Folklore Islam & Sufi Tales of Karamaat | Mufti Abu Layth

is just like it's been amazing i've been watching all your videos and uh um i do have a question though about karamatsu right choco i would go for it so i went to madrasa you know uh sufi school so uh we followed the alawi right uh so about they give us these stories about these awliya allah and some of them are ridiculous to be honest so there's like uh i'll give you one story uh there's this big chef they were they were on a journey uh and

it was in the night and there was no food right so he's like okay i'll get you guys some food he turns into a lion after praying to allah and god's hand [Laughter] right and uh comes back and eats the other guys no no no no no that'll be a proper plot twist no i want to turn into a lion he just went hunting and then brought the food back and they start eating right so i'm like and we were it was in the middle of a session right we were learning like the serra of the prophet and somehow somewhere

the karamatov went in there and they keep from telling us these stories i just want to hear about what's what's your thoughts on the karamazov of the earliers do you actually believe in them first of all right okay so i don't believe in the supernatural kind of things like this um like i believe you see miracles within the laws of nature yes of course i believe in miracles like that i believe that uh so for example life is a miracle i i believe that sometimes miraculous things happen like a person could fall from you know ten story building but somehow miraculously be

he still stays alive uh there could be a plane crash and although you know it's a miracle this one passenger survives these kind of miracles i absolutely believe in as does everyone and these kind of these are the kind of miracles that in life we like so we people pray for they may say you know somebody may be very seriously ill and you may make a dua and sometimes you see miraculously somebody recovers you know they've doctors say you know it's very unlikely this person you know forget very unlikely they say sorry you know this person isn't going to make it but they do

it's a miracle these kind of miracles of course i i believe and you know i pray that may everybody be able to kind of benefit from things and witness these miracles in their own lives that may their lives be touched by the hand of god but then you've got supernatural like these kind of uh astronomical you know larger-than-life kind of things like like you said a person uh you know i'm hungry oh you need some food okay let me just transform into a lion and i'll ah i'll go and hunt and i'll come back and yeah

you know like i remember reading these stories about um there was such a such person who uh his murids were walking with him and they say to him you're not sure uh like they kind of make this uh not sarcastic but they make this remark that you know you know how have you done this you know you could have had more dunya for example you could have earned something so he says oh you think it's money i want you you think it's and then he says look over there and there's this like amount like a hill like a big mount here and it turns into gold and then what he'll as he walks the

mount this mountain mini mountain walks with him made out of gold and then he takes the gold like a few pieces and he gives it somebody and and then he says to his murids that you think if i wanted gold you know i couldn't have it i chose to stick to allah rather than gold i just add on to that uh sometimes uh this story ends up getting updated uh yearly you know the new latest software latest update right uh there are different differences has a different story and a different version of it so i'm just wondering how do they how did he come like is was it already

transmitted is it written somewhere because i i think there's like folkloric stories so what happens is they get passed down and along the way sometimes people will modify them as they tell like a moment ago speaking to somebody who's speaking about memory is constructive like we actually it's not passive as we re back to memory we recreate it so uh without noticing it but we do so sometimes people will think yeah i'm sure this like somebody might say like imagine i've got a story about uh let's say like maybe about junaid

uh the famous sufi al-baghdadi now you might tell that story on to someone but you're not sure did he say junaid did he say abdul kadur and then what happens is the other person he narrates it from you as oh well it's changes the setting a bit and then he narrates it to someone who says well i'm pretty sure he was talking about a pizza in india and then what happens is these stories keep morphing uh they get a life of the that's from the mata of these stories really right

the knowledge aspect of it you know how uh when he was 13 he was just you know there's like a one with this story right there was this student that was uh uh intellectually a little bit slower than the others right but he was so devoted to the chef you know how he was cleaning right he was so devoted for years and years and uh one time uh he ended up the students end up laughing at him like oh you just end up just cleaning after the shaykh then the chef overheard right that story and the ship completely okay all of you just gather around uh let's uh let's do some uh liquid so the digra and the uh recited fire to her and the kid got

jazzed up and he went back home and ends up making everyone in there muslim and he becomes a big chef just like that with the jazza from the sheikh he ended up knowing all the hadiths all the quran just by the egypt of the sheikh and i find it ridiculously honest but yeah i mean so you end up like uh respecting those stars like you know yeah right yeah so sometimes you know sometimes these stories are there to it's like the moral so what they're trying to say is oh you need more adap so and you shouldn't be arrogant and then what they'll do is

they'll come up with a story there used to be this guy that was a jahil but you know he had great other and then the moral of the stories he ends up becoming successful you know it's like the the tortoise and the here and but the tortoise wins in the end and so this is the kind of uh story that people will uh you know they'll they're trying to give some moral out of it but at the moral aspect fine i accept that you know people should have good character you know you should humble yourself and you should and from that side i think these things are fine but they're presented as real stories and then the people listening sometimes they then belittle

knowledge because they will say things like you know even the shaitaan had knowledge like what is knowledge like it's not really uh you know this person had one glance of the sheikh and his life was changed you know that miraculous glance what they call another another you know in urdu they call it but this whole kind of that one navaratun you know another karama it comes from the sheikh and you'll get all of a sudden miracles will happen and and yeah but in in the real world that's not going to happen unfortunately i saw this happening right when i was uh

on my uh if did i eat right cause once i was done with that i just went to uh i went to the wahabis right i don't want to call the mojaves i went to a but the system is the same thing it's just that on this side it's they're more focused on that and i'm like there's no bond really with this uh just like you say there's like the systematization of the madras institution it's ridiculous to be honest yeah and that's you know you've you've hit the nail on the head there shirazi the thing is that you see it's a cult and the problem is that people you can

replace one cult with another cult but it's still a cult like so it's true the selfies on that note they don't have these folklores they don't have these stories and sometimes they even don't even have respect towards some of a lot of their teachers sometimes they do respect some but others they might treat them like huh you know and they and and that's a bit strange but but they don't have that folkloric in all these decorations and don't have these great stories of like a hands coming out of the moon and this is coming out there and the flying tortoise and they don't they don't have these stories but then they are just that what they

bring is a different kind they just bring this other darkness of this cultish puritanism everybody you know oh my god you know we're puritans we're better than the rest uh everything and it's just another it's an absolute cult so yeah the main thing well my question to you is how would you fix it mostly i said like absolutely that would that would be my karama if i could fix it you know that would be mean now i feel honestly what a person has to do what we have to do a