main points of todays sermon 26/12/08

alhamdulillah wa sallaallahu ala muhammad

Today the khateeb, may Allah have preserve him, spoke mainly about the issue of the christmas and what it is and what it means to muslims. As most of us know christmas is not part of christianity and certainly not part of islam, rather it is a pagan festival modified by the christian movement in order to ease the pagans into christianity, there is many researches, by non muslims, about this issue so i don't need to go into details here.

In the second part the khateeb, may Allah bless him, mentioned firstly about the ruling of celebrating and congratulating non muslims on their festival days and then mentioned other innovated acts practiced these days.
The khateeb quoted several scholars including imam ibnul qayyim who said: "Congratulating the disbelievers on the rituals that belong only to them is forbidden by consensus(ijma'), as is congratulating them on their festivals and fasts by saying ‘A happy festival to you’ or ‘May you enjoy your festival,’ and so on. If the one who says this has been saved from disbelief, it is still forbidden. It is like congratulating someone for prostrating to the cross, or even worse than that. It is as great a sin as congratulating someone for drinking wine, or murdering someone, or having illicit sexual relations (outside marriage), and so on. Many of those who have no respect for their religion fall into this error; they do not realize the offensiveness of their actions. Whoever congratulates a person for his disobedience or bid’ah or kufr exposes himself to the wrath and anger of Allaah."

many more similar statements were made by scholars to the same effect, for more detail on these rulings you can visit sheikh saleh al-munajids website with the following links:
http://www.islamqa.com/en/ref/947
http://www.islamqa.com/en/cat/148/ref/islamqa/1130
http://www.islamqa.com/en/cat/148/ref/islamqa/11427

As for other innovated acts these include birthdays and saints feast days, the prophet SAWS instructed us on two yearly festivals, eid al fitr and eid al adha, and the weekly (lesser) eid which is jumaah (friday), and he SAWS never celebrated a persons birthday and in fact warned us in authentic narrations to not exaggerate his status as the christians did with prophet jesus peace be upon him, such innovated festivals are useless and forbidden whether it has a good intention or not as the prophet SAWS said said: “Whoever does something that is a not part of this matter of ours (Islam) will have it rejected”.

So the khutbah was alhamdulillah a timely reminder about these issues which certainly we see a lot of in the ummah and we ask Allah, Al Hadiy, to guide the ummah back to the straight way, reestablish the khilafat and assist those who are striving for that in every vocation.

Subhanaka rabbana wa bihamdika ashhadu anlaa ilaha illa allah astaghfiruka wa atoobu ilayka.