Suhaib Webb – Prophets, Not Profit Secular Powers Immoral Response To Ukraine
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We praise Allah, subhanahu wa ta'ala,
a blessed praise.
We beseech Allah,
to send his peace and blessings upon
Muhammad inshallahahu
alayhi wa sallam.
And we ask Allah to send peace and
blessings upon the family of the prophet sallallahu
alaihi wa sallam, upon his
Ummah, this blessed Ummah, and upon every companion
of the prophet
Before we get started, if I could ask
the brothers in the back, we are
creating perhaps a little bit of uncomfortable situation
for an important component of our ummah, our
sisters. So if the brothers could scoot up,
insha Allah.
As Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala says that if
you make room for people,
Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala will make room for
you, alhamdulillah, in Jannah. So if the brothers,
alhamdulillah, could scoot forward.
And for those brothers who need to use
the wall, I understand. I have a 82
year old father, masha'Allah,
who likes walls. Now an an 82 years
old. Please make sure that we are creating
space,
for our elders and seniors and those who
may need to use the walls.
Today's topic is prophet not prophets, and what
a location to give this chutba.
We are a community of prophets with a
p, not prophets with an f.
And the irony of what we see happening
in the Ukraine,
the world needs to notice that when you
do Muslims wrong, it comes back to you
in different ways.
The occupation of Ukraine
and putting profits
before profits
is what we see happening in Kashmir.
The occupation of Ukraine,
whose president is begging to join NATO,
at the last moment,
is putting
an f before the p.
Profit
before profit.
The occupation of Palestine,
the continued erasure
of the Palestinian culture,
its integrity, its honor is being maintained as
even the Muslim world.
The hypocrites have been exposed.
The monathics have been exposed.
That even we find Muslims in America
beginning to waver
in understanding what Malcolm left us with. The
intersectionality
of the occupation of Palestine,
and
occupation of neighborhoods.
Prophets
or prophets.
And the prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wa'arihi
Wasa
Sallam,
he warned us of the prophets with an
f.
When he said it's authentically narrated on his
behalf,
the thing that I fear for you most
is dunya.
The thing that I fear for my community
the most is an unhealthy
because all dunya isn't bad as we'll talk
about inshallah in the second Khutba. We need
dunya for power. We need good power, but
I fear for you the unhealthy attachment to
this dunya.
When the Muslims came back from battles during
the time of Sayna Amrul Bhattab radiAllahu anhu,
and they brought back with them riches,
and they entered into the city of Medina.
Sayidina Amr, he began to weep.
And they were like, why are you weeping?
As he mentions by Imam Mataburani in his
history.
Like, why are you why are you weeping?
We have been blessed with wealth.
And he said, this is what will destroy
us.
This is what will change us.
The reason that it's very important to have
a healthy sense of attachment to the world
is that also we wanna be careful of
people who irresponsibly tell us that religion eschews
any sense of profit with an f. Allah
says,
Don't forget your portion in this dunya. And
the Allah
says,
Allah give us our lord give us good
in this life and the next and save
us from the hellfire. As one of our
teachers in Egypt used to say,
You know, like the dunya is a bridge
to the hereafter. You need it,
but don't get caught up in it.
The reason that it's very important to keep
dunya from
becoming something which
dominates
our personal hard drives and
causes us to outsource our values and morals
to things which are not intrinsic to who
we are, is that it compromises our ability
to be a prophetic community
with a p.
And the prophets were not about the f.
I don't ask you the prophets are quoted
over and over in the Quran as saying,
we're not selling out.
We're not asking
for any recompense.
In Azriya
Illa A'la.
My reward,
my recompense
is with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala.
It becomes very difficult to preach to the
hereafter
if we have an unhealthy
attachment
to the dunya.
It becomes very difficult to call people to
accept Allah as their savior
and guide and creator,
as the means of success
if we're compromising those morals
for temporary success.
That's why
Allah in Surat Al Kaf, he says
There's 2 interpretations
about this, actually 5, but 2 that are
important. One is that it's talking about the
good we do.
Because it will last forever.
The other interpretations which is strong is also
that it's daughters.
Because of course it's
So Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala says that wealth
and poverty are and sons are the beauty
of this life, but your daughters will, subhanAllah,
will continue to bring you hair after you
go.
The reason that this is important is that
it is impossible to be just
if we put
prophet
before prophets.
If you put the f before the p,
and we see that now.
The situation that's happening in Ukraine, and we
pray for the Ukrainian people, is something that
we as Muslims
have been seeing for years.
Our lands have been taken.
Our resources have been stolen.
We have been economically punished.
We are
forced to accept leader leaders that we don't
really like that much.
And many of us, especially those of us
who have relatives like myself in certain countries,
we know that we've had people who've disappeared
or been put in jail or who have
been physically maimed or abused.
And what becomes even more problematic is religious
leaders who tell
us
To
obey the leader is a part of iman.
No. To obey Allah
is from the part of iman, the arkan
of iman.
But we can't be just
if we forego prophets
for profit.
Justice is so important that Allah subhanahu wa
ta'ala says in Surat Al Hadid after 'udabilahi
minash shaitan regime.
Allah says that indeed,
we sent the books
and the messengers and almizan,
so that people
could establish justice. The lamb here is called
We sent the books and the prophets so
that people could establish justice.
And we find in the Quran, Allah subhanahu
wa ta'ala,
there's something that's misunderstood sometime, and you find
this in the books of Usul al Firk
being articulated in a much more
specific
way. People say there was no rulings in
Mecca. There were rulings in Mecca. There was
no akem ataklifiyyah
in Mecca. There was no 5, like, pillars
of Islam, like prayer, Ramadan, Hajj, and Zakah,
but there were akem.
And those akham,
those rulings largely dealt with 3 issues,
belief,
character, and justice.
Justice is one of the few rulings that
starts with and
ends with the death of the prophet
to signify how important
justice is.
And that's why Sayyidina Nabi sallallahu alaihi wa'arihi
wasaabi wasalam,
the impact that he had on people embracing
Islam
wasn't just theology,
explicit theology.
Not everyone accepted Islam because they had buy
in to Tawhid in the very beginning.
A lot of people were impacted by the
prophet's
justice
on issues like economics, on issues like family
law, on issues like how he judged between
tribes.
And that's why he is Amin
before he is Nabi. Nobody can be Nabi
before they're Amin.
Nobody will listen to a religious message
if they don't trust the person they're listening
to.
And that's why, masha'Allah,
the long narration
of Al Bukharina adab al Mufrad
from Sayyidina Abbas radiAllahu anhu man that Uthman
ibn Madhun
when he came to Sayyidina Nabi salallahu alayhi
wa'arhi wasaabi wa salam and he sat with
him. He wasn't Muslim yet and he sat
next to the prophet
and Sayyidina Abbas radiAllahu an'am said, we couldn't
hear what he was saying, but it was
like it was heated. Right?
And then afterwards, as they were talking, we
noticed that the prophet, he kept looking to
the heavens.
And then finally he turned to Uthman ibn
Madhun, and he said,
This verse Allah has commanded you to justice.
Uthman ibn Madun, he said,
Muhammadan
Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. He said, it was at
that moment that iman when I heard this
call to justice,
iman
permeated my heart and I begin to love
Muhammad.
Utham,
one of the leaders Utham, excuse me, of
a tribe of Arabs
also
in Al Adeb al Mufrad, Sayyidina Imam Ahmad
al Musnad ibn Majah.
He heard about the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa
sallam,
so he sent 2 of his scouts to
go meet him.
This is a a society that is rocked
with economic and social stratification,
like incredible stratification based on tribalism.
So he sent 2 people to meet Muhammad
sallallahu alaihi wa sallam,
and when they met him, they said, man
ent.
He said, Ana Muhammad
Abdullahi Warasulu.
I am Muhammad salallahu alaihi wa sallamah,
the servant of Allah and his Messenger.
And he read this verse. That's all he
said.
Allah has commanded you to justice and excellence.
And they said to him, can you repeat
that again?
They never heard anything like this before. We
talk about a social con con contract. We
talk about the social safety net.
We have to live beyond how long our
pants are, how big our beard is, and
can we eat a Chick Fil A.
That's not a that's not an ummah with
a vision.
That's an Ummah that's defeated, that finds power
in particulars,
not universals.
So the prophet, he said it again.
He said, read it one more time so
we can memorize it.
And they memorized it, and they went back
to Akham.
And he said, how did you how did
you meet this guy? Who's this guy, Muhammad
Alaihi Salam? They said, he said one thing,
man. What?
He said,
He said, he caused great morality and ethics
and forbids evil. And later on, this tribe
embraces Al Islam.
So the entry points, the strategic entry points
into society
are not always through the explicit message of
theology.
And that's why the most heralded Muslims in
the west
are those who stood for justice,
like Muhammad Ali,
like Al Hajj Rahimu Allah whose anniversary of
his
martyrdom was just a few days ago, Madic
Shabaz. Till now, I live in Harlem. If
I wear a Kufi,
people go to me they say, Salaikum Salam.
And I'm like, Wasalaikum Salam.
Then I'm like, Are you Muslim? No, man.
The other day I had my headphones. I
was talking to my wife on Frederick Douglass
Boulevard. This guy started grabbing me.
I said, What? What? He said, I gave
you the salaams.
I said, Wasalaikum Salam.
He's not even Muslim, but the legacy of
Malcolm is still in the blood of that
community.
If you asked him about, Sifat al Ashrin
or
They didn't know anything about that. They knew
that there was a Muslim who had their
back.
There was a Muslim who put his life
on the line for something right,
and he didn't sell out his Islam.
The first message he sent to his people,
make sure you pray 5 times a day.
Learn Arabic.
So the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam, as
a strategic entry point,
not only tawhid
and not only Ibadah,
but it's a social contract.
Prophet
or prophets.
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala shows us how important
justice is. As I mentioned earlier, it's one
of the few akham
that exist at the beginning of prophecy till
the end of prophecy. One of the few
rules, one of the few things that is
fard
is justice.
And Allah
shows us in the different aspects of life,
if we think about the 10 ideas of
Aristotle that everything in the world files under
1 of 10 things, we find all 10
of them here mentioned in the Quran, but
we'll only mention 3. Number 1 is in
what we do.
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says,
If you're gonna write the contract, write it.
Write it with justice. This is in
actions. If you're gonna trade,
trade with justice. If you're gonna create an
NFT,
create it with justice. If you're gonna get
into crypto,
do it Bil Adal. And the word bat
in Arabic is really beautiful because it's from
the same word that means, like, tape.
It should stick to you. So
Allah says,
wipe your head and wudu be.
Make it make it get on your head
so justice should get on you.
It should be with you where you are.
Iman billah. Iman is with me wherever I
am.
We lose this sort of in English. The
pixels quite aren't the same.
So Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala
here he says,
let the person write with justice. This is
in our actions.
Number 2 on what we say,
in the 17th chapter of the Quran, if
you speak,
speak with justice.
So the first is actions.
The second is speech.
The third, emotions.
Psychological justice.
Allah says,
Allah talking to the companions after the conquering
of Mecca,
he said, even though you hate those people,
what they did to you,
be just with them.
Even though you may feel you have the
right
to give it to them, those people in
Mecca.
So the concept of justice in Islam
touches on number 1, a theological nomenclature
as the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam said
that evil is or oppression is 3. One
of them is sin,
so I limit my sin, I increase my
obedience.
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says,
Those who believe in their iman is not
touched with oppression. Here oppression means
I'm sinning. I'm not just with my fitra.
I'm just with myself.
And if I make a mistake,
I turn to Allah.
The second type of justice that we talked
about is related to
our actions.
The the 3rd to the last verse of
Surat Abaqra, when the person writes, let them
write.
Allah says, and don't hide the truth.
The third
is to be just in what we say.
Even if it's against your own family, we
find this now in marriages.
Many times people will call Imam Khaled, not
me, when they have divorce issues or marriage
problems.
Or I will forward them to Imam Khaled,
outsource them to him.
And what we find is, my son can
do no wrong.
My son, Alhamdulillah,
is a waliman awliya ilah.
My daughter, Alhamdulillah,
she's perfect.
When she was born, she would wake us
up to pray to a hundred at night
at 2 years old.
My daughter can do no role.
This is where you find justice
starts to wane.
But Allah says,
Be just against yourself
if needed and against your own family.
And then finally, in our emotions and our
attitudes.
For example,
to have psychological bigotry towards people because of
their race, or color or gender or language
is a form of dhoom in the heart
and the mind.
That Allah, subhanahu wa ta'ala, he sent his
deen to create justice
and make taltihir of these horrible ideas.
In the next part of Akhudba, we'll talk
about how we can be just,
and how the lack of true profit before
profit
is creating some of the destabilization
that we know well
in the Muslim world,
as well as now we're seeing in Ukraine.
We ask Allah to make us from the
people of justice,
and we ask Allah
to accept our repentance, and we ask Allah
to unite us with our beloved messenger, Muhammad
salallahu alayhi wasalam.
Again, the brothers can scoot forward, inshallah. We
wanna make sure that the community feels a
common unity,
especially in the back there and by the
door. I promise I will finish early.
I'm older than Imam Khaled. I cannot talk
for 45 minutes.
May Allah continue to bless him
with that incredible energy.
The prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam,
he he is the
embodiment of justice. And we find in a
very important hadith
from Abu Sa'id al Khudri radiAllahu anhu
related by Imam al Bukhari and his Sahih
and others,
that when the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa'alehi wasallam
was distributing
property to people.
A person came to him and said,
Be just.
You're not just.
And the prophet said, If I'm not just
manya'dil, who could be just?
So we learned from that, that the prophet
Muhammad sallallahu alaihi wa'arihi wasallam
is the embodiment of justice.
And Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala says to him
it says to him and to us in
the Quran,
I have been commanded to be just amongst
you.
Sometimes people feel like, well, that's the prophet.
I'm just, you know,
a normal somebody. I'm not a prophet. I'm
just a Muslim, alhamdulillah.
There it is impossible
to remove the responsibility of prophecy from our
lives.
Anyone who says,
even if they may not be adherent or
committed Muslims,
that responsibility will follow them wherever they go.
And that's why Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says,
and when you
judge between people
and then you, the whole Umma in shortnessa,
you must be just. So just as the
prophet
alayhi salatu was salam
was commanded to be just, we are commanded
to be a community that puts prophets with
a p, that's the title of the hutba,
before prophets
with an f.
And that is the danger of a world
who it economically
is driven by the monoculture
of profits with an f.
Even now social enterprises are looked at like,
yeah, that's just a way to make money.
How do we make sure that we do
not contribute
to the attitude that we saw in the
Arab Spring? I was on the ground in
Egypt. I was in Azhar at that time.
SubhanAllah. When the Arab Spring happened, I remember
running in to classmates
and seeing the hope and the euphoria.
Whether you either political line you sit on
is not the point of my discussion here.
I'm not Egyptian.
But we're just to see the world
ignore.
Tunis,
Egypt,
Syria,
Yemen,
Mauritania, which was first by the way.
Our brothers and sisters in East Turkmenistan.
People, the Rohingyas.
Hong Kong.
The Ukraine.
Prophets
before
prophets.
There are 4 things that we should think
about Alhamdulillah,
so that we can be
just within our circle of influence,
not our circle of concern. Often times, we
like to put our circle of concern first,
which is like for example, is there water
on Pluto? If I'm thinking about is there
water on Pluto, but my daughter needs water
to drink in her bottle, and I'm so
busy worried about Pluto that I don't change
her diapers, may Allah bless all of our
daughters, give her water, then I am being
irresponsible. I'm not being prophetic. And oftentimes as
Muslims, we like to buy into the meta
narrative while we ignore what's right front of
us.
So what are some steps we can do
to make sure that we are being just?
Number 1
is muhasaba,
is to be introspective.
In our relationship with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala,
And to be honest about that relationship and
to be vulnerable with Allah.
As Allah says,
let every soul think about what it prepares
for tomorrow. The word ghad actually means yomuqiama,
but it's called tomorrow to remind us this
is how close it is.
And the statement of Sayidna Amar Abu Nuhotab
as well as Sayidna Adi Karamallahu Achai Wa
radiAllahu Anhuma
who said,
Look into yourselves and audit yourself before you
are audited.
Sayidna al Hassan al Basri
Radhiallahu Anhu, he used to say that the
people who are most active in auditing themselves
now
will be those who have less of an
audit
in the hereafter.
Every day is a tax deadline
for our hearts.
So every day we take the opportunity
so that we don't have to pay late
fees
when we meet Allah. Oh Allah, forgive me.
Oh Allah, forgive me for this. Oh Allah,
I seek refuge in you
from this. To be honest with ourselves. The
second, within our relationships within our families, because
one of the most important areas of justice
that we failed to pay attention to is
within our families, within our marriages and our
children, or our kids and our parents.
And Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala says, kuwa amfusakumma
aharikum nara. The first is you and your
family
from
*.
Say to your wives and your daughters first,
O Muhammad, then to the believers.
That's how it should start.
The nafs likes to be the hero. The
nafs likes to lionize itself
and to put itself in a position of
authority and being an influencer.
But if I have a 1000000 followers on
Facebook that I did not buy,
or a 1000000 followers on Instagram, but I
can't have a good relationship with my spouse
or my kids
or my parents, I can't have influence or
be influenced,
there's a problem.
And how can we work on that?
Communication.
Most of the time when people come to
me and they have problems in their family,
it's usually because they don't communicate.
There's assumptions. We think that we know each
other. Recently, my brother who when I embraced
Islam, I used to call him Abu Jahl.
And I actually felt that was a compliment.
So
I started to realize as I got older,
man, let me listen to this dude, man.
Let me try to understand this guy.
Even though it was really hard, honestly.
I hope he doesn't watch this.
But, subhanAllah, when we started to listen to
each other, and he said the same thing
about me, and we began to communicate and
talk through even difficulties,
over time,
there's not a cherry on top of that
sundae, but, alhamdulillah,
a few almonds on the whipped cream.
The relationship is better.
Oftentimes, we think we know our children because
we bore them. That doesn't mean we know
them.
We have to communicate with them.
So one of the things we can do,
especially with our our our parents and our
children, is to avoid we have, I'm sure,
some lawyers here to avoid ambiguous universal questions
and ask the questions that you would ask
someone who's on trial,
but in a nice way. So for example,
my daughter. I used to say, How was
school?
Fine. But then I started thinking,
what was the most singly what was the
most singular
amazing thing that happened to you today,
Habib Ji?
And then my daughter said,
why do you ask these kind of questions?
Because now I have to give you
an answer.
I said, that's why I asked him, because
I love you.
I wanna know what's going on, not because
I'm
but because I wanna know how your day
was.
So we should ask questions that are particular
but also show that we know something about
the person.
Communication.
Allah says,
and people don't think about communication with justice,
but ask
brothers and sisters in the boroughs of New
York who get killed by the cops because
new neighbors have never had a conversation with
them to understand
that people may have mental illnesses. And so
when they see them acting out, the rest
of the neighborhood knows that's my neighbor. It's
normal. They call the cops, and the cops
kill that person.
You tell me communication isn't value?
Valuable?
And say that Anastas and Malik said when
the prophet talked, he gave you his
presence. That's why it's a gift of presence.
So one of the most important ways to
undermine injustice in our homes is to be
good communicators
and to be listeners and to give ourselves
wholly to conversation.
The second
is that we have to, as a religious
community,
make sure that we are not gentrifiers
in the boroughs of New York City.
We cannot live as parasites
in this city and then claim to care
about Black Lives Matter or the rights of
Latinos
or issues like recivity if we're sucking the
blood from neighborhoods and we're not contributing back
to them.
That is a sin.
That's why Imam Anawi radiallahu anhu, he said
that the lands that the Mamluks took,
usurped is not allowed to eat the food
from those lands that is sold by those
people.
So we have to become part of our
neighborhood.
We should build conversations with people.
We should attend, if we can, from time
to time city council meetings to understand how
zoning is impacting places like Harlem and Brooklyn,
and how the rezoning of those neighborhoods is
impacting people who have lived there for decades
and raising rent.
If you wanna know the impact of that,
look at the train station here and look
at the train station in Brownville.
And we as Muslims cannot be part of
that.
And I gave a khutbah years ago how
not to be a gentrifier. I got in
a lot of trouble. I think I got
banned from that masjid.
But how do we pull back from being
unfortunately part of a global project
that harms the underserved?
We have to be deliberate in service.
The third
is that we speak truth to power,
no matter where the power is as best
we
can. SubhanAllah
in the time of Spain, Al Mansur Athani,
was one of the leaders of Andalus, and
he's one of the architects of why Andalus
became Andalus before everyone started fighting and killing
each other.
As Ibn Hazem said, you couldn't walk 3
miles except someone was claiming to be the
Khalifa. Like, everyone was Khalifa. That's why Andalus
fell apart.
Everyone wants to lead, no one wants to
follow. But everyone needs an Abbeccah.
Everyone needs an alumsalama.
Al Mansoor in his lifetime, a scribe begin
to complain to him
that there's a man who's accusing me of
injustice. So the man was brought into the
court of the Khalifa,
and that man,
he pointed at that scribe and said, That's
the guy. I've been petition I've petitioned him
3 times. He never showed up to the
Qadi.
And Mansoor, he listened, he said, I will
adjudicate you 2. And at the end he
said, I don't have the ability to adjudicate.
So he created an office that existed
in the khilafat of Andalus,
which is called the office to hear the
claims of the oppressed.
We have to think about that in our
nonprofits.
How as nonprofits are we functioning?
How is people who may be VCs? How
people who may be using money?
I know a Muslim brother. Recently, he sold
his company for $1,300,000,000.
Dollars Someone offered to buy it for 1,700,000,000
but the money they had he considered to
be unclean. So he took the 1.3 for
Allah.
That's the kind of attitude that we wanna
have. Prophets
before prophet.
So ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala
we ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to bless
and protect the oppressed all over the globe.
We ask allahu wa ta'ala to limit our
deliberate or
inadvertent engagement in oppression and evil. We We
ask Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala to help the
people and children of Ukraine.
We pray for our brothers and sisters in
Hong Kong. Pray for the brothers and sisters
in Palestine.
Pray for the brothers and sisters here in
the United States of America.
We pray that Allah
remove
any
support we may have contributed to oppressing others.
Before we finish, we have a prayer request.
One of our sisters and grandmother
who is currently in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Nasrul Begum, she's fighting for her life with
COVID
19. So ask Allah,
Yashfiha, Shifa, and Kamir, and Shamilan. And our
dear brother also,
one of our dear brother's
daughter is fighting with leukemia. We pray that
Allah will bless her parents and bless her
with a complete shifa. SubhanAllah radiqarabillai'zati
ammayasifu.