Ali Ataie – Losing My Religion How to Grapple Postmodernism
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
Our topic today is Losing Their Religion, The
Cause and The Cure for Apostasy
Renta
in Western Academy,
from Western Universities.
My presentation is
going to be very direct, very honest.
I don't pull any punches. I don't beat
around the bush. I'm a pretty straight shooter.
Whatever else cliche you want to use.
I'm going to tell you straight up what
I think is happening
in these colleges and universities
and what our responses and our defenses,
should be.
Also
I would say that,
if you're 13
or younger,
this lecture may not be appropriate for you.
It's,
this doesn't work.
We have to go through the obligatory microphone
problem.
The lecture
is
the lecture is, rated PG 13. So,
parental discretion is advised.
Alright.
Again,
I want to begin by reiterating
some of the things I said in a
quipa about a month ago here at MCC
to, set the table as it were metaphysically.
I'm new with technology, so if I do
something wrong, if I forget to switch a
slide or something, please let me know.
I'm kind of a techno peasant.
But we need to grasp our own metaphysics.
So even Ajeeba, who was a great metaphysician
in our tradition,
he said that every name
and title of Allah
has three aspects that relate to his creation.
And Imam al Azadiq says something similar. He
has different terminology.
But the terminology of the Banaji, but he
calls them taalbuq, tahadbuq, and ta habuq.
You can translate these something like association,
appropriation,
or assimilation,
and actualization.
So for example, he says, in his book
on the commentary of the 99 names of
Allah
he says one of the names or titles
of Allah is Al Melek, is the king,
that how does this name associate
with us. Well, it's simply a,
recognition that Allah
is the king and we are subjects and
that's it. Right? It's it's being cognizant of
that fact
To,
be resigned to that fact. You might say,
well, that's
axiomatic. That's just self evident.
That's just a clear and distinct idea as
Descartes might say. But you'll be surprised how
many people don't,
don't are not resigned to that. What we
would consider to be a self evident truth.
So it's tagl. And then, taglado,
appropriation or assimilation.
So,
how do we assimilate
as it were this name of Allah
at our level?
Well, just as Allah
is the king of everything,
we also must be kings of our subjects.
Right?
So what are our subjects?
Our faculties,
our limbs.
Right? Imam al Fazali uses the analogy in
the
ajatil Qal, the marvels of the heart, the
wonders of the heart,
uses the analogy of the heart,
being
the castle in the kingdom and there are
certain inroads,
to the heart that destroy the heart.
For example, the eyes, the ears, the tongue,
the stomach, the *, the hand and the
feet, these must be protected.
These are our subjects.
And then tahaku is actually to master
the self. Right? And to truly actualize
being the king
of our subjects.
So this is the end or the purpose
or the telos,
of the human being on this earth is
to mirror the divine names and attributes
according to our metaphysicians.
There's a tradition, there's weakness in it, but
true in its meaning,
adorn yourselves with the character of Allah
as the prophet
did.
In the Quran,
Allah describes the prophet
These are 2 divine names, but there are
no definite articles.
The prophet
is, as it were, a mirror of the
divine attributes at a human level. Whereas Allah
for example, is Arashman.
He is the infinitely
merciful, the indiscriminately
compassionate, the all loving in an absolute
sense.
We should be people of rahma. We cannot
be all rahma, but we are people of
rahma.
Right? We mirror this divine attribute because this
is an attribute of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala.
So this is true in all Abrahamic religions.
Whether it's, you know, talking about Fazali in
Islam or Aquinas in Catholicism
or Maimonides
in Judaism,
this is called a teleological
metaphysic,
an end or goal oriented
metaphysic.
Now our metaphysicians identify
4 causes of the creation of the human
being.
There are 4 causes of the creation of
the human being. The efficient cause, which is
the
direct force of production,
and that is Allah
He is al Fa'il,
as Imam al Ghazali calls him. He is
a totally free agent.
His absolute volition
within his nature to do what he wants.
In Arabic, this is called, the
efficient cause.
Then you have the material cost,
which is the stuff or the material from
which something is produced.
Right? So Aquinas calls this prime matter,
materia prima.
What is the stuff
from which,
creation is produced?
Well, it's nothing.
According to the Abrahamic
theological positions, creation is is
it is from nothing.
So there is no material cause
of creation.
Right? That the angel tells that this
is easy for Allah
He created it before when you were nothing,
you were not one thing.
How do I take this out? Okay. So,
modern science
or Newtonian physics
stops here.
They only recognize
efficient and material causes.
So everything is just matter and motion.
It is a purely mechanistic or materialistic
conception of existence.
But our scholars, they continue, they recognize a
third cause, which is called formal cause.
And this deals with the essence of that
which is produced.
What is it essentially?
Right? It's Mahia in Arabic. It's quiddity.
It's what ness.
Right? So for example, if we use the
analogy of a Aristotle uses analogy, the statue.
Let's use the analogy of a statue. The
efficient cause
of a statue
is the sculptor
the efficient cause, the force of production, or
you can say sculpting.
What is the material cause
of the statue? Well, marble, let's say, as
opposed to wood.
What would be the formal cause of the
statue? What is it? What is it essentially?
Well, it's the figure of a human being,
for example, that's the
apotheosis
of George Washington,
which is a statue in Washington DC.
So what is the formal cause of the
human being according to our meta physicians? It
is it is the khalifa,
the viceroy,
the representative
of Allah
in the earth.
Now modern philosophers
tend to be nominalistic.
You see that term up there? Nominalism?
In other words, they deny universal.
They deny essential natures.
They deny human nature.
So there's no fitra
to tap into according to that. There's no
innate disposition.
There is no a priori knowledge.
In other words, there is no knowledge without
experience.
And experience according to them is solely through
the senses.
This is also called empiricism.
That nothing else informs the intellect other than
the senses, and you have experience,
and you have memory. So there's nothing innate
within us.
Right? So like John Locke, he called it
he called our minds a tabula rasa,
a clean slate.
Nothing innate.
Right? And this is in in contrast to
someone like Plato, who's a realist, who said
that we're actually born
with all of the knowledge of the forms
or the essences of things within us. And
we have to use dialectic to draw those
meanings out. Those meanings are true.
They're real. We'll talk more about this idea
of dialectic inshallah.
But the position of the nominalist is that
there is no axiomatic,
no self evident,
no irresistible
truths to recognize.
So one of the names of the Quran
is adhikr.
It is a reminder.
What is that imply?
When we are reminded
of truths in the in the Quran,
we find that irresistible
and we embrace them because they tap into
our fitra, our human nature. They are irresistible.
Unless the fitra has been damaged, and there's
a difference of opinion about this, but somebody
heard him say that our human nature can
actually be changed and damaged through socialization.
Right? So
they call to that which is Ma'av. And
Ma'av literally means that which is known.
Right? It's a it's a passive parsable.
Means to re recognize.
Recognition.
You recognize something you already do.
Quran is in Dhikr.
Right? These are axiomatic
self evident
truths.
Like Thomas Jefferson, he says, the preamble to
the Declaration of Independence, he says that,
we hold these truths to be self evident
that all men are created equal
and they are endowed by their creator with
certain inalienable rights,
namely life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
So according to, to Thomas Jefferson,
when the human intellect comes into contact with
these ideas, equality of humanity,
life, liberty, like freedom, the pursuit of happiness,
they are irresistible.
As long as a person's fitra has not
been damaged, they will immediately gravitate and embrace
these ideas.
Okay.
However, nominalists, they reject
human nature. Right? And this leads to a
denial then of objective morality.
So everything then is subjective.
Everything becomes a social construct.
Right? Morality is as they say, then what
else did we get wrong?
Right? The very foundations, that which is axiomatic
have been shaken.
Everything is questioned.
So this has further led to a neutering
or distrust of human intellect itself.
A neutering of human reason.
So that reason cannot be trusted. So then
finally, the logical conclusion is a philosophy known
as volunteerism.
A philosophy which gives primacy to the will
over the intellect,
whereas Nietzsche said, the will to power.
Right?
The will, from our perspective,
should never exceed
the jurisdiction of the intellect.
The purpose of the intellect, the atl, is
to keep the will, the desire in check.
Even the word atl in Arabic, one the
the etymological meaning
is to is to limit or hobble something.
Remember the the
the famous hadith
of the the Bedouin who came into the
Masjid, his camel was outside running around the
prophet he said, whose camel is this? The
Bedouin said, that's my camel.
I trust Allah He
said,
hobble her first. Tie her down.
Right? We're ata related to this. The ata
is supposed to keep our will in check.
But if you don't trust the intellect,
then the will runs crazy
like a candle that bolts away from you.
So,
I mean, stoic philosophers would also say,
that the purpose of the intellect is to
keep the emotions
in check as well. People who are highly
emotive tend to be less rational.
So then, the principle becomes, do what you
want,
not what is right,
because we can't know what is right.
We can't trust the intellect.
So the worship of the nafs, this is
inevitable. Worship of the Hawa, of desires, of
appetites, of the will. You see you see
the Quran wants us to think about things.
There's a type of sentence in the Quran
called the Jumbla istikhamiyah.
Right? An interrogative sentence, which is a type
of,
Jumlah in sharia, effective sentence according to the
nomenclature of of English grammar.
This is what Allah
will ask us a question,
because we're supposed to think about the answer.
Do they not look at the camels, how
they're created?
In another ayah, where are you going? Look
at your life. Where do you think you're
going?
Stop and do a self audit.
Have you seen the one who takes as
his god his will, his desire,
his passions,
his caprice.
Right? This is the most common type of
idolatry.
Worship of the self,
egolatry,
selfism.
We'll talk more about this inshallah.
The intellect is neutered, the will takes primacy.
So this happens when you deny a formal
cause.
There's no essential nature.
We affirm a formal cause. Liquidity
of madness. What is it? And then there's
the final cause.
Why is it?
Why is it? It's purpose. It's talas.
Right? So if we go back to the
analogy of statue,
what is the final cause of that statue?
It is to adorn a museum.
The Smithsomnia in this case, if we're talking
again about the apotheosis
of George Washington.
So the purpose of the creation of the
insan, in other words, our final cause, is
given in the Quran itself.
Atfariyah,
Surah 51, Ayah 56.
Allah
says this in the first person singular,
which is very rare in the Quran for
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to speak in the
first person singular, usually he's in the plural,
and then he gives an affirmation after a
negation.
Very strong statement rhetorically in Arabic. I did
not create the jinn and hints except to
worship me.
And of course, we're, of course,
familiar with
the, opinion of Ibn Abbas. This is mentioned
by Imam al Bawawi in his tafsir.
