Sunaa’ al-Hayah

- Life Makers -

Episode 24:  The Importance of Voting for the Dreams

Where do we now stand in the ‘Life Makers’ program? It is important to pause and recall what we have done and where we are at this point in time.  Our program started six months ago; what was its idea? What have we achieved within this period? Its idea is simply that we want to launch a revival of our countries.  Can we do it or is it none of our business? Do we know how to start this revival? We always stress, on this program, that if the people want to start a revival and they feel it within their hearts, it will come true. Thus, ‘Life Makers’ is a beginning; it is saying that we can make it through teamwork and everyone’s participation.  We also say to those who claim that it is no use, that as long as the youth, boys and girls, are ready to present sacrifices for the sake of the revival of their countries, success will come, Allah willing.  This is the idea of ‘Life Makers.’

The question is: how will this revival come? It will come through transforming the energy of faith in our hearts into work and action.  This is the primary idea ‘Life Makers’ is based upon.  Boys, girls, men, and women, old and young, all of them; their hearts are full of faith and love for Allah (SWT); their aim is to please Allah the Almighty. They have perceived the meaning of Islam.  Islam is not only about praying and fasting, it is also about success in life.  They also realised that their countries are in the most difficult of times.  Thus, it is a call to everyone: what is stopping us from transforming this energy of faith in our hearts into action for the sake of this revival? After all, our intention is to please Allah.

The first phase took four months.  We always had a question in our minds: are we fit to achieve this revival or are we lazy and idle? Therefore, we did a number of things; for instance, we cast off the restraints that threatened to hinder that revival.  We hoped for a number of youth to work with us.  Surprisingly, hundreds of thousands moved with us. That renewed the hope that we have a valid concept and that we are able to act; the proof lies in the success achieved so far.

Then, we moved on to the present phase.  I thought of stipulating a particular work plan, but I decided it would be a huge mistake.  Every one of us must participate in laying down the plan for this revival and what its results will be.  That is why we called everyone to dream about how our countries will be like after twenty years.  They were only dreams.  We presented twenty-three fields, for example, agriculture, industry, tourism, religion, woman, economy, our countries’ mutual relations.  These are the fields that matter to us in our countries.  We asked you to write down your dreams in each of these fields.  We have received half a million dreams up until now.  It has been a splendid surprise that has given us renewed confidence and immense hope.

I recently met with an important industry specialist in the Arab world.  He visited the website and saw the ideas sent by the people in the field of industry.  He said a strange thing: that we have a treasure non-existent in the Arab world.  Then, he asked who the owners of these ideas were.  I told him that they belonged to boys, girls and ordinary people.  It seemed that a great number of people who sent the ideas had never had the chance to convey them.  When we asked them to dream about the revival of their countries, they found the chance to let their ideas loose.  Hence, we have a treasure.

In the last episode, I asked for the dreams of the simple people.  The team of ‘Life Makers’ in Jordan went to less developed areas, talked to the people, and collected their dreams, which was a great surprise.  I thank them for their efforts.  Furthermore, in Canada there have been very encouraging developments.  The ‘Life Makers’ team there divided and distributed the twenty-three fields between the commissions of the Islamic Council in Canada, because they saw it as the duty of the Muslims in Canada towards their nation.  Then, they formed working groups whose purpose is to specialize in producing ideas.  On top of this, they did something even greater; they went to the Canadian government and asked them to help the Islamic Council in Canada to realize these dreams.  They also asked the Canadian Government how they might be able to achieve these ideas in Canada and what the Canadian government can do to help our countries, in the Middle East and the Arab region to put these ideas into practice.  Now, they are planning to build a university in Canada called ‘Life Makers University.’  They want to annex this university to our project and to coordinate with us.  Furthermore, they agreed with a local Canadian TV channel to broadcast the translated episodes of the ‘Life Makers’ program.  Indeed, they have already broadcast the first two episodes of the program.

