Badr Khutba
First Khutba Friday 13th October 2006
Allah helped you at Badr when you were weak so have taqwa of Allah, so that hopefully you will be thankful. And when you said to the muminun, ‘Is it not enough for you that your Lord reinforced you with three thousand angels, sent down?’ Yes indeed! But if you are steadfast and have taqwa and they come upon you suddenly, your Lord will reinforce you with five thousand angels, clearly identified. Allah only did this for it to be good news for you and so that your hearts might be set at rest by it (help comes from no one but Allah, the Almighty, the All-Wise) and so that He might cut off a group of those who are kafir or crush them and they might be turned back in defeat. You have no part in the affair. Either He will turn towards them or He will punish them, for they are wrongdoers. Everything in the heavens and everything in the earth belongs to Allah. He forgives whoever He wills and punishes whoever He wills. Allah is Ever-Forgiving, Most Merciful. (3:123-129)
Although Ramadan is first and foremost a time for ‘ibada – and on that score it is a suitable moment to remind ourselves that we are now entering the last ten days of the month and that every remaining day and night presents us with an invaluable opportunity to benefit from it and taste the closeness of our Lord – it has also often been a time when the Muslims have had to face their enemies on the battlefield. Our brothers in Afghanistan and elsewhere are a timely present reminder of this; may Allah help inwardly and outwardly all those who are at this moment fighting to protect the din against the enemies of Islam. But, of course, the supreme example in our history of fighting in Ramadan was the great battle of Badr fought on the 17th of Ramadan in the third year of the Hijra, whose anniversary has just passed. There is no doubt that Badr was the crucial watershed in the struggle of the Prophet and his Companions to see Islam firmly established on the earth.
It is vital for us as Muslims here who, like the Muslims of Madina, are living surrounded by people mostly hostile to Islam, to take from this supreme example of courage and trust in Allah the lessons which will help us to follow their example in our own time. We must first fully realise that, despite all their rhetoric to the contrary, we are living among people, who consciously and unconsciously, are determined to destroy the reality of Islam if they possibly can. We are continually under attack because, as is now openly acknowledged, Islam represents the only force that can oppose the ongoing imposition of a global economic system whose real aim is to keep the population of the world under control, by enmeshing them in an endless and hopeless search for self-gratification as consumers caught up in a web of never payable debt. Ironically this is done in the name of freedom when the reality is that it cuts people off from their only hope of true freedom which lies in the worship of Allah and following the path of His Messenger, salla’Llahu ‘alayhi wa sallam.
The first thing we should take from Badr is that it was, against all outward odds, an overwhelming victory for Islam and the Muslims. Looking back from this point in time we tend to take it, and all that happened afterwards, for granted. But remember the words of the Prophet, salla’llahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, to Allah as the battle started, “If this group perishes today, You will no longer be worshipped on the earth.” The outcome of the encounter must have appeared at the time as anything but a foregone conclusion. Islam was to all outward appearances hanging on by its finger nails, fighting for its very survival. Literally a handful of people against the whole world. Yet this was not how the Muslims who fought at Badr viewed themselves, because they believed in Allah’s promise of victory to them. They knew that Allah would not abandon His Messenger and those who believed with him.
But what about us, the Muslims of today, well over a billion world-wide and two million or so in this country alone. We have not only accepted being defined as a religious minority but seem on the whole to believe that definition to be a valid one. We tend to see our present situation as an inevitable and unchangeable state of affairs over which we have no control. But what about the ayat
The deen with Allah is Islam. (3:19)
There is no valid deen except Islam but most of us have been brainwashed into unconscious compliance with the secularist thesis that all religions are equally valid. A‘udhu billah! We have been duped into accepting the unacceptable. We must not allow ourselves to be straitjacketed by any definition the kafirun try to foist onto us. To do so gives them control over us. The truth is that it is only our belief in the system they have devised that gives them power over us. They are like the magicians of Fir‘awn who created an illusory appearance of activity which held the people completely spellbound when in reality there was nothing there. The mesmeric hold the present system has over people is completely dependent on their belief in it. It is a magical web of deception which is only held in place by the endlessly multiplying usurious financial system. Everyone spends their lives chasing money whose reality is in fact nothing more than bigger and bigger numbers in the form of electrical impulses flying through cyberspace from one computer to another. In this context it is noteworthy that the ayat immediately following those which prefaced this khutba is:
You who believe, do not devour usury multiplied and remultiplied.
The Book of Allah certainly does contain guidance for every time and place. How clear it is that Allah tabaraka wa ta‘ala truly is totally aware of His creation and continually guiding us if only we have eyes to see and ears to hear.
However, the sad fact is that during the last couple of centuries the Muslims have to all intents and purposes completely lost touch with what took place that day at Badr. We have forgotten that Islam is all about victory and success and have allowed ourselves to become accustomed to defeat and failure, to accept them as a norm. We have resigned ourselves to a back seat in world affairs even though that by doing this we are, in fact, turning our backs on a considerable part of Allah’s Book which forbids us to accept the domination of the kuffar. Not at all a happy state of affairs for us in either this world or the Next. No, as they stand, things are back to front and we must turn them around and that turnaround has to first take place within ourselves. Allah tells us unequivocally:
You are uppermost if you are muminun.
It is essential for us to wholeheartedly understand and believe these words and once we do so and act on that belief in sufficient numbers there is no doubt that the situation of the Muslims will dramatically improve and the truth of Allah’s words will be made manifest. This change of attitude on our part is indispensable if Islam is once more to regain its rightful place at the head of human affairs.
Second Khutba Friday 13th September 2006
They are those to whom people said, ‘The people have gathered against you so fear them.’
But that merely increased their iman and they said, ‘Allah is enough for us and the Best of Guardians.’
So they returned with blessings and bounty from Allah and no evil touched them.
They pursued the pleasure of Allah. Allah’s favour is indeed immense. (3:173-4)
These ayats reveal a second great lesson we can learn from the glorious day of Badr and indeed in them lies the secret of the Muslim victory on that day: that the victory of the Muslims is from Allah by Allah and for Allah.
Part of the reason for the humiliating situation of the Muslims in the world today is the pervading mentality among us of acceptance of the somehow ineluctable nature kafir power and the inevitability of Muslim subservience to it. This mindset and the negativism that all too frequently accompanies it have embedded themselves into the Muslim psyche. How often you hear Muslims blaming themselves for the sorry state of the umma. “If only we were better Muslims,” you hear people say, “We’ve only got ourselves to blame.” Time and again you hear this kind of self-flagellating drivel. But what this kind of self-accusation actually means is that we in fact believe that the whole thing is in our hands, we believe that we are in charge of the affair. What we have done is take on kafir thinking. They think they control the universe. We know we do not. Allah says to His Prophet, salla’llahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, the greatest of all human beings, “You have no part in the affair.” Allah and Allah alone controls everything that happens. The affair belongs entirely to Allah.
The key to the victory of the deen is not to endlessly analyse our faults and attribute blame for failure to ourselves or any other cause, no, the key is to remember our true and only source of power, to forget ourselves and remember Allah. Look at the extraordinary ayats concerning Badr when the Prophet wrought havoc among the ranks of Quraysh by throwing a handful of sand and stones. Allah says:
You did not throw when you threw but it was Allah who threw.
It is so clear from this and other ayats that our task is simply to worship Allah and strive to our utmost to establish His deen. Of course, we are only weak human beings, of course, we makes mistakes, any number of them, but provided that we are really holding to Allah, provided our hope is in Him and not in any power we might imagine that we ourselves possess, everything becomes possible. It is true the task that confronts us, that of re-establishing Allah’s deen in the context of the world today, seems overwhelmingly difficult, but then so was the task confronting the Messenger, salla’llahu ‘alayhi wa sallam and his Companions, radiya’llah ‘anhum ajma‘een. They were faced firstly by the implacable hostility of their own people and then beyond that by the world domination of the Roman and Persian empires who between them had been ruling the known world for well over a thousand years. It was a complete impossibility from any rational human standpoint. But the strength of the Muslims has always lain precisely in the fact that we accept our own incapacity. Only then can we become instruments, as they were, for the manifestation of that divine power which nothing in existence can withstand.
The secret of the Muslim victory at the battle of Badr lay in the fact that whereas the kafir army exulted in its greater numbers and superior equipment and put its faith in those things, the Muslims realised completely their own powerlessness. But rather than make them downhearted or in any way passive, this very realisation increased their active hope in and dependence upon the only real source of power, Allah tabaraka wa ta’ala, and we know the result. By Allah, they fought their hearts out and by Allah, with help from the Unseen in the form of angelic forces, they achieved an overwhelming victory, and the future of Islam on the earth was assured once and for all.
But as it was up to them then, it is now up to us. And remember that the number of Muslim fighters at Badr was scarcely greater than our number in this mosque today. As it was their responsibility then, it is now ours, to be content with nothing less than that complete establishment of Allah’s deen in our time which they achieved in theirs. And our first priority must be to abandon any bad opinion of ourselves as Muslims we may have inherited from our recent history and to replace it with that true good opinion of Allah, tabaraka wa ta‘ala, held so firmly by the people of Badr, which means truly grasping that He alone is the sole source of might and power in all existence.
What could be worse than Islam on its knees in front of kufr and the Muslims little better than lackeys in the service of the kafirun. All evil is compounded by this state of affairs. It must be our continual and explicit intention to see the justice, mercy and moral authority of Islamic governance re-established within the course of our lifetime. We must immediately stop accepting the inevitability of the domination of kufr as an unalterable given in our lives. And we must start believing once more in the certain victory of Islam which Allah has promised. This is not that easy to achieve. These attitudes are deeply ingrained and old habits die hard. But do it we must, in order to undertake our responsibility from Allah to make Islam a living reality once more and to convey Allah’s Message in all its fullness to the people of our time. Allah tells us:
Allah does not change a people until they change what is in themselves.
What better time could there be to get on with this task of self-transformation than the month of Ramadan when Shaytan is chained up and the self’s resistance at its lowest ebb. May it be one of the fruits of this Ramadan that we are able to bring home to ourselves in the deepest possible way the meaning those words of Allah we heard at the beginning of this khutba: hasbuna’llahu wa ni‘ma’l-wakil – Allah is enough for us and the best Guardian – this so that our hearts may become completely free from the domination of the kufr which surrounds us and become truly alive and receptive to the ever present reality of la ilaha illa’llah. Then will it become a real possibility for the luminous reality of Muhammadun Rasulullah, a genuinely human community ruling itself according to the laws of Allah, to once more emerge on the surface of the earth.