Torchbearers-Creating Positive Changes

Torchbearers: Creating Positive Changes

The Inspiring Presence of Muslim Youth

First of all, it's always amazing for me to see all of the youth that we have in this community. We have all over the United States, and those of us who travel around the United States, we see this. And it's very inspiring because I see so much dignity in our young Muslims, in a time when human dignity is being challenged. Just the whole concept of karama. What we're seeing everywhere is the degradation of culture. Culture is being degraded.

The Inversion of Social Aspiration

If anybody knows, one of my favorite playwrights is George Bernard Shaw. He wrote a play called Pygmalion. And in that play, he has a character who's the father of Eliza Doolittle. And this character is basically, he's a rogue, he's outrageous. He comes to try to make some money off the fact that his daughter, he finds out, is in the house of a gentleman, which at that time, in that period in England, was considered scandalous. But he tries to make some money out of it. And the character in the play, Higgins, who's her teacher, elocution teacher, says, don't you have any morals? And he says, I can't afford them, Governor. In other words, I'm too poor to have morals.

But the play, as it goes on, Higgins writes to an ethicist in America and mentions that the greatest moral ethicist that he's met is this character, Doolittle. And so he puts him in his will and he ends up inheriting all this money. And he said, it's very unfortunate because you've made me a gentleman. In other words, you've forced me to be good. And even though he's mocking all of these bourgeois values in the play, there was a time when poor people aspired to be like the educated people. They wanted to be gentlemen. They tried to speak proper English. Many, many characters in literature are actually parodies of this idea of people aspiring to be educated or appear educated.

What's happened now is the inversion of this aspect. You actually have people now that pretend to be poor. We have middle class youth now that actually pretend to be homeless in this culture. Really, they go out. It's kind of a trend to go out. And they wear rags. You buy jeans now with holes in them. And you pay more money for good jeans. When I was growing up, the people that had tattoos, there was only three possibilities to have a tattoo. You were a prostitute, you were in a gang, or you were in certain branches of the military and always non-commissioned. That was it. There was no other reason. So if you saw a tattoo, you immediately identified one of those three categories.

Now, everybody has tattoos in California, which is a very bad sign because what happens in California usually happens everywhere else. It used to be 20, 30 years later. Now, because of the texting era, it happens much faster. The trends that we're seeing in California are very disturbing.

Muslim Youth as Barriers Against Social Collapse

So the Muslim youth today represent to me an important barrier, in essence, between this collapse. It's like preventing a group of us because the Qur'an talks about always a group of people. There should always be a group that represents this khayr, that calls to this good. And if that group is eliminated in a society, then there's no reason for that society to exist anymore, and either they perish or they're destroyed, one or the other. But this is what happens in human societies. They collapse, and societies do collapse.

The Symbolism of Fire and Youth

So the idea of being a torchbearer is very interesting because light, carrying light and carrying fire, because fire is one of the foundational myths that we have, of fire being really the beginning of human civilization. In fact, we have a character in Greek mythology that was punished by the gods for bringing fire to human beings. So this idea of fire is a really interesting concept, a torchbearer.

One of the words in Arabic for fire is also related to the same word for youth. Shabab, if you talk about fire when it really becomes inflamed, you say shabbat al-nar, that the fire entered into a shabab state. So the shabab are the people with fire, they've got fire. But that fire, you see, the nature of fire is that it is the most beneficial element that we have out there after air, but it's also the most destructive. Fire is a very destructive element. So if you don't learn to control that fire, and this is what humans do with fire, they learn to control it, but fire can get out of control. And in that way, the fire of your youth is something that has to be controlled because if it gets out of control, it will either destroy you or it will destroy others. It can destroy families. Families are torn apart because of the fire of youth, really. They're destroyed.

The Divine Fire Within the Heart

And so it's really important that you recognize, I'm talking to the young people here, that you recognize that Allah has given you this fire. In fact, Fakhruddin al-Razi, in his tafsir, Mafatih al-Ghayb, mentions in the introduction that Allah put a fire so great in the heart of the human being that he had to put the lungs as a fanning system for the fire of the heart. And so he said that the lungs were actually a fanning system to keep the fire of the heart cooled. It cools. And that's why it's interesting that as we get hotter, we begin to breathe faster, right? Not to fan the flames, but actually to cool the fire, to cool it down.

