ISLAM IS SUBMISSION TO THE WILL OF GOD
The purpose of this lecture is to try to understand on a more clear and profound level the concept of service in Islam as concerns the total agenda for life. Islam means submission to the will of God. That is the purpose of life.
FALSE IDEAS IN THE U.S.
Now in order to understand this, you need to filter out a huge amount of red white and blue garbage that the U.S. education system put in your head. Let's just repeat that again. The purpose of life is service of God. The purpose of life is not the pursuit of happiness. No, it is not, which is a completely nonsensical term that you can race around and somehow find happiness. Happiness pursued in the minds of every great philosopher can never be attained and the only reason the pursuit of happiness was put into America's ridiculous Declaration of Independence was a substitute for the right to property, which would've created major problems in terms of exploiting Blacks and Native Americans. So this is certainly not a very happy heritage.
So the role of people here is to serve the Almighty no matter what.
HOW TO EXPLAIN THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING?
Now in all religions, there's always a dialectic of how do you explain the fact that so many good people have so many disasters occur to them? A classic example would be 1258, one of the greatest disasters in the history of Islam where the Mongols led by a Christian general destroyed the center of Islamic civilization, Baghdad, and massacred almost all the inhabitants. So as well as ruining the lives of whoever survived and so on...and we could go on and on...there were all sorts of disasters where millions upon millions upon millions of people had their lives ruined.
So how do you justify that? You need to step back a bit and look at the big picture. The world is of no significance to the Almighty. It's not, except in so far as people on this planet serve the Almighty and ultimately at the end of the day,existence goes on for millions of years. The Quran very specifically points out that the what's coming is a million times better than what's here. However, we're not saying that life here is just endless misery and that's that, but you're going to get pie-in-the-sky at the end. The Quran and most religions point out that God can communicate with people. He can give people a sense of purpose and he can alleviate suffering. He can create miracles in so far as people step forward, but the main goal here is to serve. That is the end product, not just to have unlimited sex, not to have unlimited money, so on and so forth.
RULES IN ISLAM FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE
And there's an agenda for what needs to get done. There's a social agenda in Islam in terms of wealth and poverty. There's an ethical agenda as to how people behave in dealing with each other.
Now we're not going to discuss in this lecture the interpretations of issues of how women are treated in Islam. That's a subject for another lecture. When Islam began in the seventh century and expended, Islam was in many ways a force of liberation for women, and a force of liberation in terms of tolerance for other religions in place of the nightmare of Christianity. So that was a step forward and we would simply point to many Islamic countries today, where women's rights are being expanded and respected. There are even changes in Saudi Arabia. So that should not be an issue in terms of people not respecting Islam.
DUTY AND SERVICE
But let's get back to the main point, that you are here to serve. Now it's like being a soldier in a war. You remain at your post. There you may be fighting a war for your entire life that seems to produce no results. Again, you are not the ultimate judge of reality. That doesn't mean you should mindlessly stick to a miserable life or mindlessly stick to something that's failing. Again, you're supposed to have a brain. You're expected to use it. Just not fatalistically. However, it's important to understand that you've got to filter out of your head all this red, white and blue nonsense of hasty cake salvation and hasty cake religion. This is a marathon. It is not a sprint and history is a process of thousands of years, and you're just a small process part of that, but it's a worthwhile part of that in so far as the Quran very specifically states that God is merciful and will reward you and will be aware of your sacrifices. But unfortunately, people have in their minds some kind of modern media imposed view of what life is supposed to be like—that it's supposed to be some quick fix and instantly your life is changed and everything gets better and so on.
THE DISCIPLINE TO PERSEVERE
In reality, life is a long-term struggle and great movements of change are are created by people who have the discipline to persevere. These movements are not created by people who joined the movement and expected some result in six months and then got disillusioned and quit. It's years. It's often a lifetime of work of millions of people that finally created enormous levels of change. And this was certainly the case with the Islamic revolution, the greatest religious revolution in history that came from one man inspired by the Almighty coming out of the desert, and within 200 years, had created an empire stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the snows of the Himalayas. And it wasn't just an empire, or a military empire, it was an empire of belief, it was an empire of ideas, it was an empire of faith.
INNER PEACE
So as you go forward you have to live a life where you communicate with God. That is the importance of prayer that helps you make decisions and the Quran does help people have an inner peace and emotional ability to accept unacceptable events. And as we look forward in world history, this is going to become more and more necessary because the people running things don't know what the hell they're doing today and you really don't have to be a great expert to see that what they've building is going to end in disaster. It's not going to work. So you have to have the right kind of philosophy to deal with this.
POWER THROUGH PERSEVERANCE
It is possible that Islam reaching its destiny could be a huge positive force in the world and this needs to be developed. But in conclusion, you must understand you are not the star of the show. You are just a small part under the control of the Almighty. You look up on a night where there is no moon and the truth is often hard to see in the darkness, but your eyes will adjust and you'll see millions and billions of stars over your head. That's the real world. You're just a very small part of this. Your value is connected to your service in the Almighty. It's not for you to judge. He is the judge. You are not. You serve and you may spend your whole lifetime serving and in your eyes what you're doing might not seem to be doing a whole lot, however you just need to emphasize over and over again that it's the willingness to hold your position and to keep doing what you're supposed to do that's the real world. That's what produces change in people. The willingness to make that commitment to create change.