Khalid Latif – First Steps Essentials of Islam #6
AI: Summary ©
The importance of learning about Islam's actions and culture is discussed, along with the use of "offensive" in relation to personal and professional life. The speaker emphasizes the need to distinguish between professors and teachers, identifying oneself as a person and their followers, and finding one's own values and values in order to navigate religion and religious learning. They also discuss the importance of understanding one's values and values in relation to one's personal and professional life, as it is a reflection of individualism rather than a fundamental belief. The importance of finding a way to navigate the digital age and finding a way to engage in practices is emphasized.
AI: Summary ©
So, one of the things that,
I thought would be nice for us to
do also,
we've been focusing a lot on just, like,
the how tos of certain actions.
We're gonna do that a little bit more
today.
There's an article that I thought would be
good for us to take a look at
that's very short. That thing is also important
for people who are new to Islam, exploring
Islam,
people who are recent converts or converted a
while ago,
that's called Islam and the Cultural Imperative.
It's written by a scholar whose name is
doctor Omar Farooq Abdullah.
He's from Chicago.
He's a convert himself,
and I think it's a really helpful article
to read as you start to look at
practice and ritual,
but also
understanding that to be Muslim doesn't mean you
commit a cultural apostasy of some kind. Right?
It's not to become Arab or South Asian
or any kind of prevailing cultural identity
that the religion intertwines with, as I thought
in the latter part of today's session, we
could just read through that article, it's about
a page long.
Because I think it does a very good
job at answering questions that preemptively
many of you might run into,
given that Muslim communities tend to be fairly
homogeneous,
very ethnocentric,
and sociologically
connect in ways that
many religious communities tend to connect in,
shared external, shared race, shared ethnicity,
shared class.
So if we start reading through it, we're
not gonna read the whole thing. It is
short, in the sense that it's not a
book,
but it's also not, like,
you know,
but I think it's helpful as you start
to now familiarize yourself
with concepts of theology and fiqh on a
practical level, you can also just engage Muslims
from so many different backgrounds.
They're going to
tell you,
like, quite often definitively,
this is what Islam is,
where it doesn't necessarily have to be absolute
in that sense.
Do you know? When it comes to modes
of
kind of culture
and how that
intertwines,
one of the things that doctor Omer says
in this article that's really great is that
he likens the relationship
of Islam and culture
to
a stream that flows over
bedrock.
And he says the water in a stream
inherently takes on
the color of the bedrock upon which it
flows.
He says this is a relationship of sharia
to culture,
and that it's meant to now
be indicative
of the culture
and a reflection of it. So if you
go to China, Islam looks Chinese. If you
go to Malaysia, Islam looks Malaysian.
Right? If you go
to Indonesia, it looks Indonesian.
Nigeria, it looks Nigerian. Right? You get the
idea. The challenge that we run into
in the United States
is that you have Muslims from all of
these cultures
within the United States context.
Right? Many of us are going for Umrah
tomorrow. Right? Melak accepted from us, make it
easy.
You all should join us on a future
trip. It's a smaller pilgrimage to Mecca and
Medina.
When you go there, there's, like, people literally
from all over the world. If you go
for Hajj, which is a larger pilgrimage in
our tradition, we'll probably talk about that, you
know, some weeks from now, what that means.
It's really amazing to just see how everything
functions
because the way
the Hajus is set up is you live
in tents in a city called Minnaq,
and it's a tent city. Oh, wow. Looks
very like Lord of the Rings esque, if
you've watched Lord of the Rings,
where built into the mountains and across these
plains are just all of these tents.
And the ways the tents are divided is
by the country that you get your visa
from. When you walk through this tent city,
after a few days of the Hajj,
people are able to wear just their regular
clothing
and they remove kind of the white sheets
that you've probably
through this, and how deep Islam is and
how beautiful it is. You go to the
tents where people are from, like Malaysia, Indonesia,
and there's a lot of different colors
and different kinda language spoken,
you know, the foods are reflective of the
culture. You go then to the Indian subcontinent
tents, you know, men are wearing shirts and
women that go below their knees.
There's some vibrancy
to the language.
There's more spice in the food, you go
to tents from West Africa,
there's a lot of beautiful gold and purple,
like, clothing and, you know, language, again, is
distinct and you kinda get the idea, right?
The Gulf States,
men are all wearing white, women are dressed
in black.
And when you come to the American tents
or, like, the UK tents, there's people from
all of those tents in our tents.
When they go home and they are all
pretty much the same outwardly,
we come back to this place where all
of us are different from each other. Right?
And you look in this room,
everybody's a little bit different from the people
sitting next to them, you know? And what
the point is of this class is to
not just say, here's the how tos, the
do's and don'ts, like how we went through,
we'll
do for a good 3 weeks to talk
about the mechanics of it, the spiritual aspects
of it, these kinds of things. You also
wanna just ready yourself to think about
where and how
the depth of this religion
is rooted
in a shared theology
that transcends cultural differences.
But on a practical level, it's not necessarily
always that easy,
to fit into some place
when people normatively believe that the way that
they do it is the only way to
do it
from a culturally hegemonic standpoint. And the the
base of this dough in a, like, foundation
class
is that you want to understand that
to convert to Islam doesn't mean you commit
a cultural apostasy.
