Why Abu Jahl Rejected Truth He Knew

Continuing where we left off last night in the verses of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala introduced us to an individual who was of the chief antagonist of the prophet sallall.aii Alw and Alwira. He is the father of most notably Wit. As a matter of fact, he had lots of children. Some historians mention at least 10 while others place them at around 13. And close to half of them are confirmed to have become Muslim in spite of their father's insistence on disbelief. So much so that he would constantly threaten his children with regards to believing in Islam or following the prophet sallall.aii wasallam. He was noted to have threatened his children constantly that if you become Muslim, what they referred to as the time at the time in their language was mean meaning. If you follow Muhammad and embrace his religion, then you will not get any portion of my will and I will not continue to support you. So in doing this he really affected the choices that his children made. And this is perhaps one of the reasons that Khaled Wid himself only became Muslim way later, just before the conquest of Mecca in the sixth or seventh year after Hijra, after the battle of after the battle of Alb. And so this had a big a big effect on the people around him. He would control people with his money, with his wallet. And as we mentioned yesterday, his wealth was not just a source of pride for him. It was his identity. He was known to be the most wealthy man in Mecca, one of the most wealthy men ever in the Arab Peninsula. And so his wealth was a very touchy subject to him. And Abu Jahel is ali's nephew. So Abu Jaham, he is the nephew, the paternal nephew of Alw. And as was reported by Alakim and others, Abb tells us about an incident in which Ali Mur's fate was sealed. Alw Mur had plenty of chances to change his ways. He remained the most staunch enemy of the prophet sallall.aii wasallam from the first year of his prophethhood until the day he died three months after hijah. So that's how many years close to 14 years he made his choice time and time again to fight against the prophet sallall.aii alaihi wasallam and the Muslim and he spent a lot of money doing that and he seduced with his money a lot of people away from Islam in order to take them to hell with him. But when did this all start? What was the first moment when his fate was really really sealed? These are the verses in surah mud that mention to us the first time when he initially made that conscious choice to disbelieve in Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to disbelieve in the prophet sallall.aii wasallam and to actively fight against Allah and his messenger Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says forch.

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In these verses, we get the first moment that you can almost the way Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala relates to us the details of him making this decision. You can almost see the gears in his in his mind moving to figure out a way to reject the truth but maintain his position as a man of justice. That's a very precarious thing to balance, isn't it? to reject the truth in one hand but then claim to be a a a a vanguard of the truth in the other. This is what we call cognitive dissonance. This is what we call compartmentalization as psychologists would call it and that is that a person starts to lead two lives at the same time. They have two faces. One face they talk this out of and the other face they talk this out of. When those two ve faces occur, that is the moment that the person reached his crossroads and chose to go left. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala tells us of this moment in great detail. Ib Abbass sheds a little bit more light on the context of these verses. He mentions that as was customary the prophet sallallah.aii alaihi wasallam would sit at the haram and as we've mentioned before the Kaa and the masid around it right where people would make this is where the chieftains of Mecca and the different tribes would have their ni their nedi a nadi is is a place where they would meet it's a hall right And each tribe had their own medus around the Ka and the major chieftains and the tribe leaders would go and they would sit there and people would come in with their different issues or whatever it is. This is where they would meet and spend most of their time. And the prophet sallallah.aii alaihi wasallam would come there to the haram and he would pray at the ka there and he would try to talk to whoever was there whoever came through go to the different noadi around the ka recite the Quran any new verses of the Quran that were revealed he would recite them on the chieftains there he would try to speak to people as they were in talf and sometimes he would just sit there and wait for people to come and sit down and listen to what he had to say. And so on one occasion we have the prophet sallallah.aii wasallam sitting as was customary there and reciting the newer verses of the Quran. And who was spotted in that gathering but al spotted in that gathering sitting there listening to the Quran now because many of us even the Arabs amongst us we grow up speaking Arabic but we're speaking about an Arabic that is 1500 years ago not only has the language changed but the context of the langage language has changed and the environment of the language has changed. And so now when you want to understand the Quran as the prophet and his companions understood it, you have to go out of your way and dedicate yourself to the discipline of learning that Arabic. It's not just something you're born with. Nobody naturally speaks that language anymore as it was. And that's the way that languages are. They evolve. They develop as different civilizations interact with each other. But the Arabic language has been particularly pres preserved by the scholars of Islam because of its critical nature and relationship to the Quran and Sunnah. You can never understand what Allah and his messenger said unless you understand not just Arabic but that language that they spoke and you know as the language changed even the different tools or different daily things that they had we don't do these things anymore and so the names for those tools or those things also now doesn't mean anything to us. We didn't grow up using those things. So the scholars of Islam at at certain points would even draw images of these different tools. Just this is a side issue but to show you the meticulous detailoriented nature of the scholars of Islam. Iban Hajar is an 8th century scholar. Iban Hajar mentioned a narration that had a term in it that basically was a backscratcher. You know it is a back scratcher. You ever see that wooden thing that's shaped this at the top and you use it to scratch your back? You know what I'm talking about, right? Certainly not an issue. H how is that important? Because that word was no longer used in his generation. He researched it and drew a picture of what that back scratcher looked because of this one very obscure narration that mentions this back scratcher. And he said because I feared that this word would be lost to the Muslim and they would not be able to conceptualize what this word means in the narration. This is the detail that we're speaking about. And so if a person wants to understand really how captivating the Quran was, it is hard for it. it it doesn't have that same it doesn't elicit those exact same emotions and it doesn't have that visceral effect even on Arab speakers unless they have learned that Arabic language. The Quran in the time when it was revealed was so eloquent, so visceral, so surreal, so jarring in its vividness and so uncanny that the people of Mecca used to hide their children when the prophet sallall.aii wasallam would walk down the street for fear that they would hear some of those verses. It was so eloquent and so incredibly surreal and vivid and frightening to them that Abu Jahi and others of the chieftains of Mecca used to leave their house and hide at night and wait for the prophet sallall.aii alaihi wasallam to come to pray at night as he would do at the Kaa and listen to the Quran until the break of dawn. This is how captivating the Quran was to them. I mean, we are Muslim and you'd be hardressed to find many of us that would spend every single night to the break of dawn hiding to listen to the Quran. Abu Jah used to hide behind the cloak of the Kaa, standing up against the wall of the Kaa all night just to hear the Quran. Abu Jah. And so this is the effect that the Quran had. who was seen in that gathering listening to those new verses. And when came back to his nadi, to his gathering, he said to the other chieftains,.

