The Present State of the Preachers vis-à-vis Fiqh al-Wāqiʿ:

We know that many of those very preachers share with us the awareness of the root cause of the Muslims’ wretched condition today: their distance from a correct understanding of Islam in matters that are obligatory upon every individual, not merely upon some. Hence the duty is to rectify creed, worship, and conduct.

Who in this community has actually fulfilled this individual duty, rather than the collective duty? A collective duty only follows an individual duty; it never precedes it.

Therefore, to occupy oneself—and to urge the Muslim elite—to focus on a collective duty, namely Fiqh al-Wāqiʿ, while reducing concern for the jurisprudence that is individually obligatory upon every Muslim, namely the fiqh of the Book and the Sunnah to which I have referred, is excess and neglect with respect to what is emphatically required of every member of the Muslim ummah, and an exaggeration in elevating a matter that, in reality, is nothing more than a collective obligation. [See what has preceded, p. 14]