Two Faced: Overcoming Hypocrisy

So right now as I'm describing hypocrites, everyone's like, man, I got a lot of hypocrite friends. And you're starting to make lists, right? You're like tweeting them, you're like, come to this lecture right now, quick, you need to hear this.

But Imam Ghazali says that while we're doing this, we neglect reflecting on our own selves. While we're trying to call other people out, we fail to pause and say, this might be me, this might be my issue.

So what I want to preface this entire talk, and I'll be done in a few minutes inshallah, what I want to preface this entire session with is whenever you hear something that could potentially be constructively critical, don't try to apply it to people around you, apply it inwardly.

If someone says something like, yeah, you know, Muslims, they have to be more honest, be like, yeah, there was that one time I got lied to. No. Think to yourself, how many times have I lied? How many times have I broken my trust, my truth with somebody? Make it internal, because that's the only way transformation happens.

Is it painful? Yes. Being honest with yourself. Is it bitter? Absolutely. But nothing worth having was ever easy. And spiritually, it's the same.

If we sit in the land of comfort, pointing at other people's flaws, saying this person doesn't wear hijab, this person doesn't pray, this guy does this, this girl does that, how is that making you a better person?

The Prophet's Example of Friendship

And we've all been taught this notion of not being friends with people who have flaws. You know, Imam Ghazali says that that's not allowed. He says that that is impermissible in Islam to break yourself off from somebody because of a sin they have, for two reasons.

Number one, he says, how on earth can you be not friends with somebody for their sin when you have sins? The second thing is he says, who was the best person to ever live on the face of the earth? Everyone say his name. Who? Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him).

Someone's like Steph Curry. No, wrong, right? Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him). Was Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) protected from committing spiritual sins? Yes. Was he perfect in his spiritual reality? Yes.

Did he have friends? Yes. Did his friends make mistakes? Absolutely. So if the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) was perfect, how could he have had friends if you're not allowed to have friends unless they're at least as good as you or better than you? It doesn't make sense.

Communities have to come together and stop indicting one another with spiritual deficiencies. That's not how this works. We ask Allah (Glorified and Exalted be He) to protect us from arrogance.

The Four Stages of Hypocrisy

Allah (Glorified and Exalted be He), He begins by defining spiritual hypocrisy in Surah Al-Baqarah when he says:

There's four stages of hypocrisy that we're going to go over today. Four stages of nifaq.

Stage 1: Proclaiming Without Believing

Allah identifies the first stage as people who say that we believe, that we believe in Allah and the Day of Judgment, and Allah then says about those people but they don't truly believe. Then Allah (Glorified and Exalted be He) continues and says:

They're trying to actually deceive Allah (Glorified and Exalted be He), but rather they are deceived themselves, and we're going to talk about why. But the first step towards hypocrisy, I want people to write this down, is that you actually don't have any care for your internal, I don't have any care for my internal, I just want people to see me a certain way.

These people are proclaiming to the community, yes I believe in Allah and the Last Day, but Allah says in their heart there is a void of that belief, it is not truly there. And this is something that is particularly dangerous with things like social media, with things like the social media age, where really perception is 100%, portrayal is all we're concerned about, but the reality that's inside, we could care less about, that's second tier, we don't actually focus on those things.

The Ramadan Test

This month of Ramadan that is coming up, I ask Allah (Glorified and Exalted be He) to allow us to see Ramadan, say ameen.

This month of Ramadan coming up is going to be your spiritual mirror, and my spiritual mirror. The month of Ramadan, as we said yesterday in the khutbah, it reduces you as a person to your lowest state, your most weak state, so you can see who you are.

You know, they asked Steve Kerr once, from the Chicago Bulls, the 72-win team, they asked Steve Kerr once, because after Michael Jordan retired, and after Steve Kerr retired, and all these players retired, it came out that they actually hated each other.

Like the day before, Steve Kerr made the game-winning shot in the finals, Michael Jordan punched him in the face in practice, and they actually had to put makeup on his black eye, and they asked Steve Kerr, who's now the coach of the Warriors, they said, you guys had a bad relationship, it looked like you guys had such a good relationship, you guys were so good, you guys had such great chemistry on the court, what happened?

Steve Kerr said, when you're winning, everyone's friends, but it was when you were losing that people's true character was revealed. Ramadan removes all of the glitz and glamour from our nafs, and reduces us by starving us, both physically, and in a desirous way it starves us, to make us realize who we truly are.

The way that we react when fasting, that time between Asr and Maghrib, where every other thought is samosa, right? The way that we treat people when we're frustrated in Ramadan, is going to act as a spiritual mirror.

