Easter & The Illusion of Victory | Khutbah by Dr. Omar Suleiman

Allah controls what you’re allowed to see. And sometimes, He lets the wicked see exactly what they want to.

This Easter, the world is reflecting on the story of Jesus. The Quran tells us directly: “They did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, but it was made to appear so to them.” (Surah An-Nisa, Verse 157). Allah didn’t just protect Isa (Jesus). He constructed an illusion. And they fell for it completely.

This is the reality of Istidraj — when Allah allows the wicked to believe they are winning, gradually drawing them toward accountability while they remain completely unaware.

So why does Allah do this? We see it today.

In the rise of authoritarian power. In the silence of the international community. In every moment where injustice appears to go unanswered. And we see it in ourselves, when we think we’ve gotten away with something and nothing happens.

In this Khutbah, Dr. Omar Suleiman explains why what you’re witnessing right now is not the full picture.

Transcript

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Add alamana to Wabella Rizala to Nassah Hal Ummah Wa Kashatal Umma Wa Tarakana Al Mahajit Ba Leju Hakana Hariha, Laizi Wanha il Halik Fari of Salah to a Timu Tasim and Alihi was tender with Sunati Idayomidin. Allah Majana Minhom Amin aladin Amar Wa Ami Al Sali Hati Watala Sub Amin Yabameen Wa will seekum nafsi be tapullah. What amor and abil happ waqala ta'ala ya you haladina amen with tapullah happa to katihi wala to mutun illa went to muslimun. Ya you and nasu tafu rabakum ledih hala kakum in nafsin wahida, wa hala kaminha zaujaha, wabasaminhu marijalan kafir one saa, what tapullahita sa aluna bihi wahham innaha khan alikum rakiba, yeah you haladina am and tapullaha wa fulu kaulan sadida, yuslekum a'ma lakum wayafhur la kum dunu bakum, whana yutwa illaha wa rasulahu fakpa defaza fosan alimma thumma barents. We begin by praising Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, by bearing witness that none has the right to be worshipped or unconditionally obeyed except for him, and we bear witness that Muhammad sallallahu alahu alayhi wasallam is his final messenger. We ask Allah to send his peace and blessings upon him, the prophets and messengers that came before him, his family and companions that served alongside him, and those that follow in his blessed path until the day of judgment, we ask Allah to make us amongst them. Allahumma Ameen. Dear brothers and sisters, when Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala marks for us the moment in which they thought they crucified Isa a. They thought they crucified Jesus, peace be upon him. It's very interesting because there are many additional words that convey the way people were feeling at the time. The way that the aggressors were feeling, and the way that the disciples of Christ were feeling, the way that the disciples of Isa himself were feeling. And I want to situate this in a present-day context. Sometimes, what is more important in the process of war is not the shedding of blood, but who's winning the morale war. Right? And so when you have a president that says we just can't get enough of our winning, we just keep on winning. We win, we win, we win. We're always winning. And, you know, Jesus was a winner, and some people say, I'm I don't know the exact words anymore. It's very hard to quote him directly. Some people say, I'm like Jesus, you know, and there are definitely people that treat him like Jesus, treat him like Isa, that are around him, and we're witnessing the perverse, strange mix of theology and politics in a place where we, the Muslims, are often accused of being backwards and crazy. But Alhamdulillah, I mean the images and the videos speak for themselves and hopefully are causing a lot of people to be a bit more self-reflective about the types of projections that come from this country towards others. On the other hand, you have the Lego animations that are being used from the Iranian side that demonstrate panic and losing. And in so many ways, I think when we go back and we study the logic of this all and how this all played out, these things actually seem to have more weight than actual power on the ground and what's actually happening amongst people right now. Like what's actually happening, what's the casualty count, where's the destruction, what's happening here? It's trying to build morale in both directions. And the idea is the projection of power. Now I don't want to reduce any of this before I get started in the ayah and how it relates today. As funny as this may all seem sometimes when we circulate these videos, and it is sometimes humorous, right, to where this has become and where we've reached in terms of a global population and the state of our politics, there