Appreciate your Ummah

If you grew up in the discipline of Islam, and yes, it is a discipline, you may not appreciate how extraordinarily disciplined Muslims are. Your discipline eclipses the discipline of the Kufar even those in the military. Do you realize that they see just the five daily prayers as incredibly cumbersome? As Muslims, the discipline of Islam permeates every single aspect of our lives. From what and how we eat to how we put on our clothes, even how we enter and exit the bathroom.

Do you know that in a Christian church, when the pastor or the preacher is talking, the congregation is talking too throughout the entire sermon. With only rare exceptions. There is complete silence during the Friday khutbah, and no one needs to tell you to be quiet because your prophet already told you. When it's time to pray, everyone stands, everyone gets into a row, everyone bows at the same time, everyone prostrates at the same time in complete unison with military precision. When you have wudu, you follow a strict order and it's unthinkable that you could pray without wudu.

And if you found that you made a mistake, you go back and start all over again. Muslims are outstandingly disciplined. In fact, one of the primary reasons that non Muslims sometimes hesitate to come to Islam is because they're afraid that they won't be able to learn and follow all of these rules. All of this discipline is. Are no people anywhere who have dedicated their lives so comprehensively to worship or who have committed themselves to such disciplined lives.

So appreciate this about yourselves and about your brothers and sisters in Islam. And before you talk about how hard the Kufar work or how efficient they are or what have you, remember that you adhere to a level of discipline in your daily life that is unimaginable to them. And remember too, when you listen to people online bemoaning the state of the ummah, that Muslims massively surpass even the elite of the Kufar in any metric you can think of. We are the most likely people to marry. We are the least likely people to divorce.

We have the biggest families. We have the lowest incidence of zina. We have the lowest levels of mental illnesses and psychological disorders despite most of us living in very difficult conditions. We have the lowest crime rates, and we lead the world in charitable giving. Muslim averages in all spheres vastly exceed the Kufar even among the elite classes.

Look. The collapse of the Khilafa did not bring an end to Islamic civilization. Muslims all around the world, wherever they are, believe in and try to adhere to the Sharia as much as they can because it is in our hearts. We may stumble sometimes individually or even collectively, but this ummah has persevered through deviant movements and even epochs that lasted longer than The United States Of America has existed or any configuration of European states, and the remain as we are. Allah will preserve his and this will never gather together in agreement upon a falsehood until the last day.

We are not seeing the defeat of Islam or the defeat of our Ummah. What we see in the fitna of the West is the self defeat of Kufr. This is playing out right before our eyes. And remember that said that whoever declares that the people are ruined, he himself is the one who is ruined. This Muslim men and Muslim women are the most honorable, the most decent, the most moral, the most kind, and the best ummah of humanity.

Don't shame our people for their shortcomings for we are the people of Toba, the people of repentance, and that's part of what makes us the leaders of Bani Adam. We cannot extrapolate the sins of individual people to indict the entire community nor can we act as if the Muslims are not a guided people nor can we act as if iman has disappeared from the hearts of the Muslims when we witness the errors and mistakes that people make. SubhanAllah. It's one of the beautiful things about our ummah and one of the things that's distinct from the Kufar that we can predictably expect non practicing young Muslims to develop religiosity later in life. This is the opposite of the Kufar who generally become less convinced of their religions over time.

The Muslims today are disproportionately young. That means that we can expect developing in the coming decades a greater degree of religiosity in our people, not less, particularly as we see the West continue to collapse into chaos and confusion. I've explained before that a man should not be shrill and alarmist. He must balance his fears and worries against his certainty and his faith, not just his faith in the plan of Allah but his faith in the inherent goodness of the Muslims and in the invulnerable power of Islam. Any incursions you perceive of Western influence in the Muslim world, these just create the impetus for Islamic backlash.

Indeed, if you're familiar with modern history at all, then you have to recognize that the Islamic movements strengthened and grew in parallel to the rise of Western hegemony. Just compare the Arab world or Asia of fifty or sixty years ago to today. Muslim movements were marginal, Islamic schools were few and far between. Hijab was looked down upon. There were countries in which the Adhan was banned.

Historic mosques were locked up and closed. Religious people were openly mocked, ridiculed, or viciously persecuted. All of those things today have been reversed. If you're preaching the demise of this ummah, you are grossly underestimating the strength of Islam. And if you're in the business of shining a spotlight on the mistakes of individual Muslims in order to dishonor the of Muhammad then you're doing the work of our enemies, and you haven't understood us at all.