Dr Javed: Please introduce yourself.
Guest: I am Captain Abdul Rahman’s sister
Dr Javed: Okay, so Captain Abdul Rahman is your brother?
Yes, okay, I see
Guest: Sir, my question is this: God has given us humans free will, but exercising this free often gets us into trouble . We think that we need or want something, but when we get it, we realise that it wasn’t so good for us after all and then we are stuck. We cannot see a way out. So we look for someone to help us, to get us out of the very situation that at one time we desired for ourselves and when we finally find someone who can extract us from our dead end, Or we are given a way out by God, by calling to him from the depths of our heart,
We are usually also reminded that if we were to surrender our free will to God, we might save ourselves from such situations in the first place. So my question is, if we do this, if we surrender entirely to God’s will for us, then what should we ask him for when we pray?
Dr Javed: That he be pleased with us
Guest: His pleasure
Dr Javed: Yes
But this is theoretical talk. It is easy to get to this point intellectually. It is a different thing entirely to surrender to him in practice. And how much we surrender, especially in the critical moments of our lives, this differs from person to person.
Some quickly understand this concept of surrender. For others, it takes time
All of Islamic ideology is divided into two schools of thought. One says that our prayer can change destiny and the other school of thought says that prayer does not change destiny
The mystic Junayd Baghdadi and his followers believe in the former, that prayer can change your destiny and Bayazid Bastami and his followers believe that prayer has no bearing on destiny. I am from this second school of thought myself . People argue with me about this extensively. They remind me that our Prophet (PBUH) told us to pray, and that God himself tells us to pray and that is all correct. And I myself encourage people to pray and try to give them the tools to unlock their own prayers. But still, I am of the view that it doesn’t change destinies
Now of course this doesn’t mean that we can do whatever we want
And later claim that it was destined for us. Like having affairs or stealing or thieving
Or if I don’t study for the whole year
And then claim I was destined to fail my exams. No, that’s not what I am saying. We have been instructed to do the right thing in life, and to work hard.
But if anyone asks me. What is in our control in this life. I would say what is in our control is to refrain from evil. Those that ask this question though, they are usually at the stage of trying to grasp things with their intellect
And I would say to them that what is in their control is refraining from evil. That’s all
It’s a single thing , A single job, to not do something. In fact if we have explicitly been forbidden from doing it . Isn’t that a relief? It requires no hard work, no effort. No trying to make something happen, no generation of resources
We must simply refrain from doing a thing . The way in which Adam was told to stay away from a certain tree – just that one tree , What the fallen angel Iblis was told to do was harder than this
Iblis was told to kneel down before God’s human creation. Now that requires effort. He had to get up, bend down, prostrate himself. Who knows what all was on the ground where he was told to kneel down But that was the order given to him. Adam however, was simply told to stay away from a single tree , As in no effort required, nothing . Much easier To not do something, than to do it . But still Adam did it. Which means what? That it was in his control to either do, or not do. And it’s the same for us. To not do evil , That’s our task But where you come to the stage of surrender
Which is the path of intense love, From where…Actually this is the same question that someone had sent the other day. I responded to that one. What was it I said?
‘Let the one who has seen take us to the unseen’
What was that poem? Read it out for us, You can’t read Punjabi huh? Give it here
‘Let the one who has seen take us to the unseen’ And by unseen here we mean the face of the divine, These faces of ours, how we look…Actually it’s the night of ascension tonight, is it not? And so, God has made us in his image . He made the entire universe first, the different worlds and the thousands of different types of life forms. All distinct from one another. All with their own physical appearance, faces and all and us humans, we were made at the very last and God tell us that he pondered on what his final masterpiece should look like and says he made us in his own image
So we must resemble him in some way, mustn’t we? There must be something about our faces, about the way we are, that is like him But the thing is, no one has seen him So in this sense he is faceless for us. We don’t know what he looks like
We can’t guess or estimate it, So we have to rely on the person who has been closest to him
‘Let the one who has seen take us to the unseen’ And this is why we rely on the advice and practice of our Prophet (PBUH) in knowing God . We trust that wherever our Prophet takes us, that is where God is . You know we normally turn our bodies in the direction of the ancient and holy Kaaba when we pray. But there was a time when the Prophet asked his companion Bilal to give the call for prayer from the top of the Kaaba itself and Bilal duly climbed the structure but when he got to the top, he was quiet and the Prophet asked him, what is it Bilal, why are you not giving the call to prayer? and Bilal said that because normally he turns himself toward the Kaaba to give the call to prayer. Now that he is standing on top of it, he is not sure which way to face and the Prophet said to him: then face me and make your call to prayer. Now there’s something in this for those who want to understand
To face the Prophet Meaning to face the one who the Kaaba itself keeps tracks of, pays heed to, and reveres. The deeper our humility, the deeper our ability to understand these truths. And I had said this as well when I responded to that earlier question That our Prophet (PBUH) had said that after him, we will have leaders who will stray far from the path of truth and far from his example; and that among them will be those who are the very embodiment of evil Now we have to think about ourselves. How far have we strayed from the truth and the example of our Prophet’s life? When I asked earlier if you believe that our Prophet is the great seal of the Prophets, all of you said yes. The Prophet is the one who has shown us the way to God. Taken us closer to him and given us the divine message. Now are we following, in letter and spirit, the divine message that our Prophet gave us? Or are we just following what is trendy, regardless of the source Or the directives of those more powerful than us and taking on board whatever new way of life we are being told about You heard an audio recording earlier There are so many similar things But amidst all this, we have to decide, is there a new divine message out now, in the form of what the television, for example, is telling us? The television or the computer or our mobile phones and whatever nonsense is coming out of them Are we adopting for ourselves whatever we hear and whatever we see Letting it penetrate our psyches without questioning it. And a lot of it is being done subtly, and we, we are happily being influenced by it all. We are more than ready to shift our moral compass based on all this new information. Even though we claim to believe that our Prophet has delivered to us a final, divine wisdom. The other day I was part of a funeral procession in my village and we were chanting the shahadat, the declaration that God is one and Muhammad (PBUH) is his messenger and a young person who was there had the concept of the ‘shahadat’ (testimony) and ‘shaheed’ (martyr) confused – so they asked me why we were calling the deceased a martyr. and I explained that the shahadat was the giving of testimony that God is one and Muhammad (PBUH) is his messenger and the young person asked me who we were giving the testimony to? and that was when I thought of the villages of Mecca In which the Prophet’s companions loudly declared their faith, their creed, for all to hear
And I felt sad, thinking that we only do the same at funerals now, and even then we are not entirely clear about why we do it. For example, if on the one side we had our Prophet and on the other side we had the forces against him and we were in our Prophet’s camp. Wouldn’t we need to declare, openly and loudly, in our battle cry, who and what we believe in? No matter the consequence? No matter what the threat or level of force being applied from the other side
In the same way, shouldn’t we live our everyday lives as if we are on his side? Shouldn’t it be evident in our words and actions and in everything we do. Whether that’s business, or societal matters, or how we deal with our families and those in our homes, or how we conduct ourselves in offices, or how we maintain interpersonal relationships. The reality is we are not doing this. It seems we follow him in name only But are not following the divine message he gave us His life is the clearest of instruction for us . His life’s work and conduct illustrates what the divine message means in practice. But we have lost sight of this Allama Iqbal asked us in his poetry if we are still followers of peace, if we still recognize and follow the real-life example of peace given to us. I’ve pressed something on your phone and lost that post. Sorry. But even today we can, as a nation, get better. Tell me, how do I go back to that post I was looking at? Yes, back Yes, okay. So the answer is mending our ways Asking for forgiveness. We are going down the wrong path at the moment and somewhere deep inside we know this We think we have nowhere to turn
But we do. We have the example of our Prophet’s life and conduct, which God himself has praised Do we think about this life and conduct when making important decisions in our lives? When we are getting married for example, Planning wedding celebrations, Arranging our children’s marriages , Conducting business. Do we ever wonder how he might have approached these situations? Do we think about doing the same, trying to copy him. About trying not to exceed him. If we aren’t doing this, Then how can we, hand on heart, say he is our spiritual leader? And the ones we are in fact listening to, and are so heavily influenced by And are copying in our daily lives Whether that’s in how we dress But I don’t want to touch on clothing, because then the conversation gets reduced to how women should dress When the real question is of our whole lives, day in and day out. Who and what is our compass? For our Prophet it was God. Everything he did, he did for God. That was the beginning and the end for him. He had no personal animosity with anyone . His only condition was that those around him accept his one God. That was it. He had nothing more to convince people of But the fight we are having now, with ourselves, in our society, it is about everything that isn’t God
Everything that isn’t divine We are back to worshipping false gods, of money or power or status or anything else And to find again the only thing that really matters, that lifeforce that is really in charge of us and everything around us, we need a clean-up job. We need to abandon and destroy the false gods that have occupied our psyche and which direct our actions.The greatest of these false gods is the false impression we have formed of ourselves, whether this is about our strengths, our weaknesses, our self-labeled victimhood or generosity, or anything else. It is when we clear out these false gods and their false narratives that we are able to see clearly, feel clearly, and know clearly the presence of something truly divine . The presence of the omnipotent Lord that Muhammad (PBUH) talked about But the blind cannot achieve this. The ones blinded by false narratives, false gods, and flawed truths . I am talking about inner clarity here. When we transcend the fog of falsehood and see clearly the truth. Achieving this is hard. A lucky few get to this point. Those who are truly able, in theory and practice, to separate the wheat from the chaff. They see a path and they see the leader of this path, and they follow. Their insides testify that the leader of the path is the closest to the truth, the closest to transcendence . That their leader has seen and touched the face of the divine. Some might try to argue specifics here, question the details of this interaction . But if we believe in our leader . Then it’s not our place to speculate and debate. How their ascension took place. All we know and all we need to know is that it happened And that no one can know the divine as he knows the divine And we believe in his Lord, the Lord he spent his life serving. As for the rest of us, mere followers of our Prophet’s path, any one of us might be given a morsel of divine knowledge here and there, that’s for God to decide on. But look at us today. Our country is on the brink of default, We have a thousand problems But we can still solve them all. It requires our leaders and institutions and courts and politicians, and all those with power. To make their decisions as if they were sitting in front of the Prophet . Believing that he is watching them and that God is watching them and if they decide that God and his Prophet are their moral compass, their North Star Then you’ll see what sorts of decisions they make, and what direction things will start moving in We will see and feel a change. For example the woman sitting here today, she works in a government office, at a senior post and although she couldn’t be entirely open, she has told us how hard it is. To do the right thing, or to struggle with your conscience in public service But the only other solution is to become unfeeling But one is only unfeeling, When they lose their God-consciousness, when they lose the fear that their Lord is watching them and being conscience of God’s presence is true respect for him That even when we are alone and by ourselves, we regard him as present, as watching and seeing and knowing always thinking of him as with us. Thinking of him as near That is paying true homage to the awe-inspiring force that created us. Someone once asked a scholar about being able to do what they want when they are all alone and no one is around them, for example in the bathroom and the scholar asked in response if God won’t be there, where there is no one else? And this is an effective way of viewing all the situations of our lives, that he is always there. And so will we regard him as present? As far as your question about free will goes, In the beginning we all think that we have free will. This is part of our learning journey and God takes us through many situations in which he shows us the extent of this free will we think we have and he does this lovingly. He wants to see how quickly we might recognise his will in our lives. He wants to know if we will investigate the extent of his involvement. How much we will bother to get to know him . How much we will bother to get to know ourselves. Because to know God fully, we must know ourselves, If we cannot understand who and what we are, we have no chance of seeing him But we are often cruel to ourselves, unable to love ourselves, and this hinders us . We do what we are told to not do, thus blocking our own path, For example I advise many to stop their extra praying and reciting during this particular healing process But they usually call me two days later Saying there’s just a small extra prayer they want to continue with I say no again, tell them that they shouldn’t and they then call me again after three days To check about the potential of another supplementary prayer they are interested in and again I explain that they should not Or they call to say That things were fine for a few days But now again they’re not feeling well That they are dizzy Or they have heart palpitations and I say it must be because of X and Y supplementary prayers they have read. Most people can’t get over this. They insist on knowing how I knew and I say forget about how I knew! I am a doctor, I know what symptoms relate to what problem . If you have a cough Then I know you’ve had cold ice cream That you’ve gone against the instructions you were given But they get fixated on this question of how I knew , It all comes back to symptoms, and I’ve seen all these symptoms countless times Or my instinct tells me But still, they won’t listen to my advice. They want to pray extra at all costs, to overcharge their bodies with energy they cannot dispense or handle Sometimes they insist they will be able to cope That their symptoms aren’t that bad after all and finally they will admit that someone told them That X number of extra prayers will help them to have a baby boy . Now this is where they shoot themselves in the foot. They are clearly consulting two doctors at the same time, applying two different types of treatment simultaneously. No wonder nothing is changing for them! On top of that they have called me at 3am to discuss this Not considering what state I might be in at 3am in the morning Or whether my wife might want a night of sleep undisturbed by telephone calls, or if she is leaving a warm room at night to go sleep somewhere else in the house, somewhere cold and uncomfortable, so that I can continue the conversation But God is watching all of this, our individual motivations and sacrifices, and these sacrifices are dear to him So these callers, who are usually milking multiple advice sources, their progress halts entirely, and then there is nothing I can do to help them Because they haven’t listened in the first place, haven’t paid heed . It is like a mother telling her daughter to go straight to college and come straight home, to not talk to any strange men, to not go on dates with her class fellows, to not go anywhere else apart from college, even if her friends are. The mother lays it all out for the daughter, all her expectations and all the consequences . But four days later the daughter insists that she can have a boy drop her home in his car and have a cup of tea together on the way, and that this won’t break any of her mother’s rules. The daughter reinterprets the rules to suit her own purposes . In which case you might as well just go ahead and do whatever you want , If you are not interested in listening , If you’re always looking for reinterpretations to suit your purposes . Either stick to the rules if you want to get better, or do what you want and suffer the consequences! So one stays caught up in this free will question for a long time . Of whether we have it or we don’t have it, or to what extent we have it . And there are different types of people in the world, whose souls have asked God for different types of things . One type has asked God for success in this world, and they will get it. Another type is interested in divine rewards, in heaven, and they will have to strive for it and a third type, the God gifted ones, they have asked only for him to be pleased with them and so this third type, they spend a long time wandering around having a tough time in this life, thinking extensively about free will and they learn the hard way. They are the ones who can hardly manage to stick to what they intend to do on any given day and God often says to them: okay, today try to do what you want to do, let’s see what happens! For example, there was a wedding this evening that I had decided to not attend . In the end, not only did I go But I stayed there for an extra-long time and the place I had wanted to go to instead I didn’t make it there at all. My intent amounted to nothing Or a few days ago I decided to never again do a certain thing I was adamant I wouldn’t do it . But the next patient who walked through the door of my clinic Asked for that very same thing And I complied And it worked, thank God But I did it despite my intention to never do it again Or another one: I resigned once, before my teacher, Baba ji, passed on. It was some 20-21 days before he left But I often tell that story…Anyway, I also tried to resign some days ago. It was late at night. Something was brought to my attention
Something about a very sensible, spiritually-orientated person and it was disappointing, what they had done. I asked myself what role I had played in it And my contribution it seemed was that I was simply present in this person’s life . The thing is, before I met Baba ji, I was extremely reactive. I didn’t bother anyone, but if someone messed with me, I would make their lives miserable. I wouldn’t spare them I would pursue them with determination And I wouldn’t let it go. Somehow all of that changed after Baba ji. Anyway, so some days ago I said to him in my heart…Actually a Facebook video had come up on my feed . It had mention of the poet Wasif Ali Wasif in it, so I started watching. In it an elderly man who is wearing a cap in the fashion of the mystic Sufi Barkat Ali is being asked how he came upon his spiritual practice, despite being highly educated in the western sense And this man says that he didn’t believe in any of this spiritual stuff for a long time But then he came to Lahore to do an MA at Punjab University. There he met Wasif Ali Wasif And some fellow students who talked about spirituality and Sufiism. And he liked some of the things these people said, but on the whole he was pretty much against this way , So he says that he often made fun of what they said Or taunted them or said some nonsense in response. His said that Wasif Ali Wasif never reacted to any of it. But one day, about six months later, Wasif Saab asked him who his spiritual master was And he said confidently that Allah was his master, and why would anyone else be his master? and Wasif Saab said, okay, so you believe in Allah And he said yes of course! And then Wasif Saab asked, do you believe in our Prophet And he said he did And then Wasif Saab asked if he believed in Data Ganj Baksh, a prominent saint of Lahore And this man responded, what do you mean believe in Data Ganj Baksh? What’s there to believe? Sure he was a man of God, he was a good man, he came and now he is gone And Wasif Saab said ah okay, so you don’t believe in Data Ganj Baksh then And this man repeated his original answer, So Wasif Saab suggested that he go to Data Ganj Baksh’s shrine Wasif Saab asked if he had been there yet And this man replied that he hadn’t been there yet, and what was the point of going? But Wasif Saab told him to go there and to ask the Saint Who his master was And this man says that he was extremely skeptical about this proposition So he said in response, what’s the most a master will tell me except about God? And since God is available everywhere, what’s the need of a master? And Wasif Saab said to him, so you’ve come to Lahore for your MA, right? Why didn’t you stay in your hometown to do the MA, there’s a college there that offers the same degree And this man replied that he believed Punjab University’s MA is much better But Wasif Saab insisted, why not the college in his hometown And he couldn’t answer this question, so in the end he committed to going to the shrine of Data Ganj Baksh And he said that after that he ended up going there every Friday for 6 months, but only because he found it so peaceful there And he said that there he prayed to God for guidance in the way that Data Ganj Baksh had been given guidance. And for those 6 months Wasif Saab didn’t ask him any further questions , But after 6 months, Wasif Saab asked him if he had found his master yet? And he replied that no he hadn’t and Wasif Saab said that’s not possible, and that it must be because he didn’t believe in Data Ganj Baksh And this man responded that he had actually not gone just once to Data Ganj Baksh’s shrine, but every Friday for the last 6 months, so what more was there to do? And Wasif Saab asked what he prayed for when he was at the shrine And this man replied that he asked God for guidance in the way that Data Ganj Baksh had been guided And Wasif Saab said see, I told you that you don’t believe in Data Ganj Baksh You do believe in Allah, that’s true But tell me one thing, how is God supposed to pull Data Ganj Baksh’s teacher out of their grave so that they can give you guidance in the same way? Don’t you think there will be a new teacher for this job, for today’s day and age? So go back there, Wasif Saab said, and ask Data Ganj Baksh to tell you who your master is This is one of the saint’s duties And he will respond And this man said he thought that it was time to test this theory out once and for all So he went back to the shrine, and sat where he had a good view of the head stone And in his heart he said, I don’t know if you are listening Data Ganj Baksh, but if you are, could you tell me who my master is?If you are listening, please tell me Because someone I know isn’t letting the topic go and the man says he was pretty sure that nothing would happen as a result of this But then suddenly he saw that someone was standing next to him . Someone he didn’t see the face of, but who was very tall, and wearing all white and had a big turban on his head. And this stranger put a hand on the man’s head, so hard that everything seemed to be moving and the man wondered what on earth this stranger was doing to him. and as he tried to get his head loose from this grip. He felt everything around him spin extremely fast And during this he saw an image The image he saw was of the mystic Sufi Barkat Ali Saab sitting on top of a stream in Faisalabad And he wondered why he had seen this But in the meantime the stranger finally let go of his head And it took a while to come to his senses, but when he did, the person dressed in all white was nowhere to be seen So he got up and left the shrine And the next day Wasif Saab came up to him and said, congratulations, you know who your master is now And this man said nothing in response So Wasif Saab said the thing is, that man dressed in white was Data Ganj Baksh himself And the person you saw sitting on the stream, that’s your master, Sufi Barkat Ali from Faisalabad. Go to him. This man says he remained stunned by all this for a few days, But at the next opportunity he went to Faisalabad He asked around for Sufi Barkat Ali there And as someone was telling him that Sufi Barkat Ali didn’t meet random people just like that He looked up and saw Sufi Barkat Ali walking his way And Sufi Barkat Ali greeted him and said, so you’ve finally arrived huh? And this man says that all his degrees, his MAs and his BAs, fell into irrelevance after that Even though he continued teaching and working But he was fully immersed after that, on the mystic path of love. Even after his teacher Sufi Barkat Ali passed on He says in this video that he realized that there are two distinct types of knowledge one can obtain One is through studying for degrees like MAs and BAs, And the other is the knowledge of the heart And that is what he is fully immersed in since those early days of meeting Sufi Barkat Ali Anyway, so I watched this whole video on Facebook And in my heart I said to my own teacher, Baba, okay, I am done now. Whatever it is you need doing, assign it to someone else And what a response I got to that attempted resignation! I didn’t get a minute’s sleep that night. All night my phone rang. And every call was important and had to be listened to. My phone finally stopped ringing at 7am. By that time I had forgotten about resigning And I had done and said everything I didn’t want to do or say again So what free will then? Who are we to decide how we will serve? If the very thing we are desperate to avoid keeps being done by us. Shouldn’t we then know that this me, me, me, I want this and I want that, it’s all irrelevant? And if he chooses, we come to understand this But only if he chooses.
DR. M JAVED AHMED
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