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He said, "I have never heard words like that before. It has such a beautiful veneer on it and it has such a sweetness to it. I don't want it to stop." He said the top of it is just fruit after fruit after fruit and its bottom is deep and visceral as if he were describing a tree. He said this is this is saying this. He said, "I swear that these words are the highest words I have ever heard and no one can hope to beat these words. I don't know where he's bringing this from." And so he's talking this and he's saying this while he was still kind of jarred by just having listened to the prophet sallall.aii wasallam recite verses of the Quran. And so he left. Abu Jah came his nephew and the other chieftain said, "It looks your uncle W is getting ready to become Muslim." I mean, he came and he gave us this big speech about how great the Quran is. It sounds he's starting to lean to towards that. And so Abu Jahil said, "Leave him to me." And so Ib Abbas tells us that Abu Jahil being the cockroach that he was, he knew exactly how to push his uncle's buttons. And so he went to his uncle. Remember the most wealthy man in all of Mecca. A man who's not only finds his wealth to be a source of pride, but his wealth is his identity. Abu Jahi knows that and he understands that weakness about his uncle's character. And so he went to his uncle and he said, "The chieftains and the tribe leaders were just speaking that they want to pull some money together to give you as a stipen in your old age." He said, "Qores knows I am the most wealthy man amongst them. Them give me money." He said, 'Yeah, because it seems that they're under the impression that you're starting to listen to Muhammad because he offered you some money and maybe things aren't as strong in your financials as we thought. So maybe we wanted to get some money together for you. You're so old and take care of you." And this perked him right up. He said, He said knows that I am the most wealthy amongst them. What an insult to say such a thing to me to even to even assume such a thing. Of course, they never said that. Abuja had made all of this up. And he said, "Well, if that's the case, I mean, they're confused. So, you should come and give a final answer. to the chieftains and to the youth and really take a staunch clear position so that nobody is confused anymore because everybody seems to think that you've become Muslim. And so he said, "Okay, let me think about what I'm going to say." And so this moment when he was to go and say what he believed or say what his pride was driving him to say. That was the crossroads. Same thing with same thing with Abu Jah. Every one of us, every human being reaches that crossroads where you make that one choice and it changes the direct the trajectory of your life entirely. And so he as Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said that he started to think what am I going to say? What am I going to say these words are? Because for us to say that the Quran is from Allah, this answers the questions. But for a person to say the Quran is not from Allah. This raises many more questions than it does answers. You can't just deny it and think it's going to go away. You have to explain then where did it come from? And so this was the position they were in. If we're going to deny this book and take this position against Muhammad, we need to figure out what we're going to say as to where this book came from. And that is what he was going through here. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said he then looked off into the to the distance thinking and then he kind of frowned and furred his bro his brow furled his brow and then he said Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said that he then at that moment decided to reject the truth and turn away from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and he came and said he is not a magician because we have seen all kinds of magic and this is not any of that. He is not a poet because we have heard all of the poetry and the best of poetry and it is not in any way similar to that. He is not a madman because these wisdoms cannot come from a mad man. He is not a liar because we know him for all these years. The best thing for us to say is that he's a magician in the sense that he divides between a man and his own son and a mother and her own child because they saw Muhammad as a troublemaker sallallahu alaihi wasallam. We were all united and loved each other as big family and then this man comes and now fathers and their sons aren't talking to each other anymore. Now he's dividing us. We need to unite, not divide with each other. This man is bringing nothing but trouble and division to our ranks. This is what they believe. This is what they were saying. And so he said, "And this is most similar to being magic or this is most similar to be something that he's being taught by someone else, someone that's not here. Someone is using him. He's not a liar, but he's being lied to." And so Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said that his conclusion was this is magic that is being inherited and passed down from some ancestors who are magicians. Bashar. This is actually the words of some other beings or some other people that are not amongst us. But we know that he's not the one who is manufacturing these words. This is a very critical moment that Allah documented in the Quran. And why did he document it? Because as we said, never read the Quran and look at any verse as being a verse that is for someone else. If you're reading the Quran that way, you're reading it wrong. Every single verse of the Quran has some application to every single one of us. When you read the verses, you look at these verses, you understand them, and then you think, how does this apply to me? Do I have an element of in myself? What part of me is a part of the spirit of that that needs to be drowned out from my ego, drowned out from my behavior, drowned out from my attitude that has this is why Allah documents these things in the Quran. We will continue this. We've gone way over our time. All subhanahu All.

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Alhamdulillah.