Revive Your Heart: Putting Life in Perspective

ṣufūf
(rows), when 
ṣalāh
is called, but outside of that—forget about
it! Just basic human decency, basic human decency we don’t possess. We don’t
possess it.
What is Muslim civilization? We love quoting our history, we love quoting
when the Muslims were at the forefront of invention; when they were leading the
universities of the world; when people would come from all over the world to
study 
ʿilm
in Baghdad; when the Europeans had lost their literature and the

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Muslims had it and they had to come to us to learn it; when Spain was a model
for the world. We love quoting those things, but what are you going to quote
now? What have we done? What have we produced as a people? How have we
contributed to the world? The only time we make it to the news is when we blow
something up or we are in some kind of chaos or another. Look at it from the
outside perspective: these people are crazy. These people are crazy. As a matter
of fact I’m not even going to point the finger at the Muslim world—the rest of
the ummah—let’s think about Western Muslims for a moment.
We come to these societies, and I have dealt with the Muslim community in
the United States for quite some time, and I have had decent interaction with the
Muslim community in England and in Australia. But let me tell you something:
the things you see among the Muslims—
subḥān Allāh
. I know Muslim business
owners that lie on their taxes: ‘Yeah, but I don’t want to pay the 
kāfir
’. Really?
You don’t want to pay the 
kāfir
? You’re selling beer. Your Islam didn’t show up
then but all of a sudden your—
walā’
and 
barā’
—showed up when you had to
pay your taxes. These Muslims! In fact not these Muslims, 
we
Muslims! We
have such low moral standards; such low moral standards. You have Muslim
business owners that don’t pay decent wages. They don’t pay decent wages.
They don’t even give their wife her 
mahr
. They are complaining about injustices
in the world, they don’t even have justice inside their home. Inside their home.
Why would somebody want to be attracted to Islam?
The 
āyah
that I want to share with you now is one of the scariest 
āyāt
in the
Qur’an when it comes to this ummah: 
Rabbanā lā tajʿalnā fitnatan li-lladhīna
kafarū
— ‘Our 
Rabb
, do not make us a 
fitnah
, do not make us a tribulation for
those who have disbelieved’. In other words one of the meanings of that 
āyah
is,
yā
Allāh
don’t make us so wretched, so embarrassing a people, and so far from
the actual beautiful teachings of Islam that when non-Muslims see us they say,
‘Why would I want anything to do with Islam?’ ‘Why would I want to be
Muslim?’ ‘Why would I want to be like these people?’ ‘This is what I want to be
like?’
They are not justified in their poking fun but we are not justified when we
refuse to look in the mirror. We have to start looking in the mirror. We have to
fix this problem and it’s high time we stopped complaining about what the world
is doing against us. We are the people of 
Lā ilāha illā Allāh
. We have on our
side Allah (
ʿazza wa-jall
). His help is greater than any problem. There is no
problem too big when you have Allah on your side. The problem is we don’t
want Allah’s help, at least we don’t care to earn it. It doesn’t just show up for

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free, it has to be earned. There has to be a transformation that has to happen
inside my house, it has to happen inside my family, it has to happen inside my
neighbourhood. We have lost our moral compass and I am not talking about
advanced knowledge of