Naima B. Robert – Discussing the Youth, Fitna and the Culture War @TomFacchine
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The speakers emphasize the importance of finding a strong spiritual connection to Allah's teachings and pursuing it in modern society. They also stress the need for privacy and peer pressure in counseling young people to pursue one's spiritual connections. The speaker suggests that society is at war with manhood and men need to rise to the occasion and become independent, while women need to give challenges and skills to women, establish a male ecosphere, and be the breadwinner.
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Fachin. Is that how I should pronounce your
name?
Fakini. Fakini. Just like zucchini. Italian. Is it
Italian? It is Italian. That's right. Well, wonderful
to have you. I'm really, really grateful for
you making the time to speak to me
today. We're gonna be talking about
community stuff and the youth and your work
inshallah.
But please, if you don't mind just introducing
yourself briefly for those who maybe haven't met
you or are not familiar with your with
your work.
Sure. Well,
my name is Tom Fakini. I'm an Italian
American. I converted to Islam, at the end
of my undergrad.
That was about
2010.
I was studying political theory and international relations.
And then after that,
I started learning Arabic, started learning the deen
a little bit. I was able to go
abroad and study at the Islamic University of
Medina,
for about 5 years from 2015 to 2020.
Basically, COVID time. I came back to the
States,
in the middle of the pandemic, and, I
started as an imam in upstate New York,
a small city called Utica.
And I'm still there, though my role has
changed. I'm more of a resident scholar now.
I've always been passionate about Muslim youth. I
started before I went to Medina. I started,
youth groups and some of the communities that
I was a part of.
And
since I've come back, I've been involved with
an,
an online Islamic high school that's called Legacy
International Online High School. So I teach tafsir
to middle schoolers there, and I co teach
a class on Islamic history to high schoolers,
in addition to, you know, catering to the
youth in our community.
And, this past March, I was invited to,
be a part of Yaqeen Institute for Islamic
Research where I am the direct the research
director of Islamic Society.
So that has to do with basically
trying to deconstruct all of the modern contemporary
ideologies
that are sort of assaulting us from all
sides, and presenting and advocating for the Islamic
world view and what Islam says instead.
That's a lot in a very short time.
Another Madina graduate.
Over the years, my family and I have
known so many brothers who've gone to Medina
and come back and done amazing things as
we know.
So may Allah reward you and bless you,
Amin.
Okay. So a few things,
there that I I'd like to kind of
pick up on.
I first
saw you talking about, you know, what you
just said at the end there about
the modern political landscape,
and where Muslims
tend to sit.
And I I think I had my, like,
red pill moment during COVID,
where I think that I was very much,
in the space of kind
of I don't know whether you wanna call
it the
left or just left leaning,
worldview and very much seeing
anything on the right and conservative as evil
and racist and Islamophobic, which there is that
too.
But I think I think what happened with
COVID and all the conversations
about BLM and everything like that, I think
it
it's it's started to make people think slightly
differently. I think that what we've seen, especially
I would posit that
gender ideology
has been the thing that has really pushed
Muslims
into strange spaces. Right? Into in and what
all of a sudden, you have really strange
bedfellows where you now
are saying the exact same things that people
who maybe 2, 3, 5 years ago, you'd
be like, oh, no. Never. Like, I will
never see without we will never agree.
Do you let's let's talk a little bit
about that. I wanna talk about the youth
for sure, but I think this is the
environment that the youth are kind of coming
up in. Right? This space of this time
of flux. What's your
what's your take on it? What's your analysis
of this this kind of shift that we're
seeing?
Well, I think your experience is the experience
of very many people. And I think one
of the more sort of recurring lessons in
my life is that if you don't have,
strong principles,
then you're going to get pulled to one
side or the other.
And I think probably in the UK, but
certainly in the US, we see more and
more polarization.
And so people have stopped
advocating for things on principle,
and they've started sort of just advocating for
things based off of who else is saying
it. It was very telling that I don't
know if you followed any of the things
that are happening right now in Montgomery County,
Maryland where, it's become a national issue where
they very cynically forced
through a bunch of LGBTQ
agenda in the curriculum in an elementary school.
Mhmm. And so there's
Muslim parents and orthodox Christian parents from Ethiopia
that are protesting this and trying to to
stop it.
And,
you know, one of the the the most
sort of viral sound bites from the whole
thing was a a school board member who's
very left, very progressive, it's quote unquote,
who
expressed supposed shock that the Muslims were on
the same side as the white supremacists. Those
were her her her words. Yes.
And that was actually kind of a gift
politically because it was such a faux pas
and such a stupid thing to say that,
you know, we're really able to now have
some capital to leverage and to push back
and call for her removal and things like
that. And it drew a lot of sympathy.
But, it just goes to show you that
people are really thinking tribalistically.
They really are thinking about,
which side are you on, and how can
you possibly,
hold these simultaneously
what they see as contradicting beliefs. Yeah. And
I really think, you know, the thing that
I just come back to again and again
and again is that Islam is the way
out,
for not just us, but for for other
people too, for the non Muslims,
because we have the potential to offer them
something concrete and positive
that's not just antagonistic to some other side.
It's not constructed
in opposition to some other. Right? It's not
just, like, free floating in the air and
then whatever. You know, it changes every 5
years or every 10 years. We really have
an opportunity, I think, to insert ourselves into
a political discourse
and to say, like, let's get back to
thinking about what is right. Let's get back
to thinking about righteousness. Let's get back to
thinking about,
you know,
and this dovetails actually with the question about
youth, which we'll get to.
I don't think anybody's happy.
I don't think,
any Muslim or non Muslim, I don't think
any left or right. I don't think anybody's
really happy with the state of affairs that
are going on. I think economically,
socially, culturally,
politically,
There's a lot of anxiety. There's a lot
of hurt. There's a lot of,
aimlessness, purposelessness, you know. And
people
are searching for solutions. And I think that
Islam and Muslims are
are very, very
interestingly positioned
to contribute to a way out.
But we have to take it. We have
to take our own gain as this is
this thing. It's neither left nor right, and
that's unfortunately become something like a cliche and
a platitude, and people don't really follow through
on what it's supposed to entail.
But it's true is that we actually yes.
We are
environmentalists,
and we are traditional values and traditional family,
and we are
racial justice, and we are all these things
that within the UK and and the US
are, like, completely, you know, separate issues and
com exactly. Like, you would be expected to
be 1 or the other. Yeah.
Absolutely.
Absolutely. I I was I remember being on
a podcast with her sister, and she mentioned
something about anti capitalism, I remember. And I
said to her, you know what I find?
Because I went to Australia. And, in Australia,
the the young Muslims in Australia are very
woke.
Understandably.
Okay. I get it.
Immigrant communities in general, if you are in
minorities
in in general
will be at the brunt of
any type of racism, anti immigration, etcetera. We're
gonna feel it. So it I get it.
It makes sense. But I said to the
sister, I said, we need to be careful
of
putting something, putting an identity on Islam that
Islam does not claim for itself.
Because to say Islam is anti capitalist,
it sounds really good, and you're gonna win
a lot of work points for it. And
you're the cool you're with the cool kids.
But, actually, is the the Islamic economic system
is much more nuanced than that. Right. We
are allowed to profit, but we must also
pay Zakat.
