The Dark Origins of the School System

Salam aleikum, YouTube How y'all doing? I am back with a good friend of the show Sheikh Ismail Kamdar. And he is going to talk to us today about something that is dear and close to his heart something that he is a professional and expert in the nature of the modern education system, and developing alternatives for the new world that we live in. Because Muslims in the year 2024 are faced with many challenges. We have many issues in the modern schooling system, especially if you live outside of the Muslim world. But even if you live inside the Muslim world, things aren't perfectly rosy either. So

with no further ado, Sheikh Izmail, candor, if you'd like to tell anything about your background relating to this field of education of why it's so important to you, please go ahead.

So I'm only going on the left hand to having you back on the show. So this is a, a passion project of mine, something I've been working on for life and something that I only expected to produce results 10 or 20 years down the line, right. It's a lifelong project for me. And it, it starts it started when my kids were born. When my kids were born, I

was hesitant about putting them in school, right? Because my experience with school was that school was a complete waste of time.

Right? This was my experience that. So I was in and out of school in a sense that I was in school to grade eight, then I dropped out to do Islamic Studies. Then I skipped grade nine, I skipped a couple grades, I graduated

through homeschooling. And then I went to university. And along the way I realize Hold on, you could skip one or two entire grades, and you don't miss out on any actual information and knowledge. Right? I skipped a grade 11 That there's literally nothing in grade nine or 11 That's relevant or important for life. Right? It's completely a complete waste of time. So I skateboarders grades. And I realize that this system doesn't make sense. And when I first started working, my first job was as a school teacher. And I spent my first two years as a working is in Islamic schools. And when I first started, I went in with the mindset that Islamic schools are the way forward. But after two

years of working in Islamic schools, I came to the conclusion that hold on. Most Islamic schools are not really Islamic. They, they basically took the same system, they put on a Islamic label, so they gave you the Arabic name when he dropped the uniform, and made Islamic studies a subject. Right. But that's a subject that if you fail it, it's no big deal. Right? So it's like a very trivial subject. It's not even an important subject. So the Islamic school system to me

was not a proper solution. So as my kids were getting of school age, I began to worry like, what am I going to do with them, I want to put them in a system, the system's messed up. In the Islamic schools I had seen in my community, Xena was rampant. Drugs was rampant. All of these bad ideologies. Remember, these are the Islamic schools coming to the non Muslim schools, the DA Muslims go to my community 13 and 14 year olds are getting pregnant, right? It's like

so why would you want to take a child and throw them into that environment? It made no sense to me at all. And what boggles my mind even more is that most people don't think about this. Most people like the system, the system, you have to go with it. But that's how most people are wired, right? That they imagine I think in their minds, school has always been around. And that's just the way of the world and you have to do it. And I realized that you don't because I come from a family, with some of my relatives dropped out of school and opened businesses and did very well in life. I just went to university and did very well in life. Everyone took different paths. And I realized is

there's not just one path to success. Every individual is unique. Everyone's path is unique. Everyone skills are unique, and I found my own path to success, which was not directly related to learning. So as a solution I homeschool my kids been homeschooling for over a decade now since 2012. And along the way, I started teaching other parents how to homeschool. I still do that. In fact, I have a homeschooling class straight after this podcast with one of the online Institute's I teach parents how to homeschool. But to be completely honest with you, I see homeschooling as a band aid solution. A band aid solution meaning we have this problem. We can't fix it yet. This is the best

alternative we have for now. Right. So homeschooling is a band aid solution.

And furthermore, I realized from teaching other parents how to homeschool, then most people can't do it in the current environment in the current.

The current situation that the governments have built for us, most people are incapable of homeschooling, right? Because historically, parents taught their children homeschooling was the normal bulk of human history, especially the moms taught their children. But if you create an economy, where mom and dad both have to work full time, and they were too tired, when they come home from work, to spend quality time for the children, you can forget about them having any time to actually educate their children. So I realized homeschooling doesn't work for everyone. And so this led to me developing a long term passion project, which is building new systems of learning to

replace the modern education system. That's my current area of research, cannot develop new systems of learning that meet the requirements of the 21st century, that are truly Islamic. And that can make the school system completely obsolete, that we don't even need it anymore. So this is a 10 or 20 year project, it's not something that can present solutions to yet I'm still very early in my research, but I've dedicated my life to this, this to me is something that I really want to do I really want to help people find a solution to this problem. And I believe deep down inside I am capable of helping with this inshallah. Inshallah, I think so Sheikh, for starters, I want to go

back for a second. So we can clarify something because, you know, there's so many terms that get thrown around when we're talking about education systems, and a lot of people don't really understand the history of how the quote unquote modern education system came about. Now, this ties in very strongly with the previous interview we did where you talked about traditional families, and getting married earlier. Can you tell us what is the modern education system? And how is it developed? Sure, so I mentioned earlier that most people never think about this. And they just assume that this is the way the world always works. So people will be very shocked to learn that

this new that this education system that we have today, has only been around for less than 200 years.

And it's only been forced upon people for the past 100 years.

Right? Upon globally, yes, it only became an international Institute about 100 years ago, around World War One. So when you say the modern education system, we mean a system where number one, government controls education. Right? Historically, governments did not control education's, it will be parents, mentors,

private teachers, madrasahs churches, why it was a very organic thing that came out from the community to meet the needs of the community. That's how education was for the bulk of human history, about 200 years ago in Germany, right, in Germany, to create patriotic citizens, that would accept whatever the government say, the government invented the current school system, right to create patriotic citizens, that was the goal. And other European countries seeing the success of this, they began to model the system. So what is the system the system is, as soon as you are able to think for yourself, they stop you from thinking for yourself. Soon as you are 567 years old, they

throw you into this building, that's basically like a prison. There's very strict rules as these battles these tiny breaks, not allowed to talk. There's there's no scope for different opinions, there's always a right answer and a wrong answer. You forced to accept whatever the teacher says tells you is right. And you just stuck in there for your entire childhood and your young adulthood. Your entire childhood and young adulthood, you are stuck in the system for 13 years. And on top of that is the university system. So if someone's going to school and university, they are spending especially they go all the way to PhD. They're spending 20 years of their life, the prime of their

life, the best years of their life, in a system designed to make you a good citizen, to make you question your government. But it gets worse because 100 years ago,

when the system proved to be effective in America, and capitalism was starting to really go full swing, the main capitalists in America, the billionaires,

the Rockefellers, the Carnegie's, you know, these figures, didn't realize we could use the system to produce factory workers and office workers. So they funded and rolled out an international acceptance of the system is international model that we have today that every country in the world has the same school system and the same universe.

