Recordings › Monday Nights with Mufti #204 | Q&A Unscripted & Unrestricted! 😉 | Mufti Abu Layth · 2 Mar 2021 › Segment 10 of 45
Is the great love Muslims have for the Prophet a kind of prophet worship?
muftis iman imaan eemaan eeman jahannam jahanam jahannum koran quraan al-quran salafis salafism wahhabi wahabi wahhabism shaikh sheik shuyukh ibadah ibada ibaadah ibadat rahmah rahma rahmatA shaykh's clip against 'prophet worship', and why he strongly disagrees
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This segment46:41 to 55:37 · 8 min 56 sGeneral teaching
What this part covers
machinesummary, machine-writtenMuslims' love for the Prophet is not prophet worship: people need a human figure to love, and for Muslims it is the Prophet, though praying to him is wrong. He strongly disagrees with the shaykh and calls it an unnecessary battle.
In more detail
Mufti Abu Layth plays a clip that caused a stir on Muslim Twitter, in which a shaykh whose name the transcript renders as Muhammad Nizami [?] says some people go too far into prophet and personality worship, that the Quran keeps telling people to focus on the message rather than the messenger, and that people show more love to the Prophet than to God. Mufti says he had heard of the shaykh's attitude before but not from him directly: if the point were only that Muslims should show more love towards God, it would be a fine reminder, but what he has come across is a view of the Prophet as a momentary conduit to get over, which he calls unacceptable to most Muslims. He says the Prophet is the embodiment of everything Islam is, that people need a human figure to love and for Muslims that figure is the Prophet, so this is not prophet worship at all, while praying to the Prophet is wrong and comes from cultural folklore. He condemns violence done in the name of that love, calls the devotion Muslims have for the Prophet unparalleled today, says the Quran itself reaches us through the Prophet, and says he strongly disagrees, perhaps the shaykh meant something else, but it was an unnecessary battle to pick.
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got into quite a bit of a controversy when he uh let me see um issue of no not that one i think this is it when he got into some people who are controversial i feel for some people on the extreme side spectrum and we don't mean it's in a salafist way because salafi sometimes go too far but there is this level of prophet worship personality worship yet the quran god is consistently saying don't focus on the messenger focus on
the message and me think about it the you give more like you have more to praise and think and people see this let's think about sentimentally they do it because they say we respect the prophet they don't actually know what they're saying half the time they don't say to allah but we do it out of respect and love for the prophet where did you love and respect for god go no long thing
whatever it is go on where did all of that go so you actually described more love to the prophet than to god himself and even when people get caught up you know like disbelievers but when it comes to muhammad oh muhammad was this muhammad was that you know like peter phillips and that's the other is that brother forget let's not get caught up with a messenger what's your problem with the message because if you're a problem with a message and you're a christian then tell me anywhere [Music] so this was the clip that um as you can understand why it triggered quite a bit of uh heat and
to be honest this isn't the first time i've heard of sheikh muhammad nizami's opinion stroke attitude towards what he calls prophet worship i've heard it before i haven't heard it from him though so this is the first time i'm hearing him utter the words i've heard through people that he said this too that they've then asked me what do you think about this right now it's you see that the thing is that if his claim was if his claim and this is the problem i don't think this
is the claim though if it was if he was simply saying that look why don't we also show so much love towards god um then i think the claim would be fine if he's just saying look why why ain't we showing you know love towards god calling him the merciful calling him all these things i would think yeah that's a you know great reminder to people but i feel from what i've heard before as well and maybe this is i'm being misinformed and i miss reading or mis interpreting what he's saying but it's
that what i've come across is this understanding that we shouldn't really that the prophet is nothing more than a simple momentary conduit and he kind of said this and let's get over him you know and to be honest i think it's very clear that to muslims that is uh um you know it's for the most part unacceptable because the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam to us is obviously you know the a paragon
of not only mercy but he is an embodiment of everything that islam ever was um so it's not it's not enough to say that look you know he came and he went but he is to us he that that bond that we have is you know it is incredibly special and it's on the back of that that people sometimes do you know intolerable stuff and unacceptable stuff and people resort to violence and all sorts and that is
i condemn that but i'm just saying it's on the back of this um non-negotiable kind of love towards the prophet sallallahu alaihi and i absolutely endorse the love for the prophet sallallahu alaihi islam i you know i don't think it's look i understand that look as people people need a person to love you know this is you know this is actually you know if you psychologize it it's actually true people need a person a figure to love for us that figure is always the
messenger of allah and it's not because god is not a in that sense you know god is god he's not a human figure so people need a human figure regardless of faith they need a human figure to always kind of that's the ultimate figure and to us that personality is the prophet muhammad so it's not prophet worship it's no it's not at all prophet worship um and i'm not saying people who start then praying to the prophet or
something that is you know that that's just you know that's not right and that is um usually based off cultural folklore and people going off into struggling with monotheism but yeah this this kind of thing and i don't get the you know i don't get the um the objective behind why certain is army is stressing that point because i don't get where he's going with it because you know i apart from just the backlash there's no real
end game because if this is what i said if the end game was simply to say let's show a lot more a lot of respect towards god then i think that's fine but i don't think that is the end endgame it seems to be that it's to say well stop glorifying the prophet and you know i think it's incredibly unique that the love that muslims have for the prophet is unparalleled in human history i don't know about human history but in the world today when it comes to uh a figure of devotion
that is unparalleled i mean people you know not that you don't you know not and people do not need to do this but and they shouldn't be trying to like i said i condemn any kind of act of violence and i condem any kind of but just the phenomenon that people in in a moment the blink of an eye will give their life if they had to for the the love and honor of a figure that they never even met and nobody they knew met that he was a person who came
over 1400 years ago and he changed the course of human civilization as we are to know it today so i mean we you know have nothing but great love for the prophet the the quran everything you know we to say that look the quran is uh you know we should devote that towards the book obviously i mean i'm not detracting from that that's obvious but the quran in all honesty you know it just reaches us through the prophet sallallahu alaihi so i i do strongly disagree with what shaykh
nazami said maybe he has a different interpretation for what he's trying to say and it came out horribly wrong but um maybe he didn't mean it like that i don't know but i mean i don't know maybe he'll do some video explaining this or something but it caused a lot of um you know it caused a huge stir and i and i feel this was like such an unnecessary battle to to fight you know if you're gonna pick your battles for the love of god why would you pick the
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Cite this segment
Stable id, transcript version and tier are part of the citation. Every change to a transcript is logged.Mufti Abu Layth Archive, segment 2021-03-02-S10, auto-transcribed, may contain errors. https://muftiabulayth.org/r/b1ooltqtptw/s/10/ (accessed 1 November 2026)
- APA 7
Mufti Abu Layth. (2021, March 2). Is the great love Muslims have for the Prophet a kind of prophet worship? [Video, segment 2021-03-02-S10, auto-transcribed, may contain errors]. Mufti Abu Layth Archive. Retrieved November 1, 2026, from https://muftiabulayth.org/r/b1ooltqtptw/s/10/
- Chicago author-date
Mufti Abu Layth. 2021. "Is the great love Muslims have for the Prophet a kind of prophet worship?" Video, segment 2021-03-02-S10, auto-transcribed, may contain errors. Mufti Abu Layth Archive. Recorded March 2, 2021. Accessed November 1, 2026. https://muftiabulayth.org/r/b1ooltqtptw/s/10/
- BibTeX
@misc{abulayth-2021-03-02-S10, author = {Mufti Abu Layth}, title = {{Is the great love Muslims have for the Prophet a kind of prophet worship?}}, year = {2021}, month = {3}, date = {2021-03-02}, howpublished = {\url{https://muftiabulayth.org/r/b1ooltqtptw/s/10/}}, url = {https://muftiabulayth.org/r/b1ooltqtptw/s/10/}, organization = {Mufti Abu Layth Archive}, urldate = {2026-11-01}, note = {Segment 2021-03-02-S10, auto-transcribed, may contain errors} }
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