The Role of Faith in Times of Turmoil

The Role of Faith in Times of Turmoil

Opening

"I seek refuge in Allah from the accursed Satan"

"In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful"

"All praise is due to Allah. We praise Him, seek His help, and ask for His forgiveness. We seek refuge in Allah from the evil of our souls and the bad consequences of our deeds. Whomever Allah guides, none can misguide, and whomever Allah misguides, none can guide. I bear witness that there is no god but Allah, alone without any partners, and I bear witness that Muhammad is His servant and messenger."

"Thereafter, the truest speech is the Book of Allah, and the best guidance is the guidance of Muhammad ﷺ. The worst of all things are newly invented matters, and every newly invented matter is an innovation, and every innovation is a misguidance, and every misguidance is in the Fire."

"Peace, mercy, and blessings of Allah be upon you."

First Khutbah: The Current State of Our Ummah

Dear brothers and sisters, we gather today at a time that calls for deep reflection. Ten years have passed since the momentous events that shook the world, and it is fitting that we take stock of where we stand as an Ummah.

The conventional remedies proposed by the existing international structures have been challenged to and beyond breaking point by events which were completely outside their frame of reference. The solution to global extremism that has been proposed has been essentially to do with coercive measures, increased surveillance, novel forms of detention and interrogation, and a global atmosphere of suspicion about the very fact that Muslims exist at all.

On its own terms, that agenda has not demonstrably succeeded. Are we less at risk of similar events now than we were ten years ago? Not sure. Are things going well in Afghanistan? Not really. Are those people finally subdued, never to return? Unclear. It is, considering that several trillion dollars has been spent on it, not a terribly successful outcome.

The Nature of the Problem

Those of us who, in this corner of the Ummah, are called upon to play their part need to bear that in mind. In a secular age, there tends to be an assumption that only secular solutions can solve all problems, even religious problems. The current failure of the secular solutions indicates that this is just another part of modernity's hubris.

In fact, they have tried and they have thought very hard and they have used their truly gigantic resources, but still they cannot cope with the situation which is before them, and there is no clear sign that they even understand its nature. Despite the formidable nature of the tools in their toolbox, they cannot deal with what is, in essence, an aberration within a major world religion.

The problem is spiritual, it is emotive, it is theological, doctrinal, and they simply do not address that. There can be a danger that we get caught up in the slipstream of that enormous global industry of counter-radicalization. And since it is not clear at all that this industry has delivered on its own terms, we are within our right to step aside and to think carefully about whether we should be on board.

Our Historical Context

It is our responsibility as people who claim to represent this world religion to deal with the aberrations in that religion. The outside forces have, in many cases, exacerbated things, and that goes back at least 100 years. The Balfour Declaration, allowing certain powers to occupy Mecca and Medina, the bombardment of Alexandria in 1882, and other events like that, the destruction of the institution of the Shaykh al-Islam - all of these have been body blows to the traditional equilibrium which made Sunni Islam, for so many centuries, actually extremely calm, almost peaceful.

The Victorian image of Sunni Islam was one of oriental repose. Nothing ever happened in the Muslim world. It was quiet, fatalistic, accepting the decree of heaven. That stereotype has been shattered because of the extraordinary earthquakes that have shaken the foundation of the metabolism of Sunni Islam.

The Challenge of Authority

Nonetheless, it is our responsibility, independently of the wishes of others, to engage in healing the wound within our tradition. And the first thing that we need to say to those who say we should be doing more - that it is the responsibility of British Imams to be sorting the problem of radicalization - is to point out that Islam does not function as Christianity does in terms of the administration of sacraments and a parish system.

The Imam has no automatic authority. A Catholic priest, if you approach the altar to receive the sacrament and you are married to a divorcee, can send you away. You can be excommunicated. You need him for salvation. The Imam has no comparable authority. He cannot stop anybody attending the mosque.

So to ask us to sort the problem is to assume that the traditional crisis management which the British state is familiar with in terms of Christianity applies to Islam as well, and in practice it simply does not. We do not have that kind of power of excommunication or exclusion.

The Global Nature of the Crisis

Another thing to remember when we are being asked to deal with this problem is that we are being asked to deal with the local version of something that is truly global. It is a little bit like somebody who is afflicted with a condition affecting many parts of his body, and a doctor is told to keep one hand completely clear of the condition.

And we British Muslims are being told to keep our region free of this disorder. In fact the doctor cannot do that because the sickness is part of the metabolism. It is an allergy born of a deep trauma or inability of the metabolism to assimilate certain influences that is going to affect all parts of it irrespective of how much the doctors may concentrate and spend time and treasure healing a particular part.

The crisis is Ummah-wide and British Islam is not going to be spared its consequences until globally it is resolved.

Second Khutbah: The Path Forward

"I say this statement of mine, and I ask Allah for forgiveness for me and for you."

The Simplicity of the Theological Solution

Another issue it seems to me is that the problem in terms of explaining what is wrong for those who are engaged in counter-radicalization is a simple one. This is not the kind of intricate arguments required to persuade a theological scholar about complex matters.

The debates over the legitimate use of force in Islam were resolved a long time ago under the subject of scholarly consensus (ijma') and supported by very powerful Quranic and hadith evidences. As the scholars overwhelmingly rejected the extremist groups of the past, the analogous forms today have been comparably refuted very successfully since then. It is one of the easier errors in the possible spectrum of errors in our heritage to overcome. It should not actually take more than five minutes.

A real scholar confronting one of these young zealots should really take him about two or three minutes in order to present the argument in a way that really is irrefutable. The problem is ten years on, the argument is still not getting through.

The Crisis of Credibility

The reason for that I suspect is that the young are, as is very often the case in our modern personality-oriented culture, focused on who is speaking more than on the content of the arguments. They want to see who is behind the particular discourse.

