another 'majnun' across our northern border....On Qiam & Tahajjud

[  http://tafseerkoran.blogspot.my/2013/04/surah-as-sajdah-prostration-32of-salah.html  ]

friends, dato and tansri,

ustaz dr ismail lutfi al patani.....a tok guru across our northern border has a special soft demeanor in his tafseer lecture.
here, he expounds on ayat 16 to 18 of surah as sajdah.
it touches mainly on qiam and tahajjud.......the preserve of the 'majnuns'; the lovers of the beloved.....a rarefied territory.
tahajjud is wajib for the nabi[pbuh], sunnat for us mere mortal.....but a rarefied territory indeed!

put yourselves as an ordinary kampong chap in one of the 'balaisah' [ madrasah ] in yala, patani, or nara, sitting there at the serambi of the madrasah, listening to this ' majnun' from patani.

[  occasionally, young thai 'soldadu' [ soldiers] come over fully armed with m16 looking around for 'young' men, potential trouble makers. these young soldiers are generally bad news.

southern thailand is very a  'hot' territory for the majority muslim population.
soldiers everywhere and every town and villages inundated by road-blocks and fully armed 'soldadu'. A virtual 'prison'.  ]
  
dr nik

ps: 

some years back i was driving my old hj47 toyota landcruiser deep into the southern thai region, just testing the engine, off the beaten track....strayed towards penare [ in teganung we have a similar named beach village, near besut called penarik ],, on the southern patani coast. it was about magrib time.  very little light on the lonely road with very little uncoming traffic on that one lane tarred road.

a surreal experience. 
in front of me was a roadblock with a platoon of young thai soldiers manning it. 
a long line of young muslim men, in their customary baju 'tok', walking  past all these young men with m16, walking towards a madrasah, probably tok guru dr ismail lutfi al patani's pondok nearby.

as i stopped my vehicle to give them the right of way at the road block, i felt sad and this sadness i can  recall my till today. the same sadness i feel when i saw in the utbe yesterday of a muslim lady being 'stripped' off her burkini on a french rivera beach.

it is an 'accident of time' that kelantan, teganung and kedah did not become thai territory post pangkor treaty. otherwise we would not have the extreme pleasure of joining the 'bangss johor' types into what is currently known as the  the  federation!

we have to thank the brits for having that presence of mind almost 2 centuries back.
just by a stroke of the pen!

"at the end of time muslims would be like flotsams being pushed around by the waves!"
' why is it so, ya rasulallah? are they  very few in numbers? '
"no! there are 1.6 billion of them!... but they have all but forgotten their qur'an.... "

......a conversation some 1480 years ago in downtown madinah, or something to that effect.



older related articles:

1.  http://drnikisahak.blogspot.my/2009/04/tales-from-yala.html

2. http://drnikisahak.blogspot.my/2011/07/bersihbersihbersihbersihbersihbersihber_11.html

only majnun knows laila........

Friends, Dato and Tansri,

Everyone think they know Laila, but actually only Majnun knows Laila.

I count one of my current 'tok guru', Shaykh Muhammad al Ninowy as one of those 'majnuns' who knows his 'Laila'.
In this age of  the ubiquitous 'Maggi Mee and instant noodle'; 'instant experts and instant gurus';  'google scholars and google ulama';....I am always extra careful with whom  I am to follow.

I always only look for  a 'majnun' to be my 'tok guru'. A chap who is quite 'mad' with his ugama and vocation.

The late Tok Guru Nik Aziz  was one of them. The late Prof Hamka was my 1st ' majnun'.
I read his voluminous Tafsir al Azhar 2 times over at age 34.
Shaykh Ninowy is one of my current ones.
In the background , standing tall, al Ghazali, the biggest  and best 'majnun' , the world has ever known.

Put yourself in the position of Abu Hamid al Ghazali., just some 350 years after Nabi.

You have just been nominated by Nizam Shah, the all powerful Governor, to be head of  theology department at Nizamiah University in downtown Baghdad at the relative young age of 20 plus, akin to being head of school of theology at Harvard in current time.

You  can out-debate all and sundry on matters of ugama as well as philosophy, from far and near.

...And if you live long enough, you will come to know that some famous Christian luminaries like St Thomas Aquinas for example [ 1225- died 1274 ], have been lurking in the 'background', some 200 years later, cheery picking your lifetime work, to pick up some pearls and gem, from your discourses, etc etc and etc.

Out of the blue, you  just decide to give up your post, to taste 'experiential Islam, on the whims that your knowledge of the faith at that time is just hollow and carries no weight [ try google.. al Ghazali's existential crisis ]. Not helped by having a tassawuf -inclined younger brother, harping on your 'hollowness' , on a daily basis, always in the background.

' dear brother, you may a big time , big town full prof in theology, but you have not taste  real iman yet, despite your apparent stature and position, etc etc and etc...Abu Hamid! Your life is a big fraud and charade!.....'

With this realization, you relegated yourself to being a lowly janitor for 8 years at the world famous Umayyad Mosque in Damascus! All the time listening to the post magrib discourses in the mosque of upstarts and ustazs discussing your ideas and teaching!...and quoting you wrongly for that.

You are almost persuaded to barge in and correct them but that would end your camouflage in the mosque........

If this is not 'majnun' enought,what is !?

I am still stuck at his  short threatise, a TJ Winter's excellent translation of 'Kitab dhikr al Mawt wa-ma ba'dahu',  ' Remembrance of DEATH AND THE AFTERLIFE'.

I 'wrongly' started with his last thesis of the IHYA and I am still stuck at it some 20 years later, when a friend gave it as an umrah  gift in Makkah some 20 years back.  

Another 'majnun',  Prof TJ Winter of Cambridge, started his great translation work of al Ghazali's opus magnum into excellent English.

I started at the wrong end and found myself still mesmerized by this monumental work of al Ghazali.

Let us listen to Shaykh Ninowy's  new perspective on the issues of 'Signs of the Last Days'.
This 'majnun' stresses rather on the 'things that we can change and are movable' rather than ' the immovables'........ 

Dr Nik
[  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gh1XxhVKuno  ]

surah as sajdah, verse three.......

'He directeth the ordinance from the heaven unto the earth; then it ascendeth unto Him in a Day, whereof the measure is a thousand years of that ye reckon. '
[ ayat 5, surah as sajdah, translated by pickthal  ]

friends, dato and tansri,

ayat 5 of surah as sajdah, i am not qualified to comment. any ayat of the qur'an for that matter.
how can i, even up till now i still read the qur'an like a new mualaf.
but i think if i can put the perceivable size of our current universe into perspective, then all of us can at least fathom the gravity and meaning of the above ayat. 

but let me try to expand on the translation....in the above ayat, allah is giving an inkling of the long distant journey HIS angels have to thread, up and down, up and down, the journey of which is likened to a thousand years, earth years that is, in carrying out HIS every detail to the minutiae all HIS qada' and qadar for each and everyone of us., allahualam.

.....and some random thots to keep things in perspective about the 'seen' and the 'unseen':

angels are from light; iblis and jinn from fire; and we mere mortals from clay.
the fastest human dynamo today is usin bolt at just over 45 km per hour!
light traverse space at 300,000 km per second!
'kursi' or god's foot stool, and 'arash', the throne are part of the 'unseen' and 'unmeasurable'.
one sufi saint once opined that the whole of the universe if put on the 'kursi' would be like looking for  a pin in a haystack. 
likewise, the 'kursi' when compared to the 'arash' would be  a pin in another haystack!
and even this comparision is 'problematic' for us mere mortals according to some 'purists'.
allahualam

ok, now back to the real world, back to history, but still on the subject of the 'unseen'. 
imam j'aafar, the well known mufassirun and fuqaha of the past, when asked about where is allah, replied in an oblique way:
" HE is where HE was before  HE created the arash...  ", a very wise answer, tip toeing a great issue of not giving human attributes and human dimensions to God.

