Five Sunnah Practices Every Muslim Should Know

Today in we begin a new chapter in which is traditionally placed and this subject matter and topic is traditionally placed in the chapters of the books of regarding of right regarding purification in the midst of and and so forth. And the reason for that is that this topic closely follows those those topics etc. they are all driving towards the conditions of salah and being that they do have a general connection to personal hygiene the this topic is usually placed in that area of the books of and that is the topic of sun What is the singular for the word sun? Sunnah, right? Sunnah. What is sunnah in the Arabic language? A sunnah is a way. A way. And a sunn is the ways of al meaning the original pure disposition upon which Allah created every human being. The human being is naturally created. We don't have instincts as human beings. We don't know how to instinctually hunt. Right? We don't know how to instinctually fight. These are not things that we're born with an animal is. But we have something much higher than that. Something that doesn't necessarily pertain to our body, but it pertains to our mind and our heart and soul. And that is al the prophet sallall.aii Wasam tells us in Bkari Muslim. And so the prophet sallall.aii alaihi wasallam says every newborn human being is born upon the fra the natural disposition the natural disposition of the oneness of Allah only one creator the natural disposition of understanding that there is none worshiped along with Allah and the natural disposition of a general moral compass. A general moral compass, right? Lying is wrong. stealing is wrong. Harming or hurting, transgressing. a general ingrained compass that gives us this feeling of right and wrong, morality, judgment, true, false, the distinction between just and unjust in a very general and broad sense. This is why the human being naturally children and human beings when they grow up and most human beings unless they really really really work hard at it have real physiological responses to telling a lie, right? Which is how polygraphs work. You know polygraphs they call lie detectors. How do they work really? Well, it just monitors things your heart rate and your body temperature and things that, your blood pressure. Because when people lie or when people fabricate falsehood, their body physically rebels against this. It physically responds to this. Unless they have practiced lying so much that they have become pathological, they have become a complete and utter psychopath, then you know polygraphs won't really do much for that kind of person. But the human being naturally is born with this response. And so that general moral compass it also entails and includes the natural hygiene of the human being. You know how cats naturally clean themselves, right? That's an instinct for them. We call that instinct. For human beings, we have alra which is personal hygiene. This is how Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala created the human being with this particular set of hygienic practices that the person practices in himself whether it's male or female whether it's you know whether the person is old or young these are the practices of alra including the prophets and messengers Right. So this chapter is regarding.

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Abua narrates that the messenger of Allah. Wasallam said five practices are of the he says the first is for.

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The first isad. at which is translated almost literally to shaving. Shaving what? Shaving the pubic hair. Now the scholars differ on what pubic hair really is linguistically and legislatively. What part of the body what what exact hair is supposed to be removed. The prophet sallallah.aii first of all uses the hadith meaning which is shaving and that is the best way the best way with respect to the pubic hair is to shave. What about if a person trims it or cuts it? This is permissible. But the best way the way that the prophet sallall.aii alaihi wasallam did it and the companions did it is they would use a razor or shave it down to the skin. The pubic hair in the correct opinion is linguistically and legislatively any hair which grows around the front or back private parts of the human being. So around the front private parts of male or female between the legs the area which is called the perennial which is between the two private parts and then any hair that is be around the anus or between the two you know what do you call them? glu glutamous maximuses whatever it is right you get the idea so this is all called the dead this is all called in the Arabic language and this is all removed all of it is all to be shaved and as we will hear this is all to be done at least once every 40 days at least if the grows back within that time. Somebody has some kind of freakishly slow regrowth of their hair and it takes them a 100 days to grow back then it would be once every 100 days. However, the prophet sallallah.aii wasallam for the average person mentions 40 days in the narration of and im Ahmed. The next he mentions is alan. Alan is is circumcision. Okay. Circumcision. Circumcision traditionally is to be done on the seventh day after boy is born. In the correct opinion, it is obligatory for boys. It is preferred for girls. However, it is very different between boys and girls and for the boy, it is ideal to have it done on the seventh day. However, we now live in the super mega you know 1984 utopia where government is our daddy and our mommy and they do everything for us and we can't do anything for ourselves. used to be that a man would have a child, take it to the village circumciser, right? He would circumcise it there in his thing and you can do that at any time on the 7th day. But now it has to be in a hospital and they have to charge you exorbitant amounts of money to do it. you have to have insurance and you know you have to make sure that you document it because you know the government needs to know what's between your children's legs. So the issue now is that if you were to take your child home and then try to come back on the on the seventh day to do this it will throw a monkey branch in that in that process. So often times circumcision is done in the hospital before the child is taken home. Usually one or two days one or two days after the child is born. Is that ideal? No. But is it correct? Yes, it's correct. It is correct and permissible. And it is ideally and the best time to do the circumcision is on the seventh day during the right and that's why it's called a right however any time that it can be done is fine. The third is cutting or trimming the mustache.

