Full Lecture Transcript (Cleaned)
The Question — 0:00
The question is: are we allowed to live in a non-Muslim country, especially one that does not follow Muslim laws but follows another religion's laws?
The Cultural Baggage Around This Issue — 0:20
Once again we go back — and dear brothers and sisters, I do need to go into some detail here. The majority of American Muslims are children of immigrants. We need to understand that the Islam we were taught was influenced by the culture of the people from the lands they came from, whether it was Egypt, India, or Pakistan.
Back in the 60s and 70s, when those people came to America, their local scholars would say: "For Allah's sake, you're going to America? How can you go there?" And they began thinking they were not allowed to be here. But when you look at the Quran and Sunnah, you don't actually see these types of cultural understandings.
The Hadith About the Man With His Non-Muslim People — 1:00
In fact, there is an authentic hadith in the books of hadith about a man from a far-away tribe who converted to Islam. His whole tribe was not Muslim and he was the only Muslim among them. Somebody passed through the tribe and said to him: "Your Islam is not valid because you are living amongst the kuffar." He was so worried that he traveled all the way to Madinah.
He said: "O Messenger of Allah, somebody came to me and said my Islam is not valid unless I leave my people — who are not Muslim — and go live among people who are Muslim."
And our Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) said: "O so-and-so — establish the prayer, give the zakat, and live with your people wherever they are."
From this we can explicitly derive that as long as a Muslim is not forced to commit shirk and is able to practice the rituals of the faith, it is permissible for them to live wherever they are. As for temptations — they are everywhere. Do you really think there are going to be no temptations back home? Temptations are a part of life. As long as you are not forced to compromise your values, it is permissible for you to live there. Whether you choose to live there or not is up to you — you are free to weigh the pros and cons of where you want to live.
Dar al-Islam No Longer Exists — 3:00
Also, by the way, there is no dar al-Islam anymore. Dar al-Islam means that if you are a Muslim, you automatically have citizenship in that land — that if there were a theoretical caliphate somewhere, the fact of being a Muslim automatically entitles you to go there and say, "I am a Muslim; I belong here." There is no country in the world like that today. We have Muslim-majority countries, but no country is actually governing by the laws of Islam in any meaningful sense.
In reality, the system that our books discussed for a millennium no longer exists. We live in a nation-state world, a post-khilafah world. Because of this, we do need to rethink through some rulings that were formulated many centuries ago based on that framework.
The Modern Scholarly Position — 3:30
Therefore, in our times, the vast majority of scholars who understand the modern dynamics we live in say that a Muslim may live wherever they have the freedom to practice their religion. This is similar to how the Muslims at the time of Makkah migrated to Abyssinia, even though it was a land of Christians. The Prophet (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) said of it that in it is a king who will allow you to worship Allah. Notice that is the condition right there: there must be freedom to worship Allah.
You should not be persecuted for being a Muslim. If you cannot pray, cannot fast, and are forced to worship false gods, then if you are able to migrate, you must migrate. If you cannot migrate in that situation, you are forgiven. But if we have the freedoms that we do in America — then we thank Allah for those freedoms, and we have every right to live here if we choose to do so.