name.
Every single ruling in the shariah in the sacred law of
Islam is designed to preserve one of these five things:
- Religion
because that is why you were created to worship God so preservation of
religion and the beauty of Islam even though it is the preservation of
Islam it also demands that Muslims preserve the right for other people to
worship in their land. That is why the Hanafi and Maliki fiqh have even
supported the Hindus, Buddhists and every religion to worship as they see
their God or whatever they worship. Therefore commanding us to pray is to
preserve religion. Commanding us to fast to preserve our religion. All
these things hajj to preserve the religion.
- Protection
of life: That is why the prohibition of killing to preserve life. So all
the laws that related to transactions and treating people correctly in
things have to do with the preservation of life and property. You can
create wars and things like that if you treat people wrongly. You can end
up fighting and things like that. “Do not kill a soul that Allah has made
sacred”, “whoever kills a soul without just do or as a result of brigands
or highway robbers and things like that in the earth (people that sow
corruption on the earth) it is as if he has killed all humanity” so the
soul is sacred, every human soul whether they are Jew, Christian,
Buddhist, Hindi whatever. The soul is sacred and you have no right to take
the soul without permission so those laws that related in shariah to
preservation of life.
- Preservation
of property, of intellect. The prohibition of intoxicants is to preserve
the intellect. That is why they are prohibited because the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) said “intoxicants are
the roots that the matrix of so many foul things” and he said “that a man
will become so drunk and end up sleeping with his child or his relative or
kill somebody and not even know it”. Manslaughter, 50,000 people die every
year in US because of drink drivers and people intoxicated. Most of the
deaths on the road in accidents in
- Preservation
of lineage. Prohibits fornication to preserve lineage and also honour,
dignity. That is why it is prohibited to slander and backbite, to speak
ill of people because they have their name, their name is sacred and also
you honour people’s names by not speaking ill of them. Unless you have a
just reason to do that like in a court of law where you have to testify
against somebody and then that rule is set aside for the greater good so
there is a situational type of ethics here. There are things that override
other things. That is why it is permitted to kill somebody who has taken
life.
So that is the shariah. Shariah is a logical set of
principles and precepts. There are a few things that the Quran has legislated
clearly. One of them is inheritance and the reason for that is because one of
the things that breaks families apart is the distribution of wealth after death
of a wealthy relative so what shariah does it apportions that. Now out of nine
categories, six of them are women. The things about Islam is that women did not
inherit even in 19th century
The Quran and Sunnah and the historical embodiments talks
about the madhabs and I want to go over that very quickly. The basic four Sunni
madhabs came out of a recognition that there are many ways to interpret a verse
for instance the Quran says about divorce that you should wait, the word it
uses is “quru” and qur in Arabic means it is from the opposite words. It means
the time in which a woman is menstruating but it also means the time she is
free from menstruating. There was no clarification from the Prophet (sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam) about which one it was and so
it became an ijtihadi issue. Some of the scholars said it means the time
between periods. Other said it means the time of the period. The reason that we
believe that God left it like that is that it forces people to think that part
of the reason that the Quran was revealed was to force people to use their
intellect “We sent down this Quran in order to force you to think”. That is one
of the meanings of that verse, in order for you to use your intellect. Ijtihad
means it comes from jihad to exert one’s utmost intellectual endeavour, to
understand the intentions behind a verse of hadith. That is what ijtihad is.
For that reason there are multiple interpretations and therefore the shariah is
open to interpretation as long as it is not crazy or something that is off the
wall. Generally there are many different opinions. Abu Hanuifah for instance
believes that Muslim and non Muslims are equated in murder so if a Muslim kills
a non Muslim the the Muslim dies. Imam Malik did not. He said that they had to
pay the blood money. That is a difference of opinion. You get those types of
differences of opinion in the shariah and those are all open to discussion and
debate.