Lecture
4 / 84
17
Social Justice
Islam, A Coherent Social Justice Tradition | Omar Suleiman | 16th MAS-ICNA Convention
22
Jurisprudence (fiqh)
Appreciating Scholarship: Intro to Islamic Law - Tesneem Alkiek | Yaqeen in NY
26
Islamophobia
How Yaqeen Heals Internalized Islamophobia - Dalia Mogahed | Making Principled Progress
29
Education
How Yaqeen is a Resource for Our Community - Sh. Omar Suleiman | Making Principled Progress
34
General Psychology
Spiritual Personality - Zohair Abdul-Rahman | 2018 Yaqeen/MAS Academic Conference
35
Social Justice
Conflict Resolution: The Line Between Justice and Peace - Sh. Omar Suleiman | Lecture
47
Identity
Keeping Masculinity from Trending Toxic - Dr. Jonathan Brown | Reframing the Gender Question
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. We begin the name of Allah, Subhanahu wa Ta'ala, and we begin by saying, that all praise and glory belongs to Allah, Lord of the worlds. Indeed, Allah is deserving of the best of thanks and the most beautiful of praises. Those that we say and far above any praise or compliment we can say about Him, Subhanahu wa Ta'ala. And we testify that no one is worthy of our worship and our devotion, our dedication and our lives. Our love and obedience in the most absolute sense, but Allah alone without any partners, the true supreme king. That the Prophet Muhammad, salallahu alayhi wa alihi wa salam, was indeed his Prophet and his servant and his messenger, whom he sent as a mercy to the worlds. And the truest of words bar none are the words of Allah, the great glorious Qur'an. And the best of guidance bar none is the sunnah, the example of our Prophet Muhammad, salallahu alayhi wa salam. Allah Azza wa Jal created the cosmos and everything in them for one very clear purpose, for a certain something to happen inside of you. Something that would be an armor for you, for your heart, to deliver you safely to Him. It is called Yaqeen. And Yaqeen is certainty. It means literally, linguistically, to be settled, to be locked in, so that no storm can uproot you, so that no circumstances can break you. Allah Azza wa Jal created the
universe and jam packed it with His signs so that you would get to that point. That is why He said Subhanahu wa ta'ala, yudabbirul amra yufassilul ayati la'allakum biliqa'i rabbikum tuqinoon. He manages all the affairs, the macro and the micro, everything. And He details in distributing these signs, fills it. Why? So that you will be regarding your meeting with your Lord certain. You'll be certain that this was created. This didn't come out of thin air. This was not made by someone that is unwise. This is a God who has created me, who I'm going to meet, who is awaiting my arrival. So that you'll be certain. All of it was just for that. Because just for that, that is a very big thing. It is a huge thing. And I want to start about the importance of yaqeen, the worth and status of yaqeen in the eyes of Islam. You know Allah Azza wa Jal praised His laws, His instructions also in the Qur'an, His shariha. But He called our attention to the fact that a person will not be able to fully enjoy noticing the beauty of that law unless he first purifies his heart, rinses it, flushes it with that yaqeen, with that certainty. Allah says, وَمَنْ أَحْسَنُ مِنَ اللَّهِ حُكْمًا لِقَوْمٍ يُقِنُونَ And who is better than Allah in decisions? For a people that are certain. You know what that means? That means no one is better than Allah in His determinations, in His directives,
in His guidance, in His instructions. But that is noticed by who? By the people of certainty. In other words, when a person is struggling to notice the perfection of the shariha, the beauty of the shariha, that is because the yaqeen in their heart has been uprooted or has been crowded or has been polluted by suspicions, by doubts. That's why it can't be noticed. It's as if this shariha is this gorgeous palace that our Prophet ﷺ laid the final brick for as the hadith mentions. But you have to get your heart to climb the staircase of yaqeen, of certainty, so that you can get a good view of this palace, the gorgeousness of this palace. But if you're not settled in yaqeen, if you're not settled, certain, have a solid conviction in that kind of atmosphere, it's going to obscure your vision. You're not going to be able to see it right. And then you look at the hadith of Jibreel, for example, to reiterate the importance. When he comes to the Prophet ﷺ, he asks him about Islam and then iman and then ihsan. What is the perfection of our deen? What is the most excellent degree of Islam? He says, فَإِنَّمْ تَكُنْ تَرَاهُ فَإِنَّهُ يَرَاكُ For you to worship Allah as though, as if you see Him. And if you cannot see Him, then He sees you. So the excellence, the pinnacle of your Islam, the heights of it, is for you to arrive at that moment where the material world, the physical that you see with the eyes in your head, and the reality that you