Islam very few differences. It started it started in Germany. And then it became got accelerated in the United States of America, the purpose of it, the purpose of it became to produce factory workers and office workers, people who don't think people who will follow people who do what you tell them to do. This was the purpose of it, right? And so this system became the system. And what's interesting in America is it only it only stayed compulsory in America for about 30 years until the homeschooling movement started. And they rebelled against it. Because within 30 years, people realize the system doesn't make sense. It's not working. It's not what we want for our children. So

around the 1930s 1940s, it was a massive homeschooling movement in the United States of America, where parents began to push back and say, Hold on, this system doesn't work for us, we demand the right to teach our children. Yes, yeah. So like, if you look at South Africa, for example, in South Africa, the right to home school was only given in 1996 or 1998. Right? Before that schooling was compulsory, you have to go to the system, there was no choice about it. Right. And

they took the same system, and they force it upon the Muslim world.

And in the Muslim world, he was more damaging, it was more damaging in the Muslim world, because it replaced systems that we already did, and we already affected and already doing a way better job. Right. So to give you two examples of how it negatively impacted the Muslim world, before the modern school system in the Muslim world, we had a concept of off of endowments, workups, right. And these endowments, many of them were endowments to fund free education.

So they were many free schools free universities, if someone wanted to become a scholar shared or Alim they could do so for free. And this this endowment to provide them with a monthly salary so that they could live a comfortable life while pursuing research and academia. There was a a system that worked to make sure that education was free, and it was not controlled by the government. It was controlled by the Obama It was controlled by the sheiks, the scholars of the community. The government had no control over the system, right? About 150 years ago, the British when they started colonizing the Muslim world, they couldn't directly colonize the Ottoman Empire. So they began to

influence the Ottoman Empire. Right? They did colonization by an influence. And one of the things they did to influence the Ottoman Empire and Dr. Wallach speaks about this. In his book, restating Orientalism, he says one of the things they did is they got rid of the work of system, the endowment system, they basically told the Ottomans that listen, these things that you are using, you know, that your people have as free as free services, you could be making money off that these could be profit, for profit services, you have free health care, free education, free water, all the stuff for free, there's no it doesn't make any sense from a capitalist perspective. And so first, they got

the government to take over their governments. And then a few decades later, they got them to turn them into for profit industries. So suddenly, education has a cost, healthcare has a cost, water has a cost. In the Islamic world, these things were free, right? But the British influence made these things costly. So when these things became costly, that affected the quality of education, the quality of teachers, and also it gave the British the control over what Muslims are teaching and what was being taught in the Muslim world, right, because they were now controlling these these systems. To add to that, they brought in a mindset that is completely alien to Islam, but most

Muslims have adapted today. And that is the mindset of separating between religious knowledge and secular knowledge. Right, and we'll see that today even in the Islamic schools, even the Islamic school today have a separation between secular subjects and Islamic subjects. Historically, Muslims never made the separation. Muslims pursue beneficial knowledge. The only distinction we make is between what is beneficial and what is not beneficial. If someone feels that certain knowledge is not beneficial, they will not pursue it. Right. But any beneficial knowledge is the lost property of the believer. So if you had to go to a madrasa 400 or 500 years ago, you would study Quran, you

would study Vic, but you will also study algebra, you would also study science, you would also study philosophy, poetry, because anything that would benefit you will be taught in the madrasa. It wasn't seen as separate from the religion, but seen simply as beneficial knowledge. So when this distinction came in between the secular and the religious, the Muslim community got divided. And the Muslim education system got divided. So now we have the secular Muslim

We have the religious Muslim, we have the secular Muslim, as this especially was the case between World War One and the 1960s. between World War One and the 1960s. Most of the Muslims who graduated from university, or who went through the secular system were not religious. Right? They were not religious. And most of the religious Muslims did not have university qualification. It's only in the past 50 years that we began to find some, some way to bridge the gap. We now we have religious Muslims who have graduated through the secular system. But we haven't completely bridged the gap because we still see them as separate, we still see these as we still see this as secular knowledge

and this as religious knowledge. And as a result, we don't really have the quality of scholars that we had in the past. When you look at the scholars of the early generations, many of them were polymax. Right? A scholar would be a master of the Quran, and Hadees fake history, mathematics, science, philosophy, medicine, that one person will master all those fields, and the hundreds of examples of people like that, in our history. It's very rare to find people like that today, because of the secularization of knowledge and the Division of Islamic and, and knowledge of other subjects. People tend to go one way or the other. So this also negatively impacted the Muslim world. If you

don't mind, I'd like to jump in it's, it seems to me that compared to traditional Islamic systems, that the Western system is very much based on hyper compartmentalization, to use a absurdly long word. In other words, I, when I talk to people, I was at one point, when I got back from Iraq, I was a political science major, and I was doing really good at political science. And I really wanted to go off and get like a master's in a PhD. And what I started to see one of the things that turned me off from that path,

because I thought I wanted to be a political analyst. One of the things that turned me off from that path was that

I couldn't help but notice that some people become hyper obsessed in their careers over the most minut, mundane things. And it's this, I sat around talking to these professors, they have this culture of like, how should we say, pick one thing that you're super hyperfocus interested in, and only that's your life from now on from now until you get tenured? And I was like, interesting, because I tweeted something similar yesterday, right? I tweeted something similar yesterday, I love our Islamic Studies, graduates who graduated from Western universities and serve Islamic universities, they don't actually have the broad baseline knowledge of Islam that you expect from an

Islamic Studies graduate, right? Like if you study Islamic Studies in the east, you will learn the foundations of Quran, Hadith, Arabic, the FSI and fake all these different sciences. And then you might specialize in one or two, that how I specialized in fixed up see it and history. But I still know all the other subjects enough to teach it right. But what I've learned from those who graduated in the West, is they will go all the way to PhD, they will get a PhD and call themselves a professor in Islamic Studies. And people will treat them as an expert. And as someone who can lead the Salah, when you talk to them. Their PhD was like super niche, it's like certain scholars book on a specific

topic in a specific year related to a specific field. And that's all they know about. They don't know anything else. They have like no knowledge of Arabic, no knowledge of Quran, no knowledge of Hadith, but people assume the experts in Islamic studies are getting exactly what you're seeing, right? That they hyper focused on the most random and mundane aspects, you know, like this. There's so many books produced from Western universities on Islamic studies that I tried reading. They were like 400 500 page books, with absolutely no benefit in them at all. Like they will just take the most obscure of things and just write and write just to say they produce something because that's

that's what the that's the you're the Western academia to produce. The goal of Islamic knowledge is to benefit the ummah. Right? And to bring people closer to God, the purpose of knowledge in the West is just to produce is just to produce something new. So you have to always produce something new no matter how useless it is.

Yeah, that was something that my professors when I was studying political science would tell me and said, Harry, if you want to get into this field, if you're really interested, young man, you have to publish or die. If you do not publish, I had the same experience relevantly Yeah, and I just I said, I just it, it sort of drove me insane the idea of continuing down this path for 1020 years. And then what I found years later when I thought about going back to try and finish my bachelor's and then try and get into a master's in a PhD because I have a real interest in politics and international relations.

What I found

As from the people who had gotten those degrees, they pulled me aside. And they said, I mean, it's valuable for finding a job in the government. But what they also said is

everything that they learned in there, when they finished the two years after I dropped out, you know, the extra two years that they had, or whatever they said, I could have learned from a Google search or learned on my own, come up to my own conclusions.

Just in your head, the same experience, even though we studied different subjects. So when I did my bachelor's degree, my teachers tried to convince me to do a master's degree right to today, they still try to convince me to do a master's degree, even though this was like a decade ago. But what I found is when I tried to see like, what's the benefits of a master's degree, the only benefit I could find from it is to boast that I have a master's degree. Like the only benefit is none of none of that nothing to do with teaching was a benefit to me. Most of it was stuff I could study on my own.

I already had have a job that I enjoy, I already have a business that's thriving. What exactly would you get out of this? Besides being able to boast inside someone? I have a master's and you don't? Right. So I decided it's not worth my time to pursue a master's degree.

Now, and it seems to me that there's a hyper emphasis on memorization of information rather than how to analyze and use the information. Yes. And that seems to be Yeah, that's something that comes out of the German factory model. And, of course, I don't, I'm assuming and you might know, you probably know this more than I do. I'm assuming that classical Western education, when it was provided by the church was probably much closer to classical Islamic education.

Yeah, we look at the Ottoman Empire. Yeah, we look at the Ottoman Empire, they had the millet system, right, millet means religion. And basically, the way a Sharia leg works, is that every community follows their own book, right. So in the Ottoman Empire, if you had to go to a Christian village, or Christian town, the whole village and town is run by the Bible, from the education system to the criminal law, all of its run by the church. And that's part of living under Sharia, people don't realize that Christians, Jews,

Christians, and Jews have more freedom under Sharia, because you can change your education system, you could apply Public Law to your community, you could actually live a fully Christian life, right in those in those pockets. And so what you would find in the Ottoman Empire was that governments did not control knowledge, they did not control information, it was the community that that it would be the sheiks in the Muslim lands, it will be the priest in the Christian land, it will be the rabbi in the Jewish lands, and the government would stay out of it completely. And so yes, knowledge. And also another important point was that the systems of knowledge that developed before that originated

in the Muslim world, and Christians and others, adapted from the Muslims. What I mean by this is that during the Abbas, it should be going back about 1000 years ago, the Muslims developed things like research centers, libraries, madrasahs, and some kind of university not the same like today, but they had a type of university, right, a place where you could study advanced knowledge and graduate in that field. Right. And non Muslims, Christians and Jews would learn Arabic so that they could go to these Institute's and study with the Muslim professors. And then they will take that same system back to their lands, and try and replicate it in their lands. So the Muslim world

actually had a very strong influence on the types of systems of knowledge that began to become common in the Christian world. After that point in time, especially once the Muslims were in Spain, Muslims ruled over Spain for 700 years. During that time, Islamic Spain was the center of knowledge in Europe, and the rest of Europe was influenced by Muslim Spain, they would send the best minds to study under the Muslims, and they learn philosophy from the Muslims to get back to the rest of Europe. They learned morality when the Muslims have to get back to the rest of Europe, they learn systems of learning from the use of the ticket back to the rest of Europe. So a lot of what was

going on in the Christian world was ideas that they had emulated from the Muslim world. And so it was very similar systems in place, right. And you were the very effective system because you would find that at that point in time, communities with reduced missing people have genuine knowledge like even the Jews. It was in that system that Maimonides emerged the most famous Jewish philosopher, yet he was a product of the Muslim education system. He studied in the Muslim education system. He was the doctor of sallahu Deena UB, he tried in that system. Right. So that system allowed the production of geniuses for anyone to look at, but

just as

As we have the Muslims of today no longer have that system. The same thing happened with the West. And by the way, there was pushback in the West as well, the idea of church schools, they heavily opposed the idea of government education. It was a long, there's a long history of a clash between church schools and government schools, because they did not want to give that power to the governments. They knew that it was that it was not a good idea for government to take over the state. Yes, yeah, I,

I would be, if I may be so brazen, I don't think it's an accident. That the decline in monarchical systems, and the rise of central banking, the rise of government schools and the tragedies of World War One and World War Two are all interconnected. In other words, most definitely interconnected, I can tell you a few ways that interconnected, right, number one, the purpose of the school system was to create patriotic citizens, people who are willing to die for their country. Right? Those are the people who fought in World War One and world war two people willing to do anything for their country, people's commitment was no longer towards God, and towards family and towards tribes, but

towards a sense of patriotism. This allowed them to form armies that were willing to just die for them. On top of that, the modern

financial system basically allowed them to have infinite resources for producing weapons. You see, wars of the past never reached the level of devastation of World War One and World War Two, because wars were always limited by the budget of the government.

Governments had budgets. But once you start printing your own money, guess what, guess what's happening out now 14 billion going to Israel, where's it coming from? You just printing it.

If you print your own money, you now have an infinite budget for war. And now that's why we have this level of destruction in the past 100 years that never existed before. So it's all linked. It's all a product of the colonial liberal system that it started about 400 years ago, and people think the colonial era is over. But we are still living in its shadow, we are still living in the systems that they produce, whether it's the economic system, the school system, or even the state system itself, this idea of having countries and being loyal to your country, and the country having power and control over everything from the type of school your child goes to, to be able to seize your

passport to seize your bank account. This is all very new, this is all part of that project. We still stuck in that project. Right? The effects of colonization are still everywhere in every part of the world. Hmm, yeah, I can see some of that for sure. Yeah, I see here in Indonesia, people are still shaking off the shackles of the colonists mindset. And I see it even in subtle things. I'm going to make this point and then I want to go back in history a little bit if you don't mind. But I want to make this point. I see this in Indonesia all the time that Indonesians that even though they bravely fought for their independence. What I see with Indonesians always coming up to me and

talking to me, Hey, Boulais, meaning foreigner, white foreigner, white western foreigner, I have to sometimes pull Indonesia, my Indonesian friends aside and be like, Y'all don't have to be this nice to me. Meaning I don't mean I don't want people to be mean to me. But there is this act of some people almost.

White girls in Indonesia will always buy whitening cream.

And I always noticed that started my wife last night who's Indonesian, she said that a lot of Indonesian guys. fantasize about marrying a beautiful white European woman, as opposed to

say, with Indians, and it's just like, you know, they fought for their independence, they won. They're very proud of their independence as they should be. They're very proud of their country and their history and their heritage as Indonesians as they should be. But yet there's this like this thing in the background. And then I think of myself, you know, five years in the Army, you know, military police, my friends and I, you know, all my buddies, all my guys from the old unit. We always joke about how brainwashed we are.

Like the whole process of how people are trained in Modern Warfare, modern techniques and really kind of go back to the Napoleonic era. Well, some of them maybe you could even say aspirins, but the way we're trained in basic training and advanced training in the military now, is essentially Pavlovian. You know all the weird things that you see happening in movies like full metal jacket, all those mental games, that's Pavlovian, to generate certain instinctual

responses to produce the kinds of people that will go out and die for the causes, and

humbly lie seeing Gen Z, in particular Gen Z in particular. I mean, I see him on Tik Tok, they're just like, I'm not signing up for war, I'm not going to go to college. I'm not going to I don't want to play this stupid corporate game anymore. I'd rather just stay at home and like, do my own thing. And people are losing their minds, like you see the mainstream corporate media just losing it like, oh, Gen Z. They're just so lazy, and they're incompetent. And everybody hates on Gen Z right now. But you know what? I think they're actually kind of, I think they're waking up to the control system. Maybe they have a theory behind that. Yeah, I have a theory behind that. My theory is that

the pandemic and the lockdown woke everybody up. That's when people realize these governments have too much control, they have too much power. Right. And that was the breaking point for many people. Because a lot of things I used to speak about since 2010. And people used to think I'm crazy people to think of a conspiracy theory as people would think I'm extreme or backwards. Those same points. They're making it themselves now after, after the lockdown. Right? They're making the same points themselves after the doctor, they're beginning to see that hold on. This is this is right, right, because people bought into this idea that they have freedom. They bought into this idea of progress.

They bought into the idea that society is always moving forward, that this democracy and the states that this is the best system for the world. And then the lockdown happens. And these governments can take anything from you and do anything to you and force you to do anything they want. And people realize Hold on, there's not that there's not much freedom, you're not seen anything. And this really broke people's spirits really broke people's faith in the government, I tell you something else is breaking people's faith in the government's and making them realize that there isn't really freedom last year, regardless of what people think of him, I'm not making a value judgment on him,

specifically, but last year when Andrew Tate was arrested, right? The government's seized all his assets, all his valuables, threw him in prison for six months before trials even began for trial again. Now I'm not talking about him specifically, I'm not talking about him specifically, I'm not saying whether he's right or wrong. I'm simply saying the system that we live in is such that if they don't like you, they can seize all your assets and throw you in jail without a trial. That's what we learned from that. Right? That's a very scary reality about these countries that are supposed to have freedom. And people seem that even people who don't agree with him, but seeing that

realize that hold on, is freedom is an illusion. We don't really have freedom in the system. No, we don't. Andrew Tate was certainly a very powerful man. He still is, in fact, humbly like it might even be more powerful than he ever was before. Sort of like Obi Wan Kenobi after Star Wars when Darth Vader strikes down. But

the

Yeah, if they can do it to Andrew Tate, they can do it to anybody. I mean, right now I'm here, and I'm here in Jakarta, Indonesia on 100%. disability check from the Department of Veterans Affairs. If I say the wrong thing, theoretically. Now in America, we do have more legal protections, it would be really unpalatable, it would not be a very good luck for the government to shut down the bank account of some crazy guy who lives as an expat abroad. But they have done it. They have but they have done it. They could Meantime, they could just be like, you know that we don't like the stereo sky. It's talking too much. Yeah, they sure could.

I want to circle back to something in history, because this is an issue that comes back. This is an issue of contention right now. Clearly, when I look at the history of America, in particular, with our United States Constitution, and our Bill of Rights, and what the founding fathers in the writings of the founding fathers, and also some of the classic things from Europe that you were talking about earlier with classical education before it got influenced by the this modern Germanic system.

Daniel Hucky Katroo has spoken extensively about how he just really doesn't like liberalism. And I understand where Daniel Haqiqa true is coming from. And of course, he went to Harvard. He's a very smart, educated guy, he's seen the belly of the beast.

Is there is there a way we can qualify that because some of what is labeled as liberalism seems influenced by classical Islam, and some of what his liberalism is, like devolved into what we see now with the modern banking system off shooting into fascism and communism and the complete destruction of the traditional family and Christianity and any sort of

religious influence whatsoever. So we're talking about liberalism.

How do we, how do we distinguish between what is influenced by Islam and what is influenced by something else?

Um, you could do that with anything. But I

have a very simple principle that any man made philosophy will have laws. So we don't follow that philosophy. We follow Islam. Right? Okay. So we don't need liberalism, we just need Islam. Really Islam. If you really take time to study the works, that Islam teaches on politics, on education, on social reform, on family, on, you know, growing a community, you will realize we don't need anything that liberalism has to offer. Whatever we need, you will find it within Islam. So the idea here is not that every single thing that liberals teaches wrong, that's not what we say, what we saying is that the philosophy itself is flawed. So we don't need that philosophy. We follow Islam instead, or

whatever good is in liberal in liberalism, you will find it in Islam as well amplified, but without all the baggage without all the negative stuff. So we don't need anything to do with that philosophy.

Okay, so liberalism, the Enlightenment things of this nature, these have some echoes of Islam, because Islam was, like, for example, the idea of innocent until proven guilty that originated in Islam. Right. So that's one example.

That that's the probably the clearest example. Right? The the current concept of justice, a lot of it is taken from the Sharia that, you know, Sharia is built on justice, and a lot of the elements of justice applied in the west today, we are borrowed from the Muslim world.

Okay, good. Well, I appreciate you answering that. So my this is I know it's a little bit off topic here. But when I talk to older people back in the States, who are super hardcore constitutionalist, still, I often say that a lot of good things in the US Constitution, I can also be found in Islam, and that this idea that creeping Sharia is just going to come in and we're all going to be slaves.

Is this would you say that the most of these modern Islamic governments, like I don't if you're comfortable saying this? If not, I understand we can add this out later. Saudi Arabia, for example, would you say that Saudi Arabia is a good example of classical Islamic law and practice?

There is no good example of classical Islamic law in practice for what very simple reason. Today, we have countries and states where the government controls everything. And that is not Sharia. That is not

in Sharia, the government handles protecting the borders, and expanding the borders, they handle relationships with other countries. And they facilitate the application of Sharia write the actual day to day dealings of Sharia, for the average Muslims, the way the average Muslim that their lives if they need, if you need advice, if they need to go to court that was handled by the Allah ma, there was handled by the knowledge, the government stayed out of it. They stayed out of it. In fact, you could take the government to court, you could take the king to coordinate in Sharia land, right, because the law was from God, and the law was above the ruler, the rulers role was to ensure it,

right, what we have today, same with the school system, same with the banking system, is the same with that with the state system that we have the western model of a state, and people trying to fit Sharia into that. And it's not working. We have state imposed Sharia, which does not work. That's not the way Sharia existed for the bulk of human history. It was not this top down approach are we seeing in Iran, for example, where the government like forces, the hijab, a woman in a way, that's where they can like work. There's never actually in our history, I'll tell you this much. I don't know of a single Islamic land. Back when they were the caliphate, where hijab was enforced in a

violent way. I don't have a single Muslim that did that. But when you need to travel to even batida, he complains, like he went to one Muslim country, and the woman never used to cover their breasts. And he spent a few years working in that country as a mukti. Trying to encourage the woman to dress modestly. And otherwise he gave up and he just moved on to the next land.

There's no There's no violence, there's no what enforcing is just advising, because, again, the criminal laws need some of a very few things. Most things are just simply advice. You can't really you're not really going to enforce it. Right? You did things that will be enforced. There's no public intoxication, no fornication, adultery, you know, very few things, no murder, No stealing. Those are the things that are enforced with criminal laws, but the average practice of Islam, a lot of it was just

Tonight see how to advise you commanding the good and forbidding the evil. It wasn't a government force thing. Now under this new system, you see crazy stuff happening. You have stuff like ISIS, right? We I read that they would walk people for smoking cigarettes or playing soccer. Like, that's not surely something that doesn't exist in the Sharia. This is just again, this idea that the government can control everything. That's not how Sharia works. So there is no example in the world today of Sharia. What we have is a modern state system, and people trying to put elements of Sharia into it, and it's just not working.

I'm really glad you made that clarification. And I'm not gonna just pick on brother Daniel hotcake issue because they don't like he could she has done a lot of good work for the, for the community, for sure. One of the things he said was he thought that a job should be compulsory. And I see a lot of people online now saying that his job should be compulsory, and that countries like Iran are right for having that as a law. And I'm glad you said something. Because that this that struck me the wrong way. It just didn't seem like that. Again, I'm not an advocate for jobs. He job is called it's compulsory. It's a type of compulsion where there's no hard punishment for it, there's no

criminal punish right excuse, maybe the government could advise, maybe they could find people, maybe they could create an environment where it's encouraged. Maybe there's a simple way of them enforcing it if they have to write, but I've never seen it historically. Historically, you will hear stories of women dressed inappropriately in almost every error in Muslim history. There wasn't right. I don't know, I might be wrong. They might. I don't know of any historical incidents where the government prescribed a punishment for one who addressed in disagree. Right.

Right, and no, of that happening historically. But again, we would say it's an obligation in the sense that if you don't do it, you are committing a sin in the sight of God. It's an obligation in that sense, not something that the state can impose on you. That's really the difference between one's obligations to God, and what the state can impose on you.

Yes, that's what I meant. Thank you for clarifying. Yes, that's what I'm going for. Here in Indonesia. You can see in Jakarta alone, you can see a whole gamut of people. This is something that I think Indonesia does better than other Muslim countries that I've been to

is that they allow a full gamut for how people are because not everybody is as serious about the deen as other people, some people are more on the deen. And basically, you have people from the coffee's all the way down to women in short shorts and tank tops here are going on the same bus together. Yeah, nobody really bad. As far as the government's concerned.

Yeah, but the Obama and the teachers in appearance, it's their job to advise and it's their job to encourage, and it's their job to tell people what's right and wrong. But yes, to some extent, you can't really enforce it, right. And here's the other thing people don't realize, like a lot of what modern Muslims perceive of as a caliphate, or an Islamic state, never existed in our history, right? Because again, they are viewing it from the model of a modern state with Sharia laws. And they have these bizarre ideas, like everyone's going to be pious, and everyone's going to be religious, and everyone's going to be good this is that they existed. In the time of the Sahaba, you would find

there were people who had prostitutes, there were people who drank alcohol, there were people who dressed in decently. Every society is going to have its good people and its bad people, right, and everything in between. And the role of the Muslim government is to encourage good and to forbid evil and to facilitate spirituality. But one of the things that you will find in the Islamic State in a proper Islamic land, is the valuing of privacy, that you don't get involved in people's private lives. Right? So if someone is pontificating behind closed doors, it's the government won't get involved. Nobody will get involved. It's their private sin, because they haven't got and people will

know these things are going they will know the certain houses or prostitutes out so you know, a gay person's house, and everybody would just ignore it. Because it's private, right? It's a private sector, as long as the sun is done in private, is that somebody's private business between them and God? Once it's done publicly, then yes, the government can say hold on. This is our public indecency. It's in our public immorality, now we can for some kind of punishment or some kind of rule to prevent the spirit of public immorality. Right. So what the government would handle would be the spirit of public immorality, but people's private sins would be their own business. The idea

that if we had a caliphate today, and by the way, I'm completely pro caliphate, right? I'm 100% Pro Calgary, I'm simply saying people's perception of it is incorrect. This idea that if you had a caliphate today, that everybody will be pious and every woman will be in full niqab with their face covered

Every man will have

I'm sorry, that has never existed in our history that has never existed and that would not exist because that's just not how human beings are. You have to have some room for people who have weaker Imams or people who are not as strong or people that aren't as pious to just exist in at least be Muslim.

Would you say that Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism is an offshoot of now, I'm being very careful how I say this.

Because when I say the word Saudi, Wahhabi or Salafi, it has so many connotations, and it can go off in so many directions, and people have different definitions. Would you say that the modern Wahhabi

brand of Islam? Is the source of this confusion? Or it is the source go back further than that? Because you taught me

the products of it. It's one of the products, okay, one of the products not the source, because they are as influenced by modernity as anybody else without realizing it. Right, right, their perception of what an Islamic state would look like their perception of what is orthodox Islam, and what is the enemy's understanding of Islam. All of it is shaped by modernity. They are not the source, they are a product of the environment, a product of the more of the modern world. And

I mean, the origins or something else, the origins was more of a tribe.

It's similar to the Protestant movement, right, in that they wanted to reform Islam and they went a bit too far. But

what what we see in the past 60 years, especially what emergent, let's say from the 1940s Till now, what emerged during that period that became known as Salafism. Wahhabism. Most of it, if you really look at it, it's a product of modernity, that they are influenced by the world around them whether they realize it or not. Just give you one example of that. The idea of not criticizing the ruler, right? Yes, very different from the Sahaba as understanding

Abdullah, even Abbas criticize the ruler of the labels obey or criticize the ruler, fought against the ruler, Radek declared his own caliphate. Hussein Raja Raja who fought criticize the ruler of the Sahaba did not see it as black and white as they do. But in the eyes, it's a black and white issue. Any criticism of the ruler is huge, right? That's their way of looking at it. Now, again, it's black and white thinking, Where does it come from? By theory, this idea that everything has a right answer and a wrong answer. Everything is clearly only one way to do it. Where does this come from? It goes back to our original topic, the school system. Because in school, we are taught everything you do in

your exams or in your tests. It's either right or it's wrong. Right? There's no room for differences of opinion, there is no spectrum of opinions, there is no idea of the love. Right? Everything is just right or wrong. So people grew up with this right or wrong mindset. Everything's either right or wrong. You see, when you when people approach you about fix issues, right? They'll tell you shake, what is the correct opinion on on the prohibition of music? And if you tell them, there's no correct opinion, there's a variety of opinions. It's a spectrum of opinions, like no, there has to be one right opinion.

Not school. It's not school. There's no one right opinion deliberately heart in each jihad is going to be a spectrum of opinions. But people don't think like that anymore. Because school has killed the ability to think outside of black and white. So like when it comes to the issue of obeying the rules? Yes, there is a concept of obeying the rules in Islam, but it's not black and white. Is the spectrum of opinions on to what extent do you obey the rules? what extent are you allowed to criticize them when and how you will find a variety of opinions? Right? So we're not saying the position itself is wrong. But the modern application of it is a product of modernity, right? The way

people perceive of it and apply to them is a product of modernity. And it's not of how the how the predecessors who stated the same opinions, they wouldn't have applied it or thought of it the way people are doing today.

Yes, I think that that makes a lot of sense. What I noticed in Salafism, the positive about Salafism is that it is a sincere desire to return to go back to what is the real faith problem? Yeah, I agree. That there's the problem is, is that okay, well, what is the real original faith? And then the other thing I see about Salafism and this is a little bit theoretical here. And keep in mind, I'm not a scholar. When I say this, there are people who have suggested that perhaps the original source of Salafi thinking goes back to at least even Tamiya. The idea that, hey, we've got problems

That argument today we've got to remove all the shark and the betta all the innovation and all the confusion and go back to the pure form of Islam, you could say really goes back to even Tamiya. But then the problem with that is when I look at even to me his writings and his life, the guy was actually pretty nuanced. And he changed his opinion on things at different points in his life. One of the things I noticed about even to me, I found this out from watching blogging theology with Paul Adams, which was a great channel, even Tamiya. I think Dr. Shabbir Ali also mentioned this, even to me it towards the end of his life, took the minority position of scholars and a minority position

and he believed that Hellfire was not eternal for most people. And that's a minority opinion. And I'm so I when people in the Salafi movement, keep talking about all we love, even to me, even to me as our guy, you know, that kind of thing. I go, okay, but then do you actually understand, even to me, because to me, when I look at even demand, he was actually far more nuanced than he's made out to be. And my I guess my question is, why is that not reaching through? Is it because they're learning from scholars who are in a state institution? Or is it because they're just very, you know, kind of in a reactionary mindset? Why is that understanding of even to me and not following through?

