Islam for Muslims
- THE FAITH OF MUSLIMS
- GOOD DEEDS IN PERSONAL LIFE
- GOOD DEEDS IN SOCIAL LIFE
The Importance of Preaching & Good Advice
36: THE IMPORTANCE OF PREACHING & GOOD ADVICE
Introduction: Spreading the messages of Islam out among the world community and providing good advice to the people around you represent a high-value social obligation for the Muslims. God urges you to “publicly announce” His Message, invite (people) to your Lord” and “admonish (people) with the Quran (5:67; 28:87; 50:45). He then adds inspirational quote “Who is better in speech than the one who calls people to God?” (41:33). Islam requires the ‘muezzin’ to invite his fellow Muslims to good deeds (falah) including 5 times daily prayers.
Importance: In this manner, God insists on undertaking ‘dawah’ or preaching efforts on global scale to bring more people within the fold of Islam. In similar vein, He also aims to implant Islamic ideals throughout the society by urging people to “command justice” and “enjoin deeds of kindness and compassion” (16:76; 90:17). Advising or teaching God’s Messages this way, He reminds, “will benefit the believers” (51:55). God singles out the Muslims as “the best of Peoples” as they “enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong” (3:110). “Reward of highest value” awaits those who “inspire (people) to deeds of charity or justice or conciliation between men” (4:114).
Past Roles of the Muslims: If you look at the life of the Prophet, you can see a total dedication of his lifetime to preaching of Islam. He ran an informal school named ‘Ashabe Suffa’ for teaching Islam which was based at his mosque compound in Medina. During the Farewell Address at his Final Hajj, he appealed to his followers to broadcast his messages to the larger world: “Whatever you hear from me today, share that with all people who come your way”. His devoted followers and their subsequent generations did exactly what he thus wanted, focusing on expansion of Islam across time and place.
Merchants Turned Preachers: The Arab traders carried with them not only merchandise but also the Messages of Islam to their Asian and African neighbors and therefore a good percentage of the latter are now identified as Muslims. Furthermore, his loyal companions carried their dawah programs far out in the East Asia including China, Russia, Indonesia, Malaysia etc. and scattered presence of their tombs in these areas speak volumes for their sacrifices in the cause of Islam. As a result, the Muslims now claim a sizable share of population in these remote regions even if anti-religious campaign mainly of the communist regimes in some of these areas sized their number down or sometimes forced them underground. Likewise, the medieval Muslims carried the banner of Islam to Spain in Europe where they ushered in a golden age, making historic contributions to intellectual pursuits including science, math etc.
Future Roles of the Muslims: Never-ending Mission: It may be recalled that the death of the Prophet marks the end of prophetic era and therefore the obligation of spreading Islam to the humanity at large falls squarely on his followers. Now it is for the Muslims to keep on spreading God’s message worldwide as the Prophet’s legacy. This is comparable to the moon’s shining of the earth with light derived from the sun despite its absence during nighttime (the Prophet is a metaphor of the sun and the Muslims of the moon). Likewise, the effort to expand Islam should not be short-circuited within the dense Muslim community but it should also become global. It may be recalled that roughly only one-fourth of the world population are Muslims and they have God-given responsibility toward the rest of three-fourths (non-Muslims) for upgrading their own status as the true servants of God.
Social Obligation: For the Muslims, the responsibility of propagating Islam is a social obligation known as ‘fard kefaya’. This means if “a section of people” can successfully shoulder the responsibility of “inviting (people) to all that is good (Islam)” (3:104), then everyone will be cleared of this obligation. In default, everyone will be charged with a sin punishable for collective failure. In particular cases, the spreading of Islam becomes more than a social obligation. For example, it is your personal obligation (‘fard ain’) to train your children in the basics of Islam and inspire your wife to practice them. This is because an outsider (preacher) may not be a good fit for these indoor jobs.
Now let us highlight some points that make this ‘dawah’ program so valuable.
(1) Lifeblood for Religion: Preaching keeps the religion alive and healthy. If the messages of religion keep from circulating, then religious knowledge and guidance will remain closed within a narrow circle of religious enthusiasts. When the future generation will replace them, they will see religion as a matter of past, knowable mainly from outside people or history books. In this manner, many of the ancient religions belonging to some earlier prophets died a natural death in the absence of any preaching efforts following their death. Conversely, the power of preaching can be seen in the example of Christianity that transformed from a relatively fewer number of followers of Jesus into the largest religious community of today, thanks mainly to their worldwide missionary programs over the last 2 millennia. Likewise, the essentiality of spreading the Messages of God for continued vitality and growth of Islam can never be overstated.
(2) Guidance Obligates Preaching: If you are blessed with guidance from God, you are morally obligated to pay Him back by making proper use of your guidance through sowing similar guidance among His other servants by means of preaching. If you fail to “proclaim what (you) receive from God and His Messages” (72:23) among people and therefore that becomes the cause of their straying into sin, then it will also be your sin from negligence of your duties to them. As a reminder, Prophet Yunus (Jones) got into trouble of being “in the depths of darkness” after being swallowed by a big fish of Caspian Sea for angering God by walking away from preaching obligation without His approval (21:87). Thus preaching gives you an opportunity for showing gratitude for God-given guidance.
(3) Preaching Promotes Guidance: Preaching reinforces the guidance of the preacher. God promised “guidance to His (right) path” for those who “strive in (His cause)” (29:69). Toward fulfillment of this promise, apparently there are several causal links between preaching effort and spiritual development. First, if you invite others to a noble cause, then oftentimes you have to be the first one to practice that. For example, when as a ‘muezzin’, you “proclaim your call (to people) to (morning) prayers” (5:58), then you naturally get up earlier than those whom you call unless they rise for ‘tahajjud’ prayer. Second, as an inviter to good deeds, you have the moral obligation to personally “do” something that you “say” or invite others to do (61:3). Third, as a preacher, you need to be better equipped with knowledge necessary to answer questions from the audience. Access to such knowledge may make you both willing and able to practice Islam.
(4) Boundless Reward for Preaching: Social preaching is much more rewarding than self-centered rituals. Unlike individual prayers which will credit your account of ‘sawab’ or reward in exact quantity, preaching programs do have multiplier effects. In the latter case, you will bag the combined dividends of all good deeds (of all people) inspired by your preaching while not diminishing your own credits. For example, if you perform a prayer personally, you will probably gain reward applicable for only one prayer. By contrast, as a religious teacher for 30 years, as for example, if you train and inspire a total of 9,000 pupils (at the rate of 300 per year), you will inshallah gain the collective reward of all the prayers performed by all of them during their lifetime.
These benefits are too numerous to calculate but appears doubtless in reality, as God affirmed “Whoever recommends and helps a good cause becomes a partner therein” (4:85). This comparative merit inspired many companions of the Prophet to embrace indescribable hardships for spreading Islam beyond Arabian peninsula. They chose this mission over praying at the Grand Mosque of Mecca which has potentials of numerous blessings but probably not as numerous as for promoting Islam.
Conclusion: The foregoing discussion makes it clear that pro-Islamic preaching and advisement are potentially full of goodness not only for Islam but also for the Muslims.