Ibn
Abbas, he said that
is understood as
That in order to worship me is understood
as in order to know me, have intimate
knowledge of me because he argues that true
worship of Allah
is predicated or excellent worship of Allah
is predicated upon
deep intimate knowledge of Allah
And if you had intimate knowledge of Allah
Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala, then you wouldn't necessarily
love Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala. But how do
we know Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala? As we
said, by associating,
appropriating,
and finally actualizing
the divine names and attributes to truly be
representatives,
of Allah upon
the earth. To have here at Isom,
a firm grip of the Kitab of Allah
to have itiba,
which is adherence through imitation,
adherence through mimesis,
imitating the prophet
So,
Allah says in the Quran, surah number 3,
I under 31.
Ayatulintihan.
Say, if you really love Allah, then follow
me. You're biblical law. Then Allah will love
you. So the final cause according to our
tradition is wilayah,
To love God and to be loved by
God.
This is the final cause of the creation
of the human being. The final cause of
the creation of the human being
as it relates to this existence, to this
earth.
Okay. All of that was introduction.
I'm gonna take a a breath
and drink.
Okay. So this is our metaphysic.
It recognizes human nature.
Human nature is unique.
It's dignified,
and it is goal or end oriented.
By contrast,
the dominant epistemology
today in Western Academy,
specifically
American Colleges and Universities,
is known broadly as post modernism.
Post modernism includes various philosophical
movements such as critical theory,
everything is challenged,
especially religious tradition.
Deconstructionism,
which is the literary method of of post
modernism.
We'll talk about what that is.
Post structuralism,
which seeks to end hierarchical
structures.
About that.
And of course of course, Neo Marxism,
a political ideology.
This is really our challenge, postmodernism.
We need to understand what it is,
how to deal with it,
or else this pandemic of ridda, of apostasy
will continue
and continue.
In contrast to pre modernism
and modernism,
post modernism
is a revolt against faith and reason,
against religion and rationality.
First of all, a quick book recommendation. A
book that I greatly benefited from is this
book here. It's called Explaining Post Modernism. You
can take a look at it after.
Explaining Post Modernism, Skepticism and Socialism
from Rousseau de Foucault
by Stephen Hicks, who's at Rockford University, Illinois.
It's a brilliant book that not only deals
with,
the philosophy of postmodernism,
but its historical development
and political underpinnings as well.
I've been through 10 years of graduate school
in the Bay area.
I'm a professor in a very academically rich
environment at Berkeley,
so I interact with undergrad and grad students
all the time.
So I have a bit of experience with,
the academic culture,
really the monoculture,
if you will, of modern universities
and its detrimental effects upon religiously
confessional
students,
whether they're Muslim,
Christian,
or Jewish.
This is an Abrahamic crisis.
It is an Abrahamic crisis.
Postmodernism
is everywhere in the academy,
really since 19 nineties.
If you ever attended a public university,
it doesn't matter if you were an English
major or a History major or a Chemistry
major, or a Math major.
You have been suddenly indoctrinated
by professors espousing
post modernist
theories and ideas.
There is really no way around it. It
is an all pervasive monoculture.
These ideas, in my opinion,
are nothing short of satanic,
albeit
implicitly satanic.
And thus absolutely poisonous
to religious traditionalists
in the academy.
This is what the shaytan does.
So we need to understand the modus operandi,
the MO of the shaitan.
It calls through infidelity,
quoted in the Quran.
As shaitan says to the human being,
disbelief.
So apostasy,
ridda, which is spreading in academia,
like butter on toast,
is usually commensurate
with a with a satanic presence.
Apostasy and Satanism
go hand in hand.
And when you hear about Satan,
don't be dismissive,
don't roll your eyes and disdain and ridicule.
About a minute ago, when I first mentioned
satanic,
I actually noticed in this room, people kind
of
smiling,
rolling their eyes.
This is a greatly important matter
if we're believers.
In the Quran, Allah
he he refers to the prophet Muhammad
as Usmatun Hasanani,
one time in the Quran.
A beautiful
example.
Allah mentions
Al Islam, the name of our king, 8
times in the Quran.
Yet Allah
refers to the shaitan
as
at least 15 times
in the Quran.
A clear,
open,
unambiguous
enemy. Just look at the concordance.
We need to take satan
seriously.
Allah
does not mince his words.
He is direct. He is straightforward.
There is a reason for this repetition.
There's an old saying from a popular movie.
It says,
the greatest trick the devil ever pulled
was convincing the world that he didn't exist.
Even a lot of Muslims, you know, if
you say, for example, you know, don't go
out at night, you know, the demonic presence
is very active or if you say protect
yourself with Wugu,
with Avkah, with Awra, they say, really? This
day, age?
One of my favorite sayings, is actually
from Paul in the New Testament.
Go figure.
Ephesians.
Very interesting. He says, our battle
is not against flesh and blood, but rather
with principalities
of darkness
in the world
and against spiritual wickedness in high places.
End quote. I agree.
Ours is a spiritual battle against dark forces.
So we need to be spiritually powerful, intellectually
formidable.
Now, explicit satanism,
in theory and practice, is very much alive
in the world today,
whether in the form of Cralian
black magic, which is called Goisha, which is
literally conjuring of demons,
also known as Saleima. Saleima in Greek means
will,
w I l l.
Right? Because there's credo. It's do what you
will.
Again,
intimating the primacy of the will over the
intellect.
You also have something called Latvian
Satanism,
also known as selfism or egolatry. I referred
to that earlier, also known as the Church
of Satan,
which is essentially taking your Hawassa
referred to as being Dionysian.
Right?
In contrast to being Apollonian.
Being Apollonian, after Apollo,
means to give
reason, prime as reason is your guide. To
be Dionysian
means to let your desires be your god.
After the Greek god, Dionysus,
the son of Zeus, who was born from
his father's thigh near his crotch,
thus he's the wine he's the god of
wine, entertainment, pleasure, frivolity,
self indulgence.
Right?
So freedom from religious law
and absolute self determinism
are the dual principles
of satanists.
Freedom from religious law and
absolute self determinism.
This idea, I don't need God
and I can do whatever I want.
Or as Elsa sang
in the popular Disney movie,
Frozen,
no right, no wrong, no rules for me.
I am free.
So if Satan is our enemy and we
wish to do battle against him,
then we need to know our enemy, his
ways, his mentality, his philosophy, his tools, his
minions. How can you make spiritual warfare against
an enemy if you're ignorant of that enemy?
Know your enemy.
It was advised then, Khungfu Tzu, also known
as Confucius,
the greatest of the Axial Age, sages of
the the Iron Age.
He said, and I love this quote from
him. Tradition symbolizes us.
Education
perfects us.
There's incredible profundity in that statement.
In other words, we must look to our
past,
our golden age,
and determine which principles
and virtues
led to such human flourishing.
Captured the zeitgeist of that age. This is
not to, you know, foolishly romanticize
the past. That's not the goal here.
There's certainly aspects of pre modernism that we
want to avoid.
No. We're talking about
virtues
that led to intellectual
and moral flourishing.
Not type of a cultural or political aspect.
We need to identify those virtues
and then
every single device of education
should be utilized
to inculcate those virtues
within our within our children in the present
age.
So our pedagogical
methods
must rely on tried and tested
tradition. The word pedagogy in Greek comes from
pais, meaning child,
and agro, which means to lead. To lead
a child. Right? We say tariyyah
in Arabic.
Right?
Means to guide someone in stages.
Right? Allah
is He's
the one that takes care of us in
stages.
Your parents are a type of arba,
a type of,
of lower to lower case l.
Right? So we say the du'a that Allah
taught us in the Quran, have mercy on
these have mercy on
them as they raised me up in childbirth.
So tarbiyah is very important.
This is why hadith of Rahma, which I
have here on the slide in English,
the hadith of compassion for Mustaq Ahmad is
the first hadith that Muslim children learn
according to traditional Islamic curriculum.
Rahma is the greatest witch.
Underline the word compassion.
The most compassionate shows compassion to those who
show compassion
show compassion to those on Earth, and the
one in heaven will show you compassion. Compassion,
compassion, compassion,
compassion, compassion. This was chosen by our ulama
because they want to drill into the mind
of the child.
Compassion is indeed the greatest,
virtue.
So the ulama, they look back at the
prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam, it was a
paradigm of virtue.
He said, ana nabeur Rahma,
I am the prophet of mercy.
I am a gift of mercy. They look
back at the Quran.
These
ayaats.
However, in contrast to this Confucian deliberate tradition,
as it is called, deliberate tradition.
Traditional value systems,
in general,
are perceived as the enemies of humanity
by post modernists.
Traditional value systems
are inherently
oppressive, they claim,
Because they are hierarchical
and patriarchal.
So we have to get into these terms.
These are the buzz words.
Right? We have to understand the nomenclature
of the postmodernists. They love these two words,
especially the Ba ri.
I imagine postmodernists
rewording that profound Confucian aphorism to say, tradition
oppresses us,
and education
should
politicize
us.
Because postmodernism
and politics are inextricable,
cannot be separated.
I'll come back to this idea.
This postmodern revolt against tradition tradition
has now actually infected our popular films.
So hypocritical
Hollywood,
you know, sometimes called Hellywood,
hella weird,
with its putrid and shameless culture of transactional
*,
prostitution,
self aggrandizement,
holds in its hand one of the most
powerful tools
by which to indoctrinate
masses of human beings.
When you just think about the popularity
of the Star Wars franchise,
Tens of millions of people,
over the last 40 years
are obsessed with Star Wars.
But ever since Disney
has taken over
in 2012,
Star Wars has noticeably changed its tone.
For example,
in The Last Jedi,
Kylo Ren says to Rey,
both millennials,
we would call them, quote, let the past
die.
Kill it, if you have to.
That is quintessentially
postmodernism.
Now, when I say that postmodernism
is poisonous to religious traditionalism
in colleges and universities,
again, I'm referring to Judeo Christian Islamic
tradition.
The Abrahamic faith tradition.
Okay.
Abraham
is pronounced Abraham
in Hebrew.
It literally means father of many nations.
Right?
Ab Abub means father.
The word for father in Greek and Latin
is Ateil.
Abraham is the patriarch
of our religion.
Right? It is the tradition
of the pig, your patriarch, your father, Abraham.
Isa alaihis salam is quoted to have said
a New Testament in Greek,
He says to the Pharisees, if you were
truly Abraham's children, you would do the works
of Abraham.
So when you hear post modernist professors
of the social sciences
rage against the oppression,
tyranny
and eventual
overthrow
of the patriarchy,
the rule of the father,
now you know who they're talking about.
Abraham,
Ibrahim
who was called the friend of God
in the Tanakh,
the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and in the
Quran.
Aleister Crowley, who's the famous Satanist,
he said, and he said this in the
early 20th century,
he said, we are moving away from the
age of the patriarch
and into the age of Horus,
as he called it. The age of the
child.
Horus is the son of Osiris
and Isis,
the age of rebellion,
irresponsibility,
and hedonistic
self indulgence.
