Prioritising Unity

Welcome to the Middle Nation. This is Shahid Bolson. On this channel's Telegram discussion group, an interesting question was posed, which was how do we define what constitutes a practicing Muslim? And by extension, what constitutes a practicing Muslim community? Some will say that the prevalence of hijab in the community represents how religious it is, while others may be the attendance at congregational salah.

Still for others, it would be maybe the extent to which a particular articulation of is believed in and subscribed to within that community. I don't really wanna focus on the issue of hijab so much. I think that a lot of brothers are a little preoccupied with this when their time and energy would be better spent focusing on themselves and maybe the religious practice of other men rather than worrying about the state of hijab among women who are not their relatives or wives. But really, I would not like to focus on any particular criteria of how we want to define whether a Muslim community is practicing or not. And in fact, I think that type of focus at this particular moment in our history is a mistake.

It seems to me that a lot of people are very eager to apply the concept of within the I e to associate or disassociate themselves from other Muslims on the basis of their evaluation of the extent to which those Muslims are practicing or not. And this, by definition, is divisive. I remember an Iraqi brother many many years ago during a contentious discussion, one of those discussions that always takes place at a Muslim gathering, especially a gathering of Salafis in which sort of the minutiae of aqidah is being debated. He basically shut the entire conversation down simply by saying, all I need to know is are we going to pray janazah for this person when they die? I don't care about the rest.

And that's right. Look, the among the Muslims are going to be raised and gathered with this ummah on your and Allah will sort them out on that day because that job is his, not ours. If someone identifies themselves as a Muslim, we are not required to investigate further or interrogate them about their specific beliefs in aqidah nor to doubt their Islam because of some sins or wrong behaviors that we observe. If you are at all interested in the uplifting, the strengthening, and the ascendancy of the Muslims as an independent sovereign political and economic force in the world. You have to recognize that whether a Muslim is quote unquote practicing or not is not a political question.

Unity of the ummah can only be achieved around identification as a Muslim, not around any particular criteria of what makes a Muslim practicing. If we want to build an Islamic movement that has any hope whatsoever of achieving real world positive outcomes, it's gonna have to be broad and diverse. Diverse. The concept of must be contextualized within the reality that we are not alone. We share this dunya with a massive population of people who do not believe in Allah and his messenger at all, and a significant proportion of those people are hostile to those who do believe.

In other words, we don't have the luxury of siding with anyone against the Muslims nor of berating, negating, or shunning other Muslims because we think that they're not good enough. If you're Muslim, identify as Muslim. I'm on your side. No matter how imperfect you are, no matter how many mistakes there may be in your thinking, no matter how annoying you may be to me personally. And I would urge all of us to take this same position.

Once we have achieved the security and stability of what we could call the borders of a global union of Muslim states with collective sovereignty and economic and political power, then if you want to, you can start fine tuning the individual communities within that union because then we'll no longer be threatened by the influence of outsiders, neither politically, economically, nor culturally. But being preoccupied with trying to perfect the finer points of Muslims understanding their imam, their practice, and so on before such a state of security and stability can be achieved for the ummah, it's a bit like trying to keep someone dry in a downpour when you have no umbrella. We are entering a period, as I've said in my podcasts, in which the Muslims have the best opportunity we have had in over a century to reclaim our position as a sovereign collective global power. This will only be hindered by internal division, and you can be certain that non Muslim powers will do all they can to incite such divisions. We have to reject this and to remember that brotherhood is.

The desire to seek out the flaws of another Muslim, to publicize and deride them is a disease, and it is particular perverse when the flaws that you're deriding are actually permissible differences or are otherwise unimportant with regards to the presence of tawhid in that person's heart. The only Muslims that we should reasonably boycott are those who busy themselves dividing us and creating acrimony between us. No matter how apparently practicing they may appear, they are subversive. Building international Muslim unity is a project that will take more time than most of us have most likely, but the time is going to pass whether we work on it or not. The year 2100, for example, is going to come anyway, Insha'Allah.

We will have either worked in the interim period to achieve a new paradigm in the world or we will have not done so. We can spend the next eighty years bickering about what qualifies someone to be regarded as practicing, or we can spend it consolidating unity around tawhid and Muslim identity that transcends differences of opinion. If you do not say or do something that makes you ineligible for Salatul Jannahazah, I'm not personally bothered about it. And I sincerely believe that this is the attitude we have to adopt moving forward if we truly love and want the best future for our ummah. Now the fact that this is going to be maybe taken as a controversial opinion, and I can already anticipate condemnation in the comments section about how I'm not taking deviance seriously enough, just proves my point.

I am not denying the obligation of nesiha, but the supreme nesiha is to brotherhood and unity and to cherishing the primacy of tawhid. Everything else, literally everything else is of minor importance compared to that. If you are a liberal Muslim or a conservative Muslim, if you're a feminist Muslim or a red pill Muslim, if you're a Salafi or modernist, these are just details to me, idiosyncratic details about you as a Muslim. All that matters to me is that you are a Muslim. Look, Islam is a very big building in which there are many floors and many rooms.

All I need to know is that you are somewhere inside that building even if you're not on the same floor as me or in the same room as me. Now this does not negate anyone's efforts to spread knowledge, to make dua, or to help Muslims become better. But I believe that we have an obligation to the next and future generations to help create conditions that will enable our ummah to prosper and to gain supremacy as an economic and political power and force in the world. This cannot be achieved by sects or groups or parties, but rather by transcending divisions and overlooking minor differences rather than exaggerating them.