Ummah First

Auto-generated transcript:Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. Alhamdulillahi Rabbil Alameen. My dear respected brothers, sisters, elders. Alhamdulillah this year we celebrated Eid al-Adha as one community. Everyone coming together for the pleasure of Allah SWT in fulfillment of His command where He declared Which means the believers are but one brotherhood. So make peace between your brothers and be mindful of Allah so that you may be shown mercy. The result was beautiful where for the first time in the history of Western Massachusetts almost 5,000 Muslims prayed Salatul Eid al-Adha together. I ask Allah SWT to always keep our hearts together and enable us to resolve any differences that may arise from time to time respectfully in the light of the Quran and Sunnah alone. More concerned about guarding the Prophet and the Prophet's family and the Prophet's family and the Prophet's family. The fact that Allah SWT mentions making peace and reconciliation means that conflict is always a possibility. I remind you that conflict is never the problem. It is how we deal with it which can either help us to draw closer or fall apart. It is our choice and we are accountable for it. Allah SWT commanded us to be united and remain together. And He said وَاَتَصِمُوا بِحَبْلِ اللَّهِ جَمِيًا وَلَا تَفَرَّقُوا وَاذْكُرُوا نِعْمَةَ اللَّهِ عَلَيْكُمْ إِذْ كُنْتُمْ عَادَاءً فَأَلَّفَ بَيْنَ قُلُوبِكُمْ فَأَسْبَحَتُمْ بِنِعْمَتِهِ إِخْوَانًا وَكُنْتُمْ عَلَى شَفَى حُفُرَةٍ مِّنَ النَّارِ فَأَنْخَذَكُمْ مِّنْهَا كَذَلِكَ يُبَيِّنُ اللَّهُ لَكُمْ آيَاتِهِ لَعَلَّكُمْ تَهْتَدُونَ Allah SWT said in Surah Al-Imran And hold firmly to the rope of Allah SWT together and do not be divided. Remember Allah SWT's favor upon you when you were enemies. Then He, united your hearts. So you by His grace became brothers. And you were at the brink of a fiery pit. And He saved you from it. This is how Allah SWT makes His revelations clear to you so that you may be rightly guided. I remind myself and you that Allah SWT commanded us to remain united and not to create divisions and enmity between each other. He did not tell us not to have different opinions or not to disagree. It is about unity, not uniformity. Allah SWT commanded us not to allow such differences to form the basis of dividing the ummah of Rasulullah SAW. He called being divided as being on the brink or edge of a pit of fire and said that it was, He, Jalla Jalaluhu, who saved us from falling into it. We ask Allah SWT to save us from enmity towards one another and thereby falling into the pit of fire. To ensure our material and spiritual safety, it is essential to develop emotional maturity and to be able to keep the collective welfare of the ummah as the goal of all collective decision making. This is not an impossible or impossible. It is an idealistic goal. To encourage us, we have examples of the conduct of the Sahaba, Ridwanullahi Alim Ajmain, who always put the ummah ahead of themselves. Let me quote just one of these finest of examples from the early history of Islam and the Muslims. When Sayyidina Abu Bakr al-Siddiq passed away and Sayyidina Umar ibn al-Khattab succeeded him, almost the first act, that he did was to send a Farman, to send an order relieving Khalid bin Walid of supreme command of the Rashidun Khilafah's army and appointing his assistant Sayyidina Abu Ubaidah ibn al-Jarrah in his place as the commander. This order reduced Sayyidina Khalid bin Walid from being commander in chief to private, in one sentence. Imagine you are broken from being the commander in chief. In today's language, you would say, general, of course, maybe field marshal. One stroke, you are now private. You're an ordinary soldier in the army. There's no instance to my knowledge in military history to compare with this. This never happened. You might ask what Sayyidina Khalid bin Walid al-Anu had done to deserve this treatment. The answer is he did nothing. He had not done anything to deserve this treatment. On the other hand, he had the unique honor of having won every battle that he ever commanded. To cap it all, he had the title of Sayfullah from Rasulullah himself. This was so significant that when Sayyidina Umar ibn al-Khattab tried to get Sayyidina Abu Bakr as-Siddiq to relieve Sayyidina Khalid, on the other hand, he was to be lifted from the supreme command of the army. Sayyidina Abu Bakr as-Siddiq refused. And he said, I will not sheath the sword that Rasulullah has drawn. Meanwhile, Khalid bin Walid went on to prove himself and conquered all the lands. Go look up a map. He conquered all the lands from the hijaz, including the hijaz, all the way north to the bank of the Tigris. and Euphrates. That is all of Arabia, all of the Levant and all of Mesopotamia. With his victory at Firaz in Mesopotamia, he significantly weakened the Persian Sasanian Empire, which was finally conquered in the Battle of Khansiyah. He lived up to and justified the title that Rasulullah gave him and earned a reputation that is quite literally unsurpassed in the history of humankind of being a commander who fought over 200 battles and did not lose a single one. This makes him unique in history, especially since he lived in a time of legendary generals. And so his opposition was the strongest. His army loved him and was totally loyal to him because soldiers love to fight for a commander who gives them victories. There's a wonderful lecture on Khalid bin Walid by Professor Roy Casagrande of Austin School. It's on YouTube. Look it up. It's a wonderful lecture of the details of who Khalid bin Walid was and his battles and so on and so forth. Now, we don't have time to discuss all that in detail in Jum'ah, but it's one of those classic incidents in history about which one could ask how things would have turned out if a single decision was made. So, I'm going to go ahead and start with the first one. This is the one who Syedna Omar bin al-Khattab had not taken Khalid bin Walid away from the command. You could well ask how would the history of Islam have been different. This is the one who Syedna Omar bin al-Khattab demoted and broke from supreme commander to private. Now, put yourself in the place of Syedna Khalid bin Walid in a non-military context. In our current context, say you are the best manager in your company. You have won deals that grew your company from being a small local operator to becoming a global player with total dominance in the market. You are on the board of directors with only the chairman of the board above you. Suddenly, you get an order making you a salesman, ordinary salesman. Board gone, directorship gone, everything gone. You are the best manager in your company. You have won deals that grew your company from being a small local operator to becoming a global player with total dominance in the market. You are on the board of directors with only the chairman of the board above you. Suddenly, you get an order making you a salesman, ordinary salesman. Board gone, everything gone. What would you do? What would you do? Dumb question, right? The purpose of history is to learn lessons to apply in our lives. Sadly, we only use it to tell very, sometimes very sketchy stories without much evidence. We cry a few tears and we learn nothing. Think about this. Given technology of the time and the speed of communication, which is the speed of communication, which is the speed of communication, which is a soldier, a rider riding from Medina to where Sayyidina Khalid was at the time in Yarmouk in Iraq. Sayyidina Umar could not possibly have known what the situation on the ground would be when his messenger reached the army. The messenger reached the night before the Muslim army was to engage the Byzantine forces in the most significant battle of Islamic history called the Battle of Yarmouk in 636. A decisive battle of this campaign that broke the back of the Eastern Roman Empire. Night before that, this order comes. Sayyidina Umar was the decision to attempt to remove a commander who had earned the reputation of never having lost a battle and therefore had the total loyalty of troops could have been fatal. For the Khilafah Rashida. I can tell you how this would have played out if that commander being relieved have been anyone other than Sayyidina Khalid bin Waleed. Anyone other than that. That commander would have fought the Roman army the next morning and after winning the battle would have turned the forces in the direction of Medina and he would have deposed the Khalifa and he would have declared himself a Khalifa without any problem. Whatsoever. Nobody would have objected. Later in the history of Islam, in case you think I'm exaggerating, read the history of Islam. Later in the history of Islam and the Muslims, this is exactly what happened in dynasty after dynasty. Muslims killed more Muslims and blood relatives than their enemies ever did. To the extent the Ottoman Sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent or Suleiman the Magnificent, he passed a law legalizing the killing of brothers in dynastic wars. He said in a dynastic war if you kill your brother it's not a crime. It is not Islam. This is not Islam by any stretch of the imagination. It is a law passed by one of the greatest of the Osmani rulers, Sultans. We return to the story of Qalb bin Waleed and the lessons that we should learn from this story. take from that story. All I can say is that Sayyidina Umar knew his brother Khalid better than anybody else could know. So he simply sent this letter to Khalid bin Waleed with his command. Now again, picture yourself. There's a major battle that's going to happen the next morning. This Qasid, this messenger comes from Medina. He goes to Sayyidina Khalid Adilanu, gives him the letter. Sayyidina Khalid reads the letter, keeps the letter, confines the messenger to his own tent. He tells the messenger, stay inside here, don't come out of the tent, don't talk to anybody. Next morning, he commands the battle. He wins