Ammar Alshukry – We Hide This from Non Muslims
AI: Summary ©
The speaker discusses the importance of being a culture consumer versus a culture creator, citing the success of being able to feed people with their needs and receive reward. They also mention the need for people to understand their culture and not just try to be understood as a general person. The speaker suggests that people may not realize their own values until they become part of a larger group.
AI: Summary ©
When we talk about manifesting generosity, amongst ourselves, there's a really, really important point that we and I encourage everybody here to really concern themselves with. And that is, every time anybody travels anywhere in the Muslim world,
whether they go to Nigeria, or whether they go to Morocco, or whether they go to Bangladesh, they go to Indonesia, or they go to the Middle East, anywhere.
Any non Muslim travels anywhere to the Muslim world, what is the one thing that they come back raving about? Generous generosity, absolutely. Hospitality, they will feed you and feed you and feed you. And then you have to turn over the cup, and then you turn over the cup, and they still feed you, you got to like flip the table eventually, just to just to get away. And they just are wowed. And you don't want we have this hospitality. And we have this generosity. And it exists here.
When Gary and I go to lunch, or Bill and I go to lunch, or whoever it is, we do the whole wrestling thing, right? Muslims everywhere we do that we do the whole, you know, trying to fight in front of the cashier, and we do the stealing of the bill and the arguing. And I can't tell you how many times that waiters or cashiers or what have you kind of thrown their hands up in the air just like, there you guys go again, right? Like y'all always do this. And I've heard this so many times.
But we only do this when it's us. But when I go to lunch with Bill, right? Or when she goes to lunch with Jessica, are we doing the same thing? Okay, they'll never contest it. But what's stopping us from doing that?
Not to be taken advantage of you think that they will never contest it?
Why? Why am I not worried about being taken advantage of when I go to lunch for someone else? You assume that we don't do that with Jessica, I'm not assuming about individuals, I don't know about individual rights as a general culture don't We don't have it as a general culture. That's true. That's true. We are different when we are going with ours people versus when we're going with.
So different. My it's interesting because it goes back to this issue of being a culture consumer versus a culture creator. And we very much still goes back to what we were talking about, about I don't know if we were doing this on camera or not. But when we're talking about human hold dude, and his, his his, his presentation of subjugated people versus dominant people, we have so many beautiful qualities that will beautify the existence of societies around us.
Imagine if the only thing people knew about Muslims. Like you can say whatever you want, but you're not paying for lunch with one of them.
Like you're not paying for dinner with one of them. And yeah, maybe maybe
someone might take advantage of you maybe you know, eventually five or six or seven times you're always taking lunch and you're always paid. So you might want but let's get to that point.
Right? Let's get to the position where people know us for our generosity, because it's there, it's already there. Is there more reward to give to a Muslim than a non Muslim? Is there more reward to give to a Muslim or non Muslim? You know, what's really interesting about that? Is that and I remember reading this from Jaffa, Greece have you with a whole lot, one of our great you know, scholars, living scholars, he, he says, look at all of the verses in the Quran that are talking about feeding the poor and taking care of the orphan, you will find that they are Meccan Surah us, the vast majority of them are met consolas. Now when the Muslims were in Mecca, How many were they?
They were a very insignificant, small minority amongst a a non Muslim majority. And so when Allah is telling them to feed the orphan, and feed the prisoner even and the prisoner different than the orphan because you could say okay, well, the orphan might be most of them. The prisoner is never Muslim. And so when Allah is saying, feed the prisoner take care of the orphans take care of the of the poor. It is invoking us to take care of the non Muslims around us as well. And the Prophet saw the lights and his generosity and all of his beautiful qualities were never restricted to the Muslim community. Everybody recognized and everybody experienced his generosity. Everybody experienced his
benevolence. Everybody experiences beauty.