Is “Evil” Necessary, Waḥdat Al-Wujūd & Ego Death | Meetup with Zubair | Mufti Abu Layth

so what's going on what's the second Minecraft precious thoughts the second question is um I asked this to another like thing like this and it's generally you know avoided kind of so it's a philosophical question the question is do we as humans as Muslims need bad things to exist and happen because an ecosystem is to uh what's the word an ecosystem needs to exist in which we can have the possibility of committing Good Deeds okay

wow uh in the sense that do is there a is it there and is it necessary for there to be evil and harm in the world for us to do good yeah because I don't I don't I personally don't believe that if it was all good then there would be no you know action for us to take so there would be no quote-unquote accumulating Good Deeds yeah I guess the yeah the question is that you see could there be any good if all was good yeah exactly because by definition it kind of

flattens it out because then there couldn't be any good if all was good in the sense that they it has nothing to distinguish it from anything else so it would just be yes it couldn't be uh distinct um and and thereby by extension it couldn't be called goodness because it would just simply be called being because it would just be yeah B yeah it would just be a state of being and there would be nothing contrasting so yeah I uh from a philosophical

perspective I feel yeah um things true we can only understand it in contrast to things which are not good yeah you can only understand goodness by contrast true I true that that that uh I would feel is a given yeah okay cool um and another thing a lot of uh I guess Sunni Muslims if you will just the general majority children or afraid to answer so maybe you can just quickly after this is would God in the Islamic jurisprudence and any of them be considered infinite I know it's

considered Eternal but is he considered infinite wow okay um you know what shed some light on on that Forest that how are you differentiating between Eternal and infinite so for me infinite would be to for something to be truly infinite it has to be all-encompassing because for something to be infinite it has to take all possible it has to fill all possible areas of space that it can possibly fail and beyond that so if something was a truly not just we're not speaking so basically it's not

temporal we're not talking about that I mean that's not the the object of focus um it's it's everything being yes yeah yeah so right I feel okay so here hmm I feel it gets tricky yeah people because in one sense some Muslims would feel yes that um

you see because Allah is the crown of being yes and from his being and by his being any other being can only contingently exist so so it's not so it's not to say that he is the first in a series of movers as is the Aristotelian way in the Kalam argument yeah more so that he is the ground the necessary ground

of being from which being emerges uh but and by which being emerges so what they call in Akita so that's interesting because from there it stems to hmm so right do we does God so do we exist kind of I don't know if it's see because words are tricky yeah in a way to say that do we exist

in the mind of God so to speak [Music] um so are we obviously we exist in the mind of God it's not to say we are God in the sense that we are God God in that sense they don't say that so this is I guess where you had people speaking of or the non-duality of being and they argued that ultimately just God exists and nothing else actually exists in comparison to in comparison to God's existence but that's

not just you see this was believed by many Mystics of Islam of Sunni Islam many of the Great Mystics kind of held to what um yeah and other people you see the problem with Jude is people can't understand it because we have no frame of reference to understand it because we can't understand non-duality there is an ineffability about non-duality so it becomes very because when you explain that you are

a part of everything yet you are still distinctly you and not the other but you're not not the other also it it becomes like it becomes nonsensical yeah yeah people don't they don't understand it so that so that so they and as the Hadith says you know or as the the commonly transmitted you know popular rights people easily become opposed to that which they do not understand so you see the thing about this or this people the Mystic said that you can only

understand it by dissolution of the ego that the ego must undergo an ego death and then you and you must go through a fanaa they had this concept of this annihilation of the ego the perishing of the ego fanaa filler and concerning God or in relation to God there is fanaa and then what is left is you go from this transition from now this is very Mystic speak and obviously to the to the kind of calm logical

mind the mathematical or the the the uh to that mind it doesn't it sounds like gibberish it doesn't they can't compute it it doesn't understand it can understand the words but there's no meaning to it so yeah so this is why it's often rejected by most people because they can't and then what they resort to is a a kind of compartmentalized uh uh a kind of um structuralized theology to respond and I guess that makes more sense for

General people to me like I understand where the structural theology is coming from it's saying look this is how God is this is because it's it's being put into words because common people can understand these basic words um to me that the the Mystic approach I also understand that uh I feel that that is also incredibly invaluable but I also understand that that most people will not understand that because it is something only experiential it they would say it's for the people of the people who've tasted it only can understand it

so I I feel both parts have the the you know contribute valuably invaluably to the discourse and your common person will not you know if you try to speak this to him they wouldn't understand it so they would just be averted and and the Hadith says you speak to people in a way that they understand do you wish that Allah is Messenger or denied because there's no point speaking in Mystic speak to people who have not you know this is experiential so it's it's like saying the taste of an

apple now you can't really put it into words you know if you no matter what word you say it's sweet or is it like this I mean sweet like what sweet like sugar sweet like this is unless you just taste the Apple you'll never really understand the taste of an Apple so you can't never really explain in words the taste of an Apple so this is an experiential path for people who who end up or find themselves on that path and this is the normal structured path of saying well no this is simply put and you know this is how we understand God we understand God through these arguments and God is these things in this list and he's not these things and

that works sure yeah and and you know people that refute it sometimes you get refutations going on I mean you don't really get refutations from the mystics that way but you get them this way yeah and they'll say things like well you know if everything is ultimately um let's say if everything is um they will say like let's let's say because you see they say that well if God is everything but the mystics are not truly saying that though so they say well if God is everything you know like there's a common response that is made sometimes especially by the salafia for

example or some of the salafia they will say well if then God is in this apple and when I eat the apple I've eaten God and you know so and that's obviously a very uh silly uh infantile kind of misrepresentation of that argument I don't think nobody no it's I don't think nobody says it like nobody believes that so you're just refuting something which nobody believes I guess it's more akin to saying I don't know they're not exactly saying this either but a modern version would be that I guess it's more akin to saying well are we in the mind of God

well if we exist in the mind of God uh we all still exist but are we in the mind of God so I guess they didn't use those words but their arguments are more akin to that what they're saying is God is the ground of being it doesn't mean that other things don't be in their entity so they do exist but it's it's it's more like a game that is that doesn't have any true existence but it has an existence as far as we're concerned so they would say Allah says this world is

that it is a distraction from what is reality but it's okay like we just as I guess our physics would say that you see in this world there are really no sounds No colors there are no tastes that nothing like that exists in this world that but it's just in our mind like color doesn't actually exist neither does you know neither does sound neither uh smell neither does taste it's all simply in our minds but we couldn't imagine a world like that so obviously Allah is addressing us with

ways that we understand not how the world actually is because if if Allah was to address us with the world how it actually is he would address us with about a world that has no color that has no but he doesn't he addresses it with color because we see color so yeah if that makes sense yeah I guess I can so I guess too quickly I'll add on to that is with you saying that would it be against though heed to say that God is infinite I would say

would it be against the hate um I would say that there's two ways to look at that if you're looking at it from theologians speak so the theologians are the Muslim Scholars of Akida because there's a big distinction Iman Akida is Creed and Iman is faith so we don't have any patrons or Scholars or wardens or you know officials of faith we have of creed Scholars of creed

faith is not um it's you know it's kind of in its way it can't be captured it's a spirit it's not something which can be put into words in that sense people say well okay Creed can Creed is a list Scholars of design Creed so according to the theologians that I I would feel generally I don't I would feel probably most if not all theologians or definitely most let's at least go with most just in case there's some that would Clearly say that's kuffa yeah so most theologians would say that's disbelief and it goes against because

they you see in Creed they have this Creed in there that to refute Christianity they say well God cannot become incarnate and to be incarnate is to come into His creation so they say well God can create creation but he can't come into His creation so that's the angle that they're coming from therefore they would all if not all maybe I I don't know maybe some people will say well maybe there's some from other sects that disagreed um so let's just go with most if not all would say that's kufar now if you're not

looking at theologians speak and you're looking at the mystics of Islam and from Sunni Islam like Arabi and other people that followed him like Rumi and all these people that were these Mystics of Islam uh they would uh they wouldn't see that as kufar they would uh in fact you know even are we writing and stuff see this I mean not the word but this manifestation but they're not seeing it you see they don't they're not seeing it as God becomes incarnate they're not seeing it like that that's like a wrong way to see it they're saying that only in in actual just as you see we see

color but color doesn't exist just as we see certain things but they don't really exist objectively speaking we just see them in our mind so they would say really only God exists all else existence is but an illusion it's like a game that's been it's there to us it's like if we created a computer game let's say now computer games today are so uh graphically you know overpowering overwhelming in fact I you know this just goes to show I recently just shared this uh this clip uh on Instagram my insta story was of these

two cars on this race track and they were just skidding and they were maneuvering around each other so as not to hit each other one was a BMW and the other and it was just so perfectly executed it was like Wow and I shared the clip like wow that just blew my mind and and then I realized afterwards it said oh did you realize that was a computer game I I I honestly I could not tell it looked so real now so okay let's say with our Graphics if we even keep let's say we keep improving these the

games by even Z 0.1 percent 0.001 there will come a point where it will become imp you know indistinguishable from reality now let's say these characters in the game we give them some kind of uh uh uh Consciousness some kind of Quasi autonomous Consciousness that they think they are conscious even if we know they're not but they think they are because now people in games they are characters in game they have to eat they have to get dressed I have to do things so let's say this character in the game thinks it believes

it's conscious even if we know it isn't you see to the character in the game everything is real like they would think that and it is real from the the character perspective it is real everything that is happening you know the people they are meeting the interactions they are doing it's not to say it isn't real for them for them it is real let's say they could somehow feel pain they could somehow feel Joy they could let's say we if we keep improving you know it's not difficult that we would reach such a stage where the characters have some uh illusory Consciousness that they feel they are

conscious so I mean just considering Lambda the Lambda thing that was leaked by Google where the you know it's indistinguishable if you read the interview you couldn't tell and that's the touring test isn't it the test is if you're speaking on this side to a machine you can't tell it's a machine or a person it's past the test if a human can't tell if I'm chatting to someone and I can't tell this is a machine a bot or a human then it has passed the test because I can't figure if I can ask it questions whatever I want and I still can't tell I have to speak to five people and two of them are machines and I don't know which one and at the end I can't figure it out I get them wrong

those machines have passed the test because they that you as a human being could not distinguish so that's the Turing test so the point is that now so when these people were saying it's it's an illusion they meant it like that not in the sense that it is still real for us so I would say well the mystics did allow for it and the theologians if not all I I would I must I'm assuming all said it was kufar so that's the kind of difference you have that's what I that's for the Theologian aspect that's what I heard yeah okay thank you it's

been epic here just before I leave okay I just want to leave with one quick thing is uh the video that piqued my interest a lot was what you correcting who is Zayn was Osiris who's there being Osiris so just quickly um have you ever heard of the theory that uh what's his name Idris was Thoth I have actually okay good that's very fascinating because I you know when I looked into that I came across Idris uh uh being what they said Thoth and in Arabic they uh wrote it as uh I think they wrote it as

soon or something or something something like that I think I think I can't remember now or something but I can't remember but they in Arabic they they wrote it a bit differently and they were saying because you know maybe he's the first person to to scribe and the first person to do it's interesting because Idris also sounds like a kind of a Greek you know it sounds like some there's some influences along the way to to add to the to the name yeah it's just the structure um but yeah it's because it's fascinating we have no understanding of Idris

one interesting in the Christian aspect of it if we look at Christianity they say uh Enoch lived 365 days those are years right and then he was then he went to god in thothy's mythology he was the god that created the 365-day calendar so there is a correlation oh yeah and there's some yeah I remember reading at the time I mean it's kind of uh I'd have to revisit it but they were showing a lot of correlations oh not a lot but they were showing a few similarities between certain Traditions stating Idris uh because in from the quranic and the

pure Islamic perspective this very little I mean understanding is we don't even know where to place him in the timeline except that he seems to be incredibly ancient like we just don't know where to place him and um there's nothing really mentioned so surely the the some Arabs at the time when the Quran was being revealed must have had some reference of Idris this is why he's mentioned because he's mentioned because he would resonate with some people um now obviously we don't have that continuity to understand what they

understood by it so yeah it is it is fascinating I mean the Osiris thing I found it it made more sense to me yeah yeah I mean I get people felt that you know no it's a bit far-fetched but I I thought you know hmm it seems to resonate because this that the early Jewish Community they had this the kind of spirit of Osiris with them it wasn't like they it was more a because they were raised into it it would have been difficult to distinguish

I mean not to jettison it completely it would have been a real struggle and Osiris is that great you know the Epic uh deity that everybody loved and everybody had this thing for so it made sense yeah yeah um I appreciate this thank you very much for answering all the questions I will see you on patreon though oh man I'll take his speak to you there much love see you soon get back to games

just chilling coming back from work in his gaming gear