Library Chat #16: The Return of Jesus In Islamic Theology | Shaykh Dr. Yasir Qadhi

the issue about uh isabel maryam coming back at the end of times is one that has caused a little bit of controversy uh in the last few years online and before this point in time has also been a point of contention for actually for the last few decades i thought that in today's library chat let's take an academic look let's remove ourselves from the emotional back and forth and let us see uh the reality of this issue and uh allow the evidences to speak for themselves so today's talk is going to be about a very interesting topic and it's also one that uh on the one hand it is a very introductory level in the sense that everybody will benefit but on the other hand because of the nature of this talk there will be quite a lot of packed information with names and dates and uh i will be at times speeding up uh i i know people say i talk uh quickly but i think i'm gonna have to speed up quite a lot for this particular talk because i have quite a lot of information i want to just um put into today's library chat so it is at the same time an introduction and that also it is a very uh comprehensive ish allah introductory level talk obviously i always make that caveat so that people don't think that this is the end all in be all uh today's talk will be dealing with theology uh with history even with methodology and before i begin i'd like to point out that there's there's two primary ways to look at a controversy or to look at a contentious issue usually what i do is one of the ways to look at it is to start from the end and to lay out all of the opinions and then to backtrack and say who says what and why did they say that and that's a very standard and academic approach you can flip it around and you have another approach and that is to build and that is to go back to the beginning and say what does the quran have to say what does the sunnah have to say and so today we're going to be following that particular procedure and i'm going to be working chronologically forward and what we're going to do is divide this entire library chat into a number of different sections firstly does the quran mention the return of isabel maryam or not secondly what does the hadith have to say and is are they a hadith or not and who said their mutterwater thirdly what did the early scholars of islam have to say about this issue fourthly the is there unanimous consensus on this issue fifthly what do the other strands of islam say sunni islam is obviously you know generally clear but what do the other strands of islam say and then finally sixth point uh what is the modern controversy and where did this arise and who are the main figures and players with regards to the modern controversy so uh this is a fairly comprehensive uh lengthy introduction to the entire topic and i did spend a good amount of time uh around a day and a half doing uh this research to demonstrate a methodology of how we talk about uh contentious issues so we begin from the beginning and that is the book uh the book of allah the quran the quran uh has four verses in it that are used by samurai uh to posit that the quran preaches the return of isabel imagine two of these verses have the exact same phrase in them and so in reality it boils down to three particular phrases in the quran because once again there are four verses but two of the verses are pretty much the same for what we want to do so the two that are the same are al imran 46 and maeda 110 and the both of them have the phrase that is going to speak this is repeated twice in the quran he shall speak isabel maryam shall speak to mankind which basically means you know in the cradle uh is going to speak as a baby now uh the the word kahal has been defined by many early scholars including that kahel means when the whiteness of the hair begins to appear so that's what kahl means and the actual age is something that is disputed most say around 40 some say 35 some say even beyond the age of 30. the number is not what is important means that uh at an older age and the the notion here is that the quran says something that should be miraculous that he is going to speak as a baby and he's going to speak at an older age now it's not a miracle to speak at an older age but if isabel maryam is not around at an older age then this is a prediction that he's going to come back and speak when he's an older man so both the word kahel and the context of the verse according to a group of scholars is indicating that isabelliam is going to come back and uh this is the interpretation of quite a number of early authorities nonetheless it is not something that is explicit and uh the verse is ambiguous about this point about the return of isabel maryam this particular verse because even if we say that is 33 when his ministry finished jesus was 33 so 33 would be considered kahal by quite a number of linguists therefore we say that this verse has been interpreted by a group of tab and sahaba to imply that isa will come back nonetheless a it is not universally interpreted that way and b the language in and of itself does not indicate that asa is coming back okay but it can be said that the context would indicate this okay that why would it be miraculous unless there is a miracle involved the third verse that we're going to discuss is surah nisa verse 159 surat nisa 159 that allah says there is not a single person of the people of the book except that he will believe in isa before his the death of this series of verses is the context of the notion that the yahood killed erisa and allah says very explicitly that they neither killed him nor did they crucify him but rather it was made to appear to them so and allah says they did not kill him for sure for certainty they did not kill him rather allah raised him up to himself and then allah says and there is no one from the people of the book except that he shall believe in him these are now pronouns he shall believe in him before he dies these are all pronouns here okay the majority of early mufassirun have interpreted this verse to mean that there will not remain a single person of the ahlikitab except that they will believe in jesus before jesus dies okay according to the majority say that this is and therefore before isa dies the kitab will believe in him okay the kitab will affirm him however there is a minority opinion from qatar and said and others that the pronoun behe and mautihi are different and the behe is a reference according to them to the prophet and the matihee is the reference to the person of the kitab and therefore the verse will translate and there is not a single person of the ahli kitab except that he shall believe in the prophet muhammed before he dies and so they had a bizarre belief well we say it's bizarre they don't they wouldn't think it is bizarre they have a bizarre belief that at the time of death of the soul of the kitab when the angel of death comes that before the angel of death takes the soul of the ali kitab of the kitabi they must confess their iman in the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam this confession is a spiritual one it doesn't make them a muslim in other words they're not going to confess with the tongue that is physical they're going to confess with their soul and then they shall be allowed to escape their bodies now the problem of course is that uh the context of this these series of verses does not mention the prophet islam at all and also by the way uh the the the notion that the soul is going to have to uh confess the belief of the prophet something that's not found in any other source neither verse of the quran nor hadith of the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam and that is why says the correct position about this verse is that it goes back to isa and that none of the people of the book shall remain alive at that time except that they believe in jesus before jesus dies and uh ibn kathir says there is no doubt that what he says is the better opinion so this verse therefore surat nisa seems to be pretty strong however to be clear it has been interpreted differently as well there is a third uh problem if you like or problematization and that is done by the famous group grammarian as a judge and as the judge says that how can all of the kitab believe in jesus when most of them would have died before the coming of jesus right so as zajas says this verse does not mean what people think it means because he is saying that the verse says not a single person of the ali kitab shall remain except that they believe in jesus before jesus dies he is saying the bulk of ahlikitab have lived and died before the return of jesus by the way as the judge is affirming the return of jesus he's simply saying that this verse does not apply to that that's his interpretation others have responded that this verse is going to be restricted by common sense and the restriction by common sense means there is no person of the ahlikitab that shall be alive when jesus comes down except that he shall believe in jesus before jesus dies so that restriction that shall be alive when jesus comes down it's not in the quran but it is assumed it is something that is understood by the context of the verse and another problematization that occurs is that the verse says there is not a single person of the ali kitab except that they shall believe in him before he dies even if we say it is jesus what do we say to the yahood that will be fighting on the side of the jad and they're seeing jesus they're not going to believe in jesus right so what does this mean and some have responded to this by the claim that well iman here does not necessarily mean they shall believe in jesus the belief of the kalima and the belief of an acceptance of islam but rather they shall believe that jesus was a prophet even if they reject his prophethood just like allah says in the quran that allah affirmed the quraish have iman in allah but they commit shirk so this is a partial iman and so they believe in the concept of god they believe that there isn't allah out there but they don't believe that allah azzawajal alone is now the the same can apply over here that when you're fighting on the side of the jail those people that are fighting they're going to recognize that that is jesus and they're going to believe that that is the prophet but they know or they for whatever reason they are rejecting like iblis rejected they're rejecting the following but they know that he is jesus so to summarize this verse this verse seems to strongly indicate but to be fair uh a number of dissenting voices have not interpreted this verse to to confirm the return of jesus christ the fourth verse that we will uh discuss is considered to be the most explicit and it is considered to be uh the strongest indication that the quran is affirming the coming of jesus the second coming of jesus and that is surah zuch for 61. allah says in the quran and it or he is a knowledge of the day of judgment now what is the context of these verses go back a few verses and allah describes the quraysh that when uh the son of mary is given as an example your people they uh break out in applause and applause and they they become happy and they say which one is better our gods or jesus and allah says they're only using him to argue now the the context of revelation that when allah revealed in the quran you and those whom you worship besides allah will all end up in jahannam one of the members of the quraish thought that he had outwit the quran and he said okay if everything that is worship besides allah is going to end up in jahannam how about the christians who worship jesus and you guys think that jesus is a prophet this means that jesus is going to go to jahannam as well and of course we know from the quran and from the sunnah that the righteous who were mistakenly worshipped will not end up in jahannam and uh the idols that were constructed as false god will end up in jahannam so the verse here says when the son of mary is given as an example your p your people uh meaning the quraish they become happy at this and they say which one is better our gods or jesus and then the verses go on he is but a righteous example and a good a good servant and then allah says and he shall be a knowledge of the day of of the hour a knowledge of judgment so do not have any doubt about this now this verse has been interpreted by a number of sahaba most prominently ibn abbas as being an explicit affirmation of the return of isabel maryam and in fact ibn abbas and a number of other uh early sahabah obeying others they actually had a variant recitation of this verse which is actually even more explicit and that recitation rather than uh it would means an indication and they would recite the verse now of course the whole concept of recitations and something is a very very deep one and you're probably aware that it's probably best i do not go into a lot of detail because people are super sensitive about this topic even though again the evidencers are very clear about this but the sahaba had their multiple recitations and all of them are valid as a prophet salallahu said quran is very explicit that do not argue over these uh verses or process said do not argue over these recitations would recite this verse in a different recitation and jesus is a sign for the day of judgment now that recitation it is authentic from the sahaba however it has not been preserved in the ten recitations it is not preserved in the ten that are commonly recited in our times it is however well known in the early books of tafsir so the way that we recite the verse and uh isa is an ilm and even he comments whoever recites this first as it means that he is a knowledge of the closeness and proximity of the day of judgment and whoever recites it with the father woman then that means that he is an allama and a dele he is a sign for the day of judgment the point being that whether you recite or the meaning slightly changes but the concept is still the same either jesus is a knowledge of the proximity of the day of judgment or jesus is a sign of the day of judgment so this is the majority interpretation of this verse from mujahid qatar sudhir bahak a whole bunch of early tab your own however still there is an alternative interpretation and that is the interpretation of al-hasan al-basri al-hasan al-basri said means goes back to the quran or goes back to the prophet sallallahu alaihi was tell them that the quran is the knowledge of the day of judgment and it goes back to the revelation of allah subhanahu wa and so he did not understand this verse to be uh now again hasan al-basri affirms the coming of jesus it's just a matter of does the quran talk about it or not so these are the four verses in order of strength from the weakest in terms of its dalara in terms of its evidence to the strongest and to conclude this particular section about the verses of the quran the quran suggests and indicates there is really a very strong suggestion that islam shall return and this has been the derivation of the vast majority of sahaba and tabirun and the early commentators of the quran that the quran indicates the coming of isabe however to be academic and pedantic this is not the unanimous interpretation of the quran and again right now we're talking about does the quran talk about to the coming of jesus or not as for other sources of the coming of jesus that is a separate topic does the quran talk about the coming back of jesus or not for every one of these verses you will find some of the early authorities a minority opinion uh interpreting the verse in a different manner and therefore we can say that the quran strongly suggests the quran seems to have a very strong indication that isa is coming however it is not definitive and it is not conclusive in and of itself just from the language of the quran and just from the context of the quran we give it the presumption but not the certainty and that's the first evidence the quran now we now move on to the hadith and as for the hadith this is where of course the issue becomes crystal clear this is where there leaves no ambiguity whatsoever the number of a hadith reported are simply too numerous to discount and uh the most authentic in terms of mainstream sunni islam is the hadith that is and muslim and in fact this particular hadith was reported in abu dhabi and in ibn majja and in muslim muhammad and uh reported in basically almost all of the books of hadith this particular hadith which one the the narration of that the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam swore by the one in whose hands is his soul that it is only a matter of time that the son of mary is going to come down as a just ruler amongst you and he shall destroy the cross and he shall kill the pigs and he shall lift up the jizya and he shall pass out money until there will be not any need for anybody to accept any money and one prostration will be more beloved to people than all that is in this world so this hadith is muslim and is reported in pretty much all of the books of hadith not all but pretty much the most of the books of hadith and his chain stellar it's a very obviously bukhari muslim what more do you want it is it is definitive and it is explicit and to make it even more explicit the prophet sassoon is making a qasam i swear by the one in whose hands is my soul the other hadith that is in sahih muslim is the hadith so this is the second hadith and it is muslim that the prophet said there shall always remain a group of my people that is fighting on behalf of the truth until the day of judgment and jesus the son of mary will come down and their leader shall be amongst them and he shall say to jesus come and pray and lead us in salah and jesus will say no uh you continue leading as an honor for this umm and of course the reference has been understood to be the mahdi this is the reference that the majority of scholars understand this hadith is muslim and it is the only indirect reference to the mahdi in bukhari and muslim because there is no explicit mention of the mahdi in buhari and muslim this is the most implicit or the most indirect in bukhari and muslim uh and sahih muslim we're also about the mahdi obviously jesus is explicit in sahih muslim we also have a third hadith so we have basically three hadith uh in bukhari and muslim sorry either bukhari or muslim one in both bukhari and muslim and uh three in the sahih the third one is uh usaid nary said the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam said the day of judgment will not occur until ten major signs happen and he lists all of them and of course amongst the ten major signs is the coming down of isabel now the number of narrations and the number of books of hadith that mention the coming of isa are beyond counting for this simple class that we are doing or the simple lecture that we are doing in fact there are many chapter headings in the books of hadith chapter headings that talk about the return of isabel maryam so for example of the earliest books of hadith is the book al-jamir of mohammed ibn rashid ma'am was the teachers of the teachers of bukhari i.e two generations before bukhari uh and he has a catabol which is preserved in the musa and in that catabol he has a chapter called chapter regarding the return of isa the famous scholar naima bin hamad hudai 228 hijrah he has his famous booketable fitan and in kitab he has a chapter called the return of jesus imam bukhari in his sahih in the book of uh the stories of the prophets the hadith in the book of the hadith has a chapter called babu nuzu is so he has a chapter the return of isabel maryam and he has in it that we already mentioned a tiramidi in his jammeh has a chapter the return of jesus christ imam muslim of course he didn't put the chapter headings imam no we did but imam muslim has a section that imam anawi entitled the chapter of the coming back of jesus christ the chapter of the return of jesus and it goes on and on and on in fact the traditions regarding the return of isa are found in every one of the six books bukhari muslim and they are found in the muslim that least seven or eight in the muslim and in the same under the sahaba from whom this hadith is narrated is around around 10 or so we have abu hurairah we have jabba ibn abdullah ibn masrud ibn umar isha saying abdullah bin abdullah also and in fact one or two more i have them in the full file that i wrote up so we have around uh 11 or 12 of the companions sorry add a few more because um uh i don't have their names with me but the ten that i quoted we have for sure from them uh and they are found in every single book of hadith after the six uh books and the scholars of the past and of the pre-modern times have compiled these hadith a number of compilations of the most famous of them is the indian scholar anwar kashmiri who wrote this famous book called the explicit book regarding what has been narrated in mudawat reform about maryam and he compiled in this book 75 hadith 75 and the editor the famous scholar abdul fattah buruda the editor added another 10 to make a total of 85 and uh kashmiri also has around 30 statements of the sahaba and tabirun so 85 narrations from the prophet saw that doesn't mean all of them are authentic right some are weak and some are one i mean a few are even considered to be fabricated per se so obviously but the point is the sheer quantity of a hadith and the sheer quantity of athar from the sahaba and tabirun are more than a hundred put together and that is why multiple scholars have claimed that the hadith about the return of jesus are muttawater and this claim has spanned centuries and disciplines and genres and authors people like ibn jadira tabari in his tafsir said that the hadith about the return of jesus the famous the most famous scholar of hadith mentions in multiple books including fat father-body and including his other famous book he mentions that the return of jesus christ is something that is established by muttawater hadith ashokan he wrote an entire treatise and in the title of the treaties is tawatur al-masih the the tawatar of the hadith the famous moroccan muhaddith al-khattani also has uh listed this hadith and amongst the mutawater hadith al-khothari the famous ottomans called the last of the great ottoman scholars considered this hadith all of these muhammad considered the hadith of the return of jesus to be muttawater in meaning now what does this mean it doesn't mean that abu hurairah's version is muttawater it means put together too many of the sahaba have narrated it and therefore uh predominant you know sunni methodology basically is that it's not vani it's not something that is subjective it is something that is certain so the notion of tawa of uh the hadith of isabel maryam has been affirmed by many scholars including scholars of tafsir and including scholars of hadith and including the biggest names of hadith most importantly for our purposes ibn hajjar multiple times says and even and for him to say in two different places that the hadith of jesus christ and he is writing