In fact, it is obligatory upon us to
earn, especially the men to earn, to provide
for their families, and to do everything that
they need to do and can do in
order to provide for their families.
But we also believe in, and we believe
in not being extravagant. You know? So there's
this nuance there
that is is lost when we try to
score points on either side. Right? So
I think I think it does. I I'm
really, really pleased to hear that you're having
those conversations with Muslim
adults, Muslims
could not make these points, could not
could not see the nuance of Islam
in in spite of the noise. Right? Because
it's it's so it's as you said, it's
so polarized,
and it is so tribal. And, literally,
if you
if you are on one side,
you will only hear because of the algorithm.
Right? Oh, sure. Yeah. You'll only ever hear
one side. You know? Oh, I'm sure. Yeah.
It's crazy.
I mean, if I watch one video from
the Daily Wire, that's it. I'm done. You're
done. You're you're in the funnel as I
say. The funnel. And, likewise, if, you know,
if I if I follow somebody else on
the other side, that's all I'm gonna hear.
And what scares me is that neither it's
literally every single
thing that happens
in the news.
I both sides reported
completely differently. Like, there is that there's no
truth. It's just one viewpoint versus another viewpoint.
And I think what's hard for people,
I I personally
what I've come to to understand I'd love
to hear your views on this. What I've
come to accept
is that
it's probably neither one or the other,
but a bit of both. And Mhmm. There
is nuance. Unfortunately, it's not a black and
white issue. It's not they're the goodies, they're
the baddies, and, you know, pick a side
and do what you need to do. I
don't know. Do you do you think that
that's a fair way of typifying
modern history and history as well, you know,
from the past? Yeah. No. I I I
definitely think that that's accurate. And, honestly, it's
a it's a lesson that I think is
front and center,
in Surat Al Baqarah and Surah Al Imran.
You know? What was one of the fundamental
mistakes of Bennett Israel and the Nasara?
Right? They attempted to to sort of convert
what was a transactional agreement like an aht.
Right? With Allah,
A covenant of sorts. Right? We're gonna send
you prophets, and you're gonna believe in them
and and follow and obey. They tried to
turn it into an identity. They try to
turn it into,
well, we're God's chosen people. And if you
do that, then
you're less concerned about doing the right thing,
and you're more concerned about just being part
of the right type of group or the
right group.
And that's just what we're seeing over and
over and over again. It's not about being
part of the right group. It's about what's
the right thing to do.
You know,
if another if a different side has a
different attitude or a different opinion about something,
there's usually something real there that you need
to sort of bridge. Right? You don't get
any points just for, you know, patting yourself
on the back and chatting with your bros
or your sisters and saying, well, we're alright
and may Allah guide them. You know, it's
like you need to take seriously what other
people are experiencing and going through. Right? When
it comes to, you know, an example for,
an example in the United States is is
is is sort of the
racial discrimination and and the racist history that
we have, that's baked into a lot of
the institutions in the United States.
Now there have been movements such as critical
race theory and other movements that have swung
back too far to the other extreme and
now have made everything about racial essentialism, you
know, such that, well, if you're white, then
you can't possibly have anything to say. You
can't possibly be a just actor with these
particular issues. And that actually,
is to their own disservice because, historically I
was just listening to a podcast on the
way over here about the history of Italian
Americans, actually. Because Italian Americans, when they first
came to the United States, were were not
considered white. No. No. And they were lynched
in the South.
And in fact, some of them were lynched
for not adhering to Jim Crow laws. Right?
It's like there were Italians who owned businesses
who refused to serve whites before they served,
blacks. And so in consequence of that, they
were lynched.
And so they were put in neighborhoods with
African Americans, and they you know, it's not
a competition. I'm not saying that they were
as oppressed or whatever, but they were definitely
as far as the the racial hierarchy went,
they were thrown on one side of the
racial hierarchy. And then they basically
pivoted and used Columbus Day, which is a
problematic holiday,
in order to be whiten themselves and ingratiate
themselves to to white society. Right? So,
so if you're if you're on the side
of racial justice and you want to do
justice and and remove sort of the harms
that were done, which is completely
fine, to go
overboard on the other side and go into
this racial essentialism
where now you're even sort of sidelining,
you know, white people or or people who
are sympathetic to your cause or even advocates
and allies for that cause,
it doesn't really do you any good, first
of all. And and it's not just, second
of all, and it's not and it's not
right. You know? And, unfortunately,
I'm not on Twitter, but I get sent
a lot of things from Twitter. And there's
a lot of did you say?
No. Fortunately, I'm glad.
But there's a lot of even you see
that in the woke circles for Muslim youth,
animus towards white converts. Right? Like, they see
a white convert and they say Yeah. I
don't believe anything this guy says. Like, this
guy is just a he's a fed. He's
whatever.
So we've become racist in the name of
being woke, basically, as Muslims.
Exactly. What Dean are you following? That's what
I wanna know. Like, which Islam is telling
you that this is acceptable? Because that's not
the Deen of of the prophet Muhammad Sallallahu
Alaihi Wasallam, and that's not the Deen that
Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala sent.
So
we have to be careful. And,
that was actually part of my studies that
actually sort of shed the light and exposed
me to Islam in the first place. This
kind of cons it's a it's a historical
sort of constant
where you react to something. Right? But you
end up actually
assuming some of the things
about the thing that you're reacting to. Let's
take colonization. Right? So it's like,
colonization, European colonization,
uniquely horrible, I think, in in in history.
Very, very diabolical, extremely violent. We're still suffering
the consequences.
Yet if you look on the ground at
the anticolonial
movements, right, in a lot of these places,
a lot of the anticolonial movements
were actually
taking and assuming some of the things from
the colonizing forces. Right? It's like so secular
nationalism, like, as an example. Like, how are
we going to get out of this this
this problem that's been thrust upon us by
the British or by the French or by
whatever?
Secular nationalistic movements,
which is basically their political theory and their
political history. You know? We're not talking about,
well, what does Islam say? Well, how shall
we
organizing ourselves as Muslims? Like, what would a
Muslim policy look like? We're taking their models
even though we're fighting against them. Right? And
so there's a sort of, like, internal colonization
that goes on. And sometimes, even when you're
reacting against something, you're actually making it stronger,
the thing that you're reacting to. So it's
something that everything everybody has to be super
careful about.
I think,
I I live in Zimbabwe now. I've gone
back to my childhood home in Zimbabwe. Oh,
wow. So cool. Yeah. Alhamdulillah. It is. It's
very cool.
But
I've had a chance to obviously really think
about colonialism a lot. And I and I
think, again, maybe we could talk
possibly for a very long time about a
lot of this stuff because it is stuff
that I've been thinking about. And maybe one
day I'll write a book on.
But but
if we start talking about that, we're gonna
get sidetracked. So let's go stick to the
youth. Well, that's that's that's another session. Yes.
So okay. So our youth so I'm thinking
here of Gen z,
TikTok generation.
These are not the children of immigrants anymore.
More or less, these are the children of
the children of immigrants. So these are born
and raised in the US. I wanna speak
about kids in the US specifically.
What's going on with the Muslim youth if
you can summarize
some of the biggest challenges that they're facing?