see with the eyes of your heart, they converge. It's that moment when your eyesight and your insight, they carry you through life, side by side with equal strength. They both have 20-20 vision. This is the height of our Islam and our Prophet ﷺ didn't even say that in passing. Allah sends Jibreel ﷺ, the archangel, the greatest of them, to the greatest final messenger ﷺ, at the end of his life, to as if summarize his mission, and to ask him this question so nobody makes any mistake about it, this needs to be your highest concern. You need to check on it, you need to remedy it, you need to prioritize it. That's the importance of Yaqeen and Islam. And from there we move on and say one of the most painful things for a Muslim in our day and age is when we sit there and we hear the revelation calling out to us with this clarity, with this assertiveness, be certain, everything is so that you'll be certain. The universe He created and the verse that He spoke, be certain and then at the same time you have people all around you repeating the very opposite of that. There's no such thing as certainty. Nobody monopolizes truth. That's your problem. You think there's something in the world called absolute truth and that is so painful. You know, in Islam it tells us that Yaqeen, certainty, arriving at absolute truths, this is the greatest achievement a person is supposed to aspire towards in their life. And you're supposed to exert your entire effort in pursuit of this certainty. But then I'm raised by
a culture at the exact same time, it's heart-wrenching, that all these poor souls all around me, and me at times, I'm bombarded with the very opposite, a world that exerts its effort not for certainty, but it exerts it all to doubt, doubt things that are beyond being questioned. We're not saying don't be skeptical. We taught the world to be skeptical. We exported critical thinking. We exported science and medicine, all of this. But they exert their all to be cynical, to doubt everything for the sake of that and that alone. And I'm going to try to keep this as tight and consolidated as possible. You have to come to terms with this being your life mission, to arrive here and to make sure it doesn't leak. And Allah Azza wa Jal said you need to be careful, because there's so many factors out there that will cause you to bleed in your Yaqeen, it will seep out. He said, فَصْبِرْ إِنَّ وَعْدَ اللَّهِ حَقِّ Just hold on, keep knowing the promise of Allah is true. وَلَا يَسْتَخِفَّنَّكَ الَّذِينَ لَا يُقِنُونَ And do not be dislodged, don't be made light, don't be disheartened by those that don't have this Yaqeen. One of the ways to do that is to quarantine yourself, you have to protect yourself, you don't play with your health, don't play with your deen. Allah Azza wa Jal tells some people in the Qur'an, your problem is what? وَفِيكُمْ سَمَّعُونَ لَهُمْ Amongst you are those that give them an ear, those that don't have certainty. Meaning you're responsible if you allow this to keep bombarding at you. Many times we just sit there and think that so many catapults are going to hit our little fortress, our hearts, and nothing is going to break, nothing is going to get in. Oh I'm just, you know it's innocent listening. You know Al-Dhahabi rahimahullah he speaks about Ibn Rawandi and he's just someone that
was the vanguard of many many disasters in theology and our beliefs and just really went haywire in regards to many of the ways he thought he understood the Qur'an and Sunnah. They say in the beginning they would tell him stop visiting these people, stop sitting with those people, these heretics, these people that dismantle the deen, they debunk it from within and he would always say, innama atAAarrafu AAala aqwalihim, no I'm just trying to hear the mouth, I'm just exploring it, it's just casual listening. The believer is not allowed to do that because the diseases of the heart, what pollutes your yaqeen, they're just as contagious these diseases, the diseases of the body. And that's why our Prophet ﷺ he said to us, fa-itha raaytumu allatheena yattabi'oona maa tashabaha minhu fa-ulaaika allatheena samma allahu fahdharoohum. If you find people, loosely translated, playing games with the deen, picking and choosing the ayah and running and not reading it in light of all the other ayat and ahadith, right? Then these are those Allah has pointed out, meaning the disease of the heart and so be aware of them. Keep your distance from them. You have to protect your heart, you