Ramadan Muraqabah: Outer Things must be Motivated by the Inner

Ramadan Muraqabah: Outer Things must be Motivated by the Inner Dinner blessing: Bismi-Llāhi-r-Rahmāni-r-Rahīm. Allah, we are so grateful for the gathering tonight and the blessings we are having: new faces, new brothers and sisters from Washington, and for our family from Turkey and Kyrgyzstan still to be here. We ask you Allah Swt for blessings upon all of their families, and give them health and strength in the weeks and months to come. Give them fulfillment of their hopes and dreams, through deepening their iman. That means to take very seriously this path you have placed us on, Allah. Allah, we ask You to feed the poor hungry people who don t have anything in front of them, to relieve the burdens from the Syrian people s shoulders, to help our new friends from Iraq and other parts of the world who came here this summer, and to bless us with better and better work to do to serve You. Amin. Suhbat: Bismi-Llāhi-r-Rahmāni-r-Rahīm. There is a hadith where Prophet Muhammed (sal) said, Whoever sincerely purifies his heart for Allah for 40 days will find springs of wisdom gush forth from his heart and flow toward his tongue. This is a wonderful hadith. We have 30 days of Ramadan. You should have fasted 3 days in Sha ban at least, 30 days in Ramadan, and six days in Shawwal. What does that add up to? Forty! You re a math whiz, a great number, forty. How do you do that? The problem with 30 or 40 day fasts is you can become very used to them, and adapt to them, which is why people in tariqah in Naqshbandiyya and Mevlevi took to the chilla. I guarantee you cannot adapt to a chilla being in one room in khilwa for 40 days. It s very difficult. 1

Your mind starts to play tricks on you. It starts to tell you how worthless things in this world are that s a big trick. It starts to tell you that you are nothing compared to Allah. Nobody wants to hear that! You find that you have this huge amount of space you used to waste time in, and now you are sitting in khilwa, and you don t know what to do with all that time you have. Oh, yeah, you pray and do all your rak as and sunnah and nafla, and then on top of that you do a few other prayers. You make du ā and read Qur an. Now, what do you do with the other 16 hours? Time gets very heavy. Then you read the reports of people who made a thousand day chilla it used to be a requirement. The last man known to make a thousand day chilla was a Mevlevi man in Turkey who died around 1980 something. We don t have to do that. Did I hear a sigh of relief? I don t know why; if I tell you want to do you don t do it anyway. Do you know the secret of the shaykh you are supposed to protect? Try never to ask anyone to do anything, so you don t give them an excuse not to do it. That s the secret. Encourage people to do things; but if you order them to do it, they are likely not to do it. What you have to do is much simpler than that. If you think about it, there s nothing wrong with it. It s wonderful, part of our tradition. It s good to do before you give ba īat. It s good to do if you make itikāf. We should all do that if we can. The problem is it s just another outer thing you can do, if you treat it like something outer. So you do this outer thing and get some result, which is better than what you get if you do nothing. You taste some sweetness, and you are satisfied with a little sweetness. But what we have been enjoined to do is muraqabah. You all know how hard that is, because there s work and family and cooking dinners and cleanup and the summer program and the job and this and that. It s like putting the camel through the eye of the needle. Find the time, as if time can be found. It s a very elusive thing. We have a whole month of Ramadan, all the preparations. Now, you 2

get a cold at the wrong time, a sore throat. A family issue comes up. Before you know it, it s the 16 th of Ramadan. Some of the promises you made to yourself at the beginning of Ramadan haven t come true. In Bedford you can t go iftar-hopping. But you can up in Washington; it s a favorite pastime. I don t want to embarrass anybody, so I won t tell you want Mansur said to me tonight! I can t tell you that he likes to make iftar at home and then go to the mosque and pray tarawīh. But if I could tell you that, I would have told you that. This is the way it should be, subhāna- Llāh. It s also not just about going to the mosque and making tarawīh. Even the Prophet (sal) said not to make it every night, because it should not become fard. Oh, good! The Prophet said not to make it every night, therefore I don t have to! Terrific. It s that mentality that has to change. You should never use it as an excuse, obviously. Still, nothing replaces having that mentality he is expressing, which I have talked about so many times, and turning it toward muraqabah. It s a very independent act when you can sit in muraqabah with others, like in jamat. This is wonderful and a great blessing. Anything that jams / gathers has more power to it. If it lessened your prayer to jam them, the Prophet (sal) would not have allowed us to do it. It s not because you are traveling and you don t have time to stop. That s ridiculous. You can just pray wherever you are. You can pray on a camel or a horse, or therefore in any moving vehicle. It doesn t matter which direction you are facing; you can pray as long as you have your wudu. Why does it matter in which direction we pray, then? I m always traveling; the world is spinning! There are times I was rushing to sunnah prayer, and made my prayer while I was walking. I don t necessarily count it as that, but I take the time doing that. Why should I rush there and get there too late, if I can while I am walking even a short distance like walking to my car, or even driving in my car make a sunnah prayer? It is better than 3

nothing. I m permitted to do that, because I m moving. But I m not looking for the excuse, or trying to put it off so I can get in the car and make it faster. All those outer things have to be motivated by something inward. How do you develop what motivates you inwardly? By muraqabah. The implicit meaning of muraqabah is to take care of something, to guard something very carefully. What are you guarding? It means to watch over. Yes, it does. And Allah watches over all things. [It means to watch over or guard] whether reciting the names of Allah Swt, or the kalam, or an āyat of Qur an, or making tafakkur / reflection in the hope of being aware of something substantive, but not worldly (not found in the form of the world); or if we are searching for understanding of how this substance we call the world can take place; or if we contemplating how, if we are in deep meditation, something real takes place, something that has a taste to it. I had a dream this morning; it was a pretty weird dream. It wasn t necessarily a good dream. But what I found was interesting in the dream, was there was a Persian man in the dream, and he spoke English with a Persian accent a perfect Persian accent. It was in my dream, so that s me, right? It was in my brain, a perfect Persian accent. I couldn t do it as well outwardly, even though I am pretty good with accents, as it happened inwardly. I was thinking, what s the point of that? How am I going to use that in a talk tonight? The answer is different things happen inwardly. You have different capacities inwardly than you have in the outer. There is another hadith: A single attraction from Allah the Most Compassionate out balances the worship of all men and all jinn. The implication of that is, as important as worship is, [there is something beyond it]. It is enjoined upon us to do it, and we are ordered to do it (if you want to put it that way), and you are disobedient if you don t do it (and you re stupid if you are disobeying Allah, no 4

question; you can t be okay and disobey Allah). The implication is, even with that, there is something beyond it. There is a capacity you achieve in muraqabah that you don t achieve in anything else. Whether reflecting on the Sifat of Allah Swt, or even [you get] to the point where everything disappears but that name, when you are able to hold your thought in such a way that you forget yourself, and go into ghunoodgi, that state of nu as, in those moments you are tasting fana / annihilation. In the retreat, I may talk a little about time again. So much of what we do and don t do is wrapped up in time. We become so facile with time that we use all these excuses: I don t have time. I couldn t spend enough time. I know I should spend more time, if I only had time. But we do have it, if we take it. We even have expressions in English, I m taking the time to do something. Or, That person is just buying time. Interesting sentence when you convert it to Farsi or Arabic. Buying something is ba īat. Time has two faces: zaman and waqt. When you are buying time, you are buying zaman. You are selling something in order to get time. What are you selling? You must have to have something to sell. Allah has provided us with time. How much time do you have? You don t know, but you have time. It could be six months, or 100 years. How do you know? How much of it are you willing to sell, and for what? And what are you buying it with, a promise? I was going to save that for some other time. For a limited period of time, we need to keep vigil of Allah Swt. We need to pay attention to these attributes, and take our mind, capacity, devotion, iman, and sincerity, and turn it inward, not just outward. I m saying that, fully cognizant of the fact that we re going to get up from here in a few minutes, and we re going to go to the mosque and pray Isha and make tarawīh outward. Some of us will follow in Qur an, and some will read in English to make sure we are understanding it. We will get some great benefit and some 5

thoughts will come to us. Some of us will stand there and just do it as a matter of course or a supposed to or buy a few extra lottery tickets, putting in the time. The only way I know to take up the mind in an alternative process, which is an intentional process in the heart that takes a weakened heart and makes it strong; that takes an undirected mind and gives it direction; that takes a soul that is feeling yearning for its origins and gives it the impetus for the freedom to return; that takes the root of our desire for a strong foundation and roots it in the heart; that takes our ideas and makes them clear, that takes our love and makes it directed; that gives us the respect and honor for our shaykhs, the awliya-llāh, and at the same time, gives us [a way to] love the common, every day people the only thing I know is muraqabah. Allah Swt says: Behold the creation of the heavens and the earth and the alternation of night and day, there are indeed signs for men of understanding. Men who celebrate the praises of Allah standing, sitting, and lying down on their sides, and contemplate the wonders of creation and the heavens and the earth. Our Lord! Not for naught have you created all this. Glory to you! Give us salvation from the penalty of the fire. Wow! Standing, sitting, and lying on your sides. Gazing at the heavens and the earth. Again, in another hadith, the Prophet (sal) said to contemplate the creation, not the creator. People of intelligence, take a lesson from this creation of the sky and the earth. The Prophet said to ponder the creation and not the creator. Not just because it s a mystery, but because you can contemplate what you can see. All this outer stuff, all the form which we are enjoined to do, commanded to do, encouraged to do (all three), and which we do out of respect for Prophet Muhammed (sal), should be contemplated as you do it. They are a way of aligning ourselves with the 6

origin of that mystery. Those are continuously engrossed in the remembrance of Allah Swt. The second characteristic of the person is those who ponder and reflect on the creation of Allah. What happens? There is a reward. What s the reward? Hassan al Basri (ra) said, in quoting hadith, The Prophet Muhammed (sal) said, One hour s muraqabah on the creation is better than a whole night of worship. It s also quoted in Tafsir Ruhal Bayan, in the narration of Ibn Abbas (ra). And Abu Hurayra said, The Prophet (sal) said, To reflect for an hour is better than 60 years of nafle worship. Hazrat Ibn Abbas said, To reflect for an hour is better than 80 years of nafle worship. These are hadith being quoted. Who are we to argue with this? How dare we negotiate? Why don t we take it seriously? It s usually, for most people, not in jamat. Secondly, as hard as it may be, it s much easier to walk to the mosque and pray in a group of people, much easier. It s much easier to do 5 prayers a day than one hour of muraqabah, because it s form. We are used to form. We are in love with form. We fall in love with form. It can be seen, and it can be seen by others. We can keep ourselves, in a way, on the straight path by doing things seen by others, if we look at it in the most positive way, not the ego. If you do things in front of others, it keeps you on the straight path itself. That s the whole point of jamat. What is the other reason for it? The only other reason for it is that you have a sense of community/ ummah. We touch each other in prayer, and then separate for sunnah prayer. It means there are two parts to prayer. One is the group part, where you are part of a whole; and the other one is just personal, just you. Nobody knows what you are reciting. Nobody knows if you are reciting. Nobody knows how long you are reciting. It s between 7

you and Allah, if you do it right. In the Tafsir Ruhallah Bani there is a hadith narrated through Hazrat Abu Hurayra: One person lying on his bed, looking at the sky and the stars says, I know you have a creator. The tafsir says that this causes the flames of love for the creator to rise in his heart so he prays, O merciful Lord, forgive me! And so the Lord forgives him. When you observe this creation, you become so humble that it triggers your own repentance. Why? Your ego seems now so small. As soon as you focus on your ego, all the things come rushing to your mind that you should repent of. Do you see the process, the dynamic, of muraqabah? There is a dynamic that keeps linking you to the outer and the inner. This is why it is called Islam, taslim. This is why it is called Islam, submission. Abu Hurayra (ra) relates that the Prophet (sal) said, On the Day of Judgment, an announcement will be made, Where are the intelligent ones? So the people will ask, Who are the intelligent? And the answer will be about the people mentioned in this āyat. Then a flag will be raised for them, and they will gather around this flag, and they will be allowed to enter into Jannah for eternity. Who are these people? These are the people of muraqabah. When you go to your grave (inshā a-llāh, it s a long time from now), will you be able to say, I m one of the people of muraqabah, of raqib. I m a person who sold what was dear to me, and my hand is over your hand? Will you be able to say that? Aisha was asked, O mother of the believers, can you inform me about a special incident about the Prophet (sal)? And she replied, Which of the incidents were not special? But listen, one night the Prophet (sal) came to rest with me And you know the rest of 8

the story. This is a story that defines ihsan. It s not the story of islam only. It s not just a story of iman, but of ihsan. She went on and said, He made his wudu and stood up to pray and start to profusely cry, so that his beard was wet through with tears. He continued through his bowing and prostration throughout the whole night. At last Bilal (may Allah be pleased with him) had arrived at the masjid to announce the fajr prayer. Seeing this, I asked, O Prophet of Allah! You are completely sinless and pure. Why do you cry so much? He said, Should I not be a grateful servant of Allah? And why should I not cry, because just now this āyat has been revealed. Then he said, Destruction for the person who recites this āyat, but does not do muraqabah. Imam al Ghazali (ra) wrote, Pondering / fikr has been made a superior mode of worship. Not only does it include dhikr, but two other aspects as well. It contains Allah, marifah / gnosis. And the key to marifah is reflection and thinking, and the love of Allah is deeply established through this thinking/fikr. This is known as muraqabah. Hence, this brings us to the next thing, the Hadith of Jibreel, which you all know. I ll keep trying. You ll keep getting tired of hearing me, but I ll keep trying. Just think about all the junk we collect in our lives. It all has meaning, and then it all turns out to be junk. It has meaning to one person, but is just junk to someone else. If we have junk in the outer that we collect, what do you think we collect in the inner? Salaam alaikum, ya ll. 9