The staff of ahmadiyyajournal.ca wishes all a very blessed and happy Canada Day. May Allah bless this wonderful nation of ours! Ameen.
In the year 622, a man set out from Mecca under cover of darkness, a price on his head and the desert before him. He had every reason never to look back. The city behind him had mocked his message, plotted his death, and driven his small band of followers into exile. And yet, as he went, the Holy Prophet Muhammad (sa) turned towards the valley that had cast him out and spoke of it as the most beloved of all the lands of God, confessing that nothing but the cruelty of its people could ever have torn him from it.[1]
There is a paradox here one should pause over. The man who loved his homeland most was the man who was compelled to abandon it, and from his grief we inherit a teaching that sounds, to modern ears, almost strange. Love of country, he taught, is part of faith. The saying has travelled down the centuries in the great collections of hadith. Though some later scholars hesitated over it, it has been defended on the simplest of grounds, that it agrees with the spirit of the Holy Quran.[2] To love the soil that bore you is not a distraction from devotion to God; it is one of its most native expressions.
Love of country, he taught, is part of faith.
But what kind of love is this? Here a distinction matters, one that philosophers and the Holy Quran reach by different roads. There is a love of country that resembles the love of a child for a parent; grateful, rooted, and clear-sighted enough to see the faults of a parent without ceasing to love. And there is another love, restless and possessive, that prizes the nation only by looking down upon its neighbours, that worships a single flattering image of the homeland and cannot bear to hear it questioned.[3] The first is the type which is termed al-wathaniyah, or the affection for the land that reared you. The second is al-qawmiyah or the proud assertion of the nation above all others.[4] What faith forbids is the idolatry of a country, the devotion that places the nation beyond the reach of good and evil. What faith promotes is the love of country.
The Holy Quran speaks of this love. It reminds us of the prayer of Hazrat Ibrahim (as), offered in a barren valley beside the house he was commissioned to raise, not for himself but for the people to come, “My Lord, make this a town of peace and provide with fruits such of its dwellers as believe in Allah and the Last Day” [Al-Baqarah, ch.2:v.127]. The Holy Quran goes further, weighing the loss of a homeland against the heaviest sorrows a soul can bear. It sets the surrender of home beside the surrender of life itself, “And if We had commanded them, ‘Kill your people or leave your homes,’ they would not have done it except a few of them” [Al-Nisa’, ch.4:v.67]. Reading those words, the great commentator Fakhruddin al-Razi concluded that to be exiled from home is a loss as grievous as the loss of life itself.[5]
… one who receives such shelter is bound to repay it …
If love of homeland is given to us with our birth, what then do we owe a country we were not born in, but came to in time of need? It is here that Islam teaches that loyalty is founded upon gratitude, and not blood. To those who leave everything for the sake of conscience, the Holy Quran promises a place of refuge and plenty, “And whoso emigrates from his country in the cause of Allah will find in the earth an abundant place of refuge and plentifulness” [Al-Nisa’, ch.4:v.101]. And the one who receives such shelter is bound to repay it, as we are reminded in the hadith that the person who is not grateful to other people is not grateful to God.[6]
These teachings form the basis of Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama’at, one that every citizen owes a bond of genuine loyalty and faithfulness to the nation, whether that citizenship came by birth or by the long road of migration.[7]
For us, the Ahmadi Muslims of Canada, none of this is theoretical. Many of us came as refugees, fleeing lands where our faith had been written out of the law and our lives placed in danger, and we found here the freedom to worship that had been denied to us elsewhere. Canada became, in the words of the Holy Quran, “an abundant place of refuge and plentifulness.” Our answer has not been a grudging tenancy but a grateful belonging, in mosques raised from St. John’s, NL to Vancouver, BC and in countless quiet acts of service to our neighbours. When Hazrat Khalifatul Masih V (aba) addressed the Parliament of Canada in 2016, and the House of Commons rose to its feet, we, a community once driven from one homeland, stood honoured in another, not despite our faith but because of what our faith had taught us about gratitude and loyalty.[8]
Yet faith does not ask us to love blindly. Love of country turns dangerous the moment it forgets gratitude and becomes possession, flaring into a jealous heat whenever the nation feels threatened. In that heat, as the last century showed us at a terrible cost (the two world wars, the genocides waged to keep a nation pure), the worst things are done in the name of love. What holds such love in check is a loyalty greater than the nation, a devotion to God that keeps gratitude from souring into grievance. And hence, the believer, so often suspected of a divided heart, is the very citizen a country can most depend upon, loving it as a grown child loves a parent, with open eyes and a loyalty given freely.
The man who looked back at Mecca did not love his city any less because his faith would carry him beyond it. He showed us, once and for all, that to belong to God is to learn how to rightly belong to a homeland. No nation, in the end, is an island.[9] And a faith that teaches as much does not divide a citizen from the country. It gives the country its most faithful citizen of all.
Endnotes
- The words spoken by the Holy Prophet (sa) on departing Mecca, narrated in the collections of hadith and cited in Sir Muhammad Zafrulla Khan (ra), Muhammad: Seal of the Prophets, as quoted in Maria Ahmad Tooba, “A Perspective of Loyalty to One’s Nation,” Voice of British Muslim Women, 7 December 2021.
- The saying hubb al-watan min al-iman is recorded in classical works including those of Mulla Ali al-Qari, al-Sakhawi and al-Suyuti, and its authenticity is affirmed in the written reply of Hazrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad (aba), Khalifatul Masih V, “Is loving one’s country part of faith?”, Al Hakam, 1 July 2022.
- Maria Ioannou, Martijn Boot, Ryan Wittingslow and Adriana Mattos, “Patriotism and Nationalism as Two Distinct Ways of Loving One’s Country,” in New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving, ed. S. Cushing (Springer, 2021).
- Nasrulloh Al Faruqi and Yayat Suharyat, “Islamic Teachings on Love of Homeland According to the Qur’an,” International Journal of Global Sustainable Research, vol 1 no 4 (2023).
- Fakhruddin al-Razi, Mafatih al-Ghayb, also known as al-Tafsir al-Kabir, on Surah al-Nisa; cited in Faruqi and Suharyat (note 4).
- Jami’ al-Tirmidhi; cited in Tooba (note 1).
- Hazrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad (aba), Khalifatul Masih V, “True Loyalty to One’s Nation”; cited in Tooba (note 1).
- On the persecution that drove many Ahmadi Muslims to seek refuge abroad, including in Canada, and on the reception held in honour of Hazrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad (aba) at the Parliament of Canada on 17 October 2016, where he was welcomed by the Prime Minister and members of both Houses and recognised on the floor of the House of Commons, see the records of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community Canada and the Press and Media Office of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community.
- William A. Galston, “Twelve Theses on Nationalism,” Brookings, 12 August 2019.
