Featuring Dr. Hakim

Prophet's (pbuh) Birthday Celebration 2006  Dr. Hakim's Presentation Night One:   Introduction               In these three nights, we are going to explore some of the supplications of the Prophet Muhammad, and the teachings that are contained in those supplications. When the Infallibles stand before Allah and utter supplications in His Praise, it is not merely an act of personal worship for them; rather, their supplications are designed to impart to their followers a lesson that may increase them in knowledge, wisdom, and closeness to the Divine.             The Prophet Muhammad has said: “My Lord, increase me in wonder about you.” This supplication is, perhaps, one of the most elegant displays of the Prophet’s spiritual experience of his Lord. It is a recognition that Allah is He who describes Himself as “there is nothing whatsoever like Him.” The first pillar of tawhid is the recognition that there is anything whatsoever unlike Allah, the Lord of the Universes. He knows of no comparison. He has no partner, no equal, nor any opposite. When one begins to contemplate these facts, and uses one’s intellect to reflect on the absolute uniqueness of one’s creator, it produces a state of wonder and astonishment. For this reason the Prophet praised Allah by saying: “O Allah! I cannot encompass the praises which You deserve. You are as You have praised Yourself, far above what anybody might say.” This is the basis of our spirituality in Islam. The Prophet expresses it in the most elegant fashion, and in a few lines we find teachings that can require a lifetime of contemplation. The endless praises that one can give to He who is unlike anything are something that one realizes as one attempts to worship Allah, as one attempts to draw close to Him, yet never seeming to be able to reach Him. It is that reality which is the most clearest thing of all to us, and yet is veiled by our own proximity to it. Most of us think of it little; they are theological concerns that, while perhaps intellectually interesting, generally do not concern as much as our own desires in this world. But in that recognition of tawhid lies the greatest joy that one can imagine, one that lasts, one that transcends what we are able to enjoy in this world. For this reason Allah has said in the Qur’an “Everything on the Earth is perishing, but there remains forever the Face of your Lord, the Lord of Glory and Nobility.”   The Two Motions of Tawhid   Tawhid is a process of spiritual experience. The word itself signifies the action, the ‘amal, of “making something one”; in that it is grammatically similar to words like ta’lim or tashih and so forth. Obviously, this not a process whereby we “make Allah one”, for His Oneness is His very Essence; rather, it is the process whereby we come to understand what is meant by that Oneness, where we accept it in our hearts, and it becomes the basis of our own worship of Allah. Everything that we know of Islam has this single current of tawhid running through it, and the understanding and recognition of it is the very purpose of our existence, for Allah has said: “We have not created human beings and the jinns except to worship.” Allah’s Oneness is the same as His absolute Uniqueness. This Oneness and Uniqueness is described with perfection in the Qur’an. When the Prophet was asked by a group of Jewish scholars to describe the relationships of Allah with all other things, the verses of “Say, Allah is One [ahad]” were revealed. The word ahad signifies absolute uniqueness. Though often translated as one, it is different from one in the numerical sense, as in when we say one, two, three, four, five. That one exists in a sequence and is therefore connected with other numbers. But ahad is a different kind of One. It means the only One, the One true Being. Scholars of ‘irfan have often signified the uniqueness of God with the letter alif, a single vertical line that stands alone with nothing on either side. This is to signify that there is, in reality, nothing other than Allah. He is al-haqq, the Absolute Truth, the only true being; all other existence merely derives from Him, and before Him nothing else truly exists. Why do we say that Allah is absolutely unique? The answer to that question is simple, though profound: the reason is that there is, in reality, nothing other than Allah Himself. He is the only reality, the only thing that is truly real. We know that Allah is infinite, that He is unbounded; were anything to truly exist other than Him, then He would be bound by definition. There would be Him, and then there would be all those other things, and so He would be only one being amongst many. We see the universe that we dwell in, we see ourselves, and our limited perception leads us to believe that there are two things in reality: Allah, and us, and that we are completely other and separate. Yet it is precisely