Assalamu alaykum wa rahmatullah. A short note for everyone taking Before the Bond. Class 4 went ahead, and the recording is now up in the Classroom. If you could not sit in on the night, watch it there in your own time. The course is meant to be taken at your own pace, and nothing is lost by coming to a class a week late. Class 5 will be uploaded by Monday coming, insha Allah. It goes straight into the Classroom rather than running as a live session, so you can watch it whenever it suits you. If you are working through the course and something in Class 4 needs unpacking, put it in the comments here or in Ask the Shaykh and I will answer it. A question one person asks is usually the question three others are sitting with and have not asked. Barakallahu feekum.

Assalamu alaykum wa rahmatullah. I have been quiet in this feed for a while. Not away from the work, but away from this space, and I want to put that right by telling you everything at once. CONSULTATIONS The website is at isnadacademy.com, and there is now a page on it I want you to know about: https://isnadacademy.com/consultations/ Alongside the videos and the courses, I take a limited number of private consultations each month. Marriage and family matters, inheritance, fatwa questions, spiritual guidance and mentoring, and studio time for anyone recording their own work. How it works. You apply through a short form telling me what the matter is. That part is free and nothing is owed at that stage. I read every application myself, and within three working days you will hear back one of three things: an invitation to book, a request for a little more detail, or an honest referral to someone better placed to help you. If I take the matter, I send you a payment link and a booking link together, and you choose the time that suits you. The fees: A first conversation, 15 minutes: free Online, video call: R500 per hour In person, Mowbray masjid or Crawford: R700 per hour Studio time and recording: R1,200 per hour Nikah ceremony: R700 to R2,000, agreed after we have spoken Sessions are one hour by default and longer sessions are charged at the same rate. Payment by EFT, Payfast or cash. I hold consultations Monday to Thursday, 2pm to 8pm, except Wednesdays which end at 6pm. Nothing on Fridays or over the weekend. The earliest available time is 48 hours from when you book, so that I can prepare properly for your matter. In person sessions are at my home in Crawford or at Mowbray masjid, or somewhere between the two by arrangement. If you would rather sit in a masjid than in a private home, simply say so. It is never a difficulty. Anyone further afield is warmly welcome online. A word on the fee, because I would rather you hear it from me than wonder. The fee is not for the knowledge. What I know was given to me, and passing it on is an obligation rather than something I am entitled to sell. What the fee covers is time: the hour set aside, the reading done before we speak, the file gone through beforehand.

You can measure your prayer. You cannot measure your arrogance. A new four-part khutba series is now live in the Classroom, free to every member. Across four Jumu'a khutbas I work through the method Imam Ghazali sets out in Book 38 of the Ihya, the six stations that take you from setting the terms of your day after Fajr to what you do on the night you fail. Part One: purification is an obligation, and it grows as much as it removes. Part Two: four ways to find a fault you cannot see. Part Three: musharata, muraqaba, muhasaba. Part Four: mu'aqaba, mujahada, mu'ataba. The one-page Tazkiyah Daily Practice sheet is included. Print it and keep it where you pray. Watch them in order. Success comes in the attempt. https://www.skool.com/isnad-academy-7659/classroom/e318f432 🤲 Support this work: https://payf.st/sfr4x

Assalamu alaykum wa rahmatullah. The twelfth of Rabi al-Awwal is upon us, and with it the argument that comes around every year. I am putting something here in place of that argument. Some years ago my teacher, Mawlana Muhammad Taha Karaan (Allah have mercy on him), spoke on the Mawlid at a meeting of scholars at the Muslim Judicial Council. He was addressing ulama, and he spoke the way scholars speak to one another: half the sentences in Arabic, books named without explanation, the argument moving at the speed of a room that already knows the material. Anyone listening from outside that room would catch the tone and miss the substance. I have taken that recording and made it readable. I arranged the fragments into prose, gave the English for every Arabic term he used, identified each scholar and book he named in shorthand, and added footnotes where a reader would need one. The main text is his — his reasoning, his order, his conclusion. The footnotes are mine, and so is any error in them. What he does with the question is not what you expect. He could not find a single Shafi’i jurist who condemns the Mawlid itself, and he shows you why: the author of the school’s standard book against innovation is the same man who calls the Prophetic Mawlid among the finest things introduced in his time. He shows you that the earliest Mawlids were works of Prophetic biography — six and seven volumes of hadith and history — and that one of the largest of them was written by the scholar who wrote in defence of Ibn Taymiyya. Then he turns and cuts the other way. The standing at the mention of the birth, he says, is a separate legal question, and on it he sides with Ibn Hajar al-Haytami, who called it a grave and objectionable innovation. He says this plainly, in a room where many would have preferred otherwise. And he says that once a good thing hardens into a ritual, and the ritual into an obligation — you did not stand, therefore you do not love him — the very jurist who permitted it would be the first to object.