Go ahead and claim that you're a pious person, go ahead and claim that you're a pious person, but look at yourself, record yourself and how you talk, at the end of the day, make some muhasabah, muraqabah, and think to yourself, what have I done, how did I feel in my heart, when there was one samosa left in the tray, and there were two of us standing in line, did I, when the brother took the samosa first, did I make badua against him, right? Did I become upset when they ran out of, when they ran out of mango lassi?

These are all things internally that will reveal to you, who you truly are in character, and will reveal to me as well, but ask Allah to give us success.

Stage 2: Losing the Ability to Feel Shame

The second step, and this is very scary, the second step of spiritual hypocrisy is that we lose the ability to feel shame and remorse when we make a mistake. Imam Suhaib beautifully talked about when you feel this shame and this remorse and regret in front of Allah for the mistakes that we've made.

His teachers, he quoted, that they would shed tears if they missed fajr, if they missed a prayer, they would actually become emotionally rattled. Allah finishes the next part of the verse by saying, and these people have no concept of the sin that they are creating. He actually uses this description in the entire passage numerous times.

There's this concept in medicine that Dr. Farhan can probably tell you more about. Don't you love when people who aren't doctors talk about medicine? I'm not a doctor, I'm going to talk about medicine. Okay, there's this concept of medicine called neuropathy, and the reason why I know about it is because my father is a diabetic.

What happens is when a person becomes diabetic, they have the chance that their limbs, the nerves on their limbs which allow them to feel, right, your nerves allow you to feel, they have the chance that those nerves will die. Those nerves will lose the ability to feel, and so you'll oftentimes see a lot of diabetics, unless they exercise and work out and get blood pumping to their limbs, they'll have to actually start wearing thick socks.

It's very interesting. So my dad, for example, he kind of lost some sensation on one of his feet, on the bottom of his feet, and the doctor said what? Wear thick socks. I was like, what kind of doctor are you? Thick socks, right, prescribing us at Walmart. What's going on, right? Where's the medicine?

He goes, no, you have to wear thick socks. I said, explain why. He said, because your dad can't feel on one of his feet, and if he bumps into something sharp, and it gets cut, and it bleeds, it might become infected,

and if an infection goes without being taken care of, just like spiritual infections, if a bodily infection goes without being taken care of, without being cured, without being noticed, then it might actually require much more severe treatment, like amputation of the entire leg.

I said, go on Amazon, order 3,000 thick socks, please, right? That's called neuropathy. When a person loses the ability to feel, so the body loses the ability to communicate to the rest of the body that something is wrong.

Remorse is an important feeling. Regret is an important feeling. That doesn't mean that you don't appreciate yourself. There's this movement now of unconditional acceptance and love and appreciation for oneself. No, you should appreciate yourself, but at the same time, push yourself forward to become the best version of yourself.

Don't settle for mediocre me. Don't settle for being just who you are. Keep pushing yourself to become better in spirit, in emotion, in intelligence, in health, in every part of your life.

And so when a person has spiritual neuropathy, they have now lost that remorse and regret that you and I feel when we commit a sin. And all of us now can think for a moment about sins that we have been involved in for days, months, maybe years, maybe our entire life.

And we realize now that when we first did that sin, there was a pinch of the heart. There was something that hurt us. But the more and more that we did that sin, the more and more that we did it without regretting it, without trying to fight it, the more and more comfortable we became.

Do you guys ever see little children's faces when a swear word is said in front of them? One time I was driving my van. I don't have a van. I was driving a van. I rented a van.

Everyone's judging me right now. I don't have a van, okay? I was driving a van with a lot of youth, because I do a lot of youth work, alhamdulillah, with some younger teens. We were taking them, myself and one of my friends, hafizh al-baytullah, and we were taking them out for a field day.

And we had Pandora on, and for some reason one of the songs came on, and it used a cuss word, a really bad word. And all the kids in the van were like, oh my god, brother Murphy just endorsed cursing, right? No, but they heard it, and they flipped out.

Whereas with college kids, they hear that word, they're like, oh yeah, actually, that word's actually quite powerful, you know, we use it a lot when we get upset. And they'll go into the etymology of the curse word, and they'll explain what it, they'll do tafsir of it, like they'll explain how often they use it, in what ways, like Nomad Ali Khan equivalent for curse words, right?

Like, truly the meaning has profound impact on my message. I'm angry, right? Like, when we first heard it when we were younger, it impacted us. It hurt us. But as we became older and more jaded by society and media, now we hear these all the time, it's normal, to the point where we use them sometimes. It's the first thing that comes out of our lips when we're upset, when we never ever grew up hearing that from people that were close to us.

This is spiritual neuropathy. So when Allah identifies that the hypocrites lose the ability to feel regret, that itself is a punishment in and of itself. I ask Allah (Glorified and Exalted be He) to protect us from that.

