Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar…

 
Bismillah al-Rahman al-Raheem

 
Praise be to Allah, and peace and mercy upon his beloved prophet Muhammad.

 
Dear brothers and sisters, I will be delivering this short Eid khutba mostly in English today for the benefit of those who do not understand Arabic, as the purpose of a khutba is to convey a message to the listeners.

Dear brothers and sisters, the blessed day of Eid is upon us again, a day of celebration for the muhammadan community. The word community in Arabic is ummah, and Allah subhanahu wa ta`ala says in the Holy Quran that:

وَإِنَّ هَذِهِ أُمَّتُكُمْ أُمَّةً وَاحِدَةً وَأَنَا رَبُّكُمْ فَاتَّقُونِ

“This ummah of yours is one ummah, and I am your Lord”. So the unity of the final community is immortalised in the Quran, and can never be challenged. Wherever Muslims are, in the east or the west, from morocco to India to Uganda to Europe to America, we will always be one community. This allegiance to Islam takes precedence before all other allegiances, before nation or tribe or family.

 
Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar…

 
The enemies of Islam have been instigating us to fight amongst ourselves for centuries now, so we weaken ourselves and fall prey to their nefarious plans. The old colonial strategy of ‘divide and conquer’, so familiar to us, yet we keep falling into the same trap and playing the same game. Today, it is the Shi`a that they want us to fight - our Muslim brothers, the shi`a. And, yes, I say that deliberately, our ‘brothers’ the shi`a. The fact that some of you find this difficult to swallow demonstrates how the plotting of the enemies of Islam has infiltrated us so effectively. It is not me but Allah subhanahu wa ta`ala who said: “the believers are just brethren”, and the Prophet  who stated in the saheeh hadith “A Muslim is the brother of another Muslim”, and the Shi`a have not been declared as non-Muslims by the scholars of ahl al-sunnah wal jamaa`ah in our long history. They are a deviant sect, but nevertheless our scholars did not throw them out of the fold of Islam. Therefore, by the prophetic definition, they are our brothers in the faith. One day, when one of the deviant Khawarij sect stood up in front of Sayyiduna Ali when he was giving khutba, and shouted abuse at him, the Muslims with Sayyiduna Ali were going to capture him and kill him, but Sayyiduna Ali (karram-Allahu wajhah) told them to release the man, saying “hum ikhwanuna, baghaw alayna”,“They are our brothers who have rebelled against us”. Look at the wisdom of Sayyiduna Ali. These khawarij are the same ones who fought against him and killed many Muslims, and eventually actually assassinated Sayyiduna Ali himself, but he was still able to see that they were Muslims, although no doubt they had a distorted understanding of Islam.

 
Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar…

 
Today, the ikhwanis are fighting the shias, the salafis are fighting the sufis, the deobandis and braelvis cannot stand the sight of each other, and the list goes on and on. How easy it has become for our enemies to manipulate us. How easy it must be for them to send infiltrators amongst us posing as scholars or religious leaders and leading our youth astray. This is why we need our sincere young brothers and sisters to go out and study authentic Islam, the traditional understanding of ahl a-sunnah Islam which has been preserved in thousands of books written over a thousand years when Islam was the dominant superpower in the world, and preserved until today in the hearts of living teachers around the world.

  
Today, I would like to address all of my brothers and sisters here who restrict their Islam to just the Eid prayers or just the Friday prayers, and do not practise any of the remaining religious obligations. I would like to say to you that it is for Allah to dictate to us what our obligations are, and not for us to dictate to Allah what our obligations should be. Allah is the one who created you from non-existence, He gave you life, He gave you a brain, a heart, intelligence, He gave you your feelings, your emotion, your form, your shape, your physical body. He gave you your eyes, ears, sense of smell, taste and touch. He was covered you and showered you with all of His bounties – “IF you count the favours of God, you will never be able to enumerate them”. How many of us would give up our eyes in exchange for a million pounds, or a hundred million? No-one but a fool. We do not think about the value of such things that Allah has given us for free. Yet how ungrateful we are when Allah subhanahu wa ta`ala has commanded us to pray five times a day, but we say we cannot do this. He commanded us to fast, but it is too difficult for us. We want to dictate what our religion should be, as if we know better than Allah subhanahu wa ta`ala Himself?

