The story did not end!

After I finished relating the story, a Moroccan youth who attended the lecture called his mother and told her the story over the phone. The mother cried and said to the youth, “Your paternal uncle, Hasan, had entertained a German man around twenty years ago. Perhaps it is the man mentioned in the story.”

The youth talked to his uncle, who said this is exactly what happened. He told his nephew, “Can you ask about the year in which the story took place?”

I asked Dr. Khalifah about the year, and he said it was 1981. This was the same answer of the Moroccan uncle, Hasan.

Interestingly, the Moroccan Hasan is an ordinary, uneducated man, who is a smoker, and who is neither a preacher nor a sheikh. When he was informed of the story, he said, “Well, this is high time for sincere repentance and true return [to the right path].”

Lessons to learn

This wonderful story, though strange, contains highly important lessons:

1. The most important means to introduce Islam to people and to call them to it, and to change the negative image about it, is morals and practical behavior.

A European views Islam through the conduct and morals of the Muslims in the West. And truthful indeed was Shaykh-ul-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah when he said that the Companions moved the nations towards Islam and did not convey Islam to the nations. That happened through their good conduct and honesty in trade. So, they did not convey Islam through translated books, lectures or conferences.

Malcolm X and the Transforming Power of Hajj

2. One should not belittle his own good deeds, for such deeds may be an unforeseen reason for another person’s guidance to Islam.

3. The intuitive Islamic behavior of the Moroccan Hasan towards the German Hasan was a reason behind the latter’s guidance to Islam, without the former’s realizing it. Many times, the opposite occurs, with a Muslim, through bad conducts or negative trait rejected in Islam, unknowingly repelling people from the Way of Allah and driving them away from Islam, and in such a way, that Muslim becomes a factor of alienating the disbelievers.

4. This story, as well as other similar stories, represents the most eloquent counterargument to those who issue Fatwas for the European Muslims claiming that it is obligatory for them to leave the non-Muslim lands and return to Muslim countries. For, Islamic presence in the West constitutes a major gate for the introduction of Islam and for repairing the negative image about it in the minds of non-Muslims.

5. We can benefit from tourism in our Arab and Islamic world by introducing Islam to the tourists, so as to maintain cultural communication and remove the gaps among nations and peoples that have produced by the media over history.

I ask Almighty Allah to gather us with the two “Hasans” in Paradise, and to make us guides to the bewildered humanity, so that we can improve and redress its desolation.

* This article is from AboutIslam’s archive.