now, back to the world of the seemingly,'seen'.
well, how big is the universe?
it is very very very very very big. 
imagine this: 
light travel at 300,000 kilometres per second. 
if we use light as our 'tape measure', it will take our tape measure travelling at this speed,
some '14 billion earth years' to traverse one edge of the universe to the other extreme edge.

translate this figure into kilometres, for better understanding, the diameter of the universe is
8,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, km.
to compound this 'bigness', the universe is forever expanding every second!
[  http://phys.org/news/2015-10-big-universe.html  ]
and there are seven other 'universes' , ie 7 heavens.
mind-boggling!

let us  get back into 'cyberspace', over to my other blog, tafseerkoran.blogspot.com, to attend class 4 of ustaz haroon hasif's tafseer class on surah as sajdah,
commenting on ayat 3 to ayat 5.
[  http://tafseerkoran.blogspot.my/2013/04/surah-as-sajdah-prostration-32verse-1-12.html  ]
dr nik

ps: 
...and omg! the secularist and the agnostic still say  this.
the universe is too 'old' [ 32 billion years old! ] and too vast and too complex....this cannot be the work of any god!
these clowns cannot accept that 'god' is scientific, create orders in HIS creations.
they would rather accept that all these are random acts, a collection of random acts and accident of time.
the probability of this universe sooo very complex formed itself is like something to the power of 10 with several thousand zeros behind it. 
....what is time, sir  anyway? is is also a created entity.

Of Maududi, Hasan al Bana and Sayyid Qutb et al........

http://tafseerkoran.blogspot.my/2013/04/surah-as-sajdah-32overview-by-abul-ala.html

friends, dato and tansri,

i recall a conversation over steak at victoria station, damansara height. i think it must  have been seven to eight years back, between prof sayyid naguib al attas, prof wan from istac  and myself. 

'we'  were discussing the merit and demerit of scholar-theologian abul a'la maududi. 
prof wan and prof naguib, agreed that he  was a 'wee bit' misguided.
i was just a 'kampong' chap in the conversation...first time i heard  about maidudi....so i just listened.

maududi was 'space physics' to myself then.

it was only 2 years later when i finished reading maududi's  popular book,' let us be muslim ', then i could comprehend why the two scholarly gentlemen thought so.
it was an ulama'  and scholar's  discourse to me anyway....way above my head!

from my humble perspective, it is back to 'levels and levels'; the ulama' or scholar being in academia or in political against colonilism of that time;  the time and era also plays an important role in one's perspective and ijtihad.

in 'let us be muslim' maududi brings one slowly, slowly to discuss each of the five precept and pillars of faith : shahadah, solat, zakat and alms, fasting , and lastly haj.
the last chapter was jihad........i 'nearly' pengsan when i reach this chapter. 
to maududi, the 5 pillars were just preamble  and the 'training' to jihad.....jihad is the missing sixth, unstated but can be extrapolated as such!

if you cannot  and not willing to do jihad under extranuating circumstances happening to your din and fellow muslims around you, you have not yet taste iman.

' inna solati wanusuki wamahiya yawa mamati lillahirabbil alamin! '

to my mind, if people like sayyid qutb or maududi  or hasan al bana are still alive today, all of them would be  declared as persona non grata by the security council or worse still, droned rightaway.
this is the  fitna of our time.
right become wrong and overtly wrong become right.
dunya akhir zaman!

welcome to the prologue of surah as sajdah...prostration.
who do you prostrate to.....bush, obama , tony blair, donald trump or allah?

dr nik howk

ps : was maududi misguided?
let us leave this as something beyond us ordinary mortals....
may allah judge all of us accordingly to our 'level' of understanding of HIS din, allahualam.
http://www.fsmitha.com/h2/ch28arab3.htm

Let Us Get Get Back To Basic.....Surah Luqman; Epilogue

---

[  http://tafseerkoran.blogspot.my/2013/04/surah-luqman-31prologue_10.html  ]

friends, dato, and tansri,

we reach the end of surah luqman.
we have a choice of listening to shaykh tawfique chowdhury or ustaz asim khan.
i listen to both.

chowdhury at [ 41.00 ] mentioned that about 1/3 of world population are christians, 1 in 5  of people walking this earth are muslims in various forms and shapes, varying levels and levels, sufi, salafi, wahabi, traditionists, etc etc and etc,shiae, sunni....

and omg! 1 in 4 are atheists...if he include the secularists i think the figure is bigger!

a believer rides on two 'wings', the 'wing' of fear and the 'wing' of hope.
ya rahman, ya rahim, ya latiff and ya wadud are the wing of hope...ya mutakabbir, ya zaljalaliwalikram , ya malik, kahhar, ya jabbar!, the 'wing' of fear.

dr nik howk
ps: i dreamed meeting my long dead tok guru  and i asked him about the present muddle and puddle,
....'demo ning baso jenih menatae tak rg'eti ugamo! ...semua,hok ngaji denga hok tok ngaji, propesar,  DO, ADO, tok haking, pok mat nyadap
dok ikut machae hidung demo doh keno cucok machae lembu..'

---

From: Azmi Wan Hamzah Sent: Friday, August 5, 2016 5:33 PM
To: Nik Isahak Wan Abdullah; nadzru.azhari@gun; Wan Ariff Wan Hamzah
Subject: Re: Fw: let us get back to basic......surah luqman ; epilogue

nikhowk,  

chowdhury is wrong to say 1/3 of the world's population is christian. 

many people of christian heritage in europe openly declare themselves to be atheists and agnostics. if you were to judge the numbers on the basis of weekly church attendance, i would seriously doubt that 50% of the native population of any of the western european nations are christians. which explains why you frequently find old churches been converted to mosques after expanding muslim populations buy them over. 

i believe there is something of a revival of christian worship in eastern europe, parallel to the revival of islam in former territories of old russia, after years of communism where the state religion is atheism. any revival, however, will be coming from a very low base. i doubt if you can assume that 50% of the native populations consider themselves good christians; the same i suspect of the islamic revival in the stans. 

if indeed his estimate of the muslim population is reliable at 20% or 1.5 -1.6 billion people, i dare say the christian numbers do not exceed that. but the christians, by and large, are not inclined to view another christian of a different denomination as non-christian, thanks to a process of neutralisation of aggressive sectarian differentiation through the process of secularism. if you go by the trigger-happy way our lebais and mullahs of the muslim faith are prone to declare an individual, group or sect as beyond the pale, then the muslim population could be very small indeed!

salam, azmi.

________________________________ peace!

.....................................................................................

ts,

i cannot agree more with you

nobody can read people's heart even when they say they are muslim.

only allah knows the exact degree of our kufrness and  'almunafikunnness', for want of better definition.

and mind you ts, munafiks are placed at the bottom of the burning cauldron, lower than the atheists...along with false scholars, scholars who sell their ugama for a few ringgit, and kings, pm and dictators and sultans who are not 'adil'  and 'beradab' to their raayats and themselves!

i suspect chowderhury is  being quite polite and generous here.
he quotes the 'official' vatican' church figures , a combined population of both catholic and protestant.....
and yes i do agree with you ts, most christians now are non practicing...they are secular ie  meaning varying degrees of 'unbelielief'ie atheistic.

i choose to agree with the lebais though regarding muslims, and i and you know this is debatable, but i will tell you why my figures are much lower than the lebais even!

 

my figures and estimate is probably be much lower  than the lebais that most seem to look down at,.... but to be generous and politically correct,that is why i 'include, ' levels and levels' , to denote inclusiveness....  shiae and sunnis.

only god knows!

but numbers are academic ts.
in my life experience  and statistics, only  less than 0.1 % of muslims can  do the 'menguchap'  [shahadah ]at the point of their death .

   [   http://drnikisahak.blogspot.my/2008/05/some-more-random-thots-on-death.html   ]
  from here even if one is generous one can extrapolate how many billions of us are actually muslims.

.....and that is frighteningly low.
and why not?

most of us do not want hudud, or view hudud as being promitive......we are not going to debate on this, but this is already a basis for differentiaiton.
etc etc and etc.

    allah is a god of 'big pictures'! ....HE is not petty. HE only asks big questions...

"WHY, and WHY NIK HOWK you choose lord Reid over ME", HE would ask for instance,
 and that would be difficult for us all to answer, coming to almost 60 years of post independence  and currently standing at over 65 % malay-muslim dominance over politics in malaysia.

back to numbers ts, real muslims most probably will be much much less than the stated 1.6 billions....but 1.6 billion and growing is a nice figure to toast around in this age of muslim bashing.

dr nik howk

..........................................................................

 Nikhowk, 

These numbers are not important to me either, but some of your readers may consider them important and deserve to have a better perspective of the reliability of chowdhury"s estimate. Mine are purely conjecture, based on random observation and experience - hardly a basis for scientific statistical estimation!

thanks for your honesty in declaring you leaned to the side of the lebais and mullahs whom I described as trigger-happy in their denouncement or exclusion of fellow Muslims. But I am disappointed all the same, that someone as bright, educated and with your exposure would not step back a little from the temptation of being judgmental over your fellow Muslims and not leave it to Allah the All Knowing. Personally, I live my life as well as I could for Allah, my fellow humans and for myself. But as my Ustaz in school reminded me years ago : masing2 jaga kubur sdiri, tak soh sibuk kubur orae!"

Back to the unimportant figures. You now clarified that Chowdhury may have rather generously combined Catholics and Protestants in his numbers. Well, that may not now be all that generous. Most Protestants and Catholics have assumed a live and let live coexistence, refraining from the exclusion rhetoric that typified historical discourse between them. It allowed for a lowering of inter-Christian tension and settlement of the Irish sectarian bloodshed. Only the more virulent form of Anerican evangelical Christianity would insist on differentiation, exclusion and condemnation.

Iraqi and Syrian societies, under the secular, authoritarian Baathist ideology, have kept Sunni and Shiah communities away from each other's throats for decades, though not necessarily freed from regime violence. To be fair, most Muslim societies have kept to tolerance and neighborliness  for centuries, by and large. But the late 20th and early 21st century is typified by savagery and bloodlust between Muslim sects that threatens to outdo the excesses of Christian internal conflicts of 500 years ago. What caused the sudden exuberance of violent tendencies amongst the Muslims? American design and/or Zionist conspiracy? Or Saudi petro-dollars? 

When you and I were growing up, did we ever hear from the mimbar the weekly exhortation  to guard against "ajaran2 sesat saperti qadiani, shiah, etc (the etc yesterday included 'sekularisma, pluralisma dan elbigitee" and may include next week "malaysiakini, YouTube and bonsai"). Unless that apostate Obama has succeeded to swap the Malaysian religious schools syllabus or Mossad agents have penetrated Malaysian madrasahs and pondok schools, you'll have to start worrying about the third alternative as being the source of divisions within Muslim society.

Nikhowk, we have had very lively and open discussion about the introduction of hudud and where we differ on the details of readiness of infrastructure for its introduction. You dismissed my concerns as excuses; I viewed your rush as recklessness that could hurt the Islamic brand. As both of us were honest, sincere and truthful in our positions, I believe Allah will judge both of us kindly. And if we as the Ummah leave the  matter of what is beyond the pale amongst fellow Muslims to the All-Knowing, Compassionate and Merciful, you can tout the 1.6 billion with less anxiety!

My prayer for your dear wife, Salam and warm regards, Azmi.

Ps.

This my long explanation of how you help or hurt a brand;

There was a news item out today about Singaporean PM's visit to Washington.  The Singapore PM's wife came for a bit of rough criticism for presenting not the best example of Singaporean elegance and affluence - well, she did not quite compare with Michelle Obama in terms of poise, dress sense and presence. It later transpired that she carried a clutch-bag bought from some handicap school shop, designed and made at the Spore school. The mood of biting criticism reversed into an outpouring of Singaporean pride and support for Madame HoChing. I cannot rule out that it was not planned and contrived - you know she's a very smart woman.

Her Malaysian counterpart has been reported to buy loads of Birkin handbags from the Parisian Hermes boutique, each costing tens of thousands of dollars. Ho Ching paid sin$15 for her clutch bag that she took to meet The Obamas. 

What was reported of HoChing has served the Singapore brand very, very well.

............................................................................

From: Nik Isahak Wan Abdullah
Sent: Saturday, August 6, 2016 1:13 PM
To: Azmi Wan Hamzah
Cc: Wan Ariff 2; nadzru.azhari@gunanusa.co.id
Subject: Re: let us get back to basic......surah luqman ; epilogue

ts,

i dont think i am being judgemental at all ts,
when, in my frequent nightmare scenario, i often wake up with cold sweat as i dream  myself as being an al munafikun. i cannot be judgmental.

let us get beyond rhetorics and not allow ourselves to be fasinated by 'small frames' and small ideas. 
let us get beyond apoligising our  apparent disunity and broad spectrum of belief and postures.
let us look at the big picture.
the battle in this 21st century is the battle of ideas.

we muslims have  not by any means raised the bar.
our bar, ts, compared to muslims of old, has been getting lower and lower.

just look at our scholars now: before they would just be the guys who would just be fit to carry the tok guru's slippers around! now they are big time. travel business class across continents giving lectures everywhere apologising to the west!

for example, tariq ramadan was banned from entering the usa because years back he was 'slightly' independent. he has to tow the line in his thinking. now he is 'sanitised' and ok to the west.
at what price ts, you might ask?

very high one i would add.
he and his friends are going to relook and reinterpret the qur'an to bring its ' incongruence with present  secular  views' to some degree of 'congruency'. omg!

there is a select group of them singing this swan-song.

rather, the secularists have widened their net  tending to marginalise us..
just think:
if you are a cambridge prof like tj winter and hold to the sacrosanct muslim view that lgbt is not right , you stand to lose your next tenureship in the u.

if you as a majority, in afghanistan  or somalia or elsewhere, want sharia as your constitution, you get yourself talibanized and un will declare you persona non grata to the world at large.
un and usa will get a corrupted clown like hamid karzai to lord over you within a portion of the militarized enclave called kabul. elsewhere in afghanistan is talibanistan.
in the name of sanity they will bomb your homes, brand you with names and drone you to death .
fellow muslims elsewhere will be so 'dumb and stupid'  by daily drummimg by cnn, bbc and aljazira,that even they would think you are 'crazy' nuts.

if you go on the pulpit and talk about the revival of the caliphate, you will  be droned.
etc etc etc.

the space for good old islam is getting narrower and narrower.
but what the bloody heck!

at the end of time, this is what we should expect.

if we,  present day muslims bother to take more time to know our qur'an better, and in the process leave behind our secular world viewpoint at the doorstep before the qur'an , and not laced god's divine message with our  very own polluted  and adulterated understanding,
.....we will come to know our din better, insyaallah..

for some it will already be too little, too late!

dr nik howk

ps: may i suggest for our next dinner meeting we meet at me'nate, just a few metres away from wardieburn camp. they serve good steak here. we can collectively drown our sorrow and anger over their wagyu beef.