I really appreciate it. Yeah. I mean, I
was thinking about this on on the drive
over, and I I you know, there's so
many issues, but I think that there's an
umbrella issue that many of the issues that
they face are merely a symptom of,
and that larger cause is a loss of
purpose. I really think that,
modern society can be defined
partly by having a loss of purpose.
And what's downstream from this loss of purpose?
So many things that are downstream of it.
When it comes to,
the marriage crisis that we have in our
communities,
where you have young men and young women.
They don't understand,
the extended family networks have been eroded. Right?
People don't get married in the ways that
that they their parents or their grandparents used
to. And so when it's time to get
married, they literally have no clue how to
go about it. Introduce into that the sort
of gender antagonism, which I think is a
very, very new thing. I didn't see that,
you know, growing up. No. You know, just
scroll any sort of comment section on a
YouTube video or or an IG post, and
you have, like, men, like, taking shots at
women as women, and you have women taking
shots at men as men. Again, completely polarized.
Right? It's the same --izations.
So extremes, Pamela. Exactly. And, I think it
it comes back to this loss of purpose
that nobody really knows what they're doing or
why they're doing it or where they're going.
There was a really interesting you know, I
was I was watching, I think, an interview,
on YouTube, and there there's this lady who
has a podcast that was called I think
it was what was it? Maiden Mother Matriarch.
And the podcast Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
But she's from the UK, isn't she? She
is. Yes. Louise Perry. That's right. That's right.
And so,
I thought that was quite brilliant. Unfortunately, I
haven't listened to the actual podcast itself yet,
but I think that sort of restructuring, what
she did in that title is that she's
giving people a sense of purpose. She's showing
them what are the stages of your life
that you're going to go through and what's
appropriate to each stage. Right? I think we've
lost that entirely. And I recently gave a
talk that was supposed to be basically be
a knockoff of of her title for men
that was I think it was called what
was it?
ALP father elder because I went with Erzt's
rule, you know, with the ALP. I couldn't
think of anything that was equivalent to to
a maiden.
Just to say that, you know, it's like,
listen. It's like, this is your life. It's
like a it's like a river. It's like
a flowing stream.
Here's the stage that you're in now. You're
going to be in the stage after. You're
going to be in this stage after.
Each stage has certain challenges and certain opportunities,
certain skills that you need to acquire for
yourself, you know, etcetera, etcetera.
I I really think that youth don't have
that. They don't have that sense of where
is this all going. What's the the point
of it all? And so they busy themselves
with whether it's something as innocuous as memes,
whether it's something as destructive as *,
or other you know, substance abuse, you know,
clubbing, whatever it is, a lot of destructive
behaviors
come out of not knowing what your purpose
is, not knowing where you're going. If I
was to to take a young man or
a young woman and say, okay. This is
the the stage of life that you're in,
and this is where you're going next. Here's
how you get from a to zed as
you guys we say z. You guys say
zed. Right?
Right?
Here's how you get from from a to
zed. You have to invest in yourself. You
have to develop these skills. You have to
you know, this is what it's going to
look like and what you're going to be
what's going to be expected of you, right,
in the in your next stage of life.
Now there's, like, no expectations. Everybody is just,
like they they have this term in the
United States called delayed adolescence
where, you know, you're 25 years old, but,
you know, your maturity level is still that
of a 16 year old. Right? You're still
kind of a kid. And there's some societal
things, you know, that unfortunately are responsible
for that. The way that universities are run
is partly responsible for that.
What do you mean by that?
Well,
so universities in the states, you know I
don't know if you guys have experienced
this in in the UK, but,
we've
higher education is almost completely ruined in the
United States for several purposes. When I was
in my undergrad and I graduated in in
2011,
I was on the cusp
of, basically,
higher education
ceasing to be about education and starting to
be about business.
Right? And so you saw this you saw
this across the board where the the presidents
of the we call it colleges and universities.
A college is something different for you all.
But,
the presidents
used to be educators. They used to be
people who, understood how to teach people, and
that that was sort of their major role.
So, it crossed over to be where now
university presidents started to be corporate. They started
to be, you know, former bank executives.
The college I went to, Vassar College,
when I first got there, you know, it
was one president outgoing and the new one
going and the new one incoming, and the
new one was, a former employee of the
World Bank.
What does that have to do with higher
education? Nothing except
cutting costs. And so we saw these sorts
of changes where the university model stopped being
about,
you know, the end results, the outcomes of
education, preparation, even for the workforce, you know,
let alone
for human life, right, writ large. And it
started being just about business. Tuition skyrocketed. The
quality of education went down. The amount of
people that are getting admitted skyrocketed, so every
degree becomes less valuable.
Mhmm. And the other thing, and this is
the the relevance to what I was saying
before,
is that the the selling point if college
is a business or university is a business,
what are they selling you? Okay.
It used to be in the past that
they were selling you,
basically social mobility.
You get this degree and you're going to
be. Now you have access to
a a whole other sphere, stratosphere of of
sort of living and affluence, etcetera, etcetera.
They don't do that anymore. What they're selling
you is what they call student life and
student experience. Oh. What is what is student
life? Student life is basically the ability
to experiment
sexually
with substances
with normally, what's illegal activity, but you're doing
it in the bounds of a campus that's
a closed, safe space where you're going to
be basically protected from the law and from
legal sort of litigation.
And this has become a huge liability issue
when it comes to, like, sexual,
abuse and harassment and * and things like
that.
But it's part of a larger problem of
what they they'll actually, if you go on
a tour for university,
they're going to like, the colleges the university
is throwing parties. They're they're buying alcohol for
the students. They're they're trying to facilitate this,
like, wild and free sort of time where
you explore.
Right? And that's sort of
understood to be part of what you're
you're deciding where you're gonna go based Yeah.
Wonderful. Based off of the the student life
that you the that you can have and
the sort of things that you can experience.
So is this
consonance, or is it dissonance with this idea
of human purpose and going from one level
of maturity to another? It's really just extending
teenage years. It's really it's not preparing people
for marriage. It's not preparing people for to
be fathers and mothers. It's not preparing people
for family life,
or to be even a a righteous and
and contributing member of society. It's literally just
about
go crazy, explore as much as you want,
and, you know, we're gonna look the other
way unless you do something really bad. And
you graduate, and you're 23 years old, and
that's your life experience. You're not ready to
get married. You're not ready to even really
to be in a job. Right? So it's
almost like,
childhood is being extended and extended and extended
by society. And it used to be that
Muslims were a counter for us where you
would still have Muslims that were getting married
at 18 19 and were ready for it,
right, because they had something else going on.
Now you're seeing that start to lose its
grip where Muslims are being assimilated into the
system where
they're 25, they're 27, they're 29,
and they're not ready. They don't understand, like,
what marriage is about. They're just kind of
more inward focused on themselves and their pleasures
and sort of their experiences and what they're
doing.
Wow. We could we could go on. I
mean, there's more. But There's there's there's more,
I'm sure. But I wanna I'd like us
to pause for a minute here,
to talk about hedonism.
Hedonism, I think Americans say it,
and and and individualism.
How much is hedonism and individualism?
How much has it infiltrated
Muslim youth, and what is how what does
that look like? How does it show? Yeah.
Oh, man. Well, it's it's it's,
extremely pervasive. And hedonism, I think, is the
logical conclusion
of,
of liberalism. Liberalism is based off of, you
know, in a word, and I was on
with, the Thinking Muslim podcast when we were
both in Istanbul together and we talked about
liberalism.
If you wanna reduce what liberalism is to
one word, it's about autonomy. Right? Autonomy is
predicated on the idea that the most fundamental
truth in this life is that you own
your body,
and therefore, you get to do with it
what you want.
And take that just one step further,
your freedom and your worth and your value,
even the value of your life is
can be measured, let's say. It can be
measured by how freely you're you're using your
your territory and your property. Mhmm. So it
creates an imperative. Right? This is something that
you we come back to time and time
again with political theory and stuff like that.
Your definition of what is a human being
creates imperatives. It creates good and evil. It
creates, you know, what you should do and
what you shouldn't do. And so if
the most fundamental truth about life is that
you own your body, no one else owns
you, no one else can tell you what
to do, my body, my choice, this sort
of thing,
and the therefore, the most heroic sort of
action
is autonomy.
Right?
Doing something without restrictions, without anybody telling you
what to do. Mind your own business. It's
my life. Don't stick your nose in. Right?
Then hedonism is just one small step away.
Right? It becomes about
maximizing.
Right? Maximizing
experience, maximizing pleasure,
minimizing pain, any sort of thing that's going
to get me that high, right, then that's
the good. That's what I should be doing.
And in fact, you look at things like,
human rights law and international law, and you
see the slow criminalization
of any sort of force that's going to
put limits
on these experiences.
Right? So,
you know, why is it you know, why
is even LGBTQ such a big deal? Okay.
Why is it such a big deal that
Uganda has, you know, laws against homosexuality now?
What's the big deal?
Within this framework, the idea is that if
you're prevented
from doing something that you want to do,
right, that's not obviously harming, and the idea
of harm shifts every, you know, year or
2, that's not obviously harming somebody else, then
you this is, like, the worst thing that
you could do. Like, you are standing
in the way of someone
realizing their potential, actualize self actualizing,
following through on their most sacred, quote, unquote,
right, and essential desires and and, you know,
follow your heart. All the stuff that the
Disney movies told us. Right? Like and you're
the big bad guy who's now standing in
the way of this happening. So this is
nothing but hedonism. Right? The idea is that
as long as you're not
actually harming somebody and they have a materialist
understanding of what it means to harm somebody,
then you should be able to do whatever
you want, experience whatever you want, explore whatever
you want, and nobody should really tell you
otherwise.
So, I mean, that's an extremely pervasive,
mentality
in society and even among Muslim youth, and
that's why we see and I I caution
Muslims all the time to be aware of
even
even how they justify
Islamic things. Right? I mean, I when I
was giving a talk at at ICNA this
year, you know, I had a slide that
that showed, okay, there's my body, my choice.
And then what happened after that? Some Muslims
started saying, my hijab, my choice. Well, wait
a second.
The fact that it's your choice is irrelevant.
Right? You're playing on their turf. You're playing
in their arena.
That's the hedonist arena. I get to choose.
I get to. By that logic, well, what
if you don't choose it? Right? Or what
if I choose to not pray? Or what
if I choose to not, you know, like,
do whatever Islam asked me? Choice is not
the relevant factor here.
It's about obedience. It's about righteousness. It's about
piety. That's something that's, like, indigenously a Muslim
way of talking about it. Right?
So hedonism is is is subtle and and
very, very widespread and is a huge threat.
And what role does TikTok play
in the in of of of the youth?
I because the I to be honest,
I say Muslim youth.
Yeah. But I I I sometimes ask myself,
really, is it is it even relevant
that they are Muslim youth? Does it make
any difference? Because I see
how our kids are in the source like
Right. Everybody else. Right? They listen to their
music. They watch the same movies. They have
this a lot of the same addictions, whether
it's social media * or whatever the case
may be. So sometimes you almost feel like
you're making a case for Muslim youth, but
I think it's just a use thing.
But anyway, TikTok, what do you say? 100%
right. No. No. That's really an important point
is that the distinction between Muslim and non
Muslim people is less and less with as
the years go by. Mhmm. And that's a
testament to our assimilation and sort of our
lack of intentionality with how we're living in
the spaces that we're living.
TikTok, you know, if you look at social
media and you look at the social media
platforms that came out, okay, they're getting,
they're getting briefer and briefer when it comes
to the format. Okay? And they're I believe
that they're more and more objectifying. Okay? So
if you if you take
back in the day, it was MySpace. Right?
Nobody uses anymore.
But MySpace didn't have a feed. Right? It
didn't have a a news feed, and so
there was something very innocent about it.
It was actually kind of, like, just like
networking. Then you have Facebook, and Facebook has
the feed, and feed makes it possible to
doom scroll. Right? And then you have Instagram.
Instagram is, okay, more visual, okay, than Facebook.
And then you have TikTok, which is
shorter, you know, but even hyper visualized
compared to I to compared to Instagram.
And I I never was on TikTok, and
I never was on Twitter. I was on
Instagram and Facebook, though. Within the last few
months, I deactivated everything, actually.
And part of the yeah.
Honestly, I'm at totally at peace with it.
The thing is is that you have to
you have to justify
what's the return on investment. Right? It's like
and at well, I when I looked at
it soberly, it was like the connections and
and actually, we first, established contact on Instagram.
But those connections and those opportunities,
right, were maybe the 10% or the 15%
of the good
that was happening. And then the rest is
fitna.
The rest is, you know, the algorithm throwing
you something to try to get you to
interact with it. And, you know, how much
haram do you have to see unwillingly,
right, in order to to to weed through
those the that 10 or 15% of good
that's happening.
So, you know, it's extremely,
that's the thing. It's like, I think that
for the person who
they like it,
the rationalization
will always be there because there's always a
little bit of good. But anybody with any
training in fiqh will remind you that something
doesn't have to be completely bad
in order for it to be haram
or something, you know, completely good in order
for it to be halal when Allah Subhanahu
Wa Ta'ala talks about alcohol. Right? In Surat
Al Baqarah, he says there's manath there. That
that there's good to it. It's not a
100% evil.
And yet, it's haram because the evil far
outweighs the good, and it's extremely damaging. I'm
not passing a fatwa about TikTok, but I'm
just trying to get us into, like, reasoning
mode.
Right? When it comes to
how like, what does TikTok you have to
these things aren't neutral. Right? And that's why
even calling them platforms are is a little
bit misleading because a platform makes it seem
like it's very open. Everybody just puts on
the platform what you want.
That's not really true. It rewards certain behaviors,
and it deincentivizes
other behaviors. So then once you're attuned to
that, you have to ask, what does this
platform reward?
Right? It rewards
revealing your body, *, basically.
It rewards outrage.
Right?
And this is Instagram and TikTok. Right? Mhmm.
And the thing with TikTok especially is that
it
reduces the window of interaction
so much
that it really is very objectifying and just
about presenting. Right? Facebook, you know, people,
dinosaurs such as myself, could use Facebook in
a way where it was like you'd go
back and forth with multi
paragraph to post, and you're you're having some
sort of debate. That was a little niche
for people like that on Facebook. That's gone
with Instagram and especially with TikTok. Right? Yeah.
You don't have any meaningful
exchange.
It's really just about,
intervening upon you. Right? You're have you're being
presented with this thing. It has a certain
amount of transformative
or discursive force. It's doing work on you.
