 So we'll go ahead and inshallah just dive right in. Today we are going to be focusing on two different sections of the book. One in which Imam al-Haddaad is going to be talking about Aqidah or belief that we need to have and we'll kind of breeze through that section inshallah and then we'll get to the next one which is where he's going to be talking about how we prioritize our religious obligations. So last time we covered the ways in which we should follow the book and the sunnah, right? Follow the Kitab and the sunnah that the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam told us in many hadith that if you stick to the Quran and you stick to the sunnah of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam inshallah, you will be saved and you will be in a good state. And so that's the framework for which we'll use to continue into this discussion now. So he talks next about Aqidah and belief and Aqidah is basically the creed of the Muslims, right? What exactly do you and I believe? And he mentions that this is very, very important as you progress upon the spiritual path to actually have a very clear understanding of your belief. Most of us we learn this either when we convert into Islam if we entered into the religion later in our life or when we were young. But it's important to refresh it and he says it's important to have kind of systematically at least review it at some point in your life. And so the most important thing here is making sure we're following the correct belief, right? There are generally speaking the majority of the Muslims are following similar types of beliefs but that's not always the case. Over the course of the last 1400 years there have been quite a lot of various sects and divergent beliefs that have developed. And so it's important to follow what Imam Hadaad is saying now is the beliefs of the group known as Ahl Sunnah wa Jama'a, that you want to follow that type of creed and you want to follow that understanding of the of the religion. And so there are various books when this is not a lesson on Aqidah. So there's various books that someone can dive into to try to understand those. But what is that? The basic creed of the Muslims is you believe in Allah, you believe in the messengers, you believe in the angels, we believe in the books, we believe that all of the prophets came down with the message of Tokid and with the message of oneness of Allah. We believe in the afterlife, we believe in the grave, we believe in the realities of the grave and the punishments of the grave and the good aspects of the grave. We believe that on the day of judgment, we believe then in heaven, we believe in hell and so on and so forth. And those are at least intellectually, we start to believe those things. But as he's mentioned throughout, and we've been talking about that the belief gets to a point where it starts to become reality, right? It's not just an intellectual concept. You go from the knowledge of certainty to the truth of certainty. And that as somebody practices and works on themselves more and more, they start to attain these levels and they start to attain these actual beliefs, or they start to attain these actual realities based on their beliefs. So that's kind of what he's mentioning here, right? Then what's important to do as a practical takeaway is to review one basic text of Aqidah at some point, ideally with a teacher, with a scholar. And there's various also kind of classes that people can follow along online in which texts of creed are taught. A very, very solid one that's recommended is the creed written by Imam al-Hazali in the second book of the Aqiyah al-Lumuddin. It's just been translated. So if you just search Imam al-Hazali and then Aqidah or creed, you'll be able to get that as an English translation, excellently translated over the last couple of years. And just review it and read through it, right? So just kind of know, okay, what are the beliefs of Ahl al-Sunnah wa jama'a? What he also mentions is don't go too deep into the kind of theoretical aspects of belief, right? Your actual yakin, your actual certainty will not be increased by studying and memorizing all these facts. It will be increased by understanding and then by implementing the religion and working on ourselves. That's as we start to increase our yakin. But again, we just want to study this at some point. And so the risk of not doing this is we start to get into some confusing beliefs. There's beliefs out there now that every single religion is true and Islam is one of those many true religions. That's not the belief of the Muslims. There are people within the tradition of Islam who might believe that belief. But the Muslim belief is that no, the other traditions have been changed, they've been morphed, and the Prophet SAW came to rectify and to correct things and that he is the last and final messenger and his message overtakes and abrogates and overtakes these other messages, right? And so we're supposed to believe in the specifics and the core aspects of the message of the Prophet SAW. That is one example of a belief that if somebody doesn't study the yakinah, they could be like, oh, yeah, well, you know, I guess so. I guess everybody's kind of just, you know, everybody's kind of on the truth and it all makes sense and it's all relative anyways. And that's where it starts to get, that's not the belief of the Muslims, right? And especially in the Western context, sometimes we people start to think that that we don't want to be thinking things that are incorrect. If someone doesn't think the right things, they won't, at some point in their life, they won't do the right things because this is one thing Imam al-Khazali really emphasizes. This is knowledge precedes action. If you don't have the right knowledge, you won't have the right action. Your action will have some mistake in it. So someone doesn't really understand how to like pray. They'll be like, oh, well, I just want to pray like according to the way I feel is good. Well, you can feel what, what you prefer to feel, but that doesn't mean that's the way Allah wants us to pray. Allah wants us to pray in a very, very specific way, right? So we might not see the value of why should I pray standing up and bowing and doing all these things. Maybe I just want to walk around and have a conversation with God. Well, we should do that too, but that doesn't take the place of the prayers, right? It doesn't take the place of the five prayers. This is when knowledge precedes the action. So same thing with Aqidah and with belief that the knowledge and understanding of true creed must, must enter somebody and must be a part of what we study in order to make sure that our actions that we're doing and the beliefs that we have are, are all valid, right? And it's very surprising the number of conversations. I mean, I've had a number of conversations with people who, who just have very different understandings of things than what the traditional scholars have taught, right? And the understanding has usually come from them not studying something properly and just developing their understanding over time. We don't want to do that, right? We want to understand things in the way that the Sahaba and in the way that the Salaf understood things. That's how we want to understand things. And then that's, that would be translated down into the time that we, the time that we live in. So we'll move on now to really the next section. That was like probably the quickest, the quickest section that we'll cover. Does anybody though before I move on actually have questions on that? Questions I'm going to just spoke about before we keep going on creed and, and belief. No. Okay. Cool. If any questions come up, please feel free to chime in. Okay. So then now this is then the next, the next section, which is religious obligations, right? So like, he, his, he titled the section in the book on religious obligations, but we're going to talk about this more like how do we prioritize what types of actions we end up doing, right? The most, the framework that he lays out here is that the most important thing we can ever do in our life is to stay away from the things God has told us not to do and to do the things God has told us to do. And to, that ultimately allows the human being to realize a state of humility before Allah that I'm not running my own show here. I'm, I submit to a creator and someone doesn't have the humility to recognize that they still submit to somebody else. They're follow everybody's following somebody, especially in the days of social media, everybody's following each other and when everybody's following someone, following the celebrity, following this politician, following this person, following this philosopher, so on and so forth. But the Muslim, they follow the Prophet's Islam and the Prophet's Islam is getting his being from Allah, right? That's what that's, that's who the Muslim follows. So the core goal in, in life here is to obey what he has told us to do and stay away from what he's told us not to do, right? So Imam al Haddad, he talks a lot about in the last, like maybe five or 10 different sections that all the extra actions you can do, what he calls supragratory actions. He says, get your basics down and then start doing extra things, right? Start doing extra Nawafil prayers, start reciting the Quran often, start to learn knowledge, start to do, do the Sunnah of the Prophet's Islam and so on and so forth. But now what he's going to do is he zooms out a little bit and he says, just remember that before you get too deep into the extra, make sure you're prioritizing your actions correctly, right? Make sure we're prioritizing our actions correctly. So he says, it's better to perform all of the obligations that God has said, all of what's called the farah, the farah actions, which are, you know, few things, right? But they are very critical and stay away from the haram things and not do any extra, not do anything extra, not do any extra du'as and any extra things, but just do the basics than it is to do some of the farahid and do a fair amount of extra and kind of sort of not really stay away from the haram, just stay away from what we want to, right? He says that the first is better and that it's interesting because in our time, it's very difficult to really prioritize the obligations. And I'm going to talk about this in kind of what context are we doing, doing me in here. But in our time, it is difficult to prioritize the things that God has told us to do and to stay away from the things God has told us not to do. It can be difficult. And so many times we'll just, we won't know how to prioritize things. And so we will say, oh, well, I live in the West. This should be fine. I'll go ahead and do this haram thing. And then I'll make it up by doing a bunch of extra, extra good deeds, right? But that's a fine way to look at it. We shouldn't stop the extra day, extra good deeds, but it's not the correct way to look at it. It's not the way that Allah would want us to look at it, right? Allah has an order of priority, right? And he mentioned this in the famous Hadith Qudsi, which is mentioned in this chapter that my servant does not draw nearer to me except that by that, that I've made obligatory on them, obligatory. And he hasn't actually made that many things obligatory contrary to maybe when we were growing up and we learned about the rules of the religion and like, dude, this religion is all rules and no fun, right? Like, that might have been the way we thought about it. But at some point you get to a point in life, where are you okay? No, Hamdullah, this is doable, right? There's rules to everything. And if you don't obey the rules, I was just driving on, I don't know if anybody saw the construction on telegraph, but like redoing and repaving the road. This morning I was driving on it. And like, there's no lanes anymore because they are still working on the road. And so like one car is kind of driving here, one car is driving here, one car is like driving in the middle. Like there's no very, very clear lanes. And the thought that came to my mind, I was like, Subhanallah, what if life had no lanes? Like, what if Allah gave us no boundaries in life, right? That everybody, and we see that manifesting in the Western world today where people don't have, they don't want to go by any lanes, no rules. It's my rules. It's my way, right? My way or the highway. It's just, it's the way I want to do things. There's no boundaries. If you have no boundaries, you eventually result in problems starting to happen, right? So maybe it doesn't happen in the first five, 10 minutes, but at some point while someone is driving, if you ever drive in a country where they don't, even if there are lanes where they don't really follow the rules of the road, you'll see what I mean here. At some point people are just like merging, he's going here and then at some point someone's going to hit somebody, an accident is going to happen, right? And so Allah gives us rules not because he's trying to punish us or to make us be like, oh, now you have to live a very, very boring life. That's not the point of the rules. Allah gives us rules so that we, so he can benefit us. He knows that, hey, this is a creation I created that's weak, right? And they need guidance on how to figure this whole thing out because I am the one who also created this game of life. And now I'm going to give you the rules of life, right? And this is the rules by which you can attain nearness to Allah. And this is the rules of which we can attain the pleasure of Allah. And that is the ultimate, ultimate, ultimate goal. So the point where Allah mentioned in the Qur'an, how much regret people will have in the next life because they'll say they'll be thrown into, there's various verses which mentioned, they'll be thrown into the hellfire and they'll ask Allah, ya Allah, just one more chance, just let me go back. Let me go back and I'll change my life completely. Everything it is that I did, everybody around you doing something, and you're like, I can't do it. I can't do it because it would displease Allah. It does take patience. But that is at the point at which patience Allah says he rewards patience. When one, he says, Allah, you're hip-boosting. He loves the people of patience. Then he says he's with the people of patience. And then he says he rewards the people of patience without any limit. He continues to reward them and continues to reward them. And so, we really, really want to keep