الحمد لله، الحمد لله ، نحمده تعالى ونستعينه، ونشكره تعالى ونستغفره ونستغيثه، نعوذ بالله من شرور أنفسنا ومن سيئات أعمالنا، من يهد الله فهو المهتد ومن يضلل فلن تجد له وليا مرشدا، ونشهد أن لا إله إلا الله وحده لا شريك له، له الملك و له الحمد، يحيي ويميت، بيده الخير، وهو على كل شيء قدير، ونشهد أن سيدنا و مولانا محمداً عبده ورسوله، وحبيبه وصفيه، بلغ الرسالة وأدّى الأمانة ونصح الأمة، النبي الأمي الذي أرسله الله بالهدى والدين الحق، بشيرا ونذيرا بين يدي الساعة، صلى الله عليه وسلم وعلى آله وأصحابه ومن تبعهم بإحسان إلى يوم الدين.
أما بعد! فيا عباد الله اتقوا الله حق تقاته ولا تموتن إلا وأنتم مسلمون. يأيها الذين ءامنوا اتقوا الله وقولوا قولا سديدا يصلح لكم أعمالكم ويغفر لكم ذنوبكم. ومن يطع
الله ورسوله فقد فاز فوزا عظيما. اتقوا الله فيما أمر وانتهوا عما نها عنه وزجر.
قال الله تعالى في كتابه الكريم
After an exile of more than ten years, Sayyiduna Musa, ‘alayhi s-Salam, who had married and raised a family amongst the Madyan people, returned to Egypt, the land of his birth. On the way there, on the Mount of Tur, Allah, tabarak wa ta’ala, spoke to him, appointed him a prophet and granted him two miracles to use in the court of Firaun. Firaun refused to believe in Allah, set himself up as a god, enslaved the Israelites and subjected them to unimaginable cruelty. Musa employed the miracles that he had received when he found Firaun oblivious to his requests that he acknowledge Allah as the One God and release the Israelites from their bondage, but to no avail. Firaun remained heedless, even as Musa’s stick cast onto the ground became a snake and Musa’s hand shone white when withdrawn. Now Firaun ruled over his subjects utilising magic to bewitch and bewilder them, so his response to what he had just seen was to summon all the magicians in his kingdom, promise them rich rewards and then to challenge Musa, ‘alayhi s-Salam to a contest. Having chosen one of the festival days, the magicians gathered. The mufassirin inform us that Firaun’s magicians, carrying sticks and ropes, numbered between fifteen and thirty thousand so that they filled a whole valley.
Surat al-A’raf (7-115-119):
“They Said: ‘Musa, will you throw first or shall we be the ones to throw?’
He said, ‘You throw.’ And when they threw, they cast a spell on the people’s eyes and caused them to feel great fear of them. They produced an extremely powerful magic.
We revealed to Musa, ‘Throw down your staff.’ And it immediately swallowed up what they had forged. So the truth took place and what they did was shown to be false.”
The lifting of this magic spell initiated the freedom of the Israelites from their bondage and presaged the conquest and subsequent death of Firaun. The waters of the Red Sea came crashing down on him and his army as they pursued Musa, Harun, ‘alayhima s-Salam and their followers, the same waters which only moments earlier had receded so that these two brothers, prophets of Allah, could walk to safety on the ocean bed. While the inhabitants of Egypt were free for the moment, there would, however, be a new enslavement for the inhabitants of Egypt and then all Muslims by means of a new magical spell that would be cast on them.
In the last Khutba, we looked at events in Arabia with particular reference to the arrival of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. We saw how he had inexplicably denied the greatness of the historical Islam that had preceded him, of the rule of the Umayyads, Abbasids, Osmanli and Moghals of the Subcontinent, of their conquests, of their subjugation of the Kuffar, of their establishing of great empires. We saw how he denied the great body of scholarship, of the Madhhabs of Malik, Abu Hanifa and As-Shafi’i, which provided the legal framework for the expansion of these remarkable empires while being kept in check by adherence to the law of Allah and His Messenger, salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa sallam. We saw how he derided the mighty Sufic Tariqahs of the Qadiriyya and Naqshbandi, who infused in their adherents the strong bonds of Futuwwah based on love of the Messenger, salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, and how he dismissed this high quest for the station of Ihsan, as alluded to in the Hadith of Jibra’il, simply as a worshipping of the tombs of the dead.
