Everything You Must Know About The End of Times | Signs of the Hour Ep. 1
5 Signs That Happened in the Prophet’s ﷺ Lifetime | Signs of the Hour Ep. 2
Was Dajjal Alive During The Prophet’s ﷺ Time? | Signs of the Hour Ep. 3
20 Verses of Qur’an That Protect from Dajjal | Signs of the Hour Ep. 4
When 40 Prophets Were Killed | Signs of the Hour Ep. 5
When Only One Sahabi Was Left In The World | Signs of the Hour Ep. 6
Jerusalem to Constantinople: The Promised Conquests | Signs of the Hour Ep. 7
Acts of God: Disasters Foretold by the Prophet ﷺ | Signs of the Hour Ep. 8
The Rise of the Unqualified | Signs of the Hour Ep. 9
The Night the Qur’an Disappears | Signs of the Hour Ep. 10
The Years of Intense Deception | Signs of the Hour Ep. 11
The 10 Patterns of Religious Corruption | Signs of the Hour Ep. 12
A Beautiful Masjid With Empty Rows | Signs of the Hour Ep. 13
Playing
Making Halal What Allah Made Haram | Signs of the Hour Ep. 14
When The Love for Wealth Becomes Violent | Signs of the Hour Ep. 16
How Time Is Shrinking | Signs of the Hour Ep. 17
Why The Prophet ﷺ Said People Will Envy the Dead | Signs of the Hour Ep. 18
Why Modern Life Makes Every Death Feel Sudden | Signs of the Hour Ep. 19
Signs of the Hour
Making Halal What Allah Made Haram | Signs of the Hour Ep. 14
Shaytan never told Adam and Hawwa (as) to disobey Allah. He told them the forbidden tree was something else: shajarat al-khuld, the tree of eternal life. A good tree.
The command never changed. Only the name did. The Prophet ﷺ warned that this technique would come back at the end of time as one of the signs of the Hour, and it's stranger than it first sounds. It isn't about a generation that stops believing in halal and haram. It's about a generation that keeps both categories perfectly intact and quietly moves things between them. People from this ummah will drink khamr, he ﷺ said, and call it by another name.
Imam al-Ghazali (rh) mapped the same move through the diseases of the heart centuries before anyone said the word “rebrand”. Greed is renamed as ambition. Arrogance has been renamed to confidence. Cutting off your family answers to protecting your peace.
Dajjal is the end of this road, not the beginning of it. He'll rebrand Jannah as the Fire and kufr as imaan. A world that's spent generations learning to accept renamed evil is already rehearsed for him.
Name every major sin you can think of, then ask which ones already answer to something softer. That's the exercise Dr. Omar Suleiman puts to the room, and it's worth doing before you press play.
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings.
00:00The rebranding of evil. You start seeing Muslims just straight up drinking wine and saying, yeah, it's halal. Greed gets rebranded as ambition, drive. Zina gets rebranded as sexual freedom. Arrogance gets rebranded as confidence.
00:12Cutting off your family gets rebranded as protecting your space. Toxicity gets rebranded as self-care. What else is being rebranded for us? Mocking the religion. It's just comedy, right? Flaunting your sin. I'm just being real. I'm healing. What do you mean you're healing?
00:27Things are very widespread and things are being normalized and mainstreamed that have never been mainstreamed before. Never been normalized before.
00:41Now, the next side of this is much more personal. And I want everyone to pay very close attention to this part. And may Allah help me to say what's right here and protect me from saying what's wrong. But the rebranding of evil.
00:56Subhan'Allah, I found so many ahadith and so many warnings from the salaf about this particular part. The rebranding of evil in the most general way.
01:10And it's one of the ways that the masses, no matter where you are on the spectrum of religiosity, you can easily fall into. So obviously, like this previous category that we covered. Some might say, well, you know, I'm not involved in masajid. I'm not involved in teaching the Qur'an.
01:24I'm not involved in anything on the religious side of things in terms of presenting religion. Whether structurally or preaching or whatever it may be. But this one affects all of us.
01:36And I want you to think about it from the perspective of what we said. That Dajjal's deception, Dajjal being like the ultimate end sign that's going to come.
01:47And that's going to basically utilize a world that has been primed towards his deception. Builds on the daily deception of the Shaytan.
01:57Shaytan started off by rebranding the tree that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala told Adam and Eve to avoid as Shajaratul Khulud. It's a good tree. It's a tree that gives eternal life. It's not a bad tree.
02:11So he took disobedience and he renamed it something pleasant. No, there's nothing wrong with this. In fact, there's something good about it. Dajjal will do the ultimate rebrand, right?
02:23Dajjal will straight up rebrand Jannah as Nar, Nar as Jannah, kufr as iman, iman as kufr, right?
02:30So Dajjal can take the full rebrand, building on these rebranding tools, these marketing tools. So you take something that your fitrah naturally feels an aversion to. Like you know that this is not good.
02:44But then it chips away. How? It's been renamed. It's been rebranded. It starts off usually with not a straight out rebranding, but first diminishing the gravity of the sin of it.
02:57So you diminish the gravity of the sin of it and then you just rebrand the sin altogether as it's not even a sin in the first place. Okay, so first it was Iblis saying this tree is actually not a bad tree, right?
03:10You have to ask yourself like when you give fatwas and somebody like I'm not a mufti, but when you say, yeah, I don't think that's haram. I don't think that's halal. I think that that's just something that was cultural. I think that's just something that people used to say. I don't think that this is so bad. I don't think that this is so bad.
03:25And then someone hears that from you. What role are you playing? You're doing exactly what Iblis did. That's exactly what Shaytan did, right? This is not that bad.
03:35And then this is not that bad turns into this is actually good, right? A full rebrand. And listen to what Allah says in Surah An-Nahl.
03:45وَلَا تَقُولُوا لِمَا تَصِفُ أَلْسِنَتُكُمُ الْكَذِبَ هَذَا حَلَالٌ وَهَذَا حَرَامٌ Do not say based on the falsehood of your tongues that this is halal and this is haram.
03:58لِتَفْتَرُوا عَلَى اللَّهِ الْكَذِبَ So that you invent a lie against Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Okay.
04:08If you remember in the lesson two lessons ago, we talked about the hadith where the Prophet salallahu alayhi wa sallam is speaking to Adi ibn Hatim, right? About how the priests and the rabbis were taken as gods besides Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. How?
04:22Because they made haram halal and they made halal haram. That once you gave them that legislative authority and you started to delegate that to them where they could take what was clearly haram and make it halal. And they could take what was halal and make it haram.
04:36You turn them into gods, right? That's something that belongs only to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. You turn them into gods. So here, this is a warning, right? تَصِفُ أَلْسِنَتِكُمُ الْكَذِبَ
04:48That your tongues would say something and you don't think too much about it, right? You didn't really process it. The same way that Allah azzawajal described al-ifk, hadithat al-ifk, the slander of Aisha radiallahu anha.
05:00That their tongues met the slander, right? The tongues, as-sinatikum, their tongues met the slander. Like they didn't think too much about it. They didn't process it, but your tongues are moving.
05:15And so they said something against Aisha radiallahu anha so grievous without thinking about it. Here, you could be saying something so grievous against Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala Himself without thinking about it. By saying, I don't think this is haram.
05:28I think that's just cultural. I heard this, I heard that, right? Where you put yourself in that position, right? So, how does that rebrand actually look and how much did the Prophet ﷺ talk about it?
05:38The Prophet ﷺ said in an authentic narration, يَشْرَبُ نَاسٌ مِنْ أُمَّتِي الْخَمْرَ يُسَمُّونَهَا بِغَيْرِ اسْمِهَا
05:48That there will be people from my ummah that will drink khamr, that will drink intoxicants, but they won't straight up drink intoxicants as intoxicants. They'll just rename it.
