What happened to our visionaries? How did we go from an ummah that produced some of the greatest luminaries in human history, who’s work we still depend on to this day, to an ummah trapped in darkness, struggling on all fronts? In this essay I want to examine the concept of the visionary to understand what it constitutes from the perspective of the prophetic tradition, and then to apply that to our shared reality of western Islam to understand what we can do to bring it back bi’ithnillaah.
Who were the visionaries? Ibn Sina and Al-Khawrizmi, Salahuddin and Muhammad Al-Fatih, Bukhari and Ibn Taymiyyah, these people were special. They each excelled in their respective fields, forging new paths and raising the bar of human achievement. But they all had one thing in common: their God was one and His Words were their light. And this is what we need to look at to pinpoint the qualities that made up these great men.
The famous Ayah states
“Indeed, in the Messenger of Allah you have an excellent example for whoever has hope in Allah and the Last Day, and remembers Allah often” [33:21]
Allah is giving divine testimony for the Prophet (PBUH), giving us no doubt as to where we can learn the best of qualities. The blueprint is there, we just need to analyse it and learn from him (PBUH).
So, what is this secret formula for success? Perhaps we could look towards the words of Abu Bakr Al-Siddiq, the 1st Khalifa of Islam and the nominated successor to the Prophet (PBUH) to glean some insight into this:
“Run away from greatness and greatness will follow you”
This seems to be the golden formula. But what does it mean to “run away”? Such an action would typically be associated with cowardliness, not at all a noble characteristic. No, this refers to the one who flees from himself. This is the man who runs from his desires and his Nafs that call him to evil, the man who is able to say No. But this is a contradiction within the human spirit: “Man is created weak” as Allah Himself states in [4:128]. Why or how would such a being be able to have the willpower to flee from himself, given the strength of the pull the Nafs has over us?
And now we have stumbled on one of Allah’s greatest gifts to us, the gift that has given the human being a value so immense that on the creation of our Father Adam (AS), Allah commanded every one of the trillions upon trillions of Angels He had created to bow down to him out of awe of what our Allah had done. That gift is the gift of free will. The ability to choose to obey Allah when every nerve in our body is screaming at us to do evil.
And this is our answer. Our free will is like a sapling fighting to remain grounded and straight through the howling gales of temptations, distractions and whispers we are subject to every second. We need to fortify it, to strengthen it to ensure it grows straight on the path of Allah (SWT). This is sincerity. It’s ability to keep your eyes fixed on the hereafter through every deed you do, every word you speak and every decision you make. This was the life of our Prophet (SAWS), a life of unimaginable tests and trials, humiliations and losses, that ultimately changed the world, because he never moved his eyes from his ultimate goal: the pleasure of Allah. His example paves the way for us.
Sincerity is the cornerstone of greatness, because no action but the one done solely for the sake of Allah can be considered to have any worth, simply by the fact that only those deeds will be able to weigh down the scales on the Day of Reckoning. A firm and renewed sincerity, intention and purpose is fundamentally required for a Muslim to progress in the hereafter, and likewise such deeds are the only ones that elevate the people in this life. In fact, it’s mentioned that Imam Nawawi burned many of the books he wrote simply because he was unsure of the intentions he had while writing them. This sincerity we require to progress and achieve greatness:
“But the sincere servants of Allah—for them is a sustenance determined” [37:40-41]
If we take any of those Muslim luminaries we mentioned earlier, not one of them achieved what they did without humbling themselves completely to Allah. To give one example, Salahuddin, widely considered the greatest Muslim warrior outside the time of the Sahabah, was man known to be frequently moved to tears by the Qur’an, and who travelled to a scholar to learn the Muwatta of Imam Malik whilst being a king and leading a the Muslim ummah. It was our sincerity that allowed our people to be able to go from the depths of pre-Islamic ignorance, to lighting the way of humanity.
This sincerity allowed us to read the words of Allah, “Read! In the name of your Lord who created: He created man from a clinging form. Read! Your Lord is the Most Bountiful One who taught by [means of] the pen, who taught man what he did not know” [96:1-5] and have our attention drawn to understanding the natural world. In fact, we are told to do so by Allah “Then do they not look at the camels – how they are created? And at the sky – how it is raised? And at the mountains – how they are erected? And at the earth – how it is spread out?” [88:17-20]. This is the mind of the sincere Muslim, who has mind open, ever ready to try and further understand the majesty of Allah in some deeper way, ever ready to reflect or ponder or explore.
Not so today. We seem to have lost these qualities that produced those visionaries. We do not hear of famous Muslims making breakthroughs in science or politics or academia, instead it’s the West that is leading these fields. Our minds have become numbed, distracted and euthanised by the waves of media attacks and our own indulgences in the excess of the internet and social media. We are each trapped within the binary computer-generated prison cells of our own construction, furnished by algorithms that know not limits nor pauses nor depth. Our characters have been degraded, with reduced attention spans, lower memory retention and higher unsatisfaction. We cannot block out the noise to focus where we need to, to build our sincerity, to strengthen the sapling of choice and protect it from the increasingly corrosive acid rain we find in our feeds and friend groups.
This is now a game where the winners are those who manage to realise they are drowning. It is on each of us to wake up and step back, to breath and reflect, to critically analyse our relationship with Allah and begin our work on rebuilding it. Only once we begin this process can we start to see the greatness running towards us while we run away. Let us begin to move towards a future where visions burn brightly from every country, city and household, that will, insha’Allah, unite to create the light that will burn brightly into our future.
“Has the time not yet come for believers’ hearts to be humbled at the remembrance of Allah?” [57:16]