You don't realize it, but it's doing work
on you. You know, a woman's body or
a man's body and or some sort of
music or calling you to some sort of
desire that you have or exploiting some sort
of fear that you have or exploiting some
sort of anxiety that you have,
or trying to outrage you and get you
to react and get you to click because
the clicks are monetized and people are getting
paid and then all these sorts of things.
Right?
It's it's like a minefield. Right? It's extremely,
extremely,
can someone theoretically get through the minefield,
unscathed?
Yes. But the reality is that most people
go through it. You're gonna lose a limb.
You're gonna maybe you're gonna lose your life.
So I definitely I don't really see
any purpose. The only purpose that I see
just you have to deal with reality, you
know, is that the fact that people are
on
it. One of the sinister things about it
is the individualism,
right, that that it, sort of operates on.
You know, everybody's they've got their thing. And
just just ask yourself, you know, if you're
if you're watching,
would you be comfortable with someone going through
your feed? Right? Going through your history of,
like, everything that you've watched. Right? Would you
turn that over to your spouse or your
parents or your imam or things like that?
And the answer is no.
Then you are looking at the one of
the consequences
of individualism.
Right?
What if we interacted in social media in
a collective way? Like, what if we wanted
to have an account
and my family had one account, for example,
or me and my my closest
bros, right, had an account. And that way
we could benefit from the good, and we
would find some sort of mutual accountability that
we wouldn't really be you know, we'd have
one more barrier between us and and the
bad.
It's just an idea, But the sad reality
is that people are locked into this very
personal, individualized device. I bet. It's very private.
Don't look at it. There's how many, you
know, videos are there about people who the
bro code and throw in their phone when
their girlfriend wants to look at it or
something like that? Like, these are very popular
videos.
We've
we're being damaged.
We're being damaged in multiple ways by the
logic of these platforms and the logic of
these devices,
and it's it's not leading to really any
good.
And I I don't I don't think that
I don't see
Muslim parents.
I I I feel like Muslim parents have
given up.
I think the
for many, many Muslim parents,
and I say Muslim parents because Muslim parents
have, I think, a different understanding of their
role
than maybe a lot of a lot of
other parents. Right? Mhmm. But I think that
what I, you know, what I see with
a lot of my parent my parents, my
generation, my eldest is 23. Right? So
parents of my generation, we're gen gen x.
We came into the dean. Right?
We came into the dean. Many of us
are either converse or returnees. Maybe we didn't
grow up practicing, but we became practicing. We
got married the halal way. You know, we
brought our kids up on the dean,
and I see that
a lot of parents just feel powerless, really.
For example, getting giving your children devices. Right?
That was a conversation
way back when people were saying, should your
child have a phone? Should they have access
to the Internet? Should they have screens? Right?
I don't even hear people talking about that
anymore. I agree. Young Muslim parents, these ones,
the millennials,
I see them giving their kids iPads from
the age of 2, 3, 4. You know?
I see them taking pictures and videos of
their kids and putting them online.
I see them
active, really active online, which, of course, you
know what that means. Right? Means that the
kids are seeing Yep. Mom and dad doing
all of this stuff online.
And I and I'm like,
do you not know
how dangerous these platforms are? Because the people
who created the platforms,
they've made documentaries about this stuff. They've done
talks and been on tours
to talk about the dangers of social media
and the algorithm and how the algorithm works,
etcetera.
And I just I just feel like Muslim
parents,
we've just lost that sense of confidence that
we once had and that sense of certainty
that what we were doing was the right
thing
because now we don't want to be the
bad guys. We don't want to be seen
as extremists,
you know, forcing our kids and nobody wants
to force their kids anymore. And I get
it. Right? Because it's like, I don't wanna
chase them away from the deen.
I don't want to just you know, I
don't want her to hate Islam. Do you
see that with parents? I mean, is that
something that you're seeing as well?
That's a major crisis. I think that most
Muslim parents are are not intentional about very
much of what they do. Mhmm. And we're
killed by convenience.
Right? Because it's convenient
to put your kid in front of a
screen and and show a movie or a
Disney movie or Pixar movie
to give them a device.
And then you factor in the whole peer
pressure thing, and there's a ton of peer
pressure around it too. Every single non Muslim
you know, my oldest is 12.
Interesting. And, you know, I've got 3 kids.
And, we have a very, very strict no
screen, no whatever policy at all.
We don't have a television. My we'll we'll
watch, like, a soccer, like, a football match,
like, one of the nineties. That's, like, nineties
d. Right? Yeah. That's not gonna be Bring
it back. That much.
I'm bringing it back. Yeah. That's it. Bring
it back. But it has to be that
way. And, honestly, it's like you
I I see a difference. My kids aren't
perfect. We have our own struggles, but they
don't struggle with the same things that a
lot of the other kids
struggle with. And and I I say it
in the in the mesh sheet, and I
say it to to anybody who, you know,
asks. It's like if your
child is allowed to have a device,
we're not gonna be friends. I'm sorry. My
kids my kids aren't gonna I'm not gonna
let my kids be with your kids alone
if your kid has a device. And that's
a very intentional sort of thing that we've
done. And is it uncomfortable? Yeah. But, you
know and maybe, you know, I I think
that it's really interesting what you brought up
about, you know, not wanting to offend or
whatever.
For that older generation or maybe also if
you're a convert, I don't care. You know?
It's like I've I've I've I had to
tell my whole family that I changed my
religion and I lost friendships and I lost
jobs. And, you know, it's like, so I
don't care if I'm gonna hurt your feelings.
I'm gonna tell you that, you know, my
kid is not going to be friends with
your kid if you if they have a
device.
You know? But we need some of that
and some of that courage.
We need to not be afraid to do
the right thing and to call people out.
We should expect that we're better than the
rest of society, and we can't just, again,
pat ourselves on the back with giving ourselves
these, like, psychological wages of just being part
of the right group. Oh, we're Muslims, and
we're we're guided, and we've got it right.
When we're acting like everybody else,
you know, it's like we need to actually
be different.
You know, and I've had non Muslims when
I tell them about our technology policy. They're
like, oh, well, that's gonna change when they're
around when they're around other kids. Like, no.
It's not. It's like, this is I'm not
gonna let my kid go on a sleepover
over your kid's house, right, or or your
house. I'm not gonna let them around other
kids out of my sight if they have
a device. You know? Like, this is this
is a very intentional policy that we have.
The average age of exposure to * is
11 years old, average,
which means that
there's below. That means that half the kids
are below that when they're first exposed to
*. All it takes and I tell my
wife this all the time. It's like, all
it takes is one flash. Right? Someone comes
up to your kid in a school or,
like, whatever and just takes, like, one and
they can see something that can literally change
their minds. It can give them a complex
that you know, things that are going to
have lifelong consequences. So this is extremely serious,
and and I take it very seriously. And
parents need to be more intentional, these sorts
of things.
We're, you know, we're we're too,
again, killed by convenience.
What's the the the nicest neighborhood to live
in with the best school district and and,
you know, what what you know, put them
in the band, let them play an instrument,
and put them in this, and do everything
that's like American suburban life.
We have to be different. We're, like, let's
live near the Masjid. Let's live with the
Muslims. Let's have a different way of life
so that when other people see us,
it will actually be attractive. And they'll say,
woah. These people are doing something different, and
I really respect that. You know? I always
bring up in in the US, we have,
like, the Amish, and we have different sort
of religious groups that are, like, way out
there. Right? They've they've rejected society.
They've rejected modernity. Right? And they're doing things
differently.
And, you know, if Muslims were in a
different place, then I would give them a
different message. But if you look at, like,
balance, we've teetered way too much on the
side of just, like, totally just taking everything
about modern life
on. And so I use the Amish as,
like, a counterweight and be like, look at
them. Like, they have pride. They have you
have no like, this is this is crazy.
I don't know if you've you've come across
this before. But the Amish actually, when their
kids reach, like, late teenage years, they have
something that's called, like, or something like that
where they allow them to go live in
society for a certain amount of period, do
whatever they want. And then at the end
of it, they have a choice to make.
They have to choose to be in or
they choose to be out. And once they're
out, it's like tekfir. It's like you're not
gonna they're not gonna be able to beat
each other. It's so speed. Right. They don't
play. Do you have any do you if
you know and if you don't know, guess.
What is the rate
of,
retention
when it comes to those Amish youth?
I don't know.
I don't know because TLC has got a
show about them when they leave the house.
So I don't know. Oh, I wanna say
40%.
95%.
No. They have a retention, and there's studies,
like so this is not just, like, pulling
numbers. Like, there's, like, actually academics who just,
like, focus.
Their retention rate is 95%.
That's people have fitra. Right? I believe it.
It's like kids have fitra. If you give
them an environment that is principled,
that's righteous, right, that lives for higher ideals,
higher purpose, right, and then you show them,
hey. This is what the rest of society
is about. They're off they're doing their own
crazy thing.
Choose, you know, blue pill, red pill. Right?
Which which which pill are you gonna choose?
And, you know,
there I believe that we need to bet
on ourselves. Right? That Islam if we really
believe that Islam is the truth, it's the
best thing out there, let's bet on ourselves.
Let's live according to our principles. Let's live
according to our deen, and we let the
kids choose and I and even let non
Muslims choose, and you're gonna find that non
Muslims are gonna be attracted to it and
are gonna choose it. Not all of them,
but a significant amount. Then if we just
try to blend in, we just try to
assimilate, we try to do what everybody else
is doing, take our kids to prom and
the Disney movies and all this stuff, what's
the difference?
Why should anyone want to be a Muslim?
Why should anybody want to to accept Islam
if you're just like everybody else? It doesn't
that never made sense to me.
People need to rewind that whole thing, the
whole section, and watch it again.
I love that killed by convenience. That was
that's a that's a real
a real a real issue.
Now you mentioned something
about reason,
and I want to know because,
I mean, disclaimer.
One of the reasons why I'm having this
conversation with you is because I'm working on
a book, and the two main characters in
the book are, are twin boy and girl
from this generation. Right?
And I I have an idea of who
they are, what they're about, what their challenges
are, etcetera. But I want to understand
a lot deeper, you know, some of the
things going on with them so that the
story can make sense.
I see a lot of conversations
within the left versus right space about reason.
Right? About reason and rationality
and logic and facts. Right?
Mhmm. And you know which side it talks
about facts over feelings and the other side
that is just like, rah.
Right. Right. Right.
Do you what is the role of reason
in
the Muslims'
understanding of
of the deen and of life?
Yeah. That's a fantastic question. I'm sorry. I'm
sorry. Yeah. Do you have more of the
Let's start with that. Let's start with that.
Okay. Well, in Surah Al Mulk, Allah
he says that one of the two regrets
of the people of hellfire is that they
didn't use their reason.
Right? Basically, the implication being of which, if
if we had used our reason,
then we wouldn't be in this mess. We
would have attained to paradise.
Now which reason are we talking about? Right?
Is the reason that Allah is talking about
here the same
as the reason of classical liberalism or of
the enlightenment culture or whatever? No. It's not.
Because you have to understand that when the
European enlightenment got going, they were attempting to
subtract religion and faith from the equation and
establish a universal
culture based off of what they thought was
universal reason.
Right? So they took reason as their dean,
right, which is not correct. That's that's that's
using a hammer and acting like every single
thing is a nail. Right? You if you
have to cut a board in 2, I'm
not gonna use a hammer. It's the wrong
tool. If I need to, you know, like,
unscrew a a nut or something, a hammer
is useless. So reason is a tool.
If it's used for the proper purposes
and if it's guided by the proper principles
and put within the proper scope, then it
is something that can lead us to Jannah,
Allah, subhanahu wa ta'ala, told us. Right?
But if we abuse the tool or we
try to make the tool do something that
it's not supposed to do in the first
place, then it will lead to our ruin.
Right. So what is the proper role? Okay.
The proper role of reason, there's there's different
layers to it when it comes to interacting
with our deen.
The first,
Allah
treats us as reasonable people in the Quran.
Okay? He doesn't he doesn't,
appeal to us with appeals of mere authority.
He doesn't
say do this because I said so, right,
or believe this because I said so. He
actually takes our existence as reasonable being seriously
and convinces us, persuades us, uses arguments. Right?
Why can't there be more than one god?
Well, if there were more than one god,
then you would see a consequence in the
world. You know, each would wanna go away
with their own part of creation. Why can't
why isn't there such a thing as a
trinity? If Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala wanted to,
he could have, you know, destroyed Isa and
and his mother and everybody else in the
world. Reasonable arguments. Allah
is trying to reason with us to get
us to submit.
Okay? So that's the first thing. The the
first role of reason is that reason is
a tool that Allah
gave us that's supposed to bring us to
the door of submission.
Every single person is supposed to you know,
they're going to have a different level of
how much they need to be convinced,
and it should be a, a genuine sincere
level and not this sort of posture. Right?
It's, like, super skeptical. I'm not gonna be
proven until you send me angels or whatever.
Allah blames that in the Quran. But there
is a degree, right, where we have prophets
asking questions.
How are you going to resurrect the dead?
Right?
Musa alayhi salaam asked Allah
to reveal himself on the mountain. Right? These
sorts of things.
So
making sure that the use of reason is
sincere, that it's in the proper scope, that
you're having your your genuine questions kind of
checked off and filled, and that its purpose
is to bring you to the the place
where you're going to submit. Now what does
it mean after you submit? It means that,
okay, I understand that Allah is real. He's
the most real thing, more real than I
am actually, and that his revelation is real,
and I'm going to submit to his revelation.
Then you need to use reason in a
sort of secondary way, which is how to
put together and understand everything that's coming to
you in the revelation.
Now this doesn't mean people inserting their whims
and desires and calling it reason or reforming,
quote, unquote, the religion and saying, well, you
know, inheritance law, well, that's the way it
was then, and now things are different. We
need to change everything. That's not reason. That's
bias. That's prejudice. That's you know, somebody's internally
colonized.
But what it does mean is, okay, there's
this ayah over here, and it seems to
contradict this ayah over here. How do I
how do I understand the 2 together? Or
there's this ayah in the Quran, and there's
this hadith from the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa
sallam. I have to make them,
mesh. How am I going to make them
mesh? And this is the work of interpretation,
and interpretation has rules, but it's also based
off of reasoning. We can say legal reasoning.
Right? So reason has a very, very significant
role to play, but it has to have
guardrails, and it has to be used for
the proper purpose. The goals of reason, if
you could say, like, in summary, are probably
two main goals.
First, to bring a person to the point
where they can submit
in totality
to Allah
and the revelation they sent down, and the
second, to
discover
Allah's
will, right, in the revelation. What does Allah
want from us? Right? Not to not to
control and steer it. Right? But to literally
to discover, what does Allah want from me?
He says this this ayah over here and
this ayah over here, what does he want
me to do? How am I supposed to
interpret and understand it?
How do I make it apply to this
new situation that never happened before? Right? So
I think that those are the 2 sort
of avenues for reason, and they are extremely
important.
And what about the spiritual dimension?
I,
I know that
we we tend to separate the deen into
the the
the actions. Right? Oh, let's let's put it
this way. The beliefs
sorry. The actions of the heart,
the tongue, and the limbs. Right? So you
have the action of the of the tongue
where you say what you're supposed to say.
You say Shahada, you pray, you do all
of these things. You have actions, of the
limbs, which is the the manifestation, the outward
manifestation of your obedience to Allah. What about
the internal dimension? How important do you think
it is?
Let's stick with youth here, although it is
a universal thing.
Mhmm. How important do you think it is
for
a young Muslim to establish a relationship with
Allah?
Is it important? Is it, yeah, it's nice
if you get it, but if you don't,
just do the right thing anyway. Like, what
what No. What the thing is most important
thing. It's the most important thing,
because we live in an era of doubt.
And
maybe there were some societies and places and
times
where you could get by just doing the
right thing outwardly,
and then you'd be safe.
But that seems to be less and less
true,
living in the west. I think that
everybody sort of has to go through this
struggle or this path of of the revert,
right, or they need to choose.
Even if your name is Mohammed or Fatima
and you're born into a Muslim family.
You know, you have to go through your
your.
Right? I should say. You have to go
through your, yeah, your your period of doubt,
and you need to come out on the
other side, and you need to choose it
for yourself.
And that spiritual connection has to be strong.
Right?
Allah
has told us that our destiny and our
judgment in the afterlife, it's going to be
based on that spirit.
Right? Right? It's like the person who purifies
it is is successful
more than anything else. Right? And then the
person who defiles it is is ruined.
And the prophet said that in the body,
there's a there's,
like, a a piece of flesh. If it's
if it's good, everything else is good. Right?
And if it's bad, everything else is bad,
and that's the heart. Right? And that doesn't
just mean your physical pumping, beating heart. It
also means, like, what the heart symbolizes, like
your spirit, your relationship.
Right? What's the the first three people that
are gonna be thrown into hellfire in the
day of judgment? People who did the right
actions outwardly but inwardly were corrupt. Right? The
person who recited the Quran or it was
an Adam or whatever,
the person who gave their money and wealth,
the person who supposedly fought for the sake
of Allah, but they were all hypocrites. They
were all doing it to be seen for
the reputation,
for the clicks and the likes and the
hearts and the reacts
in our time. Right? So what does that
tell you? That tells you that the most
real thing about you is your spirit. It's
not your body. Your body changes. You're pretty
today,
You're not gonna be pretty in 50 years.
Right?
Your body withers and and goes away. Your
spirit is the most real part of you,
and it's the most consequential part of you
when it comes to what you're gonna experience
in the afterlife after you die. And so
having that connection is absolutely the most important
thing.
And how do you counsel young people to
find that connection?
I mean, young people have more noise,
like, than than we had. I think that's
the hard thing.
It's really just like,
somebody I knew, they put it this way,
and it was really useful sort of analogy.
You know, you go through your life. You
go through your day. You wake up. You
go whatever. Maybe you work out, eat meals,
etcetera.
There's people who spend their whole day relating
horizontally.
Right? And that means that they're
interacting
based off of the people, the stimuli, whatever's
happening.
And then there's people who relate vertically. Right?
There's people who they bring along that relationship
with Allah
in whatever they do. When they're at the
gym, they're thinking about Allah. Are is Allah
happy with what they're doing? When they're, you
know, with a meal, with their at work,
whatever, Are you gonna cut corners at work,
take a few extra minutes on break or
whatever? Right? Are you going to sort of
be upright and honest?
Right? I think that
for everybody, but for youth especially, the the
struggle and the real hard work is trying
to relate more vertically than horizontally.
And the more that you can relate vertically,
you know, the better off you're gonna be,
and the more you're gonna be able to
have that connection.
It's almost like how people you know, it's
like falling in love, and I've said this
on on other things. Right?
If you're fall if you're falling in love,
right,
everything that you do, all of your talents
and abilities and attention, like, it's all geared
towards
discovering what makes that other person happy. Right?
We need to fall up in love with
Allah. We need to be obsessed. We need
to constantly be thinking. Right? And constantly being
and like, think about how people already do
this when it comes to, like, social media.
Right? Think about, like, people who have an
Instagram. Okay? Wherever they go, snap snap. Right?
Put it for the for the gram. Right?
What if you have that relationship with Allah,
that every single place that you went, you're
thinking about, gotta do something for Allah. Gotta
do something for Allah. You know, whether it's
just, like, yeah, even a Bismillah or, like,
whatever, holding a door open or whatever it
is.
That's where we have to be.
And that's really interesting. You know, I'm just
thinking about this, like, off the top of
my head right now. So there might even
be a way where the youth,
maybe they're better off in a one small
way. I think they're worse off in most
ways. But maybe they're better off in this
one particular way where the the
pervasiveness,
right, of social media when it comes to
their attention and their time and how they
consider what they're doing,
it's almost gives you, like, a transferable skill.
Like, just do that, but with Allah
as opposed to your followers.
Okay. Well, I've written it down. I've written
it down.
Yeah. That falling in love with Allah, that's
that's an amazing concept. One last question,
if I may. Of course. Masculinity.
Yeah. Masculinity
for Gen z Muslim
youth.
Where are we at? I mean, I know
maybe this is, like, a topic for another
conversation altogether,
but my my boy character
and my girl character actually, because I the
what I realized when I was thinking through
the characters is that both of them
are unhealed
in their masculine and in their feminine. Right?
Because they've had so many
conflicting messages growing up in a broken home
with a distant father and a single mom
and all of this other stuff, feminism, and
then all of this other stuff is going
on. So so that both of them have
issues,
right,
with their healthy masculine and their healthy feminine.
But with regards to what you're seeing,
what what's your analysis of the challenges that
young Muslim boys are facing? And what's the
cure?
It's a it's a dumpster fire. It's a
hot mess right now,
because
society is at war with men right now
and masculinity, and that's undeniable
when it comes to what sort of behaviors
are rewarded in the school systems, especially.
And the you know, a lot of feminist
theory has been pushing the idea and and
queer theory about the substitutability
of men and women, that it's not essential
to have a father around, that it's not
even essential to have a biological parent around
as long as you have some warm body,
right, supposedly looking after kids, and that's somehow
enough. Like, this is very that affects
it affects women too, but it rather than
put it in quantitative and comparative sort of
ways, it affects men and women differently, and
it's devastating to each.
But there are particular ways, right, that that
men are sort of,
being,
in the in the targets or in the
crosshairs
of societal movements.
The idea of intersectionality
and oppression, the hierarchy of sort of identities.
You know, if you are a,
a straight male, and God forbid you're a
straight white male, and all of those things
are problematic, you're basically an oppressor. Like, you're
the worst oppressor you could be. Right? And
so no wonder we have a social contagion
of of trans ideology now where I can
escape all of that stigma, and I can
escape all of that
branding and being tarred and feathered,
by just sort of changing my pronouns to
they. Right? So, you know,
you take away the rights of of passage.
Right? We don't have rights of passage for
our youth anymore. Back in traditional societies, you
had
you know, when you reached, the age of
puberty. Right? You're a man. And so now
you have to go out and you hunt
your first animal, or you go on your
dream quest, or you do whatever it is
that every sort of local culture did in
order to signify
that this life that this stage of life
that you're in now is categorically different from
the stage of life that you were in
before. Things are gonna be expected of you.
You need to rise to the occasion. And
men love a challenge, and so to be
deprived of that like, you're 15 or 16
years old, you go through puberty, and you're
still a sophomore in high school. There's no
there's no, you know, rite of passage. There's
no anything in your life to indicate that
anything else is
different. Very disorienting.
You know, people saying, you know, women are
being fed the the line that you don't
need a man. You have to be independent.
You have to do whatever. Well, then what's
the need for a man? Why should a
man invest himself and go out and try
to be the breadwinner and be the earner
and put himself in that role of protector
and provider
if everybody's telling him that they don't need
him in the 1st place. Right? So society
is all by myself.
Exactly. No. Society is at war with men,
at war with masculinity.
But the other side is just as bad
or maybe and it doesn't have to be
just as bad, but men have been
fed
false masculinity
in its place. Okay?
So,
the idea of being promiscuous, the idea of
being sort of,
demeaning
towards women.
Oh. You know? Yeah. All the sort of
this stuff. Like, all of this stuff is
a false replacement.
It's really just operating from a position of
hurt and a position where, you know, it's
exactly what I said before where it's a
reaction to something that has actually assumed
some of the points of the side that
it's reacting to. Mhmm. The antagonism between genders,
the evaluation
of each other as genders, the hyperindividualism,
the crass materialism,
all these sorts of things,
they've been fed false,
you know, false ways out or false solutions,
and those are damaging as well. You know?
And I've met you know, it was a
wake up call when I first came back,
from from Medina, and I started getting involved
in in communities and and youth and the
young men.
And they follow you know,
so many of them follow every word that
Andrew Tate says. Like like, I was I
knew he was influential, but until I saw
it, I didn't realize how influential this guy
was.
Men are hurting. You know? Like, men are
they're they're looking for something. They're lost.
They're lost. And and the things that they're
being given are inadequate and not sufficient and
oftentimes misleading.
Mhmm. So I I mean, my heart goes
out for them. We need all all hands
on deck when it comes to these sorts
of issues, not just for men, also for
women, also for schools and and parenting and
stuff like that. But for the men in
particular, we need to bring back these sorts
of rights of passage. We need to give
them challenges. We need to give them skills.
We need an ecosystem of mentors, like mentor
like, master apprentice sort of relationships.
You know?
They they need to be given the freedom
to, you know, be rough with each other
and and, you know,
in,
in a in a halal way and sort
of, you know, establish this male ecosphere.
Because if it's just them by themselves on
their device or online,
they're just prey, and the wolf's gonna get
them, whether it's, you know,
depression, you know, *,
you know, purposelessness.
Or on the other side, again, all these
these false sort of solutions that are being
fed to them. So it's a very, very
tricky situation to be in, and we ask
Allah
to help us all.
Amin Amin. And
I think,
you know, so many Muslims left their countries
to find a better life in the west,
to find, you know, more prosperity,
opportunities for their kids that they hadn't had.
And, again,
as everything in life is a double edged
sword, right? Because I do believe that the
ease of life in the west
is part of what is leading to just
this sense of aimlessness and purposes. I'll just
give you a quick example.
I when I moved to Zimbabwe with my
son and my two daughters,
men in Zimbabwe are are very masculine. They're
African men anyway.
Back home, it's just a different story for
us. Maybe Italians are the same. I don't
know. But but for, you know, back home,
like, a man is a man is a
man.
And a man has to do men men's
things, and he has to take care of
man business. So when workers would come to
the house,
just like it is in the Muslim world,
when workers would come to the house, they
would see him as the only boy there.
And they would not not talk to me,
but they would make sure that he's there,
and they would expect him to take care
of certain things. So for example, the solar
panels. The solar guy doesn't talk to me.
He talks to my son. And now my
son knows and understands the solar system that
we operate
much better than I. If the lights go
out, you know, we call him. He goes
in the room. He sorts it out, you
know, and gets on the phone with the
guy and deals with it. And he himself
said,
like,
since being here and having to deal with
stuff going wrong, which in the west is
quite rare. Like, things just work. The system
just works. We think it's so easy. You
just get everything delivered. You know, you don't
have.
There's no, like Right. Right. Right. There is
nothing to struggle with or the difficulties to
solve in a way. People make up difficult
so that they've got something to solve. But
when we went there
and we're kind of settling in a new
household,
my daughters also
mentioned that
we have more respect for him now
because we see how he takes care of
us. Absolutely. See how he
he makes sure that we're okay
because we know that there is a potential
for danger, which is unfortunate. Right? Because nobody
wants to live in a place where, oh,
you know, you could get robbed or whatever.
But because people were talking about, you know,
you know, you need to make sure you
lock all your doors and stuff like that.
My daughters realized that, you know, we actually
do need our brother's care. We need his
protection.
Nothing has happened to us
at. Alright. Yeah. But it gave them that
understanding
of a man's role. And I think in
the west,
I think most women are just never in
a situation or in their minds, they are
never in a situation where I would actually
need a man. Like, I've got my phone.
I've got some money. You know? I've got
my mace. Like, I'm good. You know? So
it's it's really
it's the double edged sword, SubhanAllah. SubhanAllah. Now
that reminds me of something that I was
I was watching recently, and there's a lot
of psychological
sort of data out there to to show
how much men require a challenge,
in order to sort of be unlocked.
Right? Right.
And and reach their potential. And
culturally,
this is, like, what's responsible for the kind
of the platitudes around, like, women playing hard
to get. It's kind of like a,
it's a,
it's a an oversimplification
of really a much more important thing. It's
not just about women should be playing hard
to get. The real sort of takeaway is
that
men
rise to the occasion, become men when they're
challenged
and
especially being challenged with things going wrong. Right?
It doesn't have to be, like, you know,
whatever, like, women being difficult, like, especially in
the bedroom. We're not talking about that. But,
yes, things going wrong, things that need fixing,
things that need defending. Right? That's when men
are able to live to their full potential.
They feel the purpose. They feel needed. And
that honestly, like, unlocks the chivalry and unlocks
the the sort of magnanimity and the benevolence,
you know, that, is sort of the opposite
side of that coin. Right? So being challenged
is an extremely important thing, and maybe it's
particularly important to to men.
Imam Tom, we could definitely talk about this
for another 2 hours, but I will leave
it there.
And you've given me a lot of, and
I'm sure the audience as well, a lot
to think about. And,
this won't be the last time that we
hear from you. And
we'll get to have another conversation very soon.
Thank you so much for coming.
I look forward to it.
May Allah accept from us.