Ali Ataie – Revisiting The Corrupted Bible Argument – The Mad Mamluks
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
As-salamu alaykum and welcome to the Mad
Mamluks.
I'm Mahi and I'm joined by my co
-hosts Sheikh Amir Saeed and Sim.
So today's guest is Dr. Ali Atai from
Zaytuna College who is an expert in comparative
religion.
He had studied in Yemen as well but
he also has a PhD from the Graduate
Theological Union in Berkeley.
So I want to first of all welcome
him.
He's in Chicago this weekend.
As-salamu alaykum.
Good to have you here.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, so I had the pleasure of spending
some time with him yesterday and we were
at MEC for a talk last night and
I don't know that I've ever seen a
Muslim audience get that triggered in a Q
&A.
Like they were, some people were like literally
arguing with them after.
I think one person actually left Islam.
It's okay, we had two conversions.
Two to one ratio.
Yeah, plus one.
Wait, what was the theme?
What happened?
We'll get to that.
It's a little cliffhanger for the listeners so
you can't check out.
We'll have to get to that in a
little bit.
But I want to first of all ask
you a little bit about your background.
You're a unicorn in the sense that you're
an Iranian Sunni.
How did that like, tell us a little
bit about like where you grew up and
your influences.
And speaking of unicorns, we had a French
white guy living in the UK.
Yeah, yesterday.
So it's unicorn weekend.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, so well basically we, my parents moved
to America during the revolution.
So I was a year old.
My sister was about three years old.
So we grew up in California Bay Area
and I don't know if you know any
Iranians, but typically we're not very religious, especially
those who moved out of Iran during the
revolution.
They're not going to be very religious.
So very secular household.
So we basically, you know, there was no
religion whatsoever in the house of anything that
was actually a negative sort of perception of
all religion.
You know, so growing up, I was just
sort of curious about certain things.
You know, what's interesting is the movie Malcolm
X really had a profound effect on me.
The Spike Lee movie.
I remember the day that I saw that
movie was on a Wednesday.
It was November 18th.
Wow.
1992.
And for some reason, my dad just wanted
to watch it.
I mean, I didn't know Malcolm X was,
I was 14 years old.
So he said, let's watch this movie.
And I said, oh, okay.
And so I'm sitting there, I'm kind of
bored.
And then there's something about the scene in
Mecca that really like struck me.
So I began to study independently and then,
you know, just sort of called myself Muslim
after that point, but didn't know how to
practice and didn't know anything as far as
how to acquire theological knowledge and things like
that until I got to college and I
actually met other Muslims.
Because my high school, I think there were
a few Muslims, but I was sort of
a loner back then.
Oh, one, sorry to cut you off.
Usually when people start their, you know, exploration
through Islam, what did you actually start with
first?
And kind of, that was a tipping point
to more research.
It started with Malcolm X for me.
So kind of like the autobiography?
Autobiography.
So yeah, so at the end of the
movie, there's these long credits and then it
actually shows the book at the very end.
So I actually went to the San Ramon
Library, which is where I grew up, in
a city in the East Bay area, and
I checked out his book and I read
some passages of it.
And that's just, I found it very inspiring.
But again, didn't have any resources and was
sort of, you know, you're kind of too
embarrassed or proud, whatever it is, to actually
go and, you know, when you're 15 and
ask Muslim students, hey, you know, can you
teach me about Islam?
But when I started college and I was
invited to the MSA for the first time,
and that's when I sort of met a
group of brothers that were from, they were
Afghan, basically.
So I started just sort of emulating what
they were doing.
And then, so, you know, praying like them
and so on and so forth.
And then later, when my parents did get
religious, like much, much later, I guess it's
Iranian cultural thing, when you hit a certain
age, you're expected now to be more religious,
and you go to Hajj and things like
that.
And then they noticed that, you know, that
I was sort of Sunni, you know, I'm
praying with my hands up.
So, you know, they said, you know, we're
Shia, right?
I said, what is that?
So I did some research, and I just
decided to stay Sunni.
By that time, I had...
You should have just become a Maliki and
then blend in.
I know, that's what I would actually, Shaykh
Hamza actually advised me to do that.
And I started taking his Maliki fit class
in like the late 90s.
Oh, really?
At the old Islamic study school, whatever, in
Hayward.
So I was thinking about becoming a Maliki.
But then I noticed that all of my
friends were Hanafi.
So I was like, well, I don't know
if this is going to work out.
Those Hanafis, they ruin everything.
Yeah, we don't like that.
I'm Hanafi too, that's why I ruin everything
for everybody.
Can you just bring your mic a little
closer to yourself, if you don't mind?
So that's, yeah, basically what happened.
So did you end up kind of becoming
Hanafi in the process?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, it's just because everyone around me.
Easily.
It becomes a lot easier.
That's the same with me.
Yeah, because everyone asks me like, why are
you Hanafi?
What's wrong with your brain?
You've been hanging out with the wrong people.
I have to hang out with this guy,
Shaykh Hamir.
Just remind him of the Turks, he'll be
happy.
Yeah, I reassure my Shia relatives and say,
I'm actually more like a Sushi.
I'm a Sunni that loves Ahlul Bayt, which
is a regular Sunni.
I've never heard of that word.
It's great.
It's that nice PC term.
So talk to us a little bit about
your, so you seem to be pretty learned
in like Christianity.
That's what, that's really how I got to
really become acquainted with your works.
By the way, Maheen was just, I'm not
going to say too much in front of
you, but he was talking the world about
you, Mashallah, especially as far as comparative religion.
And he was like, basically you're the Hujjah
of interfaith Christianity.
I'm being serious.
But anyways.
Where did this interest in, because it's one
thing, it seems like you came to Islam
at a pretty relatively late age, right?
We were talking offline about how we both
read the Quran for the first time when
we were like 19 years old, right?
And so when you get into your own
religion that late, where do you all of
a sudden have an inclination to study something
else too?
Like how does that happen?
You know, growing up, I was always interested
in religion in general.
And my parents actually, when I was in
fifth grade, they wanted me to have some
sort of spirituality, but not Islam.
So they sent me to a Mormon Sunday
school.
So I'd go there for two years every
Sunday.
And it was pretty hardcore.
I never understood any of the doctrine, like
the dogmatic aspect of the religion.
I mean, they tried to explain to me
Joseph Smith in the Book of Mormon and,
you know, this kind of falling away of
the churches.
I never got into that.
The thing I took from the Mormons that
they're very moral people, they're very family oriented.
And then I did go to other churches.
I had friends when I grew up in
the eighties in San Ramon, which was, I
mean, my sister and I were probably the
only non-whites in our entire elementary school
that I can remember.
So all my friends were Christian and many
of them were very, very devout.
So they would take me to church with
them.
And sometimes the church was a Mormon church,
and sometimes it was a Protestant or like
a Baptist church, Episcopalian church.
So I would sit there and, you know,
I'd hear stories about Jesus, peace be upon
him.
And they were fantastic stories.
And I would have a Bible and I'd
read.
So I kind of just kind of fell
in love with the Jesus initially.
But again, the theological aspect to me was
just a total mystery.
It never really made sense to me.
And I didn't really try to understand it.
It wasn't important to my mind at the
time.
I was just interested in the Bible.
So that interest just never left me.
It's just something that I've always had an
interest in texts, especially religious texts.
So I started to, in my late teens,
I started to get into apologetics.
I would debate Christians on campus.
I was the MSA president at Cal Poly
in San Luis Obispo.
I'd organize debates with the Campus Crusade for
Christ.
We'd have a Dawa table out.
I was a pamphleteer.
We'd go there and, you know, Christians would
come.
And I would actually, I was somewhat of
a, and I mentioned this in another podcast,
I was somewhat of a Christian sort of
assassin in the theological sense, of course, where
I was literally just like target Christians.
And then I had this experience where there
was this older Christian man, he wasn't a
student.
I think he was just there hanging out.
And he kind of looked at me and
he said, you know, he said, I don't
think you really care about us.
You just want to prove your point.
And of course, I said, no, you can't
answer my questions.
And you know, you just, you lost the
debate.
And then I went back to my dorm
room and I thought about it.
And, you know, he was right.
I mean, it was, it was basically all
nafs.
You know, so you have to be really
honest with yourself.
And so at that point, I said, look,
I'm still interested in this, obviously.
I've always been interested in it.
But somehow I took a wrong turn.
I mean, I would have Christian, Muslim communities
literally call me and say, you know, brother,
come to our masjid.
There's Christians passing out things at Jummah.
Let them have it.
And I'd go there like a hit man.
I'd go there and I just like totally
embarrass them on the spot.
The elite force.
Yeah.
So I said, I need to get more
serious about this.
So I started studying their religion more academically
rather than polemically.
And I sort of got away from the
apologetics.
So I studied Greek and Hebrew.
And now when I got back from Yemen
to study Arabic and theology in Yemen, when
I got back, I did a master's degree
in biblical studies at the Graduate Theological Union.
And I focused on New Testament and biblical
languages.
And then I started a doctorate degree, basically
in comparative theology.
My dissertation was on a sort of like,
what did I call it?
A Sunni theo-mystical normative reading of the
Gospel of John, where I entertain the Gospel
of John as being the very injeel mentioned
in the Quran, which is an opinion of
some of the scholars.
It's textual affirmation.
So that took me like, you know, five
or six years.
And I explained to you guys offline how
writing a dissertation had adverse physical effects on
me.
Put on weight and had pain in my
shoulders and my feet and, you know, floaters
in my eyes.
And so that was difficult, you know, working
full time, having three kids and also writing,
you know, a dissertation.
So that's that's basically.
Okay.
So like, for me, it's always been like
Christians, as we're talking about Dawah here, right?
Yeah.
Christians, to me, have always seem like low
hanging fruit, in the sense that like, they
already believe in God.
So it's not like you don't, you don't
have to convince them of that.
And they are now they believe in Sayyidina
Isa, but obviously a different like perception.
So that's why I've always been interested in
like, you know, every Muslim kid loves watching
like a Zakir Naik video, right?
Where he's like, or Ahmadinejad, you know, like
what his debates going on.
I have a funny Zakir Naik story, if
I could just interrupt you for a minute.
So when I was an undergraduate at Cal
Poly, the night before I debated this Christian
guy, this white guy, his name was Steve.
I don't know where he is now, but
I invited him over to my apartment.
Yeah.
And I played him a Zakir Naik lecture.
Yeah.
So it's like 10 minutes into the lecture,
right?
And then Steve looks at me and says,
is this going to be translated?
And I said, what?
This is English.
He said, yeah, I think I heard some
English, but it's not, right?
Oh, no.
I said, no, he's speaking English.
Anyway.
That's a great one.
He couldn't understand anything.
Yes.
We always have a Zakir Naik graphic ready.
So whenever a sister asks a question in
the chat, so we say, sister, that's a
beautiful question.
Exactly.
So now I understand like, this is the
kind of like dynamics we have as far
as like, when it's Muslim-Christian dialogue, what
we typically focus on is like, first of
all, your books are corrupt.
The trinity doesn't make any sense.
What else?
There's like a bullet point.
I think Ahmadinejad used to have like this
was like the war, like the, like a
cheat sheet almost.
Yeah.
I think, have you heard of it?
The combat kit?
The combat kit.
That's what it's called.
Ahmadinejad combat kit.
Yeah.
You pull that thing out.
I had that.
It actually works.
You know, it catches people off guard.
So what I want to do is tie
back into like what you talked to, we
mentioned earlier in the show that you really
triggered some folks last night.
And so there's, it seems like there's some
things maybe in Dawa with Christian specifically that
we are maybe not focusing appropriately or maybe
ignoring some of our own scholarship on.
Right.
So tell us a little bit.
So starting with the preservation of the new
Testament, like the Bible is corrupt.
Yeah.
It sounds to me, that's not an argument
you would necessarily like to go with.
Please tell us why.
Yeah.
Okay.
I'm just wondering how this kind of subject
became so controversial that people got very upset
about.
Yeah.
Well, Muslims think the Bible is corrupted, right?
Understood.
Right.
Right.
That's the common thing.
The Bible has been corrupted and the Quran
came to like, like is, and that's one
of the things about the Quran.
It's the, it's, it'll never be corrupted.
Yeah.
Right.
So talk to us a little bit about,
I think Sim is asking though, why would
they have a problem with that?
And cause, you know, no.
Oh, so, so let's have him explain.
Let's have, let's have him break it down.
So, so the proposition that the Bible is
corrupted is, is viewed by many Muslims as
almost a, almost like a creedal statement.
And it's because of, you know, the, their
sort of background as far as the type
of rhetoric or the type of dawah, the
type of apologetics that they've heard and they've
experienced in their respective countries, that this is
a major point of dawah is that the
New Testament is not authentic.
It's been corrupted.
And certainly Muslim apologists like Zakir Naik and
Ahmad Didat and others.
I mean, this is one of their main
points.
And it's interesting because Muslims, Muslim apologists oftentimes
will use the arguments of very, very secular
historians to drive that point home.
For example, the quote of Bart Ehrman or
James Dunn or Elaine Pagel, John Dominic Cross
and even atheists like Richard Carrier and say,
see, these are secular historians.
And they're all saying, but at the same
time, those secular historians, I mean, what would
they say about the Quran?
This is a point I made last night.
I mean, I've heard Muslims use Julius Wellhausen's
documentary hypothesis to disprove that Moses wrote the
Pentateuch and say, see, this is a, you
know, this is a standard method in academia
that Moses didn't write it.
And it was written by four authors hundreds
of years later and stitched together by a
redactor.
Well, what does Wellhausen say about the Quran's
origins?
You really don't want to know, but you
can imagine.
So we need to have an answer for
that.
So unless you have an answer for that
part of it, we shouldn't be using these
secular historians.
That's a great point, man.
Yeah.
So it's a very uneven method.
Another example I give, like modern Muslim reform,
like Sayyid Qutb in his Tafsir Fi Dalal
Al-Quran, he, so he's talking about the
ayat al-sallabah 4.157, the only verse
in the Quran that refers to the crucifixion
or alleged crucifixion of Isa alayhi salam.
And he says there that we can't trust
the gospel of John's account.
And he calls it qabeeh, it's disgusting, and
it's too late.
And, you know, it's, you know, who wrote
this?
And, and then he says, and then he
uses the gospel of Barnabas, to drive his
point home, that Judas Iscariot, right, the disciple
who betrayed Jesus, he was the one who
was crucified.
Well, you know, if the gospel of John
is late, and the gospel of Barnabas is,
I mean, gospel of Barnabas is written in
the 16th century, it's written in Italian, it
has anachronisms, it has doctrinal errors.
From our perspective, it calls the Prophet Muhammad,
peace be upon him, al-Masih.
I mean, it's a total disaster, right?
So oftentimes, Muslim apologists, they don't really, they
don't see the other side of the argument,
they're not being even in the way they
apply their methodology.
Kind of cherry picking their way to winning
the debate.
So taking unauthentic pieces and trying to use
that to prove your point.
Yeah.
So Christians refer to this thing, they call
it solid bar hermeneutics, like you just pick
and choose, like whatever agrees with the Quran,
I'm going to pick and choose that, and
say this is the part of the original
issue.
But a lot of Muslims don't know, and
this is why the controversy happened last night,
a lot of Muslims don't know that there
are opinions of scholars, where the text is
actually affirmed as being authentic.
This is the opinion of, for example, an
Egyptian scholar, Ibn Umar al-Biqa'i, who
actually wrote an Arabic gospel harmony, an Arabic
diatessaron.
In other words, he took the four gospels
and he put them into a single narrative.
He also used the Torah as a primary
source of exegesis for his own tafseer.
And of course, this was the cause of
a lot of pushback from the other ulama
of his day, because of the standard sort
of interpretation.
I want to jump in real quick and
just clarify for the audience, because some people,
they assume the Bible, like I think it
came across last night, they don't understand what
the actual Bible is composed of, right?
So you've got the Old Testament, which the
first five books are the Torah, correct?
And then the New Testament, there's 27 books,
but four of those, the gospels are four
books of the 27.
And there's a bunch of letters and other
things in there, right?
So just like, so you're talking about the
gospels in the Injil, not necessarily the entire
New Testament with the Injil, right?
Yeah, it seems like Imam al-Ghazali, I
mean, he wrote this, and some say it's
pseudonymous, they say Imam al-Ghazali didn't write
it.
It certainly sounds like Ghazali, we'll just say
that he wrote it.
It's called the Raddu Jamil, so the beautiful
refutation of the divinity of Jesus from the
gospel.
So here's Ghazali, he's quoting Matthew, Mark, Luke,
and John.
He doesn't quote, you know, First Corinthians, he's
not quoting the Epistle of James.
So it seems like he's affirming that the
four gospels in the New Testament is sort
of a four-fold gospel, is the Injil,
or is a sort of an accurate representation
of the actual teachings of Jesus.
Now Ghazali just might be sort of entertaining
the text to make an argument against the
Christians, that seems to be what he's doing
in the Tahafut al-Falasifah, where he sort
of entertains Aristotelian, you know, deductive arguments to
drive a point home that the universe can't
be pre-eternal in the past.
So he doesn't really believe in actual cause
and effect, he apparently is an occasionalist, but
over there he seems to be entertaining that
argument in order to refute it.
That could be what he's doing at Raddu
Jamil, but it doesn't seem like it, because
in other works, he freely quotes from the
New Testament Gospels.
Kitab al-Ilm, the first book of the
Ihya, he will quote, he says, on the
witness of Jesus, whoever gains knowledge and teaches
others so shall be called great in the
kingdom of heaven.
Something like that, he says.
Well, he's not quoting a hadith, that's not
Quran, that's the Gospel of Matthew, he's paraphrasing
Matthew's Gospel.
So his opinion, so al-Biqa'i's opinion
is that what the Christians are calling the
Injil is the Injil, that seems to be
Ghazali's opinion, this seems to be Fakhr al
-Din al-Razi's opinion, because they're of the
opinion that لا مُبَدِّلَ لِكَرِمَاتِ اللَّهِ, no one
can change the the words of God, and
then in the Quran, وَلْيَحْكُمْ أَحْلُ الْإِنْجِلِ بِمَا
أَنزَلَ اللَّهُ فِيهِ, so Allah SWT says, let
the people of the Gospel judge by what
God has revealed therein.
So it appears from this ayah that what
the Christians have, as far as the Gospel
goes, is an accurate authentic source of legal
and moral teaching.
Why would Allah SWT, so here's the argument,
why would Allah SWT refer to the Christians,
the Ahlul Injil, if they don't have the
Injil?
Yeah, and then another piece of evidence is
in Bukhari, we're told that Waraka bin Naufal
كان رجلاً تنصر يقرأ الإنجيل بالعربية.
So Waraka bin Naufal, he became, converted to
Christianity, and he used to read the Gospel,
it says in Bukhari, the Gospel in Arabic.
So the question is, what is Waraka actually
reading?
Because Bukhari calls it the Gospel, so is
he reading some now lost archetype of the
Injil, that it was written in Syriac, and
it was written by Jesus, peace be upon
him, himself?
No, he's obviously reading the New Testament.
Now, I think the reason why the Qur
'an uses a singular Gospel and not Gospels,
is because Waraka most likely has a copy
of the Diatessaron, which is Tatian, so there's
a second century Christian scholar, he's a student
of Justin Martyr, his name was Tatian, who
did a Gospel harmony, I mean, al-Biqa
'i would do one later, right, from a
Muslim perspective.
But Tatian's Diatessaron, according to Sidney Griffith, the
Gospel in Arabic, or the Bible in Arabic,
was the most popular form of the New
Testament in the Arabic-speaking world, in the
Qur'an's milieu.
So it seems like Waraka has the Diatessaron
in front of him, and he's reading and
translating it into Arabic.
And there are some intertextual correspondences between the
Diatessaron of Tatian and what's in the Qur
'an.
For example, in the Diatessaron, you have the
first five verses of the prologue of John's
Gospel, and then you have the statement that
John the Baptist witnesses the Word of God,
and then you have the birth of John
the Baptist.
Well, in the Qur'an, you have the
birth of John the Baptist, and then you
have this statement, that he witnesses concerning the
Word of God.
So it seems to be a mirroring of
what's happening in the Diatessaron.
And sometimes people get the wrong idea and
say, what are you saying, the Prophet ﷺ,
he copied the Diatessaron, and you're just playing
into the hands of the Christian.
No, I'm not saying that.
It doesn't necessarily follow that.
I don't think it has anything to do,
sorry to cut you off, it has nothing
to do with Muhammad ﷺ, it has to
do with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, right?
Yeah, exactly.
It's what Allah is saying, right?
Exactly.
But yeah, from a Christian perspective, they'll say,
well, the Qur'an is just sort of
these different disparate Christian traditions sort of sewn
together.
So the fact that the Qur'an is
mirroring or engaging with another text does not
negate that it's a divine revelation, that's a
non-secretary argument.
I mean, the Bible, the New Testament does
that all the time, it quotes from the
Old Testament, and then it sort of revises
or interprets things through a more Christological lens.
So that appears to be happening in the
Qur'an.
So there's a valid opinion that the tahrif
is not of the Nasr, I mean, that's
the dominant opinion that the text has actually
changed, right?
I mean, there's an opinion of Ibn Taymiyyah
and the majority of ulama, but there is
an opinion, it's a minority opinion, that Muslims
are not aware of that the text of
the New Testament Gospels is sound according to
the Qur'an, based on the Qur'an.
And there's other evidence as well.
I think what throws people off is when
you say it's sound, they think that it's
on the same level of the Qur'an
as far as application.
Is that what the dilemma is?
I mean, they say, hey, you're saying that
it's equal to the Qur'an.
Maybe they're making that assumption.
Why else would someone have a problem with
it?
And I'll tell you, and tell me if
I'm thinking of this properly.
When I was growing up, and generally what
I tell people is, the idea and the
argument for Muslims that the Qur'an is
copy and pasting from the Bible is a
non-issue, because everything is from Allah.
They're all the kutub al-samawi, right?
Yeah.
They're all the books revealed from Allah subhanahu
wa ta'ala.
And that's why I like what Ahmed Didat
used to say, used to refer to the
Qur'an as the final testament.
That's because it's all from Allah subhanahu wa
ta'ala anyway.
It has nothing to do with copy and
pasting.
It has to do very simply that when
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala chose a new
messenger, and a book was not properly being
implemented, there's two parts, right?
It's about prophethood, and it's about books, right?
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala sends a prophet,
and it's the final testament, it's the final
speech of Allah.
But people, like just thinking for those people,
I think it's very, if they're not paying
attention properly, they're going to start thinking that
you're saying, hey, the Bible is legit, just
as the Qur'an is legit, so Christians
in Islam is the same thing.
Yeah, that's definitely not what I'm saying.
No, no, I know, but they're that equation
in their mind, because they're probably just listening
to certain things.
As soon as they hear something that they've
never heard before, that question mark goes on,
like, oh my God, and it's kind of
turbulent for them, right?
Yeah, and also like they'll say, wait a
minute, wait a minute, the New Testament has
contradictions, you know, Jesus is called the Son
of God in the New Testament several times,
and clearly that's, you know, that's negated, repudiated
many, many times, and how do you, how
can you possibly reconcile?
And of course, there are sophisticated answers for
these things, but that's the main issue.
And so, so to clarify the point is
that definitely there's naskh, right?
Now, the verse in the Qur'an, what
he, sorry, what do you mean by naskh
is like abrogation?
Abrogation, yeah.
So in Al-Baqarah 106, I mean, the
dominant opinion is that there's not only intra
-religious abrogation, but inter-religious abrogation.
So there's ayat in the Qur'an that
cancel other ayat in the Qur'an, the
ahkam aspect, and Suyuti puts this at, you
know, 19 or 21 verses in the itqan,
I mean, just a few verses.
So, you know, sometimes people, they sort of
take this idea of naskh, and they have
this really reductionist idea of whatever is later
automatically abrogates what is before, and this is
just so much more involved than that.
But certainly there's naskh of previous dispensations.
So, you know, I got this question one
time, are you saying that, you know, the
New Testament and Torah, they're valid in their
texts?
Possibly the Qur'an, I mean, the Torah
was brought, it's a hadith in Abu Dawud,
the Torah was brought to the Prophet ﷺ,
and he placed it on a pillow.
And then he said, I believe in you
and the one who sent you.
And now it seems like he's affirming the
Torah.
So then the question is, okay, well, why
don't you follow all 613 of the commandments
in the Torah?
You have to become a practicing Jew.
No, this is where naskh comes into play.
This is abrogation.
So naskh only refers, only applies to the
ahkam, right?
Not to the theological ayat, not to the
stories necessarily, because those things are, they're teaching
transcendental lessons.
So somebody would say, well, wait a minute,
the story of Joseph in Genesis and the
story of Joseph in the Qur'an, those
are clearly different.
The Qur'an is correcting that story.
And yeah, I can see that point, and
I'm not negating it, right, that the Qur
'an is a corrective.
And I think many times it is correcting
certain things with respect to Christian theology and
Jewish attitudes towards certain things.
But I don't necessarily see or necessitate this
idea that the Qur'an is correcting biblical
traditions, but could be sort of just expounding
them, explaining them in new light.
For example, the story of Yusuf in Genesis
is very tribal.
It's focused on fraternal type things.
It's basically trying to instill within the Israelites
this sense of pride in themselves.
Whereas the Qur'an is broader, it's more
ecumenical.
That's why the story of Yusuf in prison
in Genesis, when those two men, the cellmates,
have their dreams, Yusuf immediately interprets their dreams,
just right off, straight away.
In the Qur'an, he tells them about
Tawheed.
So the Qur'an is not necessarily negating
that story, but it's universalizing the story.
It's speaking to a wider audience.
And we see this again with the story
of Pharaoh.
In the Bible, you have Israelites against the
Egyptians and let my people go.
In the Qur'an, Allah tells Musa, speak
to him a kind word or a gentle
word, perhaps he'll fear Allah.
So, I mean, it's conceivable that many of
the people that made Exodus out of Egypt,
many of them were Egyptian converts to whatever
the religion was.
I mean, it certainly wasn't Judaism, but the
term Judaism is a much later term to
the religion of Moses at that time.
Many of them must have been Egyptians.
And that's why we have this tradition of
Asiya, the wife of Pharaoh, who believed in
Musa, missing from the Jewish tradition.
So the Qur'an is not necessarily negating
those stories or even correcting them, but expounding
them in a new way for a different
type of emphasis.
Yeah.
Don't we believe as Muslims that Allah subhanahu
wa ta'ala, in the Qur'an, is
addressing a people what was relevant for their
time to let them know what happened in
the past and what's going to be for
their time as Arabs in Arabia and for
the future, right?
And I'm glad you brought this point up.
I've actually never heard anybody talk about this.
So some of the people in the chat
are saying like, so are you saying that
the Bible is not corrupt?
But from what I'm understanding, you can't say
either or.
You can't use that as a basis of
an argument.
Is that what you're saying?
I'm saying it's a possibility that this is
what the Qur'an is saying.
So we have to not take it off
the table.
And again, the Gospels themselves.
The Gospels.
Not the other 24 or 23 books of
the New Testament.
Yeah.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
It seems like the Qur'an is affirming
that what the Christians have is the Gospel,
or else why would Allah subhanahu wa ta
'ala order the Christians to take rulings by
the Gospel if it's a corrupted text?
So I want you to clarify a couple
of things.
There are some questions in the group about
like, so when we think of, I think
when Muslims think about the Injil, they think
about a revelation to Isa a.s., right?
And they understand that Isa a.s. spoke
Aramaic.
And the original Gospels, first of all, the
Christians don't even say that Isa a.s.
wrote it.
They were written by most critical scholars will
say even John didn't write John.
We don't know who wrote John.
It's attributed to John, vice versa, right?
So how does that fit the definition of
the Injil as a revelation to Isa a
.s. if you're saying that these are the
Gospels when the Christians themselves say we may
not even know who wrote them, but these
are accounts of the life of Jesus?
Yeah.
So it's certainly conceivable that the Injil was
revealed in Greek, first of all.
Aramaic is a dead language.
A few thousand people spoke it.
It's not a very precise language.
I mean, it's related to Arabic, but it's
really, really different than Arabic.
I mean, Hebrew is actually very remedial compared.
I mean, you can, if you learn 600
words in Hebrew, you can read, you can
basically start reading the Hebrew Bible.
I mean, the dictionary is about an eighth
of that of Arabic, but Greek is an
extremely vast, precise language.
I mean, there's 16 verb conjugations in Greek
and the word Injil that the Quran uses
is actually a Greek word.
I mean, the Semitic word for gospel in
Hebrew was Bissar or Bushra in Arabic, but
the Quran says Injil, Evangelion.
So it's not conceivable that, it's not inconceivable
that the Injil was revealed in Greek to
Isa, and that was the lingua franca of
the Mediterranean during his time.
That was the, in other words, that was
the language of the Roman empire in the
ancient, in the Mediterranean at that time, in
the ancient Near East.
Now, the Quran says, وَأَوْحَيْتُ إِلَى الْحَوَارِيِّينَ that
I read, and this is the only time
in the Quran, by the way, where Allah
Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala says, أَوْحَيْتُ in the
first person common singular.
It's usually أَوْحَيْنَ or أَوْحَى وَأَوْحَى إِلَى عَبْدِهِ
مَا أَوْحَى وَأَوْحَيْنَ إِلَى أُمِّ مُوسَى So وَأَوْحَيْتُ
and I certainly gave إِيْحَى, you know, because
the verb أَوْحَى, and this is a point
that some of the, the ulema make in
the books of Ulum al-Quran is that
even though we're going to use the verb
أَوْحَى, if it's talking about a prophet, then
that's a type of وَحِيْ and وَحِيْ is
only for prophets.
But the same verb can be used for
non-prophets, but we don't call it وَحِيْ,
we call it إِيْحَى.
So it seems like the disciples are receiving
a type of إِلْحَام, a type of inspiration,
not necessarily a word-for-word, you know,
what's called إِبْسِسِمَ, a verb, a word-for
-word to dictate from God.
So what's happening here is that the disciples
are receiving, so in my opinion, I don't
think anything, I don't think the Injil was
written down in the life of Isa a
.s. I think the Injil is his message,
his message is the Injil.
And then the disciples at some point, or
disciples of disciples, they wrote down what they
remembered from the message of Jesus, and that
was given to them as a type of
إِيْحَى, non-prophetic revelation, and that's Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John.
Now you say what secular scholars, you know,
they say that these books are written later,
that trend is actually changing.
And this is something that Raymond Brown makes
a point of.
The trend now is to actually date the
Gospels earlier among secular historians.
I'm not talking about confessional Christian scholars.
And one of the reasons why is they've
discovered that secular historians traditionally make a lot
of assumptions when they're dating these manuscripts, when
they're dating these books, like Matthew, Mark, Luke,
and John.
So one of the critical assumptions that they
make is they say, well, the Gospel of
John must be very, very late, because it
doesn't even mention the destruction of the Temple
of Solomon, the destruction of the Second Temple
by the Romans, General Titus.
It doesn't even mention that.
So that event must have just blown over
by the time John wrote his Gospel.
But you can make another assumption from that,
and that is that it was written before
the destruction of the Temple.
In fact, the author of the Gospel of
John, and it is anonymous, but towards the
end of the Gospel, I think chapter 21
in its epilogue, somebody called the Beloved Disciple
takes credit for writing the Gospel.
But anyway, the author in the Gospel of
John describes the temple precincts, and he uses
a present active verb.
He says, there are this, and there is
that.
He's not saying there was.
So it seems like the temple was still
standing when John was being written.
Another critical assumption they make is, like the
Gospel of John, they'll say, well, the Gospel
of John's Christology is so high.
You know, the beginning was the Word, the
Word was with God, the Word was God.
I mean, that's a Christian translation of the
first verse of the prologue.
There's different ways of translating that.
And, you know, and I mean, we'll get
into some other comparative literature things with Philo
of Alexandria.
He uses the same type of language referring
to Moses.
But anyway, they'll say, well, its Christology is
so high, it's so skyscraping, it must have
been a later development.
Well, Paul's Christology is also very high.
If you read, for example, Philippians.
Can you define Christology for the lay listeners?
Christology is basically what you believe about Christ.
Okay.
So high Christology would be like deification.
Would you say that?
That's a type of high Christology.
Okay.
Yeah.
Or this idea that Jesus is the Word
through which all of creation was made.
And that's stated in John's prologue that through
it, all things were made.
It seems like, and there's different ways of
reading that.
Certainly there were Aryans who were Unitarian Christians
in the fourth century, who simply said, well,
Jesus is the initial created light.
And that through, through the light of the
Messiah, subsequent creation was, was, was created.
And the Aryans used to call Christ Katismatileon,
which literally means the best of creation.
That was sort of their belief about Christ.
And they were defeated at the council of
Nicaea.
But if you look at Philippians, Paul has
a very high Christology, right?
And Paul is writing in the fifties.
That's very early.
And, and, um, uh, traditionally the gospel of
John was dated by secular historians in the
nineties or 95.
So it wouldn't be out of the question
to place the gospel of John in the
forties or fifties.
So, you know, scholars are starting to rethink
these dates and Raymond Brown says, maybe John,
the son of Zebedee did have something to
do with the composition of the gospel of
John.
And you would say, well, these are, these
are sort of anonymous.
I mean, the Christians, the early church fathers,
they have chains of transmission.
They have, it's not for these four books.
I mean, these four books were chosen because,
uh, for various reasons, but they claim to
have, you know, chain of transmission that goes
back to a disciple.
So these books are just, just not chosen
haphazardly.
I mean, there's some like 30 gospels and
various dozens of epistles, and most of them
are forgeries.
So why are these four books?
Because these four books were authenticated by early
Christians as being, uh, as being, um, uh,
authentically written by disciples or students of disciples.
So John is a disciple of Jesus.
Uh, the gospel of Luke, Luke was a
traveling, uh, companion of Paul.
So he's like a Tabari.
Um, and then Mark is a student of
Peter, a Tabari.
Uh, and then, um, Matthew is a disciple.
I see.
So is that a valid argument where people
generally say that, you know, Matthew, Mark, Luke,
and John never met Jesus.
They never saw him.
They came many years after him.
So their words can't be validated at all
because who, which one was it?
Paul that was supposed to be a slayer
of Christians or something like that.
Is that actually true and accurate?
They say that he actually used to be
a bounty hunter.
Oh, that's true about Paul.
And he admits that in his, in his
letters.
Um, and he had a vision and then
for that, for that, he, yeah.
So is that actually, is that accurate?
And why people, accurate, what I mean to
say is accurate to use that as an
evidence for the lack of, uh, for, for
the, uh, reason of taking authenticity away from
the gospels.
Well, Paul didn't write a gospel.
So, um, Paul on Paul's own testimony and
his conversion is told a few times in
the New Testament, Luke, uh, retells it in
the book of Acts that Paul was a
persecutor of Christians.
Um, uh, he would arrest them and bring
them to Jerusalem to stand trial for blasphemy
and whatnot.
Uh, and then he, on his, he claims
that he had a, uh, apocalypsis or a
revel, a revelation where the resurrected Christ appeared
to him and commissioned him to be an
apostle to the Gentiles.
Now, so that's Paul.
Now, what's interesting is oftentimes Muslims will vilify
Paul and say, Paul, you know, he's the
one that, you know, who corrupted Christianity.
And, and, and certainly, um, uh, there's some,
there's some evidence for that.
I mean, there were early groups of Christians
called the Ebionites or the Ebionim and these
were, you know, Jewish Christians.
So these were Christians who believed in Jesus,
but they still continue to, to, um, to
follow the, the cash route, like the kosher
laws.
They, they, they were practicing Jews.
They worshiped in the synagogues.
The only difference was they believed that Jesus
was the Messiah and some of their writings,
it seems have been preserved.
And, and clearly Paul is the enemy.
They believe that Paul is an apostate, that
he, you know, he's the one that, uh,
introduced Hellenistic elements into the early Christian movement
and they don't like Paul at all.
And, um, Muslims sort of gravitate towards that
opinion with Paul.
Interestingly, Paul never in any letter, you know,
there's seven genuine Pauline letters and 14 of
the books of the new Testament could have
been written by Paul, but seven are agreed
upon by all secular historians.
Never does Paul call Jesus God one time,
God with a capital G.
Um, uh, there's, there's no explicit verse in
any book in the new Testament, uh, that
teaches Trinity.
I mean, the, the ingredients, if you will,
of the Trinity are there.
I mean, it says father, it says son
somewhere, it says Holy Spirit somewhere, but you'll
also find these three terms in the old
Testament.
Yeah.
So these are Hebraisms that are Christianized later,
uh, and redefined as, um, the three persons
of a Trinity that share an essence.
Um, I mean, there was a verse in
the first epistle of John, um, and this
was a book that's written much, much later,
probably, I mean, according to secular historians, 110,
115, something like that.
First John 5, seven, uh, there are three
that bear record in heaven, the father, the
word, and the Holy ghost.
And these three are one.
Well, that verse, um, is nowhere to be
found in the most ancient Greek manuscripts.
Uh, so that's an important point because somebody
was asking regarding that verse and also the
verse of the adulterer, they don't like by
throwing the stone and then the end of
Mark.
So you were, you were mentioning to me,
like we were yesterday, we were, when we
were, uh, driving about how people are still
like, okay, so we have to equate, we're
looking, we have a translation of the Bible,
the King James or NIV or whatever, right.
Yeah.
Of the gospels, even that's not, you're not
saying that's the angel.
What you're saying is there's something called the
critical Greek edition.
Okay.
That's what, so that has all those mistakes
and like forgeries removed.
Yeah.
That's what we're talking about.
Yeah.
So there were attempts to change.
So ultimately God protects his revelations and here
didn't say so in the Quran, the Sahaba
are told, if you don't know something, ask
the people of of and almost all of
the classical exegetes say here that so if,
why would you ask Jews and Christians about
something if their books are corrupted?
And then here, indeed, we have preserved the
totality of revelation.
So I think there have been attempts to
corrupt the gospel, but over time these have
been discovered.
I mean, there have attempts to corrupt the
Quran.
There was this Egyptian scientist named Khalifa who
came up with this sort of mathematical code
of the number 19.
Submitters.
Yeah.
Rashad Khalifa.
So what he did was he removed the
last two verses of Surah Tawbah.
So he took out those verses.
He said, oh, these verses are talking about
shirk and we need to remove them.
And so he started printing Arabic Qurans without
those two verses.
So what did he do?
Did he corrupt the Quran?
No, because this was discovered.
This was known that this is what he
had done.
So, I mean, it's not an official Quran.
It's not recognized by the ulama, by the
Ijma.
So it was an attempt to corrupt the
speech of God.
So there have been attempts like that in
the Injil as well.
But when we talk about Injil, we are
talking about the Greek critical edition.
We're not talking about English translations.
So the lay person, when they go to
the bookstore, they go to, I don't know
if there's any Barnes and Nobles anymore, but
I don't know if bookstores even exist anymore.
They go to Amazon and they order the
New King James Version, right?
And they pick it up and they read
it and they look, oh, 1 John 5,
7, there are three that bear record in
heaven, the Father, the Word and the Holy
Ghost.
And these three are one.
So, yeah, there's a trinity.
But if you look at what the Greek
says, because the Greek is the Injil, that
verse is nowhere to be found, right?
So there's this disconnect between Christian laity and
their ulama.
And what about the Aramaic version?
Isn't there?
There's no evidence of an Aramaic New Testament.
Or is there a Latin one?
The Latin is translated from the Greek.
The original books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and
John are in Greek.
They're not in Aramaic.
And this is the point I was making
earlier.
It seems like the Qur'an is affirming
that the Gospel was revealed in Greek.
Everyone would have understood that.
And Greek would have also been the language
that Jews in diaspora in the Mediterranean would
have understood even more so than Aramaic.
So it makes more sense to reveal it
in Greek rather than Aramaic.
And, you know, the milieu of Isa was
very, very diverse.
I mean, he probably, definitely he knew Aramaic.
That was the language of the common people.
He knew Hebrew.
That was the language of the synagogue liturgy.
And he was a rabbi.
He knew Greek.
That was the language of the Roman Empire,
who was occupying that part of the Mediterranean.
He probably knew some Latin because that was
the official language of the Roman Empire outside
of the Mediterranean and probably knew several dialects
of these languages as well.
So like I said, the Greek language is
such a precise language.
It just makes sense.
I mean, if you look at, I mean,
Greek, I think, is the most inflected of
the languages.
So like in Arabic, you know, there's like
eight or nine.
There's, you know, demonstrative pronouns.
In Greek, there's like 48 of them because
they're all, they're all inflected, you know.
Well, can we just take like a 10
minute break?
This guy just blew my mind multiple times.
This is too information overload.
If you have a flight to catch in
a couple hours, we could.
I can sit here with this guy for
like five hours.
This is a great, no, honestly, I'm just,
alhamdulillah, man.
I feel parts of my brain that are,
that I've never used before.
So there is, I was going to say.
You're confused.
There are people in the chat who are
super triggered.
I think we might have had two apostases
already.
I think I know where the dilemma is.
I think I know where, let me ask
the question.
I think I can, I can clear this
for them.
Shaykh, are you saying that the Christ, that
the Gospels and Christianity are okay to follow
exactly the way the Quran and Muhammad Sallallahu
Alaihi Wasallam are to follow?
Are they the same thing?
Am I saying?
Meaning as far as creedal, la ilaha illallah
Muhammad Rasulullah, right?
There's some confusion I saw there too.
I was like, I could see, but I
think they're triggered because there's so much information.
And because he's an academic, he's a very,
he speaks very fairly.
People are not used to other individuals talking
about Christianity and Judaism and even Hinduism in
a fair academic sense.
This is an academic discourse, right?
Yeah.
What people want to hear is those Christians,
they're crazy, they're these Jews, they're, you know,
they want to hear those kinds of terms,
right?
Right.
I think the confusion that people may have
is that they think that you're validating Christianity.
Oh, I see.
And they think that you're saying, hey, their
religion is just as valid as ours today
in 2019, not as a resource back for
them back then.
IE or you're a perennial, like someone said,
like he's a perennialist.
Not a perennialist.
So let me clarify the position.
Please, please.
My personal position is that the, while I
believe the Quran is affirming the text of
the New Testament Gospels as authentic, clearly there
is a repudiation of Christian theology in the
Quran.
Yes.
Everybody knows that.
Yeah.
So don't say three, don't say Trinity.
So I do believe in objective theological right
and wrong.
So the Christians are wrong, in my opinion,
and I think this is clearly what the
Quran is saying, and obviously I agree with
the Quran, that the Trinity is not quite
monotheism.
Now, the way that Christians explain the Trinity
is in a very subtle way, and ultimately
it's a mystery, but it's not, in my
opinion, it's not quite Tawheed.
It misses the mark of Tawheed.
The Quran says, indeed, your God is one
God.
And if I can stop you right there,
because you're going off on a beautiful tension,
but I just want to clear the confusion
for these people.
So since we got that out of the
way, you're saying that, yes, Allah and His
Rasul in the Quran you mentioned is not,
Tawheed is what you're promoting.
So then the next question is, then why
are you giving authenticity to the Gospels?
That's a good question, because I think the
Quran does.
Very good.
I think the Quran does.
Very good.
Because...
So does that mean, sorry to keep cutting
you off.
Does that mean that anyone could pick up
the Gospels and start applying it to their
lives right now because the Quran gives their
authenticity?
Well, I think the ethical teachings in the
Gospel, but I would say it would be
somewhat dangerous to do that, because when we
read the Gospel today, I think there's going
to be a tendency to read the words
of Christ, just people will do it subconsciously
through a Trinitarian or Christian lens.
And that would be...
Look at it through a Tawheedic lens, you're
saying.
Yeah, exactly.
So, for example, in Luke's travel narrative, it's
one of my favorite sections of the New
Testament.
You know, Christians believe in vicarious atonement.
So Jesus died for your sins, and he
literally took your sins.
This is Pauline Christianity.
This is what Paul says.
That's why I don't believe what Paul is
saying.
And I don't think the Quran is affirming
necessarily what Paul is saying.
In the Gospel of Mark, a Jewish rabbi
comes to Jesus and says, Good Master, what
must I do to gain eternal life?
How do I go to heaven?
Now, if you go to any college campus
and you find a Christian, maybe not in
the Bay Area, where everything's syncretistic, and you
find Buddhist Christians.
And one time a Muslim said to me,
I met a Muslim guy, and he said,
I'm Muslim.
And he said, but actually, I'm a Buddhist
Muslim.
Or a Muslim Atheist.
I said, exactly.
I said, a Moodist?
Is that what you want me to say?
So if you find an actual Christian, and
you say, how do I get to heaven?
The Christian will tell you, you have to
believe that Jesus died for your sins, and
that he is the Lord and Savior, so
on and so forth.
So what do you expect Jesus to say
here?
This is in Mark 10, 18.
Good Master, what must I do to gain
eternal life?
So Jesus responds to this Jewish lawyer by
saying, he says, why are you calling me
good?
And that in the Greek is, I mean,
that translation doesn't do the Greek justice.
In the Greek, he says, he brings the
direct object forward, right?
For emphasis.
So why me are you calling good?
He's almost like he's offended.
Nobody is good but one, and that is
God.
So he doesn't even accept the title of
Agathos, of good, out of his tawadur, right?
This is what it says in the New
Testament.
But how many Christians, if you ask them,
how do I go to heaven, are going
to respond with?
And then he says, follow the commandments and
you shall enter the life.
This is what he says in the Gospel
of Mark.
Follow the mitzvot, follow God's commandments.
You mean those commandments that Paul says are
abrogated?
Follow those commandments, right?
So who is your master?
Is it Paul or Jesus?
And I've had debates with very learned Christians,
pastors of, for example, Methodist churches, where I've
quoted Paul and they've said to me, yeah,
Paul isn't Jesus.
I'll take Jesus over Paul.
So they understand there's a hierarchy in their
scripture.
No one speaks over Jesus.
Now in the travel narrative of Luke, Jesus
gives this beautiful parable of the prodigal son.
Maybe you've heard this expression, the prodigal son
returns, right?
So basically Jesus says there's a man who
has two sons.
One of his sons stays with him and
serves him.
The other son goes out and he's like
a spendthrift.
He's a musrif, you know, and then, you
know, he blows all his money on things
and he ends up living a terrible lifestyle
and he's sleeping in a pig pen at
some point.
And then he comes back to his father
and his father sees him from a distance
and he opens his arms to his son
and he hugs him.
So what is this parable teaching?
I ask Christians all the time, what is
Jesus teaching with this parable?
Is he teaching vicarious atonement?
Is he teaching like a blood covenant?
The whole parable is about Toba.
So he had a son, you know, that
disobeyed him and then his son turned back
to his father and the language is, you
know, father-son language because Jesus taught people
how to pray and on the Sermon on
the Mount, avun devash mayo, he says in
Syriac, our father who art in heaven.
So father in the New Testament, it just
means rab.
That's what it means.
Yes.
It doesn't mean your literal father.
Biologically, yes.
Yeah.
So and then, you know, the son made
Toba and then his father welcomed him with
open arms.
Yeah.
Because he's a tawwab.
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is a tawwab.
He's the one who's constantly forgiving.
This is the point of the parable.
Yeah.
Right?
Where is he teaching this idea that he
died for your sins?
I mean, this is certainly Pauline doctrine and
that's, you know, that's the doctrine that won
the day, as it were.
You have a question?
Yeah, just very quickly.
So and I'm just going to be recapping
in simple terms.
So for the listeners, what we take from
this, we always say this, is that all
the prophets were sent down from Allah and
they all had the same message as far
as belief in Allah.
And you said, look, for the Gospels, yes,
as far as ethics are concerned.
And that's what you described now.
So generally, everything that was sent down from
Allah was preaching the same thing, was teaching
the same thing, that Allah is one and
he is the only one worthy of worship.
That's the first thing.
Yeah.
Right?
And the next thing is that when you're
referring, when you're talking about the Bible and
it's with the Gospels and how the Quran
is referring to it, people have to understand
that you're talking about a very, very niche,
specific, pinpointed study that is the Quran talking
about the Gospel?
And if it is, is it giving it
authenticity?
Yeah.
For back then.
And that's your study.
People are thinking Christianity as a whole.
You're talking about a very neat study that
people haven't really tapped into.
And that academic study is, what does the
Quran have to say about the Gospels?
And these are the reasons why.
Right?
And I think that's what's confusing people.
And I think the next thing that I
want to elaborate as far as the benefit
of all this is that when you understand
Christianity on this level and how closely Allah
Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la, and even
when we talk about the Ashab al-Kahf,
and Allah is talking about the number of
people that were there and the dog, was
it this?
Was it the...
But what was the number?
Was it the sixth?
Was it the seventh?
Was it the eighth?
Right?
Is Allah's giving them the understanding of the
differences of opinion that actually existed back then,
that even this elite group of people didn't
know properly.
Right?
But I mean, I don't want to confuse
people.
But that being said, it helps us understand
and has more mercy towards the Christians when
we discourse, when you have a discourse with
them.
Yeah.
And I made this point last night as
well, is the more nuanced one is in
their knowledge, the more one learns, the more
taciturn in speech they become, the more quiet
they become.
And if you notice...
Sorry, I don't know what taciturn means.
So it means that they don't speak as
much.
Okay.
And if you read the Shema'il Ibn
Tirmidhi, the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, and one
of his companions said, he never spoke unless
it was necessary.
So this is someone who is deeply contemplative.
This is someone who is not just, it's
not empty rhetoric.
He's thinking about what they're saying.
So for example, who was the son to
be sacrificed by Abraham?
Muslims kind of triumphantly say, oh, that's Ismail,
but the Quran doesn't name the son.
There is a valid difference of opinion as
to who that son was.
I mean, there are major Sahaba who said
it was Ishaq.
And Muslims don't know that.
And if you bring that up, I mean,
one of my teachers brought that up on
a radio show and a Muslim call and
said, are you an agent of Israel?
He said, why?
He said, because you're denying that Ismail.
He said, there's a difference of opinion since
the very beginning.
So when you think sometimes, and I'm sorry
to cut you off.
Do you think sometimes, because the general population
of the Muslims, they need, and I don't
wanna oversimplify this, but they just need someone
to bring them closer to Allah and teach
them the basics of Islam.
Do you find sometimes that you're trying to
help people, but because of the academic nature
of your study and your discourse, that do
you feel on edge sometimes because you may
confuse people more?
Because that's what the outcry is.
Like, for instance, you were talking about MEC.
Nobody wants to despise somebody that's teaching them
about Isa Alayhi Salaam and Muhammad Alayhi Salaam.
But the reason why an outcry happens is
because they're not used to hearing these opinions.
So do you feel sometimes that, you know
what, you have an obligation to teach people,
but you're gonna have to face 50%
backlash too?
Yeah, I'm used to it.
So do you feel that sometimes, like, you
should just go there and just give them
the basics and leave?
Yeah, I mean, last night was, I sort
of wanted to sort of test the waters
a little bit.
But generally, I wouldn't give such an academic
lecture at a masjid.
Because you'd have to sort of speak to
their backgrounds, and that's one of the wisdoms
of, one of the, what should I say,
one of the ways in which we have
to be wise in our discourse is to
speak to the people according to their level.
But it is very interesting to sort of
gauge reactions.
So what was the harshest thing you got
yesterday?
Like, what was the hardest thing that you
think he got as a comment or a
question?
Did you get anything condescending towards you?
Yeah, I mean, I'm used to it, he's
about to say.
Yeah, I mean, I used to...
It's funny, I'm driving and I'm up there
and he's talking about this backlash he's gonna
get.
I'm like, from who?
Are there gonna be Christians there?
He's like, no, the Muslims that'll be there
are gonna like freaking give me backlash.
Really?
So here's the main reason.
If there's anyone in the chat who's not
really understanding, a lot of apologetics, at least
from the common Muslim, is based on this
inherent fundamental argument that the Bible is corrupted.
You can't take it forward and or you
can't use it.
The authenticity or the integrity of the books
is gone.
So, yeah.
And that uses a major point of apologetics,
right?
Yeah.
That's like a major thing.
Yeah, and the thing is like, if you
read the Quran, one of the main arguments
of the Quran is that if the Jews
and Christians would just read the Torah and
the gospel properly, they will come to recognize
the prophet, salallahu alayhi wa sallam, as a
prophet.
That's one of the major arguments, right?
Yeah.
So the Christian and Jew imagine, they say,
okay, here's the gospel and the Torah.
Oh, that's corrupted.
Then what happens to that argument?
Yeah.
Then it becomes a ridiculous argument.
Aladhin yattabi'una al-rasoola al-nabiyya al
-ummi aladhin maktuban indahum fit-toraati wal-injeel
It's in the Torah and the gospel that
is with them.
Yes, and another thing, I'm glad you mentioned
Walaqa, also Bahira, the monk.
Yeah.
Like how would he know about Muhammad Sallallahu
alayhi wa sallam?
Exactly.
If there wasn't an accuracy there, right?
Yeah.
And there's several who told Abu Talib.
He said, take him away because if the
Jews find him, they might assassinate him, right?
Exactly, yeah.
So they were awaiting, they knew.
He saw the signs, like he saw the
cloud following him and all that.
Yeah, you know, and honestly what happens a
lot of times with Muslims in America, so
Muslims come from sort of these insular communities
from the Middle East where they're taught one
aqeedah, this is the way it is, one
fiqh.
So they come to America, it's somewhat of
a melting pot and they're exposed to different
opinions.
So when they hear a different opinion, there's
sort of a cognitive dissonance with them.
Like, oh, this is not what I was
taught, it must be wrong.
And I mentioned this last night in the
car.
And it was very interesting that, well, I
was given a khutbah one time and I
quoted a hadith, it's an absolutely sound hadith.
In the middle of my khutbah, a Muslim
man stood up in the front row and
he said, this brother's khutbah is batil.
Yes, that's right.
And I said, why are you saying that?
And he said, what is this hadith you
quoted?
Is it in Bukhari and Muslim?
And I said, no, this is a sound,
and I gave the hadith.
And he said, well, I've never heard of
this hadith.
That was his argument.
I've never heard of this hadith, therefore it's
a false hadith.
I mean, talk about a terrible non-secular
argument.
So after the khutbah, I- A Trumpian
argument.
Exactly, after the khutbah, I came up to
him and I said, have you heard of
my cousin, Abdul?
He said, no.
I said, well, I assure you he exists.
I mean, what kind of argument is that?
Yeah, so- I love that, because I
hear people say that all the time.
Yeah, so the deen is very nuanced.
And last night I was talking about the
ayat al-salab, the verse of the crucifixion,
and that's something that really triggers people, because
it's almost like you have to believe that
Jesus was substituted, right?
He was nowhere on the cross, or he
might have swooned, anything to avoid death.
Well, there's an, Imam al-Tabari mentions this.
Imam ibn Kathir mentions, when Allah says, inni
mutawwafika, that could mean that God seized Jesus'
soul and caused him to die.
It seems like Imam Ghazali takes that opinion.
There's something ascribed to Jafar al-Sadiq, where
he affirms the crucifixion.
Well, like in shubbiyah lahum, the whole, not
that Jesus- Not the person was confused.
Exactly, yes.
The conceptual subject of shubbiyah here, according to
Imam al-Zamakhshari, is the event of the
crucifixion itself.
That the whole affair of the crucifixion was
made dubious unto those who killed Isa alayhi
salam.
They say, what about it?
Wa ma qataluhu wa ma salabuhu.
What about that?
They did not kill him or crucify him.
It's very, very important, in my opinion, that
we study the Quran, that we understand that
the Quran is engaging with Jewish, Christian, and
late antiquity texts in the seventh century.
Oftentimes, it's responding to these religious traditions.
So I'll give you an example.
This is an example I gave last night.
In the Quran, we're told that when the
queen of Sheba was walking across the palace
of Suleyman alayhi salam, she perceived that the
floor was wet.
So the Quran says she tucked her skirt
up.
Wa kashafat an saqeeha.
And she exposed her shins, her legs.
I mean, what's the point of that?
Why does the Quran mention that?
I mean, I asked a very learned scholar
one time, and he said, well, it just
means, you know, ladies, you know, be modest.
And I said, that's it?
I mean, that's what it.
So a lot of Muslims don't know this,
but there was an Aramaic midrash, which is
an exegesis done by rabbis.
It could have been as early as the
fourth century of the book of Esther.
This is called Targum Shani.
And in this midrash, this tafsir, it states
that it's basically the same story, but it
adds that the queen of Sheba had hairy
legs, very hairy legs.
So this started a rumor amongst the rabbinical,
the Talmudic rabbis, that the queen of Sheba
was half demon, and she had hooves for
legs.
And it states this explicitly in the Kabbalah
today.
Oh, wow.
So it seems like the Quran is exonerating
Suleiman alayhi salam and saying, no, he did
not consort with demons.
He did not, he was not led astray.
Because in the Bible, it says that he
had 700 wives, 300 concubines, and they took
him out of the faith.
He apostated at the end of his life
because of these evil women, right?
That's the subtext of the story.
You wouldn't understand it.
So it also says in the Talmud, in
Sanhedrin 43, tractate Sanhedrin 43 of the Babylonian
Gemara, it says that astaghfirullah, that Maryam committed
adultery with a man named Tandera, a Roman
soldier, that produced Jesus.
And then after that, it says, and then
we hanged Jesus.
First we stoned him, then we hanged him
post-mortem.
This is what it says in the Babylonian
Gemara.
In verse in the Quran, 4, 156, 157,
is directly responding to these Jewish counter-narratives.
Wabi kufrihim ma qawlihim ala Maryam buhtanan adhima.
Allahu akbar.
Wa qawlihim inna qatalna almasi'i isa ibn
al-mahdi wa rasulallah, wa maa qataluhu.
They did not kill him by stoning, wa
maa salabuhu.
And they did not crucify him post-mortem.
Walakin shubia lahum.
But the affair of the actual crucifixion was
made dubious unto them.
And it seems like Jesus, that God took
Jesus' soul, inni mutawwafika wa raafi'uka ilayya.
That he took Jesus' soul before he could
die naturally on the cross.
In that sense, saving Jesus.
And that's certainly a possibility.
Well, you know, it's, as we started this
podcast three years ago, you know, we could
have been just as upset as some of
these listeners, or even your audience.
No, no, no, I'm just saying, there was
just a couple of people who were actually,
but I'm just saying, when it comes to
things that are ancient, or, you know, matters
like evolution, people get so passionate about like,
as if they knew, they know like, these
are, the information that we have is very
open-ended, and it's interpretive.
And even if there's consensus on something, it
doesn't mean that it's correct.
And it's just, I just kind of think
back to how stupid I was when I
was young.
And I was thinking like, man, I was
just passionate about someone else's argument.
And it wasn't even really that.
I was getting, you know how upset you
would get?
And then like, a few years later, you're
like, man, that person who I thought was
really amazing, and that they may have had
amazing accomplishments, but you finally have enough knowledge
to find some flaws in certain arguments, and
you realize that they weren't cracked up to
all, that they weren't cracked up to be.
But I was curious, at least, my feeling
is, or my question would rather be, what
do other apologetics, or Muslim apologetics like Bassam
Zawadi, think about what you're proposing?
I think generally my ideas are not sitting
well with, because you know, again, there's sort
of a, almost a quasi-dogmatic opinion or
perception that you have to believe that Jesus
was substituted.
That could have been what happened.
I'm not insisting that Jesus was crucified.
Again, you're an academic, so you're talking about
all the possibilities.
Right, exactly.
Or that he didn't swoon.
I mean, contemporary apologists, I mean, Ahmad Didat,
Zakir Naik, Shabir Ali, they all sort of
endorse this idea of the swoon theory, that
Jesus was put on the cross, but he
didn't die, right?
Mumkin, I don't know, that's certainly possible.
I'm not saying, no, that definitely did not
happen.
You know, I'm saying that's a possibility.
And they have different evidences from the New
Testament itself that supports that, and I recognize
that evidence.
The problem is that we begin to, like
I said, we sort of, we give this
almost sacred status to the opinions that we
like, right?
And when we do that, it really does
a disservice to other opinions and other Muslims
that have different opinions that are within the
realm of orthodoxy.
I mean, the parameters or the hudud of
what is normative Ahl al-Sunnah wal-Jama
'ah is very vast, you know, and people
don't know that.
I mean, Imam al-Razi himself, who is
a champion of Sunni orthodoxy, he has major
issues with this idea of substitution on the
cross, that someone else was transfigured to look
like Jesus.
He has epistemological complaints, and he has ethical
reasons for rejecting that.
He says, you know, why would God do
that?
To him, it's a type of deception that
God would do that.
This is Faqr al-Razi, you know?
And, you know, he says that, you know,
we depend on our senses to gain knowledge,
to identify people, to give legal testimony.
So why would God, in effect, deceive people
like that?
And he wouldn't go and talk about something
if it may be a difference of opinion,
if it's gonna take him out of the
fold of Islam.
The main concern here is people think that
if they don't have a clear-cut answer
about the issue with the cross, they don't
know, they think that it's gonna take you
out of the fold of Islam.
The only clear-cut answer is eyewitness testimony,
or things that are clearly, explicitly delivered through
the Quran, but anything that's interpretive, and when
you have information missing, you know, and you're
trying to form the bridge between two separate
events or two things, that's all interpretation.
Yeah, but the work and the study he's
doing, this was my point, is that to
make people understand there's possibilities, and if you
believe in one of these possibilities, understand, it's
not gonna take you out of the fold
of Islam, right?
Even he said, like, he's very honest about
his research.
He said, I don't know, it's a possibility,
right?
Which means what?
The reason why we talk about these discourse
and difference of opinion, even on this level,
is to make us understand that even if
you follow this opinion, Imam al-Razi, right?
It's not gonna take you out of the
fold of Islam.
You're not out of the club, right?
It's something that scholars have understood in the
past.
There's a few things that'll take you out
of the fold of Islam.
Someone who's close to our show, a friend
of ours, Ustad Gilan, he had a controversial
opinion regarding evolution.
Now, people got so upset about that, that,
you know, they're like, this is an Aqeedah
issue, and I'm like, wait, how is this
an Aqeedah issue?
This is like something that's completely, you know,
over hundreds of thousands of years ago.
How could you figure out something that, you
know, there could be a hundred different ways
to the way Adam al-Islam came on
Earth, you know?
You weren't there, and there's not enough information
that Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la
is providing you to make an accurate assessment
on this event.
So, everything, so how could you say it's
an Aqeedah issue?
How could you make it so that you're,
you know, you'd be leaving Islam?
Because when you say Aqeedah issue, this is
like the core, your core belief.
This is what makes you Muslim, you know?
When you're saying somebody goes against the Aqeedah,
you're saying they're not in the fold of
Islam.
When they go against, I'm not saying there's
a difference.
We're saying they're going against our Aqeedah.
That's a very strong statement, right?
If you say, yeah, there may be some
particles here and there that may be a
little confusing in his Aqeedah or someone's Aqeedah,
right?
But again, man, this, you know, and this
is one final point that I want to
make, especially in this amazing, informative guest we
have, mashaAllah, may Allah bless you and preserve
you and your family.
It's actually a sign from Allah Subh'anaHu
Wa Ta-A'la that he gave so
many clues in the context of the books
that came before us that are also in
the Quran.
And what's in the Quran is also inside
of those other texts that Allah Subh'anaHu
Wa Ta-A'la gave us so many
hints and clues of where to find him
from, right?
Christians have everything they need, and this is
how I see it, they have everything they
need to understand who Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam
is.
And we have everything we need from Allah
Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la and Muhammad
Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam to understand where the Christians
are coming from, right?
And what does Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta
-A'la say in the Quran?
We can't forget this verse.
Out of all the people that were given
the book, those who are gonna have most
love and care for you are gonna be
who?
The Christians, right?
You're gonna find those people who were given
the book, the Christians are gonna be the
nicest to you.
And we see that all the time, just
like a few weeks ago.
You know, there's some weird thing that Trump
says and the churches around the masjids or
on IFS start sending letters to us, sorry,
and this and that, you know, they're the
first ones that reach out, right?
And that's something that's gonna be manifesting at
the end of time.
Allah gives us these clues also, right?
So we shouldn't be intimidated by these nuanced
discussions or new discussions that you haven't heard
yet.
No one's asking you to change and leave
the club.
We're just asking you to think, look, what
you've learned, that's awesome.
But here's some other possibilities and here's some
evidence for those possibilities.
It doesn't mean anyone's telling you to leave
Islam now or trying to confuse your Aqidah.
It's trying to say, listen, expand your horizons.
This is what we got up to now.
But think about these other possibilities.
Think about this research.
It's meant to expand your mind and your
understanding and your concept, not to restrict them
and bully you, right?
No one should think that way.
I'm gonna give you a couple of rapid
fire questions before we wrap up here.
Here we go, you ready?
So there's a lot of comments about how
in the Old Testament there's a lot of
denigration of the prophets.
You know, how do we, like, what's your
take on the preservation of, like, what's your
understanding of the preservation of the Old Testament
and maybe the Torah specifically?
You know, on that issue, I don't have
a good answer.
I honestly don't know.
You know, I don't know.
Because it seems like in the Hadith and
the Quran, the Torah is affirmed.
And the Quran refers it to itself as
a musaddik and a muhaymin, as a confirmer
and a preserver of the Torah and the
Gospel.
If I were to put myself in the
shoes of a non-confessional, like a historian,
the answer would be something like this.
And, you know, obviously, Muslims, confessional Muslims would
have an issue with this.
But it'd be something like, well, the whole
idea of isma or prophetic infallibility is probably
a later development.
And it doesn't seem like the early Muslims
believed in that doctrine.
Therefore, the Quran is confirming.
And, you know, in the Old Testament, David
and Solomon and Lot, I mean, Jews don't
consider them prophets.
It seems like the Quran does.
So we are at an impasse with this.
Now, are their stories, like, outside of the
Torah, though?
Or are they within the first five books?
I mean, the story of Lot.
Is it in the first five books?
Yeah, it's in Genesis 19.
Now, the story of David and Solomon, I
mean, it's nothing Lot really did.
It was his daughters, you know, but I
don't wanna get into the details of that.
But what the Bible says about David and
Solomon is mentioned in 1 and 2 Samuel.
Now, there are two versions of the lives,
there are two versions of the stories of
David and Solomon, 1 and 2 Samuel, and
also 1 and 2 Chronicles.
Now, 1 and 2 Chronicles leaves out all
of those highly offensive stories about David and
Solomon.
So it seems like within Jewish tradition, some
of the Jewish scholars or Jewish scribes and
scholars, they had an issue with those stories
as well.
So they sort of rewrote those stories and
they removed all of those disturbing stories.
But yeah, there really is no, I don't
have an answer for that.
I see, I see.
I don't have an adequate answer.
Now, Paul is made out to be like
the bogeyman by a lot of Muslim apologists.
Like, he's the guy in corporate Christianity.
Now, in your talk last night, you mentioned
about how in Surah Al-Yaseen, that some
Mufassirin say that Paul is one of the
messengers.
Right?
So how do we understand that, especially in,
we talked about earlier how Paul is maybe
the person who came up with the idea
of the vicarious atonement?
Yeah.
So Surah Al-Yaseen, right?
The heart of the Quran, there's a story
of Ashab al-Qariya.
Ibn Kathir says, no, so it says that
three Mursaleen were sent to them.
And many, many classical commentators, Mufassirin, they say
that these Mursaleen are actually apostles because the
word apostle literally means someone who's sent.
That's literally what Mursaleen means, Mursal.
That these apostles are actually sent by Jesus.
This is what is standard exegesis in Sunni
tradition.
Ibn Kathir names these three apostles.
And he says their names are Sham'un,
Yuhanna, and Bulus.
Ibn Kathir, he says, Peter, John, and Paul,
right?
Now you might say, well, Paul, he's very
problematic.
There are different ways of reading Paul.
Paul is very mystical.
Paul does not even mention, he doesn't even
quote Jesus.
He doesn't mention Jesus' ministry.
He doesn't even use the word disciple.
He doesn't mention any miracles of Jesus.
He doesn't mention the virgin birth of Jesus.
He doesn't mention any of the historical events
that took place during Jesus' life.
He's describing Jesus in very mystical terms.
So there's different ways of understanding him.
But that's Ibn Kathir's opinion.
And obviously it doesn't mean that he's right.
I think there's something ascribed to Ibn Abbas
as well, where he identifies the three apostles
and he doesn't name Paul.
I think he says Thomas.
I think he says Peter, James, and Thomas
or something like that.
And that's attributed to Ibn Abbas, the myth
apostle of Tanwir.
And there's some question of authenticity with that
as well.
But yeah, I was in a bookstore one
time and one of my senior teachers saw
me there.
This was about 10 years ago.
And he asked me about Paul.
And I said, oh, you know, Paul, the
corrupter of Christianity and all these ad hominem
types of things.
And this teacher of mine is a former
Christian, very, very learned.
And he said, you know, I would be
careful with that.
It seems that there's some wilayah with Paul.
We have to be careful.
We don't know what Paul is talking about.
I mean, it's easy to put him in
a box and say that he's a heretic.
And on the surface, what he's saying, he's
kind of like Ibn Arabi, right?
If I can use that analogy.
On the surface, you're like, whoa, this is
Kufr.
And you know, and what is he talking
about?
And allahu anhu, he's a mystic.
You know, he's really, his discourse is at
a very high level.
Yeah, and there's some people, and you know,
I think some verses of the Quran and
some understandings that we have from the Hadith
allude to the fact that there's always gonna
be people in the world till Yawm al
-Qiyamah that are gonna be of curiosity, you
know?
And we're never really gonna know.
So when Ibn Kathir mentions Paul, like you
said, that's his opinion, right?
And he's not saying, hey, I have, this
is the ultimate truth.
If you know it's Paul, then your aqeedah
is complete.
That's not what he's saying.
His job as a researcher of the Quran
is to tell you what he's come across,
right?
Yeah, and I think Ibn Kathir, I think
he's familiar with biblical tradition because in Acts
chapter 13, we were told, because he identifies
the Qariyat as Antioch.
In Acts chapter 13, there is a group
of apostles of Jesus, Paul is included, that
go to Antioch, and they preach the gospel
there.
You know, so it could be that, this
is something that gets a lot of Muslims,
that the main story in the heart of
the Quran is describing apostles of Jesus, and
one of them could be Paul.
Ya Allah.
There's a possibility.
Yeah, one concern that like a lot of
Christians have, like when you're talking to them,
and one thing they have a real problem
with is the infallibility of prophets, right?
Because they say that infallibility is only for
God, and because they equate Jesus as God,
how would you like, how does, and a
lot of that is just conditioning over time,
and I know we wanted to talk a
little bit, we only have like five minutes
left, but like, can you tell us about
- It's okay, can you delay your flight
a little bit?
I wish I could.
Sim will pay for your ticket.
There's like a psychological element, I think.
I think a lot of what you're, when
you dialogue with Christians, right, a lot of
times it's like the intellectual stuff, okay, it
sets in, but then there's like, there's a
thing, there's an attachment, because you grew up
with it, and the same happens for us,
right?
Like people are upset with your opinions because
growing up, all they heard was substitution theory,
right?
So how do we like, how should people
deal with these kind of attachments as they
grow up?
What's your advice to them?
Like, because the idea of prophets being infallible
isn't a logically, they'll admit it's not logically
impossible, right?
And I think what you're asking, in essence,
is like, how can someone find the balance
between being open-minded to things, and making
sure they're not being duped into something haram?
Right, right, sure, that's fine, yeah.
I think at some point, one has to
realize that they should let reason be their
guide.
You know, 99.9% of people, they
die upon the religion they're born into.
99.9% of people, whether it's Muslims
or Christians, and I think it's because, primarily
it's a strong emotional attachment they have.
So it's like childhood memories, you know?
You know, the thing about me is, maybe
this might explain it, you know, I wasn't
raised a Muslim.
I don't have that nostalgia of going to
Eid with my father, and going to relatives'
homes, and going to a khutbah when I
was 10 years old.
I don't have that, you know?
When I think of my childhood, I think
of the 49ers, and I mean, I was
telling the brother, Maheen, I mean, I was
driving on the Embarcadero, and I saw Joe
Montana crossing the street, and I got, like,
giddy, because he was my hero in my
childhood.
And that emotion, you always go back to
that place.
So for me, I don't have that sort
of emotional attachment to things.
When I was 19, I made a conscious
choice that I'm gonna be a Muslim, right?
So I think when people mature, they have
to get into that mindset of I'm going
to pursue truth no matter where it takes
me, right, even if it sort of goes
against my conventions, what I've been taught, certain
opinions that I've taken.
That's amazing how Allah prepares people on that
level.
Like, I mean, that's what you have become
now, which is why it's easier for you
to talk about these things.
Like, for me, even if I knew this
information, I would never in the brightest day
in my life talk about the issues that
you're talking about now to any masjid, because
that's the upbringing that I have, but Allah
subhanahu wa ta'ala takes certain things away
from people, and we don't know the wisdom
of it then, and we see it manifested
now.
It didn't leave me until I started reading
primary knowledge books, you know, from founders of
the sciences.
Then you realize, like, how little they knew
and how much, when you test their ideas
against many different critiques, then you realize, like,
oh, wait, they didn't examine a certain issue
from another angle.
Then you realize how vast knowledge, the depth
of knowledge is just, we're just barely scratching
the surface of everything, and everything is just
conjecture, and you realize the importance of the
core truth, like the shahada, you know, that
there is no God but Allah, because that
is such an ultimate and pure truth.
That's the ultimate, you said it exactly, it's
the ultimate truth.
There's nothing else that, yeah, man.
So, jazakallah khair for coming on the show.
Did we have any questions at, I know
that somebody had a question about the Dead
Sea Scrolls.
Did you, how do, as Muslims, we examine
that coming to light?
What was your take on that?
That's a 15-minute answer.
Yes, I like this.
If it's 15 minutes, we've got time for
it.
I gotta go.
No, no, no, I'm sorry.
But I wanna close, like, we can probably,
what I'll do is, I'll have some, you'll
be back in Chicago, inshallah, sometime this year,
so we'll definitely bring you back on.
Can we do this again, but we need,
like, a three-hour podcast, honestly.
No, I mean, we've had three-hour podcasts
before, but we really, really need a three
-hour podcast.
We didn't touch the outline.
We were supposed to talk more about Judaism,
post-modernism.
They didn't touch it.
Right, Dawah, the thing is, the last point
about, like, the whole emotional attachment, I think
people have a problem where they think that
their emotional attachment, they couch it as faith.
Yeah.
I think that's what it is.
They're like.
Even a convert's experience, you know, I know
a lot of converts that were at a
rock bottom in their lives, and many of
them were suicidal, and then they perceived that
God guided them, right?
So, down the line, when they're, you know,
practicing whatever religion that they're now practicing, if
there's any type of doubt that creeps into
their mind about their religion, they always go
back to that moment where they perceive God
guided them, so that's also an emotional attachment.
We can't let that get in the way
of our reason.
We have to follow reason.
Right, right.
All right, Jazakallah Khair, Dr. Ali Atai, man,
that was a great show.
We gotta get you back on.
We gotta talk about post-modernism and stuff
like.
Maybe we just do a web thing.
You've got a webcam at home, I bet,
right?
I can get one.
I think you could do an episode with
us once every three months, probably once every
four months, probably, right?
No, I'm being serious, man.
I'm being serious, because we could do, you
know, Skype calls or Zoom calls, or, you
know, you don't have to be here physically,
but next time we're in Chicago, please, you
have to be here, man.
This was, honestly, this was an honor for
all of us.
Jazakallah Khair, thanks for having me.
You should thank me, because I pushed it
on you guys.
No, no, you are.
We are.
No, it is.
It is.
I was like, I made them get up
early.
They were like, oh, no, we gotta sleep
in.
I wanna sleep in on Sunday.
I'm like, not today, boys.
No, you're right.
Now I understand the hype that you were
talking about, brother.
Jazakallah Khair.
I understand.
All right, quick shout-out to our sponsors
before we wrap this puppy up.
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Wahid Invest, for your hard-earned income to
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For our special guest, Dr. Ali Attai, my
co-host, Jeff, Amr, Saeed, and Tim, this
is Martin signing off for the Mad Mom
Licks Escalero Morning.