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Talk · al-Sirat al-Mustaqeem | 2024 Ramadan Series, part 12 of 32

Why The Angels Bowed | Al-Sirat Al-Mustaqeem EP.10 | A Journey With Shaykh Alauddin ElBakri

Shaykh Alauddin ElBakri

Transcript

16 moments mention “Quran”:

  1. Assalaamu 'Alaikum
  2. and welcome back to our Ramadan series "As-Sirat al-Mustaqim"
  3. Today Insha'Allah, we will tackle one of the most
  4. important resources that Allah SWT gave us.
  5. Because of this resource, Allah honored us from the get go.
  6. One of the two reasons mentioned in the Quran
  7. as of why Allah asked the angels to make "Sujood"
  8. to Adam PBUH, to prostrate
  9. in respect to our father Adam, peace
  10. be upon him, is after Allah mentioned that he taught him
  11. the names of all the things
  12. (He taught Adam the names of all things)
  13. And then after a lot taught Adam the names
  14. of all the things, He even asked the angels:
  15. Do you know this knowledge?
  16. Do you know the name of these things?
  17. And they said, Glory be to You
  18. Oh Allah,
  19. we only know what You taught us a lot.
  20. Allah the Mighty and the Majestic said to Adam:
  21. teach them the names of these things, reveal to them what I taught you.
  22. And Adam PBUH shared the knowledge.
  23. And it was so impressive that Allah SWT after that said:
  24. (And ˹remember˺ when We said to the angels, “Prostrate before Adam")
  25. We then commanded the angels to bow down to Adam PBUH
  26. Knowledge is what makes us different and unique.
  27. Allah SWT said in The Noble Quran:
  28. (Indeed, We have dignified the children of Adam)
  29. We have honored the children of Adam.
  30. The view of the Quran, of humanity is very beautiful.
  31. Humanity, essentially, it was honored and preferred
  32. (and privileged them far above many of Our creatures)
  33. and We preferred them over a great portion of Our creation, a great preference.
  34. We are honored, we are preferred, we have been chosen
  35. and we are assigned an honorable task.
  36. How can we know anything about anything, without learning?
  37. That's why Allah SWT gave us the equipment to learn
  38. Allah said in the Quran: And Allah the Mighty and the Majestic brought you forward,
  39. brought you to life from your mother wombs, when you knew nothing,
  40. but he gifted you hearing, sight,
  41. and hearts or brains, which later on, Subhanallah,
  42. in modern science we find out that the brain is divided into regions.
  43. Every region is responsible for a task.
  44. So look at that.
  45. You have what it takes to learn.
  46. You have a hearing, a sight and a mind.
  47. Obviously, Allah give us even more senses, which are the five senses.
  48. But the highest sense of them, is the sense of hearing.
  49. Many people think that actually seeing is more important than hearing.
  50. But actually, even according to modern science,
  51. hearing is more important than seeing. Why?
  52. Because what distinguishes us is the ability to speak
  53. and to transfer information through words.
  54. And if you don't have that, it will hinder your development as a human being.
  55. Alhamdulillah! That we have our hearing and our sight.
  56. And for those who have been tested by Allah SWT
  57. in their hearing or in their sight or in their ability of thinking,
  58. Allah will never burden you with what you cannot bear.
  59. Allah has chosen you for that test
  60. and will honor you in a different way.
  61. Subhanahu wa Ta'ala
  62. My dear brothers and sisters,
  63. if you come to think about this information
  64. and how important that we pay attention
  65. to how do we gain information. We're living
  66. and 24/7 we are hit with things around us.
  67. They're going through our eyes, they're going through our ears,
  68. and our mind has to constantly filter them and sift through them.
  69. Subhanallah
  70. in about 15 years
  71. ago, they say an average person was hit by 3,500 advertisements a day.
  72. Today, it's 10,000 advertisements a day
  73. you watch just by living in this world.
  74. Do you know how much that impacts you?
  75. And how much that affects your mind and heart and soul?
  76. That's why Allah SWT, in the first revelation
  77. in The Noble Quran, asked us to put things in check.
  78. Read, ˹O Prophet,˺ in the Name of your Lord Who created
  79. created humans from a clinging clot
  80. ِAllah invited us in The Noble Quran to read,
  81. and to read in His name. Why?
  82. Because when you read in the name of Allah SWT,
  83. especially, when you read the Quran, it gives you the ability
  84. to filter the information before it gets into your heart and mind.
  85. You use the lenses and the filtration
  86. system of The Noble Quran
  87. to filter the good from the bad,
  88. the beneficial from the harmful, the truth from the falsehood.
  89. You need some system.
  90. What's your operating system that you should function based on?
  91. Allah SWT gave us The Noble Quran,
  92. the Sunnah of the Prophet PBUH, and Islam in its entirety
  93. as a gift to be able to use it as an operating system.
  94. Think of us as the hardware, like a laptop that needs a software,
  95. and think of Islam as your software. Without a software,
  96. how can your function? When it comes to learning knowledge,
  97. My dear brothers and sisters, did you know that there are 10 different types
  98. of knowledge mentioned in the Quran? Here are the top three.
  99. The first type of knowledge, is a knowledge that we were born with.
  100. We call that "Fitra"
  101. Allah SWT says in the Quran:
  102. (the natural Way of Allah which He has instilled in ˹all˺ people)
  103. This is the pure inner innate knowledge
  104. that Allah has brought people on it.
  105. Nothing will change that filter
  106. because of that Fitra, we human beings agree on so many things
  107. that, you know, lying is bad, killing is wrong, stealing is devastating.
  108. You know, we agree on certain norms
  109. and certain things that makes it easy
  110. for us to live together in peace and harmony,
  111. but also part of the Fitra is a very crucial part.
  112. It talks about a conversation that happened between us
  113. and Allah SWT when we were in the world of souls
  114. before even coming to our mother womb.
  115. The world of the womb that in that world of souls, Allah SWT
  116. had a conversation with us,
  117. “Am I not your Lord?”
  118. Allah took us from the loins of our parents and had a conversation with us.
  119. Am I not your Lord?
  120. They said: "Yes"
  121. Allah SWT tells them and told us:
  122. (Now you have no right to say on Judgment Day, "We were not aware of this")
  123. All of us don't remember that conversation between us and Allah.
  124. But the fact that you don't remember it does not mean it didn't happen.
  125. None of us remember that we were in our mother wombs.
  126. Does that mean that we were not there?
  127. But this Fitra, that there is a God, that there is a maker, that
  128. that God is one, that that God cares about you,
  129. that God wants to communicate with you, but will not force it on you.
  130. So that's why we came to this world with Fitra
  131. "pure innate nature" and Allah SWT made Islam
  132. Faith, the religion, the Straight Path, Allah made it
  133. match that Fitra that we were born with.
  134. So it makes sense to us when we come across the teachings of Islam.
  135. We feel relaxed.
  136. We feel we're not in a fight with our own logic,
  137. with our own reasoning, with our own rationale that we were born with.
  138. And that is the beauty of this knowledge.
  139. This is like a push, a heads up,
  140. a help line that you are born with.
  141. The rest of the knowledge.
  142. We are the only species that Allah SWT
  143. gave us the rest of the knowledge as an option.
  144. And that's the test of our lives.
  145. The test of our life is to choose the truth or not to choose it.
  146. Everything else, including the atoms around us,
  147. including the molecules, including the birds and the fish
  148. and the insects and the trees and the sun and the moon and the galaxies.
  149. Every thing glorifies the name of Allah, and praises
  150. Allah SWT by following the system that Allah set for it
  151. the sun, the moon, the earth, the galaxy, the universe are obeying Allah
  152. by following the system that Allah installed in it, with you
  153. and I, Allah instilled in us some basic Fitra
  154. But the complicated, sophisticated system, he gave it to us as an option.
  155. Do you want to choose it or not?
  156. That's the story of our lives.
