Defining narrative: Aligning message of Eid ul-Adha with core imperatives of Amanah, knowledge, social legacy

By Dr. Abdulrahman A. Terab, PhD

The contemporary Muslim world, particularly in regions like Northern Nigeria and most of Sub-Saharan Africa, stands at a critical crossroads. While the external infrastructure of the faith—masjids, Islamic schools, and public celebrations—flourishes, a profound internal crisis of understanding persists.

Central Islamic doctrines are frequently misconstrued, not only by external observers but by Muslims themselves.
On the sacred occasion of Eid ul-Adha, a day traditionally centered on sacrifice and obedience, there is an urgent need to shift the narrative. The sermon (khutbah) of this day must transcend historical recitation. It must confront why the global and local Muslim community is losing its grip on the essential concepts of Amanah (Trust/Responsibility), authentic development-based education, and institutionalized Sadakah Jariyah (continuous community-impact-based charity).

Furthermore, it must address how our rigid messaging systems fail to navigate contemporary realities and continue to lose their significance as a source of solutions to contemporary development challenges.

Part I: The crisis of messaging – Why the proper narrative is lost

The disconnect between Islamic teachings and the lived reality of Muslim societies stems from a systemic failure in how religious knowledge is packaged, contextualized, and delivered.

This failure manifests in three distinct dimensions:
1. Defensiveness vs. Reformative discourse
Too often, religious discourse is reactionary, focusing heavily on defending Islam from external views or pointing to geopolitical grievances. While protecting the faith is necessary, an over-reliance on defensive rhetoric blinds the community to its internal vulnerabilities.

The pulpit frequently ignores pressing local crises—such as dangerous illiteracy levels, systemic poverty, out-of-school children, intellectual stagnation, insecurity and the collapse of social and family structures—preferring abstract or distant narratives over immediate structural self-assessment and reform.

2. Ritualism divorced from socio-economic impact
Faith has increasingly been reduced to visible ritual performance, while the social, economic, and civilizational principles embedded within those rituals are left underdeveloped. Millions gather for congregational prayers, observe the symbols of devotion, and participate in the rites of sacrifice, yet the communal energy generated by these acts too rarely matures into durable institutions that can protect dignity, expand opportunity, and solve long-term problems.

In this way, Eid ul-Adha is often experienced as a seasonal climax of piety rather than as a disciplined school of transformation.

The sacrifice of Eid ul-Adha should not be treated as an end in itself, nor merely as a ceremonial act whose meaning ends with distribution and celebration. Properly understood, it is a psychological and moral training in surrender, discipline, and the willingness to give up private comfort for public good. If that spirit were translated into communal planning, the resources mobilized during festive periods could help seed scholarship funds, vocational training centres, community health initiatives, agricultural cooperatives, and other long-term assets that outlive the moment. Without such a shift, enormous financial and emotional capital is repeatedly consumed in short bursts, behaving like transient expenditure instead of becoming the foundation for sustainable development.

3. The commodification and monopolization of religious speech

In the digital era, religious messaging is frequently co-opted by sensationalism, sectarian rivalry, and political posturing. The pulpit, which should serve as a source of objective moral guidance and strategic community direction, is sometimes weaponized for fractional gains. When religious speech is commodified for algorithmic reach or political patronage, the core ethical and developmental imperatives of the faith are diluted, leaving the broader population spiritually enthusiastic but intellectually unguided.

Part II: Recontextualizing the core imperatives
To reclaim the transformative power of the Islamic narrative, the custodians of the pulpit must structurally realign their messages around three core pillars, utilizing the heightened spiritual receptivity of Eid ul-Adha to drive lasting change:
1. Reclaiming Amanah as full-spectrum accountability
In popular discourse, Amanah is often reduced to a narrow moral category: returning borrowed property, keeping one’s word, or safeguarding a secret. While these are certainly valid expressions of trustworthiness, they do not exhaust the depth of the concept in the Islamic worldview.

At its core, Amanah is an all-encompassing covenant of responsibility between the human being, the Creator, and society—a sacred charge that governs how power is exercised, how knowledge is handled, how relationships are maintained, and how resources are managed. It is not merely a personal virtue for private dealings; it is a governing principle for civilizational order.

When a leader mismanages public trust, when a parent neglects the intellectual, moral, and emotional development of their children, or when a scholar or professional compromises truth for comfort, fear, or patronage, a breach of Amanah has taken place. The concept extends far beyond personal honesty. It includes developmental responsibility: the obligation to manage institutions, public resources, education systems, and infrastructure with justice, competence, and foresight.

It also includes intellectual responsibility: the duty to teach truthfully, think independently, and refuse to manipulate religion for applause, control, or convenience. Even the environment falls within this moral orbit, because the preservation of land, water, public spaces, and the broader civic order is part of the trust humanity has been commanded to uphold.

The Eid sermon, therefore, must recover Amanah not as a passive ornament of personal piety, but as an active framework of accountability—one that measures leadership, parenting, scholarship, citizenship, and stewardship alike. Only then can the concept move from abstraction to reform, and from rhetoric to social transformation.

The Almajiri conundrum
At the heart of this failure lies the way the Almajiri crisis in Northern Nigeria is treated as though it carries no serious moral, social, or developmental consequences. The neglect is systemic: the entire society has all normalized a condition that fuels insecurity, social breakdown, and long-term underdevelopment.

Yet the pulpit rarely confronts it with the seriousness it deserves, even though it stands in plain sight as one of the most urgent indicators of collective failure. The contradiction is striking. We invest heavily in the education and future of our own children, while tolerating a wider culture that leaves countless others without the knowledge, protection, and opportunity required to become stable contributors to society.

Even where public institutions have been created to address the problem, they remain underresourced, without the pulpit and society coming to their aid. This is precisely why our narratives and khutbahs must challenge these misconceptions directly: a community cannot claim to value Amanah and Sadaqah Jariyah while remaining indifferent to a system that reproduces insecurity, vulnerability, ignorance, and instability from one generation to the next.

2. A paradigm shift in Islamic Education: Cultivating the whole being
The current educational narrative in many Muslim societies, including some of their most elite circles, suffers from an artificial and deeply counterproductive divide between what is labeled “religious” knowledge and what is called “secular or western” knowledge.

This false bifurcation has weakened intellectual confidence and slowed meaningful social advancement. Yet the Islamic tradition, both historically and doctrinally, recognizes no such separation.

Any knowledge that benefits humanity, cultivates excellence, and helps uncover the laws and wonders of creation belongs within the moral and spiritual horizon of Islamic education. How, then, can we teach physics, engineering, or medicine as though they stand outside that sacred educational mandate?

The pulpit must advocate for an educational model that brings moral and spiritual formation (tarbiyah) into meaningful partnership with technical excellence, so that the youth are not only ethically grounded but also fully equipped with the scientific, digital, entrepreneurial, and economic competencies required by the modern world.

Such an education should produce character without anti-intellectualism, and competence without moral emptiness. It must move beyond a narrow culture of memorization and passive reception toward a broader culture of disciplined inquiry, independent problem-solving, creativity, and applied learning. In practical terms, this means nurturing students who can think critically, innovate responsibly, and translate knowledge into solutions for the needs of their communities. Without this synthesis of values and capability, the Muslim community will remain dependent on ideas, systems, and technologies produced elsewhere, rather than emerging as a confident contributor to knowledge, development, and global civilization.

3. Institutionalizing Sadakah Jariyah for sustainable legacies
There is an urgent need to elevate charity from transient, transactional handouts into an enduring, institutionalized social legacy. While feeding a hungry person offers immediate relief, it rarely changes that person’s long-term economic trajectory.

True Sadakah Jariyah, therefore, requires more than compassionate distribution; it requires structural vision, collective responsibility, and strategic investment in systems that can generate both social impact and sustainable opportunity. In this sense, charity should not be confined to short-term relief by individuals alone, but should also be a communal effort to help build the educational, economic, and community institutions that enable people and societies to flourish over time.

The sermon of Eid ul-Adha must therefore challenge both the wealthy and the middle class to move beyond fragmented acts of charity and toward the creation of collective vehicles for lasting social investment.

Charitable capital should be intentionally redirected into institutional mechanisms such as endowed foundations (waqf) that can permanently support specialized healthcare, technological innovation, sustainable development, advanced education, and scientific research.

It should also encourage the formation of venture funds, incubation platforms, and community-backed financial instruments that can de-risk young entrepreneurs, expand productive opportunity, and help lift people out of long-term dependency and poverty. In other words, the narrative of Sadakah must evolve from an isolated individual giving, which unfortunately has been the narrative of the pulpit for so many years, to a coordinated communal effort aimed at building institutions that endure. This is the higher vision of Sadakah Jariyah: not merely relieving hardship for a day, but creating systems of benefit whose impact continues long after the giver is gone.

Have we, as a Muslim ummah, truly learned to recognize problem-solving inventions—such as the motor car, the aeroplane, modern communications, the internet, vaccines, medicines, and assistive technologies like wheelchairs—as forms of Sadaqah Jariyah? And if not these, then what of the education, research, and technological innovation that make such life-changing solutions possible?

The truth is that Muslim civilization once stood at the forefront of discovery, creativity, and applied knowledge, and even today, there are Muslim societies making meaningful contributions in these fields. Yet far too often, our collective imagination of Sadaqah Jariyah remains confined to a narrow framework that underestimates the power of knowledge-driven service to humanity. This mindset must change.

We must begin to understand that every lasting solution that reduces suffering, expands human possibility, and benefits generations can fall within the higher spirit of ongoing charity. This is precisely the kind of intellectual and moral reorientation the khutbah must inspire—one that calls Muslims not merely to preserve piety, but to produce benefit, solve problems, and restore the community’s reputation as a force of dignity, mercy, and civilizational value in the world.

Conclusion: A call to action for the Muslim elite and the Custodians of the Message

The misconstruction of Islamic principles can only be corrected when the custodians of the message choose to speak directly to the pressing realities of their time.

The power of the narrative must be used positively, purposely, and deliberately. Those who are endowed with the needful education to guide the ummah must see this as an urgent call to action. In the true spirit of Amanah, Knowledge, and Sadakah Jariyah, they must lead and serve as the engine for changing the mindset and the structural narratives of the khutbah.

Just ask yourself: What was the khutbah delivered in your masjid today, and what did it mean? What is its practical impact in addressing the real-world ills and shortcomings of the Muslim societies around us? Eid ul-Adha offers an unparalleled psychological moment—a time when hearts are soft, communities are gathered, and the spirit of sacrifice is palpable. By moving away from defensive, blame-trading, or purely historical rhetoric, and steering the discourse toward Amanah, intellectual development, and sustainable social legacies—by properly contextualizing the concept of Sadakah Jariyah—the Muslim world can reshape both its internal reality and its global perception.

The khutbah must once again become a source of practical guidance, societal reform, and enduring hope. We must begin to engage our sermons, lectures, and religious teachings with greater intellectual seriousness, asking what real contribution they make toward uplifting Muslim communities and confronting contemporary challenges. In societies burdened by insecurity, systemic poverty, dangerous levels of illiteracy, poor healthcare, and moral decline, it is deeply troubling that so few khutbahs address these crises with the urgency and depth they demand from an Islamic perspective. This narrative must change if Muslim societies are to recover their moral clarity, confront their structural failures, and move toward genuine renewal.