The Revival #25
Date:
Channel: Muhammad West
Series: Muhammad West - Ramadan 2024 - The Revival
File Size: 21.19MB
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AI Generated Summary ©
The Dutch were eventually conquering the small island of Kona and eventually took over the entire Jackson County, building a base in Cape Town and producing nutwithstanding spices. The Dutch eventually took over the entire Iranian arch Texas and eventually took over the entire French Islands, building a factory to produce spices. The Dutch eventually invaded the town of Robben Island and eventually led the resistance of the people, leading to the creation of a free Muslim slave. The speakers discuss the importance of learning to read and write the Arabic script and preserving deeds in public, as well as the impact of the first century of Islam on political sphere and the importance of learning to read and write the Arabic script.AI Generated Transcript ©
Night 25, it's an odd night.
It could be.
So whatever
effort, whatever energy you have,
put everything out, leave nothing behind. May Allah
bless us and grant us the reward of.
We
are now in the
deep decline of the Ummah, where the European
colonial
powers have now surpassed the Muslim Ummah. And
we mentioned how the fringe parts of the
Ummah are falling bit by bit.
The heartland is is is under threat, but,
really, it's the as we spoke yesterday, the
Muslims in West Africa completely at the mercy
of European powers. And if you look at
this point in time,
Islam, at the far extents of the world,
whether it's the far west or the far
east,
the north, Islam basically struggles to survive, almost
disappears.
But there is a tiny little place,
against all odds, in the most southern point
of Africa
that somehow survived.
Against everything that should have happened, a Muslim
community cut off from the rest of the
Muslim world survived and thrives, SubhanAllah. And, of
course, that is us here, the Muslims of
the South. So let's talk today, Insha'Allah,
about how we got here and how our
story is a phenomenal story. And so many
people, but in particular, one man,
His efforts, we all owe him a debt.
He's
up this road, and we give our salaams
to him.
So
the we spoke about how the Europeans are
now,
sending their ships around the world. It was
the Spanish and the Portuguese who were the
first to set sail. And, again, we can't
help but feel a sense
of the same time they started navigating the
world was the time Granada fell, the exact
same year. It was our technology. It was
our ships that they used to circumnavigate the
world. And they they are the ones that
first began to set up colonies in the
different parts of the world and they, they
start to monopolize
the spice trade. There was so much money.
Spice was the the gold of that time,
the oil of that time where you could
take some spices from India, from, Indonesia and
Malaysia, bring it to Europe and you make
a huge profit. The Portuguese
and the Spanish dominated this trade to be,
originally.
Then there was civil war, of course, within
Europe and Dutch, the Dutch Netherlands, who was
a colony of France. They broke away from
France or Spain. Sorry.
Spain and and the Portuguese were the,
people who had dominated the spice trade and
there was a civil war between the Netherlands
and Spain and the Dutch broke away from
from Spain. And once they broke free, Spain
blocked the Dutch off from getting part of
the spice deal. So the Dutch said, well,
we're going to do it ourselves.
Can't afford to buy a ship, so we
will club our money together, and, collectively, we
will set a fleet. We'll build a fleet
of ships, and we will send these ships
from Netherlands
to Indonesia
and get our own spices. This was the
idea. Originally, this was all about spices and
it was about trade.
And so the,
they formed what was called they they sent
their first fleet out in the 15 96,
the end of 16th century, and they made
a 400%
profit.
Few bags of spices from Indonesia
brought to to the Netherlands, and they make
a huge profit. So clearly, this business is
working. And the government got involved. The gov
government said, we're not gonna compete with one
another. We're going to have one massive shipping
shipping company called the VOC, the Dutch East
Indian Company. This is what it's gonna be
called. Of course, it's an Afrikaans.
And, they they then started to navigate the
seas, and they were able to come down
Africa. And they set up here in Cape
Town a little station. It's like a pit
stop. It's like a, you know, a refuel
station for the ships and they would go
on to to the,
Indonesian Islands. And because they were at war
with the Spanish and the Portuguese,
initially,
the Dutch were fighting other colonial powers and
they were taking over
the naval the bases, the ports of each
of these Portuguese and Spanish
posts across the Indian Ocean, and they were
fighting with each other.
Then the Dutch,
to to to muscle out the Spanish, they
they would set up their own factories, so
they would land on an island, and they
would have a deal with the Amir, the
sultan of the island. Say, look. We just
want trade. You sell us your spices.
We will keep it here and send it
back to the Netherlands. This was the original
plan. Their plan was not to go to
war with the local people. But then they
said to the local native sultans,
we don't want you to sell to the
British or to the French or to the
Spanish. And the sultan would say, but why?
I mean, it's a free free business. Anyone
who wants our spices should get our spices.
Now there was a particular island interesting, the
island of Banda.
Small, little, tiny island in Indonesia in Indonesia,
the only place on Earth where nutmeg grows
naturally.
Strange. The only place on Earth that nutmeg
exists is Banda. Of course, it's changed now,
and the Dutch did not want the sultan
of this land to sell to the Portuguese.
And because the sultan didn't agree, they then
said, well, we will then take it by
force. So they invaded the island, and there
was only about 20,000 people living on the
they basically
cleared the island of all its native people
and enslaved the rest, and then they set
up the entire island to basically be a
factory to farm
nutmeg.
All of this human life dying for spices.
And so
they realized, well, if we're doing this in
one island, why not replicate this? Why go
through all the hassle of trying to enter
into deals? Let's just take over the islands
1 by 1, and that's what they did.
A tiny country like the Netherlands,
5,000,000 people, takes over the entire Indonesian archipelago,
the biggest Muslim country in the world. Island
by island, they massacre, they take over every
single,
island in the area, burn down Jakarta, rebuild
it again. They even changed the name to
Batavia. Batavia is a Dutch word. And they
set up their colonies there. They even spread,
and you can see how quickly they spread
to,
conquering Malacca, then, Colombo in Sri Lanka, then
Ceylon, the whole of Sri Lanka, then in
parts of India. They're conquering all these little
towns and and and and setting up the
outposts. And because
their colonies are all over the world, They
have colonies now in India, in, Indonesia. Of
course, here, they set up a base here
in Cape Town. They even have colonies in
South America. When I was studying in in
Madinah, the South Africans we were quite close
with the South Americans, so the the the
what we call the West Indies. And we
were watching something, and and the South Africans
said, oh, that's liquor. And the guy there's
a guy from called the place Guyana, He
said, yeah. That's liquor. And we said, how
do you know that word? So he said,
no. That we were also Indonesian originally, and
the Dutch sent us all the way to
Guyana. Guyana is next to Venezuela.
And, subhanAllah, across the world, they had these
outposts.
And so
the Dutch, of course,
they used Cape Town as their base of
operation. They would send not only,
not only did they set up a a
base. Cape Town is a bit different. They
didn't only use it as a as a
port. They also sent settlers to come live
here. You'll hear this a lot in in
in Palestine when we speak
about, Palestine.
Settler
Settler, colonialism.
Settler, colonialism.
What that means is to hold this land,
you can't just have soldiers there that leave
after a few years or a few months.
You need people to actually live there, bring
their families there, and take control of the
land. And so they looked at people who
you know, certain religious groups like the Huguenots,
these are extreme religious groups. They couldn't live
in Europe. So they said, come and live
in South Africa. Come live in Cape Town.
We'll give you tax breaks. We'll give you
all this land. It's open land. There's no
one there. No one there. There's no one
there. Right?
And so, obviously, they,
start to set up their bases here in
in Cape Town and, of course, in Indonesia.
There's a bit of
a a a a war with with France,
and Britain takes over Cape Town and the
Dutch colonies and then gives it back to
them. Eventually, Britain takes it over but gives
it back, but they don't give back Cape
Town. Now let's talk about from a Muslim
perspective.
The Dutch would rule Indonesia up until the
end of World War 2, the biggest Muslim
country in the populated Muslim country in the
world, and they subjugated.
And if you look at what they did,
at some point, you know, at some point,
the spice trade dropped.
Dropped. There wasn't any more market for spices.
Now they had but they said they're not
gonna give up the land now. They said,
well, then we're going to force the people
to farm commodities that's not indigenous there. Coffee
is not supposed to be from Indonesia, but
you all have the Java blend.
We they forced the people of Indonesia to
farm sugar and coffee because this is what
was needed. And they got to such a
such a point where they taxed them to
such an extreme level where everything that the
people were farming would be exported. They are
producing
surplus food, but they have a persistent famine.
Everything that is farmed is taken out of
Indonesia and sold, and the people are dying
of starvation.
SubhanAllah.
So, of course and as you see from
country to country, the resistance,
the people fighting, not the lawyers, not the
accountants or the engineers, and there's good in
everything. It is the ulama
that are the ones that are dealing the
biggest resistance wherever the colonial forces came. The
people not giving up are the Ulama. And
one of these tiny islands, tiny,
the the Tidore Islands, the, there was a
sultanate, small island. The Dutch, of course, did
their thing. They came. They invaded, and
there was a long resistance between the Amir
and spearheaded by one of the alims, one
of the ulama of the of of of
the of the sultanate against the Dutch. And
this is, of course, Imam Abdullah, Qadi Abdul
Salam. Imam Abdullah, we call him 2anguru. He
was an imam, a sheikh,
maulana. He was a judge, a kadi, and
a mujahid,
a'lim and mujahid. And he fought against the
Dutch for many, many years until eventually his
jihad, he had to surrender.