And as you're navigating this and you are
experiencing this, or
you engage your own sense of religious journey,
there are things that are absolutes,
prohibitions,
obligations.
We talked about what is foundational theology in
Islam, what makes somebody Muslim.
And so this is a very important thing
to understand
because you could walk into many
Muslim spaces,
and
the hope is that it's gonna feel familiar,
but the idea is that it can feel
unfamiliar.
But on the flip end of it,
the same thing that brings those people together
sociologically,
shared language, shared food, shared culture,
is not like a bad thing
and there's a familiarity that becomes
necessary
at times when you're exploring the religion
and certain things make sense in terms of
the theology and practice,
but on a lived level, it's I don't
know how to be Muslim
because
an underlying element is I don't know how
to be Arab, I'm not Arab. I don't
know how to be South Asian, I'm not
South Asian. Right? I'm Latino, I'm white, I'm
black,
African American. I'm not in this place. And
what this article does, I think very nicely,
is outlines the base of how
Sharia relates to culture. And you want to
be aware of this just as you navigate
these things. You know, but where it goes
in both directions, I'll give you an example.
We had a young brother in our community
who is half Puerto Rican and half Dominican,
and he
was celebrating,
like, Eid with us for years. He prayed.
He observed Ramadan.
And then, one night in Ramadan a few
years ago, he sat with me and he
said, you know, everything in this religion makes
sense,
but
I don't know any Muslims
who are Puerto Rican or Dominican like I
am. And he says it just makes it
feel very much like it's not something
for me. And I said, oh, my brother-in-law
is Puerto Rican and Dominican. He said, what
do you mean? And I said, yeah. My
sister is married to a guy who's Puerto
Rican and Dominican. His name is Ulysses, really
great. Uli converted to Islam many years ago.
After him, his younger brother, Brian, converted to
Islam.
And then, in our center at Jum'ah,
their sister, who's between them in age, took
her shot, they hear, one day.
And I introduced this guy to Yulee, like,
a couple of days later. And they sat
down
and
everything
just, like, you could see felt so different
to him. Do you know? It was very,
very unique.
We had another lady who came here for
the first time for Jummah,
and she was a convert and had come
out of a place where she was the
only person,
for backgrounds.
White lady,
blonde hair, blue eyes,
and
she came in and the room was filled
with, like, white people that day And she
sat down with me. She's like, I've never
been to a masjid that has this many
white Muslims. And I sat with her and
I was like, there's a group visiting from
Denmark today that is not Muslim and they
were just here to participate in Jummah. But,
like, but there's still people who are here
who are converts and and they kinda get
what you're talking about,
but it was a need that she didn't
even know that she had. Right? That's how
we connect sociologically.
We crave similarity and familiarity.
In your own journey with Islam,
you're gonna run into people who cannot see
Islam
bigger than what they've been brought up with.
They're gonna only see kind of the culture
that is infused with religion. That doesn't negate
who they are, but they see permissibility,
in this framework
as normativity.
That this is the only way to do
something
as opposed to one of the ways that
someone can do something. Do you get what
I'm saying? Does that make sense? Yeah. So
let's take a quick look at this article.
We won't read the whole thing,
but doctor Omer Farooq Abdullah,
he's from Chicago,
and he wrote this, like, years ago.
He's like a true scholar in the scholarly
sense of things, like very intellectual,
writes a lot about spirituality,
theology,
he's a professor in Saudi Arabia for some
time, he's lived all over the world,
traces a lot of his shiuk, his teachers
to West Africa,
and, you know, he's just a very, like,
nice, kind man. Right? And I think as
you navigate
religion and religious learning, you want to also
think and distinguish between who your professors are
and who your teachers are. Right? Who you
just take information from and who it is
that you take a sense of just character
and ethic from,
and the distinction there becomes really important,
and he's like a nice guy. Right?
So if we can just start with this
first paragraph
that says, for centuries, Islamic civilization
harmonized indigenous forms of cultural expression. Does anybody
want
to
read?
Do
people
have it? We're looking at articles called Islam
and the Cultural Imperative
by a man named Omer Farooq Abdullah.
If you just Google it,
and the first
site that pops up is like an OASIS
site, It'll say download English,
so we can just download the English. Does
anybody wanna start reading? We're not gonna read
the whole thing.
This stuff is sacred, Paul.
For centuries, Islamic civilization harmonized indigenous forms.
It looks like this when you download it.
Yeah.
It struck a balance between temporal beauty and
ageless truth, and fanned a brilliant peacock's tale
of unity and diversity from the heart of
China to the shores of the Atlantic.
That's beautiful. That's a bar. Islamic jurisprudence
helped facilitate this creative genius
in history.
Islam showed itself to be culturally friendly,
and in that regard,
it has been likened to a crystal clear
river.
Its rivers, Islam,
are pure, sweet, and life giving, but have
no color of their own reflect
of their own reflect the bedrock indigenous culture
over which they flow. In China, Islam looks
Chinese. In Mali, it looks African.
Sustained cultural relevance to this to the distinct
people's diverse places in different times underlay Islam's
long success as a global civilization.
The religion became not only functional and familiar
at the local level, but dynamically engaging, fostering
stable indigenous Muslim identities, and allowing Muslims to
put down deep roots and make long lasting
contributions wherever they went.
So the idea was that when Islam
came to a people, or people embraced Islam,
it wasn't that they lost a sense of
who they were.
Right? The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him,
the generation that is immediately around the Prophet
Muhammad,
his companions, they're called Sahaba.
And the 2 qualities
that one needs in order to be deemed
to be a Sahaba,
a companion, and I'll write the word on
the board, but you're gonna hear this word
a lot.
The word sahaba,
it denotes 2 things.
One, that this was a person who met
the prophet
in the course of their life
and 2, they died
in a state of faith in Islam.
Right? That it wasn't enough that they had
one or the other,
but they were both that categorically
identified them to be a companion of the
prophet. He had companions that were young, companions
that were old,
people who were as young as his own
grandsons,
right, people who were as old as his
uncles.
But he's in a place where
the connection
as a generation identified
was to the prophet
and how
they
experienced
a relationship with him during the course of
their life. The generation that comes after this,
they're called the Tabayeen
and we don't have to get into them
just yet, but to give you an idea,
they have the same category
of dying in a state of faith,
but
they then interacted with someone who is a
Sahaba, as opposed to interacting with the Prophet.
Does that make sense?
The prophet's companions, his Sahaba,
they were definitely people who were Arab, people
who were Quraysh,
people who were of his clan and his
tribe, but he also had people who came
from all different walks of life. Right? The
major communities
at this time
were people,
you know, Persians, Byzantines, Romans,
so the prophet has companions like Suheb Arumi,
Suheb the Roman, you know who white skin,
blonde hair, blue eyed, Bilal ibn Raba who
is an Abyssinian
slave, he's a black man from Africa,
Salman al Farsi,
who is Salman the Persian.
Right? He came from a different community.
And we're talking about specifics, but to understand
for each one of these names, there's so
many more. They're not like a rarity,
but this was a community that was meant
to be rooted in an idea that it
reflected a theology that there's one God.
And you have to understand this as we
go through it because the next paragraph is
gonna juxtapose this to,
you know, challenging realities that stem up quite
often.
But let's read the the next paragraph. By
contrast,
much contemporary
Islamist rhetoric Who wants to read that?
Anybody?
You can keep going.
By contrast, much contemporary Islamist rhetoric falls
far short of Islam's
ancient cultural wisdom. Assuming at times, an unmitigated
culturally
predatory attitude.
Such rhetoric and the movement
ideologies that stand behind it have been deeply
influenced by Western revolutionary
dialectic
and a dangerously selective retrieval
and
reinterpretation
of Islamic scripture
in that light.
At the same time, however,
the Islamist phenomenon is to no small degree,
a byproduct of the grave cultural dislocation
and dysfunction of the contemporary Muslim world.
Culture Islamic or otherwise
or otherwise provides
the basis of social stability, but paradoxically
can itself only flourish in stable societies and
will inevitably break down in the confusion of
social disruption and turmoil.
Today, the Muslim world retains priceless relics
of its former cultural splendor.
But in the confusion of our times, times,
the wisdom of the past is not always
understood, and many of its established norms and
older cultural patterns no longer appear relevant to
Muslims
or seem to offer solutions.
Where the peacocks tail has not long since
folded,
it retains
little of its former dazzling fullness.
Where the cultural river has not dried up
altogether,
it seldom
its water seldom run clear.
Human beings generate culturally natural culture culture naturally
like spiders spin silk.
But unlike spiders webs, the cultures people
construct are not always Unsurprisingly,
Muslim
Unsurprisingly,
Muslim immigrants to America remain attached to the
lands they left behind, but hardly if ever
bring with them the full pattern
once healthy cultures of their past,
which if they had remained intact, would have
reduced their incentive to immigrate to in the
first place.
Converts overwhelmingly
converts overwhelmingly African American
are often alienated from their own deep indigenous
roots and native cultural sensibility through the destructive
impact of cultural culturally predatory Islamist ideologies from
abroad. Okay. So let's take a pause here.
Right? The article is gonna introduce an objective
reality.
I wish it was not an objective reality,
but it's an objective reality nonetheless, that we
live in societies that are heavily stratified,
deeply entrenched in ideas
around supremacy,
this country in particular rooted in anti blackness.
And when you have generationally,
within Muslim experience, individuals whose heritage
incorporates slavery, colonization,
the consequences of imperialism,
There's a lot
of generational trauma that gets passed on.
The people stick to certain things.
And
to be Muslim
doesn't denote a high level of literacy of
Islam.
You don't need a high level of literacy
to have a high level of devotion. Right?
Like, some of us are leaving for Umrah
tomorrow, they'll accept it from us. We're gonna
go to Mecca and Medina that every day
has millions of people praying in the Masjids
there from all over the world.
You can go to other religious
sites,
and it's not to, like, knock anybody,
but their main spaces of worship
do not have that same level
of devotion
on a regular daily basis.
And all these people who are praying in
Mecca and Medina every day, all of them
don't know all of the Quran.
All of them don't know, like, the basics
of Islam. Right? It's not like an entry
point to having a close relationship with God,
fundamentally.
When you're coming into it from the onset,
and why we wanna talk about it here
and introduce it at this juncture,
is because most
convert classes, Islam 101 classes,
foundation classes, they're just gonna teach you the
how to's and the do's and don'ts of
things. And there's not a, that's, there's a
value to that, but we want you to
also understand experientially,
when you're born into it, you come to
it later in life, you're a convert.
