Friday Night Special A Conversation about Halloween

Mohammed Faqih

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Channel: Mohammed Faqih

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Welcome to the fifth Friday, every tooth every three months we have a fifth Friday on on those Fridays inshallah Tada. We are going to have a special

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and tonight's special is going to be virtual. And I have with me a distinguished guest joining us all the way from California.

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He made most of our own labs last year. Hi Tyler. Bless them. Are you with us Jeff Mustafa. I am here. Can you hear me?

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So there you go.

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So Shannon was heavy. Lola is the

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the director, Director of Education at the Islamic Institute of Orange County, my old message, and he's also the founder of Cru California Islamic University. And he also sits on the fifth Council of North America, the same Council, Dr. Yasser quali. And emails will hate web and Dr. Muslim as a deity and others very distinguished scholars and experts sit on so he's a member of that fifth Council. Tonight, we have you in your capacity. As a member of that fifth Council chef Mustafa, welcome. Welcome to the city of Memphis, Michelle

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Lau, I love this virtual world. It looks like we're sitting next to each other right now. Hungry.

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Except you're a little bigger than you realize.

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Most of our tonight's conversation is going to be about a topic that you're you've done extensive research on. Right, which is this is a conversation about Halloween.

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So in sha Allah Tala, you know, so welcome to the program. And what would you like to tell us about your journey with Halloween researching this topic? My understanding is that later tonight, you're going to also be addressing this issue. Correct? Yes. In our own machines as well. Yes. Hamdulillah. I mean, there's, there's a lot to say, you know, one of the biggest one of the one of the things I always like to begin with is, Halloween is a very difficult holiday for Muslims, especially for Muslim parents. Because one of the things that happens is every year, I mean, Halloween is the second largest holiday after Christmas in the United States. I mean, it's it's so large that 1/4 of

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all candy that is sold sold due to Halloween throughout the entire year. So it just really gets to the big festival. And what happens is that Americans like celebrating things. And because in America, America is a consumerist culture, capitalism, people are trying to sell their products, companies are trying to establish some type of aura around their, you know, work atmosphere, or whatever. And Muslims are thrown into this one month long preparation for this one day festival. And it's very challenging. If you have to Muslims have to make a decision. Are they going to conform? And they're going to just follow what every American is doing what everyone else around us doing? Or

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are they going to resist and say, you know, what? No, we don't agree with this for either for Islamic reasons, or for psychological reasons. Or for for

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health reasons. Or for health reasons. For wasting time reasons. We have some we have better stuff to do, you know, so there's just so many

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reasons why Muslims Yeah, managing from angles, we need to look at this issue. And what makes it more challenging is that there are some aspects of Halloween which are kosher as you'd like to say, you know, they're, they're okay. Like, you know, some people say, Oh, well, we're not supposed to dress up in any costume at all, like throughout the entire year to really start thinking, you know, this is because if you dress up like a costume, you're deceiving somebody else. Is that what it is, they start to come up with all sorts of weird rationalizations. The reality is dressing up in a costume, like, you know, a normal costume of if you're gonna dress up like an imam. Let's say for

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example,

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dress up like, you know, it's our favorite holiday, right?

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When it comes to dressing up for us, you remember that when I was wearing

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when I was wearing a hoodie, like a Moroccan hoodie? Oh, yeah, someone in California. I don't know what that person was really smoking. But he said, I like your costume, dude. And I'm like, This is not a costume. This is my everyday dress.

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What is it? Are you a Jedi Master?

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Exactly. Now, people are watching these shows, you know, the role and by staff and now verbose. Oh,

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yeah, like, dress dressing up like one of those characters right?

