Praying Wearing Sandals

By Imam Muhammad Zahid al-Kawthari (d. 1371)

Last Deputy Shaykh al-Islam in the Ottoman Caliphate
Professor of the Qur’anic Sciences (Qur’an and Hadith) at the graduate
institute of the Jami`a `Uthmaniyya Professor of Fiqh and the History of Fiqh in the Shari`a Department of the Jami`a `Uthmaniyya Professor of Arabic at Dar al-Shafaqa al-Islamiyya (Maqalat, 1994 ed. p. 261-262).

“Salat while wearing sandals is valid as long as they are ritually pure
and do not prevent placing the heads of one’s toes on the ground, as the
complete prostration demands, according to what al-Khattabi and others
mentioned.

“The Prophet’s mosque, upon him blessings and peace, was strewn with
pebbles and the apartments of his wives were connected to the mosque, so
there was not a probability that filth had reached his sandals as he had
not trodden over filthy roads. Furthermore, al-Madina the Radiant’s
alleyways were clean of dung and filth as per the care taken by the
Companions after the Prophet, upon him and them blessings and peace, had
commanded them to pay especial attention to complete cleanliness in the
houses and their porches, not to mention the houses of Allah. Hence, its
pedestrians were able to guard themselves from stepping onto filth.
Further, its soil was sandy and soft, so it was easy to avoid scattered
filth (al-rashash), and when they wanted to pour water they went far
from the alleways and dwellings looking for soft and sandy spots of
earth far from the spray.

“Whenever the Prophet, upon him blessings and peace, wanted to pass
water, he went far to a place he could not be seen by anyone. He forbade
the three causes of curses: [among them] he forbade one from doing one’s
need in the people’s pathways or in the spots they use to shade
themeselves, as narrated by Abu Dawud and others.

“The above is in complete contrast to our streets and toilets today,
where it is impossible to guard oneself from stepping into filth and
preventing spray from getting on the sandals, because the toilets today
have hard surfaces which definitely splash back, especially if a person
urinates standing as one cannot use those European-designed urinals
except standing up.

“It is authentically related that the Prophet, upon him blessings and
peace, removed his sandals when he prayed during the conquest of Makka,
so this would be the final one of the two scenarios, just as he removed
them when Gibril informed him that there was something dirty on his
sandals. It is the status of mere permissibility [of praying with
sandals on], after verifying the purity of the sandals, which is the
gist of the evidence among the verifying scholars. Whoever considers it
desirable, together with the same condition [of verified purity], did so
only insofar as it is desirable to do other than what the Jews do.
However, the People of the Book today enter their places of worship and
pray with their shoes on, so to do other than what they do would entail
removing our shoes, not praying in them.

“As for the statement of Anas, may Allah be well-pleased with him, ‘Yes’
upon being asked if the Prophet, upon him blessings and peace, prayed
wearing his sandals, this reply does not denote habit. You will find
this clarified in al-Nawawi’s commentary on Muslim in the passage where
he discusses the night prayer.

“Accordingly, the claim by some stray ['shudhdhadh' = devious, i.e.,
violating ijma`] Hanbalis that “it is Sunna to wear sandals/shoes in
Salat” has no standing proof. On the contrary, today, it is considered
rude to enter a mosque with shoes on due to the reasons mentioned by
al-Nawawi and al-Ubbi in their commentaries on Muslim, `Ali al-Qari in
Sharh al-Mirqat, [Ahmad ibn Muhammad] al-Muqri’ [al-Maghribi al-Misri]
(d. 1041) in Fath al-Muta`al [fi Mad-hi Khayri al-Ni`al, a book in
praise of the Prophetic Sandals], al-Lacknawi in Ghayat al-Maqal, Ibn
Abi Sa`id al-Sijistani in Munyat al-Mufti, and [al-Sayyid Ahmad]
al-Hamawi in [Hawashi] al-Ashbah. Rather, they have predecessors [in
voicing those reasons] in the Companions, Allah be well-pleased with
them.”

Translated by Shaykh Gibril Haddad

Motherhood and the Ideal of Filial Piety
by Shaykh Gibril F Haddad

“Who deserves my love and care most in the world?” A man asked the Prophet Muhammad, upon him blessings and peace. “Your mother,” the Prophet replied on the spot. “And who else?” “Your mother,” the Prophet repeated. “And then who?” insisted the man. “Your mother,” the Prophet said a third time. “And then?” “Then your father.” Al-Bukhari and Muslim narrated it.

The Quran in several places commands filial piety but its focus is on the mother: “We have enjoined goodness upon man concerning his parents. His mother bears him in weakness upon weakness …” (Surah Luqman, verse 14), “We have commended unto man kindness toward parents. His mother bears him with reluctance …” (Surah al-Ahqaf, 46). The Quranic archetype of the pious son has no father but only a most distinguished mother the Prophet ‘Isa (Jesus), upon him peace, who describes himself as “dutiful toward her who bore me and not arrogant, unblessed” (Surah Maryam, verse 32).

It is in light of the above emphases in the Quran and hadith that we better understand the generic “parents” in other verses, such as “Worship none save Allah, and be good to parents” (Surah al-Baqarah 83) – the first two Commandments of the Decalogue, also common to Christians and Jews – and that we can say Islam, second to its theocentrism, is matricentric as well.

In the hadith, the archetype of the pious son is the Yemeni herdsman Uways al-Qarani, who sought permission from his mother before visiting Madinah to see the Prophet Muhammad, only to find the latter away on a trip, whereupon Uways, broken-hearted but bound to filial duty with hoops of steel, returned without further delay to Yemen and resumed caring for his mother. Later, the Prophet told his Companions of Uways’ superlative rank among the Just and told them he would be a major intercessor on the Day of Judgment. Indeed, filial piety comes before even Jihad in importance, as shown in the many hadiths translated and listed by Aliah Schleifer in her 1986 book _Motherhood in Islam_.

The Prophet himself never got to enjoy the company of his parents, having lost his father just before birth and his mother a few months after. One of the most touching scenes of the Sira or Prophetic Biography shows him standing wordless at her grave, weeping profusely, surrounded by a large group of hushed riding-companions, all of them weeping at his sight.

Mawlana Jalaluddin Rumi – the most un-Taliban Afghan imaginable – coined the rich conceit of worldly loss and change as the pains of mutually unaware, multiple motherhoods in all things created: “Everything in this world is a mother, each unaware of the birthpangs of the other.” It is a measure of the Prophet’s consciousness that when he saw by the wayside, in one of his military campaigns, a mother of pups with its new litter, he stopped and posted a guard by its side to make sure none of the troops marching in his wake harmed it. I have no knowledge of any other civilisation in which its key figure stops his marching army and reassigns troops to ensure a dog is protected from harm.

Another time, pointing to a woman cradling her child near a bonfire, the Prophet told his Companions: “Can any of you imagine this woman throwing her baby into this fire? Yet your Creator has more mercy and compassion for His creatures.” Compare these two paradigms to the fascist Spartan and bloodthirsty Easterners of yesterday and today; then wonder how far we Muslims and the rest of the world still have to go to absorb the motherly model of the Prophet, who possessed the most virile soul of any who ever walked the earth.

On the contrary, we seem to be going the other way fast. From the Subcontinent to Iran and the Arab world, the matrix of reverence, gentleness, good humour, balance, patient wisdom, and basic human justice with which the Prophet had single-handedly superseded brute patriarchy, has just about disappeared. Worse yet, these regions now witness a descent into sexist violence of such unprecedented repugnance as even the pre-Islamic pagans – make that the Cro-Magnons – would find blood-curdling. Goya’s horrific _Saturn devouring his sons_ has become true of our brethren devouring our mothers and sisters. How “arrogant, unblessed”!

Yet a more memorable passage of the Mathnavi is Rumi’s quip about the mother: “What did you call her? Your sweetheart? She is a creator! Almost uncreated!” Cambridge’s imam and one of the foremost living writers on Islam in English, Abdul Hakim Murad (Timothy J Winter), began his essay on feminism, “Islam, Irigaray, and the Retrieval of Gender” with the line “Can men any longer write about women?” But he epigraphed it with Rumi’s verses:

“The Prophet said that women totally dominate men of intellect and possessors of hearts.

“But ignorant men dominate women, for they are shackled by an animal ferocity.

“They have no kindness, gentleness or love, since animality dominates their nature.

“Love and kindness are human attributes; anger and sensuality belong to the animals.

“She is the radiance of God, she is not ‘your beloved’. She is a creator – you could say that she is not created.”

Another Persian poet, Iradj Mirza (d 1926) wrote this moving poetic verse about his mother: “Staying awake, she taught me even how to sleep.”

So the mother is at the heart of Islam on several levels: literally and legally, but also poetically and mystically as a reminder of Allah Most High.

She is also there historically and symbolically in the persons of the Prophet’s wives, as the Quran says: “The Prophet is closer to the believers than their selves, and his wives are as their mothers” (Surah al-Ahzab 6).

Of all the Mothers of the Believers, it is Lady Khadija, the Prophet’s first wife and 15 years his senior, whom he loved and revered the most, and who gave him several daughters, among them Lady Fatimah al-Zahra, the *woman* through whom his noble bloodline survives from East to West to this day.

All of our mothers, and Fatimah with them, were scholars or craftswomen or merchants as well. The early Muslims describe Lady Ayesha in glowing terms as the most knowledgeable woman in the history of mankind and this is true, because she was not only the longest (with Sawdah) but also the youngest and most intellectually gifted spouse of the Prophet during his post-Prophethood years.

Etymologically also, the mother is central to Islam in many important ways. The Arabic word for mother, *umm*, is the root of the Prophetic attribute of *ummi*, all-too-hastily translated “unlettered”; it is also at the root of the substantive which denotes Muslimdom through the ages, *ummah* – a word also used for religion and, indeed, any living community including birds and bees. It is also homonymic with *amma*, “to guide and lead”, from which comes the word imam.

Annemarie Schimmel in her 1995 book _Meine Seele ist eine Frau_ (My Soul is a Woman) cites Rumi’s representation of the mother of the Prophet Musa (Moses), raised in Pharaoh’s pagan court far from the Temple, as the archetype of human perfection giving birth to the Man of God, not unlike Meister Eckhart’s quasi-Islamic (but, to Christians, unorthodox) interpretation of the conception of the fatherless but Synagogue-imbued Christ in Mary.

However, it is the Prophet Muhammad, upon him and all the Prophets peace, who is the jewel in the crown of such filial God-dependency, being the most completely deprived of the two normal means of human upbringing – parents and schooling.

An unschooled orphan, the Prophet was raised by God Himself. Like a baby latching on to none other than his mother who is his whole world, ummi stands for Muhammad’s utter dependency on Allah as an incarnate proof of his God-given Prophethood. The Ummah’s own relationship to its Prophet is in every way identical. So is, at a third remote, the congregation’s relationship to its imam: “Al-Shafi’i is like the sun giving light and warmth to the people,” Ahmad ibn Hanbal would say. “Our teachers are our spiritual parents, they give us birth in the hereafter,” wrote al-Nawawi. So we can say, in Rumiesque fashion, that our Prophet is our mother, our religion is our mother, our community is our mother, and our teachers are our mothers.

As you treat your parents, so do expect to be treated in your old age. Each knows exactly how they would like their own children to treat them when they become old. This is why any time is good to pause and ponder not how to repay our mothers and fathers, for that would be impossible, but how to meet at least some of our obligations toward them. Perhaps, past experience of Divine generosity gives us hope we shall not be labelled Stone-Hearted in the Book of Life. As a certain man was circumambulating the resplendent Kaabah in pilgrimage carrying his mother on his back he met his teacher and asked: “Teacher! Have I repaid my debt to her?” The teacher only replied: “I hope.”

The Turban Tradition in Islam
Shaykh Gibril F Haddad

ALLAHUMMA salli ‘ala sahibi al-taj, goes a famous Yemeni prayer _ “Our
Lord, bless the Owner of the Crown!” The “crown” is the turban, and its
owner is the Holy Prophet Muhammad, upon him blessings and peace.

‘Imama, the turban, has been the most distinctive vestimentary sunnah _
“way of life” _ of Islam since the beginnings of the Religion. ‘Abd
Allah ibn ‘Umar said: “The Prophet used to wind the turban around his
head and tuck it in behind him, letting its extremity hang down between
his shoulders.”

Turbans were worn even before Islam and signified a man’s honour. An
Arab saying goes, “Turbans are the crowns of the Arabs”. This was
explained to mean that although the pristine Arabs were too proud to
accept a king’s rule over them, and therefore had no crowns other than
their turbans.

The early Muslim way of wearing the turban consisted in two pieces of
headdress: the qalansuwa or borderless hat of varying thickness, and the
‘imama, the actual turban cloth wound around the qalansuwa. Abu Dawud
mentioned in his Sunan that the Prophet is related to have said, “The
difference between us and the pagans is that we wear the ‘imama on top
of the qalansuwa.” Thus, wearing either exclusively of the other was
originally a foreign practice.

The material of the turban is ideally white muslin, a very fine cotton.
The colours and length of the turban vary. In the chapters on the
Prophet’s turban in the books of the “Prophetic Characteristics” known
as Shama’il, the authorities have mentioned seven and 10 yard lengths as
the two standards. However, as long as one can at least wind the turban
around once, its length suffices, while great Shaykhs of the past have
been known to wear large and heavy turbans exceeding 10 yard-lengths by
far.

All of the founding Imams of the four schools of Ahl al-Sunnah
wal-Jama’ah wore the turban. In their biographies of the founder of the
Hanafi School, Imam Abu Hanifah _ famous for his awesome analytical mind
_ al-Suyuti and al-Haytami relate that he owned seven turbans, perhaps
one for each day of the week.

The Hanafis, such as Subcontinent and other Asian Muslims from the
Chinese to the Turks, are particularly strict about never praying
bareheaded. A famous manual of law according to the four Sunni Schools
states, “According to the Hanafi school it is abominable to pray
bareheaded out of laziness. But praying bareheaded out of humbleness and
a feeling of submission is permitted.”

The founder of the Maliki School _ which dominates most of Africa today
_ Imam Malik ibn Anas always wore beautiful clothes, especially white,
and he “passed the turban under his chin (a style known as tahannuk),
letting its extremity hang behind his back, and he wore musk and other
scents,” said one of his students.

Malik stressed the wearing of the turban, particularly for the learned.
“The turbans should not be neglected,” he said. “I wore the turban with
nary a hair on my face. When I asked permission from my mother to pursue
the scholarly life she said: ‘First, wear the garb of the scholars’; she
took me and dressed me in short-hemmed (mushammara) garments, placed a
tall headcover on my head and tied a turban around it then she said,
‘Now go and write the Science’.

“I saw over 30 men wearing the turban in my teacher Rabi’a’s circle. He
would not put it down before the Pleiades rose (late at night) and he
used to say: ‘I swear it strengthens wit!”‘

Baring the head in Islam was the sign of a man of low condition and is
listed in many a manual among the “acts which betray lack of
self-respect” (khawarim al-muru’a). A scholar relates that as a young
man, one day, he entered the mosque in Madinah without anything on his
head whereupon his father scolded him to no end. “How dare you enter the
mosque bare-headed?”

It was a different matter, however, if the same was done out of
humility, as revealed by the wording of a question that was put to one
of the eight-century authorities in Syria: “Is it all right if people
gather in the mosque, making zikir and reading al-Qur’an, praying to
Allah and taking their turbans off their heads, weeping, as long as
their intention is not pride nor self-display but seeking to draw closer
to Him?” he replied yes.

The illiterate Shaykh ‘Ali al-Hajjar was described as “the Bare-Headed,
the saintly man” but another Egyptian, the stern Ibn Daqiq al-’Id, said:
“What is carried on top of the head should not be put down” _ at least,
not on the floor.

Imam Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi’i, founder of the School which bears
his name and dominates large parts of the middle East and the totality
of Southeast Asia, “was thrifty in his dress and wore thin clothes of
linen and Baghdadi cotton. He sometimes wore a headcover that was not
very tall but he wore the turban very often”, said one of his students.
“I counted three hundred turbans in his circle save those I could not
see.”

Another said: “Al-Shafi’i used to wear a large turban, as if he were a
desert Arab.” Both he and his student, the Imam of the Hanbali School,
Ahmad ibn Hanbal, passed it under his chin the way the North African
Touareg and many Sudanese do to this day.

Such is the high nobility of the turban that we are told even the angels
wore it. Of the Qur’anic verse, “Your Lord shall help you with five
thousand angels bearing marks” (Surat Ali ‘Imran, verse 125), Ibn
‘Abbas, the greatest of the early exegetes, said: “The signs are that
they wore turbans.”

Welcome to Traditional Notes.

To start off with, here is information on some new courses (Arabic and Fiqh of Marriage) offered by Abu Zahra Foundation in Bradford and Keighley, UK.

The Summer Semester will begin week commencing Monday 21st May 2007.

To register on-line please click here.