Unscripted #20 | Shaykh Abu Eesa Niamatullah in da house

Alhamdulillah, I’m so relieved that Shaykh Abu Eesa Niamatullah made the following comment (at 1:32:57):
…I don’t consider success and advancement the state of Muslims in the country. I’ve always been selfish in that way. My focus is upon that person. So for me, if that person loses their hijab or loses their iman or loses a result and saves all the Muslim community it doesn’t matter because each person is going to be judged accordingly. I don’t believe a person sacrifices their iman for everybody. That’s not worth it. Our deen doesn’t teach that…I can’t see the system allowing people to practice the deen to how it should be to get to the top…

This is what I meant when I mentioned previously about our sisters studying medicine or being happy when Muslims win competitions (or elections) that propel them into the mainstream.

Also, brother Umer posed an interesting question regarding if Muslims in the UK have become more and more disconnected from the rest of the Ummah. I think that to a certain extent we need to be focused on ourselves because we are here and unless we make hijrah to a Muslim country our children and grandchildren will also grow up here. We need to be alert to the challenges that we and our children are facing and will face in the future, and we need to guide them towards the good and warn them against the mistakes and the bad, in others. As a mother, I worry that if we as parents were to pass away and our children are still here in the UK, the children need to know who they can go to for knowledge about fiqh, matters of the heart, Islamic finance etc. That means listening to and engaging with the people who ultimately will be their teachers.

I think that Dr. Salman Butt mentioned once something about us possibly being in a ‘post groups’ phase and I think that many Muslims do have ‘groups fatigue’ and over the years have become better at using the Qur’an and Sunnah as a yardstick for knowing how to take the good in others while leaving the bad without boycotting whole groups. For the sake of our children’s aakhira, we do need to realise that we can’t shun entire groups for things that we disagree on when they do have some khayr as then we and our children will be left alone for shaytan to attack more easily. As the adults, we need to vet people and their ideas so that our children are not left alone and confused when we’re not around.

When it comes to the rest of the Ummah though, our children should know that they are always on our tongues and at the end of our pens/keyboards if we have the knowledge to help them, in our du’aas, in our hearts and minds and that they have a rightful share of our money either through zakah or sadaqah.

At 1:20:40 there was an interesting discussion on correcting your teacher/scholar on issues he deems to be correct but which you consider to be falsehood. I think that this is really important especially when addressing the issue of scholars replacing previous, well-known fatwas because they were too ‘hard-core’ for our local context.