Why Islam - Dr. Bilal Philips

first let me say that the whole story about my conversion to islam is available on youtube recorded in malaysia in around 2000 it's one and a half hour lecture and last year from university of nottingham in malaysia also the story was retold so this is like the third retelling of the story well this will be the first time that it's translated into bahasa so alhamdulillah so the story begins with my birth in jamaica central america known to you for bob marley and usain bolt okay well alhamdulillah jamaica is also known for bilal phillips muslim my parents took me to canada and i grew up in canada from the time i was about seven years old so i grew up in toronto one of the largest cities in canada and after graduating i migrated with my family to saba to kota kinabalu in sabah there i was preparing for entering university in canada i lived there for off and on about two years and while i was there my mother adopted an indonesian boy who entered our family my mother in adopted this young man because of the fact that in indonesia that in malaysia at that time indonesians who were born there didn't have the opportunity for university studies he was one of her students my both my parents were teachers so this young man we knew him as westman later i came to find out that the origin of his name was aus suleiman became westman as i think you contract names in this way anyway um he grew up with us and myself my brother my sister we observed that he did different things than we did i mean i had grown up as a christian and christianity of course was just going on sundays to the church but we did observe that sometimes we'd go in his room and we'd find him prostrating you know and we didn't know what he was doing because we had no idea what islam was my mother and father had an idea about islam my mother had studied about islam in university in canada so she was very careful to make sure that our adopted brother would not be compromised his religion wouldn't be compromised so she during ramadan when he fasted she would get up early in the morning and prepare sahur for him and if we had dinner eating pork she would prepare fish for him and on sundays with the sunday dinner they would we normally used to drink a small glass of wine so he would have grape juice you know so my my mother was very careful but we didn't know what was going on we didn't know we just knew he did different things otherwise he was the same as us during this period of time also i along with a couple other sons of expatriates formed a rock group and i used to play guitar and sing on stage there in sabah styled myself after jimi hendrix maybe this before most of your time but i was known as the jimi hendrix so i played there and the significance of this i will tell you later on but we had a three-man group and this was another side of my life which i continued for some time i moved to canada when i was accepted into simon fraser university in british columbia and began my studies there in biochemistry and i became a student activist because i became conscious of problems in the world and that led me to want to change the world to make the world a better place and the only system that was offering this change at the time was communism some of the professors leaned towards communism so they made dawa to our students to become communists and i converted to communism from christianity so i remember i went to the united states from canada before completing my degree in biochemistry i went to san francisco to los angeles and i was engaged with other uh student activists you know as a communist and supporting communist causes in the us for a couple of years however i soon became disillusioned to what communism claimed and what was the reality on the ground communism spoke about brotherhood and fraternity but stalin and mao massacred millions of their citizens there was no system of morality whatever would forward the revolution was justified and having grown up in a practicing christian home i had a sense of right and wrong of morality which communism rejected as being outdated and not effective in promoting the revolution i returned to canada to toronto after those couple of years in the states joined another communist party movement in toronto but still in my mind now i was starting to look elsewhere to find some other system which could replace and provide what communism claimed to provide and it was at this time that allah opened a window to me on islam one of the members of the organization a female converted to islam so this caused me to wonder why so i asked her why when we had been taught that religion was the opium of the masses right it is a means of drugging the masses and exploiting them so how could you then become a muslim so she tried to explain to me that no islam was different it's not like the other religions those ideas came from looking at christianity and how it operated so i asked for some books to read and i discussed with some others who had converted to islam from the states as well as some canadians there in toronto at that time and after some period of discussion and reading i came to the conclusion that islam was in fact the summary of all that was good in communism in capitalism in christianity socialism all of the good that was identified there was in islam and all of the evils found in these systems were not present in islam so i became convinced at least intellectually i was convinced that islam was the answer for changing the situation of human beings for human society to be a just a fair society but i had lived now four years in communism years in which i denied the existence of god and had accepted that there is no god so though i realized that islam intellectually was the true way for human society spiritually i wasn't able to accept because i didn't believe in god so it took another event or experience to bring my soul my heart to islam what happened was that i was living in a commune this is a house in which different people had rooms and we shared the rent and shared the cooking and the different things together but we're all individuals students at university and others and in my room i used to read a lot so i had a lot of books there and people used to come into my room from time to time even when i wasn't there to use the books read from the books and one day when i had laying down on the bed just to rest i went into a state between being awake and being asleep meaning i started to dream but i was aware that i was in the room and i could see some people who had come in and were sitting at the desk my desk and were reading some of my books and i i started to have this dream so i saw myself in this dream entering a huge warehouse entering into this huge building there was a door i came in i had a bicycle with me i used to ride bicycles for exercise i was walking in this structure with my bike walking in it's dark inside but i'm walking in and as i be i go deeper and deeper into that building i would turn and look to see make sure that the doorway i came through was still there right but somehow i was driven to keep going deeper and deeper and of course as i went deeper and deeper the doorway became smaller and smaller right and i started to develop fear of what might happen but still i was driven to keep going in and of course eventually i reached the point where i turned around and i couldn't see the door anymore so i was in complete darkness and at that point i was overcome by fear fear that if i didn't get out of this situation i would never escape i would in fact die it was fear of death struck me so i began to scream those people who i could still somehow see sitting at the desk though i was in this state of complete darkness i i was aware that they were sitting there and i started to scream help me help me you know to get me out of this situation but no sound would come out of my mouth i was screaming in my head but no sounds would come out of my throat so of course they didn't hear me i'm screaming i can't reach them and i reached the point of submission in the sense of giving up i just reached the point after screaming screaming they couldn't help me i couldn't help myself i was reached a point where i said i'm lost i'm finished and at that point when i let go believing that i was finished i woke up right i came out of it so later i i i came to know that you know many people have this experience where you feel yourself in a dream you want to get out and you're just stuck there you can't you know most people have experiences some time or the other for me that was the first time i had never experienced that before so in my mind i interpreted it as proof spiritual proof that there is a god because i couldn't help myself the people in the room couldn't get me out of that situation so then how did i get out the only other explanation that remained was god god brought me out of that so that was the spiritual leap that i needed to make to accept islam in its totality so at this point i was ready to accept this islam i declared my shahada and that was 1972 i declared my shahada and then i was taught salah right same day when i was taught salah and i was taught sujud then it clicked in my mind that my adopted brother was a muslim right because he had never said anything about islam to myself or my brothers and sisters he never said anything we were too shy to ask him and he was i guess too shy to say anything so it was at that point i realized that he was a muslim and by then he had gone to to ottawa with my parents he was studying in university of ottawa and immediately i decided to go to ottawa to to see him share with him that i had become a muslim but also i wanted to share my anger that i had been all those years with him and he never said anything about islam you know because this was wrong they should have said something so when i went to ottawa and i met him and i told him i had become muslim he's very happy i hugged him and everything but then afterwards i pushed him back and said why didn't you say anything about islam you know all those years i had to go through you could have saved me all of that you know the communists and all the stuff you know to have told me about islam so he tried to explain he said you know your parents were so kind to me to help me i didn't want to introduce anything which would create confusion in the family maybe make them upset and so i wanted to you know avoid that they were good to me i wanted to remain good to them but i said this is not acceptable not acceptable you know that's your excuse but it's not an excuse before allah you have a duty you should have told me you know i was quite upset but alhamdulillah afterwards then you know we embraced each other again and i was able to get over it so at this point of course after accepting islam i started to give dawah to both my parents tried to encourage them to become muslims my brothers and sisters you know who by the same father and mother i try to encourage them to become muslims and i tried to learn as much as i could about islam there in in canada but in my efforts to try to learn islam in canada because there were no real scholars there they were just migrants people would come from different parts of the muslim world from india pakistan from egypt morocco and their different places so i would just try to get as much as i can from each person they would tell me something and i would take note of it etc and i reached a point of confusion there in canada that though i had accepted islam when i was trying to learn from all these different people i started to hear different stories different explanations so i i had to make a decision what am i going to do with this so i you know i i had gone when i first became muslim uh with a group of brothers from from pakistan and india who were part of a movement called jamaat table so i traveled with them and they convinced me that i should be a hanafi so i decided to become mahanafi then after studying with them and getting as much information as i could i moved with my wife close to the masjid and the imam of this masjid i moved next to he was from egypt so he started to teach me from sunnah basically shafi madhab so i started to see contradictions and issues and then i befriended some brothers from morocco who were explaining to me about how life was in muslim life in morocco and they started to show me the maliki madhhab so this is where i reached a point i said i had to decide i thought islam was one you know i know christianity had all of these different sects and things but islam was supposed to be just one so what was going on here they tried to convince me that all the madhabs were correct but you just have to follow one doesn't matter which one you follow but just follow one they're all correct so though they were telling me they were all right i saw problems that couldn't be explained with that explanation i saw very clearly that the shafa school was saying that if a man accidentally touches a woman his wudu is gone and her wudu is gone and the hanafi madhhab was saying if a man accidentally touches a woman his wudu is fine it's not gone her wudu is not gone so if both of them was right if both hanafi and shafi were right then it means it is possible for you to have wudu and not have wudu at the same time so i couldn't accept this just like i couldn't accept in christianity that god was three in one they said he was one but then there's god the father god the son got the holy spirit three gods in one so he was one and he was three that to accept that you have to shut off your brain right so in the same way to accept that you could have wudu and not have udu at the same time you have to shut off your brain so at that point i decided i needed to leave canada i needed to go back to where islam started and allah opened the door scholarship was available to go and study in medina at that time nobody wanted these scholarships they were said there's a waste of time to go study in medina you know they're teaching from old yellow books that are covered in dust you know it's ancient stuff not applicable to your daily life you won't be able to look after your home your family you know if you've studied there but i said i need to know islam i need to get to the sources and understand this way of life which i believe is correct there is an explanation for what was confused to me so i decided to go there anyway so after studying the alhamdulillah it became clear to me what the problem was that the problem was really people it's not really the deen right i came to realize that imam abu hanifa wasn't a hanafi and imam ashafee wasn't a chafee the shaffer is and imam shafi are two different things meaning that the rulings that are in the shaffer school some of them were the opinion of abu hanif of imam shafi but many of them were not same thing in the hanafi school so then the question became so what was the madhhab of imam shafi what was the madhhab of imam abu hanifa then from my study it became clear that they both had the same madhhab they along with imam malik and ahmadim humble all of them followed one madhhab that one madhhab was the madhab of rasulullah sallallahu alaihi wasallam it was the madhhab of abu bakr of omar uthman and ali that was their math because really if we are to follow a madhab meaning a ruling of the rulings of one particular scholar of the past wasn't abu bakr the best of the ummah so isn't his madhab the best to follow that is logical that is the logical conclusion so the madhab which he followed is the madhhab followed by all of the early scholars of islam whether they're in the well-known math hubs or outside the well known math they were all seeking to follow the madhhab of rasulallah sallallahu alaihi wasallam and this is what is obligatory on every muslim so both abu hanifa and imam ashafe said either hadith if the hadith is correct then that is my true madhab that was their statement clarifying that they were striving to follow the way of rasulullah sallallahu sallam so when we come back to that issue when you touch a woman is your wudu broken and hurts broken or not we have to go back to the hadith and there is authentic hadith that prophet muhammad sallal kissed his wives and led the salah so if a man touching a woman breaks his wudu then what are we saying about rasulullah sallallahu sallam so this is the point it was right and wrong in this case the hanafi school ruling of abu hanifa was the correct ruling your wudu is not broken so you don't have to do what many people do from the shaffer and mother have in different parts of the world that when you're going for hajj your local mawlana or sheikh whatever will tell you listen you make the nia the special dua you make that you are going for hajj as a hanavi and when you come back from hajj you make another and a dua that turns you back into a shaft we don't have to do this so alhamdulillah in medina when i was there in the mid 70s i studied there under sheikh nasser di nalbani he was one of the teachers whose classes i sat in regularly i also studied under sheikh bin baaz i later became a translator for sheikh bin baaz in riyadh i