Beyond Battles and Conquests Islamic Civilization Spreading

Beyond Battles and Conquests: Islamic Civilization Spreading the Light

Omar Suleiman - MASCON2018

Opening Remarks

So, first of all, as you all are getting back settled in, I wanted to apologize for missing my previous session at the Yaqeen Mass Academic Conference. Jazakumullahu khayran to all of you that attended, and Alhamdulillah, as some of you may know, my son hasn't been feeling well, so, jazakumullahu khayran to all of you who made du'a for his shifa, and all of you who have children here that caught something, any type of bugs or flus or anything like that, may Allah Azawajal grant them all shifa, Allahumma ameen. But I apologize once again.

What it does give me the ability to do though is to take some of the things that I wanted to say over there and bring them over here instead.

The Importance of Knowing Our History

One of the things that we try to do at Yaqeen Institute is teach history in a way that's instructive, is look back at what Islam has done in the past, and in light of that, what Islam can offer to the world today and what Islam can do in paving the path forward in the future. And I want us to pay attention to that in particular because for many people now, we've allowed others to teach us our history, and Al-Hajj Malik al-Shabaz Rahimahullah Ta'ala Malcolm X said, "only a fool lets his enemy teach his children his history."

The False Narrative We've Internalized

And because of that, we have the tendency to associate Islam with a certain sense of barbarity, with a certain sense of regression and backwardness. You look at the state of the Muslim world today and you might, you might be fooled into thinking that it's always been that way. You might be fooled into thinking that these issues that exist in the Muslim world today are organic and indigenous problems.

You might be fooled into thinking that the reason why Muslim countries do not make progress is because their insistence on Islam. While what we're seeing is actually quite the opposite, that the way that many Muslim regimes and Muslim powers have forsaken the ethics of Islam is directly tied to the regression that we see today in those very countries.

And here in the in the West, we tend to look at the Muslim world and we tend to see all of that conflict and all of that chaos and all of that bloodshed. And we tend to internalize this idea that this is the logical ends of a belief system that breeds barbarity.

The True Story of Islam's Spread

And SubhanAllah, a few weeks ago, we actually released a paper about how Islam actually spread throughout the world. That Islam as a way of life, Islam as a religion, as a creed, and Islam as a value system spread through the world in a very powerful and profound way.

It is not a story that is exclusively conquests. It's not a story that only tells you about military defeats and military victories. But as our brother Al-Hajj Malik al-Shabazz said, that Islam enters spiritually and conquers spiritually.

Islam transforms hearts. And in the hearts of the people that it transforms, as we spoke about last night, entire societies are given life by the revelation, by Qur'an, by the sunnah of the Prophet (ﷺ) as the manifestation of that Islam.

How Allah Teaches Us History in the Qur'an

So how do we study history? And I want us to first and foremost look to how Allah teaches us history. Allah is our teacher at the end of the day, and we talked about bringing the Qur'an to life. So what are the things that Allah Azawajal highlights in the Qur'an? How does Allah teach us our history in a way that we can grow?

1. The Capacity for Evil

On one hand, we're taught about the capacity of our evil. And those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

So you constantly have that "never again" hashtag that goes out there, that the world will never again sink to the place that it sunk, that America will never again be what it was before, that the Holocaust will never happen again, that genocides will never happen again, that slavery will not happen again. And in reality, what we're seeing is that all of those things have merely been repackaged to serve the end effect of those exact same ills that purge a society. So Allah teaches us about the capacity of our evil and how to avoid the capacity of that evil.

And Allah Azawajal teaches us about how entire nations became utterly worthless because of their arrogance, because they did not give to the world except destruction, because they did not give to the except evil. And as a result of their tyranny, Allah not only removed them from the face of this earth and destroyed those nations that came before, but that which they used to take pride in has also gone along with them.

How many gardens and waterfalls and rivers and palaces did they leave behind? How many titles and pulpits and thrones did they leave behind? How many nations that bear stories of the destruction that was wreaked upon them by those nations? How many of those have now gone in the past and no one

even mentions these people anymore? No one even speaks about these tyrants anymore and no one even speaks about these nations anymore, because at the end of the day, Allah wants us to recognize as human beings the capacity of our evil.

The Lesson of Surah Al-Shams

That should we go down that path of arrogance and pride and tyranny, we end up in a dark place. And not just in a dark place in regards to the ramifications of the worldly outcome of that, but in a dark place in the way that history would view us, and ultimately a dark place in the way that we're resurrected in the hereafter. It's a very powerful sequence that Allah gives us in Surah Al-Shams.

