Delivered exactly 25 years to the day that I embraced Islam, this was the most emotional and, perhaps, the most impactful speech I have ever given. Deeply moved by feelings of honor, gratitude, joy and nostalgia, I reflected upon the core question that underpinned my shahadah… Why was Islam better than the religion of my family, Judaism, and the religion of many of my friends, Christianity? In my opinion this was, and is, the most important question any Muslim could ever answer.
But over the years I discovered that many Muslims could not provide a sufficient answer from a purely logical standpoint, therefore leaving them vulnerable to a lack of confidence in their faith and practice. And as I share in the first part of this khutbah, this lack of confidence even led to one Muslim brother leaving Islam altogether! And so I bluntly challenge the audience… Have you deeply reflected upon this essential question? And are you certain your answer is logically sound? Follow along as I present the 10 most common answers I heard during my 25 years as a member of the Muslim community. And then I ask you to consider whether or not they pass the logical litmus test.
Essential listening, especially for new Muslims, young Muslims, Muslims engaged in da’wah, and any Muslims who are not so secure in their faith and practice.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT:
When we die, our soul departs from our body, and the soul goes on a journey that has many stages to it. For the beginning of this, I want to focus on one stage of the journey of this soul, and that is when the soul descends into the grave to be reunited with our bodies.
When the soul is coming down, it witnesses the janazah. Your body is laying there on the ground, wrapped up, getting ready to be buried, and you’re descending and you’re seeing this and you’re hearing it, you’re experiencing it. And when the people then take your body and place it in the grave, your soul descends in there into the grave to be reunited with your body. And then your loved ones, your friends, who were there at your janazah, they will start shoveling dirt, start picking up dirt with their hands, and placing it in the grave, throwing it on top of you, and you will feel it fall on top of you. And they will do this until you are completely covered up, and you will be there in the grave covered up and you will have consciousness. You will be alive, not physically obviously, but your soul will experience this.
Then, after your family makes some duas and they say some nice, kind words about you, they’ll walk away, they’ll leave, and you will hear their footsteps, as the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said, that you will hear their footsteps as they walk away. And you will be there alone in the grave: darkness, silence.
What happens at that point? Two angels come to you, Munkar and Nakir, and they ask you three questions, perhaps the most important questions you will ever be asked, and the three most important questions you will ever answer. And those questions are: What is your deen (translated as, what is your way of life or your religion)? Who is your prophet? And who is your lord? Not necessarily in that order, but those are the three questions.
If you answer these questions correctly—all three of them—your stay in the grave will be one of peace. You’ll have peace, you’ll have pleasure, until the Day of Judgment when the horn is sounded and you are raised up out of your grave. So during that time, if you answer these questions correctly, you will have peace. But if you don’t answer these questions correctly—all three of them—your stay in the grave will be full of pain. So we must answer these questions correctly.
But here’s the problem: a lot of us say to ourselves at this point, “I’m good, ’cause I’m a Muslim and I know the answers to these questions and I’ll answer them correctly.” This is a problem; this is called being overconfident, because the answers are not given, as many of the scholars say, the answer is not given with your tongue. The answer is not given with your brain. The answer is given with your heart. What is in your heart will come out at that moment. And so, if you lived your life—no matter how long your life was—if you lived your life not praying, not striving to implement Islam, not striving to understand the Qur’an to the best of your ability, if you spent your life not really striving to be a Muslim, a true Muslim, trying to practice, then Islam really was not in your heart. So we have to make sure that we’re striving, again, to the best of our ability. I’m not asking for perfection, I’m not asking for scholars, I’m not asking for you to be of the best character like the Prophet, peace be upon him, but we must strive for it so that on that day, when these angels come to us and they ask us these questions, what is in our heart will naturally come forward. The answers, the correct answers, will come forth, and not the answers of “I was striving for something other than the pleasure of Allah.” So we have to make sure that Islam is in our hearts, not just on our lips, not just in our mind.
Now, I will submit to you that there’s another question that we will have to answer. It’s not a question that’s going to be asked of us after we die, it’s going to be a question that we will have to answer before we die. In my opinion, it’s not a question of what, it’s not a question of who, it’s a question of why. Why Islam? Why is Islam better than Christianity? Why is Islam better than Judaism? Why is Islam better than Hinduism or Buddhism? And I think we all are going to answer this question, or going to have to provide the answer to this question, at some point in our lives, at one time or another.
Now, why do I say this? I say this for two reasons.
Number one, because we have to answer the question to ourselves. We have to ask the question to ourselves and we have to answer it to ourselves. Why? Because we have to make sure that we don’t take this faith for granted. We have to make sure that we are absolutely convinced that Islam is the truth. We have to make sure that our faith and our practice is secure.
Now, again, the overconfidence comes in as human nature. As human beings, we say to ourselves as Muslims, we’ll say, “I’m good, no problem, I know my faith is secure, I know I’m a Muslim.” Let me tell you the story of a friend of mine whose name was Bilal. And I can guarantee you he said the same thing, that his faith was secure. This brother, I remember him as always having a smile, always praying, always making Dhikr, always reading Qur’an. He was a convert from Christianity, and he was so excited to discover Islam, an amazing brother. And when I shook his hand, you could feel the love; when I would embrace him, you could feel it. He had the Islam, he had the character, and for all intents and purposes, he was practicing Islam.
So, I left that community, I moved to a different area. Five years later, I came back to visit and I said, “Where’s Bilal?” You know what the Imam told me of the community? He said, “He left. He converted to Judaism.” A Muslim converting to another religion, Judaism. Now, first I thought to myself, “Wait a second, Judaism? That’s kind of odd. Usually convert to, you know, Christianity. Judaism was kind of strange.” So I said, “Why did he do that? Did he give you a reason?” The Imam said, “He converted to Judaism because the Jews were more organized and the Muslims were disorganized.”
And I said, subhan’ Allah, what a reason to forsake your faith, to forsake the religion of Islam, this beautiful way of life, because some people are disorganized. So he essentially predicated his faith and his practice on something that was relative: the idea of a community being disorganized or organized. That’s what he predicated his whole belief on, his whole practice. Does that make sense? He didn’t predicate his faith, he didn’t base his faith and his practice on something that was absolute, because organization is a relative thing. What happens when he becomes part of the Jewish community and they’re organized for a period of time, and then, as human beings do, they become disorganized? What happens then? Is he going to leave Judaism for another religion? So it didn’t make sense. And so he thought that his faith was secure. He thought that his faith and his practice was sound until people became disorganized and he left. So if we’re saying that our faith is sound, that our practice is secure, can we be absolutely certain about that?
The second reason why I say that we eventually will have to answer this question is that unless you’re living under a rock, you’re going to be surrounded by those who don’t practice your faith, people of other religions. And this is true of people who are living as a religious minority in places like Australia, France, England, all throughout Europe, but it is especially true of the Muslims living here in America because America is a land of immigrants. There are people of all different walks of life, all different faith groups are here, and we will have interactions with them. And what will happen is when you’re interacting with them, you’ll be communicating with them, you’ll have conversations with them, and when you have these conversations, inevitably the questions will come: “You know, what is this beard all about? What is this hijab all about? Why do you go off to the corner and pray? Why do you pray like that?”
Many of the questions come asking what things are: “What is this prayer?” or “What is this fasting that you do?” If you get more and more into the conversations and deeper into it, eventually in most cases the question comes: Why? Because as you’re discussing, you’re telling them, “You know, we believe in Jesus, we believe in Moses, we believe in Abraham.” This is fascinating for a lot of people who don’t share our faith, because they didn’t know this. But then they start thinking to themselves, “Wait a second, if you believe in Jesus, if you believe in Moses, I do too! So what makes your religion better than mine?” So they ask the question: Why?
Can we answer their question from a logical perspective? That’s why we have to ask the question of ourselves and we have to answer this question before their questions come, so that we can logically—and I’m emphasizing logically—so that we can logically answer their question.
So what I’m going to do is I’m going to challenge you. I actually want you to answer this question, not out loud, I want you to think about it in your mind: Why is Islam better than Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, or any of the traditional religions? And so as I sit down here to end this first khutbah, yes, we’ll ask Allah for forgiveness, yes, we will make Dua, but I’m going to spend an extra minute just sitting here in silence and I want all of you to formulate the answer in your own mind. Now I know what you’re thinking, “Oh, there’s a lot of answers.” I’m not looking for a bullet list of answers, because I believe—and this is my opinion—I believe that there is one answer, one logical answer that answers the question of why Islam is better. Can you come up with that answer as I sit down?
(End of first khutbah)
What is the greatest day of your life? For some of you it may be the day that you graduated high school. For some of you maybe it was the day you graduated college. Maybe for some of you it was the first time you saw the Kaaba with your own eyes, making Umrah or making Hajj. Maybe for some of you it was seeing the grave of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him. For some of you maybe it was the day you got married. For some of you maybe it was the day you had your first child. Alhamdulillah, I experienced all these things, alhamdulillah, but they weren’t the greatest day of my life.
The greatest day of my life was December 16th, 1991, which was exactly 25 years ago today. It was the day that I accepted Islam!!
(Khateeb begins weeping)
On this day, I had to answer this question. I had to answer the question of why Islam was better than Judaism, because Judaism was the religion, was the family that I was born into. And so I had to answer that question when I was introduced to Islam. I had to answer the question, “Why was Islam better than what I already had?” But at the same time, I had to answer the question of why Islam was better than Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, or any of the religions that were familiar to me at that time. Because my family didn’t teach me Judaism, my family didn’t teach me anything about religion. We just called ourselves Jews. And so I was very open-minded. I believed in God, just a natural fitrah was still intact, and I was very grateful for that. Why would I accept Islam? Why was it better? I had to ask 25 years ago today.
And I came to the realization that it was one single reason, one single reason that made logical sense. I will share with you that answer, but first, I want to look at 10 answers that I’ve heard over the past quarter century, not only from converts but from lifelong Muslims, as to why Islam was the best religion, and I want to go through these points one by one and I want to see if they hold up to the logical litmus test.
The first answer: “Islam is the truth, bottom line.” This answer that people give—”Islam is the truth, we know this, period, no need to explain it, it just is”—is in my opinion a natural response, a natural reaction when you don’t have a logical answer. It’s like a reflex, because you hearken back to your faith. Now, don’t get me wrong, of course Islam is the truth, and there is at some point a leap of faith. I can make every logical argument to a Christian or to a Jew or anybody that will never prove the existence of Allah. It will never prove that Islam is better or Islam is the truth. So ultimately there is a leap of faith that has to take place. I took that leap of faith, but I took it with information. The person who introduced me to Islam, the people who introduced me to Islam, gave me the information, and so I had access and I read and I understood and I compared and I contrasted between Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, and I ultimately made the decision. I made that leap of faith, but it was based upon information, a logical understanding of the various religions and why Islam was better. So don’t get me wrong, I am not dismissing the idea of faith. But if you make that argument to somebody who’s not a Muslim, if you say “Islam is the truth,” well, can’t they say the same thing about Christianity? Can’t they say the same thing about Judaism? Of course they can, so it doesn’t logically answer the question. It’s not a logically sound argument.
The second answer: “It’s true because the Prophet, peace be upon him, said it’s true.” It’s true because of his character, because of his amazing humility. He was known as “The Trustworthy,” he had this incredible character. Can’t Christians and can’t Jews say the same thing about Jesus, about Moses? They can say the same thing. Jesus lived a tremendously humble life, he was incredibly generous. So you see what I’m saying? It’s not a logical answer even though it’s true.
The third answer: “The Miracles of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him.” Again, you see the pattern here: Christians and Jews can say the same thing about their prophets. How many miracles did Moses perform? How many miracles did Jesus perform? So they can come back and say the same thing. So we lose the argument, we can’t say that Islam is better because they had miracles as well.
The fourth answer: “Islam teaches the complete Oneness of God.” Beautiful teaching, yes, true. But did you know that there are Christians who call themselves Unitarian Christians who say the same thing? They reject a Trinity, they reject any association with God, they believe in the Oneness of God. And there are many other religions as well that advance this belief. So Islam is no better in that regard.
The fifth answer: “When I enter the Masjid I feel peace.” I’ve heard many, many Muslims, especially converts, say this. Two things here: the Christian can say the same thing when they enter the church. The Jew, the Jewish person can say the same thing when they enter the synagogue. And many other people of many other faiths can say the same thing about their communities. So again, we’re not distinguishing Islam if we make that argument. But even if that’s a valid argument, here’s the problem: is that the peace is relative. Go back to my story of Bilal who based his faith and his practices, on the surface at least from what we can tell, on the fact that the Muslims were organized. But when they became disorganized and he had that realization, he left. Same thing when Muslims, especially new converts or new reverts as some people like to say, when they enter the Masjid they feel a peace. I felt that peace. But what happens when an elder or anybody comes to them and yells at them for wearing short shorts, or wearing their hijab in the wrong way, showing their hair, or wearing a gold necklace like I used to do because I didn’t know? What happens when they get yelled at and that and they feel that harshness from some people who react emotionally, may not understand their situation? There’s an amazing lecture that if you want more information about this topic, I encourage you to watch on YouTube, it’s called “Winning Our Children Back to Islam” by a convert named Jeffrey Lang. You have to watch this lecture because he talks about so many converts who are so excited with their newfound faith, but they come to the Masjid and they find the Muslims being the most rude, being the most harsh with their manners, and it turns them away from the Masjid, and ultimately a lot of them turn away from Islam because they’re not part of the community, or they think that Muslims are getting this behavior from the religion itself, and they’re confused and they go back to their former ways of lives. So the peace is relative, so we can’t make that argument. Another story, very briefly: I had a friend, a good Muslim brother, who converted not too long after me, and he was so excited to learn about Islam, so excited to learn about the Arabic language. He went overseas. Before he left to learn, he was saying to me, “I can’t wait to go to the Muslim countries where I can learn about Islam, where I can be with the Muslims, surrounded by Muslims.” When he came back, he told me nothing but one story after another of how the Muslims that he ran into were racists. He was an African-American, and they just treated him so horribly because they had racism in their heart. Now, I’m not saying that all Muslims are like this, I’m not saying the majority of Muslims are like this, but there are some Muslims like this who have character that is not exactly the right character, who have diseases in their heart. But we can’t base our faith and our practice upon that. We can’t base it upon the peace that we feel from the Muslims, because the Muslims are human beings, they will disappoint us, and when they disappoint you, if you’re basing your faith and your practice on them, you’re going to lose your faith and practice.
The sixth answer: “The Muslims are so nice, so humble, so generous.” This is related to the previous point, but I’ve heard this reason. Muslims are so nice, so good. They end up getting disappointed. Again, it’s the minority, but if these converts run into this minority, they may think it’s the majority if they don’t have a lot of experience with the Muslim community.
The seventh answer: “The Qur’an contains so many beautiful teachings.” Again, true, I agree with this, I’m not dismissing it, but so does the Bible, so does the Torah, so do many other scriptures, they contain many beautiful teachings. So we can’t make that argument logically.
The eighth answer: “Muslims pray five times a day.” This was a beautiful thing. When I was introduced to Islam, it was such an amazing thing. I looked at prayer as like pit stops during the day to remind you that it’s time to focus on Allah, to remind you that if you were about to do something bad or commit a sin, Allah is reminding you about the Qur’an, reminding you about your ultimate goal in life, so I saw the wisdom in that. What if there’s a religion where they pray six times a day? What if there’s a religion where they pray seven times a day or 10 times a day? You know, the Buddhist have a very rich spiritual tradition. Yes, they go to the extreme where they put themselves inside their monasteries and they divorce themselves from the world, many of them, and we see that as an imbalance. But if you’re making the argument to a non-Muslim that Muslims pray five times a day, so you should accept our way, well, he can say, “I found a way that pray six times a day.” So it’s not a logical argument again.
The ninth answer: “The Muslim Ummah is so diverse.” Again, true. You know, when I accepted Islam, beautiful, so many people from all different ways of life, it was great. But Christians can say the same thing. If you look at the overall Christian community, they’re Christians in just about every country, just like Muslims, and so their worldwide population, it can be said, it can be argued, it’s just as diverse as ours. Now, yes, in America you have segregation. You go into a church, in many cases it’s a white church. You go into another church, it’s a black church, a Chinese church. Just go down Gallows Road, you can see the Korean church and the Japanese church. So, yes, there’s segregation amongst their communities in many cases, and alhamdulillah in our Masjids for the most part we have diversity, so that is a feather in our cap that we can say, “Look, the Muslim community is so diverse.” But again, that can be seen as something relative, because human beings change, communities can get divided: the Pakistanis over here, you know, the Indians over there, whatever. So again, it’s a relative answer, it’s not an absolute, it’s not a logical argument.
The tenth answer: “Didn’t you see the name of Allah on a tree or on the side of a mountain?” And this one is more of an entertaining answer. I’ve heard this before and I’ve seen pictures on the internet. Brothers and sisters, we can’t use this as a logical argument, doesn’t prove anything. Did you hear about that story a few years back of Christians, or people in general, seeing an image of the Virgin Mary on the on a windowpane down in Tampa on the side of an office building? Somehow the shadows and the light and the way the window was bent, it looked like an outline or a silhouette of the Virgin Mary, may Allah be pleased with her. So if we make this argument that, “Look, look at this, look in the in the tree bark, it’s the name of Allah,” they can say, “Oh yeah, I saw Jesus’s face on a grilled cheese sandwich.” That was an actual story, that somebody fried a grilled cheese sandwich, lifted it up and saw, “Oh my God, it’s the face of Jesus!” That increased their faith, and that story travels all around the world and people say to themselves, “Oh my gosh, Christianity is true!” So you see my point, we can’t use these as logical arguments ‘cuz they can say the same thing. I’m not dismissing the power of Allah, yes, Allah can put His name in a tree, Allah can put His name on the side of a mountain, but it’s not a proof, it’s merely something that’s interesting. Allah knows best, I don’t know, maybe Allah did it, maybe He didn’t, but we cannot prove it and we cannot use it as a logical argument.
For the exception of the last point, all these answers are true, all these answers are valid. I’m not dismissing any of them. If any individual in here and hearing this lecture—because I’m recording it—if they’ve had this experience and it brought them closer to Allah, seeing that Muslims pray five times a day, experiencing the diversity of the Muslims, seeing how kind some Muslims are, I am not dismissing that whatsoever. Everyone has their own reason for coming to Islam and for practicing Islam on a daily basis. I am not dismissing that, I am not delegitimizing that. But we cannot use that as reasons to make the argument that Islam is better.
The way that I see all of these nine points that I went through, which again are all valid, they’re like bricks; they’re like bricks to a house that hold up the roof.
If we use this analogy of building a house, the roof is our protection, protection from the weather, protection from the elements. And they’re held up by bricks. The pain and the torment in the grave and the Hereafter that I mentioned in my opening, Islam is the protection from that. Islam is our roof, our protection. And the roof is held up by those wonderful and beautiful aspects of Islam that we mentioned—the bricks. What’s holding the bricks in place? The foundation. So all these points that I mentioned, the nine points—I’m not including the last point—they’re all like bricks to a house. They are important, they’re needed to support our logical argument that Islam is better, but they are not the foundation of our argument. As you all know, no matter how big and how strong and how sturdy those bricks are, if your foundation is weak, eventually the house will crumble. So we have to make sure that the foundation of our logical argument is solid, that those bricks are put upon a foundation that is unshakable.
So what is that foundation? What is that one answer that I keep referring to? What is that one answer that no other religion before Islam can claim?
It is the fact that the Qur’an has been preserved from day one. It is the fact that the Qur’an is the pure message from our Creator.
Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, their scriptures have been mistranslated, their scriptures have been lost, their scriptures have been corrupted, whether deliberately or by accident. They no longer have the pure word of God. They no longer have the pure word of our Creator. We do! We have that access, preserved in the Qur’an!
And that’s the argument that we need to make. Maybe “argument” is not the best word; that’s the point that we have to make to them. Because I don’t believe in arguing, I believe in discussing and dialoguing, which I’ve done over the past 25 years with people who don’t share this faith. So that’s the point that we have to make. Yes, you can tell them about all the other points, again, those are bricks, but that’s not the foundation. That’s not what distinguishes Islam. It is the fact that the Qur’an has been preserved from day one.
And if someone asks about a religion after Islam and how Islam is logically better than it, tell them: “Read the Qur’an,” because the logic changes when you’re talking about religions that had their inception after Islam. Because after all, we view the Qur’an as the final revelation of God. In these cases, allow the Qur’an to speak for itself, and tell followers of Scientology or the Mormon faith, for example, to compare the teachings of the Qur’an to their scripture or their book.
Now, I’m going to conclude with three points.
The first being that when I asked you to think about your answer, some of you may have come up with the answer that the Arabic recitation of the Qur’an is something that I have never heard before, and it has an impact on my heart from the first time I heard it until this day. It is unbelievable and so impactful that no other religion has that, and I can make that argument to somebody who’s not a Muslim: “Just listen to the Qur’an.” And we have so many stories of people who have done that, who have listened to the Qur’an, and they’ve converted on the spot. We have one most prominent example: Umar ibn Al-Khattab, may Allah be pleased with him. When he was racing to go kill the Prophet, peace be upon him, and when he stormed in and he heard the Qur’an, you know the story, the recitation of the Qur’an, it melted his heart. So yes, again, I am not dismissing that answer, but we don’t have that if the Qur’an is not preserved. So it goes back to preservation. If you don’t have it preserved, it’s not the words of God anymore, and it won’t have that effect on the heart, or at least not the effect in totality. So I go back to preservation.
The second point that I want to conclude with is that there are people who will raise contentions that the Qur’an has not been preserved, and you’ll find so much stuff on the Internet and so much stuff that is not true. I don’t have time to go into that, I don’t have time to address that, I leave that for the scholars. But I will tell you this: the Qur’an has not been preserved in the writing down of the text; it has been preserved through memorization in the hearts of the Muslims. So even if they bring variant scripts, it doesn’t matter because when they print a Qur’an, they go to a Hafiz (one who has memorized the entire Qur’an) and they say, “Verify this for me from memory in the hearts of human beings, in the hearts of the Muslims.” That’s my answer to them. But you can find more information about this if you look it up.
The third point is that I would encourage all of you, if you don’t know the answer to this, if you haven’t thought about it, to do some research and to find out why Islam is better so that you can feel secure in your faith, and so that you can logically answer those people who are going to ask you the question, “Why?”
We ask Allah, O Allah, please, we ask you to forgive us for our sins. Please forgive us for our shortcomings. Please let us strive every single day to be the best Muslims we possibly can. Please help us to be the best examples to those around us who do not share our faith, to see the beauty and the light of Islam in the way we act and the way we deal with them. Please let us be of those who are successful in this life and the next. Please forgive our parents. Please forgive our loved ones, those who are Muslims and those who are not, please guide them. Please give us the best of this life, and the best of the Hereafter, and protect us from the fire. Ameen.