The Horse’s Mouth

Prediker

Foto: Roskilde Festival

The widely popular yet controversial islamic minister from Brooklyn, sheikh Khalid Yassin, is portrayed by many as a radical preacher. So is he? Well, he might not be considered so in Saudi Arabia, but over here he doesn’t exactly have your average run-of-the-mill ideas. Which would all be fine and well and up for rational debate, if only Yassin had the stomach to be upfront about his thinking.

Ever since his visits to a reformist mosque in the Netherlands in 2009, Khalid Yassin gained particular notoriety in these parts. Dutch member of parliament Geert Wilders (of Fitna-fame), leader of the virulent anti-islamic Freedom Party, denounced him as an extremist hate-mongerer and went so far as to demand Yassin to be barred from entering the country.

Dutch journalist and avid blogger Peter Breedveld, no fan of islamophobes nor of islamic radicals, referred at the time to a British Channel4 Broadcast called ‘Undercover Mosque’, in which clips of a DVD were shown of the sheikh extolling the virtues of the islamic hudud punishments, even seeming to take glee in its gruesome beheadings and mutilations. The DVD, the report said, was readily available at the islamic bookstore adjoining London’s Regents Park Mosque.

Not surprisingly, Khalid Yassin himself has denounced this portrayal of his teachings by Channel4 in no uncertain terms. According to Yassin, his remarks were taken out of context in order to portray him as an extremist and to cast the London mosque in an unfavorable light. In a letter to the program’s chief editor, he writes:

“Your allegations of my statements on a DVD, titled ‘Building a Muslim Community’, and I must say allegations, because, in every lecture, writing, or communication of any kind, there is something called the ‘context’, which can only be appreciated when someone objectively, sincerely, and intellectually, forms an opinion, after making a comprehensive and thorough examination.”

Now I can’t help but feel a certain fondness for the sheikh. Combining the witty rhetoric and lambasting of vices of a black bapist minister on holy fire with the moral indignation and zeal of a minority rights activist, Yassin doesn’t fail to touch the heart of this evangelical fundamentalist-turned-marxist-leaning intellectual. In his best moments Yassin reminds one of Samuel L. Jackson in rant. The man is without a doubt a powerful speaker. No wonder the kids love him.

However, there’s also no doubt the sheikh needs to grow a set of gonads and own up to his own ideas. I tracked down the video of Yassin making the “alleged” statements about islamic criminal penalties being a great idea for cleaning up ghettos, and the context clearly shows him advocating the introduction of such laws and penalties in Muslim neighborhoods. Not just to put and end to gang violence, drug dealing and drug abuse, but also to stop such heinous crimes as gambling, alcohol consumption and having sex outside of marriage. To this end, sheikh Khalid Yassin proposes draconic punishments such as public mutilation, crucifying, beheading and flogging.

Reflecting on how the jamaa’ah, the muslim community, can live up to it’s full potential, Yassin offers a homily on Sura 3:110. Lets just see how far the rabbit hole of Yassin’s thinking goes.

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“He, Allah (swt) says: ‘You, muslims, are the best of human beings, evolved for the whole of humanity. Why, because you enjoin what is right, you forbid what is wrong and you believe in Allah (swt)’. Now here, ‘enjoining the right’ doesn’t mean: encouraging the people to do what is right. ‘Amr bil-ma’rouf ‘means: having the power to enjoin the people to do what is right. Having the power.

I’ll give you an idea of ‘Amr bil-ma’rouf wal-nahi an al-munka‘: Coming from the airport, I saw – people went through a toll-booth. Isn’t there one? A toll-booth. You can’t just run through the toll-booth! You have to stop and you’ve got to pay the money. Why? Because this pays for the highway. And even when the highway’s been paid for, you’re gonna still keep paying. Because it’s part of the system, it’s part of the enjoining of the system. So they set up a mechanical thing that you react to automatically, and you pay! This is because they have power.

When the muslims have power, the muslims is also able to do the same thing, in their areas, in their communities. They can stop the drugs. They can stop the alcohol-drinking. They can stop the people from gambling; they can stop the fornication; they can stop the adultery; they can stop the gangsterism. They can stop. Because they have power. And when we are unable to stop it, that means we have no power.

And when our children, and other people in our community see that we have no power, they roll over our faces. They do whatever they do right in our face. And even muslims themselves, who themselves do not fear Allah (swt), when they realise that the muslims have no power, they also do not fear us, and they sell alcohol, and they sell drugs, and they sell girlie magazines, and they sell khamr, and they sell khanzeer, and they do everything; and they come right to the mosque! While their stalls are still open!

And they have no fear and no respect, and some of them, they’re on the masjid-list. Some of them is on the board of trustees! Nobody can say nothing to them, at all. They have no fear.

Because, in the time of the companions of the Prophet (saws), if they didn’t fear Allah, they would fear Umar (ra). They would fear Khalid. They would fear people like,- or Ubaidah Ibn al Jarra.

They would fear men, who Allah (swt) gave in them, power. They would fear them if they didn’t fear Allah (swt). And this is part of the ‘Amr bil-ma’rouf‘. ‘To enjoin the right’ means: to enjoin the people, to encourage the people to do what Allah ordered. And in case the people had no fear of Allah (swt), then they will fear the presence of those whom Allah has inspired.

‘Nahi an al-munka‘ means: forbidding what is wrong. Stopping what is wrong. Prosecuting the people that do wrong. Making them pay for doing that which is wrong – in this life!

And then people can see: people without hands.

People can see in public: heads rolling down the street.

People can see in public: people got their hands from opposite sides chopped off, and they see ‘em crucified.

They see people get put up against the pole and see ‘em get lashed in the public.

They see people get punished for slandering, backbiting. They see it!

And because they see that, it acts as a deterrent for them, because they think about that, they say: ‘Ohh, I don’t want that to happen to me!’

I don’t think that the people in Saudi Arabia,- I don’t think they fear Allah anymore than you and I. But on more than one occasion, I myself left my wallet, or I left my bag someplace in the public. In Saudi-Arabia. Al-hamdulilaah, by the grace of Allah (swt), I came back to that spot and my wallet is right there. Unbelievable! But it is not so unbelievable when you think about it. Because when I was in Riyaadh one time, and I went to the central mosque on a day they had the hadd, you see, then I could believe it!

Because if you are seven years old, or nine years old or thirteen years old, whatever, and you see the execution take place for the man who stole something, that is: he picked up a wallet in the street that didn’t belong to him, and then somebody said ‘harami!‘, and he was caught with that wallet in his hands. That’s the evidence! Finished, through!

It only took three days for them to counsel him, prosecute him and after that: set up on the jumu’ah, the execution, or the cutting of the hands. Quick, fast justice!

If you saw that for yourselves, I think if you had seen my wallet sitting there, I think you would have just backed up. Subhaan Allah! How Allah, subhanahu wa ta’ala, how he gives us some of these different signs.

But we’re living in a society where: everybody’s thinking about their own profit, and if nobody can see nothing, ma’shalla, it’s mine!

So the enjoining of the right, and the forbidding of the wrong, it is not abstract. It is not just we say ‘O brother, you shouldn’t do that’. We walk into a brother’s store, you understand me, he’s got halal meat all in the back, he’s telling me: ‘Don’t eat these chips, brother, don’t eat them crisps, ‘cause they got red XZ on it’, or whatever case it must be. He got khamr’ across the whole wall. He got khanzeer right in front of him. He got a whole rack of girlie magazines fawahis over there. And he’s got the lotto machine going, he’s got the extra people working over there on the lotto machine. And he’s telling me that he’s got halal meat and don’t eat those crisps.

And the same muslim will be in the first or second rank of the masjdid in ramadan, praying behind the imam, praying the tarawih-prayer and he will be crying the most. The same man will be going to hajj and on Arafat he will be saying: ‘Ya rabb, ya rabb.’ Wa mat’amu haraam; wa mashrabu haraam; wa malbasahu haraam; wa qudiya bil haraam. How can his hajj be accepted, and how can his prayer be accepted?

But this is our condition. We can do nothing to him because if we come into his shop, and we talk to him, he will say: ‘Mind your own business, get out of my store, I’ll call the police.’

Because we have no power.”

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We can certainly thank the good sheikh for the travel advice that attempting to bring a lost wallet to the police might not be properly appreciated in Saudi Arabia. But as far as the rest of his recommendations go: for all the obfuscating Khalid Yassin does in his response to Channel4, the content of his sermon seems clear enough: Power to the sheikh, is the ability to enforce norms on people by using the threat of physical punishment, and Yassin blames the laxity among Muslims in living up to islamic precepts as well as the rampant crime in the slums on the lack of such a draconic system of islamic law enforcement.

Yassin openly deplores the lack of power for Muslims to threaten a Muslim store-owner to stop selling alcohol, porc beef and soft-porn magazines or face the consequences. ‘If only we had the power to put the fear of God and mortal punishment into him…’, the sheikh laments.

So unless the venerable Khalid Yassin is advocating some form of vigiliante justice, or asking Muslims to simply wait until Kingdom come and the US and Europe turn wholesale to his branch of Islam, he is encouraging Muslim communities in secular, Western societies to strive for the political power to set up parallel justice systems and to create privileged islamic jurisdictions in Muslim-majority neighbourhoods; jurisdictions in which both general crimes as well as transgressions against islamic taboos such as gambling, drinking and extramarital sex would be met with gruesome penalties.

Because in Yassin’s thinking, that’s the ultimate fulfillment of their destiny for Muslim communities: to enjoin what is right and to forbid what is wrong according to the religion, that is to say: by force and under threat of grave pain.

To cut a long story short, Khalid sheikh Yassin should stop whining about being misrepresented and selectively quoted, as if he wasn’t advocating mutilation and the lashing of lax store owners and promiscuous women in the squares of Harlem and Brooklyn. Because that is certainly how his extolment of the virtues of “heads rolling down the street” and people seeing thugs crucified “in public”, reads in context.

Glossary

Don’t you just hate it when the faithful start spouting jargon to sound learned and pious? Anyway, here are a few words that could’ve been easily spoken in plain English, but just ‘had to be’ uttered in Muslim lingo. 

Just like God in the Holy Scriptures, Prediker (harvest of 1976) just can’t stand hypocrisy