Maryam Amir – Emotional Spaces , Mehdi Hassan, Zahra Billoo and Imam Mansoor Sabree
AI: Summary ©
The speakers emphasize the importance of creating a culture of justice and empowerment for their community, acknowledging the negative impact of recent protests on their personal and professional lives. They also touch on the challenges faced by their community, including poverty and housing affordability, and the need for everyone to take responsibility for their actions to find the right people and resources. The generation of Muslims who believe in faith and a spirit of forgiveness is also highlighted, along with the importance of learning to be positive and bringing forth the message of forgiveness. The speakers emphasize the need to prioritize forgiveness and embracing the idea of forgiveness as a process that takes care of past mistakes and brings good deeds to life.
AI: Summary ©
The Islamic Society of North America held their annual
convention recently in Detroit, Michigan, and this portion a
discussion on challenges in the Muslim American community. It's an
hour, 25 minutes.
All right, everyone, hear me. Good. I have nothing interesting
to say beyond that.
Salamu alaykum, welcome to generation rise. My name is Harun
muhal. I am the moderator, or as I've been described, the
instigator. My job is to get the conversation going.
We have a very distinguished panel here. What I'm going to try to do
is basically let each of them speak as much as possible. And if
the conversation dies down, your questions will be brought up to
me, and then I'll filter them for the most interesting, provocative,
funniest and strangest. Feel free to throw anything in there, just
to kind of keep them on their toes. Is there something you've
always wanted to know about Imam lensor Or, for example, Matthew?
Now is your chance to ask that question? Because I will make sure
to read it out loud.
Yeah. Yeah.
So
how's everyone doing?
Good? It took me two hours to get here from the airport, which is as
long as it took me to fly here. So that is generation rise on an
American scale. The
purpose of tonight's conversation is to basically talk about the
issues, dilemmas, opportunities and challenges that are facing
Muslim communities going forward. And so what I'm going to do
basically is start the conversation off by introducing
Matthew right here to my left, who many of you may have seen or
heard. Matthew is the political director of Huffington Post UK.
He's a columnist for the New Statesman magazine and the
presenter of head to head on Al Jazeera English. If you have not
seen it, you definitely should. He is a biographer of British
opposition leader Ed Miliband, and has published an electronic book
on the financial crisis in 2012 in The Guardian newspaper. Mahdi
wrote, The British Muslim community has had a tortured
relationship with politicians in recent years that it has become a
cliche to say that young British Muslims are alienated, estranged
and marginalized from the political process,
doesn't make it any less true. Muslims are woefully
underrepresented in political life. The number of Muslim members
of parliament in the UK, for instance, stands at eight out of
650 now that was about two years ago. But what I wanted to ask
Matthew to start with is
when we are constantly as a community being tagged by events
abroad, overseas, for example, most recently, the rise of ISIS,
how do we as a community focus on the domestic when there is so much
pressure on us to talk about the so called foreign
Salaam Alaikum? Everyone. Lovely to be here in Detroit. Thank you
very much. Harun for that very kind introduction. Lovely to be on
such a distinguished panel. In answer to your not provocative
question at all, I would say, what a way to start.
I'll start by berating my fellow Muslims. No look, my view is very
clear. I don't think we should force a choice when it comes to
discussing issues that matter. And what's interesting is we have,
this is a three day event. I'm looking at the program. Those of
you have looked at your programs. Should I get closer closer? Okay.
I won't start again. Look, I don't think we should have to choose
between foreign subjects and domestic subjects. If you look at
your program, you'll see isnas put together an amazing range of panel
events over the next couple of days. I want to go to all of them,
but obviously you can't, and there's so many issues that we can
cover. Should cover, have the ability and intellect to cover,
have the expertise within our community to cover. And I just
don't buy this false choice that so many people in our communities,
both in the UK, where I live, in Europe, and here in North America,
which is, well, you know, we've got to have this debate about Gaza
and nothing else, or about Iraq and nothing else. We've got to go
on the media only talk about ISIS and terrorism and radicalization.
Look, take it from me. I'm a journalist who happens to be a
Muslim, I can assure you, when I started out, the only thing people
wanted to talk to me about were these issues, not just domestic
versus foreign, but Islamic issues in general. And now you know 100
guy who then went and wrote, as you said, I wrote a biography of
the leader of the opposition, Ed Miliband. People. Why did you
write a book about him? He's not going to be Prime Minister. Well,
we'll see next year. But separately, I kind of be like the
first book I was going to write was not going to be a book about
Islam, because it's so easy to get pigeonholed. To take directly your
question. I wrote this column in 2012 when George Galloway was
elected as a member of parliament in Bradford. Some of you may know
George Galloway, the British MP. And my point was that Muslims
cannot keep going back to the ballot box and voting basically
only on the basis of foreign policy issues, only on the basis
of which war is current right now. That doesn't mean that foreign
policy isn't important. Of course not. It is. Take it from someone
like me. You know, you want to talk about Palestinians. I spent
the last month arguing with various supporters of Israel about
Gaza. I've been on radio shows with the Israeli ambassador to the
UK. You.
To talk about Iraq. I've written several columns about ISIS. You
know, I'm at Iraq, an Iraq. You want to talk about Hans, Blix,
WMD, yellow cake from Niger. Let's go right now. We could refight the
2003 Iraq invasion, but you know what you can you can what's the
phrase? You can walk and chew gum at the same time. You can do both.
You can also focus on issues at home that matter, issues in our
community that matter, whether it's, you know, the high rates of
Muslim in prison, whether it's the number of Muslims who are
disproportionately represented amongst mental health cases in the
UK, for example, whether it's issues to do with drugs and *
and all of those other issues that the previous session was touching
upon here, I just don't buy this false division between we must
talk about foreign policy, because Muslims are dying. The Ummah
matters, and people who want to talk about domestic politics,
they're self indulgent, they're middle class. They don't care
about their fellow Muslims abroad. They're focusing on things that
don't matter when people are dying. Now, yes, people are dying,
but that doesn't mean that other issues aren't important, and
actually, not just from a moral perspective, but from a self
serving purpose. If we focus on issues at home and are a better
community at home, a more prosperous, more stable, more
united, more politically effective community home, we can actually do
much more to help on those causes abroad that matter to us.
Thank you.
To my right, we have Zara Bilu, who is a community organizer civil
rights attorney. Many of you have seen her eloquently defending
Muslim civil rights and civil rights more generally, in the
United States and abroad. She serves as the executive director
of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of care, the Council on
American Islamic Relations, which is one of the most notable Muslim
organizations that we have in the United States, and I wanted to ask
you, the last few years, have seen some really intense debates and
conversations in a lot of Muslim communities about where we stand
as a country, domestically and internationally. And sometimes
these conversations, building off of what Mahdi said, can become
kind of intense, and they provoke sharp divisions and disagreements.
Now there's nothing to say that we as a community have to agree on
where we stand, but how do we deal with the divisions in our
community that are inevitably going to keep coming up as these
conversations, especially involving Muslims, become more and
more pointed, more heated. You
also not on. Thank you to Haru and to everyone else on the panel, and
to ISNA for having this conversation. It's always
difficult to talk about disagreements and then to give us
all the stage and hope that we won't do it wrong.
We build together over and over. One of the things that my parents
always raised me with is you fight more with your siblings than you
will fight with anyone in your life, and then maybe when you get
married, you fight a little bit with your spouse, but never the
way you fight with your siblings. And you just you can't, you can't
read yourself. Of your siblings or your parents, they're your family.
Our community is one family. And one of the things that I remember
post 911 that we talked about a lot, was unity and unity and
unity. And every time there was disagreement, people got worried
and they got scared. Except we have to realize that Unity does
not mean uniformity. We're going to disagree. We have to draw our
lines in the sand. For some people, that's going to be boycott
divestment sanctions. For some people, it's going to be gender
relations. I'll tell you, personally, I have trouble working
with people who disrespect women. I have trouble being in separate
spaces. I have trouble not seeing the Imam. And so when I'm put in
those spaces, my personal lines are tested, right? And everyone
has those, but I come back over and over, I was raised to go to
the masjid every day of the week, and I'm grateful that I still get
to do that, and I don't always agree, but we're stronger
together. One of the things that's really easy to do is to fall
apart, right? How easy would it be to splinter this group in this
room into 15 different conventions? We could probably
find more ways to divide us. But the former president of the United
States, Jimmy Carter, doesn't come speak to a convention of 50
Muslims. He comes and he speaks to ISNA, because we have power when
we mobilize together. And so I say fight. Put your opinions out
there, work within the organizations and the
institutions, to put forward your agenda, but also understand that
unity is going to mean more than any divisions that we ever have.
And so if we don't have the discipline to fall in line when
it's necessary to fall in line when it's necessary to mobilize
1000s and really millions of Muslims. When you think about even
how big this group is, take a second and think actually there's
somewhat around 7 million Muslims in the United States. If you could
move 7 million Muslims, we could probably fix our four.
We're in policy and our domestic policy, but it takes discipline,
teamwork and unity first.
Thank you. I
was using the broken mic because I'm very smart.
That was a joke. Nobody laughed like That's great. He's really not
smart. It's still a story early, right? You know, is it the long
cab ride.
Nothing, man, I'm getting nothing here. It's really terrible. I'm so
sorry. I feel really bad. You know, it's bad enough. I'm not a
doctor,
so there's nothing wrong. If you're not a doctor, your kids can
pay for school themselves.
It's true. So on my far right, Imam, Mansoor Sabri, who, I
believe we met the first time in West Virginia. In West Virginia,
which is not where I expected to meet, the resident Imam, a
community activist of the largest African American Muslim community
in the United States. He's based in Atlanta, Georgia area. If you
don't know him, you should know him. And I wanted to ask you,
we have a lot of big conversations. You're the Imam of
a very large, very significant, very historical community. What
are the issues you see on the ground? What are the conversations
you think we should be having up here?
MS, Minda Sadam warekum, again, it's an honor to be here on stage
with this distinguished panel and discussing some very heavy, heavy
issues, big topics and and just to briefly comment on what has been
said, I think for for me, personally and for a segment of
the Muslim community, is very difficult or challenging sometimes
to speak about international affairs when our concerns are very
domestic.
I read a report recently done by an ISNA Research Group isan Bagby,
just noting that 36% of the Muslim community in America is made up of
African Americans, those who converted over the first and
second generation. Me, personally, I'm a second generation Muslim. My
parents converted in the in the My father in the late 60s, my mother
in the 70s. And it's a large segment of people who are not
necessarily over concerned about global issues and the degree in
which we have dialog and conversation. So it's good to kind
of have this mix.
And so for us, it becomes staying balanced with engaging and
understanding the global position and understanding the Muslim world
and how it affects us with this shrinking table that we all sit at
as human beings. But I always pose the question, when we have this
large segment of Muslims in America
who changed their religion,
who converted,
we should be asking, what
decision what decision making process took place? Why did they
come to the fold of Al Islam and continue to kind of use that as a
way to have meaningful dialog and conversation as citizens of this
country? Because as a faith,
it's something that really engages all types of people and the
diversity that comes with Al Islam historically within our Sira,
within the formation of the first community in Medina, we have a
replica of that here in America that's profound and unique,
that's unseen throughout the world, and so just kind of calling
on that strength and allowing for what we're going through as a
people to kind of dictate what the top priorities are. I'm an imam.
That means that I get abused a lot,
used quite a bit, but as Imams, we put ourselves in that position to
be servants to society. So when I think about really, just to kind
of be brief with it, when I when I think about, really, why so many
people chose al Islam as their way from the African American
community in particular, it was because Islam presented a solution
to a problem and to be leaders in today's society. We have to think
about it that way, what type of problem is in existence, and how
can we pose a suitable, responsible solution for it? And
by default, you become the one who's foremost. You become the one
who's out front. You become the one who's leading. But it's not
sitting back and having conversations about it, but it's
really about being active. So a lot of the work we do is in
community development and seeing the problems daily, seeing the
issues that come in through the door, from from community members
who are Muslim and even those who are just neighbors who need
assistance, we begin to think about as a Muslim, from our
source, from the Quran, from the tradition of Prophet Muhammad,
sallAllahu, alayhi wa sallam. How do we formulate new ideas and new
solutions for current everyday problems, and that, believe me,
brings new Muslims into the fold.
And on my left here we have Maryam amiribrahimiji. We actually shared
a cab ride here, and I got to hear her speak quite eloquently and
passionately about social justice and what's going on in the United
States today. I'm sure everyone.
Seen and been, I think,
dismayed, concerned, heartbroken, frustrated by what's happening in
Ferguson and the larger patterns and trends and speaks to
sometimes, it feels to me that we don't necessarily see things until
they pop up on a certain kind of radar, right? Things are fine if
they're in the background, and then they blow open. And suddenly,
many people ask ourselves, did we really have a problem that big
that we didn't see? And Maryam is working towards her Bachelor's in
Islamic sciences through Al Azhar University. So she's a scholar of
Islam. She's, as I said, passionate about social justice.
She's a hafezah, which means she's memorized the Quran, the Muslim
scripture, and so I wanted to ask you, in the work that you do, what
are the conversations that we're not having? Imam Suarez spoke
about how different communities have different attachments to
Islam, and what I'm wondering conversely is, what are the things
perhaps we're not talking about that could lead to the opposite,
to people, perhaps drifting away from the community or even from
Islam itself.
Okay, let me actually ask all of you a question. Raise your hand if
you know someone who has dealt with depression in the Muslim
community. Raise your hand everyone. Take a quick look
around, see how many hands there are. Okay. Hands down, depression
or isolation to the point of actually attempting suicide or
cutting or other forms of self harm. Raise your hand.
Look around. That's a lot of people raising their hand. Hands
down. How many of you know or have personally experienced racism in
the Muslim community?
Okay, look around. Look around. Hands down. As woman, how many of
you have felt like you don't have a space in the Muslim community,
don't raise your hand.
Okay, as men, how many of you feel like you have issues that can't
actually be addressed in the Muslim community?
Okay, you can't raise your hand because you can't be addressed. So
that was a trick question. Why did you raise your
hand? Those are broad issues, but in our community, we deal with
people who leave Islam completely. And it's not because Islam isn't
this incredible religion. It's because our communities don't have
relevant conversations about what people are actually going through,
and some of these issues may start young, may start in a person's
home life, but as you continue and deal with the type of segregation,
the type of sexism, the racism and a lot of the phobias that we have
in our community, it causes people to start feeling inadequate as
individuals, and it causes us to feel like we can't even be a part
of a spiritual space that's supposed to help us feel closer to
the One who created us, and when that connection is lost, it's very
difficult for us to continue to feel passionate about issues that
have to do with humanitarianism or political issues, when we feel so
broken. So one of the things that I've seen in the work that I've
been doing in different communities is that people are so
in pain, in so much pain, because, for example, a brother told me
he's an African American convert. He's been Muslim for almost 10
years. He told me that black is the wrong color to be in the
Muslim community.
Another young person, a high school student, came up to me
after a lecture, and she told me that it was the first time in her
life that she felt like God actually loved her. She thought
that God hated her her entire life, because in her family, she's
got problems. Her mom is constantly telling her, there's no
point in you praying, because God isn't going to accept it anyway,
since I'm always upset with you, and many young people have told me
they've heard that from their parents before. Then they go into
the masjid, and there's no real, tangible space in the masjid.
Sometimes for young people, then they go to school. And the people,
for example, who have who embraced this sister, were individuals who
were very, very strong, strongly involved with drugs. And she got
involved with drugs, and eventually she attempted suicide.
But why did that even happen? Because she was trying to fill a
void that didn't, it wasn't filled within our community. So one of
the things that I think I appreciate about every individual
here who do a lot of work for building the community is that
they follow a particular example. And this is something that I think
we need to keep in mind. Asmaa bintsu mais she was a female
campaigner the Prophet peace. Be upon peace. Be upon prop Muhammad.
She converted to Islam. She migrated to Abyssinia, then
migrated back to Medina. Now this is seven years after the migration
of the Prophet. Peace be upon him. She's coming in late. How many of
you guys are converts? Raise your hands.
Hi, hi, hi. May God bless every single one of you and every single
one of your family members. Amin,
how many of you came to Islam later on in life.
Okay? And how many of you have ever felt like you're inferior to
someone else who's Muslim because they've made you feel that way?
That's happened to me many times now. Asmaa, she comes in seven
years after being in Abyssinia, she's visiting the daughter.