One thing that has made it far harder for us to make this very simple case against the suicide bombers, against the mass murderers, against the torturers and the other extremists in our community is that the mainstream discourse has to some extent been co-opted. Just as Islam has been hijacked internationally by the extremist fringe, so the mainstream discourse has often been hijacked by regimes and agencies of various kinds that use the moderating agenda for their own purposes.

It is very difficult - and if you read the testimonies of some of the reformed extremists, you see how difficult it is for them really to listen to the traditional scholars when the traditional scholars are talking to them in prison while in the cell next door somebody just like them is being tortured.

It is very difficult if the scholars are perceived as being controlled by a state that is identified with cruelty for the scholars to be taken as seriously as they ought to be. Many of them are seen as having allowed themselves to be part of somebody's security agenda, to be the representatives of corruption, nepotism and the other traits which, as we all know, as the demonstrators across the Arab world know, are endemic in many Muslim countries.

The Historical Independence of Scholars

So there is a crisis among the religious scholars. We know the arguments but we ourselves are not always a sufficiently convincing argument, and this is a more profound crisis a crisis in the credibility of the scholars. We have been led astray by the desire to please authorities and formations which are extraneous to our only legitimate loyalty, which is pleasing Allah and His messenger.

Part of the problem also is the fact that with the nationalization of religious endowments (awqaf) in the great majority of Muslim countries, training scholars of the very highest level has become something that is extremely difficult to separate from various state-based manipulations of the scholarly process.

Sheikh Mustafa Sabri used to say that the thing he most feared for the region after the nationalization of the Ottoman religious endowments in the 19th century was the fact that the really great religious schools, the places that produced really new interesting scholarly thinking, were now part of the state bureaucracy. They were part of the ministry of education and the state was pushing along the arguments rather than the scholars being independently financed and coming to the arguments which on the basis of God-consciousness (taqwa) and the principles of jurisprudence alone had credibility.

The Way of the Early Scholars

This was the way of the early religious scholars. They would not go along with the powers that be. Ahmad ibn Hanbal was flogged, Imam Malik had his arms dislocated. This was the way of the scholars. And ultimately, everybody benefits from the independence of the scholars because what the scholars want is only goodness for Allah's servants.

Our Responsibility

What we wish to see in the world is not so different from what the international consensus, broadly speaking, wishes to see because the objectives of Islamic law (maqasid al-sharia) - human beings having the right to life, to honor, to property, to marriage, to religion - those are basic rights which just about everybody acknowledges. We are not advocating some strange moral system. We are advocating universal principles.

So that has to be our responsibility: to try and overcome the current state of failure, failure of international institutions and also the failure of the religious scholars to come up with successful strategies for dealing with these people. We can reach further into the shadows than the states can because we speak the same language. We do not go around talking about social cohesion and equalities and citizenship and those buzzwords.

We use our own vocabulary. When we use our own vocabulary, then we can start to do the work. To the extent that we use social science jargon, we are immediately labeled as irrelevant tools of a hostile establishment, and our words will simply harden rather than soften hearts.

We have to use the internal discourse of the religion rather than the current jargon of the current generation of fashionable social science. Our discourse has to be legitimate.

Reaching the Misguided

When we establish that discourse, then perhaps we can start to be heard. The extremists are not in the mosques, in my experience. The extremists are out there somewhere in their own little communities. They hire halls, they meet in houses, sports halls. They are not generally in the mosques. We do not reach them with sermons or with anything that we do or can do, but we have to find ways of establishing some sort of credibility in their eyes.

Independence has to be one of those ways. Sincerity has to be one of those ways. Concern with international Muslim political issues has to be one of those ways, and we have to reach those people through showing that we understand their pain, their situation, their marginalization, their humanity, rather than treating them as some kind of infection that has to be eliminated.

The Prophetic Example

Remember the Hadith of Dhul-Khuwaysira, when the man who had shown disrespect to the Holy Prophet (peace be upon him) from Bani Tamim turned away after the distribution at Khasr al-Hunayn, Sayyidna Umar said, "Shall we kill him?" And the Holy Prophet (peace be upon him) said, "No." And it was the same with Imam Ali.

(Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim)

"Rather, they have fled from disbelief."

We do not reciprocate their takfir (declaring others as disbelievers) with another takfir. Instead, we acknowledge them as erring brothers, and we listen to them, we try and experience their pain, and if for the first time they experience somebody actually empathizing with them, hearing them, rather than just pushing them away, treating them as an infection, then we will start to reach them.

Conclusion

This is an era of spiritual crisis. As I say, the doctrinal and philosophical issues easily resolve. This is a sickness which is in the hearts. And unless we can reach out to them, and include them, and embrace them, and use authentic Islamic etiquette (adab) and vocabulary with them, we will just push them further out into the shadows and the current stalemate, which is catastrophic for the Muslim community and for the world at large, is likely to continue.

We need to be detached from worldly powers. We need to be authentically Islamic. We need to have only the pleasure of Allah in view in all of these things that we do, and we need to recognize the humanity of these people.

Closing Du'a

"O Allah, correct for us our religion which is the safeguard of our affairs. And correct for us our world which contains our livelihood. And correct for us our Hereafter which is our return. And make life an increase for us in every good and make death a relief for us from every evil. Our Lord, give us in this world [that which is] good and in the Hereafter [that which is] good and protect us from the punishment of the Fire."

"Our Lord, give us in this world [that which is] good and in the Hereafter [that which is] good and protect us from the punishment of the Fire."

"May Allah bless you."

"Peace, mercy, and blessings of Allah be upon you."

This khutbah has been formatted according to traditional Islamic sermon structure with appropriate Arabic openings, closings, and references.