Finally, there is ‘Dar al-Tarjama’ (the House of Translation).  It is an organization consisting of 230 men and women who are translating the ‘Life Makers’ episodes every week into seven different languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Indonesian and Russian.  Each week the translations are published on the website, in order to make them available to anyone who wants them.  They may be distributed all over the world in order to spread the ideas of the program.  They also say that if anyone comes to an agreement with a local TV channel in the West to broadcast the episodes in the language of that country, they will have it ready within twenty-four hours.

All these positive actions show signs of hope, asserting the fact that we do possess a treasure.  This treasure has a second perspective; it is an unexpected surprise even for me. I was amazed to receive a huge file on the site containing the dreams of Muslims in India. There are about two million Muslims in India.  Twenty-five representatives met and sent us their suggestions and visions in four fields: education, economy, the media and the position of women in India.

Now, it is clear that we do indeed have an invaluable treasure; and this is where we have stopped.  We told you that half a million ideas have reached us in twenty-three fields and we agreed to discuss one or two fields every episode.  After each episode, we would upload the ideas and thoughts relating to these fields that were sent in, onto the website. Then, we would ask everyone to vote on the relative importance of these dreams.  Four fields have already been uploaded to the website.  These are: agriculture, scientific research, education and the unity of our countries.  We uploaded the ideas as sent by their owners; we only deleted the ones that were repeated and then summarized the ideas.

This is where we have stopped. I will tell you what we will do next, in detail:

1.      Each episode of ‘Life Makers’ will tackle one or two of the twenty-three fields to explain and to demonstrate the ideas of the people in those fields.  Then, we will put them on the website and you will vote for them, to differentiate between those that are important and those that are not.  Once you vote for a dream, it will turn it into a proposal, then to a project plan.  Eventually, the project will be put into action.

2.      After that, we will ask the people who are interested in the project to agree upon the method of implementing it.  This will not only take a week or two but a long time, maybe a year or two; for it is a project of revival.

I will give an example in the field of education: elimination of illiteracy.  I talked about this project and most people agree that eliminating illiteracy is a realistic project.  It begins with the dream that within one year from now, illiteracy will be eliminated from our nations.  Then, according to the votes, this dream may turn into a feasible proposal.

The next phase starts with the project for eliminating illiteracy

We want thousands of youths from all over the Arab world to volunteer for this project. In order to make the mission of teaching people easy, there will be training programs for eliminating illiteracy on Iqra’ TV channel, for example.  We will agree with charity organizations in the villages and the countryside to gather the people who need to learn, to help eliminate illiteracy in these areas.  In this way, the project will begin.

This will be the way we will proceed in the next phase of the ‘Life Makers:’

Each episode, we will take a field from the fields that have been chosen and I will let you know the project that was selected through your votes.  After that, I will explain this project and how it may be executed.  Those who want to participate in it will just register their names on the website.  There will be an administrator to coordinate with the volunteers for the project.  We will follow up with them on a monthly basis to monitor their status and progress; then we will move onto the next project.

Here, I would like to mention an important point: the opportunity is available for everyone via these projects.  Especially after we increase the number of projects in the following episodes, people will choose what they believe to be appropriate and what they wish to accomplish.  The beauty of the idea lies in the ability of each one of us to choose how to serve their country and please Allah.  On the Day of Judgment, when we meet Allah (SWT), we will have pleased Him.  We will have served our religion and country through our sincere intention to please Allah alone.  This intention is, unequivocally, the key to succeeding in these projects.

That is why we started with half a million ideas; this is the treasure that we now possess. We came across such a treasure through the dreams of inventors, university professors, businessmen, youth, women, girls and ordinary people.  As we said before, we want to reach a million votes on these half a million ideas to transform this project from the domain of personal opinions to the domain of a project that a million people in the nation want.  Thus, we need personal opinions; the ideas will no longer belong to only one of us, but they will belong to a million of us.  The revival project will emanate from the votes for these ideas, as it will help organize them.  After having been dreams, they will crystallize into five or six projects in the fields of agriculture, tourism, etc.  Voting will result in specifying these projects, turning the dream into a comprehensive revival project for a nation, adopted by ten million people.  The question is: where are we now?

We uploaded four fields onto the site and asked everyone to vote for them.  We still insist on the one million votes because these votes will move our projects forward.  Our previous experience proves that we can; for instance, the project for collecting clothes reached a million and half, the anti-smoking campaign reached seven hundred thousand and gathering thoughts and dreams reached half a million.  I believe that we can reach a million votes; yet, the reality is that the number of votes so far is far below our expectations.  This is what we are going to talk about for the rest of this episode.  This is the first obstacle we are facing in our program and in the project of reviving the Ummah (Islamic nations).

In the very first episodes, I mentioned that we will encounter many obstacles, but I did not expect us to be the reason behind these obstacles.  The results of the votes up until now are: nineteen thousand votes in the field of agriculture, eighteen thousand in the field of scientific research, twenty thousand in the field of education and only seventeen thousand in the field of interrelations between our countries.  The total number of participants adds up to eighty thousand votes only.  We can say that it is a good figure but it is not the expected result.  We were talking about a million votes; what happened? Why is the level of participation so low? I started asking people and youth on the site; I arrived at five reasons, which we will analyze and present:

First reason: I did not explain the issue well enough, which is my responsibility.  People, consequently, did not understand the importance of voting.

Second reason: Many people did not understand the suggestions well enough.

Third reason: “We do not care about our countries' affairs. We care about our individual problems much more.  If the issue were personal we would have been more interested.” (These are not my words. Unfortunately, they are the words of many of the people I asked)

Fourth reason: “Our ability to make national decisions is poor.  Everyone can make decisions on the personal level but it is too difficult on the national and patriotic level; it is not our business but the responsibility of the government.”

Fifth reason: “Many of us do not know how to use the Internet.”

That is why I decided to take a break in this episode and to explain these reasons.  A revival will not come in a day or two; we have to concentrate and see where we stand. Before starting, I need to emphasize something very important.  If this voting does not succeed we will not be able to continue Sunaa' al–Hayaa and I am serious about that. This is not a TV show; it is a project for the revival of a nation.  If this revival turns into projects that are carried out, based merely on personal opinions, then it will not be effective.  We need the participation of a million; this could become the obstacle that ends this project.  Let us return to the reasons mentioned above.

The First Reason: I did not explain the issue well enough, which is my responsibility

I will explain to you the importance of voting and why we will not be able to continue without it.  There is a rule to direct our attention to and to memorize:  people will never live for, make sacrifices for, or exert any effort for anything that does not belong to them, does not come from them, and is not owned by them.  This is a scientific fact and not my idea.  Human history confirms this fact.  I know that this program's viewers do not reach a million but I want all viewers to make the votes reach a million.  It is not enough for me that the votes reach eighty thousand.  If this continues, the surprise will come when there will be nobody to carry the projects when the time comes, due to the fact that most people will not have voted for them.  That is why voting is so important.

Here I would like to remind you of the Prophet (SAWS[1]), and how seeking everyone's participation in any matter was an important and fundamental issue to him.  In the Battle of Badr, the Prophet (SAWS) could have ordered the Muslims to fight with him, but instead he stood amongst them and said, “People, I need your opinion.” Abu-Bakr (RA) rose and told him, “Go Messenger of Allah, we are with you.”  The Prophet (SAWS) praised him and repeated his words, “People, I need your opinion.” Omar (RA) stood and repeated what Abu-Bakr (RA) had said, so the Prophet (SAWS) praised him and again repeated his words.  This time al-Mekdad stood and said, “By Allah, we won't say what the people of Israel said to Musa (AS) (Moses), ‘So go you and your Lord and fight alone, we are sitting right here’ but we say, ‘Go you and your Lord and fight; we will be fighters with you.”  The Prophet (SAWS) praised him greatly and repeated his words, “People, I need your opinion.”  He wanted to hear the opinion of al-Ansar (the inhabitants of Madinah who welcomed the Prophet ((SAWS) and defended him), because the deal between them was to defend him inside Madinah, but they were outside Madinah now, so he had to get their opinion.  If he had ordered them, they would have obeyed him blindly, without discussion, but he did so to rule out the possibility of Satan telling them later that the Prophet (SAWS) did not consult or ask them.

Do you remember what Abdul-Rahman Ibn-‘Auf did when choosing Othman Ibn-Afaan (RA) as the Caliph?  He visited every house and asked all the inhabitants their opinion in choosing Othman (RA).  He did not leave anyone without asking him, even the elderly (who did not know who Othman (RA) was) and the children.  When asked, “Why did you do that?” He said, “So that they participate in the decision to avoid a fitnah (disobedience and disapproval of the Caliph) in the future.”

There is a vast difference between realizing your aims and having someone dictate them to you.  The difference is huge between deciding for yourself and having someone decide for you, so the voting issue is of utmost importance.  Visit the site and vote, even if you did not understand the dreams at first.  This project will belong to you.  You gave your opinion, and the ideas you vote for belong to you, even if they were not originally yours.

The Second Reason: Many people did not understand the suggestions well enough

An example: a student in Commerce might say, “My knowledge of agriculture is not enough,” or a housewife might know anything about agriculture.  I am not saying that this project is easy.  It is an entire nation's project.  If you were unable to understand, then consult somebody who does.  Download the dreams from the website, go to someone who can understand them and ask this person to explain them to you.  This way you will gain two benefits: you will have participated and you will have encouraged someone else to participate; so anyone who did not understand the first time, might very well have benefited us more than someone who did.  The Prophet (SAWS) said, “He who reads Qur’an with difficulty will receive two rewards, one because he read and the other because he had to exert effort to do so.”  In a way, we are doing the same.  The revival issue is not an easy one, it is tough, and requires great effort.  Let me give you another idea: go to a university professor or any expert, pretending that you do not understand, and ask for his help.  That way you will gain his participation.

Al-Hassan and al-Hussein, when they saw an old man making Wudu (ablution; getting washed to prepare for prayers) improperly, wanted to teach him.  They went to him and pretended to have a disagreement over who was the better of the two at making Wudu. Al-Hassan started and made Wudu well.  Then al-Hussein made Wudu well too.  The man said, “Both of you make Wudu better than the other, and I have learnt from you what I did not know.”

We want you to do as they did, and to do the opposite too.  I say this to the experts, such as university professors, teachers and scientists: why don't you try to help the youth? Visit the website with them and explain these suggestions to them.  Also, I say this to educated parents: why don't you help your children? The Prophet (SAWS) once ascended the minbar (where the Imam stands to preach), red faced and said, “O people! Why are those whom Allah gave understanding and knowledge hiding (this knowledge) from other people? Let them stop or Allah shall torture them; let them teach people or Allah shall torture them.”  Then he raised his voice and said Allah's saying which can be translated as, “Make it (the news of the revelation of Prophet Muhammad and the religious knowledge) known and clear to mankind, and don’t hide it.”  (TMQ, 3:187)[2].  Then he descended the minbar, avoided looking at anybody or talking to anybody and went home.  People kept asking about whom Allah’s apostle was referring to.  al-Ashaera' said, “He means us, we have the most knowledge.” They went to the Prophet (SAWS) and told him, “Messenger of Allah, it seems you meant us.” He replied, ‘O people! Teach others what Allah has given you from knowledge and gifts or else Allah shall torture you.” Then he left them.  Have we seen how this issue was important for the Prophet (SAWS)?

Which revival in history was achieved without effort, giving and sacrifice? Are we unable to do the simple task of reading suggestions and voting for them? University education in some countries is chosen by making certain selections, where students are offered the faculties and they have to arrange them according to their wishes.  The student start to ask others and exert a conscious effort for the sake of his future; most of us have been through this.  I myself have experienced it.  We are asking you the same thing; we want you to choose the best for our countries.  Give your opinion of the dreams for your country.  Why do we only bother to exert an effort on the personal level?

Third reason: We do not care about our countries' affairs.

I asked a young man, “Have you participated in voting?” His answer was no.  I asked, “Why?” He replied, “It is not our responsibility; it is the responsibility of the government. They are the ones who organize education, health, and everything for us.”  Then I asked him, “What are your interests?” He replied that he was only interested in his personal problems.  The Prophet (SAWS) said, “The wolf eats the stray lamb, and the wolf of humans is Satan.” Abdullah Ibn-Mas’ood once said, “When I am in Iraq and I hear that a cloud has rained in Yemen, I pray to thank Allah that my brothers in Yemen can drink water.” See how the Companions shared their worries?

The Fourth Reason: Our ability to make national decisions is poor.

This reason lends itself to fear.  I can make a decision on the personal level, but on the public level, I cannot.  I want to say something and I am sorry for saying it.  I wish I did not have to say it.  It is very tough but I am obliged to do so.  A long time ago, the Ancient Greeks used to go to a large area and vote on certain decisions, but not everyone was allowed into that space.  Women and slaves were prohibited from entering that area because, according to the Greeks, they were not fit to participate.  Only masters were allowed to decide.  Does anyone understand what I am saying? Can anybody accept that they are not worthy of participating? Participation means freedom, especially for women. You should participate, and feel that you can make your own decisions. If you do not understand, ask for assistance.

Last Reason: Many of us do not know how to use the Internet.

Many of us cannot use the Internet, or don't have access to the Internet.  Let me surprise you, learning to use the Internet has almost become a religious duty, and not only for our program.  If someone travels to a Western country to practice Da’wa (inviting non-Muslims to Islam), and he does not know any foreign language, will he succeed? The language of the world in the years to come will be the Internet.  It is the language of communication between the countries of the world.  If we really want to invite the whole world to Islam, how can we communicate with them? I repeat; learning to use the Internet has become a religious duty.

How did the Messenger of Allah (SAWS) convey what he wanted so that it reaches us in Hijjat al-Wada' (the farewell pilgrimage)? Those who listened to him were a hundred thousand.  How did his message in that pilgrimage reach us? By people spreading the message.  Look at what he says, “May Allah brighten the face of a man who heard what I said, understood it and conveyed it as he heard it, where a person who heard the message second hand may be better than one who heard it from me.”  This means that you might tell somebody about something you heard and he might benefit from it and act on it more effectively than if he had heard it himself.  He may be the one the Prophet (SAWS) meant in the last clause of the Hadith. 

At the end of this episode, I am asking you to download the suggestions from the website and distribute them among various people.  Each one who now hears me (or reads the episode) is responsible before Allah (SWT) on the Day of Judgment to convey these words.  Each one of you should spread these dreams to between twenty and fifty other people.

We want to be like al-Tofeil Ibn Omar al-Daussy, a Companion of the Prophet (SAWS). The Prophet (SAWS) asked him not to stay beside him, but to return to his people and convey the message of Islam to them, so he traveled and stayed there for five years, informing his people about Islam, but they refused to listen.  The message was hard to accept.  He returned to Allah’s apostle, who raised his hands to Allah and said, “O Allah! Help him and guide Dauss (the name of the tribe).  Go Tofeil and convey the message of Islam.” He returned to Madinah after ten years, at the head of a large tribe; as they approached Madinah, they created a huge cloud of dust that covered the whole of the city.  He said, “Dauss has announced their Islam, O Messenger of Allah.”

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