The Revival #24
Date:
Channel: Muhammad West
Series: Muhammad West - Ramadan 2024 - The Revival
File Size: 19.17MB
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AI Generated Summary ©
The printing press and reformation of religion in Europe have led to the church reforming itself and becoming more and more irrelevant. The history of the Atlantic Ocean, including the French and British shipping companies, is also discussed, including struggles with neighbors and the collapse of the European free trade system. The struggles of native people and the local population during the conflict, including the loss of jobs and clothing use, were also discussed. The French invasion of Algeria and the French's return to Africa are also mentioned.AI Generated Transcript ©
Night number 24.
And, just a reminder to myself and to
everybody not to lose focus during the even
nights. Any night could be laid at Al
Qadr. Any night could be that special night.
And
as we as the hadith mentions, it's not
about how much you do in Ibadah or
how long you stand in the salah. It's
just about standing with sincerity. So find that
moment.
Inshallah. I mean, yesterday, we spoke about
these two parallel systems, the European world rising
and rising and the Muslim heartland
falling further and further behind. And one of
the major
turning points was, of course, the introduction of
the printing press, which once again and this
is
what we know from the foundation of our
religion, that the country, the nation, the people
that are reading and learning the most will
always be the most advanced. Allah says in
the Quran, he will raise up.
He will raise up the people of Iman,
will have a special place of Allah, and
those who are given knowledge.
The ones who have more knowledge will always
have a higher level, and so Europe starts
to surpass
the Muslim world in terms of learning.
And so we'll talk about what's happening in
Europe and what's happening in the in the
in the,
Middle East or the Islamic empire.
So the Europeans,
with the advent of
new techno, with the advent of the printing
press and the reformation, we said the this
man, Martin Luther, this priest,
starts a reform a reformation,
saying that the church must reform itself, that
religion must change, and his ideas gets published.
And more and more of the people rise
up, and eventually, the Catholic church is forced
to. It loses a lot of its power.
It loses its properties.
The largest landowner
in the world at that time
was the Catholic church.
Today,
if you look like at England, England, the
largest land owner owner is the monarch, the
queen or the king of England. Where did
they get their property from? They got it
the minute the Catholic church was pushed out.
They said, well, the church doesn't need to
own it, so the king can own it
now. And so,
you could see the church owned and controlled
much of the, the power within Europe.
So with the churches,
move,
away, people, of course, revolted not only against
the Catholic church, they revolted against religion,
in particular in France.
France has this very
anti anti religious outlook in life. They basically
had this view that for centuries, we were
in the dark ages. We were oppressed. We
were backwards because of the church, because the
church kept us away from,
enlightenment. And so one of the first,
ideals that that starts forming is this concept
of secularism.
Secularism is to remove religion from the state.
One of the reasons was also now that
you have many, many different Christian groups here,
the Catholics, the Protestants, who must be in
charge of the country? Which religion is in
charge? So they said, you know what? No
religion is in charge. God is irrelevant. And
so as they would say, God was dethroned.
He's no longer the sovereign of the
of the of the kingdom. Man is now
in charge or,
the government is in charge.
So secularism
is sort of the first step of the
ideology
to remove
religion from basically all spheres of life, make
religion irrelevant. Religion is only something you do
on the day you get married and you
dress up and then there's a kind of
a festival, the day someone is born, someone
dies. That's religion. Otherwise, it's irrelevant in how
we teach, our syllabus, how we do business,
our economy, our government, religion. There's no place
for God anywhere. This is secularism.
Once you have gotten rid
of God, then you pave the way to
the next stage of liberalism.
Liberalism basically says and if you read, I
mean, what it's foundation, it is that you
are free to do anything that you want.
Ultimately, your huwa is your god. So long
as you don't infringe on someone else's freedoms,
you decide
how you want to live your life, what
you want to eat, what you want to
dress, who you want to sleep with. This
is the ideology, the religion
of Europe.