Of Amar who Sunni Muslims revere highly. Omar walks in and he's
like, Who's she? And Hafsa, his daughter, is like, oh, you know
that's Asmaa bin to me. So he's like, Oh, she's the one who made
the Hijra. And you know what he told her? He was like, We got to
Medina first. We got here first. So we have more of a right to the
Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him than you do. In other words,
we're Sunnis, we're the majority of the Muslim community. We have
more of a right to Muslim spaces than you do. We were hijab, you
don't. We have more of a right to Muslim spaces than you do. We're
born Muslims. You're not. We have more of a right to Muslim spaces
than you do. We're Arab. You're everything else. We have more of a
right to Muslim spaces than you do. We hear these discussions in
the community constantly. But what did Asmaa do? She used her agency
a voice. And one thing that all of these individuals are doing, and
I'm sure many of you are doing, and this is what they alluded to,
is that she didn't just sit there and go, you're right, I'm a woman.
I'm inferior. I have nothing to say. She was like, by God, I swear
you're wrong, and I'm not going to eat, I'm not going to drink, until
I go to the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him and tell peace
be upon him and tell him what you've said. I want to tell it
like it is when she told the Prophet, peace be upon him. You
know what he told her? He didn't say, cover your face. Leave, even
though, excuse me, I don't mean to say cover your face in an
oppressive way. Many women choose to do that. May God bless them.
But sometimes that is the way that we treat women who have something
very important to say about the dynamics of our community. The
Prophet saw them instead. He told her, Omar doesn't have more of a
right to me than you, nor do his companions. O Kemal, what he told
her is that you and your companions migrated twice, and
they only migrated once, so the reward is more for them. When she
used her agency of voice, she not only affected herself, but she
empowered the rest of the community, of people who came
later. The reason I wanted to focus on this really quickly is
because we have the collective ability, like Zahara mentioned, to
focus on all these other areas like Mehdi mentioned, but we need
to make sure that we as a community feel like we can voice
the issues that we're dealing with and that we feel comfortable
having the agency of doing that, so that we can go into a community
like Imam mansours as a convert, or somebody who feels like
historically, we've been oppressed in this country, and we can say
that we have issues. We need to focus on that span beyond what
fills our Facebook feeds every few weeks and then changes when people
are dying inside. So the point is, Asmaa used her agency of voice,
and every single one of us has that ability.
I just wanted to pick up on that very spot, on every word you said.
I agree with that. I'm just want to pick up on a couple of things.
One is, I think one of the reasons the behavior you identify and feel
free to disagree is, I think there's a lot of laziness in our
community, not just physically lazy, although we are physically
lazy, and I include myself in that, but intellectually lazy. And
I think we get to this point where we say, I use the phrase early,
you know, walking and chewing gum at the same time, this idea that
you know people, I'm sure many of you are listening right now, and
you would have heard, as I did, such a passionate statement about
depression and about self harm. And a lot of you might say, well,
you know, we can't be everywhere at once. We can't all deal with
these issues. I don't have the expertise, but I can go and
protest about something that's happening abroad. And I think we
are too comfortable. We are in a comfort zone. And one of the
reasons for that is because, you know, people say, Oh, the Middle
East. I think in our minds, it's not complicated at all. I think
there's an identifiable set of baddies. There's an identifiable
set of solutions. We're on the side of the good guys, and
therefore it's very easy to take a stance, speak out, vocally, join
groups, go on protests, and when there's more complicated or
complex or nuanced or slightly less glamorous discussions to be
had at home or protest to take part in our universities or our
workplaces or our community, then it's kind of like, Well, I haven't
got time. I went to that protest last week on Iraq or Gaza or
whatever it was. I can't go on this protest about climate change
or about housing or about education or healthcare, and it
really bothers me, because that's laziness. There's no reason why we
can't do more than one thing. We have plenty of time which we
choose to waste and abuse. And you know, I took part in a rally
against austerity in 2011 a year after the British Conservative led
government came in and brought in unprecedented spending cuts, I
took part in a rally. I was on stage at Hyde Park. Quarter of a
million people marched against austerity in 2011 in the UK. And
I'm not saying Muslims are only people who wear hijabs or beards,
but I would take that as my rough indicator. Looking at the crowd,
there were not many Muslim faces that I could see from my vantage
point in Hyde Park, the same park where Muslims have gathered to
protest against the invasion of Iraq, to protest against the
Israeli bombing of Gaza, to protest against Danish cartoons of
the Prophet. You draw a cartoon, Muslims will do a protest, but
you're about to lose your job or your livelihood. You know, British
Pakistani and British Bangladeshi communities are amongst the most
deprived communities in the UK. They're some of the communities
hardest hit by government economic policies, by austerity, by
spending cuts.
And yet, where are the Muslims on this, on these struggles, on these
battles at home, which affect our daily lives and struggles. And one
last point, just to pick up something Zara said about
you were talking about siblings, and about how you never fight with
anyone as you do with a sibling here, here that my sister's not
watching. The
problem with that analogy is that sometimes I look at our community
and again, feel free to disagree. I don't think we do behave as a
family at all. I think there's very little evidence for that
suggestion. Perhaps sections of the community do, but sections
certainly don't. And I give the example of those of us who and
those of us on this platform, those of you here who have taken
an unpopular stance, who have taken a stance that the majority
hasn't agreed with. I can only speak for myself, but we don't
feel like a member of the family when you take that stance. You
know it doesn't matter how much credit you have in your bank
account, doesn't matter how much good work you've done. There's a
lot of suspicion in our community. There's a lot of lack of trust,
which is not which most families, of course, do have trust. No
matter how bad your son or daughter is, you will always still
give your life to them. You still trust them, and unfortunately, our
community, you know you have this issue. Now I'll give you one
example from my own life here. Let's make myself I've written,
what, 20, 3040, articles, columns, blogs about Israel, about Israel's
oppression of Gaza. I'm accused by people who support Israel of being
obsessed with Palestine, etc, etc. I write one column about anti
semitism in the Muslim community. Suddenly, all the comments are
Mehdi, you sold out. Mehdi, you secret Zionist. Mehdi, what are
you doing for your career? What are you doing to you? You want to
be popular in these people's circles. Doesn't matter what
you've done previously. If you you know you write anything that
doesn't follow the party line on Israel, you're a secret Zionist.
You go to a White House if star controversial subject, I believe
in the US recently, you might as well be flying the drone itself
that dropped the bomb on Pakistani children. I mean, this is the
level sometimes of the discourse in our community, which is one
perceived bad deed, even if it's not a bad deed, cancels out
everything else. And we're suspicious of the motivations of
those of us who are on the same journey. You know, we talk about
Sirata lustakim, yes, the right path is pretty broad and
capacious. In my view. You can be on that path and heading in the
same direction as everyone else, but doing your struggle in a
different way. You can be a doctor or engineer, you can be a
politician or a journalist. You can be an imam or an academic. You
can take a more engaged stance. You can take a more disengaged
stance, but the idea that you can suddenly turn to your fellow
Muslim and say, Aha, you're not doing it my way, therefore you're
a sellout, therefore you're a failure, therefore you've left the
community, that is a huge problem in our community, and that's what
prevents us from being the family we should be. I
it.
So I'm not personally attached to the example, so I don't mind that
you attacked it, but I will say families go to counseling. Mahdi,
so if this isn't where we work it out, and not you and me, but like
the community, like we go families go to counseling. They have
fights. They don't invite people to weddings, like they hash it
out, they disagree, but they are still family. Those are bonds that
can't be broken, and so I agree, the family isn't there. It's had
some rough years, right? Like, money's difficult. People
intermarried. Like some people are some nice some people are Shia,
some people want to have an Iftar at the White House, and others of
us don't think that's the best idea, but in the end, we're
family, and if we're not talking about the issues, if we're not
fighting about the issues, then they're sort of under the rug. And
that's worse. I agree with you, sir. I agree with that. I agree
with that point, but let's not be under any illusions. The people
who hear ISNA, and the people in this crowd and the people who paid
money to come to this convention, mashallah, good for all of you,
you know, not the same as the community out there. There are
many people out there, unfortunately, fellow Muslim
brothers and sisters of ours, who aren't interested in going to
counseling, who, you know, who just want to say, who just want to
be negative, unfortunately and destructive, and only want to take
the simple stances, the easy stance is the black and white
stances, the comfortable stances. And I'm not sure, and I'm, you
know, if we're going to hear from the audience, I'd love to hear
ideas about how we get to those people, how we win over those
people. Because, you know, I'm reaching this point, maybe because
I'm in a particular space that you're, you know, in the space I
occupy, you have to have a bit of a thick skin when it comes to and
I always thought I would have to have that thick skin to deal with
non Muslims, to deal with opponents, to deal with people who
are attacking me for my ideological view of doing a
Muslim. And in recent years, I found actually, I need that
thicker skin for people in my own community more, which is a pretty
depressing
realization, sure. So the hardest thing for me about wearing hijab
growing up was that I had the most insults and the most questions
from the Muslim community. So I get it. We have to have thicker
skin in our community. The last thing on the family example is
when we talk about marriage counseling and family counseling,
one of the things we run into is that many people don't even know
that counseling resources.
