Special Lectures 1 — Marātib al-Aʿmāl — the ranks of deeds, and why not every act weighs the same مَرَاتِبُ الْأَعْمَالِ

1 · The ground rule he set before starting

Two things, before the subject.

First: no verdicts. "I am not going to hand you conclusions. I will not deliver a verdict." Many contested issues would come up, and he would not be closing any of them with a ruling.

Second, the reason. These matters carry enormous background, and in this country a great deal of disorder and confusion has grown around them. If he began pronouncing on the issues he would become just another party in the dispute, and the session would end up somewhere other than where it should. So: keep to the subject itself.

He kept to that. Through the session he puts questions to the room and takes answers, and at the two points where the room most wants a ruling he stops and says he is explaining a category, not issuing a fatwā.

2 · The premise: every deed has a station

Every act we perform is an ʿamal. So: do deeds sit at different levels? Is every deed of the same rank, the same weight, the same greatness? Are there grades among them, steps, an order in which they queue?

That is the frame for everything that follows. And the interest in it is practical: if we can categorise deeds, we can grade them — this is number one, this is number two, this is number three. He calls it a matter of priority.

3 · First benchmark — Sūrat at-Tawbah 9:19

أَجَعَلْتُمْ سِقَايَةَ الْحَاجِّ وَعِمَارَةَ الْمَسْجِدِ الْحَرَامِ كَمَنْ آمَنَ بِاللَّهِ وَالْيَوْمِ الْآخِرِ وَجَاهَدَ فِي سَبِيلِ اللَّهِ ۚ لَا يَسْتَوُونَ عِندَ اللَّهِ

A-jaʿaltum siqāyata-l-ḥājji wa ʿimārata-l-masjidi-l-ḥarāmi ka-man āmana billāhi wa-l-yawmi-l-ākhiri wa jāhada fī sabīli-llāh — lā yastawūna ʿinda-llāh.

Phrase by phrase:

Five deeds are named, and the verse itself splits them into two sides:

And note which mosque is on the lesser side

This is where the force of the verse lies. Masjid al-Ḥarām is the first and most sacred place on earth — one and only; we travel there for Hajj; one rakʿah prayed there equals a hundred thousand elsewhere. And siqāyah there is no small service: millions of ḥājjīs and ʿumrah pilgrims, the logistics, the sanitation, the crowds around the Kaʿbah.

Yet the Qurʾān says even that is not equal to īmān. So īmān stands above the very best of these deeds, not above some mediocre version of them.

Two further observations he draws:

• Belief in Allah and belief in the Last Day come together. Can a man believe in the Hereafter and not in Allah? No — whoever has īmān has both.
• Jihād is set alongside īmān on the higher side, and consider its cost: you leave your home and family, you spend a great deal of wealth, there are losses. That is what mosque administration and water-service at the noblest mosque of all are being weighed against.

4 · Second benchmark — the seventy-odd branches of faith

الْإِيمَانُ بِضْعٌ وَسَبْعُونَ شُعْبَةً، فَأَفْضَلُهَا قَوْلُ لَا إِلَهَ إِلَّا اللَّهُ، وَأَدْنَاهَا إِمَاطَةُ الْأَذَى عَنِ الطَّرِيقِ، وَالْحَيَاءُ شُعْبَةٌ مِنَ الْإِيمَانِ

Al-īmānu biḍʿun wa sabʿūna shuʿbah, fa-afḍaluhā qawlu lā ilāha illā-llāh, wa adnāhā imāṭatu-l-adhā ʿani-ṭ-ṭarīq, wa-l-ḥayāʾu shuʿbatun mina-l-īmān — "Faith has seventy-odd branches. The highest of them is the word lā ilāha illā-llāh; the lowest is removing a harmful thing from the road; and modesty (ḥayāʾ) is a branch of faith." (Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim)

Shuʿbah means branch. The point he takes from it is not the number but that the ḥadīth itself ranks them:

So the ceiling and the floor of īmān are named in one ḥadīth, with everything else in between.

Which makes civic order a matter of faith

He sits deliberately with the lower branch, because it is the one we underrate. Where do we throw our rubbish? On the road, and in the drains. Does filth on the road cause illness? He points at conditions in Sri Lanka — the state of the roads, the absence of proper drainage, what gets dumped where. A tree leaning dangerously over a road that ought to be cut back is also adhā.

We do not find these in our books of law as written provisions, yet the ḥadīth calls a great many such things īmān. Picture a village of believers: how should its roads be laid out, what should its environment look like, what conditions should people live in? All of it is connected to īmān.

Alongside it: وَالْحَيَاءُ شُعْبَةٌ مِنَ الْإِيمَانِ — "modesty is a branch of faith"; and الطُّهُورُ شَطْرُ الْإِيمَانِ — aṭ-ṭuhūru shaṭru-l-īmān, "purity is half of faith." Keeping the road clean falls under that too.

The interim conclusion

Those two texts are the benchmarks. Everything after this is the working-out.

5 · The first division — deeds of the heart and deeds of the limbs

Examples of the heart-deeds he lists: īmān · ikhlāṣ (sincerity) · taqwā · iḥsān · dhikr · istiqāmah (steadfastness) · istighfār · tawakkul (reliance) · niyyah (intention) · khushūʿ · ṣabr · tawāḍuʿ (humility).

And note what happens to them: something is placed in the heart and it comes out through the limbs. Taqwā sits in the heart and shows in conduct; tawāḍuʿ is inward and appears in the body; dhikr is held in the heart and emerges on the tongue.

Linked, but not equal

A limb-deed has to have started in the heart. So the two are not separable — mostly they arrive in one bundle, and you cannot cleanly split them. But they are not equal either.

Three proofs that the heart carries the higher station

1. The Companions held back by an excuse. Some in Madinah could not go out to the battle, prevented by genuine hardship, and grieved by it:

They get the same wage as those who went, because they believed in their hearts and it was circumstance, not choice, that kept them off the field. (He notes that Imam an-Nawawī's Riyāḍ aṣ-Ṣāliḥīn opens precisely with the ḥadīths on intention and ikhlāṣ.)

2. The dirham that outstripped a hundred thousand. One man gives charity with ikhlāṣ; another gives an enormous sum outwardly. Which figure is bigger? Obviously the large one. But what is the reward given for? Ikhlāṣ.

3. The two verses. For the sacrifice, Sūrat al-Ḥajj 22:37:

We slaughter and distribute the meat — but the meat and the blood are not what reaches Allah. What is entered on the ledger is what ikhlāṣ you brought, what taqwā you had.

And for prayer, Sūrat al-Muʾminūn 23:1–2:

Which worshippers are the successful ones? The ones with khushūʿ. So even at the top of the limb-deeds, what is decisive is a condition of the heart.

The illustration he leaves it on

The man who cannot manage the postures — struggles to bow, cannot get down into sujūd, his leg stays stretched out — but his ikhlāṣ is intact, and he came. Against him, the charity given so that a name can be announced. "It is a matter of ikhlāṣ, and they will settle that account themselves."

6 · Reading rank off the adhān, and the place of prayer

The order inside the call to prayer is the teaching:

1. Allāhu akbar.
2. The two shahādahs — including "Muḥammadun rasūlullāh", because without that second testimony a man does not have īmān. (The disbelievers of Makkah accepted Allah as Lord, yet not one of their acts of worship was directed to Him alone as the shahādah requires.) The shahādah is a matter of the heart, and pronouncing it is the evidence of what is in it.
3. Ḥayya ʿalā-ṣ-ṣalāh — "Come to prayer."

Straight after the testimony of faith comes the summons to prayer. That placement tells you the rank of ṣalāh: next after īmān itself — ahead of zakāt, fasting and Hajj.

Two things he sets beside it:

• The Miʿrāj. Fifty prayers prescribed at first; five at the end — and fifty are recorded. That is what the station of prayer is worth.
• The last act of a life. In summary: the last deed should be the kalimah; and in terms of obligation, the prayer. "The mark of īmān is the kalimah — begin from there." And the shahādah is not a private matter: we are a community, and this testimony is what makes us one.

7 · Now invert it — the worst sins are also sins of the heart

If the greatest good is of the heart, what about evil? Deeds are of two kinds, good ones and sins, and the sins divide into heart and limb exactly as the virtues do.

One man's heart has kufr in it; another's hypocrisy; another prays with riyāʾ — he is a worshipper (muṣallī) and a show-off (murāʾī) at once. Will that act be accepted? It will not. Meanwhile another man prays with faults in his prayer and Allah forgives him and accepts it. Look where the difference lies.

And after kufr: rancour, vengefulness, malice, the settled will to harm, the intention of ruining another. These are diseases of the heart, and grave. He points at the pattern without naming anyone: people take a position in some dispute, and out of it grows lasting enmity — one man good, one man bad, parties and factions. "And nothing good comes of it. No good outcome, no benefit, nothing at all."

Pride is Allah's alone — al-Mutakabbir is His attribute, not given to man. Your role is humility (tawāḍuʿ).

He notes that Imam al-Ghazālī's Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm ad-Dīn devotes a whole quarter to al-Muhlikāt — the destroyers, the sins that ruin a man.

8 · Second frame — farḍ ʿayn and farḍ kifāyah

Both are compulsory; the difference between them is what matters.

No proxy in farḍ ʿayn. However great a man is, if he prays Fajr on my behalf my obligation is not discharged. Prayer, fasting, zakāt if I have wealth, Hajj if I had the capacity — "if I died without going, nothing anyone does afterwards makes up for it."

Two more farḍ ʿayn he insists on

Learning. The first word revealed: اقْرَأْ بِاسْمِ رَبِّكَ الَّذِي خَلَقَ — Iqraʾ bismi rabbika-lladhī khalaq, "Read, in the name of your Lord who created." Recite, read, study, seek, research — that is the very first command.

Raising your children. كُلُّكُمْ رَاعٍ وَكُلُّكُمْ مَسْئُولٌ عَنْ رَعِيَّتِهِ — Kullukum rāʿin wa kullukum masʾūlun ʿan raʿiyyatih, "Every one of you is a shepherd, and every one of you is responsible for his flock." His complaint: the child is packed off and the teaching handed to somebody else — "all of it outsourced" — when it is the mother's and the father's own obligation.

How much knowledge is farḍ ʿayn?

Measured by your own circumstance. What you personally must know in order to live your own life as a Muslim: I must pray, so the rulings of prayer are knowledge I am obliged to have. If I am in a partnership or a particular trade, the law governing that becomes my duty to learn.

Farḍ kifāyah in practice

Examples he gives: a village needs a mosque, needs institutions built and maintained; the community needs its graduates — engineers, doctors, lawyers — and they have to be produced. How do we determine what is required? By analysing the situation — survey it, do the count, decide what this community actually needs here and now.

Two refinements:

1. When a man takes the role on, it becomes his own personal obligation. A teacher's duty is to teach the children properly; once he has undertaken it, nobody covers it for him.
2. It scales with numbers. A village of 500 that needs seven teachers and is producing five is still in obligation; meet the ratio and the shortfall is closed; produce ten where five were needed and the excess is a mercy.

And the community must fund it. The student with a place and no money is the community's share of the obligation: "Come and study, come back and serve us; we will support you" — institutions ought to be saying this. Some things must be resourced from within the village itself: children taught to recite, someone to give legal advice when a dispute or a loan matter arises, someone available for medicine.

9 · Where the ranking is being got backwards

Why? Because the communal duty is the visible one — the reward looks bigger and the benefit to society is seen. Do both. His examples of the inversion, kept at the level of the principle:

• A man absent from the obligatory prayer who comes for the sunnah prayer — at the mosque for the optional, missing for the prescribed.
• People not fasting in Ramaḍān with no excuse at all — and nobody goes near them.
• The man who does not know, and nobody tells him; and the man who has no means to act on it.
• Zakāt collected and distributed all at the very end of Ramaḍān, in a rush — while somewhere in that village a family at the very bottom is utterly destitute. "Whose responsibility is that family?" The society's, the ʿulamāʾ's, the mosque's, the educated man's.
• Ribā. It is a major sin — but saying "don't take interest" will not end it. You must give them a solution as well. Providing the alternative is farḍ kifāyah; that planning must be treated as an obligation on the community. He reads Sūrat al-Māʿūn's opening — أَرَأَيْتَ الَّذِي يُكَذِّبُ بِالدِّينِ, "Have you seen the one who denies the Recompense?" — which goes straight to the orphan and the destitute.
• The man being pulled out of the dīn and nobody speaks to him. "That is the community's obligation, and the failure is theirs."

