Ikram Hawramani's Blog, page 9

Number of hadiths in the six major collections

As-salaamu 'alaykum, wa rahmatu-llaahi wa barakaatuh. Which of the six well-known Hadith collections contain the largest number of Hadith? Jazak-Allahu khayran.

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah wa barakatuh,

The number of hadiths that are mentioned in both Bukhari and Muslim are 2514 (excluding repetitions).

Below are the hadith counts from the major collections according to Wikipedia:

Sahih Bukhari, collected by Imam Bukhari (d. 256 AH, 870 CE), includes 7,275 ahadith (2,230 without repetitions) Sahih Muslim, collected by Muslim b. al-Hajjaj (d. 261 AH, 875 CE), includes 9,200 ahadith (2,200 without repetitions) Sunan Abu Dawood, collected by Abu Dawood (d. 275 AH, 888 CE), includes 4,800 ahadith Jami al-Tirmidhi, collected by al-Tirmidhi (d. 279 AH, 892 CE), includes 3,956 ahadith Sunan al-Sughra, collected by al-Nasa’i (d. 303 AH, 915 CE), includes 5,270 ahadith Either: Sunan ibn Majah, collected by Ibn Majah (d. 273 AH, 887 CE), over 4,000 ahadith Muwatta Malik, collected by Imam Malik (d. 179 AH, 795 CE), 1,720 ahadith

Avoiding negative assumptions about people

Assalamualaikum. I hope you're doing well. I want to ask something about making assumptions especially negative ones. How can I avoid from making this assumption and why exactly I am making all of these negative assumptions. I can't seem to understand and can't figure it out. If you can help me with this problem I would appreciate it. Jazakallahu kheir.

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,

It may have to do with brain chemicals. For example, people with schizophrenia have very high dopamine levels which makes them make negative assumptions about people and build up whole imaginary stories about how those people are trying to persecute them and they actually believe it all.

As far as I know the best solution is to read the Quran daily. It will help you stop caring about what other people think of you and what they do toward you. It has helped me deal with every person in my life with a clean slate. Regardless of what they have done in the past, to me every day is a new day where I’m ready to treat them as if I have never experienced anything but good from them. If you try to force yourself to be this way, it never works because your emotions and attachments will get in the way. But once you are attached to God and not to the worldly life, then it becomes second nature to be this way.

Best wishes.

On writers similar to C. S. Lewis

Could you recommend authors who are/were similar to C.S. Lewis or maybe some Muslim poets whose poems are pretty decent and not too engaged in worldly love affairs. Thank You.

Why not C. S. Lewis himself? His 4000-page Collected Letters is wonderful. He also has about 20 books, all of which are worth reading. The only other authors I know who would be like him are Tolkien (they were actually good friends) and George MacDonald (a writer whom Lewis admired greatly). If you read Lewis’s Collected Letters, you will see hundreds of other books and writers mentioned in it that may be worth checking out.

I don’t know any Muslim writers who reach their level of sophistication and understanding, except for possibly Said Nursi.

As for poetry, you can check out this page on Amazon.com which has translations of many Persian mystical poets. Note that all the great classical Persian poets were Sunni (if you are worried about theological differences).

On today’s capitalist and materialistic making life as a Muslim more difficult

Assalamualaikum, what do you think about the fact that the world is becoming increasingly harder for Muslims to navigate. For example how capitalist society has designed peoples lives to be all work and any spare time they have is now to consume media and this kind of society is causing increase in mental illness which makes every day life even harder to handle and the consumerist life even more appealing. I just feel like the odds are against people

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,

What we see around us is simply the aftermath of the decline of Christianity. Things will not last this way forever. When a civilization’s motivating force runs out, it is inevitably replaced by a new civilization. Japan’s population is imploding because once it embraced the Western way of life, fertility rates plummeted.

Cultures can be divided into two kinds. Sustainable cultures that enable the population to remain stable over time or grow, and unsustainable cultures that cause the population to decline over time. Japan’s major culture is unsustainable, but it also has 100,000 or more Muslims and perhaps other religious groups who do have sustainable cultures. What this means is that over time the unsustainable culture disappears and is replaced by the sustainable ones.

Egypt is a great example of a sustainable culture. Despite modernizing, fertility rates remain high, because most of the population is made up of practicing Muslims.

So if you think in terms of generations and centuries, then the current materialistic Western culture is just a small blip, a temporary aberration from the norm that is not going to last for long. Faithful Christians (such as the Amish), Muslims and Orthodox Jews continue to grow while the secular population declines. So far the US population has managed to grow due to the high rate of immigration. But that’s not going to be forever. Mexico will soon have a below-replacement fertility rate, meaning its own population will start declining soon, so that it will have fewer and fewer people to send to the US. The same applies to India and many other countries. All unsustainable cultures will decline and disappear over time. We will continue to have more and more faithful people working in business, so that they will change the nature of capitalism for the better. Wall Street used to have many extremely good and principled businessmen in 1900, and that state of things will come back again sooner or later.

What made me decide to be a scholar? Can women be Islamic scholars?

As salamu alaykum brother. What made you decide to pursue a path to become a scholar? Where do one start on such path? Is it appropriate for a girl to do it? Wont it make it difficult for me to find a husband?

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,

Alhamdulillah it has always been easy for me to master any topic and get really good at it. I kept wondering what I should use my abilities for because I was interested in so many topics. I would love to have nothing to do but read endless books on economics, or philosophy, or history, or mathematics, or English literature, or the study of human behavior (ethology, genetics, and evolutionary psychology).

I realized that great discoveries in most fields would be made with or without me due to so many people being involved with them. If you don’t find the answer to an important question in mathematics, chances are another mathematician will find it sooner or later. But when it came to Islamic studies, I realized that the field didn’t have enough capable individuals working in it to revolutionize it. I had been studying Islam casually since my childhood, but at the end of 2017 I made my decision to fully dedicate myself to Islamic studies. 

It would be great for more women to get into Islamic studies. Any man who considers it a negative thing for you to be a scholar is not worth marrying anyway. 

As for where to start, you can check out this page on my site: The Modern Islamic Studies Curriculum. You can read anything that interests you and that will usually lead you to more interesting books. Regardless of what topic you want to study, the only important thing is to read what interests you. As long as a book or paper is interesting it means it has things to teach you.

Is alcohol in beauty products and make up haram?

I recently found out a make up product I use derives a fatty acid ETHYLHEXYL from an ethanol compound called 2-ethylhexanol, would that make my product haram?

Even if it was ethanol it would be permitted. Alcohol is only forbidden to use when it is consumed for its own sake and it has a chance of causing intoxication, so, for example, the alcohol in vanilla extract is halal because the point in using it is not to get the alcohol but the vanilla, and there is no chance of intoxication. Please see: Is alcohol in tinctures and drugs halal?

Building mental toughness and will power

Salam, do you have any advice on how to build mental toughness? I feel like reaching many of my goals lies on the other side of me being too easy on myself

Is it permissible to gather to eat and pray for a dead person?

Is it permissible for people to gather to eat and pray and make dua for someone who has passed away? Or is this wrong

That to me almost sounded like asking if breathing is permitted in Islam. And then I realized that you are probably asking because of all those people who go around saying this or that is a bid`a (false innovation).

My attitude toward all religious practices that were not practiced by the Companions and Successors is that they are permissible as long as they do not include making changes to the basics of Islamic practice. So we cannot start performing the obligatory prayers differently than how the Prophet PBUH and his Companions prayed. But we know that it is permitted to perform extra prayers at any time of day or night except for the few minutes when the sun is rising or setting. So we are free to start performing 8 rakats (in units of two) every day at 2 PM even if none of the early Muslims did that.

The root of the disagreement is that Salafis (except those rare ones who really take the time to understand Ibn Taymiyyah) often believe that Islam is a replacement for our humanity. It becomes a tribalist ideology where you have to act exactly according to their system to prove that you belong to their “tribe”. I discuss this more in my article on why I don’t recommend that IslamQA.info website.

While to mainstream Islamic scholars, once you get the basics of Islam right then you have endless freedom to practice Islam as you like as long as you stick to the permitted things. So there is nothing wrong with gathering to pray for someone even if there is no record of early Muslims doing that. And Ibn Taymiyyah himself says those who gather to celebrate the Prophet’s birthday (peace be upon him) will have a “great reward” if they do it with sincerity and good intentions, despite this kind of celebration being non-existent among the early Muslims.

Struggling with materialism as a Muslim

Assalamu Alaikum wa Rahmatullah, ive recently been struggling with materialism and its making me miserable. at school everyone i see seems to be either smarter, prettier, richer, or more pious than me and thats been distracting me a lot. i havent read salah or quran as often recently and i keep thinking about changing myself or buying more things even though i know that wont fill the inner void. do you have any advice on how to stop feeling this way? thank you, Jazakallah

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah wa barakatuh,

It is natural to feel tempted to become materialistic when you are surrounded by such things. If you want to avoid it, you will need to do constant, daily work designed to help you maintain your balance. The best way is to spend half an hour to an hour of every day reading the Quran. This is the best way I have found for avoiding all kinds of character flaws. Performing tahajjud and sitting for a while after every prayer to do supplication are also helpful.

Also see my essay: God has not abandoned you: Regaining your sense of purpose when life feels spiritually empty, lonely and meaningless

Is loving yourself an Islamic teaching?

Is there any verses in the Al-Qur'an, or in Hadith that's saying to love yourself? Is loving yourself important?

In Islam we believe that psychologically humans are made of two parts. There is the ego (nafs), which is controlled by our brains and genetic instincts. Then there is the soul (ruh) which is where our free will comes from. Adam was a humanoid animal until God breathed His own soul/spirit into him, which gave him his humanity.

[God speaking to the angels:] When I have formed him, and breathed into him of My spirit, fall prostrate before him. (The Quran, verse 38:72)

It is not recommended to love the ego part of ourselves, because this always leads to pride, arrogance and cruelty. Loving this part means that person can be selfish and consider their selfishness something right and beautiful. Without proper spiritual grounding a person’s love for themselves becomes a sort of self-worship where their negative qualities become good qualities.

As for loving one’s own soul, because our souls are in a way extensions of God’s soul, to properly love it one would include God and all other souls in this love. This is the mystical kind of love that so many traditions speak of, and in my opinion it is the only proper way of loving oneself. You direct this love at yourself and then you realize that what you are actually loving is just a small part of a much larger whole, like loving a drop of water and realizing it is part of an ocean.

Love directed at the soul leads to humility and obedience toward God, because it helps us realize our own smallness. While love directed at the ego becomes worship of the animal part of us. Love directed at the soul elevates us because it directs us toward higher ideals (it motivates us to embody those attributes of God that are proper to embody, such as His all-encompassing love and mercy), while love directed at the ego degrades us because it makes us content to be merely our instincts and bodies.

So loving yourself is a very bad teaching when this is mistaken for loving one’s ego. It turns people into narcissists who think they are unique and special and who demand love and attention without doing anything to deserve these. The whole point of loving yourself, if by it we mean loving the soul, is to realize our non-uniqueness, to realize that we are just drops in the vast ocean of God.