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In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. All praise is due to God, the Lord of the worlds. And peace and blessings be upon the honour of the Prophet and the messengers, Muhammad ﷺ and the Messenger of God, peace and blessings be upon him and his family. Peace be upon you all.
My brothers and sisters, you can judge a civilization, you can judge a nation by their role models, by their icons, by people who they look up to. So, if you ask this question today and say, “Who do we look up to?” Name three role models, three icons.
What do you think you will get? What are the names you will get?
Now, I have done this exercise multiple times with multiple people, including in the masjid in America, where I am the Imam. I asked this question and we had a whole lot of young people, all of them practicing Muslims, from families of practicing Muslims. And I asked this question, I said, “Name for me three role models.” And they said, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates.
Now, what does that tell you?
The reason I’m asking this question is, if we go back in time, hypothetically speaking, and if you ask people, say a hundred years ago, name three role models, who would they have named? You go back a thousand years before and say, name three role models, who would they have named? You go over two thousand years ago, to the time of the Greeks and the Romans, who would they name?
Now, if you read history, you can say almost with certainty that the role models that they would have named would probably be people like people who conquered lands, people who built things, people who were great philosophers, people who literally changed the way people thought, and how society was formed and what they did. Today, we name three wealthy men. That’s all there is to it. Three people with money. And in this case, three white men. Now, what does that tell you about our society? And what does that tell you about the future of society like that? Because this is what consumerism has done. Beautiful. The lion that transformed the two men into a lion with the sun, with the sunrise.
The character of a people is represented and reflected in their role models. So what does this say about the character of our culture? What consumerism has done is it has raised money and the making of money to the level of the highest value. Consumerism is a religion. Believe it or not, consumerism is a religion because like any religion, it has rules. Yeah. Uh, it has high priests, it has temples where this religion is worshiped; in the case of consumerism, those temples are called malls. Those temples now have got to a point where the temple is in your hand, which is your smartphone.
Uh, with consumerism, the high priests are the people who create the ad campaigns and so on. Uh, you have the goal: to make it. You have the goal: to make money and spend money, and the algorithm is the thing that keeps it going all the time—all of technology is focused to control your mind to make you buy more—and that is why this unit of the family has been destroyed and homosexuality has taken its place, where it is just self-indulgence for the individual. The research tells us that individuals spend more than families because families conserve, they save, they look after each other. Uh, younger children were hand-me-downs off their older siblings and so on. But for the individual, if a person living on their own without anyone to take care of them, without anyone to be responsible for, then they end up spending more and they end up buying more. And that is the whole purpose of consumerism. How can we get people to buy more and more and more? And that’s where we are landed.
Now, what does this take us going forward? And this is where the role of AI now comes in. If you look at AI, forget all the hyperbole that goes with it. Forget the hype. Just look at it. The fundamental purpose of AI is to eliminate the human worker. That is it, period. All the rest of it is fluff, right? It gives you data so fast and this and that, and you can do such great deep research and whatnot. All of which is true; I don’t say it is not true, but I’m saying that all of that applies to a minuscule number of people who are in the areas of research and so on. For all the rest of us, as far as AI is concerned, the primary purpose is to eliminate human beings. And this is where computers take over. This is where robotics happens. And people become remote. Now, what happens to those people? And they tell you, they try to tell you the story: “Oh, we see, we can retrain them” and whatnot, whatnot.
I mentioned this many, many times before. I say it again: A 16-wheeler truck driver in the United States makes around 90 to 100 thousand dollars a year. Now you take this guy off because you now have a self-driving truck. You take him out of his truck cab and you say, “I’m going to retrain him.” What will you retain him to do? Because here is the issue: This person’s only skill is that he can drive this very highly sophisticated machine; he does a great job with that, but he has no other education. He has no other skill. He’s probably in his fifties. You take him out of there. What will you train him to do, which will make him 100 thousand dollars a year? So all of this is a pipe dream.
Now you have this: There are 5 million truck drivers in the United States. Multiply that by five or 25 million people—25 billion people on the street. They can’t meet their mortgage payments. They can’t send children to school. They don’t have money to pay health insurance and so on. What are you looking at? This is exactly the kind of so-called AI revolution. This is what it’s going to bring. We go back mentally, historically, you go back to the industrial revolution, um, in the 17th, 18th, 24th century, and so on, uh, which led to the Great Depression eventually, for the same reason. Because the agrarian economy got converted into an industrial economy. So people walked off their farms and they came to places like Detroit and so on, uh, to work in the factories, and it completely changed society overnight. Uh, it didn’t just end up with assembly line workers; it ended up with a changing in this. It was the birth of the schooling system. For example, it changed culture. It changed religions, uh, it changed how children were raised, uh, schools were formed.
So initially, in the agrarian economy, the father was the teacher. The mother was the teacher. In the industrial economy, the teacher was a stranger who came from some other place, different culture, different values, and that person trained your children because you didn’t have time. You were in a factory, you were trying to earn money, uh, and you were told that a good lifestyle means that both husband and wife must work in an alien environment outside; they must not take care of their children. Taking care of children should be outsourced, uh, to a third party who has nothing to do with the children, not related to them, and we’ll raise those children and we’ll school them in any way they want. Now, this is what was sold. And today we are being sold another story, which is in the context of AI and commercialism.
So I remind myself: Great civilizations rise and fall not because of money. Not because of technology, not because of military power, not because of anything else—they rise and fall because of one thing. And that one thing is character. That one thing is their values. So I asked myself, and you let us think and reflect and say, “What has happened? How have our values changed? How has our character changed?” If it doesn’t change for you, good for you. But I don’t think that is true. I think the changes that happen across the world affect almost everybody. So we need to stop for a minute and say, how have my values changed? What is the value? For example, of compassion, what is the value of concern for others? What is the value of truly human rights and respect for people for people today? We talk about human rights and then we kill human beings like they are flies or worse than flies. Now that is not human, right? That’s just stuff we are doing, uh, trying to convince ourselves that we actually believe in human rights. So this is something we need to ask ourselves. We need to train, uh, bring this into schools at the primary level and get children to be people who are thoughtful and who will think before they act, and therefore change the role models that we have.
We ask Allah to help us. And that’s the reason why Allah said about Rasulullah:
لَقَدْ كَانَ لَكُمْ فِي رَسُولِ اللَّهِ أُسْوَةٌ حَسَنًا لِمَنْ كَانَ يَرْجُو اللَّهَ وَالْيَوْمَ الْآخِرَ وَذَكَرَ اللَّهَ كَثِيرًا
(Laqad kana lakum fi rasulillah uswatun hasanah liman kana yarju Allaha wal-yawma al-akhir wa dhakara Allaha kathiran)
Allah said the best role model for you is Muhammad ﷺ. For the one who believes in the Akhirah, who believes, who wants to go to the Akhirah, who wants to believe, who believes and wants to meet Allah. We ask Allah to make us those who take his Rasul as our role model and who will mold their lives on the way of Muhammad.
وَصَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَى نَبِيِّ الْكَرِيمِ وَعَلَى آلِهِ وَصَحْبِهِ أَجْمَعِينَ بِرَحْمَةِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَنِ الرَّحِيم