As-Salamu ʿalaykum:

We should never sit and wait. He mentioned "pray" and this is the nass of the Qur'an and indeed what the Folk of the Prophetic Household did in time of difficulty, and what the Prophet ﷺ himself did during the persecution of the Muslims in Makka {wastaʿīnū bis-Sabri was-Salāh} "Avail yourself of help through steadfastness and prayer" {in tasbirū wa tattaqū yumdidkumullāh} "if only you remain steadfast and protect yourselves [against disobedience], Allah will send you aid". This is first.

Nor is the obligation of Jihad suspended anymore than that of the Pilgrimage. However, if a pre-condition of either no longer exists, such as - respectively - the Dawla [Islamic "state"] or road safety, then yes, it does become suspended until the pre-condition exists again.

As for the re-establishment of Khilafa it is not feasible in the present conditions because it requires factors which are beyond the Umma to muster in its present state. Our haphazard, undisciplined, and mutually aggressive behavior on this Forum confirms it.

We are so alienated from the sources that we cannot even recognize that Khilafa comes from the top down of the Umma, not from the grassroots. It is not a populist movement as the Khilafa movements clamor, but they will never admit it because it saps their ideological underpinnings and stuns their worldly designs.

Hujjat al-Islam Imam al-Ghazzali - mark him as one who had more Jihad and Khilafa in his little toe than the entire so-called Khilafa movement and its founders - said towards the end of al-Munqidh min al-Dalal ("Deliverance from Error"):

"When I saw that the faith of all the different kinds of people had reached such a low state of weakness because of these causes, and saw my soul entirely mobilised to discover the root causes of this defect, it became easier for me to expose all of them than to drink a sip of water due to my deep familiarity with their sciences and their paths - I mean the paths of the Sufis, the philosophers, the academics (al-taʿlīmiyya), and those who wear the outward signs of the Ulema.
I became convinced that this [weakness] was precisely the inevitable state of our times. What then could seclusion and isolation (al-khalwa wal-ʿuzla) avail you when the cancer has become so widespread that the physicians themselves are sick and humanity on the brink of destruction?
Then I said to myself:
When will you put yourself to work to try and remove this disaster and face down this huge darkness? But these are feeble times, a time for the rule of falsehood. If you tried to call people back from their false ways to truth, all of them will oppose you. How on earth are you going to fight them, and how on earth are you going to live with them at the same time? This can NEVER COME ABOUT EXCEPT WITH A PROPITIOUS TIME AND A PIOUS AND POWERFUL SULTāN."
Then he remained in khalwa until he saw signs of such a Sultan, at which time he came out and went to advise him.

Go - if you have courage and determination, and after you've cleansed your ego of the attributes of devils and worldly lures - find a strong, pious leader who will unite the word of the Muslims and re-establish Khilafa and the Jihad from the top down. And if you do not find one, then join a Jamaʿa of Muslims that are on Haqq, and do not attempt to say they don't exist - they certainly exist until Qiyāma and the mutawātir evidence rejects your denial. And if you still cannot find them - Allah guides whom He will - then bite upon the trunks of trees and chew on that until the Command of Allah comes. In any case, observe the Prophetic prescriptions that apply to our time without double-guessing them. Do not delude us and yourselves with bloody revolutionary dreams straight from the Western experience and painted over with an thin veneer of verses and hadiths.

Was-Salamu ʿala man ittabaʿa al-Huda.

Hajj Gibril

GF Haddad ©

Comments by NN:

Imam Ghazali, who was no doubt one of the biggest Muslim scholars and Sufi Awliya' in the entire Islamic history and one of the top thinkers in the entire recorded human history, was severely criticized by other contemporary and later scholars due to his failure to talk about Jihad in his Ihya', especially that he was living during the times of the Crusades. Please don't lose sight of the fact that no scholar is infallible. One has to look at the whole picture; Islam comes from the totality of the scholars, not from any single scholar no matter how big he may be. Not everything imam Nawawi said is representative of the Shafiʿi madhhab.

Whatever Imam Ghazali has meant here, it certainly does not refer to what you put in his mouth. The Abbasid Khalifa that existed when Imam Ghazali went into seclusion was the same Khalifa that existed when Imam Ghazali came out of the seclusion! -- namely al-Mustazhir-billah (487-512 A.H.)

57 of them are at the summit in Qatar now. Please name me one who fits the description of a Muslim, let alone a Khalifa! All of them are puppets who were intentionally left over by the old Colonialism to protect its interests.

Okay, great! What would the function of this jamaʿa be if it wouldn't be to make Islamic daʿwa in order to prepare the masses for the re-establishment of Khilafa?

(By the way, what is it exactly that you object to in what you termed "the Khilafa Movement"? I'm not a member of any group with such a name, but I certainly believe in the re-establishment of Khilafa!)

NN