Prophet Muhammad : The Hallmark of Leadership

1. Leadership is a journey

Nobody should ever stop improving and learning to be a leader.

The best research undoubtedly came from the west. Research in America is well-known for
something other people may criticize but that’s the strength, which is about quantitative.
They are very much dependent upon the data. They said that’s a lie. That brings us to the
fact that after reading almost 40 books about leadership, I find that these 2 authors, their
research are very very empirical. I know that some of you who do social science research in
Malaysia, if you get 1000 data points, you probably get a pHd. Their research has got 3
million data points. We’re talking 3 millions and it’s ever increasing. These are the 3 million
that they use to describe, what are the essence of leadership.

Based on empirical research done over 6 continents covering different kinds of leadership
from project leaders to leaders of large organisations, from government, private sectors, non-
profit organisations. They said that the whole world believes that their leadership is about 2
main factors. Credibility and they said that credibility is about 2 main ingredients. One is
called truthfulness. The other one is called honesty.

When you take these two words and translate it into Arabic, truthfulness is called As-siddiq,
and honesty is called al-amanah. As-siddiqul amanah are 2 basic characteristics of all the
prophets. In particular, our great Prophet Muhammad S.A.W. was given the title As-saddiq
Al-Amin not by the Muslims, but by the Quraisy.

All of us know about that incident, in which all the tribes of Quraisy were fighting about who
should get the last honor. In the rebuilding of Kaaba, who should get the honor to place the
hajarul Aswad to where it belonged.

When prophet Muhammad SAW came, the quraisy who were idolaters said “Here came As-
saddiq Al-amin”. The one who is truthful and honest. Muhammad SAW at that time was not a
prophet. So, with that, we began to expand the question, is Muhammad SAW in terms of
leadership theory, models, principles of the west, only As Sadiqul Amin or he’s more than
that?

So we look at the works of the Western scholars, and we decided to take the latest work by
Kouzes and Posner, who in 2010 called the 10 truths of leadership.

We tried to do something what’s new. Late 2008 or 2009, 2 researchers from Switzerland
decided to write a book, and said that they’ll write a book on management. Every year there
are 1000 books published on management. So we cannot publish this book in the same way.
So they decided on a collaborative model to publish a book.

This is the book called The Business Model Canvas. That is one topic which is I’m good at,
which is not related to our session this evening. So I decided to copy this model. Can we
write a book with many of us collaborating together. So I talk about this idea with my friend,
my teacher (a great scholar) and he said that this is a very innovative idea and you should
start. So many brothers and sisters from our (faculty?) gave ideas and I’m not the author. I’m
the chief editor. I edited the contents of the book and we published the book on Apple, the
most innovative company in the world. We sell it in Apple iBook store. So there’s no printed
version of the book, except what you see today.

So this book talked about the 10 truths of leadership.

1. Many people want to be leaders. Many people are made leaders, eg Dean of Faculty, Head
of Department, post in political parties, some of usually don’t know what to do. See, the first
great truth of leadership, is that leaders make a difference. Kouzer and Posner defined
leaders in their books as, “leaders achieve extraordinary things in their organization.”

That’s what leaders do. They don’t do simple things. They do the difficult things. They do
things that make a difference.
So when you take this criteria that leaders make a difference, Prophet Muhammad SAW
definitely made a big difference in this world because he is voted the most influential man in
history.

So if you’re a leader, think about what is the big thing you can do for your organization.
If you’re a leader of a company, think about you can do for your company so that it is not a
normal company, it is a great company.

Mother Teresa, one of the great leaders in the world is remembered for what she did. There
is no notable quote about her because she didn’t say anything. She just did things without
saying anything.

‘wa kuli’malu fasayarallahu ‘ammalakum warasuluhu wal mukminun..’.

Allah say, “Just do. God and the believers will see what you do”.

2. The next thing about leadership exemplied by prophet Muhammad SAW in an amazing
way is the concept of being a visionary leader. Today if you look at modern leadership, that’s
what people like to talk about. “Leaders are visionary”.

They talk about Martin Luther King : “I have a dream” and the his dream came true through
a man by the name of Barrack Obama, that a coloured man will one day become the
President of US.

Leaders have great vision and nobody has greater vision than Prophet Muhammad SAW.

Kouzer and Posner said leadership is about values. Leaders believe in certain things. Some
leaders believe in wrong things, like Hitler who believed in the supremacy of Aryan (?) race.
But that’s what made him did wrong things.
But Prophet Muhammad SAW excelled because he enshrined, in terms of applying the best of
the moral values, best of ethical values, societal values.

Nobody believed in justice and nobody was consistent with the value of justice than prophet
Muhammad SAW.

Nobody believed in the value of freedom and made sure that there is freedom more than the
Prophet Muhammad SAW.

Freedom of religion (no compulsion in religion), all of this were values of prophet Muhammad
SAW.
Honesty and the great ethical values that we talked about.

Today, western leadership emphasised on behavioural values, not ethical, moral or societal
values because they knew they couldn’t find a role model in ethical, moral or societal values.
They’ll find a lot about role models in behavioural values.

For eg, one of examples of my role models today is Alex Ferguson. (Sorry for those who are
on the wrong side).
He believed in behavioural value. He believed in giving more than 100%. That’s his values.
But it’s a behavioral, not ethical, moral or societal values.
That’s the best Western leaders can show today.
Great examples of behavioural values. You give 120%, 130% etc..
By the way, what is meant by giving more than 100%? If you are sports fan, the last 5
minutes in the game, and they are able to score 2 goals to make it a victory or 1 goal to
make it a draw.
That’s giving more than 100%. That’s the value of Sir Alex Ferguson. You want to play for
him, you give more than 100%.

Anyhow, Prophet Muhammad SAW enshrined moral, societal and ethical values, justice, fight
against oppression, religious freedom, so on and so forth.

But in studying the leadership of Prophet Muhammad SAW, one thing surprised me. Which I
didn’t expect to see, which is, one quality of leadership, if today you talked about Islamic
leadership, you’ll probably not mention this. Kouzer and Posner said this is a very important
attribute in leadership, which means leaders face challenges and overcome challenges. But
you need something to overcome challenges. You need to be creative and innovative.

That surprised me about prophet Muhammad SAW. After studying about it and looking back
at many examples the sirah, appeared to be a leader that strongly encouraged creativity and
innovation.

He said “Is something has not been done before, why not we do it?”

He took a great risk, when he followed the advice of Salman Al-Farisi to build trenches
around city of Medina.

There was no guarantee it will work. But Salman said this is how they did in Persia.

Prophet SAW said, “This is something the Arabs don’t know”.

So he build the trench. When the hundred-thousands forces came, Abu Sufyan, the leader of
Quraisy, when he saw the trench he said “This is a trench. We are Arabs, we don’t know how
to deal with trench”.

So Prophet Muhammad SAW knew the Arabs don’t know how to deal with this, so it was an
innovation.

It was not an innovation in Persia, but it was certainly an innovation in the land or Arabia.

So he Prophet SAW encouraged innovation, he encouraged new ideas, encouraged people to

be creative. He may not be creative himself, but he encouraged for people to be creative and
innovative. That characteristics continued in time of Abu Bakar, Umar, Uthman and Ali.

That’s why the Muslim ummah became great. Because our leaders, they were not only pious,
not only honest, having moral values but willing to do new things. Things that the ummad
didn’t do before.

Prophet SAW said all of you are leaders. All of you are shepherds (in the hadith, shepherds
are leaders). All leaders should behave like shepherds. You take care of your rakyat (the
sheeps).

No shepherds kill the sheeps. No shepherds bluffs the sheeps.

You are leader. All of you are leader. And you are responsible for the people whom you take
care of.
The western leaders are great but it’s one thing that they don’t have. They can talk about
visionary leaders, like John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King but they will always have one
example.

Visionary leaders, yes, John F Kennedy.

Leaders with moral, no we cannot mention John F Kennedy, because he had something to do
with Marilyn Monroe.

We cannot have Martin Luther King because he was not innovative.

So there were problems with that. They have many examples but they will never have all the
attributes of leadership in one man.

You can only find that in prophet Muhammad SAW.

We think our contribution to knowledge that bridge between the steady, empirical research in
America and our history, the prophet SAW.

So they have a great model, proved by empirical research, we have the real example.

When we merge them together, we see something that is really beautiful that we can
practice to hopefully improve our leadership capabilities.

I would like to end this with the sharing. We look at the Muslim Ummah and there are 5 basic
problems that the Muslim ummah faces.

1) We are backward.
Go to the mosque. You are considered great if you put your slippers on the right because
everybody put their shoe/slippers anywhere they like. This is in Malaysia. If you go to Yemen
you will see how backward we are.

2) We are ineffective and inefficient

When we are driving, we throw rubbish out of the window. And that same person can be any
person, could be an imam in the mosque.
In US, they party every weekend. In the morning I went for fajr prayer, I saw the rubbish
bins are full with beer cans. This shows that they are drunk, but they throw their rubbish in
the rubbish bins, in the right place. This is how backward we are.

2 roots of problems in Muslim ummah :

1) Leadership
If there is one good leader in the Muslim ummah, he makes a difference. Just one. Can you
imagine if we have 5, 6 of them. Take Turkey (?) , he wants to do something for Muslim
ummah. But he can only do 1.

2) Fikrah - understand Islam in the right way

-End-