Sahil Adeem in Scotland: The Hayya ʿala al-Falāḥ Session

Gathering Muslims globally

From the diagnosis he moves to a proposal: an educational and intellectual network binding Muslims across cities, so that Scotland, Houston, Melbourne and Paris are working on the same problem rather than each in isolation. The point is not contact for its own sake but a shared standard of seriousness, aimed particularly at the young.

The issue with current Muslim practices

He then turns the lens on the room. Mosques fill for Jumuah (الجمعة) and empty for everything after it; the same building that holds hundreds on Friday holds a handful at Asr (العصر) or Maghrib (المغرب). He reads this not as a scheduling problem but as a description of how thin the attachment has become.

Why people do not return to the mosque

Then he inverts the question. The problem, he argues, is not only the people who stay away; it is that many who do attend are there out of inheritance rather than understanding. Absence is not the root, presence without purpose is, and a habit held only by tradition breaks the moment tradition stops feeling relevant.

The underperformance of Muslim youth

He draws a line from the decline of Muslim influence to how the next generation is raised. Muslim civilisations once set the pace in medicine, architecture, mathematics and political theory. His charge is that the young are now trained to perform Islam (الإسلام) but not to live it in the world, which produces devotion without leverage.

The need for space programs and scientific inquiry

The space program returns here as the session’s recurring measure. A launch capability is not about rockets; it is what a civilisation looks like when it is serious about knowledge, and its absence is a statement about ambition.

If you do not have a space program, you are not living the full Islam.

He grounds it historically, in the observatories of Baghdad and in the algebra of al-Khwarizmi (الخوارزمي) (رحمه الله), and then sets that against the present, where the United States, China and Russia race and the Muslim world watches.

Space exploration and its connection to Islamic teaching

The same theme is then taken from the other side, as worship rather than policy. If the heavens are signs, studying them is not adjacent to devotion, it is a form of it, and the Qur’an (القرآن) repeatedly directs the reader upward: Sūrah Āl ʿImrān 3:190, Sūrah al-Mulk 67:3, Sūrah Qāf 50:6.

Redefining Islamic education

His critique of Muslim education is not that it teaches too much religion but that it teaches too little of everything else. Recitation and ritual are held; innovation, leadership and discovery are not. The scholars he holds up were rarely only jurists: they were mathematicians, physicians and astronomers as well.

The failure of Muslim leadership

On politics he is blunt: the Muslim world is failing, and not for want of intelligence or faith. Every prophet, including Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, governed as well as preached. Treating politics as inherently dirty, he argues, hands the field to whoever is willing to hold it.

Restoring the glory of Islam

Pulling the threads together, he argues that Islam (الإسلام) was never meant to be small, and that the route back runs through a connected generation rather than a better argument. Leadership, in his reading, is not a skill picked up at university; it is a disposition formed in childhood.

Concluding thoughts on youth and education

The closing remarks narrow to the first twelve years of a child’s life, which he treats as the decisive window: curiosity and reasoning are built there or not at all. Muslim children, he says, should be prepared for political and scientific engagement, not for prayer alone.

The responsibility of parents

The session ends where he says it has to end, with the home. Parents are not only caregivers but the first institution of leadership the child meets, and the question he leaves the room with is whether they are raising children for the world as it was or for the world as it is becoming.

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