are innocent people that are paying the price always. So let's never, as Muslims, remove our hearts from our brothers and sisters, whether they're in Palestine where they continue to be oppressed and it continues to get worse, or in Lubnan, where the aggression is now spreading and there have been so many casualties that we can't keep up, or in Iran, the innocent people that are completely being blacked out in terms of their casualty counts, or the Muslims anywhere that are victim to this entire thing playing out, the innocent anywhere that are victims to this entire thing playing out that have nothing to do with it. May Allah Azwajat protect them all, and may Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala have mercy on the innocent wherever they may be. Allah Ma'amen. But it's to go to that projection of we're winning. We won. And I want to take that back to the moment where those who thought that they killed Isa alayhi salam, killed Jesus, peace be upon him, thought that they won. And obviously, this is very relevant to Easter weekend. And I don't want to make this a deeply theological discussion. There's time to actually unpack the arguments that Isa was not crucified and all of the proofs that exist in early Christianity and things of that sort. I want to focus on the spiritual lessons, Baid alarah, that are embedded in the ayah. Allah Azza wa Jal says, When they said, Verily, we killed Isa ibn Maryam, Jesus the Son of Mary, Rasulullah, the Messenger of Allah. The Rinama mentioned first and foremost that why would they say Rasulullah when they didn't believe that he was a Messenger of Allah in the first place, and that's why they were attacking him. They were saying this is to mock the believers. We killed your supposed Messenger of Allah, and this was not uncommon at the time. Read about how Yahya alayhi salam was beheaded, how Zakaria alayhi salam was cut into two, how the prophets of Bani Israel, one by one at the end of their lives, especially at the end period of Bani Israel, leading up to Isa alayhi salam, one by one were hunted down and martyred, one after the other. So it moved well beyond tahdeb, well beyond denial at that point. For the prophets of Bani Israel, it was murder after murder after murder after murder. And so, inna katalna al-Masih ibn Mariyam, we killed Jesus, the son of Mary. Rasulallah, supposedly, the Messiah, supposedly the Messiah, supposedly Rasulullah, we killed him. And Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says, They neither killed him nor did they crucify him, but rather it was made to appear that way to them. But here's where it gets interesting. Allah Azza says, the differences and the groups and everything that kind of came after that narrative, there was a doubt even amongst themselves. Did we really kill him or not? Was that really him or not? We don't know, but let's double down on the narrative that we did kill him because we have to project power. Remember? We're winning. So we have to show that we're winning and we keep on winning, and everything is good, and the empire is preserved, and we're the ones who won this victory. So even if we have doubts in ourselves about whether or not we got him, let's project that image of victory. And Allah is saying they're actually toiling in doubt. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says, they have no knowledge except what they've construed upon assumptions. So you can imagine the conversations after. Well, we got him from this house. And yeah, maybe he did something uncharacteristic here, and maybe this was too easy, but still, we can still construe. That must have been him, right? Tiba'a abwan. They were building a narrative for themselves on assumption. From the very beginning. And Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says, Wana katalu ya peen. And there's two interpretations, two benefits from this part of the verse. They certainly did not kill him, or they did not kill him in certainty. Both of them have added benefits to the narrative. So let's go to the moment from a spiritual perspective, to derive what we can take, and we'll take the authentic narration of Ibn Abbas, which is in Ibn Abi Shayba, where he says that Isa alayhi salam, so this is one of the narrations of what happened, and it's the most authentic of the narrations that we find in tafsir. It goes to Ibn Abbas, that Isa alayhi salam, as the plot thickened as they were coming to take him, he gathered his disciples, he gathered the Hawari'ien, and he said, Shabahi, who amongst you will take my appearance? Fayuqt al-Makani wayukun ma'infi derajati. He would be killed in my place, and he would enjoy my companionship, my degree in paradise as well. And so one of the Hawariyun volunteers himself to be that person, to step forward and to be crucified in his place, and