1 Why Humanity Needs Prophet Muhammad By Abdul Hakim Murad ...

of Islamic practice, only one way to pray, only one way to dress, only one way to do
business, only one way to calculate one’s zakat, and so on, is simply to deny Allah’s Mercy
on this ummah. As the khalifa Umar bin Abdul Aziz said, ‚The difference of opinion within
the ulema of this community is a source of Rahmah, of Divine Mercy.‛ All too often, it seems
that nowadays we simply reject His Rahmah in favour of our personal preference for a
religion that is, as it were, totalitarian, that brooks no dissent, that regards diversity as a
source of weakness rather than of strength.
So the ummah is diverse and rightly so. And in the absence of a Christian-style
hierarchy of priests to define, and if necessary impose, a single view on each opinion, this
diversity is something inevitable, it’s going to happen anyway. And it’s a natural feature of
Islam and of traditional Muslim communities. And given this diversity, we should not
attempt to find our own niche by a detailed study of dalils, which, since most of us including
myself are not all ulemas and mujtahids, we’re unlikely to master adequately. But instead, we
should use a quite different criterion, the criterion of the heart, al-Qalb. Given that there are
so many groups and orientations within the wide, generous, broad circle of Islam, we
should try and seek out those Muslims who consciously cultivate a life of the heart. That
should be what we look for. And we can recognize them quite simply by their generosity,
their serenity, by the nur, the light in their faces. We can also recognize them, very often, by
their tolerance of diversity. A rich inward life immediately reveals itself as the only priority
and objective of religion. And once it’s established in a Muslim heart, it shows the outward
differences between believers in a more objective light. Compared to the true purpose of
Islam, which is spiritual upliftment, arguments over the small details of fiqh are of
comparatively lesser importance. And this is a vitally important fact, and it’s a fact that large
sections of the ummah, particularly in our minority experience here in the West, have a
tendency to lose sight of.
It’s not difficult to understand why this should have happened. The outward form,
the shell, the husk of religion is easier to transplant into a new diaspora, into new minorities
in the West, than is the inward reality. The outward form, the fiqh, the formal belief system,
the book Islam, the aqeedah, all of this can be studied from texts we can pack with us in
suitcases. All of these things, that the book Islam can be packed very easily into the suitcase
of the job-seeker. But the spiritual life is infinitely more subtle. Often, that’s what we leave
behind us. The spiritual life is tied by, as it were, a thousand, almost invisible filaments to
the particularities, to the cultural life of historically-rooted Muslim communities. It’s linked
to our traditional landscape of mosques, of tombs, of family ceremonials and customs, and
those are the things that, when we come to the West, we are usually torn away from. Hence
the Muslim, if he or she arrives at a British or American or Australian airport, contemplating
a new life on very unfamiliar, alien ground, can sometimes be, as it were, thrown off
balance, religiously, by the very fact of having made hijrah, of having moved. Some
newcomers can have an inexorable tendency, and we’ve all seen them, towards the outward
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