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To Truly be Free | Khutbah
How do we attain freedom from our desires? A moving story of Ibn Taymiyyah (ra) in prison highlighting the liberation of the self in servitude to Allah.
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. Promise of freedom is a promise that is often sold to actually enslave you to something else that will make you dependent upon something that allows you to be manipulated, exploited, and abused. And it's a promise that many political leaders have tried to sell. It's a promise that social movements sell, this idea of freedom. And subhanAllah, it's not all without merit, this idea of what it means to be free. However, the Islamic conception of what it means to be free is not to be free in a way that you live out your most animalistic desires and do that to the detriment of yourself, in the process corrupt your spiritual being, in the process corrupt your emotional well-being, in the process leads to the deterioration of both the individual and the society, but it's something so much more. And I want to go to that early promise of Islam and then break it out into something else. It's a famous narration that I'll start with, one that's actually known to many people. The narration of Rabi'i Ibn Amir radiAllahu ta'ala anhu, when he walks into the palace of Rustum in Persia, Rabi'i Ibn Amir being a person who came from very humble circumstances, who did not have the wealth of this world, who did not have the power and name and stature of this world. And when he walks into the most pompous palace in the world at the time, belonging to a pompous leader, he's riding a donkey. He's not wearing the best of clothes. He's not as presentable as even the guards in the palace from a physical perspective. And when he walks in dragging his spear down the red carpet and doing so with full confidence and
unfazed, Rustum looks at him and says to him, what is it with you people? Who are you? Who are you desert folk that we had abandoned and that we didn't think much of and now you're walking with such pride? What is that? And he said, InnaAllaha bta'atanaa li nukhrijal ibad min ibadatil ibad ila ibadati rabbil ibad. First and foremost, Allah has sent us to take people from being enslaved to other slaves, to being enslaved to the Lord of all slaves, Allah subhana wa ta'ala. Waman liq al dunya ila sa'at al dunya wal akhirah, from the constriction of this world to the expansion of this life and the hereafter. Waman jawr al adhyan ila abd al islam and from the injustice of all other systems to the justice of Islam. When he's saying that, he recognizes that he's not just making a statement in front of Rustum, but that all these guards, all of these people that are serving in the palace that have been put down and enslaved and treated in certain ways and told that their ceiling is a certain height. All of them are listening to this and they're seeing this man and they might think to themselves, what is this deen that is provoking that type of confidence in a person? We've never seen that before. What is it that he has inside of him? Because whatever he has inside of him, I want that too. I want to at least understand what it is. You can imagine when Bilal radiyaAllahu ta'ala anhu was dragged out and tortured and there were others that were tortured as well in certain fashion. Sumayya radiyaAllahu ta'ala anhu of course, well known, Khabab radiyaAllahu ta'ala anhu, Abu Fukaiha, others that were tortured in these fashions. And the people that were watching this, thinking to themselves,
what is it about these men? What is it about these women that causes them to insist on a certain way? And why is it that they seem unfazed by the harm? Remember when Fir'aun took out his own wife Asiya radiyaAllahu ta'ala anhu and tortured her? Because Fir'aun worships his own self, his own power. And when his wife dare challenge that, he wants to make an example out of his own wife. SubhanAllah after all these years of being together, he's bringing these strange men to humiliate his wife in public. Fadahika. And she's laughing during the torture and Fir'aun is saying, look at this mad woman, majnoona. She must be crazy. She's not crazy. She's a mu'mina. She's a believer. And Allah showed her certain things with her eyes. And before he showed her certain things with her eyes, he put certain things in her heart to where she was untorturable in the true sense, uncaptured. You cannot capture a person like that. You cannot torture a person like that. You cannot own a person like that. And that frustrates oppressors who depend upon certain devices of power to try to break you. And there's no greater example than the Prophet ﷺ himself. All of the breaking or the attempted breaking of the companions around the Prophet ﷺ was really to get to him. They wanted him to hear the children crying at night out of hunger and out of thirst during the boycott of bin al-Hashim bin al-Mutalib so that it could be said to him, they know the empathy of the Prophet ﷺ. This is because of you. Your uncle who took care of you, Abu Talib dying in the fashion that he died. This is because of you. So may Allah and her family as you walk by them and the only thing you can say is sabran ya al-Yasir. Be patient O family of Yasir. You have an appointment with Allah in Jannah. Your place is Jannah, is paradise. They wanted to tell the Prophet ﷺ this is because of you. So they tried
to break him through that. They tried to emotionally manipulate him. They tried to break him by calling into question his loyalty to his people. They tried to break him with riches then. That didn't work out. So they tried the negotiation tactics, right? After you break someone down, then bring them not just a restoration package, bring them the sweetest package that they could ever think of. You want the riches of Mecca? You want the women of Mecca? You want the keys to the Kaaba? All of it. That's fine. We'll give it to you. وَدُّوا لَوْ تُدْهِنُوا فَيُدْهِنُوا And they're like if only you would compromise, we would happily compromise. Give us something so that we can say we won. We got something out of you, right? But the Prophet ﷺ was unconquerable because he was the greatest abid of all times as well. The greatest worshipper of Allah ﷻ. He understood the nature of that relationship with Allah ﷻ. So you couldn't break him ﷺ. You couldn't buy him either ﷺ. You could neither break nor buy a man who has that type of connection to Allah ﷻ. Now where do I bring this all back to for us? Sometimes it's the examples that inspire in a people the resilience that they themselves don't even really know that they have. And you look at the famous story of Imam bin Taymiyyah ﷺ when he was being thrown into the prison and being threatened with all of these different types of things and he doesn't seem to be bothered by this. And he says, what are they going to do to me? My paradise is in my heart. You can't access my jannah. So what are they going to do to me? You kill me? You make me a martyr. You send me to Allah ﷻ. I'm okay with that. If you imprison me, it's seclusion with Allah ﷻ. I still get to be with my
Lord. You can't seclude me from my Lord. You can't take him away from me. And if you deport me, then I'll just contemplate the signs of Allah ﷻ. I'll still be connected to my Lord. Do what you want to me. Paradise is here in my heart. We read that and we think, wow, what was he really saying here? He was saying that you can't use worldly devices of power to disconnect me from one who is not subjected to your limitations. You're not going to be able to disconnect me from him because he's not subjected to your power and therefore I'm free. I'm free. I'm a free man. Do what you want to me. Kill me in any way that you want. Harass me in any way that you want. But I'm free because I have Allah ﷻ who is free from all of your limitations. SubhanAllah. Free from imperfections, free from your limitations. So I'm free because I'm connected to him. You know it's really interesting. I was reading in Al-Wabil As-Sayyib, Imam Al-Qayyim, who's a student of Ibn Taymiyyah. He says something really interesting because this is where you take inspiration from people. He says that كُنَّ إِذَا ضَاقَتْ بِنَ الدُّنْيَا When we used to feel like the world was getting tough, life was getting really hard, he said that we used to go, ذهبنا لزيارته فى السجن. We used to go visit Ibn Taymiyyah in prison. Just think about this for a moment. When we felt like things were getting tough on us outside of prison, we would go visit him in prison in Damascus. Because when we saw him in Damascus, may Allah ﷻ liberate and make easy the affairs of the people of the Sham. Allahumma ameen. When we saw him in prison, our hearts were expanded, our chests were expanded. Like everything that we were going through on the outside, we went and we saw him in prison. And suddenly we felt
like we were the ones in prison and he was the one that was free. He's the free man. We're the ones that feel like we're in prison. And then he said these words, he says وَكَانَ يَقُولُ الْمَسْجُونَ مَنْ سَجَنَهُ هَوَاهُ وَالْمَأْسُورَ مَنْ أُسِرَ عَن مَوْلَهُ Beautiful words. Beautiful words. He said the prisoner is the one who is in prison by his desires. And the captive is the one who is taken captive from his Lord. By what? By disobedience to his Lord. The true prisoner is the one who is a prisoner either to his desires or to his disobedience of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. If a person breaks himself free from those shackles of shahwa, of desire, disobedience to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, they're free. They're free. You can't conquer a person like that. You can't capture a person like that. We're coming up on Monday on the 57th anniversary of the assassination of Al-Hajj Malik al-Shabazz Malcolm X rahimahullah ta'ala. May Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala grant him shahada. Allahumma ameen. It drove people crazy how fearless he was. It drove people crazy how fearless Muhammad Ali was. You threaten him with his career, it doesn't work. Threaten him with prison, it's not working. It frustrates oppressors when they can't conquer you. And sometimes, like Ibn al-Qayyim rahimahullah saying, you know, sometimes we need to go see Ibn Taymiyyah to refresh that concept in ourselves, to remind ourselves what true freedom really looks like, seeing a man in prison who seems completely unconquered, unfazed. And yes, there are tough times. Sometimes we also need to look at the brothers and sisters around the world that continue to inspire that within us. Watching the images of that sister Muska and Khan in India. May Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala liberate