have to protect your yaqeen, this is the most important priority you have to have in your life. Look, I'll give two quick examples inshaAllah, maybe five, seven minutes on each and then we'll work towards the conclusion. The first of them, we hear time and time again, over and over, religion is so restrictive, it doesn't allow us to live our life to the max and we hear it and we hear it and why? Five times a day, why do they, you let them make you dress like that? Until after a while the sentiment starts building inside of someone like, what does God want from us anyway? And we try to suppress it but then it gets louder, a little bit louder the next time because we're not countering it enough or substantially or have that sense of urgency yet. What does Allah want from us? It starts nagging you. Had we just fed our yaqeen, had we asked Allah what
He wants from us? He says to us in His book crystal clear, you don't even need to know Arabic to understand it. Allah wishes to make your life easy for you because the human being was created weak. Allah wants to protect you from your vulnerabilities. You know what the ayah right before it says? Okay, okay, I'll stop. Allah wants to bring you back to Him. Arabic And those who live to follow their base lowly appetites, their desires, they wish, they want you to deviate, not a little, a great deviation. They want you to go completely off. They hate your deen, they hate your shariah because it's so meddlesome. It always gets in their way. It has such a command on your life, they can't stand it. That's why they tell you the deen is so restrictive. It's not restricting you, it's restricting them. They want you to be a hedonist. They want you to live as an animal would live. They tell you, why don't they let you drive in Saudi Arabia, oh women? Why do you dress like this? Do you know what year it is? A woman has the right to be free and they did not want your freedom. Allah is telling the truth. You think conspiracies don't exist? The ayah says, and Allah wants, but they want to send you this way. This is deliberate. They don't want to free the woman, they want free access to you. Free access to the woman. They want you a pawn, they want you a toy in their pockets. You think they care about women? These same channels that advocate for your causes couldn't care less about the women that are raped in Iraq or the women that are raped in Syria. It's a big lie, right? Humanity and caring and blood. They don't get involved unless
it's already over or they have an interest and that's it. They want you to just get with the program, to sway into becoming part of the herd. You know our Prophet ﷺ foretold this and it's recurrent in history. Haytham Abu Hurayran, Sahih Muslim, there are two types of people of the fire that I have never seen. Ruthless tyrants basically and women that are clothed but naked. Meaning their clothing is not offering any concealment really. Some of the scholars said pay attention to this hadith. The Prophet ﷺ never includes things in a list except there's a relationship between them. These are not random lists. They wish for people to live on those base desires. To be distracted with women and men and the hyper sexuality that you see all around you so that the ruthless tyrants can be ruthless tyrants and no one has any idea what's going on. It's the greatest red herring of all time. And so they come at you and they say, like, why should you feel ashamed of who you are? Why should you feel guilty for just being yourself? Whoever said Islam is about being yourself? Islam is about improving yourself. Yes, Allah does not expect from you to be an angel. But Allah does not accept of you to be an animal either. Right or wrong? And so this is what our deen came to do for us. Allah عز و جل wishes for you to combat those, not remove the desires but refine them so that you climb that mountain and sacrifice in a way that the angels never did even. And so He brings you to a place where you are superior to the angels in Jannah. That's what our deen is about. That's what the story of humanity, that's the history of the human race. That's what Allah wants from us. This
