Special Lectures

Talks that stand on their own. Alongside the five syllabus subjects, the programme runs one-off sessions — guest speakers, residential-programme lectures, standalone topics that belong to no course. They are collected here so they don't get lost, and because several of them carry material the syllabus never reaches.

These lessons are independent of each other. Unlike Hadees or Arabic, where each class builds on the last, every lesson here is a complete session in itself. Read them in any order; nothing later depends on anything earlier. Lesson numbers are simply the order the talks were given.

Not examined. Nothing here appears on a Semester-2 paper. These are for understanding, not for the exam — which is also why the quizzes are shorter and aimed at whether you followed the argument, rather than at recall under exam conditions.

Lesson ↔ video map: L01 ← thazkiyat_v01 (Sheikh Azad, residential programme, 2026-08-02).

▶ Resume where you left off

Residential programme

Marātib al-Aʿmāl — the ranks of deeds, and why not every act weighs the same NEW

A one-off residential-programme session (2026-08-02, Sheikh Azad, ~3 hours in one continuous sitting) on tazkiyat an-nafs and the ordering of deeds — framed by him at the outset as a discussion, not a lecture, in which he repeatedly declines to issue verdicts. One thesis: deeds are not of equal weight, and much of the community's dysfunction comes from mis-ranking them. Eight frames build it — Q 9:19 (siqāyat al-ḥājj and ʿimārat al-masjid al-ḥarām against īmān and jihād) and the seventy-odd branches of faith; aʿmāl al-qulūb vs aʿmāl al-jawāriḥ, with ikhlāṣ, taqwā, niyyah and khushūʿ above the limb-deeds — and kufr, nifāq, riyāʾ, ḥasad, kibr as the gravest sins; farḍ ʿayn vs farḍ kifāyah, applied hard to what the community leaves undone; two kinds of ḥarām — intrinsic, and ḥarām by an external factor (the coconut before the temple, trade after the Jumuʿah call, Q 62:9) — on both of which he explicitly refuses a fatwā; the five aḥkām, including three distinct definitions of sunnah (muḥaddithūn / uṣūliyyūn / fuqahāʾ); the seven duties toward the Qurʾān and the madrasah drop-out problem; the five maqāṣid ash-sharīʿah in priority order; and ḍarūriyyāt / ḥājiyyāt / taḥsīniyyāt, landing on the mosque's air-conditioning against children with nowhere to write. He closes on the three ranks of sunnah, and on a community that argues over Ḍuḥā, qunūt and Tarāwīḥ counts while tahajjud, the Fajr sunnah and witr go unmentioned.

~45 min