Saturday, April 5, 2014

Renewal of Islam: Ulema and Divine Guidance

According to Abu Dharr, the Prophet (may God give him blessings and peace) said, reporting the words of God, ever praised and exalted is He:

O My servants, I have forbidden injustice to Myself and I have made it forbidden amongst you. So be not unjust to one another.

O My servants, all of you go astray except the one whom I guide. Ask guidance of Me, and I shall guide you…

[Part I, Hadith No. 1; Muhyi-ud-din Ibn Arabi, Mishkåt al-Anwar: 101 Hadith Qudsi, written in 1202-03; Oxford: Anqa Publishing (2008); p.18.

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Renewal of Faith is through Divine Revelations

You must know that whenever a religious society became corrupted, then it was without fail, that a person came from Allah who revived the message and started a movement of great sacrifice for the sake of religion. Not taking other people’s lives but offering their own lives. Not destroying other people’s property but putting themselves in a precarious position where their property were destroyed and looted by others. So following through this hard path of sacrifice, religion was revived whereby you find these phenomena come one after the other (after religion has been trampled by stupid high priests/Mullahs who destroy the essence of religion). Our Holy Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) is thus the most dependable source of light for us (Muslims).

In fact after every other prophet and his religion became a thing of the past, Hazrat Muhammad (pbuh) is the only source of light available to us. How did he revive religious values? It is through walking in the streets of Mecca and being stoned and being abused and being maltreated in the worst possible manner, by the sacrifices of his followers when they being dragged in the hard stony streets of Mecca and them being beaten almost to death and sometimes to death just for the sake of the true faith upon which they held firm till they tasted death or till they witnessed the victory of Islam.

The atrocities committed against them are enormous and yet as they walked through the path of blood and fears and toil, they were purified at the same time, they were spreading instead of decreasing in number. They were not conquered in reality but they were turning into victors because they were winning other hearts, other souls, other people joined this procession of those who offered sacrifices, and in that process they were purified.

Islam is designed like this. There is no short-cut to glory and victory and that is done always through the Messengers of Allah. If they came in the past, is present in this era, likewise Messengers of Allah will always come till the Day of Judgement in the light of perfection of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). When the religious leadership becomes corrupt, Allah takes the leadership in His Own Hands, that is the phenomena of “Nabuwwah”.


Ulema presides over religious decadence

If a law remains intact but without Allah sending someone from Him, Himself without giving him support, without making him change the character of the people through constant sacrifice, no religion has ever been revived, not through the Ulema. In fact the latter are the cause of this destruction and deterioration. There is a saying in Creole (English translation)“If you put a cat guard over milk, you know what will happen to your milk”.

So the values which have been destroyed have been destroyed by the religious authorities themselves. The poor masses are blind people, they do not know what is happening; some people follow blindly. It is always the leadership which is responsible, so the deterioration sets in because of them.

Removal of Divine Light and Sectarian Divisions

And now you are looking to them with hope that they will put you right. If that is your view and if that is based on that tradition which you quoted at the beginning, I have another tradition to point out to and that tradition by the Holy Prophet (pbuh) that: “A time will come when people of my Ummah will begin to differ and there will be very great and fundamental differences of opinions and the common people would go to the Ulema to seek guidance from them and lo!, they would find instead of Ulema, monkeys and pigs”.

These are the words of Hazrat Muhammad (pbuh) speaking of a time much later than his time of course, and describing a situation of differences and he says that when differences would appear then the common people would naturally seek guidance from the Ulema and instead of the Ulema they would find monkeys and pigs. What does it mean?

Now this tradition was never challenged by anyone otherwise the Ulema of the previous days would have rejected this in agony because this was a tradition spoken directly against the Ulema of sometime, because they were pious people, they knew it did not apply to them so they accepted it as a future time would come when this would happen.

Again, in another tradition Hazrat Muhammad (pbuh) speaks of a time “when the Muslims would have become degenerated and Islam would be left only in name (as we find today), and the Quran would only be for scribing, writing down, it won’t run in your heart or blood”.

Apparently, their mosque will be full but will be completely deserted of truth and righteousness. Allah (swt) has told Hazrat Muhammad (pbuh) that in those days apparently people would be saying their prayers in the mosque and they would look like full of
worshippers but in the sight of Allah they would be without truth, without righteousness and they would be totally deserted of what is good. So now one turns to the Ulema in the hope that may be they would be saved. It is their task of course, they’re made for this but the end part of the Hadith is: “Their scholars would be the worst under the firmament of the heaven”Under the firmament of heaven there is so many things, every type of animal, every type of beast, every type of creatures, plants, and things.

So the Holy Prophet (pbuh) does not say they will be worst under the firmament of heaven. The word ‘man’ applies to life, conscious being. ‘Man’ is not applicable to vegetative life. So this Hadith exactly concords with the animal group, to which man belongs. People would go to the Ulema and find them these two animals (monkeys and pigs) and they are the worst as far as the human beings are concerned, they are shown to be the worst as an example to draw our lessons from them. This tradition which speaks of the Ulema being turned into monkeys and pigs is based in fact on the Holy Quran because according to the Holy Quran, when the previous Ummah, that is, Judaism and Christianity were corrupted, God removed His light from them in the end, and their Ulema were also turned into these two creatures, according to the Holy Quran.

So the Holy Prophet (pbuh) speaks of an unfortunate time when apparently his followers will not be his true followers, they would follow suit of the Jews and Christians before them, then the Ulema of “Islam” (for they are not truly Muslims, so to speak) shall become similar to them. And according to the Holy Quran these were their scholars in the end. It is not calling someone by bad names because the prophets do not do it. The truth is that when they say something it carries a very deep significant, potent message.

The metaphor of "Monkeys" 

Now to explain what becomes of the Ulema, why it is said that they would be like monkeys and pigs. Monkeys have a habit of imitating others, even human beings, it is done in every country, you must have seen some in your childhood, be it in zoos or in the wild.

So a monkey sometimes behaves so much like a human being with a hat on and all the costumes like human beings and a bride and a bridegroom that they apparently look just like human beings, but inside they’re completely animals. The humanity is just skin deep, the imitation is just apparent. So when the religious scholars imitate the prophet, that is, the founder of the religion, they do so apparently, only in skin, not in depth. Inside they’re not touched by that imitation, they’re like monkeys.

So that was the message given, their Salwaars, their Qameez, their Jubas, their turbans and things made to appear religious were in fact just mere show. They would give the message that they’re behaving (God Forbid) like our Hazrat Muhammad (pbuh) but there would be a difference of integrity between their characters and the character of Hazrat Muhammad (pbuh). His beard was a source of light, whereas their beard would be the source of hatred, corruption and everything dark.

Our Holy prophet (pbuh) attracted, he was humane, he loved others, he sacrificed all he had for the sake of other human beings. These Ulemas would be exactly opposite, they would create hatred, they would spread the message of hate, they would like people to be burnt alive and they would laugh, scoffing: “Now we got our revenge”, they would order people about to destroy other people’s properties and loot innocent people and kill innocent children and women and insult them. That is the difference between an apparent pious man and a true pious man.

True pious people are the prophets, the holy prophets of Allah. And their religion is completely different from those who follow much later by the way of religious scholars. Their attitude towards human values, towards God, towards everything, appearance is the same but in essence is entirely corrupt. This is the state of affairs we find having been reached by the latter part of a religion.

This is the state of affairs which we find was positively predicted by Hazrat Muhammad (pbuh) about the end part of his Ummah. This is the state of affairs in which we find the Muslims of today and the scholars today. Yet some people expect that out of nothingness a revolution will take place and this entire corrupted manner will be rectified automatically and people would start sticking to the Holy Quran and tradition and become one Ummah.

If this is not the definition of a fool’s paradise what else is? I don’t know. The only active phenomena is that of Allah sending some Messenger, everybody turning against him and his followers, and putting them to the same trials as people before them were put, bringing them to such sacrifices as act as purity of souls and conducts and attitude in life.

Renewal of Faith and Divine Guidance

So a new Ummah emerges from an Ummah surrounding it and it begins to spread like a spurt of yoghurt in milk and it continues to spread and spread light along with it. That is the only phenomena known to me. So Imam Mahdi and Messiah, the concept of these two fits into this concept, this philosophy as supported by the Holy Quran.

May Allah give us Muslims around the world to ponder over the state of Islam nowadays and to take action by not refusing to recognise the Chosen One of Allah who has come among you to direct you to Allah, to reform your lives in the best of ways, so that this transformation may reflect positively in you, your families, environment, in Islam and the world as a whole. Insha-Allah, Ameen. And may Allah protect you from the bigoted Mullahs, who are the monkeys and pigs of the Muhammadan Ummah like prophesised by the Beloved of Allah, Hazrat Muhammad (pbuh). Ameen.  

- Extracts from the Friday Sermon of April 4th, 2014 delivered by the Khalifatullah Hadhrat Munir Ahmad Azim Sahib (atba) of Mauritius.