My Ummah, My Ummah...

Bismillah,

My people are in pain. We have been hurting for so long it makes you wonder... will we ever heal? It used to be us against the world. We were envied, respected, talked about and joined. Now we just grieve.

I became Muslim when I was 20 years old. I had searched the globosphere of religion and belief and stumbled upon my greatest love...Islam. I was fortunate to read and study the Quran and Sahih Bukhari before I ever entered a masjid. I bought book, after book and for two glorious years was not tainted in my perspective by any group, sect or party. I was in love, I never wanted to be anything else except Allah's maidservant and a champion of my people.

Then I became salafi.

The salafi dawah echoed what I believed, worship Allah according to his book the Quran and the statements of the prophet muhammad, and the righteous community that followed after him who practiced the same. We were taught to be studious (which in turn became our downfall) to hear and obey, and to emulate the righteous in our dress, attitudes and worship.

I still believe in that way. But salafiyyah (the practitioners of it) failed me.

Just when I thought we were strong, just when I thought we were upon greatness, we were struck down from beneath. The very issues that we were taught to avoid were the very things we fell into and suffered because of.

• Backbiting, tale-carrying, spying: Allah forbid us from this in surah al-hujurat. Khatibs and Imams extolled to us the evils of this practice from the minbars weekly. Yet, a group sprung up amongst us, claiming to be of us, and the backbit and slandered and spied on until all of the trust of one muslim for another was destroyed.
• Enmity, envy and lust for leadership: "and protect us from the evil of the envier when he envies." Everybody wanted to be an Imam, a scholar. Giving beneficial, religious lectures had started to be called "rocking the mic", "blacking-out" and "cutting-up." Everyone wanted to hold an audience, give a class, run a masjid, lead a community until the Imams who had been given this responsibility, were slandered, threatened and defamed. New masjid began to spring up and older, established masajid that had been pillars of the community, were abandoned and boycotted.
• Splitting, division and abandonment: Masajid were abandoned and children pulled out of their schools, friendships were dissolved and families destroyed as a result. Distrust, suspicion and labeling ate away at our communities until nothing was left except a naked, exposed and putrid shell of what it used to be.
• Blind Following: The new era of "the sheikh said" arose. Verses of the quran and statements of the prophet were left off for "but the sheikh said". Our ummah was split into sections: scholars, students-of-knowledge, and laymen. The word laymen meant everybody who was too ignorant to understand the religion so were relegated to the statements and advice of the previous two categories. And with that, no matter how many years you had been Muslim, no matter if you understood the arabic language, tajweed or had memorized various sections of the quran, you could only be entered into the land of the knowledgeable by a select process that to the date of this writing has still not been made known.

So today, we are left with flailing communities that struggle to remain. Distrustful Muslims who either stay to themselves, neither benefiting or being benefited or hunt out the mistakes of every other Muslim in order to debase and defame them and push them into isolation. And in the meantime, our people are being killed, imprisoned, raped and murdered in almost every other country in the world. And we are so busy destroying ourselves that we can be of no help to anyone else. My ummah, My ummah! Will we ever be able to heal?