An age of
when a girl will give birth to her
master.
The age of extended adolescence.
The age of the phenomenon of the 40
year old man child
or woman child.
What's known technically
as paraphilic
infantilism.
Check this out. There's actually an entire subculture
of adults
who choose to live as children.
This is also called
age play.
Most famous example,
a 52 year old man recently in Canada
with 7 kids
decided to leave his wife and children
to live as a 6 year old girl.
He has pigtails,
and he wears dresses.
Right?
This is what's happening.
You also have an entire subculture of adults
living as dogs.
It's called pup play.
And what a surprise, the vast majority are
homosexual men,
smelling each other with the kinds.
I try not to use the word gay.
I don't allow people to pressure me
into using politically
correct language
unless I want to.
Gay has a good meaning.
I will not equate it with sexual perversion.
The word gay is found in iconic Christmas
songs.
Dech le ho.
John, we now are gay apparel.
When I was a kid, we watched reruns
of the Flintstones.
Right? We'll have the gay old times.
Christmas and children have nothing to do with
*.
I will not associate the 2.
So this is an age of shamelessness,
of doing what thou wilt, which is, of
course, again, the credo of Proloan Satanists.
Interesting is the hadith narbaheena bimal Nawawi, the
prophet
says, I'm going to tell you something that
every prophet told his people.
And if you have no shame,
then do what thou wilt.
Right? So it's not okay, I don't have
any shame on you. No. The point is
you have to have shame.
You can't do what thou wilt.
Them. Now with that said,
imagine
an 18 year old or aunt who shook
out the beaten students
entering into these institutions.
Institutions that have literally declared
ideological
warfare on Abrahamic morality.
What do you expect will happen to his
fate if he is not prepared for the
intellectual battlefield?
To be ripped apart,
chewed up and spit out.
Let's talk more specifically about postmodernism.
Let's unpack the ideology a bit more.
Now chances are you've come across names like
Michel Foucault,
Jacques Derrida,
John Francois Lyotard,
Stanley Fish, Richard Worthey,
Frank Lentrichtia,
Andrea Wharton.
Their names are not familiar. Their ideas will
be, certainly. They are the major players.
Point number 1 about postmodernism.
Postmodernism
rejects
ultimate or absolute truth.
There is no ultimate or absolute truth, they
say.
You have to find your own subjective
truths.
Plural with a lower case t.
Live your truth, as Oprah says.
There is no,
true self
in God's image to be actualized
by disciplining your desires.
As I mentioned earlier, tahluk and tahakuq,
You must invent your true self.
Self invention
by engaging your desires.
I saw another movie
about a month ago called Adventures. It was
a commercial
before the movie that caught my eye.
The 32nd commercial, you have this young woman,
millennials, who has a t shirt with a
rainbow on it, homosexual advocate.
And these are direct quotes. She says, look,
here's the thing about diet Coke.
It's delicious.
It makes me feel good.
Life is short.
Just do you.
They love that. Just do you,
whatever it is.
Diet Coke,
because I can.
It's beautiful.
Yeah.
Quintessential
post moderns.
Right before the movie. I couldn't even enjoy
the movie.
Just do me. Okay. What if I like
to torture animals? Just do me.
Achim and Pradeep.
Postmodern's
philosophy here is actually self contradictory. To say
that there is no absolute truth is to
make a statement that is absolutely true.
In other words, they're saying the only absolute
truth
is that there's no absolute truth.
Because modernists tend to be radically skeptical about
everything.
Right? Except their own skepticism.
However, contradictions don't seem to bother them
because the intellect has been devalued.
Point number 2,
postmodernism
denies objective
morality.
As we said,
you have this strain of nominalism,
where where formal and final causes are rejected.
Morality is totally fluid, they say, and relative.
Now the Assas, the foundation of Abrahamic of
the Abrahamic tradition,
is love of God and love of your
fellow human being.
And that is absolutely fundamental. You read the
New Testament, you read the biblical writings,
talk to a rabbi, talk to a pastor.
Imam al Razi, he defined Islam. He said,
He said, Islam is the worship of the
creator and showing compassion
towards the creation.
However, as Abrahamic believers, this is a very
important point.
We don't conflate
acceptance
with love, necessarily.
We don't conflate
acceptance
with love. In other words, we can love
people
and simultaneously
consider some of their behavior
as morally reprehensible.
Because modernists tend to inflate love with acceptance
with this idea that if you really love
your transgender cousin,
you would accept him totally
for who he or she or she
is.
Ze, the actual
pronoun.
One of the many pronouns
that,
people in the academy have fabricated
that are now, at least in Canada, have
proposed laws
to compel people to use.
Now this leads to another contradiction
in postmodernist
philosophy.
Postmodernists
are highly intolerant
of intolerance.
It is as if they say, respect everyone,
you idiot.
I remember
so, you know, just do you, that also
that that's called virtue signaling.
Right? That sounds like the right thing to
say, but they don't actually practice it. What
they mean is just do you as long
as you agree with me, and if you
don't, then you're a fidget.
You can change your beliefs.
I was a tutor
at the GTU for a while, tutoring,
a sister, a Christian sister in Hebrew,
kind of strange Muslim
Muslim
guy tutoring, a Christian student in Hebrew. Anyway,
she saw me a few months after our
tutoring session from a distance, and she said,
Adi, Adi. She wanted to give you a
hug.
And I said, no. I I don't I
don't hug.
She said, what? I don't I said, I
don't hug women.
And I had to explain it to her.
She said, really? She put out her hand
and wanted to shake my hand. So, you
know, I don't I don't shake my hand.
So she said, I'm so offended.
She was serious.
I'm so offended. You won't shake my hand
because I'm a woman?
So I I turned the tables on her.
Right?
I played the victim.
Right? And I told her I was doing
this. I said, what?
You're offended?
I'm an oppressed minority in America. I'm proud
to say that I'm Muslim. And my religious
beliefs offend you? I'm offended you're offended.
She said, oh my god.
You're so high. He said, well, I'm just
kidding.
So this is why traditional or religiously confessional
students, what we need,
are so reluctant,
that is to say afraid,
to take a theological
or moral stance in a university classroom.
To say, for example, that pantheism
or incarnationalism
is incorrect
theology,
Or to say that homosexuality
is sexually perverse
is to invite upon oneself.
A hailstorm
of ad hominem
FFS.
Such as arrogant,
ignorant,
antiquated,
dogmatic,
homophobic,
transphobic,
bigoted, traditionalists.
Those modernists are dogmatically opposed
to dogma.
Point number 3.
Postmodernist
literature is often
convoluted,
incoherent,
and condescending.
It is formed way over substance.
It's pseudo profundity is often perceived by young
believers in
college as just too deep and insightful for
me to understand. They think to themselves, you
know, I must be an
idiot. I just don't get it.
It's kinda like modern art.
I don't know if you've ever been to
a museum of modern art.
My daughter took the class with she did
the college class, so we did a field
trip to the MoMA
in San Francisco, the Museum of Modern Art.
We were there for about 15 15 minutes.
We scratched our heads and left.
So there's this there's this portrait.
It was completely blank,
and it's called the mirror.
And there's this crowd of people looking at
it going, oh, wow.
What is this? It's so profound.
I gotta look at my car right.
Are we looking at the same thing?
There was
this Isle of Sticks in the corner.
Isle of Sticks
that people are looking at.
Amazing sculpture.
Amazing sculpture.
There was another one, Waubati. I felt like
my 4 year old would have done a
better job. It was crayon scribbles, Waubati.
It was crayon scribbles. Yeah. And people look
at that,
wow. People were like having these
cathartic experiences.
We assume it must be deep and profound
because it's in a museum,
but it's the Emperor's New Clothes.
There's nothing there.
This is how their literature is, postmodernist
literature. It sounds deep and profound. It is
nonsense.
Nonsense.
They actually give an award, an annual reward
to who can write the most incoherent text.
And this professor at UC Berkeley has done
this professor. She's winning the award.
It's just this kind of speed they have
amongst each other.
They purposely write incoherently to impress each other.
It's nonsense.
Anyway, these believers,
they because of this, they feel a sense
of a strong sense of inadequacy and embarrassment
for both their inability to grasp
the convoluted literature and for their quote, simple
belief in God,
morality,
right and wrong and accurate. I'm actually scared
to say I believe in this, I think
this is right, I think that's wrong. They're
ridiculed.
Right?
For many of these young believers,
there are only 2 viable options.
I call it selling out or checking out.
In other words, attempt to change
the very face of the religion
in order to mitigate
the hurt feelings
of certain individuals
who are offended by the morality in religious
texts,
or to leave the religion
altogether because they just don't want to deal
with it.
So the Saba says, yes, I'm Muslim,
but
I don't believe in this or that verse
in the Quran, or this or that hadith.
The checkout
says,
Muslim?
No, not anymore.
I used to be, but now I'm enlightened.
The most infamous
of the postmodern philosophers
was a Frenchman,
one Michel Foucault,
died in 1984,
but continues to be an absolute rock star
in universities
all around the world.
He famously said, quote, it is meaningless
to speak in the name of
or against
reason,
truth,
or knowledge.
Meaningless
to speak of or against
reason, truth, or knowledge.
And he was a product of the trend
what's known as a continental
philosophy in the history of western philosophy, who
studied it. This is philosophy from the mainland
of Europe that was prevalent in the 19th
20th
centuries.
A philosophy that was becoming less and less
confident
in truth, reason, and objective
reality.
A philosophy that's represented by Immanuel Kant.
Right? The critique of pure reason or Kierkegaard,
meaning to crucify reason. However, Kant and Kierkegaard
both believed in God, they were Christians.
But then you have the atheistic
irrationalist
Friedrich Nietzsche,
who called the human intellect,
quote, pitiful
and that emotion,
drive,
ambitions,
will and desire should be our guidance.
Foucault is even more radical.
By the way, Foucault was a drug addicted,
homosexual,
malice
who died of
AIDS in 1984. He actually fell in love
with the pre AIDS San Francisco gay bar
scene, in the early 19 eighties.
Foucault also had a profound effect
on the Muslim majority world as well.
He was a professor of psychology at the
University of Tunis
from 1966
to 1968.
Alright. Truth, reason, and knowledge.
And
are meaningless,
he says.
Noam Chomsky is interesting.
He actually says, Noam Chomsky, you know you
know him Chomsky, he's a professor of linguistics
at MIT.
He says that postmodernism
is even more quote, protest
in the Muslim world
than in the Western world.
Right? He says he gives he goes to
universities,
and Middle East all the time
and he's always called naive because he speaks
about truth and objective history. He said that's
old fashioned.
So reason is meaningless, they say.
Now reason is limited, that's true, but is
it meaningless?
Can we really not know anything?
So how many times do we find in
the Quran
phrases like,
You must place some confidence
in the intellect in reason.
Now, Muslim theologians like Igit Tania,
he said that,
reason and revelation are not in conflict. The
proper use of the formal former
will lead to the recognition of the latter
because they come from the same source. They're
both from Allah
Imam Abu Ghazali says in his
that the Quran itself appeals to logic
through syllogistic
arguments
long before Hellenistic influences
upon Muslim theological discourse.
The prophets in the Quran use logic and
reason to appeal to their respective communities
because logic and reason have efficacy.
For example, in the Quran,
Badir is called Badir,
which is the efficient
cause, the origin,
originator
of the Ulesia community shape. There is nothing
like him whatsoever. He transcends space, time, and
materiality.
Cause and effect do not apply to him,
or else you're stuck in infinite regress, which
is redundant to the intellect.
That's just one example. So if you're a
Muslim educator,
professor, a chaplain,
a teacher,
from graduate school to Sunday school,
It is your duty to save these young
people.
It's salaam alayhi.
Allah speaks the truth.
Follow.
What is ittiba?
Adherence to imitation.
Adhere to the tradition of Ibrahim
the archetypal monotheist.
Edward Lane, he actually says that in his
famous lexicon. That ittibak always has
an element of imitation,
nesis.
Now, Allah
also says in the Quran,
Don't adhere to the footsteps of Satan.
Because he calls or he orders to
perversity
and falsehood.
Perversity
and falsehood. So these words are in the
Quran.
They have meanings.
They're normative definitions.
They are defined by the Quran and sunnah.
The Quran is theologically
and morally judgmental.
You cannot avoid it. Everybody is judgmental.
Everybody.
The Quran
is theologically
and morally
judgmental and we must be prepared
with reason
to defend those judgments without apology.
Even if people have discounted reasons,
continue to be reasonable.
It is our reason that makes us human.
It is our differentia, as Aristotle said, you
are the rational animal. Reason will win in
the end.
Emotional
incontinence
cannot be sustained.
People get tired of motion,
but they will not tire of reason.
So we must employ dialectic. Dialectic is the
Socratic method.
What is dialectic?
Dialogue and debate
based on asking and answering questions
to stimulate critical thinking
in order to tease out the truth.
True knowledge
as opposed to rhetoric.
Dialectic
leads to knowledge.
Right?
Rhetoric
leads to opinion.
What is rhetoric? Sophistry.
Just trying to get your own opinion across.
You don't care about truth. It's like a
defense lawyer who knows his client is guilty,
but he doesn't care. He's not trying to
get to the truth. He's trying to get
his client
acquitted.
He only cares about persuasion.
So Aristotle said there are 3 modes of
persuasion.
They're very important. Three modes of persuasion of
effective
communication.
These are the Greek terms. They're pronounced logos,
ethos, and pathos.
Logos or logos
is a reference to logic.
You're using facts and figures.
Right? Ethos is a reference to the speaker
himself or herself
That they have a good disposition,
that they have a good reputation.
And then pathos is its emotional appeal.
So the rhetorician,
the sophist,
primarily
appeals to pathos.
He wants to emotionally
manipulate you.
Whereas the dialectician
primarily
appeals to logos
and Ethos
because he wants to get to the truth.
In the Quran,
Call to the way of your Lord. With
wisdom. And The urlamasei here, the meaning of
this is with Dalahil,
rational apli
and and scriptural proof texts.
Right? With logos.
With a good disposition,
with good f off.
And debate with them in ways that are
better than what they're doing. They're gonna they're
sophists. They're betteritians.
They're going to play the victim.
You offended me. They're gonna use ad hominem
attacks.
Keep your cool and use facts and figures.
Use logic. Use logos.
Use
appeal to the intellect.
So our young people need prophetic advice. The
prophet
Speak the truth even if it's bitter.
There is truth.
It's not relativism.
He says speak the truth even if it's
bitter, and don't be afraid of people.
Morality is not subjective.
Truth is real. Falsehood is real. We need
to stand up for it. Stop being afraid.
A man came to the prophet to give
me some advice. He said,
He said,
say, I believe in Allah
and be
theologically
and morally steadfast
upon that.
And I always say this, if people think
you're weird, that's fine. The prophet said, flat
tidings to the weirdos.
We should be weird. In this day and
age,
if we're not if we're not weird, we're
doing something wrong. Ridhulah.
We should be. We should stand up.
And if people disagree with you,
fine.
You ever heard of that? You ever thought
about that?
You have your religion, I have my religion.
You have your way of life,
I have my way of life.
You have your,
theological beliefs or lack thereof. You have your
ideas of morality, and nature, and nurture, and
all of that, and so do I. Don't
tell me what to say or do. I
won't tell you what to say or do.
This should really be our attitude.
Right? Because we're living in a Meccan phase.
It was revealed in Meccan,
Whoever wants to believe, let him believe. Whoever
wants to disbelieve, let him disbelieve.
You will hear Anan Kathirah, Allah
says, in the Quran. You will hear a
lot of annoying discourse
that's going to grieve you. Right?
But if you are patient and you guard
against evil, that's going to be the determining
factor. That's what's going to come. Be patient
and guard against evil. Don't be a seller.
Life is supposed to be a bit difficult.
The dunya is supposed to be difficult.
Dunya means the low that's the low world.
The lowest world. That's what happens here. The
prophet said
that Surat Hud, walaha watu, had turned my
shayyamit. So the these these group of Suras,
they turned my hair gray because the Tanzil
was so strong upon them. And then he
singled out one item in particular,
item 112
Be upright as you have been commanded.
He found that difficult,
Physically, it's difficult,
but we have to go through it. Life
is short.
Don't sell out.
Don't check out.
Okay.
Now, the literary
method of of postmodernists
is called deconstructionism.
According to deconstructionism,
no one interpretation
of a text,
such as a religious text,
I. E. The Quran,
should be privileged
over other readings. They love this word privilege.
Social Sciences
aside,
even the hard sciences
are feel like physics,
biology,
they're feeling the pressure of post modernist thinkers.
There's a French feminist philosopher. When I say
feminist, I'm talking about 3rd wave feminism.
I'm not talking about first wave, where there's
equal rights. We have no problem there. 2nd
wave is a revolt against gender rules, a
little problematic.
3rd wave is about body autonomy
and taking down the patriarchy and replacing it
with a matriarchy.
What does that mean? The right to abort
babies
and taking down men
and ruling them. This is the essence of
3rd wave feminism.
There's a French 3rd wave feminist philosopher
named here by Gary.
She said, get this, can't make this stuff
up,
folks. The equation
e equals mc squared is sexist.
Why?
Because it privileges
the speed of light over other lights.
Apparently, there are now an infinite number of
genders.
You know, Athal and Nakhl,
reason and scripture. See, there are 2 genders,
x
y, x x,
beka, luwinsa.
We are told by postmodernists,
social scientists, we're told by Zuckerberg, we're told
by
gender theorists at the university gender theory, interesting.
We're told by gender theorists at the university
that people who maintain
this rigid binary
are bigots.
They're just not woke.
Get woke.
Get a book, not get woke. Why Gender
Matters,
doctor Leonard Sachs,
extraordinary
text.
Before it's banned,
and I mean that,
California Assembly Bill 2943
already proposed
a banning of books that are offensive
to the
LGBTQIA community.
California
legislation is trying to ban books that seek
to reform
homosexuals
and declare them big speech.
What is the natural progression?
This makes Christians very nervous
because homosexuality
in the Bible is immoral.
I said, well, you know, good written Christianity,
no. Wrong attitude. They come for you tonight.
They come for us in the morning.
We're next.
A great American Muslim scholar once said,
Shaitan wants to change
from mutables
to mutable.
Shaitan wants to change tawabit.
What are tawabit?
Tawabit are
underlines, principles, axiomatic,
self evident truths.
He wants to change those into variables. Mutarayyarat.
These things can change.
He wants to lay to waste our underlying
principles.
There are classical laws of thought,
such as the principle of identity,
the principle of non contradiction.
So male is male and not male is
not male. There are 35 100 biological differences
between men and women.
The Quran says, the human the the man,
the male, is not like the female.
There are gender roles
rooted in biology.
Rooted in biology. What I've just said could
get me expelled from a university class,
by the way.
There are gender roles
rooted in biology and are
are.
It is not purely a social construct
or a feeling.
There's an article in the Huffington Post,
some people call it the Huffington Compost,
where there's a picture of a man
sitting on a park bench,
looks like a man,
with a blood stain in his crotch
holding a sign that says, men get periods
too.
Turns out, that is a biological
woman
dressed up like a man.
So the headline should be, woman gets period.
Wow.
If you're a man,
putting on your grandmother's shoes doesn't make you
an old woman
any more than barking like a dog makes
you a dog.
American
slaves
living in the Antebellum
South,
the pre civil wars
out, had a suicide rate that high.
People who are separated from their families,
treated like animals
and utterly brutalized
do not have a suicide rate,
the rate of
some suburban
transgender of 2018.
Interesting.
Clearly,
gender identity syndrome, which is what it used
to be called, now they call it gender
dysphoria.
Gender identity syndrome is a mental illness in
adults.
But how But now it is politically incorrect
to say that.
It is politically incorrect to say that. Something
that will help people.
You cannot say.
There is a confirmed mental illness, according to
the ADA, called body integrity identity disorder.
Body integrity
identity disorder. This is when a person feels
to then feels the need to amputate
his or her healthy body parts.
But when a 12 year old girl feels
like she's a boy and wants to amputate
her *,
she is called brave,
courageous,
and a hero.
Be yourself.
Do you.
Just go get it.
Get it.
Amazing.
There was a Google engineer,
James Damore, I don't know if you've heard
of him,
who was fired from Google
because he wrote a memo
suggesting
that biological differences between men and women
help explain the differences
of their career choices.
He's absolutely right.
And he was fired. Because it's not PC
to say that. In other words, the STEM
fields, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, contain more
men than women because women are not nearly
as interested in those fields as men are.
There are also a lot more men in
construction,
sanitation,
and plumbing
because women are not interested in those jobs.
From a theological standpoint, it is Satan
who wants to blur the lines of gender.
This is why Bahamet,
which is the official symbol of the Church
of
Satan, is usually depicted as androgynous.
Clearly the body of a man with female
*,
because he shatters the gender binary.
Offerman is woke, apparently.
Here's a good hashtag for you. Hashtag, Offerman
is woke.
Now, I'm gonna come back to deconstructionism,
but I want to talk more about homosexuality.
This is a big, big issue in the
Academy.
This is the social issue.
Homosexual advocates are making this into a civil
rights issue.
Now, as believers,
when we engage,
as believers, we should we should engage in
dialecting.
We should know that if we appeal to
the Quran,
it is then a logical fallacy.
Someone who doesn't believe in the Quran is
asking you, why don't you why don't why
don't you accept homosexuality
as a lifestyle? And if you say, well,
that's in the Quran, that's called an argument
from the qualified authority because they won't believe
in that authority.
You have to give secular arguments. You have
to use dialectic.
Okay?
There's this conservative,
YouTuber. I don't agree with everything he says
obviously, but that's an interesting thing where he
goes around interviewing people on the street.
Usually, they're
millennials or in that age range.
I hate to pick on them, but
it's okay. My my kids are almost at
that age. They're all the same. Right?
So, he goes up to someone and he
says,
how do you feel about a man marrying
another man?
How do you feel about a man marrying
another man?
And this person says,
why not?
2 consenting adults.
What's wrong with that? To each his own.
Whatever floats your boat.
Right? He said, okay. 2 consenting adults. That's
right. Of course. Okay. Wait. How do you
feel about a man marrying his daughter that
are both consenting adults?
And they say, no, no, I'm I'm a
Greek. And he says, what? Are you an
* phobe?
That's all you have to do.
Throw out the ad homement.
Are you an * phobe? Oh, no?
Or I guess I guess it's, you know,
as long as they don't have kids.
What?
Are you denying my right to have children?
No. No. And you can see that one
by okay. Nothing wrong. There's nothing wrong with
that.
There's nothing wrong. As long as it's not
hurting anyone.
The CDC.
What is CDC?
Center of Disease. Center of Disease Control. According
to that,
homosexuals are 2%
of the population, homosexual men, yet account for
78%
of HIV cases.
2% account for 78%
of HIV cases.
83% of syphilis.
Here's a group, Americans with Truth About Homosexuality,
Aftab, you can do some research on.
More than 1 out of 10 homosexual men
is incontinent.
If You don't know what that means, look
it up.
I've read from 12% to 25%
of homosexual men are incontinent.
McKinsey Institute published a study by Feldman Weidberg
from 1978,
saying that finding that promiscuity
among homosexual men is through the roof.
Check this out. 28%
of homosexual men have had sexual
encounters
with 1,000
or more partners.
Multiple studies have shown that casual * causes
depression,
anxiety and mental illness.
Now, 79%
of that 28%
said that more than half of their partners
were complete strangers.
So if you go to like, those gay
bars, movie gay movie theaters,
gay dance clubs. They have these bathrooms
that actually cater to this type of thing.
This is clearly a mental illness.
Allah
intubates that homosexual
homosexual promiscuity is a mental illness in the
Quran.
Allah
says,
directly to the prophet
and this is the only time which Allah
takes an oath by the life of the
prophet
So this is a big oath.
By your life, they are indeed, in their
wild
intoxication,
wandering
blindly.
Homosexuality
is transforming the very fabric of society.
It is destroying the traditional nuclear family.
It spreads disease and a culture of irresponsibility.
Several studies have shown that same * relationships
do not last nearly as long as heterosexual
relationships.
So children end up suffering due to these
highly dysfunctional relationships.
Use the argument from nature, from natural selection.
Put 1,000,000 homosexual men on an island, give
them the best technology,
cutting edge, health care, in 100 years, everyone
is dead. Nature selects.
Now, a common argument, this is coming from
Muslim homosexual colleges,
is that why would Allah create them like
that?
Right?
Now, first of all, there's no scientific evidence,
whatsoever, of a gay gene.
So this whole idea of born this way,
right, Lady Gaga and the
is a lie.
One can certainly make the argument that homosexuality
is the result of trauma suffered
during the development of one's brain in early
childhood.
So something like divorce, rejection by a father
or mother,
sexual molestation,
being physically abused.
Doctor Omar Johnson,
who counsels African American youth, he says that
he's a clinical psychologist for something like 20
years, to 95%
of the black youth that come to him
that identify as homosexual
are victims of trauma in childhood.
The other thing is, how would a gay
gene even survive natural selection? Wouldn't
nature
weed it out eventually? It doesn't seem to
be happening. It seems to be growing.
Evolutionary biologist and
anti theist palleticist, Richard Dawkins,
over at Oxford University, evolutionary biologist,
he really doesn't have an answer. He doesn't
know. He has some theories
that I won't go into, but one of
them he says is, well, maybe it's because,
maybe babies that feed from a bottle turn
gay again.
Those who breastfeed are straight. This is this
is called Richard Dawkins. This is their main
man.
Interesting. Well, going back to this question, why
would Allah create them like that? Let's just
entertain the premise for now. Okay. That's how
they were created.
This is similar to the transgender thing.
What about a child born in the Congo
into abject poverty
to a single mother who is HIV positive
because of a vaccine that she took,
yet that child never complains.
Welcome to the dunya.
Life is hard.
We are in no position
to judge Allah
There are children born blind
with major mental and physical disabilities.
This is qadr.
There are men who are born with proclivities
towards children.
Do we ask why did Allah create them
like that? No. We expect them not to
act out on their perversion.
Okay. Switching gears here. Go back to
deconstructionism.
According to deconstructionism,
there are no right and wrong readings of
any text.
There are no true and false readings.
The idea of a meta narrative. Meta narrative
is to say,
the standard interpretation
of a text
that shaped religious orthodoxy.
These are summarily rejected by postmodernists.
All readings are valid and equally important, they
say.
What is demanded,
according to what is only demanded, according to
another infamous post modernist
American professor named Stanley Fish,
is to be quote, interesting.
Just be interesting.
Not to be right or correct, because right,
correct,
normative,
orthodox,
these do not exist
according to them.
Just be interesting.
As long as it's entertaining.
As long as it feels great.
So, now we have in religious departments and
seminaries,
a method of interpretation
known as radical hermeneutics.
Radical hermeneutics
of sacred texts. Like queer hermeneutics.
For example, we have Muslims in the seminary,
justifying homosexuality
based on the Quran. I don't know how
on earth one would even do that, but
they managed to do it somehow. They say
things like, no, the Quran is not forbidding
homosexual acts. It's only saying not to *
each other.
Which is interesting because in the Quranic narrative,
Lutz
he says to the men that are coming
to,
seduce the other men, he says to them,
take my daughters instead.
They say the meaning of that is, marry
the women of my Umma
instead
of having,
relations with the men. That's the meaning of
that. If the Quran is only denouncing their
*, then what is Luz alaihi alaihi salam
actually saying? * my women? * my daughters
instead of the men? No. That's not what
he's saying.
But this is as long as it's interesting,
don't worry about contradictions.
You can put it out there and get
your master's degree and get a professorship and
you can travel around the country and you
can engage in this nonsensical
academic speak, but nobody understands except a few
of your colleagues and you can get back,
go back to the back room and drink
and laugh about it later.
Queer hermeneutics,
transgender hermeneutics,
3rd wave feminist hermeneutics, neo Marxist hermeneutics. It
is a
So the quest for truth
or the intended
authorial meanings of a text are abandoned.
Rather sacrificed upon the altar of self interest
and feelings.
So things like grammar, logic, rhetoric, syntax,
definitions,
consistency,
context,
who cares?
Scripture now bends to accommodate us, not us
to accommodate it. Rather than interrogating
our own positions in light of scripture,
we interrogate scripture
in light of our own positions.
In short, scripture can now mean whatever we
want it to mean.
The prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam, he said, there
will come a time upon the people,
that nothing will remain of Islam except its
name. It's just a namin, a name without
a reality.
No essence.
No normative definition.
Totally subjective.
This hadith indicates that there is indeed an
orthodox
normative definition of Islam.
It's not defined by our feelings.
It's defined by Allah and his messenger. Walayafa
bin al Quran ila rasmo. Nothing will remain
of the Quran except its script.
It's just words on a page
deprived of their true meanings.
Couple of hadith of our master, Muhammad
At the end of the time, there are
going to be flagrant,
habitual
liars, impostors
who will make statements that neither you nor
your ancestors or forefathers
have ever heard. In other words, according to
the Huronama, they will say things that are
absolutely
irreconcilable
with our faith tradition
that no Muslim has ever heard,
yet they will justify themselves religiously.
This is already rampant in biblical studies.
I have an MA in biblical studies. My
former academic adviser,
who is now the director of New Testament
studies at the College of the Holy Cross,
a Jesuit school on the East Coast.
This man said, and there's a huge uproar
about it, he said, I'm not gonna say,
but one of the greatest prophets, he said,
was, quote, a gay gender fluid
drag king.
This is postmodern,
radical hermeneutics
at its worst.
Them. Lest they misguide you
or
involve you in their fitna.
What is the role of the Iberlaba during
this troublesome time?
This sacred knowledge will be borne by reliable
authorities
of each successive generation.
They will remove from it the alterations of
those guilty of exaggeration,
the plagiarism of the corrupt, and the interpretations
of the ignorance.
We're coming down to the end, folks.
And we'll open it up for some comments
and questions. A little dialectic.
We haven't given 4 o'clock, so
this is my 10th slide. I only have
11.
Another pillar of postmodernism
is named Frank Lentrichia.
He said that the very purpose
of a college education
is to exercise
power
for the purpose of social change.
Not to pursue virtue or truth. Why? Because
truth is meaningless,
and virtues are relative.
Everything is our place.
Life is all about our place.
Human beings act,
human beings don't act out of piety or
morality.
They just want power.
In other words, according to postmodernists,
the only worthwhile
purpose
of a college education
is to create political activists.
So postmodernism
clearly has Marxist
underpinnings,
which are further highlighted
by its relentless
demand for radical
egalitarianism
in order to create some sort of
communist,
godless,
raceless, genderless, classless,
utopia on Earth,
where technology reigns supreme.
No. You have to pursue justice.
No doubt about it.
But,
infinite justice,
spoiler alert,
will never be recognized, will never be achieved,
will never be actualized in the dunya.
Never. That's the whole point of Yom al
Tayyam.
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is al-'Adil.
He is the
absolute least jannah. It's only on that day
will it will manifest. This doesn't mean that
we should have worked towards justice on the
earth. Of course we do.
Imam al Quirtebay said the basis of our
Sharia is ada and is justice. Of course.
But this unnatural
obsession
for earthly justice,
to the point where I go to an
MSA at a university and the students aren't
praying. They'd rather go protest than pray.
What's going on? Very strange. And when I
tell them we should pray, it takes priority,
they'll look at me like I'm some sort
of
Buddha.
What is this Buddha talking about?
He's out of touch. He's he's an old
man.
Not as old as us.
So
they espouse the misguided proposition
that inequality
is always due to inequity.
In other words, if another social group is
doing better than your group, then you must
be victims of their oppression.
This is this type of explanatory
monism.
There are no other factors,
they say. It's always oppression.
Why are these ideas detrimental to believers?
Because they completely eliminate
gratitude.
Shukum.
They they they they foster this idea that
everyone's out to get me and I'm a
perpetual victim.
There's no time to be grateful.
Shukr
and Kufur are just juxtaposed
in the Quran. They're antonents.
They're opposites.
Remember? Or have regard for me so that
I might have regard for you.
Be grateful to me and don't disbelieve. In
other words, to be ungrateful is to disbelieve.
In other words, the word kafir in Arabic
means ingrate.
They eliminate this philosophy
eliminates
shukur. It eliminates
humility.
Tawadur, this idea of if I'm not progressing
in the dunya, maybe I'm doing something wrong.
What have I done?
Eliminate No. You're a victim. They're out to
get you.
It eliminates introspection, muhazaba,
the self audit. Sit down for 5 minutes
and think about
what am I doing to aina 10th haboom?
Where am I going? What have I done?
It eliminates personal responsibility.
The prophet
All of you are shepherds, and all of
you will be questioned.
All of you are responsible
for your flock.
Who who are your flock? Your your intellect,
your faculties, your limbs, your children, your spouses,
your parents.
It'll be questioned personal responsibility.
These ideas coming out of university, they promote
self victimization.
And to and to play the victim,
according to Roger Scruton,
is an assault on rationality
in the public discourse.
It is a cop out. It is lazy.
We must take ownership for ourselves.
We must stop blaming other people for our
problems.
The prophet
did not victimize
himself.
One of my teachers mentioned that the Satan
versus Adam
paradigm, the satanic
versus Adamic
paradigm.
That that,
shaitan,
when Allah
expelled him from the garden, he said,
because
you caused me to error,
you did this.
I will lie and wait for them.
Your servant
will come at them from all directions.
Shifts responsibility.
Victimizes
himself. You did this. It's like this. Why
would why would Allah create people like that?
Why didn't Allah do that?
Allah will well, yes, alumnmaguri.
Allah can do whatever he wants. Who who
the heck are you to question Allah Nothing.
You don't need to exist.
If you die tomorrow,
your neighbor
will be eating his Cheerios,
and you'll think for a second, oh, that
guy died.
Can you pass the milk?
You're not that important.
Really? Sorry to be so
expressive.
But Adam.
Allah is a doer of everything. That's that's
the theological point. He does everything. But look
at the attitude,
because you did this to me. That's that's
shaitan. What what Adam, alayhis salaam. Rabbanah and
Eve, Rabbanah is plural. This is this is
a first person common plural. So,
Eve alayhi salaam is also making this dua.
And if you don't have mercy on us,
we'll be lost.
See the difference?
One self victimizes.
One, makes toba, wala subhanahu wa ta'ala.
The most dangerous thing about this philosophy coming
out of universities,
it cuts off Torah. Because if there's no
objective morality, you can't break any moral laws.
There's no need for Torah.
It's like,
well, even though he's a Christian,
president Trump
who was asked, have you ever asked God
for forgiveness?
I don't feel the need to
I don't think I've ever been wrong.
Okay.
Christians.
These postmodernist
ideas
caused major conflicts between human beings,
pinning them against each other
in a never ending grab for power.
Black man against white man,
Male against female. Rich against poor.
To paraphrase,
Professor Jordan Peterson, I tend to agree with
him on this point.
If you're sitting in a university classroom,
and you hear things like white privilege,
toxic masculinity,
oppressive patriarchy,
cultural appropriation,
mansplaining,
intersectionality.
You should know that you're being ideologically
and politically
wounded.
That is more properly indoctrination
than education.
Don't play the dirty game of identity politics.
We need to interrogate ideas
irrespective
of the identity of the person
who is espousing those ideas. In other words,
treat people as individuals,
not as part of groups. That doesn't work
anymore.
I give you a story. I I I
was in a I gave a lecture one
time, and I said something about Christianity in
the lecture.
And a brother from the audience after the
lecture, he is a convert. He came up
to me and he said, you should never
talk about Christianity.
He He doesn't know anything about my background.
I said, why not? He said, because you
were never Christian.
I said, I have a an MA in
New Testament. I have a PhD in comparative
religion.
He said, it doesn't matter.
You are not allowed
to talk about Christianity
if you were never a Christian.
What did I say? Did I say something
wrong? No. What you said was correct.
Yeah?
Look, if a straight, white, Christian man
criticizes
Islam
or Muslims,
that does not make him a racist.
It is a non sequitur argument.
Don't play the dirty game.
I actually agree with Sam Harris on this
one.
Do you remember what happened on Bill Barr's
show with Batman,
Backflick?
So Sam Harris was criticizing Islam,
and he says that's racist.
It's not racist.
Islam is a set of ideas. It's not
a race. People can criticize it. Don't be
so quick to jump the gun and call
people racist. That's a cop out.
That doesn't work. That's a weakness.
And if you say that a white man
is not allowed to speak about Islam,
that ironically is racism.
Look at his statement.
If it's wrong, rip it apart. Don't rip
him apart. Don't go after the man. Don't
be ad hominem.
Look at the argument.
Sometimes ad hominem
is,
effective and rhetoric. It has to be tempered.
Now
now we have post modernist talking about
the elimination
of hierarchical
structures,
even within the family unit.
This is what they learn in social sciences
class.
Because according to them,
gender
roles are an impressive
social construct
and just another manifestation
of the evil patriarchy.
And if Judith Butler at UC Berkeley says
it, then it must be true. She's the
one that always wins the award for the
most incoherent book ever written. Every year she
writes it.
And check this out. Postmodernist professor
Andrea Dworkin
compared a married woman
to being a man's, quote, chattel.
She said, quote, a mere a normal man
operates in the mode of predation,
end quote.
In other words, a normal man
a normal man
is a predator.
This is what college students are reading.
So a further assault upon traditional marriage
and a reinforcement
of the man versus woman paradigm.
You see, our religion does not pit men
against women
in some radically
antagonistic
battle of the sexes.
They're not in competition.
They excel in different areas
and complement each other. You ever heard of
Hadid? Hadid?
Right? You're not a complete person unless you're
married. Based on their huddle, based on their
biology,
their hardwirings,
Where it suits them, post modernists pretend like
biology doesn't exist and everything is a social
construct. There is some social instruction,
but it is limited. It is certainly not
everything.
In our tradition,
men and women are equal spiritually,
but not the same
biologically.
You ready for the
and and I forgot to give the disclaimer.
My views do not necessarily represent those who
that's easy.
I'm gonna drop them off on you. Ready?
There are not equal rights in the sharia.
There are not
equal rights
in the sharia, but equitable rights.
And and for her
are rights
equitable, and for
her and for her are rights similar to
what is against her, equitable, according to what
is known, self evident.
For example, a woman must cover her head.
Do I have to cover my head?
Do I have to?
We have unequal rights. It's, by definition, unequal.
And man can marry 4 women.
Can a woman marry 4 men?
A man must support his wife financially.
Can he elect not to and have his
wife support him financially?
A woman is excused from prayer during her
menses.
You see, we live in reality.
We live in reality. These
gender theorists and social justice activists,
SJW,
social justice warriors, they live in La La
Land.
They live and I'm done. Don't don't don't
mean Los Angeles.
Some of them do though.
Some of them even say that men and
women are exactly the same, even physically.
I'd like to see where this goes.
Right? Because I want LeBron James to wake
up tomorrow morning.
I want him to say, you know what?
Gender is a social construct.
I feel like a woman.
I'm gonna join the WNBA.
Good luck.
Good luck. Wilt Chamberlain's
record is going down.
There is an MAM, a mixed martial arts
fighter, Falon Fox,
biologically
male,
but identifies as a woman,
and is sending women to the hospital,
beating women up. This this is a man.
He has the the the frame of a
man. Men have bone density that's thicker, huge
edge, incredible
muscles.
Sending these women to the optic gets anything.
If you say, oh, this is a mess.
Oh, you're a transphobe. You're a bigot.
So on and so forth.
Remember this guy, John McEnroe?
He was, he actually heard him on TV
today. It's the US Open. The commentator.
He got in some hot water because he
was on a radio show and he said,
you know, I think being, Serena Williams is
the greatest female tennis player of all time.
That's what he said. That comment got him
hot water.
Isn't that a compliment?
Yeah. The host said, what do you what
do you mean by that? It's like, what?
Because I know it's like, what?
What?
Why didn't you say she's the greatest? Period.
And he said because She's a female. She's
not.
And then Venus Serena Williams was asked later,
if you played with the men, how would
you fare? She said, I wouldn't even be
in the top 100.
That's it. That's Yeah. But people want to
equalize. I mean, if you mean that she's
the greatest pound for pound,
you know, they say like,
what's the guy? Mayweather.
Mayweather is the greatest boxer pound for pound.
In all things being equal, he's better than
let's say Mike Tyson or Muhammad Ali.
Right?
If she meant it like that No, she
didn't mean it like that. Just say she's
the best of it.
But she's not.
Interesting.
Men and women differ physically.
They process emotion differently. Usually, women process emotion
better than men.
Their brains work differently. Their brains are different
sizes.
They have different interests.
Men have more interest in things,
women with people.
That's why children tend to play little boys
tend to play with trucks, and women with
dolls, girls with dolls. You heard the Scandinavian
studies. Right? Or if you look at the
countries in Scandinavia,
and doctor Peterson also brings this up a
lot, very interesting study because European studies are
interesting because there isn't a lot of religious
baggage there, but not very religious people.
And
ethnically, it's very homogeneous.
So there's there's
incredible equality in these countries, as it were,
between the sexes.
And it shows that
that when people are left to their own
devices,
women gravitate towards traditional female occupations
and men gravitate towards traditional
male occupations.
There are 20 male engineers to every one
female engineer in the Scandinavian countries. There are
20,
teachers
and caretakers and nurses.
The Fincher now comes through. You can see
that.
It's very interesting.
Gender roles are determined by biology.
Women are naturally better caregivers
than men.
Again, that statement there will get me thrown
out
of a psychology,
sociology,
anthropology
class. How do we know that no one
may have *? That's one vision.
Right? That's just obvious.
Right? Men are more suited for manual labor.
That's why,
men have 40% more upper body strength than
women on average.
And so, back to date, US Open,
he hit the ball a 140 miles an
hour
on a serve. Even
the Fed was like, woah. It's getting fed.
Right?
He's the GOAT.
Men deal with stress,
men,
deal with stress better, yet they have
shorter lifespans,
but they process emotion in a worse way.
Multiple studies have shown that the IQs of
men are less predictable
than that of women. Men are all over
the place in the IQ.
Women
tend to cluster around the meaning.
We are different because we complete each other.
So reality is, net,
Charles University, which is in Prague. Again, you
know, South European studies are very, very interesting.
Studies on married couples,
Charles University.
They found that marriages in which one spouse
was dominant,
by dominant, I don't mean oppressive
I mean they had the final authority, the
recognized leader in the household.
The study found that marriages, where one spouse
was dominant,
were the happiest of narrative,
and 77%
of them were male dominated.
So there's a good reason why
Allah
said,
That men are the supporters of maintainers, men
stand over women. There's a reason why Paul
says in the New Testament, I don't agree
with everything that Paul says. He says the
head of the woman is the man. The
head of man is Christ. The head of
Christ is God.
These weren't written.
These texts were not written by misogynists
trying to oppress women. They were written in
accordance with reality.
That leads to greater happiness according to secular
studies
done in 2016, 17, 18.
Hierarchies
work. They are a part of life.
Most of the time, they're based on competence,
not biological factors,
not power dynamics.
They work in the market, they work in
the workplace, military, they work in school and
in the household.
And here's another problem.
Young men are constantly being told
that they are violent rapists.
Now, it is true
that men are a lot more violent than
women.
If you look at the prison population,
90 to 95% of prisoners are men.
And again, that's because
women tend to deal with their emotions in
healthier ways than men.
Right?
The answer, however,
is not to feminize men.
It's very interesting that
testosterone levels are down 30%
from just 30 years ago.
30%.
Men are becoming more and more effeminate.
They're eating more and more soy.
Don't eat soy.
Soy increases estrogen.
It's given to postmenopausal
women.
Don't eat soy. I was taking these men
vitamins
for a while,
and I was like, let me just look
at the ingredients. First ingredient,
organic soy flour. Don't
eat soy. Soy sales
in 1990 Soy food sales in 1992 were
300,000,000
in the US. Now, they're 4,000,000,000.
4,000,000,000.
It is feminizing men.
You see, masculinity is like a martial art.
So so masculinity gravitates towards risk taking,
ambition,
assertiveness,
competition
and physicality.
It's like a martial art. It's it can
be used for murder, *, oppress,
but also to protect and defend.
If men are feminized, who will check the
oppressors?
We need strong,
highly
masculine men.
We need them.
The answer is not to feminize them. The
answer is to,
reform the masculinity and be truly masculine.
And women actually prefer masculine men, despite which
you prefer. She'll pick this. A woman at
random, you want this guy? You know,
a very, very, very thin with skinny jeans.
You know, he's got a pink jacket on,
and a little love patch.
Sorry if people have frosted tips. Sorry if
people have that. What do you want this
guy? He does, you know, he's he's muscular
and,
you know, he's got decoys.
He he plays rugby.
Be honest.
Be honest.
That's the problem.
Now,
social constructionists
are taking it to even crazier levels.
Now, the trend is that children
are seen
as equal to parents
in the household.
There are 7, 8, and 9 year old
children
with gender dysphoria,
demanding
hormone therapy
from their parents and their parents giving into
the predator.
Never mind the fact that hormone therapy
sterilizes
children,
and that that out of the small fraction
of children
that have gender dysphoria,
80%
of them grow out of it.
It's a phase that they come out of
naturally.
Said Nahdi said,
childhood is a type of junun,
is a type of insanity.
They're children
for a reason.
We don't listen to children.
A child who wants to touch a stove,
right, goes, well,
okay. No.
But I wanna be a boy. Like my
daughter, 4 years old, like last year, and
she wanted to be Minnie Mouse.
So what do I do? Start pumping her
with,
mouse hormones?
And, you know, it's it's a new generation.
They know better than us.
80% of them grow out of it. 80%.
Right? And those that don't grow out of
it become,
incredibly
suicidal.
Can't go back. I mean, maybe you could.
I'll end with 2 pieces of advice
for Muslims in colleges and universities. Now, going
back to activism,
when I give you sincere advice, in particular,
Alisha,
maybe you don't agree with a thing I
said today.
That's fine.
I don't really care.
And if I've offended you, don't care.
Beware of activists.
My first piece of advice.
Beware of activists.
Now tempered activism is effective.
That activism without sacred el,
without Tasqiatom nus,
right, purification of the self,
is very very dangerous.
You're in college to gain knowledge, to grow
intellectually,
not to become these
radicalized
neo Marxist activists.
To paraphrase a wise man, if you're going
to march down the street and shout at
people and wave signs, you have to really
make sure that people is truly outside of
you and not in your own heart.
And quite often, activists who claim to be
working for our best interests
as Western Muslims are actually arming
us as they ignorantly or deliberately
antagonize
entire groups of people.
The vast majority of whom are totally innocent
of any wrongdoing.
Their postmodern
race baiting,
rhetoric of power, identity politics
and obsession for earthly justice
actually serves to galvanize
groups of people against our Muslim communities,
people who otherwise would have no problems with
us.
And not only do they contribute to our
society's polarization,
they also tend to misrepresent us
as they form alliances with organizations and individuals
whose positions about God, morality,
and human life are disturbing, to say the
very least.
They are the quintessential
products
of the postmodernist
university system.
Be aware of them. The prophet, salallahu alayhi
wasalam, he said,
honor the scholars.
They are the inheritors of the prophets.
Whoever
honors the scholars, honors Allah and His Messenger.
Follow activist scholars.
Activist scholars, people who have traditional training.
People who are not going to do more
damage than good.
2nd piece of advice,
form alliances with and brotherhoods
and sisterhoods
with Christians and Jews on campus.
I think it's,
time for the people of faith,
the children of Abraham to come together.
This is how we can change the monoculture
of postmodern universities.
In my opinion, in the English speaking world,
the Ahmadidah days are over.
Maybe in the Farsi speaking world, there's some
utility for that.
We can still debate, obviously, but with sophistication
and academic rigor, not with hardcore
polemics, and this is obviously a Quranic imperative.
But at the end of the day, we
must maintain a strong sense of respect
for and solidarity
with
the Akhmed Pitah,
because they are experiencing what we experience in
these universities.
They embrace the God of Moses and Jesus.
They honor Abrahamic morality. When we attack Jews
and Christians and disrespect their beliefs, their scriptures
and traditions, we are playing right into the
hands of the post modernists.
They want us to eat each other.
They're setting a trap for us, and we
walk right into it.
All this talk about banning the Bible and
whatnot. You say, well, that has nothing to
do with us.
Soon it
will. You'll see.
You know, people going into homosexual
people going purposely into Christian bakeries,
right, and trying to run them out of
business.
You know? I mean, in Catholicism,
marriage is a sacrament.
You don't mess around with sacraments.
And this is different than, like, if a
black person comes into your bakery and you
kick them out. Because then you're you're totally
judging them based on their physical appearance.
But here, it's the action that they want
the baker to condone. It's an action.
It's not based on their appearance.
Right?
In other words, one of the Christian bankers,
he said, look, if they came in and
say, bake me a birthday cake, I would
do it. But if he say, bake me
a wedding cake, that's a sacrament. I can't
violate that. I'll go to *. I don't
care what he what he says. And this
person won. He took it to the Supreme
Court and he won. They won for now.
So,
I mean, I used to teach at Saint
Mary's College, which is a Catholic college.
And Christian students would come to me all
the time for advice,
and I would just quote the New Testament
to them.
If the world hates you, Christ said, speaking
to the disciple, if the world hates you,
remember it hated me first.
That's the nature of the dunya. The a'il
of dunya always hate the a'il of the
law. The geocentric, as it were, always hate
the theocentric.
So when apostasy increases,
depression increases,
despair increases. We have to give people hope,
give them a sense of purpose,
a goal. People nowadays are emotionally incontinent.
A lot of it is due to social
media addiction.
Right? It's that dopamine, you know, that that
light, that little bit of dopamine.
My advice is, and I practice what I
preach, get off completely of Facebook. Completely get
off. Get off of all social media. That's
just my advice. Maybe it's not practical for
you,
But, you know, when I was,
on on Facebook 2 hours a day, and
I'm trying to answer questions, and I'm trying
to be the arbitrator of debates between my
friends,
it suddenly occurred to my mind. I was
talking to brother earlier.
It suddenly occurred to my mind,
I'm not getting paid for this. What am
I doing? Yeah. It got me.
Shut it down.
Had a nice
cup of tea,
fell into a deep
sleep,
and never missed it. Never wanna go back.
So but, you know, self control, doctor Sacks,
he said that the greatest indicator of success
for a person later in life is self
control as a child.
Self control.
We all have most of us have children.
This is a big problem in all the
houses. There are no exceptions.
Big big issues. I think I
buckle up here.
We have about 15 minutes or so.
We can maybe
take some questions and more comments.
So, Shaul, we, passed around a couple of
baskets with,
pens and cards.
If you
could, write your question down.
Okay. Can you, first one is can you
be liberal
and follow the principles of Islam
at the same time?
Yeah.
As long as, you know, as long as
you don't advocate a type of belief that
is clearly in violation
of essential creed.
Right?
So,
for example,
you know, I I don't know how Muslims
can justify homosexuality.
I don't know how they can justify
the late term abortion.
These are all liberal causes. They're the cornerstone
of the Democratic party.
You know,
I think I think we need to come
together with conservatives.
Really do. I we have so much more
in common. Maybe this is not what you
want to hear, but we have we have
much more in common with Sarah Palin
than we do with Hillary Clinton. A lot
more in common.
We can work with them. We can. And
I'm not talking about the people of the
extreme alt right. Right? I'm not talking about
these extreme leftists, obviously.
People have, you know, Antifa, things like that.
I'm talking about people who are right of
center, believe in god. They practice traditional morality.
Right? They believe in scripture.
The problem with them, however, is they have
a total of this apprehension about us. Many
of them, they think we're satanic and, you
know,
they think we're anti Christ.
But a lot of them are reaching out
to us. This is what I've noticed from
my teachers. You have, very powerful,
evangelical lobbies reaching out to some of my
teachers saying, look, there was this incident, a
16 year old boy or whatever, somewhere in
the United States, who wanted to have hormone
therapy. His parents said, no. The state removed
him from the house. They're coming after our
children. This is gonna happen to you,
because you're a Muslim.
So I think, ultimately,
aligning ourselves with leftist is probably a mistake.
I think it's done because of the mutual
hatred of Trump. But when Trump is gone,
they're gonna eat each other.
Do Muslims have to be homophobic?
So phobia means to be afraid.
To quote doctor Omar Johnson, I'm not afraid
of anybody.
Supposing your neighbor is a homosexual
or your friend. So, I think maybe what
you mean is, do Muslims have to
be unaccepting of the homosexual lifestyle?
My understanding of orthodoxy,
and I believe in orthodoxy, I believe in
normative definition,
is that homosexuality
is completely inconsistent with the teachings of the
Quran and the teachings of the Prophet
Now,
everyone's a sinner.
Everybody.
Kulubani adam khatamu
is hahi. And there is an exception, of
course, Uleiman the prophets.
Right? Everyone's a sinner.
Everyone needs a tawba.
Right? So a man who's attracted to other
men is still Muslim.
It's not actually haram for a man to
be attracted to other men. What is haram?
It's to act out on that,
desire inclination.
Just as, like I said, there are men,
grown men, who have proclivities towards children.
Right? The important thing is not to act
out on that.
Uh-huh.
So if one denies that so the difference
between,
if if if one
denies
clear
indication, clear injunction in the Quran and the
hadith, If they deny that, then this is
kuhu, no no longer Muslim.
But if one recognizes
even if one engages in the act, but
they recognize that it's a sin in the
maketobah, they still remain within Islam.
Right? Because an act does not take you
out of Islam according at least according to
the Hanafi, no act takes you out of
Islam, only a denial
of what page you booked in in the
first place. The only exception to that is
if you violate the sacred symbols of God.
Like, for example, you you,
you insult the prophet
or you desecrate the Kaaba or desecrate a
musha or something like that. It can still
remain within Islam. Just make Tawba. People have
inclinations. People make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. Don't
leave Tawba.
As a student taking a philosophy course in
college,
saying morality is relative, no real truth,
What can I do to not fall into
this convincing argument?
Well,
you can use the argument that,
even atheists, people who don't recognize God,
many of them will admit
that there is objective morality.
Right?
The Quran, I I believe, calls it a
mahu.
In Jewish tradition, it's called the Noahitic laws.
I'm talking about things like murder. I'm talking
about things like theft.
I think it's axiomatic,
wherever you go around the world.
Irrespective
of a person's religious belief or lack thereof,
that murder is wrong, stealing is wrong, adultery
is wrong,
wronging other people, oppressing other people is wrong.
Right? There's something there.
Right? I mean, theists would call that human
nature.
Right? So,
I mean, I would certainly,
take a course in the history of western
philosophy
and,
and familiarize yourself
with different thinkers that,
would,
recognize that there's an essential human nature even
if they don't recognize that there's a deity
that's the source of that human nature.
So it's not, you know, it's it's not
a black and white issue.
How do you raise
the faith with a child, family member who
identifies as LGBT?
With compassion,
you know, as I said earlier, there seems
to be according to many researchers,
there there seems to be a link between
childhood trauma
and sexual perversion.
So
we have to tread very lightly,
you know.
Continue to give advice to the child.
Continue and you know, it's it's a difficult
thing because,
children are very sensitive. You don't wanna sound
very preachy
because it might drive them further away.
Right? I think the best thing you can
do is continue to be compassionate
to them
and continue to pass this qiqamah upon your
religion.
Continue to pray. Make sure that they know
you're praying.
Make sure that they they know that you're
following the halal and you're staying with the
haram.
If they see that and they and and,
they they see your good character,
then,
you know, they'll come out of that, or
they'll they'll learn to embrace and submit to,
Islam in a fuller way because they wanna
imitate you.
Now that's a difficult
situation. The short answer is continue to be
compassionate towards people, give people advice, but don't
overdo it.
But really with your actions,
being a practicing
person with your actions.
And there are people here that,
I know that can get much better advice
on on these types of questions.
At student college,
is it worth to raise our ideas and
beliefs and discussion that contradicts them or silence
a better option? That's a very good question.
I think if,
if you can maintain
your sort
of base and
really
feel like engaging in a classroom conversation
will not lead to greater good,
then I wouldn't say anything.
You know, in my PhD seminar classes,
we're we're we're expected to
teach the class and whatnot, give our opinion.
But many of the times, I just wanted
to sit there and say nothing, you
know, Because I think it's sometimes, it actually
will benefit myself and others if you just
think twice.
So that's a that's a game time decision
that you have to make.
Right? Certainly, I think if a professor,
says something that is,
like, something that ridicule,
or the Quran or the sunnah or something
like that, makes you feel uncomfortable, then I
think one should, with Adam,
make some sort of comment to clarify to
let people in the class, especially if you're
a professor, know that you're Muslim and you're
a practicing professional Muslim.
But that's that's something that you have to
decide at the time.
Sometimes silence is better.
Can you please comment on Cecil's birth of
the clinic
with regards to his major ideas
and relate that to any issues
we'd see with modern medicine?
Oh, I can't comment on that. I haven't
read that thing.
I'm not an expert in Michelle Cook.
What do you think is our responsibility as
Muslim parents for choosing to live
and raise our children?
This western world where everything seems to be
against our Muslim beliefs. I don't know if
everything seems to be against your Muslim beliefs.
I mean, there's still like I said, there's
still Christians and Jews out there,
right, that follow traditional morality,
that believe in God, believe in the prophets.
How do you think it's a responsibility?
Responsibility is simply to
convey the message.
Right? You can't force someone to embrace something
in their part, even your own child.
You simply have to teach them
the best that you can according to the
prophetic model.
And the prophetic model is one of of
gentleness. The prophet of the bodies are not
straight children, leading and raising voice,
and one of action, of orthopraxis.
The prophet
was he was a doer. Right? He wasn't
passive. Muslim means active part of work. Active.
The STEM fields have been thriving for at
least the last 30 to 40 years. Others
won't reconcile that. In fact, the postmodernists don't
recognize,
what to do away with reason.
Math is Yeah. I mean, they will they
will attack even science. Like I said, I
mean, you might say, well, there's, you know,
there are there are axiomatic
principles in science and hard sciences, even in
mathematics.
All of these things are under scrutiny by
postpartners.
They They don't accept any of it. They'll
say, for example, you know, this this theorem
in math,
is just another manifestation of the evil patriarchy,
and a way to keep women down, minorities
down. Everything is very important.
It's just a manifestation of, you know,
the
white dominant culture and how it wants to
keep keep the color down, like a math
theory.
So they don't accept,
you know,
main main line mainstream science.
It's it's it's now being under attack.
The common argument for Muslim support of LGBT
community is as oppressed groups, we're all in
this together. You know?
What is the best way to refute this?
Are we really oppressed?
No.
I don't think so.
I mean, if you look at the history
of Islam,
I mean, what happened in our history,
and there are Muslims that
were slaughtered,
you know,
Muslims that had genocide committed against them, Muslims
that were exiled from different places.
I think we need to take, like I
said, a self audit. We're really living in
gap. This is really we're living in blessing.
Right?
And,
you know,
a lot of the a lot of the
things that Muslims point to are sort of
anecdotal.
You'll hear, for example, you know, I was,
I was in,
the Taco Bell, and
somebody said, hey, you *.
And, you know, I went home and I
put it on Facebook, and I blogged about
it, I put it on my Instagram and
Twitter.
You know, I mean, how many times it
actually happened?
Obviously, it's
it's something that is disturbing.
But I'll tell you right now,
from my personal experience, only if you want
anecdotal evidence,
the most severe racism I've ever faced was
in Muslim majority countries.
You can let that one marinate for a
minute.
I was barred from going into certain places
because I was born in a certain country.
That's never happened to me in in America.
So are we really oppressed? Who is oppressing
us?
I'm not
oppressed.
I don't agree with that premise.
Too long.
That's a dissertation.
Yeah.
How do you advise kids to stay away
from social media?
It's so rampant. I don't know. You have
to I have the same problem.
I have a kid also.
It's it's difficult. There has to
be some engagement or else that feel like
they're
living
in North Korea or something.
How can an 18 year old college enter
a
claim to his fate? Well, there has to
be
some sort of traditional or formal studies. My
advice
is to have some sort of traditional studies
before one enters into a
public university.
But there's a strong foundation.
And then your your point, your purpose in
college is to get your degree and get
out.
And, you know, maybe it's not good advice,
but, you know, I wouldn't
probably not good advice. I would not join
any clubs, and
I would not only hang out.
I work better
by myself.
I was part of a gang in high
school called ABM, all by
myself.
I'm just kidding. No. It's not good to
isolate yourself either. But you don't need a
lot of friends. You can have one good
friend. That's all you need. One friend.
Right? Then that's fine.
So,
get in and get out. Get your degree.
You know, you're gonna have to take these
elective courses
in social sciences. You're gonna hear a lot
of this type of thing.
Right?
Like I said, use your judgment. You can
choose to engage. If you feel that there's
some merit to doing that, or you can
sit in the back and sort of get
the work done and get out.
All religions claim to be Oban.
How do we explain to our kids that
Islam is Oban?
The only true religion.
Well, you have to be learned in,
several disciplines.
We have to know our scripture. We have
to know history. We have to know other
scriptures.
We have to know a comparative theology. This
is a whole
curriculum that you have to become
familiar with.
Because, you know, kids aren't that stupid,
even though childhood is a type of insanity,
you
know.
You know, if it's just sort of lip
service, you know, this is the true religion.
Okay?
You know, the Quran is the word of
God.
And a lot of times it's, you know,
sort of the uncle generation.
Because back home, you know, there was no
Internet. Everyone was Muslim, basically. All the questions
were about fiddler.
But nowadays,
you know, with America,
with the Internet, they're looking things up online,
the questions are about, is there a God?
Not, how do I pray to God? Is
there a God? Not what does this ayah
mean?
Is this the word of God?
Right? That becomes difficult.
And so, as Terrence, you might have to
go back to school, if it were.
Build our foundation, be able to,
you know. And and we have to we
have to have our
stuff together with these kids,
because, you know, 98% of what they hear,
they're not going to tell you. They'll phrase
it a little bit differently, sort of get
your
your answer.
But we have to we have to be
able to give answers. We have to be
able to read that, right,
and give substantive
answers.
That speaks to the very sort
of intention that's in your mind.
That's a difficult thing to do,
but it takes a lot
of learning in that area.
You know, there's truth in other religions. I
would also stress that.
Right? I mean, certainly, Isa Alaihi Salam is
a prophet of God. There are stories in
the Quran that confirm things in the New
Testament. But I wouldn't be this sort of
rigid exclusiveness.
Or not perennialist, or not this idea that
all the religions are basically the same,
and there's no supersessionism.
In other words, the Quran has not canceled
the act of
the previous,
religions. We're not of that position.
Islam is the
greatest manifestation of truth. However, there is truth
in other religions, even in things like Hinduism
and Buddhism that we can't really deny.
So
I would sort of abandon this,
methodology
of rigid exclusivism.
Right? Because, again, it sort of
it puts in the mind of the child
this idea of supremacy. My parents think they're
better than everyone else. You know, they tweet,
my parents are
homophobic, transphobic Muslim supremacists who want to institute
Sharia law in America.
And look how oppressed and poor I am.
Somebody, please liberate me with your Marxism.
Where are you, Karl Marx?
We ask you, oh, Allah, to
accept,
all of our actions,
that are sincerely done for you, and those
that are not not sincerely done for you.
All Allah,
we ask you to increase our knowledge.
We ask you to,
to to benefit us from gathering likeness.
We ask you to remove from our hearts,
any type of of anger, any type of
enmity that we have for any other person.
We ask you to forgive for us to
be able to deliberate, debate, get to the
truth of things,
the objective truth, and to embrace that truth.
We ask you for the ability of to
be able to see the truth, embrace it,
and see falsehood and reject it.