Yasir Qadhi – Living in Non-Muslim Countries – Ask Shaykh YQ #121

			The question I had is, are we allowed to live in a non Muslim country, especially one that does not
follow Muslim laws but on other religions laws? 107 I mean, Kobe, deca Illa. De Jalan no hay lay
him. First, blue, Lake Erie in
		

			Joomla.
		

			Once again, we go back, you see, dear brothers and sisters, again have to go into some detail here.
The majority of American Muslims are children of immigrants, right? All of you that I can see are
basically children of immigrants at home that we have a good, you know, around 30% African Americans
who are basically here for much longer than myself and many of us here, we need to understand the
Islam that we were taught was influenced by the culture of the people that came from the lands that
they came from, whether it was Egypt, whether it was India, whether it was Buxton, the type of
Islam, that was culturally influenced. So back in the 60s and 70s, those people that came here,
		

			their local mother, clergy, were like a stop for the law. You're going to America that is the Donald
Cooper, and how can you go there and this and that, so they began thinking that they're not allowed
to be here. But you see, when you look at the text, when you look at the Quran and Sunnah, you don't
see these types of cultural understandings of Islam. In fact, there's an authentic hadith in the, in
a book of Hadith called the Sahib inhibin, where a person converted in a faraway tribe, and his
whole tribe was not Muslim, and he was the only Muslim. Somebody passed through the tribe and said
to him, Hey, your Islam is not valid because you're living amongst the KU Fars you're living amongst
		

			the you know, the Kaffirs. So he got so worried he traveled all the way to Medina, Subhana Allah and
he said, Oh, messenger of Allah, somebody came to me and said, My Islam is not valid, unless I leave
my people who are not Muslim, and live amongst people who are Muslim. And our Prophet sallallahu
alayhi wa sallam said that Oh, so and so, pray, establish the prayer and give this occur, and live
with your people, wherever you wherever they are. Now, from this we can explicitly derive that as
long as a Muslim is not forced to commit should or Cofer and as long as a Muslim is able to practice
the rituals of the faith, as for temptations, they're everywhere. Do you really think there's going
		

			to be no temptations back home, temptations are a part and parcel of life, as long as you're not
forced to compromise your values, it is permissible for you to live now, whether you choose to live
or not, that is up to you, there is no question you are free to, to weigh the pros and cons wherever
you want to live. But from an Islamic perspective, there is no prohibition of living in a land that
is not a Muslim land. Also, by the way, there is no land of Islam anymore, because the land of Islam
means that if you are a Muslim, you automatically have citizenship in that land. If there was a
theoretical hypothetical Caliphate somewhere, the fact that you're a Muslim, you automatically can
		

			apply to go and migrate and say, Hi, I'm a Muslim, I deserve to be in this land. There is no country
in the world that is a doubted Islam anymore. You have Muslim majority countries, no country is
actually judging by the laws of Islam. And anyways. So in reality, the system that our books have
found, and they talked about, for many hundreds of years, for millennia, actually no longer exists.
We live in a very different world. We live in a nation state world, we live in a post khilafah
world. Because of this, we need to rethink through even some rulings that might have been found many
centuries ago. And therefore in our times, the vast vast majority of scholars who understand the
		

			modern dynamics that we live in, they say that a Muslim may live wherever they have the freedom to
practice their religion, just like the Muslims at the time of Makkah migrated to Abyssinia, even
though it was a land of Christians because the Prophet system said it is a king that will allow you
to worship Allah notice that is the condition right? There must be that the freedom to worship
Allah, you should not be persecuted for being a Muslim. If you cannot pray and you cannot fast and
you're forced to worship false gods, then if you're able to migrate, you must migrate. If you cannot
migrate in that situation, you're forgiven. But if we have the freedoms that we do in America, well
		

			then we thank Allah subhanho wa Taala for those freedoms, we have every right to live here if we
choose to do so.