Amr Khaled and the Reality of the Worship God Desires
A clear distortion of religious truths
Once again, Amr Khaled, the ignorant pretender climbing through religious outreach, the performer behind advertisements about “chicken and the soul’s ascent in night prayer”, speaks about religion’s most fundamental principle through distortion and falsification. He asserts that the servitude God desires is what produces development of the earth and struggle for worldly life, and that acts of worship and pillars of Islam, prayer with its humility, submission and reverence, alms, fasting and pilgrimage, are not the worship God desires unless translated into effects on developing the earth through inventions, industries and worldly sciences. He said this without evidence, religious proof or necessary rational implication.
Our Lord explicitly says: “I did not create jinn and humankind except to worship Me” [al-Dhariyat: 56]. He says, in restrictive and purposive terms: “They were commanded only to worship God, sincerely devoting religion to Him as upright believers, to establish prayer and give the obligatory alms. That is the upright religion” [al-Bayyinah: 5]. He also says: “Indeed, whoever submits himself to God while doing good will have his reward with his Lord; no fear will be upon them, nor will they grieve” [al-Baqarah: 112]. Many clear verses requiring no elaborate reflection explain that the purpose of creation is worship. Worship consists in actions of the heart, including love, reverent fear, fear, hope and others; speech of the tongue, including the two testimonies, remembrance and supplication; and bodily actions, foremost prayer, alms, fasting and pilgrimage, followed by all other worship and righteous deeds intended for God’s sake. In sum, the Qur’an and the Sunnah demonstrate, and the community unanimously agrees, that whoever fulfils correct worship through sincerity to God and following His Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, has thereby realised the upright religion God loves and approves and is promised salvation in the hereafter, even without developing the earth in the material, worldly sense advocated by Amr Khaled and those like him.
Shaykh Abu al-Hasan al-Nadwi, may God have mercy on him, said in “Calling to God Protects Society from Ignorance and Safeguards Religion from Distortion”, pp. 19-20, as though addressing this storyteller: “I also warn you, brothers, against what has been observed in certain writers: insistence that these religious pillars and Islamic obligations, such as prayer, alms, fasting and pilgrimage, are means, not ends, prescribed only to establish Islamic rule, organise Muslim society and strengthen it. I warn you against everything that diminishes the spirit of worship, the relationship between servant and Lord, and compliance with the command. I warn against such expansive discussion of their moral, social, political and sometimes economic benefits that the listener or reader imagines them to be educational, military or organisational methods, valued for the strength and order they bring society or their physical health and medical benefits. The first harm of this way of thinking or interpreting is that it deprives these acts of worship of their value and strength: obeying God’s command, seeking His pleasure through that, faith, seeking reward and nearness to God. This is a great loss that no benefit compensates and a void nothing in the world can fill.”
In any case, perhaps this clip and others will convince anyone who has not understood the reality of the movement activists’ call and those educated through their books and literature: ultimately, they are people of this world, not the hereafter. Do not therefore be surprised at the thinness of their religion, their distance from outward uprightness, their minimising and even permitting many unanimously prohibited things. They consider worship, which is itself the reason for creation, useless unless it achieves worldly development and prosperity: they turn the end into a means. All the more, anything below the pillars of Islam has no value for them unless it achieves that development, and especially if they see it as opposing what they advocate.
Their danger is therefore greater than many people imagine, including many preachers who criticise them only for particular prohibitions or secondary violations.
The Center for Studies in the Interpretation of Islam, which specialises in refuting the utilitarian and political interpretation of Islam through books, research, articles and lectures, calls on everyone who recognises the danger of this deviant interpretation to contribute and collaborate with the Centre in exposing this methodology’s reality, its advocates and the falsity of its call. God knows the intention behind this.
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