Having Mercy And Shunning Pride

Tonight, I am just going to be touching a little bit upon the subject of pride in relation to how we feel about the Ahlul Bayt 'alayhim us-salam, and how we feel about spreading the message of the Ahlul Bayt 'alayhim us-salam also.

There are some very interesting narrations about pride, and we can think about pride in terms of how we treat each other, within our own communities and within our own families as well.

I am sure that everyone will be well aware that Muslim communities are not immune from feeling entrenched in certain positions and we could say that perhaps this is one of the factors that is stopping the Muslim community across the world from moving forward. Again, this kind of false pride or delusion about who we are and our position as a family, or our position as a racial group, our position as a class as well, or even our position as lovers of the Ahlul Bayt 'alayhim us-salam, where we don't feel a particular necessity to try to do more to spread this message.

And yet there are people who have been born into Shi'i families that are growing up and getting into their 20s and deciding that they just cannot reconcile the secular world in which they are growing up with this message of Islam and of the Ahlul Bayt, 'alayhim us-salam. And they have many issues which are not always answered, because when it is seen that people have questions, this is actually often mistaken for pride and is often just shut down and the questions are not answered.

So it's really, again, a reflection upon turning back again to the root of who we are, turning back to the root of what this message is, and thinking about what we can potentially do to make it a global phenomenon that is understood.

As we very well know, while majlis lies at the core of the tradition of tashayyu,' this is a basis and a beginning, and it should be an inspiration for us to do more to spread this message.

We all know very well, it doesn't need to be said that isn't sufficient to turn up to the majlis and then go home and continue on with our lives in in the same way that we've been continuing before. We know very well that these commemorations for the martyrdom of Imam Al-Husayn 'alayhi as-salam, should not become like a habit, should should not be something that we feel is habitual that may perhaps give us some kind of comfort out of its habit. But we don't actually think about how we are going to change our thinking.

There are some, again, like I said some very interesting narrations about pride and about who we might think we are and about not being deluded by pride as well. Imam Ali 'alayhi as-salam, says in sermon 191 [of Nahjul Balaghah], 'Certainly, if Allah were to allow anyone to indulge in pride, He would have allowed it to His select Prophets and vicegerents. But Allah, the Sublime, disliked vanity for them and liked humbleness for them. Therefore, He laid their cheeks to the ground, smeared their faces with dust, bent themselves down for the believers and kept them as humble people. Allah tried them with hunger, afflicted them with difficulty, tested them with fear, and upset with them with troubles. Therefore, do not regard wealth and progeny as the criterion for Allah's pleasure and displeasure.'

So just because one may get a good job, or one may do well in business, and perhaps even be, you know phenomenally more successful than other brothers and sisters in this jama'ah in terms of wealth and business, this is not a reason to look down on other people who are not as successful, or to feel some kind of pride and superiority, because Allah Subhana wa Ta'ala has blessed us with these gifts and blessed us with a certain worldly success.

So that is one point where we need to move out of our entrenched positions in terms of what we succeed in earning or don't succeed in earning. If Allah Subhana wa Ta'ala, has blessed us with wealth, this should not be a reason to consider ourselves as superior in terms of belief, or superior in terms of character, and it certainly does not give us a passport to the next world or guarantee us Jannah in any shape or form.

And another thing that we can see in the Holy Qur'an about pride, very interesting here. If we're thinking about how we are striving to understand the meaning of this message, which is by no means easy, because we find as we know, that in the other Schools of Thought, so many finances have gone into translating the works of the other Schools of Thought, be it also in other Shi'i schools such as the Isma'ili School, we know that a lot of funding has gone into producing very good, beautiful publications that are easily accessible to people and that there has been much philanthropy done also.

And dollars, millions of dollars have gone into, as we know very well, the spread of the Wahhabi School of Thought across the Muslim world, madrassas set up, people intensively trained, and more crucially, the ways of thinking of whole swathes of different Muslim populations has been changed and altered.

As my colleague Sheikh Mohammad Zakaria from London said, as an example, in the Caribbean, while we know that the path of Ahlul Bayt 'alayhim us-salam, is spreading rapidly in the Caribbean, at the same time, the Wahhabi School of Thought is also spreading and it is actually changing people's way of thinking, it is changing their personalities, it is changing them as human beings.

And the question should arise, is it sufficient that we manage to, you know for our yearly Ibadah, is it sufficient that we manage to hold a majlis once in the year to remember the martyrdom of Imam Al-Husayn 'alayhi as-salam, in the light of the fact that there are very sophisticated propaganda machines going on both in the secular world and also in the Muslim world, where we know certain Schools of Thought are tied up to Western powers anyhow.

We are surrounded by a very sophisticated network of various kinds of propaganda, and this is also affecting the up and coming generations of the Shi'i youth as well. So again, we need to be very awake. We need to be very aware of what is going on, and we need to make some effort to convey the true meaning of this message.

Allah Subhana wa Ta'ala has said in the Holy Qur'an, chapter seven, verse one four six. 'I shall turn from my signs those who are proud on the earth without right, I shall turn from my signs those who are proud on the earth without right' (7:146). This means that for those of us you know, among our community who have some kind of self-delusion or some kind of false sense of pride, Allah Subhana wa Ta'ala will veil that person from being able to perceive His signs and from being able to gain ma'rifah [cognition] of Him.

In some ways, pride is a kind of narcissism, you know, pride is a kind of self-worship. The person turns inward to admire themselves. And this for the masters of the path, self admiration was considered one of the most perilous downfalls of those who are on the path towards Allah Subhana wa Ta'ala. The masters of this path were always warning those who are seeking to get close to Allah, you know if they are blessed with certain gifts, if they are blessed with any particular position, you know, even blessed with being able to produce great scholarship, blessed with the love of the people as an example, at no time should they start to claim that for themselves, and start to admire the position that they have attained, or even the sense of closeness that they may have to Allah.

The minute that one starts to have some kind of self-admiration, this is actually from shaytan, and one can lose everything that one had, that one was given before. Now interestingly, when we look at the inner meaning of what is meant by signs, when we look at the teachings of the Imams of Ahlul Bayt, 'alayhim us-salam, it is clear that the Imam himself is a sign.

The Imam is known as the 'Ayat ul-Kubra'. The Imams have called themselves the names of Allah. They are the names and attributes of Allah, the manifestations of the names and attributes of Allah. So the Imam himself is the greatest Hujjah [proof] for the existence of Allah, and to know the Imam is a way of knowing Allah Subhana wa Ta'ala.

So we can look at this from, again, a particularly Imami perspective where Allah Subhana wa Ta'ala says, 'I shall turn from My signs those who are proud on the earth without right.'(7:146) This means that the one who has some form of kibr, the one who has some form of pride in themselves for whatever reason, will be turned away from the Imam. The reality of the Imam, the inner aspect of the Imam, the truth, the haqiqah of the Imam, let alone the dhahir and the outer aspect of the Imam, will be turned away from that person who has false pride, who has kibr or who has arrogance.

And so this can very well go for those who believe that they are the lovers of Ahlul Bayt 'alayhim us-salam. And if we are thinking about OK, so how can we assess whether someone has some kind of pride, you know, towards Allah and towards this deen [religion] and there are there are certain types of kibr or certain types of pride that have been listed by the scholars.

One of them is kibr towards God, you know, pride towards Allah and this is in a sense, a feeling that one is, you know virtually equal to Allah. Now this might sound quite strange, but we know in the Muslim world that there are certain spiritual leaders who virtually consider themselves to be manifestations of God. You know, they are so close to God, or they believe themselves to be so close to God that they should be virtually worshipped. And this is not a joke we know that there are certain people who set themselves up as leaders to enslave, mentally enslave followers who are actually genuinely seeking knowledge. They acquire followers around them to, in order to control them and in order to humiliate them.

Now this is another thing, that if one is seeking knowledge of this path and if one is seeking a teacher on this path, observe how that teacher treats their followers. Observe whether that teacher humiliates their followers or treats them with arrogance and without compassion, or plays mental head games with their followers as well. We know very well that there are those who have set themselves up even in the in the Shi'i Ummah, who have done this and they will go so far as to control their followers by the use of Jinns ayyadhu bi-Llah.

So there is also kibr towards the Prophets and the Messengers and the Awliya, pride towards the Prophets and the Messengers and the Awliya. This again means considering oneself virtually, you know a representative of the Prophets, you know, to have a very special selected status in relation to them.

Now, of course, we know that there are people amongst our community who do have a very close status and the teachings of the Ahlul Bayt say that one who becomes a wali of the Imam actually shares the same spiritual status as the Imam, the only thing is that they are not ma'sum [infallible] and, you know they don't have certain types of knowledge that the ma'sum is given.

But again, there are those who fancy themselves to be, you know, virtually you know, the best friend of the Imam, the close representative of the Imam, and that somehow this might entitle them to again, have arrogance towards the people, to speak roughly towards the people, to be rude towards the people or to drive about in a large fancy car with a big escort and actually to kind of take pride in their worldly status over and above, you know those who they consider to be lesser believers or lesser human beings. So this is a kind of pride as well.

And we have kibr towards the Divine Commandments, which amounts to kibr towards Allah Subhana wa Ta'ala as well. So, again, now kibr towards the Divine Commandments. We can see that this may entail someone who considers himself to be above following the Divine Commandments. Ok, so they have reached a certain level, we could say, where again, they consider themselves exempt from following the Shari'ah.

This is where corruption comes into our communities, so we may find members of our communities and we know that there are countries, you know, around the world heavily populated by Muslims, by lovers of Ahlul Bayt 'alayhim us-salam, where as an example, tax evasion is practised. How many members of our community who may be watching this show right now have actively gone out of their way to evade paying tax from their business? And who as a as a kind of a sideline to their Islamic practise, they will consider their, their kind of dealings, you know, as something separate from their Deen? Ok, this is my Deen over here, and this is my business over here. And for my business, I am going to do whatever tricks I deem, you know, possible to enrich myself.

Or bribery. We know very well across the Muslim world and even practised by the lovers of Ahlul Bayt 'alayhim us-salam, that they will engage in bribery. They charge bribes to people to get them a certain position in government, or they will accept bribes. We can see this perhaps even in our Western countries, where certain Western governments will say to hand-picked members of our community who are going to be useful to Western governments, they will say, look, if you work for our interests as against your own people, we will give you a certain amount of funding.

And so the person in that position will say, well, maybe I can kind of juggle this. I can be a person of position in my community and I love my community, and I want to help my community but at the same time, I quite like the idea of getting a better house, and a better position, and I quite like this intoxicating feeling of being close to the big names in these various, you know, Western governments. So, yes, I will take that bribe, and I will pass on some information about my people back into the government, so that these governments can therefore, you know, know better how to manipulate, you know, my own Shi'i people.

This is, I suppose we could call a double agent. You know, we have, we have double agents in our community, where they do, they may, you know, practise, pray, pay their Zakah, fast, but they will break the commandments in terms of honesty, in terms of trade, in terms of ripping people off, in terms of as we know very well, and this is quite astonishing, not paying the work on time.

For those of you who may have worked in the Muslim community, you will know that it is almost kind of like a given, whatever country you are working in and for whomever you are working, pretty much almost across the board, but I have to say, not with my brothers and sisters at Ahlul Bayt TV Alhamdulillah, but there are certain organisations in our community that don't deem it necessary to pay their employees on time. They don't deem it necessary to pay them a living wage. This is really astonishing when we think about what is necessary to spread the message of the Ahlul Bayt 'alayhim us-salam.

So we know that the Holy Prophet, peace be upon him and his Holy Progeny, when he engaged in a battle with those in opposition who had acted in in aggression towards the Muslims, he paid his soldiers. He paid those who were fighting on his side. He did not look down on the soldiers who were fighting for his side. Now we find certain Islamic organisations that look down on their employees when the employee says, 'I'm sorry but you know, I have a mortgage to pay, I have kids to feed, could you possibly, like, pay me on time?' They will find the employees actually looking down on them and say 'You want money?' Like it's something dirty. Whereas we see the Holy Prophet himself, he paid his workers on time, he gave them enough to live on.

If we do not put the correct funding into Islamic organisations, into Islamic publications, then of course, we are not going to be able to sufficiently spread the message of the Ahlul Bayt. There is not enough finances going into publicising our texts. We, as we know very well, we are having, you know texts that could do, a lot with a lot more polishing and we need much better marketing for our texts as well.

So the question is, where did we become deluded about being a follower of the Ahlul Bayt? When did we become deluded about being, you know, calling ourselves a Rafidhi? When did we become deluded about calling ourselves a Rafidhi, when we have not even published one book or we have not lifted a finger to try to market one book, or we have a company where we don't treat our employees with justice or we don't even treat our own family members with justice.

And you know, the women expect their husbands to be like a cash machine, they don't see their husbands as a human being, and the husbands see their women as kitchen workers to produce the meals and they do not see their wives as human beings.

We need to get back to removing our pride and to seeing each other as human beings and InshaAllah to make more effort to spread this beautiful message of the Ahlul Bayt 'alayhim us-salam

Now, we are going to go to break, InshaAllah, we will see you very shortly.