Lecture
21 / 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
The Infinitely Merciful and the Question of Hellfire - Mohammad Elshinawy | YM Youth Conference 2017
Related
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. As-salamu alaykum everybody. I'll just turn my timer on. That's my calculator. Bismillah. So alhamdulillah for the blessing of Islam. And alhamdulillah for the opportunity to remind one another and rehearse the beauty and the perfection of the Lord of the Worlds, the Most Merciful, Subhanahu wa ta'ala. And so to jump right into the subject, I'm here to summarize inshallah a paper that we had published on Yaqeen regarding the infinitely merciful, Subhanahu wa ta'ala, and the question of hellfire. And so many Muslims, they find it difficult to reconcile the idea of a merciful God and the fact that he would cast some people into a fire. And it is not the place of this discussion to delve much into the flaw in the premise or the impossibility of trying to get an infinite unseen God understood fully by a finite limited human being, human mind, human perception. What we did was we focused on a tradition, a famous tradition of the Prophet ﷺ that speaks about the matchlessness of Allah's mercy.
In Sahih al-Bukhari and Muslim, Umar ibn al-Khattab radhiAllahu anhu, he says that one time the Prophet ﷺ and the sahaba, they saw a woman who was frantic over a child that she had lost. And when she finally came across him, she pulled him with such passion and such compassion to herself, to her body. And so the Prophet ﷺ said, Can you ever imagine that this woman would ever throw her child into a fire? And they said, Never, O Messenger of Allah. If it's in her hands, she would never do it. So he said, I swear that Allah is more merciful with his servants than a mother is with her child. And we all know that Allah, the Majestic and Glorified, He describes Himself throughout the Qur'an as arhamur rahimeen, the most merciful of those who show mercy. And says to us that His mercy expands wider than all things. And our Prophet ﷺ tells us that He is more merciful with us than our own mothers are with us. And more merciful with His servants than we even are with ourselves. There is no other subject more recurrent, more reinforced in the Qur'an and the Sunnah, after the fact that Allah is unique in His oneness, than the fact that He is unimaginably merciful beyond what anyone can ever fully fathom. So how can you punish some people with hellfire and still be that God who is more merciful with His servants than a mother is with her child? We gathered about six responses to help people navigate this question. The first of them is that we say Allah is more merciful than all because everyone's mercy is in reality a manifestation. Everyone's ability to be merciful was given to them by Allah in the first place.
Does that make sense? Ibn Taymiyyah says, and if you just think about it logically, Allah must be more merciful than the most merciful mother is with a newborn because the one who made her that merciful has to be more merciful than her. You cannot give something that you do not possess. And our Prophet ﷺ alluded to this human phenomenon when he was asked why he cries over an infant that was dying. He said, this is an expression of mercy that Allah places in the hearts of whomever He wishes of His servants. In another hadith, the Prophet ﷺ said that Allah had divided mercy into 100 parts and sent one of those down distributed, spread between His entire creation. Because of it, a mother is compassionate with her child. Because of it, the creation is merciful with one another. Because of it, the animals, the humans, the jinn, the insects enjoy whatever mercy they enjoy. He even says at the end of the hadith, and I'm paraphrasing here for time, even a horse lifting its foot off of its newborn out of fear that it would hurt it is from that 1% of the mercy that He sent down. And so how can anyone really exceed Allah in mercy when we are all void of mercy except the mercy that He infuses our hearts with? That's number one. Number two, a mother's mercy is just a fraction of the universal, total mercy that every single person enjoys in their lives. There is a mercy that we all enjoy, whether you're obedient or disobedient, whether you're a believer or a non-believer, His universal mercy.
Everybody enjoys that. The very fact that He gave us life and provided us a lifetime of food and drink and oxygen and protection. Every single smooth breeze that you enjoy, every single act of kindness you enjoy, every single averted tragedy you were granted, these are all just the observable manifestations of His mercy on you. Part of that observable mercy is a mother's love, just a fraction of it. And the greater lot of His mercy, by the way, is hidden, either in the unseen or it's too subtle for us to notice, or it was just buried by our own human ingratitude and human forgetfulness. That's why the Prophet ﷺ in another narration of that earlier hadith, he said, on the day that Allah created mercy, He divided it into a hundred parts and sent only one part down to this life, to the life of this world, the dunya. He says, and if the disbeliever would know what kind of mercy is with Allah, they would make the mistake of never fearing to be punished. And if the believer, he says also, would know what is with Allah of punishment, they would never hope in His mercy. But the first half of the hadith is what we want here. Everything you ever felt, everything you ever experienced, everything you were ever granted of mercy, of compassion, was from Allah, and your mother's mercy is just a fraction of it. So He is more merciful with us than our mothers are with us. That's number two. Number three is that Allah Azza wa Jal has reserved an even greater mercy for the believers in the hereafter than all you experience here combined.
Allah Azza wa Jal, on the day of judgment, we will discover that His mercy is even greater than we realize. Ninety-nine times greater is waiting for us. And the magnitude of that mercy, once we encounter it, may Allah make us and you of those who encounter it, once you see its magnitude, it will be mind-boggling. To the point that the great Sahabi Abdullah bin Mas'ud radiallahu anhu used to say, people will continue receiving mercy on the day of judgment to the point that shaitan's heart will skip a beat. You'll think, oh man, maybe even I'm getting in on this. Even shaitan's heart will quiver from what he sees of all the mercy and those that are allowed to make shafa'a, those that are allowed to intercede. That mercy though in the hereafter is reserved for the believers. So for the believers on that day, their greatest aspiration, their greatest hope and wish will not even be their mother's mercy, it will be none other than the mercy of Allah Himself. And that's why the great Tabi'i Hamad ibn Salam, he has a very beautiful statement regarding this. He said, I swear to God, I swear to Allah, if I were given the choice, meaning on the day of judgment, to have my reckoning, my auditing, my judgment done by Allah or done by my parents, I would choose that my reckoning be with Allah because I am certain that He is more merciful with me than my own parents. And so Allah being more merciful once again with us than a mother is with her child also applies to the hereafter. If we define or understand His servants as His believing servants.
As a matter of fact, in another narration of the hadith about the woman throwing her child in a fire, Allah is more merciful with His slaves, the Prophet ﷺ actually said, And just as this woman would never throw her child in the fire, Allah would never throw His beloved in the fire. And so obviously that language, beloved, would not apply to someone who's a rebellious rejecter of God, would it? And so that's the third response. The fourth response is, though the mercy of Allah is unimaginable and innumerable and without limits, we have to remember that Allah though is not limited by His mercy. This is an important point to grasp, that although Allah's mercy is without limits, He at the same time is not limited by that mercy. Because the assumption that Allah must extend unconditional mercy even to those that reject Him, what you're in reality doing is that you're kind of posing a stalemate between God's mercy and between God's justice. So in other words, if we were to dismiss all eligibility requirements for salvation, for mercy, this would in reality be insisting that Allah be unfair with people. That's not fair judgment. And that's why in so many places throughout the Qur'an, Allah Azzawajal says the likes of, Are we going to make those who submitted, like those who committed all these crimes, like the criminals, what is with you? How do you judge? How does that even make sense? And so the perfect names and attributes and qualities of Allah Azzawajal, they all work together in harmony.
They don't trump one another. I'm sorry, that's another word we can't use anymore. It's a verb, I swear. They don't cancel each other out. Allah's quality of perfect mercy and His quality of perfect justice, they synchronize in the most harmonious way in a manner befitting His perfection, Subhanahu wa ta'ala. And that's why when you look throughout the Qur'an, you frequently find Allah's mercy in the discussion tied with Allah's justice. وَرَحْمَتِي وَسِعَتْ كُلَّ شَيْءٍ فَسَأَكْتُبُهَا لِلَّذِينَ يَتَّقُونَ My mercy encompasses all things. I will write it for those, especially for those who fear Me, who are dutiful to Me. So His mercy is universal. It fits everybody. But it is written especially for those who fear Him. إِنَّ رَحْمَةَ اللَّهِ قَرِيبٌ مِّنَ الْمُحْسِنِينَ The mercy of Allah is near to those that do good. The Prophet ﷺ himself said something similar. He said, وَإِنَّمَا يَرْحَمُ اللَّهُ مِنْ عِبَادِهِ الرُّحَمَاءِ And Allah only shows mercy to those among His slaves, only to the people that are merciful. This is perfect justice here. He shows mercy to those that have mercy, kind for kind, even though the quantity is going to be so much bigger, from His bounty and His grace and His generosity because those are at play as well. You know, even among human beings, if we were to treat the golden citizen with the brazen vigilante equally in every regard, we would be foolish and unfair. We would be unjust. Allah ﷻ says, فَمَا ظَنُّكُمْ بِرَبِّ الْعَالَمِينَ What then is your expectation, your assumption of the Lord of the worlds? Do we expect that Allah is unjust?
And so our Prophet ﷺ, he actually was given this very answer by the Sahaba when he said to them, Do you think this woman would throw her child in the fire? They said, What? لا وهي تقدر على ألا تطرحه No, no, no. She would never throw her child in the fire if she could do otherwise. Like if there is any way around it, she would make sure her child is not cast into the fire. And so in the same sense, Allah would never throw someone in the fire unless His justice necessitated that there be no other fate for that person. I mean, it's from the perfection of Allah at the end of the day that He does not equate between those that devoted their lives to Him and those that devoted their lives to oppose Him. It's from His perfection that He does not treat His allies and His enemies the exact same way. And so that's number four. The fifth answer is that Allah sending you deen and guiding you to embrace it is the greatest mercy you will ever receive in this world and in the next. Allah says, قُلْ بِفَضْلِ اللَّهِ وَبِرَحْمَتِهِ فَبِذَلِكَ فَلْيَفْرَحُوا هُوَ خَيْرٌ مِّمَّا يَجْمَعُونَ Tell them, O Muhammad ﷺ, with the bounty of Allah, meaning His great gift, وَبِرَحْمَتِهِ وَبِرَحْمَتِهِ and with His mercy, with that let them celebrate. They are better than all they collect. If you read the verses before it, it is very clear why Ibn Abbas says the context here is talking clearly about Qur'an and Islam.
Allah's greatest bounty is the Qur'an and His greatest mercy is Islam. These two, that He gave you the Qur'an and guided you to Islam, this is the greatest mercy that outweighs all humanity can ever collect. It's the life that money cannot buy. It's the genius or the perfection that no genius can ever discover. It is the comfort that even a mother cannot provide. It's the strength and the moral fortitude to get through life and its anxieties and its distress. It's the inner peace that no tragedy can ever undermine. And it's that very same mercy, by the way, that makes you eligible for an upgrade on this stuff in the hereafter. As the Prophet ﷺ said, nobody is going to be admitted to paradise by their deeds. They said, not even you, O Messenger of Allah ﷺ. He said, not even I, unless Allah envelops me in a mercy from Him and a bounty. So if you want to put it a little differently, it was by Allah's sheer mercy and bounty that He offered you Islam. And then by His sheer mercy and bounty that He humbled you to embrace the Prophet's path. And then by His sheer mercy and bounty that He accepts your temporary, weak, flawed attempt at walking His Prophet's path to be given in exchange for it a priceless paradise forever. Subhanahu wa ta'ala. And that's how you understand the haitian sunnah al-tirmidhi when the Prophet ﷺ also said, for Allah to punish the residents, the inhabitants of the skies and the earth, He would do so without being wrongful in doing so. وَلَوْ أَنَّهُ رَحِمَهُمْ لَكَانَتْ رَحْمَتُهُ خَيْرًا لَهُمْ مِّنْ أَعْمَالِهِمْ But if He were to have mercy on them, His mercy for them would be far greater than their deeds.
He sent you the opportunity to deeds, and He guided you to those deeds. And we stumbled and fumbled in those deeds, and He made it all right in the end. Subhanahu wa ta'ala. As for those who, by the way, reject this opportunity, they have by that, by their behavior and actions, they've opted out of mercy. They've opted for Allah's justice with their actions. And so they are essentially saying with every deed that they do, I don't want this mercy. It is not Allah who wanted to give it to them, who deprived them of this mercy. You know, there's such an amazing hadith, Aisha radiallahu anha says in Sahih Muslim, that the Prophet ﷺ said, لَيْسَ أَحَدٌ أَلْعُذْرُ أَحَبُّ إِلَيْهِ مِنَ اللَّهِ مِنْ أَجْلِ ذَٰلِكَ أَنزَلَ الْكِتَابَ وَأَرْسَلَ الرُّسُلُ I have seven minutes. No one loves to pardon people more than Allah. And for that very reason, he sent scripture and he dispatched messengers. Yet despite Allah loving, at the end of the day, we have enough free will to be accountable. Some people insist with that free will to continue to steamroll ahead and experience ultimately what they were in denial about and mocked forever. As for the people, by the way, who did not do this, did not hear the message, that's a separate category altogether, because that's also a problem that people may have. What about the person who didn't actively reject? No, the Prophet ﷺ, he says, My example and yours, here I am grabbing you by your clothes from jumping into the fire and you're slipping from my hands. Allah does not want you to go to Jahannam. The Prophet ﷺ does not wish for you to be doomed.
And the one that the Prophet ﷺ came in contact with, this is the person that the one that could be subject to falling into that fire. As for those that never heard the message, he told us about them in the hadith of al-Aswad ibn Sari' narrated by Ahmad and Ibn al-Qayyim and others believe the hadith is authentic. Collectively, with all its trains of transmission combined, they bolster each other, that there are four types of people and these are like four categories. There are more than four types, inshallah. Four types of people that will protest to Allah on the day of judgment. The deaf person, the insane person, the decrepit old man and the man born or that lived in the interval, meaning between Jesus and Muhammad ﷺ. In other words, the people that were too old or too impaired to understand or receive, get a good look at the message, they're going to protest to Allah on the day of judgment and say, I didn't hear about this stuff. I didn't know. How am I liable for something outside of my capacity? And so Allah will take a promise from them to be obedient and He will send them a messenger that they have to obey because this life is supposed to be a test. If they were not tested in this life, then they will be given equal opportunity. So, they are given a messenger that they have to obey and the messenger says, follow me into the hellfire. And so those that would follow him will find themselves in paradise. And those that refuse to follow this messenger, after speaking to God, after seeing his messenger, you think it's extra hard but it's also extra easy, isn't it? Those that refuse to follow him, only those would be dragged to it. The sixth and final one, there's something inshallah you go back to in the paper because it's quite nuanced and beautiful, is that even those who Allah sends into the fire,
the hellfire itself contains multiple layers of mercy. We mentioned three of them in this paper. Of them is that there is a therapeutic function. Ibn al-Qayyim has awesome writings on this. We've quoted some of them in the paper. Therapeutic functions that a person has contracted certain filth that they need to get scrubbed off if all the other stations of forgiveness don't work. This is the station of purification for them. And also is that there is great gratitude described in the Qur'an for the people in paradise when they see their seat in the fire. That could have been me. Those people that I know were about to drag me down, cause me to doubt my religion, cause me to walk away, makes them feel overjoyed, nothing words can describe. That's the second one, a layer of mercy. A third of them is that the hellfire itself will be a consolation for those that deserve to be avenged. The same way in the Qur'an Allah tells us that He avenged Banu Israel, the Israelites, by drowning Pharaoh, وَأَنْتُمْ تَنظُرُونَ while you get to see that. Likewise, Jahannam, people that have seen their character assassinated, their children killed, their lands pillaged, will feel that they have been vindicated, they have been avenged by the most just, by seeing their oppressors get what's coming to them. At the end of the day, coming full circle, what we need to start doing is consider the reality of reality, the dual nature of existence. Consider the human condition with the nature of God. Consider the human being entirely dependent on Allah in every way imaginable. Consider the blood in your veins, every single heartbeat, how much does it pump?
Every single blood cell that got pumped in that heartbeat has a fatal potential, it can clog and kill you, that Allah by His mercy averts, He prevents it subhanahu wa ta'ala. Consider the water He sends down from the clouds, and He orders that it be released for you. Every single raindrop could choke you, and it could poison you, and by His mercy it doesn't. Consider a lifetime of smiles and comforts and close calls and restful sleeps, all of that by His mercy. Consider how He continues drawing closer to you every single day, while having no need for you whatsoever, simply because He is Al-Wadud, He is the most loving subhanahu wa ta'ala. Consider how He does not withhold mercy from the later generations, because the previous generations betrayed the covenant, the trust to protect the scripture. Consider how a person on an individual level can reject God's scripture, reject God's calling, His message for an entire lifetime, or even persecute people for being believers, and with one honest, genuine, sincere tear that they shed on their deathbed, in apology to Allah, He would accept it from them. Consider that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala wrote as the Prophet ﷺ said, in a statement that is inscribed above His throne, أن رحمتي وسعت غضبي that, my mercy has superseded my anger. Consider that He continues to show you mercy beyond what you can imagine, waiting on you, though not needing you, all because of what? Because He is Ar-Rahman, the infinitely merciful. You add all of that up, and then you consider who goes to the hellfire after all of this. That's what we need to do. We need to start saying, someone that goes,
gets doomed after all of that, must have really done it to themselves. As Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says, to reorient us, إِنَّ اللَّهَ لَا يَظْلِمُ النَّاسَ شَيْئًا وَلَكِنَّ النَّاسَ أَنفُسَهُمْ يَظْلِمُونَ Allah does not wrong people whatsoever, in the least, at all. Rather it is the people who wrong themselves. So we need to anchor ourselves, to close up now, in this, in an age of just unprecedented criticism of religion and God, you believing or staying believing, anchoring yourself in the belief that Allah is more merciful with me, and more merciful with whoever's fate we may be wondering about, than a mother is with her child, that is not a given. That needs to be nourished, and replenished, and protected, by regular visits to His book, for contemplation, and for regular consistent, meaningful ritual devotion to Him subhanahu wa ta'ala. And we ask Allah to spare us of His justice which we deserve, and to make us the most joyous of people, to be earners of His mercy. Allahumma ameen. May Allah boggle our minds and yours with seeing His face and His mercy on the day of judgment. May Allah's peace and blessings be upon our Prophet Muhammad, and upon his family and companions. Jazakallah khairan.
Welcome back!
Bookmark content
Download resources easily
Manage your donations
Track your spiritual growth
1 items
1 items
1 items
25 items
50 items
9 items
