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بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. All praise is due to God, Lord of the worlds. And peace and blessings be upon the honour of the prophets and messengers. Muhammadﷺ and the Messenger of God, peace and blessings be upon him, and upon his family and his companions. Peace and blessings be upon him. From now on, one of the things that we sometimes are asked is if Islam is compatible with this or that culture. Whether Islam is compatible with Western culture, whether it’s compatible with Chinese culture or whatever. The point I want to make for you is that Allahﷻ sent Islam as the measure, as the criterion to judge everything else. Islam is the Al-Furqan. It is the criterion to judge everything else. So Islam is the measure to measure other things. We don’t measure Islam against something else. Just to give you an example of Western culture, because we are exposed to that the most. Western culture and Western image and psychology is based on the individual. And it is based on the individual to such an extent that today, even the institutions, the institution of family has been destroyed.
The individual is supreme. The individual’s desires are supreme. What the individual wants is supreme. Confidence and a person’s strength is defined by their willingness or their tendency to live by their own will. So that is how we have, for example, the issue of people saying, “I define myself as this, I define myself as that.” It has gone to the extreme where today, even in the case of gender, it has gone to the extreme where today we are told that a little three-year-old or four-year-old child will decide their own gender. So, gender is not what you are born with. It is what you choose. Now, I’m not arguing about whether this is reasonable or not reasonable, whether it is sensible or not sensible. I think it is pretty clear what it is. But I’m just saying that this is an illustration of what Western culture is. The worship of the self.
Islam is the opposite of that. Allahﷻ said, “Have you seen those who have taken Their themselves as gods? Their own self as God?” His God is his desire, his wish, his desires. So this is the concept of western culture. And what they have taken, what they have done therefore, is as I said, even the issue of family. Today if you look at in the west, the whole issue is to build self-esteem. Build a child’s self-esteem. Build a person’s self-esteem. And you see if you do not have high self-esteem, then you are this or that. Islam is the opposite of that. Islam is submission. Islam is to submit yourself to the command of Allahﷻ. As demonstrated by his Nabiﷺ. It’s not a question of what I want; it’s a question of what Allahﷻ wants.
So for in the western culture, a person takes his identity from himself. Whereas in Islam, he takes his identity from being a slave of Allahﷻ. So the question of saying that I am a slave of Allahﷻ and I take my identity from being a slave of Allahﷻ. Allah Subhanahu wa ta’ala. So it’s not that the Muslim does not have confidence. It’s a question of where do you take the confidence from. So in the Western cultural context, he takes the confidence from himself. In Islam, he takes the confidence from Allahﷻ. So obviously, therefore, in Islam, there is a safety net, psychological safety net, where when a person is faced with calamities, when a person is faced with failure, when a person is faced with difficulties, then the person draws on the glory and magnificence of Allahﷻ and takes strength from that and says, “I am the slave of Allah.” Right? So it doesn’t matter. Nothing can be bigger than the Qudrat of Allahﷻ. So I am the slave of Allah. Therefore, I take my strength from there. Whereas in the Western culture, when you hit a ball in terms of your ambition, in terms of what you need to achieve, then you end up in a situation where you face despair. Because you know you can’t do beyond this. You’ve done your best. It hasn’t worked. So you face despair.
That is the reason why if you go in the West, mental illness, depression, despair, suicides are literally, they are epidemic. There are a huge number of people who just do it as an experiment, look at celebrity suicides. You know, go and do a Google search on celebrity suicides. And you can even say in the year so and so. And you will find the number of people who have committed suicide. Now if you think about, I’m saying, the reason I’m saying celebrity suicide is because it is a celebrity by definition almost has achieved all that you wanted to achieve. Right? They have name and fame. They have popularity. They have people who, you know, they have, you know, they have social media. They have got millions of followers. Obviously, they have wealth to match, depending on their popularity. So why do they commit suicide? Why is there despair? Because we are chasing a dream and we are saying, well, I think I’ll be happy if I have this much. I’ll be happy if I have this kind of car. I’ll be happy if I have so many followers on social media. I’ll be happy if I have this kind of house. They have all of that. Still they commit suicide. Why? Because there is no anchor. And in Islam, the anchor is Allahﷻ.
So therefore, the point to understand here is that we do not benchmark ourselves against another culture to say, “Are we good or we’re not good?” If the other culture wants to benchmark itself, they need to do that against Islam. Islam is the culture of, Islam is the system which is divine, which is the system of revelation. What Western culture tends to do is to make them subservient and subordinate to personal desire. Right? A person’s, your own desire, your own thought. Therefore, they’ve created, that’s how they’ve created this culture, which is so individualistic, which is so person-oriented. Whereas in Islam we say that we subject ourselves to revelation because Allah knows and we do not know. Right? That’s the reason why, if you look at it, we have in the Western concept, We have a culture that is based on interest-based banking, for example, right, on usury, on riba. And it is the amount of devastation that is created. The root cause behind all the wars is this, is the accumulation of wealth at the expense of everyone else, right?