But the point that he made about this fire that Allah put in the hearts of human beings, he said that fire was to come to know Allah, that it's an energy in the human being that wants to know why he or she is here. And then once you know why you're here, how do you act, how do you behave? These are the great issues that our prophets came to talk about.

Being Exemplars of Human Dignity

And so as you think about your role and your position here in the United States, I would argue that first and

foremost, you should be exemplars, exemplars of human dignity, because people recognize dignity. It's a very hard word to define, but it's something that when you see it, you recognize it. We are an ummah that was dignified in the way that we walked. Muslims walked in a dignified manner.

The Prophet, peace be upon him, had a very specific type of gait that's described. He had a gait that was a gait that indicated that he was a serious man. He wasn't somebody that meandered. He wasn't somebody that walked without intention. He walked as if he was on a declining slope, and it was hard to keep up with him because he was a very determined person.

The Prophet's Presence and Attentiveness

If he was called, he would stop, and he would give his whole body, because the Prophet, peace be upon him, was a present human being. He was always present. He was never absent with people. If he looked or spoke to a person, he gave them their whole being. In fact, in the hadith, it said about his death that if anybody sends him a salam, Allah returns his soul to him, and he will return that salam to that person.

Imam al-Suyuti said that what this means is that his intense istighraq in the barzakh, this complete drowning in the Divine Presence, is turned towards the creation, because the Prophet, peace be upon him, and that's the meaning of the radd al-ruh, the returning of the soul, because the Prophet's soul, it's not going back and forth like alive and dead. No, it means that he turns towards his creation in that moment.

Now, if people say, if people are doing that all the time, how is that possible? Like we're all saying, al-salatu wa al-salamu alayka ya rasul Allah. This is ma qadru Allaha haqqa qadrihi. This is people that have a worldly view of things. A worldly view of things. They're trapped in the dimensions of this realm that we're in, which is a very limited realm. It's called dunya. Once you leave the dunya, you enter into a completely different realm.

Understanding Miracles in the Modern Age

Let me give you an example. We have computers today that monitor all of our phone calls. If you go to a bank and you swipe your card, they'll get approved or disapproved immediately. That same computer database is doing this for millions of transactions in every instant. This is a computer that a human being created. And so we don't have a lord that can create a heart that can do all of that. The Prophet's heart can't do all of that. He can't be getting all those incoming messages and responding to them instantaneously. This is materialism. And people are trapped in materialism.

We know that Umar, may Allah be pleased with him, one of his miracles is that he used the first cell phone. He was in Medina and he was on the minbar and he said, Saria was his commander in Persia and they were in a battle and they needed a place to take refuge to and Umar shouted out on the minbar, and then they turned and he heard the voice in Persia. This is a recorded miracle.

People say, oh, they don't believe in miracles anymore. The whole Islam is a miracle. This whole thing is a miracle. There's miracles everywhere. You don't believe in miracles? This is a miracle. How do I talk into these

little things and my voice is heard all over the place? How is that possible? The whole thing is a miracle. You can explain the whole technology to me and it takes your voice and it amplifies the voice. You can explain all that to me. It doesn't diminish the miraculous nature of the world that we're in. Miracles all over. David Hume didn't have the ability to see that. That's his problem. It's not my problem. Really. We believe in miracles. This is our teaching. This was the aqidah of the Muslims. Assert the miracles of the saints and anybody that rejects them, reject him. I believe in miracles.

The Dignity of the Prophet

So, the Prophet, peace be upon him, he came not only to teach us about other worldly affairs, he came to teach us about worldly affairs. And at the center of this is the idea of dignity. The Prophet, peace be upon him, was the most dignified of human beings. And anything that diminished his dignity or his muru'ah, he rejected it. This is why Imam al-Shafi'i said, If I thought that drinking water would diminish my dignity one iota, I would have left drinking water. This is how concerned they were about dignity.

Dignified Dress and Appearance

So, the Prophet, peace be upon him, he dressed in a dignified manner and he encouraged people to dress in a dignified manner. We're living in a time of degraded dress. People literally look, first of all, they're wearing underwear in public. When I was a kid, T-shirts were considered underwear. That's how old I am. I don't have a problem with it. But I'm just letting you know. T-shirts were considered underwear. When I see people in a T-shirt, I see somebody in underwear. It's not the way that we should be encouraging our youth to dress.

We now, you know, the way the women are dressing today (إِنَّا لِلَّهِ وَإِنَّا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعُونَ وَلَا حَوْلَ وَلَا قُوَّةَ إِلَّا بِاللَّهِ الْعَلِيِّ الْعَظِيمِ - inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un wa la hawla wa la quwwata illa billahil aliyyil azeem) (Surely to Allah we belong and to Him we shall return, and there is no power nor strength except with Allah, the Most High, the Most Great), would have been considered outrageous. At the turn of the century, people would have heart attacks on the street. If you took somebody from the 19th century, Victorian England, and you put them, teletransported them through time and put them out on a street in Washington, D.C. in 2012, they would literally either pass out or they would have a heart attack because they could not believe that what they were seeing was actually happening and that these people, they would assume immediately that they were primitive people probably, like savages.

And I liked what Tawakkol Karman, the Yemeni, many of you saw her remark about wearing the hijab, the woman who won the Nobel Prize. When she was asked about her hijab, she said, I don't see this as a reactionary thing. On the contrary, I see it as an evolutionary thing because according to your sciences, we started out naked and we evolved into dress. And so, the more naked people are, the less evolved they are. That was her argument and I think that's a very solid argument.

So, you have to really think about dressing in a more dignified manner and not accepting this degraded culture. If you look at Muslims anywhere in human history, you look at the clothes that they wore and you will see that

they were dignified clothes. They always wore dignified clothes and clothes are not insignificant. They're not insignificant.

Congruity in Muslim Dress

Our women, alhamdulillah, you see, one of the bizarre things about modern Muslims is you'll see this woman dressed in a traditional, in fact, a lady came up to me, this is honest, a lady came up to me, we were in Turkey and an American came up to me and she was the mother of a Muslim convert and she said, it's so nice to see the Turkish men and women who dress in a congruous way. Like the women, Turkish women dress very, the Muslim women there who are modest, they dress in a very conservative, modest way but it's very fashionable at the same time. So, they look like they're part of the modern world but they're also, they look like they're maintaining the tradition because you have, you have something that needs to maintain but can be changed in its form but its essence has to stay the same. So, modesty is the essence. How you display that, that is, that can be relegated to time and place.

But she said, but what I find really strange is when I see these Muslim women dressed in their traditional garb but with them are these Muslim men that look like they're comic book characters. Right? So, you'll go, at Disney World, you know, you'll have some guy from a Muslim country, I won't say which ones, but you have some guy from a Muslim country, his wife, like in a black garment and he's there with a t-shirt, you know, that says something like, been there, done that. It just looks a little incongruous. Like, what's she doing in a black bag and you're wearing, you know, or I'm with stupid. Right? I mean, this is a problem. Like, the absurdity of our modern age. So, that's very important.

The Prophetic Teaching on Food and Health

Also, another aspect is food. Our Prophet, peace be upon him, came to teach food. We should represent the best of our tradition. We should be eating less. We should not, if you look outside, people are turning into balloons. Really, they could get jobs advertising Goodyear blimps, you know, that advertise because they're so wide. They could have all of the corporate logos on one body. It's a bad sign when you have a culture that's turning into Goodyear blimps. I'm serious. It's a really serious problem in this country.

In fact, one of these czars recently said, the greatest threat to America is no longer al-Qaeda, it's the Big Mac because we're literally turning into the most obese nation on the planet. But it's not just here because this food is being exported all over the world. So now you go to the Gulf States and you've got over 40, 70% of these people now are being afflicted with diabetes. And diabetes is a disease of a civilization. It's not a natural disease. You shouldn't get type 2 diabetes. It's purely a disease of diet. It's what you're eating. It can be prevented and it is controllable.

I would recommend for you, I'm not espousing in any way a vegan diet, but I would recommend for you watching the documentary called Forks Over Knives or read the China study or read Forks Over Knives and see what they're doing now. The cutting-edge doctors in this country, first and foremost, the cutting-edge doctors are