Ismail Kamdar – What is Shariah and how does it work
AI: Summary ©
The importance of understanding God's law and Sharia is highlighted, as most Muslims do not know what it is. The sharia is a misinterpretation of the Sharia, and the misunderstanding is a blind spot in Islamic studies. The sharia is a holistic approach to government, meaning it is not about criminalism or political parties. The sharia provides the best set of laws to make things happen, and protecting privacy and achieving their goals is crucial. The sharia is unique and focused on protecting the waters, and the ability to live a hedonistic lifestyle without restrictions is restricted by sharia laws. The speakers emphasize the importance of thinking about freedom as a lie and not just about freedom, and recommend two books for further learning.AI: Transcript ©
So today, inshallah, we begin a new series
of purpose
on the topic of understanding
God's law, the Sharia.
And
I believe it's a very important discussion
that needs to be had.
Because when I talk to people on the
ground, it becomes very clear that most
Muslims
do not know what the Sharia is. Most
Muslims in our community do not know what
how the Sharia works.
And they have very
bizarre understanding of what life on the Sharia
would be like.
And it's understandable.
It's understandable for a number of reasons. Number
1,
we haven't had a philosophy for over a
100 years.
None of us have seen a working model
of the Sharia in our lifetime.
We
for people who are born into this modern
world and who have not experienced
anything outside of modernity,
it's difficult for them to visually
conceptualize
what life has been like under a different
system.
And even the attempts at
reviving Sharia in our lifetime
have often been by those who misunderstood it.
The most extreme case being
the so called Islamic state that came about
in Syria a decade
ago.
What they applied was nothing to do with
Sharia. It was a complete
misinterpretation
of Sharia.
And because of cases like that, the world
became even more loaded.
So the purpose of this series of put
parties is simply to re educate
ourselves
on what the Sharia is,
how it works,
and to visualize
what life on the Sharia is really like.
Because if we,
as a,
ever hope to see the Sharia and the
divide in our lifetime,
it's not going to be possible if we
don't even understand these concepts,
if our understanding of this concept is so
wrong.
So looking at what went wrong in our
time, right, number 1, the Khalifa ended a
100 years ago. The final Ottoman caliphate came
to an end in 1924.
There has not been any real sharia land
for the past 100 years. Yes. There are
about 4 countries today that claim to follow
the sharia,
Saudi Arabia,
Brunei,
Iran,
and Afghanistan.
But even in these four, they have misunderstandings
of the Sharia and how it did apply.
At least some countries are trying to compare
to others.
And
I think the biggest cause of our misunderstanding
for what the Sharia is is the works
of the orientalists in the 20th century and
the Islamophobia
in this in the 21st century, which sadly,
many Muslims
have adapted an understanding of the Sharia from
those works.
Right? So what happens if the non Muslims
say, oh, Sharia
is oppressive.
Sharia is tyrannical.
Right? And the Muslim minds
ends up being, yes, it is. We're gonna
divide that.
Right? So instead
of academically
countering the arguments,
we buy into the arguments. We buy into
their picture of what the Sharia looks like.
And anyone who's studying
history,
it becomes very clear
that life under Sharia was very different
from what the audiences and the Islamic folks
want us to believe.
Life under Sharia
was very different.
And this is why, again, it's important for
us to
know our history, which is another reason why
people don't understand the Sharia today.
This is a blind spot in our Islamic
studies curriculum.
We don't study history enough.
And if we do,
we either just study the 1st generation
or we just study the political history.
How many of us know about the lives
of great
Olama
throughout history
or great warriors?
How many of us know about the lives
of the shareholder slums of the Ottoman Empire
or the Greek armies of the Abbasid Empire?
See, when you study the lives of different
people living in different roads, you get a
more holistic picture of what life was like
under Sharia.
Important that we educate ourselves on history because
history makes things clear.
History makes things clear where
the
enemies of Islam are lying about what our
religion calls for.
So today, I want to just do a
very brief,
recap of what is Sharia,
what did it look like historically,
and just refute one of the main arguments
made against Sharia by the west, which is
that we hate their freedoms and we wanna
take away freedom.
Right? This is the
big phrase they use about why Muslims are
evil and why Islam is evil. They say,
oh, they hate our freedoms. I don't even
know what that means, Hate our freedoms. I
don't think that any will slip anywhere in
the world sitting back, leaning on the couch
and say, yeah. I hate those people's freedoms.
Right? Well, it's not even
But nonetheless, the idea is that the sharia
is against freedom.
I'm going to show that we have a
different understanding of freedom.
Right?
It's not that we are against freedom. It's
that we're against
public sin. That's what we need. It's public
sin, not against freedom. So I'm jumping ahead.
Let's get down to basics. What is the
Sharia?
The Sharia
has different meanings in different
conversations.
Its main meaning
is God's law or God's way of life.
Right? The word sharia is interchangeable with the
word being, that this is the way of
life that God wants us to follow.
When people today think of the world share,
they think primarily about criminal law.
Right? It, primarily about
chopping off hand and stoning people,
which as you will see, as we go
deeper into the series, this is an aspect
of our law that was very rarely applied.
The ultimate empire, only 1 person only one
case was stony in 500 years.
500 years, there's one case of stone. It's
a bit really frightening, but that's what the
imagined Sharia to be. That's just like only
1% of Sharia.
Right? Or the imagined Sharia just to be
war and fighting.
In reality,
when you pray 5 times a day,
you are following the Sharia.
When you fast the month of Ramadan, you
are following the Sharia.
When you make niqah the Islamic way
and you run your home the Islamic way
and raise your children the Islamic way, you
are following the Sharia.
The Sharia simply means God's way of life.
The way that Allah wants us to live.
And yet there is a direct clash between
Sharia and secularism.
Because in secularism,
religion should not interfere with public life
and religion should not interfere
with politics.
But in Islam, we believe the Sharia is
holistic,
that God has a way that he wants
us to live in every aspect of our
lives,
especially the public life and including politics.
And this is why Sharia and secularism are
important compatible
because there is a direct clash in the
philosophies.
One philosophy is we don't want religion in
the public life. The other philosophy is God
tells us what you do in every aspect
of our lives. So there's a clash here.
So the sharia is God's way of life.
Right? The the the way the the way
of life that Allah has revealed for us
to live by.
And
the interpretation of the sharia
is done by
the the.
The it's on 3 levels. You have the,
the jurists
who interpret the Quran and Sunnah and write
the books of.
Then you have the muftis
who answer the questions of people.
Whenever something new comes up, they take you
to a mufti and a mufti, world will
be really hard and try and arrive at
a conclusion. And then you have the body,
the officially appointed judge who will judge between
the people and whose burdens are binding.
Now here's the area where a lot of
people
completely misunderstand the sharia.
When people hear the word sharia and halakhat,
they imagine
1 man who had absolute power.
Right? They imagine 1 man who had absolute
authority over the entire Muslim world.
The reality is that the
was more of a decentralized form of leadership.
Aside from the early years,
there was no point in our history beyond
the 1st generation where the Khalifa really had
absolute power.
Even in the first generation, the the the
first
generation of hadithas were humble enough to show
us this, that
used to tell people, if I am wrong,
connect me. Even if you have to connect
me with your sword.
Right? When
he was a Khalifa,
He would be delivering a foot by the
masjid, and a woman would stand up in
the masjid and correct him, and he would
accept correction.
We have cases in the early years of
the Khalifa
being taken to court and the party ruling
against him and he'd been forced to follow
that law.
So this really shows us that even from
the very beginning,
there's no absolute power to one individual.
Even the position of the Khalifa
is more of a
it's a role that has specific reasons behind
it.
And somebody could be taken out of that
role if they are not doing a good
job.
In a journey, for example,
they develop a policy
that the Sheikh on Islam,
if he felt that the Khalifa is not
doing a good job,
he could write a
declaring that that person will remove this and
somebody else take his place. And this happened
many times during the Ottoman era when they
were alcoholics or drug addicts who ended up
as, the Sheikh or drug addicts who ended
up as Khalifas.
The Sheikh Islam will bring a part of
this man considerable for the position. The army
will remove him and then put one of
his cousins
of in his place. So this clearly shows
us there's no one person
who has absolute power in the.
Rather, what you will find is that
power
in the is distributed on many levels.
The Khalifa himself,
his primary role is number 1, to protect
the waters and protect the Muslims.
The jihad
is something that he is in charge of.
The expansion and the projection of the Muslim
waters and ensuring that Muslims are able to
live in peace, and anyone living in the
world are able to live in peace.
His role is also to facilitate the Sharia.
Meaning, his job is simply to make sure
that people in his lands are able to
live by sharia.
He doesn't interpret the sharia himself. He doesn't
invent the sharia himself. He doesn't actually have
to say what the sharia is.
His law his role is something to make
sure people are able to live by the
Sharia.
There's actually, in the in the Islamic empire,
a separate power structure
that was in charge of the law. And
that was the ulama.
That you had the Sheikh Islam, you had
the party, you had the muftis. They interpreted
the law.
They told the people what was right and
what was wrong, what was halal and what
was wrong, and they don't even hold the
Khalifa accountable based on these laws.
And the Khalifa simply his role was to
allow the Sharia to be facilitated and to
ensure that the in accordance with the most
capable people for those roles
and to pay them the salary so they
will fulfill their goals. On a day to
day basis, the average person living under the
would not have any interaction with the government
at all.
If they had a question, they go to
the mufi. If they wanted to study, they
go to their local sheriff. If they had
a dispute with the neighbor or their friends
or their family members, they will go to
the party.
The actual application of Sharia was done by
the Ullan.
And so this was a separate level of
power and there were other levels of power
as well. So, for example, under Sharia, the
head of the household,
has actual power. He has actual authority over
the people of his household, separate from the
government. We find this hard to understand today
because governments have absolute power today. Right? But
if you know, for example,
there are many cases in our history where
a young man wants to go for jihad,
and his father says no.
And the ruler of the leader says, listen
to your father. He's the head of the
household. It's his decision, not yours. Right? That
the head of the household has actually authority.
The tribal chief will have authority. The local
governor will have authority. And so what you
end up with is decentralized authority. If you
actually live in a town or a village
under the Philippines,
it would be very rare that the government
will actually play any role in your life
at all.
You would simply live your life.
You would simply live your life. You would
go to work, raise your family,
enjoy the peace and security and lack of
crime that comes with Sharia.
And if you have a problem, you ask
your mufti or you go to your party.
This was freedom.
This is the Islamic understanding of freedom.
Right? That within these boundaries,
you're free to live your life.
You have cities in anywhere where Muslims live.
You don't have to be sitting into a
specific region. You don't need a passport to
travel from one Muslim land to another.
You have freedom.
You have freedom to do anything besides public
servant.
See, this is the one area now where
the clash comes in and why people today
look at the Sharia as being against freedom.
Because when they think of freedom,
they think of the freedom to publicly settle.
Right? They think of the freedom of promoting
sin.
And they think of the freedom of doing
whatever you want, whenever you want.
Under Sharia,
if you committed a sin in the privacy
of your home, there's nobody's business besides you
in Allah.
It's actually a sin for people to spy
on you. It's a sin for people to
peek into your homes. It's a sin for
people to try and find out what's going
on in people's private lives so people would
stick to their own lives. But then when
a sin becomes public,
someone is publicly a thief, a drug dealer,
a
fornicator.
Now this is a matter of public safety.
Now this is a matter of of protecting
the dignity and the honor of the public.
This is where the sharia will now have
some strict rules to prevent this from happening.
So for people
who assume that the Sharia is all about
restrictions,
I will count on this and say, there
are actually very few restrictions in the Sharia.
Very few.
The amount of major sins are less than
2,000.
And things that are minor sins, the government
doesn't enforce it. Something that's simply a matter
of inviting people. Right?
The only areas where the government would enforce
things under Sharia are things that are considered
crimes.
Things that are considered crimes in the side
of court.
And this would be, for example, stealing,
murder,
fornication,
adultery, and Islam fornication and adultery. Other public
fornication and public adultery are considered crimes, not
personal sense.
These are areas where there is criminal law.
But the average person doesn't want to steal.
The average person doesn't want to murder. The
average person has no interest in fornication
and the average person will feel free under
Sharia. And I have one last point. Sharia
gives so much autonomy and freedom to communities
that if you look, for example, in the
Ottoman Empire,
you will find entire
cities and towns that were Christian or Jewish,
Where even the army would be a rabbi
or a priest ruling by their law. Because
that's the level of religious freedom that the
Sharia gave.
That Christians and Jews were able to have
their own neighborhoods run by their own laws,
where they could completely follow their religion right
down to the letter of the law.
There's no place on earth today that gives
any religion that level of freedom.
So who really is free? Those under Sharia
or those under modernity? And therefore, I say
this idea that Sharia is about
restricting freedoms,
this is a lie.
This is a lie based on a very
specific false illusion of freedom that the West
is promoting in reality. For those who wish
to live a good life, for those who
want social cohesion, for those who want justice,
those who want peace, those who want a
crappy,
society, Sharia provides the best set of laws
to make that reality in this world.
And this is something we all need to
think about when we are conceptualizing
the the Sharia in our mind to.
One of the main problems
between clashes between modernity and Islam is this
concept of freedom,
where they think that we hate their freedom
and we want to take away their freedoms
and we have a problem with freedom.
Reality, many of the ulama actually have listed
freedom as one of the goals of the
sharia.
One of the goals of the Sharia
is that people are free to live good
lives.
And the only restrictions are crimes in public
sense.
And this is where the clash comes in.
Modality
has created an illusion of freedom.
What do I mean by an illusion of
freedom? They tell you, if you're living in
a modern world, you are free. You can
drink alcohol. You can take drugs. You can
fornicate. You can be a homosexual.
You can do whatever you want.
But this is an illusion.
You are free
to sin.
You are free to live a hedonistic lifestyle.
You're not really free, though.
If you,
for example, have to preach against
the LGBTQ lifestyle
And you had to become
quite popular and influential.
Modern governments
could
spread a slander about you, leading to cancel
culture, leading to your entire life in growing.
What's the debt? They can freeze your bank
accounts.
They can seize your passport.
They can throw you in jail. There's nothing
you can do about it.
Is this really freedom?
Think about how many times this happened in
the past 100 years for people.
Is this really freedom?
What is this freedom that they talk about?
You're free as long as you say what
they want and you believe what they want.
That's what they call freedom.
If you have any beliefs different from what
they believe,
if you have any ideas different from what
they believe,
then they have ways of oppressing you. They
have ways of suppressing you.
This is why the freedom of modernity is
just an illusion.
As long as you are drunk
with sin and lost in the world of
sin,
the governments are happy.
Because you're not questioning things. You're not thinking
too deeply about things. They can do what
they want. They can get away with what
they want. And by the way, they have
made laws today so restrictive and so cogulated
that every single person on earth has committed
crimes without knowing it.
And there are ways of of showing that.
They have made a straight, oh, a certain
year you didn't really pay your taxes properly
or you made a mistake in your taxes.
That if they don't like someone, if they
don't like what somebody has to say, if
they don't like how influential somebody is, they
can go through their entire life history, find
somewhere down the line where they violate their
law unknowingly and hold them accountable for it.
And so,
I firmly believe
that these same
people today who say that the Sharia restricts
your freedom,
they are the ones who restrict freedom.
They are the ones who have power to
take freedom away from people.
And many of us today are unable to
think outside of this modern structure. We assume
that because governments today have so much power,
we assume that's the way the world had
always been. But this is a very recent
product.
This is a very recent
form of of of leadership.
For the bulk of our history, the average
Muslim lived in towns and villages where the
government had no influence over them at all.
The
tribal chief or the head of the of
the, of that village, they would be the
one in charge and everybody else,
you know, would follow them. And
as long as they were living by Sharia
and as long as they were peaceful people,
the government did not get involved in their
lives at all. And for those of you
who want to understand this topic a bit
further, I highly recommend 2 books by doctor
Wael Hallam. 1 is an introduction to Islamic
law, and the other is called The Impossible
State.
For anyone who does not understand
why there's a clash between the modern state
system and sharia and why sharia is
better than the modern state system in every
possible way.
Doctor Wai Hallap's
beautiful work, the impossible state is worth reading.
Because in this book, he shows
over and over again
why the modern state system is incompatible with
Islam simply because the modern state system
the laws are from God in a modern
state system, the laws are from people.
It's a very powerful book. And I highly
recommend everybody reads it and thinks about it.
Also, highly recommend our local bookstore start talking
yet. Right? So you don't have to get
it any other way.
So this is something for us to think
about. For anyone who is who is of
this idea that the Sharia is against freedom,
I will argue that number 1,
what is your definition of freedom? If your
definition of freedom is you want to commit
whatever sin, you want to have you want,
and I'll say yes.
Allah doesn't like that. Allah doesn't like public
sin. Allah does not want us to live
a life of public sin. That's not a
bad thing. A
community and a society where sin is kept
hiding and shameful and hidden
is the most productive society.
If your definition of freedom is a life
where the government doesn't interfere too much in
your life, when you can run whatever business
you want and do whatever job you want
and run your family the way you want,
as long as whatever you're doing is not
haram,
then the Sharia is freedom.
The Sharia
is freedom.
It all depends on how you define the
word.
So that's our first point that we covered
today
to help us realign our mind to understanding
the Sharia. There are many other misconceptions
that people have about the Sharia,
and we take them step by step, one
foot by at a time, as we try
and rebuild in our image a proper understanding
of what is Sharia. I hope that today's
lecture has given you a lot of food
for thought about what is freedom, what is
the real freedom, what is the freedom we
should be seeking, and which system of law
actually gives us that freedom.
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