Aqeeda 1 — What ʿAqīdah Is — definition, scope, and the sources of creed مَا هِيَ الْعَقِيدَة

1 · The word itself — a knot tied tight

ʿAqīdah is a comparatively small subject in size, but a crucially important one. Start with the word.

Why that image was chosen: what is knotted does not come loose, does not slip. Transfer the image to the religious sense and you have ʿaqīdah: the matters one is required to believe, held in the heart without any doubt whatsoever — held firmly, fastened down in the heart.

2 · The technical definition

The definition is built from these elements:

So ʿaqīdah is firm belief in Allah: yaqīn — belief that cannot be shaken — together with taslīm, submitting to Him completely. And this is drawn from the Qurʾān and the Sunnah.

3 · What must be believed — tawḥīd, ʿibādah, ṭāʿah

وَمَا يَجِبُ لَهُ مِنَ التَّوْحِيدِ

wa mā yajibu lahu mina't-tawḥīd — "and what is obligatory towards Him of tawḥīd": to affirm Allah as One.

And in all of this one must be certain — yaqīn, absolutely firm, with no doubt of any kind in it.

4 · The articles of faith — uṣūl ad-dīn and umūr al-ghayb

وَالإِيمَانُ بِالْمَلَائِكَةِ وَكُتُبِهِ وَرُسُلِهِ وَالْيَوْمِ الآخِرِ وَبِالْقَدَرِ خَيْرِهِ وَشَرِّهِ

wa'l-īmānu bi'l-malāʾikah wa kutubihi wa rusulihi wa'l-yawmi'l-ākhiri wa bi'l-qadari khayrihi wa sharrih — belief in the angels, His Books, His Messengers, the Last Day, and the Divine Decree, its good and its evil.

مِنْ أُصُولِ الدِّينِ وَأُمُورِ الْغَيْبِ وَالأَخْبَارِ

min uṣūli'd-dīn wa umūri'l-ghayb wa'l-akhbār — whatever is established by the texts (nuṣūṣ), the evidences of Qurʾān and ḥadīth:

All of this is to be believed exactly as it comes. Put in another form, the principal item is the statement:

5 · ʿAqīdah and sharīʿah — ʿilm al-kalām and fiqh

Islam is ʿaqīdah and sharīʿah. In the technical vocabulary:

And if the ʿaqīdah portion is defective? If there is a defect in this part, the other part will not be accepted. That is precisely why this is the basic foundation.

6 · The argument from the Makkan period

Look at the Prophet's ﷺ own method of daʿwah. Which did he focus on most in the Makkan period — ʿaqīdah or sharīʿah? Take the Makkan verses, the Makkan sūrahs, and look at them: every Makkan sūrah focuses on ʿaqīdah.

Because if the ʿaqīdah is not strong — if there is even a little confusion in the ʿaqīdah — then nothing on the sharīʿah side will have any acceptance.

And the timeline says the same. After the creed was laid down, how many years passed before prayer came? Before fasting came? The prayer came only after the Miʿrāj; the zakāt, the ḥajj — all of it came later, years into the prophethood. First the foundation. Without a foundation, can you construct a building? Everything we speak about — the acts of worship — is the building on top. So the acceptance of all our acts of worship rests on the ʿaqīdah.

7 · The three areas the Prophet ﷺ highlighted in Makkah

Principally, in the Makkan period, the areas highlighted in ʿaqīdah were three — and if you take the Makkan sūrahs and examine them, these three are what you will find:

1. at-Tawḥīd. That besides Allah nothing may be worshipped and no help may be sought from anything else. One must be completely vigilant on this. The daʿwah of every prophet confirms it:

Tawḥīd itself is divided into three — tawḥīd ar-rubūbiyyah, tawḥīd al-ulūhiyyah and tawḥīd al-asmāʾ wa'ṣ-ṣifāt. These were named only; the lecturer said they will be taken up later in the course — nothing further about them was taught in this class.

2. ar-Risālah. Messengership, prophethood. Īmān is not complete without believing in the Messenger; and along with it we believe in the Books and in the angels.

3. al-Maʿād. The matters connected with the Hereafter — the Last Day, being raised again, and what follows.

8 · What that foundation produced

A community was built very quickly — magnificent, excellent in ʿibādah, excellent in akhlāq, excellent in everything: a lofty society was raised up. Once ʿaqīdah was laid down, the sharīʿah was placed on top of it, and it transformed them.

A conscience that needs no police

There was no need for a police force standing behind people to enforce anything. They came of their own accord — their conscience became their own enforcement.

That is how, in the famous incident, a woman came to the Messenger ﷺ by herself and asked for the prescribed punishment to be carried out on her. She bore the child, nursed it, and only when the child could be weaned and handed over did the punishment take place — she came back and stood for it, because the sin weighed on her and she could not carry that guilt. The belief in the Hereafter was that strong: whatever punishment here, whatever humiliation here — let it be; the Hereafter is what matters.

The Muhājirūn and the Anṣār

After the Hijrah the Messenger ﷺ called the Anṣār: "Your brothers, the Muhājirūn, have come. Look after them." Each Companion took a Muhājir by the hand, and they cared for them. Some said, "Take half of what I own." Some said, "I have two wives; I will divorce one so that you may marry her" — and it happened. (One of the Muhājirūn declined the help and asked instead to be shown the market.)

9 · Talking about ʿaqīdah versus living it

All of us are in some capacity in daʿwah work, and what we must do is convey this īmān in a way that it becomes practice.

Prayer is the test case. We have not yet fully accomplished even that. The lecturer's point is about how far short the community falls — and it varies sharply from area to area, some regions being far weaker than others.

And set the numbers aside entirely — among those who do make the takbīr and stand in prayer, is it prayer in the real sense? Of all of us praying, how many actually attain khushūʿ, that concentration, in our prayer?

The lecturer's standing example: today, if I need surgery I say "give me anaesthesia" — we cannot bear it otherwise. But there were those who said, "Do it while I am in prayer, without anaesthesia" (the well-known account of ʿUrwah ibn az-Zubayr). That does not carry over to us.

10 · Abū Bakr at Tabūk — "Allah and His Messenger"

Why would we come forward? Why would we sacrifice? Take Abū Bakr raḍiyallāhu ʿanhu. At Tabūk, when he brought everything he owned, the Messenger of Allah ﷺ asked him:

Do not treat this as a small kind of faith. What produced it? The Messenger ﷺ had said:

And the Qurʾān says the same. So that confidence came. Where does it come from? From tawḥīd — from unshakeable faith in Allah and in Allah's promise. If we had that footing, we would give the maximum of everything in our hands. Can we decide like that?

The lecturer's own recent example: a man who had already given a large plot as waqf then said, "Take another ten acres — you do not need to discuss it with me. I am with you. Just get on with the work." Asked how he arrives at decisions that fast, he answered: "After I read the Qurʾān, I come to it." That is what the Qurʾān does.

11 · The unshakeable grip — the ḥadīth of Ibn ʿAbbās

When our ʿaqīdah is strong, our grip on Allah is unshakeable: whatever I need, I ask from Allah. As the Prophet ﷺ taught Ibn ʿAbbās raḍiyallāhu ʿanhumā:

That is the belief: whatever incident occurs, to accept it with patience. Is that easy or not? This is qadar — believing in the Decree, one of the articles of īmān.

12 · The two responses to trial

The Qurʾān sets out the ordinary human stance:

When something comes to him: "Allah has respected me." When a little is withheld: "This Lord has humiliated me, has given me nothing." That is the ordinary human stance.

But the man of sound ʿaqīdah (ʿaqīdah ṣaḥīḥah) stands elsewhere. The Prophet ﷺ said:

If something harmful happens to him he says: Allah has decreed good in it — khayr is possible in it. That is qadar, and that is where the ʿaqīdah and the sharīʿah come together properly for the one who believes.

13 · Ṣabr is at the first blow

Yes — we believe in the Decree. But when something painful actually happens, are we capable of patience?

The Messenger ﷺ passed a woman weeping at a grave. Her child had died; she could not bear it and had come to the grave to weep. He ﷺ said: "Fear Allah and be patient." She did not know who he was and told him to go away — "if it had happened to you, you would know." When she was told afterwards that it was the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, she went to him and said, "I did not recognise you; truly my grief was the loss of my child." And he said — this is the point:

Patience after you have already forgotten is not patience. Saying "in time I will have to forget it" — that is not ṣabr. Ṣabr is at the very first moment, when the incident happens.

And the wage for it:

Why could they do it? Because their īmān, their ʿaqīdah, was strong — and it became strong through faith in the Decree, and everything built on top of that faith.

14 · Where we go wrong — creed taught without spirit

What is our problem? When we study ʿaqīdah, or when we teach it, we do it without any spirit in it. Then ʿaqīdah becomes something small, without any effect (athar) — mere dry theory.

On visiting graves (ziyārat al-qubūr): the lecturer said he is asked about it constantly, and that the answer lies in the same foundation — the strong belief in the Hereafter, which is what directs all our actions. He then explicitly set the topic aside for a later class, calling it a very important one. Nothing further on it is stated here, because nothing further was said.

Clear creed produces ikhlāṣ

If the ʿaqīdah is clear, it is pure, and our sincerity — ikhlāṣ — becomes very strong. If the ʿaqīdah is not clear, what comes in is showing off (riyāʾ): we do things for show, not for Allah's sake, not for the reward of the Hereafter.

Two things are needed, not one: a man must have clarity in his ʿaqīdah and be strong in it. Clarity alone is not enough.

The ḥajj example. Even in ḥajj and ʿumrah, which involve real hardship, the ikhlāṣ goes missing — hence the commotion this time, the videos going round complaining about toilets and the like. What people are looking at is the facilities, not the ḥajj: the hotel in Makkah, the hotel in Madinah, the transport. Minā, ʿArafah and Muzdalifah are not even in the frame. (The lecturer added that the food controls there have justice in their reasoning — it is a hygiene problem; an allergic reaction or an outbreak of diarrhoea would spread instantly.) The sincere ones are patient: they are there for Allah, they eat what they are given, they keep their focus on the ʿibādah. Such people exist — but in his own experience the majority are on the other side, saying "this ought to have been done for me."

The appetite for publicity

The human heart wants a little publicity, a little fame, a bit of prominence. Even when we give a single ṣadaqah we want it announced — said aloud, so that someone says "mā shāʾ Allāh, they made a contribution." We announce it at our functions. To do it with nothing at all said, in complete silence — that is the hard thing. (The lecturer had seen lorry-loads of rice arrive at the markaz from a donor nobody could identify.)

Against that, set the caliph and the blind old woman: an elderly woman living alone, unable to see, with no one to care for her; ʿUmar raḍiyallāhu ʿanhu used to visit her and would find everything already done — she had been bathed, food cooked and given, day after day — and she did not know who had been coming, because the person came without a sound, without a word. (The recording blurs which of Abū Bakr and ʿUmar was the discoverer and which the doer; the point the lecturer drew is what matters.) And these men were the heads of state. Compare politics today: a man builds one toilet and puts up a banner for it; there is a photo on Facebook. No photograph, no deed.

15 · What unclear creed produces — bidʿah and superstition

Look behind all of it and you find a great many innovations (bidʿah) and a great many superstitions. When this connection is not made correctly, this is what results.

The lecturer was careful here: "I am not angry with them" — what is popular among them is what they hold on to, and they cling to it and grow stronger in it. People are living inside tents of ignorance (jahālah). Break down the wall of ignorance and why would a person keep going there?

And if you criticise the ʿaqīdah a man knows, he will not accept it easily — he has believed it all his life. Is it not your responsibility, though? A man is going down the wrong road; you must tell him.

What bidʿah is: what the Messenger ﷺ did not do. Are such things not merely means (wasāʾil)? Look at the Sīrah: at the beginning of his daʿwah the Messenger ﷺ called his family together, gave them food, and then spoke to them — providing food as a means of daʿwah is unobjectionable. But look at what is done now: the kanduri — in the mosques, at the graves, slaughtering five or six cattle and feeding the whole village, a ritual made of it, the kanduri garment, the annual observance. That is where false ʿaqīdah shows itself: wrong beliefs in ʿaqīdah produce these bidʿahs.

The single root cause: people do not look at the evidence (dalīl). What is the evidence for tawḥīd, the evidence for ʿaqīdah? The Qurʾān.

16 · A misreading of lā ilāha illa'llāh

One particular error split off in the field of ʿaqīdah. Its proponent said his position was tawḥīd — he called it tawḥīd, he said this is the original tawḥīd.

See how far the splitting goes. From there he asks, "Who has to come to me? Who has to perform my worship?" — and then gives fatwās to the effect that worship is not needed. The people around him become confused; they gather round him and are led astray.

And his error is exactly here: "Have you seen the Lord? If you have seen Him, why do you need to pray?" — he must bring the sharīʿah in alongside. He must pray.

17 · "Where is Allah?" — and the limit on asking

The mistake we made was not laying the foundation clearly before moving on to the next thing. Our whole problem is in the ʿaqīdah: Where is Allah? Is He on the Throne (al-ʿarsh)? Is He established over the Throne? And then people go and investigate the dhāt (essence) and the ṣifāt (attributes) of Allah.

The Companions asked the Messenger ﷺ, and what the Messenger ﷺ said is our evidence: that He is above the Throne is true — but how He is, we do not know. As Imam Mālik answered:

The salaf position in ʿaqīdah: know how Allah has described Himself, and stop there. The general public does not need more than that. But nobody may say "there is no Allah" — not even for a moment. If someone approaches, we affirm that Allah exists; and when they go on to ask is He on the Throne, how is He, is He seated, is He looking — we must not go there.

The two texts

These could look like a disagreement. The explanation given: wherever you are, He is watching over you, He knows — that is the sense in which He is with you; not in the sense that Allah is physically here. Allah did not leave the matter unsaid — that is evidence.

18 · The camps, and where compromise is and is not allowed

Salafi, Sufi, Sunni. Do not assume the fault in these camps lies in ʿaqīdah: in the main it lies in fiqh. What has happened is that we have mixed the two. First understand which source is which, and then the ʿaqīdah matter becomes clear.

Working from the basic sources — Qurʾān, Sunnah, ijmāʿ — the ʿulamāʾ of each age produced certain differences of opinion (ikhtilāf). Where are such differences legitimate? In fiqh.

Following a madhhab

From where must we take our ʿaqīdah? From clear evidence — and when we do, we come to depend on the four imams.

• For the common people, when things are not clear, following a madhhab — attaching oneself to an imam — is not wrong. If I lack the clarity to derive the religion myself, I keep a trustworthy imam for myself. Everyone needs an imam first; madhhabs came into being for exactly this reason.
• But: this madhhab must not be presented as the last word in the field, and to go over to another madhhab is not, in itself, a crime.
• Going against the madhhab — whether in ʿaqīdah or in fiqh — the lecturer explicitly deferred to a later session.

19 · The sources of creed

We specified: Qurʾān, Sunnah, ijmāʿ. If we go beyond these, we go crooked — that is the error.

Imam ash-Shāfiʿī used to say:

My opinion stands — but if a ṣaḥīḥ ḥadīth is established, that is my position: take the ḥadīth and act on it. When they themselves said this, why should we be the ones to hold out against it?

The kalimah — and why he says it must be studied properly

لَا إِلَٰهَ إِلَّا اللَّهُ. That is the fundamental matter. The lecturer said the kalimah will be studied as a coming topic — and admitted he too had believed he had fully grasped it, and there was a weakness in it.

The weakness: we narrow the kalimah down to worship alone — "there is none worthy of worship except Allah" — and stop there. But within the word ilāh lie the 99 names, the asmāʾ wa'ṣ-ṣifāt. From them we get:

Only then is there clarity in our ʿaqīdah — and out of that clarity comes firm belief in Allah and love for Him, maḥabbah.

20 · Al-fiṭrah — human nature as a source

What is fiṭrah? Human nature — there is a creator. The heavens and the earth were created; the night and the day come one after another:

That is how the fiṭrah works — it points you there.

Two arguments fiṭrah makes for the Hereafter

1. From the scale of the creation. If Allah created this world on such a vast scale, with such fineness and such planning, then it cannot simply end in nothing. He had no need to plan and labour to this degree for it to come to nothing. Something must follow. And the Qurʾān speaks to exactly that nature — read Sūrat an-Nabaʾ: after speaking of the Day of Judgement, Allah turns suddenly to this created universe:

2. From the absence of real justice here. There is no real justice established in this world. A man commits a murder — the maximum you can do is execute him once. He kills a hundred people, and the maximum is still that same single sentence. Real justice therefore requires another world to exist. That too is human nature.

What this class did NOT cover

• No textbook, no exam, no assessment was named. No syllabus was published. The forward topics the lecturer committed to are listed above where he made the commitment: the three divisions of tawḥīd, the kalimah and the asmāʾ wa'ṣ-ṣifāt, ziyārat al-qubūr, and going against a madhhab in ʿaqīdah vs in fiqh.
• The prayer-attendance percentages. Given in class, but garbled in the recording (the transcript produces figures that contradict each other). No number from that passage is on this page; only the qualitative point is.
• A roughly three-minute digression on agricultural zakāt (lease rates per acre, sacks per acre, whether zakāt is calculated on the harvest or on the profit after clearing debts). It is a fiqh aside, not Aqeeda content, and nothing on this page is built on it.
• The local passage about a book released at the BMICH and the associated manhaj statement is substantially garbled in the recording and is not reconstructed here.
• The closing line of the class, where the lecturer appears to propose where to resume, is unclear in the recording.
• Several shorter stretches — the waqf partnership details, remarks following the murtadd verdict, the remarks on local imāms and following one riwāyah consistently — are marked unclear in the source and are not reconstructed.