Allah swears about the sun in its brightest moments, the moon in its brightest moments. Allah swears by everything that he has created in its most perfect manifestation. And then Allah mentions about the nafs, about the self, the individual.

Allah mentions that verily he who succeeds in purifying himself, that that is a person that ultimately succeeds. And those that corrupt and taint that which Allah gave them as pure books to start off with, as pure souls to start off with, will ultimately end up in failure. And then Allah moves on to the story of the destruction of a powerful nation.

And what the scholars mentioned there is that Allah speaks about the capacity of the individual, that when a person fails to purify themselves, and when they become engulfed in arrogance, that the ultimate result of that, even if there are worldly tools of success, is failure and destruction. And those people are placed into not just a dark place in the hereafter, but a dark place as far as history is concerned as well.

2. The Capacity for Good

Allah talks about the capacity of our good. How single individuals built entire nations and left behind glorious legacies because of their humility. And if you pay attention to the Qur'anic discourse, what you'll notice is that usually Allah talks about how entire powerful nations, as nations, were rendered irrelevant because of their arrogance.

But then Allah extols a single individual who sought to challenge that corruption and sought to bring goodness to this world. And how Allah built out of them nations because of their humility in the singular. So Allah will talk about the destruction of an entire nation.

But then he'll also say, that Abraham, peace be upon him, was a nation in and of himself. That what he brought to the world in terms of goodness, the khair that came from that one person, it was as if an entire ummah was producing that good. And all of the ummahs that come from Ibrahim Alayhis Salaam, that trace themselves back to Abraham, peace be upon him. All of that good is traced back to this one person.

The Focus on Individuals in Success Stories

So Allah talks about the capacity of our evil when he teaches us about history. Even if you have a huge nation, and even if you have a seemingly endless arsenal of tools for power and success in this world, that eventually it ends in failure.

But then Allah talks about the individual who might have that entire world standing against them. But because of their humility and because of their pursuit of greatness, the capacity of their good is that they themselves would parallel an entire nation. And so Allah focuses with the success stories in the Quran on the individuals.

We hear about the prophets, we hear about people that strove for goodness, people that might not have been deemed successful in this world. Asiya radiyaAllahu ta'ala Anha Alayhi Salaam, certainly in this world, in her life cycle as a believer, did not attain glory and success in the worldly sense, but she's extolled in the Quran. She's held up to a certain standard.

3. What Could Have Been

Allah also, as he talks about what became of arrogant nations, Allah talks about what could have happened with arrogant nations, had they not been arrogant. So for example, Allah azzawajal will say (أَلَمْ تَرَ كَيْفَ فَعَلَ رَبُّكَ بِعَادٍ - "Do you not see what Allah has done with the nation of Aad?") But then Allah also talks about what could have become of them, had they believed, had they used the goodness that they had, the strength that they had in this world, the tools that Allah gave them of greatness, for greater good.

When Allah says, (وَلَوْ أَنْ أَهْلَ الْقُرَى آمَنُوا وَاتَّقَوْا - if only those people would have believed and been pious.") The saddest thing about many of the evil actors in history and the evil empires in history, is what could have become of them of good, had they used the qualities that Allah gave them for good. And that's true of us as individuals as well.

The Example of Umar and Abu Jahl

So many of us, you see a person that's a spokesperson for evil, and you say subhanAllah, if only that person was instead a spokesperson for good. It's what the Prophet saw in Umar and Abu Jahl, as they were attacking the Prophet peace be upon him. He saw qualities in them.

(اللهم أعز الإسلام بأحد العمرين - "Allahumma izzal Islam biahadil Umarain, O Allah give victory to Islam through one of the two Umars,") Abu Jahl, Amr ibn Hisham and Umar ibn al-Khattab radiyaAllahu ta'ala anhu. He saw qualities in them even as they were both oppressing him and his nation of good. If only they would refine those tools and use them for good.

And so sometimes we ask ourselves what if? And when you look in history you say what if? What could have become had this powerful ruler used that which Allah gave them the way that Suleyman alayhi salam used the blessings that Allah gave him. As opposed to been intoxicated by his own arrogance the way that Firaun was intoxicated by his own arrogance and eventually rendered humiliated and irrelevant with absolutely no legacy of good to leave behind for us.

The Qur'anic Method Applied to Islamic History

All of this and Allah really does not talk about the irrelevant details. We don't have the interesting details in the Quran of most of the stories that are told to us of the past. We have the important details in the Quran of the histories of peoples that came before us.

We don't have the things that would prolong the conversation because you can start to fill in all these blanks and they were five or six or seven and they came from this place or that place or that place. But what we do have is an instruction manual to inspire ourselves to act in accordance with our greater selves.

The Reality of Our History

Our history is not perfect. We have stories in our history of people that abused their power for evil. And we have plenty of present examples of people in our Ummah that abused their power for evil today.

But all of those people that do so do not do so in imitation of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. They do so in rejection of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. On the other hand, we have people and nations and empires in our history that were able to not only make progress for the Ummah but make progress for the world.

Our Debt to Islamic Civilization

And this civilization that we live in today has a great debt that it owes to the Islamic civilizations of the past. So when Donald Trump talks about taming continents, let's remember that perhaps we would not be civilized had it not been for the contribution of Muslims that came before us here in the United States or anywhere else in the world in the previous generations.

So we recognize that we have our stories of people that rejected Islam even though they claimed it and abused perhaps even in its name and carried out massacres in rejection of what the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam taught, carried out religious suppression in rejection of what the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam taught, carried out tyranny in rejection of what the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam taught.

The True Islamic Legacy

But we have people in our Ummah that established endowments to not just take care of Muslims or non-Muslims but even of the animals that existed in Islamic territories because of what the

Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam taught. Muslims that innovated in the fields of science and mathematics and medicine and education because of what the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam taught. Muslims that gave us so much because of what the Qur'an and the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam gave to them and you don't have to use some far-fetched methodology to trace the actions of good that happened in our history to that direct inspiration of the Qur'an and the Sunnah of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam because it's explicit, it is pristine and it's something that we can celebrate.

When the first university in the world was started by a Muslim woman, that's something we can celebrate and we can directly trace that to the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam saying that knowledge is incumbent upon every Muslim man and every Muslim woman.

Two False Narratives to Reject

1. The Western Narrative: Islam as Barbarism

The powers that be on our side of the world in the West want us to believe that the Muslim world is a place of barbarity because of Islam and that the only way that we can tame that part of the world is through carrying out our imperialistic ambitions.

The only way that we can deal with these Muslims is by bombing them into submission because their way of life threatens our way of life and if you don't want America to become a place of regression the way that that place is a place of regression then you better kill them off before they come here and they hurt you. So it's to portray Islam as always being a source of regression, as always being a source of barbarity and we have to push back on that and we push back on that by educating ourselves about our own history, by not doing what Malcolm said in allowing our enemies to teach us about our history, by recognizing that just as the African American in this country was taught that slavery was the beginning of their history rather than an interruption of their history what exists in the Muslim world today of client kingdoms that are in fact controlled by the kingdoms that exist on this side of the world are interruptions of our history and not the beginnings of our history.

The Prerequisites for Pushback

So you push back, push back. You can't do that unless you study it yourself. You can't do that unless you know it yourself. You can't approach the present with confidence if you have all these questions about your past.

You have to dig into that and you have to learn that. You have to be willing to dedicate the time to that, not to study history in a way that would make us complacent, that would justify us being idle today by saying that well we used to be great once upon a time but by saying that just as there is something to be replicated of the Qur'an in the person of the Prophet (ﷺ) and to be replicated of

the Prophet (ﷺ) in the persons of the companions and to be replicated in the generation that came after them and the generation that came after them that the way that we actually challenge our presence we directly trace to the inspiration from our past.

The way that we talk about paving a better future not just for Muslims but for all of humanity is directly traced to the inspiration and the instruction that we get from our past and so yes here in the west we are taught that Muslims are barbaric, that the reason why the Muslim world is in shambles is because of their Islam and their insistence on a degraded way of life, on an inferior way of thinking as opposed to their rejection of Islam.

2. The Eastern Narrative: Islam as Impotence

But I'm going to also end with this because I think it's important too. The powers that exist in the west want to tame Muslims. The powers that exist in the east want to tame Islam itself.

They also want us to forget our history. They also want to teach us that Islam is a religion of impotence that never challenges structures of oppression around it because God forbid tyrants feel unsafe in their tyranny. God forbid the interests that plague and pillage the Muslim world feel like the people there will be moved by the religion of justice that's been given to them to challenge the oppression that exists in their own governments and exists in the governments that control their governments.

The False Narrative of Quietism

And so they also put out a narrative about our Islam that's untrue to it. They also put out a narrative that the only way forward for Muslims and this is part of our history that we are to be a people of quietism, that we're not supposed to challenge the ruler because apparently challenging the rulers makes you a person of khuruj, makes you one of the khawarij rather than the greatest mujahid as the Prophet (ﷺ) said, a word of truth spoken in the face of an oppressor.

That teaches you that your religion gives you absolutely no backbone, that your religion absolutely gives you no spine, that you should sit there and be silent and tolerate not only their oppression of our Muslim brothers and sisters that exist overseas but their infiltration of our Muslim communities here as they exist over here to make us as subjugated and as submissive as they have done to their own populations with the oppression that they carry out against them.

Our Response: Authentic Knowledge

And we reject that. We refuse to accept that our religion teaches us to be silent in the face of oppression when we have a Prophet (ﷺ) that shook up the world and that inspired a man by the name of Muhammad Ali in the United States to shake up the world too. That's not our religion.

That's not our religion. But you have to know your history. So when those fools come to you and tell you that well don't you know that Abdullah bin Umar was quiet during fitnah, that Abdullah bin Umar believed that people should accept subjugation, that if you don't want to become another Syria, don't question your rulers.

Instead give them unqualified praise. Put them on a pedestal. That if you don't want to be like the Khawarij who the Prophet (ﷺ) called the lowest people of hellfire, don't embroil the ummah in what ended up becoming a massive trial and tribulation.

Here's how you push back on that. You know your heroes better. Our companions that we look to for inspiration, whether it was Abdullah bin al-Zubayr or Abdullah bin Umar, all of them were unambiguous about the injustices and the oppressions that exist in their time periods.

They differed only on the methods with dealing with that oppression. If Abdullah bin Umar was a tool of al-Hajjaj, then why did al-Hajjaj poison him and kill him? And so when you come today and you try to present the history of Islam as a tamed religion that does not challenge the evil around it, because God forbid another form of evil will take place, and instead accepts a humiliated position for the Quran and the Sunnah, then you are no different than the people over here that say that Muslims need to be tamed. You're just doing it in a very different way, but the result is the very same, that you are altering Islam into a religion that does not challenge the world around it to change, but instead acquiesces to the worst elements of the world, whether they emanate from the Muslim world or otherwise.

The Resilience of Islam

That's not our Islam. We reject that Islam. That has nothing to do with our Prophet (ﷺ). We have a way of challenging oppression without becoming oppressors ourselves.

We have a way of doing that here in the United States. We have a way of doing that in the Muslim world as well, and dear brothers and sisters, you cannot push back on those narratives if you don't know the narrative of your religion properly, or else the mouthpieces of that oppression will take you on a ride, will confuse you, and embroil you in all sorts of doubt because you'll be left wondering, is that what my religion is?

The Example of Imam Malik and the Ka'bah

And I leave you with this ending. Imam Malik he was asked about changing the Kaaba back to its original structure, and my time is up so I'm not going to go too much longer at all, about changing the Kaaba to its original structure because it used to have a rectangular shape as Ibrahim (AS) built it, but because Quraysh in rebuilding it did not have enough money, or halal money, and we'll get to that later,

they ended up building instead the semicircle, the Hatim, to maintain the area of the Kaaba, but at the same time they did not build the Kaaba back in its original structure.

Abdullah ibn Zubayr returned it to the origins of Ibrahim (AS), then came Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan and then he returned it back to the cube shape, and then Harun al-Rashid comes to Imam Malik and he says to Imam Malik why don't we take it back now to the origins of Ibrahim (AS), and Imam Malik he said that I did not want, do not do so, because I do not want the Kaaba to become a toy in the playgrounds of rulers to come. It is not to become a tool or a toy to be manipulated to fit anybody's corrupt agendas.

Our Islam is resilient and the reason why it was able to change history is because history could not tame our religion.

Conclusion

Our religion is strong enough, is resilient enough to resist the autocrats that claim to represent it overseas and to resist those that try to tame it here at home in the United States of America.

We ask Allah (جل جلاله) to revive that greatness within our ummah and within us. Allahumma ameen.

Jazakumullahu khayran. Wassalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh.