Asif Hirani – On Islam In The West
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
Today, the first session we have is actually
a conversation with our brother Paul, about different
aspects of your life.
Brother Paul, first of all, welcome to Texas.
Is this your first time in Texas?
It is.
As-salamu alaykum.
It's great to be here.
And have you ever been to America before?
Yes.
Like Chicago?
No, I've been a number of times, mainly
to Chicago, which is my favorite American city.
Anyway, moving on quickly.
I like California.
It was my first visit to Texas, though.
It's great to visit the former colonies of
Great Britain, and it's good to see you're
doing quite well.
So, congratulations, and I'll report back to headquarters,
to the King of England, that you're doing
okay, inshallah.
That was not planned.
It will be interesting, very interesting.
So, after Chicago, which is your favorite city,
what's your next favorite city in America?
You want me to say Dallas, don't you?
Yeah.
I haven't been here long enough.
San Francisco is nice, very nice.
Berkeley, which is not San Francisco, but close
by, is very nice.
I like university cities.
There's so much amazing stuff going on in
the States.
That's good.
So, Brother Paul, we have seen you on
blogging theology, inviting different scholars, but very few
of us actually know about your story.
How did you convert or revert back to
Islam?
And when did it happen?
And last night, you were saying something interesting,
which actually sparked in my mind that you
said, if I'm not mistaken, that you were
evangelical fundamentalist.
And from that, what happened that you ended
up here, not only Muslim, but influencing other
Muslims to become better Muslim?
The reason I don't talk about my story
very much, because frankly, it's not interesting.
It's actually very boring.
So, I'm not keen to inflict this on
you, particularly in the morning like this.
So, it's not very interesting.
So, I'll give you the extremely brief version.
There are kind of two conversions in my
life.
One, when I became a born-again fundamentalist
evangelical Christian in my early 20s.
Now, that is a conversion, because I didn't
even believe in God before that.
So, I moved from an entirely secular worldview,
with all the attendant moral attitudes, to one
where I had quite a strict moral code,
a definite belief in God's existence.
Obviously, I believed Jesus was God, and the
Bible was the infallible word of God, and
so on.
So, most of the beliefs I had then,
I still have now.
It's not like I've rejected Christianity in total,
because a lot of Christianity is true.
I often think of it like an iceberg.
We see the differences above the sea level.
Oh, that's the bit we don't agree with,
which we don't, as Muslims.
But a lot of it we do.
Muslims and Christians both believe in the Day
of Judgment.
They believe that Jesus was a Messiah sent
by God.
We believe in the Old Testament prophets.
We believe in angels and demons.
We believe God created the universe, and so
on, and so on.
There's an awful lot we have in common,
actually, compared to any other religion, really.
If you think of Hinduism, or Shintoism, or
whatever, they don't believe a lot of that
stuff.
So, yeah, I was very attracted to Christianity
by the very loving fellowship, the Christians I
knew.
I wanted a spiritual path, and I didn't
know anything about Islam, of course.
And so, I embraced Christianity in that particular
form.
And I started reading the Bible pretty much
straight away, as you do as an evangelical.
And that's when the problems started.
So, I kind of noticed things.
I mentioned some of them last night.
There are passages in the Gospels where Jesus
denies he's God.
Which is a bit embarrassing, if you're an
evangelical, fundamentalist Christian.
And that sent me off into researching, looking
at what's going on here.
Mr. Scholars, how should we interpret this?
And then, I discovered other problems, which I
didn't know about from my reading of the
Bible, that scholars knew about, to do with
the historicity, or the lack of historicity, of
the Gospel of John.
The Gospel that has the highest Christology, the
most exalted understanding of Jesus.
And it's nearly universally considered to be the
least historical of the Gospels, for very good
reasons, actually.
So, I ended up having this kind of
very painful, bifurcated existence as a Christian.
On the one hand, I continue to pray
and worship as a Christian.
I believe the Trinity and everything else.
On the other hand, I was becoming increasingly
aware of what Christian scholars were saying about
Christianity.
About the Bible, about manuscripts, about the historical
Jesus.
The fact that the Trinity, understanding the Trinity
didn't exist in the first century.
It came about much later.
How can that be?
And that became more and more painful.
Psychologically distressing, actually.
Because I couldn't put down the two issues.
I couldn't stop being a Christian.
And yet, I also was fascinated by the
historical figure of Jesus.
And this went on for years.
In those un-PC days, I consider myself,
I wouldn't say it now, of course, a
disabled Christian.
Disabled Christian?
Well, I couldn't walk properly in my life
as a Christian.
I was handicapped.
It's a metaphor, obviously.
A spiritual and intellectual metaphor.
It means you didn't get divine guidance properly
for the different aspects of your life.
Is that what you're referring to?
You didn't get divine guidance in your different
aspects of life?
I sought guidance from my pastor, and from
books and other Christians.
And so, it was a journey.
It wasn't just like one thing overnight, I
realized there was a problem.
I was constantly wrestling with it, and trying
to find answers, and not finding answers, and
discovering more problems.
And one day, I decided to look to...
Because I became quite Islamophobic as well, actually.
Wow.
And looking back now, racist, I would say,
actually.
Because I was fearful of the increasing demographic
presence of Muslims in London, near where I
live.
And so, I thought I would go to
my local mosque, Regent's Park Mosque in London.
It's interesting.
Regent's Park Mosque has a board of trustees,
which is not remarkable.
But all the trustees are the ambassadors from
the Muslim nations.
So, guess who our treasurer is?
He's the Saudi ambassador.
And I always laugh.
I think, well, there's no chance of us
going bankrupt in this mosque.
Anyway.
So, I went there.
I literally walked through the doors, because I
knew the mosque existed.
Because, hey, there's a mosque.
I can see it.
And I immediately spotted on my right a
bookshop.
I thought, ha-ha, a bookshop.
I can relate to that.
So, in I went.
And I was spotted by some kindly brother
who bought me a pile of books.
And so, that started me in my...
I gave myself three months to learn all
I need to know about Islam.
Hilarious, three months.
And so, I read the Quran in English
in a dreadful translation.
But it started...
I suddenly realized that there was another parallel
religious tradition of, as I thought, of equal
profundity and equal...
an extraordinary tradition that rivaled Christianity that spoke
also of Jesus as being sent by God.
And that was very interesting.
Wow, I didn't know that.
And that began a discovery that ultimately led
to my embracing Islam about a year and
a half later, I think.
Wow.
I told you it was boring.
So...
No.
No, no, no, Mashallah.
Okay.
So...
How did you start?
I mean, one way is that you accepted
Islam.
You took Shahada.
But now, you're not only a Muslim.
Rather, you are influencing other Muslims and other
non-Muslims also about the beauty of Islam
through blogging theology.
So, when that idea came that you have
to start this channel and I'm pretty sure
there are some people because your channel is
my favorite channel by the way on YouTube,
Mashallah.
If you haven't subscribed it, subscribe it.
It's very different than other motivational speakers.
It's pretty academic-centric.
It's like a good resource in the contemporary
Islamic epistemology.
So, now my question to you is did
you get any pessimistic brothers and sisters in
your life who told you that who is
going to listen to this two-hour academic
video?
The attention span is 30 seconds for the
Gen Z but still, Mashallah, you are flourishing.
Yeah, it's a good question.
Well, to answer that question, we need to
go back to the beginning of the channel
which is during COVID, during the COVID lockdown
in the UK.
We went out into the streets of London.
It was like an apocalyptic scene and there
was no one around.
It was really weird.
I mean, because people were encouraged to stay
indoors, of course, during COVID.
So, I bought a new MacBook Pro and
I started making videos just for my own
interest.
There was no great vision or plan at
all, whatsoever.
And they started becoming increasingly popular and they're
mainly on things that interested me like the
Bible or Christianity or Islam.
And I invited or contacted scholars whose books
I had read, inviting them to talk about
their books.
I really wanted to ask them some questions.
And I remember the first one was a
guy called Sir Anthony Buzzard, of all things.
And he's an American, sorry, he's a British
Bible scholar who lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
And he's been here for many years and
is a Unitarian Christian.
So, I thought, that's very interesting.
So, he believes in Christianity, but doesn't believe
Jesus is God.
So, I had him on for about, and
it was great fun, hour and a half
conversation, really loved it.
And then I invited someone else, Dominic Crosson,
who's actually a much more senior, very world
-class biblical scholar in the States as well.
And he agreed to come on.
So, great, I can talk about a book
I read by him.
Now, these videos were, I don't know, an
hour or two long and it really didn't
matter what other people thought about that because
I wasn't doing it for anyone else.
I was doing it because I wanted to
really grapple with the subject matter.
And then people did start telling me, well,
Paul, you know, people's attention span these days,
young people especially, don't watch anything for more
than 10 minutes, 10 seconds, isn't it?
I can't remember if it was 10 minutes
or 10 seconds.
And I thought, well, that's very interesting, but
I really don't care.
I don't care.
I'm not doing it to reach out to
young people.
I'm not doing it to be inspirational, as
you call it.
Ghastly word, inspirational.
I'm doing it because I'm interested in the
content and I want to share that content
with a few other people, if it is
just a few other people.
And I'm glad I ignored the advice from
wiser people because it was wrong.
It was bad advice.
And indeed, a lot of young people are
interested in serious content that's not just on
TikTok or Twitter or something.
And I remember I did a video with
Professor Tupke from Brandeis University on Islam and
LGBT, you know, that thing.
And I think it was, I forget how
many, I think it was two hours long.
Yeah, I think it was four hours.
Four hours, four hours long.
Sorry, four hours long.
Okay, this is breaking all the rules.
You don't make four-hour videos with academic
videos with professors and expect anyone to watch
it on YouTube.
Anyway, I think it's had about quarter of
a million hits so far.
And it became, not anything to do with
me, but with the professor, an absolute gold
standard on this, this thorough, interesting, balanced, academic
understanding of what on earth this LGBT thing
is and where did it come from and
how are we to understand that as Muslims.
And I thought, great.
So that's what we do at Handela.
And I see myself very often as part
of the audience.
I'm there to listen and learn and benefit
from the guests rather than in any way
as their equal.
I think with the exceptions where Imam Tom,
for example, who I have a huge amount
of respect for, I feel well, maybe because
the ages, I feel more I can just
chat with him and give my uneducated opinion
because he's very relaxed, which is cool.
Yeah, that's cool.
That's cool.
And I really wish that, inshallah, the channel
will have more and more subscribers because it's
really beneficial, really, really beneficial.
I've heard so many people are getting benefit
from that intellectually and emotionally.
And that actually, that video for Dr. Sharif
sparked me to write the book on Rethinking
the Rainbow, which I gave you yesterday.
So, Brother Paul, by the way, if you
are not able to understand the British humor
so far, I'm still learning.
Yesterday, we were in a restaurant and I
think Ahmed should be here.
His colleague, he's from Germany.
He's doing a PhD from Berlin.
So, he ate the food.
Actually, he drank the water and he said,
it's very drinkable.
And I said, what does it mean?
He said, I'm praising.
It's awesome.
This is the humor in German.
Yeah, in Germany, if you say something, if
you were given something like, I don't know,
a meal and you say, it's not terribly
disgusting, it actually means that you like it.
So, in America, I think you say, oh,
my God, that's awesome.
The most amazing thing I've ever had in
my life.
Oh, my God, you know, about something trivial
like an ice cream, you know.
In Germany, they say the opposite.
Well, that wasn't terrible.
No, I'm not joking.
This is what they're like in Germany.
So, you've got to learn the lingo.
They're not being rude.
They're actually praising it, you know.
Whereas England, we're much better than these two
countries.
We're in the middle.
So, we don't over-praise and we don't
under-praise.
We just say, that was good.
So, you're saying moderate nation.
Well, we are the via media.
Yeah, we're the middle path.
England is, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think that's pretty ethnocentric, right?
Absolutely.
And your point is?
Okay, so that's humor.
Okay, okay.
Coming back to now one, I would say,
serious question and that is your observation of
challenges of Muslims in the West.
And I know there are plenty, but I
would say few of them which are the
biggest challenge right now.
What would you say?
Because you have seen the other isle, now
you have seen the Muslim community.
What are the biggest challenges you see, especially
for Muslims in the West?
Oh, I'm not really qualified to speak about
that.
All I can say is, in what I
just, I mentioned this last night, I've discovered
in the UK and also in France and
Germany and Scandinavia, is it an extraordinary success
story in some ways when it comes to,
particularly younger Muslims, adherence to the Sunnah, the
prophet, upon whom be peace.
They're much more committed.
This is not just, this is something I
discovered, it's not my opinion, this is well
known.
Much more committed than their parents and their
parents are more committed than their parents who
were the, often the first immigrants to, say,
the UK.
So there's an extraordinary revival of practice and
faith amongst Muslims in the West.
I don't know about here though, in the
United States.
Maybe I'm bracketing that out because I don't
know.
But in Europe, it's true.
And I just thought it was the UK,
but it's not.
I've got a friend of mine, a Swedish
scholar, Islamic scholar, living in Saudi Arabia and
he reports the same phenomena in Stockholm and
in Denmark and Norway.
And it's true in France and Germany as
well.
So I just want to start by saying
that there's some good news.
It's not, you know, there are problems, of
course, but there's also an amazing success story
compared to other religious traditions.
Christianity is in free fall in Europe.
It really is in terminal decline.
It's on its last legs.
And I don't like that.
I want Christianity to be strong if only
as a book against secularism and this kind
of militant secular liberalism that is attempting to
change our faith.
So there is some good news.
Another bit of good news which I really
want to stress is the quality of dower
in, again, talking about my experience of the
UK, compared to even in my short time
as a Muslim, say over 10, 11, 12
years.
I've seen such an increase in sophistication, in
education, in knowledge, in maturity, in good adab.
I mentioned someone like Hamza Zortes of the
Sapiens Institute in England.
Very nuanced, sophisticated, intellectually switched on brother who
knows his stuff Islamically and the Western tradition.
This is amazing.
And he's not unique.
And he's mentoring others like Muhammad Hijab and
many others.
So we're seeing a generation of lay ulama,
that's not a good expression, but very bright
and educated young scholars and others who are
engaging and critiquing the West, but not from
a purely rejectionist point of view.
They are engaging it with nuance and sophistication,
but they're faithful to the tradition.
They're not liberalizing or modernizing it at all.
So it's very encouraging.
That's one thing which you guys in England
think about.
If I have not mistaken, I've spoken right
now to four different scholars, not you, but
four different scholars from England.
And they all said that in England, at
the scholarship level, we have a perception that
in America, Muslim, both the scholars and the
American Muslim population masses, they tend to liberalize
and modernize.
And to a certain extent, it's a reality
because of certain factors.
But what did you notice?
Is that a partial reality?
Is that something which is actually, yeah, in
America?
Well, yeah, it is.
I'm not going to mention names.
I really am not going to go there.
But I'm going to say some names that
I really like.
Professor Ali Attai at Zaytuna College in California
is, in my humble opinion, an outstanding human
being as well as an outstanding scholar.
He's a polymath.
A polymath is someone who is an expert
in many fields.
So he's fluent in Biblical Hebrew, New Testament
Greek, obviously Arabic.
He speaks Farsi.
His parents who I've met are Farsi speakers.
He even speaks English.
And he knows Christianity better than most Christian
ministers.
And obviously, he knows Islam.
He's an Islamic scholar.
So there's some outstanding scholars here, I must
say.
And he's not unique.
There are others associated with Zaytuna, for example.
Hassan Spiker, who was on the faculty there,
is now moved back.
He's a Cambridge theologian, a philosopher, rather, an
Englishman.
So there are some other people I won't
mention who perhaps are not quite in that
class.
But I'm not going to ad hominem people.
I'm not going to criticize individuals.
So there are some excellent examples of great
Islamic scholarship in the States, I think.
Sorry.
Dr. Ali Atai and Hassan Spiker.
Ali Atai, Hassan Spiker, who was on the
faculty at Zaytuna, he's now moved back to
Amman in Jordan.
But he's really worth...
He's a brilliant young Islamic scholar.
He's written a lot of books on philosophy,
on metaphysics, on ethics.
His work is difficult to read because it
is at a very high intellectual level.
But he is...
He's interesting.
He's a white guy.
And I say that because he was born
as a Muslim.
His parents, one of whom was American, converted
in the 1970s.
So he was born and brought up as
a Muslim in Cambridge in England.
But he is a brilliant young scholar, worth
watching, following him on Twitter, reading his books.
Those are just two almost random examples.
There are others, of course.
My brief analysis of why American Muslim community
is more left towards, lean towards leftist approach.
And you...
I just want to ask you if it's
the right analysis.
It's because of, first of all, we are
less in population from the percentage and more
scattered.
America is big.
So from Seattle to Florida, you've already seen
that.
While in Europe and England, everyone in one
town.
So you would...
And one more reason is because of the
social pressure.
This is imperialism.
This is the hub of imperialism.
So everything needs to be Americanized.
Is that, to a certain extent, right assessment?
I think so.
I mean, I'm embarrassed to say Britain is
often portrayed as the poodle of the United
States.
You know, a poodle?
These little dogs that follow their owners around.
People often say, we in Britain are like
that, vis-a-vis America.
And I think, unfortunately, it's true in terms
of our foreign policy and everything else.
And we're not the only country to be
poodles, by the way.
In fact, a lot of the world is
like that at the moment.
So it's a bit humiliating for us.
What was your question?
I'm just saying that, is this the right
reason?
Because of imperial reason and because Muslims are
scattered, that's why Muslims...
Well, I was going to say Muslims haven't
been here for very long.
But that's not true, is it?
I mean, Muslims have been here in this
land even before the revolution.
I mean, in Muslim slaves, of course.
In their millions.
I mean, there'd be Muslims here.
Christians in this country, I assume, don't realize
that they think Muslims are just immigrants to
be here for five minutes.
No, no.
They go back before your country was officially
broke off from the UK when you did
that thing.
So you've been around a long time.
And I think the problems in America...
You're at the epicenter of imperialism.
And I would say the epicenter of genocide.
This country is the country that supports the
genocide of the Palestinians.
And that's an unspeakable crime.
And I'm sorry to be very critical of
your country.
But I wish you wouldn't do that.
And I wish my government wouldn't do that
either.
Because it's an appalling genocide.
And it will go down in history as
one of the worst crimes of the 21st
century.
And the free people of the West, inverted
commas, are doing it.
So it's unspeakable.
Let me ask you the very controversial question.
Are you a Ashari, Asari, Maturidi, Hanafi, Shafi,
Maliki, Hambli?
What are the flavors we have?
Who are you?
Yes, is the answer to that question.
I embraced Islam very much through the Sufi
door.
I read the works of Guy Eaton.
He's a brilliant English writer.
I do recommend his work.
When he died several years ago, he'd been
a Muslim for 50 years.
He was a British diplomat and writer.
And he was a scholar in residence at
Regents Park Mosque, where I embraced Islam.
And I picked up some bad habits from
some of the Sufi Muslims that I knew.
By bad, I mean I became reflex, in
a very ignorant way, reflexingly anti-Salafi.
So Salafis are just bad people.
They're extremists and horrible.
We must attack Salafis.
And I went along with that because I
thought that was part of the deal.
And then some time ago, there was an
incident in my life, which I won't go
into here, where two Salafi brothers came to
my aid, came to my help.
And I learned from them, and these are
well-respected Salafi brothers in England, what they
really thought, what their attitude was, how they
understood Islam.
And that began an appreciation, a positive appreciation
for the Salafi, not madhab, but instead of
methodology.
I know Salafism is complex internally.
There are different groups.
It's a loaded term.
I'm simplifying it.
And of course, they don't support terrorism.
Most of them are quite pacifist.
You know, this is the great irony, you
know.
And so, although I still had a positive
appreciation for Sufism, I then had a positive
appreciation for Salafism.
And then I encountered groups like Hizb ut
-Tahrir, which is, in my country, is now
being prescribed as a terrorist organization.
It's just a political party that campaigns for
the caliphate, restoration of the caliphate.
And I listened to their arguments and looked
into that more.
I thought, yeah, they have a good point.
Yes, the caliphate is part of our deen.
It's part of the restoration of it.
That is mentioned in the hadith, you know.
So I thought, yeah, I can see the
good in that as well.
And then I looked into the Ash'ari,
the Mas'aridi, and the Atheri.
And actually, credit where it's due, I read
Sheikh Yassir Qadhi's doctorate on Ibn Taymiyyah.
And that opened my eyes up to not
just Ibn Taymiyyah's extraordinary epistemology, but also to
the Atheri creed.
And Sheikh Yassir Qadhi argues there, I think,
that the Atheri was the earliest creed, if
you like, rather than the Ash'ari creed
came later.
So I thought, wow, I didn't know that.
And I read another, I read Professor Tubki's
book on Ibn Taymiyyah and he corroborated that.
So I started identifying as an Atheri, and
I still do.
So I'm kind of quite, even though I
identify personally as an Atheri, but I'm not
anti-Sufi.
Some practices are deviant and should be rejected,
but broadly speaking, the emphasis on the spiritual
and the purification and so on is obviously
very good and Islamic.
So I end up seeing good in virtually
all of these approaches, actually.
Which is very good, which is very good.
But I've been told, well, I think so,
I agree, but it feels I'm being incoherent.
People say, well, you can't be pro-Salafi
and for the Caliphate, because Salafis are, oh
no, I think I can.
So I tend to be very eclectic and
affirm a lot of different positions.
I have a line, I have a red
line, by the way.
And that is, I don't identify with kind
of a more liberal Islam or more modernist
Islam at all.
You know, if so-called Muslims start affirming
some of the stuff we see today, then
that is for me completely haram.
So it's definitely traditional orthodox in its various
permutations.
Yeah.
I really like this approach, because when people
revert to Islam, one of the sisters I
remember in my previous community, she converted to
Islam, and I told her just learn about
Islam, keep it easy.
And after two months she came to me
and she said that, Imam Asif, who is
this Salafi and Sufi and Deobandi?
Am I ignorant if I don't know about
them?
I said, sister, if you don't know about
them, you are protected.
But what would be your advice to the,
whether non-Muslims who are reviving Islam and
accept Islam or even generally, a Muslim who
is not well-versed about Islam and then
eventually because of social media information overload, they
were going to be exposed to these different
Islamic movements.
How to have a balanced approach, like take
the good and leave the bad, and have
the traditional guardrails, so that traditional red line.
My journey is my journey.
I'm not saying, by the way, that people
should have my views, this kind of very
eclectic.
I mean, if people want to identify strongly
as Salafi, good for them.
I'm not going to say, well, perhaps you
should be more pro-Sufi.
I mean, it's not my business.
But I suppose more fundamentally, we should stay
in the mainstream of the Sunni, mainstream Sunni
orthodoxy.
So there are four mudhabs.
Yes, you can be Ash'arite.
Yes, you can be a Maturidi.
Yes, you can be Athuri.
It doesn't, in my view as a layman,
it doesn't really matter.
At the end of the day, we're not
going to enter Jannah by our views of.
It's not that, I know I shouldn't say
that, but in my humble opinion as an
ignoramus, it doesn't matter that much, really.
But so I say, don't stress about it
too much.
The things to avoid though, you know, there
are modernists and liberal kind of things which
go under the name of Islam, which we
should avoid, like plague.
I know you love to read books.
And I see, Mashallah, four books in front
of us, Mashallah.
What are you reading these days?
Yeah, I tend to read a lot.
And one of the books I'm reading at
the moment, which I do recommend, is called
The Unintended Reformation, How a Religious Revolution Secularized
Society by Brad Gregory, who is a professor
of early modern European history at the University
of Notre Dame here in the States.
This is an academic work.
It's absolutely brilliant.
He's a Catholic, but he really, I think,
pinpoints some, he's looking into the deep history
of the West and how particularly the Reformation
in the 16th century, in the 1520s, 1530s,
how were people like Martin Luther and John
Calvin and Zwingli and others, how their protest
against the Catholic Church, that's where we get
the word Protestant from, that their protest against
the church had an unintended consequence, which he
looks at, of the secularization of Europe in
France and Germany and England, especially.
And that was exported ultimately to the States
as well.
These guys, he says, would be horrified to
see the world as it is today, where
religion is privatized and secularism rules.
So it's a brilliant academic work about how
the Reformation basically secularized the West.
If you want to understand, you want to
go deeper into why we are, in some
ways, where we are today, this book is
very good.
I haven't finished it, but I'm really, a
number of Muslim academics are reading it at
the moment.
Coincidentally, I noticed on Facebook and Twitter, they're
saying it's Sheikh Hamza, sorry, Hassan Spiker recommends
it highly.
He's read it.
But I tend to be, I tend to
read a handful of books, about five or
six books at the same time.
I can't just focus on one, but in
the States, I'm just reading this one because
I can't do that, read lots of other
books at the same time while I'm here.
And since you're reading the books, and nowadays,
Gen Z are all attached to YouTube and
TikTok, like reading the book, seems like it's
a tradition of the past.
What would be your advice to Muslim youth,
and especially we have an Amal program.
So Amal program is basically an education program
to create more activists.
Activists should know about their religion also before
they are doing activism.
What would be your advice to Muslim educated
youth in this regard?
Yeah, that's a really good question.
Very important question.
I have some very unusual views by today's
status.
I think Muslim youth should read books.
This is, you might have seen this before.
This is a, I didn't get this from
a museum, by the way, I actually purchased
this from a bookshop.
So this is a 3D example of a
book.
No, seriously, you're not going to get this
from TikTok, or YouTube, or whatever.
Not even from blogging theology?
Not even blogging theology.
Although the content there, of course, is excellent.
I do recommend that you read books.
Now what books?
Because there are some crappy books, and there's
some good books.
I would like Muslim youth, Muslim anyone, whatever
age or generation, to learn about the genealogy
of ideas in the West.
By genealogy, I mean the origin, the genesis,
of the ideas that we breathe like oxygen,
as if they're axiomatic, as if they're self
-evident.
They're not self-evident.
They come about, they are the end product,
the consequences of a series of historical and
intellectual movements, which we can identify and map,
like this book does, in very particular ways.
The worldview we have in the West today
is not natural.
It's not universal, although it thinks it is.
It's almost accidental.
It came about as a byproduct in some
of the series of consequences in Europe, mainly.
So I'd like Muslim youth to dig deep
into the history of the Western tradition.
I'd like to see us read Plato.
Plato was an ancient Greek philosopher in the
4th and 5th centuries BC, two and a
half thousand years ago in Athens, in Greece.
One of his pupils was Aristotle, who taught
Alexander the Great, of course.
Read him.
So when I say Plato, read his Republic.
It's a very famous work of his, a
work of philosophy.
Read this stuff, because I know that Plato's
Republic is read today in the Ivy League
universities in the United States.
Undergraduates are reading his work.
This guy who lived two and a half
thousand years ago.
This still forms minds, young minds, that will
end up leading this country.
We've got to understand what's influencing them.
Plato's always been read in the West by
the intelligentsia, by educated people.
So learn about the Western tradition, its philosophy,
its history, its ideas, where these ideas come
from.
Learn it for yourself, and don't do it
through YouTube, do it through books.
So Plato's Republic, he's written lots of books,
but anyway, that's the main, probably the most
significant work he wrote.
Aristotle, he wrote the Nicomachean Ethics, this amazing
book on ethics, which is still hugely influential
today in the West, read everywhere.
Learn this stuff, become acquainted with it, appreciate
it, but also critique it from the Islamic
point of view.
Also Christianity, learn about Christianity.
I don't mean from social media.
There are some common mistakes that even Muslim
scholars routinely make about Christianity, which is embarrassing,
really, because they're quite elementary mistakes.
There's a common idea around the Council of
Nicaea in the 4th century.
So there's a bunch of bishops that met
in what is now Turkey in the 4th
century.
It's called the Council of Nicaea, called by
Constantine, the Roman emperor, to settle a question
about who Jesus really was.
Was he the same as God, like God,
or was he God himself?
So they decided that Jesus was God, basically.
It's a Nicene Creed.
But I keep on hearing this idea that
Nicaea was about the Trinity.
No, he wasn't.
It doesn't mention the Trinity.
Nothing to do with the Trinity.
It never came up.
I also hear that Nicaea was the time
when they decided which books would go into
the Bible or something, or which Gospels would
be chosen.
That's simply not true.
That's a Da Vinci Code Dan Brown myth.
Da Vinci Code is a book that was
written several years ago.
A work of fiction.
He says it was a work of fiction.
It made up stories.
But these ideas have become quite popular.
We need to educate ourselves about what Christianity
really is, and not make these elementary mistakes,
which are often recycled.
I could go on about that.
So learn about real Christianity from good academic
books like The Historical Figure of Jesus by
E.P. Saunders, a professor at Duke.
This is another one of my favorites by
Ahmed Pourkila.
He's a senior fellow at Cambridge University.
He's an English Muslim.
Rethinking Islam and the West, a New Narrative
for the Age of Crises.
He's in his 80s now.
But this is a really well-received book
amongst Muslim educators and instructors.
Very, very good.
Again, going deep into the history of the
West intellectually.
Why we think the way we do now.
Where do these ideas of autonomy, individual autonomy,
come from?
Liberalism.
There are identifiable people like John Locke, the
father of liberalism.
He's actually much better known in the US,
by the way, than he is in England,
where he was from.
He invented this idea of tolerance and secularism.
It's there in his Second Treatise of Government,
which I recommend.
His Letter on Tolerance.
This influenced the American Declaration of Independence, which
quotes him.
He's an English philosopher from the 17th century.
We as Muslims need to know about these
guys so that we're not passively influenced by
the zeitgeist, these ideas.
We can critically resist them, analyze them, and
form our own Islamic tradition.
The second point is to know our Islamic
tradition well.
Great teachers like Sheikh here, but we also
need to read people like Ibn Taymiyyah, al
-Khazali.
This is very long.
We need to educate ourselves in both traditions
so that we can robustly analyze and critique
them, but remain faithful to our own tradition.
Otherwise, we're gonna go under.
We're just gonna end up repeating what Fox
News says and all that rubbish.
Anyway.
Rubbish or garbage?
Garbage, I mean.
Okay.
That's garbage.
I actually like the last point you mentioned.
I didn't, of course.
I like the first one also.
This American humor.
Oh, no, I'm kidding.
Sometimes you have the knowledge of your enemy
more than the knowledge of...
Sometimes you have the knowledge of what you
hate, but not the knowledge of what you
love.
So it is very important to have the
knowledge of Western philosophy to deconstruct these ideologies
and isms and ologies.
But having said that, if you don't have
proper knowledge of the text and the rational
sciences of Islam and textual sciences of Islam,
then eventually you won't have traditional guardrails.
So I'd really like two-point advice.
First is to get well-versed in the
philosophy and the comparative religion, including Christianity.
But have the traditional guardrails.
Because otherwise it's very easy.
Because the philosophy without traditional knowledge can take
you to skepticism route or agnosticism route.
But if you have traditional guardrails, then you
know how to take the good and wise
things and how to critique the problematic things
from an Islamic lens.
I couldn't agree more.
I was assuming someone was well-grounded in
their own tradition.
But you're absolutely right.
We need to identify good scholars.
We need to read their work, follow them,
listen to them.
In England we have people like Abdul-Hakim
Murad, Dr. Tim Winter.
I don't necessarily agree with everything he says,
but I'm just pointing to senior ulama who
are acknowledged and accessible and written a lot.
And we need to be very educated in
our own tradition as well, not just the
opposition's tradition.
So yeah, it's quite a task.
I'm not saying, by the way, that everyone
should do this.
I think it really is quite elitist, what
I'm saying.
I don't think everyone should read philosophy.
It's difficult.
It's demanding.
It's very rewarding.
It's very necessary to read it.
But I'm saying a group of us should
do it and then share that information, perhaps,
in another way with other people.
But I'm not saying everyone should do this,
actually.
And it is elitist.
A very un-American thing to say, I'm
sure.
But anyway.
Or maybe not.
I don't know.
Okay.
Let's conclude this with a final discussion.
I asked this last night, and you briefly
touched it.
Post-October 7th, we have seen our Muslim
community, especially in America but even in European
Muslim community, we were swinging, especially here, swinging
like a pendulum between the left and the
right.
Pre-October 7th, we came a little bit
to the center in our approach, whether it's
the sexuality issues or other issues.
And October 7th happened, and now we are
pushed towards the fences, it seems like.
So are you concerned that this social justice
movement, because this happened to Christianity 100 years
ago, that Christianity just turned into a social
justice movement and it lost its essence.
It became like a Marxist social justice.
Are you concerned that the same thing might
happen?
Or maybe we are smart now how to
basically tackle, because post-9-11 the same
challenge came and we learned from our mistakes.
What is your take on that?
Wow, that's a huge question.
I was in front of the White House
several days ago when we were in Washington,
and there was a Palestinian, a pro-Palestinian
demonstration happening there.
And I think it was led or initiated
by revolutionary socialists as a particular left-wing
party.
I forget who they are, anyway.
But there were Muslims present.
And I think there's the issue of how
we behave in these demonstrations.
What is the adab that Muslims should adopt?
Can we shout and scream at our enemies?
Can we abuse them?
Can we say, oh, you know.
Can we do behavior that leads to our
arrest by the police?
How do we, you know, how should we
behave distinctly Islamically, I mean?
Because the left, some of the left, will
perhaps overstep the mark.
They'll be even violent sometimes, abusive or aggressive
towards the police or whatever.
So I think we need to be much
more aware of how we should behave Islamically
in these.
I'm not saying we shouldn't go on demonstrations.
I'm saying, well, if we do, how we
should behave Islamically and not just adopt the
patterns of behavior of the left.
And of course, the left have their own
agenda.
They have their political, revolutionary, secular agenda, which
is often Marxist, by the way, which is
atheist, explicitly anti-religion.
Although they might keep that a bit quiet
if they've got Muslim allies around.
Some scholars, not from traditional perspective, but let's
say some movement-oriented, how to say, if
not scholars, Moors and Shakers of Muslim community
might say that Marx have the same approach,
even though I agree with you, but I'm
just trying to give you a pushback from
their angle.
They might say that Marx have the clash
between the haves and have-nots, the oppressor
versus oppressor, and Islam talk about this from
a different angle.
So what's wrong with that?
We have our own epistemology.
If something good is coming, we need to
take.
So Marx, one of the scholars 100 years
ago, without taking his name, and he said
that Marx plus Islam is the solution for
the humanity.
Yeah.
And if I'll tell you the name, no,
I can't.
So I'm pretty sure that at that time
it was different.
Now more researches have been done on Marx.
Now scholars won't make this mistake.
But where to identify that Marxist social justice,
and the term social justice in and of
itself, goes against the divine system of justice.
I agree.
I think Marxism is an atheistic, godless, materialist
ideology.
We must be very clear about that.
Now there may be some other aspirations which
are good.
I mean, not everything in national socialism.
He believes in extending the living working wage
to giving workers holiday.
Most ideologies have some good in them, but
we shouldn't necessarily get in bed with them,
so to speak, or form alliances with.
Marxism aims explicitly to the abolition of religion
as such.
It's not just atheists.
It actually wants to abolish religion.
I mean, Marx said so.
These people can't be really our allies.
There might be coincidental overlaps between our agendas,
but that's about it.
So no, Islam can't be combined with anything
else.
It is the divine dispensation for the human
race.
But I think the whole alliance, the Muslim
alliance with the left in general, is highly
problematic, because it often comes at a price
where we have to perhaps either be quiet
about our core Islamic beliefs, say on gender
or marriage or LGBT, whatever.
We either self-censor or we get criticized
by the left for having these views.
And with the right, many of the right,
some Christian right have good values about family
values, for example, that the importance of faith
in life, in public square, there should be
faith in public square, and so on.
But the right often allied with, in this
country anyway, with Zionism and with Islamophobic attitudes
and so on.
So I think maybe we need to form
strategic partnerships or ad hoc alliances, but not
actually have a built-in alliance with, say,
the Labour Party in Britain or the Democrats.
Well, I can't tell you what to do,
but there needs to be more independence, I
think, and critical interaction, and we need to
build up our own base, I think.
Yeah.
Actually, very, very true.
Yeah.