2015 06 05 Friday Prayer Sheikh Khalil Abdul Rashid

Responding to Islamophobia with Faith and Wisdom

As-salāmu ʿalaykum wa-rahmatullāhi wa-barakātuh.

Khudhu l-ʿafwa wa'mur bil-ʿurf, wa-aʿriḍ ʿani l-jāhilīn. This beautiful ayah in Surah al-Aʿraf contains three powerful pieces of advice for Muslims in a state of turmoil.

The Rising Tide of Islamophobia

There was a mayoral candidate in the state of Michigan who was quoted as saying that it would be a good idea to take 400,000 "ragheads," as he called the Muslims, put them in a mosque and fly a plane into the mosque — and he said to burn them all. That's a mayoral candidate.

In Chicago, we had a sister — a Muslim chaplain at a major university — who was refused a beverage on United Airlines. The flight attendant told her, "Maybe you'll use this as a bomb." The flight attendant said that to her, a woman in hijab. She asked for a Coke in a closed bottle. The flight attendant refused. The man sitting next to the sister asked for a beer, and she gave it to him. And when the sister objected, a passenger responded with the most disrespectful comments, and the flight attendant said nothing.

There is a masjid in Boston that received terroristic threats from an individual. The FBI is investigating that. A jamāʿah came to a masjid in New Jersey for ṣalāh. They found in the masjid a swastika — carved into the masjid door and the wall.

We had a sister in Oklahoma whose employer refused to hire her because of her hijab. Can you believe that? In 2015. She put in an application for a job and was flat-out told, "The way you look is not the way we want our women employees to look." SubhanAllah. It took the sister to take that company to court — not just average court, but all the way to the state supreme court — before she got a just ruling. The state supreme court. The company didn't see it right. It took until the state supreme court took the case before that was overturned. Over a job.

Our brothers in Phoenix — across from the masjid — protesters with weapons. On Jumuʿah. All this in a week. All this in a week.

The rise of bigotry, hatred, and Islamophobic rhetoric is increasing. It will get worse. It will get worse before it gets better. It will get better, but it will get worse. The night is always darkest before the dawn. It's always darkest before the fajr.

A Lesson from My Father

What do we do? I often think about these things, because the anti-Muslim hatred rhetoric is online as well — and it's worse online. My father, رحمه الله — I talk about him sometimes, because he is my personal inspiration, before my teachers, before my shuyūkh, yani.

My father dealt with hatred as well. I want to share something with you, in hopes that it may be a source of inspiration for all of us, and from that naṣīḥah, come back to the ayah.

My father accepted Islam and then went into politics. When he went into politics, his Islam was not apparent. Not everyone knew he was Muslim — only a few people around him knew at that time. This is in the late 70s in Atlanta, Georgia. He didn't have a lot of ʿilm back then. Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī wasn't even translated and didn't come into the Atlanta community until the 80s.

He worked in the mayor's office, and then he went further into politics. Eventually, there was a city in the east part of Atlanta called Stone Mountain. Some of you may have heard of it. It is the birthplace of a racist hatred group called the Ku Klux Klan. That's where they started. It was their regional headquarters in the South.

My father, as an African American Muslim, eventually became mayor of that city. One day before he passed — he died in the hospital — I happened to ask him what happened. Because I was young at that time and wasn't able to understand the full ramifications of it. How is it that a city birthed by the Ku Klux Klan — where they lived every year, where they marched with their hated symbols and preached hate openly — how is it that that city hires an African American Muslim as mayor? That's strange. In 1993.

He said: "You must believe that a place of hate has hope. You must believe that. And you must work according to that belief — not the belief of hate."

Now I find that to be a wise statement. My father was not a scholar of Islam, but he was a believer. And he followed what he understood best from the Quran — what he understood.

The Three Prescriptions from Surah al-Aʿraf

In this ayah, Allah advises the Prophet ﷺ on what to do. This is a Meccan surah — Surah al-Aʿraf — where the Muslims were victims of hate. Their children were inundated with that kind of rhetoric, just as our children are now, although the situation back then was far worse. Our children can come home to air-conditioned homes, Xbox, and all the rest, and they can somewhat forget it. They don't have to see their parents dying. But the early Muslims faced hate, they faced bigotry, and they didn't have a legal system to protect them. They had no recourse to court systems, no police department, no lawsuits, no strong community, no strong interfaith partners to stand up for them. All they had was their Īmān and their ʿAmal Ṣāliḥ.

So Allah gives this prescription — and there are three things. I want to share these three things because they are like multi-vitamins, daily pills for us to take every day, as we go out into this world and inevitably may encounter something.

Our wives — you see, it's different for us as men. We can sort of hide. If we go out and we don't wear the taqiyah, nobody knows we're Muslim. We can go to the store here and there and get by, generally speaking. Our wives have to go out with hijab. Automatically, people know. Our young daughters, the same thing. So we as men have to know how to deal with these things, and have to discuss these things with our children. Our children witness this at school as well — teachers showing classrooms videos with suggestive themes about Muslims in them, in public schools, in Allen, in Frisco.

So the first thing Allah says is:

Khudhu l-ʿafwa — "Take the way of forbearance and forgiveness."