our brothers and sisters living under the fascism of the regime in India, walking with her hijab through these mobs saying Allahu Akbar with her fist up. Of course, that's not popular to the American freedom movement, and so it didn't make the rounds here, except in the Muslim community. But putting that fist of power up, but the power was not that, the power was not in her fist, it was in her voice, Allahu Akbar. I'm not afraid of you. What are you going to do? What are you going to do to me? You watch that and you could say share, retweet, forward. But like take a moment and put yourself in that situation and be like, do I have that inside of me too? If I was placed in the same situation, do I have that freedom inside of me? That certainty inside of me? Abdullah ibn Abbas radiAllahu ta'ala anhuma, he says that leadership is given in the Quran when Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala talks about the imma of Bani Israel, the righteous ones from Bani Israel, the righteous leaders. He says it was given to them, lamma sabaru wa kanu bi-ayatina yuqinoon. They're described with two qualities. They had an exemplary patience and they had certainty in Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Those two things can't be disconnected from each other because the patience translated itself into courage and resilience and that came out of their yaqeen, their certainty in Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. The certainty generated the courage. And so was this young woman passing through thinking this is a chance to go viral on social media? Or was it a natural reaction, Allahu Akbar, what are you going to do to me? The same way we see the ahrar, the free people of Gaza, living under that barricade. But they're free. You can't conquer people like that. You can't conquer people that will go
to Masjid al-Aqsa despite all of the tactics of terror at the hands of the occupation. You can't conquer people like that. Where is that in us? And what I'm saying here to start is don't just look at those people. Do what Ibn al-Qayyim said we were doing when we'd go and we'd look at Ibn Taymiyyah. Renew that inside of yourself. Say you know what, I need to find that inside of myself. And you know what's very beautiful is that Imam bin Taymiyyah rahim Allah ta'ala as he answered that question to his students and said, المسجون من سجنه هواهو والمأسور من أسر عن مولاه That the one who's truly in prison is the one who's imprisoned by his desires. Ibn Taymiyyah was saying look this is not some sort of like macho strength that you're seeing that I garnered by watching a motivational video on YouTube or something like that. This comes from what? This comes from what? Break free of your desires. What does it mean to break free of your desires? It means to not be imprisoned by them. If you look at the world today, where do people run from a shahwa when the shahwa goes wrong? They run to the next shahwa. They run to the next desire. Bad relationship? Let me go to another relationship really really really quickly. Life is getting tough? Let me jump into this drug. So I'll go from enslaving myself to this to enslaving myself to a drug. This master, that drug, this master is no longer giving me what I need. Let me go enslave myself to another one and another one and keep on enslaving myself to this and this and that. Bird to bird picks a person up. It's like a person in the air getting picked up from bird to bird and the wind taking him to far away places and he doesn't know where he is anymore. And so what's the solution? Just like when we talk about wealth, that az-zuhd, lay says zuhd, al la tamliku shayya
kama qala Ali radiyaAllahu ta'ala anhu, zuhd, asceticism is not that you own nothing. It is al la yamliku kashayya. It's that nothing owns you. So if the wealth is in your hand and not in your heart, a person could have a million dollars, a person could have ten million dollars and be a zahid and be an ascetic and another person could have ten thousand dollars and be a complete slave to their wealth. Just like we talk about sadaqa, charity, charity is not about the quantity of charity, it's about the quality of that charity. The same thing is true when we talk about zuhd, asceticism. Suleiman alayhi salam was a zahid. He was an ascetic despite having a kingdom that was unrivaled in this world because the kingdom never detracted from the glorification of Allah subhana wa ta'ala in his heart. It never got in there. It stayed here. As long as it stays here, you're okay. The same thing is true with our shahawat, with our desires. Allah did not create us to be a form of creation without desire. We have desires and Allah did not give us a deen, a religion that is unreasonable with those desires. We have permissible outlets for our desires. We don't have a difficult religion. We have a religion that requires sacrifice. We have a religion that requires commitment. We have a religion with rules and restrictions. We have a religion that gives us discipline through the Quran and the sunnah in every way in our lives. But it's not a hard religion in the sense that it's not haraj. It is not overbearing. La yukallifu allahu nafsan illa was'aha. Allah is not burdening us beyond our scope. It's there. We have the capacity. Sometimes you don't understand the true nature of your capacity until you stretch it a bit. But it's there. It's there. And so just like when you talk about wealth not owning you, you talk about no desire owning you. No desire owning you. No disobedience owning you. You can't be owned by a sin. And sometimes you have to ask yourself,
do I really want to be doing this for the rest of my life? Do I really want this to be my source of happiness? Do I really want this to be the relief that I run back to every single time something goes wrong in life? Whatever that drug is for you, drug in the broader sense, whatever it is for you. Am I really going to continue to allow my apprehension, my fear to lead me to a place of unprincipled life? Or am I going to let my fear of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala cause me to have no fear of any human being whatsoever? You see, that's the ingredient for the believer of how they break free from fear. It's not that they fear nothing, it's that they fear Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. They fear Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala more than they fear the creation. So they're free in their ibadah to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And in the process of that, Allah azawajal opens up this dunya for them. From the constriction of this world. Because when you run from thing to thing to try to free you and empower you, it's just going to keep on messing you up and it's going to keep on frustrating you and suffocating you. And so you escape that. To the expansion of this life and the next. You live with Jannah in your heart. You live with Jannah in your heart. No one can buy you, no one can break you. We need that these days, dear brothers and sisters as individuals and as communities. Yes, we look at our brothers and sisters in India right now and many other places in the world. It's so sad subhanAllah that sometimes I feel guilty if you mention a few places. I can't start with the various places in the world. But you look at those brothers and sisters, you look at those people and the resilience that they're showing and some of us might feel sorry for them. We look at them and we say, ahl al-ghazal, Allah ya'een hum. And truly may Allah make it easy for them.
That sister, the young sister being harassed, may Allah make it easy for her. But if we as an American Muslim community or wherever we are, sacrifice our deen for the sake of safety in our dunya, then we're the losers. They should feel sorry for us. They should feel sorry for us. Can't be bought, can't be broken. That's the key to freedom. And that freedom is freeing yourself from desire and freeing yourself from disobedience to the one who is not limited, to the one who is not conquered by anyone, to the one who rewards without measure, to the one who enforces eternal justice, to the one in whose mercy we depend. Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala al-jabbar. May Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala allow us to be connected to him and allow us to break free of our flesh, free of our lusts, free of our disobedience, free of the worldly promises that only lead to more delusion and disappointment. And may Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala place that Jannah of certainty in our hearts and may Allah allow us to arrive at the Jannah that he has promised us in the companionship of our beloved Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. And may Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala liberate our brothers and sisters from the worldly oppression and liberate ourselves from worldly delusion. May Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala allow us to be truly his ibad and amongst those that are pleasing servants to him. Allahuma ameen.
Allahuma thur al-mu'minina wal-mu'minat, wal-muslimina wal-muslimat, al-ahya'i minhum wal-amwat. Innaka sami'un qareebun mujibu da'wat. Allahuma thur lana warhamna wa'afu anna wa la tu'adhibna. Rabbana zalamna anfusana wa in lam takfir lana watarhamna. Lanakuna minal khasireen. Allahuma innaka afuun kareemun tuhibbu al-afwa fa'afu anna. Allahuma thur liwalideena rabbir hamwama kama rabbuna sigara. Rabbana hablana min ajwajina wa dhriyatina qurra ta'ayun. Wa ja'alna lilmutaqina imama. Allahumma nsar ikhwanan wa sta'raafina fee masharika al-ardhu magharibiha. Allahuma ahlikil dhalimeena bildhalimeen wa akhrijna wa ikhwanan min baynihim salimeen. Ibadallah.
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