Building a relationship with Him

Do you know someone who has their "own relationship" with Allah?

 

اية الكرسي

When explaining Islam to those who are not of the faith, it's common to come across people who claim to have their own relationship with the Lord. They claim that the "lord" they worship doesn't expect or demand certain things from them, and that when they pray or supplicate to this "lord", it answers them or makes them feel better. Maybe their faith in this "lord" has a positive effect and makes them better people, so the question they will present to you is: 'What's wrong with what I'm doing?' They might even might try to present themselves as being objective, using expressions like, 'God isn't like that.', or 'God doesn't need you to do that.'

Really?

We will put this in points so that this answer is focused and coherent. Although the True Lord is above comparison and cannot be likened to His creation, your relationship with Him does have have parallels with human relationships:


1) Why do human relationships break down?

How often have you heard someone, after or in the process of a break-up, say, "He/she doesn't love me for who I am!" or "He/she is always comparing me to so-and-so!". A person in this situation has been undervalued and underappreciated. They have loved someone and expected love in return,  but that reciprocal love has been found deficient, wanting or thoroughly misplaced. This person maybe had to work extra hard or even act unlike themselves just to get a small portion of that reciprocal love.

2) Why do relationships succeed?

A relationship's success is essentially down to a) expectations of both parties being clearly elucidated and b) those expectations being met. For example, children expect food, clothing, shelter and emotional support from their parents. Parents, in turn, expect loyalty, respect and obedience. If a child's expectations are not met, if they are not given the attention and emotional support they need and crave, obedience to parents will not be forthcoming, and the relationship starts to break down.

This applies to husbands and wives and even applies to consumers and producers. Consumers always expect the goods or services that they have paid for, in terms of both quality and quantity. Producers always expect to be compensated for the goods they have levied and the services they have rendered.

If expectations are not made clear, or if they are altered arbitrarily, the result is confusion and anxiety. This is not a healthy relationship to be in.

3) Has the True Lord made clear who He is?

The answer is obvious. I could quote large sections of the Qur'an to you, but Ayat al-Kursi will do. The True Lord says:

"Allah, there is no god but Him, the Living, the Self-Sustaining. He is not subject to drowsiness or sleep. Everything in the heavens and the earth belongs to Him. Who can intercede with Him expect by His permission? He knows what is before them and what is behind them but they cannot grasp any of His knowledge save what He wills. His Footstool encompasses the heavens and the earth and their preservation does not tire Him. He is the Most High, the Magnificent." [al-Baqarah 2:255]

4) Has The True Lord made clear His expectations?

He says, "I am Allah. There is no god but Me, so worship Me and establish the prayer to remember Me." [Taha 20:14]

The True Lord's expectations, what pleases Him and displeases Him, are in His rulings. In His Book and on the tongue of His Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, He has explained your obligations, what you are prohibited from doing and what you are allowed to do.

Therefore, with the above four points in mind, is anyone in a position to tell the True Lord, the Creator and Originator of the universe, who He is and what His expectations are?  Isn't such a person failing to love Allah for who He is? Those who worship the Lord in their own way are not worshiping the True Lord at all but a deity of their own making, a god in their heads, so to speak. And what kind of god allows attributes and expectations to be imposed upon him?

For those of us who are Muslims, we should obviously be wary of failing to meet Allah's expectations of us, but we should especially be wary of falling into the trap of changing those expectations. For example, if performing the five daily prayers is an obligation and performing the night prayer in Ramadan is a recommendation, would Allah be pleased with someone who neglects the former but never misses the latter? Does wearing a necklace with Allah's name on it compensate for not praying at all?

Allah has made His expectations clear. He has said in the hadith qudsi (which is the 38th hadith in the Forty Hadith of Imam an-Nawawi, may Allah have mercy on him), {My slave doesn't draw closer to Me with anything that is more beloved to Me than that which I have made obligatory upon him, and My slave continues to draw nearer to Me with supererogatory acts until I love him, and when I love Him I am his ears with which he ears, his eyes with which he sees, his hand with which he grasps and his feet with which he walks. If he asks Me, I grant him, and if he seeks refuge in Me, I grant him refuge.} [Related by Imam al-Bukhari]

Is this strange in any way? Would a woman love her husband if he beautified himself but failed to provide? What a child love his father if he received fancy gadgets from him but inadequate food? Would a consumer be pleased to receive a beautiful package with nothing inside?

May Allah make us all better believers, which means that we ask Allah to make us better in our relationship with Him. We ask Him to make it easier for us to meet His expectations and to constantly respect those expectations. Furthermore, we ask Allah to grant us success in all our relationships, to only let us be in healthy relationships, and to let those relationships flourish through expectations being clear and expectations being met.

And with Allah is every success.

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Minority Hustlers

How the left plays blacks, and lessons for Muslims

In this short video, Prof Sowell again explains, with a concrete example, how government planning (which may or may not have good intentions) ends up hurting the people it purportedly aims to help. The example here is that of Wards Cove Packing, a company that was taken to court and charged with discrimination for having more whites working in its higher positions and and more non-whites working in its lower positions. Despite perfectly reasonable explanations (i.e. location of the company, the fact that lower positions are mainly seasonal etc.) the case was successful. The result  (or the 'unintended consequence') was that lawyers ended up advising companies not to hire blacks (or non-whites) in lower level positions unless they could hire blacks in higher positions first. In other words, or as Prof Sowell puts it, if you can't find any blacks to be engineers or managers, don't hire any blacks to be janitors or assembly line workers, because it will look bad. It will look like discrimination.

Prof Sowell then discusses the various countries that he mentions in his book, most of which he visited, including Malaysia, India, Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, to look at their governments' preferential policies. After that, he discusses differences in skills depending on where people come from. Germans, for example, are excellent at making pianos, regardless of where they live. Therefore, why do we expect different groups to do the same?

His favourite book is A Conflict of Visions, because in there he explains how people broadly fall into two categories of thinking, and thus if someone holds a certain view on one issue it is easy to predict what view they will hold concerning an entirely unrelated issue. For example, if someone is pro-abortion, they will most likely fall to the left ideologically, and therefore you can easily guess what their position will be regarding gun control or the welfare state.

The last segment of the video is the most interesting because therein he discusses what happens to those who go against the groupthink of the minority or group that they belong to, and this can apply to women, blacks, Muslims and so forth. These people are inevitably labelled as traitors, but in his case, Prof Sowell is not labelled as a traitor by all blacks but by the small class of black intellectuals and "community leaders" who portray themselves as spokesmen on behalf of their entire group. These people have huge invested interests in the various government programmes, and other deals, that are in place and therefore people like Sowell need to be demonised or at least ignored.

In the final minute, Prof Sowell draws the distinction between people like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, who puts their lives on the line and indeed died for the cause that they believed in, and the black leaders of today, who are, as Prof Sowell accurately puts it, professional hustlers. Right at the end, he even draws a comparison with religion. For example, the first Christians were persecuted by the Roman Empire and it was clear that trouble was all they were going to get out of pursuing their cause. However, once Christianity became a state religion, the movement changed and you had an entirely different type of people leading it.

Prof Sowell also elaborates on it here, i.e. professional hustlers and how they benefit from the victim mentality:

In conclusion, we should learn and understand that just like the blacks, Muslims in the Anglosphere and particularly in the United States have a) governments who want to use them and take advantage of them as their own "pet minority" and b) professional hustlers (who often seem to be called 'reverend') who benefit from the status quo and have a vested interest in government programmes and other arrangements. But unlike blacks, who are a race, Muslims have to justify why they are living in such countries. If it is simply for a luxurious lifestyle or to "islamify" these countries from the top down, there will never be any help or success from Allah. 

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Thomas Sowell: The Legacy of the Welfare State (Part 2)

More on how the welfare state has destroyed the black family

It's interesting that he mentions President Lyndon B. Johnson, who said regarding the 1964 civil rights act, 'I'll have them niggers voting Democratic for 200 years.' 

 

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Travelling to Germany

A translation of this fatwa from Naseem al-Sham

 

The road to Germany

Question:

Assalaam alaykum, what is your opinion, my sheikh Muḥammad al-Faḥḥām, about a young lady travelling to Germany for the sake of marriage in view of the fact that that most young men have ended up over there and if the intention is to return to a Muslim country? May Allah reward you in your work and in your life.

Answer: (Sheikh Muḥammad al-Faḥḥām)

Wa alaykum Assalaam wa Rahmatullahi wa Barakatuh. Travelling to such places is unlawful due to a number of considerations, the most important of which are:

Those who have been induced to migrate are a political sheet of paper to be played on for the sake of bringing benefit to Germany, which is fundamentally a country tied to the plans to break up the Arab countries.

Secondly, it is an octopus that wants to enslave the Muslim Arab minority.

Thirdly, there is a precise plan to shut off those who arrive there by terminating the link between parents and children in order to remove them from being firmly established upon the religion, so that after one or two decades the children become secularists or indeed libertines, believing that it is permissible to do whatever you desire.

Fourthly, it is extremely unlawful for a Muslim woman to travel to their countries for several reasons, the first of them being the lack of a maḥram, and if there was one he would not be allowed to constantly accompany her and take care of her, so be very wary of this matter, for it contains the loss of one’s roots and assisting the enemies of the religion and these countries in the carefully studied Jewish plans.[1] By Allah, anyone who partakes in this is a sinner, a sin that will take him to an evil outcome that will only end in Hell. O Allah, choose what is best for us and make us pleased with it, O Lord of all creation.

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Actions Speak Louder Than Words 

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[1] (tn): The sheikh is most likely referring to this plan.

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Someone's sticks and stones break a lot of bones
 

This video dovetails nicely with my post entitled The Globalists and the Nationalists. The woman who is the subject matter of this video is a satanic globalist and is also involved in plenty of corruption to boot, as this film wonderfully demonstrates. 

All the information available above should make one realise how despicable and reprehensible it is to support such a person.

And with Allah is every success.

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