Question:
Assalaamualaikum, peace, salutations and blessings be to Dearest Mawlana and to you, dear reader and friend.
With your permission, if I may share, I remember reading back then an interview involving Dearest Mawlana Shaykh. The subject being ‘family matters’, he commented saying “I Do not like to call woman ‘woman’, I call them ‘ladies'”.
May God be pleased, And I certainly hope so, that Mawlana shall display more such gallantry in the face of the world to teach us, but now the question. As a brother, I would love to follow in such ways, to be a ‘gentleman’, but I wonder. What is the thoughts on such a thing? I know that when we say gentleman, the mind simply reels off to repetitive images of englishmen with tophats, drinking tea.
I apologize for the silly notion (and perhaps a sillier question), but indeed, what is an ‘Islamic gentleman’?
Answer:
`Alaykum Salam,
Please refer to al-Sulami’s manual “Futuwwah” (Chivalry).
Hajj Gibril Haddad