Johari Abdul-Malik – Slavery & Maqasid AsSharia
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AI: Transcript ©
Beginning the Khutbatul Jum'ah,
praising
God Almighty, walhamdulillah,
for having gathered us.
For having gathered us, Alhamdulillah,
with the mind
that we would answer the call of Allah,
leave wherever we were,
whatever we were doing,
to come to the remembrance of Allah
and to establish
this prayer, the Jum'ah prayer.
Not only
in Makkah or
in other parts of the world, but to
establish
the Jum'ah, the remembrance, the prayer
in the United States
of America.
And to be able, alhamdulillah,
to have the capacity,
to be able to follow in the way
of Rasulullah
sallallahu alaihi wasallam.
Today,
we ask Allah's peace and blessings on the
prophet, alaihi wasallam,
on his family and companions,
all of the and those who follow the
way of Allah's Haqq.
This way that we call
Islam
until the day of judgment,
Amin.
This, Khutbat al Jomar, is very special
for me.
Today is
the last
Friday in the month of February,
And February
is known in America as
Black History Month.
But really, it's not Black History Month. It's
just the history
of America that's been blacked out
from the history books. And
in blacking out
the history of black Americans,
they also
blacked out
the history of Islam and America.
And so, alhamdulillah,
today I want to
tell part of the untold
story.
And I want to share with you something
that I believe, alhamdulillah,
should commit you
to doing more,
to raise up the condition
of those people who came before us,
saying, La ilaha illallah Muhammad and Rasulullah.
People ask sometimes, how did Islam get to
America?
Well,
Muslims came to America
before the time of Columbus.
There are records recording that from West Africa,
African Muslims sailed across the Atlantic,
One of the most famous,
the brother of Mansa Musa who traveled and
made a famous
pilgrimage to Mecca from Timbuktu,
that his brother, Abu Bakr the second,
traveled with over a 1000 ships
from West Africa
to
the Americas,
1 century before
Columbus.
So if anyone asked the question,
who was here first
compared to Columbus and the Europeans,
say, we, the Muslims, we were here first.
That those who would say then,
how did Columbus
come to America? Well, it's important that we
realize that
it was Tarek Aziad
who opened Spain
for Islam.
And that 8 centuries later, 8 centuries later,
the Spanish would drive Muslims out
of the Iberian Peninsula, the Moors,
and thus would not be able to travel
safely
through North Africa and
the Mediterranean.
But with the help of 2
descendants
of
Moors
in Spain,
they shared the maps
that Muslims had developed
on how to navigate the Great Lake,
the ocean we call the Atlantic.
And with that, this Italian Columbus was able
to gain financial support.
He traveled with 3 ships, the Nina, the
Pinta, and the Santa Maria.
And 2 of those ships
were captained by Muslims.
So we came before Columbus, and we came
with Columbus.
And because of the unfortunate
circumstance,
many of us were taken not as slaves,
but as prisoners of war,
sold into slavery
and brought to America.
It is estimated
that maybe 1 third
of Muslims
1 third of the enslaved Africans were
Muslim. We're talking about
the estimated
arrival in the Americas as a conservative
estimate,
30 to 40,000,000
enslaved
Africans.
What that means
is that if you take that number
and you take 1 third of 30,000,000, there
were more Muslims
in America
as a result of the slave trade
then than there are Muslims in America
today.
So if we want to think about
a genocide,
but what I want to share with you
today is something even
more serious.
You know, we don't
talk about this much among ourselves, but we
feel it a lot.
And that is that
Shaitan
is real.
The devil,
Iblis, is real.
And that Iblis has not affected
the way we are with our lifetimes,
that Iblis has
centuries of knowledge.
And I find it uniquely
significant
that in turning people
from being free
to being
slaves,
not not abdilah,
not an abd
for Allah,
but someone who is enslaved
by another human being.
Ibn Ashur,
may Allah have mercy on him, wrote about
this concept
in Maqasir of Sharia
of the 5 Durura,
the 5 necessities
human existence.
Those 5, maybe many of you, you know
them,
to preserve Hebdul Hayat, to preserve
your your dignity, your humanity, your soul.
Hebdul Aqal to preserve your intellect.
Hebdul Naser to preserve your lineage.
Hebdul Ma'al to preserve your wealth.
And have the deen
your religion, your way of life, your relationship
with Allah.
I believe that it's not by accident
that the colonizers,
maybe they they colonized the country that you
came from.
They definitely colonized this country.
But for some people,
they took it one step further.
They institutionalized
slavery.
And in American slavery,
as if Shaitan
had taught them,
the American institution of slavery
required
the removal
of all of the 5 dururah
from the enslaved African.
So they said, if you kill an enslaved
African,
whether he's Muslim or not,
you don't go to jail
because they're not human. They don't have a
soul. This is what they said.
Look, I don't know if you can imagine.