06:02So, they'll say, well, this isn't actually khamr. Khamr is this specific type of alcohol from this specific type of source, right? Or this specific type of brand.
06:17This is halal beer, that's haram beer. This is halal intoxicant, that's haram intoxicant. No, khamr doesn't mean that because of a translation that I read online, that khamr actually means this. And you start to misconstrue and people start renaming intoxicants
06:32and things that have intoxicating effects. And you think about especially the drug industry, right? And drugs that are being made not just legal but acceptable, right? Socially acceptable, culturally acceptable, and theologically acceptable as well.
06:47And how eventually, like, is it really far-fetched that you would see, like, Muslims straight up holding a bottle of – But is it really that far-fetched that you start seeing Muslims straight up drinking wine and saying, yeah, it's halal. It's halal.
07:00I've read from some sheikh that this is not actually what it means or that it's not talking about this. So, khamr starts to have 70 names, 80 different names. You know, you think about this to the Arabs, Subhan'Allah,
07:13them giving up khamr was no easy feat. It was very hard for them when the prohibition of khamr came down because khamr was so predominant, so prominent in their culture, right? And that's why it came down, the tahrim came down in stages.
07:26So, think about when they hear something from the Prophet ﷺ like this, like they would take umm al-khabaith, like the mother of all evils, and they would even rename that and they'd rebrand that and they'd make it halal. All right, let's broaden, or not broaden the meaning of the hadith,
07:39but let's think about some of the benefits of this hadith. I want you to think about every major sin that exists. And I actually did this as a thought exercise in my own notepad.
07:52I started writing down, but I'm not going to show that to you, all right? Every major sin that exists, and ask yourself, at the time that this lecture is being recorded, 2024, has it been rebranded?
08:06What are the major sins? Go ahead and just call them out. Has murder been rebranded in multiple ways, sometimes even as righteous, justified?
08:18What else? Zina. Oh my God. Zina. Has adultery been rebranded? All right, what's PG-13 today and what was PG-13 before?
08:30Right? The prominent TV shows. That's not pornography. Who said this? What do you mean it's not pornography? Right? Your social media platform is what they allow. What we've normalized watching, consuming, looking at,
08:45spreading, acting upon, has it not been rebranded as just sexual expression or even profession or work? Zina has been rebranded. Even finding Islamic justifications,
08:58like you look at the marriages that exist in Jahiliyyah and some of the fatwas, not fatwas from actual ulama, like you look at the marriages that exist in Jahiliyyah
09:10and some of the fatwa, not fatwas from actual ulama, the fatwas that get quoted and floated, right, about the types of marriage arrangements that are allowed. Like, how did you work that one out in your minds?
09:23Right? I can tell you on this side of the minbar, it's weird. And sometimes, like, how did you work this out? Muslim, praise in the masjid. How did you justify this in your mind and think that this was halal,
09:38that this was nikah, and not straight up zina? Right? Has riba been rebranded? Multiple times. How much of Islamic finance is actually just riba? Right? Has stuff been rebranded?
09:52Waylun lil-mutaffifin? Has cheating the weights been rebranded? Right? What's been called murabaha now? What's been, like, think about this. Dangerous hadith for us to really think about and contemplate.
10:06Don't rebrand sin. Very careful. You go back to what the intention of the prohibitions of those sins in the first place was. And that's where your heart has to be clean enough to where it is. Like, when Allah 'Azza wa Jall says, tashabahat qulubuhum, we're doing tafsir Surah al-Baqarah, right?
10:21Like, your hearts are all the same. That's why you're acting like the people that came before, because your hearts are like their hearts. When Allah was chastising the people of the book around the Prophet's life, He's like, your hearts have become just like the hearts of the people around Musa, 'alayhi al-salam.
10:34Are we in the same place here? We're at tashabahat qulubuhum. Your heart is messed up. So your calibration becomes, yeah, this isn't haram. This isn't haram. I can accept this. Someone else said it's halal.
10:46When someone gives you a business scam and plays with your dunyawi things, your worldly things, like, let's just say someone shows up in your social media feed.
10:59That's clearly like a con artist, looks nothing like anyone to be taken seriously, and is playing with your most precious assets. Do you go like, hey, that guy said it. I hope you don't do that, right? Some people fall for it. There's a reason why they exist, right?
11:12But you would, if you're serious about your money, you're serious about what you protect from a worldly perspective, like, you're not going to, you're going to do your due diligence. But with your deen, right?
11:22Just kind of sell it away and give it away to someone that comes and rebrands it. All right, I'm going to take it to another level here.
11:31You know, Imam al-Ghazali talks about the rebranding of the spiritual diseases, the muhlikat, as virtue. So, for example, greed gets rebranded as what?
11:46Ambition, drive, right? I already talked about this. Zina gets rebranded as sexual freedom. Arrogance gets rebranded as confidence, right?
11:58Cutting off your family gets rebranded as protecting your space, right? Toxicity gets rebranded as self-care. What else is being rebranded for us, right?
12:12By the way, not that confidence is not a real thing. Self-care is not a real thing. And there aren't legitimate reasons, right, where sometimes a person has to distance themselves even from their family. But let's be real here.
12:26If we're going to be self-critical, how much of that is rebranded now, right? Because we're letting people not just define the terms, but define the substance of those terms as well. So, both the terms are foreign to Islam sometimes,
12:40but also what is behind them is foreign as well. Mocking the religion. It's just comedy, right? Like all of these things that we have accepted.
12:54Flaunting your sin. I'm just being real. I'm healing. What do you mean you're healing? Who told you to heal when you make your sins public? It's not healing, right?
13:08Crafting identities around your sins. Wait, no, that's not like being vulnerable. That's being boastful. So, the rebrand of evil that the Prophet ﷺ talks about, and there are multiple ahadith in this regard.
13:21Multiple ahadith. They're very scary ahadith. Very scary ahadith. And there are multiple ones. Insha'Allah ta'ala, just for the sake of time, I won't go over all of them, but I'll go over some of them.
13:35This one is, it almost always ends up in a music discussion. So, I'm going to try not to spend too much time on that part, but it's a famous narration. The hadith in al-Bukhari that the Prophet ﷺ said,
13:46لَيَكُونَنَّ مِنْ أُمَّتِي أَقْوَامٌ يَسْتَحِلُّونَ الْحِرَّ وَالْحَرِيرَ وَالْخَمْرَ وَالْمَعَازِفِ
13:51That there will come upon my followers people who will make zina, the wearing of silk, the drinking of alcohol, and the use of ma'azif, which are string and wind instruments, halal.
14:03And then in this narration, which is the narration of Abu Malik al-Ash'ari, it's an interesting one because it gives you a context.
14:12That there will be some people who will stay near the side of a mountain, and in the evening, their shepherd, ya'tiihim, ya'ni al-faqir li-hajah, a shepherd will come, but like a poor person will come to them in need, and they'll say, come back to us tomorrow.
14:25And Allah 'Azza wa Jall will destroy all of them at night, and the mountain will fall upon them, and they will be transformed into monkeys and pigs, and they will remain that way until the Day of Judgment.
14:36So, let's break this hadith down.
14:40Number one, the Prophet, sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam, is giving us a group of people that party, that have no care for the world, that are completely apathetic, don't care for the rights of Allah 'Azza wa Jall upon them, don't care for the rights of the people upon them.
14:57Clearly live a life of entertainment, and live a life of ruin, spiritual ruin. And in the process, the key word here is that, yastahillun. They've made halal these things.
15:11So, they've made acceptable these things. That they found religious justification for these things, collectively or individually, but the point is, they live entirely haram lifestyles, and they've made them into halal.
15:25And eventually, Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala takes these people who fell into the danger of istihlal, of making the haram halal, and Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala transformed them into animals, basically.
15:41So, just as they transformed the ahkam of Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala, Allah 'Azza wa Jall transforms their askar. Allah transforms their appearances as well. May Allah protect us. This is obviously at the most extreme, right?
15:52Manifestation of these ahadith, that maskh starts to happen, that transformation starts to happen. Just as you rebranded evil, Allah 'Azza wa Jall rebrands you. Allah 'Azza wa Jall changes you as well as you change the appearance.
16:03There are other narrations, one of them that people from my ummah will drink wine, and calling it by another name. And musical instruments and female singers will be playing over their heads.
16:15And Allah 'Azza wa Jall will cause the earth to swallow them and turn them into monkeys and pigs. So, the point here is that al-khasm, wal-qadf, wal-maskh, three things. So, landslides, or people being swallowed by the earth.
16:29And al-qadf, stones falling from the heavens. And al-maskh, people being transformed into animals. These are the punishments of the ummah that came before, right? These are the punishments of nations that came before. And if you look at when the punishments of nations came before, when did they come?
16:43When people became so arrogant with their lewdness, so proud of their lewdness, that they no longer even pretended. Right? They boasted right in the face of their prophets, they boasted in the face of their religious ones about these diseases.
16:57And, you know, they threw the scriptures behind their backs, and they followed their desires altogether, and they started to worship their desires. But, what do we take from this?
17:11As far as not just the widespread evil, but also the making halal, that which is haram. So, first and foremost, the obvious here, right? The making wine halal, making silk halal.
17:23Now, obviously, the controversial one becomes the musical instruments. Right? We have five minutes till Isha. I'm not going to give a whole dars on this. But I don't want us to approach this from a legal framework,
17:37I want us to approach it from a spiritual framework. So we have to be mature to approach this from a spiritual framework, because that's what the point of this class is. And to do that, you start with the legal. Right?
17:49The legal of this is that the majority of scholars considered ma'azif, string and wind instruments, to be impermissible in their very nature. So they took this hadith,
18:00and they categorically prohibited string and wind instruments on the basis of this hadith. That is the majority of scholars. That is the established position of the four madhabs. You start with that.
18:11Obviously, broaden that into context. What did that look like back then? Right? People did not have phones where they were listening to these things.
18:25Music, almost always, if not always, accommodated a particular context of drinking alcohol and partying and people that are away from the deen and all of this distance from Allah and evil that comes with it.
18:39Right? So there is no doubt that some ulama took of that, that this is the context in which it's prohibited, and there is a minority of scholars that did not see string and wind instruments as categorically prohibited
18:52because they contextualized it with that. So almost all the music that exists today that people listen to falls under what's haram across the board. Right? You cannot find a scholar that would justify the types of music
19:06that people listen to today. For the most part, the lyrics of it, the manner of it, the messaging of it, because you can't say, well, the messaging of it is not getting to me and I'm not paying attention to these lyrics anyway.
19:18All the scholars would consider that to be prohibited. And then you have, again, the issue of instruments themselves. The extremes here become the following.
19:28When someone speaks of those who legalistically uphold what is the vast majority of scholarship and tradition as being extremists and a fringe group amongst the Muslims, that's a problem.
19:42So it's like, oh, these crazy people, these extremists that want to make everything haram. You would find yourself as an opponent of the vast majority of Islamic scholars throughout history, and you don't want to do that. Right?
19:56So what we did is to use the mas'ala that does have some ikhtilaf to it, that does have scholars that I honor, that I love, and that I consider to be of the greatest ulama. Right? That took an opinion that it is not categorical,
20:10but it is contextualized, and then to use that as the barometer. It's like culture wars fought within the Muslim community. Right? And to go to the point of making takfir or tabdil of someone just because of their adopting a minor opinion.
20:24So where do we find ourselves? In the spiritual sense. In the spiritual sense, not the legal sense. There is no doubt that the believer should try to protect themselves from places, from things
20:38that distract and take them away from Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala and should certainly not fall into making something halal on the basis of how they feel about something. And so having your heart filled
20:52with the Qur'an. Listening to that which is pure. Listening to things that bring you closer to Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala. This is where you should focus yourself here. But then in the discussion
21:06that we're talking about in terms of ashrat al-sa'ah, be very careful. Right? With starting to opine legally on things because you just don't want to be wrong about something. Like there's a difference between saying
21:20this is a weakness of mine and I'm still struggling with this weakness and I'm going to go ahead and say it's halal because I want it to be halal and I found someone that says it's halal. And then I'm even going to expand what that person didn't even intend when they said it's halal to include all sorts of stuff that would make that person
21:34that scholar cringe. Right? And say what are you doing and why are you using my name for this? Right? The believer protects themselves from taking a sin that Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala
21:49has, you know, in its nature, made a form of distance and a barrier between us and Him and turning it into something that's not that big of a deal and belittling it and doing muhaqqirat al-dhunub. And muhaqqirat al-dhunub is the prerequisite
22:03which is muhaqqirat al-dhunub is belittling the sin. Muhaqqirat al-dhunub is the precursor to changing the ruling of the sin as a whole. Right? Doing istihbal as a whole. Right? To make it halal after doing tahqir of it. So you belittle it and then you
22:17rebrand it. Right? And then you change it as a whole. How do we conclude this particular part for ourselves? Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala has put us in a time
22:31where things are very widespread and things are being normalized and mainstreamed that have never been mainstreamed before. Never been normalized before. That a generation before us would say, a'udhu billah, this is disgusting.
22:47Do not let your personal deficiencies become reasons for changing your deen and do not let your personal deficiencies become ways that you change the ruling for other people.
23:01Be careful what you consume. Be careful what you repeat. Be careful with what you privately struggle with and not turning that private struggle into public messaging. Right? And when I say public I'm not just talking about your social media platform. I'm talking about
23:15even your circle of friends. I'm struggling with something and at the bare minimum in this day and age and in every day and age to stay away from things that are questionable is always good for your faith
23:29and to struggle with haram privately is far better than to justify it publicly because if we forget what sin is then we forget what repentance looks like as well and when Allah Aza wa Jal
23:43starts to change people's appearance and when we talk about the earth rebelling when we start rebelling against Allah's commands when we start to change the religion that's when Allah Azawajal will then change the
23:57appearance of people on the basis of what they have done and when that was done to Bani Israel it was when they reached that point where they were changing the ahkam of the religion as a whole there's one other level of this which has to be spoken about
24:11in the context of Gaza and in the context of the evil of oppression that we see and that is وَإِذَا قِيلَ لَهُمْ لَا تُفْسِدُوا فِي الْأَرْضِ قَالُوا إِنَّمَا نَحْنُ مُصْلِحُونَ أَلَىٰ إِنَّهُمُ هُمُ الْمُفْسِدُونَ وَلَكِنْ لَا يَشْعُرُونَ that when they are told
24:25do not spread evil and corruption on the earth they say we're actually the peacemakers rather they are the ones that are corrupters but they don't perceive I know that in this world in a post-Gaza genocide
24:39it can sometimes feel like we're crazy like why are we on the defending end here why are we still having to play defense when something is so clear where the evil of what is being done to our people in Gaza and the evil of these wars
24:53and the evil of all of this fasad that's being done with our tax dollars and all of this evil that's being wreaked in terms of oppression and corruption is being done why do we have to keep on speaking out against it sometimes to keep on repeating
25:07naming the evil as evil is 'ibadah it's an act of worship naming the evil as evil is an act of worship because that way you don't let them get away with
25:21redefining the terms even if they politically have the power to keep on acting upon their evil and their falsehood but there is 'ibadah in resisting that and so when it comes to corruption as well, that also falls under
25:35the rebranding of evil. May Allah protect our brothers and sisters that are on the opposite side of that great evil. Allahumma ameen. Baarak Allahu feekum wa assalamu 'alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh
