Secularism- The Greatest Challenge Facing Islam

Secularism: The Greatest Challenge Facing Islam

Opening Supplications

I seek refuge in Allah that I should go astray or be led astray, or that I should be oppressed, or that I oppress, or that I should be ignorant, or that I'm ignorant, or ignorance is done to me, or that I should trip, or that I should be tripped.

Introduction: Understanding Secularism

Insha'Allah the title of this talk is Secularism, The Greatest Danger Facing Islam. And what I'd like to do is insha'Allah look at the idea of secularism historically and the results of the secular idea upon the psyche of humankind, what the implications of that mean for us as Muslims particularly, but also the implications of it globally for humankind, because we are Bani Adam, we're all part of the offspring of Adam alayhi salam. And so we share common destinies in this world.

And insha'Allah we will not share common destinies in the next world with those who reject the Adamic way, the Ibrahimic way, and the Muhammadan way, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam wa salatu wa sallam wa ala al-anbiya ajma'in.

The Historical Origins of Secularism

The idea of secularism is really a rather modern idea. In fact it means in Latin, one of the meanings of it is modern, or of the age, or of the time, and it has the idea of temporality, or an in-time situation.

The word in Latin, seclorum, you'll find on the dollar bill, which in the back of it there's a Freemasonic seal, and most of the founding fathers, and this is historical, it's not conspiratorial theories, or it's accepted history in the United States, that most of the founding fathers were Freemasons, but the actual seal did not come until 1935, when it was placed on the dollar bill during the Roosevelt administration. And on the back of the dollar bill it says, novus ordo seclorum, which means a new secular order, and really what the word secular is, is a nice way of saying worldly, or of the world, quite literally, a new order of the world. And this was to be in contradistinction with the old way, which is orders that were based on religious structures.

Religious Structures vs. Secular Law

In other words, understandings that peoples had that were based on religious hierarchical structures, on the belief that not only were we created, but there was a creator, and that there was a certain standard of behavior that was demanded of individuals that made up a society based on certain religion and moral injunctions that

came down to them. So the Christian tradition, despite the gross breaches of Christianity, nonetheless had a moral order that is not really that different from the moral order of the Muslims. And this is why we share with other religions certain basic moral concepts and precepts.

Where we begin to depart grossly, is how we deal with breaches of the moral order. And this is what we call in Islam, the hudud in sharia. In other words, when there are gross breaches of the moral order, how do Muslims deal with that? We deal with it by going back to Allah and his messenger, and looking at what the sharia dictates for us, this sacred law, this sacred way.

Christianity's Departure from Sacred Law

The Christians traditionally, because they separated their teaching from the Judaic tradition, which did have a sacred law. And this can be found in remnants of it in Deuteronomies and Numbers and Leviticus and the books of the Old Testament, where there are injunctions of how to deal with thieves, of how to deal with fornicators, adulterers, all of these things. The Christians departed from this based on a verse that's in the New Testament from Paul in Romans 7, where he uses an analogy of a woman married to a man and she's bounded by the law as long as she's married to the man.

And when the husband dies, she's no longer bound by the law, in other words, of being a married woman. She can go and marry other men. Well, Paul uses this as an analogy for the death of Jesus Christ.

In other words, when Jesus was alive, we were still bound to the law, meaning the Judaic law. But since Jesus has died, we are no longer bound to the law. Jesus has freed us through his death from the law.

And this is a very important concept in Christianity. And this is really setting up the scenario of using the rational intellect to deal with law. In other words, Paul's belief, and whether he was sincere in it or not, Allah knows, but Paul's belief based on what he said is that people, because they were in such a deeply spiritual state imbued with the spirit of Christ, they would not go into the errors that necessitated the law in the first place.

So it was almost like, if we're looking at it as Paul being a sincere person in what he was preaching, that his spiritual state was so high based on being imbued with the Holy Spirit and with the spirit that he could not fornicate, that he would not, because he was in such a deeply exalted spiritual state. This is the idea. Now, this is an extremely idealistic, idealistic, romantic picture of the human being.

The idea that through accepting Jesus Christ one becomes angelic. One has now entered into the realm of spirit and the flesh is no longer a difficulty for him. Now, we have seen historically the results of this kind of idea.

But what it did in separating from the sacred law, it created the viability within a Christian society for secular law. For secular law. In other words, for worldly laws to be brought about by the emperor or by legislation like now it is used in Parliament or in the United States in Congress, the legislation of laws.

Science and the Challenge to Religious Thought

So the secular idea is literally that religion has fettered the human being from progression. In other words, what happened in Christianity, because the Christian world was so deeply suspicious of science. And in fact, because they tied their metaphysics to Aristotelian metaphysics.

In other words, the transubstantiation of the wine and the bread into the blood and the flesh. The Catholics don't like to talk about this, but they believed based on Aristotelian physics that this was possible. They based the idea that the blood and the flesh were literally blood and flesh.

It was not a metaphor. And this was a doctrine within the Catholic Church that they are ashamed of now. When Aristotelian thought began to become challenged, and this happened, oddly enough, from the introduction of Muslim arguments against Aristotelian thought.

Tahafut al-Falasifah was one of the books that was translated into Latin where Imam al-Ghazali refuted much of what the Aristotelians believed in terms of metaphysics. And he, in fact, categorically denied the ability for the human intellect to arrive at a sound metaphysics. In other words, what is beyond the physical world.

That within certain limitations, the human beings could discover things about the natural world. But about the spiritual or other world, it would only in the end be conjecture. Which is what Allah said:

They only follow conjecture, ultimately.

The Islamic Understanding of Knowledge

And from a Muslim perspective, really this does not simply apply to metaphysics, but to the physical world as well. People don't like to admit this, but the vast majority of sciences in the Western civilization are actually based on conjecture. They are theories.

Now they watered them down to the masses as fact. We learn them in schools as facts. But those people that actually write the textbook, or those discoverers and scientists that actually have come up with the theories, they're the ones that know the limitations of their own thought.

People learn, for instance, in chemistry, the table, the chemical table, the table of elements. And this is a model that human beings have just projected onto the world. It is not reality.

It is a model. Now the model is, it's useful, obviously. I mean, they've done extraordinary things with the chemical table.

But we have a limited perspective of what is taking place in the chemical world. We can only assume things based on our own perceptions. And so we're making hypotheses based on a configuration of facts that, in fact, are limited because they're limited by our own perspective of it.

And this is something that the deeply esteemed scientists amongst them will admit amongst themselves, but it's something that really is not admitted when you're studying chemistry in the classroom. You learn it as if this is reality. It is simply a model for something that we are experiencing.

Now they had a philosopher, Hume, who was from Scotland, who literally destroyed this whole idea of absolute knowledge because he came along. Now the Muslims, the sad thing about it is is that we knew this a long time ago, way before they ever. We knew about this.

If you study the mutakallimoon, I mean, they talk about that we cannot determine true cause and effect because our perspective is limited. It is only Allah that truly knows what is happening. Even in chemical, if you put chemicals together and see reactions and things like this, what is causing the reactions? From a materialist point of view, it's because this and this substance came together.

That does not allow in Islam for what we call khariq al-ada, which is a break in the chain of events. For instance, when Allah said to the fire:

Be cool and peaceful. The ulema, the raji says, not only did he say be cool, but he also said be safe.

Because it's not simply enough to say be cool. Because Allah could have taken the heat out of the fire but still inflicted the same damage that fire will inflict on a human being. So this is a Muslim understanding that fire does not intrinsically burn.

It burns by the power of Allah. So a materialist will say, well no, if you put a match to your finger, you're gonna burn your finger. Well then they have people that walk on coals and do these type things and this kind of makes people scratch their head.

Right? But the point is, from the Muslim perspective, all of their sciences are conjecture. Now they are useful, but useful within their own limitations. And we should never forget when Newton, this giant to the western civilization, intellectual giant, who gave them the foundations of their physics.

This man's physics came into deep questioning at the turn of this century because they recognized it was only limited to a certain model. It did not apply at the subatomic world. It worked very well in dealing with this physical world that we experience every day.

But once they started actually looking into the atomic world and the subatomic world, they realized that this thing is very limited, this model. Now they think now that they've reached the heights. Now.

But a hundred years from now, there may be scientists that look back now and say look at what the darkness these people were in. So Muslims have always had this historical understanding that human knowledge is deeply limited.

This is a principle that the Quran gives us to know that knowledge first and foremost is from Allah.

Allah is the one that teaches the human being:

Allah taught the human being. So knowledge is literally a revelatory process.

