Friday Khotba between past and present by Hossam Badrawi

Friday sermon between past and present
By
Hossam Badrawi
I asked myself about the most important messages that Muslims in Egypt hear that build the conscience and slowly and gradually affect the subconscious mind, and I found that the Friday sermon is the most important and most common..
With a simple calculation, I found that according to the statement of the Minister of Endowments, Egypt has more than 140 thousand mosques, and considering that the year contains 52 weeks, Egyptians listen to more than 7 million Friday sermons annually!!!
What are the topics of the sermons, and what are their apparent and hidden messages and their content that certainly affects the Egyptian conscience.
More importantly, who is delivering the sermons and the degree of his education and his belief in the knowledge that is renewed day after day.
The Friday preacher is like the teacher who leaves 29 million students and pupils, who are the most important wealth of society, to take his concepts and convictions and his ideas become entrenched in their conscience.
I have repeatedly talked about the teacher and his importance, and about preparing him and raising his status to be qualified for the most important job in the nation, and this is not the subject of this article, but I found that the leaders of the mosques are also teachers and they should be viewed from this perspective.

Again, do not be surprised by the statistics, more than 7 million Friday sermons are listened to annually..

I researched the origin and history of Friday sermons and found that the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, used to pray the Friday prayer before the sermon like the two Eids, until one Friday and the Prophet was giving the sermon after the Friday prayer ended, and a man entered and said: Dihya bin Khalifa has come with a trade, and when Dihya came, his family would meet him with tambourines, and with him was trade and goods, so the people went out and did not think except that there was nothing wrong with leaving the sermon, so Allah Almighty revealed: “And when they see a trade or amusement, they disperse to it and leave you standing.”

After that, the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, gave the sermon and ended the prayer. Narrated by Abu Dawood.

I was surprised that we only have the text of the Farewell Sermon, although the Messenger used to address people every Friday, meaning that he delivered more than five hundred sermons in the last ten years of his life. Why were his sermons not documented??? More than 200 years after his death, someone came to collect his personal hadiths, not the general ones that fill most Friday sermons today. Rather, these hadiths became a source of rulings in life.

The question of not collecting the sermons of the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, and its relationship to collecting hadiths highlights fundamental differences in Islamic history related to preserving texts, the circumstances of documentation, and the priorities of collection in the eras of Islam.
The sermons of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, whether Friday sermons or others, were of a guiding and general nature, delivered in a group context before Muslims. Their primary goal was to preach and teach directly, and logic dictated that documenting them would have been agreed upon.
These sermons did not receive the same documentary attention, although they were delivered publicly in front of a large audience, and it was assumed that their content was preserved in the collective memory and not the private memory.

The Rightly-Guided Caliphs, especially Abu Bakr and Omar, were cautious about collecting hadiths extensively out of respect for his saying according to the hadith reported in Sahih Muslim on the authority of Abu Saeed Al-Khudri when he said, peace and blessings be upon him: (Do not write from me, and whoever writes from me other than the Qur’an should erase it.)

It was said that the Friday sermon requires that it be delivered by the imam himself, and after that it was said that the imam and whoever deputizes for him by his command, and with the passage of time and the expansion of geography, the one who delivers the sermon became the one appointed by the governor.

The next question is: Is the sermon a condition for the convening of Friday prayers and is it not valid without it? This is the opinion of most scholars. However, Imam Al-Hassan said: It is recommended and not obligatory for the validity of the prayer.

This is not my issue, as its existence means the ability to influence people negatively or positively, according to its message and content.
In my experience, I found in the twenty-first century that most Friday sermons, if not all, talk about the past and stories and narratives that the listener cannot verify their truth, and often I get angry at unbelievable stories and myths that establish superstition in people’s minds, and in not a few cases, there is an implicit fanaticism towards women, and the consolidation of ideas that every non-Muslim among the eight billion people will go to hell and have a miserable fate, even if he benefits humanity and is characterized by good morals, and supplication and asking for forgiveness is only valid for Muslims.

And if there are instructions, the sermon ends with supplication for the ruler and following him and obeying him.

All mosque preachers now receive a wage for their work, so in reality, even if they are people of knowledge and trust, receiving a wage makes them employees and in my humble opinion it takes away from the philosophy and value of the sermon, which should be from the imam or the most knowledgeable person, which is not happening now.
I follow the advanced initiative launched by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to purify and document the hadiths of the Prophet under the supervision of the King Salman Complex for the Noble Prophetic Hadith. This project aims to collect authentic hadiths, classify them, and purify them from weak and fabricated hadiths, taking advantage of the latest technologies. The complex was established by order of King Salman in 2017 and is headquartered in Medina.

The complex works to enhance the understanding of the Sunnah of the Prophet by organizing conferences, issuing specialized scientific journals, and developing modern scientific tools and methods. The project aims to confront skepticism and religious extremism by using only authentic hadiths. It also focuses on using technology to document hadiths and establishing specialized libraries to provide reliable sources for researchers in the hadiths of the Prophet.

These efforts represent a pioneering experience in providing an accurate scientific methodology in dealing with the Sunnah of the Prophet, taking into account the intellectual and cultural changes in the modern era.

I do not know whether Al-Azhar Al-Sharif, which is the beacon of Islam, has a similar initiative or not.
I return to the traditional Friday sermon and how we can make it more useful and enjoyable..
Everything is evolving, so why do we stand still in front of the Friday sermon!!

Friday sermon is part of people’s lives in any Islamic society, and although the general view of the Friday sermon in various countries of the Islamic world is that it is either a traditional sermon on matters that people know (although reminding them of them is a positive thing, of course), it is usually delivered in a cold manner that you see in the yawning and lazy movement of the attendees and some of them sleeping, or it is a purely political religious speech, where the preacher comes out angrily to the pulpit announcing his sharp positions through a religious speech in which he mixes political criticism with religious preaching and jurisprudential analysis, without references, which has made a number of countries in the Islamic world search for ways to control the Friday sermon.. But the Friday sermon could be a completely different matter if it was subjected to means of development, which is something I do not understand why it has remained in a rigid framework despite these years in which the art of training, public speaking and dealing with the public has advanced and technological means of presentation have advanced, and preachers have had to compete with the media that are working every day to develop themselves. Why is the sermon not interactive, and why are there no advanced technological means of presentation in the major mosques, and why not? For example, the references to the preacher’s speech are presented, and why Friday sermons do not address the foundations of quality assurance as in education, and various ideas that I see no reason not to discuss.

My intellectual structure depends on initiative and providing alternatives instead of complaining and waiting for solutions that often do not come.

I thought about the topics of Friday sermons and the means of presenting them, and I saw that it is possible to change the philosophy and talk to people about the affairs of their lives and their future instead of the past, stories and myths repeatedly, and I chose topics such as love, women’s rights, science, the creation of the universe, human values, and others, and I wrote a vision for Friday sermons using science and artificial intelligence that I harnessed to support the idea, and I took my reference from the Holy Quran, which is the origin of religion, and I will send it to the Minister of Endowments as a Muslim citizen passionate about science and building the future of his country.
Any reader who wants to read my experience and participate in knowledge, please send it to me on my Facebook page, where I publish my articles in my favorite newspaper “Al-Masry Al-Youm” every Wednesday.