Bookwright – In the name of Allah, the All-Merciful, the Most Merciful and may Allah bless His slave and messenger Muhammad and his family and companions and grant perfect peace.

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An appreciation of the life and teachings of Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi

Assalamu ‘alaikum. At this difficult time I would like to share with the fuqara and faqirat some of what I learnt from our beloved Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi.

With the pain of longing for Allah we came to Shaykh Abdalqadir and he healed our hearts by showing us how we can get near to Him. Distressed and confused at the injustices in the world we came to our Shaykh and his analyses cleared our confusion and gave us hope. He was a light that illuminated the world. Whilst others who diagnosed the problems of the modern world painted pictures of doom and gloom Shaykh Abdalqadir provided solutions to the problems. He lifted us out of the abyss of despair and energised us, calling us to action and bringing out from within us nobility, dignity, courage and strength that we didn’t know we possessed.

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Khutbah Eid al-Fitr – Norbury Park, London – 2024

The month of Ramadan is the one in which the Qur’an was sent down as guidance for mankind, with Clear Signs containing guidance and discrimination. Any of you who are resident for the month should fast it. But any of you who are ill or on a journey should fast a number of other days. Allah desires ease for you; He does not desire difficulty for you. You should complete the number of days and proclaim Allah’s greatness for the guidance He has given you so that hopefully you will be thankful.

The practice is that we repeat the takbir from the moment we leave our homes to go to the place of prayer until the imam comes to lead the prayer. We do that because of the guidance Allah has given us in allowing us to fast this month and obey Him and so that hopefully we will be grateful.

Guidance is twofold: first, it is that He has made truth and falsehood distinct in His Noble Book and in the Sunnah, and this is also the Furqan or discrimination mentioned at the beginning of the ayat. In other words, guidance is to make right and wrong, truth and falsehood clear

But guidance has a further meaning, which is that He has enabled us to understand this, to accept it and to obey it, for how many people there are who know things but are unable to act by them? It is because of Allah’s guidance that we are able to obey Him.

Throughout the month we recited after every four rak‘ats of tarawih:

‘Praise be to Allah who has guided us to this! We would not have been guided, had Allah not guided us. The Messengers of our Lord came with the Truth.’

We do not think that we are special people, but that rather we have a caring Lord Who, for reasons best known to Himself, chose to lead us out of darkness and kufr and allowed us to be Muslims, and allowed us to obey Him and guided us to that. That obedience of ours is a gift from him.

Allah has promised those of them who believe and do right actions forgiveness and an immense reward. (48:29)

The right actions He has made obligatory on us are these prayers, the fasting of Ramadan, the zakat and hajj. They are a part of the contract.

Who is truer to his contract than Allah? Rejoice then in the bargain you have made. That is the great victory.

Allah promised us the Garden if we are true to our contract with Him. So He has gifted us Islam and the ability to worship Him and then He will reward us for that obedience with forgiveness of our wrong deeds and entrance into the Garden. Should we not be grateful? And if we are grateful that very gratitude of ours is His gift to us:

Shaykh Mu?ammad ibn al-?ab?b said in a qasidah:

“Praise belongs to You O Possessor of forbearance, pardoning and veiling of wrong actions

And my praise is one of Your greatest blessings, O Vast in goodness.”

For Allah says:

And when your Lord announced: “If you are grateful, I will certainly give you increase, but if you are ungrateful, My punishment is severe.”’ (14:7)

One of the things for which we must be most grateful is that He rescued us from the darkness of kufr – ingratitude – and enabled us to be grateful for that.

It is He Who calls down blessing on you, as do His angels, to bring you out of the darkness into the light. He is Most Merciful to the believers.

A part of gratitude is that you must not underestimate what you do. The establishment of the five salat and confirmed Sunnah prayers such as the Witr, without thinking of tahajjud night prayers and other extra prayers, is an enormous thing. Fasting the month of Ramadan from dawn to sunset and the Sunnah fasts of ‘Arafat and ‘Ashura’, without looking to recommended fasts such as Monday and Thursday, is an enormous thing. Giving the recommended proportions of wealth in zak?h is something extraordinary even without extra acts of sadaqah. Making the Hajj pilgrimage to Makka once in a lifetime if one is able to do that is vast. In other religions, the only people who do things like these are devotees and monks. People in other religious communities who do what ordinary Muslim men and women do are considered to be saints of great piety.

Allah says:

You are the best nation ever to be produced before mankind. You enjoin the right, forbid the wrong and believe in Allah. (3:110)

Allah praises you as the best nation. It is true. You do enjoin things that are right and you do forbid things that are wrong, and you do believe in Allah. You fit the ayat. Thank Allah for creating you, providing for you, giving you upbringing in ways that were subtle and not always obviously conducive to the place you have arrived at now. And thank Him for praising you for the qualities which He created in you or taught you.