pre-controversy there was no controversy going on he's not being biased in any way this is a huge thing that we cannot just simply dismiss and ignore so we talked about the quran we talked about the sunnah and hadith we talked about now let us talk about very briefly where is this mentioned this belief in the return of jesus where is it mentioned in the early works and is it something that was listed in the theological treatises of early islam is this something that is a point of creed and so in order to do this we go to the writings that were done in the second third fourth century of islam and see is this notion something that was contested or agreed upon is this notion something that was deemed so important that scholars of creed added it to a book of creed or not now to be very clear here creedal books are only as good as the authors who wrote them right an author who writes a creed let's say the hawaii's creed it's this is imam tahawi he's a great scholar he's a great shaykh he's a great adam but in the end of the day he is not divinely inspired therefore tahawi's creed is only as good as the author and then as well it is only as good as the acceptance of the ummah after so how well accepted are these creeds and al-tahawi's creed without a doubt is the most universally accepted creed of sunni islam for multiple reasons beyond the scope of this maybe another library ever and in my in my class i go into those issues but that's beyond the scope of this particular class now let's go back and look who mentioned this belief in jesus christ well if you do a quick survey there the the number of references are too numerous and they are too diverse and they span all different types of disciplines you find the belief about the return of jesus in books of history in books of ansab or lineage you find it in the polymaths of early islam like ibn khuteiba who died 276 hijrah in his book tawed mustard hadith he actually mentions the issue of jesus's return as how does one reconcile that the prophet saws is the last prophet and the well-known fact that jesus is going to return he takes that as a given it's not even a controversy the question is how does one reconcile that the process is the final prophet and of course ibrahimovic says jesus shall not return as a prophet he's going to return as a follower of the ummah of the prophet sallallahu alaihi but the point is that even 276 is talking about this as a given it's something that is known uh ibn faris the language expert he mentions uh in some linguistic point he mentions that and this is a reference to jesus's return for example like he takes it as a given one of the earliest people that again he himself might be of dubious you know uh uh authenticity but not in in the sense that he himself was a storyteller but one thing mokhatil does is that he preserves uh the the the zeitgeist if you're like or the the framework of that time frame mukata on multiple occasions mentions the return of jesus and dies 150 hijrah ibn abi hatim one of the earliest books of tafsir mentions the return of jesus sataway already mentioned him on numerous occasions talks about the return of jesus as a given uh the tafseer of that was recently published that we lat the famous founder of the maturity school that he mentions again that and this is a reference to the return of jesus he mentions it as a fact not a controversy uh the tafsir of samar khande that have seen just sauce and by the way i'm not just quoting random names i have looked at all of these the season i have the quotes in my notes but i'm just telling you that these people all mentioned the return of jesus as something that was given now if you move on to other genres of literature for example history one of the first books written uh uh of of early islamic history mentions uh the issue of uh the return of jesus uh the other book of the um the book about the signs of the day of judgment uh there's a book by abdul maliki bin 238 hijrah this is perhaps the first book ever written about the science of the day of judgement and he wrote a book the science of the day of judgment and the going away of the good people right and he mentions in it the return of jesus christ ibn hasam the andalusian scholar mentions in his book of heresiography of islam he mentions it as a fact the books of quran died 4 44 mentions the return of jesus as for the books so many the books mentioned that i can't even list all of them including sunnah that is ascribed to imam ahmed uh the famous al-barbahari quran quote actually [Music] it mentions the return of jesus mentions it explicitly the point number 100 we believe in the science of the day of judgment and we believe in the coming back of the the sorry in the uh the uh uh appearance of the the judge and in the coming down of jesus from the skies this is in atahawi al-ashadi in his islam he mentions that of the things that all of ahluson agreed upon and he mentions a long list and he mentions uh the return of jesus 3 16 he mentions in one of his writings regarding what the ummah has agreed upon and in it he says of the things that the whole ummah has agreed upon is that the process and went up to israel and mirage and that the jad is going to come and that jesus is going to come down and he shall be a just judge and he shall kill the the judge this is ibn abi zaid al-qaeda explicitly mentioning uh this ibn manda uh died 395 in his kitable iman he has a chapter regarding the 10 signs that one must believe in and in it he mentions uh the uh isabelliam coming back uh all of them they mention that is going to come back these are all earthy or early books of theology and aqira and they all mentioned the return of so the notion of isa coming back became a standard motif of many books of theology it's not something that he just found in random it is found in many dozens of works of sunni theology uh that transcends even one strand of sunnism you find it uh in uh quote unquote creeds you find it in ashadi abrahasan ashadi himself you find it in maturity the explicit so and interestingly enough and al-ashadi and in mathuri the explicit statements in their three writings that affirm that they believe in the coming of isabel so we talked about early authors and by the way for any maliki's in the audience these are the dawns of the maliki school so how can anybody claim allegiance to the maliki medha and yet claim that erisa is not going to come back despite all of the great giants of the maliki maliki school claiming that isa is going to come back and by the way the notion that imam malik does not have this particular hadith it's neither here nor there imam was meant for a particular purpose and cause and the fact that he doesn't have it allah knows why he doesn't have an entire section about the details of it's something that it's a different book so to read in that imam malik didn't believe that erisa is coming this is a huge claim and it cannot be made without evidence there must be evidence and the reality is that there is no evidence of that uh nature so we talked about the quran the sunnah we talked about uh statements of the early scholars and the treatises of theology let us now move on to uh is there ijma on this issue so again in the preliminary research that i've done and by the way for the record i i only spent a day and a day and a half on this just to you know do whatever i could obviously somebody should do much more and and write a phd on this i guess but for from what i found i discovered a number of early uh and and pre-modern scholars claimed that there is ijma on this point and ijma is an evidence in islamic law is an evidence in islamic law so we have a number of scholars who have claimed there is unanimous consensus and of them and i'll quote you uh at least five or six names that i've found of them 355 hijrah he has one of the earliest treatises on history entitled kitab the book of the beginning and history and he has the chapter regarding isabella maryam coming back and coming down and then he says that al-muslim telephone if you know muslims are not at all disunited they are all in agreement that isa is going to come back ibn altija died 541 hijrah in his famous tafseer he writes that the ummah has unanimously agreed about the mutawatir a hadith that mentioned that isa is in the skies in the heavens and alive and he shall come back towards the end of times and this is in his famous volume 3 143 abu hayyan died 745 hijrah in his tafsir mentions there's 10 31 in he says they have all unanimously agreed that isis is going to come back and later on he says the entire ummah has unanimously agreed that isa will come back and only the philosophers and those who don't believe in any religion the melahida basically have denied this asafadini died 1188 not even he didn't say sunni none of the people of sharia disagreed with this except for those that are the philosophers and the malachida the eighth well you want to translate as atheists or you can say people of no religion and those we don't care about there their difference of opinion so he mentions there is ijma al-alusi the famous iraqi scholar of the last century also said in his that there is ijma in the entire ummah and this actually i found it interesting a safanini's phrase that everybody of the sharia says this i found this intriguing so i actually looked up non-sunni sources and so i looked up the kashaf of the zamakshari and as zamachari mentions explicitly without any controversy that is going to come back towards the end of times uh i looked up uh the uh the zaydi uh uh theologian al-qasim who died 860 hijrah al-qasim you can say that he is the main founder of uh the zaydi theology and and aspects of and he has a number of treatises that his students have compiled and uh one of them and much more uh that he he explicitly mentions that we believe in the reports regarding the return of jesus i looked up twelve or shiism as well dude i believe in the coming of jesus and of course the shiite polymath um one of their greatest minds of the last three hundred years uh muhammad bakr al-majdee he has this 100 volume encyclopedia called bihar anwar which every student of knowledge is aware of in volume 5 page 735 uh he mentions that there are many reports that indicate jesus shall return and that these reports have been mentioned by the khasa non-specialist or what not and so he believes in that so we have explicit statements of the mortezala and of the uh the zadies and of the twelvers that they all believe in the coming of isabel so therefore as a safadini said the people of the sharia are all of them except for the philosopher and we don't really have any writings from them in which they negated the return of jesus but there must have been some fringe figures like you know of the philosopher's movement who denied the coming of jesus so i was not able to discover and if anybody does know then please put it in the footnotes or in the comments below i was not able to discover anybody pre-modernity who explicitly negated the coming back of jesus christ okay so then when did this controversy begin where is it coming from to the best of my knowledge and research the first person to question the return of isa was muhammad abdul who died in 1905 who is of course the student of jamal dean and of course one of the founders of what is called modernist islam or what is called the you know uh neo if you like enlightenment islam you know the the new uh schools that came uh so muhammad abdul questioned many of the signs of the day of judgment uh and of them he also questioned and basically reinterpreted uh the coming of jesus he basically said the return of jesus means the spirit like compassion of jesus will come not a persona jesus right so he kind of had a a bizarre wheel that it means that the the spirit of jesus not the spirit meaning like you know the compassion of jesus is going to come and his student rasheed who died in 1935 uh championed this claim of his teacher and he championed this in his tafsir and in his magazine the famous magazine el manar which is a very interesting story in and of itself the magazine the first global transnational islamic magazine that impacted the entire globe and spawned many different movements and you know became a very uh a harbinger of a lot of good um this this magellan in this edition of 1928 rashid expounded on the belief of the return of isa and he uh did say that there are a hadith that people consider to be authentic but then he said however these hadith are ahad and they are ambiguous and they are contradictory and they do not give any certainty and therefore if somebody doubts them that the process them did not say them then uh that is something that is uh permissible like i.e basically he's saying the majority of the muslims you know basically believe in the coming of jesus but he himself is skeptical and he also claimed that one of the early authorities of the tabiron he was the one who attempted to introduce this doctrine into the ummah however rashid really is very explicit and he says whoever believes that the prophet sallallahu alaihi said these a hadith about the coming of isa then he has no choice but to believe in it and to reject it is kufuru however whoever doesn't believe then that person is not obliged to believe in the coming back of jesus and it is very clear that rashid allah himself is skeptical of the return of jesus now it's very interesting that muhammad abdul and rasheed riddha when they gave their fatwas and they wrote their their doctrines it doesn't seem that any controversy was caused which is very interesting because a lot of times usually controversies um are sparked by specific reasons right and a lot of times there might be petty reasons a lot of times there might be interesting reasons but for some reason of the 1928 did not seem to really spark any major controversy just life went on not a single person responded to it as far as we know no publications came no outcry uh occurred however uh along with this another uh trajectory was taking place in india and that sparked a lot of debate what's going on in india well in india you had a new movement and that movement was a particular person by the name of merzel who began claiming that jesus had died jesus had come to kashmir and lived the rest of his life there and then died and was buried in kashmir and that the second coming of jesus was not the actual original jesus but a jesus-like figure and he said that he himself was that figure and then eventually he upgraded himself to be a prophet and what not and so this created a whole new ideology about what does it mean the return of jesus and mir claimed himself to be jesus not that jesus but the second coming of jesus and of course he then had to make the claim that the original jesus or isa had uh died and that controversy generated a lot of responses from the ulama of the indian subcontinent and the number of greater ulama of the time they responded to this claim in particular sasawani who wrote an entire book against him about the return of isa and also anwar shah kashmiri the book i just mentioned here as well who died 1933 by the way anwar shah kashmiri's book is probably the most comprehensive compilation to date about the hadith regarding the return of jesus and the reason why he did this was to refute mirza hollam ahmed of qadiyan and in 1942 one of the followers of merzelam was stationed in egypt by the british he was a military person and he was stationed in egypt and so he wrote a and by the way up until the 40s 50s 60s remember the followers of this movement they were not uh there was no official decree that they are non-muslims it's something that's going back and forth and individual scholars are giving fatwas and others are ambivalent they don't know what to do of course now uh you know the the fatwa has been given universally that this movement and the adherence to this movement are not to be considered within the fold of mainstream islam because they have a belief that negates the kalima and to believe in any prophet after the prophet muhammad negates one's adherence to the religion of islam so that is something that is well known now in the 40s this movement was trying its best to um to mainstream itself so this movement wanted to become mainstream well it's still trying to do that if you're aware of what's going on but they're never going to succeed um but uh uh this movement was attempting to mainstream itself and one of the ways it did that this particular soldier wrote a letter to al-azhar and in it he asked the question what is the belief of muslims regarding isa and did isa die is he alive in the heavens or is he going to return to this earth and if a person denies that he's alive now and if a person denies that he's going to come back towards the end of times does that make him a kafir it's a very specific question okay because again the khadiyanis were being accused of kufur and one of the things that where they were being accused of kufur was their belief that jesus is dead and he's not going to come back so this khadiyani asked the shaykh he sent a letter and the shaykh al-azhar responded to this letter okay and the sheikh al-azhar at 1963 and he was a student of muhammad abdul and uh uh muhammad shalt um sorry a bit of a technical point here responded to the fatwa the letter was addressed not to him sorry technical point the letter was addressed to mustafa mustafa was the sheikh al-azhar mustafa gave this letter to or gave the fatwa to mahmoud so technical point here that the sheikh al-azhar was mustafa marari mahmoud saltord was a friend of his and a great shaykh an adam and well-known person he's well known in the arab world he died in 1963. he died 1945. so this is a question in 1942 so we have you know a number of years before this so 1942 akadiani asks al-azhar al-ifta and the shaykh al-azhar muslim gives this question to his friend mahmoud shalt now rumors say that the sheikh these are rumors unsubstantiated and allah knows best that the shaykh himself did not want to give the answer because he knew it would cause a backlash so he asked mahmoud because he knew that mahmoud was you know not affiliated to the sheikh azhar's position and also that uh he would give the same answer so he gave him the fatwa knowing he would give him the same answer that he wanted and the fact that muslim did not respond to mahmoud fatwa but rather tacitly approved it actually more than tacitly seems to indicate that there is a reason in other words he gave the fatwa knowing what the answer would be now mahmoud shalt by the way is a well-known propounder of this neo-rationalist streak that was very popular in this time frame as well was a part of this basically this is muhammad abdul muhammad abdul school is very skeptical of miracles uh very much in line with trying to to to take modern notions of liberalism and of whatever you know the notions are and to make them mainstream islamic uh very skeptical of the signs of the day of judgment um skeptical of a hadith overall so there's this school that's very well known type of people well known so these are those types of people and so shalt gave a very detailed fatwa which is available in arabic you can find it online in which he claims that this belief of the return of jesus is neither in the quran nor in the authentic sunnah he said all of the hadith are they are contradictory and they are weak and therefore whoever denies that jesus is alive and whoever denies that jesus shall return that person is a muslim he's not a heretic he's not a deviant he's not a kafir he is a muslim and it is permissible to deny now the father is interesting in that he himself did not say that he believes this he's simply saying whoever believes it it's okay which is basically one step you know one step away now this fatwa very interestingly caused a huge outcry and it became a global controversy very interesting rasheed fatwa and he is far more famous than shalt and didn't cause any dent just life goes on however when shaltut writes his fatwa and it is endorsed by the sheikh al-azhar muslim he's the one who publishes right so muslim is the one who pushes it out and whatnot and so it becomes an official fatwa that caused a huge outcry and it became like i said a global controversy and many scholars of the time wrote scathing refutations some of them in very harsh language perhaps most famously sheikh muhammad zahid al kauthari the died in 1954 the last of the great ottoman muftis and scholars and also sheikh mustafa sabari who wrote a very very scathing booklet charging abdu and riddha and maragi for being of those people who did not believe in and he entitled the book alcohol fossils this is the criterion between those who believe in and those who don't believe in and that's basically one charge short of kufr and he claimed that the reason why this entire group does not want to affirm the return of jesus is that they are following the western scientific paradigms of anything outside the senses cannot exist and that miracles cannot exist and that there's no such thing as the science of day of judgment and so basically he's charging them with being heretics another refutation was written by a young man from morocco at the time in his 30s who would go on to become one of the greatest minds of his generation and that is 1993. was studying in egypt as a young man in al-azhar and it was at that time when uh this fatwa came out of sheikh shalt and wrote a treatise entitled and the famous al kothari wrote an introduction to this book and so these are some amazing amazing names these are all big legends and giants and they're all refuting shelters fatwa that isa is indeed going to come back and anybody who denies this has committed a heresy and other refutations were written as well and you can read about so many other refutations in our times of course um uh the issue has uh continued to remain alive there are a number of famous preachers in all the major languages of the world who are basically following the same you know muhammad abdul type of school you have of course in the arab world dr adnan ibrahim in the urdu speaking world you have the the the famous ramadisab in english you have naim ajmal who goes by the monarch mufti abu leith and others as well and all of these figures they have the same argument some of them are more developed than others firstly all of these figures back to muhammad abdu all the way down to the modern group firstly all of them they have a different concept of the sunnah okay they define sunnah differently than the way that the majority of sunnah defines sunnah in fact i should say then all of a sudden it defines sunnah uh it defines the sunnah and for them uh hadith even hadith doesn't necessarily translate into the sunnah of the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam they all have their different interpretations but the point is that none of them considers none of these figures from muhammad abdul all the way down to the modern figures i mentioned none of them consider the sahih to be any more authoritative than the rest of the books they're willing to challenge notions based upon rationalistic um arguments nor do they view mutawatara hadith as being evidence per se and of course this is really a a fundamental point of difference between this strand call it you know neo-rationalist or call it a pseudo-enlightenment whatever you called it this strand of thought versus the mainstream scholars of sunni islam so the notion of separating the sunnah from authentic a hadith and from mutawati hadith this is something that started with abdu and we still find it amongst this group of people and frankly to me this is the far bigger issue than their denial of jesus the notion of rejecting a hadith simply because it is not rational right that's to me the fundamental uh difference between this strand of islam versus the bulk of sunnah or the bulk of sunni islam so this is the first point secondly this group is willing to claim that the belief of jesus christ is a theology that emanated from judeo-christian sources from the likes of wahhabi or or maybe even abu hurairah or some of them say ibn shahbazuri it it emanated from these people and it slowly crept in until it became a mainstream belief of the ummah now the response is that uh that's a huge claim that lacks even the slightest backing or evidence how can anybody make such a preposterous claim without bringing up any proof or evidence so we have over 75 different hadith and you don't find one person in all of these 75 i mean agreed abu hurairah is the majority narrator i agree with you yes he is definitely the majority of these but what are you going to do about the other sahaba how about jabber how about samurai how about it all of them are taking from kabbalah or where's your evidence for this how can a claim be made of such a huge magnitude without a shred of evidence which one is more likely that all of these sahaba heard it from the prophet salallahu or that they all heard it from wahhab or and then they ascribed it to the prophets of some i mean which one is more likely right so again and and there's another point by the way that needs to be said here subhanallah to claim that a judeo-christian belief was introduced into the ummah and it became not just mainstream but the default position for the entire muslim ummah basically your the implications are mind-boggling you are claiming that our faith has been corrupted at the most basic level and that the entirety of the ummah has been misguided for 14 centuries i mean it's one thing to prefer a minority opinion over a majority opinion it's one thing to talk about a modern issue in a modern way but to talk about a classical been there done that you know open shut book case to talk about something that is a fundamental unchallenged for 14 centuries and then to claim that it was introduced by judo christian sources and it became ijma of the ummah and it became tawatur hadith you see this to me is the far bigger problem than denying the return of jesus and that is the destruction of the epistemology of islam that's really what it is which is why this is uh somewhat of a dangerous topic to get involved with much more dangerous than jesus or not jesus because you know at the end of the day it doesn't affect your daily routine to believe jesus is going to come or not but what it does do it does affect your soul your paradigm your epistemology it affects how you look at the sources that's really what it does here and that is why this is an interesting case study of epistemology between sunni islam and between other interpretations of islam and here's the pointer that this group is bringing forth such a preposterous claim but they have zero evidence and the onus of proof is on them to bring not us you see the default for us is that when you have 10 hadith with 10 chains all going back to 10 different sahaba and all of these sahaba are saying the prophet salallahu said well then the default is that the prophet saws said it but now these guys come along and they say oh wahhab said it or said it and as i said firstly none of these figures is found in all of these hundreds of chains none of them you all have different chains and secondly if you're going to claim that this belief comes from rabbinical sources or christian theology and then it became mainstream well then what is left of preservation of our theology right so that's a very very dangerous point to make think about the implications of that uh the third the third point that they raise is that they all all of these groups from muhammad abdul all of these people from muhammad abdul all the way to the modern propagators of this they all view jesus as having died on this earth and so they deny that jesus was raised up alive right and so obviously when you don't believe that jesus is still alive then obviously there is no return and so it's not just the notion of jesus's return it is the notion of jesus's not having been killed and having been lifted up alive which is a mainstream belief and again i did not go down that topic today but that is an interesting topic because the mainstream belief of the muslim ummah is that arisa was raised up alive now i know there's a lot of controversy going on over this topic and this issue you will find a lot more voices uh that is that are that are claiming that uh jesus did die a natural death so um means they did not kill him and they did not put him on the cross and then they say that uh the the the the the the notion of uh uh in nimuta okay the famous verse now this library chat i didn't go down all of that because that is a separate issue suffice to state that uh the the interpretation of jesus having been killed is something that is um very obscure in early islam but it is not unknown no sorry not killed natural death died natural death it is not unknown there is one tabulari that it is narrated from but that tabari believed that he's going to come back down allah will bring him back to life right so you do have this notion of jesus dying and being resurrected and then coming back towards the end of time nobody denied his return one early authority had an interpretation in which he said jesus died a natural death and then he shall come back alive so uh that's a different topic we're not going to get there but suffice to state that a number of authors have said there is ijma that was taken up alive so that is a different controversy altogether but that is the point you should realize that those who deny the coming of jesus also deny the raising up of jesus which is obviously logical because if they said he went up alive then obviously has to come back down alive as well the fourth point that they bring is that they bring a whole bunch of rational uh objections right that these reports don't make any sense why would jesus kill pigs what have pigs done to have them killed why will jesus not accept jizya why will jesus not allow kufur to remain when freedom is everybody's allowed to choose you know if you want to remain muslim or not from insha'allah why this why that and the response to all of these whys is that well allah said so these are not strong enough arguments to reject a hadith and these rational arguments can easily be refuted by other counter-rational arguments suppose allah subhanahu wa ta'ala told isa to no longer accept the jesus that's allah and the fact that the prophet sassem said so is in fact a shari justification i.e the prophet system is literally legislating for isa that when isa comes back there shall be no more jizya when isa comes back there shall be no more crosses being shown so he is literally telling isa these are the things you're going to do and when asa comes back he will say this is an exception and see here's the point why is it problematic when the end of times is a very