Exist. So for me, when I landed at the Detroit airport, and I was
really excited that the person at the coffee shop was Arab and,
like, wanted to talk to me about my flight and all of that, he
didn't know what ISNA is, so he had no idea why I was here. And
granted, I came in, I think, a couple of like, some time before
the convention. But there's also some work that needs to be done
about going wide, about making sure that those 7 million Muslims
know about the community, know where their local mosque is, know
what resources exist. The thing I wanted to touch on is, I think a
lot of times we talk about this as talking versus doing about one
protest versus another protest. And I don't know that that works.
It's got to be a lifestyle. So looking at like using myself as an
example, I don't know if the airline I flew in on had union
staff, and I didn't check to see if the hotel staff at the place
I'm staying are union and I don't know if I tipped as generously as
I could have when I had my food. And did I greet everyone with a
smile, recognizing that I'm an ambassador of Islam when I'm out
in the street? Do I care about what I'm buying? Did everyone
download the Baikal app after the recent Gaza attack? Did anyone
download it, the one that helps you figure out what you're buying?
A few of you, how many of us are actually using it, right? So,
like, it's not just did you go to a protest? One would argue that
protests are just one method of achieving change, and alone, like
any other method, are absolutely ineffective. So if that's all
we're doing, then that's not enough. Talking is important, too.
One of the things that we said in the Bay Area when the recent
attack happened in Gaza was that it's not enough to share it on
Facebook, or to talk to your family and friends about it, or
even to hold a town hall about the issues at the mosque, you have to
be talking to people at the grocery store, at work, at school
about these issues and other issues. The other thing that I'll
say is, it sounds really terrible to say, but there is a, as Mahdi
said, a self serving reason to care about the other issues. I
could say that we should all agree that our religion calls us to work
for justice, and that working for justice is itself an act of
worship, and that issues of injustice are everywhere. You
don't have to fly to Palestine or Pakistan or even the White House
to find those, those are in our own community. And so there is a
religiously motivated reason to work for it. But Mahdi said this,
and I think it's worth just, you know, reiterating over and over
and over again, is that when we're when we're working on other
issues, issues that affect other communities, sometimes not even
our own, but I think there's a let's be real about what affects
us, and things like poverty, things like the mortgage crisis,
those things affect our community too. We're just not talking about
it because those people can't afford to come to conventions,
right? So whether it's an issue that affects me or doesn't, I have
a religiously motivated reason to work on it, but I also have a
selfish reason. All of the issues that I think I should care about,
like Palestine, like the drones, like building a mosque, I'm going
to be more effective at mobilizing allies for those issues, at
garnering empathy for those issues. If I was there. How many
of us expect our neighbors to come to our mosque when we have an open
house? A lot of us, if I send you an invitation to an open house at
my mosque. I really want you to come. How many of us are willing
to go to the synagogues, to the temples, to the churches, to say
we're also here to stand with you that it was even an issue about
whether or not Muslims should stand for Ferguson is itself
telling right, that that should have been an automatic thing for
us to do,
sure go ahead very, very briefly before that point goes so I'm not
hugging the mic. I don't even have one. Very briefly, very briefly,
just to pick up on that. In the UK, there was an interfaith
gathering between a local mosque and a synagogue where they had,
you know, people came and there were events, etc, and then it
stopped. And I said to one of the organizers, why has it stopped?
And he said, because the Jews always came to our mosque, but
none of us would go to the synagogue. And that's what we do
with interfaith events. Unfortunately, we want it all for
us and for our benefits and our causes. Are we there for their
causes? Absolutely, superb, excellent. You know, I think
there's a lot of positive things happening in our community, and
there are a lot of different people involved in different
things, but our challenge is we try to capture all of it under the
umbrella of these are, this is the Muslim community, or this is the
effort of this organization, et cetera, when we have to just live
as human beings and get engaged in the things that matter to us,
sometimes we live in a society that kind of chops us up into
different segments of society, which religion you're a part of,
what race you're part of, what generation you're part of. We're
falling victim to that same type of thinking and not understanding
that everything that the human being does has to be called upon
by his inner faith and belief that God has chosen you for this
mission, for this purpose, for this idea.
That he's guiding you every day, constantly, regardless of your
gender, your race, your your your generation, that you're a part of,
get involved where things matter, and that's how we have to kind of
look at the life of the human being, is that when you get
involved in something that matters, you're going to make a
difference, and you should believe in making that difference.
Ferguson was not a question for me. It's a it's a civil rights
issue. So if it's a human rights issue. And then as an African
American, I saw very close to home as a nephew issue or as a young
brother issue that I see every day as you all don't live in the south
of America, it's a little different than in the northern
cities, and it's and it's a real challenge. Race issues still
exist, and they still matter. So where things matter? Muslims
should be involved. Where things matter, Muslims should be
involved.
So I had a personal reflection on the flight over largely because I
don't actually fit on planes, so can't really sleep or relax, and I
don't actually know how a plane flies if I can't stand up in it,
it just I don't understand physics. That's why I'm here and
don't have real job.
But, you know, one thing I was thinking about was, you know, here
we are again, going to war with Iraq.
And it brought me back, as Matthew pointed out, to 2003 and it was an
interesting time in my life, and I want to, I promise it all makes
sense.
2003 I graduated from college. I thought I was going to go to law
school. I went to law school, and I was unbelievably miserable. I
absolutely detested and low as to law school. Nothing against
lawyers, but it was not for me,
and we all the law school,
but in my blinkered view of the world, there were only two career
options, either you're a doctor or you're a lawyer. And it sounds
ridiculous now, but this is what I honestly thought. And I thought to
myself, if I don't become a doctor and I don't become a lawyer, I'm
going to become nothing.
Could be an accountant. Yes, that's That's true. I didn't even
know that option existed. Also, as previously said, I can't count
either. So that wasn't an option. And I remember feeling very
profoundly like a personal failure. And at the same time, I
was a like, kind of a street activist, right? Please don't look
me up on Google before. 2003 I was also a lot heavier. Doesn't make
any sense. But, you know, we were organizing these protests against
the Iraq War, and 10s of 1000s of people were coming out, and it
appeared to have made absolutely no difference, right? All those
people came onto the streets and nothing happened. The war went
ahead. It was a terrible idea, and it turned out to be even more of a
terrible idea. The reason I'm bringing this up is because I want
to ask each of you, how has failure, in any respect, shaped
your life and your career? Because I think sometimes we have a
discourse in a lot of communities right, where we talk about
achievements and success, and we don't talk about how we deal with
when things don't go our way, and how sometimes, sort of as we
heard, when things don't go our way, there are opportunities for
us we don't see. And I wish you know when I was in that age
bracket and point in my life, so to speak, that I had heard that
there was perhaps value to not getting what I wanted and to
seeing things not work out, because it showed me things about
myself I didn't understand. So I wanted to start with Miriam and
ask you, you know what, what got you here?
You know? What are the experiences that you wish you could share with
people? This is called Generation rise, right? So what do we have to
share with people out there? What do we wish they knew about us or
knew about themselves? You
I came from a family where many people, many of my family members,
converted to Islam. So when my parents were raising me, Islam was
a it was a part of my identity, but I didn't connect to that, and
I didn't want to be that. So it wasn't until later on, when I
started reading the Quran in the English translation, after a
spiritual experience that I actually started wanting to take
on being Muslim and I wanted to live it. That was so exciting. And
I'm a very passionate person. I used to I was the president of my
student body Council. I was involved with local politics. I
was so excited about now sharing with everyone how awesome Muslim
women are. Since now I'm a real Muslim woman, because I identify
as that, but the more that I learned about Islam and my super
excitement to become a real understanding Muslim, I started
doubting my faith because of what I learned about women's rights and
roles, and I want to clarify what that means. I had individuals who
thought that they knew religion tell me that women shouldn't do
this, shouldn't do that, shouldn't be involved with this. Me up here.
Never the way that I speak loudly. No. My personality entirely. I
thought was a test from God himself, because he was trying to
see whether or not I could keep quiet when he's naturally.
Really made me this way, and that caused me to really doubt, is this
really the religion that I want to be a part of? And I know many
women have experienced that as well.
One of the things that helped me through that, even though it was
very painful and it took many years to get out of it, was that I
started recognizing that the reason I felt this way was because
sometimes in our communities, we put people in positions of power
who are not educated and not able to be relevant to be there. Sheik
Yusuf aldhawi talks about in his introduction to Tahrir al Mara,
it's a book that talks about the liberation of women in the time of
the Prophet. Peace be upon him. He talks about two of the reasons
that we have issues in the Muslim community when it comes to women
that didn't exist during the time of the Prophet Muhammad. Peace be
upon him. One of them is that we have a misapplication of our
textual evidences. So we use something and we say women
shouldn't do this because of this hadith. But when you really look
at that hadith, that's not at all what that's supposed to mean. The
second is having like a bad assumption. So sometimes a scholar
may be a scholar of Hadith, but he's not a scholar in fiqh. A
scholar may be a scholar in Qur'an, but she's not a scholar in
another area, but we take from the wrong people who don't necessarily
understand our situation here. So one of the reasons that I felt the
most difficult time period in my life, which was trying to figure
out whether or not I really wanted to assert my Islamic identity, was
finding what Islam really is, and it is an incredibly empowering,
incredibly liberating and incredibly socially just move
life. Movement for me, Islam changed my life in the most
incredible way after I went through the pain of thinking that
I lived what Islam really wanted from me. So in one aspect, my
experiences in trying to become scholarly caused me so much pain
and so much rift in my personality, in my relationships
and in my religion. But that also helped me understand that Islam is
relevant. It relates to all of these issues that we're talking
about and that Allah loves every single person in this room, or the
people that he's created, anyone who thinks about him and people
who don't even know that they want to think about him, he is not far
from us. God is not far from us, but our community makes us feel
that God is far from us. The second thing that really affected
me in my life was that in middle school I went to a suburb,
suburban school in the suburbs. In high school, I went to school in
the inner city, and I saw the differences in the resources and
in the consequences of what happened to a lot of my peers when
I look at the tracks of life and the opportunities that both were
given. So when I went, I did my Master's at UCLA in critical and
social justice education. I focused on critical race studies
for students of color in urban cities. What that basically meant
is that, on a personal level, my life revolved around understanding
what it's like to be in an area that policies of the United States
keep in poverty, even in education on the second level, on the
research level, I'm working with students now looking at research
on policies that affect the way we continue to put communities of
color in particular spaces. So for example, when Ferguson happened, I
was so angry, yes, at everything that's going on, but also at our
reaction as a Muslim community, I cannot believe that we actually
had questioned why we should be involved with speaking up about
what's going on, and with being allies to our brothers and sisters
in Ferguson, regardless of faith. But somebody who I make dua for,
and I ask Allah to give him the highest paradise. His name is
Quinta Quinte. He was somebody who was a free man who was brought
here from Africa, enslaved, and he learning listening to his life and
the experiences that he went through being ripped from his
family, and the types of things that he had to go through being
ripped from the family he then made here. This is not one, one
person's story. This is the reality of so many of our
beautiful brothers and sisters who are brought here, who are taken as
free people and enslaved, and then that historically affects policies
today. This isn't history. This is affecting communities today. So
for me, the two biggest things that affected my life and the
things that I'm involved with right now is one, recognizing how
painful it is when Islam is taught at the hands of individuals who
may be very well intentioned, but really unfortunately, do not truly
completely understand the text and the relevancy in our place and
time today. And the second part is being a part of living and loving
individuals from different communities, experiencing what
it's like to have education on both sides and then understanding
that the people who shaped our country today were individuals now
who live on who live on reservation camps, are individuals
who live in areas that are historically and systemically
oppressed, and are individuals who we do not constantly talk about
and represent in our own discussion.
Nations. Many of us have felt isolated in our community, and I
felt isolated as well, and I continue to feel isolated. And I
humdla, memorize the Quran And Alhamdulillah, I'm starting to be
a scholar, and I feel isolated. How many other people who have no
space can't come to a conference like this because they don't feel
like they're ever going to be welcomed, they don't feel like
they're going to have a space where they can feel supported, and
that's not what the Prophet saw them taught. One thing I want to
talk about, really, to finish this, is that for me, through
those processes, I learned about individual responsibility, because
all of this is overwhelming politics, seeing people die,
seeing all those images, it's so overwhelming, and you feel like
you can't really take it all on. But the prophet saw them taught
personal responsibility. And this is something I love. Al Fauci.
Know, the Prophet saw him. Was one time riding with him, and a woman
walked up, and she has mashaAllah. She's like a hottie. So Al fuggle,
he's checking her out. And the Prophet saw him. He's like
noticing that his young bro is checking out this girl. Now, in
this case, he could have told her, turn around. He's looking at you.
He could have told her, leave go, ask some guy you related to you,
to come ask the question. But what he did is he taught a photo of
personal responsibility. He turned his cheek. He didn't shame him. He
didn't blame him. He didn't shame her. Blame her. He just taught
her. He just taught him that when he recognizes that there's
something going on internally. Just take a moment, take personal
responsibility and do some type of action that you have control over.
And for me, I don't have control over everything that's going on,
and I'm overwhelmed oftentimes, but then I think about, what can I
control? I've been in pain because of the things I've mentioned, and
all of you have been in pain because of other issues. So what
things can you actually control in your life? And like my dad says,
Whenever there's a problem, it's not something to be super sad
about, it's a time to get excited. So what things can you can you do
personally, to take responsibility over the
problems
that you have? Very powerful, profound sister, Maddie, and thank
you for that.
Those are just passionate ideas that I think touch all of us, and
when I think about just those who've come before, we've all we
all have stories. We all have family stories, we have
community stories, we have things that really touch us in terms of
those who came before and really made the sacrifice for us to be
here today. And I would have to say that when I look prophetically
at the life of Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu, alaihi wasallam, I see
someone driven to respond to his Lord regardless of the conditions
or circumstances that will be brought on him, and I see that as
as she talked about Kunta Kinte, which is very historic for the
African American community, tied to Alex Haley's history, great
author and journalist here in the United States, he traced his
family back to him being Muslim and surviving throughout all of
the odds to remain faithful, to Know that God is still in control,
regardless of the condition that you may be in. And I think that's
profound. I think I think about
four particular people I'm going to talk about too. One is Malcolm
X al Hajj, Malik Shabazz. Raise your hand if you know who I'm
talking about.
You and millions of others throughout the world know this
figure,
and they know him because he stood for his principles. He stood for
his beliefs, and something very profound that here in Atlanta, one
of the secretaries at the masjid was Malcolm's secretary. She's
She's a pioneer. May Allah preserve her. May Allah bless her.
But one day, I was talking with her, and she shared a story with
me, and just to be brief with it, I said, How was Malcolm beyond the
rostrum? How was he outside of the public face? And she said he was
the most righteous man that I knew.
He was a man who was consistent with his principles. And when I
when I heard that, I think about the politicians, those who have to
be before the microphone, those who have to speak for all those
who have to champion these causes. And are they the same behind
closed doors? Are they ones who are charged with this belief, this
faith that says that God is watchful at all times, not just
when the news comes on and that, are you consistent with your
challenge? Are you consistent with how you respond to your challenge?
And so that always touched me to really be be a person of balance
and and judge myself
as it relates to very serious issues that come about in the
community. Usually when I work in interfaith circles, I get the
question in my Sunni, I get the question in my Shia as a convert,
as an African American, which group will they place me in at
that point? And my response is always, I'm a practical Muslim.
I'm a Muslim. I look at the life
that God.
Prescribes for us through the Quran. And then I look at the life
in which God sent as an example Prophet Muhammad, sallAllahu,
alayhi wa sallam, and extract those principles that will
influence everyone's day in life. So when I think about the Muslim
community, in many instances, I really see a group of people who
are culturally tied to a religion that has no full bearing on
culture at all,
that we're misinformed. We're not fully educated about the the
better way that I like to look at Prophet Muhammad sunnah is
thinking of the word uswa and the oswa is a way it doesn't look the
same. It doesn't it doesn't have the same characteristics of of
what type of clothing or what type of language or or talk or cultural
habits, it has a way of getting to truth, a way of getting to the
hearts of the heart of the matter, a way of seeing the problem, to
seeing the solution, solution to a problem. And so the uswa of
Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam also touched the life of
Muhammad Ali. Raise your hand if you know Muhammad Ali.
You know I've been to eight different Muslim countries, nine,
actually. And every time I arrive at the airport, I get the question
of,
after they see my passport with the eagle on it, they say, and
then see my name, Mansour Sabri. Mansour Hamdi Ibn Sabri. They say,
Well, where are you really from?
And I say, Well, I from the United States. Said, No, where's your
father from? You all know the series of questions, no, where's
your father's father from? I said, Well, everyone from the US is from
somewhere else, if that's what you mean. They say, No, you're Muslim.
I said, Do you know who Muhammad Ali is? And 100%
everyone I've talked to say, yes, Muhammad Ali. Muhammad Ali Clyde.
They do this. I said, Well, he's my uncle. They say, Oh, you're
American Muslim.
And it clicks instantly, because he's a figure that transcends kind
of this understanding of of boxes for Muslims and history, and the
reality of His story is courage.
His greatest fight was with the Supreme Court. His
greatest fight was standing for his beliefs in his religion. And
we make dua for Muhammad Ali, who's still alive, who's still
fighting a good fight. He has Parkinson's and Arizona, we make
do offer him that Allah preserve him and continue his message of
truth and standing firm out for justice, even when it's against
his own self. And when you look at his story very closely, he
corrects the idea of being the greatest. He says, Only God is the
Greatest. I'm just trying to live up to the pentate, the potential
he placed in me. So these are figures that we can call on and
really come to understand the narrative that ALLAH SubhanA wa
Taala has put in these figures who say that they are Muslim and that
they are standing for the principles of Al Islam, they have
touched my heart the other two just by mentioning Julia, which is
a zahaba and Bilal Radi Allahu Anhu. When you look at their
stories, you really kind of see a passion around Islam being
inclusive and measuring people based on the character of based
upon their character, and not on the color of their skin or their
social stability, but really looking at the heart of the matter
of what are you contributing to society, and what has Allah sent
you for? So may Allah bless us as an old man, as a community, to
keep striving for the best in this life and make sure that we
receive, Inshallah, the best of the hereafter. I mean,
so I've struggled with this question about failures and
challenges a lot, and I don't want to repeat what's been said, but
there are two things that are coming to mind for me now. The
first is, I try not to see failures as failures. I try to see
them as tests from Allah and also opportunities. And that's true for
whatever the test or opportunity is, that even the negative is an
opportunity. It's an opportunity to make use of the resources. It's
an opportunity to grow stronger. It's an opportunity to learn. And
then the second thing that I don't know if it's been said yet, is
surrounding ourselves with the right people, is that every test,
whether it is, how do we deal with international issues? How do we
deal with depression? How do we deal with marital problems, any of
those things, those are all addressed so well when we're
surrounded by the right people. That means families and parents
that have open and communicative relationships with their children.
That means religious leaders who are qualified to be religious
leaders, but also who are aware of their limitations. It means
organizations that are strong and thriving and funded and resourced,
and it means the right spouse and the right friends, because those
people will love you and help you no matter what you're going
through and when you fall and you're struggling, they're going
to be there for you and.
I think that a lot of times, it's easy to say, Oh, well, my family's
hard on me, or my spouse is difficult, or my friends this we
control those things. Maryam said she focuses on what she controls.
I control who I spend time with. I control who I marry. I control
where I work and what I do for a living. I control which protests I
go to. That's all in my hands. And so I guess just those two quick
things. Is the first is see failures and mistakes and
challenges as opportunities, as tests from Allah, because he's
paying attention to us, because He loves us. And then the second is
make sure that you are with the right people, because those
opportunities very easily can be turned around and be disasters if
we're not surrounded by the right people, if we're not in the right
places, and if we don't have access To the right resources.
When I was a kid,
I loved to argue a lot.
When I was a kid, I say
no, I really like to argue when I was a kid, and I used to fight a
lot, not just with the siblings, but with classmates, with
teachers, with anyone. I spent a lot of my time in the corridor. I
don't know what the American system is. You do a lot of
detention. In the British way, it's much quicker. You just go
stand outside the class. I spent a lot of time standing in the
corridor, having been thrown out of classrooms for answering back,
etc, etc. And my parents spent a lot of time going to parent
teacher evenings, coming back and saying, What the *'s wrong with
you? Why? You know, why don't you shut your mouth?
And interestingly, I now have a career based on running my mouth.
Allah works in mysterious ways.
And you know, I tell people this. I say, as a child, I would get in
trouble for having arguments and not knowing when to start. Now,
people pay me to come on television and radio and argue
with people. They'll even fire you business class to argue with
people. And I think to myself, how lucky I am. That's interesting
job. And I go to a gathering I'm with friends of mine. My best
friend is a doctor. My cousin is a dentist. People I hang out with,
and, you know, we go together, and people will say, Oh, how's life?
How's your job? And they'll get annoyed. No one's asking them
about their jobs. And it's great. Masha Allah, blessed by Allah.
Come back to Harun question about failure. Now, personally,
mashallah, I've done very well. I'm doing very well. Thank you
very much. But in terms of what I care about, what I write about,
what I campaign about, I'm a total failure. Every issue that matters
to me is a total failure. Nothing I wrote or said stop the Iraq war
in 2003
nothing I've done over the past 60 days in terms of arguing, writing
pieces, tweeting, going on the radio, debating the Israeli
ambassador to London, *, * blah. Nothing stopped
Israel from bombing Gaza. Nothing has lifted the siege on the people
of Gaza. I did a debate at Oxford Union that some of you will have
seen. It went viral. 1.6 million people watched on YouTube. Didn't
stop ISIS from beheading people, or Boko Haram, from kidnapping
girls, or Western politicians from passing laws or creating
surveillance programs that continue to discriminate against
or demonize Muslims. It didn't change the world's view of Islam
or non Muslims views of Islam may have done at the margins. And I
remember a friend of mine, my good friend, who's the doctor, he once
said to me, you know, what? If you just changed all your views, your
life would be so much more fulfilling.
It's so true. You go on these protests against austerity.
Governments are making cuts everywhere, record cuts, nothing
worked. And I just said, you know? And you asked about failure, and
that's the first thing I think of, in a sense, you know, how do I not
go and self harm and get depressed when you know, when you look at
what you're fighting for, what you're standing for, when you're
campaigning for, and I've sat on countless panels, countless
stages, countless conferences, and you see, what is the visible
change that we're making, or not in the community, incrementally in
The world, perhaps less. So you have to ask yourself, well, what
are you learning from that failure? And I think the only
thing I'm learning from that failure, and I can only speak for
myself, others can speak for themselves, is that
really there. You know, it's a cliche, but there is no end point
to this journey. What we're doing is the journey, what we're where
we're going. It's not necessarily we're trying to reach some light
at the end of the tunnel. It's about every day. It's about the
daily struggle, as Zara mentioned, it's about the lifestyle, and it's
about keeping doing what you're doing on a daily basis. And if you
haven't got the results in this world, perhaps the next world, or
perhaps the results will come in a few years time. And I think that's
what I would take from failure and say, Well, you know, it depends
how you measure the failure and not to connect it to your daily
principles, just to link back to what the Imam said. You know,
people like Muhammad Ali, when they were giving up their belt and
going to prison, they were a failure. He had lost in that
fight. The American justice system had won in its own way.
It, but no one classes out as a failure today, and I'm sure he
didn't see it as a failure at the time. So I think that's what I
would say about failure in terms of sticking. I mean, it's cliched,
it's obvious, but we have to remind ourselves, it is about
sticking to your principles. It is about thinking about the long game
rather than the short game, and it is about recognizing that there's
not always going to be a victory at the end of or a light at the
end of the tunnel. Haroon also asked me, since it's linked into
this, to answer the is it the first audience question? I believe
there's many more
he does not knowing the time somebody's asked to me, what are
three steps we can take together to improve our domestic issues
involvement over the next 10 years? I love that three steps. 10
years. It's very, very organized. Someone there from a business
school, I'm guessing, or a law school,
not an art student.
It's an amazing question. I'm sure there's dozens of steps and over
dozens of years, often, I'm sure the panelists can answer as well,
if they want. Off the top of my head, I would say, educate
yourself. Every Islamic conference or Muslim gathering I go to people
say education. And when I say education, I don't just mean get a
medical degree or a law degree or or postgraduate degree. I mean
find out what is happening in your societies in the world around you.
The Imam mentioned beautiful line, I think the best line of the
night, if I do, if you let me say this, let me praise you and say
the best line of that is when you said, Wherever things matter.
That's where Muslims should be. But how do you know what matters?
Unless you're reading newspapers, reading magazines, watching the
dreaded television screen, going online, going on social media,
buying books, and when I say reading a lot of Muslims now,
yeah, we do read. We consume media like nobody else. You come to
Britain, you know, we've got 30 odd Islamic channels, you know,
various different languages. Well, I'm not talking about consuming
things you agree with. I'm talking about reading what other people
are saying, what our opponents are saying, what other communities are
saying. As John Stuart Mill once said, you don't know your own side
of the argument until you know the other side of the argument. And I
worry that in our communities too much, when I'm having
conversations with people, the views reflected are reflected of a
very narrow, closed mindset from one particular article or one
particular website or one particular source of information.
So try and educate yourself as broadly as possible. Otherwise,
you stand no chance out there when you're trying to debate some of
these issues very quickly. Number two, I would say, reach out you
know. How can you not? How can you know what's important on a
national or a local level, if you are only cloistered in your house
or your school or your masjid or your community center or your
Islamic conference, that's those are all important things to do,
but also reach out and find out what is going on beyond your
comfort zone, beyond your safe space. How do you know what the
important issues are in your locality unless you're reaching
out, unless you're making friends with non Muslims, with atheists,
with Hindus, with agnostics, with Christians, with Jews, etc. Only
then can we have the common struggles as Zara talked about
earlier? Only then can we form those alliances which will then
help us later on down the line? And the third point, I would say,
the third argument, the third thing I think we need, really,
really need to do is we have to get off our backsides to come back
to the laziness point. There is literally no problem. You know,
Zara talked about mobilizing 7 million Muslims. You know, 7
million, that's a tiny number. When you think about what some of
our opponents are worried about, about the ballot, billions of
Muslims around the world. You know, we are a big number of
people, and the fact that we don't mobilize ourselves. You know,
people talk about in Europe, I don't know if any of you come to
Europe, is either far right, islamophobe argument in Europe is
there's a Muslim takeover coming. And I always laugh. I think, if
only you wish, Muslims could take over Europe. We could barely take
over our local mosque. We can barely take over our own house,
the kitchen. I mean, we're far too disorganized and lazy. So I think
we must mobilize. We must be able to organize. We must be able to do
all these things that we say but we don't do. There's no reason.
There's a beautiful paragraph. Those of you who haven't read it,
Imam Majid response to Professor Tariq Ramadan's recent outburst of
all of this was a very interesting response. If you read the
penultimate paragraph, I think it is. He makes the very, very
obvious point that in our community, we will pick up the
phone and ring our friend to complain about what we've seen on
TV about some government decision. We won't pick up the phone and
ring our congressman, our senator, our mayor, etc. We will complain
to our Imam about something that's happening in the mosque or some
religious issue. We won't go and take part in the mosque or try and
elect ourselves to a position to change that from happening, we are
back seat drivers, and the only way we can ever change any of this
is to get into the front
seat. So there were a lot of questions, and the questions tend
to revolve around a number of themes, and unfortunately, we
don't have enough time for all the questions. So I thought I would
start with a brief anecdote to kind of illustrate what I'm trying
to get at, because there's something underscoring the
questions that I think hopefully if we address, maybe we can
address maybe some of these issues. A friend of mine was
recently flying on a plane. All these Muslims flying on planes
joke are terrible and.
And he decided to pray on the plane. And as he was praying, the
stewardess came by to ask him something, and kind of, you know,
nudged him, and then saw that he was clearly preoccupied, and left,
and she came back a few later, and she said, I apologize, sir, if I
was interrupting you, to which she responded, Oh, it's okay. I was
praying, to which she responded, that's okay. You don't have to do
that anymore. The planes are really safe.
So I thought it was a nice little moment of cultural
miscommunication, right? Like, what is a prayer
but? But the reason I say that is, you know, some of the questions
we're talking about, divides in the community, facing gender
discrimination, facing pressures around career, lifestyle choices.
And what I thought I would end with is that all of you are
leaders in your fields. All of you have your finger on the pulse of
something that you know, I myself do not, and others here may not.
So I wanted to ask you, what is one positive trend you see in our
communities? Because we tend to just get bad news right? Like it's
always, every time you see something about Islam on the news,
you kind of have to take a deep breath because it's just going to
kind of stink. What is something you've seen, whether it's your day
to day life, whether it's big picture politics, whether it's
economic culture, whatever it is, something you can share that you
see that is happening right now that is positive.
So
this will make sense. One of the things that you triggered for me
earlier was 2003 and the Iraq War demonstrations, and I was in
college, and I remember the feeling of defeat and
ineffectiveness. And then Mahdi, I think, really touched on it. He
said, It's, the journey, right? That this is the task.
And I want to make clear, because I feel like there has been some
touching on spirituality within everyone's comments. But similar
to the way we talk about doing and talking, we also talk about doing
and spirituality, sometimes as if they are separate things. And so
most important in terms of positivity, I think, is that we
are starting to talk about it, that we are starting to talk about
engagement. Just a couple of years ago, I remember, I was meeting
with an administrator at a university where they were having
problems around Palestine organizing, because the students
that were organizing for Palestine were being targeted. They were
being silenced. There were groups from off campus targeting them,
and we were going to send this advocacy letter from all the
lawyers at the table. And one of the lawyers says, So where should
we send it? Because we want to make sure you see it. And the
administrator looked at us, and he smiled. He said, Look, we get so
few letters from your side that we're not going to lose it. We're
going to notice when your one letter comes in, because it's not
otherwise coming in. And more recently, around all of the
organizing with Raza, the positive thing for me has been to see the
community taking control. I feel like our generation, our parents
generation, and those that are younger than us, because, frankly,
those of us on stage are getting older are starting to mobilize.
They're raising young kids to go into careers in the media, so that
they're not just sharing those articles on Facebook. They're
calling the editor. They're calling the local elected official
in the Bay Area, where we have some of the most progressive
elected officials imaginable in the entire United States, we had
only one elected official who voted against the Iron Dome
missile defense system,
and we're working on getting people to make sure that she is
thanked, that she is appreciated, that she knows that the Muslim
community stands by her, but there are also those who voted for it,
and they are hearing from the community by the hundreds and by
the 1000s, and that matters, because they're noticing it is no
longer acceptable, that our elected officials, that our
administrators, that our media personalities say we don't know
where your community is. We don't know what they think. And so for
me, the positivity has been seeing that mobilization. You think I
would want to end on a positive note, but I want to say that the
concern I have when I see the mobilization that we all saw this
summer, that we were all really excited about and really proud
about, was, how do we sustain it? How do we make sure that we
continue to do it on every issue that matters, but also not just
when our Facebook friends say that this is what we should do and so
personally, what I've established in my life and what I recommend
for folks who are looking to make activism a lifestyle, an ingrained
part of who they are and what they do is to take it one day at a time
when someone converts to Islam, we tell them what the farahid are,
and then we work with them to slowly build that up. But.
Those of you that grew up in Pakistani households know that we
don't pray four, Fard and three with her for Isha, we pray 17.
Raka, right? Four, sunnah, four, far two, Sunnah tunafal, three,
withdra tunafal, and that's hard, and it takes a really long time,
and you don't tell the new convert, All right, welcome to
Islam. Pray 17 raka tomorrow, because that's not sustainable. So
the same thing is true for our activism. You cannot be at a Raza
protest every day. You cannot visit your elected officials every
day, and you cannot drop every unjust and inhumane company
overnight. So I quit Walmart, and that was it took some time,
because for those that shop at Walmart, you know how hard it is
to avoid Walmart. I quit Walmart, and then I said, Okay, what's
next, Nestle. And I'm still working on Nestle, because little
did you know, they own everything, but it's one company at a time,
and if I drop all of them tomorrow, that's going to last a
day, in the same way that if we tell someone pray 17 Rick out
tomorrow, that's not sustainable. And so take your excitement, your
energy, everything that you learned this weekend, and make a
commitment to make one change. And when you master that change, when
you're so comfortable with it that you don't miss Nestle drumsticks,
pick up something else, and maybe it's Coca Cola, or maybe it's H M
or Walmart, but do it one step at a time, in the same way that after
Ramadan, you add one piece of worship to your life until It's
comfortable, and then you add the next jozeck. I collective.
Okay,
so, so, to be brief, you know,
we all have a spirit that animates our body, that's regardless of
age. If you're alive, you're alive because of the Spirit that God has
put in you.
What I've seen recently, I'm a part of a generation now that's
born Muslim, and there's this sense within the Muslim community
that you can inherit faith, and it's a false idea. So what I've
seen, and I'll give it to you in a story, after I graduated high
school, I went to an all Muslim High School in Atlanta. It's a
school that I'm over now, and there was just this void of a
generation of believing firmly in the idea of faith in God. It was
just this acceptance of faith in God. And so you see that come
about when you believe, when you believe faithfully, that the God
is real, then you know he's the all seeing. You know that he's the
All Knowing. You know that he's the all wise. You have this
attention with your relationship with with Allah subhanahu wa that
helps govern your actions and behavior. So I say that to say
that people went buck wild.
They went to the far, far left of life, and they had this two face
mentality towards the community, where they would be before the
community, as though they were Muslim. We are all experiencing
it. I know it, and the massage it. They had two faces, one before the
community, and one behind closed doors with friends, etc. And so I
left the United States. I went and studied at the American University
of Dubai, thinking that I would be in a cultural environment where
Muslims would be Muslim. I was studying international business.
Would be concerned about matters of business world as well as
international things, but still have this core faith belief
globally. And to my shock, some of you all may not be shocked, but
for me, living and sacrificing to be Muslim in America and really
kind of standing up for my faith, to be with Muslims that were
Muslim for 1015, generations, for 1000, 1000 years, to find that
they don't make Salat was just heart dropping, that they don't
make Salat, that was heart dropping. Maybe you understand.
But for for me, it was devastating that I've traveled 6000 miles to
be amongst people who don't believe in this religion with
sincerity. And there was about five of us who made the Juma
Salat. And of course, in the Arab world, Friday is off. So this was
eye opening awakening for me that there's this void of spirituality
in human beings that has to be corrected. There is a problem
here. It's not being discussed, and it's global. It's not just
amongst second generation Muslims in the African American community
or in America who are coming into this quote inheritance, but this
is a global thing of how the human being has to really take charge of
his life and come back to faith.
This is a real issue across the world, but I want to just stress
that this is a real issue, and I'm a Sagittarius across America, that
just because we're physically there, it doesn't mean.
We're present, and we have youth, and we have children who are in
our midst, who aren't being challenged to think for
themselves, they're just being required to mimic and act as
though they're Muslim, and it's unhealthy for their future life.
What I've witnessed that is very positive today is this
amazing return of young adults to the masjid, and they're coming
back with with life experiences that have redirected and changed
their perspective to say that this way of life is perfect for me, and
I want to be critically engaged, meaning thinking as I move through
the growth in my spirituality, the practice of the religion, of Al
Islam, I want to be thinking, I want to be engaged on the highest
level so that I can continue to receive the benefits. And I'm
seeing it every day,
young Muslims coming into the masjid and being sincere for the
first time about who they are and being open about their faith and
their attention to their faith. And I think this is a wonderful
occurrence. It is only by God that we become Muslim who are Yadi, may
yesha, wa yadulu, may yesha, and we bear witness to that every day,
May Allah guide us all and protect us always. I mean, salaam,
Alaikum, you.
Uh,
something that gives me so much hope is the fact that Muslims
really care, and I mean, care about what we've done so many of
us myself, I'm sure many of you have done something really messed
up before. I just felt like I really screwed up. I did something
that God is going to be really displeased with me because I did
this, and then sometimes that drives you to feel so guilty and
overwhelmed that it makes you wonder what your relationship is
with him. I have been honored to receive questions from so many
individuals of different age groups, and every single time
their question is, I did this with a guy, I did this with a girl.
I've had these doubts in faith. I've done self harm, I've done
drugs, I've been sexually abused, I've XYZ over and over and over
and the ramifications of those issues, but over and over, every
single person wants to know,
what should I do with my relationship with Allah from here
on how does this affect my relationship with God? And to me,
the fact that people are driven by guilt is not necessarily a good
thing, but it is an indicator that we care. And caring about a
relationship with God is the most important care to have, and the
fact that our community has it in droves means that there's so much
good amongst us. In addition to that, one thing that I think
slowly, our community is learning is that we can't preach to people
in a way that causes them to hate themselves. The doom and gloom
chutba I would summarize last past year. Probably the best summary
that I can give to you of the Friday chutba that I've been
hearing is y'all suck, and also *'s real. It's so painful to
hear that message, when, in reality, the Quran tells us in the
25th chapter that those of us who make big mistakes, there's a verse
that talks about huge sins, and then it says, except for those who
repent, who believe and who do righteous deeds, God will change.
He will literally replace their bad deeds with good deeds. And
what that means is, the Prophet saw them explain to us, on the Day
of Judgment, a person's going to come and they're going to be
really worried about seeing their records, because they know they
really, really messed up. And when the records are shown to them,
they're like, did you do this? Did you do this? And he's like, of
course, yes. He can't. He can't deny it. He knows he didn't and
he's worried about the bigger stuff that he's not even seeing.
And then God, out of his incredible mercy, tells him, tells
that his deeds replace those bad deeds with good ones. If a person
repents, comes back to God wants to live a life of pleasing Him,
even if we mess up over and over and over, just do the process all
over again. Inshallah, all the things we've messed up on will be
turned into good deeds. And so this guilt that we feel, that
sometimes we don't know if God has forgiven us, in reality, it's us
not being able to forgive ourselves. He's already forgiven
us. He already loves us. He loves us. So many forgiven us, and
replace it with good deeds. Now we need to forgive ourselves for the
things that we've done. We just need to move forward from that
because he already has. So the point is, one of the most beloved
things that I love about our community is one that we care
about our state, and two is that even though sometimes our
preaching has to do with shame, blame and guilt. I think we're
starting to move towards recognizing that we're all human
beings. God tells us we're going to mess up, but if the sins of us
were to reach to the clouds and we believe in him and don't associate
parties with him, he'll forgive us without an issue. So because we're
starting to go towards that type of discussion, I'm very, very
excited, Inshallah, about the next generation of our kids.
Community.
I didn't
even realize this was supposed to be some kind of youth oriented a
thing till I turned up. So when Zara talks about our ages, I can't
speak for an else on the panel, but I'm certainly not a
representative of
the youth. I'm no the gray hair, and I'm 35 when I was a kid, we
played outside. That's how old I am. There were there were lawns,
indeed.
Just so on that note, talking about the future as someone who's
in the middle now they are no old to take your question about
positivity and positiveness. I'm a very negative person. My wife will
tell you that I'm always, always, class is always half empty. But
let me be positive. Let me say this, what is what do you think is
the number one? Well, not number one of the top criticisms that
both Muslims and non Muslims have about the Muslim community, I
think it's fair to say leadership. I think for years, non Muslims
have said, are these Muslim communities? They're run by
extremists, they're run by conservatives, they're run by
people who don't want to integrate. And in our community,
we've all complained about the various uncle G's and others. Self
appointed as phrases only have used in the Muslim community,
never actually used in a sentence to do with anything else other
than Muslim community leaders. It's often used self appointed
leader in Britain is a big common criticism that the Muslim
community lacks leaders. The Muslim community has gone down all
sorts of dead ends because of bad leadership. We don't have good
people leading us. We don't have good people speaking on our
behalf. So if you're going to ask me to be positive, I give this
example. After 911 I was a researcher for a TV company for
ITV, which is one of the main networks like NBC here ITV in the
UK. And my boss said, Well, go out and your job, Mandy, Muslim guy in
the office, your job is to get some good Muslim leaders to come
on and talk about terrorism, people who speak really good
English and a really dynamic and really this and that. And I said,
they don't exist. Where am I supposed to find them? I can spend
all day banging. This is Britain, 2001 if you look at what's
happening in the British media now, with British Muslims, if you
look what's happening in United States now, I think there are
massive signs of positivity. Haroon said earlier, when he
introduced one of the questions, you're all leaders. I'm not the
leader of anything. My leader is my wife. I don't lead anything.
And I couldn't lead any, you know. I'm the last person to lead
anything very disorganized, very Celtic. If there's a fire, don't
follow me.
So let me just say these three however, we have an Imam, we have
civil rights activists from care, we have a scholar and activist
here. I would say, look at these three people on stage. I go to
Muslim conferences across America now. It's my fifth one of 2014 I
am absolutely inspired and energized by the people I meet,
and sorry if I sound patronizing, but especially female leaders who
I meet in our community, doing amazing things, picking fights
with police commissioners to congressmen to foreign
governments. And I will say, You know what? I go back to the UK and
say I inspired. That's positive. Let's stop talking about the
cliched example of the bad Muslim community leader. Let's look at
some of the leaders and activists we have now, some of whom are on
this stage and say, You know what? We're in a good place right now.
Thank you.
Thank you very much everyone for an amazing panel all your
insights. Thank you for sticking around through it. Please give
them another round
apologies if we kept you a little bit late, we're trying to be
called.