 So, before we continue, I want to explain very quickly about a hadith, what is a hadith? Basically there's two types of hadith, there are hadith that are acceptable, maqbool, and then hadith that are mardood, that are rejected. Basically a hadith describes the actions, or gives the speech, or the tacit approvals of the Prophet Muhammad, sallallahu alayhi wa ala alayhi wa sallam, the ath'al, the aqwal, and the taqarir. So there's a difference now between hadith and sunnah, right? Obviously there's overlap, we draw or extract the sunnah from the hadith, but they're not necessarily the same things, there's a lot of hadith. There's thousands upon thousands of hadith at different grades, we'll talk briefly about that. Anything that's attributed to the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, peace and blessings of God be upon him, is considered to be a hadith. But the sunnah of the Prophet, this is what has the sort of providential protection, the protection of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. This is the authoritative or normative ethos, the authenticated practice of the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa ala alayhi wa sallam, and the function of the sunnah, as the scholars of Islam say, al-ulama, as sunnah tu tu fassiru al-Quran, that the sunnah, really what it does is that it exegetes, if you will, or it explains the Quran, right? So the Quran itself says in surah al-Nahl, surah number 16 verse 44, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says that indeed we sent down this vikr upon you, this reminder upon you, speaking directly to the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, in order for you to make bayan, in order for you to make clear, to explicate, to elucidate, to commentate upon what was revealed to them, to interpret the Quran, the revelation of God. This is one of the functions of prophecy. So just because you read something in a hadith doesn't necessarily mean it's true, even if it's considered to be in a sound book of hadith, there are a lot of problems with hadith that are graded as sound, there's a difference of opinion about them. You might read something that is sound and try to implement it, but implement it incorrectly. For example, one of my teachers years ago, he quoted a hadith that the Prophet used to eat dates, but what's the proper way of eating it, what's the proper etiquette of the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, how did he eat a date, right? He would put it into his mouth with his right hand and then he would extract the seed by turning his left hand over with these two fingers and push the seed out with his tongue, but no one actually saw his tongue and then he'd discard or he would get rid of the seed. He did it in a way where there's a lot of honor and there's no question about having bad adab or having bad comportment while eating. How does a Muslim pray? I mean the Qur'an tells us to pray, but how do we pray? Can you pray any way you want to? Can you just follow what your neighbor is doing or what Christians and Jews are doing? Is that how we pray? So the sunnah becomes absolutely indispensable in understanding the Qur'an. How do we send benedictions upon the Prophet? The Qur'an says, Oh you who believe, send benedictions of peace upon the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him. How do we do that? We have to look at the sunnah or the authenticated hadith. It's a meticulous science. We don't have to go into it now. It's a separate class, but basically for a hadith to be sound, there's a sanad which is the chain of transmission. It has to be muttasil. It has to be linked. There has to be a link, no missing, no gaps in the link of transmission. The famous hadith of mercy has 23 or 24 links in its chain of transmission. This is the hadith of the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him, is reported to have said, and you'll find it in Musnad Ahmad. The most compassionate shows compassion to those who show compassion. Show compassion to those on earth and the one in heaven in no anthropomorphic sense will show you compassion. This hadith is called hadith al-rahma. There's like I said about two dozen or so links in his chain of transmission, and it is indisputable the words of the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him, and this is actually the first hadith that Muslim children in the traditional Muslim world were taught. This would sort of set the foundation for their education about the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi sallam, stressing the importance of compassion, the importance of mercy. So the chain of transmission is muttasil. There's no gaps. Everyone in the chain has adhala. They have probity. They're known as being righteous people. They have tam adhapt. They have intelligence. They have good memories. There's no hidden problems, no hidden illa, which could be anything from like bad grammar because the Prophet peace be upon him did not use bad or incorrect grammar. He was the most eloquent of speakers. So this is a very meticulous science, the science of hadith authentication, and this is different than sira, right? With sira you have to be careful. A lot of things get into sira that have no chain of transmission, so it's up to the al-rahma to go through and sift through the sira and extract what is authentic to what is not. Writers of sira tend to exaggerate certain things. It's interesting because the sira is something that is constantly under attack by, for example, Christian apologists, Christian missionaries. They tend to attack stories in sira. Many of these stories are exaggerations even according to Muslim scholars. Some of these stories have, like I said, no chain of transmission, and no Muslim really takes them seriously, but these are the things that are brought up by missionaries, for example, so basically tearing down a straw man. The equivalent of that is, for example, if I said something like, if I went to a Christian and I said, you know, why did Jesus murder one of his teachers? Now, of course, I don't believe this at all. Jesus, peace be upon him, is a great prophet of God in the Islamic tradition, but just to make a point here. And he says, what are you talking about? I said, no, it's what it says in the infancy gospel of Thomas. Well, he would say, well, the infancy gospel of Thomas is an apocryphal gospel. We don't believe in that. That's what he would say. We believe in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. I say, exactly, we don't believe in that. So many of these stories in sira are just, they're falsified stories. No Muslim takes them seriously. There's no chain of transmission, and they have nothing to do with our faith. But this hadith, hadith Gabriel, this is considered to be a sound hadith, it's recorded by Imam Muslim. It is a very famous hadith, as I said. So the hadith begins and the Umar, radiAllahu ta'ala anhu, that the hadith is on the authority of one of the greatest companions of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, whose name was Umar. And Umar was the second caliph in Islam, following the first caliph, Abu Bakr, one of the most beloved human beings to the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. And generally, well, the Sunni tradition of Islam praise and love, all of the companions of the Prophet, peace be upon him, they weren't all perfect, but there's a respect there. And that's in contrast to the Shia that don't respect a great number or a majority of the companions of the Prophet. So these are the two sort of major divisions in our tradition, Sunni Islam and Shia Islam. And really, I would say the differences as far as theology goes are minor, they're negligible, some would disagree with that. But the vast majority of scholars on both sides do not anathematize either side, they don't make tuck feel, right? But the major difference is really in probably political theory, political theology. But nonetheless, the hadith begins by saying Umar is saying that one day we were sitting with the messenger of Allah, and the title of the Prophet here in Arabic, Rasulullah, a construct phrase, the messenger of God, Rasul is equivalent probably to the Greek Apostle, which literally means one who is sent forth. And of course, the word for God in Arabic is Allah. And this is the name of God in Arabic, but in all Semitic languages, the word for God begins with the Aleph in the Lamb or Aleph in Lamid. So in Hebrew, you have Elo, as the singular, and Elohim, which is the plural of majesty, which we find many, many times in the Hebrew Bible, in Aramaic or Syriac, you have Allah, right? So Jesus, peace be upon him, he would have used Allah because he spoke Aramaic or Syriac. So for example, in Mark 115, the Behold the Kingdom of God, is at hand. So Jesus would have used this name for God, Allah. So the Quran, so Arabic uses that name as well. So he's saying we're sitting with the messenger of a God, peace be upon him, that a Yeoman one day, and behold, a man rose among us, right? So the Arabic here suggests that he sort of just seemingly appeared out of nowhere, he was wearing exceedingly white clothes, Shadeed, he had exceedingly black hair, the traces of travel was not seen on him. So, you know, he didn't have, he wasn't dusty, he wasn't disheveled, anything like that. He didn't look like a traveler, didn't have, you know, a bag or something with him, and none of us knew who he was, none of us recognized him, right? So this is obviously the archangel Gabriel, right? Gabriel, peace be upon him, Gabriel in Arabic, Gabriel in Hebrew, which means the power of God. And Gabriel would often incarnate, that is to say, assume human flesh in order to teach human beings, right? So this is one of the ways in which the prophets would interact with angels, that the angels would take human form. It's called incarnation. Muslims do not believe that God incarnates, right? So this is a major difference of opinion between a major difference in theology, let's say, between Hinduism and Islam, or Christianity in Islam and Christianity. So in Hinduism, there are countless incarnations of God. Is Hinduism essentially a monotheistic religion? That's an interesting question that we can talk about later. In Christianity, God did not incarnate except for once, and that was in the person of Christ, according to Christians, and we'll talk about that as well. So oftentimes, Gabriel would incarnate and he would teach the prophet, he's the teacher of the prophet, although Muslims believe that the prophet Muhammad's rank is higher than Gabriel. His rank is actually higher than his teacher because the prophet is the best of creation, he's the beloved of God, right? So it's not all about knowledge, right? You can have teachers that are arrogant, you have students that surpass their teachers over time in piety and even in knowledge. It's very, very common. So Gabriel would come to the prophet, he would teach him the religion, or he would bring the prophet Quran, he would bring the prophet revelation. Oftentimes, Gabriel in human form would simply tell the prophet to repeat after him, and the prophet would repeat, and that's called an exterior locution. Other times, the angel would come to the prophet but was not seen by him, and the angel would dictate to the prophet internally. The prophet would perceive words internally, sounds forming words or vibrations forming words, and he would perceive that, and then he would just repeat that, and that's called an interior locution. So the Quran would come to the prophet in both ways. And on rare occasion, the Quran would come to the prophet without any angelic mediation, right? So interior locution without angelic mediation. And our scholars like Imam al-Suyuti and others scholars of Ulum al-Quran or the sciences, or using the word sciences, or the pre-1800 disciplines of the Quran, they would say that, for example, the last two ayahs of al-Baqarah were revealed to the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, by Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, by God, glorified and exalted as he, through interior locution without angelic mediation. And they mention others too. So here we have Gabriel, peace be upon him, the great archangel. He's taken on human form, he's wearing white clothes, very white clothes, he has exceedingly black hair, and no one recognizes him. So he comes and Sayyidina Omar, he continues, he says, so that he sits right in front of the prophet, peace be upon him, to the point where he sort of touches or links his knees against his. So he's sitting right in front of the prophet, peace be upon him, and then Gabriel puts his hands on his thighs, his own thighs, and he's listening intently to the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. So here Gabriel appears to be teaching us proper adab, sort of proper etiquette or comportment with the prophet. And this is very important for Muslims that we show proper respect towards all the prophets of God. And of course the Quran mentions about 25 of them, but the hadith indicates that there are thousands of prophets, 25 mentioned in the Quran, and all of them are respected and loved by Muslims. So these include even Adam, alayhi salam, Adam is considered a prophet in Islam, Noah is considered a prophet in Islam. Moses, please be upon him. And before that Ibrahim, alayhi salam, and or Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac, both of them considered prophets in the Islamic tradition, both of them beloved by Muslims, both of them respected, both of them considered legitimate prophets and righteous. Even Jacob is considered a prophet in Islam. So these stories that are mentioned about, for example, Jacob in the book of Genesis, where he's really depicted in a very negative way, right, basically as this kind of trickster. And that's a kind of common sort of literary device or literary character in ancient literature that there's this trickster figure who is considered to be very clever and gets his way by obviously tricking people. And this is sort of praised in the book of Genesis that God has this type of unconditional love for Jacob, despite all of his faults. So things like that Muslims will not confirm. So the dominant opinion, and we'll talk more about this as well, is that when the Quran speaks of the Torah that was revealed to Moses, please be upon him, it's not talking about what is today considered the Torah, right, because clearly there are stories in the so-called Torah of today that are unacceptable from a theological standpoint, from the Islamic theological standpoint. There are many things in the Torah that we would consider to be accurate and even true, but at the end of the day Muslims don't rely on any other scriptures. All of these scriptures from the perspective of the Quran and Islam have been abrogated. Islam has its own scripture, it is the Quran. Islam has its own sacred law which is derived from the Quran and the sunnah of the Prophet, peace be upon him. So anyway, we were talking about proper comportment with the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. The Imam of Medina in the second century, the second half of the second century, or right in the middle of the second century after Hijrah was Imam Malik ibn Anas, who died I believe 179 Hijri, students would come to him and they would study fiqh, they would study jurisprudence and they would study hadith and when they would study fiqh he would immediately begin teaching that, but if they wanted to study hadith he would prepare himself. Oftentimes he would go and he would take a shower, he would wear white clothes, he would tie his turban, he would burn some incense, right put on some musk. Why would he do that is because he's going to teach the words of the master Muhammad, peace be upon him. So out of respect for the words of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. Ibn Mubarak mentioned something interesting. He mentions that one time Imam Malik ibn Anas, as we said the Imam of Medina he was teaching his famous hadith book al-Mu'ata and as he was relating a hadith of the Messenger of God, peace be upon him, they noticed that he would cringe in his face for a turn pale and this would happen over and over again, but he wouldn't stop the hadith of the Prophet. So after he was done with the hadith he told his students to look between my shirt and my back and they saw that a scorpion had lashed him something like 14, 15 or 16 times, but he didn't want to cut off the speech of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, so he continued with the hadith. So Gabriel, he sits in front of the Prophet, peace be upon him, sort of locking his knees and listening intently and then he says however, Ya Muhammad, so he calls to the Prophet, peace be upon him, by using his first name. And this was something that is prohibited to do, the companions did not do that. They used the title of the Prophet, even God in the Qur'an does not address the Prophet, peace be upon him, directly by using his first name. He speaks about the Prophet by using his name in the third person. Muhammad, peace be upon him, for example. But when Allah is speaking directly to the Prophet, peace be upon him, Allah uses a title, Ya Ayyuhar Rasul, Ya Ayyuhan Nabiyuh, what does Allah do that? It's because Allah is teaching the Ummah of the Prophet, peace be upon him, how to address the Prophet. So here, however, Gabriel is saying Ya Muhammad, so the Ulama say here that Gabriel is posing as a Bedouin to conceal his identity because the Bedouin were a bit gruff, they were a bit rough around the edges, or the Ulama say that this prohibition is not for the angels, but only for the human believers in the Prophet, peace be upon him. So in that sense, then Gabriel is actually sort of subtly revealing his identity. Nanda Lassi says, Ya Muhammad, akhbirni an al-Islam, tell me about al-Islam. Of course, this is the name of the religion, but in this hadith, according to the scholars of hadith, this seems to be a reference to the sort of exoteric or exterior aspects of the religion, what sometimes philosophers of religion call the sort of lateral or horizontal aspect of the religion. Of course, it means submission, submission unto God. Faqadur Rasulullah sallallahu alayhi sallam and then the Prophet responded to Gabriel by saying al-Islamu an tashhada ad la ilaha illallah. So Islam is to witness or to testify that there is no ilah, there is no deity, there is no God, except Allah, except Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. So there's no ilah, nothing deserves worship other than Allah, nothing deserves worship, nothing other than God has divine attributes, nothing other than God has the intrinsic ability to help and or harm you. So this is what is testified on the tongue, right? So this is the first pillar of Islam and tashhada, shahada to testify and is done upon the tongue la ilaha illallah muhammadur rasulullah. This is when a convert wants to become Muslim, a proselyte becomes Muslim, they will utter the shahada, they will say ashhadu, I witness, I testify and la ilaha illallah. There's no ilah, there's no deity, there's no divinity, there's no other person that has divine attributes that deserves or merits worship other than Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And I bear witness that the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him is the messenger of God. So the Prophet himself, this is what he says here. Al Islam, number one and tashhada al la ilaha illallah wa anna muhammadur rasulullah is to testify that there is no deity other than Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and that Muhammad sallallahu alayhi sallam is the messenger of God. So one of my teachers he said here, this is something interesting, la ilaha, right? That's atheism, there is no God illallah except Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala or except God capital G. So we're moving from atheism into deism now that there is a God and that this God is the sort of great architect of the universe, the creator of all things, wa anna muhammadur rasulullah and now we move into theism. So from atheism to deism to theism, so deism God is just impersonal, right? But when we say muhammadur rasulullah and muhammad is a messenger of God, this reveals the personal aspect of God. How does it do that? Well it shows or it is evidence of God's loving nature that he sends human messengers for the guidance of humanity, right? So through his prophets, divine eminence is revealed, this kind of closeness that God has to his creation. It is through the prophets. This is how God reveals his loving nature. So the Quran says I always refer to this as sort of the equivalent of John 3.16 in the Quran. This is 21.107 of the Quran in which the prophet and which Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is speaking directly to the prophet muhammad, peace be upon him, and he says we did not send you except as a mercy to all the worlds, right? That the prophet peace be upon him is the greatest manifestation of God's mercy because the prophet is the greatest messenger of God. He brings us total guidance, guidance for all the world until the end of time. And of course all the prophets are manifestations of God's mercy. I want to use that term incarnations of God's mercy, right? Not incarnations of God's person, that's a Christian belief, right? That is intimated at least in the New Testament Gospels, especially the Gospel of John, but that's a Christian belief. So the prophets are examples of God's mercy in the Islamic tradition. Even Jesus peace be upon him in the Quran is also called a mercy. We will make Jesus a sign of God, a great sign, and a mercy from us, right? So we're moving from atheism. And of course atheism is a position of belief. So there's a difference between a position of knowledge and a position of belief, right? There are two positions of knowledge. There's agnosticism and agnosticism, right? So most atheists, for example, the late Christopher Hitchens, famous atheist author of this book, God is Not Great, which has been definitively refuted by the way by Berlinsky's book, David Berlinsky, which you should get. And John Lennox also has an extraordinary book as well. Nonetheless, Hitchens always used to refer to himself as an agnostic atheist, meaning that he is going to live his life under the assumption that there is no God, but he doesn't know for sure cannot prove that there is no God. So he's an agnostic atheist, right? It's very rare to get agnostic atheists. In other words, an atheist who knows with certitude that there is no God. And then of course you have agnostic believers and agnostic believers as well. So then that's the first pillar then, right? There's no God but Allah. And the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, is a messenger of God. And to establish the prayer. So this is a second pillar, right? And the prayer, as salah, comes from a root word which means to connect. So the prayer is our connection to God. And to give zakah, to give charity. And the word zakah comes from a word meaning purification. So this is a type of spiritual purification. And to fast the month of Ramadan, right? One, two, three, this is the fourth pillar. Muslims that are able to fast the month of Ramadan, the ninth month of the Muslim calendar, has really a commemoration of the Qur'an which was, which, whose revelation commenced during the month of Ramadan. So this is the Prophet's answer for what is al-Islam, right? And again, in this context, seems to be referring to sort of the exterior aspect of the religion. It is to say upon the tongue, there is no God but Allah, the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, a messenger of God, to establish the prayer, to give the charity, fast the Ramadan, and to make hajj if one is able to do so. And then Qaala sadaqta, Gabriel said, you've answered correctly, or he confirms his answer. And he says, what is al-Islam, right? And again, in this context, seems to be referring to sort of the correctly, or he confirms his answer. And Sayyidina Umar, he said, that was surprising to us that this person is asking the Prophet a question, and then he confirms his answer, right? And this was, you know, you can call this sort of the Socratic method, right? Where the teacher already knows the answer, but the teacher wants to honor the student and have the student give the correct answer. Now the second question, tell me about al-Iman, and which is oftentimes translated as faith, right? Iman literally means to cause safety, right? Safeguard your soul. It's related to the Hebrew Amunah, right? So for example, the famous treatise of Maimonides is called the shiroshah ashar iqarey amunah, right? The 13 principles of Jewish faith, right? And of course the word amin is related to this as well. So to safeguard your soul, right? So this isn't, you know, blind, Iman doesn't mean that you just believe in something blindly, believe without evidence, you know, belief without evidence. That's not what it is. It means to accept something because the evidence points in that direction, and by doing so, you safeguard your soul in the afterlife. So here in this context, so we have Islam, it's being contrasted with Islam, it seems to be referring to sort of the inward aspect or vertical aspect of the religion, right? So the prophet, peace be upon him, he said in Hadith, which is sound Hadith, right? Submitter is the one that is he from whose hands and feet, sorry, hands and tongue, hands and tongue, other Muslims remain safe. In other words, the true Muslim is not harming, he's not violent with other Muslims, and he's not slandering and backbiting and being calmness towards other Muslims. That's the quintessential Muslim. And then the prophet also said, al-mu'minu, right? The quintessential believer, right? The quintessential believer, man aminahu nasu ala dima'ihim wa amwadihim, awkama qala, that the quintessential mu'min, believer, right? The one who internalizes the faith is the one that humanity, humanity trusts with their literally blood and possessions, lives and property, lives and possessions, right? So the sort of field of compassion and love is expanded, begins with oneself, that's what it means to be selfish, that's what the word idiot means, idios means self, right? The idiot only cares about himself, and then it expands obviously to the family and the community and then to the Muslims and then to the whole of humanity, right? The whole of humanity. In fact, the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, he said in a famous hadith, which is in Bukhari and Muslim, rigorously authenticated, awkama qala, that none of you truly believe until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself, right? So he loves for his brother what he loves for himself, and that hadith I just mentioned is the source of the hadith, as I said, is in Bukhari and Muslim, but Imam An-Nawwi also included it as hadith number 13, I believe, in his arba'een, in his famous collection of 40 hadith, and in his commentaries, he defines what does it mean, who is your brother, right? None of you truly believe until you love, until he loves for his brother, what does that mean? He goes on to say in his commentary, that means your brother, Muslim or Jew or Christian, really your brother in Bani Adam, right? In humanity, right? But he makes that point, and one of my teachers said that there are some manuscripts of Imam Nawawi's commentary, where that sentence, where the Imam says Jews and Christians is taken out of his commentary, is apparently, there are some Muslims who don't want other Muslims to think of Jews and Christians as being their brothers, which is unfortunate. So you have this tampering with these commentaries, but that's an authentic saying from the Imam, and that's a sound hadith from the Prophet. So he continues, so what is al-Iman? What is faith, right? What does it mean to safeguard your soul? Qala, the Prophet said, It is to believe in God, right? Literally to safeguard yourself by means of God, right? Or can just say to believe in God. And it's not simply to accept the rational proposition that there is a God, right? That's what that's what Satan did. Satan accepts that there is a God, right? He accepts that wholeheartedly, but what is missing from Satan? Why does the Qur'an call him a kathar, which means an infidel, if you want, that's a Catholic word. The unbeliever, a rejecter of faith, is because Satan does not have qabul and id'an, right? He doesn't have acceptance. He doesn't accept the guidance that comes from the prophets. He doesn't have submissiveness or humility towards God, right? One of the books in the New Testament, which is very close to Islamic teaching, is the epistle of James. James, obviously, is successor of Jesus according to Christian history. He probably didn't write this epistle, but it certainly sounds like something that he would have written. It seems like someone in his school of thought wrote this epistle, but he says in there that even demons believe in God, right? So it's not just about what one accepts rationally, or just sort of accepts in oneself, but has no motivation to manifest that faith in action, right? So faith and action, very, very important. So to believe in God then means not simply to accept things on reason, but to show one's faith as it were, right? To perform righteous actions. Believe in God and in his angels and in his books, his scriptures, and in his messengers, and in the last day, the day of judgment. This day of judgment has different names in the Qur'an. Yom al-Qiyamah, like the day of standing. Yom al-Din, the day of judgment. Yom al-Akhir, the final day, the last day, etc. So the prophet here then gives us these sort of six articles of faith, right? Believe in God, believe in angels, and there are four major archangels, Gabriel and Michael, Jibril, and then Mikael or Mikael, Israfil, which I believe is Sarephiel in the Bible, or in Israelite tradition, and then Israel, Israel is not Israel, that's Israel. Israel is also the angel of death, and there are other angels mentioned in the tradition as well. As far as the scriptures go, Muslims believe in four major scriptures and many minor scriptures that are sort of indicated as well. The four major scriptures are the Torah of Moses, and the Psalms of David, the Zabur, the Injil, the Gospel given to Jesus, peace be upon him. Is that the same as the Christian Gospel, or is it the same as the New Testament, the four Gospels? It's not an easy question to answer. The dominant opinion from Muslim scholars is that those books, what the Christians are calling the Gospel is not the pristine Gospel, it's not the actual revelation given that Jesus, peace be upon him, although some of the sayings of Jesus could certainly have been preserved in these four books, but that these books, they contradict each other, and they're written in Greek, which is a foreign language to Jesus. This is sort of the dominant opinion of Muslim scholars, and they're written too late, decades later. Of course, there are different ways of looking at these things or counter-arguments to those points as well, but this is the dominant opinion. For example, there are indications in the Quran that fabrications, textual fabrications were committed by Christian scribes and Jewish scribes, and it seems like there's evidence of this. If you talk to textual critics of the New Testament, for example, there are manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark that end at chapter 16, verse 8, and according to imminent textual critics of the New Testament, that's actually the true ending of Mark, the oldest and best Greek manuscripts end at Mark 16-8. What does it say in Mark 16-8? Well, it says that on Easter Sunday, a group of women, three women, they go to the tomb with a sepulcher, and they find that the stone has been moved away, and there's an angel sitting inside the tomb, and the angel says to the women, you seek Jesus who has risen, he's gone ahead of you to Nazareth or to Galilee, and then Mark says, whoever wrote this Gospel, he doesn't identify himself, but tradition calls him Mark. Mark says that the women ran away and they were frayed and they said nothing to no one, and that's the end of the Gospel. So what happened? It seems like a cliffhanger was Jesus actually resurrected, did he survive the crucifixion and flee the city because he's afraid of authorities? What happened? And then a century or so later, a few decades later, lo and behold, you have subsequent manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark where there's now a longer ending as it's called, verses 9 through 20, where Jesus actually appears to the disciples, to male disciples, and he commissions them to go into all the world. He tells them that they can handle poisonous snakes and drink poison, and no harm would come to them. That's just one example. So Muslims believe in God, and next week we'll talk about, we'll give a little lesson on theology, what do Muslims actually believe about God? Theology, Pheos and Lagos, right, means speech about God. What do Muslims say about God? Who is God? Do Muslims believe that God is one, a sort of rigid type of Unitarian monotheism? Do gods believe that there's a plurality, if you will, in the quote-unquote Godhead, as Christians do? Do Muslims believe that God has attributes? What are the attributes? We'll go into a little bit of that. Again, we want to keep it very basic. Belief in God, angels, the revelations given to the prophets, and their original form, and messengers of God, right? According to Muslim tradition, there have been about 124,000 or so prophets, although that number is disputed, as I mentioned, 25 of them mentioned explicitly, 25 or so mentioned in the Quran, and belief in the final day, right? So belief in God, angels, revelations, messengers, they have judgment, and that's the sixth article of faith, two, three, four, yeah, and that you believe in Qadr, and Qadr is difficult to translate, divine decree, right? Some people sometimes translate it as destiny, I like divine decree or divine apportionment, and notice here the prophet, he repeats, and tukmina, that you believe, he repeats that verb because Qadr is very hard to grasp, right? It's a difficult thing to grasp, that you believe in the divine decree, the good and evil of it, right? That everything is from, everything is from God, right? So there's two terms in theology, there's Qadr and there's Qadr, and some of the scholars say that these terms are synonymous, others say that Qadr is sort of the measuring out divine apportionment, as we said, God determines all things, and then the Qadr is the playing out, if you will, of that divine decree in space-time in the world, right? So you had groups in the past that were known as the Jabariah, absolute determinists who said things like human beings have no free will, and so God could not punish, could not possibly punish human beings because we have zero volition, then you have the other extreme, the Qadariah or the absolute libertarians, we're not talking about political libertarianism, which believes that government should not have a lot of intervention, if any in our lives, no, we're talking about philosophical or theological libertarianism, which espoused that human beings have absolute free will, they create their own actions, in fact God doesn't even know the Juziyat or the particulars of things, you only know sort of the essences of things, so the truth is somewhere in the middle as they say, now as Muslims we believe that everything is decreed by God, God has perfect knowledge, right? But at the same time human beings are held accountable for their choices, sometimes this is called soft determinism or compatibilism, right? That even though everything is determined by God, even though God knows everything and has the power to do whatever he wants, if an action is, if an action originated within a person themselves, from that person's wants and desires and there are moral implications to that action, then that person is taking to account for that action, ultimately it's difficult to understand, ultimately it's impossible to understand, right? So that's why the scholars say here that the prophet repeats the verb and took me not that you believed, because this is a difficult thing to believe and it's difficult to think in terms of God's power and knowledge, yet he allows us to do certain things and then takes account for our actions, it's a very difficult thing to grasp, but it's sort of like explaining calculus to a toddler or to like a fifth grader, right? They'll get something, they'll get something from it, there's a very, very limited understanding, but at the end of the day the intellect really has to make sajdah because it has to make a prostration to God, because God's qadr, his divine decree, is beyond our ability to comprehend, right? If God didn't know what we're going to do, then he wouldn't be God, that's not a solution to anything, but this is something that we can discuss later as well, so it's akin to what philosophers would call this type of soft determinism, that you're still taken to account for your choices, but your choices are indeed limited, right? Okay, so I think that's a good place to stop for tonight, inshallah. We'll finish the hadith next time and then I'll give you a little bit of theology as well, basic theology and the Islamic tradition and that'll complete next week, that'll complete our section on basic beliefs of Islam and then we'll move in week three into Judaism, inshallah. This is the second session of our class entitled The Basics of the World Religions, inshallah. Today we're going to talk about the religion of Islam, we're going to finish our discussion on the religion of Islam, inshallah, and then we're going to move next week into Judaism, inshallah. So last week we began reading the famous hadith, Gabriel, the tradition of Gabriel, peace be upon him, and we covered most of the hadith just to give you a quick recap, we said that Gabriel, peace be upon him, the archangel, incarnated basically, became a man and came to the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, in the presence of the companions, or some of the companions, and sat in front of the Prophet, peace be upon him, and asked him a series of questions, asked him about al-Islam, which of course is the name of the religion itself, but we said that in the context of this hadith it seems to be a reference to the exterior element of the religion, that which has to do with the body, and then the Prophet, peace be upon him, answered the question by explaining or listing the five pillars of Islam, and then Gabriel, peace be upon him, asked the Prophet, peace be upon him, a second question about al-Iman, what is faith, and the Prophet, peace be upon him, he described the six articles of faith, and that's where we left off. Then Gabriel, peace be upon him, he says to the Prophet, peace be upon him, he has spoken the truth. So now we continue the hadith, the famous hadith, and there's a third question that Gabriel, peace be upon him, asks the Prophet, peace be upon him, what is al-Ihsan, right, and the root word here is beauty, ihsan is translated in a number of ways, spiritual excellence is one way of translating it, so we said that al-Islam is a reference to sort of the horizontal aspect of the religion, while iman is a reference to the vertical aspect of religion, or that which has to do with the body and the mind, and finally we have ihsan, the transcendental aspect of the religion, or the relational aspect, or you can say the soul of the religion itself. Al-Ihsan, a technical term for al-Ihsan is tasawwuf, according to many of the Ulama, they are, it's the same thing, they're synonymous, sometimes called Sufism, but when we talk about Sufism, we're talking about Sufism in the context of both Islam and iman, right, we're talking about spirituality with a cognizance that a true spirituality from the context of our religion is grounded in Islam, as well as iman, so tasawwuf is just a technical term for al-Ihsan, right, the aim, if you will, or the sort of, if we use Aristotelian nomenclature, the final cause of the human being in the Islamic tradition is to actualize wilaya, right, or friendship with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, in other words, to make oneself beloved to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, and this is the aim of al-Ihsan, of Islamic spirituality, and different Muslim metaphysicians and scholars, they describe the process, Imam Ghazali, for example, who writes about tasawwuf, a practical Sufism, if you will, he recommends that Muslims must sit with scholars, they must sit with the spiritual masters, and take from their prescriptions, take from their adhkar, take from their different litanies and eulogies and remembrances of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, one of the great scholars, Ahmad Zaruq, he said that if you don't have a spiritual master, then take as-sala'a al-nabiy, as your spiritual master, take the benedictions upon the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, as your spiritual master, and Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala will guide you spiritually by means of the salla'a al-nabiy, because the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam was the greatest of spiritual masters. So Imam Ghazali, he talks about, you know, this sort of three-step process of purging, if you will, the lower self, the nafs of vice, right? This is called a kenosis in Greek or catharsis, via purgativa in the Catholic tradition, to purge oneself, to get rid of these vices, right? What are some of these vices? What are the vices? These are diseases of the heart, the amrad al-kulub, the major ones are kibir, like arrogance, and hasad, envy, riyah, right, ostentation, so disciplining the lower self, emptying the self of these of these vices, but also then ornamenting the self with virtue. This is, so the first one he calls tahliyah, this one he calls tahliyah, right, to ornament the self to, to take on virtue, and of course we know the cardinal virtues of, you know, adhala and shuja'a and khikmah, but you also have these theological virtues. Imam Ghazali enumerates 19 or 21 theological virtues like tauba, like sabr, like repentance, like patience, rajah, hope, so on and so forth. And then finally you have something called tahliyah, right? This is to sort of manifest the divine ethos at a human level, right? This is when the abd becomes a wali, if you will, a friend of God because he mirrors the divine attributes, the divine names and attributes at a level, at the level of a human being, right? So the perfect mirror, if you will, at a, at a human level of God's names and attributes was the Prophet Muhammad, sallallahu alaihi wa sallam. And Allah SWT in the Quran intimates this when he calls the Prophet by two of his own names. Right? That the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam, there has come unto you a messenger from among yourselves. It grieves him that you should perish. Deeply concerned is he about you to the believers. He is kind and merciful, right? So Allah SWT is ar-ra'uf and ar-raheem with the definite article, right? In this sort of absolute sense, in a sense that is beyond human capability, beyond human comprehension. But something of that attribute, right, is reflected in the character, the beautiful character of Muhammad sallallahu alaihi wa sallam. And he said in a hadith, and there's weakness in the hadith, but it's true, and it's meaning to khallakubi akhlaq illa that to adorn yourself with the character, if you will, of God, right? And the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam is mentioned in the Quran. Allah speaks to him directly in the Quran. Verily, verily you dominate, right? Is usually used in grammar to denote something physical, like upon the desk or upon the floor, something like that, upon the roof. But if there is an abstract noun that follows, then this denotes a type of mastery. So indeed, you have mastered khalluk azeem, a great character, a magnificent character, because he is a reflection of the divine names and attributes at the human level, right? So like Allah swt says, speaking to the Prophet in the Quran, you did not throw when you threw, Allah threw, right? Before the Battle of Badr, you know the famous story, the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam, he picks up some pebbles and he throws them into the direction of the mushrikin. Allah swt says to him, you did not throw when you threw, right? Very interesting. But Allah threw, what does this mean? Does this mean that Allah swt incarnated into the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam and undertook this action? That's not what it means. It means that all of the actions of the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam, however mundane they might seem, all of them are guided by Allah swt, right? He is a sanctified agent of the divine. And this is the goal for all of us. Obviously, we cannot attain the maqamat of the prophets, but we can attain, we cannot be prophets, we cannot attain nabua, but we can attain wilaya, right? We can become from the awliya of Allah swt. And the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam, he intimates this in another hadith, which is in Bukhari, which is hadith number 41 of the arba'een. Arba'een means 40, but Imam Annawa, we included two more hadith, right? Where hadith number 41, where he reports from the where the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam is reported to have said None of you truly believe until his hawa, his hawa, his desires, his caprice, his hawa is in perfect accordance with what I have brought and what did the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam bring? He brought the Quran and his ethos to sunnah. In other words, he brought al-Huda, he brought the guidance from Allah swt, right? And that is perfect, that's perfect iman, that's an actualized type of faith, is that your desires and wants are perfectly aligned with what Allah and his messenger wants. This is a definition, if you will, of wilaya. Reminds me of something Confucius says in the Analex, the lunyu, where he says, at 50 years old, I understood the mandate of heaven. And at 70 years old, he says, at 70 years old, I followed my heart's desire without overstepping the line, right? So he's describing this type of wilaya. Confucius did believe in God and the jury is out whether, I mean, he certainly could have been a prophet. There's a good case to make, I think, being Confucius, just as there's a good case to be made for Siddhartha Gautama or the Buddha being a khidr mentioned in the Quran. So this is, in other words, this is mystical union, right? When your desires align with the guidance of Allah SWT, the term for that is mystical union. And there's other hadith that intimate this phenomenon. Hadith number 38, for example, in the Arba'een, also from Bukhari, where the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, he's reported to have said, let me look at that really quickly here. So this is a hadith Qudsi. This is a sacred hadith where Allah SWT will speak in the first person. So and Abu Huraira, radiallahu anhu, it's reported from Abu Huraira, may Allah be pleased with him, said that Allah SWT said, that Allah says whoever antagonizes or shows enmity towards my Wali, towards my friend, right? Again, Wilaya is the final cause of the human being according to the philosophy of Islam, if you will, or the psychology of Islam. The one who antagonizes this friend of God, and I have announced to him war from me, Allah SWT, declares war on the person who antagonizes the friends of God. It's interesting, you have a plethora of Christian and Christians and atheists who are basically working full time on the internet, trying to discredit and denounce the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. Basically, it's an everyday verbal assault. You have YouTube channels with thousands upon thousands of prescribers. This is something that Allah SWT, our subscribers, this is something that Allah SWT tells us about in the Quran. This is what he says is going to happen. This is just natural. That indeed, indeed, you will hear a lot from those who received the revelation before you, the Ahl-il Kitab, and the Mushriqin, which is interesting. The Quran doesn't necessarily affirm atheism. They were very, very, very few atheists in the ancient world. There were a few, but the Quran does not entertain atheism. Everyone worships something. You're either from Ahl-il Kitab, or you're a believer, or you're a Mushriq. So if you say, for example, the universe created itself, you're assigning to the universe a quality of Allah SWT, you're saying that the universe created itself, it's the khalaq of it, or it's the khalaq, first of all. But then he said, no, the universe didn't create itself. The universe always existed. It has a sort of internal pre-eternality. That's called Al-Qidim-Al-Vati, an essential pre-eternality. That's an attribute of Allah SWT. So these are Mushriqin, basically. That's called shirk. Right? So you're going to hear a lot from people of different faiths, from people that are Mushriqin, that is going to grieve you. A lot of white noise. But if you show patience, great theological virtue, and you guard against evil, you guard yourself from this type of thing, then that will be the determining factor of all affairs. And this doesn't mean that you can't ask questions to seek, you know, clarifications. Asking questions does not necessarily come from a place of doubt. Right? We have to remember that as well. Someone asking questions, even if they're difficult questions, does not necessarily mean that this person is having issues with their iman, or something like that, that we should constantly seek to fortify our iman. But anyway, continuing the hadith, this hadith Qudsih, that my servant does not draw close unto me. Now again, the speaker here is Allah SWT on the tongue of our master, Muhammad SAW. My servant does not draw close unto me with anything more beloved by me than his fara'id, right? His obligatory acts of worship. And he continues, and he continues to draw close unto me with his nawafil, with his super-rougatory acts of worship. Right? So you have the five pillars of Islam. These are the fara'id. And then you have nawafil. You have extra. You have the, for example, the five-day, right? The mustahab day is the sunnah day. And you have sadaqah, extra. You have the hajj, which is farad. You have umrah, which is extra. That leaves one pillar. The shahada, shahada is essentially a form of zikr. You say it on the tongue, as we said. You testify on the tongue. What is the nafila of the shahada? It is it is a zikr, zikr of Allah SWT, and additional as-sala'a on the Nabi. It is eulogies and benedictions upon the Prophet SAW, right? So the beloved of actions are fara'id. But then this the hadith Qudsis says, to draw near unto Allah SWT with the extra credit, as you will, the nawafil, حتى أحبه, until I love him or her, the masculine is used here, right? The female gender is encapsulated in the masculine gender. It's understood to be there, until I love him, until this is God speaking, until I love him. And then he says, and when I love him, كنتوا سمعه, التي يسمعوا بي. And when I love him, right, فإذا أحبه, when I love him, I become his hearing by which he sees and his بطر. And by which he's, sorry, his hearing by which he hears in his sight, by which he sees وَيَدَهُ الَّاتِي يَبْطِشُ بِحَى. And his hand by which he strikes and his foot is رِجل, التي يَمْشِ بِحَى, by which he walks. And if he were to ask anything from me, I shall surely give it to him, right? If you were to ask anything from me, I shall surely give it to him. And he continues, if you were to ask me for refuge, I should surely grant him it, right? So this, that hadith is in Bukhari, it's a sound hadith, hadith in Qudsiy. So going back to the hadith of Jibril, alaihi salam, okay. And the Prophet, alaihi salam, this is the description he gives here, a beautiful description. So the Prophet, alaihi salam, says, spiritual actification, affection of the soul, the relational aspect of the religion, the soul of the religion. It is to worship Allah SWT as though you see him, as if you see him. If you don't see him, indeed he sees you, right? So Allah, as if one is raptured in the beatific vision of Allah SWT, give you a basic worldly example. If your boss comes into your office and says, make a sale right now, and he sits down in your office and he watches you, how excellent of a sales call will you make, right? That's just your boss at work, right? Who you might not even like very much as a person. But when you worship, worship Allah SWT, as if you can see Allah SWT, and we cannot see Allah SWT, but then know, know in your very being that Allah SWT sees you. And then he says, right? So there's a fourth question. Sometimes we push the pause button on this hadith, but there's one more question, one more major question. There's actually five questions, but one more major question. What, so tell me about the hour, i.e. the day of judgment, the hour, right? The word hour in English comes from the Greek hora. This is the same word that's used for the day of judgment in the New Testament, for example, which is written in Greek. So it begins with the omega, but there's rough breathing. So hora, that's why there's an H when we say hour. So tell me about the hour. And he understood this question to mean, when is the hour, right? Now the hour is close to Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, Kahatain, and he put up these two fingers, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, the hour and my awful very close like this. So he is the eschatological prophet. He is the first of the major signs of the hour. His coming is the first major sign of Asa'a, right? When you look at the entire history of humanity, it's very, very close. So the prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam's answer is the one who's being asked the question, right? The one who's being questioned knows no more than the questioner, the sa'il, meaning Jibril Alaihi Wasallam. Nobody knows the exact time of the sa'a. This is a secret that Allah SWT has kept for himself, right? In the Quran, it says, they ask you concerning the sa'a, when will it be established? Allah SWT commands the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam to say, the knowledge of the sa'a is only with my Lord. The knowledge of the sa'a is only with my Lord. So nobody knows, nobody knows when it is. In fact, in the New Testament, you have this saying that it's a tribute to Isa Alaihi Wasallam in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 24, verse 36, when he says, of that day, right? Of that day, no if no man, not the angels, not even the son, but only the father. Now, before we continue, we have to understand here that these terms, father, son, holy spirit, these are Hebraisms. You actually find these terms, these sort of ingredients of the Trinity, the ingredients of the Trinity, right? Not the doctrine of the Trinity. The ingredients in these terms, the commonclature of Trinitarian Christianity is found in the Old Testament, but they have different meanings. So what the early Christians did is they took terms, they appropriated them, and redefined them through a Trinitarian lens. So in the Old Testament, in Jewish texts, even at the time of Isa Alaihi Wasallam, this is a Jewish prophet in a Jewish environment, right? When Jews called Allah SWT the father, what that meant was ab, sorry, what that meant was rab. So ab, father means rab, right? Isaiah, chapter 64, 16, you are the Lord, our Father. This is totally Majaz, is figurative language, right? It's figurative. No one means this, no Jewish prophet. Isaiah did not mean that in a literal sense, that God is a literal father, or God is my literal father, or the God is a literal father of anyone. And when I say literal father, I not only mean in the literal physical sense, but I mean that anyone shares a nature with Allah SWT. Anyone should find quality with Allah SWT. Nobody does. We'll get into some of this theology. And then the word son, right? You find this in the Old Testament. Israel is my son, even my firstborn. In the Psalms, God says to David, you are my son. This day I have begotten you. What does that mean? What does it mean to be a Ben Adonai, Ben Elohim, right? Ibnullah. What does that mean in a Jewish context? It simply means abd. It means slave or servant, right? And it's a great maqam to be a servant of Allah. It's a great station to be the servant of Allah. It's not like when we, you know, we use these terms slave. People think of, you know, slave in the American context, like chattel, slavery. That's what it is, right? Because in that type of relationship, the slave is dehumanized, humiliated, and the only one that benefits is a slave master. But in the relationship with Allah SWT, the slave is honored, and he benefits. The slave benefits. We cannot benefit Allah SWT one iota. There's nothing that we can do that can possibly benefit him. We take all the benefit. So it's a great maqam to be the abd par excellence, and the Prophet SAW took great pride in the sense that Allah SWT frequently refers to him in the Quran as his abd. Right? So son, in a Jewish context, son means abd, means servant, evad adonai, right? And father in the Jewish context means rab, right? So we have to keep that in mind. So what does it mean for Jesus to be the son, right? Because in the New Testament, he refers to himself more often than not as the son of man, and there's different ways of interpreting that. It seems to be a way of stressing his humanity or just a way of saying prophet or just human being. But sometimes the son. Now this could be, obviously, there could be alterations that the text has suffered. But again, keeping things in a Jewish context. If he's the son, right? So first of all, he says we're all children of God, right? Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter five also in the book of Luke. In the Aramaic, he says Avunda Vashmayo, our father who art in heaven. They ask him, how do we pray? He says, pray like this, Avunda Vashmayo, our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, right? Our father, not just his father, all of us. And again, abd means rab. So I would actually translate that. The meaning of that is rabbana, rabbana, oh our Lord, that's what it means, right? So what does it mean then for Jesus to be the son or, you know, monogenes khuyas, you know, the one of a kind son? What does that mean? Well, Christians take that to mean that he's the second person of a triune Godhead. But it simply means that he's the Messiah, right? Issa alaihi salam has this unique title. He's a unique abd. And the prophet salallahu alaihi salam is also a unique abd. And Musa alaihi salam is a unique abd, right? Unique abd, unique slave of God. So anyway, going back to this idea of the sa'a, I have to explain this sort of before we get into this. So Matthew 24, 36, he says, of that day, no with no man, right? Not the angels. Uday khuyas in the Greek, not even the son, not even the Messiah, not even this unique servant of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala meaning himself, but only the father, only the rub, only the rub knows the sa'a, the day he calls it, al yawm, yawm azeem. So Isa alaihi salam here, according to a Christian text, which is a canonical text, authoritative text, the Gospel of Matthew, the most popular Gospel in all of antiquity, admits he doesn't know. Now, what's really interesting is later scribes, they removed that statement, uday khuyas from manuscripts of Matthew's Gospel. Later Greek manuscripts, they omit that. So Jesus says, of that day, no with no man, not the angels in heaven, but only the father, which still doesn't help really because the son is not the father. You can't say that the father is the same person as the son. That's a violation of Trinitarian theology. But these scribes, whenever they were probably second, third century, they found it very troubling that Jesus, who's supposed to be God, doesn't know something because very important concept. God has these sort of omni attributes. He's omniscient. He knows everything. He's all knowing. This is called a qualitative attribute of God. God has certain attributes that qualify him as being deity. One of them is omniscience. Asifatul ma'ani, we call them an Arabic. Right? Ilm mutlak, perfect knowledge. Does it increase? Does it decrease? It's perfect. So the fact that Isa, according to this Christian text, whether it's authentic or not, Allahu alim, it doesn't really make a difference to us, right? Whether it's authentic or not. But according to this text, he admits that he doesn't know something. And if he's God, he's supposed to know everything. Of course, in Numbers 2319, this is in the Torah, or the modern day Torah, Numbers 2319, it says, God is not a man, right? That he should lie. Numbers 2319. God is not a man is just three words. I always have my students memorize it. God is not a man. Not a man is God. That he should lie is the rest of that statement. So Christians, how do Christians deal with this statement? God is not a man that he should lie. They say, yeah, God is not a man that he should lie. In other words, God can become a man, and he did become a man. He became Jesus, peace be upon him, and Jesus never lied about that, right? But that's not the actual meaning of that verse in Hebrew. And this is something that rabbinical authorities point out in their debates with Christians. This goes all the way back to like the third century, Rabbi Abahou of Caesarea, who used to debate Christian apologists. He said, that's not the meaning of it. The meaning is, whoever claims any man who claims to be God is a liar, right? So that's the meaning of it. God is not a man that he should lie. Any man, any human being who claims to be God is a liar. And that's not the only place. We have Hosea chapter 11 verse 9. Indeed, I am God and not a man. They are two mutually exclusive entities, right? So the Prophet, he's the one who has been questioned, knows no more than the questioner. And he continues. So now we have yet another question. So Islam, Iman, right, Ihsan, As-Sa'a, now a fifth question, a clarifying question, number five, maybe just, you know, 4A, question 4A. So tell me about, you don't know when is the Sa'a, but tell me its signs and portents, right? So why is this important? Because we need to recognize the signs of our times, right? And be able to guard or protect ourselves against evil. That's why there's a very fairly large corpus of what's known as eschatological literature in our tradition. The Prophet, he spoke a lot about the portents of the Sa'a and the fitan, the trials and tribulations that are going to manifest towards the end of time. Because the Prophet, he's not just a Bashir, he's not just a bear of glad tidings. He's here to warn us about things. So the Prophet, he gives us warning. This is part of his vocation as a Prophet. So what does the Prophet, what does he say? He says, Ajeeb statement. He says that the slave girl or the low-born, base-born girl will give birth to her mistress. Mistress means female master, right? That a girl will give birth to her mistress or master. So the Ulama, they have difference of opinion about this, but generally they say that the meaning of this is that towards the Sa'a, there's going to be sort of a flood of what's known as filial recalcitrance. The opposite, the opposite of Virul Wali Dayim, the opposite of filial piety, which is so important and everything starts at home. All of Confucius' philosophy begins with Virul Wali Dayim. So bolsters or buttresses are a case for Luqman al-Hakeem as being Confucius because he's giving advice to him. He's teaching his son, his children, so filial recalcitrance. So you have this idea now, this kind of post-modern philosophy that's floating around in colleges, universities, society in general, this idea of radical absolute egalitarianism in the society, which has never worked. History has shown that it's never worked. Higher archical structures are very important to society. Those work and they're tried and they're tested, that there's always going to be. You can't equalize people. It's just not going to happen. People have different abilities. People are born into different types of class and status and wealth. There's always going to be a khas and an am. There's always going to be a noble class or the nobility, the nobles if you will, influential, wealthy, and there's going to be the am, the laity or the commoners. That's how it works. Hierarchies work. They work in the workplace. They work in educational institutions and they work in the family. The study that I cite oftentimes Charles University in Prague where the researchers discovered that households where one spouse is dominant over the other, those households tend to be happier and have more children. What do I mean by dominant? I don't mean that one spouse is oppressing the other one. There's a clear social hierarchy within the family. A chain of command where the person at the top, they're magnanimous in the way that they treat their family, but the buck as it were stops at that person. They have the sort of final say within the household. And this study found that 72% of those happy families were male dominated. So there's a reason why Allah SWT says the Quran is not trying to be misogynistic and because that's a whole idea of patriarchy and we need to smash it and build up. Good luck with that. These things are not going to work. So this idea of children now ruling their parents. I just saw a thing on the news the other day. There's a show on Netflix. I think it's called the babysitter's club or something like that where you have this eight year old boy who's in the hospital, biological boy, and you have these doctors that are treating this patient as a boy. And then one of his friends or someone, a girl comes in and says, can I talk to you two doctors outside? And this girl who's like 10 years old or something, the friend of this boy who's sick, begins to just lecture these grown adult physicians. I don't care what your chart says. Look at her. It's a girl. Treat her like a girl. You're being violent or something. You're creating an unsafe space for this girl. It's actually a girl. So now we just kind of live and make believe land. And the doctors are sitting there, doctors, physicians in their 50s listening to this 10 year old girl lecture them. Okay, you're right. You're right. Very, very strange. Okay. So, and then he says, وَاَنْ تَرَاءَ الْحُفَاتَ الْعُرَاتَ العَالَى رِيْعَ أَشْاَئِ يَتَطَوَّلُونَ فِيَلْبُنْيَانَ So that's the first one he says, the Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. He says the slave girl will give birth to her master. And then he says something interesting. You will see the barefooted naked destitute herdsman competing in the construction of lofty buildings. So why these two signs? Why these two portents? So does the scholar say that well one will come very quickly and one will come later or one will come within the family and one will manifest in the society. The barefooted naked destitute herdsman competing in the construction of lofty buildings. So in other words, love of the world, the New Testament, love of Mammon. That's how Isa alayhi sallam, at least according to the New Testament puts it. The Hadith says love of the world is the head of every type of sin, love of the world. So this idea of shepherds naked, barefooted, now competing in lofty buildings, it means that hubba dunya can take root even in the most unlikely of places. In the most unlikely of places, simple shepherds, Bedouins living in the desert, intense, are now fully engrossed in love of Mammon as it were, love of the world. There's a surah of the Quran that we know very well, but we seldom contemplate. Surah 102, atakathur. What does atakathur mean? It comes from kathir. It's form six verb which denotes this kind of reciprocal action. So you have this sort of mutual competition or rivalry for stuff, for kathirah, for a lot of stuff. Al-haqumutta kathur, the Quran says, that this mutual competition or consumerism amongst yourselves deludes you or distracts you. It distracts you. Al-haqumutta kathur hatta zurtumul makabir, until you visit the graves. Right? And the meaning is either until you go into your grave, and that's really when you wake up. They could say to Ali, he said, human beings are asleep and when they die they wake up. That's when the yakeen, thumma kalla sofa ta'alamun, thumma kalla sofa ta'alamun, lau ta'alamun, lau ta'alamun, ilm al yakeen, la tarawun al jaheen. Or it means that you should go to the graveyard. When you actually go visit a graveyard, that's when people start putting things in perspective. Right? That's why we should go to funerals. Somebody dies in your community and there's a janaza prayer. Go to the graveyard. Go look at the burial. Right? And this, you know, ta'a kathur, this idea of competition, you know, you have a perfectly good phone. You know, you've got to buy another phone because your cousin has the latest iPhone. Your phone is perfectly good. But no, you have to compete with this person. And that's just in, you know, in one little gadget. For people like this, they spend their entire lives just ta'a kathur. Very interesting. So the Prophet sallallahu alayhi sallam is two portents that he gives us. Right? He tells us basically, number one, there's going to be a major breakdown of social structures. Right? We're going to enter into a type of social chaos. And then we're going to, there's going to be a sort of dominance of materialism. People will fall into total materialism. Right? And another thing he said is not mentioned in the hadith here in the Hadith of Jibril, but the Prophet sallallahu alayhi sallam, he said that there are other signs, other portents of the Sa'a that coming of the Antichrist is one of them. If you look at Isa alayhi sallam, if you look at our Christology, Isa alayhi sallam, according to the Hadith of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi sallam, his message is Bukhrawi. It's otherworldly. Right? He's talking about moat, about death. He's talking about Akhira. He's talking about purifying the self. You know, he says the dunya is like a bridge, hurry up and cross over it. He says the world is like a man who's at sea, trapped on a boat, completely lost sea. He starts taking handful after handful of seawater into his mouth, which is representative, symbolical for the dunya. The more he drinks, the more thirstier he gets, and then it kills him. Right? He says the world is like a haggard old prostitute, who sticks her hand out from behind a wall, which is all, you know, be jeweled with rings and nail polish and bangles and wave over to her. So the men go, they go and they look around the corner and then she grabs them and slaughters them. That's the nature of the dunya. Right? So the Antichrist then, the Messiah ad-Dajjal, his message is the is the polar opposite of Issa al-Islam, is that salvation is through materialism. This is all there is. So just enjoy your life. Right? And this is, you know, the barefooted naked destitute herdsman competing in the construction of lofty buildings. That's how the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam described this phenomenon, a very dramatic sort of way of putting it. And then he says Sayyidina Umar, he says, then this man left and I stayed for a while and the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, he came to me and said, Do you realize who the questioner was? And Sayyidina Umar, he says, Allahu Rasulahu a'lam, Allah and his messenger are no best. Indeed, he was Jibril alayhi salam. Yes, the age of Horus indeed. This is what Crowley says in the Liber Legis, Alistar Crowley, one of these sort of hidden figures that have so much, that has influenced American Western society, now world, the world in such an incredible way. The founder of the modern religion of Thelema, which is a type of Satanism. Right? He wrote this book called the Liber Legis, which he claimed was dictated to him by a shaitan, by a demon named Awas, which is interesting, sounds like Waswas. And in that book he says, Crowley says that we're going to enter into the age of Horus, the age of the child. Right? The dominance of the child. In other words, an age of a lack of discipline, an age of just following the Hawa, following the Nafs, an age where it's unreasonable because the purpose of the aqal, aqal means to bind something. Yaqil means to like, to the hobble of camel. Yaqilha, the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam said, about the camel running around outside the Masjid. So whose camel is that? The Bedouin said, that's my camel. I have trusted Allah. He said tie her down. Right? The intellect is supposed to tie down and control the Nafs, the Hawa, the Caprice. This goes all the way back to Plato. We've mentioned this before. The rational soul has to be in the driver's seat to keep the repetitive soul and the striving soul in check. But it's the age of Horus. I'm sorry if there's problems with the audio. I'm the only one here today. Inshallah we can work that out. God incarnate is an Arian and Greco-Roman concept. Well, Arianism is hard to pin down Arian Christology. God incarnate is certainly a Trinitarian belief. That's Orthodox Christianity. Right? In Karunatus est, it is in the Nicene Creed. It says in the Niceno Constantinopolitan Creed that God came down and assumed flesh. That's what that means. Incarnation. What did Arius actually believe? Most of his writings are lost with the exception of... Most of our information about Arius comes from his opponents, which you can't really trust. Can you really trust your opponents to reproduce? Even according to Thermotomb, a Christian theologian who wrote the book, it's a very good book, if I can think of the title. Classical Trinitarian theology. Right? He says in that book, TOOM. T-O-O-M. He says that it's known that many early church fathers, they would belie Arius. They would misquote him. They would quote him out of context. But something seems to be from Arius, because it's in the Nicene Creed, is the belief that that Jesus Christ peace be upon him, that the Son of God, and he used that term, but not in the Trinitarian sense, that the Son of God, there was a time when the Son did not exist. Right? That sort of the credo of the Arians. It's according to the Nicene Creed. In Greek, Aen Pate Hateuk Aen. There was a time when he was not. There was a time when he, the Son of God, was not. And Arius referred to Christ as a catisma creation. The Son is created. He used the term. Right? So that's sort of one way of looking at Arianism. The other way of looking at it is, well, okay, that might have been true, but did Arius somehow still give the Son some sort of semi-divine or demigod status? I mean, that's certainly how some of the early church fathers portray him. That the early church fathers, ironically, are defending monotheism in the face of what they believe is a type of bi-theism which is being espoused by the Arians. So Trinitarian monotheism for the early church fathers is a real type of monotheism, whereas what Arius was saying is that Arius is trying to propose that there are actually two gods, the Father and the Son. I think that's probably a misrepresentation of Arianism. I think Arius believed based on what cursed me as far as my research, that Arius believed that the Son was created at some point, that catisma teleon, he calls him, the best of creation. That was Arius. Okay. So anyway, he says, that was Gabriel. He came to you to teach you your religion. And that's the end of the Hadith. All right. Now, I only have a few minutes left. I want to just read a few statements from the beautiful creed, very ecumenical, popular creed of Imam Abu Ja'far al-Tahawi, the world-famous creed which is derived from the Quran, the mutawater of a multiply attested hadith of our master Muhammad, Sallallahu alayhi sallam, and the ijma, the consensus of the first three generations, the salaf of the Muslim Ummah. Just read very quickly here. He says, so number one, and of course, creed, the word creed comes from the Latin credo, which means I believe, right? So, creed in Arabic is aqidah, which is related to the Hebrew word aqidah, like the binding of Isaac, Genesis 22, right, to bind to something. That's what the root is, release the sort of knot from my tongue, which is the prayer of Musa al-Islam. So, these are beliefs that are binding upon us. It's just a list of our beliefs. This is the aim of the creedal theologian, right? The aim of the creedal theologian is simply to articulate our basic beliefs, just a list of our beliefs. And it's different than Right, or dialectical theology, or possibly a better translation. I don't like speculative theology, but a discursive theology. The aim of the discursive theologian, the mutakalim, is to reconcile our belief, our sacred texts, with reason, right? So, it's not just, you know, we believe in God, and this is who God is. It's, you know, is belief in God reasonable? Is belief in revelation reasonable? Is belief in angels reasonable? Right? So, here Imam At-Tahawi, he's assumed the role of a, of a, a creedal theologian, right? So, he's not going to get into a lot of discussion, a lot of dialectics, if you will. So, he begins by saying, God is one, and he has no partner. And some of the Ulema say here that Wahid here denotes a sort of internal oneness of God, that he's one quote unquote person, using the person as an entity which has a personality. One entity, right? Persona or hypothesis in Greek. In other words, the sort of Godhead in Islam is a simple unity, rigidly one, unitarian monotheism. In Christianity, when it comes to the essence, attributes, and actions of God, so in our tradition, no one shares in the essence, and attributes, and actions of God. No one has the essence, attributes, or actions of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, except Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, who is rigidly one in internal oneness. He is Wahid. In Christianity, three hypotheses, three persons share in the essence, the attributes, and actions of God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That's why Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, he says, don't say three. Three doesn't mean trinity. It could mean trinity, but it means three. Don't say three. Whether it's three gods, right? Another word like a sort of neoplatonic or middle platonic hierarchy of being where there's, it's really more henotheistic, where there's one major God, but then there's two sort of minor gods that are, that are effects of the major God, or the one, right? So the Godhead is sort of three distinct gods that have similar essence. Don't say that. Don't say one essence in three persons. So this verse, the way that it's worded is, is, is incredible, because not only is it denouncing trinitarian monotheism, but also these types of middle platonic, henotheistic tri-theism, all of these types of things, because that was also very popular. This predates Christianity, middle platonic philosophers. They talked about the one, they talked about the, you know, who, who, who caused from his being the low ghost, they use that term or the noose, the word, and through self-intellection, this kind of emanation. And then you have another emanation from the, from the low ghost, from the noose that created this, the, what they call the, uh, psukei, the psyche, the spirit, father, son, holy spirit, right? Christianity is heavily influenced by middle and, and, and neoplatonism, to the point where in the gospel of John, you see that word, and our K ain't how long it lasts. In the beginning was the logos, and the word was with God, and the word was God. Again, we, so what we have with Christianity, you have an appropriation of Jewish terminology redefined through a trinitarian lens. You also have an appropriation of Hellenistic philosophy and theology, redefined through a trinitarian lens, right? So with the New Testament books, especially John, you have sort of one hand on Plato and Aristotle and the other hand on the Tanakh, the Old Testament. And it's really sort of marrying the two together. This is why Imam al-Ghazali warns us in the Tehafut al-Falasafa that it's very, very dangerous to get into these, to get into Hellenistic metaphysics. He's not an anti-scholastic. Imam al-Ghazali says in that text, he says, I'm not against, you know, the hard sciences, the natural science, that has nothing to do with your religion, right? He says if a scientist comes up to you and says you can predict the eclipse of the moon or something, that's fine. Don't argue with him. But steer clear of Hellenistic metaphysics because look what it did to Christianity. And look what it did to Judaism as well. Philo of Alexandria, highly influenced, middle platonic philosopher who talks about a Deutero Staios, a second god that he calls the Logos, right? He lived in Egypt in Alexandria. That's probably where the Gospel of John was written as well. Anyways, I'm out of time. So next week, insha'Allah, we'll continue and we'll go into Judaism. This is our third class, insha'Allah, covering the basic concepts of the world major religions. So the first week we spoke of our tradition of Islam as well as the second week. So today, insha'Allah, tonight, insha'Allah, we're going to begin the first part of the religion of Judaism. So it's difficult to distill a religion down to a couple of sessions, but I'll do my best, insha'Allah, also at 8.20 or so, we'll take a break, maybe seven or eight minutes. So we can pray Maghrib, insha'Allah, for those of us on West Coast time. So I thought a good thing to look at when it comes to Judaism is the famous creed of Maimonides. So Maimonides' famous Rabbi philosopher, he died in the early 13th century. He was buried in Fustath in Egypt. Moshe bin Maimon is his name, and Jews refer to him as the rambam, that's the sort of acronym, means Rabbi Moshe bin Maimon. He was an incredible scholar, he was a great scholastic, he was a great synthesizer of Jewish thought as well as Aristotelian ethics, and we'll talk a little bit about that as well. He believed that revelation and reason go hand in hand. He was a natural theologian, meaning that he believed that one could engage in reason and philosophy as evidence of God. He was a champion of what's known as negative theology, and we'll explain that as well, insha'Allah. He wrote quite extensively, probably his two greatest works are the, and he wrote them in Arabic, at least the first one was in Arabic, which is oftentimes translated as the guide for the perplexed. It's called the three volumes, and basically the aim of the guide for the perplexed. Who are the perplexed? Who are these people in the state of Hira? These are people that cannot reconcile Naqal with Aqal. They can't reconcile the revelation with reason, so again that's sort of the job as it were, as we said last week of the dialectic theologian to reconcile the two. So that's what he attempts to do in the famous guide for the perplexed. His second famous text is called the Mishnah Torah, which is a commentary on the Torah, Jewish law, and scripture. And in his Mishnah Torah, Maimonides articulated basic creed. So his creed is 13 principles, that's all it is, 13 lines, and it's taken from the Tanakh and the Talmud, so we sort of have to get familiar again with our terminology. What are we talking about when we say Tanakh is another acronym that the Tao comes from Torah. There's a noon in there, which is from Nibbim, it means prophets. And then the calf, which is more guttural in Hebrew, so Tanakh comes from Kitubim, the writings. So it's basically the Hebrew Bible, right? Tanakh and Hebrew Bible are synonymous. Of course, Christians would call this the Old Testament, right? So the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, these are all synonymous. Of course, the term Old Testament is Christian terminology. Jews, at least Orthodox Jews, would find the term Old Testament to be a bit offensive, which implies that the covenant that God made with Moses and the Israelites on Sinai has been abrogated. So that's the Tanakh, right? So you have the Torah. So what do we mean by Torah? What do they mean by Torah? They mean the five books of Moses, right? This is also called in Hebrew, the Chumash, because the term Torah is a bit ambiguous, right? Sometimes when Jews use the word Torah, they're talking about the five books of Moses. Sometimes they're talking about the entire Old Testament, the entire Tanakh. Sometimes they're talking about all of the sacred literature, including the Talmud, and we'll talk about that. So the term Torah is a bit ambiguous. But when we say Chumash, which is related to the Arabic word Chamsa, right? Pente tuk in Greek, here we're talking about the first five books of the Tanakh, right? The books that are traditionally ascribed to Musa, alaihi salam, and Orthodox Jews believe, in fact, that Musa alaihi salam wrote these five books on Mount Sinai, some 3,500 years ago. He wrote them over 40 nights. He was in sort of a trance. He did not sleep. He did not eat. He did not drink. He was simply receiving these five books. What are these five books called? Well, in Hebrew, the first book is called Dreschith, which comes from the very first word, and that's how they're all called in Hebrew. It's the first word, or so, a word in the first verse of the first chapter of that book. In this case, Genesis, right, is called Dreschith, because the book begins, Dreschith bara ilohim et hashimayim, et aharetz, that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, right? However, it's called Genesis in English, which is taken from Greek. The titles of the books that we know are taken from Latin and Greek, and of course, they're taken into the English language. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. These are the five books of Moses. This is the humash, right? This is the first five books of the Tanakh, the Old Testament. The Orthodox believe, again, that Moses himself, Musa alaihi salam, wrote these books. They are equivalent to our conception of the Quran, as far as the Quran being a dictate from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. So Musa alaihi salam is not being inspired. These are not his words. He's not receiving some sort of inspiration or ihah, and then he's articulating the wording himself. The loft is not his, right? Just like with the Quran, the Prophet Muhammad, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, is receiving the words either through exterior or interior locution, and he's simply repeating those words that he's hearing from outside of himself or that he's perceiving within himself. So that is the status of the humash, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, right? And then we have the Nabeem, the prophets. Now, so there's another set of books in the Old Testament that are called after certain prophets, right? So you have books like Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, and Isaiah, and Amos, and Zephaniah, etc. Micah, right? So these books are believed by Jews to be inspired by God, right? So it's not a ipsisma verbah, you know, word for word dictate. It's more like hadith, if there's something comparable in our tradition, inspired words of God, where a prophet would receive inspiration, but that prophet would use his own words. He would articulate that inspiration. And then you have a third class of revelation, right? So or degree of revelation in the Old Testament, which is called the kitobim, the writings or hagiography. And these are books that are authored by nonprofits, for example, proverbs. So Jews don't believe that David and Solomon are prophets. This is a difference of opinion that we have with them. So the Psalms, for example, is kitobim. So a lower degree of revelation. Still sacred writings, canonical and sacred, but not as high, right? Not as great as the writings of Isaiah. And Isaiah is not as great as exalted as the writings of Moses, which are not even the words of Moses. They are the words of God spoken by Moses. So Maimonides creed is taken from the Tanakh, aka Old Testament, as well as something called the Talmud. The word Talmud is related to the Arabic tilmeed, right? And tilmeed means like a pupil, right? So the Talmud is sort of the pupil or the little student of the Torah. The orthodox believe the Talmud is also sacred writing, right? So it has a status that we would, the equivalent in our tradition would be something like ilham, right? Or iha, which is non-prophetic revelation. So not wahi, wahi according to our scholars like Imam Suyuti and Zarkashi and others. The term wahi is prophetic revelation. So Musa, in our tradition, Ibrahim, they received the wahi, right? But saints or non-profits, the Quran says that the Hawariyun, the disciples of Isa, received iha, non-prophetic revelation, inspiration, inspired revelation, right? So the Talmud then has two parts. The Talmud is made up of the Mishnah and Gamara, right? Mishnah and Gamara. So the Mishnah, according to Judaism, is the oral law of Moses that was finally reduced to writing. So here's something interesting that a lot of people don't know, even a lot of secular Jews don't know, is that in the orthodox tradition, Jews, orthodox Jews believe that Moses received two Torahs on Mount Sinai. He received the first five books, which is the very words of God, but he also received inspiration that he eventually would articulate piecemeal over his life in his own words, so essentially a commentary of the written Torah, right? So received the first five books and then Musa al-Islam, Moses, peace be upon him, according to Judaism, as he would live his life in situations would arise with the Israelites in the Sinai wilderness, he would commentate or interpret what was written in the first five books with his own words, and those words were eventually written down in the first century of a common era. So it's kind of like the hadith of Musa al-Islam, his tafsir, if you will, of the Khumash, so it was written down and called the Mishnah, right? And then between the second and seventh centuries of the common era, second and seventh century, second and eighth century, rabbis began to write commentaries on the Mishnah, right? And that was called the Gamara, so Gamara means completion. So you have the Tanakh, right? The Old Testament, which is the Torah, the Khumash, in other words, the Nebim, the prophets, the Kitubim, the writings, and then you have the Talmud, which is made up of the Mishnah, the oral law that Moses received that was eventually reduced to writing in the first century because the temple had been destroyed and now the religion was in danger, so the rabbis decided to write it down, and then you have rabbinical commentaries written on the Mishnah that occurred primarily in two locations at the rabbinical academy in Babylon or Iraq and as well as the rabbinical academy in Palestine. So you really have two versions then of the Talmud, you have the Babylonian Talmud and you have the Palestinian Talmud. Okay, so my monities then, the genius of my monities is that he's able to take this massive corpus of literature, I mean you look at the Tanakh and the Talmud, I mean millions of words, and he's able to distill it and give us the bare bones of Jewish theology, and that's what he does here with his 13 articles of Jewish faith, 13 principles of Jewish faith, and he says very clearly that if you don't believe in any one of these, you are a cofer, a kathir, in his opinion. Now there's some difference of opinion amongst Jewish theologians, Joseph Alba, for example, a 15th century Spanish rabbi, said that only three of the 13 are essential, and my monities he confused, which is essential with that which is derivative, but generally my monities his articulation of the creed is accepted by, by Jews the world over, right? So he called these the Sholoshah Ashar Iqare Emuna, which literally means the 13 principles of Jewish faith. So at this point we're going to take maybe a seven-minute break, inshallah, and we're going to pray the Maghrib, and then we'll come back and we'll begin with the first couple of principles as articulated by my monities, inshallah. So now continuing to principle number one, Iqar number one as articulated by my monities, he says, I believe with full faith, with perfect faith or sound faith, that the creator, lest it be his name, and the Hebrew here is, if you know Arabic, you could pick up Hebrew quite easily. He says, I believe with sound faith that the creator lest it be his name, he creates, he says, and he guides all of creation, and he by himself did, and is doing, and will do all actions. And it's very poetic here, the way that he that he frames it using the asad, the asad, so he uses the the perfect tense verb, then he uses the active participle, and then he uses the imperfect tense verb. So basically what he's saying in this principle, the first principle of the 13, is that God alone is the creator and direct doer of all things, that God is the primary cause, he's the efficient cause of all things, which is contra Aristotle, right? For Aristotle, God is not the efficient cause, because Aristotle believed that the universe is pre-eternal, right? So for Aristotle, God, the unmoved mover is kind of like a giant cosmic magnet that who draws all things unto himself, so to sort of an unconscious pull towards God, and God did not create ex nihilo, according to Aristotle's metaphysics. So God is only the final cause for Aristotle, but now in Judeo-Christian Islamic tradition, God is ultimately the final cause, but he's also the efficient cause, meaning that there was a sort of conscious push, that he is the beginning of the ontological origin of all things, the universe is not pre-eternal in the past, the universe was created from nothing, ex nihilo, the universe was created from nothing, by God, right? God is the efficient cause of primary cause. So he says that God by himself, right? He did and is doing and will do all actions, right? So you can think about here, no one does God's actions except God, none, no one can create anything except for God, right? So if you examine the rationalist, the Mu'atezillah claim, this contra-future, that the rationalists were highly influenced by Greek philosophy, they said that due to our absolutely free will, we create our own actions, we are the creators of our own actions, that our actions in effect inform God himself. So God only knows what we decided to do, so things are not pre-determined. So you have rationalist elements in the Jewish world as well, and it seems that Maimonides, a lot of these, or you can argue, all of the 13 principles has a polemical aspect to them. In other words, he is trying to argue against a position that he believes to be heretical, this idea that God does not create everything, that we create some of our actions, that God does not know everything, he doesn't know particulars, he only knows, you know, essences. So this is soundly refuted by Maimonides in his writings, as well as the theologians of Ahlus Sunnah and Al-Jama'a, they also had to deal with this idea, and our theologians, they would quote from the Qur'an, right? That God created you and your actions, right? Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is the only real creator, right? Allah is the creator of everything. So these are some of the proof texts that our theologians would use. Maimonides would quote from the book of Isaiah, for example, which is in the Nabeem, the prophets, that middle section of the Khumash. So Isaiah chapter 45, verse 6 and 7, where God is the speaker, and Isaiah is speaking the words of God, although Isaiah is choosing the wording, according, again, to the to the Jewish tradition, where he says, I make peace, and I make peace, but I create evil. He creates everything, even evil. But notice how he says it, I make peace, I'm the doer of peace, and I create evil, right? So even though God is the creator of evil, and ultimately he is the doer of every action, the way that it's worded in scripture, is a way that we should think about it. And then he says, that I am the Lord, and I do all of these things. I do all of these things. So God, for Maimonides, God, the creator, is the only creator. He's the only creator, and he's the doer of all actions. So God's omnipotence includes the power to will that which is evil, from our perspective, right? So this is an important concept. God's omnipotence, his kodra, includes the power to will that which is evil, at least from our perspective. So the rationalists, they denied this, and they said things like good and evil have intrinsic properties, and that the intellect knows, and that God is bound to act within, right? So good and evil exist outside of God as absolute things. They have intrinsic properties, and so God is bound to be good according to what is good. So this whole idea is a philosophical argument that is brought out by Plato. The Euthyphro dilemma, right? Are things good because God says they're good, or does God say they're good? So therefore they're good. This argument, ultimately, ultimately, Allah SWT is the standard of good, right? Good and evil do not exist as they don't have any type of sort of ontological existence up there in the ether somewhere, distinct from Allah SWT. Allah SWT is the one to determine what is good and what is evil. So this is what he's heading at here. Just to give some more notes here from the Orthodox tradition of Judaism, the rabbis say that that faith, iman, which they call imuna, it requires yadi'a, or ilm, knowledge, or ma'rifah. In other words, credulity, believing in something without evidence is actually blameworthy, right? So you must know that God exists. You must know that within yourself, right? You have to prove it to yourself that God exists. You have to find evidence of God's existence. Fa'alam annahu la ilaha illallah, as the Qur'an says, know that there is no God but Allah SWT. So the aqal comes first. The aqal in Hebrew is called the sakhal, and it is a necessary condition of naqal, and we would concur with this, right? In order for you to be tasked to believe in the revelation of God, the naqal, you have to have intellect. It's a necessary condition. It's not a sufficient condition because there are other conditions, right? But it certainly isn't necessary. So it's necessary for you to be able to understand at least, like what is the difference if we say, for example, God has neither kethra or adad, right? God has no multiplicity whatsoever with respect to kethra or adad, right? To understand what that means, you know, like this is one pen, right? But this pen is composed of multiple things. That's called kethra. So this has nothing to do with Allah SWT. You might have two pens, all right? So a plural of numbers. This has nothing to do with Allah SWT. You might have three similar pens. You might have three pens that in essence, they have pennness, right? But one's blue, one is red, and one is black. So different attributes of one essence, that has nothing to do with Allah SWT. So that's important. We'll get back to that idea as well when we talk about the rigid oneness of Allah SWT. So the rabbis say that Ammuna begins with the sikhil n. So faith begins where the intellect stops, right? But the sikhil leads you to faith. The aqal, the intellect leads you to faith. They are not in conflict, right? The sikhil is not a hindrance to God. It can be trusted to a certain degree. We use logic. At some point, logic will break down, especially when we talk about God, we talk about metaphysics. So Allah SWT, God is greater than human logic, but we still use logic. So it's really a faith based on evidence, right? It's reasonable faith, right? Like Richard Dawkins is incorrect when he says that faith is belief without evidence. That's not what it is at all, right? You believe because it is reasonable to believe. It's reasonable to believe in God. Again, that's the task of the dialectical theologian. That's the task of Maimonides in the the guide for the perplexed. Why is it reasonable to believe in God? Right? How is belief consistent with reason? This goes all the way back to the presocratics. Someone like Heraclitus, who just looked at nature and in the Quran, we are encouraged to look at nature, look at what Heraclitus called logos. We talked about this last week as well. There's an ordering principle in nature. Things are ordered. Things are predictable in nature, right? He called that logos. The Quran says, they not look at the camels and how they're created, right? Look at the creation of the camel. It's incredible, right? Look at the heavens, how we raise them high, how we made the the earth to appear like a carpet. These are great signs. Look at nature's evidence of God, the Alam, right? That's what the world is called. The Alam is related to Alama. It's a great sign about Allah SWT. So that's important. So Heraclitus, he looked around and he saw logos. Now, later on, another philosopher that's still presocratic, Anaxagoras, I believe, he said, look, if there's logos in nature, if there's order in nature, then someone must have ordered it, right? There must be some grand intellect and he called it the noose, the intellect. The noose is the one who ordered the universe. So that's what his intellect, that's what his reason compelled him to admit that there's order in the universe and someone must have put it there. There must be some intelligence that has ordered the universe, right? So the rabbis, they speak of Ibrahim alaihi salam and they call him Avraham Adinu, our father Abraham, that he looked at creation and he came to know that God exists, right? So Abraham, according to the Jewish tradition, was a type of evidentialist, right? That you look at evidence to arrive at faith in God. And there's something of this in the Quran as well, we find in Surat al-An'am, Ibrahim alaihi salam, looking at a star and Najm, haatharabbi, this is my lord, falamma afala, and then it's set. This is not my lord, right? And then he saw the moon, this is my lord, haatharabbi, and then it's set. Unless Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala guides me, I shall be of those who are lost. Then he saw the shams, the sun, right? Haathihirab, this is my lord, falamma afala, and then it's set, right? So don't get the wrong idea here, there's no question of Ibrahim alaihi salam, even entertaining the thought of worshiping these celestial bodies, right? This is his argument against his people, he's trying to demonstrate to them the futility in the worship of things that are mutable, things that change. Something is changing, it's constantly changing, even if it's predictable, if it's changing, then it's not eternal. If it's not eternal, then it cannot be worshiped in its right, it's not a ma'bud bi haqi, right? So this is, wallahu alam, this is the point, this is what we get from the argumentation. This is, this is in, Imam al-Tabari says there's a bit of sarcasm here, that this is the argument he's presenting to his people, that you're worshiping these celestial bodies, right? He's trying to understand their thought process, explain it to them and try to drive home the futility of worship, of creation, right? God cannot change because God is perfect and you can't improve on perfection, right? So the anthropic principle, right, the teleological argument, some people call this the argument for intelligent design or fine-tuning, the great watchmaker analogy, going back to William Paley. So the midrash, which is the word for tafsir in Hebrew, the midrash says that Ibrahim, alaihi salam, as a child, he figured this out by listening to his neishama. This is a term in Hebrew, neishama, which is translated as mind. It's more like fitra, right? I would say kind of a theological or moral compass, the level of the soul that sort of pulls you towards a greater understanding of the divine. And this is the purpose of the shabbat, yom shabbat, yom sapt, according to Judaism, is that when the body is not working, you can listen to your neishama, you can listen to your moral compass, if you will, and you reflect upon God and His greatness, listen to your soul without any type of worldly distractions. So this is a bit akin to the maturity position of aqal naqal, that the aqal is enough evidence for the aqal to arrive at a creator God, right? But the intellect must be aided with naqal to know the shari'a, the sacred law, although the one could argue that there are whether things are simply known through the intellect, through thing, through innate knowledge that's still given by Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, that's given by the al-wahhab, the one who bestows met a long argument about whether we have innate knowledge or whether we don't. Okay, so that's basically the first point here, the first principle, just to recap it again, God alone is a creator, it's only one creator, He is the direct doer of all things, the primary cause, the efficient cause, that's principle number one. Principle number two for Maimonides, he says, the same beginning because I believe with sound faith that the creator blessed be his name, he says, He is the one. Remember Imam At-Tahawi's first statement, in lallaha wahidun la sharikala, right? So here Maimonides says, God is yakhid which is wahid, that's the cognate, he is one, he is uniquely one and then he continues, and there is not a uniqueness or oneness like him in any way shape or form, right? Any way shape or form, so a lot of emphasis, he continues to say, and he by himself is our God who was, is and will be, or that he was our God and is our God and always will be our God, again very poetic here using the perfect tense and then immediately the active participle then the imperfect tense. So basically here then with this principle, God is unique and he's radically one and immutable, right? He doesn't change, right? Nalakai chapter 3 verse 6, I am the Lord and I change not, right? That Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is as-salam, right? And this is one of the words, this is one of the names of God according to the rabbinical tradition as well, it doesn't mean the peace, it means the perfect. That God is perfect, he doesn't change because he is perfect and you cannot improve on perfection. So the commentators also going to say here that God does not incarnate into human flesh, he doesn't become a human being, he's with compromise, his radical uniqueness and his immutability. He is also transcendent of space, time, and matter, right? So the word for uniqueness or once in Arabic, wahdaniya, the Hebrew equivalent is yakhiduth, yakhiduth wahdaniya, right? And the great statement in the Torah, the great monotheistic statement of the Torah is Deuteronomy 6-4. So remember Deuteronomy, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers Deuteronomy, the fifth book of the Chumash, the fifth book of the five books of Moses, it's called Deuteronomy, that's the English name taken from the Latin or Greek, meaning second law, 6-4 of Deuteronomy, this is like their shahada, right? So when one enters into Judaism and one can convert into Judaism, there's some sort of misunderstanding, popular misunderstanding that Judaism does not allow proselytes or converts, that's not true at all, you can convert to Judaism, and when one does convert to Judaism, one will recite the Shema, the Shema Deuteronomy 6-4, here, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, right? And devout Jews, they try to recite this as much as they can, they want it to be the last words on their tongue before they die, that God is, the Hebrew word, is spelled exactly the same as, God is one, right? And there's some interesting curious parallels to Plato in the Parmenides, for example, Plato refers to God as tahen the one, right? Of course, Platinus, who wrote Aeneides, who's the great formulator of Neoplatonism, which is a third century religious interpretation of Plato, where you have this whole system, he's a system builder, the hierarchy of being, and so on and so forth, and the Godhead consisting of the one that he said tahen, then you have the logos, then you have the suke, the spirit, right? We'll talk more about that when we get to Christianity, because Christians borrowed from this idea, but even if we go back to Plato again in the Timaeus, right, one of his dialogues, he says that God looked around the world, and he said it was good, right? And that is very curious parallel to something we find in Genesis 1, when God is creating in stages on these different, what is the plural of yom in Hebrew? I think it's yomim, I think it's a sound plural, we'd say ayyam in Arabic, when God is creating different things on these yomim, after each day he says, it is good, it is good, and this is something that Plato says in the Timaeus, there's this legend, right, this is sort of ad hoc, there's no strong evidence of this, but there's this legend, very interesting that Plato was captured at Syracuse, and he was enslaved, and he was brought to Egypt, and Egypt at the time of Plato had a pretty sizable Jewish population, I mean Alexandria in Egypt would be one of the great Jewish capitals of the world, the first place where the Torah was translated into Greek, into any other language, the first language was Greek, was in Alexandria Egypt in 250 before the common era, so there's a sizable population of Jews living in Egypt, and the legend is that Plato in Egypt read the books of Moses and he was highly influenced in his metaphysics, right, again there's no evidence of this, it's conjecture, but it's an interesting theory, of course Plato is much more metaphysical than someone like Aristotle, even though Aristotle studied under Plato, if you've ever seen that great painting of Raphael, right, it's called The Academy, where you have all these philosophers, and then right in the middle on the left side, I believe you have Plato, who's holding the timeus, right, his most metaphysical work, and he's pointing up like this, because for Plato, reality, I mean the real essences of things are found in the celestial realm, what we have here are just shadows on the wall, if you will, right, so here the famous theory of ideal forms in the celestial realm, the essences of things, right, and of course the essence or the form of the good to Agathon is God, he's the form of the good for Plato, this idea would be bothered, would be borrowed by middle platemists who are religious and they would say all of these forms God's mind, right, but Aristotle in that painting is to the right, and he's holding his ethics, and he's got his hand over the earth like this, he's not pointing up, he's pointing parallel to the earth, because Aristotle is an empiricist, and a hylomorphist, he believed that the essences or forms of things are in matter itself, form or essence in matter are not separate as Plato taught, so that was a major difference of opinion that Aristotle had with his teacher Plato, but nonetheless whatever happened here, it's an interesting curious parallel between Genesis and some of the Platonic dialogues, so Shema, right, so the Shema, right, their shahada begins with here, here, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, and to hear doesn't just mean to hear, it means to receive, to accept, really it means to obey, right, so the five senses, the five physical senses, they correlate to different spiritual senses if you will, right, there's sort of a correlation dealing with spirituality, so in scripture to give you an example, hearing something means to obey, right, they said we believe, we hear and we obey, so this is, these are synonymous, this is a synonymic juxtaposition here, right, there's synonymous, to hear something means to obey, to see something means to understand, it's an interesting aya in the Quran, when you call them to guidance, right, they don't hear, what does it mean, they don't hear, they didn't hear the words of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi sallam, of course they heard him, they don't obey him, and you see them looking at you, but they didn't see, you see them looking at you, but they don't see, right, to see something means to understand something, right, you say that in English, someone explained something to you, he said ah, I see, right, and then you have three different degrees of experience, smell, touch, and taste, smell something, right, you don't quite touch it, but you get something of it, and you touch something, that's a deeper level of experience, and then you taste it, that's the deepest, right, you take it into your body, you accept it completely, it's a vok, right, Imam Ghazali talks about this, vok, to taste one's faith, there's hadith that mentioned, the sweetness of faith, the taste, right, the sweetness of faith, so the shema, here, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, doesn't just mean hear, it means to obey, obey, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, right, so the rabbis say that Hashem, God is one, yes, it's not enough to just accept the rational proposition that God is one, just to give it some ear service, one must prove one's faith, they say, by following the commandments, the mitzvot, this is the Hebrew term that's used in the Bible, mitzvot are commandments, right, so there are three requirements for the new convert, right, and I think the misunderstanding comes from the idea that in Orthodox Judaism, as well as conservative Judaism, it is not necessary for one to convert to Judaism in order to be successful in both worlds, this is very interesting, right, so Jews in the Orthodox tradition and the conservative tradition and other reform as well, although when we get to reform Judaism, many of them don't even believe in God, so we'll just talk about the Orthodox tradition, there are seven laws that they call the Noah-Hiddic laws, the Noah-Hiddic laws, the Noah-Hide laws, they're called the the Sheva, mitzvot, the seven laws of the children of Noah, for non-Jews, so if you're born outside of the Jewish faith or your mother is not Jewish, if your mother is Jewish, then you have to follow all 613 of the commandments, there's no way out of it, you can't say I converted to Islam, therefore I'm just going to follow the seven Noah-Hiddic laws and I'll be fine, that conversion is not acceptable, if your mother is Jewish, you are Jewish, so in Judaism, the Jewish faith is passed matrilineally, the tribe comes from the father, you know, whatever your tribe, the tribe of Judah, the tribe of Levi, the tribe of Simeon, of Issachar, whoever it might be, the 12 tribes, but Jewishness is passed through the mother, but let's just say that you're an Iranian like me, my mother is not Jewish, so if I believed and I kept the seven Noah-Hiddic laws and these seven Noah-Hiddic laws, Jews would argue are, they're known, they're innate, they're axiomatic, everybody knows them, they are, God is one, or sometimes they explain it by saying that people know innately the futility of worshiping idols, the futility of worshiping material things, they know innately that's wrong, even though a lot of people do that, it goes against the fitra, and of course the fitra can be, but God is one, not to steal, not to commit adultery, right, not to murder, right, not to, while it's still alive, basically what that means is respect creation, respect animals, respect all of creation, set up courts of justice is one of them as well, see if I can, I think I'm missing one here, yeah, oh, don't blaspheme God, right, so recognize there's a single creator God, that's the first one, and then not to blaspheme God, or curse God, so if one recognizes that God is a creator and he's all-powerful and he's the creator of us, he's the creator of everything, then one knows not to be disrespectful towards God, so those are the seven, so according to Judaism, if one, if a Gentile, that's the word for non-Jew, goi in Hebrew, if a goi follows these seven Noahidic laws, they will be successful in this life and the next, and the next life is what takes precedence, they call it the olam haba, the world to come, this is the olam hazeh, this is this world, and then there's an olam haba, the coming world, so rabbis are trained, if someone comes to them, if a goi comes to them and says I want to convert to Judaism, the rabbis are trained to turn that person away three times, because for them there's no need to convert to Judaism, if you follow the seven Noahidic laws, you'll be successful, right? But they say, if you become a Jew, then the burden of spreading the light of el echad falls down on your shoulders, now you have a great responsibility to spread the light of monotheism to all the nations and you're going to fall short of that and oftentimes in Jewish history, you have what's known as collective punishment, you have the Jewish nation being punished as a whole, so the rabbis would tell the prosalite, if you want to convert, get ready for a lot of trials and tribulations and mus'ibat and so on and so forth, it's not going to be easy, or you can remain a non-Jew, follow the seven Noahidic laws and you'll go to the next life and you'll be in a good state, so what's then the incentive for becoming a Jew then? Why would anyone convert to Judaism? Well, if you convert to Judaism and you keep all 613 commandments, right, and you do them and you suffer in this world, you will have the highest of stations in the next life, that's the incentive, so there's degrees in the olam haba and the world to come, I'm out of time, we'll continue talking about these principles next time, inshallah. So tonight we're going to finish our section on the religion of Judaism, inshallah, so last time we ended by looking at the first and second principles of Jewish faith as articulated by Maimonides in his Mishnah Torah, so just to recap very quickly, he said the first one is that God alone is a creator and the direct doer of all things, he's a primary cause and efficient cause of all things, and then number two, he said that God is unique and radically one and immutable, right? So just by way of commentary, we talked about the Shema is something equivalent in some respects to our Shahada, Deuteronomy 6-4, we mentioned that last time, here Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, the great testification of the oneness of God, so the rabbis say that one should say the Shema with kavana, kavana is a very important concept in Judaism, it means something like focus or humility or devotion, kind of similar to what we would say is khushur or echlas, it's very difficult to translate, Rabbi Akiva, according to the Gamara, remember Gamara now is the rabbinical commentaries on the Mishnah, the oral law or the second half of the Talmud, Rabbi Akiva, he is famous for reciting the Shema at his death, he was actually killed by the Romans during the failed Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 of the common era, he actually endorsed this man Simon Bar Kokhba as being the true Jewish messiah, and Bar Kokhba actually was able to defeat the Roman legions at Fort Antonia in Jerusalem, was actually able to seize the temple at some point but he was killed thereafter in battle, but according to the Gamara, Akiva, his final words were the Shema, according to many eyewitnesses, many of the Jews that were going to a gas chambers during the Holocaust, they were heard reciting the Shema, again that's Deuteronomy 6.4, so the Emuna of El-Akhad, the faith or the belief in one God, this is according to Jews, the Jewish contribution to the world, that they brought the light of Tohed to all the nations, to the Goyim, so we would have issues, very problematic statement, we would say for example that, I mean the term Judaism as we said, it's anachronistic to use at the time of Abraham or Noah, there was no such thing as Judaism at the time of Ibrahim, the term Judaism, the eponym of Judaism is Judah or Yahuda, who's one of the older sons of Jacob, of course Jacob is the grandson of Ibrahim of Abraham, so in the Quran makes this clear, Makkana Ibrahimu Yahudiyan, that Abraham was not a Jew, it doesn't make sense to call him a Jew, it's anachronistic, it's kind of like saying George Washington was a fan of the Washington Nationals, there was no such thing as Major League Baseball at the time, it's anachronistic, it's a bit ridiculous to say that, right, so we would say that all of these prophets, Abraham, Noah, Adam, all of them were Muslim, they were submitters unto God, but this is Jewish theology, so the Jews believe that El Echad, monotheism, Yahydus monotheism is the Jewish contribution into the world and that the Jews were chosen to bring the light of the one God to the world, so this is the essence, this is the definition of their chosenness, right, we hear this phrase, the chosen people, why are they chosen, they're chosen to bring Tohid to the nations, to the world, right, this is the nature of their chosenness, so it's really seen now as a burden and something that is a major responsibility, that's how they actually look at it, right, the poet said how odd of God to choose the Jews, right, just two lines of poetry, quick poetry, and this is mentioned in the Quran, where Allah SWT speaks in the first person and I chose you, ya Bani Israel is the context, and I chose you above all of the nations, right, why were they chosen, what's the nature of this chosenness, they were chosen to bring the light of monotheism to the nations, but certainly monotheism existed in our conception of sacred history way before Bani Israel, way before Musa alaihi salam, even before Abraham, Ibrahim alaihi salam, so the rabbis go on to say that physicality has nothing to do with God, physicality implies limitation, God is not physical, he's not corporeal, right, so there may be one US president, but he is not unique, right, there's one Wahid US president, but he's not Ahad, he's not unique, so he's flesh and blood, like all other mammals, he is in space-time, so again getting to this differentiation between, distinction between Wahid and Ahad, and again many of our theologians say that they're absolutely synonymous, but others would say no God is, for example, Wahid and his Sifat, his attributes, but Ahad in his essence, we mentioned last time probably the Hebrew equivalent to Wahid is Yaqid, which is a term that's used by Maimonides, it's from the same exact root, and it can denote this type of eternal oneness with God, that he's one person, meaning one consciousness, that there's no multiplicity in the so-called Godhead, a simple unity, and of course by simple we don't mean unintelligent, we mean indivisible, radically one, right, whereas Ahad, which the equivalent is in Deuteronomy 6.4 in the Shema, Ahad, again the same exact word from the same root, denotes his external oneness, that his utter uniqueness, right, that nothing in creation resembles him whatsoever, right, utter dissimilarity to creation. Now the rabbis go on to say that it is permissible for Jews to pray in a mosque, as long as they face al-Quds, Jerusalem, it is not considered idolatry because Muslims worship the one true God, right, so for the most part our theology is correct, they have issues with our prophetology, right, and our Akhida with respect to sacred texts, and we'll talk about that, but our theology really, I would say that the differences are are minor, however they mentioned that the Shilush, that's the Hebrew term, Shilush, Arabic is a, what is the Arabic term, Tathlith, right, Shilush, the Trinity is considered idolatry according to almost all the consensus of at least the classical Jewish authorities, they call this Avudah Zarah, Avudah Zarah, Avudah is ibadah, Zarah means false, right, so false worship or idolatry, because the Trinity, and we'll talk about the Trinity next week, inshallah, and the week after that, the Trinity involves what's known as hypostatic multiplicity, this idea that there are multiple persons of God, that there are three separate indistinct persons of God, and that all three are co-eternal and co-substantial, co-equal, this is highly problematic for Maimonides, so he doesn't consider this to be correct theology by any means, so all of the major rabbis, they say that the leaf in the Tathlith or the Shilush is Avudah Zarah, is shirk, the rabbis are famous for saying we would rather live under Ishmael, meaning the Arabs or Muslims, rather than under Edom or Rome or the Christians, if you look throughout Jewish history, the Jews really flourished under Muslim caliphates, especially when we look at Muslim Spain, Muslim North Africa, Jewish systematic theology was born in Muslim Spain, Maimonides, Joseph Albo, Judah Hallavi, Saadia Gayon, these are the great Jewish thinkers and philosophers, systematic theologians, most of them actually wrote in Arabic, that was their primary language, Maimonides wrote the guide for the Proplex, the Dalalatul Ha'ireen, he wrote it actually in Arabic, it was translated later into Hebrew, but if you look at Jewish communities living in Christendom or Christian Europe, it was very precarious and often times there were pogroms set against them, that sort of state-sponsored terrorism or persecution, they were exiled several times, twice from England, twice from France, a couple times they think also from Austria, the plague was blamed on them because Jewish communities that were actually living in their own cloistered communities at the time, they did not mix with the Goyim until much, much later, we're talking maybe 17th or 18th centuries, 17th or 18th century when they actually started to intermix and live among the Gentiles, but in the Middle Ages you have the Christians dying, something like 40% of Christendom was decimated by the black plague, the Bubonic plague, but the Jewish community is relatively unaffected, so of course they were scapegoated, this is because of you, you're killers of Christ, this type of thing, you've cursed us, and the reason why the Jews weren't dying from the plague is because there's a Seder, there's a chapter in the Mishnah which is called Tahrut, which is the Babu Tahrah, so the Jews had these ideas of cleanliness, of ghusl, of wudu, of najasa, and that's where the disease, from fleas and from rats and things like that, so there's that famous statement, we'd rather live under Ishmael, Ismael alaihi salam, Arabs are usually the Muslims are referred to in rabbinical literature as Ishmaelites, Imonides refers to the prophet as that Ishmaelite for example in the Mishnah Torah. The rabbis say something interesting, they say Christianity is like a pig, the pig appears to be kosher, so what is kosher according to, we say kosher, cash root, what is halal for a Jew to eat, at least for the Orthodox and conservative, animals that have a cloven hoof and chew the cud, right, so like an animal that can eat food, it's called a ruminant, it can bring it back up and chew it later, like a cow or a goat, a sheep can do that, a giraffe can do that, giraffe is actually kosher, but camels don't, camel is not kosher, so they're saying Christianity is like a pig, the pig has a split hoof but it does not chew the cud, so in other words we're saying Christianity looks great, it sounds great on the outside, it looks good on the outside but it's a deceptive, Christianity, if you talk to Christians there's a strong emphasis on relationship and love of which is great, we believe in those things as well, but when the sharia is not emphasized and there's nothing to ground you, then you start saying deviant things, so there's that famous statement of Imam Malik ibn Anas, the Imam of Medina who said that whoever studies tasawuf, when you use that term, we say Sufism, I don't necessarily like that, tasawuf al ihsan, ilmul suluk, ilmul tazkiyah, it has different asma according to the Mabadi, for the science of tasawuf, he said whoever studies tasawuf but did not engage in fiqh in sharia, faqad taszendaka, that he will become a zindiq, that he will become a heretic, that's what the word zindiq means, or an unbeliever, so it's a very dangerous state, but whoever studies fiqh, sharia, but did not study tasawuf, faqad tasfasaka, will become a fasik, which is not as bad as a zindiq, it's better to err on the side of the sharia, he says whoever, wa man jam'a bina huma, faqad tahaqaqa, whoever joins the two will actualize the truth, so the rabbis also mentioned, for example, you shouldn't walk next to a church, I mean it's not an official mitzvah, the 613 mitzvot are in the Torah, in the Talmud, really in the Torah, they're all there according to Maimonides, his enumeration of the 613 commandments, but this is a strong recommendation given by the rabbis that if you're walking down the street and you see a church, you should cross the street because it's good to keep a safe distance from all idolatry, so it's actually prohibited for a Jew to walk into a church, and the Orthodox would even say it's prohibited to go for an Orthodox rabbi or an Orthodox Jew to go into a Reformed synagogue, because there isn't a total commitment to all of the mitzvot in the Reformed synagogue, Reformed temple. Questions about the kippah, the kippah is the small skull cap that Jewish men tend to wear, and this is a mitzvah, it is a commandment, it's called the kippah in Hebrew, which means to cover, it's called a Yarmulka in Yiddish, which is a sort of kind of a dead language, but it was spoken by Jews in Eastern Europe in the 2nd century. The purpose of it is to remind the Jewish man that there's something above him at all times, and Jewish women are also supposed to wear a something to cover their head, something like a hejab, sometimes, I mean if you go to an Orthodox community on the East Coast, the cultural practice is that girls would get married and then they would shave their heads and wear a wig, so it's kind of a, so the point is not to show your real hair. Okay, so that's the second principle then, God is unique and radically one and immutable. Before we move on, a couple more things I want to say about that, that's more focused on the theology rather than the practice. We mentioned last week that Maimonides was a negative theologian, he was a negative theologian, and many of the great systematic theologians of Judaism, Joseph Albow and others, they tended to be negative theologians, apophatic theologians. So they would engage the theological approach of negation, and this is called the lahut salbi in Arabic, and it's generally considered to be a safer way to theologize. What does it mean to theologize? Theos means God, Lagos means many things, word or reason, so to speak reasonably, so to speak about God. It's better to talk about, in other words, it's better to talk about who or what God is not rather than who or what God is. So even Hinduism has a theological approach that is akin to negative theology, it's called nirguna Brahmanism, and we'll talk about that, inshallah when we get to Hinduism. Adi Shankara calls it neti neti theology, he's sort of a champion of what's called transpersonalism, or nirguna Brahmanism, which means not this, not this, nothing in, nothing that you see in the so-called creation is, and I said so-called creation, we'll talk about what that means in Judaism, sorry, in Hinduism, because everything is ultimately an illusion in Hinduism, nothing is actually God that you see. He is utterly transcendent. So why theologize like this, again, to uphold God's radical uniqueness, his yakhiduth, his wahdaniyah, because God's nature is wholly other. So if you look at the first two commandments, so we talk about the 10 commandments, famous movie made in the 19, I guess it was in the late 50s, Charlton Heston as Moses, the 10 commandments, I think they made another, a couple more Moses movies after that, they weren't very good, and that movie's not very good, it's not very accurate according to the Bible anyway, but everyone has heard of the 10 commandments, but that's only 10 of them, those are the sort of the 10 main commandments, but as we said, Jews believe that there are 613 commandments, but let's look at the first two commandments, so we'll find this in the book of Exodus chapter 20, right at the beginning of chapter 20, remember Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, the five books, the Pentateuch, the Chumash, right, the five scrolls of Moses, so this is the second book, Moses is on the mountain, and God says to him that I am the Lord, thy God, who brought you out of the house of bondage out of Egypt, then he says, you shall not have any other gods before me, so this is the first commandment, that the God that brought the Israelites out of Egypt, he's the only God, right, and when it says, you shall have no other gods, that doesn't mean that there are other gods, right, what that means is that you shall have no other so-called gods, you shall not worship anything else other than me, because the God that is bringing you out of Egypt is the only true God, right, we find that term alihah in the Quran also, like the people of Ibrahim alaihi salam, they were devoted to their alihah, they're gods, those aren't really gods, they're so called gods, right, so that's the first commandment, and then he says, so now we're getting into the second commandment, it's kind of a long one, he says, God again, speaking directly to Moses and by extension, so this is the capital Qitab, so speaking second person, masculine, singular to Moses, but as we, as Imam Ash-Shafiqi says about the Quran, whenever Allah speaks to the Prophet, salallahu alayhi salam, in the Quran directly, it is also by extension to the ummah unless it's very obvious that it's only speaking to him, right, so in this case the rabbis would say to Moses and by extension the Am Israel or the Bani Israel, right, the children of Israel, so he says, you shall not make unto yourself the likeness of any image which is in the heavens above you, or the likeness or the image of anything which is in the earth or on the earth below you the likeness or the image of anything that is in the water beneath the earth, right, that covers everything, that covers the universe, everything above the earth, on or in the earth and below the earth, right, nothing like God, those are the first two commandments of Exodus, right, we talked about Numbers 2319, we talked about that, God is not a man that he should lie, and we mentioned that Rabbi Abahu of Caesarea who died in 320 of the common era, who was actually a brilliant orator and a defender of Jewish faith in the face of the Christians, he was a sort of anti-Christian polemicist or apologist, Jewish apologist, he said the meaning of that is that whoever claims to be God is a liar, that's that's what the Hebrew actually means, according to Rabbi Abahu of Caesarea, right, we talked about Hosea 119, I am God and not a man, mutually exclusive God and man, right, Isaiah 558 is a very famous verse of transcendence, all of Deutero Isaiah, so according to historians of the Old Testament, the Book of Isaiah actually has three authors, it was authored at three different times, so you have Proto-Isaiah from chapter one to chapter 39 and then chapters 40 to 66 is called Deutero Isaiah, and it's really in Deutero Isaiah where you get a strong teaching of God's transcendence, and then after that you have Trito-Isaiah, third Isaiah until the end of the book, but in Deutero Isaiah, basically if you believe that God exists literally within the four elements, then you're a mushrik, then you're an idolater, God is transcendent, so 558 of Isaiah is right there, my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways, right, or Isaiah 40, chapter 20, sorry, chapter 40 verse 25, to whom will you liken me, right, it's a rhetorical question, nothing is like God, in fact the name Michael in Arabic, sorry the name Michael in Hebrew, it's Hebrew in origin, it's also, you know, Mikael or Mikael, it's in the Quran, the name of one of the archangels, but its origin is Hebrew, Mikael, me, it means man, who in Arabic, and then Ka is the Ka'f, Ka'f tashbih, like we say, Lisa Ka, Mithlihi Shaitwan, right, so man Ka'ael, Allah, or Ilah, who is like God, it's a rhetorical question, it doesn't mean a man whose name is Michael is like God, doesn't mean that, his name is a rhetorical question, who is like God, nobody is the answer, it's already understood that you know the answer, that's the point of our Isthif Hamtaqiri, you already know the answer to the question, it's really just a reminder, right, okay, so negative theology, so according to Maimonides, right, when referring to God's nature or essence, right, so according to Maimonides, the name of God's essence is the tetragrammaton, the four letter word, or the four letters that you find all throughout the Hebrew Bible, right, it's the sort of initials of God's name, right, yod hay vav hay, yod hay vav hay, right, so you'll see that in the Hebrew you'll see it, usually in English it's just translated as Lord with a capital L, or Lord all letters in caps, but that's actually the four letter name of God, or the initials of God, now how do you articulate yod hay vav hay, the articulation is not known for sure, once a year on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, the high priest of the temple, who was called the haqquhen al-Qadol, he would go into the Qadosh al-Tashim, the holy of holies, inside the temple, right, the bait, what's called the bait mikdash, bait ul-maqdis in Jerusalem, he would go into the innermost chamber on Yom Kippur, and he would pronounce the holy name of God, the actual ismul avam of God, right, the initials of which are yod hay vav hay, Y-H-W-H, so the high priest knew the name, and he would make a toba on behalf of all of Israel by calling on God's most sacred name, tshuvah or toba, repentance, and then he would pass knowledge of the name to his successor, and he would pass it to his successor, and so on and so forth, but since the temple is destroyed in 70 by the Romans, general Titus, the priesthood is gone, no more sacrifices, right, the name has become lost to my monities, the yod hay vav hay, the tetragrammaton, the shem hamaforosh, as it's called in Hebrew, this is the name of God's essence, all right, and generally the Orthodox agree with him, the kabbalah, a text of Jewish mysticism, it disagrees with this and says that the actual name of God's essence is e'en-sulf, which means the one who was without limit, the limitless, that's the name of God's essence. Other rabbis, they use the name Mahut, Mahut, so right in the middle of Mahut, you have the the letters in Hebrew, hay and vav, or ha and waw in Arabic, also if you look at that tetragrammaton again, yod hay vav hay, right in the middle again, you have the hua, right, so these are the prominent letters of the sacred name of God, and oftentimes in the Hebrew Bible, the tetragrammaton is shortened by just hu, right, for example the name Elijah, Elijah in Hebrew is Eliyahu, Eli means my God, Yahu is Yahu, right, which is again a shortened way of articulating the yod hay vav hay, but how to actually articulate all four letters is not decisively known, of course, and it's actually impermissible and a mortal sin for Jews to try to articulate that tetragrammaton. The Christians, of course, they don't have these religious scruples, so you'll find, for example, Jehovah witnesses, their claim to fame is that the hayad hay vav hay is pronounced Jehovah, right, so they'll come to your door and they say, do you know the name of God, and you know, they come to a Muslim house and the Muslims say Allah, and they say, no, that's not a name, that's a title, of course we say no, it's actually a name and there's a debate, but they're trained that no, Allah is a title, it's from the God, that's a minority opinion, anyhow, so we can ask them, how do you get Jehovah, and they say, well, from the tetragrammaton, so we ask them then, okay, those are four consonants, how do you know how to vowel it, and 100% of the time, 100% of the time, the Jehovah's witness will have no answer for you, and then you say, okay, fine, that's how you vowel it, so Jehovah, so Jehovah with a J, and they say, yes, but this is a Yod in Hebrew, how do you go from a Yod to a J, and again, 90% of the time, they won't have an answer for you, so it's conjecture, they really don't know, others would say Yahweh, you hear that a lot too, Yahweh, it just seems to roll off the tongue, so that might be what it is, my opinion is it's probably Yahweh, is a present tense verb in perfect tense, which means he is, right, so verb meaning he is and continues to be, and then the shortened form of it, or Hua is the third person masculine pronoun, which again means he is, but it's a pronoun this time, it's not an actual verb, right, Ibn Arabi, he says Ha-Hut as a possible name of the essence of God, Ha-Hut, so again that Hua is in the middle, Imam Al-Razi suggests that Hua is Al-Ismul-Ahmam, Allahu la ilaha illa Hua, there's no God but Hua, say Hua is Allah, that's the Ismul-Ahmam, Allahu Alam, there's a difference of opinion, nonetheless according to Maimonides, when referring to God's essence or nature, there are three main attributes, existing theologians would agree with that, the Sifatunafsia, sort of the core attribute of God is existence, and it's not an accident, the attributes and accidents are different, God doesn't have accidents, it's an essence and attributes, right, the attributes are necessary, accidents are not necessary, so it was an accident that I was born Iranian and have a white beard now, that's an accident, if I was not born Iranian and my beard was black, I would still be me, it's not essential to my nature, that's an accident, but the fact that I have an intellect, that is an attribute of me, if I did not have intellect then I wouldn't be classified as the rational animal, right, as the human being, the homo sapiens, the homo sapiens means the rational human being, right, so intellect is an attribute of the human being, whereas skin color, eye color, so on and so forth, all of these things are accidents, they're only possible, they're not necessary, it could have been different, if I had different color eyes, if I had no eyes I would still be a human being, I was blind, I'd still be a human being, okay, so existence, unity and eternity, three main attributes according to my monities, and even these, he says, we should understand them negatively, so it's better to say God is not non-existent, it's better to put things negatively, it's better to say that with God there is no plurality or multiplicity associated with him whatsoever, we talked about kathara and adad and so on and so forth, it's better to say that God is not bound by time, so even these core attributes as articulated by my monities are better to put them negatively, however he says, we may speak of God positively, so in other words, kathaphatically, so we have apophatic negatively, kathaphatic positively for the note takers, you can make kathaphatic expressions, positive expressions of God, but only in reference to a divine action in scripture, so for my monities one cannot speak positively about God in any way, shape, or form unless one relates it to an action that was done in scripture, I'll give you an example, so if you say for example God is good in any language, so in Hebrew, you would say adonai tov or tov elohim, so in English God is good, God there is the subject, the muptada is, it's called the copulative verb, the linking verb, and then good is the predicate or the hubba, this is a kathaphatic expression, my monities would say that expression is shirk, it is idolatry to make that statement, God is good period, idolatry because we did not relate it to an action, and also you can say moshay tov in Hebrew, Moses is good, so good, the predicate good, the word good, the noun good can be predicated of many things, so how can you possibly use the same predicate for God and Moses, so for my monities that's a big problem to do, from a akita standpoint, you're qualifying God with the same noun that you're qualifying Moses, so you're saying using the same noun, so that's problematic, so for my monities you would have to say something like God is good or he is all good because he led the Jews out of Egypt and defeated the Pharaoh or something like that, so you can make a kathaphatic expression, you can make a positive statement about God as long as you use it in sort of the superlative and then relate it to something that God actually did in Scripture, so the divine names for my monities are simply and strictly descriptions of God's actions, that's all they are, the divine names of God in the Tanakh in the Hebrew Bible are simply and strictly descriptions of God's actions, so referring to God as king like melech, right, while not referencing an action in Scripture is shirk, is idolatry according to my monities because king can be predicated of many different human beings, right, David HaMelech, King David, Shlomo HaMelech, King Solomon, right, so it's God's action that makes him unique, not his names, no one can do God's actions, Solomon and David, not even Moses, can bring the, has the power intrinsically to bring anyone out of Egypt and defeat the Pharaoh, Moses didn't do that, Moses was a vehicle through which God actually did it, remember God is a doer of all actions, he's al-fa'il, free agent as my monities articulated in this first principle, okay, my monity says something interesting, he says, if you praise a king who possesses millions of gold pieces for possessing millions of silver pieces, then you're actually disparaging and insulting the king, even though your intention is to praise the king, look at this king, he has so many millions of silver pieces, while he actually has gold pieces, your intention is to praise him but you're actually insulting and disparaging him, Aquinas said, even the praise of God is extremely remote from his reality and praising God actually requires a repentance, the praise of God, forget about the cursing of God, disbelief in God, so on and so forth, the praising of God because you're using language and language is created, God is uncreated, right, so positive attributes may not be assigned to God unless these refer to God's actions and scripture, God is powerful because he did this, he saved us from the pharaoh, right, so all divine names are derived from God's actions and scripture according to my monities, in other words, Jews cannot say that these names of God, and this is my monity's opinion, these names of God had no reality until after the creation of the world, according to my monities, God is king like Melech and Shepard, Doro'i and Selah, God is the rock, you know, the exception to that is the tetragrammaton, the Yod-Hei-Wafe, because my monities that that actually refers to God's essence and God's essence was existent, it's a necessary existence obviously before creation, but if you say before creation that God was Melech Ha'olam, he's the king of Rabbu al-Alamin, Meleku al-Alamin for example, then that is too speculative for my monities, it's, you know, it's true in principle but my monities just does not want to go there, it's too conjectural because these names are describing God's actions, that's what they're doing, so we cannot talk about God's essence by using these names before he actually did the action, of course, Imam At-Tahawi says something very interesting in his creed, he says that God can be his mousufun bi jami'i sifatihi min azaliya, that God, Allah SWT, is, can be described by all of his attributes from pre-eternality because the capacity to create is always with God, is always with Allah, right? So, so he says istahaqa ismal khalaq qabla l-khalq, he merits, he deserves the name, the creator, even before creation, he merits the name Rab, even before Marbu, he merits the name Lord, even before anything to Lord over any creation he means because the divine omnipotence, the potential, the full potential and capacity is there to create, so I'm sitting right now, this wa lillahi al-mathil al-a'la, this is just an example to sort of maybe bring our understandings, I'm sitting right now, but you can still describe me as al-qa'im, the standard, because I have an ability to stand, now that ability could be taken away from me, right? Because Allah SWT, God is in control of all things, he can incapacitate me, la qadr Allah, but the fact that I'm sitting now doesn't mean that I can't stand, that you can't describe me as a standard, you can describe me as a standard because I have that ability, so with God, just because he did not create, he merits the name khalaq and nothing can incapacitate him, he makes a decision out of his absolute volition within his nature to create, nothing can stop his irada, right? He is intrinsically independent, right? So Maimonides would disagree with that and say that's just too speculative, don't talk about God's essence before creation, that's conjecture, don't go there, the names of God are describing his actions and scriptures, full stop. Okay, now returning now, so that was, now we can go to the third principle, where he begins by saying the same way, وَاَنِيْ مَعَمِيمْ بِأُمُنَا شَلَيْمَا شَيْحَبْ وُرَيْ يِثْبَرَخْشْمَا I believe with complete faith that to create or bless it be his name, he says, اِنُهُغُفْ that he's not a body, a jisum. وَاَيْنِلُهُسُمْ دِمْيَانْ كَلَلْ And there is, there is not for him any likeness whatsoever, right? He's not a body, he's not matter, like a jisum murakka, a compounded body, he's not composed of anything, there's nothing like him whatsoever, الَيْسَ كَمِثْلِهِ شَيْوَنْ And what's interesting is that this statement was actually a bit controversial in 12th century Judaism, because many rabbis tended to be literalists, they were ذَهِرِيَّ when it came to the Tanakh, right? They were مُجَّسِّمة, they were anthropomorphists, so they actually denied that the Bible has, the Hebrew Bible had a مجَّاسِّ meaning, it didn't have a figurative meaning, everything was حقِقِ, everything was literal, it's very problematic. Moses Ben-Taku, for example, was one of the famous anthropomorphists, rabbis, he died in 1290, a few decades after the death of Maimonides, where he said the Tanakh is حقِقِ, it's absolutely literal, it's like in Psalm 18 it says God has ears, he says yeah, he has ears, and you know, they're physical ears, and he has, you know, it says smoke exuded from the nostrils of God in the Psalms, right? He says yeah, that's exactly literally what happened, how does Maimonides deal with passages like this? Well, the Tanakh has what we would call مُحْكَمَات and مُتْشَابِهَات, and these terms are Quranic, right? مُحْكَمَات or verses, so آيات مُحْكَمَات وَأُخَرُمَتَشَابِهَات, right? So an آية مُتْشَابِهَ is a verse in the Quran that is on the face very clearly understood, kind of one-dimensional, even in translation very clearly understood. مُحْكَمَات and you know the name suggests that there's there's a verse of legal import, right, or what we would say in Jews would say in Judaism, it's halakik, it relates to the halak'a, right? There's a juristic aspect to that. And then you have مُتْشَابِهَات, which are obscure verses or polyvalent verses that are not easily grasped, they require some study, they require commentary, they may be theological, they may be anthropomorphic, right? يَدُوا اللَّهِ فَوْقَ اَيْدِهِ The yad of God is above their hands and yad is usually translated as hand, so doesn't mean God has a hand, God's hand is above their hand, what does that mean? God has a physical hand, right? No, it doesn't mean that. لَيْسَكَ مِتْفَ لِهِ شَيْوَنَ. So the best example, the quintessential example of an آية مُتْشَابِهَ, right, of a which is the word for آية in Hebrew, that is anthropomorphic in the Torah is Exodus 33-23, right? The quintessential anthropomorphic verse. This is when Moses asks to see God's face, he says, let me see your panim, your face, and God says, you'll see my ahor, you'll see my back. So what does this mean? So Maimonides engages in T'awil, T'awil, esoteric exegesis of the Torah as Muthushabi'at. In other words, he interprets these verses in light of God's transcendence, right? And this is the whole project of the guide of his magnum opus, دَلَالَتُ الْحَائِرِينَ, right, the مُرَيْنَ وُخِينَ, the guide for the perplexed. What is he trying to do? He's trying to bring together Naqal and Aqal, Revelation and reason, right? And preserve T'anzi, preserve transcendence of God. So this is what he says. Now, before we get to Maimonides, there was another theologian that preceded Maimonides. He died in the 10th century. His name was Sa'adiah Gion. He was probably the very first Jewish systematic theologian, very, very famous. Wrote in Arabic also. His book is called Beliefs and Opinions. كتاب الأمانات والإعتقادات I believe is the actual title. And then it was later translated as Safer Amunat or something like that. I don't remember exactly the Hebrew title. But Sa'adiah Gion, he lived in Iraq. He also did an incredible translation of the entire Hebrew Bible into Arabic. Hebrew and Arabic are very close. It is by far the best translation of the Hebrew ever done. So how does Sa'adiah Gion, how does he deal with this? You won't see my face, you'll see my back. So he says, seeing the back of God means seeing, it means seeing a created light, right? Which he calls the sheikhina, which is related to the Arabic sakina. The sheikhina represents God's presence on earth. It's a symbol of God's presence. It doesn't mean it's not God's presence literally. It symbolizes God's presence or toe field, right? This created light that Moses would see when he would go into the Mishkan, the Tabernacle of Meeting, the sort of portable temple, the prefigurement of the actual temple in Jerusalem, right? A temple that Moses would go into in the Sinai Peninsula and he would speak with God. Sa'adiah says, when God wanted to speak to Moses, he would create a light in front of Moses, telling Moses, getting his attention essentially, right? And this light is called the sheikhina. And this light was so brilliant that Moses could not look at it. He can only look at it when the light was sort of leaving and he would sort of see the tail end of it. And Sa'adiah says, that sort of tail end of the light, that's the ahur adonai, that's the back of God. So he takes the passage as total majads. It's a figurative expression. Seeing the back of God for Moses means that he saw a created light that God would manifest in the Tabernacle of Meeting. And after some point, it actually says in Exodus that Moses had to wear a veil over his face because the light was beginning to shine off his own face and it was a blinding light. So he would wear a veil, right? So the sheikhina act is an intermediary between God and human beings during prophetic encounters. Now Maimonides, he agrees with Sa'adiah with respect to the sheikhina, but he adds an interesting esoteric dimension. By the way, the rabbis quote from the Talmud that says, the sages, meaning the rabbinical sages, they teach that the Torah speaks in the language of man, right? So this is why there's mutashabi hat in the Hebrew Bible. This is why there's anthropomorphic verses in the Bible, right? Because it's trying to communicate something true that you can understand, but it's not literally true. It's rhetoric, it's very effective form of rhetoric, right? And God has to, in a sense, condescend, as it were, to speak to us. As one of my teachers said, like a mother has to sort of condescend to speak to her young child. If a mother wants a toddler to, you know, finish his meal, you know, you can't sit down and reason with a toddler, you have to eat this because it's nutritious, and so on and so forth. You can't do that. You have to sort of make a game out of it, or you have to sort of use different intonations and things like that. So in order for us to understand, right, theology and understand the will of God, God has to use expressions that we can relate to. And that's the purpose of these anthropomorphic verses, but they have to be interpreted in the light of transcendence. I'll be done in five minutes, inshallah. So then Maimonidesa, he adds an interesting esoteric dimension. So he says, yes, the back of the sheikhina, that's true. But what is the panay adonai? What is the face of wajhullah? What is the face of God? Maimonides says the face of God refers to an intense, clear knowledge or a complete apprehension or comprehension of God. So a comprehension of God is impossible for any human being. No one really comprehends, has idrak of Allah, of Allah, other than God himself. So it's impossible. Moses, can I comprehend you as you comprehend yourself? And of course, from an Islamic standpoint, that's a problematic request, according to many of the theologians. The prophet would not ask for something that's impossible, inconceivable, considered bad adab. But this is the opinion of Maimonides, whereas the back of God, the ahor adonai, is a reference to the knowledge of God which man can know. The man's capacity is to only know the quote back of God, to have ma'rifah of God. Right? So in other words, Moses seeing the back of God means that Moses had the most ma'rifah of Allah, the most gnosis, the most intimate knowledge of God that is possible for a human being to have. So none of the rules of physics apply to God, certainly not Newtonian physics. He transcends physicality completely, getting into a little bit of the halakah, Jewish law, no iconography of God, or even human beings, or even celestial bodies are allowed in Orthodox halakah, or even like painting pictures of planets, or human beings. Animals are okay, it seems, as long as there's something sort of left off, like an eye is left off, or there's some deformity given. Most rabbis are against tasweer, photography, even with the dolls, you know, to cut the nose off or something, or missing finger, no complete image is allowed. That's the halakah, the Hashem, the God, right? God is not the four elements, fire, water, earth, and wind. So the rabbis say, you know, it says in the Psalms, God is outstretched to arm, right? Virah is you, like arm, Virah, and the Hebrew, Zorah. And the meaning of this, it means that he's the savior, not that he's a physical arm, right? He lends a hand as it were, right? So the Torah speaks to us in the language of human beings. I think that's a good place to stop. So I'm almost, so yeah, I mean, we're done with Judaism, we have to move on. There's a lot more to say, obviously. That's only the third out of 13 principles. Maybe we can do a second part of this course later, but we are going to move. I gave you the basics of Jewish theology. So we're going to move next week, inshallah, to Christianity. So I look at the New Testament. What is the New Testament? I look at Issa alaihi salam from a Christian perspective. And I look at the Trinity. What is the Trinity? What is it not? It's important for us to understand what is the Trinity? What do Christians actually believe? At least what do their books? How do their classical, traditional books find the Trinity? It's very important for us to understand that. So we'll see you next week, inshallah. As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuhu. This is Thursday evening, August 18th. We are live from MCC for our class, the basics of the world, religions. Inshallah tonight we're going to start a two-part program or session on Christianity. So we finished Judaism last week, inshallah. So we're going to start Christianity. And we're going to begin tonight by talking about the New Testament. That is to say the Christian Scriptures. And then next week, next Tuesday, inshallah, we're going to look at the Nicene Creed, Orthodox Christian Creed, Trinitarian Creed, as well as the Trinity. So that's the plan for Christianity. And again, we are live. I'm looking at the chat box here. So if there are any questions, I forgot to mention this in weeks past, unfortunately. But if there are people that want to ask questions, you can go ahead and type them into the chat box. And I'll answer them. If they're appropriate, I'll answer them on the air, inshallah. Okay, so last week we said that the primary text of Judaism is the Old Testament. Of course, again, Old Testament, it's Christian terminology. It's called the Tanakh in Hebrew, which of course, again, stands for Torah Nebim Ketobim. The Torah, the Pentateuch, the first five books, the prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the writings like Psalms and Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, First and Second Kings, so on and so forth. Okay, with the New Testament, we have something interesting. So the Christians now, they believe in the Old Testament, right? They believe it to be the Word of God, however they have their own set of primary scriptures. And these scriptures are not affirmed by the Jews. So it doesn't look like the video was working here. Inshallah, it'll come back. So I can, if people have questions, we can deal with that, inshallah. So New Testament, right? It's called the Hei, Kei Nai, Diyathei, literally the New Testament. Now the phrase New Testament is actually in the Old Testament. It's in Jeremiah 31, 31, where there's this promise of God that I'm going to establish what's called a Berit Chadasha in Hebrew, which literally means New Testament. Of course, the Jews take that to mean something completely different than the Christians. In Jewish circles, Jeremiah is prophesizing that towards the end of time, during the reign of the Messiah, the Messiah will implement the Jewish law. And that's going to be new for most people because most people are not Jews. And it's going to also be sort of a renewal for Jews that weren't practicing the law. But nonetheless, this is the name of the Christian scriptures, the New Testament. So what is the essence of the Old Testament? The Old Berit, the word Berit means Testament. It basically is the following. It is if you adhere to the law of Moses, if you follow the law of Moses, then you will gain salvation. Right? That's basically the essence of the law, the essence of the law in a nutshell. Let me just quickly try something here, so I can try this again. I think we're okay now. Yes. So let me just reiterate. It's Tuesday, August 18th, Tuesday evening. We are live for people out there that want to ask me a question. Feel free to type that into the chat box, inshallah. Okay, so the essence of the Old Testament is, or the mosaic covenant, which is preferred language according to Jews, is that if you follow the law of God, you follow the mitzvot, and you will be saved, you will gain salvation. And this is interesting because this is the answer of Jesus' peace be upon him, at least according to the New Testament Gospels. We'll talk more about these, what are these Gospels? There are four Gospels in the Christian New Testament. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. You have this pericope or this story in three Gospels, where a Jewish scribe comes to Jesus, and he says to him, Good Master, what must I do to gain eternal life? And then Jesus says to him, Why are you calling me good? There's no one good but one, and that is God. And then he continues, Follow the commandments, and you shall enter the life. There's variations. I mean, that's the reading in Mark. That's how Mark has it. There's slight variations in Matthew and Luke. That's Mark 10, 18. And you have it in Luke 18, 18, and Mark, Matthew 19, 17. So here, Jesus peace be upon him, according to these Christian texts, is affirming the old berit, the mosaic covenant. But then by Gospels end, later on in the Gospel, Mark 14, Matthew 26, and Luke 22, we are told that Jesus celebrates the Passover, the Last Supper with his disciples, and he takes the bread, and he gives it to them and says, This is the bread and the wine. This is my body. This is my blood of the new covenant, of the new testament. So now he's establishing a new covenant, a new agreement. So what that means is now, is that the old covenant that God made with the Israelites is Sinai. This covenant has been revoked. It is abrogated. And now one has to simply believe in Jesus as a Lord, as Paul says, and that God raised him from the dead, and you shall be saved. So that's the essence. Paul states this, I believe in 1 Corinthians. That's the essence of this new covenant then. Okay, so let's take a closer look then at the New Testament. So there are 39 books in the Old Testament. There are 27 books in the New Testament. It's called a Canon of 27 books. There are four major types of books in the New Testament. The first major type of book is called a Gospel. So a Gospel is basically a narrative about Jesus that really focuses on the passion. The last week of Jesus's life, according to these texts. So they're basically four extended passion narratives. The real focus is on the suffering and death resurrection of Jesus. That's really where the focus is. So you have a Gospel. One of the types of books of the New Testament. There are four of them, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. We'll talk more about them, inshallah. Then you have a book of history. One book of history in the New Testament is the fifth book of the New Testament. It's called the book of Acts, ACTS, also called Acts of the Apostles in the Catholic version, English versions. So basically this is early ecclesiastical history, early church history. There are three main characters, really two main characters. There's Peter and there's Paul, but there's also James, right? Acts chapter 15. You have the famous Jerusalem Council. This is really this sort of seminal event in the early Christian movement and the sort of prototype of the later church councils, ecumenical church councils that are going to follow in the fourth century all the way into the 21st century or 20th century. We haven't had one. There hasn't been an ecumenical church council in the 21st century. The last one was in the 1960s called Vatican II. So the sort of prototype of that, the archetype was the Jerusalem Council in Acts chapter 15. And the issue of that time was how much of the mosaic law is required for these Gentile proselytes, for these Greeks. The Greeks are becoming Christian. How much of the law of Moses should we impose upon them? That's why they held the council basically. So you have early church history, the book of Acts. And then you have something called the epistles, which simply means letters. And there are 21 of them. So four gospels. There's one book of history called the book of Acts. Then you have 21 epistles or letters. And these are written by various apostles, various apostolic authorities, various disciples of Jesus, at least according to Christian tradition. So these epistles, they deal with a doctrine. They deal with council instructions. They deal with just different issues that arise in various congregations. According to historians, seven of these 21 epistles were genuinely written by Paul, the apostle Paul. We'll talk about him, inshallah. So scholars agree almost by consensus that seven of them are written by Paul. Seven of them, another seven of them are disputed, but claimed to have been written by Paul. In other words, someone pretending to be Paul. So scholars have deemed these to be pseudo-Pauline, which is sort of a nice way of saying they're forgeries. Someone is writing these letters pretending to be Paul, and they're not Paul. They're forging these letters pretending to be Paul. And then you have seven, what are known as Catholic epistles, not Catholic with a capital C, not Roman Catholic, but Catholic with a lower case C, which simply means universal epistles. And these are written by various apostles as well, like James and Peter and John and Jude. Although, again, the vast majority of historians do not believe that these men actually wrote these books, that bear their names. These are also forgeries. When it comes to the Gospels, they're called Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But in reality, they are anonymous. None of the authors identify themselves. Church tradition assigns them or attributes these books to two disciples of Jesus, Matthew, the tax collector, who's also called Levi, and John, Yohanan, the son of Zebedee, who's one of the disciples of Jesus, the beloved disciple, according to the Gospel of John, although it's disputed whether John, the son of Zebedee, is the beloved disciple. That's the dominant opinion. Historians do not believe that these two men actually wrote these Gospels. And then you have the Gospel of Mark. Mark was, according to church tradition, he was a student of Peter. So he's like a tabiri. And then you have the Gospel of Luke, who is a friend of Paul, or Paul's traveling companion. So this is very interesting. We notice that you have the Gospel of Mark, which is accepted by the church is totally canonical and written around, according to the vast majority of historians, probably around 70 of the common era or so. Most historians put the even many confessional Christian scholars. They place the date of Mark's Gospel around 70, around the time of the destruction of the temple. But there's also something called the Gospel of Peter. The Gospel of Peter is not accepted as canon. And the reason is, well, it's just too late. That's one sort of way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that it contains material that is offensive to the early Christian movement. So in the Gospel of Peter, it states that Jesus, when they were crucifying him, he was silent as if he felt no pain. So that doesn't work with the early church, because for the early church, at least the early Pauline church, Jesus needs to suffer. It really needs to hurt. His pain is our gain, as they say. It's the most painful death ever. He's bearing the sins of the world. He's smitten and afflicted. He's bruised for our iniquities. He's crushed for our transgressions, as Isaiah chapter 53 says, which Christians believe to be referencing Jesus. So it seems like in the Gospel of Peter, he's just, he's not feeling pain or perhaps his soul has left his body. They're crucifying an empty shell. Something's going on there. The church didn't like it. So the Gospel of Peter is rejected, but the Gospel of Mark, whose Peter's student is accepted as canonical. And then the Gospel of John, there's good reasons for placing John around 70 or even earlier as well, but the vast majority of historians placed the Gospel of John anywhere from about 90 to 110 of the Common Era. If we just take the low number, the earliest date of 90, that's called the Terminus Postquem, the earliest of date, 90. So the Apostle John, who wrote the Gospel, was probably, let's say he was, I don't know, 30 years old at the crucifixion around the age of Jesus, probably the same age. The disciples were probably not old men, they were probably young men around the age of Jesus. So he's 30 years old in the year 30. So he waited then 60 years to write his Gospel around 90. Again, we're taking the low end date of 90. So he's 90 years old and he's writing this Gospel and he's writing it in Greek and it's quite sophisticated Greek. And John the son of Zebedee is supposed to be a Galilean fisherman and 95% probably of people in Palestine at the time, certainly fishermen and peasants, they were illiterate, they could not read or write, they were unlettered. So how is it that he can produce this Gospel where he's talking about referencing the logos, which is a Hellenistic philosophical idea that goes back to Heraclitus. Maybe he studied for 60 years, but it still doesn't make a lot of sense that he would write it in Greek and not in Aramaic or in Syriac. Another issue is that in John, so if you ask a Christian, where does Jesus claim to be God in the New Testament and the four Gospels? Invariably, the Christian will quote something from the Gospel of John. It is the highest Christology. So a Christian would say, well, John 1030, the father and I are one. There you go. John 858, before Abraham was, I am. Right? So, before Abraham was, I am. I already was before Abraham. So here, Jesus, he's intimating his pre-eternality that he predates Abraham. Oh, they'll say, I am the way, the truth, and the life, right? John 14.6. So you have these I am statements. That's what these are called, the famous I am statements of the Johannin, or Gospel of John, the Johannin Gospel. We find none of these I am statements in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, these three Gospels, which are called the Synoptic Gospels, right? Synoptic, meaning one-eyed. Basically that Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they follow basically the same chronology of events in the life of Jesus. Whereas in John, we have this drastic departure from the Synoptic chronology, not only in chronology, but in content. So in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the preferred method of teaching, his preferred pedagogical method of teaching is through parable. But in John, he is giving these very long monologues about his relationship with the Father, making big, big claims. He's engaged in these long and sometimes very tense debates with the Jews, as it says, right? The Jews. It's very clear in the Gospel of John that the enemies of Jesus are not scribes and Pharisees, right? I mean, you find that language in Matthew, which is written around 70 or 80, 85. But by the time John comes around, there's a clear departure. You have Christians and you have Jews, right? In the earliest of Christianity, the Christians were a sect of Judaism. They're called the Nazarenes or the Evionim, which means like the spiritual poppers, the poor people. But now we have a definitive split in the late first century. These are Jews. So it's very clear, if you read the Gospel of John, hoi iudaioi, right? The Jews are the enemies of Jesus. And Jesus is always butting heads with the Jews. So it's very, very interesting. But the main point I was going to make is that these IM statements, which are supposed to be divine claims of Jesus, Jesus is claiming to be God in these IM statements. If he truly made these statements, then we really have to sort of give an F to Matthew, Mark, and Luke for how they wrote their Gospels. Matthew, Mark, and Luke mentioned, all three of them mentioned that Jesus, he rode a donkey into Jerusalem when he came into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. He rode a donkey into Jerusalem. All three of them mentioned that, right? You might think, well, is that really important? Apparently there's something in the Book of Zechariah or Zephaniah that says, you know, the king of Zion comes to you seated humbly upon a donkey. So it's a fulfillment of prophecy. Okay, still doesn't seem very important. But if Jesus is making a divine claim, he's claiming to be God, he said, before Abraham was, I am the father and I are one. I am the way, the truth, and the life. I am the good shepherd. I am the door. These big, big claims that he's making in the Gospel of John, Matthew, Mark, and Luke 100% failed in recording these divine claims. How could they not record these divine claims of Jesus? So the answer is, they're completely inept and they've done a horrible job at writing their Gospels. Or Jesus never made those statements, right? And the majority of historians nowadays, they believe that the latter is actually true, that the Gospel of John is really an ahistorical document. It's really just sort of a Christological meditation of a certain community of Christians called the Johanin community. And, you know, this community, if you read the Gospel of John, for example, he's aware that you have Matthew, Mark, and Luke floating around in the Mediterranean. But he, at times, deliberately contradicts the synoptics, right? For example, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, it says Jesus was crucified on the day of Passover, which is a strange day to be crucified. But John says that he was crucified on the eve of Passover. So the question then becomes, who's right? Can they both be right? Were there two crucifixions? How can these texts be inerrant, right? And this is the position of fundamentalist Bible colleges like the Moody Bible Institute, probably Liberty University, Oral Roberts University, that these books are inerrant. How can both of these be true? Was Jesus crucified on Passover or the eve of Passover? Which is it? Were there two crucifixions? Somebody got it wrong. Or they both got it wrong, right? It says in the Synoptic Gospels that when Jesus was going to be crucified, for no apparent reason, the Romans pulled a random guy out of the crowd named Simon of Cyrene, and compelled him to bear the cross, right? So he took the cross of Jesus, or probably the cross beam. It says Starros, which is like a steak or a beam, probably just a crossbar, and made him bear the cross while Jesus sort of just followed in front or behind. I don't remember what it says in the synoptics, but that's in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. John knows this, but John goes out of his way to contradict the synoptics, and he says, Jesus bore his own cross to Golgotha, the place of the skull, where the Romans used to crucify Jews, insurrectionist Jews, or troublemaking Jews. So why does John do that? Well, there's probably some sort of Christological or polemical reason why he does that. Now, we know that there were early Christian groups that denied the crucifixion of Jesus. One such group were the Basilidians, named after Basilides. I might have mentioned him in the past. He was a Christian teacher in Egypt, Alexandria, in the first quarter of the second century, and Basilides, his opinion was that Simon of Cyrene was transfigured, he uses that word in Latin, transfiguratum, transfigured to look like Jesus, and Jesus was transfigured to look like him, and so the Romans grabbed the apparent Jesus. This is called substitution theory, supernatural identity, transference, and so Jesus was able to escape the crucifixion. So it seems like John is familiar with this belief around the time when he's writing at 90 CE or at 100 CE, possibly 110 CE. So what he does is he completely eliminates the entire episode of Simon of Cyrene for a Christological reason, even though he knows he's contradicting the synoptics, even though his readers will eventually know that he's contradicting the synoptics. But his whole point is to teach you is not to give you accurate history. John admits at the end of the gospel, these things have been written to convince you that Jesus is the Son of God, that's the whole aim, that's to tell us, that's his maksad of writing his gospel, is to convince you by any means necessary that Jesus is the Son of God, that he died for your sins. So don't get it twisted, he wasn't substituted, died on the cross, and then John tells us something else at the crucifixion scene. So Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we were told that Jesus is on the cross for a few hours, and Mark, it's maybe three hours, and this is why Pilate marveled Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor. This man has died already after just a few hours on the cross. Pontius Pilate made a career of crucifying Jews. So if he's astonished and he's marveling that this man has died already, then there's something happening there, there's something to look into. How can he be dead already? And of course Christians will say that, well Jesus, he was beaten beyond recognition, and he was flogged front and back down to his bowels, I mean his intestines were falling out. You read things like this in Christian polemical writings like Joshua McDowell and others, Mike Lacona and things like that. So he's a bloody, bloody mess, his body's going into shock, and so three hours, I'm surprised he even lasted three hours. Why is Pilate shocked? Pilate is an expert Jew killer. He is an expert Jew crucifier, and he says he marveled. This man is dead after three hours. Are you sure he's dead? How can he be dead? And he oversaw all of, you know, these so-called beatings and flogging and so on and so forth. I mean nowhere in Matthew, Mark and Luke does it say that he was nailed to a cross, right? That's not mentioned in the synoptic tradition. We find that in John, and it's not mentioned directly. It's when, you know, in the upper room where the doubting Thomas and Jesus shows his hands, you know, in his feet, apparently the marks of the crucifixion, so we find that in John, right? But something else that happens in John is Jesus is on the cross and he's impaled on the cross. We don't find this in Matthew, Mark and Luke. Why didn't Matthew, Mark and Luke, if Matthew is an eyewitness, this is what Christians believe, at least traditional Christians, Matthew is an eyewitness of the ministry of Jesus, right? Why didn't Matthew, we say, well, he foresook Jesus and fled. I mean that's what it says in Matthew, Mark and Luke, when Jesus was on the Mount of Olives in the Garden of Gethsemane, the Jewish temple guard came to arrest him. And as all of his disciples foresook him and fled, so Matthew wasn't there. Okay, but Matthew could have, there were people that were there, Matthew could have interviewed somebody, an eyewitness, and what happened at the crucifixion? Matthew seems to know a lot about what happened at the crucifixion, even though he wasn't there. Matthew records the final words of Jesus on the cross. How did he know that? Somebody told him, why didn't somebody tell him that Jesus was impaled on the cross? John, that's what John says, writing in 90 or 100. Well, it probably didn't happen, that's why. It's not historical. Why does John say that Jesus was impaled on the cross? Because apparently there might have been Christians who had the belief that Jesus was put on a cross, but he didn't actually die, he might have swooned, he might have survived the cross, right? That's why he was seen alive in his fleshy body after the supposed, his supposed death. Well, John eliminates this type of heresy according to him and says, no, no, no, don't get it twisted. He was impaled on the cross, he's dead, there's no doubt about it. So basically, okay, so we went a little bit off course here, but that's okay. So we said that there's four Gospels, there's the Book of Acts, there's 21 Epistles, and then we have one Apocalypse, right? Apocalypse is a Greek word, apocalypse, meaning an unveiling or a disclosure, kashf, it's called kitabu mukhash. And this is sort of a book that describes visions of the eskaton, the sa'a, towards the end of time. It's very, very cryptic, it's very symbolic, very, very strange, very enigmatic. I mean, you know, the four horsemen and you have, you know, the lake of fire and it's very strange book. You have the Mark of the Beast, the Mark of the Therion in Greek, which is 666. It's stated in Revelation chapter 13 verse 18. So this book is called the Book of Revelation, right? In the Catholic version, it's called the Apocalypse. Okay, well all these strange things happening, the Mark of the Beast, the Antichrist is 666. Nobody knows what that means. Some people believe it's the numerical value of his name. Some scholars believe that it's a reference to Nero, the Roman emperor who was, who was compared today by Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump. He said, I think he said, Sanders said today, what did he say? He said, when Rome was burning, Nero was, was playing his fiddle, but Trump was golfing, right? So Nero is sort of seen as this, this sort of prototypical horrible leader, right? So some scholars believe that the numerical value of Emperor Nero is 666. Okay, so you have these 27 books. Okay, now the first books of the New Testament to be written were not the Gospels. Okay, the first books chronologically of the New Testament were the Pauline epistles, right? The letters written by Paul. So who is Paul? So Paul his actual name is Saul of Tarsus. He was a Benjaminite Jew from Sicily who was also a Pharisee who early on was a very zealous Christian persecuting Pharisee. So he would persecute the earliest of Christians, like the disciples, right? Before they were actually called Christian, they were, they were the Nazarenes, right? So Jews who happened to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, Paul was the, the man that the high priest would call upon to, according to his own words, he would bind them up, capture them, bring them back to Jerusalem for, for trial. So he was a persecutor of the early Jesus movement. And then according to Paul, he had some sort of conversion experience on the road to Damascus where he claims that he had an encounter with the resurrected Jesus who commissioned him to go into all nations and admonish the Gentiles, right? So he's the apostle to the Gentiles. So then Paul goes to different major metropolitan areas around the Mediterranean and he begins to preach what he calls my gospel. That's what he says. My gospel. Remember Jesus of the seed of David rose from the dead according to my gospel, he says. And he uses that phrase three times in his, in his, in his letters. Two of them are genuinely written by Paul. One of them is Pseudo Paul. So when Paul says my gospel, it seems like he's making a distinction between what he is saying and what this other gospel is saying. And he actually says that in the book of Galatians, he chastises his congregation in Galatia, which is in Turkey for believing in quote, another gospel. So there's another gospel. According to Christian historians, the story is this, Paul went to Galatia and he made a lot of converts to his gospel, his understanding of the gospel, that Jesus was the divine son of God and that he died for your sins. And that's the new, that's the new covenant. And, and, and then he left Galatia. And then a group of apostles from Jerusalem sent by James, who is Jesus's brother or cousin. It's not really clear what brother means, half brother or cousin possibly step brother. Nonetheless, the book of Acts tells us that James is the leader of the Jerusalem apostles. He sends messengers, other apostles into Galatia to correct Paul's deviant teachings. And so they're able to convince these Galatians that Paul was wrong about many fundamental issues. So then Paul writes now the book of his letter to the Galatians, where he chastises the Galatians. How dare you believe in this other gospel, right? We didn't bring this gospel. And then he goes on to accuse Peter, James and Barnumus of hypocrisy in the book of Galatians. So Paul is budding heads. He has fundamental big issues with actual disciples of Isa, he admits this in the book of Galatians. He refers to them sarcastically, so-called pillars. That's what he says. These so-called pillars of the church. He says these super apostles. Who do they think they are, these super apostles? This is his sarcasm. Who is he talking about? He's talking about actual disciples of Isa, he says, I don't need a letter of recommendation. You know, I have my experience. I experience the resurrected Jesus. What does he mean? I don't need a letter of recommendation. According to New Testament scholars, these apostles that are coming into these cities and Paul's wake and correcting his deviant gospel have actual hijazat. They have these teaching licenses that they've brought from Jerusalem, signed by James, who is the leader of the Nazarenes, the early Christian movement. Paul has no such letter because he's a freelance self-appointed apostle. So he says to his congregations, I don't need a letter. I had this experience and he brags, I didn't take this teaching from any human being, from any man. I took it directly from Christ. This is what he says. Yet he is at odds. Iktai, fundamental issue, he's butting heads with the actual disciples of Isa, all right? So Paul is a highly problematic person to say the least. So Paul began writing around 52. His first letter was to his congregation at Thessalonica, a major Greek city, right? It's called First Thessalonians. And in First Thessalonians, Paul is very clear. And there's certain central Pauline themes. This is how scholars, like textual critics, can tell if this is written by Paul or not. So you have these 14 epistles that are claimed to have been written by Paul. According to historians, seven of them are by Paul, because they would analyze the texts through certain textual measures. And the other seven are deemed to be forgeries in the name of Paul, right? So the seven genuine letters, the first genuine letter is called First Thessalonians. And then you have Galatians, Philemon, First Corinthians, Second Corinthians, Philippians, and Romans. And in these seven letters, you have these central Pauline themes. The second coming of Jesus will be in his lifetime. This is absolutely fundamental to Paul's understanding of his gospel, what he is claiming he has taken from Jesus. Absolutely fundamental. We're going to be transformed in the twinkling of an eye, he says, in First Thessalonians, caught up in the clouds with the Lord. And all of his advice on marriage, celibacy, on commerce, all of it is predicated upon his belief that at any moment Jesus will manifest in his second coming and set up his kingdom of God on earth, as the Jews believe the Jewish Messiah would do. And of course, this never happened. It never happened. So we have here a falsifiable claim of Paul. Paul is very, very clear. He believes the second coming will occur in his lifetime. In fact, the author of Mark's gospel and these four gospels, so you have the Pauline letters that are written between, you know, 52 and 65 or something. And then you have the first gospel mark. So the four gospels are highly influenced by Pauline doctrine. Right. And again, that's why in these four gospels, I mean, they're basically four extended passion narratives, because the cross is so central for Paul. Paul says in First Corinthians, if Christ is not raised, our faith is in vain. If Christ did not raise from the dead, if he was not resurrected, our faith is in vain. There's no point to this religion. Right. So you can see how Christians are oftentimes offended by the Muslim suggestion that Jesus was never crucified. He's never crucified. He's never killed. He's never resurrected. Christianity is in vain. But this is what Paul says in First Corinthians. So now in Mark, right, you have Jesus saying that among those standing here, right, he says, there are some standing here that shall not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in the clouds. Right. And for Mark, the Son of Man seems to be a title of Jesus himself. Coming in the clouds, he's paraphrasing something found in the book of Daniel chapter seven, the apocalyptic Son of Man, which Christians or Mark at this point believes to be a prophecy of the Jewish Messiah, the bar in Nash, the Son of Man, who's exceedingly powerful on the earth. Jesus is saying there's some standing here. He's telling this to Jews around 29 or 30 of the common era. There are people here now alive that will see me coming with great power in the clouds. Now we cannot possibly attribute such a statement to Esa, because that would make him a false prophet. And true prophets do not make false prophecies. Christians have ways of sort of working around these things. But what's very interesting is Mark wrote that around 70. So he's, you know, he's taking a big risk because, you know, if there are few people alive in the generation of Jesus around 70 of the common era, but it seems like Mark believes because of what's happening in Jerusalem around the time of Mark's composition, Mark believes it is the end of the world. What's happening in Jerusalem between 67 and 73, it's the Jewish war that Josephus writes about. So you have an all out assault upon the Jews in Palestine by the Roman war machine. So there was an insurrection by the Qanaim, the zealots or the proto zealots. These were Jewish insurrectionists that tried to seize the land and implement Jewish law from the heathen colonizers, the Romans. They were absolutely crushed over this six year period. The Romans started in the north in Galilee where Jesus was raised, and they just swept right down the entire country, destroyed the temple in 70 and massacred, you know, men, women and children of that mass suicide that happened at the fortress in Masada around 73 of the common era. So Mark believes this is the end of the world, right? So if this is the end of the world, then the second coming of Jesus is imminent. So he has no problem saying, putting the words into the mouth of Jesus, there are some standing here that shall not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power. All right. We would not attribute this false prophecy to a true prophet, Issa alaihi salam. Mark is influenced by Paul who made this false prophecy. Paul believed the second coming was imminent. It did not materialize. Paul also believes in justification by faith alone. He believes that the law of Moses was abrogated almost completely. And he believes in vicarious atonement, this idea that Jesus was a Savior, man God, a divine Son of God who died for your sins. All right. What's also interesting about Paul is that he does not mention anything about the historical Jesus. Paul does not quote Jesus accurately one time in any of his letters, whether they're genuine Paul or pseudo Paul. Paul never mentions a miracle that Jesus performed, like these exorcisms that are such a big part of the synoptic tradition, the healings, right? The resurrection of Lazarus. He doesn't mention any of these things. Paul does not mention anything about the historical Jesus. He's completely focused on the crucifixion and resurrection, the significance of the death of a Savior, man God. That's what his attention is almost exclusively focused on, right? He doesn't mention the virgin birth of Jesus. Why wouldn't he mention that? Very, very strange. He actually says Jesus who was of the seed of David, I mean it seems like he believes that Jesus was just born as a descendant of David in a conventional sense, right? Why wouldn't he mention these things? He doesn't quote Issa al-Islam. He doesn't quote the Jesus of the Gospels. If there's an oral tradition floating around where Jesus is making divine claims that are recorded by John, Paul doesn't seem to quote it. He doesn't quote them. Why doesn't he quote them? Either he doesn't care that Jesus claimed to be God and I think he would care. Or these statements did not exist and John invented them out of whole cloth in order to convince his audience that Jesus is the Son of God. Now Paul does something quite radical. What he does is he appropriates an old pagan motif. Okay, this is known as the dying and rising savior man-god motif. So this was a motif, a belief that predated Christianity by hundreds and hundreds of years. This idea that some sort of incarnation, a divine Son of God comes to the earth, suffers and dies for the sins of humanity. It's a very beautiful story. You have a personal savior. What Paul does is that he gives it a Jewish makeover and he uses it to explain what he believes to be the gospel. So what Paul basically does, I liken it to like a Christmas tree. A Christmas tree, right? So we have this tree which is brought into the home, which is what the ancient pagans used to do. I mean in Jeremiah, I think chapter 10 verse 2, he says, imitate not the way of the heathen, the infidel who brings a tree into their house and decks it out with golden silver. That's what the tree worshipers used to do. Today we call them tree-huggers. No, I'm just kidding. But that's what they used to do. What Paul is doing is basically he's taking a tree, a Christmas tree, a symbol of paganism, that's his foundation, and he's putting a star of David at the top of it. So he takes paganism as his foundation and he kind of dresses it up with the trappings of Judaism. Before Christianity, you had Osiris, the savior man god of Egypt, Adonis of Syria, Romulus of Rome, Zalmoxis of Thrace, who's mentioned by Herodotus in his histories, Inanna of Sumeria, who's a female daughter of God, and of course Mithras, the Persian sun god, who, although he didn't actually die, he did suffer for the sins of his people. There's a book called The World, The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors by Curse Graves, written in 1875. There are some problematic elements to this book from a historical standpoint, but it's an interesting book. Christianity Before Christ is the subtitle. There's another book by Tom Harper called The Pagan Christ, which is quite interesting as well. So Osiris, Adonis, Romulus, Zalmoxis, Inanna, Mithras, all savior gods, all sons of God, with the exception of Inanna, who's a daughter of God, but basically all children of God, but not the god. They are not the god. So all of these traditions are what's known as henotheistic, and I am convinced that Paul himself was a henotheist. I do not believe that Paul is a monotheist. Paul believes that Jesus is a second deity. Paul is highly, highly influenced by Hellenistic philosophy, Hellenistic motifs like this one here, The Dying and Rising, Save Your Man-God Motifs, but also this idea of, you know, this middle platonic idea that the godhead is three unique deities where there's a hierarchy of being, the one, the word, the logos, and the spirit, right? All three are divine. The latter two are the effect of the cause who is the one. He's the source and origin of everything, even the logos and the spirit. So even though the logos and spirit are from the very essence, their ex-deo, they're from the very essence of God, they are not as exalted as the one who is without origin, who is the origin and is the cause of the others. So you have this hierarchy of gods. So Paul is borrowing this idea. So is John. John directly calls Jesus the logos. So it's hard to, it's very difficult. I mean, eventually Christian apologists in the third and fourth century, they had a way of sort of working out how this is still monotheism. It's not monotheism according to the Islamic definition of monotheism, but they sort of took these middle platonic and neoplatonic ideas of a hierarchy within the godhead and said there's really no hierarchy of being just a person. So kind of sleight of hand. We'll talk about that next week, inshallah ta'ala. But anyway, you have the Savior, man gods, they all undergo a passion, some sort of suffering, and they obtain victory over death. It's very interesting, you know. The Quran says that the Christians say, al-Masih ibn Allah, that Christ is the Son of God. That is a saying that issues from their mouths. In this they but imitate what the unbelievers of all these ancient pagans used to say. It's all the way back hundreds and hundreds of years. And of course, Hellenistic religion tended to be syncretistic. They would mix and match different elements. So like the cult of Mithras was an amalgamation of Hellenistic, meaning Greek, as well as Persian beliefs. The cult of Dionyses was an amalgamation of Hellenistic, as well as Phoenician beliefs. The cult of Pauline Christianity is an amalgamation of Hellenistic and Jewish beliefs. So now you have this kind of new hybrid religion. And when that happened, now you have this definitive split. Paul set the foundation in the middle of the first century. By the end of the first century, you have this definitive split. These are not Jews. These are a separate religion. They're called Christians. They worship Christ as a God. So you have these 27 books then, just to wrap up, inshallah. Four Gospels, one Book of Acts, 21 Epistles, one Apocalypse. Okay. I think that's good for tonight, inshallah. So we will see you next time. I think that's a good place to stop. I don't want to start. I know there's a few minutes left here, but I don't want to get into a new topic. This is going to take a bit of explaining to do. So we'll save that for next time. We'll finish our discussion on the Gospels. There's one more thing I wanted to say about what's known as backward Christology, which is very, very interesting that we find in the four Gospels, Christology and the Making, James Dunn, this idea. We'll talk about that, and then we'll go into the Nicene Creed and talk about the Trinity, inshallah. Okay. So this is our final session on Christianity. So last time we talked about the four Gospels and something of the Christology. Christology is a academic term, meaning belief about Christ. We talked about the Christology that's found in each Gospel. Historians have noticed that through the years, the Christology of the Christians has become higher and higher throughout the Gospels. So in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus is a peace be upon him according to Mark. He is a prophet. He's the hidden Messiah. It's a very, very short Gospel. His statements are very brief. And then in Matthew, he is now the open Messiah. He fulfills all of these prophecies of the Old Testament. Many times, Matthew takes a lot of liberties as to how he's interpreting Old Testament stories and texts and applying them to Jesus. It seems at times he is simply making things up. For example, he says at the beginning, towards the beginning of his Gospel, that because Jesus came from Nazareth, this is so that it might be fulfilled. What was written by the prophet, he shall be called the Nazarene. He shall be called the Nazarene. Matthew is presenting the statement as if it's from the Old Testament, from the Tanakh, but there is no such statement in the Old Testament. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is called Esoter in Greek, which means Savior. Although there's different ways of understanding that term in Luke, but the main thing about Luke is Jesus becomes now this universal messenger, universal prophet. Jesus becomes this sort of quasi-Aristatelian philosopher where he is expounding truths through parable. I mean, we get some of that obviously in Matthew and Mark as well, but especially in Luke, because Luke is trying to appeal to a Gentile audience, a Greco-Roman audience. And then finally, in the Gospel of John, Jesus is called the Word, the Logos, the Word made flesh, made divine incarnation. So today then, we're going to look at the Nicene Creed. This is an Orthodox Christian Creed. When I say Orthodox, I'm talking about Trinitarian Christianity. And this Creed was ratified in the early 4th century of the Common Era, following the Council of Nicaea in 325 of the Common Era. Before the Council of Nicaea, you have many different types of Christians, many different types of Christianities, too numerous to even mention here. It would take a seminar to mention what was happening in the first three or four centuries of the Christian era with the Christian religion. You had Christians who believed that Jesus peace be upon him was only a human. You had other Christians who believed that he was only God. You have Christians who believed that he was one of many gods. You have Christians who believed that he was the only God. You have Christians who believed that he didn't have a physical body. He was a phantasm. There were Christians who believed that he was both divine and human. You had Christians who believed that not only was he both divine and human, that he became divine at his birth. You had Christians who believed that he became divine at his baptism. There were Christians who believed that he became divine at his resurrection. It's called exaltation Christology. You had Christians who believed that he was always divine, right? That he was the pre-existent or pre-eternal son, that he was the Logos. Again, this is a good idea. You had Christians who believed that there were three gods. You had Christians who believed that there was one God, but this God had three different modes, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It's like God putting on three different masks. One person of God who has sort of three modes. So he was Father and then he totally became the Son and then he becomes the Spirit, resurrects the Son. He becomes the Son again and then he becomes the Father again. This type of Christology is called modal monarchianism or Sebellianism. So you have many, many types of Christianity. Now, Constantine, who was the first Christian emperor, he wanted unity in his empire. And so after defeating his rivals to the throne, he called for this council, the council of Nicaea, very important council, 325 of the Common Era, the first so-called ecumenical world church council. Although all of the bishops that attended Nicaea believed already that Jesus, some, at least be upon him, was divine in some way, right? Although that is debatable, but certainly there were no ebunites present at the council, you know, Nazarenes. They weren't any Jewish Christians that were at the council. The Jewish Christians were extinct by this time. And if they were still practicing, and there were pockets of them, they certainly were not going to be invited to the council of Nicaea. So it's not really an ecumenical or universal or world church council. So Constantine called for this council, and there's a lot of sort of misinformation as to what actually happened at this council. Dan Brown wrote a book called The Vinci Code, in which he gives a lot of false information as to what happened. But at the end of the council, and whether Constantine was actually Christian or not during this council, was actually open to debate. It's not clear. Certainly his mother was Christian. His mother was a very hardcore Christian, but it seems like Constantine called the council for more political reasons. He wanted unity in the empire. So at the end of the council, after deliberations upon deliberations, the bishops drafted this creed, and it's a short creed. So we'll just go through it. The creedal exposition of the 318 fathers. That means the bishops that attended the council. So they say, and it begins, and it's written in Greek, right? Whether Issa alaihi salam spoke Greek or not is open to debate. It seems like he probably knew some Greek because it was the lingua franca of the Mediterranean at the time. So the New Testament documents, the New Testament books are all written in Greek, and those are original documents originally written in Greek. Paul wrote his letters in Greek. He did not write them in Syriac or Hebrew. The original documents are in Greek. So Issa alaihi salam, he grew up in a very eclectic environment in the north of Palestine in a province called Galilee. So no doubt he knew Hebrew. That was a language of the synagogue liturgy. He was a rabbi. You have to know Hebrew. It's like being a sheikh today and not knowing Arabic. Does it make any sense? Or just being an alem and not knowing Arabic. So he knew Hebrew. He knew Aramaic or Syriac. Syriac is sort of late Aramaic or sometimes called Christian Aramaic. It's related to Semitic language. It's related to Hebrew and Arabic. The language of the sort of masses, right? The sort of amia. So he certainly knew that as well. He probably knew some Latin, which was the official language of the Roman Empire. And of course Palestine at the time was a colony of Rome. And then Greek as well, which was widely spoken in that area. Even the Romans adopted Greek in that area in the Middle East and the ancient Near East. So the Romans spoke Latin and Greek. So Arisa alai salam. And many of the Jews at the time probably spoke Greek as well. But since the New Testament was written in Greek and Koine Greek, which is also called Alexandria in Greek. So this is the language of Alexander. But don't forget what Alexander did is that he conquered all of North Africa and and the ancient Near East during his time and his influence in that region was still very much alive in the first century of the common era. It's called Hellenization, like Greek influence in all spheres of life and many disciplines, including theology and philosophy, but also cultural aspects, right? Linguistic aspects, very heavy influence. So the creed begins like this. And if you're watching live, you can feel free to ask questions, inshallah, in the chat box. And I will get to them, inshallah. It begins by saying, Pisteu amen, we believe, eis hen atheon patera panto kratora. So that's the Greek. It says we believe. That's how the the creed begins. We believe in one God, the Father. Panto kratora means the Panto crater, the sort of creator of all. Sometimes that's translated as the almighty. The Latin says, kredimus in unum deum patrem amniputim. So they translate Panto crater, Panto kratora, as basically omnipotent. And that's why we get the English almighty. So the Father, we believe in one God, the Father, the creator of all. He continues, the maker of all things seen and unseen. And we believe, he says, or they say, eis hen akoryon eisun kristan ton huyon tuthayu. We also believe in one Lord. Horyon means Lord in Greek. Now this word Lord is a tricky word because the word Lord can apply to both God and man in New Testament Greek, right? Philip in the Gospel of John, somebody comes to Philip and says kurye kurye, right? Lord, Lord. Now Philip is certainly not God. Philip was a disciple of Jesus. But in the creed, the Fathers don't mean it like that. The Fathers mean to say that Jesus is God. He is divine, right? So it's important for us when reading this creed that we understand these terms as they were understood, how they were understood at the time they were written. So we have to be a bit of an originalist when it comes to these creeds, right? Just as when we read things in the New Testament, when Esalae Salaam is called Lord, kuryos, in Matthew, for example, you can make a good case that Jews are not referring to Jesus as Lord God. Why would a Jew do that? A Jew comes to Jesus, kurye kurye, my, the Lord God, Lord God, all right? That's, that's kufr, that's apostasy. A Jew would not do that. So looking at the sort of context, the social location of Esalae Salaam himself, the word is a bit ambiguous. Kurye can simply mean master or even rabbi, even the word rabbi, rabbi, right? Means my Lord, right? You know, rabbi, Shmueli Botak, you know, he's not the Lord God. When people refer to him as rabbi, rabbi, they mean to say master, teacher, right? But here in the creed, they're taking kuryos to be a divine title. And we believe in one, in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, that's what they say here, the Son of God. And then it says, genethenta ectupatros monagene, which means be gotten from the Father uniquely. And they say, this is from the essence of the Father, right? This is from the usias tu patros. So what does it mean then, Jesus is the Son of God, according to Trinitarian Christianity? What do Trinitarians mean by that? It's important for us not to build a straw man. And say, oh, Christians believe that when, that, that God had relations with Mary, physical relations and Jesus was the offspring of God and Mary in that, that physical sense. That's not what Christians believe, at least not what Trinitarian Christians believe. Mormons, on the other hand, do believe that, but Mormonism is a very strange form of Christianity, if we can even call it Christianity. Certainly Orthodox Christians, whether they're Eastern Orthodox or Protestant, Catholic, would probably not consider Mormons to be true Christians, any more than they would consider Muslims to be Christians. But what they mean by Son of God is that the Father generated the Son, so we have to be careful about our language, generated, not created. The Son of God was not created, that's a heresy. That was Arius' position, who was also at the Council of Nicia, by the way. And whether Arius believed that Jesus or the Son was a semi-deity somehow, is open to debate. But certainly, from what has survived from his writings and what we can take from his opponents, albeit with a grain of salt, it seems as though Arius believed that the Son of God was created by the Father. So that's not the Trinitarian position. The Trinitarian position is that when they say Jesus is the Son of God, or when they say we believe in the Son of God, that the meaning of that is that God generated or caused the Son to be from his very essence, from the Usias to Patras, as it says in the Creed. So the Father did not create the Son out of nothing, ex nihilo. That's a heresy. The Father created the world out of nothing, but the Father generated, or begot, that's the term they use, begot, which of course has a lot of baggage to it. Because we think, okay, this Father begot this Son, and this man begot this child. So we sort of take it in this physical sense, but it's not meant to be taken physically. That God generated the Son from his own being, and this was done in pre-eternality. This is their position. So in other words, there was never a time when the Father was sort of alone by himself, and then the Son came after him. There's no before or after. This is in pre-eternality. There is no time when this happened. Even my language cannot cap, because I'm saying when this, there's no when, when this happened. So this is their position. He's the Son of God in the sense that he shares an essential essence. Essence is called that in Arabic. You know, we say in our theology, no one shares with Allah's that, his essence, his sifat, his attributes, and his af'al. No one can do the actions of God, right? Whereas the Christians say, no, God shares. God is three persons, at least these three persons share God's essence, actions, and attributes. One God, but three persons, right? The essence of the Son is identical to the essence of the Father, but they're different persons. What does it mean to be a different person? Meaning they have different attributes, right? For example, the Son has the attribute of begottenness. He's an effect of the Father who is His cause. So the Father has uncausation. The Son is cause, but they're equal in essence because the Father generated or produced the Son from His very own essence. This is their position. Obviously, they're very problematic from our perspective. The whole idea of a pre-eternal Son seems like a bit of a contradiction. Pre-eternal Son. Well, the Son is always an effect of a Father, so it comes after, but you're saying He's pre-eternal. The pre-eternal Son seems like a bit of a oxymoron. Nonetheless, this is their position. And this was to avoid this idea that you, like other Christians at the time and other, and Jews and pagans were saying about the early Christians, you're worshiping two gods, just admit it. You're saying that this God is a Son of God. He has a Father. That's two gods, right? Even if this was done before time, the fact that the Son is an effect of the Father, the fact that the Father is uncaused and produces a Son, even if it's done before time, in pre-eternality, the fact that the Father is uncaused means that He is ontologically superior to the Son. He's a higher state of being, right? And so like a Neoplatonist or a middle Platonist would make that argument. The middle Platonist would also say that the One generated the Logos from His being. He's ex-deal. But the Logos, who's also divine, is not as divine as the One, because the Logos is the effect of the One, of the Cause, right? I think the camera just panned out for some reason. There we go. Okay. Again, people that are watching, you can ask questions for clarification or questions that are related to this topic, inshallah. So that's what they mean by Son of God. He's gotten from the Father uniquely. This is from the essence of the Father. And they continue and say, describing the Son, how do they describe the Son? Sayon eqtayu, God from God, God capital G, from God capital G. Fos eqtotas, light from light, true God, from true God, begotten not made. It's a very famous phrase here, begotten not made. Right? What does it mean, begotten not made? Meaning generated or caused naturally, not created. The Son is not created. What do I mean when I say the Son? Am I talking about Jesus of Nazareth? No, I'm not talking about Jesus. Jesus was created. Jesus was a human being. That's not the Christians. The Christians are not saying that Jesus is uncreated. Jesus was a human being. We're talking about the Son of God that incarnated into Jesus of Nazareth. The essence that dwelt within the flesh of the man Jesus is pre-eternal, is God. This is their position. Right? So the Son was not willed into existence. Right? That's Judaism. Right? That God chooses and wills something to exist. Whenever he decrees a matter, he merely says to be and it is. Right? That's not what happened with the Son. He wasn't willed into existence and it wasn't sort of this involuntary emanation that happened. That's the sort of Neoplatonic idea. That's how the Logos in Neoplatonism and Middle Platonism came to exist that God, the One, was sort of thinking about his own thoughts as they say and there was an involuntary sort of spillage of light. Right? And this light became the Logos, the second tier of being and this hierarchy of being. Right? So it wasn't something willed. It wasn't involuntary. They used the word naturally. The Son was born just naturally from the Father. What they mean is it's just who God is. God is naturally a Father. He's always been a Father. Right? That's just who he is. God is personal. He's social. He is in relationships. Right? This type of thing. Begotten, not made. Then they say, co-substantial with the Father. And this is also a famous phrase, hama-usian, hama-usian or homo-usian. So again, a little bit of a Greek lesson. I didn't intend to get so technical with these classes. I was told to keep it very, very simple. But I don't think it's too difficult, but we do have to sort of push ourselves a little bit to get more of a substantive understanding of these things. It's still not difficult, I think. So if we look at the word homo-usian, H-O-M-O, homo means same. Right? Like homosexual. Right? Everyone knows that word. So that's from a Greek, homo-same. Homo in Latin means man, like a homo erectus. Right? Like the man who stands upright. Right? So that's a different language. So hama-usia, so hama means same or homo means same. Usias means essence. Same essence. This is the position of the Trinitarians called hama-usian Christology. That word hama-usian is mentioned here in the Nicene Creed. It is not mentioned anywhere in the New Testament. Right? This term is so important yet it is not mentioned in the New Testament. Now Christians will counter here and say, oh yeah? Well, what's the most important theological concept in Islam? We say tohed and the Christian will say, take the Quran and show me the word tohed in the Quran. It's not in the Quran. So the Christian point here is that the concept of tohed is in the Quran, just as the concept of hama-usian, same essence Christology is found in the New Testament. And that's the latter obviously is open to debate. That Christians certainly take that position. The Aryans certainly did not take that position. The early Christians did not take that position, or at least the Christians in the second century that did not believe that the son was equal to the father. They still revered these four texts. I mean, the Aryans still believed in the Gospel of John. Jesus says in John 10.30, remember those IM statements we talked about last week, that logic tells us we're probably never uttered by Jesus. But let's just entertain the text for now. Let's say he did say that, the father and I are one. So Trinitarians they say, ah, you see the father and I are one. They're the same essence. Right? I mean, that's sort of a, it is a giant leap to go from a statement the father and I are one to saying that they're the same essence. Jesus is 100% God. He is co-substantially God. The Aryans also believed in that statement. What did they, how did they interpret that statement? Well, they would look at it in its context. Right? So Jesus is talking to the Pharisees and he's saying that, you know, I'm watching over my disciples. No one can snatch them out of my hand. In other words, no one can take them out of my protection. I'm watching over them. And then he says the father who was greater than all is also watching over them. And no one can snatch them out of his hand. The father and I are one. So one in purpose, one in intention. Right? Not one in essence, one in objective to protect the disciples from the enemies. Right? So we'd read it in its context. So anyway, so you have homo-oucian Christology and then you have something homo-oucian. H-O-M-O-I, just an iota in Greek. So the difference between the words homo and homo-oi, H-O-M-O-I, is a difference of one iota, one iota. But it makes a difference in theology. So homo-oucian Christology means that the father and son are exactly the same essence. Whereas homo-oucian Christology, which could have been the position of Arius, I don't think it was, but some have argued that, that the son is similar in his essence to the father. He's still divine, but he's not as divine as the father, but he's still not the same. He's not like a human being. Right? He's sort of in this middle space. Right? So homo-oi means similar, ha-ma means the same. And then of course you have hetero-oucian, heterosexual. Hetero-oucian, heteros in Greek means another. Right? Another essence. And this is the position of Unitarian Christians, that the son of God, the son of God, that's a title, it's honorific, it's takrimi, it's majaz, figurative, it's just a way of sort of exalting Issa alaihi salam. It's not to be taken literal in any way, shape or form. Right? And that Jesus's essence is other than God, the father. And by father they mean, again, the Rabb, the Lord. That's also a figurative expression. Okay. And then they say here, so co-substantial with the father, through whom all things in heaven and earth became. The one, meaning the son, the son of God, who for the sake of us human beings and for the sake of our salvation, came down and became flesh and dwelled in man. Right? And anthropesanta is the Greek, but the Latin translation says incarnatus est. Right? Incarnatus, incarnate. In means in, carne means flesh, like if you ever had some chili con carne, chili with meat or flesh. Right? So the son of God, he descended from the metaphysical realm and incarnated into a human being, Jesus of Nazareth, 2000 years ago, according to Trinitarian Christianity. Then they continue, became flesh and dwelled in man. We said that suffered and rose on the third day, ascended into the heavens and will come to judge the living and the dead. So belief in a second coming, he will basically be the judge on the Yomul Qiyama. And we believe in the Holy Spirit. So that's all the Holy Spirit gets in the Nicene Creed. He just gets that one little thing at the end. And by the way, we believe in the Holy Spirit, because the Holy Spirit is not on the table for discussion at the Council of Nicaea. That's going to come at the next Council. Right? What happened at Nicaea is they're simply dealing with the son of God. Is the son of God the same essence as the father or a different essence or a similar essence? That's what's on the table. And of course, they voted and Christians believe that, and Catholics still believe this, that at the Council of Nicaea, there were actually 319 persons there. So 318 bishops and then the Holy Spirit was there. And the Holy Spirit sort of guides the discussion of the bishops towards the right answer. Right? So what doctrine or dogma is hammered out at these ecumenical councils, and there have been 22 of them, I believe. The last one was in the 1960s called Bikin II. So the first seven of them are accepted by Protestant Christians, Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox. And then after that, from 8 to 21 or 22, the decisions are believed by Catholics only. So the Eastern Orthodox stop after seven, and so do the Protestant Christians. So in other words, all Trinitarian Christians believe that whatever came out of the Council of Nicaea, which was the first ecumenical council, it is infallible because it was a product of the providence of the Holy Spirit, who was also the third person of the Trinity. We don't get that here in the Creed yet, but we will get that later. And then the very last part of the Creed here, they actually quote the proto-Orthodox or Trinitarian. I mean, they're not Trinitarian at this point again. So I'm using Trinitarian as somewhat anachrodistic. So we can say the proto-Orthodox bishops, they quote their theological opponents here and say, as for those who say, there was once when he was not. So they're actually quoting the Arians. This was a sort of credo of the Arians in the early 4th century. And of course, again, Arius is present at the Council. What did they used to say? There was a time when he was not. There was a time when the Son of God did not exist. So the Son is not pre-eternal. They're saying those who say that, and then they quote a few other things that the Arians were saying out of non-being he became, and the Son is changeable or alterable. These, the universal and apostolic church deems accursed, anathematizes. I mean, that's the Greek word anathematizai, which is where we get the word anathematize. In other words, they're saying that we are pronouncing kufur. We're making takfir, right, of the Arians now. That, that the Arian position that the Son of God is not pre-eternal and not fully God is kufur. So that's the, that's the Nicene Creed. Now, a few years later in 381, they held another Council. It's called the Council of Constantinople, right? So they're both in Turkey. Constantinople means the, the polis of Constantine, the city of Constantine, which is now Istanbul in Turkey. So now the, the Roman emperors theodosius the first, and he's definitely a Christian. There's no doubt about it, 115 bishops are present. So what's the issue now? So the issue at, or the problem for the proto-Orthodox at Nicaea was these Arians who are saying that the Son of God is inferior to the Father. So they put it to vote and majority rules and the Son of God officially becomes God the Son after the Council of Nicaea. In 381 now the issue is what about the Holy Spirit? So now you have Christians who are saying, okay, fine, the Son and Father are Hama'u Sian. They're the same essence, but the Holy Spirit is inferior to both of them. So you have, you don't have a Trinity. You have, I don't even know what the word is. You have a by unity because Trinity comes from triune and then unity. So they're saying now there's the Father and the Son. That's the true God. And then beneath them you have the Holy Spirit who's not quite God. And then you have the rest of creation beneath the Holy Spirit. So these enemies were dubbed Numotomachians by the proto-Orthodox. These are, that literally means the spirit fighters. Those who are fighting against the Holy Spirit and will not recognize the full divinity of the Holy Spirit. So Theodosius the first he called for this Council and after again many deliberations they came to the conclusion that indeed the Holy Spirit is also God. Hama'u Sian, Numotology, Holy Spirit shares an essential essence of the Father and the Son, although he's a different person. We have three persons, one essence. Three persons, one essence. There was a Christian theologian in the Middle Ages, Hilary of Poitiers, who came up with this diagram and it's a very famous diagram. Basically it's a triangle. And so this is supposed to sort of be a diagram if you will of the Trinity. So you have a triangle. At each point you have Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Right? And so imagine that on each side of the triangle you have the words is not, is not, so equilateral triangle at each point Father, Son, Holy Spirit and then written along the lines of all three sides is not. So in other words the Son is not the Father, you're a different person. The Father is not the Spirit, the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not the Son. Right? So this is their belief. Three separate and distinct persons. Now imagine three lines, three arrows coming or pointing towards the middle of the triangle from each corner and at the center and written on the lines of these arrows is, is. So in other words the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God, the Father is God. Probably would have been better if I brought visual aids of some sort. But you can Google this, Hilary of Poitiers, the triangle, airgram of the Trinity. Right? Persons separate and distinct who are all three God because they share an essence. The analogy that we can maybe use here and there's no, there's no adequate analogy but Christians have, you know, they've tried to posit approximations like for example water, right? You have water that can exist in three different states. You have liquid, vapor and ice and all three are H2O essentially. One essence, three forms. The problem with that is that you can't get all three forms at the same time in place. That's what I'm told at least. So it's inadequate. Another example is or analogy is like an egg. It's very famous analogy. They say God is like an egg. So there's three parts. There's a shell, there's a yolk, there's a white, yet it's one egg. The problem with this analogy is that if I just took the shell of the egg and I put it off to the corner, can I still call that egg? I can't. Now it's just shell. But if I took the son of God and isolated him, he's totally 100% in and of himself God. So that analogy doesn't quite work either. So three persons that share an essence. It's like, it's like three species of the same genera. So imagine you had, imagine you had three species of shark. Right? So what makes a shark? How do we know what a shark is? We have to abstract the essence from attributes. A shark, in other words, a shark has certain attributes. And if it doesn't have those attributes, it doesn't qualify as being a shark. A shark has a dorsal fin. A shark has, is made of cartilage. A shark has teeth. It has these sort of dots on its nose where it can sort of detect motion in the water. It has a vertical tail, right? If a shark didn't have one of these things, it's not a shark. Right? So that's how we establish the essence of shark or sharkiness. Right? So imagine you have a hammerhead shark. You have a great white shark. And you have a bull shark. Right? So you have, you have, you have three, as it were, persons of shark that all share in the essence of sharkiness. Three persons of God. So the bull shark by itself is totally shark, even though it lacks an attribute of the great white, right? Or it lacks an attribute of the hammerhead. The bull shark's head is not like a hammer, but it is a hundred percent shark. This analogy also doesn't work because each one of these sharks has its own consciousness. Right? A great white shark is over eating something. This bull shark over here is, I don't know, just swimming around. But with the trinity, Father, Son, Holy Spirit are inseparable in action and thought. It's called perichoresis in Greek. Whatever the Son is doing, it necessitates the participation at some level of the Father in the Holy Spirit. So the great white shark is eating something. The bull shark has no idea what that shark is doing. So maybe a better analogy is, imagine three people that all share a mind. Right? Three different people that say, I don't know, you have Peter, Paul and Mary. Right? But they all share a mind. It's one consciousness. So if Peter has a thought, Mary and Paul have that thought. If Peter is hungry, the other two as well. If Peter stubs his toe, the other two feel it as well. One mind, one consciousness. So the Son of God, according to Christians, according to Trinitarians, does not have the attribute of uncausation. Only the Father has that. But Christians will argue that still does not deny him his Godness, the essence of Godness. Just as, again, using this crude analogy, just as the fact that the great white shark doesn't have a hammerhead does not deny the great white shark of its full sharkiness, as it were. Right? Okay. I mean, a big question is, how did we get here? How did they get from a basic and simple message of Tahit being in northern Palestine by a Jewish prophet to, you know, three hypostasists, one Usia, Perichoresis, Hama Usian, this type of thing? I would say it's from Hellenistic influence. Right? We have to be careful about that. Because, as we said in the past, the Greeks were very gifted. I mean, the Arabs say, al-Hikmah nazalat al-Thalatha, that wisdom descended upon three people, the Greeks, the Chinese, and the Arabs. Of course, the Arabs also had wahi. But hikmah is not wahi, but it's very close. It's a great type of wisdom they were given. So there's a lot of truth in what they're saying. I mean, Aristotle was incredible intellect, Plato, an incredible intellect. Right? So we can take from Greek thought and, you know, logic, ethics even, as long as it doesn't contradict our essentials. But Greek metaphysics we have to be careful about. And this is what Rosali says. Rosali was not anti-scholastic. He didn't condemn all things Greek or Hellenistic. He was a great proponent of logic. Kostas al-Mustaqim, right, in his text on logic, says the Kostas al-Mustaqim is the intellect, is reason. When Allah says in the Qur'an, judge by a just balance, Rosali says, that's using your reason, using logic. He'll argue that the prophet in the Qur'an, the appeal to logic, logic and arguments. Ibrahim al-Islam is appealing to logic when he's telling Nimrod that, you know, bring the sun from the east, from the west and put it in the east. He's teaching him a lesson that you're not God. You have a very limited volition. You don't have, you're not omnipotent. Right? So when it comes to metaphysics we have to be careful. So that's what I would say is that a significant influence of Hellenistic metaphysics just saturated the early proto-Orthodox Christians, many of whom were basically pagan philosophers before they became Christian, like Justin Martyr as an example. So they took these concepts and they apply it to the, basically the Judaism, the Tohed, that Islam that was by the prophet Isa al-Islam. And of course if you don't have a basis in Sharia, you don't have a basis in law, you don't have a basis in theology, correct theology, then you're going to make these theological and metaphysical mistakes. Okay, so just have a few minutes. The Council of Constantinople revised the Council of Nicaea, and now we have something called the Niceno Constantinopolitan Creed, the Niceno Constantinopolitan Creed of 381, which is the first truly Trinitarian Creed, because all three constituents are now dealt with, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. So now 381 of the Common Era, you have Trinitarianism officially. So this is sort of a Nicene Creed 2.0. It's very much similar. There are some additions. We believe in one God, the Father, the Creator, the Maker of Heaven and Earth, and all things seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the unique Son of God. Now they add the one begotten from the Father before all the ages, right? So they're not just stressing the pre-temporality of the Son, which seems to have been the Aryan position. Aryus says, okay, fine, the Son, the Son predates time. He's the first creation, right? That still doesn't make him God, just the first creation. But what they're saying here in this Creed is no, he's not pre-temporal. He's pre-eternal. The Son shares an essential pre-eternality with the Father. So he's not a possible being. So, you know, if the Son is the first of creation, then he's still just a possible being. But if he has an essential pre-eternality, then he's a necessary being, two types of being, right? There's their mumkinat, possible beings, and then there's wajibul wujud. There's the necessary being, the necessary existent. So that's what they're saying here. He's absolutely necessary. Light from light, true God from true God. That's, now they're saying, they're going back to the Nicene Creed, begotten not made, co-substantial, so on and so forth. And then they say, he became flesh. And then they add by the Holy Spirit and Mary the Virgin. So, they mention here the sort of parents, as it were, of Jesus. Mary is mentioned explicitly now in the Creed. So the status of Mary keeps climbing. By the next ecumenical council, 431, the Council of Ephesus, Mary will be given the title of Theodos, which is sometimes translated as Mother of God, but that's not a good translation. It really means the bearer or carrier of God, right? And then in the 19th and 20th centuries, at the strictly Roman Catholic councils, Mary, the Catholics believed that Mary was assumed into heaven. She never died. She was carried into heaven. And they also espoused the belief in what's known as the immaculate conception that Mary was conceived without sin. She never had original sin. Those are much later developments. And then they continue. And they say something now that's not in Nicene Creed. He was crucified. You notice the Nicene Creed did not say crucified. The Nicene Creed said, suffered and rose on the third day. So they want to make it, that doesn't mean that the bishops at Nicea did not believe Jesus was crucified. Of course, they believed Jesus was crucified, but they just want to be more explicit here. He was crucified. For our sake, under Pontius Pilate, now they mention explicitly the Roman governor of Judea, who was Pontius Pilate. So they want to situate, it seems, Jesus in history, that he was really crucified. It is historical. It's not a myth. It wasn't a rumor. He was crucified by Pontius Pilate. It's not just saying he suffered. What do you mean he suffered? That's so vague. Okay, fine. He was crucified, but can anyone corroborate that? Here there's yes. He was crucified under Pontius Pilate and suffered and was buried. So they do mention suffering too, and was buried. That's something new we get here in this Creed. So it seems like they want to say that it was an actual body, right? Because you have different types of literal dosetism. There's another term for you, dosetism. Very common Christology, Christological belief in the first few centuries of Christianity. You have dosetic Gnosticism that espoused that Jesus never had a physical body. So you can't bury a phantasm. That's what he was. He was just a sort of ghost. You have dosetic substitutionism, this belief that Jesus' body somehow escaped the crucifixion. Someone else was crucified, right? It's called the substitution theory. Someone else, facilities believe that Simon of Cyrene was supernaturally transformed. Transfigured is the term he uses, transfigurato. That Jesus was transfigured to look like Simon and vice versa. That's called dosetic substitutionism. You also have dosetic separationism, also a belief of some of the Gnostics, that okay Jesus had a flesh body, and okay they're crucifying him, but at some point his soul left his body before his body died. So his body didn't actually, so he didn't actually feel the pain as it were of the crucifixion. They simply crucified an empty shell of a body, right? So they're saying here he was buried. He was crucified under Pontius Pilate. He was suffered and he was buried. The body was underground, or he was in the tomb in this case, and rose on the third day and then they add according to the Scriptures. They didn't say that in the Nicene Creed. So this is very important for them, fulfillment of Scripture, that this was foretold to happen, right? The Jews at the time, they had this belief, and I also believed that what the Jews were expecting about the Messiah, by the way, was erroneous, but their belief was this Messiah will be a military leader. That he will come and he will you know, he will take up the sword and he will completely annihilate these heathens, these Romans, and purify the land that God gave us as an inheritance, right? So obviously Jesus didn't do that. So the Jews were going to the early Christians and saying, what kind of Messiah is this? You know, he gets killed? You know, what are you talking about? How can this be the Messiah? So the Christian retort can only be, well you're misreading your Scripture. And I think the Jews were misreading the Scripture. But then now we have compounded misreadings where the Christians are saying, oh look over here in Isaiah 53, there's this prophecy of someone who's going to be crushed for our iniquities, the suffering servant. And this is about the Jewish Messiah, right? Of course nowhere in that text does it even mention the word Messiah at all, but Christians would go back into these texts and they would sort of rework them and interpret them to fit in with what they believed happened to Jesus. Isaiah 53, you know, this person, whoever this person is who is being tortured is saying, he says, I was led as a lamb to the slaughter. They cut me off from the land of the living. That's from Isaiah 53. And the Christians say, yes, that's exactly what happened in Jesus. But if you read the book of Jeremiah, Jeremiah actually says those words and applies it to himself. I was as a dumb lamb led to the slaughter. I opened not my mouth. I was cut off from the land of the living. So it seems whoever wrote Isaiah 53 was sitting in Babylon after the exile and was remembering the words of Jeremiah. Jeremiah is the suffering servant. I mean, it just works out completely by looking at the text. But this is how to justify what happened to Jesus, right? That it was, they say, according to the scriptures and ascended to heaven and a seated at the right hand of the father. And he will come again with glory. So they add that part to he seated at the right hand of the father, not that like he seated next to the father like his vizier or something. No, he seated on the same level. They share a throne. That's what they mean by this. The judge living in the dead. So Jesus according to them will be the judge on the Yom Al-Qiyamah in the Quran says, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, ya'is, Ibn Maryam, and ta'ala, did you ever say to the people that you are your mother are divinities? Jesus not judging anyone on the Yom Al-Qiyamah. You'll be questioned in front of the whole of humanity according to the Quran. Of course, his response, subhanak, glory be to you. Never did I say what I had no right to say. I said, Inna Allaha Rabbil Rabbil Kufa'budu Hadha. So let's see how we're doing that. Yeah, it's nine o'clock now. There's a few more things mentioned in the creed, but basically they just repeat the Nicene Creed. So we've come to the end of our section on Christianity. As you can see that it's quite involved and requires, I hope these sessions just sort of inspire you to do some more research, inshallah. So next week we're going to get into Hinduism. Go way back in time and look at the basic tenets and beliefs of Hinduism, inshallah. We're going to discuss the theological basics of the religion of Hinduism, inshallah. So we covered the Islamic tradition. We've covered Judaism, Christianity. So there's two weeks of this class left tonight and next week. So Hinduism and Buddhism next week, inshallah. Again, we are live here on Tuesday night. This is September 1, 2020. If you're watching live, if you have questions, you can go ahead and type them into the chat box, inshallah. Okay, so Hinduism, the term Hinduism is a neologism. It was probably invented by the British or British Orientalists. It comes from the Greek word Indus, like the Indus Valley. So the ancient Sanskrit name of the religion is sanatana dharma, which means something like the eternal way or the eternal duty, something like that. Now there's different schools of thought in Hinduism, different philosophies, right? Probably the most common or popular philosophy is called Vedanta philosophy. And Vedanta philosophy espouses three propositions. Okay, so number one, first and foremost, our real nature is divine, right? And you're going to see how Hinduism is quite different than the Abrahamic religious tradition. That's the first proposition. Our nature, our real nature is divine. Our collective soul is God, right? Is Brahman. Brahman is the term Sanskrit that I'm going to use interchangeably with God. So we are all God, right? That's the first proposition. Number two, the aim or tell us of our lives, right? The goal of our lives is to realize this divinity within us. Come to this realization, this actualization, right? This taqiq, if you will, to take an Arabic term. This realization that we are divine, right? So not everyone realizes, in fact, most people don't realize that they're actually God, that they're Brahman. So that realization in Sanskrit is called moksha, which has been translated various ways. Transcendental liberation, self-actualization, we'll get to this term, inshallah. But that's the second proposition of Vedanta philosophy. The third is that all major religions are essentially in agreement, right? So Hinduism is a perennialist philosophy. All major world religions are essentially in agreement, because the goal of all of the major religions is the same. So Hinduism is looking at the telas, not necessarily at the method, right? So the method is important, and some methods are better than others. We'll talk about that, inshallah. But it's because of this, what's what Aldis Huxley called a highest common factor, right? That these religions, these major religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, that they share this highest common factor, and that is the unitive mystical experience with God. So mystical union with God. So any major religion that preaches mystical union with God as its goal in this life is a true religion according to Vedanta philosophy. Now in Hinduism, there are two major theological approaches, and this might surprise some people, but there are two major approaches. The first major approach, and by the way, both of these are considered to be correct, right? I mean, Hindus consider Judaism to be a correct religion. So within their own tradition, there are two ways of attaining this self-actualization, what they call moksha. The first way is called nirguna brahmanism, N-I-R-G-U-N-A, nirguna brahmanism. It's also called transpersonalism, God transcendent, right? So what I mean by God transcendent is God is not represented by anything physical. Not that God is imminent, not that God isn't close or kareeb. He is imminent, but he's just not represented, right? And the champion of transpersonalism was a Hindu sage named Adi Shankara, very famous Shankara. He died in the ninth century of the common era. He's as popular, or not quite, but he's somewhat comparable to like Hazali's position in Islam or Aquinas in Catholicism. And he was actually accused of teaching Buddhism because the Buddha was an iconoclast, right? He rejected these, what are known as ishtas and murtis, these sort of icons representing God in his various forms, or idols representing God. However, for Shankara, ishtas were not incorrect, right? They're just not the optimal way. So again, Hinduism is religiously pluralistic, right? But it's not relativistic. So there's a difference between being a religious pluralist, where you say that there's truth and other religions, and many of these other religions will get to your goal. And a relativist, where you say it doesn't make a difference, that all of these religions are on the same plane as it were. They're all the same on the same level. But Hindus do believe that all religions are valid. And the analogy that's used by Shankara is like a man trying to get to the top of his house. That's his goal. He can use a ladder. He can climb a rope. He can take stairs. I mean, there's different ways of doing that. Some ways are easier. So for Shankara, the easiest and quickest way, most effective way, is through Hinduism, whereas the other ways represent the other religions. So no major world religion is invalid. Again, why? Because they have the same goal, the unitive experience with God. So there are good ways of getting to God, and there are better ways. If a religion does not preach this unitive experience with God, then it would be considered an incorrect religion. So what is this unitive experience? Moksha. It's called Moksha in Sanskrit. In Arabic, it's called al-jama'a, which means to join. Mystical union is usually how it's translated. It's a union mystica in Latin. So that's the Catholics that would call it union mystica. It's called a theosis in Greek. And it's called devekut in Hebrew. Devekut means to cling to God. So all of these major religions have this idea. Now, Shankara said that the only accurate description of Brahman, of God, is neti neti. So not this, not this. And we, of course, accurate according to this approach. So imagine, like flying through the universe, you see the sun, you see the moon, neti neti. This is not God. This is not God. You pass by the, I don't know, the Andromeda galaxy. This is not God. This is not God. Until you basically have eliminated the whole of the cosmos. Right? So the world, right, which is called the jagat, the world, the phenomenal world, is aset. Aset means unreal. It's not real. It doesn't really have an ontological reality. Like, you know, like some philosophers would say that evil is not real. There's no ontological reality to evil. It's just the absence of good. Right? Or like, there's no such thing as cold. I mean, we call something cold, but it doesn't have a reality ontologically. There's no essential thing called cold. It's just the absence of heat. Right? So the world is unreal and we are under an illusion. Right? The world is aset unreal and we are under an illusion. Illusion is called maya in Sanskrit. Very important concept. So it is our association with matter and mind. Right? That deludes us away from the truth, which is a realization that we are, in fact, Brahman. Matter in mind. This is called prakriti in Sanskrit. So probably the best text to study to get a sort of firm hold or comprehensive understanding. I mean, Hinduism is an extremely vast religion. Right? And again, it's very, very difficult to distill an entire religion in one hour, but some books are better than others. Like in Buddhism, the Dhammapata is basically all you need unless you want to go into more advanced studies in Buddhism. In Hinduism, the Bhagavad Gita is the best text. Right? And all of these ideas are discussed. You should get a good commentary as well, though. Maybe study it with a guru or a swami. But a very important concept is that mind and matter called prakriti is what causes the illusion. So what is matter? That which is material, like this table here, this computer, my own body. Right? That's an illusion. It's not really there. By mind, they mean individual or subjective psychological constraints or constructs, I should say. Right? Subjective psychological constructs. They are not real. Right? So these delude us into thinking that we are a separate existence consisting of an individual body and mind. So that is an illusion. Right? So behind the, I guess, veil of this world, there is one seamless, unchanging eternal reality. And that's called Brahman. Everything is actually Brahman. Brahman is the real. Brahman is satt, S-A-T, capital S-A-T. The world is a satt. It is unreal. It is only Brahman that is real. And we are under an illusion thinking that it is real. It's not really there. There's no ontological reality. Anything other than Brahman. Matter is not real. So this is called metaphysical idealism, by the way. This is the technical term in Western philosophy. Metaphysical idealism, this idea that only our ideas and some of our ideas in our minds are real or can be real. Only some of our ideas in our minds have the potential of being real if it's a big if, if our minds are purified of its subjectivity. So Hinduism is basically teaching us how to think correctly, how to step out of our subjective psychological constructs and think about reality. And when we can tap into reality, we tap into the Brahman. Okay. So Brahman, according to Nirguna Brahmanism, is satt, chit and ananda. Very important, right? He is satt, S-A-T. He is, what is satt? He is real. Uh-huh. He is real. He is infinite being. That's a better way to translate satt. He is chit, which means knowledge, infinite knowledge. And ananda, which means infinite bliss. This is taken from the Upanishads, which is another very important Hindu text, the Upanishads. Um, so these are not his attributes, right? We're not saying that Brahman has existence. What they're saying is Brahman is existence. He is existence itself. He is the ground of being. We're not saying that he has knowledge. He is knowledge. They're not saying that he is bliss. He is infinite bliss. So these are describing the very essence of Brahman, right? And he cannot be described in any other way except neti neti, according to Nirguna Brahmanism. And this includes calling him creator and destroyer and sustainer, right? So Nirguna Brahmanism then is essentially a form of apophatic theology. Remember this term apophatic, when we talked about the theological positions of Maimonides or his method that he was a negative theologian via negativa apophatic theologian, right? Lahut salbi, as they say in Arabic, right? So not this, not this. God is none of these things. And the only three, the only three names that you can reference to or predicate to the deity, Brahman, is infinite satshit and ananda. Now, according to Nirguna Brahmanism, the atman, atman is loosely translated as soul, right? Like it's not a one to one, right? But if we have to think of a word to use, it would be soul, the human soul. The soul eventually becomes completely identified with Brahman, with God. And in doing so loses every trace of its former distinctness, which again was only illusory to begin with. So distinction, right? And duality, this idea that I am not you, you are not me, this idea that there's heaven and earth, this idea that there's God and creation, that is illusory according to Nirguna Brahmanism. It's Maya, it's an illusion. So here with Nirguna Brahmanism, mystical union then, mystical union, moksha with Brahman is non dualistic. It's a realization. It's not a realization that there is God, right? And you're a human being and you keep your identity and God stays God. That would be a type of dualistic realization. In Hinduism, moksha, in Nirguna Brahmanism, moksha is non dualistic, right? Total annihilation in God's essence. So dualism and all apparent multiplicity will fall away, right? You are Brahman. It's like a drop of fresh water into a lake, total dissolution, right? Atman equals Brahman. If you want to put it sort of mathematically, Nirguna Brahmanism espouses atman equals Brahman. Shemel calls this the mysticism of infinity. So while this method, right, is one of affirming transcendence, neti neti transcendence, tanzi in Arabic, the goal is a realization of absolute imminence, of absolute tashbi, right? The method is one of, the method is one of affirming transcendence, while the goal is a realization of absolute imminence. Because what is the goal? It is a realization that you are, in fact, Brahman. So let's talk more about moksha then. Moksha is the term that is used to describe this, this liberation, this transcendental liberation, self-actualization. I think it was translated a state of super consciousness. Moksha, it comes from muk in Sanskrit, which means to loosen or to set free, to release. It's not related to mucus. A lot of people make that mistake. Mucus is from a Latin etymology. Moksha is transcendental liberation. Spiritual release from samsara. Samsara literally means the wheel, right? Or it means to wander around. What is samsara? It's this endless cycle of birth and rebirth, right? So in the Kabbalah, it's called Gil-Gul-Ha-Nashama, which means sort of the rolling of the soul, right? In Plato, it's called metempsychosis, right? In Latin, it's called reincarnation, right? Reincarnation. So Hindus believe in reincarnation. The Buddhists believe in reincarnation. And a lot of people don't know this. I don't know if I talked about this, but most orthodox Jews, most orthodox Jews believe in reincarnation, right? Metempsychosis. So it is released from the finitude that restricts us to identify the true self, the soul, the atman, right? With Brahman, with God. So atman, Brahman identity. The word Brahman has a dual etymology. The word that is used for God in Sanskrit, a dual etymology. There's brr, brr, brr, which means to breathe. And maybe the word breathe comes from Sanskrit. I don't know, Allah knows. But then also brr, brr in Sanskrit means to be great, right? So the great breath, meaning, you know, life or existence itself. Again, Brahman is the ground of being, right? An infinite, eternal, non-contingent existence. Now moksha is what's known as the fourth purushartha. Purushartha means a stage of life, right? So Hindus believe in these stages of life on earth. So they begin with kama. Kama means pleasure. And kama is to be sought, but not hedonistically, right? It should be tempered and sought intelligently. So like, you know, the kama sutra is written for young married couples. It's not written for people so they can go live a cavalier lifestyle of licentiousness and fornication. So there's kama. And then you advance to artha, which is the next stage. Kama, then artha, right? Which is described as worldly success. You reach your thirties, you reach your forties, right? You come into some wealth. But again, this is not as an end, but as a means to an enriched life. And then you have dharma. And dharma is more of a perennial stage. Dharma means duty, right? And so to participate in these social structure, basically, to do one's role. And this is throughout your life, right? And then finally, we have moksha. So when a person becomes around 60 years old or so, it's expected that this person will now sort of settle down, retire, and pursue moksha, pursue other worldly types of enlightenment. So that's the ultimate goal then, is to actualize Brahman. So atman is the incorruptible soul or the spiritual substance within the body. Again, there's different ways of thinking about atman. Some would say the supreme being residing in every heart, the God within to be actualized, the divine spark, right? So like the name Mahatma, right? Mahatma Gandhi, right? Mahatma is a compound word. It comes from maha, which means big or great, and then atman soul. So Mahatma means the great souled one, the one with a big or great soul. The atman, according to the School of Nirguna Brahmanism, is Brahman, right? Your soul and my soul are actually the very same substance. It's the very same thing, and that thing is Brahman. We just simply need to realize, well, not simply, it's not so simple, but we need to realize that, according to Hinduism. Our individual mortal souls or selves, right? Our individual consciousnesses are subjective selves. Those are not called atman. Those are called jivas, right? And that's in the plural. So there's one atman. My atman is the same as yours, right? There's one soul, because that soul is actually Brahman. But we have individual jivas, right? The jiva is the term for the atman when it is bound to prakriti, right? When it is bound to what? To matter in mind. And matter in mind in the Hindu conception is made of three elements. They're called sattva rajas and temas. These are called the gunnas. I don't want to get too technical here, but again, I highly recommend getting the Bhagavad Gita with a good commentary. But basically it is the gunnas that create these psychological constructs, right? Which is half of prakriti, does matter in mind, that fool us into thinking that we know reality. But in reality, in real reality, capital R, all of our psychological constructs are in illusion. They're not real, right? So the jiva then is the term for the atman that is still unenlightened, has not reached moksha. So one needs to transcend the gunnas. And the gunnas are represented by, we said sattva rajas and temas, tranquility, action and agitation. So this is the state of our minds. We're in one of these three states. We're either in a state of tranquility or we're an action or striving or an agitation, right? So again, we have this idea of this kind of tripartite soul or lower self. We see that in, right? We see it in Plato, we see it in Christianity, even in Islam. I mean, obviously, again, it's not a one-to-one, right? But you have this idea of nafsul lawama, nafsul mutsma inna, right? Nafsul amarabisu, this tripartite division of the nafs. Okay. So that is to say that the person will actualize the God within. And then when that happens, the jiva, right? Free of the impediments of prakriti will realize its divinity. And that's called moksha. Okay. So the world is not real. It is an illusion. It's like a psychological construct, like when you're dreaming. This is an analogy that is used by Hindus. When you're dreaming, you accept the reality, even if it's fantastical, even if strange, very strange things that are breaking natural law are happening. And sometimes people in their dream realize that they're dreaming, that they go on with that reality, right? So that's like the world. So we perceive the world and our individual selves as ultimate and nature as real, but only Brahman is real. And we are all Brahman. Again, I'm speaking in the first person. I don't mean to say we, as in Muslims, are saying this. Don't take these things out of context. These are not things that I necessarily believe in. But I'm speaking in the first person because I'm representing, it's a more sort of effective way of speaking the tradition. Everything is Brahman, right? Everything is Brahman. Everything is one when you reach moksha. Okay. So our jivas, right? Again, the jiva is the what? The individual mortal soul or the Brahman clothed in prakriti, in matter and mind. That jiva must be transcended in order to unite with the atman, which is the incorruptible soul, which is Brahman. In other words, when our atman realizes that it is Brahman, it is in reality Brahman self actualizing, right? Brahman actualizing himself. So it is the jiva with all of its acquired karma that will reincarnate, right? What is karma? Karma. So just as there is, you know, the physical law of cause and effect, you have the moral law of cause and effect, right? So the karma, so the jiva with its acquired karma will reincarnate, should it not reach moksha? And this can go on indefinitely. When one reaches moksha, all multiplicity and materiality and illusion will vanish. And one will come to the realization that there is only one, the Brahman. So this is, if we're to classify this, what type of theology is this? So this is probably best described as pan-antheistic monism, right? Pan-antheistic monism. So what does it mean? Pan-antheistic. Everything is in God, right? God is, sorry, all is in God and monism. God is all there is in reality. So, Kabbalistic Judaism also espouses this type of pan-antheism. But unlike Kabbalistic Judaism and Nirguna Brahmanism, the world, the jagat, is totally illusory. It has not created ex nihilo. It's not created out of nothing. It wasn't created at all, right? It's not actually there. Everything is actually Brahman and we're just blinded by illusion. So in Kabbalistic Judaism, the universe exists and is created, but God is greater than the universe, although the universe is nothing other than God. So in Kabbalism, we have this paradoxical language, which is basically used to communicate the idea that God is both ontologically superior to His creation and simultaneously, mysteriously inseparable from His creation, right? But at the end of the day, both Hinduism and Kabbalistic Judaism and not all Jews believe in the Kabbalah. But at the end of the day, both religions, Hinduism and Kabbalism, would seem to agree with a statement in the Torah, where God is called, that there is nothing else but Him. There's a verse in Deuteronomy chapter four, verse 39, which is used as a proof text by Kabbalistic Jews who believe in pan-antheistic monism, this idea that everything is actually God. This verse says, I am the Lord and there is none else, right? So it's not I am the Lord and there are no other gods. I mean, there are verses like this. They're called in Hebrew, in the Tanakh, in the Hebrew Bible. But this particular verse says, I am God, I am the Lord and there is nothing else. It is only God. God is all and all, right? So in this tradition of Kabbalistic Judaism, as well as in Hinduism, to say that God is separated from creation, to say that God is definitively separated from His creation, is to put a limit on God, is to say that there is some sort of existence separate from God's existence. And that's to put a limit on God. So that can't be true. Okay. But Hindu scholars, they say most people need sort of pointers, right? They need to put their love in some place or upon some form, right? Something tangible, something visible. So hence you have this idea, this concept of the avatars, right? The dash avatara in Sanskrit means the ten incarnations of Vishnu. Vishnu is just one of the manifestations of Brahman, right? So according to this other understanding that we're going to get to called Saguna Brahmanism, S-A-G-U-N-A, Brahman does have attributes and they're positive attributes. And you can describe God as having positive attributes. Remember in Nirguna Brahmanism is Satcitta and Ananda, infinite being, bliss and knowledge, or knowledge and bliss, right? And that's it. Everything else is neti neti. But in Saguna Brahmanism, this allows for a more cataphatic positive expression about Brahman. So Brahman is now described as creator, and sustainer, and destroyer. Brahma, Shiva, Vishnu, right? Or Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva. Vishnu is the sustainer, right? So you have like the ilah and you have the rub. This is how it's taught, right? This is not three gods, right? These are manifestations of attributes of Brahman. And these aren't actual people, right? So Hindus don't believe that Krishna, for example, who was what is it? The ninth or eighth, I don't remember. He's one of the incarnations of Vishnu. They don't believe that he was actually a historical personage. Maybe some of them do, right? But these stories are mythos. It's a myth that's teaching a lesson about God, right? So what does it mean to be an incarnation of Vishnu? Again, Vishnu represents the attribute of Brahman, describing Brahman's concern and his ability to sustain the world, right? So in other words, right? Just like there's an ilah, ilah. The word ilah in Arabic denotes the transcendent God, whereas the rub denotes the one who's close to you, the one who takes care of you. We use this rubba, you rubbi, means someone who takes care of you, right? Your marabbi is the person who raises you, right? So the avatars are then revered and worshiped by most Hindus, right? And they also have and how are they worshiped? Well, they set up idols. They have iconography, right? Because again, according to Hindu scholars, most people need these kind of pointers. They need to see something. It's hard for them to conceptualize things. They need to represent them with some sort of physical form. It's like a C.S. Lewis, the famous Christian author. He says that he has a story where he was a little boy and he was going to go to sleep and they make a prayer with his parents. He asked his parents, what is God? And either his father or his mother said to him, God is formless and infinite. And then C.S. Lewis, he wrote years later that immediately I started thinking about this infinite ocean of tapioca pudding. That's where his brain went as a child, right? Because he's spiritually immature, infinite infinity. How do you conceptualize infinity, right? Formless, formless infinity. What are you talking about? His brain immediately what needed a visual. This leads us then to our second theological approach. And this is sort of the Hinduism of the masses. And this is what most people think is actually all of Hinduism, but it is not. But it is the approach of Saguna Brahmanism, S-A-G-U-N-A. Saguna Brahmanism also known as personalism, right? The Hindu of the masses. So here, oh, there's one more point I wanted to make. Going back to this idea of trying to conceptualize things versus representing them. So remember when we talked about the trinity, right? Remember the diagram of the trinity that I tried to explain, although not very effectively, the triangle of Peter of Poitiers. He said, the triangle is equilateral at every point. There's the person of God, Father, Son, the Spirit. In the middle is God. Three who's, one what. So that's good for starters, but it's also very inadequate compared to the concept in the mind, right? And the concept is nothing compared to the reality, right? Because the reality is ineffable. It is beyond speech. There's this idea of representation, conceptualization, and actualization, right? So Albiruni, who was a great Muslim scholar. He's called Albaronius, I think in Latin, Abu Rayhan Albiruni. He was arguably the founder, Bawadir, right? If you're going to use, you know, the, if you're going to do a paper on the 10 foundations of comparative religion, Albiruni would be probably, and this is by admission of Western scholars as well, Albirunius would be the founder, Alwadir, of that topic. And so he has a very famous book called Tariqul Hind, right? The History of India. And in this book, he distinguishes between what he calls the Khawas, like the elites, and the Amma, the vulgar, or the masses, right? Just like ordinary Hindu believers. And this is, this model is still used today. It's called the two-tiered model of religion, right? So what does he say about this? He says, the latter, the Amma, the vulgar, because they are not philosophically adept. They needed concrete manifestations or representations of the higher being. Therefore, shirk or polytheism became an accidental deviation. And in Hiroth is the word that he uses from Hinduism's essence, which according to Albiruni is monotheistic at the essence of the religion, because everything is Brahman, one God, right? It's a monistic religion. Everything is the same substance, and that is God. So he's saying here, so it is, it is, in other words, it is to heed at its sort of elite philosophical core, but shirk at its popular level. In other words, polytheism is caused by common people's inability to understand non-symbolic language or non-symbolic philosophical and theological matters. They need symbols. For the elites, the religious tradition is monotheistic. But at the popular level, it is manifested as polytheistic and highly anthropomorphic, right? The Scottish philosopher, famous Scottish philosopher David Hume, he actually agrees with Albiruni in his essay. He wrote an essay, he was an atheist, but he wrote an essay, The Natural History of Religion, where he says that he says, the intellectual and cultural limitations among the masses concerning original monotheism caused the vulgar to fall into anthropomorphism and the need for representation. So he says that the whole thing, the whole, the whole history of religion is characterized by, quote, the tension between theistic and polytheistic ways of thinking, right? This two-tiered model. Okay, so that leads us now to the second approach. Saguna Brahmanism, we said personalism. So here God is ishivara. Ishivara means Lord, right? So that's the focus of this approach is the rububia, if you will, the lordship of God, the proximity and nearness of God, ishivara. He's personal with attributes, correspond to his concern for humanity. He's loving, merciful, sustaining, so on and so forth. He assumes unlimited forms, incarnations, called avatars. And of course, we said the most famous of these is Krishna, right? Krishna, who is a major character in the Bhagavad Gita, right? He is the charioteer and interlocutor of Arjuna, who is sort of the protagonist of the story. The Bhagavad Gita is the entire book is a discourse or dialogue really between two men, between Arjuna, who is going to fight in the battle of Kurukshetra. This is a famous battle that might have been historical thousands of years ago in India. A massive battle. The winners would win or take all. He was on one side of the battlefield and then there was other, his cousins and whatnot, called the Kauravas. He was from the Pandavas against the Kauravas. You'd have to read the text to get the details. But anyway, his charioteer was Krishna and Arjuna doesn't know it, but Krishna is a divine incarnation of Vishnu, the attribute of Brahma's lordship, right? And then they have this incredible dialogue, culminating with Arjuna because he doesn't want to fight. He said, these are my brothers. I don't want to fight. And he's actually convinced that he should fight because sometimes fighting is necessary to create peace. Some people, they misinterpret the text and say that it's a text that advocating violence. This text was quoted by Oppenheimer, very famously, one of the chief engineers of the Manhattan Project that developed the hydrogen bomb. They've completely missed the point. The point is, you have to do your duty. Do your dharma. Right? You have to do your duty. Okay, according to Saguna Brahmanism, the perceived differentiation or duality then between God and the soul will always remain. Right? This is indispensable in order to bask in God's beatific vision. Right? So like, how would you appreciate the Grand Canyon if you are the Grand Canyon? You can't appreciate it. Right? How does the sun enjoy a beautiful sunset? These are things one of my professors, a Hindu professor, who's given me these analogies. Right? How does the sun enjoy a beautiful sunset? It can't enjoy it. It can't experience a sunset. It is the sun. So in order to experience God's beatific vision, one must not know that one is God. So this is not a total dissolution of the individual consciousness. Right? The perception of duality is indispensable. It remains. In the Upanishads, the analogy is a single salt crystal dropped into a freshwater lake. Right? So the salt only appears to dissolve completely in the vastness of the water, but something of its existence. However, infinitesimally small, however infinitesimally small, enjoy, remains to enjoy the water. You have a question here? Hearing about the Khawas and the Amma of the Hindus makes me think of the Khawas and Amma of the Muslims. There are also different understandings about Shirk between the two groups. Yeah, I mean this two-tiered approach. Right? I think it's across the board. Right? And you'll notice that people who do not safeguard their Aqidah, it's very important to study Aqidah. Right? Because things can creep into the religion. Sometimes they're harmless. So like the belief that, the belief that the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam is the initial creation, and that all of creation is derived from his light, that's a permissible belief. It's not, you know, it's not, it's not haram to believe that, not shirk to believe that, because one still maintains that he is creation. Right? So it's jaiz to believe that. But the hadith that the, that is based upon, I mean there's indications and other things in the Qur'an and things like that. Nothing explicit. But the explicit mention of that in the hadith is almost universally believed or maintained by the muhaditheen as being modour. It's a fabricated hadith. It could still be true. It doesn't mean it's definitely false. Right? But that's an example of something coming into the masses that was embraced. And that's a different situation because it's still a permissible belief. But there are other things that could come in. Cultural ideas can come into the religion. Right? That could impact one's sound akhida. Right? The beautiful thing about Islam though is that the fundamentals of the religion can be understood even by the simplest of people. That doesn't mean that the religion is simple. Right? But it means that the religion is really comprehensive and speaks to all of humanity. And it speaks to people in different ways. Right? So a simple Bedouin can grasp, hola wallahu ahad, allahu samad, lam yalid, walam yudad. One of my teachers told me what, he said that, and he was a convert and he said that he was overseas. And he said that one of the Bedouin said to him, what were you before you were Muslim? And he said, I was, my teacher, he said, I was a Christian. And the Bedouin said, what do they believe? And he said, well, they believe that Jesus is the Son of God. And then the Bedouin said, well, that kind of makes sense because Jesus didn't have a father. And then he said the other Bedouin hid him with his stick and said, lam yalid, walam yudad. Right? And he said, oh, yeah, yeah, I knew that. Right? So, so that's, that's, that's simple. God does not be getting, nor does he be, nor, God does not be getting, nor was he begotten. Now, you can write a 500 page dissertation on the theological intricacies and nuances of surats of ikhlas. That's fine, but that's not necessary. Hinduism, however, such as, it's such a deep philosophical religion. Right? I mean, the question is, how does one get to moksha? It's really a type of, of, of meditative learning that is very difficult for the fast majority of the people. And that's why you have these castes, right? The Jati system, the caste system, which is, you know, in theory abolished, but still practiced in, in India. I mean, like a consciousness of the caste system, still very much there. So like the Brahmins at the top, these are sort of the scholars and, so they don't have to do, I mean, they're just sort of, they have comfortable lives, they can, they can, they can take time and, and read and study and practice these yogas, right? Because it's expected for them to enter into a state of moksha quickly, whereas the people below them, especially people at the bottom of the caste system, right? And the caste Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras. The Shudras are sort of the servants, the unskilled labors. I mean, what type of meditation can they do? So what, so the, the yoga that's prescribed for them is really a type of worship or devotion to these representations of Brahman, right? So basically worshiping idols, right? But the higher ways, the more enlightened ways is a type of learning and meditation. And then you have the Dalits under them, the untouchables, which is a sort of new caste that we'll maybe talk about in a minute here. Yeah, so definitely this two-tiered approach. You know, it's, it's a, there's also a type of, I would say, a type of providential protection for the Muslims, right? I mean, there's, there's several hadith where the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam said, I don't fear shirk for you after me. And he's Harithun Alaikum, right? He's the most covetous or he's the, he's, he has the most concern for us. So he's giving us this advice, good advice coming from him obviously that I don't really, I don't fear shirk for you. It doesn't mean that people won't enter into shirk. It's just not a major concern. But I fear these, you know, these fitan in these, in these, these other areas, right? So, I mean, nobody in the history of Islam, no sect or group that claimed to be upon Islam ever came out and said, we worship the Prophet. That's our aqidah. This, God has protected the Prophet from that. I mean, people have come out and worship said Ali, right? The Alawiya believe that he's God. He's a divine incarnation. He's an avatar of Allah, this type of thing. This happened with Ali, but not with the Prophet, right? So we see a type of, you know, a type of preservation. God protects the Quran. He protects the Ummah, right? Okay. But thank you for your question. And then the other question. Oh, are you the one who debated David Wood? Yes, I debated, I debated Woody, as I call him, 2007, a long time ago. I debated David Wood. Yeah. Okay. So the question then becomes, how can both approaches be true at the same time? So you have Nirguna Brahmanists saying that God is transcendent. He's not represented by idols. He doesn't incarnate. You have the Saguna Brahmanists saying God has personal attributes. He can be represented by Murtis and Ishtas and avatars. So either Brahman, so either Atman is Brahman or he's not, right? God is either represented or he's not. Now the truth is, according to Hindus, that Brahman is above representation and Atman is Brahman because the world is, at the end of the day, illusory and ultimately God is all in all. However, this method of Saguna Brahmanism and this realization are not necessarily a requisite of moksha according to Hinduism. In other words, what I'm trying to say is, because representation and continuing to conceive of Brahman as other can and does lead to moksha, then it cannot be wrong. It's just not the higher way. It's not the best way. Right? So there's two ways to Brahman. One is better because it's more philosophical. It requires more thinking, more thought, more meditation. But the other way, Saguna Brahmanism, the way to God through devotion is also a valid way because it does lead to moksha. The achiever of moksha is called a sannyasin, usually an old man, sannyasin. He's described in the Bhagavad Gita, one who neither hates nor loves anything, cut off from the world like a wild goose, no fixed home but wanders north and south in the lakes and the skies. So basically he becomes like a homeless mendicant, taking no thought of the future and indifferent about the present. He lives identified with the eternal self and beholds nothing else. So in Islamic sort of Sufi terms, we would say like there's no baqa ba'ad al-fana. Again, fana is not the same as moksha. There's some similarities but it's not a one-to-one. But just to use the terms in technical terms of the people of Tasawwuf, there's no sobriety. There's no coming back to one's senses after one experiences annihilation in God. So one remains either raptured in the beatific vision if his method was saguna Brahmanism or immersed in the thought of divine realization if his method was nirguna Brahmanism. Okay, the last thing I'll mention here, how do you get to moksha? The four yogas. Yoga means a path, the four turuk if you want or madhahib. And what are they? They're called niyana yoga, spelled with a J, J-N-A-N-A, niyana yoga, which is usually practiced by the Brahmins. Then you have raja yoga, which is practiced by the kashatryas. Then you have karma yoga, which is practiced by the veishyas, those are farmers and artisans. And then you have bhakti yoga, which is practiced by the shudras, the servants and unskilled laborers, the vast majority of the people. So what do these four yogas represent? Basically, niyana yoga is experiencing moksha through knowledge, learning, studying, meditating, karma yoga. Sorry, raja yoga is through these sort of psychosomatic experiences, where there's reading coupled with movements of the body. Karma yoga is through work, right? Finding God through labor. And then bhakti yoga is through love, right? Or devotion, the worship of representations of the Brahmin. So we'll stop here, inshallah. Again, I highly recommend, if you're interested in learning more about Hinduism, getting the Bhagavad Gita with a good commentary and reading it, inshallah. So next week, we're going to finish our course with our final class, and it's going to be on a religion that is derived from Hinduism, like Christianity derived from its mother religion, Judaism, and that is the religion of Buddhism, inshallah. Subhanaka la ilmah, subhanaka la ilmah, la ilmah illa ma alam tana illa ka antal alim al hakeem, wa la hawla wa la quwwata illa billahil ali al-adheem. As-salamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. This is our final session of this course, inshallah. So we will be looking at our final religion, which is the religion of Buddhism, inshallah. I'm just seeing if I can get to the video here so I can follow along with the questions and comments. It doesn't seem to be coming up. I'll check back again, inshallah. So Buddhism, like Hinduism, is an extremely vast and nuanced religion. We'll just touch on some basics, inshallah. It is a sort of Hindu Protestant reform movement, if you will. It's like Islam is a Judeo-Christian reform movement, so Islam is kind of like a legalistic reformation of Judaism as well as a theological reformation of Christianity. So Buddha is sometimes referred to as the Martin Luther of Hinduism, the great reformer. The word Buddhism comes from buddh, which is a Pali word. Pali is an ancient Indian language. It's related to Sanskrit. It's kind of the language of the masses, the Amia language, whereas Sanskrit is more language of the elite, the language of scripture. It comes from buddh, which means to wake up or to know something. So buddha can be translated as the enlightened one, the awakened one, post-modernist might say the woke one. So like Islam, Buddhism is named after the attribute. It seeks to cultivate. So with Islam, I'm bringing up the video now. So there's very few people watching live, but you're free to ask questions, inshallah. So Islam hopes to engender submission to Allah and so Buddhism hopes to engender a type of enlightenment. Okay, so Buddhism is not named after the Buddha. That's a common misconception. Like Christianity is named after Christ, Judaism is named after Judah. Buddhism is named after the enlightened state or state of mind, state of being that the Buddha experienced. So first of all, who is the Buddha? Well, the Buddha was born Prince Siddhartha Gautama in 564 before the Common Era. This was a time, the sixth century before the Common Era, where you have this kind of proliferation of prophets all around the world, really, and sages. It's really called the axial age. That's a term that a German philosopher coined, Achenzeit in German, the axial age. So you have, for example, the Buddha here in India, the Mahavira also in India, you have Confucius in China, you have Zoroaster in Iran or in Persia, and then you have a fair amount of prophets in ancient Palestine during this time. So he was born in Lumbini, which is modern day Nepal. It's near the Indian border. He was a prince. His parents were royalty. His father was King Sudodhana and his mother was Queen Maya. They were the royalty of a family of a small kingdom called Shakya. They were of the Kshatriya caste. That's the administrative and ruling caste. You could read about the biography of the Buddha in books, but according to his biographers, or his sira, if you will, the sacred history of the Buddha, the Buddha's mother, Queen Maya, had a dream one night that a white elephant offered her a lotus flower, and then the elephant entered into the side of her body. Now, Buddhists do not believe that this was some kind of miraculous conception, like a virginal birth of Christ or something like that. They accept that King Sudodhana was the Buddha's biological father. The dream simply made Maya aware of her pregnancy and certainly of its importance. So the Queen had her dream interpreted by Brahmin diviners. These are kind of spiritual fortune tellers. They were the intellectual class. And she was told that her son would become either what's known as the Chakravartin, which is kind of the universal king of India, the one who would unite all 16 kingdoms of India, or he would become one of the greatest of spiritual masters. So either super king or super sage, but not both. So Prince Siddhartha Gautama was born, and according to his biography, he was born with 32 distinct birthmarks on his body, which was interpreted by the diviners to mean that indeed he was sort of destined or marked as it were for some sort of future greatness. Buddhist hegeographers also mentioned that Siddhartha actually began walking immediately upon birth, and wherever his foot touched, a lotus flower would spring up. And he also spoke as an infant according to his biography. And he's reported to have said, I am the chief of the world. I am foremost in the world. So we have these kind of highly realized I am statements, not unlike what we saw, for example, in the Gospel of John. The Brahmin seers told his father that if Siddhartha remained close to the palace, right, if he remained attached to palace life, if he if he sheltered his son within the confines of the palace, then he would indeed become the universal king, right? He'd become the chakravartin. And so they said to him basically, you need to keep him interested in the throne and political power. So surround him with beautiful young and healthy people. Don't let him see the true society, the problems of society. So Siddhartha had a luxurious upbringing. He had three palaces. He had access to 40,000 dancing girls. He was very handsome. Yet he was profoundly unhappy. Okay. So his father thought, well, we'll get him married off. Maybe that'll cheer him up. So he was married at 16 years old to a girl named Yosadhara. And so his father concealed from him three things, right? Because he was advised to by the Brahmin diviners. So his father concealed from him sickness, decrepitude, and death. And the servants were literally instructed that one that they would do a kind of a clean sweep of the area whenever Siddhartha would go out on his daily chariot ride with his charioteer Chandaka. And then we have what's known as the legend of the passing sights, the legend of the four passing sights. So on one occasion in his 29th year, Siddhartha's curiosity got the better of him. And he ventured beyond the palace grounds. And he saw a very old man hunched over who could barely walk. So he said, Chandaka, who is this? What is this? And Chandaka, his charioteer said, this is decrepitude, right? And then Siddhartha said to himself, well, that's going to happen to me. So it's not like he didn't know that he that he was going to get old. Of course, he knew that he just never really thought about it until now. It's like all of us know we're going to die. But go into a hospice, work in a hospice for a few days, and you're just surrounded by death. A hospice is a type of hospital that people go and to die. It's end of life care. And it's a very sobering experience. So like one of the positive effects of the pandemic is that it really forces us to remember death. And when we do that, and it's not sort of a morbid fixation, when we remember death, we actually begin to appreciate life, the importance of life. Right? So it really sort of hit Siddhartha like a ton of bricks, I'm going to get old if I even get old. And then he saw a diseased man lying on the ground with boils all over his body. And he said, what is that? And the charioteer said that is sickness. And then he saw people carrying a corpse wrapped in a shroud. And he said, what is that? And he said, this is death. Those are the three sites. And then a fourth site, he saw a monk with a shaved head wearing a yellow robe with a very serene appearance and a flashing insight, an epiphany suddenly came to Siddhartha at finding fulfillment in the physical and the pleasures of the flesh is in vain because all things in the world are impermanent. They perish. Right? Psychologists say that the apprehension of death is really the end of childhood. When a child suddenly comes to this realization that they're going to get old and die, that's really the end of their childhood. They can never go back to that age of ignorance and bliss and fantasy. So Siddhartha had a son in Brahula, which he named, it means fetter or bond, like handcuffs, like ball and chain, something like that. And the idea here was that he thought that children, the idea is basically that children can be a source of distraction for people who are highly intelligent, people who are very contemplative, people who are very academic and being a parent is basically a full-time job, so it's seen as a distraction. So his hedonistic lifestyle kind of just left him dead on the inside and his family responsibilities prevented him from finding contentment. He felt like he was literally in a prison, which is interesting because there's a hadith that says, a dunya siginul mu'min, the world is a prison of the believer. Now shortly thereafter, you have what's known as the great going forth. So there's a key element to what's known as the monomyth, the monomyth known as the hero's journey. What is a monomyth? So a monomyth is a series of events in a story that seem to occur in multiple stories across multiple cultures. So one of the most common monomyths is called the hero's journey. And the hero's journey really has three parts. The first part is called separation. There's some sort of separation. The hero is separated. The second part involves trials, victories, and some sort of apotheosis, apotheosis, some sort of enlightenment experience. And then the third part is a return. So we see this in, for example, in the story of the Buddha. We see this in the epic of Gilgamesh. We see this in the story of the biblical Jesus. We see it in Star Wars with Luke Skywalker, the hero's journey. So Siddhartha, he leaves the palace in search of meaning in his life. He went from a sheltered prince to a wandering ascetic. He went from being royalty to being a homeless mendicant, someone who just begs for things. He left his wife and his child behind. He learned Raja Yoga from Hindu sages. And eventually Hindus claimed him and deified him. And he actually became the ninth avatar of Vishnu. Even though Siddhartha was very critical of Hinduism, at least the Hinduism of his day. And he certainly never claimed to be divine, at least not in any unique way. So remember, in Hinduism, we're all divine. We're all unrealized avatars. We're all God, but we just don't know it. The Buddha did not claim to be an avatar like Krishna did. In fact, he denied the very existence of the atman. So this is very strange. This is very un-Hindu of the Buddha to do this. That he denied the existence of the atman, the eternal divine soul within each of us. We could talk more about that, inshallah. Okay. So during this period, now it's in his early 30s, he met a small group of monks who practice an extreme form of self-mortification, extreme form of zuhud. What is self-mortification? This is when the flesh is deliberately punished or agitated in order for the mind to focus on the spiritual. So fasting in every major religion has a form of self-mortification. There are different degrees of it. Some are more excessive. It's like fasting is a form of self-mortification. Abstinence is a form of self-mortification. The shia, they flog themselves. The sunnis would say that's an extreme form. They have something seen as zani, where they strike the chest. It seems to be okay. And then they have something called zanjir zani, where they take a chain and they whip themselves called matam. And then they even have something called qameh, where they take these knives and they cut themselves and they bleed. That's certainly something that is condemned among the ahru sunna wal jamal. But you see that there are different forms of self-mortification in different religions. So the Buddha, he met this group that was into this type of thing. And he thought that this must be the answer. So he practiced a highly extreme form of fasting. I mean a lifestyle that was basically the polar opposite of his previous lifestyle, 180 degrees. So he ate, according to his biography, he ate six grains of rice a day. He's quoted as saying, when I thought that I would touch my stomach, I took hold of my spine. So he's basically completely emaciated. He's wasting away. And his extreme lifestyle almost killed him. There's this iconic story that Siddhartha was on the brink of death about to lose consciousness when he perceived this little girl come out of nowhere with a bowl of rice pudding. And he and she fed him the rice pudding and that revived him. The experience taught him the futility of extreme self-mortification. No moksha, remember this term moksha, released from samsara enlightenment, the super conscious state. No moksha resulted from him torturing his body. However, the experience also taught him the principle of the middle way, very important concept in Buddhism, the middle way between prince and pauper, between indulgence and asceticism, between hedonism and self-mortification, between ifrat and tafrit, these Arabic terms, excess and shortcoming. The middle way is called madhyamika in Pali, madhyamika. So sensuality slowed his spiritual progress while mortification weakened his intellect. There's a question somebody's asking me about questions about Christianity on email. Will I reply here? Oh, I'll answer your email, inshallah. I've been behind on my emails. I'll answer them later after class, inshallah. Okay, so the middle way, what is the middle way? Giving the body what it needs to function well and keep the intellect sharp. And more than this is considered excess. So six years after the great growing fourth at age 35, okay, one night he entered a city called Gaya in northeast India and he sat under a fig tree called the bow tree, which is short for the buddh tree, the tree of knowledge, the tree of enlightenment. And he started his yoga as usual and suddenly amazingly profound truths were revealed to him or were intuited by him. And he sensed enlightenment. He sensed that the mystical experience was near. So he vowed not to rise from that spot until he had achieved it. And that spot is called the immovable spot. And Buddhists to this day, they make pilgrimage to this site. Apparently the tree, the actual tree is still there. Some say that it's not the actual tree, but it's a fig tree that grew there after. But they're certain that it is the exact spot, at least the Buddha store. Now while meditating in that spot, the god of pleasure and desire named Kama came to the Buddha and and paraded these three voluptuous women in front of him to distract him. And Siddhartha remained focus. Then Mara, the god of death, assaulted him with a hurricane falling boulders, torrential rains, and his minions of demons shot arrows at Siddhartha, which Siddhartha converted into flowers, and they fell harmlessly on the ground. Now buddha scholars mentioned that Kama and Mara here were really just aspects of Siddhartha himself. These are just modalities of his own mind symbolized as gods of temptation. So Raja Yoga, one of the steps of Raja Yoga, the sixth step, is to completely control one's thoughts, one's khawater. Great Sheikh Abul Hassan An-Nadoui, he said, if you can pray, and some say this is a hadith, Allahu Alam, that if you can pray two cycles of prayer without one extraneous thought, then without any khawater, then you've achieved wilaya at sainthood. So with Kama, we might say this was sort of his khawater nafsani, they're being activated and being mastered, and then with Mara, the khawater shaitani, which are activated and being mastered. So basically he's mastering his thoughts and impulses. Then Mara came a final time just before enlightenment and asked him, okay, you're almost at enlightenment, but who is going to witness to your teaching? Who's going to follow you? So like shaitan, he advocates nihilism. What's the point of this? Who cares? Just do what you want to do, just do you, this type of thing. It doesn't mean anything. So then Siddhartha lifted his right index finger and he struck the earth with it, and the earth began to rumble and quake. The meaning is that the earth will bear witness to his teaching. Then Mara fled and his constriction had passed and he experienced the great awakening, the great buddha. There's a term for this called nirvana that we'll talk about. And so he was there for seven days in that spot, seven days of bliss, and then on the eighth day he thought, well maybe I should leave, so he intended to rise, and then another wave of enlightened bliss washed over him, so 49 days total he remained raptured in that spot. So that was his apotheosis, right? That was his apotheosis. So according to the commentary tradition of the Dhammapada, the first words uttered by the buddha after his awakening are actually recorded in chapter 11 verses 153 and 154. So I'll read those quickly, the very famous passage. Again, like I said last week, and let me just read this here, middle way similar to virtue ethics. Yeah, exactly. That's a good way. And I forgot to mention what's happening in Greece during this axial age, right? You have Plato and Aristotle, and they're all preaching the middle way, Confucius also, the golden meme, Aristotle, the golden meme, Zoroastra, the golden meme, right? Oh yeah, I'll answer your question about Thomas, the Lord of me and the God of me, how to refute it. Okay, I can answer that very quickly. Just kind of, we'll take a break from the Dhammapada for a minute. So in my videos and in my writings and lectures I say that there's nowhere in the New Testament in the four gospels where Jesus is addressed as Ha Theos, the God. He's called Theos, but I said that has a nuanced meaning. It could mean a sort of sanctified agent of God, and that's how it's used in the in the New Testament and outside the canon in Greek by Philo, etc. But now in John 20, I believe verse 28, when the resurrected Jesus appears to the disciples, Thomas is there, and when Thomas realizes it's Jesus, he says, my Lord and my God, right? He says Ha Theosmu, Ha Kuriosmu, something along those lines. So he used a definite article, the God of me, the Lord of me. So this, this is obviously, this is obviously Te Adjubiyah. It's exclamatory. It doesn't mean that Thomas is calling Jesus God. Thomas is not saying you are my God, you are my Lord. What is he saying? Oh my God and Lord, right? If your teacher was killed and you thought he was killed and you actually knew he was killed, and then you saw him walking around three days later, what would be your reaction? Right? Your reaction would be, oh my God. So even some Christian commentators, they say that Thomas' words here are really addressed to the Father, not to Jesus. How does being resurrected qualify Jesus as God? A resurrected body doesn't equate divinity. That's a non-secretary argument. There are many people resurrected. Jesus himself resurrected Lazarus. When Lazarus showed up to his friends later, did they say to him, oh my, you are my God. Right? So I think it's obvious here. It's, this reminds me of a scene in a movie, Superman 2, an old movie, Christopher Reeve, Superman, or General Zod, right? He's in the, he's in the Oval Office and he says, and he says to the President of the United States, kneel before Zod. So the President kneels. And then the President's kneeling, he says to himself, he says, oh my God. And then Zod says, oh, that's, that's Zod, not God. Right? So the President was not talking to Zod. He was talking to God. Right? So Thomas here is not, is not calling Jesus God. That doesn't make any sense. Why would he call Jesus God? Because Jesus was resurrected. So I mean, that's, that's my answer for that. So I think Daniel Wallace, I think he calls it something like a, a, a vocative of a dress or something, a nominative vocative. That doesn't make any sense. He considers it some sort of vocative. I have to look up the, in other words, a vocative is actually like calling on somebody, calling on the Father here. Okay. Okay. So, sorry. So he said that the Buddha experienced enlightenment. Okay. And, and after his awakening, he, he, his words, the first words that he said are recorded in the Dhammapada. So I was going to say that just as the Bhagavad Gita, right, has, is, is a very good comprehensive text, very short, very comprehensive, kind of distilling the entire religion of Hinduism into one text. The Dhammapada is like that for Buddhism. Buddhist, the Buddhist canon of, of scripture is extremely vast. The Dhammapada is a one-stop shop unless you want to get more deeply into these things. But anyway, he says, through many births, I've wandered on and on, searching for but never finding the builder of this house. So the language here is, is, is kind of veiled. It's very symbolic. You have to kind of decode it through many births, right? I've wandered on and on. So he's talking about the cycle of reincarnation, it seems like, searching for but never finding by finding the commentators of the Dhammapada, say that means mastering. I never mastering the builder of this house, the builder is desire, the house is the ego. I've never mastered, I've never mastered the, the desire of my ego to be born again and again is suffering. And then he says, house builder, in other words, desire, you are seen and seen here means like exposed, right? I've, I've exposed you. You will not build a house again. You will not build a self again. So now he is selfless. All the rafters are broken rafters meaning defilements, like these vices, these diseases of the heart, these are the rafters, they're broken. The rafters are holding up the house, which is called ego. The ridgepole, that's kind of like this, like the main sort of support destroyed. So the ridgepole is ignorance, right? Which holds up the ego. That's destroyed. The mind gone to the unconstructed, he says, right? So the mind has experienced the real al-haq, right? The real with a capital R, that which is not a construct, right? The house is a construct, the house is constructed, right? The mind has left the self. The mind has destroyed the self and has gone to the unconstructed, the real. He has reached the end of craving, he says. He has reached the end of craving. So he has reached the end of house building or ego building, no more ego, right? So after this experience, the Buddha walked over a hundred miles to a place called Benares and delivered his first sermon. What was the title of his sermon? It was on the four noble truths and the middle way. So the four noble truths is what he actually intuited before reaching enlightenment. It is really the heart of his teaching. We'll come back to it in a minute, inshallah. But with respect to the middle way, his way was between basically trends in Hinduism. So at one extreme, you have being overindulgent, right? Too much focus on the first two of the purusharthas. Remember the stages of life in Hinduism? The first two are kama and artha, the pleasure and wealth. So he noticed a trend among the Hindus that they're really focusing only on these two really. But also the trend of being overly superstitious and speculative about things. So the Buddha wants us to experience things. He doesn't like this kind of empty speculation and superstition. He's not about theorizing, he's about doing. He's not about pontificating, he's about experience. And the other trend that was developing on the other extreme, and he had experimented with this, was this extreme self-mortification. And this was the way of the Mahavira, the founder of Jainism, who was about 37 years earlier than Siddhartha. And one of the two major sects of Jainism called digambara, which means skyclad, only naked male monks who practice an absolutely extreme form of non-violence can achieve moksha. Only naked male monks, and they call it jina, that's a different term they use, who practice an extreme form of non-violence, which is called ahimsa. Now all dharmic religions, by dharmic religion I mean Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, all of these dharmic religions, they all stress a level of ahimsa, they all stress a level of non-violence. But with Jainism, I mean you can't cook meals at night because you might kill an insect. When you walk you have to sweep the streets before you, because you might kill an insect. When you sleep you have to carry your little broom, because if you roll over you might kill an insect, you have to sweep before you roll over, somehow you have to wake up. Jain monks, they pull their hair out because they think it's too luxurious, this type of thing. The Dhammapada, it was all Buddhist scriptures were written well after the death of the Buddha. So the Dhammapada was written several decades, several decades after the death of the Buddha. It was compiled by some of his students, but it is accepted generally amongst all Buddhists. There may be different versions of it. I didn't do much textual criticism on the Dhammapada to prepare for this class, but inshallah ta'ala I can expand on that later. But nothing was really written during the lifetime of the Buddha. And if it was, it wasn't compiled until much, much later. Okay, and that's the same with like, like Plato, you know, didn't write anything. Sorry, Socrates, Socrates didn't write anything. We know about Socrates through Plato. Isa alaihi salam apparently did not write anything. His students wrote about him. Okay, so soon after the Great Awakening, so Dhartha formed, actually at this point, we're going to, yeah, I want to get to the noble truths. So the heart of the Buddha's teaching is called the Four Noble Truths, right? This is the Buddha's path for attaining salvation. So Four Noble Truths, three of them are theoretical, but they're based on experience and observation. And then one is practical, it's a method, it's a yoga, right? So this is mentioned in Dhammapada chapter 14, Verses 186, 192. Again, this is really sort of the central elements of the faith of Buddhism right here in 14190. So I'll begin actually a little bit earlier, 186 to one night. So 186, it says, not even with a shower of gold coins would we find satisfaction in sensual craving. Knowing that sensual cravings are suffering, that they bring little delight, the sage does not rejoice, even in divine pleasures, meaning like higher or heavenly pleasure. One who delights in the end of craving is a disciple of the fully awakened one, in the Buddha. One who delights in the end of craving. People threatened by fear go to many refuges, the mountains, the forest, the parks, trees, and shrines. None of these is a secure refuge, none is a supreme refuge. Not by going to such a refuge is one released from all suffering. But when someone going for refuge to the Buddha and to the Dharma and the Sangha, these are very important. This is called the three jewels of Buddhism, right? It's called the sort of the triple refuge of the Buddhists. You go to the Buddha, right, the master, you go to the Dharma, the Dharma is pronounced Dhamma in Pali, the Dhammapada, the path to virtue, the path to truth, right? The Buddha, the truth, or the path to truth, and the Sangha, the order, the order of monks, right? So one who is going for real refuge goes to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, sees with right insight the four noble truths, the four noble truths that lead to the end of suffering. So what are these four noble truths, right? Okay, so, okay, so first of all, to use sort of a medical analogy, wrap our head around this type of thing. So you go to the doctor and you say, I feel sick, I'm suffering. So the doctor says, what are your symptoms? What are your symptoms? And so, yes, inshallah, brother, I'll give you my, I'll respond to your email, so you'll have, inshallah, my contact information, inshallah, can the Vedas have prophecies of the Prophet Muhammad SAW? Yeah, there's, there are people who wrote books on this, you know, and there's different ways of understanding the Vedas, you're right, that the Vedas are really sort of the, the, the most holy of scriptures in Hinduism. And there have been many studies on them and many scholars have extracted prophecies there. That's certainly true. Okay, so going back to this medical analogy, so what are your symptoms? And so you say I have sore throat, cough and wheezing. So he says, ah, you have strep throat, that's called a diagnosis, right? So you have symptoms, diagnosis. And then you say to the doctor, what are my chances? Like, give it to me straight. And the doctor says, good, your chances are good. That's called a prognosis. And you say, okay, what can I do? So he gives you antibiotics, amoxicillin. So that's a, it's called a prescription. You have symptoms, diagnosis, prognosis and prescription. Okay, keep that in mind. So noble truth number one, life or existence, the world is inherently full of evil and is suffering. And the word for suffering is dukkha, D-U-K-K-H-A, that's the Pali word, dukkha. It literally means dislocated. It's actually used for like dislocated joints, right? So when your joint is dislocated, it's hard to move. It's painful. It's frustrating. So life is like this. It is frustrating physically, intellectually and spiritually. And in fact, this truth had a profound, the first truth of the Buddha had a profound effect on Western philosophers, especially those who are considered pessimistic or nihilistic philosophers. For example, the German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, who was a great influence on Nietzsche. Schopenhauer was a nihilist who said that our lives are just meaningless tragedies and we fulfill one desire just to become a slave to another desire in his endless cycle until death. Our very existence is a source of suffering. So death is a type of sweet relief for Schopenhauer. He calls it a triumph, although he did not advocate suicide enigmatically. So this sounds very similar to Buddhism. Schopenhauer said, however, if you could practice a bit of compassion and engage in the arts like music, and that gives you a bit of relief from the suffering, but it's only temporary. It's just kind of a bandaid. So his prognosis is bad. There's no way you can get rid of the suffering and then you die and that's when it goes away. But the Buddha is more optimistic. You can overcome suffering, right? There is a cure for suffering. Okay. And in these philosophers, many of them admit, I think Schopenhauer's dog's name was Atman. I think he named his dog Atman or Jiva. I think it was Atman, one of those terms. So he's also highly influenced by Hinduism. You can make a case that Kant is also influenced by Hinduism because Hinduism talks about this illusory world, the jagatismaya. It's not real. The real world is behind it. And Kant talks about the phenomenal world, phenomena, right? That we see, but that's not the real world. The real world is called the numinal world, which is behind that world, which you can't have access to. So this is where Kant differs with Hinduism. But there's a strong thesis that can be made that these Western philosophers are highly influenced by Buddhism and Hinduism. Okay. So according to the Buddha, there are six moments of dukkha in life, six moments of suffering. These are the symptoms of dukkha. So trauma of birth. Freud actually denied that. Sickness, decrepitude, right? Decrepitude fills you with fear and anxiety. You know, you can, you know, seeing your bodies and intellect sort of waste away. And this relates to the next one, phobia of death. It's called Thanatophobia, fear of death. He mentions to be tied to what one hates. You know, think about the, you know, millions of people sitting in a cubicle going to jobs that they hate, right? That's a big symptom of dukkha, right? Or think of like a woman who is maybe pressured by her family to marry some guy and then he turns out to be abusive. So then she becomes very bitter. She becomes very resentful. So then she starts abusing her own daughter-in-law because she was abused. And then finally, separation from what one loves, separation from what one loves. Yeah. And that's interesting that no self of Buddhism similar to a bundle theory of you. Yeah. I never thought about that. We're just a bundle of ideas. That's interesting. I'll look into that, inshallah. But yeah, I mean, the influence, and some might say maybe they weren't directly influenced, but sort of great minds just sort of come to similar conclusions. And I think that's true as well. Obviously, we disagree with David Hume on many issues. Okay. So that's the first noble truth. The world is in a state of suffering. The second noble truth, the cause is tanha. What is tanha? Desire, selfish craving, private fulfillment, egoism, attachment to stuff, attachment to an identity even, right? So that's also causing suffering, an identity of some sort. Also, fake concepts, fake beliefs or false beliefs, false philosophies, right? So when we're self, when we're selfless, we're free. Remove the ego and you'll remove the suffering. So what is causing the symptoms? What is causing dukkha? It's called tanha. Tanha is the diagnosis. Tanha is the disease. Extrep throat is the disease that's causing wheezing and coughing and that suffering, right? In other words, the only reason why you're suffering is because you have tanha, desire and attachment. So it said that a man came to the Buddha and he said, I want happiness. And the Buddha said, look at that sentence. I want happiness. Remove the eye, eye, ego in Latin and Greek. Remove the ego. What do you have left? He said, well, want happiness. Want is tanha, desire. Remove the desire. What are you left with? He said, happiness. He said, well, there you go, right? So remove the ego, remove want and you're left with happiness. Now, what is the prescription? Oh, sorry. Before we get to that, the third noble truth is that tanha can be overcome. It's the prognosis. What is a prognosis? Hopeful, right? It's hopeful that there is a cure, right? And this is obviously Contra, Schopenhauer. He said there's no cure, but only band-aids. And then the fourth, so that's the, that's the third noble truth. You can overcome tanha. The fourth noble truth is the prescription. What's the medicine? The eightfold path, the eightfold path. This is his yoga, his method for overcoming dukkha by extinguishing tanha. The Buddha called it the path. The path is practical. It's a treatment by training, eight-step program for overcoming selfishness, or maybe it's better to say overcoming self-identity and thus eliminating suffering. So there's one preliminary step before we get into the eightfold path, the sort of prerequisite step he calls it right association. In other words, you have to hang out with the right people or else the path won't work, right? So there's a famous parable he gives, the parable of the wild elephant. He says, how do you tame a wild elephant? The best way to do it is to yoke it. Remember the word yoga is from yoke. It's to yoke it to a tamed elephant. How do you tame a wild elephant? Tie it to a tamed elephant and it will learn its comportment by association, right? But don't punish the tamed one if the wild one makes a mistake. So be with the truth winners. This is what the Buddha says. Moukounu ma'a sadaqeen, the Qur'an says, be with the truth winners. Converse with them, serve them, observe them, learn by osmosis their compassion. It's said in a tradition of Isa a.s. that the disciples asked him, how did you learn your comportment? And he said, well, I just watched people with that character and I did the opposite. Now, that's a bit difficult to do. The best way to learn your comportment is to be with people of virtue, but he's a prophet, right? So it won't affect him. Okay, so step one of the eightfold path, okay? Again, the fourth noble truth of the Buddha is the eightfold path, the prescription, the medicine for overcoming tannha, the disease. There's eight steps. The first step is right views. That's what it's called. Right views means to exercise reason, right? Be reasonable, be practical. Don't put yourself in harm's way. So the self-mortification of the Jains is unreasonable, like pulling out hair, nudity, extreme ahimsa. That's not reasonable. See, set reasonable goals for yourself. Have temperance. So you'll be amazed how many perfectly rational people allow emotion to dominate them. So here we have to learn to be dispassionate, practice apathy. This is the most cherished virtue of the stoic philosophers. Apathia. This doesn't mean to be like cold and unemotional. It means to be emotional, but within reason, to be in control of your emotions, right? Nowadays, the one who is emotionally incontinent and screams the loudest is usually the winner of a debate, right? That's how we're swayed. We're swayed by emotion. The first person who cries, oh, he must be telling the truth, right? The one who shouts the loudest. And this is why children shout, right? Because they want to make an impression. Okay. Now, part and parcel to having right views is to accept the Buddha's rejection of the extreme existentialist positions of eternalism and nihilism. So the Buddha rejected both of these positions, eternalism and nihilism. He actually says, according to the Dhammapada, kill the two warrior kings. And the commentary says, what he meant by warrior kings was eternalism and nihilism. So the Buddha rejected eternalism. What is eternalism? The proposition that anything in the world is eternal, including a soul, right? So this is based upon what he called a fundamental mark of existence along with dukkha. So dukkha, the world of suffering is a fundamental mark of existence. A second fundamental mark of existence is called anika, A-N-I-C-C-A, anika, impermanence. Everything is changing, transitory and perishing, right? Thus there is no abiding element or everlasting or eternal thing. Thus, there is no atman, right? And this is the third fundamental mark of existence. You have dukkha, anika, and anatta. Anatta means no atman, right? We don't have a real self. We don't have an immortal soul. Well, if there's no atman, then does that mean there's no brahman? Or at least this is what can be concluded by induction, because atman is brahman. So is that what the Buddha is actually teaching? Was he an atheist? Maybe, maybe not. It's hard to tell. And there's a debate about that. So when the five khandhas are stripped away from the mind, what are the five khandhas? These are the five aggregates. Sorry, five aggregates. These are five things that make up the self, right? So these are what forms, in other words, physical bodies, feelings, perceptions, like judgments, then mental formations, like your ideologies and your beliefs, and finally consciousness itself, the fact that you're aware. These are called the five aggregates, or the five khandhas. When the five khandhas are stripped away from the mind, the so-called self dies and suffering ends, right? But when that happens, what is left of the individual person? What is left of the individual person? The answer is not much, only what's known as residue. So this is called sopa di sessa nirvana. This is what the Buddha experienced under the bow tree. Sopa di sessa nirvana. Nirvana means extinction. Sopa di sessa means with remainder. In other words, near extinction, near extinction. So, or sometimes this is called nirvana with residue. The residue of the, what's what they call the fuel of the five khandhas. So something extremely minimally residual remains of the five khandhas when one enters into a state of enlightenment in this world. So there's fuel, but there's no burning. In other words, there's no desire, right? There's no greed. There's no delusion. There's no hatred. What's known as the three fires in the Dhammapada, right? So the person still has a body. The person, you know, still feels pain. The person still has a name. The person is still conscious, obviously, right? So it's not a total extinction of the self. There's a residual effect. There's a residual remainder of the khandhas that are basically the building blocks of the self. But when the aspirant reaches this state of sora di sessa nirvana, he becomes a transformed, selfless, wise, compassionate sage. A bit detached and aloof at times, but he's still there. This is called the arhat, A-R-H-A-T or arhant, depending on Pali and Sanskrit. This is the name of the sage, right? So this happens when you realize that you are nothing, so you let go of everything, right? So the first nirvana happens in your life, and that makes you a sage, an arhat. Then when the arhat dies, what happens? He experiences what's known as nir-ud-ud-upad-disesa nir-upad-disesa nirvana, also called para-nirvana, nirvana without remainder. And that is the end of it all. His body, his consciousness, he is absolutely annihilated, total extinction, the end of all suffering. So this is why many western philosophers considered Buddhism to be basically a form of existential nihilism, because Buddhism culminates in para-nirvana, which is entering into a state of nothingness, emptiness. It's called sunyata, nothingness, emptiness. Life is transitory. There's nothing to hold on to, so just let go and be free, goodbye permanently. Para-nirvana, again nirvana means extinction, but it really means to blow something out, like blow your breath out, right? So it's like a big exhale, like a big sigh of relief. It's over, everything's done. Now, Buddhists, however, also reject the extreme position of nihilism. Remember I said at the beginning, the Buddha said, kill the two warrior kings, eternalism and nihilism. But what I've said subsequently is that western philosophers will argue that Buddhism is essentially a form of nihilism. But Buddhists will retort and say it's not. They'll say that pointing out, they'll point out that the process of karma, right, or karma, the reincarnation of your, they don't use jiva, atman, they don't use these terms, the reincarnation of your stream of consciousness, right, along with its karmic imprints indicates that existence does have meaning. Existence is not meaningless, that meaning, I mean it can be uncertain, but it's certainly there. They do say, however, that there are annihilationist or nihilistic aspects of Buddhism, like you have to annihilate, lust, delusion, hatred, right, attachment, suffering. But because of karma, you can't say that Buddhism is a nihilistic religion per se. It's kind of like in Islam, Islam's sort of mystical psychology, there are elements also of annihilationism, you know, fina fila, things like that. However, the rejoinder from critics would be, well, at Paranirvana, there is total annihilation, right, there is nothingness. The Buddhist rejoinder to that is, but the wisdom and teaching, an example of the arhat, right, the liberated Buddha that reached Paranirvana, is left on earth for people to benefit from after him. And then again, the response to that would be, why? So other people can eventually join him in the void of nothingness. Everything leads to nothingness, right? Okay, so I'm actually out of time. Do you think Buddhism had some influence on Islam, e.g. Sufi metaphysics? Yeah, it's possible. I think Hinduism, Buddhism had some influence on Islam, definitely. I think there was an influence going both ways. I don't think the foundations of the usul of Islamic metaphysics was affected by anything from Buddhism or Hinduism. Buddhist scriptures were collected 800 years, I think, where the rumors start reading as good learned, but how can we identify the real thing from where? Yeah, you really can't. Like I said, there's many, many opinions about the Buddha. So, I mean, you have Theravadi and Buddhists who are total atheists, then you have Mahayana Buddhists who are kind of polytheistic and everything in the middle. And again, that kind of goes back to Albiruni's two-tiered model that we talked about, that this sort of Amma, the masses gravitate or trend towards polytheism. And it's because they have this massive corpus of literature and all these things attributed to the Buddha. And there were many things that were fabricated. Many, many sayings of the Buddha that were fabricated was really difficult to know what's true and what's not. The Buddha prophesied the problem. Yeah, the Buddha talked about the matreya, the universal mercy. And some have identified that. He says that towards the end of time, a bodhisattva will come who will teach the dharma. So, he's certainly prophesizing people to come in the future. There's an opinion that the Buddha is not necessarily a classical opinion, but there's an opinion from modern scholars that Khidr in the Qur'an is the Buddha. It's an interesting opinion. You know, Khidr according to the Salaf was a prince who left his kingdom and lived in the wilderness. He's called Khidr, which comes from Akhtar Green, because he used to sit on green foliage. Of course, green is the middle color, the spectrum, the middle way. Zen Buddhism can be very bewildering. You're not supposed to really ask questions of your teacher. You're just kind of supposed to submit to his guidance and do what he's telling you. And it's kind of like the karate kid thing where the master, the Zen master, is teaching his padawan, if you will. He's telling him to do all this manual labor, and the kid doesn't know what he's doing. He's doing it. He doesn't know the significance of it. He's not supposed to ask questions to see that kind of discourse with Khidr and Musa and Surat Al-Kaaf. Allahu Alam. Ibrahim Ibn Adham, one of the great Sufis of the early period. His biography is similar to Siddhartha Gautama, that he was a prince, and then he left his life of opulence. He went and lived in the forests of Bulkh in Afghanistan, and according to his biography, he met Khidr, alayhi salam, on several occasions. Yeah, so if Khidr is the Buddha, and Luqman is Confucius, because people always, they criticize the Quran and say, why is it so Middle Eastern centric? What about the rest of the world? Well, he chooses whomever he wills. So that's one answer. The other answer is, yeah, that's true, but if we look at the Quran more broadly, I mean, the Quran name, probably Cyrus or Alexander, so that's, you know, the Greeks, you know, Hellenism, you have Khidr, who might be the Buddha, right, that's, you know, that entire area of South Asia, you have the Far East, if Luqman is Confucius, you know, it's, you know, taking wisdom from all of these different places in the world. Anyway, I have to go now. Nice talking with you, Crypto Cat. So I hope you benefited from this class, inshallah. Please make dua for me. You're in our prayers as well. And if there are questions, additional questions, contact MCC, the Muslim Community Center in the East Bay, inshallah. I'd like to thank the MCC for having this class. MCC is a fantastic organization here in the Bay Area, very active, very beautiful, righteous people, and they are just doing an incredible service to the world, benefiting with their outreach programs, different types of outreach programs. So may Allah SWT bless the organization and continue to bless them and bless all of us and keep us all safe.