Khutba on Substance and Superficiality

الحمد لله، الحمد لله الذي حفظ دينه بالعلماء، وأمرهم أن يبلغ علمهم للناس والجهلاء، وحذرهم من ثياب الشهرة والخُيَلاء، 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 وأدٌى 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.

Islam is not a religion in the same way that many of the other faiths are religions. It does not have a priesthood or a rabbi class, it does not have brahmans or monks and nuns, it does have a clear-cut distinction between people of the deen and the masses. The only distinctions are: on the basis of belief – the believer is not the same as the unbeliever; on the basis of taqwa – the greater a person’s taqwa, the more honour Allah confers upon him; on the basis of knowledge – those who know are not the same as those who do not know, and the greater a person’s knowledge, the higher his rank with Allah; and finally through contracts – the upper hand is better than the lower hand, and you owe the leader your obedience because of your pledge to him.
The first of these, belief, simply means that Muslims are afforded more rights than non-Muslims. They are at the top of the hierarchy in any healthy society. The second, taqwa, has no bearing on a person’s position in society as it is purely between him and Allah. As for the third, knowledge, there is no doubt that it is a means to achieve status in this world as well as the Next, for it is only with knowledge that any society can hope to thrive and hope to survive. But knowledge is not what it has become. The doorway to knowledge is and must be open to everyone, and you do not become part of a club or enter into a special stratum of society by achieving some arbitrary minimum level of knowledge or by completing some specified course. The university graduate may, in fact, have less knowledge that the one who has studied in his village and sat at the feet of his local teachers. The true extent of a person’s knowledge is difficult to determine or measure, and so to raise one person above another on its basis is no easy thing.
The problem we have today is that, too often, it is those scholars themselves who seek to raise themselves up and who put themselves forward, whether through publicly proclaiming their grasp of knowledge or choosing to don a garb that differentiates them from the common folk. We have come to know our ulama by their appearance, by their flowing robes, luxuriant beards and Azhari turbans. It is those symbols that we look for and those symbols that we have come to trust, but in truth those symbols do little more than create a barrier between us and them and create a de facto priesthood in a deen that has never had one. And that priesthood increasingly comes to see knowledge as their domain and their purview and starts to look down upon the masses as ignorant. They close ranks and become isolated, and the more they do that, the less benefit they bring the people. Anything, and I repeat, anything that takes knowledge away from the main body of the Muslims and makes it the plaything of the few is to be avoided. Ulama should not take any steps, even if it is just wearing different clothes, if it takes them away from the people and causes them to become less accessible. The Messenger of Allah did not dress any differently to his Companions. Indeed, when a stranger entered the Mosque of the Prophet, he was obliged to ask, “Which of you is Muhammad?” because there were no outward signs differentiating the Messenger from his Companions.
And it was a rule among the Maliki ulama of the past that they dress in the customary garb of their land and not differentiate themselves by their clothing from the people of their locale. To do so, they concluded, was to set themselves apart from the people and therefore something reprehensible and blameworthy. For Ibn Umar narrated that the Messenger of Allah said, 

من لبس ثوب شهرة في الدنيا ألبسه الله ثوب مذلة يوم القيامة

“Anyone who wears clothes of fame in this world, Allah will make him wear clothes of humiliation on the Day of Rising.” When explaining what was meant by ‘thawb shuhra’ – clothes of fame, Ibn al-Athir said,

المراد أن ثوبه يشتهر بين الناس لمخالفته لونه لألوان ثيابهم فيرفع الناس إليه أبصارهم

“It means that his clothing is such that it is well-known among the people on account of its being different in colour or type from theirs, thereby drawing people’s gazes to them.” When the famous Maliki scholar, al-Harith ibn Miskin was appointed qadi of Egypt in 237 AH, and was instructed to wear the black robes of state by the khalif al-Mutawakkil, he refused to do so, not wanting to wear something that set him apart from the people, even though the khalif threatened him with the dislocation of his hips and flogging if he did not obey. He recognised the inherent danger in such a step, and that danger is that people start to associate the clothes with the office and so cease to look beyond the clothes, automatically trusting whoever is wearing those clothes without knowing anything more about them and whether they actually possess knowledge or not. The outward symbols of knowledge become more important than the knowledge itself.
And when that clothing represents an entire institution, such as the Azhari cap, then it removes personal responsibility and corporatises knowledge, and makes the issuing of fatwas no longer the heavy weight on a scholar’s shoulders that it once was, forcing to examine the issue thoroughly and from all directions, but something much easier given that it is not your name primarily associated with the fatwa but that of the institution you represent. So, instead of hearing of such-and-such a fatwa from such-and-such a scholar, we now hear of fatwas issued by the Azhar or the MJC or the Muslim council of Britain, much like we used to hear of edicts passed by the church.
This issue of clothing is not one that is limited to the ulama, but has become a symptom of many of our Muslim men and women, who feel obliged to wear what has come to be termed as Islamic garb, and feel that doing so is somehow incumbent on them. And so you see young Muslim men walking through the streets of London wearing a thawb and white cap, and young Muslim women wearing black niqab, thereby drawing the gaze of every passerby towards them. They set themselves apart from the societies in which they live, and say by their appearance to those around them, “Look at me, I am Muslim.” They segregate themselves and cause the peoples of those lands to view Islam as something foreign and alien. This was not the example of the Messenger of Allah and his Companions. He did not discard the clothing of the people of Makka and create his own clothing style. He did not tell people when they became Muslim that they had to change their clothes and don a particular uniform. The only way that the clothing of his community differed from those about him was that they were more careful to maintain their modesty and avoid arrogance. For an example of this, let us look at the famous hadith always quoted to us by those young men who talk a lot about bid’a. Ibn Umar narrated that the Prophet said,

