The Shaykh mentioned the hadith of Abu Sa'id al-Khudri (may Allah be pleased with him): "You will follow the ways of those before you, handspan by handspan and cubit by cubit."

The Shaykh : As in the hadith of Abu Sa'id al-Khudri in Sahih al-Bukhari, they said, "O Messenger of Allah, the Jews and the Christians?" He said, Who on earth is mentioned as a nation with its own civilization? They claim it has a civilization, a strength, and a culture. There is no one else but the Jews and the Christians. The Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him) is pointing to the fact that it is the nature of a nation, when it declines and weakens, to imitate those who are stronger than it. The Messenger (peace be upon him) indicates in this hadith that a time will come upon the Muslim nation, which should be the strongest nation in every time and place, when it will follow and imitate the ways of the Jews and the Christians, exactly as they do, so that if they entered the hole of a scorpion, you would enter it too. If they entered any narrow strait, we would imitate them in that. And I am increasingly amazed every day. I find many young Muslims who make the heart rejoice in one aspect when I enter the mosques, but sadden it in another aspect. I find young men eager to obey Allah in the mosques, but they do not understand much of Islam. I pray in the second or third row and find a young man in front of me with strange clothing. He is a Muslim standing in the row to pray to Allah (Mighty and Majestic), but if you saw him in the market, you would think he was French or American, or perhaps if he were in the lands here, you would think he was a Jew. Why? Because of the pants, the "chalonston" "chalonston". These should be in a specific, narrow place, yet he has widened them by two handspans, and in the place where they should be wide, he has tightened them on himself until he bit his buttocks. Then Satan was not satisfied with this deception until he made the young men notice each other, so he stamped a new mark on their buttocks, an image of a branch or a flower or something similar. There is no difference in this between the young man and the young woman. And he is standing to pray. How is this? It is because he has not been raised with an Islamic upbringing. He still has an emotion for Islam and prays, but he does not understand that Islam is not only in prayer. Islam is a whole that cannot be divided. The Muslim must prove that he is a Muslim wherever he is, not only in the mosque when we see him praying. Even if he entered the church for the sake of lesson and observation, people would point at him with their fingers and say, "This is a Muslim." Who among the Muslims today, if they entered the churches for entertainment and lesson, would the people of the church think he is one of them? This is the fulfillment of the saying of the Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him): And in another narration, more amazing than this blind imitation, the appearances began to appear. He (peace and blessings be upon him) said: Therefore, O our young brothers, you must not be satisfied with the knowledge of Islam that you have been given, this superficial knowledge. Rather, you must expand your knowledge of Islam and combine it with action, so that knowledge of the matter does not become a burden upon you, and so that the saying of Allah (Blessed and Exalted is He) does not apply to us: The wealth mentioned in this hadith, we know that the intended meaning of this wealth is, in the past, slaves and servants, and now it is clearly relatives, children, and the like. And the wealth is the cars they ride in. This is one of the violations we wanted to remind you of, because the reality is that when sin is displayed, it spreads and harms, but when it is concealed, it folds up and dies. And thus the Shari'ah encourages that if a Muslim must commit a sin, let him conceal it, because this concealment is good for himself and for others. As for himself, he still feels a prick, as they say today, in his heart and conscience. But if he becomes heedless and declares it, that feeling dies, and this means that not a grain of faith remains in his heart.