His uniqueness that establishes His closeness; because there is no other reality except Him, everything we can experience is nothing but a manifestation of Him. To this end, Allah Himself has said “Wherever you turn, there is the Face of Allah.”Imam Husayn in his own declarations of praise before Allah has said: “No light is seen except His Light, and no voice is heard except His Voice.” These are the twin aspects of tawhid. On the one hand, we see that there is nothing whatsoever like Him, as Allah Himself as affirmed. Yet at the same time we see that Allah has said “We are closer to them then their own jugular veins.” In the first motion of tawhid, we assert His transcendence. We assert that He is not this universe, that He is not His creation, that He is far, far beyond anything that can be imagined or conceived. But on the second motion of tawhid, we follow through on the conclusions of the first profession. We see that we can not completely separate the creation from Allah, such that we posit two separate entities. To do so would be to negate the basic profession that there is no reality except God; to do so would be to make Him one being, and us another being, and that would be to limit Him and to define Him. We assert His infinity, and we acknowledge Allah’s words “Wherever you turn there is the Face of God.” Together, these two aspects of tawhid provide the basis of a genuine spiritual experience of our Creator. These two aspects, these two motions of tawhid, are the assertion of Divine transcendence, and Divine immanence. In explaining the meaning of the verses “Say: Allah is One [ahad]”, Imam as-Sadiq has said:   The relationship of Allah to His Creation is of Oneness and Eternality. There is no shadow that overtakes Him, but rather He holds all things in their shadows. He is known by being unknown, He is known to all who are ignorant. He is absolutely one. The creation is not in Hi, and He is not in the Creation. He is not perceived by the senses, not reached by the eyes. He is Exalted, and because of His Exaltation He is close; He is near, and because He is near, He is far.   That is an experience that all human beings are capable of. Even though Allah transcends this world, at the same time Imam Ali has said that “Allah cannot be seen with the eyes, but can be seen by the hearts that have faith.” That is a reality that can often not be grasped by mere intellectual assent. Rather, it is something that has to be experience, and when the Prophet and Imams utter these supplications, they are uttering it from the basis of their own direct, unmediated experience of the Divine within their hearts. That is something that is open to any human being who wishes to walk the path, and for this it is said in a famous poem attributed to Imam Ali:   Your sickness is within you, though you do not realize, And your cure is within, yet you do not see. You claim that you are nothing but a tiny entity, Yet wrapped up inside of you is the greatest universe. You are the clear book, through whose letters All that is secret is revealed and made known. So you have no need for anything outside of you, Your consciousness is within you, though you do not know.     Implications   The first step in this process of tawhid is understanding Allah’s words “There is nothing whatsoever like Him.” True worship and adoration only comes from knowledge, and an awareness of that which one is worshipping. As such, knowledge of tawhid is not a mere doctrinal affirmation, a statement that “There is no God but God” uttered in a state of ignorance. Imam Ali has explained this first motion of tawhid in the first sermon of Nahj al-Balagah, where he says:   The foremost in religion is the acknowledgement of Him, the perfection of acknowledging Him is to testify Him, the perfection of testifying Him is to believe in His Oneness, the perfection of believing in His Oneness is to regard Him Pure, and the perfection of His purity is to deny Him attributes, because every attribute is a proof that it is different from that to which it is attributed and everything to which something is attributed is different from the attribute.   What is being said here is that our descriptions of Allah will always fail. The Names and Attributes of Allah are not the same as Allah Himself, not as He is in His Essence, where He is absolutely indescribable. Imam ar-Rida says that “The Names of Allah were created, because of man’s intense need for them.” Allah describes Himself through attributes that are not the same as Him. On the level of His absolute Uniqueness, He is utterly indescribable, transcending every name and form. If we reflect upon this, and if we reflect upon the supplication of the Prophet where he says, “O Allah! I cannot encompass the praises which You deserve. You are as You have praised Yourself, far above what anybody might say”, than there are startling implications for this in terms of our own lives. What it means is that while we all form our own individual, limited, human understandings of Allah, none of those beliefs ever fully reach the mark. Rather, they are our understandings, which are not the same as how He is in His reality. Imam al-Baqir has said: “Everything that you distinguish in your minds concerning Allah, it is a creation just like yourself, thrown back upon yourself.” And yet, even though many of us profess to be monotheists and to accept the doctrine of tawhid, we often fail to realize that our understandings our products of our own selves, our own finite attempt to grasp with a reality that is infinite, that stretches beyond anything that our intellects can comprehend. When we fail to understand that, and rather we put up our own limited conceptions up as the absolute truth, we become guilty of a particular kind of idolatry that is profoundly pernicious. We may see members of other schools of thought or other religions, and we rush to assert the falsity of those doctrines and the absolute truth of our own conception. By doing this, we worship the idols of our own beliefs, and we create a spirit of profound intolerance. It is perfectly right, proper, and inevitable that a person will form their own belief systems based upon their experience and their understanding. But that understanding is not Allah Himself. It will always fall short, and that requires an attitude of profound humility in terms of our dealing with people of different beliefs, and different schools of thought. Each one of us has to have the moral courage to accept the fallibility and limitation of our own particular beliefs; when we do that, then we find ourselves able to live in harmony and tolerance in a community of beliefs. That requires sacrificing the egoistic pride we take in claiming that we have a monopoly on the truth. And that, in itself, is one of the greatest struggles that a person can endeavour upon. Allah has said “Wherever you turn, there is the Face of God.” Wherever you turn, even if we may be gazing towards those who follow a very different conception of truth and religion than our own. Even then, one will find the Face of Allah. If one denies that, then one is denying Allah’s own words. That verse, perhaps above all else, should be the basis for an acceptance of the plurality of religious beliefs and faiths within the world. It is said in Kitab al-Ghaybah of An-Nu’mani that when Imam al-Mahdi returns at the end of time, he will go to a cave in Antioch and he will withdraw from it the original revelations of the Torah, the Psalms, and the Gospels, and that he will rule the people of the Torah by the Torah, the people of the Gospels by the Gospels, and the people of the Qur’an by the Qur’an. Imam Ali, in a famous narration, has said similarly “Were you to bring out for me the seat of a judge, I would rule the people of the Torah by the Torah, the people of the Gospels by the Gospels, and the people of the Qur’an by the Qur’an.” This is a policy that is even encoded within Islamic law. There is a principle known as qa’idah al-ilzam, that states that an Islamic judge must arbitrate between people of different faiths on the basis of their faiths and their rules, not our own. Imam as-Sadiq has said “Whatever is allowed to a people by their religion, then it is halal to them.” Even when we are sought as arbiters by people, our religious scholars are not allowed to forcibly impose their understanding of the Law, their beliefs even, upon others, all in conformity to that basic Qur’anic maxim “There is no compulsion in faith.” Based on this, it is senseless to dismiss all other believers as mere kuffar, as “disbelievers” who are opponents of the Truth. Allah Himself denies this when He says “Indeed, those who believe, and those from the Jews, the Christians, and the Sabeans, who believe in Allah and the Last Day, and do good deeds, then they shall have their reward with their Lord, and no fear will be upon them.” Kufr means to cover over; it is that kind of idolatry that I referred to above, where one worships the creation of one’s own mind as the absolute truth, rather than accepting the infinity of Allah and seeing His Light manifest in everything, as He has said “O Allah! I cannot encompass the praises which You deserve. You are as You have praised Yourself, far above what anybody might say. “Allah is the Light of the Heavens and the Earth.” If there is any doubt in this, we can look towards the Prophet’s own life, his sirah and his sunnah. In the year 615, the Prophet Muhammad ordered many of the Muslims to migrate to Abyssinia, which is present day Ethiopia. The Ethiopian King, known as the Negus, was a Christian ruler. The companions of the Prophet who were sent there sought asylum with the Christian king, who is said to have wept when they recited for him surat maryam, the chapter concerning the life of Mary in the Qur’an. While the Muslims were being persecuted in Makkah, in their own homeland, this foreign Christian king agreed to take the Muslims under his protection, and allowed them to live in peace in his kingdom. The Negus is reported to have said of Islam “That our two religions are like this”, crossing his two fingers together. Was the Negus somebody who, because he was a Christian, somebody who we would classify as a kafir, a disbeliever, because he followed a religion with a different understanding of Truth then our own? If this were the case, the Prophet would have committed one of the gravest of sins. For Allah has said in the Qur’an: “Indeed, the believers do not take the disbelievers as guardians instead of the believers. And if anybody does, then they will have nothing with Allah.” The Qur’an forbids again and again the taking of disbelievers as protectors and guardians, yet we see that the Prophet took this Christian king as a guardian for his own believing followers. This is the firmest proof that kufr is not merely following another school of thought, or of having a different understanding of a Reality that escapes the limits of our minds. The true believer is the one who recognizes that Allah manifests Himself in all things, that wherever one turns, there is the Face of Allah. One who accepts Allah’s words and experiences that will never become a person of hate and fanaticism. Intolerance, rather than being a sign of faith, is a sign of the worst kind of idolatry. May Allah protect us from that, and make us of those who make peace.   Night Two    Introduction               After exploring some of the realities of tawhid, and the exalted station of the Prophets and Imams before Allah, we can now explore one of the most important teachings of the Prophet concerning our relationship to Allah: supplication.             The Prophet has said “Prayer is the weapon of the believer.” It is a fundamental part of our relationship to Allah. Supplication is not merely when we present ourselves before Allah to ask Him for our needs. As Allamah Tabataba’i has observed in Al-Mizan, our very existence itself is one single act of supplication from beginning to end. Our very being is that of poverty towards Allah. He is the one whose existence is essentially His own. He exists, and He cannot not exist; but we are of a different order. Our very being is nothing without Allah; His gaze is constantly upon us, and He continually gives us being from one moment to the next. Our bodies, our minds, our souls, all cry out to Him at every second, even if our tongues may be silent, and even if our conscious minds are concerned with what we think is other than Him.             Supplication, then, is the position of the servant to Allah, and our conscious supplication is our ultimate affirmation of Allah’s statement “We have not created human beings and jinns except to worship.” We have seen how Allah Himself has said “We are closer to them than their own jugular veins.”, that Allah is closer to us than our own jugular veins; the only thing that veils us from His is the illusions of our own independence, that we can subsist without His support and His aid. Allah commands us in the Qur’an to reflect upon the limitations of our own existence, so that our own limitation may be a sign for His Infinity.   Confusions               Sometimes when we reflect upon Allah’s Power, and His Sovereignty, we feel that our supplications may have no place. It is astounding to me how many Muslims are of the belief that we ask Allah for what we need, and then Allah will decide whether or not He likes what we have asked for, and will give it to us if He decides so. Many believe that this attitude is an act of humility before Allah. Yet it is not; the act of humility before Allah is not for us to guess as to how we think He will answer our supplications, but rather to listen to Him, His Prophets, and His Proofs when they describe to us how Allah hears our prayers. Let us look at the words of Allah Himself. The most important statement of this is verse 2:186: “If my servants ask of Me, then I am near. I answer the prayer of the supplicator when he supplicates Me.” Nowhere in this verse does Allah say that He may or may not answer our supplications; rather, He emphasizes, in an absolutely unconditional way, that Allah will answer the supplications of all of His servants. Again, as Allamah Tabataba’i has observed in Al-Mizan, this is a Divine promise; it is not conditioned in anyway, shape, or form. If we have any doubts about this, then we should look once again to the teachings of the Prophet, and the Prophet has spoken explicitly: “Call on Allah, and be certain of his response.” If, as many believe, that Allah will hear our supplications and, like a human king, will decide whether or not He agrees with what we our asking for, then it is impossible for us to have certainty that our prayers will be answered. Yet the Prophet orders this, and he is explicit. If prayer is the weapon of the believer, as he has said, then the believer is the one who wields that weapon with determination and strength, fully confident in Allah’s words: “The promise of Allah is true.” To behave otherwise, to say that maybe Allah will answer, or maybe He will not, is to fall into a position of doubt, and it is an explicit denial of Allah’s own Divine promise. Were Allah to make His answer to our prayers conditional upon His own preference in the way that human rulers do, then these verses would be meaningless. Worse, supplication itself would cease to make sense. For if Allah were only going to bestow upon us what He wants, then His divine decree, what the theologians refer to as His qada, would have already determined everything within creation as its supposed to be. If our supplications coincided with that decree, then they would have already been answered and would merely be redundant; and were they to contradict that decree, then they would be powerless, empty words that go unanswered. There were those in the Muslim community in the past who believed in such an absolutist vision of Divine pre-destination, known as the jabriyyah. The Imams always argued vociferously against this position, fully aware of the way that it can kill a person’s spirituality and distance them from the Divine. Imam as-Sadiq has said: “Supplicate, and do not say: ‘the affair has already been decided.’ For supplication is worship [ibadah], and Allah has said: ‘Those who are too arrogant to worship me, they will enter into the hell fire altogether,’ and He has said: ‘Call on me, and I will answer you.’” The Imams make quite clear that it is not decided and that our supplications have been given an immense power by Allah Himself. Imam ar-Rida has said: “Indeed, supplication repels that which has been decreed.” Divine fate does not operate in the way that many of us would believe. Imam Musa has explained how it works in the following hadith: “Allah knows, and He wills, and intends. He determines, and then He decrees, and then He gives permission for the decree to go into effect.” Imam Musa goes on to explain how this relates to supplication when He says “I tell you to pray, for prayer and seeking is for Allah. It turns away suffering that has been determined and decreed, but for which there only remains for Allah to give permission for that decree to go into effect. And when Allah is supplicated and asked, He will turn that suffering away.” What is being said here is clear: that while Allah has made His decree in all things, those decrees do not go into effect until He bestows upon those decrees His Divine Permission. His imda, as the Imams call it. They remain, as it were, in a suspended statement. Contrary to popular belief, the Prophet and Imams do not say to be pleased with that; rather, we are ordered to supplicate Him, and Imam as-Sadiq has therefore said “Supplication changes the decree.” What we are told to be pleased with, and what is an important part of faith, is what has been decreed already. That which is done, is done, and is the will of Allah. But the future is open to our supplications, and we have been promised by Allah Himself, His Prophets, and His Proofs that those supplications will be answered. Imam as-Sadiq says: “If you pray to Allah and you’re heart is fully in the act of prayer, then believe that your need is at the door.” The obvious response to these verses and narrations is that many people feel that their prayers have not been answered. This is a subtle point, that requires much greater explanation than the usual argument that Allah did not accept it, an argument that contradicts Allah’s own promise and is absent from the sunnah of the Prophet and Imams. The first thing to realize is that while Allah promises the answer to our prayers, that answer will occur when He wills it, and not when we do. We are told not to have despair of our prayers being answered, even if it may not come in the time that we desire. Imam as-Sadiq has said: “A believer does not cease to be in a good state, and hopeful of the Mercy of Allah, so long as He does not become impatient, fall into despair, and abandon supplication.” One of his companions asked him: “And how does one act impatiently?” Imam as-Sadiq said: “I have asked for such and such, and I have not seen the answer.” This is first. The second is that very often are supplications are not for the things that we want, and therefore may collide with other supplications that we may make. If we are spiritual and religious people and we ultimately want is what is good for our religion, we may ask for something (a property, a marriage, what have you) that may be bad for our religion. Then we are in a state of conflict, and Allah will answer us according to what we desire. For those who do not care about their religion and their hereafter, than that conflict does not occur, and to this end Allah has said: “If it were not for the fact that all of humanity would disbelieve, Allah would give all those blaspheme against the Merciful houses with roofs made of silver and staircases by which they may ascend.” Allah gives to those what they desire; He does not compel anybody, and those who are not interested in anything of the hereafter will receive that which they desire, and will suffer the ultimate consequences of that. There is a deeper issue that entails the greatest kind of spiritual jihad, the fruits of which are endless. In order to have that certainty that the Prophet orders in this hadith, we must have the fullest acknowledgment of tawhid. This is alluded to in the verse of surat al-baqarah. Allah makes it clear that it is when His servant asks of Him, then He is near. Let us look at these two conditions. Firstly, there is servanthood, which is the lot of us all. If we refuse to acknowledge our own poverty before Allah, then we do not fall under the rubric of this particular verse. That is the first step; it requires a humility before Allah. This is why we raise our hands like a beggar before Allah, and this is why we entreat Him with words of submission. Only then do we enter the first gate of supplication. The reason why humility is required is not merely because it is pleasing to Allah that we acknowledge the truth of our human condition. Much more importantly, if we are arrogant before Allah, then we are not truly praying towards Allah. This is the secret in why many prayers seem to go unanswered, is that while we utter one thing with our tongues towards the Lord of the Universes, in fact our prayers are directed at nothing at all. For by asserting our own arrogance, our own belief in our independent existence and our self-sufficiency, then we are denying Allah in the same breath. We may think we are praying to Him, but we are not. For we cannot simultaneously believe in our own self-sufficiency, and then believe in Allah before whom everything depends. We cannot be self-sufficient while He is the one upon whom we all depend. If we assert the former, then we deny the latter, and then are supplications are directed towards nothing but empty space. The second condition mentioned is asking Him. This is a profound teaching and relates to some of the points we have discussed in the previous nights. If we go into supplication with the belief that Allah may or may not answer our prayers, then we are not asking Him. Our own beliefs actually have a deep effect upon the way that Allah relates to us. Imam as-Sadiq has said: “Have a good opinion of Allah; for Allah has said: ‘I am with my servant’s opinion of me. If good, then good; if bad, then bad.’” This is part of the reason why the Prophet has said “Pray to Allah, and be certain of the answer”; that faith is not a passive faith, but is a creative one. It is what allows for the prayers to be answered, and it has a power of its own that is given by Allah Himself. Let us look at this a bit deeper. We have discussed how the first part of tawhid is the acknowledgment of Allah’s transcendence and infinity; that are our own beliefs are limited attempts at grasping an unbounded reality. Yet that does not mean our beliefs and our faith are unimportant; they are the mechanism by which we approach Allah. Our limited understandings our the only thing most of us have, and Allah has made clear “Allah does not burden a soul more than it can bear.”. The beliefs that we hold shape our own spiritual state, and they therefore shape the way that we experience Allah. If Imam Ali has said that Allah cannot be described by attributes on the level of His own Essence, nonetheless we can speak of how we experience Him. And we are the ones who determine how that experience occurs. Allah has said: “Allah is the Light of the Heavens and the Earth.” This Light radiates upon everything, and it is only one light. No one sees any light except His Light, as Imam Husayn has said. Yet we see that even though a Light may be singular, it shines upon things in accordance with the nature and capacity of those things. Let us look at the sun. The light from the sun is one light, but when it reflects off an object that is white, the object is illuminated white; and when it reflects off an object that is green, the object is illuminated green, and so forth. The human hearts are the same in terms of their relationship to the Divine Light. If we are of those who believe that Allah acts randomly, chaotically, that He may break His Promise at any point, that He may send the virtuous to hell and the evil to heaven, as was believed by some theologians in the history of Islam, then that belief creates a darkness inside the heart. The light that radiates upon the