There's many answers to that. For one, they only study specific opinions of even Taymiyah. Not all of his writings, right. But again, going back to our original topic about the education system, even Taymiyah lived in a very different world from us, he lived in a time where it was okay to have your own opinions. Right, he lived in a time where

he had was a thing that he lived in a time where we didn't have this black and white thinking of modernity. And what's happening is people are now taking his opinions, and looking at it from a modern lens. So you have people today who would see an a statement, but even Taymiyah and treat it as if it's equal to the Quran or the Hadith, right? What he himself would not have looked at his own statements in that way, he would have looked at them as his each jihad with the potential of being wrong.

And so people have, you know, I, myself am a huge fan of even Taymiyah I have most of his books, I've studied most of his books, I share his opinions on many issues, especially in the area of Akita. But as someone who studied with selfies at one point in my life, the biggest disconnect I had is that their idea of who even Taymiyah was, and what I was actually reading in his books were completely different. And that's what

and I brought it up with my teachers, and they themselves had some cognitive dissonance there, they were, like, no, no, no, no, maybe you must reading him, he can't have said that he can't believe that he's able to hear there's no way he held that opinion. But it stays in his books, he was not as black and white thinking as they are. He was a very nuanced person who made HD hard, who changed his opinions who had who held he was very humble, he accepted idea that he could be wrong. And right to the end, he was always rethinking to whatever ideas he held, which is the Islamic approach to knowledge, right, just not the clear cut, black and white that modern day movements want it to be.

It is, as I said before, it's a spectrum of knowledge. And people have lost the idea of being able to think on a spectrum of knowledge. Instead, they want everything to be right and wrong, which in of itself is a problematic way of looking at the world, and especially a problematic way of looking at religion.

I appreciate that. That's a great clarification. Because, you know, a lot of people that I deal with in the comments section, the most negative responses I get are not from

that sometimes from the Sufis, but it's usually the Salafi is to give me them harshest responses. And then I've talked to people like you who are or I see a lot of people like Dr. Yesterday ricotta, who he used to describe himself the Salafi as well. And he has had his own personal journey away from SOPHAS. And I don't want to hate on Salafism because there's a lot of good things that have come out of that movement. But

as you point out, there is a, I myself, I don't like to talk bad about the movement, because again, my teachers were selfies. And I've met a lot of pious selfies in my life, who I highly respect. And I have seen the benefits of it. And it's helped me it's helped me in my life in many ways. So I don't talk bad about it. But I do see it as a product of modernity, just like any other Muslim movement that popped up in the past 100 years. So that's why I'm not I'm not patriotic to it. This as I'm a patriotic to any other modern movement. I'm able to see it for what it is. It's a it's a revivalist effort in the modern world that has its pros and cons, just like every other revivalist

effort

and some of these criticisms could also be given of Sufism as well. Am I correct in saying that? Yes. They were ending the day. Yeah.

Because and even to me, it's time they were also very institutionalized and very black and white in their thinking as well, weren't they? That's why I got in trouble with them.

Okay, that's sure.

I'm gonna just don't miss out on any of our selfie listeners who are deeply offended and write down subscribe for me just let you know, we got criticisms for other people.

I get a lot of criticism consolidates, like all the time. So just bear with me. Well, shake, I appreciate you coming out. We got on a lot of sidetracks here, which is a good thing and a bad thing. But it's important.

circling back around to solutions, because we talked about education, how it's become a mess. What is this modern version of this confusion was the modern system versus most classical system, we got into how it ties into other aspects of life, commerce, politics, etc. We got a little bit off the weeds there. But what's the solution that you think is is going to really fix this problem is, it's obviously we can't go back to where we were 100%. We're in the age of the internet now in the age of online education, so forth, and so on. What do you think the future looks like?

Or should look like?

Okay, so I'm going to divide this into two parts, the immediate solutions and the long term solutions, immediate solutions is for parents who are able to start homeschooling, right. And, okay, if your parent if they say, you're a young person watching this and your parents can't homeschool you, then your immediate solution, as a young person, is to take control of your own journey of knowledge outside of school, right? So you go to school, but in the afternoons and evenings, you watch other things online, you read other books online, you begin to initiate your own studies, right? To help you uncover what the schools are not teaching you to help you bridge the gaps of

subjects that schools are not teaching. So really taking control of your own journey of knowledge, which is how humans have been for the bulk of human history. Now, as for long term solutions, I haven't settled on one yet. But I have a few ideas. Right? The first idea is that we replace compulsory education with a culture of learning. Right, replace compulsory education with a culture of learning. And what a culture of learning would mean is that children are raised with a love of learning and access to resources, so that they can learn whatever they need to learn when they need to learn it. And today, with the internet, with YouTube, with online courses, with books, there is

no end to resources. Anyone can teach them dissolves anything at any age. That's the world we live in today, which already makes school obsolete. It already makes school obsolete, right? My kids, my teenagers, what they learn on their own online, vastly outweighs what they've learned from school, from the school curriculum vastly outweighs it. And

I've seen this also, like one of my kids taught himself how to read when he was five years old. Without going to school without his parents helping him at all. He wanted to read, he taught himself how to read. And I realized that anyone can actually do that, like historically, if people wanted to read, they will teach themselves how to do so within a few months. It's very easy to learn when you're motivated. And that's a big problem with the school system today. Because we have forced education, people see learning as a burden. People see learning as something that's not fun. People see learning as something that they hate. People see reading as something that's a chore. School has

created all of these perceptions, pull them away from school, and put them into a natural learning environment. They will love to read, they would love to learn new things. They would love to grow their mind, they would love to develop new skills. So my main idea is to replace the school system with a culture of learning. I believe that a country has a culture of learning. It does not need a compulsory school system. Everybody would learn what they need to thrive in their lives. And he goes back to a principle that I forgot to mention today. And that is a principle I apply to both parenting and education. Every child is unique. There's no one system that's going to work for

everybody. And that's one of the biggest problems with the school system. today. We are taking a standardized approach to education and mass producing it across the globe. While in reality, every child is unique

In terms of the strengths, the weaknesses, the goals, the vision, what subjects they attracted to what, what they want to do with their lives, how they learn what's what system of learning works best for them, what system of learning they are weak at every child is unique. And if you're just going to have this mastered your system, a lot of people are going to go to the system thinking that they are stupid and thinking that they are dumb, but in reality, they're just not given the right resources or styles of learning. Right? Right, simply put in a system that doesn't work for them. So I would love to see a world where instead of forced education, we have a culture of learning. And if

you have a culture of learning with unlimited access to resources, right, where everyone has access to the resources that they need to learn, then I really don't think the world would need school anymore. Unless Unless you are someone who's going down a very specific career path. Like if you are becoming a doctor, or a lawyer or an accountant, then yes, there needs to be a systematic study to get there. But for the average person who just wants to run a business or be a plumber, or or you know, will be a freelance writer or something like that, you really don't need the school system at all. It's absolutely not beneficial to their lives at all.

No, that's very true. Sheikh I appreciate you clarifying that. I was just thinking, as you're saying this, you know, some of the things that I've been saying and dialoguing with people back in the States, because after I dropped out of university, I've tried my hand at trade schools for a while does truck driver and commercial diver briefly in traveling out a couple of things. And for a while I was of the opinion asker school, everybody should just go to trade school. And then the more I think about it,

trade schools the same problem, it can be the same sort of institutionalized problem, rather than just going with an apprenticeship, which is how you used to learn trade, or just you, like you said, there's so many ways you can learn how to do a lot of these trade professionals on your own. I'm very,

I'm very passionate about reviving mentorship and apprenticeship. I believe that these things work very well, in past communities and societies. If we could revive those systems today, they will not just help people learn better, but they will create meaningful relationships, right? Because the mentor, mentee relationship is a very powerful relationship that's dying out in our times. But historically, a lot of big figures, we're both from those type of relationships. So I'm very passionate of reviving those systems of learning as well.

That's good point. Yeah, it's it's very impersonal. You just go go to the next class booth. Next class next year, you have a different set of teachers. And after food for years, that school you go the next school and it's different thing. Different. It's basically the same thing, more advanced level of learning, but it's, you're just getting passed from person to person, the person. Most teachers, you don't really remember, I remember half the teachers, for example, like Imam Abu Hanifa, he spent 17 years studying Fick with one teacher. Can you imagine the relationship they had spending 17 years as a student that teacher relationship, right? Oh, we don't get that in our times

anymore?

No, I don't think I've ever known any teacher for that long, or had a relationship with them like that. 17 years. And now, I can't think of one.

I believe enough. I would say if you go to the same jujitsu if you people who do martial arts in the same town for an extended period of time probably have the closest thing to that. Because

yeah, and also because martial arts is not passed through the force education system. But it's still using the same systems of teaching and learning from before that, right. So it still has that mentor mentee type of system. It still has that long term relationship with the sheep who I've seen that even in my children's lives, that they still have a close relationship with their sheep, or even though they studied with him, like five or six years ago. But it's a relationship that you build with your teacher, because they're still using the traditional systems of learning when it comes to martial arts.

Yes, I'm going to use as an example from now on when I'm trying to describe this to people what right looks like. Hopefully they don't confuse it with some martial arts studio that just popped up last week. But yes, traditional martial arts for sure. Jake, I really appreciate that. Is there anything else you want to add before we wrap it up here? We're a little bit past the hour. I know you had some places you had to go to?

Oh, yes. In an hour's time, I have a homeschooling class to teach. But yeah, I just want to

end on a point that some people when they hear all of this, they must understand especially if they are not out of the system and especially if they thrived in the system, right? Some people the system is built for them. They get all A's they graduate the top of the class they double straight

students in school, they do well in university. So they wonder why anyone would ever be against the system.

We want people to be clear for one point, I'm not against education, I'm not against people learning, I'm not against people seeking knowledge, I am 100%. For that, I'm simply saying there's a better way. There are many better ways than what we have what's been forced on people in the modern world. And I want us to start thinking outside of this box, this box has has really affected people's ability to think for themselves, that people who have gone to the system, many of them cannot think outside of the system on any issues. They just see the world as it is not as it can be. And it makes it very difficult for them to grasp these kinds of ideas. So hence, learn to think

outside of the box, there is learn to understand that any man made system could be replaced with another manmade system, maybe a much better one. So if people 200 or 200 years ago, came up with this system. And our times we are seeing that this system doesn't work. It had very negative roots. And it's got gotten even worse over time. So like today, the system is a way of brainwashing people into being pro LGBTQ, right is getting worse over time. Because again, it was created to create people who just blindly follow the government. And that's what the government want people to believe that, right. So that's forcing that on them in the school system. So let us start thinking outside

and just realize that humans have always been capable of learning, they've always been capable of teaching they've always been capable of, of living up to their potential. School isn't necessarily for that. It may be necessarily for specific career paths, but it's not necessarily for everybody. And if we can come up with better ideas, better systems, then we could create a better future for the next generation. So I hope more people will get on board with this, start thinking like this, maybe start sharing ideas. And perhaps within the next five or 10 years, we'll have something concrete that we can launch as a alternative to school. That's my hope to one day launch an

alternative to school and to slowly start rolling it out globally. Allah knows best. Allah knows best indeed. Thank you so much for your time shake. All right, shake. Where can people find you?

So the why just type in my name on Twitter, or YouTube, or Instagram. I'm there Hamdulillah. I do most of my gapping on Twitter. I like to just share my scattered thoughts on Twitter every day. So most likely be able to connect with me on Twitter or YouTube with the exact same name. I'm Taylor. All right, I'll hamdulillah Thank you. We'll put some links to those in the video when we posted. Thank you so much. cyclohexane thank you for coming on. I'll see you again.

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