After the Catholic church is thrown out, essentially,
this becomes
driving force of the world today, which as
you can see is direct in conflict of
Islam, which is submission.
I surrender to something bigger than me. Liberalism
is there's nothing bigger than you or Akbar.
You are your own ilah.
Right. So now there's a new and and
one must also mention, as bad as we
might think of the
ulama and the Ottomans for banning the,
printing press, they got to see what's going
on in Europe, and they must have felt
perhaps this is protecting our our people. The
same way when the Internet came up, many
will ask, perhaps we should say this is
haram.
And now AI is coming up, perhaps. Let's
be safe.
And for the sake of protecting iman, protecting
our deen, there might have been an over
conservatism
and perhaps, you know, there's there's some there's
some goodness
in what they try to do, but, of
course, it was a huge mistake. So now
Europe, with
turning away from the church, turning away from
scripture, turning away with from belief, and looking
just to the dunya, they are finding great
success, and so religion becomes more and more
irrelevant.
So now Europe rises,
and now they want to export the ideology,
and they want to move beyond Europe. They
they can't move further east because there is
this massive Ottoman wall,
or the Ottomans are in the middle of
the Middle East. So to avoid the Ottomans
and going through that region, they go westwards,
and that's where the discoveries of, Vasco da
Gama and the great voyages across the Atlantic
Ocean. Why did they voyage all the way
to America? The objective of Christopher Columbus was
to get to India. Why does he wanna
get to India all around the world? Because
he doesn't wanna go through Muslim lands. This
was the idea. We don't wanna go through
Ottoman Islamic lands because at that time, there
was still some ISA and strength, and so
they end up in, North and South America.
And, of course, what they do there is
they commit one of the biggest genocides in
history. They completely eradicate the native people,
so much so that they have to bring
new people to this land
to to look after to to work the
land and to so initially, this whole voyage,
as we said in 14/92,
Christopher Columbus discovers America. 1498, 7 years later,
this is the Vasco da Gama sails down
South Africa, past Cape Town. He lands here
in Cape Town. It's the first person to
come around the whole Africa, and then he
finds India on the other side. And so
the Europeans are becoming the masters of the
sea because, of course, they're not going through
the Ottoman lands.
And the idea originally was to set up
trade. This was only business. We're only getting
goods from from China, from India, from different
parts of the world, and we're bringing it
to Europe. We're cutting out the Ottomans.
But, of course, when they set up trading
posts,
these became colonies, and they thought, why do
we need to trade with the local people
when we could just take from them?
They're not humans in any case. They're not
people. They are nothing in fact, if you
look at their writing is this we found
this when Christopher Columbus writes to Queen she
said, I found a land that has been
unclaimed by human beings.
What are the people there? The millions of
people that are living there, what are they?
And so they claim the lands that they
find, and, of course, naturally, the native people
would would stand against them, but these you
can't fight against a a a a technologically
superior nation, and they had the backing. So
when they talk about liberalism
and freedom and human rights,
what they're doing at the same time is
committing genocide in North America, South America, Australia,
Africa,
and they are shipping millions and millions of
people across the Atlantic Ocean.
And and how do they reconcile this? If
you look at their writings, they'll say, well,
these people don't deserve human rights because they're
not really human, until they get to a
level of being human beings,
which we need to we need to subjugate
them, enslave them, educate them, and maybe if
some of them becomes people, then we'll give
them the rights. So it's the European
ideology.
And,
the Europeans
so by and large, they're now conquering
the oceans,
and they're conquering the fringe parts of the
world, the edges of the world, the center
of the world still. The Ottomans, the Mughals
are still quite strong, And as we said,
by chance, Napoleon ends up in Egypt. It
wasn't it wasn't really a planned thing. He
somehow ends up in Egypt, and he realizes,
I'm here in Egypt in the heart of
Ottoman lands. Lands. No army is coming to
stop me. He took it so easily, and
this was a clear indication the Ottomans were
on their last legs, and this will come
into play tomorrow.
And similarly,
an English the British shipping company, not even
the Army of England, a shipping company sets
up shop in India. They're just there to
trade, but then they see the fighting that
is going on, and they have
a few thousand men. And with these few
thousand men, of course, with the backstabbing of
one
city governor against another, they are able to
basically take over the entire Indian subcontinent. They
try to rule the entire Indian subcontinent and
do away with the Mughals. Now if they
are doing this in the heartland of Islam,
in Egypt, just a stone's throw away from
the Khalifa, they managed to bring down the
Mughal Empire. What do you think they are
doing to the fringe parts of the Ummah?
Places where there is no authority anymore, like
Indonesia, Malaysia,
like West Africa. And so let's talk about
this terrible chapter in our history,
and really at the low point when the
Atlantic slave trade,
the Portuguese were the first.
They were the first people to start taking
Muslims from Africa to their new colony, Brazil.
When the Spanish and the Portuguese conquered the
North the the Americas, they had an an
agreement, this will be yours and this will
be mine. And so Brazil became Portugal's port
and that's why till today, one of the
few countries that speaks Portuguese is Brazil. And
so the Portuguese,
this tiny country, conquers this massive country of
of of Brazil, and they see the land
is fertile. There's a lot of
opportunity for agriculture, but when you have decimated
I mean, they nicely say the local population
deteriorated. What does that mean? They disappeared. They
disappeared. So when the locals were gone, we
now they're not going to farm the land.
The Europeans are not gonna farm the land.
We need to get some cheap free labor.
And so they would bring in millions of
people
from West Africa, the majority of them being
Muslim,
free people made into slaves, and they were
shipped across
the Atlantic and dropped in in Brazil.
How many people were there? Some say 20,000,000.
Some say 60,000,000.
Along the way, probably 30% of the people
died along these voyages. I mean, there was
a big wuha a few weeks ago about
cattle that were on a ship that came
around South Africa. And, yes, it's bad,
and it's bad. Of course, even animals, we
we treat correctly, but
the way they were shipping the people
was worse than the way animals are shipped
today.
And they so they bring these slaves and,
to to Brazil to the point where a
certain region in Brazil is predominantly
African Muslim.
There are so many of them that there
are more than the local
Brazilian people, which is what it tells you
what happens to the local native people, and
the slave masters of the minority. And so
this is an interesting chapter that the biggest
slave revolt in the Americas was done by
Islam, by Muslims. And in the series that
we talk about the revival, that even in
the lowest point, Islam does not give up.
What you see in Gaza, everything against them,
but there is something that cannot be broken
with this religion, and it's called the the
Ramadan revolt or the Mali revolt. So what
is this what happened there? So as we
said, millions and millions of about 30% of
all the slaves that were taken ended up
in Brazil. The majority of them were Muslim.
And the the area where they stayed is
a place called Salvador da Bahia Bahia. That's
the the land of this area, this town
was called Bahia.
And over time, the majority
together. It's interesting. Mi'raj was sort of a
big night for them, and they would keep
Mi'raj together. The obviously, the people who were
taken were,
children, old people,
everyone was taken. So you had and
are they still trying to teach the people
how to read Quran? They would write down
what they know of the of of of
of Islamic,
Arabic alphabet and they would still be reading
Quran in their own basic way. No madrasas,
no masjids, but through tradition, they would keep
it alive.
And what happened, this slave revolt in 18/35,
it happened in the Ramadan, one of the,
shuyuk,
his name was,
they called him Ma'lim
Bilal, Ma'lim Bilal. He was a slave.
He was an educated man but he was
taken as a slave and his and the
and the the slaves together for years were
collecting what little they could to free the
the mala'in. They asked the slave master, let
this guy free. We'll buy him to just
let our sheikh go free. He's teaching our
kids. He's let him go free. The slave
master refused. Then the slave master dies,
and he dies in debt.
So what happens? You are in debt. They
arrest Mawl ibn Bilal.
We need to put you in jail to
find out how this guy's estate because you're
part of the estate. So they lock him
up in in jail because the master is
in debt, and this happens in Ramadan.
And this becomes too much for the local
people. On 27th
Ramadan, laylatul Qadr, it also coincides with some
Christian
you know, they get together, they collaborate, and
we are going to storm the jail and
let Malim Bilal free. And,
this is the biggest revolt that occurs
as a slave revolt throughout the Americas. No
revolt was bigger than this, and they basically
get 100 of them and, subhanallah, what is
mentioned here, you'd see one of the,
interesting one of the leaders,
his job was his job is like the
treasurer. He collects money from all the slaves.
And what does he do with that collection?
Part of it is we are going to
use it to make Islamic clothing so that
they couldn't wear,
a a a a bayah's or thobes, but
when they made when they made salah, you
have the top. When you die, there's a
kafan for those who couldn't work because it's
Jumuah time. They would pay your your you
know, you're not gonna work, We'll do pay
for your day. There's a system going on.
And so all these the clothes that they
would wear only for salah, they took it
out. They put their Quran around their necks,
with little ayaats they had. And you could
imagine this in the middle of Brazil,
100 of Muslims
putting on their thobes and their turbans, coming
out in the streets, takbirring,
and storming the garrison, storming the jail. And
for a time, for a day or so,
they were able to take over this region.
But, of course, eventually,
the, Portuguese,
fearing that if this spreads to the rest
of Americas, I mean, all over even North
America, USA, they're all worried because they all
have the exact same situation. One slave revolt
can lead to the entire system falling down,
and so they crack down hard. They've sent
in the army, and they basically massacre 100
and they
massacre
100 of of of the Muslims.
They round up the the the the leaders,
torture them, execute them, set an example, and
what they actually did, which one might be
a silver lining, is they took the most,
learned, the and
the the more organized members of the group,
about 300 of them, 500 of them, and
they shipped them back to Africa. They took
them and they sent them back to Africa
because they they realized
if you have an intellectual
Islamic
group of people, they will never be able
to subjugate
the the masses. And so they shipped away
all the scholars, all the learned ones, all
those who could read and write, and they
sent them to to Africa.
And also, from this point on, they made
a point they're not going to take any
more Muslims as slaves because they found within
the Muslims, there is a spirit that they
could not break. And after that, they also
then realized it's not just the weapons that
keeps them in charge, we need to send
the priests. And so now they force Catholicism
down the throat of of these people. It's
estimated there were 100 100 of thousands of
Muslims in Brazil. Today, there's hardly any of
them. What happened? And so,
what what we take from this is,
I wanna talk about our own history. Our
history in Cape Town is not too too
different from that. And most of under such
persecution,
communities are not able to survive. Eventually, your
Islam can't survive under that kind of of
of constant pressure. And how many communities across
the world, all all who knows, who fought
as long as they can, like the Moriscos
in Spain, trying to keep their deen alive,
trying to just recite Quran, and therefore, what
a great Niama that we can come to
the Masjid. We can hear the adhan. Our
ladies can wear their hijab. We can go
leave our work, go for jumwa, and and
without any con or any fear in a
land that is on a Muslim land. We
thank Allah for this for this blessing. We
ask Allah to keep it this way. Tomorrow,
we'll talk about, the French invasion of Algeria.
It's quite a brutal invasion,
continuing in this colonial period, Insha'Allah. Last night,
we said that there was this this battle
in which paper was discovered between the Muslims
and the Chinese. Of course, this is the
Battle of Taras, the Battle of Taras.
And
m Salih Hamid,
Mohammad Salih Hamid. No?
Nizam Nasiruddin.
No.
No.
So one, it's almost your turn.
Coming up.
Oh, she's not here.
For tonight's question
tonight's question, what is tonight's question? In which
year? In which year were the first transatlantic
a bit difficult, this one.
a bit difficult, this one.