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Slay. When we look at the narrations here, we see trimming the mustache. Now we have different wordings of this narration in Muslim. Some wordings tell us trimming the the mustache meaning with scissors. Others tell us lightening the mustache. Others tell us shaving the mustache. Which one of them is correct? The correct opinion is that all of these are acceptable. All of these are acceptable and all of them have been narrated from the prophet sallall.aii wasallam's words. However, they're not all on the same level. Right? And what the three except for the of Hanifh is that the mustache is to be trimmed. How much should it be trimmed? Again, this is something that is to a person's desire as long as it does not go down below the top lip. This is the point when it should be cut. There's a time when the prophet sallallah.aii wasallam was sitting and a couple of men came and sat down and they had very long whiskers, mustaches. And so the prophet sallallah.aii wasallam called for a pair of scissors and a siwek. you know the sew and he had each of them come and he placed the siwak on their lip and cut what was going beyond that. This is what he did sallallahu alaihi wasallam when we look at descriptions of his mustache we see that it was cut. Is it permissible to shave? Yes. This is the med of and it is an acceptable med as it relies on the narrations some of the wordings of the prophet sallall.aii alaihi wasallam's narrations and for the most part the all agree on this. What do they really differ on? What do they really differ on? Huh? Well, details. But even details, most of the differences of opinion between them and that hip is what? What's better? What's good and what's better? what's bad and what's worse, not what's halal and haram. That's a very rare difference of opinion. Where one MB will say this is halal, another med says this is haram. This is very rare, extremely rare. The main difference of opinion in mahib, we could probably say 85% even 90% of the differences in the madib are what? in details and in better good and better, bad and worse. The last two and we'll these are quick. He says plucking the hair of the armpit. Person may say plucking the hair of the armpit. Yes, plucking the hair of the armpit. Is it uncomfortable? Yes. Is there a method to it? Yes, there is a method to doing it. Right. We'll speak about that in a second. But the way that the prophet did it sallallahu alaihi wasallam is he would pluck the hair of the armpit. He would not shave it. And when you pluck it, you don't have a lot of other things that come with shaving such as infections or ingrown hairs. And it also takes the hair a very long time to grow back. It's more hygienic. It is better for the skin area. However, shaving is acceptable and famously said, "I personally shave mine because I cannot handle the pain of plucking them." This was his personal preference. The best way to pluck the armpit hair is if there is sweat say at the end of a day or a work day etc. when the hair is a little bit that is the time when it comes out and a person plucks it not just grabbing and randomly pulling out hair. You're going to be doing that all night. it is to be done in what do you call it an order or or you know from top to bottom it's all the area that is in the white skin under the armpit and alhamdulillah once a person begins to pluck the nerves kick in and it goes numb in that area can pluck it very well. This is the best way. Is it permissible to wax it? Yeah, it's permissible. It's going to really hurt, right? And you know, you might need your wife's help with that. I don't know if that's a good look for you. Whatever you do, you know, whatever floats your boat, but that is all permissible. The last and final thing that he mentions is which is clipping the fingernails. This is for both men and women. Most all of these are for for men and women except for trimming the mustache. A woman who has hair growing on her upper lip in the correct opinion may shave that or wax it or whatever to remove it. but for a man, he is to either shave or trim his mustache. And a lot of that also has to do with the place that a person lives in the culture. here in this masid, 90% of us or 99% of us trim our mustaches. We keep our mustaches. There's a lot of Arabs and a lot of old-timers that have a lot of value for the mustache, etc. If she Ali came in tomorrow with a completely shaved mustache, it would be jarring, right? It would almost be offensive. And this is why the sunnah is so broad so that person can do whatever will make them fit in the most. And so trimming the fingernails again the absolute longest a person may go without trimming his fingernails is 40 days as the prophet sallallah.aii wasallam mentioned. However trimming of the fingernails should take place anytime the fingernails become a harbor of dirt and become unhygienic. When the fingernail grows to the point where it starts holding grease, holding dirt, holding person uses the bathroom etc. can't clean himself properly. This is when it becomes necessary to trim the fingernails if not at least once every 40 days. And that goes for women as well. what would our prophet's reaction be to seeing our women that say taking plastic fingernails that look claws off of something that crawled out of hell and putting plastering them onto their hands to where it's you know, this is there's no class. It's not even classy, right? But further than that, it is categorically haram for a number of reasons. And we'll discuss this in more detail next time.