 
To such brothers and sisters, I would say, it is time to come back into the obedience of Allah right now, don’t leave it until tomorrow, because that is shaytan’s game with you. Beware of his tricks, for he is our enemy, the enemy of mankind. He will tell you that you will start practising when you retire, but by then it will be too late for you. As people get older, they become rigid in their thinking and habits, and that is Shaytan’s game with you. You won’t be able to change your lifelong habits when you get older, and by then it’s too late – you’re already on a slippery slope into the Hell-fire. May Allah save you all and myself from the tricks of Shaytan and forgive us all our sins.

When you neglect your religious duties, your imaan gets very weak. Because imaan grows stronger through acts of obedience and grows weaker through acts of disobedience. This is an unavoidable fact. When your imaan becomes weak, you are like the dry twig in the ground. When the strong wind comes, you will break. You will not be able to face the tribulation that must come to all of us in this life, because that is the very purpose of this life: to be tested in good times and bad times. We ask Allah subhanahu wa ta`ala to make the tribulations easy for us.

 
You will break like a dry twig, whereas the true believer with firm imaan is like a green plant. When the wind blows hard, he may bend, but he will always come back up, he will always bounce back, because he knows that all tribulations are ultimately tests from his beloved Lord, and in the end his reward will be jannah if he is patient. May Allah make us firm in the face of tribulations.

 
Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar…

 
To those of my brothers and sisters here today who perform their daily prayers and private acts of worship but believe that Islam should be confined to their homes, I would like to say that whenever a guided community gives up the struggle to establish social justice, they are doomed. The Quran says:

إِلَّا تَفْعَلُوهُ تَكُنْ فِتْنَةٌ فِي الْأَرْضِ وَفَسَادٌ كَبِيرٌ

“If you do not do it [ie struggle to establish the religion of God], there will be tribulation in the earth and huge corruption”.

The earliest surahs of the Quran, revealed in Makkah, which were setting out the absolute core values of the new teaching, emphasised again and again the responsibility to social justice, of feeding the poor, taking care of orphans and protecting baby girls. These are the core teachings of Islam:

“Have you seen the one who denies the deen? That is the one who neglects the orphan, and does not strive hard to feed the poor”. The quran rejected the old social order where the rich and powerful oppressed the poor and weak. Islam demanded justice and protection of blood, honour and property for all people.

In the age of the new world order, many hundreds of millions of citizens of the global village suffer under the injustices and tyranny of political and economic oppression. It is up to us Muslims as carriers of mankind’s guidance to strive to establish the justice of Islam. This is a binding obligation, not an option.

We must realise that those suffering from the oppression of this world order are not only Muslims but also the majority of ordinary poor people of all nations.

For many of us who live in the wealthy western capitals of the world, this suffering seems far away. Many of you have driven here to today in your Mercedes and Lexuses. The love of this lower world has overwhelmed us and we have become those who run after it and it destroys them as it destroyed those before them – as the Prophet  warned many years ago. He said that this was what he feared most for his ummah, that they would lust after worldly pleasures, and he also said that this very disease would be the cause for their weakness at the end of time when other nations would come against them and devour them just as people invite each other to a feast. As he said in the famous hadith when asked what would be the weakness of Muslims in those days, he replied: “love of the world and dislike of death”.  

 
Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar…

 
To those brothers and sisters here today who claim that they follow the quran and sunnah directly without the need for anyone’s interpretation, I would like to say: beware of making a mockery of the deen of Allah subhanahu wa ta`ala. To give a hukm directly from the revelation, you must be a qualified scholar. This fact was recognised by all our great sunni scholars for over a thousand years of Islamic history. And I would say to you brothers and sisters: have some respect for the great legal schools of sunni Islam – the Hanafi, Shafai, Maliki and Hanbali schools of law that developed over the many centuries when Muslims were at their strongest. Do not forget that the great Muslim caliphates, empires and kingdoms of history, such as Abbasid, Mughal and Ottoman, all used these four legal schools to run the political, economic, and social affairs. The greatest minds and intellects of the muslim world contributed to the development of these madhhabs. Abandoning this awesome heritage is a dangerous move, which opens the shariah to abuse by unqualified half-baked pseudo-scholars, each one bringing out his own madhhab and creating chaos in the Islamic law.

To those young brothers and sisters here today who are full of enthusiasm for jihad and full of misery when they see the suffering of Muslims around the world, I would like to say: we need Muslims like you, who are concerned about ending oppression and injustice and are full of love of Allah and His messenger , and willing to lay down your lives in a moment if it was required, because you long for the next life and the meeting with your Lord. However, I would strongly caution you that you should not be used by those infiltrators, agents of the enemies of Islam. You need to gain knowledge of your deen first. You should know that jihad is a sacred duty, and like any duty, it has rules and regulations of how it is to be carried out. Just as before you pray, you need to learn the rules of purification and prayer, before you embark on the struggle for the deen, you need to study and understand. We need to understand the world we live in, we need to identify the enemy clearly, and then develop our strategy intelligently and with wisdom, and with a deep understanding of the founding principles of our religion. This requires study – that is why establishing our own educational institutions is one of our primary concerns at this time. Without knowledge and study, we cannot face any enemy, and we will continue to be mere pawns, as I am afraid most of the mujahideen in the second half of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first have been, in the hands of the powerful players on the world stage. As Shaykh Saeed Ramadhan al-Bouti, one of the leading scholars in Damascus, has said: “Jihad today is on three levels, the intellectual, the cultural and the physical.”

Today, we are living in a world in which its leaders are proclaiming the emergence of a “new world order”, a new global political and economic order under which all nations must submit. We must understand that today, we do not face a particular nation, but face this self-proclaimed global order, which serves the interests of the world’s ultra-rich elite.

This world order is a Satanic world order, as it is based on a rejection of all religious teachings. In the absence of religious constraints, the human being is left to nothing but his own reason, desires and passions, and the whisperings of the devil.

I do not claim to have all the answers, but I know some things that I have learnt through my study of Islam, and through sitting, by the blessing of Allah, with some real scholars, not half-baked preachers. Firstly, we should be absolutely clear that we are living in this country under a covenant of security, and the shariah firmly prohibits us from carrying out any type of violence or harm towards the people of this country, who have allowed us to live here with our families in safety. Any type of breaching of this trust would be considered a major sin and an act of treachery, which is forbidden by the Prophet . We are not saying this because we are in this country and we are scared. This is our shariah – we need to understand this. Secondly, you cannot fight a jihad against an enemy that can wipe out a whole city with a single bomb, unless you have a similar weapon. If you have an enemy that can wipe out your entire population if it chose to, and don’t think they wouldn’t do it if they ever needed to – they’ve used these weapons before, go and ask the Japanese, go and ask the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The shariah dictates that jihad must not be carried out if there is a danger that all the Muslims will perish, these are rules of engagement, the ahkam, that can be found in any book of Islamic law. I am not talking about any particular region right now, it is not my business to talk about specific places where fighting is taking place, it is the job of the emir in that place to make these decisions. But I am talking about general principles, general rules of engagement. Sometimes we must lay down the sword. Islam does not forbid this, Islam demands this.

 
And don’t blame the leaders and governments, we are all the same. Many of us have become biryani-eating armchair critics, endlessly sitting and having a go at the leaders of Muslim countries. But the blame is not just on our leaders, we are all to blame, our leaders are nothing but a reflection of ourselves. May Allah guide us. You get rid of one Saddam Hussein and a thousand saddams step up to take his place. Where are they coming from? They are not coming from a vacuum.

 
Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar…

 
We as Muslims in Britain, as the largest minority group in this country, must think carefully and intelligently about what our role is here.

In this country, we need to develop a Muslim intelligentsia, genuine Muslim scholars who are deeply versed in the traditional sunni teaching but having an intimate understanding of the modern world, who will be able to provide leadership for our community. We have to organise ourselves to further our interests at local and national levels. Islam has given us a powerful social institution of the Friday prayer in which the community gathers on a regular basis. The institution of the Friday prayer affords the Muslim community with the potential, with some simple organisation and foresight, to become a powerful lobby to further our common interests at home and abroad. No other community can boast of well over half a million of its members coming together on a weekly basis and listening to their religious leaders on the pulpits. We have to activate the Friday gatherings and utilise them as they are meant to be utilised to address the affairs of the community.

These are just some hints and ideas, and hints are sufficient for people of understanding. As for the dim-witted, no amount of talking will help.

May Allah subhanahu wa ta`ala give us tawfiq to learn this deen and understand it properly and Eid Mubarak to you all.

Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar…