Did God command the Israelites to kill themselves? | Mufti Abu Layth

now let's deal with the verse of the quran this is the tafseer that i quote sometimes this is now i know there was a tafseer by um oh sorry a uh the writing um i don't know whether it was actually i don't think it was printed in uh in print but anyway of muhammad abdul but this is of the subcontinent scholar mawlana abdul karim who

was part is was part of the hadith the salafi kind of denomination but one of the most open-minded scholars i've ever come across i he passed away in the 70s i believe it was and he during his life was a happy throughout i think throughout pakistan i think in punjab somewhere may have been gujarat or somewhere like that but but anyway he's way ahead of his time uh so absolute legend right so i was going through

but i was asked a question and i i just thought well i'll kind of use this as a little anchor point that's all the question i was asked was to do with the verse of the quran in surat al-baqarah and that is verse 54 i believe yep 54. and it's to do with moses and the israelites and he says

that when musa al-islam says to his people that oh people you have transgressed against yourselves by taking this uh the kind of calf the the golden calf that they take to worship that is better as far you know that will be better with god fatah alaikum and then he repent and then god turned

back this he turned back upon the meaning turned back here as in forgave them fatah alaikum from the word toba in indeed he is the of forgiving the most merciful now this verse here that [ __ ] the kind of worship that they had taken did this mean so what certain uh mufassirin have said is that this meant that god had asked them to kill a group of either the actual verse reads as in

suicide kill yourselves now some people have done okay most muslim mufasirin don't accept that absolutely literally because that would mean just everybody killed themselves [ __ ] up there will be no more israelites so we know that didn't happen so they say okay means kill some of yourselves so they take this to be a majaz that a badam minkum

kumbadan or some of you should kill some of the others i.e the perpetrators and i think some biblical kind of commentaries say that the levites because the levites was levi was the the kind of the ancestral figure forefather figure of moses and his tribe or his people from the israeli from the one israel were the levites or so some commentaries say the levites killed the perpetrators who were whatever they were you know a certain number of them they kill them now some muslims have taken

that most muslims have not taken that i mean all muslims mufasareen really have not taken that verse absolutely literally because that would mean all the the bani israel just killed themselves and then they were no more bani but we know that isn't true because that's not what happens in history and then the verse carries on talking about them so obviously if they cease to exist that would be pointless so what does this verse mean and some people have said well you know god can say i i heard some people have said well because they worshipped this false god they had become murdered

they had apostated and the punishment of an apostate was murder and therefore it was justified to kill those who perpetrated this act of worship that in my understanding is is wrong it is inaccurate and it's in conflict with this verse of the quran why i feel that is because if you look at this verse you see allah mentions and then he forgave you god forgave you question would be why would he forgive you

what does that mean because there's has he forgiven that could either mean he's forgiven those who have been killed i mean that well you know in all honesty that does very little for them in this world because they're dead i mean oh he forgave those who didn't worship but then that doesn't add up because they didn't worship anyway so what why are they being they don't worship the false uh god so why are they being kind of you know punished so and then the verse ends with

indeed allah is the most merciful and to kill yourself seems to conflict with mercy so i disagree entirely what this verse actually means is this verse is a kind of it's said as a kind of repudiation as a kind of rebuke that [ __ ] that muslim is saying this to them not god but musa alayhi salaam is saying this to them that you know what what you this is like what you deserve you know it's like if somebody is that angry

and they say you know what you you you deserve to just because what moses is saying is that look we've done this exodus we've done all of this i go away and you guys you sabotage almost everything you know you deserve what is deserving is that you just kill yourself goddammit what is wrong with you you should be destroyed that is what you know he says

i'm sorry that that is more better you know with god but this is moses speaking ali to them but they do toba because the verse begins by them saying fatubu moses is saying to them repent god damn it he's saying repent and they repented fata alaikum and allah came you know turned back to them and forgave them

he is the most forgiving now that makes sense it lies you know it's very congruent to to the rest of the verse it's congruent with the fact that moses is saying to them to seek forgiveness if he's going to say you know what you kill them what it's a bit i know people could say well for the ah but come on as far as things many of the israelites probably didn't even believe in the in the after world as from what we learned from their version of the religion to say will kill them

and you know what repent and kill you it doesn't really tie in with the word rahim and it seems that repentance is redundant if you're just going to kill them anyway and this is how you know one of the readings from qatada so from the non-mutterwater readings of the quran because the quran was just written in the uthmanic script without the dots so qatada's reading that is non-mutual but he's reading so if you had the word [ __ ] it's written as far alif and then there's just that the head of the kind of cough but no dots

