Ha-mim. Dear friend, responsibility and balance. It is time to unite and help build anew or suffer a boiling hot cleanse. Ighlī nafsak!
At the beginning of the sermon, I have cited a hadith attributed to the Prophet. The translation is as such, the Prophet says the following in the context of the reckoning of the day of resurrection. He says, "A servant of God who knows himself well in that he does not consider himself sinful shall be brought forth and shall be asked by God, 'Did you befriend and support My friends?' He shall reply, 'I used to be a peaceful person.' He shall be asked, 'So did you oppose My enemies?' He shall reply, 'My Lord, there used not to be any conflict between myself and anyone else,' whereupon God shall say, 'Whoever does not befriend and support My friends and oppose my enemies shall not take part of My mercy.'"
Over the summer, we continued to witness some of the most horrific developments in the ongoing genocide in Palestine. The genocide that takes place in all of historic Palestine, not just in what is now considered by international law as the nationstate of Israel, or occupied historic Palestine. Not just the Gaza Strip, but also the West Bank, all of historic Palestine. This genocide has worn on the entire world, on all of those in the world who have a conscience. It has worn on them, it has hurt them, and it has hurt me. It has caused me many days and nights of anxiety, self-interrogation, and introspection.
This summer, I felt very disconnected from nature. I was on my phone, as were most of you, almost every moment of the day, feeling guilty to look away. So on the days that were not too hot, I resolved to try to reconnect with nature, with the second Qur'an. As I was walking through a park very close to my home, I read an inscription that surmised to tell the history of the park in which I was walking in order to take a break, reflect and think about my own studies with the Qur'an. This inscription told the history of this area, the banks of the Scioto River, and it talked about the Wyandot tribe, Native American Indians.
It told this long story about how some fellow with a Polish name came to own these lands and was so kind as to give it to the City of Dublin, but it could not have been his originally, so what is the story? It began to talk about other historical events in this locale and it mentioned a Wyandot chief known in English as Chief Leatherlips. Of course, that is not his name, but the American colonizers and settlers decided to give him this name for a specific reason. There are two memorials dedicated to this Wyandot chief on Route 33, which is on Riverside Drive. One is a statue of a large face that you can go and stand upon. This area is very well known in Dublin and Columbus for being the place where when it snows, children go and sled down the hill, and maybe they go take a picture with the monument for Chief Leatherlips.
Further down Route 33, there is a gravestone. I have driven past this gravestone for years, it caught my attention many times and I have thought to myself, "Oh, I ought to look this up sometime and see who Chief Leatherlips was. He must have been a great Native American leader of some sort that now, after years and years of genocide against the Native American people, the City of Dublin is giving some sort of half-hearted recognition to the rightful representative of this ancient people.” I am sad to say that the reason that Chief Leatherlips is recognized is a purely colonial political scheme, and there is very little written about him. I wondered why?
The traditional American story goes as Chief Leatherlips, signatory of the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, which ended the Ohio Indian Wars, so to speak, was a great man and that he and his clan were the type of folks that were very friendly to the white man. They had decided that the writing was on the wall, there was no more point in war, and the only way forward was to live peacefully amongst the white folk and adopt their farming techniques, their clothing, and their religion as being Methodists. They became very close friends with the “Sells Brothers”, who were a local family that ran a circus, and they included Native Americans in their circus as an act (See Kihue “Bill Moose”).
The way the narrative is told is that this was a great sacrifice of love from the Indian for the white man. It is said that the Wyandot Indians accused Chief Leatherlips of witchcraft and they sentenced him to death, and so the Sells Brothers came riding down to the Scioto river and they tried to oppose this execution. Fearing escalation, Chief Leatherlips said, "Oh no. I, Chief Leatherlips, would hate to see any more white man blood spilled. I prefer to die on your behalf and just accept my execution." The Sells boys answered, "But we know that you never practiced witchcraft. We know you, you are a good man. You would have never done witchcraft. This is politically motivated. This is because of that rogue named Tecumseh and his brother, the prophet," who I will tell you about. "Tecumseh, he’s responsible for this sham execution. He wants your head because you want to keep the treaties with the white man, and because you oppose Native American independence, sovereignty and the Confederacy of the Native Americans."