This is this is a period we're talking
about
over 200 years,
generation after generation,
living in a society that says,
you are not human, you don't have a
soul.
The second Shaitan must have taught them,
make it illegal
for the enslaved people
to learn how to read or write.
So you have people like Frederick Douglass,
who would ultimately become free, who learns how
to read
on the streets of Baltimore
from passersby
trying to pick up whatever he can to
learn how to read because it's it's it's
an act of civil disobedience.
It's a crime
for my ancestors in this country
to learn how to read or write.
2. 3.
The enslaved African in America
did not have control of their lineage.
So if an enslaved person
has a child,
the child doesn't belong to the parent.
The child belongs to the master.
And so when the child gets old enough,
then the master decides, like a person who
has,
their cat has kittens.
Once the kittens get to a certain age,
then they just have a little sign, kittens
for sale. And you sell the kitten off
to whoever the neighbors are.
This was the condition that they had
for enslaved Africans.
4,
They made it illegal for enslaved people
to own property, because they are property.
So there's no inheritance.
Can you imagine a people going from 1
generation
to another generation for 5, 6, 7, 8,
9 generations?
The father cannot pass on anything to his
wife or his children,
And then they have the audacity to talk
about the wealth gap between black Americans and
whites
because that the ability to transfer wealth
is
taken
from
us.
Last but not least,
they said it's illegal for the enslaved African
to practice any religion.
And they said, why does he need to
practice religion? He doesn't have a soul.
Brothers and sisters,
I don't believe that
these people could have known how to completely
remove the humanity
unless
they had been taught
what the necessities
of human life are
and then systematically
remove them.
What they exchange them with,
now,
even if you send your children to school
and you ask little,
Ahmed or Fatima,
Fatima, what are the necessities of life?
She says, oh,
food,
clothing,
shelter.
So
really,
that's what animals need.
For human life, you need these 5 duroorah
to preserve, walhamdulillah,
havdul hayat,
to preserve your your intellect, your legacy,
your
your your knowledge.
Havdul Nasr to preserve your lineage and your
family,
your mal, your wealth that you you work
and you save and you pass on your
wealth either to be sadaqa jariyah or to
go to your children or to your your
your community,
and to preserve your deen.
Brothers and sisters,
I want you to to take some time
and think about
the condition
when you see African Americans,
and you see the condition and you see
you see the statistics.
I want to remind you
that one out of every 3
of those people,
their ancestors were Muslim.
What happened to them?
I believe
if we establish justice and equity in this
nation,
part of the job will be to restore
those 5
to the descendants
of the enslaved African.
You know,
many years ago when I was,
at Howard University,
We had,
a brother in our MSA
who he had,
he he he came from overseas. He didn't
really
know,
anybody
know anybody
here. But he had heard
the the propaganda
about black about black Americans,
you know.
And so,
in the
propaganda
then was reinforced because he rode on the
city bus to school.
And he could only afford to live in
the in the lower
rent area as a student.
So he so he was living with the
people who who in the low socioeconomic
level.
But when he got to university and he
met the Muslims in the MSA, some of
them were African Americans.
He said to one of
the other brothers from, I don't know, mentioned
the country, from the his home country.
He said, why is it
that the other blacks that I see
on the bus and in the news,
why do they act so differently
than
the blacks I meet
on campus. He's, of course, he's in the
MSA. Right?
And the brother
told him something that he probably, at first,
didn't really understand.
Because where he comes from, everybody's Muslim.
Some of them are good, some of them
are no good, some of them drink, some
of them don't drink, some of them do.
Right? He's used to that.
That's where he's from.
So when the brother told him, he said,
the reason that the blacks that you meet
in our group
are different from the ones that you see
in the ghetto
is because of Islam.
That Islam
began to restore in them
the values
that come from the Quran
and the sunnah,
that it returned
start to return to them
the the the honor
of being being Muslim,
the the honor of
of of intellect,
of seeking knowledge.
It returned to them because they accepted
Islam, returned to them a sense of their
lineage.
To be a father, to take care of
your children,
to to be conservative with your wealth, spend
it in a lost cause,
to see them they've been transformed
because they have the deen. They have preserved
the deen of Islam in them.
And I'll tell you the the funny thing
about this brother.
Since this is a common, his name was
Murad.
Murad said,
wow, I never knew Islam could do that.
But it made him a better Muslim.
It made him a better Muslim coming to
America.
Many people are asking the question,
since I left Darhajirah,
what am I doing?
First, I wanted to share with you that
I love Darhajirah.
The faces that I see here,
I've
served for 15 years. So some of you,
you are small when I first saw you.
And now there are men and women and
parents and
subhanallah.
Some of the people that I met here,
they have been buried
and we continue to make dua for them.
Darah Hijra
is a great institution
And it will be a great institution,
whoever's here,
because there's something about
this place that Allah has blessed
that will, hamdulillah,
Allah inshallah will preserve it.
You know, somebody that said, oh, Mam Juh,
how are you gone? And you know, all
the work that we did and that's a
look.
On the death of Rasulullah
Sallallahu
Alaihi Wasallam,
Umar ibn Khattabi was overcome with grief.
After my mother passed away,
Raheem al-'Alaihi,
I I started to understand what Umar was
talking about.
He said, whoever said that Muhammad is dead,
I'll cut their head off.
That's grief.
That's loss. That's how you're supposed to feel.
But Abu Bakr, and in in his calm
demeanor,
he's reported to have said,
know that whoever worshiped Muhammad,
alayhis salaam, that Muhammad is dead.
But whoever worshiped Allah know that Allah is
alive
and will never die.
This deen,
this house is Allah's house.
This deen is Allah's deen.
People will come and go,
but,
your commitment and my commitment to
establish and to maintain Islam should be maintained.
It's not a person it's not a cult
of personality.
But if people wanna know what I plan
to do,
recently, we've seen some reports
that the number
of
descendants of converts
in Islam
is going down.
They're disappearing.
Now, I believe that they're still Muslim, but
they're out there.
So we began looking,
where are these
convert families and their descendants in our area?
Where do they live?
They don't by the way, most of them
don't live in Fairfax.
So we found out where most of them
live. They live,
if anybody knows DC,
Dukareem was here earlier.
They have 8 wards in D. C.
So they either live in Wards 7 and
8
or Prince George's County, which is what we
call Ward 9.
And as
Muslims
and blacks are being pushed out of D.
C,
I hosted
last Eid,
an Eid event,
because there was a brother who's from this
community, he prays with us, but many years
ago, he wrote an article in the Muslim
link.
The title of the article was called
Eid,
the loneliest day of the year.
You say, how could Eid be the loneliest
day of the year?
He wrote in his article that it's the
loneliest day of the year for many who
have embraced Islam.
We get up in the morning
when, alhamdulillah, and put on our best clothes
and take a nice shower, and we put
on our itza, and we gather with our
family, and we come to the masjid.
And after the prayer, everyone is shaking hands
and and and
congratulating them.
And then without thinking about it,
each of us goes back to
our communities,
our families.
If you're Sudanese, there are some Sudanese people,
they're having something, you go there. And some
of the brothers from Gujarat, they're having something
there. Someone from Lahore, the brothers going there.
The one in Senegalese is going here. The
smart is going over there.
And the poor
convert to Islam,
where is he gonna go?
You don't know where he's going
because you didn't ask him.
So after everybody
clears out and you see him just standing
around, he's happy
all by himself.
So we hosted an EAD event in Prince
George's County last EAD.
1,000 people
showed up.
Not for the prayer, just for a picnic.
1,000
people.
The overwhelming majority of them,
converts
and their descendants and their families.
In that area,
the Masajid had not organized anything for them.
It's my hope to spend the next 15
years. I spent 15 years here,
Bidnila to spend 15 years over there
to help them build the capacity and to
maintain and establish
the worship of Allah, subhanahu wa ta'ala, among
them.
So if you don't see me, make du'a
for me. That's where I am.
Not a whole lot of money over there.
Somebody warned me, you won't be on television.
I told him, that's alright. I've been on
television enough. I don't need to be on
television.
I want to be recorded by Allah, subhanahu
wa ta'ala, that we establish this deen. So
please make the offer for me.
I wanna want you to know what, alhamdulillah.
Even those of you who have a problem
with me, I still love you.
Because on on yawmul kiyama,
it's not gonna matter
that we were all lovers of Allah
trying to follow the example of
Allahu Madineafimin hadayth waafiinafimin
afeit wa tawalenaafimin
tawalayth. O Allah, guide us among those whom
you have guided. O Allah, protect us among
those whom you have protected. You Allah, take
us, walhamdulillah, as a friend as you took
Ibrahim
as a friend. You Allah, we ask, alhamdulillah,
that you preserve us, alhamdulillah,
on the deen of Islam.
Oh Allah, help, alhamdulillah,
that our children, our descendants, you Allah, that
they would maintain the duroor of Islam, walhamdulillah,
to preserve their their lineage and their wealth
and their intellect, walhamdulillah,
their their their honor and dignity as a
Muslim, you Allah. Walhamdulillah,
that they would maintain the deen of Islam
until the day that they meet Allah. Oh,
Allah, we ask for you to preserve this
house, walhamdulillah,
only for the remembrance of Allah subhanahu wa
ta'ala. Oh, Allah, we ask that you have
mercy on us and our families.
You, Allah, have mercy on those who are
suffering with difficulties, you, Allah, around the corner
or around the world.
O Allah, we ask, walhamdulillah, that you might
make us emissaries of your peace.
O Allah, we ask that you bless us,
walhamdulillah, with the best in this life
and the best in the hereafter.