Our Noble Imam… Your Khutbah

Every week, as the eve of Friday draws near, thousands of preachers sit at their desks, leafing through books, browsing websites, and asking their brethren — all preoccupied by a single question: "What shall I preach about this Friday?" On its surface the question seems natural, even a mark of diligence and care; but in truth it lays bare a deep crisis in how the very function of the pulpit is understood. For the distance is vast between a preacher who searches each week for a "topic" to fill the minutes of his khutbah, and a preacher who carries in his breast a "project" of which every khutbah is a brick in the building. The first asks: What shall I say? The second asks: What shall I make? And between the two questions lies a distance like that between an article and an edifice.

An Article, or an Edifice?

An article is speech composed to be spoken: its wording is polished, its passages arranged, its evidences selected; then it is delivered and heard, praised or criticized, and then forgetfulness folds it away with the call to the afternoon prayer. The author of an article measures himself by the success of the moment: Were the people moved? Did they weep? Did they say at the door, "May God reward you, a magnificent khutbah"? Once he has heard this he departs reassured that the message has been delivered, and from the next day begins anew the search for a fresh topic.

The edifice is something else entirely. An edifice is an educational stance with a before and an after; a link in a chain, a step on a road, a rung on a ladder whose beginning and end the preacher knows. The builder of an edifice does not gauge his khutbah by the tears of its moment, but by its effect after a month and after a year: Has anything changed in the homes of the worshippers? Has a value that was abandoned been raised up? Has a habit that was entrenched been broken? For him the khutbah is not a weekly product to be consumed, but a dose within a long program of treatment and construction, in which place, measure, and timing are all reckoned.

The First Portrait: The One Who Hunts for a Topic

The preacher who hunts for a topic is governed by occasions and emergencies: Ramadan imposes its subject upon him, the Hajj imposes its subject, the incident of the week imposes its subject, and in between lies a void he fills with whatever comes to hand: a khutbah on patience, followed by one on honoring parents, followed by one on backbiting — with no thread to bind them and no end to order them. Each of these khutbahs may be good in itself, sound in structure, correct in its evidence; yet together they make nothing, for they are like beautiful stones cast one beside another, never assembled by a builder upon a design.

The result we witness in our own reality bears witness to this: a worshipper who kept up the Friday prayer for thirty years, hearing in that time more than fifteen hundred khutbahs, and yet you can scarcely find, for this vast sum, any effect worth mentioning in his conduct, his conceptions, or his way of life. Not because the khutbahs were poor, but because they did not aim at anything specific in him to begin with; they were fine words passing by him each Friday, as a breeze passes — refreshing, but not changing.

The Second Portrait: The One With a Project

As for the preacher who has a project, he begins where others end: he begins from the human being seated before him, not from the book open in his hands. He asks first: Who are these people I address? What are their ages, their occupations, their concerns? What sound conceptions have settled in their souls that I wish to anchor, and what mistaken conceptions do I wish to dismantle? What single trait, if it changed in them, would change their lives? Then, in that light, he draws a map, sets an aim, and distributes the road toward it across the Fridays of the year, so that every khutbah becomes for him an answer to a question: Where have we arrived, and what is the next step?

This preacher may preach on the very subjects on which others preach: patience, righteousness, truthfulness. But the difference is that for him these subjects are not adjacent topics, but tools in the service of a farther goal. If he preaches on truthfulness it is because his project this year is to build trustworthiness in dealings; if he preaches on thinking well of others it is because he is treating the disease of division he has observed in his quarter. The topic is one, but the intention is not the intention, and the building is not the building.

The Project of Shaping the Human Being: Three Levels

If we reflect upon the serious preacher's project, we find it working on three levels of differing depth, each one harder than the one before it and more lasting in its effect:

The first level: shaping a particular within the human being. It is that the preacher tends to a single trait or a single concept in those he addresses until it stands upright and takes form; as when he makes his concern, for an entire term, the building of a bond with the Qurʾan, or the revival of the jurisprudence of neighborliness, or the correction of the concept of reliance upon God (tawakkul). A single particular is planted, watered, and tended across successive khutbahs, from multiple angles: once by encouragement, once by story, once by practical treatment — so that when the term is over, this particular has become something present in the awareness of the community and in its conduct.

The second level: reshaping identity. This is deeper than the first, for it does not treat a specific trait but treats the human being's answer to the question: Who am I? How many a worshipper attends the Friday prayer seeing himself as an employee performing obligations, rather than a bearer of a message, a vicegerent upon the earth, an ambassador of his religion in his work and his household. Reshaping identity means that the preacher raises the one he addresses from the identity of the "consuming religious person" to the identity of the "active believer," and from seasonal religiosity to a firm belonging from which all one's stances issue. And this is not made by one khutbah, nor by ten, but by a patient pulpit that knows its destination.

The third level: changing conduct and way of life. This is the fruit by which the two levels before it are tested; for there is no worth in a concept that has settled or an identity that has formed unless it appears in the day and the night: in how one spends and saves, in the manners of the home and the raising of children, in excellence at work and honesty in the marketplace, and in a person's relationship with his time, his phone, and his health. The preacher who has a project traces the effect of his pulpit down to these details, and designs his khutbahs while summoning a specific question: What is it I want the worshipper to do — not merely to know — after this khutbah?

These three levels are not separate, to be chosen among; rather they are interlocking, each taking hold of the other. The particular that is built with care opens a door to identity, and the identity that takes form drives conduct powerfully. We have called them levels only so that the preacher beginning on this road may know where to enter: he begins with a particular he can tend well, and when he sees its fruit and tastes the delight of building, he ascends to what is broader — just as the builder begins with a single stone and does not cease to raise it until the wall stands even.

The Prophetic Pulpit: A Project, Not Publications

Nor is this conception a novel invention; it is the very thing we find in the Prophetic method. Whoever traces the khutbahs, exhortations, and admonitions of the Prophet (may God's peace and blessings be upon him) finds them to be stations within a project of clear features: the building of a nation out of scattered sands. In Mecca the project was the planting of creed and the liberation of the human being from bondage to stone and to man, so the admonitions revolved around that, revolving and never departing; and in Medina the project turned to the building of society and state, so the khutbahs came concerning brotherhood, rights, dealings, and struggle. His khutbahs (peace be upon him) were short, purposeful, their great meanings repeated — for the aim was not to delight the ears each Friday with something new, but to anchor particular meanings until they became a second nature. And this pulpit made a generation that carried the religion to the horizons; so what testimony to the logic of "the project" is more eloquent than this?

Obstacles on the Road

Yet the passage from the logic of the topic to the logic of the project is not without hurdles, the first of them the hastening of the fruit; for the preacher accustomed to plucking the praise of the crowd each Friday will find a loneliness when he works for a goal whose effect appears only after months. Here his sincerity is tested: does he want it to be said "How eloquent he is!", or does he want the people to change? The second hurdle is the pressure of occasions and events; for seasons and calamities follow one upon another and scatter the plan if the preacher does not manage them well. The truth is that the occasion does not oppose the project, but serves it if the preacher brings it in through his own door; the one whose project is the building of identity makes Ramadan a station for its building, and the one whose project is the reform of dealings preaches at the Hajj on the sanctity of people's wealth — so he takes from the occasion its fuel and spends it upon his own road.

The third hurdle is the absence of settledness; for some preachers move among many mosques whose people they do not know and who do not know them, while the project of shaping needs a residence and a long companionship, as the seedling needs firm ground. Whoever is tried by moving about, let him place his project in the near particulars that are built in few gatherings; and whoever is granted steadiness in a mosque has been given the capital of the project, so let him not squander it. The fourth hurdle — the most hidden of them — is that the preacher supposes the project to be a fetter that kills the spontaneity and warmth of the pulpit; but it is not so, for the engineer who builds upon a plan is not prevented by the plan from creativity in the details; rather, the clarity of the aim frees the preacher from the anxiety of the weekly search, and empties his energy into excellence and refinement instead of floundering and improvisation.

From Topic to Project: Five Steps

Perhaps a preacher reading these lines will say: I am convinced — so where do I begin? These are five practical steps that carry the pulpit from the logic of the topic to the logic of the project:

First: Know whom you address before you decide what to say. Sit with the congregation of your mosque, listen more than you speak, and acquaint yourself with their ages, their trades, and their prevailing problems; for the physician who prescribes the medicine before the diagnosis is no physician, though he has memorized the names of all the medicines.

Second: Set an aim for the year, not for the Friday. Choose one or two great ends for the year: that the homes return to the Qurʾan, or that the jurisprudence of lawful earning become upright, or that the identity of the young Muslim be built. Then make this end a scale by which you weigh every khutbah idea that occurs to you: does it serve the project, or does it crowd it out?

Third: Give every khutbah a function within the plan. Divide the road into stages: khutbahs that demolish the mistaken conception, khutbahs that build the alternative, khutbahs that treat the obstacles, and khutbahs that anchor and remind. Thus your weekly question becomes: What is the next brick? — instead of: What is the new topic?

Fourth: Connect the pulpit to what comes after it. The khutbah alone is a weekly flash, so supply it with tributaries: a lesson that details what it summarized, a message in the neighborhood's group that recalls it, and a collective work that turns its meaning into practice. For the project needs a small institution, even if it be of an imam, a muezzin, and three of the mosque's youth.

Fifth: Measure the effect, and do not be content with praise. Words of commendation at the mosque's door are no measure; so ask after every stage: What has actually changed? Survey, observe, and listen to the women and the youth, not to the front row alone; then adjust your plan in the light of what you see. For the living project is reviewed, and the dead one is merely repeated.

Conclusion: O Noble Imam

Before you is a pulpit for which there gather, of necks and hearts, what gathers for no greater means of influence upon the earth: an audience that comes to you willingly each week, listening by the command of the Sacred Law, prepared with ablution and tranquility. What a loss it would be for this treasure to be spent on articles that are admired and then forgotten. Turn your pulpit from a platform of delivery into a workshop of building, and from the question "What shall I say tomorrow?" to the question "Whom shall I make this year?" If you do, your khutbah will no longer be an article to be spoken, but an edifice that establishes in the people what it establishes, an effect that walks in the marketplaces and homes after the assembly disperses, and an ongoing charity of a rare kind: a human being rebuilt under your very eye. And that is enough for you as a lifetime's project.