Between Assimilation and Isolation: Is There a Third Path?

Occasion: a transcript of a lecture delivered at ICEP on July 11, 2025 (the place is given as written in the video title).Source: transcription of a recorded lecture by Dr. Ahmed Abou Seif, watch the original video on YouTube

I am glad to be with you again, and I ask Allah to accept from all of us. I am going to need your help tonight. As we announced, we need to decide together where our position is in this country: what we are doing here, why we are here, and what influence we can have on the community around us. Are you with me on that?

Do we understand our dīn, or only practise it?

The first question is this: do we really understand our dīn? Let us begin as if we were entering Islam today, from scratch. Are we understanding it, or only practising it? The two are completely different. Think of a smart student who really understands mathematics. He can create something with it, and when he meets a problem he can think his way through it. Another student only knows the steps of the process, and when he meets any difficulty, he stops.

So as a Muslim community, do we understand the reality of our dīn or do we just go through its motions? Take a plain example. You tell your children, "Come with me to the masjid," and they ask, "Why?" What is the answer in your mind? Why do you want to bring them? What benefit do they get when they come? What will they accomplish? We have to convince them with answers to all of these questions. The truth is that most of our children do not like to come to the masjid, and do you know why? Because we are forcing them. They stand next to you while the imam recites the Qur'ān, they understand nothing, and they start to worry: "What is that man doing? When is he going to finish? This is a long prayer, come on, let us go." Why does this happen? Because we could not convince them of the strength of what they will gain and the benefit they will receive by coming.

Look at the same question from the side of the home. What percentage of Muslim families in America are stable and content, without problems? Ask yourself, ask your friends and relatives and the people around you, how many such families you know. Let us understand together why we do not have tranquillity in our homes, why there is no satisfaction between us and no harmony in how we deal with each other. Did Islam call me to be harsh with my wife? Did Islam ask her to hit me every day? Did Islam ask us to shout at one another in front of our children and show them our disagreements? Is that what Islam asks of me? Then why am I doing it? Do I actually understand the rules, the reality of the rules, of our dīn? That is the first question: are we understanding our dīn or not?

Are we willing to sacrifice because of it?

The second question: are we willing to sacrifice because of our dīn? When people hear "sacrifice," their minds usually go to blood, and I do not want to speak about that. It is not our environment here, alhamdulillah. Nobody comes to attack you. We have a peaceful community. Yes, there is a struggle here and there, and somebody makes fun of you, but at the end of the day we live in peace. What I am talking about is your time, your ideas, your money, your effort. If we hold an event, are you willing to volunteer for a long day, up to its very end, and say, "Brothers, thank you for giving me the chance to take part in this great event"? Are you willing to do that?

Let me ask another question, and I am sorry, I am talking about myself first, so let me get out of my own selfishness. Usually I am thinking about myself, my time, my devices, my screens. I am not looking around me. Then one day I notice, "This is my son, and he has grown up," and I had not really seen him for a long time. You see him every day, but you are not giving your attention to what is happening inside your children. Are you willing to sacrifice by giving more patience to your wife? I am asking them the same thing in return: is she willing to give? And are we willing to look at the needs of our neighbourhood, to see what the people around us need and to give, only because of our dīn? That was the second question. The first: do we understand our dīn? The second: are we willing to give any kind of sacrifice for it? Is that clear?

The worry behind involvement: will we lose ourselves?

Now to our real subject, involvement in the American community. We usually worry about it, because we think we will lose our dignity and will not be Muslims anymore. And so you will find the familiar question: can we let our children go to the public school, or must we keep them at home? Have you heard that question before?

So let me ask you, what do you think is the best decision for our children? (I got three days of permission to be here, by the way, and when I told her, she said, "Okay, here you go." She was nice.)

Several answers came from the room. "Home school is better. You are the one who loves him." Another said: a school that teaches Islam. A third: the private schools, an Islamic school. And one said, both. I asked: what is wrong with the public school? One of you said, "Too much fitnah." Which fitnah? Mixed genders, he said. Do we have another one? Fine, I hear you.

Let me tell you a short story. One of the children in our masjid goes to the public school. A friend of his asked him, "Do you believe in Jesus?" He said, "No, I am a Muslim." His friend said, "Then we cannot be friends anymore, if you do not believe in Jesus." And the boy answered: "I have five friends, and I have one God. Do you think I will leave my one God for one of my five friends? Are you crazy? I can lose one of my friends, but I will keep my God. I will never be with you again, because you are not a right friend if you force me to leave my God for you. You are not more important than my God in my heart." I hope I am clear about the idea. Look at how far a child can be prepared. If your child is out there, do you think he will leave his Lord, Allah, because of his friends? I do not think so.

So what do we need? We need to raise them with an Islamic mentality. Do we have the time at home to build it? Even if we are going to put them in the ocean, not only in the public school [the sentence is left unfinished]. And notice that we keep looking for an Islamic environment, as if our children had to grow up in the same sort of environment as ours. Let me ask: what kind of environment did Mūsā, peace be upon him, grow up in? A Muslim one? No, not at all. And Yūsuf, peace be upon him? Give me one of the prophets who grew up in a Muslim community. That means our task is to grow up in a non-Muslim community, to confirm our identity among those people and change their mentality. It does not matter whether they will become Muslims; we are not forcing them, and we do not even have the right to force them. But we have to convince ourselves, and other people, of our dīn. Yūsuf grew up in Egypt in his time, among people who were disbelievers, even enemies, you could say, of the faith itself. Yet he grew up like that.^[1]

And the question that follows is how you become a role model your child wants to be like and love to be like. How many children in our Muslim homes want to get out of the house once they reach eighteen? "I am going to be independent. I will leave home. I will be alone. [garbled] I can cover myself." And how many of our children stick to their parents and insist on staying because they love that atmosphere? If we have a problem, it is not because the environment outside cannot be changed.

Who decides about our children while we are absent?

Then there is the decision about LGBT, or whatever you said: when they took that decision, who took it? Why are we complaining that people decide behind our backs and force us to follow their direction? Let me ask a humble question, and please be patient with me tonight. Public schools have a monthly meeting of parents, am I right? Not the parent-teacher meetings; those are another thing. I mean the meetings where parents discuss the future of the school and make decisions. How many of you have ever taken part in those? Nobody? One, two? Someone says every three or four months, when his daughter was at school. Good, I understand the case. We are speaking only of the two in this room, and we do not know the rest.

They discuss a great many things at those meetings, and sometimes someone says no. And once they see you at the meeting, they become worried about your attendance, because if they say something against your religion, somebody will stand up and say, "Hey, what are you doing here? Stop. This is against the religion of my child." They take our existence into account once we show up. But we are not showing up.

How many of you attend the monthly city meetings? Every city has one. It is a public meeting. There is a board, there are decision makers, but anybody may come and give his opinion. I may not be part of the decision, but I can state my opinion. I am a partner, one of the community. I have my home here. But we are not doing it. And how many times have we invited the neighbours to our homes, or I do not even say invited, but at least given each of them a humble gift, or built some special relationship with them? We are not doing our duties.

Closing the door

And on the other side, we try to isolate ourselves from the community. Keep my children with me, put them in the house, close the door, tick, tick, tick. [A remark about "three tips" is only partly intelligible.] And another tip: "We must protect them inside, so do not let them go out." Why?

I will tell you what I have seen. When a sister has come to Islam later in life, after something like twenty or thirty years [the phrase is unclear], look at her personality when she speaks to the community and deals with people. In my experience I find these sisters stronger than our own wives and daughters. And if you have a daughter who went to the public school with an Islamic mentality, who knows what she is doing, who debates there and takes part in activities and events, what a strong character that is. Do we want our children, I am speaking of daughters in particular, only to stay at home and be perfect at cooking in the kitchen and do nothing after that? What do we want?

Once I was buying a house, subḥān Allāh, and the closing date arrived while I was away, not here. My eldest daughter, the oldest in my family, was around seventeen then. I asked her to call the person who had phoned me, and I told her, "Ask him what he needs from us. You have access to everything of mine, the bank account, all of it." She called, asked what we needed to do, and he told her: you need to do this and this. She went through the whole process from A to Z. How did she reach that level of facing any kind of problem? My son-in-law, too, now tells me, "You gave me a backbone, a strong backbone." How did they become like that? Allah is the One who does it, glory be to Him. But from our side, how can we be strong enough to create a strong generation that deals with everybody without hesitation, that does not fear anyone and is strong enough to face any problem?

A dīn that prepares you for something bigger than practice

Between involvement and isolation, as the topic of tonight puts it, how do we evaluate our position? When Allah, glorified and exalted, sent Islam, He did not send it so that we would only practise rituals. If the dīn were only those things, we would not be able to achieve the [word cut off]. Imagine the teacher's assignment for all the students in the class is simply to clean the board, and you make a schedule so that everyone takes a turn. Do you think those students deserve to become doctors, if the only challenge they face is cleaning the board? If Allah had told me, "You will pray five times a day, you will fast Ramadan, you will go to…" [the rest is garbled], these are the easy things. But all of them came to prepare me to be a different person, a strong person.

Take the Prophet ﷺ himself. From the beginning of the da'wah, in Makkah, was he suffering? Was he struggling with people? Yes, he had a hard time. Imagine he were told: "We will give you a break. Leave this land and go to Madinah." Alhamdulillah, now we can relax, can't we? And when the Prophet ﷺ left Makkah for Madinah, did his challenge start again? Yes, yes. Peace of mind, no more problems, alhamdulillah, we are okay now? No. Come on. Why did he leave Makkah at all? He could have stayed. But it was a different kind of challenge. In one place, Allah shows us one kind of struggle; in the other place, there was a different kind of challenge that the Prophet ﷺ faced.

Now what kind of challenge are we facing? Zero. Why? Because we are not thinking about da'wah. We do not hold da'wah as one of our worries, as something we carry in our hearts. A brother once told me, "Sometimes I feel I exaggerate my situation, that I think more than I should about da'wah, here and there." I told him: listen, then why did Allah say to the Prophet ﷺ what He said? Do you know the meaning of that? You are almost going to kill yourself; be careful, take care of yourself.^[2] And the Prophet ﷺ was not taking care of himself before taking care of the community, the people, the situation, the environment; going here and there, caring for the children, the young professionals, the old people. So what is the position of da'wah in our lives? I am asking you, and I am sorry, I am talking about myself too.

The main question on the Day

I will end with this, and I repeat it often. What is the main question we will be asked about when we come to Allah on the Day of Resurrection? Concentrate with me.

Someone said: "Who is your Lord?" That is the preparation, the first station. We will come and stand before Allah as a Muslim community. Alhamdulillah, we are there, and this is the last permission before entering Paradise. You have passed all the steps up to the last, and now you receive the main, most important question; if you pass it, your passport is stamped. What is it? Another said: "How did you use your time?" A great idea. Something else? "How did you respond to the prophets? Did you accept Islam or not?" Anything else? "How did you behave with others?" Someone said the first thing we will be asked is the ṣalāh, but I am not talking about that; I am talking about the last thing. Another brother said: salah. So we have two people for that, and I think we must agree. And another: "What did you do with your knowledge?" (I am trying, with this, if I even had knowledge. [laughter])

Can anyone give us another idea? Remember that Allah tells us He will gather everyone to stand before Him on the Day of Resurrection. What is the main reason behind the questions that will come on that Day? Whether you delivered the message of Allah or not. Did you realize that before? It means that when we are asked about the ṣalāh, it is exactly like being asked about homework: did you do your homework? If the homework is the teacher's final mission, or just a step, the ṣalāh is a step, the zakāh is a step. A step toward what?

Even the prayer is training for da'wah

I will tell you more: even during the ṣalāh, Allah is preparing you to build the mentality of the caller. How did you pray? Did you like my recitation in the third rak'ah? I am not showing off my recitation; I was reciting silently. Have you ever asked yourself why we have two rak'ahs aloud and two silent? The two silent ones give you a chance to reflect on the āyāt you received in the first two. I stand behind the imam as he recites [a remark about a mistake in the recitation is garbled]; in the third and fourth rak'ahs, it is my chance to observe what the imam recited and reflect it in my own mind: am I among the [word lost], or not? That is a question you ask yourself in those moments.

And in those moments we are refraining from [words lost]. Why do we have that? It is a kind of training in patience, so that when you deal with people you are ready to be patient. And dealing with people is the core of da'wah. It was the first big challenge of the Prophet ﷺ when he began his da'wah: to speak to people and convince them.

So have you ever tried to convince somebody of your dīn without bothering him, without giving him a hard time or boring him by repeating the same thing every day, until he says, "Come on, man, I will never be a Muslim, get out, leave me alone, why do you keep saying this"? Have you tried to spend money for it, inviting him here and there? Have you tried to study the concept of da'wah itself, to learn how to practise it with the people around you? We are not doing that. If we stay in the same situation, isolating ourselves from the community, we will never reach them and never have any influence on other people.

Recharging, then going out

Someone here, I do not know who, said to me afterwards, "You answered 98% of the questions in my mind in those few minutes." How come? He said, "You talked about the future." I said, you are right, because usually, as imams, and I am talking to myself and to every imam, we talk about the past. We talk about our shortcomings, not about the positive points and the strengths already in our hands. We talk about the traditional things that everybody can practise, and we do not open our eyes to the different fields of da'wah. We can practise it not only in the masjid but in the hospitals, the schools, the stores, everywhere. Those are the places to show our Islam.

How long did the Prophet ﷺ spend in the masjid, and how long did he spend with the people, after finishing the prayer and walking out to practise what he had learned there? We are not here only to stay here. We are here to recharge our battery in order to practise the work outside. You turn off your phone at the end of the day and put it on the charger, and in the morning you take it off and use it again. Here I am working again. So how can you be one of the pillars of the community you live in? It does not matter where you work. What matters is whether you are really there, or whether the people see you and count you as just a number.

I ask Allah to accept from all of us.

--- ^[1]: توثيق المحرر: التفريغ هنا مشوَّش في الأسماء («Mus Alisam» و«Yuam / Yufu wasam»)، وقد قُرئت على أنها موسى ويوسف عليهما السلام. وقد سُجّل ذلك في uncertain. وجاء كلام المحاضر عن نشأة يوسف عليه السلام في مصر كما قيل، ولم يُصحَّح في المتن. ^[2]: توثيق المحرر: لم يذكر المحاضر الآية. يشبه ما أشار إليه قولُه تعالى ﴿لَعَلَّكَ بَاخِعٌ نَّفْسَكَ أَلَّا يَكُونُوا مُؤْمِنِينَ﴾ [الشعراء: 3]، ونحوها ﴿فَلَعَلَّكَ بَاخِعٌ نَّفْسَكَ عَلَىٰ آثَارِهِمْ﴾ [الكهف: 6]. والعزو من المحرر ولم يُثبت في المتن.