Muhammad West – The Revival #26
AI: Summary ©
The US and the Russian Empire experienced the use of cutting broth and drinking alcohol, as well as protecting local tribes and cities. The French eventually lost most of their population and territory, leading to war and suffering. The French eventually become the leader of the United Kingdom and eventually become the French leader of the Caliphate, leading to political unrest and unrest in France. The speakers emphasize the need for acceptance of the "we" and a peace treaty to prevent war.
AI: Summary ©
Hope you're all well.
Night number 26. Tonight
we have 2
personalities. We're gonna discuss 2
great revivalists or freedom fighters, and I don't
think any of us have heard much of
them before. And because of I couldn't leave
I couldn't decide which should I go with.
I put both of them in tonight. So
the lecture is a little bit long. I
asked for math, but Insha'Allah, it's gonna be
interesting. We start off by going to a
place called Dakhistan,
Chechnya.
And for many of us, you might not
have heard this area. You know a very
famous person from there now, Khabib Umer. Right?
This land
this land is just in the Caucasus area,
very rocky, very mountainous,
very tough land, and the only thing tougher
and harder than the land are its people,
the really strong,
people. And, subhanallah, it's amazing. Islam reached this
this land in the time of Sahaba. Every
Sahaba
was so amazing in their ability to spread
Islam, and this area of the mountains,
embraced Islam a long time ago, and it
was,
never ruled really by any other dominion besides
the Muslims. And as we get to this
this time of the 19th 18th 19th century
when the Muslim world is falling apart,
every one of the colonial powers are looking
to expand, and Russia is not gonna be
left out. Russia also wants its piece of
the pie. And there's no way for Russia
to go. They don't have ships to go
across the Mediterranean, so they inevitably be entering
into Muslim lands. And so the Russians invade
the Caucasus,
and they very quickly defeat the Ottomans in
the Caucasus.
They also defeat a Persian army, and the
land is left completely alone now for the
Russians to invade. And it's up to the
local people,
the the the local tribes of this land,
to stand up and resist, and they would
would fight such a brutal war that for
almost 50 years, the Russians would not be
able to tame this land. Even till today,
Chechnya
is constantly rising up against,
Russian control.
This land would be called no this they
will call the Russian army would call the
Dakhishan the graveyard of the Russian army.
And one man in particular, Imam Shamil, is
going to be known as the lion of
a Dakhistan, is the leader of this resistance
movement. So what's his story? Imam Shamil born
17/97,
so at the end of 18th century, and
the Russians invade when he's about 20 years
old.
He's comes from, he's a Muslim family, but
Islam was was quite weak in that people
still had a lot of their pagan ways
of life, and there was a lot of
sinful things happening, he joined the Nakshbandi Sufi
tariqa. And the Sufi tariqa is quite, prevalent.
The Nakshbandi,
tariqa is quite prevalent, and it was about
a reforming movement. And the tariqa had a
principle of being spiritually strong and also physically
strong. And it's a a a a interesting
antidote here that when he came home, you
know, he would go and he learned from
his sheikh, and he comes home and he
finds his dad drinking, Imam Shamil. And he
told his dad, takes his knife out, and
he says, you know, I can't kill you
because you're my dad. So if you don't
stop drinking, I'm gonna kill myself. And his
father eventually, you know, had this this this
shock because his son was serious about it,
and so he stopped drinking.
The Russian army now invades
Pakistan,
and the the Nakshabandi Tarika,
become militarized. They say, look. We don't have
an army to defend ourselves. It's pointless. We
sit in the Masjid Majdikr. We need to
pick up arms and fight back. And so
the Sufi tariqa, the imam is also not
only their spiritual imam, he's also their,
military imam. And so when the army the
Russian army invades Gimri, Gimri is the town
he lives in, it's like headquarters.
They basically kill the ladies leave and they
kill every man in the town. So Imam
Shamil is still a young guy. He's 20
years old. He's following the imam, and he
says, we were alone in this tower being
besieged. And the imam of the tariqah, he
tells he tells his he tells Imam Shamil,
listen. Time is up. Allah's decree has come.
Bring my Musalla. And he just sat there
and said he passed away. He was killed
like that. Imam Shamil, he he he ran
away, but he was severely injured. And for
basically, his injuries were so severe, he was
bayoneted in his chest. And then he shouldn't
have survived,
injury like that,
but he, you know, he he he managed
to recover, like a dead man that's come
back to life.
And he now takes he becomes appointed the
leader
of the tariqa. So at the age of,
like, 24, he's the imam of the Nakshabandi
tariqa, and he's in charge of spearheading the
resistance.
And, in this time so there's a lot
of stories. I mean, the the resistance is
over, like, 30 almost 30 years. We can't
mention all of it, but just moments in
his in his in his as his leadership.
He tries to unite all the different tribes
of of the region, even the non Muslim
tribes. And he says to them, you can
see what the Russians are doing,
and they're gonna do it to all of
us. So you you we should stand together,
and many of them actually embrace Islam. And
one of the the one of the the
positives, if you will, Gaza is very sad,
but how many people embrace Islam? Because it's
in times of war when you see the
principles of Islam standing up. And the way
we treat prisoners, the way we fight jihad
is very different to the way others go
to war. Another thing he made clear amongst
his disciples or his followers was they the
army is called the mureeds. Like, they have
the mureed of the Masjid, the mureed of
the tariqah, those are called the mureeds. He
mentioned to them that we cannot drink. We
can't all of us are gonna give us
victory if we're still committing sin. None of
us must drink wine. Alcohol was very prevalent.
And so one of the,
and he said, we're gonna introduce the 40
rashes if you drink wine. And so someone
said, Sheikh, but when you were younger, you
were also like, you know, you and your
family drank wine. He said, that's true. Bring
the whip, and we start with me. Whip
me 40 times and my brother.
And, you know, I'm showing I'm serious. He
also said we are going to fight until
the end. Even if we're gonna die, no
one is allowed to have a dialogue with
Russians to discuss even peace.
And it came to light that his mom,
of all people, was contacted by the Russians.
You know, speak to your son, and they
gave us some money. And so he said,
whoever
speaks to the Russians and has some agreements,
a 100 lashes. And so when he found
out his own mom, he said, we're gonna
practice the had on my mom, brought her
out. And when they're about to hit, they
said, no. I will take the lashes. And
he told his
hit the guy, you better hit me like
you're supposed or I'm gonna execute you. And
he took the 100 lashes for his mom.
This man was
you know, by prince principled on what he
was standing for. So this resistance stood for
so like, the Russians this time is media,
so you can see the newspaper articles. The
Russians believed this. We're not like normal people.
We send 1,000 against 100,
and they fight deep in the mountains. They
don't know the article says these are people
who don't know when to die. They don't
know when to give up. They would be
one man against a battalion, and he will
rush and charge. And no matter how many
times we shoot them until, you know, he
gives up, they will never never give up.
So the the the the only way you
defeat a peep like Gaza. The only way
you can defeat a people like this is
you have to attack the population. You need
to destroy city upon city. You need to
go after the civilians. And so this is
what they did.
They went and destroyed
many of the cities, the Masajid.
They even captured the imam's son. They held
him prisoner for, what, 15 years. This forced
the Murid army into the deep into the
mountains, into the forests of of Dagestan. And
from there, they waged a a brutal guerrilla
war. Whenever the Russians were, you know, moving
through the mountains, they were ambushed and
One
of his greatest victories
is that he had a stronghold deep in
the mountains, and to get there, the Russians
had to go single file. File. So once,
you know, had to go 1 by 1
climbing up tens of thousands of men, and,
obviously, they're getting shot all along the way.
When they get into the fortress,
it's deserted,
and they basically set it on fire and
besiege them and starve them out in their
own fortresses while the, Murid army are in
the in the forest.
This is the same Russian army who had
just defeated Napoleon. The same Russian army just
defeated Napoleon was stuck and could not beat
this army in Tajikistan.
And so finally, the czar, like, this was
hugely embarrassing for them.
They sent I mean, the the population, the
army of when you talk about the imam's
tariqa, he only had, like, 2, 3000, 5,000.
I mean, the Russians sent 250,000
men army into Dagestan.
And the way in which they're going to,
the only strategy is they're in the forest,
we burn the forest down. They we burn
the villages down, scorched earth. There's no place
you can run, no place you can hide.
And eventually, having seen this and realized it's
a no win solution, there's no way we
can we you know, it's gonna cause more
harm to our people. Eventually, the imam says,
you know what? I will I will surrender.
But by now, he's earned such a reputation
of being a fearless fighter, but not only
in the way he fought, never harming or
killing,
the soldiers, never harming any civilians.
In one of these
raids, he managed to capture 2 Russian princesses.
And the these Russian princesses and her entourage,
she had a a a lady in waiting
as well. They mentioned that, look. These people
are like, in their minds, like barbarians. These
are like real savages, but they did nothing
to us. We were completely protected,
and the imam made their we the men
can't even look at us. We are perfectly
protected. And when we return, they returned them
back to get the son of the imam
back. And you think of Gaza. You think
exactly what we see in Gaza. Like, it
left a mark on these princesses the way
in which they were treated as the prisoners
of of Imam Shamil. Imam Shamil, of course,
once he he,
he he
surrenders,
the czar is actually so impressed, wants to
meet him and because he outlives 3 different
Russian czars, and,
they settle him down in in in a
in a city in Kyiv.
And
of the last things he requests of them,
he says, look, please allow me to go
on Hajj. I've never performed Hajj, and they
said, you can go on Hajj. And he
goes on Hajj, and he dies in Madinah,
Rahimullah, and he's buried in Baqi. He's buried
in Baqi. So that's our first, the Lion
of Daghestan. Afterwards, the Russians, of course, invade
Daghestan. But I said until today, you look
at, like, 20, 30 years ago, Chechnya till
today is uprising. They will a people that
will not bend to a foreign power. They
will not surrender. They will not give up,
and they will fight the spirit of of
resistance continues in them for the sake of
Allah. The next imam, the next person
what a person.
Imam Abdul Qadir of Algeria.
There's a town in America in Iowa in
Iowa in Iowa called Alcadir
named after him, a little town in the
middle of America named after this man. How
how is it possible that in America they
named,
Amnis? So in the yearbook, they wrote about
him. The students wrote he was this is
the students in America. They wrote, he's a
scholar, a philosopher,
lover of liberty, a champion of his religion,
a born leader of men, a great soldier,
a capable administrator,
a persuasive auditor, a chivalrous opponent.
The selection was well made, meaning the town
selecting his name for our town was well
made. And with those pioneers of of 70
years ago, we we honor the sheikh. So
this is these kids in America are saying
that we are the high school of Al
Qadeer in America. So who is this man?
He was born similar time like Imam Shamil,
the end
of the 7 18 18 100, beginning of
the 1800.
And he comes from an Algerian family. They're
very similar in that his father was an
amir of a tribe, a a tribe in
the middle of Algeria, and they were part
of the Qadiri Tarika,
very religious,
very Islamic. He's both the the father is
the sheikh of the tribe, the Kabila, but
also the imam of the tariqah. And he
brought his son up to know the ways
of the desert, to know how to ride
and fight in the desert, and also very
much inclined to Islam. And Imam Al Qadr
loved learning,
memorized the Quran, and his dad took him
on a journey through the Middle East. So
he went and he performed Hajj. He went
to Damascus. He visited many of the the
graves of the, and he visited different olema,
and this left a deep, profound impact on
him. And when he turned to Algeria, now
he's in his twenties,
France owed Algeria a huge debt. This is
when Napoleon invaded Egypt. They took some, resources
from Algeria, and they want should have paid
it back. They refused to pay it back,
so instead, they invade Algeria. The French invade
Algeria.
And when this happens, the people of Algeria,
you know, the ask the Ottomans, you need
to defend us. The Ottomans are nowhere to
be found. The Ottomans basically leave, and it
allows the Russia the French to do as
they want within Algeria. And the the they
ask Imam Abdul Qadir's father, you are the
imam. You need to do something. He says,
look, I'm a guy of over 70. I'm
old. I can't be the imam. I choose
my son to be the next imam. So
at the age of about 23, 24, Imam
Al Qadeel, similar to Imam Shamir, becomes the
amir of the tariqah and the amir of
the kabila of the tribe. And now he
goes to work to unite all the tribes
in the desert, and we are going to
fight a,
a brutal guerrilla war against the against the
the the, the French.
And it's also like Imam Shamil. He takes
a very firm stance. He said, first, we
need to reform the way we do things.
The way in which we're gonna fight must
be in line with the sharia.
He did not allow the killing of Christians,
because there are many Christians in the country,
the burning of churches. He he insisted that,
nobody will be there. He had a practice
in Algeria where you would get a number
of,
money depending on how many heads you decapitated.
So you would bring here a 100 heads
of French soldiers. And in my case, this
is not part of the Sharia. If you
take someone as prisoner, he has to be
taken as a prisoner. And when they took
them as captives, he said, we'll follow the
rules of the Quran.
Allah says that they feed
first the orphan and then the miskeen, the
poor person, and the person that you have,
the prisoner of war before yourself. You first
make sure your prisoners are fed before yourself.
And so this treatment of the, of the
French army was something which became very publicized
within Europe. This man in the desert who
would capture French soldiers and treat them well.
He also
rescued Christians when they were in danger. Priests
would come and say there's a family that
is in danger, and he would say, I'll
take you to the desert. You can rescue
them. And he accepted
willingly to receive any,
prisoner exchange. He took a firm start against,
any custom which violated the Sharia. And so
rapidly, his his his his success rises,
and his tactic within the the way to
fight the look of the French are more
numerous. They have more advanced technology. The only
way you can beat them is using the
desert. So what he would do is he
would like a gorilla warfare, the French have
their bases. Any time that they would leave
their base to send supplies, they would raid
them, attack them on the road. And so
the French were almost stuck in their barracks,
and they were running out of supplies. And
this continued for such a long period that
the French were forced into,
a a a kind of peace agreement where
they said, we will keep our bases along
the Mediterranean,
and you have the desert. They even called
this area the the emirate of Abdul Kalir.
This is your own emirate or it's actually
called the Musqara, the emirate of Al Musqara.
And so Abdul Kadhir
wanted peace. He continued
to to to, develop his land. They even
there's a story where they send an assassin
against him.
And he lives in a tent. He's just
he's the Amir, but he's just living in
the desert, moving constantly. And this assassin manages
to get in and he says, when I
came upon the imam, he's sitting in his
book, he looks up, he looks at me,
and when I saw this man in this
picture of him either reciting the Quran, it
this aura, this this this immense spiritual
energy this man had,
the assassin said, I can't kill a man
like this. I cannot kill somebody like this.
This is too much, and he basically apologizes
and runs away. And this is what this
Abdul Imam Abdul Kadeer
has. Anyway,
the the crown prince of France wants to
visit Algeria, and he breaks he goes to
part he goes to the parts of Algeria
he's not supposed to. Imam al Qadir says,
look. This is the peace treaty. You don't
come to our land. We don't go to
your land. If you do this, it's going
to be war. The French don't care, and
they break the treaty. And now
they have no interest of having further peace
treaty, so they deploy an army of a
100000 men. Again, this is crazy numbers if
you think about the time like that. And
the same like the Russians did, the only
way we're gonna beat you
is to destroy
every village, every town in Algeria.
This campaign of the French killed 40% of
the Algerian population.
40% of the Algerian population was killed by
them systematically burning village after village, moving south.
If you're not going to come out of
the desert, we're going to kill your people.
Eventually, the emir, you
know, he had no,
where else to go, and
he says we have to surrender. And he
and he writes here to his his his
followers because they're quite this I mean, this
for 20 years, they've been fighting. He says,
believe me, the fight is over. We must
lay down our guns. Allah is our witness
that we fought as long and as hard
as we possibly could. So long as there
was a hope of victory for our country,
we kept fighting. But now if I if
I thought there was any possibility to to
defeat the French, I would continue. But further
resistance will only create more suffering. We must
accept that this is the decree of Allah.
This is the judgment of Allah. And who
has not given us who has not given
us victory and who in his infinite wisdom
now wants this land to go to the
French?
Are we going to then oppose his will?
He said, we can't we have to accept
the Qadir of Allah when the time comes
for the sake of our people. And so
he says, I will surrender personally,
and he takes he said and they take
his family and everybody prisoner. The deal is
he will never he will leave
he will leave, Algeria. He'll never come back
to Algeria. And he says, fine. Settle me
in Damascus. I'll go to Damascus. And the
minute they capture him, they arrest him, and
they said, no. We're gonna take you to
France, and you go to jail. And so
him and his entire family are taken to
France. But by now, also, look, there was
politically the the British hated the French, so
they made him. All the good things he
did was publicized throughout the world. Look how
he saved these prisoners. Look how he treated
the the the the French soldiers. In fact,
within France, so many of the French soldiers
that encountered him had only good
treaty. It made the it humiliated the French.
And they took him to France. They said,
look, Sheikh. We're not gonna put you in
jail. You can live in a nice chateau,
but you need to stay in France. He
said, no. If you're not gonna send me
Damascus, I will stay in the jail, and
I will continue to shame you like this,
that you broke your promise to me. And,
subhanallah, this was he was about 5 years
in France, and there are so many things
that was written about him. You know, the
the many of those people who jailed him
embraced Islam.
When they asked, how do I describe him
the way he looks? He says, he looks
like Jesus Christ. What we see the picture
of Jesus Christ, this is what this is
what he looks like. And, you know, he
was taken to Bordeaux. And as he was
going through the city, the people lined up.
They were going through an election year, and
his name was on the ballot to be
the president of France
because of the caliber and the character of
this man. And they write that he would
never held grudges against anybody. He never spoke
ill even around the French. He said to
the French ruler that Allah has blessed you
and me with a responsibility to look after
our people. Allah has given you a bigger
responsibility because you have more power, more might
than me. So let us do what is
best for the people of the world.
Eventually, the the the new emperor that came
along was Napoleon Bonaparte. And Napoleon was so
impressed with,
Imam Abdul Qadir that he's, you know, apologized,
and he said we'll send you to to
Damascus.
We'll give you an annual pension. He was
on the French pension, and he was given
the highest He was given an award from
the French. So his story's not done. He
goes to Damascus.
And once he goes to Damascus,
he goes to
he in the city of Damascus, there is
a revolt
against the Christians,
and the Christians are being, attacked.
Now he wasn't alone. He was with an
entourage. And when he heard these riots happening,
he comes out, and he defends the Christians
of Damascus. Damascus. He puts on his armor
gear that he hasn't been fighting now in
years, his his clothing, his weapons. He gets
on his horse, and he says, we must
defend these people. And one of the people
said, but you then killed all the French
in in Algeria the the Christians in Algeria.
Why are you killing Christians there but not
here? He said, there, they invaded my land.
But here, these people are they are the
victims. And as I Allah suba'at this is
jihad. As much as I fought them there,
defending them here is jihad. He saved 15,000
Christians that night. They told them to come
to our home. After after he he did
that, after he saved the Christians of Damascus,
he got so many awards. I don't think
anybody in the world got this. He got
an award from the French, the highest medal
of honor from French from the from France.
He got the gold the the green the
Grand Cross of the Redeemer from Greece. He
got the Ottomans' highest level of award. Only
49 people in 600 years received it. Even
the pope gave him the highest award of
the Vatican. Abraham Lincoln gave him 2 pistols.
He was sort of such a a
a renowned figure in the world
who ever saw him and the way in
which he even in his war, in his
jihad, and this shows you something we learned,
even in the way we fight jihad. The
prophet said,
Ihsan, you give a message of dawah even
in the way you fight jihad.
Last slide,
Imam al Khadir also wants to go on
Hajj, and he goes on Hajj. And lo
and behold, it's the same year Imam Shamil
is in Makkah. And these 2 men who
fought 30 years against different oppressors, one against
Russia, one against France, performed Hajj together, and
they must have shared war stories,
compared scars,
talked about the state of the ummah, both
fought and lost.
But Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala, as Iman Qadir
said, this was the decree of Allah and
Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala has his plan for
the ummah. But to imagine the resistance of
the ummah from deep in the mountains of
the Caucasus to the deserts of Algeria to
Tuanguru in South Africa, it's all the same
time. Tuanguru is around that time as well.
If the spirit of fighting against oppression for
the sake of the deen, he's not gonna
die. Abdul Kadeep goes back, of course, to
to, to Damascus and he passes away there.
When he died, the New York Times wrote,
this is his eulogy, the New York Times
wrote, the nobility of this man, this character
won the admiration of the world. He was
one of the few great men of the
century, rahimullah. Imam Alukkadid of Algeria, rahimullah. Tomorrow,
we will talk about the final
collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the end
of the caliphate.
Is there a question?
Who made the land available to establish the
Masjid? Oh, well, Masjid, Sarjie Faniqa, of course,
that's, sister Sarjie.
And we have Shireen Baker.
Shireen
Adnan Adnan
And tonight's no question tonight. Oh, there we
the
lion
of
the
the lion of the desert. It's easy one.
And then we continue tomorrow with.