 It's good to be after almost two years, I think two years 2021, after almost two years back in person, alhamdulillah, and where it's a big, big blessing, alhamdulillah, that we're able to gather together and to remember Allah together, and there are many different hadith for the Prophet ﷺ mentioned, the benefits of gathering in a group, remembering Allah, that the angels descend, that mercy descends, and so we pray that by means of this that mercy descends, and whatever intention we have, and we'll be talking about this a lot in this class, we will be having a whole section just on intentions, but whatever intention we have, we should reaffirm that intention, we should strengthen our intention for why we gather together, and amongst the intentions that we should make, are that we want to achieve immense nearness to Allah ﷻ, that we want to achieve immense nearness to the Prophet ﷺ, that we want to achieve high high stations in this life and in the next, that we want to learn about this Deen, that we want to benefit from all the teachings of the Prophet ﷺ, all the teachings that are outlining the Quran, that we want to make any intentions that the righteous and that the Salaf would make when they were gathering together, that we want to make any the intention that the Prophet ﷺ and Sahaba would make and so on and so forth. The Prophet ﷺ said in the hadith that the actions are by their intention. Famous hadith, the great hadith books, many times began with this hadith. And so whatever intentions you have, inshallah, reaffirm them right now, and we should also make intentions as our teachers have taught us that when you are gathering for gatherings of knowledge, that mercy descends in every single area near you, right? And so many of the great scholars, they say that by means of people remembering Allah, the rain comes. By means of people seeking knowledge of this deen, mercy descends, and tribulations are lifted. And so that should also be the intention and one of the things that scholars have also mentioned is that the more amount of gatherings of goodness that take place in a community, the healthier that community will be. And so whatever little gathering of goodness that we can try to do, we should make an intention to do. I'm feeling very, very grateful to see everybody hum the lion person. So today we're going to be starting off kicking off this class, which will be going on for some time, inshallah, if Allah gives us Taufiq, which is going to be on practical spirituality. And the focus here is really going to be not much on theory, very specific on like steps that we can take in the busy lives that all of us live. Sure, many of us are literally coming from finishing the workday right now in the busy lives that everybody lives to get closer to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala and get closer to the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. That is one of the ultimate goals that we have in this life. So one of the things we wanted to just start off with and the guiding text that we're going to be using, there's a book known as the Book of Assistance by Imam Abdullah Ibn Alwi Al-Haddad. This is a copy of the book, Brother Muhammad from the Masjid has ordered some copies, but it's available for like $11 or something on Amazon. So I'll be walking through the book as well. And then it's also available as a free PDF. And so we'll aim to cover, it's like very, very short succinct chapters on practical steps that you and I can take to achieve closeness to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala and not just to achieve like a little bit. These books were written to help us achieve very, very, very high levels of nearness to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala by implementing little steps with consistency. We know that consistency really, really is the key. So this will be one of the guiding texts that we'll use, the primary texts. And then there'll be other ones, but I probably won't mention them as much because this will be the main one. So let's start off with just kind of a larger discussion or a larger conversation around what is our main purpose in this life that Allah says in the Qur'an, He outlined the purpose for our creation. And he said that we only created mankind and jinn to worship, to worship me. That is the reason why God created us. And then the commentator is one of the famous commentators in the Qur'an, Ibn Abbas, that the son of Sayyidina Abbas, the uncle of the Prophet's son. So Ibn Abbas would be the cousin of the Prophet's son. But he said that this means liya'rifun in order to know Allah, that the reason why you were created, your general reason. There's a general reason why everybody's created. And then there's specific reasons why every single person in this room has been sent and has been created. So the general reason why all of us were created were to worship God. And that means to know God. It means through all of the ups and downs of life that we begin to know Allah. Which attribute of Allah is manifesting in this part of life? Which attribute of Allah is manifesting in this up of life and in this down of life? Am I seeing the name, the jelali name of Allah, a maidi name of Allah? Am I seeing a jemali name, a beautiful name of Allah? And that's kind of how your, what's called ma'rifah, your gnosis of Allah begins to increase. Your knowledge of Allah begins to increase. The knowledge is not something that's kept in a book. You can memorize all the rules you want about the religion. That is simply information until it becomes application in your life that impacts the depths of your heart and drives you to attain a deep nearness to Allah. That's what knowledge is. It is supported by various sayings of the salaf, by various sayings of the great imams of this religion, or among the likes of Imam Malik and others, that knowledge is a light which penetrates the heart and it gives you the ability to understand. It gives you the ability to see right from wrong. That you will know if you have true knowledge, is this right and is this wrong? And the deen is going to guide you in that. But you will ultimately know, even if there's a situation that you can find some dispensation for in the religion, but you will know, is this really the good thing to do at the time? Right? Or is this something that I shouldn't be doing? And so that is the ultimate goal of life and that's where what we call theoretical knowledge has to do with pragmatic practice. You have to actually implement the theory in order