Uthman bin Affan – Abdal Hakim Murad: Paradigms of Leadership

so we're resuming our consideration of what has already turned out to be a very uh extensive palette in our search for paradigms of leadership having deconstructed and dissected this idea of leadership and tried to as it were discard from our scalpel all of those ego residues that go with the idea of being a leader being upfront a kind of management guru mentality or the heaven help us electoral contest syndromes various uh ego manifestations of leadership we saw have no place in the context of religion which in many ways turns the world and its paradigms exactly upside down what happens when you value those who are not valued when you are actually listening with the poor or being amongst the poor when you do not like being upon the throne or the minbar or some other position of responsibility and plead with god and with your associates to be taken away from these hazardous roles because the hadith says each one of you as a shepherd and each one of you is accountable for his flock if the wolf comes along or the sheep is sick and you don't notice or the lamb is not looked after in the middle of the night the shepherd's fault don't go blaming the government or a zionist conspiracy or some other thing that you want to reduce your status as all responsible it's it's up to you and holy prophet says every one of you is a shepherd even if it just means keeping an eye on the toddler or feeding your cat or whatever it might be there's always somebody for whose well-being you are responsible and that's all responsible in the literal sense of the word in other words having to give a response to give an account to explain how you discharged that responsibility and sometimes it is just beating the cat or looking after mum sometimes it's dealing with affairs of millions of people spiritually or temporarily but in every case this shepherd hadith applies and we've seen how characteristically islamic is the way in which the human response to this weighty burden of responsibility has fluctuated in different times and places in the stately magnificent ever diversifying but nonetheless universal progress of the umma in space and time one of the things that we've been trying to get our heads around is this famous principle of what diversity means in the context of a religion that is so emphatic on uh ta'essi in other words following the prophetic oswa or example seems to be a specifically islamic characteristic in other religions you don't quite get this idea of the painstaking almost forensic imitation you don't really try to be like how jesus kept his beard and when he how often he trimmed his fingernails and those sunnah things in the context of christianity similarly judaism is not really about trying to be like moses the law is not that it's something else but in our all embracing final hatham religion we have this idea of excellence being specifically articulated in terms of the personal emulation of an ideal human being something very islamic about this idea of sunnah and sunnah doesn't translate terribly well into other linguistic cultural spiritual frames it's hard to see how you'd use the word sunnah how you'd find an english dictionary equivalent it's something specifically islamic so on one hand we have this islamic specificity of emulation but on the other hand we have the fact of a religion that is palpably embracing of all kinds of difference and diversity and one of the ways in which we've reflected on this is by looking at the principle of prophetic emulation as precedent and boundary center and expression of love rather than as it were as the founding of an ideology important to remember that islam calls itself deen and doesn't call itself ideology that's a kind of 20th century aberration hezbollah and so forth jump up and down and say islam is an ideology no that word is not to be found in the quranic dictionaries beware what you're doing if you try and reinvent the whole definition of what god's religion is according to some 20th or in this case 18th century understanding of what a world view might be it comes from the trasi in the 18th century this idea of ideology and lo and behold he says this is what we have when we don't have religion we no longer believe in the church and the priests instead we believe in humanity as a version of zoology we're just part of matter very positivistic and yet you get these muslims nowadays jumping up and down and making them feel themselves feel very modern and very political by saying islam is an ideology the ideology of islam why do they do that well it's a sad insight into the apologetic inferiority complex it sounds very modern and relevant we call it an ideology so let's go with that but no we use our own internal definitions which presumably are the correct ones and we say deen so ideology partakes in science's tendency to reduce everything to a single pattern of explanations and outcomes it's mathematical there's only one proper answer to the quadratic equation dean as opposed to this scientific ideology historically opens up humanity why because it's not really ultimately about the collisions of atoms and the forces that determine them and then ultimately human behavior dialectical materialism ideology is a big word for marx it's about the german ideologies one of the founding texts of of marxism but in said dean which is about the spiritual connection of human beings to transcendence partakes in the indefinite nature of the human spirit the roar so if we're in ideology and we're interested in natural causation that's going to make us very anxious if things seem to be going wrong in the world we are essentially reducing deen to the level of materialistic ideology and that's why a lot of modern muslims go wrong because they think oh you've got a socialist republic and you've got an islamic republic and they've got different ideologies but islam is more radical different deep than that because it's ultimately about that which touches the most indefinable unscientific part of us which is participates in the divine freedom and hence is not reducible to a single mathematical calculus of cause affects outcomes but is imponderable different and therefore dean becomes the cornucopia of incredible diversity and necessary indeterminacy in all but the most essential practices and and doctrines and this approximativity of the filk is one of the things that divides classical islam from modernistic or islamist forms of islam that the pre-modern scholars were happy with as being the latest stage of the evolution of a discussion and there's and we'll move on to something else it's approximative whereas the ideologists want it to be like you know dash capital an absolute fixed and eternally valid statement of class and money and human relations and how we should behave and how the government should be fixed that's one of the interesting paradoxes of the enlightenment science is to be the measure of all things we're just thinking animals but it's also about freedom liberty equality fraternity however science is just about matter there's nothing about it that automatically is going to deliver freedom or humanism it might but there's nothing intrinsically in it that's going to do that in fact it tends to limit everything in terms of laws cause and effect dean that which is from the spirit can transcend that and the quran is all about telling us stories about the limitations of human expectations about cause and effect in the world look at all those stories who could predict materially the outcome of any of them what really is going to happen to satan yusuf what really is going to be the outcome of musa's encounter with firaoun what is really going to happen to islam island hadja in the desert there's always a strange unanticipated outcome so that's dean not ideology and we need to be really clear about this because those who are redefining the whole world view of our civilization are reducing it to something that cannot but be totalitarian and the result is the same unhappy result as we see with every other totalitarianism it cannot deal with the flocks and the depths of the human condition and certainly has nothing to say to the possibility that prayer might be answered for instance so that's one way of beginning this journey towards trying to figure out how we can resolve the paradox of on the one hand sunnah so this is how we should live surely true and on the other hand islam's historic capacity to embrace and to colour and to transform and to purify an indefinite range of different human cultures presumably including our own and this is where this might take us too far afield to discuss it things like orfe and ada are important pick up any pre-modern book of islamic jurisprudence and you'll see how important and authoritative is people's own local customs is one of the principles of the sharia that which is known by custom is like that which is revealed by revelation the ideologist can't figure that out and freaks out and said oh it's just not the sunnah brother but it's in all of our texts of classical in all of the math hubs and it's part of how our civilization dealt with this idea of sunnah which turns out to be infinitely deeper than uh most of us have imagined so maybe that's a useful problematic to try and resolve as we move through these different expressions of islamic excellence in these different