Ismail Kamdar – Mustafa Sabris Writings on Preserving the Family
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In the name of Allah, we praise Him,
we ask for His help, we ask for
His forgiveness, and we believe in Him.
And we put our trust in Him, and
we say to Him, O Allah, from the
evil of our mouths and from the evil
of our deeds, there is none worthy of
worship except Him, and there is none worthy
of worship except Him, and there is no
one worthy of worship except Him.
One of the topics that I am quite
passionate about is reviving a way of thinking
about family and community.
Now, I believe in the past two decades,
we have become too individualistic in our thinking.
Most people these days are unable to think
outside of themselves.
Life has become all about me, all about
my ego, all about my desires, my goals.
People don't think as families anymore, people don't
think as communities anymore, they don't think as
part of an ummah anymore.
Many people can only think about themselves.
And there are many topics that need to
be discussed to fix this.
And I'm going to spend a few weeks
discussing some of these topics.
But today, I'm going to do something a
little bit different.
I'm going to go to the biography of
a very interesting scholar that you might not
be aware of.
And from his biography, I'm going to then
go into some of his writings and teachings
about family, that may help you to think
differently about family.
You see, one of the problems we have
today amongst the youth is that many of
them don't want to get married.
And when they weigh the benefits of being
single against the benefits of being married, in
their minds, for many of them, there are
more benefits than being single.
Many young people think of marriage and family
as a responsibility, as a burden, as something
that's getting in the way of their dreams.
And we need to fix this way of
thinking.
So today, I want to share with you
something I read recently that really reshaped the
way I think about family.
Recently, I've been reading through the writings of
Sheikh-ul-Islam Mustafa Sabri Effendi.
I'm not sure many of you have heard
about him.
He was the last or second last Sheikh
-ul-Islam of the Ottoman Empire.
A very important individual.
And his writings are very important and relevant
to our times.
So just a bit about who this man
is before we get into his teachings about
family.
Sheikh Mustafa Sabri was born in the 1800s,
around 1860.
And he passed away around 1950.
He lived through the fall of the Ottoman
Empire.
But he didn't just live through the fall
of the Ottoman Empire.
He was one of the most important people
in the Ottoman Empire.
Mustafa Sabri was born into a scholarly family.
And became one of the most important, leading,
Hanafi scholars in the Ottoman Empire.
To such an extent that when Sultan Abdul
Hamid began his project for trying to save
the Ottoman Empire.
Trying to preserve it from falling apart.
Mustafa Sabri was one of those scholars he
hired for this project.
He worked very closely with the Khalifa.
In trying to prevent the Ottoman Empire from
falling apart.
And in the year 1923, Mustafa Sabri was
promoted to Sheikh of Islam.
Sheikh of Islam is the highest position that
a scholar can get in the Ottoman Empire.
The Sheikh of Islam is essentially the Grand
Mufti and the Chief Qadi.
The Chief Judge of the Ottoman Empire.
The one person who has the most authority
to interpret the Sharia.
He was put into this position in 1923.
Anyone remember when the Ottoman Empire collapsed?
1924.
Just one year later.
He came into this position too late.
By the time Mustafa Sabri became Sheikh of
Islam.
The Kamalists, the secularists had already taken over
Turkey.
And they were trying to dismantle the Khilafat.
And one year later they would be successfully
dismantling the Khilafat.
And so his time as Sheikh of Islam
was a very shaky time.
Because he was trying to preserve the Sharia.
And the new leaders were trying to dismantle
the Sharia.
And sadly he lost his battle.
And he was removed from his position.
And the Sharia was dismantled.
And the Khilafat was dismantled.
And we are still living in the aftermath
of that.
After the Khilafat was dismantled.
Mustafa Sabri found himself in a very strange
position.
He was the Chief Sheikh of the Ottoman
Empire.
And now there is no Ottoman Empire.
Now there is nation states and secularism and
liberalism.
And nobody wants him.
Nobody wants him.
I am a scholar who is talking about
Islam and calling people back to Islam.
He now has to leave the country.
And he moves from land to land seeking
a new place to live.
And nobody wants him.
He goes to France, he goes to Algeria,
he goes to many different places.
Eventually he settles in Egypt.
And even in Egypt people don't really like
what he is saying.
Egypt in the 1930s was very much influenced
by feminism and liberalism.
It had become a very westernized land.
He talks a lot about this in his
writings.
And the people living in Egypt at that
time did not like what Mustafa Sabri had
to say.
But he settled there.
And he dedicated the rest of his life
to writing books.
Very very powerful books.
Some of the most important books produced in
the past hundred years.
His books were focused primarily on refuting modern
ideologies.
This is the 1930s.
He wrote books against liberalism, secularism, feminism.
All of these different ideologies.
He wrote books against them in the 1930s.
And one of the topics that he emphasized
a lot in these books was the importance
of preserving the family.
And then you see the different phases of
his life.
When Mustafa Sabri was young, his goal was
to preserve the Ottoman Empire.
To protect it from collapsing.
That failed after World War I and the
Ottoman Empire collapsed.
His goal after that was to try and
revive the Khilafat.
Okay, the Ottoman Empire collapsed, maybe we can
have another Khilafat.
But within a few years he realized the
Ummah is too divided.
These nation states are going to be here
for a while.
We are not going to have a Khilafat
anytime soon.
Then he switches gears to trying to protect
the Iman of people through his writings by
refuting modern ideologies.
But what's interesting at this point is that
a key focus of his in refuting modern
ideologies is emphasizing the importance of family.
Why?
Why does he talk so much about family?
This is something I found very interesting about
his writings.
At the time when the Khilafat had just
collapsed, people had fallen into secularism and liberalism
and all of these other isms.
Mustafa Asabri talks a lot about family.
He talks a lot about the importance of
preserving family.
The importance of having a big family, having
a strong family, having a righteous family.
You see, one of the key points that
stood out in his writings to me is
he talks about families as power structures.
This is very interesting.
Many of us, we don't think of families
as power structures.
We just think of families as people we
know.
You grow up with your siblings and then
you go your own way.
That's not how families were looked at historically.
In Islam, power is decentralized.
No one person has all the power.
The Khalifa has a certain level of power,
but there's limits to his power.
For example, the Khalifa cannot interpret the Sharia.
It's the ulama who interpret the Sharia.
So the Khalifa cannot interfere with what the
law is.
The law comes from the ulama, not from
the Khalifa.
So there's limits to his power.
So the Khalifa is one type of power.
The ulama are a different type of power.
The judges are a different type of power.
But the head of the household is also
a different type of power.
In Islam, a family or a tribe is
a unit of power.
It's a power structure.
And the head of the household or the
tribal chief has actual power in the community
to such an extent that in the Hanafi
Madhab and specifically in the Ottoman Empire, the
head of the household functioned as a mini
-Khalifa.
The level of power that a man has
in his home under the Hanafi Madhab is
almost like a mini-Khalifa.
What does this mean?
It means, for example, in the Ottoman Empire,
if you were a man and you had
your wives and your children and your grandchildren
and you had a huge compound in which
your whole family lived, how you run that
compound is not the government's business.
What rules you have for your family is
not the government's business.
As long as you are not oppressing anyone,
as long as you are not harming anyone,
how you run your house is your own
business.
That a man literally operated as a mini
-Khalifa with his family.
And this meant if a person had a
big family, if somebody had a large family,
they would be very powerful.
They would be very influential.
So what's interesting is that Sheikh Mustafa Sabri,
he noticed a couple of trends happening in
the Muslim world that he found dangerous in
the 1930s.
One of them, very interestingly, he talks often
in his writings about a marriage crisis.
He says young people can't find anyone to
get married to.
He talks about the marriage crisis.
People in their late 20s and early 30s
can't find anyone to get married to.
This is in the 1930s in Egypt.
Very similar to what our community faces today.
Very similar situation.
He talks about the marriage crisis.
He talks about the things that led to
the marriage crisis.
The rise of Sinar, people delaying marriage because
of education.
Very similar to what we are facing today.
But another problem he talks about is how
Muslims turned against polygamy.
This is very interesting, right?
So the way Mustafa Sabri approaches this topic
is he says that throughout the bulk of
Muslim history, nobody had a problem with polygamy.
It was a normal practice in the Muslim
world.
Colonization happens.
The British force their values on the Muslims.
And suddenly the Muslims now start looking at
polygamy and polygamous families as a bad thing.
So he argues in his writings, specifically in
his Kolun Vara, his views on womanhood.
He argues for the importance of polygamy.
And he argues for it from a very
interesting angle.
About families being power structures.
So he said in the past if a
man had four wives and seven children of
each wife, he is a very powerful member
of the community.
Every member of that family is going to
protect each other.
Every member of that family is going to
care for each other.
You can't oppress any member of that family
because the rest of the family is going
to team up and help them.
But family is huge.