to find benefit. And so, Alhamdulillah, we're really going to be focusing on whatever ways that we can begin to implement that theory, inshallah. So that being said, let's kind of just outline a couple of the methods that we're going to be talking about, inshallah, in this class. And then we'll actually dive into the topic. So there's a lot of different ways that one can approach spirituality. Various, various different ways. There's different paths that one can take. There's different, some people will have the path of knowledge. Some people will have the path of vicar. Some people will have the path of service. Some people will have the path of service to their parents. Some people have the path of charity. Everybody will have different paths. And then of course, amongst the best ones are to merge all of them together and to do a little bit of each until you get, because each of them has a barakah associated with it, a blessing associated with it. So Imam Al-Haddad, the author of this text, what he's trying to teach us is, here is what you can do on a daily basis, or a weekly basis, or a monthly basis, depends on how much time one can give to take little portions of each, little portion of Sadaqah, little portion of reciting the Quran, little portion of learning knowledge, little portion of serving people, a little portion of spreading the Deen, and so on and so forth until you get all of these little lights. And all of them are like different barakah deposits that go in your spiritual bank account until you become illuminated. And then when you become illuminated, I don't know what it's like to be illuminated, but according to the scholars, when you become illuminated, things start to get a lot better. And how do you know? What is a sign of spiritual progress? A sign of spiritual progress is the amount of tranquility in your life increases and the amount of anxiety decreases. That is one of the clearest signs. Allah mentions this in the Quran, Ba'ud-i-Aawd i Billah min al-Shaytan al-Rajim, that inna awliya Allah la khufan alayhum walahum yahzanun, that the saints of Allah, the friends of Allah, they neither have fear nor do they grieve. And in kind of colloquial terms, they're never trippin' and they're always in a calm state. You could kind of apply that in the way that we would understand that, right? It doesn't mean they don't have difficulty. They have the most amount of difficulty. But they are, as some of the scholars say, they're kind of at the eye of the hurricane, right? That everything around them is difficult and they're completely calm. And they know how to manage tribulation and that's one of the signs of progress. That somebody is able when things get tough and when things get difficult, that they're able to maintain a calmness and a tranquility and a level of patience and a level of trust in Allah. That is one of the goals of spirituality. That somebody who has information, but then you see them trippin' all the time. You see them getting angry all the time. You see them losing their cool all the time. You see them not able to manage difficult situations. They don't have much of a portion of spirituality. They might have a portion of outward knowledge that they do not have a portion of spirituality as has been outlined in the teachings of the Quran and the teachings of the sunnah. So that's one of the first things that happens. The second thing that happens if we follow this path of spirituality is the heart becomes softer. We're talking about the spiritual heart now, not the physical one. The spiritual heart begins to start to feel a certain level of softness. So someone says something and it's really impactful. It hits you. Maybe some tears start to flow. You start to get emotionally impacted. You see tribulations and difficult events going on around the world to our Muslim brothers and sisters and you're deeply impacted. It troubles you. You're like, Subhanallah, how are they doing? What's going on in Philistine? What's going on to my brothers and sisters in Afghanistan? What's going on in this place? And so on and so forth. You actually feel it. You may cry for them. You may weep for them. The heart begins to become soft, right? So one of the ways that we know that this happens is in Ramadan, for example, right? As you get the first five, 10 days start and we're all kind of getting used to things. But as you kind of get into the later part of Ramadan and especially if we have the blessing to stand in Taraweeh, you start to feel the impacts of the Quran being recited way more than the beginning because the heart has started to achieve a level of softness through consistent recitation and consistent standing in prayer. And that's how powerful a shortcut like Ramadan is that in a matter of 10, 20, 30 days, you can achieve what you can't always achieve in even a year or two years of time depending on how much blessing Allah puts in that specific Ramadan for us. So that's the second sign. And first, the tranquility becomes manifest and the anxiety reduces. The second is that the heart starts to become softer and you start to feel things more. And this is really, really important for our brothers that it's important for us to understand that crying and being soft is not something that men should not do. It is quite the opposite that the Prophet Sallam was somebody who would weep every single night with all of these things around toxic masculinity and the way that they portray it and so on and so forth these days is guys have to be tough and never have feelings. All of that had nothing to do with our religion. That we have to be courageous human beings as men and as women. And yes, men have to have a certain level of outward fortitude when it comes to difficult situations but that doesn't mean that we don't cry. It doesn't mean that we don't weep. And if that was the case then the greatest of creation, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam would have taught us that but he didn't teach us that. He taught us that every single night he would be up for hour, two, three hours. However long his tahajjud would be that night, weeping, weeping, weeping. And it was part, it's because of how soft his heart, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam was and even Sayyidina Omar who was known to be very, very tough, seven feet tall. If you go to Turkey in the Topkapi Palace there's a museum which have the relics of the Prophet Sallam and the relics of the greats before us and his sword, you see the sword of Sayyidina Omar. The sword is like, imagine from the ground it's like this big. That's just a sword, it's four or five feet tall and super heavy looking type of sword. That's the type of person this man was that he was a warrior in one sense but he was very, very soft hearted that they said by the end of his life he had cried so much. The tears, it's like, you know how people these days like tattoo tears to their face. It's like he had had marks of tears going down his face because of how much he used to weep. Little things would make Hazrat Omar Adil Hau'an start to cry and start to weep because of the softness that was there. And the third thing that will begin to happen as one treads the path of spirituality and one starts to implement a lot of inshallah what the scholars have outlined for us to do is that your desires will begin to change. They won't be eliminated but they'll begin to change. You will actually feel a movement and a desire to want to get close to God. It won't just be something you do because your parents told you or what we do because our family or spouse or somebody tells us you actually innately have a deep desire that I want to improve my relationship with God and you begin to tread that path. And so a while ago we spoke about this that you have every human being has desires that exist on what's called the horizontal plane. You just human to human desires or desire for money, desire for wealth, desire, sexual desires, desire for food, so on and so forth. But there's a way to channel those desires so they become vertically oriented. Meaning you actually are now desiring high aspirations rather than base things, right? You start to desire, you have a desire for getting close to God. You have a desire for learning about the religion. You have a desire for company with the greats. You have a desire for seeing the Prophet's Solomon in your dreams and so on and so forth. The desires begin to change. So maybe in someone's early days before they start to take the theme a bit more seriously, maybe the desires are more towards like this person I want to be in a relationship with and this type of food that I want to eat and maybe when someone is partying and maybe someone is caught up and that's human nature, especially these days in the society that we live in. But as somebody starts to begin with repentance and starts to change, the desires begin to change. And now that person who was the same person who was caught up in the partying and who was caught up in all the different things that they used to do, now they might be present at gatherings of goodness. They might be trying to work on themselves. Maybe they're trying to change how they look outwardly. Maybe they're trying to change the way that their character is. Maybe they're trying to work on their anger or if they were smoking or drinking or whatever it is they gave that up, right? And they began to work on that. It's a very, very good sign of Tophik from Allah when the desires began to change. So those three are like some of the biggest indications that Allah gives us in the Quran of the benefits of starting to see purification come. And all of this essentially boils down to purifying the heart and achieving knowledge of Allah. That we, if we just boil it down to what is the main goal here, it's وما خلقتو جنّ والإنس إلا ليعبدون in order to worship me. So we are now achieving a practical state of worship with a lot of different parts of us. And then other signs manifest, maybe someone you actually start to see, you see this with many of the righteous but we won't get into this as much, that the way that you think about things changes, you might actually see literally nur on someone's face. You might, like someone's countenance may actually change. They may actually start to look more peaceful, more calm. There might be more light emanating from them. Your dreams will start to change. You will start to now instead of seeing whatever dunya dreams, someone will start to see more and more spiritually oriented dreams. They might begin to see saints in their dreams or scholars in their dreams. And of course of the highest things to see is to see the prophets and then to the best one to see the prophets a la salam in your dream and so on and so forth. You may see the Kaaba in your dreams. And so the dream state also has a big effect on this, right? And it's not the guiding thing, but it is one way to tell, okay, is this working, right? Is my dhikr and so on and so forth working. Alhamdulillah. So just to kind of, you know, inshallah just a couple, a couple of quick housekeeping items I should have mentioned this first. So we'll be aiming to do this every Wednesday at eight o'clock. We'll keep it right around 40, 45 minutes and then finish with Q and A. Right now Isha is at 9 p.m. So we'll aim to end right around then. But if once Isha starts to move sooner, I'll either ask the brothers to just pray at nine or we might adjust the timing slightly to accommodate the Isha time. We will be live streaming this class. So it's live streaming right now, Alhamdulillah, across a couple of different places. So if anybody has questions or insights, feel free to raise your hand and if it's kind of possible, we'll get to you. Otherwise, we'll do it at the end just so that we can accommodate what's going on in the live stream because, you know, they won't be able to hear if someone is asking something from far away. But if you have a question, just raise your hand. I'll repeat it that way, people on the live stream can also hear. If someone is not feeling well, like any little sign that you're not feeling well, Alhamdulillah, may Allah give you, may Allah give all of us completely, completely, complete Shifa and Afia, but it would be best if we didn't come to respect the COVID precautions. And if you can wear masks, you're more than welcome to, because if you want to sit socially distant, you're more than welcome to. But generally speaking, if anybody has any symptoms of any sort or feeling really exhausted or running nose, so on, even if you think it's just allergies, it would be best just so we can respect everybody and keep this going and keep the activities in the Masjid that have resumed for the last couple of months going. If someone didn't come and you can just watch it, it's on Facebook and YouTube. Alhamdulillah. Great, and then as I mentioned, the texts that we will be using is known as the Book of Assistance and I'll get into that in just a second. And also the classes are not all interlinked. Like it's beneficial to kind of have them go in a certain order, but if you just come to like one and never come to another one or you come to a random one in the middle, it's totally fine. This is meant to be structured for busy working schedules where people have a lot going on and it's difficult sometimes to commit to every week. So we will be covering discrete topics, inshallah, every week. We might reference things in the past, but it's not like a curriculum that literally builds on top of each other for the most part. So there's just one thing I wanted to mention. Inshallah, that makes it kind of easier. Alhamdulillah. So just gonna do a quick pause here. Does anybody have any questions so far before we get into a very, very brief biography on the great saint and scholar Imam al-Hadad? Yes. I think a lot of what you were mentioning in the pause for what you were talking about, how can a lot of this apply to one person's life through a political time in their lives where like let's say we don't have a lot of these schools and my gut reaction is that we're going through this political time and all of a sudden we're creating more. We do all these things that might result in a lot of this like, oh well, some things are great, we're doing all the things that are bad without a person living on this fault. But like, how would you say these key notes from the business and supplies to those that are really, really good for the time of their lives to develop some of these schools or spiritual healing? And then also to use it as a means to give people a sense of accountability and a sense of hope for each other after their lives. Yeah, excellent question. So the question was, especially for those on the live stream, that how do the tools that we just discussed and this conversation around practical spirituality apply to when someone is going through a very, very difficult time in their life, they're going through immense tribulation and what can you do? How do you then apply these tools to not only go through that but to develop an everlasting type of spirituality? Yeah, one of the things I remember our teachers once mentioned is that all of the work that you do outside of the time of tribulation is for that time of tribulation. You are literally preparing yourself for spiritual battle when the tribulation comes because it will come. We ask Allah for aafia but Allah says in the Quran many, many, many times that we will test you. We will test you with fear, with hunger, with loss of life, with loss of wealth, with loss of fruits, and glad tidings be to the patient. And he says, and he says, and he says, and he says, and he says, and he says, that we created life and death in order to test you and in order to see which of you will be the best indeed. Who have not the highest quantity of deeds but the best quality of deeds. So we have to expect in life and we have to kind of have our framework ready to know, okay, at some point something's gonna come. Like it's gonna come at me in one way or another. God outlines categories. Wealth is one major category. Children either not, whether it's not being able to have children or whether it's with the children themselves or whether it's a disease and so on and so forth is another major category in the Quran. Sickness is another major category that Allah mentioned in the Quran. Hunger, poverty and so on and opposite of, in this case you're tested with wealth, either restricted or abundance of wealth is also a test for somebody. Someone gets a lot of wealth and they start to go through getting it via not permissible means. And there's many, many, many other categories. Each story of each of the prophets in the Quran has a central tribulation that they went through and each of those stories has lessons for us. And in every single story of the prophets there will be healing for our tribulations. You look at Ibrahim A.S., many, many family issues. If we have issues with our parents, Ibrahim A.S.'s own father like tried to completely get rid of him and then disbelieved and got, right? And you look at Sayyidina Yaqub A.S. that he had his sons tried to kill his other son and throw him into a well and almost set him to the wolves, right? And so you see like major family problems there again and then feelings of estrangement and abandonment and so on and so forth. Many tribulations that the story of Sayyidina Yaqub A.S. and Sayyidina Yusuf A.S. can open up for us. And then there's many, many, many others but for the sake of time the Prophet Sallam had throughout his life every single tribulation you could imagine Prophet Sallam went through. And so it's a kind of answer to the question the tools that we're learning are meant to help us in the time of tribulation. I think the question is when you're in the tribulation and you're learning the tools, what do you do? And the tribulation many times comes according to many of the ulama to drive you back to God. So it's not that you expect God to like, wait, where were you in the time of good? Now you're turning to me in the time of difficulty. That was the point of the test because we weren't turning to him in the time of good. If we were turning to him in the time of good the test might have not come in that way. It might have manifested differently or it might just be a means of raising our rank instead of a means of getting us to turn back, right? And so the essence of tribulation and Allah says in the Quran, for example, when you're at sea and the metaphor here is when you're like at like in the kind of darkness of the ocean and the ship is the waves are coming and it's getting very, very difficult. And you have no one to call upon Allah. I was just kind of in the area where there was a giant ocean, right? And you see how crazy it is in nighttime, how dark the ocean is. It's just the stars and the darkness of the ocean. And then imagine, we don't do this anymore but imagine if you were literally at on a ship in the middle of the darkness of the ocean. And as the waves come and as the storm comes what are you gonna do? Allah says in the Quran, then you turn to call on God, right? But he says about those people it's good that you call on God but he says then you get back to shore and you forget all about it and you go and you commit shirk. And figuratively speaking you may not actually go and worship idols but you may just forget about God at that point. And so he says that develops when you call on him in the middle of tribulation it develops what's called مخلصينة لقدين that a sincerity and a purity in your call on God because you realize there is nobody, no one who can help me through this except Allah. And you say the dua الدنون of Sayyidina Yunus, alayhi salam لا إله إلا أنتى سبحانك إني كنسم النضال I mean that he said this dua again with this metaphor of the ocean he was in three layers of darkness at the darkness of the ocean Prophet Jonah, alayhi salam then he was cast away from the boat then a whale swallowed him and this isn't like a cartoon folklore thing this actually happened like a giant whale swallowed him and he there he was in the darkness of the ocean the middle of the ocean underneath it inside of a whale and then he made this dua لا إله إلا أنتى سبحانك إني كنسم النضال I mean that it was the tribulation that then got this great prophet to make this dua that there is no God except you and I am the one who wronged myself and he had as according to many of the tafsir that he had kind of been tasked with calling people to Allah and he left his people and so this tribulation came upon him and then he went back and Allah Allah delivered him from that so all of that to say that that the whole point of the tribulation is to call on God so all these tools are meant for times of tribulation for times of ease and ideally we use them in times of ease to be ready for times of tribulation so hopefully that helps so Insha'Allah we'll do a kind of brief biography and then we'll get into the topic insha'Allah so the scholar who wrote this book his name is Imam Abdullah ibn Ali al-Haddad and as I mentioned it's going to be the kind of guiding text so if anybody wants to follow along we're going to be covering there's very very short chapters probably two the chapters are like a page or two each probably two chapters a week it's called The Book of Assistance by Imam al-Haddad and I don't know who this person is it's not Imam al-Haddad though it's a publisher included some random person on the cover so you can get that book and the brother Muhammad ibn Masjid will insha'Allah order some copies as well and then I'll also find a way to get everybody's contact information and send through like PDFs that are already available for free that has been scanned so Imam al-Haddad, yes we're starting from the beginning we're starting from the beginning we will be starting from intention is to go through all as many chapters as possible insha'Allah we've outlined at least half if not more to go through for this kind of like season semester up until December you could say insha'Allah so Imam al-Haddad one of the great things of the and why is it important to study the biography of the people who wrote the book the reason is because you have to have a sense of who the people were that are giving us this advice they're not just like kind of commoners you could say right these are people who implemented all of this and they've achieved very, very high stations so Imam al-Haddad, he was born in the he was born in this city of one second here sorry, please do me a favor and just get like one of those books that's not like Iran or Hadith I just need to put this laptop on top of it that's tough, see if there's anything else sorry, thanks I don't know if there will be anything I will just continue if you find anything yeah that would be good yeah that would be good sorry, brother from the live stream is texting yeah this is dangerous that's a good idea thank you I'm done now okay, so he was born in the city of near the city of Tarim Tarim is a city in the valley of Hadremot in Yemen and he was born in the year 1634 so right around 400 or so years ago so I'm not like way, way, way early generation but definitely it's been quite some time Imam al-Haddad was actually blind he went blind at the age of four and so how did he write all these books he actually had, he would learn and learn and they didn't have braille and these sorts of things at the time and so he would learn and then he would or he would kind of essentially dictate the books back and then his students would write them all down and from an early, early age he was devoted to Allah early age and so one of the signs of especially great people of Allah and the signs of the great knowers of Allah is that from early ages they began their journey towards devotion especially those who are gone on who have kind of meant to be doing very, very big things and when he was young and so it mentioned that when in his childhood you're talking 10, 12 years of age he would attend his lessons and then after his lessons he would go into one of the local masajids and he would pray 200 rakah of salat al-duha duha is the prayer that you pray anytime from sunrise up until right about door it's called the mid-morning prayer and so the Prophet ﷺ would regularly pray this prayer it's a sunnah that we should all try our best to do and we'll talk about it in the class but he would pray at a young age 200 rakah which is like, you know, that doesn't happen anymore you have stories of the great-great-grandchildren the Prophet ﷺ Imam Zayn al-Abideen and others that some of the great scholars of religion that they would stand the whole night and pray 1,000 rakah they would stand the whole night and pray 500 rakah and so on and so forth as again the worship was their goal worship was their focus and so it showed his immense, immense, immense devotion he was somebody who had achieved the highest stations of knowledge in every single category so he would attain the station of being able to give fatwa in the madhab and attain the station of being able to also derive rulings directly from the Quran and sunnah but out of adab to the madhab that he followed the madhab of Mama Shafi he continued to follow the Shafi madhab so attained very, very high station in fiqh in his books that we're talking about today he's not going to, of course, is a faqi a scholar of jurisprudence but he's not going to be talking about specific rulings related to Shafi fiqh or anything that's going to be broad, applicable to kind of everybody and not focused again specifically on fiqh and one of the other things that he was very, very, very well known for was somebody who had an immense, immense attachment to seeking Allah's pleasure in the later parts of the night and so one of the secrets that he mentions a lot in some of the car that he has kind of told us to do in some of the poetry that he has also written is to show a humility before Allah in the later part of the night in the time before Fajr, in the time one, two, three hours before Fajr and so many of the great saints of Allah that they are awake at that time beseeching Allah, begging Allah for assistance and what helps us do this when we're in tribulation as you mentioned, when you're in tribulation sleep doesn't matter, you just need God you know I need God, I'm going to turn to him every moment possible, oh there's a special time I need to turn to him, bismillah, right and so that also was a big part of Imam al-Hadad's spiritual path he also compiled many different adhqar for people who wanted to get closer to God to do on a daily basis, right and so he took the different adhqar from the sunnah and there's many different compilations of this but we'll talk through them in the chapter on dhikr that we should be doing regularly for us to be doing every single morning every single evening for du'as for protection, du'as for barakah in your day du'as for tofiq, du'as for afya and will-being and du'as for divine assistance and so on and so forth so it was one of the major contributions that he did and no biography will kind of do him justice, especially something short but he had achieved such a high station that when he wrote poetry about the Prophet's Islam he wrote poetry about the Prophet's Islam that it achieved such acceptance that it was written right on the blessed muhajira sharifa right on top of where the Prophet's Islam's area where he is resting is that it was written on top of that area and this was an imam that thousands and thousands and thousands of people later in life would come and flock to him to try to seek knowledge and would try to benefit from him and try to benefit from his blessed tishins he was a descendant of the Prophet's Islam and he had a long line of descendants who came after him many of who are still alive today will continue to spread and teach and teach this deen Alhamdulillah so we'll be talking more and more inshaAllah about Imam al-Hadad and about some of the specific tishins that he had but just wanted to kind of give a quick introduction and does anybody want to guess how old he was when he wrote this comprehensive book on how to achieve the highest stations of nearness to Allah yeah he was just 26 26 lunar years so probably 25 in solar years yeah so younger than I think all of us when he wrote this book but these people would achieve because if you're praying 200 rakah when you're 10 years old and that's for doha prayer for an optional prayer then what will you be when you achieve kind of in your 20s and then what will you be when you're in your 60s and in your 70s what kind of nearness will you achieve these people they have a very very different when we talk about the spirituality that you begin to experience right in the form of tranquility in the form of nearness in the form of sakina and then eventually even in the form of dream states and so on and so forth that they begin to achieve that at very very early ages and they begin to achieve a very real life experience with spirituality isn't just this like abstract concept for them but that's that's something I really understand too well so I'm not that way alhamdulillah the first topic that he mentions and that he outlines is on yakin so we'll just kind of quickly talk about that for the rest of the conversation today and yakin is known as the concept of certainty this idea of developing a certainty that truly Allah is in control of everything and ultimately the goal one of the other goals to achieve this noses of Allah is to have a very very strong yakin a very very strong certainty in a deep deep deep deep rooted trust that I only rely on Allah that I'm only going to turn to Allah Allah is the one who is in charge of every single thing happening in my life that's it everything happening in my life is in some way shape or form a lesson for me and it's coming ultimately from God now this is not an intellectual concept it's a spiritual reality but it starts with the intellect and so Imam al haddad he mentions from pulling from the Quran three levels of yakin which you want to try to achieve and so this is at the basis of the spiritual path everything else that we talk about will be assisting us everything we talk about after this in today's discussion will be assisting us in achieving this state of certainty this state of yakin the first level of the yakin is known as what's called ilmal yakin the knowledge of certainty so the example that the scholars give with regards to this is if somebody tells you there is a lake they tell you hey there's this big lake in Nevada the border of Nevada and California and you should go it's like a beautiful lake and you're like okay cool you believe them you're like yeah it's a trustworthy person I'm gonna believe that there's a lake the lake exists that's called knowledge of certainty you have a knowledge that the lake is real but you don't actually know you've never been there but you believe the person there's what's called this is the level that majority of people are at have the understanding of everything that's going to be possible the veil that is over our eyes is lifted when we pass away but for some people it's lifted in this light the next thing that you experience and these are all from from these levels we're talking about all derived from the Quran the next level is what's called ilmal yakin the eye of certainty this is somebody who you actually now are like oh there's a lake let me I want to go to the lake so you get in your car and you route to the lake Tahoe and you drive to the lake and you know there's no smoke and fires and you actually see the lake okay I achieve the eye of certain I know there's a lake and I see the lake in front of me that's called the eye of certainty and so you have seen now what's going on at the final level there's what's called the reality of certainty this is that you actually just jump in the lake and you're swimming in the lake and you're feeling that this is real this water is real someone might have told me about it I might have seen it but I'm experiencing this for myself how does this relate to faith it relates to faith because you have different levels of faith that you actually start to experience things and at the early stage it's just everything that you hear and you believe yes this all exists but the veil can be unlifted such that you can actually begin to see things and then again we're talking about we don't want to get too much into theory here but you can get to the point where you actually the spiritual experiences become something that are very much a core part of what you're doing so the Prophet s.a.w. was living of course in Haqq Al Yaqeen Sayyidina Jibril s.a.w. was descending to him he's seeing the angels he mentions I can see heaven right now I can see hell I can see this thing happening in front of me in a far away land he had knowledge of the different events that were going to come and so on and so forth we can't achieve what he achieved but we can achieve little little little little little little little portions and what's called the in the Hadith that the Prophet s.a.w. said the scholars are the inheritors of the prophets scholars are the inheritors of the prophets so the prophets don't leave behind wealth they leave behind realities and knowledge and so the scholars then inherit that knowledge they don't leave behind money we're just going to finish the section until I will get to it and so the way that he mentions that you and I can achieve this and these are the three practical things you take away anything from today take away these practical these three steps he says first thing for us to do is to contemplate the different signs that Allah has created around you the different signs that Allah has created around you in terms of Allah's creation so you could talk about this in terms of nature you could talk about this in terms of the sky and the heavens and so on and so forth let's say you just look you go into front of the ocean and you just look at the ocean and then you contemplate the fact that God created this and you contemplate how small you are relative to this magnificent creation that is the ocean or you look above maybe get out of Oakland and go to a place where there are two stars and you look above and you see the canopy of the heavens and you see the thousands of stars that you can see but knowing that there's millions and millions and millions and billions of stars that are out there and you contemplate the fact that Allah created all of this what this begins to do and we'll talk about reflection in a later session specifically but what this begins to do is it begins to make you realize that oh this is all really real like reflect upon these different creations of Allah because Allah says in the Quran in various ayahs that do they not reflect right? do they not reflect, do they not think to think about these different things it begins to create inside of you oh okay this is actually like a real creation that God actually who could have created this if it's not God and this has to be kind of something that comes from within you can't like force this to come from outside you contemplate these things but ultimately Allah kind of deposits this inside of you that this increases your yakin in him another thing that he mentions for us to do is to look at the different verses of the Quran that talk about Allah's greatness and they talk about that Allah is the all knowing they talk about the fact that Allah is the all wise they talk about the fact that Allah is the all merciful and then you just sit with that and you just think about that Allah knows everything everything that was created from before creation all the way into everything that's going to happen until the end of creation so then why am I tripping about this job that I'm trying to get why am I tripping about this small situation I have in my life that increases the yakin these tools are going to help us again when you get into the moments of difficulty or the moments of questioning what's going on what's going on what's going on because ultimately that's when your spirituality in this life begins to serve you is when the things get kind of confusing and hazy and difficult you have clarity and you operate with clarity and certainty you know this is what for sure what's why it's happening but you know this is what's happening and this is what the response is supposed to be ultimately God will be the one to tell us why something is happening and then he mentions that the other practical way and this is probably the easiest one here in terms of the way of understanding it but definitely not easy to implement is to act according to what you have learned and that automatically increases your certainty per an ayah in the Quran where Allah says those who strive in our ways surely we shall guide them or sorry those who strive in us we shall surely guide them to our ways is the translation that's written here so those who are striving in Allah's path he will guide you to what he needs you to be doing when you implement what you're learning Allah told you to do and this is where like sometimes you might not understand the wisdom of a rule but when you implement the rule the wisdom will come later in the society we live in which has concepts of critical theory they make us question everything they make us want to understand every single wisdom behind every single thing before we do it God has the wisdom behind it we may not always know ultimately though God will guide our heart He just trusts He knows more than me because He is He is the all knowing and the all wise I may not know, why did He want me to do this why did He want me to do that that requires a level of faith though I'm trusting that God knows better than myself which is obviously like a very basic thing for us to know but surprisingly in our times that we live in there's a lot of arrogance out there that in this society that people don't want to believe in God anymore don't want to trust that God has some divine wisdom and that's a journey but as long as someone is willing to learn Allah will guide them somebody starts off on the path there's hope the biggest thing though is we can't be blocked from even starting off on the path so we'll kind of cover deeper next time on this topic I want to be respectful of everybody's time here and want to get to questions that were posed that people might have so if anybody has any questions we'll go ahead and get to them so what we're going to do today are on this concept of spirituality the way you see whether you're progressing the three different signs who remembers them how you know whether you're progressing tranquility you start to find increase in tranquility and reduction in anxiety knowledge of certainty right so knowledge of certainty is one of the ways that you will get to this level of spirituality yep, yes the heart starts to become soft with the heart being soft you kind of know when you're feeling like the heart is soft and when the heart is hard yes and your desires will change those are the three general signs that we've seen from the Quran that these types of things will begin to happen as you start to implement aspects of spirituality so this has very little to do with memorizing facts and figures and the reason I emphasize that is because the scholars of spirituality emphasize that the facts and the rules and so on and so forth are to help you achieve what we just talked about if you are not achieving what we talked about you are doing something wrong and the last one I would add to this actually the one I would mention to the heart being soft I remember one of our teachers mentioned he said if you are trying to learn more about the deen and you are trying to implement the deen and you're not finding that you have more mercy you're doing it all wrong if you're finding you're becoming more harsh you're becoming more heart hearted you're becoming really really intense something is wrong because the nature of this religion is to get closer to the Sunnah of the Prophet s.a.w and what is the purpose of his existence and we that we only sent you as a mercy to the world and this argument of itself won't get into this but like it kind of all of these these groups that are intense and focus on all the outward things groups that have come on so forth until they start implementing these mercifully they have very little to no portion of the religion because the sharia is not a forceful thing that can be implemented by hard imposed law and if you do if you're it's absent of mercy but that's not the topic of the class so I won't go on that tangent but it's one of the signs so those are the signs we're progressing and then there's the ways to get there with regards to certainty which is to contemplate Allah and this is like a big big concept so we'll break it down inshallah but you just sit with okay God like you see something happen in your life and you're unsure about it and you're okay Allah is all knowing and he's all wise so there must be some wisdom in this and there must be the God of course knows what's better for me and he says in the Quran and so when you read the Quran you begin to reflect on the specific attributes of Allah he says that perhaps you love a thing perhaps you hate a thing and it is much good for you perhaps you love a thing and it is much bad for you and Allah knows and you do not know so you sit with that for a little bit oh Allah knows and I don't know okay I'm going to resign this over to him a little bit right I'm going to trust that he has a better plan and this gets more and more important as we kind of get older and we have to let go of certain things let go of children will eventually go on and grow up and do their own thing we have to let go at some point we can't be tracking their every movement they're not supposed to fear us we have to stop them correctly inshallah we have to trust that God is going to take care of things as we see prime prime examples in the sunnah ibn al-sidna ibrahim al-aslam and others how they were tested to leave their family and was their family able to follow what the teachings that they had been taught through the great prophet ibn al-aslam and then if you start to contemplate the different signs and the different creation of Allah and start to implement the different things you're learning practical ways to begin to see signs of an increase inshallah in our in our certainty alhamdulillah so we'll go ahead and stop now for questions you can do five six minutes of questions inshallah we will go ahead and end after that anybody has questions i'm checking to see online anybody has questions nothing yet any questions questions okay alhamdulillah very good so we'll pray ishah in a few minutes inshallah next time we'll start off with what kind of refresh on uncertainty and then we'll be focused on intentions and inshallah we will then also get to a couple of the next chapters that he outlines I don't want to exactly say which specific chapter we'll do in every single class I have that laid out inshallah but just in case we need to spend a little bit more time depending on how specific the topic is the types of the chapters that he has will just give folks a sense it's like okay intentions acquiring knowledge devotions you should do every day to type how often you should be residing the Quran how to have conduct with your family and with society what types of other things should you be doing with regards to working and what types of things should you be doing with regards to the basic ones zakat, fasting, hajj prayer and congregation especially critical for the men on charity advising others so he breaks it apart into very very succinct this is what you should do this is the reason this is how you go about applying it and if you do this and this you'll achieve these fruits and again people who have walked the path and they've tread the path they're the best they're the best suited to give us advice on the path and inshallah we're very blessed to be able to see from this book and then also be kind of compiling some of the resources that he's outlined in terms of things we should be doing on a daily basis in like a google drive or something that we can then share with everybody so we'll try to get everyone's like email or something to be able to actually share some of these resources yes and then what channel people subscribe to yeah so the name of the book is the question what's the name of the book the name of the book is the book of assistance by imam al haddad and the class will be live streamed through Lighthouse's facebook page and also MCC's facebook page and MCC's youtube page MCC e-spaces 30 minutes from here yep no problem ok inshallah 2 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 9 8 8 3 6 Ya Allah, all of the Muslims and all of the loved ones that anybody has in this area, Ya Rabb-ul Alameen, that have passed away, we ask that you grant them complete forgiveness and that you increase their station in Jannah, Ya Rabb-ul Alameen. Ya Allah, we ask that you pour upon our hearts Nud and pour upon our hearts Light and pour upon our hearts Rahma and pour upon our hearts Immense, immense, immense mercy. Any tribulation or difficulty that anybody here is going through, we ask that you relieve that difficulty by the barakah, Ya Rabb-ul Alameen, by the barakah of your dhikr, Ya Ar-Rahman, by the barakah of trying to see closeness to you, Ya Allah, we ask you for everything good that the prophet says and asked for, and we ask you for protection from everything that you ask protection from, Wa Salamu Alaykum, Wa Salamu Alaykum, Al-Saidunah Muhammadin, Waalih, Wa Sahbih, Wa Salam, Al-Hamdu Alaykum, Al-A'la Alameen, Al-Hamdu Alaykum, Al-Zakr Al-Haib, we'll go ahead, Insha Allah, and pray, insha Allah.