The Real Definition of Leadership

I believe it was Shaykh Haitham who once said that the Ummah would transform if it only we had two things. Unity and Leadership.

I talk often about unity. But what about leadership? What constitutes a good leader and where can we find them?

In Islam, leadership is everything. We really look towards the leader with reverence and we entrust them as our purveyors of justice. We strive to give our bayah (allegiance) to the right leader, who will lead us into glory days once again. We rightly mourn that the Islamic world has essentially been leader-less for the past 100 years, since the fall of the Caliphate.

For me, it doesn’t mean just leaders in the traditional sense of the word. You know, those who govern and provide that top-down support.

Don’t get me wrong, those leaders at the top are vital to the revival of the Ummah. This is why pledging allegiance to the leader is such an important part of a healthy, unified society.

But I also firmly believe that every one of us should be a leader.

I shared in an interview once that for me, leadership means ownership. Ownership of whatever amanah (trust) you’ve been given. And we’ve ALL been given an amanah of some sort.

That amanah is part of our purpose.

And so it doesn’t necessarily need to be those at the very top.

Everyone is not only capable of being a leader, but divinely ordained to be.

The Prophet (SAW) said:

“You are all shepherds and you are all responsible for your flocks. The ruler is the shepherd of his people and he is responsible for them. The man is the shepherd of his family and he is responsible for them. The woman is the shepherdess of her husbands house and children and she is responsible for them. And the slave is the shepherd of his master’s property and is responsible for it. So, you are all shepherds and you are all responsible for your flocks.”

In the Qur’an , Allah calls Adam (AS) his khalifah . This means that Allah entrusted Adam and all future generations of people to look after the world. A khalifah is a steward — someone who looks after something for someone else. Even the word often used is vicegerent. What does that ACTUALLY mean?

The dictionary definition of vicegerent is ‘a person exercising delegated power on behalf of a sovereign or ruler.’

That means Allah has given us all delegated power on His behalf. We are His representatives, and we have an official duty we have been given.

And He has given us all the tools and knowledge and experience to be able to carry out our amanah.

Above all, He has given us the law.

As such, my definition of a leader is someone fulfilling his God-given purpose, and someone who implements the law. The law that is appropriate to your level. And once the law is implemented, you will have order (hence the phrase, law and order).

And by law — I don’t mean the law of the land. I mean the Quran. After all, the Quran is above all else, a book of law.

So, the leader is the one who puts order in place. If order is not put in place, it can cause chaos — even at the most micro of levels.

With the gender role reversal, the rampant rise of ultra-feminism and the loss of masculinity, sadly we are seeing the fruits of the chaos in the family unit from this lack of order. The law simply isn’t being implemented.

If a household is in chaos, the husband is affected and it will affect his duties at work. A job poorly done will affect the next level up, and so on. Extrapolate that across millions of micro-transactions a day and you can see the impact.

It’s the same wherever you look. There is chaos in almost every sphere because we are so far from fitrah, so far from order, so far from the law.

At the same time, this order-chaos dichotomy also works the other way and trickles down to catastrophic effects — as we’ve seen from years and years of bungled mismanagement from politicians and presidents alike.

So, we either have order by following the law or we have chaos by not.

Part of the problem is that most of us don’t even know what our amanah even is. So how can we be sure we’re doing our duty?

Over to you.

Are you doing your God-given responsibility justice and putting order into place?

I have a program on understanding more about your purpose. If this is something you’re interested in, please check out the free training and book a call if you wish to discover your own purpose. www.secondgoldenage.com/purpose