My Search for Tazkiyah (Part 2)

This Changed the Course of Life

Allah guided me to an old acquaintance who had been studying Islam with Sheikh al-Albani and his students. When I went to the classes, I felt revived. It is like I found Allah again in my life! This was the beginning of a new journey. Deep down, I believe this is when my real life began!

Studying Islam

Studying Islam with teachers whose methodology is to follow the Quran and Sunnah according to the understanding of the early generations is the best thing that has ever happened to me. The freshness, authenticity, and pristine beauty of these studies, and the acquired clarity, bring the heart to life. The journey is redemptive and liberating.

Big shout out to my first teacher, Abu Suhaib!

Among the outstanding features of this journey is that you develop an appreciation for authenticity. You learn to look for the truth based on evidence, not impression or preference. You learn not to take matters at face value. You dig deep in search of the truth.

One of the biggest milestones in studying was learning Usul al-Fiqh. This was a game changer. It revolutionized my thinking and expanded my cognitive ability! It gave me tools to organize information and classify what I learned into meaningful structures.

Ibn Taymiyyah and His Student

Every now and then, I found myself gravitating to the writings of Ibn Taymiyyah and his loyal student, Ibn al-Qayyim. Their writings spoke to my deeply held fascination with human behaviour and its relation to Allah.

Ibn al-Qayyim’s words were mesmerising and resonated deeply, but I could not extract structure from them. They offered an experience, but I could not distill from them the patterns and frameworks I had become used to as a result of studying Usul al-Fiqh.

Ibn Taymiyyah seemed to provide structure. Even when he spoke about Aqeedah, he displayed a unique appreciation of human nature. Ibn Taymiyyah gave me the early structures I started to use to understand human behaviour.

During this period, I continued to read self-help and psychology books. I tried to draw comparisons, but I could not connect the content from these two schools coherently. It seemed as though Ibn Taymiyyah was speaking about something other than what self-help and psychology spoke about.

Becoming an Imam

At the age of 26, I travelled to the UK to take the position of Imam at a Masjid in South London, which had a lot of history. The responsibility was huge, but I fell in love with the community. I enjoyed serving the people and acting in the capacity of teaching and helping them in religious matters. However, I learned that I also needed time for myself. I needed time to reflect and learn. I needed time to grow! However, the sheer weight of work was overwhelming!

When internal politics, due to destructive dynamics that rigged the Salafi community in the UK and elsewhere, came into play, I came to realize I was not strong enough to handle such intensity. I didn’t know enough to deal with such challenges. I wasn’t mature enough to navigate the chaos! I also started to realize my understanding of human nature was not ripe enough to understand why people were behaving the way they did. I knew I had so much to learn.

I moved to another city. It was more peaceful, but I came to see how the position of Imam, as it is configured and applied today, has become a setup for self-sabotage; a real trap! Eventually, I left this position and decided the Imam position was not for me.

Huda TV

I moved back to Jordan and continued my journey of learning with my teachers. To survive, I took up the position of a journalist at a local newspaper. I then transitioned to supervising the English website of the al-Albani Center. This made me work more closely with my teachers.

A few months into the position, I got the opportunity to do a couple of TV shows for the then-new Huda TV. Abu Usamah Ath-Thahabi, may Allah reward him, put me in touch with the program manager. Eventually, I worked with Huda TV for about 3 years.

A New Challenge

Meanwhile, a friend approached me to put together a working model to help get Muslim youth off the streets in London. The request made me think of Aqeedah in a practical way for the first time. The challenge was to harness the dynamics of Islamic belief to produce a desired behaviour in other people. I had never thought of Aqeedah in such a manner. This was a challenge and an opportunity at the same time.

This was the first time I managed to couple the structure and practicality of self-help models with the study of Islamic Aqeedah. The research was interesting, and it opened new horizons.

Subsequently, the project was called off due to a lack of funding, but I ended up with something I had never seen before. This research grew into a model of behaviour, which I later called Faith-Based Intelligence. I worked on this research in both Arabic and English separately. Each track spoke to a different audience.

I taught this model in a few places and trained groups of students. The reception was overwhelmingly positive, and the results were encouraging. In 2010, I was invited to Canada by Abu Huraira Centre. I gave a series of long talks on the subject, and the attendance was generous. You can find the series on the Abu Huraira Centre YouTube channel.

Studying Leadership

I felt that my research had reached a fair level of development, and I started to notice practical and substantial changes in myself and friends with whom I shared this work. I wanted to investigate what a Western model of behavioural change had to offer so I could conduct a fair comparison. I signed up for a Master’s in Leading Innovation and Change in the UK.

This study gave me substantial exposure to the leadership and behavioural change literature. I immersed myself in scientific articles, books, and programs. A great deal of leadership research is done by psychologists and is generally conducted using psychological theories.

Naturally, I started trying different combinations of Faith-Based Intelligence research and Western models. This lasted for years, and I ventured into corporate leadership training. This helped put my ideas to the test.

This was the birth of Rashidoon as a project.

The Quest Continues…

In Arabic, I was running a separate track of research. I chose the title: “The Making of the Human Being in Islam.” It presented a model of human nature. It defined the nature of the heart, nafs, the soul, the mind, etc. It was based mainly on the works of Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn al-Qayyim while utilizing modern ways of structuring this knowledge into models, frameworks, and tools for implementation. The modern models spoke to the modern mind. That was their main function. By no means does this imply that the ideas of Ibn Taymiyyah were lacking in structure or merit.

Loneliness

In the circles I was familiar with, whether in the West or the Arab world, I couldn’t find anyone who shared the same areas of interest. It felt lonely, and I would often question whether this quest was just a fantasy of mine. I was concerned that my interest and thought process may have taken me into an area that had no value. I was deeply worried that I may have been the victim of self-deception.

If you couple this with the fact that I had to do away with any career prospects in order to continue this research, I had many moments when I seriously considered calling this project off and learning a new skillset to move into a different career. The pressure was tremendous! For many years, I had no source of income or a stable job. We lived through extreme circumstances, and it was heart-wrenching to see my children deprived of what other children took for granted. However, every time I attempted to take on a job or start a business, I had a deep sense of betrayal to my mission, even treason.

The quest for understanding human nature and how it was designed by Allah to worship Him was something I could not get off my mind. It was an obsession, and every time I put my focus on something else, I felt a deep sense of emptiness. I suffocated; I felt deep resentment towards myself for failing my family. Yet, I could not walk away from this obsession.

One of the longest stretches of me doing other work was when I worked as a researcher at the Senate House in Jordan. Every day, I suffered a level of pain I had not experienced before. I was losing myself every day. I felt I had sold myself and sacrificed my life for little value. The only thing that kept me going for six months was seeing that my family did not have to suffer from a lack of food or other necessities like they had in the previous few years.

In the last couple of months of my time in this job, I was so desperate to get out that I started cutting hours away from family time and sleep to try to get Rashidoon started as a project. I thought I could do the research, teach others, and support myself at the same time.

This is when I offered the first course by Rashidoon, which was called: Fully Engaged. It was about the inner experience in the Prayer.

The sales from the course didn’t even cover a third of the expenses. So, I ended up accepting an offer that I had turned down for years. I accepted a teaching position with Al-Kauthar Institute. For years, I didn’t like the concept of teaching intensive courses over the weekend. Knowledge takes time to settle so you can build on it subsequent layers of learning. To cram through a lot of information did not seem like education to me.

Out of necessity, I decided to do a few courses with Al-Kauthar Institute. Although it was not ideal, I am deeply grateful for the opportunity and for their support. They helped me transition from one of the darkest phases of my adult life.

Back to the Imam Position

Another organization I am grateful to is Abu Hurairah Centre in Toronto, Canada. I can’t thank them enough for their support and loyalty. They worked on getting me a work visa. I took the position of Imam since this was the only way I could get out of a financially challenging situation.

Financially, this was a big relief for me and for my family. The Imam’s position, as I mentioned before, is poorly understood these days, especially in the West.

Imams work under a huge load of desperate needs in the community. The tasks are many and thorough to the extent of being humanly impossible. I don’t intend to discuss this problem here. What concerns us in this conversation is that, under the brunt of such a demanding position, I had very little time or energy left for the family and no time left for research.

As configured in Muslim communities in the West, the Imam job consumes the Imam almost entirely. He spends his time putting out countless small fires. Nothing is left for strategic matters or for building something meaningful in the community. Imams can’t put their heads above water to notice anything other than the pressing, urgent issues community members struggle with.

A few years later, I shifted to working as a part-time Imam. This gave me a window of time to continue the research. It took me months to feel alive again. It took years to slowly break free from the narrow-mindedness that comes from being immersed all day in problems that are poorly conceptualized.

To Be Continued…

-Moutasem Al-Hameedy