Mustafa Umar – Abortion An Islamic Perspective
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The discussion on abortion is a hot topic due to legalization, with the majority of Abby's methods being used outside of wedding. The speakers emphasize the importance of researching the Quran and the development of a clot, avoiding bias and emotions in the decision of the first trimester of pregnancy, and accessing more access to contraception and education to reduce abortions. They stress the need for privacy in women's and men's settings, considering factors beyond bone structure, including emotional harm and independence, and considering factors beyond just the number of breasts and the potential for abuse.
AI: Summary ©
So,
we're gonna get started immediately since we have
only till 9:30,
and,
there's a lot to discuss. So just a
disclaimer that this talk is going to be,
a little bit more,
academically
intensive.
It's not a normal talk, which is usually,
like, you know, more of a
kind of reminders and kind of preaching because
this is a talk which, requires
it's, requires a lot of science. It requires
a lot of legal discussions.
So just so you know, it's,
you know, it's gonna be a lot of
statistics,
a lot of, you know, interpretation and things
like that. So that's just my disclaimer before
I begin.
So let's get started. So
abortion,
has become a pretty hot topic. This is
not something that, you know, Muslims have not
been discussing. They've been discussing it for,
over a 1000 years. And Muslim scholars have
been discussing the recent manifestations
of abortion in modern times for for several
decades,
since the 19 thirties,
19 twenties, and and prior to that.
So the reason why it's, become a hot
topic is because it's a part of the
American political debate right now,
with regards to what happened what's happening in
Alabama and the new law that was passed,
and with regards to Georgia and other states,
and the conservative party. So we'll talk a
little bit about that as well. But primarily,
we're not here to discuss the political aspect.
We're primarily here to discuss the Islamic
perspective
on abortion as a whole. So with that
said,
let's define abortion.
So,
abortion,
according to its technical definition,
is basically to end a pregnancy
through the removal
or the expulsion
of an embryo
or a fetus.
Right? The embryo basically becomes a fetus at
around somewhere between 5 to 11 weeks,
of pregnancy.
So how many abortions are taking place in
the world today? Well, there's approximately
205,000,000
pregnancies
every year in the world today.
1 third of those pregnancies
are unintended.
I mean, that the couple was not interested
like, they did not have the intention to
actually,
you know, get pregnant, but they did.
And 1 fifth of those pregnancies
end up in abortion.
So 20% of all pregnancies in the world
today
end up in abortion. So we're looking at
about 56,000,000
abortions are performed per year.
And if you look at the difference between
the countries,
26%
of them are in developed countries,
and 20% of them are in the quote
unquote developing countries.
So there's not that big of a difference.
It's almost,
you know, it's very close. So this is
not a first world problem. It's not a
quote unquote 3rd world, 4th world developing country
problem or issue.
It is something that is,
equally across the board.
45%
of those abortions that I mentioned, out of
the 56
million,
45%
of them are performed
unsafely.
And because they're done unsafely,
we're looking at 70,000
deaths per year because of unsafe abortions,
and
the statistics say that there's about 5,000,000
disabilities
per year because of
those unsafe practices of abortion taking place.
So that's a lot of abortions happening throughout
the world.
So how is abortion actually done?
Well, this is not a new issue. This
is something that has been done throughout history.
Obviously, it changes over time, but you have
abortion
being performed
through herbal medicines,
through using sharp instruments and people reaching in
and, you know, killing the embryo the fetus,
or
forceful massage on the woman's stomach, which ends
up, you know,
killing the fetus as well, There's been many
different procedures for abortion throughout history.
We have recorded instances of abortion from China,
ancient China, from 27 100 BCE.
We have recorded instances from ancient Egypt,
15 50 BCE,
from Rome in 200 CE.
So this is something that is well known.
It's not something new.
Hippocrates,
in his Manuals on Medicine,
he refers to abortion. The philosopher Aristotle,
he refers to abortion, and there's many many
other references regarding these things.
So the way in which it's done today
is usually primarily through two means. Number 1
is by taking a drug, so the woman
will take a drug. It's usually gonna be,
mephapristone
and a combination of a prostaglandin
analog. She'll take it, and it'll abort the
the fetus,
or she will it will be done through
surgery.
And surgery, they use a suction device, and
they suck out the fetus,
so that it dies. It's not living anymore
because it cannot survive outside the womb independently.
Why do people perform abortions?
Well,
there's a number of reasons, so we'll kind
of categorize them. Number 1,
people are not ready to have more kids.
They're not ready for kids in the first
place,
or they're not ready to have more kids.
They say, we have more than enough kids,
and it's gonna be very challenging to get
more, so therefore, we wanna have an abortion.
There are
marriage problems.
And they say, we're gonna bring a child
into a marriage where we have very severe
marriage problems. We don't even know if this
marriage is gonna last. We're gonna bring a
child into that relationship.
Or divorce.
So a woman is pregnant, and then there's
a divorce that takes place, and they say,
well, you know, why should we have this
child? We're not even a couple anymore.
And other people, another reason is they can't
they say that they cannot afford to raise
a child. So it costs too much money.
So I remember having a discussion with one
of my friends. He's not a Muslim, but
he's telling me basically he calculated.
He says, basically, each child costs about $1,000,000.
If you calculate and factor in university costs
and health care costs all the way to
get them to adulthood, it's gonna cost $1,000,000.
And then once they turn 21, you're not
gonna see them anymore. Again, he's not Muslim.
Right? So family values are different, but he
says, what's the point? You know how much
I could do with a $1,000,000 adjusted for
inflation? So so people have this idea that
it's very, very expensive
to raise a child, so therefore, they don't
wanna invest that money.
And the other reason for abortion is that
they wanted a different gender,
or they wanted a different race.
So they didn't get the race that they
wanted, they didn't get the gender that they
wanted. Now this is obviously not always the
case with married couples when it comes to
race. Obviously,
you know who you're marrying, but this is
usually the case outside of wedlock.
In terms of gender, generally,
it or it is the females that are
going to be aborted because in many in
some societies still until today,
people want to have a male, which was,
something more common in the past, but it
still exists today, and I'm gonna come back
to that point.
So these are kind of like the,
base reasons on why people want to have
an abortion.
Then there's a second level. The second level
is
someone who's engaged in fornication or adultery,
they want to conceal that.
So if they're married
and they slept with somebody else,
they don't want to get caught that they
had a relationship with someone else. Or they
were just in a a non marriage relationship,
now they're pregnant, they don't want people to
know, so therefore, they're gonna try to cover
up the fact that they were actually engaged
in relationships,
and they wanna cover that up. So that's
a second category of a reason.
3rd category
is due to * or due to *.
So the mentality is very different. The difference
is that we don't want to have this
stigma or burden of raising a child that's
a result of either * or that's a
result of *,
whether it was
consensual * or nonconsensual *. This is your
own family member, and now
what is, you know, what is society gonna
think? So that's another reason for it. 4th
category
is due to deformities.
So having deformities or severe deformities in a
child is a 4th category of reason why
people wanna have abortions,
and category number 5 is risk to the
health of the mother or the life of
the mother.
So this is across the board. Pretty much
these are most of the reasons why
people would people want to have an abortion
in the first place. K. So that's important
to understand when we get to the Islamic
discussion.
So what status does a fetus have from
an Islamic perspective? Right. This is a very
important part of the question.
So the first thing is Islam prohibits murder
of human beings.
Right? This is pretty clear. Allah says in
the Quran, and do not kill the soul
which Allah has forbidden to be killed
except
in the course of justice. You're not allowed
to you're not allowed to kill someone.
Now usually when we talk about murder, we're
talking about adults.
So what does Islam say about killing children?
It's in the same category, if not worse.
So Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says in chapter
17 verse 1 verse 31,
he
says, do not kill your children
for fear of poverty. And then he explains
he continues. He says, we will provide sustenance
for them
as well as for you. Indeed, the killing
of them is a great sin.
So Allah mentions this
It is a great sin.
So what used to happen in the past
is in Arabian society
and in many other cultures,
that if someone felt that they could not
raise their children because it's too costly, because
it costs a lot of money, not a
$1,000,000 like we talked about, but it was
still it was viewed as something that is
gonna take away from your
financial ability, or it's just gonna be a
big burden on you, then they would end
up actually killing some of their children,
usually tends to be the females that were
killed off. Because the perception was that the
male is able to fight in battle, and
the male is able to go out and
do business in trading because of the with
the nature of the society, whereas the female
cannot do that. So when it comes to
militarily and economically,
there's a disadvantage
in the Especially in in the in olden
times. So they would kill their children, and
Allah came and revealed the verse and forbade
that. And then there's another verse where it
it mentions how severe that is, and it
says, and when the girl who was buried
alive
will be asked for what sin was she
killed.
Chapter 81 verses 8 to 9. So, basically,
Allah emphasized He says, on the day of
judgment, people are gonna have to be held
they're gonna be held accountable, and they're gonna
be asked, why was this little girl killed
alive? What sin? What did she do wrong?
How could you take the life of that
child?
So what's happening here
is that when it comes to
a human being, murder is prohibited.
When it comes to a child, murder is
prohibited.
But then the question arises.
The question is,
what status
does a fetus have? Does a fetus fall
into the category of a human being? Does
it fall into the category of
a child, like a 1 year old child?
Or does it fall into some different category?
So this is a discussion that not only
Muslims have had or having, it's a discussion
which many other religions,
many other philosophers have discussed. So the question
is this,
is that
why
is murder
prohibited
against
a person? Right? When we call a person
or a human being. Right?
What differentiates
between killing
an animal
versus killing a human being?
Right? Are they are they equivalent?
If you kill if you kill an animal,
if you kill a cat,
is it the same as killing a human
being? No. For most people, it's not. For
some people, it is.
For the people, for the ethical treatment of,
you know, animals and all that stuff, they
have some equivalency, but generally not. So the
idea is this, that the question has to
be answered.
What status does a fetus have? Does a
fetus have this exact same status as a
human being like a child that's born, or
does it not? Because we differentiate between human
beings and animals.
We differentiate between plants. So then the question
is this,
if you're not allowed to kill a human
being in Islam,
are you allowed to kill animals for no
reason?
You're not.
Are you allowed to kill plants for no
reason? You're not. So the thing is all
3 of them are living beings,
but when you kill one of them, they
don't have the same status. A human doesn't
have the same status as an animal, and
an animal doesn't have the same status as
a plant.
And perhaps animals don't have the same status
within themselves, so if you're killing a dog
or a horse or an ape, it's very
different than killing an ant
or a cockroach
or something else. So the question is why.
Right? What is the reason behind the difference?
So that needs to be clarified. That needs
to be thought through, and that plays a
role in terms of what status we give
to a fetus.
So there's a lot of different thoughts.
Right? So some people have said, some philosophers
have said that
it's because it has a life. So an
embryo, a fetus has a life,
therefore it's like a human being. It's like
a it's like a one day old child.
So what's the difference between a one day
old child and an 8 month
8 month,
fetus.
Right? We say, well, they both have life.
The problem with that explanation is an animal
has life too.
So why does an animal fall into the
same category? And if you say, well, a
plant has life too. Why doesn't a plant
fall in the same category? They don't. We
acknowledge that they don't fall in the same
category. So this is not a sufficient answer
to say that life is the reason behind
it.
So then there's a second explanation.
The second explanation is
it's because
one of them has the ability to think
like a human being.
So
if the difference between an animal and a
human and a plant is that the human
being
can think
very different from an animal, very different from
a plant. Right? So the cognitive faculties are
very different. So you say, therefore, that's why
we make a differentiation between the 3. And
since a fetus
has the potential to become a human being
that's gonna think,
we're also gonna give it certain
amount of rights, or, you know, it has
it has a special status,
like the status of a human being.
The problem with that argument is it doesn't
stand either. The reason why it doesn't stand
is if somebody becomes
incapacitated in terms of their brain function,
do we put them in the same category
as an animal where if we kill them
off, there there's not gonna be accountability for
that? So that becomes a problem from that
perspective as well. Then you have the 3rd
answer, and the third answer is
that the the thing that differentiates them is
a soul.
So if a human being has a soul,
and that soul has been given to it
by God, and God is gonna hold those
people accountable in terms of once they mature
and become, you know, adults, if they make
it to adulthood,
then that soul is what's gonna become responsible.
That soul is going to make moral decisions
between what's right and what's wrong. So there's
gonna be judgment. There's gonna be responsibility.
Animals don't have that responsibility.
Plants don't have that responsibility.
So it's not just life.
It's actually a soul, and there's moral accountability
or potential
moral accountability in the future that's going to
exist.
So from a religious perspective,
from an Islamic perspective,
that becomes a core part of the discussion,
that a fetus has a very different status
than even
a developed animal because it is a potential
person that is gonna have that moral capacity.
The problem on the other side is
when there's a discussion in American politics,
when there's a discussion on the United Nations
front,
you have many people who do not adhere
to any religion.
And if they do not adhere to religion
or they're not very concerned about religion, they
don't believe in a soul.
And if you don't believe in a soul,
then what's gonna happen? The entire discussion is
gonna be around
defining what is life,
defining what is, you know, cognizance in terms
of, intellectual capacity.
Right? And using all of these other factors
and markers.
So if you go and look at any
university
in the Western world, for example, in a
secular university,
most of the discussions
animals, about the rights of the environment and
plants, and about the rights of a fetus
or a zygote or whatever it may be,
blastocyst, whatever stage it is, it's
not gonna be grounded
in the idea
of a soul existing
within that thing, because there's no religious framework.
It's a secular
discussion.
So when you remove God, and you remove
the soul, and you remove accountability from the
picture, your entire discussion
has to change and flip. And that's what
we're seeing today, particularly in America. So that's
just some philosophy as well.
People have been making this have been discussing
this for a long time. So Aristotle wrote
in his book, Politics,
around the year 350 BCE,
he said the line between lawful and unlawful
abortion
will be marked by the fact of having
sensation
and being alive.
Again, Aristotle believed in God, but he did
not he did not have, like, a religion.
Right? He did not have Christianity. He did
not have Judaism. He did not have Islam.
Allah knows best what was in his heart.
So his explanation is this,
that if this fetus
has sensation,
right, it can sense
either something around it or in today's discussion,
it can feel pain,
then we're gonna give it a special status.
If it cannot feel pain, we're gonna remove
that special status from it. The second point
he says and it's alive.
So alive part doesn't really work. Right? Because
the definition of life
is, you know, very different between plants, animals,
and human beings.
So Muslim scholars
also had a problem
trying to figure out what status does a
fetus have.
The reason why
is because
even when they believe that the fetus has
a soul, and I'm gonna talk about 120
days,
after
120 days,
all Muslim scholars agree that the fetus has
a soul, and the soul is breathed into
that fetus.
The discussion among Muslim scholars has been
that if the fetus dies after 4 months,
after 120
days,
are we gonna give it a name
or not?
Imam Abu Hanifa and the scholars from the
Hanafi School of Ta'at said, no, that we're
not. Are we gonna give it a burial
the way that we're gonna bury a one
day old child, or are we gonna differentiate
between the 2? A child that died before
it was delivered and a child that died
after it was delivered. Is there a differentiation
between the 2? So you find Muslim scholars
like Imam Abu Hanifa saying that there is
a differentiation.
We're not going to give it the same
type of burial.
The same question was, can a fetus own
property?
So what can happen is a one day
old child that has been delivered,
it's allowed to own property.
Right? In the sense that if it if
it dies and it had property in its
name, what's gonna happen? That property is going
to be inherited
to its heirs.
It's gonna be inherited
to its maybe its siblings, maybe its parents.
Obviously, there's no children in the case of
one day old child. So there's an aspect
of inheritance that's gonna play a role. Then
there was another question that came.
So what's happening is even though it had
a soul,
it was not given the same status as
a one day old child that has actually
come in. So there's a differentiation between the
status.
And then in Islamic law, there was another
question during the time of the prophet, peace
be upon him, that there was a woman
who was killed, and she was pregnant.
And what happened was, when you're killed by
someone,
accidental killing or whatever, there is a blood
money that is due.
So because the woman was killed and the
child was killed,
does that count as killing 2 people where
you have to pay double the blood money,
or does it not count as a full
blood money?
So what happened was one of the rulings
now, I'm not gonna discuss the authenticity of
this hadith, but this is there in classical
1400 years ago Islamic discussions
that they said that the miscarried fetus, which
was forcefully killed because of the death of
the mother, intentionally done,
it carries 1 tenth the value of the
blood money that was supposed to be paid.
So what does that mean? I know I'm
getting very philosophical, so I hope I'm not
losing everyone. But, basically, what's happening here is
we're talking about a fetus that has not
been born one day before it's been born.
If it dies, it has a different status
than
one day after it's born.
So there is a dividing line between birth
and between non birth, even though the soul
exists
within that fetus already.
So these are some of the markers that
we're talking about. So just keep that in
mind when we get into this discussion now.
So what whenever we're trying to figure something
out in Islam, what we do is we
go back to the Quran, and we go
back to the sunnah. We go back to
the Quran, and we say, okay,
where does it clearly tell us
exactly when a human being becomes a human
being, such that
it becomes murder
to kill that child, right, under any circumstance,
and that they have the exact same value
as a one day old child. So a
one day old child has the same value
as a 100 year old person,
the same value as a 10 year old,
has the same value as a 20 year
old, right, from the perspective of
killing them, right, or eliminating their existence.
So what's gonna happen now is we need
to figure out somehow
what guidance
do we have, what indications do we have
to figure out
where does that
fetus
what kind of right does it get
as compared to
a human being that has been born or
a person? Right?
So the issue is it is not clearly
specified in the Quran exactly what that is.
So what mean what that means is we
have to reason it out.
We have to figure it out.
And there's many things in the Quran. There's
many rules in Islam that are not 100%
clear cut, but you have to use your
mind to figure it out, because Allah wanted
you to put some effort into it. So
this is what Muslim scholars have been doing
for centuries. Right? They put their effort in.
They try and figure it out just like
everything else in life. Science, you gotta figure
it out. You gotta do some research. You
gotta do some experimentation.
Someone writes a book, you wanna understand the
details of what they're writing. You have to
try to put some effort into it. You
gotta figure it out. So when it comes
to the Quran, because not specified,
we have 1 verse or 3 verses that
talk about the creation of human beings.
Chapter 23 verse 12.
It says that I'll just read you the
English. We certainly we created man from an
extract of clay. We created human beings from
an extract of clay, then we placed them
as a sperm drop in a firm lodging,
and then we made the sperm drop into
a clinging clot, and then we made the
clot into a lump of flesh. We made
from the lump of flesh bones,
and then we covered the bones with flesh,
then we developed that
thing into another creation.
So blessed is Allah, the best of creators.
So it explains the stages
of the embryo going into the fetus and
beginning to develop in the womb of the
mother at a time where no one really
understood any of this. Right? No one knew
any of this. But it doesn't give us
the exact time, the exact moment
where one status turns into another status.
So that needs to be reasoned out. That's
not clear cut mentioned in the Quran.
So what do we do? We go to
the hadith.
We go to the statements and the sayings
of the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be
upon him, where we try to figure out,
well, where is that dividing line? Is it
from the beginning?
Is it from fertilization of sperm and the
egg? Is it something beyond that? Is it
before birth? Where where do we draw those
lines?
So what we have is we
have statements of the Prophet, peace be upon
him, which mention something very similar to what
the Quran is saying,
but it actually mentions
time periods.
So one of them from Sahih Bukhari Sahih
Muslims, authentic it's very highly authentic hadith.
It says the creation of every one of
you starts with the process
of collecting the material for his body
within 40 days 40 nights in the womb
of his mother.
So it's 40 days 40 nights.
Says then it becomes a clot of congealed
blood for a similar period.
So what was the period?
40 days. K?
How many days are we at?
8. Okay. And then it becomes like a
piece of flesh for a similar period.
How many days we at?
120.
Then an angel is sent to him by
Allah, and the angel is allowed to write
down four things. What is the livelihood gonna
be of this person?
What is their when is their when are
they gonna die? What are their deeds gonna
be like? Are they gonna be wretched? Are
they gonna be blessed? And then the soul
is breathed into that thing.
At how many days?
120 days.
Now that's
one set of hadith that we have in
the same collections of Bukharin Muslim.
Now what happened is you have different narrations
of the exact same hadith,
And the different narrations
have been interpreted by different scholars in 2
different ways.
The first one is what I just said
to you. So the similar period
means we have 40,
and we add 40,
and
we get 120.
The other narrations of the hadith, according to
some scholars, said that the similar period doesn't
mean that you add them.
It means that all of these things are
happening
in the exact same 40 day period.
You see the issue? You see what's happening?
Same hadiths,
same narrations,
same collections of Bukhari and Muslim, and you're
getting 2 interpretations.
So what has happened now
is the question is, is it 40 days
for each stage,
or is it 40 days in total?
Because what we have is at the end,
the soul is breathed into
that fetus.
So is the soul gonna be breathed in
at 40 days, or is it gonna be
breathed at 120 days? Now what you have
is the majority of scholars throughout history have
said it is 120 days,
and a minority of scholars have said it
is 40 days.
Right? So what you're gonna get is these
two markers or these two time stamps over
here.
Now,
you can sit here and analyze this hadith
and look at the science and say, okay.
Well, wait a minute. It was assumed that
osteogenesis,
which is the development of the bones,
it was believed to be at at 17th
week,
but that's not the case. The development of
the bones' osteogenesis
actually develops around the 6th week, which is
at 40 days. But what did the Quran
actually mean when it described that? What did
the prophet, peace be upon, actually mean when
it described that
becomes a discussion.
Okay? So because we have
something that is not 100%
clear cut,
we have, like, a gray area, but we
have
at least a framework
through which we can work with. Okay? So
that's the framework, and I'm gonna come back
to that in a moment. Now if we
wanna set this discussion up, the first thing
about now that we have these two time
stamps, I'm gonna come back to that. Setting
up the discussion, first of all, let's talk
about procreation.
So what does
Allah say about procreation from an Islamic perspective?
K. Without going into all the evidences and
all the detail, we can say that Islam
encourages people to have children.
K. Having children is something which is encouraged.
Why? Because you raise them correctly, you raise
them right. You have actually brought
into the world, by the permission of Allah,
a child who you can shape, hopefully, if
you're a righteous person and you're you're putting
the time and effort into them. Right? You
will shape someone and you will raise someone
who will become an asset to society.
So not only is it a need so
that the human race doesn't die out, but
the goal is
that
Islam teaches that it's a correct religion. It
has the absolute values. And if Muslims are
gonna follow Islam,
then if they're raising, they're producing, and they're
raising righteous children, what's gonna happen? They're gonna
bring more goodness into the world or potential
goodness. Right? That's the hope.
So
the encouragement
to have children is there in Islam. It's
not just something like, you know what, it's,
if you feel like it, you have children.
No, it's not just if you feel like
it, you have children. Having children is actually
something that is encouraged in Islam.
But on the flip
side, you have contraception.
Okay. So the idea of contraception
is something which is allowed in Islam. So
for example, if you look at other religions,
you look at the Catholic religion, you look
at the Mormon religion, they have the same
thing, high emphasis on having children,
for the same reasons that Islam emphasis having
children. But there's a strong discouragement against
contraception in many of the other religions out
there. When it comes to Islam,
contraception is something that is allowed.
It's been allowed since the time of the
prophet, peace be upon him, and there's a
reasoning for it. The reasoning for it is
not because it's not encouraged to have children,
it's because raising lots of children the right
way may prove to be difficult.
It may affect the health of the mother
to have too many pregnancies.
Right? So therefore, it can become a problem.
Or maybe,
you know, the father is gonna be absent,
or maybe the mother is gonna be absent,
doesn't want the child or something like that.
So the idea of contraception is something which
has been allowed in Islam. It's been agreed
upon, you know, for a very long time,
but there's one restriction.
And the only restriction, the main restriction of
a reason for contraception
that scholars have discussed
is they say that it should not be
done out of fear of poverty.
Why? Because the verse that I quoted to
you before, it says, do not kill your
children out of fear of poverty. We will
take care of them and you. Meaning, if
Allah said
that you should not
be concerned about this because Allah is gonna
take care of that part,
fear of poverty should not be a valid
reason for contraception,
which is what I mentioned in the beginning
is one of the very common reasons for
why people wanna have an abortion in the
1st place. Right? The $1,000,000 child, you know,
being raised in this society. That should not
be the reason. Right? So that's number 1.
Number 2, contraception
should be revert Well, let me give you
the hadith.
Jabir ibn Abdullah,
may Allah, peace be upon him, he's a
companion of the prophet. He says that we
used to perform azel or coitus interruptus
during the lifetime of the messenger of Allah.
And if it was something that was punishable,
if it's something that was not allowed in
Islam, the Quran would have prohibited us from
doing so. So meaning, it's clear cut. The
prophet knew that this is what we're doing,
and he he allowed it. Right? So this
is not an issue. As long as the
contraception is reversible, it's not permanent,
and as long as it's done prior to
fertilization, it is allowed pretty much agreement for
the most part. The last condition on contraception
is that both spouses are supposed to agree.
This is not a unanimous thing because both
spouses, when they're married, they both have a
right to children. So it needs to be
done with the permission of both.
So that is procreation.
Okay? Now what happens
is that if
contraception
fails,
if it doesn't work,
right, which in many cases, it doesn't, meaning
that you didn't have the intention to do
so or you didn't use it in the
first place, what will happen is when pregnancy
occurs and fertilization takes place,
people are going to say, well, it was
God's will
that
the contraception didn't work, or it was God's
will
that we didn't wanna get pregnant, but we
got pregnant. So now what do we do
about that? So one way of people's general
thinking is, for many Muslims, is that if
it's God's will, then we because it's God's
will, we have to stop it. You know,
we cannot interfere with it at all because
this is what Allah
had planned.
The problem with that is if it was
God's will, then we wouldn't be using contraception
as well.
Right? The way that we have to understand
when we say
something is the will of God,
everything is the will of God. Everything that
happens
from an Islamic perspective is the will of
God. So when we get sick,
do we just remain sick and we say
this was the will of God?
No. We get we take some medicine. We're
allowed to take some medicine. The prophet, peace
be upon him, said that as well. So
what we can do is we're allowed to
utilize means
to rectify a condition
that we don't necessarily want to be in,
but we don't put our faith in that
cause per se, if we're allowed to do
it. Right? So this is something that happened
before, you know, when when Umar, Ibn Khattab,
the second, you know, may Allah, please be
peace be with him.
He was a second khalifa, a very important
companion of the Prophet, peace be upon.
When he was traveling, he was going to
a land where that was hit by the
plague. And what happened was when he was
told that the plague is in this area,
he decided he's gonna turn around. So one
of the companions criticized him and said, are
you running away from the will of God?
And he said,
yes. I'm running away from the will of
God to the will of God. Right? So
what he meant was that everything's gonna happen
by the will of God, but if I'm
leaving, that doesn't mean that I'm going against
the will of God. I'm supposed to utilize
the means.
So this is, this is I wanted to
address that part of the discussion as well.
Okay?
Moving on.
Muslim scholarship.
Okay? What has Islamic scholarship said about abortion,
past
and present?
First of all, let me define something. Why
is it even important?
There's a lot of people who are like,
why do we even care what scholars have
to say? We should just go directly to
the Quran and then figure it out ourselves.
Right? Or we should just figure out what
Islam says according to us. We don't need
to see what other people have to say.
They're human beings, and we're human beings, and
all opinions are the same.
The thing is,
this is not that Muslim scholars,
historically past or present, it doesn't mean that
they're infallible.
There's no clergy ordained clergy in Islam where,
you know, you have to listen to them.
But the idea of
studying the intellectual
thought of people
who have put in time and effort
to try to understand the circumstances,
understand an issue is very important. We do
this in all fields.
We study what people of the past have
said with regards to medicine, with regards to
economics, with regards to politics. Rather than just
saying, I don't need to read what anyone
has to say about the subject, I'm gonna
figure it out all on my own.
Actually, going through number 1
will give us an interpretive method to see
how we approach the issue of abortion.
And number 2,
oftentimes,
people who are living in a period or
living in a certain era,
they can tend to have either their own
biases
or their own emotions
alter their perception of things and make them
more subjective and less objective. So when you
see someone who's outside of your own context
trying to understand the same issue
but from a different perspective, you can actually
learn a lot from them. So
that's why we study intellectual thought. So what
if Muslim scholars had to say regarding abortion?
They put them into different stages. So they
say stage number 1, okay,
is from fertilization
to 40 days or 42 days. I'm not
gonna get into why 42, but we we
saw the number 40 from the hadith. Right?
So from fertilization
to 40 days,
right, what's happening is that you have scholars
saying that abortion should not still not be
done
unless
you have
a good reason to do so. K. So
this is the general opinion. You should have
a good reason if you're gonna perform an
abortion.
So I'm not gonna get into too many
differences of opinion, but
what are the what are good reasons
for an abortion
during this stage,
from fertilization
to 40 days?
So some of them
I'll tell you some good reasons and some
bad reasons. Right?
The worst reason would be fear of poverty.
Why? Because if you're not allowed to do
contraception
due to fear of poverty, you're not allowed
to do abortion due to fear of poverty,
because of the verse that Allah
has mentioned regarding that, and the general
emphasis that, you know,
things will be taken care of. That should
not be the biggest concern that you have.
Right?
The second,
there's there's a good statement by doctor Hatem
al Hajj,
one of the scholars in America,
and he's a medical practitioner by profession.
He says,
abortion in the first 40 days of pregnancy
upon the mutual agreement of both parents
is permissible for a legitimate cause,
such as
the woman's fear of not having the capacity
to raise a newborn child.
So the difference between
fear of poverty
and just being so overwhelmed to the point
where I'm not gonna be able to take
care of this child properly.
But let's finish his statement.
He says, having said that, it is always
preferable to avoid that.
And if one relies on Allah's help and
puts his or her trust in him, he
will not let them down, and that fetus
may become their favorite child one day.
If you look at it from that perspective.
So basically what it says is that, you
know what? You have
a potential valid reason
for aborting
that fetus
during this time,
but it's not recommended to do so. In
fact, what's recommended
is to try and overcome that obstacle.
Feeling a little bit overwhelmed, feeling a little
bit stressed out, you're really busy with a
lot of things, you should try to overcome
that
as a recommendation.
But if you can't,
you have the permission, you have the option
to do that abortion at that time because
this would be an example of a valid
reason.
Let me give you an example
of a not very good valid reason.
So
in many countries in Asia,
there's a preference for male I mentioned preference
for male children in history. So in many
countries,
particularly
in
Taiwan,
South Korea,
India and China,
What happens is there is a preference for
male children,
and abortion is used
as a reason
to actually get rid of female
fetuses so that they can go and keep
on trying in order to have a male.
Is this a good reason
to do an abortion
even if it's prior to 40 days?
It is not.
It is not a good reason. So what
I wanna clarify is there are good reasons,
there are
bad reasons,
and
even if there's a good reason,
it's still recommended to continue when even if
you have, like, some kind of good reason
of maybe not being able to take care
of it. Another common,
cons another common,
reason during this time
is getting an abortion due to divorce or
family problems.
Again, now this is gonna depend on how
bad the situation is,
how much,
you know,
tension is there, what effect is this gonna
actually have on the family in terms of
the divorce? Are they fighting this out in
court? All of that.
So
this should not necessarily
be something where people say, well, be there's
no way. I mean, I have to get
an abortion because we're divorced now. Why?
A child
can survive I mean, the the this child
still has 2 parents.
Even if one whether they have joint custody
or they have, you know, shared whether they
have single custody or whatever it is, the
recommendation,
as mentioned by
doctor Hatem al Hajj and many other scholars,
the recommendation
is to continue.
Can it be a justification prior to 40
days? Yes, it can.
But it's not the recommendation.
Hopefully, we're clear on this so far. Now
that is when it comes to 40 days.
Now we have the 2nd stage.
The first stage is basically fertilization has taken
place. Right? And the embryo
is turning into a fetus. The second stage
is where it's developed, what's called the haluk,
where the features have now developed, either 40,
42 days up to 120
days.
K. So now this period here, we have
2 things going on. Number 1, as I
mentioned before, the interpretation of the hadith on
whether the soul is coming in or not.
So there's 2 issues here. 1 is,
has the soul come in at 40 days,
or is it gonna come in at 120
days? And the second issue is, even if
the soul comes in at 120 days,
you have a a the the development,
the physical development has taken place now.
So that physical development,
when it reaches that stage,
there is a different level that that fetus
has reached,
such that
even people who say that
there's still no soul,
there's a difference between abortion prior to the
40 days
and after the 40 days, even though in
both cases it has no soul. If you
say, well, why? If it has no soul,
what's the difference?
The difference is the same thing when we
talked about animals.
Why is there a difference between
killing of an ape and killing of an
ant? Why is there a difference between killing
of an animal and killing of a plant?
They're both living things, but they're different
development
of those living things. So there's a different
status in which it gets to. So some
of this what the scholars have basically said
is that
if you have no good reason to abort,
if you have no reason, it should not
even be done before 40 days.
But if you do it after 40 days,
it's worse.
So you shouldn't be doing it before 40
days, but it's worse if you do it
after 40 days.
Now the question is, when do you have
an exception?
Okay. So an exception
has to be
an exception that is higher than the exceptions
before 40 days. So all the exception before
40 days can be very, very difficult to
take care of this child. Divorce is gonna
be very, very ugly, and all of these
things are gonna happen. So now
the excuse
has to be elevated.
It should not be, you know, I'm I'm
really I'm in I'm in medical school. It's
gonna be very hard. My class is gonna
be difficult if I have a child, and
this and that. That's that's now now that
excuse before 40 days has changed. That excuse
is not gonna be sufficient anymore, because it's
after 40 days. So the excuse now needs
to change. So what are those excuses? They're
not 100% clear cut,
but I'll give you some examples of what
they are. K? There should be a pressing
need now. K. That pressing need usually is
there's gonna be a severe deformity in the
child,
not just a slight, you know, something is
gonna be wrong. It's gonna be born without
a finger. Right? Let's just abort the child.
It's gonna be some severe deformity that's gonna
significantly
affect that child.
Or number 2,
there was *
or there was * that's gonna happen, and
that's potentially gonna cause a very severe effect
on
the child and their life and the mother
and the family and and all of these
other things. Right?
So,
these are two examples of
when there would be an exception between 40
days and 120 days.
Now
the question
comes up, and it's a very
sticky it's a very tricky question, but we
have to ask these questions.
And that is, is it better to continue
that pregnancy
if there is a deformity,
depending on the level of the deformity?
Is it better to continue the pregnancy
if it was a result of unwanted *?
Is it better to continue the pregnancy
if it was a result of *,
whether planned or unplanned or whatever it is?
Right? So that's where it becomes very challenging,
and I'm gonna tell you why it becomes
challenging. So hear me clearly, is that these
are legitimate reasons, according to many scholars, to
abort. But the question is,
which what is the recommendation?
Right? Some people are
some people are, like, I wanna go with
Just tell me what is absolutely permissible. Right?
So see, if it's if it's allowed, I'm
gonna do that. Other people say, if it's
disliked and it's not haram, I'm gonna do
that.
That's not generally the attitude we should have
as Muslims. Right? The attitude is we should
try to do whatever is we have to
do we have to do what is mandatory.
We're supposed to do what's recommended.
Right? So the question is, what is recommended?
Not what we want. If it's allowed or
if it's disliked, as long as it's not
sinful, I'm gonna do it. The question is,
which one is recommended?
So I'm gonna give you some,
some of the what the scholars have said.
So sheikh, Shaltut,
from Al Azhar, Rahimullah, passed away quite a
while ago, from Egypt, he says he makes
an interesting argument.
He says, on what basis let's take a
child with Down syndrome.
Down syndrome is considered to be a severe
deformity, a severe abnormality.
She says, on what basis are you going
to abort this child with Down syndrome? So
the average the the common answer is gonna
be, well, it's it's gonna be living a
life of misery. Right? That's the normal answer.
Right? It's gonna live a life of misery.
So when it comes to Down syndrome, so
on what basis are you saying that a
child with Down syndrome is unhappy?
Usually,
if you ever dealt with children with Down
syndrome, right, it's not not necessarily the case.
He's saying we project
our perception
of happiness
onto
another child.
And you don't know exactly what that child
is feeling, especially when it comes to Down
syndrome. And what researchers say today is that
Down syndrome, you can actually get a very
decent quality of life. Even though the lifespan
is cut short, on a case by case
basis, you can get a very decent quality
of life for that child. So on what
basis did you abort it? You have to
have some good reason. So what's your reason?
Your reason is, oh, that child's gonna be
miserable. Well, that excuse is not really strong
per se depending on the case of the
deformity. So then what will happen is, it's
a burden on me.
Right? So if it's a burden on you,
you see how that resembles
that fear of poverty. Allah is gonna take
care of you. Allah is gonna That's not
an issue. So the late doctor Ahmed Sakhr,
may Allah be pleased with him, right, may
Allah forgive him,
have mercy on him, he says He makes
an interesting argument, and he's a medical, you
know, professional as well. So he says, look,
you know, I know He was not so
much a legal scholar. So he says, I'm
not speaking from the Islamic legal perspective.
So I'm speaking from
what we should be doing. Okay. So this
is his argument. He says, when you go
and you see a house
being constructed in the middle of its construction,
you're gonna go and you're gonna look around,
you see all these parts all over the
place, pieces everywhere, and you're like, oh, man.
This is horrible. It looks bad.
And he says, if you just wait a
little bit, what's gonna happen? You see the
finished
house,
and you fall in love with it. You
see, this is absolutely amazing.
And he's saying that it's the same thing
with a child. That child that has
an abnormality, that child that has some kind
of deformity,
he says, for many parents who decided that
they're gonna stick through it, that became their
favorite child.
That became something for them that they said,
no, this is this is a child that's
definitely worth raising. It's worth the effort.
And his argument is, this could be your
ticket to Jannah, it could be your ticket
to paradise.
Right? So this is something that you may
be rewarded for it, why would you want
to just terminate it? And the thing is,
let's say your child is born healthy. After
1 month, it can develop some it could
be in a car accident and develop some
deformity. What are you gonna do in that
case? You're gonna abort it? Not necessarily. No.
Of of course not. Right? It'd be murder.
Not necessarily. Of course not. But what are
you gonna do? You're gonna take care of
it. Are you gonna be like, you know
what? Too much of a burden. I'm just
gonna give it up for adoption, you know,
outside of this discussion of adoption, outside of
the scope of this discussion. You're just gonna
give it to someone else, say, you know
what? Too much of a burden. I don't
have time to take care of it. You're
not gonna do that. Right? For the most
part. Right? You're still gonna take care of
it, and you're gonna be rewarded for taking
care of that. So he makes this argument,
which is an interesting argument. Another sheikh, Sheikh
Jihad Al Haqq, who is the head of
Al Azhar several decades ago, he made a
similar argument. He says that a deformity today
he says, science is is rapidly increasing in
terms of technology and what we can do.
A deformity today
could be cured
in a few years. It could be cured
in a decade. And he says, how do
you know? That may not become your favorite
child and that deformity can be cured so
that you got rid of that child. So
these are some arguments
in between, even though there's a permission
to abort that child in those extreme deformity
cases. Right?
That's not always necessarily
the best route to take. K?
Stage 3 is after ensoulment.
According to most scholars, 120 days. After 120
days, this fetus now is not a human
being, but it has a soul. Therefore, it
is impermissible to kill it.
So it goes to the next level of
impermissibility.
The
only time
that this,
fetus can be killed
would be with an
extremely
pressing need, which would only be in one
case, and that is the life of the
mother is in danger. Right? So if the
life of the mother is in danger, what
ends up happening is you can only save
one of them. So what do you do?
You save the one that has a certain
life already. The life already exists. This is
a potential life. It's not been born yet.
You don't know what's gonna happen. So you
choose the lesser of 2 evils in this
situation.
You go with the life of the mother.
So that is the discussion there. So what
you have is you have a range
of permissibility
in terms of the default on abortions, it
should not be done. To the point of
Maliki's school say it's absolutely prohibited, should not
be done at all
unless it's to save the life of the
mother. And then you have, like, the lenient
Hanafi school that says, no. You have any
type of these excuses all the way up
to 120 days. The excuses get
more severe after 40 days.
Less before 40 days, more severe after,
40 days. After 120 days,
only one exception, life of the mother. K?
Now all these days that I mentioned to
you don't get confused. So these are Islamic
days, quote unquote Islamic days. So physicians,
they do not give you the number the
numbers that I'm talking to you about right
now. So physicians,
they will
give the date of pregnancy
as the time of the last menstrual period
of the woman. So what happens is when
they say
100 and 34 days,
it is 120
days.
So it's very similar to the Gregorian calendar
and the lunar calendar. Right? When you're paying
your zakah, right, and you say, I pay
my zakah every year. Which year do you
pay? Do you pay it every 365
days? You're paying your zakah late.
You should be paying every how many days?
How many days are in the Islamic lunar
calendar?
Got a problem now. 354
days.
So, 5 minutes.
5 minute delay. Well, a yes.
9:40 is better.
It's okay?
Okay. Alright. So
I wanna take questions as well. So,
so so what's happening is be careful about
that. The days are not the same. Okay?
So 134
days of pregnancy today, according to medical,
physicians,
is actually a 120
Islamic days, of conception.
Now let's move on to,
American politics. Okay? There is this debate. The
debate comes down to 3 variables. Number 1,
is the embryo or fetus
a human that has a right to life?
Is it a person,
which is what we just discussed?
Number 2, does a woman get to decide
what she does with her own body? Does
she have ownership in a sense over that
fetus because it's inside of her body? And
number 3, is there a public health measure
that the government can take in order to
make some kind of population control,
or to protect the lives of women, or
to to protect the lives of,
the embryo.
Right? So what happened was
the first countries to legalize abortion
was Soviet Russia in 1919,
Iceland in 1935,
Sweden in 9 1938.
So they're among the first countries to legalize
certain or all forms of abortion. And what
you find is these countries have something in
common.
What do they have in common?
Old communities?
No. Not No. Not just communism, but irreligious
communities. Not very religious
communities at all, very secular communities. Right? So
1973,
we have Roe v Wade, the landmark
Supreme Court case, which basically
said the following. It says Supreme Court said
that during the first trimester
of pregnancy so they define these trimesters into
periods.
During the 1st trimester,
governments cannot
prohibit abortions at all.
During the 2nd trimester,
governments could require reasonable health regulations.
And I said during the 3rd trimester,
abortions can be prohibited entirely
so long as the laws contain exceptions for
cases
where they were necessary to save the life
or the health of the mother.
So what do you find? You find
you find 3
you find 3 divisions, different divisions than what
Islam is saying, but 3 divisions that they're
coming up with. Right? The problem is the
wording of their divisions are very different, and
they're very loose and very malleable. K? So
what's happening now is in America, you had
2018
Pew Research Institute did a survey. The survey
was, how many of you want to legalize
abortion completely? 25% of Americans.
How many of
you want to legalize most abortions? 34%.
How many of you think most abortion should
be illegal? 22%.
How many of you think all abortion should
be illegal? 15%.
So what you see is America is pretty
much divided across the board.
K. But none of them
have any discussion
of these time stamps that Islam has put
into place.
That is not part of the discussion. That
is not part of the survey. So what's
happening is where are Muslims in that Pew
Research Institute survey?
They shouldn't be in there in the first
place,
because they do not fall into any one
of these 4 categories.
And that becomes a problem for American Muslims
who are trying to figure out, well, where
do we stand? Well, I can tell you
where you don't stand. You don't stand on
that spectrum
because our spectrum is completely different.
Our understanding
of life and,
ensoulment
and valid reasons and non valid reasons and
all of that is very, very different.
So what you have is basically, the Catholic
church is generally the most conservative, you know,
the most because there is not a good
term. The the most,
pro life in the sense that they say,
the moment conception happens, the moment fertilization takes
place, that is equal to a human being,
and it's murder to abort that child. Lutherans,
evangelicals, the Church of England, Orthodox Jews,
very, very similar stance as well.
American Baptist churches,
they condemn that form of abortion, but they
don't take any public political stance, and they
say, we're not we're not gonna make we're
not gonna take a a political stance. And
some of the scholars have said we should
take a very similar thing. We should have
a religious stance,
and we should not take a public political
stance in American society, and that may be
a a good option, potentially.
So And then there's other, you know, very,
you know, liberal religions who say, no, we
should
allow everything across the board. So when it
comes to
Islam, the idea this discussion or debate in
America between pro life versus pro choice. What
does pro life mean? Pro life generally means
that a fetus is equal to a human
being, and if you kill it, it is
equal to murder.
Very clear cut.
Pro choice means it is a woman's decision
whether she wants to continue her pregnancy up
until whatever point because
as long as that child is inside her
womb up until 9 months before it's born,
it's her right to do whatever she wants
with it. And what's happening is these two
groups, which are kind of here, where is
Islam on the spectrum?
It's in the middle
somewhere. Right? These two groups are fighting each
other.
If Muslims sit there and they ally themselves
with one of these things or they get
caught up into the emotional rhetoric of one
of these things, then they're actually going outside
of the framework of Islam. So let me
give you
an example. Milla Jovica
is a famous actress.
If you ever seen Resident Evil, she did
a pretty good acting job. But she basically
had an abortion, and she's a staunch advocate
who basically has set the framework and says,
who are you to tell me what to
do with my body? It is my decision,
it is not your decision, and no one
can tell me what to do with my
body. So that is kind of the liberal
perspective of,
it's not your business, it's not your body,
it's mine.
The problem with that argument is
even when it comes to animals, if your
neighbor is beating and torturing their dog,
you just be like, hey, it's my business.
I can do whatever I want. Even if
it's a dog, you're supposed to report them
to the authorities because even animal abuse and
animal cruelty is not allowed. Right? You have
Hillary Clinton when she was debating Donald Trump
in the 2016.
She was asked a question point blank. She
says, why did you vote against the ban
on late term partial birth abortions?
And
her answer, she just she avoided the question.
So Donald Trump said, yeah. She thinks it's
okay to rip out a baby in the
last month of pregnancy,
and she avoided that question too. Right? So
that's a very problematic stance, very similar to
Milajovic's
stance. That liberal stance does not have any
place in Islamic
in Islamic framework. Then you have the other
side, which is basically we need to go
and kill these abortion providers and bomb their
planned parenthood clinics and all that because they're
committing murder.
We're not there either. So we're somewhere
in between in the middle. So
my conclusion is this, is that
there's a societal effect that needs to be
taken into consideration. This is not just a
legal discussion.
Abortion should not be a primary means of
birth control
in Islam.
Abortion should not be for personal or social
convenience
of what you feel like doing. Right?
There needs to be access to contraception,
access to contraception education, which will actually remove
reduce abortions,
but it still does not solve the entire
issue.
As Muslims,
we should denounce
irresponsible
sexual behavior
and acts of violence that contribute to a
large amount of abortions per year. So it's
not just a legal discussion of what happens
in abortion. It is a societal issue of
all of these relationships that are taking place.
Many of them are having all these abortions
because of 1, lack of education, lack of
not, you know, knowing when to determine pregnancy,
waiting till later periods,
and because of the amount of relationships that
are taking place. Alright? So Islamic law has
a principle.
The principle is that whenever you can, you're
supposed to prevent harm.
You're supposed to prevent something bad. So if
the mother's life is in danger, the principle
of prevention of harm
goes into place.
But the Western
ethical framework
of preventing harm is very different from the
Islamic ethical framework,
because harm in a Western ethical framework
has 3 main considerations.
Number 1,
financial harm
to the individual or to the family.
Number 2, emotional harm. And number 3,
independence harm, meaning taking away your independence to
choose and having your freedom of choice.
These three variables
are not primarily considered
in Islamic law discussions of harm.
So I'll conclude by saying that we, as
a community,
need to invest
our time and effort into more scholarly research
to tackle these issues and to educate the
Muslim community about where we really stand on
abortion because we neither stand on this side
nor do we stand on that side. I'll
open up to first few questions. Inshallah, talk.
Yes.
Science cannot confirm anything. You said science. Right?
Science doesn't believe in a soul.
So the thing is it depends on what
level of bone structure. Right? So it's not
clear cut in the hadith, therefore it's not
clear cut in science.
Other questions?
I expected a lot of questions. Yes.
Correct. So she should go for counseling in
that case. So it should have been done
before 1:20 because the installment has taken place.
I understand it's very sensitive issue, very emotional
issue. At the same time, it's important to
understand Islam's perspective on the soul coming in
definitely by 120 days. Right? So that's why
education is extremely important to prevent these
difficult situations from occurring.
K. Yes.
Yes. Yes. Go ahead.
Bad when I say there's bad reason, is
it a valid reason? No. When I said
bad reasons, it's invalid reason.
No. So 0 to 40 days, is it
haram without any reason?
Oh, without any reason. Yes. Without any reason
is prohibited.
There needs to be a reason.
What are the signs of ensoulment?
There's no signs. The signs are just coming
from the text of Islam, the statement of
the prophet, peace be upon him.
No. Still would not be allowed. After 120
days, the only exception is going to be
that the mother's life is in danger.
Good.
It falls into the same category. Whether she
knows or she doesn't know, these are the
markers.
Exactly.
Yes. It's almost like breaking your fast in
Ramadan. You need a good reason, otherwise, you're
not supposed to break your fast. Right?
Right. So
if you look at the pictures, it'll actually
help you a lot. So depending on where
it is, it becomes more and more living.
Right?
Yeah.
We're gonna we're gonna go pray and shall
should we go and pray? What we'll do
is we'll go and pray. Hold on.
There's like a few more. So what I'll
tell you what I'll do is brothers have
no more questions. Right?
After the prayer,
I'll just, I'll walk over to the sisters
I'll walk over to the back of the
masjid, anyone has questions can come to me.
Okay? Sound good?
The last thing is always consult a scholar
before taking your own exception,
into your own hands because you should, you
know, you should determine
whether you fall into the exception category with
the help of a scholar.