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nothing intrinsically wrong like with that, right? If you're dressing up like some, you know, important figure in the past or something like that. So dressing up is not intrinsically problematic, you know, eating candy a little bit, right? It's not intrinsically problematic. There's not something wrong with you know, everyone needs a little bit of candy nowadays, right? Carving an apple, or a pumpkin or pomegranate or any fruit that you pick, carving, something like that. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with any of these actions. So that aspect of Halloween is not intrinsic. It's not it's not wrong by its nature. But then there's this other aspect of Halloween that people

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don't really pay so much attention to. It's like they could have dressed up like so many different things. They don't dress up like comic characters and cartoons and stuff. There's always an aspect of Halloween that involves, you know, witches that involves black magic that involves evil, Gore, torture, blood, you know, spiders vampires, do you have a

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connection with all of these things? You know, people like, you know, some neighbors of mine that I know they've had, like fake coffins on their lawn arm sticking out this gruesome scenes, right? And what Muslims need to do is they need to stop and ask, why? Where did this come from? What's why this instead of something of there could have been a million other options. It could have been 1000. Other options? Why this specific thing? Right? Let's when it comes to Easter, you know, there's easter eggs, and there's the bunny and all of that stuff covered coloring the eggs? Why? Why, why? Why? Why? Why not? That was gonna be my next my next question. But let me ask, is this a very

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important question that people need to ask themselves? Where did this come from? Do we because some people say, Why do we have to really obsess about the origin of everything? Why can we just like accept things as they have evolved? You know, it's just an event for the kids to have fun. So is asking this question. You know, with regards to the origin of anything, is that an important question for, for an intelligent, wise Muslim to ask? This, this is the core and the foundation of Islam. Right? Allah subhanaw taala mentioned this again, and again, in the Quran, whenever that the prophet is came, and they talked about the hate, and they say, Don't worship, these idols don't

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worship the statues only worship Allah, what was the first response is the most of the idol worshipping people. But this is what our parents used to do. This is what our forefathers and our ancestors used to do. And the response back to them was, even if they didn't, even if they were doing something wrong, you're going to simply accept the tradition, you're going to accept the culture, just you're gonna justify an action that you're doing, just because people in the past used to do it. That's what's called, like blind imitation of culture. And actually, Islam tells us when something contradicts the principles of Islam or something is is problematic. We're supposed to

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question that, right. So some people that come along, and they make this say, Well, you know, if you said, if you told me the representative council here, so I'm gonna get a little bit filthy. You know, like, if you study how I do feel here, right? You studied these principles of maximum Islam, Maxim's in Islamic law, one of them is adamant that you know, culture or custom is taken into consideration in Islamic law. Some people say, you know, but that's the culture. That's the customs. So what's wrong? We should, when in Rome, do like the Romans. Okay. So when in America, you like the Americans? And the problem is, you know, what, if we're talking about eating burgers, we're talking

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about, you know, dressing up and like a suit and tie. You know what, you do a fantastic job of martial law.

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There's nothing wrong with that. Because there's nothing intrinsically wrong with those things. There's nothing intrinsically problematic with those things. I know some people they say, Oh, the ties you the way you wrap it, and it's a cross in Christianity, that's not even true at all. That is a false origin. If it was me, it might be an issue, but it's not. So in Islam, we're supposed to investigate things. We're supposed to ask questions that you don't know the one of the things that appeals to people about the religion of Islam is it doesn't shut down questions. It doesn't shut down inquiry. And if you ask most people who came in from like a different religion that it came in

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from, like Hinduism, or they came in from a Catholic or Christian Christianity, they say, You know what? Islam makes sense. Because it actually tells us to be inquisitive. It tells us to ask questions, it tells us to think critically. And that's like the core, the foundation of Islam, but you don't have that the prophets before manifesting any miracles when they were conveying the message of Islam, they would always has appealed to the intellect of people. It's not just a leap of faith. It's not just any emotional argument that you were doing. So

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we're ready to hear the origin of it. So so so

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What is the origin of it? This is a question that a lot of people ask, you know, no, where did it come from? No, there's three main origins. There's three elements that kind of came together, right? So the first part is the oldest part is there's this Celtic festival of sound. Now it's pronounced sound. It's written Sam Hain s a MHAIN. So some people they read it, they're like, oh, Sam hain, actually the pronunciation the the M is silent. Right? This is this was their language. So the Celtic people, they haven't suppressible and it's called Solomon, even though it's written Sam hain, and until today, they still celebrate Wiggins, Satan worshippers. Witches, today, even the modern

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day versions of them, they still celebrate this festival. This is where Halloween originated. So the Celtic people they lived around modern day Ireland about 2000 years ago, right. And what they used to do is they used to have this belief that at the end of their year, write on the night of October 31, and on the day of November first, they believe that there's this this portal between the worlds where spirits and evil witches and dead people and all of that, this portal openness, and you can cross from that world into this world. So all these spirits are going to start coming to these dead spirits, all the people who have passed away, they're going to start to go through that portal and

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come back and return back to Earth. So they will start doing all these rituals, believing this superstitious practice. So obviously, as Muslims, we don't believe that almost no one really believes that in America anymore. They believe other strange things, but they don't believe stuff like that. So they have priests and the Celtic priests used to go and light these huge fires is bonfire, they will make sacrifice to the gods, they had all these religious rituals that were around this day of sound that they used to celebrate. Now this is step number one. Okay, step number one, this is where Halloween is coming from originally. Step number two is the Roman Empire comes and It

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conquers the Celtic territory in the year 43. See, at that time, the Romans are pagans, they're not Christians yet. So they're pagan people, they come in, and they say, Hey, there's a sound festival going on. People keep celebrating because they believe that the Deaf people come into this world and they have all these religious festivals and stuff. But you know, we're we have our own gods, we have Roman gods. So what we're gonna do is we're going to you guys are commemorating the passage of the dead people who died and coming back to this world. Well, we're going to introduce some of our own gods into this festival and mix it together. So one of their gods.

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Romans were notorious for that, right? Mixing things, creating

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political parties, like, hey, we can we can incorporate our own stuff, you know, can you mix it in and blend it in like a little salad? No problem. So one of one of their gods was called Pomona, kind of like the city of Pomona. This was the guy that godless uproot. Right? So they had, they had these different gods and they said, Okay, let's mix in some of the

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festivals that we have for our gods mix it in with the day of swimming together. So they did that and it kind of became like a blend. So now you have a Celtic pagan blend, and a Roman idol, idolatry pagan and blend of two festivals together. Now later on, the Roman Empire becomes Christian, right, because Constantine, accept Christianity in the year 313. They have a Council of Nicaea 325. And then they just start spreading Christianity, distorted form from the original messages, Prophet Jesus, but they started spreading Christianity throughout the Roman Empire. So now what happens is you got to the Catholic church, the Catholic Church is very powerful. And they, they you know, even

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though they have an aspect of idolatry, when it comes to the Trinity and Jesus, they don't like the idolatry of the Romans. They don't like all these other gods, the Celtic paganism that they had. So what they had in their own church was they had a day which they would celebrate all the Christian martyrs who had been killed. So anyone who gets killed, and they're considered to be holy person, like a priest or a monk, or something like that. They're known as a martyr. And what they do is they say we call them a saint, right? So someone who's a saint, somebody who dies in that fat, we consider them a martyr. What happened is they had a day called all martyrs day, where we commemorate

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the shahada, we commemorate the martyrs in the Christian church who were killed. And what happens is all martyrs day became it's renamed to All Hallows it to hollow means, like, you know, Subhana blessing to be these people, right? So it's like blessed to be the martyrs who have died.

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So they call this all the martyrs that had died. We call it All Hallows Day, let's celebrate and commemorate all of these people that died. So now there's All Hallows Day usually be celebrated in May. And this is when the Catholic Church was celebrating it. But what happened was, they said, You know what, there's so many people celebrating the sound festival still going on. We believe in the souls returned to the dead and stuff. Let's make a modification on in our religion. Forget this day of May, celebrating people, let's shift the All Saints all martyrs day or All Hallows Day, let's shift it to be exactly on October 31. So what's going to do is we're going to try to displace this

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other pagan festival that people are engaging in. So they do that, and people still are not getting rid of it. So they say, you know, let's make one more adjustment. Let's adjust it and say it's not only for martyrs, It's All Souls Day, all people who have died, we're going to commemorate all of them. And now that correlates very similar to what the Celtic and the Celtic people were doing because they're commemorating the dead, dead come back to this world to decide, you know what if we mix the two together, we can somehow get people to stop doing that. We just got to make some compromises in our religion. It's okay you know, it doesn't have to be on May let's just shift it

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over to another day and hopefully, you know, everything will be fine. So what happened was the chocolate they call it All Souls Day to include all that people. So the night before that, they be the night before All Hallows, they call it All Hallows Eve. Like for example, Christmas, Christmas is Christmas Day, the 25th. Christmas Eve meaning the night before Christmas. So you got All Hallows Day, the night before it's called All Hallows Eve. So what you do is you just change the words around All Hallows Eve, and you get Harlow weed. That's exactly where the word comes from. So it's this modification from the Church of trying to shift the festival over mixing with the Celtic

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festival, and then do all of this stuff. So now this becomes celebrated in Europe. Now in America, since we're in America, it's relevant to us, right? You have these set settlers come and they supposedly discover America, which is inhabited by millions of Native Americans anyways, and they arrived here, but the difference is that many of them are running away from the Catholic Church in Europe. So they're the Puritans. They're Protestants. They don't like the practices of the criticism of the Catholic Church. So they're not following the pope anymore. So when they arrive over here, they are completely against the practices Halloween, it says this is some Catholic thing mixing with

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some pagan festivals. We're not doing any of this is just completely haha, this is a this is an innovation in America, we Americans, we're not doing this Halloween stuff at all. So they're completely against Halloween in America, until the potato famine in 1846. The potato famine in Ireland hits Europe over there affects a lot of people, and a lot of Irish start to emigrate to America. And these are white Irish people. And when they emigrate, they bring their Catholic religion, and they bring their Halloween festival as well. And now it started spreading throughout the country. And by the 20th century, what happens is capitalism people say hey, people, this is a

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fun day people are enjoying dressing up, they're playing pranks, they're doing all sorts of things.

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We can make money off of this anything American way, right? Anything you can make money off of. Let's do it. All right, let's commercialize this entire thing. So today to interrupt you but by the way, one thing one

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it's actually fun thing and it's excited many people and some of these metropolitan areas where you have large Muslim population

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for instance, Costco was selling

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my moon like Eid Mubarak eat you know, I mean, so So you're right. You're absolutely right. Anything that that sells and that you know, basically acknowledges any group of people if it sells why not? Yeah, absolutely. Target Walmart, they're selling decorations, you know, anything. That's the problem is it's nice for most of us, like Yeah, that's good. That's good. Well, that's the that's the problem with hyper pluralism. pluralism is fine, but when it becomes moral, you know, moral relativism you're gonna include Satanism, right? You have like, oh, you know what, we're gonna sell pictures of shape on you put on your wall. Yeah, that's equal game. We'll put we'll we'll sell

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anything that sells we don't care if it has any basis whatsoever. So that's kind of the the problem with consumers, but that's the way America generally works. So today, we're talking about $6 billion every year, just in the United States only. And whatever happens is from sales of what candy or costume sales from sales every year

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because everything related to

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everything. And if it's happening here, it's America exports is culture, it's going to happen in other parts.

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It's happening and including Muslim parts of the world. And they're gonna do it for two reasons, people are going to import Halloween for two reasons. Number one, because people like to imitate Americans, they like to imitate whatever whatever's happening in America. And number two, they're also thinking, Hey, how can we develop our economies, or let's let's be capitalistic to let's be, let's just be consumer, let's sell whatever we can sell, and make some money and to be good for our economy. So some of the politicians will be like, Yeah, let's do that. No problem. Right. So that's the origins of Halloween. It's something that has really evolved over time. Incorporate it so many

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different elements into it. Most of the elements were pagan elements. Some of them were Christian elements. So you know, from our perspective is still you know, it's something wrong with that, how the religion has evolved in Christianity as well. So this is all of this stuff happens. So now that's Halloween. In a nutshell, that's Halloween in general. But if you look at the details, right? When when when you ask people about Halloween, you say, Well, what do you think, oh, trick or treating, dressing up in costumes, decorating a pumpkin carving a pumpkin and making a jack o lantern? Things like bobbing for apples? Where do all of these things come from? And it's important.

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So I'll just give you something you know, just very briefly, you know, one of the things that used to happen is that the Celtic people, they believe that these ghosts are coming back into the world on that night. So they used to get scared. So one of the things they will do is they will dress up in costumes, because they were scared of these ghosts. So they thought that if you wear a face mask, or you wear one of these costumes, you can kind of the ghosts will not recognize like the ghosts are stupid.

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Like, oh, yeah, you look pretty scary to where one of you, you're not a human. So we'll just kind of let you go by. So that was the origin of dressing up in costumes to prevent ghosts from coming here to scare the evil spirits scare the evil spirits or to normalize so that they wouldn't recognize who you are. I mean, evil spirit to say like, Hey, I'm gonna dress up like a skeleton costume. Or they're gonna think, hey, you know, that's kind of one of us.

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So that's where the costume thing originated from. And that's why many of the costumes today, they always tended to be pirates, evil people solid and bones, you know, zombie, all of these things. There's a reason for that. That's where it originally came from. Right? So that element that remain in there is not been purified by people not dressing up. Like

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I thought the guy was admiring my my dress when he when he asked me a Jedi mind, you know? And I was trying to be humble. I said, No, I'm not a Jedi Master. I'm just a student of knowledge. That's it.

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Now I feel bad. Okay, so he was saying that I was scary.

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So there's that. And then you have trick or treating to what happened one trick or treating is that people would leave treats, they would leave like some desserts and stuff like that outside their home, because they're scared that these those would come inside their home. Because hey, you can just appease these ghosts, assuming that the you know, they're gonna eat food or whatever they're coming around for to deal with retreat outside. And, you know, the bad ghosts will eat the food and leave the good ghosts, they believe that their dead family members also come back on the site and say, hey, you know what, maybe we're going to be sleeping, what if our dead family member decides to

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come and visit his old home while we're sleeping, you know, and we don't want to get to see him or something like that, let's at least make some food out for him to so he can, he can eat something, right superstitious beliefs, that's why they used to leave candy out. So when people leave candy outside, this is exactly what they're doing. They're imitating exactly that same mentality of either keeping the ghosts out of their home, or feeding their dead ancestors that they think are coming to visit, which is very similar to like the Los Muertos in the Latin American tradition. So you got that. And then what happened was that the church could try to modify this, the Catholic Church when

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it was trying to clean up and do a little bit of here and there and like trying to, you know, get removed some of the aspects of the bad aspects of Halloween. They said, Hey, let's modify it. Like for example, sometimes the same mentality, let's just make a few modifications, and then it's gonna be okay. Right? Yeah, I'm not quite sure if we need to address that question. I know you have to run. But if you if you can, Inshallah, give me some time at the end to ask me that question about I will alternative, right, for sure. For sure. I will. I will. So in short, what they try to do, I'll summarize, it's really one of the things that they tried to do was the church said, you know,

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leaving this for ghosts, and so we don't believe in this stuff. So instead, what we're going to do is let's make a let us say the church decides what to happen. So they call it you're going to make these little soul cakes because it's All Souls Day. So they made these little cakes called soul cakes, and what they do

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What's the people who come to your door? Don't give them a soul cage unless they come knock on your door and then say, Hey, I bought these treats for you. Well, I'm going to give it to you with one condition, condition and usually poor people would come. The condition is you pray for my ancestors. So you make dua for my dad.

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And I'm going to give you some candy, I'm going to give you a treat. So like, basically, you're selling to us. You know,

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it's really pretty, it's kind of less what happened with the church, you're going to confess in front of the fathers, we're giving the ICD and you give a donation you buy you buy penance, penance in front of your students. So the same concept happened they would come to make dua for my deceased ancestors will give you something that's why people would come and they will, you know, make dua and and give them a tree. So this is the idea of sacred treaty. And then later on, some people said, You know what, some people say, You're not giving us good again, you're not giving us a good soul cakes and all of that stuff, to say, you know, the people who do who do a good job, we're gonna, we're

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going to be happy. If you don't, then we're gonna, we're going to mess with you, right? So we're going to come to your house, and we're gonna say trick or treat. You either give us a treat, or you're gonna get a trick and a trick in Old English man, we're gonna, we're gonna mess up your house, we're gonna look at throw eggs at your house, we're gonna, you know, steal your horse or do something, we're gonna do something bad to you. So now basically, people are being threatened, you better give us something, otherwise, we're gonna play. Right. And this is still happening. Among some people, toilet papering and all that. Do you got that you got the jack o lantern coming from

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the same idea you use instead of a pumpkin. It used to be a turnip in Ireland, right? It's healthy people used to carve this scary face in there to keep the ghosts out of their home from getting so now you do a scary face inside of a pumpkin. Many people they don't understand why they're doing that what they're doing, right. So bobbing for apples was due to the Goddess, you know, fruit to Timon and Goddess and all that stuff. So this is this is this is where it comes back down to this concept, right? What are Muslims supposed to do? Knowing the orc first of all we're supposed to ask the origin, knowing the origin of what's going on, right understanding what the origin is. from a

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religious perspective, does it make sense that this is something that we should be partaking in when there's symbolism, there's a symbolism from the religion ruminates. So aspects of it became secularized, which is exactly what the Catholic Church tried to do. They tried to Christianize some aspects of it, but they could never get rid of the other aspects of it. So my my suggestion, first of all, I hear I hear things from people all the time, right? Like one of the argument, they say, You know what? The symbols don't have meaning anymore. Okay? If they don't have meaning any more than Why are those symbols always there? Why is there always a dark aspect of Halloween? There's

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evil witchcraft, Pirate know people dressed up like pirates don't even understand like, you know, your pirate it is a thief, somebody who's abandoned, right? Why would you want your child dressing up like that dressing up like Shabbat? Right? There's Muslim kids, they dress up like literally like shape on it. Like, we don't know what it looks like, exactly right. But they whatever they think shape looks like they try to dress the symbols have some randomness there, there is symbolism, it has not been completely removed from the thing. So just it would you would it be okay. If people said, well, you know what, let's dress up like a priest. Let's dress up like a nun. Let's dress up

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like something that we don't believe in at all. You'd say no, there's symbolism, even if even if would you say, Oh, you can wear a Christian cross around your neck. It's just symbolism. We don't believe that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, but it's just a cool looking thing. You would not do that. Or the average Muslim would be like, No, I wouldn't do something like that. Because the symbolism remains right. So that's one argument that I hear this all the time. Second argument here is it just depends on your intention. Because it's all about the intention, that you know what you told me the representative, coming back to

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this idea of your intention is all that matters. Does. Anything works, right? You always your intention, as well as what the ACT represents is what matters, right? In Islam, we don't have this idea of as long as your Nia is good. It doesn't matter if you're doing something that doesn't matter if you're doing something harmful, does like Robin Hood, you know, the Robin Hood, the character as well as maybe Robin Hood, the stock trading app, right? So either way, this idea of like, you know, you don't just go and like steal from the rich and distribute it to the poor have a good idea, while stealing is problematic, right? So that the act itself needs to be condoned by Allah subhanaw taala.

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And then your intention needs to be good as well. In addition to that, this idea of you know, we don't want our kids to feel left out and everything this is okay. Don't let your kids feel left out. There's other ways to not let them feel left out. Right first of all,

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what's exactly

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right. Establish a strong Muslim identity

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To them, this is really important, you know, so we just kind of, we skip all of that. And then we're like, now we didn't do our job the rest of the year. Now we want to, like, do something about it, right? It's common argument, you know, the argument about, you know, its culture, you know, heard of that I addressed that one already. And then the fourth argument is really, you know, we do it just to be a good neighbor, you know, so we put some decoration and put some candy out. And, you know, we want to do that because we want to connect with our neighbors. And you know, this this the thing is, this is, what about the other 364 points? 75 days a year? What do you do to be a good neighbor?

00:30:38--> 00:31:11

Right? A good neighbor is the one who's you know, sharing, you know, food with your neighbors, talking to them being nice to them, you could be sending, you know, eat gifts and treats and all sorts of stuff. And, and the reality is, you know, the reality is in America, most neighbors, they don't really care that much. You know, if you left, and you just happen to go if you went to the masjid, you know, you saved from Muslim to Russia, in the masjid, you know, with your kids and stuff like that, and you didn't put any decorations or put any candy outside your door. People might think you know what, they're probably like at a Halloween party or something like that. They won't even

00:31:11--> 00:31:20

guess they won't even they won't bother them because so many people go out anyway. Many people are not even there. Many people are out of town. So this actually there

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are people who give their neighbors Hello on eight.

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Their neighbors love them more than anything else.

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Even know someone actually, who invited his neighbors to amend stuff.

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And they fell in love with him ever since much.

00:31:38--> 00:31:40

Huh? And they probably got

00:31:41--> 00:31:42

what are you?

00:31:43--> 00:31:50

What are you? But as you have we have so many alternatives. Yeah. Was it pumpkin? Hello. It couldn't be pumpkin.

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So last question. Alternatives. Halloween? What's your take on it? You know, I don't like alternative realities. I don't like alternative. Yes. Imitation lifestyles, alternative facts. But what is your take? On Halloween?

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My take? My take is there's two groups of Muslims, right. And I think the ideal, the ideal is to simply opt out, if you have a strong Islamic based identity throughout the year, you know, your children, yourself, you're attending qualifiers, you're attending Islamic programs, you're not embarrassed to pray in public, you know, you have that strong Islamic identity. There's nothing wrong with opting out and saying we're simply just not going to participate in this festival. Because it's antithetical to Islamic beliefs. It doesn't really contribute anything, and I don't, I'm not trying to like, you know, no one's gonna really bother me for it. And it's not an issue. So

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we're not the only ones opting out. There are many conservative Christians. There are a few conservative Jews, Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses. Yeah, completely opt out. They say this for them. This is they say, they say this is

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harsh, and they're not even as sensitive to shoot because we are right there like this is this is the t shirt, this is wrong. And they have that. So first of all, we're not the only ones right? That is there are people who are non religious to opt out to say we are against the materialism and the the capitalism and this society and all of that. So they're, they're not done with that at all. So we're not alone if we opt out, and we actually really don't have that much to lose. And I think it establishes a strong independent identity for us. We don't need to mix and assimilate into the melting pot of America. We should we should.

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We should you know, be nice to everyone. But assimilation is different than integration, we should integrate, but we should not assimilate. So that is not ideal, but not everyone's in that position. And I understand that there's nothing wrong with not being I mean, some people just don't have the ability to do that. So there should be some alternatives. I think I believe that the alternatives that if you set up a costume day, if a Muslim community set up a costume day once or twice or three times a year whatever it may be people who feel like it we already did the costume day we don't need to dress up as a costume so you know we could do any night

00:34:24--> 00:34:37

we don't do that on eight that's always have people wearing the whole like uniform. They weren't we dress in a way that we don't dress throughout the whole year. Right? Right. I can I can imagine

00:34:39--> 00:34:49

fans and stuff they would love to have a costume day. They would love to dress up like you know some figure in the past or you sell up in the dean or you know, some

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justice in any type of something with the Islamic element or even even not necessarily Islamic element but nothing that is like against the principles or teachings of Islam having

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Many costume days it's perfectly fine. Having a candy lay perfectly fine, do it separately having a fruit decorating day, or, or mixing all three of them together or having the one on a separate days or whatever it is, if we need to do all of these things to have some fun for our children, or even for the adults who really like that stuff, I think that's going to be more than enough of an alternative. We don't want to get into excessive consumerism and you know, always trying to compete with the consumerism of these days. But having healthy Halal alternatives is important for many people, because Muslims are allowed to enjoy you know, people sometimes eat is really not that fun.

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When I grew up, it was really not that fun. It's a challenge. And depending on what your parents do, they take you to different houses and stuff and many children that they're not enjoying themselves. Were supposed to Memphis we make it very fun here. I'm there manage my Roth

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Hamdulillah. So that's my view on on these things, right. And also, sup just forget the Islamic side psychologically, when we normalize horror, and like gruesome scenes and jokes and haunted houses have like torture, bloody possessed people and all that stuff. You normalize that is a problem for psychology, and also displays reverence for evil things for magic for sorcery, for witchcraft, and all that you're not supposed to show you're supposed to show abhorrence to that we need to instill that into the minds of Muslims. It's very important we do that. So this is my psychological take on it. It's

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a pleasure. I really appreciate the extra 10 minutes that you gave us. I here by proposing shot McDonough that here in the Memphis Islamic Center, we start a tradition not necessarily on this particular,

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you know, weekend, but anytime of the year

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where people basically come and compete in presenting the community with their best barbecue.

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Right. And their own barbecue sauce mix, you know, so I think we just should should do a competition. I know that there is we have a sister community in Texas right now. Tonight. They're actually having a chai and tea competition where community members bring their best tea and you know, everybody is just tasting everyone else's tea. Beautiful activity. Great, great alternative. He's talking about

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pleasure. It's great to see you

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you know, she's not gonna love him for participating everyone here Subhanak Allahumma vandyk Nisha Allah in a moment. Let's sulfuryl camera to relate with Salaam Alaikum Warahmatullahi Wabarakatuh