Qāḍī Abū Bakr Ibn Al-ʿArabi: Ḥanbalīs, Ḥanafīs, Ashʿarīs, Muʿtazilīs and the Anthropomorphists.

Mt Zalagh, Fes

Alhamdulilah, a new article is now available from marifah.net entitled 'Qāḍī Abū Bakr Ibn Al-ʿArabi on the Mujassima.'

Regarding the Ḥanābila of that time in general and the “sitting” incident in particular, a few points need to be understood. First of all, the chain of transmission for the incident of “Sitting! Sitting!” is originally from Al-Andalus and is quoted and correctly cited by Imam Ash-Shāṭibī in Al-Iʿtiṣām (v.2) and those referred to therein are the Ẓāhiriyya and not the Ḥanbalīs. Thus, this information that has reached the Qāḍī has been slightly altered.  Secondly, both Imam Al-Qushayrī and his students could not have gained access in such a way in Baghdad as during this time the Ḥanbalīs allowed neither ʿilm al-kalām nor taṣawwuf to be taught in public. Thirdly, the Madrasa Niẓāmiyya was built long after Imam Al-Qushayrī. Fourthly, the issue that must be understood in light of what happened in the Muslim west and far west is that in  the time of Al-Qāḍī Abū Yaʿlā the Elder a book was written by him entitled Ibṭāl Al-Taʾwīlāt fi Ikhbār Al-Ṣifāt, which is in print and is in three thick volumes. The book was an open denunciation against interpreting and ʿilm al-kalām. In volume 1, the Elder states the Ashʿarīs to be from Ahl Al-Ḥadīth but states that they should follow the earlier Ashʿarīs, i.e. before Al-Baqilānī, who did not interpret. The Khalīfa, Al-Qāʾim bi Amrillah, loved the book and had it mass-distributed and then began persecuting the Ashʿarīs because of it, through no fault of the Elder. Later Ashʿarīs called it the era when tashbīh took over. Al-Baqilānī, and other Ashʿarīs of his persuasion, believed that the Ḥanbalī position of without how and without meaning (i.e. absolute tafwīḍ) could lead philosophically-minded people to tashbīh. Some of these people would not accept believing in revelation which they recited but were told did not understand the meaning of the words. This situation intensified with a book by Al-Qāḍī Abū Yaʿlā the Younger, who is Al-Qāḍī Abū Ḥusayn (d.526 AH). After a heated exchange and numerous confrontations with Ashʿarīs, he penned a work bearing the name Al-Iʿtiqād, the first of its kind in that, on its last page, he classed the Ashʿarīs as one of the astray cults. This exasperated the circumstances of the time and some say it precipitated his violent death, which until today has been unsolved. This should be a lesson for people today who argue without knowledge or argue past one another. Fifth and final point; the other Qāḍīs mentioned by the author were of the position of Al-Qāḍī Abū Yaʿlā the Elder but were still in opposition to ʿilm al-kalām. Thus, the reader should understand that it is this world that Al-Qāḍī Abū Bakr is coming into when he is visiting the Muslim east, having come from the far west. Let the reader keep this in mind.

One of today’s Ashʿarīs has written a warning against Ibṭāl At-Taʾwīlāt [http://web.archive.org/web/20080404225636/http://www.al-razi.net/website/pages/m21.html], but insha'Allah, this will be explained soon on www.htspub.com.

