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I just wanted to say that the Quran that we're looking at all have a relationship to the subject. And the thing about the Quran is sometimes you don't see the relationship. And that's what takes what's called tadabbur, which is to reflect deeply about something because the Quran says, don't they penetrate this Quran to its depth? You know, penetrate it. Dubar is the end of something. So you try to yita dabbar is to attempt to find the end. So don't you attempt to find. You're never going to get to the end because it's Karamullah. But the yatadabbur is to really reflect, to try to get to the other side. So it's all related. And one of the things about the Quran, there's a miracle of Quran, which is the miracle of Tara, but which is how the Quran is unified. One of the things about most books is that there's a superficial unity to most books. But if you begin to penetrate it and get into not the context but what they call the subtext, the book begins to actually fall apart. And there's a whole school of literary criticism called deconstructionism, which is based on doing that, on deconstructing texts and showing that in fact that there's not a unity to the theme and things like that. The thing about the Quran is at the superficial level, it seems very un unified. It doesn't seem to have a theme that's holding it together. But as you begin to attempt to deconstruct or go dive into it, what you see is that it's actually completely connected. And my favorite analogy for that is the stars. If you look up at the stars and have never looked at the night sky, it looks like it's a jumble of lights that have no connection. But if you begin to observe it every day and you can't do it for one lifetime, it's taken millennia to even understand what we know today. And even what we know today is like somebody who threw a net out into the ocean and he pulls in all the fish and he determines that's what's in the ocean based on the size of his net. So human knowledge, what we know is like throwing a net into the ocean of knowledge. And we've pulled in a certain amount, but it's only what our net contains. And there's different people have different intellectual capacity. The Quran mentions about saratir odiyatu biqadiri ha, you know that when Allah revealed the water, it flowed in the Valleys according to the measurement of the valley. And Ibn Abbas said it means that when Allah sent down the Quran, every human being will get a different amount of understanding from the Quran. Like that valley in which the water flows, some valleys can take a lot of water and other valleys can't take very much. And human beings are like that. And there's a Hikmah, there's a wisdom in that. So one of the things of this connection between the Quran is the connection between a chapter and then the chapter that follows it. And Ali Imran is what precedes an Nisa. And of all the women, the highest woman, the one that was chosen above women, was the mother of Mary. And there's a strong opinion of many scholars, including Ibn Abi Zayn Al Qairawani, that she was actually from the Nabiyeen, that she actually received revelation. It's a strong opinion. The majority, the majority of scholars say that the prophets are from male only. But there's a strong opinion, it's not a weak opinion. It's not. And Ibn Hazm and others were absolutely convinced of that. So Ali Imran ends. You see, the Maryam is the fruit of Ali Imran, which is that prophetic line. And so the prophetic line of Bani Israel ends with a woman because she is the one that gives birth to Isa who doesn't have a father. So he actually comes through the prophetic line through a woman, which is interesting also from the Prophet Sallallahu alaihis Salam's family, which is through Fatima. So you have a similar, the beginning of the prophetic offspring of the Prophet. In other words, a prophetic line is through Fatima and not through a son. So Ali Imran is followed by an Nisa. Now if you look last week we looked at the beginning, which is all about Taqwa and having awareness of your kinship bonds that are from the womb. And the womb is what woman from one cognate. It's the man who has a womb. Because traditionally mensch in German, which is where we get men or man from, was a noun that applied to both male and female. It didn't have a gender specific meaning. And so woman is also a minch, a man. And this is what insan is. Insan applies to both male and female. And then you get the Karan untha are the two that come out of that, the male and the female. So if you look at the end of Al Imran, which the end of chapters often are deeply related, in fact, according to Ibn Zubayr, Always related to the beginnings of the next chapter. There's a thematic relationship between one that preceded and one that follows. If you look at the end of Ari Imran, in which this verse is the 200th verse of this chapter, and it is, it's O you who believe, have Sabr patience and have musabara. Both of these words, isbiru wasabiru, are from sabara. And the root of this word, sabara is to be patient or to bear something, because that's what patience is. Patience is bearing something and accepting it. And the command here is to be patient. If you believe, have patience and have musabara. Musabara is patience with others. So the first is have patience with yourself, and then the second is have patience with your with others. Because all relationships in the world are only of two kinds, relationships with yourself and relationships with others. That's it. Now, the idea of a relationship between yourself and between Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. There's two ways you can look at that. One of them is that in reality Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala was and nothing was with him, and he continues to remain as he was. In other words, your contingent existence in relationship to Allah is cancelled out. And that's one of the means of la ilaha illallah, that there's no reality except Allah. Which is not to say this is Allah, it's to say that this is really. It's not real, because Allah is the only haq. But he created this with the haq. So what that means is it has contingent reality. So we're not like Hindus that say that this is an illusion. Although there is an illusory aspect to. To the world, there's an element in the world that is. It's an illusion. And we know that now. I mean, you can go into. They can put you in a virtual game now and you'll think that what's happening to you is happening. In other words, you can be. They'll fly you up in a plane, or you can be on a racetrack driving in a car. And your emotions, your adrenals and all of your emotions are going to be the same as if it was this, right? That's an analogy, in a sense, for what's happening here. Because in the end, most of what's happening there are mental formations that we set up in our mind, and you can get so caught up in that that you lose sight that it's a virtual reality, that this is a type of virtual reality. But it does have reality in that it exists by Allah it's contingently existent. And so your relationship with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is a real one. It's not unreal, nor is it an illusion. But your relationship with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has both elements. In other words, it has the aspect of Sabr and musabara. It has both elements. So this is in relation to how we are in the world, all right? And in the world, it's ultimately going to be you and those things that Allah has given you taqlif to do, and then you and