whole concept of just live every day to the max and be yourself. Do you know if you just give in to everything to be yourself, what that'll do? Allah عز و جل says, وَاعْلَمُ أَنَّ فِيكُمْ رَسُولَ اللَّهِ Know that amongst you is the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. لو يُطِيعُكُمْ فِي كَثِيرٍ مِّنَ الْأَمْرِ لَعَنِتْمُ If He gave in to everything that you want, you would go through so much difficulty. وَلَكِنَّ اللَّهَ حَبَّبَ إِلَيْكُمُ الْإِيمَانَ وَزَيَّنَهُ فِي قُلُوبِكُمْ But it was Allah who conferred a great favor on you. What was that? That He made Iman beloved to you. It's perspective. Some people are overjoyed at spending $600 in donation and they don't see it worth it to spend it on an iPhone. A lot of people don't think twice about spending $600 on the iPhone, right? They love to do it. And it's very hard to pull out $600 at a fundraiser. Allah makes faith beloved to you when He sees your trying and He infuses your heart with solid faith. He armors your heart with that. And so it becomes easy at that point to follow His directives, to not see them as constrictive, as suffocating. And that liberates you from the conditioning of those that want to manipulate you, those that want to use you, whether they're visible or invisible, whether they're humans or they're animals. The second example, very common, central in our dominant culture, is that in our dominant culture growing up here, and globalization of course puts this everywhere now, and it's spreaded throughout the world, we deify the human mind. Like we consider the human mind a god. And from that perspective, liberalism is a religion. Whatever ideas my
mind conjures up and thinks are pleasant enough, that's good enough. So they exalt the mind above everything. There's a reason for that by the way, and history is very liberating to understand. It's because 1500 years, the West was locked in the dark ages, they were not allowed to think, just have faith, and that's it. And when they finally broke out of it, like the mind is in a frenzy. The thinkers are coming, there's a renaissance now, the mind doesn't want to go back in the dungeon, so it's kind of binging. And so due to this overreaction, we start demanding from the mind to deliver us to certain places, to deliver us certain ideas, certain solutions, certain understandings that the mind was never created to do. Look, the mind is like the human eye, okay? Tools. The human eye, even if you have perfect vision, like even if we're going to say the mind, we're smarter now than we ever were. Your eye, let's just draw an analogy real fast. If you have perfect vision, it's still limited, isn't it? Things are so big you still can't see them. Some things are so small, microscopic, I still can't see them, right? Also, even if you can see them, but you look at a glance, you're not going to get the full picture, right? Like you look, especially in Manhattan, it's like, oh it's a woman, no, it's a man. No, it's a woman. And then sometimes they arrive right in front of you and you're still like, will I offend you if I ask you this question? But the point being, the glance will not give you the full picture. And the human eye is already limited. The mind is the same exact way. We are very limited in the capacity of our minds. And even if we can understand certain things, we've only understood this world at a glance. Like even if we have some history books, we
got a few Aristotle's and we got a few Plato's that have been salvaged throughout history and we're reading that, it's not going to give you a full understanding. Look, had we treated or imagined that the Quran was spoken by a man that lived from the beginning of time, the beginning of humanity until today, we should all agree that this human being has the most right out of anybody to govern our lives, right? He's been around the block a few times. He's seen nations rise and fall. Like we have to agree on, because if we can't have those norms of immunity, we can never develop our mind into people like the ones I've described, 미국Freearella.omg. We can't agree on this and why in the world do we study history? Why do we study like government models and why do we study this stuff? And so Allah Azzawajal, who spoke the Quran, did not take a glance. Allah Azzawajal looked at His creation. He knows His creation. And time and space for Him are one. And so when He saw what we needed and knew what we needed, He placed for us a system called the Sharia, a perfect system that would work from the beginning all the way till the end and to the infinite, if we want to talk about hypotheticals. And so the Muslim needs to know that. Lift your head up. The world will catch up one day. Once they get with the program, that's how you look at your Sharia. You know even the claim, it's so beautiful about the Quran, you know they tell us, come on man, it's like 2016, this is enough with this backward stuff. 1400 years ago they were saying that, Asatirul Awwaleen. This is the tales of old. Are you still saying that? That's fairy tales. That's backward stuff, Ya Muhammad. You know there's another ayah in the Quran that says about speaking some of the arguments of the disbelievers, Atawasaw bih. Did these disbelievers convene about this stuff?
