Following are excerpts from a sermon delivered by Egyptian cleric Mahmoud Al-Masri, which aired on Al-Nas TV on August 10, 2009.





Mahmoud Al-Masri: My dear brothers, we want to repent, and we want to take by the hand those people who have not yet repented. We should feel pity for them. By Allah, we should not be tough with them. These people are sick. They are sinners. We should feel pity for them, we should care for them. We should act like doctors who care for the sick. You should care for them and feel great pity for them, and seek any ingenious way to make a person repent.





I’d like to tell you a very nice story. Once there was a Muslim who lived next to a Jew. The Muslim saw in the Jew a measure of goodheartedness – however small – and he wanted to find any way to make him convert to Islam. So he went to him and asked: “Don’t you feel the need for Islam? Why don’t you become a Muslim?” The Jew said: “The only thing preventing me from becoming a Muslim is that I love drinking alcohol. I would have become a Muslim ages ago, but the only thing stopping me is that I am an alcoholic.”