It is a process in which the human being is given insights based on the power of the intellect that Allah has endowed it with. Now when it's coupled with revelation, it allows for the human being to literally work within creation and not be a danger to himself or to creation because he has certain parameters that he recognizes that he must stay within as an Adamic human being that is responsible for his actions.

The Danger of Intellect Without Revelation

Now to give an example in the secular world, what happens? Recently in the South Pacific, there were a group of scientists who are oceanographers, people who study the ocean.

Now they were having a problem understanding why is it that plankton and other types of seaweed do not simply take over the ocean. What is it in the ocean that is preventing this seaweed to proliferate in the same way that for instance grass will proliferate in an area given the right circumstances because the ocean has all these right circumstances for a limited amount of seaweed. What is stopping it from growing everywhere? So they came up with a hypothesis that it was iron, that the mineral iron was lacking.

So what they did was they took an area, a five mile radius and seeded it with iron pellets all over this area. They came back a month later. This was recently in the New York Times.

They came back a month later and the entire area was covered with seaweed. It was completely covered with seaweed. They had destroyed the ecosystem of that area completely.

One of the scientists who was being interviewed said that several of the people on the boat actually vomited. That they were so horrified. And this was their initial reaction and then he said and then we kind of became elated.

So the initial reaction, the human gut heart reaction was they were horrified in that they're like children playing with extremely dangerous toys. You see.

They're literally out there experimenting with a system that Allah has set up and balanced to perfection.

The Divine Balance in Creation

And it's not for us to ask why there's not seaweed all over the place. It's for us to say Subhanallah that Allah has

created this thing in perfect balance.

Allah says in the Quran in Surah Ar-Rahman:

He has placed this balance in order that you might not transgress the balance. And establish this balance with justice. And don't destroy this balance.

Now this balance applies at every level of human existence. There is an ecological balance that we literally have the power to destroy based on the linguistic analysis of this injunction in the Quran. When Allah says:

وَلَا تُخْسِرُوا الْمِيزَانَ

He is telling us don't destroy it which implies we have the ability to destroy it. And so this is what the human being without revelation becomes an extremely dangerous animal.

Becomes a dangerous animal because the intellect which has massive power the intellect must be constrained by revelation. If the intellect is not constrained by revelation then we see what we see because this is what's happened in our modern world. We have an intellect that is completely gone crazy.

And the word in Arabic عقل literally means to bind something to constrain that this is the point of the intellect. But it's an عقل that is imbued with وحي. What Fakhr al-Din al-Razi says when Allah says:

He says وحي على عقل. That light upon light is revelation upon the intellect of the human being because the intellect itself is an interface for revelation. It's a receptacle for revelation itself.

The Necessity of Intellectual Engagement with Revelation

Revelation cannot be carried by idiots. Allah in the Quran says:

The likeness of those who carry this sacred book without understanding, like donkeys. They're like donkeys.

Because the donkey carries it but doesn't know what's on its back. The donkey has no idea it's carrying knowledge. And this is what happens when we take the Quran as a book to put on our shelves and we don't actually study it.

We don't have it impact the intellect. The Quran, if the individual begins to recite the Quran, it will create a dynamic tension within the human being because it demands thought. The Quran demands thought.

One of the dominant modes, rhetorical modes in the Quran is what's called ellipsis. This is a mode that is not used in very many languages and certainly not the English language. It's rarely used.

But in Quran, the idea of hadhf is very important.

And what this does is it demands the individual to think and reflect. Allah does not give all the information in the Quran.

But He gives enough information that it can be worked out with thought. One of the most interesting things about the usool of our religion is that the vast majority of rules are based on what the usooliyin call dalail dhanniya. Which are ambiguous proofs that demand ijtihad.

In other words, Allah has given us a deen that is based on individual thought. The Prophet did not clarify this deen and spell everything out like A, B, C, D. Literally, you will find the Prophet actually gave commentary on very few verses in the Quran. If you look in al-Bukhari, there's a baab, baab al-tafsir.

The Prophet gave commentary on very few verses. He clarified the Quran in his behavior. That is the greatest tafsir of Quran, literally is the sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ.

But the idea of:

Don't they contemplate? Don't they ponder? If the Prophet literally told us everything the Quran meant, then why would we have to ponder the meanings of the Quran? If he spelled it all out for us, all the sahaba, so they didn't do this. Why? Because every generation of Muslims have to take it upon themselves to literally study this book and learn to apply the book to their given contextual circumstances which change with time and place. But the reality of Quran does not change with time and place.

It can literally be applied in every time and place which is the unique nature of the matrix of Quran, is that it will continue to engender interpretations of any human society.

The Preservation of the Quranic Message

Now in the secular society, by taking revelation out, literally, and the Christians were completely done in. The science destroyed them. Science was not able to destroy Islam. And still they have not. The Quran, they tried to find things in it.

Really, they gave up on Quran. They started focusing on the hadith. Because the Quran, it was too difficult for them.

The orientalists worked on the Quran and literally gave it up as a project to refute the Quran. You will find very few books that literally refute the Quran. In fact, the only books that they have written actually deal with the differences of the stories in the Old Testament and New Testament and the Quranic versions of them.

They point these out. And usually it's simplistic fundamentalist Christians that do this. Real academics actually usually don't do this because once you start poking holes in the Bible, pretty soon there's no end to the holes you can poke into it.

You see, so the actual, what they begin to realize is the stories in the Quran actually make more sense than the ones in the Bible. And that's one of the points of the Quran is it's Muhaymin. It's actually an overseer and a guardian of previous revelation.

They can see where they went astray and where they deviated by going back to the Quran. And they're forced to do this with the Arabic language. The Hebrews now in Tel Aviv and the places where they do semantical analysis of the Hebraic language, they are literally forced to go to Arabic because Arabic has been preserved.

The Jews didn't start writing dictionaries until after they saw the Muslims do it. It never occurred to them to save and preserve the words at the time when they were revealed. The Muslims began to do this immediately.

Ibn Abbas and Ata and Mujahid, they were already preserving the meanings of the words. But not only that, the preservation was included within the preservation of the jahili poetry based on contextual meanings of words.

So the Quranic Arabic is literally completely preserved.

Nobody can come along today and say, this really means this. Because you have to say, what's your proof? And they have to give you a proof from either jahili Arabic or the way the Arabs understood the meaning of the word based on the preservation of the Arabic language through the great lexicographers of this ummah like Ibn Manzur, al-Zahiri al-Zabidi, al-Asma'i, who was a great collector of meanings of hadith, al-Raghib al-Isfahani, who literally collected all of the absolutely preserved meanings of this book. So the language was literally completely preserved.

And more than that, it is so deeply scientific in its nature because the precision of the meanings.

The Secular Worldview and Its Vocabulary

Now one of the great things of the secular world view is literally a semi-religious vocabulary is given to human beings in which they are indoctrinated through the secular school system. So by the time an individual comes out of the secular school system, he has completely absorbed a world view.

This is the purpose of the secular school system is to adopt a world view. Now this world view has key vocabulary. In the same way with what the Quran did when it came down during the time, it took words that the Arabs knew and it added new dimensions.

One of the, for example, as Najib Abbas pointed out about the word Kareem. Kareem to the Jahili Arabs was a man who was extravagantly generous. But it was based often on his lineage, his tribal nobility.

So he had to uphold the name of his tribe like Hatham at-Ta'i. Because Hatham at-Ta'i was Ta'i which was a generous tribe and he was their Sayyid, he had to be more generous than anybody else in order to maintain his karam. And if he would, if he would renege on that obligation which was a tribal obligation as well as his own sense of personal obligation.

It was a tribal obligation because the Arabs did not like to dishonor their tribes. So karam had this meaning. What Islam did, the Quran literally ties the meaning of karam and it becomes inextricably bound with the idea of taqwa.

That karam cannot exist without taqwa:

So Allah has permanently bound the idea of nobility and generosity with the idea of taqwa. And this can never be broken now within the Arabic language.

Because this is, the revelation itself is giving people a worldview, a new way of perceiving reality. This worldview, unfortunately the Muslims have literally had it taken from them and they have had it replaced with a secular worldview. And therefore we have Muslims that literally articulate the worldview of the secularists without having any idea that they're doing it.

The Colonization of the Muslim Mind

In other words, their minds have literally been colonized. You can colonize a human being's body, but once the chains are broken, you no longer possess him. But once you colonize his mind, you can break the bonds of slavery, this perceived slavery and you have a slave forever as long as his mind is enslaved and in chains.

