Why We Must Learn Islam Directly from the Source

Just a reminder that tonight will be at 8:30 in sha Allah. Starting this evening will be at 8:30.

[Silence]

We have now completed two of the three forms of purification that we as Muslims perform in order to make our spirits and make our bodies pure in a state of purity to be able to stand in front of Allah in salah to be able to make around the Kaaba and to be able to handle the words of Allah and the Quran. Allah has mentioned that this act of purification which is known in the books of as a rough hadath or taking a person out of a state of hadath. We described and discussed what that meant before. He divides it into two types. There is purification with water and there's purification with the soil, which is tayammum. And the purification with water is two types. It's two types based on a person's state of being. And that is that the person is either in a state of major hadath, in which he or she must bathe, or a person is in a state of minor hadath, in which the person is to make wudu. And we discussed both of those, alhamdulillah, in great detail. If we're honest, if we're honest with ourselves, unless we particularly went out of our way and spent months, maybe even more, in study, we are essentially, many of us, and many people that you meet, they are making wudu, making salah, making ghusl, right? They're doing these things based on what? Based on whatever they picked up throughout their lives incidentally. Incidentally. I'm speaking from experience. if we grew up in a Muslim household, whatever we saw being done, we did. And throughout our lives, if we saw something or heard something or picked something up incidentally along the way, great. But that's really the end of it. What have we done here in this in these sessions in the past 6 months or so? I think we started at the end of Ramadan. So, that's about 6 months, right? In the past 6 months, we have now gone to the actual source. We actually have relearned these things from the Quran and from the Sunnah with evidences. And we learned the conclusions drip derived directly from the narrations and evidences of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. This is a huge achievement. And let me tell you, I have met many of men lying on their deathbeds frantically scrambling trying to learn things that they had their entire life to learn. To try to get ready for this most important thing in the last day or two or week or two of their lives. Is that the time to learn? No. The time to learn is all the life that passed. That's when we learn. A lot of times we don't learn how to make Salat al-Janazah until someone dies. That's not the time to learn. We don't learn to make Hajj or Umrah until we are forced to go. It's not the time to learn. The time to learn is when a person is in a state of calm, state of peace. Person may say, "Well, I'm so busy." You're right. But this all goes back to the idea the fantasy that the companions radiyallahu anhu were somehow less busy than we are. Let me tell you, the companions lived an infinitely more busy life to achieve a fraction of what we get done in an hour in our daily life. You're right, they weren't day trading on the stock market, right? They weren't, you know, making brokering deals and they weren't, you know, carrying around cell phones and yeah, sure. But a lot of that is busy work. I think, especially the elders amongst us, they know that it's busy work. Imagine if we had to imagine what the companions had to do just to make sure there was water to drink. Imagine. You had to get to a well, and the well was such and such distance. You had to wait. There's a line at the well. Can't just jump the line. And people have herds of cattle and livestock that they have. If you want to bathe, you got to make a fire, and then you got to heat the water up, and then you got to bathe, and then you got to if you want to eat something, you have to source the food, you have to cook the food, right? Things that we get done in a fraction of an hour. We get up in the morning, we take a shower, we brush our teeth, we, you know, do all these things, etc., wash our clothes, press our clothes, do all these things, and a half an hour these things are done, eat breakfast, and we're out the door, and it used to take them half a day to get these things done. But then they had, on top of that, all of the things we have to do to survive. They had jobs, they had work, they had So, there's no difference between us in the sense of they had time, we didn't have time. A lot of times when we think about the companions, we think about simpler times. We imagine that they were just, you know, just sitting under the tree with the with the pieces with the straw in the mouth, you know, drowsy afternoon, just watching the goats, you know, come go to and fro and just sitting around, you know, playing playing marbles and tossing rocks. Absolutely not. They were rather, you know, exponentially more busy than we are. But how did they learn? They made time. They made sacrifices. That's what's demanded of you. So now, we are going to get into the second half of purification, which is purification with by way of tayammum. And this, honestly, is one of the most mysterious things to a lot of people, but it's one of the