I was approached recently by a young student of knowledge from al-Madinat’l-Munawwarah who will soon start teaching in the West and he asked me a few questions about the da‘wah and other things.

He was very polite and respectful which is something that stood out for me, and which helped his cause too because in particular he wanted to know how I felt about being criticised publicly for some of the decisions I have made in the da‘wah, as well as more obvious mistakes that both he and others were aware of in my work.

I told him many things and gave my take on the issue. I also ended by telling him (and I thought it would be beneficial if I shared this with you all) that if I were scared of criticism, I wouldn’t be involved in teaching or giving da‘wah or being an activist. If you remain sitting down no-one will care, but it’s when you make a stand do people then want to take a pot-shot at an easy target, which I guess – and excuse the pun – is fair game I suppose?

One of my favourite quotes that keeps me going in the da‘wah is that by Shedd when he said:

“A ship in harbour is safe – but that is not what ships are for.”


Sometimes you need to be hard-skinned at the personal nature of ad-hoc attacks and other times you need to express quite a level of compassion when you see occasionally the utter level of ignorance of some who just wish to make their point.

Making our point is something that we Muslims do a lot, but don’t do very well. Add to this the cold, impersonal nature of e-communication where good intentions are often lost quicker than it takes to say “innamal a‘malu bin-niyyat” and you have a real recipe for fitnah and disaster.

To cite a relevant example, you need to look no further than the current fitnah between Shaykh ‘Adil al-Kalbani who recently enjoined a stint as the Imam of the Ka’bah and who wrote an article concerning amongst other things singing etc (always going to attract attention!), which raised the ire of a certain illustrious Imam by the name of Shaykh Shuraim – yes, his recent colleague and the permanent superstar Imam of Masjid’l-Haram – who no doubt must have had good intentions in his wanting to advise Shaykh al-Kalbani, but by choosing the internet as the medium of advice, and choosing to write a poem against al-Kalbani, really only made the situation ten times worse and we unfortunately have a real spat on our hands.

But what I really wanted to say is this: it is wholly wrong to believe that just because the advice or peoples’ base desires are expressed with a complete dearth of manners, this should not then lead you to throw the baby out with the bathwater tempting though it is!

Personally speaking, I eventually tend to read most if not all the feedback, comments and criticism that I may elicit during my day-to-day activities, despite the bitterness or painful nature sometimes of exposing yourself to the worst of human qualities such as hate, jealousy, envy or just plain simple innocent ignorance. Sometimes you wonder if more people remembered the saying “When looking for faults, use a mirror not a telescope” perhaps we’d have a much healthier social framework between us all to advise and help one another.

In any case I’d like to think that I also act upon a lot of that advice even though that might not seem apparent at the onset. In fact, if I didn’t have this attitude I’d get myself into real trouble considering my propensity for releasing masses of written material and to a lesser extent AV material, and my unfortunate ability to drop a real clanger here and there – something which is especially painful for someone who makes himself out to be a real perfectionist but hey I guess I prove better than most that no-one is perfect!

Indeed as our ‘Ulema tell us, if you are going to wait for a perfect teacher then you’ll never get to learn anything.

And here in perhaps a bizarre twist to this little piece, I thought it would be useful to review a few of some of my own personal mistakes/bloopers that I’ve committed (and please feel free to use the comments section to add your own cos’ you won’t get such an opportunity again I tell ya!) for perhaps three reasons:

  1. Because there are many people out there that might be misled in their worship by my mistake and thus it needs publicizing and correcting
  2. It proves that I do read feedback and that I certainly take criticism and corrections on board. It’d just be nice for it to be always a bit more objective and have less of the great heart-opening-reading-my-intention trick.
  3. The most important: it proves for a cracking laugh for you lot, something which I’m always prepared to do my baisti for if it turns out for the common good. And with an ego as humongous as mine, it can’t be bad for my nafs either… :-)

So here is a random list of bloopers that come to mind that other folks have spotted one way or the other and then let me have it over that mistake, or in some cases just let me know with a gentle nudge, wink and a smile…

The Best of Dates

I start with this one because it was certainly bought to my attention in the most nicest and gentlest of manners, albeit costing me a right packet!

A while ago I prepared an article called “The Best of the Best” in which I listed 100 different things which the Prophet (sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam) mentioned to be “the best”. In this list, I mentioned a hadith in which he (sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam) said, “The best of your dates is the Borniyyu date”.

Being rather lazy at the time, I just assumed the authenticity of said hadith because of its authentication by a single contemporary hadith scholar. And believing in this fact, I recently purchased an entire bucket of these rather nice dates and gifted them to my own teacher, Shaykh Kehlan.

“What are these then?” he asked me.

“Aha! Only like the BEST DATES YOU CAN GET Shaykh! Don’t you know the hadith about Borniyyu dates? “The best” as said by Rasulullah!” I replied with sheer smugness.

“Oh right. Ok. But I’m sorry to tell you this hadith is actually weak and not established,” he replied smiling.

“Oh.” :-(

“Anyway, leave them – I’ll have them with my tea…” (Scant consolation from the Shaykh for my shattered ego believe me!)

The Riwayah That Never Was

This I think falls into the category of “sheer stupidity”. I was told recently that during my recital of a certain du‘a in a few TV recordings, I had been pronouncing it incorrectly sometimes i.e. with a kasrah instead of a dhamma.

Now me being the arrogant so n’ so that I am, refused to believe that I could make such a mistake especially as I had seen some of said TV programmes and I had clearly heard myself pronounce the du‘a correctly, namely:

اللهم لا سهل إلا ما جعلته سهلاً وأنت تجعل الحزن إذا شئت سهلاً

But the brother who was telling me this was not some ordinary Joe but a student of knowledge so he couldn’t be mishearing either. Perhaps – I told myself – I had recited it like that because of it being narrated in both ways (with a kasra and a dhamma) because “I couldn’t possibly be wrong!” you know what I’m saying?

So instead of saying I’ll go back and check and see if that’s really the case, I told the brother, “Oh there’s another riwayah of that du‘a, and if you email me I’ll send it to you, because I can’t make such a mistake like that!”

Anyway, he never emailed, probably because he found out that there wasn’t another riwayah and that I was quite possibly clinically insane and I guess he just thought, “I better leave this miskeen to himself!”

Needless to say when I went back to review the tapes, I found myself on some occasions (for some bizarre reason) reciting the du‘a with a kasrah just like he said. Ajeeb! And of course, no narrations to back me up. :-(

Now that’s what you call baisti folks.

Mountains are all the same aren’t they?

In “The Last Testament”, despite consulting with my own Shaykh on the script I wrote etc, I stated in front of a live audience and what has now been recorded and been bought by thousands of people (ouch!) that the Prophet (sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam) would ascend “Jabal Thawr” on his way to meditate in “Ghar Hira’.”

But on a recent trip to the Cave of Hira’ itself, I realized to my absolute horror that I had the complete wrong mountain and that it was actually Jabal Noor that the Prophet (sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam) would ascend!

Embarrassing? Yes.

Lesson learnt? Yes. We should motivate the Saudi government to preserve more of such historical sites and not the opposite, if only to save the baisti of some of us next time. :-)

The Two Ikrimahs

This is one of my “favourites” if there even can be such a thing as a favourite mistake. In one of the episodes of al-Adab al-Mufrad Season 1, as in my normal way when we come to a hadith that has big players in the sanad, I usually give a brief biography of said person. The hadith was one of the narrations of ‘Abdullah b. ‘Abbas (radhy-Allahu ‘anhuma) and it was narrated from him by ‘Ikrimah.

Now as soon as I saw his name, I went straight into automatic mode and started telling the live audience (again!) how amazing ‘Ikrimah b. Abi Jahl was, how noble, how brave, what a partnership he had with Khalid b. al-Waleed, how much he loved the Qur’an and so on. I got all carried away as I do and we soon ran out of time and we came to the end and the recording was stopped.

It was now Q & A time (which is off-camera) and I received first of all a little note written in Arabic which said, “Um…brother, are you sure you didn’t mean ‘Ikrimah the student of Ibn ‘Abbas?”

My blood went cold. I was literally dumbstruck. I could not believe that I had just spent the last 10 minutes raving on about completely the wrong person!! How could I have just assumed for one second that the Sahabi ‘Ikrimah b. Abi Jahl was narrating from Ibn ‘Abbas when the only ‘Ikrimah that has done that is the freed slave ‘Ikrimah Mawla Ibn ‘Abbas?!

Anyway, again as you’ll see on the DVD, at the beginning of the very next episode I had to clarify my big blooper which caused a few chuckles in the crowd, proved a real embarrassing moment for myself and then taught me the golden rule: never assume, because it only makes an ass out of u and me.

:-)

Folks believe me, I have plenty more bloopers and mistakes out there, and I even compiled a number of them at the end of the al-Adab al-Mufrad DVD Boxset as outtakes just for your entertainment.

I don’t want this little bit of fun at the end take away from the serious nature of this issue: the da‘wah doesn’t stop because we (and myself especially) are prone to mistakes, however big. Likewise, I should take on board all advice and criticism whether I like it or not, and finally, if you do want your advice and criticism to actually benefit the person in question and benefit the rest of the people, then study the adab of behaving correctly and how to present the situation in the best way as taught to us by our early Imams.

Wallahu a‘lam.