So we only know him. We know his
story after he's defeated, after his island has
taken control.
His people are enslaved,
and he was seen as too much of
a danger. He was separated from his family.
He wasn't allowed to take any books, even
the Quran, and he was shipped from Indonesia
all the way to here to Cape Town.
Not a Quran with him, not a family
member with him. He he came here at
what age? 60,
68 years old,
brought
to brought to Cape Town. And
he was, of course, as we know, not
housed. He didn't get to step foot on
Cape Town. He was in Robben Island. So
everyone in the world knows, and there are
many people that listen, and the only thing
the only person they know about Robben Island
is Nelson Mandela. 200 years before Nelson Mandela
was in Robben Island, the first people incarcerated
were the ulama and the ulia fighting against
the Dutch. The fight for oppression in this
land against
oppression started with us, started with Islam. And
so,
Imam Abdullah,
Tuanguru,
he was brought to Robben Island, and there
were many other prisoners there. If you go
to the to we know that if we
go to Robben Island now, there are Krammachts
people who lived and died there. They never
got released.
He must have felt like, I'm in my
sixties. I'm almost 70. My time is up.
I have lost everything, my family, my children.
I've spent my life learning Quran, teaching
in service of Allah. I fought, and Allah
did not bless with victory at that point
in time. And he was deeply saddened because
he these letters he has, and he calls
South Africa, Cape Town, this place of sorrow,
this place of sadness.
So there's letters that he hears. What can
I do with my time? He doesn't know
how long he's gonna be incarcerated. For him,
it's you are in you are in prison
for life. Life.
So, SubhanAllah,
he's not going to let just be sad
in his sorrow. He's going to do something
productive.
And in his in his time alone, he
starts writing.
He writes a Quran from memory, number of
Qurans from memory. 30, 40 years later, the
Ottomans would send an official Quran to Cape
Town, and when they compared the official Quran
to Tuvanguru's Quran, it's almost perfect.
He wrote the Quran by memory, and you
can go to Uwal Masjid to go see
it. There's a copy sitting just around the
road. Uwal Masjid, he wrote the Quran by
memory, and he wrote everything that he could
think of, hadith, aqeedah, whatever he knew because
he, subhanallah, look at his foresight.
If this is knowledge,
it might be preserved by somebody. And so
he writes this book, Ma'arifatul Islam.
Basically, the knowledge of Islam, everything I know
about Islam, I'm gonna write it in this
book. And
after, as we said, about 12, 13 years
in the Robben Island, he's finally released, and
he comes to and he comes to mainland
Cape Town.
He is now,
basically 79 years old. Almost 80 years old,
he comes to Cape Town. Some mentions he
could have gone back to Indonesia,
or he decided to stay here. Either he
wasn't allowed to leave, or he willingly stayed
here because when he came to mainland Cape
Town, he saw so many broken people from
all over the world. People that were taken
from their families, slaves, political prisoners, people who
were so desperate.
And what they needed was a leader. They
needed someone, not a political leader. They needed
just somebody to give them some eza again,
respect, because you are told you are rubbish,
you are less than nothing. And so he
begins he rents a house or he sets
up a house here at where Awa Masjid
is.
79, he marries a lady. What a man.
Right? He marries a a sister here in
in in the book up, and he starts
a madrasah.
Now remember, this is a Qadi.
This is a judge. This is a person
who has mastered the Islamic sciences. He is
now teaching alif Batah to people who are
illiterate,
and he opens the doors of learning to
anybody irrespective of color,
irrespective of religion.
If you're a free person, a slave, you
can come and you can learn, and he
teaches you to read and write. And we
know that of the brilliance of of the
of the of the imam that he would
teach them to recite the Arabic script so
you could you could read Arabic. But because
no one could understand it, he would write
in that Afrikaans Arabic. So you would read
the Arabic script. It's alif Batah, but it's
Afrikaans, meaning the language of the people, so
that people could read the kitabs, and they
could understand it. And this is how he
was able to adapt
the knowledge
to get the people of the time to
learn the basics of Islam. And he formulated
our
well, again, you're not dealing with ulama. Also,
officially, Islam is banned. Islam is illegal. Not
allowed to have a masjid. So how do
you preserve your deen where you can't have
people sitting in classes?
Every ritual before you come to before we
eat together, we have a dua. Thursday nights,
we get together as a community. We have
a dhikr.
Every
aspect of life, where a child is born,
there's a ritual, there's a duqmal. When someone
gets married, there's a specific format. And so
every aspect of your life, there was a
bit of Islam incorporated into it. It was
taught rote learning. Everyone recites together and so
and so forth. In a very simple yet
amazing way, Islam became ingrained. It became the
identity of these people.
The imam continued to ask, allow us to
have a Masjid. Allow us to have a
Masjid. He's renting a house.
And, eventually, when the British take over, they
were a lot more
masjid, we know that this did not stop
them from having Jumuah. They would have Jumuah
here out in the open at the quarry,
an open field. The sheikh would give Jumuah
with the slaves and whoever was was allowed.
No no, Masjid. We will still have Jumuah.
This shows you the spirit of resistance. We
don't say, okay. Situation is against us. We're
gonna give up. We're going to make a
plan irrespective of our circumstances.
Eventually, the British allows,
they take over Cape Town, and they allow
a a masjid to be opened. But we're
not gonna give you a masjid. You need
to get a masjid of your own. You
need to go find a raise or something
and, subhanallah, how much in these people. So
2 1 guru was living in a house.
The lady who owned the house,
her name is Sarchi.
It's her name is Sarci, Muslim lady.
Her father was a slave who worked his
way out of slavery. He worked and worked
and worked until he bought himself free from
slavery. And he continued to work, and he
got to own a piece of property. The
first Muslim slave in this country
to own his own property.
How amazing.
A land in his own name.
And when his daughter got inheritance, she got
this from her dad. She donated it. This
is you want the Masjid Sheikh? I'm the
only slave who has a property. My house
will be the masjid,
Awal Masjid.
Awal Masjid was the house of this lady.
And from there,
as we said, it's Awa means the first
Masjid. Every single Masjid, every single madrasa,
every single Muslim in this land, every person
who's benefited
is from that lady, Sadaq al Jariyah.
As we
said, Imam Tuanguro
from that tiny little home, that tiny little
madrasah, He would teach hundreds of people. It's
interesting. When Tuanguru opened his madrasa, it's also
the same time SACS opened, which only had
25
white males. Whereas Tuanguru's Masjid or madrasa
had 100 of any every kind of person
learning. He wants to learn, we're going to
teach you. And
if you think about how he preserved the
Quran with his own memories,
fast forward a couple of 100 years, the
only Muslim minority in the world that would
compete in Quran competitions,
South Africa.
The level of Quran tafi'i
here is on par with Egypt,
Saudi Arabia,
Syria because of the legacy of the Quran,
learning knowledge. And we get to see
that when, as we said, across the world,
Muslim minorities did not survive. This tiny community
cut off from the umma
managed to survive.
It managed to thrive. It managed to develop
an identity of its own. It managed to,
as we said, go through oppression, go through
the the the Dutch came and went. The
British came and went. Apartheid came and went,
but this community is still here.
And now,
as we see it, even now, we see
the impacts. Not only that we fast, we
come to the masjid. We can make our
salah. The barakah in these massages are still
standing. We look at the current world events.
The world is seeing a genocide.
Not a single Muslim country or non Muslim
country had the ability to stand up in
that courtroom except this country.
What was different about this country?
The impact that we as Muslims have on
our
surrounding neighbors,
on on our fellow fellow non Muslims here,
the impact we have on the political
sphere in this country. And it started with
those pioneers. And if any and if we
talk about a mujaddid, a reviver,
then
from our perspective,
the reviver of his century, without a doubt
to one guru,
and all those who struggle through him. So
much to learn. So much that we can
benefit. And I think one last point to
make on this is that it was, yes,
an imam who led the charge, but also
it's a community together.
Every single person of that community did their
little bit to keep Islam alive. It went
from generation to generation, and we ask Allah
to preserve this deen in this area. Let
this plan always be a land of Quran,
of iman, of Tawhid. Let Islam always be
strong in this part of the world and
be testament to Islam. I mean, until.
Tomorrow, we'll talk about the there's 2. Do
we have a double headed tomorrow? We'll talk
about the French invasion of Algeria
and the,
the the Russian invasion of Tajistan. 2 great,
warriors Insha'Allah, talk about.
Question yesterday,
in which year did the first transatlantic slave
voyage to Brazil happen? It's 1526, so that's
when the or rather the Portuguese,
did the the the slave trades.
First,
winner is Sarah Asmal.
Masha Allah. Sister Sara.
And
for the guys, Jamal.
Is he a Jamal here?
K. Go and make up that surname.
Yes. Sorry? Jamal.
What's your name? Jamal.
Jamal. What's your surname? Shura. Yeah. That's it.
I can't pronounce it. Okay. Tonight's question.
Who made who made the land available to
establish this Awa Masjid in 792? What's the
lady's name?
at 10/22.
at 10/22.