This is the first khutbah (sermon) given from the new headquarters of The Usuli Institute. May God bless, protect, and accept this place in God’s service. May it always be an agent of goodness. May it be a place of service for the good of all Muslims and for the well-being of Islam until the Final Day. This new place was made possible by the donations of supporters of The Usuli Institute. May God bless all those who contributed to the founding of this place. May God reward them, reward their children, and reward the children of their children. May this place always be the podium of truth, the podium of transparency, the podium of courage and bravery. May it never be a podium of despotism and darkness, a podium of cowardliness and miserliness. May God accept.
I have said many times in the past that we must learn to accurately and morally read the present from a perspective anchored in taqwa (God-consciousness). We must be grounded in the full awareness of our presence before the Divine. We must have a full awareness of our accountability, our responsibility, and our covenant with God. Reading the present is a means of vesting oneself in the future. Reading the present with truth, transparency, and bravery is a means of shaping our future. And the converse is no less true. If you fail to read the present with the requisite bravery, transparency, and responsibility, then you will fail in the future. Reading the present is also reading the future, and misreading the present is also misreading the future. It is a dynamic as stable and real as the equations of mathematics the God has encoded in creation. It is delusional and an illogical impossibility to think we can accurately read the future without a brave, honest, and transparent reading of the present. It is, in fact, as I have said before, the height of dissociation.
At this moment, my mind goes to four scenes or moments of our present Muslim reality. Hence, these are also four telling insights into the possibilities of our future. All four scenes are interconnected. All are part of one and the same paradigm. It is a paradigm that has been ongoing, unhampered and uninterrupted since the advent of colonialism.
What scene do we start with? Let us start at home in the United States, for we recently had a telling event that unfolded right here. I am referring to the execution of Marcellus Williams. Pause for a moment. This was a man convicted over twenty years ago of murdering a White woman, Felicia Gayle. The story the authorities told at the time was that of a robbery gone wrong, a burglary in which the woman was stabbed several times. A Black man is accused of killing a White woman: the story is so redundant, so repeated that it becomes tedious. As often happens in these trials, there is great deal of pressure upon the young man to plead guilty to avoid the death sentence. He insists he is innocent, but he must confront the fact that, as a Black man accused of killing a White woman, with a near all-White jury, a conviction is a near certainty. So, he eventually agreed to plead “no contest.” This is something the U.S. Supreme Court has said is constitutional. It is a way of saying, “I will not admit guilt, but I concede that the state can convict me anyway.” Williams agreed to do this after reaching an agreement with the state to plead “no contest” in return for life in prison. A new Attorney General later challenged the agreement, scratching it completely, and insisted on Williams going to trial so he could get the death penalty.
As so often happens in these cases, the evidence against Williams was circumstantial. There was a jailhouse informant, a cellmate of Williams, who himself had a criminal record and wanted the reward of $10,000 for help that led to a conviction. This informant told the state that Williams admitted to the crime. Williams at the time had a girlfriend who also gave incriminating evidence testimony – not physical evidence, just testimony – against Williams. It was their testimonies that largely led to Williams’ conviction, and a mainly White jury handed Williams a death sentence. It was a White jury because the prosecutor had struck out all Black jurors except one, so it was eleven White people and one Black man who convicted Williams and handed him the death sentence.
Over twenty years go by, and over the course of these years, as is typical in these cases, both witnesses who testified against Williams pass away. When the murder weapon is tested, Williams’ DNA is not found on the weapon. Not only this, but the knife used in the murder has been mishandled by the laboratory. It is contaminated. The DNA of the prosecutor and the DNA of a lab worker is found on the knife, but Williams’ DNA is not found. There is also a bloody shoe print found at the scene of the murder that does not belong to Williams. There are serious doubts about the culpability of Williams, who always maintained his innocence, to the extent that something very unusual happened in this case. The prosecutor who originally prosecuted Williams later joined his appeal asking for a retrial or a commuting of the death sentence to a life sentence. It is highly unusual for prosecutors to take that step. The family of the victim did not want Williams to be executed. Nevertheless, despite all the doubts about his culpability, and despite the fact the trial was racially contaminated because all Black jurors except one were excluded, both the U.S. Supreme Court and Missouri Supreme Court refused to commute the death sentence or to grant a new trial.
During his twenty years in prison, Williams converted to Islam and became a devout Muslim. In fact, he became an Imam in the prison, and during these twenty years – this is critically important – Williams became a force for good. There is ample evidence that he was active and diligent in guiding his fellow inmates, getting them to abandon their lives of crime, to change their ways, to switch completely from being drug dealers and murderers to totally new human beings. If you know anything about the Williams case, you know that thousands of people appealed to the Governor of Missouri to commute the death sentence because of doubts about his culpability, the problems marring his trial, or because Williams himself became a transformed human being. Thousands of people pleaded, but the Governor did not heed any of these calls.
This continued until this past week, when Marcellus Williams was executed.
What does this scene tell us? It is a stark reminder of racism. Racism in the United States, in our modern history, and indeed in the entire experience of colonial modernity. If you are a dark-skinned person accused of murdering a White person, your chances of receiving the death sentence are many times higher than if you are a White person accused of murdering a Black person. Over two thousand people are currently on death row in the U.S., and the statistics bear out what I am saying. We do not, in fact, have many cases at all of a White person receiving a death sentence for murdering a Black person.
As I followed the Williams case, I was reminded of my time living in Texas when George Bush was Governor. This was years before he became President Bush. I remember the case of a person on death row. The entire civic discourse at the time centered around how this person has found Jesus and become a devout Christian and even a reverend in prison, helping to guide many inmates in prison. It was a White person, and Governor Bush ended up commuting the sentence. He conceded that it was a very unusual step, but he still commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment.
It makes me wonder. In addition to the racism, what about the religious element? What if Williams had become a devout Christian, not a devout Muslim? Why did the same authorities that repeatedly looked into his case give hardly any attention to the fact that Williams had become a changed man in prison? Why did they not look into his actual record of what we, in Islam, call “reform” (islah)? Since becoming an Imam, Williams’ record of guiding fellow inmates was clear and well-documented. But the Governor of Missouri waved it all away with hardly a mention that the state was executing not just a man who may have been innocent, but an entirely changed human being altogether.
Any attempt to understand the death sentence and death penalty in the U.S. without considering the role of race in such executions is mere fantasy and delusion. What, then, do we get from this scene? We see the role of race in murder, the role of race in the rule of law, and the role of race in the Western and particularly the American experience.
Let us now turn to the second scene. Immediately before this khutbah began, Israel dropped a 2000-ton bomb on a civilian neighborhood in Lebanon. Israel has once again unleashed an unrestrained and indiscriminate, even unhinged, attack on a sovereign nation. Israel also struck against Syria, but Israel strikes against Syria and kills Syrians so often these days that no one even notices it anymore. The strike against Syria in Damascus reportedly killed five Syrian soldiers, and the strike against Lebanon reportedly included a 2000-ton bomb dropped on a neighborhood in Beirut. Israel says that it was attempting to assassinate Hassan Nasrallah. The bomb exploded in a civilian neighborhood, razing at least six buildings in addition to the many other civilian buildings that have been damaged. The death toll is currently unknown.
It is the same old story. Israel says it is going after what it considers to be legitimate targets, whether Nasrallah or other members of Hezbollah. Israel itself does not contest that it was a civilian neighborhood, but Israel claims that under the civilian buildings there is a Hezbollah bunker in which members Hezbollah were meeting. As in Gaza, Israel has a free hand to kill as many civilians as it wishes to achieve whatever objective it declares. And there is no mechanism to hold Israel accountable or to question Israel about its unilateral judgment that it will go after its targets whenever it wishes, wherever it wishes, and by whatever means it wishes. Israel does not accept accountability before the UN or any other agency, including an organ like the International Criminal Court. Israel considers any interference in its unilateral decision-making process to be illegitimate. Israel tells the world, in effect, “We do what we want, when we want, and don’t you dare question us.” The U.S., in fact, gave Israel another $8 billion one day before Netanyahu authorized this bombing. Israel is never worried about depleting its arsenal because the 2000-ton bomb it dropped on Beirut came from the U.S., the same state that executed Williams. There
is an ongoing genocide in Gaza, but the U.S. continues to give Israel a complete carte blanche. The message from the U.S. is clear: “We will give you as many bombs as you want; if your economy is in trouble because of the war, we will take from the pockets of our own taxpayers and give you money without restraint; we are not troubled by how many civilians, including women and children, are killed in the process of pursuing the bad guys.” Whether the “bad guys” are Hamas or Hezbollah, Al Qaeda or the Iraqi resistance, what they have is common is that the “bad guys” are always faceless, dark-skinned human beings.
The dark-skinned human being cries, and their cries are not heard. The dark-skinned human being speaks, but their speaking sounds as if they are speaking in tongues, a bunch of noise hardly worthy of discernment and careful listening. In the same way that the particulars of the Williams case fell on deaf ears, the particulars of the Lebanese and the Palestinians, as they narrate their own suffering and their pain and their loss, matters very little. We are accustomed to killing the dark-skinned human being without paying too much attention to the reality of their suffering.
We have said that reading the present is a means of shaping the future. It is important, as we reflect upon this moment, that we do not just notice the racism. We must also notice some other things. Some Muslims, unfortunately, are willing to look the other way when it comes to the bombing of Beirut because of the specter, the ghost, the “monster” of Shi‘ism. Let us not forget that Israel still occupies Lebanese land. The U.S. considers Hezbollah to be a terrorist organization, but according to international law, Hezbollah has a right to fight to liberate its occupied territory. And it is a fact that Israel occupies Lebanese territory. But the sad fact is that some Muslims have learned to divide and separate from within and see Israel as somehow doing them a favor by killing Shi‘is. These are the same people who, for over a year, derided Hezbollah’s actions against Israel as an “act,” even claiming that Iran and Hezbollah are “allied” with Israel. Now that Israel is slaughtering these very people, however, the narrative has switched completely. It is no longer a theater narrative. The response is now to just look the other way.
What evil does this point to? Racism plus sectarianism.
There is another painful reality that often goes unnoticed. The logic of Israel and the U.S. is that Hezbollah has no right to come to the aid of Palestinians because Israel’s war with the Palestinians does not involve the Lebanese. According to this logic, Iraqis, Iranians, and Yemenis have no business coming to the aid of Palestinians. And if they try, Israel and the U.S. have the right to slaughter them. But think about it. We all know, when it comes to the White man, that an attack against one is an attack against all. None of us ever doubted the right of America to come to the aid of the British in World War II. None of us doubted the right of the British to come to the aid of the U.S. in Iraq, even though the U.S. was an aggressor. For the White man, an attack against one is an attack against all. For Muslims and dark-skinned people, however, we return to a colonial dynamic in which the U.S. makes peace with one tribe, oppresses another tribe, massacres a third tribe, all the while the Native Americans never have the right to act collectively as one consciousness. So, White people have a right to act collectively as one consciousness,
but the colonized never enjoy the same right. It is, by definition, illegitimate.
What illness does this point to? It is the ailment and delusion of nationalism.
Sadly, in the same way that Muslims did not wake up to the illnesses of racism and sectarianism, we also embraced the illness of nationalism. The result is that we today find Saudis speaking as Saudis and Egyptians speaking as Egyptians. You can attack Gaza and Egypt says, "It does not affect me." You can attack Lebanon and Jordan says, "It does not affect me."
Consider how Netanyahu recently gave an extremely telling speech at the UN. This was just before he took the decision to obliterate hundreds of Lebanese civilians in a strike on a civilian neighborhood. If Hezbollah did this, of course, claiming that it was targeting Israeli military officials, it would be called terrorism. But when Israel does it, the U.S. supplies them with weapons and money. Standing in the UN, Netanyahu said there is an “Axis of Evil” and an “Axis of Good” in the Middle East. He said the latter are the countries that signed the Abrahamic Accords and became a part of the “Axis of Abraham.” This is extremely important. Not only has our nationalism and our sense of collective consciousness been colonized and co-opted by the White man, but so too has our faith. The White man first decided that the al-Aqsa Mosque is not ours and that the Hijaz belonged to the Saudi family. Now the White man has decided that we, as Muslims, cannot share in a collective sense of consciousness. No, we can either belong to the “Axis of Good,” according to Netanyahu, or we can deny that and belong to the “Axis of Evil.” If we choose the latter, however, then we can also be killed without restraint.
Racism, sectarianism, and nationalism are all deadly sins.
The next scene is particularly painful. Many of us know that over one thousand three hundred Muslim pilgrims died during this year’s hajj because of heat, exhaustion, and thirst. Yet Muslims have no right, whether through the UN or some other means, to transparency or accountability. Think of all the previous incidents in which hajj pilgrims have died en masse. In 2015, over two thousand pilgrims died in a stampede, and there was no investigation, no transparency, and no questions. There was only the autocratic, despotic narrative of the Saudi state that effectively blamed the pilgrims for their own deaths.
Here we are again. The Saudi state allows over one thousand three hundred – a conservative estimate – to die from heat and thirst, but it takes zero responsibility and even says it is the pilgrims' fault for coming without authorization. This time, however, Saudi Arabia went beyond even this arrogant dismissal. I could not believe what Saudi Arabia did next. When I saw it, I felt the sense of sanity and reason leaving me. The Saudis published a list of people who, the Saudi government claims, are the “murderers” of the pilgrims. They even published “Wanted” posters. Who are these people? The list includes Emad Al-Moubayed, Omar al-Zahrani, Salama Abdelkawi, Saeed Al-Ghamdi, Fouad Kawthar, Abdullah al-Ouda, Abdul-Hayy Yusuf, Nasser Awad al-Qarni, Sheikh Muhammad al-Saghir, and some others.
Abdullah al-Ouda is the son of Salman al-Ouda, the famous religious scholar who still languishes is a
Saudi prison. He is based at Georgetown University in the U.S. Omar al-Zahrani is a Saudi activist, an
intellectual based in Canada who campaigns for democracy and civil rights and is a critic of Saudi
despotism. Salama Abdelkawi and Mohammed al-Saghir are critics of despotism and autocracy in the
Middle East, especially against the Egyptian government, not even the Saudi government. The Saudi
Arabian government blamed these people for the pilgrims’ deaths.
This is the same government that murdered a famous journalist in its consulate in Istanbul. His body was
disintegrated and to this day has not been found. This same government now tells us that Muslims have
no right to hold it responsible for one thousand three hundred pilgrim deaths from heat and thirst. This
same government even declares that those who criticize it are, somehow, directly or indirectly,
responsible for the pilgrims’ deaths. Why? According to official Saudi sources, they encourage people not
to follow Saudi regulations and laws.
The DNA of the Black man is not found on the murder weapon, and there is a bloody footprint that does
not belong to him. But Marcellus Williams is still declared guilty and sentenced to death by a largely
White jury. The dark-skinned man in Lebanon and Gaza is murdered at will, and no one can hold Israel or
the U.S. accountable. There is no right to a narrative of truth. Yes, the entire world saw these pilgrims die
from heat and thirst, but who is responsible? It is whoever the Saudi government says are responsible – an
entirely new understanding of criminal culpability. Critics of the Saudi government are now somehow
responsible for the deaths of pilgrims. No investigation, no fact-finding mission, nothing. It is simply
whatever the Saudis say.
What ailment does this point to? Despotism and autocracy.
This brings us to the final scene. I mentioned in my previous khutbah the case of Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, a Turkish-American woman killed while protesting illegal settlements in Palestinian lands. She was shot in the head by the Israelis. She is a U.S. citizen, but because she is of Turkish origin, the U.S. will ask Israel no questions. Her blood can be spilt, just like the blood of Marcellus Williams in Missouri, the blood of the people in Gaza and Lebanon, and the blood of pilgrims in Saudi Arabia. You have no right to ask any questions. You have no right to hold anyone accountable. You have no right to any type of investigation. Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi came from the wrong ethnic background, so the U.S. will ask no questions, and no other Muslim – no Egyptian, Palestinian, Jordanian, or Indonesian – can advocate for her or defend her rights, because Muslims do not have a right to solidarity. This is the way the colonizer defines what nationalism, racism, and sectarianism means to us.
We read the present to make the future. Some may hear this and ask, “How is any of this helpful? Someone is executed in Missouri. People are killed en masse in Lebanon and Gaza. Pilgrims are killed in Saudi and democratic advocates are blamed. A Turkish-U.S. citizen is shot dead in Palestine by Israeli forces. You are just reminding us of our vulnerabilities" But I dare tell you, on the occasion of the first khutbah at the new headquarters of The Usuli Institute, that that is nonsense. Ask yourself: what is your responsibility in the face of this reality? What do you think God will ask of you? I can tell you, in my view, what God will ask you: "Have you become the best you could be? Have you truly excelled in serving and supporting those who speak the truth?" If this voice is silenced, where will you hear this truth? Where will you hear the voice that says it is an individual obligation upon Muslims in the U.S. to gain power to then leverage that power to prevent our government from executing a Black man unfairly and unjustly, from affirming and furthering sectarianism in the Muslim world, from preventing Muslims from developing a collective consciousness and moral awareness. The type of power that would deny Israel the 2000-ton bomb. The type of power that would tell Netanyahu that his “Axis of Evil” and “Axis of Abraham” talk is nonsense. The type of power that tells him, "How dare you come to the UN when you have just made a decision to slaughter Muslims without restraint?" The type of power that says, "No, we are not going to fund your genocide."
This brings us to the fifth and final ailment. After racism, sectarianism, nationalism, and despotism, what is the final ailment? It is cowardice and miserliness.
You cannot have that type of power without spending. It is a logical impossibility. Do not expect authoritarian dictatorships, like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, to do the spending for you. All the Muslims who look to the UAE and Saudi Arabia for money are betraying the cause. It can only come from private individuals. But rich Muslims, truly rich Muslims, are cowards. They spend money only on what is safe. They spend money only on things like Muslim conferences in which they meet with each other, joke, laugh, share a bunch of rhetoric, and then all go home.
On the occasion of the first khutbah at the new headquarters of The Usuli Institute, I invite all rich Muslims who wish to break the disease of cowardliness and miserliness to support this pulpit, to support this voice, to make sure that it is never silenced. To make sure, in fact, that it spreads and grows.