An understanding that this becomes a challenge
for many people
living in as a diverse Muslim population as
we have. There's some people
who cannot separate the fact that in order
for them to be right,
that you have to be wrong just because
you come from different places and you're born
to different people. Do you get what I
mean?
And it can become very heavy, very challenging
when you have to adopt an outward skin
that now fits into somebody else's standard
that is more culturally hegemonic
than,
anything that is more kind of inviting. Do
you get what I mean? Right?
And so, that's where this article is really
important. If we can break it down to
page number 4,
There's a section that is headed, Respecting Other
Cultures, A Supreme Prophetic Sunnah.
So this Sunnah refers, in a technical sense
to the authoritative example of the Prophet Muhammad
Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, peace and blessings be upon
him.
In a literal sense, it just refers to
the authoritative example of any individual. But when
it's talked about here, it's talking about the
Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. Can somebody
start to read from here the prophet Muhammad
and his companions
were not at war with the world's cultures?
Oh, really? Yeah, go for it.
The prophet Mohammed and his companions were now
were not at war with the world's cultures
and ethnicities,
but entertain an honest, accommodating, and
prophetess companions did not look upon humanist culture
in terms of black and
white, nor did they drastically divide human societies
into spheres of absolute good and abs
absolute good and absolute
evil. Islam
did not impose itself neither among Arabs
or non Arabs as an alien,
partially predatory worldview.
Rather, the prophetic message was from the outset
based on the distinction between what was good,
beneficial,
or and authentically
human in other cultures
while seeking to older only was clearly detrimental.
Prophetic law did not burn and obliterate
what was distinctive about our peoples, but so
instead to prune, nurture, nourish, and create a
positive
Islamic synthesis.
Much of what became a prophet sunnah prophetic
model
was made up of acceptable pre Islamic Arab
cultural norms and the principle of tolerating and
accommodating such practices among Arabs and non Arabs
alike in all their diversity
may be termed as supreme overriding prophetic.
In this being, the noted early jurors Abu
Yusuf
understood the recognition of good local cultural norms
as a falling under the rubric of the
sunnah.
The 15th century
grenade
Vernon.
Jurors put it in
articulated
a similar outlook and stress. For example, that
it is not the purpose of a child
just
to impinge upon the cultural integrity integrity
of non Arab Muslims who are at liberty
to to to develop or maintain their own
distinctive dress
within the broad parameters of the sacred law.
So people understand what this means.
Yeah? So I'd like you to do just
for a minute, we can take a pause
and turn to the person next to you.
What are you taking away from this so
far? Like, what are the things we can
extrapolate from this? Things that you might seem
to be, like, very obvious
or things that you're kinda like, oh, I
didn't know that. But,
also, how does it kinda relate to your
own experience thus far? As you're exploring Islam,
you're a convert, you're, like, born into it,
This is, like, telling us what the basis
is
of a prophetic model of engagement.
But I'd love to just have you all
talk for a couple minutes to each other.
What are some of the things it's bringing
up for you or you're taking away? And
then we'll come back and discuss as a
group. Go ahead.
So you just stare at the person next
to you, introduce yourself if you don't know
them, and then you just talk for a
couple of minutes.
Okay. So what are some of the things
that's bringing up for you or you're taking
away from it so far?
What are we talking about
in our groups?
Who wants to start?
Anybody?
Yeah.
Mine was in reference to, like, the last
couple of sentences that that there's a thread,
about
not having specific with
certain type of threats. Okay.
Is there a broad spectrum of what can
you consider?
It is, like,
modest is, like, my favorite comment.
And I don't want to
I don't like
culturally appropriate by wearing something a certain way
or if I should do my own thing.
Like, sometimes I wear just like a beanie.
Sometimes I won't wear anything.
It's my first time wearing a scarf
ever. So and I feel very I feel
very comfortable in it, but I that's another
thing that I took from it is, like,
where do I fit on the spectrum
when no one in my culture or family
practices this type of honesty.
Yeah. And
fleshing that out in a practice that's, like,
very real,
especially if you're converting into something and you've
lived now for multiple years already
prior to that moment, and you have friends
and you have family.
That's why, like, the very first thing we've
talked about
is, like, who is God in all of
this, right? Because if there's not a God
centric worldview and it's just you have to
do this because this is what's done,
then it just becomes more about the mechanics
without a base that says, but why am
I doing certain things in certain ways? Right?
And we're gonna go through this whole section
just because I think it's important and then
the rest you can read on your own,
but there's gonna come to a part where
he says, it's also important to, like, let
go of parts of culture
that don't coincide with Islam as a religion.
Right?
That there's this kind of sense of
it not being absolute in one direction or
the other,
but there's a combination of saying we take
what's good and we leave behind what's bad.
But
a big part of it is recognizing
that you don't leave it altogether and the
majority of it is gonna actually be stuff
that kind of fits in. Is that, you
know what I mean? What else did we
talk about? What else came up in your
in your, like, smaller group discussions?
Yeah, go for it. Something that you just
mentioned,
I think
we just kind of talked about weddings, specifically,
in our culture.
Weddings? Weddings
and how,
like,
sometimes it's not correct Islamically,
but culturally, it's, like, so accepted that
sometimes even parents, they're like, you do it
this way, but
buying between, like, what's correct and what's not
correct and,
like or even, like,
marrying someone outside of, like, your culture is
seen
as really bad.
And, like, I have seen that in my
family where if somebody,
married someone outside of white, Foxconnian did. Like,
everybody was just like, oh my god. Like,
how could you even though they committed just
mom?
So I feel like
that's their, like, culture and, like, like, that's
their outside of, like, culture. It's,
Yeah. And the broader we
has to be kind of broken down into
I statements
because, fundamentally, as an individual, you have to
determine for yourself what goes into your decisions,
what goes into your choices,
and where and how we can navigate it.
But even in the prism of weddings, right,
I do a lot of weddings. Right? When
when I'm just like, you know, whoops.
A lot of weddings. But what's amazing is
when people are getting married from distinct cultures
and, also,
people are getting married from the same culture.
And you get to experience just, like, how
deep again and beautiful Islam is
and the way that it just manifests in
so many different traditions
and all of these weddings look so different
than what is just sometimes deemed to be
normative
rather than simply permissible.
Do you do you get what I mean?
Right?
I've done weddings for, like,
Egyptians that are marrying Afghans,
weddings for people who are Sudanese that are
marrying Italian people,
weddings for Pakistanis
getting married to Egyptians,
and people just blend all of their cultures
together.
Right? And it's it's really amazing to
see that it's a reflection
of individuals
that that diversity can be embraced and appreciated
as opposed to you gotta leave certain things
at the table,
or at the door rather,
and they can't kinda be brought to the
table. Do you you see what I'm saying?
There's moments like this that we all experience
that just because it's unfamiliar doesn't mean that
it doesn't fit
in, and where and how
you can understand at a base level when
it's a God centric religion
that Islam claims to be for all of
humanity.
It's not making a claim that it's for
all of humanity,
and then all of humanity suddenly
becomes
as if they lived 1400 years ago in
this generation,
but you draw and extrapolate lessons and meanings
and teachings from it. And it's one of
the healthy ways that our religion embraces individualism
because even all these people in this generation,
they weren't all alike. They weren't all the
same. They had different temperaments, different personalities, different
demeanors.
They struggled with different things.
It's really easy
when you
start to explore this religion and you walk
into a space
that they'll give you an aspect of Islam
but it's not Islam in its entirety.
Do you do you get what I mean?
Does that make sense?
Okay. Why don't we keep reading?
The Quran enjoined the Prophet Muhammad on page
4, the second column. The Quran enjoined the
Prophet Muhammad to adhere to people's sound customs
and usages
and take them as a fundamental reference in
legislation.
Accept from people what comes naturally for them,
command what is customarily
good, and turn away from the ignorant without
responding in kind.
Ibn Atiyeh, a renowned early Andalusian jurist and
Quranic commentator,
asserted that the verse not only upheld the
sanctity
of indigenous culture, but granted sweeping validity
to everything
the human heart regards as sound and beneficial
as long as it is not clearly repudiated
in the revealed law. For classical Islamic jurists
in general,
the verse was often cited as a major
proof text for the affirmation
of sound cultural usage,
and it was noted that what people generally
deem as proper
tends to be compatible with their nature and
environment,
serving essential needs and valid aspirations.
The story of the sons of Arfida,
a familial
Arabian linguistic reference
to Ethiopians,
provides a telling illustration of the place of
culture,
here of course, black African culture,
within the prophetic dispensation.
In celebration of an annual Islamic religious festival,
a group of a group of black African
converts
began to beat leather drums and dance with
spears in the Prophet's mosque.
Umar ibn al Khattab, one of the chief
companions,
felt compelled to interfere and stop them, but
the prophet intervened on their behalf directing Umar
to leave them alone and noting to him
that they were the sons of Arfida,
that is not his people.
The prophet invited his wife, Aisha, to watch
the dance,
took her into the crowd, and lifted her
over his back so that she could watch
them clearly as she eagerly leaned forward, her
cheek pressing against his.
The prophet made a point to dispel the
Ethiopians' misgivings about Omer's intrusion
and encouraged them to dance well. And in
one account of this authentic story,
reassured them to keep up their drumming and
dancing saying,
play your game, son of of Arfida,
so the Jews and Christians know there is
latitude in our religion.
It's not that these specifically
saying this in reaction to other people of
the book, but you contextualize
this in terms of the broader people who
are now situated
at this time with him,
that to join this religion doesn't mean that
you let go of who you are.
Right? The explanation also of the story of
the Banu Afidah
is also not something that is tokenizing.
But when you look at subsequent Hadith
traditions in the prophetic Sunnah
that refer to this instance, the dance that
they're doing is more like a military step
kinda dance. Right? If you ever seen people
perform
that kind of kinda,
routine,
you know, it's got, like, a little bit
more than just there was a crowd of
people around them watching these guys dance if
it was a spectacle. It's like a sense
of dignity
and a sense of honor. You know, if
you ever seen people do, like, haka dances,
right, if they come from a Samoan background,
and it's
They're doing this in this way
that, you know, my friend, Sheikh Obeidallah Evans,
who is from Chicago also
and he was the 1st African American to
graduate from the College of Islamic Law in
Egypt at Al Azhar University.
He explains this hadith in that way And
he says the Banwa for that, they weren't
just like dancing around. They were doing this
kinda like dignified
culturally,
adapted, like, kind of military step dance. Does
that make sense?
But what the prophet is telling his people,
like his close companions,
these people are not Arab.
Just because it's not familiar
to you,
doesn't mean that it's outside of the fold
of Islam.
Just because you're uncomfortable by it because it's
different,
doesn't mean it doesn't belong within this.
Let the people see there's latitude in this
religion of ours. This does not negate the
idea that there are prohibitions
and obligations.
But you fit what is essential,
you take what is good from the culture,
and what is in
conflict with
those parameters that we outlined,
the permissible
and the impermissible.
There was so much more that was permissible
than impermissible.
Remember we talked about the Akam Sharia,
you know, what is obligatory,
recommended,
confirmed, prophetic practice,
like neutral,
what is disliked, and what is strictly prohibited.
Everything other than strictly prohibited
falls into the category of what is potentially
permissible.
Right?
Even the category of disliked at times can
be something
that is still permissible. It's not to be
done
consistently, but it can still fall into permissibility.
Do you see what I mean? And this
is an important thing to understand,
especially as you navigate Muslim communities in the
United States. You're gonna go through New York
City. The Indonesian mosque,
Turkish mosque, Albanian mosque,
the Bengali mosque,
the Sudanese
mosque,
the Gambian mosque. You know, and it's not
that these things are problematic.
My grandfather
did speak like English as a primary language.
He would need a space that reflected
his socialization,
his upbringing,
like the realities he found himself in. Sometimes
spaces will have to be either or. They
can't be all it's very hard to create
a space that, like, everybody feels like they
can still be connected in that way. Do
you get what I mean? And I just
want you to be aware of that as
you navigate some of these things and you
navigate other people who are also very kind,
but they might say to you, like, oh,
you can't do that. Right? And you're, like,
I can't, like, eat french fries. Like, no,
you know. Muslims don't Muslims don't do that.
Right? A good friend of mine
was is a Hafiz.
Comes from African American background,
and he was leading prayer.
And he had on a baseball hat, and
he's, like, took off his hat every time
he was praying. And I said, why do
you take off your baseball hat? He said,
somebody told me it's haram to wear baseball
hats. Right? Like, they're not kufies like this.
And I was like, you can wear a
baseball hat, man. It's a hat, you know?
Like, it that's, you know but it's the
conveyance of something is problematic twofold.
One, you can't make something haram that's not
haram. Like, that's a big problem to do
that. But 2,
just because it's different, it doesn't mean by
default it's impermissible. Do you get do you
get what I mean? Does that make sense?
Yeah? Do people understand why we're talking about
this here in this space?
Right? And it's not just about only here's,
like, the legal rulings and the thick and
the how to's of will do. This is
gonna be something that's really important. Right? Like,
you could walk into
a mosque that all they have is what
we talked about last week when we're washing
up from the bathroom. Remember? We're talking about,
like, cleanliness,
and we don't simply use, like, toilet paper.
In Islam, you gotta rinse off, like, anything
that's considered to be filthy,
and you could walk into a place that
doesn't have a hand bidet. You could walk
into places culturally
like South Asian, and they use, like, those
large, like, watering pots that are called lortas.
If you've never seen one before, you'd be
like, what is this thing? It doesn't mean
that they're wrong in what they're doing, but
they're catering to the norm and majority
of that space.
But you don't have to just say this
is the only way to get it done.
Do you get what I mean? Does that
make sense?
Yeah. Okay. Let's continue.
The prophet cultivated openness and objectivity towards others.
This was also
part of his lesson to Umar
and such openness enabled his companions to acknowledge
the good in other cultures even when, as
was the case with the Byzantine Christians, Arun,
they were not only hostile to the rise
of Islamic power on their southern flank, but
constituted Islam's most formidable enemy. When it was
related to Amr ibn al-'As, a companion of
the Prophet
and victorious commander in the Byzantine wars,
that the Prophet had prophesized
that Arun, specifically the Byzantines, but understood in
this context
as a general reference to Europeans
would predominate at the end of time,
Amr responded to his informer,
if then you have related this honestly,
know that they have 4 excellent qualities.
They are the most forbearing of people in
times of discord.
They're the quickest of people to recover from
calamity.
They're the most likely of people to renew
an attack after retreat,
and they're the best of people toward the
poor, the orphan, and the weak. Amr then
added, and they have a 5th attribute
which is both beautiful and excellent.
They're the best of people in checking the
oppression of kings.
Our due attention to those European cultural traits
which he knew and regarded
as both compatible with Islam's ethos and universally
desirable as human qualities.
His response demonstrates his understanding
that the future prominence of Westerners would be
an outgrowth of their exceptional cultural traits, which
his mind immediately began to search out after
hearing the prophet's prophecy.
4 came at once to his mind, and
the 5th, they're the best of people in
checking the oppression of kings, occurred as an
afterthought but was clearly regarded amongst the most
important.
It was viewed as beautiful and excellent.
They're finding a recognition that there is beauty
in every culture.
Right?
That there's not a reductive approach to Islam
that says everybody is going to just suddenly
be exactly the same way.