As for the fitna of the Ḥanafīs being Muʿtazila, this began when Al-Qāḍī Abū Yūsuf Yaʿqūb Ibn Ibrāhīm Al-Anṣārī entered the ʿAbbāsid government and took a post while the ʿAbbāsids were swinging wildly towards the side of the Muʿtazila, to the point that all of the Ḥanafīs in the time of Imam Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal and up until the Seljuq and Ottoman invasions were Muʿtazila. The ʿAbbāsids who tortured Imam Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal were staunchly Ḥanafī although Muʿtazila. Imam Aḥmad said of them: ‘The people of Raʾy [opinion, i.e. Muʿtazila in this case] are a group of astray innovators and enemies to the Sunnah and authentic narrations. They negate the ḥadīth and refute the Messenger, may Allah’s prayers and peace be upon him. They have taken claim of Abū Ḥanīfa and whoever speaks with his words as an Imam for them and judged by their religion. Every astrayness is clear from the one who spoke in this way. So the one who has done this, he has truly left the words of the Messenger and his Companions and gone to the words of Abū Ḥanīfa and his companions. Sufficient is the state of such a person to show their wrongdoing, evil and transgression.’ [Ṭabaqāt Al-Ḥanābila v.1, p.36-37] In other words, the Muʿtazila are astray and they falsely attribute themselves to Imam Abū Ḥanīfa. Sheikh ʿAbdul Qādir Al-Jilānī, may Allah have mercy on him, denounced the Ḥanafīs in his area in his time as they were all Muʿtazila. He said of them: ‘As far as the Ḥanafiyya are concerned, they were a group among the followers of Abū Ḥanīfa Al-Nuʿmān Ibn Thābit. They profess the doctrine that faith is the recognition and acknowledgement of Allah and His Messenger and of everything as a totality that has come to us from His presence.’ [Al-Ghunya v.1 in Bāb Al-Murjiya] By stating that faith is merely the recognition and acknowledgement of Allah and His Messenger, they establish the precedent that Allah, Glorified and Exalted, can only be known through these means and thus this plays down revelation and having a personal relationship with Allah. An example of this would be the current malaise in which Muslims are very hesitant to call those who reject faith “unbelievers”, or “kuffār”, because they believe in “God.” However, acknowledgement of existence is not proof of a relationship or of salvation.

And with Allah alone is every success.

Assalaam alaykum.

Imām Ash-Shāfiʿī: Yearning for Gaza

Masjid As-Sayyid Hashim, Gaza

Yāqūt Al-Ḥamawī[1] said: ‘In Gaza,[2] Al-Imam Abū ʿAbdullah Muḥammad Bin Idrīs Ash-Shāfiʿī was born, may Allah be pleased with him. As a child he moved to the Hijāz and acquired knowledge there, and it is  related from him that he remembered [Gaza] by saying:

Indeed I yearn for the land of Gaza

             To be taken far away from it is the cause of my silence

Allah sends rain upon a land; if only I had taken some of its earth

            I would rub it on my eyelids out of my intense yearning

[Translated from Dīwān Al-Imām Ash-Shāfiʿī, p.391 (Beirut: Dar Al-Fikr, 2007/1428)]

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[1] Yāqūt Bin ʿAbdullah Ar-Rūmī Al-Ḥamawī, Abū ʿAbdullah, Shihāb Ad-Dīn, reliable historian, master of geography and scholar of language and literature (d.626/1229).

[2] (tn): i.e. Gaza City, which is where Hāshim Bin ʿAbdul Manāf is buried, the grandfather of the Messenger of Allah, may Allah’s prayers and peace be upon him, and this is why it is also known as Ghazzat Hāshim. (Muʿjam Al-Buldān: 4/202)

The Great Global Warming Fizzle

The Religiosity and Idolatry of the AGW Movement: Part 2

From the SPPI Blog:

The climate religion fades in spasms of anger and twitches of boredom.

How do religions die? Generally they don’t, which probably explains why there’s so little literature on the subject. Zoroastrianism, for instance, lost many of its sacred texts when Alexander sacked Persepolis in 330 B.C., and most Zoroastrians converted to Islam over 1,000 years ago. Yet today old Zoroaster still counts as many as 210,000 followers, including 11,000 in the U.S. Christopher Hitchens might say you can’t kill what wasn’t there to begin with.

Still, Zeus and Apollo are no longer with us, and neither are Odin and Thor. Among the secular gods, Marx is mostly dead and Freud is totally so. Something did away with them, and it’s worth asking what.

Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen.

As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term “climate change” when thermometers don’t oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other “deniers.” And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.

This week, the conclave of global warming’s cardinals are meeting in Durban, South Africa, for their 17th conference in as many years. The idea is to come up with a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which is set to expire next year, and to require rich countries to pony up $100 billion a year to help poor countries cope with the alleged effects of climate change. This is said to be essential because in 2017 global warming becomes “catastrophic and irreversible,” according to a recent report by the International Energy Agency.

Yet a funny thing happened on the way to the climate apocalypse. Namely, the financial apocalypse.

The U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada and the EU have all but confirmed they won’t be signing on to a new Kyoto. The Chinese and Indians won’t make a move unless the West does. The notion that rich (or formerly rich) countries are going to ship $100 billion every year to the Micronesias of the world is risible, especially after they’ve spent it all on Greece.

Cap and trade is a dead letter in the U.S. Even Europe is having second thoughts about carbon-reduction targets that are decimating the continent’s heavy industries and cost an estimated $67 billion a year. “Green” technologies have all proved expensive, environmentally hazardous and wildly unpopular duds.

All this has been enough to put the Durban political agenda on hold for the time being. But religions don’t die, and often thrive, when put to the political sidelines. A religion, when not physically extinguished, only dies when it loses faith in itself.

That’s where the Climategate emails come in. First released on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit two years ago and recently updated by a fresh batch, the “hide the decline” emails were an endless source of fun and lurid fascination for those of us who had never been convinced by the global-warming thesis in the first place.

But the real reason they mattered is that they introduced a note of caution into an enterprise whose motivating appeal resided in its increasingly frantic forecasts of catastrophe. Papers were withdrawn; source material re-examined. The Himalayan glaciers, it turned out, weren’t going to melt in 30 years. Nobody can say for sure how high the seas are likely to rise—if much at all. Greenland isn’t turning green. Florida isn’t going anywhere.

The reply global warming alarmists have made to these dislosures is that they did nothing to change the underlying science, and only improved it in particulars. So what to make of the U.N.’s latest supposedly authoritative report on extreme weather events, which is tinged with admissions of doubt and uncertainty? Oddly, the report has left climate activists stuttering with rage at what they call its “watered down” predictions. If nothing else, they understand that any belief system, particularly ones as young as global warming, cannot easily survive more than a few ounces of self-doubt.

Meanwhile, the world marches on. On Sunday, 2,232 days will have elapsed since a category 3 hurricane made landfall in the U.S., the longest period in more than a century that the U.S. has been spared a devastating storm. Great religions are wise enough to avoid marking down the exact date when the world comes to an end. Not so for the foolish religions. Expect Mayan cosmology to take a hit to its reputation when the world doesn’t end on Dec. 21, 2012. Expect likewise when global warming turns out to be neither catastrophic nor irreversible come 2017.

And there is this: Religions are sustained in the long run by the consolations of their teachings and the charisma of their leaders. With global warming, we have a religion whose leaders are prone to spasms of anger and whose followers are beginning to twitch with boredom. Perhaps that’s another way religions die.


Related articles:
• Climategate 2.0
• Climategate 2.0: Mann suggests Harvard take action against Soon, Baliunas
• Uh oh, global warming loons: here comes Climategate II!
• Climategate 2.0: the not nice and clueless Phil Jones
• Climategate 2.0: junk science 101 with Michael Mann

Further reading:
SPPI Collection of Papers as of October 2011
Environmentalism as Religion

Economics 101: The Broken Window Fallacy

Alhamdulilah, this short video explains why government bailouts, stimulus plans and "job creation" schemes never help an economy but in fact make things worse.

The baker in the video makes reference to Frederic Bastiat and Henry Hazlitt. Bastiat's work is called That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen, while Hazlitt's book is called Economics in One Lesson. The latter was first published in the 1940s and explains very clearly and brilliantly how a healthy economy can be brought to ruin, albeit unwittingly,  and thus it explains why the global economy, especially in the United States and Europe, is in such a terrible state. 

And with Allah alone is every success.

Imam An-Nawawī on the Ten Days of Dhul Ḥijja

The chapter on the Adhkār of the first then days of Dhul Ḥijja[1]

Allah the Exalted has said: “so that they can invoke[2] Allah’s name on specific days.” [Al-Ḥajj 22:28] Ibn ʿAbbās, Ash-Shāfiʿī and the majority say that these are the ten days of Dhul Ḥijja.

Know that it is recommended to increase one’s dhikr in these ten days more than any other time, and it is recommended to do it more on the Day of ʿArafa[3] than any of the remaining ten days.

504_We have related in Ṣaḥīḥ Al-Bukhārī on the authority of Ibn ʿAbbās, may Allah be pleased with him, that the Prophet, may Allah’s prayers and peace be upon him, said: “There are no better days than these in which to do good deeds.” They said: ‘And not even to strive in God’s way?’ He said: “Not even to strive in God’s way, except for a man who goes out and risks his life and his wealth and does not come back with either.” This is the wording of Al-Bukhārī, and it is authentic.[4] The wording in the collection of At-Tirmidhī is: “There are no days in which to do righteous action that are more beloved to Allah than these ten days.” The wording in Abū Dāwūd’s narration is almost identical, except that his says: “than these days” i.e. the ten days.

We have related in the Musnad of Imam Abū ʿAbdillah Bin ʿAbdur Raḥmān Ad-Dāramī, with the chain of transmission of the two Ṣaḥīḥ collections, that he said regarding it: “There are no better days in which to do good deeds than the ten days of Dhū Al-Ḥijja.” It was said: ‘Not even striving?’ The rest of the ḥadīth was then quoted in full. In another narration it says: “the ten days of Al-Aḍḥā.”[5]

505_We have related in the book of At-Tirmidhī, on the authority of ʿAmr Bin Shuʿayb, on the authority of his father, on the authority of his grandfather, that the Prophet, may Allah’s prayers and peace be upon him, said: “The best supplication[6] is the supplication on the Day of ʿArafa, and the best thing that I and the Prophets before me have said is: ‘There is no god but Allah alone, He has no partner. He has the Dominion and He deserves all Praise, and He has power over everything.’[7]” At-Tirmidhī declared its chain of transmission to be weak.

506_We have related in the Muwaṭṭāʾ of Imam Malik, with a chain of transmission that is mursal[8] and the wording of which is shorter, which is: “The best supplication is the supplication on the Day of ʿArafa, and the best thing that I and the Prophets before me have said is: ‘There is no god but Allah alone, He has no partner.’”

507_It has reached us on the authority of Sālim Bin ʿAbdillah Bin ʿUmar, may Allah be pleased with him, that he saw someone asking people on the Day of ʿArafa, so he said: ‘O feeble one! Is other than Allah, Mighty and Majestic, asked on this day?’

508_Al-Bukhārī has said in his Ṣaḥīḥ: ‘ʿUmar would make takbīr[9] in his dome in Minā, and the people in the masjid would hear him and do likewise. Then the people in the market would follow likewise until all of Minā was shaking with takbīr.

509_Al-Bukhārī said: ‘In these ten days, ʿUmar and Abū Hurayra, may Allah be pleased with both of them, would go out to the markets and make takbīr and the people would make takbīr with them.

