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y its practitioners. Do you understand these words? I am rereading them myself: “an Islam that was
impoverished by its practitioners.” This means that I believe that we have a duty, that we are called
upon, to bring our highest and best qualities to Islam as we practice it. If we do not, the deficiency is
not within Islam, the deficiency is within us as people who have not thought deeply enough, or tried
hard enough, to make sense of the disparate factors pulling on us.
I attended chapel with the rest of the school from then on. Did I pray? No, I didn’t. Did I see
decadence and an absence of morality in chapel? Not at all. I did listen to the sermons. And I found
that they differed from the fiery sermons I had heard in mosques since I was a child. Here again, I
believe that we should experience the perspectives of other faiths in order to reflect on our own. It is
through observing the sermons in a church that I began to imagine that perhaps our mosque sermons
might be presented in a different way.
One clear idea I came away with was that faith and community go together. It is part of the
package, Saif. That is why sermons are common in religious communities. The faithful are addressed.
Different faiths have different ideas about how the community should be guided, advised, encouraged,
and directed. I cannot help thinking that the sermons I heard, and you heard, in the Arab world are
more a product of inertia and habit than of a conscious decision. It is the weight of words that have
been passed down from one generation to the next without thought as to what we could say differently.
What might you find today in the mosques back at home? Well, the government had to get involved
and begin to set standards and expectations regarding what preachers could say in the mosques on
Fridays. Preachers are no longer allowed to encourage violence. They are not allowed to encourage
hate. They are no longer allowed to condemn those of other faiths. We as a community came together
and decided that we as Muslims had a right to demand of our religious leaders that they put their
energy into more productive sermons. In place of the anger and violence that was clearly the result of
poor training and inertia across the decades, we now have preachers who talk about constructive
values. They speak about what people can do to assist one another. They explain the more difficult
passages of the Quran, or they demonstrate the hidden wisdom in one of the sayings of the Prophet.
Nowadays, when the Friday prayer and sermon are over, you leave the mosque with a sense of quiet
pride instead of anger and irritation. Nowadays you can safely head to the mosque, knowing that you
will be uplifted rather than manipulated, as seemed to happen in the past.
Not all governments in Muslim-majority countries have succeeded in directing religious discourse.
It is a difficult area to regulate and monitor. Not all preaching takes place in mosques, and there are
unofficial sites where people can gather and listen to radical preachers. Finally, there are many
speeches and sermons by radicals who have been detained or even killed that are available online. If
you want to hear the sermons of radical Islam, it is difficult for any government to stop you.
As we progress, we will further develop our communal ideas of the purposes and possibilities of
the Friday sermon.