Did all the disbelievers throughout time have a meeting? They're being very redundant. That's basically what the ayah is saying. The Quran is telling you what has happened and what continues to happen. There's nothing new here. When someone says, I have never seen a God. Hey tough guy, the Quran already spoke about that. We will not believe until we see Allah with our own eyes. Great job Einstein. And if I can just draw like two more parallels between the eye and the mind, InshaAllah they'll be useful. The same way that your eye, even if it has perfect vision, needs light to see. Like let's say you have perfect sight but we turn off the lights. Disabled. You become visually impaired. The mind is the same exact way. It needs light to see. That light Allah revealed it. He refined our hearts and our minds with His revelation. اَمِنُوا بِاللَّهِ وَرَسُولِهِ وَالنُّورِ الَّذِي أَنزَلْنَا Believe in Allah. Be certain in Him and His Messenger ﷺ and the light that we sent down. And so you need to embrace this light. Take it entirely. And that's a huge task. It's not something for a lecture. Right? Because it's going to take a battle out of you. It's going to take a fight out of you. One of the reasons why it's going to take a fight, a jihad within you, is because, and this is my last parallel I'm going to draw with the eyes, is that sometimes when you turn the lights on for somebody, when we turn the lights on for ourselves, it hurts. Doesn't it? You start squinting. Is that because there's something wrong with the light? There's nothing wrong with the light. You've just been in the dark for a very long time. Right? That's what happened. And so the reality is that you need to give yourself a chance to get acquainted, to become comfortable, to realize,
Whoa! I see the palace now. That it could take a pinch in the beginning. Take some sacrifice from you. When Allah sees that sacrifice, He will not leave it unrewarded, subhanahu wa ta'ala. That's not the Allah that we worship. And so we, even if the light causes a bit of a squint, that doesn't mean it's harmful. It doesn't mean, Oh no, no, no, just get that away from here. We're done with this whole shari'a thing. It's painful and gruesome. We have not outgrown the shari'a guys. As one of the thinkers of today says very beautifully, we have not outgrown the shari'a, we have shrunk out of the shari'a. Right? We've been in the dark for ages. And so this is our opportunity now. And sometimes the pressure is what brings out the good stuff. The squeeze is what's going to pull out the khair in this ummah, insha'Allah ta'ala. We're going to rediscover the beauty of our faith. We need to get situated back in our deen. Find out what it is, why it is, why it's so important to not set any equals with this. To not pollute it, to not mix it with trespassers. To preserve the perfection of our Islam. You know they say that in the 20th century, 1908, Thomas Arnold, he published this famous God's Funeral poem. Like that's it, we're a new world now, we don't need religions anymore. And I was like, short while after Karl Marx made his famous statement that, listen, religion was just a big sham. Right? It was a big hoax. It's the opium, it's just to sedate the masses. It's the opium of the masses. Look at us in the past 100 years, what have we done? We've killed more people in the past 100 years than we've killed in human history. Without God, without religion, by silencing our consciences. And so much more. And are we fulfilled today?
We've left the opium of the masses that Karl Marx speaks about, and now we're knee deep in opium for real. Right? People are binging on drugs everywhere. Suicide is through the roof. Because without that sharia, you will never be wholesome. Wallahi, I invite you to go out with the brothers, B.B. and J. And the brothers that do their street da'wah here. If you're from New York, sign up. Wallahi, they're very understaffed, and they're always complaining about this. Grassroots da'wah NYC. Go see the people outside. The people outside are hurting. The people outside feel empty, they feel scared, they have no security. They have no reason to feel happy. And your sharia came to uplift them from all of that. Don't buy into these ideas. You know, a hundred years from now, mark my words, come back and tell me if I'm right. Okay? And I got four minutes left. A hundred years from now, if this civilization has not self-destructed already, and that's very possible. Have you ever seen a superpower that just stayed? Rome, Persia, China, India. And it's very possible. You know, a hyper-sexualized society has always been the final phase of a society before it falls. And Allah Azzawajal said about Qawmuloot, وَإِنَّهُ لَبِسَبِيلٍ مُقِيمٍ This is a constant pattern of ours, a tradition of ours. Meaning this punishment was not just for them. And in the other ayah, Allah Azzawajal says after He punished them, وَمَا هِيَ مِنَ الظَّالِمِينَ الْبَعِيدِ And this is not distant from the wrongdoers, meaning the similar kinds of wrongdoers perhaps. If it has not self-destructed, if it's still here, a hundred years from now, people are going to be like, man, in the year 2000,
these people thought they had it all figured out. These monkeys thought they understood stuff. And now we know this is all a sham, this is all a hoax, this is all ridiculous. And now we're the ones that understand. From the beginning of the human race, every single day human beings have been learning. Why would it stop? Human beings from all this learning, they became deluded by their knowledge. That's of what the Sharia does, it humbles you even intellectually. They've become deluded by the size of their knowledge because they see it, it's right in front of them, the advancements. And they fail to see, they're blinded by the size of their knowledge that they can see from the size of their ignorance that remains endless. Right? It hasn't ended yet. And so this is a huge fitna by the way. You know one of the mashayikh he says, the fitna today of ideas is like the fitna a long time ago of idols. And they even sound the same, ideas and idols. Long time ago they would create an idol and call him God. And out of dates, you know the narration, and when they get hungry they eat up their idol. It becomes lunch. Likewise with our ideas today, why are we constantly changing laws? Why are we constantly changing systems? Why is something forbidden and there's medication for it 30 years ago and today there's a marriage license for it? It's constantly happening, so it's a fitna. So what we need to do is realize that we have to repel our human nature of always seeing the grass greener on the other side. Human beings we're into this stuff. Like we don't appreciate what we have. And sometimes we're more into change and get new things and the glitter and the glimmer of what's new than what's actually worthwhile.