You see, and this is what happened. The colonials literally came in and this was the secular worldview. They dealt with Christianity.

They destroyed, in the United States, the Catholic Church had the best form of education. They were indoctrinating their people with a religious perspective. The Protestants literally saw their own Protestants began to go into the Catholic because Protestantism is secularized Catholicism.

That's all it is. It is secularized Catholicism. For instance, according to the Roman Catholic Church, usury is one of the grave sins that will put somebody in the hell fire.

They believed it in the same way that we believe it based on the Old Testament and based on Jesus, according to them, turning the usurer's tables up in the temple and condemning them. The Catholics, in fact, Dante in his Divine Comedy, which is really just a plagiarized rip-off of the Mi'raj, and that's all he did, the seven heavens and the seven hells and seeing all these things. He just ripped it off from a description he found in Arabic and it's considered one of the classics of Western civilization.

But in the... And then, I'll leave it there. He, in his sick and distorted mind, puts the prophets' whole lives to them in the hell fire. You see, this is what he does.

He stole the whole idea from the Muslims and that's his thanks. And we know where he's going to be. See, he's going to be... Subhanallah.

Understanding Surah Ar-Rum

Now, Allah says, Surah Ar-Rum is a fascinating... I mean, the whole of Quran is extraordinary. But Surah Ar-Rum is an interesting Surah to read from the perspective of the title.

And there are secrets in the titles of the Quran, no doubt. Ar-Rum literally means the Europeans. And by continuation, the Americans.

The Americans are new Romans. And this is a Roman culture. It's a Roman civilization.

It's actually called the Greco-Roman culture. The Judeo-Christian is an appellage that came in the 20th century, when they started accepting the Christians.

When the Jews gained more and more power, they began to add these things.

Right? And now, you've got the Pope apologizing for even intimating that the Jews ever killed Jesus, even though their own book says that. So, he apologized for blaming the Jews for that. Now, we solved the problem.

Because we said, No, they didn't do it. They're innocent. What they're guilty of is rejecting Him.

And they killed other prophets. But in terms of Jesus, Alhamdulillah, we said they didn't kill Him. So, we solved all these problems.

We could solve Ireland's problem overnight. They just become Muslim. And then, you don't have Protestant-Catholic.

But the problem is, they probably half would become Sunnis, the other half would become Shia. And they just carry on anyway. Now, in Surah Ar-Rum, Allah talks about Rome being conquered, and then saying that they will conquer.

And saying that the Momineen would be happy about that. Now, the reason they would be happy about that, and don't forget this, is because they were Christians. They were Ahlul Kitab.

These Romans are no longer Christians. Now, they are the Dajjal Christians, in the sense that they still use the appellage. And they still have a stake in maintaining some semblance of a Christian inheritance.

But the reality of it is, the Christians completely reject this. If you read modern Christian literature, most of the Christians writing today actually consider this to be like Babylon. Alright, I've read a lot of their literature, and they condemn what's happened in this world as much as the Muslims would, from a moral perspective.

But Allah, when He says that this is the promise of Allah, wa'ad Allah, then He tells us:

Allah never breaks His promise. And then reminds us:

(30:6 Quran) وَلُكِنَّ أَكْثَرَ النَّاسِ لَا يَعْلَمُونَ

But the majority of people do not know. They don't know this.

And then Allah says, after making a negation of knowledge, this is called نفي. Then Allah makes it back:

They know the outward of knowledge. They know the outward of this world. But they are completely heedless of the next world.

The Secular Worldview: Control and Domination

This is the secular world view. Is that they have reduced all of science to investigating the world, to manipulating, to conquering and to controlling. The Romans and the Greeks believed that there was a tension between the gods and nature. They saw that there was this tension between nature and the human being.

That nature was antagonistic to the human being. This is not the Islamic world view. Allah tells us that He literally:

Allah has subjugated to you all that in the heavens and the earth.

Taskhir is divine from Allah. There is a divine subjugation of nature to the human being. And we have proven this now that we are literally transforming nature because of a sickness.

Because we don't have these constraints of divine law. But Allah reminds us that the entire creation has been subjugated for us. Now a subject is exactly that.

Somebody under your control. And this necessitates responsibility. And this is why Allah has made the human being Khalifa.

Now a Khalifa:

I am placing in the earth a Khalifa. This is the role of the Adamic man and the Adamic woman is to become literally a caretaker of the earth itself. And Allah says after telling us:

وَلَا تُفْسِدُوا فِي الْمِيزَانِ وَلَا تُخْسِرُوا الْمِيزَانَ

Allah reminds us:

The earth has been literally placed for all living creatures.

The Divine Hierarchy of Creation

There is a hierarchy. And human beings are literally at the top of that hierarchy. We are at the top.

But the hierarchy is necessary for the... We cannot be at the top if we destroy everything underneath us. We literally undermine the hierarchy itself. So the king doesn't want to destroy his subjects because once he destroys them he is no longer king.

You see, once he destroys them he is not Khalifa. So by destroying this divine hierarchy that Allah has established we literally undermine our own authority on the earth. So we have been challenged by Allah to maintain this divine hierarchy that we literally take care of the earth.

The Prophet said:

(Tabarani) إياكم وهذه الأرض واحتفظوا منها فإنها أمكم وستشهد يوم القيامة لكل من ظلمها

Beware of this earth and be vigilant about it because she is your mother and she will testify on the Day of Judgment against everyone who has oppressed her.

And one of the aspects of this is بر الوالدة. That we literally show a righteousness to the mother that Allah brought us forth from her dust from her turab. She is the matrix from which the Adamic creature came out of. And this is why there is a رابطة quite literally with the earth and the mother.

And because the mother has been abused in this civilization reduced to the lowest of the low there is literally no elevation of the mother why a stewardess or a prostitute has a higher status because she is a wage earner in this culture than a mother who is literally bringing about the next generation of human beings. And because people when they are treated in that way don't expect from them except to not fulfill their obligations.

The Status of Teachers in Islam

Teachers in the same way all over the world teachers are literally considered one of the lowest occupations.

In the Muslim world when Islam was powerful and established the Mu'allim was literally the highest:

قم للمعلم وفه التبجيلا كاد المعلم أن يكون رسولا

Get up for your teacher and show him respect. This teacher is almost a prophet from God.

This is how the Muslims understood what ta'lim was:

خيركم من تعلم القرآن وعلمه )Sahih al-Bukhari 5027(

The best of you are those who learn the Quran and teach it. And this is what the Mu'allim was.

The Mu'allim was literally and it's not for nothing that the Mu'allim they call the Mu'allim is الرضاع الثاني The teacher is the second wet nurse. And there is a feminine aspect of teaching because it takes رحمة.

This is why the Prophet one of the things they used to accuse him of being like a woman. This is one of the things that the Quraysh accused him of being too feminine. That he wasn't like masculine. He wasn't a macho man like the Arabs.

They like, you know, like one of the Arabs said:

لنحن أغلظ الأكباد من الإبل ولا نبكي على أحدنا

People weep over us, we don't weep over anybody. We have livers like camels. Because the liver is the seed of emotion.

And الأقرع بن حابس التميمي And Bani Tamim, very interesting tribe from the Nejd that Allah revealed in His Quran about them:

Most of them have no understanding. And with deference to any Tamimis here.

But the, well he said أكثرهم. Not all of them. So inshallah if you are Tamimi, then you're from those who understand. But this man الأقرع بن حابس التميمي came to the Prophet and the Prophet kissed his child.

Which is something Arabs did not do. Because it was feminine. It was like acting like a mother.

That's what mothers do to their children. Especially in front of people. See they might say, I don't do that.

But then when they go home, they're kissing and hugging. Right? Because they're trying to be macho. Like the macho people.

The Prophet kissed him in front of this Arab. And he said أتقبل الأولاد You kiss children? عندي عشرة أولاد ما قبلت أحدا منهم. I have ten children. I haven't kissed one of them.

And the Prophet said:

إذا نزع الله رحمة من قلبك فماذا أملك لك في الدين

Do I have anything in this deen for somebody Allah has taken rahmah out of his heart?

So this, the honoring of the mother and by extension the word in Arabic تيمم. If you look it up one of the meanings is literally to take a mother. That's one of the meanings of تيمم in the Arabic language. It literally, one of the meanings is to take a mother.

تيمم تيمو. He took a mother.

The Commodification of Women and Earth

So this idea of secularization commodifies. Because nothing is sacred. The earth has no sanctity, no inviolability. It can be raped in the same way women are raped. In this society prostitution is literally women are encouraged to become prostitutes.