من جر ثوبه خيلاء لم ينظر الله إليه يوم القيامة.

  “Whoever lets his clothes drag on the floor out of arrogance, Allah will not look at him on the Day of Rising.” This is always understood by them to mean that it is categorically forbidden for a man to wear any garment that extends beyond his ankles, but the length of the garment is not the point of the hadith, the arrogance is. It is forbidden when it is done deliberately to show off to other people and broadcast the message that you can afford to ruin your clothes in that way because you are so wealthy, you can simply discard it and put on another one. This is proven by the continuation of the hadith. 

فقال أبو بكر: إن أحد شقي إزاري يسترخي إلا أن أتعاهد ذلك منه. فقال: إنك لست ممن يفعل ذلك خيلاء

“Abu Bakr said, ‘One of the two edges of my izar sometimes drags along the ground without my noticing.’ So the Prophet said, ‘But you are not one of those who does it out of arrogance.’” The rule regarding how clothing was to be worn was simply to avoid arrogance. Similarly, the rule regarding the hijab is simply to maintain modesty and ensure that the full awra/the full private area of a person is covered. It does not require a person to wear a particular shape of head scarf or particular colour. Similarly, clothing should avoid attracting undue attention, because then you are encouraging others to wrong action, for it makes it all the more difficult for them to avert their gaze. So, whatever clothing has the opposite effect should be avoided on that basis. And there is no doubt that overtly so-called Islamic garb has that effect, and attracts the gaze of both men and women. It causes fitna and arouses feelings of anger and resentment in the local non-Muslim population. It is antagonistic. You wouldn’t walk with your wallet and mobile phone out and in full view of everyone while you are in a dangerous area of town, so why do that with your clothes. It creates an us-and-them mentality that brings only harm on the Muslim community, not benefit. So we must avoid that, and avoid differentiating ourselves on such a basis from those in the societies in which we live. We want to attract them to Allah, not repel them. We only differentiate ourselves by our character and our adherence to the Commands of Allah, not by meaningless symbology. So don the libaasu-t-taqwa, clothe yourself in fearful awareness of Him, clothe yourself in belief in Allah and His Messenger, and adherence to His Commands and prohibitions. That is the clothing that will be of benefit to you in this world and the Next.

أقول قولي هذا وأستغفر الله لي ولكم ولسائر 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.

The other great outward symbol of religiosity is the beard. Often, the longer the beard, the more religious a man is seen to be, and woe betide any man who does not have one. They are considered to be beyond the pale. Sometimes people attach such importance to the beard that their entire first judgement as to the worth of a man is determined by the length of his beard. All other considerations – good character, noble bearing etc. – are thrown by the wayside. An example of this happened in this very mosque a couple of years ago when the imam came in to the mosque before the customary time for the iqama to find someone had taken his place as imam and already completed the prayer. So he approached the man to ask him by what right he had taken the prayer, and the man, who happened to have a long beard and be wearing a thawb, replied that he had received permission from one of the attendees, and anyway the imam was not fit to be imam because his beard was not long enough. Then, he turned to one of the congregation and exclaimed in a loud voice, “Who looks more like an imam? Me or him?”.
This might be amusing if it were not so commonplace. This mindset that gives priority to symbol over substance, that focuses on the superficial and ignores the true core of the deen. It is of little wonder that the muamalat of the deen have been left on the bookshelf and zakat abandoned as a pillar when our focus and energy is devoted to such non-issues.
For the truth of the matter is that the presence of the beard and the length of the beard are not as important as has been made out. It is more a question of urf, of custom, than anything else. Its purpose was to differentiate Muslim men from Persian fire-worshippers who all wore their facial hair in one particular way and differentiate them from women. The Messenger of Allah said,

جزوا الشوارب وأرخوا اللحى وخالفوا المجوس

“Trim your moustache and let your beard grow – be different to the Magians.” And it is reported that,

لعن رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم المتشبهين من الرجال بالنساء، والمتشبهات من النساء بالرجال‏

“The Messenger of Allah cursed men who make themselves look like women and women who make themselves look like men.” Let men be men, and women be women, not a confusing mix of both. The beard was the best way to achieve this, for women cannot generally-speaking grow them.
As for length, the best length was determined by what was seen as the norm in that society for a well-groomed man. While the Prophet was sitting in the mosque, a man came in with a wildly disheveled hair and unkempt beard, so the Prophet command that man to leave and tidy up. When he came back looking well-groomed, the Prophet said,

أليس هذا خيرا من أن يأتيَ أحدُكم ثائر الرأس كأنه شيطان

“Is this not better than one of you coming with his head disheveled, looking like a Shaytan?” On this basis, the ulama of the madhhab of Malik preferred shorter well-groomed beards to longer ones that look untidy. The important thing is to look well and not repel others by your appearance, and the matter has nothing to do with the degree of your taqwa. It is not your clothes and beard that you will be questioned about when you go before your Lord, but your heart and your action. As the Prophet said in the famous hadith,

إن الله لا ينظر الى أجسامكم ولا إلى صوركم ولكن ينظر إلى قلوبكم وأعمالكم

“Allah does not look at your bodies nor your forms but rather at your hearts and your actions.” We ask Allah to make us people of substance and not superficiality.

إِنَّ اللهَ وَمَلَائِكَتَهُ يُصَلُّونَ عَلَى النَّبِيِّ، يَا أَيُهَا الذِينَ آمَنُواْ صَلُّواْ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلِّمُواْ تَسْلِيماً. 

اللَّهُمَّ صَلِّ وَسَلِّمْ وَبَارِكْ عَلَيْهِ وَعَلَى آلِهِ وَصَحْبِهِ  أَجْمَعِينَ. وَارْضَ اللَّهُمَّ عَنِ الْخُلَفَاءِ الرَّاشِدِينَ أَبِي بَكْرٍ وَعُمَرَ وَعُثْمَانَ وَعَلِيٍّ، وعن أم المومنين عائشة التي أمرنا الله في سورة النور أن ندافع عنها، وَعَنْ سَائِرِ الصَّحَابَةِ أَجْمَعِينَ، خُصُوصاً اِلأَنْصَارَ مِنْهُمْ وَالمُهَاجِرِينَ، وَعَنِ التَّابِعِينَ وَتَابِعِي التَّابِعِينَ وَمَنْ تَبِعَهُمْ بِإِحْسَانٍ إِلَى يَوْمِ الدِّينِ.

اللَّهُمَّ اهْدِ وُلَاةَ أُمُورِ المُسْلِمِينَ لِمَا يُرْضِيكَ وَلِاتِّبَاعِ سُنَّةِ نَبِيِّكَ صَلَّى اللهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ، وَثَبِّتْ أَقْدَامَهُمْ عَلَى الصِّرَاطِ المُسْتَقِيمِ، وَأَصْلِحْهُمْ يَا رَبَّ الْعَالَمِينَ. 

اللَّهُمَّ بَارِكْ عَلَى شَيْخِنَا، وَعَلَى أَمِيرِنَا، وَعَلَى جَمِيعِ أُمَرَاءِ وَزُعَمَاءِ المُسْلِمِينَ. 

اللَّهُمَّ بَارِكْ عَلَى المُسْلِمِينَ فِي هَذِهِ المَدِينَةِ، وَوَفِّقْهُمْ لِمَا تُحِبُّهُ وَتَرْضَاهُ يَا أَكْرَمَ الأَكْرَمِينَ. 

اللَّهُمَّ أَعِزَّ الإِسْلَامَ وَالمُسِْلمِينَ، وَاخْذُلِ الْكُفْرَ وَالْكَافِرِينَ، وَانْصُرِ المُجَاهِدِينَ فِي سَبِيلِ اللهِ. وَاجْعَلْ كَلِمََتَكَ هِيَ العُلْيَا وَكَلِمَةَ الْكُفْرِ هِيَ السُّفْلَى. 

رَبَّنَا ءَاتِنَا فِي الدُّنْيَا حَسَنَةً وَفِي الآخِرَةِ حَسَنَةً وَقَِنَا عَذَابَ النَّارِ. 

إِنَّ اللهَ يَامُرُ بِالْعَدْلِ وَالإِحْسَانِ وَإِيتَاءِ ذِي الْقُرْبَى، وَيَنْهَى عَنِ الْفَحْشَاءِ وَالمُنكَرِ وَالْبَغْيِ، يَعِظُكُمْ لَعَلَّكُمْ تَذَّكَّرُونَ، وَلَذِكْرُ اللهِ أَكْبَرُ وَاللهُ يَعْلَمُ مَا تَصْنَعُونَ. وَقُومُواْ إِلَى صَلاتِكُمْ يَرْحَمُكُمُ اللهُ