he was the youngest one that volunteered three times. And subhanAllah, there's a similarity here to Ali radiallahu ta'a anhu when he volunteered, or when he took the place of the Prophet willingly without hesitation to sleep in the bed where the assassins would come to find the Prophet. And that pure youth and that pure zeal that exists when he stands at Saltha and says, I've got you, Ya Rasulullah. So the youngest one says, I will take your position, O Messenger of Allah, to Isa. And so Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala raises Isa to the heavens, and this man has the Shabah, has the appearance of Isa alayhi salam given to him. As Isa ascends to the heavens unharmed, Allah saves him from the plot of his enemies. This is the young man that will go and that will be killed in his place. And as a result, made a shaheed, and as a result, have the position with Isa alayhi salam in paradise as well. And there's so much, subhanAllah, when you start to unpack the richness of the tafsir of this, that what caused the dun of those who thought they were killing him, who thought that they were crucifying him, even though they were projecting a certainty that they got him, right? That perhaps it was his reaction at the time when he was just about to be killed that didn't resemble the actions of Isa alayhi salam. Right? Perhaps it was just too easy, right? And this is actually what's suggested in some of the early Christian writings that Pontius was surprised. This was too easy. We thought this was going to be a lot harder. That certain things were not adding up about the crucifixion of Isa a.s. And if you go to uh Psalm 91, even till now, and this is why some of the early Jewish writers in particular, they said the Messiah cannot be killed. One of the proofs of a Messiah of the Messiah is he can't be killed. So the fact that we killed him is a proof that he wasn't a Messiah, which gives a lot of uh richness to this, where it says in Psalm 91, you will only observe with your eyes and see the punishment of the wicked if you say the Lord is my refuge and you make the Most High your dwelling, no harm will overtake you until the end of this passage. Right? So the Messiah cannot be killed by his enemies. The Messiah cannot be harmed in this way. And this was part of their boasting that they killed Isa alayhi salam. Now again, I'm already at time, I don't have time to unpack this from a Christian perspective. But subhanAllah, I use this as a moment to uh to mention Dr. Gerald Dirks, may Allah have mercy on him, who was a Harvard professor, deacon in the Methodist church who converted to Islam and wrote incredibly about the early accounts of Isa a. Any Christian historian would have to admit that those accounts existed even if they don't agree with those accounts. That early Christians or that early followers of Christ, there was a narrative, even if they disagree with that narrative, that Isa alayhi salam was not actually crucified, whether it's the early group of the Basilideans or it's even writings that exist against those who were saying that Isa alayhi salam was not crucified. The Gospels were compiled later. None of those who wrote the Gospels were there historically at the time where Isa or whoever would have been in the place of Isa was crucified, and there are actual contradictions in the Gospels themselves, like technical contradictions about timing, about specifications of what happened, which is natural when it's mabni and aladwan, when it's built upon one, exactly what Allah says. Assumptions, right? People are collecting assumptions, so different words are spoken, different accounts are being given, and so a different story is being told, but overall, the idea of the crucifixion of Christ. This is not a khutbah to unpack that. I want to go to the idea of Allah sparing Isa alayhi salam and what that actually means in the current context that we are in right now. First of all, when Allah Azza says, they did not kill him nor did they crucify him. Some of the scholars say that of the mention of saying specifically, ma's, is that this wasn't a situation like Asia alayhi salam when she was killed by her husband Fira'un. Where Fira'un obviously had the stone dropped on his wife and her soul ascended. Like you never even got him in the physically compromised position. That is how much Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala spared him from your plot, rather, it was made to look that way to you. And Allah Azza, when he says, they certainly did not kill him. One of the important interpretations of this to take from this is that Allah Azzawajal is refuting anyone that would start to try to make an alternative narrative, to start to do this tafsir and this tafsir, and this tafsir, but what about this and what about this and what about that? No. Rasulan iladani israel ayat al-Nas. He was a messenger to Dani Israel, but he's ayah for the people. His mission remains, and he was certainly not killed, but again for them as well. You can imagine when they walked away. They didn't have the yaheen, the certainty that they were projecting to the people. And this is important. That oftentimes it's all a game that the most insecure people in the world project a sense of victory and security because they know how little of it they actually have. And so the yaqeen that they were projecting was actually a cover for their doubts, was actually a cover for how much they knew that they actually were losing. That they actually did not have the control of the narrative that they thought that they had, and Allah Azzawajal is showing us that they're a lot more insecure than they project, and that is the case for every single person who follows in their behavior. You know, one of the wisdoms, by the way, of Allah Azzawajal leaving the ambiguity at the time, because you have to imagine that if you lived at the time, you might have lived and died and thought that Isa was killed. They won. Right? So wherever you stand on the spectrum, wherever you are, whoever side you're on, they won. You might have thought that they won physically. And Allah Azzaal is speaking to a behavior, and subhanAllah, of the wisdoms of that behavior continuing, and of the wisdoms of that continuation, of the arrogance, is that the same type of behavior that exists in the followers of Dajjal that will be pursued by Isa is the same behavior of those that once pursued Isa A. It's the same mindset. Like if you were to take a culture and an attitude, and you took those that were tasting Isa aisla, and then you compared them to the people that will be chased by Isa a. They're the same people. The same type of evil, the same types of arrogance, and so history doesn't just repeat itself in the medicines, history repeats itself in the personality types as well. Like, wow, that so that's how Fira'un must have talked. Alright? That's how the followers of Isa must have been in terms of righteousness. That's how the evil opponents of Isa must have been. So it's a continuation. Now, what do we do in the moment that we are in today? And how do we take something that is beneficial of this for ourselves? Allah always defines the timeline, not by our end as people, but by the end that He has written for this world. So wala ta'inu wa ta'sanu wa antu'auna in kuntum' meaning after uhr, after they just lost physically. Don't grieve, don't be sad. You are in fact the exalted ones, should you be believers. The end victory is for the pious. Meaning the timeline of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is one to where as a member of the ummah of the prophets, because ummatikum, Allah Azza refers to us that we are the nation of all of the prophets, and we're specifically the nation of the Prophet Muhammad, is such that it doesn't matter where I am on the timeline, I know what the end of the story looks like, and I'm satisfied with that. And so if I die at one of the low points, so long as I die having believed in the promise of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and retaining that belief and that security in His promise, not my current day politics, I'm so satisfied with them. Because the end is Allah already wrote the end and told us what the end is going to be, and everything that happens in the meantime is a buildup to that end. And so while they think they're writing their domination, Allah is simultaneously writing their destruction. And we know it. And you can see how two people can be looking at the exact same thing and come away with the opposite conclusions. So when Allah Azwajal mentions the hypocrites, whether they were with Musa a Islam or they were with Muhammad, what did they say? Allah and the Messenger did not promise us except for delusion. What did the believers say as opposed to that? Or they said, This is what Allah and the Messenger promised us. So we're satisfied. This is what Al-Rahman promised us. And the messengers are always truthful. They're looking at the same situation, they're dealing with the same circumstances. But some people are relegated to the moment, and they define win and loss by the moment. And Allah uses the word ghurur every single time, subhanAllah. Delusion. Delusion. In fact, Allah Azza says, subhanAllah, I can't think of a time where you can reflect more on this verse. Don't be deceived by the way that the disbelievers just traverse this land like they own it. Right? They act like they own the place. They think they own the land, they think they own the skies. Right? I'm not even going to talk about, you know, the sky power, and they look up and they see death and destruction everywhere, and then praise Jesus, right? It's a weird time that we live in. But layahu ranakun. Like, don't be deceived by the way that they traverse on this land. And Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says, it's just a short time. Remember? This is a chapter I told you was going to happen. It's a short time. It always gets written in the exact same way. So do not be deceived by those things. And so I want to end on this note, dear brothers and sisters, for ourselves. How do you measure yourself in the moment with everything that's happening? Number one, measure yourself in regards to where you are standing right now with al-haq, with the truth. Measure yourself by Allah's promise, not by your political analysis. What has Allah promised? And how am I aligned to that promise right now? As a community, as individuals. And if the truth is unclear, Allah ma'in al-Hakta Haqqa, wa arein al-Balti Nabaltina, Warzukna Shina, but Allah show us the truth as truth and guide us to follow that truth and show us falsehood as falsehood and protect us from falling into that falsehood. Think about it. It's not O Allah make us from the successful ones, make us from the powerful ones. No, like where do you find the Prophet's du'as revolving around this idea of just power at any cost? We want to win so badly. No, we're asking for al-masr. But victory that is in accordance with al-haq. And we're satisfied with the timeline of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala as it relates to those who have been deceived by it. The very same timeline that we're satisfied by, others have been deceived by it, are satisfied. Alhamdulillah. This is a sign of Hazima. It's actually a sign of delusion and destruction when a person feels like they've reached the point of immunity. Alhamdulillah Rameen. You see Ben Gavir, Laanahullah, popping the wine bottles. Ya Allah, Ya Allah, Ya Allah. Let us see, let us see his misery, his eternal misery, right? Like that's a sign of their loss. Inside of themselves, they know they're losing. You know what they're talking about in their rooms? Panic. There is panic. And they project pride. But there's a reason why they're acting this way. Because inside of themselves, they don't have yaqeen. They absolutely have no certainty about themselves. They're always paranoid. They're always anxious. They're always worried. The believers are concerned, but they're not anxious. Yeah, we're concerned about al-aksa. We're concerned about our people, but we're not anxious. We don't have a mistrust in Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And dear brothers and sisters, I say this on a personal level. Last week I talked about Minanasimanullah a lahaf, those who worship Allah on an edj. And if they're doing everything right, but then bad things happen to them, they start to misjudge Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. There is an opposite to that equation too, on a very personal level, which is when you yourself can fall into istidraj, being reeled in. And what do I mean by that? That's when you're doing something evil and you're actually not facing any consequences at all, on a personal level. And you kind of look around and you say, you know what? I'm committing this sin, but money's good, career is good, everything seems to be trending alright on the relationship side and the family side. So I think I can get away with this. In that situation, you're actually projecting a mini-version of the same people that we hate when they project victory despite their evil. And so you have to also analyze yourself, and like, just because I'm getting away with something doesn't mean I'm really getting away with it. And I could be in the same state of guruur, that delusion that Allah talks about in the grand scale of things. May Allah Azza protect us from it, and may Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala grant us victory and help us to understand that not every success is a sign of Allah's pleasure, and not every task of Allah's displeasure. But rather, when we align ourselves to Allah and His Messenger, then victory is promised and success is promised. May Allah Azza write for us victory in this life, and may Allah write for us salvation the hereafter. Allah Amin Akuruh was taqallahu waqisar al mustamin festahiru inahwa forheim. Allah Mukhriwa Dinah Rabunakam Rabu Silva, Rabana Hablan and Azwajina with Ryatina Purray, Wajan in Mutsa Imama, Allah Sullihwana Mustabina, Fima Sarah Ardua Rabbiha, Allah Musulhum Fifrasim of Sudan wafi Kulli Macan, Allah May Adaliq Adim, Allah Ma'ina Aja Puratik, Allah Aliku Lari Mina Bulameen, Wa Khrijna Al Qaim Bain Salim, Ribadullah and Allah Hasan, Wa Ita Purba, Waya Alain Fasha, Iwan Mun Kari Wan Bali, Yahva Kuman Ala Kum Takarun, Fatkurullah Kurkum was Kurwani as Bakum, Wallaqullah, Allah Yahuman Tasana.