And so we're blinded from the worth of what's worthwhile from the glitter of these new ideas and we have to be very careful. And the only way to see it right is to shelter yourself in faith. You know Allah Azza wa Jal speaks about some people that criticize his sharia, meaning his revelation. And they say, why is God talking about, this is 1400 years ago, why is God talking about bugs and mosquitoes and giving examples of spiders and stuff? This is on the third page of Surah Al-Baqarah. Allah Azza wa Jal says, فَأَمَّا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا فَيَعْلَمُونَ أَنَّهُ الْحَقُّ مِنْ رَبِّهِمْ As for the believers, they know that this is the truth from their Lord. At times a person can't fully grasp it with his mind. He can't ideologically explain it in light of today's modern culture. But he finds comfort in the fact that this is from my Lord. So that's how you shelter yourself with faith. You don't necessarily need an explanation for every single thing. You know there's a very known professor in New York City whose name I'll omit. And I always love mentioning his story because he struggled with faith for a long time. And he always talks to people about this. And he was an atheist and he came back to Islam. And he says, I read a line from Muhammad Iqbal and it just shut me down. And all my research was finished. And he said, there's no running from this. Muhammad Iqbal rahimahullah he says, Sure you can deny God, but how do you deny Muhammad? Alayhi salatu was salam. In other words, sure you can be immature and say I'm not gonna believe in something I don't see. Case closed, stop talking to me. Right? But how do you deny someone who lived in the flesh here? Who God communicated with? How do you deny the reality of Muhammad? How do you explain that?
We need to revisit that. How does a man get born in a vicious environment? Alayhi salatu was salam. And he becomes this beautiful, soft, delicate, bashful, merciful person who was content when people couldn't even be patient. And was merciful when people couldn't even be just. And he was gentle with kittens and he praised people for taking care of animals. And then on the battlefield he's on the front lines. And the tough guy is the one that can stand by his side. Or the brave person more respectfully. Because these are the sahaba. Right? Al-Bara' and Ali. They say the tough one is someone that could come near him. He's on the front lines, alayhi salatu was salam. How do you explain someone who's like that? Of valor and then he stops the army, as Ibn Mas'ud says, or he says we were on a travel. And he says who scared this pigeon regarding her babies? Who took the babies away? How do you explain that? How do you explain the only person in human history that has ever removed racism from society successfully? And I think you know it alive and well in the United States. The only person in human history that has ever removed alcoholism effectively. And has suffocated the institution of slavery until it dwindled and people benefited from their freedoms and enjoyed them. How do you explain that he alayhi salatu was salam becomes the most influential figure in human history? Alayhi salatu was salam. How do you explain that? We need to come back and find shelter in these things. There's only one explanation. There's only one logical explanation. And then rationale from there will tell you it's rational that I surrender to this beautiful, perfect, omnipotent God. Subhanahu wa ta'ala. May Allah grant us a new shelter in our faith and grant us the yaqeen that will armor our hearts. Allahumma ameen. Subhanakallahumma bihamdik shahadu wa la ilaha illa anta
nistaghfiruka wa natubu ilayk. May the peace and blessings of Allah be upon our Prophet Muhammad and his family and companions.
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