The Prophet's Definition of Faith

You know, the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) one time was asked by one of the companions, the hadith says that, He said, what is faith? The Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said, He said, if you feel happy with your good deeds and you feel disappointed and sad at your bad deeds, then you're a believer.

Look at how the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) was so positive, the optimist. He didn't say you're a believer if you do good and stay away from bad. He said that you're a believer if you're happy with your good and when you occasionally make a mistake you feel disappointed and you want to change yourself.

That's a sign of belief. Then the person asked, what is sin? What is sin? And the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) described sin. He didn't say it's making a mistake. He described the emotion that a person feels when they commit a sin. He said, He said that when a person feels tightness in their chest, when a person does something they feel tightness in their chest with it, he says repel that thing.

If you're moving towards doing a deed or saying something or going somewhere and you feel this anxiety in your chest, not good anxiety, you know, when I was stepping up here, I felt nervous. When I give speeches, I feel nervous. That's good anxiety though.

But if I'm going somewhere and I'm checking to make sure that my tweets geolocation is turned off, because my parents are hip to geolocations, right, or I'm trying to make sure that my friend's parents, you know, are asleep before we sneak out, then that anxiety that you feel, if you feel that, then repel that action.

If you feel like you're doing something wrong, losing that tightness the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) described, itself is losing that awareness. Do not get hit by spiritual neuropathy. We ask Allah to protect us.

Stage 3: The Disease Perpetuates Itself

That this sickness of hypocrisy, what ends up happening is it replicates. It increases itself. Why? Because the hypocrite, the sick person, wants nothing more than what their heart desires.

A person who is suffering from the disease of alcoholism, at some point their body rejects anything that's healthy and they just want more alcohol. So when a person has spiritual diseases like backbiting or envy or jealousy or judgmentalism, anything, any of these diseases of the heart, urge of vanity, then what happens is if the heart becomes sick enough, it actually starts to perpetuate this disease and seek it more.

You get one like on Instagram, now you got to send up another picture, right? I've actually met people who get very disturbed when I don't like their pictures on Instagram. Like they meet me in person, they

say, can you like my picture on Instagram? And I say, sure. And they say, no, right now. And they take my phone.

No, seriously, I've done this. And I say to them, do you not believe me? They said, yeah, last time you said you wouldn't, you never did. So they keep a tally on this. And I apologize for maybe not telling the truth when I said I was going to, right? But the point is that these diseases can perpetuate themselves.

Don't become a slave to vanity. Don't become a slave to the favorite or the like. Only be, only worry about being liked or favorited by Allah and his messenger. Other people will favor it and like you for different reasons. And those reasons might not be good for you.

Seek Allah (Glorified and Exalted be He)'s favor and pleasure. That's the only one that you should go for, because then you'll be successful.

Stage 4: Mocking the Believers

Allah (Glorified and Exalted be He) then continues and he describes, and I'm running out of time, so I want to conclude, but he describes these people. He continues and says that the next step the hypocrites face after saying what they don't do and lying about what they actually believe and then losing that feeling of remorse, the hypocrites then start to mock the believers.

And this is actually one of the things I've seen with a lot of young Muslims who are dabbling or walking that fine line of atheism or agnosticism. Some of people, it's from a sincere concern. Some people, it's sincerely searching for Allah and they're sincerely agnostic. And to those people, I actually applaud them.

When someone comes to me and says, I've been reading a lot and I really want to know if Allah exists and if I should believe in him, if I get the feeling that they're sincere about it, I actually tell them, I'm proud of you, because Allah commands us to think and you're thinking.

But the people who use atheism and agnosticism as a mask screen, a smoke screen for their desires, that they want to do something and they end up saying, you know what, I feel guilty when I do this sin, so I'm just going to shed all my religion for my entire life. Those people have to check themselves.

Are you just giving up your relationship with Allah because of one person, a girl or a guy? Because of one habit, drinking or smoking? It's not worth it. Don't do that. You can be a person who has sins but still has a relationship with Allah. That's part of the equation.

So these people begin to mock the believers and say this religion makes absolutely no sense. Then Allah finishes by saying that the hypocrites will eventually stumble to a point. Hypocrisy will grow so large and so uncontainable that the vessel that holds iman, the heart, will be removed.

The iman will be removed and this person will have to make a decision. Allah says, He said that these people have made a purchase, they have exchanged something. When I bought this iPhone, I went to the Apple store and I gave them money and I told them I want an iPhone.

They said, okay, it's going to cost this much. I paid them and they gave me the phone. That's called a purchase. When you purchase something, the item that you are receiving is more important than the amount that you are giving to you. If I'm purchasing food, the $10 I'm paying for a meal is not as important to me as being fed.

So what's happening here with this exchange is misguidance is more important to these people than guidance. Because guidance might be seen as something that is a burden to carry, but it is something that liberates them and gives them the ability to do what they want and they trade it.

The powerful thing about this verse is that the verb of transacting is used when you transact something, you can't buy it and then take what you use to buy it. When I bought this iPhone, I didn't take the box and say, okay, give me my money back. Because once I've given it, it's gone. And once they've given it to me, it's mine. You can't keep both.

So Allah is saying if a person truly wants hidayah, a relationship with him, they can't try to balance both. It doesn't work like that. You have to choose. That doesn't mean you can't make mistakes along the way. That doesn't mean you can't struggle along the way. But what it means is you have to choose in your heart of hearts who you truly want to be.

Do you want to be close to Allah and please him or do you want to be distant from him and not have a relationship with the Lord of the worlds who gave us everything that we have. We ask Allah (Glorified and Exalted be He) to protect us.

The Cures for Hypocrisy

I'll finish with a narration and a reminder of the cures. I'll just go straight to the cures inshallah. So some of the cures that I would recommend if any of us feel like we have some hypocrisy that we're dealing with, which all of us by the way should. The narration was to Abdullah ibn Mas'ud and one of his students came to him and said, that I fear that I am a munafiq.

And he said, if you didn't fear that you were a munafiq, then I would fear for you that you were a munafiq. If you didn't have this fear in your heart that maybe I'm not sincere all the time, then I would fear for you. Meaning that a person should always check themselves. Why am I doing what I'm doing? Why am I doing this? For public perception or for the sake of Allah (Glorified and Exalted be He).

First Cure: Do More Good in Private

The first cure I'll give is to do more good in private than you do in public. Do more good deeds in private than you do in public. Why? Because this becomes an undeniable proof, an undeniable evidence to you and to Allah that you are doing it for no one else besides Allah (Glorified and Exalted be He).

Now I know what you guys are thinking. Doing more good in private than in public means I got to stop doing so much good in public. No, right. Ibn al-Qayyim actually addressed this. Somebody said, what if I don't want to go pray at the masjid in jama'a because I'm afraid that is insincere.

He said, that's from shaitan. Don't let shaitan ruin your good deeds like that. So doing more in private than you do in public.

Second Cure: Better Quality in Private

The second is doing better quality in private than you do in public. When we're together with people and it's time to pray maghrib, we make wudu. Everyone's like, okay, how long are you going to take? You're like about 20 minutes. For wudu?

When you're by yourself, it's like a slip and slide, right? You just kind of go in there and throw water everywhere and you're like maybe it's ghusl, who knows, right? You go downstairs to the kitchen sink and just grab the hose and you're like, all right, I'm good, let's pray. The game's on, it's a commercial break. That's not how it works.

Do better quality in private than you do in public. When people aren't around, extend the prayers. People are there, I have to pray sunnah. My parents are watching, I have to pray sunnah. The entire time you're praying, you're not even reciting, you're just watching your mom behind your head, right? That's not doing better quality.

What's better quality is when you're by yourself, you take longer. No one's watching, you take longer. That's time between you and Allah (Glorified and Exalted be He).

Third Cure: Have Good Friends

The last point, and I'll conclude with this inshallah, because he's staring holes through me right now, is have good friends. Have good friends. Can I tell you how to have good friends? Anyone curious how to have good friends? Be a good friend. People attract people that are like them.

If you are a good friend, if you're someone that is trustworthy, if you're someone that cares for people, if you're someone that is compassionate, that checks on people. Imam Suhaib will text me randomly, hey, I'm on a plane to Malaysia, was just thinking about you, want to see if you're okay. That's a good friend.

Everyone's like, he's friends with Imam Suhaib, right? Of course I am, people think we're the same person, right? We're stunt doubles, I'm his stunt double, mashallah. Be a good friend, be someone who shows concern, and do not judge people.

Do not look at the deficiencies that people have, and make judgments about the state of their heart, because God knows how many deficiencies we have that he has hidden from the eyes of other people. And I ask Allah to protect us from judging others.

I have never seen any relationship or any community grow when judgmentalism or judging other people, putting value on their soul, was done. In fact, it is the only thing that pushes people away. Do not judge individuals, make excuses for them, support them, pray for them when they're not around, and be a good friend.

We ask Allah (Glorified and Exalted be He) to accept. BarakAllahu feekum.

Closing

We ask Allah (Glorified and Exalted be He) to protect us from hypocrisy. We ask Allah to purify our hearts and make our actions sincere. We ask Allah to make us among those who do good deeds for His sake alone, and to protect us from showing off and seeking the praise of people. We ask Allah to help us be good friends and to surround us with righteous companions who help us in our journey towards Him.

May Allah protect us all from hypocrisy and grant us sincerity in our worship and actions. Ameen.