KAEF on Humanistic Life Of The Prophet 8 Of 8 by The Usuli Institute

Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl provides original Quranic Commentary on Surah 111 Al Masad. Originally recorded on audio cassette and converted to digital.

Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl provides original Quranic Commentary on Surah 111 Al Masad. Originally recorded on audio cassette and converted to digital.

Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl provides original Quranic Commentary on Surah 111 Al Masad. Originally recorded on audio cassette and converted to digital.

Our anchor in our existence is revelation. This is, in principle, what defines a believing Muslim. A Muslim is the person who believes that this world has an Owner, and that this Owner is All-Knowing, All-Seeing, and purposefully and meaningfully engaged with the existence that the Owner owns. This existence has not come by accident or coincidence. Further, a Muslim believes that God has spoken, which is very critical in the existence of a consistent Muslim. The speech of God is what we refer to as revelation.

Revelation has its most direct and indisputable form in the text of the Quran, taken as a whole, and in any other source that informs us about God’s revelation and what that Owner intended to reveal to us. Revelation is of a quintessential role for a consistent Muslim who believes that God created existence for a purpose and that God cares about what God created. Muslim belief is not akin to old beliefs in which gods create humanity and are not further invested in their creations. For a Muslim, God continues to be not just knowing, but interested, vested and involved.

Being anchored in this principle and mindful of God’s revelation draws us back to a conscientious journey to comprehend and effectuate God’s speech. If God speaks and you are disinterested or not engaged, you have a problem as a Muslim. Imagine if you live in a home, and this home has an owner, and that the owner speaks about his or her household, but you are agnostic about the speech of the owner in the owner’s home. That is an ethical problem. That would make you a bad guest; an unethical guest. If you function in this household as if it does not have an owner and are only interested in your own comforts, again, this is an ethical problem.

Throughout time, Allah has told us that iman (faith) is a transformative engagement. The transformative power of the words of the Quran – that revelation or speech of the Divine – can be demonstrated just using a small passage from Surah al-Ra‘d, which is itself an entire philosophy of existence in a few words. Allah reminds us not to be fooled by the physical appearance of things, as it is not the claims of knowledge that tell us who is knowledgeable or not, but the truth of things. There are many people who philosophize but who are fundamentally blind to the ethical failure of existing in a space where they do not honor the true Owner.

Allah also reminds us that he gave us a sense of reason, the miraculous ability to think, reason and decide. Reason, like all other instruments given by God, can be used for goodness or the opposite. How that reason is used to interact with, unpack, or allow revelation to occupy its ethical space in existence is the challenge.

The further challenge is to employ reason correctly, using it to honor our covenant with God, to live within the terms of God’s revelation, and to remind us that we cannot exist in this space without a purpose.

Reason reasonably applied to revelation leads to an ethical existence. God expects us to apply intellect to His revelation, therefore gaining the ability to distinguish between what is ethical and unethical.

We live in an age of constant ethical and moral challenges, where many Muslims feel they need a specific hadith or revelation before knowing if they have an ethical or moral obligation. We do not need an instruction sheet, but instead need to understand the ethics of belief and the imperative of a moral life. One can have all of the Quran and hadiths memorized, but if their ethical engine has not been activated, they will still fail ethically.

Surah al-Ra‘d reminds us that to live a moral, rational existence, we need perseverance and patience. Failure to understand the importance of perseverance or favoring immediate satisfaction and gratification, one will fail at an ethical existence. Those who persevere in prayer will have a far greater chance of persevering in patience and in upholding the bonds that God wants to be upheld.

Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl details why Islam is the only true monotheism and delves deeper into the text of the Bible on the issue of Trinity and the divinity of Jesus. Delivered at The Usuli Institute, 17 January 2020. www.usuli.org

Dr. Abou El Fadl begins with the caveat that he will deliver a different kind of khutbah. The modern age of information comes at a time in history when Muslims are at one of their weakest points.

Information is power, and power negotiates information. Information is not simply an objective reality that is presented, or data that you either take or leave. Information is intimately connected with power. The flow of information disempowers the disempowered and augments the power of the already powerful. An example is the way the Islamophobia industry uses the information age to its advantage. The realm of social media is a marketplace that has many dangers. It is best that people do not engage Islamophobic sites and steer away from them.

Islamophobia is rooted in a racist colonial enterprise that has been developing and adapting itself for centuries. Islamophobic sites today present information that the average Muslim is not equipped to respond to or deal with. Unless they are well educated or well anchored in their tradition, Muslims in the West can easily fall prey. This situation is compounded by the fact that Muslims in the West do not have the institutional infrastructure that allows for a solid education for the average Muslim.

