Allah, exalted is He, says that whose meaning is:
Who could say anything better
than someone who summons to Allah
and acts rightly
and says, “I am one of the
Muslims”? (Surah Fussilat: 33)
You have accepted Islam. You have realised that you have a Lord
Who created you, and Who has decreed your destiny, both the good and the bad of
it, the sweet and the sour of it, Who hears your prayers, Who knows you well –
for does He not know what He created? – Who guides you and has guided you to
Islam, Who is Generous, Merciful and Powerful, Swift to take reckoning, and Who
has both beautiful and majestic attributes. You realise that your Merciful Lord
sent messages to you personally by means of His messengers, the last of whom
was the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, Muhammad.
You believe that the Book of Allah is the Speech of Allah, speaking to you.
You are probably stunned that your culture concealed the truth
of Islam for more than a thousand years, and lied about it to you and to your
ancestors. You have been overwhelmed to find that Allah is the Truth, the Real,
that the Garden and the Fire are true, that countless prophets and messengers
have been sent to mankind including ‘Isa (Jesus), Musa (Moses), Ibrahim
(Abraham), Nuh (Noah) and Adam, and many more whose names you do not know, in
all corners of the earth throughout history, peace be upon all of them, and
that now you live in the time of the last prophet Muhammad, may Allah bless him
and grant him peace, whose message abrogates all other messages and whose way
of life, Islam, is for all mankind of every race and language until the end of
time.
You belong to a community that extends eastward from China to
western Europe, and into the Americas, south to the southern tip of Africa, and
north to cold Asiatic lands. It is a community that blends Arabs, Turks,
Persians, Chinese, Africans, Malays and Indonesians, Indians and Pakistanis,
and increasing numbers of Germans, Spanish, English and Italians, and Mayans,
Incas, Guyanans and Caribbeans. This community is more than a quarter of all
humanity.
You are probably aware of the amazing wealth and beauty of the
architecture, workmanship and craftsmanship of Muslim life, the great corpus of
poetry and song, and the huge cultural heritage of scholarship on the sciences
of Islam, commentary on the Qur’an, elaboration of the law in a most
sophisticated manner, studies of the hadith literature, and dictionaries of the
Arabic language, etc.
However, in the midst of all of
this, you are also struck by the fact that you are not only a new Muslim, but
are considered to be a ‘revert’ or a ‘convert’, and are expected to qualify
that further, by all manner of people, both Muslim and non-Muslim, and to
become: Sunni, Sufi, salafi,
Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, Hanbali, or to adhere to ‘Traditional Islam’, or
political Islam, become a ‘moderate’ Muslim or be regarded as a fundamentalist
or extremist. But you have simply accepted Islam and are content to be a
Muslim. You are probably perplexed that membership of these sub-divisions also
seems necessarily to place you in a position of opposition to others, sometimes
with an actual dislike verging on hatred, or with a slight antipathy, or, as in
the case of the legal schools, with a courtesy which you suspect masks a deeper
hostility.
You also see and sometimes intuit
that there are those who see ‘the West’ as utterly opposed to Islam and who are
thus themselves explicitly in opposition to it and yet others who are intent on
imitating ‘the West’ in every possible way and see no other way forward for
Islam than in such imitation.
So this is a puzzle, but as a new Muslim, you may feel yourself
not in a position to hold to your original intuition that Islam itself is
enough and that you are simply a Muslim. It is the purpose of this open letter
to try to convince you that it is indeed more than enough simply to be a
Muslim. But I would also like to show that the groupings to which you are being
called, and the labels being used all have some substance to them and to
persuade you that there is also a reality in belonging to these groups and that
they are all Muslims and part of the greater Muslim community. Nevertheless the
great secret is to remain simply a Muslim. Perhaps you are beginning to realise
that this is something whose meaning we do not completely know and needs to be
reclaimed.
But where to start? First of all, I will limit myself to matters
in which different groups of Muslims are right in what they adhere to because
they are things that all the Muslims agree upon without entering into areas on
which there is disagreement. In this I will ask your patience, because we must
tackle some demanding concepts and really try to get to grips with some of the
ideas at work here.
Let us start with political Islam, and let us for that purpose
take the much maligned Hizb at-Tahrir. Although there are other groups who
place emphasis on the political aspects of Islam, such as the Muslim Brotherhood,
we will take this one group since they are in the headlines at present. The
truth is that the Hizb have taken hold of one of the important threads of
Islam, the issue of governance.
Allah says that whose meaning is:
You
who have iman! obey Allah and obey the Messenger
and those in command among you.
(Surat an-Nisa’: 58)
The third group mentioned in this
verse, ‘those in command among you‘,
according to the majority of the people of knowledge, are the rulers and
leaders of the Muslims, and the Companions of the Prophet, may Allah bless him
and grant him peace, agreed unanimously on the election of a caliph.
Much of the Shari’ah cannot be put into effect without a
ruler, or a qadiappointed
by a ruler, and there is no doubt that caliphate is the traditional expression
of Muslim governance, although we must also be clear that we are grossly
over-simplifying our history since even a cursory glance at it reveals all
sorts of counter-Caliphates, sultanates, kingdoms and Amirates throughout the
last near millennium and a half. Yet all of these forms can clearly be
comprised under the heading of communities under the leadership of ‘those
in command among you‘.
Indeed, governance is built into
much of Islam. For example, zakah is collected by men appointed by the
ruler and is distributed by them. The ruler must decide the beginning and end
of Ramadan. He appoints imams of the major mosques, and he appoints regulators (muhtasibs)
who keep the market free of usury and make sure that the weights and measures
are just. He is the one who will decide whether or not the Muslims under his
care are at war or not, something that may not be decided by groups of fighters
in the mountains or guerrillas hiding in the cities. So the Hizb are quite
right in that there is no real way to separate the religion of Islam from
politics, and the politics of Islam is quite clearly there in the Book and the
Sunnah.
The Hizb are also one group
representing the trend called ‘modernism’, which, if stated as our need to
grapple with the modern age, then the case is inarguable. Indeed, we could
argue that it is the essential characteristic of Islam that it is destined to
be fit for every age and every society until the end of time. Not only does the
law of Islam contain specific timeless rulings, but it contains within itself
procedures to meet every new situation and to bring answers to new questions on
the basis of what we already have of verses of the Qur’an, known Sunnahs, the
consensus of the people of knowledge and previous judgements.
That is simply in the legal sense, but Islam is always modern,
or rather let us say that it is ‘new’, and if not, something has gone wrong. It
is not new because of the impact of external cultures; but because it is new it
subjects each age to its higher evaluation and retains what is acceptable and
rejects what is unacceptable. The modernism that says that we must revise or
reform Islam on the basis of what we understand from science or other
contemporary institutions is already out of date, since the science they
elevate is already under intense scrutiny from within its own citadel and in
serious crisis. Such people yearn for the precise mechanical order of Newton
which has already been swept away by the uncertainties of the quantum order.
Islam has always been new. The first appearance of Islam was
new, and in the words of the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant
him peace, it was a stranger. He said:
“Islam began as a stranger and it
will come again as a stranger as it began, so fragrant good fortune for the
strangers.” This hadith is narrated by Abu Hurayrah, may Allah be pleased with
him and is included in the collection ofSahih Muslim among others.
The great Andalusian civilisation was completely new. The
arrival of the Ottomans was completely new. Each civilisation of Islam has been
new.
After political Islam and
modernism, let us take a look at forms of Islam that emphasis tradition; let us
look at the salafis or
as they are sometimes known derogatorily the wahhabis.
They place emphasis on the practice of the salaf:
the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and the right-acting
first generations, and in that they are quite correct. Abu Nahih al-’Irbad ibn
Sariyah, may Allah be pleased with him, is reported to have said, “The
Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, admonished us with
an admonition by which the hearts became frightened and the eyes flowed with
tears, so we said, ‘Messenger of Allah, it is as if it were a farewell
admonition, so advise us.’ He said, ‘I advise you to have taqwa1 of Allah, mighty is He and majestic,
and to hear and obey even if a slave is given command over you.2Whoever
of you lives will see many disagreements, so you must take hold of my Sunnah
and the Sunnah of the rightly guided3 caliphs who take the right way4.
Bite on it with the molar teeth. Beware of newly introduced matters, for every
newly introduced matter is an innovation, and every innovation is a going
astray, and every straying is in the Fire.” Abu Dawud and at-Tirmidhi narrated
it and [at-Tirmidhi] said, “A good sahih hadith.” And Imam an-Nawawi
discerningly included it in his selection of those forty hadith about which the
people of knowledge agree that they are indispensable. This well known hadith
is one of very many that make clear that one must hold to the Sunnah of the
Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and to the Sunnah
of the caliphs who took the right way. So the salafi insistence on this is not something
new and is not something that was lost, but rather it is and has always been a
matter of agreement among the Muslims, and indeed there are too many verses of
the Qur’an and traditions of the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and
grant him peace, on this matter for there to be any doubt about it.
There are similar groups whose orientation one might say is
towards tradition and the past and carefully preserving the sources of Islam,
and who can argue with them about the importance of that?
Then let us take a glance at those
who place more stress on the spiritual aspect of Islam. For the sufis, in the
preliminary stages Sufism consists of purification of the heart and one’s
behaviour from destructive traits such as showing-off, envy, miserliness,
greed, anger and hatred and then the embodiment of the noble qualities of
character such as generosity, forbearance, steadfastness, and vigilance, etc.
They aspire to a true and direct knowledge (maﾕrifah) of
Allah, exalted is He, quite unlike the knowledge acquired from books or from
study, although not contradicting that necessary scholarly knowledge. Very many
of the people of knowledge take the position that its sciences are obligatory
for every single Muslim man and woman. That is because there are numerous
verses of the Qur’an and hadith of the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant
him peace, showing the importance of authentic knowledge of Him and that the
negative qualities of character are fatal and that the noble qualities of
character are of the very essence of what the Messenger of Allah, may Allah
bless him and grant him peace, was sent for. He, may Allah bless him and grant
him peace, is narrated to have said:
“I was only sent to perfect the noble
generous qualities of character.” This is narrated by Imam al-Bukhari and by a
number of other eminent hadith scholars, and is only one out of numerous texts
which stress the importance of this point.
Some Muslims agree on this but
differ about terminology, so that rather than talking about Sufism, they talk
about ‘purification of the self’ (tazkiyat an-nafs).
Taking that into account, and since both groups agree on the essence of the
matter, only differing about terminology, it is clear that the Muslims are
unanimous on the importance of this science.
But if someone thought that because of the spiritual and inner
dimensions of Islam one could dispense with the outward aspects of it, or if he
believed in an inner interpretation that negated the clear outward meanings, it
would be a corruption of Islam. Rather, Sufism is an important and significant
aspect of our way whose importance only becomes clearer in the context of the
traditional sources and politics, i.e. it is a part of a whole.
Now let us turn to terms such as
‘traditional Islam’ – which is a modern coinage – or ‘Sunni’ Islam, both used
for a similar purpose which we might refer to as belonging to Ahl as-sunnah wa
al-jamaﾕah ‘the people of the Sunnah and the community (jamaﾕah)’. This was a term that
was coined to cover different groups within the Muslim community, which,
although differing in some points of practice and doctrine, are considered to
stay within the acceptable parameters of Islam:
that is those who adhere to the four legal schools – the Hanafi, Maliki,
Shafi’i and Hanbali, to the two schools of ﾔaqidah – the Maturidi and the Ash’ari and to the
school of Sufism that derives from Imam al-Junayd, which is the Sufism whose
proofs are from the Book of Allah and the Sunnah. So this umbrella is used to
cover a number of different positions that Muslims have adopted, admitting that
they are acceptable even though there are differences between them.
Here it is important to remember that the people covered by this
term are Muslims, not merely Sunnis or even ‘Sunni’ Muslims, for to talk of
‘Sunni’ Muslims almost suggests that there is another acceptable type of Islam,
which is not the case.
Although Muslims follow the
Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i or Hanbali schools, which are themselves comprised within
the body known as the People of the Sunnah and the Community, they ought not to
be defined by them, i.e. one may follow the madhhab of Abu Hanifah, for example, but one
is not a Hanafi Muslim, but a Muslim. Moreover, the truth is that the vast
majority of Muslims do not, properly speaking, have a madhhab at all. The ruler of a society must
choose someone to act as qadi and mufti and they must necessarily follow the
fiqh of one of the well known imams, since they will never reach the level of
being able to derive judgements from the Qur’an and the Sunnah by themselves,
and this is the consensus of the people of knowledge. The Muslim will ask the mufti or imam for the answers to various
problems and issues, and the answer he receives will be according to one of
these well known schools, but he still remains a Muslim and not defined by the
school of his mufti or imam. In that sense,madhhabism is a corruption, although the madhhabs themselves are all acceptable. So,
incidentally, we are again pointed to the importance of leadership, since
leaders determine the path taken in these matters.
All of the above is about groups
within the fold of Islam. It is necessary to address the matter of one of the
groups outside of the acceptable parameters of Islam: the Shi’ah. This term
covers a wide range of groups some of whom, such as the Ismailis, are clearly
doctrinally so far from Islam as to be non-Muslims, or have doctrines
containing elements that remove them from Islam, such as those who declare all
of the Companions, may Allah be pleased with them all, to be unbelievers. The
main body of the Shi’ah are beyond the bounds acceptable in Islam, but one
hesitates to issue a blanket condemnation of them since unnecessary accusations
of kufr are abhorrent. If we were to look for
merit in them, we would say that it is love of the family of the Prophet, may
Allah bless him and grant him peace, such as ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib and his wife
and descendants, may Allah be pleased with them. Respect and love for the
family of the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, is
something of high importance in Islam, and is ordinarily to be found among
Muslims. There are many proofs of its importance in the Book of Allah and the
Sunnah, the most immediate of which is the fact that the very prayer we perform
five times a day concludes with the famous duﾕa, “O Allah, bless Muhammad and the family of
Muhammad as you blessed Ibrahim and the family of Ibrahim…” However, we do not
let the undoubted merit of Sayyiduna ‘Ali, may Allah be pleased with him, blind
us to the equally evident high standing of the other great Companions, which is
documented in the Qur’an itself and in numerous uncontested hadith.
Now we turn to our theme of Islam
and the West. Although we are not blind to the machinations of imperial and
colonial powers in the past and present, we are loathe to view the West as a
monolithic entity implacably opposed to Islam, particularly since we ourselves
are its fruit. A careful study of European history, in my view, shows that the
West has been making its way towards Islam for avery long time. In that, it has
been thwarted by vested interests, such as the church and usury finance, which
feel threatened by Islam. But a deep reading of our history shows that we have
been moving beyond the imperial Roman heritage and the falsifications of
doctrine and religion that the churches foisted on us, and the only logical
place for the West to go is Islam. A proof of that is the very fact that a talk
such as this is needed for the great numbers of people entering Islam here in
the UK.
In that context, I would like to
return to speaking to you about your position in this.
Do not in the midst of all this succumb, may Allah protect you
and me, to the disappointment and disillusionment that has set in for others in
similar situations, when after the initial excitement over the discovery of
this great hidden treasure of Islam they found out that many Muslims and Muslim
communities fail quite seriously to live up to it. They slowly drifted away
from mosques dominated by their own ethnic divisions and quarrels. They rarely go
right out of Islam, but the enthusiasm has gone, and at best, their Islam
became a habit, a religion. That disillusionment is impossible if you see
yourself as responsible, along with your brothers and sisters, for bringing
about Islam in our time in these lands. You will have no time for
disappointment and depression then.
We have summed up in a very
cursory way some things about the different Muslim groups that exist, trying to
show that each one has something of value and something true in what it adheres
to. Indeed, even in their grouping together under leaders and working together
to establish what they believe to be true, there is also a valuable point, for
the group is an attempt to do what we should be doing which is to bring about
community. Even though we habitually consider such groupings divisive, yet the
truth is that forming a community and obeying leaders is closer to the way of
the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and the Companions than
living as isolated families and individuals in a secular state. That such
groups ought to become communities and ought naturally to extend a welcome to
all Muslims and to regard all Muslims as their brothers and sisters and to
naturally come to coalesce with each other to form larger communities capable
of being considered societies, we consider obvious. So it is really time for
the Muslims at large to learn from these matters and to begin to come together
in communities under freely chosen leaders, and to put into effect whatever of
Islam we are able in our lives here and now, most importantly the fallen pillar
of zakah.
But I would like again to speak to you who have become a Muslim
in this society at this time. Your place is very important. It is vital that
you take the middle way of Islam, and I do not mean a way of compromise, but a
way of balance. It is important that you become a Muslim in Britain rather than
a ‘British Muslim’, because we are tired of all adjectives qualifying Islam. It
is important that you subject British life to the values of Islam rather than
trying to reform Islam according to British values. In that, you should also
resist the pressure on you from your brother and sister Muslims to modify Islam
in the other direction, i.e. to bring Arabic and Pakistani cultural elements
into your Islam. Islam will spread here when it is clear that one does not
cease to be British by becoming a Muslim, for Islam is not a culture but a
filter for culture, with the unique challenge in this time of filtering the
anti-culture of presentism that engages modern man today. Modern culture is
against culture.
In this endeavour, your
maintaining good relations with your parents and family, your old friends and
acquaintances, your work colleagues and fellow students, is something so
important that it is hard to over-stress. How much of Islam consists of good
character and behaviour, generosity, courtesy and kindness! In the Messenger of
Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, we have a good model. As
indigenous Muslims you have an access to people in these islands. It may be
enough that they simply know that you are a Muslim, if your conduct is in
harmony with his, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. You are actually
engaged in a historic event even if history does not record your name. So you
have a double responsibility: you have the responsibility of maintaining a good
opinion of and showing good behaviour to all Muslims, whatever groups they
belong to, and you have the responsibility of being a forerunner of the Islamic
society that is sure to come in these lands.
In that there is no avoiding the
need for one core element of the message of Islam, which is so obvious
that, even though, along with leadership, it is one of the threads of our
letter to you, it is almost never stated explicitly in the literature:
community. The Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and his
Companions were a community. That is evident in the entire hadith literature.
And if we link back to what we have talked about, it is the need for community
that drives people to create and belong to groups.
Needless to say, a chilly mosque in which people come and go
without meeting each other and without any care for each other’s well-being
does not fulfil that requirement, and is certainly not based on the model of
the Illuminated Madinah which our beloved Messenger, may Allah bless him and
grant him peace, established.
In the prayer we make five times a
day, and the Fatihah we recite, we ask Allah to “Guide
us on the straight path,” asking Him for ‘us’, with no
qualification of gender, race or culture, and not only for ‘me’. It is assumed
at the most fundamental level of Islam that we are in community.
The one adjective qualifying our status in Islam that we have
not refused is ‘new’, for if there is anything that a new age requires it is a
new Muslim. And as we have stressed the importance of community, we must also
add that the new Muslim will necessarily be in new communities.
But, what is community? This is a
question worth asking, for it is easy to assume that we know what it means, but
this is by no means clear. This word has received a great deal of mystification.
For an answer let us turn to the
meaning of the word. We first of all find that it links in its etymology to the
word ‘common’, i.e. what is common to a group of people. In its most extreme
form everything is held in common, to the extent that men and women hold each
other in common and there is no recognisable form of marriage. This is the
extreme idealistic form of communism. It is there in Plato’s Republic.
At the other extreme we have virtual communities, members of Facebook. People
who use the same type of computer are considered to be communities. We are in
community with people on the other side of the earth whom we have never met and
never will, because we share an interest in some form of music. So relatively
trivial things that people have in common are considered to make them
communities, even to the extent of them suffering some rare syndrome. We posit
that people are communities with respect to trivial matters, because they are
not allowed to be communities in what really matters, and a great deal of what
really matters is those things that are to do with money, property and wealth.
The great undiscovered aspect of Islam is those matters that are to do with
money and property, the most significant part of which for us is the fallen
pillar of zakat,
which we hope that Hajj Abdalhaqq Bewley will treat later today.
Humanism treats the essential thing that we have in common to be
our humanity, but since Stalin, Genghis Khan and the serial killer can all
claim that, it is not a particularly useful definition.
We say, and Allah knows best, that one of the key matters we
have in common is our need. This is not merely need of things but our deep need
of the Creator who brought us into being and sustains us in being at each
instant. That need also manifests as our need of each other and our
interconnectedness. Allah said:
Mankind! you are the poor in need of Allah
whereas Allah is the Rich
Beyond Need, the Praiseworthy. (Surah Fatir: 15)
Humanity divide into two with respect to this need: those who
acknowledge it and those who deny it. They are two communities and have always
been so throughout history.
We also realise that it links to words such as commune and
communicate. Commune is still used as a noun for a unit of urban government in
Europe, but as a verb it is a particularly intense and intimate version of
communicate. So let us dare the thought that community, as well as being a
people who hold some things in common, is something in which communication
takes place. Communication, as between human beings, we characterise as
uncovering what has become covered and bringing it to light. Its opposite is
what we experience today: the covering over of the truth, its concealment by
clever argument and dialectic.
We would not characterise our age
as community, because of its reliance on high-tech data and information, and
its adversarial and dialectical approach to that information, and information’s
propagation by expert priest-like figures and professionals who manipulate it
to nefarious ends, which is the opposite of communication.
Moreover, we would find one essential element in Islam, and in
every society that has had at some point the remnants of the Islam of an
ancient prophet, and we hold that every people has had such a being among them
at some point, that there are two levels of communication, only one of which
modern man considers real: inter-human communication. However, the other vital
element that every sane culture has always been alert to is communication with
the Unseen Divine; talking to Him in earnest supplication and hearing His
address to us in His revealed book.
So this is an attempt to open up the idea of community: it is
those who have in common their deep existential need of the Creator and of each
other, and those who communicate and commune.
You have to be such individuals
that if no one else is acting as if in a community, you will yourselves create
it. And if you cannot do that, you need to find people with whom you can do it.
I do not mean to find a community, but to find people with whom you can express
your community-making needs. Community is needed for the very prayer: Muslims
pray in community. Community is needed for the zakah:
we need others to give our sadaqah to; it is not merely that they need
our sadaqah,
although they may do, but that we need them to fulfil this aspect of our din, remembering
that sadaqah can encompass many aspects of human
behaviour along with the merely financial. Community is needed for the mutual
reminder that is so intrinsic a part of Islam. We are a people who teach and
are taught. Every Muslim has some arenas in which he teaches and some in which
he is taught. Community is needed for our children to be able to emerge from
the family into the world. Education means originally to “lead out”, to lead
the child out of the child’s world and the safe zone of the family into the
life it will need to live in its turn. Outwith community, children are led out
into the world by institutions, and even the counter-culture, the anti-culture
is now institutionalised, although people rarely recognise it. People almost
never emerge from these overt and covert institutions. The community or the
institution must not, however, be substitute safe worlds for the child but
community is another natural means of its coming out into the world and into
its adulthood in proper time.
Islam will have arrived in these lands when our children and
grandchildren have taken on Islam as a completely natural expression of their
being.
A core of our community is
leadership. Islam is not a democracy. Democracy is the humanist thesis, hoping
that, by the sheer numbers of people participating in the democratic process,
we might escape from the tyranny of autocracy. But since Islam is not an
autocracy, our first attempt to define our governance as the obedience of men
to one of their own is simply not good enough either. Neither is Islam a
theocracy; it is not the rule of priests and scholars. Islam is a nomocracy; it
is the rule of law (nomos). So it is governance
by one man counselled by, limited by and even directed by the people of
knowledge among whom the people who have knowledge of the revealed law are the
most significant, the fuqahaﾕ.
This is unarguably the very nature
of Muslim society from the time of the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant
him peace, himself, through the Caliphates of the khulafaﾕ ar-rashidun, may Allah be pleased with them,
right down to our epoch before the interregnum we now experience in the
caliphate.
Therefore, Islam can be said to
have fully arrived in these lands when communities of Muslims born and brought
up here spring up under the leadership of the best of us, guided by fuqahaﾕ from these
lands, knowledgeable first of all in the law and sciences of Islam, but also in
the culture and history of these lands.
May Allah make you and me worthy of these responsibilities.
Amin.
Assembly House, Norwich
Saturday 11th Dhi’l-Hijjah 1428/22nd December 2007
1 Taqwa is behaviour arising from fearful awareness of
Allah, i.e. avoidance of everything He and His Messenger, may Allah bless him
and grant him peace, have prohibited and obedience to everything they have
commanded.
4 ‘Rashidin‘ which I
have translated as ‘who took the right way’ is often mistranslated as ‘rightly
guided’ which has a passive sense, whereas it has an active meaning.
From: Bogvaerker.dk
See also:
