Yasir Qadhi – Why-Islam – Why-Islam
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Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala characterized us in
this room and all of the believers before
and after us with one of the highest
praises given in the Qur'an.
كُنْتُمْ خَيْرَ أُمَّةٍ أُخْرِجَتْ لِلنَّاسِ You are the
best of all nations that I have caused
to be brought out for mankind.
Now before I even finish the verse, because
you all know what the verse says, notice
there is a notion of service and khidmah
to mankind in the verse itself.
Before we even get to the description, Allah
is setting up our paradigm.
What is our paradigm?
أُخْرِجَتْ لِلنَّاسِ You were brought for another purpose.
You weren't brought for yourselves.
You weren't brought to live your lives, carpe
diem, seize the moment.
You were brought for another purpose and what
is that purpose?
أُخْرِجَتْ لِلنَّاسِ You were brought forth for the
rest of mankind.
You serve a goal.
You serve a function and that function is
you're supposed to do something for other people.
Which other people?
Every other people.
Not أُخْرِجَتْ لِلْأَمِرِكَانِ أُخْرِجَتْ لِلسُّعُدِيَينِ أُخْرِجَتْ
لِلْخَلِيجِ أُخْرِجَتْ لِلنَّاسِ Every one of us.
We have a responsibility to everybody else.
Now that is a massive responsibility.
That is a huge burden but Allah has
praised us for it.
And Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has given
us the status of being the very best
of all ummahs.
And how do we attain that status?
تَأْمُرُونَ بِالْمَعْرُوفِ وَتَنْهَوْنَ عَنِ الْمُنْكَرِ وَتُؤْمِنُونَ
بِاللَّهِ Three things are mentioned.
Three things are mentioned.
We need to understand what all of these
three are and live up to them.
You command what is good, you forbid what
is right, and you demonstrate belief in Allah
subhanahu wa ta'ala.
In other words, not only are you talking
the talk, you're walking the walk.
Not only are you speaking what you're supposed
to say, you're doing what you're supposed to
be doing.
وَتُؤْمِنُونَ بِاللَّهِ So you command what is good,
you forbid what is evil, and you demonstrate
belief in Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala.
And this obligation, it is so profound and
so beautiful and also so comforting.
Why?
Because multiple things can be said as usual,
time is always against us.
Of the biggest blessings that Allah has given
in this ayah is that He's made us
responsible for only the output and not the
reaction.
We only must give and then what happens
to our giving, we are not responsible for,
i.e. our goal is to convey, not
to convert.
Our goal is to convey, not to force
conversion.
Because if your goal becomes conversion, if your
goal becomes, I want this guy to embrace
my faith, that raises a whole bunch of
problems.
First and foremost, you're taking responsibility for what
you have no control over.
You can't help how somebody is going to
react, you don't know what their response will
be to the message.
Secondly, when your goal becomes conversion, this might
influence your pitching of the product.
If you're a dirty salesman, right, and you
have to sell something, if your goal is
to sell, you might start saying things about
the product that you shouldn't say.
That's how salespeople work.
You might start exaggerating, you might start covering
up, you might start.
But if your goal is a description of
the product, and not necessarily to sell it,
now all of a sudden, you have to
be 100% honest.
And that changes the discourse.
All too often, when people make it their
goal to convert, they start saying things they
shouldn't say.
And our job is not to change the
truth, our job is to convey the truth.
Allah says, your job is to convey, my
job is to judge.
Allah says, you are not in charge of
forcing them, you're not their boss, literally, literally,
you are not their boss.
Allah says, will you force people until they
embrace Islam?
That's not your job.
Your job is not the forcing, your job
is the conveying.
And how do we convey?
We convey by teaching with wisdom.
We convey by preaching morality.
We convey by demonstrating Iman.
That's what we do.
So da'wah is done, according to the
Qur'an, not just with the tongue, but
with your entire actions and your body.
Da'wah is done, not just by memorizing
arguments, but by demonstrating belief in Allah.
And dare I say, and I know this
is going to perhaps be misunderstood, but I
will try to say this in a gentle
manner.
Most da'wah is not done by intellectual
arguments.
Most conversion does not take place because somebody
has come along and presented a very watertight
proof for some abstract issue of Islam.
The majority of da'wah is done from
the heart to the heart.
The majority of conversion takes place because of
good manners and akhlaq, because of interaction with
the other, in which something is sparked in
the other person, and they want to find
out why are you so different?
What makes you so special?
It wasn't a deep philosophical profound truth that
sparked a light bulb moment in the life
of the other.
It was something super simple.
Like maybe even praising Allah at times of
tragedy.
