In many of our Salaah, we are encouraged to recite Surah Kaafiroon in the first Rakaat and Surah Ikhlaas in the second Rakaat. Surah Kaafiroon refers to the Kuffar, I got nothing to do with them and I am totally cut off from them. Surah Ikhlaas indicates that you attach yourself totally and only to Allah Ta’ala and Allah related people. Such a person gains salvation.

In the world, whether it be Palestine, Iraq or anywhere else, wherever Muslims had mixed excessively with non-Muslims, they forgot their identity and adopted all their un-Islamic concepts. In Malawi, one of our students opened a Madrasah and out of forty students, thirty five of them said that there were three gods. This is the indoctrination because of mixing with the Christians. In Zambia,  a lot of work take place such as distributing Zakaat to the poor and needy. I asked them, what is your criterion? How do you know who are the correct recipients of Zakaat? They replied, “We check their Aqaaid (beliefs) as well.” Many of them between the ages of thirty and fifty years are desperately in need of food, but when we question them they say, “Jesus is the son of god, but they claim to be Muslims and they perform Salaah as well.” In our country, the locals that become Muslims practice Islam, but they worship their ancestors as they believe that their ancestors got control over their lives. They believe that you cannot displease the ancestors and if you do so, you will experience various problems which is also regarded as Shirk.

What is the condition of their Imaan? This is “Zindiqiyyah”, they are performing Salaah, practising according to Islam, but they believe in three gods. This is the adverse effect of contact with non-Muslims, if we have to do business etc. with the non-Muslims we should transact with them, but we must remove the evil effects from us. For example, in our schools today, the West has kidnapped the minds of our children and we haven’t even realised it. We have started thinking like them and we have started doubting our Islamic values. How many of us regard capital punishment as barbaric? We have lost focus on our Islamic values and our thinking has changed.

What is the object of the matric certificate? In the year 1992 or 1994, a seminar was held by the government to reassess our education system and a question arose, why should we teach Shakespeare to the children if they want to study law or medicine, whereas everything is in modern English? In the past Latin was taught at school but it was taken out of the education system. Everything is in modern English today. So, if you want to become a lawyer or doctor, why do you need old Victorian English of Shakespeare? Their answer was, when we give a child a matric certificate, we want to be satisfied that they have developed a modern, western, Christian mind-set. In order to achieve this they have nothing else besides Shakespeare. You are studying literature, but you are being indoctrinated and you don’t even realise it. So when we get seven distinctions, etc. and we proud of this achievement, then in other words, we are proud that we have a very strong, modern, Christian, western, mind, and the effect of this is such that we will not be able to erase it. You will have to scrub out the effect of their way of thinking and re-instil pure Islamic values.

How to get one’s Islamic identity back?

How to remove this effect? One has to go to the Darul-Ulooms, in Jamaat, to get it back to a certain extent. If a person is regular at the Khanqah with a true Allah Wala, who has the correct Islamic values, then you will get it from him, else if death strikes whilst we have a little bit of that western dirt in our heart and mind, then it can be very dangerous for us.