Balancing Between Faith, Family & Community

Balancing Between Faith, Family, and Community

Imam Zaid Shakir

Opening Remarks

In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. All praise is due to Allah, Lord of the worlds. And peace and blessings be upon the Messenger and upon his family and companions. And peace be upon them all. Peace, mercy and blessings of Allah be upon you.

Alhamdulillah. First of all, I'd like to echo the sentiment that everyone has expressed from this podium and from the audience that we express our full support for Dr. Matson and extend our prayers that Allah gives us great success in leading this organization. I really didn't plan to speak tonight. I came to listen to Sheikh Hamza and he pulled me up here.

The Theme: Balance Between Faith, Family, and Community

So, I just very briefly looked at the banner in the back: Balancing Between Faith, Family, and Community. The few brief words I would like to say focus on that theme and focus on the fact that Islam has created a relationship, a natural and wholesome relationship between faith, family, and community.

The Need for a Balancer

But if there's going to be balance, there has to be a balancer. In 19th century European politics, there was the idea of a balance of power, the concert of Europe, and there was the idea of the balancer—the nation, usually Great Britain, that maintained the balance in this concert of Europe, the balance of power politics. So this balance between faith, family, and community requires a balancer, and that balancer is love.

The Relationship Between Love and Faith

It's very important for us to understand that Islam has created a natural relationship between love and faith, and there are many examples of this. I'll give you just one in the interest of time. The Prophet ﷺ said:

(Sahih Muslim 54)

"You will not enter paradise until you believe, and you will not believe until you love one another."

So there's a relationship between faith and love, and there are many examples of this, and that love serves as the glue that holds the family together. So love is the balancer.

Love as the Foundation of Family

Allah says in the Quran:

"And among His signs is that He created for you from yourselves spouses in order that you live together with them in peace and tranquility, and He's created between you love and mercy. Surely in this are signs for people who do reflect."

So one of the things that holds the family together is love وَجَعَلَ بَيْنَكُم مَّوَدَّةً وَرَحْمَةً"He made between you love and mercy." So this is the balancer, this is the link that makes faith real and actualizes it in the context of the family.

Love as the Foundation of Community

Similarly, in the community, love is the glue that holds the community together. The Prophet ﷺ said:

(Sahih Bukhari 6011, Sahih Muslim 2586)

"The parable of the believers in their mutual love for each other and their mutual affection for each other and their mutual mercy to each other is like a single body. When any limb aches, the whole body reacts with sleeplessness and fever."

So love is one of the things that holds the community together and makes that community a single integrated bodyفِي تَوَادِهِمْ "in their mutual love for each other."

Love as Motivation for Community Service

And love should be one of the greatest motivating factors that push us to go forward and work for the greater good of our community. Now when we say our community, we shouldn't limit ourselves. There are three basic levels, and all of you could probably think of many more, but I'll mention three basic levels of community that should be the focal point of our love and therefore the focal point of our good actions and good deeds and good healthy contribution to the betterment of this world that Imam Khatami was talking about.

The First Level: Our Neighborhood Community

The community of our neighborhoods, our immediate community, that should be a focus of our concern, and we should dedicate ourselves—as many of you are, but rededicate ourselves if we've already dedicated ourselves, and dedicate ourselves if we haven't dedicated ourselves yet—to addressing the nagging issues that affect our immediate community: issues related to poverty in many areas, drug addiction, alcoholism, broken homes, many, many different myriad problems, homelessness, as you heard from one of the earlier speakers at an earlier panel. So these are issues that it is our duty to address. It is our duty to address these issues.

The Importance of Sincere Intention

These are things, and as we said, not out of any effort, or as I said earlier at that panel, to gain benefit for our religion, not for any effort to show the superiority of our organization vis-à-vis other organizations, but for the sake of God and for the sake of our souls—for the sake of God and for the salvation of our souls.

Allah reminds us in the Quran:

"And there are some brothers sitting here from Miami, Florida—they're sitting here still because now I recognize them—who go out every weekend. They give free food to people in downtown Miami, and Allah says: 'They feed, for the love of Allah, the indigent, the orphan, and the captive, saying: We feed you for the sake of Allah alone. We desire no reward from you, nor thanks. We only fear a Day of distressful wrath from the side of our Lord.'"

The Principle of Altruism in Islam

And the prisoner—now some Muslims, they get a prisoner, they chop his head off. Allah says they feed the prisoner: وَيُطْعِمُونَ الطَّعَامَ عَلَىٰ حُبِّهِ مِسْكِينًا وَيَتِيمًا وَأَسِيرًا ‎﴿٨﴾‎ إِنَّمَا نُطْعِمُكُمْ لِوَجْهِ اللَّهِ لَا نُرِيدُ مِنكُمْ جَزَاءً وَلَا شُكُورًا : "We don't want any recompense, no compensation, no thanks. This is for God, it's not for organization, it's not for our Dawah, it's not so we'll have friends and allies if there's another terrorist attack who will watch our back. It's for the sake of God and God alone."

And this is something we as Muslims should introduce and reintroduce into this world: the idea of altruism, that everything doesn't have to have an ulterior motive, everything doesn't have to be spun to be viewed in our favor, that there are things we do for the sake of God, there are things we do because they're right and the right thing to do, and there are things we do because they are things that will benefit us in terms of saving our souls from the fire of hell.

إِنَّا نَخَافُ مِن رَّبِّنَا يَوْمًا عَبُوسًا قَمْطَرِيرًا

"We fear a day, we fear a day that will be so horrible, faces will be grotesquely distorted in light of the horror of that day-the fear of God."

The Second Level: Our National Community

So our immediate community. Secondly, our national community. There are themes that our national community is crying out for. One is knowledge and understanding. If there's a lack of understanding concerning the Muslim world in this country, and I'm sure all of us will admit that there is, then who is more rightful to provide knowledge and understanding than the Muslims who are located in this country?

So the challenge, the issue before us is not to complain of how ignorant the people are, but to go about the work of educating them and finding the means to educate them, and not relying on someone to put some scheme together that will facilitate our educating them, doing it ourselves, motivated by our desire to save this country from those who would destroy it.

The Third Level: The Global Community

And in the two minutes left, the global community. There are many issues, nagging issues confronting us in terms of the global community, and we should see ourselves as members of that global community, the human

family. And our membership in that community is no less important and no less valid and legitimate than our membership in our national community and our membership in our local community.

The Equal Value of All Human Life

And until we are as concerned and motivated—and again, introduce the idea or reinforce the idea that anyone in this global community who's unjustly killed, their life is just as valuable as someone who's a member of this national community who is unjustly killed. And a member of this national community who's unjustly killed, their life is just as valuable as our next door neighbor who might be murdered. It's all the same.

And until, as we move up, as we move up to the anniversary of September 11th, until we understand that those people who are shamelessly and unnecessarily murdered in Lebanon, in Gaza, in the West Bank, that their lives are just as valuable as those people who are shamelessly and unjustly murdered in those towers in New York—until it's all the same, we're not going to have the harmony that we envision in this global community. It's all the same.

Addressing Violence and Terrorism Justly

And we have to see it as being all the same, and we have to be just as motivated to address the factors that lead to that violence as the factors that lead to that violence over there. And we have to understand that that terrorism that was manifested on September 11th can never be adequately and realistically and justifiably addressed by the kinds of terrorism that has been visited upon the people of Iraq, the people of Palestine, the people of Lebanon, and other innocent people in this world.

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