Lauren Booth – Escaping the Western Mindset I Thinking Muslim Podcast Part 2
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The speakers discuss the increasing religious acceptance of Muslims in the United States, including the "monarchic culture" associated with the West and the "verbal response" that comes with men and women to men. They also touch on the "arousal crisis" that exists in society, where women are viewed as vulnerable and fearful, and the "monarch" concept in relation to the liberal culture. They also discuss the "monarch" concept in relation to the liberal culture and its negative impact on women and the "monarch" concept in relation to the Iraq War. They also talk about the "monster" of the Israeli government and the "monster" of the Israeli government.
AI: Summary ©
Just how duplicitous maybe the British political elite
were and in particular the Labour Party were.
And then you suddenly find yourself in a
mosque waking up going, oh my God, God
is Allah.
What do you do with that?
How do you understand this indefensible support for
Israel in the West?
You have young men saying, I get to
dominate you.
I mean, it's really it's like seven year
olds.
So you live in Istanbul.
And anecdotally, it seems to me that more
and more Muslims have decided to leave the
West and to move to Muslim countries like
Qatar or to Kuwait or to Istanbul.
I think in Istanbul, we've seen, you know,
a probably I mean, last time I was
there, I saw a growth in a number
of Westerners, Western Muslims who've decided to to
live there.
And most of them say they they just
had enough of the criticisms they get in
the West.
They've had enough of the racism maybe they
get or Islamophobia, but also they fear for
their kids.
It's now common for Muslims here to think
about, if not moving to a different country,
to think about pulling their kids out of
school.
I mean, where do you stand on this
discussion about how intense it's become in education
and just general society towards Muslims?
You know, it's really interesting.
For 10 years, a friend of mine called
Denise, she's an educator, mashallah.
She has been raising the alert.
You don't know what's in the books.
She's been on these education groups that I'm
on.
She's like, mums, wake up, ask to see
the books on your kids curriculum.
What age?
Not 11, not 10, seven and eight, ask
to see them.
And when you ask to see them, the
teachers say you don't need to.
Or now increasingly, you can't see them in
case you protest.
Because it is such disgusting content in children's
books at schools, that they cannot show it
on the news.
The same nightly news that shows dead bodies
and bombs falling and explosions and horrendous things
going on cannot show the books that are
being given to our four and five year
olds.
This interestingly, this is a sign of a
failing society.
There was a study done in 1936, by
a British academic, and he found the same
trigger points for each failed civilization that he
studied.
Yes, rising androgyny, not liberation of women, forget
the word, but it's basically no protection of
the women, right?
And the sexualization of society, a rise in
homosexuality, all of these things are happening.
It's a dire situation.
And I totally understand Muslim families wanting to
leave.
I thought about 10 years ago, actually, brother,
that, and I still do, that if you
really wanted to get the Muslims out of
Europe, and you couldn't kill them, like the
French did with the Algerians just 30 years
ago, and then through their bodies or 40
years ago, through them in the Seine, that
what you do is you just make it
a little bit unlivable, a little bit unlivable.
Let's say in France, you can't have halal
meat at school.
Why is that?
No halal meat, you have to eat pork
if you're at school, or go without.
What if we, oh, I know, they don't
like * with outside marriage, the Muslims, how
about we talk about that all the time?
And how about we force, we say to
their children, homosexuality is an option.
And we do that at a young age.
That is kind of social engineering.
Now, I'm not saying this only affects the
Muslim community.
We're not paranoid.
This is a devaluation of the human spirit
across the spectrum.
But it really is helping us leave.
And I think it's a good leave.
I think it's a good, a good thing.
Yeah, I think we should we should leave
the sinking ship.
And we should be building up our countries
and offering an alternative, which is what the
Ottoman and the Al-Andalusian societies did was
say, hey, come over here.
We've got beauty here.
We've got fairness here.
We've got a way that you can move
up the ranks in society, you're not trapped.
And for that reason, hundreds of thousands, millions,
perhaps of Christians came and lived in our
Muslim communities.
And the Jewish community thrived for centuries there.
I'm I used to be an educator.
And I know that 20 years of the
war on terror has in a way, radicalized
the teaching profession.
And today, you've got teachers who see it
as their duty to proselytize to convert Muslim
kids into good liberal liberals or, you know,
or something like that.
You know, this type of fear, I think
that Muslims face in this society is very
palpable.
Now, not everyone is going to be able
to leave the country.
You know, we've got what, two, three million
Muslims in Britain.
It's not going to be possible for those
six million Muslims in France.
Economic situation for majority of those Muslims in
France will not enable them, allow them really
to leave even if they wanted to leave
because of just the sheer amount of money
that's required to move to somewhere like Turkey,
you need to have some some, you know,
some some capital behind you, I suppose.
So, you know, in the absence of that,
how does a Muslim in this country still
make it in these societies?
It's really tough.
There's no quick fix, is there?
Yeah.
I mean, you live between here and Istanbul
too, right?
Yeah.
I left, but people do have to be
here and they have elders and the people,
the families I know, who don't want to
move, usually don't want to move because they
want to look after their parents and grandparents,
which is a beautiful duty.
And also, these are our roots.
This is our home.
These are our villages, towns and cities.
Where do we go and start again?
It's pretty scary.
I don't think there's a quick fix to
this.
But I do think that we need to
improve our Muslim schools.
I think if we do a good enough
job that the non Muslims with an ounce
of ethical grounding will actually want to come
and be in our schools.
I don't know if I don't know enough
about the education to say, can you fight?
Can you argue with the Department of Education
about what children see now?
And they're coming for homeschooling as well.
Yes.
Yeah, that's very true.
Can I turn to a broader question about
how you perceive gender relations in Islam?
There's a raging debate and again, it's usually
online about whether, what is the role of
the men and women in the family?
What's the role of men and women in
society?
And of course, there are some who have
a very liberal interpretation and some who have
an interpretation which makes it impossible for those
families to function.
But I'm just talking about, I want to
know about, you know, the average, how do
normal Muslims view this?
Let's first consider the idea of patriarchy, which
is, of course, a buzzword in the West.
Can we describe the Islamic faith to be
a patriarchal faith because of the way Islam
views the father as the authority figure in
the family and the responsible person and the
person who has to provide, you know, for
the maintenance of the entire household?
That, for me, sounds like a very patriarchal
idea.
But, you know, the connotations attached to patriarchy,
of course, are very negative.
So how would you navigate that term patriarchy?
I think our idea of patriarchy really culturally
goes back to the Victorians, because the man
in certainly middle class and upper class society
had absolute dominion over the women.
Property, rights, everything.
Property, inheritance, you married, you went from your
father's house to your husband's house and you
could carry none of that wealth with you,
right?
And if your father died and you inherited
a great amount of land, it was your
husband's and he could do with it what
he liked, spend it, drink it, give it
away.
And so that is a terrifying prospect.
And I think really, as Westerners, as Europeans,
as British people, we're traumatized by that.
The women, we're traumatized by this legacy, we're
traumatized by the fact that there was no
protection from the heavy drinking, from the beatings,
that we couldn't escape because we had no
money.
And this is not the Islamic, this is
not the Muslim experience.
Look at Khadija, she had inherited wealth from
husbands, she had built an empire that she
could keep after marriage.
We have always had this.
And yet we're supposed to look at Islam
through the lens of Victorian patriarchy and superimpose
then hyper-feminism on top of it.
Reject all of that.
We don't want anything to do with that.
We start again.
We start again.
With a blank sheet.
Yeah.
And also, does Allah Ta'ala say, this
is a patriarchal religion, women are lesser?
No.
These interpretations were never what was understood.
You know, the woman is a cover for
the man, the man is a cover for
the woman, the man has one over on
the woman, but what does that mean?
What does it mean?
He's got duties that are really, really heavy
and beautiful.
And actually, you know, me and my husband
speak about this a lot because he's studied,
Alhamdulillah, he's got Ijazah in Fiqh.
And it's a man thrives with the weight
of caring for people.
And a woman thrives with that care being
lifted and being looked after.
No point is one pressuring or destroying or
saying to the other, change.
But growing together and thriving.
You know, I want to say to my
young sisters, you're talking to someone who, for
30 years as an adult, lived the ultimate
in feminism.
I worked since I was 16.
I was hugely successful at the age of
30.
I earned more than my husband.
No one could tell me what to do.
I was entirely liberated from any man.
And what did that look like?
I'm telling you, you have your time of
the month, you're tired.
There's nobody showing you sympathy because, hey, I
don't need your sympathy.
If you said I don't need your sympathy
100 times, don't expect on day 101 to
go, I'm in pain.
Well, you said you didn't need sympathy, right?
I carried my own bags when I was
pregnant.
No man was carrying my bags.
I had some really horrible experiences during pregnancy.
I remember once, and I hope you keep
this in because it's really telling about vulnerable
moments that women have, okay?
Because we need to accept our vulnerability.
I was eight months pregnant.
I was showing off how I could carry
my eight months pregnancy and still be at
the Labour Party conference.
And it was one o'clock in the
morning and I started to have really bad
pains.
I mean, like stabbing pains.
And so I was sitting on a Brighton
pavement in the rain at one in the
morning, waiting for a taxi.
And the taxi came and two young men
from Blair's government, by the way, jumped into
the taxi.
And I went, wait, I'm waiting as well.
And they're like, yeah, whatever.
And I said, but can't you let me
go in?
And then one of them said, he was
20 years old.
Why?
I said, because I'm pregnant.
He said, well, it's not my baby, is
it?
Is that really the society that we want?
Is that really the liberty and egalitarian equality
that we're fighting for?
Don't be fooled.
I want to give another example because this
made me laugh.
I was on an underground train a couple
of years ago, and I saw a young
black sister and she was looking like she
was absolutely going to faint.
I don't know whether she was ill or
just had been working hard.
And she was exhausted standing up.
And next to me was a young man
and he looked Asian.
I just love being an auntie.
That's something else, by the way.
You know, Islam gives you a status to
grow into.
I can be as annoying and bossy.
And people are like, it's auntie.
Leave auntie alone.
It's wonderful.
You know, you have that space.
Anyway, the young man next to me, a
young Asian guy, and I said, excuse me,
brother, are you Muslim?
He said, yes, I am.
I said, then get out of that chair
and let the Muslim sister sit down.
And he was like, OK, auntie.
Do you know what she did?
No, I'm all right, thanks.
I said, you're going to sit down and
you're about to have a three stop lecture
from me about how to enable men to
look after you.
Yeah, because we're not enabling our men any
longer to be the carers.
And that makes them bitter and frigid and
more likely to say, I don't want to
care for you.
You don't deserve it.
You're this, you're that.
Leading to these schisms and illnesses.
And I just wanted to end on that
point of the patriarchy.
Islam, Allah sees believers and cares about piety.
That's very clear from all of the texts.
There isn't a male female divide.
You know, it's not men in this line.
Oh, yeah, you get fast tracked to Jannah.
Show me that tract.
Show me where it says that.
It doesn't.
Alhamdulillah.
You know, the patient ones, the Sabareen, the
kind ones, the good ones, the ones who
give charity, the ones who pray to their
Lord.
That's our parameters, not the patriarchy.
There's an interesting point you made there about
the friction that exists in wider society and
the spillover into the Muslim community.
I've noticed.
And again, this may be and we don't
have to talk about him in particular, but
the Andrew Tate effect where there is this
extreme response to hyperfeminism and the response is
this machoism where with it comes this attitude
that all women are bad.
I mean, I think it's it's maybe a
response, may not be a response, but there
is an associated feeling amongst women that all
men are bad, all men are evil.
And that doesn't lead to very good relations
between men and women.
We've noticed.
And again, you know, you've been out of
the country for a while, but we've noticed
in this last year or two that the
Andrew Tate type of ideas have started to
develop currency amongst young men and young Muslim
men.
And some of it may be may be
positive, you know, given them.
But a lot of it actually is a
an un-Islamic way of viewing women.
I mean, how have you come across this?
