اللهم صل على الثابت القدم على زحاليفها في الزمن الأول
“Peace and blessings be upon Muhammad, who remained firm despite the slippery cliffs at the start of his prophethood.” Imam Ali
إنَّ المَغْلُوبَ مُولَعٌ أَبَدًا بِالاقْتِدَاءِ بِالْغَالِبِ فِي شِعَارِهِ وَزِيِّهِ وَنِحْلَتِهِ وَسَائِرِ أَحْوَالِهِ وَعَوَائِدِهِ
“The vanquished (defeated) is always infatuated with imitating the victor in his slogans, clothing, beliefs, and all other conditions and customs.” — Ibn Khaldun
As we mark yet another Mawlid in monstrous times, I often wonder if we are diluting the immense, life-giving legacy of the Prophet ﷺ by focusing on his gentleness and loving traits only. So many invoke the verses wherein Allah himself praised the Prophet ﷺ: “you are indeed of the loftiest character,” (Qur’an 68:4) and “We have not sent you but as a mercy to all of creation,” (Qur’an 21: 107) but do we really understand the true depth and implications of these verses?
While it is imperative to learn and speak of the gentleness, pacifism and beautiful nature of the characteristic of the Prophet ﷺ, often, it is only one side of his virtues that gets discussed. Often, his warriorship, his indignant stances and righteous anger gets left out of the story. When such central aspects of prophethood get left out, that belies a misunderstanding of authentic, divinely bestowed, virtue ethics. It also indicates a misunderstanding what mercy truly is, and what being merciful entails.
Is virtue simply to be nice, to be lovely, softspoken, gentle and appeasing?
Is mercy truly merciful if it perpetually turns the other cheek, if it is constantly passive with evil?
Any honest study of the life and legacy of the Prophet will show that true prophetic virtue is just as much jalal (might) as it is jamal (beauty). He represented the perfect equilibrium between being tender and graceful, and righteous, loving fury and wrath. Yes, I said loving wrath, even though they might seem like oxymorons. He himself ﷺ said, “help your brother, whether he is an oppressor or he is an oppressed one.” When he was asked how to help an oppressor, he said, “By preventing him from oppressing others.” In other words, active resistance of oppression is the highest, most difficult road to undertake on the path of love and mercy.
This means that mercy is also sometimes the imperative necessity to conduct a mercy killing of falsehoods. It also means that sometimes the merciful path looks more like the messy path of confrontation, of taking sledgehammers to the idols, of warding harm through speech, action in ways that “respectable” society deems disruptive.
I recently met a wonderful filmmaker who works on the inspiring lives of men on death row, and he relayed to me that a transformed man—who is currently serving life and will be executed in the state of Texas—became Muslim because “the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ did not turn the other cheek.” Never mind that the teachings of Jesus son of Mary, peace be upon him, Allah’s ruh and kalima, have been distorted to make him out as a sheepish pacifist. Never mind that he used the whip and overturned the tables of the money changers, and knocked over the seats of those selling doves. These misreadings indicate that there has been a historic effort to serve the interests of the powers-that-be by distorting the Prophetic path into just toothless, harmless folk tales that turns the prophets into mere harmless mascots, والعياذ بالله.
Today, we must fight tooth-and-nail against similar efforts to water down, dilute and distort the honorable Sira and legacy of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ.
Because his very life was a testament to the fact that opting to “leave things be” and to overlook harm is not “merciful,” it is compounded ignorance and injustice. It is jahiliyya persisting. To refrain from “rocking the boat” or speaking out against injustice is not “prophetic,” or moral, it is cowardly. “Peace” without deterrence is weakness. He taught that true peace, in reality, is restrained power, not absence of power, and the Prophet ﷺ never inclined towards peace unless he had two things: the power of deterrence and the upper hand. This is why invoking Hudaybiya to justify normalizing with Israel today is dishonest and wicked. It belies the true Prophetic spirit of a just, principled peace.