there's just a kind of bracket which could be atta or a yeah or a bar it could be anything there's no dots and then there's a lamb and a wow he read this his reading of this was so repent to your lord and then you can call it is to kind of you can let off the hook and it's used in for a refund you use it as a refund in if you go to give something back it

kind of cancels out and they pay you back they call it and then allah came back as in uh forgave them and that seems to tie in this is also uh similar to what maulana abdul karim al-athari had written as well where he says

so he says that nobody accepts this as in you kill yourself entirely and then he goes on to say uh so and so he mentions that these people what's very likely and plausible is that they sought repentance from god um so it's very similar to what i'm saying that kind of the same uh kind of thought and that

ties in with the non-mutual reading of the quran because these non-mutual readings sometimes were more reflective of the meaning of what was being meant so it was not that allah said to the israelites kill yourselves but rather when this was said it was like out of repudiation from musa alayhi salaam to them but they did tawba because he begins by saying seek repentance and then it mentions and then allah forgave them so that is what kind of ties in well there is a actually there is a uh a verse that

follows on that's worth highlighting here and that is to do with did the israelites live a second time after having died some of them because this verse goes on to say that they say to moses uh that they demand to see god wife so they say we want to see god we won't believe until we see god and then they were kind of struck down and i believe that's because the i mean it may have been a kind of

like a storm as well um by a storm i mean like a thunderstorm as well but this was a volcano okay so they were a volcano side and it would have kind of erupted or had you know had some turbulence to it now this verse 56 and then we brought you back and it mentions after but the multicommanding after your death [Music] in the hope that you are grateful so

some people have felt that this of course allah said it so and people will say to people like me oh what's wrong with you you know allah said it so it has to be that they died and then they were brought back so they lived again after death so they died and this was a miracle but it doesn't have to mean that and many mufassirin and even i mean since we've got this open and maulana abdul karim he even writes that he says he gives several meanings of death in the quran he says

he says he says that these people had been over they had become unconscious or they lost their kind of intellect he gave several meanings but i wanted to actually show just in case people feel that you know what i'm saying because i would say that that was not actual death that that would be understood in two separate meanings one is which is the most likely one that they were kind of struck down and perceptibly dead like they feared that they would

the people that would have witnessed them would have thought that these people are dead but they weren't actually dead that's um the meaning that i would generally go with and yet they were revived just as you know if somebody has gone into cardiac arrest or something like that he's perceptibly dead now but if he's revived he's not actually dead in the sense of a kind of a brains a brain stem death etc now that's the other understanding is that you were a dead people and then allah

brought you back to life as in gave you a civilization uh this is the other understanding and some people have taken the understanding that he he sent me prophets amongst you now i'll just uh show you some of these actually so you can see this here is uh tafsir of alusi and you can see he goes with he mentions as well um

so he mentions that uh and he says he says sometimes death is used it could have been that they felt they became like comatose in a deep sleep and he mentions that this is in the quran as well and he gives the examples comes to him from every angle yet he is not dead that is a verse of the quran and another verse

what about he who was dead and then we gave him life this was not a literal uh death so even you've got lucy here in rohan mahani saying that if we take a look at bailawi he mentions and he mentions he says that this could mean that because it's from a kind of unconsciousness it does not have to mean a factual death so you've got uh bailary there as well here's

the great maliki legend he mentions that a very similar to a contemporary cardiac arrest situation so he mentions here that look he says [Music] he says if for example somebody was their heartbeat almost stopped or something like this momentarily they would be deemed to be dead and he mentions just as doctors say today but they may be revived or they had a

very such a low heart rate um you would call that death as well this was ibn ashore the maliki legend here was even a great scholar from muslim spain as well he actually writes uh and some people have said inna

where are we sorry um yep he mentions that they asked musa and yet that this was a that they were revived as they became prophets once again this is a one of the the kind of interpretations but i just wanted to the reason i mentioned that is because people sometimes say oh mufti you know you're making all this up and there's no precedent for any of this you know you're saying this but who has said these kind of things in the past so i thought well look let me quote different people there's obviously are

lucy there's bailly there's hypno and you know there's obviously mulan abdul kalim people like this so my point of saying this was no first of all allah did not command the israelites to kill themselves um that was a kind of it was said to almost rebuke them by muslim and two that it wasn't an actual death because allah mentions in the quran

that the only death that people only taste that once that's it so i hope that answers that question