And you have to be able to navigate
this
as you explore Islam as a faith
to understand
that the exploration of Islam as a religion
doesn't mean that you have to let go
of things that are inherently a part of
who you are. Right? I grew up
the child of immigrants
who are from Pakistan,
experienced partition
and I run the Islamic Center. Right? Story's
true so far.
And every day in Ramadan,
we only serve
the spiciest
Pakistani,
like biryani,
and like
food with all kinds of like oil and
grease.
Why would he not be able to assume
that this is just what Muslims eat? Do
you get what I mean?
And you think then about familiarity.
And it's like, man, I converted.
They have me not eating during daylight.
And then after the sun sets, I'm eating
stuff that makes me gassy and creates ulcers
in my stomach. Right?
But there's no sense of somebody might be
different
and this isn't what's familiar to them. When
I went to Myanmar
the second time to work with Rohingya refugees
there, they're facing ethnic cleansing, genocide, may Allah
make things easy for them. One of the
things that happens when you work in disaster
relief is that you buy food in large
quantities,
and they ship whatever they can. Sometimes
not thinking about what is, like, the actual
makeup of these people. So if you're old
enough to remember when Haiti went through a
lot of natural disasters
and people were sending all kinds of food
to Haiti, they were sending food in large
quantities
inclusive of like rice and other things that
were not native to Haitian diets.
And then the people of Haiti started to
develop all kinds of
illnesses related to eating that they never had
before because they could have no choice but
to eat the food that they had. And
when I went to Islamic with Islamic relief
to Myanmar,
and there was refugees now that came from
there and were living in Bangladesh,
One of the things that the Islamic relief
staff did, subhanallah,
it's really remarkable,
was
to, in specific,
bring strands of rice that were native from
Myanmar
to these people who had fled ethnic cleansing
and genocide.
Not like the rice that was native to
Bangladesh.
And I sat with people as they ate
it. These people, for 10 months, all they
ate was rice every meal.
And And then we started to bring them
different things,
but when they ate this different rice, I
kid you not, there was people who just
had tears pouring out of their eyes
Because they tasted something that was familiar to
them.
That was of like their culture and their
background. Do you get what I mean? Right?
It's not an either or. It's a both
and.
It's something that's important to understand.
The word for Islamic law is not like
law the way, like, you drive through a
red light and you get a ticket. You
don't wanna think about Sharia in that way.
But the most literal translation of this is
that it's a path to water
or the path to the watering well.
So the path to the watering well, you
conceptualize
this now. If you know the story of
Abraham
and,
Hagar, Hajar, peace be upon her, Ishmael,
they get left in the deserts of Arabia
with nothing but some dates and water. Right?
When that runs out, baby Ishmael kicks at
the desert
floor. Hajar runs between 2 mountains called Safa
and Marwa looking for some nourishment for the
child where his feet are kicking, the angel
comes and strikes the ground, and a well
known as the well of tsum tsum steps
forward.
This water starts to collect,
animals start to flock in the middle of
the desert, a tribe called the Jurham tribe
sees the animals, sends some emissaries to see
what's taking place. Their astonishment, what they thought
would be nothing,
was now a large body of water and
this elderly woman and her
child. And they asked, can we,
like, live here? And she said, yes, but
the water is under my ownership. And this
is where the city of Mecca establishes itself.
Right? But the idea is that the water
attracts life to it. Right? Sharia is a
path to water. Is that the implementation of
Sharia is meant to give you vibrancy
and vitality.
It's meant to be expansive, not restrictive.
There's gonna be prohibitions and obligations,
but it's implementation
rooted in a God centric worldview
allows for there to be that sense of
liberation,
but sometimes what becomes suffocating
is this culturally hegemonic attitude towards religion. And
you conceptualize
any body of water
from the largest of oceans to the smallest
of raindrops.
They can be approached in a multitude of
ways. You don't approach most body of water
just from one pathway.
It can be approached in a lot of
pathways. That's how Shadia functions.
You can approach it in a lot of
pathways. There's verses that say, don't eat pork.
They mean don't eat pork. There's like no
other way to work around it. That's just
what it means. But there's a lot of
other things that will manifest in different ways,
and this is what doctor Omer is saying
in this article
that culture,
custom
is taken into consideration
as practice comes about.
My wife's name is Priya.
She converted to Islam, like, 23 years ago.
And when we got married,
this is gonna
be our 12th year of marriage this September,
Inshallah.
And my wife, when she got married to
me, you know, I would just write about
her in various places, op eds, social media,
etcetera.
And my social media platforms, I have people
that engage me from different parts of the
world and there was people that would write
on my postings things like, did you marry
somebody who's Hindu?
And my wife has practiced Islam longer than
I have. And initially,
I would get very agitated.
You know, I was writing daily op eds
for the Huffington Post in Ramadan,
like some years ago, and so I wrote
one that said, people ask me why my
wife's name is Priya,
and I said,
because that's the name her parents gave her.
It was like a very angry, like, kind
of thing. And then some years passed and
something similar happened.
And
in my head, I was now a little
bit older, not like speaking on my wife's
behalf in any way,
but I wrote something different. And some people
said the same thing.
And I said,
well, why would they know it to be
different? If you go to India and Pakistan,
to be Indian is to be Hindu. To
be Pakistani is to be Muslim. If you've
ever watched a Bollywood movie,
the quintessential
name for every Bollywood heroine is Priya. Right?
