have to try and liberate ourselves of this pressure to come forward with a deep, spiritual and psychological message,with which we are able to say what we stand for and what we want. We need to be able to deal with this transmission of the values that are promoted by our religion. We don’t speak enough about love, or learning to love. When you come to the Islāmic Message,you need to attain peace, but to get peace is to learn to love. It’s not enough to love your father or mother; there is one way to love them but you have to learn to love them more. You follow in the footsteps of the Prophet and you hear about him – you say sall Allahu ‘alayhi wa sallam – but the words are not enough. You have to come back to yourself and ask ‘is he dear to my heart?’ Am I missing him? Am I following him? Becausein the Qur’an, the connection between love and him and even God, is referred to through a comparison of the way you can love your fathers and mothers, your relatives, becausethis is something which is quite natural. But from natural it has to become spiritual. And the difference between a natural love and a spiritual love is that the spiritual love is a constant exercise – deeper and deeper and deeper. And this is something that is really, really important. When someone had a problem with this father, the Prophet said ‘anta wa māluk li abik - You and all your money belong to your father’. It’s a spiritual journey to love your father and mother – it’s not easy. It’s as difficult as it is to come to your spiritual meaning. And this is why we have to promote all of this – it’s essential in our daily religion. So when we speak about spirituality in our daily life, and when we speak about love, we speak about brotherhood. When Muslims are in their community they are always speaking about brotherhood. But it is one thing to speak about brotherhood, and it’s another to experience brotherhood. Sometimes when people listen to me, they think it’s a modern way to speak about brotherhood. In Nawawi, the Ahādīth speak about the Prophet (saw) having said ‘you will not complete your faith as long as you don’t love for your brother what you love for yourself- La yu’minu ahadukum hata yuhib li akhihi ma yuhibu li nafsihi . He also mentioned that the meaning was for your brother in humanity , Al-Akhuwa Al-Insāniya means not only your brothers and sisters in Islām. You have to spread this beyond the community. It’s a personal messageof love, not a community messageof love merely saying ‘we love each other’ inside and not outside. You may dislike what your brother or sister in humanity is doing but you have to love who she is and who he is. Becausebeyond everything he or she is doing, he or she are signs of God, in front of you. You may not like what Einstein was saying when he denied God, but in his mind you can see a powerful messageof God, becausehe was so bright and contributing to our humanity. These are challenges today. And it’s not far from our daily life – it’s how to be a British Muslim. It’s the way to be a British Muslim – the way we deal with spirituality, the way we deal with love, and with brotherhood. And to be able to liberate ourselves from this defensive attitude and come to a more peaceful, open attitude out of our messageof Islām. The last point of this positive messageof Islām is to contribute. I’m sorry, but I’m no longer speaking about integration. I speak about integration to deny integration becauseintegration is a successwhen we stop talking about it. You stop talking about integration; it means that we are beyond something. The most important thing of the picture that we saw is that every man and woman is giving something to his or her community. The central word is contribution. Li tukūnū shuhadā’ ‘alā Al-Nās in order for you to bear witness to your messagein front of people, this
is what you have to do; a witness gives something. It could be a question, it could be a gift, and he or she gives something to the society.