Summary: CONTRADICTING COMMUNITY<br> <br> Alhamdulillah, assalatu wassalamu ala rasulillah summa amma ba’ad. i didn’t share a title because this was not gonna be a lecture, it was gonna be a rant Insha-Allah. And it was gonna be a rant about a frustration I’ve been feeling for a long time that I want to share with you and hopefully I want you to feel it with me, if you don’t already ok? Alhamdulillah summa Alhamdulillah I’ve gotten the chance to get intimately close to good number of communities all over the country and I’ve noticed a serious contradiction. You have a town like Houston and you have Muslims spending , you know, almost three weeks studying Islam day and night in one part of it and not too far from here maybe within a one mile radius you have Muslims doing things I can’t say here. And it’s the majority. You have masajid where people are coming for Jumma’ prayer and they have some serious, serious problems like when I say serious problems I’m not just talking about theological issues that are serious, I’m not just talking about issues of ignorance in terms of knowledge, that’s serious too. I’m talking about serious psychological problems, serious family problems, drug, alcohol, you name it. They’re coming to Friday prayer and the one place that’s supposed to give them solutions, guess what? It’s not. We’re going across the country and SubhanAllah it’s a gift of Allah that we- masajid have now become a part of the American landscape. Masajid are incredible. You’ve got large multi million properties, I mean we’re huge. We’re huge and SubhanAllah how we’ve been able to raise those funds because usually, the masjids and the world landscape they’re government funded projects or they’re public projects. These are privately funded institutions that are being built all over this country and yet these same masjids are not equipped, nor nearly equipped for the most part to deal with some of the most basic problems of the Muslim community. I’m going to share this problem with you at three levels. First I’ll just talk about the youth, just the youth. There’s the you kind of youth, you know what that means? They’re somehow identified as religious, they’re attending religious programs, they’re learning in whatever capacity, they’re attending some sort of a ‘Halaqa’, they have some sort of relationship with an Imam or two, right? They’re watching videos on You-Tube, downloading mp3’s off the internet, reading articles, books, this and that, you know, blogging on like, you know, religious websites, asking fatwah questions, that sort of thing. Religious youth.<br> On the other end of the spectrum you have the messed up youth. Who are these guys? These guys are Muslim too, which you wouldn’t know. You would not know. And the things which you say Astaghfirullah to, the things that you pass by and say ‘La hawla wala quwwata illa billah’ that’s nothing for them. That’s just the beginning. They are up to some really bad stuff. Really bad. And it’s so bad that if I sit and, we’ve actually done this in Virginia when I was there, sit down with a couple of Imams and you explain to them what the youth are doing, you take a couple of messed up youth that you can talk to, you bring them over and you say, ‘why don’t you, Me. Messed up youth, tell Mr. Imam here, what you guys are up to?’. And the Imam refuses to believe it. ‘No, come on, that’s—no, that’s impossible. Does that even exist?’<br> Yup! That exists. It’s a scary reality. That is the messed up youth. And then there’s the middle youth. You know who they are? They used to be party animals and they somehow accidentally stumbled upon an MSA? Or accidentally clicked on a You-Tube video? Or they- one of their friends became religious or something? And so they’re kinda, sorta inclined? Maybe they’ll put on hijab sometime. Maybe they’ll let it grow for a couple of days, right? But then they’ll sometimes drift back, then they get pulled here, they’re sort of in the middle.
