The purpose of Islam is to solve the problems of this world in a way that gives us success in this world and the next. I want to emphasize this because often we fall into the either/or trap when it comes to the practice of Islam. Not surprising because we have all been raised in a climate of ‘Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's’ which the Bible quotes as the response that Jesus gave to the people who were trying to trick him into forbidding the Jews from paying taxes to the Roman government. They would then have used this to implicate and condemn him to Pontius Pilate who was the Roman tax collector for Judea. I mention this not because of taxes, which we Muslims must pay but to point out that this later became the spirit in which the separation of the ‘church and state’ happened in Europe and globally. This is completely antithetical to Islam. Unfortunately, historically our own Ulama, have also taken this either/or stance, expressed as Deen or Dunya. The reality is that Deen is not the opposite of Dunya but the way of living in the Dunya. Deen gives us the criteria for making decisions in our lives, which are in Dunya. If we didn’t have the freedom to choose, there would be no need for guidance about the consequences of choices. Living Islam is about making the right choices, and the framework to do that is Deen. Allah didn’t send us into the Dunya to leave it but to live in it according to Deen and to help others to find solutions to societal problems. Leaving the Dunya is a non-Muslim concept and practice of extreme asceticism that was the way of Christian monks and Hindu sanyasis. There is no monastic life (Ruhbaniya) in Islam.

Muslims came to demonstrate the Islamic way that makes people winners. As long as we did that, we had moral authority and Allah gave us power. When we stopped being demonstrators and became imitators, we lost our moral authority and Allah took away our power. Today we have voluntarily restricted Islam to some areas of worship, some selective application of the Shari’ah and have taken to the ways of others blindly. We are not even intelligent enough to see that those people themselves are intensely unhappy in their ways because those ways have destroyed their societies. We condemn their ways, but we imitate them and then we are surprised that nobody respects us.

The Muslim Ummah today is like a ship caught in a storm. Battered from all sides by hurricane strength winds trying to throw the ship on the rocks while the ship itself, its sails tattered, is leaking badly. In such a situation, if we want to remain afloat, we must ensure that we do three things:

Be aware of our strengths and weaknesses.Understand the nature of the threat and how to overcome it.Demonstrate the way to overcome the challenge and succeed.

Ultimately it is execution that means everything. Knowing the way is not enough to reach the destination. We must walk on that path to the end. Remember that people listen with their eyes. They don’t care what we say until they see what we do. Today the world demands that we demonstrate Islam, or we stop talking about it. It is literally put up or shut up. It’s our call.

I want to begin therefore with a SWOT Analysis of the Muslim Ummah.

Strengths

Faith in Allah and the Aakhira which gives us enormous resilience and the ability to recover from personal disaster.Growing awareness and confidence especially among the youth to learn, practice and become exemplars of the Islamic model.Growing awareness of the gulf between Ulama and the general Muslim public which has difficulty applying Islamic knowledge in their lives, but unfortunately the Ulama are unable to guide them adequately.

Weaknesses

Muslims are ignorant about Islam, superstitious, and sectarian. Education methodology in Islamic schools, has no focus on application in real life. Ulama are slow (or no) to respond to emerging challenges.