The Gift of Islam by SAQ

The following is the transcript of the talk The Gift of Islam by Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi:

Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh.

All praise and gratitude belong to Allah SWT, who has bestowed upon us the blessings of iman (faith), Islam, the Qur’an, good health, time, and the opportunity to come together to seek knowledge and remember Allah SWT.

May peace and blessings be upon our beloved Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, his family, his Companions, and all those who follow him with excellence and sincerity until the Day of Judgement.

Introduction

Bismillahirahmani Rahim

I think it's very important for us as Muslims to understand the greatness and the splendor of our Deen and also the fact that having the Deen actually it gives you a... it is a gift. It's called a gift. Allah calls it a gift and we thank Allah for the gift of Islam. Alhamdulillah Islam, and it's enough for us. But this is not just a statement of acceptance; it's much more than that. You have to understand that the Muslims are set over everybody else, whether they like it or not, want it or not, know it or not. This is the reality and we will demonstrate how this is the case so that you understand very clearly that the people who are not Muslim, the people the kuffar, are of a different station; they have a different spiritual station, they have a different human station from the Muslims.  And that's why the message to the kuffar from Allah is warning; Allah gives guidance to the Muslims, but he also says to the kuffar it's a warning. And it is because they are living not just in ignorance, but they're living in an ignorance which is contracted under a deception because it's not that they don't know, it's that they do know and they've decided not to know, which is not the same thing.  It is in itself the element of it is in itself nifak, it is in itself hypocrisy. They have a hypocrisy with reality, with the Haqq, with Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala.

Understand The Process

Now, what you have to understand is the process of life is based on—in the language of our technical language of the ulama—it's based on what we call fitra. And fitra is like the natural condition. People have fitra because they're in tune with the natural condition, with the Adamic condition. Like if we go to faraway places like New Guinea or somewhere and you see the people living, now they don't know what we know, but you still see them living with a certain harmony, and the Muslim alim will say yes, they have fitra, they're in tune with nature. And this in tune with nature is something to do with the ordinary primal condition of human beings.

Quran and Human

Now, Allah explains in great length in several places in the Quran that the human species—that Allah before the creation of the world, he summoned them all before him and he made a contract with them, that is with us but with all of us, all the humans. And he said to them, "Alastu bi-rabbikum?" (Am I not your Lord?), and all the creatures replied, "Yes." (4:06) Now, those who have followed the prophets and arriving at the time of Rasul (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam), those who followed uniquely followed him, of the people who have been brought into the circle of those who remember the contract... and the kuffar take on the name kafir because kafara is from "to cover." It's from the yogurt that's left out at night and a cover is put over it so that it curdles and is ready in the morning to be another something entirely different, although its basic condition was milk; it has become something else because it's covered over. And this is where kufr comes from. So kufr is a covering up. What is covered up? What is covered up is in the depths of the being of the human creature is a covering up of the primal contract: Alastu bi-rabbikum. And that they answered "Yes." It's not that some said yes and some said no; all the human beings admitted the divine dependence of being created. And so the kafir comes into the world, he's cut off from this contract. Now this contract has with it an obligation, and Allah explains: "We have not created the jinn and the men except to glorify Us." So the creature is brought into being in order to glorify Allah.

Now the Muslims have taken on an enormously complex science. What is interesting is you know that the people who are technically would be called illiterate have got this enormous complex, sophisticated, intricate system that is Deen. You go into the depths of the desert, you go into the heart of Sudan, and there you see men who cannot read or write but they live completely in a sophisticated, complex understanding of existence because of their Deen. Why? Because it is the Deen of fitra. It fits onto it; it is like the fitra is the head and the Deen is the crown that fits onto the head, so that the people of the Deen have got this incredibly complex system; they live with part of their being, and what is that? It is ibadah. "We have not created the jinn and men except to glorify Us."

The contract. 