atypical era lots of bizarre things are going to happen and so if there's going to be global peace after global war after the armageddon there's going to be global police it's a complete up and down complete chaos and mayhem so the fact that you have these strange atypical rulings it actually conforms with those strange and atypical times and the point is that you know actually the notion of it being illogical is itself illogical and i'll tell you why when you are may allah protected we don't want to be there when it happens but imagine those that are alive when the jad is doing what the judge is doing and the isa comes down and they see isa and the jal fighting it out and isa kills the judge right they see issa coming down right now you tell me anybody who sees that and still denies what do you think so the claim that jizya is not going to be accepted the claim that you're either going to be a muslim or you're going to be with the child it actually makes sense the level of kuffur that you're going to have to have you're going to be on the side of the jar there's not going to be any middle category after that so in reality far from being illogical this is completely logical so all of these small issues of you know how about this and how about that it's not strong enough to reject the mutawater hadith about the coming of isabel now with this all of this so we talked about the quran we talked about the sunnah and the books of sunnah and the chapter headings and the tawatur we talked about the early books of theology we talked about the various other genres we talked about ijima as well then we talked about a brief history of the controversy and some other main arguments that are used against this so where does this leave us all so it leaves us with a number of points i think it is fairly clear by this point in time that the belief in the return of jesus christ wasn't just a mainstream opinion it was the standard belief of the entirety of the umm up until modernity the entirety of the ummah that is a huge thing i mean when you have the sunna and the shia combining together dudes you better listen to that man when you have the zaydis and you have the ethan ashari's and you have all strands of sunnism imam muhammad and maturity and what not when you have all of the great imams of history and tariq and and tafsir and akida all of them saying the same thing i mean that is not a trivial point anymore and therefore it's pretty straightforward to state and i don't there's not something i usually do but it is pretty straightforward therefore that anybody who denies the return of jesus by virtue of the fact that they have contravened the agreed upon beliefs of this ummah that they have contradicted them with hadith that the least that can be said is that they have fallen into a religious innovation or a bidder now not every makes the person a muppet there as we are all aware the students don't know should be aware and no doubt that some of the great scholars who who denied the coming of jesus are worthy of our respect uh rasheed rillah is somebody that you know of course i disagree with many of his fatawa but to be brutally honest he is a person that i admire immensely uh for many reasons maybe another library chat i mean and again a very interesting paradoxical figure like i don't like a lot of things about him but i admire his spirit immensely and i do find the kindred uh spirit uh in rashid uh even as i disagree with some of his particular fatal such as this one so and and i have no problem saying that may allah forgive him he made a mistake and this is a mistake that is a huge mistake it is a bid a theological innovation because there is ijma there's muttawater a hadith there is like you know it's just a complete belief of across all strands of islam and therefore to deny it you have contravened the epistemology of islam of mainstream islam that's really what it is about however all of that having been said we cannot ignore or negate the fact that there are who are respected the strand of neo-rationalists or pseudo-intellectuals or pseudo-enlightenment thinkers from the last century beginning with muhammad abdul through rishi radha through through and of course you have others as well as well i think i'm not sure don't quote me on that but a number of people they kind of sort of felt the same but it's basically that one school and of course in our times as i said a few individuals from all different cultures they're basically following that same school and therefore i think we have to also be fair here and say that if we want to refute any of these people we should understand that they're not alone that there are a handful of people that they're following and uh some of these people are way better than others like rashid allah and just because a person falls into a biddah does not make him a mubatader so we ask allah's forgiveness for them if they are genuine generally upon iman and taqwa now as for the claim that it is kufur i agree with rashid over here 100 percent rasheed said he himself in the fatwa that he denies he said the body was coming he himself said anybody who believes that the prophet salallahu said this and then denies it that person is a kafir no doubt about it but anybody who for whatever reason doesn't believe the prophet sassum said these in the first place well then he cannot be considered a catholic and that's a technically correct position that if a person's epistemology is deviated which it is in this case if a person for some reason derives that jesus is not going to come back because all of these hadith are awake for whatever we you know they're wrong they have a bizarre methodology but they don't believe the prophet islam said it right so if they deny that the prophet salallahu said it then their negative their negation of the return of jesus will not constitute kufr per se however it will constitute a serious mistake and it will constitute a religious heresy or a deviation from the beliefs of the entirety of the ummah and that's a huge thing the entirety of the ummah and therefore to conclude it is patently clear that we as muslims believe in the return of jesus the fact that christians have a similar belief should mean nothing to us that's not our sources and it's similar it's not the same our sources are different and the quran has not explicit but pretty strong implicit verses and the hadith and there is on this point and it has become a point of create in multiple books of al-qaeda and therefore it is the belief of us as muslims that jesus christ shall indeed return to this earth as a just ruler and a judge and that his return will be one of the major signs of the day of judgment and it shall be a time of great trial and tribulation and we don't want to live to see that time frame but before that time frame we should believe in it and we ask allah's refuge from ever seeing that actual time frame i hope inshallah this was of some interest and benefit and inshallah until our next library chat assalamualaikum warahmatullahi [Music] foreign

Channel: Yasir Qadhi

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Keywords: yasir, qadhi, official, islamic, scholar, Islam, Quran, Sunnah, Hadith, Bukhari, Muslim, Tirmidhi, Peace in Islam, Mercy of Allah, Blessings of Allah, Qadr of Allah, Islamic Questions Answered, Islamic Q&A Session, Ask Shaykh YQ, Prophet Muhammad, Shaykh Dr. Yasir Qadhi, Yasir Qadhi, Salah, Zakat, Hajj, Charity, Jannah, Johannam, Halal, Haram, The Return of Jesus In Islamic Theology, library chats With Shaykh Dr. Yasir Qadhi, The Relevance of Jesus in Islam, Prophet Issah in Islam

Id: cRmnJt9Di8U

Length: 72min 13sec (4333 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 23 2021