Many of us recite the du‘a:

“You fostered our growth by the graciousness, kindness and subtlety of Your lordship with an upbringing that even illuminated intellects fall short of grasping.”

Many who have come from kufr into Islam, have come from broken homes, single parent families, with careworn mothers trying to make ends meet or from completely dysfunctional families, and suffered all sorts of setbacks in their lives. Many can also say that it was precisely those things that in some way set them on the path they are on today. The way that Allah guides people is genuinely counter-intuitive but it is also genuine.

People always want to know the story of how someone became a Muslim, but that is not the true story. Rather they should ask: how was it that Allah guided you? In what way did that happen?

Suhayb ar-Rumi narrated that the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, “The affair of the mu’min is amazing. All of his affair is good for him, but that is for no one other than the mu’min. If some good fortune occurs to him he is grateful and that is good for him. And if some bad fortune occurs to him he is patient and that is good for him.”

And people often have iman before they have Islam, even if they are unable to put a name to it or know its parts.

If we stop with the gifts we have been given and merely enjoy them, even if we do so gratefully, we will not have expressed full gratitude.

Allah, exalted is He, says:

So when you have finished, work on, and make your Lord your goal!

When you finish one action, move on to another. When you finish one stage, then move on to the next. Growth is a natural law of existence. And, in its time, growth stops and there is decay and old age. As in the individual so with a society.

The worst temptation for a community is that they will simply manage the community and become narcissistic. As we heard, Allah said:

You are the best nation ever to be produced before mankind…

This word here translated as ‘produced’ is ukhrijat. It comes from the verb kharaja ‘he went out’ and ukhrijat means ‘made to go forth’ or ‘made to go out’. An intrinsic part of this ayat that praises the Muslims is that we have been ‘made to go out to people’ but not just as individuals but as an ummah, a community, a nation. A nation or a community has leadership. The leadership lead the Muslims out to people since otherwise they will not be the best community or the best nation. And that is also the meaning of the English word ‘education’ – ‘to lead out’. So the leader is an educator and the educator is a leader.

Now we have emerged from the cave-retreat of Ramadan, it is time for us to go out to people, commanding the right, forbidding the wrong and believing in Allah.

Self-knowledge

In the name of Allah, the All-Merciful, the Most Merciful, and may Allah bless His Prophet and Messenger Muhammad and his family and companions and grant peace

Dars for Saturday 16^th December København

This year marks a century and a year from the day of the final dismantling of the khalifate, and thus the rise to total dominance of the Judaeo-Christian world order, not comprising two ‘Abrahamic religions’ but two archetypal distortions of the revelation. The first was the Jewish accommodation with power, with subjection, and the centrality to it of legalisms and rituals, and the embrace of usury and banking. The second was the Christian accommodation with power; the Roman oligarchy offered them the seat of power if not its reality, and they accepted, and so the Roman Church and the Holy Roman Empire were born. Their dominant features were theology and metaphysical speculation which they took over from the Greeks.

Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi on Israel

by Dr. Riyad Asvat 5/11/2023

In 2014 Shaykh Abdalqadir, rahimahullah, said: “The removal of Hamas will change nothing. There still remains a nation divided by its two contrary elements …” The nation he is referring to is Israel. The first element is that the citizens of Israel suffer from post-concentration-camp-psychosis disorder. The Shaykh explained it as follows: “The apparent ease with which educated middle-aged men and women daily on television not only approve but call for the massacre of women and children next-door in Gaza is simply not explainable rationally. It is part of this psychosis.” The second element is: “the Israeli inability to deal with matters by military practice. Bombing and droning are acts of cowardice. The Israelis cannot role-play militarism.” Israel cannot deal with the people it rules over with honour, justice, bravery and nobility. The Israeli political class and armed forces have none of that. They never conquered Palestine, they acquired it by stealth, theft, lies and fraud. Behind it all are business corporations, the worst of which are banks and the deadly sin of riba, that is, fractional reserve banking, interest and derivatives. What exactly did the Israelis steal? According to Islamic law the whole country of Palestine including the natural resources within its territorial waters.

Shaykh Abdalqadir says: “Absurd little Israel, with its multi-racial citizens who insist that they are Jews and the descendants of Sayyidina Ibrahim, may Allah be pleased with him, although their own scientists have admitted that this is a fantasy (see The Myth of the Jewish Race by Raphael Patai and Jennifer Patai), brought into being by known terrorists, the Stern gang and so on, governed over its short history by these terrorists, and finally fighting a war against the indigenous people of their land under a terrorist named as such by their own judiciary while they embark on a genocide of the native people. Palestinians, the Arab Navaho!”
How is absurd little Israel able to slaughter thousands of Palestinians, be accused of war crimes, have United Resolutions passed against it and be able to continue genocide with impunity? Shaykh Abdalqadir explains that: “1945 saw the creation of the ultimate nihilistic phase of kufr. It aspired to a world government, a world police and already laid the foundations of a world bank and single currency. The nation state was over and now the world was governed by a totally unelected oligarchy represented by three zones of power, commodities, media and financial, while the third of these represented the inner circle of power. Current events show us that all the nations lie subservient to the Oligarchic Triad while Israel remains the ideological and imperialist entity which has survived and continues above and beyond the ruin of the national states.” Israel was created as a military base to secure energy supplies for the financial and industrial centres of the oligarchs in Europe and America. The United Nations Organisation was formed to provide global governance, that is, one world government and this has been achieved now in a most subversive way. Let me explain.

Mawlid København 2023

1. Love “Say: If you love Allah…”

Everyone has their own Qur’an: for some it is a terrible book full of warnings about eternal punishment, for others it is a legal work with regulation of all affairs of life, and with others it is a spiritual book detailing knowledge of Allah and His Messengers. Once you take the perspective of love, you will find love mentioned everywhere in the Noble Book and the Sunnah.

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Book Burning

In the Name of Allah, the All-Merciful the Most-Merciful
It is absurd beyond measure that burning a book, which is a record of speech, should become an issue of freedom of speech. Clearly it is designed to silence speech, in this case the uncreated Speech of the Divine, of the Essence itself, of That which necessarily IS. But absurdity is piled on absurdity. When a former Prime Minister sensibly spoke out in the Folketinget against this behaviour, a half or more of the members told him to shut up.
But how did we get here? A suitable beginning which is not entirely arbitrary would be the birth of modernity itself and the modern state in the French Revolution whose exultant votaries cried out “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”, failing to notice that if you are free you would be free not to be equal, as demonstrated superbly by neo-liberalism in which some are free to be stupendously wealthy, and others are free to be miserably poor but have to shut up and accept demeaning work in an Amazon warehouse.
Similarly, no one seemed to notice that if everyone is equal, then no one at all is free, except for the state administrators who enforce equality and spend their weekends and holidays in discrete summer houses that others can only dream about.
And of course, in all scenarios brotherhood simply dies. That calls to mind the title of Professor Benjamin Nelson’s seminal study on another beginning of modernity The Idea of Usury – from Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood. But that is an issue that no one feels comfortable with today because he was talking about the usury that lies at the root of banking and stock exchanges, and not just the excessive and extortionate interest the dictionaries tell us is its meaning. And is this a complete and quite vicarious digression? No, because the revealed Speech of the Essence, of the Divine, of That which necessarily IS contains among its many confirmations of prior revelations, such as the Torah and the Gospels, a ringing endorsement of their long-forgotten prohibition of usury, and that is not only very inconvenient for banks, but also for the state which rubber-stamps them. In that way we can make sense of the pictures of the more than slightly deranged book-burner (his brother’s assessment) marching flanked by state-heavies, which clearly shows that the state is not simply safeguarding a citizen’s right to freedom of speech (failing to explain how burning a book fits that category) but is itself the active agent here.
It is another absurdity for us to believe the fiction that the state merely stands by helplessly while one of its citizens does things it does not endorse. Had he demonstrated to question the holocaust (not something I would suggest), he would have been shut up immediately as were many others who have done so. There is no absolute freedom of speech, and here it is quite clear since the one whose freedom to speak is not allowed is the Divine. Everyone else may speak, but not He.

Tradition and Madinas of the Future

(To avoid confusion, it must be made clear that this has nothing to do with the ‘traditionalism’ of perennialists and esotericists.)

Recognising the catastrophe of the age and its cause in the loss of the tradition, the issue is not a simple one of returning to the tradition or restoring it. One must recognise that there was something in the tradition itself that led to its demise. Thus, respectfully, one must retrace it to its roots and then back to what it has become and what it has given rise to even in its apparent demise.

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A vignette

Allah, exalted is He, said in a famous hadith: “Do not abuse time, for I am time.” What Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi brought was a renewed relation to time. What made him a man of his time was that he was pre-eminently a man of the moment, intensely alert to it. That was because it was in the present moment that he expected Presence, hadrah, to which his entire being was attuned. Being absolutely of the present, he was totally present with whoever he was with. Being of the present moment, he was one of those about whom Allah says: “There is no fear on them” and fear is always of the future, “nor do they grieve” and grief is always of the past.

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