And it's a confusing world for young men
as well as young women, I suspect.
You know, being right on the cutting edge
of it with a daughter at university, you
have young men saying, I get to dominate
you.
I mean, it's really it's like seven year
olds going, I don't like boys.
I don't like girls.
You know, I don't like you because you're
less than me and I don't like you
because you smell.
It's pathetic.
And it really is damaging the relations between
the genders for our young Muslims.
You know, you've got you've got an environment
where a young man can.
And I've heard this twice recently in two
potential marriages or two engagements.
And both times the young men said, I
have the right to check your emails and
your phone.
Wow.
Really?
Yeah.
And the family of the young women went
* to the no, because because that is
psychologically controlling behavior.
Yes.
And it's unhealthy.
But these sort of, you know, noises off,
if you like these surround sound.
I'm not going to even name them.
These these people on social media, these men
on social media who have their own toxic
problems and their own, you know, lack of
spirituality.
It's a lack of spirituality from the brothers
to to to to look at themselves and
to say, am I be how am I
being beautiful?
How am I being kind?
How am I going to bring kindness into
this?
That's leadership.
That is leadership.
Being chivalrous is leadership.
And on the other side, yes, we have
a fractured and what's it when it's it's
not frigid, it's easily breakable version of female
femininity where they're afraid of the men.
And then that makes us more likely to
run to the safety of the office, the
safety of having our own money, the safety
of a life without a family, because I'm
afraid of you.
And we all need to get breached that
gap.
We were all all of us, you know,
the learned people, the ones who are who
are, you know, role models or speakers, however
you want to, to call us elders.
We need to to bridge that gap and
say, come on, guys, speak to each other.
Let's because I think it's hyper hyper individualism
is is an issue here.
Right.
So explain that hyper individualism.
It's that it's about my rights and about
my response, my obligation.
And that's it.
That's all that counts.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, I mean, we think
so.
A lot of the brothers, the young brothers
are saying feminism and everything that a woman
wants is now feminism.
She's the kind of woman who wants to
dress is not one feminist.
What are you talking about?
She's the kind of woman who would like
to have her own keys to the door.
Feminine.
What?
Everything is called feminist now.
Yes.
And it's such a derogatory term.
That's true, isn't it?
Yeah.
It's just bandied about normative behaviors.
Yeah.
I think that's that's interesting.
I suspect there needs to be more effort,
probably from Islamic scholars or Muslim role models
to to address this subject in a more
rational way, in a more sensible way, probably.
I know Imam Walid has written a book
on Islamic shiva, Muslim chivalry, and he gives
classes to young men as to how they
should, you know, how they should respond to
women and what should be their response.
Brittle was the word I was thinking of.
To my young sisters, I'd say don't be
brittle.
OK, if if a young man says, can
I take your chair?
Say thank you so much.
Yes.
It doesn't make you weak.
It makes you cared for.
It makes you a part of that society.
I'm a big one for going to events.
And at the end, the sisters always want
to gather the chairs.
I'm like, no, you don't move anything, brothers.
Get in there.
Let's use those muscles that you're buffing up
at the gym.
Come and do something useful.
You know, we need to give each other
spaces.
And when I said hyper individualism, what did
I mean?
I meant this is like you said, there's
a selfishness.
If you are a young sister and you
want to go into marriage and you're like,
but I'm not going to cook and I
ain't going to do this.
And well, what is the point of marriage?
You just want a flat chair, basically, with
somebody paying your bills.
No one's going to buy into that.
It's not fair and it's not nice.
It's not kind.
Just be kind to each other.
Why can't people just be normal?
Can I can I ask you a couple
of political questions?
I know a lot of your your book
does discuss your politics prior to becoming Muslim
and how you you changed not only socially
and changed in terms of your spiritual attitude,
but also your political understanding.
And the Iraq war is is, I think,
a a a key milestone in your political
journey and just how duplicitous maybe the British
political elite were and in particular the Labour
Party were in taking Britain to war.
I mean, again, you're from a from someone
who now lives a lot of the year
outside of the country.
Has any of that improved?
Do you feel that British politics has moved
on since that disastrous Iraq war decision?
We know this book really tracks a a
a a spiritual and a political journey of
a person who wanted to have beliefs but
not do anything about it and then was
forced by, as many were, by the Iraq
war to wake up.
In 2003, when I went on that march,
I was breastfeeding one baby, pushing another in
a in a pram.
It was minus three degrees.
If people were there, you they'll remember snowing
and sleeting.
And I told my three-year-old, it's
not meant to be fun.
Kids like you are dying.
Okay, which could sound kind of harsh on
a three-year-old walking in the snow.
But, you know, if you believe in something,
you have to put yourself out there.
Don't be an armchair anything.
And what I saw on that march was
amazing.
There were there were women from Middle England
who told me, I've never been on a
march before, you know, dear, but this isn't
right.
What's happening?
You know, shock and awe.
Is that what we're about now?
My grandfather, my father fought in the war
and it wasn't about killing civilians.
All right.
So we had this idea of decency.
And what the Iraq war did was it
wrecked our version of ourselves as British people.
This was before you became Muslim?
This was before.
Yeah.
And I actually, I met Yusuf Chambers because
of my activity there.
And we...
He's the lawyer, Muslim lawyer, convict.
Yes, sorry.
Yeah, yeah.
And he invited me to to give a
speech at an event for Iraqi war widows
and orphans.
And I bring it up because that that
event was where the first time I'd really
experienced segregation of the genders.
Right.
In my life.
Yes.
So I was speaking on the stage and
then Yusuf said and then I saw all
the cool guys sitting over there and the
sheikhs and Cat Stevens, Yusuf Islam was there.
And I'm like, I'll be sitting over there.
And Yusuf went, the women are over here.
And I went, I'm really like a salty
child.
And I being a thinking person by the
grace of Allah, I thought to myself, oh,
my God, I think I'm a misogynist because
I don't like women.
I don't want to say.
And apart from that, all the racist racism
thoughts that I was having, like, oh, God,
going to be talking about biryani and kids.
I mean, these are all things that we
can ignore or actually pick out in ourselves.
And Islam is a very reflective, you know,
spiritual way of life.
So so I picked up on those.
Anyway, I went to the table and there
was the first niqabi I'd ever spoken to.
Right.
So she's sitting opposite the table and I
thought I'll just be nice and engage her
poor thing, you know, a little bit about
kitchen stuff.
So what do you do?
And I fully expect to say I've got
seven kids and I'm a third wife.
And she said, oh, I'm studying civil civil
engineering at the University of X, Y and
Zed in my fourth year.
You know, I got a first in this
and then I'm leading my class.
And I was like, and she wiped the
floor with me.
Intellectually, she just she she got the mop.
She put me in there and she wiped
the floor with me.
And I loved it because I thought, good
on you.
And what she said to me coming right
back and circling back to the beginning of
our discussion, what does modesty mean to her?
She said she used to be when she
first started university to fit in.
She was in a T-shirt and jeans
and she noticed the men looking at her.
And when she got up, she might she
knew there was an uptick in the scoring
because people liked her presentation because she was
pretty.
And she said, then I started getting close
to my dean and I wanted to to
take away those triggers and protect myself for
my Lord, my family.
And now I have to work not twice
as hard, exponentially hard in my presentations because
I have nothing here.
But my words are good enough for me
to be the head of that class.
I'm like, boy, I got it.
I think that's the moment I got modesty.
And that's the moment I started to like
women.
Can I ask you about your book, your
biography, your memoir, In Search of a Holy
Land?
I read a really fascinating section in the
book about your experience.
I mean, you were someone who was very
much in favor of Tony Blair.
Of course, he's a relative of yours.
I mean, our viewers would know that he's
married to your sister.
And you were very much someone who was
within the labor mode and you supported new
labor as the alternative to, you know, to
conservatism, which was, of course, you know, horrid
in the 1990s.
Oh, it's horrid now.
And it's still horrid.
That's true.
That's very true.
But then there was a change in your
view of labor and the Iraq War, of
course, as you've just discussed, you know, comes
into that.
