Don’t Let Your Hatred Blind You From Justice

There are two ayat in the Quran that are similar.

They are-- they come together in a very profound way and then they diverge in a very interesting way.

You can think of it as the sentence starts off very similar and then goes in two different directions.

One of those ayat belongs to Surat An-Nisa, the fourth surah, and the other belongs to Surat Al-Ma'idah, the fifth surah.

So they're in two different surahs, and yet the subject matter in these two ayat is very, very similar.

The point of both of these ayat is to compel believers to commit themselves to justice.

So let me just give you that as an introduction.

The purpose of both of those ayat are believers are being told they have to stand by justice.

Kunoo qawwamina lillahi shuhadaa bil qist.

Kunoo qawwamina bil qist shuhadaa lillah.

That's almost identical phrasing with some changes in sequence, but stand up over and over again and commit yourselves to stand up with justice being witnesses to Allah or being wit-- and then in this case, kunoo qawwamina lillah, stand up for the sake of Allah while you're being witnesses to justice.

In the last few weeks, I've given khutbas about the ayah from Surat An-Nisa, and today I want to dedicate some lessons from the ayah from Surat Al-Ma'idah.

But as a recap, it's helpful to, for those of you because you weren't in those khutbas, to give you some pointers.

Allah Azza Wa Jal is essentially describing justice by teaching us something about injustice.

You know, there's an axiom, tu'araful ashya'u bi afdadiha, or in English we say by op-by opposites things are known.

So one way to understand justice is to actually have a good understanding of injustice and how injustice is done.

These words, justice, injustice, they can be used by me, they can be used by Fir'aun, they can be used by a Muslim, they can be used by non-Muslims, and these words can be used by someone who's actually fighting for what they believe is justice and fighting for a just cause, and it can be used by a politician in a speech.

It can be u-- And everybody uses them for their own purpose.

So one of the, one of the manipulations that the world has around us is what Allah describes as wa zayyina lahumush shaytanu a'malahum, that the devil made their actions beautiful to them.

So someone can do the worst acts of justice and then call them justice, or worst acts of injustice and call them justice, right? Then someone can commit te-terrible atrocities and call it self-defense.

They can rename something, repackage something just to give it a pretty name, right? Somebody can commit murder and say, "I made some mistakes." They can soften the language.

Some mistakes? You killed somebody, right? But you can use soft language to describe very ugly things, right? So this is actually one of the tactics of manipulation that, that is all around us.

So when even if a Muslim stands up here and gives a khutbah about justice, it's very possible that of a hundred people sitting in the audience, a hundred people have a hundred definitions of what justice means, and they all walk away reinforcing their own definition.

Somebody who's obsessed with revenge doesn't think that revenge that they wanna seek or the person they wanna destroy or humiliate or attack, they don't think that that's unjust.

They think it's completely just.