Overcoming Ego – Abdal Hakim Murad

cambridge muslim college training the next generation of Muslim thinkers Smith hamdulillah or salat wa salam o allah rasool allah where Ali he was off be he woman where they're moving through the days of Ramadan traveling purposefully through the desert every evening being hospitably welcomed by the Oasis and on we travel a journey it is a journey towards the aid and the outward rejoicing and celebrating the hope of our laws cabal and have his acceptance and of a return to busts after cobbed expansion after constriction but also a journey within every outward form in religion in acts and reminds us of an inward process of turning and transformation it is always about how fade about tober but it's still far so the prayer leads us to the process of being erect in our normal human life standing as biped through the sedge de of in kiss our brokenness annihilation before the divine majesty and we end in a position of equilibrium this is one of the meanings of kaverley kajal nicole oma 10 wisata thus if we made you a middle nation that we end up halfway between these two possibilities of apparently autonomous ambulant humanity and prostrate self-annihilation in the presence of the diviner this is one meaning of the hadith that says a so little Maharaj will not mean the prayer is the Maharaj of the believer in the prayer of course in the hadith was gifted to the holy prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam on the night of the maharaj which is historically commemorated in the weeks prior to the month of Ramadhan that there is their aspect of Khalifa in this and the aspect of serenity the last word of the prayer is assalamo alaikom the invocation of peace equilibrium has been restored similarly at the end of the fast after this cycle of abstention and gratitude sober and shuker we have their combination as we return purified insha'Allah chastened rejoicing as we return to our quotidian routines but in all of this there is the process of moving forward Ramadhan is not just something that we do that is awkward that disrupts our routine in order to earn treats in heaven it would be a strange thing for the divine to give us only that but instead is an inward journey that leaves a permanent trace on the soul so Ramadhan should not be a step up into a more heavenly space followed by a step down after the aid that it should be a step up that enables us to take a further step up the following year so that as we move on in life Ramadhan becomes a more and more amazing natural transformative experience rather than just circular so in order for this journey really to be a journey rather than just a wandering around in circles every year we have to make sure that we know what it is for so that we can make the right kind of Nghia just saying I intend to fast tomorrow is formally correct but unless the heart really knows what the expected benefits of the fast something is being lost just as the prayer is legitimately started by the intention of saying the mother of prayer but unless the heart really knows the immensity of this prophetic act and approaches it in gratitude and reverence something is lost it's as if we are legalists and routinized religion turning it into a kind of cosmic slot machine so we put in our amel and we get out treats at the end of our life and that's really a rather strange reason that I lost a part of the tile to have created human beings in this asana tupple human to have sent them prophets and anbiya and awliya and Allah no no there's more to this than meets the eye so what is it that Ramadan is leading us towards well it's leading us towards evidently the gift of Sabah a so more nurse for Sabra in the term is a hadith that the fasting is half of Sabah and it teaches us the rather extraordinary lesson which for most of the year we are reluctant to consider which is that actually we are able to say no to things normally we say I have to have this indulgence I need this new car I need this holiday and I'm tired and I need to chill and to have these treats and actually that's not the best part of us talking though Ramadhan tells us that we do have the capacity to say nil by mouth from dawn until dusk not even drinking and even controlling the thoughts and our habits of speech it's very radical so by the end of the month we've actually learned this formal lesson that with Allah's name Alka we he reinforces us actually to be able to say no to the ego that's an important lesson it should help us to overcome the pessimism the lassitude which we often feel these that this nufs Amara is just too strong and I can't deal with it so I'm going to do religion on a kind of minimal level because things are just too tough and I'm feeling sorry for myself no Ramadan teaches that you can actually do a lot you can do a lot more prayers you can do a lot of abstaining from pleasures human beings have this capacity and Ramadan proves that to us so that's a real gift and we need to learn from that and remember it when we're tempted to return to indulgences and forms of laziness and saying yes to the ego at other times of the year we know that we can do better than that there's no excuse so there is that journey the journey towards a greater respect I think for the capacity of the human will the arada to prevail over the the lower ego that is proved in this month but also the inward journey which is the journey towards hinata towards being a Lars approved organism in the world of dunya that entity that Adamic miracle to which to whom the Angels could bow down that strange enigmatic passage in the Quran that if it appeared say in a medieval Persian poem lot of our brothers say ah stuff for Allah sure Haram but it's there at the beginning of the Quran commands them and it's true duly Adam prostrate to Adam for Sargento Allah a bliss a bar stuck per our economy lock every knee will bow down but he beliefs didn't he refused and was proud and was one of the unbelievers there's literally cover up reality now if you look at that verse you'll see that the reason why he does it is not that his getting involved in some kind of misunderstanding of tawheed but rather that he thinks is too good for this process a bar was Deborah he considered himself to be Kabir although the divine name al kabir applies only to the divine subhana wa ta'ala he alone is al Jabar the key barrier is his alone lahul mulku Samoa t1 Arnold and any human being that thinks that is really some kind of special person has irrigated himself something that is uniquely divine trait he alone is the source of being the author of time the the underlying principle behind every movement that exists in the heavens and the earth he alone he is o Kabir and what a Kabir even he alone has the right to do that so the Shaitaan in this pride is immediately indicating what can go wrong with us in worst of the seven deadly sins superbia pride arrogance we know best and we see this now in the whole civilization that we're inhabited at this particular rather extreme stage of the human story human beings with this sovereign autonomy preached by the Enlightenment our lack of need for the wisdom and the sagacity of the past and of the sages and of the profit we alone know what's right with our science it turns out that we are so smart that we can even destroy the biosphere kill dozens of species every month re-engineer species perhaps re-engineer ourselves were so smart that we're facing extinction that's the smartness of the one who will not bow down to the clay Spiritualized creature and humanity at the moment is going through the final meltdown point of this individualism mmm this a neuron min I am better the one who knows best who thinks that he can second-guess the divine commandment God says one thing but I'm going to do something else because the dignity of the will just ego is just pride it's from the Pharaoh Allen who refuses to accept even the signs of musa alayhis salaam and wants to build a tower because in his scientific mindset that's the way in which you get to see whether there is a divine entity a fundamental category mistake and it's the nature of the ignorance of this age and it's messing human beings up it's messing family life up is messing up people's sense of national belonging it's messing up the biosphere this is an age of chaos and confusion but the basic reason for this is ego self might as William Blake call so if this fiery sense of I know I'm not going to accept the authority of anything else tradition or the sages or the itch mount or the mud hub or whatever it might be I know best there are religious expressions of this the one who thinks that is so cool that he can ignore all of the wisdom of the jurists and come up with some new fatwa thinking I know the Koran and the Sun are better than all of these people even ha journalist Eleni and so your tea and Cazale I know best so often fundamentalism is a very modern kind of phenomenon because it empowers the sovereign individual human will and says you can know better than the consensus of the scholars of bygone ages you alone have authority of the Quran and the Sunnah to understand what they mean so even religion has succumbed to this age of ego age of self age of self might so in the month of Ramadan we are told that that shayateen which teach us this nonsense about pride and self I'll chained up and a little bit broken it's hard to be really arrogant and proud when you're hungry and thirsty and the days along and you're feeling the blood sugar level is low it's hard to be really arrogant and proud in that situation that brokenness is what we need so when we're in that state and we can see ourselves in perspective and see the consequences of our pride and how inhuman it is on human and in human then we can start to move back and start to move into the situation not of pride before the divine which is an absurdity but the brokenness that leads to prostration before the divine which is the natural state of Oba Diah of humanity and of the chosen one Ali sled Aslam who is Abdullah in nee Abdullah the slave of God now this Oba Diah is related to this process of return to the divine I bada including the CM is all about returning to where and how we were in the Alamo Alois before installment in the world when the flesh made the possibility of sin and anger and pride a possibility so it's about returning to a garden like state taking us away from the fiery state of the one whose self hood is determined by ego and passion various kinds not all know him Okada Allah t-totally or Alan fe de it's like the the fire of God that rises up above the heart the angry person and the jealous person and the fearful person they're consumed by these flames this is certainly an age of anxiety and age of depression and age of envy and an age of a lack of serenity and stillness and acceptance of the divine truth and and and of the appropriateness of the divine decree in every age we are uncomfortable so in order to get back to that we use the word we layer and we have to be Whaley olia which is a very frequently used organic sense and this is why the angels were able to bow down to that that creature that simply made of perishable mud and clay the lowest thing but when the a femur rocky now we breathed into him something of our spirit and therefore this strange theological paradox of bowing down to a creature became not just possible but a divine command so this wilayah is where we need to be because allah subhana allah says in the aayah allah he local finale him Aloha me arsenal verily the olia of allah there is no fear upon them neither do they grieve that's what we all want fear is anxiety about the future what's going to happen about bricks it what will you keep do next what is happening with extremism what's happening with global warming anxiety we need to take precautions and be aware of the future that work is impossible unless we know possible outcomes but this endless fearful agitation is a denial of the divine decree and it should not settle in the believers heart so we lay is about the ass waging of the calming of our inward anxieties and fill form fearfulness but also will a for me others are known and they are not sad they are not endlessly revisiting the past and anxious about what they should have done what they didn't do and trying to reinvent the past which ultimately is in the divine decree so they are in the moment not panicking about the future not panicking about the past absolutely in the moment because the moment is all that's real and we have to be even all worked attentive mindful to the miracle of the moment because the future is who knows what it will be the past you can't do anything about be in the moment now the modern world tends to focus us very much on possible outcomes and seduces us and at least the ties us us with talk about the future if you buy this you will get that if you pursue this career option then there will be this door open to you it cetera and we dream with this termini this thinking about the future and that tends to make us spaced out and unreal and uncensored and that is one reason for anxiety but this wilayah is about being completely in a state of appropriate connectedness and nearness to the divine the wali is the one who is close mem koshary rahmatullahi Ali says has another sense of this which is unworldly human turlet fyo who Alan Martha Coe the wali is the one whose actions succeed each other uninterruptedly in conformity to the sunlit in otherwise you're not good one day and bad the next you mess up then you get back know you're in a state of consistent compliance with the divine decree so that's one meaning of the wali and necessarily the one who is Wally is the one who is in that state because it's irrational and impossible for him really to be tempted by the silliness of disobedience and to follow the flames of the lower self but as we progress we recognize that there was a journey in our faith that Ramadhan should represent and facilitate which is the journey represented by the famous hadith and northen was one of great hadith service or man it's a hadith Qudsi Albahari and Abu Hurairah to radi allahu on and the rasa la la la la la la Salameh call FEMA are we he Arabic Allah Allah when elderly Hualien Fahad Eden - who will help well I had a horrible a AB DBA in Hebei ilium of Toronto Holly tombola is a lowest occur abu allah will never fail at that or hepburn Farida are web token to--some aho Ledesma OB baba Sarah who led up 0b y a dahulu tea herbal tea shall be her original holder TMC alaihe wala in Estrada Bela Oh Adan voila instance re Neela answer on the ethereal hadith in this hadith Qudsi Allah subhana WA Ta'ala is saying whoever harms a wali of mine somebody who is in this state of constant attentiveness to the time and whose desire for anger for rage for Envy for getting his own back for vengeance has all gone and is just in the moment accepting the divine decree whoever harmed such a person I make war on him and anybody who attacks those olia of allah subhanaw taala catastrophes will come this is visible throughout our history and then the hadith continues my servant draws near to me with nothing more beloved to me than that which I have made an obligation upon him so through these obligations including fast fasting we draw near to him and Allah loves those actions we may not still be very lovable because we're not getting them right we're not inhabiting them properly we're going through the motions but the divine love is for the action for the outward form of what we're complying to and then the hadith continues and my slave draws near continues to draw to me with optional acts of diversion until they love him so when on top of that when the beauty of those actions has become so clear that we want to do more and more and we want to inhabit them more and more authentically Allah loves not just the act but the one who is performing the act knows he loves us so this muhabba this divine love is seems to be at the center of this process of moving forward through our dirt and then it says and when I love him I become the eye with which he sees and the ear with which he hears and the hand with which he strikes and the foot on which he walks which means his constant in compliance whatever he does with his limbs is in compliance with with the Sun now with maracas and his in distance said state of loving closeness to the divine and distance from revenge and passion and vengefulness and and anger and all of this other ugly things which are the satanic things that prevent the prostration and if he seeks my protection I will certainly granted him and if he seeks my support I will certainly grant at him this is what we need and this is the message and the moral and the beauty of ramadhan overcome that ego be truly in the space of accepting the Sabha accept the divine decree overcome those passions and that vengefulness and that flame within and you will become supported by the diviner this is what the own money so may allah subhanaw taala make this an Ramadan of real Sabha a real so look of real wayfaring of real journeying towards his good pleasure in sha allah and accept all of our fasting and our Quran and art are aware and are a Grom insha'Allah balaclava come well are forming call assalamualaikum warahmatullah cambridge muslim college training the next generation of Muslim thinkers

Channel: Cambridge Muslim College

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Keywords: ramadan, ramadan Moments, islam, british muslims, england, cambridge, abdal Hakim murad, tj winter, cambridge muslim college, abdul hakim murad, cambridge new mosque, cambridge central mosque, blessed month, fasting, holy month, ramadhan, cmc10years, british islam, divine, ego, sufism, authentic knowledge, islamic scholarship, tasawuf

Id: S68W1ogXShE

Length: 21min 7sec (1267 seconds)

Published: Fri May 24 2019