easiest things that a person can learn. Yes, there's a lot of rulings and there's a lot of discussion amongst the scholars of Islam with respect to the intricacies of tayammum, but in practice, tayammum is what? It's rather simple. And one more thing I wanted to mention, looking back at our achievement here in the past 6 months, not only did we learn from the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wasallam directly, and now we know for certain a lot of things that we maybe knew only by way of rumor or suspected before, but on top of that, now your children, those around you, family, they are learning from you the cycle of rumors has been broken. Because if a person doesn't return to the source, it's playing a game of telephone. You remember telephone when you were kids? If we have if we got up in into a if we all lined up and you whisper something a statement into one person's ear and then they whisper it and by the time it reaches the end it's usually a completely different thing than the what the first person said. Right? And that happens with the religion and its practices. That does happen. And that's why even amongst scholars the prophet Alayhi Wasallam tells us that at the at every 100 years Allah sends a scholar as a revivalist of the sciences of Islam. This is what the prophet Alayhi Wasallam tells us. That at every 100 years Allah Subhana Wa Ta'ala brings up the scholar of scholars that acts as a revivalist of his generation and the generations to come for the next 100 years. Why? Because again, this is what happens when people are not precise, they do things, they say things and it dulls as it goes down the row and it has to be revived. Even the sciences of Islam. You see, if you are to look in certain in the sciences of Islam you can find places where a major scholar , in a land and then for the next 50, 60, 100 years, all the other scholars are basically just disseminating his breakthroughs and his work. Right? But then they start to take that for granted, and even with scholarship, because knowledge is knowledge is huge. It's it's a it's an ocean that has no shore. Right? And so if if you live 10 lifetimes, you wouldn't be able to accumulate , you know, the sciences and the knowledge in the Islamic library. It's just not possible. So scholars have to rely on other scholars, especially in fields that is not their own. However, even that starts to dull over time, and it has to be revived. And so Allah Subhana Wa Ta'ala sends every 100 years, he brings up a scholar as a revivalist, a revivalist of his era. And the scholars did, you know, they debate which scholars in which eras are this one person, right? And so, , for instance, in the time of the Tabi'in, it is most usually cited as, , Sa'id ibn al-Musayyib, radiyallahu rahmatullahi ta'ala. And in the second century, in the first century, , you know, in that second 100 years is ash-Shafi'i, and in the third 100 years is at-Tabari, and in the fourth 100 years is And each scholar has different, , different, , different educated guesses as to who this person is, right? We can't say definitively, but we do know that every 100 years, there's a revivalist. And this is a huge mercy from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. If you notice our religion, especially in the current time, we don't have any central caliphate. We don't have any central religious figure. for instance, we don't have a pope, right? Even Even in Hinduism, they have certain people that are supposed to be the incarnation of whatever god or saint in order to what? In order to keep people together. Otherwise, people splinter because religion is innately divisive. However, in our religion, in spite of not having these things, the Muslimin are still what? In agreeance over 90% of all of their religion. 90%. And that's why And you want the best evidence of that? Watch a salah during Hajj season at the Haram. Subhanallah, not one person from all walks of life comes assuming that Zuhr is five rak'ahs. Not one. Not one of them comes assuming that there is two ruku' and one sujud. Not one of them differs on the wording of the Quran. How is this? This is a miracle from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Other religions, they never had this. And that's why they had to have prophets sent. But, in this ummah, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has trusted this ummah so much that he has left what was for the prophets in previous nations for the scholars. And now we all have taken directly from the scholars of Islam, directly from the prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, and we've restarted the cycle. So, now when we teach our children, teach them with authority. When we teach our brothers, we teach them with authority. So, we've taken ghusl and wudu, and now, inshallah, starting tomorrow, we'll begin with the rulings of at-tayammum. It's not difficult. It's not complicated. We'll discuss it, and we'll go through it bit by bit, inshallah ta'ala. And then we will move on into the book of salah, and we will discuss, bi idhnillah, the rulings of salah, followed by az-zakah, followed by fasting, and then after about 50 years, we'll get to hajj and umrah, inshallah. And inshallah, by three generations from now, we'll have finished the book entirely.