Nouman Ali Khan – Dont Let the Environment Dictate Your Islam
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AI: Transcript ©
When I I live in the United States
sometimes young people come and tell
me, Usna, it's really hard to be Muslim
in America.
And I said, I've never heard something more
ridiculous in my life.
If our Islam, in the millions, 100 of
millions,
billions of Muslims around the world, if the
vast majority of us will only be Muslim
because our parents are Muslim,
because our environment is Muslim,
then our Islam is in trouble.
Our Islam is in trouble because the environment
is changing.
For many centuries before
the coming of the Prophet and
before the revelation of the Quran,
the world operated in a certain way,
and there are some things that I want
to bring to your attention and to remind
myself of
that dominated
the world.
This was part of the Christian way of
doing things, but it was also found in
other
the Chinese civilization, the Indian civilization,
the Persians, etcetera.
They had a certain way of organizing
their societies.
I'll give the Christian example.
What they had set up was this idea
that
some people are meant to rule.
Some people are born
of royal blood,
and God wants these people to be the
rulers of the land.
And the fact that they have power itself
means
that's how Allah wants that to be.
This is how Allah wants them. This they
they are special people. They are they're not
special because of something they do, they're special
just because of
what bloodline they have. Just by being born,
they're special.
They're better than the common person.
The second part of this society structure
was that they felt that there are some
people in society that are chosen by God.
These are the holy people, the saints,
the priests,
the church clergy,
and these are the only people who understand
who God really is. Nobody else can understand.
These are the people who understand religion.
These are the people who understand the will
of God.
And these are the only people that can
speak on behalf of God. If somebody disagrees
with them,
then they are not just committing a crime
against another person, they're disagreeing with a person,
they're disagreeing with God himself.
And these 2, the so there was this
there was the royal elite
and then there was the spiritual elite,
The spiritual elite.
And these 2 elites,
they worked with each other.
They had a partnership.
So the spiritual elite would go and give
their sermon and preach to the people,
you better be loyal to the king
because God chose that king.
So he they're going around and making sure
everybody
is stays loyal to the ruling class and
the ruling class says we will
the ruling class comes to the spiritual lead
and says, we will fund your church, we
will protect you, we will make sure everybody
listens to you, and if every anybody disagrees
with you, we will have them killed.
We will protect you in that way. So
everybody will follow you, and you tell everybody
to follow us.
This this is the setup that they created.
And then there was a third class of
people. So this was the political elite, the
royal elite, and there was the spiritual elite,
and then there was the financial elite,
the people with money.
And it was this idea that some people
just, oh, you know, God has just blessed
some people to be more wealthy than other
people. And clearly, if he gave them so
much, that must mean he likes them more
than other people. They are meant to be
the masters. They are meant to be the
owner of the land. They are meant to
be the 1 that has all the money
and we're meant to serve them.
This is our place in the world. So
there was this, you can call it a
trinity,
an unholy trinity in society.
There was the rulers, there was the spiritual
elite, and there was the financial, the wealthy
elite.
And then the rest of them were called
the commoners.
The rest of us are the commoners.
Right? And our job is to accept
these people's place and our job is to
accept
our role in society. That's that's the that's
the role we were brought into in this
world. This is where you were born. Now,
this is the Christian version of things,
but the Chinese have their own version of
things, and the Hindus have their own versions
of things, and the the Zoroastrians have their
own versions of things, but they all have
something in common. Even back all the way
go back to the Firaun, you see the
same formula. Firaun believes that he's
God. He's chosen by God. He's from the
royal blood.
He has a priest class that goes around
teaching that you have to be royal to
the pharaoh,
and then they have the business class to
take advantage of all the other workers at
the bottom. This is a setup
and all 3 support each other and the
law doesn't apply equally to people that belong
in this class.
So if a common person commits a crime,
they will be punished.
But if a member of 1 of these
3 groups commits a crime,
then they will protect each other, and they
will find some way of not getting these
people punished like other people get punished.
This is a this is part of the
system, but they're they're going to preach to
people that the laws
apply for everyone, but of course they don't
apply for people that are above the law,
and these 3 groups are above the law.
And this,
even even this setup existed in Makkah at
the time
of the Prophet
in their own way.
The Quraysh believed that they were the chosen
custodians of the Kaaba,
the royals of Makkah.
They were actually they also happen to have
people of different religious classes, different idols, different
religions, and all of them are endorsing the
Maqans.
All of them.
Don't mess with the Maqans. These are the
protected people. That's why when the Maqans would
travel for business, nobody would attack them
because they are being protected by the spiritual
class.
And of course, they're also the ones making
all the money.
When the Quran came,
when Allah gave His final revelation
to Rasulullah
it was actually from the very beginning a
revolution.
Allah is teaching us that there's no 1
to be worshipped except Him
and that He created all human beings from
1 single human being,
from Adam which
means the royal blood
and the farmer's blood
and the slave's blood, and the master's blood,
and the rich person's blood, and the poorest
person's blood is just the blood of Adam
alaihis salaam.
There's no difference.
And when they're going to pray
to to Allah,
there's not going to be a row
for the royals,
then the 2nd row for the spiritual elite,
and the 3rd row for the wealthy elite,
and then the poor people can be in
the back.
It's not how it works.
When the Muslims are standing for salah,
someone belonging to a higher tribe like Hamzah
radiAllahu anhu is standing in the same row
as Bilal radiAllahu anhu,
who's supposed to be a
slave, they're all standing in the same row,
all of a sudden he's not just talking
about equality in in theory,
he's showing it every single salah
when the Muslims are standing together, he's showing
that all human beings are equal
You leave whatever title somebody had, if they
were a royal, they were a scholar, they
were a business person,
they were, you know, some some governor, whatever
they were outside,
they they take those shoes off.
They take those shoes off and they come
inside Allah's house and they're just Allah's worshipers.
That's it. They're equal completely.
There is no hierarchy between them. And the
there's a new hierarchy in the Quran.
There is such a thing as some people
are better than others. There is such a
thing. But how does the Quran define it?
The most noble among you. Now the word
noble is very important because when the Arabs
heard the word noble, what came in their
mind?
These 3 kinds of nobles came in their
mind. The 3 kinds that I keep describing
you. And Allah says the most noble among
you are the ones who are most aware
of Allah, most conscious of Allah, most mindful
of Allah.
So now,
how do you determine someone is better? The
1 that is actually more loyal to Allah,
more loyal to justice, more loyal to more
loyal to principles, more loyal to truth and
to honesty.
The person that is kinder is better. The
person that is more truthful is better. The
person that is giving the rights to their
family is better. It doesn't matter if they're
a billionaire or they're homeless, that doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter what blood they came from,
what color of their skin, that doesn't matter
because taqwa is inside, it's not outside. So
what they're wearing on the outside, the skin
on the outside, the accomplishments, the recognition,
all of these things that are from the
outside
in a sense before Allah became irrelevant.
All of that became irrelevant.
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And in fact, a lot of these people,
the elites, 1 thing you know about the
elites is that they
they love having servants.
They don't like doing things themselves.
Or can you imagine some king sitting there
going
and then the guy brings water, and somebody
brings some fruit, and somebody's giving him the
fan. Or if he's he hears a noise
outside, he says, guards, go check go check.
He's not gonna get up and check himself.
He's gonna go tell somebody else to check.
Right? And what does Allah do in the
Quran? He talks to these elites. By the
way,
much of the Makkan Quran, if you read
it carefully, the early revelations in the Quran
is talking to the elite.
He's going after them,
going after the wealthy, going after the powerful.
And Allah says
on judgment day,
what happened to your security?
Where where is your servants? Why are you
alone?
And then he's about to be humiliated on
judgment, and Allah says,
You know? Allah says
They're not going to have a protector, no
helper. You see, when the king would get
in trouble, he'd go to the church. When
the church would go to trouble, they'd go
to the king. When both of them got
in trouble, they'd go to the wealthy.
They would find each other's help.
Judgment day comes. He's like, where's my people?
I don't know who I gotta call.
Like, I don't have anybody to go back
to.
The Quran
was destroying
destroying the recognition
of this hierarchy.
All human beings are equal.
All human beings deserve dignity.
Nobody's born in a lesser class.
Nobody deserves less respect because they have less
money.
Nobody deserves more respect because they have more
power.
That's not the case. Respect,
garam,
comes from taqwa.
Respect comes from somewhere else completely.
Completely.
And this was a very it sounds like
a beautiful idea,
but it's also a really dangerous idea.
It's actually a truly, truly dangerous idea.
Because if you accept this idea,
then
you cannot just tell people what to do,
and they will not question you.
Because if I tell you something, you have
a right to ask me a question. Hey,
that doesn't make sense.
I can question it. Where did you get
this from? What's your evidence?
Bring your evidences.
But if you're the church or if you're
the spiritual elite and you speak on behalf
of God and you can never even be
questioned, nobody can even ask you a question
because questioning you is the same as questioning
God himself, well that image is shattering.
This is why you find in our tradition,
the Muslim scholarly tradition is very different from
the Jewish tradition and the Christian tradition and
other traditions. In our scholarly tradition, 1 scholar
will write a tafsir of the Quran,
and another scholar will write another tafsir of
the Quran and will debate the opinion of
the first scholar
and say, he wrote this, and here's why
I disagree with him.
And nobody looks at that and says, look
at this, Kufar.
How could he disagree with this name? How
could he just no. Nobody's a pope.
Nobody's holy. These are all human beings making
their best attempt to understand the word of
Allah,
and they can disagree with each other, they
can have debates with each other, and this
is actually the power of our religion.
The other interesting thing that happened in the
time before Islam
was nobody had access to the Bible.
You couldn't just pick up the Bible and
read it.
You have to go to the proper authority.
They will tell you what it says.
People didn't
injeel among them. They didn't have that. They
knew some basic duas and the prayers, but
the text
was in the possession of the church.
The text was in the possession of the
rabbis.
When Allah gave us the final revelation,
He didn't give it in the form of
a text
that is supposed to be preserved somewhere hidden
only to be kept to be accessed by
the very special few. The Quran was memorized
and the Quran was spread by the tongue,
and any ear could hear it. It's no
longer classified information.
Everybody has access,
and this was actually a revolution by itself.
Everybody has access to education.
Everybody has access to Allah's words.
Everybody should be thinking about Allah's words. And
then they should be going to those who
know know more than them, and learning, hey,
what does this mean? What does this mean?
And they should be inquiring.
They should be think thoughtful believers.
They shouldn't just be believers because somebody told
them to be believers.
They should be believers on their own.
This was a profound revolution.
This is actually the revolution of Islam.
That's what the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam brought.
I say this to you
because we're living at a certain time in
history. It's been, you know,
a 1000 and a half
years, 1500 almost years, since the coming of
the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam. So it's
been a long time.
Like the Quran describes about the people before
us. A long time has passed over them.
What happens over time? What happens over time
is we forget some of the things that
were there in the beginning.
We become a culture
just like every other religion became a culture.
We're born into a Muslim family.
We're born into a Muslim community.
We're we're used to, you know, things being
a certain way. We never ask any questions.
We never inquire, and we're just we accept
Islam because our environment is Islamic. Please listen
to this carefully. We accept Islam because we
found in our family or in our community
an Islamic
environment. So our Islam didn't come from the
inside,
it came from the environment which is outside.
But what now we're times have changed.
Even if you're living in Trinidad, or you're
living in Texas, or you're living in Lahore,
or you're living in Dhaka, I don't care
where you're living in the world, Your environment
is not just a physical environment. There's an
environment on this device right here.
There's an environment right here. You are now
exposed to things you were never exposed to.
Human beings were never exposed this way before,
ever.
So your environment that kept you safe
and you could just be comfortable in your
belief
because everybody around you believes the same way
you do.
It's no longer the case
it's being challenged
it's being questioned
it's being it's being made confusing
Now you have 2 choices.
If you want to save your iman, you
want to save your faith, you have 2
choices. I'm gonna shut down the internet.
I don't want I'm gonna shut down all
world communication.
Don't talk to anybody. I just wanna stay
within the few people that will protect my
iman. Everything else is fitna, everything else is
kufr, everything else will destroy me.
By the way,
several a couple of 1000 years ago,
the church
was telling the public,
don't learn,
don't ask questions,
don't inquire because if you learn anything outside,
it will ruin your faith.
It will ruin your faith. That that's what
the church was telling the people. Don't learn.
That's why they were burning books.
They were burning books because they didn't want
people to learn because if people learn, they'll
start questioning Christianity.
We can't have that. That will destroy this
whole system.
And so if our solution is we better
not learn anything,
we better we better hide to protect our
iman,
We are forgetting who we are.
Allah gave us this religion not to hide
from the environment.
Allah gave us this religion to challenge the
environment.
That's actually why he gave us this religion.
This religion doesn't run
from fitnah. This religion ends fitnah.
This is what this deen is.
This is why Allah calls it the religion,
the deen,
or the millah of our father Ibrahim alayhis
salaam. Ibrahim alayhis salaam was surrounded by shirk,
and he's constantly questioning it. He's constantly asking
questions, and he's challenging it.
We cannot become the religion of Ibrahim alaihis
salam if we don't have something inside
that is driving our iman.
And the thing that just just contemplate
this with me. The the Muslims that first
heard the Quran,
the people who first heard the Quran, and
we we often don't think about this. When
the Quran was coming down, the vast majority
of people that were listening to the Quran
were not Muslim.
When the Quran was first being revealed and
Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam was reciting the ayat
of the Quran, most of the ears that
the Quran was going into was not Muslims,
and they've been not Muslims for many centuries.
Family history and ancestry and
every eye of the Quran is challenging their
culture. It's challenging their family. It's challenging their
environment. It's challenging their lifestyle. It's challenging their
freedom. It's challenging everything.
Why would they leave their family,
and their culture, and their freedom, and their
comfort? I'll leave all of that and accept
this message.
What is it?
It's something powerful about the word of Allah.
There's something supernatural,
miraculous about the word of Allah that these
people who heard it Imagine, before Islam,
they could eat whatever they want.
They could do whatever they want. They can
kill whoever they want.
They can behave however they want. They can
speak whatever they want. And Islam comes, and
it puts restrictions on what they can eat,
and who they can marry, and how they
can behave, and how they can do business.
Why am I accepting all these restrictions? I
was free before.
Why am I following this? This is too
restricting. By the way, you get this question
today from Muslim youth. Muslims say Islam is
so strict.
It's so restricting. And I say, your your
question is not new. In fact, this question
would have been asked by the mushrik a
couple of 1000 years ago or 1500 years
ago when the Quran first came. Why should
I accept this religion that puts all these
restrictions on me when I could be free
without it?
Shirk is so much easier.
Being shirk is much more liberal
than Islam. It's too conservative.
Right?
The question that is, how why did they
accept it?
Why not? They didn't just accept it. They're
willing to die for it.
They're being tortured and beaten, and you can't
beat the Islam out of them.
They're being ripped apart and they won't leave
What in the world is happening here?
Even their family comes to them and says,
we liked you.
We used to like you.
We had hopes in you. Why are you
becoming like this? What's changed inside you?
Something came inside them that they could see
the falsehood outside.
And now they're committed to the truth.
This
will only happen when someone has basirah on
the inside. They can see for themselves this
is the word of Allah.
They could feel for themselves this is the
word of Allah.
If our Islam, in the millions, 100 of
millions, billions of Muslims around the world, if
the vast majority of us will only be
Muslim because our parents are Muslim,
because our environment is Muslim,
then our Islam is in trouble.
Our Islam is in trouble because the environment
is changing.
And when the environment changes,
then the Islam will change too.
The thing that will keep our Islam going,
even if the outside situation changes or doesn't
change, nothing will impact it, is if our
Islam is coming from inside, not from the
outside.
It's from the inside.
When I I live in the United States,
sometimes young people come and tell me,
Usna, it's really hard to be Muslim in
America.
And I said, I I've never heard something
more ridiculous in my life.
It's very hard to be Muslim in America.
When 2 +2 equals 4, it's not hard
to ex accept that 2+2 equals 4 in
Trinidad, and it's not much harder in Canada
and not much harder
in anywhere else. Fire burns, because it's really
hard to not touch fire in America. No.
No. No.
Fire burns no matter where fire is, buddy.
Truth is truth.
The idea that somehow the environment
is making my faith weak. You know what
that means? That your your faith
just came from the environment.
That's why it's weak.
Your faith didn't come from something inside.
We need to cultivate that inside.
We need to build that inside. And the
only way that will come the only way
that will come is the way that it
came the first time.
The first time it came, it came when
people were thinking about what Allah was saying.
Rasulullah sallallahu alaihi wasallam was reciting the ayat
of the Quran. People were thinking about what
what what is this word? What is he
saying? And the more they were thinking about
it, their entire world was changing. Then you
could make the environment
feel like a glimpse of *. They won't
leave Islam.
You could make the environment torturous for them,
they won't leave Islam. You could make them
leave their home, they won't leave Islam. You
can make their loved ones become their hated
ones, they won't leave Islam. Nothing can happen
that they will that will make them leave
Islam.
So when you when you see today that
life is easier for Muslims, and by the
way, when you go to Muslim I've been
in many places in the world, and when
I see Muslim communities, 1 thing I've noticed
is whenever I see more wealthy Muslims,
wealthier Muslims,
their children are farther away from Islam,
generally.
Isn't that the opposite? You have on the
1 hand, you have people that are being
tortured, and they won't leave Islam.
And on the other hand, you have people
that have a good life. They've got a
PlayStation 5 downstairs and a PlayStation 5 upstairs.
They've got life is easy. Life is they
got get got to do a iPhone, got
the HiFi Internet, wifi, you know, got a
car in the gar couple of cars in
the garage, life is good and all of
a sudden I have doubts about Islam
What in the world has happened? You know
what's happened? Well, when your environment the the
mentality is, I have everything I need. I
have money. I have entertainment. I have health.
I have safety. Why do I need God?
Why do I need religion? I have everything
already.
I don't need it. You know where that
sense of safety comes from? It comes from
the environment.
It comes from the environment. So now people
are losing their faith
because of the environment
or people are thinking that their only way
their their faith will be safe is because
of the environment. Let's get away. Let's run
away from America. Let's move somewhere in the
Muslim country so we'll be in a safe
environment. This entire thinking
goes against the message of the Quran.
Ardeen did not push people to go to
safe environments.
Ardeen pushed people to create new environments
to create new environments. The Sahaba
left their homeland. They left the sacred land
of Makkah and Madinah.
They left that sacred land, and they ended
up some of them in India.
Some of them all the way to China.
Why? Why? They should stay in a safe
environment.
Why are they going all the way out
there? What in the world?
This is the essence of our religion, and
we when we forget that essence,
then there is no in my mind, Allahu
Ta'ala Alem, there in my mind there is
no doubt about it. If we don't hold
on to this religion
for internal reasons,
for deep internal reasons,
then Allah replaces the Ummah
with others who will be better than them.
Intata wallow yastabdil kumanghayrakum,
sunbalayakunuam
salakum. If you turn your backs, he will
replace you with people other than you, and
they will not be the likes of you.
They will not be like you. May Allah
protect us from being replaced. And may Allah
Azawajal make us people who deeply connect with
Allah's word genuinely.
And we find that our faith and our
commitment to this religion is not being impacted
by the outside, but rather it's burning from
inside, and it glows from the inside. And
in fact, instead of it, the environment changing
us, we're the ones that end up changing
the environment.
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