Introduction and the Principle of Questioning Hadith

Praise be to God. There is no other God except God.

I want to connect I want to talk about today to the last Friday Sermon (An Alternative Approach to Dealing with Hadith). What we concluded in the last Friday sermon is that if someone brings us information from the Quran, we should not ask why that rule in the Quran is so. But if someone is bringing us information from hadith or any other human being, then we are allowed to ask why. If they say this rule should be like this, then we ask : “Why is that rule in such a way? What’s the reason behind it?” .There is other ways to deal with hadith, we spoke about them, but this is an alternative way. This is one of the ways, it does not have to be like this every time.

I want to use this principle and apply it to one of the hadiths which is quite well known. It’s the hadith based on which the Sunnis and the Shia (especially the Sunnis), have reached some conclusion that there are three «sacred» mosques, depending on how they express it. Some of them will actually just say it like this, but some of them will express it a little bit differently. But the basic idea according to them is that there are «sacred» mosques :

• The one in Mecca, the sacred masjid.
• The other one is in Medina, according to them.
• The other one is Masjid al-Aqsa, the one in Jerusalem.

And according to them : «All three of these are sacred, and and that’s a good thing to do some sort of pilgrimage in all three of them.»

By the way, this is not even a hadith. his is their conclusion based on a hadith. But let me talk about the hadith about what they call the three mosques.

The Hadith of the Three Mosques and Asking “Why”

The hadith doesn’t say anything about the «sacred» mosques, but the hadith goes more specifically this : that Muhammad said, according to them, that no one should ever travel (he meant overnight or long-distance travel, not just walking five miles or so) to any mosque of the world except to three mosques, and he mentioned the three mosques according to the hadith, which is the mosque in Mecca, the mosque in Medina, and the mosque in Jerusalem. So only to these three mosques is someone allowed to go and visit them through traveling. If you’re already in other mosques, let’s say if you’re in Istanbul already, you can go to another mosque (if it’s allowed of course) but you shouldn’t travel overnight or have a long travel just to go and visit it. So this is kind of the general rule in the hadith, that we shouldn’t travel to other mosques except those three.

And what’s our approach towards this hadith?

All we have to do is ask why. Why are we not allowed to travel to other mosques, but we are allowed to travel to these three mosques according to the hadith? The Muslim scholars cannot tell you why. They can tell you about the sacred mosque in Mecca, which is in the Quran because the Quran says so and God says so; that’s a good answer. But the Quran doesn’t mention the Medina mosque, and the Quran doesn’t mention the Jerusalem mosque as a sacred mosque which we should visit. So then if we ask why, they cannot tell you why.

But let me explain why and show you why those other two don’t apply :

Analyzing the Context of the Three Mosques

Let’s assume that Muhammed did say this : 

The reason why we should be expected to travel to the mosque in Mecca is that we have to go to Hajj. The Quran makes it a rule that Hajj is obligatory at least once in a lifetime to travel there. So that is the reason why we are allowed to travel there, because eventually we will have to go to Hajj if we can afford it. That’s a clear reason; it’s in the Quran, so there is no need to ask why anymore.

Then why did Muhammad also include the Medina mosque?

The reason is because Muhammad was there. There are some verses in the Quran which say you should emigrate to the messenger of God or you should follow the messenger of God. Because the Prophet Muhammad was living in Medina, people could be excused to travel to the mosque in Medina then, because they did not travel for the mosque, they traveled there to meet Muhammad. And that’s a good reason. In the past, they could not communicate online (there was no Internet). If they really wanted to get the message, they would have to travel there.

There are verses in the Quran which discourage the believers from meeting the messenger in his home. So it would be logical for them to meet him in the mosque yard, and then they would talk about the message or ask questions, or maybe they just wanted to hear what he had to say. So that is the reason why Muhammad might have told them that they are allowed to travel to Medina : because he was there. But he is not there anymore, so we do not travel to Medina; we are not allowed to travel to Medina.

(By the way, God willing, I will go to the idea of proving the concept of not traveling to other mosques except for the sacred mosque mentioned in the Quran, but here I am just tackling the hadith)

Then the other question is : Why did Muhammad also include the mosque in Jerusalem?

  The reason for that is because the Quran tells us that Muhammad traveled in one night from Mecca to the furthest place of prostration. So that means if Muhammad excluded that, he would have done a wrong thing to travel there. This doesn’t prove any rule; it just proves that Muhammad was careful not to exclude it for that specific saying because he himself had done it, and basically he did not want to exclude himself from the group of believers when he made a rule about it.

And it’s going to happen, God willing, also during the last days with The Mahdi when he travels from Mecca to the mosque in Jerusalem. That’s also sort of a prophecy. I’m guessing he’s going to travel via an airplane or high-speed train. (I don’t know what the exact method of travel will be then) But it’s going to be doable to travel during one night from Mecca to Jerusalem. But that’s an issue for another day.

What I’m saying here is that the reason to visit the Jerusalem mosque does not exist for us, at least. It existed only for Muhammad and the last messenger, Ahmed. So that reason doesn’t apply to us; therefore, we should not long-distance travel to visit that mosque as some sort of ritual or pilgrimage.

Conclusion

We are left with an excuse to travel to only one mosque, which is the sacred mosque in Mecca (the Kaaba basically). If Muhammad lived today, he would say that there is no reason to travel to visit any mosque except for the sacred masjid in Mecca. We narrowed it down to only the sacred masjid.

Scriptural Proofs Against Traveling to Distant Mosques

The main topic of today, the question is:

• Why are we not allowed to travel to visit mosques in distant places?

• Why shouldn’t we do that?

• Isn’t visiting a mosque a good thing?

Technically it is not efficient. That’s the main reason, but it also goes against some verses in the Quran. There are many verses, but I’m just going to bring two because I want to stick to the topic :

[2:187] :

“ Permitted for you is sexual intercourse with your wives during the nights of fasting. They are the keepers of your secrets, and you are the keepers of their secrets. God knew that you used to betray your souls, and He has redeemed you, and has pardoned you. Henceforth, you may have intercourse with them, seeking what God has permitted for you. You may eat and drink until the white thread of light becomes distinguishable from the dark thread of night at dawn. Then, you shall fast until sunset. Sexual intercourse is prohibited if you decide to retreat to the masjid (during the last ten days of Ramadan). These are God’s laws; you shall not transgress them. God thus clarifies His revelations for the people, that they may attain salvation. ”

It’s a good thing to retreat to any masjid during the last ten days of Ramadan while fasting. (They should be fasting, it is Ramadan)

(2:184-185) We should not fast when traveling.

Rashad translated it as we are allowed not to fast when traveling, but if you look it in Arabic, it says we should not fast when traveling. So basically, if you’re traveling long-distance (which includes traveling overnight) then you should not fast. This would create a contradiction.

Let’s say during Ramadan I want to travel to a famous mosque in Egypt because I want to spend ten days in that mosque as a retreat. In this way, I can apply the verse which talks about retreating in a masjid, but then that conflicts with the other verse which says if you travel, you should not fast. The whole idea of retreating to the masjid is an extra method of fasting : (Fasting + Retreating to the mosque). So there would be a conflict here: if you go to a distant masjid, you should stop fasting, but the verse says that if you go to a masjid for a retreat, you should be expected to fast because that is part of the Ramadan process if you decide to do that. Basically, one rule does not allow you to fast, and another rule says if you fast, you cannot travel.

Based on these two verses, this shows that it was never meant for the submitters to travel overnight to any mosque (overnight travel where you stay more than the night) except if you’re doing Hajj, and even then, it’s during the Umrah portion of the Hajj.

There are other ways we can conclude that we shouldn’t travel to distant mosques. One such case is that there would be a conflict during Hajj :

 On Friday during Hajj, we ended up praying in a mosque in Arafat. For those who were there, they know we prayed outside of that masjid because it was really hot that day. But if we were allowed or expected to travel to distant mosques for the Friday Gathering, then technically we should have been expected to go back to the sacred masjid in Mecca to do the Friday Gathering. But no, we just stayed there. If you’re doing Hajj and you’re in Arafat, you don’t travel back to Mecca just because it’s Friday, because that would conflict with the Hajj rites.

Some principles when establishing mosques with money from the community

Why am I specifying “with money from the community”?

If you want to establish a mosque alone with your own money, you don’t have to follow these principles. If you want to build a mosque in a triangle shape, feel free to do it with your own private money. That’s your choice. You can go to the North Pole, if you can, and establish there a mosque in a triangle shape. God will accept it if you do it with an honest heart. When you are using you own money, you can do whatever you want with it. But if you are using community money, you have to use it in the best way possible. Otherwise why would you be the person responsible ? The only reason someone is allowed to collect money and build a mosque is that he probably knows how to do it better. If he does not know how to do it better, then why should he collect it ? There will be no reason to collect the money. Let the people do it themselves.

What’s wrong with a triangle mosque? 

It has physical limitations. How are people in the sharp corners going to pray? When they try to bow down, they’ll hit the wall with their head. But with your private money, you have the freedom to do what you want. But if you are responsible to collect the money and then build the mosque and dedicate it to God on behalf of the community, then you should do it right, you should maximise the utility of that money.

These principles are only important if we are going to establish mosques with community money. If you do with it with your private money, then that’s your choice.

Rashad, for example, rented a place with his own money and did what he wanted. But when establishing a mosque with community money, we must make sure we do it the best way possible, because we do not want to spend other people’s money while we don’t know what we are doing. We should know what we are doing before we collect it, and where we will spend it.

Before I continue with the rest of the points, let’s repent.

Praise be to God, there is no other God except God.

Based on this, I want to establish some principles when establishing mosques using community money :

• Submitters cannot be expected to travel to there more than a reasonable walking distance

We are not expected to travel to distant mosques. Pretty much the rule is about a one-hour walking distance : if you have to walk more than an hour, it’s probably too distant for you to go to the Friday Gathering. That is the general concept from the Quran : we should not travel to any distant mosque unless it’s the sacred masjid in Mecca, and that’s only when we are visiting it as part of Umrah.

2. More than 40 submitters should live within walking distance

I think I have explained it but I did not record it. God willing I’ll explain it in the future because it’s a longer point regarding choosing a leader. But the second principle is that at least 40 submitters must live within walking distance.

3. The mosque should fit at least 100 people

It doesn’t make sense to build a mosque where people don’t fit, because those 40 initial people are going to become 100. That is easier to explain because there is a verse in the Quran which says that 100 steadfast believers can defeat 200. If would you establish a mosque which doesn’t fit 100 people, does that mean we are just going to lose? If you establish such a small mosque, if there is 70 people and the disbelievers come and attack us in the mosque, does that mean we are just going to lose ? We have to make sure when we establish a mosque that it is going to be protected, and that we are willing and that we can fight and win if we had to defend it.

4. The mosque cannot be a rented space from another owner

 (This is what Rashad did, but he did it with his own private money, that is different) 

We cannot rent a place from another owner and call it a mosque. This goes against the verse in the Quran which says that the mosques belong to God alone.

Let’s say we rent a property from someone named John. To whom that place belong ? That space belongs to John and God. But the Quran says it can only belong to God. If it does not belong to only God then it is not a mosque. It should be only God who owns it. The property owner must be God alone (It cannot even belong to us as a community, as a group). It should be to God alone. Meaning we dedicate it to God and no one can change it, and no one owns it. That’s it. Therefore, you cannot just pay rent for some building and call it a mosque. (at least it is not a mosque if you do it with community money)

These principles make establishing a mosque a major challenge today, making it very unlikely to happen easily. But God willing, we will get closer and closer to the solution.

(There is probably a few other principles but these are the key ones on which I want to focus)

Demographic and Geographic Calculations

Let’s do some calculations based on these principles :

• • The world has about 8 billion people.

• In a typical city, there are about 300,000 people living within a one-hour walking distance. (I am focusing on the one-hour radius because, as established, we are not allowed to travel to distant mosques)

• Out of those 300,000 people, at least 40 need to be submitters to make establishing a mosque feasible and logical.

If you combine these three facts, the math dictates that we would need to reach about one million submitters worldwide to begin establishing local mosques. Anyone who knows basic math can calculate this:

This sounds like terrible news (but it is not as you will see) because we are an online community that is currently very far away from a million members. However, that calculation is true only under the assumption that submitters are distributed perfectly evenly across the globe. The assumption here is that wherever you go, you would have the same proportion of submitters. But our distribution is not completely homogeneous. We have concentrated pockets of people; recently we have seen pockets of people in Turkey, earlier in Bangladesh, and before that in Kosovo. For example : there are quite a few submitters in Kosovo, but right next door in Bulgaria, there are no submitters who have joined us.

Accounting for this lack of homogeneity yields a more realistic number : 

So we need about 50,000 submitters worldwide to start having solutions through mosques for a meaningful proportion of submitters to worship God together as groups. According to this calculation, it is not very reasonable to expect mosques until we get about 50,000 submitters online. And that’s a lot.

There is a large gap. We are about 60 submitters now, and we need only about 50,000 more submitters to have meaningful solutions through mosques to be able to worship God together. There is a really large gap between where we are, and where we have to be to have meaningful solutions through mosques, because in the past, that is how people were expected to meet to be able to worship God together.

What we can do to solve this problem ?

• For about 25% of people, there is no problem to solve. (The problem is unsolvable)

In my video titled The Global Forced Behaviour, I explain that for our time, there is no solution for about 25% of the people or 25% of the cases. They might be in a village too far away or in a workplace where the manager does not allow them. I am not saying that is a good reason, what I am saying is that for 25% of them there is nothing you can do about it. They are just too far to reach. That is no problem because that is how people were meant to exist today. For example : In the past let’s say Muhammad did go to the mosque during Fridays, but he also probably met his cousins. When was the last time you met your cousin ? Probably a long time ago. So that means the world has changed. And there is no meaningful solutions for about 25% of the cases. It is what it is. It’s today’s world :we are not fully blessed, we cannot apply the Quran more than 75%. Even if we go crazy and try our hardest, it is not possible. But it’s fine. It is our destiny for today now.

That means we can now reduce that 50,000 to about 37,500, because for the rest of them we cannot even find a solution even if we want to. So now the updated calculation is that we have to reach 37,500 people to have meaningful solutions for a significant number of submitters to worship God together through mosques. So now we have come down from a million to 37,500.

Reducing the gap through Efforts

We have done lots of work to reduce it that even more, reducing the gap through effort. So basically the 37,500 is true only if we do nothing about it. If we just keep preaching like this and we do nothing about it then the 37,500 is true but we can reduce the gap if we make efforts.

Let’s see some efforts we have made :

• Focusing on English speakers to preach while young people improve their English can reduce the gap from 37,000 to about 8,000 : How?

Right now I am speaking in English. I think about 20% of people in the world understand English. Right now those who only speak Chinese but cannot speak English right now are not understanding us. So if we focus on that 20% instead of all the world, that reduces the number for us so we can focus on areas where there is more English speakers. That means it’s more likely to achieve the goal of establishing mosques for those people earlier. Let’s say we are focusing on the hot zones, the more important zones.

 If you’re young, (let’s say under 40 but especially if you’re under 35) and you are not understanding what I’m saying please learn English. You have time. Someday about 5-10 years down the road you will understand better and you will feel better about it, and you can communicate with other submitters and it’s going to be useful for everyday. If you’re under 35, please try to learn English. And so doing these two things : Focusing on English + Young people learning English, that reduces the 37,000 to 8,000 only. (Some people already know English, even the old people). So see, we are getting closer to achieving the goal. We are reducing the gap.

• Doing Friday Sermons online (8000 → 4000) :

Doing Friday Sermons online reduces the goal even more because that fulfills half of that expectation, pretty much we do half of what we are expected to do which is the Sermon part, but then we do the the contact prayer separately. So it fulfills half of the need to be together with other people. So basically when people in the past did the Friday Sermon in mosques in Muhammad’s time, they had this sense of fulfillment. They were doing it as a group, it was a celebration, it was nice. It was a good feeling as a group.

We get that feeling for only half of the time when we do it online because when we finish this we are not going to do the prayer together, we are just going to do it separately. So this reduces the goal to about 4,000 people.

By the way, I know these numbers don’t make much sense in this case, because I am using this logic : (I use this logic a lot by the way) 

Let’s say you had two boxes :

• One of one of them has $10.
• The other one has zero dollars.

and someone told you : “If I give you $6, would you take the $6 or choose one of the boxes?”  It could be zero or 10, but I would choose six because the average of zero and 10 is five. Six is better than five. I know there’s no $5 in the boxes. I know that one box either has zero or $10. But I can think of them as if though whichever box I choose is going to have $5. That’s the way to think about it : to turn probabilities into an actual expected result.

 So basically here I am turning the probability of 50% into an actual expected number, which makes sense only to answer our fulfillment of the need, it’s not some sort of a logical conclusion. What I am saying is that because of the Friday sermons, we are not in a very big emergency to reach 8,000, 4,000 would be enough because we have already a solution for half of the problem. Let’s say that biggest solution to our problem is doing the Friday Sermon online.

• Going to Hajj together every 5 years (4000 → 3000) :

 Now going to Hajj together every five years also reduces this problem , it reduces the goal from about 4,000 down to 3,000. By the way if we went to Hajj every year for seven days, the whole problem would be gone. How ? Because we do the Friday Sermons online, and during the year we are naturally expected to pray together 52 prayers, because the year has 52 weeks. So basically we would have to do the two rakaats of prayer 52 times within a year to reach that fulfillment of being part of a group, to be fully fulfilled as a group. But you can do that during Hajj if you stay for 10 days and you do five prayers each of those days, then you get 50 prayers together. So we would be fulfilling that during Hajj.

However, it is not a full solution even though technically we could fully solve the situation through Hajj and that’s it. That would be just enough if we went to Hajj every year. But I don’t want to propose that solution fully because it’s not fair to the people who cannot afford it. We went to during this year and it was about 20 out of 40 submitters then, so only half of the people managed to come to Hajj. But what about the other half ? We wouldn’t have a solution for them.

Even though this would solve the problem completely, it would only solve it if people could afford it or if people were rich enough. So because I care about the poor people as well, I don’t want to solve the gap fully through Hajj. Maybe we can just go every five years, it’s going to reduce the gap a little bit. And we know from the Quran it is obligatory only once in a in a lifetime, but if you do it every five years, it’s going to help solve this problem a little bit. It’s voluntary to go every five years. We just thought it’s sort of a nice middle ground.

 By doing it every five years how many prayers we do together ? You kind of calculate that and it comes to about 3,200. But because rich people are a little bit more important in the community, then the gap is reduced a little bit more than that. So that’s why I estimated it about 3,000.

• The Marriage App (3000 → 1500) :

 God willing, there’s going to be a Marriage App. And sorry for delaying it. I have promised this Marriage App quite a few months ago, I’ve started it. I have a first draft of it from the freelancer who is doing it, who is helping do it. But it just takes too much time to review, to edit, to propose changes, to make sure it works well and stuff like that. Sorry for the delay. It’s probably one of the solutions we’ll implement first. I don’t know exactly when, maybe in 1-3 months, God willing, but I’m not sure. It depends on how complicated it it gets. The Marriage App is going to reduce this from 3,000 to 1,500 because a lot of those people when they get married they move to to each other’s locations, focusing the community in certain zones.

By the way when you marry a non-submitter, that does not help. It divides the community a little bit more. If you marry a non-submitter, you are stuck in a location where you do not want to be, but It’s fine. Marrying a non-submitter is allowed under certain conditions, but it doesn’t help the community, it makes it more difficult for the community. But if you marry a submitter (God willing, there’s going to be a solution for that through a marriage app), then you actually help the community by focusing the community in certain locations because of that, and if you have children that is going to be focus it even more. So that helps the community reach that goal, and reduce that gap even more. So basically then, we would need to have only 1,500 people to start having meaningful solutions through mosques.

• An additional new solution coming soon, God willing (1500 → 750) :

 There is an additional new solution coming soon, God willing. I don’t want to go into detail because it’s going to be a long Friday sermon, but God willing I’ll propose this meaningful solution probably after The Marriage App (maybe in about six months, I don’t know exactly). I don’t want to mention it now because I really want to have the details laid down correctly and presentable and all of that, so that we can talk about it.

Conclusion

So in conclusion, we managed to reduce this gap from 1 million down to 750. I think this last solution is going reduce the gap by half, so from 1,500 to 750. What does this mean? This means that if we achieve 750 submitters online, we can have meaningful solutions to worship God together and feel fulfilled as a group similar to how the people used to worship in a mosque in the past and would meet during Friday gatherings and during prayers. So now it has been reduced to 750, and 750 is a realistic number. It’s within what we can achieve in my lifetime. It’s doable. I think you guys all believe that it’s doable. In the past you might think : « Oh this we’re too far from it » or whatever. But it we have been improving recently. Just a few months ago we were 40 submitters. Now we are 60. 750 is doable if we speed things up. So God willing, that new solution is going to reduce this gap even more. And that is good news.

For those who have to do the um contact prayer, do the contact prayer. For the rest of you, peace be upon you.
 
Friday Sermon by: Alban Fejza, Online Congregation Director