Tag: Friday Sermons

Friday Sermon by: Rashad Khalifa, Imam of Masjid Tucson

Summary:

In this program, Rashad Khalifa examines evolution and creation using the laws of probability, shows that the spontaneous origin of life and of complex organs has a probability of zero, presents the Quran’s mathematical code based on the number 19 as a message from the super-intelligent Creator, and concludes that creation and divinely guided evolution complement each other.

Video Transcript:

Every one of you is aware of the spirited debate that has been raging for decades between evolutionists and creationists. This hot debate began in the mid-19th century, about 125 years ago, when Charles Darwin developed his theory of gradual evolution. Basically, what Charles Darwin said was that life began spontaneously from inanimate, inorganic matter. This beginning of life was supposedly in water, and a single, simple cell formed first. Then this cell split, multiplied, and evolved into new forms of life. With the passage of millions upon millions of years, fish came into existence in this water, and with additional millions upon millions of years, some of the fish started to walk on land and developed lungs instead of gills. Eventually, additional millions and millions of years were required for some of these land creatures to develop wings and the ability to fly. Another branch of these land animals continued to develop and evolve, all the way to human beings.

Of course, as scientists, we took this theory of Charles Darwin and scrutinized it. We put it to the test, like any other theory. Darwin used terms like natural selection, mutations, and survival of the fittest to explain his theory. During the last 100 years of scientific revolution, we have learned quite a few things. Many of the things that you and I learned as youngsters have been found to be wrong, or at best trivialized. So we took this theory of evolution and studied it carefully. We started to look for the evidence. We treated it like any other theory, trying to prove it and turn it into a law. In the process of studying the theory and collecting evidence, fossils, skeletal remnants and so on, the other sciences combined to teach us that parts of Darwin’s original theory were unworkable, or scientifically just downright wrong. This led to the modification of Darwin’s theory. As scientists, we had to modify the original theory of evolution, as written by Charles Darwin, to fit the newly established facts.

Let me give you a couple of examples. Gradual evolution proved to be wrong. Our fossil record does not support gradual evolution. You’ve heard about the missing link; every one of you knows about the missing link. I’m here to tell you that there is not just one missing link; there are thousands of missing links. To solve this problem, scientists came up with a new theory called punctuated equilibrium. Stephen Gould of Harvard and Niles Eldredge came up with the idea of punctuated equilibria to solve the problem of the missing links. What they said was that evolution happened in giant leaps, not gradually. So this was the first major modification of the original theory of evolution.

Another idea that we had to abandon, for example, was Lamarck’s concept of the transmission of acquired characteristics. This concept of Lamarck’s had to be abandoned because it proved unworkable. To give you an example from everyday life, Lamarck said, for example, that the giraffe has a long neck because those animals had to reach for high leaves, and they lived in an area where they needed the long neck. Well, this was proven unworkable and scientifically untenable, and it was eventually abandoned. So we kept adjusting and modifying the theory of evolution.

What I wish to share with you today is a scientific examination of both evolution and creation. I will present to you physical, irrefutable, incontrovertible evidence that will help you decide exactly what took place: evolution and/or creation. The title of this program is “Evolution or Creation: The Final Argument,” and hopefully, by the end of this program, you will have seen enough evidence to help you make a final decision about evolution and creation. We will find out exactly which components of Darwin’s theory are correct and which are wrong. And I must point out at this time that Darwin was indeed a genius when he suggested natural selection, survival of the fittest and mutations to explain his theory.

Let me give you a good example: the navel orange. This beautiful fruit is a new creature. That’s right: your great-grandfather never saw or tasted a navel orange. This happened through mutation. All of a sudden, this tree came out with this beautiful fruit, seedless and delicious, and of course it has now spread all over the world. We take it for granted, but this is a good example of evolution. However, I must point out that the navel orange evolved from oranges. In other words, we did not see an apple, or a fig, evolve from an orange. The navel orange is still an orange, and this is an important point.

The evolution-creation issue is before the Supreme Court this year, in 1987, so this program is quite timely, because right now we have a powerful, scientific and objective tool that can tell us exactly which events in the world are probable and which are not. This powerful, objective and scientific tool is mathematics. Mathematics is the most scientific of all sciences. It is a pure science, and through mathematics we can tell whether a bridge or a building is going to collapse under any given circumstances. So we can use this powerful tool to examine both evolution and creation. This is exactly what we’re going to do together, and hopefully by the end of this program, you and I will reach a final decision. So the name “The Final Argument” is quite appropriate.

So let me first simplify the mathematical laws, the laws of probability, that we will be using today to examine both evolution and creation. Let us say we have five cubes. Each cube is labeled with only one number: either one, two, three, four or five. If we mix these five cubes in a mixer and have them fall down into some kind of device, so that they are lined up in one line, or toss them up in the air and have them fall so that they are lined up, what are the possible combinations of these five cubes? How many permutations are we going to have? The laws of mathematics are very simple. They tell you that you will get 120 combinations, and you obtain this by multiplying one by two by three by four by five. The product is 120. So you will get 120 combinations, or permutations. In other words, every combination, let’s say if they fall down lined up one, two, three, four, five, has one chance out of 120.

Let me show you on the board. Here we are with the five cubes, each one labeled with only one number. You toss them up in the air and have them fall down so that they are lined up in a particular combination. How many possible combinations are there? Here we see the formula: the number of possible combinations, or permutations, is 1 times 2 times 3 times 4 times 5, or 120 combinations. The probability of any specific combination is obtained by dividing 1 by 120, because each combination has one chance out of 120, and 1 over 120 equals 0.0083. This probability diminishes fast as we increase the number of cubes. For example, if we increase the number of cubes by one, so that you have six cubes instead of five, the number of possible combinations jumps from 120 to 720: one times two times three times four times five times six. And the probability of any specific combination goes down from 1 out of 120 to 1 out of 720, or 0.0014. So you can see how fast it diminishes.

Well, when will the probability diminish all the way to zero? Mathematicians, who are exceedingly precise, conservative and careful scientists, decided that if you have 84 cubes, the probability of getting any specific combination is zero. What does this mean? Let me go to the board and show you. I have the number here for 84 cubes. Look at this probability: 0.0000, all the way to 50 zeros, and then 208. So you can see that, for all practical purposes, the probability is zero, and this, by the way, is extending the full benefit of the doubt. What does this mean in practical terms? It means that you can take these 84 cubes, toss them up in the air and have them fall in such a way that they line up, and if you want the specific combination 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, all the way to 84, you can toss up these cubes and have them fall down lined up forever, and you will never see this combination. This is what a probability of zero means. You can appreciate that. Many of you are familiar with the lottery. You know what your chances are of winning the lottery, and in the lottery we’re talking about five or six numbers. So you can really appreciate the improbability of having 84 cubes line up in a specific combination.

To make a long story short, the genetic material of the human being, the genes that decide what kind of creature we have, contains, listen to this, 30 billion nucleotides, arranged in specific sequences and specific quantities. Now, what are the probabilities of arranging these billions of nucleotides in a specific sequence? Of course, you know the answer from the mathematical laws: the probability is zero, many times over. We are not talking about 84 numbers, or 8,400 numbers, or 84,000, or 84 million numbers. We’re talking about 30 billion nucleotides.

As scientists, we have been talking about the similarities between the human being and the ape as far as genetic material is concerned. And you know something? If we have 90 percent similarity, we are still talking about 300 million nucleotides that must be arranged in a specific sequence and in specific quantities to change the ape into a human being. Even if we have 99 percent similarity, we are still talking about 30 million nucleotides that must be haphazardly arranged in a specific sequence in order to change the ape into a human being, and you know that the probability of this is zero. We now have these mathematical laws that can tell us exactly which events are probable and which are not, and we know that in the case of 99% similarity between the human and the ape, the probability of 30 million nucleotides being arranged this way is zero. We’re not talking about 84 numbers; we’re talking about 30 million nucleotides.

Another thing: at the other end of the evolutionary spectrum, we are talking about the so-called simple cell. You remember, when I stated Charles Darwin’s theory, Darwin said that first a simple, single cell was formed. Well, the cell that Darwin is talking about is not simple at all. It’s a very complex chemical factory. In fact, it is the most complex chemical factory we know of. It has hundreds of actions and reactions going on in it, and it has DNA material, which is very complex. Just to mention something that would make you smile: about 50 years ago, Huxley and Wells, in their text “The Science of Life,” described the nucleus of the cell as showing nothing inside but clear fluid. Those great scientists knew nothing about DNA. In the last 50 years, there has been so much advancement in science that we now realize how many actions and reactions are going on within the nucleus. We know about DNA and its helical structure, and we know the arrangement and specificity of the sequences of nucleotides, and we now know that the probability of the haphazard creation of a so-called simple cell, as Darwin called it, is zero.

According to Darwin, the evolution of organs paralleled the evolution of the organisms. For example, the eye, this very complex organ, started out, according to Darwin, as a light-sensitive spot on the surface. After millions upon millions of years, this light-sensitive spot became a depression. Additional millions upon millions of years passed, and the depression became a pit, and then millions more years caused a lens to develop in that depression. Well, according to this scenario, creatures existed for millions upon millions of years in total blindness, awaiting the evolution of 20/20 vision, the evolution of the eye. Logically, to you and to me, this does not make sense, and now we see from the mathematical laws that the probability that this happened haphazardly is zero. Do you know how many things are in the eye? The lens, the cornea, the retina; I can give you a two-page list of the components of the eye. None of them can be formed haphazardly. We now have these laws of mathematics telling us that the probability is zero.

Now let me give you some examples. The dragonfly has 30,000 lenses in each eye, 30,000 of them. For millions of years, the dragonfly has existed with 30,000 lenses in each eye. What kind of intelligence told the dragonfly to stop evolving at 30,000? Imagine the small eye of the dragonfly divided into 30,000 cones, and each cone fitted with a perfectly shaped lens. Imagine that. Why did the dragonfly stop at 30,000? Why not a couple of hundred more, or a couple of thousand more? Who told the dragonfly, “This is enough evolution for your eye”? How about the housefly? The housefly has 4,000 lenses in each eye. What kind of intelligence told the housefly to stop evolving its eye at 4,000 lenses? For millions of years, the fly has had 4,000 lenses in each eye. Who told it to stop evolving? Why not go on to 5,000 lenses? The honeybee has 6,300 lenses in each eye, and again we face the same question. If you pursue that question, it will prove the existence of a super-intelligent being that told these organisms to stop evolving their eyes at a certain number of lenses.

So this is the irony of it: while evolution is proven to be correct by scientific research, the initiation of life, the origin of species, is proven to be improbable. The probability is zero, and therefore it had to be created by a super-intelligent Creator, and we will discuss this matter, and see the mathematical evidence supporting it, before the end of this program.

Let us look at some established facts that you and I have witnessed in the last few years. The first fact is that, despite our tremendous scientific advances and great achievements, not a single scientist, not a single researcher, not a single laboratory has succeeded in initiating life from inorganic, inanimate matter. They have utterly failed to duplicate Charles Darwin’s basic concept that life evolved from inanimate, inorganic matter. What we scientists have succeeded in doing is synthesizing amino acids and proteins from oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and so on. This is the extent of our success in the lab. We could not produce life. Of course, it is natural that we can make amino acids or proteins from oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and so on; after all, these are the ingredients that make up amino acids and proteins. It’s no big deal to create the circumstances for the ingredients to link up and make these chemicals. But these are dead chemicals, dead molecules of amino acids and proteins. Some people would say these are the building blocks of life. Well, that is right; these are the building blocks, but that is the extent of it, just building blocks. If you take a bunch of building blocks, put them in a corner and leave them there for thousands of years, will they assemble themselves into a building with a deliberate design? Of course not. So, as scientists, we succeeded in creating the building blocks, but we could not create the building. This is a very important fact.

The debate between evolutionists and creationists was so hot and so emotional that some of my fellow scientists gave up their scientific objectivity, and I find myself forced to criticize fellow scientists for behaving like unscientific creationists. Let me give you a good example. It has to do with a booklet published by the National Academy of Sciences back in 1983. In that booklet, they published a picture, one of their favorite pictures, of the skulls of a number of hominids, and they concluded from that picture that the skull of the more advanced hominid evolved from the more primitive skull. Well, this is a perfectly valid and scientific conclusion. There’s no problem with that. The problem is that the Academy ignored an equally valid conclusion: that the creatures that possessed these skulls simply existed independently of each other, without any relationship whatsoever. Scientific objectivity dictates that we present both views: that the skulls evolved from each other, and/or that they existed independently of each other. This kind of abandonment of scientific objectivity resulted from the high emotionalism and fanaticism on both sides of the evolution-creation issue, but scientists should never abandon their objectivity. We will be in deep trouble if we do. We cannot say, “Evolution is a fact, and it is up to the rest of the world to prove otherwise.” This is putting the cart before the horse. When we say that evolution is a theory, the burden of proof is on us to provide the evidence that evolution is a fact. It is our duty to establish evolution as a truth, not the other way around.

So, to summarize, we all appreciate the power of mathematics as a pure science, the most scientific of all sciences, and we are all familiar with Einstein’s simple formula, E = mc², and with the tremendous consequences of such a simple formula. Mathematics is an objective and powerful tool that can tell us exactly which events in the world are probable and which are not. We have been talking about DNA, the genes, the 30 billion nucleotides in the human genes, which interact with other life processes. We are not talking about a toy. When you go to the toy store and buy a bunny rabbit, for example, it has ears and realistic eyes, but these eyes don’t see, and this toy rabbit doesn’t have any cells, or DNA, or arranged nucleotides, or any life actions and reactions. Here we are assuming that we are talking just about the simple physical arrangement of nucleotides in specific sequences and specific quantities. This infinitesimally small probability is multiplied by other infinitesimally small probabilities when the nucleotides, the DNA, interact with other life processes in the cell and throughout the organism.

Now we can use the same powerful tool to prove the alternative, namely creation. How in the world can anybody prove creation? Nobody could imagine anything that could prove creation. But you know something? About 100 years ago, we could not envision TV, or the telephone, or communication satellites, but here we are. If you could see your great-grandfather today and describe television to him, he would disagree with you; he would think you had gone crazy. Similarly, we could not imagine anything that would prove or disprove creation. But how about a coded message from outer space? Did you ever think about that? A coded message from outer space telling you, “I am the Creator, and this is how I did it”: a message that would give you all the details.

Many of you are familiar with Carl Sagan’s latest novel, called “Contact.” In “Contact,” he presented a fictitious story about a coded message from outer space, from some intelligent life out there, and the message was decoded by computers, and so on. And you know something? This is not fiction at all. I am here to tell you that we have actually received a coded message, a mathematically coded message, from the super-intelligent Creator, telling us exactly what happened: how the universe and the six million species of living organisms in this universe all came to be.

Now that we possess this irrefutable mathematical proof, which came from outer space, from the super-intelligent Creator, we can look back and at least smile at the statements of even some of the leading creationists. For example, one of those leading creationists, Duane Gish, said that it is impossible to conceive of an experiment that could disprove the possibility of creation, and that creation therefore does not fulfill the criteria of a scientific theory. So even the creationists gave up, thinking that there could never be anything to prove or disprove creation. But here we are. Just like any other discovery, we have found this mathematically coded message from the super-intelligent Creator.

The first hint of the mathematical code was reported about 900 years ago by a Jewish rabbi, Rabbi Judah the Pious. And by the way, I’m talking here about unaltered, original, untranslated scripture. This is very important, very crucial, because there have been many distortions, changes, alterations, losses and additions to the scriptures, and we have to be extremely careful to know that we are dealing with original, unaltered, untranslated scriptures, literally the very same words that the Creator sent to us. So, what did Rabbi Judah find? Let me quote it for you; it is easier this way.

[He reads a passage from the book “Studies in Jewish Mysticism,” edited by Joseph Dan and Frank Talmage, describing how Rabbi Judah the Pious rejected an addition to the morning prayer because the holy name, and other key words, occur exactly 19 times in the original text, in sets of 19 that are intricately intertwined.]

So this was the first hint of a mathematical composition, some kind of a code, in the message that came to us from the Creator. You now realize that it is important to find original, unchanged scripture. Just like the evolutionists looking for fossils and skeletal remains, scientists have been searching the world over for original scriptures. You’ve heard about the Dead Sea Scrolls, and all the finds in many places in the Middle East. All these are attempts; some of them are failures, and some are successes. So I set out to find an original scripture, and here is the result. In this whole world, there’s only one scripture that was never altered, where not a single letter was changed, and that scripture is the Quran. So what I did was get the Quran, an original copy with the original Arabic, put it into the computer, and decode an intricate mathematical code that is clearly beyond human ability. So now we have physical proof, using the ultimate in scientific evidence, mathematics, telling us that there is a super-intelligent Creator, and in that message we see how we came into being, why we are here, where we are going, and many, many other answers to lots of our most urgent questions.

Before I put the Quran into the computer, I noticed a unique phenomenon that you will never find in any other literary work. I noticed, for example, that in the first verse of chapter 2 of the Quran there are only three letters, A.L.M. That’s it; that is verse 1 of chapter 2. These letters remained mysterious for fourteen hundred years. Scholars and scientists of all kinds looked at these initials, A.L.M., and the other initials in the Quran, trying to figure out what they meant, and they could not do it. The computer did it recently. To give you an idea, if you count the letters A, L and M in chapter 2 of the Quran, you will find that the total is 9,899, and this number, 9,899, is a multiple of 19. Remember the work of Rabbi Judah the Pious. The number 19 turns out to be the common denominator in the older scripture and in the newer scripture. 19 is the common denominator in the original, unaltered Bible, and also in the latest edition of the scripture, the Quran. And this is very important.

There are 29 initialed chapters in the Quran, covering half the Quran. The Quran has 114 chapters; some are longer and some are shorter, but the 29 initialed chapters constitute half the Quran. This mathematical system goes from the very simple to the very complex, so it is suitable for people of all levels of education. For example, chapter 50 is entitled “Q.” That’s it, just one letter, Q, and it is initialed with the letter Q. The computer said that this chapter contains 57 Q’s. You can count them yourself if you know the Arabic letters, and you’ll find that the total is 57, 19 times 3. There is one other chapter in the Quran that is initialed with the letter Q, and that is chapter 42, which happens to be more than twice as long as chapter 50, entitled “Q.” When you count the letter Q in chapter 42, you find exactly the same number, 57. So the only two Q-initialed chapters have the same number of Q’s: 57 and 57. Chapter 68 is initialed with the letter N, as in Nancy, and when you count the letter N in this chapter, you come up with 133, 19 times 7.

This goes on and on, and it gets more and more complex, until you realize that this is not human fabrication, that this is way beyond human ability. For example, we have seven chapters in the Quran initialed with the letters H.M. These seven constitute about one tenth of the whole book, and when you count the letters H, “Ha,” and M, “Meem,” in these seven chapters, you come up with the total 2,147, and this is a multiple of 19, the common denominator throughout the scriptures, the coded message from the Creator to us. If only one letter H or one letter M had been lost or added in the last 1,400 years, you would end up with 2,148, for example, which is not a multiple of 19, or 2,146, and the whole system would collapse, because mathematics is a pure science. It is the most sensitive scale, and if you lose one count, you don’t have a multiple of 19. By the time the computer was done with the mathematical analysis of the Quran, a vast mathematical code had emerged, and you could see that every letter and every word in the Quran is precisely calculated, beyond human ability, and you will be absolutely convinced that this is a message from a super-intelligent Creator, telling us exactly what happened.

Let me give you another good example, because some people may think that only the initialed chapters are mathematically composed. This simple example is that the opening statement in the Quran consists of four words, and the number of letters in this statement is 19. It’s a very important statement. It says, “In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful,” and it is considered the most important statement in the Quran. It consists of 19 letters, and every word in it is found in the whole book in multiples of 19. For example, the first word, “Ism,” or name, is mentioned exactly 19 times throughout the whole book. The second word is God, Allah, and it is found 2,698 times, which is 19 times 142. The third word, Most Gracious, in Arabic, is mentioned in the whole book 57 times, 19 times 3. And the last word, Most Merciful, is mentioned 114 times, 19 times 6.

Right there, you can appreciate that this cannot happen in a human-made book. If you go to the library and examine one million human-made books, how many will you find where the opening statement consists of X number of letters, and every word in the opening statement is repeated in the whole book in multiples of X? Again, the laws of probability say zero. You will not find a book where all the words of the opening statement comply with this criterion. So there you have it, a very simple phenomenon. By the way, it was published in Scientific American, in the September 1981 issue, and the comment on it was that this is an ingenious study of the Quran. I was really flattered.

What does this have to do with the evolution-creation issue? Well, we have here a vitally important document from the super-intelligent Creator, telling us, in words and letters that are mathematically composed beyond human intelligence, exactly what happened. In this document, we see that life began in water, just as Darwin said, so this portion of Darwin’s theory is confirmed. We also see evolution and changes in creation. In chapter 35, verse 1, and in chapter 16, verse 8, we see that evolution is a continuing process. So, according to this vitally important document, evolution is a divinely guided process. Evolution is a creation of the super-intelligent Creator, and it is something that is happening now, on a continuous basis. We learn that every one of us was individually created, and that the evolution that is taking place is individually controlled and guided by the super-intelligent Creator.

One of the most exciting things about this document is that the dichotomy, the great rift between science and religion, is eliminated. We now see this document from the super-intelligent Creator telling us that evolution is the Creator’s work, and that it is going on continuously, and therefore there is no need for this dichotomy between science and religion. So what we see here is mathematically irrefutable evidence that creation and evolution are both correct, and that they complement each other. Of course, we have to examine the existing theories of evolution and creation, and correct them in view of the new statements that have come to us from the super-intelligent Creator.

While on the subject of confirming or rejecting existing scriptures, I must point out that this mathematically composed document from the super-intelligent Creator, the Quran, sets the record straight as far as many existing creationist ideas are concerned. For example, we learn that the earth is billions of years old, not five thousand or ten thousand years old, and we learn that the earth is egg-shaped, as I mentioned before, not flat. And we learn that Noah’s ark, for example, did not look like what we see in the pictures of Bible stories. Noah’s ark was simply a raft made of logs tied together with primitive ropes, and Noah did not carry all the animals of the earth on his ark, or raft, either. He carried his domesticated animals, to save himself, his family and his animals from the flood. And the flood did not cover the whole world, as we heard as youngsters. The flood was a local flood. All this is proven by mathematically composed statements from the Creator Himself.

It is very important to realize that the prevalent creationism has nothing to do with the original, untranslated Bible. That’s right: the prevalent creationism is a product of medieval storytellers, and of ignorant interpretations and mistranslations of the original Bible. For example, the Bible says clearly that one of our Lord’s days is the same as 1,000 of our years, and a day can equal 50,000 years, if you look at the Quran. So we are told clearly that the day of our earth is not equal to any other day. When you go to the moon, the day equals 14 earthly days. If you go to Mercury, for example, the day over there is 88 of our days. So the minute you leave this tiny planet Earth, the day is no longer 24 hours. The truth is, the Bible does not say that the earth is six thousand or ten thousand years old. The Bible does not say that Noah’s flood covered the whole world, the original Bible did not say that Noah carried all the animals on the ark, and the ark did not look like an aircraft carrier either.

These misrepresentations of the Bible actually give Christianity, and religion in general, a bad name. The people who are pushing the prevalent false creationism are doing a terrible disservice to Christianity and to the Bible, because these misrepresentations are not the truth. Scientific findings, and now mathematics, support the truth in the Bible, and we must remember that the creationism that is prevalent today is false. The true Christian creationism agrees 100 percent with science. It is these prevalent ideas that are completely rejected by science and by the scientific findings and established facts. These ideas caused Darwin’s disillusionment with religion. Darwin himself wrote that, as a result, he gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation. We cannot blame Darwin, seeing that the earth is billions of years old, as established by science, while the creationist ideas say that the earth is 6,000 years old. You cannot blame the man for not believing that Noah carried all the animals, the lions, the giraffes, the polar bears and the giant worms of Australia, on his ark, and you cannot blame Darwin for not believing that the flood of Noah covered the whole world. So all these things are now set straight. We learn from this document that the Quran complements all the scriptures, confirms the majority of the truth in those scriptures, and consummates the whole message from the Creator to us.

To conclude: we now possess physical, incontrovertible evidence that every one of the six million species of living organisms came into being through a creation process, and that evolution then took place, and is going on continuously, as a divinely guided and controlled process. Thank you very much.

[The program then continues as a live studio debate with call-in questions, in which Rashad Khalifa and Professor Jeff Clark, an anthropologist from Arizona State University, discuss whether creationism is science. Rashad Khalifa maintains that mathematics can now prove the existence of a super-intelligent Creator, through the mathematically coded message he has presented.]

Friday Sermon by: Rashad Khalifa, Imam of Masjid Tucson

Friday Sermon by: Rashad Khalifa, Imam of Masjid Tucson

Summary:

In this Friday sermon, Rashad Khalifa explains his announcement that he is a messenger of God, which he had known since 1980: why a messenger is no better than others, why the Quran allows messengers after Muhammad, the mathematical signs connected with his name, how he was tested before making the announcement, and the corrections to the Salat, Zakat, fasting and Hajj that restore Islam to its original purity.

Video Transcript:

We praise God, and we bear witness that there is no god except the one God, and we declare that all devotion and all worship are directed to God alone, as Sura 39 says: religion belongs to God alone.

Some of you probably saw this bombshell, the announcement that I have been commissioned as a messenger of God. This is probably the most difficult announcement that I have ever made, but it is something that I have known since 1980, and you can see that I was a coward. I was afraid to come out with it. I dreaded the time when I might have to announce it, because there’s a general tendency to resent anybody saying, and I’m going to use a wrong statement now, but this is what the resentment is about, people generally resent somebody saying, or appearing to say, “I’m better than you.” Even the Quran condemns such a statement. In Sura 4, God condemns those who exalt themselves; God is the one who exalts whomever He wills, without the least injustice.

The resentment in this case results from two things: ignorance and idol worship. Ignorance, because the Quran teaches us that a messenger of God is not necessarily better than anyone else in the congregation. In Sura 18, from verse 60 to verse 82, we see that God picked out one of the biggest messengers, Moses, one about whom God said, “I made you for Myself,” and in another place God said, “I had you made before My eyes.” And we see in those verses that God sent Moses to one of His servants, whom He had blessed with mercy and knowledge, and Moses proved to be a lousy student. So this teaches us that a messenger of God is not necessarily better than anyone else in the congregation. I can think of quite a few of you whom I consider better than me. When I was the age that some of you are now, I was an idol worshiper, yet here you are, a lot younger, with a 20-year head start compared to me. So this is the first thing: ignorance causes this resentment.

And idol worship, because people idolize the messenger of God. They have made him equal to God, a god besides God, so when you mention the words “messenger of God,” they are in awe. But the truth is, a messenger of God, as the Quran repeats, is a human being like you, or, in colloquial terms, a slob like the rest of us, whom we can kid around with and who can be silly. What is more, the Quran teaches that if a person is picked out as a commissioned messenger of God, it does not even guarantee Heaven. We see this in Sura 39:65, where it says, “It has been revealed to you, and to those before you, that if you ever fall into idol worship, all your work will be nullified, and you will be with the losers.” So being a messenger of God does not even guarantee Heaven, and this is why we see in Sura 21, verse 28, that the messengers are worried about their own necks.

We are all familiar with these verses, but people who have ignorance or idolatry in them resent an announcement like this. If a person is picked as a messenger of God, it is a difficult job, a very difficult job. There is nothing material to be gained from it. I certainly will not allow a single penny to enter my personal pocket because of this, or for religious reasons. I am not a professional religionist, and I will not allow a penny to enter my pocket from religious activity, because then the motive changes, and the Quran repeats: follow those who do not ask you for wages. The Quran gives, in Sura 49, the criterion of who is better than whom. It says in Arabic that the best among you is the most righteous. It didn’t say the best among you is the messenger of God, or the richest, or the tallest, or the most knowledgeable. The best among you is the most righteous. All these things teach us that being a messenger of God is no big deal. It is just a vehicle that God uses to communicate with us, a center of information. And it is a difficult job, a very difficult job: the abuse, the slandering, the threats.

In Sura 42:51, God says that no human being can communicate with God except in three ways: through inspiration, or from behind a barrier, or through a messenger, through whom God spreads certain information, so that people know that it is reliable information, that it is from God. We are people who follow the Quran, the whole Quran, and nothing but the Quran. Therefore anybody, and this means anybody, who brings any information must conform to the Quran, the whole Quran, and nothing but the Quran. And if anyone, and we underline anyone, comes up with any information that is not confirmed by the Quran, we tell him, “Forget it. We don’t accept it.” So the criterion is preaching that confirms the existing scripture, the Quran, and nothing else. No innovations.

Now we come to the question: is it possible that we receive a messenger from God? If you ask an average Muhammadan, he will tell you that Muhammad was the last messenger, but they have no basis for saying this, and the Quran gives us a precedent. When the prophet Joseph died, the Quran teaches us, the people said, “Okay, that was the last messenger. We’ll never see another messenger after him.” So this is a human tendency, and the Muhammadans claim that Muhammad was the last messenger. He is not. In Sura 33:40, God says, “Muhammad was not the father of any man among you. He was a messenger of God and the final prophet.” So here we see a distinction between a prophet and a messenger. A prophet is one who delivers a scripture, like Jesus, Moses and Muhammad. They are prophets, and we see this clearly in Sura 3, verse 81, where God says that He made a covenant with the prophets that He would give them the scripture and wisdom. So here we have the definition of a prophet.

Then God made a covenant with us, with you and me, with every human being. He said: when a messenger comes to you confirming the existing scripture, and there is the definition of a messenger, “when a messenger comes to you confirming the existing scripture, you shall believe in him and support him.” God said, “Do you make this pledge with Me?” And we all said, “Yes, we do.” And God said, “You have thus borne witness, and I bear witness along with you.” Therefore it is possible that there will be messengers after Muhammad. Sura 7:35 says, “O children of Adam, when messengers come to you, from among you, reciting My revelations to you, those who believe and lead a righteous life” are the successful ones. This is Sura 7, verse 35. Obviously it is for people after the Quran. As a matter of fact, the verse begins by saying “O children of Adam,” so as long as there are children of Adam on this earth, this verse is valid.

If messengers are coming after Muhammad, what do they look like? What would a messenger after Muhammad look like? Do you think he’d be walking on water, or walking in the air, or coming with three antennas on each side, or something? Maybe just one of us, just a human being.

I want to answer the question: why does God send a messenger? Why not just carry on the way people have been going, reading the Quran and following the Quran? Well, one important element is the test, because of this covenant that we made with God. What are we going to do if a messenger of God comes and says, “Worship God alone, and forget about the human beings, Muhammad, Jesus, Moses or anybody; you must devote yourself totally to God alone,” one who preaches the Quran, God’s proven scripture? What are we going to do? Are we going to scoff at him? Are we going to help him? Are we going to rally around him? What are we going to do? It’s a test.

Another test is the test of ego. As the Quran repeats, they said, “Oh, he just wants to be better than we are. He wants to be a leader.” This is emphasized throughout the Quran. You’ll find verses here and there. Sura 17, verse 94, says that what prevented many people from believing was that they said, “You mean God sent a human being to be a messenger?” And Sura 64, verses 5 and 6; I’m going to read them for you: did you not receive the news of those who disbelieved in the past? They suffered the consequences of their decision and deserved painful retribution. This is because their messengers went to them with clear revelations, but they said, “Shall human beings guide us?” Thus they disbelieved and turned away. God does not need them. So it’s a tremendous test to accept somebody who says he’s a messenger of God. There’s an ego here, and we are required to kill the ego, and this applies to all of us. The egotistic person would resent anything like this and would be deprived. God says in the Quran, “I will divert from My revelations those who are arrogant.” God will actively send them away. So this is something we have to do: kill the ego.

Many people came and said they were messengers of God. One in Pakistan said he was a messenger of God, and Joseph Smith, the Mormon leader, said he was a messenger of God. But God made it mandatory that the messenger comes with proof, certain signs. Moses brought all kinds of proofs; Saleh brought proof; Jesus came with signs that he was authorized and sent by God. And about that difficult day a few days ago, I’m going to give you all the details. I’m not going to be mysterious and say, “I was told this and that,” and leave it hanging. I’m going to give you everything; it’s going to be wide open in front of you, and I will tell you exactly what happened, in time, if the time doesn’t run out on us now.

This reminds me of the fellow, I told some of you this before, who was the most curious person in town. He was always asking questions. One time he was sitting in the bar, or the pub, or whatever the place was, and in comes a man with one leg and sits next to him. And this very curious person, of course, is curious: how did you lose your leg? He wants to know. The man with one leg knows that he is the most curious person in town, and that he’ll just die to know how this fellow lost his leg. So the man with one leg told the curious fellow, “I will tell you on one condition.” He said, “Anything, anything. Just tell me what to do, and I will do it.” He said, “You ask only one question, and you don’t ask any questions after that.” He said, “Okay, okay, I will. Just tell me how you lost your leg.” He said, “It was bitten off.” I’m sure that curious guy died on the spot, because he couldn’t ask any more questions. So I’m not going to be mysterious with you. I’m going to tell you everything, gradually.

On that difficult day, when I realized that I must make the announcement, having chickened out for eight years, I needed some signs. I had some signs, but I was shown a couple of additional signs on that day. Now I will share with you some of the signs that will assure all of us.

The first sign, of course, is the mathematical miracle of the Quran, which is very simple, and people should have seen it in the last 1,400 years. Literally thousands of scholars looked into the Quran and counted all its words, its letters, its vowels, its little signs. They counted everything in the Quran, but they never came up with the mathematical composition of the Quran: the Basmalah, 19 letters; the number of suras, 19 times 6; the first revelation, 19 words; the last revelation, 19 words. All these are simple things that they should have discovered, but God reserved this for a person called Rashad. As we see in the index of the Quran, which was printed one year before I was born, a comprehensive index, on page 320 you’ll see that the root word “rashada” is mentioned 19 times. This is something that came to us from Turkey. I didn’t discover it; it was discovered and sent to us, as most of you know.

Now I want to give you a new piece of information that shows you the awesome miracle of the Quran that was reserved until this time. The word God, Allah, is mentioned in the Quran 2,698 times. When you take every verse in the Quran where you see the word Allah, starting with verse 1 of Sura 1, and add up the numbers of those verses, the total is 118,123. These are the numbers of the verses wherever you see the word God. It’s awesome, because not a single verse was transplanted from its place, not a single verse was changed, and not a single word Allah was dropped from or added to the Quran. So this is an awesome miracle that was reserved; God knew in advance who would be fortunate enough, or blessed, to release this information.

Now, if you add up all the suras and verses of the 19 occurrences of “rashada,” and the last name is also involved, this is very embarrassing to me, but I have to tell you and share it with you, “Khalifa” is mentioned in the Quran twice, then when you add all the suras and verses, the total is 1,463, which is 19 times 77. You add all the suras and verses where “rashada” and “Khalifa” are mentioned. Well, I was not content with that, and sure enough, if you look up “Rashad,” the way my name is written, it is mentioned in the Quran twice, in Sura 40, verses 29 and 38. And “Khalifa” is mentioned twice in the Quran; one of them is a bad one and the other is a good one. The bad khalifa is Satan, which is in Sura 2, and the human khalifa is specifically mentioned in the Quran in reference to David, the prophet, one of our favorite prophets, of the Psalms, and this khalifa is mentioned in Sura 38, verse 26. So if you add the suras and verses connected with “Rashad” and the human “Khalifa,” the total is 171, 19 times 9. In other words, you look at it from every angle, and you can see that the signs are connected with the mathematical code.

I will explain this to you in detail at another time, when we have time, but this is the religion of Abraham, as we see in the last verse of Sura 22: this is the religion of your father Abraham. He is the one who named you Muslims, before Muhammad brought the Quran, and yours truly was blessed with bringing the proof. I was blessed with the proof of the Quran and the secrets of the Quran. When you add the gematrical values of the three names, Ibrahim, Muhammad and Rashad, and this is all detailed here, the total is 855, which is 19 times 45, and 45 happens to be my age in 1980, when I was told for the first time. Again, I promise you, I’ll explain to you how. 45, my age in 1980, which is also 1400, exactly 14 centuries after Muhammad, who was told in the Quran that he would have seven pairs: 14 centuries, among the other meanings of the seven pairs. So it is very tight evidence, and it suits the computer age.

Now, the secrets of the Quran. I mention this because it explains the revolutionary ideas that I used to come up with once in a while, or the crazy ideas, if you want to call them that, like the end of the world. It is very clear in the Quran, but it was not shown before. It’s a secret in the Quran. God knew when the end of the world would be, and He put it in His final message, and we are the generation that was destined to get the secret out of the Quran. And like the idea that drove a lot of people crazy, that anybody who dies before the age of 40 goes to Heaven. How can they go to Heaven when they’re 35 and they’re awfully bad? Put them in Hell! We human beings are mean. There was so much opposition to that idea, it’s not even funny. And it is not coincidental that one of the sisters gave me this button here today, five minutes before the khutba. The button says, “Everything up to the age of 40 is just a rehearsal.” I thought she made the button, but she didn’t; she got it in a shop. So it’s not a coincidence. God spreads His information in many different ways and means.

Other secrets of the Quran that we’ve been enjoying in the last 10 years: oh, there’s Zakat. This is new, and I’m going to tell you about it now, and you will have to do it as of now, immediately. The Zakat is being done wrong all over the Muslim world. Here is the true Zakat from the Quran, in Sura 6, verse 141. You can remember this verse because it says, “When you harvest the crop, give the Zakat on the day of harvest.” Remember that: on the day of harvest. Okay, we are not farmers; we don’t harvest wheat or barley or anything, but we harvest paychecks every two weeks or so. That’s our harvest. On the day you receive your harvest, the day you receive your paycheck, you take out two and a half percent and you give it to people you know who are in need. It makes so much sense; how come I didn’t think of this before? It makes so much sense, it is from the Quran, and it corrects the method of Zakat that is dominant in the Muslim world, because the people we know who need help need it now. They are hungry now. They can’t wait a year, as they told us in the past.

If you get ten dollars, you take out 25 cents, two and a half percent. If it is impractical to give 25 cents to somebody, you can keep it and accumulate it for a couple of weeks, or a month, until it is a reasonable amount, and then give it. Don’t go beyond a month. You give it to somebody you know personally, according to the system of the Quran: your parents first, your relatives next, then the orphans and the people who need it, in that order. From any money, any net income that you get, you take out two and a half percent, because chances are this two and a half percent of your check is illegitimate, illicit. Get rid of it. It is called purifying your money. You spend some of your time sleeping on the job or something, yet you get the check. So God says this is the way you purify your income: you take it out immediately. Besides, who’s going to keep track for a whole year? So God has His ways. This is one of the secrets of the Quran, and we’re going to reap the benefits.

Among the secrets of the Quran that we’ve enjoyed in the last 10 years is the correct method of the Salat, the prayer, devoted to God alone, and our devotion to God alone, with no human beings. Okay, we’re running out of time. There’s a sura in the Quran that says, “When God’s victory and support come, and you see the people entering God’s religion,” God’s true religion, “in throngs.” This is what is happening now. This sura consists of 19 words, and its first verse has 19 letters. This is our sura. So far, the reaction to this bombshell has been positive. People have been calling me from everywhere in the world, saying, “I believe.”

When that difficult day came, I was a coward. I was saying, “This thing may cause my own children to disown me. They may say, ‘You’re a crazy man; get out of here.'” And, as I will tell you in detail, I was fired. I was fired, and I cried, I fell prostrate, and I begged. And when, in my heart, I became solid, and I said, “I will do it at any cost, even if I lose my own children, my own friends, I will do it,” then I was restored. I will give you the details. But the reason I’m mentioning this sura, the Victory, is that there has been a unanimous positive reaction to the announcement from everybody who has read it. I was very careful when I talked to my wife, Beth. It was three o’clock in the morning, and I told her, “Guess what, I have to tell you this and this,” and I was very careful and diplomatic, and then she, casually drinking her tea, says, “I knew that all along.”

That night in April, I opened the Quran as usual, at the place where I usually leave it, at the top right, and it said, basically, “You’re going to Hell.” So I closed it again and said, “This is Satan trying to fight me, giving me a bad time.” So I said, “I seek refuge in God from Satan the rejected; please, God, protect me from Satan; I seek refuge in You,” and I said it in many different ways. Then I opened it again, at random, as usual, and it said, “You’re fired. You will not do the job. You’re a chicken. You’re not suitable, and you’re going to Hell.” So I sought refuge in God from Satan, from the devil, again, in stronger terms and for a longer time. Then I opened the Quran again at random, and it said, “You’re fired. You’re going to meet your doom. You’re not going to do it. I’ll find somebody else to do the job.” So I closed it again. It was now defying statistics, or coincidence.

So I turned to God very hard, and I said, “Please, God, let me know whether this is coincidence, or why I am getting these bad ideas.” And I kept doing it, and repeatedly, every time I opened it, it said, “You’re fired. You’re going to Hell. You’re doomed,” and it got worse, until I reached the conviction, a real conviction in my heart, that I was doomed, that I was going to Hell. Then I started to cry and repent, and I opened it, and it was as if the Quran had nothing in it except, “You’re fired. You’re going to Hell. You’re not going to do the work. I will substitute somebody in your place.”

I said, “This Quran is worn; maybe it’s because I’m using it a lot.” So I got one that was brand new, and I opened it, and it said, “You’re fired. You’re going to Hell. You cannot do the job. You’re a chicken. I’ll substitute somebody in your place.” I closed it again and opened another place, and the Quran had nothing in it except that. I opened it at unusual spots, and it said, “You’re fired; you don’t do this; you’re going to Hell.” So it was no longer a coincidence. I got the big book, this big one here, and I opened it this way. I did all kinds of crazy things to let the Quran open at random. Then I opened it and looked in it, and it just said, “You’re going to Hell. You’re doomed. You cannot do the job. You’re fired.” I got a letter opener and stacked the Qurans like this, and I closed my eyes and pointed with the letter opener at the pages, and it told me the same thing. There was nothing in the Quran that morning except, “You’re fired. You cannot do the job. Get out of here. You’re doomed. I don’t need you anymore. I’ll substitute somebody else in your place.”

So I cried, and I repented, and I sought refuge from Satan, and it kept giving me the same message. So I became convinced that God was speaking to me through the Quran, and I became convinced that I was no good, that I was fired, that I was going to Hell, and I cried harder than I ever had in my life. I really became convinced that I was finished, that I was doomed, and that there was no salvation. My prostrations became longer and my crying became harder. There was nobody in the mosque. And then, one time, I opened the Quran and it said, “We forgive you,” when I had reached the conviction, with all this crying, that the message was very clear: I had not come out with an announcement that I am God’s messenger. I had known it since 1980, and I had ignored the messages that said, “Say, ‘O people, I am God’s messenger to all of you.'” I ignored those. They were very loud and very clear, and I ignored them. Obviously the timing was not right then. Now, in retrospect, I was supposed to have ignored those messages. They got louder and were repeated, louder and clearer, and I kept ignoring them until this happened. So there is something that led to this. I opened the Quran and it said, “Say, ‘O people, I am God’s messenger to all of you,'” and I became convinced that I could no longer ignore it.

Then, with these repetitions, I reached the decision in my repentance. I said, “Please, God, accept my repentance. Take me back. Even if I lose my own children, my friends, if I lose everybody, I will do anything. I will go out and make the announcement.” And I really had that conviction, because I said that chances are my children will tell me, “Get out of here, crazy man. What are you talking about?” So it became my neck, and the verse in the Quran about the person who disowns his own parents and his own children, and the children who disown their parents, became a reality for me. Here I was, doomed, going to Hell, and the whole thing was hinging on courage. God doesn’t want a coward to work for Him. It became very obvious. So when I really reached that conviction, that I would do it at any expense, I got this message that said, “We forgive you; we accept your repentance,” and my crying of sadness became crying of joy. I still didn’t believe it; maybe it was a fluke. So I did the same thing, and there was nothing in the Quran except, “We accept your repentance. We forgive you. Go now and do it. God is Forgiving, Merciful.” And it was in the same way. This defies all statistics and coincidence.

That is the background to this. People around me know that I’m not making any bones about it. I’m not being humble about it, and I cannot take any chances. I believe that if it happens again, it will be really final, and there’ll be no help. That’s why I have been bold, and it really has nothing to do with humbleness or modesty, if we understand a few basic things in the Quran. One thing is that a messenger is no big deal. It is a big deal only if we idolize the messengers and build up the picture in our minds. And this is the typical response of all the believers. The people who were averse from the beginning just continue to be averse, or maybe a little worse, except that the harsh attacks now have a little reverence in the background, as if, “What if he is?” I get telephone calls on the machine. In the past they used to call me bad names and all that, but now they quote the Quran and read the verses that say “Fear God,” and then they add, “Come back to Islam,” that kind of thing. But you can sense a kind of respect and reverence in the back of their minds. This is the difference in the opponents, and it’s because of their reverence for “Rasulullah,” the word “messenger of God.” They made it so big and put it next to God, and that’s why it’s a big deal for them.

But if we understand the Quran, we will find out that it is not a big deal, because the Quran teaches us that a messenger is not necessarily better than anyone in the world, or anyone around him. We have this lesson in Sura 18, where Moses, one of the big messengers of God, met someone described as one of God’s servants, “one of Our servants,” God says, and this servant of God began teaching Moses a few lessons, and Moses turned out to be a lousy student. So this teaches us that the messengers, even the biggest ones, are not necessarily better than the people around them. The Quran teaches, “Say, ‘I am a human being like you,'” and this is taught to the prophet Muhammad, for example. The Quran teaches that the criterion for closeness to God is righteousness, not being a messenger, or the most knowledgeable, or the richest, or the tallest, or anything else. It is righteousness, nothing else, and anyone can be more righteous than the messenger, or anybody else. There is also the verse in Sura 39 that says that being a messenger of God does not even guarantee Heaven. It says, I’m quoting the Quran now, “It has been revealed to you, and to those before you, that if you ever fall into idol worship, all your work will be nullified, and you will be with the losers.” So if people understand this, they won’t make a big deal about being a messenger of God.

I called a friend and told him about this, and he logically started to discuss the wisdom of making an announcement like this, and why it is necessary, and I found myself talking with him as if I had sat down and decided to make the announcement. Then it dawned on me: it’s not really my decision. It was not my decision at all. Obviously God wants this announcement to be made, for reasons that only God knows, and we can only speculate. The first verse in Sura 67 says that God created death and life to test us. Before the human race came here, there was no death; that’s why God said He created death before life. The whole purpose is a test. And it turns out, as we know now, that the road to God is full of traps on the side for people to fall into. They drop out, and when they hear somebody say “messenger of God,” some people drop out, and it’s part of the sifting process. There are so many traps along the road, and the matter is really decided from the very beginning. A person who has doubts, who is not a sincere believer, will fall into one of these traps along the road. The true believer will keep going, no matter what happens, because what we’re saying is: worship God alone.

We also destroy all idols, and we are fanatically against building idols. The Muhammadans insist on putting Muhammad’s name next to God’s, even though the Quran says, in 3:18, that God bears witness that there is no god except He, and so do the angels and those who possess knowledge. That is the Shahada. So it’s very clear in the Quran, but because of idolatry they insist on adding Muhammad’s name, which violates a good number of commandments in the Quran. When you put Muhammad’s name next to God’s in the so-called Shahada, they are violating a good number of commandments. Now they have built up so much opposition to me that I am under a death sentence in a good number of countries; Iran is one of them. We are saying God alone. We are very strongly, staunchly, against building any idols, and I don’t know how to convince them that I don’t want any glory, or money, or fame. For eight years I was a coward. What does this announcement bring me, except trouble? Actually, the reaction has been positive so far. But personally, I would rather go and worship God alone, by myself, somewhere very quietly, and just eke out a living in this world and go on to the eternal life. That’s what I wanted to do for eight years, and this is why I was fired that night.

I’m sorry, I forgot quite a few points that I wanted to tell you about the background. The background of this is that I have known since 1980 that I am God’s messenger, not in the general sense, but in the sense that Abraham was the original messenger of Islam, who brought all the practices, the prayers, the fasting, the Zakat charity, the pilgrimage, and of course the first commandment; Muhammad brought the Quran; and I am the third of a triangle, who brought the proof of the religion.

We just found out yesterday that the first time the miracle of the Quran was published was in January 1973, when I was 38 years old. I didn’t know anything then, except that I had found this mathematical miracle in the Quran. The January 1973 publication, in the most popular magazine in the Middle East and Africa, had to do with the proportions of the initials. For example, chapter 50, initialed with Q, had the highest proportion of the letter Q; Sura Saad had the highest proportion of the letter S; Sura Noon had the highest proportion of N; and so on. Every sura had the highest proportion of its initials, except Sura Ya Seen, which had the least, the exact opposite. That was the whole article, and they had the computer printout of the Quran, which I had put into the computer. Then, in November 1973, exactly on my 38th birthday, came the first report on the number 19. That was back in 1973, but I didn’t know that I am God’s messenger in that sense until 1980.

1980 corresponded to the Islamic year 1400, and it seems that a new era began at that time. Look at Sura 47, verse 38. 38 was very prominent. In fact, we became curious and were looking at the magazine yesterday. In Sura 47, the last verse, which is 38, I wrote in bold letters that if you turn away, God will substitute other people in your place, and they will not be like you. This is one of the verses, by the way, about substituting somebody in your place. I wrote this in big, bold letters, and I put a footnote saying that Islam is being re-established in the English-speaking world, after being restored to its pristine purity. So I wrote, back in 1980, the year 1400, that God had forsaken the Arabs, meaning the people of a certain geographical area. Now it’s been eight years, and of the hundred million Arabs in the world, we don’t have a single one who could see and appreciate the miracle of the Quran, even though it’s very clear. Sometimes they call me and say, “You’re an Arab,” and I say, “No, thank God, I’m Egyptian.” It’s quite a phenomenon that we don’t have a single Arab. Last Friday we had about 60 people in the mosque, and not a single Arab. We had the conference in San Francisco, a couple of hundred people, and not a single Arab.

So something happened in 1980, after seven pairs of centuries. In Sura 15, verse 87, God tells Muhammad, “We have given you the seven pairs.” Among the other meanings, I’m convinced that it means seven pairs of centuries, because of what I’ve seen, and the fact that this verse is connected with Muhammad. So the background is that I have known since 1980, and I had been evading the responsibility. I said, “Let’s just go along, worship God, and spread the message.” And God has been gracious to us, showing us what the correct Islam is.

The Muhammadans throughout the world are doing the Salat wrong. The Quran that came out of Muhammad’s mouth says that you should never mention any name other than the name of God during the Salat; the Salat must be devoted to God alone and no one else. So they did the Salat wrong, they did the Zakat wrong, they are doing it wrong, and now we have it corrected. If you look at Sura 6, verse 141, it tells you, when you harvest the fruits of the crops, to give the Zakat charity on that crop on the day of harvest. The Zakat as practiced now in the Muhammadan world is once a year, on your savings above a certain amount, but the Quran says to give the Zakat on the day of harvest. Since we are not farmers, and we do not harvest fruits or crops or anything like that, we harvest paychecks. So when we get the paycheck, we are supposed to take out what came to us from Abraham in very clear words: a quarter of a tenth. One quarter of one tenth comes to two and a half percent. So you take two and a half percent of your net income when you get it, the day you get it. I would say it makes sense to wait a month or so, since monthly income is very common; at the end of the month, you figure out how much your net income was, take two and a half percent, and give it to people you personally know are in need. You know them personally, and you know that they need the assistance.

We are given a specific order in the Quran as to whom we give the money. You give it first to your parents, if they need it; then to relatives, cousins, uncles, aunts and so on, people you know personally who are related to you and need the money or the help. After that, the orphans: you find children who lost one or both parents for some reason, divorce, abandonment or death, and you give them this money. The fourth category is any poor person, and the last category is the traveling aliens, people who sneak into this country from Mexico, who have no jobs and are hungry, so you help them. We have a specific order in the Quran. This is the correct Zakat.

So what we did was clean out the Salat. We returned it to its pristine purity. We corrected the Zakat. We corrected the fasting; even the fasting was wrong. What was wrong with it? They sleep all day and stay up all night, and they use fasting as an excuse to be nasty, calling people names and saying, “I’m fasting, so excuse me.” And their timing of the moon is always wrong. I think they’re still fasting today in Egypt, even though tonight you can see the moon. The computer tells you what time the moon is born, what time it rises and what time it sets, whether there are clouds or not, whether you’re sighted or blind; you can know exactly what the moon is doing. But they follow the Hadith that says you fast when you see it and you break your fast when you see it, and if you cannot see it, you complete the month of Ramadan as 30 days. We fasted 29 days this month. Is it 29 all the time? No, sometimes it’s 29 and sometimes 30. The Hajj was wrong too, and we have already written in the Muslim Perspective to correct it. It turns out that, as it is now done, going to Medina is the most important part of the Hajj, even though it is not part of the Hajj at all in the Quran, and going to Medina is flagrant idol worship. They go to the prophet’s room, or to Fatima’s tomb, and they pray and implore nothing, as the Quran says: on the Day of Judgment they will say they were worshiping nothing.

So that’s what I’ve been doing, and I was happy that way, just spreading the message. It has literally gone all over the world: this translation, and the small brown book, “Quran, Hadith and Islam,” and the message of returning Islam to its pristine purity as far as all the practices are concerned. It has reached places I had never heard of: little islands in the Indian Ocean, like Réunion Island, which is French, and Mauritius, another country I had never heard of. We have people there and everywhere. And I was happy that way. The message was being spread all over the world, exactly as it needed to be.

So why the announcement? That was my justification, and each one of you may ask me, “Why the announcement? Why is it necessary?” My opinion was the same as yours. But for me, I think it is necessary, because all the people who have known that we have been worshiping God alone now hear, “Oh, now he’s a messenger.” And I say, “Do you have anything against his message? What do you have against the message?” Obviously, God has a reason. The Quran says that God is not to be asked about anything He does, but we are to be asked about everything we do. So obviously God has a purpose, and very good reasons.

Now, the Quran says that Muhammad is not the last messenger, and this could be one of the very important reasons. Consider the statement in the Quran in 33:40: “Muhammad was not the father of any man among you; he was a messenger of God and the final prophet.” That is a perfect sentence, and of course every letter in the Quran is deliberate, as we now know very well. It says “the final prophet.” And verse 35 of Sura 7 says, “O children of Adam, when messengers come to you, from among you, reciting My revelations to you, those who believe and lead a righteous life” are the successful ones. Obviously this is a verse for people after Muhammad, because it is in the Quran, and, as Dr. Mansour said, for as long as there are children of Adam on earth, this verse is valid, because it says “O children of Adam.” Whom is this verse directed to? Not the people before Muhammad, because they never saw the Quran. It’s for the people who read the Quran.

The Quran also gives us another example of the human tendency, the aversion, to the idea of having a messenger. It seems to be a test of ego: “This guy is going to sit here and say he’s a messenger of God, so he’s going to steal the show and get all the attention.” It may be one of the tests for dropping out. I don’t want to contribute to that, but it’s not up to me. The Quran stresses this through Joseph. I believe it’s verse 34 of Sura 40: you doubted his message, then, when he died, you said he was the last messenger. Now look whom God picked out after Joseph: all the big ones, David, Solomon, Jesus, Moses, Muhammad. All of them came after Joseph, even though the people said he was the last messenger, that nobody else would come after him. And they have been saying the same thing about Muhammad, that Muhammad is the last messenger. The world’s population today is a thousand times what it was at the time of Muhammad, and you’ve seen how much the human being has advanced. This is an enlightened generation of humans. We are very advanced: computers, science, technology, videotapes. It just makes sense that God wants to send a messenger to this world. And I can’t make any bones about it. Now I’m on the other side: at first I was afraid to make the announcement; now I’m too much of a chicken to hold back, because I’m afraid that if I’m fired again, there will be no restoration.

So this verse about Joseph tells us that this is a human tendency. Now, to turn the tables around, the question is: why are they averse to this idea? If Muhammad is not the last messenger, and somebody is going to come after him, what would he look like? What would his qualifications be? What would he say? If someone comes along and says, “Worship God alone, uphold the word of God alone, not the words of men, clean out all the practices of worship, destroy all idols, remove all the innovations,” what is wrong with that? It makes sense that God’s messenger would do that and say that. Why would anyone oppose or object to someone who says that? It’s really the same message, from Adam until now, one and the same message. So I, along with you, would ask that question, and I think they should tell us: why shouldn’t I be a messenger of God? I’ve given them enough proof. There is a lot of evidence here, and it is mathematical, physical and tangible. So I want them to come up with evidence opposing it.

Friday Sermon by: Alban Fejza, Online Congregation Director

Summary:

In this Friday sermon, Alban Fejza explains practical ways to honor our parents in modern times, including in their absence, such as using our real names, driving carefully and forgiving them.

Video Transcript:

Praise be to God! There is no other god except God. As a lot of you know, I have preached Friday Sermons for almost 14 years now, most of them in real life, and during this last year online, and in total that is about 700 Friday Sermons. And do you know in how many of them I talked about the topic of honoring parents? Only once. Obviously, the topic of honoring parents is much more important than that. I did not talk about it more until now, for two main reasons. 1). I wasn’t sure I was qualified to do it, because I am not the best example in this issue. I think that there are many people in the world who are better than me when it comes to honoring parents. But, at the same time, I guess I am suitable to talk about this for another reason. The reason is that almost all the people of the future will have fathers like my father. I am convinced by now that my father will miss heaven by just a little bit. He will go to Hell, by just a little bit, in the mildest hell possible, if there is a such a thing, and this is how almost all the fathers in the end times will be. They will even be similar in character. Present but absent. Nice but without a goal. Nice with strangers at the expense of the family. An extremely suitable citizen for any regime. Cynical towards hope. Informed but lazy. I guess, I don’t have much to complain about, but at the same time, I never aspired to be like him, or someone like him. The people of the future will know exactly what I am talking about when they hear this description. And this is why my challenges in honoring parents and what I learned through it will be useful for future generations. Now, the second reason, I did not talk much about honoring parents before today is because I planned to do a video clarification about this, because it is a very important topic, and I wanted to give a more comprehensive understanding about this issue, but since I might do that after many years, let me just give you a pre-taste of it now. So, let me dive into the topic. Honoring parents. In my mind, I divide the word “honoring” into three subcomponents. 1. Being nice 2. Respecting 3. Listening or obeying And it is important to subdivide it like this, since depending on the situation either one of them might apply or not apply, or it might apply less or more. So keep in mind that we are talking about three things: Being nice, respecting, and listening or obeying. But why should we honor our parents? We should honor them, because doing that is the best way to survive a long life in this world. The Quran teaches us how to go to Heaven, but our parents teach us how to survive a long life in this world, and actually this is the only secret to a long life in this world. The doctors are still trying to find the secret to a long life, but it is already discovered by every parent for their children. And what will the parent tell you? Eat nice hot healthy meals. Don’t be extravagant in saving or in spending. Spend time with your family. Enjoy some fresh air. Never take unnecessary risks. Don’t jump from the couch, because you might break your leg. Be careful in traffic. And these are all scientifically connected to a long life. Of course God has decided our life span, but he has also already decided how much we will honor our parents. But understanding that honoring your parent leads to a long life in this world is deep wisdom, rarely understood by people. Solomon, the wisest human being ever, after Jesus, he was reveled this wisdom in the Proverbs about how honoring your parents leads to a long life. So, this is a fact, everything else being equal. And if we want to know when we are allowed not to honor our parents. It’s only in cases when we would prefer a shorter purer life, compared to a long life. And there are cases when a shorter life might be preferred, but be careful what you wish for. You might regret it, or part of it. Or you might not, in which case perhaps you made the right decision. So, now let me address the apparent confusion in the Quran which tells us to honor our parents without exception, but at the same time tells us not to obey the disbelievers in general. But, it does not seem to very clearly address the issue for cases when the parents are disbelievers. Which verse should take priority? Is it the one which tells us to honor our parents? Or the one which tells us not to obey the disbelievers? And do you know why this is not directly addressed in the Quran? It is because it ultimately does not matter. Let me show you how: Let’s say that your parent is a disbeliever and you honor him. In that case, you are helping and cooperating with a disbeliever, which according to verses 5:2, 25:52 and 9:23 is bad thing. But, because you honored your parent, your life will be extended by an exact equal amount to give you an exact opportunity to do a good thing which is equal in size. So, in the end the fact that you honored your disbelieving parent led to nothing bad or good. Just nothing. Now, let’s say that you decide to do the opposite, not to honor your disbelieving parent. Here is what will happen. It will be counted as a good thing now, because you opposed a disbeliever, and you obeyed verse 5:2, 25:25, and 9:23, but your life will be shortened by such an amount that you will not be able to do a good thing which you had intended. So, again you get one good deed, and one reduction of an otherwise possibly good deed. And this again totals to nothing. So, the conclusion is that if your parent is a disbeliever, it ultimately does not matter if you obey them or not. So, whether you obey them, or disobey them, or any of the choices in between, they all lead to the exact same result, if your parent is a disbeliever. The only difference will be whether you want to live a long less dignified life, or a shorter but more dignified life. So, having this in mind, and considering how I divided earlier the honoring of parents into three different subcomponents, let me present a table with conclusions to you. Here it is: So, your parent can either be a believer or a disbeliever. But it also matters if your parent is wealthier than you, or less wealthy than you, because then Obligatory Charity comes into function through our niceness, which is one of the subcomponents of honoring parents. So, here in this table we have all the four possible cases. So, if your parent is a believer and wealthier than you, you owe them niceness, respect, and lots of listening. Now, the second case. If your parent is a believer but less wealthy than you, then you owe them lots of niceness, respect, and listening.

So, if your parent is a rich believer, you lean towards listening and obeying, and if your parent is a poor believer, you lean more towards niceness and charity towards him or her. Now, the third case. If your parent is a disbeliever who is wealthier than you, whether you are nice or not nice, respect or no respect, listen or do not listen, either way is the same. And anything in between is the same. And any variation of these is the same. Now, if your parent is a disbeliever who is less wealthy than you, you owe him niceness and charity, but whether you respect him or do not respect him, and whether you listen or do not listen to him, either way is the same. So, your approach towards a wealthier disbelieving parent or a poorer disbelieving parent differs only in kindness and charity. Now, let me address, the fifth case, the case when your parent is an idol worshiper. This can only happen in religious matters, because there is no idol worship outside of religious matters. Only in religious matters your parents can be idol worshipers, then, in that case according to verse 8 in chapter 29, it becomes obligatory not to listen to them. We don’t compromise our religion under any circumstances. We make compromises in other things, but not in our religion.

So, if your parent is an idol worshiper and a disbeliever, then whenever it has anything to do with religion, you never obey them, and whenever it has something to do outside of religion, you may choose to obey them or not, because it is ultimately the same. Now, for a lot of us, honoring our parent might not be possible because they might be absent. But let me tell you how to honor your parent even in their absence. And this might not look like it has anything to do with honoring parents, but it does. For example, if you use your real name, instead of a fake name, you are honoring your parent, as it is indicated in verse 33:5. If you drive carefully, you are honoring your parent. Every parent wants their children to be safe. If you forgive your sister or your brother, you are honoring your parent. Every parent wants to see peace between their children. If you get married with a good person, you are honoring your parent. Every parent wants their children not to have marital problems. If you comb your hair, you are honoring your parent. They probably lost their hair. They appreciate it through you. If you sleep well, you are honoring your parent. If you choose life, over suicide, you are honoring your parent. If you eat a nice healthy meal, you are honoring your parent, in their absence. So, now we know for the most part the general principles of honoring our parent.

But here is where it gets weird. In our modern times, very often, parents want to honor us. This happens because of the shift between the percentage of children compared to adults. In the past, there were more children than adults, and as a result adults had more value. It’s basic economics. If there is less of something, it’s value increases in the society. So, unlike, in the past, when there were more children than adults, today there are less children than adults. Actually, only 1/7th of the world’s population consists of children, and so now they have extreme leverage over adults, and many adults will turn them into masters, and actually the adults will want to honor the children. And this is where a lot of submitters fail to make the right decisions. They decide not to honor their disbelieving parent, but they will still accept the honor when it is received from their parents. Kind of like Prince Harry from UK. He doesn’t like to be part of the royal family, which is his right, but he still wants to be called a Prince. Well, you can not have it both ways. You can not be against your father, while driving his car. Buy your own cheap car. If you can’t, tough luck. Walk. There is nothing wrong with walking. So, feel free not to honor your disbelieving parent, but you have to not accept the honor from them for that equal amount.

And this idea of accepting the honor is mentioned in the Arabic Quran as protection. The Arabic Quran, in verse 9:23 says that you should not accept the protection of your fathers or brothers, if they prefer disbelieving over believing. And actually, all these rules, will not seem so complicated, if you just realize that they emerge from a more fundamental principle, which is what really matters. The principle is: Who do you love more, deep in your heart? Do you love the believers more, or do you love the disbelievers more? Verse 58:22, in the Arabic Quran says that you will not find people who believe in God and the Last Day who love those who actively oppose God and His messenger, even if they were their parents, or their children, or their siblings, or their tribe. This is absolutely true, but you have to be careful with this, because your evaluation of your parent might not be correct. But, if your evaluation of your parent is correct, and they are truly disbelievers, you should never love them more than you love the believers. Because love leads to loyalty, and loyalty leads to the correct decisions. And finally let me remind you perhaps about the most repeated verses about parents in the Quran, which tell us not to follow our parents blindly. Ultimately, it is your decision what you do, and you will be responsible for your deeds, and you will not be able to blame your parents.

Salvation does not come through our parents, and neither do our parents have the power to stop our salvation. Now, let me also address the issue from the perspective of parents, if you yourself are a believing parent. Let me lower your expectations a little bit about your children. Here is the situation, just like your child owes you respect and obedience, you also owe them education. And all the parents these days, including the believers, outsource most of that education to the government. The children are taught by the government in schools, instead of by their own parents. So, you agreed, forcefully or not, that the government will education your children, and when the time comes for the children to honor you, it is fair for them to say, “You know what, I am going to let the government honor you. I’ll pay the taxes. They will take care of you.” Of course, it is not completely like that, because even though you sent your children to school to be taught by the government, about half of their education came from you anyway, so it is fair to expect half respect from your children. And whether this is half respect, or 70% respect, or 30% respect, that depends on how much the government interfered between the parent and the child, and there is a way to measure it indirectly. It’s called “Tax to GDP Ratio”, which explains how much of everything in a country was done through the government. In Germany, it is 40%, which means that if your child respected you 60%, he is actually being perfect towards you. And also if you respect your parent about 60% of the time, you are excused for the rest of it. It’s impossible for you to do more. The Government, the German government in this case, has taken it from you. The Tax to GDP Ratio in Canada and UK is about 33%, which means that if your child respects you 66%, your child is being perfect towards you. In the United States, the Tax to GDP Ratio is about 25%, which means that if your child respects you 75%, he is being perfect towards you. Towards the end of the world, the Tax to GDP ratio will reach 100%, even though they might be able to hide it through Public-Private Partnerships, or by rebranding some of the taxes, and calling them insurances or subscriptions, and not calling them for what they truly are, but in practice, it will be 100%, which means that your child, even if he wants to, he will respect you 0%. So, as the governments increase, and they will, they take the role of the parent, and this reduces the relationship between the parent the child, and the parents are limited to how much they can educate their children, and the children are limited to how much they can respect their parents, and by the way, we are not against this. We don’t support it, but we are also not against it. It’s modern life. Not better, not worse. Just less of a good thing, and less of a bad thing. So, let’s value whatever 60% of love and respect which has remained among us, because the time will come before the end of the world when almost none of it will remain.

Friday Sermon by: Alban Fejza, Online Congregation Director

Summary:

In this Friday sermon, Alban Fejza explains how believers should react to anyone who claims to be a messenger, true or fake, and why it is better to leave a group than to argue with fake claimants.

Video Transcript:

Praise be to God. There is no other god except God. A few days ago, I was asked the question about how we should react towards fake messengers. Well, to answer this, first let me answer a more general question. The more general question is, “How to react towards any messenger claimants, true or fake?” This question needs an answer because when someone comes with a messengership claim in the beginning, you still don’t know whether he is a true messenger or a fake messenger. Had you known beforehand who is a true messenger and who is the fake messenger, there would be no need for a messengers, because knowing why he is a true messenger or a fake messenger comes from the fact that you know about his message, and once you know the message, you have already decided about the messenger. So, what this means is that, “You have to have a strategy on how to react towards any messenger claimant, regardless if you know whether he is a true or fake messenger?” Well, first of all, if he is a true messenger, then you should not reject him, of course, and if he is a fake messenger, then you should again not reject him for other reasons. And here is how it is possible to do that. So, at the moment when someone claims to be a messenger, you do not reject him, but you wait until he or she asks you to do something, and when he asks you to do something, you ask for proof about that. So, you never ask for proof about someone’s messengership in any case.

Only the disbelievers do that according to verses 13:7, 20:133, 10:20, and 13:27, and 29:50. If you check these verses, you will see that they clearly state that those who disbelieve are the ones who will ask a messenger claimant about proof for his messengership. There are no cases in the Quran where the believers will ask a messenger claimant for proof about his messengership, regardless if he is a true or a fake messenger. So, we never never ask for proof about someone’s potential messengership, never. But we wait until he asks us to do something, then we ask him for proof about that thing. So, as long as the messenger claimant is not asking you to do something, you do not ask for proof, but once he asks you to do something, you ask for proof about that specific thing. And this is why I never ask people to do anything, because I do not bring new proofs. I only demand you to do two things which is the Contact prayers and the Obligatory Charity, because those are already in existence and demanded in the Quran. If I ask you to do something else, then I would have to provide proof about that. Of course, in some cases, it might seem like I am asking you to do something, but if you analyze it carefully, it was always a response to something which you asked me before.

For example, someone once asked me whether I would be willing to debate a certain famous person. I told him, “reserve the venue, and invite the person” Now, he can not tell me then that I am asking him to do something, because it was he who came up with the idea first. So, my asking was a response to his asking, which means that I do not need to bring proof about that. Or in things where we already agree about something. If we agree about something beforehand, and then I ask you to do something within that project, of course, I don’t need to bring proof about that, because you already agreed to be within that project. Or in cases where I become aware that you want to do something anyway, I might ask you to do something. So, anyway, regardless if the person is a true messenger or a fake messenger, we never ask for proof from him, but we wait until he asks us to do something, and then we ask for proof about that specific thing. If he does not ask as to do something, then let him claim whatever he wants. It’s not going to affect us. If he is fake, he will go to Hell, and if he is true, he will go to Heaven, but as long as he does not ask us to do anything, it has no positive or negative effect on us. You can just ignore him or her, and that’s it. There is no need for a response, because there is no demand for an action. So, this is the general approach without even knowing who is a true messenger and who is a fake messenger. But here is an even better approach. What if before you hear about anyone’s messengership claim, you identify all the possible messengers, by simply doing a research analysis of the Quran. I already did it, and you can do it also, although it takes quite some time. But what you can do is take the whole Arabic Quran, and then you search for the word messenger in it. You take all those verses one by one and put them in another file. Hundreds of verses. Now, all you have to do, is read them one by one, and divide them into two groups. 1. Verses which clearly talk about a messenger which you already know about (like Abraham, Moses, and so on) 2. Verses which leave the possibility open for a messenger which you have not heard before. Then you delete or disregard the verses of the first group, because they are messengers of the past, and you are left only with the verses which leave the possibility open that they might be talking about a messenger about whom you did not hear before, a current or future messenger. Now, you take those remaining verses, and you try to make sense of them. And actually you will realize that from those remaining verses, only four different messengers are mentioned. 1) The Messenger of the Covenant, 2) The Clarifying Messenger, 3) The Strengthening Messenger, and 4) The Guide Messenger.

Now given that the Quran is complete and fully detailed, it is not possible for a messenger to come in our times, unless it is mentioned in the Quran, and since the Quran only mentions four possible messengers, then we only accept those four. And you can even identify them before they come, but this is a longer analysis, which I give in my video titled “Three Messengers, one Mahdi”. So, given now that we have identified all the four messengers who come after the Quran, that means that any other person who claims to be a messenger, outside of these four, he must be a fake messenger. So, in this way, we can know for sure that anyone who claims to be messenger today is a fake messenger, unless he is one of the four which God identified for us. So, today it is much easier to know who is a fake messenger, compared to the past, but now finally the question comes, “How should we react towards the fake messengers, knowing for sure that they are fake messengers?” Well, if you went to him or her and wanted to talk to him or debate him, then it is your own fault. You were asking for trouble yourself. I can not help you with that. You just got enticed by the devil. That’s it. So, if you approach him or her, then it was your mistake. But what if he or she approaches you. Well, that can only happen when you stay in environments where there is something wrong going on in that group.

For example, in Facebook groups without any Quranic based rules, that will happen. Of course, there will be fake messenger claimants there. And we do not need to respond to them, because the better option is always to leave the group instead of responding to them. If it is bothering you, just leave the group. Facebook is not obligatory. But if it does not bother you, you can just stay there. But I never read what they have to say. I just scroll down and skip it. It should not make you curious at all, if you already know who all the four true messengers are, of our modern times. And, if you force yourself to be with the correct group of people, in the Friday Sermon for example, and the people who meet to do the Contact Prayer, and they do the Zakat together, then this is an environment where fake messengers do not pop up. Jesus says in the bible, “Where the dead people are, that is where the vultures will gather, to eat the dead meat”, which means that if you create an organized group, be it a fake mosque, or an unwise social media group, or discord server, without no prior Quranic rules, it will attract bad people (as well as good people), and of course fake messengers will pop up. So, where the dead bodies are, that is where the vultures will gather. So, where the dead, meaning the dead souls (disbelievers) are, that is where the fake messengers will gather to prey on them. So, to protect us from that, first we need to make sure that we are with the correct group, joining to give zakat, and you will see that the fake messengers will not bother you anymore, and never again will you have to decide who is a messenger and who is not. They are sifted away indirectly, simply by us moving forward in the cause of God, so fast that they can not catch up with us. Let me take a more extreme example from the past to prove my point. If we gathered for battle to fight against a big army of disbelievers, and there were a few disbelievers in our group, who deep inside their mind were thinking about claiming messengership, how many of them would get the courage and come up in front and claim messengership, when the other army is about to kill us. They would be looking for an escape route, and the group would be purified from potential fake messengers. Now, let’s say that instead of organizing to fight a big army of disbelievers, we organized to just chill and waste our time and enjoy each other’s presence, kind of like a solution to mitigate our loneliness. Now, the disbelievers will realize that the more they are at the center of attention, the better it is for them, and this will motivate them to claim messengership, to attract attention. So, today we deal with messengership claimants in two ways depending on whether you have seen my video titled “Three messengers, one Mahdi”. 1.

If you have not seen that video, you do not know for sure who is a true messenger, and who is a fake messenger today, and your approach in that case should be: Regardless of who claims messengership, we never ask them for proof about their messengership, but we wait until they ask us to do something, then we ask them for proof about that. 2. The second case, or the second way to deal with messenger claimants is applicable for those who have seen my video titled “Three messengers, one Mahdi”, which informs you about all the true messengers of the modern world, and by default all the others are fake. And therefore, when it comes to all the other claimants, messengership claimants, we disregard them and never engage with them. We don’t try to expose them. Don’t worry, no fake messenger who comes after a true messenger can ever have more followers than the true messenger. How many fake messengers who came after Moses have more followers than Moses? None. How many fake messengers who came after Muhammad have more followers than Muhammad? None. In the same way, no fake messenger who will come after me, will ever have more followers than me, which means that really there is no need to expose them. And even though, as predicted in verse 44:14, I am destined to be heavily rejected, the fake messengers will be even more rejected.

They will just be somewhere in the margins and dark spaces of the web, followed by people with fake accounts, out of curiosity, but not out of true conviction. They will not have any significant influence which would require an engagement from us. By the way, we should not even mention their names. There were many fake messengers during the time of Muhammad and Jesus who are mentioned in the history books, and also Prophet Elijah fought against 800 fake messengers at once. They are mentioned in history books, but in the Quran, which is the best form of speech, the names of fake messengers are never mentioned, not even as a bad example. And that’s because, even when you say, “So and so is a fake messenger, you are actually promoting them, spreading their name, encouraging people to watch it.” And this is why those who try to oppose me are disbelievers under any assumption. If I am a true messenger, they are disbelievers for opposing me, and if I am a fake messenger, they are disbelievers for mentioning me. You know, they will take a small portion from a larger text where I might have said something, they take it out of context, and then they spread it, “This is what Alban Fejza said. Look how bad he is” Are they my slaves or what? Mentioning me in places where I wouldn’t be able to reach? So, more importantly, let’s just focus on worshiping God, and helping each other in the cause of God, and keeping the harmony and peace among us, and forgiving one another when we make mistakes, and motivating each other for righteous deeds, and God willing, things will be fine.

Friday Sermon by: Alban Fejza, Online Congregation Director

Summary:

In this Friday sermon, Alban Fejza explains why God cannot be tested by the demands of His enemies, and describes the kind of scientific evidence, such as the Quran’s mathematical pattern, that points to God’s existence.

Video Transcript:

Praise be to God! There is no other god except God. Most scientist do not believe that God exists, and if you ask “Why?”, they usually say, “Because we can not prove God with scientific experiments.” And some atheists among them go even further pretending that there are experiments which disprove the existence of God. They will come up with lousy ideas for scientific experiments. For example, they might say, “If there is a God, let him hit me with lightening right now.” And then once the lightning doesn’t hit them, which normally doesn’t, they will say, “See, no lightning hit me, so there is no God.” They just don’t understand that a god who would be pressured by the demands of his enemies into doing what they wanted him to do, that would not be a God. God is not ruled by the expressions and desires of humans. But still, can there be a scientific experiment which would prove the existence of God? Well, let’s think of it. Why would we want to prove the existence of God? A disbeliever would say, “It’s because we don’t see him.” Well, a grain seed does not see the sun. So, if we humans were grain seeds how would we prove that the sun exists? Of course, some grain seeds, when they fall into the ground, they do not produce anything good. They remain underneath the soil without producing a grain plant.

And underneath the soil they can not see the sun anyway, but they also never feel the warmth of the sun. But, there are other grain seeds, which form roots, and then that enables them to grow, and once they grow above the soil, they start to feel the warmth of the sun, and they grow even more because of that. So, now the grain seeds which became useful, have started to feel the sun, but they still don’t see the sun, and imagine them telling the other grain seeds which are underneath the soil that there is a sun. They respond that it’s not possible because we haven’t seen him, and you haven’t seen him either. How, do you know that there is a sun? It’s because our life depends on it? Well, our life doesn’t seem to depend on it. We are still underground, and we don’t feel it’s warmth, so we are still not going to believe. So, now we have two types of grain seeds. The ones which became useful and grew, and now they believe that there is a sun, because they feel the sun rays on them, and the other grain seeds which were not useful for anything and remained underneath the ground, and as a result they do not believe that the sun exists. But, let’s say that these two types of grain seeds wanted to create an experiment which would prove the existence of the sun.

And remember that none of them see it, but one group of them feels it, while the other doesn’t. But, what type of experiment would enable the grain seeds to detect the sun, when they don’t have eyes to see light? Well, such an experiment already exists, and it is called the “Photo-Electric Effect”. It was discovered or explained by Albert Einstein for which he won the Nobel Prize. A lot of people think that Einstein was given the Nobel Prize in Physics for his famous discovery of the Theory of Relativity. But actually, he was given the Nobel Prize for one of his side discoveries, which is called the Photo-Electric Effect. Basically, he was one of a group of people who effectively discovered how to turn light into sound. Basically, the light when it hits atoms, it gives energy to the electrons, and if it’s sufficient light, it will cause the atom to release an electron. But one electron is undetectable. You can not sense one electron only. But we can use a Photo Multiplies which is simply a device with many cesium mirrors, which release one two electrons, every time one electron hits them. So, now, you can put a mirror to mirror the first mirror, and a third mirror to mirror the second mirror, and in this way, the electrons are doubled each time, they hit a new cesium mirror. So, from one electron, we get two, and then four, and then eight, and then 16, and then 32, and so on, and after 12 mirrors reflecting each other’s electrons in a row, now we have 4096 electrons, and 4000 electrons are sufficient to be detectable as electricity. And, if we simply attach a speaker at the end of that electricity, we get sound out of it, and speakers already existed when Einstein explained how light turns into electricity. So, with this device called the “photomultiplier”, which is simply a tube with many mirrors in it, we turn one photon of light into a sound which we humans can hear. So, even if we were blind, with this device we would be able to know whether there is light or no light in a particular direction and place. So, in a similar way, the only way that those grain seeds could know whether there is a sun or not is if they turned the light somehow into sound which they can hear. So, that would be the scientific experiment which proves the existence of the sun for plants. Now, in the same way, it is possible for humans under perfect conditions to hear God, even though they can’t see him. So, in theory, hearing God would prove the existence of God, even if you don’t see him. However, someone might say, that it still does not prove the existence of God, because you don’t know if you are hearing God, or the voice of someone else. The example, with the grain seeds would be like this. Some grain seeds still would continue not to believe in the sun, because they would claim that since the photomultiplier can produce sound even when you hit it with artificial light, without any sunlight, then we can not know whether the sound which we heard from the photomultiplier is a result of the sun or maybe it’s a result of an artificial light bulb or maybe a candle which you put nearby. Well, there is a way to distinguish those different sources of light. Each of those sources of light has a specific pattern embedded in it, and those patterns are called light absorption spectral lines. Basically, all white light which we see, it’s a composition of different colors, and once it passes through a simple prism, it diverges into its different colors, like the rainbow, and then depending on where the light came from and through what environment it passed, it will have lines, black lines, embedded in that spectrogram. And the light which comes from the sun has a specific unique pattern of those black lines which can not be imitated by artificial light sources.

So, it’s similar to the barcodes which they use in the supermarkets, and depending on the widths and distances of those lines, the computer is able to identify which products were sold. In the same way, those patterns in the sunlight are unique to the light of the sun only. A neon light has a different pattern, a candle light has a different pattern, an LED light has a different pattern, and so on, and in this way, by knowing that no one else can produce that pattern, the grain seeds would be able to know that it must be another source of light, which can not be faked by other grain seeds, which they can call sun light. So, in this way, the seeds which have grown above the ground can believe that the sun exists, even though they don’t have eyes to see it. They can know it through a scientific experiment which converts sunlight into sound, and which has a pattern which is impossible to imitate by artificial light sources on earth. And in the same way, we as humans, even if we don’t see God, we can know that God exists, through hearing his word, which is unique, unlike any human word. It has a specific pattern, which the believers are able to recognize, while the disbelievers are unable to understand and believe in it. So, there is already a scientific experiment which proves the existence of God.

It’s called the Quran, and it has a specific mathematical pattern in it, which can not be imitated by any other book, and God willing, I will give further details and explanations about it elsewhere.

Friday Sermon by: Alban Fejza, Online Congregation Director

Summary:

In this Friday sermon, Alban Fejza argues that surveys only measure whether scientists say they believe in God, not whether they truly do, and explains why many scientists deny God.

Video Transcript:

Praise be to God. There is no other god except God. In several social studies which have been conducted, when people were asked whether they believe in God, the majority of the people said that they do believe in God, but when it comes to the scientists, the majority said that they don’t believe in God. And often, Atheist use this as an argument against the existence of God, because they say, “See, the smarter people are less likely to believe in God.” Well, their argument would be correct, if those studies measure whether those people believe in God, but they only measured whether people say that they believe in God. So, it is true that scientist tend to say much less that they believe in God, and this is because in reality only about 9% of people truly believe in God anyway, even less than the scientists say, which I explain elsewhere, and so 91% either do not believe or are not sure, and this is true in all professions. It just happens that it benefits the scientist to admit it more than the others, or they are people who have thought more about what they truly believe, and have realized that they actually don’t believe in God. On the other hand, the non-scientists are simply more likely to go along with the flow, and going along with the flow for many centuries and for a large part our times, means simply saying that you believe in God, while your deeds don’t match with the fact that you claim to believe in God. So, basically the scientists don’t know the truth about God more than the non-scientists. However, they are less likely to be hypocrites, because they are less likely to say that they believe something while believing something else, while in the general population, people are more likely to say that they believe what they actually don’t believe. And this difference is partly because science is a profession where you gain credibility, and get rewarded, if you can show that you think independently of what other people think and if all people thought fully independently of others without any fear of being judged, then about 91% of them would realize and claim that they don’t believe in God, while only 9% of them would say that they believe in God. And this is the reality. Now, this does not prove much. It’s just what people would say, and not whether God really exists or not. You can not know the existence of God with social questionnaires where people answer what they personally think, or very often what they think others expect them to think. Instead, proving the existence of God should be a matter of physical facts, and not a matter of measuring social attitudes, and I explain how to do that in other videos.

However, here let me deal with how circumstances actually affect a large part of what people claim to believe, because most people go with the flow, and haven’t truly thought about whether they really believe in God or not. For example, because scientists are more likely to think about how things are, rather than how things should be, the disbelievers among them will have an exaggerated idea that they truly know how to evaluate whether there is a god or not. On the other hand, an engineer might be dealing with how to make things better, how things should be instead of how things are, so the disbelievers among them will have an exaggerated idea about their effectiveness, and this might cause them to think that God is not effective. For example, after they build a bridge on top of a river from one hill to another hill, deep in their heart they might start to think that they have defeated nature, and this might cause them to think that they can deceive God, even if he happens to exists. Or an artist for example, the disbelievers among them might start to think like this. They will think, “Whether there is a god or not, I do not know, but I surely know that he doesn’t seem to be fun. I want to express myself, not to suppress myself, so it doesn’t matter whether there is a god or not, I chose to live my life in a version which doesn’t stop me from fully expressing myself.”

That’s how an artist among the disbelievers thinks. Or a disbelieving policeman might also not care whether God exists or not, but according to him, God surely does not stop crime. If it wasn’t for us, the policemen, crime would not stop. So, a disbelieving policeman does not believe in a just God. So, depending on the profession, and depending on what people are exposed to for most of their life, the disbelievers among them will tend to deny that aspect of God which has to do with their experience. Some of them might think that God is not just, and some of them might think that God is not merciful, some of them might think that God is too dominant, some of them might think that God is not running things well, or the Jews who deal with money a lot because they have an advantage in that area, because of their believing ancestors – so because they deal with money slightly more than other people, they will tend to think that the wealth of the world depends on them, and this causes them to deny that God is the bringer of wealth. And the Quran mentions this. In verse 5:64, it says that the Jews said that God’s hand is tied down, meaning that God doesn’t give enough to people, or God doesn’t have enough. And the response in the Quran is that it is their hands who are tied down. So, they are the stingy ones, not God. So, based on what their dominant experience in life is, people tend to deny one aspect of God or another one, and the scientists simply have more experience dealing with analyzing the existence itself, so the disbelievers among them will end up denying the existence of God, but weirdly some of them actually manage to accept some other aspects of God, even if they don’t believe in him. For example, you might hear some of them saying something like, “I don’t believe in God, but I think it’s beneficial for humanity that people believe in him, because it creates a sense of community among the people, and it helps with lowering crime rates and so on.” But, anyway, the truth is that only 9.1% of people truly believe in God, and that is the same across all professions which are permissible. And when I say “permissible professions” I mean professions which do not have discriminatory barriers to entry. But there are professions which have a larger number of disbelievers than usual, because of their discriminatory barriers to entry. For example, because being a model, or a fashion influencer is a profession which discriminates against old people and males, it is a profession which might have more than 91% disbelievers. Or being a spy, or secret agent is a profession which might discriminate against females or other nationalities, for example, then again it might have more than 91% disbelievers, but here I am talking about normal professions which are permissible and with fair barriers to entry, like doctors, nurses, engineers, teachers, farmers, chefs, accountants, builders, traders, scientists, and so on. So, among these professions, among these permissible professions, 9.1% of people truly believe in God, and about 23% of them can not make up their mind, and about 66% of them truly do not believe in God, and whether these percentages are expressed outwardly like that, it depends on the culture in which people live, in the profession which they have, in what type of religious upbringing they had, in the poverty levels, simply on the general life circumstances which a person was more exposed too, rather than his true convictions. And actually, depending on how much a group of people are different from these true percentages, you can know how much they are faking it. Those percentages stay the same across all sufficiently large groups, but if that’s not what they admit to be, they are just faking it in front of the others, or they are fooling themselves without knowing it, or they haven’t had enough life experiences to realize what they truly believe.

Friday Sermon by: Alban Fejza, Online Congregation Director

Summary:

In this Friday sermon, Alban Fejza describes life as a pyramid in which hurt is passed down from the most evil people to others, and explains how taking our concerns to God in prayer stops us from passing the hurt on.

Video Transcript:

Praise be to God! There is no other god except God. A lot of times when people get hurt by others, they wonder, “Why?” They focus on how to stop it there and then, and this often prevents them from seeing the bigger picture. Most of the time, they don’t realize that it’s part of the system in this life. This whole life is one giant pyramid of hurt, and here is what I mean by that: Let’s say that someone evil out there kills someone, because he just can’t help it. He is so terribly unhappy inside to the point that it is the only things which is left for him to feel good for a few days. Now, the state has to catch him, judge him, and imprison him for a long time, and it will cost the state at least about 2 million dollars to do all of that. I am not exaggerating it. Now, because the state has 2 million dollars less, they have to raise taxes. Once they raise the taxes, it hurts a businessman who is just trying to create a business and live his life normally, but the taxes and all the complicated rules waste a lot of his efforts. So, to make up for that lost effort, the businessman has learned that he can push his employees to work harder, if he is just rude and strict with them. So, he is rude to one of the employees one day, and now the employee feels bad and worthless, and after work, he goes out to drink to get rid of his pain. He goes home, he is drunk and yells at his wife, and this happened regularly recently. She can’t take it anymore, so she divorces him. Now, the child has to be taken care of with extra efforts in two separate places. So, they have to spend more for the same child. Because they have to spend more, they become stingier in other things. Now, a friend sees that she has become stingy and never pays when they stay together, so the friends feels kind of used and doesn’t see the point in staying in a friendship where she is always the one who contributes. Now, she decides not to meet her often anymore. Now, she feels lonelier. Because she feels lonely, to alleviate that, she watches more movies. She gains weight. Eventually she has to go to the doctor earlier, because of unhealthy living. So, now the health insurance company has to pay her expenses. But, the health insurance company now has to raise the premiums for everyone else to cover her expenses, or they have to reduce what the insurance covers. So, now they start thinking of ways to cover less without the clients noticing, writing things in complicated contracts with fine prints, and then once someone needs a health treatment, he might later realize that he is not actually covered for that treatment in the same way that he thought he was covered before. Now, he feels angry. Now, he has a choice. He can break the window of the health insurance company, out of anger, or he can let go. If he doesn’t let go, this cycle of passing on the hurt from one person to another will continue forever, and it continues like that until someone who knows how to leg go comes along. And that cycle of hurt only stops at that person who fully lets go, and absorbs the hurt himself or herself, and doesn’t pass it on. I simplified this example to say it faster, but the reality is that this example can go in some many different ways, but the main idea is that whenever a person hurts a second person, then that second person feels the need to hurt a third person, and at each stage, people absorbed a little, and try to pass on most of the pain to someone else, and at the end there, the person who absorbs the hurt without passing it on to someone else becomes a believer. And because it’s psychologically impossible to get hurt without passing it on to others, the only way to do it is to pass it on to God, and that’s done through prayer. So, once you pray, you simply enable yourself psychologically to not pass your hurt to other people, but express it in words towards God, and God is there to listen when you express your concerns, and once the prayer is over, you are now capable of not passing your paint to other people. Otherwise, the anger accumulates, and you are forced to pass it on willingly or unwillingly. Anyway, what I described is only one line of passing the hurt from the most evil person to the least evil person who then expressed it to God who heals it. But, in reality it’s not just one line, it’s more like a pyramid. At the bottom, we have a large number of the least happy people who feel hurt, and they want to take some happiness from the people just above them by hurting them, and then they do that for the people just above them, and at each level, there is less and less people, and it’s like a pyramid of hurt, a pyramid of pain. And the hurt is transported from the bottom of the pyramid, absorbed a little at each level, and transported towards the top, and then the believers at the top of the pyramid transport that hurt as an expression of prayer to God. And the messenger is simply the person who is at the top of that pyramid. He is the person who is the best in the world who knows how to let go. But he is not the guy who got hurt the most.

He is simply the guy who got hurt the most compared to how little he was able to get hurt, because he chose to pass on to others as little of the hurt as possible compared to what others transported to him. And that’s only possible with honest prayer. Another way to express this is that the messenger is chosen from the person who has the biggest difference between how much he chose to get in life and how much he could get in life, and the ultimate example of this is Jesus. This difference is the biggest in him, from all the humans ever. In the bible, Jesus is offered the whole world by Satan just to worship him once, and Jesus refuses by saying that the scripture says, “We should worship God alone.” And Jesus refused a real offer. It was not a bluff by Satan. As we know in the Quran, Satan is given dominion over Earth, so he had the power to give it to Jesus, and Satan was willing to give it to Jesus, because it would prove God wrong, and both Jesus and Satan knew that if Jesus accepted the offer, they would both do it. But, instead Jesus chose to get nothing. So, the difference between what he could get in this life and what he chose to get in this life is as big as all the wealth of the world – the ultimate difference, and because Jesus has the biggest difference between how much he could get in this life, and how much he chose to get in this life, that’s why God chose him. The Messiah, as you know, means “the chosen”. And by the way this difference between what a person has the ability to get in life and what he chose to get in life is a result of their internal happiness, because only a truly happy person can tolerate to get less than what he could actually get and still be happy. An unhappy person can not let go of the hurt. But a happy person can let go of the hurt. And our happiness belongs to God. He is the one who can make us laugh or cry. So, it’s a waste of time to try to change our happiness through material things. Instead, we should simply let God rule our lives, and happiness is there.

Friday Sermon by: Alban Fejza, Online Congregation Director

Summary:

In this Friday sermon, Alban Fejza shows that most stories of the messengers in the Quran follow one twelve-word storyline (people bad, messenger warns them, people don’t believe him, people get destroyed) and explains the exceptions.

Video Transcript:

Praise be to God! There is no other god except God. The Quran contains a large number of stories, which vary in time, length, details, and so on, but there is an archetypal storyline which covers those stories. That archetypal story can be told in only twelve words. Here it is: People bad. Messenger warns them. People don’t believe him. People get destroyed. I can tell the stories of so many messengers with this archetypal story. So, let me tell you the story of Noah: People bad. Messenger warns them. People don’t believe him. People get destroyed. Now, let me tell you the story of Hud: People bad. Messenger warns them. People don’t believe him. People get destroyed. Now, let me tell you the story of Salih: People bad. Messenger warns them. People don’t believe. People get destroyed. Now, let me tell you the story of Lot: People bad. Messenger warns them. People don’t believe. People get destroyed. Now let me tell you the story of Shuayb: People bad. Messenger warns them. People don’t believe him. People get destroyed. Now, with later messengers, again the story line only gets less strong, but the idea is the same. People bad. Messenger warns them. People don’t believe him.

People continue as losers. So, instead of destroyed, they just become losers now. So, the story for the later generations and later messengers becomes more toned-down, because they don’t have as much strength to be as evil as the previous ones. So, let me continue with that archetypal story: The story of Elijah: People bad. Messenger warns them. People don’t believe him. People continue as losers. The story of Elisha: People bad. Messenger warns them. People don’t believe him. People continue as losers. The story of Zachariah: People bad. Messenger warns them. People don’t believe him. People continue as losers. Now, in the case of Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, that is only half of the story. So, their first part of the story is again the same: People bad. Messenger warns them. People don’t believe. People continue as losers. However, in the case of Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, there is a second part of the story, and the second part of the story continues like this: Other people good. Messenger gives them good news. They believe. They eventually dominate. And because of this second part of the story, we got Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

And actually, based on how many religions we have today from all those messengers, we can tell how many of them were believed by the people. Of course, the messengers did not want to create three religions, but the people ended up believing the messengers basically only three times and after them came people who did not believe but who still inherited the knowledge and they created separate religions out of it. So, from about 20 messengers, people believed them only three times, and this shows how bad the people’s condition is. And even during those three times, a group believed after another group disbelieved. So, even these three messengers were rejected by a group, and then accepted by another group. In the case of Moses, he was rejected by Pharaoh and the Egyptians, and later accepted by the Jews. In the case of Jesus, he was rejected by the Jews, and latter accepted by the Greeks and kind of latter Romans. And in the case of Muhammad, he was rejected by the Meccans and later accepted by the Medinans. Now, there are messenger to whom this archetypal story does not apply, but that’s only because of some other reason. For example, in the case of Abraham (sort of), Ismail, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, this story does not apply, because these were prophets who lived alone with their families and domesticated animals, mostly isolated from communities of disbelievers, and as a result, their people basically consisted of their family. So, in the case of Abraham, Ismail, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, the people around them obeyed them because they were their father, and they would have obeyed them even if they did not believe that they were messengers, because obeying the father was the norm during those times. There is another case where messengers are not rejected. It’s the case of David and Solomon. However, they did not reject them because they were kings, and the king would cut their heads off, if they refused to obey them, as all kings did then. Nothing different there. So, in the case of David and Solomon, they obeyed them because they were kings, and not necessarily because they were messengers. In the case of Jonah, the story diverges from the archetypical story just a little bit, because Jonah is the only messenger who initially refuses to do his job. In his case, the story goes like this: People bad. Messenger warns them. People initially believe him, but in the end they don’t believe him. People continue as losers. But for most of the cases where there is not a specific other reason to diverge from the archetypal story, the root archetypal story is the same: People bad.

Messenger warns them. People don’t believe him. People get destroyed. And the question is, why is this story at the root of all stories in the Quran? It’s because the story of all humanity is that. So, these stories are a lesson for the end of the world. And the story of all humanity is basically that. People bad. Messengers warn them. People don’t believe them. People get destroyed when the End of the World comes. The End of story…they wish. They wish it was the end of the story, but it’s only the end of the first part of the story. The sequel is worse for them, and it goes like this: The warned people get resurrected. Messengers say, “We warned them.” God judges them. The warned people go to Hell, forever. And this second destruction is worse than the first destruction because it hurts more and it lasts forever.

Friday Sermon by: Alban Fejza, Online Congregation Director

Summary:

In this Friday sermon, Alban Fejza explains the three types of proof accepted in court and in the Quran (empirical proof, logical proof and two reliable witnesses) and applies them to recognizing God’s messengers.

Video Transcript:

Praise be to God. There is no other god except God. There are three types of proof which are acceptable in court and acceptable according to the Quran. 1. Empirical proof 2. Logical proof 3. Proof through two reliable independent witnesses Now, let me take one example from daily life and show how we can prove the same thing in three different ways with these three different types of proof. Let’s say that there is a new property tax code in town, and it will remove taxes for any house which is less than 6 meters in height. Now, you are excited because it could save you a lot of money over many years, but you don’t know for sure that your house is less than 6 meters in height. In that case, the first way to prove to yourself that your house is less than 6 meters in height is to get a tape measure and measure it. But let’s say that you have with you one of those soft flexible tape measures, and it will not stay straight, if you try to reach the top of the house from the ground. So, you need a ladder, and then you release the tape measure from the top down to the ground, and in this way by looking at the tape measure, you can prove that the house is less than six meters tall. And this is empirical proof. “Empirical” means, “in practice”. So, you measured it in practice.

However, empirical proof is not always the most useful way to prove things. What if you don’t have a ladder? What if you have to measure the distance from the earth to the moon? Your ladder and your tape measure would be useless in that case. So, in cases where empirical proof is not very useful, or too time-consuming, or very expensive, or simply too impractical, we have other ways to prove the same thing. In the case of the house, we could use the second type of proof, which is logical proof. For example, logically, from geometry, we know that a right triangle with the other two angels being 45 degrees has the two short sides of equal length. We can use this logic, and think of one side of the house as one side of the triangle, and the flat ground as another side of the triangle, if the ground is flat, and then we simply have to wait until the sun reaches exactly 45 degrees of altitude in the sky, which we can find in astronomical almanacs online. And once the sun reaches 45 degrees, we simply measure the length of the shadow of the house in the flat ground, and that is equal to the height of the house. And logically, because the shadow was less than 6 meters long, we can conclude that the house is also less than 6 meters high. And there are many other logical ways through which we can prove the height of the house. However, sometimes even the logical proof is too burdensome, or too time-consuming, especially when we have to prove things over and over again. In that case, if available we can prove things through two witnesses. For example, you go and get the blueprint of the house, and you check there in the blueprint how tall the house was planned to be, and let’s say that it says that it is 5.5 meter tall. Now, all you have to do is ask two witness who were involved with that to testify that they have built the house according to the blueprint specifications. You call one of them by phone, and you ask him, “Did you follow the blueprint exactly when you built the house, especially in relation to the height?” He says, “Yes”. And then let’s say that you have access to the state inspector, and you call him whether he inspected the house after it was built, and whether it followed all the blueprint specifications. And he says, “yes”, and now you have two witnesses who told you that the measurement in the blueprint is the same as the measurement of the final house. And, if the blueprint says that the house is 5.5 meters in height, you have two witnesses who testified that the house is 5.5 meters in height. And this would be acceptable in court as proof through witnesses, or maybe expert witnesses.

And it’s also a type of proof which is acceptable according to the Quran, which is mentioned in many verses. And by the way, there is a verse in the Quran which validates these three ways of proving things. In verse 17:36, God tells us that he has given us the eyesight, the brains, and the hearing, and we are responsible for using them. Now, we verify the empirical proof through our eyes, the logical proof through our brains, and the proof through witnesses with our ears. See, all these three types of proof are types of proof which are recommended in the Quran, because we have eyes, brains, and ears to verify things. And each of these three types of proofs is used by God to prove three messengers of our generation. But before, I tell you about that, let me give you three examples of messengers from the past. For example, the disbelievers threw Abraham in the fire, but they sew him staying inside of the fire and he did not burn. This is empirical proof, because they see it with their eyes, but they do not understand logically what is going on. But, in the case of Joseph for example, when the famine happened for 7 years, that was not empirical proof, because famines happen quite often, and with their eyes, they did not see something out of the ordinary, but the fact that Joseph predicted it, it logically proves that Joseph was telling the truth, because no one knows the future, except what God tells to a messenger. Now, in the case of Aaron, Aaron was proven through witnesses. So, Moses was proven already because of the empirical proof, the miracles, and when Moses told the people that Aaron is also a messenger, because they already established that Moses was a messenger, that meant that Moses would not lie to them about Aaron. So, the bearing witness of Moses was proof of Aaron’s messengership. The same thing happened with Isaac for example. Abraham testified that Isaac was the next messenger, and that was it. Abraham did not lie, so Isaac was the next messenger. So, these are the three types of proof from the Quran: Empirical proof, logical proof, and proof through witnesses, and using these three types of proof, God proves the three messengers of today. Rashad Khalifa’s messengership was proven through empirical proof. You can see and count certain number directly from the Quran, without necessarily understanding the logic, and statistically this proves that Rashad Khalifa was the Messenger of the Covenant. Now, Alban Fejza’s messengership is proven through logical proof. After reading what the verses of the Quran and what they say about the Clarifying Messenger, logically, you can reach the conclusion that they must be talking about Alban Fejza.

By the way, there is also empirical proof about Alban Fejza’s messengership, but I don’t like to emphasize it a lot because then it makes me look like an imitator. The purpose is to learn something new while proving a messenger through a different type of proof, because ultimately understanding the truth and that there is more than one way to get to that truth is more important than simply being obsessed with who is a messenger and who is not. But, anyway, Rashad’s messengership is proven through empirical proof, Alban’s messengership is proven through logical proof, and the next messenger is proven through the third type of proof which is proof through two reliable witnesses. Just like in the case of Aaron and Isaac, the people knew that they were messengers because the already proven messengers (Moses and Abraham) told them about it. In the same way, since Alban is already proven, if he tells you about the next messenger and who he is, that is proof about him. That is proof through testimony from an already proven person. And I know that you need two witnesses instead of one to prove things through witnesses, but the testimony of a proven messenger is equal to the testimony of two witnesses, because he speaks on behalf of God also. And this is idea which is also described in the Bible. When they asked Jesus in the Bible, how do they know that he is a messenger of God?

He said, because I bear witness about it. They said, “But your witness does not count, because you are only one person, and we know from the scripture that there must be two witnesses.” And Jesus told them that being a messenger means that you speak for yourself and for God, and that’s two witnesses. So, both Jesus and God testified about the messengership of Jesus, and this was enough according to the Bible, because the truthfulness of Jesus had already been proven through the miracles. Anyway, the Quran says the same thing in verse 13:43, where it says that God is sufficient as a witness and those who possess knowledge, and Alban as a messenger is among those who possess knowledge. So, people will have two witnesses about the next messenger: God and Alban as a knowledgeable person. That’s two witnesses. So, these are the three ways to prove something. However, I want to point out a fourth way which I call alternatives to proof. This happens when some event makes that specific proof irrelevant to be verified, or when it’s not worth pursuing proving something. For example, if we go back to the example of that house when we proved that it is less than 6 meters tall so that it can qualify for a tax deduction. Now, let me tell you alternatives to that which make the proof irrelevant.

For example, let’s say that you are some kind of eccentric businessman with lots of money and power, and you think that your house should be less than 6 meters high anyway. So, whether the house is less than 6 meters in height or not doesn’t matter to you because you can make it be less than 6 meters in height anyway, even if it’s not. You ask the builders to change the height of the house. You tell them, “remove one floor, and I know for sure that the first floor alone will not be six meters tall. I don’t like climbing the stairs anyway” And because you have the power and the money, you forced the house to be as high as you wanted, and it doesn’t matter how high it was before. Facts don’t matter when you have the power and the will to change them. So, whether it was less than 6 meters or not, it doesn’t matter anymore, because with your power you forced it to be less than 6 meters in height. So, this is the alternative to proof through power. And there is also the alternative to proof through prior agreements. So, let’s say that in the case of the house, you wanted to know if it’s less than six meter in height. And you friend tells you, “How high is it planned to be in the blueprint? “It’s 5.5. meters, but I don’t know for sure that they built it exactly like in the blueprint.” And your friend tells you. “It doesn’t matter then, because the municipality has reached an agreement, a prior agreement, that they will collect the tax based on their archives where they have the blueprints of the house, and they will not go out in the field to measure the houses. So, in this case, they reached a prior agreement how to approach the situation, even if that doesn’t ultimately prove the height of the house, because that was not the main purpose. So, the alternative to proof can happen through power or prior agreements. And this alternative will be used by the last messenger, the Mahdi. See, once the Mahdi frees Mecca and takes control of Mecca and dominates the people and the region, does it really matter if he can prove himself? Did it really matter whether David as a king could prove himself to his subjects? They had to do what he said anyway, whether they believed him or not. He was the king. He ruled with power. Those who have the power don’t need to prove anything. For example, if you have children, when they were infants, did you prove to them that milk is good for them before you gave them the milk, or did you just give them the milk? And they didn’t see the need to ask for proof, because it was delicious. So, in the same way, the citizens in Mahdi’s state will feel good about their prosperity, so why would they bother to ask for proof, when things are going as they want them to go?

Those who don’t have the power are the ones who need to prove things, because they are the ones who want change. The burden of proof is on the person who is asking for change. The one who says that things are good as they are, and no one needs to change anything, then he doesn’t need to prove anything. So, the last messenger will be proven through his power and dominance over Mecca. And I show you in another video that his power is proof of his messengership because no one can free Mecca from today’s Arab elite, unless he is truly the Mahdi, the last messenger. This is predicted in the Quran. Also, before dominating Mecca, he might choose to use prior agreements as alternatives to proof. For example, he might come up with a concrete plan and written agreement which will limit what he can ask you to do, and what you can ask him to do, and in that case you just reach an agreement like any normal business agreement, and since you know beforehand what everyone’s role is, you don’t need to prove a person’s messengership before you enter into a relationship with them. However, of course, there will be many people who will claim to be the Mahdi during those times, and this is why you should make your decision, not based on what they promise you about the future, because you do not know the future, but based on whether what you are agreeing is the right Quranic thing to do in the present anyway.

And if you use that logic, they can not fool you.