Islamophobes – whether of the evangelical breed or the Israeli right-wing breed – will lie quite strategically, relying on Muslims’ ignorance of the Islamic tradition to cast doubt. If a Muslim is not morally, ethically and spiritually firm from within, it is much safer to not engage with Islamophobic material.

Institutions of Muslim learning in our day and age are so weak that they are unable to respond to even the most simple arguments. For instance, Islamophobes will raise the issue of the marriages of the Prophet Muhammad, but they will not talk about the marriages of the Prophets of the Bible. According to the Bible, the Prophet Solomon married 1,000 wives and concubines. Prophet David had 100. The evangelical Islamophobes never mention this, but rather focus on the areas of Muslim vulnerability.

In their literature, evangelical Islamophobes instruct to not start by preaching to Muslims about the Christian faith, but rather to start by casting doubt in their hearts about their own religion. Then they provide sample questions to pose to Muslims under the guise of seeking the Truth. Once doubt sets in and it appears the Muslim is thoroughly confused and lost, then they will introduce them to the “good news” of the love of Jesus Christ. This methodology is as old as colonialism in Islamic world.

In this khutbah, Dr. Abou El Fadl demonstrates what the powerless must do with the powerful. The powerless remain powerless unless they learn to return the gaze, a lesson Muslims have not yet learned. He engages in some Bible study, using the New Oxford Bible, and gives an illustration of what an educated Muslim can do if they are proud of who they are, confident, and able to return the gaze. Often the best defense is a good offense.

It is important to respect and honor Christians, but Muslims must return the gaze. To do so takes years of study, which is exactly why Muslims should support our educated, so that they can return the gaze.

Muslims should either not engage this material or educate themselves before ignorance destroys their Hereafter. The Bible confirms the One and Only God, who has sent the son of man, as Jesus called himself. We are all sons and daughters of God, as we are all bonded to God with love and passion. The difference is that in Islam, we don't need someone to die for our sins, or need to see someone suffer for us to feel God's love. We feel God’s love without God suffering. The age of social media has turned the world into a place of noise. We must learn to purify our ears, so we can listen only to what is worth listening to.

NEW!! Check out REAL TALK WITH MIDO AND BABA! The Shaykh and his teenage son in conversation about faith, Islam and growing up Muslim in America!

In this new series as part of The Usuli Institute (www.usuli.org), Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl answers candid questions from his teenage son, Mido, about faith, Islam and growing up Muslim in America. In this first episode, Mido asks: 1) Why was the Prophet Muhammad decided to be the last Prophet? 2) (9:30) Since we don't believe Jesus is the "Son of God," if Jesus was born a prophet, isn't that unfair because he already had a ticket to Heaven before he was born?; 3) (16:20) Are dates a holy food? What is the significance of dates?; 4) (18:45) There is a debate about the first prophet; was Adam not considered a prophet? Dr. Abou El Fadl talks about Adam and Eve in the Islamic tradition. At 23:35, Dr. Abou El Fadl shares his thoughts on worship, prayer and becoming great friends with God. Originally recorded 25 August, 2019.

Dr. Abou El Fadl reminds that Allah directed us to create divinity on this earth. Allah tells us it is impossible for the Divine to be unjust because God will never allow Godself to be unjust. Injustice, oppression, and tyranny (zulm) is forbidden for God and by God, and thus, apriori, justice is an obligation for human beings as well. God warns us that the consequences of injustice are disastrous.

In Surah Hud, Allah promises that when people collectively fail in the obligation of justice, Allah allows the natural consequences of injustice to befall them. The results of injustice are sweeping and comes in like negative energy, tearing apart the very fabric of an unjust society.

Contemporary Muslims are unfamiliar with the buzz and attraction that the Islamic revelation created among the people of the Near East. The possibility of individual salvation without the intercession of another human power (ie. a priest or a soothsayer or witchdoctor) was a very powerful idea. The second very powerful impulse that Islam brought was that it was a faith of dignity and justice. The aspiration for a just society was a dream that created energy and excitement in people, so much so that women of the first century of Islam emerged very visibly and actively as poets, theologians and jurists. The ideals of justice, dignity and countering zulm inspired explosive developments in Islamic art and architecture and animated Islamic poetry and music. The desire to lessen suffering and illness, seen as a form of zulm, led to great discoveries in the fields of medicine, physics and mathematics.

When Allah tells us that people of zulm are doomed, many Muslims think Allah is talking about some natural disaster coming as punishment. That is not necessarily what the Quranic verse is talking about. The death of a hopeless, dreamless society is in itself an agonizingly slow and painful death, as if it is a curse from God. It is like, you have given up on yourself, so has God has given up on you.

Often, people abandon hope and simply give up. If one does not believe in the possibility of justice, before long, one abandons the ideal of justice. If one does not believe in ideals, then before long, one abandons all idealism. If one abandons idealism, then one accepts statism—that things cannot be improved upon. Injustice digs in and becomes a permanent part of society. This is what Allah is warning about—societies that curse themselves by their own injustice.

If one abandons hope in making change, then one has also abandoned the presence of the Divine. As long as Allah exists, nothing is impossible. That is the passion of iman (faith) and what iman means—the insistence that mercy and a higher state is always possible because the Divine is always present.

One tradition often repeated by the companions of the Prophet (pbuh) was: “A people who have not preserved justice are a cursed people.” Iman (faith) means hope, and hope means insistence on an ideal. One should never give in to what is wrong because the path to changing what is wrong appears insurmountable. Hope and aspiration keep a human soul healthy, and despair kills the soul.

Reflect upon Surah Al-A’raf, verse 164. The Quran is talking to us: “Some people say, why do you speak amongst the people where there is no hope? There is so much injustice that these people are already doomed. There is no point, so why even bother?” The Quran answers: “We do it because of our relationship to Allah; because Allah expects us to do it, whether we think anyone is listening or not.”

Imam Ali (ra) said, “Don’t you dare, as you walk in the path of truth, look around to see that no one is walking with you and stop marching forward, because the only thing that Allah expects from you is to continue marching forward, even if no one accompanies you along that path.”

Dr. Abou El Fadl reminds us that Allah in the Qur’an gave us Shariah, a path that we are instructed to follow. There are many people who think that Shariah is something as simple as a group of positivistic laws. However, laws that lead to practices are only half the process, because any practice decreed by law must have a purpose. If one is not following these laws with an understanding of why, how it fits in within the Shariah of Allah, then there is a fundamental breakdown. If it was simply following these laws with no greater purpose, Islam would have been a failed project a long time ago.

Allah gave us the same Shariah that he gave all the prophets, and there is a common theme: Allah's message is a message of liberation and moral progress. It is a moral vision of human dignity, and human liberation.

The Islamic message was an equalizing, liberating message in an abusive social structure. In the Qur’an, Allah tells us to not coexist with injustice, to protest unjust rulers. To do this, to follow this path, is difficult. It requires moral courage and persistence. But every prophet came with a revolutionary message: Fear Allah, don't fear anyone else but Allah, and you are responsible for justice in your society. To speak truth before an unjust ruler; that is the greatest jihad.

In the modern age, one can practice the greatest jihad through social media, print, publications—the modern mechanisms of discourse. But most Muslims instead slump back with moral and ethical lethargy, forgetting what the path of God is about, and instead believing that God’s message is only about ritualistic practice. As a result, a study recently found that by the third generation, Islam, in many cases, is lost in immigrant Muslim families. Because we don't understand what our Shariah is about, we can't offer our children something to get excited about.

Scholars have the primary responsibility to think and talk about the path of God in a way that presents moral vision and moral leadership. What happens when scholars are moral cowards? The entire ummah becomes exactly like them—they become cowards.

Among the biggest disasters inflicted upon modern Islam was the Orientalist dogma of the idea of “political Islam.” Today, what is often meant by political Islam is that scholars should not speak up against injustice. But, if a scholar’s position is silence before injustice, then that scholar has lost the very reason for their existence. The main role of a scholar is not to tell you how to do your salat correctly, what are the rules of fasting, how to pay zakat, etc. The main role of a scholar is to be an example for how a human being can establish justice through fearing Allah and no one else; and to practice the greatest jihad, testifying to the truth.

Dr. Abou El Fadl returns to the example of the video of Hamza Yusuf mocking the Syrian revolution and the weak hadith cited as support--all that was discussed at length in a previous khutbah. He addresses the alarming phenomenon of moral cowardice. After this video was posted, there was an effort to take down the video every time it appeared. However, it was not because Hamza Yusuf changed his ideas, but rather that it was easier to teach the same ideas of quietism, political cowardliness and lack of moral vision behind closed doors. A scholar must be brave, and if you say something, you must know what you are saying and stand to defend it. To say it and then have it be taken down so you can still say it in private is moral cowardice. This is an example of exactly what is wrong with our institutions.

The fate of our Islam is up to us. If we continue teaching only the rituals of Islam, if scholars continue to show moral cowardliness, if we do not raise our children with any moral vision or purpose, or even with the cause of standing up for justice, we will lose future generations of Muslims, and we will have to answer to that before Allah on the Final Day.