Discourse given to his Fuqara

Discourse given to his Fuqara (at Masjid al-Mansoor, Constantia, Cape Town, 17 June 2006)

By Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi

Now you see the tremendous weight of this. What is true about you is true about all the previous peoples. In other words, everybody has gone through this process of test, from the time of Sayyiduna Adam and the two sons of Sayyiduna Adam. One son behaved in one manner, and the other son behaved in another manner. But they were destined to it, they were designed for it.

Every time there is a flood, or a disaster, or a famine, you see all the christians, astaghfirullah, asking, �Why does God allow this to happen?� as if He was supposed to run a tight ship and suddenly things had gone wrong and He was to blame, and it meant He was not compassionate, astaghfirullah! This is ignorance, these are the people who believe that the bread is flesh that the wine is blood. It is primitive stupidity.

What it really means is: if it happened like this, then this is how it was to be. Rasul, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, has said, �Famine is next to kufr.� Darfur � is next to kufr. If you have lost your worship of Allah and your fear of Allah and your Iman in Allah, then you are going to end up with this anarchy. It is not the fault of the government of Sudan, it is not the fault of the government of Mali, or Chad. It is because people have stopped worshipping Allah, subhanahu wa ta�ala.

When there is knowledge, people behave differently. A doctor coming on a man bleeding behaves differently from an ignorant person, does he not? Because he knows what to do. But life is like that � and you have to know what to do when these things happen that are the difficulties of life. Shaykh Ibn al-Habib, rahimahullah, said, �As far as I am concerned this whole world is a hospital, and the Shuyukh and the Salihun are the doctors and the nurses.� In other words, the ones who know what to do.

This is what you have to take on. This is what you take on by being Sufis, that you understand this. Part of this is that you cannot find that what is happening inside your own household has a prior importance and intensity and ferocity and seriousness than what is going on with your neighbours and all the rest of the world. Do you follow? You have two things. One is, if there is trouble inside the household, if there is trouble with you at a personal level, �We have given each thing its Khalq and We have given it Hada.� So you say, �I must take the guidance. I must put it right. How do I put it right? I have been told how to put it right.� Rasul, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, said, �Anger is fire, if you become angry, water puts out fire � do wudhu, that by the mercy of Allah the anger will leave you.� It will calm you down. It is something so simple, but no, people lose their tempers, people rush out, and they fight in the household. More terrible things happen inside the household than happen in the battlefields. The guidance is there, but you must take the guidance, you must see that your life is under this � not microscope � but beam, so to speak, of illumination, and you must take benefit from it.

Read the whole discourses from Shaykh Abdal Qadir's website