اے محترم امام… آپ کا خطبہ: ایک مضمون ہے یا ایک موقف؟

Every week, as Friday evening approaches, thousands of preachers sit at their desks — turning through books, browsing websites, asking their brothers — all consumed by one question: "What should I preach about this Friday?" A question that appears, on its surface, natural — even a sign of diligence and care. But in truth, it reveals a deep crisis in the very understanding of the pulpit's function. The gap is vast between a preacher who searches each week for a "topic" to fill the sermon's minutes, and a preacher who carries in his chest a "project" — one in which every sermon is a brick in a building he is raising. The first asks: What do I say? The second asks: What do I build? And between the two questions lies a distance like the one between an essay and a stance.

An Essay or a Stance?

An essay is speech crafted to be delivered — its wording polished, its paragraphs ordered, its evidence selected — then delivered, heard, admired or criticized, and folded away by the time the Asr call to prayer sounds. The essay-writer's measure is immediate success: Were the people moved? Did they weep? Did they say at the door, "Jazāk Allāh khayr — what a magnificent sermon"? When he hears that, he walks away satisfied that the message has been delivered, and begins tomorrow's search for a new topic.

The stance is something altogether different. The stance is a pedagogical position with both a before and an after — a link in a chain, a step along a road, a rung on a ladder whose beginning and end the preacher knows. The stance-holder does not measure his sermon by the tears of the moment, but by its effect after a month and a year: Has anything changed in the homes of the congregation? Has a neglected value been raised? Has an entrenched habit been broken? For him, the sermon is not a weekly product to be consumed — it is a dose in a long program of treatment and construction, one in which the preacher calculates the position, the quantity, and the timing.

Portrait of the First: The Topic-Seeker

The preacher who searches for a topic is governed by occasions and emergencies. Ramadan imposes its topic upon him; Hajj imposes its topic; the week's incident imposes its topic — and between these stretches a void he fills with whatever comes: a sermon on patience, followed by a sermon on honoring parents, followed by a sermon on backbiting, with no thread to hold them together and no aim to bring them into alignment. Each individual sermon may be well-constructed, sound in its evidence — yet taken together they build nothing. They are like beautiful stones piled one beside another with no builder and no blueprint.

The result we witness in reality is testimony enough: a worshipper who has attended Friday prayers for thirty years, who has heard more than fifteen hundred sermons — and yet you can barely find in him any trace of this enormous sum in his behavior, his convictions, or the pattern of his life. Not because the sermons were poor, but because they were never aimed at anything specific within him. They were fine words that passed by every Friday, like a breeze: refreshing, but not transforming.

Portrait of the Second: The Project-Carrier

The project-carrying preacher begins where others finish. He begins with the human being sitting before him — not with the book open in his hands. He first asks: Who are these people I am addressing? What are their ages, their occupations, their dominant concerns? What settled into their souls as sound convictions I wish to confirm, and as flawed convictions I wish to dismantle? What is the one trait — if it were to change — that would transform their lives? Then, in light of that, he draws a map, defines a goal, and distributes the road toward it across the Fridays of the year — so that every sermon becomes his answer to the question: Where have we reached, and what is the next step?

This preacher may preach on the very same topics as others: patience, honoring parents, truthfulness. But the difference is that these topics are not adjacent titles in his work — they are tools in the service of a more distant aim. When he preaches on truthfulness it is because his project this year is building integrity in daily dealings; when he preaches on good opinion it is because he is treating the disease of division he has observed in his community. The title is the same — but the intention is different, and the construction is different.

The Project of Building the Human: Three Degrees

When we reflect on the project of the serious preacher, we find him working on three degrees of depth — each harder than the one before, and more enduring in its effect.

The First Degree: Partial formation of the human. This is when the preacher undertakes a single trait or concept in those he addresses, tending it until it stands upright — making it his concern over an entire season: building connection with the Qur'an, or reviving the jurisprudence of neighborly relations, or correcting the concept of reliance on God. One piece planted, watered, and tended through successive sermons from multiple angles — once through encouragement, once through story, once through practical treatment — until by the end of the season that piece has become something remembered in the congregation's consciousness and conduct.

The Second Degree: Reshaping identity. This is deeper than the first, for it does not treat a specific trait but the human being's answer to the question: Who am I? How many worshippers attend Friday prayers seeing themselves as employees performing obligations — rather than as bearers of a message, stewards of the earth, ambassadors of their faith in their work and their families? Reshaping identity means raising those addressed from the identity of the "consuming religious-practitioner" to the identity of the "active believer" — from seasonal piety to a deep belonging from which all positions flow. This is not made by one sermon or ten. It is made by a patient pulpit that knows its direction.

The Third Degree: Changing behavior and the pattern of life. This is the fruit by which the two preceding degrees are tested — for there is no value in a concept that has taken root, 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 the excellence of one's work and integrity in the market, in one's relationship with time and phone and health. The project-carrying preacher traces the effect of his pulpit to these details, designing his sermons with a specific question in mind: What do I want the worshipper to do — not merely know — after this sermon?

These three degrees are not separate options to choose between — they interpenetrate, each grasping at the hem of the other. The piece built with mastery opens a door to identity; the identity that forms propels toward conduct. We name them degrees only so that the preacher new to this road may know where to enter: begin with a piece you can tend well — and when you see its fruit and taste the pleasure of building, ascend to what is wider, as the builder begins with a single stone and continues raising until the wall stands.

The Prophetic Pulpit: A Project, Not Posts

This vision is not a recent innovation — it is precisely what we find in the Prophetic method. Whoever traces the Prophet's (peace be upon him) sermons and exhortations finds in them stances within a project of clear contours: building a nation from scattered sands. In Mecca, the project was to plant the creed and free the human from the servitude of stone and master — and the exhortations circled around this and did not depart. In Medina, the project shifted to building society and state — and the sermons came about brotherhood, rights, dealings, and striving. His sermons (peace be upon him) were brief, purposeful, and repeated in their great meanings, because the goal was not to entertain ears every Friday with something new, but to embed specific meanings until they became second nature. That pulpit produced a generation that carried the faith to the horizons. What testimony for the logic of "the project" could be more compelling than this?

Obstacles on the Path

Yet the transition from the logic of the topic to the logic of the project is not without obstacles. The first is impatience for fruit: the preacher accustomed to harvesting the audience's praise every Friday will feel a kind of loneliness when working toward a goal whose effect will not appear for months. Here his sincerity is tested — does he want it said, "How eloquent he is!" or does he want the people to change?

The second obstacle is the pressure of occasions and events. Seasons and crises arrive one after another, scattering the plan unless the preacher manages them well. The truth is that an occasion does not conflict with the project — it serves it, when the preacher channels it through his own doorway. The one whose project is building identity makes Ramadan a station for building it; the one whose project is reforming dealings preaches at Hajj on the sanctity of people's wealth — taking the occasion's fuel and directing it along his own road.

The third obstacle is instability. Some preachers rotate among multiple mosques, not knowing their people and not known by them — and the project of building the human needs a station and a long companionship, just as a planting needs fixed soil. Whoever is tested with rotation, let him make his project among the near pieces that may be built in a few encounters. And whoever is granted stability in a mosque has been given the project's chief capital — let him not squander it.

The fourth obstacle — most concealed of all — is the preacher's belief that a project kills the spontaneity and warmth of the pulpit. It does not. The engineer building from a blueprint is not prevented from creativity in the details; indeed, clarity of purpose frees the preacher from the anxiety of the weekly search and channels his energy into excellence and mastery, rather than confusion and improvisation.

From Topic to Project: Five Steps

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

First: Know your audience before deciding what to say. Sit with your congregation. Listen more than you speak. Learn their ages, their professions, their dominant concerns. The physician who prescribes before diagnosing is no physician, however many drug names he has memorized.

Second: Set a goal for the year, not for the sermon. Choose one or two great aims for the year — that the homes return to the Qur'an, or that the jurisprudence of lawful earning be put right, or that the identity of the young Muslim be built. Then make this aim the scale by which you weigh every sermon idea that occurs to you: Does it serve the project, or does it compete with it?

Third: Give each sermon a function within the plan. Divide the road into stages: sermons that demolish the wrong perception, sermons that build the alternative, sermons that treat the obstacles, sermons that confirm and remind. With this, your weekly question becomes: What is the next brick? — rather than: What is the new title?

Fourth: Connect the pulpit to what comes after it. The sermon alone is a weekly flash — extend it with tributaries: a class that elaborates what the sermon summarized; a message in the neighborhood group that recalls it; a collective action that translates its meaning into practice. The project needs a small institution — even if it is an imam, a muezzin, and three young people of the mosque.

Fifth: Measure the effect — do not be satisfied with praise. Words of admiration at the mosque door are no measure. Ask after each phase: What has actually changed? Survey, observe, listen to the women and the youth — not only the front row — then adjust your plan in light of what you see. A living project is reviewed; a dead one is merely repeated.

Conclusion: O Revered Imam

In your hands is a pulpit that gathers for it — in attention and hearts — what the mightiest instruments of earthly influence cannot gather: an audience that comes to you willingly every week, listening by Sharia's command, composed by ablution and stillness. To spend this treasure on essays that are admired and then forgotten is a profound waste.

Turn your pulpit from a platform of delivery into a workshop of building — from the question "What do I say tomorrow?" to the question "Whom do I build this year?" When you do, your sermon will no longer be an essay that is said and then gone, but a stance that leaves in people what it leaves — an effect that walks through the markets and the homes after the congregation disperses — and a form of ongoing charity unlike any other: a human being rebuilt before your eyes. And that is purpose enough for a lifetime.

Written by Imam Dr. Ahmed Muhammad Ali Abouseif — Doctor of Quranic Exegesis and Sciences from Al-Azhar University, Founder and President of the American Imams Academy in Plano, Texas.

Episode Three of the series "Issues of the Imam."* *Episode One: "Children of the Imams: Between Grace and Trial."* *Episode Two: "The House of Daʿwah: Between the Inherited Image and the Human Reality."