This official biography describes Rashad Khalifa’s early life in Egypt, his emigration to the United States and Ph.D. in biochemistry, his discovery of the Quran’s mathematical miracle, the Quran-alone doctrine, his announcement as the Messenger of the Covenant, his martyrdom in 1990, and its aftermath.
Video Transcript:
Early Life
Born in Egypt in 1935, Rashad Khalifa grew up and studied in Egypt, and later emigrated to the United States, where he earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry. Khalifa became a naturalized U.S. citizen and settled in Tucson, Arizona.
The Discovery of the Mathematical Miracle of the Quran
Being dissatisfied with how the English translations of the Quran of that time did not manage to properly transmit the monotheistic essence of the Arabic Quran, Rashad Khalifa decided to translate the Quran from Arabic to English mainly for local consumption and his family. After translating the first Sura, he faced the challenge of translating the first verse of the second Sura. This verse only contains three mysterious letters “Alef, Laam, Meem”. Since the revelation of the Quran, for 14 centuries, the scholars did not know the meaning of these mysterious letters, they left them untranslated in English. Rashad had decided not to go further with the translation unless he understands what those mysterious letters mean first.
So he refocused his efforts into decoding the meaning of these mysterious letters, which are called Quranic Initials. He decided to put the whole Quran in the computer to see if there are any patterns which these Quranic Initials follow. Gradually, a mathematical pattern emerged, based on number 19. Eventually, the evidence piled so much that he realized that he had discovered a superhuman mathematical miracle of the Quran, which he published in 1974. He gained popularity in the Muslim World, where his discovery was published in several magazines, and a couple of books of popular Muslim preachers.
Quran alone doctrine
Realizing that from all the religious books which the Muslims use, only the Quran had this superhuman mathematical composition, this led Rashad Khalifa to conclude that the only religious book we can be sure to have been preserved, and guaranteed by God to be protected is the Quran, and therefore all the other religious books, including the Hadith books, which are commonly used in the Muslim World, are not fully reliable. In addition, given that the Quran itself says that the Quran is complete in truth and justice, and fully detailed in religious matters, this makes the Hadith books religiously unnecessary. This led Rashad to embrace the “Quran alone” doctrine, declaring that only the Quran should be used as an authoritative book for religious conclusions.
Messengership
Having adopted a Quran alone stance, Rashad Khalifa soon realized that the Quran (when read alone without reliance on outside sources like Hadith) does not actually claim that God will keep the End of the World completely hidden from humans. The Quran only says that the End of the World will be kept hidden from the disbelievers, but regarding the believers, it says that it will be kept “almost hidden”, not fully hidden, and even then, it is talking about keeping it mostly hidden from the believers before Muhammad, and during the time of Muhammad, but the Quran never says that it will be hidden from the believers after Muhammad. This realization motivated him to investigate when the End of the World will come, and soon enough, God let him discover in the Quran when the End of the World will come. This discovery happened in 1980, and he published it in his book, “The Computer Speaks”. This discovery automatically meant that Rashad Khalifa must be God’s messenger based on verse 27 of Sura 72 of the Quran which says that God reveals specific events from the future only to a messenger which he chooses. So, since the year 1980, the moment when he discovered the End of the World, Rashad Khalifa became aware that he was chosen by God to be the Messenger of the Covenant which is mentioned in Sura 3, verse 81. However, he did not inform the people about it until eight years later, in 1988. One of the reasons why he was reluctant to inform the public about this is because he was aware that the Muslim World believed that Muhammad was the last messenger based on their misunderstanding of verse 40 in Sura 33 which says that Muhammad was the final prophet. However, as Rashad was fully aware, the words “messenger (rasul)” and “prophet (nabi)” are two different words in the Arabic Quran and Rashad Khalifa never claimed to be a prophet like Muhammad was, or like Abraham was, or like Moses was, or like Jesus was. Rashad Khalifa only claimed to be a messenger, without being a prophet, which is what Peter, John, and James were, according to the Bible. It’s worth noting that after Jesus left this world, the disciples of Jesus, like Peter, John, and James became messengers, as the Bible calls them later after Jesus.
So there is a difference between someone like Jesus who was both a messenger and a prophet, and those who were only messengers like Peter, John and James. Similarly, there is a difference between Muhammad who was both a messenger and a prophet, and Rashad Khalifa who was only a messenger. And the difference between prophets and messengers is also confirmed in the Quran by the fact that the Quran says that prophets are given scriptures (books) from God, while messengers only confirm existing scriptures, existing books, which have been revealed through prophets. And in agreement with this, Rashad Khalifa’s role was to confirm the existing Quran, and prove mathematically to the enlightened modern scientific world that the Quran is indeed a book from God, as proven by it’s discovered superhuman mathematical composition.
Central Doctrine
The central doctrine of what Rashad Khalifa preached is to worship God alone, and to reject all idol worship, even if those idols might be Muhammad, or Jesus, or Mary, or the Saints. This agrees with what the Quran says that every messenger should preach. In Sura 21, verse 25, we are told that God and the heavenly society never sent any messenger except with the inspiration, “There is no god except God; you shall worship God alone”.
Martyrdom
Rashad Khalifa’s preaching enraged many Muhammedan religious leaders who were subconsciously afraid that his increasing fame would take away from the fame of their favorite prophet, prophet Muhammad. On the contrary, Rashad Khalifa agreed with everything that prophet Muhammad preached – the Quran. Nevertheless, the hatred towards Rashad Khalifa drove a Mohammedan named Glen Francis to travel all the way to Tucson, Arizona to plan Rashad’s assassination. He pretended to join the Congregation where Rashad preached, so that he can analyze the layout of the building for potential sneaky ways to commit his premeditated crime. He was using a fake name to make it more difficult to find him after the assassination. On the dawn of January 31, 1990, Glen Francis stabbed Rashad Khalifa 29 times, and by God’s leave, Rashad Khalifa joined thousands of other martyrs who were martyred for their beliefs striving in the cause of God throughout history. They are alive at their Lord, even though we can not see it from down here on earth.
Aftermath
After Rashad, those who believed him organized through the next messenger, Alban Fejza. They call themselves “the submitters” which simply means the “Muslims” in Arabic, and they follow the only religion accepted by God in the Quran called “submission”. The submitters are destined to prevail over all other religious groups, in this world and the next one, as predicted in the Quran.
To learn more about the submitters or to join them in worshiping God alone, and be part of the ultimate victory, click here.
In this message, Alban Fejza congratulates Quran-alone followers for using the Quran as their only religious source, explains why they keep splitting into ever smaller groups, and shows from the Quran that unity comes from agreeing only on the Contact Prayer and Zakat, inviting them to join the submitters.
Video Transcript:
Praise be to God. There is no other god except God.
Our dearest Quranist, or Quran-only follower: congratulations on being among the few people in the world who have realized something extremely important. You have realized that the only religious book for our religious decisions should be the Quran. This is a fundamentally important truth, which we believe and appreciate. The Quran-alone method is the correct method of approaching religion, the correct process of religious thinking. It’s actually the sister method of the scientific method. The scientific method is the tool through which we find the truth about material things, the things of this world, using only a specific set of collected data, while disregarding all hearsay. Similarly, the Quran-alone method is the tool through which we find the truth about religious things, the things of the other worlds, using only the Quran as the set of data, or information, while disregarding the hearsay and opinions outside of it.
In theory, both these methods are perfect, but when people try to apply them in practice, they encounter some challenges. The challenge with the scientific method is that, to do science with a limited budget, scientists have to simplify their studies, and they often end up having to reach conclusions from data which are not detailed enough. On the other hand, religious students have fully detailed data, the Quran, but their challenge is that, because of so many details, they do not have sufficient time, sufficient brain power, sufficient will or sufficient sincerity to cover all of it, and more often than not, they reach conclusions without complete coverage of the Quran.
This creates problems, because when Quran-alone followers reach conclusions without covering the whole Quran, they reach conclusions by covering different parts of the Quran and different parts of the Quranic truths, because each of them notices different things in the Quran and pays more attention to some truths than others. Then the conclusion which one individual reaches from the Quran is different, at least partially, from another’s, and now we have two individuals who understand the Quran differently, snowballing into a bigger problem later.
Let’s take an example to see how this happens. In Sura 2, verse 278, the Quran prohibits what is called “riba” in Arabic. One group of Quran-only followers has reached the conclusion that riba is all types of interest. A second group has concluded that riba is only interest above 20%. A third group has concluded that riba is only the percentage of interest above inflation. A fourth group has concluded that riba is only the interest charged to the poor who are seeking a loan to avoid poverty, and that it does not include interest charged to a non-poor person taking a loan for other purposes. A fifth group has concluded that riba is only the interest charged by one individual to another, but not when state-approved banking institutions do it. A sixth group has concluded that riba includes charging interest to others, but does not include being charged interest by others. A seventh group has concluded that riba and interest are two completely different things. An eighth group has concluded that it is riba only if the total amount repaid is more than twice the loan which was received.
All of these eight groups will actually show you a verse or two, or the meaning of an Arabic word or two in the Quran, or some kind of analogy, or the context in which the verse occurs, on which they based their conclusion. Yet they still reached different conclusions, because their knowledge of the Quran was partial due to their time limitations. They based their conclusions on some verses, but not on all the verses of the Quran. As a result, eight Quranist groups are created just from this issue. If we add another issue to the discussion, each of those eight groups would reach about eight other conclusions, and now we would have about 64 separate Quranist groups. Then another issue is discussed, and then another, and then another, and after six issues are opened for discussion, the Quranists are split into 262,000 groups, basically each individual ending up alone by himself.
So what is the solution to this practical problem? Should we just force other Quran-alone followers to understand the Quran as we do, and go against verse 2:256, which tells us that there should be no compulsion in religion? Should we hide the conclusions which we reach from the Quran just so that we can fit within a group of Quran-alone followers, in which case we wouldn’t be Quran-alone followers at all, because we would be giving other people’s opinions priority over what we ourselves are convinced we have found in the Quran? Should we constantly dispute with one another, and go against verse 8:46, which tells us not to dispute with one another? Or should we solve this issue like the Sunnis, by writing an official set of books on how to understand the Quran, basically creating new Hadith, and then we wouldn’t be Quran-alone followers anymore, because we would rely on other books? Or should we solve it like the Shia, by choosing an official line of leaders who would then tell us how to understand the Quran, which again would not let us be Quran-alone followers anymore?
So what is the solution? Well, guess what: the solution to this problem is already written in the Quran. According to the Quran, we, the Quran-alone followers, should seek to reach agreement between us on only two things, while on the rest of the religious issues we don’t have to agree. It would be nice to agree on everything, and we would if everyone were a perfect believer, but it’s totally okay if we don’t, because every human being today is a partial believer, as the Quran itself predicts in verse 42:14. So let everyone have their own opinion, because that is not going to divide the community if we stay connected through those two things.
So what are those two things on which we must reach a common agreement? They are, one, the Contact Prayer, Salat, and two, the obligatory charity, Zakat. These are the only two things on which we should reach agreement in order to consider each other part of the same religion. This idea is found in many verses of the Quran, like verse 9:11, for example. Verse 9:11 says that if they, the idol worshipers, turn away from idol worship, which the Quran-alone followers have already done, and they, one, do the Contact Prayer, Salat, and two, give the obligatory charity, Zakat, then they are your brothers in religion. They belong to the same religion. So the Contact Prayer and the obligatory charity make us part of the same religion, part of the same religious group, and then it’s fine if we have differences of opinion on other issues.
Even David and Solomon had a difference of opinion about something, as we see in verse 21:79, but it didn’t divide them, because at the end of the day they still went together to do the Contact Prayer, Salat, and collected the Zakat in one common pool, to spend it in the cause of God. So it’s forgivable if we have different opinions on other issues, because not all of us have the time, the patience, the knowledge, and sometimes even the readiness or the complete sincerity, to analyze every issue to the point of reaching a complete understanding of it. Verse 73:20 in the Quran tells us to simply read the portions of the Quran which we find easy, which means that not all people will be able to read and understand the Quran completely. As a result, they will not have a completely correct opinion about many issues, but that’s fine. The verse says that God has pardoned you; He knows that some of you may be ill, and others may be busy with business, seeking God’s provisions, and so on. It again says that it’s okay to just read whatever portion of the Quran you can, basically a partial understanding of the truth, but then it says: as long as all of you do the Contact Prayer, Salat, and give the obligatory charity, Zakat.
There’s another verse which conclusively confirms this idea. Verse 98:5 says that nothing else was asked of those who were given the scripture, which includes those who are given the Quran, except to worship God sincerely, devoting the religion to Him alone, and, one, to do the Contact Prayer, Salat, and two, to give the obligatory charity, Zakat; this is the perfect religion. So the perfect religion is the one where you do not demand that others agree on other issues, except to do the Contact Prayer, Salat, and give the obligatory charity, Zakat.
If we think of it the other way around, this means that just because someone uses the Quran alone as you do, and agrees on some other issues, that doesn’t make him your friend. He’s only your friend if he uses the Quran alone and does the Contact Prayer as you do, and does the Zakat as you do. Verse 5:55 in the Quran says that your only friends, your only allies, the only ones who are in the same group as you, are God and His messenger and the believers who observe the Contact Prayers and give the obligatory charity, and they bow down. This unites the community of believers through a specific, divinely authorized, Quranic method. You can get an idea of how this works, because one of the Contact Prayers, according to the Quran, is the Friday prayer, which is used as a tool to keep the community united. You can even translate it into English as the uniting prayer, or the congregational prayer. This is what keeps the congregation intact. So if you are a true Quran-alone follower, please stop seeking unity through other means. It’s just the Contact Prayer and the Zakat, and this will unite us.
By the way, being united is not optional; it’s an obligation in order to succeed. According to verse 3:200, the believers must be united in order to succeed. So the Quran-alone followers cannot succeed unless they are united, and they cannot be united unless they agree to unite through the Contact Prayer and the obligatory charity only, while letting everyone have the freedom to decide for themselves about other issues. And in order to be able to agree to have united Contact Prayers and united obligatory charity, we first have to agree on the correct common form of the Contact Prayer, Salat, and the obligatory charity, Zakat.
And guess what: you are very lucky, because for the first time in history, we have been able to extract all the details of the Salat and the Zakat directly from the Quran, all of them. You can find them in two of our videos. The links to both videos are below, in the video description. So please watch those two videos in full, where you will be able to see all the details of the Contact Prayer, directly from the Quran, in one video, and all the details of Zakat, directly from the Quran, in the other video. And then please write to us, so you can join our community.
Joining our community is an obligation if you are a believer, because in verse 18:27, God is directly talking to the Quran-alone followers, and then in the next verse, while still speaking to the Quran-alone followers, God says, “You shall force yourself to be with those who worship their Lord day and night,” basically, those who do the Contact Prayer. So, to be a complete Quran-only believer, you must also apply this verse, which tells you to join us, who do the Contact Prayer correctly. There are many verses which tell us to stay united, do the Contact Prayer together, and have the Zakat system together. The Quran says that our community is one united community. You cannot be separate from the community and still think that you are following the Quran alone. The Quran tells you to be part of the community of the submitters.
Verse 41:33 in the Quran tells you to be one of the submitters. It doesn’t tell you to be a submitter on your own; it tells you to be one of the submitters, one person in a larger community of the submitters, the only community of the submitters. There can only be one community of the submitters, according to verse 21:92, and we are that community. The submitters are the best, and the only officially authorized, community of Quran-alone followers. Verse 3:19 says that the only religion approved by God is Submission. And to join Submission, to be a submitter, since you are already a Quran-only follower, all you have to do is do the Contact Prayer as we do and give the obligatory charity as we do. You are free to think differently on other issues, but regarding Salat and Zakat, you have to do them like us, and, when available, with us, so that you can be part of the best community of Quran-alone followers. We, the submitters, are the best community of Quran-only followers.
So again, to learn how to do the Salat and the Zakat, please watch the two videos linked in the video description below, and then, once you learn them, please contact us as soon as possible to join us. Or, if you have any questions, you can contact us through our email address and our WhatsApp number, which are also given in the video description below. We are looking forward to hearing from you, and peace be upon you.
In this Friday sermon, Alban Fejza explains why it makes little sense to hate a religious group we ourselves once chose, with an exception for groups that transgress, and urges us to focus instead on what our own group does correctly: the Contact Prayers and Zakat.
Video Transcript:
Praise be to God. There is no other god except God.
I was just browsing online yesterday, being surprised over and over again at how unserious the online religious discourse has become. One thing I noticed in a few of the videos was that they were projecting hate towards groups that they themselves had chosen before. For example, in one video I heard the sentence, “I used to be a Quranist, but beware of Quranists.” Another video said something like, “I used to be one of them, but now I realize how evil they are.” Another said something like, “I used to be a Sunni,” and then went on speaking hatefully against them, or, “I used to be a Catholic, but here is my critique,” and so on. By the way, these sentences came from people who were not born into those previous religious groups. They chose those groups and then hated them later, after switching to a new group, or maybe they first switched and then started hating them.
This doesn’t fully make sense, and here’s why. But before I tell you why, let me first say that I can understand how someone might hate a religious group into which he was born, because he did not choose it while in this world. But hating a previous religious group which they themselves chose doesn’t make sense, for two potential reasons.
First, if they chose that group because they did not have all the necessary information when they joined, while being relatively intelligent, then the people in that group probably also just lack the information, and once they gradually get that information, like he did, they might also switch to a better group. So there is no reason to hate them. They are just on the same path he was on, simply at an earlier stage.
On the other hand, if he chose that earlier group because he was not intelligent enough, not being able to process the information correctly in his brain despite having all the information, then how does he know that he is in the correct group now? Clearly his brain makes mistakes. So again, there is no justification to hate the previous group, because he can be wrong now as well.
So when they focus on hating the previous religious groups which they themselves chose before, it’s like hating yourself in the past. The Quran, in verse 4:94, says, “Remember that you used to be like them, and God blessed you.” So there is no reason for anyone in any religious group to hate a previous religious group which they had chosen before.
There is an exception, though. If the previous group transgresses against people, or against you, then you have a reason. Verse 29:46 says do not argue with the people of the scripture except in the nicest possible manner, unless they transgress. This is why we see that God told Moses to speak to Pharaoh nicely, in verse 20:44, because Moses used to belong to that group of Pharaoh. But then, in verse 17:102, we see that Moses was not speaking to Pharaoh nicely, because by that time Moses had witnessed the transgressions of Pharaoh. Pharaoh doubled the workload of the slaves, the people of Moses, for no reason. He wanted to humiliate them.
Anyway, these are the general principles regarding when it is reasonable or unreasonable to hate a previous group to which you belonged. But in practice, the situation is usually much more dynamic. It’s probably never the case that they fully transgressed or did not transgress at all, or that you lacked all the information, or that you were completely unintelligent, or that the group into which you were born had nothing to do with the group which you chose first. It’s a combination of all those factors at different levels. So in practice, you just do what feels right with an honest heart. Here I was just exploring this idea in theory, and because it doesn’t help much in practice, it is probably one of the least important portions of a Friday sermon that I have given.
However, let’s make this Friday sermon more important. Let me remind you that instead of focusing on what is wrong in other groups, let’s focus on what is right in our group. Something which our group is correct about, and which no other group has exactly like us, is that we do both the Contact Prayers and the Zakat correctly. These two just cannot be wrong. Even if somehow they cannot seem to realize why these are very important and why these are obligatory, they still cannot ever prove that these are wrong. How can prostrating to God be wrong? How can helping other people through charity be wrong? The Bible says charity never fails. It just cannot be wrong. Praising God in our Contact Prayer cannot be wrong. Glorifying God in our Contact Prayer cannot be wrong. Bowing to God in our Contact Prayer cannot be wrong. So let’s focus on that. Let’s focus on what we know absolutely for sure cannot be wrong.
In this Friday sermon, Alban Fejza describes a survey he did at a supermarket asking who Jesus is, and shows that Christians overestimate him as Lord while Muslims underestimate him as just a prophet, when the best answer, according to both the Quran and the Bible, is that he is the Messiah.
Video Transcript:
Praise be to God. There is no other god except God.
About a week ago I went to Walmart, a grocery store, a supermarket. I had prepared a questionnaire for the people leaving through the exit door. The questionnaire had only one question: “Who is Jesus, according to you?” I asked the same question to about 100 people, and all the Christians who responded answered either “Lord,” or “Savior,” or “Lord and Savior,” and all the Muslims who answered said “a prophet,” except for one of them, who said “just a person.” So, according to Christians, Jesus is Lord and Savior, and according to Muslims, a prophet, or just a person.
The collection of these answers reveals the deep, totally unnecessary biases which these two groups have against each other. One group is deeply overestimating the role of Jesus in this world, while the other group is deeply underestimating it. Not once did either of these two groups mention that Jesus is the Messiah, even though that is the best answer, both according to the Quran and according to the Bible. The Quran mentions Jesus as a prophet about four times in total, but it mentions Jesus as the Messiah a total of 10 times. And yet the Muslims mentioned him as a prophet every time, and the word “Messiah” did not come to anyone’s mind when asked who Jesus was. Can you see the deep conscious or subconscious bias which the so-called Muslims have in relation to Jesus?
On the other hand, when the Christians were asked who Jesus is, they never answered “the Messiah” either. They always said “Lord and Savior.” Again, this reveals their deep conscious and subconscious bias in relation to Jesus. Their answer is not in line with the New Testament, where the same question was asked of Peter, the disciple of Jesus, and his answer was not like theirs. In the New Testament, in the Book of Mark, chapter 8, starting from verse 27, we read that Jesus and his disciples went on to the villages around Caesarea Philippi, and on the way he asked them who people said he was. They replied that some said John the Baptist, others Elijah, and others one of the prophets. Then he asked them who they said he was, and Peter answered, “You are the Messiah.” So if Christians were not biased about Jesus, they would have answered exactly the way Peter answered: that Jesus is the Messiah. According to the Bible, this answer, that Jesus is the Messiah, was revealed to Peter by God Himself, and this makes Peter the first person besides Jesus to publicly testify that Jesus is the Messiah.
By the way, I know that Jesus is called “Lord” by many people in many places in the Bible, but many other people are also called “lord” in the Bible. In the Bible, the word “lord” simply means a slave owner, for example in Luke 16:3, Luke 20:13, Acts 25:26, and 1 Peter 3:6. In all these cases in the New Testament, the word “lord” is used to refer to someone other than Jesus. So the word “Lord” does not uniquely specify the identity of Jesus. There are many lords mentioned in the Bible. To this day, they have lords in Great Britain; they gather in the House of Lords. Even in the Quran, there is an instance where Joseph, who was a slave, called his owner “lord.” So there are many lords in the Bible and the Quran. Of course, there’s only one Lord of the universe, God, but there are many lords of different slaves, and many different lords who own different properties, and so on.
Also, there are many prophets mentioned in the Bible and the Quran, but there is only one Messiah. So the word “Messiah” uniquely specifies and defines the identity of Jesus, which is why, if the Christians and the so-called Muslims were unbiased communities, it should have been the first word to come to their minds, in most cases, when they were asked who Jesus is. Most of them should have said “the Messiah.” That’s what defines him. But instead, none of them said it. How deeply biased they are! How deeply the Christians overestimate Jesus, and how deeply the Muslims underestimate him!
And by the way, saying that Jesus is the Messiah is what most annoys one of God’s biggest opponents, according to the New Testament and the Quran: the Jews. When speaking about Jesus, they hate it the most when you say that Jesus is the Messiah. They are not as jealous if you say, for example, that Jesus was a prophet; they had many prophets, and one more prophet wouldn’t make a big difference to them. And when Christians tell them that Jesus is Lord, they do not hate it as much either, because they find it ridiculous and not worth challenging, since it is very clear in the Old Testament that there is only one God. According to the Jews, the Christians are simply discrediting themselves when they say that Jesus, the son of Mary, is God, because it’s so obvious in the Old Testament that there is only one God.
But when the Jews hear Jesus called the Messiah, that is what they hate hearing about Jesus the most. The truth hurts them, because they rejected the one who was supposed to be their king and their savior, even more than David was. And their excuse for rejecting him is that he did not fulfill his political mission. They wanted someone who would elevate the Jews in the political arena of the world, not someone who would expose their evil intentions. Their argument doesn’t stand, because in the second coming of Jesus, after we are resurrected, Jesus will fulfill his expected political mission as well. He will be king on Earth for a thousand years, during which all the believers will enjoy a material life here on Earth without any imperfection. Anyway, the Jews rejected him, which is clearly evil, but in this video I’m focusing more on those who claim to accept Jesus: the Christians and the Muslims.
As I said, the Christians and the Muslims either overestimate Jesus deeply or underestimate him deeply. They can’t seem to have a balanced opinion. Let me give you an example of what their bias looks like. It might not be a perfect example, but it will drive the point home. Let’s imagine that I showed a picture of Elizabeth II, the queen of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms, to many people in a questionnaire, and asked them, “Who is she, according to you?” Now imagine if all the Muslims answered, every time, “She is the queen of Australia.” It’s technically true, but what about the fact that she was also the queen of Great Britain, the queen of England, the queen of Scotland, the queen of Canada, and the queen of many other places? If all the Muslims always answered “Australia,” it would be a biased underestimation of the queen’s role. Or imagine that every Christian, when asked the same question, said that she was the queen of the whole world and the seas. Wouldn’t that be a gross overestimation of her role? Yes, she was officially the queen of many countries, but not of the whole world, and not of the seas. Similarly, they are grossly overestimating or underestimating the role of Jesus.
After all, the biggest role of Jesus is to be the Messiah. Why not mention that? Why is that not the first thing which comes to their minds about Jesus? He is the Messiah, which means the chosen one. He was chosen by God to lead the believers, anyone who is sincere in his heart, to the city of believers, to lead them there and have a 1,000-year kingdom on Earth without any imperfection: a perfect kingdom on Earth for 1,000 years, where all of us believers will live, to show Satan that you have to leave things in God’s hands for things to go perfectly, which Satan couldn’t do. Satan wanted to take control from God. So of all the people who ever lived, Satan hates Jesus the most, because he is the one human being who directly disproves him. Satan wanted control from God so that he could have a kingdom of his own on Earth, while Jesus will do the reverse. He will leave everything in God’s hands, so that God can create a perfect kingdom on Earth, which will happen soon after we are resurrected.
Now let me address one important issue. I am fully aware that the Quran says that we should not make a distinction between any of the prophets. As a prophet, Jesus is like all the other prophets, but as the Messiah, he is the only Messiah, the only Messiah mentioned in the Quran.
So, to summarize, if anyone asks you who Jesus is, the best answer is: he is the Messiah. This answer most annoys those who are furthest away from God’s grace, and most satisfies those who are closest to God’s grace. It’s the answer which is most in line with how this question is answered in the Bible, and with how Jesus is confirmed and mentioned in the Quran.
In this Friday sermon, Alban Fejza celebrates the channel reaching 100,000 subscribers, credits God’s support, and explains the history and meaning of the name “The Submitters” for God’s chosen people.
Video Transcript:
Praise be to God, there is no other god except God. Look at this. It’s the YouTube Play Button. YouTube sent it to us for reaching 100,000 subscribers. It says, “Presented to The Submitters for passing 100,000 subscribers. YouTube.” So, congratulations to all of us for this major milestone in our journey. Verse 3:160 says, “When God supports you, none can defeat you. And when he abandons you, who else can support you? In God, the believers shall trust.” God supported us because we supported him. Verse 22:40 says, “Absolutely, God supports those who support him.” And the way we support him, according to the Quran, is to strive in his cause with our money and our lives. Essentially, helping and contributing in many ways in the cause of God. So, congratulations to all of you for contributing in the cause of God. Some of you contributed with your time and skills to help me manage the YouTube channel and the webpage. Others contributed financially in the cause of God. Others through charity. and consequently, we had less problems and concerns while we strove in the cause of God. And some of you contributed with your public support.
And some of you simply contributed by not being demanding and burdensome to the community, carrying your own problems with your own shoulders. That’s also a way of support. And perhaps the biggest contribution is from those who prayed. Who prayed to God to strengthen us. Who prayed to God to increase our numbers. Who prayed to God to make us the right group of people. Who prayed to God to keep us in the right path. Who prayed to God to keep the love and peace between us, The Submitters. And to bless us. And who prayed to God to hopefully send us all together in heaven. So, congratulations to all of you for contributing in the cause of God. And may God reward you with the biggest possible reward, paradise forever. Now, back to this plate. It says the submitters. And the addition of the definite article, the submitters, not just any submitters, but the proper noun the submitters, marks a major milestone in the history of the name of our community. But let me first give you a brief overview of the major milestones of the names of God’s chosen people since the beginning. I’m purposely going to overlook some details and nuances to keep it simple, but in general, here is the story of our name.
In the beginning, during the time of Adam, the word submitter and the word God-fearer were synonymous. At that time, before scriptures, before communities, before social structures, if you feared that God can punish you, you did the right thing. And if you did not fear that God can punish you, you allowed yourself to do the wrong thing. It was as simple as that. At that time, it was not about believing in God. They all, including the bad people, believed in God because Adam had told them that he had spoken to him, and they did not know different. Believing God was a given. And the evidence for the fact that both the good and the bad people believed in God is the story of Adam’s two sons. They both presented an offering to God. This shows that even the bad brother believed that God existed. However, he did not fear God. He thought that maybe he can outsmart him, or maybe he can escape from him, or maybe God will just not see, or maybe God will simply overlook what he did. And this foolishness caused him not to fear God. So, in the beginning, the distinction between God’s chosen people and those who were not chosen was reflected by whether they were God-fearers or not. So, initially, the name of God’s chosen people was God-fearers. And that’s what Adam’s chosen son calls himself in verse 5:28, he called himself a God-fearer. Then later, when people learned agriculture, which enabled the creation of the first cities, and people could live close together, people still had to fear God to go to heaven, of course. But one person’s fear of God could be in conflict with another person’s fear of God. When it came to the time, the place, the form, and the practical aspects of reflecting that fear of God in the society. So it became necessary to coordinate the fear of God. So in this environment, when it became for the first time necessary to coordinate the fear of God, God sent Abraham, who was the first to call himself a submitter. So submission is simply coordinated fear of God. The fear of God in coordinated form. So again, the coordinated God-fearers were named through Abraham as submitters. Then later, when agriculture became more specialized, cities started to trade and frequently communicate between each other. And this enabled one city to overpower many other cities. And so the first states were born, the first nations. So now the coordinated fear of God, or submission, could be disrupted by human power structures. And as a result, a need for the management of that coordination emerged. And in this environment, God sent Moses to organize the submitters. And for the first time we had the first nation of submitters, which God established through Moses. And because there can be only one nation of submitters, God had to choose one of the nations of the world. And given that at that moment, the children of Israel were the nation which was the most undeservedly enslaved in the world, they were the best candidate to be transferred into a nation of submitters. And in this way, the children of Israel became the first and only nation of submitters in the world. And because they were the only nation of submitters, this made the words children of Israel and submitters synonymous during that time. So, when they said we, the children of Israel, they meant we, the submitters. We, the children of Jacob who was a submitter. Then, when the children of Israel eventually displeased God with their arrogance, God let the Roman Empire occupy them. And as such, they were not God’s chosen people anymore. To end their choosing, God sent Jesus. And this time, the whole process had to restart. Jesus did not go there to organize them at the city, national, or empire level, but to tell them how to be saved at the individual level. Just like during the time of Adam, which is one of the many reasons that the Quran says that the example of Jesus is like the example of Adam. And as I told you at the time of Adam, the chosen ones were called God-fearers. And this is what the early Gentile people who believed in Jesus also called themselves, God-fearers, as it is reported in the Bible. In the book of Acts, chapter 10, for example, and in so many other places in the New Testament. They called themselves the God-fearers, people who feared God. The word Christian was a Greek label which the outsiders gave to them to refer to people who believe in the Messiah. But they themselves called each other God-fearers, just like in the times of Adam. But there was a slight difference this time. While believing God at the time of Adam was a given for both the chosen people and the unchosen people alike, at the time of Jesus, after centuries of forgetting and distorting of the history, and lies by the bad people, and the invention of other idols, and so on, belief in the only true God became questionable by the bad people. So, now only those who believed in the miracles which they saw, or the messages which they heard through the prophets and the messengers, believed in the one true God. And those who believed in all the messages and miracles which God sent were the only ones who truly believed in God in the correct way. So, now the most important distinction between the good people and the bad people was belief. Both believed that God exists and that he is all powerful as shown by the miracles and believe that he will definitely not let us down if we just do the correct thing. So for the first time the chosen people were called believers. So at that time of Jesus the word believer, God fearer and submitter were synonymous. And this is the culmination of the names for God’s chosen people. First they were called God fearers, then submitters, then children of Israel and then believers. Now, this applied only to people who reached levels of civilization to have empires by then, which included the children of Israel and the people of the Roman Empire, mostly Europeans. But there were other people who did not reach that same level of civilization in their cultures. They still did not have nations and empires. And the most advanced among the rest of the world who did not reach that level of civilization were Arabs. So for them, the Arabs and the rest of the world, this whole history of name changes did not fully apply yet. Because as I told you the names changed while people passed different levels of civilization. So when when God sent Muhammad, they started where Abraham had left. Arabs were not a nation yet or an empire. Their highest level of organization were tribes and the first Arab city as a proper organized city, not just a bunch of tribes like in Mecca, was Medina. Medina means city. For the first time they had an organized city. So the Arabs reached the city level of civilization when Muhammad was sent. Just like in Mesopotamia, they had reached the city levels of civilization when Abraham was sent. The social structures in Muhammad’s place in his time resembled that of Abraham’s place in his time. And at the time of Abraham, they, the chosen people, were called submitters or Muslims in the Semitic languages. And so the people during the time of Muhammad were also called Muslims in the Arabic language. Unfortunately, Arabs only managed to become a nation soon after Muhammad died. And as such, they did not have a messenger to lead them when they became a nation and also an empire later. And because they went through the next two stages of civilization, becoming a nation and then an empire without having a human messenger, they went through those two stages with many mistakes. And while being unauthorized, so there was no opportunity for the progression of the name of God’s chosen people to another more specified name during that time. And therefore, they got stuck being called Muslims. And then eventually, the world as a whole progressed into a level of civilization where most people were able to read. So, around the 1980s, this enabled us to translate the word Muslim into different languages. And in English, we, the chosen people, were called in the authorized English translation of the Quran, submitters, which is a translation of the word Muslim in English. Now, once the world reached another level of civilization, globalization, where the majority of people could not only receive information in real time through TV, but they could also pass information back through internet. So, once the majority of the world reached internet levels of civilization, this enabled the submitters to organize as an online community. And because there can be only one community of submitters according to the Quran, this means that there is only one group or community of submitters. And because it’s only one, our last and final name is not just submitters, but the submitters. You are either part of our community and a submitter or outside our community and a non-submitter. You cannot be a submitter while being an outsider because we are the submitters, the only group of submitters. Individuals outside of our community can only be half submitters at the most. But we are the submitters. And by the way, the Quran mentions both versions. It mentions submitters as a description of an individual human attribute, but when it comes to naming us as a group, it calls us the submitters, al-muslimeena. For example, in verse 41:33, God says, “Who can utter better words than one who invites to God, works righteousness, and says, ‘I am one of the submitters.'” Then, in verse 22:78, God says, “You shall strive for the cause of God as you should strive for His cause. He has chosen you and has placed no hardship on you in practicing your religion, the religion of your father Abraham. He, God, is the one who named you the submitters initially.” You can check this in the Arabic Quran and verify that it says al-muslimeena, the submitters, not just muslimina, submitters, but al-muslimeena, which means the submitters. So, here it is clear that our name as a religious community is the submitters. By the way, in total, the Quran mentions us as the submitters, instead of just submitters, about 14 times. So, this is our final name on Earth, the submitters. And, this will be our name until the end of the world. So, let me remind you again that in the beginning, we were called God fearers, then submitters or Muslims, then children of Israel, then believers, then for the rest of the world, Muslims again, and then submitters since the 1980s, and now finally, the submitters. This is our last name and our group defining Quranic name. Verse 22:78 clearly names us the submitters. So, this is the final name of God’s chosen people. And, this plaque cements the fact that the internet world recognizes us as the submitters. Spread the word about who we are. Our brand is the submitters. Our name is the submitters. Our description is the submitters. Our will is to be with the submitters. We are honored to be the submitters. We strive as the submitters. We increase in number as the submitters. Even our YouTube channel is called the submitters. We stay united as the submitters. We worship God as the submitters. And until our last breath on Earth, we are the submitters. But at the moment of death, because we die individually, we return to being just submitters. And then we get resurrected as submitters. And then we finally are labeled as a community to community together as the believers before we enter the city of believers during the Messianic Age. And then finally in paradise, we are called the winners. So guys, to get that ultimate name recognition in the end as the winners, let’s stick together in the cause of God as the submitters. May God protect us and support us and make us victorious in the end.
In this Friday sermon, Alban Fejza shows that the debate over three or five daily prayers cannot be settled from four verses alone, then maps all 19 verses that mention times of daily worship onto a timetable and shows that five prayers are the most efficient way to fulfill all of them, with rare exceptions where days are very long or short.
Video Transcript:
Praise be to God. There is no other god except God.
It has become quite trendy these days to debate hatefully about whether there are three or five Contact Prayers per day mentioned in the Quran, and both sides of this issue rely on four Quranic verses. Here they are. Verse 24:58 mentions the dawn prayer and the afternoon or evening prayer. Verse 2:238 mentions the middle prayer. Verse 11:114 mentions prayer times at the two ends of the day, and when night arrives. And verse 17:78 mentions a prayer time at the decline of the sun until the darkness of the night, and the dawn prayer.
Those who believe in three prayers say that only the first two verses mention the official prayer times, and that the last two verses just repeat or describe those same three prayers in different words. On the other hand, those who believe in five prayers say that, yes, the first two verses mention three prayers, but the last two verses mention two additional prayers which are not mentioned in the previous two verses, making a total of five prayers.
So which of these opinions is right? Well, the truth is that if we rely on these four verses alone, we, the submitters, should not reach a definite conclusion, because these verses alone do not give us sufficient information to do so. So then what is wrong here? What are they missing? In fact, they are missing a crucial verse in the Quran, which, once you read it, opens up a whole new understanding of many other verses, and only then can we reach a definite conclusion about the number of prayer times in the Quran.
Here is the verse: verse 98:5, which says that God did not make anything obligatory except to worship God sincerely in the correct religion, and to do the Contact Prayers and the Zakat. This is again reinforced in verses 9:11 and 9:5, where God tells us that if people do the Contact Prayer and the Zakat, then they fulfill all the basics of religion and should be considered brothers in religion. I know that Hajj and Ramadan are also obligatory, but at specific times of the year, and someone might decide to join the religion at another time of the year, outside of the Hajj or Ramadan seasons, and this is one of the reasons why only the Contact Prayer and Zakat are mentioned as the basics of joining the correct religion. And knowing that Zakat is an annual ritual, we can conclude that the Contact Prayers are the only obligatory daily ritual for the submitters.
Now, you might wonder what this has to do with the times of the Contact Prayers. Well, keep in mind that God is asking us to do only the Contact Prayers as daily religious rituals. But then, for example, in verse 50:39, God tells us to glorify and praise Him before sunrise and before sunset, which is a daily ritual, and it is given as an order, not as an option. The verse is expressed as a clear obligation. So if it is a daily obligation to glorify and praise God before sunrise and before sunset, wouldn’t this contradict the previous verse, where God told us that He does not order us to do anything else as a daily ritual except the Contact Prayers? Yet in the other verse He orders us to glorify and praise Him before sunrise and before sunset. This would be a logical contradiction, unless this obligatory glorification and praise of God are part of the Contact Prayers.
So this unlocks a whole new understanding. Now we understand that all the obligatory daily rituals which are mentioned in the Quran, including prostrating, bowing, glorifying God, praising God and so on, must all be part of the Contact Prayers. This means that when God tells us to do those obligatory daily rituals at a specific time of the day, He’s saying to do them at that specific time of the day as part of the Contact Prayer, which means that He is also telling us that at that specific time there must be a Contact Prayer. So now we have more verses from which we can draw conclusions about the number of Contact Prayers, because we have to expand our search to all the verses which order us to do obligatory daily rituals. In fact, now we do not only have four verses; we have a total of 19 verses which mention Contact Prayer times in the Quran.
So here are all those verses. Let’s go over them one by one, but before we do that, let’s put them in a daily timetable, to make them easier to understand. For now, let’s imagine that you live at the equator, where the day and the night are always 12 hours long, every day of the year. This will enable us to use clock times in this table, which is easier for most people to understand. According to the Quran, the night comes before the day, so the calendar day starts when the night starts, which in this case, at the equator, would be when the clock shows 19:30. So let’s present the hours here, starting from 19:30 at the edge of this table. Then we have 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, which is midnight, and then 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6:00, which is exactly when the sun rises in this example, and then 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, which is exactly midday in this example, and then 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, and then the tiny edge beyond 19 is half an hour, which makes it 19:30. So here we have represented all 24 hours of the day as they would be at the equator. We are doing this so that we can map the verses using clock times, without having to adjust for day lengths and so on.
Now let’s put all the times of the Contact Prayers which are mentioned in the Quran into this timetable. I will try to give you the literal translation from the Arabic, and every time a prayer time is mentioned with different wording, I will present it with a different color, so that you know it’s a different expression.
The first verse here is verse 25:64. In this verse, God orders us to do the Contact Prayer in the darkness of the night. Then, in the following four verses, verses 73:2, 73:20, 39:9 and 50:40, God orders us to do the Contact Prayer during the night. And then again, in verse 52:49, God orders us to do the Contact Prayer during the night and at the fading of the stars, which at the equator happens from around 4:30 until 6 a.m. By the way, some boxes here are too small to fit all the text, but you get the point: the colored box, not the text, represents the length of that time.
Let’s continue. Verse 11:114: in this verse, God orders us to do the Contact Prayers at night and at the two edges of the daylight, the beginning of the daylight and the end of the daylight. Then, in verse 20:130, God tells us to do the Contact Prayer at night, before sunrise, which is also the beginning of the daylight, and before sunset, at the end of the daylight. So now we have four Contact Prayer times mentioned in the same verse, which, by the way, means that from this verse alone we can conclude that there must be at least four prayer times, because these are all presented as different prayer times within the same verse. But let’s complete this analysis first, before we reach definite conclusions.
In verse 50:39, God tells us to do the Contact Prayers before sunrise and before sunset. In verse 30:17, God tells us to do the Contact Prayers when we reach the morning and when we reach the evening. In the following three verses, verses 33:42, 48:9 and 76:25, God orders us to do the Contact Prayers morning and evening. In verse 24:36, God tells us to do the Contact Prayers during the early day and the evening. The expression “early day” here more literally means breakfast, but in the past the time of breakfast varied from day to day and from region to region, from dawn until lunch, and in some regions today they actually understand that word as lunch. Anyway, if we look at how the root word used here in the Arabic is used in other verses of the Quran, we can see that it is talking about the period from early dawn until lunch.
Next verse: in verse 17:78, God tells us to do a Contact Prayer at dawn, and at the decline of the sun until the darkness of the night. In verse 24:58, God tells us to do a Contact Prayer at dawn and at “Isha.” To define Isha, we can look at other verses of the Quran where the root word is used, and we can see that it refers to the afternoon period plus the evening period. It includes both times, just like in English the word “brunch” includes both breakfast and lunch. We do not have an English word for Isha, so I’m translating it here as “afternoon/evening.”
By the way, traditionally they used the word Isha to refer to the night prayer, but that is because the prayers do not have official names in the Quran, and they did not have clocks in the past, so people named the prayers themselves, according to the time which had just passed, instead of the time in which they were at that moment. For example, they traditionally said “sunset prayer,” but the sun had already set; by “sunset prayer” they meant the prayer after sunset, which is the evening prayer. Or they said “noon prayer,” but what they meant was the prayer after noon happens. So don’t let the names confuse you. Even though traditionally they used the term “Isha prayer” to mean the night prayer, what they meant is that when the time of Isha has fully passed, and the time of Isha, according to the Quran, is the afternoon and evening, then we do the prayer which actually happens at night.
Next verse: in verse 30:18, God tells us to do a Contact Prayer when noon happens, and also during Isha time, which is the afternoon and/or evening. In verse 40:55, God tells us to do a Contact Prayer in the morning, and also during the afternoon and/or evening. And then, finally, in this last verse, 2:238, God tells us to do the middle prayer, and the word “middle” has many meanings here. One meaning is the middle of the day, which is noon, so let’s present it here with this green color. Another true meaning is that it’s talking about the sun being midway between the highest possible point in the sky, 90°, and the lowest possible point in the sky, 0°, and the middle of those two is 45° of elevation. So it is after the sun passes below 45° of elevation, which would be the afternoon prayer, and let’s represent it here with this brownish color.
Once we reach the conclusion that there are five Contact Prayers, another meaning is that the middle prayer is the noon prayer, because it comes after the night and dawn prayers and before the afternoon and evening prayers. As you remember, the calendar day starts with the night, and then the day follows, so this would make the night prayer the first prayer, and that would make the noon prayer the middle, or third, prayer. Another meaning of the middle prayer, which is also true, is the afternoon prayer, if we count the prayers from the moment we wake up, making the dawn prayer the first prayer and the afternoon prayer the middle prayer.
So these are all the Contact Prayer times mentioned in the Quran. They are mentioned in exactly 19 verses, with different wordings, or different expressions, and each different expression is represented by a different color in this timetable. To be proper submitters, we should fulfill all these 19 verses fully, all these colors. But what is the minimum number of daily Contact Prayers, in this equatorial day example, which would ensure that we fulfill all 19 verses?
We have already shown that it cannot be just three, because that would go against verse 20:130, which mentions four different Contact Prayer times. It would also go against verse 11:114, which mentions the night prayer and the evening, or sunset, prayer as two different prayers, which goes against their distorted belief that the night prayer and the evening, or sunset, prayer are the same prayer. And verses 17 and 18 of Sura 30 also go against their distorted belief that the afternoon prayer and the noon prayer are always the same prayer, because these verses clearly mention the afternoon and the noon prayers as two different prayers.
But anyway, how many daily Contact Prayers should there be in this example? As you can see in this timetable, we might actually be able to fulfill many verses with the same Contact Prayer. For example, if we do a Contact Prayer at dawn, we fulfill the expression to do it at dawn, but we also fulfill the expression which says to do it before sunrise. So, given that we can kill many birds with one stone, given that we can fulfill many of these 19 obligations simultaneously, what would be the most efficient way to fulfill all 19 verses of the Quran? What would be the minimum number of prayers which we have to do in this example to fulfill all the verses of the Quran?
To answer this question, let’s draw vertical arrows and try to touch all the colors here with as few arrows as possible. Let’s put an arrow here, and we fulfill all those dark blue obligations. Then let’s put another arrow here, and we fulfill all these obligations. We could also put it further to the right, but then we would have to use two arrows. We are trying to hit as many colors as possible with the same arrow, so if we put it here, further to the left, those late-morning colors are also hit, because all of them start in the early morning anyway. Now let’s put another arrow here; many colors here. If we move this arrow to the left, to try to hit these brownish colors as well, we would miss these pinkish colors to the right. This means that we have to add another arrow, so that we can hit both the brownish and the pinkish colors. So let’s add another arrow. And if we move this arrow to the left, to hit the green colors as well, we would miss the brownish ones. This means that we have to add yet another arrow to cover these green ones. Now we have finally covered all the colors, and guess how many arrows we have? We have five arrows. These five arrows are the five daily Contact Prayers.
So the five daily Contact Prayers are simply the most efficient way to fulfill all these 19 verses, all these Quranic obligations, all these colors. If you try to do it with fewer than five prayers in this equatorial day example, you would be going against at least one of these verses. And if you did it with more than five, with six for example, why would you do that? Why do six prayers when you can achieve the same results with five? As the saying goes, work smarter, not harder. So again, in these equatorial examples, the five daily Contact Prayers are simply the smartest, the most efficient, the best, the easiest way to fulfill all 19 verses of the Quran which prescribe daily rituals at specific times of the day. So the conclusion is that, according to the Quran, in this example the most efficient way to fulfill all the daily Contact Prayers is to do five daily Contact Prayers.
These five daily Contact Prayers don’t have official names, but for easier communication let’s label them here as the night prayer, the dawn prayer, the noon prayer, the afternoon prayer, and the sunset prayer. As you can see from this timetable, there is some wiggle room, a margin of freedom, in when you can do these five prayers, as long as you hit all those same colors with the same arrow. So you can do the night Contact Prayer at any time when there is full darkness in the sky, which is when the sun is more than 18° below the horizon. Then, from the moment the sun reaches 18° below the horizon until sunrise, you can do the dawn prayer. Then, from the moment the sun reaches its maximum elevation until it declines to 45° above the horizon, you can do the noon prayer, and after that, the afternoon prayer, until sunset, after which the sunset prayer can be done until the sun reaches 18° below the horizon. If you want to know why 18°, watch my other Friday sermon, titled “Twilight (Evening Dawn).”
So these are the five Contact Prayers at the equator, which is what happens in Mecca as well, and in most of the world during most of the year. There are rare cases, however, in specific locations and at specific times of the year, where you can fulfill these 19 verses, all these Quranic obligations, with fewer than five prayers, and in those cases you should do so. Again, work smarter, not harder. For example, if the day is very short, let’s say in Sweden in winter, these brownish colors move to the left, and when they move all the way to the left, where these green colors are, they practically come to the same place as the green colors, which means that we can then hit all these browns and greens with one single arrow instead of two. Basically, we would need only one prayer there, and it would count as both the noon and the afternoon prayer at the same time. Or, for example, if the day is so long that night doesn’t happen at all, as in Norway during summer, then these blue colors are completely absent, and in that case we do not need this arrow to hit these blue colors. They don’t exist, and in that case we just don’t do the night Contact Prayer. There’s no night. I’m not stopping you from doing it, but it simply doesn’t exist, and you cannot apply something which doesn’t exist.
Anyway, the point which I’m trying to make is that in general there are five Contact Prayers per day, through which we fulfill these 19 verses. But in rare cases, in rare locations, during a portion of the year, we can fulfill those 19 verses with four prayers, or, in even rarer cases, with three prayers, and in extremely rare cases with two prayers, and in the most extreme cases, at the North and South Poles, with only one prayer. I give all these cases, and the exact circumstances, times and locations where they happen, in the video clarification titled “Times of Contact Prayers.” And on top of that, there are other exceptions, when you’re allowed to pray without doing the actual body movements, which the Quran allows more and more in our busy modern world, and you can learn more about those exact conditions, or exceptions, in my other Friday sermon, titled “Lessening and Shortening the Contact Prayers in Civilized Spaces.”
In this short video, Alban Fejza presents examples of the Quran’s mathematical miracle based on the number 19, which Sura 74 calls one of the great miracles, and explains that this is not numerology.
Video Transcript:
Time to discover who you truly are. According to Sura 74, verse 31 in the Quran, you are a disbeliever if you do not find the content of this video significant or impressive. And alternatively, you are a believer if you find the content of this video significant or impressive. So, I wonder what you think of this. Here we go. This book has the Quran in it. It has exactly 114 chapters, and 114 is 19 * 6. It has 6,346 verses, which is 19 * 334. This is the opening statement in the Quran. It occurs in the Quran 114 times, which is 19 * 6. The statement says, “Bismillahi Rahmanir Rahim.” This is exactly 19 letters. And the first word in it is name, is found in the whole Quran 19 times. And the second word in it, the word Allah, God, is found in the whole Quran 2,698 times, 19 * 142. And the third word in it, Ar-Rahman, the Gracious, is found in the whole Quran 57 times, which is 19 * 3. And the fourth word in it, Ar-Raheem, the Merciful, is found in the whole Quran 114 times, which is 19 * 6. The famous first revelation of the Quran consists of 19 words. Those 19 words have 76 letters, which is 19 * 4. The last revelation of the Quran consists of 19 words. The Quran mentions 30 different numbers, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 19 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 99 100 200 300 1,000 2,000 3,000 5,000 50,000 and 100,000. The sum of all these numbers is 162,146, which equals to 19 * 8,534. Many suras in the Quran start with different sets of these mysterious letters, which we call Quranic initials. Sura 50 starts with the Quranic initial Q, Qaf. And in this sura, there are exactly 57 Qs, which is 19 * 3. The only other sura which has the Quranic initial Q in it is sura 42. And despite the fact that it’s twice as long as sura 50, it again has 57 Qs, which is 19 * 3. Sura 7, 19, and 38 have the Quranic initial S, Sad, in them. And there are 152 Sads in these three suras, which is 19 * 8. Sura 36 has the Quranic initials YS, Yasin, which are found in this sura 285 times, which is 19 * 15. There are seven suras which start with the Quranic initial HM, Ha Mim. And as you can guess by now, the total Hs and Ms in all these HM initial suras is also a multiple of 19. It’s 2,147, which is 19 * 113. Sura 19 has the Quranic initials KHYAS, which are found in this sura 798 times, which is 19 * 42. And examples like this of meaningful multiples of 19 go on and on in the Quran. And I only presented to you a tiny portion of it, but you can find a much longer list, at least 10 times more, in many different videos in this YouTube channel. It’s so statistically improbable that God, in chapter 74, verse 35, calls it one of the great miracles. Now, please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not praising number 19. This is not numerology, like some people might believe that a certain number has some kind of special meaning or special power. No, far from it. Number 19 is like any other number. This channel only preaches the worship of God alone. But number 19 is simply used as a means to perform a miracle, with which God supported the last prophet, Prophet Muhammad. In a similar way, for example, God supported the messenger Saleh with a miracle through a camel, which would only drink on a specific day of the week, but not on the other days of the week. Now, this does not make the camel a special animal. It doesn’t make it better than cows or sheep or goats. And likewise, number 19 is not better than any other number, but it’s simply one of the numbers which God chose to show us a miracle in the Quran to support the fact that the Quran is truly God’s revelation to us through Prophet Muhammad. Now, the recent discovery of this superhuman mathematical composition of the Quran has sparked a continuous stream of new discoveries, new paradigm shifts, a new awareness of the role of the Quran in our modern world, and many other recent discoveries. And you can find them in this YouTube channel. And if you haven’t subscribed to this YouTube channel yet, please subscribe right now. We publish new information every week. On top of that, God willing, we are publishing sura by sura four new authorized English video translations of the Quran. And the variety of meanings which you get from them will enrich you with an abundance of clear religious information. And it will nourish your soul. So, please don’t forget to hit like and subscribe. And if you’re serious about submission, send us an email at submitters.net@gmail.com.
In this Friday sermon, Alban Fejza lists 19 preconditions from the Quran that a person must fulfill to be allowed to understand it correctly, starting with the Contact Prayers, Zakat, belief and righteousness, and including sincerity, fearing God, listening and reading it regularly.
Video Transcript:
Praise be to God. There is no other god except God.
In the last Friday sermon, titled “What Does the Quran Really Say About Hadith,” I proved to you from the Quran that following Hadith is not a precondition to understanding, following or applying the Quran correctly. However, I also said that just because Hadith is not a precondition for understanding the Quran correctly, it does not mean that there are no other preconditions. In fact, the Quran does mention a number of preconditions which people need to fulfill so that they can be allowed by God to understand the Quran correctly, and in this video we will go over that list. Here it is.
The first precondition is doing the Contact Prayers, Salat. Verses 27:2 and 27:3 tell us that the Quran is guidance only for believers who do the Contact Prayers. So doing the Contact Prayers is a precondition to understanding the Quran correctly. The so-called Quranists look at this the wrong way around. They try to understand the Quran first, and then self-design a version of the Contact Prayer according to their limited understanding of the Quran. But you cannot understand from the Quran how to do the Contact Prayer correctly unless you are already doing the Contact Prayer correctly, because doing the Contact Prayer correctly is a precondition to understanding the Quran correctly, according to verses 2 and 3 of Sura 27 and verses 2 and 3 of Sura 2.
So doing the Contact Prayer is a precondition to understanding the Quran correctly, while the Quran is not a precondition to doing the Contact Prayer correctly. As we know, according to the Quran itself, the Contact Prayers existed before the Quran. They came to us all the way from Abraham. Now, it is possible to find all the details of the Contact Prayer directly from the Quran, and I will present them to you, God willing, in another video. But I was only able to find those details because I already understood the Quran correctly, which was only possible because I had already accepted to do the Contact Prayers in their full form, accepting them from the Abrahamic tradition, even before I found their details in the Quran.
So the correct process goes like this. First, you accept the Contact Prayers in their full, unchanged form from the Abrahamic tradition, which you can learn how to do in the video titled “Principles of Muslim Prayer” by Rashad Khalifa. Then, after you do that, according to verses 27:2-3 and 2:2-3, you are enabled to understand the Quran correctly. This fulfills the first precondition to understanding the Quran correctly.
The second precondition to understanding the Quran correctly is giving the obligatory charity, Zakat. The same logic applies here as with the Contact Prayers, and you can learn how to give the obligatory charity correctly in my video clarification titled “The Obligatory Charity (Zakat).”
The third precondition to understanding the Quran correctly is believing. Verses 27:2, 27:76-77, 17:82 and 41:44 tell us that the Quran is guidance only for those who believe, while at the same time it only increases the wickedness of the transgressors. Verse 41:44 also tells us that, whether the Quran is in Arabic or not, for those who believe it is a guide and healing, but those who disbelieve will be deaf and blind to it, as if they are being addressed from far away.
The fourth precondition is being righteous. Verse 2:2 says that the Quran is guidance for the righteous. By the way, the first four preconditions which I have mentioned so far are all given together, right towards the beginning of the Quran, at the start of Sura 2. Sura 2 starts by saying that the Quran is a scripture without mistakes, which is guidance for the righteous, those who believe in the unseen, observe the Contact Prayers, and give charity.
The fifth precondition is accepting the Quran in its entirety. Unfortunately, some people find it hard to accept some verses of the Quran, like the verses about war, or slavery, or miracles, or resurrection, or gender roles, and so on, and this actually limits their understanding of the other verses as well, the verses which they are willing to accept. The Quran is an interconnected book. You can only understand it correctly if you accept all of it.
The sixth precondition is seeking refuge in God from Satan the rejected before we read the Quran. Verse 16:98 says, “When you read the Quran, you shall seek refuge in God from Satan the rejected.”
The seventh precondition is believing in the Hereafter, in the next life. You cannot understand the Quran correctly if you do not believe in the Hereafter. Verse 17:45 says, “When you read the Quran, we place between you and those who do not believe in the Hereafter an invisible barrier.”
The eighth precondition is not disregarding verses when they are brought to you. Verse 18:57 says, “Who are more evil than those who are reminded of their Lord’s proofs, then disregard them, without realizing what they are doing? Consequently, we place shields on their hearts to prevent them from understanding (the Quran), and deafness in their ears. Thus, no matter what you do to guide them, they can never be guided.”
The ninth precondition is not presupposing what the Quran will say. Verse 18:55 says that nothing prevented the people from believing when the guidance came to them, and from seeking the forgiveness of their Lord, except that they demanded to see the same as the previous generations. Unfortunately, a lot of people do not fulfill this precondition. Let me give you just one example. Some people today presuppose that the Quran says that the punishment for adultery is to stone the adulterer to death, which is actually a statement in Hadith, taken from the law in the Bible. Before the Quran was completely revealed to Muhammad, the biblical rules still applied. But the Quran is complete now, and we shouldn’t presuppose that it will tell us the same thing today. The Quran never tells us to kill an adulteress. Instead, the punishment for adultery in the Quran is 100 lashes. We shouldn’t presuppose what it will say about a certain issue unless it actually says it.
The tenth precondition is not engaging in arguments about what the Quran is saying. Unfortunately, today most of the online religious groups are organized in such a way that basically all they do is argue with one another, trying to convince each other to understand the Quran their own way. That’s not the way to understand the Quran. That method of organization actually prevents you from understanding something new from the Quran. You can solidify what you already knew, but it prevents you from correctly understanding anything new from the Quran. Group thinking prevents new thinking.
The eleventh precondition is fearing God. Verse 20:3 says that the Quran is a reminder for those who fear God. The same is said at the beginning of the Book of Proverbs in the Bible: the fear of God is the beginning of knowledge. That’s because, for any new information to be ingrained in your brain, the brain first has to decide that it’s important information to be remembered, and if the heart is fearing God, it automatically tells the brain that the information is important, and then the brain puts that information in its right place, to be remembered later. This is why you might have had hundreds of traffic accidents in a video game, and you probably don’t remember any of them, but if you had an accident in real life, where the fear of dying and meeting God was involved, you can’t forget that accident for the rest of your life. So when a perfect believer reads the Quran while fearing God, his brain, because of the fear of God, registers the information similarly to how the brain registers information before an accident.
The twelfth precondition to understanding the Quran correctly is not rushing with the Quran. If you try to absorb more information than you can handle at any given time, it gets jumbled and mixed up in your head, and it increases the chances of false memories. You might end up thinking that you remember something from the Quran which is not there at all, and then misunderstand other portions of the Quran because of that false memory.
The thirteenth precondition to understanding the Quran correctly is accepting translations of the Quran in your language, but expecting the complete details only in the Arabic Quran. Unfortunately, many people today go to the extremes on this issue. They either consider the translations the final authority in religious decisions, or they do not show enough trust in the translations. Translations of the Quran should be treated as witnesses of events. Two witnesses of an event make the event trustworthy for you, and in the same way, you can use two independent translations to figure out what the Arabic Quran very likely says, or you can use one translation in combination with proof, which is similar to using two translations. You can definitely know the truth from translations, but by the very fact that they are translations, they cannot have all the details. Verse 41:3 says that the complete details are only in the Arabic Quran, but the general truth, guidance and belief can also be found in translations of the Quran.
The fourteenth precondition to understanding the Quran correctly is listening when the Quran is recited. You cannot speak over the Quran, as they do in some so-called Quranic studies. You should not interrupt while the Quran is being recited and then expect to understand the Quran correctly. You are supposed to simply listen, according to verse 7:204.
The fifteenth precondition is taking heed when the Quran is recited. It’s important that when you learn something from the Quran, you absorb it into your life and apply it, and then that enables you to learn something new correctly. If you don’t take heed in the first case, it prevents you from understanding something new in another case.
The sixteenth precondition, obviously, is wanting to learn more. Verse 54:17 tells us that the Quran was made easy for those who want to learn. Unfortunately, a large number of so-called Muslims put their children in schools where they force them to learn the Quran in their childhood years, even when they do not want to. They end up memorizing it in their minds, but it’s not in their hearts.
The seventeenth precondition is being sincere. Verse 56:79 says that none can grasp the Quran except the sincere.
The eighteenth precondition is being knowledgeable. Verse 3:7 says that when it comes to the verses with deeper, multiple meanings, none knows their true meaning except God and those well founded in knowledge. Unfortunately, often people who have no proof in their lives that they are intelligent, who were never among the best at anything, not among the best at school, not among the best at finishing college, not among the best at their work, still think that they can be the best at understanding the Quran correctly. You don’t have to be the best, but you cannot be the best at understanding the Quran if you were not intelligent enough to be the best at other things earlier in your life, when you were tested on them.
And finally, the nineteenth precondition to understanding the Quran correctly is reading it regularly. Verse 17:106 says that the Quran was revealed slowly, to be read over a long period of time.
So these are the 19 preconditions to understanding the Quran correctly. If you do not fulfill them, your understanding of the Quran is distorted, in the best-case scenario, or you might be completely blocked from understanding it, in the worst-case scenario.
In this Friday sermon, Alban Fejza goes through all 36 places where the word Hadith appears in the Quran and shows that none of them tells us to follow Hadith as a religious source, then answers the common Sunni arguments based on verses 59:7 and 5:92.
Video Transcript:
Praise be to God. There is no other god except God.
There are hundreds of debates online between Sunnis and Quranists about whether Hadith is necessary for the correct understanding of the Quran. According to the Quranists, Hadith is not necessary at all to understand the Quran correctly, while according to the Sunnis, Hadith is a necessary part of understanding the Quran correctly. In all the debates you might have seen, you can never reach a conclusion, because those debates are not done in good faith. They are not really interested in the truth. They just throw a few verses here and a few verses there, hoping to catch the other party by surprise, so that they can win the debate. Finding the truth requires a systematic process: not just looking at a few verses here and there, but at all the verses of the Quran. Only then should we allow ourselves to reach a decision about this issue. So that’s what I did. Here it is.
If you go to any Quran glossary, you can see that the word “Hadith,” in all its grammatical forms, is mentioned 36 times in the Quran. Here is one Quran glossary online, at this link, which is maintained neither by the Quranists nor by the Sunnis. It’s not maintained by a religious project at all; it’s maintained by a linguistic research group at the University of Leeds in the UK. As you can see here, the word “Hadith,” in all its grammatical forms, is mentioned 36 times in the Quran. So I took all these 36 verse numbers, and let me present them to you.
Here we have all the verses in the Quran where the word “Hadith” is mentioned. Let’s go over these verses and see for ourselves, once and for all, what they say. By the way, the word “Hadith” literally means a story, or to tell, or to bring, or something new. I will give the translation with the word “Hadith” in capital letters, and while I present the verses, please pay attention and see whether any of them tell us to follow Hadith, or more specifically the Hadith of Muhammad. So now let’s see what each of these verses says.
This verse says that buying entertaining stories (Hadith) to mislead from the way of God, without knowledge, is prohibited. This verse says that we should tell (Hadith) about God’s blessings on us. In this verse, God asks Muhammad whether the story (Hadith) about the end of the world has reached him. This verse tells us that the servant of God asked Moses not to ask him about anything until he told him (Hadith) about it. This verse tells us that people who are afraid to fight in the cause of God, and do not understand that God is doing everything, can hardly understand any story (Hadith). This verse tells us that one of the many reasons why the waiting period is commanded by God before a believer divorces his wife is that perhaps God might bring (Hadith) a solution.
These verses tell us that telling your dream is a story (Hadith). These verses tell us that the stories which are told about Moses and Abraham are stories (Hadith). This verse tells us that the Jews hide the stories (Hadith) of the Old Testament from the believers when they think that they will give supporting arguments to the believers. These verses tell us that the communities of disbelievers before the Quran who were destroyed remained as stories (Hadith) among the people after them. These verses tell us that on the Day of Judgment people will not be able to conceal their life stories (Hadith) from God. These verses simply mention the Quran as a reminder which is new (Hadith). These verses tell us that when people engage in conversations (Hadith) which ridicule or deny the verses of the Quran, or consider them debatable or unimportant, we should not sit with them until they change to another conversation. These verses tell us that the Quran is a true story (Hadith). These verses tell us that the Quran is the best story (Hadith). These verses tell us that believing in, or bringing, any other stories (Hadith) except the Quran is considered a bad idea in principle.
So, as you can see, in the verses which we have covered so far, there was not a single verse which obliged us, or even recommended us, to follow Hadith as a religious source. As a matter of fact, these verses did not even connect Hadith to Muhammad in any way. They were stories told by other people about other people, not Hadith, or stories, told by Muhammad or about Muhammad.
Now, these last two verses, which I left until the end, actually do mention Hadith from Muhammad: stories which Muhammad told. But let’s look at what they say. In this verse, God prohibited the believers during Muhammad’s time from seeking stories (Hadith) from Muhammad. And this last verse tells us that when one of Muhammad’s wives spread a private story (Hadith) from Muhammad to another wife, she was asked by God to repent for doing it. So, as you can see, even these last two verses, which talk about Hadith, stories from Muhammad, are actually cases where God either prohibited Muhammad’s contemporaries from seeking Hadith from him, or prohibited them from spreading Hadith from him, because those stories were Muhammad’s private life, which had nothing to do with his messengership. His messenger persona, his public persona, was actually expressed through the Quran, not through Hadith.
A lot of what people today call Hadith is either false, or an intrusion into Muhammad’s private life which Muhammad never authorized, and the Quran actually asks the believers to repent for sharing any aspect of Muhammad’s private life without God’s authorization. So this is everything that the Quran says about Hadith, and as you can see, the Quran does not consider Hadith a precondition or a requirement for understanding the Quran correctly, or for understanding religion correctly.
Now, even after all this, some Sunnis will insist that we should still follow Hadith because, according to them, verse 7 of Sura 59 says, “Whatever the messenger gives you, take it, and whatever the messenger stops you from, do not take it.” However, once you go and check the verse yourself, you can see that the verse does not talk about Hadith at all, and they are only quoting a small portion of it. If you read the whole verse, you can see that it actually talks about the spoils which they won in war. Here is the whole verse. It says: “Whatever God restored to His messenger from the defeated communities shall go to God and His messenger (in the form of charity). You shall give it to the relatives, the orphans, the poor, and the traveling alien. Thus, it will not remain monopolized by the strong among you. Whatever the messenger gives you (from it), take it, and whatever the messenger stops you from (taking), do not take it. You shall reverence God. God is strict in enforcing retribution.” So this is the whole verse, and you can clearly see that it is talking about the spoils of war, which should be distributed by God’s messenger as charity, and not about Hadith. Hadith is not mentioned here at all, explicitly or implicitly.
The other verses which the Sunnis will typically bring to support the wrong idea of following Hadith are the verses which say, “Obey God and obey the messenger,” like verse 5:92, for example. But they do not mention that the same verse says that the only duty of the messenger is to deliver the message: “balagh,” delivery, in Arabic. And we are told in verse 14:52 that this same word, “balagh,” refers to the Quran itself. So obeying the messenger only means obeying what the messenger delivered as a messenger, according to verse 5:92, and what Muhammad delivered as the messenger is the Quran itself, according to verse 14:52. Nowhere in the Quran does it say that balagh, the delivery, includes Hadith. I have already shown you all the verses where the word “Hadith” is mentioned, and you can recheck them to see that Hadith is not defined as balagh, delivery, in them.
According to the Quran, Hadith is simply stories, which might be useful for historians, like all other historical stories, such as the stories of Napoleon or of Alexander the Great, which contain truths and falsehoods to be studied by historians. But they are not religious texts, and were never intended to be used as religious texts in the beginning, even in cases where they were factually true. Now, despite the overwhelming evidence from the Quran, some stubborn Sunni scholars still try to come up with even weaker arguments to support their idea that Hadith is a necessary part of religion, but the answers, the counterarguments, to all of them are given in the book titled “Quran, Hadith and Islam” by Rashad Khalifa.
So now the debate between the Quranists and the Sunnis is settled. The conclusion is that when it comes to religion, the Quranists are right about this issue. They are right when they claim that we do not need Hadith at all to understand or apply the Quran correctly. However, pay attention now; this is important. Just because Hadith is not a precondition for understanding or applying the Quran correctly, it does not mean that there are no other preconditions. The Quranists still fail to understand the Quran correctly, because they do not meet those other preconditions, and I give you those other preconditions in the following Friday sermon, titled “The Preconditions to Understanding the Quran Correctly.”
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.
