
Today’s da`wah (call to Allah) requires believers who don’t just sayla illah illa Allah (There’s no God but Allah) but who have it deeply engraved upon their hearts.
Because if you say la illah illa Allah and it’s deeply there in your heart, then everything you do has a different meaning and usually what you do is different. Because if you say la illah illa Allah, you say He alone is Lord of history. He alone is in charge. Everything is in His hands and they are good hands.
Hasbuna allah wanema al-wakeel “He is enough for us and an excellent guardian”. Those who don’t panic, in the Quran, that’s what they say. If you have that tawheed(monotheism) deeply in your heart, you won’t freak out, panic or fret. You will be in a state of toma’nina (calmness). And when you have that strength of character, when you are a proper Muslim, then you won’t look at everybody else as a potential threat or someone you secretly envy. You won’t be full of complexes. Instead you will sincerely see them as people who need help.
Is this our attitudes? At the moment I think it’s not. So what we need really is to take a decision: Is it going to be the hedgehog option? Islam as a political party, “them and us”, mutually exclusive world views and interests? Or is it going to be a sense that everybody has a soul; white, black, Muslim, Kafir, mentally handicapped, baby, old lady in the retirement home who nobody visits. They all have souls. They will be accountable to their Lord. And the responsibility of anybody who thinks that they mean it when they say la illah illa Allah is towards all of those people without exception.
Those that are ummat al-da`wah and ummat al-ijabah (people who were summoned and people who have responded), humanity falls into those two categories. Some of our own people have not properly responded, or have only partially responded. Some of the others have responded very well even though the reality of la illah illa Allahhasn’t been fully presented to them. Many of them may be better people than many of our own people. Once we can acknowledge that then we can claim that la illah illa Allah has actually been percolated somewhere into our hearts.
But if we just sit around in the mosques watching the headlines and just say “kuffar, kuffar” things will not get better. The world will not respect us any more. The current polarization is likely to become more and more acute until there’s some unimaginable showdown. And if we are the ones who precipitated that all we are is a political party, a bunch of misfits, then the outcome may not necessarily go in our favor.
But if we bring the weapon which is insuperable, which can never be defeated which is truth, and all that goes with truth, which means submission to Allah’s decree, knowledge that history is in His good hands, real tawheed, tawakul and reda. If we are people of relaxation and calm amidst all this increasing craziness of the modern world, then people will come to us. We won’t have to knock on their doors or lean over their fences. They will say “What have you got that we haven’t got, give us some of it. We need medicine as well if there’s enough to go around”, and we will say “Alhamdulellah, there’s plenty because Allah’s rahma (mercy) encompasses everything in His creation”.
So we ask Allah Almighty to give us the strength that goes with real tawheed and with the reality of la illah illa Allah and make us the kind of Muslim minority that good people in this country deserve, and not the kind of Muslim minority that the bad people in this country want us to be.