times and places that we've looked at and the the particular of this as it were is the spectrum that comes out of the prophetic prism uh the closer we get to the origins of it all the clearer will be islam's vision of the accommodation rather than the suppression of the natural diversity of human beings and much many of the questions that we have about god's law cannot be resolved ideologically and cannot be resolved through what you might call a fundamentalist understanding of what the early muslims took the sunnah to be so for instance just consider if the holy prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam had only married khadija vince or just one woman in his life a lot of muslims nowadays get fidgety about this what would have been the operative consequences say if he'd married a woman of 30 of a particular height and build an education all of the muslims who love to follow the sunnah and they should love the sunnah would think i really want a woman like that who looks this way who is of this height who is of that age who has been married who hasn't been married etc and that would be an understandable form of devotion like those deobandi mawlanas who spend long periods of time and even books discussing what kind of buttons the holy prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam had on his qamis and that's valid in its way it's an expression of love but what would be the operative consequences if they also thought about who they should marry in those terms problematic especially for the women i'm 31 no religious guy is going to marry me i'm finished i'll get married at 30 because that's what all the guys with beards think that they should have it would have very significant consequences but he marries 11 also women and they're really different each one is really different the first one is older than him and then aisha is much younger than him and then there's um and then there's um and they're all really different some of them have jewish origin even and there's reihana and some from high background some of slave origin that diversity has been uh a sign that the idea of sunnah is not meant in a restrictive sense and there are so many other dimensions of this and one of them it seems to me is this idea and we hear it in the hotbus at least if you're in a sunny mosque and the imam towards the end of the always mentions their names abu bakr and omar and of man and ali and gives a little formulaic expression of the form of perfection represented by each of them not which places he conquered or whatever but what kind of person he represented and you can see four different people and their sunnah is binding each one represents a color kind of pushed out from the original prophetic uh brightness but he's one of them really different personalities if you think about it what could be more different or heterogeneous than those four men so already in the time of the salaf and under current circumstances it's important to recognize this is not something that happened with the moguls or something but it's in the time of the seller human diversity big human diversity for women and for men in that early sainted generation so he says my companions are like the stars by whichever of them you guide yourself you'll be guided nice image if you know your night sky there isn't a single star and you can identify that can't actually help you to figure out where is north and where you should be going if you're on your uh mule at night or something that that's how you do it before gps it's god's gps and it'll be around for long after the satellites have exploded or um it's permanent uh and so they too are our permanent permanent firmament and this is not in tension with the idea of prophetic emulation you don't say oh i could follow this sahabi but no i prefer to follow the sunnah that's just the early version of people nowadays who are saying oh you're following the shaybani i follow the sunnah this kind of thing that people have in their mind well you could just as well say that about people who are following the ways of abu bakr or abdulrahman bin awful salman so this idea of human diversity as part of the universality and inclusivity of islam is right there right at the beginning of the islamic package all of those different personalities not by their love of the sunnah and the holy prophet and their knowledge of the necessity of conforming to his perfection homogenized ideologically as socialist man no you see those russian statues from the stalinist era and every single one of them looks the same you know there's images sort of in usually bronze things out some some tedious party headquarters and the guy is kind of standing like this with a torch and then there's the dawn and then the woman is holding a hammer and it's that always the same socialist man is the same kind of thing it's scientific and the chinese now are doing the same thing they call it harmonization a procrustean bed if ever there was one but no we don't do that in islam we have this idea of the sahaba all hundred thousand or whatever whichever one of them okay you might say it's a little bit strange if you're stuck in the desert at night and you say i'm going to look for a particular star alkane or whatever it is there it is i can just about see it i'm going to steer my donkey by that saying maybe that's a slightly odd thing to do but it'll still get you to your destination and that's why we say they're not all the same that is impossible in terms of the eminence these great ones are not the same as somebody who converts three days before the holy prophet's death and doesn't do much obviously it's not ideological it recognizes human diversity but in a way that does not ever compromise the all-important sunni principle of the sunnah and we really need to understand this because a lot of our mutual blaming and anxiety amongst muslims is based on the fact that we differ and you have a lot of pakistanis don't understand islam and the saudis like this difference diversity is the way allah has made us of his signs the difference of your languages and colors and ideology is not into that is too scientific there has to be one proper chinese citizen but dean doesn't do that and that's one reason why ideologies always crash and humiliation dean keeps going so the for we could say that's one example you could talk about the wives of the holy prophet and the different types of female perfection and each of them is an incredible woman but they're different but we're going to talk today about one of the just to indicate something that again makes us think about what we're doing when we think of paradigms of leadership it's not one paradigm of leadership just be like the holy prophet and be identical to that no you know the greek story of the procrastina bed the ancient king of greece who had a bed and he invited his guests to stay on it every night and if they were too long he cut off their feet if they were too short it'd have them stretched so it's become a english kind of proverb the procrastinate that which tries to fit everything into a single template which is what the marxist tried to do but with the diversity and difficulty of humankind didn't really work people still wanted to have their businesses and to do their own thing and it didn't fit the reality of humanity but no islam says athens and welcome and you can be as long or short as you like and you're still welcome and it's important for us in our anxious and defensive age not to retreat into ideology but to continue this generous affirmation of difference which is that in almaty that's part of the sunnah so the one i want to talk about is actually othman ben affirm radhila may be the one that we think about and hear about least so i'm going to do a bit of bio data some of it will be familiar anyway but also a bit of analysis sort of model of sunnah perfection so you follow him and emulate him according to the holy prophet himself that's following the sunnah that's a big thing it's not prophecy but it's kind of in the shape of prophecy well to go through the the bio data first always essential to see people as consequences of their time and place as well as people who certainly in his case shook and change the world in their time and place he is the almost exact precise uh contemporary of the holy prophet salallahu alaihi wasallam what does that mean exactly i mean just last thursday happened to be the 40th anniversary of my taking shahada that's the should i have a party or i don't know um but it's something to think about so he is born five days after the holy prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam which is of course the uh the year of the elephant so a close contemporary and is also of course orishi and his aristocratic blue-blooded the twin sister of the holy prophet's father so really kind of close in kinship he's one of the first converts to islam and the scholars say maybe the fifth he is converting during abu bakr's very secret early dawah when things are really ominous it's like talking about something other than state ideology in albania um still places like that today um and that's how it was in the days of the the secret persecution so ibn ishaq says that first of the male convert abu bakr then ali then zaid bin haritha and then of manbin and most of the that's the earliest sierra books book and most of the later historians say yeah so that's really sabaq precedence in islam which is one of the ways in which we kind of rank the sahaba the people of badr and the people who are the muhajiron and then the ansar it's different gradations of the the sahaba although of course it's not always an immediate indication of who should do what because again we're not looking at ideology uh remember those uh uh i think it was um himmler or somebody who had party number number party member number eight or something he had a little badge saying this for them to be one of the first nazis was a big deal but that was just kind of ego it didn't mean anything but the longer with god's messenger and the more of his tribulations that you share with him obviously it's a sign that you are trustworthy so he is a big name convert and of course this throws the cat amongst the pigeons and his uh uncle al-haqam ibn abil ask kind of goes up to him and physically grabs him starts shaking him and shouting at him and then takes him off and ties him to a post in a public place and saying are you going to leave the religion of your ancestors the dean of your ancestors you should have said ideology i guess because they're going to comply or else by allah i will not leave you until you give this up but uthman says off man takes an oath and swears by allah i will never leave this ever and eventually after a lot more shaking the uncle kind of gives up and all the converts have this experience that oh you've become a terrorist oh you're going to hang out with weird people oh you're going to be sold into slavery in sudan or something these are kind of parental freak out that convert parents sometimes experience but eventually when you're strong they kind of kind of reconfigure it and you give them some flowers and chocolates and remember their birthdays for a change and it kind of settles down and this is constant it's a constant of human nature people don't want to be isolated from their own flesh and blood phrase the pre the first predecessors in islam some would identify with these who were muslim at the time of the first migration to alhabasha ethiopia or who actually participated in it so he goes uh and already he has um the holy prophet's daughter rokaya as his spouse and together they go to al-habasha and so the holy prophets one of the first prayers that is recorded of him that he makes for of man of man is the first to have made hijrah with his family and it said that he was the first to have done this since the time of sidne alot this is recorded in the hadith collection so he's taking his family with him and in ethiopia they kind of they're a sort of sensation because one of the things that is narrated of him is that he was a very extreme physical beauty at this time it's kind of his early 40s in his prime uh magnificent and also rokaya his wife is stunningly beautiful and this is one of the reasons it seems why that the najashi and his uh entourage kind of melted and from that time it's actually been a a principle of sharia that you should never appoint as an ambassador anybody who really isn't good to look at i don't know if the foreign officers have the same principle but i don't know maybe they'll appoint somebody who's lost an eye and kind of has no teeth to be her majesty's representative to abu zabi or gambia or somewhere but it's uh it's just good psychology that if you're pleading a case you kind of look uh look magnificent because human beings naturally are inclined to beauty so they are kind of radiant and and luminous and one of the sahabah says i saw is reminiscing and never in my life have i seen a man or even a woman whose face was more beautiful than his so he was really a sensation and this is one of the things that is recalled of him osama bin zayed narrates the messenger once sent me to off man's house with a plate of food so i go in here pleased with her sitting down and then i couldn't stop looking at off man and at her and and when i returned the messenger said have you ever seen a more beautiful couple than they and i said never so pretty dazzling uh there's also a range of hadiths in which the holy prophet comments on a resemblance between uthman and hazrat ibrahim this comes up in a number of hadiths and what are we to make of this is it a physical resemblance or some kind of spiritual resemblance but he uh often says that he found this this tashabu this this resemblance and it may well be that this has something to do with what is of man's most famous quality or characteristic the khatib is on the minbar and he's finishing his hotbar and he says man and all of the people who can't understand arabic say uh i mean i mean although the dua has finished but it's just raising off man but never mind uh it's a prayer that's already come about and the one who is most sincere in modesty is of man that's what we say of the third of the four khilafah's and what is what are we to understand by this modesty and this is maybe the heart of what we want to get at today if we're looking at the very earliest muslims those who are sunnah themselves still illuminated by the the memory of the salah each of them having a different form of human perfection that is to do with inheritance dna upbringing whatever we're all different ideology tries to squeeze us onto that percussively in bed dean says let's see what allah has made of you and see how you can be perfect and represent the sunnah in a perfect form according to what what what you are made to be so us this idea of seems to conflict completely with our conventional view of what leadership might be is kind of like being modest uh there's sound hadiths in which it was reported that of man even when in the kind of shower cubicle would be like that and wouldn't stand up it could naturally haiti a modest person what kind of leader is that it's not like prince andrew or boris or trump or these people who are now seen as symbols of immodesty the darkest secrets of what you once did you kind of blab about it in front of a camera uh this is not the islamic way and the holy prophet says sallallahu every religion has a particular virtue that characterizes it the spiritual type that it favors and that of islam is so that's the essence of the islamic modality of being but how do we even translate it it's so specific to islam it's another of those kind of untranslatable things like sunlight so islamic that we don't have a word in english precedent no won't no sunnah is just sunnah sometimes we translate it as humility or modesty or shyness that's kind of a bit of it but how does that become a paradigm of leadership you how do you do that and still be a shepherd responsible for all of the muslims and these armies that by this time are in central asia and north africa that's another very characteristic islamic paradox but it's again part of the prophetic sunlight the prophetic uh perfection the holy prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam was more modest more shy than a virgin in her tent whoa this is a man with a red turban and a scimitar who's unifying his people like the hero the warrior but more modest more shy than the virgin in her tent which is kind of for the arabs essence of uh that again is something that you have to work out if you're going to understand what islam means by specific form of virtue it's not the chess beating warrior from game of thrones with whatever it's it's not that it's some other model of warrior excellence that to us seems very strange who is the person who is at the forefront of things who is the shyest of people this in our age of democratic politics when everybody is there because they want to be there and modesty hayek wouldn't get you very far on the slippery pole of politics nowadays because it's all about you know our cvs you can't get a job unless you boast and tell half truths i'm a very dynamic outgoing person and a team player and i've done islam says cross it all out it's a problem for us but this is you know the islam the holy prophet says it and it's a sound hadith and how can we be shared and the virgin in her tent and get anything done even argue with the plumber shy it's and one of these interesting paradoxes but it's a prophetic quality and it's characteristic of so much of muslim social existence modesty with the religion of hijab the religion of nikab the religion of no seclusion to all of that other religions recognize the virtue of modesty obviously immodesty is not appreciated by anybody if they're serious but we really do these things it's characteristic look at any group of muslims and see who sits next to whom and you know on a bus in turkey now if there's only one place on the bus and the woman gets on and there's a man who would have sat next to her he gets up and sit next to a man and the woman who was there goes and it's his wife and they rearrange it so that she doesn't have to sit next to a strange man and muslim world these things are understood and this is important because we're often kind of dismissed for this as if we're inhibited or buttoned up or puritanical and that's not the muslim way either ah coexists with a naturalness about every aspect of humanity including marriage so it's a modesty that is not an inhibition and this in the context of recent news is kind of important because what is the only thing modernity can say about the male female relation the equal equality liberation is equality the man and woman are equal now when some 20 year old aspiring actress goes to see harvey weinstein in his suite at the aldorf at the waldorf astoria in new york and she's alone and he's there you can say they're equal yes okay we can say they're equal of course created to be equal but that is not an adequate account of that situation it doesn't it's not enough just to say they're equal which is what the feminists will kind of want to do islam will say no no illicit seclusion the hadith says the shaitaan is the third of them and it will also say where's her mahram her brother should be there kind of obvious or her father but the feminist thing doesn't like that equality of course she can be their own the reality of our messy world excludes any kind of idealistic image of what equality might mean there are certain realities where modesty is usually in the woman's interest usually a society where modesty is respected is one that protects women better than one where people are just predators because something in the male temperament man is either a predator or a protector we're raptors basically and it's not necessarily something to be proud of particularly but the sharia says these boundaries don't go to his hotel room don't go to the island in the caribbean on the private jet and all of these things it's not really a very complicated concept to understand and it's always the women who get hurt in these situations because they end up with the baby or feeling psychologically damaged or trafficked or whatever if you just say equality you're not dealing with the reality of the fact that he's stronger he's a bully she's the one who's going to get pregnant he won't it's equality it doesn't quite do it so this idea of hijab and of reserve between the genders is it's not really what the feminists like but it's certainly nine times out of ten will serve the interest of the female rather than the male she's on a long distance bus in turkey does she really want to go to sleep when there's a guy she doesn't know next to her no so equality fine has to be something else as well and this this modesty which is very much the islamic ethos is is important and all of these modernist muslims who want to be accepted or feel embarrassed by these kind of old customs and say well we don't it doesn't really matter and we can just mingle freely and it's cool to socialize and well when they become victims or when the girls become victims which is the more usual case in the cruel inequalities of the real world then they might think well it didn't work too well that time did it but then they end up this is uh half of our headlines are about what happens when you don't have modesty so this is the quality of satan of man and we have to get our heads around the fact that he's when he becomes khalifa the muslim thing is already enormous it's the big new superpower in the world and this man who is so modest is in charge of it so that indicates the radicalness of the human person generated by absence of ego and we've seen this many times on this journey with these paradigms of leadership that somebody who really doesn't have ego is really different and strange doesn't care clean the toilet for somebody and it doesn't matter doesn't even think about it afterwards and that's that's different not just to be committed to the poor like karl marx but to live with the poor he kind of lived a relatively comfortable life in hampstead or wherever it was even though his wife said after he died i wish karl had spent less time writing about capital and more time earning some but yes it's human nature but the holy prophet ali prays to be resurrected amongst the masakim that's where he'll be not with us kind of fortunate centrally heated westerners with our nice cars but with the kind of barefoot rohingya or whoever is there that's where to find him and that's a different kind of leadership it's it's um moving troubling guilt-inducing but that's religion turns everything upside down not through some kind of class war but through in something much deeper which is inverting people's priorities be with the poor love the poor holy prophet sallallahu alaihi wouldn't go to sleep that night if there was a coin in his house such you know that's radical that's nowadays that's an empty bank balance that's the letter from the bailiffs that's that world the precariat that's where the divine favor is likely to be so all of these figures represent the real revolution which is the revolution in the human heart which is what a new religion brings so uh we find he's he's wealthy he's aristocratic and he doesn't care it's like emmanuel junaid's statement that zod asceticism doing without is for the heart to be empty of what the hand is empty of if you're poor but you really wish you had stuff that's not zahad which is the quality of the all of the prophets is really not to care early prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam if there was food he'd eat it if there wasn't he go to sleep hungary and it wasn't what he was thinking about doesn't become an issue so that again is kind of radical when you think about it not just not to mind being poor and putting up with it but kind of not noticing it not being an issue uh imam ali's son said i once saw of man sleeping alone in the mosque with a rough blanket over him and he was amir al-mu'min wow if you've dealt with the rich visitors uh on cmc tours for instance it was really not acceptable air conditioning in my room last night it was so noisy and what is this cmc and why did you have put me in this hotel with the noisy air conditioner and i'm really sorry please don't stop giving us your thousand pounds a year or whatever really sorry about the air conditioning of man is not even thinking about how he should be he's one of the most powerful people in the world already leading these unstoppable armies uh he just crashes out in the mosque with a blanket and doesn't isn't even the beginning of an issue for him so that's part of what we are looking at um and in his own environment he's well wealthy continues to be wealthy he's one of the richest of the sahabah anshuraj s used to feed people the way a prince feeds people and then he'd go to his house and there would be vinegar and olives that's just how he was and again he probably wouldn't even think about that that was just not his concern he used to ride around medina but not on a kind of smart white horse but on a mule and if he had his servant or secretary he'd be kind of riding behind him on the mule and it might not look so regal but it's not exactly the coronation coach going down the mall as it back in all of the trumpets and the fanfares that stuff is fine but these people are different he's happy with the mule and the secretary behind him uh different uh one aspect of his of his modesty which is why modesty is not really a very good translation is he was very soft-hearted can either if allah stood to pray at a grave he would weep until his beard became wet kind of soft-hearted remembering mortality [Music] somebody said i once saw uthman ben afan on friday he was on the minbar giving the khutbah now we and there are legitimate arguments for this say be beautiful in every masjid and that's part of respect for the mosque and for the what's going on there uh but of men radhila wasn't part of the world of the huge turban and the caftan and the the performance that we have even though that becomes how it should be because people naturally are going to respect the dignity of the person up there you can see the majesty of our civilization there if he's just in jeans and a t-shirt and kind of standing any old hour and his phone is going off and it's just an ordinary bloke you don't respect the word so much and this is recognized you want to see the the the solar the majesty of of the alamo there and this is appropriate but back in those days i once saw othman on friday on the minbar and he had a rough um loincloth from aidan which might have been worth four or five coins uh and then a torn kind of shirt which was on him that also this is part of that diversity this is also part of prophetic perfection you know poverty and being clean but not extravagant uh and this is what religion brings that is new because you know it's not the byzantine emperor and it's not the king of persia and it's not the king the emperor of china where everything is kind of operatic in its magnificence he was not even thinking about whether he should do that or not but he just got up to give the hotband it was probably so amazing the people were in tears and the paraphernalia wouldn't matter another aspect of his shall we say aristocratic virtues is his generosity as one of the things that he's most remembered for and this again is an aspect of prophetic perfection was quicker in giving in giving than the winds which has come and go the imagery being that it's kind of unpredictable and spontaneous it's just like a force of nature you just give you don't think maybe next march i will give sadaka and i think i can afford 120 pounds and such and such a charity and i'll note it in my diary and i'll get a a email reminder and it's not like that it's seeing the need and immediately here you are and it's like wind it's a nice image and that was the prophetic way was the same and was famous for a number of key benefactions in the history of the umma in medina when they came and some of the tribes were not allowing them access to water and so he paid for a well to be doug which is the famous ruma which is still there and i've been there and it's actually still i don't know somebody hasn't noticed it in riyadh but it's still a beautiful place with the palm trees and the water and it's delicious water each of the wells of medina is traditionally believed to have a different taste and the ottoman elite one of the things they would do would be to have a kind of water evening and they would sample water from different parts of the world and kind of like wine tasting or something that probably ended rather better and a bit rumor was was famous and it still took my kid said it's it's a very uh a very sacred place he was the one who dug it which was a big operation in those days before big yellow machines and knowing where to do it and how to so uh that was one of the things for which the holy prophet uh asked for allah's blessings that he spent for that and the other was the battle of tabor or the expedition of tabor uh anna this is called the army of difficulty because the army had to go in the summer and people had just suffered the the siege and the campaigns and they were impoverished they found it difficult uh and of men but i found made it possible by equipping a thousand cavalry so let's let's listen to this and see if we can find a contemporary resonance for this expression of leadership gave an address and urged people to participate in the army of difficulty an off-man said i will contribute a hundred camels with all of their saddles and accoutrements and and reigns and the holy prophet again urged people an off man stands up again and said another 100 with its equipment and so it goes on allah and then the narrator said after all of this i saw the holy prophet saying and moving his hand in some way whatever othman does after this is going to be sort of covered by this kind of this is an amazing sadaka that is giving now it's interesting that what we see here is a little bit similar to what we get sometimes with muslim fundraising today and we think oh dear this is like some kind of i don't know the voice or something as a presenter and he's getting us worked up and this is nothing to do with islam but this is what is happening uh it's a kind of ancient thing the holy prophet is urging them i pledge a hundred camels but he does it three times and the result is that the army is is equipped in that world where the empires and the tribes were out to annihilate uh the early muslims and the city of of medina so um yeah making of pledges as long as courses you uh fulfill the pledges uh rather than as has happened to the new mosque project having to deal with checks that bounce and that kind of thing um if you actually do it with it's it's a prophetic emulation trying to equip this army and he prayed oh allah forgive of man that which he has turned to and turned away from that which he hides and what he has announced that which he has not spoken about and that which he has spoken about so we have this combination of this kind of physical beauty aristocratic graciousness nobles oblige a complete indifference to how comfortable he was himself the traditional hospitality and generosity of the well-trained noblemen and also this kind of modesty this hayat the one in my ummah who has the most higher is off man than a fern but there's other things one of the things that kind of made the biggest difference historically was his relationship to the quran he is said to have been in all of islamic history one of only two khalifas who was half his memorized the whole quran the other was al-makman that bursted caleb who was hafiz so he was somebody who preserved allah's book uh by heart and was uh involved during his khilafah with making sure that the text that was known by the sahaba who heard the holy prophet recite it fully and they knew the text was preserved in some kind of written form that could then be sent out in order to be compared against various variations that were inevitably happening in far away places so he assembles a committee in order to make sure that there's a kind of authorized version if you like which is the authmatic recession and there's books now which claim to be that quran and it's really hard to determine their exact age because they've been through obviously 1400 years of historic vicissitudes but if you go to tashkent ancient shash capital of uzbekistan and you go to the mubarak which has a hair from the beard of the holy prophet that's why it's called mubarak next to it they have a kind of museum of the quran where they have what they say is the original quran that hazarity of man was reciting during his martyrdom so they'll point out the stains on the page that they say are his blood there's other copies of this they say this one in egypt but his relationship to the quran is something that the ummah has certainly preserved in its in its memory um his titles also indicative of the kind of leader that he was uh he's often known as the man of the two lights maybe this is the most common of his epithets sometimes if you see in some ceremonial mosques in parts of the islamic world very self-consciously suddenly they'll have the names of the four khalifas and they might have in smaller characters the particular quality of that khalifa so his uh the one with the two lights are the two lights well there's one net text that indicates that this is to do with two particular forms of divine proximity that he will be granted in paradise there will be two flashes of light that accompany him in the garden and there's early texts that indicate that but the more usual interpretation in the ummah is that it he was the only person who ever married two of the daughters of the holy prophet as we saw who dies more or less during the battle of badr although she's in in medina and then on call form later on so the one who has two prophetic spouses the man of two lights and according to a narration from uh imam ali it was the holy prophet who gave him this title uh specifically so rokay is the mother of his son abdullah ibn of man so he has his kunya his patronemic abu abdullah is his kind of informal name and he is in because his daughter is kind of dying so he has permission not to go and join the battle of bader obviously uh and he buries her as the news reaches medina of uh the victory of badr and because he received some of the beauty of badarhi sometimes in some of the lists included as one of those who were of the people of badr and then he marries um called form also leaves him bereaved because she dies in the year nine of the hijra and the holy prophet says in the hadith if i had a third unmarried daughter i would give her to othman as well and i marry my daughters only with wahi with revelation and this is another indication of an aspect of prophetic emulation which is that you make sure that you marry your daughters to somebody who will honor them um of man certainly honored the daughters of the holy prophet salallahu alaihi wasallam and in this perhaps we can again go back to the idea of modesty and the idea also of respect and how we deal with these endless human sort of train crashes has now afflicted the royal family and boris johnson with his girlfriend in downing street but he's still got his wife somewhere else and it's at a event arranged by some muslims recently to which boris johnson was invited the idea was that he would be sitting sat next to a woman in nikaab because he makes these comments about letterboxes that would be interesting and then during the event he would slowly realize it's actually his wife okay so that's one way of getting onto the front page of the daily mail but it didn't happen that way but the point is you know this is eros the greek said was the god that never is defeated you defeat him one way he gets you some other way and that's one reason why in our time where everything is kind of immodest and the internet is sort of freakish outrageous in modesty the religion that's been given for this time is the religion of really strict modesty and correct comportment and people being very careful about what they say because i might say that impropriety in that area of human life is more destructive than anything else it really does very deep damage uh so uh the holy prophet allah is obviously choosing men for his daughters huge responsibility this is part of being a shepherd and gives his daughter not to somebody who's going to have a kind of luxury lifestyle because he certainly doesn't but this person who is profoundly decent and that's a major responsibility for muslim parents always never mind status prestige etc but somebody decent and a fortnight to this is that so much of the language about islam and modernity focuses on sharia disparities let's get rid of polygamy and let's change those inheritance laws blah blah until everything is gone really that isn't just what the west wants and there's a lot of that chit chat in the muslim world as in the west but actually the real issue as we see with these people is not really shady uh disparities but rather how decently people treat each other you can have a system that's perfectly egalitarian and irons out any wrinkles but if people are still unrefined and they're still predators and they're still not compassionate and they still don't have respect it's going to be a disaster and relationships won't last we look at the divorce rate and relationships breaking up in modern england even though they've ironed out any kind of disparity between husband and wife decades ago but still it's not working so uh if we want to set our communities right which is evidently what we should because we're dysfunctional very often in this area sometimes our relationships don't work just saying oh let's have a new hd head about inheritance law or something isn't isn't really the most useful place to look but instead how can we get people to behave better to each other and with more respect so it's a kind of inward sufi thing rather than a thing you can't actually change people's behavior through acts of parliament you can punish them for being bad but making them not bad in the first place is more interesting and is really the essence of religion so the idea of the the spouse as shahid you know it's a sufi rather than a category adam we have enoble the descendants of adam and adam were the summit of creation and that which was given to adam was nothing short of the perfection that everything in the garden partook of that hemisphere has to be seen as a sign of divine creativity and greatness and needs to be treated with respect not just with equal rights respect and honoring and amazement and gratitude has to be the basis of the relationship the male female relationship in any culture law is you have to have good laws that's not really going to reach far enough into the human heart to make relationships really work so there has to be a modesty huh to laud it over him or her or just press for this or that but just be grateful and respectful and amazed uh and the the the blessings will come uh and this is kind of obvious but nowadays we're so keen on box ticking and we often have swanky weddings and a few years later it all kind of comes to nothing and people tend not to recover fully from that the hadith says the most detested of all permissible things so we need to go into those relationships which should be easy the two hemispheres is the fitter what could be more obvious uh on the basis of respect for allah's creation and the indicativity of gender rather than just what's in it for me and is this an acquisition and does she go along with me and agree with me and all of that kind of nafs talk so the decline of the inner sufi dimension of islam has actually made the much harder work because we're always looking at these books of talaq and things and counselling and relationships that's just kind of an emergency escape hatch a very occasional thing rather than something that half of the population should be looking towards so holy prophet ali looks carefully to where he places his family members his dna this is vitally important and chooses somebody who's not going to worry about the noisy air conditioner but is a fundamentally decent respectful human being he's also known for as one of the sahaba who were most kind of emphatic in their ibadah so if you look at the tafsir works where it says is he who is humbly standing for the stretches of the night prostate prostrate and upright fearing the next world and hoping for al for the mercy of his lord uh the tafsir authors say on the authority of ibn omar who of man is and elsewhere in the books of tafsir where it says those who have iman and do beautiful works and then fear allah and then have iman and then fear allah and then allah loves those who have of man used to fast continuously and pray every night except for a small rest that he take at the beginning of the night and it's recorded by the historians that somebody once watched him in the mosque in medina to see what is he doing exactly and it turned out that he was reciting the entire quran in two rackets even today you hear stories of people doing that you recite it clearly but rapidly and you can do that it might take seven or eight hours it's possible um but this is one of the things that he was known to have done um during the sad story of his martyrdom when the streets were full of uncouth rioters trying to break down his door his wife lent over from the parapet his wife is saying will you kill him or let him live he'll still be the man who recited the entire quran in one rakah she knew she lived with him he said that's my husband so what are you doing famous for feke as well particularly some of the hadith that have come down to us and the early sayings and positions of the ta'am about the hajj are narrated specifically on the authority of othman eben so again there's a lot to be said about him he was perhaps the closest counselor to abu bakr as-siddiq during his two years khilafah which were two very turbulent years also according to some of the historians like belladore the closest councillor to uh hazrat umar radhillah during his khilafah very involved so for instance one of the issues that arose these places are being conquered what do you do with the lands so the big baizan tank is a feudal system in the byzantine empire and the dechans the big landowners of persia they kind of fled or slain on the field of battle what do you do with the lands and some of the conquerors are saying we want them and it's an omar consults with othman who says no they should be returned to their original owners that of course has a very big sort of impact on the demography and the balance of wealth in the early islamic empire and it's irrespective of whether they're muslim or not so the greek owners the armenians and so forth the cops if they're still there they they get their estates back so omar accepts this view another of the so much that could be said on this uh things that when we think about leadership in islam remind us that it is pluriform diverse and again a reminder that that is necessary if the sunnah is not to turn into ideology is the fact that these rightly guided caliphs the process by which each of them becomes caliph is very different that's important for us as an if there was a verse in the quran saying a ruler must come to power through xyz inheritance is the eldest son or he takes power or whoever's in charge or whatever that would be binding upon us now you'd have ideology but in fact uh by divine providence the process by which each of these four early caliphs comes to the amir al-mu'min is quite different [Music] so it's by acclimation the complex difficult times the sacrifice and eventually a kind of consensus and a very rowdy gathering of the sacrifice the bani said that abu bakr becomes khalifa and then he designates his successor by nos it's going to be omar and that's accepted and then omar dies of course suddenly assassinated um things are not it's not expected what's going to happen now now in the context of the ancient world there was really only one way in which you could get to be ruler which was uh being born into it that was the egyptian model all of those dynasties that was the byzantine model um that was the persian model china they all had dynasties originally met dynasty it was the eldest son and of course in europe and in england it's the same it's by primogeniture now in early islam there were lots of people who thought well that has to be this case for us as the quran says is not the father of any of your men and his daughters apart from hazard fatima who's already ill have predeceased him so a kind of imperial idea of primogeniture it's not going to be easily applied but in any case there's nothing in the quran or the sunnah that indicates that that's how it should be the same quran and sunnah that's so detailed about so many other aspects of life in the book of waldor is this big how you get to be amir and mormony something that's worked out consensually through disputation and trial and error in subsequent generations and centuries of discussion but it's not really part of the original thing so ideology which is always very politically obsessed can't really get a handle on this because it's diverse each of these four rulers is coming to power through a different process so how how does man express this how does he begin his temporal leadership omar before he dies appoints a committee of six men who are going to have this discussion in consultation with the rest of the muslims of course you can't consult people who are in kairowan and kulfur and places because it takes three months to get there and it's not not going to work so it's medina and medina as we saw with our imam malik lecture has a particular paradigmatic representative value it's a kind of ummah in microcosm so these six men who are chosen by omar are ali abitalib who is somebody who ends up unwillingly really chairing this commit committee who again is one of the sad because they say he was the eighth convert to islam and was the one who rallied the troops at uhud when it looked as if all was lost and he's the one who shouted ended up defending the holy prophet with a small band of faithful warriors a person of immense distinction these are the kind of inner core who've been around from earliest times and omar knows they have only the interests of islam at heart so uthman is on that committee and they have three days and the decision has to be on the fourth day it's not like choosing the pope where you get all of these old guys from bolivia or whatever and they sit together supposedly they have their discussions in latin but i don't know if it's quite like that and they're not allowed out until they've chosen a pope and there's camp beds and they bring in pizzas and things and they have to decide who's the pope and the white you know the whole drama the the uh operatic aspect of that well these people are given three days despite the trauma sydney omar would have sorted this out but he's been stabbed abraham and alf shares the committee but says he will not stand he will he will not become the khalifa i'm not going to compete with you in this this matter but he presides he asks each of them in turn would you do it starting with imam ali whose holy prophet's cousin son-in-law ali does not speak az-zubair says it has to be either ali or othman uthman says it should be ali saad says othman majority kind of in favor of othman because remember he's been the kind of prime minister of the deputy for abu bakr and for omar and was trusted with two of the daughters of the holy prophet et cetera and i didn't mention the other titles still qiblatain he prays towards the two quebecers he participates in the two hijras he has a lot of these kind of dual titles uh so a person of real distinction and then they go out to sound out the people in medina and the consensus seems to be in favor of uthman fourth day comes they have to have a decision abraham goes out to fajr prays in the mosque and it must have been a pretty intense prayer each time so after the prayer abraham ben alf asks people to stay and then he sends out messages to the heads of the tribes and the muhajin and the ansar and the military leaders and then he stands up and speaks to them [Music] so so he stands up to give the speech he praises allah and then he says to proceed i have looked into the public affair and i have sought their counsel and i have found that they will not choose anyone other than of man and then he says o of man i pledge allegiance to you according to the sunnah of allah's messenger and that of the two khalifas who came after him he accepts do the same and the leaders of the armies and the muslims in general and this is at the beginning of muharram immediately after the burial of omar so this is in the year 24. so it is interesting that the royal principle which was so universal at the time doesn't really manifest in any of this now in certain forms of early shii islam the idea of primogeniture seems to be evident even though ali is not the son of the holy prophet is his continental cousin son-in-law married to fatima so according to the royal understanding of things he's the heir apparent uh the next of kin so it should be he so even though many of those who became the what academics called the proto-shia those who thought it should be ali were focusing on his spiritual and historical eminence there were some also who in the background thought well it has to be succession this is what everybody does and uh sometimes some of the theorizing about the athlete when it gets larger than its due proportion and is no longer in balance tends to adopt some ideas of primogeniture as some kind of divine right of king's idea which is clearly not what these people are doing and clearly has no basis in the text of the quran so we can talk a little bit about some of his innovations when he actually was a leader he continues the conquest and it's always worth bearing in mind that these conquests were done actively with the cooperation of local populations so he is involved in the throwing out of the greek elite from armenia but most of the fighting it seems was actually done by the armenians themselves so monophysites are not dire for sites that except the [Music] theology of the great church in constantinople and it's the same with the conquest of egypt and omar that there's a lot of resentment in religious minorities in the very cosmopolitan complex ancient world that is used by the early muslim conquerors and finds the conquerors as being people who offer a much better deal than the uh the greek emperors ever did the jews in particular who are more or less subject to systematic persecution pogrom and annihilation suddenly found you can go and live in jerusalem again what are you the messiah not a very interesting early jewish text from that period and monastic text which also indicate how the earlier that would make donations benefactions to the monasteries as a chronicle by somebody called sudo cbs that talks a lot about this and it's an interesting aspect it's conquest but it's kind of people are rather appreciative they said that it was the jewish community of spain who invited the muslims to invade even though the khalifa hadn't got a clue what was happening until news reached him it took a long time to get news from gibraltar to baghdad in those days that it was a kind of conquest through collaboration but that takes us a little bit outside the story today but this is the liberative dimension of these early conquests that are being done remember not in the name of somebody who's wearing a gigantic crown the the english coronation crown is so heavy that the one who wears it has to be taught exactly how to sit because if you move your head the wrong way it'll actually break your neck because it's just such a heavy thing it weighs a ton these people are not wearing crowns that's not their style they're sleeping under a blanket in the masjid and not even giving it a second thought so that's a different kind of imperial but not imperial expansion but in any case one of the things that he does is that he creates the first muslim navy because the one of the things that muslim conquest is achieving is uh creating a unif unified near east the romans had tried to conquer persia but they always failed this with the emperor julian and his ill-fated battles in iraq empires always come to grief in iraq it seems he actually dies on those campaigns but the muslims unite the eastern and the western world the only bit that they don't take is to the north kind of europe uh partly because byzantine is getting in the way and what are we at besiege is constantinople for a year but it has walls and there's also a sense there's not an awful lot once you get past constantinople you just got forest and in england you would have kind of naked people painted in blue who would appear from the forest and kind of angrily shake spears at you and why why bother the romans went as far as scotland obviously nobody would want scotland so hadrian's wall that's really whether they got porridge or something we'd rather stay in italy um but even england there wasn't a strong it wasn't like being in syria or spain or some of those amazing places so uh it's again a little bit outside our compass but they weren't 90 of the distance from medina to cambridge that's not bad but europe was kind of invented by these conquests because they've not been in europe before those places were just part of the roman empire which is basically a mediterranean empire arthur then a european thing so it's islam that invented europe that's just a matter of historical fact and no doubt they're really grateful so this incredible thing is happening while he's reciting the whole quran in two raka's and [Music] helping the poor and sleeping in a mosque and so forth very extraordinary episode in human history and is creating the first muslim navy so and this is still the sahaba who are engaging in this so he appoints uh muawiyah to be in charge of the campaign against byzantine cyprus one of the permanent consequences of those conquests was that and maybe the generals nobody really knows what became of them but the sahaba and the tabe still buried in those places and define as it were the subterranean deep roots of those places in islamic terms so the muawiyah's invasion of cyprus with abadda ibn assamit who again is one of the great ten promised paradise his wife um hiram who had been the witness of the holy prophet salallahu alaihi wasallam is on the campaign and dies in cyprus and if you've been to cyprus an easyjet goes to laranaka that's the cheapest flight so land that london look out in the window of this plane while everybody is doing their scratch cards and thinking about their duty for you look out of the window and there is this salt lake and a dome and that's the tomb of um one of the sahaba and it's if you actually get to go there it's very close to the airport uh it's a wonderful kind of peaceful place very simple and somehow still maybe its imagination maybe it's something deeper has something of the the determination and the sincerity and the humility of primal islam definitely a place to a place to visit so these people who've not really been outside their tribal hunting grounds before are now everywhere under becoming spiritual hubs for everywhere so that's a harlot near lanaka and until ataturk put an end to such things muslim ships and the ottoman navy whenever they went near cyprus would always fire a salute in order to respect and fly their flags at half mast out of respect for her so there's a muslim navy rhodes is captured the byzantines counter-attack the famous battle of the masts which is one of the great sea battles of of history um and a lot of other strategic important decisions so the port city for makkah is now no longer shraiber but will be jiddah so the city of jeddah and saudi arabia kind of becomes significant as a result of this geographical decision he sends embassies everywhere so the first muslims who go to salons sri lanka are his ambassador to the king of salandeep and there's a shrine for them there to this day he sends the first muslim embassy to china apparently under saudi bin abi wakas they go by sea which must have been quite a journey and the hui muslims to this day consider that to be the beginning of islam in china sat is said to have met the time the emperor of the tang dynasty and called him to islam and he gave them permission to spread islam in china he strikes the first muslim coins and we've already mentioned his quran policy the othmanic recession so really busy and i should try and wind up now there's a lot to be said about his leadership qualities but let's just fast forward a little bit uh and talk about uh his demise because there's something interesting here as well uh out external threats were more or less neutralized but of course there were internal dissensions this is the case with any muslim community or perhaps any human community inevitably there's going to be people who are dissatisfied and people who complain and there are some particularly in egypt who don't like the governors that offman is appointing now othman is confident that the old experienced meccan elites are now serious enough in their islam to be as it were rehabilitated so this is again a different kind of revolution it's not that russian revolution where you just kill the entire aristocracy and get the proletarians to do the just thing all of these guys are still there sofiane is still there muawiyah is in charge of the navy and they have generations of experience in running things so he has no hesitation in appointing some of them to significant positions there's some people who think this isn't right these are the people who persecuted the holy prophet and killed xyz sahabas and now they're up there again so this is the main uh essence of the rumblings against uh off man uh that come particularly from some of the soldiers who are in egypt but also in southern iraq and uh even though he sends ambassadors to try and restrain it and he calls a council in medina 12 of the sahaba who are in the provinces to try and identify the problem he sends osama bin zayed abdullah bin omar to syria and so forth the complaints are continuing uthman asks everybody to join him for the hajj so that they can present their complaints but they come to the hajj but they won't say anything because they can see the sahaba here and they're not on side these rebels start to take over in egypt kulfa basra which looks really serious uthman doesn't have enough troops in medina to re-establish california and he also really doesn't like the idea of muslims fighting against other muslims which since early time has been a kind of no-no that just hasn't happened you fight against byzantine aristocracy or some persian knight or whatever but other muslims people saying on both sides this is part of his kind of modesty his humility he doesn't want to be the one who will do that so that's a crisis of leadership if you like should he have sent armies to suppress them with his charisma and the sabbath behind him would have won presumably a second wave of conquests he doesn't and so they kind of start infiltrating towards the city of medina and they come to medina and they come into the city and still he will not order them to be fought they're wandering around the city of medina boulder's brass with their swords unsheathed and everything riding their horses this is the city of the holy prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam he doesn't want there to be bloodshed so he orders people just just let them come and they uh encircle his house he issues that the local population of medina saying can we get these ruffians out can we push them out and uh he says no there will be no fighting no shedding of blood in the holy prophets city um the rebels then uh going to use force to prevent him from going out to the mosque and they won't allow any food to enter his house and around his house protesting there are some small skirmishes al-hasan ben ali who is there at the door is is wounded defending the house from the skirmishers and then you have these famous exchanges between off man and sometimes his wife are on the roof of the house trying to reason with these people who's doing it directly going to kill him find some way of killing him and it is by allah neither allah nor his messenger have made my killing rasool allah i heard the holy prophet himself saying the blood of a muslim man is not halal unless three things have happened after islam or zina adultery without any excuse or murder this is what the holy prophet has said i've done none of those things i will not go against the holy prophet's wishes for his ummah by shedding a single drop of muslim blood until i meet allah he says what do you want and they said resign so that we can choose whoever we want and he said i will not take off a garment which allah has caused me to wear so he makes this prediction what is still absolutely upon us today he says uh if you kill me you will never love one another again and you will never be together again against any enemy it's kind of talking to the whole ummah if you kill me that's the end of the unity of the umba you won't have this mutual love ever again muslims will not be completely united with the heart of a single man and he will never again be united in confronting an enemy and then they start shooting arrows some of them climb the back wall it's just a house [Music] and then they burst in on off man while he was sitting in the quran on his lap and his wife beside him and there were people on the roof and then somebody called ibn ramad attacked him his wife naila throws herself over her husband to protect him and her fingers are cut off man is killed and then they run away fleeing in the direction from which they'd entered so his wife naila even though she's wounded goes out to give the news falafel stabbed to death and they kind of were weeping and threw themselves upon upon him and the news came to ali and they almost lost their minds so immense was this this news according to most of the historians at the door defending the house how could you allow the emir menin to be killed when you were at the door and they said we didn't know the rebels are pursued most of them are killed off man buried three days later after a khilafar of 12 years as a shaheed there doesn't need to be a a russell a washing of his body and some other accounts of his last moment it was kind of just an act of kind of mad vengefulness mob rule a kind of wild mentality that takes over a group like the giles jean in paris the kind of crowd mentality that is quite animalistic and of course mortified many of them what has been done and it's only imam ali who comes afterwards even though he's traumatized by this event and had no part in it who manages to bring the muslims together again but from that time where he says you'll never love each other all together again um has had these fitness within it different groups and tribes in our nations and the sunnah and the shia and the zaidia and the ismaelia and the baldea and the salafia and everything that's been the ummah whereas at the beginning it was just a single garment on rent by any hand so it's a it's a climacteric moment but we live in dunya and unity of a huge human collectivity in dunya is rarely to be sought this is just how things are but that is not the key memory that we have of him instead we have the memory of the man who was the man of modesty but the man who built this great navy and the man who sent the army against constantinople and the man who said that the byzantines can have their lands back once it's been conquered and the man who slept under a blanket in the mosque and the man who married two of the daughters of the the best of creation sallallahu alaihi salam extraordinary so the take home really is leadership is not about kind of standing up straight beating your chest and being the alpha male tarzan yeah there's a certain magnificence to masculinity that has its hock that everybody recognizes the warrior is a hero but the warrior without ego that's a more interesting personality the one who's not tarzan roaring and beating his chest saying look at me but the one who is dignified because of lack of ego rather than because of self-regard that's the islamic ideal the prophetic ideal which is why these people also represent sunnah by any of these stars you'll be guided try and be like off man you'll be amazing so yes diversity is not offended by the principle of sunnah but is in fact purified and released to be itself all of those qualifier were really different people how they came to power was really different at each case uh but they all represent extensions of the same prophetic light in the same sunnah so in our diverse times we need to kind of remember that and be less freaked out by differences amongst ourselves the bangladeshi and the pakistani and the sunni and the salafi and you know well there is a place for heterogeneity in this ummah it's an ummah of the spectrum of the colors that have beautifully unfurled it's not ideology it's deen and this ichthyolaf is how things are divinely decreed to be assalamu cambridge muslim college training the next generation of muslim thinkers

Channel: Cambridge Muslim College

Views: 26,122

Rating: 4.9148936 out of 5

Keywords: finals

Id: OL9N2NoSHKU

Length: 105min 38sec (6338 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 28 2021