His reliance also on the hadith regarding straightening the rows, in which he sometimes said: “Straighten your rows, or Allah will cause discord between your hearts.”

The Shaykh : And among that is the hadith that came in the Sahih that the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him), when he stood for prayer, would not say the takbir for the prayer until he had ordered the straightening of the rows. He had several phrases when he ordered the people to straighten the rows. Among them, related to our topic here, is his saying (peace and blessings be upon him): This is a physical straightening, as is known in the practical Sunnah, that the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him), when straightening the rows, would say to the one lagging behind, “Move forward,” and to the one whose body was protruding, “Move back and straighten.” This straightening is what the Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him) ordered, and he linked the discord in it to being a cause for discord in the hearts of those who differ in straightening the rows. So he said (peace and blessings be upon him): Thus, the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) made the discord among the Muslims standing in the row for the Lord of the Worlds a cause for discord to occur between them themselves in their hearts. And this discord in the heart undoubtedly leads to the corruption of the Ummah and its weakness, and it may lead to its complete disappearance. And this is, in reality, something that should draw the attention of the scholars and students of knowledge to the fact that the weakness, humiliation, and disgrace that Muslims are in today, to the point that Allah (Mighty and Majestic) has subjected them to the most humiliated of nations, as attested by the Qur'an, is caused by their distance from the Shari'ah, sometimes in understanding, sometimes in practice, and sometimes in both understanding and practice. So many people never realize that a Muslim’s rectification of his outward appearance is an obligatory duty among the duties that Islam has emphasized and ordered the Muslims to perform. They believe that these matters, or that the best of these people are those who believe that these matters are formal and superficial, and that Islam does not give them much weight.