Mawlid an-Nabi (s) at the House of Commons (1)
As-salaamu `alaykum wa rahmatullaahi wa barakaatuh.
I am standing in front of you and it is an honor for me to be in this room where all these events take place after six o’clock! We wish to be here at six o’clock to see what is going on and we might be a part of it! (Laughter) I will not take long and will go into the subject directly. Thank you for coming and listening. We also want to listen from you at any time in the future inshaAllah at our center, which is our Grandshaykh’s center, Sayyidi Shaykh Nazim al-Haqqani (q).
First of all, I would like to say that I have toured the whole world approximately. We have established centers all around the world. In Indonesia alone we have 107 centers, in Singapore we have two centers, in Thailand we have two or three centers, in Europe it is full of centers, we have centers in Chile, Argentina, also in Spain and in Arab countries. So most importantly, as Honorable Hazel Blears is leaving soon, I want to share my experience. My experience is that through lectures and people make conferences and give lectures, we used to do that, but it does not change the grassroots. We saw that we have to go into the heart of grassroots to bring back and refresh their memories about the most important matter that everyone faces, which is love: love of the self and love of the community. If we lost the love, we lost everything.
And since it is his milaad and this is an opportunity to speak a little bit on that, the Prophet (s) stressed on love when he said, “A mu’min, believer, cannot be a believer unless he loves for his brother as he loves for himself.” So if you are my sister, I must love for you the best as I love for me, and similarly to everyone, brothers and sisters.
So we saw that it cannot be done except through traveling, like the Honorable Tony Blair would say to you, “Go travel.” So traveling programs that make it easy to stay with people and be with them and go to their mosques and speak with them at grassroots level where we will and are able to change them. As a person came to Prophet (s) asking him about the Signs of the Last Days, and Prophet (s) asked him, “What have you prepared for that?” He said, “I didn’t prepare so much praying and fasting,” as many people today only consider fasting and praying, which is okay to do, but he said, “I prepared one thing, O Muhammad! I love you and I love God.”
So love is the most important factor if we want to bring people together from many faiths. As Dr. Admani mentioned about the plane, this whole world is like a plane. In this whole world today, people are interacting with each other through a network which is the Internet and it is similar to what we are calling “Interfaith”. So they are doing on the internet today, the world of Interfaith. You can see a Muslim has fans behind him, hundreds of them who are not Muslim, and you can see a Christian who has fans behind him who are Muslims, hundreds of them, and similarly in the Jewish faith and in every community and every faith. So in order to bring back to our listeners and viewers when we are showing on TV and traveling from one place to another refresh their memory and bring them back to what Prophet (s) has mentioned about certain criteria which today we are not focusing on and what this needs. When he (s) is saying:
انما بعثت لاتمم مكارم الاخلاق
Innamaa bu`ithtu li utammimu makaarim al-akhlaaq.
I have been sent to perfect the best of conduct (your behavior and character). (Bazzaar)
“I have been sent to perfect your good manners.” So he put the whole of Islam in one word: good manners. It is Maqaam al-Ihsaan, the level of “higher quality behavior,” the quality of living a peaceful way in your life by eliminating from yourself all your bad manners, which are hate, anger, malice, jealousy and envy. When all these slowly disappear from the person, when he is focusing on what he has done or accounting and judging himself during the day what he has done of good in that day and what he has done of bad, then he will be able to understand these bad behaviors and that he has to take them away. So our center will be focusing on this issue after our tours here and there, and we can receive them in the center and those who need counselling will get counselling, those who need their questions answered and those who have difficulties.
Today we have established on the Internet an email a question and answer (website) and everyday we receive from around the world hundreds of questions asking what they have to do in their lives when they have problems with their children or their wives or husbands, so it is counseling on the Internet. I don’t know the exact number, but there are hundreds and thousands of visitors to this website.
So we see there is a big demand on focusing and arranging different representatives in different countries and places in order to establish this, and today we are very happy our center is finishing (renovation) in order that we will be able to do more work. Already we have been doing work here for many years and we are traveling from north to south and rehabilitating people through the teaching of Prophet Muhammad (s), and one of them we will say: an tasida qata`a, “to connect with the one who left you.” It means don’t let a problem between you and someone separate you from each other and try to fix these problems. So we are building bridges between different communities and you know there are people who gather against the others like gangs and try and fight with them, so we want to try and fix this problem and bring them back to normal, to live a good life, to find work, and if they can’t find any we will help them find work through people who are able to employ them. So this is what we are taking from the legacy of Prophet (s), and it is to love everyone and to be with everyone.
And also, when the Bedouin came to him and said, “I love you and I love God," the Prophet (s) said, “This is enough, to love me and to love God; this is a safety for you, this is the way out. ” So when we love each other, we will find a safety out of every problem that we are facing. Now the police are facing problems, the councils in different communities are facing problems, the ministry is facing problems, the government is facing problems, all because people are so much separated, and we have to bring them back together as normal, in order to live a decent life and to give opportunities for education for everyone. They are many who do not like to go to schools and we are trying to push them to go to schools, and these people are citizens of England from many countries, and they are illiterate and don’t know how to read and write. These are the people we see in the grassroots in these conferences where there are educated people. We see them in ghettos, those who are not studying and are running away from home. We bring them back to normal life.
So for the first time we established an international center for them in America in Maryland and Washington for educating women also, who are involved in domestic violence, and we have many lectures on this issue and we were very successful on this issue. Also, we would like to do this through the Feltham Center, help with domestic violence and to make sure that people are not fighting with their wives or having a wrong idea about Islam or that a man can beat the wife and I don’t know what else, but too many of these, imprisoning the wife and locking them in rooms. So all this we are trying to do with our representatives everywhere and we hope that inshaa-Allah as soon as possible Shaykh Maqsood will be helping us also, not only through Muslim Hands organization, but also on heavenly hands!
So we thank you very much for coming and we are very honored to see you. I just cut the speech so short so that we might keep you here as much as possible, so that you can listen to Imam Sa`ad also before the time runs away. God bless you!
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