Allah says don’t even go near fornication/adultery, as you know don’t go meant don’t even go near it, he doesn’t say; don’t do adultery, don’t commit adultery, he says; “Don’t go near it” in other words, there’s the act itself and then there is a series of smaller acts that lead to it. it’s got a perimeter around it and you can’t even go close to it. One has to understand the language of the Quran and the sensitivity in which deals with the subject to appreciate the wisdom of Allah and how he’s counseling us in dealing with this problem. Allah SWT is telling us there are certain things that in and of themselves are not Haram, you’re not going to be able to pinpoint it and say it is wrong, but when you get involved in it you’re going to get sucked into a gravitational field and it will pull you in slowly and surely, little by little by little and eventually it’ll get you, eventually it’ll come at you.
One of the things we learn about Shaitan, that is remarkable is that, he’s extremely patient, he won’t get you one shot, he’ll come at you and he will put a little bit and a little bit and a little bit and a little bit until he destroys your character, he won’t come and make you do the wrong thing right away and he when people start listening to Shaitan and this is the same surah Allah says in that “upon my slaves you’re not going to have any authority over them.” in other words people who really submit to Allah he will not have authority over them but others,
Surah Baqarah, Allah SWT says; he will command you to do shamelessness. In other words when you listen to him a little bit you’ve granted him a little bit of power, when you listen to him a little more you’ve granted him a little more power and if you keep on listening to him he gets to the point where he can command you, you will find yourself where you are like, I can’t even help myself, , I don’t know how to turn the computer off, I don’t know what makes me do that every night, I don’t know what makes me do this, I don’t know what makes me go there. that’s the way when you know Shaitan has got a pretty good hold on you, it’s just getting worse and you’re not addressing it and it’s making the problem worse, it’s destroying your spirituality altogether, your relationship with Allah depends on a heart being clean. Every time you’re exposed to fill more dirt more blackness more you like covers are poured on top of your heart and it keeps on to the point where you’re listening to the word of Allah and you can’t get yourself to even shed a single tear. It won’t come, because your heart has been made so hard, because of all the exposure to filth all the same that your eyes are taking in all the time and you don’t even care anymore. A good heart IS when it sees something inappropriate that doesn’t coincide with the commandments of Allah, it is disturbed, it’s not attractive, it’s disturbed and says no that’s wrong immediately the conscience kicks in the alarm goes off, but when you’re at the point when you’re by yourself and you feel no guilt doing it, you don’t feel that it’s wrong. the only thing you leave before you stare at a sister, you look around like anybody else watching and then you take a good look and means the fear of Allah is completely gone. the only fear you have is out of the scene. there’s no more fear of the unseen, what a horrible spiritual state to be in. Allah says; he knows the stealing of the eyes a little glance you caught, he knows that one. that little glance you took, what to speak of the stare and he knows what the chest is hiding.
This particular ayah “don’t even go near Zina (Adultery), it has always been considered a lewd shameless vulgar act and a horrible path.
Allah describes it as a path a horrible path, in other words, a path has steps and you have to identify which step you’re in, what makes you get into this, for each of us there’s a process, there’s a cycle you’re in a room by yourself, you’re at after school, you’ve got a couple of hours before your parents get home and you’re among a bunch of friends that don’t have any standard, now you have to identify what leads you to the sin every time and you have to cut it in its tracks. You have to stop going down that path.
what’s amazing to me about this ayat is where we’re it is situated. right after this ayah, Allah says; “Don’t murder people”. Don’t kill any person, that’s the innocent person essentially.
Allah mentioned this crime first and murder second. Can you think of that? like we think of murder is a huge crime right?
but Allah says when you violate the dignity of a human being, that’s fahsha, looking at a human being in that way is violating your own and their dignity and when we kill a person we have violated their physical, their right to life. So there’s a spiritual murder Fahsha and there’s a physical murder Qatl, there are two kinds of murder here, so Allah SWT mentions the spiritual murder first.
Our standards have gone so low, a movie comes out, you see a couple of trailers, you tell yourself, ah this is just one bad scene and it’s okay. It is PG 13, it is not R. what used to be R ten years ago has now PG-13, what used to be PG-13 is now PG, they put filthy scenes and everything and we don’t even care about the spiritual price we’re paying, it’s affecting our prayer, it’s affecting our dua it’s affecting our character, it’s affecting our family life, it is. and we don’t care, we just think, hey that’s life bro, come on live in the time. That’s all right. that’s just what it is now. what can you do?
So many of us don’t care about what kinds of pictures we put up of ourselves on our Facebook pages. How can you do that you’re Muslim? how can you post pictures like that?
Have dignity for yourself, have dignity for your family, guard your gaze, start with your eyes as in of the eyes everything else goes from there, but the last thing at least is something about the word Fahisha which I’m translating a shamelessness or lewdness or vulgarity, the Arabic language has roots that are close to each other, wahash and Fahash, wahash actually means a wild animal and Fahash means someone who acts like a wild animal. Shamelessness is described as behavior close to animal behavior.
Allah has dignified the human being, the punishment of Adam AS was, his clothes were removed, our mother’s and our father’s clothes were removed. That was a punishment from Allah and immediately they recognized that they need to cover themselves, they didn’t learn to cover themselves from a society, it wasn’t society that taught them to be shameless you know nowadays,
Your anthropology professors are like you know, it’s society that makes us just dress in clothes, you know it’s a sociological thing we learn to dress and cover ourselves over history, but naturally, we’re just supposed to be the way we are like all other animals.
Adam Alaihissalam didn’t learn anything from any society, he was given a consciousness and the moment when clothes were removed, he was trying to cover himself, our mother trying to cover herself.
We are supposed to be a people that guard ourselves with covering and we dignify others by not looking at them, even if they don’t have dignity for themselves, we should have dignity for them and not look, because they are in the end of creation of Allah, even if they’re disappointing creation of Allah.