those people that you're going to interact with concerning those things with which Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is saying the first and foremost is knowledge of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, that coming to know Allah is a process. You don't get an illumination. There's a process of coming to know Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. It begins with infancy. And as you move on and get older, it continues. So initially, a child, when it comes into the world, it's in this state of unity. It hasn't differentiated yet. And then it begins to move into differentiation. And. And during that process, the parents are entrusted with giving that child guidance. In other words, making the experience of coming into the world of differentiation meaningful and reminding them of where they came from. You have to remind the child where they came from. So that becomes an obligation. So the process of coming to know Allah is. Is taqlif. It's actually we are responsible know that there is nothing worthy of worship except Allah. So that's a taqlif that Allah has given you. And you have to be patient with that process, all right? And there's degrees of that of knowledge of Allah, the people that know. The Prophet said, I have more awe of Allah than any of you. And the reason for that is I know Allah better than any of you. The people who have real awe are the people who know Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And the more you know, the more awe you obtain. And so that is sabr, because you can increase in awareness of Allah. It's not like where you're at now is where you have to be for your entire life. In fact, it shouldn't be. There should be an increase. And you're going to go through. Just like planets, they have retrograde motion right in their orbit around the sun. You'll see a planet. It's not doing it in reality, but it's how we experience it. You'll see the planet moving with the rest of the Stars. And then for a period of time it starts going retrograde, which in old cosmologies they thought it was a bad time. That's the way the nafs is. You can be in this orbit of divine obedience, but then you go into this retrograde motion which. Which is maelsiya. It's disobedience and those things. There's a wisdom in that and there's also lessons to be learned from it. But it's something that's to be struggled with. It's not something that you submit to. You struggle with it. So he says, so that's of Allah. And then the prophets of what Nabuwa is coming to know who the prophets were, why they came. The next is knowing adal, which is you have to learn adal. And adal has two aspects. It has justice with yourself and justice with others. So with. But learning that is a process. You have to come to understand what justice is to the best of our ability, because we're finite. And then how to apply that towards ourselves by not oppressing. Because oppression is the opposite of adal. Dhulm is the opposite of adal. And what oppression is is putting something where it does not belong. If you put your limbs where they don't belong, it's called disobedience. And you have oppressed. If you take somebody's wealth and misappropriate it, you put something that does not belong to you where it does not belong, that's oppression to another. If you steal something and it's putting it where it doesn't belong because you took it out of its place and put it in a place it didn't belong, which was your own pocket. So that is the essence of what oppression is. And learning what is halal, what is haram, and then struggling with that also. And then also the idea of ma'ad eschatology, which is what happens after death. There's a patience in learning that you have to learn what happens after life. And there's a process. And we're supposed to know that you should know about Ba'ath and resurrection. And then the hashar, the Nashar, the maqif, the Hisab, the Mizan, the Sirat, the Hod. I mean, all these things are part of aqeedah. And that's part of what Allah is saying is to come to know is understanding those things. And then you move to the sabr of the ada al Farahid, which is fulfilling those obligations. So you've learned. You've learned the adal. And part of the adl is knowing the justice is knowing why you were created. We can look at, in the Islamic tradition and every, every system of philosophy or religion deals with five essential questions. And Islam deals with these essential questions. The first one is the cosmological question. Where did all this come from? That's a question that Islam deals with. Where did all this come from? These are the five big questions. There's a lot of little questions in the world, and a lot of people spend their lives in those little questions, and they never get to the big ones, but the big ones are always confronting them. And there's only five basic ones. That's it. And if you learn those five and occupy your life with those five, then you've done yourself a service, because they're really the only ones of worth or weight. So the first one is that cosmological question, where did this come from? And the Quran gives an answer. If you ask them, who created the heavens and the earth, they will respond, allah. So all of this, we believe, came from Allah. Subhanahu wa ta'ala. And that is a question of ultimate concern. Where did this come from? The next question is what they call the eschatological question, which is, how do we know anything? Right? In other words, how what is knowledge and how is knowledge obtained? And the Quran answers that question again. In the beginning of the Quran, read, in the name of your Lord, who created Allah is the one that taught the human being. And he also said, how do we know things? We know things through language. The difference between the human and other creatures is that humans know language. Now, one of the things about language, Chomsky has what he calls the lad, the language acquisition device, which he's saying that language is inherently programmed in the human being. In other words, it's there. Now, if you look at what a child learns in the first few years of life, by the time it's two and a half or three, it's speaking formulated sentences. Those sentences are much more complicated and difficult than basic mathematics. Two plus two equals four. To say, I want to go out and ride my bike, that is much more complicated than two plus two equals four. And yet a child of three can say the second and cannot say the first. It can't understand it. So where did its ability to acquire language come from? He imprinted, because alama means to imprint something. And that's why the alama bin qalam he taught with a pen. The original pens were into clay tablets. That's why the earliest tablets that we have, the earliest writing, is clay. That has these imprints. That's what the means, means to imprint something. And so the human being has certain things imprinted in him that begin to emerge. And throughout your life, at different stages of your life, you're designed to be ready for something at certain stages. You're not ready for geometry. At the age of seven, you can't understand it. I mean, there's absolute geniuses, which is like the Arabs say, somebody who's unusual or out of the ordinary is taken into consideration, but not used as a standard to assess other things. So you're not ready for certain concepts. Certainly the concept of death, you cannot understand that concept in any real deep level until you begin to move into the age of Tammyz. So this idea of eschatology, with how we know things and the Quran tells us that.