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[1] (Translator’s note: translated from Al-Adhkār lil Imām Abi Zakariyyā Yaḥyā Bin Sharaf An-Nawawī Ad-Dimashqi (Beirut: Muʾassasa Al-Maʿārif, 2005) p.154-155

[2] (tn): i.e. dhikr

[3] (tn): i.e. the 9^th of Dhul Ḥijja

[4] (tn): Ar. ṣaḥīḥ

[5] (tn): i.e. the Sacrifice

[6] (tn): Ar. duʿāʾ

[7] (tn): Ar. La ilaha illa Allah, waḥdahu, la sharīka lah, lahu al-mulk, wa lahu al-ḥamd wa huwa ʿalā kulli shayʾin qadīr. It should be noted that even though this ḥadīth is weak per se, it is backed up by numerous other ṣaḥīḥ ḥadīths that mention the praiseworthiness of this invocation. For example, there is the ḥadīth in the collections of Al-Bukhārī and Muslim in which the Messenger of Allah, may Allah’s prayers and peace be upon him, said: “Whoever says: ‘There is no god but Allah alone, He has no partner. He has the Dominion and He deserves all Praise, and He has power over everything’ one hundred times in a day, will have the reward of freeing ten slaves. Also, one hundred good deeds will be written down for him, one hundred evil deeds will be erased from his account and he will be protected from Shayṭān on that day until he turns in. No one can bring anything better than what this person has brought apart from the person who does more than that.”

[8] (tn): i.e. a ‘discontinued’ or ‘disconnected’ ḥadīth, especially at the level of a Companion.

[9] (tn): i.e. saying Allah Akbar

The Difference Between Tawassul and Shirk

Assalaam alaykum,

Alhamdulilah, a new article is now available from www.marifah.net entitled "Wasila, Circumambulating Graves and Accusing Others of Shirk and Kufr". Please have a read, as the article discusses the fundamental difference between Ahl us-Sunnah and the Khawarij, which, in summary, is that the latter always assume the worst of fellow Muslims.

And with Allah alone is every success.

Assalaam alaykum,

Mahdi

Good Intentions

Assalaam alaykum,

 From the You Tube Channel:

"Walter Williams' PBS documentary Good Intentions, based on his book The State Against Blacks (1982). The documentary was very controversial at the time it was released and led to many animosities and even threats of murder.

In Good Intentions, Dr. Williams examines the failure of the war on poverty and the devastating effect of well-meaning government policies on blacks, asserting that the state harms people in the U.S. more than it helps them. He shows how government anti-poverty programs have often locked people into poverty, making the points that:

- being forced to attend 3rd rate public schools leave students unprepared for working life

- minimum wages prevent young people from obtaining jobs at an early age

- licensing and labor laws have had the effect of restricting the entrance of blacks into the skilled trades and unions

- the welfare system creates perverse incentives for the poor to make bad choices they otherwise would not."

Insha'Allah, you'll find that a lot of what Dr. Williams has to say applies to the economy in general, and not just in the United States.

Assalaam alaykum,

Mahdi

Imam An-Nawawī on Benefitting the Deceased

Al-Ḥashr 59:10

Assalaam alaykum,

Alhamdulilah, a new article is now available from www.marifah.net entitled 'Imam An-Nawawī on Benefitting the Deceased', which is a translation from the Imam's book Al-Adkhār min Kalām Sayyid Al-Abrār .


Please have a read, and with Allah alone is every success.


Assalaam alaykum,


Mahdi
 

The Aphorisms of Ibn Ataillah: Hikam 177

With Sheikh Muhammad Saeed Ramadan Al-Bouti:

ان اردتَ ورود المواهب عليك صحّح الفقر و الفاقة لديك

انَّمَا الصَّدَقَاتُ الفُقَرَاءِ

Assalaam alaykum,

Mahdi

Showing Birr to Parents and The Rights of Children

Sūrat Luqmān 31:14 

Assalaam alaykum,

Alhamdulilah, a new article is now available from www.marifah.net, entitled 'Showing Birr to Parents and the Rights of Children', which is a khutba given by Sheikh ʿAbdul Ḥamīd Kishk. Insha'Allah, you will find it very beneficial, and with Allah alone is every success.

Assalaam alaykum,

Mahdi