The Qur'an says, "Call into the Way of your Lord with wisdom and the best manner." The Sunnah expounds that the best manner is with patience, addressing people at their level, at times humour, and making excuses for their wrongs, making life easier for them... Already, we have...
...reached a time near the Last Days where holding onto faith is like holding onto hot coal. Wisdom requires great understanding and communication skills. Take, for instance, a brother who is on drugs. Wisdom will tell you that preaching is futile in such cases. Is it wrong?...
...Not really. But is it wise? Certainly not. Wisdom and the best manner involves building rapport with the brother and trying to understand his circumstances, building a relationship of trust, active listening and gradually inviting him to connect to better circles of companions
...Rushing to judgement in today's times is rarely wise. Building a stronger, closer Ummah and helping each other to fulfil our responsibilities of service and reflecting Allah's Light is not facilitated by us jumping into every death bandwagon. We have so much injustice...
...on our planet, so much imbalance and destruction, so many lost and confused souls, so many who long for a sense of belonging, but instead of reaching out and bringing them closer we shun them away from our mosques and belittle them, label them and send them into the arms...
...of those who are fulfilling our mandate better than us. Those who need us around to help them truly find peace in their hearts and an Ummah to belong to will find they are seeking as refugees in the West or within a Church that embraces them and provides for them as ex-Muslims
Is this a win for the Ummah? Is this what makes us strong? Is Allah, the one with 99 beautiful attributes that we attest to, not the knower of all hearts and the one who can guide even the most lost? We may give up on a person but that person may be better than us...
...I remember once inviting an anti-Islam campaigner to a mosque in Sydney. She was in a group that published horrible insults weekly against Muslim beliefs. I wrote an article about "Shari'ah" for a newspaper and she responded with taunts that terrorism was taught in mosques...
...I messaged her with a few jokes and then invited her to come for a mosque tour led by myself. Reluctantly, she agreed. We did the tour and sat inside chatting for 2 hours, after which she said she could sit there forever and that no Muslim had ever reached out to her before...
...She wanted to invite me to talk to the leaders of her anti-Islam group and practically wanted to convert the following week. At University, many young Muslims had not been raised with true knowledge of the deen. It was a cultural baton passed on to them. They neither prayed...
...nor fasted nor wore anything indicative of being Muslim. They were smoking this and that and picking up at night clubs. We invited them all to a judgement free BBQ and shared stories and bonded. They kept coming back and in time began to pray. Within 6 months, the girls...
...wore the hijab by choice though we never discussed it with them. Some got married to each other, and they became the most hard working, impactful MSA across our city. The university was so impressed with our mobilisation that they built a mosque just for us. We reached out...
...across the political and religious spectrum, even to atheists, to the point that we became the most popular University community by everyone, and they all had our backs and defended us. Wisdom does not mean you compromise anything related to your beliefs.
It means you aim at understanding the context and the individual to make the right choices as to what will benefit society. Some people are truly evil and mean destruction for the community but most are not.