The case he puts hardest

A man who does not pray at all. Is he a disbeliever? The scholars differ — and he leaves the label alone. Does the man know and refuse, or does he not know? Has anybody approached him?

Against that, he sets what the community actually gets exercised about: a man who prays all five prayers but attends Jumuʿah in a different village — and that becomes the great controversy. "The other man does not pray at all, and nobody has once thought of him, while we fight over which mosque a praying man attends."

That is the whole point of the farḍ ʿayn / farḍ kifāyah distinction for him: what is everyone's duty, what is the community's, and where is the step we have skipped.

10 · The prohibitions — and ḥarām of two kinds

Examples of ḥarām first, from the room: alcohol; murder; lying; breaking a fast without excuse; abandoning an obligation; ribā; zinā.

Then the split he wants:

Case one — the coconut before the temple

A man sells coconuts from his own shop in front of a Hindu temple. The coconut is ḥalāl, the trade is ḥalāl, the shop is his — but why is the buyer buying? For the temple ritual, to be offered inside. "He should be selling it for a legitimate use."

Is that like ribā? No. Like zinā, or murder, or eating pork? Not at all. "And that is precisely the difficulty. He sold a lawful thing lawfully — and it went where it went."

Case two — trade after the Jumuʿah call (Q 62:9)

يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا إِذَا نُودِيَ لِلصَّلَاةِ مِن يَوْمِ الْجُمُعَةِ فَاسْعَوْا إِلَىٰ ذِكْرِ اللَّهِ وَذَرُوا الْبَيْعَ

Yā ayyuhā-lladhīna āmanū idhā nūdiya li-ṣ-ṣalāti min yawmi-l-jumuʿati fa-sʿaw ilā dhikri-llāhi wa dharū-l-bayʿ — "O you who believe, when the call to prayer is made on the day of Jumuʿah, hasten to the remembrance of Allah and leave off trade."

The worked example he runs with the room: a shopkeeper sells sugar, rice, a coconut after the adhān has been called, then shuts up shop and goes. The questions he raises and does not answer:

• Is what the buyer bought lawful?
• Is the transaction itself ḥarām, or is the sale valid and only the seller sinful?
• And note who is addressed: the obligation of Jumuʿah falls on the men, the ones commanded to hasten — so if the buyer is a woman, the address does not reach her.
• Note the wording too: "leave off trade." Allah did not say the goods are forbidden; He said stop trading and come.

He acknowledges the familiar shape of the problem — shops that stay open through the Jumuʿah hour, especially in festival season, a busy food shop that is not going to close — and notes that locally the shops do go quiet and the men do come.

What he does state: agreement and disagreement

And the ordering inside the second case, which is the part he is willing to be firm about: there are two duties, and the first is the one that matters — the command is to leave what you are doing and go to Allah. So stop first; whether the sale that occurred is void is the second question. (The passage immediately after this is heavily garbled and is not reconstructed here.)

Underlying all of it: your īmān and your yaqīn. If a man says "I closed my shop at Jumuʿah time and my rizq will suffer" — no. Allah has already written your provision; it will not be reduced.

11 · Two related principles

Conditions come before the act

The prayer itself runs from the niyyah and the takbīr to the salām. But before it stand the shurūṭ — the time must have entered; the body must be pure; the clothing must be clean; the place must be clean.

If the clothing is not lawfully mine, or is najis, I can still perform every motion — but a condition has not been met, and the act is incomplete. All of this raises doubts (shubuhāt), and this is where taqwā speaks: it says leave it. Which returns us to the highest deed — the deed of the heart.

Compulsion, and the two things never permitted

A man in dire necessity, with nothing at all to eat or drink, may eat a forbidden thing, within limits and on conditions. But two things are never permitted, not even under coercion:

1. Killing. "Kill so-and-so or I will kill you." He may not. Whose life is worth more, yours or his? In Allah's sight neither. If you refuse and are killed defending the refusal, the station of shahīd is yours.
2. Zinā. Even at gunpoint, you may not.

And at the highest rank of that refusal:

He is careful with it: not everyone is at that level, and nobody can simply be told to do this — it is a burden that falls on the one able to carry it.

12 · The five rulings (al-aḥkām al-khamsah)

Every act falls under one of five, and "whatever question you bring me, the answer will land in one of these five."

Three meanings of "sunnah"

He stops here because the word does not mean one thing — it has three distinct definitions depending on which discipline is speaking:

A further sense he names but refuses to enter: sunnah as the opposite of bidʿah, bidʿah being what was introduced and not done by the Prophet ﷺ. "That is a deep subject of its own, and I am not going into it."

But abandoning the sunnah wholesale is itself blameworthy

Here the imams are clearer than we usually are. People reason "it's only extra reward, and no sin for leaving it" — and then they leave all of it.

• The man who prays at home and never comes for the congregation (jamāʿah) — deliberately, continuously, as a settled practice. That becomes sinful.
• The sunan rawātib left permanently on the same reasoning. (The passage following this is partly garbled and is not reconstructed.)
• The Eid prayer — look at the crowd at dawn for Eid, then at the crowd for Fajr on an ordinary day. "The ranks are being inverted."
• Tarāwīḥ — "we will pull people out of Fajr in order to argue about Tarāwīḥ."

Makrūh, the doubtful, and mubāḥ

Makrūh exists because what Allah prefers is that you leave it. But it is mis-applied badly. His example is ṭalāq — divorce is makrūh; yet where a family has genuinely reached the end of the road, if we call it makrūh and refuse it we make it impossible to live at all. Makrūh means it is better and more excellent not to do it; doing it is not an offence.

Next to ḥarām stand the shubuhāt:

The better option in that zone is to leave it alone — and the Prophet's ﷺ own conduct: he found a date on the road and said, "Were I not afraid it might be from the ṣadaqah, I would have eaten it."

Mubāḥ is genuinely neutral: which shopkeeper you buy from; tea plain or with milk, hot or cold; tea or coffee; bathing in the sea, the river, at home or at the well. Two qualifications:

1. Do not let a mubāḥ become an all-consuming habit that swallows obligations standing waiting.
2. The niyyah changes it. Morning exercise is neutral — attach an intention and reward comes: for the sake of health so you can worship properly; visiting relations at Eid; taking a break so you come back fit. These become connected to īmān by way of what Allah loves.

The five rulings are not level either

Set out as priorities for a community:

1. The wājibāt must be performed.
2. The ḥarām must be left undone.
3. The sunnah should be actively cultivated and carried through the community.
4. Arrangements should be made in society such that the makrūh is avoided.
5. The mubāḥ should have a set-up that keeps it inside the frame.

And behind all of it, the heart — īmān and taqwā — is the foundation. "Everyone attends to the wājibāt; where we fall down is everything after that."

13 · The frame applied to one thing — our duties toward the Qurʾān

He takes a single case to show the ranking working inside it. Seven duties:

What a village should organise first

The Qurʾān — and this is exactly where the shortfall is. "Every single child must, without exception, be brought to the point of being able to recite the Qurʾān." The village is not going to do Qurʾānic research; but reading it, that we make compulsory and build for. He notes places that have done it well, with children brought through recitation in numbers and pass rates down the line.

Where the system is leaking

The drop-out pattern: a child goes to the madrasah for four years, then five — and then leaves. Interest falls away around grades 4 and 5, the madrasah loses its hold, the child stops. He says he can criticise the school system too — parents pulling children out on the grounds that the madrasah is not needed — and that there are damaging consequences either way.

Then the accounting he wants faced:

The resolution is the same principle: not all of these duties are of one rank. Specialists should do the specialist work, and the parts that are everyone's duty must be taken into every corner of the community. Come at it with the holistic view — what can be done, for whom, where, and at what time.

14 · The maqāṣid ash-sharīʿah — and they are in an order

"If anyone asks you anywhere what the Sharīʿah is for, this is the answer." Named by the imams — he cites Imam al-Ghazālī and Imam al-Āmidī and those after them — and agreed. Five, in priority order:

Two remarks he makes in passing, kept as he made them:

• On apostasy: the ruling exists because it is a threat to the dīn, and the law came in that frame — "I am not going to open that subject now", since circumstances differ case by case. He does not go further, and neither does this page.
• On religion in general: Islam is 100% correct, with nothing to apologise for. But speaking of the world at large, it is better that a person have a religion than none — he then has at least some restraint, some fear, someone he answers to. "The man with no religion has only his own conscience."
• On knowledge without guidance: he names Ibn Sīnā, Ibn Rushd, Ibn al-Haytham, Ibn Khaldūn as men who thought and researched, says "today we have given it away" — and adds that learning without guidance is another matter: "the Hiroshima bomb was knowledge without Allah's guidance."

15 · Three levels of need — and the case he lands them on

The applied case

A village has a Trustee Board, a zakāt fund, some donors, and they sit down to decide what to spend on. They decide to air-condition the mosque, or tile it. "Nobody is going to say no to that."

His demand is not that the mosque go without. It is that the ordering be seen and balanced: "we say we are social leaders, and what that actually means is asking whether we are truly meeting people's needs" — manageable and needs-based, judged case by case, and not letting the appearance-level items push out the basic ones.

16 · Back to the sunnah: it too has three ranks

And above all the voluntary prayers:

One zawāʾid example he gives in full — the duʿāʾ on removing one's clothes:

"That is a sunnah zāʾidah, and it is a thing we can actually practise." This is his whole life, and we can model our own on it to whatever extent we manage — nothing in it is wasted.

17 · Where he lands

In tahajjud, in the Fajr sunnah, in witr — the highest-ranked voluntary acts — we are quiet, and there is no argument at all. Meanwhile the flood of argument goes to: the sunnahs inside the prayer; qunūt — farḍ? No, sunnah; the Fātiḥah behind the imam; the number of rakʿahs of Tarāwīḥ; Ḍuḥā debated at community level while tahajjud goes unmentioned.

Are they all of one rank? No. And when a community splits over them, it is because it has not seen the grading.

His closing instruction: look at your own community and think about which problems actually matter. Where must we not give ground — and where can we give ground? Understand which is which, and understand the right time for each thing: what must be done first, and what can wait. "If we understand this, in shāʾ Allāh, we will build a good society."

What this page leaves out

• The two cases where he declined a fatwā — the coconut sold before the temple, and trade after the Jumuʿah call — are left unresolved here, as he left them. What is recorded is the category and the reported positions of the imams (majority: not permitted; some: the transaction stands, the person at fault), not a ruling.
• The Muslim-Spain story about letters from European kings (2:34) is garbled in the recording and historically loose as told — the names are unclear and the details do not stand up. It is not retold on this page. The point he used it for is kept in §14: we abandoned the pursuit of knowledge, and the situation reversed.
• The apostasy ruling and the bidʿah question were both explicitly set aside by him. They are noted as set aside and not developed.
• The names in the Jumuʿah worked example were the participants' own names, used light-heartedly in the room; they are replaced here with "a shopkeeper" and "a buyer".
• The opening four minutes — ḥamd, greetings, the duʿāʾ for the sitting, participant self-introductions and a check that Tamil suited the room — carry nothing of the subject.
• Garbled stretches not reconstructed: the remark on when ṣalāh was made obligatory (41:00); part of the Sūrat al-Māʿūn / destitute-family passage; the passage after the two duties in the Jumuʿah case; part of the sunan rawātib passage; and the closing remarks on the man who stands before a tyrant. Each is marked [unclear] in the source and none has been repaired.
• His sharper local examples — particular institutions, particular practices — are represented here at the level of the principle he was teaching. He named no one as an offender, and this page does not either.