Modelling is actually a high calling. We call that prostitution in Islam. She's selling her body.

Whether or not she sleeps with people is irrelevant. She's literally commodified her body. And this is a high calling.

Film stars, actresses and all these things. These are forms of prostitution as far as Islam is concerned. Voyeurism of people watching people make love on a screen.

Or not, can't even say make love. It's just having sex like animals. You see? And so this is literally these, these are people are encouraged to do these things.

And if a woman like becomes a model all her friends are so excited. There was a time in any human culture on the earth that they would literally the parents would weep. Tears.

Tears. In what they perceive has happened, you see. So this idea of womanhood and the preservation of womanhood is so essential to the Islamic world view and something that secularism must destroy in order for it to be maintained.

Secularism must destroy this aspect, this element. So the earth itself becomes a something that can be raped and pillaged. That's even they use those words to be raped and pillaged.

And these things take place.

The Purpose of Sharia

Now the Islamic Sharia literally came down for the preservation of human societies and for the preservation of the human being in order for it to be nurtured. For the human being to grow.

To become fully human. To realize its humanity. And this is something that in the Muslim world we have been so distanced from the Islamic world view that we have many Muslims that literally believe that the Sharia is no longer applicable in the times that we're living in.

There are Muslims that believe that the Sharia is no longer viable to be applied. And we have to recognize the Quran and the Sunnah cannot be applied piecemeal. You can't take parts of it and leave others.

It is a total integral system. That when it's applied in its integrity it succeeds in its purpose which is to establish human societies and humane societies whereby people are preserved and protected and can worship their Lord. And families are protected.

But when it's used as the tyrants use it because the Hudud can be used as a tyrannical system. The Prophet told us the Hukm al-Jahiliyya was that they:

أقام الحد على الفقير وترك الغني

They establish the Had punishment on a poor person and they leave the rich people. Which in the few countries now that claim to follow Islamic law this is what they do.

They apply to the poor people and they leave the rich people. This is Jahiliyya. It's the same thing.

Reclaiming the Quranic Worldview

Now the Muslims because they've been completely secularized the most important thing I want to move inshallah now just to looking at the getting out of this mess. The most important thing to recognize is literally that our world views have been taken from us. There is a Quranic world view and it is very different from this world view.

It places akhira over dunya. The secular world view places dunya paramount over and above everything and really does not believe in anything beyond dunya. They believe that the ultimate knowledge is to pursue worldly knowledges.

That other worldly knowledges are a waste of time. They don't encourage people to do these things. Even their theological departments in the universities have completely died out because they don't the only people in the theology department now are lesbians and homosexuals that are trying to prove their whole point of view.

Really. When I was at Harvard University I asked somebody how do you get appointed here on the faculty in the religious department and he said well it helps if you're gay or lesbian. That's a plus.

And definitely an atheist. So this is what they reduce religion to. So the dunya is placed over akhira.

In fact they don't even recognize akhira which is what Allah says:

They literally do not they're in complete heedlessness about the next world. What the Quran tells us literally is Allah is:

He's nearer to you than your own carotid artery. This is how close Allah is meaning that literally death and the presence of Allah is not only inevitable but literally presenting us in every moment.

We are literally presented with the inevitability of our own mortality. So part of the Islamic world view is to literally embrace death. To embrace death.

The Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam said:

(Sunan al-Tirmidhi 2307)

Do much remembrance of the destroyer of delights. Now it's a very beautiful term that the Arabs used for death.
The destroyer of delights.

The Consumer Culture

One of the things that you will notice in this dunya, this secularized dunya is it's all about delights. It's all about pleasure. All this is constantly being thrust onto the people.

And this is the media element within this secularized society. Even cigarettes don't have after signs that say taste the pleasure. Right? I mean it's literally killing them.

That is (هاذم اللذات - hadhim al-ladhat). The cigarette is literally one of the destroyers of pleasure. And they're telling you it's pleasure itself. This is how clever they are.

I mean if they can convince you of that. I literally watched a woman die. A respiratory failure.

Watched her die right before my eyes. And her last words were a jingle from Chesterfield. Which was a popular cigarette in the 1940's when she began smoking.

And she literally those were her last words were a jingle from Chesterfield and then she cursed them. She said those lying son of a bitches. That's what she said.

And I watched her die. Literally because of smoking cigarettes. That was the cause.

And she was singing the jingle and cursing them. But you see in the end of the day you believe the jingle. You see and we have to take responsibility for our actions.

And this is what they want to do. Put all this massive propaganda and the dangerous thing is our children. We have intellect.

We have aql. The children's aql is developing and if you allow it to develop within this context you will destroy your children. They will become dunyawi people.

They will not become ukhrawi people because this is what the entire society is telling them is the goal of life. The one with the most toys at the end wins.

This is what they say in America they have a bumper sticker the one with the most toys in the end wins.

And somebody said well you still have to die. Right? I mean yeah you have all the toys at the end but then you don't take them with you. So really do we call that winning?

So the goal of life for these people is just to gain and acquire more.

And this again is in the Quran. Clearly articulated the consumer mentality:

The human being says I have consumed vast quantities of wealth.

They actually boast. And this is something people do and Muslims are caught up in this. Of how many bangles they have.

Some of these women talk about bangles all day long. They have bangles for brains. Really.

Subhanallah. I mean Fatima didn't even wear gold. The best of creation's daughter didn't even wear gold.

Which isn't to say it's haram. But she was setting an example. The Prophet did not wear gold because one he wanted her to be an example.

I mean (الحمد لله - alhamdulillah) gold is a halal thing and I'm not telling women to throw away. But to acquire and collect. And so your arms up to here you can't even move your arms because you got so much gold on it.

You're weighted down. You know I mean what kind of this is not embellishment. Really.

It's being shackled to the dunya.

The Role of Media in Secularization

So the media we have to understand the role of the media in the secularization. Now just to look at a few things within the media to recognize the the deep psychological impact.

And I want to use children's media because we have many of us have children. The Muppets if you watch The Muppets a lot of people don't know this but Bert and Ernie are homosexual. It's not a joke.

They're literally homosexuals. In the mind of the creator of The Muppets and it was something that they actually wanted to admit at a certain point to the little kiddies. Get them used to Bert and Ernie.

They love Bert and Ernie and then Bert and Ernie come out and tell them you know why we're living together. Right. Now it's a Muppet it's imagination but it's very odd for Muslim children instead of having a family like a a mother and a father a thing is Bert and Ernie.

One of them cooks wears the really one of them is the feminine one and the other is the masculine one. And your children watching that and we don't really know the deep implications of a lot of these television programs and this is not a joke because these people have psychologists working for them.

If you go to Madison Avenue many of the people that work in advertising agencies have PhDs in psychology.

They've literally studied how to manipulate. A lot of the ads that you see are literally they're not a lot of times you see people in these contorted positions and things like that. Very unnatural.

If you try to imitate some of these ads seriously look at them they're very unnatural contorted it all has to do with subliminal of impact. And there's many books written about this.

Subliminal Messages in Children's Films

If you look at a film like Aladdin Aladdin has a deep message to children. One of the messages the most dominant message is you can disobey your father and he'll forgive you in the end. Disobey your father and he'll forgive you in the end.

The other thing is an undermining of the idea of sharia because the whole film revolves around a law that says the princess cannot marry a commoner.

And this has to do with the idea of sharia with tradition. You see so it undermines the idea of tradition because all she keeps talking about is why do I have to follow this tradition? And this is a deep subliminal message to children. When the parents try to instill in them traditional values they remember Aladdin and oh yeah that's like Princess Jasmine.

She had to do this and in the end she didn't do it and her father still loved her. You see there's a commercial in America where they had a soldier he's driving in a taxi to his home and he's in his nice shining marine suit butch hair and he comes in and he gets off the car and you see he's very hesitant and reluctant to go up to the door and then finally the door opens and there's this very stern father looking there with his face frowning and then he sees his son and goes back to the son and the son looks very apprehensive and then they both break out in a smile and they go embrace each other.

Now why would they do a commercial like that? Because there are many people who have sons now of the military age who were war resistors in the 1960s and they don't want their children to go into the army they don't want them to become part of this military industrial complex and so these commercials are and you watch them with football games that's when they come on when these young 18 year olds are watching it so there's deep psychological messages being thrust into the minds of these people that are literally in a hypnagogic passive receptive state uncritical mode.

Another example is the little mermaid again the daughter betrays the father the father's this stern mean person that wants to follow tradition and the mother goes against him again the same thing happens in the end it all works out everybody's happy the message is if you get pregnant and you're out of wedlock well your father's going to forgive you anyway right and this is the message that they're giving to children out of these things so Muslims have to be deeply aware of this that you're not it's not this innocent harmless thing that's taking place no there is indoctrination taking place.

People have a world view the creator of Bart Simpson was interviewed I read this interview and he said that he was an anarchist that did not believe in authority and he said but he realized that the best way to get his views across was to make people laugh and if you watch Bart Simpson and I don't encourage this right but Bart Simpson is all about undermining authority making fun of the principal the school the authority of the school making fun of the father is constantly making fun of the father what a buffoon his father is you see so this is what happens.

Now the same thing there was a film called the goofy movie which was a Disney film for children the film basically completely mocked school and education and the aspiration of this child was to become a rock star now this is something you're taking your little child to see thinking it's some innocent film by Walt Disney that great lover of children and good wholesome clean entertainment people don't know that Touchstone production which is a pornographic film production company is owned by Disney that's how they Disney is for the PG and the G film Touchstone is for the films that have pornography and sex and these type of things in it so these people have no family values they're only looking for a market that's all they are they're looking literally for a market and they want to commodify the people.

The Banking System and Riba

And so literally all these films that they make you have toys that come out of it so the children there's a somebody in a bank somewhere that's getting three four to six percent out of that transaction between two individuals and now in Sharia we have no that allows that that permits that between two buyers and sellers no third person can come in there like that and get money out of that transaction and yet this is what they want every single transaction to be where you're literally being charged by this third party for human transactions of buying and selling.

The prophet said:

There's coming a time on humankind where all of them will be consuming riba. And he said:

من لم يأكله أصابه من غباره

And the one that is not eating it will be covered in its dust. You see and this is the age we're in so the bankers are consolidating their power and making all of our transactions transaction which is the most haram form of transaction and the prophet likened it to in violating the mother you see this is likened in the hadith to in violating your own mother and in one riwayah and there's sound hadith that is like in violating your mother fornicating with your mother in the shade of the Kaaba.

And people say how is that possible that riba could be to this level when you begin to study riba and the effects it has on society riba literally is one of the main causes of prostitution seriously it's one of the main causes of prostitution worldwide the worldwide poverty that exists today the basis of it is because of the riba system if

you want to understand why south america is in the condition it in you have to understand the world bank and the imf policies that are usury policies.

People talk about the rain forest being destroyed and how the oxygen is going to all wear out and they don't know that the oxygen the rain forest is being destroyed because brazil has massive debt they have to pay interest on their debt so they make cash crops or they graze cattle so you can eat your mcdonalds hamburger for 99 cents in america and i don't know what it is here i only know it's 99 cents because i see it advertised i have never bought one i don't want to buy one i mean we used to have an understanding of baraka in food which is the next thing you see economics look at food.

Food and Health in Islam

The quran is a shifa it's not only a healing for the mind but for the body as well it commands us to fast the prophet says fast and you will become healthy there is a relationship between the way you eat and the way you behave. Ahmad said eat whatever you want but know that you're going to do whatever you eat if you eat halal you will do halal in spite of yourself and if you eat haram you will do haram in spite of yourself.

They asked the prophet how do we make our dua mustajab he said make pure your food and allah will answer your prayer when the people of the cave came out of the cave the first thing he said go get food and look for the purest food look which is the history of cattle. Now there is a hadith sahih that the Prophet said:

The meat of the cow is a disease and the milk is a healing.

Now we know that Ibrahim a.s. ate meat and he brought meat:

He came with a good calf and the meat is definitely, beef meat is permissible. But eating beef meat continuously brings on many diseases.

This is absolutely confirmed in medical science. They have no doubt about the deleterious impact of particular beef meat which has a great deal of fat but it literally hardens the heart. Now there's a tradition from Sayyidina Ali saying beware of much consumption of meat because it pulls rahmah out of the heart.

And in one tradition it says (يقسي القلب - yaqsi al-qalb). It makes the heart hard. Now it literally does that physically.

It destroys the elasticity of the heart and oxygen does not get to the heart. So there's an impact. Now there are only two hadiths in the Muwatta by Imam Malik dealing with meat.

Both of them are warning people about meat. And we know there's a hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari the Prophet praised meat, meat is sayyidul ta'am, all these things. But the Prophet according to Imam al-Qurtubi:

He did not take it as his staple diet nor did he seek it out. When he found it he ate it. And they did not eat a lot of meat.

And I contest anybody who has been born a Muslim, if your grandfather is still alive and they're not from a wealthy family, ask them how often they ate meat in the Muslim world. People literally, I know Yemenis who told me in Yemen they had meat maybe once a month, twice a month. Some people only on the Eid times.

And then when they had meat they just used to be literally hardly any sprinkled on the food. Now the other thing is traditionally the Muslims did not eat beef. It's not a traditional meat of the Muslims.

The Muslims ate sheep. But the beef eaters, in fact the British have the, you know the beef eater. That's literally a British, in the army, right, they have the beef eaters.

And literally these people forced beef on people, longhorns. In America they killed the buffalo to make way for the cows, for the cattle. Completely wiped out.

Millions, over 25 million buffaloes were killed in order to destroy the economic basis of the Native American nations. But they also fought and opposed the sheep farmers. Because sheep farmers are humble according to the tradition of the Prophet.

The ones that follow sheep, they learn humility. This is a hadith. And that's why the Prophet said that there was never a prophet except that he looked after sheep.

Now beef creates arrogance. People that literally raise beef can become arrogant. So this American thing is beef, Texas beef, steaks, all these things.

But read that book. The other thing they fill it with massive hormones and steroids and all of these things. So you're not, it might be halal if it's sacrificed, but is it tayyib? And this is something you have to ask yourself.

Halal and tayyib. Eat halal and pure, tayyib. And that means pure in all of the aspects of it.

And tayyib, one of the things of tayyib is to be good. Imam Malik says in the Muwatta that Umar said:

Beware of meat because it has an addiction like the addiction of wine. People get addicted to it and then people don't thank Allah.

Meat is something that when you eat it, it should be a blessing and a gift that you say, الحمد لله. And you teach your children that. But if they get used to it every day, Ibn Al-Hajj says don't give your children good food every day with like إدام what he called إدام

Get them used to having food that's not always really tasty and all these things, so that they are thankful and grateful and appreciate what they have. This is tarbiyah of the Muslims. You can see this in our book, that's a book from the 5th century of Islam.

So this is important. Really, as food, of eating healthy food and raising our children on healthy food.

Medicine and the Medical Industrial Complex

And then the next thing that follows that is medicine because there is a secularization of medicine as well.

The medicine, you have the military industrial complex, you also have the medical industrial complex. Medicine is a massive industry, billions and billions of dollars. In United States alone, over 500 billion dollars a year.

It's bigger than their war industry. You see. And they have massive conflicts of interest.

What they do, much of the medicine that is used, if there's any doctors in here, then without deference to you. Because Muslim doctors should really question things and shouldn't just take all these things face value. We have a tibb, we have a tibb in Islamic tradition, which doesn't negate that you can progress and learn new things and all these things.

But we should not take the theories of medicine as absolute fact. Because much of the medicine that exists now is based on maintenance of illness, of not getting people better, but of maintaining illness. So you end up, if you go to a doctor, they give you pills.

Before you know it, you're literally getting a pharmacy bill every month. And then these bills disturb your biochemical balance in the body so much that you can't go off them, it becomes dangerous to stop taking the pills. Now, I'm not saying, some people need, I'm not saying give up all, if people are on medicine, I'm definitely not saying throw away your medicine.

What I'm saying is, if you do become ill, look at all the possible alternatives. Much of our illness is from the way we eat, because we don't exercise. If you look at Muslim, they look unhealthy.

Seriously, they look unhealthy. The National Institute of Health in the United States, which is their, that's their icon, that's their major, it's like what they say, it's like Sahih al-Bukhari with us. They said 85% of the illness in the United States is directly related to diet and lack of exercise.

But if you go to a doctor, he doesn't say eat well and exercise. He said, take this pill. That's what he says.

It's like a magic thing, you just take it and everything goes away. But if you go to a good doctor, he say, listen, first of all, you look like hell. You better do something about, that's a good doctor.

They say the friend is the one that makes you cry, not the one that makes you happy. A good doctor will tell you, what are you doing to yourself? How did you get it? Unfortunately, most of these doctors, they're out here too.

He just had his triple bypass.

Really, he just had his triple bypass. And the psychiatrist, he's seeing a psychiatrist down the road. And his daughter's taking drugs.

Really. I mean, we have our own deen:

So our deen is different, including our medicine.

Which doesn't mean we can't learn, I'm not saying throw out all of Western medicine. But what I'm saying is Muslims should not be so naive to think that these people have our good interest in mind. Because the same companies that make those drugs and write the textbooks for these doctors that are studying them, are selling drugs that have been outlawed in the United States in Muslim countries.

Give it to the brown people, who cares? They get cancer five years from now. This is a fact. And you have to understand how ruthless these people are, because they don't care about you.

The only person who cares about you is your own self. Save yourselves and save your family. And if we all took that ayat to heart, we wouldn't have any problems in the Muslim world.

Anyway, just some thoughts to think about. But really, we're in a very desperate condition. The secularism has had a massive impact on the Muslims.

And we have to get back to our world view. Really, we have to look and analyze the Quran and study it. And look what it considers knowledge.

Redefining Knowledge: Science vs. Islamic Understanding

What it considers knowledge. Knowledge is not science. Science is this modern science, that's one branch of knowledge.

And the Muslims are always saying, well Islam is not against science. Yeah, but there are methodologies of science. There are philosophies of science that we are against.

And much of the methodologies and philosophies that are used with their sciences, we are completely opposed to. And consider them unethical. They have no problem with torturing animals.

They have no problem with that. They torture animals constantly. And they say, for the betterment of humankind.

It's for the betterment of the drug company that's funding the... That's the only reason they're torturing animals. They literally, you can see what they torture them. Put electrodes and... They don't need to do that.

They just want to find out how the central nervous system works and all these things. So, we need to really look and find out what the Quranic worldview is. And the only way we'll be able to do that is literally first to examine our own assumptions.

Because we literally, many of us are looking through colonized eyes. We have ideas in our mind that are alien to our culture, to our deen, to our way of life. And we have to examine the way we perceive reality.

And reality in Latin comes from a word which means thing, res. So, their reality is this. This is their reality.

This is not our reality. The word in Arabic for reality is haqiqa. And haqiqa comes from a word which is a name of Allah, al-haq.

And this is what we believe reality to be, is Allah. That is reality. And all this other stuff is just a contingent existence that Allah has given for a temporal period of time that will disappear.

And then we will be raised up and recreated and brought before Allah in a way only known to Him. And we will be questioned about what we did. We will be questioned, all of us.

We will be questioned what we were doing here in London. We will be questioned what we were doing in the United States. What we were doing.

A Call to Action: Transformation Begins Within

And we have to start really thinking seriously. Getting together. Using our intellects.

Setting aside differences to try to work out strategies again for re-igniting our deen through the re-ignition of the hearts of the believers. Of getting back to the deep teaching of Islam. This radical, critical analysis of kufr.

Of applying it in our lives. Altering the way we behave. And literally becoming transformed and transformers.

Salihoon wa muslihoon. Aqidu qawli hadha wa astaghfirullah. Bi hurmati Muhammad al-Mursalin.

Questions and Answers

Question: No single idea is provable. Then in order to have a stable society that ensures mutual respect, tolerance and dialogue, you must not let any idea prevail above others. Hence secularism.

That's an aspect of secularism. Is literally the reduction, what they call values clarification. Which is admitting that all ideas and all values can be reduced to a relative perspective of the world.

Based on our socialization and the historical context of where we came from. Which we reject. We believe in absolute reality.

And the Quran itself we believe is the absolute truth from Allah. Although we recognize that there are human, that we are subject to misinterpretations.

But we believe also literally in the preservation of the book of Allah.

And of the deen of Allah. It's also preserved from false interpretation. And this is very clear in the hadith.

That the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam said that I mentioned last night:

There will always be people in my ummah who preserve this deen. From the transformations of the excessive people. From the omissions of those who want to nullify it. And from the interpretations of the ignorant ones.

Question: May I please ask how far do you think that Muslims living in the secular society have been infected by these secular ideas to new movements springing up.

That's a good point. There's a lot of movements that really they're just secularized ideas. Their methodologies have been adopted by Marxism. I mean a lot of the Muslim movements literally were influenced by fascism and Marxism.

Completely alien ideas to Islam. And Marxism critiques. They never offer a real solution.

They just critique. Marxists are very good at critiques. Their solutions are slogans.

Right? That's what they are. So when you hear Muslims saying Islam is the solution. That's called a slogan.

Right? No. Where is it? Let's see it. What is it? That takes intellectual depth.

That takes thinking. You know anybody can just learn Islam is the solution. But to actually know what Islam does in a given situation and how we bring it about.

That takes depth. That takes thought. That takes analysis.

We have to transcend the slogan Islam. And we can't do that if we follow methodologies of sloganeers and pamphleteers.

Question: How can Muslims be united?

Again Allah says in the Quran:

You consider them all gathered together and their hearts are dispersed. Allah tells us why:

Because they are people that don't use intellect.

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الله أكبرkufr laws, right?

Question: What is your comment on corrupt leaders of the so-called Muslim countries? Are they kafirs or what?

Or what? Yeah, I don't know. That's subhanallah.

Question: As you, there is no Islamic party in British parliament or politics, therefore is it halal to vote in party.

I don't, just refer to your fuqaha on those things, you know.

Question: Today we are in a very bad condition, please can you expound the reasons for the...

Maybe they just got here. I tried to do my best.

Okay, this person is saying like a lot of Muslims use the word (العلمانية - al-'ilmaaniyyah), which is a very poor translation of secularism.

A better translation would be (دنيوية - dunyawiyyah) literally. Because secularism in Latin means the world. And (علمانية - 'ilmaaniyyah) comes from knowledge.

And that's not a good translation, unfortunately. This is part of the corruption of the Muslim mind. I wouldn't be surprised if this was done by a non-Muslim.

Whoever originally put this word (علمانية - 'ilmaaniyyah), because it was somebody or a committee, it was probably by some Lebanese Christians, I would think. They say it's a satanic word. There are (دنيوية - dunyawiyyah) sciences that we accept.

There are also secular aspects to life. There's aspects that the Prophet said in مسند الإمام أحمد, when they were doing the date palms, the تأبير of the date palms, and he thought it was strange, because it seems strange. I think it's strange, it's amazing.

That you have to fecundate to get a better harvest. And he mentioned that, and they left it, and they had a bad crop. When they came to him, he said:

You know better about your dunya affairs.

So there's aspects that Islam allows for the dunya. But if you have imbibed an Islamic worldview, you will not transgress those. And that's the important thing.

Is that concerning our dunya affairs, we are still constrained by the injunctions and the moral and ethical principles of Islam. But there are aspects to life that are temporal, that do not involve these. So, I mean, هندسة - handasah like learning engineering, and these type of things, they're useful.

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They're important sciences. There's no doubt about that. It's not the only thing in the world, which they have a hard time convincing some Muslims of that.

But they're useful sciences, and I'm not condemning sciences. I mean, what I'm saying is that the philosophy of science is what we need to examine and investigate. You know, because we have a different philosophy of science.

Their philosophy is based on control, subjugation, on exploitation, on commodification. Our sciences were based on enhancement, on nourishing human societies. I mean, most of the Islamic inventions dealt with the enhancement of life.

Most of these inventions are just gadgets to get people to consume, so somebody can make some money. And most of them, the vast majority of them, are completely useless. I mean, the hadith about the Dajjal having a fire, that when you go into it, it's paradise, and having a paradise when you go into it, it's a fire.

I mean, to me, there's a real... I'm not saying this is what the hadith means, but there's an interesting analogy of what they promise. You know, the consumer society and technological society, they present it like it's a paradise. It's going to solve all our problems.

But when people actually get into it... I mean, I know there's people that came here from Pakistan, from a village in Pakistan, and really, they were in paradise there. And now they're living here like they're in hell. You see? But these people think that's hell.

But if you ask them, like, living in a village in the middle of a backward, quote-unquote, backward country, they say, oh, that's hell. There's no washing machines. Where do they go? The bathroom.

Right? And those people are happy. They don't have heart disease. They smile all the time.

They pray five times a day in the masjid. They, you know, they have healthy children. I lived in the Saharan Desert with people like that.

And they were actually happy people. It's amazing to meet happy people nowadays. You kind of wonder, here, what are you smiling about? You know, it's like something's wrong with you or something.

Question: Surely, the solution of jihad, OK, you have talked about the problem of secularism. Surely, the solution is jihad. Could you please talk about how you go about doing jihad?

Well, jihad has many meanings in Islam. There is a jihad which is jihad of state, no doubt. And, you know, I read by analogy jihad of arms and things like that. Part of what we should recognize is that Western societies literally sell us weapons.

You see, they're not afraid of us. They'll give us all the machine guns we want. If you have enough money, you can buy all the machine guns you want.

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As long as they have the atom bomb, they're not worried about your machine guns. So people say, well, then we should get the atom bomb, right? Well, then what's that going to solve? They used to call the arms race between Russia and America MAD, MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction. If they blow us up, we're going to make sure they all get blown up as well.

So once all the missiles, the inter-ballistic, intercontinental missiles, once they saw they were coming from Russia, then we'd push the button and we'd send all theirs there. Probably a lot of solutions to our problems would have been solved had they ever done that. But, I mean, in the end, that's what it is, MAD.

It's just a Mutually Assured Destruction. Personally, the Prophet forbade killing with fire. Nuclear, atomic warheads are killing people with fire.

It is incinerating them. And Allah said, the Prophet said:

No one can punish with fire except the Lord of Fire. And that's what these bombs... In Iraq, they used fire bombs.

A lot of the bombs, they literally roasted Iraqi soldiers alive. These great humanistic, wonderful people. Have a nice day.

That's what they say in America. They say the drought in California, because people have been saying have a nice day for 20 years. Many... So, Jihad, there's a Hadith, Musnad Ahmad:

(Musnad Ahmad)

If you begin to buy and sell with credit and that means following Dunya. Because agriculture to the Arabs was a Zara'ah, was a type, you know, was kind of synonymous with worldly, Dunya.

And he said, and you leave Jihad in the way of Allah. Allah will subjugate you to an enemy from outside of yourself, and you will not be raised, that tribulation will not be taken from you until you return to your Deen.

Which means also returning to Jihad.

But we have to recognize where we are, who we are, what our own limitations are. You know, it's what they call in corporate management, sphere of concern and sphere of influence. You see, Muslims always talk about Jihad, Jihad, Jihad.

What's the reality of that? You see what I mean? We need to stop talking about things and literally start doing things. We can talk all day long. So we have to recognize what is our sphere of influence.

Our sphere of concern is the entire world. But what's the sphere of influence? Where can we actually impact? What can we do? And this is what we need to be concerned about. I mean, Muslims talk about the rulers all the

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time.

As an individual, I am not going to change the regime in such and such a place. As collective group of people, if we rectify ourselves, we are promised by Allah that He will rectify us. In fact, in the Quran it says:

Have taqwa and just speak upright, be upright. How many Muslims that you know are upright in their speech? How many Muslims do you know that are upright in their speech? Then what does Allah say? Allah will rectify your conditions. If you do that, this is like a condition. If you do this, Allah will do this.

It's a sharf. And in the Arabic grammar, المشروط محصور في الشرط. That the thing is contained in the other thing. So if we have taqwa of Allah, and if we are upright in the way we speak, which includes calling to dawah, because Allah says in the Quran that the most upright is the one who speaks the truth and calls to the deen of Islam.

So being upright in the speech:

That's the best way to be upright is to call to Allah:

وَعَمِلَ صَالِحًا

And to do righteous actions.

So Allah says that not only will He take care of our dunya, but He will take care of our akhira as well by forgiving us our wrongs. This is in the Quran. Unity based on difference.

Question: What can Muslims do to establish Islam in British society starting in their own community?

Personally, I think one of the most important things right now is the establishment of areas where Muslims live. Muslims should live together.

I mean the Chinese, you see you have Chinatowns all over the world. Chinese aren't stupid. They're very clever people.

They literally stay in their, they maintain their language. We've lost our language. I met an Arab last night, told me he grew up here, he doesn't speak Arabic.

Subhanallah. I mean, Allah asks, do you exchange the high for the low? You'd rather speak the Queen's English than the King's Arabic? Subhanallah.

And that's another thing, that I didn't talk about language and the effect, the impact that Arabic has on the mind and also on the world view of learning Arabic language deeply.

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Muslims, all of us should be committed to Arabic. Imam Shafi'i in his Risala said:

That every Muslim has to learn Arabic according to his capacity, even though the later Muslims put it as a فرض كفاية. كفاية is only good if there's enough people that know it.

And we don't have enough people that know Arabic anymore. Guarantee you. So a فرض كفاية becomes an عين until the كفاية is re-established.

So really, learning Arabic is incumbent on the entire Ummah. And we should learn anyway. People learn English for dunya, they can't learn Akhira language? Really, some people, Muslims, when we have Muslims here, they speak English much better than English people.

And they learned it for dunya.

Question: You mentioned death of Jesus. Do you believe Jesus is coming back or is he dead?

The dominant position of the people of Sunnah and Jama'ah and in the Aqidah of Imam al-Tahawi is that Isa a.s. returns at the end of time and that's the dominant position of the Muslims and inshallah, that's the one I adhere to and I hope I die on that inshallah.

Question: Are zoos halal?

He's asking that because we're living in one. London, man, this is the biggest zoo. It's the biggest zoo in the world.

I was on Edgware Road last night. That's a zoo from the Middle East. They brought exotic animals over here.

Subhanallah. Imam al-Ghumari said in the Quran:

He said that that was one of the signs of the end of time that that actual ayah applies to the before the Akhirah. That the wild animals would all be contained in the end of time.

And الله تعالى أعلم I'm not making that tafsir. That's the tafsir of Imam al-Ghumari who was a Azhari sheikh and a muhaddith.

Question: Is it only domestic animals that we are allowed to keep?

Zoo is a very strange... I mean, this is part of the whole... The Kuffar have made the whole world their zoo.

They literally... Morocco is a zoo for them. They go down and they ogle the animals. That's what they do.

They take pictures up there. And subhanallah, how can you go and take... If you did that in London to an English person, just take his picture like that, he'd come up and grab the camera and, well, what are you doing? What do you think I am? Just some kind of freak show? But the Muslim in the Arab countries and the non-Arab countries, people go with their pictures and take pictures of them like they're some kind of animal. They even take pictures of their women, which is haram.

You know what I mean, people? That's a loss of izzah. We don't have dignity anymore. Why? Because Allah says, al-munafiq, Allah says:

Izzah is for Allah, and for His Messenger:

And to the people of Iman.

You are over them if you're a mu'min. That's a sharf. All the ayahs in which Allah says that we will be given victory, that we are over them, but they're all conditional sentences in the Quran.

They're all conditions based on actions:

If you give victory for Allah, Allah will give victory for you, but don't expect victory from Allah if you're not doing anything for Allah. We don't believe in unconditional love.

That's just something some psychiatrist made up to make some money. What do we do? Because even Allah says:

Allah's love is conditional. It's based on following the messenger of Allah.

It's not like the Christian, it's all love and harmony and God's gonna forgive us all. They don't even believe that because read their revelations at the end of time when they say Jesus comes back and everybody condemned to hell except these 144,000 people which the Jehovah's Witness. There are only 144,000 people going to heaven? Who wants to join that religion? And it's one of the fastest growing religions in the world.

And all they have to do is just some basic mathematics but they don't encourage you to go to school. The Jehovah's Witness, they don't want you to go to school because you learn mathematics and realize 144,000 there's 5 million Jehovah's Witness. Man, most of us are going to hell.

Question: If the Catholics fight us with atom bombs then how do we counter attack them without nuclear bombs?

There's a cartoon I once saw that showed these Africans with spears and the British came down with their guns and they were shooting them and the Africans were throwing the spears. And then the next picture it showed the Africans with guns and the British with machine guns and they were just mowing them all down. And then the next picture showed the Africans with machine guns and the British with airplanes dropping bombs.

And then the final picture showed the Africans all with the tanks going by and the airplanes and they're all saluting their one handed takbir. Right? I mean people now are silent for the national anthem and they speak while the Adhan is going on. Really.

People are silent for the national anthem and when the Adhan is going on they even talk when the Quran is going on. I was at a conference and I was trying to buy a book in a souk in the conference and the guys got Quran blasting next to me and I went over and I said Ya Akhi could you please turn this off because I'm trying to do a dunya transaction and this is Quran. And he said Why? Because he's selling it.

I said because Allah says:

If you listen to the Quran if the Quran is recited listen to it and be silent. And he said Is that wajib? I said subhanallah if we want to know why we are in the condition we're in.

