[OccupyComms] About Today's World / Islam / Being a Muslim / Today's World

[Mark Barrett]

Salaam, Peace & Shalom

A very good and informative read for anyone who finds the topic
interesting, from local Imam and friend, Hajj Abdassamad Clarke. The
family of Imran referred to is that of Jesus.

Khutba – 3rd March 2017 –

Today is the 4th Jumada al-Akhir 1438

He, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, “Islam began as a
stranger and will return as a stranger, so fragrant good fortune to
the strangers.”

The Companions agreed unanimously at the time of Sayyiduna ‘Umar ibn
al-Khattab, may Allah be pleased with him and with them all, that the
beginning of Islam is the Hijra of the Messenger of Allah, may Allah
bless him and grant him peace, and the small group of individuals and
families with him from Makka to the town of Yathrib, then inhabited by
sundry Arab and Jewish tribes with uneasy treaties and truces between
them and continuous internecine warfare and raiding. Thus ‘Islam’
begins not with a pure Islamic polity but with a messy mix of people
of different races, tribes and religions. The idealisation of that
beginning causes us much confusion.

It is important to understand that the primordial story of Islam, the
sira, is intrinsically one of beginning. The very story of Islam
itself is about a beginning.

The great problem for the modern Muslim is that we do not look to that
beginning but we look nostalgically to the greatness of the caliphate
of Baghdad or the Osmanlis or the Mughal Empire. When we look to
Madinah, we are looking at a complex and sometimes messy beginning
which we can easily extrapolate to our circumstances today. Looking to
the Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad as our model is like expecting to
have an oak tree without an acorn. Conversely, if you have this tiny
insignificant acorn in your hands, you must understand that in spite
of its insignificance, tending to it properly it will result
necessarily in the mighty oak tree.

Thus, there is nothing intrinsically un-Islamic about our situation
here today, for we few Muslims, emigrants and indigenous alike, have
from a din whose inspiration is the arrival of a few emigrants among a
group of other people only some of whom had accepted Islam before
their arrival, twelve people at the first meeting at ‘Aqabah and
seventy-two at the second.

You cannot understand our situation if you imagine that there is
something called ‘the Muslim world’ from which we are exiled. Rather
we have a historic moment, as we have had repeatedly through the last
one thousand four hundred years in numerous circumstances all over the
world, of new beginnings in new lands. After the first unavoidable
jihad against the two great tyrannical empires of Rome and Persia,
Islam has spread very much in this same way. A very small number of
people went to Indonesia in comparatively recent history and now this
is the most numerous Muslim nation on Earth, without great battles.
Recent historical studies show that the Muslims didn’t conquer
al-Andalus. It appears that there was only one battle there. The
Muslims emigrated there and many of the Spanish accepted Islam.

So when we look at this Madinah, we see the eternal problem of the
human being. We are intrinsically social beings. The Arabic word insan
has two derivations: first, that it derives from nasiya – he forgot;
second, it derives from anisa – he was or became sociable,
companionable, amiable, convivial, inclined to company and converse.

Allah, exalted is He, says:

Mankind! We created you from a male and female, and made you into
peoples and tribes so that you might come to know each other. The
noblest among you in Allah’s sight is the one with the most taqwa.
Allah is All-Knowing, All-Aware. (Surat al-Hujurat 49:13)

This sociability has different concentric circles. First, there is the
family, and by the natural processes of marriage and kinship this
extends out to clan and tribe. An earlier form of Islam, that of Bani
Isra’il, was centred on the tribe. But with the age that was to come
into being, the central issue became the circle of sociability beyond
the tribe.

Islam does not abolish the tribe, the clan and the family, but the
issue for us is how do we as families, clans and tribes become a
society? This has become all too dangerous an issue today with the
current ideologies that hold sway both in the UK and the US. Today,
the nation is seen as being incompatible with the immigrant, but the
people who uphold that most strenuously are themselves immigrants or
the children and descendants of earlier immigrants. All of the white
people of the US are descendants of immigrants who displaced the
indigenous peoples most brutally. The entire history of the UK is of
successive waves of immigration and invasion. Far from being the
indigenous people, the Anglo-Saxons were themselves immigrants, and
the UK’s traditional élite, the descendants of the Normans, are the
children of invaders.

This society today has failed to resolve this problem of indigenous
people and immigrants and we simply cannot afford to be subsumed under
or enframed within their misunderstanding.

_______________________________________________________________________

There is one issue within this theme, which is the family. Families
provide the warp – sada – of the fabric of a society. In families, in
addition to the transmission of genetic inheritance, traditionally and
still today, there is transmission of certain traits: thus the child
of the woodworker is often a woodworker and that of the merchant a
merchant and the child of a scholar a scholar too. We see also that
Prophethood was transmitted in certain familial lines, as Allah says:

Allah chose Adam and Nuh and the family of Ibrahim and the family of
‘Imran over all other beings descendants one of the other. Allah is
All-Hearing, All-Knowing.(Surah Al ‘Imran 3:33-34)

Familial transmission of traits is not an invariable fact and it is
certainly not something that is legislated, but it is a broad pattern
that holds true in vastly different societies throughout history.
Similarly, there is a wealth transmission from generation to
generation through inheritance, something that is both carefully
safeguarded by the laws of inheritance in the Qur’an and the Sunnah,
and its worst excesses curbed by the breaking up of capital into
smaller portions in each generation. And we of all people ought to be
aware of the terrible dangers of great capital accumulation.

This generational transmission serves as the warp of a society, upon
which is woven, by means of the weft the fabric. The weft – luhma –
comprises all the numerous transactions and interactions known as the
mu‘amalat.

To understand the modern age, you must understand that a number of
extremely wealthy families assumed power behind the scenes, through
the means of usury finance. They made sure to hold their capital
together across the generations and to accumulate it through the
exercise of usury until their capital came to dwarf the nation-states’
own. The natural wealth of the family was their main desire. Families’
thrift and mutual interdependence is their main obstacle. Their
natural allies are the isolated individuals and couples of the modern
age who express themselves democratically, who establish no stable
families but merely serve as elements of the state or the increasingly
corporatised workplace. Their other natural ally is the modern state
which undermines the family in two ways: first, through its
undermining the finances of the family by taxation, and second, by its
insinuating itself into the family through tax credits and benefits.
The effect of both is to weaken this warp upon which the fabric of
society is woven.

Our task is to protect this family as much as we are able and to
resist the very powerful forces that work to undermine it whether
through inviting us to ever new romantic relationships, or reducing us
in our self-definition to workers for corporate entities and the
state, or making us think of ourselves as banking customers, or
redefining us, men and women, merely as citizens. None of these are
fitting for the Adamic person whose ancestor Allah taught all the
names, nor for the person of the Muhammadan d?n, whose Prophet, may
Allah bless him and grant him peace, brought us in his revelation the
very reason for our creation and our existence in these words:

I only created jinn and man to worship Me. (Surat adh-Dhariyat 51:56)

And as we have seen before one of the Companions famously interpreted
“to worship Me” as meaning “to know Me.” In other words, the entire
world is created so that you can know your Lord, not know ‘about’ your
Lord, and this is for you and it is your message to others. In order
for that to happen you have to protect all of these elements: your own
heart, your self, your family and your society and expand that
society. And ‘protect’ is the meaning of this word which we mention so
often and which is the core of the khutba: taqwa, for taqwa comes from
the word wiqaya – protection, giving taqwa the sense of ‘protecting
yourself’.

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