The Meaning of Purity – Abdal Hakim Murad: Friday Sermon

almost muslim purity is half of iman alhamdulillah fills the balance the prayer is light charity is a proof sabor is illumination and the quran is an argument for or against you this is one of those many hadiths recited in khutbas down the ages of islam and throughout its length and breadth in which the believers those who come here for the qibla and for love of the chosen one are told several things and invited to reflect on how they connect one to another and he begins with what seems like an enigma a puzzle a riddle purity or you can say purification is half of faith [Music] let's begin with this just three words in arabic what does it mean half of iman in other words half of that which brings us to the jannah half of that which brings us into harmony with the divine purposes half of that which inspires in the heart love for the sunnah of the chosen one who was and is and ever will be purity is half of this so the mind asks what is this purity what does it mean and we find it often in the quran allah loves the people of tauber of repentance and he loves those who purify themselves or who are purified what does this mean well we know even in ordinary conversation that we can speak of pure actions and pure things and pure inward states so which of these is intended what is the lesson that is our take home for today we know that in one of the very first episodes of revelation to rasulullah in those brief miraculous statements which came like thunder upon the soft heart of the chosen one sallallahu alaihi wasallam because the revelation descended upon his heart that's what else in creation in the extent of space and time could carry allah's eternal word his heart the divine voice says oh you one who is shrouded in his mantle and to this day who knows how many millions upon millions of muslims give the name muddasir to their sons out of respect for that extraordinary initial time when in that small place in arabia the whole history of the world began to be set upon a new and more hopeful course [Music] are you wrapped in your mantle you are there covered up who knows what is happening except for your faithful wife but the rest of the world has no idea that history at that moment is being changed forever [Music] arise and warm stand and warm tell people about the appalling consequences of living out of harmony with the will of their creator tell people of the incredible blessings and the ease that comes when they are in compliance with the laws of their creator it's a warning good news as well glorify your lord purify your clothes and shun impurity right at the beginning we have again this idea of tahara what does it mean what is he being told sallallahu alaihi wasallam well the ulama of tafsir tafsir means the science of understanding the quran and alhamdulillah so many thousands of books of tafsir east and west in this ummah even from granada in spain says there's three meanings to this tahara what is allah saying to his chosen one sallallahu alaihi wasallam firstly make sure that your clothes are actually clean be in an appropriate state outwardly as well as inwardly in order to receive the words of rabbal al-amin who is the essence of purity and to accept only what is good and pure that's one possible meaning another is that there's a majes which means metaphor in other words when you say may your garments be pure in a certain kind of high language it means may you write walk uprightly and not fall into sin it's a kind of simile or metaphor but it also has the sense even jose here is the imam of the malikis in the city of granada when it was still a great muslim city he's saying one of the meanings of it is make sure that your garments your thiab come from halal sources we might stop for a moment and think about that everything that we hear in quran and sunnah is relevant to us today this is something that is relevant to us today what does it mean to be halal in one's clothing we know that the famous rather alarming hadith that many a person stands and says he stands and he says ya allah allah but his food is haram and his drink is haram and his clothing is haram food and drink we understand and we must always be careful people of warah be careful about we eat and what we drink because it enters into the body which is in ways we can't understand part of the spiritual body of light with which we face it's a mystery what does it mean for our clothes to be halal why is it so stressed why is it stressed apparently at the beginning of surat al-mudhir it means the clothing it should cover the aura cover that which needs to be covered for modesty but it also means that it should be sourced in a halal and good way ethics in everything is the heart of religion religion is the ethical engagement with other members of the human family of bani adam so what does it mean when we go shopping to buy something that is halal well insha allah we won't be hypnotized by the stupid language of designer labels and spend too much for something that's just as good as anything else insha'allah were too smart for that many people have big corporations stealing from them all the time just because there's some foolish logo on the sweatshirt insha allah we won't fall for that capitalist trick but it has to do the olympia say with the ethics of the way in which the cloth was weaved the transactions were made the shopkeeper did his business and any other issues to do with riba or exploitation that might happen along the chain of production recently i read that major british supermarkets are being taken to task for buying clothing from sweatshops in bangladesh where the workers work 80 hours a week and are paid the equivalent of 7p an hour just so that people can have new clothes every year in the fashion and they throw it away it goes to the landfill when it's still perfectly wearable that exploitation and the world is full of it not just bangladesh but other countries as well so the believer really as part of the fullness of his e-man should look to see if these things are ethical firstly do i really need yet another shirt important question why not save money and receive adora as well if i do need a shirt it's a halal legitimate requirement am i absolutely sure about the ethics of it it's a kind of nephilia that we can engage with just to check to make sure that what we wear does not represent anything that in our very unequal world has uh been the result of the exploitation of the poor somewhere or other so ibn jose mentions this and it's still a very important message so three meanings of this verse was but we know also and it's implicit in this verse that there is an inward aspect of us when the quran says allah loves those who make talbah regularly and he loves those who are purified he's not just talking about those who make war a lot talber is a great thing what goes with it what is the inward state that's necessary for a tawba just to say astagfirullah [Music] is not talbot that's just the tongue doing its job in the mouth in itself not an effort not interesting it's from the heart it's when we sincerely recognize that we're violated the moral law and when weeping and stooping we come to the lord of glory and vow as a sign of the sincerity of that tulba that we won't go back to doing what we did that was so destructive to others and probably to ourselves as well so it's a kind of inward thing and it's a form of taharah so let's look at one of the great ethical theorists of islam where he looks at this idea of tahara what is it he says there's four degrees this is imam abu hamid al-ghazali one of the great ethical writers in our tradition he says there's four degrees of this tahara firstly tathir events that happen to you bodily events that mean that you break your door so being purified from that birth means things substances that are impure nepec in some of our languages that are upon your body or your clothes that can invalidate the prayer and some other things that you do so that's the first degree that tahara but he says there's a second degree to purify your limbs and your senses from crimes and sins so we know instinctively that there is an impurity that comes when we do something wrong and imam ali says when you sin there's a black spot that comes on the heart it's a kind of dirt that comes within and we intuit that when we do something really bad we feel somehow polluted it's part of human psychology it's called the macbeth effect by secular psychologists remember out foul spots with lady macbeth as the hand is grubbed but the blackness from the murder can't go away and we want to wash very often when we have been subject to violations or when we have done something wicked as part of the human self and the rituals of are part of that good psychology it helps us to feel that we have got rid of some of those sins and that we are more suited to face rabbi eliza the lord of glory so purifying the limbs including the eyes not looking at impure things things we shouldn't look at not tasting things that are haram not listening to haram talk not doing things with the hands and the feet and so forth that are not accepted in the sunnah that also is a kind of purity we can purify our physical form without using water and then the imam moves on to the third degree and he says tortilla purifying the heart from ugly traits of character if i have jealousy in my heart or a tendency to tell lies or a tendency to be greedy or tender we have so many tendencies we all know what we are where our weakness lies to purify the heart of those things in other words that black spot can be washed away and the bad qualities that come about when that dirt accumulates can be reformed people with bad akhlaq can become people of good akhla through some kind of inner purification and the basis of this is reading quran regular in your prayers remembering the formulas of dikkar saying has all of these phrases that naturally spring to the tongue of the believer all of this has an effect as it were it's kind of spiritual laundry cleans up all of that grime and the dirt and those stains within and we really need that this also is one of the meanings for the imam of tahara and the fourth degree which in our age with our weakness and our hearts full of confusion and darkness we can hardly imagine he calls a tatiro purifying the innermost nature of your consciousness from anything that is other than allah in other words never forgetting him wherever you look whatever you do you're remembering allah subhanahu wa ta'ala because you know that his witness is constant he is always with you he is with you are you always with him you are but do you know it do you remember his name the watching sometimes we do sometimes we don't but this highest degree of purity and subhanallah what a beautiful person that would create uh is the person who is constantly in the state of remembering allah and seeing everything that happens in the world is what allah is doing at that time and the imam says this is the degree of the nba in the siddiq the prophets and the highest ones of the the people of siddha so that's a fairly clear way of expressing what we kind of understand from this idea of tahara and but which is the one that this hadith in imam muslim is inviting us to consider that is half of iman sounds like a big thing well the commentators point out that imam muslim puts this whole hadith in the book of wudo so he must understand this hadith or something that's to do with the first degree in other words what we do with water or maybe if you're traveling or you're sick with sand dust or stone or whatever according to the rulings of the the fukah it's to do with just washing getting ready for prayer so this must be something important and it is something important when you think about it it's the it is the foundation of everything else that we do and it is one of those aspects of the ibadah which uh between the slave and his lord like fasting nobody really knows if you're fasting or not huh and that's why uh allah says fasting is just for me nobody knows also and these forms of tahara are just for allah subhana wa ta'ala nobody knows if you're in or you're not in if you were really preparing yourself for the prayer if you did before nobody knows and it's not their business to know it's between you and putting allah subhanahu ta'ala so it's important for us to make sure that we get this right because it's the basis for the validity of the prayer and it's what we do before we touch the holy quran and receive recite quran do some of the practices of hajj it's the opening for so many other things we all need to have the intention of course very few of us can be scholars have to have the intention that we know at least the basics of our deen correctly what a sorrow it would cause if we'd never really learned how to do for an teacher when we were little and we went through our whole lives because nobody's really checking missing out something that is a broken an obligation ordering three of one thing but nothing of another and the is technically invalid we need to be sure of these things there's a story that i love that's narrated of imam al-hasan ben ali of course one of the great ones of the athlete the grandson of the holy prophet salallahu he was outside a mosque once and he saw a man maybe somebody who is new in islam who knows doing his and he saw the man was doing his incorrectly so incorrectly that it was invalid now in islam we're not really supposed to be annoying people by inspecting them and watching them while they pray and watching this because we should be watching ourselves our own faults are certain the faults of others maybe there's some explanation the imam knows that this man has to be corrected what do we do nowadays we go over to him and we shake him and say brother i start for allah haram ahmed bill you've got it all wrong this is how we are nowadays we're so happy when we can see somebody else making a mistake but what did this great imam do he says very politely to the man brother i would like you to watch my waldorf tell me if i'm doing it correctly and the man knows that this is imam ben ali one of the great oceans of religious knowledge and righteousness that he doesn't say no and so he watches and imam al-hasan does his and then the man realizes oh i'm missing something i missed one of the obligations of waldorf and then he realized that this was the imam's gentle and beautiful way of telling him without there being a public reproach without the man being humiliated so he learns two things from the situation firstly he learns how to do this basic ibadah of his correctly and insha allah stays with him for the rest of his life and secondly he learns about akhlaq he learns the beauty of the way of the great ulama and of the ahlil bait in their wonderful way of correcting people amri bilma roof they the greatest pillar of religion putting things right correcting things that are wrong of course it's part of the work of prophecy but but with beauty [Music] gentleness enter an action but that it makes it more beautiful and never does roughness enter an action but that it makes it uglier so this is an important lesson for us so but it is important and insha'allah we all have the near just to make sure to check those texts to ask the scholars just to make sure that we're doing the basics correctly but still our mystery remains purification or purity is half of iman now iman is an inward thing even if they open your body and open your brain some surgeon can do that and observe the blood vessels pulsating they can't see your iman it's a sir allah has put everything that makes us human out of the reach of the medics and the surgeons they look at just stuff they don't look at raw and so purification must have some spiritual value it said that imam ahmad bin hanbal had a particular gift this was just what the scholars call karama seeing something that normally we don't see because of the purity of his heart that sometimes when people were making imam ahmed could see somehow the sins falling from them what did that look like i don't know hadith scholars don't know but it was recorded recorded of imam ahmad that he had this particular karama which means something that allah uses to honor certain people so that they can see that the world is not outwardly what it is inwardly so attentiveness in is important is important when we enter the mosque and we know we are in something in our hearts and our souls tells us that this is different from just wandering around the mosque knowing that we haven't done our talk yet and this is important in islam and it's part of the beauty of islam that it integrates the body into the spirit in some religious and sacred traditions the body is just a horrible dirty thing that you leave behind but in our tradition we've ennobled the descendants of adam and that means the outward form as well as the inward spirit the outward form masha allah of bani adam can be outstanding go to any art gallery in the world and you'll see what the painters are really amazed by is human beings whether it's halal haram this is not the point everybody is amazed by human beings and human beauty the outward matters holy prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam was so beautiful that um one of the sahaba used to go just to look at him they said just the physical beauty of the chosen one sallallahu alaihi wasallam would melt hearts this is part of the takarim the honoring that allah has given the bani adam that we can be outwardly more beautiful but if the inuit is beautiful as well if there is inward taharah as well as outward tahara then you start to see the light the nor which this hadith goes on to speak about and which insha allah will deal with in subsequent but for today let us insha allah make this resolution not to underestimate any aspect of allah's religion this is when we make or the other things it is not just like cleaning our teeth although alhamdulillah it means muslims are clean and not smelly when they go to places of worship but it's not primarily about that it's about influencing the soul waking the soul up at fajr time and telling it now is the time not for sleep but for ahibarda it's an alertness and the word means shining or that which is clear so if we have a strong new year and we have the love for completing the sunnah in our daughter insha'allah and to remember the dua that we do after insha allah everything that is built upon that insha allah will be stronger so we ask allah subhanahu ta'ala to rectify and to give us the inner delight and the nor that comes from following the ways of the chosen one sallallahu alaihi wasallam in worship which is the reason for our creation for allah foreign [Music] is um you

Channel: Cambridge Central Mosque

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Length: 30min 12sec (1812 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 17 2021