The Pitfalls of Dawah OR Why Don’t People Embrace Islam Immediately
By Yasir Qadhi | 2026-01-08T06:00:52.138211+00:00 | Topic: Iman
The Pitfalls of Dawah: Why Don't People Embrace Islam Immediately
Shaykh Dr. Yasir Qadhi
Opening and Introduction
In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. We have learned a lot, alhamdulillah, giving dawah collectively for the last few decades in this land.
I want to begin by actually talking a little bit about my own experiences. I grew up in the 80s, and the first exposure I had to quote-unquote dawah was none other than Ahmed Deedat and the Deedat videos, which I'm sure many of us in this audience are very familiar with. Alhamdulillah, I even met Sheikh Deedat a few times, and no doubt he was a type of influence on me.
The Misconception About Dawah
At the same time, watching Sheikh Deedat's videos gave us a type of presumption about dawah that I think needs to be corrected in hindsight. He did a great job, may Allah bless and reward him, but a lot has happened since 1985. And we have been collectively giving dawah in this part of the world for almost a generation now.
The impression that we had, the impression that I had definitely, and I know I speak on behalf of many people, was that all that we needed to do was to have a strong personality, good debate skills, and solid arguments. If you had solid arguments, and you could take on these Jimmy Swaggarts and all of these other people out there, then the whole world will convert to Islam once they hear of your solid arguments. And if we could only go to a training school by Sheikh Deedat, and come out many replicas quoting scripture and what not, then:
"All of mankind would convert."
The Reality of Dawah Experience
But you see, in my particular case, I actually did go to study at university. You start giving dawah, and you realize that no one converts. You preach and you teach, you talk and you give lectures, months, years go by, and the people that you're talking to, by and large, they don't convert because of your dawah.
They don't convert because of your solid arguments. In fact, the people who convert have nothing to do with you. They come because they're interested in something else, and they track you down, not the other way around.
They knock doors on your masjid, and they say such and such happened, I'm interested in Islam. Now that they're this close, then you come into the picture, and you speak to them a week, a month, and then inshallah ta'ala you give them the shahada. But it wasn't your Deedat arguments that converted them.
Lessons from the Prophetic Example
I think that we need to, it's about time, and again, I mean, this is the first time I'm also teaching something to this frankness, but I think that it is time that we move beyond the platitudes, move beyond the clichéd responses, and got to some real psychological issues of dawah.
Because the fact of the matter, dear Muslims who are attending a dawah workshop, if solid arguments and good personality were enough to convince the world of the truth of Islam, the Quraysh would have been convinced of the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم) as soon as the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم) opened his mouth with the kalima. But was that the case?
If all you need was to attend a training workshop, and to be spoon-fed the right answer, and to have the solid arguments, could anybody be better than our Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم)? If all you needed was to have a good hujjah, Ibrahim (عليه السلام) had the best hujjah:
And did his people convert after Ibrahim's hujjah? It did not happen.
The Political Reality of Islamic Expansion
Therefore, we need to actually have a very frank reorientation about how we're giving dawah, and what is the best mechanism for giving dawah. Remember that even our Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم), it took him 23 years of constant preaching, and even then, it wasn't his arguments that won the Quraysh over at the end of the day. It was the political conquest of Makkah.
It was the political conquest of Makkah that eventually caused the leadership of the Quraysh, and the people of Makkah en masse:
Ironically, dear brothers and sisters, even at the conquest of Makkah, those leaders converted grudgingly. They did not do so willingly. Abu Sufyan to the very end, and those other leaders, it wasn't an immediate acceptance.
When they converted, they were in a gray area for a period of time, as the books of Sira mention. And it took a while, even Allah mentions those who converted at that time:
"Iman has not yet entered your hearts."
The Limitations of Intellectual Arguments
So if converting people, and giving dawah was as easy as memorizing two second responses to the shubuhaat, to the arguments that come, then the whole world would have been Muslim for 14 centuries.
We need to get rid of this mindset, because what happens is, my dear brothers and sisters, when we have this simplistic mindset, what happens is when we start giving dawah, and nothing happens, at the very least, our Islam gets deflated. Like what's going on? Why aren't people coming to Islam? I'm saying what I was taught to say. These are the responses I was told.
It will dampen our own enthusiasm, our spirit to give dawah. So we need to be very frank here. Strong arguments by themselves will never win converts.
Solid logic in and of itself, will never gain hundreds or thousands of people converting to Islam. There's only a very small segment of mankind, where intellectual arguments works with them. A very small slither of mankind.
Psychological Barriers to Dawah
We also need to be aware of some of the psychological problems of giving dawah to others. I'm gonna mention two or three primary issues that we should all be aware of. Because we don't want to dampen our own spirit.
We don't want to astaghfirullah, even harm our own iman. And I have met people, a'udhu billah, that they have given dawah for decades or years, and then they get so frustrated that they even just lose track of religiosity.
1. Groupthink
The biggest problem that is mentioned in the Quran, and our psychologists fully understand, the technical term for it, or the mass term for it is groupthink. This is the biggest problem.
Groupthink is, when you are born and raised in a group, you will think like the group. It's very simple, right? When you're born and raised in a group, you will think like the group. And you will assume that that group's relative orientation, standards, mechanisms, mannerisms, culture, theology, everything that you associate with your own group, that is automatically the default.
So, psychologically, this is well known, and that's why the Quran mentions, every group said the same thing to their prophets. Who are you? Our fathers did this, our culture did this. Who do you think you guys are?
The point is that we need to be cognizant of this issue called groupthink and understand it is very, very difficult to persuade someone to break away from the group. And in fact, the fact of the matter, at some level, we are all guilty of groupthink.
2. In-Group Bias
The second thing to be aware of is something that psychologists have called in-group bias. In-group bias basically means, and again we're all guilty of it, there's nothing wrong with it, it's human beings do this. In-group bias, as the term implies, refers to the fact that you are always biased towards your own group.
You make excuses for your own group. And you look positively at your own group, versus those who are outside of it. That what your group does, if the same thing were to be done by somebody outside, you would problematize it. But when it's done by your side, your people, your group, in your minds, you find a justification.
Now why is this important? Because we are the other when it comes to this society. And things that our religion has done, or the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم) has done, or has happened in the Sahaba's time, this is not in-group bias. We have in-group bias when we look at those things.
3. Different Perceptions of the Seerah
What is our perception of the seerah versus their perception of the seerah? When I ask the average Muslim, when I talk to the average Muslim, and I say to them, describe for me, the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم). Or I ask the average Muslim, tell me your top five incidents from the seerah. What do you think they're thinking about?
You're thinking of his mercy, of his smile, of how he was loved to the sahaba. When you talk about the incidents of the seerah, you're gonna think about the Ta'if one, how he stood it. You're gonna think about Mecca and how he forgave. And alhamdulillah for that. That's who we are. But we need to be intelligent enough to understand.
When we give dawah to other people, do you think that is the image they have of the seerah? We have a disconnect. Our narrative of the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم), our image of our Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم), is totally disconnected from their image.
The True Nature of Dawah
Our primary goal in dawah, my dear brothers and sisters, should not be to be able to memorize these two-minute sound bites, these three-minute clips, that we can respond to with these deep-seated questions.
In my humble opinion, dawah is not primarily done via the tongue, via intellectual arguments, via solid, logical, rational debate. It doesn't done that way. It's not done that way.
I was impacted by Deedat. Zakir Naik is somebody I consider to be a friend. I was with him many, many times. But the brutal fact of the matter is those tactics did not convert hundreds and thousands of people. That's just the fact. What it did was, it reaffirmed our iman.
Conversion: A Psychological Process
On the contrary, conversion to another faith is not usually an intellectual process. It is a psychological one. It is an emotional one. When you convert, it's not generally speaking because of a deep-seated philosophical debate that you had with somebody else. Not at all.
Look around you. Who converts in our own community? The number one group of converts are those married to Muslims. That's the number one group.
The number two group are those who, they're searching for a higher truth. They are in themselves, they're not satisfied with what's going on in the world. And for example, prisoners is an example of this. Why prisoners? Because they've been cut off from any other source of entertainment.
And then you obviously have the few, the very few, who are intellectually brave in their own cultures and communities. They're not satisfied with their religions. They're not satisfied with the status quo.
The Role of Akhlaq in Dawah
Or it might be a psychological issue. They meet a Muslim at work. And this guy is intriguing. He's got this peace coming from him. Where did that come from? This person seems so calm. His manners. This akhlaq. The sakinah, the haybah.
See, this is what dawah is. Much more than just that two-minute clip. You being your authentic self.
You look at the early converts. You look at the sahaba. Abu Bakr as-Siddiq didn't need rational arguments. He knew the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم) to be true. See, that's what you call iman. Because of what? The akhlaq. The love. The kindness. Much more important than these highfalutin debates and what not.
Much more important. Your impact at the human level. At the individual level. The raw iman that you're exuding.
The Fitrah: Our Secret Weapon
We talked about the paradigm shift. How do we get the paradigm shift? The paradigm shift is to tap into their fitrah. The fitrah is our secret weapon that Allah has given us.
Everybody has a fitrah. Everybody. Islam and the fitrah are like the opposites of a magnet. They attract one another. Islam and the fitrah, they are like the opposites of the magnet. The problem comes, their fitrah is covered up.
And our Islam is covered up because of how far we are from Islam. Their fitrah is covered up because of culture, because of their religion, because our Prophet ﷺ said:
(Bukhari 1385)
"Every child is born upon the fitrah, then his parents make him Jewish, Christian, or Magian."
So their fitrah is covered up. We need to be pure Muslims. That's why I said, this is, I would say 1% of dawah. But anyway, let's say 10% of dawah. All of this intellectual stuff, 1 to 10% of dawah.
90 to 99% of dawah is us essentially exuding raw iman, being ourselves, our akhlaq, what Islam teaches us to be. And something is gonna spark in them.
Addressing Common Criticisms of Islam
Now, does that mean, that there is no point in bringing up these questions of the seerah, and then answering them? Obviously not. We will do that. But the point is that, we need to be pragmatic. The primary reason for bringing up these problematic issues from the seerah, and then teaching the responses, the primary reason, actually believe it or not, is not for dawah to non-Muslims, but to reaffirm the faith of our own Muslim men and women.
Important Principles for Dawah
Be careful, dear Muslims, of ever, ever, ever saying something about our faith because you're embarrassed, you change it. Be careful. You would rather somebody reject the faith because of a truth, than you say a falsehood, and you lie about the faith.
Remember, you are a salesperson for the religion. You're not the owner of it. The owner is up there. You do not have the right to change the product. You do not have the right to alter what is being marketed.
"Your job is to convey, and Allah's job is to judge."
1. Copying from Previous Scriptures
The first objection or the accusation is that the Prophet ﷺ, they say, he copied the message from the previous prophets and previous scriptures. They say he took this from the Old and New Testament.
Of the most obvious responses for this is, in fact we say, of course he did. What's wrong with that? He's from the same line of prophets. You just pull the rug out from under them and you say, yes, he did. And that proves he's from the same line of prophets.
The fact that a person who didn't have an education and could not read and write and was living in a culture far disconnected from the Judeo-Christian culture of the time is able to bring forth that culture in Arabia. In vivid detail. Is itself a miracle.
The Quran mentions this miracle. Allah says:
"This is from the knowledge of the unseen that we reveal to you. Neither you nor your people knew these stories before this."
2. Raiding Caravans
The second question: How do you explain and is it true that the Prophet ﷺ allowed the companions to raid and loot the caravans? Was raiding something that was allowed? Did they raid and loot the caravans of Quraysh?
We simply say that of course he did. That's what you do when your people kill you, persecute you, torture you. What was the Boston Tea Party? What did they do? What did the founding fathers of this country do? Whose property did they destroy? When you put it in their paradigm, say well that's what our founding fathers in Medina did. What's wrong with that?
The French resistance against the Germans. What did the resistance do? Did they throw flowers at the Nazis? What did they do? They attacked the supply lines. It's exactly what they did. They went underground. It's a war. What do you do in war? Simple as that.
3. Accusations of Mental Instability
The third question: Isn't it obvious they say that your Prophet was either possessed by the devil Christians would say, or crazy.
As for the claim that he was mentally unstable, this is pretty easy to refute. No one ever accused him of being mentally unstable. He lived a very stable life in every facet from being a leader to being a family man to being a friend. You can't just be unstable in one aspect and mentally stable in every other facet of life.
As for the claim that he was inspired by the devil, in my humble opinion this is a matter of theology. We would expect a person of a Christian background to say this because from their perspective that is what the devil would want somebody to do.
You gotta go indirectly and talk about Tawheed versus Trinity. That's what you need to do. Get to the crux of the matter which is: is there one God or are there three Gods? Is Jesus the son of God?
4. The Age of Aisha
Number 4 is again one of the most common ones that we get and this is the awkward one of the age of Aisha.
I cringe when Muslims want to go back and reinvent history. The claim that Aisha was miraculously 18 - what a coincidence that it's just so happens to be the legal age of consent in modern America. I cringe. Really I cringe.
You can go down the historical route. You can quote example after example of child marriages. Isabella daughter of the king of France was eight years old when Richard II of England married her. Baldwin III king of Jerusalem during the crusades married the niece of the Byzantine Empire when she was 12 years old.
You can also go down the biological route. Science has documented that the age of puberty has gone up in the last 120 years. Therefore, extrapolating back fourteen hundred years, we say what's the problem? And that's Aisha when she reached puberty.
But you seem to be concerned about her age. She was never concerned. She never complained. She lived another 50 years. She never found it problematic. She had nothing but the fondest memories. Are you going to care about her more than she cared about herself?
5. The Banu Qurayzah
Issue number 5: The highly problematic massacre of the Banu Qurayzah. This is one of those issues of the seerah where we get a lot of back and forth. The massacre of 700 people from the tribe of Banu Qurayzah.
They are a bunch of traitors. What more do you want? They did the biggest crime known to any political system. What do you do to traitors in your ranks? Every society does this. You summarily execute traitors at times of war.
In fact our Prophet ﷺ did not do that. He did not summarily execute them. He surrounded them. In his generosity he said to them you tell me what should I do. And they said choose another judge not you. So he said who do you recommend? They said Sa'd ibn Mu'adh.
Who chose their own judge? They did. Not the Prophet ﷺ. They were the ones who chose their arbitrator.
6. Multiple Wives
Point number 6: This is the standard canard goes back to the Crusades. Their prophet is a sensual man who has many wives.
I think the only way to do this is really just to say this is a blessing that Allah gave him and he deserved it. End of story. He is the best human being ever to walk the face of this earth and Allah allowed him what he didn't allow anybody else. He deserved it.
Allah says in the Quran:
"This concession to marry multiple women - exclusive for you apart from the believers."
"We know what we have made obligatory for them."
Allah is saying I know what has been made fard for them. Allah says I've allowed for you what I haven't allowed for anybody else. This is in the Quran. Why don't we accept Allah's gift to the Prophet ﷺ?
There is nothing to defend here. There is no problem in the first place. Allah gifted him. He deserved it. If anybody deserved it he did.
The fact that all of our mothers genuinely admired him ﷺ, genuinely loved him, genuinely respected him and we can't even with one woman we can't get to that level - and he had so many wives and all of them had nothing but the utmost admiration - that is a miracle. That doesn't happen anywhere else anywhere.
When Allah revealed in the Quran go give them the choice:
"I'll divorce you and give you the world or stay with me and live difficult lives" - how many chose divorce and to be given the world? Zero. That's the miracle there.
Conclusion: The Reality of Modern Dawah
Anytime these issues are raised, all of these 7, 8, 9 issues - anytime they're raised, pivot them into why we admire this man and why we believe in the faith rather than spending half an hour talking about the wives of the Prophet ﷺ, talking about the Banu Qurayzah. Waste of time. Give the two second response and then say but you know what, for me that's not how I view our Prophet ﷺ, that's not what I think of him. Do you wanna know why? Now you get into the our paradigm, the Abu Bakr model, the Iman model and you talk about Allah and the Quran and the messenger and all of the positive of Islam.
I hope that there was some benefit. If not, you can blame Talha for inviting me. I hope that any other questions you have - actually I'm in this community so you can come to me.
Embody the femininity of Islam through your haya and show them what it means to be a female muslima in a male world through your gaze, through your modesty, through your dignified interactions and hope that something clicks in their fitrah.
Jazakumullah Khair. Assalamualaikum Warahmatullahi Wabarakatuh.