I found the grave of Leatherlips. I spent some time there, and I will tell you the story in the way that I have pieced it together. The local history is told by white people who adopt the position that, "Yes, there might have been a time where we were not on good terms with the natives, but they came to realize that our superior way of life as whites was more alluring and safer, and that there was no point to endless resistance and war. We said, ‘enough is enough. We should just live in peace and harmony. Us and the Wyandot people.’"
The opposing figure,Tecumseh, is a very interesting person. Tecumseh was a Native American general who lived around the same time as Chief Leatherlips. Leatherlips was born in 1732 and he died in 1810, and I told you that he signed the Treaty of Greenville. Tecumseh had a brother. Tecumseh was raised as a warrior and as a great native general, and his brother had some sort of damage to his eye. He was one-eyed and essentially he was no good for war. As a result, he suffered from depression as a result. [I am currently reinvestigating the claim that Tenskwatawa was in fact a “drunk” in light of Peter Cozzens’s book, Tecumseh and the Prophet). Whiskey was introduced to Native Americans by white settlers. As legend has it, Tecumseh's brother had a moment of divine inspiration and realization. He had a vision that came from what they call the Great Spirit; what we might call God, so to speak. God talked to Tecumseh's brother, who now became known as a Prophet. He took the name Tenskwatawa, which translates to “The Open Door.”
Let me read a passage about Tecumseh and his brother from the book by Mary Stockwell: The Other Trail of Tears: The Removal of the Ohio Indians. “Tecumseh was inspired by visions of his younger brother, and what Tecumseh did about this vision was that he began to piece together the largest Indian Confederation in history. Its main purpose was to push American settlers out of the western territories of the United States and leave the country to the Indians. Between 1805 and 1810, Tecumseh, traveling on foot, by canoe, on horseback, had spoken to most of the tribes living in the old Ohio country, and even to a few tribes further east.” This is Tecumseh we're talking about. “He was charismatic and eloquent. He impressed everyone who heard him. He swayed many people, and especially younger chiefs and warriors to join him in this Indian Confederacy, Indian first, against the white folks. He told the Indians to think of themselves as one people, not as separate tribes. They must recognize that they held the land in common, therefore no chief could sell any more territory to the insatiable Americans who would not be satisfied until they drove the Indians into the sea.”
Who was one of those chiefs that sold the land? Chief Leatherlips, whose monument is in Dublin, Ohio. “As [Tecumseh] built his Confederation in secret, his brother, now calling himself Tenskwatawa or “The Open Door,” and who was best known as the Prophet, preached openly to the crowds that flocked to hear him. He told them that the Great Spirit had shown him frightening visions in which two paths lay open before the tribes. One path led to perpetual happiness, but the other led to fiery damnation, where drunken Indians swallowed cups of molten lead for all eternity, swallowed cups of molten lead for all of eternity." As Muslims, have you ever heard something similar to that before? Cups of molten lead. For us, it is cups of boiling lead or a brass rather, a metal boiling. This is in [Surah ad-Dukhan (Q 44:43-48]:
"Lo! The tree of Zaqqum. The food of the sinner. Like molten brass, it seethes in their bellies as the seething boiling water, and it will be said, take him and drag him to the midst of hell. Then pour upon his head the torment of boiling water."
The boiling water, mind you, is a word that we use in the Qur'an: al-hamim. We will come back to this. "The Great Spirit had assured him that if the Indians gave up the white man's ways, especially his whiskey, and returned to the customs of their forefathers, then he would protect them in this world, as well as in the next. So they urged the tribes to follow him, they started this new village in Greenville where that treaty was signed and they named it Prophet's Town. They then promised that if they did all that he asked, the Great Spirit would reward them with a permanent homeland, one in which the Americans could never take away.”
This is the unwritten part of the history of why we as Americans created a monument for Leatherlips as opposed to someone like Tecumseh and his brother, Tenskwatawa.Keep in mind this idea of brotherhood as a motif that I want us to explore: the connection of brotherhood and togetherness. The brotherhood pact between Tecumseh and his brother, and then trying to start a brotherhood, or a family with all natives; not divided by tribe but divided only by immorality, which is white settler-colonialism. So this is the story of Chief Leatherlips, Tecumseh and the Prophet, which I will try to keep as short as possible there and move on.
I thought, " Where have I seen this before in recent memory?” Broken treaties… all of the historic treaties that the United States signed with Native Americans have, without exception, been violated and broken by the United States government. Where have I seen the propping up of a native as some sort of the “good guy native” that we can hang out with? “He is okay, we will keep him around.”
It all reminded me of the ceasefire debacle. The never ending claims that a ceasefire deal is imminent. “We are going to have a ceasefire in Ramadan,” then “We are going to have a ceasefire after Ramadan,” and then they assassinate Ismail Haniyeh and now, “Iran is on the precipice of bombing Israel in response, so now, we need a ceasefire for that reason! Who is going to play the role of the ‘good native’ that is going to sign the treaties? Of course, we are going to ignore the ‘other’ natives that do not want to sign the treaty, but who is going to be the ‘good’ native that will sign? Oh, Qatar and Egypt!” Sounds familiar.
What about the individual “good native?”
Just a few weeks ago, there was a Bedouin man that had been a prisoner of war taken by Hamas and the Israeli forces brought him back to his home in the Negev desert. This man, I assume not a very intelligent or learned man, as a result of suffering from years of colonization and also being out of the loop for 10 months, begins to go on a propaganda trip for Israel and says, "Oh, thank you so much Benjamin Netanyahu! It is so great that you saved me, and we must continue doing operations like this that kill 1,000 people at a time to supposedly get one person back. Jews and Muslims can live together in harmony. What I want above all else is the end of the killing of Jews and Muslims and we must be together."
What this man did not realize is that when he went back to his Bedouin village in the Negev desert, that very same village had been chosen for demolition by the Israeli government. They were going to demolish his home. When the news got out, it caught too much attention, so the Israelis responded by saying, "Oh, well maybe we won’t demolish his home, but the others, we will." It is pretty interesting and shocking. Historically, this is nearly the same exact thing that happened to the Wyandot folk. Chief Leatherlips, remember him? He signed the treaty in order for the Wyandots to live in Ohio. Well, do you think that the Wyandots were allowed to stay? No.
After the Indian Removal Act (after Chief Leatherlips' time by a few decades), the Wyandots did not find the permanent refuge that they were promised and they were pushed out. Why? Because the white colonizers started colonizing the Wyandot land while they were living in Ohio, despite the fact that they were signatories of the treaty. So the colonizers forced them out with the Indian Removal Act and sent them to Kansas. Guess what happened when they got to Kansas? Did they live happily ever after in a new place and move on? No. White settlers colonized Wyandot land in Kansas, too. It is the same old story.
To cover it all up, Chief Leatherlips is honored. Meanwhile, Tecumseh is presented to the world by the colonizer as a troublemaking terrorist; he is someone worthy of extermination.
But listen to Tecumseh’s words documented from an argument that he had with an American Governor. He says to him, "The only way to stop this evil is for the red men to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land as it was at first and should be now, for it was never divided but belongs to all. No tribe has the right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers. Sell a country? Why not sell the air, the Great Sea as well as the Earth? Did not the Great Spirit make them for all the use of his children? How can we have confidence in the white people? When Jesus Christ came upon the earth, you killed him and you nailed him to the cross. You thought he was dead and you were mistaken." I cannot explain that. I do not know what this man knew and the more I read about him, the more I am in shock and awe. It seems he was a deeply principled man and a deeply ethical man, and I could continue using time in this khutbah to go on and on about him, but we would never get to the end.
In the previous khutbah that I gave a month ago, I promised you that I would talk to you again very briefly about Imam Ali's conception of rights that we went through in a very detailed way in his sermon. I remind you, he said, "la yajri li-ahadin illa jara ‘alayh, wa la yajri ‘alayhi illa jara lah." Which means that a right does not flow for your gain, except that it also flows against you, and no other right flows against you except that it also is to your gain. There is a relationship between these: a right and a responsibility. With responsibilities, there come rights and with rights, there come responsibilities. I told you that this was deeply ingrained in Quranic ethos.
Let us look very briefly at one of the surahs belonging to the Al-Hamim, the family of Hamim Surahs. This is Surah al-Zukhruf (Q 43), verse 12 and 13.
"He Who created all the pairs and appointed for you ships and cattle whereupon you ride, that you may mount upon their backs and may remember your Lord's favor when you mount thereon and you may say, 'Glorified be he who has subdued these unto us and we were not capable of subduing them.'"
Now, “subdued” is a word that is translated from sakhara. This word continues to come up in the Al-Hamim Surahs. It also shows up in Surah Al-Jathiyah (Q45).
Again, verses 12 and 13 in Surah al-Jathiyah,
"Allah it is Who hath made the seas of service (sakhara) unto you so that the ships may run thereon by His command that you may seek of his bounty, that you happily you may be thankful. And He hath made of service (sakhara) unto you whatsoever is in the heavens and whatsoever is in the earth. It is all from Him. Therein are signs for those who think and reflect."
I am thinking again about Tecumseh's response about land, air and sea. Can you sell land, air and sea? Why can you not sell land, air and sea? When one carelessly reads this verse—sakhara, “subjugate” as it keeps getting translated as, or “we have subdued them for you,” sakhara-lakum—one might conclude, "See, the whole world exists for my consumption!" This is the colonial philosophy. If you read the verse with the colonial lens, "The whole world exists for my consumption. In fact, the earth, the planets, the stars and the moons exist for my conception. They are subdued unto me."
But what did we learn from Imam Ali's understanding about rights and responsibilities? They are equal. If you have a right to it, you have a responsibility for it. That is what Tecumseh is saying. Leatherlips is defeated, he is a defeated man. He is tired and his people are tired. Or perhaps he is tired of being blamed for different things by different people as a Chief. But Tecumseh is calling to something greater. He is calling to a principle and saying, "We cannot accept this concept of being ridiculed and mocked."
That is another meaning of this word we are discussing, by the way. Sukhra is to be ridiculed. But think of this verse that we just talked about, the very famous verse of mounting the horse or the donkey. What is the relationship? Many of you have pets. Pets are dependent on you. Their food is completely based on whether you give it to them on time or not. Whether they can go to the restroom is based on whether you are able to provide them with the means or not. Whether they are safe in your yard is dependent on you. It is the same with the donkey. The donkey has a reliance. The donkey relies on its owner. A donkey that is used to carrying a load needs his master, his friend, so to speak. Most people who have animals love them, even if they use them for work and those animals love them back, as long as they are treated fairly and the way that they are supposed to be.
In the verse, the du’a is saying, "May God be exalted, Who has created this relationship between I," this great human being that the entire universe is subdued for, “and this donkey,” who is a lowly creature in the human conception, but not in the Quranic conception. The Qur'an is taking the traditional meaning of sukhra and is boiling it, and reassembling it. It is boiling your ethics and your worldview and getting you to think: "No, land belongs to human beings and all that live on the land." I have been entitled to live on this land peacefully and if somebody wants to come and live on that land, they can do so peacefully and together in harmony, in a system of harmony (nizaman li-ulfatihim). Last time I told you about how important this is: a system that is based on friendliness and harmony. This is Imam Ali. This is the Prophet. This is the Qur'an.
Subjugation versus service, that is the difference. Power is not in dominating. Power is in unity. It is intimate reliance. It is friendship and brotherhood. The Qur'an is teaching us that power and strength come from close connections, rather than domination. The root qaf-ra-nun has far more to do with uniting, qarn or qarana, has far more to do with uniting, connecting, joining or being bound than it does with singular and outright power. Rather, power or powerlessness is a byproduct of the quality and nature of the connection. Qarin is a close companion which also arises in Surah al-Zukhruf. If you do wrong, you will have a demonic companion. That demonic companion will be attracted to you, it will unite with you and it will help you to go to Hell. That is the colonial understanding of sukhra.
What of the colonial understanding of friendship, hamim? Were we, Americans, friends with Tecumseh? We hated Tecumseh. Who were we friends with instead? Leatherlips! Who are the Israelis friends with? Were they friends with the Palestinians, when they decided to allow the World Health Organization to go give vaccinations for the resurgence of polio? Polio has not reared its ugly head in Gaza in 25 years, and yet we have polio again. How did that polio get there? Utter destruction to the infrastructure, nowhere to use the bathroom, nowhere clean to live. And who does it affect primarily and directly? Children, babies, paralyzed. Do not think for one second that the Israelis are concerned about those children. There are these humanitarian ceasefires of several hours at a time so they can roll out the vaccinations which, by the way, is not working because when you are constantly moving people from place to place, they cannot get the second dosage. So it is ineffective. But let us just assume that they can get all of their dosages. What is it really about? Benevolence towards the Palestinians? Of course not, it is about protecting the Israelis from a polio outbreak.
Let us turn to the family of surahs that begin with Hamim. I understand now why the exegetes call it the heart and the soul of the Qur'an and they write beautiful poetry about the surahs. ‘Abdullah Ibn Mas’ud said that progressing through the Qur’an is like traveling to green pastures looking for a place to live. At different points, he comes upon green open land and finds it pleasing, but still moves ahead and finds even more verdant gardens and beautiful land. He says that the first green lands are like the Qur’an in general, but the second gardens and beauty stand out from all other land the way that the Hawamim surahs do from all of the Qur’an. He says that when he arrives at the Hawamim surahs during his recitations, it is as if he is enjoying himself in these gardens. These are the kinds of things that exist in the tradition, about the reactions and the feelings that Muslims had with the surahs, and I completely understand. I am also beginning to understand why people used it as a war cry, why people used it when they felt the need to feel together, to feel united, to feel protected from evil and return back to the surahs that begin with hamim and the meaning of hamim.
Hamim has two meanings in these surahs and this word shows up in these surahs more than in any other surahs. It only shows up a handful of times in some of the other suwar. But it happens four or five instances in the seven surahs that begin with hamim, and they are used in two ways. Al-Hamim refers to boiling water. Hamim, refers to intimacy, an intimate friend. As I said, friendship is a motif that can be observed in the hamim surahs. It comes up often, in Surah al-Shura (Q 42), there is a repetitive usage of the word wali and nasir, that God is the friend or the protector, or the nasir (supporter), and in the opposite, when someone is away from God, then they do not have a nasir. They have no hope for support, victory or salvation. This shows up in surahs like al-Dukhan and al-Jathiyah quite often.
What is friendship about? What are the elements of friendship? Friendship, above all else, requires love. It requires forgiveness. It requires balancing your rights with duties that you owe to one another. In Tafsir Al-Mizan, Allamah Tabatabai talks about the word khillah, which is used in the verse in Surah al-Zukhruf, where it talks about those who have made bad partnerships. On the final day, the akhillah (plural) or friends, will oppose one another, be disgusted by each other and blame each other. Tabatabai says the word khillah means when one person fills the deficiency of another. Think of a friend. What does that friend ultimately do? If you have a punctured tire, that is a deficiency. Who do you call? Maybe you call AAA, but if you are in a bind, you call a friend, someone you can rely on, someone you know that will sacrifice their time and energy, someone who will do a service and it is not a transactional thing. Instead, it is out of love, friendship, brotherhood and sisterhood.
"Oh, I would do it for you because you would do it for me." Yes, that is a benefit of friendship, but it is a colonial understanding of friendship. It is the type of logic that will let you become friends with somebody and ultimately ship all of them to Kansas, and then take Kansas too. No, it comes from within. Think of the title, khalilullah: being intimately, lovingly connected with God to the point that God is your friend and you are God's friend. Wilayah. Yes, this is the difference between the colonialist understanding of hamim and the Islamic understanding of hamim. In Surah Fussilat (Q 41), it says the very famous verse, idfa’ bi-lati hiya ahsan fa idha-ladhi baynaka wa baynahu ‘adawatu ka-annahu waliyun hamim. "Repel ugliness with that which is more beautiful and good, and that in and of itself will be what will win friends out of your enemies."
The reason we know these things about Tecumseh is because Americans wrote this about Tecumseh. They hated him as an enemy, but clearly they could not help but admire him. He won all of these verbal spats. He rarely lost battles. He may have ultimately lost on the battlefield, dying during battle, but the only reason he did was because people lost hope due to the feeling of loss on a personal level. But Tecumseh was about being above an individual person. He was about being a friend. He was about being a brother, a sister, someone who put his Shawnee identity, his tribe, to the side and vowed to make family with all native peoples, and not to oppose white people because they are white, but to oppose hateful ideology. This hateful ideology persists until today. It is the same ideology that is killing our children in Palestine, that is killing children and women, good folk and bad folk, and all kinds of people all over the world, but you should not be killed because you are a certain race, or bad or good. You should not be killed at all. The only time you should be killed is if you are killing people when you should not be killing them, which is most of the time. Alas, that is the way of our world.
Friends on earth and enemies on Judgment Day, that is the colonial attitude. But friends on earth and in the hereafter, that is the Islamic attitude. That is hamim, a protector. Waliyun hamim, someone who is your enemy becomes a loving, protective friend, an intimate like no other. Another word on Al-Hamim. It is interesting that in Surah ad-Dukhan, as we said earlier, remember what Tecumseh's brother said about stomachs being full of molten, boiling lead? That shows up here as well. Boiling brass is what? I believe it has very well-to-do with the idea of materialism. Zaqqum is more of what you wanted, right? You did not want principles, you wanted materialism. You wanted consumption because that is what gave you that feeling of safety and satisfaction, just for a moment. Well, now that same stomach is turning into brass. It has to burn, but there is a problem. Al-Hamim is cast inside of you. You are drinking the boiling water and it is thrown over you—I hope not you, but those who deserve it—because it is cleansing.
It is the same word that is used, hammam, to wash, to take a shower, hot water, I could go on and on about the root word and all of the different meanings, but just for your knowledge: that boiling water washes. Now, why does it have to be boiling? Because if you get there and you need a cleansing, it is because you stink. You did really stinky things. You killed children, or you stood by while children were being killed, and told yourself, "Well, I am busy with this or that, and what am I supposed to do anyways? It is all in the hands of the United States, it is in the hands of the Muslim world, it is in the hands of such-and-such, what does it have to do with me and why are you picking on me? I made du’a, that should solve it." As I told a friend of mine, if that is the case, we should just forget about science and forget about treating cancer. Let’s just shut down hospitals and make du’a instead.
I do not know if your du’a will be answered if you are not interrogating yourself to see how you are involved in all of this, because I am interrogating myself and I am involved. I am involved in all of this. I drove past that statue for three years every single day, and I thought, "Some poor native fellow got killed here, probably. Same old story, huh? I do not want to bother myself and learn the history of the place in which I live. I live here in safety. I eat and sleep in safety. I entertain in safety. I pray in safety." Mind you, I am not giving a fatwa here and I do not know the ins and outs, as I am sure there are all kinds of loopholes, but there used to be a consensus that ritual prayers in occupied and stolen land is batil, is not accepted.I am not saying that your prayers are not accepted, I do not know. That is up to God, but to assume that you can just waltz in and take all of the good that is here and pay no real mind to the fact of whose backs and body it was built on, and I am talking to myself here, is disgraceful.
There are no indigenous tribes left in Ohio. Listen to what the author Mary Stockwell says about the removal of the Ohio Indians, "Yet what makes American history so challenging to write is not merely the fact that the stories of so many people have been forgotten. Even when all the threads of the past drawn out against the passage of time are woven together, tragedy remains. The suffering of a group of people like the Delaware, the Seneca, Shawnee, Ottawa, Wyandot (If any of those words sound familiar to you, they are villages here in Ohio. I grew up in Ottawa Hills, and there are villages around here that are named just like that, Delaware, Seneca, Shawnee, Wyandot, Wyandot Woods) often gives rise to the triumph of another, like the millions of farmers and townspeople and factory workers and immigrants and city dwellers who filled up the land in Ohio, left behind by the tribes.” They did not get left behind, they got kicked out and killed. "Until we have figured out a way for all Americans to live side by side, fulfilling personal dreams for a better future, but never at the expense of someone else's life, we will be left wondering…if the consequences of immense tragedies we bring into the lives of one another, will ever be resolved in time or in eternity." No, we are not going to do that because we live in the colonial mindset. I live in the colonial mindset and I am ashamed to say that, and that is why I keep saying ‘boil yourself,’ and here I am trying to boil myself. When you hear about the Land Back Movement for the return of land to native hands, it is your and my qarin, this personalized whispering demon, in our ears prompting us to ask, “Does that mean that I am going to get kicked out of my house?"
Surah al-Jathiyah tells us about the colonial philosophy. There is no responsibility or accountability. Whatever is good for me is good for me. What is good for the goose is good for the gander, except the gander are white people and those who serve white power and domination, and nobody else. That is in verses 23 and 24, "He who makes his desire and ambitions his God." What does that sound like? That is colonialism. That is raping and pillaging the land, and what does that do? It seals your hearing, it seals your heart and it blinds your eyes, and so it did.
I felt that I was having such a tough time, "What am I going to do? I do not know how to help stop this genocide," and I am walking through this park trying to make myself feel better, not thinking about how I myself am walking on genocide-stolen land. I am seeing it, but I am not seeing it at the same time. I have heard it before, but I shoved my fingers into my ears and said, "I do not want to hear about it because that makes me feel like I have to interrogate myself. I do not want to owe any rights. "I have no entitlement here. This is not my park." Yes, that is that little Qareen voice. Be honest. Yeah, it boils. It boils my blood and it boils my skin and it boils my stomach. I hope to God that it makes me come out clean before the end.
Why is it named Surah al-Jathiyah? Please review these surahs in the Project Illumine Halaqas. All of these insights are extrapolated from Illumine insights, and I would have nothing to say if it was not for that tafsir. Really, I am only here because I am advocating for you to spend time learning the tafsir, because anything else you know is worth nothing if you do not know it.
The famous lines of Surah al-Jathiyah say that every nation will be brought upon its knees in front of its accounting. The Project Illumine halaqa lays this out so crystal clear that you are going to see what your nation has done, and by my reading of the scripture, I do not know if you are a good person, that you will be prevented from seeing this. This may be inevitable for all of us, whether your destiny is in hell or in heaven, and I really do not want to see it regardless of where I end up. By my reading, I do not know if we get let off the hook, that is up to God and His mercy. If it counteracts, I do not know. That is His world. But I am telling you, be prepared.
It might be an inevitable experience of suffering for all of us.
But what is the difference? In Surah al-Jathiyah, the verses that talk about the one who does good for their own soul, it is for their own soul. The one who does good, it is for their own soul, and the one who does wrong, then it is for their own soul. Is there a discrepancy here between these two things? Why am I having to take account for an entire nation? I opposed Israel. I did not like Israel. I did not co-sign the genocide of the the Palestinian people by the Israelis. I did not co-sign the genocide of the natives by the American colonies, that was not even my time period. I was born in the 80s, 90s or the 2000s, those aren’t my people. That is a different generation, qarn. No, qarn is connected, my friend, and ayyam-allah (Q 45:14) is God's timing which is not the same as yours. The way that God views time is not the same way as we view time. You are constantly trying to find a way to let yourself off the hook and say, "That was a different time. It did not belong to me, sorry." No, I do not think so. We belong to this qawm, we belong to this nation, this American nation. I pay taxes to this nation, I benefit from living here. I am safe here, I make an earning here,and my family is relatively safe. The bar is low, I guess, for brown people.
You do not want to be part of this qawm? You want to survive that moment where you are on your knees watching the video, the carefully constructed, recorded moment-by-moment tragedy that took place on your watch? Then it is all about how you choose to oppose this outcome. Your choices either supported your nation's tyranny, or opposed it and attempted to rectify it. The less we contribute, the less personal suffering and hopefully we will be shielded by mercy through that horrible moment.
The family of Hamim surahs. God knows best what the disconnected letters ha-mim mean and refer to as the first verses of these seven surahs. But I can tell you what I think it means to me. To me, ha-mim is about haqq and mizan, because that is what hamim is, friendship. Friendship is about truth. It is about rights and it is about responsibility. That is ha…haqq. And the mim is mizan. The difficulty of balancing the truth, rights and responsibilities, balancing against yourself, the liar inside of you that would keep you from being accountable to the truth, deceiving yourself about the truth. Being in a smoke of your own creation to be deluded about it, to disassociate because you do not want the responsibility, but you want the entitlement. That is not friendship, that is colonialism. Friendship is to burn together, to fight together to the very bitter end, and to connect with each other. To be muqrin. You are strong through your connection, not through being set apart.
I have no strength unless it is with all of you and you have no strength unless it is with all of us. The colonial mentality is to divide and conquer. This man, Tecumseh and his brother, how brilliant these men were. Who were they connected to? Must be God. They had this gift of hamim. They understood hamim, and to me, whatever battle cry they said sounds like hamim, protection together. You win together, you lose together. You uphold each other's rights together. You empower each other to uphold your rights together and you fight what is wrong everywhere, especially in a place where you are eating the fruit of the poisonous tree.
Can you turn this land, this evil place–because it is evil until it makes up for the loss that it has inflicted upon millions of people–into a nation of good? Through your ethics, your beauty and your uncompromising dedication to reparations and setting things right, setting the balance and the mizan right, can you turn these very enemies that right now are our enemies into as if intimate friends? The challenge is on me and the challenge is on you, Ha-mim. Dear friend, responsibility and balance. It is time to unite and help build anew or suffer a boiling hot cleansing. Ighli nafsak!