  157. Therefore, Fitra is very, very important.
  158. Whether you are a muslim or you're not a muslim, we are all equal in that.
  159. That's why, when a child dies, it doesn't matter.
  160. Before they've reached puberty, if they die, Insha'Allah, God willing,
  161. they will be going to heaven because they were born with the pure Fitra
  162. and they still didn't develop enough mental sophistication
  163. to make the ultimate choice choose the truth or not.
  164. So this first type of knowledge, on it, we built. The second thing
  165. that Allah SWT gave us, as He said in the Quran,
  166. is the observational knowledge which everyone shares
  167. when you are one year old, two years old, three years old four years.... before
  168. you even learn the letters and how to read and write, you can observe.
  169. Oh, this is Baba, my dad.
  170. This is Mama, my mom.
  171. These are my brothers and sisters.
  172. This is a table. This is a chair.
  173. You observe and you learn through observation.
  174. And that gives us a lot, through observation
  175. also, we learn language from our parents and from our surroundings
  176. and that is very, very important tool
  177. that we will later on use in order to even learn more
  178. Allah says that one of the things that He made unique about the human is that
  179. He taught him "Al-Bayan"
  180. (The Most Compassionate
  181. taught the Quran,
  182. created humanity,˹ and˺ taught them speech)
  183. The Most Merciful, taught the Quran, created
  184. the human, taught him how to express and speak himself.
  185. And He said in The Noble Quran, in another Ayah
  186. that one of the miracles of Allah, the creation of the skies and the Earth,
  187. (and the diversity of your languages and colours)
  188. The variation is in your tongues
  189. and in your skin color, languages is taught by Allah SWT
  190. This is very, very, very important,
  191. that we learn through observation
  192. and through observation, we actually learn language
  193. and how to speak different languages in our life.
  194. The third type of knowledge that we acquire
  195. is actually through trial and error.
  196. The first trial and error we try in our lives is actually to learn how to walk.
  197. Walk, you fall, you cripple, you walk, you cripple, you fall.
  198. This is a cycle until you get it.
  199. This ability, Alhamdulillah Rabb Alalameen, that Allah gifted it to us
  200. so that we don't repeat the same mistakes again and again and again.
  201. And the Prophet even made us smarter.
  202. He pushed us to even learn from the mistakes of the others.
  203. The happy one is the one who learned from the mistakes of the others.
  204. You don't have to make the same mistakes.
  205. And then this ability from
  206. trial and error takes us to the next level
  207. when we grow up and go to school and learn letters and reading.
  208. And this ability to read is one of the earliest commands in the Quran
  209. as we said,
  210. (Read, ˹O Prophet,˺ in the Name of your Lord Who created
  211. created humans from a clinging clot
  212. Read! And your Lord is the Most Generous)
  213. Read, read, read
  214. Subhanallah
  215. which leads us to so many different types of reading
  216. and one of which is actually to read,
  217. how to read and write, because in that first 5 Ayahs:
  218. (Read! And your Lord is the Most Generous, Who taught by the pen, taught humanity what they knew not)
  219. Read and your Lord is the most generous who taught with the pen.
  220. We are the only specie that uses the pen and writes the language.
  221. Not only we speak sophisticated language, we write it,
  222. which means we can read it, which means we can accumulate knowledge.
  223. You learn, you read, you write.
  224. Then someone passes away,
  225. then someone comes and builds on that knowledge and makes an accumulative
  226. knowledge that enables mankind to advance in every field of science.
  227. Insha'Allah,
  228. In the next episode, we will learn about the remaining 7 types of knowledge.
  229. May Allah's blessings be upon our master Muhammad and all his family and companions

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Why The Angels Bowed | Al-Sirat Al-Mustaqeem EP.10 | A Journey With Shaykh Alauddin ElBakri · Tawasaw Institute