studied under sheikh abdullah abbad as well as sheikh mukhbil i studied takhrij hadith in the home of sheikh mukhbil and alhamdulillah you know that was a wonderful period of time in which there was so much knowledge available from leading scholars of that time i've included of course is sheikh abu bakr al-jazeera and others having graduated from medina i went to riyadh i did my masters as you heard in riyadh we had university became a teacher at the same time teaching in high school my parents came to riyadh actually before me as teachers there and i taught islamic studies at the same school in which they managed called menaret aread schools and i continued to try to give them dawah you know time now had passed some six years since i accepted islam so during the next 10 years i continued to try to give them dawah in riyadh but they didn't convert during this period in the 80s i became involved in giving dawah to people in riyadh foreigners who were there mostly filipinos and found alhamdulillah that the filipinos were very receptive to islam many of them converted i started to translate the juma into english for them this was the first translations of khutbahs which were done in saudi arabia and from that eventually we set up the first dawa center in bata which later became hundreds of tawa centers all across saudi arabia in 1991 after the gulf war first gulf war with uh saddam hussein and half a million american troops were brought into saudi arabia supposedly to fight them after that gulf war they had to be processed back out of the country and i led a team of duat where we set up in their camp their main camp in khobar khobar towers in eastern arabia a dawa tent which was called the saudi arabian cultural information tent and alhamdulillah in the next five months from the time we started five and a half months we had over three thousand american troops accepted islam after that in in 93 i completed my phd from university of wales and i went to canada to visit my parents because by the end of the 90s they went back to canada i went to visit them and alhamdulillah when i stayed with them about the second night after i had gotten there my mother and then my father came to me and both said they wanted to become muslims so that was you could say one of the happiest days of my life both of my parents took shahada on the same day so this was after 21 years of dawah i had given them dawa for 21 years they both accepted islam actually i had already given up earlier than the 21 years i tried everything that i thought i could um i had written a book based on a lecture which i gave in in riyadh called the true religion of god this book i had written i had given it as a lecture and i'd asked my parents to edit for me from the english perspective my dad was a english expert my mom was very strong in english also but she was a science teacher but anyway both of them went over the book and i asked them if there was anything they found wrong to let me correct it you know if there are any mistakes whether grammatical or even conceptual even ideas if it wasn't well presented let me know so i could correct it and give me their suggestions so they went through the whole book and made some suggestions changes i made the changes etc and after they said yeah it's fine now i said so then why don't you become muslims yeah but they said okay give us a quran we'll start to read it so that was a step but they didn't accept islam you know this is after trying as i said virtually everything so when they came to me and said they wanted to become muslims afterwards i spoke with my mother and asked okay why did you guys decide now why not back then when i had you read the book and i'd explain and so many things to you and she said that there were many two main factors one that they could see my behavior to them how i treated them how i loved them looked after them was always contacting them my brother and sister who are now adults etc oh my brother was a phd also professor in university but whatever problems they had in their lives they would say you're the reason pointing to my parents you know they blame my parents for everything that went wrong in their lives whereas i refused to do that i looked at them as having tried their best and would not blame them so they could see the difference what islam made in my life in terms of how i treated them so the other thing which my mom explained to me was that when they were in jiddah because after they ran the school in riyadh then they went back to canada they came back to jiddah to work for a few more years in jiddah i had gone to visit my mother and she told me that she was seeing and feeling there was something in the house you know she would see something seeming to move very quickly she couldn't see exactly where it was what it was but she felt it was something like an evil spirit or something that was there so she made with crochet i don't know if you know crochet but there's a kind of a knitting woman knit so she knitted a cross and she put it over the door right and the thing still ran around it was still moving around in the house the cross did nothing right so she came and when i came to visit she told me about the problem so i took the quran and i recited read surah al-baqarah in the living room in the house surah al-baqarah and i went back to riyadh and i didn't think about it after that she said you know after you read sue al-baqarah it stopped so she said that was proof to me that there is something about islam which although she was looking at islam and christianity as being about the same you know she had a good idea about islam christianity but then she that showed her that there was something islam had that christianity didn't have it had to do with this belief in god etc so alhamdulillah that was the other point for her which made helped to make her make that decision to become a muslim so inshallah if you're having this in your home use surah al-baqarah prophet sallam said you read surah al-baqarah you know shaytan will not come to your home for like three days and nights so you use it this is you see the power of it allah you should uh use it yourself this is what the prophet saws has given us and don't use the other things i know there are other people who tell you you have spirits you need to do this poor water you know you need to write things and burn things and wear things and all kinds of other know that is not from islam surah al-baqarah is what rasulullah sallallahu gave us whilst i after i accepted sorry after i completed my phd i became a university professor of arabic and islamic studies in the uae i moved to the uae i was teaching in university there and i started the first dawa center in the uae in in dubai and ran it and towards the end of the 90s i had many students who were studying in circles that i did in masjids and centers there one student came to me and asked me a question you know whether i had lived in sabah he was a malaysian he asked me so i said yeah i did she says i said why i said because my brother he had taken one of my books back to sabah and showed it to his brother because he was younger his brother was from my age group actually his brother was a student in the school that i went to close friend of my brother um so when he saw the name and that though my name had changed right but still phillips was still there my family name right bilal phillips born in jamaica he's saying i wonder if this is the same person so he had his brother ask me and i confirmed it so they invited me to come to sabah right to visit sabah and when i went there i met the former members of the group the the rock group from 20 years 30 40 years before and allahu akbar both of the other two band members had accepted islam one had gone to australia accepted islam in australia the other one accepted islam there in kota kinabalu and i accepted islam in canada allahu akbar so that was a a beautiful ending and that basically you know concludes my story of course in the in 2000 the year 2000 i set up university you've heard about it islamic online university and this is where i'm mostly focused now we have over 250 000 students around the world and the goal is to spread the teachings of islam to all who wish to find it particularly to the muslim world to muslims and even to non-muslims who want to know what islam is so although you might think that if i have a university with 250 000 students i must be a millionaire right because all it takes is for each one to pay ten dollars i'm a millionaire right however just to let you know uh of the 250 000 students 245 000 of them study for free there are no costs at all it's absolutely free no hidden costs so i'm not a millionaire the 5 000 students who actually pay fees which are very very low fees that is used to run the university and alhamdulillah this is what we are bringing here to indonesia and inshallah we hope to spread information about it and those of you who want to understand english who want to study the deen in english you can do it now from your home you don't have to go into travel to saudi arabia or to egypt or whatever you can do it right from your own home alhamdulillah okay the last point i'd just like to raise is that if any of you know english and would like to contribute to the translation of my university course from from english to bahasa please contact the organizers of this program uh our representatives from the islamic online university here we have daru we have another brother adi from jakarta to participate with us in this effort to make that university available to the majority of people in indonesia inshallah this is the goal to spread the knowledge and i know that most of you don't know english so we are trying now to turn this program into indonesia and inshallah what is the most appealing or what is most appealing from islam that attracted you to it actually i already explained in the presentation that it was the completeness of islam in offering solutions to all aspects of life it's comprehensiveness that it covers every personally i would say that becoming a muslim the path in life became clear before being a muslim i was unsure of what was right what was wrong trying this trying that once one accepts islam then surat and mustaqeem the straight path in all affairs becomes clear life becomes much easier because you don't have to be trying to figure out this and figure out that islam is made the clear way for you okay there's another part to the question what would be my advice to doing dawa in indonesia where muslims don't really know islam properly they are unfamiliar with the sunnah and the non-muslims are sick of islam that the solution is to learn islam spread knowledge of islam and that will be enough to bring people back to islam and when non-muslims know what the true teachings of islam are then inshallah they will accept islam as i experienced where we had a chance to give dawa to the american troops so many of them accepted islam so easily more than 20 people a day were accepting islam and that was just because they were able to hear islam correctly i would like to ask sir bilal phillips how are you sir brian rely on yourself uh it's it's glad to have you here but i'm wondering like do you have any uh down situation uh during your hijra period like like what we have here like when we do hijra and the bankruptcy it's coming to us or or our family avoiding us or or any difficulties that came to us during our hija period do you have such things like that thank you by hijra i'm understanding that you're talking about the transition into islam alhamdulillah i really didn't have any problems because my parents were positive they accepted my acceptance of islam and so my journey into islam was quite simple i have many friends who had many difficulties some kicked out of their homes i remember one jewish friend even told me that his family told them not to call them anymore because they they made salatul janaza for him you know so but alhamdulillah i was blessed with an easy transition do you have any particular advice for us to stand in the in the right path that we choose right now that uh that for us that hijra can could make us down you know like like i said before like economic problems like family problems like even uh some of us have uh have a really bad situation with the with our wives when we do it when we grow our beard like something like that do you have any tips for that well i would just say that whatever tests that you face are set by a law to develop your faith that you become stronger allah told us that nobody is burdened with a test too great for him or her to handle so just keep in mind that whatever you face is within your ability to handle and when you handle it you become a better person so it allah has chosen these tests to bring out the best in you thank you barack obama guest here is asking about the correct understanding of the trinity since from her perspective it is correct um islamically allah is god is one and this is what all of the prophets of god taught jesus even in the gospels does not refer to three gods when he was asked what is the first commandment he re he repeated the same commandment which moses uh taught hear o israel the lord your god is one god so the whole idea of trinity is something which was added to the religion which jesus brought and turned it into another religion jesus taught one god and he worshipped that one god the trinitarian concept say that jesus was god he was the son of god and at the same time he was also god so if he was god then the question is who did he pray to if he was god it means he was praying to himself which is futility it's confusion god jesus in all of the texts of the new testament the gospels considers god to be other than himself there are many statements that he is supposed to have made the father for example the father is greater than i so he's saying that obviously he and god are not one and the same so the idea of trinity my advice to those christians who believe in it it is best for you to research the origin of the concept of trinity because the early followers of christ did not teach it it came about in the fourth century prior to that people believed god was one and jesus was a prophet of god and the famous bishop of alexandria who upheld that concept in the council of nicaea where the trinitarian idea was established his name is arius read about aries and understand that the christians of or the followers of jesus in the east believed that he was a prophet of god and god was one it was the romans and the greeks who promoted the idea that jesus was god and your common sense should tell you that if jesus and god were one and the same god's attributes are infinite and eternal jesus's attributes were those of a human being god is not born he was born god does not die according to their teachings he died jesus died we don't believe he died as muslims but according to their teachings he died so these are not the attributes of god god is without beginning and without end inshallah my basic advice for yourselves and for myself is to seek to understand the teachings of islam not merely to learn information about islam but to actually understand it as we read quran in ramadan for example we read quran with the intention of trying to complete the reading of the whole quran in ramadan but that wasn't the goal of the reading of quran the goal of reading the quran in ramadan is to hear and understand the words of allah and to try to put it in our lives so better for you if all you can do is to read surah al-baqarah and read it along with the tafseer translation tafsir and you have understood that in ramadan that is better for you than to have read the whole quran and understood nothing so we have to make priorities in our application of islam the key is understanding so whether it is salah reflecting on the purpose of salah not just the ritual of salah but what is allah supposed to do it is supposed to change our character in the salah tanha and in prevents us from evil speech and evil deeds if it's not preventing us from evil speech and evil deeds then the salah that we are doing is not the salah which allah prescribed we're doing rituals and the salah is a system for change it's different from what we're doing so we need to treat all of our islam that way to understand what the goals of the pillars and the principles of islam are and to seek to achieve those goals i pray that allah gives us the understanding of the deen as the prophet sallam had said if whoever allah wishes good he gives them the deep understanding of the deen subhanallah on the two

Channel: Bilal Philips

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Keywords: muslim, revert, convert, conversion, from, christianity, to, islam, inspiring, god, atheist, diaries, islamic lecture bilal philips, Khutbah, Aspire Mosque, english sermon, digital minbar, bilal philips, islamic online university, iou, islam way of life, Masjid Aspire, islam online, Dr. Abu Ameena Bilal Philips

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Length: 57min 48sec (3468 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2016