http://www.zaytuna.org/tragedy/tragedy1.html
America's
Tragedy: An Islamic Perspective
By Shaykh Hamza
Yusuf
This is an
edited transcript of the talk that Shaykh Hamza Yusuf gave on
Sunday, Sept. 30th, 2001 at Zaytuna Academy and
Institute in Hayward, California regarding his reflections on the
Sept 11th tragedy and his trip to the White House from
which he had just returned. In this talk, he distinguishes what
the terrorists did from what Islam teaches, addressing several
important issues in regards to the tragedy such as the Islamic
concept of jihad and martyrdom. Anyone wanting to gain a clear
understanding of what the religion of Islam has to say about the
calamitous event is sure to find this talk beneficial. If you
would like to obtain the audio cassette of this talk, please go to
www.alhambraproductions.com.
We should all
realize that the outreach has been extraordinary in terms of the
numbers of people contacting Muslim organizations and reaching out
to the Muslims. I think some of these stories need to be
documented because they are very profound and powerful stories,
and I think that something very interesting like a book can come
out of this. It may be titled, The Best of Americans in the
Worst of Times or something similar to that.
A mosque was
attacked in Seattle, and a group of Christians started an
organization called, "The Peace Keepers" and actually went and
guarded the mosque. Also, if you do not have a copy, I would get a
copy of the tape the MCA (Muslim Community Association) in Santa
Clara made of the love messages that they got. The tape is just of
people calling up, and that was very powerful to listen to one
after another, messages of love and support. By far, the majority
of people who have called have called with those types of
responses, and I think what we should see from this is that there
are a lot of good people in this country. That in itself is very
powerful.
There are a lot
of people who do have the right sensibility. They also realize the
stupidity of assuming the acts of a statistically insignificant
number of people, whoever they were, represent the majority. In
this country, there are almost 300,000,000 people; the attackers
of Sept 11th are amongst a number of very crazy people
that would do very crazy things given the opportunity, and some of
them have actually proven that, and they are the Timothy McVeighs
of the world. So, I think that in it of itself, this outreach is
something that we should all be very optimistic of.
On the other
hand, we also should keep in mind that living in the Bay Area
gives us a false sense about the pulse in some of the other parts
of the country. The outreach we have experienced here is probably
from some of the most educated and most tolerant people because
this is a very tolerating area. It tends to embrace others and
things considered strange, and that is something that people here
pride themselves in, so we do have that here. Another aspect of
this area is that it is very heavily populated with immigrants,
and that in itself is good because those who work with immigrants
see the human side which is always important. The immigrants,
especially those coming from other countries where the social
conditions are difficult, tend to know what these types of
incidents mean.
In certain parts
of this country, there is a lot of jingoism going on right now.
There is a lot of anger. I flew across this country with a friend,
who is a tall, dark-skinned Arab, and it was very shocking to see
the eyes of others, and this is not paranoia. People looking at
him as we were traveling were really frightened. There was real
fear. We were in the front of the plane, so every time my friend
got up, I looked back, and I noticed people would go into a state
of rigor mortis as though they were thinking, "What's he going to
do?!" and that is a tragedy. We traveled two weeks earlier, and
people did not have those feelings.
Also, I have
been across the country now four times in the last ten days, and
the planes are empty. There are a lot of economic repercussions to
this; 15,000 people have been fired from United Airlines. There
are going to be disgruntle people. So, those elements are going to
be there; there are hard times ahead.
Now, in terms of
what happened in the last week, I think people need to understand.
One of the things about many people is that they tend to be very
shortsighted in a lot of ways; they do not look at long-term
strategy. The Muslims are particularly this way. We have forgotten
what strategic thinking is. The odd thing about it is that we had
designed the classes this semester to teach strategic thinking.
That is why we had the Battles of the Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi
wa sallam and Dr. Thomas Cleary's Art of War courses. It was
not belligerence; it was quite the opposite. I was hoping we would
learn from the battles of the Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wa
sallam. I wanted us to explore how he planned and what the
purposes of his actions were. You can see in his actions always an
understanding of this long-range thinking. For example, Suraqa Ibn
Malik was attempting to catch the Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wa
sallam to get a reward of 100 camels promised by the Quraysh
to whomever brought the Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam
in. When he met him in the desert, the Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi
wa sallam said, "What did they offer you?"
He said, "100
camels."
The Prophet
sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam said, "Suraqa, what would you
think about wearing the bracelets of Khosroes?" and this is
something that happened at the time of the Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi
wa sallam. He always saw way ahead, and that is wisdom. Even
his ahadith apply until the end of time. That is the beauty
of the ahadith. He was not speaking only to his community.
Look at the
hadith: "If you leave one-tenth of what I have given you, you
will be punished, but there is coming a time on my ummah
that if they hold to one-tenth, they will go into paradise." Now,
think of the strategic planning of that hadith. Think, had
he just said to his sahaba, "If you leave one-tenth of what
I have given you, you will be punished," what would that mean to
us? We know what the sahaba did, but the Prophet
sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam was not speaking just to the
sahaba; he was speaking to us. He was speaking to people whom
he knew would be in such difficult situations that holding on to
their deen would be like holding onto burning coals. That
is the beauty of Prophetic wisdom. He spoke to every time and
every place, and he certainly spoke to the time and place that we
are in because these are the fitan.
Fitin is Arabic. Fatanah means "to test gold." One of
the things you can see in this time is that the basic material
people are made of becomes apparent. Is it gold, is it silver, is
it lead, or is it some kind of toxic element? You see what people
are made of. Some people can act, and you are amazed at their
humanity. Other people come out, and you are amazed at their
inhumanity, but that is what fitnah does. It exposes
people, and that is one of the wisdoms of tribulation.
I would like to
talk about how people judge situations. Many people often judge a
situation with the short-term in mind and without looking at the
long-term implications. People who tend to get caught up in the
moment of their short-term judgment lose an understanding that
every moment is actually part of a continuum. Not only is the
moment that we are in right now based on everything that preceded
it, but it also will affect what follows it. There is no such
thing as an isolated incident. Every incident in your life is
related to the totality of your life. You cannot separate any
individual life. That is why a human being is not judged for any
individual incident, but you must look at the whole spectrum of
growth.
One of the
things that people do not like to do is allow people to grow. They
want to pigeonhole you. However, conditions necessitate different
responses: not every condition necessitates the same response. If
you give the same response, you are a fool because there is a time
for anger, and there is a time for forgiveness. There is a time
when you need to get angry, and if you do not get angry, you are
not responding appropriately to the situation. Our prophet
sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam got angry, so there is a time for
anger, but there is never a time for wrath because wrath is
excessive anger. There is never a time to lose your reason from
anger. I know that some people will judge from outward appearance
because that is all we have on which to base our judgments. The
Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam said, "I was commanded
to judge people according to their outward states," but Allah does
not judge by the outward because Allah encompasses everything. "Muhitun
bi 'ibaadihi: Allah encompasses his servants" to know their
inward and their outward. "Ya'lamu sirrakum wa l'alaaniya:
He knows your inward and your outward," and He judges actions by
your intentions. Allah gave to his servants a means to maintain
harmony for the believers: the idea of having a good opinion-husnu
dhann. Having a good opinion of people is the principle upon
which our teaching is based. We should look for an excuse for
others and not assume the worst. We should always look to say,
"perhaps, perhaps, perhaps," and come up with excuses. The
hypocrite's nature is that he will always look for a reason to
condemn. The munafiq will always say, "he did it because of
this; he did it because of that" and try to find fault. That is
unfortunate to mention.
In reality, what
we have done too little of is build real institutional bases and
have engaged in too much empty rhetoric. Now, it is coming back to
haunt us. However, the Chinese symbol for crisis is also the
symbol for opportunity, and I think this crisis that we are in is
an opportunity. The power of the historical moment we are in is
extraordinary because we are in an unprecedented situation. For
the first time, large numbers of Americans actually want to
understand what Islam is. Even the Iranian Revolution did not do
this because that was again something that happened far away. Here
is a time where it has come home, and people are trying to make
sense of it.
I have been
getting many calls from people wanting to know the concept of
martyrdom. Martyrdom is not an alien concept to the West. The West
has a history of martyrdom. The Christian Church honors martyrs.
They are the highest people in the Church and are recognized as
saints because they are people who died for their beliefs. Some of
the people of the Revolutionary War were considered martyrs. Those
are words that Westerners use. Martin Luther King Jr. and people
like him are considered martyrs, so the concept is not alien to
westerners. However, the idea of martyrdom being associated with
violence against innocent individuals is such an atrocity to any
sane person, and the travesty is when Islam is indicated here to
have anything to do with this. That is why we just cannot see this
incident in religious terms. It is really important to keep
focusing on the fact that this act really does not have anything
to do with Islam.
Unfortunately,
in the past, we have had people whom we have been plagued with
called the Khawarij. They emerged early on and were the
first people who split from the rightly guided khulafa.
They emerged from the time of Sayyiduna Uthman. These are the
people who surrounded his house and actually killed him. One of
the things about these people that is very problematic is that
they are very "religious," and this is where the real crisis
comes. These people display a religiosity about which our Prophet
sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam said, "You will hold your own
prayer in contempt when you see their prayer." In other words,
they will be praying so much, you will feel that you do not pray
enough. Similarly, he sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam went on
to say, "You will see them fast, and you will feel like you do not
fast." They fast every other day or on Mondays and Thursdays, and
you will feel contempt for yourself when you compare your fasts to
theirs. He sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam said, "They read
the Qur'an, but it does not go past their throats." The 'ulama
say this means that they read the words, but they do not know the
meanings. There are verses in the Qur'an that if read outwardly,
you will think they are a license to kill people, but that is not
what the verses actually mean. The verse in Sura Tawbah was
in clear reference to a group of people that broke the treaty with
Muslims. The Muslims were commanded to fight them wherever they
found them. They were a specific group of people, and that verse
is not a generalized verse. It applies only to that time of
treachery.
Allah does not
prevent you from being good to those who have not fought you or
chased you out of your home. Be good to them, and share in your
wealth with them. You can interact with and help non-Muslims. This
is permitted in Islam. The Qur'an is a holistic body of guidance,
and if you take parts of the Qur'an without understanding the
holistic body, you will go astray. For this reason, Buddah Al-Jakany
in Mauritania wrote a book, and in it, he said that every single
group that has gone astray has used part of the Qur'an to prove
their error. There is not a sect in the history of Islam that did
not use the Qur'an as a foundation for their misguidance, not one.
They all proved their points from the Qur'an.
When Ibn Abbas
went to the Khawarij to try to speak with them, the
Khawarij said that one of the reasons they rebelled against
Sayyiduna Ali is because Sayyiduna Ali asked that a hakim
be brought from Mu'awiya's group to sit with a hakim from
his own group so that they would as arbitrators come to a decision
on the particular matter. To this idea, the Khawarij said
that the Qur'an says, "La hukma illa lillah: There is no
judgment except Allah." Allah is the only one that can judge, and
so they said, "What you have done is going against the book of
Allah, Imam Ali." They said, "You do not understand the Qur'an.
The Qur'an says, 'La hukma illa lillah.'" That was their
slogan, literally: There is no judgment except Allah's. What did
Imam Ali do? He sent Ibn Abbas to go and debate with them. He
advised Ibn Abbas: If they debate with the Qur'an, debate with the
other parts of the Qur'an; if they do not agree, then go to the
hadiths.
So, Ibn Abbas
went, and he argued with them. There were about 30,000 of them
originally, and about 3,000 of those went over to the other side
and joined Ibn Abbas because he convinced them with his arguments.
He said, "Does not Allah all ow arbitration between a man and a
wife? Does not Allah allow arbitration on haj j? You bring a
hakim to decide what the penalty is." Ibn Abbas showed the m
how in the Qur'an itself, Allah allows people to arbitrate, and
thus he proved that Imam Ali was not going against the Qur'an. So,
the point is that the Kh awarij have been a plague on the
Muslim ummah from early time, and, I think out of the 1.3
billion people in this ummah, there are some people ,
unfortunately, who are misguided enough to think that by
committing such horri fic acts, they were doing something good.
That is the reality of it. Whatever it was and whoever was behind
the recent events, the people who benefit from it ar e the enemies
of Islam.
On the other
hand, Allah says, "Maybe you hate a thing, but in it is much good
for you." The reality of the situation is that immense good can
come out of the tragedy. US News and Report, which is one
of the major news journals, had an article on jihad that I
could not have done a better job writing. I was amazed. It was an
excellent article explaining the rules of jihad. My God,
millions of people are going to read this and have to confirm that
these are very human rulings. They mentioned not poisoning wells,
not killing livestock, not cutting down fruit trees; that is
Islam. I think an intelligent person is going to have to reason
that if that is their reason in war, then the attacks on September
11th certainly have nothing to do with Islam.
Unfortunately, we have other elements in the media that have a
very serious agenda, and this is evident to anyone who has been
watching some of the media, particularly, Fox. They are
hardliners. I think what they did to Muzammil Siddiqi was a
horrific thing to do to him because it just does not represent
Muzammil Siddiqi. You have Muslims that were supporting what they
believe to be a legitimate struggle of the Palestinian people in
their fight.
I have never and
I will never agree with suicide bombings. That has never sat right
with me, ever. I think it is just so antithetical to the truth of
Islam, and I have always had that problem with it. No one can ever
find anywhere, in the last 13 or 14 years of my public speaking,
where I have condoned that. I have never been comfortable with
that or comfortable with any types of terror because my
understanding of Islam is that it is a chivalrous religion. It is
a religion that demands honor in engagement, and my belief is that
I would rather die than reduce myself to the level of these types
of people because I know they certainly use it against us. They
do. However, as Umar Mukhtar pointed out, when they wanted to kill
the Italian prisoners and he refused to let them, they said,
"Well, they do it to our prisoners," and he replied, "But they are
not our teachers."
These people are
not our teachers. They did not teach us how to fight. We have laws
and rules, and those are our principles. On 60 Minutes the
other night, four of us were interviewed, and they interviewed us
for three hours. They give you enough rope to hang yourself, and
then they kind of edit from that. It is very tricky business
talking to these people. During the three-hour interview, I was
asked, "Where does this idea come from if it is not from Islam?" I
replied that it is an old idea called The End Justifies the
Means, and it is a philosophy alien to Islam because we
believe that if the ends are noble, the means have to be
consistent with the ends. We believe in noble ends, and therefore
our means have to be consistent with those ends because if you say
the ends justify the means, what you are saying is you can use
ignoble means to achieve noble ends, and that is inconsistent
logically. That is the philosophy here, and it is not from Islam.
I think that we
have a lot of work to do. In chemistry, there is something known
as dissipated structures. Prigogine got a nobel prize for showing
that when massive turbulence is created in a system of chemical
bonds that breaks all those bonds, what happens is they re-bond at
a more complex level than the initial. It goes to a higher level,
and this is consistent also with nuclear fusion. The point is that
these types of things should actually force us to go to a higher
level of understanding and operation, not to a lower level. This
should literally force us to raise the level of our discourse, to
raise the level of our understanding, and to do a lot more than we
were doing before because there is no room for sleep anymore. Get
your sleep that you need for your body, but the rest of the time,
you have to be awake, and if this does not do it to wake us up,
nothing is going to do it, really, because we are now in danger.
We hope for the best, but the danger is repeated incidents and
more blame because even if a White Supremacist group does
anything, who is everybody going to blame when it happens? They
are going to blame Muslims, right?
This is the time
now to reach out and build bridges as fast as we can with as many
people as we can, to get out there, to extend hands to anybody who
is offering hands of friendship and understanding right now; we
have to reach out to them and really try to create some
understanding. Part of what we really have to focus on and what I
want you to understand is that Islam's word for calling others to
Islam is da'wah, which in the Arabic language means
"invitation to a banquet." What we have to remember is what
Muhammad Zakariya said, "An invitation is only real if it's open
to rejection," and that is the beauty of our Lord: He has given an
invitation and is not forcing anybody to go to the banquet.
When we look at
the people out there, they have every right to believe what they
believe, to be doing what they are doing because it is consistent
with where they are. Our job is only to present Islam in the best
way, and there are two responses that we hope for: either somebody
sees it as the beauty that it is and the truth that it is and is
welcome to join us or a person gains a heightened appreciation for
this incredible, human tradition because it is part of the
tapestry of human civilization, and we have, I think, the greatest
contribution. That is something we are all proud of, and it is
something they need to find out about and learn about so that at
least they can appreciate it. There will always be the disgruntled
few who are going to hate you anyway, and Allah mentioned that in
the Qur'an; there is always going to be that, but I do not think
that represents a majority of people, yet the majority can be
manipulated by that minority, unfortunately, especially with the
means that they have in their hands. You can see: they can paint
day night and night day, black white and white black. They can
call war "peace" and peace "war," and people start believing it.
They can call murder "collateral damage," and it sounds a lot
nicer. "Collateral damage" sounds a lot nicer than slaughtering
innocent civilians. It has got a nicer ring to it, and that is
called a euphemism: "kicked the bucket" – he did not kick the
bucket; he dropped dead. It is just a euphemism like, "retired to
the farm." That is how they say in idiomatic English, "he died":
"he retired to the farm." He did not retire to the farm; he
stopped breathing.
I mentioned what
happened in the last week, and I will just tell you, it was a very
difficult trip. I was asked by somebody I know, and whom people
probably know, who works in the White House. He is a Muslim, the
son of a very prominent Muslim, and he called me up and said,
"They're asking for somebody to come to talk to the President and
represent the Muslims, and I thought that you would be the best
person in my estimation to do that. So could you come?" So, I
talked to Shaykh Abdullah Bin Bayyah, and he said that it was a
fard on me. He said, "You have to go." I went, and I was part
of I think about 30 religious leaders there. The Head of the
Mormon Church, the Head of Billy Graham Ministries, his son
Franklin Graham, the Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church, the
Archbishop of the Catholic Church in America, and a lot of other
very prominent religious leaders were there. There were also a
Tibetan Lama, one of the heads of a national Sikh organization,
and Methodist Bishops. A lot of different people were present.
From that group,
a handful, six of us were asked to meet with President Bush in the
Oval Office. So, I put forth four points, and we were given quite
a bit of time. I was allowed to say everything I wanted to say. I
gave a copy of The Essential Koran to the President, and
the night before, I spent a couple hours going through the book
and putting Post-Its on all of the verses that I thought were most
pertinent. I said, "I know you're very busy, so I put these in so
that if you don't have time to read the whole book, you can read
these verses." I also gave him a book called Thunder in the Sky
which is a book Thomas Cleary translated on the humanistic use of
power. In other words, it is about how to use power to benefit
humans and not to harm them. I also gave him a piece of
calligraphy done by Muhammad Zakariya, who did the Eid stamp.
When I called
Muhammad Zakariya, he was in Virginia; he lives a few miles away
from the Pentagon, and he was writing what is called a hilyah
in calligraphy from the Shifa' of Qadi Iyaad. He was
writing a description of the Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wa
sallam from Umar ibn Al-Aws. Muhammad Zakariya told me what
was the sentence he was writing when he heard the explosion. The
beauty of this is that only Allah can do this. That was for
Muhammad Zakariya because Allah is the Author of this; Allah is
the One who has decreed all of this, and that moment was for
Muhammad Zakariya, and then it was related to the President
because it ended up going there. Muhammad Zakariya told me that
the sentence he was writing when he heard the explosions was "Wa
kana salla llahu 'alayhi wa sallam la yadfa'u sayyi'ah bi sayyi'ah,
wa lakin wa ya'fu wa yaghfiru: He would never repel an evil
with another evil, but he forgave, and he condoned." Allahumma
salli 'alayh. And that is our teaching.
That is his
description of the Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam,
and that is how we know that no matter what America has done to
Muslims anywhere, our teaching is that we do not repay evil with
evil, and that is Islam. It is not all this rage and anger that is
out there. That is Islam, and it is a hard thing to do except when
you remember that this is dunya, and you are looking at
infinity; you are not looking at dunya; you are not looking
at 50, 60, 70 years; you are looking at infinity, and you want
Allah to forgive you for your own evil. Is not that what we all
want? We just want forgiveness on yaum al-qiyaamah because
we are all guilty. We think that we are independent from Allah. We
are all guilty from that perspective. The point is, here he was
writing that, and I told the President that. I said, "When the
Pentagon was struck, Muhammad Zakariya was writing that the
Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam did not repel an evil
with an evil." Similar incidents occur, and that is the beauty of
our deen. This is a true story; it is not made up. Muhammad
Zakariya is saadiq. He is truthful; he does not lie, and I
believe him. I do not need any witnesses – the angels were the
witnesses. Those are our two just witnesses.
The points that
I made at the White House were four. The first was emphasizing,
and it had to be reiterated again and again, that Islam does not
have anything to do with this, that this is not the teaching of
Islam. It is a religion that teaches mercy and compassion, and
when it uses martial force, it uses it with just laws, and
non-combatants are never involved. It is based on legitimate
authority, not on vigilantism. We do not believe in vigilantism;
we do not believe in outlaws; we do not believe in Robin Hood. It
is kind of interesting that in this culture, Robin Hood is a hero
because he stole from the rich and gave to the poor, and even more
bizarre is the story of Samson. I told them on 60 Minutes,
which I doubt they will air, that Samson is the first suicide
bomber, and he is in the Bible. If you do not know the story of
Shamshun, Samson was in the temple of the Philistine, and he
was an Israeli. He asked where the pillars that hold up the temple
were, and he went in chains, and he pushed them, killing himself
and everybody else as revenge for the Israelis against the wrongs
of their enemies. That story is in the Bible, and I was taught
that as a child. Samson was presented as a hero. That story is not
in the Qur'an; it is conspicuously absent from the Qur'an.
The second point
I made to the President was the danger of polarization. I said
that this could polarize the world, and we could get a
self-fulfilling prophecy of Samuel Huntington's Clash of
Civilizations, such as China and Islam versus the West. Nobody
wants that; there is no benefit in that, except for warmongers:
people who make money off of the death of other people.
I also spoke
about the idea of a consensus. I had already spoken to Shaykh
Abdullah Bin Bayyah, and I had also conveyed that to some Arab
Ambassadors. I told them that I felt there should be a summit
meeting of the most prominent Muslim 'ulama in the Muslim
world to declare terrorism as inconsistent with the teachings of
Islam and that it is prohibited by ijma', consensus of the
scholars. I said the attacks should be just rejected by an ijma'.
I also suggested that there should be one done by the Abrahamic
religions in someplace like Rome or Jerusalem, where there is a
declaration that the taking of innocent lives is not consistent
with the teachings of the prophets, whether it is state terrorism
or individual terrorism. Both forms of terrorism are rejected by
religion, and let them be seen as what they are: as political
means to political ends because that is what they are. They are
political means to political ends, and that is not what the
prophets came to teach. They came to teach prophetic means to
prophetic ends.
Then the last
point I made to the President was about oppression. I said that
this country had a responsibility in creating just regimes because
of the power that this country has and that we have to recognize
that the oppression and the extreme circumstances in the Muslim
world breed the type of extremism that exists in some parts of the
Muslim world.
I think that the
Muslims are incredibly moderate. The Iraqis have displayed
incredible patience, perseverance, and lack of animosity and
hatred. Muslims are a testimony to patience at times of adversity.
Ismail Faruqi was in a debate once, and I heard this from a man
who was present at that debate. He said that someone was saying
how terrible the Muslims were, and Ismail Faruqi said that you see
the Muslims now with their corruption, and you go to the
countries, and you can laugh at how corrupt these countries are,
but have you seen us suffer? He asked, have you seen what happens
to us when we get afflicted with pain and suffering? He said, then
you will know who we are because when we lose all our money, we do
not jump out of buildings. We say, "Ma sha' Allah; la quwwata
illa billah: Whatever Allah wills happens; there is no power
except by Allah," and that is the truth. The Muslims have been
incredibly patient in the light of all this, and that is because
we do have hope, and we know that despair is Iblis, and we know
that ya'as is prohibited in Islam. We do not despair. "La
tay'asu min rawhillah : Do not despair from this spirit that
God sends." Do not despair of it, and that is why in the worst of
times, Allah sends that madad (help), and you should all
know that. It is Allah who sends that. It is Allah who gives
people that strength to get through even the most horrific times
because if He did not send that, we would all go crazy; we would
lose our minds; we would go totally insane.
That was the
gist of what I said to the President. Then I was asked to be the
guest that night of the First Lady, and I was told that there was
going to be a speech. I had no idea that it was going to be the
way it was; I really did not, but that is the situation I was in,
and my intentions in it were trying to do what I could do in this
type of a crisis. You have to do what you think is the right thing
and the best thing for the overall benefit, I would say not just
for Muslims but for everybody: Al-maslaha al-'amma. I think
we have a concern for humanity in general and certainly for the
Muslims in particular. Always the ummah is paramount, but
we are also supposed to be caretakers of humanity. That is a task
that we were given by Allah, so we should not act without the rest
of humanity in our considerations.
I would like to
emphasize something here. I thought that the most profound person
and the one who seemed to be the most genuine person of all those
people that I met was Rabbi Joshua Haberman. He defended Islam
when he spoke to President Bush. At one point, I looked over at
him when we were in the Roosevelt room or some other room. Mayor
Giuliani, the Governor of New York, and the Chief of Staff were
also present, and Rabbi Joshua was sitting in the corner reading
something in Hebrew. Everybody else was 'schmoozing,' so I went
over to the Rabbi, and I asked, "What are you reading?"
He said, "Well,
I'm reading the Psalms," and he was. He seemed like a genuine
person, and we spoke quite a bit. He said that the tragedy of this
is that Americans are so ignorant of Islam; they do not know the
greatness of its civilization; they do not know the history, and
they really think that this represents Islam, and this is the real
tragedy. He also said that as somebody who has studied Islam, he
knows that the easiest religion for a Jewish person to convert to
is Islam. Wallahi, that is what he said. He said, "Your
shari'a is not that different from what Musa was given." There
are good people out there. That person was genuine, and that is
what I got from him. I asked him, "Are you a student of Martin
Buber?" and he said, "Yes." That is what Martin Buber was
about-just having real regard for other human beings, and I think
that, as Muslims, we need to inculcate that in our relations with
other people. When some of the Muslims say "kuffar," there
is this disdain and contempt for people. Listen to those love
messages to MCA, and see if you can say "kuffar" with the
same kind of contempt and disdain. Those are good human beings.
The disdain and contempt we should have is for ourselves for not
reaching out to those people, for not being true representatives
of Islam because Allah teaches us a du'ah in the Qur'an: "Rabbana
la taj'alna fitnatan liladhina kafaru : O our Lord! Do not
make us a tribulation for those who do not believe in this
religion," and in a lot of ways, we have become the biggest
barrier.
I think we have
an immense opportunity, and this is a time when we really need to
reach out and go out there with respect, recognizing that they
have their ways. What we need to have is some mutual understanding
of each other, of our communities, and of their communities. I got
a call from the head of the Christian Businessmen's Association –
they're all CEOs of business – and he called me and said that he
read the interview I had done in the San Jose Mercury and
that he would really like me to come and address their business
association. We continued talking, and he said, "The thing that
troubles me most is the arrogance of our country." He also said,
"If you do not have humility in your heart when you have power,
God will destroy you." This is what he said to me. We often forget
that they have truth in their Books, yet we believe in the Bible;
we believe in the Injil, and there is truth in there, and
there are people who do read those truthful things. One of the
Bishops said to the President in the Oval Office, "You have to
remind people what the Bible says: "Vengeance is Mine sayeth the
Lord." That is what he said: "Vengeance is Mine, sayeth the Lord."
He advised the President not to take vengeance because that is
what people want when they get hurt, and vengeance is not from any
of the prophetic traditions.
Another thing that happened in the White House was that I told the
President that Infinite Justice is an attribute of God and that by
using that name, it is like saying that you are God, and the
President was shocked. He said, "You know, we don't have any
theologians down in the Pentagon, and they name this stuff," and
so they changed the name. Alhamdulillah. A friend of mine
told me that during the sixties, somebody used the term in a
speech, "a hail-Mary play," and he said that he read an
article in the Egyptian newspaper that was trying to prove that
this was a crusading conspiracy because this politician had used
the phrase, "a hail-Mary play." He explained that Egyptian
scholars do not know American football, and the writer was simply
using a sports metaphor. That is what we find when we demystify
power. A lot of it is just our own ignorance here. People need to
hear the truth, but if you are harsh or hard-hearted, people will
not listen to you. They will just flee from you. I think that we
have allowed too much harshness into our discourse, and I can say
that for my own self in some of the past talks I have given. We
need to really rethink a lot about what we say in our discourses.
America's Tragedy:
An Islamic Perspective: Question and Answer Session
By Shaykh Hamza
Yusuf
Q: Could you
clarify what you told President Bush and what his reaction was to
what you told him? And what is your view on measures either
against Afghanistan or the Taliban?
Shaykh Hamza: I
thought he seemed to be listening very attentively to what I had
to say. When I mentioned a couple things, he confirmed them: he
said "I agree with you wholeheartedly." He also mentioned to one
of the aides that what we had to say was useful. I think about
four or five times, he came up to me and shook my hand very firmly
and thanked me as what seemed to be a very hearty thanks for just
coming and edifying him. So, that was my take on it. I was
impressed: there were only three of us who spoke in the meeting,
including Franklin Graham, who said he was willing to go wherever
to service the troops if there was going to be a war; and the
Jewish man, who said that he hoped that the President would
reconsider the war and that he thought that war was the worst
thing that they could do. He also asked people to pray, to go back
to their communities and pray.
I did mention
Afghanistan to him. I told him that the Afghanis have been so
hard-hit, and they cannot take anymore and that the vast majority
of them are innocent people. I mentioned that more innocent blood
is going to further polarize the world, and that there are going
to be more Muslims who view America as inherently belligerent
towards Muslims, and this could turn into a major Muslim-Christian
battle. He said that this was also a major fear of theirs. He said
that he was rebuked for using the word "crusade." He said when he
said it he did not mean any religious connotation, but it was the
first word that came to him, so there seems to be a real concern
here. I think that there was deliberation here because it looked
like they were just going to go bomb like crazy at first, and I'm
really hoping and praying to Allah that it doesn't escalate.
Q: What is the
best way to do da'wah if one does not have much knowledge?
Shaykh Hamza: I
would talk to ING about that. One of the things that I am hoping
for is that people who have been students here, who should have
learned something, get more involved. Not everybody is a public
speaker, but there are a lot of things you can do. You can write
letters to the editor; you can support people, but we need more
people to get active. We have a real dearth of spokespeople for
Muslims right now, and we need intelligent discourse. The beauty
of intelligence is that people recognize it, and they listen to
it. If you make sense to people, they tend to respond.
Unfortunately, people who are called sophists, who are people that
use sophistry and demagogy, can do the same thing, but whenever
you get a sophist against somebody who is logical, you will always
see the sophist lose. The dialogues of Socrates are some of the
best examples because he went up against some brilliant sophists,
and they would always fall apart when he would debate them because
he knew how to pull their arguments apart. That is why I think
that if Muslims could get out there and just speak from the heart,
it would make a real difference.
I think
duplicity is a really dangerous thing. Our public and private
discourses have to be the same because one of the things they are
trying to do now is undermine the public discourse of the Muslims.
What they did to Dr. Siddiqi was really malignant because he was
at the National Cathedral and gave that prayer, and he also met
with President Bush, and they had him on Fox News from some old
video saying that he supported Hizbullah and Hamas and things like
that. Then they were calling him, "terrorist in the White House"
and things like that. We are no longer in the little leagues
anymore. We have hit mainstream. Muslim voices are getting on
major networks. There are people who make their livelihood
assassinating the characters of other people, so we have to pray
for our brothers and sisters out there as well. They can take
things out of context; they can manipulate; they can do what ever
they want, but Allah is the Protector of those who believe. Allah
protects those who believe.
Q: How should
women wear the hijab?
Shaykh Hamza: I
think that the area that we are in is probably one of the safest
areas in America, but there are other areas where it is dangerous.
Shaykh Abdullah Bin Bayyah gave a fatwa, and it was a very good,
sound fatwa. His point was that if Muslim women were in danger of
being harmed or accosted, they should not go out, and if they have
to go out, he said that they are not obliged to wear the hijab.
That is what he said. He gave all his usuli proofs for it,
so I would stipulate with that that if there are dire
circumstances, then that is a dire rukhsa from a person
with a valid license in Islamic law because Islam is an
intelligent religion. The laws are there to serve human beings; we
are not there to serve the law. We are there to serve Allah, and
that is why whenever the law does not serve you, you are permitted
to abandon it, and that is actually following the law. That is
where the confusion lies because people do not realize that. The
law is for our benefit, not for our harm. Therefore, if the law
harms us, we no longer have to abide by it. For example, pig is
prohibited because it harms us, but if we are going to die without
eating pig, we do not follow the law anymore because now the law
says eat the pig. If you are worshipping the law, then you cannot
understand that. You cannot worship the sacred law because the law
is there to serve you; it is for your maslaha, your
benefit, and that is our fiqh.
At night,
especially, people have to be careful. It is always better to be
in groups. Generally in most places, people will come to your
defense. There is a lot of sensitivity in this area. There are
non-Muslim women all over the country who have been wearing
scarves in solidarity with the Muslim women. It has been shown all
over. I would recommend having a PR campaign. Show pictures of
Mary Magdalene or the Virgin Mary since they are basically wearing
the hijab, and explain that this is a sign of purity as it
always has been, so people should not desecrate it. Do this to
remind them that it is from their own tradition. Also, have a
picture of a nun next to a Muslim woman, and ask why is one pure
and the other impure? By what criteria are you judging? You can do
things like that just to take things home to people.
Q: What should
we do about sending children to school these days, and how should
we advise them to deal with teasing?
Shaykh Hamza:
The first question is very serious because there are a lot of
children in the schools who are being blamed by people. Children
really can be very cruel. I hate the idea of group mentality,
groupthink, cliques, gangs, and clubs because children really
suffer in such environments. School is meant to be a place where
you enhance your mind, not where the mind is shrunk, so I think it
is time to consider home schooling or Muslim schools. I think
public schools are difficult places, but people are different. If
you are in a more educated area, I think you will come across more
people who do not have those attitudes. Also, in the real
underbelly areas, underclass areas, people, especially
African-American communities, tend to know about Islam, and they
know Islam is a good thing. A lot of African-Americans in this
culture have a good view of Islam, and that is positive because
there has been a lot of work done in those areas to take that
message out to people.
I thing there is
more of a problem in the middle-America type scene. I think you
need to talk to your children a lot. My son saw one of those films
of these hooded guys breaking in, and there was a cross that he
attacked. My son said to me, "Oh, those could not be Muslims," and
I asked why not? He replied, "A Muslim would never attack a
cross." That is just how he saw it, and that is true. We do not
desecrate crosses. That is a sacred symbol of their religion.
Sayyiduna Umar did not desecrate crosses when he went into
Jerusalem. Jerusalem was opened by the Muslims; the keys were
given to the Muslims.
This is an
opportunity for our children to be proud and to let others know,
"terrorism is not my religion." Do not teach them to be cow-tailed
and to capitulate to that type of pressure. It is important for
them to be affirmative. Children tend to respect courage. The
thing a bully loves most is that you just fall apart. If you stand
up to him, even if you lose the fight, everybody has respect for
you afterwards.
Q: What do you
think about the Taliban?
Shaykh Hamza: I
do not like to get into Afghani politics because it is very
complicated, but I think we should be against war. I personally am
totally against modern warfare; I really am. I think Muslims
should be much more outspoken about the prohibitions. Gai Eaton
wrote a book saying that Muslim scholars have taken positions
about emulsifiers and biscuit ingredients that are dubious, but
somehow, they just have not really come out and condemned modern
warfare for what it is; it is evil. Modern warfare uses weapons of
mass destruction, and we do not believe in weapons of mass
destruction. We can say they have them, so we need them. Well,
take that to its logical conclusion. They can destroy us, so we
have to be able to destroy them. Well, if everybody can destroy
everybody else, I guess we are all going to be destroyed. It is
called, "Mutually Assured Destruction: MAD." That is what they
used to call it in the Cold War. The logic used is that if they
can wipe us all out, we should at least be able to get our
missiles off before their missiles hit us and wipe us all out; at
least we will wipe them all out too, so we all get wiped out, and
nobody wins. Great. That is not an end or aim of shari'a.
You cannot kill with fire, which eliminates nuclear power. No one
can kill with fire except the Lord of fire. You cannot poison, so
there goes biological and chemical warfare. "Do not poison the
wells of your enemies." Well, what does that mean? Who is going to
drink the water? They are and their animals, which means they
would die of chemicals. So, we are told, do not use chemical
warfare either. There goes modern warfare. In addition, we are
prohibited from indiscriminate killing. So, we should speak out
against this stuff. We should be at the forefront of the movement
against weapons of mass destruction, really.
Q: Should
Muslims support and participate with Leftist groups who are
working for justice and anti-war movements?