Like maybe demonstrating dignity when the Ghazza massacre
is taking place.
Like maybe even the Ammu Khalid showing the
sabr that he shows when his granddaughter passes
away.
That's how da'wah is done.
And I say this because all too often
when you're young, you think da'wah is
by advanced debates.
Da'wah is by memorizing the arguments and
deconstructing the trinity of Christianity and understanding the
proofs for the existence of God and what
not.
No, no, no, no, no.
That's 1% of da'wah.
I'm not saying it's not there.
That's like 1%.
99% of preaching is done via simply
interacting in a positive manner.
And in fact, this is exactly what the
Seerah and the early biographies of the Sahaba
demonstrate for us.
Most of the people converted simply by seeing
the akhlaq of the Muslims.
By recognizing what these people are doing and
not by the deep argument.
The arguments will come, but those arguments in
order for them to be effective, it must
have a precursor.
And the precursor is you make the person
receptive to those arguments.
You make them genuinely curious.
You make them open up to the reality
that there are other civilizations, other fates.
And you do that not by appealing to
the mind, but by appealing to the heart
and the soul.
You do that by conquering their hearts before
you conquer their intellectual arguments.
You want evidence for this?
The entirety of the Seerah.
One simple example should suffice to prove this
before I move on to my next point.
Our Prophet ﷺ, what was he doing for
40 years before the coming of the revelation?
You do realize the Prophet ﷺ lived for
63 years, 40 of which he was not
preaching a new theology.
The bulk of his life, he was not
engaging in intellectual arguments against the other.
The bulk of his life, 40 years, he
was not preaching anything new.
The Qur'an came down when he was
40 years old.
So for 23 years he's preaching.
For 40 years, what is the purpose of
that?
All too often we zoom over as if
that's the precursor.
No.
Those 40 years were needed in order to
make the next 23 effective.
Those 40 years laid the precursors, they were
the foundations for the next 23 years.
Now what were those 40 years?
What did he do in those 40 years?
Well, very simple.
He established social credibility and he gained the
hearts and minds and love and admiration for
his entire people.
They all loved him.
That was needed in order for the next
23 years to be effective.
He was known as a Sadiq decades before
anybody called him Ya Rasulullah.
He was called an Ameen before Jibreel came
down with the Wahi and made him a
Nabi.
The Akhlaq is needed before the intellectual arguments.
The compassion, the humanity, the interaction, the admiration
and that will be won and that will
be gained at the human individual level without
the need for detailed advanced discussions of Islamic
philosophy and the proofs for the existence of
God and what is this deconstruction and how
to talk about liberalism and this and no.
That is simply done by smiling in the
face of those whom you meet and being
generous to them.
Simple as that.
You show them the meaning of Akhlaq.
You show them the strength of Iman and
we see this in the people of Gaza
over and over again.
I mentioned here on stage and yesterday as
well that in the last 9 months, thousands
of people have embraced Islam, tens of thousands
are interested and admiring the people of Gaza.
Why?
Because they studied the Quran?
No, because the people of Gaza have demonstrated
what it means when you believe in God
and facing trial and adversity.
That has stirred the hearts and minds of
people in ways that reading and intellectual debates
will never do.
So you really want to give da'wah?
You don't need to go through da'wah
training school.
You just need to start acting in the
prophetic manner.
You need to start absorbing the Akhlaq, the
humility.
Allah says in the Quran to the Prophet
ﷺ, وَلَوْ كُنْتَ فَضًّا غَلِيضًا الْقَلْبِ لَنْ فَضُّ
مِنْ حَوْلِكَ If you were harsh and strict
in nature, your own companions would have left
you.
You have to show genuine compassion and love
to the people around you.
You have to show genuine humility and exemplary
Akhlaq and then they will open up to
the intellectual arguments.
And that will be done by proudly practicing
your faith in spite of all the negativity
surrounding it.
By demonstrating each and every aspect of piety,
of taqwa, of honesty.
And I have so many stories in my
own life and my friends and family and
my acquaintances and hearing all of the people.
Do you know SubhanAllah, one of my teachers,
he told me a story about how his
wife is a convert.
She's a western lady and then she converted
to Islam.
The story of her conversion is demonstrative of
this Akhlaq.
When she was younger, she considered herself a
very beautiful lady and she would dress up
in a very attractive manner.
And every single person, she would work in
an office, every person would come and every
young man would try to flirt and look
and stare and what not.
And she enjoyed that attention.
Until finally she met her match and that
match was a young dignified foreign student from
a Muslim land who was embodying the Akhlaq
of Islam.
Every time this young man would come, he
would not stare at her body.
He would look down and he would address
her in the most honorable of terms.
And he would not ever flirt.
She says, at first I was irritated.
Am I not beautiful?
Can't you see what I'm dressed as?
Can't you look at me?
But eventually something about him as he continued,
he has to take care of his bills,
whatever he's coming all the time.
Eventually something about him demonstrated this is a
true gentleman.
This is how a man is supposed to
interact.
Nobody's ever done this before.
And so she said to him, where are
you from?
He said, SubhanAllah, why are you not looking
at me?
Literally, why are you not staring at me?
And he said, because I'm a Muslim and
my Quran tells me to lower my gaze
and to not stare at lust.
You are too precious to be stared at
in this manner.
And that was the first time she'd ever
heard of Islam.
This is back in the 70s.
It was a story back in the day.
The first time she ever heard of Islam
and she started researching on her own back
in the 70s until that led her to
embrace the faith.
And then she eventually married one of the
scholars of Islam, SubhanAllah.
This is what you mean, akhlaaq.
This is how da'wah is given.
Not by some advanced deconstruction of falsehfah and
proving the existence of God and what not.
At the human level, just showing what it
means to be a believer.
You know, another convergent story amongst my friends,
right?
Again, this is so small things here, right?
Is that one of my, I used to
work in, you know this, I used to
be chemical engineer once upon a time.
I worked at Dow Chemical for a while.
I used to work in corporate for a
little while, right?
And so this story is an interesting story
as well.
When you're in corporate, you know that you
get a per diem, you get an amount
every single day when you travel where you
can spend and splurge and go and eat
and drink and tab the company, right?
And the per diem amount back then, I
know it's much more now, but back then
I think it was like $35.
This was a long time ago.
I don't know how much it is now,
but back then it was $35.
And every single person, whoever would go outside
would spend the max 35 and no bills
required is 35 and just like, you know,
just, you know, charge the company except one
Muslim in my company, one Muslim brother, he
would go because back then there was no
halal food.
So he would get like your McFish sandwich
and McDonald's, right?
And you know, a water and then contract
out and say $3.45. Back then it
was 3.45, whatever it was, right?
And he would say $3.45 every single
day.
Can you believe the company accountant tracked down
this Muslim brother, the company accountant tracked down
this Muslim brother in the company and called
him a visit.
I forgot which one and asked him, you
know, out of all of the hundreds of
employees, every single one of them maxes out
and we don't require receipts.
You're the only one out of all of
the company that charges us one 10th that
we're willing to give you and you send
your McDonald's receipt as well.
You're the only one.
Why?
She's perplexed.
And once again, he says, well, because my
religion tells me I have to be honest.
And even if you give me $35, I
didn't spend $35 and this is all I
spent.
And I just want to be showing you
this is all I spent and this impressed
her so much.
She began doing her research about Islam and
one thing led to another, SubhanAllah.
This is what I mean.
These small matters of akhlaaq, you demonstrating what
faith actually means.
You bring it to the table and you
show people what your faith does for you.
Over and over again, oh Muslims, da'wah
is not complicated.
You don't need to have a PhD in
Islamic sciences and philosophy.
Da'wah is done one on one at
the individual level.
You demonstrate, you showcase this country needs to
see the morality of Islam, the akhlaaq of
Islam, the dignity of Islam, and we must
speak the truth no matter how politically incorrect
it is.
I don't want to go too deep in
this topic, but one of the realities we're
facing now is morality and sexuality.
The whole world is going crazy.
We cannot compromise on our principles and we
must demonstrate what it means to be a
family based system.
We must demonstrate izzah to the family.
We must showcase what it means for the
husband and wife to come together as husbands
and wives of two opposite genders and to
have a family together and the mother is
a mother and the father is a father
and the two are not the same.
And we need to demonstrate this because you
know what, it's just a fad what they
say.
You can't change biology.
And if we persist in the truth and
we already saw this when the school systems
wanted to change and start preaching alternative understandings,
even mainstream Christians didn't know what to do.
It was the Muslims who stood up and
said, no way, you're not going to cross
that line.
You're not going to teach our children that
which is immoral and unethical and against human
nature.
And they protested Dearborn, Michigan, here in Maryland,
in DC, other places, and I gave a
lecture at that time that subhanAllah, it went
viral in the Christian community.
Multiple Christian pastors took my lecture and they
propagated it on the same channels that a
decade before had been anti-Islamic.
And they said, you know what, we must
have misunderstood these Muslims because they're saying what
no Christian dares say.
They're speaking the truth.
I got contacted by ministers and priests around
the world asking me for talk shows, whatnot,
because they were finally hearing some common sense.
I have a whole khutba about this reality,
right?
And this is how you're going to save
the rest of the world by preaching the
truth.
And again, we can't force anybody.
That's the Quran.
You can't force, but you must preach the
truth.
You must dignify, you must exude the morality
of Islam.
So to conclude, brothers and sisters, really very
simple.
My genuine, sincere, honest advice, don't complicate what
Allah has made very simple.
You are taught that da'wah is obligatory
and that scares people.
Oh my God, I'm not qualified to give
da'wah.
I say to you, da'wah is obligatory
and you are qualified to give da'wah.
Because what you understand of da'wah is
not the da'wah you need to give.
The da'wah you need to give is
literally be prophetic in your akhlaaq.
The da'wah you need to give, live
the life of Islam.
Be honest in your workplace, be generous, be
humble in your corporations, in your offices when
everybody's involved in dirty politics and backbiting and
backstabbing, you never get involved in that.
You never get involved in the dirty politics.
You demonstrate your tongue is more pure than
that.
You are kind to everybody.
You are smiling with everybody.
You are honest with everybody.
That is the best da'wah you can
give.
When it's time to pray, I have a
story from my own childhood, from my own
teenage years before I went to study Islam.
And I guess I'll conclude with that story
as well, right?
Is that once upon a time, when was
this, 1993, 1994, when I was a teenager.
And the world was a very different place,
right?
And I was driving between two cities in
Texas and you know I had a foreign
shaykh with me from another land and I
was driving him, I was his driver to
between two conferences.
This is back in the 90s, early 90s,
I was a teenager.
And the shaykh said, it's time to pray.
We need to pray now.
I said, shaykh, we're in Texas, these are
small towns.
I don't think you understand, I mean, I'm
from Texas, you have to understand these small
towns are different.
Shaykh, it's probably not the wisest thing to
just stop on the side of the road
and pray.
He goes, no, no, I want to pray
now and you just, Bismillah, let's just pray
here.
So I was like making da'wah to
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, what am I
going to do?
And we found the only place that was
there before, you know, Asr finished, he wanted
to pray Dhuhr on time.
Even though he knew it was Musabir, he
wanted to make jama' between Dhuhr and Asr
time.
We found a truck stop.
And, you know, truckers, I mean, they are
different, you know, I mean, it is what
it is, right?
We went that way.
And I'm like, what do we do now?
I drove to the other side of the
truck station and I tried to put my
car between them and the trucks, right?
And I had the prayer rug, we put
it out and the shaykh is dressed in
his thawb and everything and he's like, Allahu
Akbar, like that, and I'm like, oh my
God, what do we do now?
I'm like really scared right now.
And I see the truckers start poking hands
and whatnot and they start gathering on the
other side and we're praying and doing sajda
and I see them talking amongst themselves, pointing
at us, right?
And I'm like, I'm just a kid, ya
shaykh, I'm 17 years old, what do I
do now?
Ya Allah, protect us.
And I'm in charge of taking a shaykh
between conferences that he doesn't understand this is
America and I'm in Texas and whatnot.
I'm literally like making dua in sajda, right?
Because these are truckers, like five of them
are talking and they're pointing and whatnot and
you know, tattoos, everything.
And we're praying and our shaykh, mashallah, he's
in a different world, right?
Full, khushu, tamkeen, everything, assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullah,
assalamu alaikum, doing the adhkar.
They notice we're done.
One of them starts walking our way and
I'm like, khalas, this is it.
And he walks up and he says, are
you guys done?
I said, yes, we are.
Can we help you?
He goes, I want to ask, why did
you stop here?
And we said, I said, I said, well,
it was time for our regular prayers.
We're Muslims and we have to pray on
the side of the road.
And he goes, that's what we were discussing,
who you people were, what you're doing.
And we figured out, because this is the
90s, we figured out that you're Muslims and
you're praying.
And I just want to say that if
everybody paused in their day to worship God,
the way you guys do, the world would
be a better place.
Thank you and God bless you.
And when he said that, my heart felt
so guilty because of where I was going
and where he was going.
And ever since that day, I have never
been embarrassed to pray anywhere in public, never.
Why should I be embarrassed if somebody says
something, whatever, but I have to pray and
that's what I need to do.
So simple reality of Muslims, you do you,
you be proud of Islam, be proud of
who you are, practice your faith and that
is the best da'wah and that's the
only da'wah you need to give.
Just do Islam, practice Islam, live Islam and
leave the rest to Allah subhanahu wa ta
'ala.
Jazakumullah khair.
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh.