Ummah Talk #006 – Dr. Abdullah bin Hamid Ali – How Islamic is Critical Race Theory?
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Channel: Fatima Barkatulla
Series: Fatima Barkatulla - Ummah Talk
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The speakers discuss the negative impact of racism on people, including suicides and blind spots. They touch on the "monster" of Islam, a man who claims to be black and expresses concerns about being black. They emphasize the importance of understanding the experience of black people and bringing together their voices to speak their language. The speakers stress the need for transformational policies that do not harm people and encourage others to use racist language. They also emphasize the importance of embracing civil rights and support for civil rights, and encourage listeners to leave comments and share their own experiences.AI Generated Transcript ©
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Welcome to the oma talk podcast with me, Fatima Baraka Tula be led the
rise.
In this podcast, I speak to scholars, experts, leaders in their field about some of the big issues facing the Muslim community worldwide, as well as your local Muslim community here, especially in the West. So please tune in, you can catch the podcast on Muslim Central podcasts, which is available on all sorts of audio platforms. The podcast episodes will also be available on YouTube. So do share the episodes. Let me know what you think about the ideas and the topics that we discuss in the episodes.
The revival of the message of Islam, the revival of the oma of Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam is a responsibility, and it's the responsibility of every single generation to strengthen and pass on something better to the next generation. And I hope that we can begin to do that.
Bismillah Alhamdulillah wa salatu salam ala rasulillah dear brothers and sisters as salaam alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh. And welcome to the oma talk podcast. We've just come out of Hajj season. And one of the striking things about Herge that is commonly pointed out is the equality and the diversity of people of all different racial backgrounds coming together, side by side, you know, wearing those two white sheets. And you know, how does become a symbol really of the Brotherhood of humanity. And it has become very symbolic of that. And, and that's one of the striking, most striking things that you get when you look at images from heart, right.
We know that Malcolm X famously in his letter from Hodge said that basically changed the way he thought about race and the relations between the races. He said, America needs to understand slump, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the rest problem. Throughout my travels in the Muslim world, I have met talk to an even eaten with people who in America would have been considered white. But the white attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam. I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all colors together, irrespective of their color. And that's a famous quote that most of us have probably read or heard. However, we
know that although the prophets Allah, Allah when he was salam, and the Quran is unequivocal, when it comes to discrimination based on skin color, what about Muslim societies and Muslim history?
are Muslim societies free of racism? Has Islamic history been free of racism? And what about modern ideological responses to racism such as critical race theory? How should we as Muslims be viewing them?
I've got here with me today, a special guest to help me answer some of these questions because actually, I don't know the answers to all of these questions myself. And Alhamdulillah have with me chef, Dr. Abdullah bin Hamad Ali, from all the way from California. Shaka de la teaches courses in Islamic law prophetic tradition as a Turner College in California. He specializes in Islamic law, with particular emphasis on commercial law, Family Law and inheritance law. He's translated written works of Arabian Raja belly belly and about Hamidullah zaarly, as well as authored numerous books and articles. He studied Sharia at the Royal Cairo in university, I think I've pronounced that
correctly. And went on to complete an MA and PhD at graduate theological union in California. And his PhD thesis was it was entitled, The Negro in Afro Afro Arabian Muslim consciousness. So, with that great introduction, I hope I'd like to welcome Dr. Abdullah salaam aleikum.
Wa Rahmatullahi wa barakaatuh. How are you?
And hamdulillah isn't it
Amazing that we can speak like this, like I'm sitting here in London and you are, I believe in California. Yes. of California.
miraculous to an extent. Yes. So Pamela is that color hair and for joining me.
You know,
Chef Abdullah, just before we like get into the discussion,
just so that people know like a little bit about your background, would you be pleased, willing to just share with us a little bit about your, your own background like growing up and things like that? Yes, you're right. Sure, I can do that. Yeah, I,
my, my parents accepted Islam era in the early 60s, and they were followers of the Elijah Muhammad, and they converted the Nation of Islam. And upon the death of Elijah Muhammad, they, they follow the Sunday mount worth de Muhammad.
And I grew up spent about making the first 11 years 11 years of my life in Chicago after being born in Philadelphia, and then would relocate once again to Philadelphia,
around the year 1984, there are from my family backgrounds, largely, I guess, you would say cultural Muslim, in that sense, in that my inspite of my parents conversion, we were not necessarily taught the basics of real Islam. And my father was the only person in their house that was praying at the time. After the after he followed him at WWE, Mohammed and the Nation of Islam, they started to institute the five daily prayers, you know, eventually my parents would get divorce in Philadelphia, and around that same time, I would discover a Sunni Muslim family in the area.
And, and I would start to attend, go to their home, visit their home and start to learn the basics of Islam. That's where I had my first look at a, an Arabic Koran. And I was fashioning language. And then I tried to teach myself Arabic. And then eventually, about two weeks later, I discovered a in a retreat and teacher, the local
traveling Arabic teacher who studied an Arab studied in Egypt.
And I started to study with him. So I did that for about a year. And then eventually, I would study with a an institution, close to the other institution, called the Cuba Institute, where a few American scholars who had studied in Saudi Arabia have started a new Arabic language program as well. I studied with them for a number of years, and also Koran with them, and some basic introduction to some of the Islamic sciences. And, you know, long story short, eventually, I would go to study at Temple University for two years. And then I went to Morocco to study at the pottery in university. And I returned in 2001, I was teaching at a Muslim school, the same school that I
attended prior to that, and prior to leaving the US, and then I started became a chaplain and the LA state Correctional Institution in Pennsylvania, and east coast of United States. And I did that for five years. In my fifth year, I was invited by zaytuna to come to take up the the poles of Resident scholar, and then eventually I would complete my Master's in my PhD, and my Master's in ethics and sofa theory, and then my PhD and cultural and historical studies and religion.
Wow, Mashallah. I didn't I had no idea about your background, and even the connection with
your parents connection with the Nation of Islam, etc. Do you do you actually remember, like,
being
Yeah, I remember it. Yeah, I remember attending summer camp program when I was younger, but I wasn't indoctrinated my my older siblings were indoctrinated into the original teachings of the Nation of Islam, my oldest brother,
and my second oldest brother, you know, but the rest of us we really didn't get that, that indoctrination. We were more just sort of left as like free spirits to sort of like figure out our own way.
So yeah, but I do remember attending the, we call the temple. Right? basis, especially on Fridays. Yeah.
Okay, well, and so does that like, just out of interest like, now is there still like, tension between people, people who left and
People there or is it?
Oh, it's a pretty much that most people have left. You mean people will left the Nation of Islam? Yeah, within your circle? I wouldn't necessarily say that there's tension. But I do think that the those who follow the meme WD Muhammad into Sunni Islam, they definitely, excuse me, they definitely have
aired their own negative view of those who follow fair Khan and vice versa, you know, that there is that each group considers the other group misguided.
You know, so they, but I wouldn't say it's tension to the extent that people are fighting and, you know, their physical violence and those type of things, you know, but I think this this people to sort of keep their distance from one another and avoid certain conversations, but acknowledge the value of the movement itself, and that it was,
it was relevant.
And some most probably would say, be probably necessary for the times in American history, because of the Civil Rights struggles at the time.
Yeah, I mean, as a student in Egypt, I actually met former Nation of Islam members who had left and now they were, they were they're studying with their children. And it was really, it was a new thing for me, maybe just because I've, you know, grown up in London and not really had any connection with, with Americans before that.
My only connection had been reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as a child as a teenager. And believe it or not, even like, as somebody came from an Indian background, like, as in my parents came from India, to Britain,
being visibly Muslim, and growing up in the UK, obviously, you do face and we did face a lot of racism. And The Autobiography of Malcolm X was completely like life changing, you know, even for somebody like me.
Because it was like, the first time I realize there were Western Muslims.
Like him, and also because he articulated a kind of pride and, you know, in the Muslim identity, but I'd never experienced that. So, yeah, so it was, you know, it was a life changing book for me. Yeah, well, I appreciate it. Now, I was just going to say that, you know, and I, that book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X has influenced so many people's lives, I know, a number of white Americans who actually relate to Islam because of the Autobiography of Malcolm X. Yeah. Which is really interesting, you know, what's happening today, with amongst certain Muslims actually
see some ridiculous outrageous posts, saying that, you know, the white people shouldn't become Muslim, etc. You know, so. So yeah, it's, it's really interesting. That brings me to the topic of,
I guess, critical race theory, because, you know, like, when I was first exposed to critical race theory, it some aspects of it rang true, you know, like,
especially, like I said, growing up in Britain, in the 80s, especially, you know, lot of racism, and to some extent, I feel like I experienced structural racism as well. But to be honest, Dr. Abdullah, I, this might sound strange, and maybe maybe I'm living in an ivory tower myself. But my experience was,
I always felt a huge sense of privilege myself, even though I grew up in a really rough part of London, East London, like in what probably would be called in America, the project, right?
I didn't really see it like that. I think, because I wasn't slim. And I grew up in a religious family. I always felt really privileged, because I seem to know what the purpose of life was, I knew I had I had a framework and a structure for life in a way that
so many people around me, regardless of their race, white or black, or any other ethnicity, didn't seem to have you know, so for me, I always felt a certain strange sense of privilege, being clear on so many things, having a father who was a scholar who's who gave us a lot of clarity, you know, so, sometimes I read about like, white privilege and also some some aspects of critical race theory that seem to imply a certain
certain
type of ingrained disadvantage for everybody other than white people. Um, it, it troubles me because and I find I find that very disempowering, and it also does not ring true for me anyway.
Right? Well, um, again, this this critical race theory is in terms of defining it can be a bit elusive. And and I guess that's probably by design being that critical race theory is we would say a subcategory of what we call critical theory, which is connected with postmodernist philosophy, which really prides itself on the centering sort of narratives and, and, and undermining or deconstructing what they consider to be
power relations in society. So so so I would say that critical race theory can probably best be defined as an analytical
list of analytical assumptions about race reason, and domination. Right? In Western societies in particular. And I would say that the the goal is to, is to, to to create
outcomes, which are reflective of the numbers and
the the, or the idea or the concept of an egalitarian existence. And so when you hear this, that something like that, most people would say, Well, okay, there's nothing to object to write about that and why would we not want
some level of egalitarianism? Why would we not want justice or to correct certain
problems which have been created by racist policies, its historical policies.
However,
when we look at the foundational assumptions of critical race theory, among which are
the idea of intersectionality and anti centralism, yeah, so intersectionality is basically the idea that
any given individual
can be seen as a press from multiple perspectives, right? So for instance, you as a woman, right, it was okay, well, and then also you as a Muslim, right, that you are automatically placed into the category of the oppressed, because you're both a woman and you are a Muslim. Right. So. And, in me, I'm automatically placed into the category of an oppressor because of me with respect to you, because I'm a man. And in perhaps if we say, because I'm conservative, right, you know, in my my viewpoints, right, so that sort of makes me the oppressor, right, default. Right, you know, but the greatest oppressor and the one who the the group of people who are said to oppress everyone
our calls they call cisgender, or heterosexual, white, white people, white men in particular, you know, they're at the top of this pyramid of, say, and, and so, so often when we talk about intersectionality, what's included here is also things like sexual orientation, right? So a person or a sexual is assumed to be an oppressor of a homosexual. Right, so these these sort of assumptions, and in that sense, it's not necessarily we say, wait a theory, but it's more, again, just an analytical and analytical way of deconstructing society, but also trying to reconstruct it according to a type of how utopianism which which really can never really happen. Right. And and
then the idea, the claim of anti centralism. It's been a principle of, of critical race theory. What that means is that you're not allowed to assume that the individual members of any particular group are the same, right? Because of the fact that again, there are over lapping differences between people on the basis of sex or sexual orientation or political affiliation, social class, you know, so you're not allowed to assume that all black people are the same, or that all Indian people are the same. They're all Chinese people.
You know, it cetera, et cetera are the same. But you know, you're allowed to assume that about white people, right, you know, which realistically is the fundamental problem right with with critical race theory is that while it claims to be fighting against racism, it is itself a race, a racist ideology, it promotes and propagates a new our Neo racism directed towards white people as a collective.
So, from my understanding, there's this idea that
white people basically treat white people as though they have Original Sin, right, like,
whether they are conscious of it or not. They are by by definition, racist. Yeah. Is that fair? Warren? Yeah, you're born. Because it's like, it's what we call biological determinism, which was always the problem with the, the the arguments about race during the Enlightenment period, realistically, were objected to because of the suggestions of there being biological determinism. In other words, meaning that if you're a certain color, that assumes that you behave a certain way are motivated by certain things. Right. And that itself, fundamentally means that you're sort of stamped right, from the beginning to, to achieve or not achieve certain certain certain things, you know, so
fundamentally, after, and this is also one of the contradictions and contradictions of progress theory is that
there's a claim that race is not biological that race is a social construct. That's all it is, right? It has nothing to do by biology. Right. But then when you say, okay, all white people, right, are races, you know, by nature, right? Or innately rate the rate races, you know, then you're actually contradicting what you just stated, you know, because if it's cultural, they can be biological at the same time, right? Yeah. You know, so. So it can be a combination of both, right? It can be a combination of culture and biology, right. But to say that it's only one and not the other, you know, and then to, to assume, or to insist that these particular people who look like
this, that they all entertain negative ideas about the people who don't look like them. Right, then that in itself is called biological determinism. And that in itself is unacceptable. islamically is unacceptable, you know, it pretty much in any civilized or rational type of environment. So, so it's, you know, I'm one, as I said, I will actually go further and say that it makes it seem as if White people have Original Sin. Excuse me, if anything, is, it actually makes white people appear to be both the devil and God. Right, and right, yeah, because they've got that status, permanent status of
being able to disempower everyone else. Right? Exactly. They got all the control, they got all the power, and no one else has any power has been in control to do anything about it. Right. And, and so but we, you know, but at the same time, we're working to dismantle it, you know, so which really, again, also contradicts in terms of like it? Well, if this is a trans historical fact, you know, and this is something which is just simply part of the natural terrain and, and white people can't do anything about it. Right, then how can you dismantle it, right, you know, if this is just the way that things are supposed to be? And it's also a very, very anti historical. And one thing, the thing
that's interesting about this is that,
that this particular idea, the ideas that it entertains, or the cookery theories, and theories entertain about why people
it's similar to the ideas that are entertained by the Nation of Islam. I was actually just, I was exactly just saying that the whole idea of the white man is the devil. Right.
And that whole separatists?
Yes, yeah. When I say the Continental difference upon the difference between the Nation of Islam and critical race series is that anybody who's went through the Nation of Islam experience will tell you that wow, the black, you know, nationalists among the Nation of Islam, they considered white people to be the devil. They didn't obsess about white people to the extent that the curvier racists do today. Yeah. So blacks who was like, Well, yeah, the white man is the devil. There's nothing you can do. He can't pretend to be redeemed, you know, however, you know, I mean, so we're just going to do for ourselves. We're not going to demand anything from him because he can't, he can't go against his
nature, you know, so we're just gonna ignore him. You know, and we're gonna do
it separate ourselves from him.
Society and etc. And his systems it as much as we can. But what happened with the grace series is that on one hand, Well, okay, the white man is the cause of all of my problems. And and we also were demanding that white people solve those problems and act as if only they can actually solve those problems. You can remember only white people can stop being racist, only they can stop being racist. But okay, if they're naturally racist, innately racist, how can they stop? They can't change their nature. So this is when it comes to critical race theory.
So do you think because I noticed some like,
commentators and stuff in Britain anyway,
who are like professors of black studies and things like that, I noticed that they really do respect and refer to Malcolm X a lot, right? Do you think? I don't know about this? What do you think like they kind of got stuck in the Nation of Islam phase of Malcolm X. And
do you think that influenced critical race theory? Oh, yeah, definitely. I think that not only Malcolm X, but the multiple others who were leaders. I mean, you'll see them quote, multiple black civil rights leaders from the from the US who actually they will say that they support their ideas. I mean, even Martin Luther King, when he spoke about racism, he spoke about how, you know, how racism when it's combined with power, right, that that that itself being the fundamental issue, right, the matter of domination of racial domination. Right, you know, and so from from that, they would say, Well, this is where we get our definition of racism, right? You know, so they'll appeal
to people like Malcolm or sometimes, or Martin, even you saw during the summer, last year, summer riots related to BLM riots that people were posting means where Martin Luther King talked about how riots were the the voice of the of the of the voiceless. Yeah, but they didn't complete the quote, you know, because he was he also right, he also was against the riots, right? So
it's selective quoting of these
Yeah, cuz I noticed that the kind of Islam side of Malcolm X is always downplayed and his kind of his evolution or the changes especially towards the end of his life are hardly acknowledged what it was note of others, I'm sorry to cut you off. But you know, but um, but it was interesting about situation or the way the Muslims, many Muslims have started to utilize Malcolm is that.
I think, if you go back to about 2015, and you see
the Muslim reaction to attacks on white people, that overall you see that Muslims are actually defensive of white people, they will say, What are you talking about, you know, Malcolm X in a will hold up Malcolm X statement about me, okay, he is letter from from Mecca
when he was on Hajj, and so Malcolm said this, and this is like, the strength of Islam, you know, so you can just simply attack that whole group of people. But then once Trump became president, it was the same as, like, more and more Muslims embrace critical race theory without knowing without understanding what critical race theory was. And, and understandably so, because, again, as you started, you mentioned at the start of this,
that critical race theory, it presents ideas or things that we find to be morally
I guess you say digestible, that things that we are ready we even believe to be good things right. And so they appeal to you to that day, they're sort of this sort of ethos, you know, they're they're making
an ethical appeal, right? Yeah. Sometimes, you know, pesos pathological appeals as well. Right through this and so peoples are all Yeah, I believe in that. Yeah, I believe the Black Lives Matter. Yes, I believe you know, and we all believe that but it's like, you know, not understanding that the people pulling the strings have a different goal then the most most of us actually do right that you know that they're these individuals are materialists atheists, and they want they don't want a world with religion to begin with. Right? So they don't want to roll with God they don't want to world with family. Right. And so critical race theory just simply is be simply is a a tool that for power,
right, you know, it actually is utilized for power for though for that elite, and add on top of that, and I guess we don't know for sure.
Welcome to the discussion of white supremacy. But
that, that most of the individuals who are
exploiting critical race theory to to their advantage are white elite. Right, on the left, right, you know, so. So that's something that needs his own compensation with regard to the concept of white supremacy. Yes. In your in your article, how Islamic is critical race theory, you, you said that it is good at identifying problems and social inequities, but not so good at reconstructing Right. Right. What What is this? What do critical readers see as the solution if they're saying that, you know, if there if there is this burden on white people, you know, the, because they apparently hold all the power?
No one apart from white people can really be racist, if, you know, it kind of other rises white people to that extent.
What What do they see as the reconstruction?
Right, yeah, well, yeah, exactly. That's a good question. I mean, and so the reconstruction entails what often is called radical equality or equity. And fundamentally, it means a redistribution of economic resources, political resources, and social currency. Right. Whereas white people are expected to step down or step aside, create space
for the minorities, which, of course, on one level is not a, an unreasonable demand to an extent, but, but the idea is that, since you see, for instance, the wealth distribution between say, whites and blacks is so significant, right, you know, the blacks they own so much less than the whites do collectively, then that in itself looks at looks as a sign of an equality. Right? Yeah. So and then is when you look at it, you know, but the causes of that those those things are not really discussed in a robust and objective way. Right? Yeah. As always, the assumption always has to be that white people got all this wealth wealth, because because of thievery, or because of some type of
exploitation or domination and because of oppression of blacks. And the same thing comes up in feminism, you know, when we're talking about the gender pay pay gap, you know, which really, there's no basis for the claim that you know, that the gender gender, that women are paid less than men for doing the same exact job. Right. But that is the call design, guys. That is the
the orthodoxy of political orthodoxy at the time of like, currently, where there's an assumption that this is true, because when you put it on paper, you throw it in front of people say, Okay, well, men collectively get paid this much, and women collectively get paid that much. So it has to be because of patriarchy, and men, holding women down, and men deciding that women should get paid only half the amount that men get paid due to when they do the same exact job. Right, you know, and so, so, so, so fundamentally, we look at this, and people say, Oh, yeah, yeah, that's, that's pretty, yeah, it's pretty obvious that there's a difference in terms of their wealth distribution
between these two groups, you know, and it has to be because of racism has because of oppression, right? And so we have to fix that. Right. So so white people have to give up their wealth, right? And, and give some of that to to blacks. And we make sure that, you know, that the amount of wealth that blacks own, is commensurate with the percentage of their population, right, you know, and the amount of wealth that whites own is commensurate with the population, their population, right, you know, so which itself is a as a, as a call for disaster, it is a, a, again, a, it's going to lead to great disaster, because there's no society in history that's ever been a gala. terian right. Or,
or those of us who have attempted to be egalitarian and have, you know, have failed, you know, miserably. And it's led to great suffering, as we know, has repeated itself over and over and over. So um, yeah. What do you mean by egalitarian? Because people might think, well, would you speak Are you saying people shouldn't shouldn't have, you know, do you mean like the ratio of all differences, is that what you mean? Yeah, is that the ratio of all differences that should be no difference between anyone in any particular fashion and you see it happening in multiple levels, right, because
what people will Muslims have to understand is that
critical race theory along with
queer theory along with feminism, that they are parts of a same family, right. And it's a NEO Marxist family, which is attempting to create, you know, accords, the so called egalitarian type of distance or equal distance to the ratio of difference between everyone, right? So the ratio of the family the ratio of even gender and sex distinctions, right, right, they want to get rid of that as well. And we all and they also want to get rid of any economic disparities between people that everyone is very good, everyone should be getting paid the same thing everyone should,
should own the same amount of wealth. Right. Right. So it's,
it's radical equality, right. You know, and then a focus on outcomes rather than equal opportunity. Yeah. So so we have been in favor, of course, our religion promotes the importance of equal opportunity, you know, but it doesn't, you know, it doesn't favor equal outcomes, where everyone has to be 100%, the same in every single way. Right. So that's where we have to basically where we have to force the outcome to be a certain way. Right? Exactly. Right. Well, that's interesting, because there's, there's two things I wanted to share with you like that have kind of troubled me in
some of the influences that I've seen of these ideologies in the Muslim community. Just two examples that I've seen recently. One is a sister that I know who's a, she's a lecturer, professor at a university in UK. She's from an indo Pak background.
She was the judge, she observes the hijab. So in a way, she's like a, she's quite a iconic person in the sense that, you know, she's made it she's, she's hijabi, professor at University, right? So you would think she's somebody, you should be celebrated, right by the left and by critical race theorists.
But she recently she was trying to launch a journal, and Muslim journal. And she put the call out for, you know, she was trying to find a great,
diverse editorial board. And loads of people are gonna apply it, etc. And then, you know, they went through the whole process, and she advertised the people who had been chosen, right? She put images of them like photos of them on
Twitter or somewhere.
It just so happened that there were no black people amongst the editorial board, okay.
Though Arabs there were, you know, Asians, they were I don't like people. I didn't I couldn't even tell To be honest, what backgrounds they were.
But within minutes of her, tweeting the photos of the board,
her Twitter account was absolutely bombarded with messages from people saying why aren't there any black people on this sport? Couldn't you find any black black Muslims?
And accusing her of all sorts of things? You know?
When I know, personally from her that she, the nobody had applied? Right. Okay. Who had been from a black background? Right. And she just happened to choose the right, you know, like people who had the who had the qualifications and
who actually who actually applied. And she was being accused of not having done the due diligence to reach out to black people. Okay.
So, so there was almost like, there was nothing she could do right? To say, I, oh, you know, I didn't do this on purpose. Like, I just went through a process that was very clearly advertised it. And in the end, she did what so many people do, she apologized, she somehow found found somebody like to be on the board, you know, I mean, I just found it ridiculous. I mean, I was thinking to myself, if I was that black person who was then chosen After all that, right, I wouldn't feel I wouldn't feel empowered. I would feel like I was there as a token, you know, right. Exactly. Right. And but the thing is interesting about this is a lot of the black people who actually would accept
that particular role. They don't realize that they are being tokenized. They don't they don't they don't realize that they actually believe that they're being chosen because of their marriage. Right, you know, rather than Okay, we're trying to this is a political statement that's being made here. And, and so yeah, this is a big problem. You've seen it for a number of years now where these demands are
Make sure that you don't have all male panels. You know, there should be sort of equal distribution between men and women and all of these situations and management and the programs that they come up. And, you know, it's, you know, I think, of course, in certain situations, there may be
some intentional efforts by certain people to ensure that certain types of people are not there. Yeah, sure. I mean, that does exist. Yeah. However, however, our our religion is, we would say, a largely a meritocracy. Yeah, this is about meritocracy and placing in the front and in positions of influence, those who are qualified to be there, this is what our religion emphasizes, I've been accused of the same thing with my own efforts, but a couple of times in the past where people say, okay, where are the woman where the sisters, you know, and, and then again, not realizing that, okay, well, we did reach out to sisters, you know, but we're not into tokenism reached out to
sisters, we believe we're qualified to actually play this role. And they couldn't they couldn't come. Right. They know, either children or they have some other function, or they may be sick, you know, or problems with travel. I mean, there are a lot of different possibilities, which are there, you know, why, why we don't see this, you know, and, and you can, I mean, you can also, you know, you can also say, Okay, well, why are there no Filipinos here? Why are those Sri Lankans there? Why are they tiny? Why are they No, you don't understand what I'm saying. You can just go on forever.
But the thing that really troubled me as well with this was a lot of the people calling this out were Muslims. And they were implying that because this sister was Indian, right, or Pakistani, that she she herself had a type of privilege, you know? Because basically, she wasn't at the bottom of the pile. Right. Right. And so, so there was nothing she could, she couldn't even sort of play the identity politics card and say, Well, look, I'm a minority too, you know, it didn't matter. It the divisiveness that has seeped even into the Muslim community because of this
amongst races, if you want to call them that within the Muslim community, right, that's really troubling. You know, that troubles me. But we've abandoned our Deen is we've raised this new ideology, not even fully understanding this history and his assumptions, his goals.
The founders themselves who were a godless people, right materialists, you know, who had a different idea in mind with regard to what can be done with these sorts of disorder ideas, and we hardly open up the Koran or read the Sunnah anymore if you ever have done so. And when you in it when you don't philosophize? Or no study philosophy, and somebody is going to philosophize for you, you know, she comes in one of his quotes, you know, if you don't philosophize, somebody's gonna philosophize for you. And fundamentally, this is I think it's what's happening is that Muslims don't understand the philosophical roots of the movements that they've embraced. They don't understand the motion don't
understand what the goals are.
What type of outcomes are we talking about? What type of even tactics and treatment of others are tolerated? Right yeah, these things wouldn't be tolerated by the process. I so love that you just simply assuming a prejudging someone. I mean, there's a famous story of Osama bin Salman, bin Zayed Raja Alabama,
where he was on the battlefield and he killed the man after he said, I have a lot and when it came to the prophet who had heard about this, the prophet so he said, you know, did you say, Did you kill him after you say, I have a lot and then
he would just try and just save his own life. And then the Prophet said to him again, did you kill him after? You know, he said, Allah, did you open up his heart? Right? Yeah. So I'm gonna say that, you know, I wish I was born on that day after that, that occurrence, you know, so so but this is fundamentally what Muslims are doing when we just simply all the sister a had to be because she hates black people has been because you know that again, she looks down on black who and that's why she didn't do that. So well. No explanation she can give and the last thing you need to do is apologize. That is a big mistake. I know. And,
unfortunately,
unfortunately, the pressure is so immense that people fear losing their job and they fear
Yeah, totally. Another incident.
Another incident i don't i don't think i want to name names. But you know, just something that was out there in the public sphere. And by the way,
I'm not saying that there aren't things that you know, are wrong, and there aren't people who do, you know, speak out of turn or act out of turn. And I do think that definitely because of the like,
the the history and the landscape, there is a level of sensitivity that's needed. Right? Right. However, when this incident happened when one of the American white American scholar he was, he made some comments, or he was, from what I could see is advising people, right, you know, he's advising the black community. And there was a big kind of fuss made about it and accusations of white supremacy. And
now, maybe there's some aspect of you that I'm not aware of, I don't know. But from from where I was looking at the whole thing,
I found it quite embarrassing that.
And it made me actually asked like, how would people react if the prophets Allah Salam?
You know, because at the end of the day, the scholars are the Waterford, Columbia, right? They're the, the the heirs of the prophets are there.
In the place of the prophet SAW Selim, in his absence, right there, they're our advisors.
And they're our kind of, they're there to point out things that they see that we could change or work on. So what troubles me was similar to how when feminists say, you know, well, men can't say anything about women, you know, men can't. Male scholars, they can't advise women, right? What would they say if the prophet SAW someone was advising them? You know, you're a man, you're a man, you can't vote Oh, you're, you're you're not black? Or you're not Asian, or you're not whatever. Right. And so you can't say anything? Do you think I've analyzed this a bit simplistically, or? No, I don't think you have it all. I mean, you analyze it in the proper way. Because the goal, every interaction
should be the pursuit of truth. Right? And
objective, no matter who says it, right, no matter who says it, right, the truth is truth. Right, the truth is the truth. And I said, I wanted to state whether famous statements attributed
nobody thought it, Camilla Whishaw. Yeah, let's talk a little bit
out of Allah, you know, that, you know, don't know the truth by men rather know the truth, you know, those who have it. So, it's, and that's, again, our Deen and that's, you know, that's, I mean, you know, the most advanced civilizations, you know, they they make the claim that we're, we're pursuit, we were pursuing truth. Right, you know, so if the pursuit is truth, then it really shouldn't matter. Who says it, you're the gender, the sex of the person. It shouldn't matter the color or race of the person. And, you know, because everyone can have the truth and the messenger, it is so, so, so obvious. We know, you know, he's a specialist, he would teach the woman right, yeah, he would
teach the sisters and the message, you know, he would constantly advise Muslim woman. And if you claim that you hate men, then you know, I guess you hate your father, and then you have to hate the profits. I mean, how can you possibly, you know, be believed that that's reconcilable with Islam, that you can reconcile that Islam this idea that you hate men, or you hate the member of a particular race, or like you hate Arabs, for instance, how can you hate Arabs and but not hate the Prophet? sly Silva, you know, you can't, you shouldn't even be saying such things, right? You know, because even even if not even if not hate, if you if you're saying that men are necessarily
oppressive of women, right? If you're saying white people unnecessarily, even if they're Muslim, even if they're, you know, like, have any background, and, you know, they are necessarily racist, or they have some element of white privilege or white supremacy in them.
Then, you know, even if you don't hate them, just that accusation itself means that you're saying that it's impossible for white person to ever advise, you know, a non white person, or for a man to advise a woman. Yeah, right. Right, again, is once again is biological determinism, right? So it's, sometimes it's on the level of race, sometimes it's on level gender, right. So, this idea that certain, you know, flexes they, again, they can help it that this is the way that they are, you know, certain races they can help with this is just the way they are. And if we again, coming back to the CRT, which claims that you should not centralize anybody mean that you should treat every
individually you shouldn't assume that every individual member of a group is the same, right? But this is the default. This is what happens. We do it with white people, but then we'd sometimes we do it with men, then let's do it with
Then the cooker race theory is with white people. Right? And, and perhaps and I really can't say too much about the transgender community, but I would assume that something similar is there with regard to so called cisgender people this idea, some ideas that they entertain about, you know, what they call cisgender or heterosexual people. Right. You know, also, of course, the gays and others, right. So, so fundamentally, it is a problem, and it's unscientific. This isn't a very unscientific, unscientific
sort of way of dealing with suicides, I would even say this pseudoscience, and, and it just really has no basis in reality. Right. So, Dr. Abdullah, like, could it be argued, though, like, that,
you know, certain races or certain people have certain backgrounds, even myself as an Indian person, person from an Indian, of Indian heritage, we do have blind spots regarding other communities, right. Like, obviously, that's kind of, and same with white people, you know, they could have certain blind spots with other communities, and you know, they've had a different maybe experience of, also it depends on like, which kind of social status they have as well, right. Like, I mean, there's so many factors. So human beings. Yeah, and the same thing for minority super black people and others. Everybody has bias. Right. blind spots about the other. Right. Exactly. Right. Yeah. So
we all prejudge, we have been wired. This is why Allah created us. I mean, there's certain things we call the biological factory, you know, and, and we can't help but to judge that we do. Judge we prejudge, but we resist the assumptions. Right, you know, or
making those judgments or assumptions to influence the way that we treat somebody? Right, you know, we might be right about our judgment. Right. You know, but we won't, we won't, we don't want to make the error, right, in discovering that we were wrong. Right. You know, so we treat people a certain way until our pre judgment proves to be correct. Right. You know, and because if is, is incorrect, and this really can be really disastrous. So
that's our, that's our dean. And I think there's also just common, or what used to be sort of common sense or common
ethics, you know, that human beings shared across civilizations. So, but today, we see something else developing.
That totally said in your article beyond racism, that
I think it was another article day, so um, has a transformative and conciliatory spirit. And, but you did also highlight, you know, like, although the Quran and Sunnah unequivocal about, you know, racism,
obviously, throughout Muslim history, you know, there have been situations times like, for example, you highlighted
during a mayor times
higher taxes on the Persians, for example, who were not black, but you know, there were different, different ethnic background to Arabs, and then Abbas at times, certain policies, racist policies against black people, I believe in Iraq.
And you highlighted that some scholars even wrote books like the 13th century scholar, even a Josie humbly scholar, that
kind of talking about the virtue of black and Ethiopian peoples
basically, seemingly trying to counter
an anti black trend had developed is that rather we think it was, yeah, yeah, I think I mean, a couple of things. I think about this. First of all, the transformative nature of Islam and its conciliatory nature, is that this is something which has been well acknowledged throughout Islamic history, even by non Muslims, you know, so for instance, and I like to often mention, this is like Gandhi, you know, had some very positive things to say about Islam, you know, and if you praise Islam over his own religion, Hinduism, and talked about the contribution of Islam to India, right being among among the things being this brother, right, your sense of brotherhood or true
Brotherhood in Islam that you don't find among amongst functional Hindu Hinduism, and then you towhead he mentioned, you know, our unconfident compromising
belief and, and true monotheism. Right. And he talks about case Hindus a, they they claim the same thing you know, but their, their monotheism is a bit more polluted, right? So there's Gandhi. You
Speaking about Islam, and as a matter of fact, there's a black American scholar from the civil rights era called by the name of Dr. Howard Thurman. He has multiple books and treatises he's written and he, in one of his books, he talks about he visited India to meet Gandhi.
Gandhi actually was surprised that he was not Muslim. He was like, Well, how are you Krishna?
Is Oh, is that what he said? Well, well, no, I'm not. I'm not Muslim. I'm a Christian. And so what was what was his name? Sorry, the person who? Dr. Howard Thurman.
Yeah, Dr. Howard Thurman. And
I think isn't his one book a luminous darkness? I think it's a luminous luminous darkness in his book. He mentioned this in one of his chapters, you know, he visits Gandhi, and Gandhi tells him, you know, well, it seems to make more make more sense to you to be Muslim because the religion of Muhammad is the only one that teaches that teaches race race egalitarianism, right, you know, actually true. And so, and then Howard Thurman goes on to say after this, you know, what, Gandhi did have a point, right? He did have a point when he said this, you know, historians like honor Toynbee, Thomas Carlyle very praiseworthy, like words about Islam, and how Islam, especially in the area of
race, you know, is the is actually the only the only religion that actually can can solve the race problem, right, you know, no one's praise any other religion in this particular regard, you know, but all of a sudden Muslims, you know, I have abandoned that for something different, you know, we've chosen something other than what I've lost, it kind of has given us, you know, but
the can't remember was the other part of your question. I'm sorry. Sorry, I saw that. So I think you've made it really clear that obviously Islam doesn't promote racism, in fact, it does the opposite. But are you highlighted that obviously Muslims being fallible, and you know, even throughout in the history, have had some?
Right, right, yeah. So yes, this is important, this is an important discussion to have about, like, course, the difference between the ideal and the reality, right. And human beings always want to be
imperfect, naturally, you know, and this is why I've been when I mean, that's islamize, transformative, you know, transform to mean that you're coming from something to something new. Right, you know, that you have issues. And so after becoming a Muslim and submitting yourself to Allah, you know, do you work through those that baggage, you sort of you drop the baggage as you become more committed to Islam, you know, that doesn't So, so I'm in the process of that people are still carrying their baggage. So naturally, you will see this historically, you know, but still Islam has the proper way to treat these issues. And I think what needs to be understood is that
while race as we know it today,
or we think about it today, was different.
Back then, right, understood it that that anti black antipathy is transhistorical right? In other words, what it means is that even what I mean by Black is this I don't mean black
as understood in America, right? Or but perhaps that is understood in Britain, right? Where you have, you know, someone whose looks very fairly light skin, you know, some people are tan, some people are like brown, some people are dark brown men and black women black, right. So like when in our sources, Hades and any other source of Islam, when they say black, what they're talking about are Sub Saharan Africans, they're talking about people actually have black skin, you know, so they're not talking about people, all shades. Right. Right. You know, first and foremost, you know, that doesn't justify so the antipathy Yeah, and maltreatment, but I'm just making the point that we
haven't very clear then we read the works of different scholars in the called lunar maturity, that they're not talking about blackness as we understand it today, right? First of all, but the idea that that anti blackness or anti darker skin is a kind of trans historical fact. You know, I do think that that is that there's enough evidence to embrace this idea because for instance, you can go back to ancient China of like, you know, it's still the case today, you know, 3500 years ago in China, you have you know, the northern Chinese discriminated against the southern Chinese who are darker, right, you know, on the basis of their skin. You know, what happened in India, you know,
the, the J the Brahmins against dravidian Sandra videos are darker
Right, you know, so they were mistreated on the basis of their skin, right skin color, right? So you come to the East African or the sub Saharan African.
These African, of course, the Arabians have more dealing with the East African, you know, but they were still SubSaharan that when you find it mentioned in a Hadees, or mentioned in many of the ancient books of Islamic law, theology, black, they're talking about SubSaharan people. They're not talking about individuals who are a tan or brown because the Arabs themselves were largely brown people, right.
So they're not talking about, you know, blackness, as we understand it in the American context, where we have the one drop rule, you know, and we discovered that you have any amount of African blood, even if you look almost white, quote, unquote, that you're still black. Right? So they're not talking about that.
So that's the first thing outside of that, you know, we can call this as you say colorism, right, yeah, you know, and what colorism again, was not universal. It's still people in the past, and especially there for most of Islamic history. And for most of history, they didn't they didn't define themselves on the basis of their color. But they I mean, collectively, they didn't define themselves on the basis of comedy defined themselves on the basis of cultural, cultural, shared cultural artifacts, you know, shared history, shared practices, shared religious beliefs, you know, this is how they're identified. Right. And so, so And for that reason, like the Arabs themselves,
the people they considered to be white. Right, were the Persians, the Syrians and the Europeans, right? Those are
great. And actually didn't call them white, they call them red.
They didn't call them white, because in the language of the arrows when you call someone why it meant you have what is called bit ally ago, right, which is a discoloration of pigmentation in the skin. Right? So all the loss of melanin, right, which lets you know, like you'd lost your color, right? That was also again reinforces the fact that most of the Arabs were people who melanated people, right, you know, so so they consider it to be a pejorative, like you can't call I'm not why would you mean, I'm way, right, you know, I'm not white. So, but I didn't say that they weren't Africans, either. They were not the Europeans nor Africans, right. And they didn't self identify as
white. Right? So so so this is often missed by people, right. And so so as you're reading books, or certain people read in books of Islamic, like, you can find this more easily in Maliki law books, for instance. And they speak about some of the Maliki theologians as well, you know, to your find your mention of black people, right, and someone who made disparagement of black skin, right, that again, once again, they're not talking about American black, you know, you know, with all of the different kaleidoscope of different tones and things like they're talking about African right sub Saharan Africa, this is really what they're talking about. And again, that doesn't justify it. But
this is really they have a specific type of person or look in mind when they're making certain derogatory statements or speaking of black woman, you know, as ignoble, you know, a part of it and ignoble class, you know, and this is not all Maliki's, as well as the other thing, this is a mistake that certain people are making today. I've seen some of this play out recently, where even in particularly some people from the UK, you know, I see them in interviews, and you're talking about, okay, what's happening
in the classroom or is happening. And, and Maliki works a certain Muslim books, you know, and they speak about the Maliki works, that they make this mistake to think that the people are listening think, okay, where, oh, black people, if I consider myself to be black, then this book or this author is talking about me too, right, you know, and so but there's always a, there's a way to actually understand what's happening here. And most people just are not sophisticated enough to really get the why the scholars would say those things. Or, or even Of course, some of the time, some of the statements are inexcusable, you know, but other statements are somewhat understandable
from a cultural standpoint, which really, we don't have enough time to really go into during this during this interview. But But we all will have our family we all have our feelings, right you know, but the same same xenophobia that is expressed against blacks by this this cast scholar from the certain parts of the world, the blacks also entertain, same type of xenophobia tourism, right. So there's a lot to talk about is a two way street, you know, cuz this is just that pre modern world. Right? You know, and Africa has never been in a monolithic culture or civilization, you know, Africans always see themselves as distinct from other Africans, you know, so, you know, so the claim
or the assumption that they
Have itself is is anachronistic right now. transistor is actually historical. So So wait, where do you think that colorism comes from? That's a big question. I know, the ideology of it is debated. I mean, some I know like one scholar who says that maybe like, how the Nike ship will teach you that university, Temple University and Philadelphia in conversation I've had with him before. And then some of the things he's written to me like email he, like, you know, he's talking about how, I don't know, maybe it comes from the fear of, you know, things go on thumping tonight in the dark, you know, because people are scared of the dark and, and maybe this is something that was sort of
inculcated within the human human being in light of that, you know, because fear of the dark or, or the fear of that came with the sounds that are out in the, in the nighttime. And just, you know, and maybe that's what sort of started there. So over time, people associated evil things with with the night because you can't see, and then often people get hurt during the nighttime, you know, so and maybe that would just projected onto the human being as well. We saw these people are dark, like the night, therefore, they're, they're there. They're evil. Right. And but you find the this is before evolution, right. Like before the whole kind of?
Yeah, I guess. It's also it's also before colonialism when obviously, yeah, during this time. Yeah. What a proper hierarchy put in place in terms of color. Right. But you're saying even before that in societies? Yeah. I think that yeah, that definitely was a type of hierarchy. Yeah, of color of colorism, you know, but
I don't think there's enough evidence to say that, that most places on the earth that they discriminated, or they denied certain rights to people simply on the basis of them being darker, right, you know, except for in this, you know, certain cases, I mentioned, the ancient China, and also India as well, you know, so, so yeah, you do have these examples. But for the most part, I don't think there's enough evidence to conclude that in most places that people were mistreated or denied
freedom or denied the, the opportunity to ascend to other offices simply because they were dark people, you know, was having an Islamic tradition. You know, we know that, you know, being black didn't mean that you were a slave, right, you know, that's not something, you know, wasn't synonymous at all, as a slave and many former slaves in Islamic history became great people, you know, get great scholars, and they would, you know, have great many students. Some of them became governors of, of countries, like the mem Luke's for instance, you know, these Turk Turks, you know, Turkish slaves, former Turkish slaves who ruled Egypt and the exedy. dynasty, they were the the
Africans, you know, the SubSaharan peoples who had enrolled as well. You know, so, in Islamic context, they weren't for most of our history, we're not denied a type of we call the postmodern is called agency, right, you know, this, which is the opportunity to, to ascend to great things. So I think you called it upward upward mobility, right? Yes. upward mobility. Right. Exactly. Yeah. So, whereas in the European context, that was different, it was different, you know, so, especially after they decided that only blacks can be slaves. So,
so there was really no upward mobility in we even see it after.
After Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War, American Civil War, that many of the gains of blacks were just simply rolled back by them in the races, right, or racist whites, you know, for much of the 20th century until the late 60s, right, when a lot of these things started to improve, right. So. So there definitely has been, there have been many failings, right? You know, in multiple civilizations, Muslim civilization had failures, you know, but, you know, compared to European civilizational failures with regard to race and racism, I think there's no comparison between the two, you know, of course, if we're allowed to make those types of comparisons, but get people will
fail, right, you know, people are imperfect, right, you know, so, Islam is what makes us more perfect. And we have to remember that that everybody's redeemable So, and I do think that
when we've been talking about like white, black, etc, that, you know, that fundamentally what we are doing to an extent is reinforcing
What, you know what we call white supremacy, right? And I'm not gonna say you don't utilize these terms for convenience. Right? Yeah, what we need to understand is that race, the word race itself is not a scientific term. But scientists don't consider race to be a scientific term. You know, it's a social scientific term. You know, it was really, it's not like hard science or like biological science, you know, but it's a convenient term that convenient terms utilize to describe people. And during the Enlightenment period, starting with
scholars like sweetest scholar by the name of well known as Carl Linnaeus, like he was the first one to classify human beings on the on the basis of color. Right. And so, so what his vocation was, was radical, not because simply, he placed people in different colors, he said, there was human race there for races, you know, you have the white race, the black race, the red race and the yellow race, you know, so so that itself was unproblematic. But what he did when further to do was that he associated with each color, certain motivations and certain behaviors, right.
And that was fundamental problem, right. And this is around the same time that for instance, America is forming.
And, you know, the, the Declaration of Independence, and then eventually the first national Naturalization Act
under George Washington, where they stipulated that if you wanted to be an American, that one of the important factors that you had to be a white person, right, you know, and then this time, that didn't include the Italians and the Irish and the Jews and many other compete Europeans, right. Largely, we're talking about the Anglo Saxon, right, which we're which, which is men. Now, some people will say, Okay, well, this is this is what proves that America was founded upon racism.
And to an extent, there's truth today, you know, but what else what they have founded upon when we consider the fact that the American revolutionaries, they would tried to create a new type of society, which, which was not connected with the monarchy in England. And what they saw was tyranny, you know, and so, and they had distantly could what went through more than 100 years
of war of civil war between the the Protestant and Catholic churches were bloodshed, great bloodshed between them, right? They said, Well, no, we can't create a country and say that citizenship is based upon religion.
So they just chose Okay, well, we'll choose whiteness, right? And so, you know, what else would they have chosen? Right? Yeah, to an extent, and you kind of have to get over that. And to an extent is that, especially when you consider that there's evolution that happened in American history, and then perhaps even the UK, or England.
So the so it's, it's, it's over simplistic explanations that are really harming us, you know, that there's no nuance involved, right, with a lot of these ideas that we are promoting, and then utilizing to further divide the human species, right. So
we don't we don't realize we don't realize this and i and i think that is, it's really bad, especially being that Muslims are supposed to be witnesses over humanity that you know, because it could not come home with the muscle family told me to call Shahada as a nurse. You cannot also daddy come shahida you know that we're supposed to be the best
hydrometer created leanness. Right, and the most beneficial, you know, hydro nazjatar unless leanness. Right. So the most the best people are those who are most beneficial and useful to other people. Right? So we have to be beneficial, right? We can't be
I guess you say
people who are oracles of doom, right? It just watch that and see we're doing when we embrace critical theory and praise in the world culture overall, you know, LGBTQ advocacy. And then, of course, many of the more toxic aspects of feminism, right. So I think that we're just really, following we're falling as a prophet talked about it, the day would come that we would follow those who came before us into the visitors hole. And this is exactly what we're doing. We're following
Subhanallah Yeah, I mean, so So, what's the way forward? I mean, like, I'm just thinking fast forward to today.
The Muslim community America in Britain, you know, people of all sorts of backgrounds.
Recently, somebody I know, they organized a black Muslim festival, right? online. And, and, you know, when I had a conversation about it, I could see where that person was coming from. Okay. And the argument was, Well, look, the majority of Muslims in the UK are India, indo Pakistani, right. And therefore, when you have events when you have even like media, Islam channel or whatever, you know, whatever media and whatever events and platforms that you have
the default ends up being Indian Pakistani people, right. Mainly because they're the majority, I guess, you know.
And so we need a space where we can,
I don't know, create a platform for,
for black people. I think the argument was something like that.
Although the organizer was quite surprised, because
the, the speakers didn't really want to talk about anything to do with being black. And they were all from very different backgrounds. We didn't even like, you know, somebody from Africa is not the same as somebody brought up in Britain, somebody like from a Jamaican background or from an afro American background. I don't even think people call themselves Afro Americans anymore, do they? I think it's right. No, no, I don't Muslim. So we applied and
probably more like Americans, right. So. So I think they realized that actually, there was little reason to kind of,
you know, create that platform that there was no real. There was nothing really, apart from being black or, you know, having a certain skin tone.
There was nothing really unifying the various peoples. But I want to know what you think about that? I mean, is there a place for things like that? Maybe, maybe there is, yeah, I actually have organized three conferences we call the black American Muslim conference. And the last,
the last one we have was online. During 2020, it was the first one we had online, the other two were actually physical location. And originally, the thinking was that
we need to bring together the voices of the the black leaders, national leaders, or the influencers in American society. Because we weren't pleased with the direction we felt that the quote unquote immigrant community or organizations were taking us islamically in the country. And we wanted to preserve that original authentic black American voice and courage, you know, which is connected with our civil rights leaders and legacy. Right? Yeah. So that, you know, Islam wouldn't just simply become a culture, which it seemed that we call the immigrant organizations seem to be taking Islam to becoming. And so so the idea was that, okay, we want to come together, bring these people
together, put them on stage, have multiple panel discussions about multiple topics, to one to reveal the diversity of thought and ideology in the black community. That's for the very first thing, because remember, with race, critical race theory, their claim is that, you know, they're anti incent essentialist. And no one should assume that the members of any group are all the same. Right. So, so I want we wanted to reveal that okay. Well, there's, there's there's diversity of ideology in our community, you know, I mean, among the Muslims themselves, and in Islam in I'm sorry, American history, after the Civil the Civil War, and during Reconstruction, that there were two basic
paradigms that developed, you know, and actually pivotal prior to the Civil War among free blacks. And one particular paradigm was the integrationist paradigm. Like Frederick Douglass, he represented this and he was like, Listen, this is our home. We're gonna stay here, we're gonna try to make it work. And then you had his colleague, Martin Delaney, who was actually the first he was a military doctor who was commissioned by Lincoln and to field filled
command. And in Richard Delaney. His position was different. Martin Delaney was different in that. He said, Okay, listen, these people, they don't want us here. We need to go back to Africa. Right. So so you have to sort of back to Africa, or, and then there's sort of sub paradigms from that with the separatists.
In which you have people like Booker T. Washington who were like, Okay, well, we live here and but we're not trying to integrate with white people or and he actually explicitly flatly said that the white people's lives, we're not trying to integrate with you, we're trying to clean ourselves up and build ourselves up, and we just need your support, you know, and actually donate it to his effort right to white people donate to his effort to to improve that and so, so so the Nation of Islam, for instance, especially during the Elijah Muhammad days, represented that separatists nationalist paradigm, right. And in many ways, the Nation of Islam was the most successful black American
movement, right and in American history, right, with regard to unification actually, and helping people to feel, you know, that they were confident and, and have good self esteem, and that they can do pretty much anything. On the other hand, the integration of paradigm was represented late later represented by a chorus, Dr. Martin Luther King, and, and so the NAACP as well. And people like wb Dubois. And so they focus on civil rights issues about trying to gain equality with with with white people, right, and so on. Anyway, the whole point, I went back to the black American Muslim conferences that we have, I tried to invite people who represented both paradigms as well, right,
you know, what, what happened, the Muslims, you know, we tried to bring together we can sit on stage and have the conversations, we can have debates even, right. But we can show the audience, you know, how you can actually have a mature debate between, you know, of course, intelligent people, and, and hopefully, that'll teach, you know, the general attendees on how to have like, you know, mature conversations. So, that was one of the goals is to do that. And, and, but what happened is that
is that some of the people who represented different paradigms, that, in particular, there's some people from our community who are pro L, critical, critical race theory, they're very comfortable with LGBTQ, etc, who didn't agree with me, Philip philosophically, like me, for instance, philosophically, and they turned down my invitation to attend.
And, and then against, and eventually what happened was that, you know, COVID happen, and then certain other more, more people started to sort of pull away from the program that we decided, you know, that's really, really pointless at this right now to actually continue these types of programs, because
because the, the goal is very difficult to be achieved now, with so many people embracing critical race theory, and, and the type of tolerance in this sort of intolerance that doesn't allow for valid, you know, this disagreement or difference of opinion. Right. So, so so I think that mean, because do you mean, because you're seen as like, conservative, is that what, like, right, exactly, the more people saw his derivative, you know, the more they did not want to become involved. And I was like, Okay, well, don't come because of me.
Come because all the other people who are not conservative, right, you know, and come to engage with that, right. Don't just put it all on me. Yeah. So
yeah. So as I yeah, as people saw identify me more with being conservative. Yeah, that is if like black, a black man is not allowed to be conservative conservative, then it really, really is really, you know, and I actually wouldn't consider myself class myself as politically conservative people sort of mistake this mistake in my sharing of like fox news videos. And, you know, and expressing support for much of what Trump was has stood for that, that people interpret that as mean that I'm like, I'm a Republican, and I believe the Republican establishment. That's a no, I don't at all, you know, I believe, and shaking up the establishment, right. I supported Ron Paul and his run for
president president before, but he never made it to, of course, the the, what we call the finals, whatever you call it, you know, I can't remember the term we use for it and politics, you know, but he didn't make it that far. And I just didn't vote that particular year, you know, but I've only voted twice in my life. Right, you know, and I voted for obama once in your net first, his first term. And then the other time I voted for Trump. Yeah, I did. I voted for Trump the last time because I felt that his platform, he had proven himself to be better, right or more supportive of the interests that I felt that a committed Muslim, right. Yeah. Should should be should be
supportive of right, you know, and the left was was antithetical, right. You know, I felt that their their platform would undermine Islam undermine religion overall. Right. And and I couldn't, I couldn't support that, right. So if you're in politics, you have trade off.
All right. So in politics,
I believe someone said to me a long time ago that in politics, there are no permanent friends or enemies. There are only permanent interests. That's all you have in politics. Right? So you have trade offs, actually, you know, you know what I meant by conservative I meant, like a, I don't know, like a tuna would be probably classed as like a NEO traditionalist. Is
islamically relatively conservative, you know? Yeah, for me, it's like, Okay, well,
how can a, I think that any committed Muslim is conservative? Right. Yeah. So I mean,
conservative, right, you know, so.
And, but but I understand that a lot of those, you know, that course, Republicans made it in the conservative political conservatives made it difficult for a lot of Muslims embrace, embracing any rate, the whole point, coming back to the original question about those type of conferences, you know, the sort of black,
black oriented black focus comp conferences, I think that probably most of them are not useful, right, either for the blacks who attend, or for the Muslims overall. Unless, again, you actually articulate a clear program, which, like, we would say that listen, everybody's invited, you know, but this is not only for black people, we said, this is for everybody, you know, because we want you to understand our experience as well. Right? We want you to understand our experience and, and get our point of view as well. And maybe it'll help you to develop, you know, a better strategy for, you know, dealing with the National population as well. Right. So, so that's what, that's what we would
do, you know, we you know, and there was some people were resistant at first similar to yourself, you know, but there's one person that one brother I know, you know, he is member, he finally came, and then he really felt good about coming, he was really happy.
But at first he was upset he was he was afraid, because he felt that this is like just another form of identity, identity politics, and, you know, division, just that sense of division, you know, right. Right. So he said, reinforcing, reinforcing the,
the race stuff, you know, right, exactly. Right. Yeah. But I'm at this moment, like, we've this, we've discontinued the conference, for the time being, I personally, I don't, I don't, I don't have any plans to return to it, you know, because of the fact that, you know, it just seemed that most Muslims are critical race series, and they're embracing critical race theory. And that's, you know, not exactly what, you know, I want to become the norm, you know, personally, you know, and just, and I'm not sure if anybody even come now, many of those people who, you know, who, who are invited in the past,
because, again, they don't
forget, for some reason, they feel that I'm not allowed to, to be who I am. Right, you know,
I thought I thought it was about giving people agency. Right, right.
As long as you choose what we want you to choose, right? Right. So
that's an interesting point here, because this is what's at the root of us,
again, have a lot of what we call racism, today's, there's a tendency to think that only people in the writer races, and the people on the left there are friends, you know, but the people on the left, right, white and otherwise, my view of them, they are the races, they're the true races, because they're the ones who actually keep telling us that as a black person,
or as a minority person, that your, your, your story or you your experience is defined by your victimhood, right.
You can't do anything because of us, right. I mean, the white people left is the left this white leftist, like you can't do anything because of us. But we're going to help you as well. And we and we got to make sure that you get what you want. In other words, you begin by assuming that the other person's inferior, right, that I'm any more insecure than then than you are. I recently I was having a you know, conversation with
your brother, you know, friend of mines Afghan brother. And I remember he said to me, he says though, you know that, um, that black people are poor.
And I said, bro, that's not true. You know, they are is your present come around black genocide. Yeah.
I listened there and say, a large minority of black people between 20 and 25% who qualify as poor are in the United States
which means the 75 to 80%
blacks do not qualify as poor, which means that they are the middle class or their rich. Right? Right. But the message we keep get receiving is that black people are just a whole bunch of poor people who have been disenfranchised by the system. And they can't do anything for themselves, right? And everything, all their problems are a result of what white people did to them, right. And they'll say, white people will continue to,
to emphasize these things to them, they're the ones who keep saying that we're going to pull you up, we're going to make we're gonna make things make things better for you. Those are the writers saying, No, you can do whatever I can do. Right? They treated me as an equal, right? But you tell me that they mean racist, right? Because they say pull myself up by the bootstraps. And every time I ask someone, like a person, a black person who say that their systemic racism, institutional racism and structural racism that is keeping me down, it's keeping us keeping black people from doing better. I say to them, I just ask the question, Okay, tell me, what is it that you want to do that
you can't do because of white supremacy and structural racism? No one has has given me an answer to today, right, that there's something someone particularly they want to do, they can't do because of racism, you know, because it doesn't exist anymore. Right? Those of obstacles, those barriers don't exist anymore. We acknowledge that they didn't exist for much of American history, they didn't exist, right? Well, you know, and racism is real. Right? We acknowledge that as well. Right. And we also acknowledge that it is possible for institutions to have negative impacts on populations. And, you know, in particular, you know, certain racial populations more than other racial property
populations, we acknowledge that that can happen and does and has occurred in the past, right, you know,
but but but at the same time,
if you want to become a doctor, if you want to become a lawyer, engineer, you want to be you want to travel, you want to go into a move into an all white neighborhood, you know, nothing's keeping you from doing any of those things. You're going to university, and nothing keeping you from doing that. But he's starting the business, nothing keeping you from doing it other than yourself. Right. Yeah. And so so we can't automatically just use this sort of, we default to us racism. The reasons I can do this, or when a white officer police officer kills a black person, you know, the default is Oh, he only reason he did that was because he hates black people, and said, Well, how do you know that?
How do you know do you don't even know the circumstances leading up to the shooting? Right, you know, and people don't forget that most of the shootings that happens. Yeah, I mean, yeah, actually, cops, they take out, they take out the guns more often against white people, right, man, then it goes. It's blacks. Right? Yeah. So people don't know these things. Right. So is that true? Yes. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, you know, there's certain crimes that, like friends aggravated assaults in simple assault, that, that white people, they're more common among white people than black people. Right. But murder is more common among black men than among white men. Right. And most of
those people murdered, you know, by black men or other black men. And just as most of those that were murdered by by by white men or white people are by are the white people, or it just really it makes it makes sense that it works out that way. Now, but most of the murders that more than more murders committed by blacks than any other group of people in the United States. You know, and this is just simply a fact. You know, people think that's racism to mention that, but it's like, no, it just simply stayed in effect, right. You know, and it doesn't mean that black people overall, right, that that or that most black people are murderers, it doesn't mean that because that's usually what
people processes, unfortunately, that they hear it, they say, Oh, you basically said that black people are murderers, that most black people read that no, we're not saying that the criminal element among blacks is a minority of a minority. Right? Yeah. You know, and so so it's extremely small number but they wreak havoc, right? You know, so, but most black people are not criminals, right? Most black people are not murdering people. Most black people are not selling drugs. Most black people are not going to prison, you see. So that itself those ideas come
right from people's minds because those assumptions are what again, they're racist assumptions right? So again, with my my friend who says he says that to me, I'm just like, brother a brother, you don't know what you're talking about. That's not true, you know, and I can pull up the stats and show them to you right now. Right? That's actually not true. And that's propaganda that's been put out there. And unfortunately, enough of enough black so many blacks actually like to buy into the victim narrative this convenient for them, that it makes it easy for non black to say, Okay, well, yeah, black
People are oppressed, and they've been oppressed, and they're still oppressed. And they really can't do about
it when you said, when we when you're talking about,
you know, American police and their treatment of black people, especially like George Floyd, for example, right? Couldn't there be an argument for the fact that because because of the racism, you know, that does still exist in society.
Black people who are arrested like George Floyd, you know, there's a tendency to, to, because of the dehumanization,
there's a tendency to treat them worse. I'm just saying this, because like, you know, I'm probably in a position of ignorance here in Britain, you know, it was all over the news here as well, you know,
but like seeing the images, seeing, you know, what happened, and
then I have a gut feeling that,
you know, a white person would not be treated in such a inhumane way. You know, and there's a certain type of permission giving that
society gives to people to treat black people in that way. Do you think I'm wrong about that, or?
I think largely, you are wrong. I think that and those others who make this argument, I think, largely are wrong as well, because, again, we, we have a media that has decided that the new enemy is white people used to be Muslims used to be black seas to be Latino people. And the establishment has decided that now we're going to target in particular, certain types of white people that they're the new enemy. And for that reason, what they show us on TV, are only these cases where blacks are being killed by white cops, you know, you don't see the cases where you're saying selective, selective.
Yes, is very, very selective. And the other part of it is that we ignore how those situations begin. Right, you know, because, again, I'm not justifying, you know, what happened? Right, you know, but I think that, you know, there's still still debatable about what caused the death of joy Floyd, you know, but, you know, we know, the conviction has occurred, you know, currently, you know, but, you know, that potentially can be overturned, because of certain things that have come out. But, um, but George Floyd, he was he committed a crime, and there are others, similar to joy Floyd, who committed a crime prior to this, and this what, what brought the police into the situation? We don't look at
that, you know, and, and, you know, enjoy Floyd is a very extreme example, right? You know, it's a very difficult example to talk about, and to try to justify, because, again, you know, he's already gone unconscious, and the man he remained on him, you know, and he was already high, and he was complaining about so much and you can breathe in or whatever. But of course, an officer,
does it know, you know, if that those things are fake? Are they real? You know, so you do have to give some leeway to this, you know, because offices, most of who they deal with are criminals. That's what they do with on a regular basis. Right. And they're used to criminals lying to them. Right. So, and people miss that part as well. I used to work in prison. I'm familiar with some of law enforcement, you know, a lot of certain things that they do, and they're good tactics, and the attitude as well. Right. So I was gonna ask you do American police treat other people of different ethnicities in that same? Yes, with
the latest research, the latest research has proven that there's statistically no difference in the way that black black
suspects are treated compared to white suspect, you know, that's the latest research, even people on the left have had to have to admit to this. Right. You know, it's not the of course, the dominant narrative still, no, but the research is very clear that there's no indication that that blacks are treated worse than whites, white suspects. And then also, there's actually more intimate information proven that that police are much more hesitant to shoot black people than to shoot white, the whites. Whites are killed more every year than blacks are, you know, now, people often will say, well, disproportionately, you know, I mean, they of course, a more of them, because if there are
more white people in the country, I said, but that in itself is besides the fact which is that
that the that whites themselves when we look at them brought the wrong numbers. There. The numbers are double the amount of number of black people killed by cops every single year. And then the other part too, we have to consider the fact that that the bump to
40% of the murders are killed about a happen in the United States are committed by black people. So, and there's not that percentage of white people come in the amount of murders. So they're these these things that sort of know that make you sort of bounce back and forth on these type of issues. And so it's not as it's not what people claim it to be. And then the other part is that about 80%, or more of the people who are killed by police every single year, are people who are either they had some weapon or they're resisting arrest, or they are threatening the lives of the officer, he also the vast majority of people were killed by police every single year. And they're black, white,
Hispanic, and others, right, that those individuals who are willing some type of weapon, you know, so there's not a situation where the people just that the cops are just out there talking about they're hunting down black people, this is exaggeration, this hyperbole that people utilize, to sort of score points, you know, with certain black people who feel, again, the strong need to be loved, you know, and to be respected, you know, you know, that that itself is just untrue, is untrue. The numbers, the numbers say something different, they tell us a totally different story. And, and the media is very selective, they are very selective about what they show us. You know, there, you don't
see the many situations where cops sometimes black cops killing white people, right, it does happen. So but they're not gonna put that on television, because it doesn't fit the narrative, because again, they want to maintain that solid voter base, right, you know, the committed voter base, you know, that never leaves the Democrat Party, you know, and the establishment, they're pro democratic, right? They control most of the media,
about 90% or more of the media, and they control the Academy, the academic institutions as well. I was gonna ask you, like, isn't there such thing as,
you know, like, inherited trauma, in the sense that,
you know, if if a community was, you know, brutalized and was subject to racist policies for centuries, right.
Isn't there an argument for Well, look, you know, those policies, and then the Jim Crow laws, and then you know, all of that there is some, it's not to say that, you know, that people don't have the ability to rise above, you know, difficult circumstances, etc. But to say that, look, you can't completely ignore the historical legacy, you know,
of what happened to black people in America.
Isn't there an argument for that? Right? Yeah.
Yeah, that mean, there definitely is assessing is inherited trauma. But I do think we need to talk about the cause of that inherited trauma. Right, you know, of course, people will automatically say this is because of the
because of race, because of slavery, these are part of the legacy of slavery, you know, but there's less evidence for that than other things, you know, so for instance,
the media, Hollywood, right, they've reinforced these ideas for so long, they vision black people into believing or a lot of black people into into believing that the way things were still are today, right, they haven't changed. And then those who are who are actually in charge, the media and Hollywood,
that these again, the same left is the democrats in particular in our in our context, who actually are in charge of the inner city. Right. Yeah, that, you know, again, and again, this is not a pro conservative approach, Republican sort of type of argument I'm trying to make here, you know, and I don't know how to make this argument. But people have to, you have to come to terms that if there is institutional racism, it's not being perpetuated necessarily by liberal conservatives. It being perpetuated by the the the Democrats, those are the leftists themselves that they're the ones who procrastinating because they've been in charge of the inner cities, black and Latino inner cities
for decades now. And nothing has improved. They're in charge. They've been in charge the police, they had him in charge of all the schools and the systems, whatever, but and then we add on top of the media and Hollywood, the academy right as well, when you have instance, in the 1960s when critical race theory actually is born. Right? The that eventually this becomes the norm we see where it is right now that that that critical race theory is now being embraced by instinct to government institutions, right? This is how far it is because God you know that they have, you know, the US military, CIA, the federal government, right, that they're embracing critical race theory you see,
that that all these these ideas being reinforced
It keeps the trauma right, you know, sort of, you know, right in front of people's people's faces. Right. You know, but if you ask the average black person, right, you know, if White supremacy is so severe, it's so significant, you know, in your life.
What was the last time you ran into a skinhead? When's the last time that you had a run in with a kkk member? Right? You know, I'm gonna say, you know,
you know, having regular interaction with the so called overt racist people, they're only being shown things on the television screen, right? That, and then they're given a narrative, a caption has been attached to it, then we get a narrative, here's a white cop kills a black person. And the only reason is because it hasn't because of racism, right, you know, and what the media has done also, is that they've stopped showing those negative films and reports about violence in the black neighborhood, which they were actually showing prior to Trump winning, winning winning office. Right? Yeah. Because prior to that, you know, get again, you know, movies, boys in the hood, and all
these other, you know, the crazy gang movies, right. And then hip hop itself is a very negative culture. And on top of that, you know, so you have some things about black culture, or what is considered to be mentioned black culture, but then you also have the left is institutions, reinforcing the narrative about black victimhood, right. And fundamentally, what that does is it guarantees a a solid and unshakable voter voter base, right? Because up to like, a black American vote Democrat, right, you know, because they understand that most black people, well, a lot of black people, I think, is most black people, most black people care very much about what people think
about them that we care, we have a very deep hunger to feel loved by other people, right? And so and so. And so these leftists they take advantage of this and say, Okay, well, so so is a race, they don't like black people, so you shouldn't vote for them. Right. But it's all gonna vote for them, you know, so, so say something races about, but they use the N word one time, right. So on, I'm not voting for that person, you know, and so this is just for, you know, our sort of dumbing down of the of the of the population overall, not just black people. But the, our educational system is falling apart, as well, you know, and it makes it easy, everyone easy prey to be manipulated in this
particular fashion. Right. So, again, the point I'm making is this is that, yes, there is intergenerational or so in traditional generations of trauma, right, you know, or put it like this, those blacks living today are more traumatizing the blacks from the generations before. Because, again, the blacks right after slavery, they didn't feel that they couldn't do something to make life better for themselves. They actually did, they worked hard to make life better for them. And the generation after that did the same thing is all is only now that you're all these blacks are like, Oh, hey, you know, pick up a lot of complaining about, again, to wealth disparities, but nobody ever
wants to talk about Okay, well, well, what type of what type of career did you choose for yourself? Right? What did you go to university for? Right, you know, what, what are you studying in university? You know, so you complain about, okay, the how much white white men are making white people are making, you know, but you know, you know, how are you going into engineering? Are you going into medicine? Are you striving, starting your own business? Right? Are you going to ethnic studies, are you going into humanities, you know, these things that you're holding on to philosophy, right? These are not high paying jobs? Right? What about that? Right? What about those averages? Why
is that not as many people going into engineering or going into it? Right? You know, so, so, so so those are, you know, those type of questions that you can't really ask, or people don't want to answer because fundamentally, he puts them in the hot seat, right? So but there are those important questions right? They have words we can't reduce every single factor of racism right? He has a thing called single factor ism, right yell causation single factor ism for causation, which is almost never like true, right? You know, that that something can be just reduced to a single factor, you know, you don't you're not going then you're not doing well because of what someone external to your
your environment did to you. Right. Yeah, you know, it does happen from time to time has happened historically. But again, when I ask someone, what is it that you want to do that you can't do because of racism? No one's ever give me an answer. No one's ever given the answer up to this day.
So you're not denying that racist people don't exist or racist cops don't exist. You're saying that the overarching narrative that basically you cannot matter your situation you you have no kind of agency to
To move upwards or move anywhere in society is the problem.
Yes, I've definitely said that there are there racist people there what I believe it was a white supremacy is real, it actually is a privilege is real. But I think the mistake that people make about white supremacy and white privilege is that they're focused on the wrong aspects of it. In other words, white domination is real and has been real right. And it goes way back to go center, you're indoctrinated into white superiority and excuse me in black inferiority for FY different debt 50 about three different decades. Right, you know, we've been indoctrinated into this stuff. And, and I would say that the mistake of the West is that in a particular America, is that after the
Civil War, America should have started a re education sort of program, right, you know, where, where the population get reprogrammed or deprogram from the ideas that were promoted. And centuries before that about, you know, again, blacks are naturally lazy, white people are, you know, industrious, and, you know, they sang green and black shirts, you know, or, you know,
or melancholy, is, you know, all these ideas that they're promoting, you know, and, you know, then Darwinian Darwinism came about and then cultural Darwinism, all these ideas influenced the way that we look at other people. And we have the eugenics movement, you know, there was never a real free education movement, right? You know, that that deprogrammed everybody and so we saw, and we saw what that resulted in, during the 20th century, most of the 20th century.
And then now today, Europe and America are undergoing a reckoning, right? a well deserved reckoning, because he didn't do that. Right. So so I was gonna get it right, white supremacy is it's real. Right? You know, it's in, you know, in our politics is in economics is in education, it's in media is in pretty much all of the major, you know, office or institutions of influence, right, it still remains there, right. But it also it also has to be found in these type of discussions about black lives matter about, about critical theory, right, who is leading the charge, and this thing's about cultural appropriation, who's leading the charge anything, these are white people, again, once
again, leading the charge here, you're telling everyone else, most black people that I know, can care less if you were an African shirt or something like that. This is why you didn't have I don't know if you remember seeing when Nancy Pelosi was the Speaker of the House and, and you have, there are others, these other democrats prior to the elections, that they appeared in this, they were
they did a a
when it called an A,
they appeared in a report where they were protesting George Floyd being killed, and they all sort of got down on their knees, and they had the Kente cloth around their necks and things like that. Nobody made it. What do I say that was cultural appropriation. But nobody said it at all, you know, but then again, here we go. White leadership, there's still white leadership here, right. And again, even still, when we can use terms white, black, brown, red, yellow, these were alternate created by white people. Right, the more we continue to white, black bodies, brown brown bodies, right? When we start using those terms, again, these are terms that read they were white men who created these,
these sort of stratification, this racial stratification, you know, that we still live according and even the understanding that the white men define who white men were, but it also defined who other people were as well. That's all part of white supremacy regular that we say, Okay, I'm black, according to the way that white people define me as black. Right. You know, so Obama was not allowed to say he was white. Why? Because white people define blackness and everything, you know, didn't allow him to do that, you know, his mother was white. He couldn't Why can you say why can't move I'm gonna be white. Right.
The vice president Kamala Harris, right. You know, she's have Jamaican have Indian, you know, sometimes young she was running for Senate. She's, I'm the first the first Indian American now that she ran for Vice President, the first African American
woman right. To run for office. I so so it's, you know, we live with it's very complicated.
You know, you know, list of, of concepts and, and ideas and assumptions, right, that actually make a robust conversation about these things very difficult, right. But people are often looking at white supremacy in the
Wrong areas are white privilege, for instance.
white privilege is real, but we're talking about more of psychological and social privilege. We're not necessarily talking about
all white people have economic privilege or white, our me, even though the people use you use the term white privilege that they mean, everything in every way white people have privileged more than other people, if a white person would come to me and say that, you know, Hey, man, you're oppressed, and I'm not oppressed. You know, basically, he's a racist in my, in my view viewpoint, because he basically said that, listen, you know, that my reality is to find my victimhood, and I can't do anything, right, you know, that he can do. But, you know, so that's a racist person, he's looking down upon me, right? He's belittling my existence. So, but, but white privilege is what we give to
them. Right? If we have a problem with white privilege, then we just need to stop giving it to them. Right? Stop giving, why? Because we're the ones making making them privilege. You have to say, you know, and Muslims in this * all the time, you know, wait, where they used to, and and now things are changing. But why convert, you know, oh, we're gonna
pull them up as a prize. Right? So so it's real fun, right? I had experienced some years ago, where the message message, actually a couple messages I was, I've been given a hug by for multiple years. And, and the message would post videos of people specific people given a clip, but there's an individual white, white, white white brother, who was a student of mine, right, who moved to the area, and he started to go visit these places. And they started to post his videos. And I said, Man, you know, I've been giving supers there for the for years, and they never posted videos, you know, and then all of a sudden, this white, this white brother comes in anything and they're posting their
videos, right? Post his videos. That's it. Again, he's a student of mine here. Right. So. Okay, yeah. So yeah, so that doesn't mean these problems, right, that Muslims have to, they have to deal with, they have to deal with and, but but I do think that we focus on the wrong aspects of white supremacy, we have to in terms of white supremacy, obviously, like Dr. Jackson, often used to Dr. Sherman Jackson will often use it often, you know, highlight the, the, the psychological, spiritual, emotional effects of white supremacy, rather than the 50. The physical domination, for instance, we focus on a white cop, because,
you know, we're focusing so much on that that's bad, you know, if it's only because the person was black, and that's why he killed them. Right. Yeah, that's, you know, something to focus on. But what about how, you know, white supremacy affects the way that we see white people that we assume them to be superior, we assume their civilization disappear, we actually grant them credence before our own. Right and epistemological sort of, like, advantages that they have. Right, you know, it's not really to wipe as it right. You know, I mean, how does it affect
that, so so he is focused, Raj has been about that, rather than the type of things that we've been obsessing about, like right now, you know, I personally, I personally, myself,
I'm not really that much bothered by somebody calling me the N word. You know, and again, I don't want anybody call me any better than anybody. But I'm saying that, if I hear, for instance, that Muslims are utilizing, like, the N word, or whatever word that they utilize in their original language, which may be derogatory towards black people, I'm not going to go on a crusade to try to eradicate that, you know, I mean, somebody can do that, you know, but that's not me. That's not my focus. Right? You know, I think that too much energy can be expended in that right, and those other things, but realistically, what matters is treatment, right? People will always have negative, you
know, views of other people, right? Like a, a white man married to a black woman.
Again, that doesn't prove that the person is not racist. You know, the racism also may often come out once you have an argument and the thoughts that go through your head about like, you know, I wish I should have married someone for my own race, right? Or, or or any other race that it can happen with, you know, that you get me it doesn't make you all of a sudden now I'm not racist. Yeah, you know, it's convenient, it makes you have the claim, you can make the claim now, you know, but again, I'm not saying that to say that only white people are racist, but I'm just simply making the point. That
that fundamentally, to focus only on what people say, or perhaps even what people think, right?
Rather than the treatment, the way that they've been treated, or rather, they treat you i think is, is is wasted, energy is wasted, and we're not going to get rid of prejudice. Human beings are prejudiced by nature. We make choices. We choose some things we leave other things and we can only make
Is it better? That's all we can do. We can't eradicate racism, we can't eradicate prejudice, right? Yeah. So we can we can work to eradicate discrimination, right on the basis of race and on the basis of sex, right. But we can't, again, make people stop thinking in prejudicial terms.
So you're saying we need to trance we need something more transform transformational, rather than just tokenistic change? Right. Right. Exactly. Because you want to like fire people, because also, so caught me the N word, we need to fire that person. That doesn't make the person stop being racist. Right? It doesn't at all right. You know, they may it may just take an underground, right, you know, but how are you treating that person? How do you react to that person? Is there something you can do to
help that individual to grow? Right, yeah. So it's, yeah, it's, I just think that to expend so much energy on those types of things. It's really, you know, really a week. I mean, I am glad that, to some extent, took it to a great extent that overtly racist language and, you know, expressions are now not okay, you know, in society. I mean, that's definitely a good thing, right? Like, the old kids don't have to grow up with the same kind of well, being is a good thing, if the people are not doing it because of their own. People are no longer utilizing those type of words, because they believe these can be bad.
You know, bad social. Okay. You know, I guess you would say, bad, bad, bad for social interaction. Right. You know, and that there, I'm sure, yeah, no, but if people have been compelled against, you know, using those type of terms, I don't necessarily think that that bodes well, for society, you know, it just again, because people just go on the ground. They say they sending it home, but they're just not seeing it in public. Right.
Yeah, you know, you definitely don't want to say publicly and obviously, of course, we don't want people say it at home, either. But But I just think that when you have policies that punish
language, right, and offensive language, right, you know, unless you're talking about something that incites is very insightful. Yeah, I think that's fine to punish.
insightful
type of language, you know, which leads to chaos and things like that. But you know, if you're just talking about, okay, a person, you know, expressing their viewpoint about me or you, to me, I actually appreciate the fact that people are able to say those things, because then you know, who to keep your distance from?
You know, but when, when no one can say it, you don't know, who's actually the snake in the grass, who actually is going to be the one undermining you. And then and again, I would bring it up from the American democrats once again, is that while we're, there's a focus on, okay, what happened, and we had Jim Crow, we had the black codes, we had a lot of discrimination. You know, the, you know, I think with regard to voting, historically, people don't realize that these were the Democrats, these are the democrats who were doing these things, first and foremost. And then second of all, even if we say that the democrats are now you know, those democrats switch parties to the Republican Party,
which, again, is a myth that is promoted often today. But even if you say that, you know, that the more the most harmful policies that I mean, for for blacks in the inner city, have been the policies that have been championed largely by Democrats, you know, again, the sexual revolution, welfare, the breakup of the family, etc, etc, you know, and those same democrats are the ones who robbed the inner cities, you know, they talk too much and talk too much about how they're our friends, but they haven't done anything to improve the inner cities, you know, even though they're the ones who've been running them for the past few decades, you know, not the republicans problem champion run into
one of those, those those cities, right. So. So while you can, you can speak nicely to me, but it doesn't really mean you're my friend. I see like, somebody was much more abortion, and you know, and is willing to come out and be sincere and honest about how they feel about that, then I know I can prepare for that I can prepare myself for any type of harm that may come to me from that person. You know, but when the person is talking to me nicely, but then at the same time, they're undermining me they destroy me, right? Even without me knowing. You know, I'm just like a frog and in hot water in boiling water, this one is on the rise to boil right? That's really the only difference between the
two
is that we're hiring them. Talk to just lastly, I'd really like to hear from you like your I guess
First of all, like your what you think might be some blind spots with the I think you call them the immigrant community, right? Like, what's your definition of immigrant community? By the way? Do you include Africans in that?
Yeah, the Africans that will be included in that definition to me as well, right. In the US, for instance, you have
probably three basic types of blacks, you know, we have the indigenous blacks who are the descendants of African slaves, and then you have those from the Caribbean. And then you have though, from the continent directly from the continent. So
while I would include the Africans, you know, that I'm largely talking about the we call the Dacey or in the Pakistani community or the Arabs well, or the Persian and also the Persians, right, it's largely, I would say, because I think that the Africans don't have as much influence on the direction of Islam and elites in America, you know, that, that these other organizations and groups do. Right. So. So what would your message be to to the immigrant community? Like, what would you like them to know about the issue of racism? And in America in the West? And also, what would you like? fellow black people to know about it? And what how would you address them? You know, because I
don't want anyone to go away from this discussion, thinking.
Feeling alienated, I guess, or feeling like, Okay, so what what's the way forward? You know, because to some extent, I feel like maybe the left have provided something for people to hold on to right, like, you know, and so in the absence of a counter narrative, or in the absence of visible counter narrative, people have just kind of latched on to it. Right? So if we want to create change, I guess we've got to articulate what,
what we see and message we'd like to give you.
Right, so I'd love you to be able to do that.
Yeah, sure. Yeah. For the quote, unquote, immigrant community, I would say that
it doesn't serve blacks to treat us as victims as permanent victims, it doesn't serve as well as anything. That's it's that itself is a much more racist treatment, then to demand from us to take advantage of opportunities that are bill before us, right? The situation isn't as it appears,
there blacks can can do and be anything that you can be and do.
There's there are no social or structural barriers, keeping us from doing that, with the exception, perhaps of certain people who have been formerly incarcerated, who find themselves in situations where it's difficult for them to to do better, most of them at least,
was over that exception, with that exception of a very small minority of black, black black Americans, that everyone else has the opportunity to do better. And I do think that it was service better for you to,
if you if you know of opportunities, and you can help by providing those opportunities,
you can encourage us to take advantage of things that exist, but you should never validate any and Islamic behavior that originates from us, you know, and this is something that happened, in particular in the summers when we saw the riots and these are certain popular Muslims in particularly in America, saying things like, Oh, you Who are you to, to tell them how to protest their injustice, injustice is against them, right, you know, where blacks are brought in destroying their own neighborhoods, burning things down bringing down businesses and looting businesses? You know, no, you don't, you don't put up for that, you know, you don't validate those things, you know,
a loss of contact is going to punish you, you know, for validating to certain people and gaming to hold on to be Hello, because it is typed as a type of cover for you to deem the unlawful to be lawful. You remember how he mentions Is there a lot of capital I haven't had a cup of tea with them. Mmm is that you know, we don't deem anyone to be a Kaffir because of a sin that he commits unless he deems it to be lawful. Right? And or without a bit of covering cover, you know, and being content with cover is covered itself. So when you see someone stealing something, seeing someone destroying property, seeing someone attacking a person physically who hasn't done anything to them, and you say
hey, it is what it is that you are making the unlawful
The Haram Allah, and that itself is a type of cover. Right? So. So that doesn't help any of us at all. And that's my message to the community with regard to the black community, I would say, as well that the opportunities abound, you have to decide what is it? What is it that you want to do with your life, right, and then pursue those things. There's nothing standing in your way from becoming whatever you want to want to become. And doing whatever you want to do is only in your head. And you're only being told that by the same white supremacists, that you believe that you're fighting against. All right, you know that those leftists, those, you know, those individuals, those
progressives, those are the white supremacist and there is there wants to tell you that you're a victim, you can't do anything without us. And you know, and we want to help you, you know, so just sit back, lay back and just relax, and we're gonna, we're gonna handle it, you know, and they're reinforcing for you, they themselves, they are reproducing the trauma, the historical trauma, they are the ones who are dictating to you and telling you that, that, that, that the the legacy of slavery is what defines you, rather than the legacy of, of fighting struggle in overcoming adversity, because that's, that's where we were prior to all of this mess becoming mainstream, this
critical race theory becoming mainstream is that our predecessors it is a betrayal of their legacy. For us to say that, there's nothing I can do. There's never been anything I could ever do. And I'm just going to sit back and wait for these white people to fix these things for me, that day that they broke in me know that our predecessors they they built cities, they they ran for office, they became public office, people, members of public office and Supreme Court dress justices, Congress, people, Senate, Senators, they business people, and you still see a lot of those people today. Right, you know, so, reality belies all the claims, you know, I would say that the reality lies all
the claims. And once we come to that understanding and realization that it is the media, it is Hollywood, it is the the academic establishment, in our schools, all these things, these are the things that are actually manipulating us and making us believe that there's nothing we can do better, you know, and once we come to that realization, and we, and we leave those things aside, Will our condition become better. And as the Koran says, law, you lay in the law later on, in the law that you later on, that become unhappy that you will not be able to see him that a law, he does not change what is with the people until they change with themselves or as a source and found that
it can undermine them nikolova network net, and I'm a holla, calm and happy Fujian and that is because Allah, He does not remove a blessing that he gave to the people until they change within themselves. So it happens in both directions, you know that a lot would change your situation from from bad to good. But it also would change it from good to bad, right? And it all comes down to how you look at things and what is within your heart and within your mind. And so once you throw off those shackles, then inshallah life will become better. Would you also say that you'd like to see more people turning to God? Right, turning to Islam even? Yeah, of course, of course.
Yes. Right. on both the reverb from both from from the back and the in all communities is, but yeah, that, you know, we, we, we've lost a sense of mission, right, you know, and the West in particular, you know, I mean, and then Muslim country, you don't necessarily have to have, you don't necessarily have a sense of mission because everybody's Muslim, at least or most of them are these. But in the West, we don't have the sense of mission that it seems that we once had, especially prior to 911, where people were interested in dharwad, spreading Islam. And but now it's like we're just trying to fit in. We are citizens we've embraced you know that we are the citizens of this country. We live in
a secular society, and we have to embrace civil rights and support everybody civil rights. And we were just like everybody else. No, you're not just like everyone else, a loss kind of thought he values to believing so over the non believing So, right? That's a law in His Messenger, Thomas, and he wants people to be saved, you know. And so in one of our obligations, our responsibility is for us to spread the message of Islam, and CRT is not the message of Islam. Muslim Islam, what again, was articulated by Malcolm, you know, was circulated by these non Muslim Thomas Carlyle and on oj Toynbee by Gandhi. Dr. Howard Thurman. I mean, you know what all of those comments that comes they
meet in partly positive comments. I mean, that's what real Islam is, you know, and the hope for the world is it to for them to do better in times of racial strife is for them to turn to Islam.
And it's not to say that you know, that we're, we believe in a racist race less society. You know, Allah says he made us into tribes and peoples right, you know, so people are, you know, he did he did that to people. So we are different. But, you know, but the idea is different, you know that, you know, the pre modern celebrations were.
Right, exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. Right, you know, so, and it's okay, you need to feel pride about where you're from, and it's not a problem at all right, you know, on doesn't forbid that, you know, and what your ethnicity is and what your parents and and your forefathers and mothers what they had done, there's nothing wrong with you know, islamically but, but the idea that you know, that, you know, that that you can just simply assume what some other person from a different race or category or population thinks and believes about other people, and it's just absurd, and there's nothing Islamic about it. It's a satanic and it is this Neo racism anti racism today is Neo racism, anything
we hear people say anti racism, you're again, you're just racism
it's just a new type of racism. That's all it is, right? He just happens to be focused largely on white people, you know, and so and this is why somebody like brown kindy can say you know, that you know, that we in order to combat racism, we need to have more racism. Alright, so they explicit about this stuff, you know, there's nothing Islamic about any of that. Oh,
thank you so much for giving me so much of your time and really like going through all of that, and actually really changed the way I'm thinking again, given me a lot more to think about actually. So I do really appreciate that. I'm sure our listeners also have benefited from that.
Their brothers and sisters I hope you enjoyed that episode and benefited from it please do share it with somebody you know, and leave a comment and let us know what you think about the issues that we've discussed. And inshallah with that, I'm going to just sign off subhanak Allah whom I'll be handing a shadow Illa Illa Illa and testofuel go out to the lake salaam aleikum wa rahmatullah wa barakato.
You've been listening to all my talk with Fatima Baraka Tila, please share this episode. Please leave a comment. And let us know what you think about the issues that we've discussed. Joseph Camillo Heron was Salam alaykum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh