Ibn Battāl (1) said: “The Prophet (may Allah bless him and grant him peace) made it known that his nation would follow newly introduced practices, religious innovations, and capricious desires, just as had happened to the nations before them. In many hadiths, he warned that what comes later would be worse, that the Hour would come only upon the worst of people, and that the religion would remain upheld only among a select group of people.” (2)

Ibn Hajar said: “Most of what the Prophet (may Allah bless him and grant him peace) warned of has already come to pass, and the remainder will also come to pass.” (3)

In our time, many Muslims have come to imitate the disbelievers of both East and West. Our men have imitated their men, and our women their women, becoming enthralled by them. This has gone so far that some people have left Islam and come to believe that they could attain progress and civilization only by casting aside the Book of Allah and the sunnah of His Prophet (may Allah bless him and grant him peace). Anyone who truly understands Islam recognizes what Muslims have come to in recent centuries: estrangement from the teachings of Islam and deviation from its creed. Among some of them, nothing of Islam remains but its name. They have adopted the laws of the disbelievers as the basis of judgment and turned away from the law of Allah. No description of the Muslims’ following and imitation of the disbelievers is more eloquent than the Prophet’s (may Allah bless him and grant him peace) words: “Span by span and cubit by cubit, to the point that if they entered a lizard’s hole,