In the name of Allah, and praises and peace be upon the Prophet of Allah. I advise us all to fear Allah, and to be conscious of his omniscience, for whoever does so, Allah will provide for him a way out of trouble. There is no God but Allah the Kind and Merciful, and thanks be to Allah, the lord of the Great Throne. We ask that you bring upon us your mercy and the doors of your forgiveness, and protection from our own sins, and forgiveness of our minor transgressions. Assalamu Alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. May the peace, blessings and mercy of Allah be upon you all. As Soadad explained, Islam is something that is visionary; something that has and we are promised by Allah, will, make the world the best possible place it can be for all of humanity. As the Qur'an says:
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You are indeed the best from among the peoples, ordering what is right and forbidding what is evil. Surah 3 Verse 110But the first step in reestablishing Islam is that you have to want Islam to be in this position and you have to do your part to bring it around. As the verse says, Allah will not change a situation until the people change themselves. Surah 13 Verse 11
So, Soadad has made you see why changing yourself is so important. Now we come to the crux of the question. We now know whatyou want to change - we want to be better Muslims; we want to be part of that solution of the world's problems. So now we ask the question ... how?
Now there's a lot of things that have to happen before we can establish the Muslims ummah. But if we look at the history of the Prophet (SAWS), what do we find? We find that he spent 13 years in Makkah, developing people's Iman, people's belief, with not many rules - most of the Islamic Law comes from the Madinan period; the last ten years of the Prophet's life.
So why'd he spend so much time on establishing faith? I mean as far as many people, what's so tricky about Iman. We all know the Shahadah, but do we understand its ramifications? I really don't think so. We don't understand that the Shahadah has very serious implications for our life.
Now I could give a whole seminar about the implications of the Shahadah, but I'll leave that for another time. I just want to talk about one aspect of Iman, and that is the idea of an Islamic mindset. It is this that I think the Prophet (SAWS) was trying to establish.
A mindset is about the way you see the world, and what you see your role in the world as being. It's a modern word, but it's a very old concept. One hadith Qudsi (a hadith in which Allah speaks to the Prophet [saws]) says in part of it:
When I love [my servant] I am his hearing with which he hears, his seeing with which he sees, his hand with which he strikes and his foot with which he walks.
That's what we want Islam to be for us. We want it to be the way we see the world. You know how we describe someone who has a naive view of the world as wearing ``rose-coloured glasses''. Well, what I want us all to have is ``green-coloured glasses'' - we always want to see the world through Islamic eyes. But I can't do this for you. You've got to do this for yourself. But as another hadith says, if you walk towards Allah, he comes running towards you.
The basis of the Islamic mindset is, of course, the Shahadah. But part of the shahadah is believing in Allah and his Messenger, and of course, the Qur'an. It also means that you believe the Qur'an is the ultimate guide to living on this planet. And this means that the belief has effects, it must be reflected through obedience.
This shouldn't be too hard, should it? I mean we know that Islam is part of the fitra, our nature as human beings. Yet most of us don't have and Islamic mindset. Why is that?
The answer is that you can still change someone's mindset, especially if you control them when they are young. And if you live in a Western country, like Australia, then their system will not be designed to give you an Islamic mindset; it will be designed to give you a Western mindset; to appreciate their system. I mean it's not surprising, is it?
So how do they modify our Islamic mindset? The main ways are through the education system, through the media, especially television. And they do it in two main ways: One is through putting down Islam, which makes Muslims not proud to be Muslim. In fact it makes them ashamed to be Muslims, and they're always on the back foot, defending themselves. The other is by introducing their own mindset that is the opposite of that which Islam teaches. What's more they do it in a very subtle and tricky way.
So let's look at the first way they stuff you around and twist your mind. They make you feel inferior by being Muslim. They don't want you to acknowledge Islam's beauty and history. I'll give you some examples:
When I was in high school, which believe it or not, was only 10 years ago, we did ancient history (6000BC to about 100CE) and then we did modern history (1500CE to the current time). Who can see the problem here? Where'd they hide 1400 years? I spent 4 years studying history at school. How much time did we spend on those 1400 years that represent about one fifth of humanity's recorded history? Two lessons. And you know what those lessons were? My teacher actually said ``Well, the reason the Muslims ruled the world at that time was that everybody else was weak''. And then what do they do? They start the history of the modern world talking about the renaissance and give you some fiction about the renaissance being based on the Medici family sponsoring art; when the truth is that any historian will tell you that the European renaissance was largely a result of the Islamic writing and Muslims preserving European books which they themselves had destroyed.
They don't teach you how brutal Europe was. They don't teach you about the Spanish Inquisition. They don't tell you about how nasty the crusades were and how the so-called ``civilised world'' used to act.
They don't teach you that much of the mathematics we need today to design computers and build cars and even our number system, came from the Muslims.
They don't teach you that the Muslims had a glorious history, when the world was at peace for centuries - a period of justice, even for non-Muslims; when some Christians preferred to be under the control of Muslims than to be at the mercy of other Christians. They don't teach you that we advanced knowledge in every field of knowledge of the time, from philosophy to astronomy to architecture and everything in between. They don't teach you that YOU as a Muslim are the heir to this wonderful civilisation. They don't teach you about the brutality of colonialism and the incredibly barbarous things the Europeans did to our home countries, to the Muslim world, using their old favourite: divide and conquer; and that the current decrepitude and poverty in our home countries is the result of them raping our countries for all the resources they could possibly extract.
They teach you evolution as if it's some kind of law; not acknowledging that evolution has serious flaws and isn't even a well-formed scientific theory. They don't teach you what every scientist knows: that science is just a set of ``working hypotheses'', that there's no such thing as Newton's Laws.
They don't teach you that Islam provided a stable economic system without having to use interest; and that in fact, the market instabilities we see around us today are caused mostly by interest and interest-related phenomena.
But the information is all there. Even their historians know this. You read their histories and it's there. They just don't teach it to you.
So what? The result is that you feel as if being Muslim is something to be ashamed of, instead of something to be proud of. You're too busy overcoming your sense of shame and explaining how Islam isn't what they say it is to see that Islam is better than what they have.
And the media is no different. They just create these images of Islam as some sort of evil. Three years ago, I did a survey about the press media and Islam. And it was disgusting. 30 articles. 26 were about war. And the things they said about people associated with Islam; it was just incredible. There is far more to the Muslim world than this. And if you watch television, they play similar tricks. But they do it dirty; they do it by association. For example, they'll discuss daughters who get bashed by their fathers because they didn't accept an arranged marriage (something which in Islam we know is completely unacceptable). And they won't say anything explicitly about Islam - they won't mention it. What they do is they'll put someone making Athan in the background, put up some pictures of women wearing the veil, put a picture of a mosque. They don't actually tell you that it's got nothing to do with Islam; but they're intent on associating it with Islam anyway. As they say ``Never let the facts stand in the way of a good story.'' See, the problem is that we don't understand what effect television has on us. Psychologists who have done research in this area will tell you that even though we all know consciously that television is just this electronic gizmo, but that at a deeper level, television is real to us. I mean have you ever sat back and though about how stupid it is that after seeing a scary movie you tell yourself ``It's only a movie''. I mean, well, duh, you obviously know it's only a movie! So why are you saying that? Do you understand now why some scholars are so adamant about TV? That they tell you to switch off the television? I mean you should at least be a little selective.
Again, in addition to what they do tell you, there's a lot they don't tell you, too. Remember the furore over Pakistan having nuclear weapons? Well, do you know that there was a meeting a few weeks before, where India and Pakistan were both saying to the US and other countries that already have nuclear weapons that they were ready to cut a deal on nuclear weapons if the US would cut its own stock? And the US just vetoed it. As one commentator said, what the US is actually saying is: Nuclear weapons in our hands contributes to global security, nuclear weapons in your brown Indian hands, or Pakistani hands contributes to global insecurity. This is hypocritical at best, racist at worst. Let me emphasise I am not making a statement about whether what Pakistan is doing is wrong or right; I am just saying that look at how we only get the information they want us to have. And you know what? A few weeks ago the US Dept of Energy commissioned the world's largest supercomputer. You know what they're going to use it for, right? They're going to use it for nuclear simulations! The thing is the US has enough data from real tests to make good simulations while other countries can't.
Same thing with Iraq. They don't tell you that over 600,000 children have died as a result of UN-imposed sanctions. Again, all the information is there, and if you look for it, you can find it. But it's not publicised. Nobody tells you about it.
Instead, what do they teach you? Well, they do teach you a lot of useful stuff, no doubt about it. But they also teach you some things which are essentially against Islamic teaching. I will highlight three of these. Now, as far as I can see, these are three of the pillars of Western Society. The problem is that these three are Great Lies.
The First Great Lie is that if a majority of people say something is right, then it is right. This Lie is called democracy. And we know that this isn't the case. But they don't really emphasise the effects. They don't tell you that the Nazi Party was the most popular party in the 1933 elections in Germany. They don't tell you that this means something that used to be wrong can become right. Now, in Islam, we know that people can be misled, and that truth is independant of numbers. Truth comes from Allah. One of his names is Truth. So when we build an Islamic state, the starting point is not something invented by man, be it capitalism, communism or whatever, but something from God. Instead, they promote this idea that democracy is the ultimate way to lead and anything that isn't democracy is just plain wrong. There, I said it. Some of you in the audience are going no! but Islam is democratic! You see? You already see democracy as the ultimate form of leadership. You can see it's worked on you! The other thing they don't tell you is that because it's a few rich people who own the media, and control the agenda, that democracy very soon becomes the rich ruling the poor. And they also teach you that religion should have no role in government, when Islam says the complete opposite! As if believing in God doesn't affect how you think a country should be run. In an Islamic state, people have input in the decision-making process, but they can't change the laws.
The Second Great Lie is that satisfaction is only to be had by having material things. This Lie is called materialism. And this one is also a whopper. They don't tell you that scientific research of 30,000 people shows that material wealth is a very, very poor predictor of happiness. They don't tell you that the richest people frequently have the most serious psychological problems and end up dead by suicide, or overdosed on drugs that they took to forget how bad their life was. Instead, you watch the daytime TV shows and what do people on those TV shows do when they're depressed? They go shopping. As if shopping is the ultimate solution to depression! And they do it to kids too. Every cartoon now comes out with a set of merchandise. It's not the Saturday Morning Cartoons any more, it's the Saturday Morning Ads. It's ads within ads. Man, have you seen some of them? Like the new one for shampoo: they say, it's not a shampoo, it's a lifestyle or something like that. Yeah right! Like a shampoo's going to change your life! Or the ads for the new Jeep Cherokee, you seen them? Where the woman gets out of the car and shuts the other woman's mouth? What are they saying? They're saying ``if you own a Jeep, you can impress other women''. Or the TV shows: Better Homes and Gardens, you too can have houses like the rich and famous. We watch TV without thinking what are they really telling us? What does Islam tell us? Islam tells us that, sure, you need some basic material things to survive. But people will never be satisfied with material things, you always want more. And true satisfaction, true peace, true Islam, can only be obtained by making ourselves subservient to the will of Allah.
One thing I haven't figured out yet is why you guys are wearing your fila and your adidas and your nike t-shirts. Why do you buy them? Do you really think Nike shirts are better quality? They're made in Indonesia, just like the rest of them. Yet you pay what, three times as much? For what? You're buying their advertising not the t-shirt!
Why? I asked one of my friends who used to wear shirts like that and he had the honesty to tell me it's for showing off, so you can be accepted by your peers. Fine! Then explain this to me. You're showing off your clothes, but you don't want to show off Islam, when Islam is from Allah, someone who loves you and cares for you; and your T-shirt is from nike, a company who want nothing more than your money? I would really appreciate it if someone, during question time, could explain to me, give me a good reason, why they are wearing a nike t-shirt. I won't rip into you, I promise. I just want to understand why!
The Third Great Lie, and the one that seems to be becoming very strong right now, is that if everybody acts as greedily as they possibly can, then this thing called the market makes sure that everyone gets the best deal possible. This is called Capitalism, or increasingly, Economic Rationalism. It's like the first thing they teach you in economics, about Adam Smith and the ``invisible hand''. What a complete load of nonsense. It's been proven wrong time and time again. They don't tell you about how because of the overemphasis on the market, the difference between the poor and the rich is becoming bigger and bigger. They don't tell you that big international banks tried to wipe out the Australian economy a few weeks ago with a multi-billion dollar attempt to deflate our currency so that they could make a quick buck. They don't tell you that interest is the mechanism used by the first world to keep the third world in debt and that Pakistan pays US$500 million a month in interest alone on its debts. That the IMF won't dismiss the debts of Honduras and Nicaragua, despite Hurricane Mitch; and this means they will be in a debt hole forever, they won't ever be able to get out of. They don't tell you that because rich companies donate to political parties, the environment will be stuffed for the foreseeable future. And what does Islam tell us? It tells us that unconstrained greed leads to destruction of the world. That interest is bad. That hoarding to create a monopoly is not permitted. That deception is not permitted. That we have a responsibility to this planet; that we are its caretakers.
So what we have is a society that stuffs the Muslim around in two ways. First it makes him ashamed to be Muslim. Then it takes his Islamic mindset away and replaces it not with nothing (which is what the people in the West claim it to be), but with something that is the complete opposite of Islam in many, many ways.
How on earth do we fix this problem? I mean we've all been affected by it. Well, the first thing is that you have to learn about the Islamic mindset. And there are lots of ways you can do this. There are now at leat three lessons in English that occur regularly around the place for men and women, young and old. If you don't like going to lessons, fine, there are books. There's also a lot of stuff on the Web. There's too much stuff on the Web. The question isn't where, but which?
Then once you know about Islam, you have to re-evaluate everything you already know. You have to always be thinking: what does Islam say about this? Even when you're at school, or uni, or work and especially when you are watching television, you should always have this Islamic filter in place and be thinking: is this idea in line with Islam or not?
We should never just accept some fact about society or truth because the course or the degree or the television says so. We should always be questioning; never accepting things blindly.
Second thing is to spread this around - to both non-Muslims and Muslims. Make them see that things are not always what they seem and that you have to realise that Western Society today is a network of vested interests. You have governments local and international, media, education, the military and industry. When it serves their interests, they won't tell you the the truth.
Finally, I think that we, as second generation Australians, have a special role to play. Now, I'm going to say something that may offend some older members of the audience, but that is not my intention, and I welcome discussion during Q & A. Most of our parents did not go through high school in Australia, right? So they don't understand the process about how we got indoctrinated. They don't understand how we get twisted and what the average Australian goes through. That means that we have a better understanding of what it means to have been brought up Australian than our parents do. So they didn't understand what they had to provide for us to stop us being indoctrinated and affected.
But what about you? What about when you have kids? What about your smaller brothers and sisters? Are you going to let the same thing that happened to you happen to them? You have a responsibility to ensure that your kids don't end up like you did. If you want to improve the Muslim Ummah, then one place to start is with you, your friends, your brothers and sisters, and when you get to it, your children. You know what the Prophet said when he was ordered to make the revelation public? He gathered the people and asked them: If I was to warn you that over that very hill comes an army that's going to try to take over Makkah, would you believe me? And they said yes! And the prophet said in the same way: I warn you of Allah and the last day.
And it should be the same for us. The same way if your friend or your brother if a car was coming towards him, you'd warn him, that's the way it should be with your Islam and your mindset. If you really care about him or her; you'll try to save them. That's the correct view of it. If you don't do it, then you're not being a true friend or brother or son to them.
But it also means that we have another responsibility. You see, anyone who looks, who reads, who pays attention and applies the Islamic filter - those ``green-coloured glasses'' can see that Western Society is falling to pieces. The idea that I said earlier about the three great lies: I'm not the first person to see these problems - Western intellectuals have been discussing the problems for a long time. All three issues are being discussed right now, but it looks like all three are on a downhill slide, and the West doesn't seem to have anything to slow down these society-breaking developments. So we've got to be here to offer them the right alternative, that is Islam. How many more years do you think Western Society will survive before collapsing? 30 years? 40 years? If it's lucky. I'm telling you now, that there is very little doubt in my mind that within our lifetimes, something is going to happen. And we have to be ready to fulfill our Islamic responsibilities when that happens.
So, in conclusion, the take-home message - the thing I want you to remember from this talk. What we have to do to ourselves is very difficult. We have to undo all the damage that was done to us as children. The damage is done through two main agencies: education and media. These two agencies affect us by firstly destroying our pride in Islam and secondly by replacing the Islamic mindset with the Western mindset, which is built on three lies: Democracy & Secularism, Materialism and Capitalism.
And the only way to fix this is through firstly educating ourselves and secondly always analysing what we see. In addition, for the future, we have to make sure our children, friends and brothers and sisters don't fall in the same trap. And we should always be ready to be called upon by Islam; and I suspect that in the newar future we will be called upon to make a major sacrifice for the sake of Allah.
Thank you, and if you have any questions, I'd appreciate hearing them from you. I also don't mind discussing this sort of stuff with any of you in private after the conference if you have any comments; if you feel I offended you, tell me so I don't do it again.
Wassalamu Alaikum.
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Bagchi said that he will have to confirm with the ratified list if India has an extradition treaty with Oman or not.
