The Discourses: Safar – Part 5

The Fifth of six Discourses on Safar,
11th October 2008,
Habibia Soofie Saheb Masjid, Rylands, Cape Town, South Africa

First of all I want to welcome all the Fuqara from every part of the world, as we now have Fuqara here coming from all over the world, and most importantly, we welcome our brothers from Russia because they bring with them a whole body of Russian Muslims from the capital – a body of men stretching from Moscow to Vladivostok. The Tariqa is established in Russia, and with it, the disciplines of The School of the ‘Amal of the Ahl al-Madinah. This is a big, big historical event which presages very well for the future of Islam in the world. It is why I want to take one phrase which recurs in the Qur‘an in that way that the Qur’an has an almost musical structure which repeats itself, as in a symphony the theme is repeated, but when it is repeated it is changed slightly in meaning so that depth and emotion are added to it. So this phrase which recurs in several Ayats, you shall see how it deepens its meanings as it progresses.

The subject of what I want to say is because you are here, because you are Fuqara and you have travelled, and you have travelled for the sake of Allah. This, apart from the obligatory right of Hajj, the travel of the people who love Allah, who travel for the sake of Allah, to meet other living Muslims – this is the life-blood, this is the venous system on which the Deen of Islam lives and survives. If this travel did not take place, the Hajj could not take place, because it is this turbulence and awakening in the heart that makes men and women yearn to visit the House of Allah. The visiting of the houses of the Fuqara also has a great secret in it because embedded in it is that same secret that is fulfilled in the Tawaf of a house that is the House of all mankind, as Allah designates it. It is His House, but it is a House for all mankind.

We are now living in a very strange time. In our lifetime, and in your lifetimes, we have seen the collapse of a whole formal structure that was understood and accepted in almost all the world, as a basic pattern of law which was based on a certain respect for people which had been trumpeted by the atheist and the kuffar – the Humanists, in trumpeting the ‘Rights of Man’. In our lifetime, we have seen the most horrible abandoning of a kind of discipline that men put on their violence in times of war and aggression – and we saw this collapse completely. And the country that presented itself as the leaders of society, the ones who were taking the world to a new level of justice and this famous ‘humanity’, we saw them smash all the structures of International Law and smash all the principles and rights due to men in war in the terrible, inescapable shame of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prison.

There is no going back from that. There is no repairing it. There is no punishing the guilty. There is no saying they are sorry. There is no apologising. There is no way back. We have witnessed the collapse of the moral order – what was left of it – which was based on the remnants of the christian religion.

Now we are in a situation where there is basically no law. The Nation States have collapsed, and we now have warlords who are answerable in fact to no individual nation – I am referring to NATO – and here we all are in the middle of it all, and every time you get into an airport and you have come this way to travel you see the humiliation and the degradation visited on the Muslims worldwide by a society which in itself is collapsing, bankrupt, and with the macabre discovery that their money is disappearing and they do not know how it happened. They cannot explain it.

Now, Allah, subhanahu wa ta‘ala, warns people. I want you to understand that you must not travel naively, you must travel with understanding and see what Allah has prepared you for in travelling because from one point of view, it is not nice, it is not pleasant, it is not tourism, but it is a deep, deep, deep opportunity to understand how existence works, how human beings behave, and what the message of it is. Look at Surat Fatir (35:44):

We find in the Bewley version this:

Have they not travelled in the land
and seen the final fate of those before them?
They were far greater than them in strength.
Allah cannot be withstood in any way,
either in the heavens or on earth.
He is All-Knowing, All-Powerful.

So you see that this travel you have made to come to one of the furthest points of the earth is in fact to liberate you, to free you from the bonds that have held back the Muslims because we have been held back from the time that the Khilafa was destroyed, and the time that the Dinar and the Dirham were doctrinally abolished by the kuffar. When they took away the golden rupee and gave India the paper rupee, overnight the richest country became a country of beggars. What you have to understand is that by this journey, you cannot ever be the same again. You cannot go back to believing that reality is what you get on the television news. You have to have this Qur’anic perspective which frees you to be ready for the next stage which is the coming together of the people who love Allah and who are able to raise up the whole world with them, the way these people have cast the whole world down – not just into prisons and torture but into bankruptcy. Look now at Surat ar-Rum (30:9):

Have they not travelled in the earth
and seen the final fate of those before them?
They had greater strength than them and cultivated the land
and inhabited it in far greater numbers than they do.
Their Messengers also came to them with the Clear Signs.
Allah would never have wronged them – but they wronged themselves.

Let us listen to the last phrase again:

Allah would never have wronged them – but they wronged themselves.

So obedience to Allah is to be right by yourself, to act rightly with yourself, and that is to write for yourself a good life. You must write for yourselves a good life. A good life is when you start living first of all for your brothers and for your sisters, for the close ones, the Fuqara, the people of the Jama‘at, and then you can extend it out beyond that circle who know each other and who love each other. You can raise up the world because they have what they need. You have what they do not have. If you go to any major country in the world today, its government is betraying its people. Its government has lied to its people and nowhere is that more clearly so than in South Africa, where the Freedom Charter had removed from it the very physical means which would have raised up the people from the townships and from the scandalous poverty of these isolated zones which after ten years, are not only exactly where they were, but they are ten years further in decay and disgrace.

It is this outer community which we have to reach out to and unify. This is the task you can only grasp and take on by being freed through travel and by seeing that Allah has punished these people, but also that they have not served themselves. The Fuqara are the ones who serve themselves by serving others. The Khidma of the Faqir is what makes him noble above everybody else. The Fuqara give, and the governments and the State take.

When the great first conqueror entered India, when he arrived at Peshawar he rode with his army and he distributed thousands of gold Dinars to the people. Now when the heads of these kafir enslaving States go into these cities, it costs that city hundreds and thousands of Dinar of gold to pay for their security because everybody wants to kill them! That is the difference. The Muslims go in and they give to the people, and the people love them. It is this generosity of which our Imam was speaking today. Now look at Surat Muhammad (47:10), sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam:

Have they not travelled about the earth
and seen the final fate of those before them?
Allah destroyed them utterly.
And those who are kafir will suffer the same fate.

And those who are kafir will suffer the same fate. This is the world you are living in. This is what you are seeing when you travel about. Go here in Cape Town, from the Waterfront and from Constantia, and then go to the great Muslim community of the Cape Flats and see what has been done to people by this enslaving government. They are themselves slaves of people whom nobody has elected because these people have the wealth and the real money. The gold which is dug out of the earth does not go into the hands of the poor, it goes into a plane and straight over to the United States.

So this is the message: The kafir will suffer the same fate. For this we travel the earth to understand what is going on. But this also makes you free, and it makes you free to realise that in living your life you need the Fuqara, you ARE the Fuqara, and it is your love for each other which will be the model for everyone to take because it is mutual help and mutual support, it is mutual feeding and concern – the very aspects that are totally missing in the whole political spectrum of what is current living in the industrial societies.

Now look at Surat an-Nahl (16:36):

Travel about the earth and see the final fate of the deniers.

This is the first part of the message of this gathering here in Cape Town. “Travel about the earth and see the final fate of the deniers.” You see it all around you. But then, recognise what Abu Madyan said, the Ghawth of the Sufis:

The pleasure of life is only in the company of the Fuqara.
They are the Sultans, the masters, the princes.

They are the Sultans, the masters, the princes, because they are the people of Khidma. They are people of Khidma with their hands, but they are people of Khidma with their Hikma. They serve the people with right guidance and a good word, and a healing word, that they are those who make the whole situation of the world continue to exist. If the Awliya of the Sufic Tariqa, known and unknown, inside Tariqas and outside Tariqas, these people who love Allah and love the people of Allah, if these people ceased to exist, the world could not exist. If the queen insect of the termitiary is destroyed, then the termitiary is destroyed. It is these people’s love that keeps the whole thing going. It is not the whale or the forests or the Amazon that we have to be worried about. It is these people who love Allah and who speak the name of Allah, if these people were to disappear, then we would have reached the end of the matter.

It is our business to keep it alive, and to keep it dynamic because there is more to be done and there is greater glory to be achieved for Allah, subhanahu wa ta‘ala, and you are the people to do this. You have been blessed by Allah, you have been picked by Allah, and you have been brought 

together by Allah. Allah says in Surat al-Anfal (8:62-64):

If they intend to deceive you, Allah is enough for you.
It is He who supported you with His help and with the muminun,
and unified their hearts.
Even if you had spent everything on the earth,
you could not have unified their hearts.
But Allah has unified them.
He is Almighty, All-Wise.
O Prophet! Allah is enough for you,
and for the muminun who follow you.

That is the truth. And that is the truth which has brought us together. The arrival of our friends from Russia is an evidence of the success of this. It is also a signal that you must visit them in Russia and you must visit the Fuqara in Pakistan and in India. Pass over the Middle East because it is a lost desert. Apart from the Holy places there is no reason to have anything to do with it, it is doomed. But visit the brothers and sisters in India and in Pakistan and Indonesia, and then Uzbekistan when that shaytan has gone. Go into Tajikistan. Go into Kyrgyzstan. This is your future. The future is there. This place of Cape Town for the people of Cape Town is a place you must jump off from because there is no indication of any justice or any social elevation or education from the political class who are tearing each other to bits with their greed to get at the wealth of which they are only given a little bit by its masters, who have got it all hidden away in Switzerland.

This is the world we live in. You must travel in the land and you must see. If you travel that way, you only stop for the House of Allah and to visit Rasul, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, and then on to the renewal of Islam which will certainly come with the people of the Subcontinent and from these great Stans which have been sleeping and sleeping, and which are now waking up.

Also, the Russian people, who have nowhere to turn but to Allah, subhanahu wa ta‘ala, and Rasul, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam. We make Fatiha for the blessings of the future and all the Fuqara, and for success for all the Fuqara, and mercy to all the Muslims of Cape Town. We ask Allah, subhanahu wa ta‘ala, to bless all the family of Sufi Sahib whose mosque we are in – a great Wali. He came to this country and he put down nine mosques all over the country and without them there would not have been a trace left. He did that because of his love for Allah and because he was from a Tariqa of intoxication, a Tariqa of adoration, of love of Rasul, sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, of love of Allah, the Chistiyya Tariqa. It is because of that, that we are here tonight. We are his guests, and the guests of his family. It is such a tremendous thing, you cannot imagine how important it is. If you go to Ladysmith you see one of the most beautiful mosques in the world. It is in the middle of nowhere, and he put it there! But when you see it, everything changes. The land becomes blessed. Everything changes. We are very blessed to belong to a Tariqa that has links to the Chistiyya and its great past, and its family are still alive in the Tariqa and alive in service to Allah, subhanahu wa ta‘ala. We ask Allah to bless the family of the Habibia and we ask Allah to keep us in close friendship and alliance with them. We ask Allah, subhanahu wa ta‘ala, to restore the Jama‘at as a living thing in which the people serve each other.