Friday Sermon by: Alban Fejza, Online Congregation Director
Summary:
In this Friday sermon, Alban Fejza explains how the community should respond to people who leave Submission, the conditions for rejoining a second time, including repentance and bearing witness to the messenger they rejected, and why marriage to someone who left Submission must end.
Video Transcript:
Praise be to God. There is no other god except God.
According to the Bible and the Quran, people who leave Submission must be killed, except in cases where they join people with whom we have reached peace agreements. One type of peace agreement is democracy, and since we all live in democracies in modern times, that means that people who leave Submission should not be killed. If not killed, then what should our response towards them be?
Before I talk about that, let me first define what I mean when I say people who left Submission. That includes both those who left Submission for reasons of their own, and those who were excluded from Submission because they refused to do the Contact Prayer or give the Zakat. Regardless of the reason, if someone leaves Submission quietly, in peace, without making noise, or trying to create chaos on his way out, or trying to take others with him, or attacking the community verbally or otherwise, then fine. We have no problem with that, and everyone is free to leave. However, if the person uses the channels of the community, or pre-existing friendships within the community, to create chaos, or to try to convince others to leave as well, then everyone should block his email, or whatever channel of communication he’s using, or report his email as spam in whatever email provider you are using, and let the congregation director deal with him. If there’s some kind of dispute going on, don’t get involved. Don’t waste the energy of hundreds of submitters trying to convince only one person. Don’t give him or her the attention which he or she now wants as a disbeliever.
Once that person leaves, he is allowed to join again only once more, but there are additional requirements the second time. The first time, as we know, the only requirements for him were the Contact Prayer and the Zakat. But if they leave and then wish to rejoin, they first have to admit and fix their mistakes, and that includes correcting the reason why they left in the first place. The correction of the mistake also includes making up for their missed Zakat during that period of time. For example, let’s say that someone leaves Submission and wishes to rejoin after 10 years. They will have to pay all their missed Zakat for all 10 years, which includes their regular Zakat plus the penalty Zakat, equivalent to four grams of gold for each year of being with non-submitters during those 10 years, so 40 grams of gold, minus, of course, the portion which was forced, which I explained in the video titled “The Global Forced Behaviour.” They should also pay anything which they left unpaid when they left. The congregation director goes back to the files from 10 years earlier and sees what was left unpaid, and they have to make up for those payments; otherwise they are not allowed to rejoin.
You see, according to verse 9:11, besides doing the Contact Prayer and giving Zakat, a person must also repent to be able to join the submitters, and true repentance does not exist if you do not also fix or compensate for the mistake which you made. For example, if the person left the submitters because he said that he does not believe in a particular messenger, then when he wants to rejoin for the second time, he should publicly declare that he was wrong to reject the messenger, and that he now bears witness that this messenger is a true messenger. The declaration admitting that someone is a messenger of God should be as public as the rejection was during the years out of Submission, and the congregation director decides how public it should be. So if a person went into a group, or group chats, to say that Alban is not a messenger of God, or that Alban is a fake messenger, then he has not truly repented when he wants to join, unless he goes into the same group chats and channels of communication, if they still exist, and says that he has changed his mind and now believes that Alban is a true messenger of God. If the congregation director judges that enough correction has been done at the right public level, then fine, he can join. But if more is needed, the congregation director has the right to ask the person to record a video of himself stating, “I now believe that Alban is the Clarifying Messenger mentioned in Sura 44, verse 13.”
By the way, this witnessing about the identity of a living messenger, when someone joins the submitters for the second time, was misunderstood by the early Muslims, and they created a distorted Shahada, a distorted witnessing, out of it. The reason why Muhammad would have asked the Meccans to declare that he is a messenger of God in order to join the submitters is precisely because they were technically joining him for the second time.
Here is what happened. When the Quran was revealed to Muhammad, the people of Mecca had already inherited all the religious rituals from Abraham: Salat, Zakat, fasting and Hajj. So technically, they were already submitters before Muhammad received the Quran from God. They were also idol worshipers at the same time, but they were also submitters, and this is actually possible, which is another issue for another time. So the Meccans were both idol worshipers and submitters at the same time, and when God revealed the Quran to Muhammad, they rejected him, and together with rejecting him, they also left Submission, because of their hatred for Muhammad. God let them leave Submission this time, because now Submission could be carried from generation to generation through Muhammad and some of his followers from Mecca.
Then, years later, when Muhammad defeated the opposing Meccans, they wanted to join Submission again, but this was their second time, and because it was their second time, they were required to fix their mistakes before they joined. One of those mistakes was that they had declared that Muhammad is not a messenger of God, so now they had to fix it and declare that Muhammad is a messenger of God. So, as you can see, the distorted Shahada which millions of Muhammadans recite today emerged from the fact that when the Meccans joined Muhammad for the first time, they were actually joining Submission for the second time.
But today this is not the case. Most people who join us today are actually joining Submission for the first time in their lives. They never did the Contact Prayer or the Zakat correctly as a group with us before, which is why they do not need to bear witness that Alban is God’s messenger when they join us for the first time. As we know, the correct Shahada, the witnessing in the Quran, in verse 3:18, is only: “There is no other god except God.” However, if someone leaves Submission and wants to join the second time, they should also declare that Alban is the Clarifying Messenger mentioned in verse 44:13 of the Quran. Now, this is not part of the Shahada. I repeat: this is not part of the Shahada. But it is part of repentance the second time around, when someone wants to join, because repentance includes fixing the mistake, and anyone who leaves Submission and then wants to rejoin has already, at least implicitly, rejected the messenger, having been part of the community before, where they were exposed to the fact that Alban is the Clarifying Messenger.
So if anyone wants to join for the second time, they must bear witness that Alban is the Clarifying Messenger mentioned in verse 44:13 of the Quran. If this situation happens during the time of Alhaq, then they must bear witness that Alhaq is the Strengthening Messenger mentioned in verse 69:40 of the Quran. If this situation happens after the death of Alhaq, then they must bear witness that Alhaq was the Strengthening Messenger mentioned in verse 69:40 of the Quran. And if this situation happens during the time of the last messenger, the time of Ahmed the Mahdi, then they must declare that they bear witness that Ahmed is the Guide Messenger mentioned in verse 9:33 of the Quran.
Now, after joining for the second time, if a person leaves Submission again, they are not allowed to join ever again. Verse 4:137 says, “Surely, those who believe, then disbelieve, then believe, then disbelieve, then plunge deeper into disbelief, God will not forgive them, nor will He guide them in any way.”
And this brings me to the most important part of this sermon. Whether a person leaves Submission the first time and then never joins again, or leaves Submission for the second time, after which he is not allowed to join again, in both of these cases that person will go to Hell, guaranteed. There’s no salvation for him or her, ever. Here is why. There are only two roads to Heaven: one is through Submission, and the other is through suffering. If someone was never a submitter, it is still possible for him to go to Heaven through suffering. But if someone was a submitter before and he left, then God will make sure to close the door of suffering for him as well, to reward him in this life for his previous Submission. So even if the person suffers, he will not suffer enough in this world to pay for his sins and escape Hell. In verse 3:86, God says, “Why should God guide people who disbelieved after believing, and after witnessing that the messenger is truthful, and after solid proofs have been given to them? God does not guide the wicked.” And the verse just before it, verse 3:85, says that anyone who accepts other than Submission as his religion, it will not be accepted from him, and in the Hereafter he will be with the losers. So this is guaranteed, except when a person rejoins Submission for the second time before he dies. But if the person has left Submission for the second time, then both options, going to Heaven through suffering or through Submission, are closed forever.
Now, because people who never joined Submission may or may not go to Hell, we should give them the benefit of the doubt, and we are allowed to marry them, because we don’t know for sure. It’s not a good option, but it is allowed. However, we are not allowed to marry, or stay married to, anyone who was once a submitter and then left. This is because they are guaranteed to go to Hell, unless they join for the second time, in which case we are allowed to remarry them. This issue is important because people with low self-esteem do exist who would change their religion and become submitters just because they want to marry a submitter woman or a submitter man. But let me remind you that if they leave Submission after marrying a submitter, that submitter must divorce them. It’s not an option; it’s an obligation, for men according to verse 60:10, and for women according to verses 66:8 through 66:12. It’s an obligation.
So if your spouse was never a submitter, there is no automatic obligation to divorce them for religious reasons. But if, after being a submitter, he or she leaves Submission, then you must divorce them. It’s an obligation. It doesn’t matter what they tell you. Actions speak louder than words. If they left Submission, that is an action. If they say something to you privately, about how they are good people anyway, and so on, those are just words. They mean nothing, because they come from people who left Submission, and all people who left Submission are disbelievers, and all disbelievers, by definition, are liars. The Quran tells us not to obey them. Get away from them as quickly as possible.