Radical Middle Way Transcripts

Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad on:

Turning Anger into Action

London, 5 February 2009

The Chinese curse, of course, is „may you live in interesting times,‟ and generally we
sympathise with that. There is even a Spanish way of bidding farewell to people in a
friendly way „Que no haya novedad‟ „May no new thing arise‟. That is how humanity
used to be; we liked things the way they were. We knew that the past was probably
better and we thought that any substantial changes were likely to disturb our
equilibrium: the equilibrium in society, government and our souls. Nowadays, we live
in a time where everything is the exact reverse of that; nobody‟s particularly
interested in truth or beauty any longer. Instead, the cutting edge of our culture is
always what‟s new, what‟s innovative and what challenges are established:
perceptions. Take a look at the National Gallery, then go over the river and take a
look at the Tate Modern, and you will see how our sensibilities have been turned on
their heads. Ours is a culture that isn‟t about truth, it isn‟t about beauty, it has more or
less given up on those things. But it is about finding new things all the time, and there
are believers in this very strange kind of situation. We are wrong-footed or puzzled.

As believers in Allah, (swt) we have always looked back to a golden age that we
knew existed, which was the time of our Lord the Prophet Muhammad, peace and
blessings upon him. We know that perfection is possible because it has existed and it
has walked this Earth. Modernity says that perfection is there somewhere in the future
and we can‟t really imagine what it would look like. Our reality is unimaginable to
the people of a hundred years ago, let alone the people of a thousand years ago, and it
is a reasonable bet that our great grandchildren‟s reality will be unimaginable to our
realities now, and the process is constantly accelerating. So as believers who like to
look back, and love what we see when we look back, we find the modern world very
peculiar. Everything is challenging us, and many of those things that challenge us
most are the things that seem to be about things that we weren‟t most certain about.
Current events seem to be coming closer and closer to our hearts, there is something
elemental about the destruction of Baghdad; once the symbol of Muslim intellectual
and political and economic leadership of the world. There is something elemental also
about the situation in the Holy Land, and in Palestine, and it tugs at our hearts not just
because of the suffering of the people who are there now, but because of what this
seems to represent, the challenge that it represents to our certainties.

What is our image of history? Our image is that Allah (swt) vindicated, in perhaps the
greatest surprise in history, the line of Sayidna Ishmael, peace and blessings upon
him, and made the outcast into the victors. And from the Haram in Mecca, there was a
spiritual victory, which led to the Haram in Jerusalem. Shortly to be followed, in the
time of the Caliphate, by a physical victory, which united all three holy cities. There
is something for our imagination, which is profoundly right, about the existence of the
Dome of the Rock. What could be more glorious as a culmination of the manifestly
legible purposes of heaven in history than that beautiful, golden crown? That is the
place where the ancient Prophets, peace upon them, worshiped. That is the place
where Sayidna Jesus, peace upon him, taught and worshiped. That is the place where
Sayidna Muhammad, peace and blessings upon him, worshiped, leading and affirming
all of the earlier Prophets in prayer before he went on that final, unimaginable solo
voyage. What could be more appropriate than the Dome of the Rock as the crown of
all history? That was the Muslim assurance, shaken but not overthrown by the
crusader interlude, threatened but not destroyed by the armies of Hulagu and the
Mongols, threatened but not destroyed by the British occupation, but now apparently
facing unprecedented hazards. So fundamental is the symbol of that structure and
what it represents; our culmination of monotheistic history. That we feel that what is
happening in the Holy Land now, not comparable to what is happening in so many
other troubled places, in this troubled age. What happens there has to be, not just
different and more important, but also more meaningful, and because that is a place
where so much sacred history is unfolded, who‟s meaning is often discernable only by
linear afterwards, we struggle to discern the meaning of this current episode. What
does the situation in Palestine mean? If we take a step back from the immediate
coverage of the humanitarian catastrophes, and the political shenanigans, what does it
actually mean? Well what it means is, firstly the vindication of the outcast, Sayidna
Ishmael, peace be upon him, the outcast son finally vindicated, showing where Allah
is. In other words, with the broken hearted, with the ethnically impure, who were
rejected by a powerful narrative of centrality and exclusion; the rejected son turns out
to be the one who is finally to be chosen. But what it seems to represent to ourselves,
is that time is being turned back. Just as so much of modernity is about looking
forward to a time that we vaguely assume and hope is going to be better. There is
something retrograde about the current history and situation of Palestine and the Holy
Land. How could it be if there is a progression of prophecy? Not a progression about
the content of prophecy, but in terms of the immenseness of the reach of the message,
from the time of the earliest Hebrew prophets, then to the time of Sayidna Jesus,
peace be upon him, and his larger message. And finally the message of the Ishmaelite
Sayidna Muhammad, peace and blessings upon him, which becomes the centre of this
extraordinary political and cultural zone that unites East and West, and brings
together the Persian world with the Eastern Mediterranean world and with the North
African world; that is an obvious progression that we can understand.

Now the custodians of that city seem to be the people that reject that image of history,
the people that say that there have been two drastic wrong turnings: the alleged
Messianic event and the alleged sealing of prophecy. And we struggle to understand
why this should be the case, why should the custodians of some of our holiest places
be the people who‟s ideology seems to be based, as far as we can discern on an
explicit rejection of the claims of the two most recent prophetic founders. What‟s
going on? Has history gone wrong? We start to panic, we start to worry, and we start
to doubt, and that has a lot to do with the kind of gut reaction that we see amongst
many Muslims.

What‟s really going on? Well let‟s rewind history back a little bit and consider,
focussing on the history of the city of Gaza, the city of Palestine that has been most in
the news of late, a kind of icon of Ishmaelite suffering at the hands of unfeeling
oppressors. The history of Gaza turns out to be an interesting sign of what Islam has
accomplished in the region, a city that was very slow to Christianise and then
eventually had to be effectively Christianised by force. Saint Porphyry in the 5th
century was so impatient with the reluctance of the population to accept baptism that
he led his monks on a campaign to physically destroy the pagan temples and to rough
up the pagan priests. And his church, the Church of Porphyry is still there, and it‟s
still a church, he is still the Christian patron saint of the city. The Byzantine empress,
when she heard that the city had finally been forcibly Christianised, celebrated by
sending two thousand gold coins to the city in order to turn the main pagan temple
into a church; the Eudoxiana, a glorious church. But that episode only lasted less than
two hundred years because, at the beginning of the 7th century, the Ishmaelites, the
outcast, the ethnically impure, the rejected, appear in order to overthrow the
pretensions and the cruelties of Christianised Rome. It was one of the fastest episodes
of conversion that the ancient world has ever seen. The same people, who were so
stubborn to accept Christianity, became Muslim almost overnight. The Greek
Christian population went to Sayidna Umar, may God be pleased with him, and asked
him for permission to transform the Eudoxiana church into a mosque, and it is a
mosque until this day, it is the Jam‟ia Umar: the Mosque of Umar ibn al Khataab, and
has been ever since, except for the short crusader interlude when it was turned over to
catholic worship. Imam Shafi, may God have mercy on him, was from the city of
Gaza. It produced so many great ones in the history of this Umma (Muslim
community). The Ottoman Empire had flourished, and it flourished until the dawn of
our current calamity and our current puzzlement.

1917: the three battles of Gaza, splashed across our headlines at the time, but we have
profoundly forgotten them. What were the battles of Gaza? The first two were
between the British forces and the Ottoman forces, the Ottoman forces fighting for the
Caliphate of the Messenger of God, peace and blessings upon him, and the British
fighting for imperial glory. The first two battles were won by the forces of the
Caliphate, and General Allenby was soundly defeated. The third battle was different,
the third battle introduced the principle that has characterised the tragedy of the region
ever since; the tragedy of insincerity, double standards, hypocrisy, back stabbing and
treason. The reason why the caliphal forces crumpled and were defeated in the region,
having held on triumphantly for so many centuries against all comers, was not
because they were incapable with dealing with these external enemies. They defeated
the British at Gallipoli, a great humiliation; the greatest humiliation in the career of
Winston Churchill was his defeat at Gallipoli. Despite all of the suffering that the
empire had experienced, they could still defeat the British Empire, and imperial
troops were routed at the beach of Gallipoli. They were doing the same at Gaza, and
then something unprecedented in the history of Islam took place, and what was that
unprecedented event? The great treason. Who was it that was fighting alongside the
British? The propaganda portraits of the time; the British „tommy‟ with his solar
helmet with a machine gun, the Lois gun pointed at the distant Turkish lines, and you
can just about see the Tarbushes and the Ottoman army there. Who is feeding the
bullets into the machine gun? It is the local Arab ally; that‟s the great treason. The
uprising of Arab nationalists against the Caliphate of the Messenger of God, peace
and blessings upon him, for the sake of British promises, and British gold, and the
opportunity to sack Damascus. If you look at the pages of history in any civilisation,
you will be hard put to find a comparable act of treason. That is why the third battle of
Gaza did not go our way, and why the story of the city ever since has been a story not
of prosperity under a united Islamic realm, but of division, partition, occupation and
now catastrophe, at the hands of a merciless powerful oppressor.

The obvious moral lesson for this is: be united „hold fast altogether to the rope of
Allah.‟ At that most critical point in the history of the Umma, or one section of the
Umma, the Arab nationalist paused, decide to change sides, to cross the lines and to
fight for Whitehall against Istanbul. In our vision of history, that must be important,
and perhaps that treachery, that insincerity and that hypocrisy lies at a spiritual heart
of this rotten situation. Maybe Allah (swt) is still angry with those people. So colossal
was that betrayal, and so absolute was their rejection of the idea that they might even
acknowledge that they made a mistake that those people have been subjected to
punishment after punishment, not just the Palestinian people, but the people of the
region more generally.

Each one of the national stories of those new nations, as though bravely in their
nationalistic, Arab nationalistic way, arose following the decline of imperial rule, has
been more or less a shabby catastrophe. Scoundrels in uniforms, scoundrels with
crowns, scoundrels wherever you look. The catastrophe of people who don‟t seem to
deserve that kind of torment, and it seems to become worse and worse. Perhaps if we
do look at the history a little a bit, and look at the origins of this, then we can begin to
do two things. First we can pray to Allah (swt) for forgiveness for the people of the
region. And secondly, we can start to reorient our thinking, recognising that the
secular alternative, the banner of Arabdom in this case, but there were also banners of
Turkish nationalism that soon came, banners of Iranian nationalism, banners of
Pakistani nationalism all of theses new forms of Jahilia (ignorance) have actually not
delivered, even on their own terms. Look at the state of the modern Middle East. Each
one of them, by any standards, is a failure: a political failure, an ethical failure, an
economic failure, military failure and a diplomatic failure, completely helpless, the
laughing stock of the world. The failure of the old slogans that bravely thought that
they could replace the principles of Islam means that it‟s time for us now to start
looking for something better, because we‟ve experimented with that, and it hasn‟t
helped anybody. It hasn‟t even helped the West particularly because it is harder to
make money out of a region that‟s kind of in a ruinous state. Nobody really benefits
from this.

The Muslim response, the awareness of the categoric uselessness of those regimes,
the dreadfulness of the Egyptian regime, the dreadfulness of just about everybody you
look at in that part of the world, the manifest dreadfulness of it all. The response has
not been the right response. The response first of all, must be a laser sharp awareness
that that treason must be repented of, and that‟s still not the case. In the textbooks
throughout the region they still refer to the Arab revolt as a step forward, that the
principle of Arabdom was now going to take over from old, medieval ideas of
religious unity. Remember the old slogans that one more or less laughs at now „one
Arab nation, possessed of an eternal message.‟ They certainly didn‟t get the unity
right; they are still not one Arab nation fifty years after Nasser and the others. And
what really is the message to the world of Arabdom? What is the ethical vision of
Saddam Hussein, Hafez al Asad, Hosni Mubarak and the others? There is really
nothing there; nobody really claims any longer that there was ever really anything
there. There is a bankruptcy and that bankruptcy is the image that we now see on our
television screens: the uselessness of the region, the uselessness of the leadership in
the region, and the fundamental sense that things have gone wrong with history.

But the believer can see meaning, he knows that the Aqsa Mosque is one of the most
important lightening rods for meaning in human history, and that Allah (swt) means
well for that holy place, and one day He will place it once again in the hands of holy
people, but they must be holy people. Not people with silly slogans, not people who
have scores to settle, not enraged armies of Islamists destroying the settlements, none
of that. But people who enter the city with humility and respect and reverence, people
who enter the city as Sayidna Umar, may God be pleased with him, entered the city
with his donkey, humbly, refusing even to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,
despite the extraordinary symbolic power of that moment. Any other ruler in history
would have said “this is how we can show that they are finished, pray in the altar of
their church.” But he doesn‟t do that because of his certainty, may God be pleased
with him, he prays next door and the place where he prays is still Jami‟a Umari, the
Mosque of Umar, and the Church of the Sepulchre is still the Holy Church of the
Sepulchre: that was the real conquest. That was the real conquest, and how was that
conquest possible that gave the Muslims the right to be the kings of the city? Because
there was a conquest in the souls, a conquest in the hearts, there was a „sakina‟
(tranquillity) there, the same „sakina‟ that had made the conquest of Mecca a spiritual
as well as a purely military and political victory, „since He appointed in the hearts of
those who disbelieve, the rage, the fever of Jahilia,‟ and then what does he do? On the
one side, the pagan principle: rage, tribalism (what we would call nationalism), the
fever that desires to support one‟s own side whether right or wrong. And on the other
side „sakina‟: „Allah sent down His „sakina‟ (His stillness, His calm) as a present in
the hearts of the believers, and He imposed upon them the word of „taqwa‟ (piety),
and they were the ones who had most right to it, they were the ones who‟s principle it
was. And Allah is always knowing of all things.‟

That was the real „Fath Mecca‟, „Fath‟ an opening within; a new kind of humanity
from the chauvinistic bosoms of a primitive people, sunk in rage and tribalism with no
law and only the principle of vendetta and feuding, comes this extraordinary Umma
of angels. And the conquest of Jerusalem was like that, it was like an honourable echo
of the conquest of Mecca, but this time with the „ahlul Kitaab‟ (people of the book)
not with the pagans.

When we become ready in our hearts to approach the city of Jerusalem, in that spirit
that is the Qura‟nic spirit and the spirit of the „Sahaba‟ (companions) and the real
spirit of the „Salaf‟ (the early generations), then the city‟s gates will be open to us.
But there is no reason, if you look at history, to suppose that they will be opened to us
if we are banging upon them with „jahilia‟ in our hearts, with rage, desire for
vengeance, desire to settle scores; the tribal, mafia mentality of an eye for an eye. We
will have revenge, these pagan principles.

The city of Jerusalem, they say the Golden Gate is the gate that is closed, and you can
see it; it is bricked up. And it will be opened when Sayidna Imam al Mahdi comes
into the city. Perhaps the city is also close to us, and the land of Palestine close to us
because our hearts are bricked up against what it really signifies. We don‟t deserve to
be there. Other conquerors: the British for their reasons, the Mongols for their
reasons, and the Israelis, they are there for essentially for nationalistic purposes, and
the land deals with that. But if you go there and claim that you are doing it for
religious principle, then you will find that you are tested the much more. If you are
not there as a barbarian conqueror, not there as Israeli ethnically cleansers in 1948 or
1967, simply one flag against another flag, one race against another race, but you are
there for a principle that is a universal principle: the principle of „la illaha il Allah‟
then you will be tested. Then you will find that you really have to work hard to find
the key to that Golden Gate. We haven‟t yet got it, in fact, more depressing than those
images of Gaza, more depressing than all of the myriad things that seem to be
descending on the heads of Muslims just about everywhere at the moment, is the
Muslim reaction. „Ibtila‟ trials, „fitna‟, suffering, always come, and that‟s the law of
history. The only place where there is no suffering at all, is the place where there is no
differentiation at all; the absolute, unqualified essence of Allah (swt). In the world of
manifestation, there is distance from him, therefore there is suffering; that is part of
being descendents of Sayidna Adam, peace upon him. None of this is surprising. But
the way back, the key to the door, the way to deserve the Dome of the Rock again, the
path to that, lies within. Do you really the think that the Byzantine Empire, the great
super power of its day, was overcome because the Arab armies were organised and
had better weapons? Not really, the Byzantine Empire had just thrashed the Persians,
and was pretty trained, pretty powerful. The emperor Heraclius knew the ground, he
had fought the Persians there, and he was ready.

What was the secret that enabled them to take the city? The reason why they were
allowed into the city became clear on the day that they entered the city, and Sayidna
Umar, may God pleased with him, refused to pray in the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre. He gave the Christians and the Jews their rights, and he asked to be shown
the place of the temple „al Haikal‟ the place which is the „Musra‟ of the Messenger of
God, peace and blessings upon him, (the point of departure for Muhammad‟s
midnight journey to the seven heavens). Hard to imagine a more magnetic, more
powerful place, and the Christians had covered it with garbage and sewage. Because
for them, this was the relic of the old thing; Judaism, and Christianity was really
formed as a specific rejection of, and a persecution of Judaism, so it was the city‟s
rubbish heap. Sayidna Umar, May God be pleased with him, starts to clear the site
with his own hands, he doesn‟t enslave the population and get them to do if for him,
he does it with his own hands. Here again we breathe something of the perfume of the
extraordinary humility of the entrance of the Messenger of God, peace and blessings
upon him, and his great, pure-hearted, luminous „Sahaba‟ into the city of Mecca: that
is a real „Fath‟ and inward „fath‟ as well as an outward „fath.‟ And the presence of the
Dome of the Rock, possibly the most beautiful building in the world, the art historian
Sir Sacheverell Sitwell travelled there in the 1950‟s, and said: “probably the most
beautiful building in the world.” The reason why we had that, is that we deserved to
have that. So the key to Jerusalem, and the key to a united Palestine, once again,
under solely Islamic rule, is not Hamas, it is not Fatah, and it is certainly not these
new Al Qaeda type factions, all of that is just an intensification of the reason for
failure, it is more revenge and suicide bombing is an example of that. Who could
imagine the companions of Sayidna Umar, may God be pleased with him, going into
the Byzantine market place in Jerusalem, and stabbing people at random? That‟s not
who they were. Did they do it at the time of the crusades? For a hundred and twenty-
five years of crusader ruling in Jerusalem, was there ever anything like suicide
bombing? The crusaders were worse than the Israelis. Nothing like that, there was
„sabr‟ (patience) and there was an awareness that Allah (swt) was the Lord of history,
and that he can turn history around just like that.

This doesn‟t mean that there is no action. What it does mean is that the action you
start with is the action within. What is the first Hadith in Islam? It is the beginning of
the Sahih Hadith of Imam Bukhari „actions are only by intentions‟ which has a
thousand meanings. And one of those meanings is that the blessed consequence of
your action really depends absolutely on the heart-felt quality of the intention that you
put into it. And this is one of the „asrar‟ (secrets) of Allah in history. Most of the time,
we cannot see it because how much of history do we understand? How much of
history do we see? We only see a tiny proportion of it, most of the time we are just
blundering, guessing in the dark. But it is clear that this „sakina‟ was part of the „fath‟.
How do we get this „sakina‟ in our hearts again? How can the world switch on Sky
News, and instead of seeing the screaming Palestinian faces „almost exploding with
rage‟ as the Qur‟an says, not of something paradisal, but of the fires of hell. When we,
instead of seeing those faces, see „sakina‟ and calm in the face of adversity, then we
can begin to feel our souls being healed, because we can see that the Umma is at the
beginning of the path that will lead to that Golden Gate in Jerusalem. Inshallah, in a
beautiful way, the way of the „fath‟ of Mecca, and the way of the original conquest of
Jerusalem. And the way of Salahuddin‟s conquest of Jerusalem, that which the city, in
its eternal beauty and perfection deserves, the honour which it deserves and which
Allah (swt) made it a city of more prophets than any other city on Earth, the city has
certain rights. And one of its rights is that if you violate it, sooner or later, a calamity
will come.

It‟s almost as though, when you look at the history, and to get back to the point with
which I started, our puzzlement at what‟s happening: upholders of an ancient
covenant, apparently trumping the two upholders of later covenants. What could that
mean? So to deal with our puzzlement we recall the reasons for it all, the basic reason
is not because of what we did; we honoured the city, and we allowed other
communities to exist and to worship in the city, that was always the case. The reason
why there was this, the reason why there is Zionism is not because of anything that
happened in the Islamic world. The movement didn‟t arise in the Jewish and the
Muslim world, they tagged along much, much later, some of them to this day have not
done so. It arose in the heart of the West for a reason that we have to acknowledge as
a good reason. Twenty centuries of ferocious, unmeaning, anti-Semitic persecution,
what Dan Sherbock calls „the oldest hatred.‟ Almost from the word „go‟ the parent
religion is vilified and punished and crucified. Certainly forty years ago, when the
Vatican took those things out of the mass, which blamed the Jewish people
collectively for the death of God, only forty years ago, and some of them still think
that way.

Christendom, finally, after the holocaust, recognized that it had messed up really
badly. How could the prince of Peace have initiated such catastrophes for his own
people? There is a lethal danger, just as the idea of choseness for the Jewish people
was really challenged following the holocaust. “Chosen for what?” They asked. So
also the idea of Christianity as the ethical summation for the world, seemed to come
collapsing down, when you look at the historical Christian record of treating the
parent religion. A big crisis, and the solution was not Christendom making amends,
and this is where they went wrong, not Christendom making amends. But somehow,
the crime is so absolute: original sin, centuries of stupid racism, anti-Semitism, anti-
Jewish prejudice, the inquisition and the pogroms, and all of that black history; a long
night. The solution was not for Europe to make amends, to give up a part of Europe,
not a „tauba‟ (repentance). But instead the very strange idea that is present in Saint
Paul, of the vicarious atonement. So great is the crime that you yourself can‟t atone
for it. Find an innocent victim, and who are the innocent victims? The Palestinians;
the people who always allowed the Jewish people to go back to Jerusalem when the
crusaders and the Byzantines and others had persecuted them, the nearest people that
you have ever had to friends: make them into the sacrificial victim. The Palestinians
are the Pascal lamb, slaughtered on the rock of Jerusalem, to atone for twenty
centuries of Christian anti-Semitism. That is the poetry of the situation, and it is very
deeply rooted in a certain type of western mentality. Let the Palestinians suffer
because we really can‟t suffer in order to atone for this. Somebody else will make
way for them, for the remnants of our horrible treatment towards them.

So what should we do, we who believe in justice rather than a vicarious atonement,
and in the suffering of the innocent? Well what we have to do is to remember the
Islamic sense of „tauba‟ which is first of all, that it is a gift of Allah (swt), but also
that it happens at certain times and in certain places, triggered by our „tauba‟ towards
Allah, and that is what we need. The oldest trick in the armoury of the preacher is
„repent and you will be saved,‟ and that means in this world as well as the next world.
The Umma will get what it deserves or better than what it deserves because of the
generosity of Allah (swt). At the moment, I don‟t think that we deserve the key to that
gate. I don‟t know how Fatah or Hamas or Islamic Jihad, or any of those other groups
would behave of they had the whip hand. And what we don‟t want is for the history of
this Umma to be stained by the kind of thing that the history of Christendom is
stained by. If there is to be another catastrophe in the history of the Jewish people,
God forbid, those incomprehensible catastrophes, we must not allow it to be at the
hands of the Umma of Sayidna Muhammad, peace and blessings upon him, we must
not allow that. The burdens of the holocaust and the pogroms, and all that is on the
shoulders of the Christian churches and of secular Europe. It is not on our shoulders,
and that is somehow the nature of history: the churches have been historically the
nemesis of the Jews. Now we have the strange vicarious atonement, our response
must never be „tit for tat‟: “They‟re doing it to us, so we must do it to them. Lets send
a few rockets over the wall to bombard Sderot or those other places in southern
Palestine. Let‟s have a go at them.” The more you do that, the more you are bricking
up the door „repel an evil with something that is better‟ that is the Qur‟anic
commandment. Once you internalise that, then you will start to see the road that leads
back, and it may take decades, it may take centuries, who knows? Allah (swt) is the
Lord of history, we can only dimly guess at the future in this situation. But the road is
there, Allah (swt) wishes us to tread that road, and it means: begin with yourself,
overcome that rage, and overcome that fury, because it is from the „jahilia.‟ This
fever, this gut reaction, this trauma, this rage is from the „jahili‟ principle, which is
guided so much by the nationalistic leadership and rhetoric, empty rhetoric of the
region. So we have to say “no” to Fatah, “no” to Hamas, “no” to the discourse of
grievance and revenge, but “no” also to Zionism, because we certainly don‟t believe
in that, what Benny Morris calls „ethnic cleansing.‟ Allah (swt) does not wish that for
this Holy Land. And that is what we can do, we have heard the appeal for Gaza, and
Inshallah every one of us should be generous as we live, and give to the people of
Gaza because they need it desperately; no water in the taps, sewage over flowing,
hungry children. It‟s very bad there.

As well as that, it‟s not an either or, as well as that look into your hearts, improve
your hearts, improve your relationships, improve your communities, improve your
mosques, speak out for the truth of Islam, and fearlessly reject the new „jahilia‟ of
suicide bombing, of terrorism, of „tit for tat‟, and of rage, because that has nothing to
do with the „sakina‟ that Allah (swt) placed in the hearts of the „Sahaba‟. If we truly
follow the „Salaf‟, we will look for the „sakina‟, we will not look for the rage.
Anybody who is yelling and shouting and screaming, has nothing to do with the
„Sahaba‟ of Sayidna Muhammad, peace and blessings upon him, and everything to do
with Abu Jahl and Abu Lahab, because that was their inward state. So it‟s really quite
simply: help them, campaign, go on the rallies, write the letters and protest. All of that
is necessary, and Inshallah, if there is enough of it, it will make a difference. But the
long-term difference, the road to the Golden Gate, lies through the Muslim heart.
When we deserve to be once again the custodians of the city, that is when Allah (swt)
will open that gate for us and „He will heal the hearts of the believing people.‟ Once
we see the Dome of the Rock, once again in the hands of the people who are
inclusive, who recognise, not just one part of the prophetic story, but Sayidna Musa
and Sayidna Suleiman and Sayidna Daud and Sayidna Ishmael, Sayidna Ishaq,
Sayidna Jesus and Sayidna Muhammad, peace and blessings upon him. When the
inclusivity of Islam becomes a reality, then the gate will open, and the world will look
at us not with distaste, but with amazement. That‟s not hard for Allah (swt),
everything is equally easy for Him. But we need to take the first step, we need to say
“the road to that city, that irreplaceable city which every Muslim in his heart knows
can never be allowed not to be in the hands of this Umma,” and to tread that road we
need to start within. To overcome the rage, the frustration, the stupidity, the „jahili‟
practice. Turn away from that, as the „Sahaba‟ turned away from that when they took
their Shahada „la illaha il Allah‟. Say „la illah il Allah‟ recognise that He is the Lord
of history, and Muhammad, the Messenger of God, peace and blessings upon him, is
the man of „sakina‟, the man on whose heart was sent down the „sakina‟. And
Inshallah, that road will not just be shown to you, but you will have the honour of
being one of those who tread it, to hold the key, to open the city. May Allah,
Inshallah, make that day soon, and overcome the current sicknesses of this Umma and
open to us all the gates of the good things, which He wishes for the people of Sayidna
Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, his family and his companions. May
peace and the mercy of Allah be upon you.
Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad

Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad is one of Islam’s leading thinkers today. He

graduated from Cambridge University with a double-first in Arabic in 1983.
He then lived in Cairo for three years, studying Islam under traditional
teachers at Al-Azhar, one of the oldest universities in the world. He went on to
reside for three years in Jeddah, where he administered a commercial
translation office and maintained close contact with Habib Ahmad Mashhur
al-Haddad and other ulama from Hadramaut, Yemen.

In 1989, Shaykh Abdal Hakim returned to England and spent two years at the
University of London learning Turkish and Farsi. Since 1992 he has been a
doctoral student at Oxford University, specializing in the religious life of the
early Ottoman Empire. He is currently Secretary of the Muslim Academic
Trust (London) and Director of the Sunna Project at the Centre of Middle
Eastern Studies at Cambridge University, which issues the first-ever scholarly
Arabic editions of the major Hadith collections.

Shaykh Abdal Hakim is the translator of a number of works, including two

volumes from Imam al-Ghazali's Ihya Ulum al-Din. He gives durus and
halaqas from time to time and taught the works of Imam al-Ghazali at the
Winter 1995 Deen Intensive Program in New Haven, CT. He appears
frequently on BBC Radio and writes occasionally for a number of publications,
including The Independent; Q-News, Britain's premier Muslim Magazine; and
Seasons, the semiacademic journal of Zaytuna Institute.

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