Thus, scholars who try to refashion the Prophet ﷺ as a defenseless man are lying to themselves and to their students. Because a man, any man, who is incapable of violence is not inherently good or moral. Ultimately, we learn from the Sira that peace, that salam is the true aim of Islam, but peace that is invoked without justice is simply tyranny covered up. As we learn from the military campaigns of the Prophet ﷺ, true peace is achieved through carefully studied, strategic planning of controlled risk and danger. The Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi encapsulated the spirit of the Warrior-Prophet when he said, “a peaceful man must still know violence, or his peace belongs to whoever threatens it.”
And no, not everyone is destined to follow these lofty footsteps of discipline and courage. Yes, some people choose the path of least resistance. Does that make them “bad” Muslims? No. “The strong believer is better and more beloved to Allah than the weak believer, though there is good in both.” People have different capacities and abilities to confront injustice. We are not all meant to flip the tables, so to speak. But we were never commanded to help or accept injustice, ever.
Even the Prophet ﷺ offered us three levels of engagement with injustice, when he said, “Whoever among you sees evil, let them change it with his hand. If he cannot do so, then with their tongue. If they cannot do so, then with their heart, which is the weakest level of faith."
But that’s just it. We have reached a point where even the lowest form of faith—the rejection of evil with our hearts— has become difficult to do because we do not even inwardly repel the structural evils befalling the ummah, we accept them and design our lives to fit around them. Instead, we still incline to taghut, we still make excuses for it. We still fear or even love said tyranny/tyrant and cover for their faults, normalizing them as a fixed reality and inevitability.
But if changing a reality in one’s heart is difficult for most, what can be weaker than the weakest of faith, the rebellion of the heart? If that state is lower than the lowest prophetic standard, can it truly remain classified as a state of faith, then?
It is understandable, after all, that to console themselves in monstrous times, people prefer to hear of Prophetic gentleness, grace and sweetness. He is indeed an elixir, a cure, and a medicine for weary hearts.
But the Prophet ﷺ I know was also a stranger. He climbed the mountain of solitude when the valley of convention below had become too unbearable, when the masks became tiresome, and when scorn came in the form of his loved ones, his beloved tribe and kin.
The Prophet ﷺ I know did not people please. He did not force fake joy. He chose the cave of sorrow and contemplation over the sedative of the crowd. He shepherded his soul through solitude, and left the conformity of the herd. His greatness was in his refusal of societal and political crookedness. He rejected the abnormality and dysfunction of his time in heart, word and deed.
The Prophet ﷺ I know did not go along with the times, he did not trade the truth to keep up appearances, to protect false ideas of “stability” and “peace.” He guarded the unseen kingdom within: his clear mind, its captain. His freedom, its compass. Thus, even before he was entrusted with prophethood, he was already free from bondage to any master, to any but the One. He was not easily swayed, nor haphazardly moulded. He never lied, nor took shortcuts. He was Al-Ṣādiq. The truthful one. Drenched in dignity, honor and a trust hat no dirham could buy. He was al-Amīn. The trustworthy one, and even his enemies testified to him as such.
He did not soothsay, or embellish lies with sweet nothings, ornate verbiage or fake intellectualism. He revolutionized weary, broken hearts through his very presence, and set the world of pretense ablaze. He walked through the ashes of extinguished bestial egos, burned idols and incinerated attachments.
And yes, the Prophet ﷺ I know was so beautifully gentle. So gentle, that the dejected always found their way to him, not the tyrannical, haughty, detached, privileged, crooked ones. He sat with the disheveled, the humiliated, the orphaned, the poor,
the preferably unheard and the preferably unseen.
When the woman who cleaned the masjid died, they buried her without telling him.
“She died and we buried her at night,” they said.
He was angry that no one cared to tell him. He showed displeasure at them. Sorrowful, he went to her grave. There, the Messenger of God stood beside the grave of a woman society considered too unimportant to honor, not worthy of even a mention.
And in that simple act of displeasure, he enacted a timeless mercy.
He protested dehumanization.
The Prophet ﷺ I know did indeed have a heart so tender, that he wept and wept. He wept aplenty until his beard became wet. For his beloved wife, for his children, for the dead.