You see? But if he's watching television you know what he says to his wife? Shut up! I'm trying to watch this! You see? Seriously! These same characters. Be quiet! I'm trying to watch You're disturbing me? Mike Tyson I'm trying to watch in only 85 seconds and I paid 25 quid for this. They say takbir Now Muslims, that's what they do.

They takbir Mike Tyson once. Subhanallah. That's dhul and hawan.

So anyway, the last picture in the frame showed them all with the airplane and then it showed this one kafir in a big computerized room with these warheads all facing Africa. So that's where we're at. They gave us all their dead weapons and we end up killing each other with them anyway.

If the Muslims were in the state of mind they're in now and they had the nuclear bomb they wouldn't drop it on Tel Aviv they'd drop it on Riyadh or drop it on Baghdad. Seriously! If these characters had I hope Saddam Hussein never gets the atom bomb because he'd just drop it on the Muslims before he'd drop it on the kuffar. Seriously! We should use our brains.

Closing Remarks

Jazakum Allah khairun. And my intention these are you know the purpose is just inshallah just to get us all

thinking a little bit and my intention is not to offend anybody if I mentioned any nationalities any thing that is not my intention. I don't and even some of the questions if I'm a little harsh on my response it's just you know it's just it's not so much the question but it's you know it's being having done this for several years now and this being the thousandth time I've had that question you know and I'm just wondering I mean it might genuinely be the first time you've ever asked a question or you might be a new Muslim or Islamist so my intention wasn't to make fun of asking the question but just you know it's just frustrating for me as an individual so I apologize for that.

I did not whoever wrote that question I apologize to you for my reaction it was not from you as an individual but from a collective state. Alright. Imam Malik said:

The Prophet said the one who says that people are finished or destroyed he's the most destroyed of them.

Imam Malik said that that means if he says it out of arrogance thinking that he's better than them in other words if he says it tahazzunan out of grief and just of our own human condition then it doesn't that wa'id from the Prophet doesn't apply. So all of us you know we're in a destitute state and we need to ask Allah we need to turn to Allah in a sincere tawbah:

Turn to Allah in a pure tawbah collectively as an ummah and this is really as far as I can see we have to turn to Allah because Allah:

There's no safety from Him except to Him there's no safety from Him except to Him that's tawheed you want aqeedah there's your aqeedah there's no safety from Him except to Him because:

The affair is in the hand of Allah it's not in America.

I told a Muslim I was so grieved really I was I was almost in tears when I saw McDonald's in Mecca I mean I really it just it just broke my heart to see McDonald's in Mecca and I'm in this sacred place that you can't even uproot a tree you know and these kuffar just running around with impunity and the person I told this to he felt like weeping and he said we just have to remember Hamza that Allah is Allah is over them Allah is over these people Allah is over them and Allah will take them to account.

The Promise of Allah and Our Responsibility

We need to raise this ummah up and if we don't do it:

If you don't do it Allah will replace you with people who do it and the ayah might take 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 generations but it will happen so I don't know.

Deviance in Society

So, this... What Dante did, he put the homosexuals and the sodomites in the same place in hell. What they call now homosexuals. They used to call them sodomites.

In fact, they don't even use homo, but they say gay. The sodomites he placed in the same circle of hell fire as the usurers. Why did he do that? Because sodomy, according to the Catholic understanding, was a crime against nature.

It was against the nature for a male to have a sexual, physical relationship with another male. That is against nature. And anyone that says otherwise is a sick human being.

And the Quran talks about when they chase Lut out, the reason they chase him out is because he was purified. So, it shows you the sickness of that. In other words, they're so sick that the impurity becomes the norm and the purity becomes the deviance.

And this is a sociological principle. Deviation does not mean in sociology, in the same understanding as the Quran, deviation does not mean the bad thing. It means when the norm is good, then evil is deviant.

But when evil is the norm, good becomes deviant. And this is how the Quran perceives it. And that's why the Prophet said:

The wrong thing becomes the right thing? This is what he said.

And this is a deep sociological understanding of human society. How will you be when the wrong thing becomes the right thing? And they said, يا رسول الله سيكون ذلك? Will that happen O Messenger of Allah? He said, بل أشد. Even worse than that. They said, what could be worse than that? He said كيف أنتم إذا تأمرون بالمنكر وتنهون عن المعروف. What will happen to you when you enjoin wrong and forbid right?

When the actual criterion of human society is completely turned upside down, so righteousness is deviance and it's something that is, like now in societies, to be religious is a psychological neurosis.

If you are religious, if you cry out of fear of God, they will say he's suffering from neurotic religiosity. This is what they'll say. And the psychiatrist will actually try to cure you of this by letting you know that don't feel bad about yourself.

You know that these taboos are simply social norms. You see, they just change with the times. You see, I mean in the 19th century for a woman in England to show her ankle was considered risque.

She was actually considered a loose woman. This is in England. Now, subhanallah, trying to make a phone call in this city.

Seriously. And unbelievable. So this is the complete transformation of the goodness as a norm to evil becoming a norm.

The Hardening of Hearts

Now the danger of this is that the heart becomes accustomed to it. You see, the Prophet said:

If one of you sees a wrong, a munkar, let him change it. And he said let him change it first with his hand.

Literally. So if you see a pornographic picture, you rip it down. Right? And if he can't do that, then with his tongue.

You should speak out against it. And if he can't do that, then at least reject it in his heart. And that is the weakest of iman.

Which means ليس وراءه إيمان. There is no iman after that. Now what happens when you live in a society where munkar is the ma'ruf. The human heart literally becomes accustomed to it and you stop, even your own heart stops seeing it as something that's wrong.

You see, which is what happens if the stable boy who cleans cleans out the manure all day long. Now when you go into the stable What's that? You know, what a horrific smell. And the stable boy says, What smell? Because he's accustomed to the smell of manure.

And this is what happens when Muslims come from somewhat traditional cultures. When they first get to England, they go into shock. They do.

They go into shock. They can't believe it. They can't believe their eyes.

How can human beings do it? You bring somebody from the Swat Valley. I mean, unfortunately, now they have satellite disks so they can watch it all on television. But if you bring somebody from the Mauritanian desert, where I was, who's never even seen haram things and put him in... He'll think he's arrived to another planet.

That this is hell or something like that. He'll think that he died and he's in hell. But here we are it's just become a norm.

It's become a norm. You just say, Oh, ma'aleesh, you know, you're in London. Here we are, London.

Like Big Ben when it rings on BBC Arabic broadcast. Here we are, London. In Mauritania, they had a Bedouin who, he was out in the middle of the Sahara and somebody brought a radio and he'd never seen a radio.

And then they turned on the BBC and it said, bong, bong and they said, Here we are, London. He said, Here we are, London. This is, Here we are? This is not London.

What's he talking about? You bring a box that's telling lies? You see, because the Arabs, if they say huna, it means here. You have to say hunak. So he said, This is, Here we are, London.

Here we are? I'm an Arab. He said, I'm stupid or something. I know where I am, but the box doesn't know where it is.

The Strategy Against Muslims

So, this idea again of stripping people of a traditional worldview which included the Christians, the next move was the Muslims. The next move was the Muslims. And the Chinese as well.

You see, because the Chinese scared them. They had to literally inundate that country with opium. It was done here by merchants.

The emperor, the Chinese emperor wrote a letter to the Queen of England, Queen Victoria, and said that there's these barbarians that are from your country. They're obviously pirates. And they're coming selling drugs to the people here.

And she sent a gunboat to defend them. And he found out later that they were noblemen from England. He thought they were like criminals.

You see, because they were dealing drugs and that's what criminals do. They were noblemen. Some of them were MPs in the parliament.

And this completely shattered the Chinese perception of the English. These are barbarian people. Because they didn't have that concept that somebody, a noble person would deal drugs.

You give them a title and call them an Earl or a Duke. In fact, the more drugs they deal, the higher up they go on their social hierarchy. That's true.

The more damage you've done to the world in England, the higher you are up. So, the Dukes are worse than the Knights. You know, it's like having a petty criminal and a big criminal.

And then you have the major players, right? And they give them crowns and things like that. And gold, all these big... They have Muslims walking around with these things now. Muslims walking around with a cross.

You know, in the books of Fiqh, that's called Ridda. It's called apostasy. To put on a Zinar, which was the Christian belt that the Dhimmiyun used to wear, was considered Ridda.

It was apostasy for a Muslim to do that. And now, they're all honored. I've been honored.

You know, I'm the Lord Mayor.

Understanding