What is the ruling on the military training preparations (in Saudi Arabia)?

The questioner : Now, Shaykh, in Saudi Arabia, there is training on weapons for preparation through voluntary courses. What is the ruling on volunteering for this?

The Shaykh : Volunteering is also one of the foreign terms introduced into Islam, because it implies that preparation is not obligatory. Our Lord says: This means that it is presumed that when there is a Muslim people governed by a Muslim state that rules by what Allah has revealed, truly applying the rulings of the Shari'ah completely, not from one side only, then among these rulings is what I mentioned earlier, the saying of the Exalted: And especially if Allah, Blessed and Exalted is He, has blessed the state with vast wealth that it does not know how to manage due to its abundance, then this state is more entitled than any other state to make every capable individual in its people prepared for jihad in the path of Allah, so that if an incident occurs, as is happening now, the individuals of this people are prepared for death and jihad in the path of Allah, Blessed and Exalted is He. Now, unfortunately, many states are content with equipping an official state army and do not expand the scope of conscription so that the entire people become an army capable of fighting in the path of Allah. This is undoubtedly also a foreign policy that the Muslims imitated from the disbelievers, making military service of two types: compulsory and optional, which they call volunteering. When such a problem occurs in any country, the rulers pretend that they want to train the people in combat and open the door to volunteering. If the cause necessitating this volunteering ceases, the name of volunteering is forgotten after this introduction. I want to say that this is an opportunity that the Muslim youth must seize and take advantage of in the path of preparing for jihad. I do not say for fighting, because the existing states in the Muslim lands do not have a policy, which is an un-Islamic policy, of allowing the people to be able to fight, because they fear the people. So if a state pretends to call the people to volunteering, as they say, then the people should rush to this training, but with one condition: that no religious violation results from this volunteering. In some states that do not care, for example, about prayer, and especially if their commanders and army leaders do not pray, when the time for prayer arrives, they do not allow the volunteers to pray and establish the prayer at its time in congregation. In that case, this volunteering contradicts that obligation. If performing volunteering leads to the loss of an obligation, we abandon the volunteering in order to preserve the obligation. This is an example, and examples may increase. For instance, there may be free mixing of men and women in some states, between young men and young women, between youths and young women, and so on, under the name of what? Volunteering. So if this volunteering is an opportunity that presents itself to Muslims, they must seize it, but with the condition that they observe the other religious rulings.