And these people have never experienced this ever
before.
They fundamentally can't grasp the idea
that somebody
who is Indian and Hindu
converted to Islam.
And they then couldn't understand also, how her
name being what it was, was a completely
fine Muslim name. Right? It didn't have to
be an Arabic name. Do you get what
I mean? Right? Like my daughter's name is
Medina
Noor Latif.
All three Arabic names.
My son's name
is Kareem
Gabriel
Latif.
We didn't name him Jibrael
to Arabize it. We named him Gabriel because
we like the name Gabriel. It's a really
beautiful name.
One of my friends who's like,
Sheikh studied Islam for years in Syria, he
named his daughter Hope.
Right? It's a beautiful name. That's what names
have to have. They have good meanings. Right?
But this is what Sharia is. It's a
path to water. It's not singular.
It only looks one way.
Right? But there's sometimes
multitudes of ways to get to certain places.
Does that make sense?
So what I want you to do is
just to, like, sit with this, read the
rest of the article,
and allow for it to kind of soak
in. So that you can understand
that engaging this religion doesn't mean you have
to let go of parts of who you
are.
There will be things
that every culture has that is not Islamic.
This culture
has a lot of real noble traits. It
also has a lot of traits that are
deeply racist.
They do not coincide with what Islam teaches.
And to be in a place where one
says, I have to leave behind some of
these things, then you have to leave behind
it. The other things that come into here
are important to understand because everybody's family's not
Muslim.
Everybody's family, even if they're Muslim, they might
not practice Islam like you.
There's not gonna necessarily be always, like, uniformity
across.
People are going to engage in practices in
different levels,
and as you navigate some of these things
and you Google stuff, because all kind of
information out there, but nobody's teaching you what
it means, It's just gonna be more and
more suffocating.
They're like, well, there's this many opinions on
this, and this many opinions on that. It
all falls under this idea,
but none of it says you have to
forego
and commit a cultural apostasy
to become Muslim. Does that make sense?
Okay.
So we're gonna take a pause in a
minute to pray.
We are not meeting next Wednesday,
but from the Wednesday after, we will meet,
and we'll meet at 7 on that Wednesday
after.
It's
the last day before Ramadan starts.
So not the coming Wednesday, but the Wednesday
after. I don't know what the date is.
2 weeks from now.
After that, in Ramadan, we will meet
at 6 o'clock in this room
on Wednesdays instead of at 7. Does that
work for people, especially those who've been coming
consistently? Can you get here by 6?
Yeah.
Anybody have an issue with it? You can
tell me. Yeah. And through Ramadan, we'll meet
at 6 and we'll go through other stuff.
I think next week or the next time
we meet, which will be 2 weeks from
now, we might pivot a bit. And instead
of continuing with some of the, like, you
know,
washing up and will do and this kinda
of stuff. We'll talk about Ramadan in specific,
like the do's and don'ts of Ramadan,
how that kind of functions, what you can,
like, kind of expect and anticipate within Ramadan.
But,
throughout the course of the month, we'll then
go back to, like, some of what we're
talking about, so there's continuity
throughout what it is that we're we're discussing,
and,
we'll kinda take it from there. Does that
make sense? Does that sound good?
Okay. Great. So we're gonna take a pause.
Khalid and I and Solo
are tomorrow
going to,
Mecca and Medina. We'll be in Saudi Arabia,
for the next week, that's why we won't
be here next Wednesday. If anybody needs anything
or wants anything from there, please let us
know. We'll do our best to get that
for you.
All of you are definitely in our prayers.
We're taking a smaller pilgrimage that's called the
Umrah.
It's different from the Hajj pilgrimage,
that the Umrah can be done in a
few hours, it doesn't have to be done
at a specified time of the year, it
can be done at any time in the
calendar year,
and, you know, we're looking forward
to, perhaps, one day doing, you know,
a specific
umrah for our conversations group or things that
kinda
are more, you know, segmented to helping to
meet some of the the needs of some
of the people that, you know, come to
us through our conversations group. But if anybody
needs anything, please do let us know.
We'll do our best to to get that
for you. Does anybody have any questions or
anything they wanna add in before we wrap
up?
Yeah. So please lead the article in its
entirety.
It's a really important thing to understand as
a base so that when you enter into
certain spaces,
you can get to a place where you
recognize, this is why this person is potentially
telling me that I need to, like, do
some of these things that I'm doing.
But if it doesn't feel familiar because you're
not of that background,
that's okay. Right? And you can still have
gentleness and compassion,
unless they're, like, inhibiting you from your growth,
do you know what I mean? And being
in a place then where you have to
then deal with, like, certain realities,
and I wanna be very transparent with you,
it becomes hard for sometimes people who convert
to Islam quite often
because people speak in languages that they don't
understand around them, don't invite them to things
because they don't share, like, culture. You know,
connections are just rooted in externals and not
internals,
and that's not like what Islam is about,
fundamentally.
But we wanna kinda be in a place
where we're on the same page,
in terms of what your experiences will be
and how we can pivot and shift that
as Khaled was saying. So we're building the
spaces and offering insights
so that
it's getting better. And then in another generation,
it'll be that much better. Do you you
get what I mean? Okay.
Alright. Assalamu
Alaikum.