The Muslim Ummah numbers close to two billion souls today, yet its lands are cut apart by borders its enemies drew, its wealth flows into foreign hands, its scholars sit in prison cells for speaking the truth, while its children in Gaza have been starved as the armies of their brothers stood still at the crossings. A people who carry the Book of Allah in their hands has been made to forget what that Book demands of them, which is why Sayf Al Furqan Publications was founded: to bring those demands back to the centre of the Muslim mind and to weigh the events of our time on the scale that Allah revealed.
Our name carries our purpose. Al Furqan (الفرقان), from the root faraqa, meaning to separate, is one of the names Allah gave to the Quran, and the surah that bears this name opens with it:
تَبَارَكَ الَّذِي نَزَّلَ الْفُرْقَانَ عَلَىٰ عَبْدِهِ لِيَكُونَ لِلْعَالَمِينَ نَذِيرًا “Blessed is He who sent down the Criterion upon His servant so that he may be a warner to the worlds.” (Al Furqan 25:1)
Imam Ibn Kathir (d. 774 AH) said:
“For this reason He named it here al Furqan, because it separates between truth and falsehood, guidance and misguidance, error and right conduct, the lawful and the unlawful.”
The sword (sayf) in our name stands for the sharpness with which that separation has to be made in an age where falsehood dresses itself in the language of freedom, progress and national interest. Our sword is the pen, and its edge is the daleel.
From this foundation we write structured articles that measure the ideas and events of our time against the Quran, the authentic Sunnah and the understanding of the scholars of Ahl as Sunnah wal Jamaʿah. Secularism, nationalism, democracy and capitalism are taken apart argument by argument, while the conditions of legitimate rule, the obligation of the Khilafah, the cause of Palestine and the rights of the imprisoned scholars are laid out with their evidence. Every word we attribute to a scholar is taken from a source the reader can trace for himself, since a call built on invented quotations has already lost its right to be heard. Our critique is directed at systems and ideologies, so we do not pronounce takfir on individuals, and we call to the truth through knowledge and sincere advice.
We write for the young Muslim who sits in a European classroom where his deen is treated as a private hobby, for the sister who senses that something is deeply wrong with the state of the Ummah yet lacks the words to explain it, and for every believer who wants to read the world in the light of revelation, so that a generation may grow up that knows its deen with clarity and refuses to be divided by the lines others have drawn for it.
The Ummah once stood under one leadership, and the scholars gave that leadership a name. Al Khilafah (الخلافة), from khalafa, meaning to succeed someone, is the general leadership of the Muslims that succeeds the Prophet ﷺ in establishing the deen and governing the affairs of the world by the Shariah, while the one who holds it is called the khalifah or the imam.
Imam al Mawardi (d. 450 AH) said:
“The Imamah is established as a succession to prophethood in guarding the deen and governing worldly affairs, and contracting it for the one who carries it out within the Ummah is obligatory by consensus, even though al Asamm departed from them.”
The Messenger of Allah ﷺ told his Ummah that this leadership would continue after him, when he said:
“The Children of Israel were governed by the prophets; whenever a prophet died, another prophet succeeded him. There is no prophet after me, and there will be caliphs, and they will be many.” (Sahih al Bukhari 3455, Sahih Muslim 1842)
He also left a warning that no Muslim can read lightly:
“Whoever withdraws his hand from obedience will meet Allah on the Day of Resurrection with no proof for himself, and whoever dies without a pledge of allegiance on his neck dies a death of jahiliyyah.” (Sahih Muslim 1851)
When the last Khilafah was abolished in 1924, the Ummah lost the shield that had gathered it for thirteen centuries, and what followed is the reality we live in today: dozens of states each guarding its own flag, rulers who answer to foreign capitals, and a body whose limbs no longer move when one of them is struck. The scholars counted the appointment of an imam among the obligations of the deen, so its absence is a gap that the whole Ummah carries, and every Muslim who knows this has a share in the duty of closing it.
Our duty, then, is clear. We must learn the deen from its sources so that the obligation of the Khilafah is understood with its evidence, reject the nationalism that turned one Ummah into rival peoples, hold to tawhid as the bond that stands above every flag, race and border, and work with sincerity through knowledge, dawah and patience toward a Khilafah upon the methodology of prophethood that rules by the Book of Allah. Whoever reads our articles and finds truth in them, we ask to share them, to correct us where we err, and to make dua that Allah returns to this Ummah the leadership it has lost.
والحمد لله رب العالمين