And the kuffar, because they've cut themselves off from this, do not practice a procedure which totally changes the understanding of existence. I would put it like this: that the Muslim is dynamic, is active in relation to existence, and the kafir in fact is passive. The Muslim is constructive in relation to existence, and the kafir is destructive. From where does this come? Because at the heart of the Muslim's condition is that he is locked into a system, as I've said, a very complicated system, which is the glorification of Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala. (9:04) I mean look at the intricacy of it: there are five fard prayers, there's a number of nawafl prayers, there are prayers for the duha, there are prayers for the night, there are prayers for funerals, there are prayers for the rain. Each has its procedure, each has its rhythm. There are times you may not pray, there are times when you must pray. It all is a very sophisticated system, and the Muslim takes it with him in the most ordinary way. But it means he's active, because—and this is again why the modernists have really gone a long way to destroying Islam in our time—for example, the time of prayer is not by a clock. The time of prayer is by the sky. Rasul (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) has explained it himself. Allah has said he has put the sun and the moon in the sky to be a measure for you of the time of Salat. You're plugged into a cosmic time system which is existential, which you see with your eye and you verify. Fajr is because of the line that delineates the thread that delineates that the first hint of the sun is on the way, and that you have that from that delineation until the point where the sun is about to appear, that is the time of Fajr. And so and it's set in that time, and then the minute the sun rises, no, then you cannot pray, you cannot make up Fajr. It's gone. It's in its time. Prayers are in appointed times; there's no such thing as making up a prayer.  So that what is the Fajr and what is the Maghrib... Maghrib is also on a time frame, but that time frame is by verification; it is by verification, not by a clock. Ramadan is not by 27 minutes past and 23 minutes past and so on; this is not Islam, this is another invention of mankind. It is by verification of the Maghrib, and then the breaking of the fast, the sighting of the moon—all of these things are existential. They are by verification. And in the case of that, it's by verification with Amal. It is not a democratic thing of everyone going on to the beach and looking for the moon; it is the correct shari'ah of that is two witnesses have to identify the moon within the domain that is to go under the rule of Ramadan. They have to then go before a qadi, and the qadi verifies their character, like character references—they've got to be sound, they're not to be crazy, they're not to be people who would be emotionally disturbed and make up a story. Once they've given that, they have that ijazah, then that goes to the Amir, and the Amir takes the confirmation from the witnesses and the authorizing qadi, and then he gives the authority, gives the order for Ramadan. And that, only to my knowledge performed now by the King of Morocco, who have followed strictly in this matter, have followed strictly the Amal of Medina.

Ibadah ang living

So what I'm saying is that this relationship with ibadah clicks the Muslim into what you might call the active mode in their existential reality, in their existence, in their life.  So that onto this also comes a whole other set of things which they can acquire according to their knowledge and acquire to the richness of the Deen of the ulama around them. [The Prophet] lived in dua; he said Allah loves best the doer of the moment of all the ibadah. He loves Allah best to do because it is the expression of need. It's the need of the slave for his Lord; that is a consciousness, that is knowledge. The knowledge that you need Allah is already tuning you into a right action which will follow that, so that in dealing with the need you will make those moves that will bring mercy and rahma to you, so that the need is met—not that you have to fight the existence to get it, but existence will begin to move in harmony with you to give you, because of your dua, what you need, because Allah answers the dua of his slave. So this is another kind of person we're talking about now. In place of this, we go back to the kafir. Now it's quite stunning if you think about it. The kuffar don't worship Allah, they don't worship their Creator. They don't know how he is with his existence, what he does with his existence, how he set it up. It all works by laws, and strangely enough they seem they found out all the kind of laws we didn't know about, about how microorganisms work and how astral bodies in the heavens move and form, and you know, they know that now that there's ice on the base of the planet Mars. And they don't know how existence works, they don't know how their own life works because they haven't got a knowledge that is given to the Muslims; it's how he lives. So what you must remember is that for the kafir, his only realities are what we might call earthly realities. Now this means that every day he gets up, and every day he has breakfast, and then sometime in the middle of the day he has lunch, and then in the evening he has something else to eat, and he goes to the lavatory, and then he goes to bed and he has intercourse, and then he sleeps and then he wakes, and then it's again the next day he has breakfast and his lunch and he has dinner, and he has to wash himself and he has to go to the lavatory, intercourse... 

And all his existence is in fact a monotony of appetite and fulfilling appetite and not being satisfied by appetite and getting weary of the meal, getting weary of his partner as a woman, and needing another one now, and having to change, and being restless. Everything that he's got, he's not content with it; he's in movement all the time, but he seems trapped in stuff, in existence, in the matter, and it doesn't make sense to him. It's absurd. It's absurd to him. Remember now that the dominant religion in France is atheism, the second religion is Christianity, and the third catching up to be the most dominant religion is Islam. But the body of people in Europe, they don't believe in anything, and so at the heart of their life is a kind of emptiness.

The Dynamic Relationship

Now, if you could then go back to the Muslim, he also has the same rhythm as the kafir because he's a human, he's from insaniyah. But every day there is the Fajr, there is Asr, there is Maghrib, there is Isha. There are extra prayers in the time of struggle and difficulty. In the middle of the day before the sun is high he can make the Duha prayer; in the night he can rise and be with Allah and pour out his heart and ask for strength. He is in a dynamic relationship with these same sort of events that the kafir is dealing with in a setting which he cannot find the meaning. And when the troubles come, when the shipwreck comes, when the storm comes, then he's lost to pieces because he does not have one he can call on, he does not have trust. Not only that, but the Muslim is moving through the world knowing that while there is a visible world, there's also an invisible world. The beginning of Alif Lam Mim: "This book is for those who believe in the [unseen]." The Muslim believes in the unseen, so he himself has an unseen earthly dimension which is if he sleeps he dreams—this is the unseen earthly—but there's also an unseen heavenly. There are true dreams which illuminate. Muhammad Ibrahim, who was in Meknes at the time of Sheikh—he was a student—and he was to leave Meknes and go to Casablanca to study, and he was very concerned that in going to this great city he might lose his Deen and he might go to, you know, bad company and lose everything he gained in the company of the Sheikh. And the next morning before he left he said to me, "I had the most extraordinary dream. I dreamed that I was standing on the shore and Moulay al-Arbi, who is the Sheikh of our Sheikh, great Sheikh, called him over, and he was in a boat. And Moulay al-Arbi said, 'Get into the boat. Go, row.' And he got into the boat and then Moulay al-Arbi pushed the boat out into the water." And he said, "This was most vivid dream." You see, he said, "I have to go now and say goodbye to my Sheikh." He went to Sheikh Abdulhabib, he said, "I'm leaving for Casablanca, and I'm a bit worried about it, how I should be." And the Sheikh Ibrahim smiled and he said, "Be like you were when Moulay al-Arbi pushed your boat into the water." So this dimension of existence, you see, of certainty, of knowing that you're on the right way, this is not known to the kafir. He's in ignorance, he's in the darkness that there are good times and bad times and they're opposites. But as the man of knowledge begins to realize that these things are the same—the one of the great Sufis of the East said that the Sufi weeps at the wedding and smiles at the funeral, because he sees it from another point of view, with another understanding. So you have to realize that what you take with you is void of this emptiness that the kafir has. When you look at the kuffar, they don't have fitra, they don't have the attitude to cleanliness that we have, and they don't have a harmony with nature that we have. And not only that, they don't know how existence works. And we know how it works because as Sheikh Akbar, the Sheikh of the Sufis, Ibn Arabi, said: "Allah governs the universe from inside the universe." Allah rules the world from inside the world; it's not a divinity crashing and intervening at dramatic moments because of something that is pleasing or not pleasing. Allah has set up the whole thing of the Rububiyah—the ulama call it the interconnectedness of all the rules of existence—so that things work from inside the universe by vast series of patterns. Then the Sufis know and have taught their people that not only that, but that we have a specific relationship with existence that no other creature has. And that is, from the Hadith Qudsi that is referred to a lot by Ibn Arabi: when Allah says, "I was a hidden treasure and I desired to be known, so I created mankind in order to be known." In other words, they are a mirror in which Allah contemplates himself. So once you know that you are this mirror that is reflecting light from Allah Subhanahu, then the beginning of the path of knowledge and Ma'rifa begins. But this is another kind of person who knows that he has been created for this high thing which is the knowledge of Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala. "I was a hidden secret and I desire to be known," in order that this secret should manifest, there had to be the mirror to take the reflection of the light of Allah.

High Place For Muslims

Now, this puts the Muslims in a high place. There is no kafir equivalent to Hajj. There's no kafir equivalent to the House of Allah. There's no kafir equivalent to the Black Stone. There's no kafir equivalent to the Tawaf, to the running between Safa and Marwa. All these are complex, sophisticated rituals in order to take us on this difficult journey, of which Hajj is Arafat. Arafat is from Arafa—from the knowledge—so Hajj is self-knowledge. And Hajj is Arafat; Hajj is not all the things that make it up, it is that you must stand if only for a moment on Arafat. That is Hajj, and at that point you are alone before Allah, dressed in the two garments of burial. That is Arafat. So we have millions of us, the common people, go on that Hajj, stand on Arafat. Already all the hajjis are set above all the rest of mankind because they have fulfilled this command, and they're imbued with secrets from it and lights from it that they take with them for the rest of their lives. And this is what you have to understand: you are people who know how existence works. You know that you have come from Allah and you are going to Allah. And this is with this begins something that happens naturally—also not unnaturally, but that among the body of the Muslims there are men who achieve what we would call gravity, depth—what the Spanish call hondo, is that right? Hondo, no, it's a depth, it's a kind of depth in the being. And it's an age where men are frivolous, and lack this quality. Anyway, but the Muslim acquires it by his increase of knowledge. And then he becomes another sort of being, and the word in Arabic is Rijal. They become the Rijalullah, the men of Allah. And the men of Allah are the ones who know they have come from Allah and they are going to Allah. That is their life's journey; it is not a project, it is a divine project, it is a divine rendezvous, it is an encounter, an expected encounter. The last words of Rasul (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) were the fulfillment of that; that his last words were to the Highest Companion. This is the noble perfection of the Muslim man. Fatihah.

MasyaAllah, May Allah Grant Shaykh AbdalQadir Rahimullah Janatul Firdaus

Professor Dr Zuhaimy Ismail