Shaykh Hamza: I
think that there are a lot of good people in such movements. For
example, the people with KPFA are good people. Also, my brother
was saying he wants to put an Afghani flag on his car, and my
mother keeps saying, "We are to blame." She was in the Civil
Rights era, and she did a lot of work in the anti-war movements.
She is against all that stuff. She said we pay our taxes, and so
we have some complicity in all this stuff that is happening. There
are a lot of Americans who know that. They are an intelligent
minority because a lot of people do not know. Even intelligent,
educated Americans have no knowledge of what goes on in the rest
of the world, and you know that. You see it again and again.
Really, intelligent people who are really good in their fields
know nothing about the types of suffering that are going on in
other parts of the world.
On the other
hand, from a Quranic perspective, we also have to get out of
pointing our fingers and blaming the West all the time because
that is an empty, disempowering road to go down. Muslims need to
take some responsibility for why we have the most corrupt
countries on the planet. You just cannot blame the West for that.
Nobody puts a gun to your head and forces you to take bribes, but
that is what happens in the Muslim countries. You can blame it on
the conditions, but what brought about the conditions? The West?
Well, what brought about the West? Allah is in charge of the
universe or not? He gives His dominion to whomever He pleases. In
other words, Muslims are not the only ones who get dominion in
this world, and if He gives it to other than Muslims, it is
because Muslims cannot handle it. Think about that.
Everybody says
the Americans do all this terrible stuff around the world. The
only reason that Muslim countries are not doing it is because they
do not have the power. That is why they can only do it to their
own population, and I am serious about this. All they can do is
torture, persecute, and oppress their own population because they
are not able to do it outside of their own country whereas there
is a lot of bad stuff going on outside this country and bad stuff
that goes on inside this country as well, but that is the reality
of it. We are in a bad situation all around, but this is the best
world that we have, and it is the one that Allah gave us. This is
it, and all we can do is work to make the whole thing better. That
is our role, historically. As Muslims, we have to stand for the
truth and with those who speak the truth whether it comes from us
or from others.
Q: Recently a
co-worker asked me if I could say that Osama Bin Laden is a
non-Muslim and if he truly did this act. How should I respond?
Shaykh Hamza: I
think it is important to tell people that murder is not a reason
for being out of Islam. Whether he did this or not, he claims he
did not do it, and people are presumed innocent until proven
guilty. There needs to be due process of the law in terms of this
incident. In terms of Bin Laden, from what I have heard from his
own mouth in taped broadcasts, which I have seen, he has some
serious misconceptions about Islamic law because you cannot claim
that American civilians are halal to kill; you cannot say
that. No matter what your disagreements are with the foreign
policy of this country, civilians are civilians, and we do not
believe in killing innocent civilians.
Now, I have
never met him; I do not know him, and I really do not know very
much; I have only heard clips and such. Irrespective of who he is,
I know that at one time, he was considered a hero and a freedom
fighter by the Reagan administration. That is a fact. He was
trained by the CIA. He was initially sent to Afghanistan by the
Saudi government's backing, and he collected a lot of money. He
built some hospitals and some charity organizations; he did a lot
of good in that area. Now, though, the problem is that according
to Islamic law, he does not represent legitimate state authority.
He has no authority to declare war on anybody. He is not the
khalifah. If he represents 3,000 men, those people are whom he
represents. There are a lot of Muslims around the world that feel
this kind of solidarity with him, and I think that it is misplaced
emotionalism. It is a romantic type of image of an individual
standing up. It is like David versus Goliath, and as I explained
to Ed Bradley, America loves underdogs that stand up against all
odds. Hollywood movies are filled with these types of characters.
Saddam Hussein
is considered a hero to some Muslims. The guy is one of the worst
criminals in the history of Muslim rulers. The man is a criminal.
He has killed incredible amounts of people, gassed his own people
and other Muslims, but here is a guy that postures and says, "the
Mother of all Battles," and unfortunately the Muslims are in a
beleaguered, defeated, and humiliated state, and so anybody that
raises their head and shows this kind of posturing is seen as a
hero by a lot of Muslims who feel this gung-ho type of thing.
However, it is very dangerous for us to say that Osama Bin Laden
represents Muslim law because he does not. He does not have that
authority, and people have to understand that by shari'a,
he does not have that authority. The only people who can declare
jihad are legitimate rulers, and none of these groups has
that legitimacy. I am sorry, but that is shari'a, and I
challenge anybody to bring textual evidence for proof otherwise.
Q: In an
interview, you mentioned that the Qur'an never used the word
jihad to imply fighting and the Qur'an never mentioned hur
al-'ain.
Shaykh Hamza: I
did not say the Qur'an never mentions hur al-'ain. I said
that the 72 virgins is not in the Qur'an. It is in the hadith.
About jihad, there is no verse where jihad is
specifically used to refer to war, and you can look through the
entire Qur'an. When Allah speaks about war, He uses the word
qital. Jihad is a general, comprehensive term that
includes a military endeavor that is for the truth, but it has the
broadest meanings in the Qur'an. It includes all that Muslims
struggle to do. For example, building schools is a jihad;
fighting the nafs is a jihad; and so forth. That is
why the Qur'an does not limit the word. Juhud just means
struggle, and that was what I meant in the interview. There are
verses where it does refer to martial combat, but it does not
specifically limit the term to that one use, and that is why we do
not have a "holy war," so to speak. The struggle for the sake of
Allah is a high thing.
What I said
about hur al-'ain is that the 72 virgins is not mentioned
in the Qur'an. I did say that you have to be very careful about
literalism with the Qur'an. For example, the Qur'an says about
Allah, "there is nothing like Allah," and then what does Allah say
after that? He says, "and He is the All-Hearing and the
All-Knowing." Well, how would you know what All-Hearing and
All-Knowing is if you did not have hearing and knowing? Also,
Allah sees, so how would you know what sight is if you did not
have sight? Allah gave you sight, but is your sight like the sight
of Allah? Absolutely not.
Now, Allah says
about jannah that it is something no eye has seen, and it
never occurred to the human heart. So, when you look at the other
descriptions of paradise in the Qur'an, you have to know that
those are approximations. Do not think that Allah is describing
physical types of things that we know of in this world. That is
what Imam Al-Ghazali said, and that is what the 'ulama say.
One of the things that some people are trying to use against Islam
is that they say we envision paradise as being this type of sexual
romp or something like that, which is a terrible thing. For the
human being, the highest level of pleasure is in sexual relations,
and therefore, it would be appropriate, according to what Imam Al-Ghazali
says, to give some indication of the pleasures of paradise by
talking about something that human beings know about, which is
that experience, because the majority of human beings do not have
intense mystical experiences in their life. There are mystics who
do have these experiences that are very profound and intense, but
most people do not. The most intense experience that they will
have of pleasure is in this act, and when Allah describes the
pleasures of paradise, He uses those examples because they are
close to people's understandings.
That is not to
say that hur al-'ain do not exist because they are real.
However, to think that they are somehow related to the bestial
elements of this world is incorrect. Allah says that these are
pure beings. Paradise is total purity, so, it is about purity; its
not about anything that relates to the mud of this world; that is
euros. It is in the world. So, I said that because I think that
sometimes people misunderstand the way Muslims view paradise. For
example, what is in it for the women? What do the women get? Well,
jealousy is removed from their hearts, they say. Allah says that
both of them get their rewards. Believing men and believing women
get the same rewards in paradise. Another thing to remember is
that the highest station in paradise is the presence of Allah; it
has nothing to do with any sensual description. The lowest
jannah is the jannah of food and drink, and those are
just approximations. Do not think that paradise is going to be
just eating and drinking like here. It is not.
Q: Would the
firefighters in New York be considered shahid by Islamic
shari'a?
Shaykh Hamza: I
think that is for Allah to judge. I believe people are taken to
account based on what they know. According to Imam Al-Ghazali, and
Shaykh Murabit al-Hajj told me this as well, if people have not
heard the message of Islam, they are not taken to account for
Islam. I think that people who do good deeds, according to our
beliefs, are rewarded for the good that they do. Even Abu-Lahab is
given water in the hellfire for freeing a slave the day that the
Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam was born, and that is
in a sound hadith. If Abu Lahab, the worst enemy of the
Prophet sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam is rewarded for the
good he did in this world, our Lord is a Just Lord, and He rewards
good. So, what I did say is that if there were martyrs in this
situation, then certainly they would be those people, but I cannot
say who is a martyr and who is not. Even if a Muslim dies fi
sabilillah, you hope that he is a martyr, but you cannot say
with any certainty because it is for Allah to decide if it was
sincerely for the sake of Allah, but they were heroic people; they
were good people. The man I sat next to that night in Washington
was one of the heroes of that day, and I told him it is an honor
sitting next to you. He was an Irish fireman from New York, and he
said in response, "Don't say that. I shouldn't even be here; I was
just doing my job." That is literally what he said to me in total
sincerity. Then I said to him, "You guys did a great job," and he
said, "No, we didn't." He said, "We should have gotten a lot more
people out of there," and he said the city has a lot to answer for
because that was a very poorly executed operation. He said a lot
more people should be alive.
Q: A number of
non-Muslims asked me about what they could do to help. What should
I tell them?
Shaykh Hamza:
Finding out about Islam is a really good thing to do to help. I
would really recommend Dr. Thomas Cleary's, The Essential Koran.
I think it is a really useful introduction because the Qur'an has
verses about which even Muslims need to know the interpretations,
and there are all these translations out there without
interpretations. There are verses like, "strike them if they're
disobedient" referring to women, and the outward of that ayah
does not mean what it appears, and it cannot be used to justify
domestic violence.
Written
Questions:
Shaykh Hamza:
This question is about the shooting of the Muslim woman in the
head in public. I have never heard of that as a punishment. I know
that if you look at the hudud, what are called the penal
laws of Islam, you are supposed to try to avoid implementing these
penal punishments as much as you are able to, and that is the real
spirit of the shari'a. I would say that Afghanistan is in a
condition right now where you cannot implement the had
punishments. Sayyiduna Umar removed had punishments during
a famine because people who would not normally steal were
stealing, and I think that conditions are extreme in Afghanistan
right now. For instance, with adultery, you have to look at how
many men have been killed in Afghanistan. How many women are
completely on their own now? The shari'a is a merciful law.
It teaches people to look for mercy.
I think people
locally really need to help ING. They need more volunteers, more
full-time people, and you need to sacrifice with your wealth and
your time as well. I think it is really important to help those
organizations that are most effective. I feel sorry for the entire
Afghani population, not just there, but here as well. They are
people who have just seen too much pain and suffering, like the
Palestinians and like other Muslim peoples, and our hearts need to
be with them; they really do. The Jews have seen a lot of
suffering also; they really have. A lot of what goes on in
Palestine is a result of the type of interiorization of the abuse
and humiliation that they experienced in Europe, and a lot of
people do not realize that. They have internalized that
humiliation and treatment. Dr. Cleary mentioned how they used to
make the Jews run naked through the streets in European cities and
whip them and spit on them. People forget that. So, there is a lot
of suffering out there, and I think that we should be more
compassionate.
Q: If Bin Laden
does go to trial, who should try him?
Shaykh Hamza: He
has allegiance to the king of Saudi Arabia, and that is who his
bay'ah is with. All Saudi citizens are required to take
bay'ah with the king of Saudi Arabia, so that is their
concern.
Q: My family is
non-Muslim, and the more I try to tell them that this was not
Islam, the more angry they get with me. What should I do?
Shaykh Hamza:
That is sad because my family had an opposite reaction. I am
really sorry about that. This is one of the unfortunate
repercussions.
Q: What should I
do to help if I lack knowledge?
Shaykh Hamza: I
think that the best way to help, if you do lack the knowledge and
things like that, is to support the organizations that are doing
this type of work. That is the best you can do.
I want to thank
all of you, in sha Allah, for coming. Don't give up. If
anyone wants to know who is really behind the conspiracy, know
that it is Iblis. He is our avowed enemy, so just recognize that,
and do not go into despair. Do dhikr; remember Allah; do
the Prophetic Invocations or other dhikr. Do
dhikr. This is a time to really be in a state of dhikr.
Have love, mahabba; have some love. This is a time to put
aside our petty differences because we are facing much, much
greater things. Really, have some respect for your Muslim brothers
and sisters. As for the ones who are making mistakes out there,
just forgive them, and know that they are trying. There are some
fools amongst us, and they are often worse than our enemies. Like
they say, give me an intelligent enemy and not a stupid friend. It
is Arab proverb because they say a stupid friend harms you when he
thinks he is trying to help you. At least with an intelligent
enemy, you know he is trying to harm you. So,
barak Allah fikum.