Two hours before the Friday call to prayer, the mosque of Anas ibn Malik filled to capacity with worshippers. They were all Islamist students, some wearing Western clothes but most in Pakistani dress — a white or blue gallabiya that reached to just below the knees with trousers of the same color beneath it and on their heads a white turban whose tail dangled at the back of the neck. These were all devotees and followers of Sheikh Muhammad Shakir and they came to the mosque early on Fridays to reserve their places before the crowd came and pass the time making acquaintances, reciting the Qur’an, and engaging in religious discussions. Their numbers grew until the place became too small to hold them all and the mosque officials brought out dozens of mats and spread them in the square opposite the mosque. This too filled to capacity with worshippers so that the traffic was brought to a standstill; even the enclosed balcony of the mosque, which was reserved for female students, despite being hidden from sight was the source of a loud murmuring that indicated that it was filled to overflowing as well.
Someone turned on the mosque’s loudspeaker and it emitted a loud squeal; then the sound cleared and one of the students started to chant the Qur’an in a sweet, submissive voice, the students listening to him with rapt attention. The atmosphere was fabulous, authentic, and pure, the ascetic, homespun, primitive scene bringing to mind the first days of Islam. Suddenly, shouts of “There is no god but God” and “God is most great” rang out and the students, rising, crowded one another to shake the hand of Sheikh Shakir, who had finally arrived. He was about fifty and stocky, with a sparse beard dyed with henna, a face not without certain good looks, and wide, impressive, honey-colored eyes. He was dressed in the Islamist fashion like the students, with a black shawl over his robes. He knew most of the students crowding around him, and shook their hands and embraced them, asking them how they were. It took a long time for him to mount the pulpit and take from his pocket a siwak, with which he purified and sweetened his teeth. Then he said, “In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate,” and the cries of “God is most great” redoubled in strength until the walls of the mosque shook. The sheikh made a gesture with his hand and immediately complete silence reigned.
Starting his sermon with praise and thanks to God, he continued, “Beloved sons and daughters, I want every one of you to ask himself this question: ‘How many years does a man live on this earth?’ The answer is that the average lifespan, at the best estimate, does not exceed seventy years. This, when we come to think about it, is a very short time indeed. Moreover, a man may be afflicted at any moment with a disease or by an accident and die. If you ask among your acquaintances and friends, you will find more than one who has died suddenly while young, and it would never have occurred to any of those who died young that they would die. Pursuing this line of thinking, we find that Man has two choices before him, no more. He may focus all his efforts on his life in this fleeting, brief world that may come to an unexpected end at any moment, in which case he is like the man who wants to build himself a luxurious, elegant house but makes it of sand, on the seashore, so that the house is exposed to the possibility that at any moment a wave may come and knock it down; this is the choice that is doomed to failure. As for the second choice, that to which our Lord, Almighty and Glorious, calls us, it requires that the Muslim live in this world from the perspective that it is a brief and passing stage in the life of the immortal soul. One who lives their life in this way will gain both this world and the next and be always happy, content in mind and conscience, and courageous, fearing none but our Lord, Almighty and Glorious. The true believer has no fear of death because he does not consider it the end of existence, as the materialists believe it to be. Death for the believer is the transition of the soul from the ephemeral body to everlasting life. It was this sincere faith that allowed a few thousand of the first Muslims to be victorious over the armies of the great empires of that time, such as Persia and Byzantium. Those simple Muslims were successful in raising the banner of Islam in every part of the world through the strength of their faith, their true love for death in God’s cause, and their deep contempt for the evanescent pleasures of this world. God has made it incumbent upon us to struggle to raise high His word. Gihad is a pillar of Islam, exactly like prayer and fasting. Indeed, gihad is the most important of those pillars but the corrupt rulers dedicated to the pursuit of money and the pleasures of the flesh who have ruled the Islamic world in times of decadence have attempted, with the help of their hypocritical men of religion, to exclude gihad from the pillars of Islam, knowing that if the people cleaved fast to gihad, it would in the end be turned against them and cost them their thrones. In this way, by eliminating gihad, Islam was robbed of its real meaning and our great religion was transformed into a collection of meaningless rituals that the Muslims performed like athletic exercises, mere physical movements without spiritual significance. When the Muslims abandoned gihad, they became slaves to this world, clinging to it, shy of death, cowards. Thus their enemies prevailed over them and God condemned them to defeat, backwardness, and poverty, because they had broken their trust with Him, the Almighty and Glorious.
“Beloved sons and daughters, our rulers claim that they are applying the Law of Islam and assert at the same time that they are governing us by democracy. God knows they are liars in both. Islamic law is ignored in our unhappy country and we are governed according to French secular law, which permits drunkenness, fornication, and perversion so long as it is by mutual consent. The state itself in fact benefits from gambling and the sale of alcohol, then spews out its ill-gotten gains in the form of salaries for the Muslims, who as a result are cursed with the curse of what is forbidden and God expunges His blessings from their life. The supposedly democratic state is based on the rigging of elections and the detention and torture of innocent people so that the ruling clique can remain on their thrones forever. They lie and lie and lie, and they want us to believe their revolting lies. We say to them, loud and clear, ‘We do not want our Islamic Nation to be either socialist or democratic. We want it Islamic-Islamic, and we will struggle and give up our lives and all we hold dear till Egypt is Islamic once more.’ Islam and democracy are opposites and can never meet. How can water meet with fire, or light with darkness? Democracy means people ruling themselves by themselves. Islam knows only God’s rule. They want to submit God’s Law to the People’s Assembly so that the honorable representatives may decide whether God’s Law is worthy of application or not! A monstrous word it is, issuing from their mouths; they say nothing but a lie. The Law of the Truth, Glorious and Sublime, is not to be discussed or scrutinized; it is to be obeyed and implemented immediately, by force, unhappy as that may make some people. Come, my children, let us prepare our hearts to receive God’s presence, and while we are in this blessed congregation of ours, let us contract with Him, Great and Glorious, to be faithful to Him in our religion, struggle for His cause with every atom of our beings, give our lives gladly until it is God’s word that is supreme… ”
Shouts and cries of “God is most great!” arose, shaking the place to its foundations, and the sheikh stopped speaking and bowed his head for a short while till silence had returned. Then he resumed, “My children, the task before Muslim youth today is to reclaim the concept of gihad and bring it back to the minds and hearts of the Muslims. It is precisely this that terrifies America and Israel and with them our traitorous rulers. They tremble in fear at the great Islamic Awakening that gains greater momentum and whose power becomes more exigent in our country day by day. A handful of warriors from Hizbollah and Hamas were able to defeat Almighty America and Invincible Israel, while Abd el Nasser’s huge armies were routed because they fought for this world and forgot their religion.”