This denial of the truth and a false Salafism would bring untold calamity on the once great body of Muslims. For how could there be any talk of the Salaf without giving a rightful place to Malik, the founder of Umm al-Madhahib, The Madhhab of the ‘Amal of the Ahl al-Madina? Having found the support of the Najdi leader, Muhammad ibn Sa’ud and his Khalif-betraying descendants, the Muslims would be infected with a virus, spreading and worsening under Abdalaziz ibn Sa’ud and his ‘Ikhwan’.
Surat al-Hujarat (49:10):
“The Muminun are brothers, so make peace between your brothers and have taqwa of Allah so that hopefully you will gain mercy.
In the Jalalayn tafsir on this Ayat: ‘The Muminun are brothers, that is, in the Deen.’
Ironically, during the last century the two factions who take their names from the Arabic root
A-KH-W, that is, the Ikhwan of Najd and the Ikhwan al-Muslimeen, are precisely the ones who have acted contrary to the advice in the Ayat just read out. The Ikhwan, read Wahhabi/Salafi broke their allegiance with the Osmanli Khalif, siding instead with his British enemies. The Ikhwan al-Muslimeen, on the other hand, like their Wahhabi counterparts, declared the Madhhabs ‘outdated medieval scholarship’ (Umar Vadillo, The Esoteric Deviation in Islam) and Khalifal rule, with the exception of the first four, decadent. With this new modernist, revisionist view of the Deen, they have broken the bonds of brotherhood in the Deen.
The London based, Indian novelist, Pankaj Mishra, has just had his latest book published. The title is ‘From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia’. The Guardian’s Ben Shephard in his review of the book has the following to say:
What gives From the Ruins of Empire its charm and richness of texture, however, is that its main focus is not on major players such as Gandhi and Mao, but on little-known and seemingly ineffectual intellectuals whose writings would inspire later generations. Jamal al-Din al-Afghani…: a peripatetic journalist, teacher and agitator, working in cafes, mosques and homes, expelled in turn from Afghanistan, India, Turkey and Egypt between 1860 and 1900. A contradictory and inconsistent thinker who tailored his ideas and his wardrobe to local circumstances, al-Afghani was a Persian-born Shia who pretended to be a Sunni (Muslim) from Afghanistan, and in his early days a liberal – critical of the fanaticism and political tyranny that held back many Islamic societies and an advocate of education for women. He “preached the necessity of reconsidering the whole Islamic position and, instead of clinging to the past, of making an onward intellectual movement in harmony with modern knowledge”.
While Hassan al-Banna founded the Ikhwan al-Muslimun in Egypt in 1928, the ideological foundation was laid by al-Afghani. Al-Afghani was actually Iranian, and went around posing as a Muslim while he was actually a shi’a, born in the village of Asadabad in Northern Iran and educated in the shi’a shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala. Our commentator in The Guardian has placed him in the dubious company of the Hindu Gandhi and Mao, only al-Afghani placed a few rungs down the ladder of infamy. What is certain is that he was a Freemason who attended French Masonic lodges, conclusive proof of which is provided in Umar Ibrahim Vadillo’s ‘The Esoteric Deviation in Islam’. Regarding Afghani’s modernism, Umar Vadillo writes:
“Afghani thought that the only way of elevating the Muslims was by reforming their religion, which on examination meant the abandoning of their religion. He was among the first to reject the madhhabs and advocate his own free interpretation of Qur’an and the texts of Hadith.”
“It is written in the book ‘Jamaluddin’ by Abu Rayah: “One day an ‘alim of the ahl as-Sunnah asked Jamaluddin al-Afghani: What is your aqida? He answered: ‘I am a Muslim.’ And what is your madhhab? He said: ‘I do not know any person from the people of the madhhabs who is greater than me to follow him.’”
Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi, in an article written earlier this year entitled ‘Islam – the Recovery’, on the matter of the madhhabs our Shaykh says: “Because the Madh-habs in themselves encapsulate the two vital matters of Islam. What are its two vital matters? They are announced in our dual Shahadah. Under ‘La ilaha illallah’ we subsume all the laws of ‘Ibada. Salat. Zakat. Sawm. Hajj, and a correct ‘Aqida, assuring a pure Tawhid. Avoidance of shirk. Under ‘Muhammad, Rasul Allah’ we subsume all social intercourse. This is dominated by the prohibitions and strictures of the market. All the rules of buying and selling. The permissible models of trade agreements. Avoidance of usury. This permits us to say that Islam, having no political imperatives, is itself a dual system of Divine worship and permitted trade, contracts, and instruments of exchange. In short, worship and markets.”
أقول قولي هذا و أستغفر الله لي و لكم و لسائر المسلمين من كل ذنب فاستغفروه إنه هو الغفور الرَّحيم
الحمد لله الحمد لله رب العالمين، وأشهد أن لا إله إلا الله وحده لا شريك له وأشهد أن محمداً عبده ورسوله، صلى الله وسلم وبارك عليه وعلى آله وصحبه، والتابعين وتابعي التابعين ومن تبعهم بإحسان إلى يوم الدين.
أما بعد! فيأيها الذين ءامنوا اتقوا الله ما استطعتم واسمعوا وأطيعوا وأنفقوا خيرا لأنفسكم. يا عباد الله أوصيكم وإياي بتقوى الله وطاعته وأحذركم وإياي عن معصيته ومخالفته.
أيها المسلمون!
Allah the Exalted says (2:275):
Those who practise usury will not rise from the grave except as someone driven mad by Shaytan’s touch.”
The great mufassir, Ibn ‘Atiyya, said on this: “The words of the ayat contain a simile for the state of someone who engages in trade in this world with avarice and greed, comparing him to a madman because greed and desire affect him to the extent that his limbs become disordered. This is like when you say, ‘He’s mad!’ about someone walking quickly whose movements are agitated, either by anxiety or something else.”
In order to propagate his reformist ideas, al-Afghani published an Arabic journal called al-‘Urwat al-Wuthqa (The firmest bond). His associate in this endeavour and at the Masonic lodges of Cairo was Muhammad Abduh. In 1899, Abduh was appointed Grand Mufti of Egypt by Sir Evelyn Baring (a descendant of the founder of Barings Bank). Lord Cromer, as he was known, wrote in his book ‘Modern Egypt’:
“For many years I gave Muhammad Abduh all the encouragement in my power, but it was uphill work, for besides the strong antagonism he encountered from conservative Muslims, he was unfortunately on very bad terms with the Khedive, and was only able to retain his place as Mufti by relying on strong British support.”
His first announcement as Shaykh al-Azhar was to declare that the interest of the Post Office Bank was halal: Umar Vadillo notes: “He had created the basis of Islamic banking, which is based on precisely the same idea of making an impossible correspondence between the contract of qirad or mudaraba and the interest of the banking institution. Abduh later qualified his position further and declared a fatwa saying: “Interest in saving funds is allowed.”
The dissemination of the ideas of al-Afghani and Abduh was intensified by Muhammad Rashid Reda who established the magazine ‘al-Manar’. Also in this magazine he popularised the creed of ibn Abdal Wahhab and urged for the establishment of a constitutional Arab Khalifate to rival the Muslim Khalif Sultan Abdalhamid II, rahimahu Allah. To this end he worked tirelessly with the Saudis, the British and the Young Turks, they being the liberal and constitutionalist opposition to Sultan Abdalhamid.
The last member of this quartet of deconstruction of the Deen was Hassan al-Banna. He was the best known student of Rashid Reda. Under al-Banna the Ikhwan al-Muslimun was first transformed into a social movement and then transformed into a political party. Al-Banna, like his forebears continued on the doomed path of the Islamisation of Kafir-Capitalist modes. His contribution was the legalisation of stock dividends which was ‘crucial for the later formulation of Islamic Banking’ (Vadillo). One perk of Ikhwan al-Muslimun membership is a cushy job at one or other Islamic Bank. Presently they have one of their own at the helm in post-Mubarak Egypt, one Muhammad Morsi. One of his first acts in office was a request for a five billion dollar loan from the International Monetary Fund. How kind of Christine Lagarde, the IMF chief, to fly to Cairo to open negotiations. So speedily was business concluded that she even had a chance to visit the Pyramidic tombs of the Pharoahs.
Beware the new magicians, they are everyday fewer in number but their magic has been cast over the whole planet so that everything and everyone suffers from it. They have swopped their sticks and ropes and nowadays cast their spells with the chants of democracy and banking.
You have your weapons. The Deen of Allah and His Messenger: Muslim leaders, appointed collectors who take Zakat in the only Salafi currency of Gold Dinars and Silver Dirhams.
Allah the Exalted says in Surat Al-Isra’ (17:81):
Say: ‘Truth has come and falsehood has vanished. Falsehood is always bound to vanish.’
إنَّ اللهَ ومَلائِكَتَهُ يُصلُّونَ على النَّبِي يَا أَيُها الذينَ آمنوا صَلُّوا عَلَيْهِ وسَلِّمُوا تَسْليماً. اللهمَّ صَلِّ وسَلِّم وبارِك عَلَيْهِ وعلى آلِهِ وصَحْبِهِ أجمعين.
وارض اللهم عن الخلفاء الراشدين المرشدين الحنفاء ساداتنا وأئمتنا أبي بكر وعمر وعثمان وعلي ، وعن سائر الصحابة أجمعين، خصوصا الأنصار منهم والمهاجرين، وعن التابعين وتابعي التابعين ومن تبعهم بإحسان إلى يوم الدين.
اللهم اهد أولات أمور المسلمين لما يرضيك ولاتباع سنة نبيك صلى الله عليه وسلم وثبت أقدامهم على الصراط المستقيم وأصلحهم يا رب العالمين.
اللهم بارك على شيخنا، و على أميرنا، وعلى جميع أمراء وزعماء المسلمين.
اللهم بارك على المسلمين في هذه المدينة ووفقهم لما تحبه وترضاه يا أكرم الأكرمين. .
اللهمّ أَعِزَّ الْلإسلامَ والمُسِلمينَ (3) واَخْذُلِ الكُفْرَ والكافِرينَ، وانْصُرِ المُجاهِدينَ في سَبِيلِ
اللهِ. واجْعَلْ كَلِمََتَكَ هِيَ العُلْيَا وكَلِمَةَ الكُفْرِ هِيَ السُّفْلى.
ربنا ءاتنا في الدنيا حسنة وفي الأخرة حسنة وقنا عذاب النار.
ربنا ءاتنا من لدنك رحمة و هيئ لنا من أمرنا رشدا.
ربنا هب لنا من أزواجنا وذريتنا قرة أعين واجعلنا للمتقين إماما.
ربنا اغفر لنا ذنوبنا وإِسرافنا في أمرِنا وثبت أقدامنا وانصرنا على القوم الكافرِينَ.
إن الله يأمر بالعدل والإحسان وإيتاء ذي القربى وينهى عَنِ الفحشاءِ والمُنكَرِ والبغي، يعظكم لعلكم تذكرون، ولَذِكْرُ اللهِ أكبر والله يَعْلَمُ ما تَصْنَعُون. وقُومُوا إِلَى صَلاتِكُمْ يرحمكم الله
