2014-09-19 - Friday Prayer - Sheikh Khalil Abdul Rashid

The Adhan

Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar. Ash-hadu alla ilaha illa Allah. Ash-hadu alla ilaha illa Allah. Ash-hadu anna Muhammadan Rasulullah. Ash-hadu anna Muhammadan Rasulullah. Hayya 'ala al-salah. Hayya 'ala al-salah. Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar. La ilaha illa Allah.

Khutbah Opening

Alhamdulillah. We praise Him, we worship Him, we seek His guidance, we believe in Him, and we put our trust in Him. We seek refuge in Allah from the evil of our souls and from the bad deeds of our deeds. Whomsoever Allah guides, none can misguide him, and whosoever He leads astray, none can guide him. We bear witness that there is none worthy of worship except Allah. We bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, peace be upon him and his family and companions.

Allah says:

And to the parents, do good. And to those near to you, do good. And to the orphans, do good.

And the Prophet, peace be upon him, said:

(Sahih Muslim, Book 35, Hadith 6518)

And Allah is at the service of the servant, as long as the servant is at the service of his brother.

Imam Muhammad al-Usrushiri and the Crisis of His Time

There was a 7th century Hanafi scholar. His name is Imam Muhammad al-Usrushiri, from the area of what's called the Mawara' al-Nahar — the trans-Saxonia region. We have Bukhara, Samarkand, modern-day Afghanistan. And he saw that the society that he lived in was going down. The people in the towns and the cities and the villages were no longer so much concerned about giving people their rights and duties. They were concerned about taking. They were concerned about their own selfish needs. And because of that, many of the rights of the brothers and sisters in the communities were not being met. Many of the rights of the servants were being abandoned. People became so materialistic. And in his view, he writes, that people no longer had a care if somebody died or not.

And so he decided to write a book to, in his words, wake up the community and inspire them to change, and give them advice on how to change, so that the help of Allah would come. And of all the topics that he chose, he chose to write about the ahkam — the rulings — related to children. And so he entitled his book, which is two volumes, Ahkam al-Sighar — the rulings related to al-sighar, from the word sagheer in Arabic, which means small. Sighar means the minors. The ahkam of children. How do you raise children? How do you deal with children?

And he chaptered the book according to the chapters in fiqh. So the first chapter has to do with tahara, and all of the ahkam — all of the rulings, all of the fiqhi matters — related to children in the matter of tahara: wudu, water, istinja, ghusl, tayammum, everything, najasa. Then he went to salat — same thing. Then zakat, then fasting, then hajj, then marriage, then divorce, then inheritance, buying and selling. What happens if you send your child to go buy something for you? Renting — are rental contracts with kids valid? All kinds of things. Two volumes.

And he says: when we as a community, as an ummah, when we take care to perform our duties — our responsibilities — with our sighar, with our minor children, with our minors, when we take care of them as a community, then we will not be sagar with Allah. Let's play on words. Sighar means minor — something that is little. Sagar with a fatha means to be belittled, to be held minor by Allah. As long as you have no concern for the sighar, he says, the rights and the ahkam of children — Allah, your place with Allah, he says, is a place of sagar: disgrace, belittlement, debased status.

The Orphan-demic: A Crisis of Fatherless Children

The statistics for our country — for last year, statistics in 2013 — show that one out of every three children in America is without a father. Can you imagine that? In the home, one out of every three. That means if you see three kids in the grocery store — three different children — one out of those three is going to go home without a dad. And in the house, the father is not present. Whether he is alive or not is a different issue — he is not present.

Unless we start to take care of these things, and we speak out against it, these kids grow up affected, and it has a negative impact on our society. I mentioned this earlier and I call this an orphan-demic. You have an epidemic — a pandemic — of a disease that is rampant. Right now we are dealing with Ebola, which is epidemic now. Epidemic is a crisis that is contained to a particular region. When that crisis explodes and it becomes a global problem, it is called a pandemic. So what we have is an orphan-demic.

Because the Quranic definition of a yateem is a child where the father is absent — not necessarily the death of the father. Whether he is dead or alive is not the shar'i point. The point is فَقْدَانُ الْأَب — the father is not there. He is absent. Where is dad? He is absent. Whether that absent means he is dead, or whether it means he is a neglectful father, or he is not involved in the kid's life — irrelevant. When that kid is looking around for their dad, and they need their dad, they want to talk to their dad, and he is not there, they don't know who he is, they don't have any contact with him — that is a yateem in the shar'i sense. And it includes kids whose fathers have died, but it also includes kids whose father is not dead — he is in jail.

The crisis of single-family homes in this country, and all over the Muslim world — but we can't do anything about what is the crisis in the Muslim world; our problem, our challenge is local — the crisis of single-family homes, and it is rampant in the Muslim community as well locally, is a crisis that we have to deal with whether we like it or not.

The Quranic Duty Toward the Yateem

From a sharia, from a Quranic lens, yateem is the term that Allah brings out. And He instructs us that we all have a duty to honor and to give shelter and to give ihsan — virtue — to the yateem. And the level of that virtue as an obligation is the same level as that of the parents and the relatives:

You have a duty to be virtuous and to display sublime care to your walidayn — your parents — and those that are relatives of you — the extension of your parents — and to orphans as well.

The Fiqh of Caring for Abandoned Children

In fiqh, in the chapters of Islamic law, if you look under — if you want to find what is the fiqh for foster care and caring for children — you're not going to find it in the chapter of marriage. You would think you might find it in the chapter related to family. It's not there. On the contrary, it's in the chapter on contracts — Kitab al-Buyur — buying and selling.

It's very puzzling. When you look at the chapter of contracts and there's a lot there — how a contract is valid, how it's invalid — and you've got different types of contracts, you turn the pages and you've got different topics. And you come up and you discover the chapter on renting. How to rent. There's the fiqh of that. What are you renting? You're renting perhaps a service. You want to hire somebody temporarily to repair something. It's a rental contract. You're paying for a service temporarily. Fee for hire, temporarily.

And under the rental section, you have the chapter or the section on caring for abandoned children. La hawla wa la quwwata illa billah. What is the section on caring for the abandoned child doing in the section on rental contracts in the sharia, in the Kitab al-Buyur? First comes the fiqh of renting, dealing with service for hire. And after that — Bab al-Laqit — the chapter on what happens when you find a child. What happens if you know in your community that there's a child that does not have a parent or parents? No one knows who their mom and dad is. Baby just left by the dumpster. It can happen to anybody.

I used to do this full time for a profession — I used to be a social worker. They'd call me, and I'd have to show up to the hospital. Some lady, she's given birth to a child and she's left. We have to take that child. What happens if you go to park your car for Jumu'ah and you hear a crying sound and you look by the bushes — there's a child wrapped up in blankets?

What's that fiqh doing in the chapter on contracts in general? It's because we have a social duty — a social contract — to take care of that child. And what we are doing when we decide to bring that child up, care for that child, provide a home for that child, foster that child, is that we become hired by society and by Allah. We are doing a service for a fee. But our fee is in Jannah. But there is a social benefit as well, and there is a contract in the society that it is our job — our responsibility — not to leave kids abandoned out here.

And abandonment means, in the shar'i sense, that they do not have a father. They don't have a mother — that's not in the discussion in the fiqh book. It's important, but it's not a crisis. In fiqh terms, what's the crisis? Is the absence of the father. Because as men, as Muslim men and fathers and brothers and uncles and grandfathers, we are charged to keep the society balanced and to maintain that social contract.

And so we find in the chapters in fiqh that it's a fard kifaya — it's a communal obligation — to ensure that kids that don't have fathers, that don't have families, that are neglected, that are left out there, that are abandoned — it is a communal obligation for somebody to pick that child up, for somebody to bring that child in.

In the fiqh books, there is no CPS — there is no Child Protective Services. It's a communal responsibility. You don't need the government, for example, to tell you that it's the right thing to do to take care of a child. You don't need policy to explain that. You don't need a congressman or a legislator to tell you that the right thing to do is to care for that child. You don't need that. That's a fard kifaya. Allah tells you that's the reality. So it's the reality.

And then the ulema continue and they say — and this is a profound statement, really, it is maktub, it is written and inscribed in our fiqh books — it's there. Quote, in translation: if you find a child, or if a child is found, and that child is found in a balad that is non-Muslim, what do you do with that child? You don't know. The people of that balad are non-Muslim. That kid most likely belonged to parents that were non-Muslim. That child is given the label of Islam — ila al-Islam walaw kana fee hadhal balad ghayru muslim — that child is described and treated and viewed as a Muslim child, even if only one Muslim lives in the balad.

Profound. That child is given the spiritual nasab of the balad. Why? Because that child has no nasab of a deen. And so the ascription — the attribution of the religion, which is a tie to it — must be the best, because you have to give children what's the best. And if there is one Muslim in that balad, then that means Islam is there even in the most minor sense, and Islam always in all matters should reign dominant and supreme. And that means that a significant majority of kids that are in foster care, who've been given up, and the authorities don't know who their parents are or where their parents are — a significant number of those kids have the hukm of being Muslim. And they will be placed with non-Muslim homes.

Ibn Khaldun on Violence Against Children

Ibn Khaldun — one of the most profound thinkers and scholars of the 10th century in medieval Islamic history — he wrote a book, his magnum opus, called Al-Muqaddimah. The Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun. It's translated into English and in most languages. You should have this book. Every Muslim should make an investment and buy the Muqaddimah and read it. Profound text. It's an analysis of Muslim civilization.

In the last chapter of his Muqaddimah — Chapter 6 — he has several chapters there on sciences, Islamic sciences, the description of those sciences, the importance of education, and what is significant in Muslim society. He says the contribution of Muslims to the world is that they built their societies on fiqh principles, shar'i principles. That's what Muslims gave to the world. Because it's a society built on justice and ta'awun — helping each other.

And after that, he has a chapter heading that's called: The Harm of Violence (Shiddah) to Children. It's the 10th century. The harm of violence to children. He goes on in this section — he has three paragraphs.

He says: when a child — and he uses the term sirar — when the minor experiences violence at the hands of the father, or at the hands of the mu'allim — the teacher — that violence is an act where something is done: a fi'al — or an ihmal — a neglect. Both are violence. An actual act of doing something, or a neglect. You have a child and you leave it alone — that's violence. You think nothing's being done, but that's violence.

He says — Ibn Khaldun goes on — he says: when violence is done to a sirar, to a minor, that child feels oppression — dhulm. He said, when that child feels oppression — dhulm, they feel madhlum — they begin a new character of lying. He says, lying. You want to know why your sons and daughters lie so much? Some violence has occurred to them.

Then he says: and because they lie, they develop a sifah — a characteristic — of not being sincere. It teaches them a lack of sincerity. They don't learn ikhlas. Because you can't lie and have ikhlas and learn ikhlas — it doesn't work. Ikhlas is all about sidq — truthfulness.

Then he goes on. He says: when they become insincere and they start lying, they learn the sifah — the characteristic, the habit — of deceit and trickery. They learn how to trick. They learn deceit. And he says, if this continues, he says they lose — and I'll quote him in Arabic here:

(Ibn Khaldun, Al-Muqaddimah, Chapter 6 — on the harm of severity in teaching)

What's absent and lost is al-ma'ani al-insaniyya — their human qualities. What it means to be human. SubhanAllah. Because of violence. You want to know why we have animals for adults? Because these kids have experienced tremendous levels of violence. That's why they grow up to be men who aren't men — but who are just beasts. And love to hurt, love to abuse, love to fight.

Look at the NFL. How many men have lost their positions because of violence — domestic violence. And we have men that go on camera and say, "This is what my mom did to me. This is how we do it. I got beat." As if that's a sign of manhood — that you got beat as a kid. That's a sign of attaining status. That first of all your dad wasn't around, second of all your mom took a stick off of a tree and beat you with it — and that the community did that — was a sign of communal status and it should stay that way.

Then Ibn Khaldun says: when they have lost their human characteristics, what's left are evil characteristics. And they become accustomed and habituated — it becomes their norm — to show evil character. That becomes their norm. That becomes their habits. And we've got an entire corporate industry that thrives off of locking people up because of that. It's called the prison industry.

So he says in the end — Ibn Khaldun — his advice for fathers and teachers is: do not do violence to kids. That's what he says. But what is even deeper is that he attributes violence as the willful neglect — not fulfilling our responsibilities to kids. That's also violence.

Allah's Reminder to the Prophet About His Own Orphanhood

Allah reaches out to the Prophet and reminds him of his rahim and characteristic:

Did I not know that you were — you didn't have a father — that your father was not there? Fa-awa — and I gave you shelter. It's like the person is outside in the rain, in the cold, in the storm, and you invite them in. That's awa. They're in trouble, they're in turmoil, they're in pain, they're in distress — you give them comfort, you embrace them. Despite certain disadvantages they might have, despite the fact that it may make you spend extra money to foster that child, to take care of that child — fa-awa, you give them shelter.

And you were roaming, trying to find a way — fa-hada — and I showed you the right path. These kids out here walking the streets. The Prophet, peace be upon him, used to look at youth. He used to tell them:

(Sahih al-Bukhari, Hadith 2465; Sahih Muslim, Book 39, Hadith 5576)

Beware of just sitting on the sides of the roads. We've got kids whose nature it is to just leave the house and just roam — they don't know where they're going.

Wa wajadaka da'ilan fa-aghna — and I found that you were impoverished, you had a need. There was a hole in your qalb. You needed a big brother. You needed a father. You needed a companion. You needed someone to give you guidance and advice, and support you. Tell you, "Good job." Pick you up when you fall. Tell you, "Don't do that, because it's horrible for you." Fa-hada — and enrich you.

So when you come across a kid that doesn't have a father — fala taqhar — give him a break. Don't be tough. Give him a break. He doesn't have those things. He's in foster care. His parents, who were supposed to be a source of love, they dropped him on the side of the road. Of course he's got a discipline problem. Of course he can't sit down and memorize Quran. What do you think? This kid's world is in trouble. Where's the community? Who's going to support that child?

And any adult who grows up and asks — they ask because they didn't have as a child. They didn't have. Now they don't have as an adult. So they come to you and ask, because they were taught as a kid to ask, and they spent their life asking. So don't turn them away.

Examples from History: The Impact of Caring for the Fatherless

Very profound. Take care of your social contracts. We take care of kids that don't have fathers — Allah will take care of us as a community and as individuals.

Look at the worldly examples. Forget Islam for a second. Look at the worldly examples. iPhone 6 just came out today. Steve Jobs — founder of Apple, brought the iPhone, revolutionized society — Steve Jobs was adopted. Didn't know who his dad was. His dad in reality was a Muslim. Did you know that? He was a Syrian Muslim. His name was Abdul Fattah. Abdul Fattah had met a young lady who was not Muslim. She was pregnant. Her parents didn't like the idea that the baby had a father who was Muslim. They made her give that child up for adoption right after she birthed that child. And two people came along — guy's name was Paul, and his wife's name was Clara. Paul and Clara Jobs adopted the child and named him Steve.

History. Bill Clinton — adopted. Nelson Mandela — we don't need to talk about his record. He was adopted. Somebody saw that kid and said, "I'm going to take care of that kid." Look at the world now. Look at South Africa now. Jesse Jackson — adopted. The guy who was the owner of Wendy's — Dave Thomas, Wendy's Corporation — he was adopted.

Look at our pop culture. Look at the media and how it tells you. Even from a pop culture standpoint, there's pride in taking care of kids that don't have fathers. Look at the story of what are called superheroes. Spiderman — dad's gone, didn't have a father. Batman — same thing. Superman — he's adopted by some folks in Kansas. The entire system of superheroes — people that change society — is built on the idea of supporting kids that don't have fathers.

Look at Musa — he was brought up by Fir'awn. Didn't matter that his adoptive parent was a tyrant — there was a father in the house. Look at Yusuf — brought up in the palace with the Aziz. Do we need to speak about the Prophet, peace be upon him?

Imam al-Shafi'i — his mother was Palestinian. She migrated with him all the way to Mecca. His dad was gone, dead. In Mecca, he meets the Mufti. She goes up to the Mufti of Mecca — Muslim ibn Khalid al-Zinji, from West Africa. He meets this 10-year-old kid. She says, "I want you to teach my son everything you know." He says, "What is your name, ya ghulam?" He says, "Muhammad ibn Idris."

Five years later — look at the investment — five years later, he learns everything from Muslim ibn Khalid al-Zinji. And he's giving, at the age of 15, he's giving fatawa in Mecca. And his teacher tells him, "Go to Medina and sit with the 'alim of Medina — Malik ibn Anas." And in the history books, his name is Imam. We know him as Imam al-Shafi'i.

(Sahih Muslim, Book 35, Hadith 6518)

Allah will always help you and me — the abd — as long as the abd supports, helps, uplifts, takes risks with his brother.

Maybe the person you help — the kid you foster, the kids you support — that doesn't have a dad. Maybe that kid grows up to be the next Shafi'i. Maybe that kid does for the Muslims what Steve Jobs did for the world. Maybe that kid does for Islam what Nelson Mandela did for South Africa. You have no idea the impact of that. By saving a kid from violence — may Allah inspire us, uplift us, and save our youth, so that we can save ourselves.

Second Khutbah and Du'a

Alhamdulillah. Alhamdulillahi Rabbil 'Alamin. Wassalatu wassalamu 'ala Sayyidina Muhammad, wa 'ala alihi wa sahbihi ajma'een. I advise you and myself with the taqwa of Allah.

Allah says:

O servants of Allah, have taqwa of Allah. Indeed Allah commands justice, and ihsan, and giving to relatives, and He forbids immorality and wrongdoing and oppression. He admonishes you so that you may remember.