But he also wept for the broken, for the soul of Islam, for us, yes even us, cowardly 21st century fools.
For generations yet unborn, who would claim to inherit his banner, yet oftentimes cheaply trade his guidance for the glittering corpse of this lowly world.
The Prophet ﷺ I know did not praise Pharaohs to justify any realpolitik “pragmatism.” He could not bear injustice. His interior conformed with his exterior actions without blemish or hypocrisy. He consoled the abused. He saw the scarlet bloodied skies and the slaughter of his grandchildren in Karbala and Gaza before they even occurred. He carried the weight of all the oppressed across time and space, as if to say, “I am a trustee of all of humanity’s tears, from the creation of time until its end.”
The very essence of the Prophet ﷺ I know is a Mercy to both worlds, to beast and to man. He conversed with the stars, the animals and the trees.
Yet, his mercy was kind and firm, not “nice.” This was a man you were enraptured with and at the same time, this was not a man you wanted to cross. For make no mistake, his mercy had teeth.
It roared with the thunderous names of Al-Qahhar and Al-Jabbar. His mercy knew the counters of holy anger, when anger was required. It stood up with rooted dignity and roared, and thus dwarfed all the forces of self-interest and malice.
Because true Prophetic mercy is to make the tyrants’ knees tremble. The Prophet’s light sears the sunlight to the lies and the falsehoods. It clears away the cobwebs of pretense and deception. It is the whip to hypocrisy and the spear to tribalist self worship.
We often neglect that the true Prophetic ethic is as much about flipping tables as it is about a loving embrace.
The Prophet ﷺ I know taught us the perfected equilibrium of both honor and courage, and gentleness and kindness. He taught us that frowning and looking away from his uncle’s killer’s face was proper, natural and just, not rude.
He taught us how to shatter idols of tribe and ego, of race and rank, of wealth and throne, of scholars who sold their tongues and pens to the highest bidder, of rulers who dressed tyranny in the garments of “Islam,” “the Aal al Bayt” or “custodianship” of the besieged holy sites.
Tell me, how will they bear to look him in the eye, when at the end of times, the elite who rule the Muslims more closely resemble British aristocracy than his beloved ragtag companions of Madina?
The Prophet ﷺ I know served as both Mercy and Warner. He established a timeless, universal school for the cultivation of sovereign human beings. Humans who were dignified and free. Humans who tread the earth lightly and shed themselves from worldly fear. Humans who were free from both the base desire to oppress, and free from the fear of stopping oppression. Free from the shackles of the lowly attachments, to connections, respectability, addictions, ego, whims and fancy.
The Mercy to the World was also a valiant and skilled warrior and military leader.
During the Battle of Uhud, two iron links from the Prophet’s helmet pierced deeply into his blessed cheek. Abu Ubaidah ibn al-Jarrah used his teeth to pull out the first metal ring, which caused one of his front teeth to break. He then bit into and removed the second ring, losing a second front tooth in the process. He had the most beautiful toothless smile as a result.
This is the true spirit of the Sira we often neglect when we celebrate the Mawlid: the Prophetic path was a path of blood mixed with iron, sweat and teeth. Otherwise, if it becomes just about fancy aqiq rings, lavish retreats and floral sandalas only, it is a mirage. A theater of the absurd.
Uhud represents a timeless lesson for us. In that battle, his men were assigned specific instructions, they were given a place. When they left it, significant losses were suffered by the army of the believers. Why did they leave it?
So I ask us now: Is this moment in this season finale of being human not our collective Uḥud?
Why did we leave our place?
Why did we move away from his path, why did we abandon the summit of ʿizzah?
Why did we trade honor for servility and subservience?
Why did we surrender the true Muhammadan trust of courage and honor?
Why did we allow wolves to wear the wool of Islam?
Why did we hand the banner to soothsayers with ornate turbans and magnificent titles
whose scholarship on “the Tradition” functionally serves at the pleasure of the Yazids of their age in its silent complicity?
There are even those who don sandala rings and teach the blessed Shama’il dare to tell us:
Detach.
Suffer in silence.
Do not resist.
Be patient.
Be quiet.
Keep the peace.
Do not cause fitna.
Unite no matter what.
As though the Prophet ﷺ came to teach a people, subjugated for over a 500 years now, to worship their chains and even enjoy the searing whips on their back.
No, the Prophet ﷺ I know would not be impressed with sidis and mawlanas like these.
This is not the Islam I know.
This is not the Islam of Muhammad ibn Abdullah.
The strings of his beloved children of Gaza’s kites have more honor, than the long beards of court scholars.
But in his characteristic kindness and mercy, he warned us of the dajallic danger of false scholars and hypocrites in our time. He did not hide or occult this warning for the fear of “compromising the ulama class.” For he knew them in his own time, too. After all, the two-faced prayed behind him. He knew them. He knew what their hearts concealed, and the Qur’an described them to warn us, that those who package the truth in the name of falsehood are doubly culpable than those who are outright, plainly wicked, for at least the latter have inner states that match their outer states. There is no hypocrisy there.
Because what kind of mercy protects the powerful from the cries of the oppressed?
What kind of Islam is gentle with killers and impatient with those who cry out against unjust killings?
What kind of Muhammadan love praises and sings qasidas to the Prophet in royal palaces while shaking hands with the devil outside the zawiya door?
That is not his mercy.
That is theater.
That is not Muhammadan.
It is not Muhammadan to become numb to evil.
It is not Muhammadan to make peace with the inhuman.
It is not Muhammadan not to wage war on the Epstein cabal.
It is not Muhammadan to stop weeping when the rivers of blood
course through of the minarets, when it is splattered across pages of the Qur’an and the veins of humanity.
It is not Muhammadan to say I love him while walking deliberately in the opposite direction.
Towards the ditch of deception.
Downward to the mirage of safety.
Toward wahn: that terrible, Gollum-like love of this world he said would be our pandemic at this time,
that sickness of the heart which a human being hysterical with delusional attachment, afraid to lose an inch of it.
No. The Prophet ﷺ I know came to wake us, to make us think critically. To be sharp in our discernment not sheep in our blind following. He came to shake us awake from the blind imitation and the idolatrous propaganda and fearmongering campaigns of our times. He came to tear the sleep from our eyes and came to teach the human being the secret behind our creation, our khilafa: to be truly human is to bow to the Only King, never to the devil, the ego, the dunya or human masters.
He came to erase idols from the sanctuary of the heart and the fossilized court of the scribes and pharisees of his time. He took on the idol of Kisra and Pharaoh and slaughtered the greater, most dangerous idol of all: that sheep that rests within the chests of weak, fickle men who fancy themselves as princes and allamas, who think they are owed unconditional respect for the absurd titles they invented or the ijazas they collect like trophies.
No, the Prophet ﷺ I know did not come to flatter our egos.
He came as al-Māḥī— the Effacer of Kufr and Nifaq. The one through whom God erases the traces of falsehood, self-deception, arrogance and tribalism. He came to teach captive souls hat death is the beginning, not the end, and that the dunya and its warden, fear, are its cage.
The Prophet ﷺ came as the second part of a testimony, a shahada, that starts with lā:
No.
No to fealty to the arrogance of a king.
No to the cruelty of a supremacist conquerer and desecrator.
No to Islam in name only, to secular, private, neoliberal religion.
No to chauvinism and hard-heartedness in the name of revelation.
No to mass psychosis that abornamlizes with the abnormal.
No to bowing down to Pharaoh or accepting the rule of Yazid.
No to idolatry with flag, tribe or identity.
No to a toothless existence that offers no deterrence to the merciless monsters.
No.
For the Prophet ﷺ all of creation knows deeply is alive in souls of his true heirs, and in the life of everyone who truly honors his legacy and walks his path.
The Prophet ﷺ I know carried mercy upon mercy.
And sometimes that blessed mercy looked like wrath.