But, you know, I found it a fascinating
read.
And in a way, it allowed me to
understand how someone who was a non-Muslim
viewed those years.
Because from a Muslim perspective, you know, I
saw it very much as a war on
terror.
This is a prime minister who's getting close
to Bush.
And, you know, it's amazing.
Every day, there was something on TV about
Muslims.
And every other day, Tony Blair was announcing
an anti-terror law.
And, you know, I just felt that Muslims
were under siege during that period.
So it was fascinating to see from your
perspective, but just from a broader sense.
I mean, what lay behind?
Why did you write this book, your memoir?
I wrote this for somebody like myself in
my 20s, who got a sense that this
isn't it.
This table, this mug, this world isn't it.
The material world, that there's something more out
there, but couldn't put my finger on it.
And many of the people that we meet,
they're exploring Buddhism, and they're going through the
tick boxes.
Even veganism is almost like a religious cult.
Now, you're cleansing your body to get closer
to some amorphous being, right?
But what is the access point to a
spirituality that leads to God?
I wanted to give that access point, and
also to run through the differences in the
culture, the things that have been happening over
the last 25 years.
Who were we and who are we now?
And there's so much in there as well,
about traveling to Muslim lands, and to accepting
my own innate prejudices as well.
I hope I've done it in a humorous
way.
I think people do tell me that, yes,
I laughed my way through it, and I
cried my way through it.
But that honesty about what I thought about
Muslims, then you meet them.
And then you suddenly find yourself in a
mosque waking up going, Oh my God, God
is Allah.
And this guy, Muhammad, I kind of think
he's the last prophet.
What do you do with that?
And so it takes us on that journey.
And I really wanted to do that for
people like me in my 20s.
But I think more than ever, my readers
are Muslims.
Young Muslims asking themselves, I don't know why
I'm Muslim.
I'm Muslim by heritage.
But I don't know how to ask the
questions.
And I don't know how to come over
this hump, if I can make it in
modernity as a Muslim.
It answers those questions, inshallah, in one way,
from a western perspective to an eastern perspective
from a from a Christian to a Muslim.
Can I ask you one last question about
Palestine?
Now, you've been a advocate for Palestinian rights
for a very long time.
And it's often quite perplexing to just see
how Israel is treated in a very double,
you know, it's become now common to say
that there is a hypocrisy, there's double standards,
and Israel is treated in a completely different
way than any other country in the world.
It can get away with anything, really.
And there will not be a uproar in
the British press or in the American press
or the European press.
How do you understand this indefensible support for
Israel in the West?
I don't think they're getting it all their
own way anymore.
Right.
It's changing.
Since, you know, just in the little time
span, when I've been an observer.
And the other good thing, by the way,
much better thing is that the Palestinians now
have their own voice.
Social media has allowed people like me to
step back.
You know, you don't need my voice now.
Maybe you never did.
Maybe it was white savior.
Wallahu alam.
I just, you know, we saw something and
we wanted to reflect upon it with the
world.
So there's a Palestinian voices now of pain,
of brilliance, of cleverness, of resistance, and they're
being heard.
So that's number one.
And the second thing is, I think the
exceptionalism is falling apart.
Alhamdulillah, studies have shown that young Christians in
America, which is which is really Israel's capital
state of support, are now more likely to
support the Palestinian cause than be Zionists.
And that's huge.
I think a couple of weeks ago in
Australia, is it the government who said they're
going to be referring to the occupant, they're
not going to be calling it the occupied
West Bank, they're going to be calling it
Palestine now.
That for the Zionists is like the stab
in the heart.
So yes, there is still political exceptionalism.
And unfortunately, it looks going to take many
more deaths, and much more pain, probably, for
that to change.
But it is changing.
Alhamdulillah, you know, never give up, never give
up.
Allah sees all.
They want to destroy Al-Aqsa, you know,
Allah is with the believers.
And the world is waking up.
So I actually feel much more positive than
I did at the start of my personal
experience with this question in 2005.
Sister Lauren Griffith, jazakallah for your time today,
it's been fascinating.
It's an absolute pleasure.