You have more people there who are likely
to protect you and help you against external
forces.
And he said that the reason why they
tried to get rid of polygamy in the
Muslim world was to make families smaller to
make families weaker.
So now a man goes from having a
large family to a smaller family.
In our time, even smaller family.
In our times, many people don't think of
family as protection.
They think of family as inconvenience.
And the important metaphor here, he says that
the wolf goes after the lone sheep.
It doesn't go after the sheep in the
flock.
And this is what's happening to the Ummah
today.
People are going out alone.
They say, I don't need family, I don't
need community, I don't need anybody.
I can take care of myself.
That's when you are most vulnerable to shaitan.
That's when you are most vulnerable to the
elements of society.
When you don't have people around you to
keep you in check, to protect you.
Not just to protect you from external forces,
but from your own self.
From your own nafs.
And so this is a key teaching that
Mustafa as-Salih Rahimallah emphasizes over and over
again in his writings for the rest of
his life.
That families are meant to protect each other.
They are meant to be a sense of
security.
If you have a large family, you have
many members of the family who are there
to protect each other.
If things go wrong, your family will be
there for you.
If things go wrong, you have people there
who can take care of you.
In life, things do go wrong.
He lived in a time when things went
very, very wrong.
Remember this man lived through World War I
and World War II.
He lived in a very difficult point in
history.
And so he emphasizes the importance of family
from this perspective.
The perspective of families being a source of
power.
And he argues that they took away the
Khilafat.
They took away one source of power from
the Muslims.
Don't let them take away your families.
Don't let them destroy your family.
Because historically, the Khilafat protected Muslims from outside
elements.
You lived in Darul Islam, you are protected
from Kufr.
Now without a Khilafat, especially for us living
as minorities in non-Muslim lands, what protects
you from the outside elements?
What protects you from being influenced by Kufr?
Your family.
If you have a strong, righteous family, with
a strong head of the household, and a
strong heart of the household, where the mother
and father are righteous and committed to the
Deen, and they teach you the religion, you
are more likely to be protected from the
Kufr that is being bombarded at you through
the media and through society.
Families are powerful.
So the young people today, when they talk
about families being an inconvenience, families getting in
the way of their goals, I want you
to now rethink this.
I want you to weigh the pros and
cons.
Remember, anything you choose in life is costing
you something else.
That's how the world works.
It's always a cost.
Yes, if you choose family, it may cost
you some of your personal dreams, some of
your free time, some of your hobbies.
That's part of the cost of choosing family.
But what's the cost of choosing to be
alone?
The cost of choosing to be alone is
vulnerability.
You become vulnerable to shaitan, to society, to
the government.
You don't have that extra layer of protection
that you would have if you are part
of a family.
If you are committed to a family.
If you and your family get along, and
you take care of each other, and you
love each other, and you are there for
each other.
Weigh the pros and cons.
Do you choose absolute freedom with the chance
that if things go wrong, you are on
your own?
Or do you choose to be part of
a family where yes, there's responsibilities, there's limits
in what you can do, but you have
each other's backs.
You are there for each other.
And when things go wrong, you know your
family are there to take care of you.
And I think if we start thinking like
this again, perhaps young people once again see
the importance of family.
See the importance of being part of something
bigger.
We are not meant to be individuals.
There's a hadith that applies to community.
I want you to take that hadith and
apply it to family as well.
The Prophet ﷺ said, The person who mixes
with people and bears their harm is better
than the one who is alone.
It is better to mix with people and
bear their harm than to be alone.
Why?
Because when you are alone, yes, people can't
harm you, people can't fight with you, people
can't argue with you, but you are vulnerable.
Something happens to you, there's no one to
help you.
When you are part of a people, whether
it's a community or a family, yes, you
will get on each other's nerves.
Yes, you will have differences of opinion.
Yes, you may clash with each other, things
may get heated.
But you'll have each other's backs.
The family protects the family.
The community protects the community.
And that makes it worth dealing with the
inconvenience of the small harms that come from
being part of a bigger whole.
So let us go back to thinking about
families as a source of protection from the
harmful elements of the outside world.
Let us go back to thinking of families
as a source of power that gives us
actual influence in our communities.
Strong, influential families don't just have protection for
each other but they influence the greater community
as well.
And this has always been the case throughout
history and it is still the case today.
We need to build such families in the
Muslim community so that we are influential over
others instead of allowing others to have influence
over us.
وَأَفْرِقْ دَعْوَانًا الْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ وَبِالْعَالَمِينَ الحمد لله وحده
والصلاة والسلام على من لا نبي أبعد أم
آباد إِنَّ أَسْتَقَى الْحَدِيثِ كِتَابُ اللَّهُ وَخَيْرِهُ حَدِّي
حَلِّ مُحَمَّدٍ صَلُّ اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّى وَسُلِّمُهُ مُحْدَسَاتُهَا
وَقُلُوا مُحْدَسَةٍ بِنْعَمْ وَقُلُوا بِتَةٍ مُلَالًا وَقُلُوا دَلَالًا
جُبِنَّا Nowadays, the young people are bombarded with
many wrong messages about family, especially through social
media.
Seems like there's a lot of individualism being
pushed on social media, telling people, you don't
need a man, you don't need a woman,
men are evil, women are evil.
All these messages are being pushed on people
to make people hate the opposite gender, to
make people think of marriage as something inconvenient,
something that gets in the way of your
freedom, something that gets in the way of
pursuing your dreams, and we need to take
these topics one by one and dismantle them.
So let's start with one.
One of the ideas that is being pushed
on young Muslim women today, and really on
women all over the world today, is the
idea that men are inherently evil.
This is an idea that is being pushed
a lot online, that men are evil, men
are trash, men are dangerous, you can't trust
men, it's an idea that men are just
bad.
And because of this, a lot of women
choose not to get married, they end up
having bad relationships with their own fathers, they
don't want to have sons, they just see
men as a dangerous and evil thing.
Understand that this concept is foreign to our
religion.
It's not just foreign to our religion, but
if a woman believes this is dangerous to
her iman, why?
Because she thinks all men are evil.
What would be her conclusion about the prophets
of Allah, who are men?
Or the great ulema of the past, who
are men?
Or the khulafa, who are men?
Would she look at them as evil too?
And some of them are doing that.
You will find people online claiming that Abu
Huraira was a misogynist, or Imam Ghazali was
a misogynist.
People are saying things like this today, because
this is the conclusion of thinking all men
are evil.
That you now start to look at the
great men of the past and see them
as evil.
So what does Islam teach us?
Islam teaches us very simply, there are good
men and there are bad men.
There are good women and there are bad
women.
You can't take an entire gender and lump
it like this.
And this is why the Quran says, righteous
men are for righteous women, and evil men
are for evil women.
It makes it very clear, both types of
people exist.
You cannot label an entire gender based on
the actions of evil people.
This is a very toxic way to live
your life.
Because what happens then, even when a woman
does get married, she goes into a marriage
with the idea that this man is evil.
And I need to fix it.
Or I need to keep him under control.
This is not the Islamic approach.
Islamically, you find yourself a good man.
And a good man and a good woman
together, they build a good home.
So don't think of every member of the
opposite gender as evil.
Because Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala tells us
in Surah Tawbah, that the believing men and
women, المؤمنون والمؤمنان بعضهم أولياء وبعض The believing
men and women are allies of each other.
They command what is good and they forbid
what is evil.
Meaning righteous men and women keep each other
in check.
They prevent each other from doing haram.
They prevent each other from going astray.
This is the foundation of an Islamic community.
This is the foundation of an Islamic marriage.
You are there to keep each other in
check, to prevent each other from falling into
haram, and to trust each other and to
love each other.
And so we must be wary of these
ideas that have been put out into the
community.
And we must make sure that we are
having conversations with our young men and women
about the idea that they are being fed.
There are influential men online who are preaching
the idea that all women are evil.
Or that all women will cheat on you.
Or that all women are bad.
This is a completely haram ideology.
Righteous women do not fall into this category
that they are talking about.
They had experience with bad women and they
are labelling all women with this.
And likewise there are women online who are
labelling all men as evil.
And many young people are buying into these
gender ideologies.
So we need to make sure that our
ideology comes from the Quran and Sunnah.
And the Quran and Sunnah makes it very
clear that every man and woman is born
upon the fitrah.
They are born upon natural goodness.
Society can corrupt them.
But if they nurture their goodness, if they
follow Allah, if they obey Allah, any man
or woman can become righteous.
So righteous men should marry righteous women and
build righteous families.
And know all of this noise online trying
to paint the opposite gender as something evil.
This is not from the teachings of Islam.
This is not something we agree upon.
And this is something that is very dangerous
to you and to your Iman and to
your community and to your families if you
buy into these type of ideologies.
We ask Allah to protect us from dangerous
ideologies and to grant us the correct understanding
of Islam.