 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 la ala ali wa sallam, the athaaal, the aqwaal, and the taqarir. So there's a difference now between hadith and sunnah. 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 is 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 SWT. This is the authoritative or normative ethos, the authenticated practice of the Prophet Muhammad, sallallahu alayhi wa la ala ali wa sallam, and the function of the sunnah as the scholars of Islam say, al-ulama, as sunnah too, to fasiru al-Quran. That the sunnah, really what it does is that it exegetes, if you will, or it explains the Quran. So the Quran itself says in Surah Nahl, Surah number 16, verse 44, Allah SWT says that indeed we sent down this vikr upon you, this reminder upon you, speaking directly to the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, 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 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 you pop it in your mouth and you spit out the seed? How did the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, how did he eat a date? 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. So he did it in a way where there's a lot of honor and there wasn't, 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 kind of 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, O 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 of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, and upon his family. And 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, right? 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. That 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 its 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, peace be upon him, 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 justice. They have probity. They're known as being righteous people. They have intelligence. They have good memories. There's no hidden problems, no hidden illa, which could be anything from 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 sort of sift through the sira and extract what is authentic to what is not. Riders of sira tend to exaggerate certain things. And 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. And 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 example that I give, 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. Exactly, we don't believe in that. So many of these stories in sira are just their 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, all right, 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 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 the, 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. Uh, but nonetheless, the hadith begins by saying, بينما نحن جروس عند رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم. So Sayyidina Umar is saying that one day we were sitting with the Messenger of Allah صلى الله عليه وسلم and the title of the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم here in Arabic, رسول الله, a construct phrase, the Messenger of God, رسول 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 there, but in all Semitic languages, the word for God begins with the alif in the lamb or alif in Lamid. Um, so in, uh, in Hebrew, you have elo, um, uh, 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, um, Allah because he spoke Aramaic or Syriac. So for example in Mark 115, uh, the, behold the kingdom of God, the Malqootha da Allah is at hand. So Jesus would have used this name for God, Allah. Um, so the Quran, uh, so in Arabic uses that name as well. So he's saying we, 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, uh, seemingly appeared out of nowhere. He was wearing exceedingly white clothes, he had exceedingly black hair. The traces of travel was not seen on him. So, uh, 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, uh, obviously the archangel Gabriel, right, Gabriel, Jibril in Arabic, Gabriel in Hebrew, which means the power of God, and Gabriel would often, uh, incarnate, that is to say, assume human flesh in order to teach human beings, right? Uh, so this is one of the ways in which the prophets would, uh, 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, uh, 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. Uh, is, 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, uh, 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, it's not all about knowledge, right? Um, you can have teachers that are, uh, that are arrogant, you have students that surpass their teachers over time, uh, in piety and even in knowledge. It's very, very common. So, so Gabriel would come to the prophet, he would teach him, uh, 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, uh, dictate to the prophet internally. The prophet would, uh, he 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, uh, mediation, right? So interior locution without angelic mediation. And our scholars, like Imam al-Suyuti and others, uh, scholars of Ulum al-Quran or the sciences, um, or using the word science and sort of the pre-1800 disciplines of the Quran, they would say that, uh, for example, the, the last two ayas of al-Baqarah, uh, were revealed to the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, by Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, by God glorified and exalted is he through interior locution without angelic mediation. And they mentioned others too. And the surah that follows it. 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, on 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, right? 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, right? 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, peace 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 an Islamic theological standpoint. There are many things in the Torah that we 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 them. 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, peace be upon him. So out of respect for the words of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, 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 with 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 ﷺ directly by using his first name. He speaks about the Prophet by using his name in the third person, right? Muhammadur Rasulullah, for example. But when Allah ﷻ is speaking directly to the Prophet ﷺ, Allah ﷻ uses a title. Because Allah ﷻ is teaching the ummah of the Prophet ﷺ 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. None the less he says Ya Muhammad. 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 aspect 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. فَقَادَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ صَلُّ اللَّهِ سَلَمْ And then the Prophet responded to Gabriel by saying al-Islamu and تَشْهَدَ أَدْلَا إِلَهَ إِلَى اللَّهِ. So Islam is to witness or to testify that there is no ila, there is no deity, there is no God, except Allah, except Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. So there's no ila, 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. So this is the first pillar of Islam and تَشْهَدَ شَهَدَ to testify and is done upon the tongue لا إِلَهَ إِلَى اللَّهِ مُحَمَضُ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ. This is when a convert wants to become Muslim, a prosolite becomes Muslim, they will utter the shahada, they will say اشهدُ, I witness, I testify. There's no ila, 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. الإسلام number one and تَشْهَدَ أَلَى إِلَهَ إِلَى اللَّهِ وَأَنَّ مُحَمَضَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ 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. It's one of my teachers he said here, this is something interesting. لا إِلَهَ right that's atheism, there is no God إِلَ اللَّهِ except Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala or except God, capital G. They'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. وَأَنَّ مُحَمَدَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ and now we move into theism. So from atheism to deism to theism. So deism God is just impersonal, right? But when we say محمد رسول الله and محمد 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. 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 Qur'an says وَمَا أَرْسَلْنَاكَ إِلَّا رَحْمَةِ لِلْعَلَمِينَ. Right? I always refer to this as sort of the equivalent of John 3.16 in the Qur'an. This is 21.107 of the Qur'an, which the prophet and which Allah SWT is speaking directly to the prophet Muhammad, a 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 Qur'an 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 Gnosticism and Agnosticism. Right? So most atheists, for example, the late Christopher Hitchens, famous atheist, the 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 a Gnostic atheist. In other words, an atheist who knows with certitude that there is no God. And then of course you have agnostic believers and Gnostic 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 the second pillar, right? And the prayer, as-salah, comes from a rude 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 a spiritual purification. What's the summa Ramadan? And to fast the month of Ramadan, right? One, two, three, this is the fourth pillar. Muslims that are able to will fast the month of Ramadan, the ninth month of the Muslim calendar as really a commemoration of the Quran, which was, whose revelation commenced during the month of Ramadan. wa tahujal bait. And to make pilgrimage in istata'at e-lihi sabila, if you're able to do so. And that's the final pillar of Islam, to make pilgrimage to Mecca. 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 the religion. It is to say upon the tongue there is no God but Allah, the Prophet ﷺ 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 Qala Sadaqta Gabriel said, you've answered correctly or he confirms his answer. And Sayyidna Omar, he said, فَعَجِبْنَا لَهُ يَسْأَلُهُ وَيُصَدِّقُهُ 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 the teacher already knows the answer but the teacher wants to honor the student and have the student give the correct answer. Qala, فَأَخْبِرْنِ عَلَى الْإِمَانِ Now the second question, tell me about al-e-man and which is oftentimes translated as faith, right? اِمَانِ literally means to cause safety, right? Safeguard your soul. It's it's related to the Hebrew أموناه, right? So for example the famous treatise of Maimonides is called the شروشة عشر إقري أموناه, right? The thirteen principles of Jewish faith, right? And of course the word أمين is related to this as well. So to safeguard your soul, right? So this isn't, you know, blind, إيمان 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, المسلمون من سلم المسلمون من لسانه و يده or قما قال that the quintessential Muslim, 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 المؤمنه, right, the quintessential believer, right, the quintessential believer من أمنه الناسه على دمائهم و أموالهم or قما قاله that the quintessential Muslim 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, idiose 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. لا يؤمنوا أحدكم حتى يحب لأخيه ما يحب لنفسي. Now, as he said 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 this, that hadith I just mentioned is the source of the hadith as I said is in Bukhari and Muslim but Imam An-Nawawi 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, حتى يحب لأخيه, 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. He's 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, this tampering with these, with these commentaries. But that's an authentic saying from the Imam. And that's a sound hadith from the Prophet. So you continue. So what is al-Iman, what is faith, right? What does it mean to safeguard your soul? Qala, the Prophet said, And تُقْمِنَ بِلَّهِ وَمَلَائِكَتِهِ وَكُتُبِهِ وَرُسُولِهِ وَالْيَوْمَ الْأَخِرْ It is to believe in God, right? Literally to safeguard yourself by means of God, right? Or we 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 Quran call him a kathar, which means an infidel, if you want, that's a Catholic word, unbeliever. A rejector of faith is because Satan does not have قبول and إذعان, 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 the 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. Seems like someone in his sort of school of thought wrote this epistle, but he says in there that that even demons believe in God, right? Right? So it's it's not just about what one accepts rationally or just sort of accepts in oneself, but has no 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 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 of the day of judgment. Al-Yom al-Akhir, this day of judgment has different names in the Quran. Yom al-Qiyamah, like the day of standing, Yom ad-Din, the day of judgment, 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, Gabriel, and then Mikael or Mikael, Israel, 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. But 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? 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, is 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 to 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. So for example, well, 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, right? And according to eminent 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, right? And then Mark says, whoever wrote this Gospel, he doesn't identify himself. 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, right? 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, low 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 we'll talk next week, we'll talk about, we'll give a little bit of, a little lesson on theology. What do Muslims actually believe about God? Theology, Phaos 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 in their original form, and messengers of God, right? Urusulihi, 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. Alright, so belief in God, angels, revelations, messengers, day of judgment, and that's the sixth article of faith. Yeah, and that you believe in Qadr, and Qadr is difficult to translate. Divine decree, right? Some people sometimes they translate as destiny. I like divine decree or divine apportionment, and notice here the prophet, he repeats Antutmina, 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 Qadah, 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 Qadah is the playing out, if you will, of that, 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 had 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, 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, that the prophet repeats the verb and took me not that you believe, 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, you know, 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, right? 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, right? 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. As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh.